The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia 1138347752, 9781138347755

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Part I Conceptual Debates and Methodological Differences
Introduction: Conceptual Debates and Methodological Differences
The Development of the Field
1 Between Regional and Transnational Contexts
The Region: What’s in a Name?
The Nation: Diverse Approaches to Gender Analysis
Transnational and Global Frameworks
Conclusions
References
2 Fluidity or Clean Breaks?
The Critical Junctures: Transition vs. Transformation
Shaping Gender Identities and Dynamics: Actors and Processes
Interaction of Actors
Conclusions
References
3 Neoliberal Intervention: Analyzing the Drakulic– Funk–Ghodsee Debates: Analyzing the Drakulic– Funk–Ghodsee Debates
Feminist Disputes Between East and West: Drakulić– Funk in the 1990s
The Impact of Western Donors on Feminism: Funk–Ghodsee in the 2000s
Debating State Socialist Women’s Organizations: Funk–Ghodsee in the 2010s
(Not) Laughing in Communism and Postcommunism: Drakulic–Ghodsee and Others in the 2010s
Feminism in Times of Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism: CEE Authors Engage the Debate
Conclusions
References
Methodologies
4 Legacies of the Cold War and the Future of Gender in Feminist Histories of Socialism
What is a Cold War Narrative?
Gender Analysis Meets Cold War Narratives of Socialism
Beyond the Cold War Plots
The Trouble with Gender in Counter-narratives of Socialism
Conclusions
References
5 The Case and Comparative Methods
Tradeoffs in the Use of Case Studies and Other Comparative Methods
Varying Disciplinary Approaches to Case Studies and Comparative Method
Political Science Approaches to Women’s Organizing in Russia
Cultural Anthropology of Women’s Organizing and Lived Experiences of Gender in and Beyond Russia
Sociological Mixed Methods to Women’s Organization and Gender
Conclusions
References
6 Quantitative and Experimental Methods
Quantitative– Qualitative Debates in Gender and Politics Research
Quantitative Research, Intersectionality, and Multidimensionality
Research on Institutions and Institutional Change in CEE&E
Research on Genderspecific Public Opinion in CEE&E
Conclusions
References
Epistemologies
7 Postcoloniality in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia
After Socialist Internationalism: A New Postcolonial Optic
Multiple Centers and Peripheries
Decolonial Interventions
Conclusions
References
8 Post-Soviet Masculinities: Sex, Power, and the Vanishing Subject
Masculinity and Homoeroticism
Homosociality and Power
Masculinity and State Power: Who’s on Top?
Conclusions
References
Part II Feminist and Women’s Movements Cooperating and Colliding
Introduction: Feminist and Women’s Movements Cooperating and Colliding
Women’s Organizing Under Empires
9 Challenging Tradition and Crossing Borders: Women’s Activism and Literary Modernism in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
Women’s Philanthropic Organizations and Salons
The National Movements and Women’s Organizations
The Fight for Women’s Education
The Role of Women’s Professional Organizations
Women’s Alliances
Women Writers
Conclusions
References
10 The First All-Russian Women’s Congress: “The Women’s Parliament”
Revolution, Repression, and Resistance
Ladies, Laborers, and Professionals
Congress Sessions: Debating Feminist Theory and Practice
The Final Congress Resolutions: Advocating Within an Autocracy
The Short- and Long-term Impact of the Congress
Conclusions
References
Socialist (Feminist) Interpretations
11 the Russian Revolution and Women’s Liberation: Rethinking the Legacy of the Socialist Emancipation Project
Labor Feminism and the Russian Revolution
Soviet Socialism and the Woman Question
The Socialist Model and Its Discontents
References
Dissident Women and Feminisms
12 Czechoslovak Feminisms During the Interwar Period
Czech and Slovak Women’s Emancipation Efforts Prior to Independence
The First Republic
Conclusions
References
13 Women in Poland’s Solidarity
Women Within Male Political and Religious Narratives
The Development of a Gendered Perspective of Dissent
Religious/ Cultural Factors Influencing Gender Roles
Women’s Rights and Opposition to Socialism
Women Organize the Underground: Solidarity’s “Third Space”
A Gendered Elite
The Rise of Feminist and Nationalist Turns
The New Patriarchy
Conclusion
References
Postcommunist NGO Feminisms and Beyond
14 From Soviet Feminism to the European Union: Transnational Women’s Movements Between East and West
East– West Exchanges After 1945
From International to Local: Impact of International Networks on Local Gender Politics
Postsocialist Feminism, the European Union Accession, and the Turn to “Connective” Action
Conclusions
References
15 Transnational Feminism and Women’s NGOs: the Case of the Network of East– West Women
Structural Steps to Minimize Risks of US Feminist Domination
Neww as Transnational Feminist Donor Without Colonization
Neww Commitment to Intersectionality
How Not to be Donor Driven
Avoiding Complicity in Neoliberalism
NEWW’s Difficulties
Conclusions
References
16 Contentions of Funding Gender Equality in Central-Eastern Europe
Gender Equality and Women’s Organizing Under Late State Socialism
Frameworks for Funding: The Civil Society and Philanthrocapitalist Approaches
NGOization, Project Feminism, and Movement Building
Neoliberalism, Governance Feminism, and Movement Building
Austerity, Identity, and Intersectional Movement Building
Conclusion
References
17 Pussy Riot and Femen’s Global Trajectories in Law, Society, and Culture
Design and Strategies
Common Roots, Diverging Routes
From Postcommunist Post-Secularism to “Sextremism”
A Moving Vector with no Endpoint
Conclusions
References
Part III Constructions of Gender in Different Ideologies
Introduction: Constructions of Gender in Different Ideologies
Nationalism
18 Nationalism and Sexuality in Central-Eastern Europe
Strange but Magnetic Bedfellows: Prostitution and Nationalism
Eugenics and the Scientific Legitimization of Racialized Nationalism
Nationalism and Homosexuality
Sexuality and Nationalism Through the Lens of Antisemitism
Conclusions
References
19 Gender, Militarism, and the Modern Nation in Soviet and Russian Cultures
Intertwined National and Gender Identities
Hegemony and Challenge: Masculinity and the Military
The Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland
Late Soviet Responses to Military Masculinity
Conclusions
References
Fascism
20 Farright Expectations of Women in Central-Eastern Europe
Research on Women and Fascism in CEE After WWII
Gendered Analyses of Fascism in CEE After Communism
The Birth of Gendered Antimodernism in Central-Eastern Europe
Gender and Fascism During World War II in CEE
Conclusions
References
Socialisms and Communisms
21 Paradoxes of Gender in Soviet Communist Party Women’s Sections (the Zhenotdel), 1981-1930
Tensions from the Beginning
Organizational Struggles Force the Women’s Sections to Become More Compliant
Assessing the Work of the Women’s Sections
The Gender Politics of Backwardness
Conclusions
References
22 Women’s Education, Entry to Paid Work, and Forced Unveiling in Soviet Central Asia
Debates About the Soviet Emancipatory Project
Bolshevik Ideas on Women’s Education and Emancipation: the “Woman of the East”
Bolshevik Ideas on Work Among “Women of the East”
Soviet Ideology on the Transformation of Women’s Family and Private Life: The Case of hujum
Conclusions
References
23 “Gypsies”/ Roma and the Politics of Reproduction in Post-Stalinist Central-Eastern Europe
Pronatalism and Eugenic Thought in the First Half of the 20th Century
“New Eugenics” in Postworld War II Reproductive Politics
“Gypsies”/ Roma as Targets of Post-world War II “Racialist Thinking”
“Gypsies”/ Roma and Racialized Selective Pronatalism
Conclusions
References
24 Legalizing Queerness in Central-Eastern Europe
Discourses on Decriminalization
Ideological Continuities in the Conceptualization of Homosexualities
Ideological Approaches to Legislation in Post-Stalinist CEE
Postsocialist Decriminalization
Grassroots Mobilizations Under Different Ideologies
Movements and
Processes
Conclusions
References
Democracy
25 Gender and the Democratic Paradox in Latvia
Political Legacies of 20th-century Latvia
Women and Opposition: Building the Foundations of Democratic Development
Gender and Early Postcommunist “Normalization” in Latvia
Public Representation and Political Practices in a Gendered Democracy
Conclusions
References
26 Anti-Gender Mobilization and Right-Wing Populism
Origins and Core Claims of the Anti-Gender Discourse
Transnational Antigender Networks and Organizations
Antigender Campaigns in CEE
Anti-Genderism and Populism: Political Alliances and Discursive Patterns
Central-Eastern Europe: Is There a Difference?
Conclusions
References
Part IV Lived Experiences of Individuals in Different Regimes
Introduction: Lived Experiences of Individuals in Different Regimes
Empires and Monarchies
27 Late Imperial Russia and Its Gendered Order in the Countryside
Peasant Male Authority and Its Potential Enhancement by Way of the Stolypin Reforms
Improvements in Peasant Women’s Standard of Living
Sexual Norms, Violence Against Peasant Women, and Peasant Women’s Agency
Religious Devotion as Resistance
Conclusions
References
28 Gendered Moral Panics in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: Prostitution, Sex Trafficking, and Venereal Disease
Varying Prostitution Regulations Across Austria-Hungary
The Specter of Sex Trafficking
The Panic over Venereal Disease
The Afterlife of Regulation
Conclusions
Note
References
Independence
29 the Promise of Gender Equality in Interwar Central-Eastern Europe
Women in Politics in Interwar Central-Eastern Europe
The Meaning of Citizenship: Equality, Difference, Nation
The Appeal of the Nationalist Right
Conclusions
References
Nazism, Stalinism, and War
30 Sexuality in the Holocaust
Pleasure and Love
Sexual and Sexualized Violence
Sexual Barter
Men Selling Sex
Sexuality as a Tool of Othering
Samesex Desire in the Camps
Conclusions
References
31 Deportation and Gulag as Gendered Processes
Gendered Traumas and Gendered Processes of Deportation
The Dynamics of Survival: Hunger and Food
The Worst Experiences and the Ways of Coping with Them
The Small Zone and the Larger Zone
Women’s Stories and Political Transition from Communism to Democracy
Conclusions
References
Socialisms and Communisms
32 Yugoslav Gender Experiments and Soviet Influences
Charting Socialist Gender Policies
Postwar Legal Transformation
Broader Interventions and Resistance
Conclusions
References
33 Struggles to Reconcile Women’s Wage Labor and Kitchen Labor in the German Democratic Republic
Communist Approaches to Cooking
Women’s Work and Kitchen Labor in the GDR
Collective Meals and Female Emancipation
Remaking “Home Cooking” as a Communist Necessity
Conclusions
References
Part V the Ambiguous Postcommunist Transitions
Introduction: the Ambiguous Postcommunist Transitions
Democratic and Economic Changes
34 Gender and the Ambiguities of Economic Transition in Romania
The Gendered Dimensions of Privatization
Negotiating Precarity and Uncertainty
Sink, Swim, or Tread Water? Navigating Neoliberalism
Conclusions
References
35 Democratization, Authoritarianism, and Gender in Russia
Regime Type and Gender Equality
The Gender Regime in Russia
Conclusions
References
Europeanization
36 Europeanization and the Challenge of Gender Equality
EU Impact on Gender Equality Legislation: “hard Law” and “soft Law”
National Machineries for the Advancement of Gender Equality
The Agency of Women’s Movements
Conclusions
References
37 the Europeanization and Politicization of LGBT Rights in Serbia
Antidiscrimination Policies and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Serbia
Pride Parades as a Battlefield on Europe
Conclusions
References
Migrations
38 Russianspeaking LGBTQ Communities in the West
Negotiating Queerness in Post-Soviet Diasporas
Statesponsored Homophobia and LGBTQ Migration After 2013
Activism and Gender(ed) Matters in LGBTQ Migration and Asylum
Conclusions
References
39 Postsocialist Migration and Intimacy
Postsoviet Migrants, Gender, Intimacy
Intimate Practices: Labor, Sexuality, and Nurturing
Conclusions
References
Armed Conflict/Resolution
40 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Development of Legal Frameworks on Violence ...
Women’s Presence in Developing International Justice
Violence Against Women in War: International Law and Feminist Critiques
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Redefining Sexual Violence in Wartime and Changing Procedures
Rape, Genocide, Victimhood, and Nationalist Narratives
Limits of the Law
Conclusions
References
41 Gender, Conflict, and Social Change in Armenia and Azerbaijan
The Gendered Impact of Conflict and Transition
Women’s Activism Within and Across Borders
Male Dominance, Militarism, and Authoritarianism
Conclusions
Note
References
Part VI Postcommunist Policy Issues
Introduction: Postcommunist Policy Issues
Political Leadership
42 Women’s Representation in Politics
The Mixed Communist Legacy
The Gradual Increase in Women’s Descriptive Representation After 1990
The Growing Impact of Substantive Representation
Emerging Patterns of Representation at the EU Level
Conclusions
References
Gender-based Violence
43 Hybrid Regimes and Gender Violence Prevention Campaigns in Ukraine
Violence Against Women in Soviet Ukraine
European Integration and Comprehensive Gender Violence Policy
High-level Subversion Under Yanukovych and During the Hybrid War
Conclusions
References
44 Bride Kidnapping and Polygynous Marriages: Gendered Debates in Central Asia
The Social Value of Marriage in Central Asia
Bride Kidnapping and Polygyny in the Presoviet and Soviet Periods
Postsoviet Revivals
Debates About Polygyny
Debates About Bride Kidnapping
Conclusions
References
45 Trafficked Women and Men to and from Russia
Human Trafficking Policy in Postsoviet Russia
The Reality of Human Trafficking in Russia
International and Regional Comparisons
Conclusions
References
Reproductive Rights
46 Assisted Reproduction: Poland in a Comparative Perspective
Assisted Reproduction in Postcommunist Countries: Between Global Trends and Local Specificities
Opposition to Arts in Poland: the Synergy Between Nationalism and Neoliberalism
Conclusions
References
47 Abortion and Reproductive Health in Eurasia: Continuity and Change
Expanding Contraceptive Knowledge and Access
Uneven Reproductive Health Improvements
Rising Nationalism and Falling Birthrates
Fertility Patterns and Pathways of Control and Choice
Conclusions
References
Social Policy and Health
48 Single Mothers, Family Change, and Normalized Gender Crisis in Russia
A Stalled Gender Revolution in Family Life
Creating “Single Mothers” in the Postwar Soviet Period (1944–1967)
Single Motherhood in the Late Soviet Period (1968–1991)
Single Motherhood in Post-soviet Russia (1992–Present)
Conclusions
References
49 Social Welfare and Family Policies in Central-Eastern European Countries
Legacies of the Pre-world War II Period
State Socialism and the New Interpretation of Gender Roles: Pre-1956
Reinterpretation of Gender Roles After 1956
The Collapse of State Socialism, Transformation, and Comparative Studies of the Region
From Defamilialization to Degenderization
Gender, Right-Wing Populism, and Recent Welfare Policy Reforms
Conclusions
References
50 Women’s Representation in Sport
Physical Culture and Professional Sport Under Communism
The Privatization of Leisure Sport and the Marketization of Professional Sport in the Postcommunist Era
Women’s (un)recognition in Postcommunist Professional Sport
Conclusions
References
51 Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Postsocialist Central-Eastern Europe
State Socialism and Its Legacy
Postsocialist Neoliberalization
Postsocialist Agencies
References
Index

Citation preview

i

“The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia is an invaluable resource for understanding the sometimes-​heated debates which have animated global conversations about postsocialist, postcolonial, and post-​Cold War studies over the last three decades. Fábián, Johnson, and Lazda have expertly curated an excellent selection of interdisciplinary chapters from a wide variety of preeminent scholars whose work collectively challenges the epistemic hegemony of Western feminist perspectives. The essays included provide fascinating intersectional analyses of how gender interacts with race, class, ethnicity, nationalism, and other factors to organize polities, economies, and societies. This Handbook is a must read for all scholars and policy makers interested in gender issues in the region.” Kristen R. Ghodsee, Professor, Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA

“This timely and thorough reference collection is an essential guide to gender studies scholarship on postcommunist Europe and Eurasia. The editors gathered the highest caliber experts in the field to explicate the debates on gender in this diverse region, and to examine key topics, from methodology, to ideology, to intriguing empirical research on women’s organizing, everyday life, and gender-related policy before, during and after communist party rule. This engaging and comprehensive volume will be indispensable for anyone undertaking research on gender in the region, whether a novice or an advanced scholar long steeped in the subject. Rather than applying an ‘add women and stir’ approach, the contributors examine the political, economic, social, cultural and legal systems that create and enforce gender norms, revealing the ineluctable centrality of gender to our understanding of politics.” Valerie Sperling, Professor of Political Science, Clark University, USA, and author of Sex, Politics and Putin

“What an extraordinary volume! At the time when the rights of women and the nonheteronormative people are under assault by the increasingly belligerent right-wing forces, a stellar cast of top researchers gives us a comprehensive overview of what needs to be known about gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Dozens of erudite chapters cover a lot of ground, ranging from useful reviews of theories, approaches and methods to illuminating historical studies and insightful dissections of cultural constructs and power constellations underpinning gender relations in these societies and elsewhere.” Jan Kubik, Professor, Department of Political Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA

ii

iii

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF GENDER IN CENTRAL-​EASTERN EUROPE AND EURASIA

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-​ Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region’s highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces’ organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-​Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. Katalin Fábián is Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. She edited Globalization: Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe (2007) and served as the editor of the journal Canadian-​American Slavic Studies that focused on the changing international relations of Central and Eastern Europe. Her book Contemporary Women’s Movements in Hungary: Globalization, Democracy, and Gender Equality (2009) analyzes the political significance of women’s activism in Hungary. She contributed chapters to and edited Domestic Violence in Postcommunist States: Local Activism, National Policies, and Global Forces (2010). With Ioana Vlad, she edited Democratization through Social Activism: Gender and Environmental Issues in Post-​ Communist Societies (2015). With Elżbieta Korolczuk, she edited and wrote chapters that

iv

appeared in Rebellious Parents: Parents’ Movements in Central-​Eastern Europe and Russia (2017). Janet Elise Johnson is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Bronx, USA. Her books include The Gender of Informal Politics (2018), Gender Violence in Russia (2009), and Living Gender after Communism (with Jean C. Robinson, 2007). In the last few years, she has published articles in Slavic Review, Human Rights Review, Journal of Social Policy Studies, Politics & Gender, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Social Policy, and Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History as well as online in The New Yorker, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, and The Boston Review. From 2008–​2019, she was one of the coordinators of the monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe, at New York University. Mara Lazda is Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College, City University of Brookyln, New York, USA. Her regional focus is on Latvia, with broader research interests on the intersections between gender, nationalism, and transnationalism in historical and contemporary contexts. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Baltic Studies, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Nationalities Papers. She has served as the President of the Association of Baltic Studies (2014–​2016), a coordinator of the Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe workshop at New York University, and an editor for Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History.

v

Routledge Handbooks of Gender and Sexuality

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication Edited by Marnel Niles Goins, Joan Faber McAlister and Bryant Keith Alexander The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia Edited by Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda https://​www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Handbooks-​of-​Gender-​and-​Sexuality/​ book-​series/​HGS

vi

vii

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF GENDER IN CENTRAL-​EASTERN EUROPE AND EURASIA

Edited by Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda

viii

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson and Mara Lazda; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson and Mara Lazda to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Fábián, Katalin, editor. | Johnson, Janet Elise, editor. | Lazda, Mara Irene, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia / edited by Katalin Fábián, Janet ELise Johnson and Mara Lazda. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056344 (print) | LCCN 2020056345 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138347755 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138347762 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429792304 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780429792298 (epub) | ISBN 9780429792281 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Gender identity–Europe, Eastern. | Gender identity–Europe, Central. | Gender identity–Eurasia. | Sex role–Europe, Eastern. | Sex role–Europe, Central. | Sex role–Eurasia. | Feminism–Europe, Eastern. | Feminism–Europe, Central. | Feminism–Eurasia. | Post-communism–Europe. | Post-communism–Eurasia. Classification: LCC HQ18.E852 R68 2021 (print) | LCC HQ18.E852 (ebook) | DDC 305.309437–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056344 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056345 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​34775-​5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​01601-​6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​34776-​2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

ix

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  List of contributors  Acknowledgements 

xvi xvii xxxii

PART I

Conceptual debates and methodological differences  Introduction  Janet Elise Johnson, Katalin Fábián, and Mara Lazda

1 3

The development of the field 

7

1 Between regional and transnational contexts  Maria Bucur

9

2 Fluidity or clean breaks?  Joanna Regulska and Zofia Włodarczyk

18

3 Neoliberal intervention: Analyzing the Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates  Eva Maria Hinterhuber and Gesine Fuchs

28



39

Methodologies 

4 Legacies of the Cold War and the future of gender in feminist histories of socialism  Anna Krylova

ix

41

x

Contents

5 The case and comparative methods  Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom

52

6 Quantitative and experimental methods  Olga A. Avdeyeva and Nellie Bohac

61



69

Epistemologies 

7 Postcoloniality in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia  Tatsiana Shchurko and Jennifer Suchland

71

8 Post-​Soviet masculinities: Sex, power, and the vanishing subject  Eliot Borenstein

80

PART II

Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding 



89

Introduction  Katalin Fábián, Mara Lazda, and Janet Elise Johnson

91

Women’s organizing under empires 

93

9 Challenging tradition and crossing borders: Women’s activism and literary modernism in the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy  Agatha Schwartz

95

10 The First All-​Russian Women’s Congress: “The Women’s Parliament”  Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

103



113

Socialist (feminist) interpretations 

11 The Russian Revolution and women’s liberation: Rethinking the legacy of the socialist emancipation project  Elena Gapova

115



123

Dissident women and feminisms 

12 Czechoslovak feminisms during the interwar period  Iveta Jusová and Karla Huebner

125

13 Women in Poland’s Solidarity  Shana Penn

133

x

xi

Contents



Postcommunist NGO feminisms and beyond 

143

14 From Soviet feminism to the European Union: Transnational women’s movements between East and West  Magdalena Grabowska

145

15 Transnational feminism and women’s NGOs: The case of the Network of East–​West Women  Nanette Funk

154

16 Contentions of funding gender equality in Central-​Eastern Europe  163 Jill Irvine 17 Pussy Riot and FEMEN’s global trajectories in law, society, and culture  Jessica Zychowicz and Nataliya Tchermalykh PART III

Constructions of gender in different ideologies 



172

181

Introduction  Mara Lazda, Janet Elise Johnson, and Katalin Fábián

183

Nationalism 

185

18 Nationalism and sexuality in Central-​Eastern Europe  Anita Kurimay

187

19 Gender, militarism, and the modern nation in Soviet and Russian cultures  Karen Petrone

196



205

Fascism 

20 Far-​right expectations of women in Central-​Eastern Europe  Andrea Pető

207



217

Socialisms and communisms 

21 Paradoxes of gender in Soviet Communist Party women’s sections (the Zhenotdel), 1918–​1930  Elizabeth A. Wood

xi

219

xii

Contents

22 Women’s education, entry to paid work, and forced unveiling in Soviet Central Asia  Yulia Gradskova

227

23 “Gypsies”/​Roma and the politics of reproduction in post-​Stalinist Central-​Eastern Europe  Eszter Varsa

236

24 Legalizing queerness in Central-​Eastern Europe  Judit Takács

246



255

Democracy 

25 Gender and the democratic paradox in Latvia  Daina S. Eglitis, Marita Zitmane, and Laura Ardava-​Āboliņa

257

26 Anti-​gender mobilization and right-​wing populism  Agnieszka Graff

266

PART IV

Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes 

277

Introduction  Mara Lazda, Katalin Fábián, and Janet Elise Johnson

279

Empires and monarchies 

281



27 Late Imperial Russia and its gendered order in the countryside  Christine D. Worobec

283

28 Gendered moral panics in the late Habsburg Monarchy: Prostitution, sex trafficking, and venereal disease  Nancy M. Wingfield

292



301

Independence 

29 The promise of gender equality in interwar Central-​Eastern Europe 303 Melissa Feinberg

Nazism, Stalinism, and war 

311

30 Sexuality in the Holocaust  Anna Hájková

313

xii

xiii

Contents

31 Deportation and Gulag as gendered processes  Dovilė Budrytė

322



331

Socialisms and communisms 

32 Yugoslav gender experiments and Soviet influences  Ivan Simić 33 Struggles to reconcile women’s wage labor and kitchen labor in the German Democratic Republic  Alice Weinreb PART V

The ambiguous postcommunist transitions 



333

342

351

Introduction  Janet Elise Johnson, Mara Lazda, and Katalin Fábián

353

Democratic and economic changes 

355

34 Gender and the ambiguities of economic transition in Romania  Jill Massino

357

35 Democratization, authoritarianism, and gender in Russia  Andrea Chandler

366



377

Europeanization 

36 Europeanization and the challenge of gender equality  Andrea Spehar

379

37 The Europeanization and politicization of LGBT rights in Serbia  Koen Slootmaeckers

387



395

Migrations 

38 Russian-​speaking LGBTQ communities in the West  Alexandra Novitskaya

397

39 Postsocialist migration and intimacy  Alexia Bloch

406

xiii

xiv

Contents



415

Armed conflict/​resolution 

40 The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the development of legal frameworks on violence against women in conflict  Belinda Cooper 41 Gender, conflict, and social change in Armenia and Azerbaijan  Sinéad Walsh PART VI

Postcommunist policy issues 



417 426

435

Introduction  Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda

437

Political leadership 

439

42 Women’s representation in politics  Sharon Wolchik and Cristina Chiva

441



451

Gender-​based violence 

43 Hybrid regimes and gender violence prevention campaigns in Ukraine  Alexandra Hrycak

453

44 Bride kidnapping and polygynous marriages: Gendered debates in Central Asia  Cynthia Werner

462

45 Trafficked women and men to and from Russia  Lauren A. McCarthy

472



481

Reproductive rights 

46 Assisted reproduction: Poland in a comparative perspective  Elżbieta Korolczuk 47 Abortion and reproductive health in Eurasia: Continuity and change  Cynthia Buckley

xiv

483

492

xv

Contents



503

Social policy and health 

48 Single mothers, family change, and normalized gender crisis in Russia  Jennifer Utrata

505

49 Social welfare and family policies in Central-​Eastern European countries  Dorota Szelewa

514

50 Women’s representation in sport  Honorata Jakubowska

523

51 Gender, sexuality, and disability in postsocialist Central-​Eastern Europe  Teodor Mladenov

531

Index 

540

xv

xvi

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1 Actors, processes, and structures shaping gender identities and dynamics 

21

Tables 35.1 The gender regime (dependent variable)  35.2 Causal factors for explaining gender politics in the regime-​building process  42.1 Women’s descriptive representation in CEE Legislatures, 1990–​2020 

xvi

368 369 444

xvi

CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Ardava-​Āboliņa is Assistant Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia. Her work examines the meaning and gender aspects of the Latvian National Awakening period (1986–​1991). She is an author of many academic publications in Latvia on different social memory issues and has extensive experience in the field of communication of science. She is also a co-​author of articles in Europe-​Asia Studies and collective monographs published by Oxford University Press and Palgrave Macmillan, including Women Presidents and Prime Ministers in Post-​Transition Democracies (Palgrave 2017). Olga A. Avdeyeva is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the European Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA. Her area of expertise includes comparative analysis of women and politics, gender attitudes, and comparative institutionalization of gender equality policies, with a regional focus on Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Her research has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Gender and Politics, Social Politics, Post-​Soviet Affairs, PS: Political Science and Politics, and The International Journal of Human Rights among other outlets. She is the author of Defending Women’s Rights in Europe: Gender Equality and EU Enlargement (SUNY University Press 2015). Currently, she explores the connections between gendered labor market structures and public attitudes toward female political leaders. Alexia Bloch is Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests span migration, gender and sexuality, socialist cultures and projects of modernity, and citizenship. She is the author of Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a Post-​Soviet State (University of Pennsylvania Press 2003), Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Russian Far East (with Laurel Kendall, University of Pennsylvania Press 2004), and Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic (Cornell University Press 2017). She has also published in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary venues, such as Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, Global Networks, Identities, and Signs. Most recently her research focuses on conditions and experiences xvii

xvi

Contributors

of mobility and immobility among non-​citizens and their families in Russia, with an emphasis on how asylum seekers’ aspirations intersect with the ideals of Russian citizen activists. Nellie Bohac is currently working at the State of New Mexico, USA, in the Environment Department. She received her Masters degree in Political Science from Loyola University Chicago in the spring of 2018. Her areas of research focused on the use of quantitative methods in comparative politics, particularly in regards to the interaction between institutional factors and regime type. Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University, New York, USA. He is the author of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–​1929 (winner of the 2001 AATSEEL book prize), Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (winner of the 2008 AWSS book prize), Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (winner of the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich book prize), and Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (2020). His current projects include the recently submitted Soviet-​Self-​Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, and Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video (under contract with Bloomsbury Press). After that, he will begin work on HBO’s The Leftovers: Mourning and Melancholy on Premium Cable and The Dispossessed: On the Post-​Soviet Uncanny. Cynthia Buckley is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-​ Champaign, USA. A social demographer, she consults with UNAIDS, UNHCR, UNDP, Macro International, and other international agencies. Her work, funded by NIH, NSF, and OSFs, focuses on demographic change across Eurasia. The lead editor of Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia (Johns Hopkins Press 2008), she is the author of academic articles, policy briefs, and methodological assessment reports on sexual health, reproduction, and migration. Her current research focuses on a MINERVA funded investigation of state capacity challenges in the areas of healthcare (including COVID-​19), elections, and education in the multicultural countries of Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine (with Ralph Clem and Erik Herron), and a manuscript project on population change and social stability in Central Asia. Maria Bucur is the John W. Hill Professor of East European History and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. She is the author of Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (University of Pittsburgh Press 2002), Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-​ Century Romania (Indiana University Press 2009), The Century of Women: How Women Have Changed the World since 1900 (Rowman & Littlefield 2018), Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon (Bloomsbury Publishing 2019), and The Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women in Modern Romania (with Mihaela Miroiu, Indiana University Press 2018), as well as several other co-​edited volumes. She has recently completed The Nation’s Gratitude: War and Citizenship in Romania after World War I (forthcoming Routledge). Dovilė Budrytė is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Faculty (Political Science) at Georgia Gwinnett College, Georgia, USA. She was the recipient of research fellowships xviii

xix

Contributors

at Europa University Viadrina (Germany) and Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. In 2018, 2019, and 2015 she was a visiting professor at Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Her articles on women and historical trauma in Lithuania have appeared in The Journal of Baltic Studies and Gender and History. Her most recent book is Crisis and Change in Post-​Cold War Global Politics: Ukraine in a Comparative Perspective (co-​edited with Erica Resende and Didem Buhari-​Gulmez, Palgrave 2018). Her other publications include books and articles on minority rights and historical memory in Eastern Europe. She is President-​Elect of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic States. Andrea Chandler is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books: Institutions of Isolation: Border Controls in the Soviet Union and its Successor States, 1917–​1993 (McGill-​ Queen’s University Press 1998), Shocking Mother Russia: Democratization, Social Rights, and Pension Reform in Russia, 1990–​ 2001 (University of Toronto Press 2004), and Democracy, Gender and Social Policy in Russia: A Wayward Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). She has published a number of articles in peer-​reviewed journals, including Global Social Policy, Democratization, Nationalities Papers, and Politics and Gender. Cristina Chiva is Lecturer in EU Politics at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK. Her research focuses on women’s representation in Europe’s new democracies, on the impact of EU accession on gender equality in the postcommunist, and on gender and European integration. Her monograph, Gender, Institutions and Political Representation: Reproducing Male Dominance in Europe’s New Democracies (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) explores the causal mechanisms responsible for sustaining male dominance in politics in postcommunist Europe since 1990. Her most recent publication is “Overcoming male dominance? The representation of women in the European Parliament delegations of the post-​communist EU member states” in Gendering the European Parliament (edited by Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín, Rowman and Littlefield 2019). Belinda Cooper is Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Global Affairs Program and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, New York, USA, where she teaches courses on international human rights law and women’s rights and has co-​taught a course on war crimes prosecutions that took NYU students to The Hague and former Yugoslavia. Her experience includes working with East German dissidents before the fall of communism, assisting the lawyers for a German Guantanamo detainee, organizing a project on memorialization of the past in Turkey, and co-​authoring reports on domestic violence in Tanzania, Armenia, and Uzbekistan. She edited the volume “War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg” and has written for a wide variety of publications in English and German. She is also a translator of German-​language books and articles, including works on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and international criminal law and transitional justice. She holds a law degree from Yale. Daina S. Eglitis is Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is the author of the book Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity, and Revolution in Latvia (Penn State University Press 2002/​ 2004), as well as recent articles in East European Politics and Societies, Acta Sociologica, xix

xx

Contributors

Nationalities Papers, Europe-​Asia Studies, and the Journal of Genocide Research. She is a two-​time Fulbright recipient and was a research fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. She has taught courses at the University of Latvia, the Latvian Academy of Culture, and Riga Stradins University. She is currently working on a manuscript about women’s experiences of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Katalin Fábián is Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. She edited Globalization: Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe (Elsevier 2007) and served as the editor of Canadian-​American Slavic Studies, which focused on the changing international relations of Central and Eastern Europe. Her book Contemporary Women’s Movements in Hungary: Globalization, Democracy, and Gender Equality (Johns Hopkins University Press 2009) analyzes the political significance of women’s activism in Hungary. She contributed chapters to and edited Domestic Violence in Postcommunist States: Local Activism, National Policies, and Global Forces (Indiana University Press 2010). With Ioana Vlad, she edited Democratization through Social Activism: Gender and Environmental Issues in Post-​Communist Societies (Tritonic Romania 2015). With Elżbieta Korolczuk, she edited and wrote chapters that appeared in Rebellious Parents: Parents’ Movements in Central-​Eastern Europe and Russia (Indiana University Press 2017). Melissa Feinberg is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA. Her research interests include the history of gender and citizenship, political culture, feminism, and human rights. She is the author of Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–​1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press 2006) and Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press 2017, winner of the 2017 George Blazyca prize). Her articles have appeared in a variety of venues, including the Journal of Women’s History, Contemporary European History, Aspasia, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-​Forschung, and East European Politics and Societies. Gesine Fuchs is a political scientist and Professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences—​School of Social Work in Switzerland. Her research focuses on law and society, welfare states, social movements, and gender equality policies. Her dissertation at the University of Hannover analyzed the development of the Polish women’s movement after 1989 (Die Zivilgesellschaft mitgestalten, Frankfurt/​New York 2003). She co-​edited with Eva Maria Hinterhuber two special issues on gender and Eastern Europe for Femina Politica, the German feminist journal of political science. Her project “Pay Equity by Law?” analyzed legal mobilization in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Poland. Her latest book Gleichstellungspolitik in der Schweiz (Leverkusen 2018) is an introduction to a contested field, namely Swiss gender equality policies. Nanette Funk is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, USA. She has written widely on gender issues in east, south, and central Europe, political philosophy, contemporary German political theory, Marxism and feminist political theory. She has written about Europe since 1970. She co-​edited Gender Politics and Postcommunism (Routledge 1993), one of the first volumes in English

xx

xxi

Contributors

on gender and postsocialism, with writings mainly from women in east, south Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles appeared in many journals and collections nationally and internationally, including Signs, European Journal of Women’s Studies, femina politica, and Hypatia. She founded and co-​directed the Gender and Transformation in Europe workshop at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies from 1992–​2019. She was a founding member of the Network of East–​West Women (NEWW). She was active in debates about state socialist women’s organizations and those in the US. Elena Gapova is Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. She was the founder of the Centre for Gender Studies at European Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus. She writes extensively on gender, nation, class, and intellectuals in postsocialism. Her most recent book is The Classes of Nations: Feminist Critique of Nationbuilding (in Russian, NLO 2016). Magdalena Grabowska is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests include the history of women’s and emancipation movements in post-​state socialism, global and transnational feminisms, and feminist research on sexual violence and reproductive rights. She has published chapters on the history of women’s movements after 1945, and 1989 in Poland and transnationally, in collected volumes and academic journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Aspasia, and The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. She is the author of the book (in Polish) Broken Genealogy. Social and Political Women’s Activity after 1945, and the Contemporary Polish Women’s Movement (Scholar Publishers 2018). Yulia Gradskova is Associate Professor in History, researcher at the Center for Baltic and East European Studies, and lecturer in Gender Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden. She is the author of The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South and the Cold War: Defending the Rights of Women of the “Whole World”? (Routledge 2021), Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Women. Natsionalka (Springer 2018) and co-​editor of several books, including Gendering Postsocialism: Old Legacies and New Hierarchies (with I. Asztalos Morell, Routledge 2018), Gender Equality on a Grand Tour. Politics and Institutions: The Nordic Council, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia (with E. Blomberg, Y. Waldemarson and A. Zvinkliene, Brill 2017). Agnieszka Graff is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland. She has published articles on gender in Polish and US culture in collected volumes and academic journals including Public Culture, Feminist Studies, Signs, and East European Politics and Societies. She co-​edited the Spring 2019 theme issue of Signs, “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right.” A monograph on connections between the anti-​gender mobilization and right-​wing populism, co-​authored with Elżbieta Korolczuk, is forthcoming with Routledge. Her books in Polish include: Świat bez kobiet [World without Women] 2001, Rykoszetem [Stray Bullets: Gender, Sexuality and Nation] 2008, Magma [The Quagmire Effect] 2010, and Matka Feministka [Mother and Feminist] 2014. Anna Hájková is Associate Professor of Modern European Continental History at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of

xxi

xxi

Contributors

Theresienstadt (Oxford University Press 2020) and editor of the special issue “Holocaust, Sexuality, Stigma” of German History. She has published extensively on prisoner society in the Holocaust, Jewish Councils, sexuality, and queer Holocaust history. Eva Maria Hinterhuber is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Gender Studies at Rhine-​Waal University of Applied Sciences in Kleve, Germany. Her fields of expertise are political sociology, civil society research, and peace and conflict studies, continuously from a gender perspective. Her dissertation at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) analyzed women’s civil society activism in the social sphere in Russia in the tension between securing survival and participation (Zwischen Überlebenssicherung und Partizipation, Baden-​Baden 2012). She co-​edited (with Gesine Fuchs) two special issues on gender and Eastern Europe for the German feminist journal of political science, Femina Politica. Her latest publications on gender and Eastern Europe deal with “Gender, Civil Society, and Non-​Democratic Regimes” (with Silke Schneider, 2018), historical women’s movements in Russia and the UK in comparison (with Jana Günther, 2017), and “New Gender-​Political Impulses from Eastern Europe: The Case of Pussy Riot” (with Gesine Fuchs, 2016). Alexandra Hrycak is Professor of Sociology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, USA. Her current research interests include transnational feminisms, online communities, and gender-​based violence. She has published articles and chapters examining cultural production in the American Journal of Sociology, Harvard Ukrainian Studies and in academic journals and edited collections. Her research investigating the effects of international aid projects on collective action capacity and self-​organization among women in Ukraine has appeared in East European Politics and Societies, Problems of Post-​Communism, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and edited collections. Karla Huebner is Associate Professor of Art History and Affiliate Faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA. Her regional focus is on the Czech lands, with research areas including surrealism, Czech visual culture, and periodical studies. Her book Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020) examines a founding Czech surrealist. She contributed chapters to Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe, edited by Iveta Jusova and Jiřina Šiklová (Indiana University Press 2016), Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production, and Consumption (Routledge 2016), The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014), and The New Woman International (University of Michigan Press 2011). She has also published articles in the Journal of Women’s History, Papers of Surrealism, and Aspasia. She has served on the board of Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and is current president of the Czechoslovak Studies Association. Jill Irvine is President’s Associates Presidential Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA. She is founding director of the Center for Social Justice, served as Director of Community Engagement and Vice Provost for Faculty in the Office of the Sr. Vice President and Provost and currently holds the position of Interim Senior Vice President and Provost. She is the author of The Croatian Question: Partisan Politics in the Formation of the Yugoslav Socialist State xxii

xxi

Contributors

(Westview Press 1995), co-​author of Natalija, Life in the Balkan Powderkeg (Central European University Press 2007), and co-​editor of State-​Society Relations in Yugoslavia 1945–​1992 (St. Martin’s Press 1997) and Gendered Mobilization: Intersectional Challenges in Social Movements in North America and Europe (Rowman & Littlefield 2018). Her work has appeared in journals such as Democratization, Politics & Gender, East European Politics, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Communist and Postcommunist Studies, East European Politics and Societies, and Contexts. Honorata Jakubowska is Professor at the Faculty of Sociology and a chair of the Department of Sociology of the Individual and Social Relations at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She is author of Skill Transmission, Sport and Tacit Knowledge: A Sociological Perspective (2017) and co-​author of Female Fans, Gender Relations and Football Fandom: Challenging the Brotherhood Culture (2020), both based on the research projects financed by the National Science Centre and two books in Polish. She has published numerous articles and chapters related to her main research interests: sociology of sport, gender studies, and sociology of the body. She was the coordinator of European Sociological Association Research Network “Society and Sports” and vice-​president of Polish Sociological Association Section “Sociology of Sport” (2017–​2019). Janet Elise Johnson is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, USA. Her books include The Gender of Informal Politics (Palgrave 2018), Gender Violence in Russia (Indiana University Press 2009), and Living Gender after Communism (with Jean C. Robinson, Indiana University Press 2007). In the last few years, she has published articles in Slavic Review, Human Rights Review, Journal of Social Policy Studies, Politics & Gender, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Social Policy, and Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History as well as online in The New Yorker, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, and The Boston Review. From 2008–​2019, she was one of the coordinators of the monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe, at New York University. Iveta Jusová is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe study-​abroad program. She is the author of The New Woman and the Empire (Ohio State University Press 2005) and the co-​editor (with Jiřina Šiklová) of Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe (Indiana University Press 2016, winner of the 2017 Heldt prize in AWSS). Her articles on 19th-​and 20th-​century Czech, British, and Dutch women writers, actresses and film directors (including Věra Chytilová) have appeared in various books and journals, such as Feminist Theory, Women’s Studies International Forum, Social Text, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies, Theatre History Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, Divadelní revue, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Most recently, she completed a digital oral history project, Paměti tří paneláků: život jedné komunity (Panel Story: The Life of a Community) with the renowned Czech photographer Jindřich Štreit. Elżbieta Korolczuk is Associate Professor in Sociology at Södertörn University in Stockholm and at American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research xxiii

xxvi

Contributors

interests involve gender, reproduction, social movements, and civil society. She has published numerous articles and books including volumes on social movements and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe: Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland (co-​edited with Kerstin Jacobsson, Berghahn Books 2017) and Rebellious Parents: Parental Movements in Central-​Eastern Europe and Russia (co-​edited with Katalin Fábián, Indiana University Press 2017). Recent publications include a monograph Matki i córki we współczesnej Polsce [Mothers and daughters in contemporary Poland] (Universitas 2019), an edited volume Bunt kobiet. Czarne Protesty i Strajki Kobiet [Women’s Rebellion. Black Protests and Women’s Strikes] (European Solidarity Centre 2019), and (Anti)gender Politics in the Populist Moment (with Agnieszka Graff, Routledge 2021). Anna Krylova is Associate Professor of Modern Russian History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. She is the author of Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press 2010), which was awarded the 2011 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. Most recently, she has participated in an AHR Conversation “History after the End of History: Re-​conceptualizing the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review, December 2016 and is the author of “Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method,” Gender and History, August 2016; “Bolshevik Feminism and Gender Agendas of Communism,” in World Revolution and Socialism in One Country (edited by Silvio Pons and Stephen Smith, Cambridge University Press 2017); and “Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century,” Social History, August 2017. Anita Kurimay is Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, USA. Her main research interests include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender history, conservatism and the politics of the far right, the history of human rights, and the history of sport. Her book Queer Budapest, 1873–​1961 (Chicago University Press 2020) examines the history of Hungarian politics of non-​normative sexualities from the late 19th century to the present. She has published articles on Hungarian gay and lesbian history in Sexualities and Eastern European Politics and Societies. Mara Lazda is Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College, City University of New York, Bronx, USA. Her regional focus is on Latvia, with broader research interests on the intersections between gender, nationalism, and transnationalism in historical and contemporary contexts. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Baltic Studies, The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Nationalities Papers. She has served as the President of the Association of Baltic Studies (2014–​2016), a coordinator of the Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe workshop at New York University, and an editor for Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. Jill Massino is Associate Professor of History at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA, where she teaches courses on modern European and comparative history. She has published numerous articles and books, including Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, (co-​edited with Shana Penn, Palgrave 2009) and Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn Books 2019).

xxiv

xxv

Contributors

Lauren A. McCarthy is Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science and Director of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. She is the author of Trafficking Justice: How Russian Police Use New Laws, from Crime to Courtroom (Cornell University Press 2015), which explores how Russian law enforcement agencies have implemented laws on human trafficking. She has also published articles in Europe-​Asia Studies, Journal of Human Trafficking, Anti-​Trafficking Review, Post-​Soviet Affairs, and Demokratizatsiya. Teodor Mladenov is Senior Lecturer at the School of Education and Social Work, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK. Previously, he was Marie Curie Individual Fellow at the European Network on Independent Living (2017–​2019), and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Public Policy Research, King’s College London (2013–​ 2016). He is author of Critical Theory and Disability: A Phenomenological Approach (Bloomsbury 2015), and Disability and Postsocialism (Routledge 2018). During 2000–​ 2009, he was actively involved in campaigning for disability rights in Bulgaria. Alexandra Novitskaya is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University (SUNY), New York, USA. Her articles have been published in NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies and Russian Review. With Janet Elise Johnson, she co-​authored a chapter on gender in Russian politics in two editions of Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain (Rowman & Littlefield 2015 and 2019). Her research interests are post-​Soviet sexuality, national identity, migration studies, and queer theory. Alexandra’s doctoral dissertation explores the experiences of post-​Soviet LGBTQ migrants in the United States. Since 2010, she has been translating films for the Side-​by-​Side LGBT International Film Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia). She is also a volunteer at several New York-​based organizations that support LGBTQ immigrants and asylum seekers. Shana Penn is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, Berkeley, California, USA. She is the author of Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press 2005), which received the AWSS Heldt Prize in 2005 and is published in Polish as Sekret Solidarnosc (2nd edition, W.A.B. Publishers 2014). With Jill Massino, she co-​edited Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (Palgrave 2009). She serves on the Council of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and on the Advisory Committee of Notes From Poland. Andrea Pető is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, and a Doctor of Science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She was awarded the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by the President of the Hungarian Republic in 2005, the Bolyai Prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2006, and All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values in 2018. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She is author of Political Justice in Budapest after WWII (with Ildikó Barna, CEU Press 2015) and co-​editor of Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversation on War, Genocide and Political Violence (with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Routledge 2016) and edited the volume on War in the Interdisciplinary Handbook: Gender series

xxv

xxvi

Contributors

(Macmillan 2017). Her book on Women in the Arrow Cross Party came out in 2020 (Palgrave). Karen Petrone is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and inaugural Director of the University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences’s Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. Her research focuses on 20th-​and 21st-​century cultural and gender history in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Indiana University Press 2000) and The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University Press 2011). She has also co-​edited a volume of essays in comparative gender history with Jie-​Hyun Lim, entitled Gender Politics in Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (Palgrave 2011), and published an essay on gender and the memory of World War I in Gender and the Great War (edited by Grayzel and Proctor, Oxford University Press 2017). She is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Reading War Memory in Putin’s Russia. Joanna Regulska is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Vice Provost and Dean, Global Affairs at the University of California, Davis, USA. She has published on decentralization, democracy, feminist grassroots mobilizations, and changing gender roles under conditions of regime transformations. She is the author and co-​ author of seven books, among them Between Mayor and Vicar: Women’s Role in Polish Local Government (1990–​2016) (with M. Grabowska and E. Rekosz-​Cebula, Warsaw, Poland 2018), Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union (edited with B. Smith, Routledge 2012) and the author of over 100 articles and chapters. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the European Commission, the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and other funding agencies. She co-​established graduate degree programs in gender studies at the Central European University, Hungary and the Tbilisi State University, Georgia. Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild is Professor Emerita of Graduate Studies at The Union Institute and University, Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, a coordinator of the Center’s Gender, Socialism and Postsocialism Working Group, and a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center. She is author of Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–​1917 (Pittsburgh University Press 2010) as well as articles, reviews, and blogs about Russian and Soviet women’s activism. She is an editor of Aspasia and The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. From 1981 to 2001 she was Professor of Graduate Studies, and from 1988 to 1994, Director of the Russian School at Norwich University. She is an Executive Producer of the documentary film Left on Pearl about the 1971 Boston International Women’s Day march and the creation of the Cambridge Women’s Center, actions in which she participated. Agatha Schwartz is Professor of German and World Literatures and Cultures at University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research areas are 19th-​to 21st-​century Central European literature and culture, women’s writing, and narratives of trauma. Her books include Shaking the Empire, Shaking Patriarchy: The Growth of a Feminist Consciousness Across

xxvi

xxvi

Contributors

the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy (with Helga Thorson, 2014), Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy and its Legacy (2010), Shifting Voices: Feminist Thought and Women’s Writing in Fin-​de-​Siècle Austria and Hungary (2008), and The Third Shore: East Central European Women’s Prose (with Luise von Flotow, 2006). Her articles have appeared in, among others, Aspasia, German Studies Review, Hungarian Cultural Studies, Slavonica, Seminar, Journal of Austrian Studies, National Identities, and, along with her book chapters, in Canada, the USA, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, the UK, Brazil, and China. Tatsiana Shchurko is a researcher and feminist activist from Belarus and a PhD candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, Ohio, USA. She has published numerous articles on Belarusian health politics, gender education, and children’s rights. She also analyzes Soviet colonial gender politics in Central Asia. Her dissertation analyzes histories of Black feminist internationalism in order to re-​evaluate their legacy and relevance for today. Her research interests include queer/​feminist art, transnational feminism, postcolonial and decolonial theories, critical race studies, socialist and postsocialist studies, and politics of solidarity. Ivan Simić is a cultural and gender historian at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He has published a book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave 2018), and numerous articles on Yugoslav gender history. He has been a recipient of many fellowships and grants. He is the principal investigator on a major project that examines communist gender policies toward Muslim minorities in Eastern Europe, leading a large international team. Prior to joining Charles University, he has held fellowships at Carleton University, Yale, and the University of Graz. He earned his PhD at University College London in the UK, as an SSEES Foundation and the FBB Trust scholar. Koen Slootmaeckers is a Senior Lecturer in international politics at City, University of London, UK. He is also the outgoing co-​chair of the Council of European Studies’ Gender and Sexuality Research Network. His broad research interests relate to the international politics of the Other, which he analyses from a gender and sexuality perspective. His work analyzes power relations within transnational politics and seeks to de-​construct core-​periphery hierarchies. He has extensively researched the EU accession process in Serbia and how this process affects LGBT politics and activism. Koen is the editor of the book EU Enlargement and Gay Politics: The Impact of Eastern Enlargement on Rights, Activism and Prejudice (with Heleen Touquet and Peter Vermeersch, Palgrave 2016), and the author of a forthcoming monograph Coming In: Sexuality Politics and EU Accession in Serbia (Manchester University Press). His work has also been published, among others, in Political Studies Review, Theory & Society, Social Politics, Europe–​Asia Studies, and East European Politics. Andrea Spehar is Associate Professor in Political Science and director of the Centre on Global Migration (CGM) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interest is comparative public policy, particularly with regards to gender policy development in Central and Eastern Europe and immigrant integration policy in a European context. Her work has appeared in, among others, the Journal of European Public Policy,

xxvii

xxvi

Contributors

Comparative European Politics, Critical Social Policy, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Eastern European Politics & Societies, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Jennifer Suchland is Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, Ohio, USA. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, trained in political and feminist theory and area studies and jointly appointed in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In her first book, Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (Duke University Press 2015), she analyzed the re-​emergence of global anti-​trafficking discourse at the end of the Cold War. The book earned honorable mention for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies. Currently she is an ACLS/​Mellon Scholars & Society fellow at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is collaborating on a project called Abolition Today. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests include Russian civic activism and legal mobilization in the areas of gender and human rights, in both domestic and transnational politics. Her book Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and the European Court of Human Rights (with Valerie Sperling and Melike Sayoglu, Oxford University Press 2019) examines gender discrimination cases as well as LGBTQ+ discrimination cases from Russia and Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights. Her other books include Funding Civil Society: Foreign Assistance and NGO Development in Russia (Stanford University Press 2006), and Russian Civil Society: A Critical Assessment (co-​edited with Laura A. Henry and Alfred B. Evans, Jr., ME Sharpe 2005). Article publications appear in journals including International Organization, Global Environmental Politics, Communist and Post-​Communist Studies, Europe–​Asia Studies, Problems of Post-​ Communism, International Journal of Human Rights, and Human Rights Quarterly. Dorota Szelewa is Assistant Professor in Social Justice, University College Dublin, Ireland, and an Editor in Chief of the Journal of Family Studies. She completed academic programs at the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary), Warsaw University (Poland) and Dalarna University (Sweden) and received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. She worked at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences and at Warsaw University (Institute of Social Policy). Szelewa has published articles in journals such as Social Politics, Journal of European Social Policy, Social and Legal Studies, or Social Policy & Administration. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the issues of gender and social policy transformation in postcommunist countries, reproductive rights, migration, social investment, theories of institutional evolution, social policy and religion, and the problems of Europeanization. Judit Takács is a Research Chair at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence, and a Doctor of Science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, leading research teams and conducting independent research on topics including the social history of homosexuality, genderphobia, and community engagement. She completed an MA in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, holds a

xxviii

xxxi

Contributors

PhD in sociology (2002), and a Diploma Habilitationis (2011). Her recent publications include “Democracy deficit and homophobic divergence in 21st century Europe” (with I. Szalma, Gender, Place & Culture 2020) and “How involved are involved fathers in Hungary? Exploring caring masculinities in a post-​ socialist context” (Families, Relationships, and Societies 2019). Currently she is an Academy in Exile fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI), Essen, Germany. Nataliya Tchermalykh is a Social Anthropologist, working at the intersection of art and law. Born in Kyiv in 1984, she took an active part in the feminist movement in the region and was a founding member of Femynistychna Ofenzyva. Nataliya Tchermalykh holds a doctoral degree in anthropology and sociology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (Switzerland). She is a postdoctoral teaching and research fellow at the University of Geneva. Her research interests include the entanglements of civic and legal activism with artistic practices in the post-​Soviet region and globally. In 2015, she published Paysages Instables: Des Artistes Ukrainiens entre Révolution et Guerre [Shifting Landscapes: Ukrainian Artists between Revolution and War]. Jennifer Utrata is Professor of Sociology in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, USA. She is the author of the award-​winning monograph, Women Without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Cornell 2015). Her research interests focus on how economic and cultural transformations shape gender and intimate relationships in families. She has published on nonresident fathers and divorce, the effects of neoliberal capitalism on the self, intersections of gender and age, multiple femininities and men’s drinking, and the myriad ways in which unpaid care work shapes gender inequality globally. Her current research, supported by an ACLS Burkhardt Residential Fellowship in the Humanities, examines "intensive grandmothering,” intergenerational supports, and connections to the broader stalled gender revolution in the United States. Eszter Varsa is Romani Rose Fellow at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University’s Department of History, Germany. From 2014 to 2016, she was Marie Sklodowska-​Curie Intra-​European (IEF) Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg. She is an advisory board member of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories. She is the author of Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the “Gypsy Question” in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–​1956 (CEU Press 2021). Her articles have appeared in Nationalities Papers, East European Politics and Societies, Aspasia, and The History of the Family, where she recently co-​edited a special issue on reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe. Her current project examines how efforts toward the eradication of diseases, the improvement of health, and hygienic conditions in the framework of eugenic state building in interwar Austria and Hungary were linked to the persecution of Roma. Sinéad Walsh teaches in the Sociology department at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests include gender, civil society, and conflict in the former Soviet Union, and she has published on women’s activism and peacebuilding in Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as dilemmas in feminist fieldwork. Her PhD was awarded by Trinity

xxix

xxx

Contributors

College Dublin in 2016. She is currently working on an ethnographic monograph based on fieldwork in the South Caucasus. Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA. Her book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth Century Germany, was awarded the 2017 Ernst Fraenkel Book Prize for Contemporary European History and the 2017 Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. She has published articles on food, the body, and memory in East and West Germany in the Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte, Central European History, and German Studies Review, and is currently working on a transnational history of Anorexia Nervosa and “disordered eating” in the late Cold War. Cynthia Werner is Professor of Anthropology and is currently serving as the Director of ADVANCE within the Office of the Dean of Faculties at Texas A&M University, Texas, USA. She is also the past-​President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. Her research focuses on economic, environmental, and gender issues within the postsocialist states of Central Asia (especially Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the Kyrgyz Republic). She has conducted research on rural survival strategies in a postsocialist context, gift exchange and bribery, international tourism development, bazaar trade, and bride abduction. She has authored and co-​authored articles about Central Asia that have appeared in Central Asian Survey, American Anthropologist, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, Europe-​Asia Studies, and Human Organization. Nancy M. Wingfield is a cultural and gender historian of Habsburg Central Europe. Her numerous publications include the award-​winning monograph, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford University Press 2017). Zofia Włodarczyk is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology with designated emphasis in Human Rights at the University of California Davis, USA. Previously she received a Master’s degree in Sociology at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests include women’s rights, gender-​based violence, migration, and refugees. Zofia’s doctoral dissertation explores the experiences of women from the North Caucasus region fleeing domestic violence and political persecution. Sharon Wolchik is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Washington DC, USA where she teaches and does research on Central and East European politics. She is author of Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe (with Alfred G. Meyer, Duke University Press 1983), Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (with Valerie Bunce, Cambridge University Press 2011), and Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics, and Society (Pinter 1992) and editor of Central and East European Politics: From Communism to Democracy (with Jane L. Curry, Rowman & Littlefield, 5th edition 2018), Women in Power in Post-​Communist Parliaments (with Marilyn Rueschemeyer; Indiana University Press 2009), and Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe (with Jane S. Jaquette, Johns Hopkins University Press 1998). Elizabeth A. Wood is Professor of Russian and Soviet History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, where she also directs the

xxx

xxxi

Contributors

Russian Studies Program and the MIT-​Russia Program. Her books include The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (1997); Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (2005); and Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine (co-​authored, 2016). She has also published a number of articles in Theory and Society, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Slavic Review, The Soviet & Post-​Soviet Review, Russian Review, and Gender and History. Christine D. Worobec is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of History at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA. She has published widely on 19th-​century Russian and Ukrainian peasants, women and gender issues, and religious history. Her monographs, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-​Emancipation Period (Princeton University Press 1991) and Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press 2001), won the Heldt Prize. She co-​edited with Barbara Evans Clements and Barbara Alpern Engel, Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (University of California Press 1991), with Mary Zirin, Irina Livezeanu, and June-​Pachuta Farris, Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 2 volumes (M.E. Sharpe 2007), and most recently with Valerie A. Kivelson, Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–​1900: A Sourcebook (Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press 2020). She has been President of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (1995–​1997). Marita Zitmane is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia, where she teaches courses on gender and media, as well as advertising and consumer culture. She has been a Marie Curie Fellowship recipient. She is interested in gender representation in media and gender representation in advertising. Her work examines how the media has shaped the notion of gender roles in post-​Soviet society and how past notions of gender roles shape contemporary gender equality discourse. She is an author of several publications on gender representation in media, and has participated in international conferences on Gender and Women’s studies. She also serves as a gender equality expert. Jessica Zychowicz was a US Fulbright Scholar in 2017–​2018 to Kyiv-​Mohyla Academy. Her publications include her recent monograph Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-​First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press 2020). She is currently based at the University of Alberta in the Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program, Canada. She has also been a Fellow at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs 2015–​2016, a Visiting Scholar at Uppsala University’s Institute for Russian and East European Studies in Sweden, and has participated in talks and residencies at the University of St. Andrews in Edinburgh, NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and others. She earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan.

xxxi

xxxi

newgenprepdf

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a book that is collaborative to its core. Most of the collaborators are named here as authors, and we are deeply grateful for their willingness to engage in multiple rounds of conversations, sometimes fraught, but always productive as we pushed each other to get clearer on this multidisciplinary study of gender in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The discussions include multiple years of meetings and panels at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). We have learned so much from all of you, and we hope that when you read the book now in its whole, you see the intellectual arcs that we were aiming for when we asked you to revise or tweak the chapters yet one more time. We also want to recognize research assistants that we were so lucky to have. With the help of Lafayette College, Thalia Charles has steadfastly assisted us since the arrival of the first draft chapters and to the very end of submitting the volume. Karolina Mackiewicz from Brooklyn College, CUNY, also gave us many thoughtful comments and edits on the chapters, supported through the generosity of Janet’s colleague Anna Law, Herbert Kurz Chair of Constitutional Rights, and the Kurz Undergraduate Research Assistantship program. As we reached the final stages of revisions, Amber Hatcher, also from Brooklyn College, helped us read through the manuscript for clarity. We wish to thank Brooklyn College for Janet’s fellowship leave 2019–​2020 and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany, and the European Union for her FRIAS Senior Fellowship/​Marie Curie Fellowship. We thank the CUNY William P. Kelly Research Fellowship and Bronx Community College for Mara’s course releases in the fall of 2019 and fellowship leave in spring 2020. We are also grateful to New York University’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, for hosting the monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe for a quarter of a century. It is through our participation in the workshop—​founded and coordinated by Nanette Funk and Sonia Jaffe Robbins and cultivated by Ann Snitow, all from the Network East–​West Women—​that we gained the confidence to claim the authority to intervene in this rich and evolving field.

xxxii

1

PART I

Conceptual debates and methodological differences

2

3

INTRODUCTION Conceptual debates and methodological differences Janet Elise Johnson, Katalin Fábián, and Mara Lazda

The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia examines the contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-​Eastern Europe and parts of Eurasia (CEE&E) from the 20th through the first two decades of the 21st century. With the collapse of communism starting in the late 1980s, the past three decades brought this large and previously relatively isolated region quickly into extensive contact with the rest of the world. The Handbook asks how political forces have organized gender before, during, and after communism and how individuals and women’s/​feminists groups respond. This collection is structured to present the developments in the study of women and gender in CEE&E through the defining debates, highlighting specificity but also the many inviting and challenging connections globally. Gender is always one of the main axes around which politics, economics, and societies are organized, but Communist Party regimes in CEE&E explicitly politicized gender by raising and ostensibly solving the “woman question.” As Soviet power collapsed, state-​ defined gender ideologies transformed, making it even more obvious that not only social norms and economic conditions construct gender, but that gender is a structure of power shaped by distinct historical contexts. As developed in the chapters that follow, we hold that gender represents systems of difference, privilege, and oppression that affect us all—​ women, men, and those who do not fit within these binary categories—​and is created, not primarily through individual acts of sexism but through political, economic, and social processes, lived and inscribed into laws, informal norms, and practices. The Handbook demonstrates how gender has become politicized and central to the various regimes over the last century and a half in CEE&E. From the late 1980s, the study of gender within CEE&E grew rapidly inside and outside the region. The analysis has mostly been of women’s positions and later gender, eventually embracing intersectionality—​the dynamic matrix through which various structures of power operate, not just separately but in combination with each other. Some scholars focusing on gender have taken up the lens of postcoloniality—​the examination of the racialized and ethnicized legacy of imperialism and colonialism including the Soviet project—​and the interrogation of the unmarked categories of masculinity as well as hetero-​and cis-​normativity. Prominent scholarly disagreements have manifested, most 3

4

Janet Elise Johnson et al.

notably about western intervention, feminism, and the assessment of state socialist policies for promoting gender equality but also about the usefulness of traditional gender analytics. Driven by feminist commitments to integrating women’s stories, the Handbook’s chapters mostly rely on qualitative data, such as memoirs, oral history, archival research, ethnography, and interviews. Most of the chapters’ authors are trained as scholars of history, political science, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, or the study of the region, but there are also chapters from the perspectives of disability studies, social work, legal studies, peace studies, and public health. We did not overcome the legacy of scholarship’s focus on Russia or the tendency toward Cold War lenses, yet the inclusion of perspectives from across the region and alternative frameworks suggests paths to diversifying knowledge production. By focusing on countries that have a shared—​albeit, quite varied—​experience of communism in the 20th century, the Handbook makes an argument that this history continues to shape how gender is constructed. But, we argue that this communist history is neither the only shared experience, nor the only useful spatial or temporal framework for understanding the parameters of the region. When discussing pre-​World War I periods, the Handbook includes the lands of the Austro-​Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian Empires as they exerted significant influence regarding gender arrangements on these territories and peoples. When discussing the communist period, the Handbook interprets the Eastern Bloc, meaning the territories under Soviet influence in Central-​ Eastern Europe as well as the entire Soviet Union, and periods when Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania endorsed a form of communism while distancing themselves from the Soviet Union. After the early 1990s, major political shifts took place: some states divided, Germany reunited, some states entered into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. At the same time, the Handbook recognizes that postcolonial and intersectional perspectives especially complicate and challenge the idea that ideological and regime changes are critical junctures and raise questions as to whether a region as such exists. The COVID-​related crises of 2020, with their gendered and racialized impact, may further challenge our assertion. This first Part of the Handbook examines the development of the feminist study of CEE&E over time, including epistemological and methodological approaches and the most important continuing debates that inform and enrich the global intellectual engagement with gender in CEE&E. The second Part focuses on the emergence of women’s movements in their cooperation and collision with feminist movements and different regimes. The third Part analyzes how the dominant ideologies intended to organize gender relations, with the fourth Part deliberating how lived experiences conformed to—​ and challenged—​ such ideological visions. The fifth and six Parts are similarly paired in their dialogue with each other, with the fifth examining the ambiguity of the postcommunist transitions and the sixth focusing on gender-​specific policy debates, all the while considering the global, regional, state-​centric, and local dynamics. The study of gender in CEE&E is multidimensional, interdisciplinary, and relevant for professed and practiced ideology, policy, and everyday lives. It is transnational, intersectional, and reflexive, informed by intense debates and learning from the ongoing scholarly contentions. Over the last three decades, gender has become an integral, if derided, part of the study of CEE&E across the social sciences. This study is an important part of

4

5

Debates and differences

the decentering of the West in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, especially with its nuanced and innovative theorizing on the intersections of class, ethnicity, and race outside of western frameworks. With the rise of anti-​gender movements and leaders since the global financial crisis and their opposition to democracy and gender equality, these kinds of approaches to interpreting the intersections between gender and politics are crucial to understanding and undermining these logics and moving toward gender justice.

5

6

7

The development of the field

8

9

1 BETWEEN REGIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS Maria Bucur

At its most expansive definition, Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) contains both the world’s largest landmass and is home to over half a billion people. It is a space with a dizzying diversity of languages and other cultural attributes, and with a rich past in every aspect of human endeavor. Yet it has been the object of less interest in gender analysis than other parts of the world, especially the Americas and Western Europe. Scholars of CEE&E have framed answers to questions about how gender regimes are established and negotiated over time through specific spatial contexts: local, regional, national, transnational, or global. By gender regimes I mean the articulation of gender norms through state policies, as well as cultural institutions like religious denominations and kinship practices. Choices made to shift among them generate geographic hierarchies of meaning. When feminist activists and scholars frame the nation as the proper context for understanding gender regimes, they often render the local or transnational as secondary or even invisible for understanding gender norms. In other cases, explicit tension among spatial frameworks becomes productive for gender analysis. Local events become more meaningful when various layers of other spatially defined norms or processes are examined together: the national could be important for specific legislation, the transnational relevant for cultural networks, the local for cultural resignifications of gender policies. The intersection of various spatial contexts is particularly meaningful when gender analysis interrogates the relationship between intentional, institutionalized action, such as government policies about LGBTQ rights, and fluid discourses, like pride marches. This chapter points to the limits and productive possibilities of moving among geographic registers as strategies for understanding gender in CEE&E.

The region: What’s in a name? In the early 2000s, when I joined Francisca de Haan and Krassimira Daskalova to establish Aspasia, we had numerous discussions about the geographic reach and appropriate nomenclature. We ended up with “the International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History,” which is not an elegant or even

9

10

Maria Bucur

precise definition of the journal’s geographic reach, since countries like Turkey and Russia lie not only in Europe. It was a compromise aimed to encourage wide participation from scholars of gender and women’s history, as well as wide interest among readers from this region. We were confident that gender norms in this area had more in common than near invisibility in the historiography. Premodern Empires (Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg) that controlled much of the region generated gender regimes for parts of CEE&E as these states grew or shrank in size. Sometimes these shifts meant that older gender policies and discourses would be replaced by new ones. But sometimes political changes on the surface left gender regimes established in previous Empires somewhat untouched. For instance, the Central European Habsburg Empire struggled to gain and maintain legitimacy over inheritance practices in Southeastern European places like Croatia and Bosnia (Krešić 2011). The two sub-​regions had localized practices connected to religious dogma and customary law that gave women different rights than men. In Bosnia, therefore, one can speak about Central Europe as relevant geography for understanding the intentions of the Vienna-​based Habsburg regime. Southeastern Europe is relevant for understanding the Islamic schools that afforded women specific avenues for claiming inheritance (Zečević 2007). But Central Europe does not describe a unitary set of expectations, values, or discourses about gender norms. Though the strongly Catholic Habsburg Empire dominated this region, it did not impose Catholic gender norms on non-​Catholic subjects. The result was the juxtaposition of different, even contradictory principles and policies about marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other elements of gender roles (see also Wingfield, Chapter 28 in this Handbook). Religious institutions and practices predominant in parts of CEE&E are important for understanding the development of gender regimes both before secularization in the 20th century and also since the end of the Cold War. Yet they do not amount to a solid geographical region with specific, unique attributes. Even on matters of heteronormativity, the perspective of various Christian churches on homosexuality differed significantly from that of Islamic schools of thought in the region. The Christian discourses and the specific punishments leveled against non-​heterosexual behavior were more disparaging and drastic than any form of heteronormative disciplining taking place in Islamic communities. Even Orthodox Christianity, largely circumscribed to CEE&E, is a religion with significant regional variance, often impacted by the religious institutions of the specific Empire that ruled over Orthodox populations. The history and impact of Orthodox Christianity in Russia, where some categories of women had more property rights, is very different from the history of Orthodox Christianity in Romania, for instance (Bucur 2018b; Marrese 2002). Eastern Europe has been used in gender analysis more frequently than Central or Southeastern Europe, as “Eastern” served to identify countries with a state socialist regime in Europe after World War II and it was used primarily outside of the region, initially by politicians and scholars operating through the polarizing framework of the Cold War (Wolchik and Meyer 1985). The Soviet Union and its satellite countries presented gender equality early on as a mark of the communist regimes’ democratic accomplishments and progressive foundations. The (in)famous 1959 Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev served as a staging ground for making opposing claims on behalf of women’s emancipation on the basis of technological advancements (Hamilton and Phillips 2014). A more self-​critical position on the part of North American Sovietologists developed within the feminist scholarship in the 1980s. Some perspectives were more sympathetic 10

11

Regional and transnational contexts

to Marxist ideas about gender equality and to anti-​colonial perspectives on capitalism (Boxer 2007). The neat West/​East, capitalist/​communist binary became more complicated when feminist scholars and activists, such as Angela Davis (1981), began to introduce questions about racism in gender analysis. More recently, some scholars from former communist countries have assumed Eastern Europe as a self-​referential term to highlight both the communist legacies with regard to gender norms, as well as the power differentials between feminists and more generally women from this region in relation to the West (Kościańska and Owczarzak 2009). Communist policies regarding women’s rights have been a subject of debate especially after the end of the Cold War, when most of the scholarship on gender in this region began to flourish (de Haan 2016; Miroiu 2007). Many have tried to assess the extent to which legal changes led to actual forms of empowerment promised by communist regimes. While most feminist scholars today reject the depiction of state socialism as completely failing in its emancipatory promises, some consider women as the main agents of positive change or resistors to deleterious policies, with the state cast as repeatedly failing to incorporate gender considerations in crucial policies, such as wages and childcare (Bucur and Miroiu 2018; Harsch 2014). Others view the gender policies of these states as more intentionally and effectively aligned with women’s emancipation (Ghodsee 2018b). In the past decade, a greater level of differentiation has been evident in studies that compare European communist regimes. Though equal access to education, for instance, is still hailed as an important common feature, policies related to job placement and overall economic power turn out to be a function of specific gender policies of each regime, such as maternity leave, affordable childcare, and housing, rather than a common feature of all communist countries. Some of the greatest levels of variation seem to do with sexuality, from birth control to sexual identity and orientation (Lišková 2018; McLellan 2011). In those areas, the communism of Eastern Europe may turn out to be less important than other variables linked to longer-​term practices connected to other ideologies—​nationalism, feminism, and religion. Scholars are beginning to compare state socialist regimes in Europe to other Marxist regimes and movements around the world (Ghodsee 2018a; Varga-​Harris 2019). This trend has been described as transnational by some, global by others, or as a reassessment of the East–​West binary, which seeks to critique the hegemonic narrative of who won the Cold War. By examining linkages between individual communist regimes in Europe and the Global South, they resignify the impact of regimes with an explicit gender equality ideology on postcolonial countries. These studies invite us to consider East European communist regimes and especially women leaders as a global force for shaping gender-​ progressive movements and policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, framing East European women’s organizations from the communist period as forces for progress in the postcolonial world has seen a backlash. For some scholars in CEE&E (Miroiu 2007), the claim that women’s organizations under communism were progressive, feminist, and empowered women reads like a bad joke, as these did not translate into progressive feminist activism after 1989. And for those who still want to celebrate the neoliberal victory of capitalism over communism, to claim women were emancipated by communism reads like a threat (see Hinterhuber and Fuchs, Chapter 3 in this Handbook). The European Union (EU) became a new framework for resignifying East–​West gendered divisions. The postcommunist members that joined the EU starting in 2004 had to prove they were on board with gender mainstreaming (Roth 2008). At that time, gender studies graduate programs were just starting in CEE&E. Thus, aligning all policies and 11

12

Maria Bucur

structures of the government and public services to reflect EU standards about gender inclusiveness and justice became mostly an exercise in superficial training; rarely did it empower feminist scholars and activists to gain a more central foothold in policymaking. The results have been superficial, with no substantial investments in educating policymakers about existing problems and the value of gender mainstreaming. Many public servants have come to see this requirement as a western imposition, a reflection of East–​West power relations, or as a form of political correctness (Kováts and Põim 2015). Yet, gender mainstreaming was in fact homegrown in the region. CEE&E women activists began to think of themselves as part of this region in a meaningful way already after World War I. As these women started to travel and as international suffrage and socialist networks began to be better known in the postwar countries of this region, they also developed an interest in collaborating regionally. The Little Entente of Women became a network that operated through national chapters, but worked for the purpose of mutual interest and support (Daskalova 2008). Nationalists listened to socialists, religious conservatives offered words of praise for progressive feminists. The regional served as a site with an entangled history and common goals, such as providing equal benefits for all working women and men. Though policy was national, regional best practices became self-​assumed models. The Little Entente model of thinking regionally about gender regimes from the ground up has yet to resurface with vigor since 1989. There are few regional networks of women’s groups or even scholars working on gender analysis and few powerful exchanges of ideas and best practices. European and other international scholarly gatherings and publications that foster gender analysis have provided space for scholars from the postcommunist regimes as a platform for sharing and disseminating specific knowledge about related issues. Aspasia, for instance, has had a self-​conscious policy of encouraging the publication of research from CEE&E and dissemination of debates about gender history in the region. Until recent politics in Hungary required it to relocate its program to Vienna, the Central European University hosted conferences on gender studies, providing a welcoming environment for scholars from the region. The one broadly transnational network in the region is the Network of East-​West Women, but it also exists because of funding and support from the USA and has had uneven presence in CEE&E (see Funk, Chapter 15 in this Handbook). But a strong sense of regional solidarity among scholars of gender has yet to flourish. The one ostensibly more homegrown trans-​ regional effort to organize around questions about gender are the anti-​gender coalitions developing from Latvia to Croatia, and especially in Poland and Hungary (Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). But these organizations are also a product of substantial investments from outside the region. The rising World Congress for Families has organized six of its first 13 gatherings in CEE&E countries—​ the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Georgia, Hungary, and Moldova—​despite having been established in the USA and receiving funding from Christian fundamentalist organizations. It has found allies on the ground among governments (especially in Russia, Hungary, and Poland), as well as among the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In short, gender is becoming a point of interest and fostering connections, it seems, more vigorously among opponents of gender mainstreaming, feminist politics, and LGBTQ rights, than among activists and scholars of gender studies. The most complicated aspect of rendering this region meaningful for gender analysis pertains to the oversized role of Russia and the Soviet Union. In its historic and 12

13

Regional and transnational contexts

contemporary embodiments, Russia has a dizzying array of communities with different gender discourses and practices. The impact of the Russian dominant political and cultural institutions (especially the Orthodox Church) has been represented alternately as imperial, liberating, predatory, progressive, authoritarian, and democratizing in relation to gender (Kupari and Vuola 2019). There is no neutral ground in this heavily politicized scholarly minefield on which any gender analysis has been able to grow. But the Soviet Union, as the first political regime in the world to adopt a radical program for women’s equality, is an essential case study for anyone who seeks to understand how well women’s emancipatory promises of Marxism worked in real life (Atwood 1990). With a communist regime in power for three generations, the Soviet Union had the longest opportunity to translate ideas about gender equality into action. In addition, the cultural diversity of communities who went through these radical transformations is another essential variable for gender scholars to tease out how such policies played out in places like Latvia and Uzbekistan, and to what extent they generated a common set of gender practices and discourses (Blomberg et al. 2017; Peshkova 2014). There is little agreement among scholars, either in Russia and in the USSR successor states or elsewhere, about the overall quality of this experience, because in fact the same policies had different results in different parts of the country due to pre-​existing cultural and political differences that translated into different gender norms in those locales (Ilic 2017). In addition, the experience of gender empowerment through Russian imperialism has left few possibilities for appreciative analyses of Soviet gender policies, especially after 1991. Anti-​communism remains a nearly hegemonic position in some post-​Soviet countries, such as Estonia. Gender policies have started to be articulated in increasingly polarized terms as either pro-​European or pro-​Eurasian. Estonia’s government rallied behind gender mainstreaming, a reflection of the country’s pro-​European position (van der Molen and Novikova 2005). Armenia’s policies went from prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender to legislating the elimination of the word “gender” from any government policy. This switch happened as Armenian leaders rejected overtures by the EU toward a closer relationship in exchange for membership in the Russian-​led Eurasian Union (Nikoghosyan 2016).

The nation: Diverse approaches to gender analysis Most of the focus of gender activism and scholarship in CEE&E has centered on the national, from policymaking to cultural developments. During the 19th century, feminist activities became enmeshed with ethno-​nationalism, sometimes enthusiastically and other times more reluctantly. In imperial spaces, the nation served as a site of resistance, where women’s gender roles could be mobilized, especially as mothers. Feminist activists from the educated upper classes embraced this maternalist perspective and even participated in racist biopolitics. The proliferation of nation states after 1918 provided the institutional framework for new gender policies, from civil codes to state education, and created the foundation for negotiating on behalf of women’s equal rights, such as suffrage and property. State socialist regimes adopted diverse perspectives on the importance of studying gender issues, with increasingly varied outcomes. In Poland, for instance, the Academy of Sciences had vigorous women’s social history projects, but no such accumulation of research and publications can be seen in the case of Romania. Variances among countries in the region continue to this day, often a function of the level of interest in gender mainstreaming in different areas of knowledge and 13

14

Maria Bucur

policymaking. Initially, after 1989, clusters of gender studies researchers began to populate the social sciences and played an important role in policymaking. Nongovernmental organizations also participated in this process of enhancing the language and activities of gender mainstreaming. Yet a backlash has ensued especially since 2012. Even as the need continues to better understand the impact of gender norms on how state institutions, economic processes, and cultural tropes operate, growing ethno-​nationalism on the part of political parties and nongovernmental organizations is actively rejecting gender critiques as foreign (Kováts and Põim 2015). The national, however, remains a fruitful site for in-​depth empirical research, and gender analyses of CEE&E can benefit from their accumulation (see Sundstrom, Chapter 5 in this volume). We do not yet have sufficient empirical foundations for articulating innovative theoretical frameworks for comparative regional or transnational gender analyses in many subfields, especially for the study of sexuality. The difficult groundwork for constructing quantitative and qualitative archives that are deep and diverse enough in each country to enable generalizations and comparisons is still being done. What will hopefully take place in the next decade is both a diversification of themes, as well as a deepening of the analytical offers in rendering individual case studies relevant for broader transnational questions.

Transnational and global frameworks Transnational networks have connected activists and scholars of gender since the 19th century. With the founding of international suffrage and other women’s movements in the late 1800s, feminists, and women activists more generally, related their internal activities to women’s similar work in other parts of the world, such as Great Britain, the USA, Sweden, or Egypt. These links became more diverse in terms of class, ideological, and religious specificities. Interest in gender issues in a transnational context was further facilitated by the growth of international organizations after World War I, such as the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO). Women from CEE&E helped frame some of these discussions, such as the reports on female and child employment generated by the ILO. Institutional networks continued during the Cold War, to a great extent circumscribed by the priorities of the Soviet Union. Since 2000, scholars of gender in CEE&E have shown a growing interest in placing this region in wider transnational and even global frameworks. Some have recast Cold War narratives to privilege interactions among women’s networks in state socialist and postcolonial regimes (de Haan 2010). Others are uncovering women’s transnational networks further back, into the early 20th century, seeking to place activists in the region as active participants rather than recipients of external influence in suffrage movements, artistic developments, labor activism, consumption, and other major developments across the world (Bucur 2018a). Another approach has been to compare or relate case studies from CEE&E with other parts of the world (Johnson 2018). Some of these comparisons are meant to move beyond regional unity and inquire into other types of institutional and discursive frameworks that help illuminate specific gender dynamics. Studies focusing on gender norms and property rights in rural societies are one such example (Kingston-​ Mann 2018). Over the last two decades the global has become a more frequent framework for research in the social sciences and to some extent the humanities. The rapid globalization

14

15

Regional and transnational contexts

of certain processes, such as information sharing, economic production and services, prompted policymakers, activists, and scholars to ask new questions about gender power relations. The CEE&E region became involved in this process early on, especially after the end of the communist regime, when tight controls over foreign travel and access to information were eliminated. Many globalization processes cast women as victims of new forms of exploitation. Human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, is a problem in which CEE&E has been active both as a recipient and exporter. A growing demand around the globe for services such as childcare, domestic work, and nursing have also drawn women from this region into the global labor marketplace. Though always touted as opportunities, the wages, work conditions, and even personal safety of these individuals are under-​regulated and therefore prone to abuse by especially private employers. Some scholarship in the region has brought attention to the various negative effects of globalization on the economic power of women from CEE&E (Keough 2016). Globalization has brought with it, however, some forms of greater visibility and potential empowerment for individual women in the region. The ability to travel anywhere and gain access to resources previously unavailable has been a boon for the lucky few, like the Polish tech-​entrepreneur Marta Krupinskaia. But such spectacular success stories are not a mark of greater gender equality in CEE&E itself. The neoliberal order ushered in by the end of the Cold War provided new openings and opportunities, but did so by eliminating important considerations about structural gender inequalities. Most women have not had the opportunity to “lean in” as a means to climb the transnational corporate ladder. In fact, policies introduced recently in Poland and Hungary to encourage fertility by offering women financial rewards for giving birth and raising more children suggest that some current regimes in the region view women’s roles normatively as more closely related to reproductive anxieties than to opportunities for greater economic power. A promising development in rendering CEE&E analytically relevant for globalization is the intervention made by queer studies scholars from the region in relation to the theorization of queerness. In the past decade, scholars and activists focusing on locales other than the USA started to critique queer theory produced there as limited in being able to represent the specifics of non-​binary gender cultures in places like Africa. Anchored in anti-​colonial intellectual and political networks, these analyses have become more recently the object of criticism on the part of queer studies scholars in CEE&E (Kulpa and Mizieliñska 2011). For now, these articulations focus primarily on deconstructing existing analytical frameworks, insisting on the relevance of the local, such as the impact of the Orthodox Church on heteronormativity as the dominant discourse on sexuality. It remains to be seen how the local specifics will shape new articulations of queerness as a transnational phenomenon.

Conclusions The very diversity and complexity of the communities in CEE&E, inclusive of gender norms, is both daunting and also promising. To know how people in this region understand, appropriate, and challenge gender norms is necessary as a step toward better global understanding of gender injustices and solutions to them, as well as more broadly how political and economic processes function. To understand, for instance, how migration into and from the region is imbricated with local gender norms and practices, is to

15

16

Maria Bucur

better appreciate the overall impact of these population movements for families, industries, and state policy in CEE&E. Without a gender analysis of these processes, severe shortcomings in understanding their nature and impact lead to inadequate policymaking and socioeconomic problems down the road. The most fruitful future directions in gender analysis are likely to be a combination of locally, nationally, regionally, transnationally, and globally framed research. The national remains essential as a site for understanding government policies and citizenship as gendered developments. Local specificities of gender roles and practices need to be brought into greater focus as a way to challenge overgeneralizations about national trends in gender regimes, especially with regard to important varieties of experiences and power relations based on ethnic differences, religious practice and institutions, urban and rural contexts, and many other localized specificities, such as environmental changes. How CEE&E can be regarded as an intelligible region into the future, in the face of many transnational processes and globalization, remains to be determined. A more explicit dialogue among different geographic frameworks is necessary, as is the willingness to acknowledge both the strengths and weaknesses in these separate approaches. In the process, what CEE&E comes to signify may shift dramatically or even become useless. Despite its inelegant name, for now this spatial nomenclature serves as a productive site for deepening our knowledge about gender.

References Atwood, Lynne. 1990. The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-​role Socialization in the USSR. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Blomberg, Eva, Yulia Gradskova, Ylva Waldemarson and Alina Zvinkliene, eds. 2017. Gender Equality on a Grand Tour. Politics and Institutions—​the Nordic Council, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia. Leiden: Brill. Boxer, Marylin. 2007. “‘Communist Feminism’ as Oxymoron? Reflections of a ‘Second-​Wave’ Feminist Historian of European Socialism and Feminism.” Aspasia 1: 241–​246. Bucur, Maria. 2018a. The Century of Women: How Women Have Changed the World since 1900. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield. –​–​–​–​. 2018b. “To Have and to Hold: Gender Regimes and Property Rights in the Romanian Principalities and Habsburg Empire, 1600–​1914.” European History Quarterly 48 (4): 601–​628. Bucur, Maria and Mihaela Miroiu. 2018. Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Daskalova, Krassimira. 2008. “Balkans.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, edited by Bonnie Smith, 185–​195. Oxford: Oxford University Press Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House. de Haan, Francisca. 2010. “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF).” Women’s History Review 19 (4): 547–​573. –​–​–​–​, ed. 2016. “Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited.” Aspasia 10: 106–​168. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2018a. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2018b. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Hachette. Hamilton, Shane and Sarah T. Phillips, eds. 2014. The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford and St. Martin’s Press. Harsch, Donna. 2014. “Communism and Women.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, edited by Stephen A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ilic, Melanie, ed. 2017. The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-​Century Russia and the Soviet Union. London: Palgrave.

16

17

Regional and transnational contexts Johnson, Janet Elise. 2018. The Gender of Informal Politics: Russia, Iceland and Twenty-​First Century Male Dominance. London: Palgrave. Keough, Leyla. 2016. Worker-​Mothers on the Margins of Europe: Gender and Migration between Moldova and Istanbul. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kingston-​Mann, Esther. 2018. Women, Land Rights and Rural Development: How Much Land Does a Woman Need? New York: Routledge. Kościańska, Agnieszka and Jill Owczarzak, eds. 2009. “The East Speaks Back: Gender and Sexuality in Postsocialist Europe. Special Issue.” Focaal 53. Kováts, Eszter and Maari Põim, eds. 2015. The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the Anti-​ Gender Mobilizations in Europe. Budapest: Foundation for European Progressive Studies. Krešić, Mirela. 2011. “Entitlement of Female Descendants to Property of Croatian Communal Household.” Journal of European History of Law 2 (2): 73–​85. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte, eds. 2017. Anti-​Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Kulpa, R. and J. Mizieliñska, eds. 2011. De-​Centering Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. London: Ashgate. Kupari, Helena, and Elina Vuola, eds. 2019. Gender and Orthodox Christianity. Dynamics of Tradition, Culture, and Lived Practice. New York: Routledge. Lišková, Kateřina. 2018. Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–​1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marrese, Michelle Lamarche. 2002. A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–​1861. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McLellan, Josie. 2011. Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR. New York: Cambridge University Press. Miroiu, Mihaela. 2007. “Communism Was a State Patriarchy, Not State Feminism.” Aspasia 1: 197–​201. Nikoghosyan, Anna. 2016. “In Armenia, Gender is Geopolitical.” Open Democracy. www. opendemocracy.net/​en/​odr/​in-​armenia-​gender-​is-​geopolitical/​. Peshkova, Svetlana. 2014. Women, Islam and Identity: Public Life in Private Spaces in Uzbekistan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Roth, Silke, ed. 2008. Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union: Mobilization, Inclusion, Exclusion. New York: Berghahn. van der Molen, Irna and Irina Novikova. 2005. “Mainstreaming Gender in the EU-​Accession Process: The Case of the Baltic Republics.” Journal of European Social Policy 15 (2): 139–​156. Varga-​Harris, Christine. 2019. “Between National Tradition and Western Modernization: Soviet Woman and Representations of Socialist Gender Equality as a ‘Third Way’ for Developing Countries, 1956–​1964.” Slavic Review 78 (3): 1–​24. Wolchik, Sharon and Meyer, Alfred G., eds. 1985. Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zečević, Selma. 2007. “Missing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Muftis: Fatwa Texts and the Interpretation of Gendered Presences and Absences in Late Ottoman Bosnia.” In Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, edited by Amila Buturović and İrvin Cemİl Schick, 335–​360. London: I.B. Tauris.

17

18

2 FLUIDITY OR CLEAN BREAKS? Joanna Regulska and Zofia Włodarczyk

For centuries, Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) has been besieged by revolutions, wars, regime and ideological changes, partitioning, and repeated boundary shifts that divided communities and created new states. Marginalized social groups across the region have strategized, fought, built coalitions, demonstrated, won elections, and repeatedly demanded that their gender, sexual, ethnic, or racial identities be recognized and their rights acknowledged, that they be treated as equal regardless of their identity markings. All of these developments have altered social and cultural as well as legal practices and have left their mark on the ways in which genders are defined and operationalized, but also threatened and attacked in the region. This chapter explores the trajectory of these changes, in order to show how formations of gender and practices of gender dynamics have evolved in CEE&E. In this discussion, we hold that gender is constructed in intermeshed, interspersed, intermingled, non-​ linear, and also non-​chronological processes. It is an outcome of the complex interactions between and across a wide range of actors, forces, processes, and structures and, as they interact with different identity markings, they shape gender dynamics in CEE&E.

The critical junctures: Transition vs. transformation Scholars have offered periodization as the main approach to tracing the complex histories of CEE&E, emphasizing critical junctures connected to communism and European Union (EU) integration (Kubik and Linch 2013; Millán 2016; Regulska and Smith 2012; Roth 2008). Although none explicitly write of clean breaks, there seems to be a common understanding that gender dynamics are shaped sequentially, with each stage characterized by different sets of gender-​related conditions, restrictions, triggers, and changes. Yet, these scholars simultaneously recognize fluidity and continuity of processes and practices across these periods. From the periodization approach, scholars see the 19th century as a time of more visible mobilization on behalf of equal rights for women as they were acknowledged in public spaces in CEE&E. Women held first congresses, organized around suffrage movements, and established various women-​ focused organizations (Fuszara 2005).

18

19

Fluidity or clean breaks?

Communism, in turn, has been perceived by many as a period of the suppression of feminist movements and a break in the pursuit of equality of women’s rights. Scholars have extensively discussed the abolition of nongovernmental organizations and the arbitrariness with which remaining organizations became controlled by the communist authorities (Funk 2014). This top-​down control did not, however, suppress women’s and feminist consciousness about their positionality within larger social, economic, cultural, and political structures (Grabowska 2017). The fall of communism was considered as both a new period of gender formations and a return to the interrupted pre-​war progress in the area of gender equality. Scholars have also debated whether the end of Communist Party regimes in CEE&E meant a dramatic shift or more of a gradual transformation in gender formations. Over the last decade, scholars began to lean toward the assessment that state-​socialist policies for women were more a part of a “gender-​equality continuum” rather than a break from it (de Haan 2016). Such change in the scholarship has in part been occasioned by the emerging understanding of the reality of neoliberal policies, and in part by new studies on the role of women’s organizations under communism, with their often clear agenda for the advancement of women’s equality, though not necessarily with an explicit commitment to feminism (Johnson and Robinson 2007). For many countries in the region, EU integration offered a liberal economy and new democratic practices that, while promoting new gender power relations, sensitivities, and opportunities, led to new marginalization and struggles (see Spehar, Chapter 36 in this Handbook). Although changes of such a scope are not new (e.g., the African or South-​East Asian decolonization movement, or Latin American struggles to overthrow authoritarian regimes), what makes these political changes in CEE&E different is their relatively peaceful character (with Romania and former Yugoslavia—​and later Georgia and Ukraine—​as important exceptions) as well as the simultaneous transformation of the region through its partial incorporation into the European Union. Despite the disruptions caused by geopolitical changes, the specific context of these transformations created conditions conducive to continuity and fluidity rather than to a clean break. When discussing recent political changes in CEE&E, scholars usually focus on 1989/​ 1991 because at that time transformation happened across multiple countries (except in Yugoslavia, where political and economic changes started to appear several decades earlier). Many assumed that the arrival of competitive elections, new freedoms, and economic liberalization would result in a new recognition of women and others as powerful agents of change, such that democracy would emerge as inclusive of all social groups and genders. What did happen is that some democratic practices germinated, through many pathways, and with mixed effects and impacts on the gender dynamics in the region. The political soil was diverse, notwithstanding the forced similarities of the communist policies of “women’s emancipation.” Different histories of the struggle for national independence and identities of being the colonizer (e.g., Poland in 16th century) and being colonized in the 20th century (as a part of the Soviet bloc) have all contributed to a widely uneven and differentiated democratization process and conceptualization of gender across CEE&E. This in turn not only further perpetuated the gendering process (emergence of clearer anti-​women and anti-​LGBT+ rhetoric), but also helped to establish gender definitions, agendas, struggles, and mobilizations in the region. The debate over whether 1989/​1991 was a clean break is also shaped by intersectional perspectives. Kulpa and Mizielińska (2011), while discussing non-​heterosexuality in the

19

20

Joanna Regulska and Zofia Włodarczyk

region, argue that from the western progressive perspective, the “end of communism” is placed as another episode in a sequence of events. From the perspective of the CEE&E region, changes were more abrupt and multidirectional. Thus, from a western interpretation, postcommunism can be seen as a “time of sequence,” but from CEE&E’s it is rather a “time of coincidence.” While never presenting a full clean break, the fluidity of discourses, practices, and systems has resulted in the creation of genders of different forms, meanings, and understandings. They have all been subject to different interpretations and practices, not only across the region, but also within each state. The post-​transformation CEE&E states’ repositioning to protect businesses and private property rather than collective rights, resulted in the states’ abandonment of those economically insecure (such as women, children, elderly, and the working class) or those not conforming to traditional views of individual identities. In spite of the promise of a better future, many of the new processes resulted in the suppression of rights for numerous individuals and social groups, in an increase of nationalistic, patriarchal, and paternalistic attitudes, discrimination, abuse and/​or the restriction of basic freedoms. These transformations reintroduced and perpetuated the ethnic, racial, and cultural desire for homogenization. The complexities of the processes involved have reinforced the sense of fluidity, of déjà vu of struggles and mobilizations, and of arguments made in the past. Thus, even as the context within which genders in CEE&E are being defined and redefined is changing, there is clearly an underlying continuity of processes, including those of struggle and mobilization.

Shaping gender identities and dynamics: Actors and processes To untangle these complex interactions and to develop a greater understanding of the ways in which different processes have shaped gender dynamics in CEE&E, we offer in Figure 2.1 a visual representation of actors (external circle), processes and structures (middle circle), and identity markings (inner circle) that interact with each other and thereby shape gender dynamics. These relationships are initiated by actors who, through diverse processes, mold structures that in turn influence and form gender identities and dynamics. Gender identities reflect individual experiences, and at the same time represent intersections of multiple identities such as race, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and (dis)ability, among other markings. The presented representation by no means pretends to be encompassing; rather, it signals the dynamism and complexities of the processes involved, the range of actors, and most of all the unpredictability of the outcomes. Diverse actors in CEE&E have influenced gender dynamics (Regulska and Roseman 1998) often operating in intricate ways and at different scales (from neighborhood to transnational). In the last 30 to 40 years, the actors include, among others: the state, factions and political parties, progressive and regressive nongovernmental organizations, academic spaces such as women’s/​gender studies, businesses and oligarchs, mass and new social media, nuclear and extended family, religious institutions from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity to Muslim and Jewish, the military, and various international institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), the EU, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Individuals themselves, with their unique identity markings and personal experiences, have engaged and interacted with these actors on an everyday basis. All of the actors have exercised influence and power in their conscious and unconscious 20

21

Fluidity or clean breaks?

Figure 2.1  Actors, processes, and structures shaping gender identities and dynamics

quest, across a variety of structures, to shape the processes through which genders are being constituted in different locations and under different social, political, economic, and cultural conditions. Over the years, the frameworks within which each actor and its groups operated and the actions that they took, have changed. This has in turn led to significant changes and evolutions in the ways in which institutions and structures, and therefore gender processes and relations between actors, have been formed. Looking at the role of the state and its institutions with varying and often conflicting agendas shows their far-​reaching impact, influencing gender constructions and relations at the international, national, regional, and local scales. Regardless of the frequently changing CEE&E state’s ideological stance, its units are embedded in every aspect of individuals’ lives. Communist states did advance women’s rights to work and to have custody of their children, while post-​EU accession states have eroded women’s access to work, resulting in unemployment and underemployment, even though such erosion varies across the region (de Haan 2016). The state also decides on lesbian, gay, bi-​sexual, 21

22

Joanna Regulska and Zofia Włodarczyk

transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBT+) people’s rights to enter into a civil union, get married, have children, or even express one’s identity in public (O’Dwyer 2017). The state plays an important role in regulating domestic violence (Fábián 2010) and continues to influence individuals’ decisions to have children, by providing different welfare state programs, regulating birth control and abortion access, or permitting adoption. In Romania, abortion was legalized in 1957 only to be severely restricted in 1967, and legalized again after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989. In Poland, the shift was the opposite, with postcommunist leaders quickly criminalizing most forms of abortion. This multidirectionality of change shows that generally recognized actors (such as a state) operate differently over time, place, and under different political regimes and result in different gender outcomes. Starting in the 1980s, before communism’s official collapse, different international institutions, foreign labor unions, and the international community became engaged in the region. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Council of Europe, foreign governments, foundations, or aid organizations began to play a more critical and visible role. Existing relationships with some international institutions were renegotiated and reinvigorated as states showed agency as a part of a collective process of transformation, for example, the UN and the engagement with the UN conventions (e.g., the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women). At the same time, nongovernmental organizations also actively engaged as they structured new relationships with international nongovernmental organizations and international institutions (e.g., Amnesty International, the International Women’s Health Coalition, the International Planned Parenthood Federation). Some international organizations in the CEE&E region became more visible and accessible as post-​Soviet states were admitted as members (e.g., the Council of Europe) and yet another set of institutions emerged as key players in the region (e.g., the EU, NATO). Their impact on shaping gender dynamics varied; while the Council of Europe has been far more progressive on the gender agenda than the EU, it has not been able to exercise much power over its members to secure the reinforcement of its gender-​related standards. Communist Party promises of gender equality were more rhetoric than practice and this stand, albeit in a different way, continued after the transformation; domestic violence, patriarchal attitudes, discrimination were all there and did not go away. In the 1990s, gender equality was not a priority for political parties, and in the last decade, parties in power (in Poland, Hungary, Georgia, Slovenia, and Russia, among others), have outright rejected calls for response to domestic violence or to the lack of LGBT+ rights, because they saw these as threats to more traditional and established forms of gender ideology. Members and allies of these parties (often within established religious institutions) began to call for the protection or restoration of “traditional family values,” casting feminism and gender movements as having been enforced from outside (Kuhar and Paternotte 2018; Wierzcholska 2018; see Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook). Grassroots movements and women’s organizations have also undergone numerous multidirectional transformations over time, but they continue to fight for the rights of the underprivileged and marginalized. In the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century they grew strong, focusing on suffrage, helping the poor, children, and the sick, or fighting for women’s right to vote. During World War I and II, women carried the burden of organizing not only everyday survival but also social and political life. After the communist takeover, parts of citizen’s activism weakened, as it was limited to organizations approved by the Communist Party. That led to the above-​the-​ground activism that predominantly 22

23

Fluidity or clean breaks?

developed around everyday life issues (e.g., protests against raising prices of food in Poland during the 1970s) (Grabowska 2017) and underground oppositions that repeatedly confronted political regimes in power, such as the feminist or gay undergrounds (Fábián, Hrycak, and Johnson 2016). After the 1989/​91 transformations, feminist and gender movements re-​entered the public sphere, focusing on domestic violence, equal pay and workers’ rights, LGBT+ rights, women’s political participation, or increasing unemployment (Lukić, Regulska, and Zaviršek 2006). At the same time, by the 2000s, driven by changing dominant political ideologies and societal values, anti-​feminist, anti-​ gender equality, anti-​abortion as well as anti-​LGBT+ advocates became more visible and organized, and entered the public sphere in heretofore unseen strengths (Kováts and Põim 2015). Under communism, women’s/​gender studies as a field of scientific enquiry and university education was mostly invisible—​limited predominantly to individual research, publications, and isolated interventions—​but the discussions of women’s rights were nonetheless present across many disciplines. In the early 1990s, formal gender studies started to emerge across CEE&E (Aavik and Marling 2018; Nyklová 2018) and grew stronger in the early 2000s. This often began within the sphere of civil society and nongovernmental organizations, with the most exciting work taking place in the former Yugoslavia. Individual scholars and nongovernmental organizations eventually managed to establish only a few degree programs in women’s and gender studies in Hungary, Georgia, and Romania, with many more certificates and courses offered. By 2020, the conservative and patriarchal political climate resulted in cancelation and elimination of gender studies, when authorities in several states in CEE&E fomented a backlash (e.g., Hungary and Romania). Hungary even forced the exile of the Central European University to Vienna, Austria, among other factors, because of its gender studies program. The pressures to engage with gender discourses, debates, and practices also became visible in mainstream business, media, and popular culture. Those actors brought with them diverse ideologies and practices as well as strong and diverse financial pressures from sponsors, shareholders, and other constituencies. They thereby formed and influenced gender trends and gender dynamics across different social groups; in the process they often rejected feminism and feminist approaches as imported from the West. In other instances, they appropriated feminist tropes in the service of selling goods and services as empowering to women. The polarization of political and social environments paralleled the emergence of new conservative and liberal newspapers, TV programs, and social media platforms, which often ridiculed, undermined, and rejected feminist, women’s, or LGBT+ agendas. At the same time, some new magazines for girls and boys sought to promote gender equality from an early age, for example, Kosmos or Szajn in Poland or AnaLize and D.O.R. (Doar o Revista) in Romania, while others focused specifically on LGBT+ issues (Replika in Poland). In the CEE&E region, the family defined as a “nuclear” group, with a father as a primary breadwinner and a mother as a care provider, was introduced in the early 19th century based on the Napoleonic Code. During and after communism, what constitutes a family has changed: fertility rates decreased, the number of divorces has increased, new forms of cohabitation have emerged, and the number of children born within new, non-​ traditional unions has increased. Such changes have not, however, progressed steadily across the region or within all countries of CEE&E. The advancing diversification of families across the region makes it impossible to talk about one family model. While in the past, the heterosexual family was defined by legal or blood ties, this is not so clear in 23

24

Joanna Regulska and Zofia Włodarczyk

the case of non-​heterosexual unions. Not only did the form of the family start to vary, but also the understanding of who does and who does not hold the power, authority, or rights within such unions becomes increasingly diversified. In Europe, prior to the suffragist movement, it was the father who automatically gained custody rights in the case of a divorce (Htun and Weldon 2011). Nowadays, it is most commonly the mother, who is assigned the right (and obligation) to take care of children after a breakup. The LGBT+ community is still denied many basic rights related to starting a family. In many countries in CEE&E neither same-​sex marriages nor civil unions of same-​sex couples are allowed (e.g., Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine). The right of same-​sex couples to adoption remains rare in the region (Fábián and Korolczuk 2017). In many religions strong in the region, the belief of ascribing certain gender roles based on one’s biological sex, whereby sex and gender have been seen as synonymous, has been resurgent. Leaders from the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and Islam have commonly voiced conservative opinions on gender-​related issues, including women’s role in marriage, same-​ sex marriages, abortion, or contraception (Essed, Goldberg, and Kobayashi 2005). The political role that institutionalized religion plays in many CEE&E countries can be seen in the political engagement of religious leaders, teaching religion in public schools, and registering religious views by the state authorities (e.g., Lithuania, Romania, Estonia). In such models, church leaders interfere in the state’s decisions concerning access to legal abortion, sex education, or LGBT+ rights (Poland, Russia). Church and state remain more separate in some countries, with the Czech and Hungarian governments remaining the most secular (Stan and Turcescu 2011). This brief review of key actors in CEE&E shows how their existence sets the architecture within which gender identities and gender dynamics are shaped. It also points not only to their diversity, but also to the unlimited opportunities for interactions between them. The unpredictability of these interactions and behaviors assures the constant fluidity of concepts and practices of gender dynamics.

Interaction of actors Actors do not act in isolation; they are constantly engaged in interactions with one another across the CEE&E region. They create partnerships, coalitions, networks, associations, and alliances. They bond together to unleash collective power and resilience. At the same time, the unions may also be subjected to resistance, tension, even violence from other actors. Actors can contradict each other and sabotage each other’s efforts. Although some do show longevity in their agenda and connection, their coming together is often fluid and temporary, more focused on the alignment of goals or benefits of the moment than on long-​term strategic partnerships. The diversity and unpredictability of interaction patterns result in different forms, contents, and directions of outcomes when it comes to genders’ construction processes. For example, international institutions such as the UN and the Council of Europe have repeatedly condemned violence against women, calling for national legislation. But it is national legislatures that have to make laws, and states have the power to implement or enforce relevant anti-​violence legislation or introduce policies to mandate certain approaches aimed at addressing these oppressions and discriminatory practices (Regulska and Smith 2012). The willingness of individual ministries—​and regional and local governments—​in CEE&E to condemn and eradicate gender-​based violence has 24

25

Fluidity or clean breaks?

been extremely uneven. In some cases, state institutions, for a period of time, were open to providing funding and services, to cooperating with nongovernmental organizations and other non-​state actors, and to recognizing the diverse needs and identities of those in need; at other times all funding and services were withdrawn by state institutions, and nongovernmental organizations were tasked with filling the void. Still, monitoring and evaluation measures are a rarity in CEE&E. Ultimately, all these interactions, behaviors, approaches, and responses shape the context of how the question of gender-​based violence is addressed and what rights are guaranteed. Civil society can be strongly influenced by the state, as happened under communism or in contemporary authoritarian postcommunist states, where women’s organizations have been closed down, and activism was restricted to organizations approved by the ruling party. However, grassroots movements can also shape the state’s legislations in positive and negative ways. After the regime changes, women’s movements placed the topic of domestic violence on the political and public agenda, and promoted it as a policy issue. At the same time, however, grassroots homophobia has helped bolster resistance to gender mainstreaming on the part of states, for example, in public education. Moreover, civil society in the form of gender think tanks, advocacy groups, or resource centers did implement or replace the state’s actions by providing services and resources, and by mobilizing groups for political action. International institutions also significantly affect civic mobilizations insofar as they often provide financial support to financially strapped nongovernmental organizations. This financial dependence, it should be noted, makes groups vulnerable to being manipulated or influenced by donor agendas. Such a dependency was especially visible in CEE&E, in the early 2000s and that dependency led to a mismatch between the actions of international donors, grassroots organizations, and local women’s needs (Ghodsee 2004). Similarly, in the case of social media, in the era of #MeToo and women’s mass protests, but also of far-​right outspoken rhetoric, social media has played a crucial role as a mobilization platform that gives voice to representatives of civil society and individuals, who have not until now been heard.

Conclusions This chapter calls for recognizing the fluid and dynamic processes of gender formations in CEE&E, resulting from complex interactions among a multiplicity of actors and under ever-​changing conditions. We suggest that such a conceptualization of gender dynamics allows a more nuanced understanding of the processes and practices through which gender identities, relations, and power are produced in CEE&E. This fluidity approach, unlike one that emphasizes periodization and ruptures, opens up the possibility of an examination of the impact and role of fractures and fissures on gender formations; in doing so it, at the same time, rejects a view that focuses on an imagined singularity of the forces at play. It permits a microscopic scrutiny of actors’ behaviors, of their interactions, and of their responses to the ever-​changing internal and external conditions within which power dynamics exist. It thereby opens up the possibility for an inquiry into how both continuity and ruptures influence gender conception and gender practices, in different contexts, time, and place. The recognition of fluidity as the core focus implies that the fight for rights, for example, exists on a continuum, where the past informs the future; once-​won rights (e.g., abortion), can very easily be taken away when political power shifts and conditions change. Things that many of us take for granted (e.g., the existence of gender studies) can be easily lost. 25

26

Joanna Regulska and Zofia Włodarczyk

But while the successes and achievements of past generations might be fragile and temporary, their loss signifies not just a continued need for advocacy, but also a need for the recognition that the particularity of certain moments requires that future struggles and strategies look beyond what may seem their obvious framing. Here this inherent volatility and uncertainty may direct attention to processes that earlier remained unnoticed, opening doors to new potential forms of inquiry that would attempt to untangle the complexities of the relationships forming gender dynamics. The variability of outcomes in the ways in which gender dynamics are formed and function, draws our attention to the need for a continued interrogation of conditions under which questions are asked. The outcomes of those inquiries will not only lead activists, scholars, and organizations to effective strategies, but will also allow for theorizing of these conditions.

References Aavik, Kadri, and Raili Marling. 2018. “Gender Studies at the Time of Neo-​liberal Transformation in Estonian Academia.” In Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance. Global Challenges, Glocal Dynamics and Local Impacts, edited by Heike Kahlert, 41–​64. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. de Haan, Francisca. 2016. “Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited.” Aspasia 10 (1): 102–​168. Essed, Philomena, Davis Theo Goldberg, and Kobayashi Audrey, eds. 2005. A Companion to Gender Studies. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing. Fábián, Katalin, ed. 2010. Domestic Violence in Postcommunist States: Local Activism, National Policies, and Global Forces. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Fábián, Katalin, Alex Hrycak, and Janet Elise Johnson. 2016. “Women’s and Feminist Activism in Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.” In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy A. Naples, 1–​5. Chichester, West Sussex and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Fábián, Katalin and Elżbieta Korolczuk, eds. 2017. Rebellious Parents: Parental Movements in Central-​Eastern Europe and Russia. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Funk, Nanette. 2014. “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 344–​360. Fuszara, Małgorzata. 2005. “Between Feminism and the Catholic Church: The Women’s Movement in Poland.” Czech Sociological Review 41 (6): 1057–​1075. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2004. “Feminism-​by-​Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminism, and Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 (3): 728–​753. Grabowska, Magdalena. 2017. “Bits of Freedom: Demystifying Women’s Activism under State Socialism in Poland and Georgia.” Feminist Studies 43 (1): 141–​168. Htun, Mala and Laurel Weldon. 2011. “State Power, Religion, and Women’s Rights: A Comparative Analysis of Family Law.” Law & Social Inquiry 18 (1): 145–​165. Johnson, Janet Elise and Jean C. Robinson, eds. 2007. Living Gender after Communism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Kováts, Eszter and Maari Põim, eds. 2015. Gender as Symbolic Glue: The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the Anti-​ Gender Mobilizations in Europe. Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies. Kubik, Jan and Amy Linch. 2013. Postcommunism From Within. Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony. New York: NYU Press. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte, eds. 2018. Anti-​Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing Against Equality. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Kulpa, Robert and Joanna Mizielińska, eds. 2011. De-​Centring Western Sexualities. Central and Eastern European Perspectives. New York: Ashgate Publishing. Lukić, Jasmina, Joanna Regulska, and Darja Zaviršek. 2006. Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Ashgate Publishing.

26

27

Fluidity or clean breaks? Millán, Márgara. 2016. “The Traveling of ‘Gender’ and Its Accompanying Baggage: Thoughts on the Translation of Feminism(s), the Globalization of Discourses, and Representational Divides.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 23 (1): 6–​27. Nyklová, Blanka. 2018. “Gender Studies in the Czech Republic: Institutionalisation Meets Neo-​ liberalism Contingent on Geopolitics.” In Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance. Global Challenges, Glocal Dynamics and Local Impacts, edited by H. Kahlert. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. O’Dwyer, Conor. 2017. Coming Out of Communism. The Emergence of LGBT Activism in Eastern Europe. New York: NYU Press. Regulska, Joanna and Bonnie G. Smith, eds. 2012. Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union. London and New York: Routledge. Regulska, Joanna and Mindy Jane Roseman, 1998. “What is Gender?” Transitions, January 15. www.tol.org/​client/​article/​4973-​what-​is-​gender.html?print. Roth, Silke, ed. 2008. Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union. Mobilization, Inclusion, Exclusion. New York: Berghahn Books. Stan, Lavina, and Turcescu, Lucian. 2011. Church, State, and Democracy in Expanding Europe (Religion and Global Politics). New York: Oxford University Press. Wierzcholska, Agnieszka. 2018. “Gender in the Resurgent Polish Conservatism.” In New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe, edited by K. Bluhm and M. Varga. London and New York: Routledge.

27

28

3 NEOLIBERAL INTERVENTION Analyzing the Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates Eva Maria Hinterhuber and Gesine Fuchs

Over the last three decades, the major political and theoretical challenges for feminist scholarship in examining Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) have been exemplified in the Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates: These debates started in the early 1990s with a dispute between the Croatian journalist, novelist, and feminist Slavenka Drakulić (1993) and Nanette Funk (1993), a US-​based professor of philosophy and feminist, who were simultaneously in the process of jointly founding the Network East-​West Women (see Funk, Chapter 15 in this Handbook). At a time when eastern and western feminists had the historical chance to exchange their experiences gained under specific political, economic, and societal circumstances, the potential (in-​)compatibility of “Feminism East and West” (Funk 1993) took center stage in their exchange, covering the dual quality of feminism: analysis and activism. A decade later, the discussion focused on how to evaluate the feminist activism that had emerged in the region. US-​based Kristen Ghodsee (2004), ethnographer and professor of gender studies, branded the West-​induced “Feminism-​by-​Design” as a major enabler of the new neoliberal economic system, under whose dramatic follow-​up costs, vast parts of the population experienced severe suffering (Dale and Fabry 2018). Funk (2006) responded, questioning this characterization of women’s activism in the region and rejecting a generalizing “Imperialist Criticism.” Another 10 years later, the debate continued, now over the scope of action of state socialist women’s organizations and their successes (Funk 2014, 2015; Ghodsee 2012, 2015). This time, the debate broadened to the evaluation of gender relations under communism, bringing back in Drakulić (2015) as well as adding Belgrade-​based philosopher Adriana Zaharijević (Ghodsee and Zaharijević 2015) and Central European University historian Andrea Pető (2015). Ghodsee then elaborates her stance in The New York Times (2017) and in a book, Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism (2018). United by their focus on feminism and their interest in exploring socialism, the three main contributors to this debate can be firmly placed on the left of the spectrum. Still, Ghodsee is clearly more sympathetic to state socialism than Drakulić and Funk. Their differing conclusions are partly connected to diverging biographical experiences—​ Drakulić having experienced life under socialism (thus also its authoritarian realities), and Funk and Ghodsee belonging to different generations of US-​American academics—​but 28

29

The Drakulić–Funk–Ghodsee debates

partly also to their disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches. Drakulić writes from her perspective within literary and journalistic work; Funk, trained as a philosopher, bases her studies on secondary empirical research, covering a broad regional spectrum within CEE; and anthropologist Ghodsee develops theories on extrapolation from her empirical case studies. Although the Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates are directed at Eastern Europe, they are predominantly led in English by US-​based scientists. Most of the texts are only marginally based on their own empirical research and rather theoretical by nature. Thus, the differences among the authors presumably are part of a broader dispute within the Left, namely, whether the class struggle or the culture war deserves priority. It is based on the postulate of a main contradiction—​the contrasts between classes—​and of side contradictions, including the “women’s question.” The assumption that the solution of the principal contradiction, that is, between the classes, would also overcome the side contradiction—​patriarchy—​has also been disputed among feminists for almost 150 years (Susemichel and Kastner 2018, 12). The Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates fit into this context. In doing so, they anticipated current discussions (e.g., Arruzza et al. 2019) and preemptively responded to the triumph of a neoliberal lean in feminism à la Sheryl Sandberg. With the rise of right-​wing populist politicians (such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Putin, and Erdoğan), this dispute within the Left has regained topicality. Behind this is the accusation that the emphasis on cultural differences (including that which is framed as cultural feminism) instead of class differences is driving the population into the arms of right-​wing parties (Susemichel and Kastner 2018, 12). In addition, the debates seem to be also part of a US debate on the welfare state (especially Ghodsee 2018), whereby, from our perspectives, with the aim of better social security for broad sections of the population, the differences between socialism and social democracy are lost from sight. However, a democracy with a pronounced welfare state such as Sweden, for example, should not be confused with Soviet-​style authoritarian state socialism: last but not least, the scope for action by civil society varies considerably among democratic and authoritarian political systems. The debates revolve around the following: (1) how to evaluate state socialist ideologies and lived experiences, especially concerning gender relations, a core controversy within the Left; (2) how to evaluate the role different feminist and women’s activisms have played in willingly or unwillingly spreading neoliberalism in the region; and (3) how feminism is challenged by both neoliberalism and the recent rise of authoritarianism in the region. In our view, these debates reflect pressing questions of the time and have inspired many other scholars and activists in the East and West (e.g., Kováts 2016). They go far beyond research into gender relations in communist and postsocialist Eastern Europe by questioning the hegemonic theory transfer from one region to another, by critically analyzing civil society’s contribution to the maintenance of the present economic system, and by examining the scope for action under different political systems. Furthermore, they inspire scientific theoretical considerations: the demands to contextualize research, to perceive and recognize differences, and to reflect one’s own positionality.

Feminist disputes between East and West: Drakulić–​Funk in the 1990s The controversy between Drakulić and Funk in the 1990s focuses on the evaluation of gender regimes under state socialist rule, in particular on gender politics as well as on 29

30

Eva Maria Hinterhuber and Gesine Fuchs

the evaluation of gender political activism after 1989. When, after the Iron Curtain rose, eastern and western scholars and activists were able to engage in exchange in an unprecedented way, the dialogue proved difficult. Kulawik (2019) calls this a “velvet border,” a context of continued hierarchies and a “West-​centric skew” of feminist knowledge production. In her collection of essays, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Drakulić (1993) describes the particular relationship between public and private under an omnipresent authoritarian state and illustrates the gender-​specific challenges of organizing everyday life under the conditions of permanent scarcity. One essay is a harsh reaction to “A Letter from the United States (…)” (Drakulić 1993, 123–​132), through which an unnamed author (Funk, as it was later revealed) had invited her to contribute to an anthology about women in Eastern Europe. In this public reply, Drakulić rejects any generalizations on the research subject in view of national differences among state socialist countries and criticizes a supposed arrogance of western scholars explaining the system from outside (Drakulić 1993, 125). She stresses differences between western and eastern (style) feminists, questions the knowledge of the researchers, and the quality and applicability of the questions posed by the American colleague. Finally, she refers to the difficulties faced by eastern women during transition, like concomitant rollbacks concerning reproductive rights or the rise of pornography. In the very anthology for which Drakulić was asked to contribute a chapter (and eventually did), Funk (1993, 319) replies, recognizing that their dispute is not restricted to individuals, but “symptomatic of the risks, tensions, and difficulties inherent in the discourse between Eastern and Western women.” Funk is aware of the real existing power imbalances between East and West, both structural and economic, and the fact that the East was being incorporated into the West rather than unifying. The gradient also includes the hegemony of western feminist discourse. She expresses understanding for tensions resulting from this complex situation, calling for a differentiated perspective (also on the situation of feminist women scholars in the West as representatives of a marginalized field of research) and for “a dialogue regarded as a joint enterprise directed toward understanding each other, rather than a battle to prove the other wrong” (1993, 321). She exemplifies this with an analysis of the different value ascribed to gainful employment by western and eastern women in the 1990s. Without negating economic, political, and cultural differences, Funk sees comparable challenges for women in the East and West: “The problems Eastern women confront in the conservative turn in some Eastern countries or the repressive nationalist threats in others, resonate with problems women face in the West” (1993, 328). Against this background, she expresses hope to gain helpful insights in an exchange from all sides. The dispute between the two authors reflects a global conversation within feminism at the time. One main point was whether western feminist concepts and theories were transferable to the conditions and experiences in Eastern Europe. In their evaluation of the controversy, authors such as Jalušić (1997) point out that the dispute was productive, as contents and forms of feminism were reflected and various strategies were debated. Taking into account the different experiences in East and West made it necessary to (re-​) consider the premises for scientific reasoning and provoked new approaches in political thinking. In contrast to the scientific mainstream in the 1990s, the feminism dispute—​and the debate between Drakulić and Funk as a crucial part of it—​reflected on the often uncritical transfer of theoretical approaches from West to East, both in terms of their analytical power and political effects (Jalušić 1998). 30

31

The Drakulić–Funk–Ghodsee debates

The impact of western donors on feminism: Funk–​Ghodsee in the 2000s There was a similar scientific gain in the next discursive event, the Funk–​ Ghodsee debate on how to assess the feminist activism emerging in the region after the transition. The debate took place when neoliberalism gained a foothold in the region, with feminist scholars arguing that the consequences of economic restructuring were being borne disproportionately by women—​be it in terms of unemployment, pay gaps, labor market segregation, or a disproportionate effect of the collapse of social security systems on women both as the majority of service recipients and state employees. The anxious question was whether feminist civil society organizations were contributing to this development rather than alleviating it. In particular, the developing landscape of civil societies and social movements in CEE&E sparked academic debates about the character, motives, and outcomes of donor support (Wedel 1998). Ghodsee (2004) issued a harsh critique of western donor feminism—​calling it “feminism by design” for its promotion of neoliberal visions of society and displacement of issues of interest to local activists. She criticizes western feminists and organizations for “jumping on the aid bandwagon” and for supporting mostly issues of “cultural feminism,” thereby privileging gender as the most important difference category. In her reading, developments in women’s organized activism are primarily donor-​driven, transplanting institutional forms and principles from the West like women’s advocacy groups, gender think tanks or women’s shelters. According to Ghodsee, the problem with this “gender first” framework is that some activities result in women’s victimization and that “women’s NGOs in Eastern Europe do, in some ways, directly undermine the possibility of a united proletariat by narrowly focusing on projects for women and discursively constructing women as somehow less suited to capitalism” (Ghodsee 2004, 742). In the case of Bulgaria, Ghodsee concludes—​in line with Fraser’s (2013) thesis of feminism as the handmaiden of neoliberalism—​that women’s NGOs might actually weaken grassroots opposition to neoliberalism. Analyses that privilege gender over class, she infers, are based on a “hegemonic, Western, cultural-​feminist conception of gender as an essentialist category of difference” (Ghodsee 2004, 748) and fail to explain the complexity of the postsocialist context. Ghodsee’s conclusion is extremely critical: The feminism-​by-​design model masks important class distinctions, and NGOs do more to assist western capitalist expansion in the region than improve women’s lives (Ghodsee 2004, 749). We suggest that Ghodsee’s critique refers especially to theoretical considerations in US liberal feminism that differ greatly from the more Marxist and structuralist approaches in (western) European feminism (see Kulawik 2019, 21–​23). Partially in response to Ghodsee (2004), Funk (2006) systematically reviews the “imperialist criticism” of western donor policies for women’s organizations in the region. Funk claims to be cautionary but not over-​generalizing: NGOs are indeed vulnerable to imperialism, neocolonialism, and feminist imperialism ... I also accept the assumption that neoliberalism is neither in the interest of women nor the region … All that follows is a need for caution, a case-​by-​case analysis, and awareness of limitations to NGO effectiveness and possible problems. (Funk 2006, 70) She detects old Left assumptions: the blaming of women’s NGOs for a gender focus instead of a class-​centered one would perpetuate the old Left failure to recognize gender 31

32

Eva Maria Hinterhuber and Gesine Fuchs

and race injustice “as equally fundamental forms of injustice, which intersect with class, but cannot be reduced to it.” Most women would have had enough of class struggle talk after 1989 (Funk 2006, 72). She argues that donors do not wholly determine the nature of funded activities; this would make local organizations passive victims without their own agendas. Furthermore, not all western donors had a neoliberal agenda, and many donors were dependent on western feminist organizations for contacts. Empirically, Funk (2006) argues, the grim picture by Ghodsee and others does not hold true. A broad variety of women’s NGOs emerged in the region, including Yugoslav organizations that became major peace activists during the 1990s war as well as non-​ western funded NGOs and strong native, feminist-​identified NGOs that were already active under state socialism or right thereafter (2006, 73f.). Funk extolls many benefits of donors and women’s NGOs, ranging from the introduction of new frames and concepts into public discourse to resistance to neoliberalism, support for women’s political participation, ethnic justice, and peace. Among the positive influences of western feminisms would be, for example, democratic inner-​organizational decision-​making or shared leadership. She concludes that “women in NGOs in the region have to assess what funding to accept, which western NGOs to work with, and whether likely accomplishments are worth the concessions. It is better to leave that decision to those active in NGOs” (Funk 2006, 81). Funk here seems to respond to her initial exchange with Drakulić. Here again, we can see the relevance of the debate in a broader context. As the consequences of the neoliberal economic system became apparent in the mid-1990s, the debate drew attention to gender-​specific aspects—​and to the tension between emancipatory aspirations on the one hand and the possibility of being co-​opted by, and contributing to, the maintenance of the present economic system on the other. This is not specific to women’s organizations as it affects other activists such as those involved in ecological activism. The topics discussed in the debate are still relevant today; they not only concern Eastern Europe but, accelerated by the cessation of the competition between political and economic systems, also exhibit patterns increasingly similar to Western Europe and North America.

Debating state socialist women’s organizations: Funk–​Ghodsee in the 2010s Several years later, a closely associated discussion between Funk and Ghodsee grew around the re-​evaluation of socialist women’s organizations and their political impact and influence under state socialism. In the new millennium, gender scholars returned to the socialist period, for example, on state socialist emancipation policies or on gender in oppositional movements (see Brier 2017 for an introduction). Ghodsee (2012) turned her focus to official state socialist organizations, especially the activities of the Bulgarian state socialist women’s organizations. Funk (2014, 2015) challenged the premises of Ghodsee’s (2015) research on this topic (such as her notion of women’s agency). In her article, Ghodsee (2012) claims that members and officials of the women’s organizations were indeed agents with policy successes for gender equality, and not a mere transmission belt organization (cf. Lenin 1965), bringing party policies to women. Funk (2014) contends that assumptions about women’s agency in state socialist regimes are misleading and fail to recognize that state socialist regimes were not open to free agency—​ after all, all non-​ communist organizations had been dismantled and independent legal organizing was not possible. The desire behind some research “to show

32

33

The Drakulić–Funk–Ghodsee debates

women as ‘active’, not ‘passive’, simply following Communist Party orders” (Funk 2014, 345) would lead to a simplistic view of the historical realities. Funk argues that organized women’s activism independent of the ruling party occurred either before 1955 in a yet unconsolidated system or in times of political crises like the Prague Spring 1968 or the Solidarity movement in Poland. In reaction to Ghodsee’s (2014) critique of the vague notion of “agency,” Funk (2015) proposes a more developed conceptualization of the term, differentiating between proactive “episodic, programmatic, and structural agency” (Funk 2015, 353). Viewed from the outside, Ghodsee (2012) strives to investigate possible progressive and pro-​women issues in state socialist regimes, whereas in Funk’s (2015) view, the material outcomes of state socialist women’s policies are inextricably ambivalent toward women, and sometimes even negative.

(Not) laughing in communism and postcommunism: Drakulić–​Ghodsee and others in the 2010s In her 2015 article, “How [women] survived post-​ communism (and didn’t laugh),” Drakulić responded to her previous essay. Building on the premise that Eastern European women suffered more from the hardships of transition than men (Drakulić 2015, 2), she argues that shared experiences of life under communism still unite Eastern European women. A main characteristic in this regard is the Soviet-​style “emancipation from above,” a legal framework that guaranteed women “all the basic rights—​from voting to property ownership, from education to divorce, from equal pay for equal work to the right to control their bodies” (Drakulić 2015, 3–​4). Concurrently, patriarchal structures remained in force also under state socialism, especially in the private sphere where women continued to do most of the care work (Fuchs and Hinterhuber forthcoming). Drakulić explains the lack of strong protest against this state socialist version of patriarchy with the widespread expectation that the authorities will take care of the problems stemming from the gendered division of labor. The few who overtly committed themselves to feminism were accused of importing a “bourgeois” ideology from the West (Drakulić 2015, 4). Encounters between eastern and western feminists in the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a collision between the socialist “experience of emancipation from above” and the “grassroots fight” on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Drakulić (2015, 7) sees a sustained bad reputation of feminism and an “authoritarian mentality” as the main reasons why the severe backlash against communist gender-​ political achievements after 1989 did not meet strong resistance. This argument refers to the concept of paternalist state socialism, advanced by Verdery (1994) or Dölling (1991): That the ambiguous legacy of authoritarian-​paternalist granting of social rights paradoxically had emancipatory outcomes for women, but prevailing traditions of collective and not individual rights as well as missing memories of pre-​socialist women’s organizing in state-​socialism impeded the articulation and representation of women’s interests after transition. Drakulić emphasizes that undermining women’s rights is endemic and not restricted to postsocialism. But the author raises the question, “[w]‌hat if values have changed so much that women increasingly see their subordinate position as normal?” (Drakulić 2015, 10). Against this alarming backdrop, she accentuates the inextricable link between women’s participation and democracy and calls for “an emancipation after emancipation” (Drakulić 2015, 10–​11).

33

34

Eva Maria Hinterhuber and Gesine Fuchs

In their response, Ghodsee and Zaharijević (2015) oppose the juxtaposition of western women’s liberation through grassroots activism and Eastern European women’s liberation through communism. They reject the explanation that the legacy of “emancipation from above” explains the missing resistance. The authors point out that gender equality achievements in the West were often due to top-​down interventions rather than grassroots activism, particularly because of the “system competition” between East and West. Ghodsee and Zaharijević again stress women’s fight for equality in state socialism and its official women’s organizations. While both sides agree on the absence of a broad women’s movement in contemporary Eastern Europe, Ghodsee and Zaharijević are convinced that “the biggest barrier to active mass social movements derives not from a Communist past but from a neoliberal present” (Ghodsee and Zaharijević 2015, 4), where solidarity has become a foreign word. In the same issue of Eurozine as this text, Pető (2015) pushes the discussion into another direction. She endorses that “[v]‌ery few would disagree that being (and living) as a woman in central Europe is no laughing matter.” Still, the triumphant anti-​genderism and the emergence of right-​wing populism is, according to Pető, a new phenomenon, where negatively referring to gender works as “symbolic glue,” sticking together otherwise diverse actors. This new occurrence calls also for new, independent (counter-​)strategies: Pető (2015) sees the necessity of “re-​thinking the neoliberal emancipation model” and trying to “re-​enchant the doing of the feminist politics in order to reach out to a wider public.” The debate about the evaluation of women’s organizations in the state-​socialist past is thus reminiscent of the consideration of the effects of (authoritarian) political systems on the scope of women’s political actors. Here, too, a look into the past can sharpen the tools for analyzing the present, in which democratization processes come to a standstill or are even reversed.

Feminism in times of neoliberalism and authoritarianism: CEE authors engage the debate Scholars from the region have implicitly and explicitly referred to the debate and initiated empirical research. Korolczuk’s (2016) study in the anthology “Solidarity in struggle: Feminist perspectives on neoliberalism in East-​Central Europe” may serve as an example. According to her study, women’s and gender activists, and thus practice, seem to be partly ahead of the scholarly debate. Contemporary women’s activism—​not only in Poland—​shows new forms of resistance against the hardships of neoliberalism. The largest Polish women’s initiative, Congress of Women (Kongres Kobiet), cannot not be reduced to its initial focus on a “symbolic recognition of women’s achievements” (Korolczuk 2016, 35) for which it was accused of being “neoliberalized” in the 1990s, mirroring the assessment suggested by Ghodsee (2012). This, according to Korolczuk, would ignore the heterogeneity of opinions in the Congress and wider Polish feminist movement (2016, 36), where anti-​neoliberal arguments concerning redistribution and social rights took center stage by the mid-​2000s. New coalitions and mass demonstrations with groups affected by the increasing economic precariousness (not necessarily feminist), organized by the Women’s 8th of March Alliance, a Warsaw-​based grassroots initiative with no external funding or institutional support, are a promising attempt “to implement intersectionality as a social movement strategy” (2016, 38). The biggest hurdle

34

35

The Drakulić–Funk–Ghodsee debates

in pursuing this strategy is a right-​wing populism strong enough to effect an “illiberal turn” in the Polish state that now no longer embodies “the values which lay at the core of liberal democracy such as equality, tolerance, individual and minority rights” (2016, 39), resulting in attempts to re-​traditionalize gender relations. If Pető is right that the merger between neoliberalism and authoritarianism, symbolically glued together with a shared anti-​genderism, calls for new feminist approaches, then indeed broad emancipatory movements seem to be the most promising as long as they choose comprehensive, intersectional, and solidarity-​based approaches. Thus, the necessity of challenging economic inequality is acknowledged, as well as the fact that feminist claims for equal opportunities and participation are equally important requests. This reality calls for a multilayered approach. Any dichotomization and oversimplification would not only conceal the fact that women’s activism in the region is still underexplored, contributing “to unconsciously reproduce and legitimate the picture of the ‘potent west’ and ‘passive rest of the world’ ” (Ostertágová 2016, 65). It also bears the risk of adding a voice to the chorus of right-​wing populism and authoritarianism disavowing feminism as a whole, not only undermining gender equality in the region, but also contributing to the growing backlash throughout Europe (Ostertágová 2016, 67). In this sense, dividing feminist activism along the lines of class and gender might, on the contrary, rather play into the hands of the rising authoritarianism in the region.

Conclusions Analogous to what Jalušić (1997) pointed out regarding the feminist disputes between East and West in the 1990s, debates like the Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee controversy have great potential. They remind us to carry out analyses of women’s movements with the necessary attention to the multilayered and intersectional dynamics of gender, taking into account different historical, political, and social contexts as well as reflecting on our own positionality as researchers (see Harders 1999, 181 on principles of feminist research methodology). Research should be firmly grounded in political and/​or social theory and simultaneously generate more empirical, hypothesis-​driven knowledge that avoids (paternalist) generalizations. The debate also illuminates how distinctive feminist and gender theories and approaches have different strengths as well as specific blind spots. Certain theoretical strands—​like feminist democratic theory and intersectional analysis—​should be given greater consideration. We believe that the debate here points to the necessity of referring to theories about non-​democratic regimes in order to systematically clarify individual and collective possibilities for action; from the beginning, the debate shows also parallels to feminist postcolonial criticism (explicitly transferred to the region, e.g., by Kulawik 2019; see also Shchurko and Suchland, Chapter 7 in this Handbook). Differentiated analyses can open up new fields of research and advance scientific knowledge and, last but not least, help to overcome “velvet borders.” Altogether, such debates can open up new fields of research and questions and advance science and research as a whole. In line with the dual quality of feminism—​analysis and activism—​differentiated analyses can be a powerful tool against neoliberal and right-​wing authoritarian currents. At best, they help alternatives to emerge that are beyond the glorification of the (state-​socialist) past or the celebration of the current political conditions, where economic hardships under

35

36

Eva Maria Hinterhuber and Gesine Fuchs

neoliberalism resulted in discrediting democracy in the eyes of big parts of the population (cf. Arruzza et al. 2019; Kováts 2016).

References Arruzza, Cinzia, Thiti Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism of the 99%. New York: Verso. Brier, Robert. 2017. “Gendering Dissent: Human Rights, Gender History and the Road to 1989.” L‘Homme—​Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 28 (1): 15–​32. Dale, Gareth, and Adam Fabry. 2018. “Neoliberalism in Eastern Europe in the Former Soviet Union.” In The Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism, edited by Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings, and David Primrose, 234–​247. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Dölling, Irene. 1991. “Über den Patriarchalismus staatssozialistischer Gesellschaften und die Geschlechterfrage im gesellschaftlichen Umbruch.” [“On the Patriarchalism of State-​Socialist Societies and the Gender Question in Social Transition.”] UTOPIE kreativ 7: 25–​32. Drakulić, Slavenka. 1993. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. New York: HarperPerennial. –​–​–​–​. 2015. “How Women Survived Post-​communism (and Didn’t Laugh).” Eurozine, February 15. www.eurozine.com/​how-​women-​survived-​post-​communism-​and-​didnt-​laugh/​. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-​managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis and Beyond. London and New York: Verso. Fuchs, Gesine and Eva M. Hinterhuber. Forthcoming. “Öffentlich und privat in Osteuropa.” [“Public and Private in Eastern Europe.”] In Privat/​öffentlich: Gesellschaftstheoretische Relevanz einer feministischen Debatte [Private /​Public: Social-​Theoretical Relevance of a Feminist Debate], edited by Heike Kahlert, Diana Cichecki, Nina Degele, and Günter Burkart. Wiesbaden: Springer. Funk, Nanette. 1993. “Feminism East and West.” In Gender Politics and Post-​Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, edited by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, 318–​330. New York: Routledge. –​–​–​–​. 2006. “Women’s NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: The Imperialist Criticism.” femina politica 1: 68–​83. –​–​–​–​. 2014. “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 344–​360. –​–​–​–​. 2015. “(K)Not So: A Response to Kristen Ghodsee.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (3): 350–​355. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2004. “Feminism-​by-​Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminism, and Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” Signs 29 (3): 727–​753. –​–​–​–​. 2012. “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–​ 1985.” Journal of Women’s History 24 (4): 49–​73. –​–​–​–​. 2015. “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2): 248–​252. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” The New York Times, August 12. www.nytimes.com/​2017/​08/​12/​opinion/​why-​women-​had-​better-​sex-​under-​socialism.html. –​–​–​–​. 2018. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Bodley Head. Ghodsee, Kristen, and Adriana Zaharijević. 2015. “Fantasies of Feminist History in Eastern Europe: A Response to Slavenka Drakulić.” Eurozine, March 1. www.eurozine.com/​fantasies-​ of-​feminist-​history-​in-​eastern-​europe/​. Harders, Cilja. 1999. “Das Ende der Strukturkategorie Geschlecht?” [“The End of the Structural Category Gender?”] In Gender and Politics, edited by Angelika von Wahl, 171–​ 197. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Jalušić, Vlasta. 1997. “Die Geschlechterfrage und die Transformation in Ostmitteleuropa: Kann das Geschlechterparadigma zur ‘Transformation des Politischen’ beitragen?” [“The Gender

36

37

The Drakulić–Funk–Ghodsee debates Question and Transformation in East Central Europe: Can the Gender Paradigm Contribute to the ‘Transformation of the Political’?”] PVS-​Sonderheft: 450–​474. Korolczuk, Elżbieta. 2016. “Neoliberalism and Feminist Organizing: From ‘NGO-​ ization of Resistance’ to Resistance against Neoliberalism.” In Solidarity in Struggle: Feminist Perspectives on Neoliberalism in East-​Central Europe, edited by Eszter Kováts, 32–​41. Budapest: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Kováts, Eszter, ed. 2016. Solidarity in Struggle: Feminist Perspectives on Neoliberalism in East-​ Central Europe. Budapest: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Kulawik, Teresa. 2019. “Introduction: European Borderlands and Topographies of Transnational Feminism.” In Borderlands in European Gender Studies: Beyond the East–​West Frontier, edited by Teresa Kulawik and Zhanna Kravchenko 1–​39. New York: Routledge. Lenin, Vladimir. 1965. “The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes.” In Lenin’s Collected Works. www.marxists.org/​archive/​lenin/​works/​1920/​dec/​30.htm. Ostertágová, Alexandra. 2016. “Challenging the Narrative of Feminism as a Facilitator of Neoliberalism in the Context of Slovakia.” In Solidarity in Struggle: Feminist Perspectives on Neoliberalism in East-​Central Europe, edited by Eszter Kováts, 60–​69. Budapest: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Pető, Andrea, 2015. “After ‘Emancipation after Emancipation’: On Europe’s anti-​gender movements.” Eurozine, March 1. www.eurozine.com/​after-​emancipation-​after-​emancipation/​?pdf. Susemichel, Lea, and Jens Kastner. 2018. Identitätspolitiken (Identity Politics). Münster: Unrast. Verdery, Katherine. 1994. “From Parent-​ State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” EEPS 9 (2): 225–​255. Wedel, Janine R. 1998. Collision and Collusion. The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europa 1989–​1998. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

37

38

39

Methodologies

40

41

4 LEGACIES OF THE COLD WAR AND THE FUTURE OF GENDER IN FEMINIST HISTORIES OF SOCIALISM Anna Krylova

At the turn of the century, feminist scholars committed to bringing gender analytics into historiographies of modern Russia and Central-​Eastern Europe saw their mission as decidedly field-​ transforming, even revolutionary. The plan, writes feminist historian Maria Bucur (2008, 1383), was to “enact a major shift in the historiography,” by making gender an “integral component” of historians’ inquiry. The gender analytics in question was, and still is, one of the most utilized and most criticized in the discipline of history and beyond. Thirty years ago, it pointed to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes and offered a powerful tool of analysis—​the gender category—​which entrenchment in poststructuralist modes of critique has since proven to be both a strength and a weakness. For example, the category has served feminist scholars well, critiquing a particular form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary, hierarchical system. It has empowered historians to pursue and deconstruct the binary organization of heterosexual—​woman/​man—​identities as well as power relations and discursive formations that produce them. At the same time, the gender category itself has ended up carrying a rich repertoire of binary, heteronormative connotations—​those of radical distinction, opposition, hierarchy, and oppression. As a result, this founding category of gender history offers little help to historians whose research agendas encompass either non-heterosexual gender systems or alternative heterosexual regimes of difference and power relations that exist outside the binary-bound, heteronormative paradigm (see Boydston 2008; Krylova 2016; Najmabadi 2006). This chapter explores strengths and weaknesses of gender analytics in histories of socialist modernities. Today, the mission of bringing gender into the Central-​Eastern European and Eurasian (CEE&E) studies has been accomplished. It is impossible to imagine these historiographies without research projects utilizing gender theory and methodology and exposing binary organization of subjectivities, relations, or policies either in its traditional or modern incarnations. Having proliferated since the 1990s, gender-​ informed scholarship has profoundly changed research agendas and the understanding of historical practice. 41

42

Anna Krylova

Yet, the trajectories that gender analytics has charted out through these historiographical traditions tell a story that is bigger than an account of the initially difficult but ultimately successful struggle for its implementation. Such an account stumbles when we turn our attention to the gender-​informed scholarship devoted to the problem of socialist modernities and their record of women’s emancipation (Bonfiglioli 2016; Chatterjee 1999; de Haan 2010; Krylova 2004). What one finds is the disconcerting presence of Cold War habits of thought—​these 50-​year-​plus analytical constructs—​that apparently have survived the gender shake-​up of the past decades. Today all too familiar, Cold War plots continue to empower gender scholars to charge socialist modernities with familiar flaws: “failed” or “incomplete” gender revolutions; socialist states’ inadequate or missing breakup with traditional gender norms; and communist feminists’ and their organizations’ failure to put women’s interests ahead of state-​, party-​, class-​identified agendas and, as a result, their ultimate reduction to being just an instrument in male-​identified projects. As such, they offer a classic example of the moralizing “storytelling,” now empowered by gender analysis, that pre-​judges socialism’s emancipatory promise and prohibits the history of socialism from taking place outside its plot lines (White 1987, 2). The history of gender analytics, however, does not stop here. It has seen a new chapter in pioneering research on socialist modernities that decisively ventures beyond Cold War plots. Its history in this case is epitomized by a thought-​provoking absence: the hesitance on the part of scholars who work against Cold War paradigms to use the gender category when they interrogate novel forms of heterosexual organization of family, work, self, etc. that surpass binary, heteronormative imperatives, either in their traditional or contemporary forms. Here, I engage the peculiar behaviors of the gender category in scholarship on socialist modernities by considering the following questions: First, how do we explain the ease with which Cold War plots and characters have made themselves at home in gender-​ informed scholarship on socialism? Second, what is the future of gender analytics in recent histories of socialism that are parting ways with Cold War habits of interpretation? In particular, what is the future of the gender category in the emergent scholarship that explores alternative heterosexual relations, identities, familial, and intimate arrangements—​that is, heterosexual gender systems—​that did not fit the binary matrix of the borrowed gender category? My query has a twofold structure. What is at stake, on the one hand, is, an explication of the symbiotic relationship between the 50-​year-​plus story about socialism’s fundamental failure to serve the cause of women’s liberation and gender history’s propensity to agree with the general outline of this account. On the other, it is the poverty of gender as a binary device to help feminist scholars analyze alternative heterosexual systems of differentiation and power under socialism. The trouble with the gender category examined here, in other words, is different from the one that propelled founding critiques of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory and continues to inform conversations in transgender and third gender studies. The deficiency of gender as a binary device does not stop with non-​heterosexual relations but also directly pertains to heterosexual relations that do not fit the binary matrix. One of my key arguments is that scholars who explore novel forms of heterosexual organization of family, work, self, etc. under socialism tend to sidestep the gender category in order to clear their research of the category’s mainstream binary connotations.

42

43

Legacies of the Cold War

The history of gender in histories of socialism contains an eventful plot examined below: from being welcomed as a field-​transforming category in the 1990s to being recently sidestepped by scholars launching post-​Cold War research agendas. I propose to turn the recent scholarship that ventures beyond Cold War plots into a productive site for the continuous development of gender theory and methodology. This way, the intersecting fields of Russian and CEE history cease playing the role of recipients and deployers of theory not of their making and become leading players in its development in the 21st century.

What is a Cold War narrative? Cold War accounts of socialism’s failure to emancipate women have long enabled scholars to approach the subject matter with varying degrees of maximalism. One such narrative, for example, pertains to the history of the Soviet Union and tells the story of de-​radicalization of the Bolshevik and, later, Soviet commitment to women’s emancipation. Another predominant account tends to frame histories of CEE experiences by foregrounding a fundamental conflict between agendas of feminism and state socialism. Both tend to share several signature interpretive moves, including an insistence on the socialist state’s instrumental use of women and the perseverance of traditional gender norms despite economic and social changes introduced into women’s and men’s lives by socialist governments. In the 1970s, the theses about the instrumental value of women and the perseverance of traditional gender norms in the Soviet Union was used to argue against, what Elizabeth Wood (1997) called, the “emancipatory” story found in Soviet as well as western scholarship of the period. Richard Stites’ (1978) The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, for example, argued that Bolshevism was one of the three defining women’s movements of modern Russia and, as such, formed a permanent feature of Soviet 20th century. Gail Lapidus’s (1978) Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change, offered a counter-​argument that is of direct relevance here. A political scientist drawing on methodologies of social history, Lapidus situated her analysis within Soviet industrialization and the social restructuring it caused. She argued that Soviet women’s lives, legal status, social roles, and educational and economic opportunities did indeed change. Yet, whatever new happened in the lives of Soviet women, Lapidus (1978, 96–​97) offered one of the most succinct and tenacious formulations of socialism’s fundamental failures to liberate women: it was “assimilated into older values and patterns of behavior.” Being useful to the state as it struggled to industrialize and modernize did not mean to be liberated by the state. The message of the emergent moralizing story cannot be fully grasped outside of the Cold War ideological struggles of the second half of the 20th century. At its most basic, it warns women against counting on a socialist state for their true liberation. Over the next two decades, this story of women’s liberation in Soviet Russia acquired complicating contextual detail. But the emergent, richly researched narrative tended, nevertheless, to culminate in the demise of the Bolshevik feminist tradition, on the one hand, and the triumph of traditional expectations of women and men, on the other. In Barbara Evans Clements’ (1992, 1997) field-​shaping work, the Soviet story began with unequivocal radicalism of Bolshevik feminism and its institutional incarnation in the Women’s Section of the Communist Party (Zhenotdel). After the October Revolution and

43

44

Anna Krylova

in the early 1920s, Clements (1992, 488–​489) wrote, the section’s commitment to women’s emancipation, understood as women’s “independence and activism” was “so integral that it almost became the means to all other useful social change, as well as the standard by which to measure the achievements of the revolution.” By the early 1930s, the Bolshevik feminist agenda and its party and local institutions were no longer there. In Clements’ reading, the demise of Bolshevik feminists was not an inevitable result of irreconcilable conflict between feminism and the socialist state. Rather, she situated the history of Bolshevik feminism inside Russia’s predicament of economic and cultural backwardness. The socialist state’s poverty and struggle to survive made gender compromises paramount while it was only the ultimate but not inevitable triumph of the Stalinist style of governance and industrialization that closed the Bolshevik feminist chapter of women’s liberation in Russia (see also Engel 2004). Wendy Z. Goldman’s (1993) Women, the State, and Revolution furthered the understanding of the challenges of pursuing a radical feminist agenda in an economically and culturally disadvantaged country by zeroing in on many collisions between the Marxist-​feminist legal theory and life. The overarching story told in this and other scholarship tended to end in the middle of the Stalinist industrialization, with the 1936 Soviet Family Code and Anti-​Abortion Law used to epitomize the return of traditional gender ideals (Hoffmann 2000). As such, it seemed to supply scholars with evidence to conclude that, first, it was possible for a society to undergo a radical remaking of its economic and social relations and, in the end, recycle its traditional gender expectations. Second, the history of Bolshevik feminism can be adequately accounted for via a narrative of continuous compromise and ultimate demise in the name of state and national agendas.

Gender analysis meets Cold War narratives of socialism From the 1970s and 1980s, the field of Soviet women’s history did not have a monopoly on narratives of failed socialist attempts to liberate women. Such narratives proved particularly useful in emerging, feminist scholarship on CEE encounters with socialism (e.g., Jancar 1978; Scott 1976; Wolchik and Meyer 1985). Here, the story about how, under socialism, women’s and men’s societal and familial roles got “modified in form, not in essence” (Massino 2010, 34–​35) was specified with two inflexible qualifications, missing from the Soviet historiography: first, that socialist and feminist agendas in 20th-​century Eastern Europe were invariably incompatible and that “communist women” had little choice but to become pawns of party-​and state agendas. Such a variation on the Cold War moralizing narrative proposed the categorical counterposition between women’s interests and state and national agendas that continues to inform the recent debates in the field (see Hinterhuber and Fuchs, Chapter 3 in this Handbook). The mid-​1990s saw new developments in the scholarship on socialist modernities. It was scholars working on CEE&E who, in the 1990s, led the way in the gender revolution and introduced the category into the study of socialism, the endeavors that, I argue, ended up combining gender analytics with available interpretations of women’s compromised and incomplete emancipation. A “benchmark for historians and other scholars of gender under socialism” (Bucur 2008, 1382) was Katherine Verdery’s (1996) “From Parent State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” The proposed gender framework pointed to “in-​built [societal] inequalities” and hierarchies that “favor the occupants of masculine gender roles.” It also offered critical

44

45

Legacies of the Cold War

interpretive tools of unearthing and deconstructing the way those “in-​built inequalities” were organized and institutionalized as natural male/​female, that is, heteronormative, differences in an infinite array of political, social, institutional, and discursive activities (Verdery 1996, 61). Verdery narrated how CEE socialist regimes opened new positions to women in production, education, science, and arts only to advance their own agendas—​to meet the needs of capital-​poor, industrializing societies. Gender analytics seemed to prove exceptionally effective in detailing Verdery’s story. The “substantial reorganization of gender roles” in socialist societies, Verdery elaborated, took place within the confines of creatively repurposed traditional “gender regimes” and gender logics that continued to restrict women’s access to male-​identified jobs and assigned less social power and prestige to positions made available to women. In Verdery’s gendered account of socialism, there seemed to be no room for feminism. Unlike Soviet scholars who narrated by measuring degrees of Bolshevik feminism’s de-​radicalization at the hands of the Soviet state, Verdery’s account suggested that socialist and feminist agendas in 20th-​century Eastern Europe were incompatible. The full potential of bringing gender analytics into critical accounts of “manipulative party-​states,” attempting to “maneuver women” into the workforce, came into fruition over the next decades. Donna Harsch’s (2007) study of the East German state and ordinary women-​citizens demonstrated what invaluable insight gender analysis could offer a scholar who investigated how socialist regimes and socialist societies impacted each other. Harsch contested one lingering totalitarian thesis that presented socialist societies as atomized, repressed, and oppressed. She showed how ordinary German women countered the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) disinterest in their “lived experience[s]‌” at home, on the job, in stores; turned their domestic concerns into policy issues; and ended up impacting both the state’s priorities and their own lives (Harsch 2007, 4, 8, 12–​13). Having uncovered dynamic interactions between social and economic development, on the one hand, and gender relations, on the other, Harsch argued that the state’s resultant attention to women’s domestic needs only reinforced traditional organization of family labor and reinforced conventional gender roles in East German society. In later work, Harsch took a broader, transnational view on the problem of women, feminism, and communism. She argued that when it came to socialist regimes’ own initiatives on behalf of women—​be they carried out by communist women or their state-​ socialist women’s organizations in China, Eastern Europe, or Cuba—​those initiatives tended to degenerate toward what Harsch described as “cheerleading for the party line” and “convincing housewives to join the workforce” (Harsch 2014, 492). In this analysis, Harsch, too, suggested that socialist and feminist agendas were problematic, if not entirely incompatible, companions. In the field of modern Russia, a master narrative about socialism’s discordancy with feminism and failure to liberate women acquired its gendered version by the early and mid-​2000s (Clements, Friedman, and Healey 2002; Goldman 2002; Petrone 2000; Wood 1997; see also Lakhtikova, Brintlinger, and Glushchenko 2019). In fact, a graduate student such as myself entering the field at the turn of the century would already take this moralizing narrative for a constitutive element of gender history. The gender category proved to be a powerful tool in substantiating the story about the de-​radicalization of the Soviet Union’s commitment to women’s liberation. With its help, scholars now undertook deconstructive gender-​informed readings of socialism’s latent patriarchal/​binary

45

46

Anna Krylova

predispositions at the deepest levels of socialist ideologies, social policies, and popular culture in the interwar period. As scholars argued, both Bolshevik revolutionary rhetoric and practice of gender equality got displaced, decentered, or marginalized, de facto made historically irrelevant, by male-​identified accounts of the Revolution and the Civil War, by masculinist representations of socialist heroes of the Stalinist epoch, and ultimately by the revival of essentialist gender visions of womanhood and manhood, motherhood and fatherhood. Once again, it became possible to argue that the new and, one might add, unprecedented educational, work, and career opportunities that became available to Soviet women in the first half of the 20th century did not discard traditional gender regimes. Rather, traditional gender norms got creatively revised and reinscribed onto the new socioeconomic situation. Thanks to this resourceful and easily modifiable plot, one could at once acknowledge the apparent, profound changes in Soviet women’s lives and interpret them in light of concomitant conservative reversals and shifts in official ideology, culture, and popular understanding of gender norms.

Beyond the Cold War plots Over the past two decades, the continuous presence of Cold War plots and Cold War habits of thought in histories of 20th-​century socialism have come under close scrutiny. The impetus to challenge what Francisca de Haan (2010) has called “continuing Cold War paradigms” of western historiography came from innovative archival and ethnographic research projects, which findings scholars have proven unable to fit into available narratives about instrumental uses of women and de-​radicalization of socialist feminism ideologies. In their work on the Soviet Union, Choi Chatterjee (1999), Rebecca Balmas Nearly (1999), Elena Shulman (2012), and, most recently, Daria Dyakonova (2021) have uncovered different institutional, cultural, and transnational lives of Bolshevik feminism and its uneven, contradictory and, still, transformative impact on Soviet society and its generations throughout the interwar period (see also Krylova 2010). As a result of this collective effort, the Cold War narrative of demise has been challenged by a narrative of uneven transformation and radical variation of gender policies and popular understandings of normative gender differences. One paradox that has been central to this project of non-​linear history is the fact that the construction of state socialism in its 1930s Stalinist-​totalitarian variety relied on varied and blatantly contradictory ways of viewing and instituting gender norms, including both binary and non-​binary regimes of imagining and enacting socialist ideals of womanhood and manhood (Krylova 2017). Over the past decade, feminist scholars of CEE have also turned the long history of the “Cold War” in historiographies of socialism into a cardinal problem of historical analysis. Here, deep ideological roots of Cold War paradigms have been examined and, as a result, today we can talk about connections between academic habits of thought and Cold War politics in rather concrete terms (de Haan 2010). Scholars have also argued against instrumental readings of women’s experience under socialism, as well as unconditional counterpositions between women’s political agency and the socialist state, which have been imposed on CEE women’s and gender histories (Artwinska and Mrozik 2020; Bonfiglioli 2016; de Haan 2010; Dyakonova and Taber 2021; Ghodsee 2015; Massino 2010). Productive sites of critical debate about Cold War legacies in the historiographies of socialist modernities, the Russian and CEE&E fields contain, however, an intriguing 46

47

Legacies of the Cold War

silence. What has been left unattended is the apparent ease with which, over the past 30 years, gender analytics has not only made itself at home in Cold War plots but has also given them a second life. Moreover, the problem with the gender category’s limiting analytical capabilities has recently become even more acute because of the ongoing research that keeps uncovering non-​binary and, yet, heterosexual relations under socialism but lacks theoretical and analytical tools to engage them. It is the gender category itself, both its possibilities and limitations in research on socialist modernity, that I propose to put under scrutiny.

The trouble with gender in counter-​narratives of socialism To gain insight into the peculiar behavior of the gender category in the scholarship on heterosexual lives under socialist modernities—​its propensity to empower Cold War accounts, on the one hand, and to fall short in research on alternative heterosexual female–​male relations, on the other—​let us reexamine the category’s well-​established analytical strengths and weaknesses. One of the oldest charges of this foundational category was, and still is, its entanglement in binary connotations of feminine and masculine differences and, consequently, in heteronormative relations of subordination. For example, the problem of pervasive heteronormativity—​that is, the reproduction of binary, female/​male, qualities, roles, identities in the very act of their deconstruction in gender history—​formed a founding critique of lesbian and gay studies of the 1990s and continues to inform conversations in transgender and third gender studies. In these fields, the critique of pervasive heteronormativity has been also accompanied by continuous efforts to build alternative theoretical and analytical frameworks to work outside the binary parameters of mainstream gender analytics (Butler 2004; Valentine 2007). In gender history, the critique of the gender category’s binary predispositions followed a different path. Here, the language of the critical interrogation of gender has been that of reification. Especially over the past two decades, scholars have noted the odd effect of gender analysis (across national, temporal, or thematic divides) to empower its users to launch a penetrating critique of the deceptive fixity of binary systems and, at once, to reify what they strive to undermine. A problem not uncommon in historical scholarship informed by poststructuralist theory, launching an ever-​deepening deconstruction of the binary work of gender was not, it turned out, tantamount to stepping outside it. Having detected the problem early on, Joan Scott (2008), a field-​forming voice of gender history in the 1980s, for example, attempted to fight gender’s unintended outcomes by drawing on insights of poststructuralist psychoanalysis only to wonder, by the late 2000s, whether the gender category had exhausted its analytical currency. In stark contrast with the fields of lesbian and gay studies, as well as transgender and third gender studies, in gender history the critical insight into the trouble with gender has not been accompanied by a purposeful effort to develop the category’s theoretical and analytical frameworks to provide scholars with means to study the heterosexual phenomena outside the binary parameters. Elsewhere, I argued that the working category at our disposal today in gender history falls short not only of non-​heterosexual cultures of difference—​the problem that has been at the heart of queer and third gender theory—​but also of heterosexual regimes of imaging and enacting womanhood and manhood that do not warrant binary, that is, oppositional and hierarchal connotations of difference (Boydston 2008; Krylova 2016; Najmabadi 2006). 47

48

Anna Krylova

The behavior of the gender category in the scholarship on heterosexual lives under socialism should no longer surprise us. Gender scholars of socialist modernities have indeed found it to be exceedingly easier to trace the presence of traditional, that is, binary gender norms in socialist societies and, thus, to substantiate Cold War plots than to study the emergence of new, non-​binary regimes of imaging and enacting difference as pertaining to heterosexual womanhood and manhood. In fact, we can see these strengths and weaknesses of the gender category play out particularly forcefully in the cutting-​edge counter-​narratives of socialist modernities, which agendas do not stop with accounts of persevering traditional gender identities, but extend into what authors refer to as “alternative,” “less traditional,” “new,” “empowering,” or “emancipating” changes in women’s and men’s lives under socialism. The interpretive language of “alternative,” “less traditional,” “new,” etc. in these pioneering studies on novel conceptions and practices of heterosexual womanhood and manhood is of paramount significance. It signals the apparent scholarly hesitation to invoke the available gender analytics when one turns one’s analysis to what was new or different about socialist conceptions and practices of heterosexual womanhood and manhood. It also underlines the interpretive limits of the gender category at our disposal when it pertains to those “alternative” heterosexual conceptions of difference. We engage the descriptive language of “alternative,” “less traditional,” “new,” I contend, in order not to confuse our readers. We want and need to distinguish between the much criticized “gendered”—​that is, the oppositional and the hierarchical—​connotations of difference and subordination and the ones that transgress those norms and point toward beyond-​ binary conceptions and practices of heterosexual womanhood and manhood. For example, in her innovative research on socialist Romania, Jill Massino (2010) introduces the reader to a wide range of working, familial, and marital roles and relations that Romanian women and men enacted in their everyday lives, ranging from traditionally gendered to, what the scholar calls, “new” and “transgressing.” Massino’s mastery with the gender category comes into the foreground when she analyzes traditional, even if changing and adopting, dimensions of women’s and men’s lives. She discontinues the use of gender analytics when she turns to what she calls “new ways of thinking about marriage and [one’s] roles within it” in socialist policies, layers of mainstream culture, and, as importantly, familial and marital relations “on the ground,” the ways that ventured beyond traditional oppositions between masculinity and femininity in relation to work inside and outside home (Massino 2010, 35–​36). The difficulty that Massino’s works capture can be found in much of recent scholarship that critically interrogates Cold War plots (see Bucur 2018; Chatterjee 2002; Ghodsee 2018; Hofman 2010). Scholars know too well that the working gender analytics offer little assistance in the study of alternative heterosexual relations. Rather, they tend to hide the novel and the alternative from scholars. In my research on interwar and wartime Soviet society, I vividly remember the sense of loss of fundamental historical material when initially I tried to narrate Soviet young women’s en masse volunteering for World War II combat in 1941 by drawing on conventional gender analysis, and presented “women’s entrance” into combat units as women’s intrusion onto the “male territory” (Krylova 2010, 2017). The problem with this much-​used interpretive trope was that the traditional view of the citizen-​soldier “masculine” calling did not constitute an a priori assumption either in Soviet official ideology, or mainstream culture, educational, paramilitary, and military institutions, or individual self-​perceptions of Soviet women and men. I wondered as to how one was to call those emergent heterosexual identities and practices of war and 48

49

Legacies of the Cold War

peace that redefined and extended the very notions of feminine and masculine, motherly and fatherly, daughter-​like and son-​like predisposition and entitlements in interwar and wartime Soviet society beyond binary oppositions. In the first decades of the 21st century one thing has become unambiguously clear: gender-​informed Cold War stories about traditional gender norms’ adaptation and perseverance under socialism fell short of capturing a different story: one about tangible and, necessarily, uneven transformations of traditional ideals and practices pertaining to heterosexual womanhood and manhood in Soviet and Eastern European state-​socialist societies. What has also been thrown into sharp relief is the poverty of the working analytics of gender history, honed to interrogate the binary organization of female and male difference, to address, analytically as well as theoretically, the emerged problem of non-​binary and, yet, heterosexual conceptions and practices of womanhood and manhood under socialism.

