Poland, Czech

Republic,

The twentieth anniversary of the 1989 breakthrough is an occasion for

summaries. In spite of the twenty years of democratic transformation,

Slovakia,

women did not manage to reduce their distance from men enough for

East Germany

their voice to be clearly heard in public debate. Furthermore, the account

of the past two decades, as seen from the women's perspective, is not

and Ukraine

1989-2009

exactly in tune with the celebratory anniversary atmosphere. It is a para-

dox that for women in the former Eastern Bloc the freedom regained in

1989 was often combined with significant limitations of economic, social

and reproductive rights.

Change,

In the face of the lack of public debate on the role of women in the time of

of

transformation, the publication of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Warsaw

attempts to present a multidimensional dialogue about the transformation

Women in Times

experiences, giving voice to women. The Authors of the publication judge

the past twenty years of reforms from the point of view of women from the

Times

former countries of the Eastern Bloc: the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia,

of Change, 1989-2009

in

Ukraine and former East Germany, and in this context, from the perspec-

tive of personal experiences. At the same time, the publication constitutes

a platform for inter-generational dialogue. In the publication, personal texts

meet more theoretical reflections, and literary accounts often complement

omen

more objective attempts to describe the past twenty years.

W

Foundation

Böll

Heinrich Böll Foundation

Regional Office Warsaw

ul. Żurawia 45, 00-680 Warsaw, Poland

phone: + 48 22 59 42 333, e-mail: hbs@boell.pl

Heinrich

Poland, Czech

Republic,

Slovakia,

East Germany

and Ukraine

Women in Times

of Change, 1989-2009

The publication was elaborated within the framework

of the Regional Program “Gender Democracy/ Women’s Politics”.

Editor: Agnieszka Grzybek

English editing: Justyna Włodarczyk

Graphic design: Studio 27

Published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation Regional Office Warsaw.

Printed in Warsaw, September 2009.

This project has been supported by the European Union: Financing of organizations

that are active on the European level for an active European society.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors alone.

They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

ISBN: 978-83-61340-40-9

Copyright by the Heinrich Böll Foundation Regional Office Warsaw.

All rights reserved.

This publication can be ordered at:

Heinrich Böll Foundation Regional Office Warsaw,

ul. Żurawia 45,

00-680 Warsaw, Poland

phone: + 48 22 59 42 333

e-mail: hbs@boell.pl

www.boell.pl

Contents

Agnieszka Rochon, Agnieszka Grzybek

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

1. Poland

Bożena Umińska-Keff

Reclaiming the Tractors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Agnieszka Graff

Where did the Woman on

a Tractor and the Cynical

Tough Guy Go? Gender

Innocence Irretrievably Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Sylwia Chutnik

Transformers, or the Changes

in Poland after 1989, as Seen

by a 30-Year-Old . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

2. Czech Republic

Petra Hůlová

Happiness short of Sean Connery . . . 56

Jiřina Šiklová

Women and Transformation:

Example of the Czech Republic . . . . . . . . 69

Kateřina Jacques

Women’s Velvet Revolution

is Yet to Come . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

www.boell.pl

3

3. Slovakia

Jana Juráňová

How Our Past Is Still in Our Present . . 100

Anna Grusková

Tell Sophie and the Others... . . . . . . . . . 111

Ľubica Kobová

Feminism as a Practice of Freedom . . . 124

4. East Germany

Rita Pawlowski

No State Can Exist Without Women!

German “Turning Point” Experiences

1989/90 and Afterwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

Jana Simon

My Failure at Becoming Italian . . . . . . . . 147

Mirjam Hirsch

Transformation – an Unquestioned

Western Category? The Example

of Post-Communist Germany . . . . . . . . . 157

5. Ukraine

Natalka Śniadanko

Being or Considering Yourself

– or on the Unpopularity

of Ukrainian Feminism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

Tanya Malyarchuk

Eating and Drinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

4

Women

in Times of

Change,

1989-2009:

Poland,

Czech Republic,

Slovakia,

East Germany

and Ukraine

Introduction

The twentieth anniversary of the 1989 breakthrough is an occasion for sum-

maries. The year 2009, now coming to an end, was full of intense debates

about achievements and failures, successes and lost opportunities of the past

two decades. In the countries of the former Eastern Bloc those debates were

a sort of closure on history. In the context of broadly publicised disputes about

hierarchy of events and symbols (the Polish Round Table vs. the fall of the Berlin

Wall) and the lists of those deserving most honours (whether and why Wałęsa

or Gorbachev ought to be included), both the role and significance of women

6

INTRODUCTION

in the events of 1989, and their experiences during the twenty years of transfor-

mation constituted a marginal topic in the anniversary discourse.

In spite of the twenty years of democratic transformation, women did

not manage to reduce their distance from men enough for their voice to be

clearly heard in public debate. Furthermore, the account of the past two dec-

ades, as seen from the women’s perspective, is not exactly in tune with the ce-

lebratory anniversary atmosphere. It is a paradox that for women in the former

Eastern Bloc the freedom regained in 1989 was often combined with significant

limitations of economic, social and reproductive rights. Women were those

most hit by the cutting of social expenses, and the resulting removal of maternity

entitlements of the times of real socialism, or the restructuring of large industrial

plants. Particularly in the initial stages of the transformation, women – seen by

employers as “a worse category of employees” responsible for looking after

children and housework – experienced mass unemployment and feminisation

of poverty. In spite of their involvement in the democratic opposition and the

dissident movement, after 1989 women were also excluded from participation

in power and relegated to the private sphere. There was a renaissance of right-

wing discourse, in which women were seen only in the context of community,

as guardians of family values. In all post-socialist countries – though to a different

degree and with differing outcomes – a debate took place, concerning the right

to abortion. In Poland, it concluded with the passing of a restrictive anti-abortion

law, which provides for termination only in extreme cases, nevertheless even

those strict provisions are not observed by public healthcare units. One may

easily formulate a thesis that in spite of the aroused expectations, in practice civil

activity of women faced limitations.1 Obviously, the last twenty years saw the

creation of several women‘s organisations, which draw public attention to dis-

1 An excellent analysis of the first years of transformation in Poland, former Czechoslovakia

and Hungary can be found in the publication of British sociologist Barbara Einhorn, Cin-

derella Goes to Market. Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movement in East Central Europe,

London – New York 1993.

www.boell.pl

7

WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

crimination of women, try to publicise striking violations of women‘s rights and

run public awareness campaigns. Nevertheless, a mass women‘s movement has

not been born, and there has been no sense of shared interests.

The Polish Women‘s Congress, which took place in Warsaw twenty

years after the first almost free parliamentary election, was – at least in the Polish

context – a noticeable exception from that rule. A grassroot initiative, which

regardless of differences united women‘s organisations and gathered more than

three thousand participants ready to establish a shared platform for exchanging

experiences and creating a positive action programme, deserves particular re-

cognition, and at the same time it emphasises the need to notice and appreciate

the women‘s experience and their role in the transformation.

Today, it would be hard to find a holistic analysis of the situation of women during the past twenty years, which attempts to answer the question about the women‘s influence upon the transformation, and the way the transformation influenced the position of women. Some reports devoted to social and

economic changes and including the perspective of gender equality were crea-

ted in the past, nevertheless those analyses are fragmentary and dispersed.2

Furthermore, few works present individual experiences of women from various

areas within the region, expressed in their own voice.

In the face of the lack of public debate on the role of women in the time

of transformation, the publication of the Heinrich Böl Foundation Regional Office

in Warsaw attempts to present a multidimensional dialogue about the trans-

formation experiences, giving voice to women. The Authors of the publication

judge the past twenty years of reforms from the point of view of women from

the former countries of the Eastern Bloc: the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia,

Ukraine and former East Germany, and in this context, from the perspective of

personal experiences. At the same time, the publication constitutes a platform

2 See e.g. Gender and economic opportunities in Poland: has transition left women behind?

The World Bank, Warsaw 2004.

8

INTRODUCTION

for inter-generational dialogue, as the Authors come from different generations:

there are women whose adult life began long before 1989, women who en-

tered into adulthood around the time of the breakthrough, and women, who

never personally experienced the earlier period. The Authors include writers

(such as Jana Juráňová, Bożena UmińskaKeff, Petra Hůlová, Natalka Śniadanko,

Sylwia Chutnik), researchers of feminism (e.g. Agnieszka Graff, Ľubica Kobová

or Mirjam Hirsch) and journalists (Rita Pawlowski, Jana Simon), who combine

their work with involvement in the women‘s movement. In the publication,

personal texts meet more theoretical reflections, and literary accounts often

complement more objective attempts to describe the past twenty years.

According to the Authors, the freedom regained after the breakthrough

of 1989 often tastes bitter of disappointment, although the awareness of lost

chances came with time: “20 years ago, I was not particularly naïve. Still, in

1990, I believed that feminism could soon become a leading ideal for women,

since pluralism of political ideas was about to set in, and with it a possibility to

articulate one‘s own political interests – why should women not do it then?”

writes Bożena UmińskaKeff in her essay, adding that in the following years plu-

ralism was substituted with fossilisation and levelling of everything with a right-

wing roller, while the liberation from “the Reds” proved – paradoxically – to be a

liberation from the ideals of emancipation. Jana Juráňová, cofounder of Aspekt,

the first Slovak feminist organisation and a longterm partner of the Heinrich

Böll Foundation, reminisces that in the first years of transformation she and her

colleagues were accused of wasting their energy on issues less important than

defending democracy, as they were claiming women‘s rights. Within the discus-

sion on the direction of change, it was difficult for feminists to put across the

message that democracy without women is not a genuine democracy, and in

that context participation of women is a measure of its quality.

Rita Pawlowski writes about difficult relations dividing Germany united

after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Young feminists from the former GDR stated that

“without women, it is impossible to create a state”, and they became dynami-

www.boell.pl

9

WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

cally involved in its construction, founding the Independent Women‘s Associa-

tion (Unabhängige Frauenbund), which stood in critical opposition towards the

Democratic Women‘s Federation of Germany (Demokratischer Frauenbund

Deutschland) – a post-socialist organisation their mothers strived to preserve

trying to find a place for themselves in the new world. Rita Pawlowski‘s text, by

no means lacking in self-criticism, is conducive to comparing the development

of women‘s movements in different postsocialist countries, and to reflection

on the extent to which the “state” women‘s organisations managed to redefine

their role, whether and how women‘s movements of different roots cooper-

ate, and, finally, whether the cooperation of postsocialist organisations with

the women‘s movement newly created after 1989 would have improved the

effectiveness of proequality actions? The text by Kateřina Jacques, who rep-

resents the Czech Greens (Strana zelených), tries to evaluate the influence

of women‘s organisations upon politics. Jacques writes about the difficulties in

cooperation between female politicians and women‘s organisations, which try

at all costs to remain “politically impartial” and unaffiliated to any party, but they

often become embroiled in contradictions resulting from the fact that they “put

the issue of gender above the substance of political work” and they judge other

people‘s political activity only in this context, not taking into account the rest of

political agenda.

The assessment of the democratic transformation from the women‘s

perspective, though largely critical, is not devoid of accents allowing for an opti-

mistic view of the future. According to Jiřina Šiklová, Czech sociologist, signatory

of Charter 77 and founder of the legendary Gender Studies in Prague – the first

feminist organisation in the Czech Republic – Czech women in 1989 started

from level zero, while at the moment, as far as “the development of women‘s

movement, feminism and gender approach to social issues” are concerned,

they are equal to most nations of the European Union. Based on nearly twenty

years of observation of trends in political discourse, Agnieszka Graff comes to

the conclusion that although “if you look at the hard facts, things are bad”, the

10

INTRODUCTION

last years brought something, which might be called “loss of collective gender

innocence”. The issues of gender became strongly politicised: the discussion of

those issues no longer involves wisecracking, passing clever remarks and repro-

ducing overheard clichés; instead, people have started to dispute and contradict

each other. The role of women is discussed by left-wing and conservative politi-

cians alike, based on the same premise – that women are discriminated – but

proposing completely different remedies for this deadlock. Twenty years after

the breakthrough of 1989, the public debate does not yet lead to spectacular

changes, but it has gained in substance.

Agnieszka Rochon,

director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Regional Office in Warsaw

Agnieszka Grzybek,

coordinator of the regional program

“Gender Democracy/Women’s Politics”

Translated by Katarzyna Nowakowska

www.boell.pl

11

1.

Poland

Reclaiming

the Tractors

Bożena Umińska-Keff

14

bożena Umińska-keff

Bolshevik Percherons

In Świat bez kobiet [ World Without Women], a book published in 2001, which

was the first major attempt at gender analysis of Poland after transformation,

Agnieszka Graff wrote:

“(...) the freedom spurt that was ‘Solidarity’ in the symbolic dimension

constituted an act of restoring the patriarchal order, which had been distorted

by the totalitarian system. Just as in the collective unconsciousness communism

became the period of Seksmisja,1 emerging to the surface constituted the mo-

ment of reclaiming manhood, cutting off the detestable umbilical cord”.2

Remark to the point. The thing is, there was no need to “restore the

patriarchal order”, since in the People’s Republic of Poland it was not in danger

of any major shake-ups. However, after the collapse of the system it was ne-

cessary to remove the essentially democratic corrections concerning gender,

which real socialism (and not communism, as it never existed as a system), re-

lated – however distantly – to the set of emancipating and left-wing social ideals,

introduced into social practice.

For some reason, the most readily quoted icon of the communist devia-

tion connected with gender and insolent liberation of women (in other words

– with forcing them to adopt an alien standard) were female tractor drivers.

Historically, we are talking about photographs and films from the early 1950s,

about covers of women’s magazines featuring the new heroines of socialism –

and, at the same time, the new heroines of the gender model – young women

on tractors, often leaders of production, sometimes named, often with informa-

1 Seksmisja – a Juliusz Machulski film from 1983, about a subterranean totalitarian women's

state, where there were no men at all. In spite of the lack of male presence, women kept

affirming the significance of womanhood as if taking example from feminist consciousnessraising meetings, and they used medication to reduce libido, because without men they had no use for it. Well...

2 Agnieszka Graff, Świat bez kobiet, Wydawnictwo W.A.B., Warsaw 2001, p. 26.

www.boell.pl

15

WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

tion about the village where they lived and worked. I can imagine that for many

young women they were as attractive as film stars; they stimulated imagination,

because they represented the new model of femininity. The return of “normal-

ity”, as Agnieszka Graff observed in Świat bez kobiet, was to be carried out by

symbolically pushing them off those tractors (and only those symbolic ones),

and putting them where they traditionally belonged, e.g. next to the cooker.

Where they were standing anyway, even having come back from their work on

a tractor, since socialist Poland never did propagate any model of actual equality

between the sexes. Why then do those tractors from the early People’s Repub-

lic of Poland still remain so irritating and shocking for traditionalists and the Right?

Had those tractor drivers been male, nobody would have remembered them

today. In fact, nobody does.

Let us have a closer look at the question then.

Tractors are technology, progress of civilisation, and therefore power

and independence attributed by our culture to men. The tractor means con-

trol over nature and power over it. What is more, it needs to be operated

skilfully, with technical skills. Then, it can move – move away from home, be-

cause it certainly does not belong in the domestic sphere. (Operating a wash-

ing machine causes no objection, but then a washing machine stays home and

does not distract women away, not to mention that it washes a husband’s

clothes under the supervision of his wife, i.e. in accordance with tradition). On

the other hand, a tractor is no Jeep, it wil not go far and, al in al , it is safe. Yet

again, as a tool of technical progress it is a weapon of sorts, a means of con-

trolling the resources and the environment. Meanwhile, a woman, according

to the scheme of culture and religion, is passivity, dependence and pleasant

stupidity. Technology gives a sense of cause, power over the environment and

production. All very masculine attributes.

According to the political Right, a woman can produce nothing but

children and services – she can only reproduce the very hierarchy, in which

she occupies the bottom position. She is absent from community, except to

16

bożena Umińska-keff

play ancillary roles: to cook, to bandage up, to clean. She could not go as far

as ploughing a field though. Ploughing is a man’s job, an expression of con-

trol ing the resources, of possessing the resources. It is the male power over

the feminine fertility of soil. When a woman sits on a tractor, the earth’s fer-

tility goes nuts and does not know where it belongs in the symbolic sense.

Now, that is Seksmisja – creating fertility and produce without the help of

the phallus.

Further still – the tractor has no national connotations, there is nothing

specifically Polish about it. All the more communist and hostile it is – with a

woman on top of it, anyway. This woman on a tractor looks to the right-wing,

she’s “our” woman, a woman from our tribe, seduced or abducted by the Bol-

sheviks and sat on their horse.

(Further psycho-sexual connotations could be interesting, considering

that women found the horse rather attractive. Many wanted to be a tractor

driver, and many were. Obviously, you could say today that a tractor is like a

Percheron, a draught horse with no grace, besides – mechanical and rowdy,

whilst our Polish horse is passionate and gallops so elegantly; who knows, this

Bolshevik one might even be a mare.

No, obviously this would be at odds with the spirit of the times. Then

again, who really knew what sex the woman on the tractor was?)

Shopping recently in Carrefour, I took a look at a dejected lady driving a

huge floorcleaning machine. This is 2009, not 1949 of course, so a woman in

this situation does not surprise. Then again, we know she goes about her own

business, to earn her pay, and her social significance is about the same, as that

of any cleaner, even if her mop is huge and mechanical. A tractor driver, on the

other hand, was in the centre of communal life, in the centre of social life. Her

presence on a tractor was a presence of the woman in social life – not within

her private space, but within the public one, and it was not ancillary or menial,

it was causal. Even more so than in the case of female bricklayers on building

sites, since they were not technologically equipped, and often supervised by a

www.boell.pl

17

WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

foreman.3 Tractor drivers supervised their own tractor, which in those days, in

technologically backward Poland, was not a common sight. It was a novelty, a

sign of progress, development, achievement. A Mercedes of sorts. In those days

the common sight was a horse.

That is why all this thoughtless mockery of the image of emancipation has never

been about reality, about the fact that women had little access to tractors, that women

found the job very attractive and that it increased their self-esteem; that in comparison

with other farming work driving a tractor is relatively easy, i.e. suitable for women, who

in the West or in the U.S. have operated farming machinery for a long time. Finally, it

has not been about the fact that the legend about tractors’ aleged adverse ef ects on

women is just that: a legend. Riding a tractor can be harmful only during the first three

months of pregnancy; instead, as a permanent job it is supposed to be bad for male

fertility, since overheating and shaking the scrotum weakens sperms.

The woman on a tractor is outrageous not as a set of facts but as a symbol,

obviously, as an usurpation, as reaching for what is absolutely masculine. From today’s

perspective, too, women can be exculpated – they are, after all, susceptible to male

manipulation (as illustrated by the quoted Seksmisja, for example). The communists

are to blame, those alien, non-Polish and non-Catholic manipulators. They made the

subversive image popular and they turned it into something resembling the “reverse”

sexual position in Redliński’s novel Konopielka. Let me remind that the book is set in

Polesie, among the marshes cut of from the rest of the world, after the Second World

War, in a village, which for the first time is visited by a teacher arriving to set up a school

and teach children. This teacher is at one point spied on by the farmer she lodges with,

as she is having sex with her partner – him underneath, her on top! The farmer literaly

sees the upside-down world, and the position is like a symbol heralding the end of the

old world order by negating its basic divisions constituting the pilars of the regime. The

3 This is discussed by Ewa Toniak on the basis of socialist-realist images in: Olbrzymki.

Kobiety i socrealizm, Korporacja Ha!Art, Krakow 2008, pp. 103120.

18

bożena Umińska-keff

female and the male, the weaker and the dominating, the woman below, the man on

top. Interestingly enough, the Polesie farmer himself gradually begins to side with the

novelty, he includes new elements in his view of the world.

For the political Right, however, and for the Polish Catholic Conservatives,

there are no multiple orders – “this order” and the new order, because for “this

order” there is no alternative. “This one” is “the” order, ful stop. In this sense the

Right is always authoritarian, because it only sees one possibility, the one it consi-

ders natural, given and eternal, the one which needs to be protected.

Back to the main subject – as the transformation in Poland aimed for democ-

racy, Polish citizens obtained certain freedoms. The freedom of (certain) political choices,

of expression (increasingly, within limits), of traveling, and consequently of leaving the

homeland, and others, which cannot be dismissed. Citizens, i.e. us: men and women.

However, the transformation in Poland was a creation of people who had

had little experience of the democratic order, and sometimes understood it super-

ficially, or anachronistically (Wałęsa being a good example); furthermore, the entire

“Solidarity” movement was linked to people and ideals of the Church, which is a hi-

erarchic structure, inflexible and based on obedience rather than discussion. Hence,

certain freedoms were lost by the citizens as wel . Particularly by the female citizens,

because liberation from “the Red” was also liberation from the ideals of emancipa-

tion. Furthermore, rejecting all kinds of left-wing traditions, which in the 1990s were

still represented by Jacek Kuroń and Zofia Kuratowska4 – and after them by nobody

from the “Solidarity’s” side – was deadly. Solidarity and post-Solidarity propaganda

persuaded people that whatever was good for the Church, was good for them,

because the interests and goals were identical. In a way, the Catholic Church in

Poland said “I am the state”. But such identity does not exist, and never did.

4 Jacek Kuroń (19342004) – a Polish politician, one of the leaders of the Polish dis-

sidents’ movement before 1989, cofounder of KOR (the Committee on the De-

fense of Workers), known from his left-wing political opinions. In 1989-2001,

he was elected to the Sejm. He was the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs.

Zofia Kuratowska (19311999) – a Polish doctor, politician, diplomat. In 19891997 she

was elected to the Senate. She had always strongly supported women’s rights.

www.boell.pl

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

Understanding one’s own political interest is related to individualism, which

is almost absent from Polish tradition. Individualism, in turn, is connected with

a sense of self-respect, of respect for one’s identity, whatever it might be, as

long as it is human and it is one’s own. There is little room for both those

stances in Poland – for individualism and respect for identity (not the mythologised

one and not collective). The Church punishes equally for individualism and for

independent thinking; it is but a huge store issuing mass-produced col ective identity.

Its key principle is exclusion, removing anything potential y leading to, however

small, changes in the identity described as Polish and Catholic.

“(...) anything that was Polish they turned into Catholic, anything Catholic

they considered purely Polish, and so cleverly did they fence with this duality, that

they managed to undo almost everything that had been achieved in the general

conscience of humanity since the beginning of the 18th century at the expense of

blood, life and hard work of scientists and heroes, the wise and the good.”

That much from 19thcentury writer Narcyza Żmichowska, commenting

on the establishment of the cluster: “a Pole – a Catholic”. She was quoted by Boy-

Żeleński in 1929, as he added his comment about Poland’s revival in 1918:

“The tombstone was removed, Poland began to live a life of its own. Imme-

diately, the clergy reached for it, as if it were their rightful inheritance. Strengthened in

their power by our electoral law, aware of their influence upon the peasant masses

and the women, they made their foundation of those two factors.”5

Well, exactly.

How I understand the ban on abortion

in Poland

20 years ago, I was not particularly naïve. Still, in 1990, I believed that feminism

could soon become a leading ideal for women, since pluralism of political ideas

5 Tadeusz BoyŻeleński, Dziewice konsystorskie, in: Pisma, vol. XV, PiW, Warsaw 1958, p. 75.

20

bożena Umińska-keff

was about to set in, and with it a possibility to articulate one’s own political inter-

ests – why should women not do it then?

Feminism was my input into the transformation, my chosen ideal of al ,

since I found the rest of them impossible. Let me just remind that in 1993 we

col ected over a mil ion signatures in support of the referendum on abortion. Al of

them were ignored by the new Polish democracy. Though the general direction

was apparent, the domination of the Church was not yet a confirmed fact, as it is

18 years later. Poland was not yet an extra-constitutionally confessional state.

I felt superiority towards activists of the old Polish Women’s League6 – as

if they were dinosaurs, heavily stepping of the world’s stage on their huge paws,

whilst we, the mammals, the new formation, the light-armed anti-patriarchy, were

jumping on. I did not take into account that there were dif erent kinds of dinosaurs,

and that us, mammals, inhabited a valley belonging to the dinosaurs not of the

Polish Women’s League variety, but to those bearing crosses. And that in total, in

practice, we were not that remote, the feminists and the activists, though we

would have been divided by our interpretation of reality. I probably would not say

it aloud at the time, because as the new mammal I would not want to admit affinity

with the old dinosaurs. But today, when it is obvious that neither they, nor us,

were winning, there is no point in renouncing the kinship of emancipation.

Today, I am far more prone to respecting those women and their femi-

nine solidarity, which is rather lacking in the Third Polish Republic. All of us – we,

the new ones, the feminists, and they, the older ones, the activists – were out-

raged by women being deprived of their rights as citizens and humans, which

culminated in the new anti-abortion law of 1993. As we can see now, it was

only the beginning of an ongoing process.

6 Polish Women's League – women's organisation affiliated to the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR)

working for women, dissolved along with the Party at the beginning of the 1990s. The League's

activists were distrustful of feminism, they operated according to the old pattern of intervention, par-

ticularly where women were harmed by the custom, but they did not see women as a social group.

During the debate on the abortion law they consistently defended the women's right to choose.

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I would like to repeat that for me the ban on abortion means women are

being deprived of their elementary rights as individuals and as human beings.

One can personally encounter this situation, or not, depending on

whether an unwanted pregnancy happens to her, or whether, for example, she

has the misfortune of getting seriously ill while pregnant.

The first situation can be practically sorted out by money for an illegal

abortion, and most Polish women resort to this solution – to the zloty, the euro,

the rouble or the hryvnia.7 The second situation can be beyond solutions, as

was the case of a young woman who died of untreated colitis ulcerosa, a se-

rious illness of the intestines. The illness was untreated, because doctors “were

afraid” to damage the foetus during examination. Effectively, they sentenced a

25year old woman to painful agony and death.8 They robbed her of her life.

The defenders of life.

In this situation there is no remedy for bad cases. There certainly is none

for degradation of human dignity. As we know, no man will ever be refused

treatment because he fell ill with a foetus inside him. Men never happen to be

at once ill and pregnant, do they?

Female human beings, as a community, in Poland lose a part of their

human and civil rights, such as the right to decide about one’s own life and its

course, the right to protection of life and health, physical and psychological –

should they encounter a situation, which only happens to female humans.

7 The Ukrainian currency. In Ukraine, as in all Poland's neighbouring countries, termination

of pregnancy is legal.

8 In 2005, a 25year old resident of Piła died of sepsis, without medical help. Doctors were

afraid of causing a miscarriage, so they refused to examine and treat the woman, quoting

the conscience clause. The girl's parents tried to seek justice, but the prosecutor's office

discontinued the case in September 2008. The court supported the prosecutor's decision

and the medical disciplinary court decided that the doctors did not commit malpractice.

The case has been brought to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which

applied a fast-track procedure, just months after receiving the suit. Lawyers of the Federa-

tion for Women and Family Planning provide legal support to the family of the deceased

woman.

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Thus female human beings are deprived of their subjectivity, or the hu-

man causative power over their own lives. In certain situations, representatives of the

Church and the state take over direct control over bodies of female human beings,

even against their choices or against the very possibility of making those choices.

Male human beings do not have unwanted pregnancies, and they do

not fall ill during pregnancies, be it wanted or unwanted, do they?

But if some humans do not get pregnant and others do, we should in

fact ask a question whether there are two species of humans, or is there one? If

there is one, than the rights must be identical. All people should have the right

to decide about themselves and their lives. Regardless of their sex.

As soon as the foetus obtains civil and human rights before the female human

being in whose uterus it is developing, the question arises: who gives those rights to the

foetus, having first deprived of them the woman? The Church does, along with politi-

cians representing its interests – they take over the control over the woman’s body.

And that is the conclusion – in Poland, only men and the Catholic Church,

as the representatives of the col ection of principles and attitudes – enjoy human

rights to the full. Women have been pushed out. The Church must maintain hier-

archy not only inside its wal s, but also within the society it rules, exactly to feel the

rule and the unity with the society.

Yes, but. . But women obtained their political and civil rights in 1918. Quite

a decent date, immediately after the First World War, along with most European

countries. Earlier than other women – if we remember that the French women

obtained those rights in 1945, the Italian ones in 1946, the Spanish in 1931, the

Swiss even later than that, depending on the canton. If, then, women possess some

rights, and do not possess others, they resemble someone who walks with one foot

on a curb and the other in a gutter. They can change their situation by themselves,

without any help, just by an act of will, by placing the legs next to one another.

Let us face it: if women in Poland have a bad, discriminating abortion law,

they can change it themselves. If they do not, if they do not even attempt to tackle

the problem as a group of social interest, than their passivity describes the state of

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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their consciousness. The Church is considered as the no. 1 political power that

should never be irritated. BoyŻeleński’s texts about the clergy’s power in Poland

between the wars, particularly about their pressure on women, were entitled

Nasi okupanci [ Our occupants]. But who occupies us? Whose occupation is it in a

situation potential y political y open to various possibilities? We occupy ourselves,

our conformism must provide consent for the Church’s power. Polish mentality

creates this state of af airs. As far as I know, the Catholic Church, even in Poland,

does not have an army, marine forces or missile launchers.

This enslavement is a self-enslavement, this occupation is an auto-occupation.

Stil, in the context of the ideal of justice, the situation indeed looks as if we had

two, rather than one human species – the (relatively) free male one, and the sub-male,

dependent on the male as far as very basic issues are concerned. However, as we said,

history does not repeat itself and we are not in the same place any more. Today, wo-

men have a broader choice and can choose an honorary sex for themselves – at least

symbolicaly and at least those who are not sensitive to their own human humiliation.

They can become a right-wing MP and send other women of to church, where they

can al bow to the “conceived baby”, this weird creature of imagination and language,

which became synonymous with pregnancy and now expels women from their bod-

ies. We no longer know how this “conceived baby” found itself inside a woman’s body

– not required as a body any more, merely as an abode for the heavenly creature. You

can be an abode then. Or you can be a woman of success, and name yourself:

a he-manager, a he-teacher, a he-wife. 9

Women respond to today’s situation – which is a kind of backlash, an anti-eman-

cipation counter-offensive – in the worst possible manner: with an assimilative

9 In Polish, almost al nouns are genderspecific. The language fashion of the last decades has been to treat male versions of nouns defining jobs and positions (particularly the prestigious or expert ones)

as gender neutral, and female versions of those nouns as “funny” or “sounding strange”.

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strategy. Assimilation, or mimicry, is a principle according to which

the minority is to blend into the majority, mimic it, try to fit in. That is

supposed to be the price of acceptance, though it usually is not. Historically, this

method was used by minorities aspiring to equal rights, where the rights were

assigned by those holding power in societies unfamiliar with the concepts of

diversity and equality. Assimilation is a strategy of the weak and the aspiring, in

which it is assumed that the significant power is beyond their reach. Assimilation

does not come cheap: the price is blurred identity and distortion of self-respect.

In Poland though, women with full capitalist force assimilate to the male rule,

to the male sense of superiority, clearly sharing without protest the everlasting

assumption that whatever is masculine is significant, and whatever is feminine –

is not. The masculine is prestigious, rich and powerful.

If men in Poland had purple skin, and women had yellow,

women would universally paint their skins purple.

And they do, only their makeup is language. Polish is very inflectional

and pays much attention to observing the right gender, i.e. the sex of the per-

son speaking. Even in the plural, we “zrobiłyśmy” (did) in the feminine and

“zrobiliśmy” in the masculine.

Still, every professionally active woman is a man, every professional is

a he-professional. A he-doctor, a he-teacher, a he-journalist, an actor, not an

actress.10 “Jestem pisarzem” – “I am a hewriter” announced Manuela Gretkows-

ka. To make things worse, she said that as President of the Women’s Party.

Oops.

I am a he-historian, a he-journalist, a he-sociologist, a he-psychologist, a chair-

man, say women, and it is no coincidence. Whenever a sister (i.e. a brother) contra-

dicts them, caling them a she, others are outraged – if she admits to being a she, it will

10 Due to the genderspecific character of Polish, an “actor” does not have the universal meaning it does in English, hence the linguistic situation is in a sense the reverse of the

Englishlanguage one, where female actors find being called “actresses” demeaning.

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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come out into the open – they, too, are she-journalists! How would that sound?

It sounds as if women did not want anybody to notice they were not

male human beings. In a social sense, obviously. Because in private, I pre-

sume, they want others to notice they were not men.

The thing is, those suffixes do not mask the sex of a woman who uses

them; they emphasise the patriarchal character of Polish culture, the secondary

position of women who, not necessarily consciously, assume that using the right

suffix would deprive them of gravitas, particularly in the professional context.

Using the inappropriate one, on the other hand, exposes their fear of feminine in-

significance. As wel as the women’s incompetence in coping with this fear except

for what is described as identification with the aggressor, with the stronger party.

What was wrong with the female tractor drivers then? I would say there

was nothing wrong with the drivers themselves, with those women on covers

of women’s magazines, with this new model for women to follow. What we

find irritating today, perhaps, is the fact that the leading power were the men,

that it was them who put women behind driving wheels of tractors. It could not

have happened any other way though. In the early 1950s, even Betty Friedan

probably did not think about feminism. Maybe Simone de Beauvoir did, but her

thoughts could hardly have been optimistic.

Still, when even today in Poland right-wing men talk about the ridiculous

female tractor driver, that alien force in the Polish countryside, I boil over with

anger. As if she were a rabid she-wolf attacking little Red Riding Hoods busy run-

ning to church, as if she were a QueenKong destroying Krakow with its lovely

churches, as if she were a pro-abortionist vampire, some kind of Jewish Lilith lying

in guard to drink fresh blood from the conceived baby’s heart – conceived only a

day ago, but she is in so much hurry, she cannot comprehend the heart does not

exist in a physical sense, that she has to wait. If, then, this woman on a tractor is so

evil, if she raises so much resistance, perhaps she is our symbol, our icon, perhaps

we should stand firmly behind her and not let anyone attack her? Maybe she is

the Polish version of Rosie the Riveter of the “We can do it” fame, and we should

26

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put her on our banners rather than deny ever knowing her! Perhaps she was our

mother, aunt or grandmother? Because the female tractor drivers were not made

up – they had faces, names, addresses and achievements.

Since there is so much lost, could we, just for the start, dream for the

first time about claiming back the tractors?

Even in the shape of the correct suffix. I am a sheteacher, I am a shejournalist – it sounds powerful, like a starting tractor engine.

You have to begin somewhere when you are a Polish prodigal daughter,

who, in churches, wasted so much of what Mother Emancipation had given her.

Translated by Katarzyna Nowakowska

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27

Where did the

Woman on a Tractor

and the Cynical

Tough Guy Go?

Gender Innocence

Irretrievably Lost

Agnieszka Graff

28

AGNIESzkA GRAFF

Women were conspicuously missing in anniversary exultations, emotions and

summaries. Oddly, the media associated twenty years of democracy with

heroic men, but not heroic women of Solidarity; with male, but not female

politicians of the years immediately after the breakthrough. Little was said

about equality – as if gender democracy had no relation to democracy itself. It

is fine of the Heinrich Böll Foundation to enquire about memories of women

and the transformation... but this hardly makes up for the general silence of

Polish mainstream media.

