Family and Women in Central and Eastern Europe: the Significance of Traditional Roles after Socialism (original) (raw)
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Women and Social Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe
The situation of women was improved in many respects under the totalitarian state socialist system. However, the improvement was brought about from the top down, without civil participation and control. Also, many legal and financial dispositions concerning the family, women and gender relations were fundamentally conservative. Such politics may not be seen as left-wing. The socialists never analysed their mistakes in this respect, so that a consistent left-wing agenda on family and gender policy is still missing irrespective of whether they are in government or in opposition. Since the collapse of the old system, many new 'right' trends have gained ground. Conservative trends are harming the reproductive rights of women and are questioning the legitimacy of their work outside the home. Economic crisis and monetary pressures are leading to a wholesale reorganisation of former social policy dispositions, with a minimal state, the scaling down of universal and social insurance benefits, the spread of individually targeted social assistance and market or quasi-market solutions. This results in increasing child and female poverty. Also, the situation of women on the labour market is worsening because of the weakening of rights and the play of 'free' market forces. The attitudes of women have been changing during and after 'socialism'. This is one of the foundations of further changes. The other and most important one is that in the new system civil and political rights have been strengthened. This is a gain for civil society in general. These rights allow the assertion of group interests, hence they may effectively serve the interests of women. For this to happen, however, it will take time, but this seems the only asset of women in the face of a 'patriarchal' state and an unrestrained market.
The Other Half of Communism: Women's Outlook
Aspasia, 2020
The authors in this volume have, each in their own way, tried to crack a rather tough nut. To what extent, they ask, did communism or socialism (as it was variously called) in different East European countries succeed in "emancipating" women, leveling the playing field, allowing them to reach their full potential? This conundrum itself has many aspects. How do you define what "emancipation" meant in the first place? How do you find out what really happened in these societies that were dominated by propaganda trumpeting success? How do you measure what was a success or at least progress? In the end, the most interesting puzzle the question of agency dominates all others: how well were women and some men able to create changes in gendered social structures in societies with strong, some would say totalitarian, controls in the party structures, both local and national? The volume consists of fourteen articles covering women's history, literature, and memoirs in the interwar and postwar periods in Poland (4), Romania (3), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The authors take a variety of approaches, including studying legislation and practices, developing collective biographies and analyzing memoirs of women communists, and examining literary images of women and women's publications.
the Significance of Traditional Roles after Socialism
2015
This paper will focus on possible transformations of ‘family ’ in post-communist countries of Central Europe (using the examples of Slovakia and the Czech Republic) under the influence of ideas of Western feminism. It attempts to show how feminist ideas are reflected in the writings of Slovak and Czech social scientists and how they influence local cultural settings. Although the ideas of feminism gained much influence, support, and popularity in the West, they were not influential in former communist countries. This was not surprising because the communist regimes did not allow Western ideas to spread in those societies. Western feminists hoped that after the collapse of communist ideology the situation would change. However, I would argue that their expectations have not been fulfilled and feminist ideas remain weak in post-communist societies. There is a whole range of reasons that can explain why women in Central and Eastern Europe have not been very receptive to feminist ideas....
Femininities: a Way of Linking Socialism and Feminism?
Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond
The decline of socialist feminism When second wave feminism emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxist or Socialist feminism was a vigorous part of the new ideas which emerged. By the late 1990s publishers' catalogues usually contained only some socialist feminist classics plus one or two books at most which aimed to revive materialist feminism. The reasons for this are legion, and a thorough analysis of them would take up the whole chapter. In no particular order, the following are certainly important. Then, Communist societies could be held up as a distorted but possibly promising illustration of the possibilities held out by communism for women: the percentage of Russian doctors or engineers who were women, good collective child care facilities and the ready availability of abortion could be seen as positive features, even if the lack of consumer goods, unreconstructed Russian males and the lack of democracy rendered Russia ultimately unattractive as a model. With the collapse of communism, however, the long and bloody history of the revolution and then of Stalinism could hardly be seen as a price worth paying to achieve a society whose leaders finally gave up on their own system, still less the dreadful suffering caused by the post-Communist Russian economy of today. A second set of problems has to do with whether Marxism provides a satisfactory description and set of guidelines for today's capitalist societies. Whether one turns to the class structure with the decline of the industrial working class and rise of a new middle class of technicians, teachers and service workers, the economic analysis with its problems about the declining rate of profit and the transformation of value into price, or the political analysis which has problems making sense of M. Cowling et al. (eds.), Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond
This paper critically examines the socialist equality of women in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1989. The first socialist constitution of 1947 establishes the equality of women in all spheres of public and private life and specifically points out the equal employment rights of all women and the special protection of mothers. The communist ideology proclaims the liberation and equality of women workers and claims to have resolved the women's issues. The paper argues that such claim is not tenable through the lens of understanding feminism as a value that crystalizes in the social practises of women in modernity. The socialist equality of women is questioned by highlighting the tension between normativity and facticity through two main topics -motherhood and prostitution. The choice of these topics is logical not only because they are typical for the feminist studies, but also because the totalitarian laws are focussed on the mother and the prostitute, and treat them as special categories of women subject to various totalitarian policies. Besides these are exactly the themes with focus on women by which the dissident writer Georgi Markov depicts the socialist society in his famous book "Reporting in absentia" of 1978, in which he exposes the duality of the existence between the official and the unofficial in the totalitarian state. Such facticity, taken from a documentary book on the edge of memoirs and short stories, and supported by statistics, by biographies of famous women (the jurist Dimitrana Ivanova and the writer Fani Popova-Mutafova), memoirs from the labor camps (Cvetana Germanova), explodes the ideological and juridical construct of socialist equality of women.
Women's Emancipation Under Socialism
World Development Routledge eBooks, 1981
The commitment to the principle of sexual equality can be found throughout socialist programmes and legislation, It is seen as an integral part of their claim to be socially revolutionary and it is proclaimed as much in the new post-revolutionary states of the Third World as it is in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Yet although substantial advances have been made in this area, sexual inequality persists. This article examines the policies adopted by socialist states to improve the position of women and traces some of these inequalities to the policies themselves, and to the theoretical assumptions underlying them.