Conclusions Today, feminist scholars of socialist modernities grapple not only with Cold War legacies but also with the limitations of the gender category characteristic of the field of gender history as a whole. If available gender analytics stand in the way of capturing what was new about socialist women’s and men’s roles and relations, what is the future of the gender category in feminist histories of socialism? In this regard, the rejection of gender analytics in the study of state-​socialism by socialist-​feminist scholars in China and Hong Kong captures the severity of the problem that we face (Spakowski 2018). However, I do not think that we need to reject gender as a category of analysis in our research on 20th-​century socialism. On the contrary, I propose we do what scholars in the fields of lesbian and gay studies, queer theory, transgender, and third gender studies have been doing, that is, to turn our analytical difficulties into opportunities. The proposed agenda entails turning histories of socialist modernities with their alternative heterosexual systems of difference and power relations into a new site—​a theoretical resource—​for the development of gender theory and methodology. The gender category itself needs to undergo a radical expansion and re-​theorization to become a category that encompasses non-​binary modes of thinking about woman-​and man-​identities even in heterosexual gender systems (Krylova 2016). The challenge of the feminist historian would be not to impose a binary reading onto any invocation of heterosexual female/​ male distinction in a socialist or any other historical setting but to keep in mind that not all female/​male, heterosexual distinctions must be necessarily binary. This way, the historical site of heterosexual subject formation itself would become a site of contestation of both binary gender ideologies and binary analytics. And, gender historians will be able to start new conversations with scholars in gay and lesbian, transgender, and third gender studies.

References Artwinska, Anna and Agnieszka Mrozik, eds. 2020. Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond. New York: Routledge. Bonfiglioli, Chiara. 2016. “On Vida Tomsic, Marxist Feminism, and Agency.” Aspasia 10, no. 1, 145–​151. Boydston, Jeanne. 2008. “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis.” Gender & History 20 (3): 558–​583.

49

50

Anna Krylova Bucur, Maria. 2008. “An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe.” American Historical Review 113 (5, December): 1375–​1389. –​–​–​–​. 2018. The Century of Women: How Women Have Transformed the World since 1900. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Butler, Judith. 2004. “The Question of Social Transformation.” In Undoing Gender, 204–​231. New York: Routledge. Chatterjee, Choi. 1999. “Ideology, Gender, and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey.” Left History 6 (2): 11–​28. –​–​–​–​. 2002. Celebrating Women. Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–​ 1939. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. 1992. “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel.” Slavic Review 51 (3, Autumn): 485–​496. –​–​–​–​. 1997. Bolshevik Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans, Rebecca Friedman, Dan Healey, eds. 2002. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. New York: Palgrave. de Haan, Francisca. 2010. “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF).” Women’s History Review 19 (4): 556–​557. Dyakonova, Daria. 2021. “Introduction.” In The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920–​1922, edited by Daria Dyakonova and Mike Taber. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Dyakonova, Daria, and Mike Taber, eds. 2021. The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920–​1922. Proceedings, Resolutions, and Reports. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Engel, Barbara Alpern. 2004. Women in Russia, 1700–​2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2015. “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2): 248–​252. –​–​–​–​. 2018. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Random House. Goldman, Wendy Z. 1993. Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–​1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2002. Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harsch, Donna. 2007. Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2014. “Communism and Women.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, edited by S. A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffmann, David L. 2000. “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-​European Context.” Journal of Social History 34 (1, Fall): 35–​54. Hofman, Ana. 2010. Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performance in Serbia. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Jancar, Barbara Wolfe. 1978. Women under Communism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Krylova, Anna. 2004. “Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender.” Gender and History 16 (3, November): 626–​653. –​–​–​–​. 2010. Soviet Women in Combat. A History of Violence on the Eastern Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2016. “Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method.” Gender & History 28 (2): 307–​323. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Bolshevik Feminism and Gender Agendas of Communism.” In The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. 1, edited by Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakhtikova, Anastasia, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko, eds. 2019. Seasoned Socialism: Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lapidus, Gail. 1978. Women in Soviet Society. Equality, Development, and Social Change. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Massino, Jill. 2010. “Something Old, Something New: Marital Roles and Relations in State Socialist Romania.” Journal of Women’s History 22 (1): 34–​60. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2006. “Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?” Journal of Women’s History 18 (1): 11–​21.

50

51

Legacies of the Cold War Nearly, Rebecca Balmas. 1999. “Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-​Activists’ Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934–​41.” The Russian Review 58 (3): 396–​412. Petrone, Karen. 2000. Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Scott, Hilda. 1976. Women and Socialism: Experiences from Eastern Europe. London: Allison and Busby. Scott, Joan W. 2008. “Unanswered Questions.” American Historical Review 113 (5, December): 1422–​1430. Shulman, Elena. 2012. Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spakowski, Nicola. 2018. “Socialist Feminism in Postsocialist China.” Positions: Asia Critique 26 (4, November): 561–​592. Stites, Richard. 1978. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. “From Parent-​ State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” In What was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. White, Hayden. 1987. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation. Edited by Hayden White. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wolchik, Sharon L. and Alfred G. Meyer, eds. 1985. Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wood, Elizabeth A. 1997. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

51

52

5 THE CASE AND COMPARATIVE METHODS Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom

There are distinct tradeoffs associated with scholars’ choices of how to approach case studies, and comparison in social science research generally, which certainly play out in studies of gender in the region of Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). The disciplines of political science, sociology, and anthropology each value a different point in the balance of these tradeoffs. These are not ironclad disciplinary rules, but tendencies that inform about the values and strengths of different disciplinary worlds as they grapple with understanding and explaining gendered aspects of politics and social relationships in the region. People in the CEE&E region are united in some ways by their personal historical encounters with decades of communist rule, and the approaches to gender embraced by communist parties in the region. Beyond that, so many other factors (e.g., religion, ethnicity, past empires, and current political ideologies) distinguish people and places from one another in cross-​cutting ways that require us to consider unique conditions of each person or place, but also provide fruitful opportunities for analytical leverage over the influence of different factors. As such, there are some benefits to be gained from comparing across multiple countries in the region, or systematically comparing gender politics in countries of our region with countries outside the region. However, there are remarkably few examples of CEE&E gender studies scholars conducting these multi-​ country comparisons; the main examples are edited volumes with chapters by different authors focused on particular countries of the CEE&E region, rather than sustained comparisons cross-​nationally (e.g., Attwood, Schimpfössl, and Yusupova 2018; Avdeyeva 2015; De Soto and Dudwick 2000; Gal and Kligman 2000; Johnson and Robinson 2006). The diversity of languages and histories across the region presents high barriers to multi-​country comparisons for solitary researchers. The multidisciplinarity of the field of gender studies in CEE&E, representing different approaches to case studies, further complicates comparative work. At the same time, the enormous size of Russia in the region, both in geography and population as well as its geopolitical prominence, contributes to a preponderance of case studies on Russian gender issues. This, in turn, may have led scholars of the region to be influenced by the Russian case’s particularities in terms of, for example, how communist

52

53

The case and comparative methods

regimes shaped gender relations (when the policies and social practices of gender under socialism and communism varied across the region), and/​or the roles of western donor organizations in promoting gender equality and feminist organizing (which was very prominent in Russia, and perhaps less so in some other cases). Given the diversity but recognizing these limitations and biases, this chapter’s analysis hews closely to my sphere of expertise, which includes gender politics (especially the activities of feminist activists) in contemporary Russia. Gender studies in this context includes examining the political and social dynamics that people face in organizing on the basis of their gender identities, and how people’s lived experience of gender influences their engagement in civic and political life. As such, the examples chosen in this chapter include scholars’ studies of contemporary postcommunist gender issues rather than of earlier periods in history; those who study Russia primarily; and those that are concerned in some way with the politics of gender rather than purely social or cultural patterns. The disciplines that most often employ case study and comparative approaches to contemporary topics in gender studies are the social science disciplines of political science, sociology, and anthropology. The chapter focuses on the English-​language publications of authors, even though several mentioned are native Russian speakers. I have selected a number of examples of gender studies scholars who are trained in these disciplines, to illustrate how methodological approaches to case studies and comparison vary, but also overlap. As such, the chapter could be said to constitute a “comparison of comparative methods” across disciplines, using them to reflect upon larger questions about the advantages, disadvantages, and implications of such methodological approaches to studying gender.

Tradeoffs in the use of case studies and other comparative methods The gender-​blind methodological literature suggests costs of, and benefits in, examining a large number of comparative cases in one study that prove even more problematic for feminist research. Multi-​case comparative methods—​in which two or more cases are systematically compared for their similarities and differences in order to suggest causality—​ are used most often in political science, where students are exhorted to maximize their ability to draw generalizations. Political science methods and some forms of sociological analysis carry the advantage of attempting to generate findings that are likely to extend to a whole range of particular locations and circumstances. These scholars emphasize consciously chosen variations across explanatory factors and qualities of the people and organizations they are observing, in order to be alerted to how patterns and relationships might change in relation to changes in hypothesized explanatory variables. Yet there are costs to examining large numbers of cases. The conclusions can be superficial, since multiplying the cases means that the researcher must sacrifice depth of understanding in any single case. When we apply this approach to studying gendered social or political questions, it is difficult to capture a depth of subjectivity of the people “studied”—​a subjective stance that feminist methodologies typically demand. For feminist theorists, an issue of key importance in research design and analysis is to allow the voices of research participants themselves to be showcased in research publications and often to give participants a role in determining the research questions and goals as projects evolve (Naples 2003; Smith 1987).

53

54

Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom

In contrast, anthropologically leaning social scientists are less likely to emphasize maximizing variation and generalizability in favor of understanding a particular place or group of people more deeply. Scholars who employ methods of extended participant observation and participatory action research (PAR) to explore a single case can improve the accuracy and nuance of analysis. These approaches also carry important advantages for improving the ethical standards of field research. PAR methods demand that scholars interrogate and try to reduce the power inequality between the researcher and the people who are “subjects” of research, and can be more satisfying for the research participants if they feel that real-​world, constructive outcomes are a product of the research. However, there are disadvantages to this approach as well. For example, researchers incur some risk of becoming too sympathetic to the research participants and being hesitant to examine their behavior critically. While all field research carries an element of unpredictability, PAR methods, with their relinquishment of control over the project, heighten the degree of unpredictability of results. In addition, claims of generalizable findings are weaker than with a structured multi-​case comparison, since one cannot conclude confidently that the patterns observed reflect wider patterns in the society. On the other hand, many gender scholars would argue that generalizability should not be the goal of feminist research, since gender identities are wildly diverse and intersectional, and the ways in which societies shape and react to them are ultimately unique to specific contexts—​at the levels of countries and political systems, religious and ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, industries, professions, and so on, finally to the level of individual circumstances (Naples 2003, 183).

Varying disciplinary approaches to case studies and comparative method A case study is typically considered to be a study of a single country, a community, an event, or some other unit of analysis (George and Bennett 2004; Seawright and Gerring 2011). However, the situation becomes complicated when we speak about multiple dimensions of a case. Sometimes in a single research publication, one speaks simultaneously of the case of Russia relative to other country contexts, in addition to the case of one city or village relative to another, and the case of one organization or individual person. In short, the case can often change depending on the dimension of comparison the researcher has in mind at a certain juncture in their analysis. Case-​based and comparative methods are usually associated with qualitative data and methods, as opposed to statistical quantitative methods—​although comparative methods can also be quantitative in nature. If the researcher is studying a single case of one community or organization, they will often combine more formal interviews with members of that group, with ongoing participant-​observation activity in the group or PAR in some cases. If they are studying many cases comparatively, the emphasis is usually on large numbers of standardized or semi-​structured interviews, in some instances supplemented by even larger-​scale surveys in those communities that can be compared across communities. Social science disciplines vary considerably in their tendencies to rely on these different modes of research.

Political science approaches to women’s organizing in Russia Political scientists are typically concerned with the wider generalizability of their research findings—​although usually with particular scope conditions attached to their findings. 54

55

The case and comparative methods

We tend to pay considerable attention to ensuring that we conduct several case studies, selected explicitly to either hold certain factors constant, or vary them in ways that are helpful for gaining analytical leverage to test working hypotheses (George and Bennett 2004; Mill 1884, Book III, c­ hapter 8). As a result of this concern with generalizability and comparing across numerous cases, our approach often involves less sustained observation of any individual case. Our methods usually include large numbers of interviews with relevant participants to understand various aspects of gendered politics. From a feminist methodological standpoint, these formalized and larger-​N comparative research designs have the disadvantage of making it very difficult to follow the recommended approach of spending sufficient time with any one research participant to ensure that their unique perspectives and voices are featured in the analysis (Rivkin-​Fish 2005, 18). For example, my book Funding Civil Society (Sundstrom 2006) utilized a political science approach to draw comparisons across the civil society environments and NGO communities in seven Russian cities, as well as across sectors (women’s organizations and soldiers’ rights organizations) and across individual organizations themselves. The project involved over 120 interviews in the seven cities; and because of the geographic expanse and numbers of organizations involved, very little sustained participant observation was involved in examining any one particular organization. While I did attend various workshops, conferences, press conferences, and roundtables of feminist and soldiers’ rights organizations, and for some organizations conducted multiple interviews with multiple activists over time, I did not embed myself in any group for an extended period of time and maintained some analytical distance from most of the people I interviewed. The large number of interviews and locations lent themselves to finding patterns and exposing a wide variety of modes of funding for women’s groups, the impacts of the different local political contexts they faced, and the ways in which women’s groups navigated their relationships among western donor preferences, local concerns, and their own views of their goals in organizing on the basis of gender. The research design facilitated the development of a typology of how funding donors and local political environments interacted to influence women’s organizing and their ability to frame issues through a gender lens for different audiences. Sperling (1999), in one of the first monograph-​length English-​language analyses of Russian women’s organizing in the early post-​Soviet era (see also Kay 2000; Racioppi and See 1997), embraced a combination of participant observation of events such as conferences, workshops, and street demonstrations, with a large number of detailed, semi-​structured interviews with 63 activists from 50 different women’s groups with diverse aims and perspectives (Sperling 1999, 10). Sperling’s later book, Sex, Politics, and Putin (2015), used a similar methodology, although on a smaller scale, focusing more closely on interviewing young feminist and antifeminist activists to examine the political gender ideology of Putin’s Russia (2015, 311–​313). A third example of a political scientist’s approach to gender studies is Johnson’s (2009) Gender Violence in Russia, which examines the question of the conditions under which global feminist interventions to try to “help” Russian feminist gender violence activists can be successful in creating more effective local mobilization. Johnson calls her study a single case study of Russia. As an example of how the definition of a case can shift throughout a book, Johnson later refers to the “case” as different types of interventions into different types of gender violence within that larger case (2009, 15). Like Sperling and Sundstrom, and typical of political scientists conducting field-​based case studies, her major modes of data gathering were interviews with feminist activists and foreign donors, 55

56

Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom

as well as observation of events such as training seminars and conferences, and media content analysis to trace policy and public opinion impacts. There is a sense in which all three of these examples are typical of scholars trained as political scientists who study gender issues in Russia (e.g., Eichler 2011; Henderson 2003; Suchland 2015), and likely typical of political scientists who study gender in other specific regions or countries (who are often called “area studies” scholars as well as gender studies scholars). Unlike many political scientists today who focus on large-​N statistical analysis or formal modeling, and similar to most anthropologists, political scientists who study gender in the region tend to conduct in-​depth field research that is empirically rich in its analysis. In doing so, all of these cited examples are also careful to quote the voices of the women who participate in their research, in their own words, as feminist research methods would encourage. Yet gender studies scholars who are political scientists still tend to design and conduct field research in an intentionally systematic way, with preliminary hypotheses in mind, which is aimed at producing some broader generalizations than most anthropologists would venture.

Cultural anthropology of women’s organizing and lived experiences of gender in and beyond Russia Cultural anthropologists tend to approach case studies much more narrowly and deeply. They also engage typically in significant self-​reflection in their research: on their position as a researcher and the kinds of biases and privilege they bring to the research, which could potentially influence the people they are studying or the conclusions they draw from the research (De Soto and Dudwick 2000). Cultural anthropologists are expected to spend a great deal of time immersed in participant observation through direct field research into their cases (Bernard and Gravlee 2014, 2), certainly much longer in a particular case than political scientists typically do, and often longer than sociologists. The paradigmatic research design of an anthropological study is ethnographic, classically involving going to one small town or village, and living there for a year or more, engaging in constant observation of as many events and situations as possible (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus 1995). Contemporary anthropological research also frequently includes PAR methods, in which the researcher herself becomes involved in participating in the very activities she is studying (McIntyre 2007). These methods align more easily than traditional political science methods with feminist gender studies principles of including research participants’ voices and agency in the research process and written works that result. A good illustration of an anthropological approach to gender studies is Hemment’s (2007) Empowering Women in Russia. Hemment examines the interactions between western organizations’ efforts to support Russian women’s organizing, and the activists locally on the ground who were experiencing these “gendered interventions” (2007, 2). Using ethnographic field research methods and PAR, Hemment immersed herself in the lives of feminist activists in one organization in the provincial central Russian city of Tver’. Illustrating the anthropologist’s typical commitment to long-​term immersion in a particular case study, Hemment spent 19 months in Tver, living in the town and working closely with one women’s group, including undertaking a collaborative research project with group members. Hemment increasingly saw this PAR approach as necessary to democratize the research encounter between foreign intellectual researcher and community group members (2007, 14). 56

57

The case and comparative methods

Similarly, Rivkin-​ Fish (2005) was embedded in an organization in Russia as a participant-​observer in order to conduct the ethnographic study for her book, Women’s Health in Post-​Soviet Russia. For Rivkin-​Fish, though, the organization in which she was a participant was an international organization—​the World Health Organization—​ for whom she was a research consultant in Russia on reproductive health practices and policies, interacting with Russian health provider institutions. Rivkin-​Fish refers to her cases as consisting of instances of reproductive healthcare interventions in Russia, both as “projects” of organizations and as everyday “practices” of Russians negotiating the maternity healthcare system (Rivkin-​Fish 2005, 4). Rivkin-​Fish’s participant-​observation methods of her ethnographic study extended beyond her interactions within her WTO work and formal interviews, to her everyday conversations with Russians, including the families she lived with, beyond the walls of healthcare institutions. A somewhat different approach, using “multi-​sited” ethnographic methods (Marcus 1995), is that of Bloch’s (2017) Sex, Love, and Migration. Bloch works across multiple sites of ethnography, even crossing numerous countries (Turkey, Russia, and Moldova) to understand the lives of post-​Soviet migrant women working in the informal arenas of sex work, domestic labor, and the garment trade. In doing so, she treats individual people as cases. Her cases are not a particular place, but people who come from a particular place—​the former Soviet Union; this illustrates that the definition of case studies of a region or gender dynamics related to it are not necessarily isolated within the physical borders of the countries considered to constitute that region. She focuses in detail on the cases of five key women and their families (Bloch 2017). Because her subjects were often unpredictably mobile women, she conducted a significant amount of her repeated research conversations with them remotely by phone, Skype, or Whatsapp. The research spanned over a decade of time, necessarily due to the geographic expanse involved, and thus was not conducted as a traditional deep ethnography in a defined time period.

Sociological mixed methods to women’s organization and gender Like political scientists, sociologists of gender often use large numbers of interviews as an approach to field research to constitute their case comparisons. A frequent method that sociologists employ to analyze their interview data is discourse analysis, in which they examine interview statements or texts to identify themes that emerge, relating to larger social dynamics and relationships (Fairclough 2013, 3; Salmenniemi 2008, 13). Like anthropologists, and in keeping with feminist research methodology, some sociologists engage in self-​reflection in their case studies regarding how their intervention as a researcher affects their research participants, and the power dynamics between themselves and their participants. It is worth noting that gender studies researchers trained in Russia are more frequently sociologists than anthropologists or political scientists, largely because sociology has a long-​standing history as a discipline in Russia/​the Soviet Union, while anthropology and especially political science are less established disciplines (Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2003, 52). By contrast, western gender studies scholars tend more frequently to be trained as political scientists than in these other two disciplines. Salmenniemi’s (2008) Democratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia used a combination of methods, both large-​N survey and detailed qualitative case studies. Like anthropologist Hemment, she chose to focus her study in the provincial city of Tver’. But while Hemment engaged in PAR within one organization, Salmenniemi focused on detailed comparisons of women’s involvement in civic activity in two different 57

58

Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom

nongovernmental organizations (2008, 21). In addition, to obtain a more general sense of how her observations of these two organizations compared to the larger regional sector, Salmenniemi used the conventional sociological method of a large-​N survey, conducted by a team of researchers using a structured questionnaire during personal interviews with leaders of 105 civic organizations in Tver’ (2008, 23–​24, ­chapter 2). In doing so, she struck a balance between the pros and cons of sustained focus on a small number of cases to acquire a deeper understanding of their unique qualities, and large-​N comparisons to strengthen generalizable conclusions. Temkina and Zdravomyslova’s (2018) book chapter reports the results of an interview study of pregnant women’s maternity care choices in private medical institutions in St. Petersburg. These Russian sociologists conducted a total of 25 interviews with pregnant women and 12 interviews with medical practitioners. They then analyzed interview transcripts to identify several themes that emerged in the interviews relating to major social dynamics, and to select notable quotes that illustrate these themes, rather than drawing strict comparisons to indicate where there may have been divergence or departure from these themes in responses within the sample of women. As such, they aimed more to find systematic patterns in large themes of gendered parenting roles than to develop deep relationships with any of their respondents. Another sociologist of Russian gender issues, Utrata (2015, 11–​14), focused her field research in a single provincial city in Russia, spending a total of one year in Kaluga to facilitate not only conducting over 150 interviews with women about her research topic (single motherhood in Russia), but also immersing herself in observing the lives of a smaller number of these women and their relationships with other people who are with them on a regular basis. Utrata employed a “grounded theory” approach that is highly inductive and open-​ended in nature, letting her field interviews and observations, and importantly the women she was meeting, guide what the most important analytical themes of the project were. She spent longer amounts of time with approximately a dozen single mothers of varying socioeconomic status, joining them frequently for visits in their homes or on social outings in other locations during the entirety of her time in the field. In doing so over an extended period, she was able to acquire the trust of her participants and discuss many painful subjects, such as reasons for their marital breakdown, material hardship, or intimate partner violence. Like Salmenniemi, by combining a large number of interviews among an intentionally diverse set of participants with in-​depth case studies of a smaller number of women, Utrata was able to make some claims of generalizable findings about single women’s lives in Russia while simultaneously collecting very individualized, granular observations from her subset of in-​depth relationships to reflect upon in her analysis. She found throughout that single motherhood is considered normal throughout Russian society and not at all stigmatized, and argued that perhaps this has led to a “normalized gender crisis” that suppresses women’s demands for more support from the state and Russian men (Utrata 2015, 17–​18). Still, the practical need with this research design to focus only on one provincial city supplemented by a small number of interviews in Moscow led to a corresponding disadvantage, that she could not claim to have witnessed how single motherhood varies across the country at large.

Conclusions These varying allegiances to generalizable comparisons and depth of detail in gender studies of CEE&E have largely reinforced the disciplinary boundaries that hinder 58

59

The case and comparative methods

scholars in our interdisciplinary field of gender studies from collaborating with one another in ways that could build our capacity to draw comparisons across different CEE&E locales on the common questions that motivate us. Moreover, as Bucur (Chapter 1 in this Handbook) points out, the depth of empirical knowledge we possess today on many gender studies questions in the CEE&E region remains insufficient to draw serious cross-​national comparisons, and single-​country, single-​case studies are still needed as a foundation for future comparative collaborations. There is no perfect answer to the selection of an empirical method for studying gender issues in any context. While every person’s experience of gender in the world is unique and intersectional in nature, there are also patterns that can be discerned through careful comparisons across cases of whatever gender question a scholar is asking, and feminist theory has long been built upon understanding these systematic patterns. Scholars in our highly interdisciplinary field of gender studies in CEE&E have benefited collectively from employing a multifaceted set of approaches to case studies and comparative methods. We could benefit even further in the future by working in a two-​pronged fashion, both continuing to carry out sole-​authored studies that deepen our empirical knowledge of specific circumstances in individual cases, and embarking on wider collaborations among scholars with diverse disciplinary and country expertise that broaden our ability to compare gender patterns across the region. More globally, feminist theory’s understanding of patriarchy as a pervasive institutional structure can benefit from seeing the particularities of CEE&E, with its shared history of communist rule intersecting with variations in other respects including religion, ethno-​linguistic diversity, imperial rule, and conflict.

References Attwood, Lynne, Elisabeth Schimpfössl, and Marina Yusupova, eds. 2018. Gender and Choice after Socialism. Gewerbestrasse: Springer International Publishing. Avdeyeva, Olga A. 2015. Defending Women’s Rights in Europe: Gender Equality and EU Enlargement. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bernard, H. Russel, and Clarence Gravlee, eds. 2014. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Bloch, Alexia. 2017. Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Clifford, James, George E. Marcus, et al., eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. De Soto, Hermaine G., and Nora Dudwick, eds. 2000. Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Eichler, Maya. 2011. Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-​Soviet Russia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Fairclough, Norman. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman. 2000. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life After Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Paperbacks, Princeton University Press. George, Alexander L., and Andrew Bennett, eds. 2004. “Case Studies and Theory Development.” In Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, 3–​36. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hemment, Julie. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Henderson, Sarah L. 2003. Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Johnson, Janet Elise. 2009. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Johnson, Janet Elise, and Jean C Robinson. 2006. Living Gender after Communism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

59

60

Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom Kay, Rebecca. 2000. Russian Women and Their Organizations: Gender, Discrimination and Grassroots Women’s Organizations, 1991–​96. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography in/​of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-​Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1): 95–​117. McIntyre, Alice. 2007. Participatory Action Research. (Qualitative Research Methods Series). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications. Mill, John Stuart. 1884. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London: Longmans, Green, and Company. Naples, Nancy N. 2003. Feminism and Method. New York: Routledge. Racioppi, Linda, and Katherine O’Sullivan See. 1997. Women’s Activism in Contemporary Russia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Rivkin-​Fish, Michele R. 2005. Women’s Health in Post-​Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Salmenniemi, Suvi. 2008. Democratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia. London: Routledge. Seawright, Jason, and John Gerring. 2011. “Case Selection Techniques Case Study Research Options.” Political Research Quarterly 61 (2): 294–​308. Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. (Northeastern Series in Feminist Theory). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sperling, Valerie. 1999. Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition. New York: Cambridge University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2015. Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia. (Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics Series). New York: Oxford University Press. Suchland, Jennifer. 2015. Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sundstrom, Lisa McIntosh. 2006. Funding Civil Society: Foreign Assistance And NGO Development in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Temkina, Anna, and Elena Zdravomyslova. 2003. “Gender Studies in Post-​Soviet Society: Western Frames and Cultural Differences.” Studies in East European Thought 55 (1): 51–​61. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Responsible Motherhood, Practices of Reproductive Choice and Class Construction in Contemporary Russia.” In Gender and Choice after Socialism, edited by Lynne Attwood, Elisabeth Schimpfössl, and Marina Yusupova, 161–​ 186. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Utrata, Jennifer. 2015. Women Without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

60

61

6 QUANTITATIVE AND EXPERIMENTAL METHODS Olga A. Avdeyeva and Nellie Bohac

Quantitative research is a developing area in scholarship on gender and politics in Central-​ Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). While recognizing that there are important concerns about such approaches, we argue that feminist scholars of the region could benefit from adopting the rich methodological toolkit offered by quantitative methodology. Quantitative methods are used to study complex phenomena: they can help organize multidimensional data to enable the research on diversity, change, and persistence, something that is much needed in this ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse region with a history of frequent institutional changes, even if it is often assumed to be one coherent whole. Quantitative approaches can help improve conceptualization, enrich a comprehension of meaning, measurement, and data collection, while making data analysis more sophisticated. Quantitative research on CEE&E has been constrained by the limited amount of high-​ quality gender-​specific data needed to study the profound changes in the region over the last 40 years. The destruction of previous institutions and the struggles to rebuild new ones—​from educational to governing institutions—​has produced few financial and technical resources to collect such data on gender. Moreover, conducting gendered quantitative analysis is not in the countries’ tradition: while communist regimes collected a lot of different statistics, the analysis was not designed to capture built-​in structural and institutional gender inequalities. We highlight several new efforts that allow scholars of CEE&E to study women’s organizing (Hughes et al. 2017), international development assistance to promote gender equality (Tierney et al. 2011), and the broader use of the new gender empowerment indices that includes multiple dimensions of women’s political, economic, and social status and spans across multiple states in time (Sundström et al. 2017).

Quantitative–​qualitative debates in gender and politics research As there has been little debate within the field of gender and politics in CEE&E about the usefulness of quantitative methods, this chapter summarizes the methodological debates in the broader field of gender and politics and considers some ways of reconciling the two research traditions.

61

62

Olga A. Avdeyeva and Nellie Bohac

The subfield of gender and politics within political science has experienced a transformation in the last several decades, developing into a vigorous research area that includes diverse methodological traditions and employs a wide array of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-​methods designs (Tripp and Hughes 2018). Ackerly and True (2013, 135) argue that “there are no distinct feminist methodologies or methods for studying gender and politics, but feminist methodological reflection is central to the development of the field of gender and politics.” Feminist scholars adopt and adapt conventional social science methods to reveal concealed power dynamics and different forms of social, political, and economic marginalization, and analyze complex sources and structures of oppression and inequality. This turn to methodological pluralism reflects the acceptance of positivist research within feminist social science (Tripp and Hughes 2018). Many early feminist critiques of social science methodologies challenged the positivist epistemology for its preoccupation with objectivity, standardization of data, replicability, causality, and the withdrawal of the researcher from the subject matter and data collection (Bryman 1984). Positivism is grounded in the idea that the researcher can study objective reality with a preconceived hypothesis, which can be operationalized and tested as empirical evidence collected in a systematic and standardized way. Some feminist scholars challenged these positivist assumptions and questioned the existence of objective reality. They see surveys, experiments, and statistics as tools of “objectivation of research subjects” that limit “our understanding of the social construction of meaning and experience” (Naples with Clark 1995, 160). They claim that knowledge itself is partial, relational, and reflective of unequal power relations, and thus, reality can be uncovered only through in-​depth face-​to-​face interviews, participant observation, and other data collection methods that emphasize the researcher’s reflexivity and immersion in the context of the study and the importance of subjects’ individual experiences, views, and identities (Ritter and Mellow 2000), methods that have predominated in the study of CEE&E. In response, feminist positivists argue that it was possible to do quantitative research that could be attentive to feminist goals, reflect on power inequalities, and uncover critical sources and structures of oppression (Tripp and Hughes 2018). The quantitative and qualitative methodological traditions constitute two “alternative cultures” with their own set of norms, values, and beliefs, but they both produce valid descriptive and causal inferences (Mahoney and Goertz 2006). They pride themselves on pursuing different goals: exploring a particular phenomenon in depth to reveal the unique experiences and facts for qualitative inquiry and finding generalizable causal relationships for quantitative studies. The two traditions vary in the scope of their theoretical application: in a qualitative case study, the scope of theory is narrowly defined, whereas in quantitative studies the scope of theory is broadly defined, emphasizing the generalizability of findings to a large set of different cases (e.g., global studies) or the whole population (e.g., studies of public opinion). Finally, they differ in how they treat the data: in quantitative analysis, no piece of evidence has a different weight, each piece of evidence is just a data point in a dataset; whereas in qualitative analysis the researcher emphasizes the unique cases, experiences, and observations in the process of exploration (Mahoney and Goertz 2006). Given these differences, feminist quantitative research has much to offer the field of gender and politics in CEE&E to enhance our understanding of unequal power dynamics, reveal the complexity of inequality and the sources of inequality, and, finally, uncover its scope.

62

63

Quantitative and experimental methods

Recent methodological advances provided several responses to reconciling the two traditions suggesting their compatibility. McCall’s classification of feminist research articulated the types and epistemological positions of feminist approaches and analyzed their contributions to research on diversity (2005). She demonstrated the compatibility of the feminist empiricist approach and intercategorical analysis of diversity with quantitative methodology. Spierings took McCall’s classification further to demonstrate how quantitative methods could be applied in the intracategorical analysis of standpoint feminism (Spierings 2012). He proposed to conceptualize diversity as a multilevel continuum that can account for numerous categories of diversity at different levels (e.g., sex, gender, sexuality, education, employment status, locality, region, gender equality policies, gendered labor market structure, etc.) to reflect fine differences in positions of multiple distinguishable groups, describe these groups, and draw inferences for these groups using basic quantitative techniques (Spierings 2012). Spierings’ articulation of diversity through relative positions of groups brought quantitative techniques closer to relativist analysis of standpoint feminism. The application of quantitative methods to postmodernist feminist research, however, remains difficult. Quantitative methods offer several important benefits to gender studies. They serve as effective tools at summarizing and systematizing large quantities of information (Weldon 2014). Cross-​national and cross-​temporal systematic data enables the researcher to reveal trends and patterns in persistence and change of a studied phenomenon and uncover the relationship between this phenomenon and other factors. Moreover, statistical techniques can provide an assessment of correlational and causal relationship (there a relationship between A and B?), estimate the size of the effect (how strong is the association between A and B?), and demonstrate the type of the relationship (is this relationship linear, non-​ linear, curvilinear, or interactive?) (Weldon 2014). Quantitative research includes observational studies with data received from systematic observation of reality, as well as experimental and quasi-​experimental research. Scholars of politics and gender have started to employ experiments to study some aspects of gendered relations and behaviors. For instance, experiments can be a useful tool for studying attitudes toward socially sensitive characteristics of individuals (such as sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation) that a regular survey might not expose because respondents may feel uncomfortable revealing their true attitudes. Experimental research disguises these sensitive characteristics in vignettes, randomly assigning different characteristics to hypothetical individuals for different respondents to assess. The difference in the respondents’ assessments of these varied vignettes allows for detecting the degree of group bias. Policy experimentation is another fruitful technique for determining the impact of certain policy characteristics on the policy outcome. For instance, in a hypothetical study of information on reproductive rights and the rates of abortion, the researchers randomly assign the mailing (or not mailing) of information materials on the availability of contraceptives to people’s homes across different counties. At the end of the experiment, they collect and compare data on abortion rates across counties that received such correspondence and those that did not receive it, as well as compare the data for previous rates of abortion (pre-​treatment) to post-​treatment rates of abortion. Such lab-​in-​the-​field experimental studies provide a unique opportunity for scholars to study policy-​related issues and could be of particular interest to policy practitioners and social movement activists. Policy experiments, however, rely on careful planning and cooperation between

63

64

Olga A. Avdeyeva and Nellie Bohac

state institutions and nongovernmental organizations, and are, thus, limited to those areas where such ties between state and non-​state actors already exist.

Quantitative research, intersectionality, and multidimensionality Much of the pioneering interdisciplinary gender scholarship today—​ including on CEE&E—​ focuses on the study of the multidimensionality of gender, gender politics, gendered divisions of labor, and gendered power and institutions, theorizing and exploring the nature and relationship between distinct dimensions of what constitutes complex social identities, institutions, laws, policies, and practices. Challenged by black feminists, gender and politics scholars included race, class, sexuality, disability, and other dimensions of social identity in the analysis of political intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991). Research on intersectionality became one of the most important transformative developments in the field of gender and politics (Tripp and Hughes 2018). It brought essential changes to the conceptual, methodological, and normative paradigm of gender and politics scholarship. Research on intersectionality calls for sophisticated research designs and methods able to deal with high complexity. Whether quantitative methods can contribute to research on intersectionality has become another debate within the study of gender and politics. Multiple studies have discussed the complexity of intersectionality from the methodological perspective and highlighted the importance of quantitative work in enhancing the quality and scope of intersectional analysis (McCall 2005; Spierings 2012; Weldon 2006). Advanced quantitative work demonstrates how sophisticated statistical analysis utilizing high-​quality data can contribute to our understanding of complex multidimensional processes and phenomena. An important example of sophisticated quantitative research is Htun and Weldon’s (2018) cross-​national analysis of state policies on women’s rights around the world, including the CEE&E region. Recognizing the multidimensionality of gender politics, Htun and Weldon disaggregate policies by type, such as policies combating violence against women, policies concerning women’s legal status at work, family law, family leave and childcare policies, and reproductive rights and run the separate analysis for each of these policy categories. They find that for different types of gender politics, different actors and conditions matter. For instance, they find that the communist experience enabled the CEE&E states to develop progressive family laws and generous leave policies relative to other states. The communist suppression of autonomous movements, however, prevented the development of policies combating violence against women, and these states are still lagging in providing protection and safety to women facing violence.

Research on institutions and institutional change in CEE&E There are two quantitative subfields in the study of gender in CEE&E that are emerging: (1) institutions and institutional change, and (2) public opinion, with the latter including some experimental research. In the former, most research focuses on explaining the number of women in legislatures, and more recently, executive positions (Millard 2004; Moser 2003; Saxonberg 2000). Most commonly, these studies investigate if electoral rules impact the electability of female candidates (Brzinski 2003; Golosov 2001; Gwiazda 2015; Millard 2014; Moser 2003). In contrast to the consensus that proportional representation systems make women more electable in western democracies, Moser (2003) finds that, in Russia, more women were elected in single-​member districts. Golosov 64

65

Quantitative and experimental methods

(2001), investigating the pathways of women to regional legislatures in Russia, finds little evidence that the type of electoral system matters for women’s representation. Instead, he suggests that party development is the key to increasing the proportion of women in the legislative office. Dubrow (2006) demonstrates that regional economic development in Romania strongly correlates with the chances of female candidates being elected to the national parliament, with most female candidates winning seats in economically advanced districts. As with global comparative quantitative research on gender and politics, this research is limited to a narrow niche of questions that can be studied using the data compiled by states or by large research agencies, such as the Inter-​Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the International IDEA. That is why studies investigating the number of women in legislatures, in executive office roles, and in judiciary positions, as well as research on legislative and party quotas, constitute the largest portion of quantitative work in politics and gender (Tripp and Hughes 2018). In the study of CEE&E, this research is often not theoretically innovative as most studies test hypotheses developed in the West in a new context. A small set of studies investigates policy and institutional development in the CEE&E region using quantitative methods. This is particularly important in those postcommunist states that became members of the European Union (EU) and had to conform to EU legal standards on gender equality in the workplace. Avdeyeva (2015) explores government compliance with EU requirements to align national policies and practices in the area of gender equality in the workplace, measured as policy adoption and institutional reform (1995–​2010). The findings reveal that government compliance depends on the configuration of political actors mobilized in support of reform. Legislative reform is facilitated by a strong women’s movement and mobilized female parliamentarians. Institutional reform depends on the strength of the women’s movement and its ability to form coalitions with political actors within government elites, most importantly governing parties. Finally, the effect of women’s movements’ actors on institutional reform is moderated by the ideology of political parties in power. Similarly, Sedelmeier (2009) analyzes workplace gender-​ related policies and national equality institutions in several Central European states and finds no significant difference in compliance in pre-​and post-​accession into the EU. Overall, institutional and policy research in CEE&E is narrow in scope and covers a limited number of questions because researchers must rely on data compiled by states and other governing institutions, such as the EU. Critical areas in politics and gender research, such as the analysis of intersectionality in the CEE&E region, remain unexamined from the quantitative perspective. While qualitative research has already engaged in the intersectional analysis of gender inequalities in the region (Krizsan, Skjeie, and Squires 2012), quantitative scholars have just begun to utilize statistical methods to study intersectionality, and thus, there is room to grow (Dubrow 2008; Hughes and Dubrow 2018).

Research on gender-​specific public opinion in CEE&E Research on public opinion in the region exploded since the collapse of communism when CEE&E states were included in global and regional surveys of public attitudes, such as the World Values Survey (WVS), the Eurobarometer, and the South East European Social Survey Project (SEESSP). The main gender-​related research centers on attitudes toward gender roles and women’s political leadership. Researchers have studied 65

66

Olga A. Avdeyeva and Nellie Bohac

how factors such as ideology, socioeconomic status, and attitudes toward gendered social and political roles of women, impact women’s representation in Eastern Europe. Brajdić-​ Vuković, Birkelund, and Štulhofer’s (2007) study attitudes toward gender roles in Croatia using the SEESSP survey. They find that socioeconomic factors such as unemployment and low socioeconomic status are negatively correlated with gender progressive norms. Fodor and Balogh (2010) use survey data from another data set on social inequality, the EUREQUAL 2007, for 13 postcommunist CEE states, finding that demographic characteristics, such as being female, being young, and being educated are associated with liberal gender role views. Much of the research on public opinion on gendered attitudes and gender roles employs the WVS data. This global survey allows for assessing the position of CEE&E public responses to questions on gender equality support compared to other regions in the world (Inglehart and Norris 2003). Inglehart and Norris (2003) apply the modernization theory to demonstrate that public attitudes toward gender equality in CEE&E fall in the group of industrial states, scoring higher than the agrarian states, but lower than the post-​industrial states. However, the expansive range in attitudes between the CEE&E states demonstrates that it is not a homogenous region, suggesting that modernization theory alone does not help explain the diversity in attitudes across the CEE&E states. Understanding this diversity requires going beyond the GDP per capita measure of economic development to include such aspects as gendered labor market structure, gendered career opportunities, gendered labor policies and regulations, the number of women in local and regional politics, party politics, and the political regime. Several studies exploited the partition of Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study the effects of political and economic regimes on gender roles attitudes. Campa and Serafinelli (2019) find that women raised in East Germany, especially from those areas with higher rates of female labor force participation, are more likely to place importance on career success than women from West Germany. Respondents from East Germany, regardless of gender, also are more likely to hold less traditional gender role attitudes than respondents from West Germany. Alesina and Fuchs-​Schundeln (2007) analyze preferences for redistribution across East and West Germany, finding that men from East Germany are much more in favor of state redistribution and provision of social services than men from West Germany. There are very few experimental studies conducted in CEE&E, which mostly deal with attitudes toward female political leaders. In a study conducted in Kazakhstan, a predominantly agrarian economy with a mostly Muslim population, the researchers asked participants to listen to a speech given by a prominent politician (female or male) and evaluate this politician and her/​his competencies in different policy areas (Herrick and Sapieva 1997). The findings reveal the female politician was perceived as less competent than a male politician in all policy areas, including economic, foreign, and social policies. Since the study participants were college students, we can expect that the degree of bias in the general population may be higher. Avdeyeva and Matland (2020) conduct experimental studies on gender bias in four regions of Russia by giving subjects vignettes about a local political leader, in which the gender and ethnicity were varied. They find that in regions with a diverse economy and a gender-​mixed labor market, the public is supportive of female political leaders; in a region dominated by the resource extraction industry, they find systematic bias against female political leaders. The findings support the oil curse theory for low female emancipation in states dominated by resource extraction industries because women are marginalized in 66

67

Quantitative and experimental methods

the labor market and politics (Ross 2008). These results demonstrate the importance of the socioeconomic context and the structure of the local labor market to explain public attitudes toward women in leadership positions.

Conclusions While quantitative research is well equipped to uncover gendered aspects of existing policies and practices and reveal how inequalities are produced and reproduced, the use of quantitative methods in research on gender and politics in CEE&E has been scarce. We argue that quantitative methodologies can offer scholars of gender and politics, social movement activists, and policymakers in CEE&E a toolkit for data collection, data organization, and data analysis. These tools can be used to produce innovative research, or they can be used poorly when researchers fail to effectively collect data, refine study variables, and develop analytical techniques that suit the goals of the research questions. These failures occur not because of the methods, but because of their inadequate use. The benefits of quantitative research should not be disregarded by scholars and policy practitioners today, particularly at a time of concerted conservative pushback against feminist positions across CEE&E. It is critical to put a diverse toolkit of methods to the service of studying the history of the region as well as, more recently, the outcomes of the conservative assault for different groups of people and revealing these data to the CEE&E publics and others.

References Ackerly, Brooke and Jacqui True. 2013. “Methods and Methodologies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon, 135–​161. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alesina, Alberto, and Nicola Fuchs-​Schundeln. 2007. “Good-​Bye, Lenin (Or Not?): The Effects of Communism on People’s Preferences.” American Economic Review 97 (4): 469–​530. Avdeyeva, Olga A. 2015. Defending Women’s Rights in Europe: Gender Equality and EU Enlargement. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Avdeyeva, Olga A. and Richard E. Matland. 2020. “Ethnic and Gender-​Trait Biases in Russian Regions: Ethnic Integration, Regional Economy, and Women in Local Politics.” Politics and Gender. Forthcoming. Brajdić-​Vuković, Marija, Birkelund, Gunn Elizabeth, and Aleksandar Štulhofer. 2007. “Between Tradition and Modernization: Attitudes toward Women’s Employment and Gender Roles in Croatia.” International Journal of Sociology 37 (3): 32–​53. Bryman, Alan. 1984. “The Debate about Quantitative and Qualitative Research: A Question of Method or Epistemology?” The British Journal of Sociology 35 (1): 75–​92. Brzinski, Joanne Bay. 2003. “Women’s Representation in Germany: A Comparison of East and West” In Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-​Communist Europe, edited by Richard E. Matland, 63–​80. New York: Oxford University Press. Campa, Pamela, and Michel Serafinelli. 2019. “Politico-​Economic Regimes and Attitudes: Female Workers under State Socialism.” The Review of Economic and Statistics 101 (2): 233–​248. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–​1299. Dubrow, Joshua K. 2006. “Women’s Representation in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies, 1992-​ 2005: The Effect of District Economic Development.” International Journal of Sociology 36 (1): 93–​109. –​–​–​–. 2008. “How Can We Account for Intersectionality in Quantitative Analysis of Survey Data? Empirical Illustration for Central and Eastern Europe.” ASK. Research and Methods, 17: 85–​100.

67

68

Olga A. Avdeyeva and Nellie Bohac Fodor, Eva, and Balogh, Aniko. 2010. “Back to the Kitchen? Gender Role attitudes in 13 East European Countries.” Zeitschrift für Familienforschung 22 (3): 289–​307. Golosov, Grigorii V. 2001. “Political Parties, Electoral Systems and Women’s Representation in the Regional Legislative Assemblies of Russia, 1995-​1998.” Party Politics 7(1), 45–​68. Gwiazda, Anna. 2015. “Women’s Representation and Gender Quotas: The Case of the Polish Parliament.” Democratization 22 (4): 679–​697. Herrick, Rebekah, and Almira Sapieva. 1997. “Perception of Women Politicians in Kazakhstan” Women and Politics 18 (4): 27–​40. Htun, Mala, and S. Laurel Weldon. 2018. The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Right around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Melanie M., and Joshua K. Dubrow. 2018. “Intersectionality and Women’s Political Empowerment Worldwide.” In Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment across the Globe: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Research, edited by Amy C. Alexander, Catherine Bolzendahl, and Farida Jalalzai: 76–​96. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hughes, Melanie M., Pamela Paxton, Sharon Quinsaat, and Nicholas Reith. 2017. Women’s International Nongovernmental Organizations, 1950-​ 2013. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-​ university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2003. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change. New York: Cambridge University Press. Krizsan, Andrea, Hege Skjeie, and Judith Squires. 2012. Institutionalizing Intersectionality: The Changing Nature of European Equality Regimes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mahoney, James, and Gary Goertz. 2006. “A Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Quantitative and Qualitative Research.” Political Analysis 14 (3): 227–​249. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs 30 (3): 1771–​1800. Millard, Frances. 2004. Elections, Parties, and Representation in Post-​ Communist Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–. 2014. “Not Much Happened: The Impact of Gender Quotas in Poland.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 47 (1): 1–​11. Moser, Robert G. 2003. “Electoral Systems and Women’s Representation: The Strange Case of Russia.” In Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-​Communist Europe, edited by Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery, 153–​172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naples, Nancy A. with Emily Clark. 1995. ‘‘Feminist Participatory Research and Empowerment: Going Public as Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse.’’ In Feminism and Social Change: Bridging Theory and Practice, edited by Heidi Gottfried, 160–​183. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Ritter, Gretchen and Nicole Mellow. 2000. “The state of gender studies in political science.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 571 (1): 121–​134. Ross, Michael L. 2008. “Oil, Islam, and Women.” American Political Science Review 102 (1): 107–​123. Saxonberg, Steven. 2000. “Women in East European Parliaments.” Journal of Democracy 11 (2): 145–​158. Sedelmeier, Ulrich. 2009. “Post-​Accession Compliance with EU Gender Equality Legislation in Post-​Communist New Member States.” In Post-​Accession Compliance in the EU’s New Member States, edited by Frank Schimmelfennig and Florian Trauner. European Integration online Papers (EIoP) 13 (Special Issue 2), Art. 23. Spierings, Niels. 2012. “The Inclusion of Quantitative Techniques and Diversity in the Mainstream of Feminist Research.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (3): 331–​347. Sundström, Aksel, Pamela Paxton, Yi-​Ting Wang, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2017. “Women’s Political Empowerment: A New Global Index, 1900–​2012.” World Development 94: 321–​335. Tierney, Michael J., Daniel L. Nielson, Darren G. Hawkins, J. Timmons Roberts, Michael G. Findley, Ryan M. Powers, Bradley Parks, Sven E. Wilson, and Robert L. Hicks. 2011. “More Dollars than Sense: Refining Our Knowledge of Development Finance Using AidData.” World Development 39 (11): 1891–​1906. Tripp, Aili Mari, and Melanie M. Hughes. 2018. “Methods, Methodologies, and Epistemologies in the Study of Gender and Politics.” European Journal of Politics and Gender 1 (2): 241–​257. Weldon, S. Laurel. 2006. “The Structure of Intersectionality: A Comparative Politics of Gender.” Politics and Gender 2 (2): 235–​248. –​–​–​–. 2014. “Using Statistical Methods to Study Institutions.” Politics and Gender 10 (4): 661–​672.

68

69

Epistemologies

70

71

7 POSTCOLONIALITY IN CENTRAL-​E ASTERN EUROPE AND EURASIA Tatsiana Shchurko and Jennifer Suchland

The question of postcoloniality in the context of Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) has fundamentally shifted since the dissolution of state socialism. There had been a long and active alliance between the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc with anti-​ imperialist movements in the so-​called third world. These alliances were a matter of state socialist policy and generated numerous affinities between the second world and the colonized world, including with the cause of racial justice in the United States. The region’s relationship to critiques of colonialism and imperialism radically changed when the demise of state socialism brought an end to the gravitational force of socialist internationalism. In the absence of that force, varied new scholarly and political relations to imperialism, colonialism, and postcolonialism emerged. While some scholars are unreflective of, or resistant to, anti-​imperial frameworks as they remain bound to Eurocentric epistemologies, others have taken the question of postcoloniality as an opportunity for internal reckoning and re-​evaluation. Notably, in the first decade of postsocialism there was a re-​evaluation of Soviet modernity as an imperial formation and not just an alternative to capitalist/​western modernity. With that re-​evaluation came a new identification with being postcolonial, which was most relevant in the contexts of the former Eastern Bloc, the western borderlands of the USSR, Central Asia, and with subaltern groups within the Russian state. Casting Soviet Russia as an imperial state formation also generated resentment and resistance, resulting in recuperative projects that tended to overemphasize Russia’s secondary position vis-​à-​vis the West. In their attachment to seeing Russia through an East/​West logic of power, feminist scholars and activists can perpetuate Eurocentrism and avoid interrogating how postsocialist positionalities are embedded in global racial and imperial logics. The focus of this entry will be on postsocialist postcolonial interventions regarding social difference and power. This focus necessarily involves grappling with gender and sexuality as tools of coloniality and raises questions about Eurocentrism. A postcolonial approach has altered understandings of power in the region including the state socialist projects of equality and friendship—​two ideas fundamental to how states related to and 71

72

Tatsiana Shchurko and Jennifer Suchland

constructed sexual, racial, and ethnic differences. Scholars also are interrogating current state projects that use gender, sexuality, and race/​ethnicity to engineer the nation. As such, discourses of social difference (and its control) illuminate the lingering effects of colonial relations. The centrality of racial and ethnic differences is paramount to a postcolonial lens, though it is not always centered in gender studies. This absence remains a negligence, if not also an opportunity to take-​up the legacies of the socialist international struggle against capitalist imperialism and the promise of decolonization pursued by third world women and women of color. This chapter attends to how gender and sexuality are structured in colonial relations in the following contexts: Soviet/​Russian relations to ethnicized and racialized women; the tensions between Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia and the West apparent in contemporary campaigns for social justice; and in power relations within the CEE&E region.

After socialist internationalism: A new postcolonial optic For many in the region, the answer to the question “Are we postcolonial” is obviously “Yes.” While certainly not a unified experience, scholars forcefully argue a postcolonial critique is relevant for the former Eastern bloc, western Soviet borderlands, Central Asia and colonized groups within the Russian state (Annus 2016; Korek 2007; Tlostanova 2010). That turn to a postcolonial critique has provided a reorientation from previously standard approaches informed by the Cold War and Sovietology. An important implication of this work is to see Soviet modernity as part of, rather than separate from, western modernity. Building on Buck-​Morss’s (2000) writing about the twin nature of Soviet and western modernity, Annus (2016) challenges depictions of Soviet power that categorize it as distinct from European imperial formations. Thus, despite its overt anti-​imperialist position and support for decolonization, the myriad experiences and practices of the Soviet empire should also be understood as colonial in nature. The turn to analyze Soviet-​dictated state socialism as an imperial formation in its own right is an important corrective. It has the potential to expose oppressive power relations once subsumed under terminology that did not have the same connotation as colonialism, terms such as “occupation” or “satellite states.” Furthermore, a postcolonial approach is used to critically evaluate how Soviet modernity (as with western modernity) had a dark side. This has brought a re-​evaluation of state socialist approaches to inequality and oppression. For example, a postcolonial approach illuminates how women’s rights policies were tools of domination in which ethnic, religious, and culturally “backward others” were subjected to the civilizing mission of the Russian/​Soviet state. In the context of Soviet empire building, gender policy served as a tool to expand power, including across Eurasia. For instance, the Soviet campaigns of forced mass unveiling, beginning in the second half of the 1920s, pushed women in Central Asia to remove their traditional face and head coverings called paranja and chachvan (Northrop 2004). The Soviet state believed that veiling was oppressing Central Asian women and portrayed them as agentless victims of cultural practices (Tlostanova 2010). The unveiling campaigns served to “modernize” the region by bringing Central Asian women into the Soviet public sphere. Likewise, the Soviet “friendship of peoples” discourse recognized national/​ethnic difference but it also created an ethnic (and racialized) hierarchy with Slavic peoples at the top (Sahadeo 2007; Sarkisova 2017). 72

73

Postcoloniality in CEE&E

Nevertheless, much scholarship focused on women and Soviet gender policy has not engaged the complex interplay of ethnicity, racialization, class, and gender in empire building. For example, Tlostanova (2010) notes that post-​Soviet gender studies often affirm Eurocentric frameworks that contribute to the disregard of colonized, racialized, and gendered experiences. As Tlostanova highlights, post-​Soviet gender discourses reproduce “a progressivist model of development” that overlooks understandings of sex and gender in colonial spaces by reproducing “a simple juxtaposition of archaic gender discourses (here conceptualized as Muslim ones) and modernized western patterns of women’s liberation from the patriarchal system” (Tlostanova 2010, 188). Correspondingly, a postcolonial (or anti-​colonial) approach challenges the assumption that women, as a social category, share the same oppression or that women’s rights policies serve all women the same. In fact, women’s rights policies were useful to Soviet expansion and produced differentiated models of Soviet womanhood. Shulman’s (2008) study of Soviet-​ era migrations to the Far East illustrates how gender is deployed by imperial projects and thus how gender and other forms of difference are entangled rather than separate. In the 1930s, the Khetagurovite campaign (named after the communist activist Valentina Khetagurova) was used to settle the Far East by creating incentives for communist women from central Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus to relocate there. The emancipated (Slavic) women who migrated to the Far East replaced the Soviet Koreans and Chinese migrant laborers who were cruelly deported (Shulman 2008, 49). The racialized suspicion toward Soviet Koreans and Chinese as well as the disregard for indigenous peoples of the Far East were intertwined with the promotion of female migration and women’s emancipation through labor. As a result, official Soviet policy produced at least two models of womanhood that dominated cultural representations: one referred to oppressed non-​ Slavic women who needed enlightenment and another referred to women like Valentina Khetagurova, who were educated, mobile, and working outside the domestic sphere (Shulman 2008, 87). Shulman’s research illustrates how the Soviet project for women’s emancipation intersected with the violent removal of ethnic and national groups. Importantly, while illuminating the urgency to examine the Soviet state’s racist, Eurocentric, and patriarchal dimensions, Tlostanova (2010) also focuses on the question of women’s agency under the conditions of these constraints. Specifically, she emphasizes that women were not simply passive victims and “created various ways out of the imposed binarity and conscious paths of flexible (re)construction of their identities in different social contexts” (Tlostanova 2010, 193). Similarly, Moldosheva (2016) analyzes Soviet gender policy for what it opened up and hindered for Central Asian women. In looking at the comradely correspondence (tovarishcheskaia perepiska) of the local and regional Communist Party women’s departments in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Moldosheva reveals how Central Asian women challenged ineffective policies even as their voices where circumscribed by how non-​Slavic women were imagined in the Soviet Union. Women’s correspondence also reflected the tension between Slavic/​European and Central Asian women-​activists and the difficulties Central Asian women faced when racial/​ethnic power hierarchies were not addressed.

Multiple centers and peripheries In addition to a Russian/​Soviet imperial center, there are other power centers exerting authority across the region that a critique of colonialism can illuminate. For example, 73

74

Tatsiana Shchurko and Jennifer Suchland

Bakić-​Hayden (1995) extends Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism to diagnose the “nesting orientalisms” that mark regions within CEE&E as metaphorically east and south. Bakić-​Hayden argues that the Balkans serve as the othered geography within CEE and that this is nested within the western imagination of the region. There have always been racialized meanings associated with marking these nested otherings. However, with the demise of Soviet multiculturalism and the divestment from socialist internationalism, there has been an intensification of claims to a white-​identified ethnic identity across the region (Baker 2018a; Böröcz and Sarkar 2017; Zakharov 2015). For example, the so-​called “return to Europe” that metaphorically described the accession of some former Eastern bloc countries into the EU reasserted racialized hierarchies. The process of accession reinforced the centrality of Eurocentrism and produced asymmetrical positionalities between new and old Europe. These asymmetrical positionalities often played out over the terrain of borders. Who could travel and why and which borders were open are questions relevant to understanding the multiple peripheries at work in the region. The answer to such questions is also produced through social difference. For example, Yugoslav-​born artist Tanja Ostojić documented the sexualized dimensions of the internal peripheries of Europe. Ostojić dramatized the closures and access points for post-​Yugoslav women who found themselves outside of fortress Europe in her performance piece “Looking for a Husband with EU-​Passport” (Gržinić, Eisenstein, and Ostojić 2009). She created the online figure called “[email protected]” to solicit marriage inquiries from men within the EU and, in so doing, made explicit the gendered and sexual dimensions of mobility and women’s labor (see also Parvulescu 2014). Ostojić’s project also provided a counter-​discourse to the dominant image of women’s bodies as victims of human trafficking. The placid and alarming image of Hottanja presents women as agents of their own empowerment even if constrained by the sexualization of their bodies. Ostojić’s project implicitly made clear what the discourse of human trafficking often obscured—​that state policies, including visa regimes and the divestment in social programs, were culpable for much of the violence produced by economic transition. At the same time, the marketability of the ubiquitous postcommunist woman (named Tanya or Natasha) across Europe and the globe was tied to her readability as white. The visibility of some gendered violence, like sex trafficking, then also obscured the violence that ethnicized migrants experienced. Nesting orientalisms play out in political claims used to define and defend national prerogatives regarding gender and sexuality as well as the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers. The embracing of conservative values across the region, including the restriction of women’s rights, the normalization of political homophobia, and the rejection of multiculturalism, requires that scholars (and social activists) grapple with gender and sexual rights within the racialized meanings and operations of the nation (Suchland 2018). For example, Rexhepi (2016) analyzes the colonial logic behind EU-​sponsored discourses for queer rights in Kosovo. He argues that the political recognition of queer rights in Kosovo also can erase racial/​ethnic difference. Within the constraints of mainstream LGBQ rights, sexual identity is linked to the dominant ethnic-​national category of the citizen. As a result, the cause for recognizing queer rights in Kosovo can erase queer Muslims. Likewise, Pagulich (2019) explores the link between liberal gay rights discourses and the production of narratives of progress in Ukraine. Focusing on the limits of liberal discourses that reinforce a single-​issue politics, Pagulich illuminates how

74

75

Postcoloniality in CEE&E

claims to Europeanness alongside practices of recognition and visibility for LGBTQ people can occlude racialized non-​normative subjects. Rexhepi and Pagulich remind us that long-​standing (nested) “others” within CEE&E remain and that their positions are further complicated by new political formations. This is also the case regarding Roma communities who routinely encounter hostility, violence, and displacement across Europe. Yet, the experiences of Roma peoples often are overlooked by postcolonial gender scholars because categories of social difference like gender and sexuality are not thought of as entangled with ethnicity and racialized national categories. Oprea (2012, 18) summarizes this tendency, arguing that, “Feminist and antiracist politics in Europe are still by and large two separate struggles, and Romani feminists wind up in a separate, isolated sphere fighting on their own. Instead of a holistic incorporation of anti-​racist politics into feminist politics and vice versa, what we often see are token inclusions or outright exclusions.” In turn, Hasḍeu (2016) appeals to a postcolonial perspective to articulate a feminist anti-​racist positionality based on her research experience in Roma communities. Hasḍeu (2016, 85), a non-​Roma feminist, offers a “personal epistemological manifesto” that states one “cannot be feminist without being anti-​racist.” Hașdeu also problematizes the common skepticism specifically among anthropologists that prevents defining the oppression of Roma women as a racial issue. She emphasizes that postcolonial and subaltern studies, as well as intersectional, Black, and women of color feminism, provide tools to criticize “the mainstream history made by colonizers, the hegemonic epistemologies creating categories, definitions and knowledge paths” in order to “produce alternative stories and understandings, to reread collective memories, cultures and representations” (Hașdeu 2016, 84). Hașdeu points to the nested colonial relations that inform gender and racial politics in CEE for Roma communities and cautions against the tendency in some feminist approaches to reify Roma communities as a homogenous group and/​or the “nature” of gender oppression as universal regardless of questions of race and class. Related to nesting orientalisms is Imre’s (2014) concept of internalized imperialism. This idea refers to the tendency in CEE&E to not question claims to “Europeanness” as a troubled claim to past and present forms of (neo-​)colonialism. Indeed, such claims are deeply racialized and do not critically reflect internal forms of othering that remain a negligence in scholarly and national discourses. However, there are growing critical voices that push the limits of postcolonial theory for the former second world (Baker 2018a; Dzenovska 2013; Gržinić and Tatlić 2014; Koobak and Marling 2014; Marciniak 2009). That limit is very much about challenging the persistence of Eurocentrism and acknowledging the possible self-​victimization at the heart of the resentment of the West. It also includes seeing a connection between internal and hidden Eurocentrism and the political projects of right-​wing racism, xenophobia, anti-​migrant vitriol, and “anti-​gender” policy that are present across the former state socialist region. Internalized imperialism is on display when categories such as gender and sexuality circulate with implicit ethnic/​racial normativity. For example, Kurmanov (2018), a trans activist from Kyrgyzstan, warns about the colonial and ethnocentric politics within trans activism in the former Soviet region. Specifically, he problematizes the hegemonic position of activists from Russia and their ignorance toward the practices that silence the perspectives of non-​white non-​European non-​Slavic people from different parts of the former Soviet region. Kurmanov highlights the ongoing legacies of imperial and colonial formations manifested in ethnocentric and Eurocentric knowledge production and

75

76

Tatsiana Shchurko and Jennifer Suchland

political action. The resistance to see the negligences produced by internal imperialisms is closely tied to the rejection of seeing race as relevant to the region. Baker (2018b) notes that postcolonial scholarship on the region rarely incorporates race as a global formation that originates from Europe’s rationalization of colonialism and enslavement. When the racial dimensions of colonialism are not taken up, scholarly engagements with postcoloniality can unwittingly be complicit with white supremacy, racism, and colonialism (Gržinić 2014; Kancler 2017; Navickaitė 2014; Tlostanova 2015). Baker reminds us that scholarship on colonialism cannot be detached from racial logics.

Decolonial interventions Scholars who adopt a decolonial framework engage coloniality as a racial epistemology and distinguish themselves from postcolonial models. Gržinić (2019) states that a decolonial perspective centers race and racialization as an organizing principle of the global neoliberal system. A decolonial framework focuses on the entanglements between colonialism, coloniality, capital, racism, and heteropatriarchy that produce mechanisms of exploitation, extraction, and dispossession. Gržinić (2019) emphasizes that a decolonial perspective complicates feminist conceptualizations by interlinking racialization, the colonial matrix of power, and heteropatriarchy, a sociopolitical system that privileges cisgender and heterosexual subjects. The field of decolonial studies has diverse perspectives and myriad understandings of coloniality, including settler colonialism. However, they share the common idea that the colonization of the Americas, the trans-​Atlantic slave trade, and European Enlightenment shaped the current global world order or what is called “global coloniality” (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Global coloniality produces and facilitates hierarchical classifications of populations, sustains the hegemony of heteropatriarchy, and perpetuates capitalist accumulation and liberal humanism. In relation to Central-​ Eastern Europe and Eurasia, scholars engage with decoloniality in order to situate the region in global coloniality rather than apply postcolonial analogies. Scholars explore how different imperial formations, such as the Ottoman, Chinese, Persian, Russian, and Soviet, produced alternative modernities while also operating in relation to and within global coloniality. For example, Tlostanova (2017) demarcates a strong connection between two modernities—​the western liberal capitalist and state socialist. Tlostanova notes that since socialist modernity originated in the West, it shared familiar features of western modernity such as progressivism, orientalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy (Tlostanova 2017, 6–​7). Drawing on the experience of the Americas, Lugones (2007) introduced the term “coloniality of gender” to describe the heteronormative foundation of global coloniality predicated on Eurocentrism, capitalist exploitation, colonialism, and racism. Decolonial scholars attempt to locate and/​or preserve ways of being and doing outside of that epistemology (Lugones 2007; Simpson 2017; Tlostanova 2018). Thus, a decolonial approach aims to “unthink” Eurocentrism which is different from a postcolonial approach that can reassert the colonial logics of liberal humanism. Coloniality of gender and racialization are fully at work in CEE&E. For example, the relation of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union with global coloniality is reflected not only in the physical colonization of Siberia, the Far East and North, the Caucasus, and Central Asia but also in the epistemic colonization of these territories by Eurocentric discourses of modernization and gendered regimes of ethnic and racial difference (Bonnett 2002; Kandiyoti 2007; Sahni 1997). 76

77

Postcoloniality in CEE&E

The coloniality of gender can also be understood as a lens into how gender and sexuality operate as racialized categories. This is relevant for postsocialist gender studies as the field can perpetuate ethnocentrism and the neglect of non-​European gendered subjects. For example, Gržinić (2014) writes that Eurocentric feminist approaches to the former Yugoslavia obfuscate race and facilitate the white normativity of the category gender. In response to this Eurocentrism, Gržinić focuses on “dissident feminisms” that “disrupt the monolithic history of a feminism that is heterosexual and white and based on a defined feminist subject that is supposedly a woman as a predefined biological reality” (Gržinić 2014, 1). Similarly, trans feminist scholars and activists focus on how queer feminist reflections can become complicit with hegemonic racist formations and neoliberal technologies. Kancler (2017) notes that the institutionalization of trans issues coincided with the rise and expansion of neoliberalism on a global scale after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Kancler emphasizes that this coincidence produced “transgender” as a new commodity that supports “the political economy of knowledge production that frame[s]‌ Euro-​America as the centre of discourse about gender and sexual diversity, while capitalizing on racial and cultural difference” (Kancler 2017, 3). Kancler offers decolonial transfeminist politics that challenges the subject of feminist struggle, questions biological and ontological difference, and acknowledges “the fact that our common basis of oppression remains capitalism, coloniality and heteropatriarchy” (Kancler 2017, 17).

Conclusions Although postcolonial and decolonial perspectives have created new avenues for critical reflection, there are still contradictions connected with the use of these frameworks in CEE&E. One contradiction is that the politics of knowledge production have not radically changed. The most prominent perspectives remain those who can access dominant languages and who are in close proximity to western knowledge production. Another contradiction is that, while many gender studies scholars acknowledge imperial formations in the region, there is much less engagement with how race is central to imperial projects and thus also to gender studies. For some, the turn to postcoloniality feeds a self-​othering and resentment toward the West/​Europe that affirms rather than critiques Eurocentrism. In this regard, there are missed opportunities to connect CEE&E to contemporary global coloniality and create feminist solidarities based on accountability. Speaking to this, Todorova (2018) proposes that, “Developing successful transnational feminist collaborations, collectives, and political alliances between postsocialist women in central and southeastern Europe and Black women and other women of color in the Global North and South will require critical conversations about how race and racial globality have constituted socialist and postsocialist women and subjects” (Todorova 2018, 136). Todorova asks postsocialist women and feminists, socialized and racialized as white and European, to interrogate how they are embedded in these formations. Perhaps one way to take-​up Todorova’s call is to develop anti-​colonial and decolonial approaches to postsocialism. Scholars are beginning, for example, to broaden the political imaginary of what postsocialism implies beyond a condition of after-​state socialism to a category of relationality and multiplicity that is radically open to the promises (and potential) of decolonization (Atanasoski and Vora 2018; Shih 2012). For example, Popa (2018) elaborates a queer postsocialist temporality that imagines alliance between trans/​ queer politics that aim to disrupt racial capitalism. Popa explores the relation between 77

78

Tatsiana Shchurko and Jennifer Suchland

Black trans politics in the US and the legacies of anti-​communist Cold War politics with labor politics and postsocialist migrant bodies. Similarly, rethinking postsocialism and postcoloniality also demands that gender and queer feminist scholars of CEE&E (re) engage socialist internationalism, including the many relations with women of color from the global north and south (Ghodsee 2018). It is thus important to interpret and engage their legacies and even the contemporary possibilities of those former alliances imagined anew.

References Annus, Epp. 2016. “Between Arts and Politics: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures of the Soviet Era.” Journal of Baltic Studies 47 (1): 1–​13. Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. 2018. “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution.” Social Identities 24 (2): 139–​154. Baker, Catherine. 2018a. “Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies.” Interventions 20 (6): 759–​784. –​–​–​–​. 2018b. Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-​conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bakić-​Hayden, Milica. 1995. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54 (4): 917–​931. Bonnett, Alastair. 2002. “Communists Like Us. Ethnicized Modernity and the Idea of ‘the West’ in the Soviet Union.” Ethnicities 2 (4): 435–​467. Böröcz, József, and Mahua Sarkar. 2017. “The Unbearable Whiteness of the Polish Plumber and the Hungarian Peacock Dance around Race.” Slavic Review 76 (2): 307–​314. Buck-​Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dzenovska, Dace. 2013. “Historical Agency and the Coloniality of Power in Postsocialist Europe.” Anthropological Theory 13 (4): 394–​416. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2018. Second World Second Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gržinić, Marina. 2014. “Dissident Feminism, Anti-​Racist Politics, and Artistic Interventionist Practices.” Participate: Kultur Aktiv Gestalten, March 19. www.p-​art-​icipate.net/​dissident-​ feminisms-​anti-​racist-​politics-​and-​artistic-​interventionist-​practices/​. –​–​–​–. 2019. “Theorizing Decoloniality in Southeastern Europe: Vocabularies, Politics, Perspectives.” dВЕРСИЯ: Decolonial Theory & Practice in Southeast Europe 3: 169–​193. Gržinić, Marina, and Šefik Tatlić. 2014. Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gržinić, Marina, Adele Eisenstein, and Tanja Ostojić. 2009. Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić. Berlin: Argo Books. Hașdeu, Iulia. 2016. “Words that Don’t Come Easy. Intersectional and Post-​colonial Feminist Understandings about Roma in East-​European Societies.” Analize—​Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies 7: 181–​189. Imre, Anikó. 2014. “Postcolonial Media Studies in Postsocialist Europe.” Boundary 2 41 (1): 113–​134. Kancler, Tjaša. 2017. “Body-​politics, Trans* Imaginary and Decoloniality.” Damne.net, February 20. www.damne.net/​?p=2545. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2007. “The Politics of Gender and the Soviet Paradox: Neither Colonized, nor Modern?” Central Asian Survey 26 (4): 601–​623. Koobak, Redi, and Raili Marling. 2014. “The Decolonial Challenge: Framing Post-​socialist Central and Eastern Europe within Transnational Feminist Studies.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 330–​343. Korek, Janusz, ed. 2007. From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective. Stockholm: Södertörn University Academic Studies. Kurmanov, Sanzhar. 2018. “O Kolonializme i Mezhstranovykh Dinamikakh v Postsovetskom Trans-​ aktivizme.” Interview by Yana Kirey-​ Sitnikova. TransKoalit͡sii͡a Na Postsovetskom Prostranstve, February 27. Audio. www.transcoalition.net/​about_​colonialism/​.

78

79

Postcoloniality in CEE&E Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial /​Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–​209. Marciniak, Katarzyna. 2009. “Postsocialist Hybrids.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (2): 173–​190. Moldosheva, Anara. 2016. “‘Naberites’ Khrabrosti i Prochtite Vsë!’ Perepiska Rabotnit͡ s Zhenotdelov Kyrgyzstana 1920-​kh Godov.” Poni͡ atii͡ a o Sovetskom v T͡ sentral’noĭ Azii: Al’manakh Shtaba № 2, pod redakt͡sieĭ Georgii͡a Mamedova i Oksany Shatalovoĭ, 210–​269. Bishkek: SHTAB Press. Navickaitė, Rasa. 2014. “Postcolonial Queer Critique in Post-​communist Europe: Stuck in the Western Progress Narrative?” Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 17 (2): 167–​185. Northrop, Douglas. 2004. Veiled Empire. Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Oprea, Alexandra. 2012. “Romani Feminism in Reactionary Times.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (1): 11–​21. Pagulich, Lesia. 2019. “New Lovers…? As Patriots and Citizens: Thinking beyond Homonationalism and Promises of Freedom (the Ukrainian case).” In Queering Paradigms VIII: Queer-​Feminist Solidarity and the East/​West Divide, edited By Katharina Wiedlack, Saltanat Shoshanova, and Masha Godovananya, 125–​151. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang UK. Parvulescu, Anca. 2014. The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Popa, Bogdan. 2018. “Trans* and Legacies of Socialism: Reading Queer Postsocialism in Tangerine.” The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 5: 27–​53. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept or the Americas in the Modern-​World System.” Institute for Scientific Information 44 (134): 549–​558. Rexhepi, Piro. 2016. “From Orientalism to Homonationalism: Queer Politics, Islamophobia and Europeanization in Kosovo.” Southeastern Europe 40 (1): 32–​53. Sahadeo, Jeff. 2007. “Druzhba Narodov or Second-​class Citizenship? Soviet Asian Migrants in a Post-​colonial World.” Central Asian Survey 26 (4): 559–​579. Sahni, Kalpana. 1997. Crucifying the Orient: Russian Orientalism and the Colonization of Caucasus and Central Asia. Oslo: White Orchid Press. Sarkisova, Oksana. 2017. Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Shih, Shu-​mei. 2012. “Is the Post-​in Postsocialism the Post-​in Posthumanism?” Social Text 30 (1): 27–​50. Shulman, Elena. 2008. Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire. Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Suchland, Jennifer. 2018. “The LGBT Specter in Russia: Refusing Queerness, Claiming ‘Whiteness.’” Gender, Place & Culture 25 (7): 1073–​1088. Tlostanova, Madina. 2010. Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–​. 2015. “Can the Post-​Soviet Think? On Coloniality of Knowledge, External Imperial and Double Colonial Difference.” Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics 1 (2): 38–​58. –​–​–​–​. 2017. Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-​Existence. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–​. 2018. What Does It Mean to be Post-​Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Todorova, Miglena S. 2018. “Race and Women of Color in Socialist/​Postsocialist Transnational Feminisms in Central and Southeastern Europe.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 16 (1): 114–​141. Zakharov, Nikolay. 2015. Race and Racism in Russia: Mapping Global Racisms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

79

80

8 POST-​S OVIET MASCULINITIES Sex, power, and the vanishing subject Eliot Borenstein

As both an object of study and an element of everyday life, masculinity in post-​Soviet Russia is simultaneously ubiquitous and all but absent. Masculine primacy and an essentialist notion of the masculine have been dominant features of Russian life, particularly since the Soviet collapse framed the new capitalist economy as a man’s world. In the absence of a public language for treating masculinity as a category subject to positive change, as something that can evolve, masculinity only becomes visible and legible when the media present it as in some way deficient or aberrant. The solution rarely calls for rethinking masculine virtues or redefining masculinity according to a new gender paradigm. For Russian media, scholarship, and mainstream culture, the question is framed in terms of deficiency, while for western scholars it is a matter of excess. Russian masculinity has a great deal in common with the masculinity studied in the West (particularly its reliance on the structures of patriarchy) and its hegemony, but also key differences. The phenomenon of homosociality—​the social and affective structures among men (Sedgwick 1985)—​has received relatively little attention, while its manifestations in Russian culture are marked by a higher acceptance of emotional display, a strong emphasis on the value of male friendship, and a hostility toward homosexuality accompanied by different standards of what constitutes the homoerotic. Treatment of Russian masculinity by progressive scholars in Russia and the West—​with few exceptions, such as the recent sociological work by Marina Yusupova (2018)—​tends to focus on discrete phenomena, such as the cult of masculinity in politics (Sperling 2014), the continued militarization of Russian culture (Eichler 2011), and the state’s role in encouraging violent homophobia (Kondakov 2017). There is as yet no full-​fledged theory of Russian masculinity, and, given the increasing hostility toward gender studies under Putin, little space in Russian academia to develop it. Masculinity began to emerge as an occasional, if incomplete, topic of discussion and scholarship with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Though the Bolsheviks who established the new regime were, in theory, committed to women’s equality, the virtues and priorities of the New World to be built by communists was marked by traditionally masculine virtues: production rather than reproduction, the public sphere over the private sphere, and heavy industry over agriculture (Borenstein 2000). Doubling down on masculine values did not, however, mean that early Soviet masculinity was unproblematic. In the 80

81

Post-Soviet masculinities

1920s, venereological journals and sexual education pamphlets portrayed young Soviet men as anxiety-​ridden neurotics, whose manhood was under severe stress (Bernstein 2007). All such discussions vanished with the rise of Joseph Stalin; propaganda in the 1930s emphasized the manly industrial worker, while the struggle against fascism during World War II was quite predictably accompanied by an ethos of masculine heroism. By the 1970s, concerns about masculinity resurfaced in a debate about “infantilized” men that began in the Soviet central newspapers (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2012). In 2018, the challenge resurfaced in the responses to a popular video of scantily clad aviation cadets performing a parody of a well-​known music clip. Western and western-​oriented scholars use an idiom of gender that has been poorly assimilated by the Russian language and Russian media. This is not just a matter of gender theory; it is also a question of how gender is seen and lived. Western scholars of male homosexuality in Russia, such as Healey (2001, 2017) and Baer (2009), by necessity deal with masculinity, but primarily in service to their discussions of LGBT issues. In a book whose focus is broader than homosexuality, Sperling (2014) examines the masculinization of political power in 21st-​century Russia, though this, too, falls short of a more general theory of Russian masculinity. Sperling’s work fits within the rich vein of western scholarship on masculinity and authoritarianism, going back to Theweleit (1987) on the fratriarchal precursors to Nazism in interwar Germany and Mosse (1985) on the violent homoeroticism and misogyny of fascism. These earlier studies are understandably concerned with the authoritarian cult of the (male) leader, but their legacy may encourage an undue emphasis on the person and power of President Vladimir Putin.

Masculinity and homoeroticism There can be no doubt that a major component of what journalist Anna Artunyan (2014) calls the “Putin Mystique” is his masculinity. From the contrast between the fit, restrained Putin and his flabby, drunken, and erratic predecessor Boris Yeltsin to the toughness of the former’s language (“rubbing out terrorists in the outhouses”), Putin’s political appeal is a function of the strength he conveys at all times. In 2004, a girl band sang his praises by detailing exactly how the singer’s boyfriend fails to measure up to the Russian president (“I want someone like Putin/​Someone like Putin, whose full of strength/​Someone like Putin, who doesn’t drink”). A decade later, Putin seemed more actively invested in maintaining this image: flying with cranes, diving for lost treasure, and, most famously, appearing shirtless on horseback (now a meme that shows no sign of fading). The “shirtless Putin” meme is something of a Rorschach test for gender and sexuality. In the West, it is fodder for jokes based on the image’s homoeroticism, but that is not the case in Russia. Westerners can see homoeroticism because male homosexuality has been rendered thinkable. Nearly all male self-​display is perceived as homoerotic, while in Russia the presumed admirer for a shirtless Putin is either a woman (who could find him attractive) or a straight man (who can be favorably impressed that Putin is a real man). Each attitude rests on blindness to desire on the part of half the potential viewers of the image. Decades of feminist-​inflected western criticism (starting with Berger 1972 and Mulvey 1975) have highlighted the notion of the “male gaze,” a perspective that objectifies the person it desires; in this approach, the very subject position of the desiring viewer is posited as masculine, while the object, whatever its biological sex, is framed within a feminine position. In the West, the naked male body is assumed to be desired by men, not women, and in Russia, desire for men by men has to work extra hard to be visible. 81

82

Eliot Borenstein

We see this in a video campaign in 2018 that emerged in response to a clip of freshmen cadets at an aviation academy in Ulyanovsk (a provincial town bearing Lenin’s original last name), inspired both by Benny Benassi’s 2002 “Satisfaction” and a 2013 all-​male British army parody (“Neuemnye” 2018). In various states of undress, the young men dance suggestively while brandishing tools of all sorts, an all-​male erotic spectacle that fueled outrage on the part of conservatives, though not for being homoerotic: “It’s a tragedy,” declared famous aviator Magomed Tolboev. “It’s a mockery. I would even compare it with Pussy Riot, when they made a mockery of the cathedral. And this is a cathedral of science.” The Rector of the Ulyanovsk Aviation Institute, Sergei Krasnov, agreed. “This is a great insult to the Ulyanovsk region, and to veterans” (Davydov 2018). Disagreeing with this reading of sacrilege, people throughout the Russian Federation began posting their own “Satisfaction” clips, made by construction students, agricultural students, emergency workers, stable jocks, a theater troupe, nurses, and, most delightfully, two headscarved and housedress-​bedecked babushki in a St. Petersburg communal apartment (“Russian Babushkas” 2018). The defense of the “Satisfaction” video was not waged on gendered grounds. Few bothered to respond to attacks on the boys’ masculinity, and virtually no one was arguing that the video was, indeed, homoerotic. According to the logic of the pro-​“Satisfaction” camp, the problem with the naysayers is not homophobia; the problem is that they are the enemies of fun. Indeed, the very title of the clip (“Satisfaction”) would seem to reveal just what it is that its critics oppose: pleasure. What, the defenders ask, is wrong with playful, erotic dancing? It turns out that the boys’ supporters are not enacting a virtual Stonewall uprising; rather, they are unwittingly reenacting the plot of Footloose (a film and Broadway musical in which the forces of fun triumph over a puritanical ban on dancing). The pro-​“Satisfaction” camp is implicitly motivated by two key features: heterosexual privilege and the persistence of gay invisibility. What most Russian commentators and netizens saw was something quite different: a bunch of boys who, by definition, are assumed to be straight. Gay men are so demonized in current Russian mass culture that they simply cannot be the boys next door. No matter how homoerotic their dancing, the boys’ defenders generally allow no room to doubt their heterosexuality. Seen as a dance performed by straight men, the “Satisfaction” video is immediately assimilated to the tradition of cross-​dressing and gender-​bending as comedy. Contrast this to the Russian social media scandal of the bearded Austrian cross-​ dresser Conchita Wurst’s victory in the 2014 Eurovision contest, shortly after the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and the Russian annexation of Crimea, and not long after Russia’s adoption of the gay propaganda law. Conchita, who presents as a bearded man in women’s dresses, came to represent everything that men must not be. On Russian social media, Conchita’s victory became a slap in the face not just of traditional masculinity, but of Russia. The resulting 2014 campaign on Russian social networks aimed at getting men to shave off beards was minor compared to the “Satisfaction” campaign, at least in part because the pro-​masculinity, anti-​beard message was rather muddled. Critics of Conchita assumed she was gay as a matter of course, putting her in a completely different category from the Ulyanovsk boys. The Ulyanovsk boys, however, are consistently read as straight. Or, more accurately, they are not read at all. By virtue of their identity as a group, they could do anything short of actually having sex with each other on tape, and their sexual orientation would remain unquestioned. The group aspect is critical: if any one of those boys had performed a 82

83

Post-Soviet masculinities

solo video to the song, adopting a gay aesthetic could have opened them up to suspicion, since any group could have “one bad apple.” But all of them? This may be the greatest irony of the performers’ presumptive orientation: what is it that shields a near-​naked, fetish-​garbed dancing boy from suspicions of homosexuality? The presence of so many near-​naked, fetish-​garbed dancing boys all around them. An isolated boy could reveal a solitary sin, but homosociality renders gayness all but unthinkable. The boys may be dancing next to each other and even touching, but the space between them shouts out a confident “no homo.” The Ulyanovsk videos, in uniting such a broad spectrum of the Russian Internet, remind us that the unassailability of heteronormative masculinity in contemporary Russia is virtually immune to politics. As Sperling (2014) shows, masculinity is treasured by Putinists and anti-​Putinists alike, aided by the virtual absence of a coherent discourse of (non-​biological) gender. The case of Pussy Riot, an anonymous collective of female feminist activists whose scandalous performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012 led to the arrest and trial of three of its members, would presumably only be about masculinity to the extent that the group was vocally and consistently feminist. But the media framing of the group told a different story: again and again, Pyotr Verzilov, the husband of one of the defendants, was portrayed as the group’s mastermind. It was simply unthinkable that a “bunch of girls” could have done something without a man to direct them. Thus, even Pussy Riot gets assimilated into the narrative of masculine supremacy. This does not mean that there is no anxiety about masculinity, but that this anxiety expresses itself obliquely. The 2013 law banning so-​called gay propaganda around minors and increasing demonization of (and violence against) the LGBT community is an expression for two primary preoccupations: Russian demographics and the maintenance of heterosexual masculinity. The demographic argument, though irredeemably flawed (there is no realistic model in which Russia’s declining birthrate can be ascribed to same-​sex activity), is understandable, since heterosexual intercourse is still the most reliable and cost-​effective way to produce offspring. The failure of the Ulyanovsk videos to produce homophobic backlash also points to the continued hegemonic power of military service and military institutions in the construction of masculinity in the mass media and popular culture (see Petrone, Chapter 19 in this Handbook). One year of military service (and, before 2007, two years) remains compulsory for all male citizens of the Russian Federation, a law that is complicated by the numerous mechanisms for legally avoiding the draft. Attendance at a college or university with a Reserve Officer Training Program (voennaya kafedra) exempts its participants from the otherwise mandatory draft. Naturally, there are medical exemptions, which lead to a number of loopholes, such that family connections and bribes continue to allow more privileged young men to avoid the military. As a result, military service functions symbolically as the foundation of universal adult masculinity, while at the same time functioning as a marker of what we can call, for simplicity’s sake, social class.

Homosociality and power The prominence of the military reinforces one of the primary features of contemporary Russian masculinity: the horizontal ties among the all-​male group. Russia has a strong mythology of both male friendship (that is, the close connection between two men based on affinity) and male comradeship (the fratriarchal male group bond) (Borenstein 2000; 83

84

Eliot Borenstein

Friedman 2005). Such ties are held up as an exclusively masculine prerogative (supported by the casual assumption that women are incapable of real friendship or solidarity, and are ready to turn on each other at the drop of a hat). At the same time, military male group dynamics also reinforce the “rightness” of hierarchical subordination to a leader. The influence of military masculinity (Eichler 2011) is readily apparent in popular entertainment. The Soviet Union provided few avenues for creating stories of adventure. Where the United States churned out endless variations on superhero vigilantes and lone-​wolf avengers (variations on the cowboy myth), Soviet adventure was largely confined to war stories (particularly about World War II). When the publishing market exploded after the Soviet collapse (and, several years later, when the film and television industries began to rebuild themselves after the loss of state subsidies and the influx of foreign competition), more individualist protagonists began to appear in an action story (boevik) genre, though even here, these men were usually either part of, or recently discharged from, a military, police, or security organization. The paradigmatic example is Alexei Barabanov’s 1997 film Brother, along with its sequel, Brother 2 (2000), in which a recently discharged, taciturn soldier turns into an avenging hitman (usually, but not always, protecting the weak from those who prey on them). By the Putin era, however, such lone wolf stories began to be once again supplanted by tales of adventurous male groups (“The Brigade” miniseries of 2002, war films and miniseries such as The Ninth Company (2005) and The Penal Battalion (2004)). Stories of Russian war heroes naturally encouraged patriotism, but critics saw the renewed reverence for the military and state security as signs that Putin’s regime was exploiting familiar tropes for his own purposes. The popular, yet controversial, avant-​garde novelist Vladimir Sorokin provides the cleverest response to the masculinization of state power, in his 2006 novel Day of the Opichnik. In a walled-​off, near-​future Russia modeled on a revival of the harsh tradition of Ivan the Terrible, the state security forces are once again the most respected and feared part of a now neo-​feudal society. The characters’ actions and attitudes are marked by a stunning casualness when it comes to extreme violence (the ringtone on the narrator’s phone is the screams of a prisoner being tortured). At the end of the novel, the secret servicemen join their leader (whom they call “Batya,” or father) for a celebration in the banya. The Russian bath house, long a site of communal relaxation, had, by the 1990s, become an essential trope in the lore about the new Russian gangster/​businessmen, who would inevitably meet for excessively ornate celebrations in the banya as part of a homosocial tradition (often facilitated by sharing prostitutes). In Sorokin’s novel, the men all take a pill that seems to be a cross between a hallucinogen and Viagra. They all develop massive erections, start kissing each other, and then form what they call the caterpillar (an all-​male acrobatic gang bang that is a cross between anal sex and a conga line). In Sorokin’s novel, this homosexual orgy is the apotheosis of the male bonding on which this quasi-​fascist, quasi-​feudal state is built, one of the most widely read critiques of the masculinist structures of Putin’s regime.

Masculinity and state power: Who’s on top? Sorokin’s novel also literalizes one of the primary sexual metaphors of masculinity and state power. In Soviet times, there was a joke about General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev commissioning a bust of himself from a Soviet sculptor. Weeks go by, and when the bust is unveiled, Brezhnev expresses hesitant approval, but wonders why he is portrayed with 84

85

Post-Soviet masculinities

large, female breasts. The sculptor replies that it is an allegory about the leader’s relationship to the Soviet people: with the left breast, he nurses the working class. With the right, the peasantry. Brezhnev asks, “But what about the intelligentsia?” To which the sculptor replies: “For that I would have needed to sculpt your torso.” This joke operates through the sculptural equivalent of verbal ellipsis: what’s left out is entirely overdetermined, in terms of both sex and power. One of Russia’s most pervasive cultural myths about power and violence is encoded in a phrase that consists entirely of subject and object: “Kto kogo?” which is inadequately translated into English as “Who whom?” The person who is said to have originally posed this question is Vladimir Lenin in 1921, referring to the competition between communism and capitalism (“Who will overtake whom?”). Stalin much more explicitly framed the question in terms of violence (“will we knock them, the capitalists, flat … or will they knock us flat?” “Kto kogo?” and its missing verb leave us with clearly defined subjects and direct object, but the object is part of a predicate that is only implied. The missing verb has to be active and transitive, and while it is theoretically conceivable that, in the right context, the verb could be neutral (Who sees whom) or even positive (Who kisses whom), let’s not kid ourselves. At its most basic, the relationship between subject and object here is all about violence, whether literal (b’et) (beats) or figurative and (ebet) (fucks). The sexual figuration in this last example is crucial: the relationship here is profoundly intimate. The heteronormative paradigm conjures up different implications when the subject and object are both male. Here the only acceptable set of verbs that could connote intimacy are verbs of violence. Certainly, North Americans are familiar with the heterosexual male tendency to express “brotherly” affection through downplayed, ritualized violence (the punch in the arm or the slap on the back, for example). As sociologists have argued for decades, the male bond is cemented through such seemingly aggressive rituals. Punching means never having to say “no homo.” Indeed, “no homo” may well be an oblique (that is, queer) answer to “Kto kogo?” If we go back to this Russian question, we have a formulation that, appropriately enough, lets us have it both ways: it’s sex and it’s violence, or it’s sex disguised as violence, or violence disguised as sex. As an exercise in dominance between men, it can either feminize the victim, or, just as likely, bind victim and perpetrator together in a bond whose framework escapes the bounds of heteronormativity: perhaps the best rendering of “Kto kogo?” in this case is “Who’s the top, and who’s the bottom?” The language of masculine sexualized violence appropriated so frequently by Sorokin also gets coopted by progressive artists in opposition to the regime. The radical Actionist art movement Voina (War), before it was eclipsed by its offshoot, the feminist Pussy Riot collective, used a particularly phallic aesthetic in its artistic critique of power. Actionism, a movement that began in Vienna in the mid-​20th century, involves deliberately transgressive public performance designed to shock viewers out of complacency; in Russia, Voina was among its most famous practitioners. In May 2009, Voina occupied the Tagansky courtroom in Moscow, claiming to be a punk group called “A Cock Up the Asshole;” a few of the men performed a song called “Remember, All Cops are Bastards,” while the rest of the group danced wildly. All three of the future Pussy Riot defendants took part in the dancing, little knowing that they would eventually headline a much more famous punk act of their own. But despite the presence of women, the whole event was structured around not just male sexuality, but male sexual violence. Thanks to the magic of Russian grammar, it is clear in the original that the group’s name is about the act of 85

86

Eliot Borenstein

inserting the aforementioned cock, rather than its simple location. The name is as much a threat as it is a description. In 2010, the Petersburg wing of Voina painted an enormous phallus on a drawbridge opposite FSB headquarters, in an event called “Cock Captured by the FSB.” As the bridge went up, so, too, did the phallus. But Voina’s most notorious sexual performance took place in February 2008, the day before the presidential election (in which Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s victory and the continuation of Putin’s power behind the scenes was a foregone conclusion). An obvious reference to the future president’s last name (“Medved” in Russian means “bear”), “Fuck for the Puppy Bear Heir” consisted of five heterosexual couples having sex in Moscow’s Biological Museum. “Puppy Bear Heir” was a study in patriarchal power dynamics; it seemed not to have occurred to anyone involved that there could be a sex act that did not involve either penetration or fellatio. There may have been a practical reason, given that anyone viewing the video is treated to the spectacle of the men grimly trying to get into (and maintain) the proper frame of mind—​the men’s steely determination was less like the demeanor of the stars of PornHub and more reminiscent of the British Prime Minister in the notorious first episode of the dystopian Black Mirror. Clearly, they needed all the help they could get. But Voina was also exploiting a clear patriarchal metaphor of power (who gets fucked by whom). If the biological museum event can safely be called pornographic, it is not as a value judgment, but as a performance that followed the most important imperative of filmed heterosexual porn—​all power to the penis. Indeed, power is precisely the point. The use of the word fuck as an insult or even a political criticism implicitly assumes that the object of the verb is not just grammatically, but invisibly passive, with penetration as a metaphor for triumph. This fits with what Sperling (2014) calls the rhetoric of “topping,” shared by the regime and opposition alike). Perhaps inadvertently, the Petersburg wing of Voina’s drawbridge stunt makes this fact even clearer: tracing a giant penis on public property is a classic “fuck you” gesture, but it is also one that fits comfortably with a traditional gendered hierarchy. Only in the wake of Pussy Riot has masculine Actionist art in Russia begun to fight a masculinist state while rejecting aggressive masculinity. The performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky made a name for himself primarily through self-​harm and self-​mutilation rather than “topping”: first by sewing his lips shut in protest of the Pussy Riot trial, then by surrounding his vulnerable, naked body with barbed wire, and, most memorably, by nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square. Like the activists of the FEMEN group, who exposed their breasts as part of their political protest, Pavlensky turns his (male) body from subject to object, simultaneously appealing to more traditionally female traditions of self-​punishment and the practices of some Gulag dissidents (who nailed their scrotums to planks of wood). The subsequent rape accusations against Pavlensky and his (female) partner have undermined his credibility, but the actions that first brought Pavlensky wide attention nonetheless played an important role in the development of performative protest during Putin’s third term.

Conclusions By leveraging the attention that their outrageous texts and performances inevitably attract, Actionists such as Voina and Pavlensky, along with avant-​garde writers such as Sorokin, manage to render masculinity visible as an object of critique, albeit second-​order critique: deconstructing masculinity serves as a prerequisite for the deconstruction of 86

87

Post-Soviet masculinities

power. Pussy Riot, with its explicit feminist agenda, does not subordinate gender critique to the analysis of power, treating the two as inextricably linked. For the most part, however, concern about masculinity is largely instrumental, less of a challenge to the reigning paradigms of gender than a useful chink in the armor of the men who hold power. By the same token, masculinity remains a second-​order question in most scholarship on Russian gender; it is subordinate either to questions of power or to the plight of the LGBT community. Scholars of gender studies could find much in the Russian discourse of masculinity that could inform their understanding of masculinity in general; Russian homosociality, for example, should remind us that relationships and interactions among men are about more than homoeroticism (repressed or otherwise). Russia, along with much of the former Soviet bloc, also resists an understanding of modern gender relations that assumes an inevitable “arc of progress”: what happens when a country that, in addition to paying lip service to equality, successfully brought women into the workforce, collectively retreats from the gains we might associate with feminism, in order to extol the virtues of patriarchy? Future scholars are in an enviable position: a great deal of important work involving Russian masculinity has been published in the last two decades, but the field is still wide open to further definition. At this point, Russian masculinity can be studied as much indirectly as directly, by inference in the absence of serious societal attention or reliable data. In a social and cultural environment that is increasingly hostile to the very concept of gender, conceptions of “manliness” tend to be tautological: men are manly because that is what men are, and that is what men must be. Studying masculinity through its representation (across the whole spectrum of cultural production) and its discursive construction (the rhetorical formulations and the manner in which notions of masculinity are deployed) can create the framework for understanding how masculinity functions in post-​Soviet Russia.

References Artunyan, Anna. 2014. The Putin Mystique. New York: Olive Branch Press. Baer, Brian. 2009. Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-​ Soviet Identity. London: Palgrave. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin. Bernstein, Frances Lee. 2007. The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Borenstein, Eliot. 2000. Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–​ 1929. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davydov, Ivan. 2018. “Tantsui, poka molodoi, mal’chik.” Republic, January 18. https://​republic. ru/​posts/​89001. Eichler, Maya. 2011. Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription and War in Post-​Soviet Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Friedman, Rebecca. 2005. Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804–​1863. London: Palgrave. Healey, Dan. 2001. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. –​–​–​–​. 2017. Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. London: Bloomsbury. Kondakov, Alexander. 2017. “Putting Russia’s Homophobic Violence on the Map.” Open Democracy, May 17. www.opendemocracy.net/​od-​russia/​alexander-​kondakov/​ putting-​russia-​s-​homophobic-​violence-​on-​map. Mosse, George. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality. New York: Howard Fertig. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 26 (3, Autumn): 6–​18. “Neuemnye kursanty Ul’ianovskogo letnogo uchilishcha (UI GA).” January 16. www.youtube. com/​watch?time_​continue=5&v=lw0Ls2aiTVg&feature=emb_​title.

87

88

Eliot Borenstein “Russian babushkas embrace the ‘Satisfaction Challenge.’” 2018. Russia Beyond the Headlines, January 22. www.rbth.com/​lifestyle/​327337-​russian-​babushkas-​satisfaction-​challenge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sperling, Valerie. 2014. Sex, Politics, and Putin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Theweleit, Klaus. 1987. Male Fantasies. Volumes 1 and 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Yusupova, Marina. 2018. “Between Militarism and Anti-​Militarism: ‘Masculine’ Choice’ in Post-​ Soviet Russia.” In Gender and Choice after Socialism, edited by Lynne Attwood, Elisabeth Schimpfoessl, and Marina Yusupova, 187–​215. New York: Palgrave. Zdravomyslova, Elena and Anna Temkina. 2012. “The Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse.” Russian Studies in History 51 (2): 13–​34.

88

89

PART II

Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding

90

91

INTRODUCTION Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding Katalin Fábián, Mara Lazda, and Janet Elise Johnson

The chapters in Part II invite us to reexamine what feminism means in the different historical and political contexts of Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). The types of regimes—​monarchies changing to socialism and postcommunism—​have affected how women’s and feminist movements vary in form from organized to informal, and how collaborative or divided they act across political ideology, class, nationality/​ethnicity, religion, disability, and sexual orientation/​identity. Since the emergence of feminism and related activism in the region, its meaning and main agenda items have adapted to local and global conditions, while its central tenet of fighting for women’s equality has remained the same. Recognizing the similarities in their agendas, the chapters in this Part identify significant differences between women’s movements and feminist activism, with the women’s movement more likely to strive for equality between the sexes, and feminism focusing on difference, aiming to eliminate arrangements of domination based on gender. While some men choose to support women’s movements, quite a few women do not identify with them and instead focus on class, ethnic, religious, or national interest. Women’s and feminist movements in CEE&E have long engaged in promoting their visions of social change, often against powerful political and economic counter-​currents and despite various cultural obstacles. Social movements are especially challenging to observe and analyze when under repressive regimes, which have characterized CEE&E for much of the region’s recent past and for some, its present. Accounting for women’s and feminist movements tends to be further marginalized because they rarely appear as mass demonstrations or organize in large numbers in a formal, institutional manner except in cases of explicit political crisis. It was the emergence of the Soviet Union in 1917 and the regional expansion of the Stalinist influence that most affected—​both pro and contra—​women’s organizing. The officially sanctioned women’s councils promoted the ideal of emancipation while the regime’s practices suffocated challenges to traditional sexual norms within the home and personal relations, at the same time drastically limiting access to fertility control, and did little in practice to address gendered interpersonal violence. In communist regimes, 91

92

Katalin Fábián et al.

women’s informally organized challenge to political and social control became increasingly evident to authorities from the 1970s, leading to activists’ expulsions from their universities, workplaces, and home countries. However, it was the authorities themselves that activist women were able to dislodge in Poland after their successful, if clandestine, takeover of Solidarity while their husbands were in prison. With every regime offering ideological and material resources or constraints, the chapters show the changing and different dimensions of success. The scholarship debates the degree of success based on complex measures such as women’s agency, or indicators such as the right to vote, education, employment, and representation. Organizations’ and movements’ autonomy emerges as a central contention over the socialist period. The revisionist camp argues that socialist women’s organizations had feminist goals and outcomes in the region and beyond. The competing mainstream claims split into various groups, from those who completely reject the marriage of feminism with socialism, to those who accept some socialist emancipation as achievements while pointing out how they served ideological interests and personal whims. With the political, economic, and cultural openings to the West after 1990, a new phase of activism and understanding of womanhood, femininity, equal or different rights among the sexes, and feminism began. Women’s political activism has focused broadly on welfare (such as employment, retirement, childcare, maternity allowance, and gendered violence) but the newly established nongovernmental organizations needed the funding coming from the West, and consequently became at least partially dependent on such financial support and ideological/​policy agendas. In the 2010s, the increasingly authoritarian leaderships in many previously democratizing countries made political capital out of targeting feminisms, boxing them into global protest art as FEMEN and Pussy Riot. The CEE&E cases of women’s and feminist activism broadly substantiate that even just a few women acting together can have very high resonance and long-​term effect, expanding the narrow confines of formal politics. This observation applies to the sustained efforts of suffragists and activists in raising awareness regarding domestic violence in the last 30 years, women and their predecessors in the 19th century who fought for female access to education and employment and wrote literature in their own native languages, breaking gender barriers and evoking the ire of empires and governments. Whether aligning with whom they perceived as supportive governments, or used by what they saw as reprehensible and oppressive governments, their contributions are crucial, and often global.

92

93

Women’s organizing under empires

94

95

9 CHALLENGING TRADITION AND CROSSING BORDERS Women’s activism and literary modernism in the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy Agatha Schwartz

Despite the fact that women from across the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy were very much part of, and in many instances key players in, the numerous social and cultural innovations that characterize this period, until a few decades ago, their contributions had been marginalized or left out of the discussions altogether. Yet women were not only actively involved in cultural and artistic production and major debates of the time but they also took on leading roles in redefining gender roles and social and cultural norms (Schwartz 2008). We witness women’s increased presence in the public sphere, both in urban centers (i.e., Vienna, Budapest, and Prague) and on the so-​called “peripheries.” The Empire’s geographic and cultural diversity was reflected in the many facets of women’s activism. Women of all backgrounds across the Empire were founding their organizations to promote first and foremost their access to education and new professions and, later, demanded political rights. During its relatively short existence (1867–​1918), the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy offered a rich mosaic of cultural and linguistic variety, which is very much reflected in women’s activism as well. In this last phase of the Habsburg Empire, this vast territory (that further increased following the annexation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina in 1908) stretched over large parts of Central and Eastern Europe and into the Balkans. With a population of over 50 million, it was the second-​largest state in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. With two official languages (German and Hungarian) and two administrative centers (Vienna and Budapest), it was home to well over a dozen ethnic and linguistic groups as well as five major religious groups. While much of the focus when researching the culture of the Monarchy has been on Vienna—​which, as we are reminded by Steven Beller, has been considered by many “the birthplace of the modern world” (Beller 2001, 5)—​according to Moritz Csáky, studying the cultures of Central Europe (and, by extension the legacies of the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy) is of particular importance in our times. Csáky considers this region, due to its ethnic and cultural diversity, as a “ ‘laboratory’ in which processes have taken place that in the age 95

96

Agatha Schwartz

of globalization and building of cultural networks have gained universal, i.e., worldwide relevance” (Csáky 2001, 47, translation A.S.). The same statement could be applied regarding women’s activism and creative output across the Monarchy. Although we can distinguish between different strands of proto-​feminist thought at the time, and various types of women’s organizing, labels that researchers have retrospectively placed on early women’s movements, be it regarding class, political orientation, or ideology, do not necessarily contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of these movements. Marilyn J. Boxer considers terms such as “proletarian” and “bourgeois” feminism “reductionist constructions” that emerged at the end of the 19th century and do not reflect the multifaceted realities of women’ lives at the time (Boxer 2007, 154). This is particularly apparent in the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy where class issues took on a different picture in urban centers than in the countryside. Similarly, the distinction between “western” and “non-​western” feminism when talking about this state and its women’s movements makes little sense as its borders encompassed regions that transgress the later political division lines imposed by the Cold War.

Women’s philanthropic organizations and salons The very first women’s associations were of a philanthropic nature, going back to the early 19th century. For a long time, these organizations carried the stigma of non-​relevance from the point of view of the history of the women’s movement. Recently this biased image has been rectified by Austrian feminist scholars (Hauch 1992; Vittorelli 2007). Since women’s philanthropic organizations, much like women’s salons which had been in existence even longer, challenged women’s socially promoted attachment to the domestic sphere, they can be considered early sites of feminist efforts (Malleier 2006). These organizations also played an important role in the various national movements within the Habsburg Empire. They offered middle-​class and upper-​class women an opportunity to develop their fundraising and organizational skills outside the private sphere. Not only did they help the socially marginalized (i.e., orphans), they also often promoted girls’ education and helped open girls’ schools in their national languages. One example of this is the Romanian women’s organizations in Transylvania. The oldest association of Transylvanian Romanian women was founded in 1850 in Brașov/​Brassó. Its name speaks to its philanthropic character: Romanian Women’s Association for the Support of Poor Orphaned Romanian Girls (Reuniunea Femelior Române). The membership fees were spent toward the funding of Romanian girls’ schools. Other women’s associations soon followed, modeled after the one in Brașov. Their activities were mostly philanthropic and educational but also cultural (founding libraries and promoting publishing in Romanian along with organizing conferences) and commercial (developing home industries and thus preserving the Romanian cultural heritage; Glodariu 1983). The Romanian women’s association in Sibiu/​Nagyszeben/​Hermannstadt, founded in 1881, went one step further by setting another goal, namely, to train female elementary school teachers. These women’s associations were all actively involved in organizing various gatherings of Romanians. Jewish women often organized along faith-​based philanthropic associations. However, many of them were also important players in the large national women’s associations in both parts of the Monarchy. Jewish women also made significant cultural contributions as writers and through their salons. Jewish salonières of Vienna and Budapest actively contributed to the cultural and political modernization of their country as key cultural 96

97

Activism in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

and political discussions took place in the salons. In the words of Alison Rose, “each salonière used her platform to advocate for further change, political rights, and/​or cultural innovation” (Rose 2010, 119). Thus, both the salons and philanthropic organizations challenged and redefined the “public-​private dichotomy” (Rose 2010, 120).

The national movements and women’s organizations This link between the national movement and women’s organizations in the Austro-​ Hungarian Monarchy was important for many ethnicities. One example is the Slovak women’s organization Živena, established in 1869 in what was then Upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia). The organization recognized the importance of women’s participation in the national movement. Its most prominent leader was Elena Maróthy-​Šoltésová who became the association’s vice-​president in 1883 and after 1894, its president. Maróthy-​ Šoltésová was a passionate spokesperson for the use of the Slovak language and she emphasized girls’ right to be schooled in their mother tongue. She continued to fight for the opening of a Slovak girls’ school, which only materialized with the end of the Austro-​ Hungarian Monarchy and the subsequent establishment of independent Czechoslovakia. However, some scholars have criticized a narrow focus on a single national movement when speaking of multi-​ethnic regions of the Empire. Thus Gabriela Dudeková pointed out the existence of various non-​Slovak women’s organizations in Upper Hungary, for example, a branch of the Budapest-​based Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete). Moreover, according to Dudeková, in towns many women’s groups were organized not along ethnic but confessional lines (Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant) while some were multi-​confessional in profile (Dudeková 2009, 334). Dudeková recognizes that a more differentiated picture of the women’s movement in the Habsburg Empire from a multicultural perspective is necessary. In addition, she is critical of the fact that women’s emancipation was instrumentalized by various political interests, such as the fight for national independence in the 19th and early 20th centuries and after 1918, “the political regimes of the nation-​state” (Dudeková 2012, 148). A good example for this tension between women’s interethnic collaboration and national interest is the first Novi Sad/​Újvidék/​Neusatz Women’s Association established in 1867 in what was Southern Hungary at the time and what became Vojvodina as part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) after World War I. Like many other contemporary associations, it had a philanthropic profile. It was a remarkable phenomenon as its founding members came from different religious as well as ethnic backgrounds, such as Serbian Savka Subotić, German Maria Tomeković (née Fradl) or its later president Fáni Fülesy, an ethnic Hungarian. It was thus a rare example of an early women’s association in the Monarchy, which came into being in the probably most multi-​ethnic region, trying to unite women of various backgrounds around a common goal. Unfortunately, after about three decades of existence, the association succumbed to the nationalist political winds of the time, which led to the erosion of its multi-​ethnic and multi-​confessional character (Schwartz and Thorson 2014).

The fight for women’s education One central argument that seems to run across all strands of women’s activism in the Monarchy, regardless of national, linguistic or regional differences, was the demand and necessity to improve women’s education, a demand that can be traced back to the 97

98

Agatha Schwartz

beginnings of European feminist thinking in the 18th century. While initially these arguments were based on the Enlightenment principle of universal human rights, the 19th century saw the addition of the necessity for women’s education, for reasons of national rebirth given women’s importance in raising the nation’s children. Unlike in the centralized nations of Europe, like England and France, the fight for women’s rights followed a different path in the complex multi-​ethnic Habsburg Empire. The desire and fight for national independence among many national groups increasingly emphasized the necessity to improve the level of women’s education as mothers of the nation. The latter part of the 19th century thus saw a substantial improvement in women’s educational opportunities and the opening of secondary schools for women across the Empire. The very first grammar school for girls opened in Prague in 1890 following the tireless efforts of Czech writer and activist Eliška Krásnohorská, who founded Minerva, an association for women’s higher education. Minerva opened the very first girls’ grammar school in the entire Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy (according to James C. Albisetti [1994], in the whole of Central and Western Europe). The universities opened their doors to women at around the same time as well. In Budapest, a ministerial decree was issued in December 1895 whereby the universities (the faculties of humanities and medicine, which included pharmacy) were opened to women in the Hungarian part of the Monarchy (so-​ called Transleithania) in the fall of 1896 (Szapor 2004), a year earlier than in Cisleithania, the Vienna-​administered part. In Cisleithania, women gained access to the faculties of philosophy (humanities) in 1897 and in 1990, to medicine. The faculties of law and engineering remained closed to women until after World War I.

The role of women’s professional organizations Women’s professional organizations were of particular importance for the evolving women’s movement. In some regions of the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy where there were no women’s organizations with an explicitly political agenda we still find examples of professional organizations that became the site from which women formulated various political demands. One such example was the Female Teachers’ Association of the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia, established in 1905 (Udruga učiteljica kraljevina Hrvatske i Slavonije) whose journal Domaće ognjište sometimes brought forth well-​ camouflaged feminist demands in reports on the progress and achievements of the women’s movement worldwide, even venturing as far as to write about female suffrage (Schwartz and Thorson 2014). While in Budapest girls’ schools and teachers’ colleges began to produce young women who became employed in white-​collar occupations that were previously unavailable to women, such as post office workers, typists, and elementary school teachers (Szapor 2004), in Vienna, the 1866 foundation of the Viennese Women’s Employment Association (Wiener Frauen-​Erwerbsverein) marks the beginning of the “era of the organized woman” in Austria (Anderson 1992, 25). The association offered courses in sewing, drawing, sales, and other female occupations. Marianne Hainisch, one of its members and later founder of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine), stated that this was “the first non-​philanthropic and non-​confessional women’s association in Austria” (Malleier 2006, 363). These were the very first steps for middle-​class women to become financially independent. However, women were often underpaid and subject to discrimination.

98

99

Activism in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

These associations are considered the forerunners of women’s political organizations and of the organized women’s movement. For example, Jewish-​Hungarian Rózsa (Rosika) Schwimmer (Bédy-​Schwimmer), a leading member of the fin-​de-​siècle Hungarian women’s movement, started her feminist career as a member of the Hungarian Association of Women Office Workers (Magyar Nőtisztviselők Egyesülete); she became its president between 1900 and 1908 (Zimmermann 1999, 197). Women’s professional associations led to the establishment of organizations that fought for women’s rights more broadly, such as the General Austrian Women’s Association in 1893 (Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein), which started off as a moderate organization to evolve into one with radical goals following the lines of the international women’s movement, that is, fighting for women’s education, women’s political and legal rights, and against the sexual and moral double standard. Distinguished feminist, writer, and artist Rosa Mayreder was one of its founding members. In Budapest, in 1904 the Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete) came into being, with Rózsa Schwimmer as one of its founding members. The Feminist Association was the only women’s organization in the Empire to refer to itself as feminist (Szapor 2004). Its members came from a variety of social and class backgrounds: religious and atheist, Social-​Democrats, nationalists, middle-​class, and working-​class women. They fought for women’s legal rights and suffrage, among other issues, and also became openly pacifist throughout World War I.

Women’s alliances Despite national division lines in the women’s movement in parts of the Monarchy with sizable ethnic groups fighting for their rights, individual women and groups across the Monarchy were connected both within its borders and beyond (Zimmermann 2006). Often their magazines would report about the activities of other national groups within the Empire itself and abroad. Many feminists formed transnational alliances so that we can speak of an organized women’s movement in most of Europe, North America, and worldwide (Rupp 1997, 16–​18). While many individual activists and organizations were connected to the nascent international women’s movement in different ways (i.e., the Budapest-​ based Feminist Association joined the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1906), numerous contacts existed within the Monarchy on a trans-​regional and trans-​ linguistic level between individual activists, organizations, and writers. For example, Ukrainian writer and activist Natalia (or Nataliya) Kobrynska from Galicia (Transleithania), considered the founder of the Ukrainian women’s movement (Bohachevsky-​Chomiak 1982), was connected to Ukrainian feminists in the Bukovina (Cisleithania) while also supporting the activities of Czech feminists. Polish feminist Paulina Kuczalska-​Reinschmitt (Krzywiec 2006; Stegmann 2006) was active both in Galicia and in the part of Poland that belonged to the Russian Empire while also being connected to the international women’s movement. Croatian writer and activist Jagoda Truhelka (Schwartz and Thorson 2014; Vittorelli 2007) published both in Croatia and in Bosnia-​Herzegovina. Several writers and feminists also worked across linguistic borders. Slovenian writer and activist Zofka Kveder wrote in Slovenian, Croatian, and German while Rózsa Schwimmer published in Hungarian and German. Some organizations became members of the Vienna-​based League of Austrian Women’s Associations while others (i.e., Czech and Hungarian feminists) did not join. They looked more to Germany and other western countries than to Vienna. For a long time, the dominant discourse in

99

100

Agatha Schwartz

scholarship when presenting women’s activism in the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy has tended to embrace a national, sometimes nationalist perspective, thus erasing these very important trans-​ethnic contacts and realities. This can be partly explained with post-​ World War I developments and the creation of many new nation states whose territories had formerly been part of the Monarchy. Recently this image has begun to shift with new publications (Carlier 2009; Schwartz and Thorson 2014; Tutavac and Korotin 2016) that show women’s rich trans-​regional networking across this vast Empire and beyond, which challenged national division lines.

Women writers Parallel to the women’s movement, we witness women’s hitherto unprecedented presence on the publishing scene. The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries saw a flourishing of women’s writing in newspapers, magazines, and books. Women’s writing reflects very much the concerns women expressed in their fight for their rights and beyond. Women writers addressed issues that were on the agenda of the women’s movement, such as new educational and career opportunities and the challenges they brought with them; questioning patriarchal sexual standards and the established norms of masculinity and femininity; and the legal discrimination women faced. Some prominent writers who wrote on these and related topics both in their essays and fiction include Rosa Mayreder (Austrian), Margit Kaffka (Hungarian), Olha Kobylianska (Ukrainian), Zofka Kveder (Slovenian), Hana Gregorová (Slovak), Jagoda Truhelka (Croatian), Nafija Sarajlić (Muslim writer from Bosnia), and Isidora Sekulić (Serbian), to name but a few. In women’s fiction, we also encounter themes that were rarely, if at all, discussed by the women’s movement, such as violence, including rape, misogyny, and incest, but also lesbian love as seen for instance in the works of Grete Meisel-​Hess (Jewish-​Austrian), Anna Szederkényi (Hungarian) or Růžena Jesenská (Czech). The often repeated bias in male-​ centered literary criticism, that women’s writing from this period lacks formal innovation and therefore does not fall within the confines of literary modernism, has been challenged by Schwartz and Thorson (2017) who argue that not only did women writers across the Monarchy experiment with literary form in ways different from male writers but that women writers in addition deconstructed norms and challenged traditions according to their own concerns. Women’s literary works are an important element when mapping women’s lives and concerns during this period of major cultural, social, and political upheavals. Women’s fiction further deconstructs a nationalist interpretation of their emancipatory efforts as having served first and foremost their national group rather than offering a criticism of the reality of women’s lives and the many shades of their oppression in the still very patriarchal societies across the Monarchy.

Conclusions The dramatic changes in women’s realities during the politically agitated times of the last decades of the Habsburg Empire along with the multiple facets of their organizing and creative output carry a long legacy. Reading women’s political and fictional writings from this time can help us better understand post-​World War I, interwar (Sharp and Stibbe 2017), and even post-​World War II as well as contemporary developments in the regions of the former Empire. They are a treasure trove of a rich array of reflections 100

101

Activism in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

that—​unfortunately—​have not lost their relevance since, in matters of social constructions of gender, the multiple mechanisms of women’s oppression and marginalization, misogyny, or the use and abuse of women for the sake of nation-​building projects. These texts also carry an incredible potential to invite reflection on ways to transgress borders that were, and continue to be, all too narrowly defined. Exploring Austro-​Hungarian women’s transnational networks, intersectional identities, and trans-​regional contacts has been a focus in recent scholarship such as the volumes edited by Vesela Tutavac and Ilse Korotin (2016) and Ramona Mihăilă (2016), respectively. While both offer new insights into the complexities of women’s networking across cultural and linguistic borders of the Monarchy, Mihăilă’s volume has a section dedicated to women’s travel narratives. This is a still understudied genre when it comes to this region and merits further research as it can yield new insights into women’s border crossings. A recent project at the University of Vienna had the focus on migrating women writers within the Empire who chose German as their literary language. By applying the concept of trans-​difference, Alexandra Millner and Katalin Teller (2016) explore how these multicultural writers negotiated intersectional binaries, and whether and how they challenged cultural stereotypes. This is another example of an interesting possible direction for further research.

References Albisetti, James C. 1994. “Mädchenerziehung im deutschsprachigen Österreich, im Deutschen Reich und in der Schweiz, 1866–​1914.” In Frauen in Österreich: Beiträge zu ihrer Situation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by David F. Good et al., 15–​31. Vienna: Böhlau. Anderson, Harriet. 1992. Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in Fin-​de-​ Siècle Vienna. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Beller, Steven, ed. 2001. Rethinking Vienna 1900. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Bohachevsky-​Chomiak, Martha. 1982. “Natalia Kobrynska: A Formulator of Feminism.” In Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia, edited by Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn, 196–​219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boxer, Marilyn J. 2007. “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism.’” American Historical Review 112 (1): 131–​158. Carlier, Julie. 2009. “Crossing Borders: How the Women’s Movement Can (or Should) Be Written from a Transnational Perspective.” In Wie Frauenbewegung geschrieben wird: Historiographie, Dokumentation, Stellungnahmen, Bibliographien, edited by Johanna Gehmacher and Natascha Vittorelli, 233–​237. Vienna: Löcker. Csáky, Moritz. 2001. “Was man Nation und Rasse heißt, sind Ergebnisse und keine Ursachen: Zur Konstruktion kollektiver Identitäten in Zentraleuropa.” In Kakanien revisited: Das Eigene und das Fremde (in) der österreichisch-​ungarischen Monarchie, edited by Wolfgang Müller-​Funk, Peter Plener, and Clemens Ruthner, 33–​49. Basel: Francke. Dudeková, Gabriela. 2009. “Frauenbewegung in der Slowakei bis 1918: Bibliographie und Kommentar.” In Wie Frauenbewegung geschrieben wird: Historiographie, Dokumentation, Stellungnahmen, Bibliographien, edited by Johanna Gehmacher and Natascha Vittorelli, 329–​ 349. Vienna: Erhard Löcker. –​ –​ –​ –. 2012. “Gender History in Slovakia: Still a Challenge.” Aspasia 6 (1): 142–​156. Glodariu, Eugenia. 1983. “Unele consideratii privind mişcarea feministă din Transilvani (a doua jumătate a sec. al XIX-​lea—​inceputul sec. al XX-​lea).” Acta Musei Napocensis 20: 231–​240. Hauch, Gabriella. 1992. “Politische Wohltätigkeit—​wohltätige Politik. Frauenvereine in der Habsburger Monarchie bis 1866.” Zeitgeschichte, 200–​214. Krzywiec, Grzegorz. 2006. “Kuczalska-​Reinschmit (Reinschmidt), Paulina Jadwiga (1859–​1921).” In A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South

101

102

Agatha Schwartz Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, 274–​277. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. Malleier, Elisabeth. 2006. “Vergessene Differenzen: Jüdische Frauen in der Habsburgermonarchie.” In Zions Töchter: Jüdische Frauen in Literatur, Kunst und Politik, edited by Andrea M. Lauritsch, 355–​369. Vienna: Lit Verlag. Mihăilă, Ramona, ed. 2016. Transnational Identities of Women Writers in the Austro-​Hungarian Empire. New York: Addleton Academic Publishers. Millner, Alexandra and Katalin Teller. 2016. Transdifferenz in der Literatur deutschsprachiger Migrantinnen in Österreich-​Ungarn. www.univie.ac.at/​transdifferenz/​. Rose, Alison. 2010. “The Jewish Salons of Vienna.” In Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy and its Legacy, edited by Agatha Schwartz, 119–​132. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Rupp, Leila. J. 1997. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schwartz, Agatha. 2008. Shifting Voices: Feminist Thought and Women’s Writing in Fin-​de-​Siècle Austria and Hungary. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Schwartz, Agatha and Helga Thorson. 2014. Shaking the Empire, Shaking Patriarchy: The Growth of a Feminist Consciousness Across the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. –​–​–​–. 2017. “The Aesthetics of Change: Women Writers of the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy.” In Crossing Central Europe: Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000, edited by Carrie Smith-​Prei and Helga Mitterbauer, 27–​49. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Sharp, Ingrid and Matthew Stibbe. 2017. Women Activists Between War and Peace: Europe 1918–​ 1923. London: Bloomsbury. Stegmann, Natali. 2006. “Der Platz polnischer Feministinnen im galizischen Machtgefüge der 1890er Jahre bis 1914.” In Frauenbilder, feministische Praxis und nationales Bewussstein in Österreich-​Ungarn 1867–​1918, edited by Waltraud Heindl, Edit Király, and Alexandra Millner, 241–​255. Tübingen and Basel: Francke. Szapor, Judith. 2004. “Sisters or Foes: The Shifting Front Lines of the Hungarian Women’s Movements, 1896–​1918.” In Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century: A European Perspective, edited by Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-​ Ennker, 189–​ 205. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tutavac, Vesela and Ilse Korotin. 2016. “Wir wollen der Gerechtigkeit und Menschenliebe dienen...” Frauenbildung und Emanzipation in der Habsburgermonarchie. Der südslawische Raum und seine Wechselwirkung mit Wien, Prag und Budapest. Vienna: Praesens Verlag. Vittorelli, Natascha. 2007. Frauenbewegung um 1900: Über Triest nach Zagreb. Vienna: Erhard Löcker. Zimmermann, Susan. 1999. Die bessere Hälfte: Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie1848 bis 1918. Wien-​Budapest: Promedia-​Napvilág. –​ –​ –​ –. 2006. “Reich, Nation und Internationalismus: Kooperationen und Konflikte der Frauenbewegungen der Habsburger Monarchie im Spannungsfeld internationaler Organisation und Politik.” In Frauenbilder, feministische Praxis und nationales Bewussstein in Österreich-​ Ungarn 1867–​1918, edited by Waltraud Heindl, Edit Király, and Alexandra Millner, 119–​167. Tübingen: Francke.

102

103

10 THE FIRST ALL-​RUSSIAN WOMEN’S CONGRESS “The Women’s Parliament” Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

Public conferences of professionals and activists, known at the time as congresses, came to Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the tsarist regime liberalized public gatherings for the first time. Within a context in which free expression was heavily regulated by the state, congresses provided a relatively open venue for public discussion of contested policy issues (Bradley 2002). Part of this phenomenon and often ignored or minimized in the histories of the period, the 1908 congress contributed to the general development of civil society before the 1917 Revolutions, and in particular to the harnessing of women’s political activism (Edmondson 1984, 102–​104; Stites 1978, 215–​220). In this chapter I argue that despite the many obstacles put in their path by the authorities, the organizers succeeded in creating the first mass legal women’s meeting in pre-​ revolutionary Russian history. The women’s meeting can be considered as an example of such a challenge and of what Foucault called “subversive heterotopias,” spaces carved out of the larger environment that serve as centers of resistance, of envisioning an alternative to the existing socio-​political norms and power relations (Ely 2016, 23–​28). Within the limits of a resurgent autocracy, congress participants succeeded in presenting a comprehensive record of the overall status of women in the tsarist empire, debated different visions of feminism, spurred pro women’s rights sentiment in society, and even caught Nicholas II’s attention. Outside the Empire, especially in Western Europe, home to many exiles who would shape Russian and world history for the rest of the 20th century, the congress sparked changes in socialist organizing strategies, and influenced the creation two years later of International Women’s Day, the only socialist women’s holiday, with women’s suffrage as its chief demand.

Revolution, repression, and resistance At the time that the congress convened, Russia was in the midst of a severe government backlash against those who spearheaded the 1905 Revolution. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, tsarist police and military fanned out across the vast 103

104

Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

Empire and meted out punishment. So many lost their lives that the ropes used to hang them were called “Stolypin neckties” (Ruthchild 2010, 92). Gender power relations in Russia had shifted in 1905. Until that year, women and men were equal in their lack of political rights. The Tsar’s October Manifesto in response to the 1905 Revolution granted men political rights. Women and men were no longer equally disfranchised; this change in status spurred the emergence of a feminist movement in the Empire. The relatively liberal First and Second Dumas (1906–​1907) featured passionate debates about women’s rights; it was one of the most discussed issues in both parliamentary sessions. The subsequent Third and Fourth Dumas (1907–​1917) were less favorable to feminists after the government changed the electoral law to privilege wealthier, more conservative voters. Mass women’s rights groups emerged in 1905; most had dissolved or been repressed by 1908. Still, feminist activists pressed on, seeking to influence public opinion within the narrow parameters of the possible. The 1908 Women’s Congress was an important part of this strategy. The congress was the product of years of lobbying and negotiations, especially by Anna Filosofova (1837–​1912) and Anna Shabanova (1848–​1932), well-​connected leaders of the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society. Both women, of gentry background, had strong ties to the first and most conservative of modern international women’s organizations. In Russia, members of the gentry next below the nobility in terms of status and birth, along with Jews, formed the great majority of the small educated class, from which came most feminist activists. Beginning in 1899, Filosofova served as Honorary Vice President of the International Council of Women (ICW). In the same year, Shabanova, one of several Russian female physicians to hold leadership positions in feminist organizations, was elected chair of the ICW International Standing Committee on Peace and International Arbitration (Rupp 1997, 19). The congress talks offer a comprehensive snapshot, from a largely progressive perspective, of Russian Empire women in the early years of the 20th century. From the start, speakers pushed against authoritarian restrictions to set an oppositional tone. The 71-​year-​old Filosofova, in her inaugural address, claimed feminism as the heir to the movement to abolish serfdom. In her youth she had “the joy of witnessing the liberation of the serfs and … in the evening of my life I am witness to the liberation of women” (Trudy 1909, 1). To further the female cause, she sought both to unite women of the Empire and connect them with their sisters internationally, thus transcending national boundaries. Filosofova implored the congress delegates to create a national council of women, which would enable Russia to become an official member of the ICW (Trudy 1909, 836). Congress delegates shared space with representatives of the state. The police were highly visible at all the congress venues, not only at the City Hall, but also at museums and women’s organization spaces in the capital. At the more populous joint sessions, those entering the meeting halls passed by a long line of police (Mirovich 1909, 412–​ 413). In the regular meetings, as many as three policemen monitored all speakers and stopped those who had gone beyond permissible time or content limits. Nevertheless, perhaps because the police were not used to monitoring such a women’s gathering, most participants had a fairly wide leeway. Of the speakers listed on the program, only the socialist feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–​1952) was endangered by her presence at the congress. Warned of her impending arrest after the police spotted her at the congress, she fled the country on December 15. She did not return until March 18, 1917, after the

104

105

The First All-Russian Women’s Congress

February Revolution. The workers group she had organized was thus leaderless at the end of the congress. A number of speakers tested the limits of acceptable discourse. An example was the discussion of agrarian policy, a key element of Stolypin’s attempts to reform the autocracy. The most serious interruption of the congress came when non-​party socialist Ekaterina Kuskova (1869–​1958) read a resolution critical of Stolypin’s policy of encouraging the breakup of peasant self-​government in communes. One of the police monitors charged Kuskova with advocating a “radical solution of the agrarian question.” The women in the session persisted in reading the resolution, at which point the official ended the session. Despite the widely varying political positions of the women at the session, the police action unified the group (Trudy 1909, 390).

Ladies, laborers, and professionals Who came to the congress? Was this a “ladies congress” as Kollontai, herself of Cossack-​ Finnish gentry background, claimed? (Kollontai 1909, 3) Baronesses and princesses did attend, but so did the Socialist Revolutionaries Maria Spiridonova (1884–​1941) and Olga Vol’kenshtein (1871–​1942) and the Bolshevik (the radical, Lenin-​led wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party-​ RSDLP) Anna Gurevich (1878–​ 1942) (Trudy 1909, 907–​920). The Menshevik (the moderate wing of the RSDLP) journalist Osip Ermanskii (1867–​1941) noted three identifiable groups at the opening session. On the stage, behind a long table, “sat the members of the organizing committee, typical Petersburg lady-​ patronesses.” On the other side of the hall, sharply contrasting with the women on the dais, were a small group of women workers. Young, dressed simply, unused to such a gathering, they talked shyly among themselves and to their intelligentsia sympathizers. But by far the majority, filling the hall and overflowing into the corridor, were distinct from both the ladies and the workers. Many belonged to the progressive intelligentsia; badges identifying participants as physicians were common. Most were affluent enough to afford the five-​ruble registration fee, but hardly wealthy (Ermanskii 1909, 103). Although the Empire was multi-​ ethnic, the overwhelming number of delegates were Russian Christians, with some Jews, but few representatives of other nationalities and religions. In an empire with a peasant majority, the congress was overwhelmingly urban, as most delegates came from St Petersburg and Moscow. Urban spaces, with their concentrations of the educated and workers in a rapidly industrializing economy, provided fertile ground for the emergence of oppositional movements. Despite the lack of diverse national and rural representation, the congress, as a gathering of women challenging traditional roles, occupying public space and seeking political rights, was an island of subversion within the autocratic Empire. But those on the island had differing agendas. The Kadet women who dominated the organizing committee sought to control the direction of the congress and its final resolutions. Non-​ party progressive feminists emphasized the importance of liberal and left parties acknowledging and prioritizing women’s issues. Party-​affiliated socialists underlined the primacy of class issues. The growing number of female industrial workers were heavily recruited by all sides. Congress organizers sent notices to trade unions and working-​women’s groups, and waived registration fees (M.B. 1909, 16–​17). Social Democrats noted the appeal of feminist ideas to the female proletariat (Chlen 1909, 2). Although news of recruiting meetings

105

106

Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

spread mostly by word of mouth, the newspaper Golos sotsial-​demokrata (Voice of Social Democracy) claimed that only the issue of sick benefits for workers had aroused so much interest. Older, married workers responded especially enthusiastically, referring to women’s meetings from 1906 that “left especially fond memories” (“Khronika” 1908, 26). With little support from her male comrades, Kollontai countered feminist recruiting efforts, bringing a whirlwind of activity to the preparations for the congress (Clements 1979; Farnsworth 1980). She wrote a detailed critique of the feminists, set up fundraising lectures, organized groups to attend feminist meetings, and attended all the recruiting meetings, while successfully eluding capture by the police. Kollontai and the women workers’ groups together selected about 45 delegates (Ruthchild 2010, 109–​112).

Congress sessions: Debating feminist theory and practice The congress was divided into four sections: Education and Enlightenment, Economics and Ethics, Politics, and Education (Trudy 1909, X–​XVIII). It is impossible to cover the eclectic range of talks and topics discussed. Altogether there were 148 presentations, of which 26 were by men. Speakers advocated equal opportunity for women in fields either restricted or closed to them, such as agronomy, law, the Russian Orthodox priesthood, and sailing. Topics included Esperanto, co-​education, alcoholism, women’s culture, women workers, prostitution, motherhood, free love, feminism in other countries, women’s consciousness, and the political structure (Trudy 1909, 921–​927). Congress delegates showed a remarkable degree of unity about specific economic and educational issues, reflecting progressive democratic views similar to the programs of the Left and liberal parties. Resolutions articulated alternatives to the autocratic status quo. For example, delegates supported the eight-​hour workday, child labor laws, protective legislation for pregnant women and mothers, equal access to higher education and the professions, pre-​school and universal free education for all children, the abolition of religious and national quotas, the ending of legalized prostitution, and equality in marriage, divorce, and inheritance (Trudy 1909, 820–​828). Some of the most passionate debates among advocates for the cause of women came in the political section, where speakers articulated their different visions of the “woman question.” Kollontai, in her written remarks, portrayed feminists as economically clueless. She accused feminists of privileging equal rights and ignoring class issues: “The woman question—​say the feminists—​is a question of rights and justice. The woman question—​answer the woman workers—​is a question of a crust of bread” (Trudy 1909, 767–​769). But her formulation was disputed from a radical feminist perspective. Anna Kal’manovich (d. 1921) objected strenuously to Kollontai’s emphasis on the class basis of women’s oppression, arguing that female oppression could be traced at least as far back as Biblical times. This spurred the Kadet Ariadna Tyrkova (1869–​1962) to accuse Kal’manovich of “man-​hating.” The speaker rebuffed this charge by citing her status as a wife and mother of sons. Underlining her belief in the primacy of female oppression, she proclaimed: “There are patriots for the fatherland. I am a patriot for women” (Trudy 1909, 767–​769). Suffrage proved the source of particular disagreement. The workers group and progressives in general supported universal, direct, equal, and secret suffrage, without regard to sex, nationality, and religion, the standard Liberation movement formula adopted by the Women’s Equal Rights Union, the first mass Russian feminist political organization, in 1905. Kadet women defended the politics of the possible, arguing that 106

107

The First All-Russian Women’s Congress

times had changed. Women’s suffrage with income limitations, equal to that of Russian men, was a more realistic demand and one that had a chance to pass in the more conservative Third Duma.

The final congress resolutions: Advocating within an autocracy On December 16, the last day of the congress, the Editorial Bureau presented the final resolutions for ratification. The general political resolutions had included a call for equal, direct and secret universal suffrage. But at the last-​minute Editorial Bureau Chair Olga Shapir (1850–​1916), claimed that time constraints prohibited debate on the slate of resolutions: “there is nothing new in them … A discussion would only return us to the old vicious circle of principled disagreements” (Trudy 1909, 818–​819). In fact, Kadet members of the Editorial Bureau, claiming that they feared police reaction, argued for the removal of the equal, direct, and secret stipulations, and presented the weakened version as the final suffrage resolution. Anna Miliukova (1861–​1935) tried to excuse the change by claiming that “by simple forgetfulness,” the chair of the political section had failed to forward the more inclusive suffrage resolution, approved by the political section attendees, to the Bureau (Trudy 1909, 819). This did not mollify the delegates. Kuskova objected strenuously that it was against the congress rules to propose a resolution not introduced in the sections. To resolve the situation, workers group spokeswoman Maria Sabinina proposed that the congress adopt the workers group resolution advocating full universal suffrage, since it had been greeted with applause when proposed in the political section. When this proposal failed to pass, Sabinina and most of the workers group walked out. But some stayed, still seeking a path to consensus. When Tyrkova, presiding over the meeting, ruled against blocking the vote, the remaining members of the workers group left. “A Kadet cavalry charge,” observed Ermanskii, spearheaded passage of the watered-​down suffrage resolution. In the end, it was the Kadets controlling the Editorial Bureau who abandoned the goal of unity in favor of maintaining control over the congress’s message on suffrage. Although the workers group was small, they exercised a large influence on the congress agenda, and except for the suffrage resolution, won acceptance of many of their economic demands. Their exit was slow, but the symbolism of their protest became an important weapon for socialists portraying feminists as indifferent to class concerns (Trudy 1909, 819–​820). Overall, the final resolutions represented positions largely in accord with a progressive agenda, except for the retreat on suffrage. The other main general political resolution adopted called for the creation of an All-​Russian Women’s Council, although the government blocked actual fulfillment of Filosofova’s goal. The First Section resolutions reiterated the importance of equal rights in all spheres of public life, and for raising the living standards of peasant women through greater access to education, changing laws on inheritance, and access to land. The Second Section resolutions advocated limiting factory and other work to women 18 years and older, an eight-​hour day, banning night and underground work, protective legislation for pregnant women and mothers, child labor laws, training female factory inspectors, a unified government system of workers insurance, an end to the sexual double standard, the abolition of legalized prostitution and the closing of houses of prostitution, combating alcoholism by improving living standards and widespread anti-​ alcohol campaigns, and raising the general cultural level of the masses with the full participation of women. The Third Section resolutions included the aforementioned resolution on equal suffrage, a complete revision of the law code on 107

108

Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

the basis of equality and justice without regard to nationality, the abolition of all discriminatory laws against Jews, equal access to education, the removal of regulations barring women from practicing all kinds of law, equal access to medical education and medical practice, equality in marriage, divorce, and inheritance, and expanding inheritance and other rights of children born out of wedlock. The Fourth Section resolutions included early education for all Russian children, teaching elementary schools in children’s native languages, universal free education for all school-​age children, schools for adult women workers, higher schools to train workers to be village teachers, equal access for women to all higher education, and co-​education on all levels with no religious or national restrictions (Trudy 1909, 811–​828). The congress demands, while more specifically focused on women, were similar to those in the programs of Russia’s main left and liberal parties. Continuing to push boundaries, the gathering concluded with a powerful and defiant statement. Daily executions were part of the government’s repressive policies, and their use had escalated since the 1905 Revolution. Abolition of capital punishment was a key opposition demand. Asking to speak, Sofia Dekhtereva (1862–​1939) called on wives and mothers to lead the charge against the plague of government executions. Applause greeted Dekhtereva’s remarks. The police censor ordered her away from the podium and Shabanova ended the meeting. But the crowd ignored police orders to empty the hall, instead congratulating Dekhtereva before slowly dispersing (Edmondson 1984, 101–​102). Thus, the congress, which began with an impassioned speech linking serf liberation to women’s liberation, ended with a call to women to lead the opposition to Tsarist repression.

The short-​and long-​term impact of the congress The congress showed how, in the depths of repression, resistance, in this case through a weeklong transformation of municipal space, could gain a foothold. Socialists acknowledged the appeal of women’s rights to female workers, and liberal politicians united in support of women’s suffrage. The congress caught the attention of women’s rights opponents, who had mostly ignored feminist activism until then. Duma deputy Vladimir Purishkevich, organizer of the nationalist and anti-​ Semitic Union of the Russian People, equated the assembly to a gathering of whores. Filosofova took him to court. Three hundred people crowded the courtroom; one woman challenged the deputy to a duel. Purishkevich was sentenced to a month in jail. In sentencing him, the judge noted the growing support for women’s rights: “public opinion on women has changed.” Purishkevich never served his sentence. In the only indication that he paid any attention to the congress at all, the Tsar intervened with an imperial pardon (Tyrkova 1915, 437–​438). Although Nicholas II had approved the 1906 agreement leading to women’s suffrage in Finland (then part of the Russian Empire), his government stood against women’s rights in the rest of the Empire. The regime’s Minister of Justice Ivan Shcheglovitov (1861–​1918), later connected to the 1913 Mendel Beilis Jewish ‘blood libel’ trial, argued that: “One of the chief tasks of the twentieth century … consists of keeping women in the sphere most suited to them—​the family and the home” (Ruthchild 2010, 146). Attacks from the Right only served to invigorate Russian feminists. The Women’s Equal Rights Union, never legally approved, no longer existed, but the congress highlighted the need for a legal organization to continue to advance feminist goals after the meeting. The League for Women’s Equal Rights had won legal status earlier in March 1907 with its goals “The attainment by all women of political and civil rights identical with the 108

109

The First All-Russian Women’s Congress

rights of Russian male citizens” (Ruthchild 2010, 153–​154). By early 1909, leadership was in the hands of veterans of the Women’s Equal Rights Union. These were intelligentsia women, members of the group most drawn to feminist activism, such as the educator Maria Chekhova (1866–​1937), the writer and publisher Liubov Gurevich (1866–​1940), the writer-​translator Zinaida Mirovich (1865–​1913), the historian Ekaterina Shchepkina (1854–​1938), and the physician Poliksena Shishkina-​Iavein (1875–​1947) (Ruthchild 2010, 154). The last remnant of the Equal Rights Union, the journal Soiuz zhenshchin (Union of Women), published throughout 1909, carried news of League activities. The main feminist organization throughout 1917, the League pursued lobbying and keeping the issue of women’s rights in the public eye, with little interference from the government. Among its other activities, the League organized two more congresses. Building on the success of the 1908 congress, the League joined with a coalition of philanthropic and other women’s groups for the First All-​Russian Congress against the Trade in Women, from April 21 to 25, 1910 in St. Petersburg. The gathering was smaller, a few hundred participants. The largest of the congresses, the First All-​Russian Congress on Women’s Education, attracted 1115 delegates. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the first women’s higher education courses, the congress was held from December 26, 1912 to January 4, 1913. Seeking greater control over the outcome, organizers of the education congress banned participation by a workers group. Nevertheless the congress included a talk by the Bolshevik Praskov’ia Kudelli (1859–​1944) and continued the oppositional tone of the 1908 congress (Ruthchild 2010, 172–​180). The feminists were successful in raising the visibility of women’s rights as part of the liberal-​left’s vision of democracy and the modern state, a contrast to Tsarist autocracy. Paul Miliukov, at the 1908 congress, had “apologized for underestimating the problem of equal political rights for women” (Trudy 1909, 22; Yukina 1998, 3–​4). In the Fourth Duma sessions of March 8 and 13, 1913, Miliukov, declaiming “Gentlemen, it is our turn, it is Russia’s turn,” became the spokesman for the last women’s suffrage proposal submitted to the Empire’s parliament. Continuing the tradition among many Russian activists of looking to the West for democratic examples, Miliukov pointed to the Scandinavian nations as women’s rights models. Placing Russia “also in the ranks of these northern countries,” Miliukov cited Finland, Norway, and Denmark for having legalized women’s suffrage. Based on the standard seven-​point formula (universal, direct, equal, and secret without regard to nationality, religion, and sex), but maintaining the categories of active and passive voting, the proposal was defeated (Gosudarstvennaia Duma 1906–​1917 [1913, v. 1, 2176–​2222]). This was the last attempt to win women’s suffrage in the Duma before the end of the autocracy in 1917. Notably, Miliukov used Scandinavia as his example. The Anglophile Kadet leader’s pro-​suffrage stance contrasted with his British and US contemporaries. Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister from 1908 to December 1916 staunchly opposed votes for women. US President Woodrow Wilson declared in favor of the suffrage amendment to the Constitution only in January 1918, having ordered suffrage protesters imprisoned in 1917. Once converted, Miliukov envisioned equal rights as one of the hallmarks of a modern state. In contrast to the liberals, Russian socialists had long supported women’s equality in principle, but many considered women workers backward and their issues secondary to the struggle against capitalism and autocracy. The 1908 congress demonstrated the appeal of equal rights to women workers. Kollontai’s first post-​congress article was surprisingly positive about the meeting. Writing under the pseudonym “Mikhailova,” 109

110

Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

from her German exile, she cited the socialist feminist leader Clara Zetkin’s report in the German socialist women’s journal Die Gleichheit (Equality), claiming that the Russian congress “had important significance for the entire international socialist movement.” To Kollontai, the congress was equally significant for Russia as it linked to the revolutionary spirit of a few years earlier: “Against a background of triumphant reaction … the oppositional mood of the congress, the brave speeches, the ‘left’ resolutions, all this vividly recalled the familiar ‘fighting causes’ of 1905–​1906” (Mikhailova 1909, 6). Kollontai’s The Social Foundations of the Woman Question, originally scheduled for publication before the Women’s Congress, appeared early in 1909. It was the most significant work on women and socialism since Auguste Bebel’s 1879 Woman and Socialism. The book was full of Kollontai’s polemics against the feminists, but for a while after the congress Kollontai softened her criticism, as she and other socialist women leaders crafted their own brand of feminism (Kollontai 1909). The congress influenced the growing international socialist movement, especially in the creation of the first socialist women’s holiday. The usual history of the creation of International Women’s Day emphasizes its US roots, ignoring its Russian connections. In this regard, the recruiting of the workers group, and its activity during the 1908 congress, are particularly important. Kollontai fled Russia initially for Germany. Less than two years after she witnessed and no doubt conveyed to Clara Zetkin the appeal of equal rights to the women workers of St. Petersburg, Kollontai represented the Russian textile workers union when the Second Socialist Women’s Congress proclaimed International Women’s Day. On August 26, 1910, Zetkin proposed that the socialist women’s holiday be created around the slogan of “universal suffrage,” as “the vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism” (Ruthchild 2010, 185). The holiday proved very popular; its celebrations quickly spread across the globe (Offen 2000, 210–​211). The most significant commemoration came just nine years later, when Russian women demonstrating on International Women’s Day sparked the February Revolution toppling the Tsar. Soon after, on March 19, 1917, a mass feminist demonstration won a pledge of support for women’s suffrage from leaders of the rival governing bodies, the Provisional Government and the Soviets. On July 20, the Electoral Law formalized this pledge. With the law, Russia became the first major power to extend voting rights to all women (Ruthchild 2010).

Conclusions Both in Russia and internationally, the 1908 congress, featuring articulate women speaking on a wide range of subjects, aided in the portrayal of women as ready to be politically active on an equal basis with men. As feminist physician Maria Pokrovskaia (1852–​1922) observed ironically: “ ‘Just think!’ the sceptics were heard to declare, ‘women have organized everything and are running the whole congress themselves. Astonishing!’ ” (Edmondson 1984, 104) For a week, in the heart of the capital of the tsarist empire, the congress succeeded in creating a subversive women’s heterotopia.

References Bradley, Joseph. 2002. “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia.” American Historical Review 107 (4): 1094–​1123.

110

111

The First All-Russian Women’s Congress Chlen, P. K. 1909. “Rabochaia gruppa na zhenskom s”ezde (Pis’mo iz Peterburga).” [“The Workers’ Group at the Women’s Congress. Letter from Petersburg.”] Sotsial-​demokrat: 2–​5. Clements, Barbara Evans. 1979. Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Edmondson, Linda. 1984. Feminism in Russia, 1900–​1917. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ely, Christopher D. 2016. Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-​Era Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Ermanskii, A. 1909. “Vserossiiskii zhenskii s”ezd.” [“All-​Russian Women’s Congress.”] Sovremennyi mir (January): 103–​112. Farnsworth, Beatrice Brodsky. 1980. Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford: CA: Stanford University Press. Glinskii, Boris B. 1909. “Pervyi zhenskii vserossiiskii s”ezd.” [“The First All-​Russian Women’s Congress.”] Istoricheskii vestnik: 384–​407. Gosudarstvennaia Duma. 1906–​1917. Stenograficheskie Otchety. St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia. “Khronika.” 1908. Golos sotsial-​demokrata [Voice of the Social Democrat]. (November–​ December): 25–​26. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1909. Sotsial’nie osnovy zhenskogo voprosa [The Social Foundations of the Woman Question]. St. Petersburg: Znanie, 1909. M.B. 1909. “Vserossiiskii zhenskii s”ezd i rabochaia gruppa.” [The All-​Russian Women’s Congress and the Workers’ Group], Professional’nyi vestnik: 16–​19. Mikhailova, A. (Kollontai). 1909. “Zhenshchina-​rabotnitsa na pervom feministkom kongresse v Rossii.” [“The Woman Worker at the First Feminist Congress in Russia.”] Golossotsial-​ demokrata (12): 6–​7. Mirovich, N. (Zinaida). 1909. “Pervyi vserossiiskii zhenskii s”ezd.” [“First All-​Russian Women’s Congress.”]. Vestnik Evropy: 411–​415. Offen, Karen. 2000. European Feminisms. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rupp, Leila. 1997. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ruthchild, Rochelle Goldberg. 2010. Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire. 1905–​1917. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Stites, Richard. 1978, 1991. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–​1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo zhenskogo s”ezda pri Russkom zhenskom obshchestve v Sankt-​ Peterburge 10–​16 Dekabriia 1908. [Proceedings of the First All-​Russian Women’s Congress under the auspices of the Russian Women’s Society in St. Petersburg December 10–​16, 1908]. 1909. St. Petersburg: Tip. I.N. Kushnerova. Tyrkova, Ariadna. 1915. Anna Pavlovna Filosofova i eia vremia. [Anna Pavlovna Filosofova and her time] Vol. 1, 2 vols. Sbornik pamiati Anny Pavlovny Filosofovoi. [Collected Memories of Anna Pavlovna Filosofova]. Petrograd: Izd. R. Golike i A. Vil’borg. Yukina, Irina. 1998. “The First Russian National Women’s Congress.” We/​Myi 6: 3–​4.

111

112

113

Socialist (feminist) interpretations

114

115

11 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION Rethinking the legacy of the socialist emancipation project Elena Gapova

The Russian Revolution “reshaped global time and space” (Nathans 2017, 18), although in contentious ways. A source of social experimentation that opened all fields of life for innovative action, it was the first political project to put gender equality on its program. That had a complex impact on the understanding of “the woman question,” on concrete state policies, and on the women’s activist agenda in the region and more globally throughout the “short 20th century.” With inspiration in Marxist theorizing and labor/​ working-​class feminism, socialist emancipation entailed eradication of economic and gender inequality through state-​driven redistribution of resources. That intersectional model received its due of skepticism from feminist critics (Hartmann 1979) who sought other concepts to theorize the woman condition, but still retains its conceptual importance. This chapter reflects on the complex socialist legacy while addressing three aspects: the vision of gender equality that emerged out of revolutionary labor feminist imagination; the way socialist emancipation sought to redefine women’s agency; and its general significance for feminists seeking to meet the challenges of the post-​industrial era. To challenge the tradition of placing Russia at the center of these kinds of discussions, this chapter adds examples from Belarus, an ethnic-​based territory in the north-​west of the Russian Empire that became a Soviet Republic several years after the Revolution.

Labor feminism and the Russian Revolution The 1917 Russian Revolution was envisioned by radical intelligentsia as a proletarian-​ class project; however, gender was intertwined into it from the very beginning. In fact, the Revolution took off from women’s bread riots in the capital city of St. Petersburg, where female textile workers, exhausted by food shortages, took to the streets on the date (March 8 on the reformed calendar) proposed by socialist theorist and feminist Clara Zetkin as International Women’s Day. While it is debatable whether overworked female workers were led by leftist agitators or had revolutionary consciousness of their own (Ruthchild 2017; see also Chapter 10 in this Handbook), the case illustrates contentions 115

116

Elena Gapova

around the “woman question.” Popular histories of feminism in the West tend to present the first wave as focused on women’s political rights, whereas socialist proponents of gender equality, who relied on Marxist theorizing of the woman condition to uncover a link between capitalism and patriarchy as two mutually reinforcing systems of inequality, saw the suffragist agenda as too narrow. According to the Marxist perspective, first invoked in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto and developed later in Engels’ (1884) The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and in the writings of European socialists, gender oppression is a by-​product of class inequality. Women, who are engaged in capitalist production and the reproduction of life at the same time, toil for both men and capitalism. Thus, their liberation would require integrating them into paid labor for economic independence and putting an end to class inequality, which oppressed both women and men. Embracing this perspective, political theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), Alexandra Kollontai (Russia), and Emma Goldman (USA), viewed the right to vote as a token issue pursued by liberal middle-​class women and insisted on a broader critique of the bourgeois order. Luxemburg (1914) believed that “women’s disenfranchisement was only a link in the chain reaction that fetters the life of the people” and viewed middle-​class suffragists as the handmaids of the bourgeoisie who would betray proletarian women as soon as their goals have been achieved. That was the origin of contemporary debates about redistribution vs. recognition (see Fraser 2013). This debate builds around two different perspectives on gender equality. One, called labor feminist and arising out of the view that gender oppression is based on the objective historical relations of property, seeks to resolve inequality through redistributive justice. The other builds on the recognition of cultural difference and identity politics. The two are interconnected, as one’s rights and economic situation are not sealed from each other: this may explain why the pursuit of recognition is more readily embraced by intellectual and economic elites for whom “rights” stand as a signifier of their dignity and citizenship status. Eventually, labor/​working-​class feminism became foundational for the socialist emancipatory project. According to this perspective, equality with men makes little sense in the context of poverty and class inequality, and this view is shared today by intersectional feminists who consider that gender intertwines with class and race. African American critical theorist bell hooks expressed this view by asking, in her book, to which men, that is, men of what class and race, women are expected to be equal (hooks 1984).