I believe the enthusiasm about the Polish Women’s Congress was a

reaction to this omission.1 It was the total disregard for us as a group that

made women from such diverse circles feel like a community for a short

while. Women close to the Catholic Church talking to feminists, left-wingers

meeting businesswomen, women from NGOs sharing panels with members

of radical groups – what made it al possible was irritation, injured dignity, a

sense of having become transparent in the midst of patriotic turmoil. Women,

too, felt the need to celebrate free Poland. During those two days, we felt like

a community, maybe even a group of political interest. In my view it was an

ephemeral sort of unity, and I said as much in my congress speech. I do not

believe in enduring al iances between a feminist who has for years fought for

secular education and a founder of Przymierze Rodzin, a group intent on just

the opposite goal,2 or between an employer and a woman she employs. Stil ,

we did talk. Together, we were moved to tears when Henryka Krzywonos

walked onto the stage to receive the title of the Polish Woman of the Two

1 The Polish Women's Congress “Women for Poland – Poland for Women” took place on

the 20th and the 21st of June 2009 in Warsaw. It gathered over 3 thousand women from all

over Poland; the agenda included 21 discussion panels; the Congress produced over 100

postulates, including the demand for a parity system for election lists and alternating place-

ment of women and men on those lists, as well as the creation of an independent office of

the Plenipotentiary for Women and Equality, who would be elected by the Parliament.

2 Przymierze Rodzin [Family Alliance] – a Catholic educational organisation.

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATION 1989-2009: POLAND,

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Decades.3 The sense of unity in spite of divisions was something real, a phe-

nomenon of the politics of emotion. It was also a sign of the times.

The Congress: a lost opportunity

or a revolution?

The Palace of Culture Congress Hal ful of women from al over Poland – can

it be seen as a “lost opportunity”? Agnieszka Mrozik and Piotr Szumlewicz say

so in their muchdiscussed article published in “Gazeta Wyborcza.”4 They assess

that “the meeting was organised by women of al possible views. Hence it was

difficult to come up with a shared programme of any kind: al that was left were

group sentiments and a warm atmosphere,” while the shared ef orts focussed on

“pacification of voices of protest.” I do not think so. I was there, I listened, I talked

to dozens of women, and I do not think so. In fact, I know things looked dif erent.

Rebellion and radicalism were in the air. I heard those tones in a toilet queue. Of

course, one can stil ask how much of this rebel ion was truly feminist rebel ion, or

how leftwing it real y was, and then judge whether it was enough. For Mrozik and

Szumlewicz – decisively not. As for myself, I was perfectly satisfied.

I have no illusion that the crowd of women in the Congress Hall was com-

prised of feminists. True, they listened with deep emotion to the feminist lecture of

Professor Maria Janion, they cheered for Magdalena Środa (a feminist), they wept

during the (by all means feminist) official laudation in honour of Henryka Krzywonos,

3 Henryka KrzywonosStrycharska – tram driver, Solidarity activist, signatory of the August

Agreement of 1980; on the 15th of August 1980, she stopped her tram number 15 in

Gdańsk, declaring: “This carriage is not going any further”, which was a signal for the city

transport to join the strike. She made Lech Wałęsa keep up the strike, when he wanted

to end it. “If you abandon us, we will be lost. They will leave the shipyard alone, but small

plants will be crushed like worms! Don't break the strike, buses will not win against tanks”,

she exclaimed to Wałęsa. The Polish Women's Congress honoured her with the title of the

Polish Woman of the Two Decades.

4 Agnieszka Mrozik, Piotr Szumlewicz, Kongres Kobiet: stracona szansa, in: “Gazeta Wyborcza”, 45/07/2009.

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AGNIESzkA GRAFF

and they applauded my own (undoubtedly feminist) speech. Does this make them

feminists? A French journalist told me that many women to whom she talked in

the corridors of the Congress Hal had begun their statements with a sacramental

disclaimer: “I am not a feminist, but. .”. So I want to make this much clear: it was not

a crowd of feminists, because such crowd does not exist in Poland. Still, whatever

came after the “BUT” is worthy of our attention and respect. After the “but” comes

feminist insight, regardless of whether the statement’s author is prepared to accept

the stigmatising label. We are a part of age-long tradition of women’s resistance, the

core of which is not the nomenclature, but protest against the patriarchal state of

affairs and the shared sense that women should, and can, oppose it.

I hope the Congress wil prove to be the beginning of change, the beginning

of a revolution. But in my opinion, the event was a revolution in itself. Politics does not

comprise solely of successfuly introduced laws and victorious parliamentary debates,

but is constituted by human emotions as well. And this was an explosion of women’s

colective political emotion – something that had not transpired in Poland before. The

Congress demonstrated that something had changed in this country, as far as women’s

issues are concerned. This change is real though it does not register in statistics about

unequal pay (they remain relatively stable), or in the evident defeat of the pro-choice

side in the Polish struggle for reproductive rights (we are on the defensive – no longer

fighting for the right to abortion, but trying to prevent a ban on invitro fertilisation).5

5 Poland’s anti-abortion law is one of the most restrictive in Europe. The act of 7/1/1993

on family planning, protection of the human foetus and conditions of pregnancy termina-

tion allows for abortion only when the woman's life or health are in danger, the foetus is

damaged or the pregnancy is the result of a criminal act. In spite of several years of efforts,

changing it proved impossible, and the article al owing for abortion due to the woman's

difficult living conditions or personal situation, introduced in 1996, was eventual y deemed

unconstitutional by the Constitutional Tribunal in 1997, thus losing its legal binding power.

At the moment, work is underway on an act regulating the in-vitro fertilisation: MPs from

the Law and Justice party (PiS) demand a ban on such treatment, and the draft prepared by

the Citizens' Platform (PO) largely limits access to IVF, does not provide for NFZ (the Polish

NHS) funding for such procedures and is inconsistent with modern medical knowledge.

Thanks to the initiative of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, a civic draft of the

act was prepared, providing for introduction of NFZ funding for IVF treatment.

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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Facts say one thing, intuition another:

Why things are better than they are.

If you look at the hard facts, things are bad, really bad. At the time of wri-

ting, the media are reporting about the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy,

which deprived Deputy Minister Agnieszka ChłońDomińczak of a huge part of

her duties after she returned to work from maternity leave. Her boss, Minister

(Ms.!) Fedak, comments in the “Dziennik” daily: “She is a woman with three

children, and I do not believe she is short of things to do.” Without batting an

eye, a woman (and a woman of extremely high merit) is discriminated against

in a government department headed by a woman and responsible for, among

other things, counteracting discrimination against women.

The media response to the Congress was singularly unimpressive. The

event was warmly received and reported by “Gazeta Wyborcza” daily... And that

would be it, ladies and gentlemen. To the participants’ amusement, Roman Kurkiewicz, our ally in the media, mocked this situation in the “Przekrój” weekly:

“And what if a thousand miners arrived and each exclaimed a thousand

times? And what if a hundred football fans got into a huge fight? (…) And what

if one male MP appeared with an artificial brain or a plastic dick in his hand in

front of journalists in the Parliament? (…) Then we would have a celebration of

freedom, i.e. press headlines, news on the telly, plenty of information on the

radio. But four thousand women in the Congress Hall? Women who speak,

who demand, who ARE THERE? What sort of story is that?”6

What then, are the grounds for my optimism? Let us say, perversely, that

I base it on female intuition. This intuition of mine (along with over a decade

of observation and reading) tells me that the subject of gender has become

politicised in the course of those past twenty years. Let us call this development

“loss of collective gender innocence”. My intuition also tells me also that this a

6 Roman Kurkiewicz, Knebel jest mężczyzną, in: “Przekrój”, 2009, no. 26.

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AGNIESzkA GRAFF

good thing. It is what the feminist vision of the world is all about: making issues

of gender less colloquial, less transparent, and more political. It is no longer

clear and obvious in Polish culture that a woman is simply a woman, and a guy

is just a guy, and that anyone can see who is who, and who wants what in life.

Things have become less obvious. Matters that used to be discussed among

references to “mother nature” and “brain sex,” in an atmosphere of crude jokes

and colloquial obviousness, have become a subject of political reflection and

political debate. It happened in part due to openly political conservative attacks

against women’s rights in times of right-wing rule, and in part thanks efforts

of the women’s movement. The Congress demonstrated that the language of

rights and disputes has replaced the language of obviousness, not least in the

minds of women, and women of very diverse views.

It is no longer possible to dismiss inequality in access to the labour mar-

ket with jokes about blond bimbos. The case of the Vice-Minister demoted

for being a mother was discussed by all the media as an example of gender

discrimination. They could have wondered collectively whether she was a good

mother and whether a mother can be (ha ha!) a minister. Ten years ago that

is just how the story would have been framed, no doubt including expressions

of concern for the Deputy Minister’s husband. As a society, we have ceased

repeating tired clichés about gender issues, we have stopped ogling, joking and

giggling. We have begun to argue, to take sides. To me, this change is all the

more striking since I devoted several years of my life in the late 1990s to regis-

tering and describing the diverse tones of Poland’s collective giggle over gender

– that is what my book Świat bez kobiet [ World Without Women]7 is about. I

hereby declare with pleasure that the chapter about media nonsense replacing

a debate about equality between the sexes is out of date. In order to write such

7 Agnieszka Graff, Świat bez kobiet, Wydawnictwo W.A.B., Warsaw 2001.

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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a piece today, I would have to read nothing but tabloids and “Nasz Dziennik,”8

and I have no intention of doing so.

Ageing machos and a naked woman

I realised the scale of mentality change thanks to a recent ef ort to return to the

discourse of gender innocence – a moving attempt in a sense, because it was so

desperate, so utterly doomed to failure right from the start. I am talking about the

exhibition by the Łódź Kaliska art group, entitled Niech sczezną mężczyźni [May men

rot],9 presented in January and February 2009 at the Centre for Contemporary Art

in Warsaw. The exhibition comprised of fourteen large-scale staged photographs of

naked women engaged in “men’s” work: there were women-lumberjacks on one,

women-builders on another, metal workers, carpenters, sailors etc. In other words,

it was a cultural event meant to encourage reflection about that astounding freak of

nature: a naked woman who thinks she can do a serious job.

What did the artists mean by that? The curator’s note informed the

viewer (only a male one, I suspect) that the photographs “create and unusual

vision of absurd futurism with overwhelming feminism,” and that the project

was “inspired by modern culture, particularly by its aspect described by the term

‘gender’, or more precisely – ‘feminism’”. The exhibition was accompanied by a

Manifesto, which reads as follows:

“We, the four men from Łódź Kaliska, representing the male kind, de-

clare: 1. Sex segregation was, is and will remain a fact; 2. Women are a different

race and men are a different race; 3. The differences are huge; 4. They cannot

8 “Nasz Dziennik” (“Our Daily”) – an ultraCatholic daily newspaper representing views

close to Radio Maryja.

9 Łódź Kaliska – a neoavantgarde art group created in 1979. In 1981, it changed its pro-

gramme to a far more Dadaist – Surrealist one. Its objective was to ridicule the absurdities

of Communist Poland; the group undertakes artistic interventions and performance, at the

moment its strategy involves annexing the achievements of mass culture by art.

34

AGNIESzkA GRAFF

be levelled out, ignored, omitted (…) We four men representing the entire

male kind, (…) manifest: Adoration for women, for their motherly wisdom,

their bitchy enterprise, natural gentleness, uterine desperation, vaginal sensiti-

vity, the acquiescent power of endurance of the Divinity of Being a Woman.”10

I admit I groaned silently when TV Kultura channel asked me – the femi-

nist they like to call from time to time, when in need of a feminist sound-bite – to

have a say about this work of art. It was not the first time that I was facing this

dilemma. If I comment, I will not only come across as touchy and lacking a sense

of humour, but I will also deliver just what the four aging machos from Łódź

Kaliska want – I will play the role of an offended, censorious feminist. If I refuse

to comment, they will say I am snob, a supporter of porn, or a coward. I did

comment. And after a few days I registered, with relief and some surprise, that

for once my reaction was not at all exceptional on the Polish market of ideas:

most critics responded to the exhibition with embarrassment, as to something

astoundingly anachronistic. Dorota Jarecka wrote in her devastating review in

“Gazeta Wyborcza”:

“Łódź Kaliska conjures up a dinosaur version of feminism and tells us

what a monster it is. It has a bum, tits, and, worse still, it wants to work in a

factory. The famous art group is asked to kindly return to reality. (…) The view

that feminism is about turning women into men is about as accurate as the view

that Communism was an era when you were supposed to put on a red tie and

march.”11

Does misogyny, as performed by Łódź Kaliska, tell us anything about

today’s Poland? What is the point of describing in a feminist text a failed artistic

project calculated to gain splendour by outraging feminists? The point is that

10 Marek Janiak, Adam Rzepecki, Andrzej Świetlik, Andrzej Wielogórski, Łódź Kaliska – Niech

sczezną mężczyźni. The Manifesto and the photographs can be viewed at: http://fototap-

eta.art.pl/2009/lka.php .

11 Dorota Jarecka, Łódź Kaliska na mieliźnie, in: “Gazeta Wyborcza”, 21/1/2009.

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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this exhibition – or rather in its failure – allows us to see, as if through a lens, an

enormous change in our collective mentality. The visit at the Centre of Con-

temporary Art felt to me like a déjà vu: I was struck by the stylistic likeness and

similarity of message between this project and Juliusz Machulski’s film Seksmisja

(1984). Its reinterpretation was a breakthrough moment for my personal femi-

nist thinking years ago. The mastery with which Machulski pictured feminism as

a topsy-turvy world, became a curse for Polish feminists, not because Machulski

is a genius, but because that language was ready, transparent, unproblematic,

and he skilfully transformed it into a plot. Feminism = totalitarianism; commu-

nism = woman on a tractor – these were the ready-made associations in the

1980s and nobody questioned their obvious merit. Not so today. Machulski

himself clearly underwent the same transformation, as his recent pro-women

picture Ile waży koń trojański (2008) clearly shows. Many women perceived it as

an apology for Seksmisja.

There is no turning back, even though

your heart weeps

In conclusion, let us return to the woman on a tractor. As far as I can remember,

there was no such figure among the butch women in the Łódź Kaliska’s work.

But don’t be fooled: in the end, it was all about her. The message was clear:

talk about gender equality is some sort of communist nonsense, and we, Poles,

have been through all that before. The fact that this view did not resonate with

the public, that it annoyed rather than amused, is evidence of a huge cultural

gap between the two eras, represented here by two twin events in the Polish

culture – Machulski’s Seksmisja and Niech sczezną mężczyźni by Łódź Kaliska.

This gap exists between the reception of both works and is the effect of

the exhaustion of a certain language. The intended effect is strikingly similar: in

both cases we hear the same ostentatiously “innocent” and seemingly apoliti-

cal male voice praising beautiful women and the “natural difference between

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AGNIESzkA GRAFF

the sexes,” and associating feminism with communism. In both cases this voice

demands that we appreciate it for being oh so brave and rebellious. But the

Łódź Kaliska’s exhibition embarrasses with its anachronism, its unconsciously

veteran air. In 2009, it uses the language of the 1980s, a language of humiliated

manliness, throwing itself into battle against bosomy totalitarianism. Four age-

ing machos from Łódź Kaliska demand that we accept misogyny as a language

of counter-culture, artistic avant-garde and rebellion. Meanwhile, modern-day

viewers do not find courage in those gestures – on the contrary, they find them

mouldy and completely out of place at the Centre of Contemporary Art.

Igor Stokfiszewski captured this dissonance well, when he asked in his

review for “Krytyka Polityczna”: “What exactly happened during the last few

years to turn the hub of critical thinking, as the Ujazdowski Castle used to be

perceived, into a clinic for ageing misogynists, affirming the quasinationalistic

social order?” The reviewer continues to mock not the exhibition, but the Cas-

tle itself:

“Why not go one step further along the fertile ground of discrimination,

and have an anti-Semitic exhibition with pictures of Jews in a rubbish dump, or

better yet – a homophobic one! Let’s hang a few faggots in the courtyard of

the Ujazdowski Castle, as an artistic event. Let us style the scene to echo well

known photographs of the World War II executions, in order to introduce ele-

ments of history and inter-textuality.”12

Seksmisja does not cause such irritation, because we understand it was

created in a different era – in times when misogyny and rebellion against the

“system” harmonised perfectly with one another. And if it remains a cult movie

today, it is not because we are all closet misogynists, but because this voice from

the past allows the audience to return, for a moment, to the old times, to the

era of gender innocence.

12 Igor Stokfiszewski, Łódź, kał i ska, http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/IgorStokfiszewski/Kali-ska/menu-id-194.html www.boell.pl

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Nostalgia is a powerful force, and the dark 1980s were beautiful times

for thoughtless, narcissistic masculinity a la polonaise, that peculiar mix of chival-

rous gestures, sexism, rebellion and shameful hurt. In those days, you could be

a conservative, a misogynist, and a romantic rebel all at once. You could love

women and hate women’s rights. And, being a woman, you could fall in love

with such a sexist rebel (believe me, I know a thing or two about it), and, having

fallen for him, feed his wounded ego and sneer with contempt whenever femi-

nism was mentioned: a mere Western whim, when we in Poland are fighting

Communism.

A charming misogynist rebel, a bit cynical, a bit unwashed, a perennially

depressed romantic – such was the central figure of collective imagination in the

times of waning Communism. The remains of this charm were still possessed

by Bogusław Linda in the early 1990s.13 His most quoted line, spoken deeply,

with resignation, went like this: “’Cause she was a bad woman...”. Well, you

could not get away with that today. Seksmisja is a nostalgia flick, an occasion for

time-travel. Linda’s macho parts in Psy and Sara look like self-mockery to today’s

viewer. We have lost our innocence irrevocably. There is no turning back, ladies

and gentlemen. There is no turning back.

Translated by Katarzyna Nowakowska

13 Bogusław Linda – one of cult Polish actors; in the 1970s and the 1980s he played in socal ed “films of moral anxiety” by Agnieszka Hol and and Krzysztof Kieślowski. He became famous in the 1990s, thanks to Władysław Pasikowski's films, where he played tough

macho types.

38

Transformers,

or the Changes

in Poland after

1989, as Seen

by a 30-Year-Old

Sylwia Chutnik

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Before 1989, my time, as wel as that of my family’s, was largely spent in the St.

Stanisław Kostka church, where little Sylwia, immersed in her prayers, danced

in nativity plays and scattered flower petals during processions. Buried on parish

grounds was father Popiełuszko,1 murdered by the security police – his grave

drowning in flowers. And we – the kids on their way to divinity classes in a cool

classroom – ate loads of chocolate bars from foreign aid. The entire world sent us

parcels, because we were a poor, oppressed country in the East. We loved it all.

Anti-communist opposition was closely linked with the Catholic Church, and

the vision of free Poland invariably brought about associations with the cross. As we

found out later, this was to have negative effects in the context of women’s rights.

Meanwhile, the fence between the church and the street was covered

in Solidarity flags and banners. I cannot remember exactly, but I don’t think they

could be hung arbitrarily, without consent from the parish priest. Judging by the

scale of those canvases, the priest must not have been particularly assertive.

I used to associate the year 1989 with the strong scent of church flow-

ers. I was ten, when one of my primary school col eagues brought in a poster

with a cowboy on it.2 An election was to be held, so the evening children’s

programmes were shorter for a while – people on the tel y kept talking about

the Round Table.3 I also remember that once, during the evening news, I was

1 Jerzy Popiełuszko was a priest involved in the opposition movement. Since August 1980, he close-

ly cooperated with workers and actively supported Solidarity. During the strike he was de legated

to say mass in the Warsaw foundries; during the martial law, he organised masses for Poland in the

St. Stanisław Kostka church. Abducted and murdered by the security police in 1984.

2 The famous poster encouraging people to vote during the first free election in Poland showed

Gary Cooper in “High Noon”, with a Solidarity badge in his lapel. The caption contained simply

the film title. At the bottom there was the date of the election: 4, June, 1989.

3 The Round Table – talks held by the authorities of Communist Poland, representatives

of the democratic opposition and the Catholic Church between 6, February and 5, April

1989. The talks resulted in the commencement of the systemic transformation in Poland,

culminating in the first free election on 4 June 1989. Ef ectively, Poland became the first

country of the Eastern Bloc, where elected representatives of the society gained real influ-

ence upon execution of power, and, in August 1989, the government headed by Tadeusz

Mazowiecki – the first noncommunist prime minister – was appointed.

40

SYLWIA CHUTNIk

wearing my Madonna-style dress and dancing on the living room carpet, sing-

ing: “The Round Table, they talk about it again, I’m sick of it, why don’t you

stop?” to the tune of “Like a Virgin.” And though I liked the excitement of the

upcoming change, I was afraid that after the election they would stop giving

away parcels full of sweets.

Changes without women

My fears proved unfounded, chocolate and colourful toys could be bought

in normal shops, and, for the first time, I could feel the great alliance be-

tween the government and the Church: in 1990, religious instruction was

introduced to schools. I cannot tel how it came about that the 11-year-old

good girl, and a believer, went mad. Anyhow, it resulted in my categorical

refusal to participate in divinity lessons, and complete abandonment of all

contacts with the Żoliborz parish. Furthermore, I began to notice that my

family’s material situation did not improve at al , and that for a long time

assurances from the new government had nothing to do with what was

actually happening.

Years later I began do discover other “sins”, for example, that out of

26 participants of the Round Table talks on the opposition side only one was

a woman – Grażyna Staniszewska, and only one out of the 29 participants

on the party’s side – Anna Przecławska. Let us add to the picture the two

press officers and three observers from the Church side – the two ladies

look statistical y quite insignificant against the crowd of men participating in

the negotiations between the opposition and the authorities. It is also worth

some consideration that in spite of introducing parity during the Sejm election,

in order to ensure appropriate participation of party members and those from

the opposition, there was no mention of parity according to sex. A slogan

from 1980, painted on the Gdańsk shipyard wal , kept resounding in my years:

“Women, do not disturb us, we are fighting for Poland.” You could say it is still

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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in force.4 We (implying: the gentlemen) have so many things to see to. Women’s

demands, or simply “women’s perspective” in politics remains a nuisance – both

in the context of the Great Systemic Change of ‘89 (election lists practically

without women, the Round Table guidelines – without them as well), and right

through to this day.

Al one needs to do is fol ow the statistics of electoral lists of al the parties

participating in the so-called free elections over the past twenty years. So little

has changed – how tedious seem those quarrels about top positions. For who

are those elections free, open, democratic? The percentage of female MPs in the

Sejm5 provides an answer to this question: during the years 1989-2001, on average

13% MPs were women. The percentage went up to 20% in the fol owing term

(and has remained at that level).6 The situation looks far worse in the Senat: there

are only 8% women there.7 Curious, how little has changed, in spite of all the

actions (e.g. by the Parliamentary Women’s Group or other women’s initiatives).

Low representation of women in high positions (be it in government or

in business) is one of the failures of the past 20 years.

However, we must not forget about the women working in low-paid

jobs, who do not necessarily aim to become managers. Feminisation of poverty

and assigning low-paid jobs mainly to women (predominantly at the level of

care and social services) illustrates the economic discrimination of women ta king

place in the name of the “free market”. Its most radical representation is the

concept that women cannot cope in the new system because they are too lazy

or maladjusted.

4 See: Agnieszka Graff Rykoszetem. Rzecz o płci, seksualności i narodzie, WAB,

Warszawa 2008, p. 204.

5 The lower house of parliament in Poland. The higher house is called Senat.

6 Polki w Sejmie 1918-2008 [Polish Women in the Sejm, 1918-2008], study by Fundacja Kobieca eFKa, Krakow 2008, p.12.

7 After the 2001 election, there were 23% women in the Senat, but after the coming into

power of the rightwing parties in 2005, their representation began to shrink again.

42

SYLWIA CHUTNIk

The latter term is repeated in the media and public discourse like a man-

tra, relating to all those who did not manage to get on board the Brave New

World of Capitalism.

Once we realise the persistent discrimination of women, we can see

that the “miracle” of the breakthrough “cowboy” election did not, unfortunately,

concern cowgirls.

If not the parliament, then perhaps the

Third Sector

In spite of the unsatisfactory state of affairs in official politics, women in Poland

did organise, however unfavourable the conditions. Their activity was based on

three key premisses of the system transformation: the mainstream system trans-

formation (introduction of democratic institutions and procedures), the eco-

nomic transformation (creation of a free market based on private ownership)

and the social transformation (changing social mentality, acceptance of the new

rules of operation). Obviously, the ways of implementing those objectives were

quite diverse, often even critical towards the general guidelines. I refer to the

economic and the free market question, criticised by the Left. Still, those actions

were performed in relation to the changes proposed in ‘89.

A few informal groups describing themselves as feminist were created

in the 1980s, mainly by students interested in gender issues and theories. In

time, those groups began to specify their activity and fields of interest. Since

1988, emotions were stirred mostly by the abortion debate. In Warsaw, a

group which used to organise e.g. women’s film retrospectives began to or-

ganise demonstrations, col ect signatures, write protests, gather opinions, deal

with lobbying and networking. In time, it was transformed into the Polish

Feminist Association, official y registered in 1989. Two years later, along with

four other organisations, it founded the Federation for Women and Family

Planning, thus creating a pressure group in the struggle for legal abortion. A

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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breakthrough moment in the activity of women’s groups was the year 1993,

when the anti-abortion law came into power (the act on family planning, pro-

tection of the human foetus and conditions of pregnancy termination), allow-

ing for abortions to be performed only under exceptional circumstances, such

as a threat to a woman’s life or health, rape, irreversible damage to the foetus.

Abortion was allowed only in state hospitals. The debate stirred huge contro-

versy, which continues to this day. At the same time, women’s organisations

and informal groups were active in areas like culture, women’s economy and

women’s rights. The Women’s Rights Centre was created in Warsaw, the

eFKa Women’s Foundation began to operate in Krakow. Subsequent women’s

organisations appeared within the following few years. In 1995, the first in-

formal anarcha-feminist group was created – Women Against Discrimination

and Violence (KDP), a year later transformed into Emancypunx. The KDP

tried to consolidate women from alternative circles and aimed for political and

public action. The group dealt with issues like the women’s right to legal abor-

tion, anti-fascism, propagating feminism and anti-sexism within the alternative

movement, and pro-environmental actions.8

Informal groups, along with non-governmental organisations, created

the last twenty years of changes concerning women’s rights. At the same time,

they influenced the special character of the women’s movement in our coun-

try, successfully mixing different circles (academics, students, workers etc.) and

methods of operation (informal groups, art, non-governmental organisations or

individual projects).

I myself started of working in the informal groups’ movement, to

eventually found my own non-governmental organisation – the MaMa Foun-

dation – at the age of 26. It was not as much a mature decision to join orderly

structures, as an attempt to seek new methods of social activity and more

8 Based on: Niezależny ruch feministyczny po 1989 roku [ The Independent Feminist Movement after 1989]. An exhibition prepared for the Polish Women's Congress, 2021/6/2009.

44

SYLWIA CHUTNIk

official forms of contact with local authorities, as wel as with those high up,

in the ruling elites. For somebody, who used to organise pickets outside mi-

nistries, the sheer experience of entering those buildings and having cof ee

with people in power is quite peculiar. Nonetheless, all this does not signify

compromising anything or the age-old dilemma of “radicalism vs. legalism” – it

constitutes a natural progression and an attempt to use the opportunities pro-

vided by official structures (and I do not only mean access to the mythical “EU

funding”, but to actual influence as well).

A few years later — alternatives for the

free market

I would risk a thesis that real actions aimed at improving the situation of women

started in 1995, when the first results of the antiabortion law introduced two

years earlier became perceptible, and the non-governmental organisations be-

came stronger. A milestone in development of the non-governmental organisa-

tions working for women’s rights was the Fourth World Conference on Women

in Beijing (1995), which issued a Platform for Action as its final document. Women from Poland participated in the Conference, and they tried to implement its provisions on home grounds.9

At the same time, in the mid1990s, a flood of prowomen and feminist

initiatives could be observed (pickets, festivals, publications), all of them aimed

at transforming the parts of the system which did not live up to expectations

after our passage into the capitalist, or the free-market economy. One of those

movements was anarchafeminism, in which I myself became active in 1995.

9 Results of those actions can be fol owed by studying the Conference fol ow-up materials

Dziesięć lat po konferencji w Pekinie [ Ten Years After the Beijing Conference] http://www.unic.

un.org.pl/kobiety_rozwoj_pokoj/konferencja.php

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I was 16, had long before ceased to drop flowers in front of priests, and possibly

belonged to the first generation of “free” Poland, which was a recipient of the

systemic changes.

With those recipients I had little in common. I was disillusioned by the

Church’s excessive role, and began to look for less hierarchic groups. Under the

wing of poet Danuta Wawiłow, who conducted art workshops for young peo-

ple, I wrote poems and got actively involved in public work – initially during vo-

luntary work for Amnesty International, and later in informal groups. Feminism

had been brewing in my head for a long time by then, and as soon as I became

old enough to start participating in meetings and “go out in the evenings”, I im-

mediately got involved in the blooming freedom, punk, and – finally – anarchafeminist movement.

Interestingly enough, my peers did not always follow the consumerist

lifestyle of the “at last we can buy everything” kind. Very soon they realised that

a fair system based on Solidarity’s demands was not built. With our own eyes

(young, but therefore sensitive) we saw the plight of our parents’ theory, and its

transformation into compromises we could not accept.

Anarchafeminism was never scientifically analysed (apart from some

dispersed articles), but it constitutes an important element of the activity of the

women’s movement in Poland, because due to its manner of operation it in-

fluenced the mainstream fraction of the movement, e.g. the informal Porozumienie Kobiet 8 Marca group, which, since 2000, has been organising Manifas

– street demonstrations in defence of women’s rights.10

In the context of the free market and Poland’s delight in “money ma-

king” and new opportunities after 1989, radical critique of the system seems

an important element of democracy. A critical voice is meant to sober up those

enchanted by capitalism, and draw attention to the social groups which did not

benefit from the changes.

10 More about the initiative: www.porozumieniekobiet.home.pl

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SYLWIA CHUTNIk

An activist and theorist of the American feminist movement, Peggy Ko-

rnegger, created the most powerful and simple definition of anarchafeminism.

She came to the conclusion that the entire idea is based on fighting Patriarchy,

Money and State. In one catchy slogan we find three ideas of three leading social

movements: feminism, anti-capitalism and anarchism. Here is what the three

main opponents of anarcha-feminists are.

Patriarchy, Money, State

Patriarchy is the system of authority and domination of men over women, which,

via its social, economic and political institutions constitutes a source of oppre-

ssion not only for women, but men as well. The concept of patriarchy is one of

the basic concepts of the critique of social relations in feminism. It can be found

in practically all fractions of the movement. Colloquially, patriarchy is quoted in

relation to the struggle for women’s liberation. Increasingly, in social critique,

patriarchy becomes a symbol of hierarchy within the family and interpersonal

relations based on unconditional obedience to the father, brother or husband.

Feminists draw attention to the fact that regardless of culture (Muslim, Catholic

or other) or political situation (Iran or Western Europe) women are expected

to obey men. The only difference lies in methods of executing this demand. For

anarcha-feminists, money is an attribute of domination, a symbol of the mate-

rial rather than the freedom-focussed outlook upon life. Also, it constitutes yet

another way of controlling and exploiting people. Money here is a symbol of

the economic situation of women, who are discriminated in the labour market.

They are paid less, in spite of working the same jobs as men. We can observe

feminisation of professions considered inferior in social hierarchy (kindergarten

teacher, cleaner, nurse), and connecting them with women’s “natural” disposi-

tion. Money influences the situation of mothers in the job market, the fact that

they are asked questions about their reproductive plans during job interviews,

their problems with finding a job due to possible unavailability related to looking

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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after children. Finally, it means the situation of single mothers and the way they

are treated by social services: lack of financial support and help funds, closing

down of childcare facilities, low level of execution of overdue alimonies from

fathers, liquidation of the Alimony Fund.11

In their critique of money, anarcha-feminists are close to situationist

anarchists in their attention to consumerist culture. As far as their economic

critique is concerned, their views are similar to the stance of syndicalists or

anarcha-communists. They try to create independent cooperatives or colle-

ctives, where decisions about management or funds are made democratically.

Also individual initiatives in the anarchist or the feminist movement – e.g. dis-

tribution of press and publications or textiles – are conducted according to the

principle of complete control by all people involved in the initiative.12 Another

method of improving the economic situation of women is involvement in the

activity of trade unions.

According to anarcha-feminists, the state resembles the patriarchal sys-

tem, which constrains both sexes, restricting and destroying their individuality. In

their critique of the state, anarcha-feminists are close to the traditional critique of

restricting freedom, characteristic for different fractions of anarchism. Freedom,

to anarcha-feminists, is important mainly as the liberation of women: from the

authority of the father, the state, social pressure or stereotypes. Only when a

woman is capable of making her own decisions, will she be able to call herself

emancipated. The difference in the anarcha-feminist approach to coercion is

the area of interest and critique, in which it is similar to the feminist movement,

focussing on reproductive rights and the issues of physicality, sexuality, relations

with loved ones, issues of housework and paid work, prostitution and trafficking

in women, life choices (career, motherhood, staying single), sexual preferences

11 See: Zine “Obrzydzara”, 1996, no. 2 or “Vacula”, 2004, no.1.

12 See: “Emancypunx distro”, www.emancypunx.com or “Porcamadonna”, advertising leaflet

in possession of the Author, Italy.

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SYLWIA CHUTNIk

and the issues of women’s creativity. Freedom of choice should be secured in

practically all of those areas. Only then will we be able to speak of women’s

freedom and their right to self-determination.

According to anarcha-feminists, an individual builds their identity on the

basis of private autonomy. A woman, equally to a man, should have freedom to

decide about anything that concerns her. Neither medical, nor social, nor any

other predispositions can undermine women’s personal freedom.13

Anarcha-feminists oppose using women or their situation for political

purposes. This concerns the parties drawing attention to so-called “women’s is-

sues” in their election campaigns in an attempt to win votes. There are subjects,

which serve solely for political gain, and have nothing to do with actually helping

women, e.g. reproductive rights, particularly sex education and the right to legal

abortion. Anarcha-feminists vary in their approach to possible cooperation with

parties or parliamentary groups wanting to change the law on issues concerning

women. They do not cooperate with them, nor do they get directly involved in

activity aimed at introducing the changes – they concentrate on public education

and informing the society.

Sometimes, they try to bypass legal barriers and create an alternative

for the official situation. This takes place in the area of socalled “radical gynae-

cology” (abortions, sex education, medical and non-medical education – ho-

meopathy). Anarcha-feminists try, as much as they can, to bypass the state’s

interference with their life, by resorting to alternative education. Kindergartens

and schools based on freedom-oriented education methods (usually on the

unschooling movement, or the Steiner-Waldorf methods) are organised in pri-

vate homes or places created by the anarchist circles – at squats, collectives,

infoshops and meeting places.14

13 Siren, Anarcho-feminist manifesto, in: Quiet rumours, Rebel Press, London 1996, p. 45.

14 To create a definition of anarchafeminism, I used an M.A. dissertation by Joanna

Zwierkowska, written under the supervision of Professor Małgorzata Fuszara at the Insti-

tute of Applied Social Sciences of the Warsaw University, 2005 (unpublished).

