Women in Transition From Post Feminism to Past Femininity

"[In]... the brothels off Wenceslas Square, in central Prague, [where] sexual intercourse can be bought for USD 25 - about half the price charged at a German brothel... Slav women have supplanted Filipinos and Thais as the most common foreign offering in [Europe]." The Economist, August 2000, p.18

"Im also wary of the revolutionary ambition of some feminist texts, with their ideas about changing present conditions, having seen enough attempted utopias for one lifetime" Petr Príhoda, The New Presence, 2000, p. 35.

"As probably every country has its Amazons, if we go far back in Czech mythology, to a collection of Old Czech Legends, we come across a very interesting legend about the Dévín castle which literally means The Girls Castle. It describes a bloody story about a rebellion of women, who started a vengeful war against men. As the story goes, they were not only capable warriors, they had no mercy and would not hesitate to kill their fathers and brothers. Under the leadership of mighty Vlasta, the "girls" lived in their castle, "Dévín", where they underwent a severe military training. They led the war very successfully, and one day Vlasta came up with an shrewd plan, how to take hostage a famous nobleman, Ctirad. She chose the lovely Sárka from the body sic! of her troops and had her tied up to a tree by a road with a horn and a jar of a mead out of her reach, but in her sight. In this state, Sárka was waiting for Ctirad to find her. When he actually really appeared and saw her, she told him a sad story of how the women from Dévín punished her for not following their ideology by tying her to the tree, mockingly putting a jar and a horn so that she would be always reminded that she is thirsty and helpless near by. Ctirad, enchanted by the beautiful woman, believed the lure and untied her, and when she handed him the mead, he willingly drunk it. When he was drunk already, she let him blow the horn, which was a signal for the Dévín warriors to capture him. He was then tortured in many horrible ways, at the end of which, his body was woven into a wooden wheel and displayed. This event mobilized the army, which soon afterwards destroyed Dévín. Very significantly, this legend is the only account of radical feminism in Czech Lands." "The Vissicitudes of Czech Feminism" by Petra Hanáková

"We myself...and many others are not in search of global sisterhood at all, and it is only when we give up expecting it that we can get anywhere. It is each others very otherness that motivates us, and the things we find in common take on greater meaning within the context of otherness. There is so much to learn by comparing the ways in which we are different, and which the same elements of womens experience are global, and which arent, and wondering why, and what it means" Jirina Siklová

"It is difficult to carry three watermelons under one arm." Proverb attributed to Bulgarian women

"The high level of unemployment among women, segregation in the labour market, the increasing salary gap between women and men, the lack of women present at the decision making level, increasing violence against women, the high levels of maternal and infant mortality, the total absence of a contraceptive industry in Russia, the insufficiency of child welfare benefits, the lack of adequate resources to fund current state programs - this is only part of the long list of womens rights violations." Elena Kotchkina, Moscow Centre for Gender Studies, "Report on the Legal Status of Women in Russia"

Communism was mens nightmare and womens dream, or so the left wing version goes. In reality it was a gender-neutral hell. Women under communism were, indeed, encouraged to participate in the labour force. An array of conveniences facilitated their participation: day care centres, kindergarten, daylong schools, abortion clinics. They had their quota in parliament. They climbed to the top of some professions though there was a list of women-free occupations, more than 90 is Poland. But this - as most other things in communism - was a mere simulacrum.

Reality was much drearier. Women, however mettlesome, groaned under the "triple burden" - work, marital expectations cum childrearing chores and party activism. They succumbed to the lure and demands of the stressful and boastful image of the communist "super-woman". This martyrdom - now threatened by the dual Western imports, capitalism and feminism - served as a fountain of self-esteem and a source of self-worth in otherwise gloomy circumstances.

Yet, the communist inspired workplace revolution was not complemented by a domestic one. Womens traditional roles - so succinctly summarized by Bismarck with Prussian geniality as "kitchen, children, church" - survived the modernizing onslaught of scientific Marxism. It is true that power shifted within the family unit "The woman is the neck that moves the head, her husband". But the "underslippers" as Czech men disparagingly self-labeled still had the upper hand. In short, women were now subjected to onerous double patriarchy, both private and public the latter propagated by the party and the state. It is not that they did not value the independence, status, social interaction and support networks that their jobs afforded them. But they resented the lack of choice employment was obligatory and the parasitic rule of their often useless husbands. Many of them were an integral and important part of national and social movements throughout the region. Yet, with victory secured and goals achieved, they were invariably shunned and marginalized. As a result, they felt exploited and abused. Small wonder women voted overwhelmingly for right wing parties post communism.