Soviet socialism and the woman question Historians who consider the Russian Revolution a pivotal moment of contesting possibilities, recognize that some ideas it sought to implement were utopian or premature for a mostly agrarian country whose economy had been ravaged by war (Clements 1992). The envisioned transformation was truly radical, as it concerned, besides overtly political matters, social relations that derive from the organization of sexuality and reproduction. In practice, decrees that abolished estate differences and instituted political equality between men and women were followed by the Family Code (1918), which secularized marriage, legitimized divorce, and eliminated distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. In 1920, the government legalized abortion, under pressure by feminist-​ oriented female members of the Bolshevik Party, who argued that while capitalist and gender oppression was not eliminated, motherhood could make women vulnerable. Next, homosexuality was decriminalized, with somewhat different attitudes toward male and 116

117

Russian Revolution and women’s liberation

female same-​sex relations remaining: while male homosexuals were quietly tolerated, if a person was a productive member of society and contributed to the revolutionary cause, “masculine traits” in women were often regarded in a positive light as a sign of active agency (Healey 2001). Labor feminists who were dreaming of the revolutionary remaking of the world, debated the future “proletarian family,” and Kollontai, who would become the first female to serve on the Soviet government, wrote extensively not only about the economic aspects of the proletarian woman question, but also about working-​class morality, love, and motherhood and argued that proletarian eroticism could not be confined to the traditional family, that is, an oppressive patriarchal institution (Kollontai 1923). Sexual liberalization and recognition of diverse identities was a feature of post-​ revolutionary “anomie,” that is, social upheaval accompanied by the breakdown of traditional regulations, the search for new moral norms, and experimentation with intimacy and relationships. However, it had been prepared by discussions of anti-​bourgeois libertarian sexuality in European workers’ parties still prior to World War I, while public interest in psychoanalysis in the 1920s contributed to the rise of Freudo-​Marxism that sought to channel sexual energy of the proletariat to the socialist cause. Communists, who had no historical precedent for fashioning their gender policy, viewed socialism as the ultimate precondition for resolving the woman question and to mobilize diverse women’s masses for the socialist cause and their own liberation, instituted, in 1919, Women’s Section (Zhenotdel) within the structure of the Communist Party. Zhenotdel was conceived, ideally, by female party members as the “deliberate, painstaking effort of hundreds of already ‘released’ women injecting their beliefs and programs and their self-​ confidence into the bloodstream of rural and proletarian Russia” (Stites 1986, 172; see also both Ruthchild, Chapter 10, and Wood, Chapter 21 in this Handbook). An example from Belarus is useful here. In 1921, the western part of Belarusian ethnic lands was ceded to Poland in accordance with the Treaty of Riga. Throughout the interwar period, the discourse of the “divided Belarusian nation” prevailed there, as leftist activists in the “bourgeois” Western Belarus cited gender and welfare policies and support for schools and culture in the Soviet part as reasons in favor of national reunification within Soviet borders (Gapova 2004). Zhenotdel functionaries in those borderland territories that were ravaged by seven years of fighting and had four official languages (Russian, Belarusian, Polish, and Yiddish) were expected to be able to reach out to ethnically diverse populations. Sometimes against the resistance of their male comrades, they worked on behalf of the poor, especially peasants, women’s welfare, and socialist organizing and propaganda, which they considered tightly related, as they believed in wider party and national goals that their work served. One of the primary concerns was the liquidation of illiteracy, which had special urgency in the Belarusian countryside where in the 1920s only 7 percent of peasant women could read. Belarusian Zhenotdel also sought to bring women into local/​regional government, militia, and the public sphere; to eliminate poverty-​related prostitution; provide employment, housing, and childcare for single mothers; deliver social services and provide access to healthcare and medical abortion; oust discrimination of female workers; ensure child support and “milk kitchens”; satirize domestic violence; and involve women in the study of Marxist ideology and educate them against popular religiosity and superstition. In 1924, the first mass women’s magazine in the Belarusian language Belarusian woman-​worker and peasant (Belaruskaya rabotnitsa i syalyanka) was launched. Framing women’s emancipation around labor participation, it was a vehicle for promoting the socialist agenda, but also an outlet for agency, which encouraged women to contribute 117

118

Elena Gapova

to the media in the capacity of “worker/​peasant correspondents” and write on issues in their communities. Many women, however, would send poems and essays. A recently published anthology of Belarusian women’s poetry of the interwar period is largely based on material retrieved from newspapers in Soviet Belarus; in its western part, where some women could not afford education (Danilchyk and Zhybul 2017, 12), their creativity was not equally encouraged. Socialism is, by definition, a state project, and after Zhenotdel, which had been fully dependent on government funding, was shut down in 1930, women’s emancipation continued with industrialization and forced collectivization in the countryside. Substantial resources were invested in women’s education, professional development, communal childcare facilities, maternity clinics, consultation offices, feeding stations, nurseries, and mother and infant homes for women workers. All-​ Soviet campaigns encouraged polytechnic and vocational education programs for girls and aimed to bring younger women into new ‘technological’ professions by demonstrating, through media and cinema, prominent women as role models. Those policies obviously undermined patriarchal order, but with housework remaining largely unsocialized, the private sphere and family roles were rather traditional. Socialist ideology glorified the subordination of women’s personal interests to those of the nation and celebrated their contribution to the collectivist cause, and Attwood (1999, 28) argues that the demands that western governments have habitually placed on women when their countries are at war, when women have to take over “men’s jobs,” and when service to the state is prioritized above personal considerations, were imposed on Soviet women throughout the Stalin era. This point echoes ongoing discussions regarding women’s agency under socialist hegemony best expressed by Engel’s assertion (2006, 475) that socialist emancipation both empowered and constrained socialist women. A related point is that while the interests of women and Bolsheviks might have overlapped, socialist gender policy was driven by the goal of making women useful for socialism, rather than “creating free subjects” Yukina (2007, 443). This reasoning, however, seems to overlook the dialectic relationship between women’s emancipation and the necessity for their economic independence, which became legitimized and naturalized under socialism, as women’s life trajectories and structures of opportunities were newly crafted. The case of Vera Kharuzhaya, a Belarusian activist who responded to the socialist ideals and joined the party at age 18, illustrates this claim. Kharuzhaya spent much of the interwar period in the ceded Western Belarus, sent there by the party on a mission of national and socialist organizing; she was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison, but later exchanged for Poles captured by Soviets. When in 1941 the war began, Kharuzhaya, who was pregnant with her second child, joined a Soviet partisan brigade, but the commander arranged for her to be sent outside of the war zone (which she resisted). A year later, she sent a letter to a functionary in charge of partisan resistance in occupied Belarusian territories which read: “…in these terrible times, when fascists tread on and slaughter my Belarus, I, who have given twenty years of my life to struggle for the happiness of my people, stay in the rear and live a peaceful life. I can’t do this anymore. I have to go back. I can be of use. I have great work experience. I can speak Belarusian, Polish, Yiddish, German. I am ready to do any work, at the front or in the German rear. I am not scared of anything…” (Seledievskaya 1975). Permission was granted and Kharuzhaya, having left the baby with her sister (her husband, a partisan, was killed in a battle), crossed the front line in order to join partisans

118

119

Russian Revolution and women’s liberation

and in several days was captured and, after torture, executed by fascists. Awarded, posthumously, in 1960, the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest military recognition, she was glorified as a model of living one’s life for the socialist motherland. During World War II, 800,000 Soviet women, the biggest number ever, joined the military. They served their country as nurses and cooks, but also as doctors (40 percent of physicians at the front were female), pilots of night bombers, tank drivers, snipers, partisan fighters, radio operators, and interpreters. The generation of (mostly young) Soviet women built unconventional, though still binary, gender identities that allowed them to merge the woman and the soldier (or almost any other occupation) into a non-​ contradictory social identity (Krylova 2011, 13). These new individualities were the most persuasive subject-​effect of the era.

The socialist model and its discontents In the wake of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, the socialist emancipatory project that redefined gender relations and reorganized society came to be seen as a template for development, and the woman question moved into international politics. During the Cold War, which was largely a contest over deeply gendered values and ways of life, superpower rivalries paid significant attention to the status of women, as it stood for a way of life and principles of social organization (Peri 2018). The Committee of Soviet Women (founded in 1941 as the Antifascist Committee of Soviet Women), which was headed by the first female astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, showcased socialist emancipation internationally. Similar leagues were established in other countries of Eastern Europe now socialist and under Soviet hegemony; together, these organizations made a strong presence in international and United Nations arenas articulating peace, disarmament, and humanistic concerns from the socialist perspective (Ghodsee 2018). The committee published in several languages, including non-​western ones, the magazine Soviet Woman (Sovetskaia zhenshchina), “an artifact of both wartime internationalism and Cold War competition” (Peri 2018, 622). Its materials often targeted female audiences in decolonized and non-​aligned nations striving to eradicate economic and social backwardness, cultivating the idea that socialism was a model for progress and women’s liberation. Reaching out to “the global South,” the magazine declared, on behalf of Soviet women, support for their struggle and national cultures and invoked the motif of “global sisterhood” (Varga-​Harris 2019, 761). However, western critics argue that socialist women’s committees were docile vehicles for promoting the party line and their members, paid for their work, were not autonomous subjects and feminist agents (Funk 2014). Ghodsee, who suggests an opposite view, insists that the concept of “autonomy” is applicable only within particular historical circumstances and praises socialist women’s work on gender issues at home and internationally as an effort to unite people across the political, ideological, cultural, economic, and even technological divide (Ghodsee 2018, 47). She argues that the contribution of socialist women to humanitarian issues and social and political transformation remains contested and even unrecognized and rejected as a way to write off socialist organizations from the history of feminism (Ghodsee 2018). Contentions over socialist women’s agency in the period of “developed socialism,” as it was called, echo a controversy that surfaced during the Russian Revolution, between labor and liberal trends in feminism. The founding tenets of socialist emancipation were

119

120

Elena Gapova

the protection of women within “the contract of the working mother” (Rotkirch and Temkina 1997): it was a standard by which gender equality was to be measured. Socialist governments proudly expanded paid parental leaves to several years and strengthened legislation on shorter work hours for mothers, paid vacations, not working nights, and avoiding heavy lifting and even prohibited some occupations considered dangerous for women; the implementation of these benefits requires a socialist system of resource distribution. In the 1960s, when Soviet women’s integration in professions was the highest in the world, with 75 percent of them working outside the home, the US government sponsored several studies to examine Soviet gender policy, but efforts to introduce state-​ sponsored benefits for women were later rejected as “communist” and unacceptable for the American way of life (Briggs 2017, 24). With time, though, the socialist emancipatory paradigm, which drew from intellectual traditions on the Left to focus on redistributive justice on behalf of working women, began to lose against the conceptual framework of recognition that resulted from new feminist theorizing of the woman condition. It never conceptualized masculine patriarchal domination in all social domains from sexuality to language, and that was problematic for the rising urban educated women’s “class.” Women’s “discontent” with the discrepancy between the promise of emancipation and their own experience that was emerging on the socialist block, initially oscillated between demands for more protection, on the one hand, and the pursuit of autonomy and recognition, on the other (see Posadskaya 1992). For example, dissident feminists in Soviet Russia, who in 1979 published independent women’s magazine Maria to criticize inadequate social services, in one article condemned the Soviet system for taking away “manly functions” from men. At the same time, in Yugoslavia, female academics took a critical stance over “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” in their own system (Lorand 2018). Protectionism created public patriarchy, when women were dependent on the state, rather than on individual men (Aivazova 1998), and with the disintegration of state monopoly on defining gender issues, women began to claim a recognition of their autonomy and full humanity. In the 1990s, criticism of socialist emancipation became almost an industry: whether socialism forcefully emancipated women too much (as conservatives would claim), or not enough, the critique served both liberal and nationalist causes against “communist ideology.” With liberalization and political changes in the region, gender “multiplied” (Johnson and Robinson 2007, 2–​5) and diverse forms of sexuality, intimate partnerships, and roles became socially acceptable. However, the dismantling of protections under the free market produced new forms of gender intimidation and oppression. Neoliberalism emphasizes one’s autonomy and responsibility for one’s own well-​being, and women began to experience contradiction between their productive and reproductive “obligations.” With austerity, flexible labor markets, and precarious employment, as workers have to efficiently market themselves and be available at any moment, “reproductive labor has become simultaneously more important … and harder to find time and space to do” (Briggs 2017, 6), while public support for it is reduced and families stay abandoned to their own devices. These days, some women in the postsocialist region, as well as in the West, choose staying child-​free as the preference strategy to level their chances, while others hire poor or immigrant women to do subsistence work. Women who often become dependents as family caretakers are more likely to stay in unhealthy relationships: this is one reason for the perceivable rise in domestic abuse, while global media “sell” female sexualization and objectification.

120

121

Russian Revolution and women’s liberation

This history of the postsocialist “experiment” and its effect on gender relations helps explain political theorist Fraser’s (2013) claim that, under certain circumstances, feminism may become the handmaiden of neoliberalism. With the arrival of the neoliberal market and dismantling of protections in the former social region, the feminist activist agenda, framed by (western) donors’ priorities, was turning to culture and identity politics. Many of us greeted the opportunity to voice issues that had been muted in socialism and to join hands with “global” feminist activism. However, there was one problem that—​unexpectedly—​has to do with class inequality and the deconstruction of women’s social rights. The 1970s, when a new feminist agenda was emerging in the West, was the period that Hobsbawm (1996) called “the golden age”: for a variety of reasons, class/​economic inequality was decreasing at the time. Rising against the backdrop of shrinking economic divisions, second wave feminism and other New Social Movements expanded democratization and empowerment of marginalized groups by broadening both the number of people who were introduced to equality and the scope of content to be included into recognition. Postsocialist feminism emerged in very different circumstances: alongside the rise of economic inequality and critical restrictions on access to equal opportunities and even livelihood for millions of people. By turning to the matters of recognition, it was ambivalent as regards the issues of class and redistribution. Historically, labor feminists did not see equality in the workplace and protectionism as contradictory (Briggs 2017, 24), and leftists argue that its dismantling (e.g., lifting bans on hazardous labor for women or dismantling maternal benefits) is a neoliberal instrument against all workers. Working-​class women welcome protection, of which they are the main recipients and beneficiaries (Phillips 2012), while middle-​ class professionals, operating within the global quest for efficiency, fear that protection would be detrimental to women’s competitiveness. Sometimes they tend to view working-​class women who are eager to rely on benefits as needy, politically backward, and insensitive to the feminist cause. However, the legacy of the socialist emancipation project launched by the Revolution more than a century ago may help in finding ways to resolve these contradictions and see that “unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives” (Ghodsee 2019, 1).

References Aivazova, Svetlana. 1998. Russkie zhenshchiny v labirinte ravnopravia. Moscow: Rusanova. Attwood, Lynn. 1999. Creating the New Soviet Woman. London: Macmillan Press. Briggs, Laura. 2017. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics. From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Clements, Barbara. 1992. “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel.” Slavic Review 51 (3): 485–​496. Danilchyk, Aksana, and Victor Zhybul, eds. 2017. Antalohia Belarudskai zhanochai paezii mizhvaennaha chasu. Minsk: Knihazbor. Engel, Barbara. 2006. “Women and the State.” In Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. II, edited by R. Suny, 468–​494. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism. London: Verso. Funk, Nanette. 2014. “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 344–​360. Gapova, Elena. 2004. “Women’s Question and National Projects in Soviet Byelorussia and Western Belarus, 1921–​1939.” In Zwischen Kriegen. Nationen, Nationalismen und Geschlechterverhältnisse

121

122

Elena Gapova in Mittel-​und Osteuropa, 1918–​1939, edited by J. Gehmacher, E. Harvey, and S. Kemlein, 105–​ 128. Osnabrück: fibre-​Verlag. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2018. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity During the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2019. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Nation Books. Hartmann, Heidi. 1979. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital and Class 3 (2). Healey, Dan. 2001. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1996. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–​1991. New York: Random House. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Johnson, Janet and J. Robinson eds. 2007. Living Gender after Communism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1923. “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth.” First published in Molodoya Gvardiya (Young Guard) Magazine (#3). www.marxists.org/​archive/​ kollonta/​1923/​winged-​eros.htm. Krylova, Anna. 2011. Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lorand, Zsófia. 2018. The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1914. “Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle.” Marxist Internet Archive. www. marxists.org/​archive/​draper/​1976/​women/​4-​luxemburg.html. Nathans, Benjamin. 2017. “Bolshevism’s New Believers.” New York Review of Books, November 23. Peri, Alexis. 2018. “The Soviet Woman: The Post-​World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad.” The Russian Review 77 (4): 621–​644. Phillips, Sarah. 2012. “Gender and Social Worth in Post-​Soviet Ukrainian Civil Society.” In Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine, edited by Olena Hankivskiy and A. Salnykova, 180–​203. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Posadskaya, Anastasia. 1992. “Self-​Portrait of a Russian Feminist.” New Left Review 195 (11). Rotkirch, Anna and Anna Temkina. 1997 “Soviet Gender Contracts and Their Shifts in Contemporary Russia.” Idantutkimus (4). Ruthchild, Rochelle. 2017. “Women and Gender in 1917.” Slavic Review 76 (3): 694–​702. Seledievskaya, Natalia, ed. 1975. Zhizn’, otdannaya bor’be. Sbornik vospominanii o Vere Khoruzhey [Life Dedicated to Struggle. Memoirs on Vera Kharuzhaya]. Minsk: Belarus. Stites, Richard. 1986. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–​1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Varga-​Harris, Christine. 2019. “Between National Tradition and Western Modernization: Soviet Woman and Representations of Socialist Gender Equality as a “Third Way” for Developing Countries, 1956–​1964.” Slavic Review 78 (3): 758–​781. Yukina, Irina. 2007. Russkii feminism kak vyzov sovremennosti [Russian Feminism as Modern Challenge]. St. Petersburg: Aleteia.

122

123

Dissident women and feminisms

124

125

12 CZECHOSLOVAK FEMINISMS DURING THE INTERWAR PERIOD Iveta Jusová and Karla Huebner

Czechoslovakia’s First Republic (1918–​1938), a parliamentary democracy, is remarkable for its respect for civil liberties and women’s rights. While the interwar period in the region was turbulent and marked by unrest and economic depression, Czechoslovakia exemplified successful democracy. Its relatively stable political climate and strong economic situation (especially throughout the 1920s) was favorable for feminism, and Czechoslovak feminists achieved a wider array of rights than women in many other European countries of the period. At least two different streams emerged within Czechoslovak activism around women’s issues during this time. One stream, represented by Františka Plamínková’s Women’s National Council (Ženská národní rada), was more aligned with the political goals of the middle classes and with political liberalism; the other stream was aligned with the plight of the working classes and a fledgling socialist ideology. Their success was precipitated by 19th-​century women’s prominent role in the Czech and Slovak national revival movements, as well as the early 20th-​century feminists’ strategy of presenting women’s equality as integral to democracy (Feinberg 2006, 24).

Czech and Slovak women’s emancipation efforts prior to independence The Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) and Slovakia were separate territories under the Austro-​Hungarian Empire until 1918, when the two nations joined together to form a single republic. Under the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, women had few rights and little opportunity for formal education or for well-​paid work outside the home. The 19th century, however, witnessed the beginnings of emancipation movements among women across the Empire. The Czech women’s movement specifically, while it commenced later than feminism in England and France, became the vanguard of women’s emancipation within the Empire. Slovakia also saw fledgling efforts toward women’s emancipation, but advances there were more limited. Czech and Slovak women’s emancipatory efforts first emerged as part of local national revival movements and quickly found backing on the part of prominent figures in the Czech and Slovak national leaderships. Patriotic 19th-​century Czech and 125

126

Iveta Jusová and Karla Huebner

Slovak men assigned much importance to achieving validation through the support of “their” women, and they encouraged women to be culturally productive—​as long as this productivity supported the national revival. Such activism by women, in fact, existed even as early as the revolutionary days of 1848–​1849, when students from a girls’ school helped build barricades (Pech 1969, 149). “Women’s emancipation” in this context meant women’s freedom to use in public the Czech and Slovak languages rather than German or Hungarian, support patriotic activities, and be sufficiently educated to be able to cultivate patriotic sensibilities in their children. While some women were satisfied with these goals, others found the traditional sex roles suffocating and worked to legitimize women’s desires for self-​realization outside the home (Jusová 2005, 76). They asserted that their male compatriots should sympathize with their cause because both men and women were oppressed as things stood. However, the Czech situation proved more conducive to feminism than the situation in Slovakia, where the conservative Hungarian state bureaucracy, bolstered by a more prominent Catholic church, was particularly inflexible. Leading Slovak feminists tended to avoid criticism of the Church and of marriage (Hollý 2010, 78), which limited the otherwise strong cooperation between Czech and Slovak feminists (2010, 64). Malečková (2016, 48) has argued that the strong public support for women’s emancipation in situations like the 19th-​century Czech (and, to lesser extent, Slovak) national revival can be ascribed to the national leadership’s need to enlist as large a basis of support as possible in a relatively small national community. Indeed, late 19th-​century Czech and Slovak women were particularly successful in advocating for women’s rights when they articulated their agenda in terms of the good of the whole nation. In 1890, Eliška Krásnohorská established the Empire’s first university-​preparation school for women. By the early 20th century, Czech feminists published seven periodicals, and in Slovakia, women’s periodicals Dennica and Živena were also being established. Czech feminist literature was thriving as well, responding to new cosmopolitan trends and discussing such topics as the double sexual standard, women’s education, and suffrage. In 1905, still in the context of the struggle for national self-​determination, the charismatic Plamínková and other Czech feminists established the Committee for Women’s Voting Rights, whose objective was to convince the public that women’s suffrage would benefit the nation’s cause. They argued that women would bring new, previously overlooked concerns into politics, as well as contribute specific female experiences and “feminine traits” (Gelnarová 2014, 60). In 1912, with overwhelming support from Czech male politicians, the committee even succeeded in getting a woman candidate elected to the Bohemian diet, although she was ultimately prevented from taking up her seat. Czech and Slovak feminisms’ connections with nationalism, which continued well into the 20th century, encouraged cooperation with feminists from other Slavic nations, although this also discouraged cooperation with local German feminists (Bahenská, Heczková, and Musilová 2010, 17).

The First Republic Defeated in World War I, the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy was divided by the Allied victors into several independent states. In 1918, independent Czechoslovakia was established as a democratic republic, uniting the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Aligned with the Czechs through strong cultural ties and mutually comprehensible languages, Slovaks,

126

127

Feminisms during the interwar period

however, soon grew to resent the Prague government’s reneging on its promise to grant Slovakia autonomy, and relations deteriorated, ending in 1939 with a split brokered by Nazi Germany. But the 1920s were heady days full of optimism for the new Czechoslovak Republic. While elsewhere in the region the aftermath of World War I was characterized by economic devastation, territorial disputes, political radicalization, and a slide toward fascism, Czechoslovakia was an exception; interwar Czechoslovakia was the only successful liberal democracy in what would later be called Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The republic was also economically advanced, as the Czech lands included two-​ thirds of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire’s industrial base (Heitlinger 1979, 3). Buttressed by strong industry and led by a widely popular pro-​democratic president, the new republic (especially Bohemia and Moravia) fared well when compared to the surrounding states, although it was not spared by the Great Depression. In comparison, in 1919 Poland emerged from over a century of partition, overwhelmingly poor and agrarian, with its government unstable and gradually shifting toward authoritarianism. Another neighbor, Hungary, previously an autonomous kingdom in the Monarchy, emerged from the Great War defeated, war-​torn, and facing a loss of territories and resources to the new countries of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania (Walters 1988, 185–​188). Such conditions of uncertainty were less than favorable to struggles for either women’s rights or the rights of national and ethnic minorities. In contrast, the post-​World War I Czechoslovak generation was full of enthusiasm and enjoying prosperity. Nor did they fear for the survival of national culture, as had their 19th-​century predecessors. This was a climate conducive to the further advancement of women’s rights, and Czechoslovak feminists took advantage of these auspicious conditions. Women’s rights in matters of the public sphere expanded significantly, particularly between 1918 and 1930. This earned Czechoslovakia a reputation as a beacon of women’s advancement and progressive values. With Plamínková becoming a prominent figure in such organizations as the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the International Council of Women, Czechoslovak feminism gained further international visibility and prominence. In 1918, as part of the establishment of the new state, new political rights were granted to Czechoslovak women. The Washington Declaration, the founding document of the Czechoslovak Republic, asserted: “Women will enjoy the same political, social, and cultural rights as men.” This was subsequently written into Article 106 of the new Constitution of 1920: “Privileges of race, sex, and profession are not recognized.” Indeed, with the foundation of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Czechoslovak feminist movement briskly achieved many of its goals. Women not only obtained the vote and constitutional promises of legal equality, with the National Assembly assigning seats to them, but divorce also became much easier to obtain, women gained access to many middle-​class professions previously reserved for men, and the so-​called celibacy law pertaining to women teachers was overturned. These rapid initial gains for Czechoslovak women, and especially their broad public support, were striking in their day. By 1920, when Czechoslovak women legally won the vote, women had been enfranchised in other European countries, including Germany, Austria, and Poland. Yet Britain had seen a bitter half-​century struggle for women’s suffrage, and the limited suffrage granted there in 1918 was not made equal until 1928. The Czechoslovak public also closely followed developments in France and was familiar with the extended battle for women’s suffrage there (French women won the vote in 1945).

127

128

Iveta Jusová and Karla Huebner

Compared to the protracted and virulent public opposition to women’s suffrage in these two established democracies, the enthusiastic support of the Czechoslovak public for women’s political rights appeared remarkable (Feinberg 2006, 32). What explains the enthusiasm on the part of the Czechoslovak public for enshrining women’s political rights in the first Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920? To some extent, that support was an outgrowth of the earlier feminists’ success at convincing prominent Czech public figures that backing “their women’s” rights was part of the overall struggle against the Habsburgs. Essential for the Czech women’s suffrage movement’s success to gain public approval was the backing of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a university philosopher and prominent public figure, who would become Czechoslovakia’s first president in 1918. One of the most outspoken proponents of democratic principles in the region, Masaryk was married to American feminist Charlotte Garrigue and was a fervent advocate of women’s rights as well as the rights of ethnic and national minorities. His journal Our Era (Naše doba) carried a monthly column on women’s issues, and his slogan, “Let woman be placed on an equal level with man culturally, legally, and politically,” was part of the Czech Progressive Party’s 1906 platform (David 1991, 30–​31). In his writing and public speeches, which carried much weight among the public, Masaryk translated the ideas of earlier Czech national revivalists to the 20th-​century language of liberal democracy and also liberal feminism. He represented the Czech (later Czechoslovak) nation as “historically conditioned for democracy” and simultaneously defined the equality of all individuals, including women, as the key principle of democracy (Feinberg 2006, 24). Masaryk made sure to commit the new republic to democracy, the rights of national minorities, as well as women’s rights. In his vision, the destiny of the Czech nation, democracy, and gender equality became indelibly linked (Feinberg 2006, 13). The interwar Czechoslovak feminist movement gained a major boost from this rhetoric and adopted it with enthusiasm. The most prominent Czechoslovak feminist organization, the Women’s National Council, WNC (Ženská národní rada), founded by Plamínková in 1923, argued that “those who did not support women’s rights were in fact betraying their national democratic heritage” (Feinberg 2006, 24). Some feminist historians have scrutinized the WNC for uncritically adopting Masaryk’s philosophy as a foundation for their own ideology (Bahenská, Heczková, and Musilová 2010, 21). But on certain key issues, especially concerning gender equality in the arena of politics, presenting women’s rights as a litmus test of the nation’s democracy served feminists very well. The WNC became the main center for Czechoslovak women’s political action throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and it was mostly due to their lobbying that Czechoslovak women in the interwar period gained further access to secondary schools and universities (Garver 1985, 70–​71). The WNC’s other gains included abolition of the requirement that female civil servants be unmarried, and recognition of their right to the same salary as men. The next gain, in 1926, was a granting of a three-​month maternity leave to women teachers. In 1929, feminists also succeeded in their demand to reform the civil code to end differentiation between legitimate and “illegitimate” (out-​of-​wedlock) births (Burešová 2001, 45). While linking women’s rights to the “good of the whole” proved a winning strategy when it came to advancing women’s rights in the public sphere, it reached its limits when it came to efforts to change gender relations in the domestic sphere. The WNC’s struggle to update the outdated family law, where changes would affect individual Czechoslovaks’ everyday lives more universally than would changes in the sphere of public rights, remained unsuccessful due to the magnitude of the task and differing views about specific

128

129

Feminisms during the interwar period

aspects of this area of law. Yet although family law was not successfully updated during the First Republic, nonetheless, in the general post-​World War I European context, characterized by efforts to restore order by retaining the traditional family, the WNC’s efforts to bring gender equality to family law remain noteworthy. The First Republic’s family law, inherited from the Austrian civil code from 1811, distinguished between husbands as breadwinners and heads of households, and wives as mothers and caregivers, legally responsible for carrying out domestic chores and following their husbands’ decisions. This meant, among other things, that married Czechoslovak women, similar to women elsewhere in Europe, needed their husbands’ permission to work outside the home (Burešová 2001, 33). Feminist lobbyists threw their energies into a struggle to modernize the family law, viewing it as necessary to bring principles of gender equality into the private sphere. Their strategy was to argue that the family law was incongruous with Article 106 (women’s equality) of the new Czechoslovak constitution. However, their opponents cited §126 of the same constitution, which placed marriage, motherhood, and the family under the protection of the state. Reflective of a lack of consensus on the part of the 1920 constitution drafters on matters of gender equality, the contrary pulls of §106 and §126 significantly hampered the progress of interwar Czechoslovak feminist struggle to bring the legal principles of gender equality into the private sphere of marriage and the family (Feinberg 2006, 35, 96). The Czechoslovak public itself was divided on this topic. The cosmopolitan-​leaning urban youth tended to be open to new ideas, and they took women’s work outside the home for granted (many women joined the labor force for the first time during World War I). They were interested in physical fitness, sexual pleasure, birth control, and the rights of sexual minorities (Huebner 2010, 25; Huebner 2011, 234, 241–​244). Yet, the majority of the Czechoslovak public was much more cautious. While they applauded gender equality in the political arena, treating men and women as equals within the family was a different matter altogether. In the 1930s, when the economic depression began to make itself felt, even in Czechoslovakia, the growing sense of uncertainty further decreased public tolerance for women’s equality. Some of the earlier Czechoslovak feminist gains in the economic sphere were reversed in the 1930s when, during the Depression, attacks on double-​earner families grew. In 1938, under the pretense of protecting (what they deemed as legitimate, husband-​headed) families from want, restrictions were placed on married women’s ability to retain civil service jobs (Feinberg 2006, 101, 109–​128, 166). The eagerness for experimentation with new sexual and gender relations on the part of some thus remained mitigated by dominant anxieties about the possible consequences of such experimentation for the family and the national community. The ideal of the traditional family, albeit in a somewhat modernized form, persisted (Huebner 2010, 29). The modernization of the family law proved impossible within the interwar cultural political context and would only come to be addressed after 1949, when it was updated by the communist regime. Ironically, the family law implemented by the new communist regime drew heavily on the interwar drafts proposed by WNC lawyer Milada Horáková, who in 1950 was sentenced to death and executed by that same regime during the Stalinist show trials. In spite of their efforts to modernize the position of women in the family, the WNC feminists remained conservative on matters of sexuality and, as a group, promoted monogamy. Masaryk’s stance on matters of sexuality was also far from progressive; he promoted abstinence until marriage, was opposed to abortion and emphasized the importance of monogamy and sexual “purity” for both men and women (Feinberg 2006, 155;

129

130

Iveta Jusová and Karla Huebner

Huebner 2010, 31). In the 1920s, the WNC’s emphasis on “purity” became one aspect of a generational divide between themselves and the younger, usually less explicitly feminist, generation who came of age during and after World War I (Huebner 2010, 30). On this topic, socialist and communist organizations and leftist press were more progressive, and communist periodicals frequently advertised new titles concerning sexuality, pregnancy, birth control, and venereal disease. Mainstream periodicals did not shun topics of sexuality either (Huebner 2010, 33). As in other countries in the region (Boxer and Quataert 1978, 6), activism around women’s issues in interwar Czechoslovakia thus splintered along generational and ideological axes. The liberal feminist movement led by the WNC focused on suffrage, the civil code, and matters affecting professional working women, but during the same time, the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CCP) was increasing its efforts to organize women workers and address issues of working-​class women from within a Marxist framework. The interwar period was not one of political consensus and became increasingly marked by competing political visions concerning the desired political path forward. Communism and socialism were ascendant in the post-​World War I situation, and the liberal republican establishment was increasingly challenged, and worried, by a loss of popular position to socialists who urged the working classes to reject the elite leadership. Like other leftist political parties, the CCP enjoyed strong support among women, and the issues they foregrounded included poverty, unemployment, persecution of strikers, high food prices, and low wages. Socialist and communist women activists were also vocal and active concerning abortion reform, in contrast to the WNC liberal feminists whose membership remained divided on the topic. At the time of Czechoslovakia’s founding, under §144 of the Habsburg-​era criminal code, abortion was a crime punishable by up to five years of hard labor. Socialist and communist women activists saw abortion as an important issue significantly affecting proletarian women, who made up the largest percentage of those prosecuted for abortion. Several revisions of the abortion law were submitted throughout the 1920s. Despite public support, none of these bills passed, however, mostly due to the organized opposition from the Catholic-​sponsored People’s Party (Feinberg 2006, 153). Abortion law reform would not be addressed until after World War II (legalized in 1956), but birth control became more socially acceptable during the interwar period, albeit perhaps more due to the work of sex reformists than feminists (Huebner 2010, 36). Similarly, homosexuality—​or what was labeled “sexual inversion” at the time—​was not a topic that interwar Czechoslovak feminists engaged. This was not unusual as women’s rights and the rights of sexual minorities were not typically viewed as intertwined at the time. It was mostly through the efforts of the homophile movement and sex reformists that public acceptance of sexual minorities in interwar Czechoslovakia increased. Several gay and lesbian clubs existed in Prague and gay magazines Hlas [Voice] and later Nový hlas [New Voice] were published throughout the 1930s. The gender-​ambiguous artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová) was a fully accepted member of the Prague art group Devětsil and later a founding member of the prominent Prague surrealist group, which is further suggestive of the range of possibilities open to unconventional Czechoslovak women of this generation (Huebner 2016, 75). Throughout the interwar period, there were also efforts, led by the homophile movement and sexologists, to decriminalize homosexuality. Same-​sex relations became decriminalized in 1962 under state socialism, mostly thanks to the work of progressive sexologists (Lišková 2016, 54).

130

131

Feminisms during the interwar period

Conclusions Interwar Czechoslovakia had one of the best women’s rights records in Europe and the period was a time of intense feminist activity in the state. Czechoslovak liberal feminists made great strides, especially during the 1920s, in the domain of women’s political rights, but their efforts were successful only as long as they could convince the increasingly cautious public that the rights they were calling for would be “good for the whole.” Encountering major opposition in their lobbying efforts in the area of the family law, the political progress of Czechoslovak liberal feminism, like feminisms elsewhere in Europe, slowed significantly in the 1930s. Beyond liberal feminists, socialist and communist women activists in Czechoslovakia were vocal on issues affecting the day-​to-​day lives of working-​class women, including access to abortion. But like liberal feminists, leftist women activists did not succeed in their efforts to liberalize the abortion law. The public’s insurmountable resistance to the progress of women’s rights into the private sphere suggests that the progressiveness of interwar Czechoslovak society on women’s issues had its limits (as it did elsewhere in the world). Traditional gender roles remained embedded in broader Czech society and entrenched in the family law, even though parts of cosmopolitan Czechoslovak youth were experimenting with unconventional sexual relations and the situation of sexual minorities was also improving. Yet, even if not completely successful during the interwar period with its challenges (especially in the 1930s) of economic crisis and encroaching war, many of the efforts of Czechoslovak feminists and leftist women’s rights’ activists (including family law revision, liberalization of abortion, married women’s citizenship law reform) were brought to some degree of fruition after World War II, albeit in a quite different sociopolitical context.

References Bahenská, Marie, Libuše Heczková, and Dana Musilová, eds. 2010. Ženy na stráž. České feministické myšlení 19. a 20. století. Prague: Masarykův ústav a AVČR. Boxer, Marilyn and Jean H. Quataert. 1978. Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Elsevier. Burešová, Jana. 2001. Proměny společenského postavení českých žen v první polovině 20. století. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého. David, Katherine. 1991. “Czech Feminists and Nationalism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: ‘The First in Austria.’” Journal of Women’s History 3 (2): 26–​45. Feinberg, Melissa. 2006. Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–​1950. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Garver, Bruce M. 1985. “Women in the First Czechoslovak Republic.” In Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe, edited by Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer, 64–​81. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gelnarová, Jitka. 2014. “Koncept volebního práva v diskurzu českých středostavovských sufražistek.” In Ženy a politika (1890–​1938), edited by Marie Bahenská and Jana Malínská, 49–​62. Prague: Masarykův ústav a Archív AVČR. Heitlinger, Alena. 1979. Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Hollý, Karol. 2010. “Limity spolupráce medzi slovenským a českým ženským hnutím na prelomu 19. a 20. storočia.” In Ženy na stráž! České feministické myšlení 19. a 20. století, edited by Marie Bahenská, Libuše Heczková and Dana Musilová, 63–​82. Prague: Masarykův ústav a AVČR. Huebner, Karla. 2010. “The Whole World Revolves Around It: Sex Education and Sex Reform in First Republic Czech Print Media.” Aspasia 4 (Spring): 25–​48.

131

132

Iveta Jusová and Karla Huebner –​–​–​–​. 2011. “Girl, Trampka, or Žába? The Czechoslovak New Woman.” In The New Woman International, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, 231–​251. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. –​–​–​–​. 2016. “The Czech 1930s through Toyen.” In Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe, edited by Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová, 60–​76. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jusová, Iveta. 2005. “Gabriela Preissová’s Women-​Centered Texts: Subverting the Myth of the Homogeneous Nation.” Slavic and East European Journal 49 (1): 63–​78. Lišková, Kateřina. 2016. “’Now You See Them, Now You Don’t’. Sexual Deviants and Sexological Expertise in Communist Czechoslovakia.” History of the Human Sciences 29 (1): 49–​74. Malečková, Jitka. 2016. “The Importance of Being Nationalist.” In Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe, edited by Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová, 46–​59. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pech, Stanley Z. 1969. The Czech Revolution of 1848. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Walters, Garrison. 1988. The Other Europe: Eastern Europe to 1945. New York: Dorset.

132

133

13 WOMEN IN POLAND’S SOLIDARITY Shana Penn

Drawing from scholarship of Poland’s opposition movement Solidarity over the last four decades, this chapter analyzes the gendered construction of dissent. It examines the motivations and the means that informed women’s diverse and pivotal anti-​communist activism within Solidarity’s male-​centric dramas. This includes women’s involvement in the founding and operation of Solidarity; their critical agency during the martial law era; and feminist awakening in reaction to the patriarchal nature of both communism and Solidarity. Though the standard narrative portrays women as acting in support roles to their male counterparts, at critical moments key women activists undertook leadership of their own choosing, most notably after martial law threatened Solidarity’s survival. From 1982 to 1989, women mobilized multitudes of fellow citizens, guided by their moral and political affinity for Solidarity’s vision of nonviolent revolution. Women’s steadfast commitment to, and realization of, an evolutionary social transformation ensured Solidarity’s endurance in the 1980s leading up to its 1989 victory over communism. The chapter highlights how a “third space” developed between public and private realms, where some female activists were able to establish their own agency and pursue political goals while willingly maintaining patriarchal values (Penn 2005). They did not theorize their space through a feminist perspective but remained situated in traditional views of male dominance in public life and over women. Their third space could therefore exist and be understood only in the context of the cultural and religious norms that shaped Solidarity. Polish feminism, as it emerged in the last years of the communist regime, evolved separately, disillusioned with Solidarity’s gender discrimination and stimulated through exposure to western feminism. The separate lines of origin help explain why many Solidarity women rarely embraced feminism. Not to be deterred, Polish feminists carved a respected public space for gender discourse and activism by the opening of the 21st century.

Women within male political and religious narratives Kenney (1999, 399–​425) argues that in Poland’s postwar society, which lost its multi-​ ethnic character to WWII’s death toll and postwar border changes, the most striking

133

134

Shana Penn

social difference pertained to gender. The opposition’s main dramas played out in male-​ dominated locales—​in factories, shipyards, and at the negotiating table—​where activists and authorities shared a common “culture of masculinity and political logic” (1999, 408). Accordingly, gender scholarship, before and into the early 1990s, usually focuses on women’s activism within the male-​dominated arena of workers’ strikes. Solidarity was formed from nationwide shipyard, factory, and transportation strikes in summer 1980, the largest strike in world history. Forged by a unique coalition of workers, Catholic clergy, and intellectuals, the nonviolent movement was politically inspiring and gender-​conservative. It generated a standard narrative in which decisive acts grew out of confrontations between government and opposition rivals, who expressed similar masculine values and language about power, politics, and the right to claim the working-​class hero and the workers’ state as their own symbols and domain. Although women made up approximately half of Solidarity’s membership of 10 million, which was proportional to their paid labor force participation, they were scarcely represented in Solidarity’s leadership structures, figuring only 8 percent (Jancar 1985, 169). Reporting from Poland in the early 1980s, Weschler (1990, 253) compared Solidarity’s leaders to the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, disregarding even the women who were his sources. Timothy Garton Ash (1983, 285) discerned a dual role for Solidarity as an independent trade union and a telerevolution, able to spread reliable news and information across the nation. However, he overlooked the women media strategists who engineered the telerevolution during martial law. Jancar characterized women’s activism as having been spontaneous, symbolic, and/​or unstructured (1985, ­chapter 10). Symbolic activism is exemplified in the legendary origin of the historic shipyard strike in Solidarity’s birthplace, Gdańsk. There, authorities fired a charismatic free-​trade unionist and crane operator, Anna Walentynowicz, instantly sparking the nationwide strikes that catapulted Solidarity into existence. A member of the Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS), Walentynowicz co-​signed the Gdańsk Accords, Solidarity’s founding mission statement. Once Solidarity became a legal entity, however, she was excluded from its male-​dominated local, regional, and national boards. As a middle-​aged, uneducated widow often acting individually, Walentynowicz lacked male endorsement and could be more easily marginalized than women, such as Alina Pieńkowska, who were supported by a spouse or partner. Women’s spontaneous activism saved the Gdańsk strike from a premature end. On day three, after the government offered a pay raise and strike leaders agreed to stop protesting and cede their demand for free trade unions, four women independently of one another barricaded the shipyard gates, imploring workers to remain for a solidarity strike with ongoing actions elsewhere. The workers complied. Without the appeals of the four women—​Walentynowicz, Pieńkowska, Henryka Krzywonos, and Ewa Ossowska—​ Solidarity might not have been established that summer. The 1971 Łódź textile strike exemplifies unstructured activism. Workers, predominantly women, spontaneously mobilized a major strike on the heels of workers’ protests and violence in northern Poland. The Łódź strike won the immediate demand to eliminate food price increases, succeeding where recent strikes had failed. Jancar and Kenney (1999) regard the Łódź strike as a distinctively female formula for dissent: women rallied outside masculine expectations of struggle and negotiation, demanding living wages and food, not freedom nor trade unions. As managers of their household budgets, feeding their families was the non-​negotiable demand. Whereas male-​led strikes often ended in compromise, the Łódź authorities conceded to the women’s demands. The 134

135

Women in Poland’s Solidarity

unruliness of the female demonstrations, notes Kenney, intimidated them (1999, 410–​ 411). “Disorganization may have its own rewards,” suggests Jancar (1985, 176). These workers did not organize to protect their interests beyond their strike. Absent a critique of the inherent weaknesses in unstructured activism, the stereotype of women as being fundamentally apolitical, unable to uphold long-​term strategy and organizational discipline, persists.

The development of a gendered perspective of dissent Jancar and Kenney focus on women workers during a period spanning the 1970s and 1980s, when class overshadowed gender in both scholarship and activism, when the opposition was mainly regarded as a working-​class phenomenon. As gender scholarship develops in the 1990s, oral histories of Solidarity women become a notable primary source, although Kenney criticizes what he calls an “also there” portrayal of women workers that documents their presence but not their agency (1999, 400). Elżbieta Klimek-​ Domaniuk takes issue with Kenney for seeming “to disregard the hybrid, multivocal, inclusive [mix of] extensive oral interviews with many eye-​witness participants and … cultural analysis of Polish gender mythology in the history of Polish freedom-​fighting” (2016, 118). In the early 1990s—​a time of flux in discourse and organization in both Polish society and Solidarity scholarship—​gender research, including my own, gives voice to women from diverse backgrounds through recorded testimonies and documentation that became accessible as people shared personal files and established archives. Subsequent interdisciplinary scholarship melds oral history with cultural anthropology, qualitative sociology, and history, and contributes to new understandings of gender dynamics in Solidarity. Personal recollections become more imperative to record as time passes and activists age (Kondratowicz 2001). Key personalities in the time of Solidarity pen memoirs or become biographical subjects (Klimek-​Domaniuk 2016), including Danuta Wałęsa, former First Lady and wife of the Solidarity leader (2011), and Henryka Krzywonos, a transportation workers’ organizer (2010). In the second decade of the 21st century, studies diversify into multimedia examinations such as Marta Dzido’s documentary film, Solidarność według Kobiet (2014) and artworks by Croatian feminist Sanja Ivecović (2009) that challenge women’s invisible role in Solidarity. A gendered perspective illuminates what Long calls Solidarity’s transformative liminal space (Long 1996, 37). During Solidarity’s 16 months of legal existence, activists began organizing previously prohibited elements of civil society such as an independent press, autonomous trade unions, political clubs, and adult education classes. Testimonies that I recorded in the early 1990s indicate that, by 1980, some women had already begun to institutionalize their distinctly female methods of operation at locations outside the realm of workers’ strikes—​notably, in the opposition media (Penn 2005). My research extends Long’s image of a transformative liminal space into a “third space” that developed between public and private realms during martial law, when the suppression of public life drove Solidarity into the home. In this third space, neither quite private nor public, women oversaw a national operation, which defied traditional gender roles within the confines of a patriarchal authoritarian system. Here, women exercised power within the opposition, even though they lacked feminist consciousness and were reluctant to compete directly with men or assume public positions in the struggle. The seemingly paradoxical situation of these women raises a fundamental question: Was this third space sui generis, or can it be placed within a context that reflects 135

136

Shana Penn

later discussions about women and gender in Poland? Barbara Einhorn’s dictum that “women’s status in society is not static: it is both influenced by and has an effect upon the process of social transformation itself ” (Einhorn 1993, 3) encourages analysis of why and how some women in Solidarity chose to exercise an exceptional degree of personal agency, and if and how their efforts experimented with alternative gender constructions.

Religious/​cultural factors influencing gender roles Solidarity drew its iconography from Catholic religious imagery. Its activists painted graffiti that depicted the Virgin Mary making the “V for victory” sign or holding a baby Jesus on her lap waving his fist (Grudzińska-​Gross 1985). In other depictions Pope John Paul II, “the Polish Pope,” elected to the papacy in 1978 and a beacon of hope for the opposition, made similar gestures. Catholicism, which had long been a prime social and cultural force in Poland, grew in influence during the 19th century, after a series of wars saw the Kingdom of Poland divided among three empires—​Russian, Austro-​Hungarian, and Prussian. Poland ceased to exist as a single unified political entity and would not regain its national independence until the end of World War I. Absent statehood, notes Geneviève Zubrzycki, the nation was reimagined not as a set of political rights and institutions, but as “a moral entity… a community held together voluntarily by a shared history and the common will to regain independent statehood” (Zubrzycki 2006, 44). Catholicism became the natural ally of victimized Poland, “the Christ of Nations.” Man was its “heroic martyr” (Zubrzycki 2006, 34) and woman its Matka Polka (Polish Mother), who selflessly protects her family, community, and nation. During national uprisings against tsarist rule, and in later periods of oppression, women smuggled food and clothing to political prisoners, operated clandestine networks, and followed convicted husbands to exile. However, they never overtly challenged male dominance (Jaworski and Pietrow-​ Ennker 1992). Catholic notions of good and evil gave the opposition’s struggle a binary typology of “us versus them” that obscured real differences of class, ethnicity, and gender. The typology pitted “a unitarily conceived state against an equally undifferentiated society, which left little space conceptually or organizationally for a specifically feminist consciousness or voice” (Hauser, Heyns, and Mansbridge 1993, 261). At the heart of the binary perception was the opposition’s anti-​political disposition. Because politics was identified with communism and thus shunned, the opposition would be social and moral, as articulated by opposition theorist/​activist Adam Michnik (Ost 1990, 75). Moral motivations for dissent lent credibility to women’s activism and some women even claimed they were not involved in politics but in morality-​based social activism, a stance that intentionally or not, averted tensions about women’s involvement in a conventionally male domain (Szczęsna 1991).

Women’s rights and opposition to socialism The rights of women as workers and citizens fared poorly in the Gdańsk Accords, the 21 labor demands put forth by the MKS that were agreed upon and co-​signed by the Communist Party on August 31, 1980. At first glance, it would seem that the Gdańsk Accords provided significant gains for women: increased placements in daycare centers and preschools for the children of working mothers; three-​year paid maternity leave; and reduction of women’s retirement age from age 55 to 50. 136

137

Women in Poland’s Solidarity

Closer inspection suggests that while these provisions addressed the real needs of working mothers, they also “helped maintain them in traditionally subordinate positions, reinforcing the image of women as secondary wage earners focused on the family and the home” (Hauser, Heyns, and Mansbridge 1993, 262). This view of women is consistent with the position taken by Solidarity in its critique of the communist state’s claims to be both the workers’ party and the party that liberated women. The critique drew on the experience of female emancipation with its conflicting messages of liberation and oppression (Hauser, Heyns, and Mansbridge 1993, 263). Women’s unprecedented mass entry into the postwar labor force across wide-​ranging industrial and professional fields marked liberation; oppression followed with, among other factors, the liberalization of the state socialist system in 1956. Paradoxically, liberalization restricted women’s options by introducing feminized labor and exclusion from high earning, physically demanding industrial jobs deemed unfit for women. It might logically follow that Solidarity would expose the contradictions in the state’s claims to female emancipation by strategizing to enforce gender equality in all facets of public and private life. However, though both women and men benefitted from many of the state’s gender policies such as access to education, work, and abortion, feminism became closely and narrowly identified with a discredited communism, a common occurrence throughout the Soviet bloc (Drakulic 1990). Even women oppositionists viewed gender issues as contentious and likely to undermine group solidarity (Hauser, Heyns, and Mansbridge 1993; Long 1996; Penn 2005). The Gdańsk Accords shifted the emphasis from the socialist ideal of gender-​equal participation to the patriarchal ideal of women’s family role (Hauser, Heyns, and Mansbridge 1993, 261–​263). Valuing family life overshadowed the needs of women living outside families and also obscured the power dynamics between men and women in the home, including unmentionable subjects such as domestic violence, rape, or the unavailability of contraception and the use of abortion as a form of birth control (Fuszara 1993). The oppositionists, careful to distinguish themselves from a government that notoriously invaded people’s privacy, declined to intervene in matters considered to be private. Their assumption that they had to guard the private sphere from the public sphere kept them from addressing the humiliations women experienced in their homes at the hands of abusive male partners. It was easier to blame the state than directly confront oppressive family relations (Marcus 2009).

Women organize the underground: Solidarity’s “third space” Despite the cultural and legal constraints, some women, acting as a team, created powerful positions within the opposition and became de facto leaders of the resistance, both locally and nationally, when martial law was imposed. When the government declared martial law on December 13, 1981, and revoked Solidarity’s legal status, it imprisoned or isolated Solidarity’s leaders, nearly all of them men. Those who were not arrested went into hiding. The emergency circumstances enabled women to create space within the boundaries imposed both by the government and by Solidarity’s official organization. With the effective absence of male leaders, the women, recognizing the historical precedents for permissible activism when the nation is besieged, planned a rescue mission. In place of open confrontation and negotiation, they organized a clandestine resistance based on the protection of male leaders and the establishment of a national underground media organization to promote the opposition’s message and assure supporters that the 137

138

Shana Penn

movement was alive and working. “We created a patient revolution, the kind that women are best suited to organize,” said Helena Łuczywo, the mastermind of the underground who, after 1989, built the multimedia empire Agora (Penn 2005, ­chapter 7). Łuczywo’s characterization of the Solidarity underground as a patient revolution implies a change in the typical male locations and patterns of dissent. Instead of organizing strikes and negotiating with the state on national television, the women focused on grassroots civic activities like newspaper production, whose clandestine daily operations required thousands of hands and task-​oriented activism: typing, editing, delivering messages, distributing newspapers, escorting people, and lending apartments for meetings. Łuczywo’s patient revolution resonated with Solidarity’s initial concept of a “self-​ limiting” transformation through peaceful civic actions. During Solidarity’s legal existence, however, its male leaders turned aggressive toward the government, thereby contributing to their downfall (Michnik 1985, 29–​30).

A gendered elite Kenney notes that “the fire of martial law reforged Solidarity, melting down some components while giving rise to new ones, and forcing the core to reinvent itself to survive” (Kenney 2007). In Warsaw seven women leaders emerged: Łuczywo, Ewa Kulik, Joanna Szczęsna, Anna Dodziuk, Anna Bikont, Zofia Bydlińska, and Małgorzata Pawlicka. Skilled editors, some had been working together at an independent newswire service called the Solidarity Press Agency, which they had founded during Solidarity’s legal period. Self-​identifying as professional oppositionists, not as Matka Polka, they became part of an activist elite who received remuneration for their underground work. They belonged to the 1968 generation of women and men who led campus human-​rights protests, were arrested, imprisoned, suspended from their studies, had police records, and helped organize the opposition. They shared common loyalties and experiences, which they perceived as gender-​neutral and lending a sense of unity and gender complementarity. In their 20s and early 30s at the time of martial law, three were single mothers; one was a wife and mother who divorced while in the underground; three were not married, either with or without partners. Families and friends helped care for their children when they went underground. Tygodnik Mazowsze (Regional Weekly), the newspaper they produced, became the voice of Solidarity, without which “the underground could not have existed,” notes Grudzińska-​Gross. “It was an institution, the national headquarters, a symbol of civic life and of Solidarity’s staying power” (cited in Penn 2005, 11, 148 respectively). Its weekly print run of up to 80,000 copies involved tens of thousands of people nationwide, working secretly, illegally, and without the use of real editorial offices, printing houses, or distribution centers. The Warsaw group developed a distinctive mode of operation that was neither symbolic nor spontaneous but, rather, ambitious, strategic, sustainable, yet endorsed by men. Deploying tactics planned during the 1970s in the event of a Soviet intervention, they recruited women of all ages and backgrounds, recognizing that the communist regime did not regard women as important opposition players. The regime’s gender-​biased misunderstanding of the situation enabled the women to operate with seeming impunity. Knowing the secret police and the militia mainly searched for male oppositionists, they manipulated gender stereotypes, smuggling documents sewn into their clothing and

138

139

Women in Poland’s Solidarity

feigning pregnancy when in transit, and hiding illegal papers under refrigerators and in washing machines—​wherever policemen would not think to look. Solidarity’s move underground brought a sudden need for places to hide activists and provide space for editorial and administrative offices, printing presses, distribution centers, and other infrastructure. Since residential apartments were the most accessible private spaces for such facilities, and tradition accorded women a decisive position in the home, the decision to go underground meant that Solidarity’s infrastructure was now operating in a female-​centered domain. The women leaders who were building the underground, secured permission from other women to use their apartments. Politics came into the home and politicized women, even though this pattern departed from the conventional view that politics was a male domain. The women in their private spaces were on familiar ground, but they were using it in a new way, affecting “a momentary re-​ ordering of domestic/​private and public/​political domains through a major extension of the domestic ground into public spaces” (Long 1996, 42). In a twist of norms, women, not men, could move freely in public spaces and negotiate with outsiders and officialdom; they mediated opposition men’s contact with the world outside their hideouts. The dynamic recalls the argument by Johnson and Robinson (2007, 2) that alternatives to the gender constructions of state socialism existed where “at some times, in some places for some women, some personal agency in the process of constructing individual identities in opposition to the state … women and men did act in ways that push the boundaries of what was acceptable gendered behavior.” Ultimately, both the women and men continued to regard politics as a primarily male domain. By and large, the men devalued the underground operations by considering them a momentary expedient. They failed to reward the women leaders and silenced any gender dialogue, thereby suppressing any implications for changes once Solidarity regained its legal status.

The rise of feminist and nationalist turns After the 1989 democratic victory, women lost political leverage, and their leadership during the critical underground era became what Wrocław’s Barbara Labuda called Poland’s “national secret” (Penn 2005, 6). One of the few women to be elected to the first post-​1989 Parliament, Labuda had honed her political instincts through exposure to French feminism in Paris, where she studied in the 1970s. Her female colleagues in Poland, lacking comparable access to feminism, did not engage with her feminist views, although they respected Labuda and many agreed with her assertion that, without women, Solidarity would probably not have endured or achieved its democratic victory. Because Solidarity’s mythic male narrative focused on two spectacular events—​its founding in 1980 and its defeat of communism in 1989—​it paid scant attention to how the movement survived the years in between. Still, signs of an indigenous feminism were evident by the mid-​1980s, when the relaxation of government restrictions provided opportunities for travel and communication with other Soviet Bloc activists and westerners. A younger generation advocated, not for Solidarity, but rather, for pan-​European social movements such as feminism, ecology, and disarmament. Surprisingly, Kenney’s 2003 work on this youthful grassroots activism neglects feminism. His book’s index references only the subject “women in opposition” (333, 340). Yet women across generations were studying feminism in classes, reading

139

140

Shana Penn

groups, and film screenings, mostly on urban campuses. The Polish Feminist Association, formed in 1988, was one of the first registered nonprofit organizations after communism. Consequently, even before Solidarity’s victory, two streams of discourse about women had developed. One was traditional and supported by Solidarity, the Church, and many women who had played roles in the underground; the other was feminist, with adherents who also belonged to the opposition but were not necessarily deeply active. With notable exceptions like Labuda, the two groups were largely irreconcilable.

The new patriarchy After 1989, when Solidarity’s unproblematized patriarchal values became instrumentalized through policies and political platforms in the new democracy, feminists confronted daunting challenges including restrictive abortion legislation, employment discrimination, political marginalization, and misogynist propaganda. However, by 1999, feminists had found a platform and receptive audiences. Through a three-​month national media debate during the 10th anniversary commemorations of communism’s end, they demanded the nation recognize women’s leadership in Solidarity, and they argued how an ostensibly male-​led revolution had fostered a male-​led democracy. Public polls following the catalytic debate indicated growing awareness of gender discrimination in democratic Poland. Feminists gained a rightful space in national discourse and an unprecedented, strategic opportunity to question the traditional image of the family-​oriented female and the discredited socialist rhetoric of female empowerment, and the feminist critique of both (Graff 1999, 20–​23).

Conclusion Although feminism gained traction in progressive circles during the early 21st century, rapid social change and increasing integration into the European Union unleashed anti-​ gender campaigns in Poland and across Europe, exploited by ultranationalist populist governments in Poland and elsewhere (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Ultranationalist revisionists usurped Łuczywo’s patient revolution to minimize women’s role in Solidarity’s underground media, counter-​arguing that men also worked in the underground media (Jarska and Olaszek 2014). The anti-​gender offensive occurs in the broader context of state-​funded revisionism that undercuts Solidarity scholarship and vilifies key personalities, including Łuczywo and Michnik and their “anti-​Polish” newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. Meanwhile an unexpected feminist critique appeared that argues against restoring Solidarity women in the historical record (Graff 2014). Some of the same Polish feminists who, during the 1999 media debate tried to embrace Solidarity women as role models but were rebuffed, assert that women’s role in Solidarity history is not worthy of feminist attention. Since most Solidarity women were not feminist, they argue, their story could not serve feminist objectives, particularly the urgent need to combat anti-​genderism. On purely conceptual grounds, any critique like this, which ignores history, also eliminates history as a source of understanding. More concretely it fails to recognize that formerly anti-​feminist Solidarity women had participated in recent feminist activism. Nationwide marches demanding abortion and gender rights mobilized tens of thousands of citizens, including the Warsaw Solidarity women and their milieu. The feminist argument to ignore these women, though problematic, highlights a critical, present-​day moment, 140

141

Women in Poland’s Solidarity

in which fighting for rights matters more than the past or past differences. Three decades after 1989, Solidarity may be receding into the past, into the realm of scholarship, while a new, feminist-​inclusive opposition struggles to restore or protect what women had wanted from the beginning.

References Drakulic, Slavenka. 1990. “In Their Own Words: Women of Eastern Europe.” Ms. (July–​ August): 36–​47. Dzido, Marta. 2014. Solidarność według Kobiet. Warsaw: Emotikon Film. Einhorn, Barbara. 1993. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe. London: Verso Books. Fuszara, Malgorzata. 1993. “Abortion and the Formation of the Public Sphere in Poland.” In Gender Politics and Post-​Communism, edited by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, 241–​252. New York: Routledge. Garton Ash, Timothy. 1983. The Polish Revolution. London: Trinity Press. Graff, Agnieszka. 1999. “Patriarchat po seksmisji.” Gazeta Wyborcza, June 19–​20, 20–​23. –​–​–​–​. 2014. “Gdzie Jesteś, Polski Feminizmie? Pochwala Sporu I Niejasności.” Krytyka Polityczna, June 2. https://​krytykapolityczna.pl/​kraj/​graff-​gdzie-​jestes-​polski-​feminizmie-​ pochwala-​sporu-​ i-​niejasnosci/​. Grudzińska-​Gross, Irena. 1985. The Art of Solidarity. Staten Island, NY: International Popular Culture. Hauser, Ewa, Barbara Heyns, and Jane Mansbridge. 1993. “Feminism in the Interstices of Politics and Culture: Poland in Transition.” In Gender Politics and Post-​Communism, edited by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, 257–​273. New York: Routledge. Ivecović, Sanja. 2009. Magazine cover of Wysokie Obcasy, December 8. An article in the same issue profiled the artist and the artwork. “Kobiece w samo południe” by Katarzyna Pabijanek. https://​ www.wysokieobcasy.pl/​wysokie-​obcasy/​1,53662,7328146,Kobiece_​w_​samo_​poludnie.html. Jancar, Barbara. 1985. “Women in the Opposition in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1970s.” In Women, State, and the Party in Eastern Europe, edited by Sharon Wolchik and Alfred Meyer, 168–​185. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jarska, Natalia and Jan Olaszek, eds. 2014. Płeć buntu. Kobiety w oporzespołecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–​1989 na tle porównawczym. Warsaw: Institute for National Remembrance. Jaworski, Rudolf and Bianka Pietrow-​Ennker. 1992. Women in Polish Society. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs. Johnson, Janet Elise, and Jean C. Robinson, eds. 2007. Living Gender after Communism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kenney, Padraic. 1999. “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland.” American Historical Review 104 (2): 399–​425. –​–​–​–​. 2003. Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2007. “A Solidarity Still Unexamined.” (Review of Penn’s Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland). H-​NET Online, October. www.hnet.org/​reviews/​showrev. php?id=13690. Klimek-​Domaniuk, Elżbieta. 2016. “Resisting (In)visible Women of Solidarity: Gender in American and Polish Oral History, Life Writing, Visual Arts and Film, Part I.” In Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia 5 (Special Issue) 1 (May): 103–​199. Kondratowicz, Ewa. 2001. Szminka na sztandarze: Kobiety Solidarnosci 1980–​1980: rozmowy. Warsaw: Sic! Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte. 2017. Anti-​Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Long, Kristi S. 1996. We All Fought for Freedom: Women in Poland’s Solidarity Movement. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Marcus, Isabel. 2009. “Wife Beating: Ideology and Practice under State Socialism in Hungary, Poland, and Romania.” In Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Shana Penn and Jill Massino, 115–​132. New York: Palgrave USA.

141

142

Shana Penn Michnik, Adam. 1985. Letters from Prison and Other Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ost, David. 1990. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-​Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland Since 1968. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Penn, Shana. 2005. Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Szczęsna, Joanna. 1991. “Women in the Opposition.” Princeton, New Jersey. Unpublished essay used with permission. Weschler, Lawrence. 1990. “Afterword.” In Konspira, edited by Maciej Łopinski, Marcin Moskit, and Mariusz Wilk. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2006. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-​Communist Poland. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

142

143

Postcommunist NGO feminisms and beyond

144

145

14 FROM SOVIET FEMINISM TO THE EUROPEAN UNION Transnational women’s movements between East and West Magdalena Grabowska

This chapter examines developments in the study of women’s and gender equality activism in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1945 as engaging with two broader, intersecting theoretical and academic projects. The first project is part of the debate on relations between feminisms in the East and West (see also Hinterhuber and Fuchs, Chapter 3 in this Handbook), and aims to overcome the enduring tendency to represent CEE women’s movements as lacking, delayed, or even antifeminist when comparing to the West. Newly emergent research on post-​1945 history of women’s emancipation in the region and beyond expands narrow understandings of global feminist politics and finds that concepts of equality and practices of implementing gender social justice have been, in part, conceived and transformed within CEE after World War II and during the 1990s’ social and political transformations. The goal of the second project is broader, as it attempts to deconstruct the chronological, and deterministic, visions of the history of women’s movements, and is part of a larger debate on continuity and “clear break” (see Regulska and Włodarczyk, Chapter 2 in this Handbook). The genealogical approach that is proposed as an alternative to the linear history of emancipation engages the view of the past, reconceptualizing it as explanatory but not as altogether determining the way things are in the present. It cautions scholars, both in the East and the West, against speaking of a single, particular path that determines the development of women’s activism, and calls for incorporation of the state’s socialist past as an essential component of their examination of the current gender power dynamics, including transnational engagements at the level of the European Union (Popa and Krizsán 2016). Over the last decade, the absence of the CEE “non-​ region” from transnational feminisms has been a subject of debate within studies on postsocialist women’s activism, and postcoloniality in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Grabowska 2012; Kobak 2013; Suchland 2015, see also Shchurko and Suchland, Chapter 7 in this Handbook). Some argue that the seemingly egalitarian and inclusive frame of transnational feminism has failed to recognize the complex experiences and legacies of emancipation present 145

146

Magdalena Grabowska

within the CEE region (Grabowska 2012; Kobak 2013). Others point to the fact that dominant periodization modes, based for the most part on the metaphor of feminist’s waves, and historical narratives that operate within the “Cold War paradigm” fail to include contributions made by CEE women and gender equality activists to transnational social movements (de Haan 2016). I use a genealogical approach to examine post-​1945 and post-​1989 gender transformations in CEE as engaging with intersecting paths of emancipation: socialist and, more recently, liberal. I propose to see women’s service activism after 1989, institutionalization and feminists engagements with the state (through gender mainstreaming), as well as the current turn toward “connective action,” as diverse, yet intertwined ways of articulating specific subjectivities of CEE women and gender equality activists, within the context of ambivalent historical legacies, and continuing domination of right-​wing politics in the region (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2017; see also Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook).

East–​West exchanges after 1945 Current academic research on women’s activism in CEE engages with broader debates about the role of the post-​1945 period in shaping emancipation discourses in CEE and beyond, the genealogy of transnational feminism, and the status of civil society in the region after 1989 and today. While traditional feminist historiography of women’s activism (both in the West and in the East) renders the decades after 1945 as a period of “stagnation” or feminism’s descent, recent studies note that unraveling the complex connections and connectivities between East and West after World War II may produce a new, and fascinating, if controversial knowledge on genealogies of modern feminisms. Works by scholars such as Castledine (2012), McDuffie (2011), and Weigand (2001) highlight how “second wave” feminism in the USA descended directly from the work of antiracists and communist emancipatory efforts (Horowitz 1998), both in terms of individual biographies of the women’s activists (including figures such as Betty Friedan) and political goals (Giardina 2018; Weigand 2001). Similarly de Haan (2018), Daskalova (2007), Fidelis (2010), and Ghodsee (2017) are among the most outspoken about the need to reconsider the impact of post-​World War II women’s state-​led emancipation in CEE within a genealogy of emancipation movements worldwide. All these studies suggest that rather than being dismissed as “non” or “anti-​feminist,” the socialist project of women’s equality, which stems from 19th-​century emancipation movements, should be considered as an alternative program for gendered social justice, one that developed in parallel, and oftentimes preceded liberal feminism. Authors such as Fidelis, Artwińska, Mrozik, and I argue that Marxist and liberal visions of equality differ in various ways, including: communist emphasis on collective well-​being rather than individual rights and autonomy; a focus on the economic rights of women; a perception of state institutions as major agents of emancipation and providers of social services; and the communist goal to ultimately revoke the private vs. public distinction through the abolition of the monogamous family and state subsidy for what was seen as private housework (Artwińska and Mrozik 2020; Fidelis 2010; Grabowska 2018; see also Gapova, Chapter 11 and Wood, Chapter 21 in this Handbook). Recent research on the history of CEE emancipation also proposes several crucial revisions to the debates on genealogies of transnational feminisms. De Haan (2018) argues that recasting state-​socialist women’s activism as part of the genealogy of women’s

146

147

From Soviet feminism to the European Union

movements globally requires taking a closer look at international mobilizations post-​1945 and the transformational work of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a socialist-​feminist organization that was created in 1945 in Paris. Federation founders defined WIDF’s mission as focusing on four major concerns: antifascism, international peace, child welfare, and the status of women. Between 1945 and 1969, WIDF organized six international World Congresses: in Paris (1945), in Budapest (1948), in Copenhagen (1953), in Vienna (1958), in Moscow (1963), and in Helsinki (1969). Reporting on the status of women’s rights in various parts of the globe, and networking among delegates were principal activities of these gatherings. WIDF managed to bring together women from different states and affiliations: Soviet communist Nina Popova, French scientist Irene Joliot-​Curie, as well as progressive women from the US, such as anthropologist Gene Weltfish and anti-​racist communist Claudia Jones (Boyce-​Davies 2011). Socialist states from CEE were represented at the congresses as well as in the leadership of the Federation. Eugenia Pragierowa (from Poland), Elisabeth Andics (from Hungary), and Anezka Hodinova (Czechoslovakia), for example, were members of the organizing Committee of the WIDF Second International Congress in 1948 (Committee consisted of 18 members). Boris Fai (from Hungary) and Edwarda Orłowska (from Poland) were members of the Congress’s Secretariat (consisting of nine people). Incorporation of women into a labor force, rights of working women, and maternal provisions were seen as key components of socialist-​ feminist emancipation worldwide and the center of WIDF’s international agenda. Most of all, the federation recognized “inequality of women’s wages” as “the most flagrant social injustice,” and its representatives fought for equal pay both “at home” (by securing the introduction of the equal pay rule to national laws) and globally (by lobbying for recognition of the rule by international bodies such as the International Labor Organization). In the 1950s, WIDF consolidated its position as a leading actor fighting for women’s rights internationally. The final document of the 1953 WIDF Copenhagen Conference, “The Declaration on the Rights of Women”—​highlighting issues such as women’s right to work, equal pay, the right of peasant women to own their land, the right for education, political rights, and equal rights with men in relation to poverty, marriage, and children—​ was an important stepping stone toward the recognition of the connection between local and global gender politics (de Haan 2018). In the 1960s and 1970s, contributions by women from the Soviet bloc to the development of the transnational equal rights agenda developed in two directions (de Haan 2018). First, in 1963, representatives of socialist states—​Zofia Dembińska from Poland, Hanna Bokor from Hungary, Helena Leferowa from Czechoslovakia, and Zoya Mironova and Tatiana Nikoleyeva from the USSR—​started the work on the UN’s Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the 1967 precursor to the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, adopted in 1979). Later, CEE women stood behind another groundbreaking UN event, the 1975 International Women’s Year, which inaugurated the Decade of Women and the series of periodic UN Conferences on women in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995). The main ideas of gender mainstreaming proclaimed in the Beijing Platform for Action and now official policy of the European Union, paralleled goals of the CEE-​influenced progressive postwar movements as it aimed to conceptualize gender equality as a structural issue, crucial for social justice and development at the state and supranational levels.

147

148

Magdalena Grabowska

From international to local: Impact of international networks on local gender politics Post-​World War II women’s activism in CEE and in the West was transnational. It transcended national borders, foregrounded the circulation of the intersectional feminist ideas beyond the national states, and connected local politics to global visions of social change. Studies show that the work of communist and socialist women politicians and women’s organizations activists after 1945 was inspired by their international contacts at the WIDF Congresses, and conversely, their locally acquired expertise shaped the politics of women’s movements internationally (Ghodsee 2017; Grabowska 2017; Popa 2009). In CEE, the impact of internationally inspired gender politics was never homogeneous partially because of the significant political, economic, religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity that was and is still present in the region. The extent of state socialist equality, its authenticity, and value for women’s emancipation is a subject of lively academic debate. Some scholars argue that while legal provisions meant more extensive social and economic rights for women, they offered no space for an authentic exercise of agency (Funk 2014). Going beyond the notion of state socialism as “Soviet patriarchy,” other studies have shown that during state socialism women were able to exercise their agency and make claims to different international bodies (de Haan 2018), as well as local institutions (e.g., Daskalova 2007 in de Haan 2016; Popa 2009). In the majority of CEE locations, the implementation of equality rested on introducing legal frameworks for structural equality between women and men (including the introduction of civil marriage and equal pay laws, most often in the mid-​1940s) and creating state support for the work–​family balance (public childcare, maternity provisions, and decriminalization of abortion). Yet, the legislation regarding various women’s rights varied: while the majority of socialist states legalized abortion in the 1950s, in Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu enforced criminalization of abortion and contraception under the “Decree 770” during 1966–​1989. The impact of women on state socialist emancipation policies and their transnational involvement also depended on the level of autonomy of state controlled “civil society” organizations through which activists tried to influence policies and practices. In Romania, for instance, the Council of Romanian Women remained the party’s unit, and all women active in it were party employees (Popa 2009, 59). The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (CBWM) locally fought for socializing housework and later on birth control, issues that were often not fully supported by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Internationally, in the mid-​1940s CBWM coordinated the work of socialist women’s organizations participating in the Decade for Women (Ghodsee 2012). In Poland, the postwar women communists of the Women’s Department of Polish United Workers Party active between 1946 and 1952, many of whom had been part of a pre-​war communist activism, engaged in political activism not only as actors—​whose actions were simply an implementation of party orders—​but also as agents, co-​creating party politics. They exercised power to initiate fundamental political and social changes, through proposing crucial legal changes, challenging male comrades’ sexism and fundamental structures of cultural domination embedded in the Polish Catholic Church (Grabowska 2018). This changed in the 1950s, when Polish governmental policies partially reverted to pre-​war ideas of gender roles, offering only a limited role of “practical activist” to women’s organizations (Nowak 2009). New measures and institutions introduced after 1956, including the Committee for Household Economics (1957), became 148

149

From Soviet feminism to the European Union

tools for “modernization,” places that facilitated reconciliation of wage work and family life, but also served as sites where limited legislative initiatives, particularly in the area of health and labor rights, were feasible. In 1956, women politicians succeeded in introducing progressive legislation on abortion—​during the debate on the issue in the Polish Parliament, Maria Jaszczukowa, Wanda Gościmińska, and Zofia Tomczyk (politicians and League of Women activists) brought up important arguments on behalf of women’s equality and well-​being. Paid maternity leave was extended in 1972 (to four months) and 1974 (to 16 to 26 weeks), and the Alimony Fund was established securing divorced women’s rights for child support. These changes led to women constituting 45 percent of the workforce and over 88 percent of working mothers returning to work after having a child in the late 1980s (Kosztowna 2016).

Postsocialist feminism, the European Union accession, and the turn to “connective” action The postsocialist transformation was, without a doubt, an ambivalent process where gender equality and feminist activism are concerned. While the region experienced a significant drop in women’s participation in both political processes and labor force, new opportunities arose for independent organizing on behalf of women’s rights (Watson 1993). After 1989, some state socialist women’s organizations remained active, keeping their hierarchical structure, while a number of democratic and loose-​structured groups and organizations have emerged all over the region (Regulska and Grabowska 2014). These new organizations were built on dissident traditions of opposition movements and were based on informal East–​West networks created in the 1980s, and more recent ones, which, like the Network of East–​West Women, were established in the early 1990s. Many of these organizations were grassroots and service organizations (Mueller 1995); they responded directly to the changing social conditions and focused on fighting new forms of discrimination that accompanied social transformations and the declining welfare state (Fábián 2014). In the mid-​1990s, activism on behalf of gender equality in the region was driven by two tendencies: institutionalization and professionalization (Hašková 2005; see also Irvine, Chapter 16 in this Handbook). Transnationally, these processes were strongly related to global transformations, broader processes of political, social, and economic dislocation, and transition from a bipolar to a unipolar world dominated by the supranational market economy (Einhorn 2005). In terms of CEE’s transnational engagements on women’s and gender equality, the 1995 United Nation’s Beijing Conference was a milestone: it triggered the first wave of institutionalization of equality (incorporating gender equality into state institutions, and local and national policies) and professionalization of activism in CEE (Popa and Krizsán 2016). Intensified contacts with western-​ developed ideas and strategies influenced the agendas of local NGOs and interested newly emergent women’s groups in regional and transnational alliances (Fábián and Korolczuk 2017). The Beijing Conference was also a critical moment in the formation of the new movements’ regional subjectivity. Not only did CEE activists manage to establish regional transnational networks—​such as the KARAT Coalition (a network of Central and Eastern European and Central Asian organizations working on women’s equality since 1997) and the ASTRA Network (Central and Eastern European Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights created in 1999)—​they also coined the

149

150

Magdalena Grabowska

term “non-​region” to describe the dubious, marginal position of postsocialist states within transnationalism, that centered on the exchanges between the Global South and the Global North (Nowicka 1995). EU accession was responsible for major structural transformations that took place in CEE at the turn of the 21st century, including a second stage of institutionalization and transformation within the women’s movement (see Spehar, Chapter 36 in this Handbook). EU membership brought a significant change in the funding structures. Unlike earlier funding coming from US donors, the EU financial scheme was fortified with a number of formal requirements, including: financial stability, equity contribution, and international partnership, which were hardly achievable for small NGOs, as was the EU’s requirement for transnational collaboration. After 2004, some countries activists formed national branches (e.g., the Czech Women’s Lobby) of the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), the largest and most prominent umbrella organization active at the EU level, securing their position as countries’ women’s movements’ representatives within EWL and the EU. In other locations, women’s groups remained dissatisfied with both: the practices of representation at the EU level and the scope of EWL activities (Regulska and Grabowska 2014). At home, women’s organizations attempted to use gender mainstreaming as a means to incorporate progressive policies on gender equality into nation-​ state’s agendas (Rawłuszko 2018). In this process, EU funds, and in particular the European Social Fund (ESF), represented a strong bargaining tool in NGOs–​state exchanges (within this funding scheme a failure to comply with gender equality requirements was linked with a real sanction, dismissal of the ESF application). To secure the success of a program, a number of feminist activists were contracted to different state agendas, where they provided gender equality training or consultancy in long-​and short-​term educational programs (Rawłuszko 2018). Scholars note that this kind of cooptation of feminism contributes to the situation in which civil society activists were used to provide primary services and expert knowledge to otherwise anti-​feminist states (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2017). Some negative effects of this tendency included the bureaucratization and depoliticization of gender equality activism. As in Western Europe, gender mainstreaming turned feminist activists into technocrats, and once again the women’s activists found themselves in the role of transmitting bureaucratic routines and guidelines, rather than instituting substantial social changes (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2003). Some authors argue that the top-​down implementation of EU gender equality had indirect, negative consequences, including fostering the emergence of the last decade’s war against “gender ideology.” The strategy of promoting gender equality from the outside, via “room-​service feminism” (Miroiu 2004), and without much on-​the-​ground consultation with the general public (Rawłuszko 2019) fueled beliefs that international policies, like the “Soviet feminism” of the past, serve political and economic interests of the supranational powers rather than local communities. In this context, anti-​genderism has become a new language of resistance to “ebola from Brussels” (Graff and Korolczuk 2017), and gender became a “symbolic glue” for anti-​ capitalistic and anti-​ western sentiments (Kováts and Põim 2015; see Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook). However, other scholars argue that institutionalization and professionalization processes had profound, positive effects on women’s activism. In the first decade of the 21st century, feminisms in CEE went mainstream. The fact that local NGOs were able to pressure the state from within by reaching out to the international institutions, created a “boomerang pattern” that increased significance of women’s NGOs in political processes 150

151

From Soviet feminism to the European Union

(Keck and Sikkink 1998). At the national level, through gender mainstreaming training, NGOs and individual women’s activists have gained an opportunity to reach out to new audiences, including local government officials (Rawłuszko 2018). The scope of the feminist base was broadened: women coming from various sectors—​the state bureaucracy or politics, the women’s movement, and academia—​were now involved in pursuing institutional changes on behalf of gender equality, leading to the establishment of the new forms of feminist activism that appeal to broad masses (such as the Congress of Women in Poland). Other women’s activists have moved to more radical and critical positions. Recent resurgence of grassroots feminist activism and the search for new modes of organizing across CEE are in part a reaction to transplanting models and practices of gender equality mobilizations from the West (Fábián and Korolczuk 2017). They are also an effect of broadening the scope of mainstream public debates that are, regardless of the current right-​wing turn in electoral politics, more and more receptive to gender equality ideas.

Conclusions Newer studies on local, regional, and transnational activisms in CEE assert that past accounts on CEE’s civil societies neglected various forms of social activism that exist in CEE for theoretical, methodological, and ideological reasons (Ekiert and Kubik 2017). A number of authors suggest that the new typology of civil activism is needed when problematic forms of activism in CEE are examined, arguing that while participatory activism (based in membership in civil society organizations) has been scarce in the region, transactional activism defined through relations with the state is more prominent (Petrova and Tarrow 2007). This emerging body of work suggests that postsocialist civil societies, including feminisms, were not created “from scratch,” and demonstrates how post-​1990s social and political engagements built on the past and developed in relation to transforming political and cultural contexts (Fábián and Korolczuk 2017). While contemporary gender equality activism in CEE grew beyond NGOization (Jacobsson and Saxonberg 2013; Irvine, Chapter 16 in this Handbook), it is no longer preoccupied in producing fixed and collective subjectivities, but rather, as it was in the case of the 2016 “black protest” in Poland (spurred by a proposal to almost completely ban abortion), relies on connectivity (Fábián and Korolczuk 2017) and the “weak resistance” of groups of women and minorities who remain relatively powerless within the existing institutionalized politics (Majewska and Szreder 2016). Many current mobilizations on behalf of gender equality are intersectional in their essence, combining struggles against gender, racial, ethnic, and class discrimination and building strong alliances with LGBTQ and workers’ movements. This fragmentation and diversity of social mobilizations in the postsocialist context is no longer mistaken for an absence of social movements in the region.

References Artwińska, Anna and Agnieszka Mrozik, eds. 2020. Gender, Generations and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Boyce-​ Davies, Carole. 2011. Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing. Castledine, Jacqueline. 2012. Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

151

152

Magdalena Grabowska Daskalova, Krassimira. 2007. “How Should We Name the ‘Women-​Friendly’ Actions of State Socialism?” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 1 (1): 214–​219. de Haan, Francisca, ed. 2016. “Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited.” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 10 (102): 102–​168. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “The Global Left–​Feminist 1960s: From Copenhagen to Moscow and New York.” In Handbook on the Global Sixties, edited by Ch. Jian, 230–​242. London: Routledge. Einhorn, Barbara. 2005. “Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: Contested Strategies.” Czech Sociological Review 41 (6): 1023–​1039. Ekiert, Grzegorz and Jan Kubik. 2017. “Civil Society in Post-​communist Europe—​Poland in a Comparative Perspective.” In Civil Society Revisited. Lessons from Poland, edited by Kerstin Jacobsson and Elżbieta Korolczuk, 39–​62. New York and Oxford: Berhahn Books. Fábián, Katalin. 2014. “Disciplining the ‘Second World’: The Relationship between Transnational and Local Forces in Contemporary Hungarian Women’s Social Movement.” East European Politics 30 (1): 1–​20. Fábián, Katalin and Elżbieta Korolczuk, eds. 2017. Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-​Eastern Europe and Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fidelis, Małgorzata. 2010. Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland. New York: Cambridge University Press. Funk, Nanette. 2014 “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 344–​360. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2012. “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–​1985.” Journal of Women’s History 24 (4): 49–​73. –​–​–​–​. 2017. Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-​ Century Communism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Giardina, Carol. 2018. “MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism.” Feminist Studies 44 (3): 736–​765. Grabowska, Magdalena. 2012. “Bringing the Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37 (2): 385–​411. –​ –​ –​ –​ . 2017. “Beyond the ‘Development’ Paradigm: State Socialist Women’s Activism, Transnationalism and the ‘Long Sixties.’” In Women’s Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism, Transnational Histories, edited by Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson, 147–​172. London: Bloomsbury Academic. –​–​–​–​. 2018. Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 r., a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy [Broken Genealogies: Women’s Social and Political Activism after 1945, and the Polish Women’s Movement]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Graff, Agnieszka and Elżbieta Korolczuk. 2017. “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’: The Anti-​ colonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (4): 797–​821. Hašková, Hana. 2005. “Czech Women’s Civic Organizing Under the State Socialist Regime, Socio-​Economic Transformation and the EU Accession Period.” Czech Sociological Review 41 (6): 1077–​1110. Horowitz, Daniel. 1998. Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Jacobsson, Kerstin and Elżbieta Korolczuk, eds. 2017. Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland. New York and Oxford: Berhahn Books. Jacobsson, Kerstin and Steven Saxonberg, eds. 2013. Beyond NGO-​ization: The Development of Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kobak, Redi. 2013. Whirling Stories: Postsocialist Feminist Imaginaries and the Visual Arts. Uurimistöö tüüp: Doktoritöö, Aasta.

152

153

From Soviet feminism to the European Union Kosztowna. Natalia. 2016. “Kobieta w zakładzie pracy w Polsce Ludowej i po 1990 r. Analiza stanu prawnego.” [“The Legal Aspects of the Employment of Women in the Polish People’s Republic and Today.”] Annales. Etyka w życiu gospodarczym /​ Annales. Ethics in Economic Life 19 (2): 93–​108. Kováts, Eszter and Maari Põim, eds. 2015. Gender as Symbolic Glue: The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the Anti-​ gender Mobilizations in Europe. Budapest: Friedrich-​Ebert-​Stiftung. Lombardo, Emanuela, Petra Meier, and Mike Verloo, eds. 2003. The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking. London: Routledge. Majewska, Ewa and Kuba Szreder. 2016. “So Far, So Good: Contemporary Fascism, Weak Resistance, and Postartistic Practices in Today’s Poland.” E-​Flux, October. www.e-​flux.com/​ journal/​76/​71467/​so-​far-​so-​good-​contemporary-​fascism-​weak-​resistance-​and-​postartistic-​ practices-​in-​today-​s-​poland/​. McDuffie, Erik S. 2011. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miroiu, Mihaela. 2007. “Communism was a State Patriarchy, not State Feminism.” Aspasia International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History (1): 197–​201. Mueller, Carol. 1995. “Organization Basis of Conflict in Contemporary Feminism.” In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, 263–​275. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Nowak, Basia. 2009. “‘Where Do You Think I Learned How to Style My Own Hair?’: Gender and Everyday Lives of Women Activists in Poland’s League of Women.” In Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Shana Penn and Jill Massino, 45–​58. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nowicka, Wanda. 1995. “Statement from the Non-​region.” Statement made at the Fourth World Conference of Women, Beijing, September 13. Petrova, Tsveta and Sidney Tarrow. 2007. “Transactional and Participatory Activism in the Emerging European Polity: The Puzzle of East-​Central Europe.” Comparative Political Studies 40 (1): 74–​94. Popa, Raluca Maria. 2009. “Translating Equality between Women and Men across Cold War Divides: Women Activists from Hungary and Romania and the Creation of International Women’s Year.” In Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Shana Penn and Jill Massino, 59–​74. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Popa, Raluca Maria and Andrea Krizsán. 2016. “Gender, Politics, and the State in Central and Eastern Europe.” In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe, Wai Ching, and Angela Wong, 1–​12. Chichester, West Sussex, and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Rawłuszko, Marta. 2018. “Gender Mainstreaming Revisited: Lessons from Poland.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 26 (1): 70–​84. –​–​–​–​. 2019. “And If the Opponents of Gender Ideology Are Right? Gender Politics, Europeanization, and the Democratic Deficit.” Politics & Gender (online): 1–​23. Regulska, Joanna and Magdalena Grabowska. 2014. “Social Justice, Hegemony, and Women’s Mobilizations.” In Postcommunism from Within: Social Justice Mobilization, and Hegemony, edited by Jan Kubik and Amy Linch, 139–​190. New York: NYU Press. Suchland, Jennifer. 2015. Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Watson, Peggy. 1993. “Eastern Europe’s Silent Revolution: Gender.” Sociology 27 (3): 471–​487. Weigand, Kate. 2001. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

153

154

15 TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S NGOS The case of the Network of East–​West Women Nanette Funk

The Network of East–​West Women (NEWW) is a transnational feminist network and nongovernmental organization (NGO) connecting and supporting Central-​ Eastern European and Eurasian (CEE&E) women’s civil society activists working for gender justice. Founded in 1990–​1991 and formalized as an NGO in 1995, NEWW was one of the earliest transnational women’s networks in CEE&E, originally based in the USA with members from over 10 different countries at the first meeting. I was a founding member of NEWW, writing on and studying European issues since the 1970s, with connections to several Central and South European countries and Germany. I became engaged in several debates on the role of women’s NGOs, arguing that important NGOs in CEE&E opposed neoliberalism, that some transnational feminist associations in CEE&E were not imperialist, and that it was problematic to identify state socialist women’s organizations as feminist, as some claimed. Transnational feminist networks have long been criticized as feminist colonizers and imperialists for imposing western feminist premises that a woman’s gender is her primary self-​identification, and for using a concept of “woman” that presumes there is an essential nature that all women share, a “homogeneous category of woman,” mistakenly thought to be independent of race, class, and ethnicity (Lugones and Spelman 1983; Mohanty 2003, 22). Critics, focused on CEE&E, repeated these accusations, using virtually the exact same formulations (Ghodsee 2004, 727–​728, 732–​733; Hardt and Negri 2000; Hemment 2007; Olsen 1997, 2223ff; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, 134), sometimes speaking of purported CEE&E feminist assumptions of an “essential difference between men and women” (Ghodsee 2004, 728, 732–​733, 749; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001). Feminist NGOs were also said to become “unwittingly complicit” in neoliberalism, accepting funding for projects that promoted neoliberalism—​for example, replacing state services, enabling the state to cut back services, and urging the state to do so (Ghodsee 2004, 728, 738; Hanlon 2000; Hemment, 2007, 52; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, 128–​130, 132–​136). Finally, they were berated for focusing on the “private sphere and personal politics” (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, 134f), and for not criticizing neoliberalism.

154

155

Transnational feminism and women’s NGOs

Through an examination of NEWW and its partner NGOs, I here consider the debates over transnational feminist networks in CEE&E and whether there are steps that reduce the risks of incorporating western feminist assumptions and other forms of western feminist domination in CEE&E. A participant in these debates, I argue that some feminist transnational networks—​of which NEWW is a prime, though not the only, example— had learned from past criticisms and took steps to minimize the risks of imposing US-​ based feminist concepts. An examination of NEWW and its partners shows that some feminist associations in CEE&E do not presuppose essentialist conceptions or promote neoliberalism. This discussion is meant to compensate for critics’ lack of attention to organizations such as NEWW. Analysis of NEWW serves as a pivot from a critical to a constructive discourse about transnational feminism and feminist NGOs in CEE&E.

Structural steps to minimize risks of US feminist domination NEWW was intended to be a democratic transnational network, incorporating partnership and the principle of equality. To this end, we as activists took structural steps to reduce the risk of US feminist domination. First, NEWW was jointly founded by Slavenka Drakulić, the Yugoslav writer and feminist leader since the late 1970s, and the US feminist Ann Snitow, a seasoned feminist activist, organizer, writer, and teacher working since the 1970s. Drakulić gave a talk in spring 1990 in New York that became a symbol of how the collapse of communism was gendered. Drakulić held up a tampon, declaring that state socialist countries’ failure to produce such consumer products, contributed to their failure. Snitow and I individually contacted her, impressed by her vivid illustration of the intersection of gender and the economy, that is, the gendered nature of state socialist consumer production. I invited her to contribute to Gender Politics and Post-​Communism (Funk and Mueller 1993), which she did, while Snitow asked what we in the USA could do to support women in CEE&E, to which Drakulić replied, “Bring us together.” This, not a US feminist agenda, set the stage for NEWW. NEWW enabled women from CEE&E to meet each other and US women, often for the first time, at NEWW meetings, building community and friendships, each identifying those with whom they shared projects. Snitow—​ a vibrant, warm, smart, and deeply committed feminist—​ became the moving force in NEWW. Aware of the past problems of transnational feminism, she was determined to avoid US feminist domination. NEWW was not to act for women in CEE&E, to impose its own agenda, or to act as US women in NEWW decided, but to be a network of equal partners from CEE&E. Snitow’s know-​how from having helped form many important US feminist organizations, taught her the necessary steps to create an effective woman’s organization. Her approach was one of active listening more often than speaking. It embodied the cognitive virtues of self-​reflection, self-​criticism, and epistemic generosity; when confronted with substantive differences with some CEE&E women, one needed to acknowledge that one’s own assumptions might be mistaken (Funk 2007). Second, the founding meeting deliberately had a majority (51 women out of about 70 women) from CEE, albeit 19 from the USA alone. Participants were jointly invited through Drakulić’s network in CEE, Snitow’s network of US feminist writers, activists, and those she met in CEE in 1990 (Snitow 2020) and mine in the former German Democratic Republic and CEE&E. Women from the former Soviet Union were not initially included due to some CEE women’s resentment of Soviet domination.

155

156

Nanette Funk

Third, in 2003, NEWW moved its headquarters from New York and Washington, DC to NEWW/​Polska in Gdansk, Poland. NEWW/​Polska was founded and directed since 1999 by the Polish feminist Małgorzata Tarasiewicz, a former Solidarity and Peace and Freedom activist long active in NEWW, strengthening CEE&E women’s role in NEWW decision-​making. NEWW/​Polska took over the NEWW email and its interactive bilingual Polish/​English online communications site. It works in the often problematic European Women’s Lobby (EWL), primarily focused on western European women’s issues and positions, with dues that imposed a greater burden on CEE women’s organizations. NEWW/​Polska worked to strengthen and coordinate the network of Polish women’s organizations in the EU, worked on violence against women, particularly the ratification and implementation of the Istanbul Convention, and in support of women immigrants in Poland. It has an active Facebook presence. Fourth, in 1993, NEWW created a transnational decision-​ making body, the International Steering Committee, with a majority from CEE&E, ideally one woman from each CEE&E country, with sometimes 20 members (Network of East–​ West Women Newsletter, Spring 1993). Decision-​making requires deliberation, and in 1995, the NEWW On-​Line Committee, put online 150 women active on sex/​gender justice in CEE&E countries, with an online forum for deliberation and discussion. Adopting Drakulić’s initial proposal, this was also to break down previous barriers between countries within CEE&E, for example, between Warsaw Pact and non Warsaw Pact countries such as Yugoslavia, and within the Warsaw Pact, due to its hierarchical nature. At the cusp of the Internet age, with little online access in CEE&E and with email still in its infancy in the USA, the On-​Line Project provided computers, and brief computer and email training and created a proto mailing list for discussion, exchange of knowledge, strategies, and news. This replaced an occasional print newsletter, the only prior official means of exchange in NEWW. A printed membership directory had been the networking vehicle; in 1996 it included 2000 women with contact information, without email addresses, which most did not have in the 1990s. This was to make possible both non-​hierarchical egalitarian communication within each CEE&E country and transnationally (NEWW Newsletter, Winter 1994, 1), and non-​hierarchical joint Steering Committee decision-​making. Decisions were to be made primarily as NEWW members in CEE&E decided, in response to issues women in their countries considered important. Fifth, with active feminist lawyers in NEWW and fast-​ paced legal changes, the NEWW East–​West Legal Conference in Budapest in 1995 founded the East-​East Legal Committee, with members mainly from CEE&E (NEWW East-​East Legal Committee n.d.). They created a small, deliberately co-​ determined and co-​ directed innovative training program in gender law for CEE&E gender activists with internships at leading US women’s human rights organizations and practices, and a Legal Fellowship Program (1996–​2003). Isabel Marcus (USA) and Ursula Nowakowska (Poland) were the guiding forces. The training incorporated jointly proposed topics to compensate for the absence of gender frameworks in CEE&E law school education (Marcus 2017, 549–​550). This included gendered unemployment and labor discrimination (Nowakowska’s focus), domestic violence (Marcus’s focus), trafficking of women, and strengthening women’s political participation in CEE&E. Distinguished feminist law professors and lawyers Małgorzata Fuszara (Poland), Eleanora Zielińska (Poland), and Rhonda Copelan (USA) all participated. Twenty-​four young women, lawyer activists from 12 different CEE&E countries, received fellowships and $10,000 to use for gender rights projects with their home NGO. Sylwia Spurek, one of the fellows, later played an important role in 156

157

Transnational feminism and women’s NGOs

developing gender law in Poland, helping to draft the domestic violence law and working in the Government Plenipotentiary for the Equal Status of Men and Women, and was Deputy Ombudsman for Equal Treatment in the Polish government. This training program, like the NEWW headquarters, was then transferred to CEE&E, to Bulgaria. The initial US-​based training was innovative, but flawed, predicated on the US common law legal system based on precedent and irrelevant to the Roman law-​based civil law tradition of CEE&E countries. To remedy this defect, the Legal Committee, in partnership with NEWW/​Polska, the US Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation (BGRF) jointly formed the Women’s Human Rights Training Institute (WHRTI) in 2003 in Sofia, Bulgaria, directed by Geneveva Tischeva of BGRF (Marcus, 2014, 298; 2017, 544, 552). WHRTI adopted the Legal Fellowship’s approach but rooted it in CEE&E civil law. It trained over 100 lawyers in feminist legal theory, women’s rights practices, in understanding law as itself a gendering practice, and included analysis of the discriminatory impact of neoliberal changes (Marcus 2017, 550, 555–​556). From this examination of NEWW, we see the many steps a transnational network in CEE&E can, and did take, to minimize risks of US feminist colonization, including the following: co-​founding NEWW by CEE&E and US women with a CEE&E majority at its founding meeting, with its direction set by a feminist from CEE&E; co-​direction of its committees with greater authority for CEE&E members; privileging CEE&E members in setting network goals and in network decision-​making; transferring leadership and headquarters to CEE&E; and creating non-​hierarchical egalitarian communication.

NEWW as transnational feminist donor without colonization Through its Book and Journal Fund, NEWW was also a small intermediary donor, funding feminist CEE&E women’s feminist educational projects through books and grants, the largest being $2,500. This included supporting a feminist magazine, Aspekt (Slovakia), and a women’s studies center, the Prague Gender Center. NEWW avoided imposing its own conceptions by supporting NGOs’ ongoing, self-​defined projects. It also advanced Drakulic’s goal of fostering communication across borders in CEE&E through funding translations, publications, and exchanges of CEE&E women’s own publications into other local languages, for example, by the Polish Feminist Association, SOS Hotline in Belgrade, Bosnian women refugees (1992), as well as US writings (Snitow 2020). NEWW provided feminist works (over 6,000 books) but only as requested, including, but not limited to, US feminist works. NEWW was thus a midwife for CEE&E women’s own agency. Recognizing the need for US members’ education about CEE&E, NEWW had earlier created an internal US Study Group including readings from my manuscript for Gender Politics and Post-​Communism with writings mainly by CEE&E women. NEWW worked with a wide range of CEE&E women’s centers, women’s studies, and women’s media including the Second Independent Women’s Forum in Dubna Russia in 1992, the Center for Women’s Studies at Vilnius University (Lithuania), the Romanian Feminist Working Group with Laura Grunberg, efKa (Krakow, Poland), Feminist Network (Budapest), B.a.B.e (Croatia) and NaNe Domestic Violence Project (Budapest); only the latter focused on the private sphere. NEWW did not work with those groups arising from former state socialist women’s organizations, who had their own networks, funding sources, and properties and who did not seem generally interested in cooperation. Several NEWW members had questions regarding these organizations’ transparency, 157

158

Nanette Funk

but their members were not excluded from NEWW. Individual NEWW members had friendly, supportive contacts with some in these organizations.

NEWW commitment to intersectionality NEWW and its feminist partners were not built on essentialist metaphysical assumptions and their practices are compatible with an intersectional concept of gender identity, that is, that one’s identity and experience as a woman differs depending on one’s national, religious, class, and ethnic identities. NEWW’s foundations were political, not metaphysical, that gender was a fundamental, legitimate category of social analysis, and gender injustice an equally important form of injustice as race, class, and national injustice. NEWW was committed to supporting CEE&E women’s agency for gender justice and that “the unity of woman … is something that has to be … struggled for” (Mohanty 2003, 116), not presupposed, and that relations of power, including between women, need to be recognized. NEWW opposed the sacrifice of sex/​gender justice for other goals as in conventional left politics. Sex/​gender justice included respect for: women’s social rights to benefits; equal employment rights; rights in the workplace, such as to not be harassed; equal political power; reproductive freedom; freedom from violence of all forms; and the equal worth of LGBTQI lives. Rather than assuming “the primacy of gender oppression” or being built on the slogan “gender first” (Ghodsee 2004, 732–​733), NEWW and its partner NGOs worked to prevent it being “gender last,” and gendered, ethnic, or class forms of oppression from being ignored. Ghodsee’s claim that “women’s NGOs narrowly focused on projects for women” and, as a result, “directly undermine the possibility of a united proletariat” (Ghodsee 2004, 742) exhibits a conventional left appeal to the primacy of class, and a willingness to sacrifice gender justice to that end. NEWW’s focus on broad educational and conceptual transformation was anything but narrow. Moreover, transnational feminism and women’s NGOs only threaten unjust, gender-​ biased forms of class solidarity that presume a male worker and his interests, or that ignores gendered workplace injustices—​for example, the sexual harassment of women employees. Acknowledging them promotes a more complex understanding of class oppression and exploitation as gendered and greater attention to such issues, generating more solidarity from women. Nor does unity require all being in one class-​based organization, but can occur through coalitions, for example, between gender and class-​based organizations. It is true that NEWW did not focus on the intersection of class and gender in the 1990s, but focusing on gender does not at all preclude doing so. NEWW and its partners especially addressed the intersection of gender with national and ethnic identity. There was an unavoidable urgency to these issues given the horrific, violent, nationalist wars and ensuing national tensions among women in the 1990s, with women being raped based on their national identity as in Yugoslavia; many ex-​Yugoslav women were associated with NEWW. In the 1990s, after the fall of state socialism, many CEE&E women had an allergy to discussing class. As Ost (2015) wrote, “no one, it seemed, could utter the term ‘class’… associated almost exclusively with the departed and discredited old regime.” NEWW did also have a relatively narrow class membership, with mainly highly educated feminist academics and intellectuals from CEE&E and the US, which helped NEWW to survive, but also limited its focus (see NEWW Membership Directory 1996).

158

159

Transnational feminism and women’s NGOs

How not to be donor driven NEWW shows that, although there is a risk of transnational feminist networks and NGOs being western donor driven, this can also be avoided. Contrary to critics’ claims that funding for women’s NGOs and networks was abundant (Ghodsee 2004, 30; Olsen 1997; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001) as was well known, it was fickle, available only for a brief period in the 1990s, and was only a very small percentage of funding for civil society (Funk 2006). NEWW had only a few small grants, and no major foundation support until 1994–​ 1995, almost four years after it started. Though short of space and funds, it survived on commitment, determination, and improvisation, for example, carrying cash discreetly to its Dubrovnik meeting, exchanging it at favorable black market exchange rates (Snitow 2020), using social networking, holding meetings at Snitow’s loft in NYC from 1990–​1995, relying on the generosity of members and their contacts, and later, through academic institutional support and support from the Gdansk city government. NEWW received major US funding only in 1994–​1995 for its Online Project, from Eurasia, MacArthur, World Learning (Vrana 1995, 1), and later from the relatively sympathetic Soros and Ford Foundations, in which some CEE&E women committed to gender justice, and associated with NEWW, held important positions. It is also important to distinguish between strong NGOs—​such as NEWW and its partner NGOs in CEE&E, on the one hand, with entrenched value commitments, strong social networks, non-​ foundation resources, multiple donors, or supporters among foundation officers and active strategies to resist unwelcome donor imperatives—​and on the other hand, weak NGOs of which this is not true (Funk 2006, 275). NEWW could survive with little foundation support through its access to university support, including Rutgers University, but especially The New School University for Social Research where Snitow taught, which long had a special focus on CEE&E, albeit with utterly no attention to gender. The New School summer school in Poland, the Democracy and Diversity Institute, founded in 1992, enabled Snitow to create and teach a gender course there for 25 years, with students from throughout CEE&E (Snitow 2020), strengthening her own and NEWW’s ties to Polish feminism and CEE&E. The NEWW member, Polish-​ American professor Joanna Regulska of Rutgers Women’s Studies and Global Studies Departments, and director of major local democracy projects in Poland, in the 1990s used her institutional power to fund CEE&E women and NEWW conferences. NEWW was in many ways privileged, which helped its transnational project. Some NEWW activities required little funding. The 1990s was a time of immigration and movement across borders from CEE&E. NEWW provided immigration support in New York for some CEE&E women, including for asylum and permanent residency claims in the US. Through NEWW members’ university affiliations, some CEE&E feminist activists could study in the USA, a respite from intense feminist activism in CEE&E, and have time to think. US NEWW members provided recognition, solidarity, friendship, university positions, admission, scholarships, and mentorships. Some CEE&E women thereby reclaimed their status lost through immigration, integrating themselves into US women’s professional, personal, and friendship networks. CEE&E women in turn transformed and enriched the lives of US women active in NEWW professionally and intellectually, and through their friendship. There was mutual learning whereby US NEWW members provided social learning about US ways, such as how to write an American résumé, while CEE&E women provided US women enormous insight, 159

160

Nanette Funk

knowledge, translations, and introductions in CEE&E countries and friendship as well. In my own case, a CEE&E member’s moral shock about the lack of daycare for faculty and staff children at my university led me to initiate action, which became the first step in providing faculty daycare (Funk 2007, 205–​206).

Avoiding complicity in neoliberalism The criticisms that feminist NGOs support neoliberalism are vast overgeneralizations, focus on bad actors, and do not examine those who did not support neoliberalism, and what can be learned from them. NEWW and its partner NGOs were critics of the neoliberal dismantling of state socialist services and benefits. A minority of NEWW partner NGOs provided services, but usually services the state hadn’t provided or did so only poorly, such as for women war victims or for domestic violence. They fought, sometimes successfully, for the state to provide those services, or educated their recipients to become politically active, as did the Center for Women War Victims in Croatia. NEWW and its partner NGOs did not focus on the private sphere but on changing public understanding and practices, introducing concepts of gender discrimination. The claim that accepting western funding promotes neoliberalism presumes that all western donors had a neoliberal agenda in CEE&E, that they could achieve their aims, to which recipient NGOs passively acceded. But none of this is true. Many strong and savvy women’s NGOs knew how to thwart neoliberal donors. Some major funders of many women’s NGOs in CEE&E, including of NEWW’s NGO partners, opposed neoliberalism, as did several women’s foundations, who would not support NGO projects to provide services—​for example, the German Greens’ FrauenAnstiftung, Mama Cash (Netherlands), Kvinna del Kvinna (Sweden) (Funk 2006, 273–​274; 2013), all important funders of many feminist NGOs in CEE&E. Contrary to critics, NEWW and many feminist NGOs in CEE&E in fact also addressed issues in the public sphere, such as nationalism, war and nationalist-​motivated war rapes, and unemployment, or worked to get women elected in parliaments. In Bosnia-​ Herzegovina in the 1990s, women’s NGOs worked on ethnic reconciliation after the war while many others in the former Yugoslavia were peace activists, such as Women in Black.

NEWW’s difficulties NEWW did not avoid all the risks of transnational feminism, but not for the reasons critics of transnational feminism cite. Face-​to-​face meetings of the International Steering Committee, and NEWW generally, were expensive and labor intensive, and in 1995 NEWW turned to an unsuccessful technological solution, the-​then new technology of email, to make possible egalitarian transnational decision-​making and communication. But it was severely constrained by technological and language difficulties. NEWW was unaware, as were most at the time, that since email is not synchronic, it is a poor decision-​ making vehicle, especially for complex discussions. Frustrating, inconclusive email-​based Steering Committee meetings could take six weeks (Robbins 2000, 45–​46, 51). NEWW in New York and Washington had a dominant role in online steering committee meetings, determining the discussion questions, which CEE&E steering committee members did not themselves choose. Email was at the time still new even in the US, and NEWW should have taken into account that getting online was unavailable, unaffordable, and unstable,

160

161

Transnational feminism and women’s NGOs

in much of CEE&E in the 1990s. Overburdened as CEE&E activists were, the Steering Committee also sometimes failed to have majority representation from CEE&E. The Steering Committee thus could not remain an effective, transnational governance body (NEWW Newsletter, Summer 1995). From 1999 to 2003, a very small, non-​representative US-​based Board of Directors became the effective decision-​making body. Some others knew little of what was happening in NEWW, becoming less engaged. There were also unaddressed tensions within NEWW. Scholars, academics, and researchers studying, and from, CEE&E, were sometimes frustrated by other US NEWW activists’ lack of knowledge about CEE&E. This was reflected at the first NEWW meeting in Dubrovnik both in the creation of consciousness raising groups to discuss personal experiences with strangers, inappropriate for those who had learned to protect their private spheres, and in the lack of extensive panels on unemployment, when so many were so economically threatened. Thus NEWW did not avoid all the risks.

Conclusions NEWW has changed, but it has survived more than 25 years, headed by NEWW/​Polska. It played a key role in an EWL seminar in 2019 for women politicians and on feminism and politics in Poland. It aims to reestablish its website and continue as a resource for transnational communication and cooperation among feminist scholars and activists in and about CEE&E. Transnational feminism among those in CEE&E is important, given overlapping histories and contemporary gendered institutions and politics. Western feminist engagement and research have to be pursued with caution, given the serious risks of each being used for political or self-​interested ends and professional agendas antithetical to feminism’s normative commitments. Gender research benefits from an intersectional understanding of gender that utilizes national and ethnic identity, class, rural and urban identity, religion, immigration status and, where relevant, is contextualized to current gendered political regimes. From urgent political issues of neoliberalism, to nationalism’s covert gender agenda, populism’s and authoritarianism’s overt attacks on gender, issues of state and society in CEE&E are increasingly overtly gendered. To honor its feminist commitments and not become instrumentalized, gender research must remain connected to gender programs and activism in CEE&E.

References Funk, Nanette. 2006. “Women’s NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: The Imperialist Criticism.” In Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Joanna Regulska, Jasmina Lukic, and Darja Zavirsek, 265–​ 286. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press. –​–​–​–​. 2007. “Fifteen years of the East–​West Women’s Dialog.” In Living Gender after Communism, edited by Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, 203–​226. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2013. “Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism.” Hypatia 28 (1): 179–​196. Funk, Nanette and Magda Mueller, eds. 1993. Gender Politics and Post-​Communism. Reflections from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. New York: Routledge. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2004. “Feminism-​ By-​ Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminisms, and Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” Signs 29 (3): 727–​754.

161

162

Nanette Funk Hanlon, Joseph. 2000. “An Ambitious and Extensive Political Agenda: The Role of NGOs and the Aid Industry.” In Global Institutions and Local Empowerment: Competing Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Kendall Stiles, 132–​145. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hemment, Julie. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGOs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lugones, Maria and Elizabeth Spelman. 1983. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘the Woman’s Voice.’” Women’s Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573–​581. Marcus, Isabel. 2014. “The ‘Woman Question’ in Post-​Socialist Legal Education.” Human Rights Quarterly 363 (3): 507–​568. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Compensatory Women’s Rights Legal Education in Eastern Europe: The Women’s Human Rights Training Institute.” Human Rights Quarterly 39(3): 539–​573. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. NEWW East-​East Legal Committee. n.d. NEWW Membership Directory. 1996. NEWW Newsletter, Spring 1993. NEWW Newsletter, Winter 1994. NEWW Newsletter, Summer 1995. NEWW Projects. n.d. www.neww.org/​projects/​book_​journal_​project.html. Olsen, Francis. 1997. “Feminism in Central and Eastern Europe: Risks and Possibilities of American Engagement.” Yale Law Review 106 (7): 2216–​2257. Ost, David. (2015). “Class after Communism: Introduction to the Special Issue.” East European Politics and Societies 29 (3): 543–​564. Petras, James and Henry Veltmeyer. 2001. Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century. Halifax: Zed Books. Robbins, Sonia Jaffe. 2000. “Network of East–​ West Women. Offering Hope in a Time of Upheavals.” In Women in Sync: Toolkit for Locally, Connecting Globally. Women’s Networking Support Program, Studies from the Region, 45–​65. Johannesburg: Association for Progressive Communications. Snitow, Ann. 2020. Visitors. New York: New Village Press. Vrana, Victoria. 1995. “NEWW On-​Line Connects Women. The First Women’s Electronic Network In Central & Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.” In Network of East–​West Women Newsletter (Summer).

162

163

16 CONTENTIONS OF FUNDING GENDER EQUALITY IN CENTRAL-​ EASTERN EUROPE Jill Irvine

This chapter investigates the debates and dilemmas associated with three decades of aid provided to gender equality organizations in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE). While a substantial literature of empirical studies, theoretical debates, and activists’ assessments has emerged about this subject globally, CEE offers a particularly rich case for studying how donor practices and priorities shape gender equality advocacy. Emerging funding frameworks were developed and applied here, and women’s organizations were targeted as essential vehicles of change and recipients of aid. Three main debates have shaped the ways in which funding practices impact gender equality activism. The first, which emerged in CEE during the democratic assistance programs of the 1990s, involves the increasing NGOization of women’s organizing and the accompanying “project feminism.” The second debate, highlighted by the EU accession process and the project of building gender equality architectures, involves the increasing professionalization of women’s organizations and the legalistic strategies they pursue. The final debate, associated with the post-​2008 period of austerity and the rise of right-​wing populism in CEE, involves the ways in which the funding landscape has helped or hindered the inclusion of historically marginalized groups. This chapter argues that emerging civil society and funding frameworks in CEE were aimed at promoting the twin political projects of democratization and neoliberalization, with gendered consequences. While the underlying political goals remained the same throughout the postsocialist period, major donors and donor practices shifted significantly, as funding moved from democratic assistance programs in the 1990s, to EU harmonization programs in the period of EU accession, and to a significant drop in funding after the economic crisis began in 2008. Women’s organizations and activists in CEE were challenged to navigate this funding landscape while at the same time building women’s movements capable of promoting transformational change. Their experiences and insights thus contribute fundamentally to our understanding of how funding shapes gender equality initiatives and activism. 163

164

Jill Irvine

Gender equality and women’s organizing under late state socialism The state socialist regimes that came to power in Central-​Eastern Europe after World War II proclaimed their intention to achieve the emancipation of women and devoted considerable effort to promoting new gender ideals. Nevertheless, state socialist policies concerning the emancipation of women suffered from a host of shortcomings resulting from the regime’s unwillingness to address gender relations in the private sphere where women were expected to carry the burden of domestic and caring work (Verdery 1994). Women suffered from both horizontal and vertical segregation in the labor market and, despite the institutionalization of gender quotas, rarely held any positions of authority in decision-​making bodies. Women’s organizing under state socialism in the decades after World War II was channeled through officially sanctioned women’s groups or larger socialist umbrella groups controlled by the state. This began to change in several countries by the 1980s as women organized to advocate for better state responses to such pressing problems as violence against women and, in some cases, to establish hotlines or safe houses for victims of domestic violence (Einhorn 2002). With the collapse of state socialism, autonomous women’s organizations exploded on the scene, along with other civil society organizations. In the first several election cycles after 1989, women’s representation in the formal political sphere plummeted across CEE, largely as a result of the abolition of gender quotas (Matland and Montgomery 2003; see Wolchik and Chiva, Chapter 42 in this Handbook). Even as women’s issues were sidelined in the formal political arena, however, women’s activism in the informal political sphere grew rapidly, as childcare, healthcare, and other state social services were slashed and women’s organizations moved in to fill the gap (Einhorn 2002). The growth in the number and importance of women’s civil society organizations occurred at the same time that governmental and private funding agencies were turning their attention to the postcommunist world with increased interest in providing financial and other support (Hemment 2007). International donors and European and US government agencies increasingly viewed women’s organizations as promising recipients of aid and as crucial building blocks in strengthening civil society during the period of postsocialist transformations.

Frameworks for funding: The civil society and philanthrocapitalist approaches Civil society has been critical in shaping the theory and practice of funding women’s organizations and gender equality programs around the world, including CEE. As international assistance to CEE grew as a response to the postsocialist transformations, civil society experienced a renaissance in democratic theory and funding practices (Ottaway and Chung 2002). Many donors and activists alike came to see NGOs as a “magic bullet” for achieving almost every goal (Hemment 2007, 52). In this “civil society funding model,” NGOs were seen as essential vehicles of education, advocacy and service provision, and assistance programs targeted women’s NGOs as a vehicle with which to perform all three of these functions (Irvine 2018). In practice, this approach usually meant funding women’s organizations for short-​term projects with limited goals, driven by what Krause (2014) has insightfully called the logic of the “good project,” with its easily tracked and measurable deliverables. Easterly (2006) argued that NGO short-​term projects were far more likely to yield results and produce better outcomes than vaguely formulated projects 164

165

Contentions of funding gender equality

aimed at achieving emancipatory political goals. Despite the claims of those promoting the “neutral” value of civil society, funding women’s organizations was usually tied to larger political objectives that were determined in New York or Washington or Brussels and associated with the dual political projects of democratization and neoliberalization in postsocialist Europe. As the civil society funding model took hold in CEE and elsewhere, it was joined by the emergence of a set of ideas associated with philanthrocapitalism. “Philanthrocapitalism” is a term that covers a range of actors and approaches, but the hallmarks of this funding have been “an entrepreneurial result-​oriented framework and the use of market mechanisms to achieve philanthropic ends” (Edwards 2009, 245). Along with neoliberal ideas about the greater efficiency of the market for delivering social goods, donors embraced approaches that rested on the notion of “doing well by doing good,” that aid programs could and should use the same cost analysis and “bottom line|” thinking as private companies (Bishop and Green 2011). Reflecting neoliberal values, it stressed individual opportunity and choice over collective strategies for achieving social change (McGoey 2015), focusing on the achievements of individual women in transforming their communities, while neglecting the role of women’s movements in achieving enduring, structural change. The philanthrocapitalist approach dovetailed with the civil society funding framework, reinforcing the preference for funding NGOs for short-​term projects with quantifiable indicators and measurable outcomes (Witte 2009). Together they connected the funding approaches aimed at promoting the twin political projects in CEE of democratization and neoliberalization.

NGOization, project feminism, and movement building The funding landscape in CEE in the initial postsocialist period began with democratic assistance programs in the 1990s, including funding for the “color revolutions’‘ in several CEE countries (Bunce and Wolchik 2011). Although private foundations and organizations played a crucial role, the largest donors shaping the funding landscape in CEE during this period were US and European government agencies along with the UN, particularly in the war-​torn regions of southeastern Europe. During the first decades after the collapse of state socialism, significant funds were directed toward women’s organizations as essential civil society partners. US funders tended to favor competitive grant processes involving US-​based INGOs or USAID with a requirement for local partner participation (Halterman and Irvine 2014). This approach resulted in the rapid increase of women’s equality NGOs working on particular projects in the “third sector” of civil society as they sought to take advantage of new opportunities for achieving their goals. Gender equality and women’s rights activists faced significant challenges in building women’s movements in this landscape dominated by large international donors with their own agendas. The process of NGOization in CEE followed a different trajectory than that of Latin America, North America, or Europe. In these parts of the world, well-​established women’s movements were threatened with fragmentation by increasing professionalization. In contrast, in Eastern Europe, where women’s movements were relatively weak, women’s organizing was characterized by rapid NGOization. It is perhaps as a result of these pressures on gender equality organizing that scholars and activists from and writing about CEE (and post-​Soviet countries more generally) were instrumental in contributing to the emerging critique of donor practices and ensuing NGOization. 165

166

Jill Irvine

According to this critique, donor practices and the resulting NGOization raised issues both of fragmentation and representation. First, cooperation among women’s organizations and activists is undermined by the influx of project-​based funds and competitive bidding processes, as women’s organizations compete with one another for the resources necessary to their survival (Hemment 2007). Second, organizations often become beholden to their donors instead of their constituents, causing them to shift priorities suddenly or invest in resources outside their mission (Lang 1997). Donors have tended to favor urban elites, who they believe have the language and professional skills to quickly master the necessary reporting and budgetary requirements, denying resources to rural women’s organizations and projects (Ghodsee 2004). The result has been the emergence of what Stubbs and Wedel (2015) call NGO flexians, who are more concerned about their professional careers than pressing for crucial social, economic, and political change. Finally, professionalized organizations chasing short-​term, project-​based funding, must often spend a great deal of their time writing reports and preparing new proposals, leaving them with little time or energy to think strategically about women’s empowerment (Bagic 2006). The upshot of NGOization has been the depoliticization of the discourses and practices of women’s activism. While these potentially negative effects of NGOization have been well documented in the literature, others have pointed out that it is a mistake to neglect the capacity of women’s organizations to develop effective strategies for responding to them or to dismiss the positive, capacity-​building impact of funding women’s organizations (Stubbs 2017). As Funk (2006; also Chapter 15 in this Handbook) argued in response to the growing critique of NGOization in CEE, most women’s organizations strongly support funding assistance, viewing it as essential not only for their survival but also for increasing their capacity to act effectively. The potentially demobilizing effects of NGOization and fragmentation have become the explicit focus of counter-​strategies in CEE. These activists eschew funding in order to avoid becoming mired in competition for funds and rely instead on more grassroots, movement-​building activities (Bias 2019). For example, women’s movements in CEE, often operating outside mainstream funding sources, have pressed successfully for political reform in a number of policy areas, including violence against women and reproductive rights (Montoya 2013). In some cases, women’s organizations proved adept at using democratization assistance to build organizational structures and capacity through networks and coalitions that brought gender equality issues to the fore in election campaigns and political party platforms (Irvine 2007).

Neoliberalism, governance feminism, and movement building A new period of funding practices and political opportunities emerged in the late 1990s as the EU access process got underway and the EU emerged as the major funder of gender equality initiatives in the region. In contrast to US government funding, EU funding favored the creation of supranational umbrella organizations such as the European Women’s Lobby or the Social Platform, as both mechanisms for funding and for the representation of women’s interests in the policymaking process (Johansson and Kalm 2015). This approach tended to favor larger, more established women’s organizations with the capacity to operate through these complex bureaucratic structures spanning national borders, and it reinforced the professionalization of women’s organizations that was already underway (Butterfield 2016). For example, the EU requirement that gender equality organizations use new public management tools resulted in many organizations 166

167

Contentions of funding gender equality

shifting away from using voluntary staff and hiring professionals (Mahoney 2004). As CEE countries worked toward the “harmonization” of their legal and regulatory structures with EU prescriptions, building gender architectures within a neoliberal economic framework became a primary focus of women’s organizations and activists. This meant that many women’s organizations shifted to a more legalistic or governance strategy focused on the policymaking process. The EU funding approach resulted in potential gains for women’s organizations as their political activity widened to include not only the third sector but more participation in the formal political arena. Women’s organizations and activists were consulted on the project of building gender architectures and provided the expertise needed to draft new gender equality legislation (Spehar 2012). As gender equality agencies were established across CEE, gender equality concerns were, at least symbolically, integrated into the highest levels of government. This integration was reinforced by the gender mainstreaming policies and practices promoted by the European Union and adopted as part of the harmonization process in CEE countries. As the European Union promoted gender equality norms and policy prescriptions, funding was directed toward studying the role of gender in the policymaking process through such initiatives as Quality in Gender Equality Policies (QUING) and (Diversity and the European Public Sphere—​ toward a Citizens’ Europe (EUROSPHERE). Nevertheless, the project of building gender equality architectures did not necessarily result in concrete gains, as a “compliance gap” emerged between comprehensive gender equality legislation enacted as part of the EU conditionality process and the actual implementation of gender equality policies and processes (see Spehar, Chapter 36 in this Handbook). At least part of the problem lay with the deficiencies in the EU model itself, as well as a lack of will among EU officials to require enforcement of these laws (Avdeyeva 2008). At the same time, activists and scholars began to raise the alarm about the “governance feminism” infusing women’s organizations and movements. According to these interpretations, through adopting forms of feminism centered on legalistic strategies “friendly” to the existing neoliberal governments, women’s organizations had been diverted from the project of challenging the existing economic and political structures that reinforce inequality (Kantola and Squires 2012). “Governance feminism” had adapted to the neoliberal context by “providing gender expertise into existing policies rather than engaging in more radical forms of feminist critique” (Kantola and Lombardo 2017, 18). Resistance to legalistic strategies and governance feminism has sparked important new forms of activism (Elomäki and Kantola 2017). Some activists have embraced forms of neo-​Marxist feminism that insist on bringing class back in (Butterfield 2016). This left-​feminist activism, often operating outside official channels or funding streams, has rejected the professionalized women’s organizations of governance feminism, that, according to it, has emptied the women’s movement of its historical commitment to transformational, emancipatory aims (Irvine and Sutlović 2019). In the post-​accession era of austerity, when the gap between gender equality and policy prescriptions and their implementation has widened, activists continue to challenge the NGOization and professionalization of women’s organizations.

Austerity, identity, and intersectional movement building With the economic crisis beginning in 2008, the shortcomings of the EU model of funding gender equality initiatives within a neoliberal framework became more apparent. 167

168

Jill Irvine

First, with austerity came a narrowing of policy frameworks. The needs of working-​ class, non-​white women, never the main focus of EU economic policies, were further pushed to the margins of the agenda (Elomäki 2012). According to one recent study, funding for organizations focusing on anti-​racism and/​or LGBT issues was particularly affected (Ahrens 2019). Second, the creation of the Economic Benefits of Gender Equality in the EU (EIGE) and greater budget scrutiny reinforced the impact measurement aspect of grant requirements and squeezed out the harder-​to-​quantify social justice approaches (Roberts 2013). States prioritized service delivery over advocacy, while pushing to the margins their previous commitment to gender mainstreaming. At the same time, reductions in funding for gender equality resulted in a fierce struggle among gender equality organizations at the top, undermining women’s movement strength and cohesion (Jacquot 2017). The introduction of austerity funding practices has raised serious challenges related to European identity and intersectionality. In the first decade after regime change in CEE, intersectionality was not on the funding agenda, but this began to change after the turn of the century as EU policy moved from its single focus on gender equality toward a wider focus on other identity groups based on race, religion, disability, age, and sexual orientation (Krizsán and Lombardo 2013). Funding for gender equality programs and organizations was restructured to reflect this emphasis on multiple forms of inequality and discrimination. Despite the rhetorical support for funding multiple disadvantaged groups of women, critics argued that EU funding practices remained both exclusionary and hierarchical. In her recent study of funding for equality organizations in Europe, Ahrens (2019) reached two conclusions: first, that EU funding structures make it much easier for civil society organizations focusing on one ground of discrimination to gain funding and, second, that resource allocation is ranked according to class, gender, and race, with migrants, refugees, and ethnic minorities at the bottom (Ahrens 2019). According to one perspective, at the heart of exclusionary and hierarchical donor practices is the instrumentalization of gender equality as a “foundational European value” in the service of constructing and maintaining a “true” European identity in distinction to others (Chiva 2009). In this view, EU officials and institutions have made gender equality a litmus test for Europeanness and established themselves as the ultimate arbiters (Kunz and Maisenbacher 2017). During much of the postsocialist period, this approach was directed toward the more “backward” area of Eastern Europe as these countries sought to achieve the standards and norms that would allow them to join the European Union (Bilic 2016). More recently, several CEE governments and political parties have adopted this approach in relation to immigrants from outside Europe, touting the gender equality norms and practices of their citizens as a way of distinguishing themselves from “backward” migrants and migrant communities. By claiming to defend the “European values” of gender equality, they assert their white, Christian, European identity against migrant outsiders. The resurgence of right-​wing populism in Europe, directed against migrants, has negatively impacted the ability of some historically marginalized groups in Europe to build meaningful coalitions across positional differences (Bassel and Emejulu 2018). It also has created fissures and disagreements among gender equality activists and organizations across Europe. While some feminists point to the dangers posed by migrant men, including an undermining of equality gained over the past several decades, others warn against the potential this stance has of being used by right-​wing populist groups to demonize migrants (Montoya 2013). In other instances, women’s organizations have campaigned 168

169

Contentions of funding gender equality

against genital mutilation and forced marriages in immigrant communities which, as others charge, simply reinforces right-​wing populist claims about a fundamental “clash of civilizations” (Akkerman and Hagelund 2007). It is clear that right-​wing populism threatens the general receptiveness of national governments and the EU to fund gender equality programs that address the needs of historically marginalized groups and those that do not conform to particular ideas about what constitutes European values and identity.

Conclusion Three decades of funding gender equality initiatives in CEE have produced several arguments and debates about how donor practices and priorities shape gender equality advocacy and outcomes. The first is that funding practices have professionalized gender equality organizations and advocates in ways that may divert them from their mission and weaken their ability to build and strengthen gender equality movements. While many scholars and activists have pointed to the fragmenting and even demobilizing effects of NGOization, others point to the need for capacity building that NGOization can help address and the crucial support that project grants provide. At the same time, many funding programs support neoliberal projects that have reinforced the very inequality gender equality groups are dedicated to reducing. While some studies emphasize the gains women have made by acting as gender equality experts, others highlight the dangers of “governance feminism,” which is complicit in neoliberal policies Finally, although there has been a greater discursive emphasis on supporting gender equality programs with intersectional aims, evidence suggests it has produced mixed results at best. Some activists and scholars point to the potentially positive impact that EU discourse and funding has had on intersectional activism in CEE; others argue that austerity policies and rising anti-​immigrant sentiment has marginalized some gender equality advocacy groups, while privileging others. In short, there is still much we do not know about how funders interact with INGOs, national governments, and intergovernmental organizations in devising and delivering gender equality aid. Unless we are to give up altogether on the funding that gender equality advocates desperately need, we can and should continue to better understand the funding landscape shaping gender equality initiatives in CEE and around the world.

References Ahrens, Petra. 2019. “A Mountain Skyline? Gender Equality and Intersectionality in Supranational ‘Equality CSOs.’” In Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges, edited by Jill A. Irvine, Sabine Lang, and Celeste Montoya, 244–​262. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Akkerman, Tjitske and Anniken Hagelund. 2007. “‘Women and Children First!’ Anti-​Immigration Parties and Gender in Norway and the Netherlands.” Patterns of Prejudice 41 (2): 197–​214. Avdeyeva, Olga. 2008. “States’ Compliance with International Requirements.” Political Research Quarterly 63 (1): 203–​217. Bagic, Aida. 2006. “Women’s Organizing in Post-​Yugoslav Countries: Talking about Donors.” In Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, edited by Aili Mari Tripp and Myla Marx Feree, 141–​165. New York: NYU Press. Bassel, Leah and Akwugo Emejulu. 2018. Minority Women and Austerity Survival and Resistance in France and Britain. Bristol: Policy Press. Bias, Leandra. 2019. “NGOoization and Generational Divides in Serbia’s Feminist Movement.” Women’s Studies International Forum 77.

169

170

Jill Irvine Bilic, Bojan. 2016. LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-​Yugoslav Space: on the Rainbow Way to Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bishop, Matthew and Michael Green. 2011. Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World. London: Black. Bunce, Valerie and Sharon L. Wolchik. 2011. Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries. New York: Cambridge University Press. Butterfield, Nicole. 2016. “Discontents of Professionalisation: Sexual Politics and Activism in Croatia in the Context of EU Accession.” In LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-​ Yugoslav Space, 23–​58. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chiva, Cristina. 2009. “The Limits of Europeanization: EU Accession and Gender Equality in Bulgaria and Romania.” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 10 (2): 195–​209. Easterly, William. 2006. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Johanneshov: MTM. Edwards, Michael. 2009. “Why ‘Philanthrocapitalism’ Is Not the Answer: Private Initiatives and International Development.” In Doing Good or Doing Better: Development Policies in a Globalizing World, edited by Monique Kremer, Peter van Lieshout, and Robert Went, 237–​254. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Einhorn, Barbara. 2002. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe. London: Verso. Elomäki, Anna. 2012. The Price of Austerity: The Impact on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in Europe, 1–​20. Brussels: European Women’s Lobby. Elomäki, Anna, and Johanna Kantola. 2017. “Austerity Politics and Feminist Resistance in Finland: From Established Women’s Organizations to New Feminist Initiatives.” Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: 231–​255. Funk, Nanette. 2006. “Women’s NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe.” In Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Jasmina Likic, JoAnna Regulska, and Darja Zavir”sek, 265–​286. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2004. “Feminism-​by-​Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminism, and Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 (3): 727–​753. Halterman, Andrew L. and Jill A. Irvine. 2014. “Bounded Altruism: INGOs’ Opportunities and Constraints during Humanitarian Crises and the US Intervention in Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Kosovo.” East European Politics 30 (4): 458–​481. Hemment, Julie. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Irvine, Jill. 2007. “From Civil Society to Civil Servants: Women’s Organizations and Critical Elections in Croatia.” Politics & Gender 3 (1): 7–​32. –​–​–​–. 2018. “US Aid and Gender Equality: Social Movement vs Civil Society Models of Funding.” Democratization 25 (4): 728–​746. Irvine, Jill and Leda Sutlović. 2019. “Political Opportunities and Intersectional Politics in Croatia.” In Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges, 92–​110. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Jacquot, Sophie. 2017. “A Policy in Crisis: The Dismantling of the EU Gender Equality Policy.” In Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe, Politics, Institutions, and Intersectionality, edited by Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo, 27–​48. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Johansson, Håkan and Sara Kalm. 2015. “Thinking Relationally: Questions, Themes and Perspectives for the Study of EU Civil Society.” EU Civil Society: 1–​20. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo. 2017. “Gender and the Politics of the Economic Crisis in Europe.” Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: 1–​25. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​978–​ 3–​319–​50778–​1_​1. Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires. 2012. “From State Feminism to Market Feminism?” International Political Science Review 33 (4): 382–​400. Krause, Monika. 2014. The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Krizsán, Andrea and Emanuela Lombardo. 2013. “The Quality of Gender Equality Policies: A Discursive Approach.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 20 (1): 77–​92.

170

171

Contentions of funding gender equality Kunz, Rachel and Julia Maisenbacher. 2017. “Women in the Neighbourhood: Reinstating the European Union’s Civilising Mission on the Back of Gender Equality Promotion?” European Journal of International Relations 23 (1): 122–​144. Lang, Sabine. 1997. “The NGOization of Feminism.” In Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics, edited by Joan Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates, 101–​ 120. New York: Routledge. Mahoney, Christine. 2004. “The Power of Institutions.” European Union Politics 5 (4): 441–​466. Matland, Richard E. and Kathleen A. Montgomery. 2003. “Women’s Representation in Post-​ Communist Europe.” Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-​Communist Europe: 321–​341. McGoey, Linsey. 2015. No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy. London: Verso. Montoya, Celeste. 2013. From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy and Combatting Violence against Women. New York: Oxford University Press. Ottaway, Marina and Theresa Chung. 2002. “Toward a New Paradigm.” Journal of Democracy 10 (4): 99–​113. Roberts, Adrienne. 2013. “Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-​First-​Century America.” New Political Economy 18 (1): 21–​42. Spehar, Andrea. 2012. “This Far, but No Further?” East European Politics and Societies: And Cultures 26 (2): 362–​379. Stubbs, Paul. 2017. “Review. Patrice C. McMahon: The NGO Game, Post Conflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond.” H-​Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences. www.h-​net. org/​reviews/​showpdf.php?id=50472. Stubbs, Paul and Janine Wedel. 2015. “Policy Flexians in the Global Order.” In Actors and Agency in Global Social Governance, edited by Alexandra Kaash and Kerstin Martens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1994. “From Parent-​ State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” East European Politics and Societies: And Cultures 8 (2): 225–​255. Witte, Jan Martin. 2009. “Are Private Actors Revolutionizing Foreign Aid?” World Politics Review. www.worldpoliticsreview.com/​articles/​3964/​are-​private-​actors-​revolutionizing-​foreign-​aid.

171

172

17 PUSSY RIOT AND FEMEN’S GLOBAL TRAJECTORIES IN LAW, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Jessica Zychowicz and Nataliya Tchermalykh

Pussy Riot and FEMEN—​two all-​female activist collectives, originating from within the former USSR since 2010—​have each become a global phenomenon, meaningful for diverse audiences. This chapter follows the trajectory of each of these groups to better understand the continuities and breaks in emerging forms of feminist movements, and, in particular, how these patterns have taken civic shape in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE). Public receptions of both groups are important for understanding gender and feminism in the region, made more acute by FEMEN’s provocative design and the legal outcomes of the 2012 trial and sentencing in the case of Pussy Riot. While both can be read as general resistance to authoritarian state structures, a closer look at their positioning in scholarly and legal debates in fraught East–​West relations tells a different story: rising agitation, even panic, around the female body as the most prominent site for social movements in the first two decades of the 21st century. FEMEN and Pussy Riot began in the late 2000s as collectives, marking a continuity with the long traditions of underground, nonconformist, and self-​organizing cultural production dating to the Soviet period. The intersection of media and politics served as the main stage for the dramaturgies that each group manifested through strategies tailored to the public sites, courtrooms, and virtual public square. Pussy Riot and FEMEN differ in how they maneuvered the political stage, but their trajectories have moved in parallel: from periphery to center, local to global, and as cultural icons capable of commanding audiences from DAVOS to the EuroCup (UEFA Football Championship). These transformations were shaped by postcommunist legal cultures, geopolitics, commercial campaigns, and celebrity production specific to CEE. Initial scholarly debates focused on these groups’ claims to feminism. Some saw in them a redefining historical context for women by way of circumscribing social agency in the rejection of binary gender roles (Rubchak 2012; Sperling 2015; Zychowicz 2011). Others pointed to their socioeconomic origins, noting the demographics of the two groups as non-​representative of any social majority (Dmytriyeva 2011; Gapova 2014; 172

173

Pussy Riot and FEMEN

Kis 2011; Phillips 2008). Studies on the role of the media in FEMEN (Reestorff 2014) pointed to both hyper-​sexualization and demonization of sex-​work in undermining clear aims (Thomas and Stehling 2016). After FEMEN’s move abroad in 2012, the group’s adoption of “sextremism,” in their depictions of Muslim women caused a backlash. FEMEN earned severe critique from women-​of-​color feminist scholars who claimed the group overly universalized oppression and ignored cultural differences (Al Mahadin 2015; Eileraas 2014; Salime 2014; Savage 2013; Weiner 2017). Attention in global mass media pivoted around the question of whether or not naked breasts could lead to feminist agency. Scholars of Ukraine have tended to agree that the visibility around feminism that the group introduced was, initially, highly valuable in local terms (Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2012; Tchermalykh 2012, 2014), even if their protests had mixed results or led to unexpected outcomes in the inconsistency of their reception (Martsenyuk 2019). Ukrainian feminist cultural figures, often working across the Ukraine–​Russia border, and in Europe, expressed a similar stance, though also underlined their opinion that the West had given too much credit to these groups’ significance for politics, and that the celebrity scale of FEMEN and Pussy Riot had somewhat muffled or even silenced platforms of support for the wider art-​activist community (Briukhovetska 2016; Dmytryk 2016). Assessments of gender-​based protest in CEE by scholars in the wake of the Pussy Riot trial in 2012, tended to focus on the emergence of new legal cultures that they argue would, over time, have lasting impacts across the region (Bernstein 2014; Borenstein 2018; Johnson 2014; Kayiatos 2013). Where FEMEN and Pussy Riot were criticized for being inauthentic as feminist movements, some pointed to this charge as one often leveraged against the radical feminine presence in politics, and more generally to devalue non-​verbal and performative forms of political expression (Tchermalykh 2019). These studies converge with other scholars working specifically on gender in the CEE region. Some link Pussy Riot and FEMEN’s art activism in the 2000s to new civic vocabularies for dissent and its shaping of prior understandings of women’s movements in East–​West exchanges (Rubchak 2012; Sanborn and Timm 2016) that emerged from postcolonial theory (Chernetsky 2007; Mohanty 2013), and which complicate how we understand gender in light of rising authoritarianism and nationalism in CEE today (Puar 2017; Smith-​Prei and Stehle 2016; Wiedlack 2014, 2015; Zychowicz 2020).

Design and strategies Initially, Pussy Riot—​an acephalous and anonymous collective of radical performance artists—​was genealogically linked to the early post-​Soviet experiments practiced within the muscovite artistic and political underground by such (predominantly male) performers as Brenner, Ter-​Oganyan, Kulik, Voina group, and the poet Prigov (Obukhova 2014). The group reached global notoriety after 2012, becoming an international cause celebre: the Pussy Riot as we know it today was produced by close encounters with the Russian criminal justice system. On February 21, 2012, five members of Pussy Riot attempted to stage a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, but were quickly stopped by church security officials. The collective then released a music video, combined with prior footage, entitled, “Punk Prayer—​ Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” On March 3, 2012, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Yekaterina Samutsevich was arrested two weeks 173

174

Jessica Zychowicz and Nataliya Tchermalykh

later. All three members were held until their trial in July 2012, when they were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. Samutsevich appealed and was freed on probation, but Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sent to serve time in separate women’s detention facilities. In early November 2012, prosecutors appealed to Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow under “anti-​extremism” to ban several Pussy Riot videos, including the video of the group’s “Punk Prayer.” The court added the videos to the Federal List of Extremist Materials maintained by the Ministry of Justice, making it a criminal offense to disseminate them by any means within the Russian Federation. On June 30, 2013, Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law imposing jail terms and fines for “any insult to people’s religious feelings.” Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were amnestied after 21 months on December 23, 2013. In 2014, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova brought a suit addressing their arrest and detention to the European Court of Human Rights. FEMEN is a self-​proclaimed feminist group founded in Khmelnytskyi in 2008. Their demonstrations initially took place on public squares in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, but the group became known internationally through social media for their actions, mostly topless, orchestrated as performances addressing sex work and women’s rights. They later expanded their public posturing to include commentary on other issues, including anti-​corruption, censorship, and the separation between church and state. The greatest number and frequency of their actions were realized between 2008 and 2013, after which they were forced out of Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested by the police several times during this period, but were usually held for only a short amount of time and released on relatively minor charges. Seven months before Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer,” FEMEN had staged an action at the same Moscow cathedral, yelling a near-​identical slogan “God chase away the King!” but were not prosecuted. Shifting their bodies between physical sites and virtual settings, FEMEN’s strategy and design afforded the spectacle of a dystopian totalitarianism in which patriarchy and annihilation appeared as one and the same. Their overtures to totalitarianism parody authoritarianism through hyperbole and humor. In some ways, this is the same strategy employed in earlier happenings that claimed to be antipolitical and sought to deconstruct communist rhetoric (Kenney 2002). Artistic protest entails a rich history in CEE, where art and artistic communities have often challenged regimes of injustice. Polish art critic Piotr Piotrowski (2012) has termed this tendency in postwar Poland, Ukraine, and Russia “agoraphilia,” describing public anxiety around the borderline between art and politics. In these instances, an artist acts upon a deeper desire: “to perform critical and design functions for the sake of and within the social space” (Piotrowski 2012, 7). For both FEMEN and Pussy Riot, this is achieved through a strategy of public appearance that is marked by disruptive, transgressive performances in locations of significant symbolic value. Scholars of feminism working at the intersection of gender and culture in the region in the 1990s noted similar strategies rooted in performance and public space (Holmgren and Goscilo 1996). FEMEN and Pussy Riot collapse the border between politics and art; for scholars and others, their relationship with their audiences, including law enforcement, has been controversial.

Common roots, diverging routes On the day of Pussy Riot’s conviction, FEMEN member Inna Shevchenko used a chainsaw to cut down a four-​meter wooden cross near Kyiv’s central square in protest against 174

175

Pussy Riot and FEMEN

the incarceration of Pussy Riot. The public, including Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, condemned the act, and a criminal case was filed against Shevchenko under Part 2 of Article 296 (hooliganism) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The destruction of the cross in Kyiv took place on the tailwind of Pussy Riot’s globalization: both produced unprecedented events in global digital media for how oppositional politics are marketed across borders in the information economy (Kennedy 2014; Mouffe 2013; Zychowicz 2015). Inna Shevchenko, claiming she had faced threats from security services after sawing down the cross in Kyiv in support of Pussy Riot, left Ukraine and was granted political asylum in France, where she led FEMEN’s new, global phase. The arrest of Pussy Riot increased their visibility both on the Russian and international stages. For FEMEN, emigration from Ukraine presented itself as the only solution for continuing their movement. Whereas Pussy Riot became assimilated into the western liberal public, the nudity of FEMEN prevented them from fully mainstreaming into international icons (Zychowicz 2020). Where Pussy Riot had been publicly tried and incarcerated, their court case signaled increasing restrictions around citizen’s rights and revealed deeper divides in Russian society (Gessen 2014; Lomasko 2016), FEMEN had not; and although FEMEN’s formula of nude radicalism had been too much for local audiences to accept or for the Ukrainian authorities to condemn in any serious way, their catalyzing of global mass media worked to maximize the visibility of both groups. After FEMEN left Kyiv in 2013 they became émigrés who, in attempting to export and utilize the same tactics that they had applied to the postcommunist context in their new liberal host society, failed; they were less easily recognized in western liberal definitions of injustice, which differ from the Ukrainian context they were addressing. By contrast, Pussy Riot leveraged approval from western governments at odds with Putin, even while choosing to remain in the Russian Federation, where they are human rights activists. Upon release, Pussy Riot members Alyokhina, Tolokonnikova, and her former husband Pyotr Verzilov founded their own legal organization, Zona Prava, dedicated to carceral ill-​treatment and media censorship (Tolokonnikova 2018).

From postcommunist post-​secularism to “sextremism” Both FEMEN and Pussy Riot utilized religious sites and symbols for their performances, and stimulated fierce reactions from authorities, as well as from religious activists. Early on, near 2011, FEMEN adopted “sextremism,” a strategy of provocation involving painting controversial slogans onto bare skin in black war paint: “Our God is a Woman! Our Mission is Perfect! Our Weapons are bare breasts! FEMEN is born and sextremism is launched!” (FEMEN and Ackerman 2018). Their first action as FEMEN France was a “Naked Jihad!” at the Eiffel Tower with French-​Arab feminist Safia Lebdi. FEMEN was criticized as overidentifying with Islamic women (Al Mahadin 2015) and a group called Muslim Women Against Femen formed (Facebook Group). FEMEN’s imagery is rooted in a post-​Soviet form of challenging a church-​state bond, where deeply entrenched boundaries, constants, and definitions of the religious and the secular orders fluctuate against the backdrop of ecclesiastical movements increasingly affiliated with governments (Uzlaner 2014). This wide spectrum of postmodern radicalism blurs gender, but also religion and race. For a social movement, such polysemy can be coopted, so mixing signs/​signifiers with nudity does not easily integrate into liberal political norms. FEMEN’s exaggerated radical statements are more ambivalent than the anti-​clerical and anti-​authoritarian declarations of Pussy Riot. For example, former 175

176

Jessica Zychowicz and Nataliya Tchermalykh

FEMEN Brazil leader Sara Winter in 2020 reversed into an “antifeminist” and started “300 do Brasil,” a far-​right group. This ambivalence is openly acknowledged by Yelena Myshko, former leader of FEMEN Amsterdam. Reflecting on sextremism, she holds that it afforded “internal power hierarchies” that she felt ran counter to the “inclusiveness” she believes is a prerequisite to a successful feminist movement, and why she left the group (Myshko 2018). By contrast, Pussy Riot’s case was widely validated by western liberal audiences. The group successfully increased their political reach (but not artistic—​the sequence of events distanced them from other figures of the Russian opposition on the cultural scene). Nonetheless, Pussy Riot declared at the European Human Rights Court that they had defended themselves from Russia in 2012, not as a representative set of laws or culpable party, but Russia as an entity with Putin as an authoritarian President (Tolokonnikova 2012). Pussy Riot’s stage on the public square, as with FEMEN, became characterized by the reversibility of positions of the accusers and the accused. This reversibility is characteristic of the governing structures in oligarchy that preserve authoritarianism in Ukraine and Russia (Way and Levitsky 2010). The absence of FEMEN from the events on Kyiv’s Maidan in 2013–​2014 sealed their exile from Ukraine. Around this same time, western governments’ recognition of Pussy Riot as symbols of anti-​Putinism further solidified the group’s shift away from protest politics toward pop performance; this was looked upon by their critics as courting commercial interests over fighting for feminism. Pussy Riot’s anonymous members circulated a letter on the Internet in 2013 stating their official split with the two convicted members. This announcement coincided with Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina—​as Pussy Riot—​ launching their creative careers by going on a global tour. Nonetheless, the pair would maintain their political views. They protested during the Sochi Olympics in Russia just as state violence was unleashed on the crowds in the revolution then taking place on Kyiv’s Maidan.

A moving vector with no endpoint On July 17, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued an announcement with its final decision on Pussy Riot, described as a feminist punk band that gives spontaneous public performances dressed in brightly colored balaclavas. ECHR ruled that “a reaction” to the defendants’ performance on account of their “breaching the rules of conduct in a place of religious worship” might have been warranted, yet decided two years of imprisonment to be disproportionate, aside from the violation of four articles of the European Convention (Art. 3, 5, 6 and 10). In July of 2018, both FEMEN and Pussy Riot suddenly reappeared in western media. The first instance was on July 15, 2018, during the EuroCup Football Championship match between France and Croatia in Moscow. Four members of Pussy Riot disrupted the game wearing Russian police uniforms, triggering a minute-​long delay on the field in front of many global cameras. Pussy Riot publicly claimed full responsibility. They called their performance “Policeman Enters the Game” and issued a statement calling for the release of political prisoners in Russia, including Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and opponent of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, sentenced in 2015 to 20 years. Sentsov began a hunger strike in May 2018 and only after international protest was released in late 2019 (Human Rights Watch 2019).

176

177

Pussy Riot and FEMEN

In a version of streaking—​nudist intrusion into public spaces—​members of Pussy Riot readapted FEMEN’s strategy to their own devices by storming the soccer field, but did so fully clothed in an ironic “drag” uniform of the disciplinarians of civil disobedience: street police. By disrupting the rules of the playing field, they also temporarily inverted the social hierarchy: inserting feminism into a mass-​media event televised and pitched for male soccer fans’ global consumption. The four Pussy Riot demonstrators were consequently charged with “violation of spectators’ rights and illegal display of official symbols” (Interfax 2018). These bold protesters could be seen storming the field on screens in Paris, but not in Ukraine, where all traces of the action had been cut, replaced with commercial advertisements, and then filtered out of all recordings.

Conclusions The misbehaving female body in public is a trope for attaching and signifying transgression in broader ideological frameworks. This trope has proven durable and multilateral, and when viewed today, in the context of the history of transatlantic women’s and feminist organizations, unprecedented in its power, afforded by the instantaneous transmission of information. This development has shifted the demands voiced by activists in the periphery of the former “Second World” to the center of international affairs. During the later 2000s Ukraine witnessed a vibrant outpouring of protest by women and others calling for a range of demands tied to gender. Two contradictory tendencies positioned the Russian and Ukrainian public spheres in opposition to one another. After the pro-​Russian candidate Yanukovych won the presidential election in 2008, public protests were, in comparison with Russia, mostly tolerated in Ukraine. At this time the feminist protest group FEMEN realized numerous demonstrations, reaching the greatest frequency from 2008 to 2012, yet only one led to criminal procedure in Ukraine. This caused the group to emigrate to France. Bearing political agency—​as social movements—​Pussy Riot and FEMEN evidence dual roots in western liberalism and the postcommunist sociolegal landscape. Initially, the arrest and trial of Pussy Riot was a case dealing with the Russian context and its codes, which shared aspects with Ukraine, namely, the corrupted alliance between the Orthodox Church and Putin’s regime. In Russia, the trial of young and unknown punk artists resulted in harsher punishment. When each of these groups first exported themselves in English and other language media, they were interpreted and presented as anti-​ Putin protest scandals. By contrast, the postcommunist mainstream largely condemned them as imprisoned princesses and celebrities, fixating on the young women’s bodies and ambitions to explore artistic and music careers. Putin’s character in his authoritarian performances of masculinity (Sperling 2015) added to this story an Iron Dictator, evoking familiar depictions of the USSR as an Empire of Evil easily recognizable, though divergently packaged, for audiences on both sides of the former iron curtain. Both FEMEN and Pussy Riot found audiences in their own countries and abroad, but the outcomes of each were diametrically opposed. The western liberal public expressed outrage and concern at the behavior of conservative Russian authorities; this reinforced the symbolic capital of Mariya Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot within their own national context, maximizing their visibility in the West, which then facilitated their ability to position themselves as human rights defenders. The group FEMEN—​scandalous in the West for their nudity and “sextremism”—​culminated in

177

178

Jessica Zychowicz and Nataliya Tchermalykh

the polar opposite outcome: forced to leave Ukraine and emigrate to France, they were not accepted by many feminists abroad. By contrast, Pussy Riot was positively received, marked in statements by the UNHCR, EU, and the US State Department issued against their arrest and subsequent crackdown on protest in the Russian Federation. Ten days after the Pussy Riot protest on a soccer field in 2018 at the UEFA Football Championship in Moscow, another critical event occurred that further marks the evolution of both groups. On July 25, 2018, Oksana Shachko, a visual artist and one of the founding members of FEMEN, committed suicide (Johnson 2019). Only one month earlier, on June 11, she had protested at the French Ministry of Justice on behalf of the trial of Russian activist Petr Pavlensky. Marie-​Francoise Verdun, a former French judge, joined the group of lawyers, activists, and artists. Russian and Ukrainian émigrés also stood together, despite the ongoing war between their home countries. All held a photograph of Pavlensky with the statement: “An artist in prison is a graveyard for culture.” Few knew that Shachko, who had become a recognized artist in Paris for her paintings of Orthodox icons, was silently suffering from depression. In contrast to FEMEN’s performances and the persecution that members endured, there was nothing ironic about this second act of resistance. There remains a need for more critical analysis of FEMEN, Pussy Riot, and so many unknown feminists beyond them—​who have boldly challenged how we approach feminism today, and by extension, global vocabularies for dissent from gendered oppression and authoritarianism in the early decades of the 21st century.

References Al-​Mahadin, Salam. 2015. “Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Making (Non)sense of FEMEN’s Ethico-​Aesthetics in the Arab World.” Women’s Studies in Communication 38 (4): 388–​392. Bernstein, Anya. 2014. “Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post-​ Soviet Art Wars.” Public Culture 26 (3): 419–​448. Borenstein, Eliot. 2018. “Vystuplenie i nakazanie: Performing Political Protest in Putin’s Russia (Voina, Pussy Riot, Pavlensky).” In Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action, edited by Julie A. Buckler, Julie A. Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Briukhovetska, Oksana. 2016. “What in Me is Feminine?” Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal 38: 20–​28. Chernetsky, Vitaly. 2007. Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Dmytriyeva, Maria. 2011. “Femen Na Tli Hrudej.” Krytyka 15 (1–​2): 20–​23. Dmytryk, Olenka. 2016. “‘I’m a Feminist, Therefore …’: The Art of Gender and Sexual Dissent in 2010s Ukraine and Russia.” Journal of Soviet and Post-​Soviet Politics and Society 2 (1): 147–​180. Eileraas, Karina. 2014. “Sex(t)ing Revolution, Femen-​ izing the Public Square: Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, Nude Protest, and Transnational Feminist Body Politics.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(40): 40–​52. FEMEN, and Galia Ackerman. 2018. Manifeste Femen: Analyse de leurs combats (Dépasser le patriarcat). Paris: Les Èditions Utopia. Gapova, Elena. 2014. “Becoming Visible in the Digital Age: The Class and Media Dimensions of the Pussy Riot Affair.” Feminist Media Studies 15 (1): 1–​18. Gessen, Masha. 2014. Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. London: Granta. Holmgren, Beth and Helena Goscilo, eds. 1996. Russia, Women, Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Human Rights Watch/​ Gorbunova, Yulia. 2019. “Russia/​ Ukraine Prisoner Exchange Includes Release of Oleg Sentsov.” September 7. www.hrw.org/​news/​2019/​09/​07/​russia/​ukraine-​prisonerexchange-​includes-​release-​oleg-​sentsov. Interfax/​Ellingworth, James. 2018. “Pussy Riot Upstages Putin with Protest that Halts World Cup.” AP NEWS. https://​apnews.com/​7f4fde50caf8462d8bfa6038ef56ffa8/​Pussy-​Riot-​%20%20 upstages-​Putin-​with-​protest-​that-​halts-​World-​Cup.

178

179

Pussy Riot and FEMEN Johnson, Janet E. 2014. “Pussy Riot as a Feminist Project: Russia’s Gendered Informal Politics.” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 42 (4): 583–​590. –​–​–​–. 2019. “In Memoriam: Oksana Shachko (1987–​2018), co-​founder of FEMEN.” Slavic Review 78 (1): 318–​323. Kayiatos, Anastasia. 2013. “Penile Servitude and the Police State.” NYU Jordan Center News, November 20. http://​jordanrussiacenter.org/​news/​penile-​servitude-​police-​state/​. Kennedy, Michael D. 2014. Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kenney, Padraic. 2002. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Kis, Oksana. 2011. “Restoring the Broken Continuity: Women’s History in Post-​Soviet Ukraine.” ASPASIA: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southern European Women’s and Gender History (6): 171–​183. Lomasko, Victoria. 2016. Other Russias, translated by Thomas Campbell. New York: N+1. Martsenyuk, Tamara. 2019. Chomu ne varto boiatysia feminyzmu, edited by Oksana Kis’. Kyiv: Komora. Mayerchyk, Maria and Olga Plakhotnik. 2012. “Radykalni Femen i Novyj Zhinochyj Aktyvizm.” Krytyka 11 (11–​12): 7–​10. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2013. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs 38 (4): 967–​991. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso Books. Myshko, Yelena. 2018. “A Little Story about Big Issues: An Introspective Account of FEMEN.” MA Thesis, Linköping University. Obukhova, Aleksandra. 2014. Performans’ v Rossiji 1910–​ 2010: kartografii istorii. Catalogue. Artguide Editions OOO. Phillips, Sarah D. 2008. Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Piotrowski, Piotr. 2012. Art and Democracy in Post-​ Communist Europe. Translated by Anna Bryzski. London: Reaktion Books. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reestorff, C. M. 2014. “Mediatised Affective Activism: The Activist Imaginary and the Topless Body in the Femen Movement,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20 (4): 478–​495. Rubchak, Marian J. 2012. “Seeing Pink: Searching for Gender Justice through Opposition in Ukraine.” European Journal of Women's Studies 19 (1): 55–​72. Salime, Zakia. 2014. “New Feminism as Personal Revolutions: Microrebellious Bodies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40 (1): 14–​20. Sanborn, Joshua A. and Annette F. Timm. 2016. Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day. London: Bloomsbury Press. Savage, Ellena. 2013. “Naked Jihad Sacrifices Feminism to Racism.” Eureka Street 23 (7): 30–​31. Smith-​Prei, Carrie and Maria Stehle. 2016. Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism. London: McGill-​Queen's University Press. Sperling, Valerie. 2015. Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tchermalykh, Nataliya. 2012. “Feministychnyj analiz politychnoyi amalgamy mizh radykal'nymy I pomirkovanymy nacionalistamy ta relihijnymy pravymy.” Gender, relihiya i nacionalizm v ukraini. Kyiv and Warsaw: Heinrich-​Böll-​Stiftung. –​–​–​–. 2014. “Will Pussy Riot Dance on #Euromaidan? New Dissidence, Civic Disobedience, and Cyber-​Mythology in the Post-​Soviet Context.” Religion & Gender 4 (2): 215–​220. –​–​–​–. 2019. “Making Art, Breaking Law: Exploring Creative Dissent and Cause Lawyering in Contemporary Russia.” PhD diss., The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. Thomas, Tanja and Miriam Stehling. 2016. “The Communicative Construction of FEMEN: Naked Protest in Self-​mediation and German Media Discourse.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (1): 86–​100. Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda. 2012. Pussy Riot: Chto Eto Bylo? Edited by E. Buzev. Moscow: Algoritim.

179

180

Jessica Zychowicz and Nataliya Tchermalykh Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda. 2018. Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins Publishers. Uzlaner, Dmitry. 2014. “The Pussy Riot Case and the Peculiarities of Russian Post-​secularism.” State, Religion and Church 1 (1). Way, Lucan A. and Steven Levitsky. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weiner, Scott. 2017. “Objectification as Negotiation: Re-​ examining the Agency of Targets.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19 (2): 168–​182. Wiedlack, Katharina Maria. 2014. “ ‘Free Pussy Riot!’ and Riot Grrrlsm: International Solidarity, or the Incorporation of the ‘Eastern Other’ into North/​Western Discourses?” LES Online 6 (1). –​–​–​–. 2015. Queer-​Feminist Punk: An Antisocial History. Vienna: Zaglossus. Zychowicz, Jessica. 2011. “Two Bad Words: FEMEN and Feminism in Independent Ukraine.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 29 (2): 215–​227. –​–​–​–. 2015. “Performing Protest: FEMEN, Nation and the Marketing of Resistance.” Journal of Ukrainian Politics and Society 1 (1): 79–​104. –​–​–​–. 2020. Superfluous Women: Feminism, Art, and Revolution in Twenty-​First Century Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

180

181

PART III

Constructions of gender in different ideologies

182

183

INTRODUCTION Constructions of gender in different ideologies Mara Lazda, Janet Elise Johnson, and Katalin Fábián

The chapters in Part III analyze how Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) has experienced gendered ideological shifts since the beginning of the 20th century. They show how seemingly disparate and often competing ideologies relied on constructions of gender in creating and maintaining power hierarchies favorable to them. Proponents of nationalist ideologies in CEE&E have sought power by endorsing a gendered and overwhelmingly heteronormative us versus them discourse. Regardless whether this unity was constructed under the framework of ethnicity, religion, or class, or whether ideologies emerged in the multi-​ethnic Habsburg Monarchy or the Ottoman, Russian, or Soviet empires, nationalists incorporated gender into their constructions of national unity. Discourses and policies prescribed women’s and men’s roles, often relegating women to the role of mothers and keepers of the nation’s culture, men as armed defenders. The diversity of the region and variations of CEE&E nationalisms challenge scholars’ assumptions of these gendered ideals as homogenous. In the Habsburg Monarchy, nationalists were more likely to accept the fluidity of masculinity, tolerating homosexuality expressed behind closed doors, but only for majority ethnicities. Even where national idealizations of masculinity and femininity seemed hegemonic—​such as in 20th-​century Russia and the Soviet Union—​they were periodically challenged, defended, and reconstructed. Fascism capitalized on gendered, exclusive, and racist definitions of the nation. Various organizations embraced fascism—​such as the Iron Guard (Romania), Ustaša (Croatia), and Arrow Cross (Hungary)—​at times in collaboration, but also in competition, with German Nazism. Fascists co-​opted conservative nationalist idealization of women’s maternal roles in a way that suggested to women that their domestic work was revered and a source of empowerment. They framed this idealization of women as mothers in a context of considerable violence, which some women saw as an opportunity to challenge patriarchal norms, even within fascism. Socialists and communists defined themselves in opposition to gendered fascist and nationalist ideologies, charting a path to what they called the emancipation of women. Socialist and communist propaganda reconstructed gender in the “new socialist man” and the “new socialist woman” as workers for the state; policies linked these gender

183

184

Mara Lazda et al.

conceptualizations to tangible support for housing, childcare, healthcare, pensions, and education. Individual authors in this Handbook chose how to use the terms “socialism” or “communism,” whether to reflect periodizations of communism, the self-​designation of regimes, and scholars’ debates. Much of existing scholarship on socialism and communism has been focused on ascertaining the intentions or success of socialism and communism as agents of gender equality, concerned with the contradictions between ideals and results. The chapters in Part III suggest that this dichotomized approach overlooks the complexities within socialist and communist ideas of women’s roles and the complicated relationship women leaders such as Alexandra Kollontai had to feminism. Ethnicity and race intersected with socialist and communist understandings of gender and class. Romani women in CEE were subjected to racialized antinatalist policies while women of majority ethnicities were the targets of pronatalist programs. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, Soviet efforts to emancipate women reflected Orientalist and imperialist priorities; efforts that included education initiatives as well as unveiling campaigns claimed to free Central Asian women from seclusion but in fact reinforced the idealization of Russian women. The history of the criminalization and decriminalization of homosexuality in the region further underscores the diversity belying gendered ideological conformity. The last section in this Part examines how leaders of democracies partially incorporated gender in representative governments. In the interwar democracies, leaders included policies of gender equality as signifiers of their legitimacy as new republics, as much of the region introduced universal suffrage. Postcommunist democratic leaders have relied on explicitly gendered language mixed with policies of gender equality to separate themselves from previous regimes, provide evidence of westernness, as well as to create or reestablish national identity based on historical trajectories. In the last decade, regimes that appeared democratic and gender progressive have moved toward authoritarianism, embracing an illiberal populism that has derided gender equality and embraced anti-​ genderism. In its campaigns against gender equality policies, LGBTQ rights, and even the very term “gender,” anti-​genderism provides evidence of the enduring influence of religious institutions in claiming cultural and social norms as well as policies. Taken together, the chapters in this Part expose fissures within gendered ideologies while revealing the interactions and overlaps in their constructions of gender and sexuality. While the implementation of gendered ideologies brought diverse results, it also points to transnational and transregional commonalities of exclusion (antisemitism and xenophobia) and inclusion (membership in Europe and democracy).

