Gender and Power in Eastern Europe: Changing Concepts of Femininity and Masculinity in Power Relations

This book explores the contradictory development of gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe including Russia. In light of the social changes that followed the collapse of communism and the rise of new conservatism in Eastern Europe, it studies new forms of gender relationships and reassesses the status quo of female empowerment. Moreover, leading scholars in gender studies discuss how right-wing populism and conservative movements have affected sociopolitical discourses and concepts related to gender roles, rights, and attitudes, and how Western feminism in the 1990s may have contributed to this conservative turn.

Mainly focusing on power constellations and gender, the book is divided into four parts: the first explores the history of and recent trends in feminist movements in Eastern Europe, while the second highlights the dynamics and conflicts that gained momentum after neoconservative parties gained political power in post-socialist countries. In turn, the third partdiscusses new empowerment strategies and changes in gender relationships. The final part illustrates the identities, roles, and concepts of masculinity created in the sociocultural and political context of Eastern Europe. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030531300

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

K. Bluhm et al. (eds.)Gender and Power in Eastern EuropeSocieties and Political Orders in Transitionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53130-0_1

Introduction

Katharina Bluhm¹  , Gertrud Pickhan¹  , Justyna Stypińska¹   and Agnieszka Wierzcholska¹  

(1)

Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Katharina Bluhm (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Gertrud Pickhan

Email: [e-mail]

Justyna Stypińska

Email: [e-mail]

Agnieszka Wierzcholska

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Over the last decade, gender has become a surprisingly charged topic that has drawn sharp lines in the political landscape of Europe and beyond. Central and Eastern Europe have played a critical role in this, given that the governments of Russia, Poland, and Hungary have rejected Western gender ideology, while in other countries of the region anti-gender sentiments and political forces have also grown, but without dominating government policy or having such an ideological emphasis. It is not the first time that this backlash happens in a postsocialist, or other, context.

In most Central and Eastern European countries, the political and socioeconomic transition of the 1990s did not provoke an emancipatory momentum for women, much to the dismay of the region’s feminists. Although female activists in Poland, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany played a role in the dissident movements of the 1980s, the revolutionary introduction of a market economy, democracy, and the rule of law was not destined to be a feminist emancipatory project. A significant group of dissidents and government reformers interpreted the socialist project of women’s emancipation as artificial and patronizing—yet another facet of communist ideology that had to be rejected. They believed that liberation from communism implied the freedom for women to retreat from work. Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, hoped that the market economy would raise wages enough to sustain a typical family—two parents and two children. A family or household wage is usually associated with men’s earnings that would allow women to stay at home. This new public discourse during the perestroika was intertwined not only in Russia but also in East Central Europe with concerns about the social and moral anomie that supposedly resulted from socialist state policy’s focus on working mothers and their rights and obligation to form part of a full-time labor force. As a result, the state was intimately involved in family affairs, childcare, and education (see Ashwin 2006; Verdery 1994). This socialist emancipation from the above was also seen as a cause of men’s absence from the family. Stripped of their patriarchal rights and powerful position as breadwinners, coupled with the fact that work or military service often took them far from home, men had great difficulty in determining a proper role for themselves within a gender arrangement conceived by the parent-state to promote working mothers. The resulting crisis of masculinity became a signifier for the crisis of the nation itself (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2014; see Hallama 2020).

In contrast to the views of many reformers, feminist activists and politically active women at the time embraced democratization and a market economy as the means to achieve the same kind of socioeconomic prosperity and political freedom expected for men (see Graff 2020). Increased political rights were meant to complement existing social rights and assumed economic independence. Within this constellation, Western feminists ventured to Central and Eastern Europe to promote their own ideas about real emancipation while discrediting all that had previously been achieved. They discursively separated women from men in the struggle for democratic and economic participation by highlighting patriarchy as a major cause of women’s oppression. Kristen Ghodsee (2004) has vividly described the tensions that followed early misunderstandings between feminists in the West and East and women’s activists in Bulgaria. Her analysis also applies to the rapid alienation between West German and East German activists, which persisted over the next two decades in the unified Germany (Dölling 2001).