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The New Politics

The general activity takes place within the framework of the so-cal ed “new

politics”, which (unlike the 1968 revolution throughout the world) deve-

loped in Poland after 1989. The right to associate and increasingly frequent

contacts with foreign social activists resulted in new initiatives based on the

principle of non-hierarchy. Each participant of the movement has an oppor-

tunity to make decisions, and a sense that their voice does matter. Another

important principle is the conviction about privacy of an individual being a

public matter, i.e. the old feminist slogan: “private is public”, meaning that

even our least significant activity can influence the social situation. Hence

the rejection of the understanding of politics, which separates the home

sphere from the parliamentary one. This facilitates the uncovering of the

hidden authority which does not originate from individuals, but constitutes

a synthesis of their actions or approach to individuals. One example of such

hidden authority is mass culture, which often uses a manipulated message

disguised as the objective truth.

Here comes the Union

The idea of “new politics”, combined with strong structural support, could cre-

ate a dream social system, where social activity founded on democracy would

fight for particular legal solutions, and, supported by the law, those solutions

would develop all across Europe.

Hopes connected with Poland’s accession into the European Union

were soon shattered, as we learned that EU regulations and norms are not

automatically introduced at the national level. On the other hand, access to EU

funding, grant programmes and free training, open borders and freedom to

travel, learn and work, gave my generation of women excellent tools for self-

improvement, tools of which our moms could not even dream.

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SYLWIA CHUTNIk

If we look closely into the market of economic activity, we can con-

clude that Polish women are quite successful – they top European rankings.

According to the European Commission report on gender equality, in Poland

women constitute 36% of lower and medium management, i.e. 3 % over the

EU average. In 2009, i.e. just five years after the accession, over a third of Polish

women have their own, quite prosperous companies.15 The report omits the

fact that we have mass “self-employment”, i.e. one-person companies, which

have little to do with business. Unfortunately, also very few Polish women

occupy top positions. Only 2% of general directors and company presidents are

women – poor statistics.

While writing this article, I looked through the issue of the OŚKA Bulletin

entirely devoted to women’s rights in the European Union. Published in 2001,

it informed about Poland’s integration process, directives on equal treatment

of women and men, jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and other

“inventions” of the unified Europe. I wrote a critical text for that issue, focuss-

ing on centralised structures and their negative influence upon communities.16

My critique was strong in tone, and reading it brings back memories about the

manner in which the debate about Poland’s joining the Union and the 2003

referendum was conducted. On the one hand, the government’s delight in the

profits derived from being “a part of Europe”, on the other, the ultraRight’s

discourse of danger to Poland and potential extinction of the Polish nation. My

text was dominated by a sense of disappointment in the Union (before we even

joined its structures) – I concentrated mainly on the issue of sealing borders and

the EU’s policy towards refugees.

15 Raport Kongres Kobiet Polskich 2009. 20 lat transformacji 1989-2009 [ Report of the Congress of Polish Women 2009. Twenty Years of Transformation 1989-2009], Fundacja Femi-

noteka, Warsaw 2009.

16 Sylwia Chutnik, Pozorna wolność w obrębie struktur państwowych albo śmiech wolnej meduzy

[ Apparent Freedom within State Structures or the Laugh of the Free Medusa] in: Biuletyn

OŚKI, 2001, p. 44.

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Several years later, I get an impression that the texts written over the

past 20 years from the perspective of women’s rights usually concern the same

thing: disappointment that joining a tried system, seemingly eliminating gender

inequality, did not sort out our problems for us.

This refers to both leaving the communist era and returning to Europe

via the EU accession. 1989 (the first free election) and 2004 (joining the Union)

were in fact the years of hope for women’s movements, who expected that the

situation of women would finally improve.

I would not want to finish this text with a straightforwardly pessimistic

picture of the changes taking place during the past 20 years. Nevertheless, I do

believe that certain Polish afflictions, such as the lack of a secular state, conserva-

tism and depreciating the women’s point of view (on all levels) seriously ble mish

the picture of the “twenty years of freedom”. What sort of freedom is it, if

women’s rights in the labour market continue to be violated, non-heterosexuals

have virtually no rights and the battle for legal access to termination of pregnancy

seems a lost cause right from the start?

Laborious efforts of women in non-governmental organisations, informal

groups or teams will continue, in spite of permanent problems with funding and

resistance from subsequent ruling parties. Hundreds of women involved in the

feminist movement remind me of an ad, which used to appear on Polish TV in

the 1990s: the Transformers figures suddenly change from cars into dangerous

monsters. The slogan encouraging to buy toys reads: “It’s a hidden weapon”.

I think that is what women in Poland are – a hidden weapon, just as they used to

be in the times of illegal opposition, which Ewa Kornatowicz illustrates perfectly

in her book of interviews with women involved in the democratic opposition;17

and as they used to be in the times of the first government after the systemic

change. They still are now – both at the level of private family relations, and in

17 See: Ewa Kondratowicz, Szminka na sztandarze [ Lipstick on the Banner], Wydawnictwo Sic!, Warsaw 2001.

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SYLWIA CHUTNIk

companies or political parties. A hidden weapon not only in terms of methods

of achieving the goal – far from aggressive instigation, close to dialogue rather

than confrontation – but of the consistent struggle for women’s rights as well:

outside the official system (though closer and closer to the mainstream), but

with increasing effectiveness.

Translated by Katarzyna Nowakowska

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53

2.

Czech

Republic

Happiness short

of Sean Connery

Petra Hůlová

56

Petra Hůlová

It is spring and the streets are glowing with color. Colorful dresses, frivolous

shoes, hats of all shapes, women youthful, younger and older, swaying their hips

and with flowing skirts they cruise the streets of Prague as if they were ships.

Ever since I was a little girl I have been fascinated by their attention to

detail. Every woman can put on a tight skirt that barely covers her bottom. But

enticing with little hints, and looking like you’ve stepped out only by accident, is

quite another business.

Twenty years ago the streets used to come alive with the spring as well.

Women proudly carried their perm hairdos reminiscent of puffy clouds, the

cobblestones in the street resounding to the clapping of their heels. Wearing

high waist pants with large pockets and wide belts, they clutched their mesh

shopping bags. No playful purses. The mesh bags were either empty or packed

full, depending on whether they were about to get in the line for the bananas or

whether they were already done.

Back then women didn’t mix and match the latest fashion fads with an-

tiques dug out of grandmother’s closets. Shabby was shabby. Brand-new worn-

out clothes pretending to be unpretentious were not in style. Bright lipstick and

a miniskirt were sexy, greasy hair in a bun and suede Oxford shoes signified an

intellectual, and most communist youth workers in the elementary schools of

communist Czechoslovakia used to die their curls purple. One simply knew

right away who one was dealing with.

It’s called nostalgia, that longing for the good old times, the times when

life was easier and the reality was readily legible and comprehensible. Every-

body was employed. All the emancipated workers of the socialist state, female

or male, were required to work. Naturally, women also looked after children

and the household – that was self-evident. Women worked as tractor-driv-

ers, City Council comrades,1 Communist Party officers as well as secret police

agents. Not only school canteens, but entire elementary schools, supermarkets,

1 “National Council” (národní výbor) was a communist equivalent of today's City Council.

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trams, „Pioneer” youth groups,2 and even the long office halls of the communist

authorities were all fully staffed by women and thrived without male presence.

How was that possible? Differences between men and women had officially

been erased. And men were not interested in the less paid jobs in “feminised”

fields. Women’s work however, didn’t stop at clockout time. The second shift

awaited the Stakhanovite woman3 at home. She was the Queen of Household

Chores (having her house fully under control), the Heroic Mother, the Woman

by the Stove, the Cleaning Squad, and the Worker Reaching the Goals of the

Five-Year Plans4 all at the same time.

Ladia,5 the husband of this versatile woman, let’s call her Marie, spends

his free time tinkering about at the cottage.6 Whether he works hard in his job

at the state-owned enterprise or not makes no difference, so he prefers to save

his drive for the cottage. After all, there is hardly anything for him to do at home,

nothing to control, so he has got energy left. Every year he paints the gate. He

also collects wires, sticks, pieces of wood, sticks, acorns, bark and other natu-

ral materials for making hooks, hangers, key pendants and other hand-crafted

decorations. In the afternoon, while Marie is mopping the floor and making

plum preserves, Ladia, provided he has finished his tinkering for the day, steals

a moment to read a little samizdat.7 He reads a part of the barely legible carbon

2 Communist, central y organised youth groups for al ages.

3 Stakhanovite (údernice): the communist ideal of a strong and fearless person able to take

on any physical or psychological challenges.

4 Five-year plans were a characteristic feature of the central y-planned economy.

5 Ladia – a colloquial form of a typical Czech male name.

6 In the socialist era, most urban families owned so-called “cottages.“ These were bungalows

in the country or in the suburbs where people would spend their weekends gardening,

fishing, grilling, or pursuing other “creative” activities such as handicrafts.

7 Samizdat was undeground literature by authors banned by the regime that was ilegal y

circulated and copied, typically using a typewriter and carbon copy papers.

58

Petra Hůlová

copy of a text by Havel8 that raises civil society. In the evening, while Marie is

putting the children to bed and hanging the laundry out to dry, Ladia nurtures a

few thoughts as he enjoys a cigarette by the window (so that the laundry doesn’t

absorb the smoke). He might even be lucky enough to catch Medek9 speaking

on Radio Free Europe.

The samizdat Ladia was reading had probably been transcribed by

somebody like Marie. Women typically did this quiet discreet labor requiring

no more than mindfulness and patience. It was theirs to do. Samizdat texts had

no chance of surviving, had there been no transcribers. Thank you, women.

Mere transcribing of other authors does not deserve applause, however. Havel

wouldn’t have lasted long without his wife Olga’s cooking. He got all the credit,

though, naturally. Olga only created the home, the working conditions, so to

speak, for her husband. Olga did it just as Marie did it for Ladia who had read

something by Havel. Just as thousands of Czechoslovak women did it for thou-

sands of their Czechoslovak husbands whether they had been reading Havel or

not. In regard to emancipation, or feminism, or gender analysis, one’s affinity

with political dissent was inconsequential.

The Czech dissent was, obviously, concerned with human rights, not

women’s rights. Emancipation and gender tend to become issues in societies

that „can afford it”. These societies tend to be rich, democratic and capitalist.

And even though communist Czechoslovakia was rich in comparison with some

countries, it was not democratic nor capitalist and, therefore, it was not „ready”

for a debate on gender or equality –the pseudo-feminism of the Communist

Women’s Union excepted. It also seems natural that in a system that treads

upon human rights, the treaded upon unite in fighting against the oppressive sys-

8 Vaclav Havel (born in 1936) – a Czech writer and playwright, signatory of Charter 77. He

led the political changes in former Czechoslovakia after 1989. He was the last President of

Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic.

9 Ivan Medek was a legendary reporter on Radio Free Europe, a banned station that broad-

casted in Czechoslovakia.

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tem, and that becomes their sole focus. Communism was the common enemy

and fighting it was the goal the dissident community shared. As a result, differences of opinion faded away. Perhaps it was a time of true luxury. Or perhaps the domestic and public spheres are not to be compared. It is also possible that

resistance against the regime had nothing to do with the tough regimes in the

dissidents’ apartments in Prague where they were being waited on as they lay in

their slippers on the couch. But the sad truth remains that the patriarchal regime

was alive and well in socialist Czechoslovakia, in the families of communist boot-

lickers and of dissidents alike. And among these there definitely were families in

which traditional gender roles had not resulted out of the „mutual agreement”

of both partners, as claimed by those who accuse feminists today of infring-

ing on people’s personal freedom. Relationships are not contracts made from

scratch: they are bastions of relationships past, conserving the bonds between

our mothers and fathers.

It is easy to be wise after the event, they say. But the point here is not

to judge whether emancipation was supposed to take place as a part of the re-

sistance or whether it was right to save it for later, for a good reason. The point

is that the issue of gender seems to have been neglected in the underground

circles altogether. Gender simply did not make it on the long list of intellectual

topics taken up at apartment seminars.10 A pity for the women, and their own

fault. Nothing comes free. The grand changes in the political regime needed a

push too, to say the least. Men were not inclined to discuss gender, for obvious

reasons, and women did not push the issue. Maybe it did not even occur to

them. This lack of dialogue, however, led to absurd situations, such as a sense

of relief on behalf of the wife following her husband’s imprisonment. Finally she

had a moment to herself, wives of former dissidents have told me time and time

again. In situations like this, women are not the victims. Everybody suffers. Not

10 For lack of public space, academic discussion took place at illegal seminars in apartments

of dissident intellectuals.

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Petra Hůlová

only women deserve the status of the victims. Given how much women are

and were able to manage now as well as then, they must have had the capacity

to carry on a dialogue on gender. They just did not dare, they did not think of

it, nobody encouraged them to. Old gender habits die hard. The positives and

negatives of the customs forged by our ancestors are with us now almost as

much as before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

I am no real eyewitness of the communist era. I was ten years old when

the regime fell. For my understanding of that historical period I rely on read-

ing, interviews, my imagination and a few fragmented memories. My parents

represent their generation perfectly. They did not lack character but they were

certainly very flexible. Like most people around them, my parents were afraid

of the regime. They were not willing to risk anything, including risking for their

own ideals.

What I recall best from that time is the aesthetics. The look of groce-

ries, the political bulletins on the wall of the house, the winter hats with tassels

and pom-poms kids used to wear, and the greyness of the capital I thought was

house paint. None of this looked shabby; it was normal. What wasn‘t normal

was what came afterwards.

Politics was never discussed in our home. We celebrated the fall of the

regime by attending the demonstrations as a family. I had not realised there had

been something terrible about the place we used to live until it was all over. I

had not realised dissidents were heroes. My mother fell platonically in love with

Havel in the first few days of the Velvet Revolution. Like thousands of other

women who had never heard of him until then, she has kept his photos above

her desk to this day.

Socialism was a period of zero ambiguity. That came later. Relative out-

looks on communism came along: not everything was that bad. Relative out-

looks on dissent came along: the dissidents had made agreements with the

communists in the end so what kind of revolution was that? And relative out-

looks on established gender roles came along too. In comparison with Western

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Europe we seem to have made a step back at first. Nurseries were being abolished across the board, including some kindergartens, because children were happiest at home with their mothers. After decades of central planning, family

values were asking for the floor in the early 1990s.

When the first Western feminists arrived in the Czech Republic to raise

the consciousness of the unconscious local members of the gentler sex, both

parties were rather confused. Feminists from Western Europe and the U.S.

praised the high numbers of women in the workforce. What they found appa-

lling were the manners of Czech men and the fact that the care for the children

and the household was still exclusively the job of the women. While Czech

women would have preferred to stay at home with their children as long as

possible, a novelty after all those years, Western feminists worried about the

low numbers of women in the civic sector.

Feminism aroused disgust among Czech women after the Velvet Revo-

lution, owing more to the fact that its protagonists appeared to fill the roles of

yet other experts who showed up in the country in the early nineties “to help”.

Most of these well-meaning, self-assured foreigners with little knowledge of the

local historical and social contexts were met with mixed feelings rather than

welcome. Czech women were simply not interested in their style of feminism

at the time. They had worked plenty, both on and off the job, and it had been

of no use. The fall of the regime brought along freedom and more desirable

options. Opportunities to pursue travel or meaningful studies as well as chances

to find oneself a man with good prospects presented themselves. So Czech

women, along with their Slovak and Polish counterparts, became marriage ma-

terial in demand, precisely thanks to the qualities Western feminists had come

to help them unlearn. The willingness of Eastern European women to take on

the burden of care for their husbands and for the household in quite a traditional

sense was rather different than the kind of care common among well-educated

women in Western Europe. Czech women traded their traditional qualities for

higher standards of living on a mass scale. Dating and living with foreigners was

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Petra Hůlová

called „not being ashamed of one‘s femininity,“ an identity starkly contrasted with

being „feminist“.

The image of a feminist was (and, to a large extent, still is) unflattering.

Even though much of it no longer holds, images of the woman with a mous-

tache wearing baggy clothes, the woman who is undesirable to men and there-

fore frustrated and hateful, or of the woman who constantly makes ungrounded

accusations, are still around. In the Czech Republic today, a feminist woman can

still be viewed as one who has failed „as a woman,“ and whose sexual frustration

and lack of male attention have led her all the way to feminism.

Moreover, feminist women who also live for themselves and their work,

and whose primary role is not to keep the family hearth, claim their allegiance to

feminism with a sense of hesitation. They typically introduce it starting with the

following caveat: „I am not a feminist but…“ Finally, even women who see the

world in feminist terms dislike the label out of fear of being called men-haters.

The conflict between Western feminism and women raised in socialism

was also rooted in the traditional association of feminism and left-wing ideology.

Its proponents were neither able nor willing to share local women‘s fascination

with the new opportunities capitalism had introduced. Their different historical

experience did not predispose them to understand the relationship between

communism and the lack of freedom in the same way Czech women did. See-

ing that gender equality seemed to be grounded in the idea of an egalitarian

Utopia, they immediately associated the latter with their experience of commu-

nism. These rough edges, however, as well as the “Us versus Them” mentality

have smoothened out now in the new millennium. Perhaps we have sobered

up about democracy, or perhaps the Radical Left in the West has lost its sex

appeal. Other contrasts have also become less distinct. There are no vast dif-

ferences in education, fashion, hobbies or in the pop-culture in the East and

the West any more. Due to globalisation, the former vast disparities between

the women living on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain have become mere

differences.

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Despite all its particularities, Europe is significantly more unified today

than it was twenty years ago, and the same can be said of feminism, or femi-

nisms. Two essential trends can be observed in Prague, Berlin, and Barcelona

alike. Feminism based on the ideal of women‘s self-realisation “outside” of the

family co-exists with the trend of the “new family” or “new motherhood”, both

of which seek to revive tradition, making a peculiar step back in time. „It‘s us who

are marginalised now,“ these new-old voices are saying. „We are oppressed by

the feminists who don‘t give family care the credit it deserves. In their eyes,

homemakers are secondclass citizens. We are not like them!“, “new” mothers

assert themselves, calling for greater respect of their life choices. Both extremes

receive media attention – women in high decision-making positions as well as

women who spend their days looking after and cooking for their six children.

And what about Marie and Ladia?

Marie and Ladia, or rather their younger counterparts born in the 1970s

baby-boom generation called „Husak‘s Children“,11 have a one-year-old son,

Raphael. Unusual names are fashionable among young parents nowadays. Ma-

rie works as an accountant and Ladia is a sales representative in a large multi-

national company. At the moment, Marie is at home on maternity leave with

Raphael. She had a baby at the age of thirty, after she had done some travelling.

Her and Ladia had gone to Corsica twice and they had made two trips to Paris.

Marie’s mother had had her first child when she was ten years younger than

Marie. She had just turned twenty but having children at this age was perfectly

common when the commies were around. Marie and her friends ridicule their

mothers from time to time. Young families had to share living quarters with the

grandparents, „Gee, we couldn’t do that now!” They used to get married to be

eligible for those newly-wed loans! The brides used to have big pregnant bellies

11 Children born during the baby boom in the 1970s when Gustav Husak was the President

of Czechoslovakia. This period, called "normalisation", followed the Prague Spring of 1968

when the socialist reform movement was violently suppressed. The Party "normalised" the

society by stronger control of personal expression in al spheres of life".

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Petra Hůlová

at the wedding ceremonies. They spent the first year of the baby’s life wash-

ing cotton nappies and their apartments smelled of pee and poo. Young moms

didn’t use to be able to leave the house because the strollers were too big to

be taken out even to the shops, not to mention public transportation. There

were stairs, stairs, and stairs everywhere. At least the large apartment buildings

had assigned special storage rooms for parking the strollers. Nursing in public

was an embarrassment. So folks stayed at home. No innovations like baby travel

beds, disposable wet towels, baby monitors or ice teething soothers. Unlike

her mother who used to sit at home, Marie sits with her friends in a café with a

baby corner now. They are talking about how far the times have finally come.

Ladia has promised Marie he would buy diapers on the way home from work.

He does a good job at changing Raphie by now and he is fast at it. Marie’s dad

never would have done either shopping or changing and her mom would never

have thought to ask. Marie decided to enroll Raphie in baby swimming and baby

dancing classes upon reading in a magazine that children must develop their skills

from an early age, something the commies had neglected too. They watch the

levels of sugar in the baby’s blood and the nitrates in the carrots much more

carefully nowadays. There is a lot Marie can be happy about, and not only from

the mother’s perspective. Her employer is supposed to set up new part-time

work options, rumour has it. They might even start a company kindergarten.

She could work three days a week and spend four days at home with Raphie.

Luckily, mother is retired and available to watch him. That will be great.

Ladia isn’t quite as happy as Marie. His life is nowhere close to ideal.

His father used to have a lot less to do after work. Ladia’s dad thinks Ladia is

a little hen-pecked, doing nappy shopping on the way from work. Thank God

Ladia doesn’t iron and he will never mop the floors, never! That would be the

last straw. How low we have sunk! The world has lost its order. Ladia kind of

believes this. He would never mention it in front of Marie. He lets her have her

say but he is never going to mop, ever! And if she thinks he is always going to just

dance to her tune, she is wrong. She even said recently at the movies that she

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

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liked Jean Claude Van Damme and Sean Connery the best. They haven’t seen

a mop once in their lives! When he told her this she just frowned, no answer.

Women, what can you say. „Are you sure this isn’t what you wanted?”, Ladia

asks himself. But he knows exactly what he wants. Sometimes he just wants to

have a normal woman at home, one who doesn’t fight all the time. Ladia has

enough fighting at work and home is supposed to be a haven, isn’t it? Ladia feels

that the times are unfair to him and that his role in society is unclear, but he

doesn’t know what to do about it.

The proponents of „new motherhood” would say Ladia and Marie’s

marriage is going downhill. The problem remains, however, that there is no

clear answer to whether Czech women are happier now than they used to be.

And if there is one, it is probably negative.

Men lack the opportunity to prove themselves “as men”. Already in the

era of communism physical strength was taking a back seat, but patriarchal eti-

quette was still upheld at least in the home. And while women today still seek

support with the men, men have nowhere to turn. They put their clubs and

axes aside long ago and now they are fighting with their wives about who is the

boss. And while women have never put aside their women’s weapons, men are

no longer allowed to respond to them in the same way they always have.

Liberal feminism reached its peak with the passing of the right to vote. The

aspirations of radical feminism are as broad and blurry as the limitless European

Union project. It is attractive for a wide range of social actors as long as they

find comfort in the idea of their own potential membership. Europe is like a

seductress who never says a final „No”. Although she is unavailable for Turkey

and many countries of Eastern Europe, she leaves everyone hoping for the blissful

moment of becoming one. If project Europe drew its boundaries, it would lose its

charm. Similarly, if radical feminism set its goals, it would pave the way to its own

decline. Like the universe that must expand not to col apse, radical feminism has

us fol owing it into the great unknown, as the world of equality seems to shimmer

somewhere in a distance and we are not quite sure what it should look like.

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Petra Hůlová

Some people believe the main contribution of feminism in the last three

decades has been the fact that women have extremely high expectations these

days. They expect too much of themselves as well as of men and when they

fail, they project their frustration onto the society saying it did not enable them

to have a life that stands up to their dreams. The thirty-year-old Marie despairs

over the fact that her employer still has not set up the part-time work options

as promised, and that there is still no company kindergarten. And although Ladia

does the shopping, his share of the household chores is far smaller than his

fair half. He does maybe a quarter of what she does in the house. He doesn’t

even notice the mess. So she puts hope in little Raphie. Every time she dries

the dishes, she sticks a handkerchief and a plastic cup in his hand, so that he can

follow her example. Practice makes perfect. But Raphie usually doesn’t give a

damn and quickly throws the cup away.

Conversely, the fact that Marie just cannot be like a normal woman gets

on Ladia’s nerves, at least now and then. He does not force her to do anything,

so why doesn’t she leave him alone. He didn’t get married to be constantly

corrected, especially by someone who should take out the log out of her own

eye before she takes the splinter out of his. She doesn’t look after herself. She

barely ever puts on make-up, in spite of his compliments every time she does.

It is already spring and she hasn’t even taken that sky-blue skirt he gave her last

year out of the closet.

Ladia looks out of the window of his office, the sales representative of

a multi-national company, and he sees a street bathing in sunlight, resplendent

with color. Manifold dresses, frivolous shoes, hats of all shapes, women youth-

ful, younger and older, swaying their hips, with their skirts flowing, they cruise

the streets of Prague as if they were ships. “If I had lived a century ago,” Ladia

says to himself, “I could just stop by a brothel on my way home.” But he isn’t

sure he would. “Maybe Marie would even like that,” he thinks. “She would have

another reason to say that men are nothing but scoundrels and that’s why the

poor women must keep treading the war path.”

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Marie is also looking out the window onto the street. Raphie is taking

his afternoon nap and she is smoking her secret cigarette by the window. It is

her window in her apartment that she has inherited from her parents. Ladia

lives with her but should something go wrong, it is her who is going to stay. Last

week, when they last made love, he bent her over the washing machine in the

bathroom. She enjoyed that. She thought of Sean Connery. Would he have

fought the commies back in socialism? She imagines him holding her in his arms.

Not the Sean Connery as he is today but the old one from James Bond, when

he was all young and handsome. It makes her head spin for a moment.

Translated by Kateřina Kastnerowá

68

Women and

Transformation:

Example of the

Czech Republic

Jiřina Šiklová

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Twenty years is enough time to assess change in society. But what angle to take? In

this case, transformation is understood as an indistinct process of transition from a

system of „real“ socialism and a centrally planned economy to a market economy, or

in terms of ideology, to capitalism. However, these terms do not help us define the

criteria for success and failure. Is success the rate of GDP growth, change in income

stratification, or the fact that a country joins international structures and institutions?

In respect to the growth of the women’s movement, feminism, and

applying the gender lens to social and political issues, post-1989 changes have

been enormous.

In brief: we started at ground zero and today we have reached about

the same level as other EU states, as far as the position of women is concerned.

Equal opportunities for men and women, gender gaps in wages or social security

benefits, the representation of women in top professions, science, and in politi-

cal parties, the need to change the image of women starting with the educa-

tion process, the role of language in reinforcing male dominance, empowering

women from sexual and national minorities, reinterpretation of history from the

perspective of women, all these topics are discussed in the media nowadays,

even including issues that used to escape our attention, such as domestic vio-

lence, sexual harassment or sex trafficking. All this work has begun at grassroots

level; it is the women themselves who have been founding interest groups and

civic associations, out of their own initiative rather than upon any government

or state order. When facing challenges, women in the Czech Republic are now

usually able to state their demands and to form civic initiatives to address them.

At the same time, women have experienced all the twists and turns the

complete society has been going through in the last two decades: property re-

privatisation, coupon privatisation,1 the split of the Czech and Slovak Republics,

1 An uniquely Czech method of privatisation in which shares in companies are distributed

free to those citizens who have registered as interested and who have bought books of

investment coupons (editor’s note).

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Jiřina Šiklová

the steep stratification into rich and poor, including the emergence of the new

establishment, the new „them” whom we hold accountable. In general, how-

ever, women have not been the primary actors driving these processes. There

are fewer businesswomen than there are businessmen and there were fewer

women than men involved in shaping new decision-making centres; therefore,

women are less responsible than men for what has gone wrong. Women ca-

rried less stigma of collaboration with the former regime and the secret police

than their male counterparts did when they entered the public arena. They had

ideal conditions at the start but they have not taken advantage of them, and now

the numbers of women in the top positions in politics and business positions

are lower than the numbers of men. In contrast to twenty years ago, however,

women‘s roles have greatly transformed and diversified.

Let us take the following as an example illustrating my point: Prior to 1989,

there was only a single top-level women‘s organisation, permitted to operate by

the Communist Party – the Czech Women‘s Union – a member of the National

Front2 coalition, of course. For younger readers, let me explain that every organisa-

tion founded in the socialist era was required to enter the National Front, and to

declare that it sought to build socialism and follow the lead of the Communist Party

of Czechoslovakia. No other organisations for women were permitted by the Party.

Today we have 51 womeninitiated nonprofit organisations,3 according to Alts and

Sopranos II, a 2005 pocket guide to gender equality initiatives in the Czech Republic.

There are two academic centres dedicated to gender issues, one at the Charles

University in Prague and the other at the Masaryk University in Brno. Additional y,

the Academy of Sciences has a Department for Gender, Equal Opportunities and

Research and there is a department researching the position of women in science.

2 Communistcontrolled coalition of all civic or community organisations in socialist Czecho-

slovakia. Membership in National Front and a pledge of allegiance to the ideology of the

Communist Party was necessary for obtaining permission to operate legally.

3 The Czech law on nonprofit organisations distinguishes two types of organisations governed

by different regulations: o.s. – civic association, and o.p.s. – public good association.

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Four women‘s groups associated with different political parties are active in the Czech

Republic. There are 5 organisations and 3 centres studying and promoting genderequality issues. Besides the „Gender and Sociology“ Department at the Institute of Sociology at the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs

has an Inter-Departmental Committee for Equal Opportunities, and there are the

Government Council for Human Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of All

Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Equality Committee at the Czech

Moravian Confederation of Trade Unions. The first and oldest nongovernmental

civic initiative, a library cal ed the Gender Studies Centre, was founded as early as

1991. Today the organisation boasts probably the best and largest library specialising

in gender in Central Europe, or, as far as we know, at least in the post-communist

states. Gender Studies often represents Czech civic, nonacademic women‘s initia-

tives abroad and serves as the first point of contact for international entities and

individuals interested in the field. The success story of Gender Studies owes a lot

to its early date of founding, right after the Velvet Revolution when Czechoslovakia

was a popular destination. Prague was likened to Paris of the 1930s and was consid-

ered a feminist “Mecca”. The financial and moral support of the German Heinrich

Böl Foundation, a.k.a. the Green Party, and of international organisations advocating

women‘s issues, particularly the New School for Social Research were also essential

to the success of Gender Studies. The New School helped establish the Network

of East-West Women (NEWW), a platform for cooperation of women in Eastern

Europe, which has served as a launching pad for many women‘s civic and inter-

est groups that eventually became independent. In a like manner, Gender Stud-

ies ini tiated many projects for women from post-communist countries, such as the

Karat Coalition, the Women‘s Memory Oral History Project, international training

initiatives and legal and other assistance programs for migrant and minority women.

Finally, the fact that the Czech Republic sought entry into the European Union and

that politicians strove to meet the Union‘s criteria for membership created more

favourable conditions for gender equality. More women entered public offices and a

variety of women‘s interest groups emerged.

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Despite the bias against feminism prevalent in the early 1990s, the topic of

gender (although most often discussed from a perspective which is not feminist)

has by now penetrated public debate. What is often bemoaned is the low number

of women in politics. However, these numbers are not low as a result of discrimi-

nation against women, legal y speaking. In the Czech Republic, women are well

represented in local politics as mayors of vil ages and towns and in the nonprofit

sector. But they are missing from leadership positions in political parties and in the

government. The reason is that the competition between men and women is

stronger in politics, which is always in the media spotlight, and the fact that beco-

ming involved in top-level politics is not very appealing to women. People who are

not well-informed point out that there used to be more women in the Parliament

during the communist era (28%) than there are now (barely 15%). I always use

my standard response: in socialism, all political decisions were made by the Cen-

tral Committee of the Communist Party, the Parliament had no decision-making

power. Its composition was dictated by the Party that set exact quota for workers,

farmers, „working intel igentsia,“ and for women. Unlike the others, the category

of women somehow circumvented acquired professional status; women were a

category based on their biological sex.

Questions about why women who were formerly active in the anti-

communist resistance and entered the first political institutions in 1990 later left

the Parliament and resigned from political party leadership are as common as

comments on women’s representation in the Communist Parliament. In my

opinion, nobody forced these women out of their political positions. Rather, they

resolved to leave politics on their own and go back to their original professions,

which they had not been allowed to practice in the period of normalisation.4

After all, a similar process has taken place in Poland (as described by author Shana

4 A period cal ed "normalisation" fol owed after the Prague Spring of 1968 when the socialist reform movement was violently suppressed. The Party "normalized" the society by stronger control of personal expression in al spheres of life.

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Penn from the U.S. – analyses of internal gender relations from “the outside”

were also typical of this time period), Hungary, in the Baltic states, and in some

countries of the former Yugoslavia. And possibly this was the case in Russia and

Ukraine as wel , although I do not have data on these geographical areas. The

women active in top-level politics nowadays are not, and have never been,

active in the anticommunist resistance movement; their promotion to office

was based on their party membership. Former women dissidents, like their

former male partners, tend to stay away from political parties. Gender discrimi-

nation in the Czech Republic today stems out of prejudice, as according to law,

women and men in the Czech Republic are perfectly equal. Still, it is unpopular

to say, or, God forbid, write, that the position of women is significantly better

today than it was twenty years ago. Certainly, it is correct to point out inad-

equacies, but the unceasing stream of selfpity strips women of selfconfidence

because it makes them believe their efforts have been in vain.

A discussion on feminism or feminisms as ideas and ideologies is barely

taking place in this country. Even in the academia, feminist debate is hard to find.

The majority of research applies the gender lens to social issues. Research re-

sults are then published, in oversimplified terms, in the media. People are not

interested in feminism as a philosophy, as a tool for interpretation of history and

culture, or as an ideology for social change. Most of the women who are stil alive

remember the times of forced employment (97.8% women capable of work had

jobs) and forced „stabling“ of their children in nurseries and kindergartens. Their

subconscious selves might still be haunted by communist slogans that portrayed

feminism as the enemy ideology aiming to ruin the workers‘ struggle to establish

socialism as the world order. Younger and less-educated women often claim that

the position of women during socialism was high because every one could easily

find employment. Many women may real y believe that the fact that a woman can

do the same work as a man demonstrates her equality. In communist ideology,

sameness was an important value. Consequently, equality was put to practice by

rejecting the dif erences that characterised women. Inequalities between the social

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Jiřina Šiklová

positions of women and men, such as the fact that women‘s wages amounted to

no more than 69% of men‘s wages (in contrast to today‘s 73%), have long been

forgotten. Poverty, formerly discussed only in terms of “social groups with limited

consumption potential”, violence against women, divorce, prostitution, abortion,

and women‘s inability to apply their education in the profession they had pursued

at school – al these issues were interpreted merely as remnants of capitalism.

Owing to the fact that these social problems were not official y subject to public

debate or published writing, many people believe they did not exist.

Questions or debates concerning feminist theory and the different schools

of feminist thought are very rare. Thanks to gender studies, however, we realise

that social problems related to the position of women are not limited to feminism

or feminisms. Critique of social problems is grounded in the concept of human

rights, which also constituted a banned topic during socialism. The first Czecho-

slovak president Thomas Garrigue Masaryk lectured on “the women‘s question”

as early as in the 1890s. Similarly, the position of women in society and gender

equality were addressed by women senators Františka Plamínková and Milada

Horáková, among others, before and after the First World War. Milada Horáková

was executed by the communists in 1950. The official approach to women varied

over time even during the socialist era. In the beginning of the 1950s, women

were incorporated into the workforce as cheap and unqualified labor. Over the

next decade they acquired higher qualifications and were able to rise up in the

professional ranks.

Right after the fall of the regime in 1989 it was difficult to discuss the position

of women and feminism in the media. These days, however, gender is an estab-

lished topic of public discourse and gender principles are applied in discussions on art

and art critique. Integrating the gender perspective into various fields in the Czech

academy has been another positive post-1989 development. Final y, awareness of

gender aspects and of the specific position of women constitutes the third approach

to dealing with gender issues. It is coupled with creating political structures or non-

profit organisations that promote women’s interests informed by this awareness.