184

185

Nationalism

186

187

18 NATIONALISM AND SEXUALITY IN CENTRAL-​ EASTERN EUROPE Anita Kurimay

As sexuality and gender have become more widely used categories of analysis, scholars have illustrated the centrality sexuality played for nationalist visions in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE). In particular, histories of prostitution, eugenics, and homo and non-​ normative sexuality have demonstrated how within the multi-​ethnic, multi-​lingual, and multi-​denominational context of CEE, heteronormative sexuality and strict prescriptive gender norms became cornerstones of ethnic nationalism. Nationalists—​initially urban intellectuals and politicians—​ saw ethnic purity, sexual health, and sexual practices, that is, who was having sexual relations with whom, as existential questions during the interwar years. Those nationalist visions and approaches to sexuality, similarly to nationalism more broadly, were highly gendered. However, what made the issue of prostitution and discussions of sexual morality so crucial for nationalism in the context of CEE, was the region’s remarkable ethnic diversity. Nationalists used discourses on sexuality to promote their idealized conceptualization of the nation, which became increasingly exclusionary. The combination of the CEE region’s ethnic heterogeneity along with a cultural understanding of male sexuality as rather flexible, resulted in a situation where nationalists embraced the protection and scrutiny of female sexuality as paramount for national survival, while male sexuality, with the exception of Jews and ethnic minorities, most notably the Roma, was left relatively alone. This chapter focuses on discourses in nations of the former Habsburg Monarchy, and Russian, German, and Ottoman Empires, particularly in Hungary and Romania in the interwar period. Nationalists in CEE often approached sexuality in practice—​through policing, laws, or policies—​in complex and contradictory ways. Scholarship highlights the region’s heterogeneous experience of the periodic coexistence of nationalism with non-​normative sexual practices and identities. Historicizing the relationship between nationalism and sexuality helps frame the ongoing theoretical debate about the possibility of approaching sexuality in CEE on its own terms, rather than, as most scholars do, applying the dominant western (Anglo-​American) theoretical framework of sexualities. Queer studies scholars of the region have produced a substantial critique of the dominant western and postcolonial models in conceptualizing sexual politics in CEE. Kulpa and Mizilienska’s edited volume (2011) is a testament to this new direction in scholarship 187

188

Anita Kurimay

that, by conceptualizing the region as a place of “in-​betweenness,” offers insight on how to think about sexual politics in CEE on its own terms.

Strange but magnetic bedfellows: Prostitution and nationalism Scholars on the history of prostitution were pioneers in bringing attention to the politics of sexuality in relation to nationalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These works (Forrai 2008, 2018; Stauter-​Halsted 2015; Stauter-​Halsted and Wingfield 2011; Wingfield 2017) established that upholding patriarchy and controlling female sexuality (as opposed to male sexuality) were paramount for nationalism and nation building. In the second half of the 19th century, nationalism emerged as the most important political ideology that was embraced within ethnic communities—​including Czech, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, and Croatian—​living at the time under German, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian rule (Judson and Rozenblit 2005). Over time, the more exclusive form of ethnic nationalism became dominant over civic understandings. Intellectuals, writers, and the popular press in each respective language across the Habsburg Monarchy portrayed the nation as a “national brotherhood” (Maxwell 2007, 413) while touting that the nation’s existence depended on female sexuality. The same processes that fostered the spread of a gendered national consciousness—​the growth of urbanization, the popular press, literacy, and mass media, along with generally liberal attitudes toward male sexuality—​also fueled a booming urban sexual culture especially in metropolises such as Vienna and Budapest. Growing attention to prostitution in popular and academic press marked the beginning of a sustained public discourse around sexuality in fin de siècle CEE, responding both to the visibility of prostitution in cities across the Habsburg Empire and the rapidly rising rates of sexually transmitted illnesses (see Wingfield, Chapter 28 in this Handbook). The topic of prostitution provided a platform for different articulations of the nation. There were those who saw prostitution as a representation of sexual freedom and a vibrant sexual culture. Since these nationalists understood ethnicity in terms of linguistic, not innate biological or racial terms, cosmopolitan sex culture could act as a melting pot and as an agent of national cohesiveness (Kurimay 2019). This positive view of prostitution was echoed by municipal authorities and lawmakers who at first considered prostitution as a public health issue, not a moral or national one. However, for a growing number of nationalists (initially urban intellectuals, writers, and politicians) an antithetical view emerged. These nationalists imagined their nation in primarily ethnic terms (where membership to the nation was predicated on a dominant ethnicity) linked to gendered ideas of moral purity and biology. They argued that prostitution represented society’s (and the nation’s) moral decay and was antithetical to nationalist values of female chastity and male honor. There was an important gendered difference within nationalist ideas about prostitution. Scholars have found that the same nationalists who prescribed chastity and modesty for women as the guardians of public and private morality of the nation, held men to different standards (Kurimay 2020; Stauter-​Halsted 2015; Stauter-​Halsted and Wingfield 2011; Turda and Weindling 2007; Wingfield 2017). The boundaries of respectable male behavior were more expansive and far more porous than those of acceptable female behavior. While men represented Austria’s, Hungary’s, or Poland’s strength after World War I by being virile and honorable, they also took advantage of flexible understandings of male respectability. 188

189

Nationalism and sexuality in CEE

In Hungary, the male gentry (nobility without land) enjoyed romanticized admiration as bastions of patriotism linked to chivalry. In the eyes of contemporary nationalists, the masculinity of the Hungarian gentry also manifested itself in lavish spending, decadent parties, and a bohemian lifestyle (Gyáni and Kövér 1998). A number of cultural assumptions about maleness prevailed, including the association of male virility with sexual prowess. This meant that nationalists—​along with the rest of society—​considered female prostitution and public (hetero)sexual culture “necessary evils.” For many men of the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy who could afford it, visiting prostitutes was a coming-​of-​age experience and an expected expression of masculinity. In contrast, women engaging in casual sex committed a capital sin and merely the suspicion of having an inappropriate male friend could ruin a woman’s respectability. At the time when only men and prostitutes were considered to possess a sexual drive, sexuality and female respectability were mutually exclusive. Such marked differences between the cultural norms for the sexes, which were not unique to the Monarchy, continued into the 20th century even as nationalists, along with social critics, politicians, and particularly religious institutions, increasingly demanded moral purity for both sexes (Maxwell 2015; Szegedi 2015a). The ethnic heterogeneity of CEE, however, shaped the discussion of prostitution and sexual morality in particular ways. Discussions about the sexual ethics of prostitution became a vehicle for nationalists to define who did and did not belong. For nationalists who embraced ethnic and moral purity as foundations for the nation, sexuality as a private and public performance became an important means to delineate who was worthy of membership of the nation. Nationalists across CEE glorified military masculinity for men and female reproductive sexuality for women for the creation of homogenous ethnic communities. Newspaper accounts that boasted about the superior sexual virtues of one’s own populace (i.e., Austrian, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian) while blaming “foreign” (the non-​dominant ethnic) sexualities for various social ills including prostitution are illustrious examples of what constituted sexual nationalism. By the turn of the 20th century, sexual stereotyping in the context of prostitution increasingly reflected ethnic stereotypes and helped to reinforce an exclusionary form of nationalism (Maxwell 2005; Stauter-​Halsted 2015; Wingfield 2017).

Eugenics and the scientific legitimization of racialized nationalism Eugenic ideas about human development, remarkably adaptable within the diverse region, emerged as one of the driving forces shaping the relationship between the politics of sexuality and nationalism in CEE. While eugenic societies in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest were established prior to World War I, eugenic ideas did not become crucial agents shaping public and professional discourses until after the war, as Bucur (2002) argues in her study on Romania. The war, with the dismantling of four empires, resulted in the new CEE nation-​states of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, which continued to be ethnically diverse. The establishment of these new states, while grounded in the idea of national self-​determination of peoples and guaranteeing the rights of ethnic minorities, also strengthened ethnic nationalism that was increasingly based on biological constructions of ethnicity, as opposed to a linguistic or cultural one. In contrast to the pre-​World War I era, the governments of most of the new nation-​ states (with the exception of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), openly embraced ethnic 189

190

Anita Kurimay

nationalism. Eugenic ideas, claiming to be based on “biological laws of heredity” (Turda and Weindling 2007) legitimized exclusionary ethnic nationalist policies by the 1930s. By conceptualizing inter-​ethnic marriage and ethnic diversity as biologically dangerous, eugenics provided scientific legitimacy to ethnic nationalists, many of whom now were in national governments. In their eyes, the health of the ethnic majority was no longer simply a public health concern but, by the 1930s, was an issue of national security and survival (Kund 2016; Kurimay 2020; Szegedi 2015a; Turda and Weindling 2007; see Varsa, Chapter 23 in this Handbook). Embracing eugenics as a tool of modern scientific management of the nation, interwar nationalists believed in the right of the state to intervene in matters of sexuality. Whether it was to regenerate the nation, as in Hungary, which had lost territory (Kund 2016; Szegedi 2015b; Turda 2015), or to strengthen the nation, as in Romania, which now had more territory with a larger non-​ethnic Romanian population (Bucur 2002)—​eugenics, with its racist and ableist ideas, provided an important justification for controlling sexuality. In Czechoslovakia, eugenics had support too (even though it had not embraced ethnic nationalism), as a tool to bolster democratic order (Lišková 2018). At the same time as they aligned themselves with religion, nationalists turned to a distinctly modern “science” to create their nation, which meant a patriarchal family, restrained and monogamous procreative sexuality for both men and women, and high fertility rates. The strong alliance between interwar nationalists, nationalist governments, and organized religion or “Christian nationalism” (Hanebrink 2006) had a crucial impact on nationalist discourses in the popular and official press and on actual policies on sexuality across CEE. Like their counterparts elsewhere, interwar nationalists in CEE believed that control over women’s sexuality and reproductive choices was the prerequisite of a healthy and prosperous nation. Despite women gaining the right to vote for the first time across the new countries in CEE (although not in Romania), women’s rights to their bodies remained secondary to the nation’s interests. Hungary and Romania, both of which experienced sharp turns toward autocratic rule during the interwar years, enacted labor and public health regulations to protect women’s reproductive health. Both countries provided eugenics-​ based marriage counseling and education. In Romania, peasant women were instructed how to find ethnically pure and biologically healthy mates (Bucur 2002); in Hungary, marriage counseling became mandatory from 1939. These measures claimed to promote healthy births and marriages but also were intended to weed out the birth of ethnically, racially (first and foremost Jewish), and biologically undesirable children (Szegedi 2014). More recent scholarship introduces important nuances to discussions about the influence of eugenics on nationalists’ understanding and regulation of sexuality. First, these works show how sexuality and CEE eugenics were at once intimately connected to western eugenic ideas (in particular in the USA and Germany) and also shaped by local and national characteristics, including the co-​constitutive nature of eugenics and radical nationalism (Kund 2016; Turda 2015). Second, Lišková (2018) argues that nationalist supporters of eugenics (including government officials) throughout CEE did not necessarily introduce new regulations on sexuality, but rather relied on the stricter enforcement of existing laws such as the criminalization of abortion to further their eugenic goals. Third, by emphasizing the particular significance of ethnic nationalism, scholars make a distinction between the regulation of supposed hereditary or biological “defectives” and of ethnic and religious minorities. While sterilization and prevention of hereditary 190

191

Nationalism and sexuality in CEE

illnesses and anti-​Jewish and anti-​Roma regulations prohibiting marriage and criminalizing sexual relations were both propagated in public discourse, only prohibiting marriage and criminalizing sexual relations came to be introduced legislatively (Lišková 2018; Szegedi 2015b; Turda 2015). In contrast to Germany, and also to the USA, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland where eugenic sterilization was legalized during the interwar years, in CEE, no countries legalized involuntary eugenic sterilization. This is where the importance of nationalist alliance with religion in CEE becomes crucial. Nationalists who were aligned with the Catholic Church (Poland and Hungary), while inherently antisemitic and xenophobic, followed the Vatican’s lead and its pro-​life stance. Nationalists upheld a sexual double standard and strongly supported the prosecution of women for abortion and prostitution, which they perceived as a threat to the future of the nation, but the sterilization of “defectives” based on physical, mental, or (homo)sexual grounds was not made into law. The regional exception was Romania, where the Orthodox Church remained silent on abortion and sterilization (Turda 2009) and abortion was legalized for certain conditions deemed hereditary in 1936.

Nationalism and homosexuality Until recently, histories of non-​normative sexualities were absent in the historiography of CEE (Stauter-​Halsted and Wingfield 2011). Homophobia and sexism were present both within and outside CEE academic institutions. The perceived association of one’s intellectual subject with one’s sexual identity made writing on LGBTQI+ history challenging. The scarcity of sources has also limited work on same-​sex sexuality in CEE. The devastation of World War II destroyed many historical archives. Four decades of communist rule silenced, prosecuted, and used homosexuals as informants (communists destroyed evidence related to queer informants). Thanks to the digitalization of archives, dedicated scholars and their students, and some institutional support, the research and writing of queer history is more feasible. Scholars’ recent examinations of discourses around homosexuality in interwar CEE demonstrate how the exclusivity of nationalism in CEE was invested in (hetero)normative procreative sexuality (Cornwall 2012; Kurimay 2020; Takács 2018). These works also provide a more complex view of nationalism, suggesting how nationalists tolerated and even normalized certain forms of sexuality. Cornwall’s (2012) reconstruction of the life of Henz Rutha, the internationally known leader of the ethnic German youth movement in interwar Czechoslovakia, examines the co-​existence of male homosexuality and ethnic nationalism. Rutha, a supporter of ethnic superiority and exclusionary nationalism, also embraced certain forms of male same-​sexual desire. My study of interwar Budapest (Kurimay 2020) also finds that nationalism and homosexuality were not mutually exclusive, though for different reasons. In Hungary, a conservative Christian nation-​state that was founded on irredentist nationalism, with a powerful radical right, practiced tolerance toward certain forms of homosexuality. Paradoxically, at the same time as nationalists demanded control over sexual practices, homosexuality as a private sexual act between consenting adults of both sexes was tolerated. An analysis of discourses, along with judicial and police treatment of non-​normative sexuality in Hungary, during the first half of the 20th century brings to light the highly gendered, class-​based and racialized notion of sexual citizenship. Prior to World War I, the same understanding of flexible masculinity, which accepted prostitution as part of the male sexual world, also tolerated male homosexuality or queer sex. As long as adult 191

192

Anita Kurimay

men had the means to conduct their affairs in private, their sexual conduct was no concern for Hungarian nationalists. In the interwar years, even as they worked to assure what they saw as the country’s future strength (moral, physical, and numerical), and made heteronormative sexuality a prerequisite of citizenship (Kurimay 2020; Szegedi 2015b), they did so through a highly sexed and gendered policing and enactment of its ideals. Nationalists prescribed procreative monogamous sexuality for both men and women. But in practice, nationalists used the state to channel greater resources into policing female sexuality than male sexuality, including male homosexuality. Authorities did not ignore non-​normative male sexual behaviors in public, especially homosexual behaviors. During the interwar years the police increased the policing of sexual activities (anything from mutual masturbation to anal sex), between men under the criminal code of “crimes against nature” in force since 1878 (female homosexual acts were not criminalized anywhere in CEE). As in the case of eugenic policies, interwar nationalists relied on a stricter enforcement of an existing law. However, by differentiating between “authentic” homosexual men who engaged in homosexual activities in private because of their sexual inclinations, which they tolerated, and those “inauthentic” homosexual men who only engaged in, or were associated with homosexual activities for immoral reasons (i.e., blackmailing sexual partners), which was prosecuted, interwar nationalists showed tolerance toward “respectable homosexuals” (Kurimay 2020). These men were productive members of the community who conducted their affairs in private, which, considering the crowded living situations of the lower classes in Hungary, was a class privilege. “Authentic” homosexuals paradoxically benefitted from the increased presence of the state and the policing of sexuality. By focusing more closely and imposing harsher measures on the exploiters of so-​called authentic sexual otherness, while at the same time not prosecuting or ignoring consensual homosexual activity conducted in private, the Hungarian authorities—​with, the backing of nationalists—​protected and helped to normalize male homosexuality during the 1920s and 1930s.

Sexuality and nationalism through the lens of antisemitism The CEE history of antisemitism provides additional insights to the complex relationship between sexuality and nationalism. By the first decade of the 20th century in partitioned Poland (Stauter-​Halsted 2015), imperial Austria (Wingfield 2017), and Hungary (Kurimay 2020), the popular press’s focus on scandalizing prostitution and writing exposés on “white slavery” or the trafficking of women provided an important platform for antisemitism. The portrayal of pimps, madams, and traffickers as exclusively Jewish connected antisemitism and exclusive forms of nationalism. This focus also contributed to the erasure of the female agency of women who decided to enter the sex industry (Kurimay 2020; Stauter-​Halsted 2015; Wingfield 2017). In the context of interwar eugenics, the anti-​ Jewish laws shed further light on nationalists’ double standards of male and female sexuality. Inspired by Nazi racial laws and Hungarian eugenics arguing about the superiority of Hungarian “race,” by 1941, Hungarian nationalists codified Jewishness as a racial category rather than a religious belonging, and prohibited intermarriage between Hungarians and Jews (Kurimay 2020; Szegedi 2015b). The law that racialized Jewish people, also criminalized sexual relationships between Jewish men and “honorable” Hungarian women. In noted contrast to the initial Nazi racial laws, however, while the law prohibited sexual relationships 192

193

Nationalism and sexuality in CEE

between Jewish men and all non-​Jewish women living in Hungary, Hungarian men could have sexual relationships with Jewish women without punishment. The enacting of the Hungarian law of race defilement, along with the news coverage it received, brought all women, irrespective of their class, under scrutiny (Nagy 2015). Even simply being seen in the company of Jewish men threatened non-​Jewish Hungarian women’s moral and sexual respectability and could land them in court, resulting in hundreds of criminal cases annually in Budapest alone (Nagy 2015, 489). Permissiveness surrounding male sexual behavior was limited to those of the ethnic majority. My own work shows that while Hungarian men’s homosexual practices were of little concern for most nationalists, the sexual practice of Jewish men did not escape scrutiny (Kurimay 2020). This fact becomes particularly striking in a region where right-​ wing nationalism and aggressive antisemitic propaganda were decisive in influencing the conservative ruling elite and authorities in adopting anti-​Jewish laws and regulations (Hanebrink 2006). In sharp contrast, right-​wing nationalists were conspicuously silent about homosexuality, refraining from openly addressing or making homosexuals scapegoats for social ills. As long as people were deemed ethnically pure and conformed to other areas of the nationalist ideal, their (homo)sexual actions in private could be ignored.

Conclusions In matters of sex, the coexistence of secular eugenics, the strong alliance between organized religion, and increasingly racialized nationalism produced a particular set of regulations and had some counter-​intuitive effects. In upholding cultural assumptions about maleness that encompassed promiscuity, nationalists disproportionately focused on women and their bodies while they showed tolerance toward certain non-​normative male behaviors including homosexual behaviors. Believing that the state had the right to intervene in the sexual life of its female citizens and especially of ethnic minorities, interwar nationalists also chose to uphold the view that what happens in the bedroom of men, as long as it remains private, is no concern of nationalists or the state. The history of sexuality of CEE thus offers important insights to understanding the complex historical relationship between nationalist discourses, including silences, nationalist policies on sexuality, and lived experiences on the ground. The historical study of prostitution, eugenics, and homosexuality in the region also provides insights into the strong rejection by nationalists of sexual minorities in the present. With the accession of CEE countries to the European Union, symbolic fights over gender and sexuality emerged as defining features of 21st-​century nationalisms in the region (see Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook). While within nationalist discourses in Western Europe homosexuality and gender equality are upheld as beacons of European civilization (vis-​à-​vis the assumed cultural and religious value system of Muslim refugees and immigrants), for nationalists in CEE, homophobia and patriarchy are upheld as national virtues and signs of patriotism vis-​à-​vis assumed cultural imperialism of the EU, expressed in the form of the celebration of multiculturalism and gender and sexual equality (Moss 2014). Within this interpretation, homosexuality and gender are rejected not on religious or moral grounds but rather on presumed national (for instance Polish or Hungarian) cultural identity (Graff 2010). A different interpretation stresses the importance of the resurgence of religious nationalism and its role in CEE—​often amplified with US NGO support (such as the World Family Organization)—​in making homosexuality, 193

194

Anita Kurimay

along with “gender ideologies,” antithetical to Christian nationhood (Sremac and Ganzevoort 2015). Both of these interpretations are predicated on the belief that the visibility of homosexuals and queer people are a product of the post-​1989 democratic era. In turn, the belief that queers are western imports provides a convenient ideological foundation for the ongoing efforts to resist granting LGBTQ communities in CEE equal rights and recognition (Swimelar 2019). However, incorporating historical works that attest to the visible presence of homosexuals and the coexistence of homosexuality and nationalism in the interwar era introduces an important disruptor to perspectives on the relationship between homosexuality and nationalism that contend that homosexuality and nationalism in CEE are (and always were) incompatible (Sremac and Ganzevoort 2015). While both interwar and postsocialist nationalists prescribed to strictly heteronormative views, they were willing to accept homosexuality, especially within their own ranks, as long as it was confined to the bedroom. The example of the rehabilitation and unconditional embrace of Cécile Tormay (1875–​1937), celebrated interwar queer Hungarian writer, by the Orbán government is illustrative of this tendency (Kurimay 2016). In fact, by imposing silence around, and the lack of public engagement with, issues of their own members and protégés’ non-​normative sexuality in their approach to sexuality, 21st-​century Hungarian nationalists have followed in the footsteps of their interwar counterparts. It is first and foremost homosexuality as an act or identity in public that has been incompatible with nationalisms in CEE, past and present.

References Bucur, Maria. 2002. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cornwall, Mark. 2012. The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forrai, Judit. 2008. “Beautiful Girls’ Ugly Malady: Selected Passages from the History of Guilty Sex and Syphilis.” Orvosi Hetilap 149 (40): 1895–​1901. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Militarizált szex: katonák, prostitúció, nemi betegségek a Nagy Háborúban.” [“Militarized Sex: Soldiers, Prostitution, Venereal Diseases in the Great War”] Per Aspera Ad Astra 5 (2): 93–​114. Graff, Agnieszka. 2010. “Looking at Pictures of Gay Men: Political Uses of Homophobia in Contemporary Poland.” Public Culture 22 (3): 583–​603. Gyáni, Gábor and György Kövér. 1998. Magyarország Társadalomtörténete a Reformkortól a Második Világháborúig [Social history of Hungary from the reform era to World War II]. Tokyo: Osiris. Hanebrink, Paul. 2006. In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–​1944. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Judson, Pieter M. and Marsha L. Rozenblit, eds. 2005. Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Kulpa, Robert and Joanna Mizielinska, eds. 2011. De-​Centering Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate. Kund, Attila. 2016. “‘Duties for Her Race and Nation’: Scientistic Racist Views on Sexuality and Reproduction in 1920s Hungary.” Sexualities 19 (1–​2): 190–​210. Kurimay, Anita. 2016. “Interrogating the Historical Revisionism of the Hungarian Right: The Queer Case of Cécile Tormay.” East European Politics & Societies 30 (1): 10–​33. –​–​–​–​. 2019. “From the ‘Paris of Eastern Europe’ to the ‘Sinful City’: Imagining Sex in Fin-​de-​Siècle Budapest.” Conference paper. ASEEES. –​–​–​–​. 2020. Queer Budapest, 1873—​1961. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

194

195

Nationalism and sexuality in CEE Lišková, Katerina. 2018. Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxwell, Alexander. 2005. “Nationalizing Sexuality: Sexual Stereotypes in the Habsburg Empire.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (3): 266–​290. –​–​–​–​. 2007. “National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-​ Central Europe During the 19th Century.” Journal of Social History 41 (2): 413–​433. –​–​–​–​. 2015. “The Nation as a ‘Gentleman’s Agreement.’” Men and Masculinities 18 (5): 536–​558. Moss, Kevin. 2014. “Split Europe: Homonationalism and Homophobia in Croatia.” In LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe, edited by Phillip M. Ayoub and David Paternotte, 212–​232. London: Palgrave. Nagy, Sándor. 2015. “A Fajvédelem Útvesztőjében. Bírói Gyakorlat „fajgyalázási” Perekben (1942–​ 1944).” [“In the Labyrinth of Race Protection: Judicial Practice in “Race Defilement” Law Suits (1942–​1944).”] Fons 22 (4): 487–​532. Sremac, Srđjan and R. Ruard Ganzevoort, eds. 2015. Religious and Sexual Nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe: Gods, Gays, and Governments. Boston, MA: Brill. Stauter-​Halsted, Keely. 2015. The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stauter-​Halsted, Keely and Nancy M. Wingfield. 2011. “Introduction: The Construction of Sexual Deviance in Late Imperial Eastern Europe.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20 (2): 215–​224. Swimelar, Safia. 2019. “Nationalism and Europeanization in LGBT Rights and Politics: A Comparative Study of Croatia and Serbia.” East European Politics and Societies & Cultures 33 (3): 603–​630. Szegedi, Gábor. 2014. “Good Health Is the Best Dowry: Marriage Counseling, Premarital Examinations, Sex Education in Hungary, 1920–​1952.” PhD diss., Central European University. –​–​–​–​. 2015a. “Stand by Your Man: Honor and Race Defilement in Hungary, 1941–​44.” Hungarian Historical Review 4 (3): 577–​605. –​–​–​–​. 2015b. “Tisztaság, Tisztesség, Fajgyalázás: Szexuális És Faji Normalizáció a Horthy-​ Korban.” [“Purity, Integrity: Sexual and Racial Normalization in the Horthy Age.”] Socio.Hu 5 (1): 57–​76. Takács, Judit. 2018. Meleg század: Adalékok a homoszexualitás 20. századi magyarországi Társad alomtörténetéhez [Gay Century: Additives to Homosexuality in 20th Century Hungarian Social History]. Budapest: Kalrigram. Turda, Marius. 2009. “‘To End the Degeneration of a Nation’: Debates on Eugenic Sterilization in Inter-​War Romania.” Medical History 53 (1): 77–​104. –​–​–​–​ ed. 2015. The History of East-​ Central European Eugenics, 1900–​ 1945: Sources and Commentaries. London: Bloomsbury. Turda, Marius and Paul Weindling, eds. 2007. “Blood and Homeland”: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–​ 1940. Budapest: Central European University Press. Wingfield, Nancy M. 2017. The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

195

196

19 GENDER, MILITARISM, AND THE MODERN NATION IN SOVIET AND RUSSIAN CULTURES Karen Petrone

This chapter explores the intersection of gender and national identities in Russia before 1917, the Soviet Union, and post-​Soviet Russia, particularly through the construction of the ideal soldier by both state and society. The image of the ideal soldier remains remarkably consistent over time, persisting through the pre-​revolutionary and Soviet periods and emerging into contemporary Russian culture. To say that this model of masculinity is enduring is not to say that it is static. While periodization is rarely exact, and there are always exceptions to general trends, there is a discernable chronology of alternating periods of challenges to and retrenchment of military masculinity throughout the last 120 years. These alternating cycles of challenge and restoration of the masculine ideal help to explain why there are robust scholarly debates about when and whether more conservative tenets of patriarchy and Russian nationalism superseded early Soviet ideas about gender equality and national/​racial equality (Ashwin 2000; Brandenberger 2002; Krylova 2004; Reese 2011; Timasheff 1946; Wood 1997). This chapter contributes to these debates by exploring the chronology of the formation of and challenges to the military masculine ideal. In modern Europe, the hegemonic soldierly ideal serves as one of the highest forms of masculinity to which all men are supposed to aspire and against which all men are supposed to be measured (Mosse 1996). During the two extended revolutionary periods in which the Russian and then the Soviet governments fell and were reconstituted, (1917–​ 1932 and 1985–​2000), the Russian and Soviet military-​masculine ideal underwent significant challenges but nevertheless survived. During World War I and World War II as well as the war in Afghanistan (1979–​1989), masculinity was also threatened as the horrors of mechanized and asymmetrical warfare destroyed masculinity rather than reaffirming its valor. Women’s participation in fighting the World Wars, and the expansion of the definitions of femininity to include military valor likewise put the hegemonic masculine ideal in jeopardy. While the end of World War I ushered in a revolutionary period that brought about advances in gender equality, the period after 1945 saw a significant, though 196

197

Gender and militarism in Russia

not complete, retrenchment of hegemonic masculinity and the suppression of women’s wartime heroism until the second revolutionary period of glasnost in the mid-​1980s. A key premise of this chapter is that gender, militarism, and the modern nation, originating with the creation of the first citizen-​soldiers during the French Revolution, are inextricably intertwined (Sanborn 2003; Timm and Sanborn 2016). Sanborn (2003) argues that between 1905 and 1925, Russian and Soviet military conscription sought to create a modern nation by nationalizing masculinity, as the Russian and then Soviet states engaged in constructing Russian and Soviet manhood through military service and forging a lasting connection between manliness and patriotism. Sanborn demonstrates that both the Russian and Soviet ideal soldier had the physical attributes of “health, strength, hardiness, and dexterity” and the spiritual attributes of “honor, discipline, a feeling of duty, self-​sacrifice, a ‘hard’ will, attentiveness, courage, boldness, initiative, and obedience” (Sanborn 2003, 132–​133, 139, 143–​144). While Sanborn emphasizes the continuities in the ways in which the Russian and Soviet states promoted an ideal soldierly masculinity that they then upheld as ideal manliness in general, it is crucial to understand that both states did so amidst a dramatic backdrop of war and revolution that challenged, destroyed, and then rebuilt the foundations of the state and society as well as of masculinity and femininity. Although states and military establishments often treated the enduring soldierly ideal as if it were a natural and perhaps even biological aspect of masculinity, in which manly prowess was equated to devotion to the nation, there is nothing at all natural about the hegemonic soldier or his ideally feminine civilian counterpart. They both require constant constructing and reconstructing, making and remaking in order to endure. These ideals may be challenged during wartime and in periods of revolutionary upheaval, but they can also serve as anchors for post-​revolutionary and postwar retrenchment. This chapter demonstrates the power of the male soldierly ideal in Russia and the Soviet Union, as it has reemerged again and again in the 20th and 21st centuries, articulating a particular kind of hegemonic and national masculinity, reasserting masculine and Russian/​Soviet superiority, and also reshaping understandings of idealized femininity.

Intertwined national and gender identities In Russia, national and gender identities were interdependent and each was shaped and formed in relation to the other (Petrone 2002). The Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, which was divided into 15 different national republics with more than 100 ethnic groups, had, in the words of Anderson (1991, 86), sought to stretch “the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire.” After the French and American Revolutions, notions of gender became deeply entwined with ideas about nationalism, citizenship, and military service. States began to define citizenship as a reward for bearing arms on behalf of the nation, a reward often limited to males of European descent. Females of European descent, denied full republican citizenship, were celebrated instead as the mothers of the next generation of soldiers. In this formulation of nationalism, the state required the participation of both males and females in their gendered roles of protectors and birth-​ givers to ensure the perpetuation of the ethnicized nation through time. The Russian Revolution destabilized this version of nationalized gender relations. Even before the Bolshevik takeover in October of 1917, the Provisional Government, which had emerged in February 1917 after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, gave voting rights and legal citizenship to men and women equally. Because of the national emergency 197

198

Karen Petrone

caused by World War I, the Provisional Government also took the unprecedented step of recruiting women into combat roles in the Russian Army. While units such as the “Women’s Battalion of Death,” so named because these women soldiers pledged to fight to the death, did not turn out to be an effective solution to low morale among male soldiers, by taking this step, the Provisional Government demonstrated their commitment to a radical reimagining of citizenship rights and service to the nation as the purview of both genders (Stockdale 2004, 111–​112). The Bolsheviks continued this gender revolution with equal citizenship rights for men and women, and tens of thousands of women served at the front with the Soviet Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918–​1921), though the Soviet state conscripted only men into the Red Army. While women mostly served in non-​combat roles (nurses, political instructors, etc.), some also participated in combat. In the following decades, Soviet culture heroized both fictional and non-​fictional female as well as male Civil War veterans for their military contributions. In this new formulation of citizenship, men continued to fulfill their traditional military and labor obligations, with many of the same ideal attributes as their tsarist predecessors, but women were also recognized as citizens who served the state as soldiers, laborers, and mothers. Women’s new roles necessarily changed the relationship between military masculinity and ideal femininity, increasing the possibility that women would be recognized as full citizens and simultaneously allowing for a more capacious social understanding of feminine roles. Equally striking and equally gendered was the Soviet state’s simultaneous re-​ envisioning of nationalism, welcoming all of the nationalities of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union on a putatively equal footing, as articulated in the 1924 Soviet Constitution. The state conceived of Soviet identity as open and multinational, and this overarching Soviet identity fulfilled the same function within the state as the 19th-​century national ideal. The Soviet Union promised autonomy to the most populous nationalities within the Soviet Union, but this promise was not ultimately kept, and Moscow’s relations with the Soviet republics often reproduced repressive colonial relationships. The idea of equality across all nations and all races was nonetheless radically different from tsarist ideals and practices. The creation of the Soviet Union initiated a new, explicitly multinational state that disrupted the idea of a single nation perpetuating itself through exclusive biological reproduction of men and women of a certain nationality; the Soviet state also envisioned women’s equality as a key feature of a new modern Soviet identity that encompassed all nationalities. These developments changed gendered expectations for both men and women in the creation of a new form of non-​ethnic but yet somehow still national-​patriotic allegiance to the first communist state (Goscilo and Lanoux 2006; Martin 2001; Northrop 2004; Riabov 2014). Soviet notions of heroism, masculinity, and patriotism must be considered in this radically new context in which revolutionary policies challenged the presumed superiority of males and of Russians (or more broadly, Slavs from an Orthodox Christian background). While the Soviet state often backpedaled or failed to enforce these radical policies, or even used terror against its citizens in direct contradiction to them, the key ideological tenets of racial and gender equality remained part of Soviet doctrine until 1991. Soviet military masculinity operated within a system in which, theoretically, and also sometimes in reality, women could participate alongside men in military activities and be equally valued for these activities, and in which the heroism of non-​Slavs could equal that of Slavs, as soldiers of all nationalities fought side by side on behalf of the Soviet Union. Real Soviet men and women of all ethnicities experienced new ideologies and rapidly changing conditions within the Soviet military and Soviet society, but the Soviet ideal 198

199

Gender and militarism in Russia

of military masculinity was more resistant to change. Non-​Slavs and women may have assumed new roles, but the archetypal Soviet male soldier, whose default ethnicity was Slavic, and who was obligated to protect the Soviet land (zemlia, gendered female; and Rodina or motherland, even more explicitly female), was in many ways nearly identical to his tsarist counterpart. The Soviet soldier represented a powerful hegemonic soldierly ideal that had originated in classical Greece, but which was tied to the nation-​state in particular ways during the 19th century (Clements 2002, 5–​10; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). This desirable and canonical type of masculinity, set up as a model for Russian and Soviet men (and also women) of all ethnicities to emulate, remained remarkably consistent from the tsarist army, to Soviet patriotic masculinity under Joseph Stalin, to late Soviet masculinity with its greater Russian nationalist tinges, and also to contemporary post-​Soviet Russian masculinity.

Hegemony and challenge: Masculinity and the military What were the attributes of hegemonic military masculinity? The quintessentially honorable soldier was first and foremost willing to sacrifice his life to defend the Russian or Soviet land. Despite the atheistic nature of the Soviet state, this sacrifice, which had been conceived of in tsarist times as Christ-​like, remained tinged with spiritual significance. In his analysis of the centrality of war to pre-​revolutionary Russian national identity, Carleton points to the significance of the Gospel of John 15:13 when Jesus declares, “there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Carleton 2017, 28). By dying for Russia or the Soviet Union, the ideal hero gained eternal life either through heavenly reward in the Christian context or through the living community of the Soviet people in the atheist Soviet context. This ideal hero was exceptionally brave, passionate, and powerfully effective in battle. He willingly fulfilled his duty of committing violence against enemies, but he refrained from harming civilians or the wounded. The hero was disciplined and endured great difficulties and privations; even when wounded he followed orders. He was an active part of a homosocial world with close, nearly filial, bonds, maintaining great rapport with the other soldiers, and whatever his rank, he knew how to encourage and lead them. He remained morally grounded and committed to his cause in spite of the violence he carried out. The first period of questioning the masculine soldierly ideal occurred from the revolutionary period through the early 1930s when Soviet censorship was relatively lax compared to the rest of the Stalin period. During this time, there were numerous challenges to the soldierly ideal, including the fundamental rejection of the cornerstone of soldierly masculinity: the idea that the soldier should sacrifice his life for his country. In Soviet literature and films about World War I written in the 1920s, there were a variety of episodes in which Bolshevik soldiers in the tsarist army proudly described their evasion of military conscription, their absences from the front without leave, and even their outright desertion to the enemy. These soldiers sought to avoid sacrificing their lives for their friends. In these works, the soldierly ideal was turned on its head and the soldier’s heroic exploit consisted of his refusal to fight for tsarist Russia. In some cases, the authors articulated an even broader pacifist rejection of fighting in all wars (Petrone 2011, 101–​105). While these authors (Lev Voitolovskii, Aleksandr Pireiko, Leonid Katzov, V. Dmitrieev) were not well known, they launched a direct attack on militarism, modes of masculinity, nationalism, and patriotism all at once. More famous Soviet authors such as Mikhail Sholokhov and Ilya Erenberg also expressed pacifist thinking and a profound ambivalence about war. 199

200

Karen Petrone

For these thinkers who challenged hegemonic masculinity, the courageous masculine ideal was not to fight and not to kill. This attack on the idea that fighting in wars was a man’s patriotic duty did not survive the tightening of censorship in the 1930s. After the upheavals of Stalin’s forced industrialization and collectivization, Stalin and other Communist Party and cultural leaders began to promote the Soviet military. This campaign was so comprehensive that censors no longer allowed works that questioned service in the tsarist army. As paradoxical as it might seem given the Soviet rejection of World War I as an imperialist war, no heroic Soviet figure could evade military service even in a tsarist war; anyone who did so was marked in the new literature as a villainous other. Soviet censors did not allow the republication of some pacifist works; others were republished with the offending pacifist passages excised (Petrone 2011, 251–​252, 259–​262). The seemingly natural endurance of hegemonic military masculinity required substantial political, social, and cultural work to uphold the ideal and to combat challenges to it. The idea that a soldier might be fearful during battle was not welcome in 1930s Soviet discourse with its heightened militarism and intentional restoration of the masculine soldierly ideal. A telling example was a scene from World War I in Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov’s popular novel Quiet Flows the Don. The Cossack Grigorii Melekhov, the novel’s ambiguous hero/​anti-​hero who at the end of the novel rejected Soviet power, became fearful during an attack: “Now as never before he was afraid for himself and for his men. He wanted to throw himself to the ground and weep, pouring his troubles out childishly to the earth as if she were his mother” (Petrone 2011, 246; Sholokhov 1996, 366–​367). The censors removed this passage from all Stalin-​era editions after 1933, while the World War I scenes in which Melekhov performed bravely remained. The ideal soldier (or even in Melekhov’s case the flawed soldier) in Soviet discourse had to defend his mother earth (the Soviet or Russian land) courageously, not be comforted and protected by her. Melekhov’s fear transgressed gender boundaries and was excised from the novel.

The Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland With the outbreak of World War II, or as the Soviets called it “The Great Patriotic War” or “The Great War of the Fatherland (otechestvo),” a national emergency led to the necessity of mobilizing both men and women for war in unprecedented numbers. The influx of female militia and Red Army personnel working alongside Soviet male soldiers required the men to reconsider the soldierly ideal. Approximately 500,000 out of the 800,000 women who served in the military during World War II were, in effect, conscripted by the party or the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol. Although the majority of these women served in non-​combat roles such as radio operators, doctors, nurses, censors, drivers, laundresses, and cooks, there were substantial numbers of women in combat as snipers, infantry soldiers, members of tank and artillery crews, pilots and also as partisans in the occupied territories (Reese 2011, 257). Krylova (2004, 628) argues that it became conceivable for women to participate in “combat, war and violence” because of the “radical undoing of traditional gender differences that Stalinist society underwent in the 1930s.” There is no doubt that the official ideology of Soviet gender equality influenced women’s commitment to serve and the Soviet leadership’s willingness to allow them to do so. Reese (2011, 264) places more emphasis on conscription and the context of national emergency. Reese suggests that

200

201

Gender and militarism in Russia

the women vigorously challenged gender differences, but that these differences were not “undone,” as many women continued to perceive the military as a masculine sphere even when they were determined to join it. Women served in record numbers, during which they were required to engage in violence against the enemy, and they exhibited attributes such as strength, bravery, duty, self-​sacrifice, and discipline that qualified them as ideal soldiers irrespective of gender. The success of women in combat roles and the existence of Soviet propaganda celebrating these women had potential to destabilize hegemonic military masculinity. Yet, the Soviet state, like other wartime states in the 20th century, employed “for the duration” tactics to defend and restore Soviet hegemonic masculinity after the war (Rupp 1978). Soviet propaganda during the first two years of national emergency often framed Soviet women as potential warriors enacting violence and vengeance on enemies. After the tide turned against the Nazis in 1943, propaganda also shifted toward the valorization of male warriors, and began to associate women more frequently with motherhood, the restoration of domestic order, and the healing of the bodies and souls of wounded veterans (Kirschenbaum 2000; Krylova 2001). In this way, state discourse asserted the primacy of the male soldier and veteran and advocated motherhood as a response to demographic disaster. After the war, the majority of women did not remain in the military and returned home to rebuild their civilian lives, though some women continued in military careers throughout the Soviet period. Beyond women’s success in the previously all-​male sphere of the military, the postwar state also had to cope with the devastating costs of war, and especially the disproportionately high number of dead and wounded male soldiers. Dale (2017) argues that the postwar period was the site of multiple masculinities as the less than ideal behaviors of traumatized and wounded veterans subverted archetypal masculinity. While McCallum (2018) and Fraser (2019) do not agree on the timeline in which the state reconfigured masculinity in the postwar period, or about the nature of the reconfiguration, each shows the reimagining of traumatized and wounded masculinity after the war. McCallum argues that fatherhood became central to visual depictions of postwar masculinity, constructing an appealing masculine ideal of the former soldier-​father in domestic space. She also argues that realistic visual depictions of male suffering and trauma did not emerge until the mid-​1960s, an era that is usually associated with reining in some of the more open discourse about the war. The outpouring of grief about the wartime suffering of men (and women too) coexisted with the state-​sponsored glorification of war and with new prohibitions on criticizing the military leadership. Fraser (2019), by contrast, identifies a variety of postwar tactics to rebuild a hierarchical and hegemonic masculinity through valorizing such figures as male scientists and cosmonauts, while devaluing women’s contributions. She also discusses official concerns about military mobilization in the late 1940s and 1950s when young Soviet men were not very eager to follow the soldierly ideal after witnessing the toll it had taken on the previous generation, and were evading conscription in unmanly ways. This phenomenon demonstrates ongoing challenges to the manly ideal that the Soviet government sought to contain.

Late Soviet responses to military masculinity In considering challenges to military masculinity, the trends of the Brezhnev period are complex and not as well researched as earlier ones. Tumarkin (1995) argues that the

201

202

Karen Petrone

leadership created a cult of World War II that celebrated male soldiers’ heroism as the post-​World War II “baby boomer” generation entered military service. Although conscription was supposed to be a rite of passage that made “men out of boys,” young men continued to resist service, especially after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. In addition to the dangers of combat, another increasingly negative aspect of conscription was hazing (dedovshchina or grandfathers’ rule), the practice of the second-​year recruits systematically bullying and beating (and sometimes raping and killing) the new inductees. Being the victim of homosocial violence and then in turn enacting violence on other men became a hallmark of military service, but one that strongly contradicted the ethos of the ideal soldier. Despite the fact that the military was an all-​union institution intended to strengthen relations within the multi-​ethnic Soviet state, tensions developed among recruits of different ethnicities, and nationalist resistance emerged to conscription (Eichler 2012, 7, 30–​31). Contradictions between ideals and reality deepened and the “short, tight, skin of the nation” was also beginning to rip. When Mikhail Gorbachev opened up Soviet discourse in his efforts to reform the Soviet system, he made broad criticism of the military-​masculine ideal possible. One significant publication that challenged the Soviet hegemonic masculine ideal during glasnost’ was Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War first published in Russian in 1985, though she began her interviews with women soldiers in the late Brezhnev period. Alexievich was a pacifist and articulated the idea that war caused the suffering of people as well as of, “the earth, the birds, the trees.” She made an argument based on gender difference: that war through women’s eyes was profoundly different than what she perceived as the standard view of war: “How certain people heroically killed other people and won.” Instead of discussion of “heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.” Alexievich (2017, xv–​xvi) could not accept “[w]‌hy, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history?” She then chronicled the war from the women’s point of view, destabilizing the idea that courage and heroism were masculine traits. This book was one of the first of a torrent of materials that questioned Soviet myth making about World War II and the heroic masculinity of World War II soldiers.

Conclusions Between 1985 and 2000, the news media heavily criticized the military, and during the Boris Yeltsin era, the military’s institutional prestige and state funding dropped precipitously, and ideals of military masculinity declined (Eichler 2012). The free press recognized many failures of Red Army leadership and soldiers, demonstrating that neither group consistently lived up to heroic masculine ideals. In the last two decades, Vladimir Putin has raised the prestige of the military, and has reburnished the military masculine ideal, in large part through the resurrection of the cult of World War II (see Borenstein, Chapter 8 in this Handbook). A law that was passed in May 2014 punishes the denial of the verdicts of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the dissemination of false information about the Soviet Union during World War II, and the desecration of symbols of Russian military glory. The mutually constitutive nature of gender and national identities through the soldierly ideal both pre-​dates and post-​dates the Soviet Union, demonstrating a remarkable continuity. At the same time, this ideal masculinity has been challenged by the realities 202

203

Gender and militarism in Russia

of war and public opposition to it, and it is perennially being repaired by state and non-​ state actors who are invested in maintaining national and gender hierarchies and promoting militarization. The Soviet case shows the creative ways in which these actors repair modern masculinity when it is challenged by egalitarian politics or broken by the horrors of war. Soviet policies of gender equality and the cataclysm of World War II led to powerful challenges to the Soviet masculine ideal, but masculinist forces in the Soviet state, military, and society actively sought to maintain male dominance, even while sometimes simultaneously promoting official values of gender equality. The efforts to uphold the hegemonic soldierly masculine ideal bolstered other male roles such as father and scientist, while postwar pronatalism and the suppression of women’s participation in World War II undercut women’s claims to equal citizenship and political power. The current Russian cult of the soldier continues this trend of disempowering women and affirming male hegemony.

References Alexievich, Svetlana. 2017. The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Random House. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Books. Ashwin, Sarah. 2000. Gender, State, and Society in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Russia. London and New York: Routledge. Brandenberger, David. 2002. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–​1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carleton, Gregory. 2017. Russia: The Story of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. 2002. “Introduction.” In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, 1–​14. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Connell, R. W. and James W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–​859. Dale, Robert. 2017. “‘Being a Real Man’: Masculinities in Soviet Russia during and after the Great Patriotic War.” In Gender and the Second World War: Lessons of War, edited by Corinna Peniston-​Bird and Emma Vickers. London: Palgrave. Eichler, Maya. 2012. Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-​Soviet Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fraser, Erica L. 2019. Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Goscilo, Helena and Andrea Lanoux, eds. 2006. Gender and National Identity in Twentieth Century Russian Culture. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Kirschenbaum, Lisa. 2000. “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families’: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda.” Slavic Review 59 (4): 825–​847. Krylova, Anna. 2001. “‘Healers of Wounded Souls’: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944–​1946.” Journal of Modern History 73 (2): 307–​331. –​–​–​–​. 2004. “Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women-​Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia.” Gender and History 16 (3): 626–​653. Martin, Terry. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McCallum, Claire E. 2018. The Fate of the New Man: Representing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Soviet Visual Culture, 1945–​1965. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Mosse, George. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Northrop, Douglas T. 2004. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

203

204

Karen Petrone Petrone, Karen. 2002. “Masculinity and Heroism in Imperial and Soviet Military-​ Patriotic Cultures.” In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, 172–​193. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. –​–​–​–​. 2011. The Great War in Russian Memory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Reese, Roger R. 2011. Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Riabov, Oleg V. 2014. “The Symbol of ‘Mother Russia’ Across Two Epochs: From the First World War to the Civil War.” In Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–​22, Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory, edited by Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K. Stockdale, 73–​97. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers. Rupp, Leila. 1978. Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-​1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sanborn, Joshua. 2003. Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–​1925. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Sholokhov, Mikhail. 1996. Quiet Flows the Don, translated by Robert Daglish, edited by Brian Murphy. New York: Carroll and Graf. Stockdale, Melissa K. 2004. “ ‘My Death for the Motherland is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–​1917.” The American Historical Review 109 (1): 78–​116. Timasheff, Nicholas S. 1946. The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia. New York: E. P. Dutton. Timm, Annette and Joshua Sanborn. 2016. Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Tumarkin, Nina. 1995. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books. Wood, Elizabeth. 1997. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

204

205

Fascism

206

207

20 FAR-​R IGHT EXPECTATIONS OF WOMEN IN CENTRAL-​ EASTERN EUROPE Andrea Pető

Gender-​based analysis of Central-​Eastern European (CEE) far-​right movements’ history had a late start in comparison with research on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. One reason behind this is the pre-​1989 ideological control under communism, another is the state of gender historiography in the region. After 1989, fueled by desire for retribution for crimes committed during Soviet occupation (e.g., forced resettlement, nationalization of property), anti-​communism became the ideological foundation of CEE countries, undermining the previous anti-​fascist consensus. There has also been a tendency with the nascent scholarship on women’s participation in far-​right parties in CEE to see women as victims, losers, or lunatics. I propose an alternative theoretical framework in two ways. First, I take the agency of these women into consideration when trying to explain why women joined far-​right movements, and what role ideology played in that process. Building on Mudde’s (2004) concept of host ideology, I hold that women’s equality requires a host ideology to which its demands for equality can be attached, represented, or glued, depending on the historical context (Pető forthcoming). Second, I use Mahmood’s concept of agency (2006, 34), “a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.” Far-​right women challenged social norms and their subordination primarily through participation in violent actions, suggesting that violence, not just ideologies such as fascism, can be a host of gender equality. In the interwar period, the far right grew in influence across CEE, acquiring varying degrees of power. Many CEE movements modeled their ideology on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, but at the same time, they sought to distinguish themselves from Western European fascism, creating their own, nativist stances on women and gender. While considering the commonalities among movements in the region, this chapter focuses on the gendered politics of those movements that acquired institutional power, such as the Arrow Cross in Hungary, or those that had the support of the German Nazi Party, such as in Slovakia and Croatia.

207

208

Andrea Pető

Research on women and fascism in CEE after WWII During their liberation of CEE from Nazi occupation, the Red Army frequently committed atrocities against civilian women. The anti-​communist rhetoric of the Cold War focused on this violence. This discourse framed Nazi collaborator far-​right parties as victims of Soviet military violence (see discussion in Pető 2017, 132–​148). Both the Soviet and western occupation zones in postwar Europe were similar in one aspect: when examining the role that women played in Nazism, their tribunals either minimized that role or perceived it as exotically “other.” These female war criminals were perceived as counter to the idealized roles of women as caretakers and mothers. Women who said they committed their crimes under orders from male relatives were acquitted. These trials downplayed the agency of women and sought to undo the “matriarchy born in need” during the war and, as a result, far-​right women were marginalized and forgotten (Barna and Pető 2015). If there was any mention of far-​right women public figures in CEE, then it referred to the occupying Germans and never to the locals. Cold War scholarship on both sides of the Iron Curtain also excluded women active in far-​right regimes from research on fascism but for different reasons. At first, the focus of researchers was mostly on political history, and they did not see women in decision-​making positions. Women’s stories were not examined. In the 1980s, German historians began to study women perpetrators, whom they portrayed as “evil” or “bad women,” followed by researchers in other countries (Kater 1983, 218–​224; Windaus-​Walser 1988, 102–​115; see reflection on this by Pető 2009, 147–​151). Research on women in fascist movements was first oriented toward women in prominent positions—​concentration camp guards, actors, journalists—​and the wives of famous men, including various politicians. However, as Schwarz (2000) points out, these women were relegated to a special and extreme category, which therefore did not deserve scholarly attention. Women’s roles in fascism drew particular attention through the prolonged debate between Gisela Bock and Claudia Koonz, which, in reference to the Historikerstreit (Historians’ debate) on the responsibility of Germans for Nazism, was called the Historikerinnenstreit (Female historians’ debate). This debate was about the definition of gendered collaboration, where Koonz argued for a broader understanding of women’s collaboration, and Bock rejected the implications of women’s collective guilt (Grossmann 1991, 350–​358). The debate rendered invalid the assumption that German women were all victims of Nazi sexism. This assumption of victimhood sweeps under the carpet the fact that non-​Jewish German women profited from racist Nazi politics partly through the maternal welfare institutions of the eugenics program, and also because of the employment opportunities available for them in the newly built health system. Yet the Koonz and Bock debate has had limited influence on CEE scholarship. Scholarship in the Soviet bloc on women’s participation in extreme right movements was limited by the inaccessibility of state archives to those researchers who were considered ideologically unreliable. The hegemonic anti-​fascist rhetoric created homogenized victim and perpetrator groups, ignoring the differentiation of victims like Jews or women, and the complex relationship between the mainstream political ideology and extreme right politics. Women’s participation in local far-​right movements as wartime collaborators was left unexamined. If studies on local far-​right movements mentioned women at all, they focused on the far-​right portrayal of women as mothers. Anti-​fascist and socialist historians argued that the far right put women back in the family home, ending women’s increased employment as well as their political emancipation, which socialists promised to return. 208

209

Far-right expectations of women in CEE

Gendered analyses of fascism in CEE after communism After the collapse of communism, research on women and the far right was shaped by other political and cultural shifts. There were few women historians, and gender history at this time was mostly written by women. Gender research followed the pattern of early feminist historical work in other regions, which examined women’s movements, but limited its definition of women’s movements to leftist, liberal, and emancipatory movements. The focus on select movements was motivated by an interest in legitimizing leftist contemporary movements campaigning for women’s equality, while ignoring women who were equally active, but on the right. As the presence and influence of contemporary non-​progressive women’s movements in 21st-​century CEE has grown, research on women’s connections with far-​right movements has become a political necessity (Pető 2004, 173–​183). As part of the growth of illiberalism, some Nazi collaborator politicians, such as Ukrainian Stepan Bandera, have been rehabilitated as anti-​communists and used to legitimize the new political regime (Kis 2015, 53–​82; Petrenko 2015, 57–​74). Illiberal versions of CEE far-​right movements include women but exclusively as victims or as suffering mothers that symbolize the nation (Grzebalska and Pető 2017). Perpetrator research (Täterforschung) is a developing field in CEE (Lower 2013; Pető 2020), but to integrate women and gender, scholars have had to dismantle widely accepted models including the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. This limiting dichotomy existed outside CEE; most research has focused on the social and psychological condition of perpetrators, and set up typologies of perpetrators, without taking gender into consideration (Mann 2000, 331–​366; Paul 2002; Waller 2002). Williams and Buckley-​Zistel (2018) argue that simplifying typologies should be left behind, and they consider the complexity of subgroups, including gender. Incorporating gender into perpetrator typologies not only challenges simple dichotomies but also identifies how women interacted with far-​right ideologies in institutional, formal, and informal social spaces (Pető 2014, 107–​131). The process of studying women in CEE far-​right movements, whose history had been silenced because of gender and memory politics during communism and neoliberalism, gives insights into how far-​right movements tried to marginalize women and how far-​right women themselves contested that marginalization.

The birth of gendered anti-​modernism in Central-​Eastern Europe Far-​right movements in CEE were connected to a broader anti-​modernist critique—​ under the influence of a variety of intellectual schools including nativism—​that offered a new and viable alternative to 19th-​century liberal capitalism. In interwar CEE, different political forces from the Croatian Ustasha to the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party successfully recruited women’s support as voters, sympathizers, and members, and engaged gender politics to build even more popular support (Bitunjac 2018). In some cases, religious, mostly Catholic women’s, organizations advocated for including women in public life in opposition to unresponsive far-​right movements, like Hlinka’s guard in Slovakia, which celebrated only militarized masculinity (Zavacká 2012, 425–​451). These far-​right movements incorporated criticism against liberalism and socialism to build up electoral and popular support, presenting themselves as an alternative to the Left. In the cases of Hungary and Bulgaria, the Right blamed the Left for territorial losses after World War I. In the cases of the Baltic states or Romania, the Right opposed their powerful and expansive neighbor, the Soviet Union, which used women’s 209

210

Andrea Pető

emancipation as a tool of public diplomacy. The Right’s gendered criticism of the Left also targeted what they saw as liberal and leftist women’s behavior. Estonian veterans blamed the decadent and immoral behavior of young Estonian women for “having put cigarettes in the mouths of our daughters and having taught them the bodily contortions of the foxtrot” (Kasekamp 1999, 593). Far-​right parties in CEE exhibited strong anti-​woman tendencies by opposing women’s employment and demands for suffrage, both of which had expanded during World War I. Women in several CEE countries—​Germany, Poland, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Czechoslovakia—​gained the right to vote during and soon after World War I. In far-​right political discourse, “woman” and especially “the new woman” emerged as an unpredictable and dangerous element that threatened male hegemony in the economic, political, and cultural life. This opposition was based, as Sandulescu (2004) shows in Romania, in part on male-​dominated friendships and connections members of the far right had formed during World War I in the army (Sandulescu 2004, 349–​361). For the far right, a woman who did not conform to a biologically determined caring role (i.e., was not a mother), was not considered a real woman. This discourse on motherhood was also closely linked to eugenics movements across the CEE region (Bridenthal, Grossman, and Kaplan 1984; Lafferton 2007, 706–​732; Turda 2006, 303–​325; see Kurimay, Chapter 18 in this Handbook). Motherhood was integrated into electoral laws in Hungary where women having three living children were eligible to vote together with educated women or women with considerable wealth (Pető and Szapor 2004, 172–​181). Women joined far-​ right parties and movements to resist the conservative patriarchy’s opposition to women’s participation in the public sphere, as well as to pursue acknowledgement for their unpaid care work at home (Zarnowska 2004, 57–​68). Uniforms were a common fascination and tool for far-​right parties, and each party had special uniforms designed for women. The design of these uniforms communicated far-​right gendered ideals, and also reflects the particularities of these ideals, revealing differences between the Italian, German, and CEE movements. While the woman members of the Republic of Salò in Italy sported women’s trousers, the female members of the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary wore skirts with neckties. They received written instructions from party headquarters on how to color silk green, the color of the movement, if such dye was not available in shops. Hungarian far-​right leaders also instructed women to feel pride in sewing their own uniforms, which helped them avoid the exploitation of other laborers (Pető 2020). The uniforms of Nazi women’s organizations, by contrast, painstakingly avoided every stylistic feature that could have accentuated what they saw as masculine characteristics such as broad shoulders or narrow hips and neckties. Fashion that did not clearly distinguish between men and women was considered “alien” (Guenther 1997, 29–​58). The difference between extreme right parties in controlling women’s bodies reflects the variances among their gendered ideologies.

Gender and fascism during World War II in CEE Leaders of CEE far-​right women’s movements, their fellow intellectuals, as well as representatives of respective party media, regularly participated in the meetings of Italian and German fascist women’s organizations. The local far-​right women’s press often published translations of articles from German and Italian newspapers. All far-​ right movements incorporated antisemitism into their own nation’s mythology. Still, as

210

211

Far-right expectations of women in CEE

the example of women’s uniforms shows, although CEE far-​right movements were in contact with German and Italian movements, they also maintained a strategic distance as they understood German and Italian interest in their work not only as a new form of hegemony but also as a political influence harming their national interests (Bauerkämper and Rossoliński-​Liebe 2017). During the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, women members of local far-​right parties (that in other ways collaborated with the Germans) often got into conflict with the German women workforce who arrived together with the occupying forces—​among them doctors, nurses, typists, and administrators—​because of the privileges the latter enjoyed (Lower 2013). CEE right-​wing movements adopted Nazi idealized gender models and applied them to their own national contexts (Passmore 2003). In particular the CEE far-​right parties incorporated Nazi tactics of violence, inspired in part by the rapid armament and initial military successes of Nazi Germany. This cult of violence distinguished the far right from conservative parties and was linked to two other cults. The first was the cult of the heroic soldier who fought in World War I, but was betrayed by the Great Powers and domestic, leftist political forces. In this discursive field in idealization of soldiers they were competing with the mainstream conservative ideology (Lambert 2007). In Romania, the cult of the soldier honored ordinary soldiers instead of heroic ones (Platon 2012, 65–​90). The second cult as an ideological base was the cult of the martyr mother and wife. Both gendered cults incorporated Christian images to compete with the dominant mainstream ideology. As more and more men were mobilized to serve on the frontlines, a “matriarchy born in need” brought women into the labor market (Pető 2008, 63–​83). This labor market development reshaped political discourse in which the far right claimed to protect women. First, the far right raised alarms about the damaging effects that paid employment would have on women, and the wartime woman worker would undermine their idealized image of the woman homemaker. Second, as the state became increasingly impoverished by its growing military expenditures, more women found support in welfare services provided by far-​right parties, receiving aid as members and as party employees. Third, as women’s employment grew, more women experienced gender-​based discrimination. In 1938, the Arrow Cross Party was the first to propose a bill against workplace sexual harassment to the Hungarian Parliament, though its focus was the antisemitic claim that young Hungarian women were being exploited by Jewish employers (Pető 2020). Starting in 1938, as the Hungarian Parliament passed several anti-​Jewish laws, which strengthened the positions of far-​right parties, leaders like Ferenc Szálasi emphasized that the far right discouraged women to become like men and did not want women to compete with them at the workplace. The far-​right parties’ and movements’ policies on women were like conservative anti-​feminism as they also held that the place of women is in the family home with their children. However, the far-​right cult of violence, which was also linked to reaching back to pagan “traditions,” separated the far-​right parties from conservative parties. Before coming to power, the Croatian Ustasha movement mobilized women in a relatively wide array of roles—​mother, wife, worker, writer, and artist—​while men were only to be fearless warriors (Jelınek 1992, 191–​223; Yeomans 2005, 720–​721). Combative queens informed the historical prototype of the ideal woman for the Ustasha, but the first woman tram conductor of Sarajevo and women artists also appeared in the Ustasha press as potential examples to follow. Women could choose to become fierce amazons

211

212

Andrea Pető

as well, with which they would have reached the Ustasha movement’s final political objective: turning into “men” and deleting gender differences, which would then erase all the political and rhetorical problems that arise from women’s difference. But that theory of gender neutrality was only a part of their program. In 1941, when the Ustasha took power and formed the Independent State of Croatia, they put theory into praxis, which de-​emphasized gender equality. Then they stated their goal to be sending women back to their families and homes in contrast to promises of liberal feminist and socialist emancipation, which they perceived as a failure, shedding a light on the inbuilt paradoxes of their gender politics. The Hungarian Arrow Cross Party similarly pushed women toward their domestic responsibilities in its six months of power in 1944–​1945. In both cases, female activists encountered the same glass ceiling as their sisters had earlier encountered with the mainstream conservative parties. Conservative and far-​ right parties faced the same problem: how to integrate women with increasing economic and psychological independence into their movement while, in their idealized state, women’s work would confine women to their homes. During the period of the war’s radicalization, small and often previously banned parties in CEE entered the government, and together with them, their female party members and supporters also experienced a measure of independence and power. In their memoirs, the women who served in the Italian Republic of Salò’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps describe this period as “the time of freedom” because they could finally leave the politically sanctified confinement of motherhood—​in uniforms and armor (Schiavo 2016, 135–​ 145). In both fascist Italy and CEE, where fascist states promoted normative motherhood, appropriating Christian imaginary and rhetoric, women challenged this framework confining them to the home. Women in the Italian Saló Republic and women in the Hungarian Arrow Cross actively participated in the killing, murdering, robbing, and denouncing in the last days of World War II. As Cynthia Enloe warns us, “many women who experience militarization do not see themselves as victims of that process” but rather see it as a form of empowerment (2000, 297). For these women, the militarism and militarization of the far right provided much needed resources for upward mobility or regaining dignity.

Conclusions The difficulties of research on the relationship between women and the far-​ right movements in CEE are caused just as much by the blind spots of mainstream historical research as by the shortcomings of gender research in CEE. There is a lack of amply complex analytical concepts to understand the motivations of women in far-​right movements and parties in CEE. The concepts developed and applied to research on leftist and liberal movements are not always applicable for researching the far-​right mobilization of women. For instance, these far-​right movements were attractive for women because they could join them directly, that is, they did not have to establish a separate women’s organization as they were integrated into the main movement. The far-​right discourse about saving the nation had a powerful positive impact on women’s mobilization as well. The gendered discourse of CEE far-​right nationalism distinguished it from German Nazism. After women were admitted in these parties, they created spaces of their own. Within these spaces, women activists often challenged the official program of far-​right parties 212

213

Far-right expectations of women in CEE

regarding women’s official role as housewives only, causing serious internal tensions. The party leadership wanted women to focus on social politics alone, while the women themselves wanted to engage in real politics by developing an alternative, anti-​modernist vision of women’s emancipation. This was especially the case with female medical doctors in CEE, as women who achieved a university degree and were dedicated to social change very often only found space in the extreme political movements of the Right and the Left (Pető 2020, 45–​52). Women’s participation in conservative-​ nationalist and especially in far-​ right movements also brings up theoretical questions. Approaches to this area of research fail to acknowledge the agency of these women in deciding to participate in right-​wing political movements. Failure to recognize the choices women made lessens the critical potential to see how these women’s organizations could challenge patriarchy, while also recognizing their ideological-​political involvement with racism and the Holocaust. Comparing women’s involvement in different far-​right parties, not just the often-​studied countries of Germany, Italy or Spain and Portugal, provides an insight into the often-​ neglected “dark legacy” of Central and Eastern Europe.

References Barna, Ildikó and Andrea Pető. 2015. Political Justice in post Second World War Budapest. Budapest-​New York: CEU Press. Bauerkämper, Arnd and Grzegorz Rossoliński-​ Liebe, eds. 2017. Fascism without Borders. Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945. London and New York: Berghahn. Bitunjac, Martina. 2018. Verwicklung. Beteiligung. Unrecht. Frauen und die Ustaša-​Bewegung [Involvement, Participation, Injustice: Women in the Ustasha Movement]. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Bridenthal, Renate, Atina Grossmann, and Marion A. Kaplan, eds. 1984. When Biology Became Destiny. Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. New York: Monthly Review Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Grossmann, Atina. 1991. “Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism.” Gender and History (3): 350–​358. Grzebalska, Weronika and Andrea Pető, eds. 2017. “Her-​story.” Special Issue. Baltic Worlds 4 (10). Guenther, Irene V. 1997. “The Nazi ‘Chic’: German Politics and Women’s Fashion.” Fashion Theory 1: 29–​58. Jelınek, Yeshayahu. 1992. “On the Condition of Women in Wartime Slovakia and Croatia.” In Labyrinth of National Complexities and Diplomacy, edited by R. Frucht, 191–​223. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Kasekamp, Andres. 1999. “Radical Right-​Wing Movements in the North-​East Baltic.” Journal of Contemporary History 4 (34): 587–​600. Kater, Michael. 1983. “Frauen in der NS Bewegung.” [“Women in NS Movement.”] Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2 (31): 218–​224. Kis, Oksana. 2015. “National Femininity Used and Contested: Women’s Participation in the Nationalist Underground in Western Ukraine during the 1940s–​50s.” East/​West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 2 (2): 53–​82. Lafferton, Emese. 2007. “The Magyar Moustache: The Faces of Hungarian State Formation, 1867–​ 1918.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (38): 706–​732. Lambert, Peter. 2007. “Heroisation and Demonisation in the Third Reich: The Consensus Building Value of a Nazi Pantheon Heroes.” In Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (3–​ 4): 523–​546. Lower, Wendy. 2013. Hitler’s Furies. German Women at the Nazi Killing Fields. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Mahmood, Saba. 2006. “Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt.” Temenos 1 (42): 31–​71.

213

214

Andrea Pető Mann, Michael. 2000. “Were the Perpetrators of Genocide ‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Real Nazi’? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographies.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14 (3): 331–​366. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 4 (39): 541–​563. Passmore, Kevin, ed. 2003. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​45. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Paul, Gerhard. 2002. “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und „ganz gewöhnlichen” Deutschen. Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung.” [“From Psychopath, Technocrats of Terror and the Ordinary Germans. The Shoah Perpetrators in the Mirror of the Research.”] Die Täter der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? [Perpetrators of the Shoah. Fanatic National Socialist or Just Normal Germans?], 13–​90. Göttingen: Wallstein. Pető, Andrea. 2004. “Writing Women’s History in Eastern Europe. Toward a Terra Cognita?” Journal of Women’s History 3 (16): 173–​183. –​–​–​–​. 2008. “The Rhetoric of Weaving and Healing: Women’s Work in Interwar Hungary, a Failed Anti-​Democratic Utopia.” In Rhetorics of Work, edited by Yannis Yannitsiotis, Dimitra Lampropoulou, and Carla Salvaterra, 63–​83. Pisa: University of Pisa Press. –​–​–​–​. 2009. “Who Is Afraid of the ‘Ugly Women’? Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block.” Journal of Women’s History 4 (21): 147–​151. –​–​–​–​. 2014. “Gendered Exclusions and Inclusions in Hungary’s Right-​Radical Arrow Cross Party (1939–​1945): A Case Study of Three Female Party Members.” Hungarian Studies Review 1–​ 2: 107–​131. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Silencing and Unsilencing Sexual Violence in Hungary.” In Continued Violence and Troublesome Pasts: Post War Europe between Victors after the Second World War, edited by Ville Kivimäki and Petri Karonen, 132–​148. Helsinki: SKS. –​–​–​–​. 2020. Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War—​The Women of the Arrow Cross Party. London: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–​. forthcoming. “Gender.” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by Steven Holmes, András Sajó, and Renata Uitz. London and New York: Routledge. Pető, Andrea and Szapor, Judith. 2004. “Women and ‘the Alternative Public Sphere’: Toward a New Definition of Women’s Activism and the Separate Spheres in East-​Central Europe.” Nora: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 12 (3): 172–​181. Petrenko, Olena. 2015. “Frauen als ‘Verräterinnen.’ Ukrainische Nationalistinnen im Konflikt mit den kommunistischen Sicherheitsorganen und dem eigenen Geheimdienst.” [“Women as Perpetrators: Ukrainian Nationalist in Conflict with the Communist Security Organizations and their own Security Services.”] “Frauen im Kommunismus.” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, [“Women in Communism.” Yearbook of Research on Communism]. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 57–​74. Platon, Mircea. 2012. “The Iron Guard and the ‘Modern State.’ Iron Guard Leaders Vasile Marin and Ion I. Moţa, and the ‘New European Order.’” Fascism 2 (1): 65–​90. Sandulescu, Valentin. 2004. “Fascism and its Quest for the ‘New Man.’ The Case of the Romanian Legionary Movement.” Studia Hebraica 4: 349–​361. Schiavo, Gianluca. 2016. “The Italian Civil War in the Memoirs of Female Fascist Soldiers.” In Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories. Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence, edited by Ayşe Gül Altınay and Andrea Pető. London: Routledge, 135–​145. Schwarz Gudrun. 2000. Eine Frau an seiner Seite? Ehefrauen in der SS Sippengemeinschaft. [A Women by their Side? Wives in the SS Kinship Society]. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag. Turda, Marius. 2006. “‘A New Religion’? Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre-​First World War Hungary.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7 (3): 303–​325. Waller, James. 2002. Becoming Evil. How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Timothy and Susanne Buckley-​Zistel, eds. 2018. Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Action, Motivations and Dynamics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Windaus-​Walser, Karin.1988. “Gnade der weiblichen Geburt? Zum Umgang der Frauen-​forschung mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus.” [“Grace of Female Birth? Women’s Studies Researching National Socialism and Anti-​Semitism.”] Feministische Studien 1: 102–​115.

214

215

Far-right expectations of women in CEE Yeomans, Rory. 2005. “Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman.” The Slavonic and East European Review 4 (83): 720–​721. Zarnowska, Anna. 2004. “Women’s Political Participation in Interwar Poland.” Women’s History Review 1 (13): 57–​68. Zavacká, Marína. 2012. “Crossing Sisters: Patterns of Protest in the Journal of the Catholic Union of Slovak Women during the Second World War.” Social History 4 (37): 425–​451.

215

216

217

Socialisms and communisms

218

219

21 PARADOXES OF GENDER IN SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY WOMEN’S SECTIONS (THE ZHENOTDEL), 1918–​1 930 Elizabeth A. Wood

The women’s section of the Russian Communist Party (Zhenotdel) was founded in 1918 immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. It took as its principal aim to “draw the female masses into socialist construction” (Metody i formy raboty 1921, 1933, 247). At the same time, its founding director Aleksandra Kollontai and her colleagues wrote extensively about women’s emancipation as a project by and for women. In practice these two goals—​ drawing women into the party and encouraging their emancipation through their own efforts—​proved difficult to combine in one organization. The difficulty emerged because the one goal (drawing women into the party) was inherently oriented toward the official party center, while the other (self-​realization, emancipation) was inherently centrifugal, encouraging women to move outward from patriarchal sources of power to find their own liberation. This tension also reflected a second set of contradictions as women organizers sought to have the new party-​state treat women the same as men (through extensive legislation), yet also as inherently different from men because of their presumed “backwardness” and the corresponding need, therefore, to organize them separately and in different ways. Scholars of Soviet and East European feminisms have recently been engaged in a lengthy debate over the degree of women’s autonomy and proactive feminist agency in state-​sponsored, socialist “women’s movements” in the early and mid-​20th century (see Hinterhuber and Fuchs, Chapter 3 in this Handbook). The relationship between ideology and practice has been especially troubling. To what extent, some have asked (Funk 2014), should communism be viewed as “state patriarchy,” that is, as an inherently repressive social and political order that may have espoused women’s emancipation but ultimately failed to allow autonomy and activism by and for women? Conversely, others have wondered (Daskalova 2007; de Haan 2007; Ghodsee 2015), should it rather be seen as a positive example of “state feminism,” that is, a set of policies and practices put in place from above in order to emancipate women and foster gender equality in private and public life? The latter question thus involves both goals and means. Regarding women, early Soviet authorities spoke much more consistently about “emancipation” than they 219

220

Elizabeth A. Wood

did about gender “equality.” To them emancipation meant liberation from the strictures of prerevolutionary patriarchy, especially that of the Russian Orthodox Church which, as Marxists, they roundly condemned for its obfuscation and oppression of the masses. The practices of the Zhenotdel revealed paradoxes and challenges in actual practice that made the attainment of what feminists today call equality quite difficult.

Tensions from the beginning From the first post-​ revolutionary Conference of Working Women in Petrograd in November 1917, activists sparred over taking a Marxist, worker-​oriented approach versus a more feminist, all-​woman one. Activist Konkordia Nikolaeva argued that there should be “no separate women’s organizations,” while Kollontai insisted, to the contrary, that women workers should have their own representatives at the upcoming Constituent Assembly to safeguard their interests in the family, motherhood, childcare, and the workplace (Hayden 1976, 153). A year later in 1918, Bolshevik women activists held a follow-​ up conference where they presented an extensive package of new institutions, from childcare centers to public dining, that would advance women’s emancipation from the patriarchal structures of the family (Krylova 2017, 430). Inessa Armand and Kollontai also received a green light from the Central Committee to create what became women’s sections or zhenotdely. In March 1919, the newly renamed Communist Party established the Secretariat, Politburo, and Orgburo, with the new women’s sections under the Secretariat. This meant that the women’s sections were pursuing neither high-​level policy (the domain of the Politburo), nor purely organizational matters (usually handled by the Orgburo). Rather, zhenotdely were linked with Communist Party agitation and propaganda. They were also organized in a hierarchy in which the district-​level women’s section was subordinated not to the women’s section at the regional level, but to the district-​level branch of the Communist Party, which in its turn was subordinated to the regional branch of the Communist Party. Nor did the women’s sections have their own funding; rather, funding was supplied by the branches of the party and by the agitation sections. A major victory came, however, in a circular from the Central Committee in December 1919 ordering all party committees at all levels to organize zhenotdely.

Organizational struggles force the women’s sections to become more compliant During the Civil War (1918–​1921), the women’s sections concentrated on recruiting staff and on supporting the war effort through campaigns and workdays to aid sick and wounded Red Army soldiers. This effort included publishing new journals for women (e.g., Kommunistka [The Woman Communist] from 1920) and creating institutions for maternal and child health, childcare, canteens, and laundries. They also contributed to campaigns against illiteracy. With the advent of economic liberalization through the New Economic Policy (NEP), women’s section leaders like Kollontai vociferously attacked the high rates of female unemployment that accompanied the government’s refusal to maintain and subsidize unproductive factories and other enterprises. Male party leaders like Valerian Kuibyshev used Kommunistka to express their disagreement with the economic liberalization of NEP and the attendant high rates of female unemployment, suggesting

220

221

Paradoxes of gender in the Zhenotdel

that, as a second-​string journal, Kommunistka was a place for some genuine party debate (Wood 1997, 173–​176). Kollontai had made ambivalent statements about feminism throughout her career (Iukina 2003; Uspenskaia 2003). Although she had advocated using methods similar to those of feminists since the 1860s (such as special circles for women workers, women’s clubs, childcare programs), she insisted that she was not a feminist; in her view the revolution would create a new social order that would solve the so-​called “woman question,” as it was called. For reasons not entirely clear, she disbanded all feminist organizations, as well as women’s educational institutions and the independent women’s press as soon as she was brought into the Soviet government as Commissar of Social Welfare in the fall of 1917 (Patterson 2011, 41–​42). In 1923, Kollontai and her deputy Vera Golubeva provoked a raging party controversy over feminism as a word and the concept. Golubeva, head of the TransCaucasus regional Zhenotdel, published an article in Pravda in which she argued that the women’s sections should broaden their work to include not only women workers and peasants (their official mandate), but also housewives and unemployed women, especially since NEP was having pernicious effects on women’s employment. She argued that they should create “special societies” to work on women’s emancipation outside the party. When she was attacked in the press by several women party members for overstepping the party mandate to draw women into the party and raise their political consciousness, Kollontai came to her defense, suggesting feminism was not such a terrible word and should be rehabilitated now that the work was taking place in a workers’ state rather than a bourgeois one (Dubinina 1981; Patterson 2011, 43–​48). This conflict over the meaning of feminism and women’s interests reached its apex in 1923 when the 12th Party Congress accused the women’s section of “creating the grounds for feminist deviations” which ran the risk of “separating the female part of the workers from the general class struggle” (cited in Wood 1997, 192). Joseph Stalin weighed in at the Party Congress, characterizing the women’s sections as “an essential transmission mechanism joining our party with the female portion of the working class.” From encouraging women’s emancipatory voices, party leaders moved to further suppress women’s independent initiative (Emelianova 2003). Kollontai, who had relentlessly spurred the party into giving women representation at all levels, was now sidelined and sent abroad to Norway in October 1922 as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission. By 1926, the International Women’s Secretariat of the Comintern (founded in 1920 and headed by Clara Zetkin) was closed by order of the Soviet Politburo. The women’s section became immersed in internal debates over questions of marriage, divorce, alimony, and illegitimacy of children born out of wedlock, ceding ground to more conservative women who wanted more restrictive divorce practices in particular (Goldman 1984). In 1927, the 15th Party Congress criticized the women’s section for not sufficiently following party guidance (Hayden 1979, 351). Thereafter, the women’s sections became increasingly compliant with official directives. Anna Artiukhina (head of Zhenotdel, 1925–​1930) played down the Zhenotdel’s independence, arguing that the sections should follow the party line. The women’s journal Kommunistka followed party directives to accentuate the threat of war and the need to “militarize” women workers. In 1928–​1929, the women’s sections concentrated on pushing for the official policy of collectivization even though it had no benefits and significant harm for women’s agricultural practices (Kingston-​Mann 2018, 70–​72; Patterson 2011).

221

222

Elizabeth A. Wood

In January 1930, the Zhenotdel was formally closed on the grounds that the “woman question” had been “solved.” Artiukhina, still head of the section, tried in vain to appeal the decision. Henceforth, work among women would be carried out by so-​called “women’s sectors” inside the agitation department, but they would have no funding and no independent personnel (Goldman 1996; Scheide 2001).

Assessing the work of the women’s sections To assess whether the women’s sections fulfilled their official mission to emancipate women, it is necessary to go beyond the debate over state patriarchy versus state feminism. On the one hand, the women’s sections functioned as a “transmission belt” through which the party-​state spread its control over the larger society. Yet, on the other, they also established an agenda and a process for giving women some voice and agency in striving to improve their position in society. One way to square the circle, as it were, is to view them as an integral part of a larger program of transformation in the Soviet Union, which had both positive and negative consequences. As Scott (1998) documented in his work on Soviet collectivization, utopian projects often fail to consider the people involved and the local ways of doing things. Yet they also create new structures that have a long-​term impact. In the long run, while the Zhenotdel agenda may not have entirely succeeded, it laid groundwork for greater equality, with both beneficial and sometimes not so beneficial outcomes. Over the course of their existence from 1919–​1930, the work of the women’s sections can be assessed in five key areas, each of which merits individual attention. The most time-​ consuming of all these tasks, so-​ called “organizational” work, meant holding women’s meetings at all levels of the party. These were strictly controlled affairs designed to bring women into the party and educate them in the spirit of the party, as one party directive said, “so as not to end up with incorrect women’s sections at the local level” (cited in Iukina 2007, 449). The women’s delegate meetings were expected to draw in the most inexperienced women and to keep them for a year, during which time they were asked to observe and learn, rather than to advocate for change on behalf of women (Goldman 1996; Scheide 2001; Wood 1997). There is little evidence that these women, many of them illiterate or inexperienced, were able to effect change or improvement in women’s lives more broadly. In publishing, by contrast, the Zhenotdel activists made some of their strongest contributions to women’s equality. By 1930, they were putting out 18 different publications with a total circulation of 670,000 copies, not counting the special “women’s pages” in the main party newspapers (Stites 1978, 336). Readership included women workers, peasants, and the delegates serving in local government. Kommunistka, in particular, became a place for trying out new ideas and debating women’s roles in society, women’s leadership, and organizing work among women (Goldman 1996; Krylova 2017). Activists, male and female, used the journal to write probing criticism of NEP in particular (Wood 1997). They fought against the disbanding of local women labor organizers in the second half of the 1920s (Goldman 1996). They debated the best forms of creating services for women and children that would create new ways of living (byt) and new gender relations. Women’s sections also worked successfully with various institutions to improve maternity and childcare, especially the Section for the Protection of Mothers and Children (Okhmatmlad). With roots in the prerevolutionary period, they were significantly more

222

223

Paradoxes of gender in the Zhenotdel

developed in the Soviet period and lasted until the post-​Soviet period. Soviet architects built high-​rise apartment buildings complete with childcare facilities, food shopping, and laundries right up until the fall of the USSR. In the post-​Soviet period, childcare and social services have been drastically cut back, but some women activists have been able to continue the work of social service centers for women and children in crisis situations (Johnson and Saarinen 2013). Less successful was Zhenotdel work with the Commission for the Improvement and Study of Female Labor in Industry created in 1922, but not fully functional until 1925 or 1926 (Patterson 2011). Improving women’s position in the workforce proved difficult because of resistance among male workers and trade unions, as well as persistent efforts to eliminate separate organizing of women workers (Goldman 1996). Zhenotdel activists frequently expressed concern that women workers forced out of jobs would resort to prostitution. Working first with the Commissariat of Social Welfare (headed by Kollontai) and later with the Commissariat of Health, the Zhenotdely sought to eradicate prostitution (Wood 1997, 111–​116). Kollontai viewed the problem as a breakdown of solidarity between men and women workers when women were equated with instruments of pleasure (Kollontai 1920). Soviet practice in this period was not uniform, however, and ranged from supporting women by providing alternative work to stigmatizing and even prosecuting them (Hearne 2020). Key leaders of the women’s section—​Kollontai above all, but also Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya (Vladimir Lenin’s wife), and others—​worked with legislators to create new law codes on a range of topics including equal rights in marriage and the family, equal property ownership, the legalization of abortion, and labor protection (Goldman 1993). Compared to government policies at the time and even today, this was some of the most progressive legislation the world had ever seen (see Htun and Weldon 2010 for a discussion of how to measure gender equality; also Johnson 2018, 9, on the problem of gender legislation that is not actually implemented). Even though the 1930s saw a clawback of rights given to women and increased regulation of sexuality—​especially the criminalization of abortion, prostitution, and male homosexuality, as well as the banning of divorce and the stigmatization of illegitimate children who were not allowed to carry a patronymic (their father’s name) in their passport—​the general legislation made outright discrimination against women illegal in a range of areas (the family, education, and work) in ways that were sustained for the next 70 years and technically still hold today. The Soviet Union was also one of the first states to ban sexual harassment in the workplace or in situations where the perpetrator used his position of authority to extract sexual favors (Granik 1997).

The gender politics of backwardness Often the efforts in these areas had unintended consequences, however. Two stand out as the most important: the tendency to equate women with “backward” areas of society and the demand that women both work and care for children and the household, often with insufficient support. From the beginning, the new authorities mobilized the women’s sections to deal with the most challenging social holdovers in everyday life from the Tsarist period—​illiteracy, high rates of maternal and infant mortality, syphilis, and prostitution. The concentration on women’s illiteracy and inexperience meant that they were, by definition, in need of the

223

224

Elizabeth A. Wood

party’s tutelage. This use of gender as a wedge to bring in the party’s domination can be seen particularly in Central Asia (Gradskova 2019; Kamp 2011; Massell 1974; Northrop 2004), but also in the whole of the USSR (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2005). In posters, the artists employed by the new leadership tended to display men as warriors looking forward (a metaphor that had been used by populists and socialists from the 1870s up to the Revolutions of 1917) and women as backwards, looking back over their shoulders and barefoot, with kerchiefs on their heads (Wood, forthcoming). At the same time, the party (both leaders and rank-​and-​file) continued to view women’s contributions to society primarily through the lens of maternity and child welfare. This meant that over the long haul “women’s matters” (zhenskoe delo) would come to be associated with the domestic sphere and relegated to second-​class status after the more urgent problems of production and heavy industry. Since the domestic was associated almost exclusively with women, there was little call for men to change the degree of their responsibility for home and childcare. International Women’s Day (March 8), to take just one example, evolved from a holiday to emancipate women from the drudgery of the kitchen into a frilly holiday for women with flowers and cakes (Chatterjee 2002). Since Bolshevik policy was implemented somewhat sporadically and not always with an eye to the diversity of women’s own experiences, women themselves (especially peasant women) expressed deep ambivalence about issues of divorce and abortion, even how best to work among women (Goldman 1993). By the end of the Soviet period, many women had rejected “the woman question” altogether. If one of the main tasks of the Zhenotdel was to provide public solutions to the issue of the family, women themselves did not always agree (Fuqua 1996).

Conclusions Perhaps in the end it is unfair to raise the question of Zhenotdel effectiveness as either emancipatory or instrumentalist exploitation for the purpose of building party loyalty and control. Nonetheless, it will probably long remain a subject of controversy whether such a public, state takeover of domestic issues represented a step forward in emancipating women or a step backward in subordinating them to a different authority—​the patriarchal state instead of the patriarchal male head of household. Despite excellent studies of the Zhenotdel that have been emerging in Russia (Alferova 2011; Emelianova 2005; Iukina 2003, 2007), much more needs to be done in a number of areas. One is to determine the degree to which activists in the women’s section (particularly but not only Kollontai) worked with early jurists to create the new emancipatory laws on women and the family, and the degree to which that legislation was actually implemented. A second concerns the connections between the Commissariats of Social Welfare, Health, and Labor and the women’s sections. Although the leading Soviet-​era author on the women’s section, Chirkov (1978, 79), claims that the zhenotdely did not have any impact on the commissariats when they tried to send their representatives to work in them, it is not clear how much progress was actually made in creating the institutions for women that socialist theory advocated. From 1918 to 1930, the women’s sections struggled with their identities as the Push-​ Me-​Pull-​You’s of the Communist Party. On the one hand, they tried valiantly to push the party, setting out demands and resolutions for improving women workers’ and peasants’ lives. On the other hand, they were frequently pulled in many directions, both through their own lack of confidence and through the party’s insistence that their first priority was 224

225

Paradoxes of gender in the Zhenotdel

to draw women into the party, which was itself frequently changing direction through those years.

References Alferova, Irina V. 2011. “Delegatskie sobranie 1920e godov kak proekt podgotovki sovetskikh zhenshchin k upravlencheskoi deiatel’nosti.” [“Delegates Meetings of the 1920s as a Project for Preparing Soviet Women for Management.”] Magistra vitae 1 (216). Chatterjee, Choi. 2002. Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–​ 1939. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chirkov, P. M. 1978. Reshenie zhenskogo voprosa v SSSR, 1917–​1937 g.g. [The Solution of the Woman Question in the USSR, 1917–​1937]. Moscow: Myslʹ. Daskalova, Krassimira. 2007. “How Should We Name the ‘Women-​Friendly’ Actions of State Socialism?” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 1: 214–​219. de Haan, Francisca. 2007. “Introduction.” Aspasia 1: v–​ix. Dubinina, N. I. 1981. “Pobeda velikogo Oktiabria i pervye meropriiatiia partii v reshenii zhenskogo voprosa.” [“The Victory of the Great October Revolution and the First Efforts of the Party in the Solution to the Woman Question.”] In Opyt KPSS v reshenii zhenksogo voprosa [The Experience of the CPSU in the Solution of the Woman Question], 14–​34. Moscow: Mysl. www.a-​ z.ru/​women/​texts/​s_​14r.htm. Emelianova, Elena Dmitrievna. 2003. “A. M. Kollontai-​ zachinatel’ demokratizatsii partiino-​ gosudarstvennoi sistemy.” [“A. M. Kollontai, the Initiator of Democratization in the Party-​ State System.”] In Aleksandra Kollontai: Teoriia zhenskoi emansipatsii v kontekste Rossiiskoi gendernoi politiki, edited by V. I. Uspenskaia, 119–​130. Tver’: Zolotaia bukva. –​–​–​–​. 2005. “Gender v sovetskoi istoriografii.” [“Gender in Soviet Historiography.”] In Pol i gender v naukakh o cheloveke i obshchestve [Sex and Gender in the Humanities and in Society], edited by V. I. Uspenskaia. Tverʹ: Feminist-​Press, 2005. Funk, Nanette. 2014. “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 344–​360. Fuqua, Michelle. 1996. “The Politics of the Domestic Sphere: The Zhenotdely, Women’s Liberation, and the Search for a Novyi Byt in Early Soviet Russia.” Treadgold Paper (10). Ghodsee, Kristen. 2015. “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2): 248–​252. Goldman, Wendy. 1984. “Freedom and its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet Family Code of 1926.” Russian History 11 (4): 362–​388. –​–​–​–​. 1993. Women the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, I917–​1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –​–​–​–​. 1996. “Industrial Politics, Peasant Rebellion and the Death of the Proletarian Women’s Movement in the USSR.” Slavic Review 55 (1): 63–​67. Gradskova, Yulia. 2019. Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Women. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Granik, Lisa. 1997. “The Trials of the Proletarka: Sexual Harassment Claims in the 1920s.” In Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–​1996. Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order, edited by Peter H. Solomon. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Hayden, Carol Eubanks. 1976. “The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party.” Russian History 3 (2): 150–​173. –​–​–​–​. 1979. “Feminism and Bolshevism: The Zhenotdel and the Politics of Women’s Emancipation in Russia, 1917–​1930.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, California. Hearne, Siobhan. 2020. “Liberation and Limitation: The Early Soviet Campaign to ‘Struggle with Prostitution.’” In The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–​41, edited by Lara Douds, James Harris, and Peter Whitewood. London: Bloomsbury. Htun, Mara and S. Laurel Weldon. 2010. “When Do Governments Promote Women’s Rights? A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Sex Equality Policy.” Perspectives on Politics 8 (1): 207–​216.

225

226

Elizabeth A. Wood Iukina, Irina. 2003. “Aleksandra Kollontai i rossiiskii feminizm.” [“Alexandra Kollontai and Russian Feminism.”] In Aleksandra Kollontai: Teoriia zhenskoi emansipatsii v kontekste Rossiiskoi gendernoi politiki, edited by V. I. Uspenskaia, 29–​44. Tver’: Zolotaia bukva. –​–​–​–​. 2007. Russkiĭ feminizm kak vyzov sovremennosti [Russian Feminism as a Challenge to Modernity]. St. Petersburg: Aleteĭia. Johnson, Janet E. 2018. The Gender of Informal Politics: Russia, Iceland and Twenty-​First Century Male Dominance. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Johnson, Janet Elise and Aino Saarinen. 2013. “Twenty-​ first-​ century Feminisms under Repression: Gender Regime Change and the Women’s Crisis Center Movement in Russia.” Signs: Journal of women in Culture and Society 38 (3): 543–​567. Kamp, Marianne. 2011. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kingston-​Mann, Esther. 2018. Women, Land Rights and Rural Development: How Much Land Does a Woman Need? New York and London: Routledge. Kollontai, Alexandra M. 1920. “Trudovaia Respublika i prostitutsiia.” [“The Workers’ Republic and Prostitution.”] Kommunistka (6): 16–​20. Krylova, Anna. 2017. “Bolshevik Feminism and Gender Agendas of Communism.” In The Cambridge History of Communism, edited by Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith, 399–​423. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massell, Gregory. 1974. The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia: 1919–​1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. “Metody i formy raboty sredi zhenshchin kommunisticheskikh partii: Tezisy, osnovnye printsipy (Tretii congress, 22 iiunia–​12 iiulia 1921 g.).” [“Methods and forms of work among women of the Communist Party: Theses, basic principles. Third [Comintern] Congress, June 22–​July 12, 1921.”] 1933. In Kommunisticheskiĭ internat︠ ︡ sional v dokumentakh: Reshenii︠ ︡ a, tezisy i vozzvanii︠ ︡ a kongressov kominterna i plenumov IККI, 1919–​1932, edited by Béla Kun. Moscow: Partiĭnoe izd-​vo. Northrop, Douglas. 2004. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Patterson, Michelle Jane. 2011. “Red ‘Teaspoons of Charity’: Zhenotdel, Russian Women, and the Communist Party, 1919–​1930.” PhD diss., University of Toronto. Scheide, Carmen. 2001. “‘Born in October’: The Life and Thought of Aleksandra Vasil’evna Artyukhina, 1889–​1969.” In Women in the Stalin Era, edited by Melanie Ilič, 9–​28. London: Palgrave. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stites, Richard. 1978. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–​1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Uspenskaia, V. I. 2003. “Radikal’nyi proekt zhenskoi emancipatsii Aleksandry Kollontai.” [“The Radical Women’s Emancipation Project of Alexandra Kollontai.”] In Aleksandra Kollontai: Teoriia zhenskoi emansipatsii v kontekste Rossiiskoi gendernoi politiki, edited by V. I. Uspenskaia, 11–​28. Wood, Elizabeth A. 1997. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. –​–​–​–​. forthcoming. “Gender and Imagination in the Russian Revolution: Backward Women and Forward Men in Iconic Perspective, 1919–​1923.” In The Russian Revolution of 1917: Memory and Legacy, edited by Carol S Leonard, Daniel Orlovsky, and Yury Petrov. Oxford: Routledge. Zdravomyslova, Elena and Anna Temkina. 2005. “Gendered Citizenship in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Societies.” In Nation and Gender in Contemporary Europe, edited by Vera Tolz and Stephenie Booth. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

226

227

22 WOMEN’S EDUCATION, ENTRY TO PAID WORK, AND FORCED UNVEILING IN SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA Yulia Gradskova

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, they were quick to declare equality for men and women, but at the same time stressed that women’s cultural levels were low; educational efforts were needed for women to achieve real equality with men and to contribute to socialist production in the same manner as men. The non-​Russian women living in the Russian Empire were considered to be particularly backward and in need of Russian help for their emancipation. This Soviet gender ideology focused on the importance of work, political participation, and education for both men and women, while women were also responsible for reproduction. Soviet ideology shaped gendered relationship and policies outside Russia, including in the case of the so-​called “women of the East,” the non-​Slavic women living in Central Asia, Caucasus, and Siberia. Attempts to enact Soviet gender ideology in Central Asia resulted in conflicting policies and gendered violence. This chapter focuses on the implications of Bolshevik (1920s) and Soviet (1930s) ideas on gender equality in the territory of Central Asia that had been colonized by Russia in the 19th century. It places the study of Bolshevik politics at the intersection of national and gender politics and considers the Soviet emancipation of non-​Slavic women in the USSR (Gradskova 2018). The emancipation of women in Central Asia has been the focus of scholarly discussions, in particular with respect to its possible connection to the colonial politics of the past and their long-​lasting effects (see Shchurko and Suchland, Chapter 7 in this Handbook). The Central Asian part of the Soviet Union included five Soviet republics, the now independent countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. This region is populated by diverse and often mixed populations (including some numerically small ethnic groups in the Pamir mountain region), with their own languages and traditions concerning gender norms. The Tashkent area was conquered around 1868, the Pamir mountains in the mid-​1890s.

227

228

Yulia Gradskova

Debates about the Soviet emancipatory project There are continuing debates about the Soviet emancipatory project in the region centering on the issues of intent and source of emancipation, its character, and long-​time effects. Central Asia (called Turkestan in Russian imperial documents) was one of the territories that the Russian Empire conquered last, and its relationship to Russia was similar to that between West European empires and their colonies. The Central Asian population was less Russified before 1917 than that of many other imperial territories (Khalid 1999; Sahadeo 2007), which drew the special interest of historians studying Sovietization. However, Cold War period researchers were limited in their analysis of the emancipation of women in Central Asia. While Soviet historians followed the scripts of Soviet ideology and praised the emancipation of women (e.g., Palvanova 1982; Shakulova 1981), the ones based in the West often lacked access to the primary materials, leading to some assumptions that were not grounded in empirical facts. Soviet modernization of Central Asia was used by Soviet authorities and scholars for showcasing the achievements of state socialism and its affirmative politics in Asian and African countries that got their independence as a result of the anti-​colonial struggle, particularly Muslim countries (Rasulov 2017, 225). One of the first studies of Soviet gender politics in Central Asia was published during the Cold War by Massell (1974). Focusing on the work of the Women’s Section of the Communist Party (Zhenotdel), he argues that the Bolsheviks attempted to use the mobilization of women, the “surrogate proletariat,” for destabilizing the traditional social order in Central Asia. Women, liberated from the control of men and families, could advocate for Bolshevik politics in a region that lacked proper proletarians. However, according to Massell, social change with respect to women’s status was pushed too strongly by the Bolsheviks, which negatively affected men’s “self-​image, self-​definition, self-​esteem and ego-​identity” (1974, 401). Massell’s analysis does not discuss much the implications of these politics for the identity of women in Central Asia, nor their implications for Soviet discourse on the emancipation of women in general. The opening of the archives after the fall of the Soviet Union contributed to renewed research interest in the Soviet gender project, which began to examine discourses of emancipation with a particular focus on Soviet imperial ambitions (Edgar 2006; Florin 2017). Several scholars saw Soviet politics in the borderlands as a continuation of Russian colonial politics to establish Russian control over the borderlands’ natural resources and population through destroying religion, national languages, and the traditional system of the socialization of children (Florin 2017). In Central Asia, the campaign against Islam, together with forced collectivization and ecological disasters (an effect of Soviet economic exploitation), were the most important arguments for explaining to the West that Soviet politics in the region were colonial. These scholars pointed to the extreme violence in the hujum campaign—​the attack on traditional gender norms culminating in mass forced unveilings in many cities of Uzbekistan, but also Tajikistan, on March 8, 1927. In reaction to the hujum, some local men attacked and killed several thousands of women who had unveiled as a result of this campaign. The killing was seen as a protest against the unveiling as a violation of the gender order. However, scholars do not agree in their evaluation of this campaign. Kamp, examining both documents and interviewing women witnesses of the campaign, suggests that discussions on changes in women’s societal status and the tradition of covering women’s 228

229

Women in Soviet Central Asia

bodies, started inside Uzbek society well before the Bolshevik campaign (Kamp 2006). Kamp states that before the mid-​1920s unveiling was partially voluntary—​some Uzbek women observed Russian and Tatar women and wanted to have similar freedoms, for example, to study. Some Uzbek women married members of the Uzbek communist youth organization and were less restricted than other women. Kamp questions the interpretation of the killing of women, who took off their paranja [traditional robe] on March 8, as “crimes of passion” and insists it was a rather well-​planned action of revenge (Kamp 2006, 186–​187). Northrop (2004) claims that hujum was an expression of Russian colonial ambitions; it hindered, rather than facilitated, the emancipation of women. Indeed, the Russian conquest of Central Asia contributed to a heavier veiling of women who had to be protected from colonizers; control over women also became stronger after the Bolshevik campaign. Another approach acknowledges the emancipatory intention of Soviet gender politics, but focuses on the limitations of Soviet influence. Many studies published after 1991, including Kamp, examine the role of national intellectuals and reformed Islamic scholars (jadids) advocating women’s education in different parts of the Russian Empire before the Bolshevik Revolution (Kamp 2006; Khalid 1999; see also Zikrieeva 2002, 67–​69). They argue that the Bolshevik discourse on “backward Muslim women” undermined local efforts (Igmen 2012, 152; Kocaoglu 2009; Makhmutova 2006). Still, a researcher from Tajikistan, Zikrieeva, suggests that Muslim women of many parts of Central Asia faced discrimination in their families and did not have political rights. Their situation in colonized Turkestan was similar to that in the Bukhara Emirate, the state in Central Asia that had relative independence from the Russian imperial government (Zikrieeva 2002, 59). Kyrgyz scholar Moldosheva (2016) argues that the Soviet campaign included Bolshevik female activists who had a genuine interest in emancipation. Other scholars analyze the structure and long-​term effects of the Soviet emancipation. According to Kalinovsky (2018, 77), in the 1960s, female economists like Rano Ubaidullaeva from Uzbekistan showed that women working in both industry and on collective farms were mainly engaged in manual labor, but did not have managerial positions or those requiring technical skills. However, other work argues that the Soviet emancipatory efforts led to significant progress. In their introduction to a collection of oral histories of women from Uzbekistan, Tokhtakhodzhaeva, Abdurazakova, and Kadyrova argue that, thanks to Soviet emancipation politics, including hujum, “Several generations of women got to the center of the public life,” and they take a critical position toward contemporary Uzbekistan’s officials’ perspective on hujum as a “campaign imposed by Moscow and requiring to refuse one’s own cultural roots.” At the same time, the authors do not approve of “the Soviet methods of social transformation” that limited their success (2002, 7, 8). In particular, they criticize the lack of preventative measures against local resistance (2002, 8). They also stress the limited character of changes sponsored by Moscow: while most of the women worked outside of the home in the 1930s to 1940s, family life continued to be patriarchal during the whole of the Soviet period (2002, 9). Families preserved separate male and female spaces, practiced customs of female obedience and silence, and in some cases, participated in arranged marriages. My study on the Soviet politics of the emancipation of ethnic minority women in the Soviet Union argues that the Soviet narrative that praised the generous help of the Soviet center to the “backward woman of the East” contributed to the othering of minority women vis-​à-​vis the greatness of the civilizing mission successfully fulfilled by the Soviet center (Gradskova 2018, 161–​164). The Soviet politics of emancipation often follow the colonial patterns even if not with intention. 229

230

Yulia Gradskova

Bolshevik ideas on women’s education and emancipation: The “woman of the East” To become an equal builder of communist society, Soviet gender ideology held that women had to be educated and professionally trained, even more so than men because the levels of literacy and professional skills among women were considered to be significantly lower than among men. Schooling for girls had to be on equal terms with boys, and adult women who could not read and write had to be involved in courses or informal literacy groups. The elimination of illiteracy of women from the former colonial borderlands was a more difficult and longer process than the education of women in central Russia. It involved the costly preparation of teachers speaking national languages, and changing popular attitudes toward the education of girls (Rakhimbabaeva 1949). In the case of most Turkic languages, Soviet modernization also meant a change from the Arabic writing system into Latin around 1927–​1928. The use of the Latin alphabet was explained through simplification and Europeanization; however, it contributed to the Bolsheviks’ fight against Islam. In the late 1930s, the Latin alphabet was substituted by the Cyrillic one. The Bolsheviks recognized, quite early, the importance of special institutions for the emancipation of women in former colonies and territories with a non-​Slavic population. This task of setting up such institutions was first assigned to the Women’s Section of the Communist Party, the Zhenotdel (Massell 1974) and in April 1921 the first meeting for those working among “women of the Orient” took place in Moscow. According to the memoirs of Zhenotdel member, Serafima Liubimova, that meeting was attended by 45 delegates, including from some Central Asian countries (Liubimova 1958, 6). In March 1923, at the second all-​Russian meeting for those working among people of the East in Moscow, only seven delegates could speak the language of the local people with whom they were working (Materialy 1923). The Bolshevik center’s ability to influence changes in the former imperial borderlands was limited from the beginning. In 1926, the All Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) created the Special Commission for the Improvement of Work and Everyday Life to work with the women of “culturally backward people” (kulturno-​otstalykh narodnostei) (GARF 6983/​1/​141, 60–​63). The documents of the commission show that women’s emancipation was focused on the improvement of women’s work conditions, helping with the organization of education and the involvement of women in professional education, establishing healthcare and childcare institutions, introducing women into work in Soviet organizations, and spreading propaganda about the new Soviet legislation on women’s rights in family life (Gradskova 2018, 83–​102). The ideas of the Soviet emancipators were shared in a series of pamphlets titled “Woman-​Toiler of the East,” published in 1927/​1928 by the Institute for the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood. As toilers (truzhenitzy), women in the region were not proletarian workers, but people who earned their living through their work on a farm or in a small business. The series was for Russian participants in the emancipation campaign—​ Zhenotdel specialists—​but also teachers, party cadres, nurses, or midwives. The series included 28 pamphlets mainly written by ethnologists, with each pamphlet dedicated to the life of a woman from a particular ethnic group, focusing on her dependency and oppression. The series used anti-​imperialist language, and often started from a critique of tsarist colonial politics (Gradskova 2018, 76–​80). 230

231

Women in Soviet Central Asia

Despite the emancipatory rhetoric and critique of imperial politics, the description of the life of the “woman of the East” usually followed an orientalist paradigm. For example, the pamphlet on the Uzbek woman presented Uzbekistan as a place very far from Moscow and with different norms (Moskalev 1928, 6, 18). The pamphlet also stated that changes were underway, however, and that Uzbek women were starting to take part in public life and even be represented in local Soviet councils (1928, 36). Soviet leaders saw education as crucial for women’s Sovietization. In contrast to many other regions of the Soviet Union, where mixed gender education was a norm established by the Bolsheviks, Uzbekistan was allowed to have many gender-​segregated schools (1928, 45). Although this practice was largely abandoned in the 1930s, according to Soviet data, girls constituted approximately 42 percent of school pupils of gender-​integrated schools in 1937–​1938 (Rakhimbabaeva 1949, 41).

Bolshevik ideas on work among “women of the East” According to Bolshevik ideology, socialist society should be based on the collective productive work of all its members, men and women, whether living in the center or on the periphery. Similarly to schooling, Soviet emancipators saw the mass involvement of Central Asian women into production as a gradual process. Bolshevik leaders considered that women-​toilers of the national minorities lacked culture and education, but they also assumed that these women worked for their communities and performed important duties in indigenous households, in a way similar to Russian peasant women. The Soviet emancipators considered it important to study the work that women were doing in their traditional societies, to better organize professional training and education for them. The series of pamphlets and documents of the commission named the different types of work women that were performing—​from working in the fields to producing carpets (Venediktov 1928) or silk. Bolshevik emancipators’ assumptions that tied the productive role of “women of the East” to the household led them to believe that women had to learn new technologies and instruments to improve their skills. The commission organized special courses on poultry, milk products, silk production, and cloth making. The commission’s documents also expressed hope that in the near future some women would organize different kinds of cooperative enterprises and workshops, with modern methods, including collectivization and mechanization (Trud i byt 1928, 5). The materials on Uzbekistan show that the Bolsheviks were thinking about a fundamental change in women’s attitudes toward work and consumption, hoping that it could help to overcome their seclusion. They recognized the challenges they would face in a society that supported gender segregation and adopted a gradual model. A cooperative shop in one region of Uzbekistan reserved one day a week for women customers only (GARF 6983/​1/​10, p. 72). The pamphlet on Uzbek women reported that in 1928, local Uzbek women worked in 17 cooperative shops and 18 workshops, producing silk and milk products, and sewing (Moskalev 1928, 38). The documents of the commission show that these initial plans met a lot of difficulties, including a lack of finances and a lack of cadres (Gradskova 2018, 78–​90). The work of Soviet emancipators often repeated typical imperial-​colonial dynamics: women sent by the Bolshevik center to emancipate the “woman of the East” felt themselves stepping onto unknown ground, attempting to prepare themselves through reading books written by imperial orientalists and having difficulties in establishing contacts with Central Asian women (Liubimova 1958). 231

232

Yulia Gradskova

Moreover, while the Soviet government expected Soviet women of all ethnicities to be promoted to important positions at the production sites and in Soviet institutions, in practice non-​Russian women were not trusted from the beginning, even as low-​paid workers. Many factory directors and Communist Party leaders on different levels were very suspicious: “The Kazakh woman never worked at the factory, she does not have the necessary skills. But at the same time the growing industrial production requires from her knowledge on productive processes, skills and qualification” (GARF, d 11 p. 4 from 18.05.1928). The commission often expressed dissatisfaction with the involvement of women in industrial production (GARF 6983/​1/​141, p. 58). With the beginning of the first five-​year plan (1928) and forced industrialization, women from the imperial borderlands, together with women from the center, started to be seen not as individual producers, but as a productive force that could be used as was best suited for the state.

Soviet ideology on the transformation of women’s family and private life: The case of hujum Soviet ideology also required the transformation of private life (termed as everyday life or byt). The private space was less accessible to the Bolshevik party or the commission’s supervision and required changes in the family regarding a woman’s status, as well as considering a woman’s religious beliefs and national traditions. The commission confronted the same issues that “Christian civilizers” and “imperial modernizers” had been dealing with before 1917, challenging religious institutions and traditions connected to marriage and family life, including seclusion and women’s dress. To emancipate the woman of national minority [natsionalka], the commission focused on informing her about her new rights in accordance with Soviet legislation, especially regarding so-​ called everyday crimes—​ polygamy, bride kidnapping, bride price, and domestic violence. The pamphlet on the Uzbek woman declared that the new Soviet legislation demanded that a man who kills his wife must be executed, and that forced marriage would lead to three years in prison (Moskalev 1928, 47). Soviet legislation, seen as a violation of local laws and traditions, met much resistance on the way to its implementation. While some women in the cities of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were killed by their relatives for taking off the paranja, Werner’s (2004, 84) work on bride kidnapping in Kazakhstan shows that, even if non-​consensual bride kidnapping in Kazakhstan diminished significantly during the Soviet period, it never stopped. Ideas on the protection of health through the regulation of dress were no less intrusive for family life and the national communities than the regulation of personal relationships. The campaign against paranja and other traditional clothes was inspired by the assumption about progress associated with western modernity. Antonina Nukhrat, a member of Zhenotdel and of the Commission for the Improvement of Work and Everyday Life of Women considered “rationalization of dress” to be an important part of Sovietization (Nukhrat 1930, 50). One of the institutions supported by the commission was the so-​called house of the woman-​toiler (dom truzhenitsy), a kind of club offering courses, library facilities, and dormitories for women whose ethnic group was considered to be in need of special help with Sovietization. Often the program of such houses included the opportunity to try on “European” (in practice Russian) clothes. Liubimova’s memoirs (1958, 31) state that the house of dekhanka (agricultural worker) in Ashkhabad (Turkmenistan) gave out “European clothes” and underwear to women while they were attending courses in the house. 232

233

Women in Soviet Central Asia

The clothes of Muslim women covering the entire body were at the center of particular criticism by male and female Soviet emancipators. While Soviet doctors criticized the covering of women’s bodies as dangerous for their health, some Soviet publications, following works of the pre-​1917 Muslim reformers, jadids, argued that the Quran did not require women to cover their faces (Smirnov 1929, 27); thus the “harmful tradition” could be changed without destroying the social order prescribed by religion. The pamphlet on the Uzbek woman used similar arguments, referring to the Quran, and compared Central Asian women with Muslim women from the Volga-​Ural region who did not cover their faces (Moskalev 1928, 19). The covered bodies of women, argued the author, symbolized the submissiveness and dominated status of Uzbek women. Her husband is described as looking at a woman as “Something that has a much lower status compared to a man” (Moskalev 1928, 22). The paranja is described as an obstacle to modernization and development, however the attacks of March 8, 1927 in the hujum campaign are described without acknowledging the tragedy of female mass murder. The victory of Soviet modernization and the bright future of socialism seemed more important to the authorities than the lives of individual women.

Conclusions The Soviet scenario for the emancipation of “women of the East” showed itself to be contradictory and marked by imperial and orientalist thinking about “other” women as more backward than women from the Russian center and as those unable to find their own way to freedom. Even during the first decade after the Bolshevik Revolution the new Soviet leaders of Central Asian countries criticized Russian imperial politics for the lack of rights and education for women in the imperial borderlands. At the same time they also criticized the heavy burden of traditional and religious rules that limited women’s freedom. Bolshevik propaganda production on the “backward woman of the East” had a double function: showing the dependent position of non-​Russian women while elevating the status of Russian women and Russia itself (on the Russian inferiority complex compared to the “West” see Tlostanova 2008). Examining the Central Asian experience of women’s emancipation in the Soviet period identifies important differences in gender politics between the Russian center and the periphery. Many men and women in Central Asia saw the institutions and policies aimed for development of women’s education, culture, and work as a continuation of the imperial politics of Russification, and resisted such reforms. Similarly to the pre-​1917 period, new ideas and institutions came from outside while local traditions concerning gender norms and family relationships were modified without local consent. Even if these efforts had been embraced by more people, the Bolshevik center never had enough money and cadres for realizing the promised program: the number of nursery schools, hospitals, clubs, and cooperatives getting state help in the 1920s was quite limited. The Bolshevik party was “compensating” these small practical achievements through loud propaganda campaigns and violent “attacks on old life” like hujum. The ideological violence of the Soviet state became harmful not only for the emancipatory ideas but for the life of the activists. Many women from different nations who were active in supporting early Bolshevik “emancipation” campaigns became victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of the late 1930s (see Gradskova 2018). As Edgar (2006, 271) argues, the legitimacy of Soviet emancipation directed from the imperial center came under growing criticism from the site of nationalizing states in 233

234

Yulia Gradskova

post-​Soviet Central Asia. This lack of legitimacy was exacerbated by the fact that Central Asian women experienced the double burden that women everywhere in the communist world had experienced. While women in Central Asia largely got full access to universal school education in the post-​1945 period, the school curriculum continued to be controlled from Moscow. Women could not choose if they wanted to work outside of home or to spend some years at home caring for their children. The lack of such a choice was also attributed to the politics of Moscow, while the contradictory legacies of Soviet emancipation now have to be faced by the post-​Soviet states in Central Asia.

References Edgar, Adrienne. 2006. “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet “Emancipation” of Muslim Women in Pan-​Islamic Perspective.” Slavic Review 65 (2): 252–​272. Florin, Moriz. 2017. “Beyond Colonialism? Agency, Power and Making of Soviet Central Asia.” Kritika 18 (4): 827–​838. GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), fond 6983, Kommitet po uluchsheniyu truda i byta rabotnits i krestianok. 1926–​1932. Gradskova, Yulia. 2018. Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Woman. Natzionalka. Cham: Springer, 2018. Igmen, Ali. 2012. Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Kalinovsky, Artemy. 2018. Laboratory of Socialist Development. The Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kamp, Marianne. 2006. New Woman in Uzbekistan, Islam, Modernity and Unveiling under Communism. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Khalid, Adeeb. 1999. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kocaoglu, Timur. 2009. “The Past as Prologue? Challenging the Myth of the Subordinated, Docile Woman in Muslim Central Asia.” In Gender Politics in Post-​Communist Eurasia, edited by Lina Racioppi and Katherine O’Sullivan See, 169–​208. East Lancing, MI: Michigan University Press. Liubimova, Serafima. 1958. V pervye gody (In the first years). Moskva: Gospolitizdat. Makhmutova, Alta. 2006. “Pora i nam zazhech zariu svobody.” Jadidism i zhenskoe dvizhenie [“It is a time for us to ignite the dawn of the freedom” Jadidism and Women’s Movement]. Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo. Massell, Gregory. 1974. The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–​1929. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton. Materialy. 1923. Materialy Vtorogo Vserossiiskogo soveshchaniia rabotnikov sredi zhenshchin vostochnykh narodnostei [The Materials of the Second All-​Russia Meeting of those Working among Women of Eastern People]. Moskva. Moldosheva, Anara. 2016. “ ‘Naberites khrabrosti i prochtite vse!’ Perepiska rabotnits zhenotdelov Kyrgyzstana 1920-​kh gg.” [“ ‘Get the courage to read to the end’ The correspondence of the Zhenotdel of Kyrgyzstan.”] In Poniatiia o Sovetskom v Tsentralnoi Asii. [Ideas about “Soviet” in Central Asia], edited by Georgi Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova, 210–​269. Bishkek: Stab-​Press. Moskalev, V. I. 1928. Uzbechka [The Uzbek Woman]. Moskva: Institut okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva. Northrop, Douglas. 2004. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Nukhrat, Antonina.1930. Bytovaia rabota potrebitelskoi kooperatsii v natsionalnykh raionakh [Work of the Consumer Cooperation in the National Regions]. Moskva: Tsentrsoyus. Palvanova, Bibi P. 1982. Emansipatsiia musulmanki. Opyt raskreposhcheniia zhenshchiny sovetskogo vostoka [Emancipation of the Muslim Woman. Experience of Emancipation of Woman of the Soviet East]. Moskva: Nauka. Rakhimbabaeva, Zukhra. 1949. Zhenshchina Uzbekistana na puti k kommunismu [Woman of Uzbekistan on the way to Communism]. Tashkent: Gosizdat Uz.SSR.

234

235

Women in Soviet Central Asia Rasulov, Akbar. 2017. “Central Asia as an Object of Orientalist Narratives at the Age of Bandung.” In Bandung, Global History and International Law, edited by Luis Ealava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah, 217–​231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sahadeo, Jeff. 2007. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–​1923. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Shakulova, V. S. 1981. “Kulturnaia revoliutsiia i zhenskii vopros.” [“Cultural revolution and Women’s Question.”] In Opyt KPSS v reshenii zhenskogo voprosa [The Experience of CPSU in Solution of Women’s Question], 77–​102. Moskva: Mysl. Smirnov, N. 1929. Chadra [The Chador]. Moskva: Bezbozhnik. Tlostanova, Madina. 2008. “The Janus-​faced Empire Distorting Orientalist Discourses: Gender, Race and Religion in the Russian/​ (post)Soviet Constructions of the ‘Orient’.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (Spring): 1–​11. Tokhtakhodzhaeva, Marfua, Dono Abdurazakova, and Almaz Kadyrova. 2002. Sudby I vremia. Proshloe Uzbekistana v ustnykh rasskazakh zhenshhin-​svidetelnits sovremennits sobytii [Time and Lives: The Past of Uzbekistan Told through Stories of Women who Witnessed the Events]. Tashkent. Trud i byt zhenshchiny-​kustarki. 1928. Pervyi Vsesoyuznyi Kooperativnyi sezd kustarok [The Work and Everyday Life of Female Hand-​workers. The First All-​Soviet Cooperative Congress of Female Hand-​workers]. Moskva: Vsekompromsoyuz. Venediktov, N. N. 1928. Turkmenka [The Turkmen Woman]. Moskva: Institut okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva. Werner, Cynthia. 2004. “Women, Marriage and the Nation-​state: The Rise of Non-​Consensual Bride-​Kidnapping in Post-​Soviet Kazakhstan.” In The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies From Soviet Rule to Independence, edited by P. Jones Luong, 59–​91. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zikrieeva, M. 2002. Istoriografiia. Problemy zhenshchin Tadjikistana [Historiography. Problems of Women in Tajikistan]. Dushanbe: Tadzhikkskii Gosudarsvennyi Pedagogicheskii Universitet.

235

236

23 “GYPSIES”/​ROMA AND THE POLITICS OF REPRODUCTION IN POST-​STALINIST CENTRAL-​E ASTERN EUROPE Eszter Varsa

The historiography of gender in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE), especially postsocialist women’s and gender history, has long identified Stalinism (1934–​1953) with repression, especially regarding women’s reproductive freedom (Pető 2002; Wolchik 2000). Some scholars argue that the Thaw (1953–​1964) after Stalin’s death ushered in more freedom in women’s reproductive decision-​making (Funk 1993; Wolchik 2000; Wolchik and Meyer 1985). They have interpreted the legalization of abortion in most state-socialist countries in CEE between 1955 and 1957 to be “part of the post-​Stalinist liberalization of social and political life” that suggested greater gender equality (Zielinska 2000, 24–​25). Other scholars have argued, however, that the Thaw was a backlash that brought about a decrease in gender equality. Goldman (1991) shows that the reproductive measures in Stalin’s Soviet Union, though restrictive, had positive outcomes for working-​class women and single mothers. In post-​World War II CEE, critics compare the Stalinist 1950s to the more conservative gender politics of the interwar period (Fidelis 2008) or to the post-​ Stalinist reaffirmation of sex-​based differences, the emphasis on women’s reproductive role, maternal identity, and accompanying pronatalism (Adamik 2000; Fidelis 2010; Haney 2002; Ignaciuk 2020; Kościańska 2016; Lišková 2018; Misthal 2009). Fidelis (2010, 9) argues, for example, that Stalinism in post-​WWII Poland was a “force that brought about radical social changes” in “interwar conservative structures.” De-​Stalinization by contrast, affected women more negatively than men. While women benefitted from political liberalization, which brought release from Stalinist imprisonment and reforms that included access to abortion, “precommunist gender hierarchies” strengthened and “heightened male authority over women” (Fidelis 2010, 171–​172). Lišková (2018) makes similar claims concerning Czechoslovakia. She locates some liberalizing changes in sexuality during Stalinism, and argues against a linear understanding of the history of

236

237

“Gypsies”/Roma and reproductive politics

sexuality in which the liberalization of reproductive politics following the Thaw contrasts to the repressive 1950s. This chapter intervenes in this scholarship by considering the intersections between gender and race/​ethnicity in post-​Stalinist reproductive politics. It identifies pronatalist discourses in CEE between the 1960s and the 1980s as aiming to reaffirm maternal identity only in certain groups of women. “New eugenic” selectivity (Varsa and Szikra 2020) targeted all those considered to potentially endanger population quality and healthy birth, such as “too large families,” the “degenerate,” and alcoholics. The examples of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria show that when mixed with racial/​ ethnic prejudices, “new eugenics” manifested in antinatalism, especially directed at “Gypsy”/​Romani women. Both racial and ethnic understandings of social difference historically have been used to construct the categories of “Gypsy” and Roma. The two terms are not synonymous or interchangeable. This chapter uses “Gypsy”/​Roma to denote the combination of assigned, derogatory versus self-​chosen categories of identification in the past and present. The text uses “Gypsy” solely with reference to historical sources from the 1930s to the 1980s where this label was applied. In all other cases, “Roma (adj. Romani)” is used to refer to (self-​identified) members of this population group.

Pronatalism and eugenic thought in the first half of the 20th century Population size and reproductive issues gained political importance in Europe at the end of the 19th century when, with expanding industrialization, birth rates started to decline (Timm 2010). The Soviet Union was the first to legalize abortion in 1920. Bolshevik leaders initially introduced legal abortion along a series of other legal changes they saw as liberating women from the home to facilitate their entrance to paid work, including women’s rights to property and divorce and equal rights to children born out of wedlock (Goldman 1991; Hilevych and Sato 2018; Hoffmann 2000). Growing concern about the drop in birth rates, however, resulted in restrictive legislation to increase population size, including the ban on abortion in 1936 under Stalin (Hilevych and Sato 2018; Hoffmann 2000). In the newly independent states of CEE following the breakup of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, concerns about declining birth rates, accelerated by population loss as a result of World War I, gave the issue of fertility rates political weight and also prompted questions around population quality related to national strength (Bucur 2002; Karge, Kind-​Kovács, and Bernasconi 2017; Promitzer, Trubeta, and Turda 2011; Turda 2009, 2014, 2015). Eugenics that embedded the idea of a healthy population as a source of power gained political support in Europe. In pursuit of modernization and nation building, interwar CEE governments introduced a variety of eugenically motivated reproductive policies (Bucur 2002; Kund 2016; Turda 2009, 2015; see also Kurimay, Chapter 18 in this Handbook). These efforts resulted in both positive eugenic measures, such as protective legislation for mothers and child welfare benefits targeting increased fertility rates among population groups perceived to have desirable qualities, and from the 1930s, increasingly negative eugenic measures, such as premarital examinations, sterilization, and euthanasia that aimed to eliminate population groups labeled to have undesirable traits (Kuźma-​Markowska 2011; Shmidt 2019; Szegedi 2012; Turda and Weindling 2007).

237

238

Eszter Varsa

With the rise of National Socialism in the late 1920s in Europe and the radicalization of national politics in CEE, eugenics was increasingly mixed with racial thought (Thorne 2011; Turda 2013; Turda and Weindling 2007). Racial hygiene was central to National Socialist reproductive and fertility politics and formed part of the persecution of both “Jewish” and “Gypsy” populations during the Holocaust in the territories of the Third Reich (Turda and Weindling 2007; Weindling 2000). Preserving the “biological capital” of the nation became a political task for CEE governments. In Romania and in Hungary, for example, interwar “plans for a new, national order” based on “eugenic principles” shifted by the late 1930s to include more radical discourses (Turda 2011, 2013). Though these views were held by a minority, they called for the elimination of “Gypsies” alongside “Jewish” populations, promoting the “racial purification” of the Romanian and Hungarian nations (Thorne 2011; Turda 2011, 2013; Turda and Weindling 2007; Varsa 2017b; Zimmermann 2008). The extent of the racial hygienic persecution of “Gypsies,” however, varied greatly in CEE during World War II, depending on the Third Reich administrative structures in occupied territories (Zimmermann 2008).

“New eugenics” in post-​World War II reproductive politics Anxiety about fertility and falling birth rates remained a central concern for the immediate postwar democracies as well as the Stalinist and state-socialist regimes of CEE between the mid-​1940s and the end of the 1980s. Efforts to increase births were intertwined with a resurgence of “new eugenic” concerns connected to questions of healthy birth that, from the second half of the 1950s and especially from the 1960s and 1970s, were articulated in the field of family planning (Kuźma-​Markowska 2011; Kuźma-​Markowska and Ignaciuk 2020; Varsa and Szikra 2020). One of the first issues that arose concerning healthy birth was the question of abortion. In the early 1950s, under Stalinist governments, many CEE countries retained the ban or the very restrictive regulation of abortion that had existed since the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, which allowed abortions in only very limited cases (Hilevych and Sato 2018; Ignaciuk 2020; Lišková 2018). Though Hungary had briefly allowed abortions in 1945 in response to the rapes committed by Red Army Soldiers (Pető 2017), regulations limiting access were strengthened in 1953. After the legalization of abortion in the Soviet Union in 1955 as part of the Thaw several countries, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, also liberalized abortion (Massino 2019). While legal abortion was part of Marxist thought on women’s liberation, in the Soviet Union (Hilevych and Sato 2018), Czechoslovakia (Dudová 2018; Hašková and Dudová 2020), and in Poland (Ignaciuk 2020) legalization was explicitly framed as a measure to ensure the reproductive health of women. Using eugenic arguments about protecting women’s fertility and securing healthy birth, medical professionals saw the advantages of legalization to regulate abortions and protect women from “the threat of illegal abortionists” (Ignaciuk 2020, 5). While providing information about contraceptive measures, physicians also warned women about the health risks of abortion (Ignaciuk 2020; Hilevych and Sato 2018). The centrality of the question of abortion to (pronatalist) reproductive politics is further underlined by the fact that some state-socialist countries did not legalize abortion, as in Albania; lifted their abortion ban much later, as in East Germany; or recriminalized abortion, as it was in Nicolae Ceaușecu’s Romania in 1966 (Doboş 2020; Kligman 1995). Due to the restricted availability of other contraceptive means, abortion rates increased dramatically in many countries by the early 1960s (Doboş 2020; Hašková and Dudová 238

239

“Gypsies”/Roma and reproductive politics

2020; Hilevych and Sato 2018; Varsa 2017a). These high numbers of abortions, along with declining birth rates, growing rates of out-​of-​wedlock births, and divorce, caused concern among medical and population experts (Doboş 2020; Hašková and Dudová 2020; Hilevych and Sato 2018). Between the mid-​1960s and the end of the 1980s, state-socialist governments used welfare incentives and reproductive policies, including restricted access to abortion, to increase births (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004; Fidelis 2010; Haney 2002; Hilevych and Sato 2018; Hoffmann 2000; Kassabova and Brunnbauer 2009; Sokolová 2008; Szikra and Tomka 2009). In close interaction with Western European and North American movements and transnational actors, family planning was increasingly embraced in the state-socialist countries of Europe from the 1960s in the form of selective pronatalism (Hašková and Dudová 2020; Kuźma-​Markowska 2011; Kuźma-​Markowska and Ignaciuk 2020; Varsa and Szikra 2020). Physicians and organizations propagating family planning in sex education and marriage counseling services in CEE emphasized the importance of “healthy birth” through the use of (hormonal) contraceptives to reduce abortion rates and secure the health of mothers and their families (Hilevych and Sato 2018; Ignaciuk 2020). In this context, voluntary and compulsory sterilization as a eugenic measure to prevent the “reproduction of ‘biologically defective’ individuals” (Kuźma-​Markowska 2011, 109) was actively debated in Poland, while in Czechoslovakia voluntary sterilization was introduced in 1972. When due to the global economic crisis in the 1970s welfare budgets were cut, incentives aiming to increase family size favored educated, better-​to-​do families (Varsa 2017a). Meanwhile social and medical professionals blamed poor and “too large” families for being a burden on the welfare system, whose “undesirable” fertility endangered “quality reproduction” and “the health of the population” (Kuźma-​ Markowska 2019; Melegh 2011).

“Gypsies”/​Roma as targets of post-​World War II “racialist thinking” More than 200,000 Sinti and Roma lost their lives during World War II in the territories of the Third Reich and its allied countries (Donert 2017). The surviving Roma, who formed between less than 1 to 10 percent of CEE societies, formed very heterogeneous population groups in these countries. As discriminatory practices in postwar Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria show, although overt racism was delegitimized after World War II, “racialist thinking” continued to exist (Fehrenbach 2005). In both Western and Eastern Europe, racial bias affected the investigation of crimes committed against Roma during the Holocaust (Margalit 2007; Zimmermann 1999). A number of the anti-​Gypsy regulations established between the late 1920s and the early 1940s were not revoked or were reenacted after the end of the war (Donert 2017; Margalit 2007; Widmann 2001). In Czechoslovakia, for example, police introduced the national register of “nomadic Gypsies” only two years after the end of the war (Donert 2017, 40), while in Hungary separate color identification cards existed for “Gypsies” that labeled them as “work-​shy” between 1953 and 1961 (Purcsi Barna 2004). In Hungary, forced bathing in “Gypsy settlements” carried out by local medical staff and aided by the police, that had begun in the 1930s, continued well into the 1980s (Bernáth 2002; Purcsi Barna 2004). Scholars have pointed to a direct relationship between the mistrust among Roma for hospital care and medical services provided by Gadje (non-​Roma) and the genocidal efforts directed at them during the Holocaust in the form of medical tests and sterilization (Donert 2017; Sokolová 2008). 239

240

Eszter Varsa

Initially addressing “citizens of Gypsy origin” with the promise of “emancipation” (Donert 2017, 2) state-socialist governments aimed to solve the “Gypsy question” through their assimilation into the working class (Crowe 2007; Guy 2001; Stewart 2001). Efforts toward their assimilation through improved access to jobs, schooling, and better housing were, however, riddled with contradictions (Donert 2017). State officials designated “Gypsies” as backward, and denied them means for self-​representation. Assimilatory efforts were often realized through repressive and coercive measures, such as the anti-​ nomadism campaigns in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and sedentarization in Romania between the 1960s and 1980s, the forced transfer of “Gypsies”/​Roma from the Slovakian to the Czech half of Czechoslovakia during the 1960s nationwide resettlement program, and the implementation of housing programs in Hungary (Crowe 2007; Donert 2017; Guy 2001). De-​Stalinization also brought about another shift in politics toward Roma in CEE from the 1960s and 1970s. As research on Czechoslovakia and Hungary shows, experts and policymakers focused less on the goal of assimilating Roma through bettering their social and economic circumstances which, in practice, was fraught with conflicts and difficulties. Instead, officials increasingly promoted the idea of their “natural or ‘biological’ difference” (Donert 2017, 148). This shift in approach to the “Gypsy question” paralleled the post-​Stalinist shift in approach to the emancipation of women, which moved toward a gender order based on the “biological difference” between men and women, and in which women’s roles as mothers strengthened (Adamik 2000; Donert 2017; Fidelis 2010; Haney 2002; Ignaciuk 2020; Kościańska 2016; Lišková 2018; Misthal 2009). Focusing on the difference of Roma not only explained the failure of previous assimilatory efforts but also strengthened prejudices and stigma, that in turn were reflected in policymaking (Donert 2017; Sokolová 2008; Varsa 2017a).

“Gypsies”/​Roma and racialized selective pronatalism The “new eugenics” of post-​ Stalinist CEE reproductive politics intersected with racialized prejudices against “Gypsies”/​Roma (Varsa and Szikra 2020). With a growing emphasis on the qualitative aspects of population increase, from the mid-​1960s the “Gypsy question” became equated with “problematic fertility” and “unhealthy birth” (Donert 2017; Hašková and Dudová 2020; Melegh 2011; Shmidt 2019; Sokolová 2008; Varsa 2017a). Eugenically selective pronatalism, combined with racialized prejudices, resulted in antinatalist efforts targeting “Gypsies”/​Roma (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004; Donert 2017; Kassabova and Brunnbauer 2009; Varsa 2017a). Like pronatalism, these antinatalist efforts addressed the female members of communities, who were discouraged from giving birth or were forced and tricked into infertility operations (Hašková and Dudová 2020; Shmidt 2019; Sokolová 2008). In Hungary, medical professionals were especially worried about the fact that young and well-​situated women were “refusing to give birth” and requesting abortions while those with many children, such as “the Gypsies” and “the degenerate” were not limiting their family size (Varsa 2017a). Recent research has found how family planning and health education advice provided by physicians to Romani women in Hungary and Czechoslovakia included free pregnancy screenings and the distribution of free oral contraceptives to stop “unwanted birth” (Donert 2017; Shmidt 2019; Varsa 2017a). Experts in Czechoslovakia and Hungary agreed that young women and married women

240

241

“Gypsies”/Roma and reproductive politics

from the majority population with fewer than three children should be “discouraged from having an abortion” (Donert 2017; Hašková and Dudová 2020, 8; Varsa 2017a). Meanwhile experts and authorities posited that abortion was the best alternative “for mothers with multiple children, living in poverty and all those considered unable to care for their children properly” (Hašková and Dudová 2020, 8). Romani mothers were explicitly identified with the latter group and encouraged to use abortion as a means of birth control (Donert 2017; Varsa 2017a). These racialized antinatalist discourses and practices happened while the reproductive policies of the 1960s to 1980s in CEE restricted—​and, in Romania, even reintroduced the ban on—​ abortion to encourage births in general (Doboş 2020; Hašková and Dudová 2020; Kligman 1995; Varsa 2017a). The restructuring of family allowances in these countries embedded similar selective pronatalist intentions by providing more benefits for more children, but making the marginal increase much smaller once there were three or more children (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004; Sokolová 2008). These indirect measures to “tackle the issue of the undesirable fertility” of the Roma and other minorities were part of the social support schemes for families introduced in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (amended in 1972), as well as in Romania and Bulgaria (Hašková and Dudová 2020, 15). In the 1980 Romanian reform of welfare support, families with more than five children with parents “who were not employed in a ‘useful social activity’ and whose children did not attend school regularly” could be denied benefits (Barany 2000, 426). In Bulgaria, when child allowance and paid maternity leave were significantly increased in 1968 with the goal of stimulating fertility, benefits explicitly “excluded incentives for a fourth child, because the abundance of children in the Roma and Turkish families should not be rewarded” (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004; Kassabova and Brunnbauer 2009, 42). Sokolová (2008) argues that a similar, covert form of racism against Roma was manifested in the race-​neutral legislation that resulted in the forced sterilization of Romani women in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic between the 1970s and the 1990s. Shmidt (2019) underlines the continuity in equating being “Gypsy” with disability in interwar and postwar Czechoslovakia and claims disability co-​constructed the category “Gypsy.” “The universal definition of Gypsy as unhealthy led to the translation of, and interchangeability of terms” used to define Roma with those defining “social abnormality and deviance” (Sokolová 2008, 226). The law of 1966 and the Ministry of Health directive issued in 1972, which described who could be targeted by sterilization in Czechoslovakia, did not include any reference to Roma. They referred to “psychopaths,” the “sexually severely deviant,” chronic alcoholics, recurrent criminals, and those who might give birth to a genetically defective child (Shmidt 2019; Sokolová 2008). The negative perception of Roma as socially deviant, as irresponsible and bad parents who lacked an interest in family planning, which increased with the shift in approach to the “solution of the Gypsy question” in CEE from the 1960s (Donert 2017), overlapped with the categories of social and medical deviance, whose sterilization the law permitted. The forced sterilization of Romani women in Czechoslovakia is thus not an extraordinary case of violence committed against Romani women by actors of “the communist state.” It rather highlights the much more general pattern of the intersection of “new eugenic” selectivity in postwar pronatalism with racial bias against “Gypsies”/​Roma that characterized reproductive politics in CEE.

241

242

Eszter Varsa

Conclusions Putting Roma at the forefront of analysis, with an intersectional framework of “new eugenics” and racialism, reveals the antinatalism that women labeled as “Gypsy” faced during the pronatalist decades following the Thaw. This recognition of the “regressive impact of de-​Stalinization for Roma rights” (Donert 2017) supplements scholarship in gender history that has questioned the linear history of progress in terms of family and reproductive politics from the “totalitarian” years of Stalinism to the systemic changes of 1989–​1991. The chapter also highlights the historical role of reproductive politics in constructing Romani difference and deviance in CEE, and the centrality of this process of othering in defining “healthy birth.” Selective reproductive politics, combining eugenic concerns with racialist thinking were not specific to CEE. The US population policy of the 1970s resulted in the disproportionate sterilization of Native American, Latina, and African American women (Davis 2003). The UN-​driven efforts of postwar population control that targeted “third world” women implemented racialized reproductive politics on a global scale. This chapter’s examples from behind the Iron Curtain are among many historical contexts where poor, ethnic, or colonized populations were considered dangerous to the “health” and “quality” of the (nation) state.

References Adamik, Mária. 2000. “Az államszocializmus és a ‘nőkérdés:’ ‘A legnagyobb ígéret—​a legnagyobb megaláztatás.” [“State Socialism and the ‘Woman Question:’ The Greatest Promise—​ The Greatest Humiliation.”]. PhD diss., Budapesti Közgazdasági Egyetem. Barany, Zoltan. 2000. “Politics and the Roma in State-​Socialist Eastern Europe.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 33 (4): 421–​437. Bernáth, Gábor, ed. 2002. Forced Bathings in Romani Settlements, 1940–​1985. Budapest: Roma Sajtóközpont. Brunnbauer, Ulf and Karin Taylor. 2004. “Creating a ‘Socialist Way of Life’: Family and Reproduction Policies in Bulgaria, 1944–​1989.” Continuity and Change 19 (2): 283–​312. Bucur, Maria. 2002. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Crowe, David M. 2007. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Davis, Angela. 2003. “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights.” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, 353–​367. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Doboş, Corina. 2020. “Disciplining Births: Population Research and Politics in Communist Romania.” The History of the Family 25 (4): 559–​626. Donert, Celia. 2017. The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dudová, Radka. 2018. “Discourses on Abortion and their Impact on Institutions in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic in the Second Half of the 20th Century (1950-​2003).” In Children by Choice? Changing Values, Reproduction, and Family Planning in the 20th Century, edited by Ann-​ Katrin Gembries, Theresia Theuke, and Isabell Heinemann, 163–​188. Oldenbourg: De Gruyer. Fehrenbach, Heide. 2005. Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fidelis, Malgorzata. 2008. “A Nation’s Strength Lies not in Numbers: De-​Stalinization, Pronatalism, and the Abortion Law of 1956 in Poland.” In Geschlecterbeziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, edited by Claudia Kraft, 203–​215. Munich: R. Oldenburg Verlag. —​—​. 2010. Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

242

243

“Gypsies”/Roma and reproductive politics Funk, Nanette. 1993. “Abortion and German Unification.” In Gender Politics and Post-​ Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, edited by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, 194–​200. New York: Routledge. Goldman, Wendy Z. 1991. “Working-​Class Women and the ‘Withering Away’ of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy.” In Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, 125–​143. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Guy, Will, ed. 2001. Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire. Haney, Lynne. 2002. Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hašková, Hana and Radka Dudová. 2020. “Selective Pronatalism in Childcare and Reproductive Health Policies in Czechoslovakia.” The History of the Family 25 (4): 627-648. Hilevych, Yuliya and Chizu Sato. 2018. “Popular Medical Discourses on Birth Control in the Soviet Union during the Cold War: Shifting Responsibilities and Relational Values.” In Children by Choice? Changing Values, Reproduction, and Family Planning in the 20th Century, edited by Ann-​ Katrin Gembries, Theresia Theuke, and Isabel Heinemann, 99–​122. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter. Hoffmann, David L. 2000. “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-​European Context.” Journal of Social History 34 (1): 35–​54. Ignaciuk, Agata. 2020. “No Man’s Land? Gendering Contraception in Family Planning Advice Literature in State-​Socialist Poland (1950s–​1980s).” Social History of Medicine 33 (4): 1327–1349. Karge, Heike, Friederike Kind-​Kovács, and Sara Bernasconi. 2017. “From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe.” In From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe, edited by Heike Karge, Friederike Kind-​Kovács, and Sara Bernasconi, 1–​24. Budapest: CEU Press. Kassabova, Anelia and Ulf Brunnbauer. 2009. “Socialism, Sexuality and Marriage: Family Policies in Socialist Bulgaria, 1944–​1989.” In Social Care under State Socialism, 1945–​1989, edited by Sabine Hering, 35–​53. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Kligman, Gail. 1995. “Political Demography: The Banning of Abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania.” In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Fayne D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 234–​525. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kościańska, Agnieszka. 2016. “Sex on Equal Terms? Polish Sexology on Women’s Emancipation and ‘Good Sex’ from the 1970s to the Present.” Sexualities 19 (1–​2): 236–​256. https://doi. org/10.1177/1363460714557662. Kund, Attila. 2016. “‘Duties for her Race and Nation,’ Scientistic Racist Views on Sexuality and Reproduction in 1920s Hungary.” Sexualities 19 (1–​2): 190–​210. Kuźma-​ Markowska, Sylwia. 2011. “An Unexpected Continuity: Voluntary and Compulsory Sterilization in the Rhetoric of the Pre-​and Post-​World War II Polish Birth Control Movement.” East Central Europe 38 (1): 97–​114. –​–​–​–​. 2019. “Marx or Malthus? Population Debates and the Reproductive Politics of State-​Socialist Poland in the 1950s and 1960s.” The History of the Family 25 (4): 576–598. Kuźma-​Markowska, Sylwia and Agata Ignaciuk. 2020. “Family Planning Advice in State-​Socialist Poland, 1950s-​80s: Local and Transnational Exchanges.” Medical History 64 (2): 240–​266. Lišková, Katarina. 2018. Sexual Liberations, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–​1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Margalit, Gilad. 2007. “Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerdiskurs im Deutschland der Nachkriegszeit.” [“Gypsy Politics and Gypsy Discourse in Germany in the Postwar Period.”] In Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Michael Zimmermann, 483–​509. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Massino, Jill. 2019. Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania. New York: Berghahn. Melegh, Attila. 2011. “Living to Ourselves: Localising Global Hierarchies in State-​ Socialist Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s.” Journal of Modern European History 9 (2): 263–​283. Misthal, Joanna Z. 2009. “How the Church became the State: The Catholic Regime and Reproductive Rights in State Socialist Poland.” In Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Shana Penn and Jill Massino, 133–​149. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

243

244

Eszter Varsa Pető, Andrea. 2002. “Women’s Rights in Stalinist Hungary: The Abortion Trials of 1952–​53.” Hungarian Studies Review 29 (1–​2): 49–​76. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Silencing and Unsilencing Sexual Violence in Hungary.” In Continued Violence and Troublesome Pasts: Postwar Europe between Victors after Second World War, edited by Ville Kivimäki and Petri Karonen, 132–​148. Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society. Promitzer, Christian, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda. 2011. “Framing Issues of Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe.” In Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, edited by Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, 1–​26. Budapest: CEU Press. Purcsi Barna, Gyula. 2004. A cigánykérdés “gyökeres és végleges megoldása:” Tanulmányok a XX. századi “cigánykérdés” történetéből [The “Radical and Final Solution” of the Gypsy-​ Question: Essays on the History of the “Gypsy-​Question” in the 20th Century]. Debrecen: Csokonai. Shmidt, Veronica. 2019. The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist Czechoslovakia: Segregating in the Name of the Nation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sokolová, Vera. 2008. Cultural Politics of Ethnicity: Discourses on Roma in Communist Czechoslovakia. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag. Stewart, Michael. 2001. “Communist Roma Policy 1945–​1989 as Seen through the Hungarian Case.” In Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Will Guy, 71–​92. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire. Szegedi, Gábor. 2012. “Dangerous Liaisons: Marriage Counselling as an Early Discourse and Practice of Biopolitics in Hungary.” Kaleidoscope: Journal of History of Culture, Science and Medicine 3 (5): 286–​306. Szikra, Dorottya and Béla Tomka. 2009. “Social Policy in East Central Europe: Major Trends in the 20th Century.” In Post-​ Communist Welfare Pathways: Theorizing Social Policy Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Alfio Cerami and Peter Vanhuysee, 17–​34. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thorne, Benjamin. 2011. “Assimilation, Invisibility and the Eugenic Turn in the ‘Gypsy Question’ in Romanian Society, 1938–​1942.” Romani Studies 21 (2): 177–​205. Timm, Annette F. 2010. The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-​Century Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turda, Marius. 2009. “‘To End the Degeneration of a Nation’: Debates on Eugenic Sterilization in Inter-​war Romania.” Medical History 53: 77–​104. –​–​–​–​. 2011. “Controlling the National Body: Ideas of Racial Purification in Romania, 1918–​1944.” In Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, edited by Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, 325–​350. Budapest: CEU Press. –​–​–​–​. 2013. “‘If Our Race Did Not Exist, It Would Have to Be Created’: Racial Science in Hungary, 1940–​1944.” In Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-​1945, edited by Anton Weiss-​Wendt and Rory Yeomans, 237–​258. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. –​–​–​–​. 2014. Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary. London: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–​, ed. 2015. The History of East-​ Central European Eugenics, 1900–​ 1945: Sources and Commentaries. London: Bloomsbury. Turda, Marius and Paul J. Weindling, eds. 2007. Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-​1940. Budapest: CEU Press. Varsa, Eszter. 2017a. “’The Gypsy Population is Constantly Growing:’ Roma and the Politics of Reproduction in Cold War Hungary.” In From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe, edited by Heike Karge, Friederike Kind-​Kovács, and Sara Bernasconi, 263–​292. Budapest: CEU Press. –​–​–​–​2017b. “’The (Final) Solution of the Gypsy-​Question’: Continuities in Discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–​1950s.” Nationalities Papers 45 (1): 114–​130. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00905992.2016.1241221. Varsa, Eszter and Dorottya Szikra. 2020. “‘New Eugenics,’ Gender and Sexuality: A Global Perspective on Reproductive Politics and Sex Education in Cold War Europe.” The History of the Family 25 (4): 527–​549. Weindling, Paul. 2000. Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–​1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

244

245

“Gypsies”/Roma and reproductive politics Widmann, Peter. 2001. An den Rändern der Städte: Sinti und Jenische in der deutschen Kommunalpolitik [On the Margins of the Cities: Sinti and Yenish in German Municipal Politics]. Berlin: Metropol Verlag. Wolchik, Sharon. 2000. “Reproductive Policies in the Czech and Slovak Republics.” In Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, edited by Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, 58–​91. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wolchik, Sharon L. and Alfred G. Meyer, eds. 1985. Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zielinska, Eleonora. 2000. “Between Ideology, Politics, and Common Sense: The Discourse of Reproductive Rights in Poland.” In Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, edited by Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, 23–​57. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zimmermann, Michael. 1999. “Zigeunerpolitik im Stalinismus, im ‘realen Sozialismus’ und unter dem Nationalsozialismus: ein Vergleich.” [“Gypsy Politics in Stalinism, in ‘Existing Socialism’ and under National Socialism: A Comparison.”] In Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation: Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945, edited by Dittmar Dahlmann and Gerhard Hirschfeld, 111–​132. Essen: Klartext. –​ –​ –​ –​ . 2008. “Die nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung in Ost-​und Südosteuropa—​ein Überblick.” [“The National Socialist Persecution of Gypsies in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: An Overview.”] In Der nationalsozialistische Genozid an der Roma Osteuropas: Geschichte und künstlerische Verarbeitung, edited by Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Christoph Garstka, Urs Heftrich and Heinz-​Dietrich Löwe, 3–​28. Köln: Böhlau.

245

246

24 LEGALIZING QUEERNESS IN CENTRAL-​ EASTERN EUROPE Judit Takács

Central-​Eastern European (CEE) policies and discussions of the decriminalization of homosexual practices are similar to other parts of Europe, beginning in the 19th century. Same-​sex sexual activity between women was not criminalized, partly because of the traditional phallocentric view of sexuality and preoccupation with penetrative procreational sex as the legitimate form of sexual activity (Hildebrandt 2014). Historical recollections of same-​sex desire and acts were often sporadic and piecemeal, reflecting the desires of men rather than women, whose same-​sex identifications and practices left fewer detectable marks in the public realm. The scant social visibility of lesbians can be linked to the limited social and economic resources of women in general, relative to men who traditionally had more access to public spaces. In both CEE and Western Europe, the experience of trans people has been marginalized by scholars and contemporaries to varying degree. The history of decriminalization in the context of CEE reveals how discourses on homosexuality marginalized specific social groups, and how ideologies, particularly state-​ socialism (1945–​1989) and postsocialism, shaped these discussions. This chapter argues how ideological shifts and disruptions did not play a crucial role in determining (de)criminalization outcomes. At the same time, ideology did play a role in how activists framed their work.

Discourses on decriminalization Criminalization of consensual sexual practices between same-​sex individuals, especially between adult men, became a contested issue in CEE in the second half of the 19th century. Before this time, any queer act transgressing the ostensibly God-​given authority of the church and the monarch, and especially of non-​reproductive sexuality, had been covered by the broad category of sodomy or unnatural fornication. Sodomy was one of the gender-​and identity-​neutral misdeeds that could be committed by anyone irrespective of their sexuality. In the 1860s, CEE intellectuals proposed different arguments for decriminalization: the German writer and jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs supported decriminalization based on the idea that homosexuality was innate, arguing that men-​loving men, characterized by a 246

247

Legalizing queerness in CEE

certain degree of “femininity of the soul,” made up a third sex (Kennedy 1988). Austrian-​ Hungarian writer Károly Kertbeny, who coined the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality (Takács 2004), put forward a classic liberal argument of non-​intervention by the modern state in the intimate lives of its citizens. After the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871, Kertbeny’s political pamphlets argued against maintaining the criminalization of consensual homosexual acts. However, his argument of privacy was marginalized in legal discourse. CEE policies and discussions were shaped by shifting power structures that brought with them different legal models. Traces of legal path dependence (Asal and Sommer 2016) can also be observed particularly regarding the adoption of the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810, based on the French Penal Code of 1791, which disregarded the criminalization of sodomy. For example, the Polish Criminal Code of 1932, also patterned on French Law, was the first to decriminalize homosexuality in Europe in the 20th century (Szulc 2017). With the crystallization of psychology and psychiatry as medical specialties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the disease model of homosexuality, emphasizing its biological innateness, became widespread across Europe. The long-​term effect of applying medicalized and often pathologizing models of non-​reproductive forms of sexuality was that essentialist interpretations about sexuality became widely palatable, regardless of the ruling ideology.

Ideological continuities in the conceptualization of homosexualities Comparing legislation on homosexuality under different political regimes reveals previously unwrapped complexities: contrasts and often continuities. The Soviet Union’s temporary decriminalization of homosexuality between 1922 and 1933 reflected the rejection of moral standards based on religious belief (Hildebrandt 2014), and the Bolsheviks’ passing stance that criminalization of homosexuality was a bourgeois relic. Stalinism, by contrast, “relied on an intolerant and negative view of sex,” and “for the sake of both the nation and the Communist Party” (Herzog 2011, 100) demanded self-​discipline as well as marital and family stability from its citizens. This framing of homosexuality as detrimental to the nation was similar to that found in Nazi Germany, where sexual life was linked to preserving the race and the nation, and homosexuality was heavily condemned as “asocial,” with “adverse effects on the German birth rate” (Pine 1997, 122). In state-​socialist societies in CEE, especially during the Stalinist period, homosexuality was perceived as incompatible with the communist healthy mores (Kon 1995). We can also observe similarities in the treatment of communists and homosexuals during McCarthyism in 1950s’ USA, comparable with state-​socialist considerations of homosexuals being “unreliable elements” (Moss 1995, 230), with limited (reproductive) contributions to building state-​socialism, who are easily compromised. While female homosexuals or lesbians were still considered to be women, this was not the case for men. Male homosexuality was mostly perceived as a manifestation of “disreputable and illegal masculinity” (Healey 2002, 166), underscoring the strict boundaries and insecurities of the exclusively heteronormative scripts of Soviet-​type masculinities.

Ideological approaches to legislation in post-​Stalinist CEE Almost all state-​socialist countries decriminalized homosexuality in the period after 1953. Though the reasons differed, legislation was often framed in medical terms. Their 247

248

Judit Takács

diverse decriminalization paths challenge the idea about a homogenized “bloc” ideology shared among CEE countries. In state-​socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the notion that homosexuality is a pathological phenomenon was essential to the legalization of consensual homosexual sex in 1961, but the decisions were based on different medicalized approaches. In Czechoslovakia, it took place in the context of sexology research. The world’s first university-​based sexology institute opened in 1921 in Prague and continued work during the state-​socialist period under the leadership of Josef Hynie. He and his colleagues, including Kurt Freund, applied medical rather than criminal approaches to sexual deviations. After his failed aversion therapy experiments in the 1950s, Freund concluded that homosexuality is not “curable,” and advised counseling toward self-​acceptance (Freund 1977, 239). Freund took part in organizing a legal-​psychiatric seminar, where psychiatrists, sexologists, legal experts, and representatives from the police drafted a proposal against continuing the prohibition of homosexual acts, preceding the introduction of a new penal code in 1961 (Davison 2020; Sokolova 2014). Lifting prohibition of consensual homosexuality in Hungary followed the 1958 medical recommendation of a committee of psychiatrists. The committee considered counter-​arguments against decriminalization, including that homosexuality corrupted the youth, harmed family life, inhibited population growth, and may lead to homosexual marriage. The inhibition of population growth argument was quickly dismissed by referring to the general acceptance of birth control. The committee emphasized that ending criminal liability would likely limit blackmailing. They also argued that the struggle between one’s homosexual instinct and the fear of being caught and punished would lead to neurosis. With the introduction of the 1961 Hungarian Criminal Code, consensual homosexual activity between adult men was decriminalized, and gender equality or more precisely, equal treatment regarding the perpetrator’s gender, was introduced regarding “unnatural fornication” (forms of behavior that have never been clearly defined). From this time, both men and women could be prosecuted, and a special clause prohibited “unnatural fornication conducted in a scandalous manner” (Takács 2015a). The age of consent for same-​sex relationships was set at 20, considerably higher than the 14 years age of consent for heterosexual relationships. Bulgaria decriminalized male same-​sex sexual activity in 1968, and used language similar to Hungary in retaining laws against acts that “cause a public scandal or entice others to perversity” (Torra 1998, 75), and set a higher age of consent for homosexual than heterosexual sex (18 and 14 years respectively). In 1968, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) also removed the prohibition of consensual homosexual acts between men over 21 from their Criminal Code, although in practice this prohibition had been rarely enforced since the late 1950s (McLellan 2012). Also in 1968, Yugoslav legal experts published a report in which they argued against repressive measures for dealing with “deviant sexual behavior” among consenting adults, and defined homosexuality as a “less dangerous social phenomenon” (Takács, Kuhar, and PTóth 2017, 1949). The first Yugoslav decriminalization steps took place in 1977, but only in the Socialist Republics of Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro and in the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (in the northern part of Serbia, with a Hungarian ethnic minority), while Serbia did not enact legislation at this time. In Slovenia and Montenegro, the age of consent remained 14 years for all, while in Croatia and Vojvodina a higher age of consent was set at 18 years only for homosexual relationships (Torra 1998). 248

249

Legalizing queerness in CEE

Romania had a different trajectory, with criminalization of consensual homosexual acts for both men and women being introduced for the first time in 1936, two years after homosexuality became re-​criminalized by Stalin in the Soviet Union. The 1936 Romanian Penal Code came into operation during the chaotic years preceding World War II, when the Kingdom of Romania was more aligned with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia (HRW 1998), and homosexuality remained criminalized through the socialist period.

Postsocialist decriminalization The diversity of approaches to decriminalization under socialism continued under postsocialism. As the Soviet Union maintained criminalization from the 1930s until its collapse in 1990, decriminalization could start only in its successor states, including Ukraine in 1991, Estonia and Latvia in 1992, and Lithuania as well as Russia in 1993. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a second wave of decriminalization took place, starting with Serbia in 1994. In Romania, the infamous “section 200” of the 1968 Romanian Penal Code (Long 1999), criminalizing public manifestations of homosexuality, was abolished only in 2001. A year later postsocialist Hungary equalized the age of consent, setting it at 14 for all consensual sexual relations, a decade after Czechoslovakia equalized the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual sex at 15. The diversity of the timing and forms of legalizing queerness complicates the conceptualization of (homo)sexual politics of state socialism across CEE and challenges approaching the region as a bloc. Several factors contribute to the region’s heterogeneity, including varying cultural and religious traditions, as well as democratic and economic conditions. In CEE, Orthodox Christian denominations seem to generate a more negative effect on attitudes toward homosexuality than Roman Catholic ones (Szalma and Takács 2019), but the influence of Orthodox Churches differs. Spina (2016) argues that the Romanian Orthodox Church wields more influence over their members’ beliefs and attitudes than the Bulgarian one. The importance of democratization can be illustrated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to a decriminalization wave in its successor countries. At the same time, it can be argued that liberation from a semi-​colonial status might also contribute to the (re)emergence of nationalist agendas, re-​traditionalizing gender regimes, and in the longer term in some cases, even a form of demographically focused neoliberal governance.