Yet, even after the demise of communism, Western feminism failed to take root in Central and Eastern Europe CEE. The East Coast Amazons from America and their British counterparts were too ideological, too Marxist, too radical and too men-hating and family-disparaging to engender much following in the just-liberated victims of leftist ideologies. Hectoring, overly-politicized women were a staple of communism - and so was womens liberation. Women in CEE vowed: "never again".

Moreover, the evaporation of the iron curtain lifted the triple burden as well. Women finally had a choice whether to develop a career and how to balance it with family life. Granted, economic hardship made this choice highly theoretical. Once again, women had to work to make ends meet. But the stifling ethos was gone.

Communism left behind it a legal infrastructure incompatible with a modern market economy. Maternal leave was anywhere between 18 and 36 ! months, for instance. But there were no laws to tackle domestic or spousal violence, women trafficking, organized crime prostitution rings, discrimination, inequality, marital rape, date rape and a host of other issues. There were no womens media of any kind TV or print. No university offered a gender studies program or had a womens studies department. Communism was interested in women and humans as means of production. It ignored all other dimensions of their existence. In sputnik-era Russia, there were no factories for tampons or sanitary bandages, for example. Communism believed that the restructuring of class relations will resolve all other social inequities. Feminism properly belonged to the spoiled, brooding women of the West - not to the bluestockings of communism. Ignoring problems was communisms way of solving them. Thus, there was no official unemployment in the lands of socialism - or drugs, or AIDS, or unhappy women. To borrow from psychodynamic theories, Communism never developed "problem constancy".

To many, women included, communism was about the perversion of the "natural order". Men and women were catapulted out of their pre-ordained social orbits into an experiment in dystopy. When it ended, post communism became a throwback to the 19th century: its values, mores and petite bourgeois aspirations. In the exegesis of transition, communism was interpreted as an aberration, an interruption in an otherwise linear progress. It was cast as a regrettable historical accident or, worse, a criminal endeavour to be vehemently disowned and reversed.

Yet again women proved to be the prime victims of historical processes, this time of transition. They saw their jobs consumed by male-dominated privatization and male-biased technological modernization. Men in the CEE are 3 times more likely to find a job, 60-80% of all womens jobs were lost for instance in the textile and clothing industries and the highest rates of unemployment are among middle aged and older women "unemployment with a female face" as it is called in Ukraine. Women constitute 50-70% of the unemployed. And womens unemployment is probably under-reported. Most unrecorded workers omitted from the official statistics are women. Where retraining is available a rarity, women are trained to do computer jobs, mostly clerical and low skilled. Men, on the other hand, are assigned to assimilate new and promising technologies. In many countries, women are asked to waive their rights under the law, or even to produce proof of sterilization before they get a job. The only ray of light is higher education, where womens participation actually increased in certain countries. But this blessing is confined to "feminine" low pay and low status professions. Vocational and technical schools have either closed down entirely or closed their gates to women. Even in feminized professions such as university teaching, women make less than 20% of the upper rungs e.g., full professorships. The tidal wave of the rising cost of education threatens to drown this trend of womens education. Studies have shown that, with rising costs, womens educational opportunities decline. Families prefer to invest - and rationally so - in their males.

Women witnessed the resurgence of nostalgic nationalism, neo traditionalism and religious revival - social forces which sought to confine them to home, hearth, spouse and children and to "liberate" them from the "forced labour" of communism. Negative demographic trends declining life expectancy and birth rate, numerous abortions, late marriage, a high divorce rate, increasing suicide rate conspired to provoke a "we are a dying nation" outcry and the inevitable re-emphasis of the womans reproductive functions. Fierce debates about the morality of abortion erupted in bastions of Catholic fundamentalism such as Poland and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania as well as in citadels of rational agnosticism, such as the Czech Republic. Curiously, prostitution and women trafficking were accepted as inevitable. Perhaps because they catered to masculine needs.

Indeed, in feminist lore and theory, both nationalism and capitalism are "patriarchal". Nationalism allocates distinct and mutually exclusive roles to men and women. The latter are supposed to act as homemakers and have babies. Capitalism encourages the formation of impregnable male elites, disseminates new technologies mainly to male monopolies, eliminates menial and low skilled womens jobs and puts emphasis on masculine traits such as aggression and competitiveness. No wonder female political representation in parliaments and governments diminished dramatically since 1989. When powerless, under communism, CEE parliaments were stacked with women. Now that they are more potent elected bodies, they are almost nowhere to be seen. The few that infiltrated these august institutions are relegated to "soft" committees social issues, usually devoid of budgets and of influence. It is very much like under communism when the decision making party echelons were predominantly male. The only influential women then were dissidents but they seem to have rejected the fruit of their labour, democracy, in favour of tranquility and peace of mind - or to have been usurped by an emerging male establishment. Despite an education in economics, they are under-represented among business executives, the owners of privatized enterprises and the beneficiaries of favourable pay regulations and tax systems