Why Working Women Do Not Always Make Feminists: New Study Challenges Modernisation Theory

One of the most enduring assumptions in the social sciences is that when women enter the paid workforce in large numbers, feminist consciousness and collective political action will follow. The logic seems intuitive: economic independence breeds awareness of inequality, and awareness breeds mobilisation. Yet across much of the former Soviet Union, this equation stubbornly fails to hold. Women in many post-Soviet states work outside the home at rates comparable to, and sometimes exceeding, those in Western Europe, while organised feminist movements remain weak, fragmented, or conspicuously absent. A new comparative study published in SN Social Sciences confronts this paradox directly and concludes that the missing link is not economic development at all, but the moral and political meaning attached to women’s work.

The research, conducted by Zuhriddin Juraev of Kokand University and Chonnam National University together with Makhfuzakhon Shamsieva, Boburmirzo Khursanaliyev and Shakhodatkhon Okhunjonova, offers a systematic comparison of eight post-Soviet states over the period from 2015 to 2019. Rather than relying on case narratives alone, the team assembled quantitative indicators for each country, including levels of urbanisation, female labour force participation and fertility, drawn from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. To capture the dependent variable of interest, the authors coded feminist mobilisation on a zero-to-two ordinal scale, distinguishing between the absence of organised feminist advocacy, limited or episodic activity, and sustained movement presence. The coding decisions and derived data are documented in an appendix and compiled from open-access NGO registries, human rights reports and published sources.

The analytical result is striking in its consistency: the structural variables that modernisation theory treats as engines of feminist politics simply do not predict feminist mobilisation in this region. Countries with similar levels of urbanisation and female employment diverge sharply in the strength of their feminist movements, while some states with high economic participation of women show almost no organised feminist advocacy at all. The disconnect held across the 2015 to 2019 window, a period that included both economic growth and political tightening across much of the post-Soviet space. In statistical terms, neither modernisation nor economic participation emerged as a reliable predictor of feminist political outcomes, a finding that challenges decades of theorising that treats women’s paid work as a structural precondition for collective gender politics.

To explain this pattern, the authors turn to the concept of the moral economy, a framework with roots in the work of Karl Polanyi and later elaborated by scholars such as William Booth and Andrew Sayer. A moral economy, in this sense, is the set of shared normative expectations that governs how economic activity is valued and justified. In many post-Soviet societies, the study argues, women’s labour is embedded in a moral economy that frames work as duty rather than entitlement. Women work because the household needs the income, because socialist-era norms of the working mother persist, or because family obligation demands it, not because employment is understood as a basis for individual rights or political claims. Work performed as duty generates wages, but it does not generate the sense of grievance and entitlement from which feminist movements historically draw their energy.

This distinction between work as duty and work as entitlement carries significant theoretical weight. Classic accounts, including Inglehart and Norris’s work on gender equality and cultural change, have treated rising female employment as a solvent of traditional gender attitudes, gradually producing demands for political equality. The post-Soviet evidence suggests instead that the same observable behaviour, paid employment, can be sustained by very different normative logics in different societies. Nancy Fraser’s analysis of the contradictions between capitalism and care, along with scholarship on moral economies of care by Linda McDowell and colleagues, supports the idea that the political meaning of women’s work depends on the institutional and cultural framing that surrounds it. Where employment is framed as contribution to family survival, it may even reinforce rather than erode traditional gender expectations, leaving little discursive space for feminist claims-making.

The second mechanism the study identifies is political regulation. Drawing on the civil society literature, including the USAID Civil Society Organization Sustainability Index and Freedom House’s Nations in Transit reports, the authors document the administrative constraints under which women’s organisations operate across the region. Feminist advocacy is further constrained by state regulation and administrative repression, ranging from restrictive NGO registration regimes and burdensome reporting requirements to the surveillance and harassment of activists. Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow’s work on the political context of social movements underscores that movements do not arise simply because grievances exist; they require political opportunities, and in authoritarian or hybrid regimes those opportunities are systematically closed. The study’s two-mechanism framework therefore links moral economy and political regulation together, arguing that each suppresses feminist mobilisation through a distinct pathway: one by hollowing out the normative foundations of feminist claims, the other by criminalising or exhausting the organisational forms those claims would take.

The framework also engages a long-standing debate in postsocialist gender studies. Scholars such as Barbara Einhorn, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, and Kristen Ghodsee have documented how the transition from state socialism reshaped gender regimes, with the privatisation of social care pushing responsibility for welfare back onto families and onto women in particular. Maxine Molyneux’s earlier work on family reform in socialist states highlighted how socialist governments mobilised women’s labour while carefully managing the political implications of women’s emancipation. The new study extends this lineage by arguing that the post-Soviet present should not be read as a transitional stage on the way to Western-style feminist politics. Instead, the authors treat the absence of organised feminist advocacy as an institutionally produced condition, a stable outcome generated by the interaction of moral economies and political regulation, rather than a delay in an expected developmental sequence.

The methodological choices reflect the difficult research environment in which such work is conducted. As Nicholas Koch has noted, field research in authoritarian contexts demands particular care, and the authors state that their study involved no interviews or human participants, relying entirely on publicly available secondary materials. In interpreting politically sensitive documents, they took care to avoid identifying specific individuals or organisations in ways that could not be verified through open sources, an approach designed to protect activists operating under repressive conditions. The quantitative indicators are publicly accessible, and the supplementary materials, including the coding of feminist mobilisation for each country, are available alongside the article, allowing other researchers to scrutinise and extend the analysis. The research received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests.

The implications extend well beyond the post-Soviet region. Recent scholarship on anti-gender politics, including work by Elżbieta Korolczuk, Agnieszka Graff and Johanna Kantola, and on authoritarian gender regimes by Sylvia Walby, suggests that feminist movements worldwide face intensifying state hostility and ideological contestation. If the post-Soviet case demonstrates that economic modernisation provides no automatic foundation for feminist politics, then activists, funders and policymakers who assume that development programmes will organically produce gender-equality movements may be operating on flawed premises. The study suggests instead that supporting feminist mobilisation requires attention to the moral framings that give women’s work its meaning, and to the political openings that allow grievance to become organisation. Where work is framed as duty and advocacy is framed as subversion, neither rising employment nor rising incomes will do the political work that theory once promised.

For the comparative politics of gender, the study’s contribution lies in its refusal to treat absent feminist movements as a puzzle to be explained by deficiency. By specifying two mechanisms, moral economy and political regulation, and by operationalising them across eight countries with transparent coding, the authors convert a regional anomaly into a testable framework with broader purchase. The finding that women’s labour force participation coexists with weak feminist mobilisation is not an exception to be managed but a signal that the relationship between economic structure and political consciousness is mediated by institutions, norms and state power. As debates over gender, authoritarianism and civil society intensify globally, the post-Soviet experience offers a sobering empirical lesson: the road from the workplace to the movement is neither short nor automatic, and it can be blocked at either end.

Subject of Research: The relationship between women's economic participation, moral economy, state regulation and feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies

Article Title: Beyond modernisation: moral economy and the limits of feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies

Article References: Juraev, Z., Shamsieva, M., Khursanaliyev, B., & Okhunjonova, S. (2026). Beyond modernisation: moral economy and the limits of feminist mobilisation in post-Soviet societies. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01740-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01740-x

Keywords: feminist mobilisation, post-Soviet societies, moral economy, modernisation theory, women's labour, gender politics, civil society, authoritarianism, social movements, political repression, comparative analysis, gender regimes