Grassroots mobilizations under different ideologies It is important to see legalizing queerness in specific socio-​spatial contexts as an often lengthy and complex process rather than a one-​off event of decriminalization. These processes usually included several iterations and alterations in the scope, composition, genders, ages of the (sexual) actors, as well as their—​typically not at all well-​defined—​acts. In fact, it can be argued that the lack of active prosecution could make legal emancipation efforts—​at least temporarily—​redundant. This was the case in Poland between the 1930s and the 1980s which, Szulc (2017, 91) argues, had “a more progressive legislation toward homosexuality than some Western Bloc countries” that can be linked with the lack of an urgent need for more systematic homosexual self-​organization before the 1980s. Repealing sodomy laws reduced the chances of creating “queer scandals” in the press that could draw undesired public attention to criminalized queer encounters, even 249

250

Judit Takács

though such press scandals were not a very likely scenario in CEE, where state-​controlled media avoided discussion of non-​normative sexualities and gender expressions. In this context, especially when considering that the social visibility of lesbian women in public spaces was more limited than that of gay men, the 1982 presentation of the film Another Way [Egymásra nézve] directed by Károly Makk, the first mainstream film in Hungary and CEE to portray a lesbian relationship, was a great breakthrough for challenging silence. Winning the FIPRESCI critics award at Cannes, it soon became a Hungarian lesbian cult film, which carved a place in public discourse for same-​sex desire among women. The thawing of official attitudes toward homosexuality did not necessarily translate into greater visibility or a more accepting social climate. Queer life in CEE and grassroots activism during state socialism was characterized by the precarious coexistence of homosexual identities and the constraints of everyday life, including limited access to private space, the surveillance of public spaces and private lives, along with limited opportunities for self-​identification (Long 1999; McLellan 2011, 2012; Sokolova 2014; Takács 2015a). Until the end of the 1980s there was no officially recognized homosexual movement in CEE, where besides the general constraints on individual self-​expression, communist parties prohibited the formation of any kind of NGOs. The history of the first organized homosexual groups in CEE was divergent, depending considerably on the harshness of prosecution of homosexuality. Despite official restrictions in some countries, including the GDR, Hungary, and Poland, activists organized their movements within the confines of state socialism, instead of opposing or hoping to undermine the system. They met in private parties organized in bigger apartments or in spaces rented for other purposes, such as for movie nights (Kurimay and Takács 2017; McLellan 2011; Szulc 2017). The collapse of state socialism in CEE after 1989 opened opportunities for mobilizing queers in their home countries as well as—​rephrasing Szulc (2017)—​“transnationalizing” homosexuality by (inter)connecting formerly unconnected people and products, including cultural representations, leading to potential acceleration in various sexual and gender identity formation processes. These changes resulted in an expansion in the volume as well as diversification of activism, from a homosexual toward LGBTQI+ movements since the 1990s. The seedlings of this expansion had already been planted in some places several years before. In Hungary, for instance, where one of the first formal homosexual organizations of CEE, the Homeros-​Lambda National Association of Homosexuals, was registered in 1988, the increasing visibility of the movement was not primarily a result of democratization or a crisis within state socialism. Instead, it was the considerable agency of Hungarian homosexual activists in navigating space within late socialist Hungary, and the emergence of HIV/​AIDS, that worked as a catalyst that transformed the Hungarian homosexual subculture into a more organized gay and lesbian movement (Kurimay and Takács 2017). The emerging LGBTQI+ movements in CEE and elsewhere tried to problematize the ways in which sexuality and gender—​of their members and in society at large—​shaped social inclusion and exclusion mechanisms, and in many cases prevented the enjoyment of full citizenship rights. In former state-​socialist countries, citizenship in general, referring to rights and practices in the public sphere and “intimate citizenship,” dealing with the “rights, obligations, recognitions and respect around those most intimate spheres of life—​who to live with, how to raise children, how to handle one’s body, how to relate as a gendered being, how to be an erotic person” (Plummer 2001, 238), in particular, evolved slowly and with disruptions deriving from their semi-​peripheral condition and the democracy deficit accumulated especially after World War II. Recent European 250

251

Legalizing queerness in CEE

empirical findings indicate that individual perceptions of democracy deficit, expressed in CEE countries, can contribute to a homophobic social climate, while satisfaction with the functioning of the democratic system can contribute to an increase in the social acceptance of lesbians and gays (Szalma and Takács 2020).

Movements and EUropeanization processes In the post-​Soviet era, the Council of Europe and the European Union (EU) have become important agents of change toward the legal emancipation of LGBTQI+ people, expanding equality issues beyond gender, and mainstreaming LGBTI+ rights in the EU policymaking processes (Hildebrandt 2014). EUropeanization could provide much needed transnational resources, such as organizational capacity, for mobilizing NGO-​ based activism in resource-​poor environments but interaction between Europeanization processes and domestic norms could result in various outcomes in different CEE countries (Ayoub 2016). For example, for Polish lesbian and gay activists, entering the EU meant an opportunity to be fully recognized, while their opponents saw it as “a threat to Polish sovereignty combined with an opportunity for Poland to introduce ‘Christian values’ to EU politics” (Ayoub and Chetaille 2020, 22). By the time eight CEE countries became members of the EU in 2004, sexual orientation had already developed into a protected category with anti-​discrimination rights attachments (Stychin 2001). However, the EUropean values were shaped by the founding members and the old EU member states, and latecomers received them as part of a ready-​ made package deal. Kulpa (2014, 432) argues that this passive receiver role was rooted in a “didactical and cultural hegemonic relation of power, where the CEE figures as an object of West/​European pedagogy. […] the CEE is somehow ‘European enough’ to be ‘taken care of’, but ‘not yet Western’ so as to be allowed into the ‘First World’ club.” The still ongoing EUropean(ization) project has been criticized by activists and scholars for promoting a homonationalist Pink Agenda (Ammaturo 2017), elevating “certain forms of gay activist engagement and, perhaps also non-​heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress, and modernity” (Bilić and Stubbs 2016, 233). At the same time, while homonationalism is often portrayed by scholars as being closely connected to Islamophobia, in CEE there are alternative racialized and sexualized Others that deserve attention, especially in local contexts with long histories of antisemitism and social exclusion targeting the Roma people. In postsocialist societies that have been characterized by dynamics of re-​traditionalizing gender regimes and the mixing of late modern commodification with nationalism, the social acceptance of gay, lesbian, and trans people is often portrayed as a desirable European or western value by local LGBTQI+ communities, and at the same time as an undesirable foreign import by nationalists who try to evict homosexuals and homosexuality from their nation (Moss 2014). The strategy of portraying homosexuality as alien to the national culture has been an evergreen in nationalist heteronormative discourses. In postsocialist Romania, the reluctance to decriminalize homosexual relations derived from essentialist assumptions about homosexuality being “alien and threatening to the family and religion oriented Romanian way of life” (Nachescu 2005, 130). Anti-​gender movements have mobilized across Europe, triggered by concrete policy proposals such as the introduction of same-​sex marriage in France, or as a preventive measure to avoid the implementation of such policies in the future, for example in Croatia and Romania (Paternotte and Kuhar 2018; see Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook). The concept 251

252

Judit Takács

of genderphobia describes the strategic avoidance of breaking gender(ed) norms in institutional settings and in everyday life (Takács 2015b). Genderphobia can be institutionalized (e.g., banning gender studies from higher education) and often internalized. It is a conceptually broader and more neutral term than than homophobia, to be interpreted as a specific subset of genderphobia, partly because social rejection of lesbians, gays, queers, and non-​heteronormatively aligned others, seems to be part of a broader gender belief system based on assumptions about (hetero-​and cisnormative) procreation-​centered and often deterministically distinct paths of women and men in society. Genderphobia targets trans people, often framed as threatening the heteronormative binary gender system by their mere existence, and thus they can encounter hostile interpersonal and social reactions (Kuhar, Monro, and Takács 2018). Trans communities increasingly face organized resistance against gender equality and intimate citizenship by anti-​gender movements attacking the straw man of gender ideology, a multi-​function enemy that can be shaped in different ways to fit into a political protest to protect allegedly endangered traditional family values. Because of their particular economic and social marginalization, transgender communities have been able to develop activist networks with increased difficulty. Trans and gender variant people have historically been—​and to a great extent continue to be—​largely invisible in CEE, where state institutions were for a long time highly reluctant to deal with trans issues. In postsocialist CEE, a lack of systematic legal protection and healthcare provision is a crucial aspect of trans citizenship. Yet questions remain whether it is just transsexual men and women’s citizenships that are sought, or citizenship rights for all gender variant people, which would entail fundamental changes in the social categorization systems of sex and gender (Kuhar, Monro, and Takács 2018).

Conclusions Queer legalization in CEE refers to complex cultural processes that made non-​ heteronormatively aligned queer lives increasingly possible at different—​ individual, interpersonal, and social—​levels by creating (social) space and at least some (political, legal) recognition for sexual and gender diversity. These processes provide insights into how concepts and variations of being queer traveled between countries, regions, and within national histories. This chapter challenges the idea of treating the region as a bloc by showing significant diversity within CEE regarding the timing and forms of legalizing queerness. Local developments were guided less by ideology than by country-​specific sociocultural conditions, and individual or ego-​network actions. These reveal that ideological shifts and disruptions cannot determine (de)criminalization outcomes as a rule, which can further complicate the conceptualization of (homo)sexual politics of state socialism across CEE. Steps toward decriminalization took place under authoritarian state socialist governments. Medicalized approaches to sexuality at least in some CEE countries contributed to lesbians’ and gay men’s ability to navigate within a paternalistic state-​ socialist system predicated on socialist (heterosexual, cisgender) homogamy that shaped both public and private life. Recent research findings indicate that hostile social attitudes can be unlearned, especially if this process can be supported with practical policy developments strengthening LGBTQI+ rights (Szalma and Takács 2020). At the same time, the democratic decline resulting from resurgent authoritarianism “hybridised with neoliberal capitalism” (Bilić 252

253

Legalizing queerness in CEE

and Stubbs 2016, 245), which is present in an increasing number of countries in CEE and elsewhere, questions the link between improvement of attitudes and the democratization process, often envisioned as a linear development. Recent policies in CEE, such as ending legal gender recognition for trans people in Hungary by introducing an unalterable sex-​at-​birth record in the civil registry, proposed and rapidly introduced in the midst of the 2020 COVID-​19 pandemic crisis, point to the community-​mobilizing capacity of LGBTQI+ rights. These developments also underscore the need for intersectionally sensitive analyses of genderphobia, and intimate, sexual and trans citizenship, that recognize decriminalization as a broad, multilayered process.

References Ammaturo, Francesca Romana. 2017. European Sexual Citizenship: Human Rights, Bodies and Identities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Asal, Victor and Udi Sommer. 2016. Legal Path Dependence and the Long Arm of the Religious State: Sodomy Provisions and Gay Rights across Nations and over Time. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ayoub, Phillip M. 2016. When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ayoub, Phillip M. and Agnès Chetaille. 2020. “Movement/​Countermovement Interaction and Instrumental Framing in a Multi-​level World: Rooting Polish Lesbian and Gay Activism.” Social Movement Studies 19 (1): 21–​37. Bilić, Bojan and Paul Stubbs. 2016. “Beyond EUtopian Promises and Disillusions: A Conclusion.” In LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-​Yugoslav Space: On the Rainbow Way to Europe, edited by Bojan Bilić, 231–​248. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davison, Kate. 2020. “Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual Aversion Therapy in the 1960s.” History of the Human Sciences. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0952695120911593. Freund, Kurt. 1977. “Should Homosexuality Arouse Therapeutic Concern?” Journal of Homosexuality 2 (3): 235–​240. Healey, Dan. 2002. “The Disappearance of the Russian Queen, or How the Soviet Closet Was Born.” In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, 152–​171. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Herzog, Dagmar. 2011. Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-​Century History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hildebrandt, Achim. 2014. “Routes to Decriminalization: A Comparative Analysis of the Legalization of Same-​sex Sexual Acts.” Sexualities 17 (1/​2): 230–​253. HRW (Human Rights Watch). 1998. Public Scandals: Sexual Orientation and Criminal Law in Romania, January 1, 1-​56432-​178–​9. www.refworld.org/​docid/​3ae6a7e70.html. Kennedy, Hubert. 1988. Ulrichs. The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston, MA: Alyson. Kon, Igor S. 1995. Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today. New York: Free Press. Kuhar, Roman, Surya Monro and Judit Takács. 2018. “Trans Citizenship in Post-​socialist Societies.” Critical Social Policy 38 (1): 99–​120. Kulpa, Robert. 2014. “Western Leveraged Pedagogy of Central and Eastern Europe: Discourses of Homophobia, Tolerance, and Nationhood.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 21 (4): 431–​448. Kurimay, Anita and Judit Takács. 2017. “Emergence of the Hungarian Homosexual Movement in Late Refrigerator Socialism.” Sexualities 20 (5–​6): 585–​603. Long, Scott. 1999. “Gay and Lesbian Movements in Eastern Europe: Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.” In The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement, edited by Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Andre Krouwel, 242–​265. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McLellan, Josie. 2011. Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

253

254

Judit Takács –​–​–​–​. 2012. “Glad to Be Gay Behind the Wall: Gay and Lesbian Activism in 1970s East Germany.” History Workshop Journal 74 (1): 105–​130. Moss, Kevin 1995. “The Underground Closet: Political and Sexual Dissidence in Eastern Europe.” In Genders 22: Postcommunism and the Body Politic, edited by E. E. Berry, 229–​251. New York: New York University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2014. “Split Europe: Homonationalism and Homophobia in Croatia.” In LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe. A Rainbow Europe? edited by Phillip M. Ayoub and David Paternotte, 212–​232. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nachescu, Voichita. 2005. “Hierarchies of Difference: National Identity, Gay and Lesbian Rights, and the Church in Post-​Communist Romania.” In Sexuality and Gender in Post-​Communist Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Theo Sandfort and Aleksander Štulhofer, 57–​77. New York: The Haworth Press. Paternotte, David and Roman Kuhar. 2018. “Disentangling and Locating the ‘Global Right’: Anti-​ Gender Campaigns in Europe.” Politics and Governance 6 (3): 6–​19. Pine, Lisa. 1997. Nazi Family Policy, 1933–​1945. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Plummer, Ken. 2001. “The Square of Intimate Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 5 (6): 237–​255. Sokolova, Vera. 2014. “State Approaches to Homosexuality and Non-​ heterosexual Lives in Czechoslovakia during State-​ Socialism.” In The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice, edited by Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-​Indruchová, 82–​109. London: Routledge. Spina, Nicholas. 2016. “The Religious Authority of the Orthodox Church and Tolerance toward Homosexuality.” Problems of Post-​Communism 63 (1): 37–​49. Stychin, Carl F. 2001. “Sexual Citizenship in the European Union.” Citizenship Studies 5 (3): 285–​301. Szalma, Ivett and Judit Takács. 2019. “Social Attitudes towards Homosexuality in Hungary and Romania: Does the Main Religious Denomination Matter?” Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics 5 (1): 71–​99. –​–​–​–​. 2020. “Democracy Deficit and Homophobic Divergence in 21st Century Europe.” Gender, Place and Culture 27 (4): 459–​478. Szulc, Lukasz. 2017. Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-​Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Takács, Judit. 2004. “The Double Life of Kertbeny.” In Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics, edited by Gert Hekma, 51–​62. Amsterdam: UvA–​Mosse Foundation. –​–​–​–​. 2015a. “Disciplining Gender and (Homo)Sexuality in State Socialist Hungary in the 1970s.” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 22 (1): 161–​175. –​–​–​–​. 2015b. Homophobia and Genderphobia in the European Union: Policy Contexts and Empirical Evidence. Stockholm: SIEPS. Takács, Judit, Roman Kuhar, and Tamás PTóth. 2017. “Unnatural Fornication Cases under State-​ Socialism: A Hungarian–​ Slovenian Comparative Social-​ Historical Approach.” Journal of Homosexuality 64 (14): 1943–​1960. Torra, Michael Jose. 1998. “Gay Rights after the Iron Curtain.” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 22 (2): 73–​87.

254

255

Democracy

256

257

25 GENDER AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARADOX IN LATVIA Daina S. Eglitis, Marita Zitmane, and Laura Ardava-​Āboliņa

Women played significant roles in the opposition to Soviet occupation, contributing to Latvia’s reestablishment of independence in 1991. They have held prominent positions in political institutions in the three decades since then. At the same time, the democratization process in Latvia has been characterized by key paradoxes. First, public discourse highlighted the imperative of normalization after a half-​century of Soviet rule, which was perceived as having deformed and degraded Latvian national norms, institutions, and traditions, including gender roles. Equality between the sexes, rather than being embraced as a fundamental characteristic of democracy, was associated with Soviet ideology and practices. Second, in spite of a slow but steady rise in Latvian women’s representation in political institutions, the development of policies directed at ensuring gender equality between men and women commanded little attention until EU accession forced the topic onto the political agenda, and it remains more a novelty than a priority. In Latvia, as in other democratizing states in the region, the late communist period ushered in a process of liberalization and a decline in women’s representation in public life (Fallon, Swiss, and Viterna 2012). Scholars have argued that across postcommunist Europe, “the ‘regaining’ of a traditionally prescribed gender identity [was] an important aspect of the nostalgia for ‘normality’ ” that many hoped to reclaim with the end of communism (Watson 1993, 472–​473). Democratization processes in Latvia after the reestablishment of independence in 1991 point to the significance of gendered historical legacies that shape contemporary understandings of gender equality, competing with domestic and international agendas. These legacies have hindered gender equality in spite of gains that women have made in employment and political representation. Latvian women’s presence in the public sphere, including politics, is not sufficient for the development of an inclusive and gender-​equal democratic state and society.

Political legacies of 20th-​century Latvia From 1918 through to 1940, Latvia was an independent state, with mixed developments for the realization of women’s political voices in the public sphere. Women in interwar Latvia gained suffrage in 1918, before many of their European sisters, and the country’s 257

258

Daina S. Eglitis et al.

1922 Constitution enshrined equal political rights for men and women. At the same time, women were valued primarily for their contributions to the domestic sphere as wives and mothers. Robust population growth was embraced as a national imperative to counter the decimation of the population during World War I. In the 1920s and 1930s, political and religious public figures commonly expressed concern about the country’s low birth rate, the number of single men and women, and the high divorce rate (Lipša 2013). Women participated in political life as voters, but few held elected office. In the 1920 elections, women won six seats on the Riga City Council, and in the national election of 1931, a woman won a seat in parliament for the first time. Their influence as political actors, however, was circumscribed, most apparent when democracy came to an end in 1934 with the one-​party rule of Kārlis Ulmanis. In the authoritarian context, appeals to embrace masculine national traits to the exclusion of perceived “weak” traits of the Latvian character like sentimentality and tearfulness, which were associated with women, became commonplace in culture and political discourse (Lipša 2018). During authoritarian rule, laws were used as an instrument of social control by male decision makers. Among the regulations that came into force after 1934 was an abortion law that banned abortions for “social” reasons (i.e., for elective rather than medically necessary abortions). The state’s interference in reproductive matters continued to expand in the last years of independent Latvia. After 1938, abortions had to be approved by the Eugenics Commission, a signal that Latvia was following a disturbing trend in population engineering (Lipša 2013). World War II altered the political fate of the Baltic states, which had a dramatic effect on the gender regime. In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Latvia. Later, it was occupied by Nazi Germany (1941–​1944), and then the USSR again from 1944 to 1991. The postwar Soviet restructuring of society called for ideological equality between the sexes, though it was incompletely realized in practice. On the one hand, women had ample educational opportunities and entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. On the other hand, wage work was obligatory and women workers disproportionately occupied low-​status and poorly remunerated positions, continued to be responsible for domestic tasks, and spent hours in lines waiting for goods in the deficit-​riven Soviet economy, a phenomenon referred to as the “triple burden” (Johnson and Novitskaya 2016, 216). While quotas ensured that women occupied about a third of legislative positions in the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic across the period of occupation, this body had limited power in an authoritarian state and women were excluded from the highest echelons of the Soviet state and Communist Party, where key decisions were enacted (Eglitis 2002). In addition to policies, carefully cultivated images of women were an important component of Soviet propaganda. Soviet images of women were a stark contrast to the domestically oriented woman who had been a touchpoint of late interwar-​era images of Latvia’s women. In the Soviet period, dominant images elevated women as fully vested members of society, who enjoyed political equality with men, and were also good mothers. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet mass media offered two other (unflattering) images of women alongside the venerated image of a socially active and maternal woman. One was a woman who was not interested in public activities, but instead concerned herself with fashion, flirtation, and cosmetics. The other was a rural farmwoman who preserved archaic traditions and habits (Azhgihina 2000, 261–​273). These images were not limited to the Latvian context but ubiquitous across the Soviet space that constructed the narrative about women and their acceptable roles. 258

259

Gender and the democratic paradox in Latvia

Women and opposition: Building the foundations of democratic development The politics of ethnically based opposition to Soviet occupation formed a foundation for the transformation of gendered political discourse. According to the 1989 Soviet census, Latvians comprised a bare 52 percent majority compared to Russian-​speakers in their republic after decades of immigration from other parts of the USSR. This made ethnic Latvian women’s below-​replacement rate fertility a perceived existential threat to many Latvians. The pursuit of independence and democracy was entwined with an ambition to revitalize the Latvian nation, which was, at least in part, understood to be a responsibility of women (Eglitis 2002). In 1990, when the Supreme Council of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic approved a declaration on the restoration of Latvia’s independence, the pronatalist discourse that elevated women’s maternal role to the exclusion of other roles was taking shape. At a conference hosted by one influential political organization, Latvia’s National Independence Movement, a participant tied the “survival of the Latvian nation” to the birth rate: “[T]‌he hot-​blooded slogans about independence will do nothing if there are no children” (Maulinš 1990, 68–​70). Opposition movement discourse that suggested that the Soviet period had deformed “natural” gender roles and relations was present in academic spheres as well. On International Women’s Day on March 8, 1990, a University of Latvia professor argued that, “studies show that because of a greater burden in caring of hearth and home and of difficulties in everyday life, the professional qualifications of women increase more slowly, and it is only natural, therefore, that their wages are lower than those of men” (Zvidriņš 1990). A significant number of women were engaged in pro-​independence political activism, though they were less visible in public discourse than their male peers. Sandra Kalniete, who later became a member of parliament, remembers that women of the opposition movement mostly did “grunt work.” They handled organizational and administrative duties, but earned less recognition as public figures from the general public and media (Kalniete 2000). Shortly before the March 1990 election, the newspaper Latvijas Jaunatne [Latvia’s Youth] published a public opinion survey, the results of which suggested that some respondents had negative attitudes toward the involvement of women in the public sphere: not a single woman emerged among the reader-​ selected “top ten” political activists in Latvia (Urdze 1990, 4). Few women were selected as opposition candidates in this election: they made up less than 18 percent of candidates who stood for election on the slate of the pro-​independence Latvian Popular Front, comprising 22 of the 390 candidates for the legislative body (Zariņa 1994, 10–​12). Prior to the 1990 election, Latvijas Jaunatne and the newspaper Atmoda [The Awakening] published opposition candidate profiles, including those of women standing for election. A notable pattern in the profiles was the stereotypical characterization of women: while they were recognized as aspirants to public office, unlike their male counterparts they were simultaneously tied to the private sphere. For example, in an interview with Atmoda, a woman candidate noted, “It turns out that one of my main shortcomings [was] my second marriage. I didn’t know what to say when someone brought this up at a meeting with voters … is it all that uncommon among women of my generation?” (“Kam uzticēsim Latvijas nākotni?” 1990). Election results returned a roster of 200 men and 10 women: from the Latvian Popular Front, winners included 123 men and 9 women. 259

260

Daina S. Eglitis et al.

Gender and early postcommunist “normalization” in Latvia Early postcommunist “normalization” was tied to an imperative of restoration of interwar democracy, including a restoration of perceived interwar gender roles. The National Report on the Situation of Women, produced in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Women in 1995, lamented the “destruction of individuality brought on by socialism generally [that] led to the asexualization of behavioral norms, disdain for women and traditionally ‘feminine’ work, [and] ignorance of female characteristics” (quoted in Eglitis 2002, 202–​203). The process of remaking institutions and relationships in a constructed image of the past was also ethnically exclusionary. The first citizenship law restored citizenship to interwar citizens and their descendants, leaving a significant proportion of ethnic Russian inhabitants of Latvia without citizenship and political voice in the early years of postcommunist independence: initially, Latvian citizenship was conferred on most of the ethnic Latvian population but only on about 38 percent of the ethnic Russian population (Eglitis 2002). The citizenship law—​though since amended in part due to pressure from institutions such as the Council of Europe (Schulze 2018)—​highlights the paradoxical exclusionary characteristics of early postcommunist democratic development. It also points to the centrality of ethnic identity as a political master identity that contributed to the marginality of gender equality as a widely accepted shaper of political orientations and interests. The early postcommunist democratic process in Latvia was exclusive rather than inclusive, ordered around a restorationist narrative that sought to marginalize the participation of women as a group in the public sphere in order to foster a return to family and maternal priorities. Politically, it functioned to define the body of the citizenry restrictively for fear of enfranchising non-​Latvian residents whose political motivations and interests could fail to comport to the goals of the new state. These restorationist initiatives, however, were not successful. Restorationist discourse on gender roles and practices, which drew from the rhetoric and imperatives of the 1980s anti-​Soviet movements, but also hearkened back to traditional roles associated with independent interwar Latvia, bore little fruit in practice. First, the entreaties of nationalists to raise reproduction rates and return to the gender roles of the past has not been resonant in society, though the influence of economic imperatives rather than ideology is also significant. Women continue to comprise a significant share of the labor market in independent Latvia. Women’s economic activity in Latvia exceeds rates of labor force participation and full-​time work in most other European Union states: for example, just over 10 percent of Latvia’s women workers are employed part-​time by comparison to over 32 percent in the EU—​the rest are employed full-​time (Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia 2016, 26). Second, women have pulled further ahead of their male peers in educational attainment: a higher education matriculation and completion gap that began in the communist era when “many women compensated for their relative lack of political capital and occupational prestige by seeking high levels of educational credentials” (Glass 2008, 759) has continued to grow in the decades after independence (Eglitis 2017). Third, in the decade after independence was reestablished, both marriage and fertility rates took a dramatic downward plunge, though they have rebounded moderately since then. Women’s participation in educational institutions and the labor market, however, cannot be construed as evidence of a democratization process tilted toward the goal of 260

261

Gender and the democratic paradox in Latvia

gender equality. The institutionalization of equality as part of a robust democracy would entail addressing, for instance, the gender wage gap, which exists and persists in spite of women’s higher median educational attainment and long-​term attachment to the full-​time workforce. Women-​dominated occupational sectors like education and healthcare are characterized by lower wage scales than male-​dominated sectors. The gender wage-​gap has not made its way onto the political agenda in spite of the fact that women comprise a significant proportion of heads of household in Latvia (65 percent; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019).

Public representation and political practices in a gendered democracy The process of democratic development does not organically improve women’s access to political voice and power (Fallon, Swiss, and Viterna 2012). Early postcommunism saw low levels of representation for women, but by the turn of the millennium, women had increased political visibility. At the same time, women’s ascent to positions of political prominence did not usher in a gender equality agenda, which was sidelined by competing priorities (see Wolchik and Chiva, Chapter 42 in this Handbook). Most prominently, in 1999, Vaira Vīķe-​Freiberga became the first woman President of Latvia, as well as the first in the postcommunist region. Her presidency was followed by the election of woman presidents in the neighboring Baltic countries of Lithuania (Dalia Grybauskaite, 2009–​2019) and Estonia (Kersti Kaljulaid, 2016–​). Vīķe-​Freiberga was elected by Latvia’s unicameral legislature, the Saeima, to a four-​year term and re-​elected in 2003. In a parliamentary system without a popularly elected president, her election represented an elite political compromise rather than a popular movement for a woman executive. She was acceptable as a political and geographic outsider (she had lived most of her life outside of Latvia as a member of the exile community and thus had no ties to communist Latvia), as well as a link to independent interwar Latvia, where she was born (Lazda 2018). In a country deeply skeptical about politics and politicians, she enjoyed record high approval ratings throughout her presidency. She exercised considerable political power in spite of the institutional limitations of the presidency in Latvia’s parliamentary system and the cultural obstacles imposed by persisting patriarchal norms and practices (Eglitis and Ardava 2017). Domestically, Vīķe-​Freiberga fostered public dialogue on Latvian and European identity and social issues. In foreign policy, she was instrumental in securing membership in the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for Latvia. As president, Vīķe-​Freiberga did not embrace an explicitly feminist agenda: faced with economic challenges in a newly capitalist country, societal challenges in a country experiencing ethnic tensions between the majority Latvian and minority Russian populations, and security challenges posed by a revanchist Russian neighbor, she focused on building consensus around those issues. These challenges, among others, ensured that a feminist-​ oriented agenda remained marginal in spite of the president’s stated interest in women’s and children’s issues (Eglitis and Ardava 2017). Latvia’s pursuit of membership in the EU, shepherded by Vīķe-​Freiberga, helped foster the development of gender equality as a component of the national agenda (Eglitis and Ardava 2017). Consistent with EU imperatives, Latvia adopted legislation that prohibited differential treatment or discrimination based on gender and established institutions to promote gender equity. While the influence of EU mandates on the lived

261

262

Daina S. Eglitis et al.

experience of gender equity may be debated (for instance, some EU states, such as Poland and Hungary, have made strident efforts to circumscribe women’s reproductive freedom), it is also the case that EU mandates forced attention to issues that might otherwise remain marginal: monitoring requirements on, for example, intimate partner violence promoted more robust data collection than might be expected without the benefit of external institutional pressures. Women’s representation in national elected offices has been noteworthy, though the party list system by which they are elected creates both obstacles and opportunities for women candidates. In Latvia’s 2018 election, women’s representation on lists ranged between 20 percent and 42 percent, with slightly more women listed for left-​oriented parties, but little difference between Russian-​and Latvian-​dominated parties. Only one of 16 parties running for the 2018 parliament placed a woman first on the list in all five electoral districts (Dean 2018). Recent national elections have seen significant gains for women. More women were elected to parliament in 2018 than in any previous democratic election: out of 100 deputies, 31 are women. In previous elections, the number of elected women deputies has ranged between 8 and 21. The representation of women in local legislative bodies is similar, though it varies significantly by location: recently, in some of Latvia’s larger cities such as Jēkabpils and Rēzekne, male candidates won over 90 percent of seats, though representation is greater in more rural districts (Ministry of Welfare 2016, 7–​8). Women’s representation remains low in the Cabinet of Ministers: Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, elected in 2019, chose four women to fill the 13 cabinet positions. As in most previous cabinets, women hold traditionally “feminine” chairs in the Ministries of Education and Science, Culture, Welfare, and Health. At the same time, in 2019, the parliament’s highest leadership position was held by a woman, Ināra Mūrniece. Since the renewal of Latvia’s independence, this position has been held five times by men and five times by women. Women’s ability to implement a gender equity agenda, especially one that represents women’s diverse interests, remains circumscribed by historical and contemporary forces. On the one hand, historical legacies have underpinned a perception on the part of conservative political forces that normality is to be found in traditional gender roles. On the other hand, an amalgamation of illiberal political figures, nationalist parties, and conservative religious entities, has positioned itself against measures promoting gender equality, rejecting them as threats to the family, children, and the nation. The perceived imperative of a return to traditional values has united political forces that otherwise hold fundamentally opposing views on most national questions, including questions of citizenship. The founders of the group “Let’s Protect Our Children,” for example, are pro-​Kremlin activists, and the organization “Our Children” is tied to the political party Harmony, which is the primary representative of Russophone interests in Latvia. On the other side of the political spectrum, “Family” mobilizes Christians in ethnic Latvian churches and leans politically toward the hard-​right party National Alliance (Zitmane 2018). These conservative forces have targeted the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, which was developed to prevent and combat violence against women and foresees state responsibility for addressing gender-​based violence as a societal phenomenon by taking steps to prevent abuse, protect victims, prosecute perpetrators, and address cultural norms that normalize violence.

262

263

Gender and the democratic paradox in Latvia

Latvia is among a number of states in CEE where ratification of the Istanbul Convention has resulted in public and political resistance (Korolczuk 2015, 47). While Latvia signed the convention in 2016, as of late 2020 it had yet to be ratified. Conservatives have suggested that the Istanbul Convention is a threat to traditional and spiritual values and its ratification will lead to the homogenization of masculinity and femininity. The Latvian language term for “gender” translates back to English as “social sex,” a term that been manipulated by opponents of the convention to claim that it will lead to a reconstruction of the male and female sexes that is unnatural and a threat to traditional families and the nation (Zitmane 2018). Reproductive rights have periodically come under legislative pressure. In 2016, a bill in Parliament was proposed to prohibit women who have not previously given birth from donating their eggs to prospective mothers in the country. The bill caused a furor over what was widely perceived to be legislation challenging women’s bodily autonomy. At a June 2018 demonstration, protesters carried signs with slogans like, “Respect the Constitution, Respect Women” and “Women with ovaries and their own mind.” The legislation was repeatedly postponed; when a vote was finally taken, it was soundly defeated (Diena 2018). Although Latvia as a democratic state has leaned toward traditional understandings of gender roles, women’s steady advances in political representation, educational attainment, and economic independence have curtailed efforts to limit the rights of women.

Conclusions The Latvian case is significant because it points to several important aspects of gender and the democratization process in the Baltic region and postcommunism. First, it highlights the centrality of the interwar democratization experience to the process of creating postcommunist institutions and norms. While political continuity was prioritized through, for instance, the utilization of interwar constitutions as the basis of the independent Baltic states, it is arguably the case that cultural continuity was embraced by nationalists, in particular, in ways that had the potential to compromise women’s social, political, and economic gains by defining their societal role primarily in terms of motherhood. This pattern was repeated across CEE, with the restoration of democracy providing some cover for the attempted restoration of a regressive gender order. Second, it points to the phenomenon of the elevation of women into executive offices across the Baltic region in a political environment inimical to active legislating for gender equity and inclusion. Women executives, arguably, did not evoke the public hand-​wringing about whether Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were “ready for a woman president” (or prime minister), as observers have witnessed in the USA. At the same time, women’s executive power did not translate easily to political or social acceptance of progressive gender legislation. The road to greater equity and inclusion has been paved most fully in these democratic states by imperatives set by European institutions, and, recently, by women’s own collective efforts to speak out against attempts to curtail their rights. If full democratization is to be realized, then equality of access must be recognized across societal spheres, institutionalized, and nurtured culturally. Latvia has made significant progress, but that progress is deterred rather than realized by democratization

263

264

Daina S. Eglitis et al.

processes that have sidelined the women and have failed to recognize and remediate gender inequalities in the economy and politics.

References Azhgihina, Nadezhda. 2000. “Gendernye stereotipy b sovremennyh mass-​ media.” [“Gender stereotypes in mass media.”] In Gendernye issledovahiya, edited by Irina Zherebkina. Kharkiv, Ukraine: Kharkiv Center for Gender Studies. Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia. 2016. Women and Men in Latvia. Riga: CSB. Dean, Laura A. 2018. “Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Latvia: Slow Progress for Women in 100 Years of Latvian Suffrage.” Foreign Policy Research Institute, October 3. Diena. 2018. “Protests pret olšūnu likumu.” [“Protests against ovary law.”]. Eglitis, Daina S. 2002. Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity, and Revolution in Latvia. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Paradoxes of Power: Gender, Work, and Family in the New Europe.” In Latvia—​A Work in Progress? 100 Years of State-​and Nation-​building, edited by David J. Smith, 225–​242. Stuttgart: ibidem-​Verlag. Eglitis, Daina S. and Laura Ardava. 2017. “Challenges of a Post-​Communist Presidency: Vaira Vike-​Freiberga and the Leadership of Latvia.” In Women Presidents and Prime Ministers in Post-​Transition Democracies, edited by Veronica Montecinos, 259–​ 276. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Fallon, Kathleen M., Liam Swiss, and Jocelyn Viterna. 2012. “Resolving the Democracy Paradox: Democratization and Women’s Legislative Representation in Developing Nations, 1975 to 2009.” American Sociological Review 77 (3): 380–​408. Glass, Christy M. 2008. “Gender and Work in Transition: Job Loss in Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia,” East European Politics & Societies 22 (4): 759. Johnson, Janet E. and Alexandra Novitskaya. 2016. “Gender and Politics.” In Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, edited by Stephen Wegren, 215–​230. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kalniete, Sandra. 2000. Es lauzu, tu lauzi, mēs lauzām, viņi lūza [I broke, you broke, we broke. They fell apart]. Riga: Jumava. “Kam uzticēsim Latvijas nākotni?” [“To whom will we entrust Latvia’s future?”]. 1990. Atmoda, March 13, p. 3. Korolczuk, Elżbieta. 2015. “‘The War on Gender’ from a Transnational Perspective –​Lessons for Feminist Strategising.” In Anti-​Gender Movements on the Rise? Strategising for Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe. Publication Series on Democracy, Volume 38, edited by Heinrich Böll Foundation, 43–​54. Berlin: Heinrich-​Böll-​Stiftung. Lazda, Mara. 2018. “Negotiating Gendered Transnationalism and Nationalism in Post-​socialist Latvia.” Nationalities Papers 46 (3): 422–​440. Lipša, Ineta. 2013. “Over-​Latvianization in the Heaven: Attitude towards Contraception and Abortions in Latvia, 1918–​1940.” In Baltic Eugenics. Bio-​Politics, Race and Nation in interwar Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, 1918–​1940, edited by Bjorn M. Felder and Paul J. Weindling, 169–​201. New York: Rodopi. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Nation Building and Gender Issues in Interwar Latvia: Representations and Reality.” In War, Revolution, and Governance: The Baltic Countries in the Twentieth Century, edited by Lazar Fleisman and Amar Weiner, 30–​55. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press. Maulinš, Jānis. 1990. “Pats galvenais—​Dzīvīga gimene.” [“The main thing—​a robust family.”] In Latviešu nācijas izredzes: 1990.g. 28. septembra conference. Riga: Zinātne. Ministry of Welfare of the Republic of Latvia. 2016. Informatīvais ziņojums par Pekinas rīcības platformas īstenošanu Latvijā. [Bulletin on the realization of the Peking action platform in Latvia]. Schulze, Jennie L. 2018. Strategic Frames: Europe, Russia, and Minority Inclusion in Estonia and Latvia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

264

265

Gender and the democratic paradox in Latvia United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2019. Patterns and Trends in Household Size and Composition: Evidence from a United Nations Dataset. New York: United Nations. www.un.org/​ e n/​ d evelopment/​ d esa/​ p opulation/​ p ublications/​ p df/​ ageing/​ h ousehold_​ s ize_ and_​composition_​technical_​report.pdf. Urdze, Andrejs. 1990. “Latvijas politiskās organizācijas vadošie politiskie darbinieki.” [“Leading Political Figures in Latvia’s Political Organizations.”] Latvijas Jaunatne, February 8. Watson, Peggy. 1993. “Eastern Europe’s Silent Revolution: Gender.” Sociology 27: 471–​487. Zariņa, Inna, ed. 1994. News about Women in Latvia. Riga: Women Studies and Information Centre. Zitmane, Marita. 2018. “Evils of the Istanbul Convention. Discourse Analysis of Latvian Press Publications (2016).” Femeris: Revista Multidisciplinar de Estudios de Género 3 (1): 111–​124. Zvidriņš, Pēteris. 1990. “Sievieti no verdzības stāvokļa var glābt tikai komunisms.” [“Only Communism can Rescue Women from a Status of Slavery.”] Latvijas Jaunatne, March 8.

265

266

26 ANTI-​G ENDER MOBILIZATION AND RIGHT-​W ING POPULISM Agnieszka Graff

Unlike earlier waves of anti-​feminist backlash, the Vatican-​inspired transnational right-​ wing countermovement against gender equality and LGBTQ rights, which began in Europe in the mid 2000s, demonizes the very concept of gender (Case 2011; Kováts and Põim 2015; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). Rather than targeting feminism, these campaigns vilify “gender ideology,” “gender theory,” or “genderism.” This vilification of gender has facilitated alliances between religious and non-​religious actors on the populist right, and propagators of “gender ideology” are presented as corrupt elites: ideological colonizers, enemies of ordinary people, both wealthy and arrogant (Korolczuk and Graff 2018). The movement is a well-​networked transnational phenomenon that Corredor (2019) describes as a global countermovement against gender equality. Neither the anti-​gender discourse nor its activist manifestations are peculiar to CEE. Yet, as this chapter argues, there are several reasons to view the region as a distinctive case, as well as an area where these efforts are particularly effective. The new conservatism in Russia and CEE has been an important source of anti-​gender argumentation and activism. Anti-​gender campaigns in the region tend to link “gender ideology” with Soviet propaganda, thus linking the anti-​gender struggle with resistance against totalitarianism. In the anti-​gender imaginary, gender is a sign of the West’s degeneration and arrogance, while the East is viewed as a frontier where conservative family values can be most successfully defended (Kuby 2015). Resistance to gender is legitimized as national pride, a form of resistance to EU efforts to shame the region as “backward” and “civilize” it (Graff 2010). Most scholars have examined anti-​genderism as a phenomenon rooted in religion, independent of, and largely pre-​existing, the rise of right-​wing populism (Case 2011, 2016, 2019; Fassin 2016; Garbagnoli 2016). Paternotte and Kuhar (2018) call for methodologies that carefully disentangle the two. Some scholars, however, have pointed at close alliances between them, both emphasizing their ideological kinship and suggesting their common historical origin as conservative responses to neoliberalism (Grzebalska and Pető 2018; Gunnarsson Payne 2019; Korolczuk and Graff 2018). The relationship between anti-​gender mobilizations and right-​wing populism can also be conceptualized as an opportunistic synergy: an alliance based on discursive similarity and motivated by strategic calculations (Graff and Korolczuk, forthcoming). 266

267

Anti-gender mobilization and populism

Origins and core claims of the anti-​gender discourse Anti-​gender campaigns originate with the Vatican’s reaction to two United Nations (UN) conferences: the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women (Bracke and Paternotte 2016; Buss 1998; Buss and Herman 2003; Case 2011, 2016, 2019; Corredor 2019). Since then, the Holy See has protested against the use of the term “gender” in international treaties on population and women’s rights. Gender has largely replaced “civilization of death” within Catholic teaching. This strategy facilitated alliances that are both international and interfaith: Catholic Integralists build coalitions with Evangelical fundamentalists and representatives of Russian Orthodoxy. By the mid 2000s, anti-​genderism gradually evolved into a social movement with a fairly coherent and widely shared ideology, whose core is a declension narrative (Bracke and Paternotte 2016). The sexual revolution—​ described as a form of enslavement conducted in the name of freedom—​is blamed for secularization and the steady decline not just of the “natural family” but of civilization as such (Kuby 2015). Anti-​gender campaigns present the concept of gender as a force responsible for “denaturalization of the sexual order” (Garbagnoli 2016), a powerful global plot, a new form of Marxism, a sinister force associated with “globalism,” and—​with important consequences in non-​ western contexts, including CEE—​as a form of “ideological colonization” (Korolczuk and Graff 2018). One way to understand the movement’s ideology is as a foundationalist response to gender constructionism, a political struggle over universals (Fassin 2016). In one of the movement’s core documents, Benedict XVI (2012) blames gender for subverting the order of creation: “The words of the creation account: ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen 1:27) no longer apply … Man calls his nature into question” (Benedict XVI 2012). Such attacks against the idea of social construction of gender are a departure point for an elaborate narrative about the decay of the West caused by secularization, a story that, in some versions goes back as far as the French Revolution and includes Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Simone DeBeauvoir, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Judith Butler, as well as international bodies such as the UN and the World Health Organization. Key anti-​gender books include works by German sociologist Gabriele Kuby (2015) and Belgian American theologian Marguerite Peeters (2013), both of which have been translated into many languages and circulated widely in Eastern Europe. They appear to be more popular in the postsocialist region than in their countries of origin. Kuby held well-​attended lecture tours in Poland and Slovakia. These sources, however, are not necessarily known to the movement’s activists in the region. Anti-​gender ideas spread through endless repetition, through traditional media and social media, disguised as common-​sense truths and alarmist calls to action. Perhaps the most pervasive theme of the campaigns is the child in danger: “genderists”—​often personified by transgender people or gay activists in drag—​are presented as sexual deviants whose aim is to corrupt innocent children. The aim of anti-​genderists appears innocent to many: to “defend the traditional family.” The idea that local populations are under siege from the decadent West is more than a metaphor here. In October 2019, on the eve of parliamentary elections, a Polish public television info channel aired a propaganda film titled “Invasion,” focused on LGBTQ demonstrations organized in several Polish cities that year. The film presented activists as a direct threat to the nation’s safety, equating homosexuality with pedophilia. 267

268

Agnieszka Graff

Transnational anti-​gender networks and organizations While Roman Catholics—​bishops, priests as well as lay intellectuals and journalists—​ remain the core ideologues and organizers, anti-​gender campaigns have been a fertile ground for interfaith alliances that involve representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, Evangelical Christians and, at times, Orthodox Jews and Muslims. In 1997, Orthodox Christians in Europe and the American Christian Right joined forces to establish the World Congress of Families (WCF, now renamed the International Organization for the Family). It is a global network of self-​identified pro-​family and pro-​life groups, with more than 40 official partner organizations around the world and the long-​term ambition of becoming the counterweight to the UN regarding population policies. So far, 13 congresses have taken place, with attendance ranging from 700 in Prague in 1997 to almost 4000 in Warsaw in 2007. Russians (next to Americans) were among the founders and have remained a strong presence throughout the organization’s history (Moss 2017). The WCF actively seeks support from populist leaders. In 2017, Viktor Orbán gave the opening address at the XI Congress in Budapest; the 2019 Congress, held in Verona, Italy, featured the leader of the country’s populist right, Matteo Salvini, as keynote speaker. A second noteworthy transnational player with significant influence in CEE is the Tradition Family Property (TFP), an ultra-​conservative organization of Catholic laity founded in Brazil in 1960 to combat communism. Its daughter organization, a group of ultra-​conservative lawyers named the Ordo Iuris Institute, has been active in anti-​choice campaigns in Poland and Croatia. Strong links exist between activists, groups, and strategies in both countries (Brakus 2018) as well as connections between the CEE groups and the TFP (Suchanow 2018). Third, Agenda Europe, a network of over 100 organizations from 30 European countries, was established in 2013 by a group of US and European right-​wing religious campaigners (Datta 2018). The network’s ideological claims are those of religious extremists, but its language is a strategically devised secular discourse of rights (especially religious freedom) and natural law. Agenda Europe’s long-​term plan is to overturn LGBT rights and reproductive rights, as well as the right to divorce, the use of embryonic stem cells, euthanasia, and organ transplantation. The group’s manifesto recommends reframing ultraconservative religious positions on sex and reproduction to sound like human rights language. This strategy positions Orthodox Christians as the victims of discrimination and intolerance (Datta 2018).

Anti-​gender campaigns in CEE Since the mid-​1990s, the movement has branched out from these theological origins. When used by right-​wing populists, gender means “deviance” and laws that the Right happens to deem worth attacking in a given context. In addition to linking gender ideology to pedophilia, another much-​repeated claim is that genderists use sex education to encourage arbitrary sex change in young children. Public schools constitute a key target of the campaigns, and much effort is put into involving parents in the movement’s activities (Hennig 2018; Kuhar 2017; Kuhar and Zobec 2017). The movement’s key ideologues present themselves as defenders of freedom and democracy, which, they claim, has been hijacked by NGOs and supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN).

268

269

Anti-gender mobilization and populism

In a controversial argument similar to Ghodsee’s earlier critique of feminist NGOs (2004), Polish feminist scholar Marta Rawłuszko (2019) argues that gender equality projects have often been introduced in CEE with little regard for democratic process (fostered mainly by external commitments), providing the impetus for anti-​ gender campaigns. The controversy around Equality Kindergartens, which Rawłuszko examines, was not just about gender roles and education but, more significantly, about citizens resisting what they experienced as losing control over their state and disregard for their participation in decision-​making (Rawłuszko 2019, 18). Anti-​gender activism quite consistently targets issues of sexual citizenship: reproductive rights and the recognition of non-​heteronormative partnership and marriage. The campaigns target sex-​education and gender-​equality education in schools, same-​sex marriage, legal abortion, contraception, divorce, and trans-​rights. Anti-​gender activists claim a corrupt global elite stands behind these measures and the traditional views of ordinary people are ignored. The earliest outburst of activism occurred in Spain, when the Catholic Church mobilized conservative parties and organizations against the same-​ sex marriage law proposed by Zapatero in 2004 (Cornejo and Galán 2017). This was followed by Croatia’s mobilization against sex education (2006), protests against same-​ sex civil partnership in Italy (2007), mobilization against marriage Equality in Slovenia (2009), and the “Manif pour Tous” (Protest for Everyone) against same sex marriage in France (Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). Most CEE countries witnessed campaigns in 2010–​2014. Anti-​gender activity is staged to appear as spontaneous outbursts of moral outrage; in fact, the campaigns always begin with strategic interventions in specific policy debates, aimed to prevent or derail efforts at introducing progressive legislation. Throughout CEE, an important trigger was the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (also known as the Istanbul Convention). In Poland (Graff and Korolczuk 2017), Slovenia (Kuhar 2017), and Bulgaria (Darakchi 2019), anti-​gender actors dubbed the convention a “trojan horse for gender ideology,” agitating against its ratification and raising anti-​EU sentiments in the process. In Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania, anti-​gender movements anticipated the introduction of marriage equality and called for constitutional referenda to change national constitutions so as to exclude the possibility of same-​sex marriage (Ciobanu 2017; Hodžić and Štulhofer 2017; Smrek 2015). Strategies include collecting signatures under legislative initiatives (often ones involving referenda), organizing pickets, marches, and rallies (often quite colorful and festive ones) in defense of the “natural family,” as well as silent vigils, stand-​ins, and sit-​ins. Much of the activity takes place online, in social media, through the building of online communities, emails bombarding state institutions, and the spreading of fake news including through mainstream media outlets (e.g., concerning “sexualization of children” at the hands of UN bodies, including the WHO). The movement has also targeted gender studies scholars and programs, presented as sources of “gender ideology,” a breeding ground for sex-​educators, as well as “fake science” undeserving of taxpayers’ money. In the fall of 2018, Victor Orbán’s government closed down gender studies programs at two Hungarian universities (Eötvös Loránd University, ELTE and the Central European University, CEU). There is a widespread sense among gender studies scholars that both their jobs and their personal safety may be at stake; scholars report receiving hate mail. In 2017, the Ordo Iuris Institute in Poland

269

270

Agnieszka Graff

demanded that rectors of public universities provide a list of gender studies scholars, whom anti-​genderists accuse of promoting pedophilia. CEE countries most affected by the movement have been those with a strong presence of Roman Catholicism: Poland (Graff and Korolczuk 2017), Slovakia (Ďurinová 2015), Croatia (Hodžić and Štulhofer 2017), and Slovenia (Kuhar 2017), but also the predominantly Eastern Orthodox Bulgaria (Darakchi 2019). The language of these campaigns is one of wounded national pride: each country is presented as the final frontier under siege, the last bastion of the natural family, bravely opposing western interference and colonization. Reliable research is still lacking on the precise extent of Russian influence on (or funding for) CEE anti-​gender initiatives, but there is no doubt that the Russian brand of “new conservatism” (Bluhm and Varga 2019) is reflected in anti-​gender campaigns. The promise that Russia, and the East more generally, will “save the West from corruption” appears to have originated from Russian conservatives, to be then popularized by the World Congress of Families and the work of Gabriele Kuby. In Russia itself, critique of “gender ideology” has long been firmly established at public universities, notably the Sociology Faculty at Moscow University (Moss 2017); key anti-​gender voices include the enormously influential Aleksander Dugin, Anatoly Antonov, and Aleksei Komov, the most visible face of the World Congress of Families in Russia.

Anti-​genderism and populism: Political alliances and discursive patterns This chapter argues that while the origins of anti-​gender ideology are religious, anti-​ gender rhetoric owes its successes to both discursive and strategic alliances with right-​ wing populism. Opposition to gender brought together religious groups, far-​ right nationalist groups and right-​wing populist parties. If populism is a “thin-​centered” ideology (Mudde 2004), then resistance to gender was one of the ways for it to “thicken.” Müller (2016) has argued that populism is the moralization of politics and anti-​gender campaigns are, at their core, moral panics. Participation in the anti-​gender scene seems to offer immense moral satisfaction to its participants: collectively experienced righteous anger, a sense of moral superiority, and a sense of mission. It is a political identity based entirely on moral claims: to purity, normalcy, and victimhood. As Paternotte and Kuhar (2018) point out, anti-​genderism and populism resonate with each other in four different ways. First, populists are among the key drivers of the campaigns, which in some contexts—​Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Italy—​means that anti-​gender actors have political power. Second, the two discourses share certain core elements: anti-​ European sentiments, focus on the nation and its demographics, and anti-​elitism. Third, the anti-​gender movement shares elements of what Wodak (2015) defines as populist “politics of fear”: reliance on victim/​perpetrator reversal, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories. Finally, their strategies are strikingly similar, for example, denunciations of media or the use of referenda. Anti-​genderism emerged during the period of austerity measures following the economic crisis of 2008 and many scholars argue that—​through its alliance with right-​ wing populism—​it became a language for expressing dissatisfaction with neoliberalism. Grzebalska, Kováts, and Pető (2017) observe that gender ideology has become a “symbolic glue” signifying “the failure of democratic representation … [and] different facets of the current socioeconomic order, from the prioritization of identity politics over material issues, and the weakening of people’s social, cultural and political security, to the

270

271

Anti-gender mobilization and populism

detachment of social and political elites and the influence of transnational institutions and the global economy on nation states.” The heart of right-​wing populism is the opposition between corrupt elites and ordinary honest people (Mudde 2004, 2017). Anti-​gender rhetoric heavily relies on this binary. Gender is presented as a neo-​colonial project, a violent imposition of powerful global elites on local populations with the aim of undermining traditional cultures and national sovereignty (Korolczuk and Graff 2018). The rhetoric capitalizes on the fact that the word sounds foreign in most contexts. Hostility to gender brings together nationalists, who may be indifferent to the religious component of anti-​gender argumentation. As related political phenomena, anti-​gender movements and right-​wing populist parties coexist in an opportunistic synergy: a strategic alliance that is based on strong similarity between their worldviews (a juxtaposition between elites and innocent people, authoritarian tendencies, and strong anti-​western sentiments) (Graff and Korolczuk forthcoming). Right-​ wing populists often draw on anti-​gender rhetoric in electoral campaigns as it offers a robust moral frame for their claims to legitimacy; anti-​gender groups, in turn, use their links with populist parties to gain access to political power and funding for their projects.

Central-​Eastern Europe: Is there a difference? According to Paternotte and Kuhar (2018), key scholars in the area, “despite the fact that some differences can be accredited to the historical and political contexts of post-​ socialist countries in Eastern Europe, the East–​West divide does not offer a particularly useful analytical lens.” This chapter argues that CEE movements and discourses are distinctive and that the region has a special place in the anti-​gender imaginary and strategy. First, CEE anti-​gender campaigns rely on anxieties and antagonisms specific to the region and rooted in its recent history. Analogies between “gender ideology” and Soviet propaganda are a staple of campaigns in CEE: gender is viewed as part of “cultural Marxism” and hence, by association, is linked with communism, a remnant of the Soviet past. Consequently, resistance to gender is framed as a continuation of opposition to Soviet rule, except that now the local, national values are under threat from western liberalism. The discourse thus allows the Right to smoothly combine anti-​communism with anti-​western (anti-​liberal) sentiments, which, as Bluhm and Varga argue, is a central feature of the new conservatism in CEE (2019, 2). Second, due to the relative weakness of women’s and LGBT movements and lack of institutional and cultural entrenchment of gender studies in the region, the campaigns have been remarkably effective. A recent study shows that 30 percent of Poles believe that gender studies are involved in a conspiracy (Marchlewska et al. 2019). Arguably, anti-​gender discourse in the region did not undermine a feminist consensus in support of gender equality because no such consensus was established in the first place. Instead, the campaigns confirmed and strengthened pre-​existing conservative attitudes and a pervasive distrust of EU gender-​ mainstreaming policies. Anti-​ gender mobilizations in the region capitalized on these feelings, insisting that feminism and LGBTQ rights are a foreign import; that such ideas do not properly belong in the local cultures. Anti-​ gender campaigns expand these claims further, suggesting that the introduction of gender equality measures after 1989 was part of western economic and cultural and economic colonization—​a claim that, incidentally, resonates with certain feminist critiques

271

272

Agnieszka Graff

(Ghodsee 2004). Thus, the vulnerability of activists and scholars in the region has been considerably greater than in the West. Third, it is worth noting that the East figures prominently in western anti-​gender discourse itself. The movements’ main authorities, especially Kuby (2015), consider countries of the former Soviet bloc to be superior to western democracies—​an argument that repeats the claims of Dugin in other messianic-​nationalist interpretations of CEE Christianity. In this region, anti-​genderism has become a language for the expression of Eastern European anxiety and resentment against Western Europe. CEE is claimed to be immune to Marxism and communism because of its experience with it, and hence, according to Kuby (2015), is able to oppose “genderism” more effectively. The claim that Russia is destined to be the savior of European civilization is a central tenet of Russian anti-​genderism (Moss 2017), and similar claims have been made regarding countries such as Poland, Croatia (Brakus 2018), and Bulgaria (Darakchi 2019). This discourse is evident in an article on the website of Tradition, Family, and Property, one of the key transnational anti-​gender organizations: “In the past, Croatia was known as the Shield of Christendom thanks to her glorious defense of Europe against Mohammedan invasions. Today, we can deem it as the Shield of the Family. May her example be followed in the West and throughout the world!” (Campos 2014). Fourth, only in CEE (and Italy) is anti-​gender rhetoric used by ruling parties. Populist parties, especially in Hungary and Poland, have managed to integrate anti-​gender discourse into their programs and instrumentalize this rhetoric in both their political campaigns and their “modus operandi” (Graff and Korolczuk 2017; Grzebalska and Pető 2018). While in most Western European contexts anti-​gender panics are a marginal if increasingly visible discourse of right-​wing extremists, in CEE anti-​genderism is well integrated into a much broader political enterprise: that of replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” (Zakaria 1997).

Conclusions Anti-​gender discourse and activism in CEE must be seen as part of transnational mobilization inspired and originally coordinated by the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the movement rose in close collaboration with socially conservative populist forces that are especially strong in the region, and today it is difficult to disentangle the political from the religious. The story of anti-​genderism in CEE is not simply about the power of the Catholic Church in countries like Poland, Croatia, or Slovenia, but also about intense collaboration between the most conservative forces within the Church and the nationalist groups in the respective countries. The collaboration turned out successful in part due to the weakness of feminist movements in the region and the vulnerability of CEE populations to the movements’ particular discursive manipulation in which the movement engaged. A powerful ally of right-​wing populism, anti-​genderism should be interpreted as a response to a vacuum created by a receding welfare state and lack of alternatives on the left. Anti-​gender movements effectively combine a socially conservative agenda with a critique of some aspects of neoliberalism, tapping into existing anxieties and the disillusionments. The anti-​gender discourse serves as a code for expression of anti-​EU sentiments and a broader resentment against the liberal West. With the recurring claim that the East will save the West from moral corruption, anti-​genderism has become the new language

272

273

Anti-gender mobilization and populism

for nationalisms in the region. Right-​wing populist resistance to gender is presented as Central-​Eastern Europe’s proud determination to withstand western domination.

References Benedict XVI. 2012. “Address of his Holiness Benedict XVI on the Occasion of Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia.” Clementine Hall, Friday, December 21. http://​w2.vatican. va/​content/​benedict-​xvi/​en/​speeches/​2012/​december/​documents/​hf_​ben-​xvi_​spe_​20121221_​ auguri-​curia.html Bluhm, Katharina and Mihai Varga. 2019. “Introduction. Toward a New Illiberal Conservatism in Russia and Central Europe.” In New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe, edited by Katharina Luhm and Mihai Varga, 1–​22. London and New York: Routledge. Bracke, Sarah and David Paternotte. 2016. “Unpacking the Sin of Gender.” Religion and Gender 6 (2): 143–​154. Brakus, Ana. 2018. “Poland’s Hidden Hand Behind Croatian Catholic Lobby Group,” BalkanInsight, October 30. https://​balkaninsight.com/​2018/​10/​30/​poland-​s-​hidden-​hand-​behind-​croatian-​ catholic-​lobby-​group-​10-​29-​2018/​. Buss, Doris E. 1998. “Robes, Relics, and Rights: The Vatican and the Beijing Conference on Women.” Social and Legal Studies 7 (3): 339–​363. Buss, Doris E. and Didi Herman. 2003. Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Campos, Paulo Roberto. 2014. “Croatia: Protecting the Traditional Family,” TFP News, January 20. www.tfp.org/​croatia-​protecting-​the-​traditional-​family/​. Case, Mary Anne. 2011. “After Gender the Destruction of Man? The Vatican’s Nightmare Vision of the ‘Gender Agenda’ for Law.” Pace Law Review 31 (1): 802–​817. –​–​–​–. 2016. “The Role of the Popes in the Invention of Complementarity and the Anathematization of Gender.” Religion and Gender 6 (2): 155–​172. –​–​–​–. 2019. “Trans Formations in the Vatican’s War on ‘Gender Ideology.’” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44 (3): 639–​664. Ciobanu, Claudia. 2017. “Romania Turns ‘Illiberal’ with Moves against Gay Marriage.” Politico, October 6. https://​balkaninsight.com/​2018/​10/​30/​poland-​s-​hidden-​hand-​behind-​croatian-​ catholic-lobby-​group-​10-​29-​2018/​. Cornejo, Monica and José Ignacio P. Galán. 2017. “From the Pulpit to the Streets: Ultra-​ Conservative Religious Positions against Gender in Spain.” In Anti-​ Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing against Equality, edited by Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, 233–​251. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Corredor, Elizabeth S. 2019. “Unpacking ‘Gender Ideology’ and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44 (3): 613–​638. Darakchi, Shaban. 2019. “ ‘The Western Feminists Want to Make Us Gay’: Nationalism, Heteronormativity, and Violence against Women in Bulgaria in Times of ‘Anti-​ gender Campaigns.’ ” Sexuality and Culture 23: 1208–​1229. Datta, Neil. 2018. “‘Restoring the Natural Order’: The Religious Extremists’ Vision to Mobilize European Societies against Human Rights on Sexuality and Reproduction.” European Parliamentary Forum on Population & Development, April 19. www.epfweb.org/​node/​690. Ďurinová, Petra. 2015. “Slovakia.” In Gender as Symbolic Glue: The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the Anti-​gender Mobilization in Europe, edited by Eszter Kováts and Maari Põim, 104–​125. Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Friedrich-​Ebert-​Stiftung Budapest. Fassin, Eric. 2016. “Gender and the Problem of Universals: Catholic Mobilizations and Sexual Democracy in France.” Religion and Gender 6 (2): 173–​186. Garbagnoli, Sara. 2016. “Against the Heresy of Immanence: Vatican’s ‘Gender’ as a New Rhetorical Device against the Denaturalization of the Sexual Order.” Religion and Gender 6 (2): 187–​204. Ghodsee, Kirsten. 2004. “Feminism-​by-​Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminism, and Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” Signs: Journal for Women in Culture and Society 29 (3): 727–​753.

273

274

Agnieszka Graff Graff, Agnieszka. 2010. “Looking at Pictures of Gay Men: Political Uses of Homophobia in Contemporary Poland.” Public Culture 3: 583–​603. Graff, Agnieszka and Elżbieta Korolczuk. 2017. “‘Worse Than Communism and Nazism Put Together’: War on Gender in Poland.” In Anti-​gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, edited by Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, 175–​ 194. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Graff, Agnieszka and Elżbieta Korolczuk. Forthcoming. Anti-​gender Politics and the Populist Moment. London: Routledge. Grzebalska, Weronika and Andrea Pető. 2018. “The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland.” Women’s Studies International Forum 68: 164–​172. Grzebalska, Weronika, Eszter Kováts, and Andrea Pető. 2017. “Gender as Symbolic Glue: How ‘Gender’ Became an Umbrella Term for the Rejection of the (Neo)liberal Order.” Political Critique, January 13. http://​politicalcritique.org/​long-​read/​2017/​gender-​as-​symbolic-​glue-​how-​ gender-​became-​an-​umbrella-​term-​for-​the-​rejection-​of-​the-​neoliberal-​order/​. Gunnarsson Payne, Jenny. 2019. “Challenging ‘Gender Ideology’: (Anti-​ )Gender Politics in Europe’s Populist Moment.” The New Pretender, February 10. http://​new-​pretender.com/​2019/​ 02/​10/​challenging-​gender-​ideology-​anti-​gender-​politics-​in-​europes-​populist-​moment-​jenny-​ gunnarsson-​payne/​. Hennig, Anja. 2018. “Political Genderphobia in Europe: Accounting for Right-​wing Political-​ religious Alliances against Gender-​sensitive Education Reforms since 2012.” Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik, October 22. Hodžić, Amir and Aleksandar Štulhofer. 2017. “Embryo, Teddy Bear-​ Centaur, and the Constitution: Mobilizations against ‘Gender Ideology’ and Sexual Permissiveness in Croatia.” In Anti-​gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, edited by Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, 59–​78. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Korolczuk, Elżbieta and Agnieszka Graff. 2018. “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’: The Anti-​ colonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism.” Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (4): 797–​821. Kováts, Eszter and Maari Põim, eds. 2015. Gender as Symbolic Glue: The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the Anti-​gender Mobilization in Europe. Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Friedrich-​Ebert-​Stiftung Budapest. Kuby, Gabriele. 2015. The Global Revolution. Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom. Kettering, OH: Angelico Press. Kuhar, Roman 2017. “Changing Gender Several Times a Day: The Anti-​gender Movement in Slovenia.” In Anti-​gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, edited by Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, 59–​78. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Kuhar, Roman and Aleš Zobec. 2017. “The Anti-​gender Movement in Europe and the Educational Process in Public Schools.” CEPS Journal 7 (2), 29–​46. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte, eds. 2017. Anti-​gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Marchlewska, Marta, et al. 2019. “In Search of an Imaginary Enemy: Catholic Collective Narcissism and the Endorsement of Gender Conspiracy Beliefs.” The Journal of Social Psychology, March 14. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00224545.2019.1586637. Moss, Kevin. 2017. “Russia as the Savior of European Civilization: Gender and the Geopolitics of Traditional Values.” In Anti-​gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, edited by Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, 195–​214. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–​563. –​–​–​–. 2017. “Introduction to the Populist Radical Right.” In The Populist Radical Right. A Reader, edited by Cas Mudde, 1–​10. London: Routledge. Müller, Jan Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Paternotte, David and Roman Kuhar. 2018. “Disentangling and Locating the ‘Global Right’: Anti-​ gender Campaigns in Europe.” Politics and Governance 6 (3): 6–​19. Peeters, Marguerite A. 2013. Le Gender, une norme mondiale? Pour un discernement [Gender, the Global Norm? Toward an Understanding]. Paris: MamE. Rawłuszko, Marta. 2019. “And if the Opponents of Gender Ideology Are Right? Gender Politics, Europeanization, and the Democratic Deficit.” Politics & Gender: 1–​23.

274

275

Anti-gender mobilization and populism Smrek, Michal. 2015. “The Failed Slovak Referendum on ‘Family’: Voters’ Apathy and Minority Rights in Central Europe.” Baltic Worlds, March 4. Suchanow, Klementyna. 2018. “Organizacji antyaborcyjnych przybywa w Polsce i na świecie. Czy coś je łączy?” [“The number of anti-abortion groups is growing in Poland and globally. How are they connected?”] Gazeta Wyborcza. Magazyn Świąteczny, March 24. Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-​Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Zakaria, Farid. 1997. “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” Foreign Affairs (November–​ December): 22–​43.

275

276

277

PART IV

Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes

278

279

INTRODUCTION Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Mara Lazda, Katalin Fábián, and Janet Elise Johnson

Part IV examines the gendered lived experiences of the ideological constructions described in Part III. The lived experience is a channel through which ideologies are imposed by regimes and interpreted by individuals. In the everyday, the regulation of bodies often became the site of gendered power negotiation. The negotiation of the intimate was invasive, but in asserting autonomy over their own bodies and actions, women claimed agency. Examining gendered everyday life—​such as resistance by women peasants to domestic violence in the Russian Empire, sexuality during the Holocaust, or communal kitchens in East Germany—​has been central to the work of feminist scholars of Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). Recorded in diaries, letters, memoirs, poems, novels, trial testimonies, even recipes, everyday experiences allow us to interpret how individuals chose to subvert, condone, or co-​exist with the gendered regimes that exerted varying levels of incentives, coercion, and violence. Much of the population in CEE&E entered the 20th century as subjects of monarchies or empires, not rights-​bearing citizens. Access to education, jobs, political representation, material wealth, and social mobility were differentially dependent on intertwined factors of gender, sexuality, class, age, religion, and ethnicity. Individuals who found themselves on the margins because of any, some, or all of these factors were particularly vulnerable, but all lacked basic political and civil rights. In the Habsburg Monarchy, prostitutes attracted the scorn of society and concern of officials, who considered prostitution an indicator of immorality and instability, and subjected women to varying levels of regulation and surveillance. Recent studies, including the chapter in this Part, reveal how women navigated the systems of regulations, for example, changing their registration status and building networks to move across and out of the Monarchy. Despite their vulnerability, individual women took advantage of political and economic shifts within these hierarchical systems to take control of their lives, leveraging customary law and practice with legal and economic reforms. Peasant women in Russia took their abusive husbands to court and used song to challenge discriminatory attitudes regarding premarital sex. Though they were poorly compensated, women built economic 279

280

Mara Lazda et al.

independence through their work in domestic trade and agriculture, work that men abandoned as they migrated to jobs elsewhere. The establishment of democratic-​aspiring states at the end of World War I augured well for the advancement for women in the region. But acquiring the right to vote did not mean the same thing as sharing power with male elites, who rejected more than the symbolic inclusion of women. Some women resisted this renewed exclusion, and, as in Czechoslovakia, created organizations to hold government leaders accountable in upholding principles of gender equality. Despite these efforts, the proportion of women representatives in governing bodies remained low and further declined over the interwar period. As civic ideals of the nation were replaced by increasingly exclusionary ethnic ones, some women saw opportunity in the turn toward authoritarianism and pronatalism. Part IV considers how individuals coped with Stalinism and Nazism as systems at war with their own populations and with external enemies, at times coopting these systems to their needs. The Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships sought control over public and private affairs, seemingly negating the possibility of individual action. Chapters in this Handbook find, however, that even under the most oppressive regimes, including those that commit genocide, individuals did not give up control over the intimate, which could enable survival and produce resistance. In the Gulags and deportation, women tried to recreate the semblance of autonomous space through traditions and foods that they linked to a sense of normalcy, security, and ethnic identity. Though scholars have been reluctant to broach the topic, the testimonies used in the chapters here reveal that women engaged in sexual barter for food, protection, and to better their chances for survival. Individual experiences after World War II testify to the uneven implementation, at times intentional undermining, of the emancipatory promises of gender equality made by socialist and communist regimes. In Yugoslavia, the gendered experiences of wartime in which women took on what were seen as new and empowering roles in anti-​ fascist partisan resistance, help explain the distinct path of the Yugoslav communist gender program in adapting Stalinist gender constructions. In the German Democratic Republic, the proliferation of workplace canteens and school cafeterias made the experience of food preparation and consumption a collective one, relieving the daily pressure of meal preparation for women, but the institutionalization of meals ideologically enhanced the connection of the domestic to maternal roles. Individuals’ lives spanned more than one regime, carrying strategies of agency from one to the next. Chapters in Part V focus on the lived experiences during the postcommunist period, as individuals have navigated the recent wave of social, economic, and political transitions.

280

281

Empires and monarchies

282

283

27 LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA AND ITS GENDERED ORDER IN THE COUNTRYSIDE Christine D. Worobec

Russian peasant society, which represented more than four out of five ethnic Russians in the Empire at the turn of the 20th century, replicated the structure of the hierarchical patriarchal state. Within Russian villages women found themselves subordinated to husbands, fathers-​ in-​ law, and brothers-​ in-​ law, and children of both sexes were subordinated to fathers and uncles, just as peasants of both sexes as a whole were subservient to the tsar, the supreme father. Subservience also dictated the unequal relationships that peasants experienced with nobles and employers (Worobec 2002, 77). While young men were expected to defer to senior men, and young women to senior women within the peasant household and community, unmarried men also found themselves under the authority of the most senior woman, the household head’s wife (the bol’shukha), who supervised the domestic realm (Olson and Adonyeva 2012, 67, 69). These patriarchal characteristics and hierarchies of submission also applied to largely Orthodox Belarusian and Ukrainian peasant societies within the European and Siberian sector of the Empire although some differences in culture and land tenure practices distinguished them from their Russian counterparts. Although peasant women generally conformed to a subordinate position within the male-​dominated hierarchy, they did occasionally seize opportunities to enhance their status as female heads of households and daughters-​in-​law, to blunt the worst aspects of their lives by demanding separation from abusive husbands, and to protest ill-​defined government reforms, which in their implementation often deprived them of property benefits that customary laws had bestowed upon them. This chapter examines the critical period in the aftermath of the 1861 emancipation, when peasants gained autonomy from their noble owners and the right to govern themselves, all the while retaining their customary laws. The era ends with the implementation of the Stolypin land reforms in late 1906 until 1916 in the midst of World War I. These reforms attempted unsuccessfully to introduce capitalist elements and notions of individual male property ownership in the countryside. Contrary to work that claims otherwise (Muravyeva 2011), peasant women’s positions largely improved in this period within the framework of a modernizing state that allowed for greater freedom of movement, a 283

284

Christine D. Worobec

rising standard of living, higher literacy rates, and some legal recourse for abused peasant women. The challenges the agrarian reforms posed to women were nipped in the bud by peasant strategies of subterfuge and the unprecedented demands of a total war that ended in revolution, subjects that remain outside the bounds of this chapter.

Peasant male authority and its potential enhancement by way of the Stolypin reforms The Russian male peasant household head (bol’shak) enjoyed absolute authority over all household members, who comprised either a nuclear family or an extended one if a married son or two and their wives or another in-​law or two were present. Besides managing the household’s complex economy and collective family property, the bol’shak determined every able household member’s labor input on and off the land (Worobec 2002, 77–​78). A family member could not leave the commune beyond a fifteen-​mile radius to work or travel elsewhere without his permission until early March 1914. That permission was necessary for a migrant worker or religious pilgrim to acquire and renew a temporary internal passport. After November 1906, the bol’shak’s authority became legally enhanced if he chose to claim title to his communal allotment land, which according to the Stolypin reforms became his private property to sell and bequeath without having to defer to customary practices. In practice, not only could a wife be dispossessed, but exaggerated assertions of individual and communal rights often came at the expense of independent widows who, if they had children to support, had generally been allowed to farm communal allotment lands until their children reached the age of maturity (Gaudin 2007, 124–​125). Those lands, even in areas where domestic trades predominated, gave these women essential income and insurance against economic disaster, a safety net not accorded widowed women without children who forfeited communal land upon their husbands’ death (Dennison and Nafziger 2013, 421). After 1906, men’s specious land claims and communal pressures disfavoring marginal communal members superseded the customary rights of women household heads, who had little recourse but to appeal communal decisions. Even at the appellate level, the odds were two to one against these women in spite of reminders that officials received from the Ministry of the Interior and Senate that widows still enjoyed a right to a communal land allotment. Fortunately, the ill-​defined Stolypin reforms were slow to take effect amidst peasant subversionary tactics and disbanded in late 1916 in the midst of the vagaries of World War I (Gaudin 2007, 199–​202, 204) and women’s protests against inflationary prices and land policies detrimental to their livelihood (Baker 2001). However, any dispossession of women—​including soldiers’ wives—​that had occurred prior to 1916 was not reversed (Gaudin 2007, 200–​201, 204–​205). In spite of the reforms’ negative impact upon some women, other factors associated with post-​emancipation reforms and modernization in the countryside produced more positive outcomes for them. Such changes provided peasant women with greater agency over their lives at the same time that the system continued to victimize them.

Improvements in peasant women’s standard of living By the turn of the 20th century, the standard of living had improved for rural peasant women. Negative assessments about peasants’ living standards, based on incomplete data on tax arrears and on peasants’ ability to purchase a limited number of essential goods, 284

285

Imperial Russia and gendered order

had dominated the historiography through the early 1990s (see Hoch 1994 and Mironov 2009). However, new sources made available with the opening of Russian archives after 1991 provide a fuller picture of consumption patterns and demonstrate overall improvements, although men fared better than women (Dennison and Nafziger 2013, 421; Mironov 2012, 126). Households in various Russian areas were able to purchase easily accessible foodstuffs and had low costs of living. Anywhere from 15 to 40 percent of household expenses involved “housing, non-​essentials, and luxury goods” and an additional 5 to 15 percent for clothing, items that benefitted women and their domestic realm (Dennison and Nafziger 2013, 414, 412). Peasant women’s living standards were highest in households in central and northern Russia, which engaged in complementary agricultural and nonagricultural labor and experienced a surge in male peasant outmigration to agricultural and urban areas either seasonally or more permanently. Women, children, and the elderly were more closely bound to the land because the landholding system did not allow peasants to abandon their allotments on which they owed taxes. Until 1903 communal members shared mutual responsibility for tax payments. A shortage of housing in Moscow and St. Petersburg also discouraged most women from joining their migrant spouses, although single women’s migration to the capital cities to work in factories and domestic service grew from the 1890s onward. Women who stayed behind were, at least temporarily, freed from abusive husbands. In some locales, women even gained a vote as their households’ representatives in village assemblies and occasionally assumed official political duties (Gaudin 2007, 156–​157). Growing literacy rates for women (around 25 percent by 1911), while low by Western European standards, aided this upward mobility (Dennison and Nafziger 2013, 415). Peasant women’s resourcefulness and hard work were essential to a household’s success. They took charge of the kitchen garden, producing not only vegetables but also herbs, which were critical in healing ailments. They tended to the domestic animals and most of the domestic work, transforming the raw into the cooked. They were full participants in heavy agricultural work, the burdens of which increased in areas of significant male migration. Either in the nonagricultural season or throughout most of the year, depending again on location, peasant women engaged in the domestic production of trades, some of them specialized. Women’s exclusive contributions in Nizhnii Novgorod province included the making of intricate fishnets, the painstaking sewing of sheepskin rags for coats, sleeves, and hats; the weaving of saddle straps from goat hair; and the processing of hemp. Such demanding work involved long hours, which were “constantly interrupted by the need to care for livestock and children” (Evtuhov 2011, 93, 91, 86). Here and elsewhere, women were involved in lace-​making, gold thread embroidery, knitting, wet-​nursing, weaving, basket weaving, bobbin winding, and cigarette mouthpiece assembly. All in all, the production of goods resulted in significant revenues, although women labored “on the lowest status and least well remunerated domestic manufactures” (Pallot 1991, 171). Even in paid agricultural work, women’s wages were anywhere from 30 to 90 percent lower than men’s in Iaroslavl province’s Iurev district, a pattern undoubtedly replicated elsewhere (Dennison and Nafziger 2013, 421). On the positive side, women’s remunerations from any sales that they made at market constituted their own property by virtue of customary law. What they did not spend on clothing and household items, they passed onto their daughters as dowries. As markets became more integrated with the expansion of the railway, and rural migrants went back and forth between town and countryside, ready-​to-​wear clothing and 285

286

Christine D. Worobec

accessories became ubiquitous in rural areas. Although some upper-​class photographers of village life such as Sergei Prokudin-​Gorskii, patronized by Nicholas II, exhibited a nostalgia for colorful traditional peasant women’s clothing that varied from village to village, such representations of women at work or at leisure were almost as anachronistic as Nicholas II’s attempt to highlight cumbersome Muscovite dress for both men and women at extravagant court balls. More comfortable and sanitary cotton dresses, aprons, and headscarves had become common in the countryside. More fashionable clothing also reflected women’s growing self-​worth and independence, providing them with an opportunity to climb the social ladder. Consequently, peasant women became increasingly indistinguishable from their lower-​class urban counterparts at markets and pilgrimage sites, and on urban streets as well as in photographs (Ruane 2009). That self-​worth and independence might not have sufficiently compensated women for extremely high birth and infant mortality rates and the spousal abuse they experienced. Such high infant mortality rates could not be mitigated without alterations in cultural practices, including the abandonment of the unsanitary rag pacifiers filled with chewed up food; the adoption of a more evenly distributed birthing cycle to avoid a predominance of summer births; and the implementation of breastfeeding on demand, which would have allowed women to have more frequent rest from their labor obligations and to bond with their children more intimately (Ransel 2000, 35–​36, 103, 203). Self-​esteem and independent actions nevertheless reflected ways in which women increasingly tried to mitigate domestic violence and gain some control over their everyday lives.

Sexual norms, violence against peasant women, and peasant women’s agency Peasant women were not protected “from beatings, rape, incest or other forms of violence” (Kingston-​Mann 2018, 14). Steinberg’s (2017, 374–​384) comment that “the power to harm was overwhelmingly on the side of men” in modern Russian urban areas also applied to the countryside, even though lower-​class urban single and sometimes married women were more vulnerable to men’s advances given the anonymity of urban spaces and the lack of the kind of collective action against excessive behavior that occurred in villages. Courtship rituals in the public sphere encouraged frank sexual commentary and tested peasant men’s virility in an assertion of men’s sexual dominance over women. Eligible young women enjoyed some leverage in the mating game by commenting on their suitors’ sexual attributes. A woman’s praise or condemnation of the size of a man’s sexual organ and remarks on his sexual practices could enhance or destroy his reputation (Worobec 2002, 83). However, the double standard ensured that men controlled the dating game by initiating sexual advances, promising to marry women to obtain consent for sex (Engel 1990), and casting doubt on a young woman’s virginity or character through innuendo or public shaming practices (Worobec 1991, 146–​148). The sources’ deafening silence on date rapes, of course, could not mask the prevalence of shotgun weddings. As outmigration of men in the central and northern provinces and their recourse to urban prostitutes became so widespread that sexually transmitted diseases became endemic in the countryside (Engelstein 1986), attitudes to women’s premarital sex became more forgiving in some rural communities, and the public shaming of women for pre-​marital sex largely disappeared by the turn of the 20th century (Pushkareva 2013, 173). Although peasant responses to ethnographical queries privileged the male voice by placing responsibility for sexual transgression solely on women’s shoulders (Pushkareva 286

287

Imperial Russia and gendered order

2013, 169), peasant women’s melodramatic songs highlighted other aspects of patriarchy by depicting them “as victims of men’s carelessness, self-​interest, or cruelty” (Olson and Adonyeva 2012, 148). By elevating women’s morality above that of men, however, these songs also redeemed the victims. By the turn of the 20th century, rebellious voices against such conservative norms were growing stronger with peasant women’s creation and public singing of short verses (chastushki). These songs challenged social norms, making individual, normally taboo judgments about personal desires collective ones. They championed a woman’s freedom to choose her marital partner and to enjoy sexual agency (Olson and Adonyeva 2012, 147–​148, 166–​172). In his early 1990s oral interviews of Russian peasant women born before 1912, Ransel (2000, 5) notes that a woman’s freedom of choice in a spouse remained somewhat limited by a father’s preference, while most of the interviewees noted that they remained virgins upon marriage. Olson and Adonyeva likewise found their respondents voicing puritanical notions about sexuality, echoing the Orthodox Christian premise that sexual relations were unclean. Young women and their parents sought village assemblies’ support to counter any false slights of reputation and restore the young women’s and their households’ reputations. While shaming rituals of peasant women who indulged in premarital sex appeared to have dissipated by the early 20th century, they continued to be used against women who committed adultery, wherein a husband’s prerogative to beat his wife (and control her sexuality) and invite others to participate in the beating sometimes led to deadly consequences (Pushkareva 2013, 169, 174, 177). In December 1908, a husband persuaded six (presumably male) neighbors in the village of Prilepki in Voronezh province to beat his wife and her lover, leaving the latter dead and the former near death (Russkoe Slovo, December 20, 1908). In an unfortunate twist of events, women of the Ukrainian village of Voloshki in Zhitomir province took extra-​legal justice against a neighbor they identified as “turning the heads of their husbands,” leaving her with life-​threatening fractures (Russkoe Slovo, June 5, 1909). Such collective action by women could also be taken against a cruel wife abuser. In July 1911, 22 women in a village in the Russian Don Region attacked the Cossack Parshin with oven prongs and sticks until his male comrades rescued him (Russkoe Slovo, July 2, 1911). Such extra-​legal actions were not confined to sexual matters. In early 1910, Ukrainian villagers of Viazovka in Zhitomir province avenged the death of the woman Shelest by fatally beating her assailant Ponomarenko; the dispute between the two peasants had been over the possession of a household plot (Russkoe Slovo, February 26, 1910). A similar revenge killing had occurred a couple weeks earlier in the Russian village of Chekalino in Samara region, this time against two brothers who had murdered a peasant woman and beat her daughter over a paltry 25-​kopeck debt (Russkoe Slovo, February 12, 1910). These extra-​legal practices, which were infrequently reported and often escaped authorities’ attention in an undergoverned and underpoliced countryside, constituted part of peasants’ repertoire of collective strategies. They employed them periodically to dilute tensions within their own communities. More often than not, they protested injustices perpetuated by a government that treated them as second-​class subjects and failed to provide them with sufficient legal support against crimes—​including abuse, witchcraft, horse theft, and murder—​that affected their daily lives and subsistence (Frank 1999, 249–​261; Frierson 1987; Worobec 1987; 2001, 87–​108). The 1861 Emancipation legislation had created a separate legal framework for peasants, one governed by customary rather than written law. Elected peasant judges in township courts adjudicated most civil law and petty criminal law cases, under which 287

288

Christine D. Worobec

instances involving reputation and sexual innuendo, as well as incidents of domestic violence by husbands and other family members, fell. Local customs, however, varied considerably among villages, leading to inconsistencies in the application of customary law and even to the invention of tradition by officials and litigants alike (Popkins 2000, 418). Initially, battered women could not appeal township court decisions. By the end of the 19th century, as the government placed these courts under the oversight of provincial land captains, written law began to influence local decisions more and more. This change was positive for women in terms of abuse but negative with regard to inheritance for widows with underage children because they could receive only one-​seventh of their spouses’ real property and an eighth of his movable property instead of full shares (Gaudin 2007, 125). Fortunately, the latter provision was not applied universally and became more influential only temporarily between late 1906 and 1915. Finally, peasant women were able to appeal cases of “insult” or abuse to the land captain. Husbands convicted of domestic abuse and sentenced to a short prison sentence (or alternatively fined), nonetheless, did return home with their “ ‘conjugal rights’ completely intact” (Engel 2011, 107, 109). Unlike domestic violence and insult, rape and murder fell under the rubric of general criminal law, while incest remained a crime adjudicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, rape and incest were rarely reported because of victims’ sense of shame and the need to maintain their households’ reputations. The relative lack of punishments for rape in favor of reconciliation and minimum compensations to injured parties at the communal and township court levels also inhibited reporting (Frank 1999, 162–​163). Finally, victims perceived the harsher sentences of under three years of hard labor for a convicted rapist and a year and a half for attempted rape, levied in the higher circuit courts, as insufficient deterrents to others (Russkoe Slovo, April 22, 1911, May 14, 1910). There was nothing to stop released convicts from taking revenge on the women or the families who had denounced them to the authorities. In spite of various obstacles, significant numbers of Russian peasant women did protest abuse. While extra-​legal practices remained exceptional (although more work needs to be done on this issue after their importance was questioned as “an abstraction created by Russian ethnographers and jurists,” used by historians “to exoticize the peasant” at times to emphasize peasants’ “resistance and subalternity”) (Burbank 2004, 15), already in the 1870s peasant women turned to more impartial township courts to report domestic violence, among other offenses committed by spouses and in-​laws. Vulnerable daughters-​ in-​law and soldiers’ wives figured prominently among the litigants (Farnsworth 1986, 1990). Occasionally, household heads’ spouses (bol’shukhi) made appearances as well; if they could provide evidence through character references from fellow villagers that their abusive husbands were also squandering the household’s resources, township judges might transfer their full household authority to their wives. In a moral economy and taxation system of mutual responsibility, where everyone had to pull their weight, pragmatic economics occasionally trumped patriarchalism. Nevertheless, the issue of spousal abuse remained problematic. By the end of the century, a number of changes improved women’s positions within peasant households. They included an increase in nuclear families due to household divisions championed by daughters-​in-​law wishing independence from in-​laws, growing male out-​migration, and greater “familiarity with the legal system” (Popkins 2000, 414). Between 1905 and 1917, according to Burbank’s analysis of over 900 cases in 10 township courts of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novgorod provinces, 19 percent of women’s criminal charges against men involved beatings, while 10.5 percent consisted of “insults in 288

289

Imperial Russia and gendered order

deed,” in contrast to charges of “insult in words,” which fell from 44 to 33 percent after 1914. Just over half of the cases involving beatings resulted in convictions and 27 percent in acquittals, while the rest were settled or dropped (Burbank 2004, 215, 219). Dramatic improvements in some women’s lives, albeit a minority, came with the ability to separate from tyrannical husbands. Between 1884 and 1902, thousands of courageous peasant women joined mainly their urban lower-​class women counterparts in appealing to the Imperial Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions for a marital separation. The Chancellery circumvented the law forbidding marital separation and the Russian Orthodox Church’s plodding bureaucracy, which rarely granted annulments. Beginning in 1888, chancellery officials could provide a peasant woman temporary relief by overriding a husband’s prerogative to disallow his wife to have an internal passport so that she could leave the village to work elsewhere, if he had abused or neglected her. That passport had to be renewed each year and could be relitigated; in the event of a lengthy relitigation process, officials simply extended the passport. Even though the same officials sometimes ruled in a husband’s favor, some progress in favor of peasant women had been made and the successful women’s appeals established a precedent for others to take action. After 1902, peasant women gained the right to petition local non-​peasant rather than chancery authorities (Engel 2011, 6, 123, 108, 129).

Religious devotion as resistance Those peasant women who accommodated themselves to abusive husbands and other family members could, of course, take subversive small daily actions of disobedience or foot-​dragging in their labors, but the price they had to pay for such resistance may have been too great. A far safer outlet involved women gaining temporary relief by abandoning their obligations and deference to the power structures of the household and village during slow work times to visit saints’ graves and icons believed to be miracle-​working at nearby or far away monastic sites. By the early 20th century, women dominated among Orthodox pilgrims in the Russian Empire. Not all of them were victims of abuse. Others sought miraculous cures of other ailments or fulfilled religious vows they had made during their own or family members’ illnesses. Often, they were also seeking the advice of monastic elders about domestic affairs. They tended to travel with other female relatives and neighbors. The most adventuresome went for months at a time, visiting multiple monasteries along the way, or fulfilled a vow to visit the Holy Land (Worobec 2016, 373–​375). This temporary religious migration provided cathartic experiences for the sick, abused, and well. The most rebellious women among the Orthodox, Old Believers (who clung to pre-​mid-​17th-​century Orthodox Christian rituals and rejected the modern Russian Orthodox Church), and sectarians chose not to marry but to pursue a full-​time religious vocation within the village or in the case of the Orthodox entered a religious community of like-​minded women.

Conclusions By and large, peasant women’s positions had improved by 1905. A higher living standard, a diversified economy, the growth in male migration to cities, and bureaucratic changes increased peasant women’s self-​worth and provided many with the independence to challenge their subordination and abuse, providing models for others to emulate. Such improvements took a temporary hit with the Stolypin land reforms that began in late 1906. 289

290

Christine D. Worobec

World War I changed everything: women came to dominate the agricultural sector as ten million men and millions of livestock, including draft horses and milk cows, were sent to the front, and gender roles were altered as women had to assume men’s responsibilities at home. Engel’s pioneering study of Russian peasant women’s participation in subsistence riots (1997) and Baker’s (2001) critical work on Ukrainian peasant women’s leadership in large-​scale protests against the Stolypin reforms during the war and small-​ scale actions against price controls in 1916 in Kharkov province need to be supplemented with multiple case studies to fill out our knowledge of women’s war roles and resistance. Other studies should examine peasant women’s participation in the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath, a subject about which there remains silence. Only then will historians be better able to understand peasant women’s experiences and attitudes during and after the 1917 Revolutions. The story of Russian peasant women’s improvements within the context of a modernizing state provides a glimpse of a complex world in which women were able not only to carve out spaces for themselves within a hierarchical patriarchal society, but also to adapt to a diversifying economy as laborers and consumers and to utilize new courts and appeals procedures to chip away at their victimization and establish some independence and a sense of self-​worth. Their resilience was remarkable.

References Baker, Mark. 2001. “Rampaging Soldatki, Cowering Police, Bazaar Riots and Moral Economy: The Social Impact of the Great War in Kharkiv Province.” Canadian-​American Slavic Studies 35 (2–​ 3): 137–​155. Burbank, Jane. 2004. Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–​1917. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Dennison, Tracy, and Steven Nafziger. 2013. “Living Standards in Nineteenth-​Century Russia.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (3): 397–​441. Engel, Barbara Alpern. 1990. “Peasant Morality and Pre-​Marital Relations in Late 19th Century Russia.” Journal of Social History 23 (4): 695–​714. –​–​–​–. 1997. “Not By Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I.” Journal of Modern History 69 (4): 696–​721. –​–​–​–. 2011. Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Engelstein, Laura. 1986. “Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890–​1905.” Representations 14: 169–​208. Evtuhov, Catherine. 2011. Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-​Century Nizhnii Novgorod. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Farnsworth, Beatrice. 1986. “The Litigious Daughter-​in-​Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Slavic Review 45 (1): 49–​64. –​–​–​–. 1990. “The Soldatka: Folklore and Court Record.” Slavic Review 49 (1): 58–​73. Frank, Stephen P. 1999. Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–​1914. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Frierson, Cathy. 1987. “Crime and Punishment in the Russian Village: Rural Concepts of Criminality at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” Slavic Review 46 (1): 55–​69. Gaudin, Corinne. 2007. Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Hoch, Steven L. 1994. “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia.” Slavic Review 53 (1): 41–​75. Kingston-​Mann, Esther. 2018. Women, Land Rights and Rural Development: How Much Land Does a Woman Need? New York: Routledge.

290

291

Imperial Russia and gendered order Mironov, Boris N. 2009. “The Myth of a Systemic Crisis in Russia after the Great Reforms of the 1860s–​1870s.” Russian Social Science Review 50 (4): 36–​48. –​–​–​–. 2012. The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700–​1917, edited by Gregory L. Freeze. London: Routledge. Muravyeva, Marianna. 2011. “Between Law and Morality: Violence Against Women in Nineteenth-​ Century Russia.” In Women in Nineteenth-​Century Russia: Lives and Culture, edited by Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi, 209–​238. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Olson, Laura J., and Svetlana Adonyeva. 2012. The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Pallot, Judith. 1991. “Women’s Domestic Industries in Moscow Province, 1880–​1900.” In Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, 163–​ 184. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Popkins, Gareth. 2000. “Code versus Custom? Norms and Tactics in Peasant Volost Court Appeals, 1889–​1917.” Russian Review 59 (2): 408–​424. Pushkareva, Natalia. 2013. “Shaming Punishments of Women in Russia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In Shame, Blame, and Culpability: Crime and Violence in the Modern State, edited by Judith Rowbottam, Marianna Muravyeva, and David Nash, 168–​183. London: Routledge. Ransel, David L. 2000. Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ruane, Christine. 2009. The Empire’s New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700–​1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Russkoe Slovo. 1908. “Samosud.” In “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] December 20. http://​starosti.ru/​ archive.php?y=1908&m=12&d=20. –​–​–​–. 1909. “Babii samosud.” In “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] June 5. http://​starosti.ru/​archive. php?m=6&y=1909. –​–​–​–. 1910. “Samosud.” In “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] February 12. http://​starosti.ru/​archive. php?y=1910&m=02&d=12. –​–​–​–. 1910. “V derevne: Pavlograd, 12.II.” In “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] February 26. http://​ starosti.ru/​archive.php?y=1910&m=02&d=26. –​–​–​–. 1910. “Sudebnyi sledovatel' Ermolenskii.” In “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] May 14. http://​ starosti.ru/​archive.php?y=1910&m=05&d=14. –​–​–​–. 1911. “V sudakh: Minsk, 8, IV.” In: “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] April 22. http://​starosti.ru/​ archive.php?y=1911&m=04&d=22. –​–​–​–. 1911. “Babii samosud.” In “Gazetnye starosti,” [online] July 2. http://​starosti.ru/​archive. php?m=7&y=1911. Steinberg, Mark D. 2017. “Feeling Modern on the Russian Street: From Desire to Despair.” In The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, edited by Deborah Simonton, 374–​384. London: Routledge. Worobec, Christine D. 1987. “Horse Thieves and Peasant Justice in Post-​Emancipation Imperial Russia.” Journal of Social History 21 (2): 220–​234. –​–​–​–. 1991. Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-​Emancipation Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. –​–​–​–. 2001. Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern University Press. –​–​–​–. 2002. “Masculinity in Late-​Imperial Russian Peasant Society.” In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Freidman, and Dan Healey, 76–​93. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. –​–​–​–. 2016. “Russian Orthodoxy and Women’s Spirituality in Imperial Russia.” In The Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture. (Eastern Christian Studies, vol. 2), edited by Nickolas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski, and Jennifer B. Spock, 355–​388. Columbus: Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, The Ohio State University.

291

292

28 GENDERED MORAL PANICS IN THE LATE HABSBURG MONARCHY Prostitution, sex trafficking, and venereal disease Nancy M. Wingfield

Three moral panics around what were then called prostitution, venereal disease, and “white slavery” (also Mädchenhandel, literally, “trade in girls”) shaped individual attitudes toward gender in the late Habsburg Monarchy. Weeks’ observation about moral panics in Britain also applies to fin-​de-​siècle Austria-​Hungary: panics crystallize “widespread fears and anxieties” and sexuality has “a peculiar centrality” with sexual “deviants” being scapegoated (1981, 14–​15). Worldwide fears about venereal disease, especially syphilis, and trafficking in girls became intertwined with popular attitudes toward prostitution over the course of the 19th century. The expanding public sphere provided greater possibilities both for increasing the panic over trafficking and for resolving it. Venereal disease (VD) followed trafficking into the Habsburg public sphere as a topic of acceptable discussion; both VD and trafficking were the foci of a series of international conferences around the turn of the century, reflecting the popular, intensely held beliefs about issues that members of the expanding bourgeoisie believed threatened the existing social order in a time of change (Critcher 2009, 17–​34). In Austria-​Hungary, bourgeois, sometimes even aristocratic, women, helped found and/​or participated in regional, national, and international organizations to fight these scourges, which contemporaries believed were endemic in the decades before 1914.

Varying prostitution regulations across Austria-​Hungary The regulation of prostitution in the Habsburg Monarchy—​registering women with police, housing them in brothels, and subjecting them to regular medical examinations— often post-dated the settlement of 1867 (Ausgleich), which gave Austria and Hungary independence in domestic affairs, while leaving the foreign ministry, the military, and the treasury as joint institutions.1 Prostitution was “tolerated” in the dual Monarchy—​so long as women registered with the police—​rather than legal, although rules governing commercial sex varied at the provincial and local level. What all regions of the Monarchy 292

293

Gendered moral panics in Habsburg Monarchy

shared in common was local police jurisdiction over commercial sex, whose regulations varied by locality but were driven by government, military, and popular concerns about public morals and public health, as well as about the effectiveness of the armed forces. The vice police (those concerned with “immoral” activities) in Vienna and Budapest, the capitals of imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, respectively, regularly corresponded with one another—​ and with vice police elsewhere in the Monarchy and outside it—​about prostitution and trafficking. Local police, who enforced the rules across the Monarchy, had a great deal of discretion in regulation. Many medical specialists in the Habsburg Monarchy continued to believe that prostitution regulation was a “necessary evil.” By contrast, in neighboring countries such as Italy, the medical profession responded to the threat they saw in VD by arguing for “neo-​regulation,” or strengthening the clinical elements of regulation, and, in some cases, the abolition of prostitution. Prostitution in Austria-​Hungary was multi-​confessional, multi-​generational, multi-​ lingual, and, often, international. Aided in part by the Monarchy’s expanding railway network, it was also very mobile, as local studies of prostitution reveal (Baczkowski 2000, 597; Cvelfar 1994, 29). As elsewhere in Europe, the majority of women who participated in the sex trade across the Monarchy practiced their trade clandestinely, sometimes temporarily or seasonally, rather than registering with police. Working-​class women who attended a 1908 meeting of the Austrian Society for the Control of Venereal Disease explained that some women who participated in casual, part-​time sex work were otherwise gainfully employed—​if badly paid—​for much or all of the year in other working-​ class occupations. In addition to female servants, whose employers regularly let them go in the summer, fashion embroiderers, whose work was also seasonal, and seamstresses, whose pay was very low, might “establish relationships” with men, that is, exchange sex for goods or money. Rather than self-​identifying as prostitutes, some of these women may have thought of themselves as participating in the traditional working-​class barter of goods for sexual favors (Walkowitz and Walkowitz 1973, 83–​84). When they came into contact with the vice police, these women were often arrested, tested for venereal disease, and frequently expelled if they lacked right of residency. The variation in regulations across Austria owed to the Stadion Constitution of 1849, which granted townships considerable control over local affairs. Some municipalities permitted prostitution in brothels or designated inns, while others permitted only independent prostitutes. Still others permitted both kinds of prostitution, or none at all. Vorarlberg, Austria’s westernmost province, prohibited prostitution altogether, with the apparent support of the greater public. Formal regulation of prostitution came later to Vienna, the largest city in the Monarchy, than to other cities in Austria-​Hungary, and it remained in place longer than elsewhere, into the 1970s. Regulation in Vienna developed through a series of ad hoc measures, beginning with a police decree from 1873 that mandated issuing a health book that contained a tolerated prostitute’s personal information, including results of her regular examinations for venereal disease. The 1885 appendix to the so-​called Vagabond Law formalized the existing regulations in Vienna and elsewhere in Cisleithanian Austria. Paragraph 5 of the law placed the punishment of women who used their body for “lewd trade” in the hands of the security authorities. Their male clients were, however, not punished. Viennese regulations were revised in 1911, after several years’ debate over the efficacy of the city’s vice police supervision of prostitution following the explosive 1906 trial of Regine Riehl, a brothel keeper, whose Jewish origin drew the attention of the city’s antisemitic press. She had been found guilty of a variety of crimes related to running 293

294

Nancy M. Wingfield

her establishment, including maltreating the prostitutes she employed in a brothel in the center of Vienna (Wingfield 2017, 17–​46). Regulations in several other cities, including the free city of Trieste, the provincial capital of the Austrian Littoral, were also revised after the turn of the century, sometimes following the example of Vienna. Rules for streetwalking in Vienna laid out in the revised prostitution regulations limited the practice to the period from dusk to an hour after coffee houses closed in the early morning and forbade the practice altogether in the wealthy First District, as well as near police stations and other locations detailed in the document. Although many large cities in Austria-​Hungary had numerous brothels, metropolitan Vienna, which had a population of more than two million by 1910, had just six after the turn of the century. Budapest, the Monarchy’s second city, with a population of about 1.2 million, had far more brothels. In contrast to Budapest, where the number of tolerated prostitutes in 1905 was 2,404, there were only 1,478 women registered in Vienna that same year. While 321 prostitutes still lived in Budapest’s brothels in 1912, a decline from more than 500 in the 1890s, only 50 to 60 women lived in Viennese brothels in the last years before World War I (Prokopovych 2017, 40). Most of Vienna’s tolerated prostitutes had long lived independently in apartments and rooms on particular streets of certain districts, their addresses known to the vice police. In Trieste and Lemberg/​Lwów/​ Lviv, the provincial capital of Galicia, many prostitutes lived in brothels. Many of these buildings were located in the older, poorer, parts of town, often in the former Jewish quarters, as was the case in Czernowitz/​Chernivtsi/​Cernăuți and Prague, the provincial capitals of Bukovina and Bohemia. In smaller locales, brothels could be found in isolated areas on the edge of town, to keep commercial sex from offending the bourgeoisie. Local rules also dictated who, besides prostitutes, could live in a brothel. In Trieste, Vienna, and Agram/​Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and other cities in Austria-​Hungary, brothel keeping was an exclusively female occupation. Police obliged registered prostitutes to follow regulations that varied by city and province, including regular medical examinations for venereal disease. Independent prostitutes were not to make themselves a nuisance by soliciting in public, for example by leaning out of windows to proposition men or walking designated streets outside of specific locations during designated hours in the evening. In any case, the number of women who registered with the vice police in larger cities was estimated to constitute only 10 percent of the women who sold sex in the imperial capital. This percentage remained consistent through the end of World War I. The regulations for prostitution in Croatia after the 1868 Nagodba (the Croatian–​ Hungarian settlement governing Croatia’s political status within the Kingdom of Hungary), and in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, which the Habsburg military occupied in 1878, and Austria-​Hungary annexed in 1908, were independent of, but paralleled, the practices in Austria and Hungary. Prostitution in Croatia was regulated by an 1875 code modeled on the Austrian Penal Code of 1873: it left the punishment of prostitutes to the local police, and regulation also varied from city to city, although commercial sex occurred primarily in brothels. Later decrees called for greater surveillance of prostitution owing to its role in the spread of sexually transmitted infections (Filipović 2014, 145). Similar to other European militaries, the Habsburg military sought to regulate prostitution above all to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted infections in order to maintain troops in fighting condition. Following the occupation of Bosnia-​Herzegovina, the number of prostitutes in the larger cities, especially those where troops were quartered,

294

295

Gendered moral panics in Habsburg Monarchy

increased. Thus, during the 1880s, prostitution regulations were established. Guidelines in Sarajevo, the provincial capital, laid out the rules for medical and police control of commercial sex, as well as the functioning of brothels. Among the requirements was that clients be permitted to inspect registered prostitutes’ health books, which were required to be displayed in a visible spot in their rooms (Kasumović 2018, 45–​46, 48). As many of the authors cited in this chapter and others have shown, no other female working-​ class profession was so well documented as tolerated prostitution. Police reports, court records, and newspapers provide a plethora of information on prostitutes’ lived experiences. They also reflect why prostitution appeared so pervasive. Local police registers incorporated the women’s personal details, including their date and place of birth, parents’ names, level of education (their literacy rate roughly tracked that of the provinces where they were raised), religion, and physical description. Police inspection reports added miscellaneous information on their daily lives, and physicians in service of the police provided health information, sometimes over long periods of time. These police records reveal that women moved in and out of regulated prostitution, sometimes registering and unregistering repeatedly with police. In their local studies of prostitution in Habsburg Central Europe, Baczkowski (2000), Cvelfar (1994), and Schneider (2016) have revealed the widely varying ages of prostitutes—​many were in their twenties, but some were younger, and others were older, sometimes, much older—​and their mobility, showing that while some women registered with police in or near their place of birth, others employed the Monarchy’s expanding railway system to travel to nearby, larger cities, and farther afield, even to neighboring countries and back, sometimes with the help of panderers. In the same way, some of the residents of the Monarchy’s brothels, especially those in larger cities, hailed from outside the Monarchy.

The specter of sex trafficking The specter of “white-​slave” trafficking captured the public imagination in the late Monarchy. Few forms of socially deviant behavior attracted so much attention in the sexually saturated fin de siècle as sex trafficking, with its narrative of the innocent girl taken abroad against her will. “White slavery,” with its clear racist overtones, was part of contemporary discourse on racial degeneration. There were conflicting evaluations of the girls and women who played so central a role in the two panics—​trafficking and venereal disease—​that intersected with turn-​of-​the-​century commercial sex. Abolitionists, politicians, religious leaders, and many members of the public often employed rhetoric that described the prostitute as a debauched, degraded, and sinful female, while some of the press and many reformers portrayed the girl or woman who was trafficked as an abused, helpless, innocent victim. Concerns about the increased movement of women and girls, which reflected greater spatial mobility, including traditional internal and continental migration, as well as more recent trans-​oceanic movement that expanding rail and shipping routes, better roads, and greater anonymity in the growing cities facilitated, helped fuel the panic. Inhabitants of the Habsburg Monarchy were latecomers to trans-​ Atlantic migration, with numbers increasing dramatically between the 1880s and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The traffickers—​male and female—​who allegedly transported “innocent” girls against their will to non-​European, often understood to be less civilized, sometimes colonial, brothels aroused great public interest and indignation in turn-​of-​the-​century Austria-​Hungary. This was in part because their numbers were

295

296

Nancy M. Wingfield

thought to be so great and the problem was so widely publicized. The greater public, including anti-​Semites and some Jews, associated, above all, East European Jewish men, many of whom came from Bukovina and Galicia in the Habsburg East, with global trafficking, largely because they were businessmen who regularly moved across international borders and often spoke several languages (Wingfield 2017, 172–​178, 181–​187). A network of working-​class men and women—​brothel keepers, as well as pimps and panderers, who might also hold any of a number of badly paid jobs as servants, coachmen, day laborers, or waiters—​helped move women at the local and regional level: from town or province to another, and from one brothel to another. Poverty-​stricken parents might encourage their daughters to engage in sexual commerce. Prostitutes moved within Austria and Hungary, and between the two halves of the Monarchy, but this elicited relatively little public outcry. German-​speaking women crossed the Bohemian border from Habsburg Austria to Wilhelmine Germany to engage in sex work; some German women made the trip in the reverse direction, although prostitutes believed that brothels in Germany paid better than those in the Bohemian Lands. Italian prostitutes traveled across the border to work in the brothels of Trieste and Laibach/​Ljubljana, the provincial capital of Carniola. Bijeljina, a town in northeastern Bosnia-​Herzegovina, near the border with Serbia, was a center of trade in girls from across the Monarchy; many of the customers were Serbian brothel owners (Kasumović 2018, 50). The Austrian and Hungarian governments’ response to the trafficking panic was both domestic and international. Members of the government were joined by members of the public, including aristocratic and bourgeois women who participated as officers, fundraisers, and volunteers in organizations that sought to counter trafficking. Female aristocrats sometimes represented the Monarchy at international trafficking congresses beginning in the late 19th century, when Austria and Hungary signed both the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, which came into force on July 18, 1905, and the renegotiated agreement of 1910. In accordance with the provisions of the first agreement, the Austrian Ministry of Interior issued a decree calling for the centralization of police activities connected with trafficking in the Viennese Police Directorate as the Central Office for Surveillance of Trafficking. The Police Directorate issued its own decree in August 1905, delineating the sphere of activity of the central office, which included coordinating with local and provincial police. The largest of the many reform organizations was the voluntary Vienna-​ based Austrian League against the White Slave Trade (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels, or the Liga, founded in 1902), which focused on preventing trafficking and saving women from becoming prostitutes. It had branches in imperial Austrian cities associated with trafficking: Chernowitz, Lemberg, Prague, and Trieste, as well as an agency in Budapest that reported on trafficking in Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and the “Orient.” Liga members worked with members of other local—​both religiously and nationally oriented—​reform organizations in the Monarchy, to rescue young women and girls by providing police with information on possible traffickers and by establishing train-​station missions for females traveling alone. They also alerted police to brothel keepers’ rumored failure to maintain their premises according to regulations; the complaints usually concerned lack of sleeping space for the women employed in the brothels. Finally, the Liga also provided those they “rescued” with “respectable,” if ill-​ paying, jobs and housing, which provided these girls only marginal economic security. At least some of those whom Liga members helped “rescue,” rejected their aid and absconded, much to members’ chagrin. 296

297

Gendered moral panics in Habsburg Monarchy

Anxiety in Austria-​Hungary about migration and the antisemitic press’s obsession with alleged Jewish participation in trafficking added to the panic over trafficking at the turn of the century. Related concerns included antisemitism, Jewish men as protagonists and women as victims, and young women traveling alone as part of mass migration in an urbanizing world. The Austrian and Hungarian governments, and to some extent bourgeois society in general through aid agencies, may well have helped increase this panic via warnings, police work, and diplomatic correspondence.

The panic over venereal disease The European-​wide panic over venereal disease focused on prostitutes as dangerous vectors of contagion, both because these women were considered to be the cause of the disease’s spread and because infected females were still considered to be more contagious than males. The residents of southern Dalmatia referred to syphilis as “women’s evil” (zla od žena) (Gruber and Lipozenčić 2010, 75). The contemporaneous debate over the efficacy of tolerated prostitution stemmed in part from the growing belief in some quarters that regulation did little to staunch the spread of VD. Beginning with the 1973 publications of Walkowitz and Walkowitz on prostitution in Great Britain, scholarship has shown European governments and military authorities working together in garrison towns and naval ports to control prostitution, especially clandestine prostitution, owing to concerns about VD. Certainly, around the turn of the 20th century, because of its preoccupation about high VD rates among the rank and file, the Habsburg military joined civilian officials in their efforts to control regulated prostitutes and limit clandestine prostitution to check the spread of venereal disease. Following the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Habsburg Army High Command aggressively expanded its influence throughout the civilian realm. One of the most important military measures of the war was the organization of healthcare (Forrai 2018, 103). The state increasingly intervened into life on the home front: not only in provisions and waged work, more and more frequently undertaken by women, but also how residents dressed, what they ate, what constituted their leisure, and their sexual interactions. In wartime Austria, the military and the state sought to expand control over women’s bodies under conditions of total war. They sought to increase surveillance of prostitutes and other women who engaged—​or were thought to engage—​in commercial sex in the name of limiting VD. At the same time there were fewer vice police to observe the larger number of women selling sex on the home front.

The afterlife of regulation In matters of sexual morality, Austria-​Hungary’s defeat in World War I did not constitute a decisive break with the past, but rather a juncture in long-​term historical processes. The Central Powers’ loss meant the end of the Habsburg Monarchy, but not of its administrative and juridical apparatus, some of which continued to function well into the interwar era, and even beyond, incorporated into the various successor states’ legal systems. Bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition, so there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution—​or the treatment of prostitutes and alleged prostitutes—​in the so-​called nation-​states created from the defunct multinational Monarchy beginning in late autumn 1918. Most legislation changed regulation only piecemeal in the first chaotic months and years after the war, sometimes as part 297

298

Nancy M. Wingfield

of new laws aimed at combating venereal disease. They incorporated various forms of control, which reflected society’s attitudes about sexuality, particularly female sexuality. Some officials continued to consider tolerated prostitutes a necessary evil. Regulation of prostitution initially remained little changed in many post-​Habsburg regions. Clandestine and regulated prostitution continued to be an option among the female working class in the first postwar years. A Viennese police report from 1920 shows that the percentage of registered prostitutes had increased by 29.6 percent since 1918, reflecting female poverty that owed its existence to wartime (male) casualties, wartime dislocation, and postwar inflation, as well as the loss of empire, all of which damaged working and middle-​class families. Both women who registered with the police or were arrested for clandestine prostitution in the war’s wake included married women as well as skilled workers and women employed in positions requiring specialized training, among them dental assistants and nurses. Austria, Hungary, and their successor states adopted varied solutions to the problem of prostitution after 1918. The responses, which ranged from abolition/​criminalization through regulation to neo-​regulation, owed in part to prewar experiences of the enlarged and reconstituted states to which the lands of the former Monarchy were annexed. They were Italy, Poland, Romania, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (from 1929, Yugoslavia). Successor-​state governments, their militaries, and their police showed similar concerns about prostitutes as the source of venereal disease as had their Habsburg predecessors. This was to some extent the result of continuity in attitudes toward class, gender, and sexuality that had set prostitutes apart as Other in Austria-​Hungary. The successor-​state governments drew upon the Habsburg Monarchy’s wartime experiences in the connections they made among public hygiene, prostitution, venereal disease, and military strength. The military, physicians, and other experts, as well as many laypeople, commonly accepted that the experience of the war had demonstrated that VD was spread primarily through extramarital relations, and prostitutes were still popularly blamed. Across postwar Habsburg Central Europe, the solutions to prostitution were sometimes subsumed under the still-​pressing issue of eradication of venereal disease, because rates that had skyrocketed during wartime did not immediately drop after 1918. The Austrian government promulgated new public-​ administrative, preventative measures regarding venereal disease in a November 21, 1918 decree. The gender-​neutral document required those suffering from venereal disease to take responsibility for their own medical treatment and sexual behavior. While it did not force the closing of Austria’s tolerated brothels, those in Graz and Vienna were shuttered during the 1920s. Others continued to function until the Austrian Constitutional Court finally ruled Paragraph 5.1 of the Vagabond Law unconstitutional in 1973. When the penal code was revised the following year, prostitution was no longer prohibited (Sauer 2004, 43). Prostitution was permitted in Hungary between the wars, with regulation abolished only in 1950. Abolitionists dominated the prostitution debate in the nascent First Czechoslovak Republic, where newly enfranchised women were no longer incipient citizens dependent on male family members. This change was reflected in the passage of Law No. 241, Combating Sexually Transmitted Diseases (O potírání pohlavních nemocí), on July 11, 1922, which Czechoslovak National Socialist female deputies Luisa Landová-​Štychová and Fráňa Zemínová shepherded through Parliament. The law abolished regulation, closed the country’s brothels, and punished prostitution only when it caused “public scandal.” Continuing practices developed in late imperial Austria, the law criminalized

298

299

Gendered moral panics in Habsburg Monarchy

endangering the health of others by both men and women through the spreading of venereal disease, but, as in rump Austria, employed gender-​neutral language. The law sought to ameliorate the more egregious medical practices vis-​à-​vis tolerated prostitutes in the Monarchy, but some postwar medical examinations of prostitutes appear to have been just as invasive.

Conclusions The way that the two moral panics so closely associated with prostitution in the late Monarchy—​trafficking in women and venereal disease—​were treated between the wars was often quite different. Austria-​Hungary’s borders had been watched even before 1914, and civilian trans-​oceanic travel had virtually ceased among the belligerents during the war years. The issue of trafficking in women, which had received little attention during wartime, reemerged. It was reexamined and re-​named (“women and children”) in the changed sociopolitical conditions of the interwar period. Recent scholarship on trafficking in CEE analyzes it in the context of European-​wide migration between 1880 and 1914: the movement of single women was internal, seasonal, transcontinental, and trans-​oceanic (Stauter-​Halsted 2017, 164–​187). The public attention to prostitution and venereal disease that had begun in the late decades of the 19th century continued in many of the Habsburg successor states—​anxiety about public hygiene, trafficking, public morals—​yet with a modern inflection. Middle-​ class, often female, social reformers and abolitionists had far more political power in the interwar “democracies,” where women often obtained the franchise they had lacked in Austria-​Hungary, with some even serving in parliament, and were able to accomplish change they could only hope for in the last decades before 1914. The scientific turn in understanding race and nation infected professional thinking about the regulation of commercial sex and the kind of women who engaged in it. The prostitute could be both a racial and a sexual outlier as those who carried sexually transmitted infections were increasingly potential enemies of the state in the racially saturated sexual politics of the interwar era, in CEE and beyond the region.

Note 1 The lands of imperial Austria, those represented in its parliament, were roughly the territory west of the Leitha River, the historical border between Austria and Hungary, as well as the provinces of Bukovina and Galicia. The Kingdom of Hungary included Croatia, which from 1868 had limited cultural and administrative autonomy.

References Baczkowski, Michał. 2000. “Prostytucja w Krakowie na przełomie XIX i XX w.” [“Prostitution in Cracow at the Turn of the Nineteenth-​and Twentieth-​Centuries.”] Studia Historyczne 43 (4): 593–​607. Critcher, Chas. 2009. “Widening the Focus: Moral Panics as Moral Regulation.” The British Journal of Criminology 49 (1) Moral Panics—​36 Years On (January): 17–​34. Cvelfar, Bojan. 1994. “‘Ko prostitutko jeden zapusti, gre že drugi moški skozi vežna vrata’: ureditev prostitucije in življenje v javni hiši v Ljubljani na začetku 20. stoletja.” [“When One Man Leaves a Prostitute, Another Comes in the Door: Life in a Ljubljana Brothel at the Beginning of the 20th Century.”] Kronika 42 (3): 25–​41.

299

300

Nancy M. Wingfield Filipović, Sergej. 2014. “Reguliranje prostitucije u Osijeku na prijelazu iz 19.u 20. stoljeć: Pravilnik o uređenju i nadziranju prostitucije iz 1896. i Pravilnik za Bludilišta iz 1911.” [“The Regulation of Prostitution in Osijek at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries: The 1896 Ordinance on the Regulation and Supervision of Prostitution and the 1911 Ordinance on Fornication.”] Scrinia Slavonica 14 (1): 141–​158. Forrai, Judit. 2018.“Militarizált szex: katonák, prostitúció, nemi betegségek a Nagy Háborúban.” [“Militarized Sex: Soldiers, Prostitution, STIs during Great War.”] Per Aspera Ad Astra 2 (1): 93–​114. Gruber, Franjo and Jasna Lipozenčić. 2010.“Syphilis and Scherlievo in Dalmatia.” Acta Dermatovenerol 18 (4): 234–​242. Kasumović, Amila. 2018. “Povijest marginalnih i ‘neuspješnih’: Zašto nam je potrebna?” [“History of the Marginal and the “Failed”: Why Do We Need It?”] Na margini povijest 5 (1): 31–​64. Prokopovych, Markian. 2017.“Prostitution in Budapest in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century.” In Trafficking in Women 1924–​1926. The Paul Kinsie Reports for the League of Nations, edited by Jean-​Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodríguez García, and Paul Servais, 38–​ 43. Geneva: United Nations. Sauer, Birgit. 2004. “Taxes, Rights and Regimentation: Discourses on Prostitution in Austria.” In The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Globalisation of Sex Commerce, edited by Joyce Outshoorn, 41–​61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Erik Holmes. 2016. Zois in Nighttown: Prostitution and Syphilis in the Trieste of James Joyce and Italo Svevo: 1880–​1920. London: Ashgrove Publishers. Stauter-​Halsted, Keely. 2017. “Sex at the Border: Trafficking as a Migration Problem in Partitioned Poland.” Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia, edited by Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny, 164–​187. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Walkowitz, Daniel, and Judith Walkowitz. 1973. “‘We Are Not Beasts of the Field’: Prostitution and the Poor in Plymouth and Southampton under the Contagious Diseases Act.” Feminist Studies 1/​3–​4, Special Double Issue: Women’s History (Winter–​Spring): 73–​106. Weeks, Jeffrey. 1981. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman Group Ltd. Wingfield, Nancy M. 2017. The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

300

301

Independence

302

303

29 THE PROMISE OF GENDER EQUALITY IN INTERWAR CENTRAL-​E ASTERN EUROPE Melissa Feinberg

The end of World War I seemed to herald a new era of gender equality in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE). The war’s aftermath marked the end of the German and Habsburg Empires. Germany was transformed into a republic, while Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland became independent nation-​states. All five of these states had a parliamentary system of government and each ostensibly accepted the liberal ideals of legal and political equality for all citizens. For the first time, women in CEE would be allowed to vote on roughly the same terms as men. However, granting women the right to vote did not automatically make them fully equal citizens. Gender difference continued to be salient in many areas of the law, particularly within marriage. There were vigorous debates in all of the CEE countries over issues of legal gender equality. Some feminists hoped that the new governments of CEE would change their laws so that gender would no longer determine a citizen’s rights. This feminist conception of citizenship, which demanded that laws treat men and women equally, was quite controversial. Many Central-​Eastern Europeans believed instead that their governments should support socially accepted notions of gender difference, granting rights to men and women on the basis of their gendered roles within the traditional family. This chapter examines how debates between CEE women’s activists and their opponents evolved throughout the interwar period, showing how these issues became tied to the rise of the authoritarian right. Attitudes toward gender and citizenship in interwar CEE were inextricably tied to assumptions about national identity and its relationship to the state. The dissolution of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 paved the way for the triumph of the idea of the nation-​state in European politics. In the minds of their creators, Habsburg successor states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were intended to serve the interests of one particular national group, although in reality they had ethnically diverse populations just like the Monarchy they replaced (Judson 2016). In Hungary, Germany, and Austria, nationalists similarly conceived of a symbiotic relationship between the nation and the state. The belief that the state was subordinate to the needs of the national community created a tension with the requirements of democratic citizenship. Was the state’s priority 303

304

Melissa Feinberg

to protect the rights and freedoms of individual citizens or to protect the well-​being of the nation? The debate over this question would shape women’s experience of democratic government in interwar CEE.

Women in politics in interwar Central-​Eastern Europe As the countries of CEE prepared for their first postwar elections, women’s activists across the region were full of hopeful optimism, believing that once women had gained the right to vote, full equality would soon follow. One Czech woman wrote in 1919 that suffrage seemed to have magically erased men’s former prejudices about women, making it impossible for anyone to say to a woman: “ ‘you’re not allowed to do that,’ ‘don’t involve yourself in that,’ ‘be quiet now,’ ‘you are a woman and your intellect is less worthy,’ ‘your brain is smaller,’ ‘you can’t understand science’ … and so on” (Feinberg 2002, 555). Yet within only a few years, many felt this optimism had been misplaced. The largely male leaders of each country’s political parties courted women’s votes but resisted allowing women a share of their power. Although a few activists attempted to form special women’s parties or candidate lists, these experiments garnered little support. In the Polish elections of 1919, a separate women’s list garnered only 51 votes (Kuźma-​Markowska 2011, 280). An attempt by Austrian liberal women to create a separate women’s party, the Frauenpartei [Women’s Party], was only marginally more successful (Bader-​Zaar 1996, 81–​83). Rather than uniting around shared interests, women spread their votes across the political spectrum. Parties on the left, like Social Democratic and Communist Parties, were more supportive of policies that promoted gender equality, but Central-​Eastern European women voted in greater numbers for Catholic or conservative parties who appealed to them on the basis of their gendered roles as wives and mothers. While they competed for women’s votes, all of these parties were slow to accommodate women in the ranks of their leadership. Only small numbers of women were elected as parliamentary delegates throughout the interwar period. In 1919, 9.6 percent of those elected to the German National Assembly were women; this was the highest percentage in Europe at the time, but it also marked the high point of women’s representation in interwar Germany (Sneeringer 2002, 10). In contrast, only 1.6 percent of the delegates to the first Polish parliament were women (Kuźma-​Markowska 2011, 280). The experience of Róza Schwimmer in Hungary illustrates the difficulties women faced when they tried to infiltrate the corridors of power. Schwimmer was one of the founders of the Hungarian Feminist Association and had been a prominent figure in international women’s activism before World War I. Due to her international connections, the prime minister of the short-​lived liberal Hungarian republic, Mihály Károlyi, appointed Schwimmer as ambassador to Switzerland, hoping she would help to represent Hungarian interests with the Allies. The world, however, proved not to be ready for a feminist woman as ambassador. Her appointment was denounced by the French foreign minister as a “perfidious act,” the Swiss government would not recognize her, and even the Hungarian embassy staff rebelled against her presence. Schwimmer was forced to resign. After the establishment of the rightist Horthy regime in Hungary, Schwimmer fled to the USA, where she found herself accused of being alternately a German spy, a Bolshevik agent, and a member of an international Jewish conspiracy (Szapor 2018; Zimmermann and Major 2006).

304

305

Gender equality in interwar CEE

In the Czechoslovak Republic, Františka Plamínková had a more successful political career. Like Schwimmer, Plamínková had been involved in prewar suffrage activism and participated in the international women’s movement. Like many women’s activists at the time, Plamínková initially believed that achieving suffrage had ended the need for women to organize on the basis of gender. She became active in the Czech National Socialist Party (a left-​oriented nationalist party that had no connection with the German Nazi Party) and in 1925 was elected to the Czechoslovak Senate, a position she would hold until the Nazi occupation of the country in 1939. The Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920 had included a commitment to equality between the sexes and Plamínková made it her mission to see that her government worked to realize this vision. However, she quickly realized that the established parties were not very responsive to women’s concerns, particularly when it came to defending principles of equality. Left to their own devices, male politicians constantly tried to chip away at the advances women had gained at the time of independence, particularly attacking their access to the labor market on equal terms with their male colleagues. In 1923, Plamínková created an organization designed to bring Czechoslovak women from different political parties together in defense of common interests: the Women’s National Council [Ženská Národní Rada]. Plamínková said of herself, “I am simply an active person, a seeing person, a feeling person—​the things were in the air. And because I am a thorough and responsible person, I could not rail on about them and then run away like many people, but I held on and tried to carry them through to the end” (Feinberg 2006, 26). Plamínková and the ŽNR did have some success during the 1920s and 1930s, but much of their work was undone when the Czechoslovak government turned to the Right after the Munich agreement in 1938. In 1942, Plamínková was arrested and executed during the terror that followed the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS officer installed as the leader of the Nazi-​occupied Czech lands (Musilová 2007).

The meaning of citizenship: Equality, difference, nation Liberal, progressive, and social democratic women’s activists like Františka Plamínková and Róza Schwimmer emphasized the responsibility of republican governments to protect individual rights and freedoms. Their priority was ensuring that women and men had the same legal rights and the same opportunities to flourish. While most believed in the salience of gender difference, they nonetheless promoted equality as a social and political ideal. In contrast, women and men on the right side of the political spectrum claimed that the needs of collectives, such as the family and the nation, should sometimes take priority over an individual’s right to freedom. Rather than defending women’s rights as voters, workers, or students, they emphasized their gendered responsibilities as wives and mothers. In other words, they wanted their governments to defend the traditional gender order and to treat citizens as gendered beings rather than as genderless individuals. This clash of perspectives informed debates over state policies and women’s experience of citizenship in the interwar era across the Central-​Eastern European region. One flashpoint was women’s access to the labor market, particularly in white-​collar administrative and civil service jobs. Before World War I, few women were employed in such jobs. Those few were primarily employed as teachers (considered civil servants in CEE), and they were required to resign upon marriage. The exigencies of the war propelled more women into white-​collar work. In the same postwar revolutionary moment

305

306

Melissa Feinberg

that produced universal suffrage, women across the region gained more access to universities, and policies that mandated married women resign from civil service jobs were repealed. As a result of these changes, the numbers of women in the white-​collar sector increased. Even though a substantial majority of these jobs were still held by men, the female white-​collar worker became a symbol of gender upheaval. Married women employed in the civil service—​referred to as “double-​earners” if their husbands were also employed—​were particularly controversial. Many argued that stable civil service jobs should be reserved for men, so that they could fulfill their natural roles as providers for their families. In times of economic crisis, attacking married female civil servants (even if their tiny numbers meant that they were economically insignificant) proved to be a popular political tactic. In Germany, these “double-​earners” faced possible dismissal already in 1922, as part of a package of measures passed to deal with the immediate postwar economic crisis. Women’s state employment would continue to be a contentious issue in Germany until 1934, when the Nazi regime fired all women in the civil service (Sneeringer 2002, 70–​73, 132–​173). Similar attempts to revive restrictions on married women’s employment occurred all around the region. Those who called for removing married women from state employment argued that any right that women had to work was secondary to the state’s responsibility to protect the family. The nation’s health, they claimed, was dependent on the ability of men and women to fulfill their gendered roles as mothers and fathers. During the economic upheaval of the Depression, many blamed so-​called double-​earners for all of their country’s ills. One conservative Czech commentator wrote in 1935 that married women who continued to work in office jobs were responsible for unemployment among educated men. These “demoralized” women, he charged, were not only selfish, they were bad mothers who had abandoned their children to the care of strangers (Feinberg 2007, 59). Married women who wanted to keep their jobs were forced to weather these attacks. A married Czech teacher and union activist, Mrs. Zabranová, wrote that she was exhausted from the fight. As she told her union colleagues, “the envy of these people is so great, that there is nothing they don’t abhor. I wrote this several times to the editors of [two newspapers of a more conservative bent] in the matter of working women. Now I see that it is a waste of time” (Feinberg 2006, 124). Similar issues bedeviled feminist attempts to make the region’s family and marriage laws more egalitarian. The newly independent states of CEE had inherited their civil law codes from previous regimes. All of these sets of laws made legal distinctions between husbands and wives, granting husbands significant powers over their family members. Liberal and progressive women’s activists campaigned for new laws that would allow spouses to exist as independent legal persons with equal rights over their children. While limited changes—​such as the legalization of divorce and civil marriage in Czechoslovakia in 1919 or a reform of alimony law in Austria—​did occur in some countries, no country would complete a major overhaul of its family and marriage laws until after 1945. In Poland, for example, a 1921 law amended the old Russian statutes in the former Congress Poland (the part of Poland that had belonged to the Russian Empire) to allow wives the right to administer their own property and represent themselves in court. Yet the larger project to codify a single set of modernized civil laws for the newly united Poland was never completed (Kraft 2004). A similar commission to create a new civil law code for the Czechoslovak Republic also failed to produce a result (Feinberg 2006, 41–​71). 306

307

Gender equality in interwar CEE

The most vehement resistance to more egalitarian family and marriage laws came from nationalist and Catholic women. These women were deeply invested in maintaining the boundaries of gender difference within the family. For them, the roles of wife and mother not only best suited women’s essential nature, they were crucial tasks that only women could perform for the nation. In Poland, women’s place in the nation was bound up with the ideal of the Polish Mother (Matka Polska). While the image of the Polish Mother allowed women to claim membership in the Polish nation, it also suggested that women were not important to that nation as individuals, but through their roles as mothers and nurturers (Kałwa 2003). For Polish nationalist women, proposals to revise family and marriage laws in ways that de-​emphasized gender difference went against the national interest; they saw them as the work of what they claimed were anti-​national socialist and Jewish elements (Kraft 2004). One consequence of this unresolved debate over how to legally conceptualize marriage was the phenomenon of stateless women. Before 1918, it was universally recognized that a married woman’s citizenship would follow her husband’s: if a woman married a foreigner or if her husband became naturalized elsewhere, she automatically lost citizenship in her own country and acquired his. In the 1920s, some countries began to change their laws to allow women to retain their own citizenship after marriage. One corollary of these new laws was that the wives of foreigners or newly naturalized men no longer automatically received citizenship in their husband’s country. This created the potential for a clash with those countries that had not changed their laws, which initially included all of CEE. After 1922, when the USA altered its citizenship laws, CEE women who married Americans, or whose husbands became US citizens, became stateless: their own countries no longer recognized them, but neither did the USA. Without legal citizenship, these women could no longer legally work, receive welfare assistance, or even travel. While most countries around the world passed legislation to remedy this problem of female statelessness, the countries of CEE were reluctant to do so. As late as 1939, Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia still automatically revoked the citizenship of women who either married non-​citizens or whose husbands left the nation. Another issue that deeply divided women was abortion. Social democratic and communist women in CEE advocated the de-​criminalization of abortion, as well as improved access to contraception. Yet Catholic women, and even some who identified as liberal or progressive, were deeply opposed to making abortion legal. In Czechoslovakia, the issue was so divisive that the Women’s National Council, which tried to bring together women from the center and left, refused to take a public stand on the matter. The campaign to legalize abortion was particularly vocal in Germany. In 1931, it became a mass movement, fueled by women’s anger and frustration in a moment of economic crisis. Tens of thousands of women attended rallies and demonstrations and wrote letters to newspapers. Their sentiments were echoed by Dr. Elsa Kienle, whose arrest for performing illegal abortions helped to spark the campaign. Kienle wrote in her prison diary, “Of what use is suffrage to woman if she is still to remain a helpless baby machine?” Notably, as in Czechoslovakia, the mainstream of the German feminist movement stood aside from the abortion issue and refused to get involved. While it was briefly able to bring together women who had not otherwise been active politically, the campaign to repeal Paragraph 218 (the part of the German Criminal Code that criminalized abortion) ultimately foundered on the inability of the German Communist and Social Democratic Parties to cooperate. Women’s interests were not enough to transcend the limits of male-​ dominated partisan politics (Grossmann 1978, quote on 130). 307

308

Melissa Feinberg

The appeal of the nationalist right In 1918, democratic revolutions opened up the possibility for greater gender equality in CEE. Yet by the 1930s, all of the countries of the region except for Czechoslovakia had drifted toward authoritarian forms of governance. These virulently nationalist and anti-​ democratic regimes disdained liberal notions of legal equality between men and women in favor of promoting the traditional heterosexual family. Many women, like many men, supported these trends. Some had never been enthusiastic about democratic government; others were disillusioned with partisan politics. In Austria, for example, not only the Catholic women’s movement but also the liberal Frauenpartei supported the authoritarian regime established by Engelbert Dolfuß in 1933–​1934 seeing it as, at the very least, no worse than other alternatives (Bader-​Zaar 1996, 83–​84). The Hungarian Cécile Tormay was one of those who had never wanted democracy. A novelist, Tormay shot to fame in 1920 with the publication of An Outlaw’s Diary, a book that recorded her reaction to the 1918 liberal revolution of Mihály Károlyi and the short-​lived Bolshevik regime that followed it. Viciously antisemitic and proudly anti-​ liberal, An Outlaw’s Diary depicted Jews and socialists as the enemies of the Hungarian nation. During the interwar period, Tormay was the president of the National Alliance of Hungarian Women (MANSZ). Although Tormay herself was an active public figure who never married (and was even caught up in a scandal involving an alleged lesbian relationship with another leader of MANSZ), MANSZ worked to protect the patriarchal family and advocated motherhood as the most important task for Hungarian women (Kurimay 2016). Tormay condemned feminism as a Jewish ideology foreign to true Hungarians, telling the Debrecen branch of MANSZ in 1921, “the duty of the Hungarian woman is the raising of the new, nation-​building generation” (Szapor 2018, 136). Tormay’s traditional model of gender relations aligned perfectly with the politics of Miklós Horthy’s illiberal authoritarian regime, serving as one of its crucial supports. While many women in CEE enthusiastically supported illiberal and fascist alternatives to democracy, some would find that giving up democratic government for the supposed stability of an authoritarian regime left them with little recourse should that regime go against their interests. Like Cécile Tormay, the German Guida Diehl rejected egalitarian feminism in favor of separate spheres for men and women. In the 1920s, Diehl became attracted to the Nazi Party. She imagined that a Nazi victory would provide the opportunity for women to realize their feminine roles in society. Women, she thought, should be excluded from the workplace so that they could concentrate on the domestic realm. “Every woman deserves her home!” she declared. In Diehl’s ideal Nazi state, women whose husbands could not support them would receive state subsidies to remain at home. Instead of universal suffrage, Diehl envisioned separate male and female legislatures. The “woman’s chamber” would take charge of concerns like social welfare, healthcare, education, and morality. However, when the Nazi Party did take power in 1933, male leaders did not adopt any of her ideas. While they did support women’s return to the home (until they needed their labor during the war), Nazi men did not want women to take charge of policy in any form. Diehl found herself abruptly sidelined (Koonz 1987, 80–​84, 169). Because the Nazi government allowed women little say in creating policies that affected their lives, some historians have argued that German women were primarily the victims of a male-​dominated system (Bock 1986). Other historians, however, have emphasized women’s agency, showing how some women avidly worked to perpetuate the Nazi state (Harvey 2003; Koonz 1987). 308

309

Gender equality in interwar CEE

Marie Tumlířová was a successful agronomist, a member of the Czechoslovak National Assembly for the conservative Agrarian party and the president of the Czechoslovak Association of University Women. Tumlířová, like other prominent women in her party, had cooperated with Czech liberal and socialist feminists on issues like equal pay and women’s access to higher education. But as Czechoslovakia moved away from democracy after the Munich Agreement of 1938, Tumlířová began to think that national rejuvenation required promoting distinct gender ideals for men and women. She founded a new organization, the Women’s Center, to help shape women’s role in the new semi-​ authoritarian Czechoslovakia. Tumlířová and those who worked with her did not advocate motherhood as a woman’s sole role for the nation, but they did believe that women needed to be true to their gendered natures. As they wrote, “women and men are two different beings and must follow two different paths to the same goal … the protection of national self-​determination.” Tumlířová wanted women to be active in public life, but in ways that followed from their femininity and did not compete with men. Yet, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Germany in March 1939, male Czech leaders pushed to exclude women from the public life of the nation, arguing that politics was too dangerous for women in such times. In the new environment, there was no opportunity for public protest (Feinberg 2006, 168–​181). In 1918, at the end of World War I, Central-​Eastern Europeans were optimistic that democracy would usher in a new and better era. Feminists in particular imagined that women’s liberation had finally been achieved. By 1939, that hope was gone. A newly authoritarian and fascist Europe teetered on the brink of another major war. Harkening back to that earlier moment, the progressive Czech author Milena Jesenská wrote in 1938, “There was a time when people spoke of women’s emancipation, about the equality of women and fighters for women’s rights. But those times are long gone” (Jesenská 1997, 134).

Conclusions As Jesenská’s words suggest, the case of interwar CEE belies any notion of linear progress. After World War I, CEE women’s activists believed that democratic government would inevitably lead to greater legal equality for men and women. Instead, the association of democracy with women’s rights helped create support for anti-​democratic forces. Women who challenged the boundaries of traditional femininity faced resistance whenever they encroached on what were seen as men’s natural roles, whether in politics, in the workplace or in the family. By the end of the 1930s, many Central-​Eastern Europeans (women as well as men) supported authoritarian or fascist movements that openly portrayed gender equality as a threat to the nation. The postwar promise of gender equality was replaced by the promise of a stable family and a healthy nation. Since the French Revolution, people around the world have been inspired by the radical potential embedded in democratic ideals. Concepts like universal rights and equality under the law have allowed many groups of people—​including slaves, women, the working class, and national or racial minorities—​to envision futures in which they would become full members in the polity. But while democratic ideology allows different groups to imagine radical change and provides them with a vocabulary to frame their demands, it does not guarantee success. The existence of democratic institutions and legal norms gave women’s activists in interwar CEE the tools to argue for gender equality, but this was not enough to create the larger social consensus that might have made their dreams a reality. 309

310

Melissa Feinberg

References Bader-​Zaar, Birgitta. 1996. “Women in Austrian Politics, 1890–​1934.” In Austrian Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, 59–​90. New York: Berghahn Books. Bock, Gisela. 1986. Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik [Forced Sterilization under National Socialism. Studies on Racial Politics and Women’s Politics]. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Feinberg, Melissa. 2002. “Democracy and Its Limits: Gender and Rights in the Czech Lands, 1918–​ 1938.” Nationalities Papers 30 (4): 553–​570. –​–​–​–​. 2006. Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. –​–​–​–​. 2007. “The New Woman Question: Gender, Nation and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak Republic.” In Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe 1918–​1948, edited by Mark Cornwall and R. J. W. Evans, 45–​61. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grossmann, Atina. 1978. “Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign against §218 in Germany.” New German Critique 14 (Spring): 119–​137. Harvey, Elizabeth. 2003. Women in the Nazi East. Agents and Witnesses of Germanization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jesenská, Milena. 1997. Nad Naše Síly [Beyond Our Strength]. Olomouc: Votobia. Judson, Pieter. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kałwa, Dobrochna. 2003. “Poland.” In Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​1945, edited by Kevin Passmore, 148–​167. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Koonz, Claudia. 1987. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s. Kraft, Claudia. 2004. “Das Eherecht in der Zweiten Polnischen Republik (1918–​1939) und das gescheiterte Ideal gleichberechtigter Staatsbürger.” [“Marriage Law in the Second Polish Republic (1918–​1939) and the Failed Ideal of the Equal Citizen.”] In Zwischen Kriegen: Nationen, Nationalismen und Geschlechterverhältnisse in Mittel-​und Osteuropa 1918–​ 1939, edited by Johanna Gehmacher, Elizabeth Harvey, and Sophia Kemlein, 63–​82. Fibre: Osnabrück. Kurimay, Anita. 2016. “Interrogating the Historical Revisionism of the Hungarian Right: The Queer Case of Cécile Tormay.” East European Politics and Societies 30 (1): 10–​33. Kuźma-​Markowska, Sylwia. 2011. “Soldiers, Members of Parliament, Social Activists: The Polish Women’s Movement after World War One.” In Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–​1923, edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, 265–​286. Leiden: Brill. Musilová, Dana. 2007. Z ženského pohledu. Poslankyně a senátorky Národního shromáždění Československé republiky 1918–​ 1939 [From a Female Perspective. Female Parliamentary Representatives and Senators in the National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Republic 1918–​1939]. České Budějovice: Veduta. Sneeringer, Julia. 2002. Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Szapor, Judith. 2018. Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War. London: Bloomsbury. Zimmermann, Susan and Borbala Major. 2006. “Róza Schwimmer.” In A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, edited by Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, 484–​ 490. Budapest: Central European University Press.

310

311

Nazism, Stalinism, and war

312

313

30 SEXUALITY IN THE HOLOCAUST Anna Hájková

Sexuality offers a particularly informative perspective for understanding the complex situation, the coping strategies, and leeway of Holocaust victims in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). Sexuality can carry multiple functions: comfort, pleasure, bonding, expression of status, a resource, or dehumanization. Addressing the history of sexuality in the Holocaust in CEE&E allows us to recognize different levels of interactions between participants. It shows how the perpetrators perceived the region: the further east they were, the more they understood the area as periphery where they could behave as they wanted. For German soldiers, spoils of war often included rape of local women; in this respect, the eastern front was very different from the western. Finally, focus on sexuality among Holocaust victims shows them as individuals in a society, for whom sexuality could be a form of agency (Heineman 2002; Herzog 2009). Historians, most of them men, have been slow in addressing sexuality in the Holocaust, in part due to long-​standing resistance to the category of gender in Holocaust studies. Some scholars maintained that gender was irrelevant in the gas chambers, while others considered a feminist line of inquiry ethically wrong (Langer 1998; see also discussion in Waxman 2016). Scholarship tends to view sexuality in the Holocaust through a binary of romantic love versus sexual violence. This limiting perspective is unfortunate because it omits the middle and largest area where sexuality in the Holocaust played out: sexual barter, neglecting women’s agency (Kaplan 2019; Röger 2015).

Pleasure and love Victims, both during and after the war, stressed how crucial it was for them to stay together with their families. Who constituted family changed when people fell in love and chose a partner: as children became adults, their primary connection was to their spouse, not to their parents. During deportations, people sometimes had to decide who to join, either parents or partner. For many people, love and desire were motors keeping them alive. The 23-​year-​old Susanne Fall from Ostrava (Czechoslovakia) recalled how in the transit ghetto Theresienstadt (Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia), she fell in love and became physically intimate with her boyfriend: “The day passes quickly, I happily expect

313

314

Anna Hájková

the evening, and using various excuses I often disappear from my job and steal half an hour of joy and love” (Fall 2015, 34f). The Holocaust intensified dependencies present in most societies, meaning that Holocaust historians thinking about love, choice, and agency face a complex situation. Rescuers aiding Jews sometimes fell in love with those who depended on them or were motivated in their decision to help by romantic interest that predated the Holocaust. Sometimes Jewish men and women shared (or believed they shared) the feelings of their rescuers, sometimes the Jews in hiding were aware they were not in love with their non-​ Jewish rescuers, but followed suit because they saw the relationship as the most promising route to survival. If they did survive, some of the couples married after the war (usually the tendency in Central and Western Europe, where most Jews were assimilated), while others went their separate ways (more often in Eastern Europe, where most Jews were Orthodox and intermarriage numbers low). (Aleksiun 2021; Gusarov 2020; Horowitz 2020). Whose perspective should we pay attention to, and whose is more important for feminist analysis? The answer is all, but there is a crucial ethical component in finding, and listening, to the voice of the weaker party. One such perspective that complicates our understanding of sexual barter, pleasure, and agency is the diary of Molly Applebaum, a Polish Jewish teenager who went into hiding with her cousin, Helen, on a farm near Dąbrowa Tarnowska. Both girls had sex with the 40-​year-​old farmer who sheltered them. In her 2018 oral history interview, Applebaum describes the physical intimacy as something the girls wanted, rather than a price for shelter: they found it pleasurable, it was a tool against the monotony and boredom of hiding, and the girls possibly imagined it strengthened the bond between them and the rescuer, while also reflecting the power hierarchy and dependency (Applebaum 2017, 25; Applebaum 2018). The girls wrote notes to their rescuer: “ ‘If you want to, come over for a while in the evening, because I am lonely and sad.’ And he did. And there was some [sex]. And her [Helen’s] heart became stronger right away because she needed it as medicine.” Rather than focusing on the dependency and the youth of both girls, Timm (2017, 358) suggests we “must therefore recognize the complexity of the sexual relationship by acknowledging both its coercive and its redemptive elements.”

Sexual and sexualized violence Sexual violence in the Holocaust soon after the war became a topic of fascination to a general audience. From Ka-​Tzetnik’s House of Dolls (1953) to the Pawnbroker (1963), sexual violence offered titillating portrayals of the genocide, engendering a lasting notion that while Jewish men were murdered, many Jewish women were raped before their murder (Bartov 1997; Timm 2018). At the same time, many historians believed that “racial defilement law” (intimate relations between a Jew and a German) made sexual violence rare (Mühlhäuser 2010, 21; Przyrembel 2003). These assumptions contributed to reservations among Holocaust scholars against the usefulness of inquiry into gender in general, and sexuality and sexual violence in particular (Langer 1998). Examination of both topics was made possible by second-​wave feminism (Herzog 2009). Feminist scholars such as Ringelheim (1998), Angrick (2003), Mühlhäuser (2010), Bergen (2006), and Waxman (2016) show that rape was frequent: soldiers in the German Army assaulted Jewish women, the SS killing squads picked women during mass executions to gang rape and then shoot, commanders in concentration camps raped women prisoners in broad daylight. 314

315

Sexuality in the Holocaust

One of the functions of sexual violence was to dehumanize the victims and communicate absolute power. Brownmiller’s (1975) argument that rape is about power rather than lust is useful to make sense of sexual violence against Jewish women. Rape served as a means of control, or spectacle, a bonding mechanism, and a wedge among the besieged people in various forms. While the Nuremberg laws of 1935 categorized “racial defilement” as a crime, lived experience on the eastern front shows these prohibitions did not always hold; sexual violence often took forms other than penile penetration, such as sexual torture. Wehrmacht soldiers arranged “rape joke” photographs, staging the assault of an unconscious or dead body as collective fun (Mailänder 2017). And, as Mühlhäuser (2010) pointed out, the further in the eastern front, and the later in the war, the less often were sexual crimes against Jewish women prosecuted. The concentration camps and ghettos were sites of sexual violence, by Germans, gentile bystanders, and fellow prisoners. The German commandant of the Starachowice (Poland) labor camp, Walter Kolditz, raped a married young woman he was “obsessed with” (Browning 2010). The assault took place in his office, with a window open to the roll call, for everyone, including the victim’s husband, to witness. This sexual assault ascertained the commandant’s absolute power over all the prisoners. In occupied Poland, where thousands of Jews tried to survive in hiding, so-​called blackmailers specialized in finding them and blackmailing them into giving up their belongings; sometimes forcing women to have sex. Susan, a 20-​year-​old Viennese immigrant to Czechoslovakia, was deported first to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz in January 1943, where she became a prisoner typist. She was approached by a prisoner who offered her food; they met, and he “grabbed and raped her,” and then gave her the food. This story is particularly telling, as Susan, who openly spoke about sexual barter in Theresienstadt, described this episode as rape (Cernyak-​Spatz 2005; Ringelheim 1998). In 1942, SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler started establishing brothels in men’s concentration camps to boost the productivity of non-​Jewish prisoners (Anderson Hughes 2011; Sommer 2009) Only certain gentile national groups were allowed to visit, largely prisoner functionaries. The forced sex workers came from Ravensbrück and Auschwitz-​Birkenau concentration camps; some were recruited with the promise of release, usually those who worked in difficult labor commando units. The SS falsely promised to release the women from the concentration camp after six months. Others were selected by force. The selected women were usually young German women, all of them non-​Jews, some of them former sex workers, others were “asocial” and “criminal” prisoners. The conditions in the camp brothel were misleadingly civilian—​the forced sex workers had access to decent food, warm clothes, their own beds, and did not have to do any other arduous physical labor in factories or outside. However, they had no choice over their clients, who came assembly-​line style, 15 minutes each, in the evening; after each client, the women had to do a douche with lactic acid; moreover, the women were made to undergo regular pap smears and if they fell pregnant, were forced to abort. It was not possible to leave. More often than overt sexual violence, women in concentration camps experienced sexualized violence that could be also traumatizing: enforced nudity, gynecological exams, abortions, no sanitary provisions for menstruating women, little possibility of hygiene, no underwear, and mass toilets without toilet paper (Amesberger, Auer, and Halbmayr 2004). During processing into concentration camps, prisoners had to undress and take showers, and then had their heads, armpits, and pubic hair shorn by fellow prisoners. Many (but not all) women experienced forced nudity as a dehumanizing shock; 315

316

Anna Hájková

for family members, especially Orthodox Jews, it was unsettling to see each other naked (Baumel Tydor 1998). Sometimes the SS attended and made lewd remarks about the naked women. Women were disconsolate about having shaved heads: they stressed, in contemporary sources and later testimonies, that without their long hair, they lost a key component of their identity as women. Women compensated by organizing headscarves, makeshift lipstick, or tailoring their uniforms. The seemingly genderless inmate society recreated gender markers; for some, even sexual violence by perpetrators served as a marker of womanliness. As Flaschka (2010) shows, in the mass of sexless prisoners, women who became victims of sexual assault could be perceived by fellow prisoners as more feminine and beautiful. The conditions of incarceration and starvation also caused many women to stop menstruating. While some women expressed relief that they did not have to deal with bleeding in the unhygienic surrounding, others worried that they were made sterile and had lost their main purpose in life. Those women who had their periods sometimes created period sisterhoods, envied by those with amenorrhea (Owusu 2019).

Sexual barter The work of historians of prostitution, which recognizes prostitution as labor, has not been integrated into Holocaust history. Holocaust historians tend to interpret prostitution as sexual violence (Kaplan 2019; Mühlhäuser 2010; Röger 2015). Prostitution and coerced relationships in the Holocaust make historians so uncomfortable because they raise issues of agency, and question whether these were genuine choices for surviving in what we may interpret as undignified ways (Kaplan 2019). Yet it is in this area between romantic and violent sexuality where most of the expressions of sexuality during the Holocaust played out. Sexual barter and rational relationships had elements of sexual violence; however, they were not rape. The above example of Susan’s rape in Auschwitz is instrumental: what she experienced as rape (she did not have a choice) was probably understood by her rapist as barter (he brought her food, which she took). His perspective does not make it any less of rape, but it does cast light on the fluidity of violence. Had Susan met the man again, knowing ahead of time what the encounter entailed (and some victims in her situation did), and making a choice to engage, the position would have moved from rape to violent sexual barter in her perspective as well. The forced sex workers in the camp brothels used their limited leeway: they made “boyfriends” who protected them from the clients, put on weight, thus fending off starvation, recovered from the conditions of their previous camp and, usually, they survived. “I’m supposed to refuse life because it’s offered on a dirty plate?” asks Lotti, a Dutch prisoner who signed up for the camp brothel, in the fictionalized account Smoke over Birkenau (Millu 1997, 172). Lotti’s question suggests we should take the agency and decision-​taking of Holocaust victims seriously, as I have argued (Hájková 2013). In 1942, a 24-​ year-​ old woman, Alice Haberland (pseudonym), was deported to Theresienstadt from Berlin. She grew up in a wealthy, well-​known family, and arrived without her parents—​her mother was gentile and her Jewish father had been murdered. At first shocked with the dirt, hunger, and overcrowding, Alice started providing for herself and her sister by offering sex to male inmates for food. When her three elderly disabled female relatives arrived to Theresienstadt, she took them under her wing as well. Haberland’s coping strategy was stigmatized when Leo Baeck, the honored leader of

316

317

Sexuality in the Holocaust

German Jews and a family friend, arrived in Theresienstadt and disapproved of her conduct. She stopped selling sex. Haberland survived the ghetto, but never gave testimony to any of the many Holocaust oral history projects, and never mentioned her sex work to her relatives. The only surviving account is her anonymized testimony in a hagiography of Leo Baeck (Baker 1978, 294). Haberland’s story requires us to reconsider interpreting sex work as discrediting and victimizing, but rather, as a resource: alone in a foreign ghetto, without any connections, this young woman was able to provide for herself and four relatives. After Haberland stopped selling sex, her grandmother died. Rational relationships, as I term them—​romantic relationships in which one party engaged in a relationship to gain access to resources or protection—​present the question of agency and consent in a different light. In her memoir, Marie Simon, a 20-​year-​old Berlin Jewish woman who survived in hiding for two and half years describes in a matter-​ of-​fact tone how she offered affection, money, help, psychological support, and sex in return for help (Jalowicz Simon 2015). Occasionally, she is disgusted by her rescuers who want to sleep with her, and writes that under normal circumstances, she would not have spent time with them. By the end of the war, she also describes a rape by a Red Army soldier. Even though Simon calls this rape, she recalls the incident almost in passing, noting how she could make the soldier useful to herself. Simon’s reactions to both her rescuers and the Soviet soldier point to the fluidity of violence and agency. Helliwell (2000) argues that we need to recognize the western societal construction of sexual violence, especially rape, as particularly horrible. She reminds us, by narrating sexual violence as horrible, we dictate its horror. Understanding sexual barter in the Holocaust would benefit from a similar insight: the reasoning that prostitution for survival is degrading and damaging assumes that under “normal” conditions, “decent” women would never engage in sex work. This assumption is classist and stigmatizes sex work. But alongside Helliwell’s argument, by proclaiming sex work in the Holocaust as damaging, we are reading our assumptions about the necessity of trauma into these accounts—​independently of the trauma of the genocide. We need to differentiate between rational relationships, in which the Jewish woman prisoner engaged in sex, though under duress, and exploitation, in which non-​Jewish rescuers expected sex or affection, and used dependent Jews whom they sheltered for sex, and disposed of them afterward. Similarly to Munich Jews who were taken in, stripped of all their belongings, and then turned out on the street or even directly betrayed to the Gestapo (Schrafstetter 2015), gentile men around Buczacz in Eastern Galicia would visit the ghetto, look for pretty young Jewish women, take them out—​and return them back a few months later, pregnant, when they would likely be killed, or even handed over to the Gestapo (Bartov 2018, 246f). Encountering both of these kinds of stories (sexual barter in exchange for hiding, in one case delivered, in another not) leads to understandable disgust and judgment against rescuers demanding a countervalue in sex, but it is important to differentiate between those who did fulfill their promises of saving the women and those who did not (Gusarov 2020).

Men selling sex There are few testimonies of sexual barter outside heterosexual or standard gender conventions, as victim society in camps and ghettos produced more conservative, deeply gendered norms than interwar society, stigmatizing same-​sex relationships. Austrian Josef

317

318

Anna Hájková

Kohout was one of the few prisoners who bore testimony to queer sexual barter (Heger 1980). Persecuted for Article 129 of the Austrian criminal code (same-​sex intimacy), Kohout survived Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps in Germany. At first, Kohout was sexually assaulted by other prisoners, who saw him as fair game because they perceived his pink triangle as a marker of femininity, therefore as sexually available. Later, he became the lover of first one and later another prisoner functionary, men who identified as straight, but, according to Kohout’s testimony, had relationships with him because there were no women present. Kohout described how none of these relationships came about from his free will, but he was also aware, and appreciated, that both men grew to like him. With the help of these connections, Kohout became a prisoner functionary himself and eventually could afford the ultimate sign of a status: a freely chosen relationship with another prisoner who was himself persecuted as a homosexual. There is even less information on men who engaged in rational heterosexual relationships. There are indications that Jewish men in hiding, just like Jewish women, were expected to purchase rescue with affection and intimacy, but if they survived, they almost never spoke about it in such terms, instead portraying intimate relationships as proof of their masculinity and status (Glowacka 2020). Research on German women who fell in love with French POWs suggests that male sexual barter for Jews in hiding would be a fruitful line of inquiry (Usborne 2017).

Sexuality as a tool of othering Holocaust victims used sexuality to mark others as deviant, particularly same-​ sex intimacy. Similarly to the inmates of the Soviet Gulag, concentration camp inmates separated themselves from queer sexuality (Healey 2017). Wanda Połtawska, a young Polish resistance fighter imprisoned in Ravensbrück, remembered encountering lesbian roommates: “God, are these people? Are these still people?” (1994, 58f). Inmates describe queer conduct as profoundly disturbing, using such negative and forceful language that suggests they felt living with queer sexuality more hurtful than physical violence. Ascriptions of queer identity applied always to a different group than the narrators: by a Jewish prisoner to other prisoners—​German, “criminal,” “Gypsy”—​or to prison functionaries. Homophobia in the camps used sexual stigmatization to maintain the identity of one’s own group (Eschebach 2012). It is worth noting that much scholarship has shown that victims often used “deviant” sexuality to condemn perpetrators (Przyrembel 2001). Survivor testimonies paint women perpetrators in particular as sexually deviant: as a “beautiful beast” (a well-​ known example was the “Kommandeuse” of Buchenwald, Ilse Koch) or accused of using torture for sexual satisfaction. Some prisoners characterized their women guards as disgusting lesbians. Mailänder (2017) has shown that women guards did commit sexual violence and torture. But unlike male perpetrators committing violence, Mailänder argues, women perpetrators were perceived as monsters by victims and postwar observers alike. Victims whose conduct was perceived as transgressive were similarly ostracized. Martha Mosse, a functionary of the Reich Association of German Jews, for instance, was attacked by survivors for her coldness and lack of feminine qualities. Jewish men in leadership positions in the ghettos and camps, Chaim Rumkowski of the Łódź ghetto and Benjamin Murmelstein of Theresienstadt, were accused in survivor memoirs of blackmailing women into having sex, or, in the case of Rumkowski, of pedophilia (Eichengreen 2000; Hájková 2011; Samper Vendrell 2018). 318

319

Sexuality in the Holocaust

Same-​sex desire in the camps There is little information about queer victims as there are almost no first-​person queer Holocaust victims’ testimonies due to the stigmatization of same-​sex desire. The term “queer” is important here, albeit ahistorical, as it helps address an erroneous conceptualization of prison same-​sex sexuality as “situational,” and therefore not genuine. However, sexual orientation is a scale, and the term “queer” goes beyond self-​identification and includes same-​sex desire. Such conceptualization is key because of the lack of sources by victims. There are obvious ethical problems in using the only sources available, namely, those of homophobic observers. The group of queer prisoners goes much beyond only men (whose situation in the camps is fairly researched) and women persecuted for their sexual orientation (about whom we know little). The concentration camps were largely monosexual, and therefore if one wanted to be sexually active, the choices for men were the camp brothel (access limited to a minority of prisoners), masturbation, or same-​sex intimacy. It is likely that same-​sex intimacy encompassed most sexual activity among the population of concentration camps (Bergen et al. 2018; Hájková 2018a). Many of these interactions were results of violent sexual barter, and some were rape (Glowacka 2020). However, for some victims, concentration camps enabled them to realize their queerness. One of these was the 20-​year-​old Czech Jew Jiří Vrba who had a romance with a French prisoner in the concentration and death camp Auschwitz. After liberation from Buchenwald, Vrba went to Paris to search for his lover. He was not able to find him, but spent the rest of his life as a self-​identified gay man (author’s interview with Vrba’s partner, Hájková 2018b).

Conclusions A gendered analysis of women’s and men’s lived experiences during the Holocaust in CEE&E shifts understandings of individual agency under conditions of extreme violence (Walke 2015). The enforced society of the Holocaust was violent, judgmental, and profoundly gendered. The leeway for decisions was severely restricted, and the consequences often deadly. Nevertheless, testimonies reveal that victims made meaningful choices in the hopes of saving the lives of others or their own. Sexuality also served as a framework through which imprisoned Jews defined social and sexual norms as a way of protecting themselves, and of navigating society. Defining these norms contributed to stigmatization of what was seen as sexual deviancy, a stigmatization that continues to shape scholarly and popular perception of the genocide. We need to recognize sexuality in the Holocaust as a tool that allows us to understand the layers of Holocaust victims’ actions and points to the social construction of what we understand as sexual violence more broadly.