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Each of the above mentioned approaches deserves a separate study that

would describe its evolution in the particular context of the Czech Republic as

a post-communist state.

The overthrow of the regime in November 1989 provided opportunities

for a spontaneous revival of civil society. Many civic organisations and foundations

emerged and formed the so-called “third”, or NGO sector. Impulses for this

deve lopment came, yet again, from the West. The first part of the 1990s can

therefore be called a period of diversification, searching and re-stratification of

social positions and interests of all citizens including women. In this time period,

practically anything related to the past regime was rejected and ridiculed.

Feminist theories were being introduced as well as critiqued and ridiculed, all at

the same time. We knew more about antifeminism than about feminism itself.

Consequently, Czech women understood and accepted the term gender rather

than feminism. Given that we had decades of centralised politics and of the

National Front fresh in our memory, we naturally, at the time, resisted founding

an umbrella organisation for women‘s issues. And to date, there still is no such

umbrella organisation, although we have come to see the value of networking

in the women‘s movement.

With the continuous help of foreign organisations, the NGO Gender

Stu dies also housed the first initiative aimed at establishing research sites

where feminism would be studied. The first theoretical lectures on feminism

took place on GS premises. After some time, perhaps in 1993, these GS-run

lectures moved to the Faculty of Arts. Nowadays, lectures on feminism are

commonplace in many academic departments and have even been integrated

into teaching curricula. The current Director of the Institute of Sociology at the

Czech Academy of Sciences, Marie Čermaková, has founded a Department

of Gender Studies at the Institute. It explores a variety of issues from the

perspective of gender rather than feminist theories. Presentation of feminist

theories, something akin to women‘s studies in the West, has been the job of the

Department for Gender Studies at the Faculty of Humanities under the Charles

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Jiřina Šiklová

University. It was founded in 1999, again upon the impulse of the Gender

Studies NGO. Students can earn Master’s degrees in Gender Studies at this

department. In addition, the second largest university in the country (Masaryk

University in Brno) has established an equivalent programme in gender studies.

The general public, however, is interested mostly in social and political

issues. These include policies on equal opportunities and anti-discrimination

provisions. This explains why studies on gender mainstreaming have been

emerging. Gender mainstreaming means monitoring of all legal or social policies

on federal or local levels for the (differential) effects they have on the position

of women and men. Gender bu dgeting, another related method, enables us

to monitor and evaluate the differential impacts of investments and budgets of

all business entities on each gender. The gender lens is beginning to be applied

to demographic statistics, social security for the elderly, retirement policies and

to paid and unpaid work in the family and the home. The latest trend is to use

the term “genderagemainstreaming” to speak about the aspect of gender in

different age groups. As women compose two-thirds of the aging generation,

the term is typically applied to the elderly. However, there are other age groups

where gender also plays an important role. Certain populations of young people

face different expectations when they are looking for work. These expectations,

based on whether applicants are women or men and their respective gender

status and roles, determine how easy or how difficult the job search is for each

applicant. As I already mentioned, the questions and suggestions the European

Union made prior to admitting the Czech Republic into the Union had paved

the path for many new laws. The position of Czech women today and their

ability to reflect on it and to pursue and protect their inte rests has improved

significantly since 1989 and constitutes one of the major post1989 changes in

respect to women‘s issues.

All these advancements help solidify the women’s movement, even

though its traditions have suffered. The historical continuity and local devel-

opment of the women’s movement in the Czech Republic were interrupted

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in 19485 and when the opportunities to revive the movement recently pre-

sented themselves, we ignored them in order to catch up with the West. Czech

women’s organisations now copy some Western trends. They do so, in part, for

purposes of fundraising, as they seek grants from the European Union. EU grant

competitions tend to be announced in areas considered important for Europe

today. The indirect effect of this situation is that we are constantly comparing

ourselves with others and adjusting our projects to the criteria championed by

women in other European countries. It is hard to imagine what the develop-

ment of the women‘s movement would have looked like without this influence.

And this will never be established. After all, we cannot change our country’s

geographic location... Balancing inequities among various social groups is the

right thing to do. Women are one of these influential social groups. What I per-

sonally value the most is the ability of women in this country to reflect on their

needs and to promote their interests, however slowly, through representation

in the democratic institutions of this country and via civic initiatives.

Translated by Kateřina Kastnerowá

5 In February 1948, the Communist Party nationalised all private property, gaining absolute cont-

rol over resources. The Party dominated al spheres of public life in the fol owing decades.

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Women’s Velvet

Revolution is Yet

to Come

Kateřina Jacques

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Waiting for Women’s Velvet is the title of a collection of interviews with women

politically active in the Czech Republic published in 2006 by Forum 50 %, a civic

association promoting gender equality. It aptly describes the position of women

in the Czech society 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The extensive changes introduced by the so-called Velvet Revolution

starkly contrast with the still slow and insufficient engagement of women in all

the areas of social and public life. Even though the position of women and their

selfperception has improved, gender inequality persists in many fields. The rep-

resentation of women in positions of power and decision-making is low and

thus men continue to have control over the country’s governance. Men also

occupy the majority of positions of social prestige.

Rates of women’s political participation

fall behind global average

The levels of women’s participation in top politics are appallingly low. The

Czech Republic lags behind Europe as well as the world. According to the Inter

Parliamentary Union, the country ranked 76th among 135 countries in women’s

public participation rates. On the other hand, public opinion polls1 suggest that

an overwhelming majority of the population (86%) believe that women’s par-

ticipation in politics is important and that it should be actively supported by the

society (3/4 of poll respondents). It is encouraging that public trust in women’s

political participation has been growing over the years. In 1991 only 61% of

poll respondents considered women’s participation useful. By the mid 1990s

the level rose to 75% and in 2004 it reached 84%. This positive trend presents

a challenge to political representatives as well as to the nonprofit groups seeking to involve women in politics. It appears that the potential of the situation remains largely untapped…

1 June 2009 poll by CVVM agency commissioned by Forum 50% in June 2009.

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No to Quota

Despite the strong consensus on the need to involve more women in politics,

opinions on the best way to achieve it vary. Affirmative action strategies, such as

quota,2 have been criticised and rejected by men and women politicians as well

as by the public. As a result, there is no pressure for political parties to engage

women or put female candidates on the ballot. Moreover, although the vot-

ers would like to see more women participate in politics, it seems to have no

effect on their voting decisions. Political ideologies and the election platforms of

political parties seem to be much more important to voters than the numbers

of women on the ballots. The experience of the Equal Chances Party (Strana

Rovnost Šancí) that put only women on its ballot in 2004 demonstrated this

phenomenon. Voters as well as the media viewed the party as an odd experi-

ment rather than a real political force and in the 2006 parliamentary elections,

the Equal Chances Party gained only 0.2% of votes. On the other hand, the

party’s media campaign played into this perception. In general, however, few

Czech citizens take equal representation into consideration when making their

voting decisions.

Recently, the Minister for Human Rights and Minorities Michael

Kocáb of the Green Party made a “revolutionary” proposal to the govern-

ment by presenting a new policy that would require a minimum of 30% of

women candidates on each ballot. This policy would apply to the Parliamen-

tary Chamber of Deputies and to local government elections and it is to be

drafted by the end of 2009. However, as the proposal was passed “merely”

by the current so-called “government without a political mandate,”3 it is not

2 Quota mandates, numbers of women members in political party leadership or on the candi

date lists.

3 In March 2009, the Czech government had to resign because a voted of no confidence vote.

A new government "without a political mandate" was formed to lead the country until new

elections take place.

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certain that it wil be implemented. Judging by the response of the media

and of political representatives so far, its chances are unfortunately not very

high. Nevertheless, the draft wil be developed and wil serve as a potential

point of departure in the process of updating the Czech political landscape

in the future.

The only party in the Czech Republic that currently pays attention to fair

representation of men and women in its management bodies and on the ballot,

is the Green Party. Along with its partners around the world, and especially in

the European Union, Czech Greens consider equal opportunities as a platform

issue despite the fact that so far, it is more of an expression of its progressive

political culture rather than a way to secure votes. For example, although the

Green Party ballot for the 2009 European Parliament elections had equal num-

bers of men and women candidates, alternating the order of men and women

on the lists,4 the media, political pundits and voters alike seemed to ignore this

unique strategy, proving it of no concrete benefit to the Party in that particular

election.

Few women in top politics

There are only a few women who have established themselves in the popular

consciousness as politicians after 1989. Many women have been involved in

party leadership at local and middle levels but they have rarely assumed top

positions. Many are politically active in their communities and regions but only a

few work (or have worked) as politicians at the national level, in the spotlight of

the media that would bring them public recognition.

In 2006, there were only 31 women MPs among the 200 members of

the Parliamentary Chamber of Deputies, making up only 15.5% of all the MPs.

4 The bal ot fol owed a socal ed zipper principle, which requires female and male candidates

to be listed in alternating order (man following woman following man...).

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kateřina JacqUes

In the Senate, women held 14 seats (17%) out of the total of 81 seats after the

last election in 2008. The situation is different at the local level, where women

make up a quarter of all the elected representatives.

The way women feel is important too…

An important factor in evaluating the progress the society has made since 1989

in its approach to women is women’s own view of the changes in their position.

As sociologist Jiřina Šiklová has mentioned, looking merely at the post1989 po-

litical involvement of women is shortsighted; women‘s subjective feelings matter

just as much, according to Šiklová. In general, they say that people are more

free in a democratic system than in a totalitarian one. In order to draw any use-

ful conclusions and to gain perspective, however, we must compare individual

aspects of women‘s lives in the two political eras (socialist and post-socialist). A

seminar held by the NGO Gender Studies in 2006 as a part of the Women‘s

Memory project, put this comparative method into practice.

It was dedicated to the CzechGerman writer Alena Wagner, in honour

of her 70th birthday. At this seminar Jiřina Šiklová suggested that in place of the

unproductive dichotomy of better and worse, detailed narratives of women’s

day-to-day lives before and after the revolution be used. Then she spoke about

women’s lives before 1989, including women’s formal political involvement.

She mentioned the fact that 30% of the MPs were women in the 1980s with

the following caveat: “When someone asks me how come there has been such

a drop in women’s political participation after the Velvet Revolution, I reply with

the old joke: The Parliament used to be something between a museum and a

theatre. The membership made absolutely no difference.“

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Three stages of „real socialism5”

According to Alena Wagner, real socialism was not a single time period but con-

sisted of three stages. The first stage started in 1950 with the passing of the Family Law that formally established women and men as equals. (Interestingly, the Federal Republic of Germany didn’t pass a similar law until 1971.) The second

stage started in 1959 when experts began introducing the concept of gender.

According to Wagner, a particular milestone event was a 1961 conference of

pediatricians in Bratislava that introduced a new child-raising theory that put the

central role of the family above the social role of peers. This trend led to the

extension of maternity leave, for instance. The third stage started in 1969 after

the Prague Spring6 and it was a period of stagnation when women retreated

from the public sphere dominated by communist ideology in favour of childcare

and domesticity.

Me and the Velvet Revolution

The Velvet Revolution, which ended the period of real socialism in 1989 and

set off a wave of transformations in all the spheres of the society, also marked a

significant shift in my own life. In 1989 I turned 18 years old and officially became

an adult. The fall of the totalitarian regime and the new freedom it brought were

my beautiful surprise birthday gifts. My understanding of life in Czechoslovakia

prior to 1989 therefore draws on my experience as a child.

5 Real socialism (also actually existing socialism, really existing socialism, developed socialism, and state socialism) was a term introduced by Soviet propaganda in the 1970s to refer to the de facto socialism as found in the Eastern Bloc and dif erentiate it from traditional (or ideal) socialism. Real referred to the fact that not all utopian promises of the

socialism and communism could be implemented in the beginning, and so this real socialism

was only a stepping stone towards the ideal, promised socialism. (Wikipedia)

6 In response to a rising liberation movement, the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia

in 1968.

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1989 was a turning point for everyone. At secondary school I had imag-

ined my life would take place on the margins of mainstream society, among

Prague dissidents. I had not aspired to a university education or to a position of

influence or public recognition. Instead, I had searched for meaning in friend-

ships and family relationships and planned a career that would in no way support

or rely on the establishment.

Courageous Dissident Women Role

Models

My role models at the time were the brave women in the Charter 777 circles

who were politically active outside the Communist Party system. They were

usually the mothers of my friends and seemed to seamlessly combine their

family life with their politically apolitical involvement. These women, in addition

to interesting independent literature, played a key role in shaping my beliefs at

the time. I was not involved in any official children‘s or youth groups and made

friends outside of school.

Children as equals

Courage was characteristic of the strong women in my memories. Women

dissidents enjoyed a natural authority. Their approaches to family and raising

children differed from the mainstream in that they viewed children as their peers

rather than inferiors. The boundaries between children and adults seemed thin.

Children understood the point of their parents‘ efforts and grasped the cynical

nature of the power of the establishment.

7 Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative named after an anti-communist manifesto signed

by over 200 Czech citizens in 1977.

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My memories and beginnings of my

civic engagement

The Charter 77 community inspired civic engagement. I became very

politically involved already at secondary school when I was attending demon-

strations, including the one that took place on November 17th 1989, an event

that marked one of the most violent clashes between the armed establishment

and the citizens. Later I organized a strike at our secondary school, I spoke in

public for the first time from an improvised stage at the top of a truck at the Old

Town Square in Prague…

Yet, the fall of the Iron Curtain surprised practically all of us. I had not

been able to imagine a future other than life behind the barbed wire; I had not

prepared for life in a free society. Nevertheless, as soon as I graduated from

secondary school in 1990, I seized the opportunity to travel abroad and left for

Berlin to pursue further study and work

I realise in hindsight that my desire to have children early was a result

of my pre-1989 conditioning. Children represented a sense of grounding that

enables, rather than hinders, woman’s broader self-realisation. Motherhood felt

as a natural role and a vocation to me, even though other women in my ge-

neration shifted their priorities and postponed having children in order to take

advantage of the new opportunities. Unlike the women who first studied, then

built their careers and then had children, I raised children and studied at univer-

sity (or worked) at the same time.

Women Heroes of 1989

The women I remember the most from 1989 actively participated and sym-

bolised the transformation. Marta Kubišová, for example, a singer previously

banned by the regime for signing Charter 77 and an icon of the anti-occupation

struggle in 1968, strongly marked the spirit and the atmosphere of November

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kateřina JacqUes

1989. Soon after, she stopped her political work, although she continued to be

active in the arts and in the nonprofit sector, especially in the area of animal

protection. Her story was typical for many well-known women who had not

been able to work in their professions prior to 1989, and who had often been

impri soned for their anti-communist activities. These women had strongly con-

tributed to the fall of the establishment and although they had actively partici-

pated in the process of the transformation, they stayed in the background in the

shadow of men. Often they decided not to continue their political work for an

extended period of time and returned to their original careers.

The european union has an influence on

the changing position of women

The public as well as the political representatives of the Czech Republic saw

membership in the EU as one of the primary goals of the post-1989 period.

Full integration into the Union took over ten years in the course of which the

society underwent “ills”, some of which have been troubling it to this day. Rising

corruption, search of quick and easy gain, larceny, lack of respect for traditional

values, and other issues became common among ordinary people as well as

among the politicians. Many elected representatives turned away from ideals of

a fair and just society which led to a lack of respect for emigrants, dissidents and

victims of the former regime and an overall high tolerance for crimes commi tted

in the communist era. As a result, former communist officials have returned to

social positions of power. Equal opportunities and women‘s issues were not

considered important in the early years after 1989.

The European Union however, put pressure on the Czech society and

helped shape its early democracy with restorative standards and rules that have

had a positive influence on the country’s social milieu. One of the areas affected

by EU trends and policies has been the area of gender. I believe that the EU has

been playing an instrumental role in improving women‘s position in the society

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and in developing women‘s NGOs. Factors such as the requirement to fulfill the

EU admission criteria and the increasingly common interaction with other coun-

tries in the form of professional and student exchange programs, in addition to

tourism, have cultivated the Czech culture and environment. They have also

created more space for women‘s self-realisation and more freedom for women

to make decisions about their own lives. Women are less restricted in respect

to planning children, their choice of marital status or a career, and they face

progressively less pressure to fulfill the limited range of traditional gender roles.

Following the trends in more economically and politically developed countries,

male and female gender roles have been changing in the Czech Republic in the

last twenty years and, increasingly often, women prioritise professional careers

and adjust family plans and lives accordingly.

The long road to implementation

of Anti-Discrimination Legislation

After years of negotiations and under the threat of severe sanctions by the Euro-

pean Union, equal opportunity and anti-discrimination legislation was passed in June

2009, almost a moment too late. Paradoxically, the legislative process itself was pro-

tracted by the Social Democrats, who voted against it despite their platform that

touts equality.8 The passing of this piece of legislation received a lot of media attention

and triggered perhaps the most fervent and long public and political debate in recent

history involving both the nonprofit sector and the academia in a very productive

8 In 2008, President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus vetoed the antidiscrimination legis-

lation which the Czech Republic was obliged to pass in order to fulfil EU requirements in

the field of gender equality and combating discrimination. It took a long time to encourage

the lower house of the Czech Parliament to open a debate on this law and the presidential

veto. The Social Democrats claimed that due to the fact the vetoed law would provide

rather weak protection against discrimination progressive political forces should work on a

new law. The Greens as a progressive part of the coalition government preferred to with-

draw the presidential veto and to pass the law. They argued that the law should be passed

and amended later on (editor’s note).

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kateřina JacqUes

way. NGO groups and experts agreed on the value of the legislation even though

its final version had been strippeddown due to political compromises. However,

the long years it took the Czech Republic to pass the law made it the last country

in the EU that lacked comprehensive anti-discrimination provisions. In effect, the

Czech Republic had failed to fulfil its EU membership obligations and provoked

several lawsuits by the European Court. The anti-discrimination law has been the

subject of dangerous politicking in the last three years. The Green Party was the

only party that had consistently pushed it forward and eventual y succeeded when

the centerright coalition government final y finished its draft and presented it to the

Parliament. The Social Democrats, their women MPs included, opposed it for many

months, blo cking the law in the Parliament using a variety of objections. The law

was final y passed right after the fal of the Czech government in the spring of 2009,

almost a whole year after it was vetoed by Vaclav Klaus, the current Czech President

known to espouse antiEuropean views, and the Czech Republic final y formal y

joined other civilised European countries.

Walking the talk

Interestingly, one of the politicians who opposed the anti-discrimination law

most fervently was a woman MP Alena Čurdová of the Social Democratic Party,

who had made equal opportunities issues key to her politics. Her example,

unfortunately, illustrates a problem that begs to be discussed frankly: There are

some male and female politicians in the Czech Republic who claim to seek im-

provements in the position of women but whose deeds contrast starkly.9

An alarming and interesting example of this conflict was a speech given

by the Prime Minister Miroslav Topolanek at the official launch of the European

Year of Equal Opportunities in Prague in April 2007. The Prime Minister sparked

an extensive public controversy that attracted a lot of media attention as well

9 See the footnote above (editor’s note).

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as powerful opposition on the side of anti-discrimination and women‘s NGOs.

In his speech, Topolanek raised doubt about the purpose of any affirmative

action provisions and claimed that such provisions actually put the social groups

that face discrimination in the position of disadvantage. Anti-discrimination pro-

visions on the basis of group identity, he argued, lead to discrimination against

these social groups. To illustrate his point, Topolanek erroneously quoted the

Labour Code that „protects women all too much and on terms all too rigid,

and therefore puts women‘s employment at risk and encourages the practice of

giving preference to men.“ The Prime Minister‘s error consisted in the fact that

the new Labour Code does not draw a distinction between male and female

employees. On the contrary, it specifically uses the term “parent” to give equal

weight to women‘s and men‘s roles in childcare.

In his speech, Topolanek went even further by refuting the concept of equal

opportunities and by saying that it was incorrect to call women a discriminated

minority. In his opinion, pregnancy and motherhood are the privileges of being

a woman and that while this situation is natural, logical and healthy, women can

freely choose not have children and then enjoy the same opportunities as men.

The law should take these conditions into account, according to Topolanek, and

not force protective measures upon women who are not inte rested in being

protected, especially when they evoke discrimination. If a woman decides to

devote herself to her natural vocation, she does not need the law to make her

equal with men. On the contrary, a woman needs a job market flexible enough

to employ her on terms that are beneficial to both the employer and to herself.

Finally, a woman needs the support of her family, of course.

Media and non-profit voices protest

Prime Minister’s speech

Representatives of the academia and nonprofit organisations drafted a protest

note that strongly criticized Topolanek’s speech. The Green Party joined this

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ef ort. The authors of the note, along with many media commentators, al pointed

out that the Prime Minister’s speech undermined the country’s commitments

to the EU and other international treaties.

Essential role of the Non-Profit Sector

The civic and nonprofit sectors have undergone tremendous growth in the post1989 period of democracy building and it is noteworthy that both sectors employ more women than men. Many wel-known women, including many of the strong

women previously active in the pre-1989 political underground, have pursued careers

and assumed leadership positions in these sectors (Libuše Šilhánová, Dana Němcová,

Jiřina Šiklová, Rut Kolínská or Marta Kubišová). Nongovernmental and nonprofit

groups have been the ones to take on feminism and gender issues, such as the issue

of women in politics, and have helped to establish them as credible topics in academia

and science. As a former political science student and now as an active politician, I have

been able to folow and participate in their programmes or surveys and to utilise the

data they have collected, and I am optimistic about their work.

Policy – roadblock for non-profits

Speaking from experience, I believe that women’s organisations are very su-

ccessful in awareness-raising about women’s rights and gender equality. Their

work in the fields of policy, however, has not been very effective, possibly for

the following reasons. The groups do not seem to understand the world of poli-

tics nor do they exhibit a willingness to learn about it in greater depth. Theoreti-

cal knowledge is rarely applied in efforts to promote women‘s rights. The Czech

Republic lacks interdisciplinary experts able to design strategies that implement

knowledge from the fields of political science and gender at the same time.

Nonprofit organisations claim to strive to be “apolitical” and “nonpar-

tisan” in their work. In promoting women into politics though, impartiality is

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problematic because politics is a pragmatic business, however ideology-rooted.

Organisations claiming to be equal, non-partisan, and apolitical in their engage-

ment of politically active women run into trouble in practice. Nonprofit groups

and their leaders are typically left-leaning and this often clashes with the political

programs of their women partners who are involved in real politics.

I see the following trends among women’s NGOs. Their efforts to re-

main neutral in respect to political programmes result in undermining the very

nature of political work. In their equal treatment of all politicians and political

bodies, the groups prioritise the issue of gender over the content of political

work itself. In effect, they judge and support women politicians on the basis of

“objective” criteria, irrespective of other aspects of their work. This approach

produces situations in which women politicians in the Communist Party can

(and do) achieve high rankings from the nonprofits despite the fact that they

represent a formerly totalitarian party with a programme that deeply conflicts

with democratic principles.

For all these reasons, civic initiatives are rarely able to maintain their

ability to evaluate, differentiate and make up hierarchies and to simultaneously

observe their policy of objectivity and non-partisanship. On the other hand, it

is a fact that implementing strategies that promote women into politics in a ba-

lanced way is an extremely difficult endeavor.

Non-profits typically lean left10

A recent event in the Social Democratic party serves as a good example of the

lack of willingness among women’s NGOs to critique a left-wing party. Social

Democrats, a large party that claims to welcome women and to be sensitive

10 The author classifies the Social Democrats and the Czech and Moravian Communist Party

as left wing parties. The Czech Greens consider themselves neither left nor right part of

the political spectrum (editor’s note).

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to gender issues, was repeatedly unable to find a woman member to fill the

Deputy Chief position as its bylaws stipulate. With each unsuccessful election

round, the electoral process grew more and more pathetic.

In the end, the party leadership introduced a young and attractive candidate

with no qualifications for the job. She demonstrated her lack of knowledge in the

interviews when she failed to cite not only the main tenets of the party platform but

even the names of the party leaders. However, even she was not elected and in the

upcoming national election in the fal of 2009 the Czech Social Democratic Party is

going to run, for the second time. without a woman in its leadership.

This internal election process received a lot of media attention and earned

a lot of criticism in opinion columns. However, there was no wave of protest on

the part of NGOs dealing with women’s issues, which had so strongly reacted to

the above-mentioned controversial speech by Prime Minister Topolanek in 2007.

No activists commented on this utter failure of the left-wing Social Democratic

party. Moreover, there seems to be a general lack of critical perspective on the

part of NGOs in respect to problems that occur on the left side of the political

spectrum, leading to a gradual loss of credibility of NGOs among the public and

among politicians who no longer feel under watchdog pressure.

Another example of the failure of NGOs to adhere to their principles

of non-partisanship was a discussion regarding the implementation of the U.S.

antimissile radar system in the Czech Republic. Many women’s organisations

were actively involved in the anti-radar movement and expected that women

politicians would follow. By creating an image of “women peacemakers” activists

pressured women politicians to assume a pacifist stance.

Unhealthy idealisation of women

A tendency to idealise women with the help of arguments that are too hard to

prove poses another risk to the women’s movement. Many well-meaning acti-

vist efforts use bad, easily refuted examples of morally superior values women

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politicians are supposed to uphold simply because they are women. The claim

that greater participation of women would lead to less conflict and more ratio-

nality and efficiency in political negotiations, is a good example.

The public rejects such naïve premises and, therefore, these are not useful

but even counterproductive. I believe that the argument for fair representation as

a cornerstone of democracy is strong enough in itself. This principle demands that

the proportion of women in a population be reflected in decisionmaking struc-

tures and if it is not, it is a systemic problem that must be addressed.

Solidarity as a result of strategy

Many awareness-raising ef orts refer to the so-cal ed “women’s solidarity” factor. It

is said that this principle of solidarity becomes ef ective at a thirty percent threshold

for any social minority. According to interviews, Czech women politicians have

not seen this principle at work so far, except for women‘s fractions and clubs

within political parties. Women in the Social Democratic Party have even tried to

set up a „shadow government of women“ in protest against the all-male govern-

ment led by the Social Democratic leader Miloš Zeman in 2000. Nobody gave

this ef ort much significance, and it was viewed rather as a joke. Similarly, women‘s

clubs within political parties have not been very successful in working together

toward concrete goals. Real results have usual y been produced by women and

men working together. But let us not forget that solidarity and teamwork are

much harder to implement in the political arena than in other fields, due to the

competitive nature of politics which is not only a contest of ideas but a struggle

for real power and position. Women in politics participate in al these struggles,

fighting for positions within their parties as wel as outside of them. Just like men,

women have a hard time finding consensus on strategies to promote their political

platforms or to secure their candidate listing positions. Instances of a unanimously

shared agreement among women politicians on strategies or issues are extremely

rare and have never occurred in top politics in the Czech Republic. On the con-

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trary, women politicians often develop their own kind of rivalry including personal

and emotional attacks. Even within public agencies, women‘s interests are rarely

promoted in a coordinated way, whether they come in the form of equal oppor-

tunity, family policies or gender budgeting.

This is not to deny the importance of solidarity among women. I believe

in its value whether it is spontaneous or results from a rational strategy. Women

politicians could find a shared voice for a variety of reasons. It is interesting that

some women politicians have developed a sense of solidarity and a self-awareness

as a result of negative personal experiences, and changed their attitude toward

equal opportunities after getting personally hurt. Miroslava Němcová, a top politi-

cian in the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) for instance, refused to acknowledge

her identity as a woman in politics and strongly opposed affirmative action policies.

Much to everybody‘s surprise however, Ms. Němcová ited gender discrimination

as the reason behind her failure in the internal party election. In a like manner, her

party colleague Alena Páralová sought the support of women‘s NGOs follow-

ing her unsuccessful candidacy for a ministerial position she had prepared for in

the shadow government. After years of staunch refusal of EU equal opportunity

policies, Ms. Páralová tarted speaking of the unequal position of women in politics

once her male counterpart had been elected for the office.

Perhaps analyses of stories of women who have been successfully in-

volved in politics would be useful for building strategies aimed at raising the

numbers of women in politics. Although there have not been many women

politicians in the Czech Republic in the last twenty years, the few who became

wellknown influenced public opinion more than any awarenessraising activi-

ties (Hana Marvanová, Petra Buzková, Jaroslava Moserová a others). Real role

models are always more inspiring. This is an interesting question: Who is more

popular: women politicians tough enough to compete for the top candidate

positions or the women “whom nobody minds”; women who seem to hold no

actual power? Case studies on situations within individual parties may suggest an

interesting answer. On the surface, it appears that the Czech political landscape

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accommodates two types of women at the level of top politics: either very

active women who fight for their space or very passive women who respond to

offers made by political parties.

The NGO initiatives I appreciate the most concern education and

knowledge production: training for inexperienced women politicians, collecting

and publishing interviews with women seasoned in the field, seminars and the

NGOs‘ work with the media.

I do not believe that women politicians produce better quality work

than their male counterparts. This said, there is no doubt that women’s life

experiences and strategies differ from those of men and may be leveraged to

argue some policy points more convincingly. Areas such as childcare, family law,

health, consumer protection come to mind. Women politicians tend to get in-

volved in humanitarian areas such as education, arts or social affairs. It has been

argued that this is a result of the limited opportunity women get in the more

prestigious spheres of influence that remain under the control of men.

Controversial role of the media

Although the amount of attention gender receives in the media is growing, it is

difficult to assess its positive and negative effects, particularly when it comes to

politics. Women in politics face different types of pressure than men, and their

images in the media vary as well. Women usually have to answer questions

men are never asked. They are forced to describe their family situations and to

defend their readiness to balance their work and childcare duties. Unlike men,

women also tend to be judged on the basis of their appearance. Their looks

are subject to public scrutiny in tabloid as well as broadsheet media that cease-

lessly publish opinion surveys on women politicians‘ taste in fashion. In contrast

to their male counterparts, women politicians are also ascribed nicknames or

attributes based on their looks, “a blonde”, for example.

Empirical research has demonstrated the differences in the public per-

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ception of male and female politicians. Studies have indicated that people as-

sociate different characteristics with each gender and project their expectations

accordingly. For instance, the media have cited cases of retiring or unsuccessful

women to argue that women were not fit for politics and that efforts to bal-

ance the numbers of men and women in the field missed the point. Much of

the public shares this opinion. Studies have also shown that in their desire to

find unifying factors among women politicians that would allow for putting them

all in one homogeneous group, people make misguided generalisations about

women more frequently than about men. A mistake made by one woman

would be applied to the entire social group and used to argue against women‘s

involvement in politics a priori. Women interested in political work must take

these pressures into consideration and expect that they will be forced to defend

their positions and fight negative stereotypes.

Speaking from experience, I can also attest to other barriers women

must overcome if they seek a political career. It is indeed difficult to strike a balance between political work and family life. Party meetings are time consuming and often take place in the evenings or at weekends which puts a great burden

on mothers without substantial family support. Moreover, it is difficult to rise in

party ranks without intense involvement in the life of the party.

Twenty years after political transition, I think that it is necessary to move

discussions on women’s participation in public life along. We must leave some

clichés behind and look for inspirations that will bring better results. To achieve

this, we must hold an open and critical debate. Women have helped shape the

last twenty years of our history. In terms of power and influence however, they

have occupied marginal positions in comparison with men. Women‘s Velvet

Revolution is yet to come.

Translated by Kateřina Kastnerowá

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3.

Slovakia

How Our Past Is

Still in Our Present

Jana Juráňová

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Images

Shortly after the velvet revolution I was watching, by accident, a very stupid

TV show. I was watching it with my friend and colleague. In the show some

women were dressed up as “fruits“, but they were more exposed than dressed,

seductive and tempting. As my friend watched it, she said, disgusted, something

like: “I hope that the change of the political system will not bring us this kind of

‘freedom’“. I remember her sentence till this day. This stupid show was no ex-

ception. Nowadays, there are many programmes in which women – very sexy

and very “beautiful” women, who are nothing more and nothing less than sexual

objects – are “dished up” to men, to be crunched by them.

The media image of women just after the change of regime both reflected and shaped the real position of women in the society. Mass media formed the image of women from the very beginning after the crash of communism.

The “new wave” of images started to be increasingly visible even though these

images were far from reality. But they had a very strong influence on the real

lives of real women and sometimes images seem to be more real than real

womenś lives. These “new” images are very often irritating and even frustra-

ting. They might not seem dangerous at first, but in reality they contribute to

violating women’s sense of selves.

How do these mass media images of women in Slovakia function nowa-

days? Are women really expected to identify with them? If so, then how? Are

they really important? Or should they simply be treated as unpleasant “pollu-

tion of the environment”? What does it mean that women’s bodies are used

to sell almost all products? What kind of body is it? Is this young, naked, bare

body “only” a decoration? Is it a real body or is it artificial and anonymous, not

a real womanś body? For whom is it important? Is it important for women

themselves, or for men? What is the relation between the position of women

in society and the images of women visible in public places? Do these images

change the situation of women? Or does the situation of women change the

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images? What is more influential and more important: the situation of women,

or the images in which they are captured?

To some degree there exist two contradictory poles in womenś ima-

ges created by the media: a beauty and a mother. During the last twenty years

women were being confronted with both of them very strongly. The beauty

ought to be physically perfect; she must spend a lot of time taking care of her

body. The beauty is young, sexy, slim, but with an ample bosom, etc. Her

function is simple: to present a product and sell it. The mother should also be

perfect; she must spend her time entirely with her children and husband. This

image predominates in advertisements for some kinds of food, drugstore goods,

etc. – all needed by the family and provided by women.

All these “good mothers” and housekeepers are at least pretty, if not

beautiful, but for a long time both myths were strictly divided. By now they have

started to be joined, fused into one myth. The result is an absolutely perfect

and absolutely beautiful young mother, who not only looks beautiful, but also

cares for her family perfectly. She knows everything: how to clean a toilet, how

to cook a delicious meal, how to shave her armpits so that they are absolutely

smooth, etc.

The myth about beautiful Slovak women is very vivid in Slovakia. Even

politicians, from time to time, repeat that women in Slovakia are the most beauti-

ful in the world, and that “they” are “our national wealth”. Such sexist speeches

come from the entire political spectrum – regardless of the speaker’s political

orientation. They are uttered by conservatives but also by socialists and post-

communists, even liberals. Even the President of the Slovak Republic has made

similar statements several times; and the former minister of foreign affairs lately

claimed that a woman model is the best representative of Slovakia in the world.

Several years ago, probably because of the influence of models from

abroad, both myths started to merge. The pregnant body is exposed much

more frequently than in the past. During socialism, a pregnant body was taboo.

This state of affairs continued for a while after the fall of communism – only

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non-pregnant and non-motherly bodies were exposed. Nowadays, young and

beautiful pregnant bodies can even be very active; e. g. an ad may portray a

pregnant woman with a baby in one hand and her notebook in the other hand.

This image, influenced by the very formally grasped gender equality politics, can

be seen as the realisation of the newly outlined gender democracy.

The double and even triple burden of women in socialism, with the so-

cialist ideal of the “emancipation” of women, will be perhaps – on the ideological

level – replaced by the burden of misunderstood gender democracy.

Roles

It can be said then, that the roles which women are encouraged to assume

through public discourse – advertisements, media, etc. – are strictly defined and

fixed. Even older women are expected to be beautiful, slim, and caring – all at

the same time. All media are full of sexy images of women’s bodies, yet, at the

same time, all women ought to be mothers. This creates tension on the one

hand, but, on the other, also a kind of schizophrenic imperative and instruction

for women: be sexual objects and careful mothers at the same time.