During the course of the transformation, the initial expectations of reformers and feminist activists were disappointed. No family wage emerged for most of the households, now integrated into the world economy as a semi-periphery or periphery. Many women quickly learned that the social rights they had previously taken for granted were less secure than expected. Western feminist scholars described the changing power relationships in postsocialist gender regimes as a process of retraditionalization, which refers both to the reform discourses of the late 1980s and early 1990s and to practical changes of the gender regime after the breakdown of state socialism. Gal and Kligman (2000) have pointed to the fight over abortion in the early 1990s triggered by attempted, and indeed realized, restrictions on women’s reproductive rights in Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and the former East Germany.¹ Except in Germany, such restrictions were already linked to morality and so-called traditional values as well as to the unfolding demographic crisis and migration. This was especially true for countries that struggled to conceive of new postsocialist national identities as well as for those where the Church forcefully reentered the political stage (see Graff and Korolczuk 2018). At the same time, countries with restrictive regulations under state socialism, such as Romania and Bulgaria, relaxed anti-abortion laws afterwards, while Russia kept its liberal laws mostly untouched until 2011. Other factors that contributed to retraditionalization include the relative decline of women’s labor market participation compared to that of men (who also experienced a significant decline in most of these countries); the dismantling of universal childcare, especially for children below the age of three; implicit or explicit familiaristic social policies; and the withdrawal of women from politics, especially from parliaments once this institution had acquired some real power. Only in a few countries did the share of women in parliament exceed 10% at the end of the 1990s (Ashwin 2006; Bridger et al. 1996; Glass and Fodor 2007; Teplova 2007; for a critical review of the retraditionalization thesis see Pascall and Kwak 2009 and Nenova 2020).

From a historical point of view, the global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Eurozone crisis fostered a second wave of retraditionalization—visible both in public discourse and political practices in Eastern Europe. Both waves are important points of departure for this volume. However, we do not wish to simply reiterate the analysis of right-wing, anti-gender propaganda, and policy already accomplished by several recent studies (see, for example, Kováts and Pető 2017; Graff and Korolczuk 2018; Bluhm and Brand 2018). Rather, the collection of articles in this volume focuses on changing gender arrangements and power relationships as nonlinear, contradictory processes where shifting ideologies, socioeconomic conditions, and social practices are intertwined. We look at the perspective of bottom-up agency, which allows us to bring more dynamics and differentiation into our analysis of the new/recent nationalist-conservative turn. This bottom-up perspective opens up space for questions about intersectionality and how gender and class are mutually related to one another in postsocialist countries where the economic and social upheavals of the transition period fundamentally changed the social structures while the legacies of socialist modernization were still (partly) traceable.

This volume is divided into four sections. In the first, Feminism in Eastern Europe Revisited, prominent scholars and feminist activists reflect upon the transition period and its long-term consequences for gender regimes. They examine the validity of the claim that feminist movements were co-opted by neoliberal ideology and engage in a lively debate about what alternatives were available to feminists both in the past and today. Utilizing Nancy Fraser’s influential article Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History (2009) as a reference point, the authors discuss her arguments for the region of Central and Eastern Europe. This critical assessment of the post-transition period allows for a deeper reflection on emancipation, class issues, and different strands of feminism in postsocialist countries. While Olga Sasunkevich and Kristen Ghodsee in this volume share the notion that liberal feminism contributed to the recent backlash and criticize the revitalized hegemonic Western image of a politically constructed Eastern Europe as a backward region especially when it comes to gender regimes, Agnieszka Graff rejects the notion of a Western feminist colonialization.

The second section of the book, New Conflicts and Empowerment Strategies, is devoted to the self-organization and grassroots movements of women in Central and Eastern Europe in response to the challenges of illiberal regimes and war. Using multiple empirical examples, the authors show from different perspectives that women in the region are capable of enacting change from below and confronting right-wing conservative gender ideology and nationalist identity policy.

The third section Work, Money, and Power aims to uncover the interrelationship between work, money, and power on an individual and collective level. It sheds light on the contradictory development between socioeconomic circumstances and gender ideology, which do not necessarily determine one another. The authors reveal the limitations of the retraditionalization thesis given socialist legacies but also postsocialist realities. Nevertheless, their findings also indicate that the male-breadwinner model is a powerful cultural concept, especially among middle-class men.

