Women in Times of Change, 1989-2009

The twentieth anniversary of the 1989 breakthrough is an occasion for summaries. The year 2009 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 in the events of 1989, and their experiences during the twenty years of transformation constituted a marginal topic in the anniversary discourse.