In this context of womenś roles it is very interesting to analyse how

some special days devoted to women have been celebrated since the fall of

communism. Even after twenty years of democracy International Womenś

Day on March 8 is assumed by many to be a communist feast without a mes-

sage. The truth is that during communism the holiday was celebrated in a very

disgusting way; and it therefore remains a symbol of the empty socialist eman-

cipation of women, without any content. On the other hand, several years ago

this holiday started to be reclaimed by feminist activists in this part of Europe,

to some degree also in Slovakia. These activities are not massive; it is mainly

younger women who present their discontent with the official celebration of the

holiday. Nonetheless, these activities are intentionally belittled and disregarded.

The present governmental party, which pretends to be social democratic ( Smer,

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in English Direction), regularly organises special March 8 meetings mostly for

older women. These meetings are very similar in spirit to the former celebra-

tions of International Womenś Day during communism: a mixture of kitschy

entertainment programmes, compliments, and red carnations. These meetings

are not very massive, but all media inform about them, and the topic of Interna-

tional Womenś Day is lost; its sense is absolutely devalued.

Motherś Day was not officially celebrated during communism; this tra-

ditional holiday is celebrated in May. It used to be quite popular in the period

before communism. There is significant pressure in the media to celebrate this

holiday; there are many statements and utterances about mothers, their “fun-

ction” in the society, etc. In recent years some of these utterances have assumed

a slightly critical tone because, on the one hand, motherhood is put on a pedes-

tal, but on the other hand, real mothers suffer discrimination, especially mothers

with young children. Even though the media promote large families, the real

atmosphere experienced by mothers and their children is quite unfriendly.

Violence against women

I recently watched a talk show in which a woman from a distant village in North-

ern Slovakia was talking about the divorce of her daughter. She said that people

should not divorce and that the breakup of her daughter’s marriage was a real

tragedy for the entire family. And after that she continued in a humorous tone: “If a

woman is a good wife, she ought to be beaten to be even better; and if a woman

is not a good wife, then she should also be beaten so that she might become a

good one.” The woman moderator was so stif ed by this utterance that she was

not capable of responding. Several years ago the moderator – whether a woman

or a man – might have laughed at this comment and treated it as a good joke.

Now the society is much more sensitive to the topic of violence against women.

The same TV talk show also featured a young woman working in a crisis

center for beaten women. At first, the young woman talked about her work and

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later on, in the TV studio, she met with one of her clients. The woman mod-

erator was very involved this time and even though the topic – violence against

women – was not discussed from the feminist perspective, it was still discussed

in a very sensitive way, which would not have been possible twenty years ago.

Nevertheless, the “joke” of the older village woman remained uncommented

– it was met with silence.

The approach to the topic of violence has changed a lot since 2000 in

Slovakia, as a result of two national campaigns organised by a coalition of feminist

NGOs. Both were carried out without any support from the government. The

campaign with the slogan: “Every fifth woman is abused” was shocking for the

society in Slovakia in 2000 and 2001. To some degree change is visible also in

praxis (several positive legislative changes have been introduced), but the posi-

tive changes are much more visible in the language used to discuss the topic. Till

the feminist NGOs began talking about the problem, violence against women

was a subject discussed only in the tabloid media. Violence against women was

approached as the failure of a concrete woman. At that time no one dared to

say that there were many women suffering from the problem of violence. Even

though breaching the issue in public encountered significant hostility, most of so-

ciety – and especially women – understood that violence was a real problem.

The number “five” in the slogan “Every fifth woman is abused” was de-

rived from European campaigns against violence against women; one of them

also realised in Austria, a country considered similar to Slovakia with regards to

this issue. After two campaigns, research was conducted in 2003 and it turned

out that the figure was even worse: every fourth woman in Slovakia has experi-

enced violence. If research of this kind had been done before the campaign, the

figures would have been “better”, because women did not talk openly about

the problem and they could not name it. Unfortunately, there exist areas where

the figure is even worse: women in a suburb of Bratislava, all on maternity leave,

told us that in their area every third woman was abused at some time.

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Feminism in Slovakia

As in most postcommunist countries, also in former Czechoslovakia there

were about as many women and men demonstrating and calling for freedom in

November 1989, but it was mostly men who presented passionate speeches

from platforms during demonstrations. Even though there were some women

students who were politically active at that time, later on the functions were

given almost only to men (or were taken almost only by men). Women were

mostly silent during the velvet revolution and afterward. But one voice stands

out. The famous Slovak actress Emília Vášáryová and her highly emotional

speech. The leitmotif of this speech was “love” – and she pronounced the word

“love” se veral times very dramatically, so that for many people it sounded very

funny. Not that those other speeches given mostly by men were not emotional.

But she, as a woman, fulfilled her role to be very emotional and to speak about

“love”.

After the fall of communism, it soon became clear that all important

positions were occupied by men. This does not mean that all the women disa-

ppeared. In fact, they were very helpful. But quite often they were invisible, or

less visible. Even ambitious women were mostly employed in service positions.

Why did this happen? This was an important question and one of the impulses

for starting activities from which the new project ASPEKT was created in 1991

and officially established in 1993.

In Slovakia we felt the absence of the whole sphere of feminist think-

ing, literature, culture, politics, etc. We started to publish the feminist cultural

journal ASPEKT in 1993 and this event can be regarded as the formal beginning

of gender studies in Slovakia. Most of us were active in literature at that time,

either as critics or authors. So naturally, our first interest was literature. Yet, early

on many of us grasped the fact that social sciences, and even more generally –

social problems, are more urgent. So we started working on issues which we

considered the most important. For this reason we established initiatives dealing

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with such topics as violence against women, sexual minorities, human rights of

women, gender-sensitive pedagogy, etc.

For me this was like fresh air, a new world opening. All topics were

interesting and many questions were asked. More were asked then answered,

but still, the feeling was: “Now I can understand the life I am living”. This positive

feeling was soon spoiled by the reaction of the democratic part of the post-

communist society in Slovakia. Those women who identified themselves as femi-

nists were confronted with very negative reactions: they were likened to commu-

nist officials (even though there were very few female functionaries, in comparison

with male ones). None of the members of ASPEKT were former communist

party members, but there were still attempts to call us communists.

The atmosphere in the society changed a lot during the sixteen or more

years of existence of the first feminist NGO ASPEKT, the emergence of gender

studies at Comenius University in Bratislava and the founding of some other femi-

nist NGOs. More women became interested in the topic of gender. Although the

general public perceived the development of feminism in Slovakia as an attempt to

take over power, it was obvious that this was a very well planned misinterpretation.

Almost twenty years ago many told us: “The most important thing is to protect de-

mocracy and you are wasting your energy on something unimportant”. And we still

use the answer which we formulated quite a long time ago: “There is no democracy

without women”. But I am afraid this answer was not grasped quite properly, or

perhaps it is misunderstood intentionally. My feeling was: This is my freedom. Now

I have my own idea and there are women who have their ideas and we can realise

them. Til then we were realising mostly some other ideas – mainly those of men.

Now we felt liberated. And the price was repudiation, but fortunately not forever.

Women in politics

After the fal of communism there were many topics to be opened. The beauty

myth, the myth of motherhood, womenś access to power being only some of

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them. Still, the presence of women in high politics was a typical indicator of gen-

der democracy in this part of the world. Women were not seen in “high politics”.

Many discussions were going on about whether women ought to be in politics

or not, even though at the same time some of them – very few – already were.

Every election to the national parliament reopened discussion of this topic.

A true story from the early 1990s is illustrates the point very well.

ASPEKT was invited to a discussion on women in politics. A woman politician

from the Christian democratic movement told us: “I would like to listen to your

report very much, but my party chief asked me to come, he wanted to tell me

something important”.

After several years more women begun to be seen in politics. Womenś

faces were appealing and attractive for the voters, but the political leaders ma-

nipulated them a lot, so that they were only fulfilling special “tasks” and were not

leaders themselves. Many examples of this approach can be provided; the most

flagrant was the candidacy of Professor of Sociology, the vicepresident of the

SDKU (Slovak Democratic and Christian Union) Iveta Radičová for presidency

this year. She lost, but she was enormously successful. And still, her home party

did not take advantage of her popularity, but pushed her aside not to endanger

the chief of the party.

Although today there are quite a few women in politics, they are not

in the real positions of power. On other hand, it can be said that the topic of

wo men in politics holds in it many other topics, simply said: all gender stereo-

types internalised by the society in Slovakia. Stil , much has changed, as it was

seen e.g. in the presidential election I have described above. Ten years ago the

media and male politicians were very critical of the female candidate Magda

Vášáryová, because she was, according to them, impolite. The fact is that she

sometimes interrupted other male candidates, because it was the only pos-

sibility for her to be given the floor. On the other hand, nationalist politician

Jan Slota, who came drunk to a TV discussion, was not criticised as much as

she was. In this respect the presidential campaign was somewhat better this

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time; but women are stil very vulnerable in the public sphere because of their

body, age, marital status etc. The opinion presented by one Christian demo-

cratic politician is very typical. He answered the question about why there

were no women on their candidate list in the previous parliamentary election

campaign: “Our wives are there with us, so it is as if they are themselves on

the candidate list”.

Even though there are some women politicians in Slovakia, most of

them play an inferior role. They even appear in TV discussions mostly when

there is some very unpleasant problem; male chiefs send them to solve trouble-

some issues and they usually do it very willingly.

There are also practical y no female politicians who try to realise a

womenś political agenda. Party leaders would not admit anyone with such an

agenda into “high” politics, both in the present and in the past. The gender agenda

is simultaneously dismissed as unimportant, irrelevant and perceived as dange-

rous. Explanations of this schizophrenic attitude can be discovered in our past.

There was no women’s movement in former Czechoslovakia and in

Slovakia, which was then a part of it. In the 1960s some dissolution of the

rigid and cruel communism of the 1950s started, but in 1968 the Soviet Army,

together with armies of other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia

and that was the end of the so-called Prague Spring. The 1970s were a decade

of strong “normalisation“, understood as the closing of both physical and mental

borders.

We lived through so-called communist emancipation of women. What

the regime really meant by emancipation was that women were needed in the

labour force in order to boost the economy. As there was no political move-

ment of women, there is no consciousness of women’s problems. ASPEKT is

the first feminist project and because of this we are, unwillingly, in permanent

conflict with many parts of society. Twenty years after the fall of communism and

more than fifteen years after the establishment of ASPEKT, the situation is slightly

better. But the heritage of communism – prevalence of form over content – is

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still dangerous. Women’s problems remain invisible or are only acknowledged

with rhetorical gestures which do not transfer into practical solutions.

Life goes on, with its hopes and disappointments. Five years after the fall

of communism I presented a paper at some conference and made the follo wing

diagnosis: “The problem of Slovakia cannot be formulated as an opposition be-

tween democracy and totalitarianism. The problem is: of what quality will the

democracy be; with women or without them?” And I must say not much has

changed after fifteen more years.

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Tell Sophie and

Others...

Anna Grusková

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...a good girl first learned to properly

clean her shoes...

I’m in the country at my father’s parents. I’m twelve. For the whole afternoon,

my cousin of the same age is “fixing” a motorbike he got from my father. There

is a workshop in the yard and he’s lying in front of it on the lawn completely

covered in oil, snorting while loosening some screws.

“Will you give me a ride when it’s done?” I ask shyly. “We’ll see”, he

retorts with a newly gained male superiority and turns his attention back to the

motorcycle. His father has already taught him to drive a car.

“The dishes!” my father yells from the kitchen. I shuffle my feet; I don’t

feel like doing it, I don’t enjoy this ritual twice a day. Moreover, we don’t have a

proper sink. I have to warm up water on a stove and pour it into ancient pots. I

wash the dishes in bubbles of soap, then I put them into another pot and rinse

them with water, which at the beginning may be clean, but then it starts resem-

bling the soap bubbles. I don’t feel like doing it, but in the end I go to the kitchen

because I’m a good, which means obedient, girl.

When the dishes are washed, dried and placed in the cupboard, I run

back with relief to a book I started to read. But my father has another task for me:

cleaning my shoes. I go out to the yard with a pair of white shoes with perforated

tips. My cousin is stil lying under the motorbike. I’m watching him from the corner

of my eye. He has disassembled my father’s old Jawa and now he’s adding new,

modern parts to it. It’s real y hard to believe that this strange array wil ever be able

to function again. In the end, the young repairman leaves everything as it is and

runs out onto the street. His father, my uncle, a very nice man, came to pick him

up. He never accepted my grandparents’ house rules; he always takes a nap after

lunch, he even smokes, which they consider to be most decadent.

My cousin gets in my uncle’s car; they’re going to the airport where

some guy they know will let them fly a sailplane. When they disappear, my

father with a dissatisfied expression on his face is eyeing the disassembled bike

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and its parts scattered around, but says nothing. Then he picks up my polished

shoes and shouts out: “You don’t mind that there is shoe polish in those holes?

Grab a toothpick and clean them. Learn to do things properly!”

…but she didn’t know how to dance…

For years I had many lively dreams with the same theme. They contained various

permutations of the situation I have just described. In one dream I see two women.

One is beautiful, wearing a broad skirt and jewellery on her neck and hands. She is

beating a smal drum hanging from her neck and dancing by herself. The other one

is not dancing; she is looking at her friend with a mixture of admiration and envy.

She is ill, she can’t dance – this crosses my mind while I’m sleeping.

In one dream I’m at a ball. A young man comes to ask me to dance, but

I’m petrified with fear that I don’t know how to dance. I beg him to teach me to

dance, but he is convinced that I must know how to do it. I’m looking around,

I’m ashamed, and then I see my friend, how well she is dancing. She looks

gorgeous dancing ardently. All of a sudden, my father approaches me carrying

some ashes from a fireplace on a dustpan and sticks them under my nose. I stop

dancing; spill the ashes from the dustpan on the floor and leave. I don’t want to

dance any more.

The other night I dreamed about country wagons passing me by. They

carry joyful young people in colourful clothes; they are singing, having a good

time. This isn’t good, I explain to myself. The wagons are not covered, if the rain

starts, they will get wet. They aren’t protected. And there’s another dream that

I still remember mostly as a very impressive image: I’m standing in front of a big

table full of ripe yellow pumpkins. I know this is my harvest and I must process

it and store it somehow. I process maybe one pumpkin and leave it; meanwhile

the others disappear. Then I’m angry with myself.

Only nowadays, when I have taken updancing, do I understand the

meaning of these dreams. I have very few journal entries, but I jotted down

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that feeling when I started to artistically express myself at the age of around

forty: “That joy of creation, I can’t believe it I’m creating, I’m very happy, like

when one experiences physical love, cuddling, and I’m surprised to realise that

it is true, that I’m not just dreaming it, that it’s happening now, and I’m afraid it

will only last a short while and that terrible useless time of empty longing and

dreaming will replace it . Over and over again old relations, old wounds, old

scars keep coming back to me.”

…respected her family…

Before I started to create and dance, I stumbled many times and sometimes

somebody tripped me: the regime antagonistic to free creativity, my parents

formed by the regime and their own parents, I myself formed by the regime

and parents who had been formed by their parents and the regime… Who will

assess the degree of culpability?

Where was my mother when my father taught me to clean the holes in

the tips of my shoes with a toothpick? Surely, she must have been somewhere

around. My mother is Slovak; all relatives from my father’s side are Czech. She

was poor; she didn’t have her own house. My mother didn’t fit into the house

of my father’s parents. To this day she dislikes cleaning; she cooks with no spe-

cial pleasure, with a corresponding outcome. Although she eventually learned

to bake my father’s favourite Christmas pastries, she never eats those jams and

sweets because she wants to be slim and pretty. She liked to laugh, they were

frowning all the time, as they needed to work and work is serious business.

They didn’t understand her and she didn’t understand them. Mom has always

been my sun. Only today do I see its shadows as well. She hasn’t been a good

role model as a woman, she has been living with a man who does not respect

her and humiliates her. She gave up on finding fulfillment in love and sexual life

and turned to God – a usual path for a Slovak Catholic. On the other hand, in

her forties she did not hesitate to change her job when she had a chance to

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improve her professional qualifications through postgraduate study. My grandma

liked to tell how she had come to live on the estate of her husband’s aunt. It was

right after her wedding; she still had her wedding dress on. The aunt pointed

out of a window: “Those are our fields. You’re going to work there.” Grandma

didn’t realise that she applied this pattern of behaviour also to her daughter-in-

law, my mother.

Until very old age, my grandma had black hair and she grew more beau-

tiful with age. And she didn’t even try. Her greatest adventure was when she

had ridden a bike 15 kilometres from a district town with a piglet on her back.

She liked to describe what that piglet had been doing. Once, on a very hot day,

she saw a mirage in a field. She used to say that a whole ancient village, maybe

Italian, had appeared in front of her. The image was trembling in hot air.

My grandma lived long enough to experience the post-revolution times,

but in principle, she was happy with what had been before. She was happy with

little things. “The most important thing is that people have enough food”, she used

to say. “When I was a girl I saw how poor people would take potato peels from

pigs.” She didn’t want me to study that much; she used to send me to dances. At

that time, I laughed at it…She wanted me to wear bright colours and short skirts,

but I liked to do just the opposite. Her son, my father, who more and more takes

after her, was unable to come to terms with his own heroism. It broke him down.

When, after the invasion of the allied troops of the Warsaw Pact on Czechoslova-

kia in 1968, he proclaimed that he disagreed with such “fraternal help” he got fired

from the job he loved. My father was a very good pilot, at that time he was thirty-

seven. He couldn’t find another job. He wanted to fly at least agricultural planes,

he wanted to be a travel guide in Czechoslovakia, but after many unsuccessful

attempts he ended up as a welder in an automobile plant. He was different from

his co-workers, much gentler. They sensed it and laughed at him. My father, whom

from my childhood I remember as a charming and cordial man, grew sour.

He started to assemble airplane models. He started to beat me. He would

beat me every day; for petty things, when I disobeyed something or didn’t clean

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something up. Most often he would slap my face, but sometimes he would take out

his belt. I didn’t disobey on purpose, I was simply thinking about other things. I was

nineteen when he beat me up for the last time. At that time I was working in Prague,

I was commuting and I wanted to stay there for a weekend. He started yel ing and

beating me. That time I rebelled and I returned the strokes. That took him by sur-

prise and he stopped for good. Later I talked about it with my peers. Many of them

were beaten by their parents. Then, under socialism, it was nothing exceptional.

My father was fiftyseven when communism fell. He was rehabilitated

and he got some symbolic financial compensation. A number of his colleagues

with similar life stories passed pilot exams, hired small airports, but he didn’t

want to do so. He was retired, taking care of his parents and he liked to go

skiing. And also, for many years, he wanted to buy a country house. During

socialism, having a country house was a national sport, an escape to nature, to

the world of one’s own rules. “Under commies” it was possible to cheaply buy

an old country house. We had many such chances, but nothing ever came out

of them. Today I realise that for my father it was some kind of adrenaline sport.

He knew he was going to inherit his parents’ house, he knew they disagreed

with the country house. In principle, he too was a good boy.

…listened to her bad teachers…

One day, when I was in the last year of grade school, my mom came home de-

vastated. “I spoke with your teacher; you’re not going to get a recommendation

to study at a college prep school. She told me the mother of your best friend had

yelled at her she’d been giving recommendations to children of class enemies.”

In spite of good grades I’m not admitted to the prep school, and to avoid going

to apprenticeship I study, in a complicated manner, at librarian schools in Brno

and Prague. With my background I wouldn’t have been admitted to a university

either, but my beautiful mom manages to arrange it. She goes to the ministry

of economy to talk to a brother of a wellknown resistance fighter, partisan Ján

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Nálepka. She knew him from her youth when he courted her. We go to the

ministry together. In the end, I’m admitted to study at a university, after we send

in an appeal. There were two of us who got admitted this way. And only the

two of us for years really worked within the discipline we had studied – theatre

theory. And both of us earned an academic degree.

At the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague we have a seminar

with one feared theater theorist and critic. As the only one of our teachers he

addresses us as “comrades”. He is a vice-dean for ideology. After a fellow stu-

dent turns in her analysis of Bulgakov’s plays he threateningly asks her whether

he should understand it as her approval of Christian ideology, or else he would

be compelled to draw consequences. She is scared and denies everything. This

person later successfully sails through the waves of changes in 1989. For a short

while after the revolution he even becomes the new minister of culture.

During socialism and also after it, he always had a large group of admi-

rers, especially of the female sex. He was a very eloquent speaker, he spoke

English, which at that time was a rare thing, but he also knew how to deeply

offend and embarrass people, so many people feared him.

Among others, this man taught us critical analysis. Once he gave me an

assignment to write a review overnight. After the theatre show he of ered to give

me a ride back to my dormitory, so that – as he claimed – I could start to work

on it sooner. He said he lived nearby anyway. When we arrived at the dorm, he

stopped in a shady area, turned of the engine and sat silently. I was confused,

didn’t know how to react, so I said nothing. After a while I got out from the car

and parted with him. If until then he had “liked” me, since then he hated me. At

the beginning I was a very good student, but later my grades got worse. I had big

problems with final exams. It’s strange, but at that time I didn’t see these linkages.

I blamed myself for not being smart, educated, pretty enough…

I wanted to write a final thesis about a method of one of the most im-

portant world theatre directors and theorists Augusto Boal. He dealt mostly

with the social dimension of theatre, and at that time he was working and living

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in Paris. I wrote to him and he wrote me back, inviting me to Paris. My teacher-

ideologist immediately prohibited me from going there. I couldn’t go without his

recommendation. He said: “You would get married and stay there.”

After the revolution, one of my colleagues, an admirer of the professor-ide-

ologist, invited me to an international seminar. “Who’s that?” one Canadian feminist

theatre theorist whom I invited asked me during the professor’s presentation. “He’s

talking about nothing.” Really, in translation his presentation lost all rhetorical embel-

lishments and dramatic pauses and what remained was quite uninteresting.

Today I see this smal , subtle man, who despite being married for years has

had af airs with many other women, as a typical product of the totalitarian regime

based on manipulation and fear. I remember my dreams from those times. One

was repeated. I am amidst grey, dead natural scenery, branches of dead trees are

sticking out at the horizon and I’m wading in dirty water. Nobody’s around.

…she rode a rickety Karosa bus…

In these days of cheap airplane tickets I basically stopped riding long-distance

bus lines, but recently I had no other option. At night we stop on the German

border. “Get your documents ready, please”, the driver announces into a mike

and mercilessly turns on the light. A German border guard enters the stuffy air

and walks among sleepy passengers. There are no longer any border checks

on the Austrian side where I go more often, but apparently they still exist on

the CzechGerman side. They even collect all IDs and take them away. I’m

surprised how insulted I feel. I recollect all those years of humiliation, of luggage

searches in front of the whole bus, of travel permits, of the atmosphere of mass

shopping trips to East Germany organised by the Revolutionary Labour Unions

at my father’s workplace.

That part of my life when I lived in socialism now seems to me like a bus

trip in a rickety Karosa bus with closed windows and stuffy air, to keep the heat

inside. A despotic driver, vexed passengers, the smell of home-fried pork chops

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and salami sandwiches, tea in plastic vinegar bottles… Of course, these weren’t

railroad freight cars on their road to Auschwitz. Luckily, we could look out the

windows, we could get off, from time to time use some public bathrooms…

…she lived in a “universal” world…

To me, November 1989 is related to joy connected to the conception of my

son, which happened shortly before. At that time I already knew I was preg-

nant. In those crowded squares I experienced great euphoria! I didn’t join the

revolutionary committees, I had the feeling they were mostly for men and the

truth was that they indeed were. I lived in a universal world, which in reality was

male, and that was reflected in our language too. To these days I must watch

myself not to forget to speak about authors in appropriate gender terms. Ger-

mans resolved this issue by creating one expression – AutorInnen; we have to

use two words to refer to male and female authors.

…she didn’t know how to fight for

herself…

There were only two women, both former communists, at the defense of my

dissertation in 1995. One was my supervisor, an educated woman, later the

first female professor of theatre studies in Slovakia. The other one belonged to

those apparatchiks who during socialism had positions and power and she didn’t

want to give them up after the regime change. She was friends with the head of

my research institute who also used to be a very active communist. The rest of

the committee consisted of old men, most of them past retirement age, who

wanted to stay on at the university a few more years – and that was up to their

boss to decide. Neither I nor my supervisor knew they all had agreed they were

going to vote against my getting the academic degree.

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This was due to several reasons. In my dissertation I had to deal with

the work of some of them and, in accordance with my convictions, I pointed to

some ideational and methodological stereotypes prevalent in Slovakia. Besides,

we also significantly diverged in our political inclinations. I was never able to

accept neither primitive nationalism nor hidden animosity towards Czechs; I

myself had come from Bohemia to live in Slovakia when I married a Slovak. But

these attitudes were popular at that time. Vladimír Mečiar was the Prime Minister and suspicious shadows of connections with the mafia, unresolved crimes and profound deterioration of political culture in Slovakia have been lingering

over since his years in power.

The expert reviews of the dissertation were quite positive; I refuted all

reservations some of which were ridiculously unprofessional. It looked like a

successful defense. They voted and I passed, although it was close. They con-

gratulated me with insincere smiles. Two days later, the head of the committee

called me to let me know I didn’t pass – a mistake had been made in counting

up the votes. They invited my supervisor to sign a new protocol. When she

was leaving, the head of the institute shouted after her: “You should’ve won the

elections!”

My supervisor didn’t complain; she didn’t fight for me. I didn’t fight for

myself either. It even did not occur to us…Today I find it incomprehensible.

How come we didn’t complain at the Presidium of the Slovak Academy of

Scien ces? Maybe because we sensed that those committee members had con-

nections other than purely academic. I guess that socialist fear was still strongly

engraved in us together with a tested experience that such complains had been

futile and could do more harm than good.

I was saved by one of my opponents – an important figure of the Velvet

Revolution. He wasn’t present at the defense due to a trip abroad. He organised

a new defense at a different institute. My dissertation was later published as

a book and got a number of positive reviews. My former boss took revenge

on me by posting on the website of his institute the information that I hadn’t

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defended my dissertation. He formulated it in such a malicious way that un-

informed people will get the impression I never defended it. When I stopped

greeting him, he would yell at me in front of people that I was a wretch because

I’d written a poor dissertation… I believe this was my most intense postrevo-

lutionary encounter with the filth of the past.

My dreams corresponded with those harsh times. I come to an old

house, trying to turn on the light, but I can’t do it no matter how hard I push the

button on the light switch. The rooms remain dark. Then I find an old closet,

I’m excited I may find some treasure there and indeed I find an old fur collar

there. But when I look at it in light I see the fur is gone. I realise there’s nothing

interesting there. Or another dream: I sit on a cold, unlit train. Then I find out

there are some other cars there too, for instance a restaurant car. One cannot

sit there, but I don’t mind. It’s warm and lit, there are people and food there,

while I – together with someone I don’t even know – am freezing somewhere

on the side in darkness.

Luckily, at that time a new world was opening up to me and it brought

me a whole new perspective. Yet another train dream proves it: I’m traveling

on a nice modern train, but I have to stand as there’s no place to sit. I put my

handbag somewhere, forget about it and move on. They I remember I don’t

have it; I look in that direction and see there is a woman taking something out of

it. I push my way back to her and I see she isn’t opening my bag but hers is lying

next to mine. Moreover, I know this woman, maybe she’s even my relative. My

initial distrust turns into joy.

… and then she didn’t want to be

a good girl… or a woman of style…

My most important post-revolutionary discovery was the power of female

solidarity and, in parallel, exploration of my own femininity. Until then I was

fascinated by decadence, art déco, I would make myself into a femme fatale,

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a woman of style, and I was proud of it. I had no idea that a femme fatale is

mainly a projection of male fantasies. Then one day, all of a sudden I wrote:

A Femme Fatale is a female clown. An upside-down clown. On 2000 New

Year’s greeting cards I painted rosy cheeks of a clown on my picture. I wanted to

be a femme fatale in my own projection, not in the projections of others.

…because she knew the power of female

solidarity and became a woman…

My first significant encounter with concentrated female solidarity and female

intellect happened at a conference of a unique, pioneering feminist group –

ASPEKT. From my previous life I had been used to academic events dominated

by men. I knew very well the game around the best self-presentation, laconic

conciseness, the cryptic nature of narrowly specialised themes, hiding one’s lack

of knowledge in a flood of foreign works and quotes by authorities… Rarely had

there been any interesting discussion, rarely had I discovered something lively,

real, up-to-date. All of a sudden I found myself in a different world. Women

were listening to each other, they were speaking to say something and not to

show off. But the most important thing was the subject of the discussion. I found

all themes very interesting; they were tackled from a multidisciplinary perspec-

tive, in an erudite fashion, with zeal. All seemed to speak about myself. I have

often mentioned this experience and I will never forget it.

When I think about it with hindsight, I recollect a Hungarian novel for girls Tell

Sophie by Magda Szabó. I read it at that time when I was watching my cousin grow

while polishing my shoes, but I understood the meaning of the book only much later.

Just like the meaning of my dreams. The novel was about a girl whose mother had

died. She left her daughter a message, but she couldn’t finish it. The girl investigates

the meaning of the message to learn, in the end, that the world is full of mothers who,

together and gradually, can provide her with what her mother couldn’t give her.

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…who seeks and finds her sisters and

mothers…

I read Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, I read the

book Woman: the Body and Soul by American gynaecologist Christiane Nothrup,

I read great books by other “sisters and mothers” published by my “sisters and

mothers” Jana Cviková and Jana Juráňová from ASPEKT: Karen Horney, Judith

L. Herman, Elisabeth Badinter... I started to do theatre and find others there. In

the Bronx, in Antwerp, Berne, Prague, Banská Bystrica and also at home in Brat-

islava I have my theatre mothers and sisters, I write and edit plays, stage them,

sometimes I also act… And I haven’t forgotten about theory either.

I started going to different dance courses. I wear bright colours and short

skirts. I dream less and live more.

…and she hasn’t stopped yet

Recently, at a workshop “The Inner Child” with Israeli actress Neta Plotzki

I came across a picture of a girl jumping a rope held by two boys. The first thing

that crossed my mind was that the boys were manipulating the girl and dictating

to her how to jump. But then I realised they were actually helping her to be

happy. And that there was a time for a change in my head.

Now I’m faced with an important task – to find my fathers and brothers.

I know I must do it.

Translated by Eva Riečanská

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Feminism

as a Practice

of Freedom

Ľubica Kobová

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It happened some time in July 1996 in the town of Humenné. We were on

our way from a swimming pool that I had not found very entertaining. To me,

splashing around in a crowded pool was an unfamiliar urban pastime and – as

someone who used to spend most of her summer vacations in the countryside

– I did not understand it. But for urban adolescents, water was a must, just like

magazines and books during the summer and planting potatoes in the spring and

harvesting them in the fall were a must for adolescent countryside intellectuals.

Humenné is caled the metropolis of Zemplín. Maybe that’s true – at that time it

had one bookstore and names of al businesses were writ en in two languages – Slovak

and Ukrainian. Maybe it was a deed of the blind hand of the book market that on dark

brown cardboard shelves in the one-story house of the local bookstore I came across

the magazine Aspekt. The subtitle on its cover read: “A feminist cultural magazine” and

they only had two issues – Female Wri ting and The Lesbian Existence. I walked away from

the store with one of them and spent that evening flipping through the pages of the femi-

nist magazine – instead of watching horror movies which my uncle and aunt had bought

after the revolution during their first trip to visit relatives in Switzerland.

A few years after several women in Bratislava and Prague had proclaimed

that it was “time to take the words about equality and democracy seriously and apply

them in real lives of people of the female sex in Slovakia.”1 I connected with them –

feminists – through the already oldfashioned medium of a magazine. Seven years

after “the revolution” a seventeenyearold “gal” is perusing a feminist magazine on

the periphery of a periphery, in eastern Slovakia. Isn’t that the fulfillment of a dream

about good – pardon the masculine bureaucratic term – dissemination?

I never experienced my “own” 1989. I spent those November days in

hospital with pneumonia, a lump of teenage emotions and a strange realisation

that there was something going on out there. But I had my year 1996. For my-

self I discovered feminism as a practice of freedom.2

1 O Aspekte (2009). Available at http://www.aspekt.sk/about.php.

2 Cf. Zerilli, Linda M. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.

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But have people – women and men – ever had their year 1989? Overt-

ly, the change of the regime was described as a revolution and it was supposed

to start something new. Hannah Arendt wrote that we can speak of revolution

“only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected

with the idea of freedom.”3 But has this political and social change meant the

beginning of a practice of freedom for women and men of the old-new state?

When I look at the recent past with hindsight, when I go through newspaper

clippings of articles on the state of women’s rights in Slovakia, when I read feminist social

critique and fiction books writ en by female authors I cannot see any single beginning,

a single deep breath folowed by a gradual transition to democracy and the market

economy also for women. The past twenty years have not folowed an ideal scheme of

linear development from the declaration of liberation in 1989 to gradual – albeit falter-

ing – democratisation in 2009. The thesis about non-linearity of democratisation may

have become shared academic knowledge in social sciences dealing with transforma-

tion, but it only represents a small fragment of our beliefs and convictions.

I believe that most women and men wanted, and stil want, to be part of a polity

which develops in a sure and unquestionable direction, guaranteeing prosperity and “the

future of our children.” And maybe it seemed that this would be brought about by the

fal of a republic that for some unknown reason was caled “socialist.” Anyway, there was

“no other alternative” but the combination of democracy and free market. A rupture in

the old regime should have been just one. However, it seems to me that due to hard-

to-change social and political relations, this rupture has multiplied and induced smaler or

bigger crises. To resolve them, politicians have used various strategies that, in line with

their ideas, have been meant to ensure stability of the political and social system. And one

of the ways to avert crises is to locate their causes or their solutions in women.

According to feminist theory, we should be wary of the category of “women,”

which magically becomes whole when we fill it with various elements of race, class, age,

3 See Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 34.

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ethnicity and sexuality What is denoted by the term “women”, and what is called upon

as such when seeking the causes of crises or their solutions, does not have one common

referent and is not a sum of seve ral concrete referents. “Women” are an attempt at con-

struction of a political subject in a concrete space, at a concrete time, here and now. Oth-

erwise there would be no such category, just like there is no political category of “men”.

Let the elections be democratic

In 2001, for the first, I time placed my signature under a public initiative concern-

ing women’s rights. I joined thousands of women and men who disagreed with the

planned ban on abortion, which would have ensued from changes in the Constitution

of the Slovak Republic proposed by MPs from the Christian-Democratic Party. By sign-

ing the petition, called The Pro-Choice Initiative, 4 women mobilised as a subject whose

relations with the state should, according to some legislators, be derived from their

ability to give birth. The mobilised subject of women clearly rejected this definition.

Just a few months after women, men and women’s rights NGOs had united in

the common public action which they – given the course of further events – modestly

caled an “initiative”, public space in Slovakia was occupied by one “informal women’s

movement”. It was the first time after 1989 when some colective activity of women

caled itself a movement. Feminists, intelectuals, academics were stil uncomfortable

with using the word “movement” when speaking about the activity of women’s organi-

sations in Central and Eastern Europe or in Slovakia.5

4 For more see the texts of the Initiaves of February 5 and 19, 2001 published in: Iniciatíva

za možnosť voľby (2001), in: Cviková, Jana, Juráňová, Jana, Možnosť voľby. Aspekty práv a zodpovednosti ASPEKT, Bratislava, 2001, pp. 102104.