The fourth section, Changing Concepts of Masculinity and Fatherhood, deals with a relatively new area of research. It combines historical and sociological studies revealing that the notion of absent men is a too broad concept to account for the diverse experiences of different countries during and after socialism. Again, the empirical findings from different countries indicate that in spite of conservative discourses, actual gender arrangements are much more complex than simply adhering to gender ideology.

To follow, we elaborate on this anthology’s point of departure by presenting the differences between the first and second waves of retraditionalization. We then explore the limitations of the argument that the current gender arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe are the results of retraditionalization, neo-conservatism, or even straight restoration. Samuel Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernities allows us to acknowledge the existence of multiple paths of emancipation while understanding backlashes as responses to tensions, contradictions, and antinomies within modern societies. Thus, the recent nationalist-conservative or right-wing populist turn in some countries is not per se anti-modern. For both questions, we highlight crucial outcomes of the collected articles.

1 The Second Wave of Retraditionalization

The national-conservative turn in Orbán’s Hungary, Kaczyński’s Poland, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and to a lesser extent in other Central and East European countries is part of a broader countermovement that is not restricted to postsocialist states. In this way, it decisively differs from the first wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when discourse was dominated by high hopes for the triumph of democracy and liberalism over any kind of authoritarianism. Those who dismissed the socialist project of women’s emancipation as part and parcel of their integration into the labor market were anti-communists without anti-Western or anti-liberal sentiments. In contrary, relieving women of their double-burden by allowing them to stay at home was perceived as a step toward normalization—in the form of a normal and civilized Western-style society—even though their image of a classic breadwinner model better resembled middle-class (white) families in the US and Western Europe of the 1950s and 1960s rather than the gender arrangements of the 1990s and 2000s. Already in socialist times, feminism was framed as a bourgeois Western ideology, neatly separated from the justified fight for equal rights. However, it was only during the second wave after 2010 that feminism gained the status as a major threat that needed to be stemmed (see Pető 2020).

Along with being part of a larger countermovement, there is another important difference to the first wave, since anti-gender ideology has now become an element of a broader ideological project against communism and (neo-)liberalism. The social construct of gender as an enemy of the so-called natural social order acts as the symbolic glue unifying different right-wing, conservative, and nationalist strands (Grzebalska et al. 2017). However, the attack is not only on gender. Rather, gender and feminism are discursively associated with environmentalism and globalism, both elements of a totalitarian-neoliberal ideology propagated by transnational organizations, multinational companies, and a cosmopolitical elite who stand to most profit from rapid exposure to global or European markets (see more Bluhm and Varga 2019a).

What is puzzling still is why precisely in East Central Europe and Russia—both places where feminism is not exactly a widespread phenomenon—right-wing populist rulers and national-conservative ideologues aggressively rail against gender ideology. Bluhm and Varga (2019a) have argued elsewhere that the illiberal turn cannot be sufficiently explained either by a sliding back toward authoritarianism or the long shadow of the authoritarian past. Nor is it just the result of state capture by rent-seeking groups employing populist strategies and rhetoric. Both arguments can hardly explain why with Hungary and Poland, two of the countries that ranked highest in international indices in terms of market-economy performance and stable democratic institutions, moved to the forefront of this countermovement in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The current ruling elites in both countries are convinced that the neoliberal, open-market path of transition of the 1990s needs to at least be corrected because it failed to overcome post-communism, instead bringing about new economic, political, and cultural dependence (this time on the West). This, in turn, precludes the establishment of those positions within the European Union that they desire for their countries. The need to regain national sovereignty by means of a powerful nationalist state that intervenes in the economy and in society is a view that Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński share with Vladimir Putin. According to this narrative, the notion of liberal Western gender ideology was successfully framed as an attempt to limit these countries’ national sovereignty by imposing foreign norms and rules that further exacerbated the demographic crisis, hindering the recovery of families after socialism and the shock of transition. The national conservatives do not limit their battle for traditional values to their own countries but see it as part of a broader missionary impetus to save Europe from post-1968 decadence, which is also a novel characteristic of this second wave.