References Aleksiun, Natalia. 2021. “When Fajga Left Tadeusz: The Afterlife of Survivors’ Wartime Relationships.” Dubnow Institute Yearbook. Amesberger, Helga, Katrin Auer, and Brigitte Halbmayr. 2004. Sexualisierte Gewalt. Weibliche Erfahrungen in NS-​ Konzentrationslagern [Sexualized Violence: Female Experience in Nazi Concentration Camps]. Vienna: Mandelbaum. Anderson Hughes, Jessica. 2011. “Forced Prostitution: The Competing and Contested Uses of the Concentration Camp Brothel.” PhD diss., Rutgers University.

319

320

Anna Hájková Angrick, Andrej. 2003. Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–​1943 [Occupation Policy and Mass Murder: The Einsatzgruppe D in the Southern Soviet Union, 1941–​1943]. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Applebaum, Molly. 2017. Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum. Toronto: Azrieli Foundation. –​–​–​–. 2018. “Molly Applebaum’s Oral History.” Visual History Foundation/​Azrieli Foundation, February 26, #57177. Baker, Leonard. 1978. Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews. New York: Macmillan. Bartov, Omer. 1997. “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-​Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust.” Jewish Social Studies 3 (2): 42–​76. –​–​–​–​. 2018. Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz. New York: Simon & Schuster. Baumel Tydor, Judith. 1998. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Bergen, Doris. 2006. “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?” In Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, edited by Dagmar Herzog, 179–​201. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Bergen, Doris, Patrick Farges, Atina Grossmann, Anna Hájková, and Elissa Mailänder. 2018. “Holocaust and the History of Gender and Sexuality.” In German History 36 (1): 78–​100. Browning, Christopher. 2010. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-​Labor Camp. New York: W. W. Norton. Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cernyak-​Spatz, Susan. 2005. Protective Custody: Prisoner 34042. New York: N&S. Eichengreen, Lucille. 2000. Rumkowski and the Orphans of Lodz. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House. Eschebach, Insa. 2012. “Homophobie, weibliche Devianz und weibliche Homosexualität im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück.” [“Homophobia, Female Deviance, and Female Homosexuality in the Ravensbrück Concentration Camps.”] In Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Insa Eschebach. Berlin: Metropol Verlag. Fall, Susanne. 2015. Terezín, ráj mezi lágry [Terezín, a Paradise among the Camps]. Prague: Revolver Revue. Flaschka, Monika. 2010. “‘Only Pretty Women Were Raped:’ The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender Identities in the Concentration Camps.” In Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, 77–​93. Hanover: University Press of New England. Glowacka, Dorota. 2020. “Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys During the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-​So-​Silent) Silence.” “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma,” edited by Anna Hájková, Special Issue, German History 38 (3). Gusarov, Katya. 2020. “Sexual Barter and Jewish Women’s Efforts to Save their Lives: Accounts from the Righteous among the Nation’s Archives.” “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma,” edited by Anna Hájková, Special Issue, German History 38 (3). Hájková, Anna. 2011. “Der Judenälteste und seine SS–​Männer: Benjamin Murmelstein, der letzte Judenälteste in Theresienstadt und seine Beziehung zu Adolf Eichmann und Karl Rahm.” [“The Elder of the Jews and his SS Men: Benjamin Murmelstein, the Last Elder of the Jews in Theresienstadt. And his Relationship to Adolf Eichmann and Karl Rahm.”] In “Der Letzte der Ungerechten:” Der Judenälteste Benjamin Murmelstein in Filmen 1942–​1975, edited by Ronny Loewy and Katharina Rauschenberger, 75–​100. Frankfurt/​Main: Campus. –​ –​ –​ –​ . 2013. “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (3): 503–​533. –​–​–​–​. 2018a. “Den Holocaust queer erzählen.” [“To Narrate the Holocaust Queerly.”] Sexualitäten Jahrbuch: 86–​110. –​–​–​–​. 2018b. Author’s interview with Miroslav Spořitel (pseudonym), November 16. Healey, Dan. 2017. Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. London: Bloomsbury. Heger, Heinz. 1980. The Men With The Pink Triangle. London: GMP. Heineman, Elizabeth. 2002. “Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (1–​2): 22–​66.

320

321

Sexuality in the Holocaust Helliwell, Christine. 2000. “‘It’s Only a Penis:’ Rape, Feminism, and Difference.” Signs 253 (3): 789–​816. Herzog, Dagmar. ed., 2009. Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Horowitz, Sara. 2020. “What We Learn, at Last: Recounting Sexuality in Women’s Deferred Autobiographies and Testimonies.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, edited by Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner, 45–​66. Cham: Palgrave. Jalowicz Simon, Marie. 2015. Gone to Ground: A Young Woman’s Survival in Berlin 1940–​1945. London: Clerkenwell Press. Kaplan, Marion. 2019. “Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust?” Jewish Social Studies 24 (2): 37–​56. Langer, Lawrence. 1998. “Gendered Suffering? Women in the Holocaust Testimonies.” In Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Leonore J. Weitzman, 351–​363. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mailänder, Elissa. 2017. “Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939–​1944.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26 (3): 489–​520. Millu, Liana. 1997. Smoke over Birkenau. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mühlhäuser, Regina. 2010. Eroberungen: Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 1941–​1945 [Conquests: Sexual Violence and Intimate Relationships of German Soldiers in the Soviet Union, 1941–​1945]. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Owusu, Jo-​Ann. 2019. “A Cruel Period.” History Today 69 (5): 52–​61. Połtawska, Wanda. 1987. And I Am Afraid of My Dreams. London: Hodder and Stoughton. –​–​–​–. 1994. Und ich fürchte meine Träume. Abensberg: Maria Aktuell. Przyrembel, Alexandra. 2001. “Transfixed by an Image: Ilse Koch, the ‘Kommandeuse of Buchenwald.’” German History 19 (3): 369–​399. –​–​–​–. 2003. “Rassenschande”: Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus. [“Racial Disgrace”: The Purity Myth and the Legitimization of Destruction in National Socialism]. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ringelheim, Joan. 1998. “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust.” In Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, 340–​350. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Röger, Maren. 2015. Kriegsbeziehungen: Intimität, Gewalt und Prostitution im besetzten Polen, 1939 bis 1945 [Wartime Relationships: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939 to 1945]. Frankfurt/​Main: Fischer. Samper Vendrell, Javier. 2018. “The Case of a German-​Jewish Lesbian Woman: Martha Mosse and the Danger of Standing Out.” German Studies Review 41 (2): 335–​353. Schrafstetter, Susanna. 2015. Flucht und Versteck: untergetauchte Juden in München: Verfolgungserfahrung und Nachkriegsalltag [Escape and Hiding: Hidden Jews in Munich: The Experience of Persecution and the Postwar Everyday]. Göttingen: Wallstein. Sommer, Robert. 2009. Das KZ-​ Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern. [The Camp Brothel: Forced Sex Work in Nazi Concentration Camps]. Paderborn: Schöningh. Timm, Annette F. 2017. “The Challenges of Including Sexual Violence and Transgressive Love in Historical Writing on World War II and the Holocaust.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26 (3): 351–​365. –​–​–​–, ed. 2018. Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-​Tzetnik. London: Bloomsbury. Usborne, Cornelie. 2017. “Female Sexual Desire and Male Honor: German Women’s Illicit Love Affairs with Prisoners of War during the Second World War.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26 (3). Walke, Anika. 2015. Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia, 454–​ 488. New York: Oxford University Press. Waxman, Zoe. 2016. Women and the Holocaust: A Feminist History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

321

322

31 DEPORTATION AND GULAG AS GENDERED PROCESSES Dovilė Budrytė

Despite the deportations under Joseph Stalin and imprisonment in the Gulag being seen as among the most traumatic experiences of the 20th century, the gendered dimensions of these phenomena have become apparent only in the last 30 years. Women’s memoir literature and testimonies depict issues such as motherhood, gender relations, and sexual violence that tend to be absent from the mainstream literature on the Gulag. They suggest that in the Gulag women faced certain types of gendered violence, and that gender mattered in ways that were different from men’s experiences. Women’s memoirs and testimonies highlight the crucial importance of the private sphere and painful attempts to preserve privacy and a sense of normalcy, associated with domesticity, as well as the importance of various individual and family relationships. Sources by women from non-​ Russian territories—​including the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania—​reveal efforts to preserve what they saw as their national identities and the gender roles associated with these identities. During the time of political transition beginning in the late 1980s early 1990s in the Soviet Union and its successor states, gendered testimonies and literature played a political role in delegitimizing the previous regime by exposing the wrongs committed under Stalin. Women’s voices became part of commemorations of the victims, and they were essential in opposition movements and nongovernmental organizations during the processes of democratic transitions. As testimonies and narratives became part of democratization in the former Soviet Union, scholars raised questions: Can subjective, emotional first-​ hand accounts be reconciled with traditional historical narratives that try to recreate “objective” reality? How can we rely on narratives written by biased individuals, former victims (Davoliūtė and Balkelis 2018, 12)? Feminist scholars, who have been suspicious of “objective” histories and “objective” ways of knowing, tend to embrace individual narratives, insisting that they should not be viewed as “compensatory or supplementary history” (Kirss 2009, 2), but as valuable sources that reveal the deportations under Stalin and the Gulag as bodily gendered experiences. Collections of women’s life stories from the former Soviet Union (Kirss, Kõresaar, and Lauristin 2004; Leinartė 2010; Lie et al. 2007; Vilensky 1999) include traumatic narratives by women on pregnancy, giving birth in prison, the

322

323

Deportation and Gulag as gendered process

loss of menstruation while not pregnant, and abortion experienced in the deportations and the Gulag.

Gendered traumas and gendered processes of deportation Women were a minority in the Gulag (Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno trudovykh LAGerei), “a flourishing system of camps, colonies, prisons, special settlements, and other more fleeting and specialized units of isolation and forced labor” (Khlevniuk 2016, 26). Between 1930 and 1952, 18 to 20 million people in the Soviet Union were sentenced to imprisonment in camps, colonies, and prisons (Khlevniuk 2016, 16). It is estimated that female prisoners accounted for approximately 9 percent of the prison camp population from 1934 to 1940 (Mason 2001, 132), rising to 30 percent in 1945 (when many male prisoners were drafted into the Red Army) and dropping to 17 percent in 1951 and 1952 (Applebaum 2003, 287). Although the Soviet system of repression did not specifically target women as women until 1937, they too were labeled as “enemies of the state” or class enemies, and they were also accused of various crimes, such as stealing, which brought them into the Gulag system (Shapovalov 2001, 7). During the Stalinist period, women in the Soviet Union were more likely to be seen as criminals than women in the West. Activities such as petty theft or showing up late to work were criminalized, and women were much more likely to commit such “crimes” than violent crimes (Filtzer 2002, 27). In the 1930s, during the famine in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, many peasant women ended up in camps because they picked the remaining stalks of grain in the fields after the harvest (Shapovalov 2001, 8). In 1937, the Soviet state started using the formula “wife of a traitor to the Motherland” for women whose husbands were accused of treason. In the 1940s, women who were accused of supporting the postwar anti-​ Soviet resistance movements in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were deported (Shapovalov 2001, 7–​12). Women (the wives of officers, members of insurgent organizations and other groups considered to be “dangerous,” as well as prostitutes) were among the deportees from the territories of Poland and Romania annexed by the USSR in 1940 to 1941 (Polian 2004, 117, 121). They were also included in the post-​World War II deportations of Germans from Central-​ Eastern European countries, including Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia (Polian 2004, 266). The beginning of the gendered Gulag experiences was an arrest, which usually took place in a person’s home in the middle of the night, followed by separation from family, deportation by train to a prison camp or a special settlement, or “colonization villages.” Here deportees had limited freedom and lived under the supervision of a local commandant (Viola 2007, 93). As women, men, and children were transported in freight trains unequipped for human beings, they experienced “enforced intimacy” (Jolluck 2002, 18). Violation of privacy as a gendered trauma is a common theme in the testimonies of women deportees, who describe an intense feeling of humiliation when forced to use a hole in the floor as a toilet as others watched (Lazda 2005, 3). Such gendered traumas “offered a taste of what was to come” (Jolluck 2002, 37). The hardships in labor camps and special settlements included overcrowded living quarters, harsh climates, shortages of food, and, in the case of deportees from territories newly occupied by the Soviet Union (such as parts of Poland and the Baltic states), new gender roles as women were asked to do what was in their societies considered “men’s work.”

323

324

Dovilė Budrytė

Women were forced to engage in hard labor (Yarovskaya 2019), which included clearing forests, working in tractor brigades, and building railroads. In the Gulag, women were “subjected to particular kinds of sexual enslavement and violence that men did not have to endure” (Gregory 2013, x)—​even though some men experienced gendered violence as well. Women endured rape and sexual abuse by male guards and other prisoners, “night searches,” which involved stripping of clothes, and “sanitary processing” during which a search for, and rape of, virgins took place (Mason 2001, 137). This kind of gendered violence is what made the experience of women distinct from men (Gregory 2013, x). This gendered violence, understood as a system of interactions and relations between women and men, also provides insight into the experiences of men as part of a prison culture centered on sexuality and negotiated power relations.

The dynamics of survival: Hunger and food The themes of hunger and food are prominent in many men’s and women’s memoirs and testimonies, but those of women form a particular, “strong thematic core” (Kurvet-​ Käosaar 2015, 351) as women use food to foster connection among people. Often represented “as [a]‌metaphor of survival and perseverance,” food was associated with women’s attempts to create a sense of “normalcy” and domesticity (Kurvet-​Käosaar 2015, 338), often linked to ethnicity. For example, in the story of Natalija Gudonytė, a former partisan messenger from Lithuania who was deported to Taishet labor camp close to Irkutsk, food preparation is associated with holidays and celebration. She describes how she hid pieces of bread every day, then would collect them around the time of Christmas and make a “cake” to celebrate this holiday, which reminded her of home (Budrytė 2018, 114). Religious observance of Christmas Eve (kūčios) was intimately linked to Natalija’s Lithuanian identity. Similar to Jewish women’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps (Kurvet-​Käosaar 2015, 341), the deportation narratives of other Baltic women include descriptions of how women shared their dreams about food and exchanged recipes. In both cases, exchanging recipes represents the will to survive and preserve moments from the “normal” past, even when memories of that past are threatened by the traumatic present. This practice “attests to the value of what they had to offer as women—​the knowledge of food preparation” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006, 356). In the Gulag, the diet was extremely poor, consisting of poor quality bread, watery camp soup and porridge. Memoirs suggest that women received smaller rations than male prisoners (Mason 2001, 141). Some scholars argue that camp authorities would give pregnant women slightly bigger and better portions of food and some time off work, perhaps incentivizing some women to engage in sexual relations (Applebaum 2003, 293; Mason 2001, 141). Sex was also often used by women for barter—​either to obtain food from the guards or other officials, or to get engaged in “camp marriages,” in which a “husband” would protect his camp “wife” from the guards and other prisoners in exchange for sex (Bell 2015, 206; see also Hájková, Chapter 30 in this Handbook)—​although it is still unclear whether such decisions were made by women autonomously. Women’s and men’s camp memoirs reflect that individuals with power, such as camp administrators, often looked for better-​looking female prisoners to take as their “wives” (Mason 2001, 137), and such instances resembled sexual slavery. In memoirs, neither men nor women condemn the use of sex for barter. Sexual barter implied that the Gulag prisoners still had choices, albeit limited ones, suggesting they had 324

325

Deportation and Gulag as gendered process

some agency (Bell 2015, 206). Sources also depict voluntary sex and love in the Gulag (Červinskienė 1995; Ginzburg 1967; Petkevich 2010). Although heterosexual sex was forbidden, it occurred regularly, and in a way that Bell (2015, 199) considers prisoners asserted their “bodily and social autonomy.” Whereas official camp documents are usually silent on homosexual relations, Gulag memoirs are highly critical of homosexual sex, including lesbian relations, associating them with the criminal world (Kuntsman 2009, 310). Having learned about sexual relations between Valya, a fellow female prisoner, and her female “husband” Zoyka, Petkevich describes these relations as belonging to an “aberrant world” (2010, 152), making an explicit link between criminality and homosexuality. In contrast, topics related to the “traditional” heterosexual family (remembering family, experiencing painful feelings of separation), and motherhood are usually described by memoirists as pure and noble. Maintaining dignity is associated with keeping away from the “criminal world,” which is depicted as transgressing traditional gender norms.

The worst experiences and the ways of coping with them One of the long-​lasting traumas of deportation and the Gulag was the destruction of the family unit, which made many women and men cling to the memories of “traditional” roles. As Jolluck (2002, 47) discusses, Polish deportees associated sexual differences with physical bodies, making these differences “fixed and indisputable.” Distinct areas of activity were prescribed for women and men, and productivity was associated with masculinity. Gender roles were a part of national identity, and during the prewar period women were taught that it was their duty “to act as proper Polish mothers” (Jolluck 2002, 46). Many women internalized these norms, and therefore saw the “manly” work that they had to perform in the camps and special settlements as especially traumatic and humiliating. Women survivors of the Gulag document the breakdown of marriages, sexual relations outside of marriage, children born out of wedlock, and the immense suffering of mothers who are unable to take care of their children. In most cases, women who were deported to the labor camps were separated from their children shortly after breastfeeding ended, and their children were likely taken to orphanages (Jolluck 2002, 116). Due to bad living conditions, many infants died early, and such deaths are depicted as some of the worst and most traumatic experiences in women’s memoirs (e.g., Červinskienė 1995). In the special settlements also, women faced enormous challenges providing for and emotionally supporting their children. This situation sometimes resulted in their suicides and mental breakdowns as well as surrendering children to orphanages or other women (Jolluck 2002, 123). It appears that when faced with the need to take care of their families, women were much more likely to embrace a “pragmatic” attitude toward stealing than men. In addition to sexual barter, stealing became a survival strategy, a way to provide for starving children (Kirss 2005, 27). Developing surrogate families, usually consisting only of women and children, was another survival strategy, especially in special settlements. Such families of women “sometimes built their own clay huts, salvaged abandoned ones, or pooled their resources to buy domiciles from the locals so they could stay on their own” (Jolluck 2002, 130). There were clear gender differences in the formation of support networks, with women more likely than men to stress “the selflessness and cohesion of the collective” (Jolluck 325

326

Dovilė Budrytė

2002, 133). Making a comparison with Nazi camps, Leinarte (2018, 56) makes a similar argument about women from the Baltic countries in labor camps. Sexual violence and sexuality are topics that women were reluctant to write about in their memoirs or reveal in their oral testimonies, referring to violence in vague terms. Some women do break the taboo of this topic. For Tamara Petkevich, rape and attempted rape emerged as one of the worst experiences in the camp, as bad as death itself. She describes how Kirghiz women who received food from their relatives were attacked by male prisoners and gang raped (Petkevich 2010, 174). Petkevich was almost raped herself by one of the camp administrators (Petkevich 2010, 201). Memoirists described mass rape by other prisoners in Kolyma (Glinka 2001, 305–​306) and other camps (Vasileva 2001, 312). Women tended to internalize the guilt and stigma associated with rape, which undermined the security of their identities (Jolluck 2002, 238). Especially in cases where women saw their roles as wives and “mothers of the nation,” the experience of rape made them feel “contaminated” and unworthy to return to their family and community (Jolluck 2002, 238). The narratives of women survivors of the Gulag remain important sources about rape and other types of sexual violence because the official reports conceal how much sexual violence there was in the camps. Sometimes the reports used the term “cohabitation” [sozhitel’stvo] to refer to coerced sexual relations, but the term “rape” [iznasilovaniye] (rape) was rarely used, although the official reports did mention gang rape in the camps (Bell 2015, 211). These reports did not include many details, and seem to have focused on “sexual promiscuity,” (the term used to describe “cohabitation” by the camp authorities) in the camps. Women’s memoirs suggest that long-​term cohabitation was often a type of forced sexual relations as well (Bell 2015, 211).

The small zone and the larger zone It is essential to look at the Gulag and non-​Gulag (i.e., the society outside of the prison system) as an integrated whole (Khlevniuk 2016). People from the “larger zone” (the part of society that had not been imprisoned) constantly moved to the “small zone” (the prison complex), and vice versa. Gender norms and gender hierarchies that asserted themselves in the “larger zone” were transferred to the “small zone,” and vice versa. Women memoirists, for example, tended not to condemn sexual relations in the camps. In the case of Russian memoirists such as Petkevich, who lived in Soviet Russia prior to deportation, such attitudes may have been influenced by the ideal of the “liberated new Soviet woman” or the impact of pronatalist Stalinist propaganda, which encouraged all women, including single women, to become mothers (Bell 2015, 205). However, women narrators from cultures that associated sexual differences with distinct spheres of activities and responsibilities, such as pre-​World War II Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states, wrote about the challenges to their gender identities and changes in gender relations experienced in the Gulag. Eventually “gender leveling” (which includes gender-​ transcending behavior and women performing what they saw as men’s roles) became to some extent accepted by both men and women who were deported from Lithuania (Leinarte 2018, 61). However, some men retained the “patriarchal attitude” prevalent in Lithuania and disapproved of women performing men’s roles (Leinarte 2018, 60). Polish exiles, too, bemoaned the fact that everyone, including women, were forced into hard labor, which “appeared to the Poles as a breakdown of order, a sign of barbarity” (Jolluck 2002, 66). 326

327

Deportation and Gulag as gendered process

Embracing the image of a “suffering nation” and identifying with it were powerful survival strategies in the Gulag for female deportees from non-​ Russian territories. Polish female deportees from different socioeconomic classes identified with the image of Matka Polka, “the ideal of selfless and patriotic motherhood (Jolluck 2002, 140). Serving the nation often meant serving the needs of others, which helped to strengthen networks between deportees and connect their self-​help mechanisms. Such mechanisms included support systems with other women and the performance of “traditional” gender tasks, such as embroidery, sewing, or food preparation. For Romanian women who were brought up and acted according to “traditional” gender roles such tasks could help to counterbalance the sense of confusion triggered by the changes in gender roles in the places of deportation (Massino 2008). The return to life in the “larger zone” was also experienced by women differently than men; however, this is still by and large unresearched. It is clear, however, that women who returned from the “small zone” were women hardened by tough work and tough life conditions in the Gulag. Their children (if they were able to find them) grew up as children of “enemies of the people” and were taught to hate their parents (Gregory 2013, xi). To make matters worse, most Gulag survivors could not share their traumatic memories for a long time, and they had to develop “non-​narrative ways to deal with their time in Gulag” (Gheith 2007, 161), which underscores the need for feminist scholars to examine a broad range of sources, including artifacts, embroidery, and songs.

Women’s stories and political transition from communism to democracy Women had longer life expectancy than men in the USSR, meaning that more women than men survived into the 1980s and 1990s, when they could finally record and publish their experiences. Perestroika was a period in which, in the words of Kirss, the “performative remembering of Siberia” took place (2005, 18). Deportation and imprisonment became conceptualized as a “rupture,” a deviation from “normality” (Kõresaar 2004, 54). Political organizations such as Memorial in Russia and organizations uniting former political prisoners and deportees started publishing Gulag memoirs, and women’s stories became part of a larger narrative with political goals. Women’s memoirs and testimonies describing suffering were appropriated for the creation of political metanarratives and new histories. Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea) is a case in point (Grinkevičiūtė 2005). Separated from her father in 1941, Dalia, her brother and her mother were deported to a virtually uninhabited area in Siberia. Most deportees died during the first winter. Grinkevičiūtė’s experience became widely known in Lithuania in 1988, and she was seen as “a prophet of the nation’s suffering” who described how the members of the Lithuanian nation were physically destroyed in the North (Davoliūtė 2005, 64). This would not have been possible without the attention that Grinkevičiūtė’s diary received from Justinas Marcinkevičius, a popular Soviet Lithuanian poet, who had a personal encounter with Grinkevičiūtė and helped to convey her experiences by incorporating fragments of her testimony into his own text, which was published in the official press (Davoliūtė 2018, 120–​121). In Lithuania, women survivors acted as primary agents of memory during Perestroika, communicating their individual traumas publicly and influencing collective memory with the publication of memoirs, the establishment of museums, and the organization of public commemorations (Budrytė 2010). 327

328

Dovilė Budrytė

Conclusions Scholars studying the Gulag have found that there were multiple forms of interaction between the Gulag (“the small zone”) and Soviet society outside the Gulag system (“the larger zone”) (Khlevniuk 2016, 33). Research on the Gulag as a gendered system suggests several ways in which the study of women and gender can inform the study of the “larger”—​broader societal—​zone. First, this research explores the impact of deportation and imprisonment on gender identities and gender relations. In the USSR, tens of millions were subjected to forced labor even though they were not imprisoned (Khlevniuk 2016, 40); this dynamic was probably visible in the “larger zone” as well. Second, studying the Gulag as a gendered system points to women’s commitment to trying to create a sense of “normalcy” and domesticity, even in extreme conditions. This means that the private sphere, whatever was left of it, was essential for women in the Gulag. These strategies extended into the “larger zone,” and they can be conceptualized as ways to “control the intimate.” Third, the Gulag was part of the Soviet policy of internal colonization. The study of women and gender in the Gulag points to how different identities, especially gender, nation, and ethnicity intersected. It is essential to include the narratives of non-​Russian women. Deportation and imprisonment inspired women from non-​Russian territories to identify with the “suffering nation” (i.e., the nation of their origin) and even strengthened “the ideology of womanhood” (Jolluck 2002, 140). Repression in the “larger zone” may have produced a similar result, pointing to the importance of gender and nation. The inclusion of the non-​Russian perspectives on the Gulag also enriches our understanding of the political transition from communism to democracy in the 1980s. Fourth, the study of gender and ethnic/​national identities in the Gulag and the society outside of the Gulag system reveals the pervasiveness of personal trauma. Initially, these traumatic experiences were disempowering, disorienting, and isolating, and it was essential for the survivors of these traumas to find ways to address them. Writing a memoir or giving testimony was an act of healing. At the same time, it was a political act, an attempt to have their truth acknowledged and accepted by a wider community. When these individual traumatic experiences acquired political significance, they were incorporated into communities of suffering, built around a narrative about a collective trauma. The study of women’s memoirs and testimonies about the Gulag and their significance during perestroika is essential for understanding the construction of collective traumas and their relationship with collective identities.

References Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps. London: Penguin Books. Bell, Wilson T. 2015. “Sex, Pregnancy and Power in the Late Stalinist Gulag.” Journal of the History and Sexuality 24 (2): 198–​224. Budrytė, Dovilė. 2010. “Experiences of Collective Trauma and Political Activism: A Study of Women ‘Agents of Memory’ in Post-​Soviet Lithuania.” Journal of Baltic Studies 41 (3): 331–​350. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Gendering ‘History of Fighting and Suffering’: War and Deportation in the Narratives of Women Resistance Fighters in Lithuania.” In Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States, edited by Violeta Davoliūtė and Tomas Balkelis, 103–​117. Budapest: Central European University Press. Červinskienė, Elena. 1995. Silpnųjų jėga. Vilnius: Vaga. Davoliūtė, Violeta. 2005. “Deportee Memoirs and Lithuanian History: The Double Testimony of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė.” Journal of Baltic Studies 36 (1): 51–​68.

328

329

Deportation and Gulag as gendered process –​–​–​–. 2018. “‘We Are All Deportees’: The Trauma of Displacement and the Consolidation of National Identity during the Popular Movement in Lithuania.” In Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States, edited by Violeta Davoliūtė and Tomas Balkelis, 119–​146. Budapest: Central European University Press. Davoliūtė, Violeta and Tomas Balkelis. 2018. “Introduction.” In Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States, edited by Violeta Davoliūtė and Tomas Balkelis, 1–​15. Budapest: Central European University Press. Filtzer, Donald. 2002. Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labor and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gheith, Jehanne. 2007. “‘I Never Talked’: Enforced Silence, Non-​Narrative Memory, and the Gulag.” Mortality 12 (2): 159–​175. Ginzburg, Evgenia Semyonova. 1967. Into the Whirlwind, translated by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari. London: Collins/​Harvill. Glinka, Elena Semenova. 2001. “The Hold.” In Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons, edited and translated by Veronica Shapovalov, 301–​310. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Gregory, Paul R. 2013. Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia. 2005. Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros: Atsiminimai, miniatiūros. [Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea: Memoirs, Miniatures]. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla. Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. 2006. “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender and Transmission.” Poetics Today 27 (2): 353–​383. Jolluck, Katherine R. 2002. Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Khlevniuk, Oleg. 2016. “The Gulag and the Non-​Gulag as the Interrelated Whole.” Translated by Simon Belokowsky. In The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison, edited by Michael David-​Fox, 25–​41. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kirss, Tiina. 2005. “Survivorship and the Eastern Exile: Estonian Women’s Life Narratives of the 1941 and 1949 Siberian Deportation.” Journal of Baltic Studies 36 (1): 13–​38. –​–​–​–, ed. 2009. Estonian Life Stories. Budapest: Central European University Press. Kirss, Tiina, Ene Kõresaar, and Marju Lauristin, eds. 2004. She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-​Soviet Life Stories. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Kõresaar, Ene. 2004. “Private and Public, Individual and Collective in Linda’s Life Story.” In She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-​Soviet Life Stories, edited by Tiina Kirss, Ene Kõresaar, and Marju Lauristin, 89–​111. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Kuntsman, Adi. 2009. “‘With a Shade of Disgust’: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag.” Slavic Review 68 (2): 308–​328. Kurvet-​Käosaar, Leena. 2015. “‘Is that Hunger Haunting the Stove?’ Thematization of Food in the Deportation Narratives of Baltic Women.” Journal of Baltic Studies 46 (3): 337–​353. Lazda, Mara. 2005. “Women, Nation and Survival: Latvian Women in Siberia 1941–​57.” Journal of Baltic Studies 36 (1): 1–​12. Leinartė, Dalia. 2010. Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–​1970. Amsterdam: Rodopi. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Victims and Collective Trauma: Surviving Mass Repression and Living through the Soviet Period.” In Women’s Experiences of Repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by Kelly Hignett, Melanie Ilic, Dalia Leinarte, and Corina Snitar, 54–​85. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Lie, Suzanne Stiver, Lynda Malik, Ilvi Jõe-​Cannon, and Rutt Hinrikus, eds. 2007. Carrying Linda’s Stones: An Anthology of Estonian Women’s Life Stories. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press. Mason, Emma. 2001. “Women in the Gulag in the 1930s.” In Women in the Stalin Era, edited by Melanie Ilič. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Massino, Jill. 2008. “Gender as Survival: Women’s Experiences of Deportation from Romania to the Soviet Union, 1945–​50.” Nationalities Papers 36 (1): 55–​83. Petkevich, Tamara. 2010. Memoir of a Gulag Actress, translated by Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Polian, Pavel. 2004. Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, translated by Anna Yastrzhembska. Budapest: CEU Press.

329

330

Dovilė Budrytė Shapovalov, Veronica. 2001. “Introduction.” In Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons, edited and translated by Veronica Shapovalov, 1–​ 17. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Vasileva, Irina Pavlovna. 2001. “I Never Saw Him Again.” In Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons, edited and translated by Veronica Shapovalov, 311–​316. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Vilensky, Simeon, ed. 1999. Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, translated by John Crowfoot, Marjorie Farquharson, Catriona Kelly, Sally Laird, and Cathy Porter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Viola, Lynne. 2007. The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. New York: Oxford University Press. Yarovskaya, Marianna, dir. 2019. Women of the Gulag: The Stories of Six Women as Last Survivors of the Gulag. Mayfilms.

330

331

Socialisms and communisms

332

333

32 YUGOSLAV GENDER EXPERIMENTS AND SOVIET INFLUENCES Ivan Simić

After World War II, the Soviet Union had a substantial influence on the framing of Yugoslav gender policies and the lived experiences of gender. The new Yugoslav Constitution and laws resembled the Soviet ones, while the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) engaged in many social interventions in which gender was a crucial component and the primary field where the new communist ideology was tested and challenged (Simić 2018). Trying to change society, which communists considered backward, they faced popular resistance to any attempt to alter established ways of living. This chapter looks at some of these efforts in the first decade after the war, focusing on Yugoslav communists’ attempts to challenge gender norms with their interpretation of Soviet ideals as models. It places Stalinism in a broader context, showing its complexity once it was transferred, negotiated, and adapted to the socialist periphery. Yugoslav communists adopted Stalinist ideas, including gender policies of the 1920s and 1930s, which they put into practice during World War II. Soviet models had long-​lasting consequences, despite resistance to changes in gender norms, long after the Yugoslav–​Soviet split over Yugoslav foreign politics in 1948 (on the split, see Perović 2007). Many scholars have explored the lives of women in socialist Yugoslavia. Yugoslav feminists had already brought attention to unresolved issues such as the wage gap, employment, and insufficient political participation in the 1970s and 1980s (Blagojević 1988; Rener 1985; Sklevicky 1984). Scholars have also been interested in women’s active involvement in the World War II partisan struggle, a topic revisited recently to bring more nuanced gender analysis (Batinić 2015; Jancar-​Webster 1990; Sklevicky 1989; Wiesinger 2009). A vibrant intellectual feminist tradition was also analyzed in the context of late Yugoslav socialism (Lóránd 2018). The collapse of Yugoslavia, however, brought a disappointing trend among the scholars in post-​Yugoslav states to explore only one part of Yugoslavia without connecting it to the whole. While there are studies on the experiences of women in one Yugoslav republic (Gudac-​Dodić 2006; Jambrešić Kirin 2009; Pantelić 2011), few scholars consider how the ideals of Yugoslav socialism shaped gender policies across the country.

333

334

Ivan Simić

Charting socialist gender policies Post-​World War II Yugoslav gender policies were marked by Soviet influences, with their roots dating back to before World War II. Established in 1919, the KPJ achieved significant electoral successes, leading to banishment and persecution by the monarchist regime. Generations of communists were educated in Yugoslav prisons, where they read and translated Soviet press and Marxist classics. Dreaming about the Soviet state, where, according to KPJ publications, “workers are truly liberated” and “women fully equal to men” (Proleter 1933), many Yugoslav communists did not survive the torture and harsh conditions of interwar Yugoslav prisons. Others were able to go to Moscow for training at Lenin’s International School, though many in the leadership and hundreds of members perished in the Stalinist purges (Očak 1988). The Stalinist purges also caused a generational shift in the KPJ with a new generation of communists emerging, mostly in their early 20s. Among them was a significant number of women. The party also changed its approach toward feminist organizations following the Comintern directive in 1935, instructing activists to infiltrate feminist groups to gain grounds among “female masses.” Dutifully following all instructions from Moscow, Yugoslav communists infiltrated several organizations, gaining a magazine, Žena danas [Woman Today], which would later become the official magazine for the party’s women section (AFŽ). The number of young women in the party surged, while Vida Tomšič and Spasenija Babović were the first women elected to the central committee at the 1940 Party Conference. At the same event, Vida Tomšič presented the first coherent program for gender equality, shunning liberal feminism and establishing the Soviet model as the only legitimate way of bringing equality between men and women, promising legal and political equality and state services to women and mothers as they existed in the Soviet Union (Tomšič 1940). The program was based on Soviet gender policies from the mid-​1930s, which among other things included the Family Law of 1936. Some scholars have called this entire process a “Great Retreat” (Timasheff 1972) from Soviet promises, as the law restricted access to abortion and divorce. Others such as Hoffmann (2011) argue that there is evidence of continuity and that some women benefited from Stalinist changes to legislation (Goldman 1993). It is unlikely that Yugoslav communists observed changes in gender policies brought by Stalin’s regime (Hoffmann 2011; Wood 1997). For Yugoslav communists educated in Moscow, there were no splits between the Leninist and Stalinist periods, but a natural socialist evolution. Yugoslav communists accepted Stalinist legislation, policies, and practices, often explaining them in post-​revolutionary Leninist terms. The core of such an approach remained intact in the following decades. World War II allowed Yugoslav communists to test in practice what they learned in Moscow or from Soviet books and magazines, but the war, too, reshaped gender norms. Reorganized under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito and with significant underground experience, Yugoslav communists started their armed struggle when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. During the next four years, Yugoslav communists engaged in guerrilla fighting with Germany and their allies but also used every peaceful moment on the liberated territories to spread their teaching to their newly recruited. Accepting all nationalities in their army, women joined in large numbers, serving not only in the medical corps but in active combat units, making the Yugoslav Partisan resistance unique. Many women obtained officer ranks, and many were killed in combat (Jancar-​Webster 1990). At the same time, as Batinić (2015) shows, traditional gender divisions of labor were present in the units, with Partisan women doing “domestic chores” besides other duties, 334

335

Yugoslav gender and Soviet influences

while patriarchal sexual prudence was carefully observed. Nevertheless, the change in women’s lived experiences was immense. Women were fighting alongside men, and for the first time, Yugoslav women were enfranchised and were elected to ruling councils in the liberated territories. Men were forced to share responsibilities and authority. For many people, such a development had been unthinkable before the war when Yugoslav women had no political, social, or economic rights. During the war, the KPJ also organized a large women’s organization (the Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ) in 1942. The reasons why the party established a separate women’s organization are still discussed, ranging from a historical analysis that shows the party’s needs for war efforts and socialist transformation (Jancar-​Webster 1990), to ahistorical attempts to place the AFŽ in continuation of the pre-​war feminist societies (Sklevicky 1996). The AFŽ was always closely tied to the party, with leading women being communists and fierce anti-​feminists, believing that feminism separates women from the socialist revolution (Tomšič 1946). Whether a socialist state needs a separate women’s organization was questioned by communists from the very beginning while the organization was relegated to social issues after the war. However, the AFŽ invested much effort in the education of illiterate women, and in numerous programs that empowered many to improve their lives. The AFŽ placed much effort in supporting the party’s social policies, but also in mobilizing women for industry and collectivization. During its existence, the AFŽ had tremendous value to many women, particularly in remote areas, giving them voice and framework for social activities, with local rank-​and-​file women being among the most dissatisfied once the organization was abolished (Report 1953). Yugoslav Party leaders abolished the organization in 1953 for ideological reasons, using the same explanations as the Soviets did for the Zhenotdel decades earlier, arguing that no separate female organization was needed in socialism (Djilas 1953).

Postwar legal transformation Once the communist partisans liberated the country in 1945, they were eager to continue transforming society and gender norms according to the Soviet model. The desire to follow Stalinist policies did not derive from the pressure of the Soviet army as elsewhere, but out of the belief that the path via the Soviet modernization project was the only suitable way (Unkovski-​Korica 2016). The legal transformation was the first step. The communists modeled the Yugoslav Constitution on the 1936 Soviet constitution, with many literal translations and the same solutions for organizing society. Men and women were equalized in political, economic, and social rights rendering the Stalinist Constitution a progressive force, radically challenging a conservative Yugoslav society. The state also offered protections for motherhood and children (Jovanović 2008; for similar cases elsewhere see Fidelis 2010). The new Family Law took marital relations out of the purview of ecclesiastical courts, declaring men and women equal in marriage, with the same rights to initiate divorce. Following the pre-​war Soviet legislation, Yugoslav communists introduced provisions guaranteeing women half of marital property in divorce, with domestic chores also counted as labor, as well as alimony for children (Prokop 1946). A conservative Yugoslav society resisted in many ways, revealing the limits of the party’s authority. Men found various ways to avoid paying alimony not just in the immediate postwar years, but also in the following decades (Gudac-​Dodić 2008). A similar situation occurred regarding property division after divorce, particularly in the countryside. 335

336

Ivan Simić

Many women were pressured to give up the property, regardless of the party’s promises, following traditions holding that it was inappropriate for a woman to split property (Božinović 1953). As the divorce rate increased, voices in the lower rank and file in the party evoked moral panic, with calls to restrict divorce, to penalize adultery, and to enforce marital loyalty (Committee Zagreb AFŽ 1953). While the party leadership preserved the Soviet model urging more Marxist education that was supposed to lead to more humane relationships (Tomšič 1952), prejudices toward divorced women were deeply entrenched, with divorce being blamed for all varieties of social problems, including a very negative academic discourse on the effects of divorce on children (e.g., A 1954). The Yugoslav approach toward abortion was another example of how the party adapted Soviet legislation that changed women’s lived experience. After initially decriminalizing abortion, the Soviets criminalized abortion in 1936, allowing it only for medical reasons (Nakachi 2010). With similar language, the 1951 Yugoslav criminal code appears to do the same. However, Yugoslav communists added a stipulation that allowed abortion for social reasons, besides medical ones in which woman’s health was endangered (“Krivični zakonik [Penal Code]” 1951). While the law was being drafted, Yugoslav gynecologists argued against any social reasoning (such as poverty), and for strict bans and punishment for women. In the end, the party leadership, concerned with a large number of illegal abortions and the mortality rate of women, took a more lenient approach. According to party leaders and health officials the situation was particularly critical in the countryside, where traditional means of abortion were still predominant, usually self-​induced or with the help of a folk-​healer (Tomšič 1954). The procedure for legal abortion remained complicated, so many women in the cities induced abortion at home in order to receive a safe treatment in the clinic. Due to the lobbying of important women in the party leadership, the party was willing to turn a blind eye to such practices, encouraging gynecologists to engage in promoting modern contraception and in educating the population on the adverse effects of abortion. Nevertheless, as in the Soviet Union, Yugoslav communists did not consider abortion to be a woman’s right, but as a necessary evil until socialism and consciousness or people were developed enough that it is no longer needed. This stance changed in the 1970s when abortion on demand was legalized, but the negative discourse on abortion still prevailed (Bogdan 2018).

Broader interventions and resistance The inclusion of women was also a crucial component of Yugoslavia’s grand and ambitious projects of industrialization and collectivization. Seeing themselves as ahead of all communist states except the Soviet Union, Yugoslav communists launched an extensive program of industrialization in 1947, engaging in construction projects that were supposed to double economic output in just five years. For such an endeavor, they needed female labor more than ever. Women entered industrial jobs before World War II, but as in the Soviet Union, industrialization opened places and positions in heavy industry and highly paid posts that were previously unimaginable (even as some jobs were banned to women). Women entered metallurgy, precise mechanics, and construction jobs, the pinnacle of socialist modernization. Adapting the Soviet model, many Yugoslav women became shock-​workers, who earned medals, monetary benefits, and holidays in paid resorts (Koh 1947; Bonfiglioli 2019). Yet, resistance to women’s inclusion in the male-​dominated working class was immense. The shop-​floor atmosphere proved to be a hostile environment for many women. They 336

337

Yugoslav gender and Soviet influences

faced sexist jokes, underestimation of their work, or deliberate obstructions by the managers (Tomšič 1953). Almost all factory managers were men, the trade unions’ leaders as well, while the trade unions were not willing to bring women’s concerns forward unless the AFŽ pressured them. It was not uncommon that female workers received older equipment, worse clothing, and worse living arrangements than men (Report 1949). Following the conflict with the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav Party charted its own way to communism, including Yugoslav self-​management in 1950, a decentralized system that made the gender war in factories even more visible. Namely, the factories were supposed to be ruled by the workers’ councils and boards, and it soon became evident that women were excluded from both. Male workers gave various reasons for not voting for women, with understandings about gender and morality crucial. Male workers carefully considered women’s marital status, the number of children, and what they considered to be appropriate behavior. After the Yugoslav–​Soviet split in 1948 and the resulting Soviet-​ backed economic blockade, the economy shrank, and the factories were called upon to cut costs. Married women were first to lose their jobs, with women’s dismissal reaching such levels that the top party leadership had to intervene. Women lost jobs in the best-​ paying heavy industries, causing the feminization of lower-​paid jobs (Tomšič 1953) that would remain until the end of Yugoslav socialism. In the countryside, one of the goals of agrarian collectivization was to shape Yugoslav gendered lived experiences, which Yugoslav communists adapted from Soviet policies. Initially, supported by the peasants during the war, Yugoslav communists opted for a gradual approach, clearing peasants’ debts, giving land to landless peasants, and confiscating large estates. Some collective farms were created, favored by the state with subsidies, but they were still a rarity. However, following the conflict with the Soviet Union, in which Stalin also criticized the Yugoslav Party for supposedly protecting rich peasants (kulaks), Yugoslavs launched sweeping collectivization in 1949 (Bokovoy 1998). Collective farms were not just economic units, but social as well, supposed to establish socialist modernity, and accordingly, socialist gender relations in the countryside. Collective farms promised to alter traditional family relations, to revalue women’s work, to make widespread domestic violence disappear, to secure girls’ schooling, to provide healthcare and childcare, to ensure the division of property, and provide protection for divorced women. Women were supposed to become managers of the farms, equal to men (Djurić 1948). Despite tremendous efforts invested by the party’s women section, these high ideals turned into disappointments and failures. The inherited poverty of the Yugoslav countryside and the effects of the war were significant factors, but men’s (and occasionally women’s) resistance to any intervention into traditional ways of living was immense. Even local communist men often opposed women who dared to try to enter the ruling boards of the farms or to demand fair compensation for their work (Field Report 1952). In the few years that collective farms were the focus of the entire party, they failed to change the gendered structure of the Yugoslav countryside. The majority of peasant men did not see collective farms as a road to a more prosperous future but as a usurpation of their autonomy and diminishing of their family status. According to internal party reports, domestic violence remained rife, properties were not shared with female children, women were excluded from decision-​making, while the living conditions barely improved (Report 1953). Yugoslav communists also targeted Muslim communities and Muslim women, aiming to bring them to imagined socialist modernity and gender relations. With the highest illiteracy and unemployment rates, they were the most vulnerable group in the country. 337

338

Ivan Simić

Scholars of Soviet policies in Muslim communities have debated the intent and measures of what was called the Soviet emancipation of Muslim women, pointing to their imperialist nature and contradictory results (see Gradskova, Chapter 22 in this Handbook). As in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, Yugoslav media and Yugoslav politicians fostered a discourse on Muslim women that presented them as slaves of veils (in the Yugoslav case, full head and face covering) and traditions (Kovačević 1950). Yugoslav magazines often published the translated stories about Muslim women from Central Asia who made careers thanks to the Soviet state. Yugoslav communists were no less ambitious (Arbat 1948). Aiming to create a new type of woman who was integrated into a new socialist state, Yugoslavs attempted to persuade Muslim women to unveil in the years following World War II. Although these attempts were supported by the leadership of the Islamic Community in Yugoslavia (Fejić 1950), the party activists failed, and many women would put on the veils again as soon as the activist left their villages (Annual Report 1948), suggesting individual resistance to the unveiling policy. Yugoslav communists learned that they might need more than sporadic unveiling campaigns and suggestive articles in the press. In 1950, Yugoslav communists decided to ban the veil, and introduce punishments not only for women but for men who, by any means, pressured women to wear it. This was a prelude to the aggressive unveiling campaign, which saw veils disappearing from the Yugoslav streets, leaving many women in uncomfortable positions. The veil-​lifting campaign mobilized the entire state apparatus, but also thousands of non-​Muslim and Muslim activist women who had a chance to exercise their own sense of modernity and commitment to the party. Many Muslim women decided to stay in their homes, adapting only slowly to the new situation by wearing headscarves (Mujdović 1953). The unveiling campaign was followed by a health campaign, connecting veils and traditional life with disease, which was used to simultaneously monitor the unveiling. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim women had their first gynecological exam. The traumatic experiences of Muslim women targeted by the campaigns were often ignored by the party (Proceedings 1951). The lived experience in Muslim communities was permanently changed, being one of the long-​term consequences of Yugoslav gender experiments. Some adapted to the situation and used it to obtain education and achieve distinguished careers, others turned to various forms of resistance trying to preserve their way of living, while many left the country and emigrated abroad, particularly to Turkey (Pezo 2018).

Conclusions The Yugoslav post-​World War II socialist transformation provides an intriguing case for examining how Soviet gender policies were transferred and applied in the socialist periphery. Yugoslav communists were not forced to use the Soviet models; instead, they considered them a progressive force and a tool to change the conservative society, and selectively included measures in the Yugoslav program. The Yugoslav case also shows how attempts to alter people’s lives based on Soviet gender models faced severe challenges in practice. Men’s resistance to any change in gender norms was fierce. Many men undermined women’s political activities; resisted women’s promotions in the factories, often creating an atmosphere of toxic masculinity on shop-​floors; opposed allocating money for childcare services; resented sharing childcare responsibilities; excluded women from economic decision-​making; opposed

338

339

Yugoslav gender and Soviet influences

attempts to promote more women to administer collective farms; undervalued women’s work in agriculture; resisted new laws to pay alimonies; and opposed women’s inheritance and property splitting after the divorce. Communist policies in Muslim communities also faced resistance. Nevertheless, the adaptation of Soviet ideas to Yugoslav practice has had long-​lasting consequences, changing Yugoslav society well beyond the Yugoslav–​ Soviet conflict and the Yugoslav attempts to find its path to socialism.

References A, S. 1954. “Razvod braka najteže pogađa djecu.” [“Divorce Hurts Children the Most.”] Naša žena (11–​12, December): 8–​9. Annual Report. 1948. “Godišnji izveštaj o radu Glavnog odbora AFŽ Srbije.” [“Annual Report on the Activities of the Head Committee of the AFŽ Serbia.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 13. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Arbat, Jurij. 1948. “Iz ropstva harema.” [“From Slavery of a Harem.”] Žena danas 53: 44–​45. Batinić, Jelena. 2015. Women and Partisan Resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blagojević, Marina. 1988. “Nejednakosti između polova i društvena struktura.” Zbornik Filozofskog fakulteta. Serija B, Društvene nauke 15: 387–​405. Bogdan, Branka. 2018. “Cold War Entanglements and Abortion Technology: Writing Yugoslavia into the Global History of Vacuum Aspiration, 1964–​1974: Cold War Entanglements and Abortion Technology.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 64 (3): 407–​421. Bokovoy, Melissa K. 1998. Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–​1953. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bonfiglioli, Chiara. 2019. Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector. London: I.B. Tauris. Božinović, Neda. 1953. “Izveštaj o radu komisije za porodične odnose na selu.” [“Report of the Committee for Family Relations in the Countryside.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 5. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Committee Zagreb AFŽ. 1953. “Komisija za izmjenu nekih zakonskih propisa, Gradska organizacija Zagreb AFŽ.” [“Committee for Changing of Some Laws, City Organisation of the Zagreb AFŽ.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 4. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Djilas, Milovan. 1953. “Govor na IV Kongresu AFŽ.” [“Speech at the Fourth AFŽ Congress.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 5. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Djurić, Goja. 1948. “Govor na II Kongresu AFŽ.” [“Speech at the Second AFŽ Congress.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 2. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Fejić, Ibrahim. 1950. “Ja dijelim mišljenje naroda, a narod je rekao svoju riječ.” [“I Share the People’s View, and the People Have Spoken.”] Žena danas 75 (September): 3. Fidelis, Malgorzata. 2010. Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Field Report. 1952. “Izveštaj ekipe koja je obradila teren sreza titogradskog.” [“Report from a Team that Worked in the Area of Titograd.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 12. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Goldman, Wendy Z. 1993. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–​1936. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Gudac-​Dodić, Vera. 2006. Žena u socijalizmu: položaj žene u Srbiji u drugoj polovini 20. veka. Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije. –​–​–​–​. 2008. “Divorce in Serbia.” Tokovi istorije 1–​2: 137–​148. Hoffmann, David L. 2011. Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–​1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. 2009. “Rodni aspekti socijalističke politike pamćenja Drugoga svjetskog rata.” In Kultura sjecanja: 1945. povijesni lomovi i savladavanje proslosti, edited by Sulejman Bosto and Tihomir Cipek, 59–​81. Zagreb: Disput. Jancar-​ Webster, Barbara. 1990. Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–​ 1945. Denver, CO: Arden Press.

339

340

Ivan Simić Jovanović, Miroslav. 2008. “Preslikana ili samobitna društvena izgradnja: komparativna analiza ustava FNRJ (1946) i ‘Staljinskog’ ustava SSSR-​a (1936).” Tokovi istorije 1–​2: 280–​290. Koh, Jana. 1947. “Udarnica Matilda Baruh.” [“A Shock-​worker Matilda Baruh.”] Žena danas 48 (June): 6–​8. Kovačević, Dušanka. 1950. “Govor na III Kongresu AFŽ.” [“Speech at the Third AFŽ Congress.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 3. The Archives of Yugoslavia. “Krivični zakonik” [“Penal Code”]. 1951. Službeni list Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije [The Official Gazette of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia] 13 (March). Lóránd, Zsófia. 2018. The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. New York: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Mujdović, Zahra. 1953. “Govor na IV Kongresu AFŽ.” [“Speech at the Fourth Congress of the AFŽ.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 5. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Nakachi, Mie. 2010. “‘Abortion Is Killing Us’: Women’s Medicine and the Postwar Dilemmas of Soviet Doctors, 1944–​1946.” In Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science, edited by Frances Lee Bernstein, Chris Burton, and Dan Healey, 195–​213. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Očak, Ivan. 1988. “Staljinski obračun s jugoslavenskim partijskim rukovodstvom u SSSR-​u.” Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest 21: 81–​106. Pantelić, Ivana. 2011. Partizanke kao građanke: društvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji, 1945–​ 1953. Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju. Perović, Jeronim. 2007. “The Tito–​Stalin Split: A Reassessment in Light of New Evidence.” Journal of Cold War Studies 9 (2): 32–​63. Pezo, Edvin. 2018. “Emigration and Policy in Yugoslavia: Dynamics and Constraints within the Process of Muslim Emigration to Turkey during the 1950s.” European History Quarterly 48 (2): 283–​313. Proceedings. 1951. “Stenografske beleške sastanka izvršnog odbora Centralnog odbora Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije.” [“Proceedings from the Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 8. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Prokop, Ana. 1946. Ravnopravnost žene, brak i porodica: po Ustavu Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije [Equality of Women, Marriage and Family: According to the Constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia]. Zagreb: Antifašistički front žena Hrvatske. Proleter. 1933. “Jedini put potpunog oslobodjenja žene.” [“The Only Road to a Full Liberation of Women.”] Proleter 1 (January): 11–​12. Rener, Tanja. 1985. “Yugoslav Women in Politics: Selected Issues.” International Political Science Review /​Revue Internationale de Science Politique 6 (3): 347–​354. Report. 1949. “Problemi uposlenih žena i briga sindikalnih organizacija za njihovo pravilno rešenje.” [“Problems of the Employed Women and Attempts of the Union Organisations for their Correct Solutions.”] Collection 117, Savez sindikata Jugoslavije, box 235. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Report. 1953. “Materijal za referat IV Kongresa AFŽ Jugoslavije.” [“Material for the Report of the Fourth AFŽ Congress.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 4. The Archives of Yugoslavia. Simić, Ivan. 2018. Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sklevicky, Lydia. 1984. “Karakteristike organiziranog djelovanja žena u Jugoslaviji u razdoblju do Drugog svjetskog rata.” Polja: časopis za kulturu, umetnost i društvena pitanja 30 (308): 415–​417. –​–​–​–​. 1989. “More Horses Than Women: On the Difficulties of Founding Women’s History in Yugoslavia.” Gender & History 1 (1): 68–​73. –​–​–​–​. 1996. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Druga; Ženska infoteka. Timasheff, Nicholas S. 1972. The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia. World Affairs: National and International Viewpoints. New York: Arno Press. Tomšič, Vida. 1940. “Referat na V Zemaljskoj konferenciji.” [“Report at the Fifth Conference.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 10. The Archives of Yugoslavia. –​–​–​–​. 1946. “Rad i zadatak Antifašističkog fronta žena.” [“Work and Task of the Antifascist Women’s Front.”] Žena danas 40 (March): 2–​3. –​–​–​–​. 1952. “Postoji li kod nas žensko pitanje.” [“Does the Woman Question Exist in Our Country.”] Žena danas 99 (September): 1–​2.

340

341

Yugoslav gender and Soviet influences –​–​–​–​. 1953. “Mesto i uloga ženskih organizacija u današnjoj etapi razvitka socijalističkih društvenih odnosa.” [“The Place and Role of the Women Organisations during the Contemporary Stage of the Development of Socialist Social Relations.”] Collection 141 AFŽ, box 5. The Archives of Yugoslavia. –​–​–​–​. 1954. “Da li je legalizacija pobačaja prihvatljivo rešenje?” [“Is Legalisation of Abortion an Acceptable Solution?”] Borba, January 17. Unkovski-​Korica, Vladimir. 2016. The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-​Alignment. London: I.B. Tauris. Wiesinger, Barbara N. 2009. “Rat partizanki—​žene u oružanom otporu u Jugoslaviji 1941–​1945.” Historijska traganja 4: 201–​226. Wood, Elizabeth A. 1997. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

341

342

33 STRUGGLES TO RECONCILE WOMEN’S WAGE LABOR AND KITCHEN LABOR IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC Alice Weinreb

By the 20th century, modern industrial economies, capitalist as well as communist, had recognized that societal pressures on women to cook for their families limited their options for wage labor. Some countries, including Spain and West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, FRG; in German, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD), discouraged women from wage labor by pressuring them to “return” to the kitchen. Others, including the USA and East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR; in German, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR), attempted to modernize private cooking to enable women to combine private cooking with joining the workforce. Modernization as a strategy meant different things to different economies. Communist economists advocated collectivization as a key method of reducing individual labor, embracing the expansion of canteens, school meals, and other forms of collective food preparation and consumption. Although contemporary scholars rarely connect women’s experiences in the labor market with the industrial food system, the two are in fact inextricably intertwined. By underscoring the importance of both private foodwork and collective meals for determining women’s access to political and economic equality, this chapter explores the particular ways in which gender was shaped by the communist food economy. A close examination of the GDR’s food system reveals both impressive successes and striking limitations in East German communist ambitions for what they considered emancipation. The very success of East Germany’s collective eating establishments confirmed rather than challenged the societal necessity of female home cooking. Factory and school eating halls enabled women to join the workforce in record-​breaking numbers. At the same time, the primarily male planners of the GDR continued to perceive cooking as a definitionally female activity. This deeply held conviction proved a profound limitation to the achievement of equality for the women of the GDR.

342

343

Women’s wage and kitchen labor in GDR

Communist approaches to cooking Understanding communist ideology demands a serious engagement with the relationship of home cooking to the national economy. Home cooking was crucial for the effective labor of the working class but, at the same time, it seemed deeply counterproductive. The many hours women spent toiling at their stoves were hours that were not spent toiling in factories, mines, and other industrial workplaces. Equally problematic was the ephemeral nature of cooking—​intensive and highly skilled work that results in an object that is promptly consumed. Even more disturbing was the fact that family cooking was not remunerated. All of this made home cooking seem like the ultimate form of oppression and exploitation. Vladimir Lenin himself proclaimed that only canteens could provide “the simple, everyday means [to] really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life” (quoted by Heitlinger 1979, 17). Early communist thinkers consistently imagined a world where both food production and consumption were collective, assuming that canteens would liberate women from cooking and thus allow them to achieve equality (Weinreb 2017). Collective eating programs have received relatively little attention from scholars of communism. There have been important exceptions; historians of China (Wemheuer 2019) and the Soviet Union (Goldman and Filzer 2015) have begun to explore canteens as a key aspect of labor history and the history of everyday life. However, canteens’ relationships to women’s engagement in the workforce remains peripheral. Scholarship on gender and communism has generally focused on consumer culture and the private sphere for understanding the everyday lives of women in communist regimes (Betts and Pence 2007; Bren and Neuburger 2012; Merkel 1999; Pence 2001). Even the limited scholarship on foodways in communism has emphasized women’s food shopping, restaurant meals, and private eating rather than collective eating (Caldwell, Dunn, and Nestle 2009). In the case of the GDR, this absence is especially striking because canteens and school cafeterias fed so much of the population for much of the country’s existence (1949–​1990). By the 1960s, about two-​thirds of the nation’s children were eating in cafeterias, and by the 1980s, the number was an impressive 92 percent. Canteen participation was more variable, but by 1980, 65 percent of the working population ate at least one daily meal at a canteen (Weinreb 2017). There were also many other forms of collective eating establishments that fed specific segments of the population, including the elderly, the sick, and university students. Thus, East Germany offers a particularly interesting case study for understanding the complex ways in which a communist state negotiated women’s relationship to food production. The relationship between women’s work and the GDR’s food supply was especially fraught. After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, a brief but dramatic surplus of women made gender equality rhetorically central to the development of the first ever expression of “socialism on German soil.” Postwar food shortages were particularly severe and particularly political in occupied and divided Germany. As a result, East German communism created a food system that shaped women’s lives and societal gender expectations in distinctive ways. Relatively generous state funding and a well-​developed network of interdisciplinary collaboration meant that East Germany developed a system of collective eating for children and adults that was admired by experts from not only within the Soviet bloc, but by British, Scandinavian, and American nutritionists as well. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the resultant dissolution of the GDR in 1990, there has been considerable discussion of women’s experiences, aspirations, and disappointments under communism. By many counts, East Germany achieved impressive 343

344

Alice Weinreb

gains in gender equality. By 1970, three out of four East German women worked outside of the home and women made up 48.3 percent of the total workforce. By the late 1980s, almost all adult East German women worked in some capacity outside of the home (Harsch 2007, 303). The country enjoyed the highest standard of living in the Eastern bloc and was one of the wealthiest and stablest of “second world” nations until its dramatic collapse in 1990. Stability and relative economic prosperity came at a price, however, relying in large part on the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the country’s infamous secret police (the Stasi). This postwar economic growth was also dependent upon the near-​complete incorporation of women into the productive economy, of which the country’s politicians were well aware. Perhaps for this reason the GDR, despite its many oppressive aspects, was one of the few countries in the Eastern bloc to have a self-​identified, if quite small, feminist movement (Kenawi 1995; Martens 2001), and East German women reported high levels of personal fulfillment, sexual satisfaction, and economic independence (McLellan 2011). The end of the GDR in 1990 meant not only a massive wave of permanent unemployment for the country’s women—​within two years of reunification, women made up roughly two-​thirds of the region’s unemployed, and the majority would never return to the job market (Rosenfeld, Trappe, and Gornick 2004)—​but also the near-​complete dismantling of the social services that had shaped East German citizens’ everyday lives for decades, chief among them various collective eating programs. All of this inspired many scholars to claim that East Germany’s women were the “losers of reunification” (Young 1999).

Women’s work and kitchen labor in the GDR The dilemma of private cooking had been a central concern for East German economists, nutritionists, and architects since the early years of the country’s formation. In the aftermath of World War II and under the economic pressures of Soviet occupation, the question of whether or not the home should be considered a formal workplace or a sphere of leisure and consumption was far from trivial (Ziegelmayer 1949). In the words of East Germany’s first Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl, “man can do nothing less noble than expecting women to be his unpaid serving girl” (quoted in Schubert 1980, 51). Of all household chores that oppressed women, cooking was especially troublesome. Unlike shopping and cleaning, cooking was essential to public health and thus to the productivity of the national economy. Yet it also represented the single largest time-​drain on the housewife, limiting her ability to work outside of the home. Cooking, a form of private domestic labor that women performed for cultural and emotional reasons rather than for financial reward, did not fit into the standard model of a modern industrial economy. Because cooking was tied so tightly to the act of consumption—​both shopping and eating—​its nature as productive labor had often been subsumed or ignored by economists. Perhaps most nefariously, the sensual nature of cooking and eating, its intimate relationship to pleasure, allowed foodwork to be easily shifted to the sphere of leisure rather than labor. For the communist GDR, which defined the value of individuals in relation to their labor potential, the question of how to define labor was of paramount importance. In the face of the destruction wrought by World War II, the necessity of drawing all adults, especially the women who made up the majority of the postwar population, into the workforce encouraged an absolute and aggressive rhetoric regarding domestic labor. While men were returning to the workforce after the war, many women were supposed to enter it for the first time—​a more complicated rhetorical project for the state. Heinrich Gräfe, 344

345

Women’s wage and kitchen labor in GDR

head nutritionist at the internationally renowned East German Institute of Nutritional Research, explained that the “incorporation of women into the public world” required that “we must realize that their thousand year old duty to be responsible for the shaping of daily food intake can no longer be maintained” (Gräfe 1967, 120). Women’s traditional assignment to the kitchen was recast as something structurally linked to unappreciated labor, marital inequality, and improperly nourished children. So-​called traditional home cooking was linked explicitly to exploitative labor; Grandma’s cookbook, in the West an icon of abundance, security, and cherished traditions, was in the GDR associated with a lack of personal fulfillment, poor familial health, and gendered exploitation. East German thinkers, unlike in some more radical communist states, never called for the elimination of private cooking. (Both China and Russia went much further than the GDR in theoretically calling for an end to women’s private cooking, as had various US and European utopian thinkers since the 19th century.) Cookbooks specifically targeting working mothers were a booming branch of the publishing industry in the GDR. While postwar capitalism consistently emphasized women’s cooking skills as crucial for winning and caring for husbands, in East German communism women needed to cook for their children, whose health and productivity was thus dependent upon the unpaid labor of their mothers.

Collective meals and female emancipation The establishment of workplace canteens had two equally important and connected goals: (1) maintaining the productivity and health of workers and (2) increasing the number of workers by allowing women to join the workforce. The first major research institute founded in 1946 in the Soviet Zone, later to become the GDR, was the Anstalt für Verpflegungswesen [Institute for Collective Catering]. Created with the financial support of the Soviet occupying army, the institute became an important component in the struggle against hunger that followed the war; it also explicitly linked the establishment of public dining halls with the establishment of German communism. However, as envisioned by GDR planners, the country’s modern and scientific network of workplace canteens functioned as a resource and inspiration for women who were continuing, albeit in modified form, to cook for their families. Industrial canteens were supposed to confirm the significance of women’s private cooking. Nutritionists envisioned a complex food system within which collective meals were responsible for the maintenance of daily nourishment and collective health, enabling productive labor of the masses, while private cooking constituted a vital but ephemeral component of the country’s emotional life. Canteens provided adults and children with their primary meals (breakfast and lunch), but it was the snacks, treats, and small meals prepared with love by mom that would provide the psychological glue holding families together. This food reflected and created the love that bound genders and generations together, ironically thought to fulfill the same women who were being told that the only path to fulfillment was paid labor. While workplace canteens received the bulk of the country’s nutritional research attention and funding, the school lunch program proved more popular and more meaningful in shaping women’s daily lives. Since the country’s founding, the GDR had been deeply committed to state-​sponsored school lunches. East German mothers were regularly reminded that “it is, after all, the school meal program that first made it possible for many mothers to pursue their careers in peace” (Henschel 1968, 11). By the 1980s, more than 85 percent of East German schoolchildren were eating at least one hot meal a day 345

346

Alice Weinreb

at their schools, and mothers who cooked midday meals for their children had become an anomaly, in dramatic contrast to West Germany where mothers continued to cook hot lunches for their families throughout the postwar decades. Despite these real achievements, school lunches were not as emancipatory as had been expected, since they did not sever the binds tying East German women to the kitchen. Women, specifically mothers, remained the core labor force for the school meal program. Early on, the vast majority of school cafeterias were staffed by housewives without formal training, a pattern that was tolerated and even encouraged by a state hard-​pressed for labor; motherhood was considered the relevant qualification for cooking school meals. By the 1970s, most school cafeterias were staffed by trained and paid full-​ time workers—​but the labor of these women continued to be framed by a maternalist language that distinguished school cafeterias from masculine and rationalized workplace canteens. While discussions of workplace canteens emphasized the scientific training of largely male cooks, reports on school cafeterias described the emotional warmth, not professional expertise, of the staff. Regional and national newspapers regularly described the all-​female staff of school cafeterias as maternal figures who cooked with “love” and used their “hearts” to flavor their savory dishes (Weinreb 2011). This maternal school lunch program reframed the value of home cooking within a collective, industrial setting.

Remaking “home cooking” as a communist necessity By the 1960s, East German rhetoric insisted that a good communist mother must not only work but also cook—​although differently and less frequently than her grandmother. Women’s food preparation labor must be transformed from exploitative capitalist slave labor into an empowering form of feminine self-​expression. This transformation generally happened by emphasizing the scientific aspects of cooking: Have you ever thought about the enormous scientific work—​ the research, pondering, calculations, tests and not least of all the incredibly precise handiwork—​ necessary to send a manned spaceship around earth or into the atmosphere? … in cooking … there is just as much research, considerations, calculations, and tests. (Drummer and Muskewitz 1968, 5) Cookbooks and nutritional education programs emphasized increasing women’s scientific knowledge about diet, spreading modern techniques like steaming rather than boiling foods, not soaking cut vegetables, and eating frequent, smaller meals. Unlike in the West, which frequently described private cooking as a sort of delightful and incredibly easy game, communist experts made few attempts to downplay the seriousness and intense labor that proper cooking required. Cooking was both an obligation and a science, and as such should be taken seriously by the women who were expected to recognize it as their responsibility. (The fact that mothers, unlike astronauts, did not receive wages for their labor remained unaddressed.) As women’s employment rates steadily grew, there was a clear shift toward encouraging a fairer distribution of domestic labor among the family members as a way of reducing women’s unpaid kitchen-​work. By the late 1960s, expanded home economics programs for grade schools targeted boys as well as girls, anticipating that the next generation of fathers and husbands would need to take over increased responsibilities in 346

347

Women’s wage and kitchen labor in GDR

the kitchen. In 1971, the women’s magazine Für Dich [For You] advised working women to always boil potatoes in their skins, not only because of added nutritional value but because it meant that the labor of the peeling would be done by whomever ate that specific potato. Kitchen technology promised to reduce women’s labor not only by taking over some of their traditional tasks, but by simplifying them enough so that children, and even adult men, could occasionally take over aspects of food preparation. Home meals should become “not an individual but a familial issue. All who eat the meal must also play a role in creating it” (Gesunde Küche leicht gemacht 1963, 32), an obligation that demanded from women the new task of delegating the labor of cooking. Such ostensible egalitarianism, however, was qualified with reminders that “of course the housewife has the last word—​and ultimately primary responsibility—​in tasting and flavoring the dishes” (1963, 32). East German communism promised to link the family and the workplace as the two primary sites of human life-​identity. Remaking the labor of the housewife was one of this goal’s most important symbols. The promise to free women from the slavery of the stove, however, was realized not by rejecting the home-​cooked meal but by remaking their cooking as productive labor, ostensibly equivalent to the labor of the working classes. The requirement that women enter the workforce thus did not accompany a meaningful challenge to their continued responsibility for domestic labor—​in particular cooking—​but it did change familial dynamics (gender and generational relations) and the relationships between food, production, and consumption. Few aspects of bourgeois family life proved as difficult to imagine away, even though in other ways East German women lived lives far removed from the despised middle-​class norm that communist thinkers claimed to reject. By the 1970s, they had levels of job training and education, low birthrates, easy access to birth control and abortion, and high rates of divorce and childbirth outside of marriage. Studies revealed that East German women enjoyed multiple sexual partners, and access to full-​time and long-​term childcare. All of these factors were recognized as enabling women’s extremely high employment rates (McLellan 2011; Szepansky 1998). However, East German women were never freed from the expectation that they should personally prepare food for their children. While wage labor itself promised women access to personal and professional fulfillment, canteens were to serve as educative models of optimized recipes for their female consumers. Workplace cafeterias were imagined as a cooking school for women, while remaining a space of leisure and consumption for their male colleagues. A revolution in the kitchen proved more difficult, and for East German men much less desirable, than other, more seemingly dramatic revolutions in the political and economic spheres. The fact that East German women kept cooking for their children and, to a lesser degree, for their husbands, had profound material as well as ideological consequences. Women in the GDR consistently earned less than their male counterparts, received fewer promotions, and occupied lower-​status positions in most fields of work. Although East German women prepared substantially fewer meals than their counterparts in West Germany thanks to collective feeding programs, by the 1980s they were still spending approximately 37 hours a week on housework, and food preparation and cleanup made up the largest proportion of this work (Kaminsky 2001, 87). This labor was different not only in quantity but also in kind from that performed in the West; in the East, lunches were almost never eaten at home, and dinners were usually cold rather than hot. Most strikingly, private food labor was always fit around a woman’s work schedule, rather than, as in the West, around the husband’s work schedule. East 347

348

Alice Weinreb

German women consistently centered their identity around their employment rather than their domestic abilities. In the GDR, cooking was often a source of public anger for women, who continually complained about their mandated double burden. Recurrent letters of complaint to women’s magazines as well as local government offices resulted in constant surveys and evaluations of the country’s gender-​ labor divide. Women’s magazines regularly reported the disappointing results of national surveys on free time among the working population; despite decades of declared progress, the findings of a 1966 internal study stayed constant for the duration of the GDR: “a whole series of regularly occurring household chores remain for psychological and traditional reasons the responsibility of women … but especially in the realm of food provisioning and preparation there is substantial room for reducing and easing housework” (“Komplexes Programm für die Erleichterung und Verringerung der Hausarbeit,” 1966, Stadtarchiv Leipzig 20237 /​31647). East German women adapted various strategies of balancing these pulls, including shorter work days or part-​time employment, selecting workplaces closer to their homes, and taking on fewer positions of responsibility at their workplaces (Gysi and Meyer 1993, 159). As family cooks, they tended to continue the German tradition of a cold dinner (usually bread, salad, cheese, and meats) rather than a meat-​based cooked dinner, as well as often using the weekends to bake for the entire week.

Conclusions Even within a socialist discourse of women’s emancipation, the GDR maintained and valorized the family meal. This economic and discursive reliance on home cooking served to both normalize and make mandatory women’s domestic labor. According to East German idealists, the GDR’s version of communism distinguished itself through its commitment to female participation in the workforce. Collective meals were accurately recognized as a crucial strategy for enabling women to work; yet, paradoxically, canteens were not supposed to totally eliminate women’s private cooking responsibilities. While East Germany’s impressive network of workplace canteens and school cafeterias dramatically reduced the number of meals that women needed to prepare at home, this reduction actually elevated in significance the importance of “mom’s cooking,” which shifted from being a practical, biological necessity (as in countries where women prepared all of their families’ daily meals) to being vital emotional and symbolic labor. The family meal did not offer its participants an enduring haven of love and tender care, nor did canteen lunches successfully produce female empowerment or domestic equity. Ultimately, pressures on East German women to produce family meals as “food for the soul” rather than nutrition for the body radically limited the achievement of gender equality. The case of the GDR teaches another lesson as well; perhaps the single most effective method of bringing women into the workforce was the availability of widespread and relatively high-​quality meals for the population, especially for children. East German women themselves asserted what the state also claimed; it was above all the school lunch program that freed women up to join the workforce. Both these positive and negative lessons ultimately confirm the centrality of managing food preparation for determining women’s social and economic status, and for broader questions of gender equity, in all societies, communist or not.

348

349

Women’s wage and kitchen labor in GDR

References Betts, Paul and Katherine Pence, eds. 2007. Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bren, Paulina, and Mary Neuburger, eds. 2012. Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. Caldwell, Melissa, Elizabeth Dunn, and Marion Nestle, eds. 2009. Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Drummer, Kurt and Käthe Muskewitz. 1968. Kochkunst aus dem Fernsehstudio: Rezepte, Praktische Winke, Literarische Anmerkungen [The Art of Cooking from the TV Studio: Recipes, Practical Tips, Literary Notes]. Leipzig: Fachbuchverlag VEB. Gesunde Küche leicht gemacht: Ein Taschenbuch für die werktätige Hausfrau. [Healthy Cooking Made Easy: A Handbook for the Working Woman]. 1963. Berlin: Zentralstelle f. Werbung d. Lebensmittelindustrie. Goldman, Wendy and Donald Filzer. 2015. Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gräfe, Heinrich -​Karl. 1967. Richtige Ernährung, gesunde Menschen. Nahrungsbedarf, Ernährungsweise u. Kostpläne unter verschiedenen Lebens-​u. Arbeitsbedingungen [Proper Diet, Healthy People. Nutritional Needs, Ways of Eating and Meal Plans for Various Living and Work Conditions]. Leipzig: Fachbuchverlag. Gysi, Jutta and Dagmar Meyer. 1993. “Leitbild: berufstätige Mutter—​DDR-​Frauen in Familie, Partnerschaft und Ehe.” [“Model: Working Mother—​GDR Women in Family, Partnership and Marriage.”] In Frauen in Deutschland, 1945–​1992 [Women in Germany 1945–​1992], edited by Gisela Helwig and Hildegard Nickel. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. Harsch, Donna. 2007. Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heitlinger, Alena. 1979. Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Henschel, Rolf. 1968. “… Nun Lasst es euch Schmecken.” Für Dich 6: 11. Kaminsky, Annette. 2001. Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück: Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR [Prosperity, Beauty, Happiness: A Small Consumer History of the GDR]. Munich: Beck. Kenawi, Samirah. 1995. Frauengruppen in der DDR der 80er Jahre: eine Dokumentation. [Women’s organizations in the GDR in the 1980s: A Documentation]. Berlin: GrauZone. “Komplexes Programm für die Erleichterung und Verringerung der Hausarbeit.” [Complex Program for the Easing and Reducing of Housework]. 1966. Stadtarchiv Leipzig 20237 /​31647. Martens, Lorna. 2001. The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McLellan, Josie. 2011. Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merkel, Ina. 1999. Utopie und Bedürfnis: Die Geschichte der Konsumkultur in der DDR [Utopia and Needs: The History of Consumer Culture in the GDR]. Köln: Böhlau. Pence, Katherine. 2001. “‘You as a Woman will Understand’: Consumption, Gender, and the Relationship between State and Citizenry in the GDR’s June 17, 1953 Crisis.” German History 19 (2): 218–​252. Rosenfeld, Rachel A., Heike Trappe, and Janet C. Gornick. 2004. “Gender and Work in Germany: Before and After Reunification.” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (August): 103–​124. Schubert, Friedel. 1980. Die Frau in der DDR: Ideologie und konzeptionelle Ausgestaltung ihrer Stellung in Beruf und Familie [The Woman in the GDR: Ideology and Conceptual Structure of her Position in Career and Family]. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Szepansky, Gerda. 1998. Die stille Emanzipation: Frauen in der DDR. [The Silent Emancipation: Women in the GDR]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-​Taschenbuch-​Verlag. Weinreb, Alice. 2011. “Die sozialistische Schulspeisung: Kinder, Mütter und die Bedeutung der Arbeit in der DDR.” [“The Socialist School Lunch: Children, Mothers and the Meaning of Work in the GDR.”] In Hunger, Ernährung und Rationierungssysteme unter dem Staatssozialismus [Hunger, Nutrition and Systems of Rationing in State Socialism], edited by Matthias Middell and Felix Wemheuer. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

349

350

Alice Weinreb –​–​–​–​. 2017. Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth Century Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. Wemheuer, Felix. 2019. A Social History of Maoist China: Conflict and Change, 1949–​ 1976. New York: Cambridge. Young, Brigitte. 1999. Triumph of the Fatherland: German Unification and the Marginalization of Women. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ziegelmayer, Wilhelm. 1949. Neue Nahrungsquellen: Kommunalpolitische Aufgaben zur Sicherung der deutschen Volksernährung [New Sources of Nutrition: Communal-​political Tasks to Ensure the Food Supply of the German People]. Berlin: Heymann.

350

351

PART V

The ambiguous postcommunist transitions

352

353

INTRODUCTION The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Janet Elise Johnson, Mara Lazda, and Katalin Fábián

Part V of this Handbook is about the reconstructing of gender as Central-​Eastern European and Eurasian (CEE&E) societies have moved away from Leninist interpretations of communism and developed a variety of economies and political regimes in new relationships with Europe, Russia, neighbors, and more distant parts of the world. Pointing out similarities to other regional contexts and using different analytical lenses such as postcolonialism, some scholars suggest that postcommunism should no longer be the guiding framework for analyzing gender. Chapters in this Part demonstrate the possibilities arising from, and the challenges discovered in, situating the study of gender in CEE&E within and beyond the differentiated, but shared legacy of the communist experience and postcommunist transitions. Moving past the unanswerable questions as to whether the political–​economic transitions were better or worse for women than for men, Part V embraces ambiguity as an analytical tool. The evaluation of the transition has to be seen as ambiguous when intersectionality is taken seriously. For many in the region, there is a perception of sustained crisis. The livelihoods of working-​class and minority women and men as well as older women have become more precarious with deindustrialization and the drastic cutting of state jobs and services, exacerbated by the austerity measures adopted by most regimes in the wake of the global financial crash in 2008. But, chapters here also interpret how some women and a few LGBTQ people, as well as elite men, benefit from the privileges of class, nationality, religion, and postcommunist generation that enable them to participate in new economic, political, and migration opportunities. Claiming ambiguity in the political transitions, the chapters ascertain how democratization holds more promise for gender equality, but deeper democratization instead of less is needed in the wake of multiple continuing transitions. Some countries, such as Russia, have never consolidated even the minimal form of democracy and others, such as Hungary and Poland, have moved away from it, with governing elites instead turning to sexism, homophobia, racism, and xenophobia to generate support for their form of authoritarianism. While membership in the European Union, which eleven postcommunist countries had attained by 2020, held promise for gender and LGBTQ equality in the 2000s, the chapters in this Part show ambiguous results in terms of meaningful inclusion of women

353

354

Janet Elise Johnson et al.

and alternative sexual identities. Accession required passing gender equality reforms and anti-​discrimination laws as well as the creation of gender equality policy agencies, but scholars consistently find that the EU’s efforts have been thin and inconsistent. Most polities in the region lack the political interest to consolidate these reforms long term; many have backtracked when confronted by anti-​gender activism. Similarly, the Council of Europe’s “Convention on preventing and combating violence against women” (the Istanbul Convention) became politicized and hamstrung in postcommunist countries for its claims that gender is socially constructed. The chapters stake a claim for further inflection points for gender beyond 1989/​1991, such as EU accession and the global financial crisis. Expanding the perspective beyond the borders of CEE&E, this Part also finds migration ambiguous, especially in terms of how to assess agency and shifting identities in these situations constrained by economics, asylum laws, sexism, and homophobia. Some women migrants find themselves in abusive conditions as healthcare providers, domestic workers, sex workers, and in the garment trade, such as Ukrainian, Russian, and Moldovan women employed in Turkey, but chapters here show that migration may enable them to challenge gendered expectations of all-​encompassing motherhood and create now kinds of intimacy. Similarly ambiguous are the privileges and marginalization of some gay men and lesbians who needed to leave, especially after Russia’s anti-​gay legislation, turning to places they imagined as more LGBTQ-​friendly, like Berlin, Israel, and New York City, but then are compelled to choose between their various national, religious, and sexual identities. The substantial international attention centered on the use of rape as a weapon of war in the former Yugoslavia has appeared the least ambiguous, bringing important innovations in international law. These include the fuller incorporation of women’s voices as victims and advocates in the post-​conflict accountability process and the recognition of rape as a war crime; however, local activists found that this came at the cost of downplaying women’s agency and could not provide much-​needed social support on the ground. The attention to this conflict, where the gendered dynamics were made so evident, has made it harder for gendered scholarship to attend to not-​so-​frozen conflicts in territories around the former Soviet Union, such as Nagorno Karabakh. These conflicts too have displaced and disempowered many women and women’s activists and exacerbated turns toward gender traditionalism in the nation-​states involved in the conflict.

354

355

Democratic and economic changes

356

357

34 GENDER AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF ECONOMIC TRANSITION IN ROMANIA Jill Massino

While Romania experienced systemic change following the collapse of state socialism, the ensuing transformation did not signify a dramatic rupture for all as daily life continues to be characterized by challenges, uncertainty, and precarity. By the mid-​1990s, scholars of gender in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE) generally agreed that women had fared worse than men due to deindustrialization, economic restructuring, and the revival of traditional gender roles. This, they argued, contributed to job loss, workplace discrimination, and the curtailment of social entitlements, which, in turn, led to the feminization of poverty (Einhorn 2010; Fodor 1997). While recognizing notable positive changes, scholars of the region also expressed concern about the increased influence of the church, women’s under-​representation in politics, and state efforts to hamper reproductive freedom (Gal and Kligman 2002). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the picture appeared more complex and less gloomy as some women had successfully adapted to market conditions by mobilizing their cultural capital (facility in foreign languages and experience with westerners; Ghodsee 2005; Weiner 2007). In Romania as well, cultural capital has enabled some women to secure well-​paying jobs and even thrive in the market economy. In contrast, many female (as well as male) laborers who had been employed in socialist industry and lost their jobs owing to restructuring have struggled to find work commensurate with their skills. Although many women work in retail and manufacturing, these jobs are temporally demanding, subject to market fluctuations, and, in light of rising inflation and scaled-​back entitlements, often do not pay enough to cover basic expenses. This chapter examines how Romania’s transition from a command economy to a market economy has affected women’s employment patterns and standard of living, their ability to reconcile work and family responsibilities, and their view of the state. As in other countries in CEE, the transformation to liberal democracy and a capitalist system has been characterized by ambiguities. Individuals have been granted civil and political rights, which they actively express by participating in multiparty elections, associational life, and through popular mobilization, and the shift to a market economy has expanded 357

358

Jill Massino

employment opportunities, especially for enterprising women who possess social and cultural capital and marketable skills. Yet, women (as well as men) also face new uncertainties and vulnerabilities as work is no longer guaranteed by the state and the onus is on the individual to find their place in the new system. Moreover, women face workplace discrimination, particularly pregnant and Roma women and women with disabilities, and have minimal or no possibility for collective bargaining. The curtailment and cutting of social entitlements have exacerbated economic uncertainty, particularly for female single-​ headed households, Roma families, and women retirees, who receive the lowest pensions (Băluță 2011). Rising costs for basic goods and services, as well as the adoption of austerity measures in response to the global financial crisis in 2008, has dramatically affected many Romanians’ quality of life, though the more vulnerable segments of the population have been especially hard hit. While the opening of Romania’s borders and EU accession (in 2007) have expanded employment opportunities, in some cases working conditions abroad are poor, pay is low, and employees experience exploitation or abuse by employers. Emigration has also reduced the size of the active population, which negatively affects the state budget and separates children from their parents for extended periods. Given the ambiguities associated with these changes, women’s views of the transition vary considerably. Women who have “made it” tend to believe it is the individual’s, rather than the state’s, role to ensure personal livelihood, and that through hard work and perseverance one can successfully navigate the system. These women ignore the systemic roots of social inequality and precarity, which prevent some individuals from thriving—​or even maintaining a decent standard of living—​in the postsocialist economy. In contrast, female blue-​collar workers, many of whom were middle-​aged when socialism collapsed and lost their jobs as a result of restructuring, tend to be critical of the neoliberal state. They believe the government should guarantee economic security and, more generally, civic well-​being by directing resources toward education, healthcare, housing, and supporting vulnerable populations (Bucur and Miroiu 2018; Massino 2019). Accordingly, these women viewed the transition to capitalism ambivalently, if not negatively. Such discontent is shared by individuals who were born during and after the final decade of communist rule and have experienced material uncertainty as adults. Some from this cohort of women emigrated for study or employment and have been active in protesting elite corruption, which they target for ordinary Romanians’ continued precarity.

The gendered dimensions of privatization During the final decade of socialist rule, Romanians’ standard of living declined sharply as the government, in an effort to pay off foreign debt, increased exports and decreased imports and began rationing food, gasoline, and other essentials. As individuals relied on the black market to compensate for shortage, increasingly more of their earnings went toward food and other necessities. In addition, utilities such as heat, electricity, and water were subject to interruptions, and state facilities, such as hospitals, experienced supply shortages and power outages. The burdens of late-​socialist austerity fell heavily on women as they were responsible for most domestic duties, further exacerbating the stresses produced by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s pronatalism. This program, which included the criminalization of abortion (in 1966) and surveillance of hospitals by the militia and Securitate (to prevent illegal abortions), resulted in the death of approximately 10,000 women from abortion-​related complications between 1966 and 1989. These repressive

358

359

Gender and economic ambiguities in Romania

measures coexisted with a number of social rights implemented after World War II, such as work, universal education, and healthcare, which, despite their shortcomings, improved the lives of many. Work, which was defined as a right and a duty, was guaranteed to all citizens (except those who had been imprisoned), and individuals could expect to be employed for the entirety of their lives. In addition to economic remuneration, work served as a networking site through which people acquired goods and services, as well as a moral and emotional support system. A large proportion of the active population was employed in socialist industries, some of which—​particularly gas-​guzzling heavy industry—​placed a huge drain on an already over-​stretched state budget. With the collapse of socialism in 1989 and the subsequent advent of liberal democracy, the government, in an effort to make the Romanian economy competitive, began downsizing, privatizing, or closing industrial enterprises throughout the country. In contrast to Poland, which followed the rapid “shock therapy” approach to privatization, Romania’s economic transformation was a gradual process, and restructuring was beset by corruption and clientelism as former communist elites enriched themselves through back-​door dealings. Meanwhile, as inflation skyrocketed into the double (and even triple) digits during the 1990s, ordinary Romanians sunk deeper into poverty, with the result that by the late 1990s more than half of the population lived at or below the poverty level. Alongside deindustrialization and privatization, the welfare state shrunk after 1989, as it did across CEE. Privatization in Romania was also influenced by the dictates of external lending bodies (e.g., the IMF and World Bank), which contributed to the erosion or wholescale elimination of social entitlements such as state-​subsidized (public) childcare facilities. In fact, the postsocialist welfare state is far from woman-​friendly, as the state has redistributed money in a way that is advantageous to men (through generous leave packages and high salaries and pensions for male-​dominated public sector jobs) and disadvantageous to women (Miroiu 2004). While the Romanian economy experienced a boom in the early 2000s, it was hard hit by the global financial crisis of 2008, to which then President Traian Băsescu responded with a number of austerity measures, slashing the salaries of public sector employees by 25 percent—​with the exception of select positions, many of them male-​dominated. An increase in the Value Added Tax accompanied these measures. In addition to cuts in pensions and childcare subsidies, over the course of the 1990s and 2000s the state slashed benefits for particular groups, namely the disabled, orphans, the homeless, single-​parent households, the long-​term unemployed, the HIV infected, and victims of violence and trafficking (Bucur and Miroiu 2018). While policymakers presented such cuts as necessary, the state has invested millions in the construction of new churches, and retired members of the Securitate and police receive among the highest pensions.

Negotiating precarity and uncertainty With the downsizing and closing of state-​run enterprises, many Romanians struggled to transition from one system to another. However, some Romanians—​primarily men in heavy industry (e.g., miners and steelworkers) who could rely on the support of unions to negotiate leave packages—​were insulated from poverty during the first decade of transition. Meanwhile, many women industrial laborers were let go and forced to fend for themselves in the marketplace (Pasti 2003). In addition to loss of income and the personal validation their jobs conferred, many individuals lost the social networks they

359

360

Jill Massino

had developed—​networks that, in some cases, served as vital material support systems. In severe cases, people lost their homes and were forced to live with relatives, in improvised shelters, or on the streets. Blue-​collar women workers who entered middle age during the 1990s were in a particularly difficult position as they lacked marketable skills and were not as resilient or flexible (due to age and/​or family care responsibilities) as younger women who could attend university or acquire computing or other skills through job-​ training programs. In contrast, women with advanced degrees and cultural capital were more successful in adapting to market capitalism. Such women fared particularly well (from the late 1990s on) in the small-​business sector, often founding their own companies. By 2016, one-​third of all entrepreneurs in Romania were women—​well above the EU average—​though they own smaller businesses and generate much less revenue than their male counterparts (Paul 2016, 42). Romanian women also face a glass ceiling as they are grossly under-​represented in the highest echelons of power in large companies and corporations, both in absolute terms and relative to EU averages (European Institute for Gender Equality 2018). Like under socialism, the labor force is vertically segregated, with men assuming leadership roles in all sectors of the economy. The labor force is also segregated horizontally as women dominate in healthcare, education, social work, retail, and light industries (e.g., textiles and food processing), where they typically earn less than men in comparative jobs such as engineering, transport, utilities, and the army, police, and secret services. Although the gender pay gap in Romania is among the narrowest in the EU, at 5.2 percent in 2016, this is due to the fact that wages in Romania, regardless of gender, are among the lowest in the EU. While restructuring displaced some women from the labor force, the female percentage of the total employed has not experienced a sharp decline as it has in other CEE countries. Over the last three decades, women’s employment rates in Romania have consistently exceeded the EU average. For instance, in 2000 women (aged 20 to 49) constituted 46.9 percent of the labor force, dropping only to 45.6 percent in 2006 and 43.3 percent in 2015 (Eurostat 2008; “Ocupare şi Somaj, Anul 2015” 2016). Unemployment rates (for men and women alike) have remained relatively low, increasing during the early 1990s and then again during the global financial crisis, after which they declined. A number of factors explain women’s low unemployment rate, from women’s younger retirement age (61) and their return to agricultural production, to the fact that women are no longer actively looking for work (and thus not registered as unemployed) and because millions have migrated to other parts of Europe for work. While emigration increased substantially with Romania’s entry into the EU in 2007, it soared after the global financial crisis. However, employment data do not capture those working in the informal or gray economy, a large portion of which are women. In light of these factors, women’s participation in the labor force remains high, as it was under socialism. Although the majority of Romanians of working age are employed, many do not earn a living wage as employment is no guarantor of material security. Between 2014 and 2016, the relative poverty rate was 25 percent, falling slightly, in 2017, to 23.6 or 4.6 million (“Dimensiuni” 2019). While women’s presence in state industries declined with privatization, they constitute a large portion of those employed in the non-​industrial public sector (state institutions and institutes), which, until recently, has not been subject to downsizing. However, until the 2017 wage increase many female-​dominated public sector jobs were poorly remunerated, especially when compared to male-​dominated, public sector jobs.

360

361

Gender and economic ambiguities in Romania

Sink, swim, or tread water? Navigating neoliberalism Navigating the choppy waters of postsocialism requires making compromises and employing various strategies to manage economic change and uncertainty. After 1989, many women lost their jobs as a result of restructuring and, because they lacked advanced degrees and cultural capital (i.e., foreign language and computing skills), were at a particular disadvantage for securing work. While some made ends meet by working long hours, often combining a number of jobs, including in the informal economy, others, at least after 2007, chose to emigrate. Marketization, particularly in its neoliberal variant, is thus predicated on flexible, adaptable, and mobile workers. However, as the state no longer guarantees (or forces individuals to) work, employment is presented as a personal choice, masking structural constraints in the economy and the challenges in securing—​ and keeping—​a job in a system subject to market shocks. Thus, successful adaptation to the new economic climate requires adopting various strategies—​or descending deeper into poverty—​a process Gal and Kligman (2002, 76) refer to as “market coercion.” During socialism, individuals also adopted strategies to manage uncertainty—working in the underground economy to supplement income or bartering for scarce goods or luxury items–but this was considered a rational response to a flawed system. With the transition to pluralism and marketization, however, Romanians expected an ideologically sound system, wherein diligence and merit, rather than connections, favoritism, or luck, would ensure a decent and even good standard of living. Choice and agency thus obscure the hierarchies and uncertainties embedded in the neoliberal system—​the reality that (mostly male) local elites and external bodies dominated economic and institutional change and that industries collapsed overnight. The financial crisis exacerbated these uncertainties, as factories and businesses downsized or closed, in some cases without paying their employees (Oddone 2019). In addition to challenges securing—​or retaining—​work, women face challenges in securing affordable childcare, and many families cannot afford the private crèches and daycare centers established after state-​subsidized facilities closed. This situation creates difficulties in reconciling work and family, especially in rural or semi-​rural areas where there are little or no childcare options, prompting parents to rely on informal caregiving, namely a (most often unpaid) relative or low-​paid nanny to stay home with children until they reach school age. With the broadening of maternity leave to family leave in 1999 men now have the option to stay at home with their children; however, due to men’s generally higher earnings and the persistence of traditional ideas about caregiving, the vast majority of men do not take leave. Consequently, the employment rate for women (aged 20 to 49) decreases when they have a young child. Women’s absence from the labor force in turn hampers their chances for economic reintegration, not to mention promotion. It also reduces their pension, further reinforcing economic inequality between men and women. Job insecurity in the private sector or fear of being passed over for promotion discourages women from taking the full two-​years’ leave, and the law itself discourages parents from taking the full two years’ leave as the monthly subsidy is substantially reduced for the second year. Due to low wages and the lack of subsidized childcare options, then, many women have chosen to limit family size, or not have children at all. As a result, as in most of CEE, the fertility rate in Romania is below the natural replacement rate. This, coupled with the high emigration rate, has affected the demographic character of the country, raising concerns about having enough workers to support the older generations (in 2015 the active population was 4.85 million out of a total population of 19.8 million). 361

362

Jill Massino

Although economic uncertainty has prompted women to limit family size in Romania, it has also prompted popular mobilization. After the government proposed a cut in the child allowance and childcare subsidies for single parents in 2010, NGOs, alongside parents with babies in strollers and sacks of diapers in hand, protested in front of the Ministry of Labor. The protestors claimed that these subsidies were not charity given to families by the state but their rights as working citizens, underscoring the continued salience of social citizenship in their understanding of the relationship between state and citizen. They also connected curtailment of subsidies to declining fertility rates, underscoring that government cuts, not simply–or even necessarily–personal choice, were hampering demographic growth. Women who were young when socialism collapsed, particularly those with a university degree or cultural capital, have more effectively navigated economic change. In some cases, these women found lucrative work in the private sector, opening up their own businesses. Such women tended to see the possibilities rather than the limitations of marketization, a sentiment they shared with Czech female managers who claimed capitalism had offered women new opportunities that they simply needed to take advantage of (Weiner 2007). This “new class” of educated, enterprising, and assertive women subscribed to what Weiner (2007, 6) refers to as the “metanarrative of the market.” They believed the market is not only the best but also the only alternative to socialism. This view, however, neglects the reality that many women (as well as men) lack the education and skills necessary for securing work, or at least well-​paid work, in the competitive marketplace. Thus, these white collar women’s experiences depart from those of laborers whose skills are no longer in demand and for whom the market has not been synonymous with success, but with dashed hopes and material uncertainty. Emigration is one strategy for women who have been unable to find gainful, satisfying, or well-​remunerated employment. While Romanians immigrated to Canada, the United States, and various parts of Europe in the 1990s, with EU accession and especially the onset of the global financial crisis, during which the Băsescu government encouraged emigration, this process accelerated, with Romania losing approximately 10 percent of its population between 2009 and 2011 (Ther 2016, xiv). This included women and men from a host of occupational backgrounds: doctors, information technology specialists, and other skilled professionals along with laborers employed in construction, agriculture, domestic service, and the hospitality industry. While some women, particularly professionals and those who have been joined by family, have fared well abroad, many continue to experience precarity and, in some cases, dangerous and exploitative working conditions. On farms in Sicily, for instance, Romanian women agricultural workers have been victims of sexual assault, forced labor, and trafficking (Tondo and Kelly 2017). Poor working conditions are evident in Romania too, as some blue-​collar women workers are subject to mistreatment by bosses, earn below the minimum wage, work long shifts without additional remuneration, and have minimal or no possibility of redress through collective bargaining (Oddone 2019). Emigration has also affected family cohesion and emotional health by separating children from their parents. By 2014, an estimated 350,000 children had one or both parents working abroad and were cared for by the remaining parent or, if both parents were abroad, extended family or older siblings. Although families also experienced periods of rupture during the socialist period as parents commuted from rural areas to industrial towns, because borders were closed, the distance between work and home was considerably less than it currently is. The material remittances of Romanians working abroad 362

363

Gender and economic ambiguities in Romania

are often essential for covering basic necessities, including medical costs, and have also enhanced children’s educational prospects, covering the cost of a tutor, a computer, and university tuition. While the media has criticized women who have emigrated for “leaving their children behind,” citing such children’s increased susceptibility to depression, drug abuse, and poor school performance, this assessment shifts responsibility away from the market and state, obscuring the systemic roots of the problem. Lack of viable employment opportunities, especially in defunct industrial towns and cities, dire poverty, particularly in female-​headed, single-​parent households, and government-​imposed austerity measures and political corruption should instead be targeted for blame. Emigration is thus often a pragmatic response to a system that has failed women and families—​as well as a means for providing children with opportunities for educational and social advancement. This underscores the imbalance between East and West, and in the case of mothers who migrate to work as nannies for western families, one of the tragic ironies of EU enlargement. In addition to female single-​headed households and Roma families, retired women are among those at greatest risk of falling into poverty as they receive smaller pensions than men due to their earlier retirement age, comparatively lower salaries, and because many women were forced into early retirement during economic restructuring. Those with fewer than 35 years in the labor force receive a lower-​than-​average pension—​often well below subsistence level, while those with fewer than 15 documented years in the labor force do not qualify for a pension at all. Although the monthly pension amount increased in 2019, it is often insufficient for covering basic expenses such as utilities and medicine. As a result, retired women feel the state, for which they had worked for decades, has betrayed them by not providing a livable pension (Bucur and Miroiu 2018; Massino 2019). Moreover, they express frustration with privileged groups, namely those who worked for the Securitate, police, and army (all men) who enjoy among the highest pensions in the country.

Conclusions Given the repressiveness and penury of the 1980s, Romanians had, arguably, the most to gain in CEE with the collapse of state socialism and adoption of liberal democracy and market capitalism. While 1989 brought an end to one-​party rule, rationing, and pronatalist policies, and Romanians were granted a range of political rights, it also brought deindustrialization, privatization, and curtailment of social entitlements. The process was also beset with corruption. Consequently, many blue-​collar workers lost their jobs, while former members of the communist elite enriched themselves, translating their political capital into economic capital. Individuals with marketable skills, by contrast, transitioned more or less smoothly from one system to the next. So too did those with connections and well-​educated and young individuals who lived in urban areas. People lacking advanced degrees and marketable skills, however, were less successful in refashioning themselves after 1989—​often due to factors outside of their control. Many, especially middle-​aged factory workers and older women, experienced downward mobility and were forced to look to the market and informal economy for work or survive on meager pensions. Meanwhile, for working mothers the scaling back of social entitlements and closing of state-​subsidized child facilities further exacerbated economic uncertainty, posing challenges in reconciling work and family, and contributing to lower employment rates for women with young children. 363

364

Jill Massino

While Romania experienced an economic boom in the early 2000s, it was felt mainly by the middle class and elite, though easy credit also increased the increased the purchasing power–as well as indebtedness–of the lower class. This upswing was short-​lived, however, as the global financial crisis of 2008 led to the adoption of austerity measures, increasing social inequality and precarity and undermining women’s ability to support themselves and their families. Alongside material poverty, neoliberalism has produced time poverty, both for white-​collar and blue-​collar workers, as individuals take on part-​time work in addition to their official jobs. This, combined with caring for young children, elderly relatives, and those with disabilities, has presented challenges in reconciling work and family. Others have simply left the country altogether, and Romania and Bulgaria have the highest emigration rates (as a percentage of the total population) within the EU, a reality which affects family cohesion as well as the demographic character of the country. This situation is not unique to Romania as women in the West, as a result of neoliberal policies and the global economic crisis, have also been struggling with material uncertainty, including unemployment, underemployment, and the scaling back of social entitlements. Precarity and poverty (both time and material poverty) are not products simply of the transitions in the former Eastern Bloc, then, but part of a larger, global shift to a neoliberal paradigm. Consequently, the economic changes Romania and other CEE countries have experienced—​and continue to experience—​are a function of both local and global realities and processes. At the same time, Romania serves as a particularly good case for illuminating the ambiguities of transition. As one of the CEE countries with ostensibly the most to gain after 1989, the benefits of transition have been felt unevenly and have not come to fruition for some as daily realities still generally lag behind expectations.

References Băluță, Oana, ed. 2011. Impactul crizei economice asupra femeilor [The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Women]. Bucharest: Maiko. https://​centrulfilia.ro/​publicatii/​Impactul-​Crizei-​EconomiceAsupra-​Femeilor.pdf. Bucur, Maria and Mihaela Miroiu. 2018. Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. “Dimensiuni ale Incluziuni Sociale în Romania, 2018.” [“Dimensions of Social Exclusion in Romania, 2018.”]. 2019. Institutul Naţional de Statistică. https://​insse.ro/​cms/​ro/​content/​ dimensiuni-​ale-​incluziunii-​sociale-​%C3%AEn-​rom%C3%A2nia-​2. Einhorn, Barbara. 2010. Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. European Institute for Gender Equality. 2018. “Gender Equality Index 2017: Romania.” https://​ eige.europa.eu/​publications/​gender-​equality-​index-​2017-​romania. Eurostat. 2008. The Life of Women and Men in Europe: A Statistical Portrait. Gender Statistics Database, European Institute for Gender Equality. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. https://​ec.europa.eu/​eurostat/​documents/​3217494/​5698400/​KS-​ 80-​07-​135-​EN.PDF/​101b2bc8-​03f8-​4f49-​b4e4-​811fff81b174. Fodor, Eva. 1997. “Gender in Transition: Unemployment in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.” Eastern European Politics and Societies 11 (3): 470–​500. Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. 2002. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2005. The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massino, Jill. 2019. Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania. New York: Berghahn.

364

365

Gender and economic ambiguities in Romania Miroiu, Mihaela. 2004. Drumul către autonomie. Teorii politice feministe [The Path to Autonomy: Feminist Political Theory]. Iasi: Polirom. “Ocupare şi Somaj, Anul 2015.” [“Employment and Unemployment, 2015.”]. 2016. Institutul Naţional de Statistică. https://​insse.ro/​cms/​sites/​default/​files/​field/​publicatii/​forta_​de_​munca_​ in_​romania_​ocupare_​si_​somaj_​in_​anul_​2015.pdf. Oddone, Elisa. 2019. “Made in Eastern Europe: Garment Workers Denied Basic Rights.” Al Jazeera, September 22. www.aljazeera.com/​features/​2019/​9/​22/​made-​in-​eastern-​europe-garment-​workersdenied-​basic-​rights. Pasti, Vladimir. 2003. Ultima inegalitate: Relaţile de gen în România [The ultimate equality: Gender relations in Romania]. Iaşi: Polirom. Paul, Andreea. 2016. Forţa politică a femeilor [Women as a Political Force]. Iaşi: Polirom. Ther, Philipp. 2016. Europe Since 1989: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tondo, Lorenzo and Annie Kelly. 2017. “‘Terrible Conditions’: Police Uncover Abuse and Exploitation on Farms in Sicily.” The Guardian, October 31. www.theguardian.com/​global-​development/​ 2017/​oct/​31/​terrible-​conditions-​police-​uncover-​abuse-​and-​exploitation-​on-​farms-​in-​sicily. Weiner, Elaine. 2007. Market Dreams: Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

365

366

35 DEMOCRATIZATION, AUTHORITARIANISM, AND GENDER IN RUSSIA Andrea Chandler

Is democracy bad for gender equality in Russia? At first glance, the answer appears to be yes. In the 1990s, Russia began a transition from authoritarian communism to democracy, which initially brought considerable setbacks for women. Despite newly competitive elections, citizens elected fewer female parliamentarians than during Soviet times (Nechemias 1994, 4–​6; also Wolchik and Chiva, Chapter 42 in this Handbook). Those women who were elected to public office did not necessarily advance gender equality (Shevchenko 2002, 1203–​1204). Democratization also coincided with market privatization. Economic restructuring brought new opportunities, but the socioeconomic hardships of the 1990s were extremely hard on many Russian citizens (Shevchenko 2009, 15–​49). Russian women faced disproportionate unemployment, declining availability of social services, and an increased sense of discrimination in the professions (Posadskaya 1994, 160–​164). In addition, the expansion of media freedom included the distribution of literature that propagated misogynist views and which exploited women’s bodies (Sperling 1999). This chapter argues that while regime type (democracy or authoritarianism) does exert a strong influence on Russia’s gender regime—defined as the mix of political, economic, and cultural constructs of gender relations in the polity—​one cannot isolate the impact of democracy as an independent variable. This is because democratic experiments in Russia have occurred at times of intense socioeconomic change and disruptions in state capacity. Between 1989 and the present, Russia experienced upheavals and abrupt policy changes on a number of dimensions, all of which interacted to influence the gender regime. These transformative processes include state capacity building; the evolution of the rule of law; privatization of property; and the dynamics of state-​sponsored nationalism. In order to examine these complex relationships, the chapter offers a conceptual framework for understanding the gender regime in Russia and tracks its institutionalization over time. The consolidation of state power under Vladimir Putin’s presidency indicates that, in stable regimes, authoritarianism is associated with gender inequality, and that the gender regime in an authoritarian system may have different characteristics than in a democracy. 366

367

Democratization, authoritarianism, Russia

Regime type and gender equality The Russian case may be contextualized in the comparative political science literature on gender and regime type. Generally speaking, liberal democracies are better for gender equality than authoritarian regimes. Liberal democracies provide conditions in which progressive social movements can form freely (Encarnacion 2014; Tripp 2013, 515–​517). Once women gain political recognition, their representation may increase over time, leading to advances in equality (Beer 2009). In some contexts, feminists have advanced quotas to increase women’s representation in elected bodies (Krook 2008); in others, feminists have gained positions in government that have enabled them to advance policy reforms (Chappell 2002). Gender equality itself can promote economic prosperity and upward mobility (Arpino, Esping-​Andersen, and Pessin 2015; Esping-​Andersen 2007), thus reinforcing the social stability that helps to sustain democracy. In democratizing regimes, advances in gender equality may be uneven. As Waylen (2009, 2010) argues, transitions from authoritarianism to democracy can enable women’s activism to secure greater gender equality within the new liberal regime. Nevertheless, the causal relationship between democratization and gender equality is seldom linear, because democratization in practice tends to coincide with other processes. In recent decades, feminists’ efforts to advance women’s political representation have existed alongside the development of a neoliberal capitalism in which workers’ rights have lost ground and social inequality has widened (Fraser 2015, 702–​703; 2016, 281–​284). More specifically, in the countries of Central-​Eastern European and Eurasia (CEE&E), feminist studies observe that the postcommunist transition brought unexpected material hardships to women, notwithstanding the introduction of democratic contestation. Unemployment hit women especially hard; social services such as childcare were cut back. Discourses of the “traditional family” were revived, creating pressures for women to stay home and raise children (Funk and Mueller 1993, 1–​13; Gal and Kligman 2000). Ghodsee (2018, 10–​12) argues that throughout the postcommunist world, the sudden, chaotic nature of market reform exacerbated existing barriers to the inclusion of women in political decision-​making. Feminist activists in postcommunist countries were not operating in a level playing field, but in a political arena in which more conservative social forces had accumulated power (Einhorn and Sever 2003, 175–​178). Furthermore, regime changes may be accompanied by a breakdown of state capacity. Democracy may falter amidst the structural shocks that occur as authoritarianism breaks down. It is difficult to institutionalize inclusive policies during times of intense political upheaval, when few resources are available for distribution or enforcement. In the Russian Federation, this breakdown of state capacity was acute. Following the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia became its largest successor state. The Russian Federation became an independent state at a time when state authority was weakened by the disintegration of the powerful Soviet Communist Party, and by the economic crisis that had accelerated from the late 1980s onward. Russia’s democratization actually began during the late Soviet regime, under reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms (known as Perestroika) initially called for a more open political system, in which society would benefit from a shift in economic priorities. These reforms brought hope that the status of women could improve. Perestroika included the creation of a new Soviet parliament, whose members were chosen through partially competitive elections. But in the early 1990s as Gorbachev’s economic reforms faltered, polarization between communist 367

368

Andrea Chandler

hardliners and reformers intensified. The Soviet legislature’s reforms were not actually implemented: Perestroika ended in chaos with a failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991. The Russian Federation was now led by Boris Yeltsin, a market reformer who came to power in a contested presidential election. Yeltsin introduced reforms intended to create a capitalist market economy. The political environment became competitive, and elections gave citizens more representation.

The gender regime in Russia Table 35.1 below identifies the key features of the gender regime’s evolution in postcommunist Russia, while Table 35.2 considers the causal factors in the scholarship’s hypotheses about the role that regime-​building processes in shaping gender politics. On the second column from the left in the tables, we can identify the starting point of the transition. In the late Soviet period, full employment remained a regime goal, and most women worked full-​time outside the home. The Soviet regime emphasized full-​time employment for women, and socialist ideology justified the maintenance of social welfare programs such as childcare. In the 1980s, as the regime made population growth a goal, the Soviet legislature adopted new laws oriented toward gender equality: for example, extending parental leave and improving prenatal and maternal healthcare (Chandler 2013a, 31–​32). In Soviet times, women had relatively high representation in legislatures, but relatively low impact, as power de facto resided in the Communist Party rather than in the legislature. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, competitive elections demonstrated mixed results for women. While women’s representation declined, those who were politically active had arguably greater impact than in Soviet times. In the 1980s and 1990s, some of the most influential leaders of Russia’s democratic movement were women: among them were the late Liudmila Alexeyeva (a human rights activist and author) and the late Galina Starovoitova (a politician, assassinated in 1998). Prominent female politicians, such as Elena Lakhova, formed a political party (Lakhova 1995), Women of Russia, intended

Table 35.1  The gender regime (dependent variable)

Female representation rates Impact of women in leadership Social stability and safety net Gender equality Gender roles

Soviet period: 1980s

1990s

2000s

2010 onwards

High

Low

Low ↑

Moderate

Low

Moderate

Moderate ↓

Low

Moderate ↓ ↑

Low

Moderate

Moderate ↓

Moderate Work in paid employment as norm

Low Gendered trends in unemployment appear

Low ↑ Low ↓ Traditional gender roles encouraged, through both policy incentives and official discourse

Source: Author’s compilation.

368

369

Democratization, authoritarianism, Russia Table 35.2  Causal factors for explaining gender politics in the regime-​building process Soviet period: 1980s Regime type

1990s

Property

One-​party centrally Democratization planned economy State-​owned Privatization

State capacity Rule of law

Moderate Low ↑

Economic development

Stable economy, declining growth

Nationalism

High: official state Low: civic nationalism nationalism

Low Low (incoherent legal development) Unstable economy, declining growth

2000s

2010 onwards

Hybrid regime

Authoritarianism

Mixed: state capitalism, oligarchy, limited private market High High ↓ Low ↑ Low ↓ (inconsistent enforcement) Stable Stable economy, economy, declining improving growth growth High official Blend of state state and ethnic nationalism nationalism

Source: Author’s compilation.

to increase female representation in parliament and push for women-​friendly policies (Cook and Nechemias 2009, 25–​28). Independent women’s groups quickly established fruitful contacts with western counterparts, and some gained funding from western organizations (Hemment 2007, 3–​13). For example, such activities established support services for victims of domestic violence (Johnson 2009, 2). Russian women formed self-​help organizations, such as the Soldiers’ Mothers organization (Sundstrom 2005). The reformist climate at the time also allowed some concrete improvements in accepting social diversity: in 1993, Russia decriminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults (Rivkin-​Fish and Hartblay 2014, 99). But while the political arena enabled new opportunities for women to engage, President Yeltsin pursued a market privatization policy that was largely elite-​driven. Compared to men, women gained fewer shares in privatized enterprises, were less likely to gain ownership of their housing, and were left outside the male-​dominated economic elites (Liborakina 2001, 34–​36, 42–​43). These disparities in property and capital left women with relatively few resources to advance their political power, as prominent liberal politician Irina Khakamada (1999, 193–​197) once observed. Political efforts to advance gender equality were eclipsed by more powerful actors, especially the Russian Orthodox Church. As the Church’s Social Policy document declared, caring for the husband and family was an essential part of women’s nature (Russian Orthodox Church 1997, X.4 and X.5). The Church adopted conservative positions on a variety of policy issues that affected women, such as abortion, and it advocated strongly for monogamous marriages (Kizenko 2013, 198–​199, 606–​607). 369

370

Andrea Chandler

The loss of state capacity that Russia experienced with the collapse of the Soviet Union persisted throughout the 1990s. As the state’s centrally planned economy had collapsed, a new budgetary system was slow to take root, and political tension between Yeltsin’s executive and the legislature hampered the development of a cohesive body of laws. The resulting shortage of revenue created severe disruptions to the social safety net. Women were heavily affected by the shortfalls of childcare for working women, gaps in the healthcare system, and benefits for old age pensioners (Chandler 2004, 78–​86, 114; 2013a, 65–​74). As a small number of mostly male oligarchs gained political influence, women became the ultimate outsiders as the disparities between the wealthy and the impoverished eroded the inclusivity of the system. In 1999, Vladimir Putin became Russian Prime Minister, and following Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin was elected President in 2000. As scholars have well documented, democratic institutions eroded during his first two terms in office (McFaul 2018, 57–​62; Stoner-​Weiss 2006). In some respects, especially in this first decade, it may have looked like women were better off under Putin, and indeed Putin claimed that his policies benefited citizens by promoting stability and economic growth. A key part of the effort to reverse democracy was the adoption of a discourse that linked democratization to lawlessness. State capacity strengthened under Putin, due to an initial economic recovery and improved coordination between the executive and legislature. This contributed to the improved delivery of social welfare services. In 2006, Putin introduced pronatalist policies oriented toward encouraging women to have more children, establishing a statist form of nationalism that altered the gender regime by promoting traditional gender roles. Citizens were urged to pair off into monogamous marriages and procreate. Russian women were to assume most of the responsibility for child rearing. Patriotic citizens were expected to focus on their private lives in the family household (Chandler 2013a, 115–​118; Rivkin-​Fish 2010, 707–​716). As the tables above indicate, after 2000 women as a whole may have experienced some improvements in their material security and living standards. There was also an increase in women’s formal representation in legislatures, an improvement compared to the low point of the 1990s (Chandler 2013b, 76). Under Putin, a number of women attained positions of prominence in the leadership: Valentina Matvienko, a former governor of Saint Petersburg became the Speaker of the Federation Council, while El’vira Nabiullina became the head of Russia’s Central Bank. Nevertheless, the impact that women have in the political arena is low. Putin himself presents an image of male power (Sperling 2015). Putin’s cabinets have been predominantly male; of the four leading parties in the Duma (United Russia, the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and a Just Russia), none of them have ever had a female leader. Putin’s incremental expansion of authoritarianism has been accompanied by gaps in the rule of law, as few independent institutions exist that could enforce women’s individual rights to equality. There are few avenues of appeal for women who face discrimination or sexual harassment in the workforce. In 2003, the Duma adopted in the first reading a draft law on gender equality that would have provided remedies for such complaints, but it was never passed, and the Duma formally removed it from its agenda in 2018 (Gosudarstvennaia Duma 2018). Another barrier to women’s full participation in the workforce is access to affordable childcare, where demand has often exceeded supply. Many retired women provide childcare to grandchildren, but in 2018 a law was passed to raise retirement ages, which will keep women in the workforce longer before they can claim a pension (Zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii 2018). 370

371

Democratization, authoritarianism, Russia

Women continued to be at a disadvantage in the insecure property rights that have developed in Russian capitalism. In rural areas, the vast majority of landowners are men. Within married couples, typically the husband is the sole landowner (Wegren et al. 2017, 95–97). In addition to rural women, single mothers and sole female pensioners remain among the groups least well-​off in the postcommunist transition (Wegren et al. 2017; Zakirova 2014, 204). Forbes-​Russia’s list of the 200 wealthiest people in Russia included only six women; the wealthiest woman ranked only 79th (Forbes-​Russia 2018). Furthermore, a study published by the World Bank showed that Russian women’s incomes are significantly lower than men’s, even when levels of education, working hours and experience are comparable (Atencio and Posados 2015, 20–​25). It should be emphasized that in Russia under Putin, property rights became insecure for everyone, because of the regime’s arbitrary and inconsistent protection of property rights (Ledeneva 2013, Loc 415, 4979, 5369). From 2011 onwards, the causal relationship between authoritarianism and gender inequality in Russia became starker, as the country’s state power became consolidated and the economy reached a degree of stability, if not prosperity. A noteworthy trend is that official tolerance of LGBTQ individuals has dramatically declined since Putin became President. Putin himself made public remarks in 2006 that implied that gay and lesbian people were not helping to address Russia’s population crisis (Stella 2013, 474–​475). In 2013, Russia’s legislature passed the “gay propaganda” laws, which made it an administrative offense to speak about “nontraditional” relationships in the presence of children. The law imposed a chill on public discussion of LGBTQ identity, even advocating for equal rights and fair treatment. Various organizations, among them Human Rights Watch (2018, 6–​7, 13–​17), have expressed concerns about the safety of LGBTQ people. In the former separatist republic of Chechnya, President Ramzan Kadyrov presides over a regime that has been widely criticized for its alleged persecution of gay men (Benedek 2018, 10–​18) and for its policies of shaming women seen in public with uncovered heads (Human Rights Watch 2011, 9–​12). In addition, politically active women in Russia have included decidedly antifeminist personalities. The best example is Elena Mizulina, a long-​serving member of parliament (she has served in both houses) and one-​time Chair of the Duma’s committee on women, children, and the family in the mid-​2010s. Mizulina advocated for a number of draft laws in parliament, among them the law that made all but the most serious instances of domestic violence into misdemeanors rather than criminal offences (Walker 2017a, 2017b). In 2018, the “Me Too” movement reached Russia; a media furor resulted when several female journalists alleged that a parliamentary deputy, Leonid Slutsky, had sexually harassed them. The Duma’s ethics committee dismissed the complaints; subsequently a number of media withdrew their in-​house reporters from the Duma (Gessen 2018). As of 2020, other feminist groups continued to protest the prevalence of sexual harassment and to call attention to sexist themes in popular culture (RuNet Echo 2019). But women’s formal presence in political institutions remained low. Following the 2016 Duma election, women held 15.8 percent of seats; contemporaneously, women held 15 percent of the seats in the Upper House of Parliament, the Federation Council (Inter-​Parliamentary Union 2016 and 2017). This is well below the 2018 world average of 24 percent (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2018).

371

372

Andrea Chandler

Conclusions The Russian case draws attention to the methodological difficulties of measuring a simple relationship between democracy and the gender regime when there are many other variables involved. Over the course of three decades, Russia moved along an uneven trajectory from liberal democracy to hybrid regime to authoritarianism, rarely fitting neatly into any of those categories. Democratic openings have coincided with periods of conflict, state breakdown and economic crisis. Gender equality is difficult to institutionalize when a new democracy is established in a volatile, precarious environment. Citizens who face economic uncertainty may feel they have to choose between democratic freedoms and their family’s sustenance, a message often reinforced by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin. When rule of law is weak, the protection of citizens’ legal rights may cancel out any sense of agency they may have felt by their ability to cast a ballot in a competitive election. Gaps in the rule of law leave women with few legal protections against discrimination and domestic violence. Privatization creates new market opportunities, but if undertaken quickly, it tends to accentuate gendered disparities in the distribution of resources. Despite the gender hierarchy of the Putin regime, individual women have continued to advocate for more inclusive forms of politics. The political opposition that emerged in response to alleged electoral irregularities in 2011 and 2012 included some prominent female leaders: among them environmental activist Lidia Chirikova, who later emigrated (BBC News 2017) and TV personality Ksenia Sobchak, who ran an unsuccessful presidential election campaign in 2018. Since 2011, scholars have observed a trend of increasing political participation of the younger generation (Hemment 2015, 193–​195; Flikke 2017, 307). The political performance art group Pussy Riot gained worldwide attention in 2012 when three members stood trial for criminal hooliganism following a staged anti-​Putin punk rock performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Pussy Riot directly challenged Putin’s close relationship with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church and rejected the idea that young women should dedicate their lives to motherhood (Smyth and Soboleva 2014, 260–​264). In 2018, political protests led by Aleksey Naval’ny led to arrests of young activists, including women, as exposed on social media. Most recently, the anticorruption activist and lawyer Liubov’ Sobol made headlines for her high-​visibility presence in the summer 2019 protests against the alleged irregularities of the mayoral election in the city of Moscow (Danilova 2019). So while Putin’s regime provides considerable risks and disincentives for independent political engagement, women have not yet been politically neutralized. Should there be a democratic opening in Russia in the foreseeable future, female leaders may well play a leading role.

References Arpino, Bruno, Gøsta Esping-​Andersen, and Léa Pessin. 2015. “How do Changes in Gender Role Attitudes Towards Female Employment Influence Fertility? A Macro-​Level Analysis.” European Sociological Review 31 (3): 370–​382. Atencio, Andrea and Josefina Posados. 2015. Gender Gap and Pay in the Russian Federation: Twenty Years Later, Still a Concern. Washington, DC: World Bank Group, Poverty Global Practice Group. http://​documents.worldbank.org/​curated/​en/​838301468185384790/​pdf/​WPS7407.pdf.

372

373

Democratization, authoritarianism, Russia BBC News. 2017. “Goodbye Russia: A Generation Packs its Bags.” BBC News, December 23. www. bbc.com/​news/​stories-​42431009. Beer, Caroline. 2009. “Democracy and Gender Equality.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (3): 212–​227. Benedek, Wolfgang. 2018. OSCE Rapporteur’s Report under the Moscow Mechanism on Alleged Human Rights Violations and Impunity in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation. Warsaw: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. www.osce.org/​odihr/​407402. Chandler, Andrea. 2004. Shocking Mother Russia: Democratization, Social Rights, and Pension Reform in Russia, 1990–​2001. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. –​–​–​–​. 2013a. Democracy, Gender and Social Policy in Russia: A Wayward Society. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–​. 2013b. “Has the Putin–​Medvedev Tandem Improved Women’s Rights?” In Russia after 2012: From Putin to Medvedev to Putin—​Continuity, Change or Revolution? Edited by J. L. Black and Michael Johns, 73–​86. Abingdon: Routledge. Chappell, Louise A. 2002. Gendering Government: Feminist Engagement with the State in Australia and Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Cook, Linda J. and Carol Nechemias. 2009. “Women in the Russian State Duma.” In Women in Power in Post-​Communist Parliaments, edited by Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Sharon L. Wolchik, 25–​59. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Danilova, Maria. 2019. “‘You Cannot Forbid Love’: a Kremlin Critic’s Struggle.” The Atlantic, August 23. www.theatlantic.com/​international/​archive/​2019/​08/​russia-​politics-​protest-​alexei-​ navalny-​lyubov-​sobol/​596539/​. Einhorn, Barbara and Charlotte Sever. 2003. “Gender and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (2): 163–​190. Encarnacion, Omar G. 2014. “Gay Rights: Why Democracy Matters.” Journal of Democracy 25 (3): 90–​104. Esping-​Andersen, Gøsta. 2007. “Sociological Explanations of Changing Income Distributions.” American Behavioral Scientist 50: 639–​658. Flikke, Geir. 2017. “Monstrations for Mocracy: Framing Absurdity and Irony in Russia’s Youth Mobilization.” Demokratizatsiya 25 (3): 305–​334. Forbes-​Russia. 2018. “200 bogateishikh biznessmenov Rossii.” [“The 200 Richest Businessmen in Russia.”] Forbes-​Russia. www.forbes.ru/​rating/​360355-​200-​bogateyshih-biznesmenovrossii-​2018. Fraser, Nancy. 2015. “Feminism’s Two Legacies: A Tale of Ambivalence.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114 (4): 699–​712. –​–​–​–. 2016. “Progressive Neoliberalism versus Reactionary Populism: A Choice that Feminists should Refuse.” Nora—​Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 24 (4): 281–​284. Funk, Nanette and Magda Mueller. 1993. “Introduction.” In Gender Politics and Post-​ Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, edited by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller. New York: Routledge. Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gessen, Masha. 2018. “Russia Finally gets its #Me-​Too Moment.” The New Yorker, March 23. www.newyorker.com/​news/​our-​columnists/​russia-​finally-​gets-​its-​metoo-​moment. Ghodsee, Kristen R. 2018. Why Women have Better Sex under Socialism, and other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Nation Books. Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossiiskoi Federatsii. 2018. “Viacheslav Volodin predlozhil skontsentrirovat’sia na zaschite trudovykh prav zhenshchin.” http://​duma.gov.ru/​news/​27572. Hemment, Julie. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. –​–​–​–. 2015. Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Human Rights Watch. 2011. You Dress According to their Rules: Enforcement of an Islamic Dress Code for Women in Chechnya. New York: Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/​report/​2011/​03/​ 10/​you-​dress-​according-​their-​rules/​enforcement-​islamic-​dress-​code-​women-​chechnya.

373

374

Andrea Chandler Human Rights Watch. 2018. No Support: Russia’s ‘Gay Propaganda’ Law Imperils LGBT Youth. New York: Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/​sites/​default/​files/​report_​pdf/​russia1218_ web2.pdf. Inter-​ Parliamentary Union (IPU) PARLINE. 2016. “Council of the Federation: General Information about the Parliamentary Chamber.” http://​archive.ipu.org/​parline-​e/​reports/​2264_​ A.htm. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “State Duma: General Information about the Parliamentary Chamber.” http://​archive. ipu.org/​parline-​e/​reports/​2263_​A.htm. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Women in Parliaments.” http://​archive.ipu.org/​wmn-​e/​world.htm. Johnson, Janet Elise. 2009. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Khakamada, Irina. 1999. Devich’ia familiia. Moscow: Podkova. Kizenko, Nadieszda. 2013. “Feminized Patriarchy?” Orthodoxy and Gender in Post-​Soviet Russia.” Signs 38 (3): 595–​621. Krook, Mona Lena. 2008. “Quota Laws for Women in Politics: Implications for Feminist Practice.” Social Politics 15 (3): 348–​369. Lakhova, Ekaterina. 1995. Moi put’ v politiku. Moscow: Aurika. Ledeneva, Alena V. 2013. Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Liborakina, M. 2001. “The Social Consequences of Privatization for Women.” Problems of Economic Transition 43 (9): 34–​36. McFaul, Michael. 2018. From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Nechemias, Carol. 1994. “Democratization and Women’s Access to Legislative Seats: the Soviet Case, 1989–​91.” Women and Politics 14 (3): 1–​18. Posadskaya, Anastasia. 1994. “Women’s Studies in Russia: Prospects for a Feminist Agenda.” Women's Studies Quarterly 22 (3/​4): 157–​170. Rivkin-​Fish, Michele. 2010. “Pronatalism, Gender Politics and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Toward a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital.’” Slavic Review 69 (3): 701–​724. Rivkin-​Fish, Michele and Cassandra Hartblay. 2014. “When Global LGBTQ Advocacy became Entangled with Cold War Sentiment: A Call for Examining Russian Queer Experience.” Brown Journal of World Affairs 1 (1): 95–​112. RuNet Echo. 2019. “To Every Age Its Art.” Transitions Online, January 14. www.tol.org/​client/​article/​28163-​to-​every-​age-​its-​art.html. Russian Orthodox Church Department for External Relations. 1997. “The Basis of the Social Concept.” https://​mospat.ru/​en/​documents/​social-​concepts/​. Shevchenko, Iulia. 2002. “Who Cares about Women’s Problems? Female Legislators in the 1995 and 1999 Russian State Dumas.” Europe-​Asia Studies 54 (8): 1201–​1222. Shevchenko, Olga. 2009. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Smyth, Regina and Irina Soboleva. 2014. “Looking Beyond the Economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin’s Voting Coalition.” Post-​Soviet Affairs 30 (4): 157–​175. Sperling, Valerie. 1999. Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –​–​–​–. 2015. Sex, Politics and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Stella, Francesca. 2013. “Queer Space, Pride, and Shame in Moscow.” Slavic Review 72 (3): 458–​480. Stoner-​Weiss, Kathryn. 2006. “Russia: Authoritarianism without Authority.” Journal of Democracy 17 (1): 104–​114. Sundstrom, Lisa McIntosh. 2005. “Foreign Assistance, International Norms, and NGO Development: Lessons from the Russian Campaign.” International Organization 59 (2): 419–​449. Tripp, Ali Mari. 2013. “Political Systems and Gender.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon, 514–​535. New York: Oxford University Press. Walker, Shaun. 2017a. “Fury at Russian Move to Soften Domestic Violence Law.” The Guardian, January 19. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2017/​jan/​19/​russian-​soften-​domestic-​violence-​lawdecriminalise-​womens-​rights.

374

375

Democratization, authoritarianism, Russia –​–​–​–​. 2017b. “Putin Approves Legal Change that Decriminalizes Some Domestic Violence.” The Guardian, February 7. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2017/​feb/​07/​putin-​approves-change-​to-​lawdecriminalising-​ domestic-​violence. Waylen, Georgina. 2009. “What can Historical Institutionalism Offer Feminist Institutionalists?” Politics and Gender 5 (2): 245–​253. –​–​–​–. 2010. “A Comparative Politics of Gender: Limits and Possibilities.” Perspectives on Politics 8 (1): 223–​231. Wegren, Stephen K., Alexander Nikulin, Irina Trotsuk, and Svetlana Golovina. 2017. “Gender Inequality in Russia’s Rural Informal Economy.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 50 (2): 87–​98. Zakirova, Venera. 2014. “Gender Inequality in Russia: The Perspective of Participatory Gender Budgeting.” Reproductive Health Matters 22 (44): 202–​212. Zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii no 350-​FZ. 2018. “O vsesenii izmenenii v otdel’nye zakonodatel’nye akty Rossiiskoi Federatsii po voprosam naznacheniia i vyplaty pensii.” http://​kremlin.ru/​acts/​ bank/​43614/​page/​4.

375

376

377

Europeanization

378

379

36 EUROPEANIZATION AND THE CHALLENGE OF GENDER EQUALITY Andrea Spehar

This chapter assesses the impact of Europeanization on the promotion of gender equality in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE). Starting in the late 1990s, countries across CEE reformed their institutions and laws in part to attain membership in the European Union (EU). Eight of them (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) acceded to the Union in 2004 followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. As of 2020, the enlargement agenda of the European Union covers the countries of the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia. Although some scholars see gender more broadly, as including some aspects of LGBTQ issues, this chapter uses the EU concept of equality between women and men, focusing on economic and political equality as well as gender-​based violence. As is common, this chapter uses Europeanization to refer to the domestic consequences of European integration in terms of the policies and politics of each of its member states, candidate, and potential candidate countries (Börzel, Dimitrova, and Schimmelfennig 2017). Since 2000, a significant number of studies have examined the effects of Europeanization on gender equality policies and politics in CEE countries. Some studies have assessed whether the EU lived up to its commitment to gender equality and gender mainstreaming the enlargement process (e.g., Haskova and Kuízková 2008; Roth 2004; Steinhilber 2002; Van der Molen and Novikova 2005). Other studies have examined the implementation of EU equality legislation in the postcommunist accession states (e.g., Avdeyeva 2015; Bego 2015; Chiva 2009). In addition, scholars have examined how enlargement processes impacted women’s mobilization and the institutionalization of gender equality policies and politics through national machineries for the advancement of gender equality (e.g., Jezerska 2003; Spehar 2012). In general, scholars agree that the EU has developed into an important actor in the field of gender equality (e.g., Kantola 2010; Walby 2004). Beginning with the demand of equal pay for men and women, the principle of equality is being integrated into all European Community policies and activities through the framework of gender mainstreaming. Large bodies of EU legislative texts are dedicated to gender equality. This is mainly made 379

380

Andrea Spehar

up of various treaty provisions and directives concerning access to employment, equal pay, maternity protection, parental leave, social security, and occupational social security, the burden of proof in discrimination cases and self-​employment (Pollack and Hafner-​ Burton 2000). However, the scholarship on policy and policy formation also indicates a disjuncture between commitments at the EU level and outcomes at the member state level regarding gender equality policy and outcomes (e.g., Kantola 2010; Spehar 2012). While asking different questions and analyzing different processes, the research on policy implementation shares one common finding—​a relatively high adoption of EU-​related legislation ensuring and protecting gender equality and yet the significant lack of implementation of adopted policies (Cowles, Caporaso, and Risse 2001; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). The influence of the EU is mediated by intervening domestic factors that range from cultural, formal, and informal institutions, administrative capacity, and traditions of litigation. Research has demonstrated that domestic factors are of great importance in understanding the implementation of EU gender equality legislation and policies, for example ideologies of the ruling party, the role of the church in the country, and the strength of women’s movements. In terms of the EU’s gender equality approach, the most persistent critique is that the concrete policy strategies tackle the symptoms instead of the causes of gender inequality, such as structural obstacles in the form of a patriarchal system (Kantola 2010; Pollack and Hafner-​Burton 2000; Spehar 2012). EU gender equality policy is confined within the limits of liberal individualism, doing little to tackle the broader structural aspects of gender inequality in different spheres of social, economic, and political life (Lombardo 2003; Spehar 2012). Another way of framing this problem is to note that the nature of the EU gender equality policy itself is misleading because it does not recognize the distinction between “equality of rights” and “equality of results.” The fact that women and men are equal in their rights does not mean that they will achieve the same results.

EU impact on gender equality legislation: “hard law” and “soft law” In CEE, the EU was entering into a region with a communist legacy, which had an ambiguous commitment to gender equality, then complicated by a transition in the 1990s in which there were prominent calls for “re-​traditionalization” (Funk and Mueller 1993; Gal and Kligman 2000). There were, for example, arguments that women should be liberated from their “forced” participation in the labor market under communism and retreat to domesticity. At the same time, “the dual breadwinner model” was undermined by economic insecurity, with higher unemployment bringing an increase in women’s dependence on men’s incomes, and by a reduction of welfare state intervention, as a consequence of hard budget constraints and market austerity reforms. The EU’s intervention into gender in CEE was similarly ambiguous in its ostensible commitment to gender equality (as promised in various treaties) but in different ways. Social policy including gender equality was treated as less important than economic policy in the accession processes, leaving promises of financial assistance in the EU’s “conditionality” as less credible (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). As a result, gender equality issues were largely missing from the enlargement agenda, and thereby, the EU failed to live up to its commitment to gender equality and gender mainstreaming (Roth 2004; Spehar 2012; Steinhilber 2002). For example, Steinhilber (2002) notes, when examining

380

381

Europeanization and gender equality

the Progress Reports from the 2004 enlargement, that there is no systemic evaluation of the progress of the accession states regarding equal opportunities for men and women, and that the mentions of gender equality are scarce and very general, making assessing progress between years or countries difficult. Looking at the first stages of enlargement, Bretherton (2001) found that the values and practices of gender mainstreaming were being subordinated to the dominant, and deeply embedded neoliberal values of marketization and the economic benefits of enlargement. Roth (2004, 121) claims that “[g]‌ender equality came late onto the agenda of 5th enlargement… neo-​liberal principles of social and economic reforms that lacked a gender perspective were higher priority.” Accession negotiations required candidates to fulfill economic, political, and administrative/​institutional criteria as well as adopt all of the 35 chapters within the legislative framework of Acquis Communitaire (Acquis) in which the development concerning gender equality is monitored under ­chapter 19 (Employment and Social Policy) and ­chapter 23 (Judiciary and Fundamental Rights). At the time of the accession, EU gender equality legislation consisted of nine legally binding directives. These directives include issues such as equality with regard to part-​time work, self-​employment, social security schemes, occupational pensions, the burden of proof in discrimination cases, protection of pregnant workers, and parental leave. Given the communist history, most countries already had provisions in their constitutions and labor codes for equal treatment in the workplace, but there were, for example, no specific regulations for the reversal of the burden of proof in cases of sex discrimination or sexual harassment at work. In the period leading up to EU accession, significant advancements were made through the drafting and passage of anti-​ discrimination laws to prohibit sexually harassing conduct in the workplace (Avdeyeva 2015; Bego 2015). For example, Estonia passed the Gender Equality Act in 2004, which defines direct and indirect discrimination as well as sexual harassment; it also requires the promotion of gender equality by state institutions, local governments, and employers. In Slovenia, equal pay is more precisely defined in the Employment Relationship Act (2002), where Article 133 provides that for equal work and for work of equal value, employers are bound to pay workers equal wages irrespective of gender. In Lithuania, the Act on Equal Opportunities (1999) obliges employers to respect the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. With pressures from the EU, countries also added stipulations in their family laws that encourage sharing the responsibilities of raising children by emphasizing fathers’ rights, a new phenomenon in CEE countries (EIGE 2017). In spite of these EU-​influenced legislative efforts, the general assessment is that gender equality enjoys merely a de jure instead of de facto presence in society (e.g., Petricevic 2012; Spehar 2012, 2018). The transposition of EU hard laws—​ the binding legal instruments—​very often resulted in an overlap, a lack of clarity, and inconsistencies in the national gender policy legislation. Another concern is related to the limited resources available for implementation of the laws and different strategies for protecting women’s rights and achieving gender equality. In the field of gender equality and labor market policies, soft laws—​policy declarations, guidelines, or codes of conduct—​are also of importance. In the area of soft law the CEE countries were subjected to EU recommendations aiming to improve women’s access to the labor market, among others, childcare provisions (Morgan 2008). In 2002, the Barcelona targets were adopted by the European Council with the aim of increasing the availability of formal childcare arrangements. The targets set two objectives, namely

381

382

Andrea Spehar

to provide childcare places to at least 33 percent of children under three and to 90 percent of children aged between three and the mandatory school age. In 2006, the European Council reaffirmed its commitment to the Barcelona targets by adopting the first European Pact for Gender Equality. The Europe 2020 Strategy, launched in 2010, also points out the importance of access to childcare facilities and provision of care for other dependents in increasing labor market participation of women. While there was a communist legacy of providing childcare, the implementation varied widely, and after communism collapsed, there was a substantial drop in the number of childcare centers and pre-​elementary nursery schools that took place with little to no protest (Heinen 2002). As of 2020, the majority of CEE countries remain far away from achieving the Barcelona targets (EIGE 2017), suggesting the impact of the EU on this policy area was negligible. According to the European Commission (2018), the rates of childcare coverage in CEE countries are insufficient to serve as an impetus for women’s participation in the labor market.

National machineries for the advancement of gender equality National women’s organizations were a feature of all of the CEE countries during the state socialism. There is much disagreement among scholars as to whether official state socialist women’s organizations were agents on behalf of women or if they primarily acted as transmission belts of communist parties (see Hinterhuber and Fuchs, Chapter 3 in this Handbook). According to some scholars, the state socialist women’s organizations were appendages of male-​controlled Communist Parties and their role was merely to mobilize women’s support for party goals (e.g., Jancar 1978; Racioppi and O’Sullivan 1995). Others have argued, however, that the socialist women’s organizations could advocate for women’s interests, and help to improve women’s quality of life, despite their relationship to the state and the Communist Party (e.g., Daskalova 2007; Ghodsee 2012). It has also been argued that the official organizations were both friendly and unfriendly to women and at times even actively prevented women’s agency (Funk 2014). Paying no attention to this complex history, the EU membership process and international obligations (i.e., the Beijing Platform for Action) required governments in the region to set up new national machineries for the advancement of gender equality. For example, the Directive 2002/​73 requires the member states to establish institutional bodies to promote gender equality. Regarding the tasks and competences, such bodies should, among other things, conduct independent surveys concerning discrimination, publish independent reports and make recommendations, as well as provide “independent assistance to victims of discrimination in pursuing their complaints.” In the 1990s and 2000s, countries created special departments, directorates, agencies, and committees at the national and local level to deal with issues related to gender inequalities and discrimination (Bego 2015). CEE countries adopted differing approaches to their national machineries and its location within the ministerial hierarchy (Jezerska 2003). For example, in the Czech Republic, a Government Council for Equal Opportunities was created to help shape gender equality policy, whereas in Slovakia, it was a subsection for equal opportunities in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in the Slovak Republic. In Croatia, the Office for Gender Equality has been operating since 2000, with a Gender Equality Ombudsperson since 2003. Romania has a department for gender equality located at the intermediate level within the Ministry of Labor, Family, Social Protection and the 382

383

Europeanization and gender equality

Elderly, where equal opportunities between women and men are placed under the mandate of family policies. Lacking real domestic political commitment to these institutions, many of the bodies responsible for gender equality have been marginalized within the national governmental structures; split into different policy areas; and hampered by complex and expanding mandates; they lack adequate staff, training, data, and sufficient resources; and experience insufficient support from political leadership (European Parliament 2018). The austerity measures proposed in the context of the 2008–​2010 economic and financial crises disproportionately hit policies and institutions targeting gender equality (Kantola and Lombardo 2017). In several CEE countries, the gender equality institutional structures have been dismantled or cut back (European Parliament 2018). The bodies responsible for gender equality are increasingly replaced by bodies for the protection against discrimination on various grounds. The concerns are raised that a multidisciplinary approach undermines the importance of gender equality as the underlying ground of all inequalities and also leads to a reduction in the existing institutional capacity for, and commitment to, gender equality policymaking (European Parliament 2018). In the last several years, different actors working for gender equality in CEE countries, including national machineries, have been targeted by a campaign against so-​called gender ideology (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; see Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook).

The agency of women’s movements Funding support for women’s organizations and for NGOs working to achieve gender equality is an important element in the EU strategy to achieve greater gender equality and something that was particularly important in CEE where independent women’s organizing had been severely restricted during communism and where the 1990s legacy increased suspicion of women’s organizing. Several studies show how enlargement functioned as a “window of opportunity” for feminist movements in CEE (e.g., Krizsan and Roggeband 2018; Sloat 2005; Spehar 2012). Women’s transnational advocacy networks in Europe (e.g., the Karat Coalition and European Women’s Lobby) functioned as a source of both exchanges of knowledge and good practice as well as moral support that arises from being part of a network (Einhorn 2006). Several studies also point to the importance of international and EU gender equality norms in women’s movements’ policy lobbying in CEE countries (Krizsan and Roggeband 2018; Spehar 2007). There is a strong possibility that some aspects of international and EU gender equality norms would not have been implemented in CEE countries had the women’s movements not been engaged in the effort to convey the content of these norms to the public, place them on the political agenda, and lobby for their implementation. Women’s movements actors have also mobilized to transform and adopt the wording of various international laws in order to fit national legislative settings (Bego 2015; Spehar 2007). Scholars argue that the EU accession process in CEE was contradictory in its impact on women’s movements because it offered more political and economic opportunities to larger and better organized civil society organizations, disadvantaging smaller organizations (Rek 2010; Roth, 2007). The European Social Fund grants to support gender equality and anti-​discrimination are set in a way that excludes small organizations, mostly because of administrative burden and financial insecurity. At the same time, many other international foundations withdrew when CEE countries became EU members (Sloat 2005), and state financial support for women’s activism since the 1990s has been 383

384

Andrea Spehar

very limited and short-​term, leading to reduced financial resources. Over the last decade, with the mobilization against gender ideology, women’s activists working on gender issues became considered antipatriotic in their transposing of “western ideology.” Therefore, the sustainability of women’s NGOs in several CEE countries, even those with decades-​ long operation, is at risk.

Conclusions The EU enlargement process was a unique opportunity for the EU to promote gender equality, both through hard legislation and norm diffusion in the CEE region, but the results were mostly superficial. Part of the problem is that adaptational pressures do not automatically translate into domestic structural and policy change. Pre-​existing institutions, actors and policy environment mediate these pressures and affect the ultimate outcome. The lack of litigation from below, a lack of support by governments, weak equal treatment bodies, and shortcomings in the judiciary—​these difficulties led to a lot of the transposed legislation remaining dead letters. In CEE, poor implementation is also symptomatic of ingrained gender stereotypes, which cannot be uprooted through legislation alone. Communist authorities had declared gender equality goals, but many aspects were neglected in practice or subordinated to other policy areas considered to be of more imminent political importance. This public neglect of gender issues then continued during the transition period in CEE. Thus, the reception of EU gender equality promotion in CEE must be considered in the light of their common past based on contradictory attitudes toward gender equality—​made up of a combination of “socialist emancipation” provisions and a rather patriarchal structure of society with strong inbuilt gender role stereotypes. As long as there are no forceful and demanding enough constituencies both within and outside the national governments, the chance that the EU gender equality strategy would be implemented effectively is negligible. However, the effectiveness of the EU gender equality promotion has been a problem in older member states as well. While more systematic comparative analysis between Western European countries and CEE need to be undertaken, Central-​Eastern European countries appear to have similar forms of gender (in)equality to those of older member states despite different structural challenges, welfare-​state clusters, and historical and cultural institutions. Women and men remain far from equal in all EU member states, as high levels of employment segregation, persistent pay gaps, income inequalities, gender stereotypes, and sexism illustrate. Progress in reducing gender inequality has been slow in both Western and Eastern Europe as is repeatedly confirmed by the European Commission’s Annual Reports on Equality Between Women and Men. To achieve de facto equality, it is necessary to invest in additional efforts from the national and the EU level in order to attain equal economic independence and prosperity between men and women, to reach a balance between work and private life, to promote equal representation in the decision-​ making process, to abolish gender-​based violence and trafficking in human beings, and to eliminate gender stereotypes in various social areas.

References Avdeyeva, Olga. 2015. Defending Women’s Rights in Europe: Gender Equality and EU Enlargement. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bego, Ingrid. 2015. Gender Equality Policy in the European Union: A Fast Track to Parity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

384

385

Europeanization and gender equality Börzel, Tanja A., Antoaneta Dimitrova, and Frank Schimmelfennig. 2017. “European Union Enlargement and Integration Capacity: Concepts, Findings, and Policy Implications.” Journal of European Public Policy 24 (1): 157–​176. Bretherton, Charlotte. 2001. “Gender Mainstreaming and EU Enlargement: Swimming Against the Tide?” Journal of European Public Policy 8 (2): 60–​81. Chiva, Cristina. 2009. “The Limits of Europeanisation: EU Accession and Gender Equality in Bulgaria and Romania.” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 10 (2): 195–​209. Cowles, Maria Green, James A. Caporaso, and Thomas Risse, eds. 2001. Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Daskalova, Krassimira. 2007. “How Should We Name the ‘Women-​friendly’ Actions of State Socialism?” Aspasia 1 (1): 214–​219. EIGE. 2017. Reconciliation of Work and Family Life as a Condition of Equal Participation in the Labour Market. Luxembourg: European Institute for Gender Equality. Einhorn, Barbara. 2006. “Citizenship, Civil Society and Gender Mainstreaming: Complexities of Political Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe.” In Women’s Citizenship and Political Rights. Women’s Rights in Europe, edited by Sirkku K. Hellsten, Anne Maria Holli, and Krassimira Daskalova, 67–​85. London: Palgrave Macmillan. European Commission. 2018. Report on Equality between Women and Men in the European Union. Luxemburg: Publications Office of the European Union. European Parliament. 2018. Backlash in Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Rights. Brussels: Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs. Funk, Nanette. 2014. “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4): 344–​360. Funk, Nanette and Magda Mueller, eds. 1993. Gender Politics and Post-​Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. New York: Routledge. Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman, eds. 2000. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2012. “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organisations: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–​1985.” Journal of Women’s History 24 (4): 49–​73. Haskova, Hana and Kuízková, Alena. 2008. “The Impact of EU Accession on the Promotion of Women and Gender Equality in the Czech Republic.” In Gender Politics in the expanding European Union. Mobilization. Inclusion. Exclusion, edited by Silke Roth, 155–​178. New York: Berghahn. Heinen, Jacqueline. 2002. “Ideology, Economics, and the Politics of Child Care in Poland Before and After the Transition.” In Child Care Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, edited by Sonya Michel and Rianne Mahon, 71–​94. New York: Routledge. Jancar, Barbara W. 1978. Women under Communism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jezerska, Zuzana. 2003. “Gender Awareness and the National Machineries in the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe.” In Mainstreaming Gender, Democratizing the State: Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women, edited by Shirin M. Rai, 167–​183. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Kantola, Johanna. 2010. Gender and the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo. 2017. Gender and the Economic Crisis: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Krizsan, Andrea and Conny Roggeband. 2018. The Gender Politics of Domestic Violence. Feminists Engaging the State in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Routledge. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte. 2017. Anti-​gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Lombardo, Emanuela. 2003.“EU Gender Policy: Trapped in the ‘Wollstonecraft Dilemma’?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 10 (2): 59–​80. Morgan, Kimberly J. 2008. “Toward the Europeanization of Work–​Family Policies? The Impact of the EU on Policies for Working Parents.” In Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union: Mobilization, Inclusion, Exclusion, edited by Silke Roth, 37–​59. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

385

386

Andrea Spehar Petricevic, Ivana. 2012. Women’s Rights in the Western Balkans in the Context of EU Integration: Institutional Mechanisms for Gender Mainstreaming. Brussels: European Parliament. Pollack, Mark A. and Emilie Hafner-​Burton. 2000. “Mainstreaming Gender in the European Union.” Journal of European Public Policy 7 (3): 432–​455. Racioppi, Linda and Katherine O’Sullivan See. 1995. “Organizing Women Before and After the Fall: Women’s Politics in the Soviet Union and Post-​Soviet Russia.” Signs 20 (4): 818–​850. Rek, Mateja. 2010. “Europeanisation of Civil Society Sector in Central and Eastern Europe.” Innovative Issues and Approaches in Social Sciences 3 (3): 60–​86. Roth, Silke. 2004. “Opportunities and Obstacles—​Screening the EU Enlargement Process from a Gender Perspective.” Loyola University Chicago International Law Review 2 (1): 117–​127. –​ –​ –​ –. 2007. “Sisterhood and Solidarity? Women’s Organizations in the Expanded European Union.” Social Politics 14 (4): 460–​487. Schimmelfennig, Frank and Urlich Sedelmeier. 2005. “Candidate Countries and Conditionality.” In Europeanization. New Research Agendas, edited by Paolo Graziano and Maarten P. Vink, 88–​101. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sloat, Amanda. 2005. “The Rebirth of Civil Society: The Growth of Women’s NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 12 (4): 437–​452. Spehar, Andrea. 2007. How Women’s Movements Matter. Women’s Movements’ Strategies and Influence on Gender Policy Formation in Post-​Communist Croatia and Slovenia. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. –​–​–​–. 2012. “This Far, but No Further? Benefits and Limitations of EU Gender Equality Policy Making in the Western Balkans.” East European Politics & Societies 26 (2): 362–​379. –​ –​ –​ –. 2018. “The Pursuit of Political Will: Decision Makers’ Incentives and Gender Policy Implementation in the Western Balkans.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (2): 236–​250. Steinhilber, Silke. 2002. Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in the EU Enlargement: An Opportunity for Progress. Brussels: Brussels WIDE. www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/​docs/​wide-​eu.doc. Van der Molen, Irna and Irina Novikova. 2005. “Mainstreaming Gender in the EU Accession Process: The Case of the Baltic Republics.” Journal of European Social Policy 15 (2): 139–​156. Walby, Sylvia. 2004. “The European Union and Gender Equality: Emergent Varieties of Gender Regime.” Social Politics 11 (1): 4–​29.

386

387

37 THE EUROPEANIZATION AND POLITICIZATION OF LGBT RIGHTS IN SERBIA Koen Slootmaeckers

In 2017, when news broke that Ana Brnabić would become the new prime minister of Serbia, observers started congratulating Serbia on its double first: the first female and first openly lesbian prime minister. Following the election of Aleksandar Vučić as president earlier that spring, Ana Brnabić was appointed as his successor and the new prime minister of Serbia. As the story developed, western news outlets, such as the BBC, were quick to highlight the apparent progress this represented by contrasting this with the riots that accompanied the 2010 Belgrade Pride parade. This apparent progress is often linked to Serbia’s European Union (EU) candidacy and the wider European integration process. This chapter looks into how LGBT rights have been subject to Serbia’s Europeanization process, drawing attention to how LGBT rights have been politicized domestically and transnationally throughout the process. The literature on the LGBT rights within the EU enlargement process has produced different arguments about the Europeanization of LGBT rights in Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE). First and foremost, scholars have highlighted the role played by external incentives, that is, EU conditionality, in the adoption of LGBT rights in candidate countries (O’Dwyer 2010). They have pointed to the increased norm visibility (Ayoub 2016) and new political opportunities (O’Dwyer 2018) created by the process as a catalyst for change, as well as the role of transnational activism (Ayoub 2013). Although there is a general consensus that the EU has mattered for LGBT rights in candidate countries, there have also been criticisms of the EU’s engagement with LGBT rights, arguing that the EU has not been consistent and its actions were subject to other priorities (Ames 2004; Slootmaeckers and Touquet 2016). Domestic legislation was introduced in a rather top-​down manner, without public debate (Chetaille 2011), which in turn has led to laws remaining under-​implemented. The EU’s apparent, if partial, promotion of LGBT rights has sparked resistance and state-​sponsored and political homophobia within new member states (on political homophobia, see Weiss and Bosia 2013). Such politicization of LGBT topics has been linked to the interrelated phenomena of threat perception (Ayoub 2014), nationalism (Mole 2011), and Euroskepticism based on the rejection of so-​called EU values (Slootmaeckers and Sircar 2018). More recently, scholars have been highlighting how these initial backlashes against LGBT rights are part 387

388

Koen Slootmaeckers

of a longer process of change. Ayoub (2016), for example, demonstrates that resistance and state-​sponsored homophobia paradoxically make LGBT equality norms more visible and therefore can contribute to further change in the longer run. O’Dwyer (2018), similarly, argued that backlash can have both a unifying and professionalizing effect on LGBT movements, allowing them to forge new alliances and coalitions. Within the EU enlargement process to the Western Balkans (Croatia became a member in 2013, whereas Albania, the Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia are all official candidate countries at the time of writing), LGBT rights have become increasingly central and have become a symbolic litmus test for the Europeanness of the candidate countries (Slootmaeckers 2017). Scholarship on LGBT rights in the Western Balkans is still in its early stages—​at least within the Anglophone literature—​ and predominantly focuses on the development of LGBT politics in the region and how it is shaped by wider processes of nationalism and/​or Europeanization (e.g., Bilić 2016a; Gould and Moe 2015; Mikuš 2011; Swimelar 2019). The remainder of this chapter focuses on two key aspects of Serbian LGBT politics: the anti-​discrimination legislative framework as the beginning of the politicization and Europeanization of LGBT rights in Serbia and, more briefly, the Belgrade Pride parades that have received more scholarly attention (e.g., Bilić 2016b; Ejdus and Božović 2019; Mikuš 2011). Doing so, it will highlight two key elements in how we can understand the Europeanization of LGBT rights politics. First, the chapter reconfirms the crucial role of domestic activists in bringing LGBT rights onto the agenda as the EU did not introduce initiatives that were not already present in domestic activism. Second, and more importantly, the inconsistent engagement of the EU with LGBT rights allowed for Serbian governments to instrumentalize these rights for their own political agenda and to symbolically demonstrate Europeanness. It is against this background that the appointment of Brnabić should be read. It was an example of symbolic politics in which LGBT issues are used to speak to the EU’s self-​proclaimed LGBT-​friendly identity without engaging with LGBT issues domestically. Finally, a note on terminology is warranted in relation to the term LGBT. Whereas gay and lesbian, along with the acronym LGBT (and sometimes LGBTI to include intersex) are now commonplace terms (Paternotte and Tremblay 2015), they are not free from criticism (e.g., Binnie and Klesse 2012). In this chapter, the term LGBT is used for the simple reason that this acronym is not only dominant in EU policies and documents, but, more importantly, it is also the predominant label used by activists in Serbia. However, in EU policies and documents, LGBT mostly refers to same-​sex sexual orientations while trans and bisexual issues remain invisible. Similarly, in Serbia, LGBT refers predominantly to lesbian and gay people and issues. To date, bisexuals and trans issues, although certainly not absent, usually remain relatively invisible, under-​recognized, and, at times, have been actively erased from the laws. Although the chapter will distinguish between sexual orientation and gender identity where needed, within the Europeanization of LGBT rights, they remain often folded onto, if unequally, each other, even as this is problematic.