5 For a discussion of the women’s movement in the Czech Republic and Slovakia see e.g. Farkašová,

Etela, Bola to naozaj šťastná zhoda okolností; Havelková, Hana, Ženské hnutí a genderová kultura v Česku 1989-2003; Kiczková, Zuzana, Stretnutie s feministickou filozofiou bol na začiatku skutočne

osobný a intelektuálny šok.; Lacinová, Ľubica, Subjektívne dejiny slovenského feminizmu; Vodrážka, Mi-rek, Diskursivní smrt a feminismus bez feminismu; Wöhrer, Veronika, Spôsob hovorenia o feminizme

na Slovensku by som nazvala ako „doing feminism“ and discussion on these conference papers. In:

ASPEKT má 10+. Jubileum (2003). Available at http://www.aspekt.sk/desat.php?desat=17.

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“Women, let’s speak about what bothers us! Women, let’s claim what

we’re entitled to!” These appeals gradually, one by one, were addressed to

women via billboards placed along roads and motorways several weeks before

the 2002 general elections. When and where should we speak and claim?!

Should we complain to our friends even more? Give a piece of our mind to

our partners, be angry with parents and tell them to stop poking their noses

into everything? Nobody understood those mysterious messages. An on top

of everything – that name: Let’s Do IT! This was not a campaign for the new-

est jogging collection for women from Nike, but an ad for a “women’s move-

ment”. Like in a bad home video, a guy kept attacking us from the TV screen,

for a seeimngly endless half-minute, speaking about his plight. His wife joined a

“women’s movement”. Take sympathy on him. All he wants is to have his wife

back. Also that daughter standing next to him with a sad stare on her face will

be happy when her mom is back home, with her family. Because when women

of Slovakia join the “movement”, their mom will be able to return where she

belongs – to her daughter and husband. And will let the movement be.

But what wouldn’t a Slovak woman do to make one man happy?

Or two, three of them or…the whole government, coalition parties! Finally, all was

exposed. A couple of days before the elections the third bil board appeared and a

popular actress came up with her TV appeal: “Women, let’s vote!” Thank you for

reminding me. Isn’t it nice to remind women – through flowers on bil boards and a

membership card that could be used in partner businesses for discount purchases –

that they have the right to vote and are a dynamic force of democracy?

How did women deserve such attention, so much TV time, so many

billboards and – so much money? It was simple. Allegedly, at that time democ-

racy was under threat and women needed to be mobilised. In 2002 the vic-

tory of the ruling coalition parties – which in 1998 had succeeded in breaking

the authoritarian style of governance of Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar – was

far from certain. Pre-election polls, however, indicated that women were an

untapped pool that the collation parties could use. Some women over 55, with

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lower education and from smaller towns up to 5,000 inhabitants, intended to

cast their ballot for the opponent of the ruling coalition – the HZDS party. Many

women over 55 were undecided.6 Was there any significant gender difference

in voting behaviour in Slovakia? According to the polls, women’s election par-

ticipation as voters was at about the same level as men’s, so was it legitimate to

speak about a gender “gap” at all?7 Nevertheless, the target group of the Let’s Do

IT! “informal women’s movement” precisely corresponded with the description

of undecided female voters or those who intended to vote for the oppositional

HZDS. These were supposed to be women with the following characteristics:

“age 3065, elementary or secondary education, living in smaller towns and

villages.”8 This women-targeting election campaign was successful – the pre-

2002 ruling coalition secured another term in office and the support of women

significantly facilitated the formation of the rightwing coalition.9

The movement Let’s Do IT! indeed did a lot of “it” shortly before and after the

elections. In addition to at racting women to the balots they succeeded – for a time

exceeding the very existence of the movement – in distorting the meaning of the notion

of “women’s movement” to denote something demeaning, a fake creation, a marketing

product of one US media advisor and PR agencies cooperating with her in Slovakia.

Everything was organised unbelievably smoothly. Where before feminist

and women’s rights organisations had demanded better cooperation with the

state, the Let’s Do IT! movement succeeded immediately. After the elections,

6 Gyarfášová, Oľga – Pafková, Katarína, Potenciál aktívnej účasti žien vo verejnom živote, Inštitút pre verejné otázky, Bratislava, 2002, p. 9.

7 Filadelfiová, Jarmila – Bútorová, Zora – Gyarfášová, Oľga, “Women and Men in Politics”, in: Mesežnikova, Grigorij – Kollár, Miroslav – Nicholson, Tom (ed.), Slovakia 2002. A Global

Report on the State of Society, Institute for Public Affairs, Bratislava, 2003, p. 335.

8 Slušná, Ľubomíra, Päť mýtov o Urobme TO!, in: SME.sk. 2002.

9 Cf. Filadelfiová et all. (2003), p. 336; Slovakia Parliamentary Elections, September 20 & 21, 2002. Election Report, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Washington,

D.C. 2002.

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its representatives met with politicians. Women presented their demands and

ministers and MPs, without any hesitation, committed themselves to their fulfill-

ment. Handshakes, smiles for the camera – and the new gender contract in

Slovakia came into existence. Representatives of the female folk met with rep-

resentatives of the male folk and, without having any real power to be able to

monitor whether the men really upheld their commitments, they granted – as

“women of Slovakia” – legitimacy to the new political elite.

Once again, women rushed in to help the state in a time of crisis; or

more precisely they came to give their helping hand to faltering democracy. The

women, who perceived themselves as those who were a little left-behind by

the democratisation process, were supposed to be its engine – at least during

the elections. Vis-à-vis the ideal state order they were somehow different and

politically backward. Allegedly, they didn’t know how to use their right to vote.

But thanks to the noble intentions of the “informal women’s movement” they

uprose and uplifted the Slovak democracy, which, in turn, allegedly gave voice

to women. Through their diligent work on the altar of democracy, the “women

of Slovakia” earned their status of citizens of a state which, since 2002, was

increasingly defined by its neoliberal orientation.

For God or for the Constitution

The repertory of possible public roles for women has not been exhausted

by their identification with democratisation. As a political subject, women

were continuously constructed as a population of disorderly subjects whose

morals had been destroyed by the al egedly excessively liberal abortion law

of the 1950s. For rightwing and conservative politicians of both sexes, re-

ligious NGOs, Catholic clergy and one popular neo-conservative weekly

“women” did not represent real women. This anti-secular coalition advocat-

ing neo-moralisation (which has become one of the most common ways of

doing politics not only in Slovakia) constructed women as a discursive tool.

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Women are used to stabilise the limits of the sought-after political order. As

a discursive category they are supposed to proceed from sinning, through

repentance to understanding their nature and, final y, to redemption – not

only in heaven but, ideally, in a non-secular state, already on earth. Dis-

orderly women must be continual y disciplined and their inner evil cal ed

upon so that they could discover their inner good. And if it is not possible to

achieve this once and for al with one law, then it is convenient to tame at

least one woman, once in a while.

When in April 2009, sociologist and – from fall of 2005 until the elections

in 2006 – Minister of Labour, Social Affairs and the Family Iveta Radičová ran for

president, she dared to do something unforgivable. She proclaimed – not in an

academic journal with hardly any readership – but in public: “what is moral or

immoral in society is a matter of social convention.”10 She spoke about abortion

and about the fact that the opinion of the church has its limitations – a secular state

with its constitutions and its citizens of both sexes. I presume that by social conven-

tions she did not mean a unilateral decree that she would have issued as the future

president of Slovakia. But maybe this is precisely how those whose power rests

upon hierarchical relations – representatives of the Catholic Church in Slovakia – pic-

ture a social contract on social change. No wonder that statements of the presiden-

tial candidate were repeated by both lower and higher ranking priests. From Polish

priests who a few years back had come to evangelise the godless capital city, and

who anxiously strove to do so also through publishing colorful magazines preaching

sexual abstinence before marriage, to Catholic bishops, of whom we have eighteen

in Slovakia, but of these only one or two can be heard in public.

Immediately after the statement about morality and abortions, represen-

tatives of the Catholic Church denounced the public activities of Iveta Radičová.

10 Tódová, Monika, Radičová: Slová biskupa ma ranili, in: SME.sk, 26. 2. 2009. Available at http://volby.sme.sk/c/4325397/radicovaslovabiskupamaranili.html.

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In sermons and media statements they commented on the presidential candi-

date, but claimed they were only presenting their personal opinions as common

citizens. All right, let’s consider this option as well. But who was it who, a few

days after a sermon preached by Bishop Rudolf Baláž, in which he had indirectly

compared Radičová to Hitler, had a meeting at the Bishop’s Office in Banská

Bystrica? Was it Iveta Radičová – a citizen and presidential candidate and Rudolf

Baláž – a citizen from Banská Bystrica, or was it Iveta Radičová – a Catholic and

presidential candidate and her shepherd, bishop and politician Baláž?

After a fifteenminute discussion they presented to the media a common

statement saying they had “no difference as concerns fundamental questions”11

and refused to provide the media with any further answers to their questions.

I tried to imagine what could have been the subject of their discussion and what

political, noncivic, Christian lesson Radičová had received. Maybe her talk with

the bishop resembled the dialogue between a bishop and a nun in a book writ-

ten by Jana Juráňová: “’You must, my child, learn that our plans are not in our

hands,’ the bishop told her the other day. Klára does not comprehend why the

bishop’s office wants to change people’s plans. Does the office represent God

on this earth in this respect as well?”12 Let’s swap Klára with Radičová and we

get the first political message of the Catholic Church to the candidate. She too

was obliged to grasp this lesson – in Slovakia a representative of God has more

power than a symbolic representative of the people.

And let’s swap Klára for other women who in 2001 – when the

ChristianDemocratic Movement (KDH), at that time a parliamentary party

of the ruling coalition, proposed changes in the Constitution that would

have meant a ban on abortion, added to their signatures under the peti-

11 SITA (2009), Radičová si vyjasnila svoje postoje s biskupom Balážom, in: SME.sk, 9. 3. 2009.

Available at http://volby.sme.sk/c/4341167/radicova-si-vyjasnila-svoje-postoje-s-bisku-

pombalazom.html

12 Juráňová, Jana, Orodovnice, ASPEKT, Bratislava, 2008, p. 85.

132

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tion comments such as: “The KDH proposal is idiotic.”, “I add my voice to

support the pro-choice stance. And, of course, I’m a woman and I’d love

to kick the asses of those men who talk such baloney.” “It is absurd that

political sects would usurp the right to decide in the name of all citizens.”

“I disagree that men from KDH should decide about us, women. No man

has the right to decide on behalf of a woman. Each woman has the right

to decide about herself freely and on her own.” “How come it is men who

initiated this proposal to change the abortion law?” “I’m against the ban on

abortion. I believe I have the right to decide freely, we live in a democratic

state, don’t we?”13

To sum it up: we live in a democratic state, don’t we? In 2001, the

change of the Constitution did not come into being. In 2002, political games

with abortion led to the demise of the government and the life of women and

men in Slovakia now goes on with a new, allegedly social-democratic, govern-

ment. At the end of 2008 the government discussed the National Programme

for Protection of Sexual and Reproductive Health – a document that, not with-

out a reason, had been put aside for a long time. The recapitulation of the dis-

cussion about it looks like a mass crash: the minister of health who had prepared

the document was recalled, none of those who had proposed their comments

was able to successfully push for their interests, and the national programme

ended up as some incomprehensible amalgam. The whole – democratic – dis-

cussion led to a stalemate. But what is decisive for the nature of politics shaping

women’s lives is the fact that it was not about a clash of pro-life and pro-choice

organisations. The National Programme that was supposed to define the steps

to the improvement of sexual and reproductive health of men and women was

sent to the shredding machine due to one meeting of the Prime Minister with

bishops, during which the “bishops (finally) came to an agreement with Prime

Minister Robert Fico that the controversial material would not be discussed by

13 Iniciatíva za možnosť voľby (2001), pp. 102-104.

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the government.”14 It must have been a rather pleasant meeting; the conversation

must have proceeded nonconflictual y and smoothly. Neither of the attending

parties would want to ruin their common dinner.

Burdens from the Times

of Emancipation

What to do with the women who wil not bear any more children and whose wrinkles

make them unfit for a commercial of the “women’s movement”? Pensioners have

ended up badly. They are unat ractive, they eat up the state budget – as some would

say – and maybe they are good only for taking care of their grandchildren whom could

not be place in daycare. The best thing these women could do is be invisible.

But in the past two years they have received ample media atten-

tion as supporters of the main ruling party SMER-SD, when the party or-

ganised ce lebrations of International Women’s Day for them. Elderly women have

become the visual materialisation of a socialist society. Hundreds of women, pensioners were

packed in theatres and sport arenas to see the show, a handful of politicians and get a red rose.

Authors of video recordings from these celebrations, published with plea-

sure by internet news portals, never missed a chance for mockery: some elderly

women are trying to find seating in a packed hal , another one is chewing on a

hamburger, yet another is covering her face maybe wondering how the whole

thing would turn out. But whom should we laugh at? The Prime Minister, the Mi-

nister of Interior as wel as the Minister of Culture are decorating cakes, tel ing jokes,

revealing secretes from higher politics. They make a few jokes when they cal the

neatly groomed women in the audience (only a few of them are accompanied by

their husbands) “dear girls” and introduce themselves as “handsome guys”. But the

14 Program sexuálneho zdravia nebude. Cirkev uspela. (2009). In aktuálne.sk, 21. 1. 2009.

Available

at

http://aktualne.centrum.sk/domov/zdravieskolstvospolocnost/clanek.

phtml?id=1173702

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air does not thicken; there is no erotic tension of male-female courtship. However,

it is not imbued with the rage of forgotten and excluded old women either.

The mother of the politician resembles the women in the audience. She worked

hard and, besides, brought up the politician and his siblings. If it is impossible to properly

appreciate her work, then it is necessary to ritualise this appreciation. The politicians face

women who in their lives experienced the double or triple burden of the “socialist eman-

cipation” of women. Nowadays, the women themselves are burdens left over from those

times of “emancipation”, so what shall we do with them? Nothing, we’d rather do noth-

ing. There are more and more of them and so it is a good thing to make peace with them,

and wish them all the best “on the occasion of your holiday, International Women’s Day”.15

And, in turn, to expect they will cause no trouble.

When society, its politicians, husbands, employers and children show “res-

pect” to women – and it does not matter whether they do so on IWD or Moth-

ers’ Day – they publicly acknowledge that they ignore them for the remaining 364

days of the year. It is necessary, then, to symbolical y include women in society

on that 365th day, and stop looking at them as some incapable beings who do not

even understand their own pensions, low salaries, abuse of their maternal and

family “obligations” by their relatives and the state. But the Prime Minister under-

stands this well when he tells them: “Let me symbolically embrace you all…”16 And

so the state embraces them and there is no problem whatsoever.

How much liberation, how much freedom

Women, then, do not exist on their own, be it in transforming society or in

any other political, social and economic regime. Each question asking what has

15 Robert Fico, in: Mátyus, Róbert, Video dňa. MDŽ skončil, šou musí pokračovať,

in: aktuálne.sk, 11. 3. 2009. Available at http://aktualne.centrum.sk/video/?id=962863.

16 Robert Fico, in Holičková, Zuzana, Video dňa. Premiér oslavoval MDŽ aj v Bratislave.

Zdobil tortu, in: aktuálne.sk, 13. 3. 2008. Available at http://aktualne.centrum.sk/video/

?id=948836.

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happened to women then and there first asks about the meaning ascribed to

women in social relations and the meaning that women give to themselves.

I tried to describe three figurations of women – actors of democratisation,

mothers under moral scrutiny and useless pensioners – through which politics

and public debate have politicised the category of women in Slovakia after 1989.

This has happened in order to foreclose the category from further possible

problematisation. However, the politicisation of women should take the opposite

direction. It should open the category of women and enable also conflictual

figurations of the subject of women. Such politicisation should be a legitimate

part of unstable democratic politics, the conflictual nature of which is related to

the fact that democracy is a practice of freedom and not some administrative

machinery carrying out democracy according to some scheme.

Finally, I would like to get back to two questions which the texts in this publica-

tion touch upon. How much have women gained or lost during transformation? If I

leave out the problem of the non-existence of one homogenous subject of woman,

even if it were delineated by the territory of Slovakia and the time period of 1989 and

2009, I am stil unable to answer this question no mat er how much I try. A partial

answer to the question “how much” could be found in gender disaggregated statistical

data collected by the state, gender indicators in evaluations of recently finished “Euro-

pean” projects, the number of female MPs or institutions dealing with gender equality.

However, I consider the real informational value of these indicators to be null as long

as there does not exist a group of female scientists, teachers, authors or simply intel-

lectuals who have enough time and money to critically interpret these data, to research

current problems of women and of gender organisation of society, publish their find-

ings and criticaly discuss them. If feminist research existed in Slovakia, then I would in

this place write about problems of those women I have so far only heard of from news

or from final reports of NGO “women’s projects”. I know only very lit le, for instance,

about unemployed women in Eastern Slovakia working as caretakers of dying Rus-

sians or Poles in the USA, about the current gender division of labour in small factories

producing semi-products for the automobile industry, scattered all over Slovakia, or

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about the reasons why the total devaluation of the work of teachers in elementary

and secondary schools has not induced mass protests yet. And I don’t think that these

problems of women would be any smaler than those embodied by the described

figurations of women as actors of democratisation, mothers under moral scrutiny and

useless pensioners. I simply don’t know them or know very little about them, and I

think that this is the case of other female intellectuals in Slovakia as well.

To the second question: Have the changes of 1989 “liberated” women? In

contrast to equality, which I have always deemed as something measurable, I have for

a long time regarded freedom as a concept too vague and too often instrumentalised

to be meaningful. Just like the editors of this publication, I usually understood freedom

as a notion in quotation marks. This indicates that the status of this grand word is

unquestionable, but its meaning is problematic. Nevertheless, I believe that freedom

is tangible. It is experienced as a strategy of action against oppression. What else but

their own practice of freedom could explain women’s opposition to the at ack on their

freedom when they spoke up against the ban on abortion? The “liberation” of women

that has happened after 1989 in the sphere of reproductive and sexual rights does not

contain the pathos of the questions posed at the beginning of this paragraph. However,

it contains a different pathos – of a collective action of women against their oppressive

relations with other people and institutions. I don’t want to narrow the freedom of

women in Slovakia down to a single sphere, but this example is blatant. I don’t have

doubts that many women and girls follow the lines of freedom, be it in smaller or big-

ger events of their lives. My practice of freedom is feminism.

Translated by Eva Riečanská

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137

4.

East

Germany

No State Can Exist

Without Women!

German „Turning

Point” Experiences

1989/90 and

Afterwards

Rita Pawlowski

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RITA PAWLOWSkI

The Germans coined the term Wende or turning point for the societal changes

of the years 1989/90 in their country. And indeed, in the months between

November 1989 and October 1990 quite a few turning points were reached

between the Oder and Rhine rivers: The 40 years of two German nations came

to an end, the wall between the East and the West disappeared in no time at

all, socialist East Germany (DDR) and capitalist West Germany (BRD) united…

okay, but into what did they unite? Today, 20 years later, the answer is: Germany,

which does not call itself capitalist and is certainly not socialist.

The debates are still ongoing and tons of paper have been filled with de-

scriptions of this metamorphosis. In united Germany there is no general agree-

ment about the gains and losses of the turning point. And the interpretation

of the past – especially the past of the DDR – is becoming increasingly more

vehement and ideological.

There is only one topic in these endless debates that seems not worth

mentioning: women – before, during and after the turning point! A large photo

exhibition on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz documenting the time from 1988 to 1990

is exemplary in this regard. Dozens of strong and brave men look down onto

the visitors of the exhibition. And the many strong and brave women, where

are they? Perhaps they didn’t exist at all? In German memory, it seems that the

female subject disappeared in the celebration of democracy and freedom.

But appearances are often deceitful. “No state can exist without wo-

men,” said our daughters during the time of the turning point, full of selfconfi-

dence, and on December 3 1989 founded a new, feminist women’s association,

the Independent Women’s Association (Unabhängiger Frauenverband or UFV).

They were rebelling against the patriarchal structures and politics in the DDR,

and were also rebelling against us, their mothers, who predominantly accepted

and supported these structures and policies. They wanted a transformed DDR

and changes in the relationship between the genders. As the founders put it in

their manifesto of December 3 1989, “We must insist that women’s questions

are not a marginal societal issue, but instead are basic existential questions.”

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They further stated that there was neither public awareness of gender, nor an

appropriate political advocacy group for women. The group aspired to change

both of these things. The engagement of our daughters was thrilling, almost

limitless and absolutely selfconfident.

They defined a notion of feminism for the DDR that, in contrast to West

Germany, focused on the perception and represenation of women’s interests,

without completely excluding men. In January 1990 they successful y secured a

ministerial position for the UFV in the Modrow government. In a wide-ranging

alliance of political parties and civic movements they phrased their feminist ideas

about the future of the DDR in a “social charter”. They plunged, inexperienced,

into the parliamentary elections in February/March 1990 and in doing so under-

estimated their male col eagues in the scramble for positions of power in the

new DDR parliament. They made formerly taboo topics, like same-sex love and

spousal abuse, subjects of open discussion. They were provocative in their televi-

sion appearances, aiming to publicise the social inequalities between women and

men and challenge ideas about the emancipation of East German women.

They encountered enthusiastic approval from both men and women,

as well as unsympathetic or even hostile rejection. But in many women they

triggered a thought process that is still being felt today.

With the unification of the two German states in October 1990 it was

also the East German feminists who publicly positioned themselves against uni-

fication at the expense of women and who marched in the streets for women’s

right to work, right to self-determination and the right for women’s voices to be

heard in all areas of politics and economic life.

The state powers of the new Federal Republic of Germany completely

ignored the demands and suggestions of the East German women, which was

aided by reawakened feelings of superiority of East German men, among other

things. In 1998 the feminist women’s association disappeared from the political

landscape in the new Germany, thus ending one of the most exciting and moti-

vational chapters of the history of the German women’s movement.

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Yes, our intelligent, emancipated daughters were not counted among

the winners of the turning point era.

From my point of view, the new feminist women’s movement in the

DDR in 1989/1990 was the only political movement of the time that also more

or less openly dealt with generational conflict. The rejection of what at that

point was East Germany’s only women’s association, the Democratic Women’s

Association of Germany (Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschland or DFD),

is an important indication of this.

The younger generation of women felt that the initials stood for some-

thing else. They ironically deciphered the acronym DFD as “Dienstbar – Folg-

sam – Dumpf” (“Subservient – Obedient – Musty”). It was a harsh judgement

about a generation of women to which I belonged. It was also unfair, as we

had taken advantage of the chances offered to us in the DDR; chances we had

worked hard to get. Did that make our gratitude to this country uncritical? Was

our lack of feminism a lack of selfconfidence?

The turning point did not allow the old women’s association DFD with

its 1.5 million members and the baggage of its history a fresh start in 1989/1990.

For 40 long years the association was committed to the SED (Socialist Unity

Party of Germany) and to East Germany. Now the members of DFD needed

to act and think on their own.

Federal structures and new responsibilities for the 17,000 grassroots

groups in the cities and vil ages had to be developed from the association’s

ubiquitous and strongly internalised centralism. However, this proved to

be a difficult problem. Many, many members and staf of the association

left the organisation, disappointed and uncertain. The lack of membership

dues and government funds forced drastic budget cuts, which meant that

more than 1,000 women lost their jobs with the association. Until February

1990 we argued and struggled to find new forms and content for the work

of the women’s association, however, this mostly took place behind closed

doors.

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Adding insult to injury, as an organisation close to the state the DFD

ended up under the control of the trustee corporation entrusted with the pri-

vatisation and reorganisation of East Germany’s nationally owned assets. The

bright minds of the women’s organisation spent months, even years struggling

with the trustee corporation to defend the interests of the association, especially

the association’s property.

In this situation the political position of the DFD remained powerless,

ineffective and invisible to the public. And at the time, no one wanted to listen to

the “elders” or cooperate with them: they were assigned shared responsibility

for the failure of the DDR per se and the exclusion of the women’s association

close to the state seemed appropriate. And we, “the elders”? How long did we

need to get over our previous entitlement of speaking on behalf of all women

and assume a more easy-going view of competing with our daughters who had

formed the new feminist association!

But perhaps this exclusion played its part in ensuring that the old East

German women’s organisation did not totally disappear from the scene even 20

years after the turning point.It may sound paradoxical, but the association that,

in contrast to the feminist women’s association UFV, did not attain any political

publicity in 1989/1990 was compelled – almost unavoidably – to refocus on its

strengths: on-site social work. The association’s well-founded knowledge about

the situations and needs of women in the regions, experience in dealing with

administrations, counselling and assistance structures in place from the DDR

era, not to mention the still active membership all over East Germany proved

advantageous for the DFD. It already had a network in place that the newer

associations first had to arduously put together.

I cannot conceal that I was not one of the members that contributed

to the turning point of the DFD, which turned it into a community welfare

organisation with its current name “Democratic Women’s Association”

(demokratischer frauenbund or dfb) and demanded that it took new political

positions.

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However, I do recognise the success of this transformation and the

group’s accomplishments for women. Over many years the association or-

ganised temporary jobs for thousands of women and occupational re-training

financed by the federal government, especially for unemployed East German

women. In 1996 the dfb charity established a unique living project for homeless

women (and now also men) called “Undine,” which was one of the winners

in the “Social City 2006”nationwide competition. And the general manager of

the charity, who before 1989 was also the federal secretary of the DFD federal

board of directors for a short period of time, received the Order of Merit of the

Federal Republic of Germany in 2006 for her social engagement.

Today the association no longer counts over one million members and the

majority of the remaining and/or new 50,000 members belong to the older

generation. This accounts for the fact that the dfb was not able to gain a foothold

in former West Germany and has found its base and supporters in the East of

the Federal Republic.

Today, when I think back to the weeks and months of the year 1990

until the disappearance of the DDR and the creation of a larger Federal Republic

of Germany I ask myself, “What could have been achieved if the generations

of mothers and daughters of the DDR had found common ground to work

together with the women’s associations of West Germany? And why did our

attempts to surmount the walls between women in the East and West fail? We

certainly shared the same language – yet despite this we could not understand

one another, or only with great difficulty. Pointless questions? Probably, but per-

haps important ones for the generation of our granddaughters?

While we women were trying to understand one another in 1989/1990,

it was the politicians, meaning especially men that were putting together the

packages for the country’s future. And these packages for the future did not con-

tain many of the women’s rights achieved previously. The legal system in force

today and the current social system mean a step backwards for me as an East

German women. What I understand by this is that the promotion of women

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within companies and on the national level, women’s self-determination, child-

care, care for the elderly and healthcare are for the most part understood as

economic categories and are thus subject to the rule of money. I feel that this is

a loss for which the gains of the turning point cannot completely compensate.

Naturally, nowadays I, and not the state, decide about what I do or don’t do,

whether I speak or remain silent, about my engagement or my reticence. The

feeling of freedom is a lovely feeling. And at the same time this freedom is, nev-

ertheless, not enough for me when the sisters by my side don’t know how they

can fill their children’s bellies, or afford sending them some day to university.

It is time that we, women, kicked against the pricks again. However, this

time with the many experiences of the German turning point!

Translated by Anthony B. Heric

146

My Failure at

Becoming Italian

Jana Simon

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During my childhood Europe meant Italy to me. La Strada was the first film

that made me cry, I adored Italian cuisine and once received a postcard of

the sun shining on the Spanish Steps. That was the moment I fel in love. Italy

combined all of my childhood wishes and longings: spaghetti with tons of to-

mato sauce, gelato in al flavours, good looking darkhaired boys on mopeds,

convertibles driving along narrow coastal roads – the sweet life of the siesta,

a mixture of idleness and consummate beauty. I painted the outline of Italy on

the wall in my room, taped up pictures next to it and marked the most impor-

tant cities with a dot from a black felt-tip pen. I lived far away from these places

in East Berlin in the 1980s and dreamed of a country that I had never seen and

probably never would, just as I would not see the rest of Western Europe.

At school I delved into expert discussions with my friend. She had just

one flaw, as she preferred France. One day during geography class she looked

at me from the side and whispered into my ear, “Jana, the Italians are lazy,

you know.” After that I stopped speaking to her for a couple of days. She had

injured my sensitive national pride and I plotted my revenge. Soon thereafter,

much to my great delight, I was able to crow about Italy becoming World

Footbal Champions in 1982 and France landing far behind in fourth place. In

any case, East Germany could not compete, and even if they could have, I

doubt that I would have been rooting for my native country.

It was a life of the absurd. Our fantasy world seldom col ided with our

everyday lives, we compartmentalised very meticulously. During lessons we

took notes on the superiority of the socialist system, these perfectly conceived

fiveyear plans: bituminous coal, potash salts, machine building. Too bad that

there still wasn’t any ketchup or any Depeche Mode records to buy. We re-

ceived postcards with ugly socialist buildings on the front. Girls and boys com-

pletely unknown to us from the Soviet Union wrote: “Dear German Friend!

I congratulate you on the anniversary of the Thälmann Young Pioneers. Your

Soviet friend.” I wrote similar words on postcards of Berlin’s Television Tower

and sent them to Moscow or Vladivostok. Everyone knew we would never

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jANA SIMON

meet, never get to know one another. We were happy about it. The thought

of meeting and having to chat about the Thälmann Young Pioneers could only

cause panic.

Under the chairs my friend and I further lived out our secret West-

erner existence, exchanging notes discussing Madonna’s new hairstyle. We

planned our futures far away in Rome or Paris, and preferably with Marcel-

lo Mastroianni. Maybe we, Easterners, were the first real Europeans – we

changed our nationality every day, slipped into it and took it of as we pleased.

Completely unsuspectingly. In our thoughts we already lived in a Europe with-

out borders.

As I entered the third grade I decided to transform myself into a fu-

llyfledged Italian. To do this I now needed that which could no longer be

avoided: the language. My parents placed a classified advertisement and one

week later Mr. Kurz appeared in our living room. My first Italian teacher wore

grey syntheticfibre pants, had a dark beard and his eyes disappeared behind

glasses that were so large they almost engulfed his chin – he must have gotten

them in the Soviet Union. Kindly put, I had pictured Mr. Kurz a little more

Mediterranean. Regardless, I was ready to spare no effort in becoming Italian.

From that point forward, once a week I went to Mr. Kurz, he lived far away

from us in a newly constructed high-rise in Lichtenberg. The hour-long les-

son always began the same way: to start, Mrs. Kurz placed a glass of orange

sea-buckthorn juice in front of me on the ochre-coloured cof ee table, I took

my notebook out of my bag and then recited vocabulary sitting next to the

brown wal unit. In my Italian book from the West the people constantly took

walks along the Lido in Venice, ordered “un vino per favore” and talked about

where they had spent their vacations, which fit wel with my ideas of Italy. I

took my personal vacation from East Berlin, plunged into the fascinating world

of “professores”, “dottores”, “ingenieres” and even managed to forget the

claustrophobical y low ceilings in Mr. Kurz’s apartment. I repeated sentences

like, “Ah buon giorno dottore, anche mia moglie e qui,” which means some-

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thing like, “Ah, good day Doctor, my wife is also here.” For ten-year-olds an

indispensable turn of phrase, Mr. Kurz seemed quite serious about my edu-

cation. After the hours on the Venice beach I returned to Berlin Johannisthal

where my parents reckoned the wine was sweet, gelato was cal ed vanil a,

chocolate or fruit ice cream and for school I had to memorise the character-

istics of a revolutionary crisis. Italy, like al of Western Europe, belonged to a

paral el universe – I may have heard about it daily on the radio and watched it

on television, but I unfortunately had no idea about what it felt like. Gradual y

I left my homeland and became an intermediate entity. I lived as an under-

ground Italian in East Berlin and in doing so felt somehow subversive.

It also had much to do with the fact that I was not particularly pleased

with my real identity – who was happy to be citizen of a country whose bands

named themselves “Roundabout” or “Inca”, where fel ow citizens fought

over discounted bottles of neon-coloured nail polish and where, when on

the telephone, you always also greeted the suspected state eavesdropper

on the line. My identity was a magnificent mosaic made up of many colourful

individual pieces that had no connection to one another. One day I could be

an Italian for the day, tomorrow a Brit. I became a master of staging. And of

self-denial.

In the late 1980s my friend and I often travel ed to Budapest in the

summer, which was our capital of the West in the East. One of the ironies of

history is that Hungary was admitted much later to the European Union than

the former East Germany. In Budapest there was Coca Cola, pink pants and

Flashdance was showing at the cinema. One evening in July 1987 we decided

to pretend we were English girls for the night. We teased up our hair, lined

our eyelids with black kohl and struck out for the night. On our way to the

club we constantly stopped in the middle of the street, loudly yelling “won-

derful” and in English asked passers-by for directions that we already knew

perfectly wel . The club was located in the middle of a park, everyone danced

beneath the open sky, we sat elegantly on the margins and watched. Soon

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jANA SIMON

from the right two lads approached us asking where we came from. “Lon-

don!” we screamed. The two of them eyed us with respect, in their eyes we

had reached the pinnacle of the glamour scale, or at least that was what we

fancied. Unfortunately, we could hardly talk to them now. The only sentence

that kept crossing my mind was, “Hel o, I’m Mike and I am a boxer” from my

English lessons, my friend softly muttered “Big Ben, Big Ben” like a mantra to

herself. Perhaps she was hoping to be asked about the sights in London, we

had studied them in school. We fell silent and I planned my escape. Finally, I

departed the scene with a terrible combination of English and German, saying,

“I hol us paar drinks.” The two lads just nodded knowingly and grinned.

But I did not want to see it, understand it. And so there was a second

story of wanton deception. At a campsite on Lake Balaton in the late 1980s I

met two Dutch girls. We chatted for a while and then came the unavoidable

question of where I came from. “From West Berlin,” I answered, unaf ected.

Although my father’s Lada with its East Berlin license plate was parked next to

our tent for al to see. I spun a long, complicated yarn. I lived with my mother

(true) and said that she and I had emigrated to West Berlin (false). I only spent

summer vacations with my East German father. I cocked my head to the side

and looked earnest, everything was just very complicated. The two of them

looked at me with some astonishment but appeared to believe me. This story

at least had the advantage that I did not have to speak perfect English but in-

stead could freely speak in my mother tongue. I perfected my methods.

The falsehood robbed me of the summer and my insouciance. From

that point onward I lived in constant fear of my true identity being discovered

or that my father would accidentally betray me. I only wore my most col-

ourful t-shirts, read all day from a dog-eared Donald Duck comic book and

thought about whether or not I should remove the “VEB”-label (“state-owned

enterprise”) from my towel. After al , one of the Dutch girls might catch me

in the shower with a towel from the East. That would al ow them to draw

dangerous conclusions. I was so busy with my new identity that I gradual y

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grew lonely. I no longer knew exactly what I had told to whom, so it was

better not to talk to anyone. I had been strung up by my own yarn. For just

a short moment in time I became one with my new identity, I could taste it,

the sweetness of the West, separated from the tedious everyday of the East.

Unfortunately, this feeling never lasted long – it left a bitter aftertaste of deceit

in my mouth, of betrayal. In the end I was happy when we departed so that I

could give up the game.