In the social policy, the conservative ideological turn has a redistributive component that favors heterosexual marriage and the so-called traditional nuclear family, absent during the 1990s wave, when the state was meant to withdraw from family matters (Bluhm and Varga 2019b). With the economic recovery and the sharpening of the demographic situation, pronatalist policies were implemented in much of the region beginning in the mid-2000s, including the expansion of financial incentives. One such example is the Polish PiS government’s well-known 500+ program, which eased the lives of many families with children, thus strengthening the party’s electorate. The manner in which the issues of social justice are appropriated by illiberal conservatives in Central and Eastern Europe underlines the urgency of the debate about a new feminism for the 99% that focuses on class issues (Fraser et al. 2019), as debated in the first section of this volume.

Finally, the growing authoritarianism limits democratic voices (to different degrees) and creates serious obstacles for individual and collective agencies. One of the early lessons of Putin’s regime was to fill the space of civil society with loyal domestic actors and a third-sector that provided social services. This concept traveled to Hungary and Poland and contributed to a phenomenon that was also absent in the early 1990s. However, there are still significant differences in the capability and opportunity to organize protests. This is especially true in Poland as Julia Kubisa showed in her chapter about the struggle of Polish nurses’ trade unions as well as Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez and Jennifer Ramme’s chapter on the Black Protests strike for women’s reproductive rights. It is especially striking that these women have claimed the notion of the ordinary for themselves. In this way, they have profoundly challenged the discourse of the regime, which claimed to be the sole representative of ordinary people and attributed feminism to leftist, urban traitor-elites. However, even in Russia, where public space is under heavy surveillance by the state, feminist groups and counteractions have employed new media as strategies of empowerment. Elena Korowina describes the Facebook flashmob #яНеБоюсьСказать that long preceded the global #MeToo movement.

2 Multiple Emancipatory Trajectories and Changing Gender Relations

Despite the strong impact of the illiberal conservative turn in Poland, Hungary, and Russia (especially after December 2011) on these societies as well as the overall political climate in Europe, neither first-wave retraditionalization nor second-wave illiberal conservatism fully grasp the complexity of these changes. In her contribution to this volume, Olga Sasunkevich explores what she identified as the three main concepts of emancipation present in feminist literature. She distinguishes between a socialist-paternalist model, a liberal concept focused on individual autonomy and recognition, and a third that emphasizes individual freedom without neglecting socioeconomic factors; thus, bringing class issues back into the feminist debate on emancipation. According to Thomas H. Marshall’s classic typology, this last concept of emancipation acknowledges that democratic, political, and legal rights and social rights are intertwined and codependent (2009/1950).

A nonlinear understanding of emancipation may also draw upon Samuel Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernity (2002). Socialist-paternalist emancipation that focused on labor-market participation, equal rights, and public childcare formed part of a specific pattern of modernity. It created unique tensions, contradictions, and antinomies that laid the ground for the neo-traditional reform debate of the late 1980s. Rapid industrialization and enforced collectivization in the Soviet Union, for example, provided women with their own income for the first time in their lives. Nevertheless, men’s earnings were still perceived as family wages throughout the entire Soviet period despite the need for average households to have a second income. In this volume, Alya Guseva and Dilyara Ibragimova define the Soviet-Russian gender model as transitional precisely because it combines the ideology of socialist emancipation and women’s economic independence with traditional perceptions about household duties and a male breadwinner whose breadwinning role often concluded with handing their pay over to their wives. The control that wives who usually earned less than their husbands had over their wages historically resembles proletarian arrangements in the US and Western Europe rather than the socialist ideal.

The lack of real participation under state socialism blocked public debates on the quality of public care and education. It was precisely the poor quality of public childcare in many countries that made it easy for the state to withdraw its support in the 1990s when local communities acquired the facilities from the former state-owned companies but often lacked sufficient funding to maintain them. The limitations placed on public discourse by the party-state also impeded debates about men’s roles in household labor and made domestic violence a taboo topic. The contemporary Russian government and the Orthodox Church could still rely on the widespread attitude that domestic violence was not a public issue when they rolled back feminist efforts to criminalize domestic violence in 2017.