Anti-​discrimination policies and sexual orientation and gender identity in Serbia The Europeanization of Serbian anti-​discrimination policies started with the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. While LGBT activists then redirected their attention

388

389

LGBT rights in Serbia

from fighting the wars and nationalism to legal initiatives, the new government sought to end Serbia’s international isolation. Since then, several laws have been adopted that contain anti-​discrimination clauses that mention sexual orientation and/​or gender identity, as well as a general LGBT-​inclusive anti-​discrimination law in 2009. The process of adopting these laws took place in three distinct phases marked by differences in politicization of LGBT topics and EU commitments. The first phase (2001–​2005), the first five years after the so-​called Bulldozer Revolution, is characterized by Serbia’s initial democratization and rapprochement with Europe—​ with both the EU and Council of Europe (CoE)—​and limited political attention to anti-​ discrimination principles. The adoption of the first LGBT inclusive anti-​discrimination clauses was the result of normative emulation (Börzel and Risse 2012), in which Serbia “downloaded” policies from those institutions it deemed legitimate. Indeed, following the 1990s war-​induced isolation, there was a strong desire in Serbia to reintegrate into the international community. Although there was limited-​to-​no international pressure for such references at the time, LGBT-​inclusive anti-​discrimination clauses were perceived to be emerging European standards that Serbia should follow (Slootmaeckers 2017). The second phase (2005–​2009) sees the politicization of LGBT rights in Serbian politics as a result of the intertwining of EU conditionality, nationalist politics, and threat perception. Although civil society actors had drafted an LGBT-​inclusive anti-​ discrimination bill as early as 2001, EU pressure on the government to adopt the law began only in 2005 after the establishment of the Coalition Against Discrimination and the start of the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) negotiations, which had the adoption of a comprehensive anti-​ discrimination legislation as one of its conditions. This pressure, combined with EU funds, led to the first government-​led draft of an anti-​discrimination law, but without any mention of LGBT rights. The draft never made parliamentary proceedings because of the resurgence of nationalist politics in response to other EU demands related to Serbia’s need to deal with the legacies of the war (Subotić and Carey 2014). The Serbian government grew ever more intolerant with these demands and increasingly relied on nationalist rhetoric in which the governing Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) argued that the Serbian nation needed to be protected from undue European influence. This line of argument resembled the victimization discourse that underpinned the 1990s nationalism, calling for Serbia to defend itself from external and internal enemies and traitors as well as foreign efforts to subordinate and demasculinize the Serbian nation. Within this discourse—​which is inherently gendered—​ the anti-​discrimination law and LGBT issues more widely were represented as yet another attack on the Serbian nation and its values. After the 2007 snap elections demonstrated a clear nationalist turn in Serbian politics, the EU significantly softened, or as Stahl (2011) argues, “perverted” its conditionality, dropping the anti-​discrimination law from the political agenda. When the newly elected government fell over Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, Serbia’s political arena became increasingly split over Serbia’s future within the EU. When a pro-​ European coalition won in the next election, the EU integration process again became a key priority for the new government, and with it the political climate once more turned favorable for the adoption of the anti-​discrimination law. In this context—​using what Keck and Sikkink (1998) have labeled the “boomerang pattern of influence”—​Serbian civil society worked with their transnational allies to lobby the EU to include the anti-​discrimination law in the visa-​liberalization conditionality

389

390

Koen Slootmaeckers

(Slootmaeckers 2017). As the pro-​European government was committed to Serbia’s EU integration and was presented with tangible rewards for adopting the law, passing the anti-​discrimination bill became its main priority. Although the government sought to adopt the 2006 government bill quickly with no changes, the newly appointed State Secretary for Human and Minority Rights (Marko Karadzić, who had an NGO background and was an ally to the LGBT movement) insisted the law had to be rewritten to include articles on sexual orientation and gender identity. When the new version of the law was about to enter parliamentary proceedings, strong opposition against the law emerged that, in turn, politicized LGBT rights in Serbian politics. After a phone call by the Serbian Orthodox Church to the president, the government withdrew the bill from parliamentary proceedings. Although the Orthodox Church objected to the law as a whole, the debates quickly narrowed in on the articles pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity. Religious leaders, and nationalists alike, argued that the legislation was threatening the religious and cultural values upon which the Serbian nation was built. They also argued that LGBT rights would be introduced under the false pretense of EU conditionality. Highlighting the lack of EU standards in anti-​ discrimination legislation and its inclusion of LGBT rights, the opponents argued that removing the LGBT provisions would not harm Serbia’s European integration. Proponents of the law, in turn, increased pressure on the government to adopt the law through increased media pressure, street protests, one-​on-​one discussions with politicians, and involving the international community. This resulted in a three-​week debate permeated with homophobia. Under strong pressure to adopt the law within the EU’s expectations, yet considering the Orthodox Church’s objections to the law, the government redrafted the law with some compromise modifications to the articles pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity (Slootmaeckers 2017, 143–​145). Key changes in the law were the deletion of the article relating to gender identity and adding a paragraph that stipulates that the official conduct of church officials cannot be considered to constitute discrimination. Whereas the parliamentary debate on the bill was permeated with anti-​LGBT arguments, an important shift in debates can be observed. When opponents realized that their further attempts to also remove sexual orientation as a protected category within the law would prove unsuccessful, they shifted their arguments against the law as a whole. Maintaining that homosexuality is a disorder and against Serbian traditional values, opponents now sought to limit the societal impact of the law by suggesting amendments to limit the freedom of expression of sexual orientation by removing those paragraphs to provide the right to declare one’s sexual orientation. The proponents of the law, in contrast, strongly relied on EU integration-​based arguments to defend the law. While EU conditionality enabled the government to overcome the strong nationalist opposition, it also externalized the need for the law and thus attenuated its potential impact on society. Indeed, to date, the implementation of the law remains rather limited. The final and third phase (2010 onwards) is characterized by uncontested and strategic changes and the continued expansion of the anti-​discrimination framework that seem to be part of a strategic move in which the government aims to communicate its Europeanness to the EU. Partly due to the path-​dependency of adopting the anti-​ discrimination law and a shift of nationalist movements and the Orthodox Church toward opposing Pride parades, legal initiatives pertaining to anti-​discrimination clauses became less contested. Despite such depoliticization of LGBT-​ inclusive anti-​ discrimination clauses, the government generally remains uninterested in adopting new pieces of 390

391

LGBT rights in Serbia

legislation or strategic documents that would expand the legal framework. Due to the depoliticization of anti-​discrimination legislative initiatives, one can also observe the re-​introduction of gender identity in the list of protected characteristics. Such changes, like the hate crime law or the national strategy and action plan against discrimination, only seemed to happen with international financial aid and at times when the government needed to demonstrate its Europeanness (Slootmaeckers 2017).

Pride parades as a battlefield on Europe Once the anti-​discrimination law was adopted, the nationalist opposition shifted their attention to the Belgrade Pride to fight the physical visibility of LGBT people in Serbia, which activists had first tried to organize in 2001. The history of the Belgrade pride shows that whether or not the Pride would happen is the result of a complex interplay of domestic and EU politics. Although an important player in this story, the EU, with its inconsistent focus on fundamental rights, has equally contributed to the reasons why the Pride parades were banned. Emboldened by the EU pressure and the pro-​EU government, LGBT activists started preparations for the 2009 Belgrade Pride, which, both domestically and internationally, was perceived to be an important test of Serbia’s Europeanness. Having just adopted the anti-​discrimination law and being pro-​EU, the government was rhetorically trapped to support the event publicly. Behind the scenes, however, state institutions tried to get the event cancelled by exploiting internal movement disagreements, as well as by trying to intimidate the mostly female organizers (Ejdus and Božović 2019). Police leadership drew on omnipresent opposition by both extreme right groups and the Orthodox Church in the media, with the capital plastered with graffiti containing physical threats (Johnson 2012), while also misquoting the law by shifting responsibility of potential attacks on the Pride and ensuing injuries to the organizers. When organizers did not back down, the state sought to move Pride to the periphery of the city as some sort of compromise between proponents and opponents of the Pride. This policy backfired as both organizers and the international community considered this suggestion to be a de facto ban, putting the Belgrade Pride in the international spotlight. With its EU-​ credentials being questioned, the Serbian government took a more cooperative stance in facilitating the 2010 Pride parade (Mikuš 2011). As both the government and the organizers discursively linked Pride to Serbia’s EU integration process, the Pride became connected to the EU, paradoxically enabling the opponents of LGBT rights to frame the event as a western (anti-​Serbian) perversion. On the day of the Pride, extreme right-​wing groups mobilized a mob of several thousand. When protesters realized they could not reach Pride participants through the police cordons, they clashed with the police in what appeared to be a coordinated riot (Slootmaeckers 2017, 214–​215). The lack of measures taken by the police to prevent these riots demonstrates the government’s Janus-​faced attitude toward the Pride parade. Though it knew Pride had to happen to maintain a positive relationship with the EU, it also did not want to challenge the nationalist forces within the country and thus allow for both the pride and the riots to happen. The government then used the riots to shift the blame of the violence onto the EU and LGBT activists who, it argued, had forced it to organize an event that provoked violence. With this discourse relatively unchallenged (particularly by international actors), the riots became useful for the government by providing an excuse to ban the Pride the 391

392

Koen Slootmaeckers

following three years on security grounds. Indeed, faced with domestically more sensitive issues, including elections and the normalization of relations with Kosovo, the government chose to ban the Pride. Doing so has had the added benefit of allowing the government to communicate to domestic nationalist forces that it was able to fend off undue EU influences, while also softening its stance on Kosovo. The linkage with Kosovo is important as the normalization of Serbia-​Kosovo relations governed most of Serbia–​EU relations at the time. With rising tensions in Kosovo and the formation of a new government in 2012—​formed of parties with a nationalist and authoritarian legacy—​the EU prioritized regional stability over fundamental rights, rewarding Serbia for its efforts in normalizing its relations with Kosovo, though turning a blind eye on fundamental rights issues, including the Pride. In other words, the bans of Pride were effectively made possible by the changing prioritization within the EU accession process. It was only after a deal to normalize relations between Serbia and Kosovo was brokered in the spring of 2013 that the EU reprioritized fundamental rights and explicitly started pressuring Serbia to maintain Belgrade Pride. With a new government elected in 2014, the government re-​engaged with the event in a way that was qualitatively different from the 2010 organizational process. Contrary to 2010, the 2014 and 2015 Prides were not explicitly linked to the EU accession process. In fact, Prime Minister Vučić managed to use the event to bolster his personal image as “the reformer” at both the domestic and international scene, without creating visibility for LGBT people per se (Slootmaeckers 2017). The inconsistency of EU pressure and the resulting discontinuity of Prides has undermined their potential to force the state to recognize LGBT lives. Though this political context anchored the Belgrade Pride in the realm of human rights, it also contributed to the widening of the gap between Pride organizers and LGBT people, as the Belgrade Pride transformed into a ritualized event, voided of (LGBT) politics (Slootmaeckers 2017). This, in turn, allowed the Serbian government to appropriate Pride. The increasing symbolism of Pride as an indication of Serbia’s Europeanness and the increasing disconnect between Pride and LGBT people allowed the Serbian state to transform the controversial Pride into a political tool of its own. The government resorted to “tactical Europeanization,” a performative act to communicate the readiness to Europeanize by aligning oneself with certain perceived European norms, while disengaging with and undermining the underlying principles of the norm at the domestic level (Slootmaeckers 2017). Internationally, the government used Pride to demonstrate Serbia’s commitment to the European integration process by showing its alignment with the EU’s values, while domestically it was used to emphasize the state’s power and sovereignty. The current government—​in protecting the pride by using extreme police deployment—​has successfully transformed the “State Pride” into a “Ghost Pride,” that is, a state-​tolerated manifestation of Pride which takes place in a militarized “transparent closet” (Kuhar 2011) that keeps LGBT people’s visibility strategies invisible and outside the public sphere. Despite the fact that this process has significantly impacted LGBT politics in Serbia, one should not be too quick to dismiss the future potential of Pride altogether. Since 2016, activists have engaged in a process to reclaim Pride by building stronger connections with LGBT communities and re-​inject the event with LGBT politics.

Conclusions This Serbian case study demonstrates the inconsistent role played by the EU in the advancement of LGBT rights, with both positive and negative effects, and the essential 392

393

LGBT rights in Serbia

role of domestic activists. On the one hand, while the EU accession process helped push legislative reform, those initiatives were already being pursued by domestic activists. As such, the EU’s conditionality has not been the driver of reform, but rather a facilitator of the adoption of the anti-​discrimination law, where the promised rewards allowed the government to overcome domestic opposition. While this corroborates the findings of previous scholarship on CEE where conditionality has been proven vital for the adoption of new legislation, this does not mean that such processes should be interpreted as the EU imposing or introducing new legal initiatives to candidate countries. Indeed, local activists are also capable of using their transnational networks to include their agenda within EU conditionality through “boomerang mechanisms.” On the other hand, in contrast to Ayoub’s (2016) and O’Dwyer’s (2018) more positive assessment of the EU-​fostered anti-​LGBT politics, EU conditionality in Serbia sparked and increased the general opposition to LGBT equality. This may be because of differences in the timing. In Serbia, the opposition and the politicization of LGBT rights were part and parcel of the accession process, not after-​effects, as Serbia is still in the process and LGBT rights have become more central (Slootmaeckers, Touquet, and Vermeersch 2016). Further, there are suggestions that Serbia has learned from previous enlargement rounds and has been able to tactically use symbolic acts with regards to LGBT rights to advance its European aspirations without having to improve its domestic track record on the issue. This, in turn, complicates how LGBT activists go about their struggle.

References Ames, Lela M. 2004. “Beyond Gay Paree: What Does the Enlargement of the European Union Mean for Same-​Sex Partners.” Emory International Law Review 18 (1): 503–​554. Ayoub, Phillip M. 2013. “Cooperative Transnationalism in Contemporary Europe: Europeanization and Political Opportunities for LGBT Mobilization in the European Union.” European Political Science Review (August): 1–​32. —​—​. 2014. “With Arms Wide Shut: Threat Perception, Norm Reception, and Mobilized Resistance to LGBT Rights.” Journal of Human Rights 13 (3): 337–​362. –​–​–​–​. 2016. When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bilić, Bojan, ed. 2016a. LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-​Yugoslav Space: On the Rainbow Way to Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–​. 2016b. “Whose Pride? LGBT ‘Community’ and the Organization of Pride Parades in Serbia.” In The EU Enlargement and Gay Politics, edited by Koen Slootmaeckers, Heleen Touquet, and Peter Vermeersch, 203–​220. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Binnie, Jon and Christian Klesse. 2012. “Solidarities and Tensions: Feminism and Transnational LGBTQ Politics in Poland.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (4): 444–​459. Börzel, Tanja A. and Thomas Risse. 2012. “From Europeanisation to Diffusion: Introduction.” West European Politics 35 (1): 1–​19. Chetaille, Agnès. 2011. “Poland: Sovereignty and Sexuality in Post-​Socialist Times.” In The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights Into a Transformed Relationship, edited by Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte, and Carol Johnson. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Ejdus, Filip and M Božović. 2019. “Europeanisation and Indirect Resistance: Serbian Police and Pride Parades.” The International Journal of Human Rights 23 (4): 493–​511. Gould, John A. and Edward Moe. 2015. “Nationalism and the Struggle for LGBTQ Rights in Serbia, 1991–​2014.” Problems of Post-​Communism 62 (5): 273–​286. Johnson, Dana N. 2012. “We Are Waiting for You: The Discursive (De)Construction of Belgrade Pride 2009.” Sextures 2 (2): 6–​31. Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

393

394

Koen Slootmaeckers Kuhar, Roman. 2011. “The Heteronormative Panopticon and the Transparent Closet of the Public Space in Slovenia.” In De-​Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives, edited by R. Kulpa and J. Mizielińska, 149–​166. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company. Mikuš, Marek. 2011. “‘State Pride’: Politics of LGBT Rights and Democratisation in ‘European Serbia.’” East European Politics & Societies 25 (4): 834–​851. Mole, Richard. 2011. “Nationality and Sexuality: Homophobic Discourse and the ‘National Threat’ in Contemporary Latvia.” Nations and Nationalism 17 (3): 540–​560. O’Dwyer, Conor. 2010. “From Conditionality to Persuasion? Europeanization and the Rights of Sexual Minorities in Post-​Accession Poland.” Journal of European Integration 32 (3): 229–​247. –​–​–​–​. 2018. Coming Out of Communism: The Emergence of LGBT Activism in Eastern Europe. New York: New York University Press. Paternotte, David. and Manon Tremblay. 2015. “Introduction: Investigating Lesbian and Gay Activism.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Lesbian and Gay Activism, edited by David Paternotte and Manon Tremblay, 1–​12. Farnham: Routledge. Slootmaeckers, Koen. 2017. “From ‘Strategic Accession’ to ‘Tactical Europeanisation’? The Promotion of and Resistance to LGBT Equality in Serbia’s European Integration Process.” PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, UK. Slootmaeckers, Koen and Indraneel Sircar. 2018. “Marrying European and Domestic Politics? The Marriage Referendum in Croatia and Value-​Based Euroscepticism.” Europe–​Asia Studies 70 (3): 321–​344. Slootmaeckers, Koen and Heleen Touquet. 2016. “The Co-​Evolution of EU’s Eastern Enlargement and LGBT Politics: An Ever Gayer Union?” In The EU Enlargement and Gay Politics: The Impact of Eastern Enlargement on Rights, Activism and Prejudice, edited by Koen Slootmaeckers, Heleen Touquet, and Peter Vermeersch, 19–​44. London: Palgrave. Slootmaeckers, Koen, Heleen Touquet, and Peter Vermeersch, eds. 2016. The EU Enlargement and Gay Politics: The Impact of Eastern Enlargement on Rights, Activism and Prejudice. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stahl, Bernhard. 2011. “Perverted Conditionality: The Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the European Union and Serbia.” European Foreign Affairs Review 16 (4): 465–​487. Subotić, Jelena and Henry F. Carey. 2014. “The European Union, the ICTY, and the Challenge of Europeanization in Serbia.” In European Institutions, Democratization, and Human Rights Protection in the European Periphery, edited by Henry F. Carey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Swimelar, Safia. 2019. “LGBT Rights in Bosnia: The Challenge of Nationalism in the Context of Europeanization.” Nationalities Papers, September, 1–​23. Weiss, Meredith L. and Michael J. Bosia, eds. 2013. Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

394

395

Migrations

396

397

38 RUSSIAN-​SPEAKING LGBTQ COMMUNITIES IN THE WEST Alexandra Novitskaya

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened Eurasian borders, allowing its former citizens to travel and move abroad. Interpreted primarily through the lens of globalization, the consequences of that newfound mobility, often in conjunction with gender, have been researched primarily in the context of human trafficking (Morokvasic, Erel, and Shinozaki 2003; Suchland 2015; see McCarthy, Chapter 45 in this Handbook), immigrant adaptation (Remennick 1999) and labor migration (Bloch 2017; also Bloch, Chapter 39 in this Handbook). At the same time, there has been less academic interest in the deterritorializing impact of globalized migration on post-​Soviet gender and sexual contracts. Globalized migration leads to the deterritorialization of national culture and identity, producing displaced, mobile cultures whose members “feel they belong to various communities … [although] they do not share a common territory with all [their] members” (Papastergiadis 2000, 115). Deterritorialization produces divided loyalties and hybrid identities, as migrant communities often must negotiate and engage in contradictory values and practices. As they simultaneously reflect and challenge post-​Soviet configurations of gender and sexuality, Russian-​speaking migrant LGBTQ communities in the West allow us to conceptualize the former Soviet Union (FSU) as a deterritorialized entity; not as a victim of globalization but as its active participant, its gender and sexual politics going beyond the region’s physical borders. Here, as is the convention, I use the term “Russian-​speaking LGBTQ migrants” to refer to post-​Soviet LGBTQ diasporas in the West (Kuntsman 2003; Mole 2018). It includes the citizens of 12 former Soviet republics (with the exception of the Baltic states), who upon immigration are pressed to rely on Russian as a lingua franca and share a commonality of being non-​heterosexual persons whose identities have been shaped by Soviet legacies of homosexual erasure and gender norms. Although sexuality was not a migration-​driving factor in the late 1980s to early 1990s, LGBTQ diasporas emerged as a part of these larger waves of predominantly ethnic and socioeconomic migration out of the FSU. In the first two decades of the 21st century, however, global perspectives on homosexuality became increasingly polarized. In Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E), conservative and right-​ wing-​ leaning governments and nationalist social movements view homosexuality as a threat to national identity and security, while many

397

398

Alexandra Novitskaya

Western European and North American nations have adopted universal marriage laws and anti-​discriminatory protections (Graff 2010; Stychin 2004). These conflicting, yet parallel processes stimulate and politicize international LGBTQ migration from the FSU today.

Negotiating queerness in post-​Soviet diasporas Russian-​ speaking LGBTQ persons’ networks and migration trajectories are shaped by larger histories and patterns of post-​Soviet migration. As of 2020, scholarship on Russian-​speaking LGBTQ migration has been limited to the three countries with the largest numbers of Russian-​speaking residents—​Israel, Germany, and the United States (Fisher 2003; Kuntsman 2009; Mole 2018)—​with little on the role of sexuality in the migrants’ decisions to immigrate. Rather, scholars have foregrounded analyses of how non-​ heterosexual Russian-​ speaking migrants negotiate their Russianness and queer sexuality in diaspora. Their findings indicate that Russian-​speaking LGBTQ migrant communities become an amalgamation of post-​Soviet legacies in cultural attitudes to non-​normative sexuality and local, place-​specific contexts and practices. Post-​Soviet LGBTQ identities have been defined by the absence of western-​style activism and visibility politics (Essig 1999; Shirinian 2017; Stella 2015). Since 2003, same-​sex relationships have been legal everywhere in the FSU, except for Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, but Soviet legacies of criminalization and pathologization of homosexuality have sustained popular homophobia (Kuntsman 2003). The extensive state intervention into Soviet people’s lives contributed to a post-​Soviet understanding of sexuality as a private matter to be protected from state or public involvement (Kondakov 2014). Hence, scholars have used the experiences of post-​Soviet LGBTQ people, who avoid rights-​based activism and may view it as useless and dangerous, to advance the debate around the value of coming out and visibility as a one-​size-​fits-​all model of LGBTQ politics (Stella 2015). In Los Angeles, the history of the Russian Gay and Lesbian Group of West Hollywood (RGLGWH), active in the mid-​1990s, illustrates how this post-​Soviet pattern of queer invisibility has been de-​territorialized (Fisher 2003). Initially comprised of only five members, RGLGWH was sandwiched between two cultures, the American queer community and the Russian Jewish diaspora. The group viewed its members’ queer and Russian immigrant identities as incompatible and worked hard to remain invisible to the larger Russian-​speaking diaspora by promoting their group through anonymous flyers and word of mouth. This secrecy was crucial in avoiding homophobia and the social ostracism the group would have inevitably faced in the diaspora if its existence had become public knowledge. Reflecting the internalized understanding of queer sexuality by post-​Soviet LGBTQ people as a private matter (Kondakov 2014), but also a continuation of the Soviet tradition of concealment (Fitzpatrick 1999), one of Fisher’s informants admitted to having no qualms about lying to fellow immigrants about his sexuality, insisting it was none of their business. Fisher interprets this closeted existence as an intentional tactic, an act of resistance that Russian-​speaking gay and lesbian migrants performed to successfully occupy “overlapping and contradicting cultures” (1999, 171). That the Russian-​speaking diaspora could welcome sexual diversity remained inconceivable to Fisher’s informants. In Israel, where Russian speakers comprise 1.5 million out of the total population of 8.7 million (Golubovich 2017), Russian-​born lesbians similarly could not combine 398

399

Russian-speaking LGBTQ communities

“out” queer sexuality with Russianness (Kuntsman 2003). Rather than grappling with immigrant/​queer hybridity, young Russian-​Israeli lesbians actively sought full integration with the mainstream Israeli LGBTQ community, giving up their Russianness along the way: for them, there was “no such thing as a Russian and a lesbian” (2003, 302). The absence of positive Soviet discourses of queer sexuality, the popularity of western notions of sexuality in Israel, and the racist prejudice Russian-​speaking immigrants—​ women in particular—​encounter there, all contributed to this contradiction. In Israel, Russian-​speaking immigrants frequently endure racialization as improper Jews, seen as too intermarried, too secular, or too sexually promiscuous. A lesbian identity allowed Kuntsman’s informants to “pass as Israeli-​born and join the club of middle-​class Jewish queers of European origin” (2003, 301). For them, integrating with the mainstream LGBTQ community meant a “double homecoming,” as Israelis, and as queer women; and an escape from repressive hypersexualized gender-​ethnic stereotyping imposed on Russian-​speaking women. Despite the tensions between queer sexuality and Russian cultural identity noted by Kuntsman’s informants, by the late 1990s Russian groups began to form at Israeli LGBTQ centers. In 2001, a group of activists established the first website for the Russian-​ speaking LGBTQ diaspora, “The Pan Israeli Portal of Russian speaking GLBTs” (Kuntsman 2009). The website’s Forum became a site of networking, debates, and community building, as well as organizing against diasporic homophobia. At the same time, as was clear from the virtual ethnography of the Forum discussions, despite their first-​ hand experience with prejudice, Russian-​speaking LGBTQ immigrants were unwilling to find solidarity with other marginalized groups in Israel, instead adopting nationalist and Islamophobic views. Kuntsman argues that a transition from marginalized existence as an ethnic minority (as Jews) in the Soviet Union to a (provisionally) privileged national majority in Zionist Israel encourages Russian-​speaking immigrants to accept the Israeli cultural citizenship model as a package deal, including its controversial anti-​Palestine ideology. Queer sexuality might not have been included in the ostensibly heteronormative brand of Israeli nationalism, but it does not preclude queer immigrants’ attempts to belong to the nation through an embrace of its hegemonic narratives. The polarization of global sexual politics, alongside the continuing tightening of the border and immigration regimes in the 21st century, have made sexual identity a more prominent migration-​driving factor. Although a study (Mole 2018) of the Russian-​ speaking queer diaspora in Berlin, Germany, claims that sexuality is not “always the primary motivating factor” for emigration (2018, 86), the weight of evidence in this very study suggests the contrary. The study participants, Russian speakers of German and Jewish descent and relatively privileged professional migrants (i.e., holders of student and work visas), viewed Berlin as an attractive migration destination because of its perceived gay-​friendliness within Germany’s general respect for sexual diversity and appreciated Germans’ “sexual citizenship rights” (2018, 89), including same-​sex marriage and adoption, as well as the freedom to live as an out non-​heterosexual person. In the FSU, the “heteronormative mechanisms of social control” (2018, 89), such as inability to come out to friends and family or the lack of a publicly visible community, continued to influence non-​heterosexual people, motivating some to emigrate. Mole (2018) finds a similarly tense relationship between queer migrants and the larger Russian-​speaking diaspora in Germany who they perceive as largely homophobic. Furthermore, his study suggests that the increased role of sexuality in migration might influence immigrant politics and foster solidarity across borders. In the mid-​ 2010s, 399

400

Alexandra Novitskaya

members of the Russian-​ speaking queer diaspora in Berlin founded Quarteera, an activist organization, which—​ unlike RGLGWH and early Russian-​ Israeli LGBTQ organizations—​engages in transnational activism, publicly protesting state-​sponsored homophobia in Russia. Timing matters here: in the 2010s, Russia’s state-​sponsored homophobic campaign inadvertently increased the visibility of non-​normative sexualities and mobilized LGBTQ communities (Buyantuyeva 2018; Kondakov 2016). Considering the ease and speed of spreading information in the increasingly interconnected and deterritorialized world, it is not surprising that the ripples of Russian homophobia had reached and transformed Russian-​speaking LGBTQ communities outside the FSU.

State-​sponsored homophobia and LGBTQ migration after 2013 Russia’s anti-​gay legislation, passed in 2013, changed LGBTQ people’s lives in Russia and affected its neighboring countries. Formally a censorship law banning the dissemination of positive information regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities, the legislation had far-​reaching, albeit not entirely unexpected, consequences. Instead of silencing non-​normative sexuality, the ban increased its visibility but also sanctioned homo-​and transphobia (Kondakov 2016). Russia’s continuing informal influence in the former Soviet region then contributed to the spread of state-​sponsored homophobia, which Russia has used to advance its geopolitical interests (Foxall 2019; Maietta 2019). As of 2019, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Armenia have attempted to pass copycat legislation (Mendos 2019), but only Russia has a working and explicit anti-​gay law while Belarus has a law “protecting” children from information discrediting “the institution of family and marriage” that could be interpreted as anti-​gay (2019, 211). Amnesty International (2017) notes that “an overspill of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric and practice from Russia” has worsened existing homo-​and transphobic attitudes in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia—​the countries that joined the Russia-​ initiated Eurasian Economic Union. In Ukraine, local activists have commented on Russia’s importation of homophobia as a “divide and conquer” strategy (Globa 2019). In Russia, the homophobic campaign in the state-​controlled media during the bill’s introduction made alternative sexualities a public discussion topic (Kondakov 2016). Far from being a positive change, such visibility resulted in a loss of the relative safety previously afforded to most LGBTQ persons whose existence was, before 2012–​2013, a blind spot to the general population. In the years following the law’s passing, anti-​LGBTQ hate crimes, as well as discrimination and depression among LGBTQ persons, increased (Kondakov 2017; Hylton et al. 2017). Kondakov (2017) demonstrates that the number of recorded anti-​LGBTQ hate crimes went from 33 in 2012 to 50 in 2013, a marked increase in the year the anti-​gay law was passed. The number of anti-​LGBTQ hate crimes continued to grow, with 65 recorded cases in 2015. In 257 of the total 267 cases identified for this study, the victims were gay men, with this prevalence likely resulting from the fact that the Russian criminal justice system lacks a language to articulate LGBTQ identities, but also because hate crimes represent only the tip of the iceberg of homo-​and transphobic violence and do not include its other forms, like psychological violence or discrimination. While not criminalizing LGBTQ identities explicitly, Russia’s anti-​gay law implicitly sanctioned violence and discrimination against the LGBTQ community, cementing its social inequality. This increase in anti-​LGBTQ hate crimes parallels an increase in asylum applications from Russian citizens in the USA. In 2015, such applications doubled the previous year’s 400

401

Russian-speaking LGBTQ communities

record, reaching 1,454, the highest in the last 20 years; and set a 24-​year record in 2017 at 2,664 (Schreck 2019). The US Department of Homeland Security does not disclose the grounds for asylum applications, but NGO reports, popular media, and my study of the Russian-​speaking LGBTQ migrant community in New York City (described below) suggest a connection between state-​sponsored homophobia and LGBTQ emigration out of post-​Soviet countries to the USA. There is indirect evidence of a substantial increase in both the interest in emigration within post-​Soviet LGBTQ communities and actual migration (Cheredov 2017; Garmazhapova 2015; Russian LGBT Network 2015). The rise of state-​sponsored homophobia in post-​Soviet countries coincided with the US foreign policy’s prioritization of LGBTQ advocacy until 2017. Best represented in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2011 statement that “LGBT rights are human rights” at the United Nations, the Obama administration’s intent to champion LGBTQ rights made the USA look like a welcoming, gay-​friendly nation (Maietta 2019). This perceived hospitality and the promise of a safe life likely contributed to the expansion and transformation of the Russian-​speaking LGBTQ diaspora in New York City where applying for asylum on the grounds of one’s sexuality or gender identity has become a precarious, yet common immigration route.

Activism and gender(ed) matters in LGBTQ migration and asylum In 2016–​2020, during an ethnographic study of the Russian-​speaking LGBTQ diaspora in New York City, I conducted 29 semi-​structured biographic interviews with immigrants who attended events organized by RUSA LGBT, a grassroots organization for post-​Soviet LGBTQ migrants. The study participants, ranging in age from 23 to 57, immigrated to the United States as adults, and identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, and/​or queer; 11 identified as cisgender women, 15 as cisgender men, one as intersex, one as non-​binary and one as bi-​gender. For most, the experience of internal migration (i.e., from a small community to a large city, typically the capital) preceding immigration was common—​as well as using asylum as a primary immigration strategy. As of 2020, 26 out of 29 participants have either already received political asylum or were waiting for the asylum interview. New York City is home to one of the largest Russian-​speaking diasporas in the world. Diasporic infrastructure, the city’s gay history, and what the study participants perceive as immigrant-​friendly attitudes make it an attractive starting point for immigration. Also significant is the presence of RUSA LGBT. Founded in 2008 as a small support group for Russian-​speaking LGBTQ New Yorkers who arrived during the 1980–​1990 wave of predominantly Soviet Jewish immigration, it expanded after 2013, transformed by the influx of asylum seekers. Responding to their needs, it became involved in broader immigrant, LGBTQ, and social justice activism. It has thousands of followers on social media (as of 2020), and its public events, especially the Brighton Beach Pride parade it organizes annually since 2017, attract hundreds of participants. During the interviews, RUSA LGBT members explained that their activism was inspired by their appreciation of the legacy of queer politics in New York and by their own post-​Soviet queer identities. As one study participant noted, his activism was a contribution to the historic struggle for LGBTQ rights in the United States, which to him started at the Stonewall Riots and culminated in the USA starting to offer LGBTQ asylum. As Ayoub and Bauman (2018) argue, activists with a migrant background have a more complex understanding of sexuality and can put forth new issues and contexts of the queer activist agenda. Thus, transnational LGBTQ 401

402

Alexandra Novitskaya

migration might foster solidarity and activism across migrant communities. RUSA LGBT’s transformation, together with Mole’s (2018) study of German activist organization Quarteera, illustrate this argument. Apart from Kuntsman (2003), the existing scholarship on Russian-​speaking LGBTQ migrants—​like most research on alternative sexualities in the FSU—​does not differentiate migrants’ experiences by gender. While privileging the general moniker of LGBTQ might be useful politically, a focus on non-​heterosexual women asylum seekers specifically suggests that their experience of gender at home might limit their utilization of asylum to escape homophobia. With no official statistics regarding the gender of Russian-​speaking LGBTQ asylum seekers in the USA, anecdotal evidence suggests that non-​heterosexual women might be under-​represented among new migrants. During my fieldwork with RUSA LGBT, I observed that women rarely exceeded one-​third of its active members, while in the past, according to the group’s veterans, women and men participated in RUSA LGBT activities in equal numbers. The influx of new migrants—​primarily young, educated middle-​ class men who are asylum seekers—​changed the gender ratio (Goltsman 2015). Understanding LGBTQ migration intersectionally suggests that although post-​Soviet homophobia motivates migration, lesbian and bisexual women’s gender might hinder their ability to use immigration as an escape strategy. Women are disadvantaged in international mobility and political asylum generally (Lewis 2013), and post-​Soviet women might be disadvantaged specifically due to post-​Soviet gender norms. First, nation-​states frequently attempt to limit women’s mobility, citing anti-​trafficking efforts; this affects women’s visa applications and border crossings where they face more scrutiny (Bloch 2017). Second, the very notion of a “credible fear of persecution,” which is necessary to be granted asylum in the USA, privileges a specific type of persecution—​usually a highly visible, physical violence (Lewis 2013). Given that the international coverage of Russian state-​sponsored homophobia has mostly focused on gay men’s encounters with graphic physical violence (Wiedlack 2017), asylum adjudicators might expect the evidence of this form of persecution from asylum seekers. Lesbian and bisexual women frequently face less visible violence, such as violence at home (Stella 2015), or psychological violence (Kondakov and Subbotina 2016; Morgan and Björkert 2006), which could be harder to demonstrate to asylum officers. Furthermore, I observed that some non-​heterosexual women believe they do not qualify for asylum if they have not experienced physical persecution. One study participant said about her intent to apply for asylum: “At first, I felt awkward because no one has ever chased after me with a police baton, so how can I qualify?” Finally, the post-​Soviet gender contract impacts lesbian and bisexual women’s utilization of asylum as immigration strategy. The post-​Soviet gender contract consists of normative prescriptions for an “appropriate” model of femininity and is characterized by a return, to a certain degree, to a traditional understanding of gender difference such as essentialized motherhood, emphasized caretaker responsibilities, de-​politicization, and impoverishment of women (Gapova 2002; Ishkanian 2002; Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2003). The latter alone might hinder lesbian and bisexual women’s immigration options by making economically disadvantaged women ineligible for US visas or unable to undertake a costly transcontinental journey. Likewise, the non-​heterosexual women migrants I interviewed agreed that the post-​Soviet gender contract, or, as they define it, “female socialization” (zhenskaia sotsializatsia), hinders women’s international mobility due to the pressure of compulsory heterosexuality and the gendered expectations of 402

403

Russian-speaking LGBTQ communities

family responsibilities. This female socialization ties women in the FSU to their families, making immigration a challenge since it would mean abandoning their dependents. It also influences some non-​heterosexual women to remain closeted and lead a double life of combining a heterosexual relationship with clandestine same-​sex encounters, thus precluding immigration.

Conclusions Russian-​speaking LGBTQ diasporas in the West find themselves in a negotiation of post-​ Soviet gender, sexual, and ethnic identities in their respective local contexts. In the first two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the main challenge was negotiation of Russianness and queer identity in the diaspora. Over the last decade, Russia’s state-​ sponsored homophobia, with its influence in the post-​Soviet region, led LGBTQ individuals to consider migration as a strategy to escape persecution, possibly contributing to the surge in asylum applications in the US and transforming the Russian-​speaking LGBTQ community in New York City specifically. Approaching international migration intersectionally underscores that not just sexuality, but other categories of social positionality, such as ethnicity and socioeconomic background, as well as local histories, are critical in determining one’s ability to move across borders. Russian-​speaking LGBTQ migrant communities initially emerged as a consequence of ethnic (Jewish or German) waves of immigration, with an addition, in the case of Germany, of the relatively privileged student visa and work visa holders. Even among LGBTQ asylum seekers, lesbians and bisexual women seem to be under-​ represented, as the example of RUSA LGBT, the diasporic advocacy group for Russian-​ speaking non-​heterosexual migrants in the US, demonstrates. Examining gender, and the post-​Soviet gender contract particularly, helps investigate the obstacles to women’s mobility. Overall, Russian-​speaking LGBTQ diasporas exemplify the transnational reach of post-​Soviet sexual and gender contracts, suggesting a need to approach the study of gender and sexuality in the CEE&E region in a deterritorialized way.

References Amnesty International. 2017. Less Equal: LGBTI Human Rights Defenders in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. London: Amnesty International. Ayoub, Phillip M. and Lauren Bauman. 2018. “Migration and Queer Mobilisations: How Migration Facilitates Cross-​Border LGBTQ Activism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45 (15): 2758–​2778. Bloch, Alexia. 2017. Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Buyantuyeva, Radzhana. 2018. “LGBT Rights Activism and Homophobia in Russia.” Journal of Homosexuality 65 (4): 456–​483. Cheredov, Dmitry. 2017. “Russkoyazychniie gei i lesbiianki nachinaiut zhizn’ s nulia v N’iu-​Yorke.” [“Russian-​speaking Gays and Lesbians Start Anew in New York.”]. Forum Daily, October 29. Essig, Laurie. 1999. Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, Diana. 2003. “Immigrant Closets: Tactical-​Micro-​Practices-​in-​the-​Hyphen.” Journal of Homosexuality 45 (2–​4): 171–​192. Fitzpatrick, Stella. 1999. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foxall, Andrew. 2019. “From Evropa to Gayropa: A Critical Geopolitics of the European Union as Seen from Russia.” Geopolitics 24 (1): 174–​193.

403

404

Alexandra Novitskaya Gapova, Elena. 2002. “On Nation, Gender, and Class Formation in Belarus … and Elsewhere in the Post-​Soviet World.” Nationalities Papers 30 (4): 639–​662. Garmazhapova, Alexandra. 2015. “Uiezzhat’ nel’zia ostat’sia.” [“Staying (or) Leaving.”]. Side-​by-​ Side, August 20. Globa, Bogdan. 2019. “Guest Op-​Ed: How Russia Exports Homophobia into Ukraine.” Georgetown Public Policy Review, March 19. http://​gppreview.com/​2019/​03/​19/​guest-​op-​ed-​russia-​exports-​ homophobia-​ukraine/​. Goltsman, Yelena. 2015. Presentation at the roundtable: “St. Petersburg to Sarajevo: Coming Out Under Fire: The LGBTI Human Rights Struggle for Dignity in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.” Columbia University, New York, April 2. Golubovich, Aleksei. 2017. “K vizitu Netan’iakhu: chto Rossiia mozhet poluchit’ ot ekonomiki Izrailia.” [“On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Visit: What Russia can Gain from Israel’s Economy.”] Forbes, September 3. Graff, Agnieszka. 2010. “Looking at Pictures of Gay Men: Political Uses of Homophobia in Contemporary Poland.” Public Culture 22 (3): 583–​603. Hylton, Emily, Andrea L. Wirtz, Carla E. Zelaya, Carl Latkin, Alena Peryshkina, Vladmir Mogilnyi, Petr Dzhigun, Irina Kostetskaya, Noya Galai, and Chris Beyrer. 2017. “Sexual Identity, Stigma, and Depression: The Role of the ‘Anti-​Gay Propaganda Law’ in Mental Health among Men Who have Sex with Men in Moscow, Russia.” Journal of Urban Health 94 (3): 319–​329. Ishkanian, Armine. 2002. “Mobile Motherhood: Armenian Women’s Labor Migration in the Post-​ Soviet Period.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 11 (3): 383–​415. Kondakov, Alexander. 2014. “The Silenced Citizens of Russia: Exclusion of Non-​heterosexual Subjects from Rights-​Based Citizenship.” Social and Legal Studies 23 (2): 151–​174. –​–​–​–​. 2016. “Teaching Queer Theory in Russia.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3 (2): 107–​118. –​–​–​–​. 2017. Prestuplenia Na Pochve Nenavisti Protiv LGBT [Anti-​ LGBT hate crimes]. St. Petersburg: Center for Independent Social Research. Kondakov, Alexander, and Julia Subbotina. 2016. Otchet. Kolichestvenniie danniie monitoringa diskriminatsii po SOGI [Report: Qualitative data of the SOGI discrimination monitoring]. St. Petersburg: Russian LGBT Network. Kuntsman, Adi. 2003. “Double Homecoming: Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Place in Immigration Stories of Russian Lesbians in Israel.” Women’s Studies International Forum 26 (4): 299–​311. –​–​–​–​. 2009. Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond. Bern: Peter Lang. Lewis, Rachel. 2013. “Deportable Lives: Lesbian and Political Asylum.” Feminist Formations 25 (2): 174–​194. Maietta, Michel. 2019. “The Geopolitics of Homophobia.” Gender and Politics Observatory. Paris: IRIS: The French Institute for International Relations and Strategic Affairs. Mendos, Lucas Ramon. 2019. State-​Sponsored Homophobia 2019. Geneva: International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World). Mole, Richard. 2018. “Identity, Belonging and Solidarity among Russian-​Speaking Queer Migrants in Berlin.” Slavic Review 77 (1): 77–​98. Morgan, Karen and Suruchi Thapar Björkert. 2006. “‘I’d Rather You’d Lay Me on the Floor and Start Kicking Me’: Understanding Symbolic Violence in Everyday Life.” Women’s Studies International Forum 29 (5): 441–​452. Morokvasic, Mirjana, Umut Erel, and Kyoko Shinozaki, eds. 2003. Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries. Vol. 1. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Remennick, Larissa. 1999. “‘Women with a Russian Accent’ in Israel.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 6 (4): 441–​461. Russian LGBT Network. 2015. Monitoring naruchenii prav cheloveka i diskriminatsii po priznakam seksual’noi orientatsii i gendernoi identichnosti za 2014 god [Monitoring of SOGI Discrimination and Human Rights Violations in 2014]. St. Petersburg: Russian LGBT Network. Schreck, Carl. 2019. “Rekordnoie chislo rossiian v 2017 godu poprosili ubezhishche v SSHA, no Peskov ne verit.” [“Record Numbers of Russians Applied for Asylum in the US in 2017, But Peskov Does Not Believe It.”] Radio Svoboda, May 3. www.svoboda.org/​a/​29206320.html.

404

405

Russian-speaking LGBTQ communities Shirinian, Tamar. 2017. “Sovereignty as a Structure of Feeling: The Homosexual within Post-​Cold War Armenian Geopolitics.” Lambda Nordica 32 (2–​3): 93–​124. Stella, Francesca. 2015. Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Russia: Post/​Socialism and Gendered Sexualities. London: Palgrave McMillan. Stychin, Carl. 2004. “Same-​Sex Sexualities and the Globalization of Human Rights Discourse.” McGill Law Journal 49 (4): 951–​968. Suchland, Jennifer. 2015. Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wiedlack, M. Katharina. 2017. “Gays vs. Russia: Media Representations, Vulnerable Bodies and the Construction of a (Post)Modern West.” European Journal of English Studies 21 (3): 241–​257. Zdravomyslova, Elena and Anna Temkina. 2003. “Transformatsiia gendernogo grazhdanstva v sovremennoi Rossii.” [“Transformation of gendered citizenship in contemporary Russia.”] In Kuda prishla Rossiia? Itogi sotsietal’noi transformatsii [Where has Russia Arrived? Results of Societal Transformation], edited by Tatiana Zaslavskaia, 140–​150. Moscow: MVSHSEN.

405

406

39 POSTSOCIALIST MIGRATION AND INTIMACY Alexia Bloch

The end of socialism in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) brought about massive shifts not just between former client states and centers of power, but also within communities and households of people who have experienced new forms of power and marginality in uniquely gendered ways, including in the realms of mobility. In contrast to a dominant trend in migration studies that focuses on women’s mobility as a crisis producing victims, whether of human trafficking (Hughes 2000) or the loss of mother-​ centered care (e.g., Keough 2015; Parreñas 2005), by turning attention to questions of intimacy and aspirations of migrants we can learn about how these are intertwined with migration. This approach positions migrant women as co-​equals of those often writing about them (Abu-​Lughod 1993, 27); along with being constrained by structural inequalities and sometimes extreme hardship, migrant women navigate daily lives animated by relationships with children, parents, partners, and lovers. Migrants’ practices of intimacy are a key part of their experiences of being mobile. By examining these intimate practices we can better understand the meaning of newly porous borders for those in CEE&E and also consider how social relationships are transformed in a world of growing inequality and mobility (see Novitskaya, Chapter 38 in this Handbook). This story of gender and migration in CEE&E is part of a global trend where contours of migration shifted dramatically over the past 50 years. If earlier patterns of migration predominantly involved men, with women and children sometimes accompanying or following men as dependents, today nearly equal numbers of men and women are international migrants, with about 272 million people on the move globally (UN 2019). The number of people on the move due to civil war, natural disasters, and unstable governments has spiked in recent years, but women’s mobility, in particular, has steadily increased since the 1970s (Morokvasic 1984). The global turn toward neoliberal economic restructuring that brought about the retraction of government services and new forms of precarity also resulted in an expansion of service economies and the demand for low-​wage feminized labor. With the end of socialism in CEE&E in the late 1980s and 1990s, these global processes also emerged there, pointing to a convergence of historical experience between East and West (Chari and Verdery 2009). As elsewhere, the wholesale restructuring of state socialist economies led to widespread poverty with distinctly gendered patterns (Einhorn 1993; Gal and Kligman 2000). 406

407

Postsocialist migration and intimacy

These included a massive outmigration of women into Western Europe, but also into the Middle East and parts of Asia, pursuing largely undocumented employment and sending remittances to support family left behind (Bloch 2017; Mahdavi 2011; Solari 2017). This unprecedented gendered migration has generated a large body of scholarship, including on gendered labor (Akalin 2007; Keough 2015; Malysheva and Tiuriukanova 2000), sex work (Béller-​Hann 1995; Bloch 2003), and “trafficking in women” (Hughes 2000). A discourse on trafficking largely ignoring structural violence brought about by neoliberalism tends to dominate portrayals of gender and mobility in the region over the past 20 years. This discourse features victims and criminal elements while ignoring the systems of precarious labor common to neoliberalism globally (Suchland 2015; see also McCarthy, Chapter 45 in this Handbook). Shifting the focus to migrants’ aspirations and experiences of transnational mobility allows us to strike a balance between a celebratory portrait of globalization—​featuring unprecedented possibilities for people, commodities, finances, and ideas to traverse wide distances—and an ominous one, dominated by criminal figures orchestrating trafficking in women and devoid of a broader critique of structural readjustment and how it has been experienced. Gendered mobility is integrally tied to economic transformations that shape intimate realms of everyday life, an area of considerable recent feminist anthropological research (Åkesson 2011; Brennan 2004; Cheng 2010; Coe 2013; Constable 2003; Faier 2009; Hirsch 2003; Parreñas 2005). A vibrant body of scholarship examining the intersection of gender, power, and mobility in CEE&E has likewise emerged over the past 20 years. Research dedicated to understanding the experience of people on the move includes studies of how gendered mobility shapes romantic relationships and marriage (Johnson 2007; Luehrmann 2004; Patico 2010), transnational kinship is fostered by mothers and grandmothers (Solari 2017; Tianynen-​Qadir 2016), masculinity is shaped through processes of mobility (Reeves 2014), and immigrants’ ideals of sexuality and intimacy are steeped in legacies of state socialist discourses (Gewinner 2020; Rogova 2020). Deploying the concept of intimacy provides a means for examining several types of experience that are often elided in discussions of migration. The intimate is a realm broad enough to encompass relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, and migrants and their close friends and boyfriends. The idea of intimacy can also refer to feelings and attitudes, such as the sense of belonging that was lost with the end of state socialism in the region. The term “intimacy” is inclusive enough to bridge structural shifts facing people like labor migrants out of the former Soviet Union and also the personal, often emotional negotiations these same people are caught up in. Following Wilson (2012, 46), the term intimacy allows us to avoid separating economic realms from private ones; an emphasis on intimate practices allows us to portray the realm of emotion—​a personally experienced state—in conjunction with affect—​a collective state (Ahmed 2004; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012) that is shaped by, and sometimes in tension with, prevailing structural forces, such as neocapitalism or state socialism.

Post-​Soviet migrants, gender, intimacy From the early 1990s to late 2010s, Russia became a major receiving country for labor migrants predominantly from Central Asia, but also from other former Soviet countries (Bloch 2014; Demintseva and Kashnitsky 2016; Malysheva and Tiuriukanova 2000; Reeves 2014). Migrant men and women found work in construction and apartment renovation, 407

408

Alexia Bloch

as well as in the service sector, with women from Moldova and Ukraine increasingly in demand as domestic laborers. As economies collapsed in the region, women turned to work that often required them to be mobile, including as “shuttle traders” (chelnoki) doing transnational small-​scale garment trade, and in filling the demand for feminized labor as domestic workers, sex workers, or sales staff in nearby and easily accessible Turkey (Akalin 2007; Béller-​Hann 1995). My research in Turkey, Moldova, and Russia traces linkages between transnational mobility, brought about by the end of socialism and the expansion of global capitalism, and the daily relationships that are often sidelined in accounts of migration too often narrowly focused on victimization at the hands of criminal elements (Bloch 2017). I explore the radical ways that new mobility has shaped intimate practices, emotional worlds, and social ties of women, men, and children in (or from) the former Soviet Union. In my research among post-​Soviet women employed in Istanbul in three distinct spheres—​sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work—I found that migrant women were negotiating emotions, intimate relationships, and unpredictable state power shaping their labor. Moreover, contrary to a victimization approach (e.g., Hughes 2000), women’s accounts point to how they were not simply in danger, victimized, or exploited. Instead, their stories emphasized intricate lives and intimate ties, often based on love or commitment, that they fostered as transnational migrants in Eurasia. Grounded in the accounts of more than 50 post-​Soviet migrant women largely from Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus, my research highlights the hopes and dreams, as well as the crises, which compelled women to turn to transnational labor migration to Istanbul. In the case of Bella (all names here are pseudonyms) in the mid-​1990s, when her second child was two years old, she boarded a minibus in southern Moldova to seek work in Istanbul; her job as a civil engineer in the municipal government had gone unpaid for months, and her husband’s lack of stable work further destabilized the household. Employed for nearly 20 years (mid-​1990s to 2013) in domestic work in Istanbul and then apartment renovation in Moscow, Bella was able to support her two sons who remained living with close family in Moldova until they departed on scholarships to pursue university studies in Romania. Others—​like Olga, a shuttle trader from Russia, and Irina, an exotic dancer from Ukraine—​traveled as much out of a newfound sense of possibility as out of necessity. As mobile post-​Soviet women rewove a social fabric frayed with the end of socialism, they were reworking intimacy in a time of widely atomized lives (Yurchak 2003). Women who shared a history of living in societies shaped by socialism, including a particular ethic around the meanings of citizenship and a lingua franca of Russian, arrived in Turkey by the thousands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, just as tensions between secularist and Islamist visions of modernity were intensifying (see White 2002) and the Turkish service economy was expanding (Gökovali 2010). As the former Soviet region’s economies collapsed, the Turkish economy benefited from the extralegal flow of “irregular circular migrants,” many of them from relatively nearby and economically struggling Moldova, with others from Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia (see İçduygu and Yükseker 2012, 443–​444, 448). Migrants encountered a growing Turkish Islamist movement that was increasingly defined by political and revivalist sentiments, which included gendered codes of modesty that contrasted with those predominant among secular, urban women (and among newly arrived Russian-​speaking migrant women) (Öncü 2002; Yükseker 2007). Despite some commonalities between Russian-​speaking migrant women and secular, urban Turkish women, the Turkish public widely vilified

408

409

Postsocialist migration and intimacy

migrant women as hypersexualized and out of step with gender expectations for women in Turkish society. Nevertheless, migrant women also had a certain currency as linking urbanites to a global economy of gendered labor (Giddens 1992; Keough 2015; Uygun 2004); migrant women from the former Soviet Union came to be in demand for their emotional labor, including as housekeepers and caregivers, girlfriends of Turkish men, and exotic dancers.

Intimate practices: Labor, sexuality, and nurturing In contrast to literature focused on state-​inscribed gender binaries and ideals within national borders of CEE&E (Gal and Kligman 2000; Temkina and Rotkirch 1997), for this group of women migrants originating from across the former Soviet Union, the common experience of state socialism defined how gender and intimacy were enacted, as well as informing how they thought about the intimate practices of their labor, sexuality, and caregiving. Transnational mobility, and the new social locations it requires women (and men) migrants to occupy, magnifies a number of questions, including about gender and labor. In my conversations with women migrants they frequently reflected on socialist discourses on labor, and especially older interviewees spoke about a Soviet era when many of them were factory workers or employed in agricultural spheres, and others were engineers, accountants, or hospital administrators. They recounted how they saw their labor in the past as officially respected and rewarded, in contrast to how they felt treated like “dogs” (sobaky) and “slaves” (riaby) in their intimate household work as nannies and domestic laborers in Turkey. In interviews, many older women, regardless of professional background, lamented being inserted into a global service economy where ideals of socialist labor had no meaning, and they no longer had any social protections in the form of pensions, overtime, sick leave, or mechanisms for gender equity. In contrast, younger women, with no direct experience of socialist working conditions, tended to consider their work and life in Istanbul as exciting, urbane, and an escape from the, often dire, poverty they knew in home communities. Women’s mobility highlights not only divergent ideals about labor, but also how these converge with ideals about sexuality, as illustrated in the lives of post-​Soviet exotic dancers in a central tourist district of Istanbul (Bloch 2017, 135–​162, ­chapter 5). Their experiences point to how intimate economies are being remade as post-​Soviet women migrants differentially capitalize on what they frequently referred to in conversation as their sexuality “without hang-​ups” (bez kompleksov). I found many younger women to be savvy about engaging in an intimate services economy as a means of realizing transnational mobility. Women sought to benefit from Turkish men’s financial expenditures as customers in clubs or as boyfriends, and women made strategic use of the forms of power they embodied, presenting themselves as sexually liberated, relatively well educated (several were university students), and “white” (belye). Many young women migrants I met in Istanbul who came of age in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s, unlike the older women in their forties and fifties who were working as shuttle traders, shop assistants, or domestics, were explicit about their ease with sexuality as something to be embraced, and they saw it as distinguishing them as modern young people. Significantly, in contrast to literature focused on women’s irregular migration into sex work as a dimension of the trafficking in women (e.g., Hughes 2000), the dancers I interviewed in Istanbul did not speak of being coerced or deceived into taking on their

409

410

Alexia Bloch

work, although they did feel that they were paying unfair fees to the agencies that had arranged their visas. Due to their contacts with previous migrants, women were mostly aware of the conditions they were to encounter on arriving in Istanbul, and many were on repeat contracts as entertainers or previously had worked abroad elsewhere. Ten of the 15 entertainers I interviewed were on their second and third six-​month contracts as dancers in Turkey; at least two of the women had worked in Poland and the Czech Republic as seamstresses, and one had been an entertainer in Greece and Lebanon. As one dancer explained, “It is not such a big deal, it’s just dancing after all … It is not as if we are having sex or anything; it’s just a job and we just try to be without hangups (bez kompleksov),” once again invoking the expression often used by dancers to indicate a sense of unrepressed sexuality. These women were inserted into a global service economy, specifically an intimate services economy, similar to those from California to western Canada to South Korea (Bernstein 2007; Cheng 2010; Ross 2009). In addition to engaging in a global intimate services economy, however, these post-​ Soviet dancers shared some common history. They could be seen as taking part in a post-​Soviet heteronormative sexual revolution where, according to Kon (1995, 3), “sexual freedom became one of the most important aspects and symbols of social liberation.” Young women migrants of the early to mid-​2000s were very much part of a post-​Soviet generational transformation shaped by an explosion of sexually explicit information and media images, including an affirmation of sexuality as something to be consciously performed and capitalized upon (Gessen 1995; Rotkirch 2004, 108); I also encountered a few young post-​Soviet men who found work as masseurs in a vibrant gay segment of Istanbul’s intimate services economy. The dancers, like the handful of masseurs I met, imagined returning home permanently, having saved enough money to run their own garment import businesses and boutiques, in some cases to support children they had left behind with relatives. While only a very few women saved enough money in repeated contracts as dancers to invest in their own businesses, one woman I interviewed, who remained in Istanbul for nearly ten years, proudly recounted how she had established her own real estate business and had purchased a home for her mother back in Moldova. Post-​Soviet women’s accounts were peppered with reflections on caregiving obligations and arrangements that kept them closely linked to home communities. These stories reflect another key dimension of how intimacy—​in this case, mothering—​gets reworked in circuits of migration, in some ways reflecting a pattern of grandmothers also becoming more integral to carework in Russia over the past two decades (Semenova and Thompson 2004, 126–​127; Utrata 2015). In the case of many Moldovan women, however, care for children is often spread between a number of close relatives including, on occasion, husbands staying home. This was the case for Sveta, a young woman I met on a microbus returning from a visit to her ten-​month-​old daughter who was being cared for by her husband and mother. After the three-​hour bus journey, Sveta continued her trek from Chișinău via an overnight train to Moscow where a housekeeping job awaited. Sveta’s daughter, like nearly one-​quarter of children in Moldova at the time, was growing up with at least one parent away as a labor migrant (UNICEF 2009). During my research I encountered many young women like Sveta who were reflecting on their mothering from a distance, arrangements that often extended from their children’s infancy well into early adulthood. In many instances, as children grew they were cared for by a close relative who oversaw daily needs, while mothers’, and less often fathers’, remittances financed basic necessities. I heard about the decisions women were

410

411

Postsocialist migration and intimacy

making regarding their children and implicitly about what I came to call a “transnational nurturing nexus,” or the complex ways that families and households provide for children by combining historical caregiving practices with investment in transnational circuits of mobility. In contrast to a dominant trend in migration studies that focuses on women’s mobility as creating a nurturing crisis, a sort of rupture of universal mother-​centered care (e.g., Keough 2015; Parreñas 2005), the case of post-​Soviet women’s migration turns our attention to how local forms of intimacy and caregiving also shape women’s prospects for mobility. Across the former Soviet Union a nurturing nexus of grandmothers, migrant mothers, and state institutions made it possible for women to even imagine seeking work abroad (Tianynen-​Qadir 2016). Women in southern Moldova and Istanbul spoke of the role of daycares, after-​school programs, and residential schools in supporting the caregiving provided within transnational households, even if, as elsewhere across CEE&E, state investment in infrastructures for caregiving has drastically diminished in recent years (Utrata 2015). However, even before the massive outmigration from the region, it was not uncommon for grandmothers, adoptive parents, and other kin, sometimes referred to as “other mothers” in women’s accounts, to provide essential caregiving as a familiar part of the nurturing nexus defining households intergenerationally (Kvilinkova 2007). As one woman who raised her sister’s children in the 1990s explained to me, “Of course, the grandchildren should also stay with me so their parents can work more.” As in other locations, for southern Moldovan families other mothering has meant that caregiving is carried out by multiple actors, and instead of being an aberration, this form of nurturing is historically central to how families are organized (Bloch 2017; Collins 1990, 222–​223). In southern Moldova women’s labor migration has been enabled both by local, historically grounded kinship practices and forms of intimacy, and by state socialist infrastructures and ideals that historically facilitated women’s lives beyond their households, even if today these state infrastructures are in disrepair.

Conclusions The transnational circuits of women moving between Istanbul and the former Soviet Union involve extreme hardship, but situating women as victims leaves little room for their accounts of love, exhilaration, disappointment, connection, and many other experiences they feature in discussing intimate realms of migration. Analyses centered on crisis in the form of trafficking or the lack of mother-​centered care too easily overshadow how people make sense of mobility and the intimate connections animating their lives in postsocialist CEE&E. A focus on intimacy and migration in CEE&E illuminates how people experience neoliberal restructuring globally through a prism of local political economies and politics of race, household formations, and intimate practices. Post-​Soviet women’s experiences of being mobile offer a plethora of ways to think about gender, migration, and intimacy in an emerging market economy and a retreating state socialist one. In the case of post-​Soviet migrants as mobile, transnational populations, they have experienced a radical change in their intimate lives, where just a generation ago they could rely on stable state structures to support public institutions, households, and for some, a coherent sense of well-​being . Examining migration and intimacy in CEE&E provides a powerful means of understanding how geopolitics, kinship, and gendered aspirations are interwoven in the experience of migration.

411

412

Alexia Bloch

References Abu-​Lughod, Lila. 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Akalin, Ayşe. 2007. “Hired as Caregiver, Demanded as a Housewife: Becoming a Migrant Domestic Worker in Turkey.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14 (3): 209–​225. Åkesson, Lisa. 2011. “Remittances and Relationships: Exchange in Cape Verdean Transnational Families.” Ethnos 76 (3): 326–​347. Béller-​Hann, Ildikó. 1995. “Prostitution and Its Effects in Northeast Turkey.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 2 (2): 219–​235. Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bloch, Alexia. 2003. “Victims of Trafficking or Entrepreneurial Women? Narratives of Post-​Soviet Entertainers in Turkey.” Journal of Canadian Woman Studies 22 (3/​4): 152–​158. –​–​–​–​. 2014. “Citizenship, Belonging, and Moldovan Migrants in Post-​Soviet Russia.” Ethnos 79 (4): 445–​472. –​–​–​–​. 2017. Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brennan, Denise. 2004. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chari, Sharad and Katherine Verdery. 2009. “Thinking Between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (1): 6–​34. Cheng, Sealing. 2010. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coe, Cati. 2013. The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Demintseva, Ekaterina, and Daniel Kashnitsky. 2016. “Contextualizing Migrants’ Methods of Seeking Medical Care in Russia.” International Migration 54 (5): 29–​42. Einhorn, Barbara. 1993. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe. New York: Verso. Faier, Leiba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gessen, Masha. 1995. “Sex in the Media and the Birth of the Sex Media in Russia.” In Postcommunism and the Body Politic, edited by Ellen Berry, 197–​228. New York: New York University Press. Gewinner, Irina. 2020. “Gender Norms, Sexuality and Post-​socialist Identity: Does Migration Matter?” Sexuality & Culture 24 (2): 465–​484. Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Eroticism, and Love in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gökovali, Ummuhan. 2010. “Contribution of Tourism to Economic Growth in Turkey.” Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research 21 (1): 139–​153. Hirsch, Jennifer S. 2003. A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hughes, Donna M. 2000. “The ‘Natasha’ Trade: The Transnational Shadow Market of Trafficking in Women.” Journal of International Affairs 53 (2): 625–​651. İçduygu, Ahmet and Deniz Yükseker. 2012. “Rethinking Transit Migration in Turkey: Reality and Representation in the Creation of a Migratory Phenomenon.” Population, Space, and Place 18 (4): 441–​456.

412

413

Postsocialist migration and intimacy Johnson, Ericka. 2007. Dreaming of a Mail-​Order Husband: Russian–​American Internet Romance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keough, Leyla J. 2015. Worker-​Mothers on the Margins of Europe: Gender and Migration between Moldova and Istanbul. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kon, Igor. 1995. The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today. New York: Free Press. Kvilinkova, Elizaveta Nikolaevna. 2007. Traditsionnaia dukhovnaia kul’tura gagauzov: etnoregional’nye osobennosti [Traditional Spiritual Culture of the Gagauz: Ethnoregional Characteristics]. Kishinev: Biznec-​Elita. Luehrmann, Sonja. 2004. “Mediated Marriage: Internet Matchmaking in Provincial Russia.” Europe-​Asia Studies 56 (6): 857–​875. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2011. Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Malysheva, Marina M. and Elena V. Tiuriukanova. 2000. “Zhenshchiny v mezhdunarodnoi trudovoi migratsii.” [“Women in international labor migration.”] Narodonaselenie (2): 91–​101. Morokvasic, Mirjana. 1984. “Birds of Passage Are Also Women.” International Migration Review 18 (4): 886–​907. Öncü, Ayșe. 2002. “Global Consumerism, Sexuality as Public Spectacle, and the Cultural Remapping of Istanbul in the 1990s.” In Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayșe Saktanber, 171–​190. London: I.B. Tauris. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Patico, Jennifer. 2010. “Kinship and Crisis: Embedded Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking.” Slavic Review 69 (1): 16–​39. Pedwell, Carolyn and Anne Whitehead. 2012. “Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory.” Feminist Theory 13 (2): 115–​129. Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. Border Work: Culture and Society after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rogova, Anastasia. 2020. “Russian-​ Speaking Immigrants in Canada: Belonging, Political Subjectivity, and Struggle for Recognition.” Unpub. diss. University of British Columbia. Ross, Becki. 2009. Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rotkirch, Anna. 2004. “What Kind of Sex Can You Talk About? Acquiring Sexual Knowledge in Three Soviet Generations.” In On Living through Soviet Russia, edited by Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, 90–​117. New York: Routledge. Semenova, Victoria and Paul Thompson. 2004. “Family Models and Intergenerational Influences: Grandparents, Parents and Children in Moscow and Leningrad from the Soviet to the Market Era.” In On Living through Soviet Russia, edited by Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, 118–​143. New York: Routledge. Solari, Cinzia. 2017. On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Nationalism, and Ukrainian Migration to Italy and the United States. New York: Routledge. Suchland, Jennifer. 2015. Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Post-​socialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Temkina, Anna and Anna Rotkirch. 1997. “Soviet Gender Contracts and Their Shifts in Contemporary Russia.” In Russia in Transition: The Case of New Collective Actors and New Collective Actions, edited by Anna Temkina, 195–​203. Helsinki: Kikimora. Tianynen-​Qadir, Tatiana. 2016. “Transnational Grandmothers Making Their Multi-​sited Homes between Finland and Russia.” In Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age, edited by Katie Walsh and Lena Näre, 25–​37. New York: Routledge. UNICEF. 2009. Assessment of the Childcare System in Moldova. www.ceecis.org/​ccc/​publications/​ Raport_​Eng_​PDF.pdf. United Nations (UN). 2019. International Migration Report. www.un.org/​en/​development/​desa/​ population/​migration/​publications/​migrationreport/​docs/​InternationalMigration2019_​Report. pdf. Utrata, Jennifer. 2015. Women Without Men, Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

413

414

Alexia Bloch Uygun, Banu Nilgün. 2004. “Post-​socialist Scapes of Economy and Desire: The Case of Turkey.” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 43: 27–​45. White, Jenny B. 2002. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Wilson, Ara. 2012. “Intimacy: A Useful Category of Transnational Analysis.” In The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, edited by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, 31–​57. New York: Columbia University Press. Yükseker, Deniz. 2007. Shuttling Goods, Weaving Consumer Tastes: Informal Trade between Turkey and Russia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31 (1): 60–​72. Yurchak, Alexei. 2003. “Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever until It Was No More.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (3): 480–​510.

414

415

Armed conflict/​resolution

416

417

40 THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL FRAMEWORKS ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN CONFLICT Belinda Cooper

The conflicts in former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995 claimed an estimated 100,000 lives and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. A particularly horrifying feature of the conflicts was their treatment of women. Tens of thousands of women, it has been estimated, became victims of sexual violence carried out, to a great degree, in systematic fashion. Rapes occurred on all sides of the conflict, but reports quickly emerged that rape and “rape camps” were being used especially by Bosnian Serbs to terrorize non-​Serb—​in particular Bosnian Muslim—​communities. As evidence of the scope of these atrocities mounted, even before the end of hostilities, journalists and NGOs reported extensively on them, generating a level of international publicity and outrage that became instrumental in catalyzing demands for the creation of an international war crimes tribunal (Mertus 2004, vii, 5) while bringing unprecedented attention to gender issues in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The Cold War had made it impossible to create a successor to the post-​World War II International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the first international tribunal to try individual leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law. But the window of opportunity that opened as Cold War tensions eased, coupled with guilt over the international community’s inability to prevent the atrocities in Yugoslavia, changed the playing field, and in 1993, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) based in The Hague.

417

418

Belinda Cooper

While the tribunal has ultimately been viewed as a success in incorporating into international justice both women themselves and legal issues of importance to feminist scholars and activists, it not only suffered from some inherent weaknesses, but also triggered important debates among activists and scholars inside and outside the region. These included the necessity of casting women as victims for legal action and reconciling gendered frameworks and nationalist narratives, most prominently in a debate between US feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon (1993, 1994) and Croatian anti-​war feminist Vesna Kesić (1994).

Women’s presence in developing international justice A hallmark of the ICTY was its inclusion of women from the beginning and at all levels, far more than was the case at Nuremberg. This attention to women owes a great deal to the increased presence of women in public roles as lawyers, activists, and scholars by the early 1990s (Askin 2003, 295–​296). “The court’s very existence can be credited in large part to the efforts of local and international women’s human rights advocates” (Mertus 2004, vii). These advocates not only provided practical input, such as interviewing and counseling witnesses, they also lobbied for practices and procedures that took women’s concerns into account, and for inclusion of crimes against women in the court’s indictments. Women’s groups on the ground began collecting testimonies early in the wars, in part with the hope of later bringing perpetrators to justice (Orentlicher 2018). The presence of women investigators, who were more likely to be entrusted with women victims’ stories, helped to ensure the availability of evidence. Of the ICTY’s four chief prosecutors, two (Louise Arbour and Carla del Ponte) were women, and women represented up to 20–​30 percent of its judges. Perhaps most importantly, the court had an official gender advisor from the start. Attorney Patricia Viseur Sellers, appointed the first Gender Advisor to the Office of the Prosecutor by the Tribunal’s first prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, played a key role in the identification and prosecution of crimes against women. Whatever one thinks of the “add women and stir” philosophy of gender inclusion, the presence of women in the development of the tribunal was crucial to ensuring continued attention to women’s interests. The development of international women’s rights activism in the decades leading up to the 1990s also played a significant role. Starting with the 1975 UN conference on women in Mexico City and continuing through Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985 (and culminating later with Beijing in 1995), awareness of women’s rights issues and organizing around them had grown exponentially. The UN’s major post-​Cold War World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 explicitly recognized women’s rights as human rights and began to highlight the ways in which traditional human rights thinking failed to reflect women’s experience—​as when the violations most often suffered by women, such as rape and domestic violence, were viewed as private acts and thus not covered by traditional human rights protections against government action. As part of this process, scholars turned their attention to international law, including the laws of war, and its treatment of crimes against women.

Violence against women in war: International law and feminist critiques According to international legal scholars, law has historically defined women in terms of their relationships to men and children—​as wives and mothers, with rights and duties 418

419

Violence against women in Yugoslav wars

dependent on those roles. Women’s sexuality, in particular, was considered to belong to men; therefore rape was primarily a crime against a man’s property (Askin 2003, 296). Similarly, while rape has long been considered a crime in wartime (Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000, 314), it was as much a crime against the male adversary as against women themselves. Since female sexuality in many places was the property of the community and of men, raping women was a way of undermining the (male) enemy, both individually and as a group. The “dishonored” woman was shamed and often rejected, along with any children that resulted, which made rape an even more powerful weapon against a community’s cohesion. At the same time, regardless of the law, access to women was often considered part of a soldier’s prerogative: the enemy’s women were “spoils of war” (Askin 2003, 296–​299). When modern international codes and conventions to regulate armed conflict were developing in the mid-​19th century, they were built on these old ideas about rape as a crime against the male adversary’s honor. While the victim was now more clearly the woman herself, rape was still interpreted largely through a male lens, as a violation of “the honor and dignity of women” rather than a straightforward physical harm. Even when rape was explicitly recognized as a war crime, as in parts of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (IV, Article 27), honor remained an operative term in its interpretation, associated with such concepts as modesty and weakness (Crowe 2016, 13–​16), as well as with men’s failure to protect “their” women. As feminist legal scholars Charlesworth and Chinkin (2000, 314) point out, this presented women as in need of particular protection and as “male and family property.” Otherwise, rape was not separately listed, but was covered by other war crimes such as “causing great suffering or serious injury.” When international courts had the chance to interpret the laws of war following WWII, they failed to address rape directly. The Allies’ Nuremberg Charter, which provided the legal framework for the first international tribunal, did not explicitly include rape in its definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. While evidence of rape was introduced at the postwar trials—​Nuremberg and the lesser-​known Tokyo trial—​it was subsumed under the rubric of other crimes (Askin 2003). Neither the so-​called comfort women forcibly prostituted by the Japanese army, nor rape by Allied troops, in particular the mass rapes of women by Soviet soldiers in occupied Germany after World War II, were addressed at these tribunals. As the ICTY began its work, the international women’s movement was challenging this historical approach to crimes against women in war as part of its more general critique of the male orientation of international and human rights law.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: Redefining sexual violence in wartime and changing procedures Building upon the work of feminist lawyers and scholars, the ICTY set significant precedents for the treatment of crimes of violence against women. The tribunal’s statute, which gave it jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, explicitly listed rape for the first time as a crime against humanity; in its decisions, the tribunal also defined sexual slavery as a crime against humanity and conceptualized rape as a war crime in its own right and as a form of torture, which was already defined as a war crime. These were particularly important findings, as they expanded the definitions of commonly accepted human rights violations to include acts specifically targeting women, and identified them as concrete, violent assaults rather than private acts or attacks on 419

420

Belinda Cooper

honor. The tribunal additionally acknowledged the connection between rape and ethnic cleansing. Each of these decisions represented a significant step in naming and recognizing acts of sexual violence against women as crimes under international law. The court also clarified the evidentiary requirements for proving these crimes. It eliminated the need for corroborating witnesses for cases of sexual violence, refused consideration of evidence of a victim’s sexual history, and rejected the need to show coercion or use of force in rape—​all of which were (and often still are) part of rape laws in many countries, including in former Yugoslavia. The court further recognized that consent had little meaning in the context of war. These determinations had concrete consequences: Over a third of the defendants convicted by the tribunal were charged with crimes involving sexual violence (ICTY, n.d.). The legal discussions initiated at the ICTY (as well as at a similar international tribunal for Rwanda) influenced the statute establishing the permanent International Criminal Court, negotiated at Rome in 1998. A broad range of international women’s NGOs, organized in the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, attended the conference to lobby governments around issues of concern to women (Spees 2003). As a direct result of their work, the Rome Statute contains an extensive list of sexual violence crimes—​ “Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity”—​as crimes against humanity as well as war crimes (Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court 1998, Articles 7(1)(g) and 8(2)(e)(vi)). Beyond its jurisprudence, the ICTY took women’s experience into account in its creation of a Witnesses and Victims Section, which offered practical and psychological support to witnesses coming to The Hague to testify. Its mandate in the court’s rules of procedure explicitly referred to counseling and support for victims of sexual violence, and emphasized the need for female staff in its work (Rohne 2003). For survivors of sexual violence, who could be especially vulnerable and for whom a trip to The Hague and testimony before an international court were often difficult experiences, this type of support was particularly important. Victims’ groups from the region criticized the tribunal for failing to provide ongoing psychosocial and protective assistance to victims after they returned home. While it did expand its support services to aid witnesses upon their return, the ICTY, as an international court, did not have the resources or expertise to provide continuing aid of this sort. Its innovative witness support work, however, influenced national and local war crimes tribunals in the region and beyond, and witness support—​with specific attention to the needs of women—​is now generally considered an integral aspect of such trials.

Rape, genocide, victimhood, and nationalist narratives As the tribunal began its work, a significant debate emerged regarding rape, genocide, and their relationship to nationalist narratives in former Yugoslavia. On one side was MacKinnon (1993, 1994), who framed the conflict’s violence against women in ethnic terms and underscored the role of rape as a key element in Serb genocide against non-​ Serbs. She graphically detailed instances of Serb sexual violence against Croatian and Muslim women and argued that the scale of this violence on the Serb side distinguished it from crimes against women committed by other parties to the conflict. MacKinnon emphasized what she described as the widespread use of pornography “as a tool of genocide” in the Yugoslav conflicts, arguing both that it influenced Serb behavior and 420

421

Violence against women in Yugoslav wars

that Serbs were turning their systematic rapes into pornography. Not just a scholarly bystander, MacKinnon was at the time working with women from the region to sue Bosnian Serb strongman Radovan Karadzic in federal court in New York, which would result in a judgment holding him liable under US civil law for Bosnian Serb rapes (Kadic v. Karadzic, 70 F3rd 232 (2d Cir. 1995). Kesić (1994) questioned MacKinnon’s more sensational factual claims regarding Serb sexual crimes. She also countered MacKinnon’s anti-​pornography arguments in the Yugoslav context, describing them as “reductionism” (1994, 276) and as an outsider’s attempt to impose her own understandings on a culture with which she was not familiar (see also Batinic 2001). More significantly for the legal discussion, Kesić resisted what she saw as an ethnic division of rape, arguing that crimes against women had occurred on all sides and required a broader feminist lens. “Instead of talking about the ‘universal Serbian rapist’ in this war, as MacKinnon ultimately does, it is more appropriate to talk about the universal soldier who is keen to rape in all wars” (Kesić 1994, 279). Rather than defining rape primarily as part of the ethnically based crime of genocide, Kesić and others who shared her perspective concentrated on its nature as a crime specifically targeted against women (Engle 2005, 786; Kesić 2003). They pointed out that the rise of nationalism throughout former Yugoslavia in the lead-​up to war was accompanied by a reversal of feminist gains under communism, as many women’s organizations were coopted or coerced in the service of nationalist agendas. Rape imagery played an important role in this nationalist discourse (Batinic 2001, 9). Kesić (2003, 268) essentially accused MacKinnon of contributing to this nationalist instrumentalization of women: “[H]‌er work has become a part of the war propaganda which stirs ethnic hatred and promotes revenge.” Even if they did not address the court specifically, these diverging feminist views reflected differing ideas of the approach the ICTY might take in its jurisprudence on rape: either focusing on Serb crimes against women as part of a specifically Serbian, ethnically targeted campaign of genocide, or acknowledging rape and abuse of women as crimes that transcended national lines and might even constitute an independent crime of gender-​based persecution. The tribunal would ultimately incorporate both views, trying members of all ethnic groups for sexual violence, while also highlighting the commission of ethnic cleansing (though not genocide, except in Srebrenica) by the Bosnian Serbs and recognizing the systematic use of rape as part of that crime (Engle 2005). In this way, while the court did not establish a specific crime of gender-​based persecution, it recognized that all sides in the conflict targeted women, while also accepting an ethnic aspect of rape in Serbian ethnic cleansing. Summarizing the debate years later, Engle (2005) criticized both sides for “treat[ing] most women as victims of the war.” This underlying presumption of victimhood—​one adopted perhaps unconsciously by many scholars, primarily from outside the region, and frequently noted by observers from the region (Hromadzic 2007)—​can deprive women of agency and elide differences among victims themselves, thereby silencing certain voices within victim groups. It underplays women’s ability to take on active roles as resisters and fighters (Engle 2005). It may negate the possibility of women’s choice, for example in the context of relationships between members of differing ethnic groups in wartime (Helms 2014). The narrative of victimhood also fails to account for women who support the perpetrator side—​graphically illustrated, for example, by the images in the documentary I Came to Testify (2011) of Bosnian Serb women screaming insults at Muslim victims attempting to place a memorial plaque at the site of a rape camp in the town of Foca. 421

422

Belinda Cooper

Women were not only victims, but the efforts to ensure that sexual violence receives proper recognition have often—​perhaps unavoidably—​relegated them to that passive role. Defining rape as an element of ethnic cleansing and genocide, while a significant advance in the treatment of these crimes, raises additional difficult questions. Scholars and lawyers have tended to ground this development in culturally based arguments. They maintain that Serbs, in particular, intentionally aimed to change the population structure by impregnating Muslim women with Serb babies and thus eliminating the victimized group, either because ethnicity is inherited through the father in Muslim culture, or because raped women and their children would (in this telling) be rejected by their patriarchal, conservative community. Though it did not address rape in particular, the ICTY’s Krstic judgment, which found that the killings at Srebrenica constituted genocide, used typical cultural reasoning: “In a patriarchal society, such as the one in which the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica lived, the elimination of virtually all the men has made it almost impossible for the Bosnian Muslim women who survived the take-​over of Srebrenica to successfully reestablish their lives” (Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, ICTY, 2001, para. 91). Accepting the truth of these claims, however, seems in a perverse way to internalize nationalist and patriarchal stereotypes. As Engle (2005, 788) points out, “One particularly strong and largely unchallenged belief seems to be that, if a Muslim egg were inseminated with a Serbian sperm, a Serbian child would ensue.” Kesić (2003, 3) argues, “The concept of ‘genocide by procreation’ appropriates and reinforces racist ideology, because it accepts that the nation or ethnic group can be destroyed by procreation, that is, by its enlargement through the dilution of ‘ethnic blood.’ ” This framing of genocide and ethnic cleansing also assumes the questionable existence of monolithic cultures, including the notion that raped women and their children, in this case particularly Bosnian Muslims, are in fact humiliated, blamed, and excluded from the community, which contributes to its destruction. While such shaming certainly does happen, these beliefs are not always borne out in fact and ignore complex cultural realities (Engle 2005; Kesić 2003, 5). The reason for these assumptions lies in part in the legal definition of genocide itself, which is predicated on genocidal intent, a subjective element. This means the intent of the Serb rapist (to dishonor women and produce “Serb babies” to destroy the Bosnian Muslim community) is the key factor, not whether the rapist’s beliefs about the victim’s culture, and therefore about the potentially genocidal consequences of his behavior, are true. Engle (2005) points out, however, that lawyers and courts often infer the rapist’s beliefs by making those very same cultural assumptions. Here the law itself becomes complicit in upholding a problematic view of culture and women’s agency. Even though the ICTY’s jurisprudence has brought important advances in the definition and prosecution of crimes of sexual violence, significant tensions underlying some of its reasoning thus remain unresolved.

Limits of the law The ICTY has been the most high profile and successful means of achieving justice in former Yugoslavia. In addition to its own work, it supported and aided the development of domestic war crimes tribunals in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. No successful regional or national truth commissions have yet been held in former Yugoslavia, so trials have been the primary means of working through the region’s recent history.

422

423

Violence against women in Yugoslav wars

For women, this reliance on legal process has been a mixed experience. Women throughout the region, hoping for justice, supported judicial mechanisms and worked during and after the years of war to collect evidence. The ICTY’s legal achievements have been recognized by women on the ground. On an individual level, the chance to speak out in court, facing down and testifying against their rapists, could be a satisfying and even empowering experience for victims of sexual crimes (King et al. 2016, 50–​52; Hogan 2011; Jacobson and Jelinčić 1996). Yet, the tribunal was “only a war crimes tribunal” (Mertus 1999). Trials are not truth commissions, in which victims have the chance to tell their stories and frame their own narratives. They are not victim-​but perpetrator-​centered, with the aim of bringing specific criminals to justice. In order to do this, prosecutors must seek the strongest possible evidence for a limited set of crimes that permit the strongest indictments. The victim’s role is to provide precise testimony regarding perpetrators’ criminal behavior, not to tell her full story. Like the substantive legal definitions discussed above, the structure of a trial limits witnesses to the role of victim. Trials can also end in acquittals, which may be deeply unsatisfying to victims. The tribunal did often provide a powerful forum for those who had the chance to testify. But for others—​including many victims who were interviewed, sometimes repeatedly, to collect evidence for various trials but were not asked to testify—​the effect could be less positive, causing retraumatization and affecting their sense of self-​worth. The ICTY could only try a relatively small number of high-​level perpetrators. To expand the opportunities for legal accountability, the tribunal worked with the countries of former Yugoslavia to establish domestic war crimes prosecutions, and its jurisprudence influenced their fledgling war crimes chambers. Still, these national courts have had only mixed success at prosecuting an equally limited number of lower level perpetrators. Thus, many of those involved in the violence, particularly at the most local levels, have evaded accountability, and they are the people most likely to be living side by side with their victims. Moreover, when domestic courts in former Yugoslavia have prosecuted wartime crimes against women, they have at times been stymied by less progressive national laws that continue to define rape in limited ways (though this has improved in recent years), or by problematic application of laws at trial, as when judges wrongly allow evidence of women’s sexual history or of supposed consent (Edman 2008, 21–​23; Amnesty International 2017; TRIAL International 2018). National courts have also at times failed to provide sufficient protection for witnesses, and anonymity is particularly difficult to maintain at local-​level trials, where victims are more easily identifiable. International bodies now acknowledge that compensation and reparations measures—​financial, social, and psychological—​are essential to victims in their recovery from trauma and an integral component of justice. The ICTY had no mechanism for granting reparations to victims, however, so compensation has depended on the interests and resources of state governments. While war veterans have received compensation, support for victims has been limited and sporadic (Vladisavljevic, Lakic, and Begisholli 2019). Survivors of sexual violence throughout the region have faced particular neglect (IOM 2013). Organizations representing these women complain of limited attention to their needs over the years, including a widespread lack of available health and psychological support and treatment. In this regard, too, justice in the Balkans remains incomplete.

423

424

Belinda Cooper

Conclusions The systematic violence against women committed in the course of the wars in former Yugoslavia occurred in a context in which women could for the first time demand that it be taken seriously. The ICTY, the main vehicle for achieving justice following the conflicts, responded to these demands by directly addressing sexual violence against women and by incorporating women into the mechanisms of justice themselves. The tribunal was quite successful in acknowledging many of the issues women as scholars, activists, and lawyers had hoped for, and it also influenced domestic justice mechanisms and their approach to crimes against women. However, its work also highlighted weaknesses and ambiguities both in the structures of international law and in the approaches women themselves had championed. While its legacy is therefore mixed, it remains a significant step in acknowledging, and developing legal accountability for, crimes against women in wartime, both internationally and in former Yugoslavia.

References Amnesty International. 2017. “We Need Support, Not Pity: Last Chance for Justice for Bosnia’s Wartime Rape Survivors.” www.amnesty.ie/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2017/​09/​BiH-​report-​final-​for-​ print.pdf. Askin, Kelly Dawn. 2003.“Prosecuting Wartime Rape and Other Gender-​Related Crimes Under International Law: Extraordinary Advances, Enduring Obstacles.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 21: 288–​349. Batinic, Jelena. 2001. “Feminism, Nationalism, and War: The ‘Yugoslav Case’ in Feminist Texts.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 3: 1–​19. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin. 2000. The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crowe, Anna. 2016. “ ‘All the Regard Due to Their Sex’: Women in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.” Human Rights Program Working Paper Series, Harvard Law School. http://​hrp.law.harvard.edu/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​12/​Anna-​Crowe_​HRP-​16_​001.pdf. Edman, Angela J. 2008. “Crimes of Sexual Violence in the War Crimes Chamber of the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Successes and Challenges.” Human Rights Brief 16 (1): 21–​28. Engle, Karen. 2005. “Feminism and Its (Dis)Contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” American Journal of International Law 88: 778–​816. Helms, Elissa. 2014. “Rejecting Angelina: Bosnian War Rape Survivors and the Ambiguities of Sex in War.” Slavic Review 73 (3): 612–​634. Hogan, Pamela. 2011. “I Came To Testify.” Women, War and Peace: A Five Part Special Series on PBS. Hromadzic, Azra. 2007. “Challenging the Discourse of Bosnian War Rapes.” In Living Gender After Communism, edited by Janet Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, 169–​184. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ICTY. n.d. “Crimes of Sexual Violence.” www.icty.org/​en/​features/​crimes-​sexual-​violence. IOM (International Organization for Migration). 2013. “Reparations for Wartime Victims in the Former Yugoslavia: In Search of the Way Forward.” www.iom.int/​files/​live/​sites/​iom/​files/​What-​ We-​Do/​docs/​Reparations-​for-​Wartime-​Victimes-​in-​the-​Former-​Yugoslavia-​In-​Search-​of-​the-​ Way-​Forward.pdf. Jacobson, Mandy and Karmen Jelinčić. 1996. “Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women: A Film.” Women Make Movies (documentary). www.wmm.com/​catalog/​film/​calling-​ the-​ghosts/​. Kesić, Vesna. 1994. “A Response to Catharine MacKinnon’s Article, ‘Turning Rape Into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide.’” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5: 267–​278. –​–​–​–​. 2003. “Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women.” Eurozine. www. eurozine.com/​muslim-​women-​croatian-​women-​serbian-​women-​albanian-​women/​.

424

425

Violence against women in Yugoslav wars King, Kimi et al. 2016. “Echoes of Testimonies: A Pilot Study into the Long-​Term Impact of Bearing Witness before the ICTY.” University of North Texas and Victims and Witnesses Section of the ICTY. www.icty.org/​x/​file/​About/​Registry/​Witnesses/​Echoes-​Full-​Report_​EN.pdf. MacKinnon, Catharine. 1993. “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide.” In Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer, 73–​81. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. –​–​–​–​. 1994. “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights.” In Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer. 183–​196. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Mertus, Julie. 1999. “Only a War Crimes Tribunal: Triumph of the International Community, Pain of the Survivors.” In War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, edited by Belinda Cooper, 229–​ 243. New York: TV Books. –​ –​ –​ –​ . 2004. “Women’s Participation in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): Transitional Justice for Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Women Waging Peace Policy Commission. www.inclusivesecurity.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2004/​07/​19_​women_​s_​ participation_​in_​the_​international_​criminal_​tribunal_​for_​the_​former_​yugoslavia_​icty_​transitional_​justice_​for_​bosnia_​and_​herzegovina.pdf. Orentlicher, Diane. 2018. “Some Kind of Justice: The ICTY’s Impact in Bosnia and Serbia.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rohne, Holger C. 2003. “The Victims and Witnesses Section at the ICTY: An Interview with Wendy Lobwein.” Max Planck institute fuer ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht. https://​csl. mpg.de/​media/​filer_​public/​98/​1d/​981d47bf-​98a5-​4d8d-​abdd-​8c4e445b337f/​tmptmpy_​lbq7ea. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. 1998. United Nations, Treaty Series 2187, no. 38544. www.icc-​cpi.int/​resource-​library/​documents/​rs-​eng.pdf. Spees, Pam. 2003. “Women’s Advocacy in the Creation of the International Criminal Court: Changing the Landscapes of Justice and Power.” Signs (Summer): 1233–​1254. TRIAL International. 2018. “Rape Myths in Wartime Sexual Violence Trials: Transferring the Burden from Survivor to Perpetrator.” Report. https://​trialinternational.org/​wp-​content/​ uploads/​2018/​01/​20180112-​TRIAL-​Rape-​Myths-​ENG-​WEB.pdf. Vladisavljevic, Anja, Mladen Lakic and Blerta Begisholli. 2019. “Compensation Comes Late for Rape Survivors of Balkan Wars.” Balkan Transitional Justice, June 19. https://​balkaninsight. com/​2019/​06/​19/​compensation-​comes-​late-​for-​rape-​survivors-​of-​balkan-​wars/​.

425

426

41 GENDER, CONFLICT, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN Sinéad Walsh

Gender in Armenia and Azerbaijan is affected not just by the sudden political and economic changes of the 1990s, as in other post-​Soviet states, but also by the conflict over Nagorno-​Karabakh. This conflict, which has roots in Soviet nationalities policy as well as Russian–​Ottoman rivalry, resurfaced in the late 1980s, when the ethnic Armenian majority in Nagorno-​Karabakh, an autonomous region of Azerbaijan, voiced their demand for unification with Armenia. Peaceful protests gave way to communal clashes, population transfers, and, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a full-​scale war in which up to 30,000 people were killed (De Waal 2003). A ceasefire in 1994 led to a frozen conflict which periodically descended into further violence, such as frontline clashes in April 2016 which resulted in the deaths of over 200 soldiers (Broers 2016). In September 2020, the conflict moved into a new phase that saw the fresh displacement of thousands of ethnic Armenian civilians from Nagorno-​Karabakh, the return of several districts to Azerbaijani control, and the arrival of Russian peacekeeping troops.1 Due to similarities between this and the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (regions that according to international law are in neighboring Georgia), as well as the geopolitical significance of the South Caucasus, mainstream scholarship often adopts a framework of regional security studies. Conversely, feminist scholarship tends to seek connections between the local and the global, looking at how gender intersects with and transverses ethnic, religious, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries. Gender relations in Armenia and Azerbaijan have been considered in national-​ historical perspective (Beukian 2014; Fertaly 2012; Tohidi 1998) as well as in the context of post-​Soviet transition, globalization, and neoliberalism (Heyat 2006; Ishkanian 2003). Women’s activism has also been explored in terms of the relationships between local and transnational feminist actors (Ishkanian 2004; Tohidi 2004) and how this plays out for different generations of women (Gureyeva Aliyeva 2020). While acknowledging the importance of transnational perspectives, this chapter argues for more specific attention to be paid to the role of conflict in structuring gender relations. There is much to be gained from analyses which detail the gendered impact of conflict, for example among refugees and internally displaced women and men 426

427

Gender and conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh

(Kabachnik et al. 2013; Najafizadeh 2003, 2013; Shahnazarian and Ziemer 2014) and war widows (Shahnazarian and Ziemer 2018). Scholarship on women’s activism would be incomplete without considering the challenges women face in mobilizing for peace and post-​conflict justice (Walsh 2015a). Recent collaborations suggest that dialogue across borders is possible, especially concerning women and sexual minorities in the region (Ziemer 2020). Such discussion is vital to understanding how new patterns in feminist and LGBTQ activism, and participatory approaches to peacebuilding, can contend with masculinized, nationalist, and authoritarian politics, as well as the ramifications of the most recent violence.

The gendered impact of conflict and transition One of the most clearly gendered aspects of the conflict over Nagorno-​Karabakh is that men make up the majority of those who fought and died in the war, as well as those who remain missing since the ceasefire. As men are widely perceived as the traditional breadwinners in both Armenian and Azerbaijani families, this has created a class of women whose status as war widows or as wives of missing persons places them in precarious economic and social positions. It has also contributed to the vulnerability of older people whose sons were killed or went missing during the war. These economic challenges are compounded in most cases by trauma and displacement. Moreover, with young men still subject to military conscription in both countries, the risk of fatalities is part of everyday life for those whose family members serve in and around the conflict zone (Shahnazarian and Ziemer 2018). Between 1988 and 1994, conflict led to the displacement of approximately 350,000 Armenians from Azerbaijan and over 700,000 Azerbaijanis from Armenia and Nagorno-​ Karabakh. Many people left their homes anticipating a swift return, at first seeking only temporary shelter with relatives living further from the frontline. Women were primarily responsible for caring for children and elderly relatives during this time, while some men stayed behind to defend their homes and villages. In Azerbaijan, internally displaced people (IDPs) were housed in emergency dormitories and tent camps, or created their own makeshift accommodation. Of the Armenians who left Azerbaijan, several went on to experience war first-​hand in Nagorno-​Karabakh, while many emigrated to Russia or further afield. Only a small proportion of these refugees have claimed Armenian citizenship. The impact of these traumatic experiences (and sometimes physical injuries) continues to affect survivors decades later (Ziemer 2018). Forced displacement has profound social and economic consequences in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-​Karabakh, as thousands of families experienced a loss of home and livelihood, from urban professional to rural working classes. Many Armenians who lived in the relatively multicultural city of Baku struggled to adapt to living conditions in war-​torn Nagorno-​Karabakh, with women experiencing a restriction of freedom and a return to more traditional gender roles (Shahnazarian and Ziemer 2014). On the other hand, agricultural workers from the fertile territories in and around Nagorno-​Karabakh were confined to crowded IDP camps or high-​rise apartment blocks. Emergency relief efforts were constrained by the wider economic context, including the mass devastation of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1988. In reduced economic circumstances, and in some cases without a male breadwinner, some women took pride in their primary role as caregivers (Najafizadeh 2003) and in their ability to “make do” (Fertaly 2012). Others turned to petty trade and the informal 427

428

Sinéad Walsh

economy (Shahnazarian and Ziemer 2014). Underage or early marriages, which had been discouraged throughout the 20th century, came to be viewed as an economic survival strategy for some families in poorer circumstances, and led to many young women missing out on an education. More recently, there have been unsubstantiated reports of survival sex (i.e., exchanging sex for basic foodstuffs) taking place in the vicinity of military outposts in poverty-​stricken areas and calls for further investigation into this phenomenon (Kvinna Till Kvinna 2019). Over time, it has become increasingly difficult to disentangle the effects of (and responses to) displacement from similar strategies adopted by members of host communities. Given the impact of the Soviet collapse on local industries and agricultural production, together with the limits on trade that resulted from the war and the increased competition for scarce resources due to inward migration, the economic impact of conflict has been felt even in communities far from the frontline (Gureyeva-​Alieva and Huseynov 2011). The fresh wave of displacement of civilians from Nagorno-​Karabakh and the surrounding territories in 2020, and the likely resettlement of tens of thousands of Azerbaijani IDPs in areas that were previously held by Armenian forces, will further complicate patterns of community development and economic migration across the region. The cultural transformation in gender roles over the past three decades is similar to those witnessed in postcommunist countries in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) that did not experience armed conflict. This includes a resurgence of the traditional gender binary, differentiating between conventional forms of masculinity (brave, warlike) and femininity (caring, mothering). These binary roles were instrumental in galvanizing support for the war, which called for men to defend the nation, and women to shoulder reproductive and caring roles (Dudwick 1997; Tohidi 1998). This gender ideology claims to be rooted in long-​standing historical traditions and national survival, and emphasizes the value of duty, sacrifice, and service to the nation for all. Such discourse has in large part dictated the terms under which a wide range of women, including refugees and IDPs, mothers and widows of soldiers, and female ex-​combatants, may seek individual and collective redress for the insecurities and harms arising from the conflict. Finally, as well as being shaped by (and giving shape to) conflict, gender politics in Armenia and Azerbaijan is connected with public debate about external cultural influences. In Armenia, this is often framed in terms of the locally rooted gender ideology of Armenians from the Republic of Armenia (Hayastantsi) versus western variations on gender roles that are being imported by Armenians from the diaspora (spiurk) (Darieva 2011). In Azerbaijan, globalization and cultural flows from both East and West have had an impact on public and private identities of women and men (Heyat 2006). The relationship between gender and Islam, for example, is understood in relation to both the Soviet past and contemporary practices in Turkey, Iran, and further afield (Heyat 2008; Najafizadeh 2012; Tohidi 1997).

Women’s activism within and across borders During the 1980s and 1990s, women actively responded to conflict and humanitarian crisis. Some activism was directed toward supporting men who volunteered for war, and a number of women took up arms themselves, particularly those who were left in Nagorno-​ Karabakh (Shahnazarian 2016). Others were involved in internal relief efforts, including psychosocial support and the distribution of aid (Dudwick 1997; Tohidi 2004). Although 428

429

Gender and conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh

there was no mass women’s peace movement, as there was in the Balkan wars, some individual women, such as Anahit Bayandur and Arzu Geybullaeva (chairs of the Armenian and Azerbaijani chapters of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly), were prominent peace advocates and negotiated hostage exchanges at the height of the hostilities (Hasanov and Ishkanian 2005). Throughout the 1990s, there was a shift from ad hoc, community-​based organizing to formal NGO activities inspired by the United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and its message that women’s rights are human rights. Women’s organizations based primarily in Baku and Yerevan began to procure funding and training opportunities from western donors. These groups, consisting mainly of urban, educated women from the civic and political elites, focused on women’s political participation, gender and development, and ending violence against women. The latter campaigns met with public resistance, including from some politicians who claimed that women’s rights advocates were attempting to break up families and destroy national values (Ishkanian 2007). Despite hostile rhetoric, which drew parallels between attacks against the nation from within as well as without, laws against domestic violence were passed in Azerbaijan in 2010 and Armenia in 2017. These changes followed years of campaigning by women’s rights defenders, support from some sectors of the media, and pressure from international organizations. The rhetoric used by conservative political and civic actors to delegitimize women’s NGOs in Armenia and Azerbaijan is similar to that found in other postsocialist contexts, but is heightened by the presence of conflict in the region. Women’s organizations are accused of importing a foreign concept (gender) and seeking to destroy traditional family values (Ishkanian 2007). Another common accusation is that they lack any ideology, and are “grant-​eaters” in the pay of international donor organizations. Given the public sensitivity of the conflict, women’s rights organizations can little afford to be portrayed as traitors and enemies of the nation. Consequently, women’s organizations, particularly those identified as feminist, have faced difficult decisions about the visibility of their work. Some groups have broken with conventional NGO-​based practices, preferring to use flexible tactics such as art-​based activism and flash mobs rather than engaging the state directly (Mehrabov 2016; Sargysyan 2017; Tlostanova, Thapar-​Bjorkert, and Koobak 2016). Given the relevance of the conflict in everyday life, women’s activism often crosses over into the arena of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. In Azerbaijan, where over 600,000 individuals are registered as IDPs (out of a population of over 9 million), there is a history of local and international women’s organizations engaging with women in the IDP community and in the border regions (Walsh 2015a). Armenian women’s organizations have likewise targeted women in conflict-​affected areas, aided by the state and international donors. Many women’s rights activists link conflict and militarization with gender-​based violence, noting high rates of domestic abuse and the prevalence of sex-​selective abortion across the South Caucasus (Kvinna Till Kvinna 2019). Anti-​militarist feminists, albeit speaking anonymously, highlight the gendered nature of conflict, including disproportionate spending on defensive weaponry and the underfunding of areas providing greater employment to women such as health and education (Anonymous 2016). Women’s organizations have been able to discuss the gendered impact of conflict and to compare strategies for working on common issues, through programs coordinated by international organizations such as UNIFEM (subsequently UN Women), International Alert (UK), Care International (USA), and the Kvinna Till Kvinna Foundation (Sweden). 429

430

Sinéad Walsh

Since the early 1990s, democracy, development, and peacebuilding have been the focus of regional women’s meetings (including Georgia), as well as the subject of dialogue between women directly affected by the Karabakh conflict. Women have many common experiences of conflict and insecurity (often framed around concerns for family members or specific localities), and many express a preference for nonviolent conflict resolution. However, there are also important differences in relation to issues which are perceived as critical to an eventual settlement, including the right of return of refugees and IDPs, and the long-​term status of Nagorno-​Karabakh (Walsh 2015a). UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (adopted in 2000) has allowed women’s and peace organizations to form a common agenda around protecting women’s rights in conflict and enhancing their role in the peace process. Civil Society Monitoring Reports on Women, Peace, and Security in Armenia, Azerbaijan and, separately, Nagorno-​Karabakh, reflect the uneven impact of conflict across the region and the different working environments for NGOs. While all three reports emphasize the vulnerability of women in and near the conflict zone and in displaced/​refugee communities, the report by Armenian NGOs includes a particular focus on domestic violence. The report for Azerbaijan emphasizes state restrictions on civic activism (irrespective of gender). The report for Nagorno-​Karabakh draws attention to the gendered impact of the conflict, but also underscores the political isolation of the region and the challenges this poses for human rights and peacebuilding in general (Cabrera-​Balleza et al. 2013, 2015a, 2015b).

Male dominance, militarism, and authoritarianism Since 1992, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has spearheaded negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the conflict over Nagorno-​ Karabakh. The OSCE Minsk Group, co-​chaired by diplomats from France, Russia, and the United States, facilitates talks between the heads of state of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and their respective ministers of foreign affairs. Only a handful of people, all of whom are men, have held these roles in the last 25 years. Women’s organizations argue that the elite nature of the talks—​and the absence of women as either mediators or negotiators—​ is an additional barrier to broadening female participation in the peace process (Freizer 2014; Kvinna Till Kvinna 2012). While the talks have excluded civil society and community representatives in general, women face additional obstacles due to gender stereotypes and a relative lack of family support and financial resources needed to enter the political arena (Shahnazaryan 2015; Walsh 2015b). The Minsk Group process differs in two ways from negotiations over the ostensibly similar post-​Soviet conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. First, negotiations are held between two internationally recognized sovereign states, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The de facto state of Nagorno-​Karabakh has no official representation in these talks. Secondly, Russia’s role is officially that of mediator, although Russia maintains a military base in Armenia’s second largest city, Gyumri, and the two countries are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Despite cooperating with Armenia in matters of security, Russia has also concluded several major weapons deals with Azerbaijan (Shiriyev 2019). The ensuing arms race has placed both Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 10 most militarized countries in the world. The 2020 ceasefire was brokered by Russia outside the framework of the Minsk Group. The deployment of

430

431

Gender and conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh

Russian peacekeeping troops to Nagorno-​Karabakh (with their mandate to be reviewed at five-​year intervals) merits further attention from a gender perspective. The presence of heavily militarized forces along the Line of Contact and the absence of a robust mechanism for monitoring the ceasefire contributed to the increased risks of war in the past decade (International Crisis Group 2017). In recent years, women and children were among civilians killed by shelling and sniper fire, and parts of the population were displaced once again. Women’s organizations, continuing to cite UN Security Council Resolution 1325, have highlighted the vulnerabilities of women, children, the elderly, and those with disabilities in conflict-​affected areas. They argue that effective peacebuilding requires participation from those who live in frontline areas. It should be noted, however, that many women in the areas affected by conflict experience a tension between the desire for peace and the need for everyday security. The lack of trust between communities adversely affected by conflict was a barrier to peacebuilding even before the mass violence that took place in 2020 (Kvinna Till Kvinna 2019). Since the failure to reach a settlement in the 1990s, scholars have debated the extent to which the Nagorno-​Karabakh conflict has been deliberately frozen by certain elites in order to entrench their position on a national level. The perceived connection between conflict and authoritarianism prompted the question of whether peace is possible in the absence of functioning democracy (Caspersen 2012; Simao 2012). Civil society organizations have used a grassroots participatory approach to initiate cross-​community dialogue. However, individuals involved in these efforts must contend not only with public mistrust, but also restrictions imposed by local and national authorities. The tactics used to intimidate peacebuilders are part of a broader series of measures used to repress NGOs. In Azerbaijan, this includes increased surveillance of women’s rights and pro-​democracy organizations (Mehrabov 2015). In Armenia, feminist and pro-​LGBTQ organizations have experienced public backlash tied to other anti-​gender movements in the region (Heinrich Boell Foundation 2015).

Conclusions Many of the themes reflected in this chapter are common to analyses of gender across CEE&E. The political intransigence of male elites, the connections between authoritarianism and militarization, and the gendered discourses of nationalism are not specific to places that are experiencing armed conflict or that have a history of warfare. However, gender in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-​Karabakh is unusual in terms of its immediate relationship to conflict, militarization, and insecurity. It is vital that we try to understand the extent to which the impact of post-​Soviet transition has been exacerbated by the costs of war and the effects of conflict in everyday lives. That being said, it could also be argued that political, social, and economic factors arising from the Soviet Union’s collapse have helped to normalize the conflict and prevent societies in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-​Karabakh from moving toward peace. This double-​ bind, already well known to the region’s citizens, merits further study for what it can tell us about the nature of postsocialist transformations. The case of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the conflict over Nagorno-​Karabakh also provides insights into the contradictions of postsocialist gender politics. Patriarchal gender expectations reinforce the constraints on women’s public participation, while at the same time leaving in place tacit assumptions about the relationship between women,

431

432

Sinéad Walsh

especially mothers, and peace. Although the defense of women and children remains part of the discourse of war, motherhood can provide the moral authority needed to justify participation in activities related to women, peace, and security. In practice, this strategy can founder when women’s shared desire for peace is met with conflicting visions of justice. Long-​term, sustained dialogue is necessary to build trust between multiple constituencies, but such dialogue is threatened by a new wave of militarism, authoritarianism, and the rising tide of anti-​genderism in CEE&E. Despite the local specificities of this conflict, the tactics being used to control women’s activism are another reminder of the importance of theorizing gender politics transnationally.

Note 1 At the time of going to press, the mandate of the Russian peacekeeping mission is unclear, and the political situation in the region remains unstable. For an indication of the response from women’s organizations to the first fortnight of the violence, see Kvinna Till Kvinna (2020).

References Anonymous Anti-​Militarist Feminists from Caucasus and Central Asia. 2016. “They Make Money Through Our Dead Bodies.” Open Democracy, April 15. www.opendemocracy.net/​en/​odr/​they-​ make-​money-​through-​our-​dead-​bodies/​. Beukian, Sevan. 2014. “Motherhood as Armenianness: Expressions of Femininity in the Making of Armenian National Identity.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14 (2): 247–​269. Broers, Laurence. 2016. The Nagorny Karabakh Conflict: Defaulting to War. London: Chatham House. www.chathamhouse.org/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​research/​NK%20paper%202408 2016%20WEB.pdf. Cabrera-​Balleza, Mavic, Eléonore Veillet Chowdhury, Helena Gronberg, Karen Barnes Robinson, and Selamawit Tesfaye. 2013. Women Count—​Security Council Resolution 1325: Civil Society Monitoring Report 2013, Armenia. New York: GNWP. https://​issuu.com/​suba_​gnwp/​docs/​ women_​count_​civil_​society_​monitorin. Cabrera-​ Balleza, Mavic, Eléonore Veillet Chowdhury, Helena Gronberg, and Annalise Moser. 2015a. Women Count—​Security Council Resolution 1325: Civil Society Monitoring Report 2014, Azerbaijan. New York: GNWP. https://​gnwp.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​CivilSociety-​Monitoring-​Report-​2014. –​–​–​–​. 2015b. Women Count—​Security Council Resolution 1325: Civil Society Monitoring Report 2014, Nagorno-​Karabakh. New York: GNWP. https://​gnwp.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​Civil-​ Society-​Monitoring-​Report-​2014.pdf. Caspersen, Nina. 2012. “Regimes and Peace Processes: Democratic (Non)Development in Armenia and Azerbaijan and its Impact on the Nagorno-​Karabakh Conflict.” Communist and PostCommunist Studies 45 (1–​2): 131–​139. Darieva, Tsypylma. 2011. “Rethinking Homecoming: Diasporic Cosmopolitanism in post-​Soviet Armenia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (3): 490–​508. De Waal, Thomas. 2003. Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War. New York: New York University Press. Dudwick, Nora. 1997. “Out of the Kitchen into the Cross-​Fire: Women in Independent Armenia.” In Post-​Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia, edited by Mary Buckley, 235–​249. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fertaly, Kaitlin. 2012. “Khash, History and Armenian National Identity: Reconsidering Post-​ socialist Gender, Food Practices and the Domestic.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19 (1): 81–​102. Freizer, Sabine. 2014. “Twenty Years After the Nagorny Karabakh Ceasefire: An Opportunity to Move Towards More Inclusive Conflict Resolution.” Caucasus Survey 1 (2): 109–​122. Gureyeva Aliyeva, Yuliya. 2020. “Exploring Two Generations of Women Activists in Azerbaijan: Between Feminism and a Post-​Soviet Locality.” In Women’s Everyday Lives in

432

433

Gender and conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh War and Peace in the South Caucasus, edited by Ulrike Ziemer, 225–​252. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gureyeva-​Alieva, Yulia and Tabib Huseynov. 2011. “Can You Be an IDP for 20 Years?” A Comparative Field Study on the Protection Needs and Attitudes Towards Displacement among IDPs and Host Communities in Azerbaijan. Baku: Brookings Institute/​London School of Economics Project on Internal Displacement. Hasanov, Avaz and Armine Ishkanian. 2005. “Bridging Divides: Civil Society Peacebuilding Initiatives.” In The Limits of Leadership: Elites and Societies in the Nagorny Karabakh Peace Process, Accord 17, edited by Laurence Broers, 44–​47. London: Conciliation Resources. Heinrich Boell Foundation. 2015. “Anti-​Gender Movements on the Rise? Strategising for Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe.” Publication Series on Democracy 38 (1). Heyat, Farideh. 2006. “Globalisation and Changing Gender Norms in Azerbaijan.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8 (3): 394–​412. –​–​–​–​. 2008. “New Veiling in Azerbaijan.” European Journal of Women's Studies 15 (4): 361–​376. International Crisis Group. 2017. Nagorno-​Karabakh’s Gathering War Clouds. Europe Report 244. Brussels: International Crisis Group. https://​d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/​244-​nagorno-​ karabakhs-​gathering-​war-​clouds.pdf. Ishkanian, Armine. 2003. “Gendered Transitions: The Impact of the Post-​Soviet Transition on Women in Central Asia and the Caucasus.” Perspectives on Global Technology and Development 2 (3–​4): 475–​496. –​–​–​–​. 2004. “Working at the Local–​Global Intersection: The Challenges Facing Women in Armenia’s Nongovernmental Organization Sector.” In Post-​Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism, edited by Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias, 262–​287. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. –​–​–​–​. 2007. “En-​gendering Civil Society and Democracy-​Building: The Anti-​Domestic Violence Campaign in Armenia.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 14 (4): 488–​525. Kabachnik, Peter, Magda Grabowska, Joanna Regulska, Beth Mitchneck, and Olga V. Mayorova. 2013. “Traumatic Masculinities: The Gendered Geographies of Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia.” Gender, Place, and Culture 20 (6): 773–​793. Kvinna Till Kvinna. 2012. Equal Power—​Lasting Peace: Obstacles for Women’s Participation in Peace Processes. Johanneshov: Kvinna Till Kvinna Foundation. –​–​–​–​. 2019. Listen to Her: Gendered Effects of the Conflict over Nagorno-​Karabakh and Women’s Priorities for Peace. Tbilisi: Kvinna Till Kvinna Foundation. –​–​–​–​. 2020. The Missing Peace. A Gender Brief on the Current Escalation between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-​Karabakh, October 9. Johanneshov: Kvinna Till Kvinna Foundation. Mehrabov, Ilkin. 2015. “Gendered Surveillance and Media Usage in Post-​Soviet Space: The Case of Azerbaijan.” Baltic Words 8 (1–​2): 44–​48. –​–​–​–​. 2016. “Azerbaijani Women, Online Mediatized Activism and Offline Mass Mobilisation.” Social Sciences 5 (4): 60. Najafizadeh, Mehrangiz. 2003. “Women’s Empowering Carework in Post-​ Soviet Azerbaijan.” Gender and Society 17 (2): 293–​304. –​–​–​–​. 2012. “Gender and Ideology: Social Change and Islam in Post-​Soviet Azerbaijan.” Journal of Third World Studies 29 (1): 81–​101. –​–​–​–​. 2013. “Ethnic Conflict and Forced Displacement: Narratives of Azeri IDP and Refugee Women from the Nagorno-​ Karabakh War.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 14 (1): 161–​283. Sargysyan, Nelli. 2017. “Discursive Presence through Group Anonymity: Ethnonational Belonging, Gender, Sexuality, and Activism in the Republic of Armenia.” Feminist Formations 29 (2): 92–​120. Shahnazaryan, Gohar. 2015. “Women’s Political Participation in Armenia: Institutional and Cultural Factors.” Caucasus Analytical Digest 71 (1): 9–​12. Shahnazarian, Nona. 2016. “A Good Soldier and a Good Mother: New Conditions and New Roles in the Nagorno-​Karabakh War.” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-​Soviet Societies 17 (1). Shahnazarian, Nona and Ulrike Ziemer. 2014. “Emotions, Loss and Change: Armenian Women and Postsocialist Transformations in Nagorno Karabakh.” Caucasus Survey 2 (1–​2): 27–​40.

433

434

Sinéad Walsh –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Women Confronting Death: War Widows’ Experiences in the South Caucasus.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 19 (2): 29–​43. Shiriyev, Zaur. 2019. Azerbaijani’s Relations with Russia: Closer by Default? London: Chatham House. www.chathamhouse.org/​publication/​azerbaijan-​s-​relations-​russia-​closer-​default. Simao, Licinia. 2012. “The Problematic Role of EU Democracy Promotion in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-​Karabakh.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 45: 193–​200. Tlostanova, Madina, Suruchi Thapar-​Bjorkert, and Redi Koobak. 2016. “Border Thinking and Disidentification: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Feminist Dialogues.” Feminist Theory 17 (2): 211–​228. Tohidi, Nayereh. 1997. “The Intersection of Gender, Ethnicity and Islam in Soviet and Post-​Soviet Azerbaijan.” Nationalities Papers 25 (1): 147–​167. –​–​–​–​. 1998. “‘Guardians of the Nation’: Women, Islam, and the Soviet Legacy of Modernization in Azerbaijan.” In Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity Within Unity, edited by Herbert L. Bodman and Nayereh Tohidi, 137–​162. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. –​–​–​–​. 2004. “Women, Building Civil Society, and Democratization in Post-​Soviet Azerbaijan.” In Post-​ Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism, edited by Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias, 149–​171. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Walsh, Sinéad. 2015a. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Developing a Women’s Peace Agenda in Post-​Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan.” In Gender and Peacebuilding: All Hands Required, edited by Maureen P. Flaherty, Tom Matyok, Jessica Senehi, Sean Byrne, and Hamdesa Tuso, 139–​155. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. –​–​–​–​. 2015b. “Representation, Reform and Resistance: Broadening Our Understanding of Women in Politics in Azerbaijan.” Caucasus Analytical Digest 71 (1): 6–​9. Ziemer, Ulrike. 2018. “‘The Waiting and Not Knowing Can Be Agonizing’: Tracing the Power of Emotions in a Prolonged Conflict in the South Caucasus.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (3): 331–​349. Ziemer, Ulrike, ed. 2020. Women’s Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

434

435

PART VI

Postcommunist policy issues

436

437

INTRODUCTION Postcommunist policy issues Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda

Part VI shows how postcommunist states have a central but deeply contentious engagement with gender and a conflicted relationship to gender equality. In the past 30 years, Central-​Eastern European and Eurasian (CEE&E) governments have reinterpreted sexual roles and rights, turning to an instrumentalist essentialism as part of ascendant nationalism and nostalgia for stability, without the veneer of Soviet promises of emancipation. Building upon Part V, which lays claim to the analytical lens of ambiguity for evaluating the impact of the transitions on the intersectional experience of women, Part VI uses the lens of policy to map the location-​specific mix of change and continuity as they relate to gender. This Part also shows that, in the adjustment away from communist-​era practices, the interpretation of gender and the implementation of welfare have become important signals of whether the state is aligning with varieties of democracy or authoritarianism. Since the 1990s, postcommunist states have systematically politicized reproductive rights, most dramatically in Poland, where successive governments implemented a near-​ total ban on abortion despite mass protests. The similarly explicitly gendered policy areas of domestic violence, prostitution, and human trafficking, which had not been officially recognized as social problems earlier, have become geopolitical signals to the EU/​western funders if, and if so, how they wish to replicate their interpretation of gender and policy frameworks. The half-​hearted acceptance of western human rights norms led to framing domestic violence and human trafficking through reductive notions of gender and race, deepening rooted stereotypes. In the uneasy and hierarchical engagement with new global norms, technologies in new biomedical reproduction, such as IVF and surrogacy, have also constructed intersectional threats and barriers, becoming connected with classist, racist, and xenophobic conceptions of citizenship. Policy scholarship aptly followed four main parallel developments. First, some policy themes have emerged and stayed over the past three decades, such as LGBTQ rights, and violence against women and domestic violence. A second, parallel process shows other previously well-​established policy areas becoming marginal only to reappear relatively recently, such as the gender pay gap and the un-​appreciated household work that women provide. Third, postcommunist policies increasingly respond to the gender equality claims of social movements and global policy concerns, such as disability and sports. Fourth,

437

438

Katalin Fábián et al.

policy discussions trace the ebb and flow of rejection or nostalgia toward communism, as in the case of quotas for women in higher-​level political leadership and the rhetoric and maternity capital-​related tools of pronatalism. This Part demonstrates the policy-​specific debates as to whether women fared better or worse with the fall of communism, but also that the position of what the communists identified as sexual minorities is much less ambiguous. While during communist times homosexuality was a criminal act, since the regime change, LGBTQ people can legally identify and establish their associations in most countries. At the same time, identifying as any of these categories may also be dangerous, as fluid and non-​normative gender identities and sexualities have become a central point of demarcation and exclusion. Homosexuality and attitudes toward gender identity have emerged as some of the most successful wedge issues in re-​dividing Europe. The analysis of postcommunist policy allows us to bring together the frameworks of all the previous Parts of the Handbook, offering a globally interconnected, dynamic synthesis of the region’s gender histories, social movements, dominant ideologies, lived experiences, and persistent ambiguities. Here, the three decades of policy-​related debates bring forward three paradoxes related to the conceptualization of gender and the evaluation of policy outcomes concerning gender equality. The first and most defining paradox concerns the very concept of gender, which has rarely been translated to local languages but traveled to the region in the transliteration of the original English term, causing considerable difficulty in making it broadly accessible and applicable to local conditions. The second paradox is how gender itself has become a major subject of confrontation, as the alleged re-​traditionalization of gender norms has taken place hand-​in-​hand with the opening of the economies and cultures. A third paradox focuses on the evaluation of women as the weaker or the stronger sex, either in cahoots with, or as challengers of, the state. CEE&E’s specificity is that during the communist system and as a demographic consequence of wars and political repression that killed or forcefully removed many men, women have taken on previously male-​dominated professions, along with family obligations as breadwinners and decision makers. With multiple policy changes taking place at the same time after 1990, only a cautious intersectional lens can provide clues as to how and when women can successfully run for political office and how interests of gender equality appear in public policies and daily community practices.

438

439

Political leadership

440

441

42 WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION IN POLITICS Sharon Wolchik and Cristina Chiva

In the early 1990s, women seemed to disappear from politics across Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE): the proportion of women elected to national legislatures dropped precipitously by comparison to the late communist era, while women’s advocates were seldom able to make their voices heard in public debates on the future direction of politics in their countries. Europe’s new democracies were thus gendered male from the very outset, a “silent revolution” (Watson 1993) premised on the exclusion of women from democracy building. In fact, the exclusion of women was not a new phenomenon: despite appearances to the contrary, women had far less power in communist regimes than their share (in the proximity of 25 percent) within communist legislatures suggested. However, liberal democracy was a political system nominally predicated on universal citizenship and extensive participation. Within this context, women’s disappearance from politics was part of a wider shift toward traditional gender relations throughout the postcommunist region, a shift that also saw prominent public figures exhorting women to return to their purportedly “natural” place in the home and making repeated calls for restrictions on reproductive rights. We argue that in order to understand the historical trajectory of women’s representation in politics in CEE since 1990, it is important to focus on the interaction between two main factors: persistent structural barriers to equal representation for women in politics; and sustained efforts by women’s advocates to push for gender-​equitable change throughout the region. The trajectory of women’s representation in postcommunist Europe is neither linear, nor uniform across all countries in the region; instead, it shows that both structure and agency matter for women’s representation, and that the balance between the agency and structure shifts over time and across countries. For example, while electoral gender quotas were largely inconceivable in the region in the early 1990s, gender quotas are in place in three countries in the region in 2020, and voluntary quotas have been adopted by many political parties (International IDEA et al. 2020). Similarly, if women’s advocates were unsuccessful in pushing for gender-​equitable change in the early 1990s, numerous instances of policy success have emerged in the 2000s and 2010s. Differences in outcomes in female representation from one country to another suggest that while, in some instances, women’s advocates were able to prevail over significant

441

442

Sharon Wolchik and Cristina Chiva

structural constraints, in other instances they were unable to do so. Our case studies in this chapter are the postcommunist countries that have joined the European Union by 2020: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

The mixed communist legacy The precipitous drop in women’s descriptive representation, so widely deplored by scholars in the early 1990s, did not represent a loss of political power, but rather a continuation of women’s marginalization from power. Much of the literature on women’s representation during the communist era focused on their numerical representation in the top governmental and party bodies: while women were well represented in the national legislatures of most CEE communist countries and the Soviet Union, in comparison to other legislatures in the world at the time (for instance, one in five MPs in Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary and one in three MPs in Czechoslovakia and Romania were women), these numbers had very little to do with women’s role in actually exercising political power, as legislatures under communism were generally symbolic (Brunnbauer 2002; Saxonberg 2000; Wolchik 1981), and real political power was in the hands of the communist parties’ executive bodies where women were far less frequently found (Jaquette and Wolchik 1998). Scholars also analyzed the social backgrounds of women members of top communist party bodies and linked the differences in the backgrounds of men and women—​and the small numbers of women in these bodies (generally one or at most two)—​to women’s lack of influence. The few women who reached the Politburos or Presidiums as they were sometimes called (the executive committees of the communist parties) were of two types. The first—​found in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in the last two decades of communist rule, and in Bulgaria earlier—​were heads of the official women’s organizations. There is debate over the influence of these women and over the impact of the women’s organizations more generally. Wolchik and Meyer (1985) argued that these women were token members with few links to ordinary women, as the official women’s organizations, like other mass organizations, generally acted like transmission belts to mobilize women to carry out party activities. Differences in the social backgrounds of these women and their male counterparts in top bodies in terms of educational levels and career paths further limited their impact. However, there were also situations where women’s organizations were in fact able to act on women’s behalf: for instance, in Czechoslovakia, women’s organizations did act as interest groups to advocate for women in the unusual and far more open reform period in the mid-​to-​late 1960s (Scott 1974; Wolchik 1978). Recent work also shows that some of these organizations, including the Bulgarian women’s organization, did serve to advance women’s interests in the communist era, even in more repressive regimes (Daskalova 2016; Ghodsee 2012). There is a similar debate about women who rose to top party bodies by the second route, their relationship with a powerful male politician. These women—​who included Ludmila Zhivkova, daughter of Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria; Elena Ceaușescu, wife of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania; and the wives of several top leaders in Albania—​were powerful political figures who clearly had influence over important domains of public life. However, although they were women who exercised political power, they did not serve as advocates for women and thus cannot be said to have contributed to women’s substantive representation among political leaders. 442

443

Women’s representation in politics

The communist period left a complicated legacy for women’s representation in politics. In some countries, communist legacies had an immediate negative effect on women’s representation. For instance, in Romania, women may well have been reluctant to run for political office, fearing that doing so would expose them to negative comparisons with the much-​hated Elena Ceaușescu. In Poland, as Grabowska (2012) shows, Solidarity’s decision to ally itself with the Catholic Church in the late 1980s closed off the organization to feminist advocates, who were later unable to influence Solidarity’s successors when it came to introducing restrictions on abortion. However, the precise causal mechanisms whereby communist legacies shaped women’s representation over the postcommunist period have yet to be explored systematically in scholarship on the region.

The gradual increase in women’s descriptive representation after 1990 Women in postcommunist Europe have been somewhat successful in gaining access to political office. Table 42.1 summarizes the data on the proportion of women elected to the single or lower chamber of postcommunist legislatures over the period 1990 to 2020. As the data show, a gradual rise in women’s numerical representation as members of parliament has occurred throughout the region. In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the increase has been fairly significant, while in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, it has been much less so. These gains notwithstanding, the trend is more incremental than in Western Europe, prompting scholars such as Chiva (2017) to argue that we need to identify the precise mechanisms that locked in the initial outcome of the first elections—​ male over-​representation in politics—​over the postcommunist period. Women’s representation in postcommunist executives (prime ministers or presidents) follows a similar pattern. Typically, women have held fewer positions as government ministers and seldom rose to the position of prime minister or president in the region during the first two decades of postcommunism, but this has changed recently with the appointment of female prime ministers and the election of heads of state in Estonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, and Lithuania. However, their numbers in these positions are far fewer than those of men (Montecinos 2017). Furthermore, women in these positions typically do not identify themselves as advocates for women or as feminists (Bútorová, Filadelfiova, and Gyarfasova 2012; Skard 2015; Wolchik 2017). Despite their potential to serve as role models for other women who might consider political careers, there has not been a noticeable increase in women’s representation during or immediately after women have held top governmental positions. Rueschemeyer and Wolchik’s (2009) study of women in parliaments in six postcommunist countries found that women deputies were similarly hesitant to identify themselves as either women’s candidates or feminists. Explanations of the historical trends in women’s legislative and executive representation identified above have emphasized a number of factors. First, women’s exercise of political power is constrained by the gender-​based division of labor in the roles men and women play within legislatures. Interviews with women deputies in six postcommunist countries indicate that women are more likely to be assigned to committees that deal with issues associated with children and the family or social welfare than to those that deal with foreign policy or economics (Rueschemeyer and Wolchik 2009). Second, party-​ based candidate recruitment systems continue to be significant barriers to cooperation across party lines. Women candidates are dependent on party leaders for placement on party lists as well as their positions on those lists. The dominant role of party leaders 443

444

newgenrtpdf

Table 42.1  Women’s descriptive representation in CEE Legislatures, 1990–​2020 2nd election %

3rd election %

4th election %

5th election %

6th election %

7th election %

8th election %

9th election %

10th election %

Difference with 1st election %

8.5 4.3 13.0 12.9 7.3 14.0 7.1 9.6 4.5 11.3 12.0

13.7 7.9 10.5 11.9 11.1 8.0 17.0 13.0 3.8 12.3 15.3

11.7 19.9 15.0 17.8 8.3 17.0 10.6 13.0 7.3 7.8 14.7

10.8 17.8 15.0 18.8 9.1 18.0 22.0 20.2 11.0 13.3 11.3

26.7 20.9 17.0 23.8 10.6 19.0 17.7 20.4 11.4 12.2 14.7

20.8 23.8 15.5 19.8 9.1 19.0 24.1 20.4 11.4 13.3 16.0

20.8 15.2 22.0 23.8 9.5 21.0 21.3 23.9 13.3 32.2 15.3

25.4 12.6 19.5 25.7 -​ 19.0 -​ 27.2 20.4 35.6 16.0

20.0 23.2 -​ 29.7 -​ 31.0 -​ 28.7 -​ 24.4 19.3

23.8 -​ -​ -​ -​ -​ -​ -​ -​ -​ 21.3

+15.3 +18.9 +6.5 +16.8 +2.2 +17.0 +14.2 +19.1 +15.9 +13.1 +9.3

Source: Inter-​Parliamentary Union. Note: % of women MPs in the unicameral legislature or lower chamber, as applicable.

Sharon Wolchik and Cristina Chiva

444

Bulgaria Croatia Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Poland Romania Slovenia Slovakia

1st election %

445

Women’s representation in politics

in this respect means that it is very difficult for women to depart from the party line on issues. Women leaders typically follow their parties’ leads in voting (Matland 2003, 328). The dominance of parties also means that there are few cases of cooperation across party lines (Rueschemeyer and Wolchik 2009). The Women’s Parliamentary Group, an intraparty group that worked to protect the interests of women and children in Poland, formed in 1991, was a short-​lived exception to this rule (Siemienska 2004). Third, stereotypes that portray women as unfit for leadership go a long way in hindering women’s political ascent into positions of leadership. Women in the region have cited these attitudes as a major barrier for their participation in political life (Council of Europe 2017; Galligan and Clavero 2008; Saxonberg 2000). These attitudes are particularly prevalent among men, but also among many women, although these views are beginning to change in some countries (Matland and Montgomery 2003). Fourth, women’s ability to become politically engaged is very much constrained by their dual roles as economic actors and domestic workers: part-​time work is practically non-​existent in the postcommunist region, and women are routinely faced with the double burden of work and childcare, leaving very little time for political participation (Chiva 2017). Fifth, media representations also have an impact on citizens’ perceptions of women candidates, who are more susceptible to negative media coverage, as well as a lack of coverage overall compared to male candidates (Murray 2010; Pop 2016). Sixth, scholars point to the role of the electoral systems. With a few exceptions, such as Hungary and, briefly, Romania and Bulgaria, countries in the postcommunist region have adopted proportional representation (PR) in elections to the lower chambers of parliament. However, women’s descriptive representation in politics has yet to reach the same levels as in western established democracies with similar systems. One proposed explanation is that CEE electoral systems are combined with relatively high incumbency levels in order to reproduce male over-​representation in politics (Chiva 2017). Another is that the party politics of the postcommunist region interacts with proportional representation in ways that tend to disadvantage women candidates. For example, while in Western Europe, parties of the left historically have tended to elect women MPs in much greater proportion than their counterparts on the right, the evidence for CEE is much more mixed. Existing studies identify several recurring patterns, such as the remarkable ambivalence of left-​wing parties in electing women MPs; significant advances in women’s representation on the center-​right, especially among liberal parties; the emergence of new, albeit small, parties committed to gender balance in political representation, and the abysmal record of the radical right in terms of selecting female candidates (Saxonberg 2000; Montgomery and Ilonszki 2016). Finally, as far as postcommunist women’s ability to access executive power is concerned, Bego (2014) finds that both a high percentage of women appointed to ministerial positions and a higher rate of appointments to prestigious posts correlate with a high percentage of women’s enrollment in higher education in postcommunist Europe. In contrast, Rashkova and Zankina (2019) make the case that the appointment of women ministers is related to the institutionalization of the parties in power. Interestingly, both studies agree that, unlike in Western Europe, left-​leaning parties do not tend to recruit more women to ministerial portfolios than right-​leaning parties. Despite these barriers, women’s presence in politics does have some impact on the policies considered and adopted. Women ministers tend to occupy ministries of health, social welfare, labor, culture, and education, although a few women have served as ministers of

445

446

Sharon Wolchik and Cristina Chiva

defense and other positions more frequently held by men. Similarly, women deputies’ concentration in committees that deal with ‘women’s issues,’ means that they can have some impact in these areas. Evidence from the Czech Republic indicates that women deputies most often speak and initiate legislation on such issues (Galligan and Clavero 2008; Regulska and Grabowska 2013; Rueschemeyer and Wolchik 2009). Thus, women in parliaments do sometimes succeed in making their voices heard on issues assumed to be of importance to women in particular. In some cases, women’s advocates in CEE have been successful in pushing for the introduction of candidate gender quotas (Dahlerup and Antić Gaber 2017). By 2020, Albania, Croatia, Poland, and Slovenia have introduced legislated gender quotas, which mandate that 35 to 40 percent of candidates on party lists are either men or women. However, most countries do not mandate the order of candidates on these lists, which can have a significant impact on who is chosen from each party. The sanctions or fines on parties for violating these laws also vary depending on the country. In Albania, for example, large parties often ignore gender quota legislation (OSCE 2017, 2), while in Poland parties will not be allowed to run candidates unless they meet the quota requirement. The implementation of gender quota laws does not necessarily translate into higher female representation in parliament—​as is the case of Albania and Croatia, although this may improve over time—​as is the case with Poland. Other countries, like Bulgaria and Estonia, for example, do not have legislated gender quotas, and they have some of the highest proportions of women elected to parliament (see Table 42.1). At the party level, many parties have voluntary quotas on the books, but few parties respect these (see Galligan, Clavero, and Calloni 2007). Chiva (2017, 134–​139) finds similar problems: although voluntary party quotas are much more widespread among parties of the left, they tend to be either unevenly implemented or, where correctly implemented, they do not result in a significant increase in the proportion of women MPs, certainly not to the level that the quota provides for.

The growing impact of substantive representation Some women MPs and activists in the region have also focused on advancing gender equality in legislatures through establishing gender-​focused committees (Chiva 2017), strengthening the status of women’s policy agencies, such as the Plenipotentiary for Women in Poland and the National Agency for Equal Opportunities in Romania, or introducing legislation providing for increased public funding for political parties that recruit women candidates. These campaigns have not always been successful, and in some cases, such as in Poland and Hungary, they have been undermined by a recent backlash against gender equality prevalent throughout the region. However, they do indicate that women MPs and their allies in postcommunist Europe view representation in terms that are broader than simply increasing descriptive representation, especially through promoting policies to increase the visibility of women and strengthen institutional structures focused on gender equality. Recent literature on the region has begun to address substantive representation directly, especially within the context of conservative politics in Hungary (Ilonszki and Vajda 2019) and in Poland (Gwiazda 2019). Furthermore, the representation of LGBTQ+ groups has attracted increasing scholarly attention. For instance, Ayoub (2016) introduces the concept of “norm visibility” to explain variation in the adoption of LGBT rights across the postcommunist region, focusing on how, within

446

447

Women’s representation in politics

the context of EU accession, links between local social movements’ and transnational LGBT rights groups foster the adoption of legislation on LGBT rights. O’Dwyer (2018) argues that activism on LGBT rights in the CEE region over the postcommunist region has become both more organized and more influential since 1990, due to the fact that the EU accession process created a cycle of backlash and political polarization that increased the visibility of LGBT movements across the region. Within this context, scholars have studied the substantive representation of women in postcommunist Europe in two main ways. First, one strand highlights the ways in which women parliamentarians view their roles as MPs in relation to their ability to “act for” women (Galligan and Clavero 2008; Regulska and Grabowska 2013; Rueschemeyer and Wolchik 2009). These studies have found that women’s relatively low levels of descriptive representation, coupled with barriers to cross-​party collaboration and rarity among top political leaders, as well as the fact that most women leaders do not self-​identify as women’s advocates, limit the substantive representation of women (Galligan, Clavero, and Calloni 2007). The second strand within the literature on women’s organizations in postcommunist politics theorizes and explains the impact of women’s advocates on policymaking in the region. On the one hand, Krizsán and Popa (2015) focus on the conditions underpinning successful substantive representation by women’s movements, introducing the concept of “critical institutionalization” as a mechanism of policy influence, defined as the resources and capacity of women’s movements, strategies of movements including political alliances, and finding voice including framing collective identity and framing domestic violence” (Krizsán and Popa 2015, 24). On the other hand, Chiva (2017) examines the conditions underpinning the consistent marginalization of women’s movements over the postcommunist period. She argues that “asymmetric institutionalization” occurs when political elites in emerging democracies prioritize the formal versus the substantive institutions of democracy during the process of transition and democratic consolidations. This process reduced the likelihood of state feminism emerging in the postcommunist region.

Emerging patterns of representation at the EU level The eleven postcommunist EU member states are legally obligated to be committed to the notion of gender equality at both the treaty and secondary legislation level (see Spehar, Chapter 36 in this Handbook). However, women’s representation in politics is not an EU competence, and the recruitment of women candidates to European institutions remains at the discretion of the member states and national political parties. As on the state level, postcommunist countries have a mixed record in terms of women’s representation to the EU. The former state socialist countries have been quite willing to nominate women for the high-​level position of European Commissioner, such as Danuta Hübner (Poland), Kristalina Georgieva and Mariya Gabriel (Bulgaria), Dubravka Šuica (Croatia), Věra Jourová (Czech Republic), Kadri Simson (Estonia), and Adina Vălean (Romania). However, member states’ records on recruiting women candidates for elections to the European Parliament show significant variation among postcommunist countries, with the Czech Republic and Poland lagging behind the other former state socialist countries in this respect, as well as along party lines, with pro-​EU parties much more likely to recruit women candidates than Eurosceptic parties (Chiva 2014).

447

448

Sharon Wolchik and Cristina Chiva

As far as women’s substantive representation is concerned, Chiva (2019) finds that women Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the postcommunist member states are in general as supportive of the notion of gender equality as their counterparts in the EU’s established democracies. However, women MEPs from the populist right and from the European Conservative and Reformist Group (ECR) are almost invariably opposed to gender equality in the context of the European Parliament’s legislative politics.

Conclusions There are considerable structural barriers to equal representation for women in politics throughout CEE. However, sustained efforts by women’s advocates to push for gender-​ equitable change throughout the region have had a measure of success, albeit unevenly across the region. Thus, the trajectory of women’s representation in postcommunist Europe needs to be seen as the outcome of political struggles whereby women’s advocates seek to break down the structural barriers to access to political power and do so within a context characterized by momentous domestic change and new international challenges.

References Ayoub, Philip M. 2016. When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bego, Ingrid. 2014. “Accessing Power in New Democracies: The Appointment of Female Ministers in Postcommunist Europe.” Political Research Quarterly 67 (2): 347–​360. Brunnbauer, Ulf. 2002. “From Equality without Democracy to Democracy without Equality? Women and Transition in Southeast Europe.” South-​East Europe Review 3 (3): 151–​168. Bútorová, Zora, Jarmila Filadelfiova and Olga Gyarfasova. 2012. Towards Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chiva, Cristina. 2014. “Gender, European Integration and Candidate Recruitment: The European Parliament Elections in the New EU Member States.” Parliamentary Affairs 67 (2): 458–​494. –​–​–​–. 2017. Gender, Institutions and Political Representation: Reproducing Male Dominance in Europe’s New Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. –​–​–​–. 2019. “Overcoming Male Dominance? The Representation of Women in the European Parliament Delegations of the Post-​communist EU Member States.” In Gendering the European Parliament, edited by Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín, 177–​198. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Council of Europe. 2017. “Regional Study on Women’s Political Representation in the Eastern Partnership Countries.” https://​rm.coe.int/​regional-​study-​on-​women-​s-​political-​representation-​ in-​the-​eastern-​part/​168070b6a4. Dahlerup, Drude and Milica Antić Gaber. 2017. “The Legitimacy and Effectiveness of Gender Quotas in Politics in CE Europe.” Teorija in Praksa 54 (2): 307–​316. Daskalova, Krassimira. 2016. “Audiatur et altera pars: In Response to Nanette Funk.” Aspasia 10, 121–​126. https://​projects.iq.harvard.edu/​files/​soc_​fem/​files/​aspasia_​vol._​102c_​20162c_​ forum2c_​ten_​years_​after-​_​communism_​and_​feminism_​revisited.pdf. Galligan, Yvonne and Sara Clavero. 2008. “Prospects for Women’s Legislative Representation in Post-​socialist Europe.” Gender and Society 22 (2): 149–​171. Galligan, Yvonne, Sara Clavero, and Marina Calloni. 2007. Gender Politics and Democracy in Post-​ Socialist Europe. Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2012. “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations.” Journal of Women’s History 24 (4): 49–​73. Grabowska, Magdalena. 2012. “Bringing the Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism.” Signs 37 (2): 385–​411.

448

449

Women’s representation in politics Gwiazda, Anna. 2019. “The Substantive Representation of Women in Poland.” Politics and Gender 15 (2): 262–​284. Ilonszki, Gabriella and Adrienn Vajda. 2019. “Women’s Substantive Representation in Decline: The Case of Democratic Failure in Hungary.” Politics and Gender 15 (2): 240–​261. International IDEA, Inter-​ Parliamentary Union and Stockholm University. 2020. “Global Database of Gender Quotas.” www.idea.int/​data-​tools/​data/​gender-​quotas. Jaquette, Jane S. and Sharon L. Wolchik, eds. 1998. Women in Transition: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Krizsán, Andrea and Raluca Popa. 2015. “Women’s Movements Challenging Gender-​ based Violence in Countries of Central and Eastern Europe.” In Mobilising for Policy Change: Women’s Movements in Central and Eastern European Domestic Violence Policy Struggles, edited by Andrea Krizsán, 1–​44. Budapest: CEU Press, 1–​44. Matland, Richard. 2003. “Women’s Representation in Post-​communist Europe.” In Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-​Communist Europe, edited by Richard E. Matland and Kathleen Montgomery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 321–​342. Matland, Richard E. and Kathleen A. Montgomery, eds. 2003. Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-​Communist Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montecinos, Verónica, ed. 2017. Women Presidents and Prime Ministers in Post-​ Transition Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Montgomery, Kathleen A. and Gabriella Ilonszki. 2016. “Stuck in the Basement: A Pathway Case Analysis of Female Recruitment in Hungary’s 2010 National Assembly Elections.” Politics & Gender 12 (4): 700–​726. Murray, Rainbow. 2010. Crashing the Highest Glass Ceiling: A Global Comparison of Women’s Campaigns for Exclusive Office. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-​Clio, LLC. O’Dwyer, Conor. 2018. Coming Out of Communism: The Emergence of LGBT Activism in Eastern Europe. New York: New York University Press. OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. 2017. Republic of Albania—​ Parliamentary Elections June 25, 2017. OSCE/​ODIHR Election Observation Mission Final Report. www.osce.org/​files/​f/​documents/​4/​d/​346661.pdf. Pop, Doru. 2016. “Patriarchal Discourses and Antifeminine Attitudes in Romanian Political and Media Cultures.” Caietele Echinox 30. Rashkova, Ekaterina and Emilia Zankina. 2019. “Ministerial Politics in Southeastern Europe: Appointment and Portfolio Allocation to Female Ministers.” Politics and Gender 15 (2): 211–​239. Regulska, Joanna and Magdalena Grabowska. 2013. “Social Justice, Hegemony, and Women’s Mobilizations.” Postcommunism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony, edited by Jan Kubik and Amy Linch, 139–​189. New York: New York University Press. Rueschemeyer, Marilyn and Sharon Wolchik, eds. 2009. Women in Power in Post-​Communist Parliaments. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Saxonberg, Steven. 2000. “Women in East European Parliaments.” Journal of Democracy 11 (2): 145–​158. Scott, Hilda. 1974. Does Socialism Liberate Women? Experiences from Eastern Europe. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Siemienska, Renata. 2004. “Values.” Current Sociology 52 (3): 429–​480. Skard, Torlid. 2015. Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide. Chicago, IL: Policy Press. Watson, Peggy. 1993. “Eastern Europe’s Silent Revolution: Gender.” Sociology 27 (3): 471–​487. Wolchik, Sharon L. 1978. “Politics, Ideology, and Equality: The Status of Women in Eastern Europe.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. –​–​–​–​. 1981. “Women and Politics: The East European Experience.” In The Politics of the Second Electorate, edited by Joni Lovenduski and Jill Hills. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. –​–​–​–​. 2017. “Iveta Radicova: The First Female Prime Minister of Slovakia.” In Women Presidents and Prime Ministers in Post-​Transition Democracies, edited by Veronica Montecitos, 239–​259. London: Palgrave. Wolchik, Sharon L. and Meyer, Alfred G, eds. 1985. Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

449

450

451

Gender-​based violence

452

453

43 HYBRID REGIMES AND GENDER VIOLENCE PREVENTION CAMPAIGNS IN UKRAINE Alexandra Hrycak

Gender and gender-​based violence (in Ukrainian, gender and genderne nasyl’stvo) are relatively new terms introduced through western projects to aid in reforming postcommunist countries. Local campaigns to address violence against women initially yielded promising new policies regarding trafficking prevention and domestic violence. Ukraine was the first post-​Soviet country to formally criminalize trafficking (in 1998) and the first postcommunist country to pass a law to combat domestic violence through a comprehensive system of state-​funded services (in 2001) (Hrycak 2010, 2012). Further policies in the mid-​2000s corresponding to Council of Europe recommendations and defining sexual harassment as a civil offense suggested government responsiveness to women’s advocacy. Yet, subsequent efforts faced challenges: a law to address the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention to combat violence against women was passed in revised format by the Ukrainian parliament initially remained after facing religious and parliamentary opposition for its reliance on the term “gender” (UNIAN 2020). This chapter explores the centrality of geopolitics and Soviet legacies for understanding these shifts in state responsiveness to gender violence advocacy in Ukraine. Rising Russian geopolitical counter-​pressure against Ukraine’s EU candidacy efforts has interfered with the country’s democratization and legal reform, triggering cyclic confrontations with authoritarian pro-​ Russian factions in Ukraine (Sakwa 2016; Zhurzhenko 2005). Conflict over Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment in tandem with Soviet practices have given rise to hybrid authoritarianism, leading to subversion of gender violence reform efforts (Way 2004). Recognizing how Soviet legacies of public patriarchy and imperialism continue to shape geopolitics and domestic political alignments is vital for understanding gender-​based violence reform in Ukraine and probably elsewhere in the postcommunist region. Early feminist scholarship singled out nationalism, domestic neoconservative backlash, and international pressures for neoliberal reform as posing significant threats to postcommunist women’s rights (Einhorn and Sever 2003). Others argued that foreign 453

454

Alexandra Hrycak

assistance was a factor facilitating women’s mobilization and driving gender violence reforms in Ukraine and other post-​Soviet countries (Johnson 2007; Johnson and Brunell 2006). Cross-​national studies explored diverse gender violence reform paths in which postcommunist women’s advocates (domestic and/​or transnational) used geopolitical pressure (normative or coercive) to enhance government responsiveness to global gender violence advocacy (Montoya 2013). In such studies, the EU emerged as the primary new regional hegemonic power dictating legal regimes that facilitated postcommunist gender violence reform (Fábián 2010). The initial geopolitical dynamics of campaigns against gender violence in Ukraine resembled patterns observed in neighboring postcommunist countries, where desires for EU membership initiated legal change that eventually led to the criminalization of trafficking and, later, domestic violence (Fábián 2010). In countries that joined the EU in the first decades after communism’s collapse, international pressure created political leverage for domestic women’s advocates (Fábián 2010; Montoya 2013). However, counter-pressure from Russian geopolitical claims not only prevented Ukraine from attaining EU membership, but also jeopardized and subverted domestic violence reforms while creating conditions that led to new forms of violence against women. The EU accession process, domestic Ukrainian authoritarianism, and rising anti-​EU backlash by the Kremlin together threaten women’s rights, demonstrating that many post-​Soviet countries face different and more geopolitically unstable environments than postcommunist EU members. State policy was initiated in Ukraine under Soviet rule to seek validation and legitimacy from external actors, in particular, the United Nations (UN). This pattern of policymaking driven by external legitimation continued after independence vis-​à-​vis the EU. However, in contrast to postcommunist countries that were granted EU membership or clear plans toward that goal, the path of legal reforms to combat gender violence in Ukraine has been cyclical, with reforms introduced by EU programs later undermined by officials allied with domestic political clans suspected of collusion with Russia. Since 2014, rising pressure from Russia for Ukraine to abort its European integration efforts has resulted in ongoing political instability and a protracted hybrid war, in which elements of conventional warfare are blended with cyberwarfare, media dissemination of fake news, and other efforts to sow disorder. Reform in Ukraine has also been undermined by western donors’ failure to recognize the peculiarities of post-​Soviet institutional environments, in particular the lasting influence of coercive autocratic state practices as they interact with domestic manifestations of patriarchy. In Ukraine, as in other communist societies, both women and men were subordinated to the state, which instituted paternalistic control over women’s bodies and their children, and was the principal agent of violence in daily life. This public patriarchy contrasts with private patriarchy, more common in the West, where individual women are more directly controlled by individual men (Gal 2003). A lack of recognition of the state as an agent of systemic institutional violence in post-​Soviet Ukraine persists among western donors.

Violence against women in Soviet Ukraine The state of Ukraine is a successor to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), a founding member of the United Nations and a signatory to the UN Convention on the

454

455

Hybrid regimes and gender violence

Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Despite Soviet claims that the Ukrainian SSR was an independent state with a modern legal order consistent with international norms, Soviet institutions operated to control public life and centralize political power in Moscow. The Soviet system produced an institutional facade of political rights that were openly flouted domestically and manipulated internationally to bolster the Soviet Union’s legitimacy against allegations of human rights violations. Even though Ukraine signed CEDAW in 1979, women remained unaware of their legal rights until after Ukraine’s independence (Hrycak 2010). Under Soviet authority, in the years following the establishment of the Ukrainian SSR, official state discourse shifted ambiguously away from emancipation, bringing a renewed emphasis on motherhood and the family. Celebrations of International Women’s Day, which earlier featured the struggle for equality, became centered on the “caring, loving, and faithful woman-​mother” (Kis 2019). In their assessment of women’s status required for CEDAW, Ukrainian SSR representatives made sweeping claims of success, asserting that “[w]‌omen in the Ukraine were able to exercise their rights in all areas of life” (United Nations 1983, 3). Responding to questions about violence against women, Ukrainian representatives proclaimed that further legal measures or state services to protect women were unnecessary, as harsh sentences for rape and prostitution under existing Soviet legislation provided adequate protection (United Nations 1984, 17–​19). Political devolution in the late 1980s created incentives that led Ukrainian UN officials to begin differentiating from Soviet state positions and brought acknowledgement that reforms were necessary to comply with CEDAW obligations. In 1990, the Ukrainian SSR government admitted for the first time that women faced rising levels of violence and unemployment and were fleeing abroad, where some encountered human trafficking (United Nations 1990). Despite these admissions, the Soviet Ukrainian state undertook no steps to reform its handling of gender violence. Women who faced violence typically remained silent and avoided contact with law enforcement. Viewing domestic violence as an offense against public order and morality, associated with hooliganism, Soviet police often held both victims and perpetrators responsible (Muravyeva 2014). There were no shelters or other services available to victims of rape, spousal abuse, or other forms of violence.

European integration and comprehensive gender violence policy The 1990s witnessed Ukraine’s independence and the election of president Leonid Kuchma (1994–​ 2005). Expressing commitment to strengthen national sovereignty, legality, and democracy, the Kuchma government declared European integration to be a top state priority (Kubicek 2005; Protsyk 2003; Zhurzhenko 2005). However, as they navigated the uncertain geopolitics of EU integration, pro-​European reformers faced complex domestic patronage relationships. In the 1990s, pro-​western politicians were a tiny parliamentary minority, opposed by a supermajority of anti-​European-​integration Communist Party members. Although parliamentary support later rose, EU membership continued to face opposition from clientelistic networks of eastern Ukrainian officials and oligarchs who considered membership harmful to their economic interests. While forging pragmatic alliances with politicians of both geopolitical orientations, President Kuchma persisted in advancing Ukraine’s EU candidacy, even though he and allied state officials also obstructed reforms and engaged in violence to silence journalists, activists, and political adversaries.

455

456

Alexandra Hrycak

Despite state promises to undertake reforms, informal state practices prevented the development of a stable democratic system and instead produced a hybrid authoritarian regime (Way 2004). Machine politics and informal deals dominated the justice system and state administration, undermining the rule of law and efforts to address gender violence. Exercising control over extensive coercive agencies, state officials manipulated elections and carried out surveillance, harassment, and selective violence against activists, journalists, and political opponents, including prominent women politicians and feminist activists (Way 2004). They also impeded reforms by exploiting their power over administrative resources to create institutional facades that hid their lack of commitment to reforms and prevented higher-​ups and other groups from monitoring policy compliance (Allina-​Pisano 2010). EU policy shaped domestic opportunities for initiating gender violence reform in Ukraine. Nevertheless, ongoing human rights violations and inadequate reforms led Ukraine’s EU candidacy to fade (Kubicek 2005). EU decision makers began viewing Ukraine as a non-​ EU candidate and geopolitical security barrier, initiating renewed pressure for the Ukrainian government to address cross-​border crime, migration, and related issues (Kubicek 2005; Zhurzhenko 2005, 145). To help aid EU security projects, western donors shifted focus to domestic violence and trafficking prevention, human rights violations they considered catalysts for undocumented female migration (Hrycak 2010, 2012). US grants to the Women’s Consortium of Ukraine, a network of advocacy groups, moved its work away from civil society building to center on domestic violence reform and trafficking prevention. European Commission funding established the NGO La Strada to run a hotline for survivors of violence and spearheaded legal reform in 1998 that led to the criminalization of human trafficking and spurred state policy aimed at its prevention. With UN Development Programme support, the Women’s Consortium and La Strada coordinated work on domestic violence and trafficking reform, leading to the passage in 2001 of Ukraine’s Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence (Hrycak 2010). The law, the first of its kind in the postcommunist region, defined domestic violence as a specific offense, introduced temporary restraining orders, and mandated state support for nationwide networks of crisis centers, shelters, and other services to assist victims of abuse. Elite divisions over Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation continued to shape the country’s reform path. The 2004 Orange Revolution thwarted the violent efforts of EU opponent Viktor Yanukovych to steal the election, bringing pro-​western President Viktor Yushchenko to office. Yushchenko renewed efforts to advance Ukraine’s flagging EU candidacy (Kubicek 2005). State authorities increased the number of state-​run hotlines, shelters, crisis centers, and other forms of support for domestic violence victims. To harmonize Ukrainian and EU policies on women’s rights, reformers passed gender equality legislation, created state gender advisory bodies, appointed women’s advocates from La Strada and the Women’s Consortium to state agencies, and held parliamentary hearings on gender violence (Hrycak 2012). In 2008, the Ukrainian parliament initiated discussion of amendments needed to bring domestic violence law in line with women’s advocates’ and EU recommendations. These promising reforms brought legislation, services, and other positive developments. However, lingering autocratic practices subverted implementation. A nationwide examination of the first decade of the 2001 law found that key provisions had been undermined by inadequate funding for social services and police officer retraining (Bandurka and Levchenko 2010). Alarmingly, the police continued to rely on coercive practices that left victims without protection or recourse to justice, extensively issuing warnings against 456

457

Hybrid regimes and gender violence

provocative behavior to domestic violence complainants that police believed had themselves instigated the conflict (Bandurka and Levchenko 2010, 20). Echoing Soviet practices of social control over problem families, police often responded by placing perpetrators and/​or victims on deviant registries and imposing fines on the entire household. Indeed, while articulating a new legal definition of domestic violence intended to bring Ukraine into compliance with international standards, the 2001 law retained a family focus: “any intentional act of a physical, sexual, psychological or economic nature undertaken by a family member with respect to another family member” (Bandurka and Levchenko 2010, 6). Far from protecting the welfare and human rights of citizens, the police used this law to extend coercive state control over both perpetrators and victims. Domestic violence reformers called for a western-​modeled system of social services for victims and perpetrators. The only effective local system for victims arose in Kyiv, where western grants and alliances with city officials together established shelters and services serving hundreds of clients annually (Hrycak 2010). However, even these services were inadequate, as they were restricted to registered residents, excluding many victims. Elsewhere, most crisis centers remained underdeveloped, under-​resourced shells. Crisis centers in some locales served only children or youth, while in others, they were expected to serve diverse groups with disparate needs: trafficking victims, domestic violence survivors, the homeless, and recently released convicts (Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union 2015, 356). Some were located in mental hospitals, an obvious violation of the law (Bandurka and Levchenko 2010, 34). Programs for perpetrators did not exist. Trafficking prevention work exhibited similar shortcomings and gaps between formal rules and state action (Levchenko 2010; Lutsenko et al. 2005). Few criminal cases were prosecuted due to corruption and inadequate support for prosecutors. The few functioning shelters to aid trafficking victims were created by international projects. State services remained insufficient, with police and civil servants often ignorant of the law and unaware of their obligation to help trafficking victims. As in other postcommunist settings, state handling of gender issues remained strongly affected by Soviet legacies (Hrycak 2010). Responsibility for executing policy was located in short-​lived, underfunded state agencies that remained little more than institutional facades and revealed that government officials continued to view women through a neo-​ Soviet focus on motherhood and children: the Ministry for Family and Youth (1996); the Ministry for Family, Children, and Youth (1996–​2005); and the Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sport (2006–​2010). Local corruption and selective prosecution in the justice system further hampered the implementation of state policy on advancing women’s rights. Financing and staffing of gender violence activities were inadequate at the national and local levels, leaving state officials dependent on western donors with shifting priorities. Gender violence reform ultimately resembled Soviet campaigns with discursive commitments and false claims of progress, but little genuine institutional change.

High-​level subversion under Yanukovych and during the hybrid war Gendered political crises in postcommunist countries have been found to stimulate domestic violence reform (Johnson and Brunell 2006). The 2010 election of anti-​EU President Yanukovych intensified threats to women’s rights, spurring widespread women’s mobilization and calls for reform. Political violence and repression were unleashed against advocates of EU policies. Policies around gender justice were subjected to backlash by state officials and their allies. However, this gendered crisis failed to open opportunities 457

458

Alexandra Hrycak

for further domestic violence reform. Instead, geopolitics and domestic political polarization gave rise to an intensification of patriarchal views. Yanukovych initiated a campaign of repression against pro-​European reformers using widespread purges and dismissals, dissolving state agencies created by past governments as they had prepared Ukraine for EU membership. These steps included the elimination of state structures concerned with gender issues and the dismissal of staff gender experts (Lutsenko, Strebkova, and Skoryk 2016, 6). In the new Ministry of Social Policy created a year later, gender policy was delegated to five staff members who lacked knowledge of gender equity laws and policies (Lutsenko et al. 2016, 7–​12). Western-​oriented women’s advocates were subjected to new restrictions preventing them from monitoring state compliance, and faced harassment by a state-​facilitated campaign promoting homophobic, pro-​family positions within the government and parliament (Lutsenko et al. 2016, 7). Starting in 2010, state officials subjected women activists and political rivals to repression. Former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was sentenced to prison in a trial viewed as politically motivated. A series of high profile rapes and assaults on women took place involving males who received preferential treatment by the justice system due to their associations with the Yanukovych-​led Party of Regions. Framing these assaults as illustrations of endemic corruption, impunity, and selective justice, the women’s protest group FEMEN and other advocates organized protests calling for Yanukovych’s ouster. In retaliation, women’s advocates who directly challenged the Yanukovych government’s gender politics were subjected to clandestine assaults and repression. The harmful effects of this authoritarian crackdown were compounded by harassment directed against women’s rights groups and state gender-​related policy through Stop Gender!, a transnational campaign directed against the term gender and efforts toward achieving gender equality (Korolczuk 2015; Paternotte and Kuhar 2018; see Graff, Chapter 26 in this Handbook). While leaders claimed to represent local concerned citizens, their activities received high-​level facilitation and strong financial and logistical support of suspected Kremlin origin (Hankivsky and Skoryk 2014; Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). Echoing nearly verbatim rhetoric in use in neighboring Russia, campaigns argued that EU gender policies would cause the destruction of families, the “legalization of pedophilia and incest,” and the imposition of a “homosexual dictatorship” (Hankivsky and Skoryk 2014; Korolczuk 2015). The movement aggressively demanded that Ukraine ban sex education in schools, reverse LGBTQ protections, and repeal legislation on gender equality (while also directing attacks on gender studies centers and La Strada for promoting homosexuality and child trafficking). This wave of repression culminated when Yanukovych announced that Ukraine would halt further steps toward European integration. In response, a protest movement called the Euromaidan arose to demand respect for civil rights and the rule of law. After months of state efforts to violently suppress this movement, Yanukovych fled the country and the Russian state proceeded to occupy and then annex Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Subsequent Russian-​backed insurgent activity led to a hybrid war throughout the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. As the result of this armed conflict, millions of Ukrainians became internally displaced persons (IDPs) or were exposed to violence at the hands of armed forces, paramilitaries, and other actors allied with separatist movements (United Nations 2017). Advocates express concern that violence against women and patriarchal attitudes have intensified, especially against women and girls who are internally displaced or living in close

458

459

Hybrid regimes and gender violence

proximity to the conflict. There are continued reports of abuse in the regions affected by the crisis, exacerbating human trafficking and sexual exploitation. However, there is no reliable information regarding territories outside Ukrainian state control, as armed factions have blocked access to monitoring groups. The continuing hybrid warfare and domestic backlash against gender initiatives have undermined renewed efforts to address gender violence. Since Yanukovych’s ouster, pro-​ EU politicians have created opportunities for new state policies against gender violence. The predominant form of violence against women that the courts, police, and social workers have addressed remains domestic violence. Advocates seek to broaden attention beyond abuse in the private sphere, toward harassment at work, the exploitation of sex workers, and the ongoing abuse of girls in state-​run children’s institutions, where gender violence is rife (The Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine and United Nations Population Fund 2014, 13). Despite its pervasiveness, gender violence remains a low government priority (Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union 2018). Reformers’ long-​standing attempts for parliamentary ratification of the Istanbul Convention led to initial parliamentary approval of the draft law, contingent on the removal of all references to the term gender. Although the law’s authors agreed to these terms, a parliamentary vote remains unlikely, due to religious opposition to its perceived promotion of gender ideology and same-​sex unions (Ukrainian News Agency 2017; UNIAN 2020).