My becoming Italian was also at a standstil ; Mr. Kurz was nowhere to

be found. After he thoroughly quizzed me about my family background he

just disappeared. I never heard from him again, the only things that remained

were the three volumes of Italian for You on my bookshelf. It was a shame,

as I had enjoyed the apolitical hours on the Lido of Venice in an environment

where everything was analysed politically.

Even as I small child I had declared my solidarity with Angola. Generally,

in East Germany we were constantly involved with some random country in

the middle of nowhere. We sent letters to Nicaragua, collected clothing for Mo-

zambique. I remember once standing in front of my childhood bookcase for a

long time, pondering what I should send to a starving child in Africa. I decided on

a Smurf. That was a real sacrifice. After all, it was from the West and was certain

to be just as coveted in Africa as it was with us in East Berlin, I imagined.

My political socialisation reached its zenith in the eleventh grade, 1989,

as we were instructed to dialectically evaluate the formation of fold moun-

tains in geography class. No god could have his holy hands in play. Even the

mountains were on our side. Despite this, East Germany foundered shortly

thereafter. I had left it long before the Berlin Wal came down, however it had

failed to notice.

Reunification was extreme in all respects. That an entire system, in-

cluding its unbeloved representatives and products, could simply disappear

is an experience that separates us from our contemporaries in the West. In

history class in school we once again started with prehistoric man but by the

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jANA SIMON

end of the school year we had only reached the Middle Ages. Al authorities

were in a state of disintegration, our feared civics teacher landed in a psy-

chiatric ward, the formerly influential school director left by taking an early

retirement. Books were stacked up next to the trash containers, books tel ing

the history of the working classes, portions of which we had been required to

memorise. Anyone who has experienced that will have difficulties ever believing in authority again or taking political parties seriously. Because we saw that nothing is certain and permanent – no system, no party, no authority, not even

a formerly powerful world order.

At some point during this time I lost the ambiguousness of my identity.

Before the fal of the Berlin Wal I saw myself as a Western European who,

due to some divine oversight, was living in the East. Now after the change in

political systems I would final y be renaturalised into my natural environment.

To my great surprise, no one in the West recognised my true identity, they

viewed me as a true Easterner from the East, one that in my memory I never

was. Everyone assumed I could speak fluent Russian, was well versed in the

works of Karl Marx and the teachings of dialectical materialism, but I had never

been interested in any of that. After the embarrassing experiences in Budapest

I had focussed more on the English language and also felt at home with the

wisdom of Donald Duck. I in no way fulfil ed their expectations. At the same

time, I couldn’t really join in. I was intimately familiar with the Milky Way candy

bar, Levis jeans and Madonna, however the subtle dif erences that ruled life

in the West left me baffled. I had no idea how this nation, this Western Euro-

pean entity was structured. I knew the theory behind it, but not what held it

together at its core. Even today it may be the case that I cannot name al of the

West German federal chancel ors and foreign ministers in order; I grew up in

a dif erent country. The Soviet national leaders disappeared from my memory

and I floated in a noman’sland detached from time and space.

When I final y physical y went to Italy in 1992, travel ed to the country

of my longings, I was both happy and disappointed. In Perugia it was hot, the

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cappuccino was creamy, a few individual older men stil took siestas, but al of

this did not have much to do with me. I shared a room with a Dutch woman,

there were Brits, Austrians, Swiss, even a Brazilian – but I was the only one

from the East. Sometimes I had the feeling that I was observing my fellow

lodgers from a far away place, benevolently, but their experiences at anti-

nuclear power protests in Gorleben and school exchange programmes in the

USA left me strangely unaf ected. My stories about military defence teacher

Major Mendel, parties drinking vodka with cola, the decision as to whether

or not to become a member of the Free German Youth and songs like Spain’s

heaven spreads its stars above our trenches sounded exciting, almost exotic, but

they now separated me from the others. Suddenly, all of these past events

were weighed down by an unforeseen gravity and seriousness. It seemed to

me that there were no more categories into which I could flee. So I tried to

transform myself back from a fullfledged Italian into a fullfledged Eastern Eu-

ropean; I started studying Russian and travel ed to Moscow for the first time.

Earlier, in East Germany, I had refused to go there, as that was something an

Italian in exile in the East just simply could not do.

In the great East I stayed with Irina, an unemployed French teacher

and her daughter, Katja. I never was able to find out how the two of them

spent their days. Regardless of whether I was coming or going, they were

wearing floral terrycloth robes and blowdrying their hair. Katja was 23 years

old, newly divorced and seemed unhappy that her mother had al owed me to

use her old childhood room and that she had to sleep on the couch. Perhaps

this is why she looked me up and down with such detached condescension or

total y ignored me. It was very surprising when she spoke to me one morning

in the kitchen. Wearily she asked me who had won more medals at the last

Olympics, Germany or Russia. “Russia, probably,” I answered. She lit a ciga-

rette, lowered her hand to the table with an “I-knew-it” gesture, turned away

from me and disappeared without uttering another word. She just wanted to

show this clueless Westerner her place, she who knew nothing of the glori-

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jANA SIMON

ous victories of bygone Soviet power. I understood Katja very wel – I saw

the colourful sheepdog calendar on the wal and the leather Lenin armbands

under the bed. Here the yearning was palpable in every object – in the toy

figures from the children’s surprise eggs behind glass, in the CocaCola sticker

on her shelf. It was as if I were looking into a mirror back into the past. I could

feel the heaviness, the melancholy. I knew her dreams, but there was no

longer any trust between us. I had switched sides; in her eyes I was a Western

European.

Whenever I travel into what was formerly the East I am now a woman

from the West. Recently, as a journalist, I visited Azerbaijan, a country with

a lot of oil that has left behind a series of ugly black lakes everywhere and a

president and former head of the KGB who loves to persecute his citizens

with his own personal quotes and photos of himself. In a café in Baku I met

an opposition politician, stout in stature with a dark moustache, who smoked

a lot and smiled a lot. He talked insistently for several hours and tried to hyp-

notise me with his eyes. Without a doubt the man had a mission. His country

belonged to Europe and absolutely nowhere else, he said. Democracy, West-

ern values had for centuries been deeply rooted in Azerbaijan. I felt like an EU

diplomat who was supposed to pass judgement for or against Azerbaijan and

Europe. Looking at him I felt sorry for him. How should I know what Europe

real y is and who is al owed to belong or not? I always imagined Europe as a

large building, somewhere in Brussels, where they store a lot of documents

that get pushed back and forth, occasional y they lose a file or it gets withheld.

They decide on condom sizes and how apples are supposed to look. I do not

know what any of that has to do with me. The opposition politician opposite

me started to sweat, small moist spots blossomed on his shirt. And then I sud-

denly had that East German feeling: someone is trying desperately to be re-

levant in the world and simply does not want to miss the boat. At this moment

I am playing the Western European who explains the East together with com-

munism, from whom gifts are expected and for whom one always has time,

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even when other appointments beckon. I observed myself in this role and

tried to make no mistakes, not to hurt anyone or seem arrogant. I couldn’t

tel the man anything about my unsuccessful attempts at becoming Italian, he

would have thought I was overwrought. So I remained silent about that. “I’m

reporting about oil,” I said in the end, and wished him the best of luck.

Translated by Anthony B. Heric

156

Transformation –

an Unquestioned

Western Category?

The Example of

Post-Communist

Germany

Mirjam Hirsch

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Introduction

Ever since I was asked to write an article for this publication, I repeatedly re-

turned to thoughts about what concepts like “women” and “transformation”

mean for me in this context. Because of this, I would like to initially approach

these terms by clarifying exactly what I understand by them. Since my critical

gaze also results, at least partly, from my position in society, I will also explain

my personal context. A critical approach to the term “transformation,” which

is often understood statically, is central to my argumentation. I will specifically

discuss problems of “west-centrism.”1

Subsequently, I will make a case for a dynamic understanding of trans-

formation, taking into account its historical context. This dynamic understanding

will be distinguished especially by its multidimensionality. I will clarify this concept

by analysing the simultaneous „feminisation” of poverty in former East Germany

and a specific „stubbornness” of East German women who continue to seek

full employment, trying to balance family and professional life. The economic

challenges that women face, however, do not result solely from upheavals in

the political system, but are additionally strongly influenced by neoliberal reor-

ganisation processes. Over the course of these processes, the welfare state and

its social safety net have lost relevance. This in turn leads me to the question of

the interdependence of dimensions of domination and control. I will align myself

with Peggy Watson’s thesis from „Gender and Politics in Postcommunism”2 in

recommending the introduction of an East-West dimension and in emphasising

the importance of an interdependent approach, using the example of discourse

about racism in East Germany in the post-turning point era.3

1 I use the term “west-centrism” here in reference to the term eurocentrism.

2 Compare: Watson, Peggy. Gender and Politics in Postcommunism. In: Jähnert, Gabriele et al.

(ed.), Gender in Transition in Eastern and Central Europe Proceedings. Berlin 2001. p. 37–39.

3 The German word Wende is usually translated into English as turning point to refer to the events of 19891990 that led to the reunification of Germany.

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MIRjAM HIRSCH

Clarification of meanings

and self-positioning:

1. Women

Here, at this point, I will not speak for all women of my generation from former

East Germany, since I believe there is no common “we” for all women, which

stands opposite the category of “men”. This will become much more clear

when I compare my personal background with those of many other women

from former East Germany, as it is likely that I share very few experiences with

the majority of them. This is because I grew up as the daughter of a pastor in

rural East Germany and was living there in 1989 and afterwards.

For example, due to the oppositional stance of my parents and other

family members (some of whom were subject to physical violence and/or jail

sentences), I was the first and only child in my school who was not allowed to

join the Young Pioneers. For outsiders this may sound banal, for others even

subversive. For me as a child, however, these were experiences of exclusion

and discrimination. For instance, this was expressed during the wellknown flagrolls, in which we lined up from shortest to tallest. I always had to stand in the back even though I was one of the shortest.

I was also not allowed to participate in the Spartakiaden – East Ger-

many’s youth sport competition – although I was the fastest runner in my class.

I could not comprehend these exclusions at the time, however, they did create

in me a strong sense of recognising injustice.

Moreover, my mother was one of the few women in East Germany

who did not perform any wage labour. Instead, she was a stay-at-home wife

and mother, and additionally performed the unpaid “voluntary” work of a pas-

tor’s wife. I mention these things because they make clear that the oppositional

stance of my parents did not simply result in concrete exclusion from important

social areas, but was also expressed in our family arrangements. As a family we

deviated quite far from the norm in a few central aspects; violating ideas that

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extolled wage labour for men and women and, for the most part, placed child-

rearing and childcare in the hands of the state.4

Today, however, I am writing this article as a young feminist from Berlin

who has a very critical view of both „the East” and „the West”. In my college

gender studies programme I have been especially influenced by feminist theo-

ries from the West and Latin America.

2. Transformation

With this background, being familiar with terms like “Stasi”, “informer”, “surveil-

lance” and “wiretaps” from an early age onward, I also experienced the turning

point of 1989 as a sort of “liberation”. This was naturally also conveyed through

my immediate family environment, a few of my relatives still use this liberation

terminology to this day. Central aspects of this terminology seemed intelligible

to me as a child, for example the newly won freedom of speech, freedom of

opinion, freedom of travel, and the freedom to form political parties and organi-

sations. What is conspicuous here is the repetitive use of the term “freedom”.

What bothers me about the abundance of these collocations is the implicit as-

sumption of equating “the West” with freedom. As Watson writes, “The free-

dom/captivity coding of West-East difference rests on a one-dimensional oppo-

sition: liberation, theoretically, is all it takes to make “them” one of “us”5. What

this produces is a natural history of political change, whereby aberrations are

attributed to the abnormal environment of communism.”6 This is accompanied

by a concept of transformation that assumes a simplified „before” and „after”.

Before in this chain of associations is linked with the East – totalitarian state,

4 However, it is important to mention that despite this, women were also responsible for

childbearing, which subjected them to a dual burden.

5 It is very fascinating to note that Watson is writing from a western context. Personal y, I do not feel included in her definition of "us", but instead am more likely to identify with

"them".

6 Watson, op. cit., p. 42.

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oppression – while the after is associated with the West – democracy, freedom.

Both of these concepts are thus ahistoric and statically constructed. As a result,

historical developments, differences and contradictions within the systems, as

well as activities between the regimes, move outside of our field of vision. This

is why a static understanding of transformation must be traded for a dynamic

one, one that examines social circumstances in their historical context and their

often contradictory multidimensionality. This is the only way a comprehensive

analysis can be productive.

The binary juxtaposition of East and West contains a clear hierarchy in

favour of the West. Watson writes, “Within the particular definitional context

of transition, the West is first and foremost a ‘place’ where people are free.”7

This freedom is set as the norm and usually not questioned further. In order to

explain my point, I would like to quickly mention, by way of example, the newly

won freedom of travel. On the one hand, it is said that people in East Germany

were unable to travel and were, therefore, imprisoned. This is only true to

a point, because it was very much possible to travel within the Eastern Bloc.

Travel to the West, possible only with official approval, was certainly a problem.

To set this on equal footing with a total ban on travel, however, once again sets

the West as the unquestioned norm, because the argument is phrased as „those

who cannot travel to the West cannot travel”. This becomes even more cynical

when aspects of new border demarcation are further illuminated. With the uni-

fication of Germany it may have been the case that every person with German

citizenship was allowed to travel. At the same time, the borders of Germany

were closed down, as manifested in, among other things, the de facto abolition

of the right to asylum in 1993. Additionally, refugees living in Germany are still

subject to „compulsory residency” (Residenzpflicht), which requires them to re-

main within a particular administrative district. Leaving the district requires a per-

mit that is often issued arbitrarily, however, sometimes it is denied. So as of yet,

7 Ibidem, p. 38 – italics in the original.

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not everyone has been able to enjoy the newly won freedom of travel. A group

of former citizens of East Germany were allowed access to this freedom, but

the right was denied to others who, in the past, had been able travel in former

East Germany without a problem. However, since the West is associated with

democracy and human rights, it is very difficult to articulate these unfair wrongs

and to make them heard. This concept of freedom is especially convenient for

justifying the implementation of the interests of the West.8

Gender and Transformation

The radical change of the political system was accompanied by transferring the

West German framework of institutions, legal norms and market economy onto

the East. Women’s and family policies from the East, which today are often con-

sidered progressive and forward-looking, were ignored in the new formation

of society. One of the effects of the devaluing of everything originating from the

East has been the incompatibility of having a career and a family, in a context

where public day-care for children practically disappeared.

Instead, western concepts like the model of the family with the male as

the sole wage earner and the woman as housewife (although often working

part-time) were adopted. The right to abortion, which since 1973 had been

a woman’s legal right up to the third month of pregnancy in East Germany,

was abolished. Abortion in West Germany was illegal, but depending on the

circumstances could result in “immunity from prosecution”. This was the case

with proof of “courtcertified mediation”, for instance. As Irene Dolling summed

it up in her account of the effects of the systemic changes on gender relations,

“[...] With the transition to a modern capitalist-type society, gender difference as

8 The justification of ruling interests as more important than the idea of freedom has had a

long history. In the context of enlightenment and colonialism "the savages" are to be freed

from "barbarism".

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a factor of social differentiation had [therefore] become more powerful than it

had been in the GDR”.9

Women in former East Germany have been and still are affected by

unemployment, especially long-term unemployment. Furthermore, they expe-

rience discrimination when resuming wage labour after a break. Despite this, it

is difficult to speak of women as “losers of the unification process”.10 This one-

dimensional perception11 is short-sighted: the labour force participation rate of

women in the East is still higher than that of women in the West, and nowadays

it is still somewhat taken for granted and self-evident for women from the East

of Germany to hold full-time jobs. It is often said that East German women are

stubborn12 but this stubbornness is conditional upon a variety of factors. Firstly,

full-time employment is an economic necessity since wages in the East are such

that two breadwinners are needed to feed a family. And secondly, there remains

a very large income gap in the East as compared to West Germany. In other

words, stubborness in seeking employment is an economic necessity. How-

ever, purely economic reasons are not sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

Internalised social norms according to which female wage labour is considered

normal also play an important role. Wage labour is considered an important fac-

tor for social and personal recognition, and for the majority of women, as well

as men, a successful professional life boosts self-esteem.

At the moment, one can observe re-traditionalising of gender roles. This

phenomenon is especially visible in the division of labour and in the sphere of

9 Dölling, Irene, Ten Years After. Gender Relations in a Changed World – New Chal enges for Women's and Gender Studies, in: Jähnert, Gabriele et al. (ed.), Gender in Transition in

Eastern and Central Europe Proceedings. Berlin, 2001, p. 58.

10 Nickel, Hildegard Maria. Zurück in die Moderne? Kontinuitäten und Veränderungen im

Geschlechterverhältnis, in: Funkkolleg Deutschland im Umbruch. Studienbrief 5, Tübingen,

1998, p. 23.

11 Ibidem, p. 23.

12 Ibidem, p. 18; Dölling, op. cit., 59.

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sexuality, as seen in discourse about family and children. However, we must

wait and see how this phenomenon proceeds and whether it develops into a

trend. Still, it should be noted that these discourses and policies are not solely

the result of changes in the political system, but are also an expression of the

neoliberalisation of a global world. Peggy Watson suggests that “in East Ger-

many, flexible labour contracts, hours and forms of work have already been

achieved which are seen as ‘pointing to the future’ of West Germany as well,

in terms of neoliberal deregulation and reductions in the social welfare state.”13

Flexibilisation and individualisation is actually making making the labour market

more precarious and will result in even more marked social inequalities. These,

in turn, will also influence inequalities between the genders and increase the dif-

ferences among women. Thus it is all the more important to understand gender

as an interdependent category. As already suggested above, it is thus indispensa-

ble to also consider inequalities and differences in the West and to thus pursue

a dynamic term of transformation.

Criticism of West-Centrism

When I argue for a dynamic understanding of transformation, the question of

how it is possible to analyse transformation multidimensionally naturally comes

up. To do this I would, as Watson does, advocate for the recognition of fur-

ther differentiation. Following the critique of a female unit/unity, as especially

expressed by African-American feminists from the USA and as adopted by the

feminist critique of science, Watson recommends the introduction of an East-

West dimension. “[...] [A]n idea of the West – even if implicit and unspoken – is

an inevitable part of the cognitive frame within which the discourse of transition

is constructed, just as this discourse itself produces ‘the West’. Insofar, then, as

this ‘West’ is an unspoken point of reference for the representation of Eastern

13 Dölling, op. cit., p. 60.

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Europe, a westerncentredness, analogous to whiteness, structures interpreta-

tions of change.”14 However, Watson explicitly points out the fact that this rela-

tionship of the West to post-communism is not the same as that of the West

to Orientalism, as described by Edward Said. Additionally, the racism of white

women, one that is structurally anchored, is in no way to be compared to the

western supremacy toward women from the former East.

Watson’s expansion must therefore be understood interdependently,

since racism, through which white norms are reproduced, also exists in the

East. This racism includes white East German women as “perpetrators”. This

makes German “reunification” difficult to describe without responding to racist

structures and aggression. After the pogrom-like attacks of Rostock Lichtenha-

gen in 1992 and Hoyerswerder in 1993,15 racist-motivated violence became

an attention-getter for the (international) public. The reasons for these attacks

were often found in communist upbringing, which meant an after-the-fact “defa-

mation of the East”. In my opinion, the reasons for these attacks have different

roots and are very multifaceted. For one, I absolutely believe that economic

and social uncertainties and the much-discussed „lack of orientation” during this

phase of political upheaval led to an increase in racism. However it would be

fatal to assume that this was the only layer!

A second layer was a new nationalism that formed over the course of the

frenzy around German unification. Slogans like „finally what belongs together is

together once again” ( Endlich ist wieder zusammen, was zusammen gehört) and

other similar ones were not uncommon. East German citizens could represent

themselves as victims of a totalitarian regime and were also gladly constructed

as such from the western point of view. This allowed the western capitalist de-

mocracy to present itself as the sole alternative.

14 Watson, op. cit., 38.

15 In 1992 and 1993 Neonazi groups attacked the asylumseekers' centers in Rostock, Lich-

tenhagen and Hoyerswerder. These acts of violence were welcomed by the neighbours

of the centers. The police did not intervene for the entire day.

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Thirdly, not al this racism was new; in fact, it had been present during the

communist regime. This can be seen, for example, In an institutional level in the

handling of victims of the Nazi regime, who were celebrated as „heroes of the

working class”, while victims of anti-Semitism and racism were either ignored,

or Jews were ostracised as part of the bourgeoisie and were, in a sense, further

persecuted.

A fourth level is the institutional level. It is at this level that restrictive asy-

lum and migration policies were enacted. As a consequence of these policies a

society which differentiated between people with and without German citizen-

ship was institutionalised; a society in which refugees are unable to freely choose

their place of residence, unable to travel freely within Germany and are housed

in asylum homes often located on a city’s outskirts or even in the woods.

Additionally, the creation of the European Union has made new border

demarcations important. On a discursive level this situation has constructed a

racist image of illegal immigrants, who are often perceived as being connected

to with organised crime, human trafficking and forced prostitution.

The majority of these aspects mentioned do not solely apply to former East

Germany. Racism is also present in the West, where outbursts of racial violence

have also taken place, for example in Solingen in May 1993. The almost exclusive

focus on former East Germany in the public consciousness thus produces a western

norm, which implies that racism is not a problem in one’s own backyard.

The question that remains, however, is to what extent this West-centrism

in post-communist discourse, which equates the West with freedom as shown

above, creates a universal patriarchy and reproduces it on a transnational level.16

This becomes clear in the example described by Smejkalová in her es-

say “Gender as an Analytical Category of Post-Communist Studies”, in which the

West German claim “The private is political!” describes a terrible joke for women

who have fought their whole lives to push back the influence of the state on the

16 Watson, op. cit., p. 38.

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private sphere.17 In my opinion this argument is very meaningful since it opens up a

multidimensional perspective that al ows commonalities and dif erentialities to be

appropriately analysed and implemented in feminist scholarship and practice.

Conclusion

As my observations have shown, the term transformation, as used in post-

communist Germany, is a completely western category, which masks fundamental di-

mensions of dominance and control. The introduction of an East-West dimension is thus

productive for making visible specific life situations and social positionings of women from

the former East. Furthermore, for me personaly, such expansion of the meaning of the

term poses chalenges for meaningful selfpositioning within the scholarly and activist fields.

These chalenges stem especialy from the contemporaneity of various power structures:

on the one hand, this alows a specific experience under the communist regime to be

made visible. Yet at the same time, it definitively positions “the West” in a global context,

with all the privileges associated with it. This contradictory simultaneity requires the com-

plication of power structures, as this is the only way to make possible relevant analyses in

scholarly and political activism. Reflection upon and deconstruction of binary oppositions,

like “male” and “female”, “East” and “West”, “repression” and “freedom” must thus be

central to emancipatory approaches and concepts. This is the only way to overcome a

static interpretation of the term transformation. That is why, in conclusion, I argue for an

exact contextualisation and positioning, not just within a social, but also an historical frame-

work. Contextualising helps do justice to various life situations, theoretical concepts and

feminist practices, since these can have very different meanings in various contexts.

Translated by Anthony B. Heric

17 Smejkalová, Jirina, Gender as an Analytical Category of Post-Communist Studies, in: Gender in Transition in Eastern and Central Europe Proceedings, Jähnert, Gabriele et al. (ed.), Berlin,

2001, p. 50.

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5.

Ukraine

Being or Considering

Yourself – or on

the Unpopularity of

Ukrainian Feminism

Natalka Śniadanko

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I find it difficult to answer the question whether I consider myself a feminist. First

of all, because of the uncertainty of the reflexive verb “consider yourself”, which

sparks the immediate association with the eternal Slavic divide between what is

said and what is done, what is promised and what is real, between identifying

yourself as someone and sticking to this claim in everyday life. And this irrever-

sibly entails all kinds of rhetorical questions, such as – is it better to consider

yourself or to be someone, which one demands more courage, which one is

more necessary and to whom?

On the other hand, it seems impossible not to agree with the uncom-

promising view expressed by my Polish fellow writer, Olga Tokarczuk: for a

modern, thinking woman it is impossible not to be a feminist. However, such

uncompromising words pay a lurking tribute to sad reality – as it seems undesi-

rable to link feminism with lack of choice.

An important aspect of my reflections on this subject is the geographical

one. The question whether I consider myself a feminist has never been posed

to me in Ukraine. Similarly, rarely have I heard this question in Western Europe.

Only once in Vienna I was approached by a journalist from an aggressively dis-

posed feminist magazine who asked to interview me. However, after the inter-

view, she admitted she didn’t see the possibility to include my account in the

format of the magazine, with its main concept of aggressive feminism, as all she

learned about me was “too normal”. I didn’t recount any experiences of trau-

mas from family violence, as did her interlocutor from Africa, nor any discrimina-

tion on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, as did other women she wrote

about. All I told her seemed to be about success, peacefulness, selffulfilment,

and therefore uninteresting to publish. I remember having sighed with relief that

all went so well in my life and didn’t regret much this lost PR opportunity. Well,

let the lack of publicity be the price I pay.

The question whether I consider myself a feminist has most often been

posed to me in Poland. And it was asked without further specifications – such as

which current of feminism I subscribe to: ecological, pacifist, separatist, liberal,

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neoliberal, Marxist, radical, modern, postmodern, poststructural, psychoanalyti-

cal, lesbian, sadomasochistic or queer. Still, it might not be justifiable to draw

any space-time conclusions from the above and predict a sudden outburst of

feminist activity within several years also in the territory of Ukraine. It would be

all too simple if the world was governed by such cause and effect analogies.

For Ukrainian women, the feminist worldview is less of an only option

than one could imagine, based on the Soviet claims to have solved all women’s

issues as early as in the 1930-40s. The feminist movement in Western countries

is clearly delimited in time and closely interrelated with political changes within

societies. For instance, last year I found that a German newspaper announced

the anniversary of German feminism, the beginning of which was marked by

passing some landmark law. In the countries of Eastern Europe the revival of

feminist discourse started to be noticeable after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

But it would be difficult to give such precise dates for Ukraine. Ukrainian femi-

nism did not start to enjoy rapid growth neither with the onset of independ-

ence, nor after the Orange Revolution.

“Wikipedia”, an online encyclopaedia, eagerly reports that “independ-

ent Ukraine undergoes an active process of returning to the values of liberal

feminism, and sees the revival of Ukrainian organisations (such as the League of

Ukrainian Women), the creation of new ones, strengthening the ties between

Ukrainian women’s organisations and international women’s networks”. How-

ever, among the cited women’s organisations it is difficult to find ones which

were not created in the diaspora.

And the stories recounted by feminists “in practice” do not seem to bring

any more optimism. See for example Tamara Zlobina, known as the author of

a feminist popproject “Feminism Is…” – a book with postcards and pictures

aimed at “glamour” popularisation of feminism, such as “feminism means buy-

ing your diamonds yourself”. Last year in a text entitled “Being a Feminist/Being

a Woman in Ukraine” in the Krytyka magazine Zlobina said: “For several years

of my conscious feminism I have gathered a collection of typical reactions to

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my identity. Many times I have heard angry tirades such as ‘These feminists!

Awful, unpleasant women, no one wants them so they hate all men!’ or other

words to that effect. The less my interlocutors knew about feminism, the more

emotional were their reactions. And because in most cases I was the only femi-

nist in flesh and blood they knew, and I did not fit their vision of an ‘old, awful

woman’, they either saw my feminism as some juvenile exaggeration (which

made it all fall back into place) or became confused and tried to prove that ‘men

are supreme to women’ (to show me where my place is?). I also happened to

meet emancipated women or girls in favour of independence and equality who

started or finished their speeches with ‘but don’t think I’m a feminist’. As if being

a feminist was a cause for shame.”

The negative stereotype linked with how the word “feminism” is seen in

Ukraine is indirectly confirmed by the translation of the title of the classic work

by an American researcher of Ukrainian origin, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak,

Feminists Despite Themselves – in Ukraine the book was published under the

title White over White: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884-1939 (Kyiv:

1995). Most probably, the Ukrainian publisher decided to avoid the “problem-

atic” term so as not to discourage potential readers.

I found few theoretical analyses of Ukrainian feminism on the internet.

One was an abstract of the thesis by O. Stiazhkina, defended in Donetsk Na-

tional University: “Women in the history of Ukrainian culture in the second half

of the 20th century”. Although the thesis clearly states that the feminist approach

is used in the analysis of such historical material “for the first time”, the very

fact that such an analysis exists is optimistic. The author of the thesis notices a

decisive turning point in the social perception of feminism in the post-Soviet

period and tries to explain the emergence of the negative stereotype: “the first

cause might be linked to some psychological tiredness of women, whom the

Soviet state offered the opportunity to put into practice the idea of a ‘working

mother’. With an underdeveloped social sphere, the double burden of duties

– at work and at home – caused this model to be associated with negative

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features, not arousing much enthusiasm to follow this example in everyday life.

A beautiful, well-groomed, perfect and relaxed woman, as opposed to ‘an old

aunt from the queue’ could therefore be an appealing image and a dream for

many women. Other factors influencing the emergence of new cultural stere-

otypes are the consequences of globalisation and popularisation of models and

constructs of, Western lifestyle, in Ukraine. The uncritical attitude towards the

socalled achievements of European civilisation has led to superficial copying and

replication of stereotypes which represent women in a humiliating way.”

Oksana Kis, a researcher, in her analysis Female Strategies in Ukrainian

Politics, published last year on the website of the Western Analytical Group,

points out the same two models of successful female realisation dominating in

post-Soviet society, although she labels them in a different way – Berehynia1 and

Barbie. “Berehynia is rooted in the traditional gender order of Ukraine, which

includes a myth about a special eternal, true Ukrainian Woman. The complete

image of Berehynia was created quite recently – at the end of the 1980s. And

although she is an eclectic combination of elements diverse in their nature and

origin (from the elements of pagan beliefs and matriarchal myth, typical folklore

motifs and features of different literature characters to the Christian cult of Virgin

Mary), society sees it as an authentic canon of traditional national femininity. The

key representatives of this image are the Great Mother, a Zealous Christian

and a Devoted Patriot. It is also important that Berehynia has some important

matriarchal connotations, encouraging women to demonstrate dominance, de-

cisiveness and competence within their sphere of activity. The other image –

Barbie – emerges from market ideology and the culture of mass consumption.”

Serving the nation or the aesthetic and erotic pleasure of men – these are the

roles implied by each of these models. “Serving” is the common denominator

here, without any individual freedom of choice, the element lying at the heart

1 Berehynia is a female spirit in Slavic mythology. She is considered to be a protectoress of

the home.

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natalka Śniadanko

of the feminist theory. Moreover, in order to achieve real success in the sphere

of politics, one woman should combine the elements of these two images, be-

coming thus the sex symbol of the nation. Such a phenomenon is investigated

by Oksana Kis’ in the biography of Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister of

Ukraine.

Obviously, there are also other models of successful women, but they

remain marginal and do not enjoy wide social recognition. In the Ukrainian

context, feminism is perceived similarly to cultural production in the Ukrainian

language. On the one hand, it seems fashionable and progressive, on the other

it is difficult to get rid of provincial and rural connotations, attached to both

discourses in the Soviet times. It can be often noticed that middle-age Ukraino-

phone women switch to Russian in conversations so as not to seem like “old

aunts from the queue”, but to be seen as “cultural and educated”.

This dual perception also explains the feelings of contemporary women

described by Tamara Zlobina – those in their thirties or forties, having a success-

ful family life and career, who despite their success are haunted by an oppressive

question – is everything all right with them, is everything well. This is precisely

the kind of women who end up in the gap between the abovementioned “con-

sidering themselves” and “being” feminists. Because to add it all up they live

and think like feminists, but might not dare to call themselves ones, under the

influence of the associated negative connotations. The lack of a positive model

linked with feminism leaves their success unrecognised by the society, because

instead of being simply a woman and a mother, they take on the burden “that

women do not need”.

Gender-differentiated upbringing still dominates in Ukrainian society, so

today’s children often hear, if not from their parents, then from their grandpar-

ents or teachers, the same comments that my generation used to hear over and

over: “But you’re a girl/a boy!” They also hear long-winded explanations of what

is necessary or unnecessary in the life of a real woman or a real man. I used to

hear, for example, that girls do not need to speak foreign languages, because

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“they will get married and have children anyway”, while boys do not need to

study music, because “why would they need it?”.

A symptomatic indicator of the level of gender awareness of the con-

temporary Ukrainian society are the traditional newspaper publications before

Christmas or Easter, when most issues of local press feature wives of different

officials who describe the recipes for they favourite festive meals. Extremely

rarely do such publications reveal something more about these wives than just

their culinary preferences.

The antifeminist attitudes of the society may also infringe on the rights

of men. First of all, obviously in the sphere of their relations with their own chil-

dren. For example, the local clinic refused to issue a medical certificate for my

husband seeking family leave to care for a child, requiring him to present proof

that his wife was unable to provide such care. As it turned out, this refusal was

without any legal grounds. However, during many years of practice the local

doctor had never encountered a man who demanded such a certificate, so she

was not even aware of the existence of appropriate legal provisions.

Needless to say, feminist trends have not as yet reached such theoretical

spheres as grammar, so there hasn’t yet been a wide debate about introducing

feminine endings, for example in nouns used to describe professions. And de-

spite my protests, on my work certificates I am usually described as a “journalist”

or “editor” in the masculine form of the word. Only on book covers I manage to

feature as a “female writer” or “authoress” in the feminine form.2

Cases when a woman does not take on her husband’s surname after mar-

riage are extremely rare. So every time when I pay bil s for kindergarten or school,

I have to deal with the long and significant stare of the accountant, when instead

of simply answering the question “surname?”, I ask for clarification “my surname

2 In Ukrainian, as in all Slavic languages, all nouns are genderspecific. Thus, a “writer” does

not have the universal meaning it does in English, hence feminists are calling for the reintro-

duction of feminine versions of the names of professions.

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natalka Śniadanko

or my child’s?”. Situations when the mother, father and children have dif erent

surnames are not associated by public opinion with family bliss. The Ukrainian

language has the phrase “maiden name”, but there is nothing like a “bachelor

name” counterpart. I have never encountered any cases of using double sur-

names. Children usual y use the surname of their father, even if their parents are

divorced. Moreover, even if the father “disappears” for many years from the life of

the child and does not participate in any way in his or her upbringing, the mother

does not have the right, for example, to take the child abroad without the written

consent of the father, certified by a notary. This is a common problem in the cur-

rent Ukrainian context, where thousands of migrant workers il egal y stay abroad,

sometimes even without their families knowing in which country they are cur-

rently residing. This can not only be an obstacle for tourism, summer holidays or

educational trips of the child, but also for treatment of serious diseases in a foreign

country. Although such cases are widely discussed in the press, the authorities

have not taken any steps to solve this issue so far.

Cases of children staying with their father after the divorce are extremely

rare in Ukraine, and Ukrainian legislation is not adapted to such situations. It is

much more difficult for fathers than for mothers to obtain custody of the child in

case of divorce; even in a situation when the couple has reached an agreement

and decided that the children should stay with the father.