Women in the Soviet Union and other state-socialist countries did participate in politics in higher state apparatuses, mass organizations, and national and local parliaments. Some countries even had quotas for women in their national and regional parliaments; however, the party leadership, the military and security, and the commanders of the large combined forces were overwhelmingly male. This power asymmetry drastically weakened the position of women during the redistribution of wealth and influence following the regime’s collapse. Becoming rich was almost exclusively a male phenomenon, creating a type of hegemonic masculinity that Boris Knorre describes in his contribution as embodied by physically strong, healthy, rich, expensively and tastefully dressed men.

Moreover, the overall notion of a socialist-paternalist model of emancipation overlooks the remarkable variations between the countries within the very same institutional model, as well as social changes that occurred in gender arrangements over decades. While the first point requires a closer look at the level of development reached by each country before entering state socialism, the latter needs a stronger emphasis on agents of change in this non-democratic, authoritarian context. Historian Peter Hallama points in this volume to the literature’s shortcomings regarding the role of men, especially in late socialism with the fading of the Stalinist ideal of the man as a worker, hero, and soldier who sacrifices his life for the cause of communism. Hallama approaches these changes from the perspective of "individual agency and Eigensinn (self-will, obstinacy) beyond political resistance and opposition and shows that the concept of absent men is too monolithic. Beginning in the 1960s, public media in the former GDR and Czechoslovakia promoted the image of a new-sensitive father whose availability to his children is not based on patriarchal authority. Hallama argues that the phenomenon of single fathers provoked changes in social policies as well as in family and labor legislation years before parental leave became a political issue in the European Union and West Germany. Silke Scholz’s contribution in this volume moves in the same direction. As a sociologist, she has researched gender arrangements and changing concepts of masculinity and fatherhood in East Germany for many years. Scholz shows how the recent hegemonic West German discourse on the sensitive father ignores the East German experience, leading to the dichotomy of the progressive, modern West German man versus the traditionalist, right-wing extremist East German man" who uses right-wing ideology to reestablish a traditional concept of masculinity. This construct glosses over the complexity of gender arrangements in GDR that to this day keep shaping the social practices of motherhood and fatherhood in the East. The fact that many East German women work longer hours (not only for economic reasons; see Schiefer and Naderi 2015) makes it necessary for fathers to participate in childcare and household chores—which they do in a pragmatic and self-evident way (Scholz 2020).

Alya Guseva and Dilyara Ibragimova, however, show that for Russia the postsocialist, neo-traditional gender ideology of the first and second waves matters. When men earn family wages and adhere to a conservative gender ideology, their spouses not only return to a traditional caretaking role at home but also lose control over the management of the household income, which presents a strong contrast to the former socialist-paternalist gender regime. When interviewed, many of these women reveal dissatisfaction with this neo-traditional construct that results in their economic dependence on a male breadwinner. The relevance of competing ideologies and their mediating impact on contemporary gender arrangements are also the subject of the chapter by Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, who points to the gap between the persistence of the phenomenon of absent men in family life and the public reinvention of parental roles. In her in-depth, qualitative study, Rozhdestvenskaya demonstrates that the social and cultural differentiation of post-Soviet Russian society includes a diversification of fathers’ roles that go beyond the traditional-conservative or the Soviet transitional model.

While the articles on fatherhood underline a shift toward a more individualistic, the so-called soft masculinity that resembles the notion of the sensitive man (Hallama 2020), Boris Knorre looks at how Russia’s conservative turn transformed the Soviet heroic man into a neo-imperial concept of masculinity. This version of masculinity allows men to identify as heroes and warriors on the geopolitical front. With the promotion of this new hero model, the Russian Orthodox Church not only supports Putin’s foreign policy, but also it offers religious, less economically successful men an attractive alternative role that compensates for their inability to fulfill the prerequisites of the new hegemonic men. However, it has little to do with the Church’s historical concept of masculinity with its aestheticization of weakness and detachment from secular activity.

