Family and Women in Central and Eastern Europe: the Significance of Traditional Roles after Socialism (original) (raw)
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.
One step forward, two steps back: women in the post-communist states
Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2001
The role and status of women in the post-communist countries has been and continues to be varied and full of contradictions. This article discusses the historical, social, economic, and political dynamics affecting the lives of women during the transition from communism to democracy. It argues that democracy, rather than diminishing gender discrimination, has widened the gender gap through declines in women's political representation and increases in women's unemployment and underemployment. Recently, however, the proliferation of women's organizations and the growth of women's studies programs suggests a more optimistic outlook for the future.
Did communism liberate women in Eastern Europe?
In order to analyse communism in relation to the liberation of Eastern European women, we must consider two major factors. Firstly, we shall explore how communist legislation regarding female education and employment. Secondly, we should evaluate how attitudes and laws in relation to abortion, divorce, and marriage in Eastern Europe. Within these two factors, there are several subsections which arise. With regards to education and employment, we will first identify the policy changes that were implemented under the socialist state. We shall then identify the social implications of these policy changes – the cost to the countries, as it were; from a decline in birth rates to stagnating economies. By analysing the propaganda that Eastern European states used regarding women in the workplace, we will see that the states may not have been fully supportive of women being employed. We must also discuss the personal impact of communism; these policy changes aimed to emancipate women, however the negative effects outweighed the positive, as many socialist parties still saw women primarily as homemakers, thus their policies did less to liberate women, and more to allow them to participate in full time employment while also raising a family. By using real life examples from Bulgaria and Romania, we will be able to assess how communism changed repressed, rather than liberated, women in Eastern Europe.
P a g e | 5 Editorial: Communism/Postcommunism. Perspectives on Gender
This issue of Analize-Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies set to explore the complex relationship between ideologies and practices in different countries in Central and Eastern Europe in communist times and in the postcommunist period, with an emphasis on gender constructs and gender roles presumed and assumed in both the public and the private spheres. Starting from already well-known publications in the field 1 , we aimed at enlarging the discussion and bringing it up-to-date, by including some young researchers next to already established ones. Clearly, the rapidly changing global social, political and ideological environment requires permanent updates, constant revisions and context-based re-evaluations. The articles accepted for publication bring diverse contributions to the large spectrum of topics proposed. The authors recreated the communist and postcommunist gendered spaces and proposed reflection subjects in a variety of directions subsumed to women's rights, equal ...