In an interview, Mariana Rubchak, a renowned American researcher, a

professor of the Valparaiso University in a joking manner recounts her struggle

with the common Ukrainian interpretation of feminism. When a famous Ukrai-

nian researcher started a meeting by dashing to kiss her hand, Ms. Rubchak tried

to explain that it feels humiliating and makes her feel like a doll on a pedestal,

not a woman. Her attempts to have her hand shaken were futile. So next time,

upon entering his cabinet, she caught his hand and kissed it. This made him

turn deep red in embarrassment. Anecdotes about this event were repeated

manifold. Some other time, while she was standing in a queue in Khreshchatyk

Street, an unknown man addressed her with the common Soviet “zhinochko…”

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(dimunitive for “woman”), so she answered “Yes, cholovichku?” (dimunitive for

“men”). The man flew into a rage and the situation almost led to a fight.

If the archaic and no longer widespread ceremony of gallant and preten-

tious kissing of a woman’s hand can be still considered to have some charm,

more modern Ukrainian greeting rituals much more openly demonstrate a dis-

dainful attitude towards women. Being among a group of several men who

greet one another, every time I need to force myself to extend my hand, be-

cause I’m fairly certain that my hand will simply not be shaken – instead, I will

be given a haughty, suspicious look. Sometimes, even when I get to have my

hand shaken, the face of my interlocutor blushes in embarrassment. This way

or another, it seems impossible to avoid the unpleasant moment – someone,

either a man or a woman, feels humiliated in this ritual.

With no less wonder does Ms. Rubchak recount the classical phrases

mouthed by different well-known politicians, both men and women, such as

“We don’t need any foreign feminism, because Ukrainians have always been

a feminist nation” or “In fact in our country women have all the real power in

their hands, even if they do not appear to.” She found it difficult to grasp how

it was possible to convince women so successfully that “women in Ukraine do

not need anything, they are powerful anyway.” This curious Ukrainian version

of feminism as an ancient tradition is readily illustrated with historical facts. For

example that since 1646 the Trebnyk (the Book of Needs, a liturgical book

containing the rituals of sacraments and blessings) states that a priest solemnis-

ing marriage between the bride and the groom should tell the groom that a

woman is always equal to a man and that he should treat her as a friend, not

as a slave or hired workforce. Another example: the widely-known liberal at-

titude towards witches in the Middle Ages in Ukrainian territories. At that time,

while witches in Europe were burned alive, after having had their breasts cut off

in slices, in Ukraine they often simply had to carry two buckets full of water to

a designated place and if they managed to do this without spilling a drop, they

were pardoned.

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It is also interesting to look at the particularities of the statistical data

about women’s dominance in different professions. O. Stiazhkina in her dis-

sertation notices a sharp fall in the number of women in creative occupations at

the beginning of the 1990s compared to the Soviet period, explaining this with

growing misogyny and the spread of a negative image of women in the arts.

Recently, however, the number of young women entering different spheres of

arts, first of all literature, has again noticeably increased. But it does not seem

that we can talk about any shifts in the quality of gender awareness here. It can

rather lead to a conclusion that women’s greater activity in this sphere is linked

to a drop in the prestige of the creative professions. A drop in prestige that can

be also explained by the suppression of material benefits flowing from mem-

bership in such professions in Soviet times – free workshops, public demand,

special vacation houses and resorts etc.

A similar trend can also be noticed in the Ukrainian contract army.

Accor ding to the available data, currently 40% of contract soldiers in Ukraine

are women. This optimistic statistics puts Ukraine in front of many other Eu-

ropean countries, such as Norway with only 7.6% of female soldiers. How-

ever, as explained in a recent interview in the Korespondent magazine by major

Natalia Dubchak from the Department of Humanitarian Policy of the Ministry

of Defence of Ukraine: “Ukrainian women join the army not with the aim of

selffulfilment but in order to work somewhere. Unfortunately, nowadays men

are unwilling to serve for such a meagre salary, while women agree to do so.

Moreover, two years ago we carried out a survey to find out why women join

the army. It turned out that most of them are family members of male soldiers,

who helped them get employed.”

The same trend is pointed out by O. Stiazhkina concerning women in

the arts. She notices that in the Soviet times women usually entered the world

of artistic creation through family connections.

Natalia Dubchak also discusses everyday curiosities linked with the pre-

sence of women in the army. For example, the tie which is worn in the female

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military uniform is attached to the shirt with a special buckle in the form of tryzyb

(the coat of arms of Ukraine). But the designers of the uniform did not take into

account that women’s shirts are done up on the left not the right side, which

is why female soldiers have to wear the state symbol buckle upside down – an

insult to the national symbol. Natalia Dubchak even donated one such shirt

with a buckle to the recently created Kharkiv Gender Museum – the first such

museum in Ukraine.

Modern trends in child upbringing are also treated in a curious way.

Tetyana Isaeva, one of the initiators of the Kharkiv Gender Museum, gives an

interview in which she explains the following experiment – a group of children

were told that now their father can also take “paternity” leave to take care of

a child and asked to draw a picture of how it might look like. The drawings

showed both parents in their traditional roles – mum wearing an apron in the

kitchen, and dad in a suit driving a car to take the child somewhere interesting

and cool. Not a single child had the idea to switch the parents’ roles and make

the father wear an apron in the kitchen, and give the mother the car keys and

the “cool” status.

The bulk of publications on “female issues” in Ukraine traditionally end

with the conclusion of a sad “male” fact. According to official data, the current

life expectancy for men in Ukraine is 62 years, 12 years less than the ave rage for

Ukrainian women, and 56 years less than in Western countries. Of all European

countries, the situation is worse only in Russia, where the discrepancy between

the life expectancy of women and men amounts to 1415 years. Therefore, it

is not surprising that Ukraine strengthens its image of the country of girl-brides.

According to the survey carried out by Korespondent, the stereotype of a perfect

man from the point of view of a 30-40 year old Ukrainian woman goes as fol-

lows: “he should be wise, handsome, considerate, generous, rich and willing to

get married.”

In the eyes of a Russian bride such a list of expectations might seem ex-

aggerated. Last year on a train I met a fellow passenger of my age, a specialist in

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literature from Yekaterinburg. After a curious tirade praising Mr. Medvedev and

the bliss his presidency brought to an average Russian, her spirits suddenly fell

and she unexpectedly stated: “Everything’s fine, except there’s no one to bear

children to. All men get drunk before you can turn around. In Ukraine it might

not be as bad as that, but in Russia every single one drinks.”

I didn’t ask my interlocutor about feminism in Russia or whether as a

specialist in the folklore of the peoples of Ural she considered herself a feminist.

I did not dare. Which is a pity, I guess.

Translated by Natalia Kertyczak

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Eeating and

Drinking

Tanya Malyarchuk

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TANYA MALYARCHUk

A woman is what she eats and drinks. A woman’s freedom is the freedom to

choose food and drinks. In any case this freedom is dangerous, because enjoying

it a woman enters two categories of similar social disadvantage. She becomes

either fat or alcoholic. Personally, I don’t see any other alternative.

1.

Both my grandmas lived through famine. One in 19331, the other one in

1947. The famine radical y changed them. My grandmas remained “hungry”

forever. The value of food squeezed any other values from their idea of hap-

piness. A set out table, a pantry crammed with sacks of wheat, barrels with

sauerkraut and pickles, 10-litre buckets with melted pig fat – this is practical y

all they aspired to achieve during the calendar year and what made them ut-

terly happy. The awareness of this gastronomic happiness made my grandmas

benign and gentle, caused their faces to shine with dignity and self-respect,

even though both of them perfectly understood – it would be too early to

relax. Gastronomic happiness is elusive, just as elusive are wheat in sacks and

lard in buckets.

Grandma Yadzia, for instance, liked to go out into the garden during a

lasting drought and forecast poor crops and imminent famine. I saw the pleasure

with which she expressed such thoughts. Sometimes I suspected that grandma

Yadzia was really awaiting famine, wanted it to happen again. All that of course

in order to show her thoughtless children and grand-children the true and only

meaning of life – the search for a piece of bread.

Grandma Yadzia remained a slave to crumbs on the table. After lunch,

she would diligently gather all breadcrumbs from the table and put them into

her mouth. In fact, she might have even found these breadcrumbs the most

1 The Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33, during which mil ions of people were starved

to death because of the Soviet policies of collectivisation.

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tasty part of the meal as they brought her the final satisfaction. Grandma Yadzia

tried to teach me to eat crumbs from the table as well, and when I resisted, she

would get angry and shout. She said I was good for nothing, I had no chances of

becoming a human being, as I did not value the bread that had been graciously

given to me. When there would be no such bread – and this might come

shortly! – I would regret, I would understand, but it would be too late.

I was a huge fan of the “famine” stories of my grandma. Like, Yadzia is five.

A complete orphan, she strolls the market in Zhytomyr and gathers plum stones.

Next, she smashes them against a stone and eats the middle. Al around, there

are people shrivel ed from famine. Most of them are women. They walk around

like sleepwalkers, leaning against fences and enclosures so as not to fal . And then

Yadzia is taken to an orphanage. The orphanage ensures one meal per day. There

is bean soup on the menu, but it could be cal ed bean only because of one single

bean from an unknown source in a plate of thin water. And final y: Yadzia is taken

to a young Jewish mother to take care of her child. Yadzia obediently stays in the

corner of the room awaiting the verdict. The Jewish woman looks at the thin,

grimy fiveyearold creature and quarrels with her husband. She says: how can

this creature look after my child?! And Yadzia thinks: give me a slice of bread and I

wil serve you like a dog, I wil lick your hands and feet, just give me something to

eat. The Jewish women gives Yadzia a slice of buttered bread andever since that

time Yadzia wil say “bread, and even buttered.” Simply bread would have been

perfectly enough.

Grandma Vasylyna remembers the famine of 1947 in a special way. This

was the year when she got married. She even had a wedding party, although

I cannot imagine what kind of food was served. Probably some kind of weed

pancakes. I know that after midnight, when the invited children already went

to sleep, the wedding guests danced naked. Grandma Vasylyna told me about

it fairly recently, when she started to consider me old enough to hear it. I can

imagine such “naked” dancing pretty well. A sort of a wild dance of death. There

is nothing to eat, let us therefore dance as is fit for this last time.

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In the spring of 1948 grandma Vasylyna couldn’t find anything to plant in

her garden. She put potato peels in the vegetable patch. And these peels gave

wonderful crop. Grandma Vasylyna never again saw such enormous potatoes

in her life. She said this was a miracle.

When Western Ukraine fell under the Soviet rule, grandma Vasylyna had

to hand in 200 kilos of meat into the collective farm. Roughly the equivalent of

two pigs. Grandma didn’t want to give away pigs. In order to satisfy the appetites

of the head of the collective farm, she bred rabbits in a hole in her garden. No

one knew exactly how many rabbits there were, they bred uncontrollably and

grew up to one-metre tall. They dug tunnels and, as grandma said, went close

to the forest to eat grass. When it was time to give meat to the collective farm,

grandma opened the hole and randomly took the first rabbit out by its ears. Ten

rabbits were enough. As grandma Vasylyna said – this was another miracle.

She made curious dishes. For instance zaterka – milk porridge with an

egg scrambled with flour. Or her own version of stuffed cabbage with mamalyga

rolled up in beetroot leaves instead of cabbage leaves. Or dumplings with feath-

ers – this is what grandma called the shoots of onion. Her strangest dish was

kreplyky – herring pies. She prepared them only for Christmas and this is truly

one of the most tasty dishes I have ever tried. I think God could be born in the

human world just in order to taste the kreplyky of my grandma.

Grandma Vasylyna completed only two classes of school – there was

not enough time to do the rest. At school grandma learned how to hold a pen

properly and how to sign with a cross. She learned by heart two poems, which

she used to recite to her cows during each milking. I liked to lie on hay next to

her and listen to these poems. They seemed different every time. It seemed

that no book would ever be able to tell me anything new.

During al her life grandma Vasylyna never quit the borders of her vil age.

She always said that you could gain wisdom in your own courtyard. This principle

first of all related to her. She was wise and good. She lived a quiet, unpretentious

life. She cultivated hectares of gardens, took care of her grand-children, and once

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a week she would plait her hair and make her feather dumplings. Now I can re-

member grandma Vasylyna as the only woman I’ve known who was happy with

what she had, because she knew what it was like not to have anything.

2.

In 1991 I was eight years old. I don’t remember a lot from the Soviet times, but

I remember perfectly what I lacked. I lacked everything. Chewing gum, oranges,

clothes, colour markers, dolls, nylon fishnet tights, chocolate butter, bicycles,

American cartoons and Brazilian TV series. This era will forever remain to me

the era of lacking the indispensable. The period of uncontrollable desires and

childish angriness at somebody great and unknown – the one who fails to pay

the salaries to my parents. My mum taught me to lose the habit of asking to buy

things. I studied my schoolbooks and wrote passionate compositions about how

true happiness is not a matter of money but of the freedom of thought. I wore

the dresses of my older sister and comforted myself with the thought that the

world revolves around me as I am the only one to understand it fully. In fact, I

was the only one to understand it at all.

My mum, as the true child of one sixth of the earth’s surface,2 wanted

only to be like everyone else. She was afraid to even minimally cross the self-

imposed limits concerning respectability and good manners. All her skirts were

slightly below her knees. She simply didn’t buy any shorter or longer ones. All

her shoes had three-centimetre heels, not higher or lower. Her New Year

salad was composed of the same set of ingredients, never changing over the

decades: cheap boiled sausage, tinned peas, potatoes, carrots, onions, two eggs

and mayonnaise. Quite recently my mum started to enrich the salad with pick-

led cucumbers of an average size. I do not understand why. It didn’t change the

taste of the salad in any way.

2 The area covered by the USSR.

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Potatoes were what we used to eat most often. Boiled, fried, baked and

grated potatoes. I have to admit that I can imagine worse things than such a “po-

tato childhood” but today, instead of eating potatoes, I stuff myself on principle

with rice with soya sauce. In order to restore some gastronomic balance and

diminish the influence of potatoes on my worldview.

The aesthetic taste of my mum would fully emerge when she got to pre-

paring marinates, jams and compotes in the autumn. She used to put half-a-litre,

litre and three-litre jars with all kinds of tasty contents on the corridor shelves.

These jars had powerful magnetic properties. I simply liked to look at them,

to sort them according to their size, colour or content. Marinated tomatoes,

together with marinated peppers and cucumbers. Pear and cherry compotes in

the front, apple and sour grape ones in the back, where it was impossible to get

them without a stool. Mum allowed me to open these jars only for big holidays

but I wanted to eat them all the time, everyday, every minute. I remember once

I could not help myself and, when no one was at home, opened everything I

wanted at once. One compote, two salads and marinated pumpkins. I made a

whole feast of it with music and smart clothes: I turned on the record player

with Alla Pugachova’s “Arlequin” – my favourite back then, I pulled on my mum’s

mink hat (I judged it to be the most expensive item of clothing in the flat) and

spent several hours eating salads and strawberries from the compote. My feast

must have looked quite miserable, as my mum burst into tears when she saw

me sleeping with the mink hat on, next to the undeniable proof of the commit-

ted crime – four empty jars.

The declaration of independence of Ukraine did not make my mum any

happier. Possibly even the other way round. My mum turned out to be help-

less in the struggle with the new times, which required women only to have

good selling skills. All friends of my mum started working on the market. Our

small town in Western Ukraine changed into one huge ghetto of female sellers.

A new fashion emerged – big, leather jackets with numerous pockets where it

was easy to hide the money earned. This was when I saw gloves with cut finger

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holes for the first time – it made it easier to smoke in winter, while marking time

near the stall with Turkish sweaters with hideous red flowers on the front. I also

got one such sweater. In the dark, you could see sparks flying from it, and I was

convinced I had superhuman power to set things on fire with my eyes.

In the third grade I started to have teenage problems with weight. It

seemed, however, that my mum liked it. Her daughter was getting plump,

which meant she was eating well. My mum would gently call me her “dough-

nut” and bake delicious doughnuts with plum jam every week. I used to eat like

three people and would stuff myself with absolutely anything. Pasta, cabbage

rolls, dumplings, pasta again, bread with sausage and mayonnaise, pasta, pasta

and pasta. Eating gave me enormous satisfaction. It healed the wounds caused

by the persistent inferiority complex I suffered from. Of course, I took fullness

for wholesomeness. I stuffed my stomach and believed it filled all the emptiness

inside me.

Right now, my mum lives next to the “Arsen” supermarket. It’s a fiveminute walk to get there. My mum treats this supermarket like a human being, possibly even of the male sex. Regardless of the demands of her refrigerator

and the possibilities of her wallet, she goes there three times a week. She scru-

pulously walks all the aisles, finds out about brandnew products, sometimes

allows herself to buy some overseas delicacy, such as a bottle of Czech beer.

My mum feels cosy at “Arsen”. As if it could protect her when needed, defend

her against another undesirable change of times. And my mum says: a woman is

the supermarket where she shops. A woman’s freedom is at least ten different

kinds of cream in the dairy aisle.

3.

It so happened that in 2004 I lived two revolutions at once. A family revolution

and a national one. I was victorious in both of them, although I didn’t want to

fight with anybody.

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At the beginning of the year I got married against the will of my parents

and fled to Kyiv. I literally fled. All my past fitted into one small rucksack, although

to be frank, it would be easier to get by without it. In my pocket I had some

hryvnas for the next pack of cigarettes and that was it. Smokers in love are not

very demanding.

My husband worked as a TV journalist in an investigative programme,

probably the only more or less objective one at that time. Once or twice a

month he had to go away on business, and I would insist on going with him, as

I was afraid to be alone again. I thought that if I was next to him, nothing bad

would happen. I would be able to save him.

In Mukachevo, during the first round of presidential elections, our car

was attacked at night by unknown skinheads who almost managed to roll it

over. At the last moment we managed to close the windows and doors, placing

unjustifiable hope in the quality of the local manufacturer. The skinheads were

interested in the cassette from our video camera, I was interested only in getting

the answer to one question: what kind of country demands sacrifices all the time

without giving anything in return.

We saw the second round of elections in Luhansk. From Luhansk you

can reach the border with Russia on foot, although in my opinion there is no

need to go anywhere at all – the whole of Russia can be found in the very cen-

tre of Luhansk, in Radianska Street, in the hotel named “Russia”. The driver we

hired was a racer, which turned out to be very useful when fleeing from perse-

cution. The black “Jaguar” kept its distance at the beginning, but then decided

to have a closer look. For our driverracer (a young boy under twenty five) this

must have been the most exciting Formula 1 race in all of his life. He was not

afraid. He hugged the steering wheel and raced ahead making my head spin.

With all of that, our racer calmly remarked that he knew the owners of the

Jaguar. Luckily, they were not going to beat us up. Just shoot.

What did I eat then? Spices. In unbelievable quantities. All possible kinds,

except the classic black pepper and bay leaf. With utter lack of respect for any

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culinary recipes, I spiced up any meal with a pinch from each packet. And I had

several tens of different packets. I pity those who were forced to consume my

almost criminal experiments. I was most generous with ginger and rosemary.

Rosemary got between my teeth, and ginger burned my tongue and digestive

tract. Curry painted my lips orange, but fortunately orange was very much in

vogue back then. The spices became the symbol of the changes I had been

awaiting since I was born. Food, just like life, gained a whole new different taste.

Even pasta tasted different when spiced with oregano, and chicken with tarra-

gon tasted like a plum dried in the sun.

The day when “Maydan”3 started I was concerned not about justice and

the future of my country, but about the safety of my beloved one. Women go to

the barricades unintentionally, in order to be closer to their senseless men, who

sometimes for some unknown reason are tempted to become heroes. There

were a lot of such men. Practically all of my friends and acquaintances. Journal-

ists, poets, artists, photographers, university lecturers. Next to them were girls

and wives – revolutionists in disguise. And I am convinced that their rage is much

more dangerous, since they defend the backs of their men, not some illusive,

worthless political slogans. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I used to think that

in a moment they were going to come and shoot everyone – journalists, poets,

artists, lecturers – and who would remain alive? I, for that matter, did not want

to count among those who remained. It seemed it would be dreadfully boring

to stay alive in such company.

I do not feel proud or boast, I avoid talks about the Orange Revolution,

but I profoundly dislike other people’s sneering and complaints. Such as, look,

what and who did you fight for? What have you achieved? Has it become any bet-

ter? You were used in political plotting like brainless puppets. It’s funny to hear that,

because I do not consider myself deceived or taken advantage of. No revolution

3 Maydan Nezalezhnosti (the Independence Square) in Kyiv was the main scene of protests

during the Orange Revolution, which took place from November 2004 to January 2005

following the 2004 rigged presidential election.

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has ever met the expectations of its participants. Its value lies entirely somewhere

else. Possibly, in the opportunity to taste chilli pepper at the edge of a blunt knife.

4.

I find women who drink much more appealing than women who eat. However

awful a woman’s drinking spree might look like, it hides some unbelievable power

of resistance and protest, unbelievable charm which arouses both compassion

and admiration at the same time. I understand why women are more at risk

of becoming alcoholic – they cannot stop at half-a-bottle. Alcohol is like a river,

where most people just paddle up to their knees, but when you get there up to

your waist, the current takes you. A drunken woman fal s in love with herself – so

tragical y failed and thus so beautiful. The social masks that have been so careful y

chosen fal of , just like the perfect evening make-up. What seemed important

when you were sober, is forgotten when you’re drunk. Finally, only one ques-

tion becomes important: what is al this for? Men need to become heroes now

and again, every now and then make sure that they are important, but what do

women need? I suspect that women-drunkards know the answer to that ques-

tion, but they no longer have the articulatory power to explain it.

My neighbour, whose name I ignore, is a dedicated drunkard. Similarly, I

have no idea how old she is and whether she has any family. The appearance of

this woman brings to mind a basketball player disappointed with life. She is excep-

tional y tal and thin, her hair is cut short, she wears trainers and a sports jacket,

regardless of the season outside. She has a tiny dachshund she often walks under

my windows. When the drinking spree comes, she becomes more lively. She

approaches people in the street, discusses something aloud, every hour goes to

the shop nearby to get another bottle of the cheapest vodka and laughs, laughs,

laughs. The drinking spree always ends in the same fashion: the helpless woman

lying in the corridor at the door to her flat, asking everyone she sees to help her

open it. I come up to her and try to open the door, but it is locked up. I ask the

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woman to give me the key. And then she says what only women-drunkards can

say and for what I respect them more than many zealous teetotallers. She says:

with a key, I could open the door myself, try doing it without one! I can help you

only with this one – and she shows me a remote control.

All shop assistants from the local shop hate her. The shop itself is left

over from the Soviet times. There are three departments there and, as is fitted,

all three close at the same time for stocktaking. And there goes my neighbour-

drunkard, entering the shop with a very clear purpose – to buy something to

drink. She takes time studying the choice of alcohol, asks to show her some-

thing, politely apologises and asks to show her something else. The shop assist-

ant is seething with anger, but tries to refrain herself. She explodes only when

my basketball player wants to have a closer look at the most expensive bottle of

Georgian wine in the shop. In order to get this wine from the display, the shop

assistant has to climb a special ladder. The drunkard holds the bottle of wine

like a holy relic, respectfully blows the dust off, attentively studies the label and

– indeed! – asks whether the bottle has been stored under the correct angle.

When the shop assistant is red with anger, the woman gives her the bottle back

and asks for the usual quarter of vodka.

I often feel like talking to my neighbour in order to ask her some ex-

tremely banal question such as “what is the meaning of life?”, but I’m afraid she

would laugh straight into my face.

––––––––––

A woman is what she eats and drinks. Relentless search for food makes

a woman a slave to potatoes and pasta, and too much freedom – a slave to

supermarkets. I don’t know, maybe it has to be this way. Balancing between

these two forms of slavery, a woman has the chance to manage to feel, do or

understand something.

Translated by Natalia Kertyczak

192

About

the Authors

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Sylwia Chutnik (1979) – a graduate of the Institute

of Polish Culture and Gender Studies at the University

of Warsaw. Since the 1990s she has been involved in

the women’s movement. She is a co-founder of MaMa

Foundation, which advocates for mothers’ rights from

the feminist perspective. She is the author of the novel

Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet (2008) for which she was rewarded with Polityka Pass-

port Award in the field of literature. In 2009, the book was also nominated for

the Nike Award which is the most prestigious Polish literary award.

Agnieszka Graff (1970) – Adjunct Professor in the

American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw,

where she lectures on American literature and culture.

She is also a lecturer at the Gender Studies Programme

at the University of Warsaw. She is a graduate of Am-

herst College (U.S.), Oxford University and the School

of Social Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Aca-

demy of Sciences. The author of two books Świat bez kobiet. Płeć w polskim

życiu publicznym ( World Without Women. Gender in Polish Public Life, 2001) and

Rykoszetem. Rzecz o płci, seksualności i narodzie ( Stray Bullets. Essays on Gender,

Sexuality and Nation, 2008) as well as many articles about feminist thought,

gender in popular culture and the women’s movement in the U.S. and Poland.

She received a Fulbright Fellowship (2004/2005) within the programme for the

New Century Scholars “Towards Equality. The Global Empowerment of Wo-

men”. She cooperates with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland

and is a member of “Krytyka Polityczna” (Political Critique).

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Anna Grusková (1962) – is an author of plays for

theatre, radio and scenarios for documentary movies.

They were realized and presented in Slovakia, the

Czech Republic and Austria. She works as a dramatic

adviser and theatre theoretician as well. Ocassionally

she works also as a theatre director and journalist. She

graduated from the Charles University in Prague. She lives in Bratislava.

Mirjam Hirsch – a student of Gender Studies and

Modern History at the Humboldt University of Berlin

and the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires. She

has worked on the Argentine tango and gender, social

and feminist movements in Europe and Latin America

and interdependence of sexism, racism, (neo)colonia-

lism and capitalism. Furthermore, she is a political activist in the areas of (transna-

tional) feminist, antiracist and anticapitalist politics.

Petra Hůlová (1979) – a graduate of the Charles

University in Prague with degrees in Cultural Studies

and Mongolian Studies. She works as a freelance writ-

er and novelist. She has authored several novels, such

as Paměť mojí babičce ( In Memory of My Grandmother,

2002), Přes matný sklo ( Through Matt Glass, 2004),

Cirkus Les Mémoires ( Les Memoires Circus, 2005), Umělohmotný třípokoj (2006)

and Stanice tajga ( Station Taiga, 2008). Her novels have received numerous

prizes and have been translated into English, German, French, Hungarian, Dutch

and Polish.

www.boell.pl

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

Kateřina Jacques (1971) – a politician of the Czech

Green Party. She was elected to the lower house of

parliament of the Czech Republic in the June 2006 ele-

ction, representing the Prague electoral district. She

has worked as the director of the human rights section

of the prime minister’s office. From 1994 to 2002 she

studied political science and German translation at the Charles University in

Prague. In 2006 she received a Ph.D in political science.

Jana Juráňová (1957) – Slovakian writer, feminist

and cofounder of ASPEKT, the first feminist organisa-

tion in Slovakia. She is a graduate of the Comenius

University in Bratislava, with degrees in English and

Russian literature. She has written plays, such as Sa-

lome (1989), Misky strieborné, nádoby výborné (1997)

and novels Zverinec (1994), Siete (1996), Utrpenie starého kocúra (2000), and

books for children Iba baba (1999), Bubliny (2002), Babeta ide do sveta (2003),

Ježibaby z Novej Baby (2006). Her book Orodovnice (2007) was nominated for

the most prestigous Slovakian literary award Anasoft Litera 2006. Her recent

novel Žila som s Hviezdoslavom has also been nominated for this award this year.

She has translated into Slovakian books by Margaret Atwood, Judith Butler and

Virginia Woolf.

Ľubica Kobová (1978) – philosopher, doctoral stu-

dent at the Comenius University in Bratislava and a

graduate of Gender Studies at the Central European

University in Budapest. Since 1998 she has been co-

operating with ASPEKT, the first feminist organisation

in Slovakia. She is the co-author of some of ASPEKT’s

publications, such as Aká práca, taká pláca? Aspekty rodovej nerovnosti

196

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

v odmeňovaní ( Equal Pay for Equal Work? Aspects of Gender Pay Gap, 2007),

Kradmá ruka feministky rozvažuje za plentou. Aspekty parlamentných volieb

(2007), Histórie žien. Aspekty písania a čítania ( Women’s History. Aspects of Wri-

ting and Reading, 2007), Žena nie je tovar. Komodifikácia žien v našej culture

( A Woman is not a Commodity. Making Women a Commodity in Our Culture,

2005), Lesby-by-by. Aspekty politiky identít ( Lesbians coming out. Aspects of Politi-

cal Identity, 2004). She specialises in social and political philosophy, feminist

studies of science and queer theory. In 2008/2009 she was a Fulbright Fellow at

the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, U.S.

Tanya Malyarchuk – born in 1983 in Ivano-Frankivsk. She graduated from the

Vasyl Stefanyk Prykarpatsky University, Faculty of Philology. She has lived in Kyiv

since 2004. She is the author of 4 novels ( Endspiel Adolfo abo Troyanda dla Lizy,

Zhory vnyz (knyha strahiv), Jak ja stala sviatoju, Hovoryty).The German translation

of the last one was published in 2009 by Residenz, an Austrian publishing house.

Her 5th novel – Zviroslov – is about to be released. In 2006 Tanya Malyarchuk

won the Ukrainian BBC Book of the Year award.

Rita Pawlowski – was born in 1941 in Pomerania

into a farming family, went to school in Mecklenburg

and worked in a printing shop. In 1962 she started a

multiyear journalism course in Leipzig. She had a son

in 1964. Starting in 1977 she began working in various

positions for the Women’s Association of East Ger-

many, ending in 1989 as press spokesperson for the DFD federal board. After

1990 she worked for several years in women’s archives in Wiesbaden and Ber-

lin, was unemployed several times and retired in 2001. She resides in Berlin.

www.boell.pl

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WOMEN IN TIMES OF CHANGE 1989-2009: POLAND, CzECH

REPUBLIC, SLOVAkIA, EAST GERMANY AND UkRAINE

Jirina Šiklova (1935) – Czech sociologist and publi-

cist, former dissident, involved in the Prague Spring’68,

a member of Charta 77, arrested during the commu-

nist regime for smuggling illegal dissidents’ texts, dis-

missed from the Department of Sociology at the

Chales University in Prague, of which she was a co-

founder. After 1989 she returned to the Faculty of Arts and founded the Depart-

ment of Social Work at the Charles University. She is a founder of Gender

Studies which is the first feminist organisation in the Czech Republic. She is the

author of numerous articles and two books: Deník staré paní ( A Journal of an Old

Lady, 2003) and Dopisy vnučce ( Advice for My Grand-Daughter, 2007). In 1995

she was rewarded with the Women for Europe Award for her contribution to the

European integration.

Jana Simon (1972) – German journalist and writer. She worked for ZDF,

Der Spiegel, Berliner Zeitung, since 1997 she has been working as a freelancer

for tageszeitung. In 2001 she was awarded the Axel-Springer-Preis for young

journalists. She is studying Ita lian Philology and Political Sciences in Berlin and

London. She is the author of books, such as Denn wir sind anders. Geschichte des

Felix S. ( As We are Strangers. Story of Felix S. , 2002) and Alltägliche Abgründe: Das Fremde in unserer Nähe. Reportagen und Porträts ( Gap in Everyday Life: A Stranger

is among Us, 2004).

198

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Natalka Śniadanko (1973) – she lives and works in

Lviv. She is a Polish and German translator and a jour-

nalist. She translated into Ukrainian Polish authors,

such as Zbigniew Herbert, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz,

Czesław Miłosz, Jan Brzechwa, Olga Tokarczuk and

German authors, such as Franz Kafka, Friedrich Dür-

renmatt, Günter Grass, Stefan Zweig. She is the author of several books. Her

novels were translated and published in Poland, Russia, Czech Republic, Ger-

many, Austria, Belgium and Belarus.

Bożena Umińska-Keff (1948) – a poet, writer,

translator and academic lecturer. She is a Polish litera-

ture specialist and a philosopher. She works in the Je-

wish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Since the beginning

of Gender Studies in Poland she has been teaching dif-

ferent interdisciplinary courses. She is the author of

volumes of poems, such as Razem osobno ( Together in Separation, 1986), Sen o

znaczeniu snów ( A Dream about the Meaning of Dreams, 1995), Nie jesteś

gotowy (You Are Not Ready, 2000), Utwór o matce i ojczyźnie ( A Poem about

Mother and Mother-land, 2008) and essays, such as Postać z cieniem. Portrety

żydówek w polskiej literaturze ( Figure with a Shadow. Represenations of Jewish

Women in Polish Literature, 2001), Barykady. Kroniki obsesyjne ( Barricades or

Obsessive Chronicles, 2006).

www.boell.pl

199

The Heinrich Böll Foundation (Heinrich Böll Stiftung), with headquarters in

Berlin, is a German political foundation linked to the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen party.

The Foundation’s basic objective, both in Germany and abroad, is civil education

aimed at supporting formation of democratic attitudes, social and political activism

and understanding between nations. Its key values are: ecology, democracy,

solidarity and nonviolence.

The Foundation is particularly devoted to building a democratic society based

on respect for the rights of immigrants and the principles of gender democracy,

understood as a domination-free relation between women and men. Both

those principles constitute a basis for cooperation inside the Foundation, as well

as in all areas of its public operation.

International operation of the Foundation involves cooperation with over 160 partner

organisations from 60 countries on 4 continents, as well as running 27 foreign

branches.

For over 15 years, the Foundation has been active in Central Europe, including

Poland. In the 1990’s, the Foundation mainly supported projects of partner

organisations working towards human rights, equal opportunity for women and

men, and balanced development of the natural environment. The Polish branch

of the Foundation inaugurated its operation at the beginning of 2002, when the

negotiations before EU accession of the countries of Central Europe reached

their final stages. One of the tasks of the Polish branch was to monitor and

support actions aimed at inclusion of the equality perspective into the process

of integration of those countries with the EU. Since the accession, the branch

has faced new challenges: it initiates and supports social and political debate in

Central and Eastern Europe (i.e. in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and

Ukraine), including the perspective of other issues close to the “Greens”.

You can find more information about Heinrich Böll Stiftung, its operation and

publications on our websites:

www.boell.de or www.boell.pl.

200

Poland, Czech

Republic,

The twentieth anniversary of the 1989 breakthrough is an occasion for

summaries. In spite of the twenty years of democratic transformation,

Slovakia,

women did not manage to reduce their distance from men enough for

East Germany

their voice to be clearly heard in public debate. Furthermore, the account

of the past two decades, as seen from the women's perspective, is not

and Ukraine

1989-2009

exactly in tune with the celebratory anniversary atmosphere. It is a para-

dox that for women in the former Eastern Bloc the freedom regained in

1989 was often combined with significant limitations of economic, social

and reproductive rights.

Change,

In the face of the lack of public debate on the role of women in the time of

of

transformation, the publication of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Warsaw

attempts to present a multidimensional dialogue about the transformation

Women in Times

experiences, giving voice to women. The Authors of the publication judge

the past twenty years of reforms from the point of view of women from the

Times

former countries of the Eastern Bloc: the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia,

of Change, 1989-2009

in

Ukraine and former East Germany, and in this context, from the perspec-

tive of personal experiences. At the same time, the publication constitutes

a platform for inter-generational dialogue. In the publication, personal texts

meet more theoretical reflections, and literary accounts often complement

omen

more objective attempts to describe the past twenty years.

W

Foundation

Böll

Heinrich Böll Foundation

Regional Office Warsaw

ul. Żurawia 45, 00-680 Warsaw, Poland

phone: + 48 22 59 42 333, e-mail: hbs@boell.pl

Heinrich