Ukraine is a good example of the possible tensions between a nationalist male role and a post-Soviet gender construct that is both individualistic and influenced by capitalist consumerism, as Rebecca Barth argues in her chapter, which draws upon the work of Oksana Kis. She identifies the two gender roles that post-Soviet Ukraine offered its female population: The first is derived from the celebrated Berehynia, a mythological figure and mother of the nation, while the other is based on the American Barbie doll and posits women as female trophies of the country’s prosperous and powerful new men. Much of the rich historical literature on gender and war narrates how women often replaced men as workers and administrators during wartime but lost their positions once men returned from the front. This pattern has changed only during recent violent conflicts. This also holds true for Ukraine and seems to challenge the normative Berehynia-Barbie dichtonomy of postsocialist femininity. Barth’s interviews with women of different generations who returned from active participation in the war in Donbas show how under certain circumstances war may lead to an empowerment of women, creating lasting changes. The same conclusions can be drawn from the chapter by Ioulia Shukan, who studied Ukrainian women’s empowerment and self-organization in response to the failure of the state that became obvious during the war in Donbas.

In summary, the empirical findings and theoretical conceptualizations of the gender arrangements in this volume highlight the complexity and contradictory character of social change in Central and Eastern Europe after 1990. The second wave of retraditionalization, an all-encompassing nationalist and illiberal conservative project, represents a specific response to the neoliberal transition to a market economy and the perceived dependence upon established economic and political centers. It refocuses the state attention on social issues but in a restrictive and paternalistic manner willing to trample individual rights. The curtailing of women’s reproductive rights is not only legitimized by Christian values and moral concerns but also by the national project of addressing the demographic crisis resulting from the transition and emigration. Additionally, socialist legacies and 1990s postsocialist liberalization (including the economic hardship and capitalist consumerism it has spawned) have also had an impact. The latter triggered an unfolding social differentiation that did not easily conform to neoconservative nationalist discourses. To understand this complex social reality, a far more systematic comparison and in-depth intersectional analysis, which exceeds the parameters of this volume, is needed.

References

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Footnotes

1

The German case is unique because restrictions in the former GDR resulted from a compromise between East and West German politicians following protests in the East. As a result, abortion rights in the unified Germany were more liberal compared to those under the former West German law but more restrictive compared to late GDR law. A similar liberalization occurred in relation to LGBT rights, which in the GDR were only established in the late 1980s. These are two of the rare examples during the unification process in which mutual adaptation instead of an institutional transfer from West to East occurred.

Part IFeminism in Eastern Europe Revisited

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

K. Bluhm et al. (eds.)Gender and Power in Eastern EuropeSocieties and Political Orders in Transitionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53130-0_2

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend: The Curious Tale of Feminism and Capitalism in Eastern Europe

Kristen R. Ghodsee¹ 

(1)

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

1 Introduction

Across Eastern Europe today, populist leaders fan the flames of anti-feminism. Poland has seen renewed attempts to restrict women’s reproductive rights and revert to traditional gender roles as Catholic bishops rail against the pernicious influence of gender ideology. (Kościańska 2014). In Hungary, anti-gender policies have led to new rhetoric of family mainstreaming, and Viktor Orbán himself has said that women can only be promoted in his administration if they have three children (Juhász 2016). Fears about falling birth rates throughout the region have led to a resurgence of patriarchal, nationalist political movements, which reject supposedly foreign notions of gender equality. Women have become the scapegoats for weak economies and demographic collapses.

In this brief essay, I want to revisit my own early fieldwork in Bulgaria in the late 1990s (Ghodsee 2004, 2005) and also think about Nancy Fraser’s seminal article, Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History (Fraser 2009) in relation to the current gender backlash in Eastern Europe. Fraser’s article was intended as an indictment of the narrow domestic identity politics of American feminism, but it has a great critical value when we consider the ways that Western liberal feminist theory and praxis were exported to Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Fraser argues in the United States context, I propose that the triumphalist neoliberal capitalism of the 1990s co-opted and deployed liberal feminism and women’s rights as a tool in the project of Western economic domination in Eastern Europe. Current tropes of hyper-masculinity and anti-gender diatribes in Eastern Europe at least in part arise from local perceptions that liberal feminism is an ideology of Western cultural and economic imperialism, a perception that can and must be challenged by activist women in the region. By embracing the history of local women’s activism, including that of state socialist women’s organizations, feminists can once again represent a political project with the potential to challenge (rather than support and perpetuate) the ravages of unfettered free markets in the twenty-first century.

2 Feminisms East and West

This story could start back in the late nineteenth century with the debates between Western women advocating for separatist suffrage movements in the United States and Great Britain and the socialist women in Germany and Russia who believed that working women needed to struggle together with working men for political as well as social and economic rights (Zetkin 1896). But for the sake of brevity, I begin this tale in 1975, in the middle of the Cold War when the government of Mexico hosted the first United Nation’s Conference on Women for International Women’s Year. This historic gathering brought together delegations from the capitalist West, the state socialist East, and the developing countries of the South to deliberate on women’s roles in society and culture under the three themes of Equality, Development, and Peace (Olcott 2017).

American feminists travelled to Mexico City expecting to find a global sisterhood of women united in a common fight for equal rights with men. Instead, Jane Jaquette, an American political scientist noticed the deep tensions that divided women from different political backgrounds: I found North American feminists surprised to discover that not everyone shared their view that patriarchy was the major cause of women’s oppression, and that Third World women held views closer to Marx than Friedan(Jaquette 2004). Arvonne Fraser, a member of the official United States delegation in 1975, later recalled that: American women learned that they could be the target of public vilification, which shocked many of them deeply…the new U.S. women’s movement had taught many American women to think of all women as friends, people united in a common cause. To find this not true, in their first international encounter, was, to some, an infuriating and very disappointing experience (Fraser 1987).

Most relevant to the argument I hope to put forward in this essay, however, is the report from a journalist covering the 1975 conference for the American magazine, Foreign Affairs. She reported that some African women attending the conference considered Western feminism a neo-colonialist plot to divide and conquer the men and women of newly independent countries in the Global South (Whitaker 1975). In order to resist the economic and political imperialism of the capitalist countries, they argued, African men and women needed to work together. They believed that an independent women’s movement would merely play into the hands of their former colonial masters. Also, was this attitude really so unreasonable, given the long history of British imperial tactics to divide and rule African populations by promoting inter-ethnic hostility? Indeed, throughout the United Nations Decade for Women that followed the International Women’s Year (1976–1985), liberal feminists from the advanced capitalist countries tried to insist that the UN conferences focus on narrowly defined women’s issues, whereas women from the Eastern Bloc countries and many women from the Global South wanted to use the international women’s congresses as an opportunity for women to speak about larger social, political, and economic issues (Ghodsee 2012).

Fast forward to 1998, when I began living in Bulgaria to do my dissertation research on women’s labor in the tourism industry. The immediate post-communist period was a time that witnessed a resurgence of traditional gender roles across Eastern Europe (Gal and Kligman 2000). This was a moment when Western aid was flooding into Bulgaria through the European Union’s PHARE Program, USAID’s Democracy Network (DemNet) Program, and a variety of other bilateral donors to encourage the development of civil society through the establishment of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Many of these new NGOs were created specifically to promote women’s issues, to allow Western liberal feminist ideas to be transferred to East European women who had been emancipated from above (Drakulic 2015). The anthropologist Katherine Verdery has argued that state socialism reduced women’s economic dependence on men by making men and women equally dependent on the centralized state (Verdery 1996). With the collapse of that state and the rapid privatization (and outright theft) of state assets, men under capitalism would regain their supposedly natural roles as familial patriarchs and women could return to their natural roles as mothers and wives supported by their husbands (Gal and Kligman 2000). Across Eastern Europe, nationalists argued that capitalist competition would relieve women of the notorious double burden and restore familial and societal harmony by allowing men to reassert their masculine authority as breadwinners. For instance, the historian of sexuality, Dagmar Herzog, shared a conversation with several East German men in their late-forties in 2006. They told her that:

It was really annoying that East German women had so