Conclusions The intervention of transnational feminism and EU aid created new political opportunities for postcommunist women’s organizations and state reform (Johnson and Brunell 2006). In Ukraine, they aided the emergence of NGOs oriented toward domestic violence and trafficking and encouraged state reform. However, in the shifting geopolitical environment of the former Soviet states, international pressure has also given rise to transnational forms of illiberal populism that deepen domestic anti-​feminist backlash, as well as fuel homophobic campaigns (see Korolczuk 2015). Ukrainian EU integration efforts initiated promising reforms in the handling of violence against women, an issue that previously had been taboo. Yet, despite the achievements of local advocates, state practices obstruct institutional reforms and fail to meet the needs of victims (Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union 2018). State programs remain institutional facades, suffering from insufficient funding and oversight. Recreating elements of Soviet public patriarchy and exacerbating gender violence, state coercive agencies themselves continue to subvert the rule of law, civil rights, and human rights while promoting populist family discourse. These Soviet legacies, the ongoing Kremlin-​backed hybrid warfare, and EU ambivalence interact dangerously to prevent Ukraine from integrating with the West, deeply threatening women’s rights in unanticipated ways. Anti-​EU actors deliberately provoked a gendered political crisis through counter-​ mobilization against gender and gender violence as western categories. Rather than reinvigorating women’s mobilization, this backlash subverted renewed advocacy efforts to address gender violence as a systemic problem requiring institutional reform. Feminist groups active during the first decade of the 2000s splintered or dissolved. Feminist frames played virtually no role in general debates (although exceptional social campaigns have broadened awareness among youth, see Lokot 2018). When Yanukovych initiated

459

460

Alexandra Hrycak

repression against women’s advocates, the public viewed these assaults as further expressions of the rising state violence the regime directed against all citizens, but rarely acknowledged it as organized violence against women (Levchenko 2012). Coalitions of women’s advocates mobilized for domestic violence reform, attempting to transform women’s rights institutions inherited from the USSR from facades into something more meaningful. However, their work has been doubly undermined, first by the informal practices of the justice system, and later, by high-​level violence against the institutions tasked with implementation of gendered laws. In the face of ongoing cycles of geopolitical realignment, pro-​EU reformers’ struggles suggest that the future handling of violence against women in post-​Soviet countries will undoubtedly remain precarious as long as border countries like Ukraine are prevented from joining the EU by Russian aggression. Furthermore, by mainly addressing private patriarchy in its policy recommendations, western-​ oriented advocacy may have overlooked ongoing institutional and state-​based gender violence and other legacies of Soviet public patriarchy. This omission results in current-​day postcommunist policies and structures ill-​equipped to protect and empower vulnerable groups of women.

References Allina-​Pisano, Jessica. 2010. “Social Contracts and Authoritarian Projects in Post-​Soviet Space: The Use of Administrative Resource.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 43 (4): 373–​382. Bandurka, Oleksandr and Kateryna Levchenko, eds. 2010. The Monitoring of the Implementation of the Law of Ukraine about Preventing Family Violence. Kharkiv: Prava Liudyny Publishers. Einhorn, Barbara and Charlotte Sever. 2003. “Gender and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (2): 163–​190. Fábián, Katalin. 2010. “Mores and Gains: The EU’s Influence on Domestic Violence Policies among Its New Post-​Communist Member States.” Women’s Studies International Forum 33 (1): 54–​67. Gal, Susan. 2003. “Movements of Feminism: The Circulation of Discourses about Women.” In Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Power and Agency, edited by Barbara Hobson, 93–​119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hankivsky, Olena and Marfa Skoryk. 2014. “The Current Situation and Potential Responses to Movements against Gender Equality in Ukraine.” East/​West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 1 (1): 19–​44. Hrycak, Alexandra. 2010. “Transnational Advocacy Campaigns and Domestic Violence Prevention in Ukraine.” In Domestic Violence in Postcommunist States: Local Activism, National Policies, and Global Forces, edited by Katalin Fábián, 45–​77. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. –​ –​ –​ –​ . 2012. “Global Campaigns to Combat Violence against Women: Their Impact in Postcommunist Ukraine.” In Gender, State and Politics in Ukraine, edited by Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova, 98–​127. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Johnson, Janet Elise. 2007. “Domestic Violence Politics in Post-​ Soviet States.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 14 (3): 380–​405. Johnson, Janet Elise and Laura Brunell. 2006. “The Emergence of Contrasting Domestic Violence Regimes in Post-​communist Europe.” Policy & Politics 34 (4): 575–​595. Kis, Oksana. 2019. “How International Women’s Day Became a Celebration of Eternal Femininity.” Euromaidan Press, March 9. http://​euromaidanpress.com/​2019/​03/​09/​ukraine-​ussr-​ international-​womens-​day-​history/​. Korolczuk, Elżbieta. 2015. “The War on Gender: From a Transnational Perspective—​Lessons for Feminist Strategising.” In Anti-​Gender Movements on the Rise? Strategising for Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, 43–​53. Berlin: Heinrich Boll Foundation. Kubicek, Paul. 2005. “The European Union and Democratization in Ukraine.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 38 (2) 269–​292.

460

461

Hybrid regimes and gender violence Levchenko, Kateryna. 2010. Monitorinh Vykonnia Derzhavnoi Prohramy Protydii Torhivli Liud’my Na Period Do 2010 Roku. Kyiv: La Strada Ukraine. –​–​–​–​. 2012. “Chomu suspilʹstvo vvazhaye, shcho zhertvy zgvaltuvannya sami v tsʹomu vynni?” Ukrains’ka pravda, March 31. www.pravda.com.ua/​columns/​2012/​03/​31/​6961852/​. Lokot, Tetyana. 2018. “#IAmNotAfraidToSayIt: Stories of Sexual Violence as Everyday Political Speech on Facebook.” Information, Communication & Society 21 (6): 802–​817. Lutsenko, Yevgeniia, Julia Strebkova, and Marfa Skoryk editors. 2016. NGO Alternative Report on Ukraine’s Implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Eight Periodic Report). Kyiv: Gender Strategic Platform. Lutsenko, Yevgeniia, Lydia Matiaszek, Shivaun Scanlan, and Inna Shvab. 2005. Trafficking in Ukraine: An Assessment of Current Responses. Kyiv: UNICEF, OSCE, USAID, British Council. Montoya, Celeste. 2013. From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women. New York: Oxford University Press. Muravyeva, Marianna. 2014. “Bytovukha: Family Violence in Soviet Russia.” Aspasia 8 (1): 90–124. Paternotte, David and Roman Kuhar. 2018. “Disentangling and Locating the ‘Global Right’: Anti-​ Gender Campaigns in Europe.” Politics and Governance 6 (3): 6–​19. Protsyk, Oleh. 2003. “Domestic Political Institutions in Ukraine and Russia and their Responses to EU Enlargement.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 36 (4): 427–​442. Sakwa, Richard. 2016. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. London: I.B. Tauris. The Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine and United Nations Population Fund. 2014. Report on the Implementation in Ukraine of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: The Eighth Periodic Report (Submitted under the Article 18 of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in Ukraine). Kyiv: United Nations. Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. 2015. Human Rights in Ukraine —​2014. Human Rights Organizations Report. Kyiv: Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. –​–​–​–. 2018. Prava liudyny —​2017. Kyiv: Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. Ukrainian News Agency. 2017. “La Strada Ukraine Asking Rada To Ratify Istanbul Convention.” Ukrainian News Agency, March 10. UNIAN. 2020 “Leading Party Leader Says Rada Unlikely to Ratify Istanbul Convention.” Ukrainian Independent Information Agency [UNIAN], January 22. United Nations. 1983. Report of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. UN document CEPAW/​C/​SR.16. New York: General Assembly. –​–​–​–. 1984. Report of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. UN document A/​39/​45. New York: General Assembly. –​–​–​–. 1990. Report of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. UN document A/​45/​38. New York: General Assembly. –​–​–​–. 2017. Conflict-​Related Sexual Violence in Ukraine (14 March 2014 to 31 January 2017). United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Way, Lucan A. 2004. “The Sources and Dynamics of Competitive Authoritarianism in Ukraine.” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 20 (1): 143–​161. Zhurzhenko, Tatiana. 2005. “Europeanizing the Ukrainian–​Russian border: From EU Enlargement to the ‘Orange Revolution.’” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 13 (2): 137–​154.

461

462

44 BRIDE KIDNAPPING AND POLYGYNOUS MARRIAGES Gendered debates in Central Asia Cynthia Werner

Over 90 years ago, the Bolshevik rulers banned polygyny and forced marriage in Central Asia as part of a broad effort to emancipate women and to put an end to what they considered to be the “patriarchal-​feudal” phase of social evolution. Despite being legally prohibited for decades, both forms of marriage continue to persist and spark controversy into the 21st century. Forced marriage, known more commonly today in western literature as non-​consensual bride kidnapping, is one of several paths to marriage among certain ethnic groups in Central Asia and the Caucasus, including Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Armenians, Azeris, and Chechens (Werner et al. 2018). In contrast, polygyny, the marriage of one man to two or more wives, is a practice shared by all Central Asian ethnic groups with differing levels of frequency across time and space. In contemporary society, the two practices are united by a cultural anxiety toward unmarried women. As one scholar puts it, “women living out of marriage remain suspicious” (Cleuziou 2016, 82). This worldview helps explain why some Central Asians would argue that it is better for a woman to marry her kidnapper than to return home and risk the possibility of never being married, and why some would argue that it is better for a woman to be a second wife than to remain unmarried. There is evidence to suggest that there was a resurgence of both practices in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union (Amsler and Kleinbach 1999; Cleuziou 2016; Commercio 2020; Thibault 2018; Werner 2004). The increased frequency of these practices coincided with the rise of nationalism in the post-​Soviet years and declining political support for women’s equality in society. There is no consensus regarding the social acceptance of these practices within local communities. In between people who wholeheartedly support and people who actively contest these practices, there is a large swath of the population that “reluctantly tolerates” these practices (Commercio 2020). Across Central Asia, political debates about legalizing polygyny, on the one hand, and increasing penalties for bride kidnapping, on the other, reveal social divisions within society as well as the unique challenges faced by those advocating for women’s rights. These political debates are situated within a broader context in which “tradition” has been simultaneously invoked by elites and authorities as a “deficiency to be overcome” in pursuit of modernity and 462

463

Bride kidnapping and polygynous marriages

a “quality to be embraced” in the construction of national identity (Beyer and Finke 2019: 310). Parallel to these political debates within the region, there have also been a number of scholarly debates about these practices. This includes conceptual debates about the ideal term used to describe bride kidnapping, and the extent to which the concept of gender-​based violence applies equally to “non-​consensual bride kidnapping” and other variations of the practice which are sometimes referred to as “consensual bride kidnapping” (Handrahan 2004; Shields 2006; Werner 2009; Werner et al. 2018). Scholars have also debated whether the continued existence of bride kidnapping and polygyny are best explained by cultural continuity with the past, a return to traditional values, or through the re-​traditionalization of gendered practices within a unique post-​Soviet context where tradition and modernity are simultaneously pursued (Beyer and Finke 2019; Borbieva 2012; Cleuziou 2019; Kleinbach and Salimjanova 2007; Thibault 2018; Werner 2004). Specific to bride kidnapping, there have also been scholarly discussions about whether the practice experienced a resurgence during the initial post-​Soviet years, followed by a decline in more recent years (Amsler and Kleinbach 1999; Kleinbach 2003; Nedoluzhko and Agadjanian 2015; Shields 2006; Werner 2004). Specific to polygyny, there have been scholarly discussions about the social and demographic factors that contribute toward polygyny, as well as the social status and respectability of second wives (Cleuziou 2016; Commercio 2020; Eshanova 2002; Thibault 2018).

The social value of marriage in Central Asia In order to understand these debates about bride kidnapping and forced marriage, it is important to underscore the value of marriage in Central Asia. Marriages are typically celebrated through a series of social events that emphasize the union between two family lineages and culminate with a large wedding banquet—​hosted by the groom’s family and attended by hundreds of guests. Weddings provide opportunities for the host family and their guests to compete for social prestige and status through expenditures on the wedding banquet and wedding gifts respectively (Cleuziou 2016; Werner 1998). Due to social pressures, wedding costs tend to be quite high, and some Central Asian countries have attempted to regulate these expenses, albeit with limited success (Cleuziou 2019, 355; Roche and Hohmann 2011; Trevisani 2016). Throughout the region, there is strong social pressure for young people of both sexes to get married as young adults (i.e., between the ages of 18 and 25). Women who postpone marriage are questioned and judged by family members and friends to a greater extent than men who postpone marriage. Both men and women acquire social status and respect through marriage, and through the birth of children that come out of that marriage. The pressure to marry and to have children is reinforced by popular beliefs that children will grow up and care for their parents later in life. Marriage represents a dramatic change in a person’s status, and this is especially true for women. Women are more likely than men to leave their natal family and relatives behind to go live with their husband’s family and relatives. This may take the form of moving to a different house within the same town or city, or it might involve moving to an entirely different place. Upon marriage, the bride’s extended family transfers responsibility for her well-​being to the groom’s extended family (Kandiyoti 2007). This means that women are much more integrated socially and economically into their husband’s extended families than vice versa. Upon marriage, the bride secures her spot in broader 463

464

Cynthia Werner

society as an honorable (married) woman, yet this often comes at the expense of her status within her husband’s household, particularly with the re-​traditionalized discourse of the daughter-​in-​law (kelin) role (Kudaibergenova 2018). The centrality of (heterosexual) marriage is reinforced by local languages. In Kazakh, for example, the word for “girl” is also used to connote a “virgin,” while the word for “woman” is equated with “wife,” as if it is impossible for a female Kazakh to have sex outside of marriage or to live as an unmarried woman. Women who never marry are referred to as an “old girl” until later in life. In contrast, “boys” mature into “young men,” and the term for a “man” is distinct from the concept for a “husband.” In other words, one can be a man without being married, but one cannot be a woman until one is married. Further, there are gendered differences in how one describes the process of getting married: females “leave to enter life” while males “form a household.” This is consistent with social practices where women typically leave their natal family to join their husband’s family, and men start the process of forming their own independent household by getting married.

Bride kidnapping and polygyny in the pre-​Soviet and Soviet periods According to many sources, marriages in pre-​Soviet Central Asia were typically arranged by parents (and kinsmen) when the bride and groom were young children (Nalivkin and Nalivkina 2016). Marriages were viewed as a union between families, rather than a match based on love. Forced marriage or bride kidnapping was an option for the groom’s family in situations where the parents of a “girl” did not agree to a particular match, including cases where a “boy” fell in love with a particular girl. When a girl was kidnapped, her parents not only lost control over the decision to accept a marriage, but they also lost out on the brideprice (kalym) they would receive from an arranged marriage (Poliakov 1992, 55). Nevertheless, once a girl was kidnapped and taken inside the groom’s house, the marriage was considered to be final due to a popular belief that a girl’s reputation would be tainted and she would be unlikely to get married if she did not stay. The belief that a girl who returns home will suffer a bad fate continues to hold power in the present, and thus makes it difficult for a girl’s parents to intervene without incurring gossip and shame. In the pre-​Soviet period, polygyny occurred among wealthy men who had the means to support multiple wives, and in cases where a widow married her late husband’s brother in order to keep the widow and her children within the same family unit. Polygynous marriages also occurred in situations where the first wife was unable to have children (Commercio 2020). While Russian colonial authorities brought some legal changes to Central Asia (Martin 2001) in the 19th century, the Bolsheviks introduced more significant changes in the 20th century. Inspired by Marxist ideology, early Bolshevik leaders sought to enlist women as the “surrogate proletariat” in their efforts to transform Central Asian society (Massell 1974). They attempted to change marriage practices in the late 1920s by banning what they perceived to be deplorable and archaic marriage practices, including child betrothals, child marriages, forced marriages, and polygyny. There is a growing body of English-​language scholarship on Central Asian women. This literature is focused on two periods: the years of Soviet liberation and its aftermath (approximately 1927–​1938) and the years after the fall of the Soviet Union (1991–​ present). Historical research conducted by western scholars on the lives of Central Asian women has been concentrated on the first few Soviet decades when the state was initially 464

465

Bride kidnapping and polygynous marriages

enforcing these dramatic changes to social life, including the forced unveiling campaign. These studies emphasize chaos, anger, and resistance in the implementation of these top-​down policies (Kamp 2006; Northrop 2004; see Gradskova, Chapter 22 in this Handbook). In the early 1990s, the region opened up to ethnographic research conducted by scholars trained outside of the region, leading to an increasing number of studies on women’s lives in Central Asia. Less scholarly research has been conducted on gender issues during the middle and late Soviet eras. Thus, there is a missing link between studies of the early Soviet period and studies of the post-​Soviet period. A small number of studies conducted by Soviet-​ trained scholars suggest that bride kidnapping and polygyny had declined by the 1960s and 1970s (Abramzon 1949 cited in Kleinbach and Salimjanova 2007; Taizhanov 1995). These studies provide important glimpses into these decades, yet it is possible that these scholars faced ideological pressure to paint a rosy picture of women’s lives in the late Soviet era. Other scholars (Poliakov 1992) have been more critical of the efficacy of Soviet policies, arguing that traditional practices were too deeply rooted in Central Asia to be removed by top-​down policies. There is little doubt that Soviet policies changed social practices and worldviews, yet they did not succeed in eradicating marriage practices such as forced marriage and polygyny. There is evidence that local people developed creative acts of noncompliance in response to these top-​down efforts to change society. We know that some form of bride kidnapping took place during the Soviet years based on interviews conducted in the post-​ Soviet era about the past (Kleinbach 2003; Werner 2004). Many of these involved the bride’s consent, and thus resembled elopement more than forced marriage. At some point during the Soviet decades, it also became customary for kidnapped brides to write a letter to their parents stating that they came of their own free will. As early as the 1920s, Bolshevik officials made it clear that polygyny was neither legal nor politically acceptable. Central Asian families were able to get around this law by only registering the first marriage at the local civil registry office (Zapiska Aktov Grazhdanskogo Sostoianiia). Second marriages were legitimized through the Islamic religious ceremony known as the nikah. The legitimacy of second marriages comes from the Islamic tenet that a man can marry up to four women as long as he has the means to provide for them equally. A man’s first wife was often a young bride, but a second wife might be an older woman who had not yet married, a widowed woman, or even a divorced woman. In Soviet times, instances of polygyny were not the norm, but they were common enough that most people in Central Asia can think of at least one example. Polygyny provided an avenue for these women to receive the economic support and social legitimacy they needed for daily survival.

Post-​Soviet revivals Although the full extent to which bride abduction and polygyny declined during the Soviet period is unknown, the continued existence and increased visibility of these marriage practices in post-​Soviet Central Asia has been well documented (Amsler and Kleinbach 1999; Asanalieva 2012; Commercio 2020; Handrahan 2004; Kleinbach and Salimjanova 2007; Shields 2006; Tabyshalieva 1998; Thibault 2018; Werner 2009). It is likely that an increase in social stratification in the post-​Soviet decades can help explain the resurgence of both practices. Bride kidnapping offers a less expensive way to get married, and is therefore more common among families that need to minimize the ritual 465

466

Cynthia Werner

expenses associated with marriage. It is also an appealing option for young men with limited economic opportunities, as they do not have to be as concerned about attracting a marriage partner (though they are unlikely to kidnap a woman from a wealthy family). Polygyny is more common for men who have the economic means to support more than one wife (and the children that come from that marriage). In the post-​Soviet era, there are more men who have the money to support multiple wives. Polygyny is an appealing option for women who are economically vulnerable for one reason or another. This may explain why the rise of polygyny has been most evident in post-​Soviet Tajikistan where lives have been disrupted by a civil war from 1992 to 1997, and labor out-​migration in subsequent years (Thibault 2018). Polygyny is also an appealing option for single working women who want to have moral respectability associated with marriage. In one survey, 20 percent of married women in Tajikistan are in polygynous marriages (Shemyakina 2009). Another study (Cleuziou 2016, 84) cites a public leader who claims that one out of three Tajik men are polygynous. The two practices of polygyny and bride kidnapping are connected by a cultural discomfort and misgiving toward adult women who are unmarried, especially among individuals who support more “traditional” values within society. Marriage is associated with respectability among women. As girls mature into young women, there is pressure for them to get married and start a family. Women who do not get married within the culturally acceptable timeframe (age 17–​25) are referred to derogatorily as “old girls,” the Central Asian equivalent of “old maids.” Although divorce is fairly common throughout Central Asia, divorced women are economically vulnerable, and are likely to encounter social disapproval, especially if they maintain a separate household from their parents. The belief that it is better for a woman to marry her kidnapper than to return home and face the possibility of never getting married is rooted in the same “traditional” ideology as the belief that it might be better for a woman to be a second wife than to be unmarried. In both cases, the alternative is the same—​an unmarried woman is often perceived as a person who is subjected to a lonely and vulnerable life. From a traditional perspective, marriage can provide women with economic security, as well as social protection from verbal or physical abuse (Cleuziou 2016).

Debates about polygyny Among scholars of Central Asia, the topic of polygyny has received much less scholarly attention than bride kidnapping, probably due to the “exotic” nature of the latter. Polygyny, however, has received more political attention within the Central Asian context. Under Soviet law, polygyny was punishable by fines or jail time (Thibault 2018). Such laws have remained in post-​Soviet Central Asian states, yet by the mid-​2000s, each of the five Central Asian countries considered proposals to legalize polygyny (Cleuziou 2016; Commercio 2020; Eshanova 2002; Saidazimova 2008; Zakirova 2005). These proposals have garnered support from some women, as polygyny has been politically framed as a way to provide economic security to vulnerable women, such as divorcees and widows, at a time when the state has been forced to cut back social welfare expenditures. More importantly, the legalization of polygyny is believed by some to bring important legal rights to second wives and the children of these marriages. Not all Central Asian women support this view. Representing one alternative position, a female parliamentarian suggested that new laws could be introduced that would simply extend legal rights to children born out of wedlock (Saidazimova 2008). 466

467

Bride kidnapping and polygynous marriages

Scholars who have studied polygyny have tried to understand the social and demographic factors that explain why men and women pursue these marriages, and why there have been political efforts to legalize polygyny. Most studies have focused on the case of Tajikistan. Although these studies acknowledge that many men were killed during the civil war in Tajikistan, authors emphasize poverty, rather than a shortage of men, as a key driver to explain the rise of polygyny. Eshanova (2002), for example, states that women and girls from impoverished families often become second and third wives. Thibault (2018) adds that migration can be explained by looking at the link between migration and poverty. Poverty explains why so many young people, especially men, seek work in Russia and Kazakhstan, among other destinations. Poverty also explains why women in Tajikistan need the financial support of men. Among Tajik labor migrants, it is not uncommon for the first wife to be a Tajik woman living in Tajikistan, while the second wife is a woman living in Russia. Over time, the first marriage may end in divorce, and the woman left behind may seek a marriage where she is the second wife (Thibault 2018, 2812). In contrast to Eshanova’s portrayal of second wives as economically vulnerable women, Cleuziou (2016) finds that some second wives are economically secure working women who are interested in the social respectability of marriage, in addition to the economic benefits. Adding more complexity to the motivations behind polygyny, Commercio’s study (2020) of polygyny in Kyrgyzstan focuses on cultural rather than economic factors, arguing that women who agree to be second wives are motivated by the desire to have children in a society where marriage is viewed as a precondition for motherhood. There have also been scholarly discussions about the social status and respectability of second wives (Cleuziou 2016; Commercio 2020; Eshanova 2002; Thibault 2018). Cleuziou (2016) argues that second wives do not receive the same status as first wives within the community. This can be observed by the fact that marriages to second wives are not celebrated with a large, public ceremony, or marked by a large array of gifts exchanged between families. The marriages are nevertheless socially acknowledged, such that second wives are no longer subjected to social surveillance or compared to prostitutes (Cleuziou 2016). Acknowledging the link between marriage and gender respectability, Commercio (2020) states that women “acquire power and prestige through marriage and motherhood.” While it is fairly common for second wives to be portrayed in negative ways as economically desperate women (Eshanova 2002; Faskhutdinov 2014), both Cleuziou (2016) and Thibault (2018) emphasize the agency of second wives, yet they do this from very different perspectives. Cleuziou finds that some second wives have jobs and property, and are primarily seeking the moral respectability that comes from marriage. In contrast, Thibault argues that the second marriages provide an opportunity for “indulgence” as they are much more likely than the first to be a marriage that both men and women are choosing, compared to the first marriage which is more likely to have been arranged by parents. Less attention has been paid to the social status and respectability of men in polygynous marriages, given the twin assumptions that such men will be wealthy enough to afford multiple wives and that wealthy men will be respected within society.

Debates about bride kidnapping Similar to polygyny, there is a range of views toward bride kidnapping. On the one hand, some locals think that bride kidnapping is an acceptable, traditional way to get married (Abdurasulov 2012; Kleinbach and Salimjanova 2007; Najibullah 2011). On the other 467

468

Cynthia Werner

hand, other locals challenge the acceptability of a practice that so clearly limits a woman’s rights to choose her own marriage partner. While political debates about polygyny have revolved around whether or not the government should legalize the practice, political debates about bride kidnapping have not been accompanied by political efforts aimed at loosening restrictions on bride kidnapping. Instead, they have centered on whether or not penalties for this practice should be increased. These views are shared by feminist activists and government officials who have been particularly disturbed by situations where a woman is forced to marry somebody against her will (Konurbaeva 2013; Regnum Informationiye Avgenstvo 2017; Zakon.kz 2018). Within the past decade, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and Kyrgyzstan have increased the maximum penalties for bride kidnapping in response to women’s rights activists (Brooks and Umarova 2010; Kiryashova 2005; Konurbaeva 2013). In addition, NGOs have initiated public awareness campaigns in an effort to change cultural attitudes toward kidnapping (Kleinbach and Babaiarova 2013). One NGO, for example, used films and educational seminars to illustrate the psychological and social impacts of bride kidnapping on young women. High-​profile cases have bolstered these efforts, such as the case of Burulai Turdaaly Kyzy, a woman who was killed by her abductor at a police station where she and her abductor were taken after her father reported the kidnapping (Toktonazarova 2018). Scholars who study bride kidnapping have engaged in conceptual debates about the ideal term used to describe bride kidnapping in English, and the extent to which the concept of gender-​based violence applies equally to “non-​consensual bride kidnapping” and other variations of the practice which are sometimes referred to as “consensual bride kidnapping” (Handrahan 2004; Shields 2006; Werner 2009; Werner et al. 2018). Experts agree that individual cases vary greatly. Amsler and Kleinbach (1999) introduced the distinction between “consensual” and “non-​consensual” bride kidnapping, based on a translation of local terms which conflated two different forms of kidnapping, a “consensual” form where the bride knows of the plan beforehand and pretends to be taken against her will, and a “non-​consensual” form where the bride is kidnapped against her will. Werner (2004) proposed that the distinction was more of a continuum and added the idea of “semi-​consensual” to the discussion. Later, Werner (2009) proposed the use of “bride abduction” rather than “bride kidnapping” to minimize the connection with kidnap for ransom, and to reduce association with “kids” or children. In a more recent paper, several of the experts on this subject (Werner et al. 2018) debate whether or not we should continue to distinguish “consensual” and “non-​consensual” kidnapping; not ironically—​but there is no consensus on this topic. Scholars who study bride kidnapping have attempted to determine whether the practice has become more frequent in post-​Soviet years. From a methodological perspective, these efforts have been challenged by the lack of nationwide data on how people get married, either in the past or the present. Interviews and surveys, however, suggest that there was a resurgence of bride kidnapping in the post-​Soviet years, compared to late Soviet years (Amsler and Kleinbach 1999; Kleinbach 2003; Werner 2004). These scholars explain the rise of bride kidnapping as part of the re-​traditionalization of Central Asian society, and view the practice as a form of gender-​based violence that ensures male dominance over women (Handrahan 2004; Werner et al. 2018). One study finds that public awareness campaigns can help reduce bride kidnapping (Kleinbach and Babaiarova 2013). In contrast to the “re-​traditionalization” approach, Nedoluzhko and Agadjanian (2015) argue that there has been a notable decrease in the frequency of non-​consensual bride kidnapping after 2000. They explain this change 468

469

Bride kidnapping and polygynous marriages

in marriage dynamics as part of a larger pattern in which the importance of marriage is declining, as witnessed by postponement of marriage and the spread of informal partnerships. In this sense, their study, emphasizing the “modernization” of post-​Soviet Central Asian societies, stands in contrast to other studies of marriage in Central Asia, which tend to give centrality to the value placed on marriage. Finally, scholars who study bride kidnapping have also engaged in debates about the factors that explain bride kidnapping in contemporary society. Using a game-​theoretic model and a comparative approach, Becker and his colleagues develop a theory for understanding why bride kidnapping occurs among some post-​Soviet ethnic groups, but not others. They find that bride kidnapping is more likely to occur when there are generational differences in preferences regarding the age of marriage, and where there is a relatively low population density (which increases the “cost” of finding a spouse). In an alternative historical approach, Kleinbach and Salimjanova (2007) use the concept of “imagined tradition” to explain the evolution of a traditional practice of consensual elopement into the practice of non-​consensual bride kidnapping that is encountered today. In comparison, my earlier publications (2004, 2009) uses a shorter historical timeframe to explain changes in the practice between late Soviet and post-​Soviet years; her study emphasizes the rise of post-​Soviet nationalism, the prevalence of corruption, and the growth of social inequality. My recent article, co-​authored with six leading experts, provides different viewpoints on these scholarly debates about bride kidnapping (Werner et al. 2018).

Conclusions This chapter focuses on changing and contested views toward two marriage practices—​ bride kidnapping and polygyny—​within the post-​Soviet states of Central Asia. Although these marriage practices may be unique to Central Asia (and the Caucasus), the social and political dynamics that shape local debates about these practices are shared by other postsocialist states in Central and Eastern Europe. Namely, this broad geographical landscape was once united—​to a certain extent—​by a shared political ideology of socialism, and socialist agenda for reducing gender oppression. In the postsocialist period, each country within this broader region has experienced social tensions between those who support a nationalist agenda (and a return to what are perceived to be “natural” constructions of gender) and those who support alternative “modern” political agendas (including agendas that emphasize a global, or multicultural, approach and agendas that support women’s rights). Debates about polygyny and bride kidnapping in Central Asia are situated within this context. These two practices have ushered in a new round of scholarly debates about the efficacy and legacy of socialist-​era policies designed to improve the status of women in Central Asia: How can the rise of non-​consensual bride kidnapping and polygyny be explained after 70-​odd years of socialist policies designed to root out the oppression of patriarchal-​feudal customs? In this chapter, we find that both practices—​polygyny and bride kidnapping—​have increased in frequency, yet remain controversial in contemporary Central Asia. The two practices share one thing in common: they are both united by a cultural anxiety toward unmarried women. The respectability that is granted to a woman upon marriage helps to explain why an economically independent woman might opt to become a second wife, and why a woman kidnapped against her will might choose to remain in a forced marriage. Of course, there are other factors at play in any given situation, but the respectability that 469

470

Cynthia Werner

comes with marriage is a key factor that unites these two practices that otherwise seem to be at odds with a postsocialist context.

References Abdurasulov, Abdujalil. 2012. “Bride-​ kidnapping Debate Divides Kyrgyzstan.” BBC News, December 12. www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​20675101. Amsler, Sarah and Russell Kleinbach. 1999. “Bride Kidnapping in the Kyrgyz Republic.” International Journal of Central Asian Studies 4: 185–​216. Asanalieva, Djamila. 2012. “Stariye ‘traditsii’—​noviye problem.” Bulletin of the Issyk Kul State University (30). Beyer, Judith and Peter Finke. 2019. “Practices of Traditionalization in Central Asia.” Central Asian Survey 38 (3): 310–​328. Borbieva, Noor. 2012. “Kidnapping Women: Discourses of Emotion and Social Change in the Kyrgyz Republic.” Anthropological Quarterly 85: 141–​170. Brooks, C. and A. Umarova. 2010. “Despite Official Measures, Bride Kidnapping Endemic in Chechnya.” Radio Free Europe/​Radio Liberty, October 21. www.rferl.org/​a/​Despite_​Official_​ Measures_​Bride_​Kidnapping_​Endemic_​In_​Chechnya/​2197575.html. Cleuziou, Juliette. 2016. “‘A Second Wife is Not Really a Wife’: Polygyny, Gender Relations and Economic Realities in Tajikistan.” Central Asian Survey 35 (1): 76–​90. –​–​–​–. 2019. “Traditionalization, or the Making of a Reputation: Women, Weddings and Expenditure in Tajikistan.” Central Asian Survey 38 (3): 346–​362. Commercio, Michele E. 2020. “‘Don’t Become a Lost Specimen!’ Polygyny and Motivational Interconnectivity in Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Survey 38 (4). Published online June 16. www. tandfonline.com/​doi/​full/​10.1080/​02634937.2020.1777088. Eshanova, Zamira. 2002. “Central Asia: Increase in Polygamy Attributed to Economic Hardship, Return to Tradition.” Radio Free Europe/​Radio Liberty, October 16. www.rferl.org/​a/​1101091. html. Faskhutdinov, Galim. 2014. “Despite Ban, Polygamy Becoming Normal in Tajikistan.” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, August 31. https://​iwpr.net/​global-​voices/​despite-​ban-​polygamybecoming-​normal-​tajikistan. Handrahan, Lori. 2004. “Hunting for Women: Bride-​Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (2): 207–​233. Kamp, Marianne. 2006. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2007. “The Politics of Gender and the Soviet Paradox: Neither Colonized, nor Modern?” Central Asian Survey 26 (4): 601–​623. Kiryashova, S. 2005. “Azeri Bride Kidnappers Risk Heavy Sentences.” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, November 23. https://​iwpr.net/​global-​voices/​azeri-​bride-​kidnappers-riskheavy-​sentences. Kleinbach, Russell. 2003. “Frequency of Non-​ Consensual Bride Kidnapping in the Kyrgyz Republic.” International Journal of Central Asian Studies 8 (1): 108–​128. Kleinbach, Russell and Gazbubu Babaiarova. 2013. “Reducing Non-​consensual Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.” Eurasian Journal of Social Sciences 1 (1): 50–​60. Kleinbach, Russell and Lilly Salimjanova. 2007. “Kyz Ala Kachuu and Adat: Non-​consensual Bride Kidnapping and Tradition in Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Survey 26 (2): 217–​233. Konurbaeva, N. 2013. “Kyz uurdagan oluttuu kylmysh.” BBC-​Kyrgyzstan, January 28. www.bbc. com/​kyrgyz/​kyrgyzstan/​2013/​01/​130128_​kidnapping. Kudaibergenova, Diana. 2018. “The Body Global and the Body Traditional: A Digital Ethnography of Instagram and Nationalism in Kazakhstan and Russia.” Central Asian Survey 38 (3): 363–​380. Martin, Virginia. 2001. Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century. Richmond, Surrey: Routledge. Massell, Gregory. 1974. The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Central Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Najibullah, Farangis. 2011. “Bride Kidnapping: A Tradition or a Crime?” Radio Free Europe/​Radio Liberty, May 21. www.rferl.org/​a/​bride_​kidnapping_​a_​tradition_​or_​a_​crime/​24181723.html.

470

471

Bride kidnapping and polygynous marriages Nalivkin, Vladimir and Maria Nalivkina. 2016. Muslim Women of the Ferghana Valley: A 19th Century Ethnography from Central Asia, translated by Marianne Kamp. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nedoluzhko, Lesia and Victor Agadjanian. 2015. “Between Tradition and Modernity: Marriage Dynamics in Kyrgyzstan.” Demography 52 (3): 861–​882. Northrop, Douglas. 2004. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Poliakov, Sergei P. 1992. Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Regnum Informationiye Avgenstvo. 2017. “Krazha nevesty—​ ne prestupleniye: gendernogo neravenstva v Kazakhstana net?” August 11. https://​regnum.ru/​news/​society/​2309332.html. Roche, Sophie and Sophie Hohmann. 2011. “Wedding Rituals and the Struggle over National Identities.” Central Asian Survey 30 (1): 113–​128. Saidazimova, Gulnoza. 2008. “Central Asia: Kazakhstan Debates Polygamy Amid Regional Rise in Popularity.” Radio Free Europe/​Radio Liberty, May 28. www.refworld.org/​docid/​4844c1e7c. html. Shemyakina, O. 2009. “The Marriage Market and Tajik Armed Conflict.” HiCN Working Paper 66. Shields, Acacia. 2006. Reconciled to Violence: State Failure to Stop Domestic Abuse and the Abduction of Women in Kyrgyzstan. Human Rights Watch Report, September 27. http://​hrw. org/​reports/​2006/​kyrgyzstan0906/​. Tabyshalieva, A. 1998. Otrazhenie Vremeni [Reflection of the Times]. Bishkek: Turar. Taizhanov, G. E. 1995. Kazakhi: Istorikha-​ etnograficheskoe issledovanie. Almaty: Kazakhstan Publishers. Thibault, Helene. 2018. “Labour Migration, Sex, and Polygyny: Negotiating Patriarchy in Tajikistan.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (15). Toktonazarova, Nurzhan. 2018. “Kyrgyz Bride Kidnapping Ends in Brutal Stabbing, Prompting Outrage.” Radio Free Europe/​Radio Liberty, May 29. www.refrl.org/​a/​kyrgyz-​bride-​kidnapping-​ ends-​in-​brutal-​stabbing-​prompting-​outrage/​29257873.html. Trevisani, Tommasso. 2016. “Modern Weddings in Uzbekistan: Ritual Change from ‘Above’ and ‘Below.’ ” Central Asian Survey 35 (1): 61–​75. Werner, Cynthia. 1998. “Household Networks and the Security of Mutual Indebtedness in Rural Kazakhstan.” Central Asian Survey 17 (4): 597–​612. –​ –​ –​ –. 2004. “Women, Marriage, and the Nation-​ State: The Rise of Nonconsensual Bride Kidnapping in Post-​Soviet Kazakhstan.” In Reconceptualizing Central Asia: States and Societies in Formation, edited by Pauline Jones Luong, 59–​89. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. –​–​–​–. 2009. “Bride Abduction in Post-​Soviet Central Asia: Marking a Shift Towards Patriarchy Through Local Discourses of Shame and Tradition.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2): 314–​331. Werner, Cynthia, Christopher Edling, Charles Becker, Elena Kim, Russell Kleinbach, Fatima Esengeldievna, and Woden Teachout. 2018. “Bride Kidnapping in Post-​Soviet Eurasia: A Roundtable Discussion.” Central Asian Survey 37 (4): 582–​601. Zakirova, Nargiz. 2005. “Tajik Women Want Polygyny Legalised.” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, February 21. https://​iwpr.net/​global-​voices/​tajik-​women-​want-​polygamy-​legalized. Zakon.kz. 2018. “Experty vyskazalis’ po voprosu pochischeniya nevest v Kazakhstane.” February 27. www.zakon.kz/​4906103-​skolko-​deneg-​mozhet-​potrebovat.html.

471

472

45 TRAFFICKED WOMEN AND MEN TO AND FROM RUSSIA Lauren A. McCarthy

When human trafficking found its way back onto the international stage in the mid-​ 1990s, it was largely due to the wave of white, highly educated, trafficked women from the Central-​East Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) region who appeared in Western Europe in the wake of the postcommunist transition. Unlike previous waves, which had been from the global South and had not drawn much attention, the resurgence of the “white slave trade” triggered particular alarm reminiscent of the first anti-​trafficking movement in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century which also focused on saving white women and girls from being sold into prostitution (Limoncelli 2010). The perceived whiteness of this wave led to their gendered portrayal as either innocent victims or complicit prostitutes. In popular culture, the media, and some international reports (e.g., Hughes 2002), trafficked women are portrayed as innocent young victims who were kidnapped or duped into sexual slavery by violent, often non-​white men who are part of organized crime groups. Any indication that they may have consented to working in the sex industry or had agency makes them complicit in their own exploitation and no longer deserving of sympathy. In addition to creating an ideal type victim that guides policy solutions, this framing has obscured the prevalence of trafficking victims who are not white, not in the sex industry, and who are often men. Solutions to the trafficking problem have been gendered in different ways. International and domestic policymakers have focused on criminalization and masculine law enforcement responses—​a security framing—​rather than the more feminine responses that focus on respecting the human rights of victims and caring for their post-​trafficking needs. From a critical feminist perspective, there has been precious little attention to ameliorating structural conditions that push people to seek work elsewhere, or make them vulnerable to exploitation within their own countries (Suchland 2015). This chapter explores how gendered and racialized framings obscure the reality of and responses to trafficking in Russia, framings that are widely shared in the CEE&E region, and indeed around the world (Andrijasevic 2007; Berman 2003; Kligman and Limoncelli 2005).

Human trafficking policy in post-​Soviet Russia Often referred to as “the Natashas”—​a gendered stereotype of beautiful Slavic women—​ many women from the postcommunist region accepted fake jobs in the 1990s and 2000s 472

473

Trafficked women and men

as nannies, waitresses, and hostesses in Europe and were forced into prostitution. Others who had migrated for greater economic opportunity after the fall of the Soviet Union, including for sex work, also ended up being exploited in the sex industry (Hughes 2002; Stoecker and Shelley 2005; Tverdova 2011). Most had been driven to look for opportunities abroad by postcommunist transition policies like privatization and liberalization, which removed social supports that enabled women’s employment, and a lack of legal protections for women, which led to discrimination in hiring and expectations of sexual availability at the workplace (Orlova 2004; Suchland 2015). Though numbers of trafficking victims are difficult to calculate—​the crime is intentionally hidden and there is no one clear victim type—​and there has been much debate over how to quantify the scale of the problem, even the most conservative numbers from Russia estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked into, within, or out of Russia in the past three decades (Global Slavery Index 2018; Tiurukanova 2006). Despite overwhelming evidence that many of the “Natashas” were Russian, the Russian government was slow to recognize it as a problem that they should deal with domestically. Their first response was, somewhat reasonably, to blame the West for the trafficking demand, but Russian authorities, playing upon xenophobic and gendered stereotypes, painted Westerners as avaricious and sex-​crazed, and then abrogated their own responsibilities (Buckley 2008; Repetskaya 1999). Closely behind in blameworthiness were the victims whom officials saw as knowing what they were getting into and wanting to make quick, easy money, assumptions that resonated with Russian norms that portray women as responsible for provoking rape or sexual harassment. Russian public opinion largely shared these views (Buckley 2009). Throughout the initial discussions of trafficking in the late 1990s, the Russian government proved entirely unwilling to recognize the ways that the postcommunist economic transformation had contributed to the problem. The only other form of trafficking that Russian officials recognized was organized crime gangs in the Caucasus who captured and sold Russian soldiers fighting in Chechnya into slavery. Relying on racial stereotypes, officials argued that slavery had a long history in the Caucasus and that Chechens, seen as a different race, were inherently a slave-​holding and slave-​trading people (McCarthy 2015). Russian women being trafficked within their own country, women trafficked into Russia, and men (foreign or Russian) trafficked into forced labor outside of Chechnya were barely recognized at all. When the Russian government finally drafted anti-​trafficking legislation in 2002–​ 2003, it was largely under a security and criminalization paradigm (Johnson 2009). The 2000 United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (note the gendered nature of the Protocol’s title), also known as the Palermo Protocol, was an optional protocol of the UN’s Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (TOC). The Palermo Protocol served as the model for anti-​trafficking legislation for all signatories, including Russia, and emphasized a criminal justice response to the problem rather than one that foregrounded victim assistance and prevention—​a human rights-​based response advocated by organizations working with trafficking victims. These approaches are often in tension with one another. The former calls for policies that focus on border control, criminalization, and prosecution, viewing victim assistance as helpful insofar as it can make them better witnesses for court cases. The latter calls for policies focused on restoring the human rights and dignity of victims, dealing with their immediate post-​trafficking needs (medical, psychological, legal, and housing assistance) and longer-​term reintegration into society regardless of their cooperation with law enforcement and participation in the prosecutions of their traffickers. 473

474

Lauren A. McCarthy

In the early 2000s, the Russian context was particularly conducive to security framing after multiple terrorist attacks throughout the country, including in Moscow. In fact, Vladimir Putin’s image as a strong, masculine leader focused on law-​and-​order and stability was deliberately cultivated to contrast him with the wild 1990s of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin (Sperling 2015). With no clear evidence, officials argued that a major reason to deal with human trafficking was because the proceeds from trafficking could provide a funding source for terrorism (Shelley 2005). A parallel official response was both security driven and gendered. The trafficking of women to the West would result in the loss of the genetic foundations (genfond) of the nation, a particularly salient problem considering the birthrate at the time was continuing to decline (McKinney 2009). Russian officials also engaged in patriarchal protectionist rhetoric—​Russia should be ashamed that it could not protect its women from being taken advantage of in this way (Shelley and Orttung 2005). These framings left out the very significant problem of labor trafficking, other than the concern about Russian soldiers in Chechnya. In 2003, after a series of conferences sponsored by the United States to discuss trafficking legislation, a draft law was produced that followed the Palermo Protocol’s suggested framework of the 3Ps, prosecution, victim protection, and prevention. The leader of these efforts on the Russian side was Elena Mizulina, a legislator whose lack of commitment to feminist issues became clear later in her ardent advocacy for limits on abortion, the ban on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors,” and the rollback of a minor reform on domestic violence. Budgetary considerations and concerns about singling out trafficking victims for protection rather than a more general crime victims bill, a rationale that had strong undertones of discrimination against people who had engaged in sex for pay, meant that this law was never signed (Buckley 2017; Johnson 2009; McCarthy 2015). Instead, two criminal offenses were added to the Criminal Code, Article 127.1 “Human Trafficking” and Article 127.2 “Use of Slave Labor.” While these gave Russian law enforcement the tools to prosecute traffickers, victim protection and prevention efforts fell to the largely feminized nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector, which received almost no government funding or support. The women’s NGO sector in Russia was strong at the time, owing to successful anti-​ domestic violence and sexual assault campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was largely foreign funded (Kay 2000; Sperling 1999). Donors encouraged women’s organizations to expand their conceptions of violence against women to include trafficking, as the issue became more central to donor organizations’ overseas missions and in 2007, as many as 149 Russian organizations claimed they were working on human trafficking in some way. The movement toward anti-​trafficking work was a comfortable fit for some Russian women’s organizations, particularly for those that were well-​resourced, but for others, it took needed funding and effort away from their other programs (Hemment 2007; Johnson 2009). It also had the effect of narrowing the policy discourse on gendered violence to focus on human trafficking and prostitution policy, stalling long-​standing movements for stronger domestic violence and sexual assault legislation. Since the late 2000s, there has been very little government attention to trafficking in Russia. Trafficking is firmly ensconced in a security paradigm and is usually only mentioned by officials in a laundry list of “modern threats and challenges” to the Russian state including drug and arms trafficking, and terrorism. Since the criminalization of trafficking in 2003, Russian law enforcement has used the laws to prosecute 75–​100 cases a year. They prosecute additional trafficking crimes under other statutes that make

474

475

Trafficked women and men

up component parts of the crime like kidnapping, illegal deprivation of freedom, and recruitment into prostitution, a common practice around the world (McCarthy 2015). Aside from an amendment to clarify the wording of the law in 2008, there has been little to no parliamentary discussion or debate on trafficking. In addition, the once burgeoning anti-​trafficking NGO sector has been nearly decimated after the state’s crackdown on foreign funding in 2012. This included the 2010 closure of a shelter located in Moscow sponsored by the International Organization for Migration, one of the only places in Russia dedicated solely to assisting trafficking victims, both women and men.

The reality of human trafficking in Russia The framing of trafficking in these racialized and gendered ways in Russia has limited the visibility of other forms of trafficking to policymakers, law enforcement, and the general public. Based on my own data collected from 2003 to 2013, there are three predominant forms of human trafficking in Russia: sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and the trafficking of children, usually infants, for illegal adoption (McCarthy 2015). Each of these forms of trafficking are gendered in the eyes of policymakers and the public: sex trafficking is always female, labor trafficking is primarily male. When babies are trafficked, male infants generally are sold for more money than female ones. Trafficking occurs into Russia, out of Russia, and domestically, from towns to cities and sometimes within towns. In each of these categories there is a variety of forms of recruitment, movement, and exploitation making it difficult to describe a “typical” trafficking case in Russia. While the stereotypical vision of trafficking in Russia tends to focus on young, innocent women duped and forced into prostitution abroad by organized crime gangs, the more prevalent form of sex trafficking in Russia today is domestic, with labor trafficking only slightly less common. Sex trafficking of Russian women to countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East has continued in much the same form as in the 1990s. Women are recruited to work abroad, sometimes with explicit knowledge that they will be doing sex work, other times under fraudulent recruitment schemes. Once they arrive they are forced to work in worse conditions than they were originally promised, with little ability to leave the situation. There are also numerous domestic sex trafficking cases in which women are trafficked from towns to regional capitals or to the metropolises, Moscow and St. Petersburg. There are fewer situations of women being trafficked into Russia from abroad, but they do occur, with victims coming mostly from other post-​Soviet countries (Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan). Labor trafficking occurs in industries that are less well regulated and therefore more likely to rely on informal employment practices and where the place of work is often isolated. Labor trafficking cases in Russia can be found in a range of industries, in order of prevalence: agriculture, factory work, construction, domestic labor, forestry, automotive work, begging, salvage/​trash, and fishing. Victims in these industries are usually, but not always, men. Women have also been trafficked for domestic labor and factory work, sometimes alongside groups of men to cook and clean for them. Most victims of labor trafficking endure similar conditions. They work excessively long hours with little to no time off, live in poor conditions, are not fed regularly, and are not paid for their labor (McCarthy 2015). There are two primary groups of male labor trafficking victims, ethnic Russians who have fallen on hard times, and foreign migrant workers. Each is vulnerable in a different

475

476

Lauren A. McCarthy

way. Ethnically Russian men who are trafficked are most often homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts or of a similarly marginalized status, many without identity documents, places to live, or family to turn to. Foreign migrant workers are made vulnerable because of their willingness to accept jobs in the informal labor market—​most are economic migrants, seeing Russia as a place where they can find temporary work to send remittances home—​and their often precarious migration status in Russia. They are primarily from neighboring countries (Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova) and occasionally Asia (e.g., Vietnam, China). The forms of subordination in both labor and sex trafficking cases are similar: physical violence, threats, debt bondage, confiscation of identity documents, and isolation. Physical violence can be brutal, including rape and beatings in cases of sex trafficking, and severe beatings and food and water rationing in cases of labor trafficking. Traffickers also threaten to sell the victims elsewhere, threaten their families’ well-​being, or to take some sort of legal action against them. This last strategy is particularly effective against migrants who may be deported if their traffickers call migration authorities. Isolation, either in apartments or in workplaces that are far from neighbors, like farms and factories, can also be a way to deter victims from trying to leave the situation. But by far, the most effective strategy is debt bondage. Victims are expected to work off the high, often inflated, debts that they have racked up in the process of getting to their destination. This has the perverse effect of making them work harder so that they can pay off their debts more quickly. Though some victims do exit trafficking situations by working off their debts, most remain caught in the cycle, amassing additional debt through ever-​increasing fines that are assessed by their traffickers, mostly for invented infractions. Traffickers are also strategic in their recruitment, tending to focus on disadvantaged people who are less likely to have a support network of family and friends, or who are already estranged from their family and society. These victims are less likely to be reported missing or if they are, to have the authorities believe that something bad happened, instead assuming they ran away or disappeared into a drug or alcohol binge. For example, in domestic sex trafficking cases, recruiters have largely focused on young women, often minors, coming from abusive homes or who had already run away, who were poor, or who had aged out of state orphanage facilities at 18 lacking basic life skills. In labor trafficking situations, the focus is usually on disadvantaged ethnic Russians or migrants, mostly men. The final form of trafficking that occurs in Russia is for illegal adoption (McCarthy 2016). Some of these traffickers operate in organized rings selling newborn babies to childless couples in Russia who are unwilling to go through official adoption channels. These rings usually include at least one person who works at a hospital and can convince women to give up their babies, most of whom do so willingly. The other form of child trafficking is parents (usually women) who attempt to sell their children out of economic desperation. In these cases, husbands/​partners are usually missing or absent, and the mothers cannot make ends meet because they are homeless, unemployed, addicts, or have other economic difficulties that make it difficult to bring a child, or another child, into the family. This is a further example of the ways in which ongoing gender expectations—​ that women, but not men, should be caring and nurturing—​has contributed to the way trafficking unfolds and is perceived in Russia (McCarthy 2019). Rather than recognizing the root causes of the child trafficking problem as the precarious nature of life caused by the legacies of the post Soviet transition, women who give up their children

476

477

Trafficked women and men

to trafficking rings at hospitals, or those who attempt to sell their children on the black market, are vilified and harshly prosecuted. Who are trafficking perpetrators in Russia? Again, the stereotype does not line up with the reality. Trafficking is often portrayed as a highly organized crime in which gangs, usually of non-​white men, engage in forcing women into prostitution for high profits (Buckley 2017). Data from traffickers who have been arrested, charged and prosecuted shows the reality on the ground is much different (McCarthy 2015). For one, a significant proportion of traffickers in Russia are women. From 2003 to 2013, women had some involvement as perpetrators in half of the cases that were charged as trafficking, taking on roles from low-​level recruiters to entrepreneurs running entire trafficking operations (McCarthy 2019). Most of these were sex and child trafficking cases but women traffickers were also involved in a variety of labor trafficking cases. Second, while there are international trafficking rings that operate at a higher level of organization, trafficking in Russia most often presents itself as a “disorganized crime” with multiple links in a chain, rather than a hierarchical structure with one person at the top. Traffickers may be involved casually, participating only once, or may be more regular contributors to a trafficking operation. With domestic trafficking, most are small, locally based groups of friends or relatives, sometimes involved in other local crime, sometimes not.

International and regional comparisons Russia is structurally distinct in the Eurasia region because, even with the economic downturn starting in 2008, it continues to be a magnet for migration from countries that are in worse economic shape (Ukraine, Moldova, and Central Asia, excluding Kazakhstan which has its own oil wealth and generally low unemployment). Most of the other countries in the CEE&E region are primarily identified as origin countries for trafficking victims, though a few also serve as destination countries for sex and labor trafficking in a variety of forms (US Department of State 2020). Trafficking is quite context specific with each country in the region having its own push/​pull factors impacting who becomes a victim, in what industries, and through what methods. However, there are some commonalities across the region that stem from the communist legacy and immediate postcommunist policy decisions, particularly as they relate to gender disparities. These include the prevalence of gendered norms surrounding housework and childcare, a gendered distribution of labor that privileges men for highly compensated, professional work, policies that continue to enable workplace discrimination and sexual harassment, and increasingly restrictive migration policies around the world affecting the possibilities for economic migration, for both women and men (Suchland 2015). In terms of policy responses to trafficking, Russia has done far less, both de jure and de facto, than the rest of the region. Despite its regional leadership position, it remains one of the few countries in the region that has made no efforts to legislate, develop, or fund assistance measures for victims. Prevention measures have been left entirely to the nongovernment sector, which is increasingly unable to fund them (Dean 2020). In contrast, CEE countries that have joined the European Union are subject to additional obligations to combat trafficking, as are members of the Council of Europe. All Council of Europe countries except Russia have now signed and ratified the Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, which creates minimum standards for protection, prevention, and prosecution and also includes regular monitoring and

477

478

Lauren A. McCarthy

recommendations. As a result, most of these countries now have robust anti-​trafficking policies, though, as elsewhere around the world, they struggle to implement them fully. For example, prosecutions are still rare and difficult to undertake, victims are often misidentified or treated as criminals, and funding for shelters and other protection measures is often incomplete. Though many receive immediate post-​trafficking assistance, victims throughout the region continue to struggle with long-​term reintegration and rehabilitation whether in their destination country or their country of origin (McCarthy 2018).

Conclusions Human trafficking in Russia takes a variety of forms and affects men, women, and children as victims in both domestic and international cases. The supply-​side problem stems from a host of structural and economic inequalities in the region, including gendered disparities in opportunities for work, gender discrimination, and the precarious nature of migration to and from Russia. The roots of these inequalities can be traced to decisions that were made in the immediate postcommunist period and are frequently the long-​term consequence of the various kinds of structural and physical dislocations faced by the region’s residents, both men and women. While most other countries in the region have taken concrete steps, the Russian government has only paid lip service to the problem of trafficking and the issue has also largely faded from public view. Though the law criminalizes the acts of human trafficking and slave labor and is used fairly effectively, there are neither policies nor funding to support victims who have exited trafficking situations, and nothing to address the root causes of the problem. Overall, despite its position as a regional leader on many other issues, Russia lags significantly behind its peers in almost all aspects of dealing with its human trafficking problem, despite significant evidence to suggest that it is a destination, transit, and origin point for large numbers of victims. More broadly, this chapter demonstrates the ways that discussion and debates around human trafficking are gendered and racialized. These gendered and racialized expectations of who is a victim—​young, innocent, white women exploited for sex—​leave out many other victims of exploitation, like men, who are subject to similar economic pressures and vulnerabilities, but are often viewed as inherently less exploitable and therefore more culpable in their own exploitation. Gender also appears when Russian law enforcement applies the law to trafficking crimes—​males are never categorized as sex trafficking victims and females are rarely characterized as labor trafficking victims. Policy solutions on human trafficking are also gendered. The security framework is paradigmatically male, focused on breaking up organized crime groups and using the masculine power of the state’s security services to catch criminals, whereas the human rights framework is paradigmatically female, focused on the care work that must be done to restore victims’ physical and emotional health. In Russia, the debates over human trafficking policy were also suffused with paternalism and race—​how could they protect “their” (ethnic Russian) women from exploitation by the West, how could they protect “their” (ethnic Russian) men from exploitation by Chechens. Ultimately, theorizing and effectively responding to the problem of human trafficking requires seeing through the gendered and racialized framings used by states, international organizations, and the media while simultaneously recognizing how gender and race operate in the lived experience of men, women, and children who are trafficked. 478

479

Trafficked women and men

References Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 2007. “Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti-​trafficking Campaigns.” Feminist Review 86: 24–​44. Berman, Jacqueline. 2003. “(Un)popular Strangers and Crises (Un)bounded: Discourses of Sex Trafficking, the European Political Community, and the Panicked State of the Modern State.” European Journal of International Relations 9 (1): 37–​86. Buckley, Mary. 2008. “Human Trafficking from Russia: Political Responses and Public Opinion.” St. Antony’s International Review 4 (1): 115–​134. –​–​–​–​. 2009. “Public Opinion in Russia on the Politics of Human Trafficking.” Europe-​Asia Studies 61 (2): 213–​248. –​–​–​–​. 2017. The Politics of Unfree Labour in Russia: Human Trafficking and Labour Migration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dean, Laura A. 2020. Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia. Bristol: The Policy Press. Global Slavery Index. 2018. “Russia.” www.globalslaveryindex.org/​2018/​findings/​country-​studies/​ russia/​. Hemment, Julie. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGOs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hughes, Donna. 2002. Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation: The Case of the Russian Federation. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Johnson, Janet Elise. 2009. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kay, Rebecca. 2000. Russian Women and their Organizations: Gender, Discrimination, and Grassroots Women’s Organizations, 1991–​96. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kligman, Gail and Stephanie Limoncelli. 2005. “Trafficking Women after Socialism: To, Through and From Eastern Europe.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12 (1): 118–​140. Limoncelli, Stephanie. 2010. The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. McCarthy, Lauren A. 2015. Trafficking Justice: How Russian Police Enforce New Laws, from Crime to Courtroom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2016. “Transaction Costs: Prosecuting Child Trafficking for Illegal Adoption in Russia.” Anti-​Trafficking Review 1 (6): 31–​47. –​–​–​–​. 2018. “Life after Trafficking in Azerbaijan: Reintegration Experiences of Survivors.” Anti-​ Trafficking Review 1 (10): 105–​122. –​–​–​–​. 2019. “A Gendered Perspective on Human Trafficking Perpetrators: Evidence from Russia.” Journal of Human Trafficking 1: 1–​16. McKinney, Judith. 2009. “Russian Babies, Russian Babes: Economic and Demographic Implications of International Adoption and International Trafficking for Russia.” Demokratizatsiya 17 (1): 19–​39. Orlova, Alexandra V. 2004. “From Social Dislocation to Human Trafficking: The Russian Case.” Problems of Post-​Communism 51 (6): 14–​22. Repetskaya, Anna. 1999. “The Trafficking of Russian Women and Children.” Organized Crime Watch 1 (2): 4–​5. Shelley, Louise. 2005. “Russia’s Law against Trade in People: A Response to International Pressure and Domestic Coalitions.” In Public Policy and Law in Russia: In Search of a Unified Legal and Political Space, edited by Robert Sharlet and Ferdinand Feldbrugge, 291–​ 305. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. Shelley, Louise and Robert W. Orttung. 2005. “Russia’s Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking.” In Ruling Russia: Law, Crime and Justice in a Changing Society, edited by William Alex. Pridemore, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sperling, Valerie. 1999. Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2015. Sex, Politics and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. Stoecker, Sally and Louise Shelley, eds. 2005. Human Traffic and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and American Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

479

480

Lauren A. McCarthy Suchland, Jennifer. 2015. Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tiurukanova, Elena. 2006. Human Trafficking in the Russian Federation: Inventory and Analysis of the Current Situation and Responses. Moscow: UNICEF. Tverdova, Yuliya. 2011. “Human Trafficking in Russia and Other Post-​Soviet States.” Human Rights Review 12 (3): 329–​344. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. 2020. Trafficking in Persons Report, 20th Edition. Washington, DC: US Department of State Publication.

480

481

Reproductive rights

482

483

46 ASSISTED REPRODUCTION Poland in a comparative perspective Elżbieta Korolczuk

Nine years after the first baby was born by in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1978, the first successful assisted reproduction technique (ART) procedure took place in Poland. Since then, we have witnessed a continuing expansion of assisted reproduction in Europe in terms of the number of treatments and their effectiveness, which translates into a rising contribution of ARTs to birth rates (De Geyter et al. 2018; Lie and Lykke 2016). In recent years, there has also been rapid development of the biomedical industry offering IVF, ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), gamete donation and PGD (pre-​implantation genetic diagnostics), and many countries of Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E) offer a full range of high quality procedures. This chapter maps out the legislation, practices, and debates on reproductive technologies in postcommunist countries, with a specific focus on Poland. Employing a comparative perspective makes it possible to demonstrate how local trends, including the legacy of state socialism, the sociocultural and political changes brought about by the transformation (e.g., privatization of healthcare, the rise of gendered nationalism, and neo-​patriarchal trends), converge with global tendencies, such as “medical tourism” and intersectional debates on access to assisted reproduction. As observed by Knecht, Klotz, and Beck (2012, 13), today “a multi-​local configuration has emerged from the multitude of practices that are generating, transferring, acquiring, imagining, and regulating reproductive technologies across and beyond regional and national borders.” Examination of the field of assisted reproduction not only broadens our knowledge concerning specific policy issues, discourses, and practices. It also shows how biomedicine became a space where power relations are renegotiated and imaginaries, ideals and norms regarding family, gender and citizenship are reconstructed. Poland and other postcommunist countries do not represent a uniform policy pattern and cannot be distinguished from western countries simply by a specific set of laws or practices. Rather, they present an assemblage of national, regional, and global trends that yields contradictory effects in different contexts. Existing research demonstrates that there are some trends specific to the region, which include the emergence of a trans-​European market of infertility care, with CEE genetic material and bodies becoming “biodesirable” for western clients. National debates on ARTs in the region are often focused on the

483

484

Elżbieta Korolczuk

issue of “deservedness,” which is routinely framed in terms of class, race, ethnicity, or sexuality, linking ethnonationalist views on biomedicine as holding a promise of revival for the nation, and religious opposition to assisted reproduction as a continuation of abortion debates. The differences between the western and eastern part of Europe result from a combination of historic legacies, national discourses on gender and sexuality, legislative processes, and differences in the prices of private healthcare. Moreover, the shape of discourses and practices change considerably with political shifts, deepening the fragmentation of Europe as a space where divergent values and practices intersect and interact.

Assisted reproduction in postcommunist countries: Between global trends and local specificities Comparison of the usage of assisted conception methods in different countries in Europe shows that affluent western European countries do not dominate the picture. Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Estonia are listed among the top 10 countries and “when we look at the bottom of the distribution, it is apparent that ART is no more widespread in Germany, Austria, or Ireland than it is in Ukraine or in Albania” (Präg and Mills 2017, 292). Präg and Mills (2017) confirm that the differences in ART usage across countries depend on a number of factors such as specific regulations, affordability, the number of fertility clinics in a country, as well as cultural norms and beliefs that are widespread in a given context. As of 2015, in all European countries, including postcommunist ones, access to ARTs was regulated under the law, sometimes with additional national guidelines, and in all countries, except for Belarus, some basic costs were covered within national health plans (Präg and Mills 2017). Also, when it comes to the availability of specific procedures, such as gamete donation or couple and sexuality requirements for ART, for quite a long time there were no clear patterns of difference between eastern and western parts of Europe. For example, as of 2013, single women and lesbians had no access to ARTs in Croatia and Czech Republic as well as in Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, but they did in Bulgaria and Latvia (Ory et al. 2014) and in some private facilities also in Poland. Similarly, as of 2019, surrogacy was available in Spain and Ukraine, but illegal in France, Germany, and Poland. An intersectional perspective helps to analyze the ways in which class, race, and sexuality shape the deservedness and desirability of specific groups of people in relation to biomedical interventions. Due to high quality procedures, lower prices, and the lack of legal prohibitions concerning gamete donation, and in some cases also surrogacy, countries such as the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Georgia have become popular destinations for cross-​border treatments (Bergmann 2012; Gunnarsson Payne 2015; Vlasenko 2015). Among patients living in affluent EU countries, CEE countries have been preferred partly because of geographical proximity, but also due to desirable ethnic and cultural features associated with the region. Jenny Gunnarsson Payne shows that many Scandinavian prospective recipients travel to CEE “hoping to find a donor that is ‘a close match’ to their own phenotype—​a ‘Scandinavian’, or ‘European’ looking donor” (2015, 5; Bergmann 2012). Scandinavian patients perceive some countries such as Latvia or Estonia as more developed, closer to the West, so they expect higher quality of healthcare and better safety standards. Thus, Gunnarsson Payne argues that the

484

485

Assisted reproduction in Poland

so-​called transition to democracy “has constituted crucial conditions of emergence for the trans-​European market of infertility care, which not only results in new modalities of reproductive mobility but also articulates a new set of ‘new reproductive subjectivities’ ” (2015, 10). Choice has been constituted as the central element of these subjectivities, both for western patients navigating the private healthcare market of reproductive medicine, and the imagined eastern egg donors who are supposedly more “free to choose” than their Indian counterparts, and as “choosing subjects” more “biodesirable” to clients (Gunnarsson Payne 2015). Bergmann (2012) argues that class and ethnicity matter also in the recruitment procedures for egg donors in the Czech clinics. This trend is reflected in the preference for “white” women from the rural regions of the country. As a result, “potential donors are excluded through racism (antiziganizm) [also called anti-​Roma sentiments and discrimination], classism (exclusion of ‘dangerous’ urban populations), and nationalism (exclusion of migrants)” (Bergmann 2012, 348). Roma women, poor urban dwellers, and immigrants are seen as undesirable donors due to the fact that their ethnicity or economic marginalization—​associated with alcoholism and drug abuse—​are seen as potential risk factors, as features that may be transferable to children. Despite the wider availability of, and the growing demand for, assisted conception techniques, politicians, religious authorities, experts, as well as feminists and patients’ movements still raise objections to biotechnological interventions in the sphere of procreation (Lie and Lykke 2016). Scholars who examine these objections show that the issues at stake include not only dropping fertility rates, new forms of family and women’s rights, but also the relation between science, religious authorities, and the state, as well as new modes of citizenship and political subjecthood (Korolczuk 2017; Marchesi 2012). In Western Europe opposition to ARTs is often voiced by the feminist movement fearing increasing medicalization of the woman’s body and commercialization of reproduction, especially in cross-​border arrangements. In contrast, postcommunist resistance to reproductive technologies is embedded mostly in ethnonationalist and religious views regarding kinship and human sexuality. Simultaneously, in many postcommunist countries, there is a push for wider availability of ARTs and for state coverage of costly procedures. These trends come from patients’ organizations as well as private companies seeking to expand the market, but in some cases also from the state seeking ways to increase birthrates and from the women’s movement framing ARTs as part of an egalitarian system of reproductive healthcare (Dimitrova 2017; Gunnarsson-​ Payne and Korolczuk 2016; Knoll 2012). Burgeoning in Western Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist critiques of assisted reproduction focusing mostly on women’s autonomy and reproductive justice did not travel east. Such critiques have focused mostly on the commodification and medicalization of women’s bodies, highlighting the unequal power relations between patients and the medical establishment, and the ways in which compulsory motherhood fueled the demand for biotechnological progress (Donchin 1996). Feminist views on the issue in western countries became more nuanced and complex over time, problematizing the question of choice and growing commercialization of health services and exploitation of women from poorer countries (Gunnarsson Payne, Korolczuk, and Mezinska 2020; Strathern 1992). The women’s movement in the eastern bloc, however, hardly voiced such critiques at all before the fall of the Berlin wall, and continue to marginalize them today. For example, Kulawik (2019) shows that in the debates on both stem cells and in vitro fertilization, the Polish women’s movement did not openly challenge the medicalization

485

486

Elżbieta Korolczuk

of reproduction by the healthcare system and pharmaceutical industry. Similarly, comparison of the claims of patients’ organizations in Poland and Sweden show significant differences in the ways in which the rights of the LGBTQ community are (not) articulated in debates on access to ARTs (Gunnarsson Payne and Korolczuk 2016). Representatives of the Swedish organization Barnlängtan cooperate with national LGBTQ organizations and focus on securing equal access for all involuntarily childless people, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or whether or not they are married. In contrast, the Polish association Nasz Bocian (Our Stork) tends to frame the question of equality mostly in terms of economic disparities between heterosexual couples, and downplays the problem of social infertility affecting gay people. This marginalization is related to the strength of nationalist discourses in some Central and East European countries, where the need to defend the nation’s sovereignty and “traditional” values clashes with LGBTQ rights, seen as foreign and western (e.g., Mole 2016). These trends require further research and each country’s context merits a more detailed analysis. However, the lack of feminist critiques of biotechnological developments in the sphere of reproduction and the relative weakness of LGBTQ voices on this issue in public debates in postcommunist countries reflect broader tendencies that are specific to the ways in which the politics of reproduction and sexuality developed in the region. In the early 1990s, the issue of reproduction became an important part of the process of reconstitution and legitimization of political authority in postcommunist countries, although at the time the main point of controversy was abortion. The discursive and political effects of heated debates around the termination of pregnancy may be interpreted as a key aspect of the process of reshaping political order in the eastern bloc (Gal and Kligman 2000, 15; see also Fuszara 2002; Mishtal 2015). Even though the region is far from homogenous, there are important similarities regarding the configuration of cultural and sociopolitical factors, including the ideals of citizenship, the history of the women’s movements, the revival of nationalist ideologies and embracement of neoliberalism in the post-​1990s. All of these trends have shaped the ideals and practices of reproductive citizenship in the region. In many countries, the tensions and anxieties resulting from the process of transformation have been projected onto the realm of gender, although the effects differ considerably, depending on the strength of nationalist discourses, the ethnic composition of society, and the political importance of the Catholic or Orthodox Church, respectively. Whereas in Poland the process of democratization resulted in severe limitations in access to abortion, in countries where the right to abortion was restricted under state socialism, transformation brought about liberalization (as in Bulgaria and Romania). A similar tendency can be observed in the case of IVF: in many postcommunist countries the governments perceive assisted reproduction as a technique that can help reverse the declining fertility rates, thus the use of these technologies does not raise major controversies, as long as they are used by heterosexual couples. In Bulgaria and Hungary, the state combines traditional pronatalist measures such as tax incentives for families, or family–​work reconciliation policies, with support for the use of assisted reproduction technologies. The potential of assisted techniques to increase birth rates substantially in the short run has not been confirmed by research but in contexts with extremely low fertility rates and considerable ethnic minority populations, conservative politicians turn to ARTs as appropriate measures in pro-​natalist projects. In Bulgaria, assisted reproduction was integrated into the plans for national revival, supported by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Modern biomedicine became an important tool in counteracting the prospect of “ethnic Bulgarians” becoming outnumbered by 486

487

Assisted reproduction in Poland

ethnic Turks and Roma (Dimitrova 2017). In debates on ARTs, the proponents of medical intervention in the sphere of reproduction gained public support by successfully combining the nationalist discourse with the vision of technological progress: a strategy that Dimitrova (2017) terms “reactionary techno-​progressivism.” In contrast to the Roma minority, seen as “irresponsible reproducers,” involuntarily childless ethnic Bulgarians are supported by the state as worthy citizens. What matters is ethnicity, class, and education level. Similar tendencies can be observed in Hungary, where the threat of a “demographic winter” is combined with nationalist discourse and post-​imperial nostalgia. The combination of these factors led to the inclusion of “Hungarians living abroad” among the recipients of state-​covered health services already in the first decade of the 21st century (Knoll 2012, 270). The country’s birth rate continued to fall, thus in January 2020 the Hungarian state decided to take over six privately funded fertility clinics. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that the clinics would provide free-​of-​charge services to all infertile couples in the country (Crowcroft 2019). While the conditions for accessing these services remain unclear, the case of Hungary demonstrates a broader trend. Right-​wing politicians readily employ reproductive technologies as a tool to reproduce an “ethnically pure” nation and to increase the population, without increasing immigration. Orbán explained this logic during a press conference: “If we want Hungarian children instead of immigrants, and if the Hungarian economy can generate the necessary funding, then the only solution is to spend as much of the funds as possible on supporting families and raising children” (Crowcroft 2019). In contrast to western countries, such as Germany, where political leaders view immigration as the answer to falling birth rates, in the postcommunist context many politicians see immigrants as a threat, rather than a solution. In some countries the exclusionary logic of ethnonationalism goes hand in hand with the neoliberal logic of the free market. This trend can be observed in Latvia, Ukraine, and Georgia, where private clinics have targeted wealthy patients and which have become important destinations for reproductive travelers from the West (Siegl 2018; Vlasenko 2015). Cross-​border reproductive care allows patients to circumvent the legal and regulatory frameworks in their home countries (egg donation is prohibited in Germany and Italy, and most European countries ban gestational surrogacy), but it lends itself easily to the exploitation of women from poorer countries. Cross-​border reproductive care often reinforces the economic division between the “West” and “East” of Europe and racial division between “North” and “South.” CEE countries are seen as spaces where white and blue-​eyed Europeans can find gametes and surrogate mothers matching their own ethnic legacy, and the clinics respond to these demands by employing different inclusion/​ exclusion strategies (Gunnarsson-​Payne 2015).

Opposition to ARTs in Poland: The synergy between nationalism and neoliberalism The case of Poland shows how trends such as the rise of nationalism, neo-​patriarchal trends, and the continuous dominance of voices of conservative religious authorities in public debates (Korolczuk and Graff 2018) overlap with the development of the market-​ oriented approach to healthcare. Until 2015, the field of biomedicine in Poland was not regulated by law, and all patients have had to pay privately for infertility treatments. In 2013, the Ministry of Health implemented a program of IVF reimbursement to boost fertility rates in Poland and ensure the safety of patients and embryos, and in 2015, the 487

488

Elżbieta Korolczuk

Polish parliament finally passed a bill stipulating the conditions for the use of assisted reproduction techniques (Just 2016). The new regulations allow for IVF and ICSI for heterosexual couples in all cases that are medically justified, as well as for the anonymous donation of gametes and embryos. The state introduced a ban on experimenting on, and selling, gametes and embryos, as well as destroying embryos that are fit for further development, and severely limited access to IVF for single women and non-​heterosexual couples. The bill was vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church and conservative organizations, and when the conservative Law and Justice party came to power later in 2015, the funds for the reimbursement program were cut (Korolczuk 2017; Radkowska-​ Walkowicz 2012). The ruling party continued to oppose medical interventions in the sphere of reproduction, but it did not attempt to revoke or change the 2015 bill, mostly because the vast majority of the Polish population, including Catholics, accept this method of treatment. As a result, today access to reproductive medicine is limited to middle-​class heterosexual couples who can afford the costly procedures and fit the heterosexist ideal of the family, whereas single women and lesbians who started the procedure prior to the legislative change lost not only their chance to have a child but also access to their own gametes already stored in cryogenic tanks. Since 2012, the political debate on assisted reproduction has been extremely heated. Liberal politicians and the feminist movement framed their arguments mostly in terms of patients’ rights to healthcare and women’s rights to choice in the sphere of reproduction, but the Church representatives stressed that the protection of life starting at the moment of conception is non-​disputable, thus Polish parliament has no right even to debate this issue (Korolczuk 2017). In a 2013 sermon, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, known for having been a long-​time and influential aide to the late Pope John Paul II, said that the Catholic Church respects democracy but “the truth cannot be established by voting” (Wirtualna Polska 2013). In short, the representatives of the Church opposed not only biomedical intervention in the process of reproduction, but also the very idea that the availability of such procedures should be determined by the parliament through the process of democratic deliberation. In the debate on new legislation, representatives of the Catholic Church and conservative politicians who compared IVF to “murder” and “sophisticated abortion,” claimed that assisted conception is immoral and leads to the slaughter of “children at the embryonic stage” stored in cryonic tanks. They also denigrated the social and biological value of people experiencing infertility and the children born through such procedures. Some bishops and Catholic priests went on record comparing children born through ARTs to Frankenstein’s creation, spreading opinions that these children are prone to physical and psychological dysfunctions, and that they suffer from a so-​called “survivor syndrome” because their “brothers and sisters” did not have a chance to develop or were disposed of in the form of surplus embryos (Korolczuk 2017; Radkowska-​Walkowicz 2012). The tendency to create a specific category of “IVF children” and discriminate against this group appears specific to Poland, and it can be explained by the ways in which nationalistic discourse in the country has developed in an ethnically and religiously homogenous country. The otherness of such children is constructed as a threat to the nation: they are supposedly genetically different and this difference can be passed on to next generations, which will result in “polluting” the healthy body of the nation (Korolczuk 2017). Just like the children of migrants in Italy emerge in right-​wing populist discourse as a threat to the nation because of their racial and ethnic characteristics (Marchesi 2012), children 488

489

Assisted reproduction in Poland

born due to medical interventions in Poland are seen as agents weakening the body of the imagined community, endangering its wellbeing and survival. The imagery evoking “pollution” and the alleged intergenerational stigma that such children carry show that the debates around assisted reproduction draw upon older patterns of discrimination and exclusion, such as antisemitism. Antisemitism, understood as a deep structure of affects based on suspicion, fear and hatred (e.g., Graff 2010), is reflected in certain analogies between the rhetoric of anti-​IVF campaigners and the antisemitic discourse promulgated by the extreme right, both of which have links to the Polish Catholic Church (Korolczuk 2017). Comparable to “the Jew” in antisemitic propaganda, the “IVF child” appears strikingly different from “genuine Poles,” marked by a range of chronic diseases, which make her monstrous and repulsive. The Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik described the type of genetic abnormalities that supposedly result from IVF as causing severe disability, for example, “frequent drooling and motion of the tongue, increased chewing movements, and with time, ataxic movements and/​or trembling of the limbs” (Radkowska-​Walkowicz 2012, 33). Such children are perceived as dangerous because they embody the genetic Other, and comparably to Jews, they are demonized and targeted as a part of conspiracy, which aims to corrupt the Catholic nation from inside. The analysis of the Polish debate on IVF shows that at the heart of contemporary controversies around ARTs are not just religious discourses, but also the ways in which they merge with nationalistic imagery and ideals of citizenship (Korolczuk 2017). In Hungary, ethnonationalism prompted the ruling party to offer wide access to IVF for Hungarian nationals, but in Poland similar views encouraged politicians to impose restrictions: the political power of the Catholic Church and the lack of internal Others resulted in vehement opposition to IVF. In the end, assisted reproduction technologies are available in both countries, but while in Hungary the state funds ARTs as a tool to fight depopulation, in Poland only wealthy heterosexual couples seem to deserve access to assisted reproduction.

Conclusions The classification of countries according to their permissive, intermediate, or restrictive regulations, which is often used for a national comparative analysis of policy patterns (Engeli and Rothmayr Allison 2014), does not show a clear division between the postcommunist region and the West. There are, however, some discernible trends characteristic to postcommunist countries, which include the tendency to politicize ARTs in public debates, mostly in the context of population policies: either as a threat to the nation or a tool to save it from decline. Importantly, politicization of assisted reproduction does not determine availability of biomedicine in any given country. Rather, it shapes the hegemonic imaginaries regarding ARTs and dictates who will be supported by the state and who will need to seek private care abroad. Due to the sustained strength of ethnonationalist discourses on gender and family, often combined with the power of religious institutions, in some countries such as Poland assisted reproduction is available but remains highly controversial, thus access to biomedicine is strictly limited. Only those who can afford costly procedures in the country or a trip to Ukraine or the US have a chance to fulfill their reproductive desires. In postcommunist countries it is perhaps more visible than in most western contexts how the logic of the free market intersects with nationalistic sentiments and demographic panics, producing an environment conducive to the 489

490

Elżbieta Korolczuk

“stratification of reproduction” (Colen 1995), which deems some groups as deserving of state assistance while excluding others from reproduction. Advances in biomedicine, along with increased reproductive mobility, are giving rise to new divisions in contemporary Europe: while some postcommunist countries have open doors for wealthy (western) patients seeking reproductive services, there are also governments which seek ways to limit access to reproductive medicine, even for their own citizens, or promote ARTs as an alternative to immigration. These differences reflect a more general trend toward fragmentation of Europe and the clash of divergent values and practices within the European Union. Exclusionary politics of assisted reproduction signal a desire and readiness to oppose equality, pluralism, and solidarity in other areas of social and political life, whereas the most effective uniting power appears to be the power of the market.

References Bergmann, Sven. 2012. “Resemblance that Matters: On Transnational Anonymized Egg Donation in Two European IVF Clinics.” In Reproductive Technologies as Global Form. Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters, edited by Michi Knecht, Maren Klotz, and Stefan Beck, 331–​356. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Colen, Shellee. 1995. “‘Like A Mother To Them:’ Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York.” In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 78–​99. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crowcroft, Orlando. 2019. “Hungary Makes Fertility Treatment ‘Free’ in Bid to Boost Birthrate.” Euronews, December 23. www.euronews.com/​2019/​12/​23/​hungary-​takes-fertilityclinics-​under-​state-​control-​in-​bid-​to-​boost-​falling-​birthrate. De Geyter, Christian, C. Calhaz-​Jorge, M.S. Kupka, C. Wyns, E. Mocanu, T. Motrenko, G. Scaravelli, J. Smeenk, S. Vidakovic, and V. Goossens. 2018. “The European IVF-​monitoring Consortium (EIM) for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). ART in Europe 2014.” Human Reproduction 33 (9): 1586–​1601. Dimitrova, Ina. 2017. “(Un)Deserving Parents: Constructing Parenthood and Nation in Bulgaria through New Reproductive Technologies.” In Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-​Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Katalin Fábián and Elżbieta Korolczuk, 91–​112. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Donchin, Anne. 1996. “Feminist Critiques of New Fertility Technologies: Implications for Social Policy.” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 21 (5): 475–​498. Engeli, Isabelle and Christine Rothmayr Allison, eds. 2014. Comparative Policy Studies: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. ECPR Research Methods. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fuszara, Małgorzata, ed. 2002. Kobiety w Polsce na przełomie wieków. Nowy kontrakt płci? [Women in Poland at the Turn of the Century]. Warsaw: Trio. Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman, eds. 2000. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Graff, Agnieszka. 2010. “Looking at Pictures of Gay Men: Political Uses of Homophobia in Contemporary Poland.” Public Culture 22 (3): 583–​603. Gunnarsson Payne, Jenny. 2015. “Reproduction in Transition: Cross-​ border Egg Donation, Biodesirability and New Reproductive Subjectivities on the European Fertility Market.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 22 (1): 107–​122. Gunnarsson Payne, Jenny and Elżbieta Korolczuk. 2016. “Reproducing Politics: The Politicization of Patient Identities and Assisted Reproduction in Poland and Sweden.” Sociology of Health and Illness 38 (7): 1–​18. Gunnarsson Payne, Jenny, Elżbieta Korolczuk, and Signe Mezinska. 2020. “Surrogacy Relationships: A Critical Interpretative Review.” Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences 125 (2): 183–​191.

490

491

Assisted reproduction in Poland Just, Edyta. 2016. “Desiring Bodies: Problematizing the Matter of ARTs in Poland.” In Assisted Reproduction Across Borders: Feminist Perspectives on Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions, edited by Merete Lie and Nina Lykke, 164–​175. New York and London: Routledge. Knecht, Michi, Maren Klotz, and Stefan Beck, eds. 2012. Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Knoll, Eva Maria. 2012. “Reproducing Hungarians: Reflections on Fuzzy Boundaries in Reproductive Border Crossing.” In Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters, edited by Michi Knecht, Maren Klotz, and Stefan Beck, 255–​282. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Korolczuk, Elżbieta. 2017. “‘The Purest Citizens’ and ‘IVF Children’: Reproductive Citizenship in Contemporary Poland.” Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online 3 (1): 126–​133. Korolczuk Elżbieta and Agnieszka Graff. 2018. “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’: The Anti-​ colonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (4): 797–​821. Kulawik, Teresa. 2017. “  ‘Wir wollen Medizin, keine Ideologie!’ Politische Epistemologie, Körperwissen und Geschlechterverhältnisse in Polen.” In Geschlecht und Wissen(schaft) in Ostmitteleuropa, edited by Ina Alber-​Armenat and Claudia Kraft, 93–​118. Marburg: Herder Institut. Lie, Merete and Nina Lykke. 2016. Assisted Reproduction Across Borders: Feminist Perspectives on Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions. New York and London: Routledge. Marchesi, Milena. 2012. “Reproducing Italians: Contested Biopolitics in the Age of ‘Replacement Anxiety.’” Anthropology & Medicine 19 (2): 171–​188. Mishtal, Joanna. 2015. The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Mole, Richard C. M. 2016. “Nationalism and Homophobia in Central and Eastern Europe.” In The EU Enlargement and Gay Politics: The Impact of Eastern Enlargement on Rights, Activism and Prejudice, edited by Koen Slootmaeckers, Heleen Touquet, and Peter Vermeersch, 99–​121. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ory, S. J., P. Devroey, M. Banker, P. Brinsden, J. Buster, M. Fiadjoe, et al. 2014. “IFFS Surveillance 2013: Preface and Conclusions.” Fertility and Sterility 101: 1582–​1583. Präg, Patrick and Melinda C. Mills. 2017. “Assisted Reproductive Technology in Europe: Usage and Regulation in the Context of Cross-​ Border Reproductive Care.” In Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, Causes, and Consequences, edited by Michaela Kreyenfeld and Dirk Konietzka, 289–​309. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Radkowska-​ Walkowicz, Magdalena. 2012. “The Creation of ‘Monsters’: The Discourse of Opposition to In Vitro Fertilization in Poland.” Reproductive Health Matters 20 (40): 30–​37. Siegl, Veronika. 2018. “Aligning the Affective Body: Commercial Surrogacy in Moscow and the Emotional Labour of Nastraivatsya.” Tsantsa—​Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association 23: 63–​72. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vlasenko, Polina. 2015. “Desirable Bodies/​Precarious Laborers: Ukrainian Egg Donors in Context of Transnational Fertility.” In (In)fertile Citizens: Anthropological and Legal Challenges of Assisted Reproduction Technologies, edited by Veneta Kantsa, Gulia Zanini, and Lina Papadopoulou, 197–​216. Aegean: In Ferci. Wirtualna Polska. 2013. “Kard. Dziwisz: Kościół ma strzecładumoralnegoopartegonaDekalogu.” May 30. https://​wiadomosci.wp.pl/​kard-​dziwisz-​kosciol-​ma-​strzec-​ladu-​moralnego-​opartego-​ na-​dekalogu-​6031290928886913a.

491

492

47 ABORTION AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH IN EURASIA Continuity and change Cynthia Buckley

Public health advocates and scholars of reproductive health often cast as revolutionary the efforts to expand reproductive health. Fertility control generates broad based significant social, political, and economic changes. The improvements to maternal and child health advancements are seen as drivers of increased individual female agency, expanding the abilities to make decisions based on an individual’s or a couple’s preferences rather than solely determined by structural forces of cultural or political origins. Eurasia’s reproductive healthcare history, particularly Central Asia and the Caucasus, is characterized by a very narrow mix of contraceptives, high reliance upon abortion, and persistent regional and ethnic variation in access (Buckley 2006; Chan 2019; Popov 1991). After the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, with support from a variety of international agencies and bilateral donors, programs and policies sought to bring the reproductive health revolution to the region, including efforts to alter attitudes toward family planning and modern contraceptives, to improve the breadth of available contraceptives, and to provide more comprehensive healthcare access. Examining how these programs affected women’s reproductive lives in Central Asia and the Caucasus incorporates this region into global reproductive health studies and invites a reconsideration of existing assumptions concerning the link between contraceptive access and women’s status. In the decades after independence, family planning programs across Eurasia did spur marked increases in contraceptive rates, declines in abortion, better health outcomes, and declining fertility rates in Central Asia. However, they did not markedly change cultural and political constraints on women’s reproductive decision-​ making. The Eurasian experience both reaffirms and challenges the ties between improvements in contraceptive use and reproductive health and enhanced decision-​ making ability and status for women.

492

493

Abortion and reproductive health

Expanding contraceptive knowledge and access The 1990s were a time of tumultuous transitions across Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E), coinciding with political, economic, and social demands from grassroots groups. A variety of United Nations health agencies and numerous regional governmental and nongovernmental groups sought to expand access to modern contraception, widening women’s fertility control choices beyond abortion (David 1999). For international funders, addressing healthcare provided a clear channel for welcomed humanitarian assistance. Focusing on contraceptive knowledge and access during dire economic challenges ensured a client base among individuals and families. Newly independent national governments welcomed maternal and child health assistance to decrease strains upon increasingly eroding social safety nets. As in previous interventions elsewhere worldwide, reproductive health initiatives afforded donors a potential channel for future economic cooperation and potential political influence (DaVanzo and Adamson 1998). Local activists and scholars have often questioned international reproductive health programs, driven by highly industrialized countries, to focus on issue-​specific success measures rather than the broader pursuit of female equity and related economic, social, and cultural rights (see Aliyeva 2015; Buckley 2006; James-​Hawkins et al. 2018). One specific measurement target used as an indicator of success for reproductive health programs in the former Soviet Union countries was decreasing the incidence of abortion. During the Soviet-​era, abortion levels across the region were substantially higher than in Western Europe or North America. Abortion provided a broadly accessible means for avoiding unwanted births in Eurasia, while the scarcity of modern contraceptive alternatives generated reliance upon it. As reproductive health programs expanded in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union countries, the frequency of abortions began to fall. By 2019, total abortion rates in the region were one-​third of 1994 rates (Mahmood et al. 2020, 88), reflecting the significant expansion of access to broader contraceptive choices. Donor agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighted decreased abortion rates across the countries of Central Asia as a critical indicator of their programmatic impact on healthcare, alongside the expansion of reproductive healthcare for doctors and nurses and access to contraception and family planning (USAID 2015). While some researchers viewed the changing reproductive health landscape as replacing abortion with modern contraceptives, others offered more nuanced approaches, focusing on the persistent cultural, regional, and generational variations in gender norms, family formation traditions, and healthcare access. By the mid to late-​1990s, the ideal number of children desired by women in Central Asia (a region noted for relatively high fertility) began to fall (Agadjanian 2003; David 1999). Sociopolitical instability, declining access to healthcare, and the intensive economic challenges of the early 1990s motivated many to postpone childbearing across Eurasia. This context created a pronounced population decline in low fertility countries across Eastern Europe while contributing to the ideational changes associated with lower desired family size in the Caucasus and Central Asia (Mahmood et al. 2020). Following global trends, in the 1990s, unintended pregnancies across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union countries declined. Abortion ratios (the number of abortions per 1000 live births) in Central Asia, where the fertility decline was not steep, still declined noticeably between 1994 and 2015 (Bearak et al. 2020).

493

494

Cynthia Buckley

In the early 1990s, unmet contraceptive need (referring to fertile and sexually active women who do not use a contraceptive method and do not wish to become pregnant) varied across the countries of CEE and Eurasia. Unmet contraceptive need levels remained higher in the Caucasus and Central Asia, particularly among migrants, youth, and the poor (USAID 2015 , 55). Still, unmet need fell from nearly 30 percent in 1990 to under 18 percent in 2020 (Mahmood et al. 2020, 89). According to these measures, women were ready, willing, and able to embrace contraceptive use. The declining reliance on abortion was viewed as an indicator of programmatic success. However, challenges in reproductive health have persisted. Men were rarely included in programming outreach across decades of programming efforts, and scant attention was paid to male contraceptives. This exclusion is notable in the Caucasus and Central Asia, where surveys continue to indicate a continued reliance on high failure traditional contraceptive methods, such as withdrawal. The Caucasus and Central Asia countries had a narrow range of contraceptive choices, with intrauterine devices emerging as the dominant method (Barrett and Buckley 2007).

Uneven reproductive health improvements The improvements in reproductive health across Eurasia are notable and have been linked to better maternal and infant health indicators between 1991 and 2020. Nevertheless, the experiences of women in the Caucasus and Central Asia are far from uniform. Studies of the region indicate excluding specific populations from improvements in reproductive healthcare and outreach. They note intersectional differences by ethnolinguistic identity, residence, and marital status among women (Buckley 2006; Nedoluzhko 2012; USAID 2015). In Central Asia, efforts to expand access to reproductive healthcare and education tended to focus only on married women, generally targeting women only after they had given birth to their first child. Unmarried women who sought contraception challenged societal condemnation of extramarital sex. Married women were still expected to demonstrate their fertility as soon as possible. In Central Asian countries like Tajikistan, international funding supported contraceptive clinics located within birthing hospitals by local administrators. Across Central Asia, rural residents, who lack local hospitals, continued to experience relatively limited reproductive healthcare services. After 2000, national health ministries in the Caucasus and Central Asia employed resources to provide traveling nurses and care workers in rural regions. However, these healthcare workers tend to focus on antenatal care and assistance centered on ensuring the married women space the births of their children, typically to approximately 24 months. Such reproductive healthcare is rarely offered to young, newly married, or unmarried women. Improving maternal and child health indicators continue to be a priority in Central Asia and the Caucasus. By the late 1990s, initial policies that targeted areas including decreasing teen pregnancy, reducing maternal mortality, and increasing birth spacing, generated demonstrable improvements. Levels of other adverse reproductive health outcomes remained high. Over two and a half decades after reproductive health programs were launched in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan, their Maternal Mortality Ratios (MMR, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births) remain far above the average in CEE&E. Kyrgyzstan posts a troubling MMR of 60 compared to the overall regional average of 20 in 2017 (Mahmood et al. 2020, 88). While the initial influx of foreign funding for reproductive health initiatives provided much-​needed resources for national healthcare systems, the expansion of contraceptive access and reproductive health was incomplete. 494

495

Abortion and reproductive health

Summary regional data indicates marked declines in the number of births per 1000 women aged 15–​49. At the same time, the improvement in contraceptive availability and use across the region since the 1990s represents a positive development in a health policy landscape riddled with challenges (Bearak et al. 2020). This expansion of reproductive healthcare and education has coincided with social program changes, shifting more of the cost of raising children from the state and onto family budgets through reductions in maternity benefits, childcare provision, healthcare coverage, and education. Challenges relating to economic shocks and declining living standards in the 1990s were amplified across the Caucasus by the effects of armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh and a combination of civil unrest and Abkhazian separatism in Georgia. The civil war in Tajikistan in the mid-​1990s ushered in a period of prolonged social and political uncertainty, deepening the economic crises experienced throughout Central Asia. In 1991, national total fertility rates (TFR, a hypothetical measure predicting the average number of children a woman could expect to have between 15 and 49 if experiencing the age-​specific birth rates of a given year) were above the replacement level (2.1) in Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Armenia and relatively high (3.0) in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. By 1993, 1997, and 1998, the TFRs for Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Armenia fell below the replacement level. In 1991 TFRs, in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were above four children, and Tajikistan’s TFR stood at 5.2. By 2008, Uzbekistan’s TFR had fallen below replacement, while Turkmenistan estimates placed the TFR at replacement levels (US Census 2020). In the late 1990s, below-​ replacement fertility and threats of population decline emerged as new political issues in the Caucasus and Central Asia. However, these issues had challenged many national governments in CEE years earlier. High rates of female labor force participation, rising divorce rates, housing shortages, increasing costs of education, and the quality of, and access to, state-​provided childcare had prompted a shift to smaller families beginning in the 1950s across the many countries in the then-​ Soviet bloc. Women born in the 1970s and reaching fertility ages in the 1990s tended to postpone childbearing during these trying years of transition. Cohort assessments of fertility across CEE indicate that most of these postponed births were permanently foregone; cohort fertility in the broader CEE region will remain low in the foreseeable future (Frejka and Gietel-​Basten 2016), even though public opinion surveys continue to document the desired family size of two children. Numerous pronatalist policies have been enacted across CEE&E countries (Chernova 2012). Few governments have sought to address fundamental underlying gender equity issues such as family support, employment adjustments for parents, and equalized efforts in child-​rearing responsibilities for men and women (McDonald 2013).

Rising nationalism and falling birthrates National interests persistently play an essential role in shaping the impacts of contraception expansion in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Advances in maternal and child health indicators, coupled with rapid fertility decrease, alter many married women’s lives across the region. Simultaneously, rising nationalism across the region generated both subtle and not so subtle changes in the priorities and practices among women in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Cleuziou and Direnberger 2016; Matveeva 2002). Nation-​building projects across the region tended to rely upon returns to patriarchal beliefs and approaches, which often stand at odds with dependence upon international assistance and the prioritization 495

496

Cynthia Buckley

of expanding women’s social, economic, and cultural autonomy. Only in Kazakhstan did the TFR rise clearly above replacement in the mid-​2000s and remain there. In the southern Caucasus, each state has engaged in showcasing efforts on various programs and initiatives to address support for more flexible employment options for women, expanded support for young families, and encouraging childbirth. Often underfunded and rarely focused on issues linked to childcare provision or substantial shifts in housing availability, these programs alone have not generated a marked impact in raising fertility rates above replacement levels. The political and economic concerns over high fertility rates in the early 1990s, which had motivated the initial state support of internationally funded reproductive health efforts, were counteracted in the late 1990s by calls for the reclamation and reinforcement of national traditions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Resurgent traditionalism emphasized the importance of women’s work in the family and home, valorizing females’ domestic and reproductive duties. Arising during a time of economic fragility and widespread unemployment, movements to revitalize traditional family roles carried the added state budget benefit of diminishing the number of most employment seekers to men. Nationalist movements in the region emphasized the importance of reproduction for the nation while stressing females’ role in the domestic sphere. Patriarchal norms, particularly norms governing female sexuality, found renewed support and authority, and deepening fertility stigmatization of giving birth outside of marriage. Even as families with large numbers of children became rare, and the reported ideal family size declined compared to the Soviet era, women faced substantial messaging from state authorities emphasizing reproduction, with their individual choices placed within the context of national interests (Nedoluzhko 2012). Governmental and religious leaders across the region strongly supported traditional childbearing norms, providing a structural context that shapes the fertility pathways and choices for women and couples, lessening the benefits to individual agency often tied to the expansion of reproductive health (James-​Hawkins et al. 2018). Three specific factors—​the persistence of early first births, increasing indications of the use of sex-​ selective abortion, and reports of covert coerced or involuntary female sterilization highlight how national policies and cultural priorities narrow, and in extreme cases control, women’s reproductive options in Central Asia and the Caucasus even after the expansion of contraception knowledge and access.

Fertility patterns and pathways of control and choice Historically, the expansion of female educational opportunities increased female employment, and access to contraception spurred increases in both the average age of marriage and first births by increasing the years expected for schooling, enhancing women’s autonomy, and providing a means to delay motherhood. The availability of effective contraception can also enable a division between the initiation of sexual activity and childbearing, facilitating the postponement of marriage and extending the length of time between the age of marital entrance and the first birth. During the Soviet period, even with high female education and labor force participation, the average age at first marriage was low compared to Europe (United Nations 2018). As of 2020, within the Caucasus and Central Asia, the national averages for female age at first marriage remain relatively low, with average ages in the early twenties persisting today in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and the mid-​twenties for Tajikistan, 496

497

Abortion and reproductive health

Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. In Georgia and Armenia, the average age at first marriage is over 25 years of age, driven in some part by the relatively larger percentage of women who do not marry in these two countries compared to other countries in the region where marriage is nearly universal. The importance of marriage for women in Tajikistan and other countries in Eurasia is reflected in the persistence of polygamy practices, despite legal sanctions. After women reach their mid-​twenties, rates of the first marital entrance decline markedly in the area. Marital entrance remains a strong expectation for women in the region, with family pressure encouraging young women to enter marital unions while young, or risk losing the opportunity to wed. Countries, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, continue to combat child marriages legislatively. Once wed, women in the Caucasus and Central Asia continue to rapidly give birth to their first child, with most women bearing their first child within 24 months of their first marriage (MacQuarrie 2016). Rapid first births may reflect a couple’s preferences or perhaps reflect the persistent scarcity of reproductive knowledge, healthcare, and education for individuals or couples to access reproductive health services before marriage (Buckley, Barrett, and Adkins 2008). Women in the region often face pressure from spouses, parents, and in-​laws to rapidly demonstrate their fertility, ideally with a male child. These factors potentially contribute to shortened intervals between marriage and the birth of the first child. Neither fieldwork findings nor large-​scale health surveys among the countries indicate contraception utilization before the first birth. In Tajikistan, interviews suggest strong beliefs concerning the dangers of using contraceptives before the first birth, with older women particularly opposed, due to a perceived risk to a young woman’s future fecundity when contraceptives (specifically the commonly used IUD or spiral) are used before the first birth. If first births occurred at slightly older maternal ages, decreased years of potential childbearing could contribute to further reductions in family size. Before childbearing, the additional time might also benefit women’s educational attainment, occupational experience, and the stability of marital unions. Nonetheless, early first births continue to be encouraged structurally and attitudinally, and there is scant evidence that increasing contraceptive access has led to any significant delays in initiating childbearing. International reproductive health programs have highlighted the benefits of birth spacing, waiting for at least 24 months between births (Rutstein 2011). Trends across the Caucasus and Central Asia show a widening of intervals between births, pointing toward increased use of contraceptive approaches to ensure birth spacing. Medical counseling programs for new mothers across the region stress the importance of taking time between births for children’s and mothers’ well-​being. Increasing the time between births can lead to smaller completed family sizes for women, and increased attention to child spacing appears to have benefitted maternal and child health, especially in rural regions. Reflecting the powerful traditional patterns of son preference, women with a first female child often pursue a second birth before this recommended interval. Overall, birth spacing patterns do point to the alteration of fertility timing due to birth spacing after the reproductive health campaigns of the mid-​to-​late 1990s. Increasing skewed sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus raises the possibility of a more disturbing trend associated with son preference. Examining parity-​specific sex ratios over time, several scholars find evidence of sex-​selective abortion employed in the area as the number of male infants exceeds the number of female infants (Aliyeva 2015). These assessments led to widespread descriptions of the region as a leading location for sex-​selective abortion. Detailed assessments of the data suggest that son preference 497

498

Cynthia Buckley

is unlikely to be the sole underlying motivation for sex-​selective pregnancy termination decisions. In low fertility regions, family balancing preferences (one female and one male child) are more common (Hohmann, Lefevre, and Garenne 2014). When more systematic and complete birth registry data are analyzed at the aggregate level, the sex ratio imbalances in the Caucasus are modest, particularly compared to China’s patterns. Debates over the extent and causal factors driving the relatively high number of male births in the Caucasus continue. The situation does indicate a continued acceptance of abortion in the Caucasus, less as a form of controlling the timing and number of births, but, coupled with accessible technology for sex determination of the fetus, to ensure offspring’s preferred sex. Continuing discussions of sex-​selective abortions in the Caucasus provide a critical example of the intersection between contraceptive availability, reproductive health technology, socially constructed norms, and gender hierarchy. This volatile combination of social norms and attitudes toward the importance of family, the sex (or sex balance) of offspring, and accessible reproductive technology expand women’s options while placing strong emphasis upon behaviors that maintain socially expected outcomes. It comes at the cost of individual preferences, potentially constraining women’s agency. Reproductive coercion includes birth control sabotage, pregnancy coercion, or and bringing the pregnancy to term (Grace and Anderson 2018). While often studied at the individual level, or focused upon partner or family influence, state institutions are also potential actors. Clear documentation regarding the power of state practices concerning potentially coercive approaches to contraceptive advocacy or quota targets for female sterilization is rarely found. This absence of legibility can call claims of reproductive coercion into question. It may also provide an opportunity for casting doubt upon reproductive health programs entirely by generating widespread rumor and distrust. The charges of contraceptive coercion and forced sterilization invite questions concerning how females view access to reproductive health and their trust in the treatment and services provided. Both the Uzbek and Tajik examples highlight the state’s potential to pursue reproductive health programs that write governmental interests directly onto females’ bodies of childbearing age. This type of reproductive coercion illustrates how the expansion of contraceptive access and the increasing focus on reproductive health can be utilized to further state control over reproduction. Even more direct attempts to restrict female reproductive autonomy and agency by the state are rumored to be shared in Central Asia. Contraceptive use, particularly among those who have given birth to their first child, is strongly encouraged by health professionals who may be motivated to place program expectations and state population policy ahead of patient preferences. Pursuing programs associated with the forced or coerced utilization of contraception is in keeping with state interests in lowering population growth rates in countries still struggling with high population growth, either nationally or within specific regions or ethnic groups. Charges of medical professionals inserting IUDs without the explicit and informed consent of postpartum females in Tajikistan frequently appear in informal conversations across the country. In informal discussions, Tajik women report medical care providers very strongly encouraging them to use IUDs for contraception during well-​baby checkups and scheduled vaccinations, leading some respondents to conclude their acceptance of an IUD was linked to medical care access for their infant. Regardless of intent, such practices serve as a draconian means of ensuring state interests in birth spacing and constraining women’s decision-​making abilities.

498

499

Abortion and reproductive health

The state’s role in pursuing favored fertility outcomes is particularly apparent in allegations concerning a secretive state policy of forced sterilization in Uzbekistan. Insights from reproductive healthcare providers and female clients indicate a comprehensive state policy of quotas to incentivize the completion of women’s sterilization procedures in Uzbekistan, suspected of targeting rural women, who disproportionately represent ethnic minorities and the poor (Antelaeva 2013). Careful research on Uzbekistan’s secret fertility control program provides documentation that women with more than two children were targeted for sterilization and that medical professionals were expected to complete a set number of sterilizations per quarter (Antelaeva 2013). Medical care providers report that these policies forced healthcare providers to compromise on obtaining patients’ informed consent.

Conclusions The expansion of contraceptive access and reproductive health in the 1990s across CEE&E drew heavily upon the ideas and goals of the 1994 UN Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) declaration. This watershed declaration broadens previous approaches to family planning. It includes all aspects of reproductive and sexual health as a core global concern, emphasizing women’s status and the advancement of women’s empowerment at the center of development efforts and stressing the health and mortality benefits empowerment generates for women and children (Population Reference Bureau 2004). Efforts to advance reproductive health in the Caucasus and Central Asia, like investments in gender advocacy, contributed to women’s expanding opportunities. Reproductive health efforts benefitted both women and children directly, leading to lower population growth rates and enabling families to control the timing and number of births. Still, the broader goals of supporting women’s ability to make informed and voluntary reproductive decisions remain severely constrained by a return to national traditionalism across the region and state policies. Governments in Central Asia and the Caucasus have failed to advocate for women and instead use increased access to reproductive services to coerce family planning decisions. The expansion of contraceptive access and reproductive awareness, healthcare, and education have increased markedly since the 1990s in CEE&E. Like other world regions, reliance on abortion has declined significantly, but its legality continues to be challenged in several countries. More considerable efforts to expand women’s empowerment will generate benefits across the region, most notably in the Caucasus and Central Asia, where the potential for improvement of maternal and child health is most significant. Expanding reproductive health outreach to youth, both male and female, expands health knowledge, allows individuals greater opportunity to develop attitudes following individual aspirations, and provides access to various contraceptive practices to ensure fertility outcomes following those aspirations. More significant efforts to expand individual access and autonomy are likely to improve health outcomes. Nevertheless, the cultural and social contexts in which individuals make reproductive health decisions must also be appreciated. In many ways, the contraceptive and reproductive health needs of the region echo the goals of the ICPD. The experiences of many countries of the region justify an amplified focus on the state’s role in reproductive health, an issue beyond the basic tenets of the Cairo ICPD. Within the nations of CEE&E, particularly those with below-​replacement fertility, maintaining a

499

500

Cynthia Buckley

palatable balance between individual choice and the state’s interests is critical. Among the states concerned with population growth, a more substantial commitment to individual agency ideas, autonomy, and informed choice in reproductive health by policymakers is similarly important. The expansion of access to contraception and reproductive health services in the Caucasus and Central Asia demonstrates that expanding efforts in reproductive health can enhance women and children’s health. To achieve improvements in women’s ability to make well-​informed reproductive decisions following their aspirations, additional efforts are needed. Such an achievement is dependent upon the will of states to respect individual autonomy and decision-​making. The expansion of contraception access and increased focus on reproductive health in CEE&E generated a reduction in abortion reliance and at least partially better health for women and children. To date, the revolutionary impact on women’s agency remains contradictory.

References Agadjanian, Victor. 2003. “Is ‘Abortion Culture’ Fading in the former Soviet Union? Views about Abortion and Contraception in Kazakhstan.” Studies in Family Planning 33 (3): 237–​248. Aliyeva, Bahija. 2015. “The Boomerang Effect of Liberal Abortion Laws in Patriarchal Societies: The Case of Gender Biased Sex-​Selection in the Republic of Azerbaijan.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 5 (1): 93–​109. Antelaeva, Natalia. 2013. “Forced Sterilization of Women in Uzbekistan.” Open Society Foundations Policy Report, December. Barrett, Jennifer and Cynthia Buckley. 2007. “Constrained Contraceptive Choice: IUD Prevalence in Uzbekistan.” Studies in Family Planning 33 (2): 50–​57. Bearak, Jonathan, Anna Popinchalk, Bella Ganatra, Ann-​Beth Moller, Ozge Tuncalp, Cynthia Beavin, and Leontine Kwok Leontine Alkema. 2020. “Unintended Pregnancy and Abortion by Income, Region, and the Legal Status of Abortion: Estimates from a Comprehensive Model for 1990–​2019.” Lancet Global Health 8 (9): 1–​10. Buckley, Cynthia. 2006. “Challenges to Integrating Sexual Health Issues into Reproductive Health Programs in Uzbekistan.” Studies in Family Planning 37 (3): 155–​168. Buckley, Cynthia, Jennifer Barrett, and Kristen Adkins. 2008. “Reproductive Health Information for Young Women in Kazakhstan: Disparities in Access by Channel.” Journal of Health Communication 13 (7): 681–​697. Chan, Julia. 2019. “The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control: Women’s Travel in the Soviet Union and Naomi Mitchenson’s We Have Been Warned.” Journal of Modern Literature 42 (2): 38–​56. Chernova, Zhanna. 2012. “New Pronatalism? Family Policy in Post-​Soviet Russia.” Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 1 (1): 75–​92. Cleuziou, Juliette and Lucia Direnberger. 2016. “Gender and Nation in Post-​ Soviet Central Asia: From National Narratives to Women’s Practices.” Nationalities Papers 44 (2): 195–​206. DaVanzo, Julie and David M. Adamson. 1998. Family Planning in Developing Countries: An Unfinished Success Story. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. David, Henry, ed. 1999. From Abortion to Contraception: A Resource to Public Policies and Reproductive Behavior in Central and Eastern Europe from 1917 to the Present. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Frejka, Tomas and S. Gietel-​Basten. 2016. “Fertility and Family Policies in Central and Eastern Europe after 1990.” Comparative Population Studies 41 (1): 3–​56. Grace, Karen Trister and Jocelyn C. Anderson. 2018. “Reproductive Coercion: A Systematic Review.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 19 (4): 371–​390. Hohmann, Sophie, Cecile Lefevre, and Michel Garenne. 2014. “A Framework for Analyzing Sex-​ selective Abortion: The Example of Changing Sex Ratios in Southern Caucasus.” International Journal of Women’s Health 6: 889–​897. James-​Hawkins, Lauren, Courtney Peters, Kristen VanderEnde, Lauren Bardin, and Kathryn Yount. 2018. “Women’s Agency and its Relationship to Current Contraceptive Use in the

500

501

Abortion and reproductive health Lower and Middle-​income Countries: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Global Health 13 (7): 2843–​2858. MacQuarrie, Kerry L. D. 2016. Marriage and Fertility Dynamics: The Influence of Marriage Age on the Timing of First Birth and Birth Spacing. DHS Analytical Studies No. 56. Rockville, MD: ICF International. Mahmood, T., J. Bitzer, J. Nizard, and M. Short. 2020. “The Sexual Reproductive Health of Women: Unfinished Business in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Region.” The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care: The Official Journal of the European Society of Contraception 25 (2): 87–​94. Matveeva, Anna. 2002. The South Caucasus: Nationalism, Conflict and Minorities. London: Minority Rights Group. McDonald, Paul. 2013. “Societal Foundations for Explaining Low Fertility: Gender Equity.” Demographic Research 28 (34): 981–​994. Nedoluzhko, Lesia. 2012. “Achieved Fertility and Fertility Intentions among Ethnic Groups in Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan Compared.” https://​www.diva-​portal.org/​ smash/​record.jsf ?pid=diva2%3A524753&dswid=7552. Popov, A. 1991. “Family Planning and Induced Abortion in the USSR: Basic Health and Demographic Characteristics.” Studies in Family Planning 22 (6): 368–​377. Population Reference Bureau. 2004. What was Cairo? The Promise and Reality of the ICPD. Washington DC: Population Reference Bureau Report. https://​www.prb.org/​whatwascairothe promiseandrealityoficpd/​. Rutstein, Shea O. 2011. “Trends in Birth Spacing.” DHS Comparative Reports No. 28. Calverton, MD: ICF Macro. https://​dhsprogram.com/​pubs/​pdf/​CR28/​CR28.pdf. United Nations. 2018. “World Marriage 2017.” www.un.org/​en/​development/​desa/​population/​ theme/​marriage-​unions/​WMD2017.asp. USAID. 2015. Anatomy of Health Care Transformation: USAID’s 20-​Year Legacy in Health Systems Strengthening in Central Asia. Bethesda, MD. Quality Health Care Project in Central Asia, Abt Associated Inc. US Census Bureau. 2020. “International Data Base.” www.census.gov/​data-​tools/​demo/​idb/​ informationGateway.php.

501

502

503

Social policy and health

504

505

48 SINGLE MOTHERS, FAMILY CHANGE, AND NORMALIZED GENDER CRISIS IN RUSSIA Jennifer Utrata

Examining single motherhood as an analytical category as well as a lived experience illuminates important questions regarding the gender regime in Russia before, during, and after communism. Constructions of motherhood in state policy and related discourses, as well as the lived experiences of mothers, illuminate the larger landscape of changing gender relations in Russia and elsewhere in Central-​Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E), including how families cope with fluctuations in state policies. However, there is a lack of comprehensive data for key aspects of family policy in Russia, including enrollment rates for childcare, coverage rates for benefits, and more (Kravchenko 2012, 190). There are also significant gaps between formal legal norms concerning family policy and the treatment of mothers, including single mothers, and actual practices (Kravchenko 2012). One cannot assume that official proclamations lead to policy delivery. These gaps are intensified in Russia due to dramatic regional disparities according to social development indicators (Kainu et al. 2017, 296). Even comparisons with CEE&E are challenging given that, relative to CEE, Russia and the states of the Former Soviet Union have suffered from “deeper and more prolonged economic contraction, limited political accountability, and weak state administrations” (Cook 2015, 2347). Notwithstanding these limitations, Russia has continued to support some mothers, especially mothers bearing more than one child since 2007, albeit with a weaker commitment to mothers as workers relative to the state socialist period (McKinney 2004). But considering Russian women’s high rates of employment, alongside cutbacks in childcare and a lack of a comprehensive approach in family policy (Kingsbury 2019), most Russian mothers experience little meaningful policy support even though they bear a disproportionate share of the unpaid labor in families while working for pay. While the struggle to balance work and caregiving is not new for Russian women, the costs are higher under capitalism, where motherhood has been privatized, childcare has been cut, and the state merely pays partial compensation to mothers for their losses. With some exceptions, the Russian state has shifted its focus to “an autonomous family which makes its own life decisions including employment and childcare” (Kingsbury 2019, 5). This has led to “systematic disadvantages for Russian mothers” whether married or single (2019, 12). Policies of “refamilialization” in the region put women at a structural 505

506

Jennifer Utrata

disadvantage relative to the state supports and guarantees for mothers provided during the Soviet period. Discourses and policies on single motherhood illuminate gender relations, especially given the increasing normalcy of single motherhood as a stage in many women’s lives. Most children in Russia live in two-​parent families, but the increase in cohabitation, high divorce and nonmarital birth rates, and men’s premature mortality rates, suggest an overall trend toward increasing numbers of single-​parent (typically single-​mother) households (Motivans 2001; Utrata 2015). Single mothers are the most ordinary of Russian women in a society where matrifocal families (i.e., where the mother–​child unit is more central culturally than fathers or the mother–​father conjugal relationship) and female-​dominated kinship networks predominate in everyday life (Utrata 2015). This is in stark contrast to the way single motherhood has been racialized and pathologized elsewhere, such as in the United States. This context is critical for understanding the effects of shifting family policies. My fieldwork conversations with mothers in provincial Russia from 2003 to 2004 reflected the many ambiguities and complexities surrounding single motherhood during the transition period. Perhaps these complexities related to family fluidity and flux are inherent to the constructed category of single motherhood, but they are also amplified in Russia, given its quiet revolution in family life since the breakup of the Soviet Union. For instance, Russians seldom agree on who counts as single. Some wonder if unmarried mothers count as single more than divorced mothers (even though many divorced mothers receive paltry, if any, child support from ex-​husbands due to lax enforcement of child support laws and shadow incomes), or whether single mothers with extensive support from their own mothers (their children’s babushki) are really single at all given the extensive domestic and childcare assistance so many grandmothers provide. Beyond the officially single, some married mothers, too, are quasi-​single and bear sole responsibility for their family’s welfare (Kanji 2004). During fieldwork, I frequently heard comments such as the following: “Wait! I think I have just the woman for you. Olga Petrovna is a real single mother—​she has no husband, mother, relatives, or anyone else supporting her!” For ordinary Russians, the meaning of single motherhood varies along a continuum of singleness, depending on the amount of social support available in a mother’s life. Single motherhood is a metaphor for how supported, or unsupported, mothers feel in their everyday lives as they juggle paid work with the unpaid work of the home and children. Many contemporary mothers feel abandoned by the state and by men as they continue bearing primary responsibility for the home, children, and paid work during the transition from state socialism to market capitalism. Though there have long been significant gaps between state proclamations and actual policy delivery in Russia, the guarantees of the Soviet period were robust, especially relative to contemporary policies on childcare services. Although there is “a revival of a more expansive state welfare role under semi-​authoritarian auspices” (Cook 2015, 2333) in recent years, motherhood has become privatized rather than supported by the state. Frequently, contemporary single mothers embrace an ideology of “practical realism” (Utrata 2015), a kind of neoliberal triumphalism that allows them to turn their struggles to support their family on their own—​in spite of a dearth of meaningful support from the state and most men—​into a badge of honor. Many single mothers, too, if they can count on the support of their own mothers (their children’s grandmothers), experience a sense of control and self-​reliance that many married mothers in Russian society lack.

506

507

Single mothers and gender in Russia

A stalled gender revolution in family life Russia is the preeminent case of a stalled gender revolution in family life (Ashwin and Isupova 2018; Utrata 2015), which allows us to better understand the challenges that single mothers, and many married mothers, face in Russia. Hochschild’s (1989) concept of a stalled revolution, describing the contradictions of US women’s lives whereby women work full-​time for pay but to varying degrees also bear primary responsibility for unpaid labor at home, with the practices of men and state policies lagging behind, is a useful analytical lens. In Russia, the double burden of unpaid work at home and paid employment has been especially stark. There is a vast literature on the second shift, not only in the West but globally. Yet Russia is an extreme case of these second shift inequalities in that it has long combined high female employment with a dramatically unequal gender division of domestic labor (Ashwin and Isupova 2018, 442). Women’s lives have changed dramatically in terms of the large number of women working for pay, but men’s behaviors in sharing the work of the home as well as state and workplace policies supporting the changes in women’s lives have consistently lagged behind. In the early days of Soviet rule revolutionary authorities saw families as a sign of backwardness that progressive policies and socialized labor would eventually overcome. Russia’s contemporary concern with families is similarly motivated by the desire to control families, and women’s reproduction. Moreover, there is a long legacy in Russia of women’s unpaid work at home being devalued and dismissed relative to paid work—​all while the state, and men, have benefited directly from women’s unpaid labor in families. These contradictions have intensified during the transition to capitalism, given significant cutbacks in support for families (Teplova 2007). The radical potential of the 1917 Russian Revolution was short-​lived, and women’s lives in Soviet, as well as post-​Soviet, Russia have long been defined by the unpaid labor they perform alongside high rates of formal labor market participation. It is important to note that fatherhood has long been marginalized relative to motherhood in Russia (Utrata, Ispa, and Ispa-​Landa 2013) and it is women, as mothers and grandmothers, who are typically held responsible for maintaining family life. In contemporary Russia, women, especially mothers, have experienced many challenges given the limited access to public childcare, high rates of employment, and primary responsibility for carework in families. Single mothers experience additional pressures, unless they have the support of kin, most frequently their own mothers.

Creating “single mothers” in the postwar Soviet period (1944–​1967) Since the earliest days of the Soviet Union, mothers have raised their children alone. But then, as now, the meanings of single parenthood (which typically means single motherhood) have been shaped by the state. Single mothers were created as a legal category, with an official status conferring benefits, only in the aftermath of World War II. Russia lost a staggering number of men during the war, over 20 million citizens (mostly men). These losses produced a large number of single mothers and a dramatic sex ratio imbalance. The USSR officially recognized single mothers in 1944, when the term “single mother” (odinokaia mat’) appeared in a decree. Men’s absence in the aftermath of the war established the precedent for matrifocal family networks of grandmothers and adult daughters raising children, with some help from the state.

507

508

Jennifer Utrata

The 1944 Family Law, notable for being strikingly pro-​natalist (McKinney 2004, 42), provided increased government support for all kinds of mothers (e.g., pregnant women, mothers with many children, and single mothers) and collapsed distinctions between war widows and unmarried mothers in hopes of encouraging women to replenish the population. The pro-​natalist government encouraged all women to bear children, and in the absence of a father, the state would support single mothers. This policy, alongside the scarcity of men, led to a vast increase in out-​of-​wedlock births (Nakachi 2006). By encouraging men to sire more children than they could afford to support, the Family Law also forged a new set of gender relations, undermining the state’s desire for stable families by sanctioning adultery, marginalizing fathers further from family life, and ensuring that mothers bore full responsibility for children (Nakachi 2006). The state discouraged moral condemnation of single, unmarried mothers because it needed women to give birth, and some might have viewed unwed single mothers and women who had lost husbands with some sympathy. But even though single mothers were officially supported by the state, single mothers were stigmatized in society. Also, although the abortion ban was repealed in 1955, with the state relying less on force and more on normalizing techniques of power afterwards, in subsequent years the state sought to regulate gender and sexuality in myriad ways, including protecting the category of mothers deemed “single” while valorizing marriage and nuclear families as normative.

Single motherhood in the late Soviet period (1968–​1991) Mixed messages from the state prevailed during the late Soviet period. The state tried to increase parents’ sense of personal responsibility for children and efforts were made to support families who were especially low-​income (McKinney 2004). But supports for single mothers as such were minimal. The 1968 Family Code ushered in a new era of reproductive politics. After 1968, mothers were permitted to register any male name as the father on a child’s birth certificate, softening the division between legitimate and illegitimate children. Paternity was no longer tied to legal marriage alone, so women could make claims on their children’s fathers for support. Yet years of sanctioning adultery for men likely had effects on families. During this period, the state still upheld a two-​parent family ideal but encouraged men to become more conscientious husbands and fathers. This period, in contrast to the postwar period, had fewer nonmarital births (down to 10 percent from a high of 33 percent after the war), and the state gave special rights and responsibilities to motherhood. The 1968 legislation led the divorce rate to increase sharply (Lapidus 1978). By 1979, the Soviet Union had the world’s second highest divorce rate, but child support was legally mandated and enforced. Although there were relatively few benefits specifically for single mothers, with most benefits accruing to women as mothers, whenever the state did distinguish between single and married mothers it sought to provide some additional support to single mothers. The state tried to reduce the costs of raising children through increasing maternity leave and investing more in childcare facilities, in part due to changing labor force needs, although the size of monthly allowances was not changed (McKinney 2004). Due in part to the stigma surrounding unmarried motherhood, women generally considered single motherhood only as a last resort (Utrata 2015). In contrast to the postwar period, late Soviet single mothers raised their children during a time when everyday life seemed quite stable, in spite of the increasing frequency of divorce, the dominance of traditional, exclusively heterosexual gender ideologies, and the stigmatization 508

509

Single mothers and gender in Russia

of women who did not marry or bear children. Women were encouraged to look to the state and their employment for support rather than to individual men. In everyday life, women described the importance of their own mother’s help, especially in ensuring that their children were not deprived relative to children with two parents. This reliance on the unpaid labor of older women continued into the post-​Soviet period, even though many older women also worked for pay alongside helping adult children. Older women, especially as grandmothers, frequently are expected to serve as the reserve army of feminine self-​sacrifice, in terms of helping adult daughters with childcare, even if they would prefer to consider alternative options for retirement (Utrata 2011).

Single motherhood in post-​Soviet Russia (1992–​present) As the state focused primarily on neoliberal reforms and addressing the perceived demographic crisis blamed on women’s low fertility, the retrenchment of the state from family life in the 1990s created a financial imperative for women’s work (Kanji 2011). As job opportunities became scarce, families struggled to survive the cutback in state services. Not only were childcare slots reduced, as the proportion of children in kindergartens fell by 55 percent between 1989 and 1997 (Lokshin 2004), but the real value of child benefits decreased. Much scholarship demonstrates that broader changes in Russian society during this period were detrimental to women and families (Kanji 2011). The meanings of motherhood, as well as single motherhood, have shifted since the collapse of communism. Many single mothers are proud of their efforts to work and raise children, though some feel pressure to conform to a neoliberal kind of self by proclaiming that they are “going it alone” and hardly need the support of the state. Depending on the situation, many single mothers have more control over their lives and enhanced freedoms relative to the time they spent managing burdensome, heavy-​drinking husbands. Russian women as wives and mothers engage in a great deal of invisible labor in managing their husband’s masculine drinking alongside breadwinning (Utrata 2019), and some single mothers find parenting and working for pay simpler alone than when partnered. These feelings tend to be amplified if single mothers have a grandmother—​ their children’s babushka—​nearby and available to help with childcare and housework so that they can focus more of their efforts on paid work and improving the family’s material situation (Utrata 2015). Whereas many single mothers experience material difficulties, so do many married mothers in Russia. Some single mothers find that the increased control over their lives, as well as more consistent access to kin support (Utrata 2015) partially compensates for the challenges they face in raising children. In Russia, regardless of marital status, differences in levels of kin support shape the experiences of mothers significantly (Utrata 2015). Studies suggest that there is a correlation between poverty and single motherhood, and that many single mothers live with extended kin in households as a survival strategy (Ahmed and Emigh 2005; Lokshin et al. 2000), but many single mothers benefit from the support of a grandmother even if they live separately (Utrata 2015). Indeed, many single mothers are reluctant to center material difficulties as the defining narrative of their lives. Many have long faced material difficulties, including while partnered, and sometimes with less control over how their money was spent relative to their time as single mothers. Whether mothers are single or married, the Russian state no longer supports women as workers as it once did, in terms of cutbacks in childcare support and wage penalties for motherhood, though it supports some gender traditionalism and pronatalism (at least 509

510

Jennifer Utrata

for mothers bearing two or more children). In general, women’s position in society has diminished, as rights and guarantees assisting women in managing their paid work and unpaid home responsibilities have weakened. Although the state provides less support for women balancing employment with the unpaid carework of motherhood during the post-​Soviet period, there is an exception to this rule. In 2007, the state implemented a maternity (family) capital program to incentivize women to give birth to more children. It offers mothers giving birth to a second or third child an amount equivalent to $10,000, indexed to inflation. While originally mothers could access these benefits only after a child turned three years old, since 2018 benefits can be accessed soon after a birth, and there are monthly payments for families with very low incomes. But for the most part, rather than cash, mothers are eligible for a voucher to be used for improving an apartment, the mother’s pension, or the costs of a child’s education. Rivkin-​Fish (2010) argues that the gender-​neutral discourses ignore the rampant gender inequality that Russian women, including single mothers, face in the public and private spheres. As a result of a constitutional court decision, fathers have the right to manage this capital only in very unusual circumstances and neofamilialist ideologies encourage women to focus on childbearing. Rather than trying to reconcile work and family, the policy is an effort at solving the Russian nation’s problem of dying out (Borozdina et al. 2016). The Russian state accepts the idea that women’s responsibility for providing childcare weakens their position in labor markets, and the maternity capital program is meant to partially compensate women—​and the family as a whole—​for those losses. In addition to motherhood’s privatization, considered a mere “choice” rather than a collective responsibility (with the important exception of maternity capital policies), the retreat of the state has also cleared the way for a more active, involved conception of fatherhood. However, even though ideals of fatherhood are shifting to encompass more involved ideals (Kay 2006), some argue that practices are changing much more slowly. Indeed, the male breadwinner ideal remains firmly in place, and many men are caught between competing ideals and behaviors (Ashwin and Lytkina 2004; Utrata 2008). Although the privatization of motherhood may seem to have shifted somewhat with the onset of maternity capital since 2007, Borozdina et al. (2016, 72) suggest that we are witnessing “the return of Russian family policy to a paternalistic and statist trend,” including gender traditionalism and cutbacks in childcare support. The issues of work and family integration, and women’s second shift, are seldom discussed in policy despite their importance in women’s lives. In terms of pension allocations and gender gaps in pay over the life course, Russian women face a motherhood penalty, whereby those women having one child (i.e., most Russian women) face higher wage penalties than those mothers having two or three children (Kingsbury 2019). Although maternity capital has been criticized for its symbolic message that mothers retain primary responsibility for childbearing and raising children, the policy nevertheless provides limited practical support. However, most Russian women have one child and thus remain ineligible for the program, and the real cutbacks in childcare and entitlements to ease work and family responsibilities reflect a broader, troubling, gender traditionalism. Furthermore, while some educated, urban, middle-​class mothers are able to benefit from the maternity capital program, in practice scholars have found that lower-​income mothers do not have sufficient financial resources to use the money or have needs that are not addressed by the program (Borozdina et al. 2016). Considering the Russian state’s reduced support for women and families (Teplova 2007), the rise of neotraditional ideologies, the reduction 510

511

Single mothers and gender in Russia

in penalties for domestic violence since 2017, and related efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church to mobilize against abortion, Putin’s Russia is becoming an increasingly conservative country hostile to women’s rights (Ferris-​Rotman 2018). Since at least 2008, when Russia’s recovery from a global crash was sluggish, Putin and church leaders have restricted abortion rights as part of a broader pronatalist agenda focused on women’s maternal “duty” alongside new laws banning gay propaganda in 2013. Neotraditionalist ideologies and pronatalist policies are no substitute for the strong support of mothers as workers. Recent policies have made the lives of mothers, married and single, more difficult relative to the late Soviet period.

Conclusions As Rivkin-​Fish (2010, 702) has argued, “interventions in the intimate sphere of gender and family are a key site for the deployment and transformation of state power.” In spite of inequalities at home and at work, Russian single mothers are no longer stigmatized in society as they once were and many highlight the increased control they have over their lives in spite of material difficulties. Many single mothers are admired by others, constituting an alternative femininity and serving as exemplars for women unwilling to endure blatant inequalities at home (Utrata 2019). Single mothers have some independence through their reliance on paid work and, quite often, practical support from their own mothers. But a normalized gender crisis continues in Putin-​era Russia, with many overburdened women disillusioned with men and the state, and many demoralized men who turn to the bottle or even violence, rather than family life, for solace. This is critical for understanding the experiences of single mothers, who frequently become single despite the additional difficulties, so that they could have some increased control over their own lives and the lives of their children. While there are exceptions to these patterns, the idea of overburdened strong women and demoralized weak men is reinforced at several levels of society, including everyday cultural discourse. This normalized gender crisis is likely to continue without a grassroots feminist movement, even as Putin’s masculinist legitimization strategies continue (Riabov and Riabova 2014). Even today, nearly 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and in spite of clear data showing that women have experienced significant losses relative to the guarantees they had in the Soviet period, for some in the West “it’s still hard to have a conversation about what socialism might have gotten right” (Ghodsee and Mead 2018, 102). There is greater attention to bringing Russia more fully into broader discussions of motherhood wage penalties and the heavy costs women still bear around the world for doing the bulk of unpaid care work with limited policies supporting them as workers. The alternative strategies pursued by single mothers in “going it alone” are partial solutions given the continued feminization, and devaluation, of carework in Russian society. Policies based on nationalistic pronatalism and neotraditionalism are no remedy for the gaps in childcare and pension funds that affect all kinds of Russian women, but especially mothers. Depending on the levels of kin support in their lives, single mothers, but also some married mothers, face varying degrees of systematic disadvantages in the new Russia.

References Ahmed, Patricia and Rebecca Jean Emigh. 2005. “Household Composition in Post-​ Socialist Eastern Europe.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 25 (3): 9–​41.

511

512

Jennifer Utrata Ashwin, Sarah and Olga Isupova. 2018. “Anatomy of a Stalled Revolution: Processes of Reproduction and Change in Russian Women’s Gender Ideologies.” Gender & Society 32 (4): 441–​468. Ashwin, Sarah and Tatyana Lytkina. 2004. “Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization.” Gender & Society 18: 189–​206. Borozdina, Ekaterina, Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova. 2016. “Using Maternity Capital: Citizen Distrust of Russian Family Policy.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 23 (1): 60–​75. Cook, Linda J. 2015. “New Winds of Social Policy in the East.” Voluntas 26: 2330–​2350. Ferris-​Rotman, Amie. 2018. “Putin’s War on Women.” Foreign Policy, April 9. https://​foreignpolicy. com/​2018/​04/​09/​putins-​war-​on-​women/​. Ghodsee, Kristen R. and Julia Mead. 2018. “What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women?” Catalyst 2 (2): 101–​133. Hochschild, Arlie Russell, with Anne Machung. 1989. The Second Shift. New York: Avon. Kainu, Markus, Meri Kulmala, Jouko Nikula, and Markku Kivinen. 2017. “The Russian Welfare State System: With Special Reference to Regional Inequality.” In The Routledge International Handbook to Welfare State Systems, edited by Christian Aspalter, 291–​ 321. London and New York: Routledge. Kanji, Shireen. 2004. “The Route Matters: Poverty and Inequality among Lone-​Mother Households in Russia.” Feminist Economics 10 (2): 207–​225. –​–​–​–​. 2011. “Labor Force Participation, Regional Location, and Economic Well-​Being of Single Mothers in Russia.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 32 (1): 62–​72. Kay, Rebecca. 2006. Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-​Soviet Change? Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Kingsbury, Marina A. 2019. “Expanding Understanding of Motherhood Penalty: How Gaps in Family Policies Contribute to Gaps in Old-​Age Earnings in Russia.” Frontiers in Sociology 67 (4): 1–​15. Kravchenko, Zhanna. 2012. “Everyday Continuity and Change: Family and Family Policy in Russia.” In And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Helene Carlback, Yulia Gradskova, and Zhanna Kravchenko, 185–​206. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky. 1978. Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lokshin, Michael. 2004. “Household Childcare Choices and Women’s Work Behavior in Russia.” Journal of Human Resources 39 (4): 1094–​1115. Lokshin, Michael, Kathleen Mullan Harris, and Barry M. Popkin. 2000. “Single Mothers in Russia: Household Strategies for Coping with Poverty.” World Development 28 (12): 2183–​2198. McKinney, Judith Record. 2004. “Lone Mothers in Russia: Soviet and Post-​Soviet Policy.” Feminist Economics 10 (2): 37–​60. Motivans, Albert. 2001. “Family Formation, Stability and Structure in Russia.” In Single Parents and Child Welfare in the New Russia, edited by Jeni Klugman and A. Motivans, 27–​ 52. New York: Palgrave. Nakachi, Mie. 2006. “N.S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction, and Language.” East European Politics and Societies 20 (1): 40–​68. Riabov, Oleg and Tatiana Riabova. 2014. “The Remasculinization of Russia? Gender, Nationalism, and the Legitimation of Power Under Vladimir Putin.” Problems of Post-​Communism 61 (2): 23–​35. Rivkin-​Fish, Michele. 2010. “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Toward a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital.’” Slavic Review 69 (3): 701–​724. Teplova, Tatyana. 2007. “Welfare State Transformation, Childcare, and Women’s Work in Russia.” Social Politics 14 (3): 284–​322. Utrata, Jennifer. 2008. “Keeping the Bar Low: Why Russia’s Nonresident Fathers Accept Narrow Fatherhood Ideals.” Journal of Marriage and Family 70 (5): 1297–​1310. –​–​–​–​. 2011. “Youth Privilege: Doing Age and Gender in Russia’s Single-​Mother Families.” Gender & Society 25 (5): 616–​641.

512

513

Single mothers and gender in Russia –​–​–​–​. 2015. Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. –​–​–​–​. 2019. “Invisible Labor and Women’s Double Binds: Collusive Femininity and Masculine Drinking in Russia.” Gender & Society 33 (6): 911–​934. Utrata, Jennifer, Jean M. Ispa, and Simone Ispa-​Landa. 2013. “Men on the Margins of Family Life: Fathers in Russia.” In Fathers in Cultural Context, edited by David W. Shwalb, Barbara J. Shwalb, and Michael E. Lamb, 279–​301. New York and London: Routledge.

513

514

49 SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY POLICIES IN CENTRAL-​ EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES Dorota Szelewa

For welfare policies that were relatively well developed in state-​socialist countries, at least in terms of their support for dual-​earner families and female economic independence, the market-​oriented reforms that marked the fall of communism alongside a conservative turn in the public sphere meant justification for cuts in welfare spending, closing daycare centers in factories and in municipalities, or introducing an income test to previously universal schemes (Saxonberg 2014). From a gender perspective, the state withdrawing from childcare support burdened women with (even) more domestic work (Heinen 1997). Hence, by placing more emphasis on family as the locus of care, the new policies put the burden of care on women, either by explicitly supporting women performing the task of care at home, or implicitly, with the state withdrawing support for formal childcare and women ending up performing care due to gendered societal norms (Szelewa and Polakowski 2008). However, if one takes a closer look at the shape of childcare policies in Hungary, Czechoslovakia (and its successor states), and Poland there are also some important differences between these countries that were already present even before World War I (Hašková and Saxonberg 2016; Inglot 2008; Saxonberg 2014; Szelewa 2019). The aim of this chapter is to discuss the most important debates and research trends in relation to social welfare and family policies in Cental-Eastern Europe (CEE), with an emphasis on how these policies were involved in shaping gender relations in the region. Referring to scholarly debates on the impact of regime changes on welfare policy reforms, the chapter is particularly focused on studies showing how these historical events influenced shifts in gender roles. This is also placed in the context of debates taking place in western capitalist democracies. The goal of this chapter is not a comprehensive, in-​ depth analysis, but a brief review of the most important studies that have explored the issue of gender relations in CEE in conjunction with welfare and family policy reforms. Welfare is “the highest possible access to economic resources, a high level of well-​ being, including the happiness of the citizens, a guaranteed minimum income to avoid living in poverty, and, finally, having the capabilities to ensure the individual a good life” 514

515

Social welfare and family policies

(Greve 2013, 3), while this chapter is interested in on how the economic resources, level of well-​being, and income is gendered when channeled through public policies. This chapter focuses on family policies, that is, policies relating to care (mostly childcare), such as care services and parental leave schemes.

Legacies of the pre-​World War II period A majority of CEE comprised parts of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, and therefore their first welfare systems were strongly in a Bismarckian, conservative tradition, and oriented toward the male-​breadwinner model, but with a relatively developed system of preschool centers (Szikra 2004). The first pre-​World War I childcare policies in CEE were mostly maternalist, that is, treating gender roles as separate, and (working) women—​ primarily as mothers (Szelewa 2019). This emphasis on maternalism was not different from many western countries (Teichova 1988). Hungary was the pioneer example of introducing early education centers: the first ever kindergarten in CEE was opened in Budapest in 1836; attending kindergarten became obligatory for children between three and six years of age in 1891 (Bicskei 2006). These tendencies to develop childcare centers were inherited and sustained in the interwar period. The situation was quite similar in (post-​World War I) Czechoslovakia where, in 1869, the system of public early education centers was established (Teichova 1988). Consequently, the net of childcare centers was expanding and just before World War II the rate of enrolments reached 20 percent of children under the age of six, which was comparable to 23 percent in Hungary, while the same indicator for Poland was only 3 percent (Szelewa 2007). These differences in availability of the first early education and care institutions could have resulted in various levels of support for working mothers, with implications for gender relations. What the three countries had in common was the administration of these services. The countries established a split system, where preschool children were institutionally separated from small children (under the age of three). The latter group of children was then to be taken care of by their mothers. Such policy design was based on a specific gendered “logic of appropriateness” (Chappell 2006, 229) based on the premise that “women should not work, so nurseries [day care] should only be a last resort” (Hašková and Saxonberg 2016, 568).

State socialism and the new interpretation of gender roles: Pre-​1956 Immediately after World War II, when state-​socialist regimes in CEE introduced the principle of gender equality in their legal frameworks, the prewar legislation was regarded as bourgeois, and hence oppressive and exploitative (Szelewa 2019). The region went through a specific type of modernization phase, especially during the first years after the war, when female participation in the labor market was part of the large plan to build state-​socialist economies (Mieczkowski 1982). A rise in the accessibility of childcare services and state support for families was also aimed at stimulating fertility (Fidelis 2014). Although state-​socialist leaders shared a genuine concern about women’s emancipation, the push to mobilize the female labor force was also quite instrumental (Fidelis 2014), as all women were to be “liberated” by having gainful employment (Hašková and Saxonberg 2016, 570). In sum, women were needed both to produce children and to join the labor force. This, and a rapid process of industrialization, influenced a shift in gender

515

516

Dorota Szelewa

relations and the first, Stalinist period, contributed to the economic emancipation of women (Fidelis 2014; Szelewa 2019). During this first phase of state socialism, two kinds of policies were strengthened: while the impetus for the financial support for families was mainly to stimulate demographic growth, policies aimed at increasing female participation in the labor force were focused on public childcare (Heinen and Wator 2006). As far as cash transfers were concerned, family allowances were in support of all families with children, with some preferences for big families, especially in Czechoslovakia (Heitlinger 1976). In Poland, family allowances were added to mothers’ salaries and so that kind of family support was of an insurance-​ based character, attached to women’s status as worker and mother (Szelewa 2019).

Reinterpretation of gender roles after 1956 After 1956, when the regime allowed some political concessions, or, as in Hungary in the late 1960s, eventually adopted elements of the market economy, the mother–​worker model was slightly modified, which had an impact on changes in family-​related schemes (Heinen and Wator 2006). Maternity leave schemes were extended, with Czechoslovakia giving working women the right to 18 weeks’ paid maternity leave in 1956, which was the most extensive scheme of its kind among this group of countries (Świątkowski 1981) until maternity leave was extended to 20 weeks in Hungary in 1965 (Haney 2002). In 1972, Poland was the last country to extend maternity leave to 16 weeks (in the case of a first birth). The late 1960s were also marked by the introduction of a new parental leave scheme that followed maternity leave; in most cases the right to access such leave was limited to (employed) mothers, giving them the right to two or three years of additional leave (Saxonberg 2014). As a result of these changes, Hungarian and Czechoslovak mothers got the right to long, paid leave requiring them to go back to work mostly when the child was around three years of age. At the same time the leave in Poland was paid only from the early 1980s and from the outset the payment was means-​tested. Later on, these schemes survived the fall of state socialism and only recently underwent some major reforms (Hašková and Saxonberg 2016). These new policies strengthened entitlement to maternity-​related schemes and benefits but could also have important gendered implications. Heinen and Wator (2006) argue that extending maternity leave duration and the introduction of additional leave schemes kept women longer outside of the labor force to some extent (Heinen and Wator 2006). Hašková and Saxonberg (2016, 572) suggest that the regime realized there was an excess of labor force in comparison to the demand in the production sector, that is, “the economy could no longer ‘afford’ to employ all the women.” Scholars put forward that another reason for introducing policies aimed at withdrawing women from the labor force (at least temporarily) could be that the regime was concerned that women’s increased engagement in employment negatively affected fertility rates, which started to drop after the first baby-​boom period of the late 1940s and the 1950s (Fidelis 2014; Hašková and Saxonberg 2016). That was a clear shift as compared to the first, postwar period, where women were mobilized both to join the labor force and to give birth to children, while this reproductive function became more important during the second sub-​period during state socialism. Nevertheless, even though extensive maternity leave meant that women were taking longer career breaks, this did not preclude them from coming back to the labor market after the break. As throughout the whole period of state socialism the regime’s

516

517

Social welfare and family policies

policies were not accompanied by an equal emphasis on men to share household and care responsibilities (Saxonberg 2014), this tended to create a strong double burden for women (Heinen 1997). Investment in care services was insufficient, therefore the facilities remained understaffed, and the services were of a low quality. Developing childcare services did not represent a priority for the state-​socialist rulers, who often assumed that it would be grandmothers who would take care of the babies of their working daughters. Another important factor driving developments in the care sector were institutional legacies from the previous historical period. First, and common to all three countries, was the separation of early education (for children aged three to five years) from care services (for children under three years of age). In the 1950s, all three countries also administratively attached responsibility for the latter to the Ministry of Health. This led to a serious disinvestment in childcare services as compared to pre-​school education. Nevertheless, as the countries already had different levels of availability of these services before World War II, these differences continued to matter during state socialism: while in Hungary and Czechoslovakia up to 90 percent of children in their preschool age attended kindergartens, in Poland the same indicator never reached 50 percent (Heinen and Wator 2006). Also, none of the countries provided childcare services for more than 20 percent of children under the age of three, although again, Poland was a laggard in that respect, with no more than 5 percent of an enrolment rate throughout the whole period of state socialism, suggesting its society retained the most gendered notions of early childcare, whether it was carried out by mothers or grandmothers (Heinen and Wator 2006).

The collapse of state socialism, transformation, and comparative studies of the region After the collapse of state socialism, scholars became more interested in how the transformation to a market economy could influence gender roles. The first wave of research on the development of the welfare state in CEE tended to treat this region as a monolith and underlined its common features, stemming largely from the countries’ communist and postcommunist experiences (Pascall and Lewis 2004). With regards to family policies and gender relations, the story, as identified in this first wave of research, was quite simplified and the prevailing perception was the following: during state socialism women were encouraged to join the labor force. In the early 1990s, the governments of most of those newly democratized states were composed of former opposition leaders, often holding conservative views on gender roles. They assumed that after the period of so-​ called “forced commodification” during state socialism (and introducing the principle of top-​down gender equality), society would opt for a male-​breadwinner model. This conservative view on gender roles promoted by the new political leaders had an impact on welfare policy reforms, which included state withdrawal from supporting childcare centers, especially for small children (Haney 2002; Heinen 1997). In this narrative, CEE countries were quite different from those of Western Europe. Faced with change in demographic structure and with their welfare institutions under pressure, most of the western countries had converged in their departure from the male-​breadwinner model (Orloff 2009). Other domains, wherein this wave of “anti-​feminism” was demonstrated, included politics and reproductive rights. While in most countries of the region women disappeared

517

518

Dorota Szelewa

from politics (or their presence was much less pronounced), in Poland the Catholic Church lobbied successfully for a serious limitation of reproductive rights and, as a result, in 1993 the Parliament adopted a law seriously limiting the access to abortion (Heinen 1997). The political power of the Catholic Church was also strengthened by the fact that the Church presented itself as a hero fighting communism, demanding concessions in the form of concrete changes in public policies (Heinen and Wator 2006). After this initial period, researchers analyzing welfare state transformation in CEE countries in a comparative manner were pointing to differences between social welfare and family policies within the group (Fodor et al. 2002; Javornik 2014; Szelewa and Polakowski 2008). In particular, the study of Szelewa and Polakowski (2008) identified four different childcare regimes: “implicit familialism” (Poland), “explicit familialism” (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia), “comprehensive support/​ optional familialism” (Hungary, Lithuania) and “female mobilizing” (Estonia, Latvia), basing their analysis on the concept of defamilialization of care, that is, how state policies support moving the responsibility for performing and/​or financing care away from the family. Qualitative comparative case studies stressed the pre-​existing, historically grounded similarities and differences between the institutional solutions, such as separating early education and care, but also based the countries’ family support systems on previously established schemes (Hašková and Saxonberg 2016; Inglot, Szikra, and Raţ 2012).

From defamilialization to degenderization The aforementioned comparative studies on welfare and family policies included references to gender roles; however, in order to place the concept of gender at the center of analysis, Saxonberg (2013) suggested replacing the concept of “defamilialization” with “degenderization,” meaning “eliminating gender roles” (Saxonberg 2013, 33). In a larger context, this new conceptual framework also responded to the general tendencies in research to focus not only on reconciliation measures like childcare services provision, but also on the policy tools aimed at changing the attitudes of men. It was important to include into the analysis degenderizing care work as primarily women’s responsibility by redistributing care more equally within the household (Elson 2017). A degenderized version of policies would include generous parental leave with a strong obligation element for fathers (“use it or lose it” schemes). In parallel with previous studies, and using the concept of defamilialization, Saxonberg classified the case of Poland as “implicit genderization,” while in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia it was termed “explicit genderization” because of their long maternity and parental leave periods, inherited from state socialism (Saxonberg 2013). Together with their anticipated (and later, achieved) EU membership, the countries needed to adjust their welfare systems to EU anti-​discrimination laws. Labor codes were amended to open the existing parental schemes for men, while the principle of gender mainstreaming was adopted for evaluating the new policy programs and distributing EU structural funds. The establishment of the institutions for monitoring gender equality policies, although not directly influencing family and welfare policies, had some indirect impact on the acceptance of gender equality as a principle for public policy reforms, at least for some period of time (Saxonberg 2015).

518

519

Social welfare and family policies

In concert with the debate placing more emphasis on the centrality of gender-​ sensitive analysis of welfare policies, new concepts were developed, such as the “capability approach” (Javornik and Kurowska 2017). Aimed at capturing accessibility of social rights filtered through gendered norms and economic constraints, the approach was aimed at presenting the structure of “real opportunities for parents” (Javornik and Kurowska 2017, 617). The study demonstrated the internal variety of another East European subgroup of countries—​the Baltic states—​as the researchers situated Estonia closer to the dual earner and gender equalizing model of the Nordic states, and Lithuania as approaching a male-​breadwinner model (for further inquiries on the internal differences within the Baltic states group see Aidukaite 2019; Toots and Lauri 2017).

Gender, right-​wing populism, and recent welfare policy reforms More recently, scholars of the region have engaged in analyzing the impact of right-​wing populism on the public interpretations of gender equality and the concept of gender as such, including LGBT+ rights (Grzebalska and Pető 2018; Korolczuk and Graff 2018). This wave of right-​wing populists’ political victories included the governments formed by Fidesz in Hungary (from 2010), Law and Justice in Poland (2005–​2007 and 2015 onwards), the Civic Democratic Party (various periods from 2006 until 2013) or the ANO party (from 2017) in the Czech Republic. The populist Right re-​employed ideas about conservative gender roles and understanding women’s roles predominantly through their reproductive capacities and rejected the previous adoption of gender equality and gender mainstreaming policies coming from the EU (Szelewa and Polakowski 2020). References to the histories and struggles with keeping national identity have now been coupled with the discourse on demographic downfall. Faced with falling birth rates, right-​wing populists employ discourses about the “dying nation,” often placed in a broader historical context of partitions, wars, western invasions and martyrdom (Mishtal 2012). Various statements of government officials and other influential political actors underline the similarity between the EU’s strategic goals for women’s employment and the priorities of the state-​socialist regime that mobilized the female labor force (Szelewa and Polakowski 2020). Some welfare reforms marked CEE reorientation toward genderization as they included strengthening family-​related cash transfers at the expense of investment in care services (Szelewa and Polakowski 2020). In Poland, gender-​differentiated retirement age reform (65 for men and 60 for women) was introduced, while mothers of at least four children got the right to a basic pension. In Hungary, the government strengthened tax breaks for families with three or more children with the overall support in cash for mothers with at least three children equaling the level of the minimum wage (Szikra 2014). This recent trend toward the regenderization of family policies strengthens the convergence of the welfare policies of the region, while at the same time the impact of historically embedded differences and institutional legacies from the previous historical periods seems to be lessening.

Conclusions Studies analyzing the early development of welfare laws and policies in CEE emphasized how their institutional features were embedded in regime changes, gaining political independence after World War I, coming under Soviet influence after World War II, with

519

520

Dorota Szelewa

the profound impact of the state-​socialist vision of society and its principle of gender equality implemented top-​down and undergoing the process of postcommunist transformation after 1989. Although these big events to a large extent inspired similar trends in family policies within this group of countries, some important differences were present already during the pre-​1989 period. Differences in the level of accessibility of care and early education services that existed even before World War II continued to influence the development of these services during the state-​socialist period and even after the fall of state socialism, with Poland remaining the long-​term laggard. Generosity and the level of maternal entitlements also historically differed: with the most generous support for working mothers in Hungary; long, but poorly paid leave periods in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia); and shorter and less generous periods in Poland. Importantly, the legacy of state socialism is also difficult to assess in terms of its impact on gender relations. On the one hand, the top-​down implementation of gender equality seemed artificial, with similar effects for gender relations, as none of the countries provided a fully emancipating set of policies, even during state socialism. Moreover, women were often treated instrumentally—​once the regime realized there was not enough demand for labor, the introduction of longer breaks from work for mothers served to withdraw women, at least temporarily, from employment, a tendency which was more profound during the second sub-​period of state socialism, that is, after 1956. On the other hand, a rapid increase in female employment during state socialism was largely sustained during the postcommunist period and normalized women’s professional engagement. After the old system collapsed, according to most scholars, the tendency in CEE countries was to “come back to normality,” through, among others, the re-​introduction of separate gender roles, even if that was just a utopian vision, as each family needed two breadwinners to deal with the conditions that resulted from the economic hardship of transformation. Such a trend marked a difference when compared to the discussion on gender and care in western countries. The latter emphasized most welfare systems departing from separate gender roles. Only when CEE aspired for and finally achieved its integration with the EU, did the EU gender equality policies have some minor, indirect impact on the discourse on gender equality. The differences seem to gradually play a smaller role throughout the most recent historical period. Together with the wave of right-​wing populist parties entering government offices in CEE, these countries are currently experiencing a retreat from the EU-​inspired policies of gender equality, while these anti-​ feminist trends in public debates again inspire welfare policies aimed at retraditionalization and regenderization of work and care.

References Aidukaite, Jolanta. 2019. “The Welfare Systems of the Baltic States Following the Recent Financial Crisis of 2008–​2010: Expansion or Retrenchment?” Journal of Baltic Studies: The Baltic States After the Crisis? The Transformation of Welfare Systems and Social Problems 50 (1): 39–​58. Bicskei, Éva. 2006. “ ‘Our Greatest Treasure, the Child’: The Politics of Child Care in Hungary, 1945–​1956.” Social Politics 13 (2): 151–​188. Chappell, Louise. 2006 “Comparing Political Institutions: Revealing the Gendered ‘Logic of Appropriateness.’” Politics & Gender 2 (2): 223–​235. Elson, Diane. 2017. “Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute Unpaid Care Work: How to Close the Gender Gap.” New Labor Forum 26 (2): 52–​61. Fidelis, Małgorzata. 2014. Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland: Cambridge University Press.

520

521

Social welfare and family policies Fodor, Eva, Christy Glass, J. Kawachi, and L. Popescu. 2002. “Family Policies and Gender in Hungary, Poland and Romania.” Communist and Post-​Communist Studies 35 (4): 475–​490. Greve, Bent. 2013. The Routledge Handbook of the Welfare State. London and New York: Routledge. Grzebalska, Weronika and Andrea Pető. 2018. “The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland.” Women’s Studies International Forum 68: 164–​172. Haney, Lynn. 2002. Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hašková, Hana and Steven Saxonberg. 2016. “The Revenge of History: The Institutional Roots of Post-​Communist Family Policy in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.” Social Policy & Administration 50 (5): 559–​579. Heinen, Jacqueline. 1997. “Public/​Private: Gender, Social and Political Citizenship in Eastern Europe.” Theory and Society 26 (4): 577–​597. Heinen, Jacqueline and Monika Wator. 2006. “Child Care in Poland Before, During, and After the Transition: Still a Women’s Business.” Social Politics 13 (2): 189–​216. Heitlinger, Alena. 1976. “Pro-​ Natalist Population Policies in Czechoslovakia.” Population Studies 30. Inglot, Tomasz. 2008. Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–​ 2004. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Inglot, Tomasz, Dorottya Szikra, and Cristina Raţ. 2012. “Reforming Post-​Communist Welfare States: Family Policy in Poland, Hungary, and Romania Since 2000.” Problems of Post-​ Communism 59 (6): 27–​49. Javornik, Jana. 2014. “Measuring State De-​Familialism: Contesting Post-​Socialist Exceptionalism.” Journal of European Social Policy 24 (3): 240–​257. Javornik, Jana and Anna Kurowska. 2017. “Work and Care Opportunities under Different Parental Leave Systems: Gender and Class Inequalities in Northern Europe.” Social Policy and Administration 51 (4): 617–​637. Korolczuk, Elżbieta and Agnieszka Graff. 2018. “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’: The Anticolonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (4): 797–​821. Mieczkowski, Bogdan.1982. Social Services for Women in Eastern Europe. Charleston, IL: Association for the Study of the Nationalities (USSR and East Europe). Mishtal, J. 2012. “Irrational Non-​reproduction? The ‘Dying Nation’ and the Postsocialist Logics of Declining Motherhood in Poland.” Anthropology and Medicine 19 (2): 153–​169. Orloff, Ann Shola. 2009. “Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda.” Sociological Theory 27 (3): 317–​343. Pascall, Gill and Jane Lewis. 2004. “Emerging Gender Regimes and Policies for Gender Equality in a Wider Europe.” Journal of Social Policy 33 (3): 373–​394. Saxonberg, Steven. 2013. “From Defamilialization to Degenderization: Toward a New Welfare Typology.” Social Policy and Administration 47 (1): 26–​49. –​–​–​–. 2014. Gendering Family Policies in Post-​ Communist Europe—​ A Historical–​ Institutional Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. –​–​–​–. 2015. “The Indirect Future Influence of the EU on Post-​Communist Family Policy.” Social Policy & Administration 49 (4): 512–​529. Świątkowski, Andrzej. 1981. Urlopy Opiekuncze. Warszawa, Krakow: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Szelewa, Dorota. 2007. “Three Faces of Familialism: A Historical Development of Family Policies in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.” A paper presented at the 5th ESPAnet Conference, Vienna, Austria, September 20–​22. –​–​–​–. 2019. “Invention–​Institutionalization–​Implementation: The Origins of Childcare Policies in Poland.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 26 (1): 139–​163. Szelewa, Dorota and Michal Polakowski. 2008. “Who Cares? Changing Patterns of Childcare in Central and Eastern Europe.” Journal of European Social Policy 18 (2): 115–​131. –​–​–​–. 2020. “The ‘Ugly’ Face of Social Investment? The Politics of Childcare in Central and Eastern Europe.” Social Policy and Administration 54 (1): 14–​27. Szikra, Dorottya. 2004. “The Thorny Path to Implementation: Bismarckian Social Insurance in Hungary in the Late 19th Century.” European Journal of Social Security 6 (3): 255–​272.

521

522

Dorota Szelewa –​–​–​–. 2014. “Democracy and Welfare in Hard Times: The Social Policy of the Orbán Government in Hungary between 2010 and 2014.” Journal of European Social Policy 24 (5): 486–​500. Teichova, Alice. 1988. The Czechoslovak Economy, 1918–​1980. Contemporary Economic History of Europe Series. London and New York: Routledge. Toots, Anu and Triin Lauri. 2017. “Varieties of Social Investment Policies on Two Sides of the Baltic Sea: Explaining Routes to Endurance.” Social Policy & Administration 51 (4): 550–​576.

522

523

50 WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION IN SPORT Honorata Jakubowska

Although a relatively new focus of study—​often conducted only in the local languages—​ the scholarship of sports research shows that sociopolitical changes that took place in the countries of Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE) since the 1990s and the collapse of communism have reshaped sport, both professional and amateur, in ways that are gendered. Previously subordinated to ideology and state-​controlled during the communist era, professional sport in postcommunist CEE has become dependent on business, mass media, and international sports federations, while amateur sport has been transformed into activities that people do during their free time as part of a healthy lifestyle. Despite the growing number of female athletes participating in sports mega-​events, such as the Olympic Games, insufficient support from state and local authorities and marginalization in the media have worsened the financial situation of women’s sport even if the athletes have more autonomy than under communist time. The particular sociopolitical context, with a shorter history of feminism, persistent gender inequalities, and the strength of conservative parties in some countries, does not allow women to break through the glass ceiling in management within sports federations.

Physical culture and professional sport under communism In communist CEE, the concept of physical culture defined the status of amateur sport for both women and men. In contrast to the western concept of leisure sport, the Soviet model constructed physical culture as “an organized part of cultural and social life [for] the harmonic physical and spiritual development of its citizens, improving their health, increasing and extending creative activities, improving work productivity and defending the Motherland” (Grant 2011, 495). Adopted into CEE after World War II, this framing meant the ideologization of amateur sport, shifting it from the private to the public sphere governed by the state (Edelman, Hilbrenner, and Brownell 2014; Gál and Földesi 2018; Girginov 1998). Sport was perceived as part of the creation of the “socialist way of life” (Pfister 2003) and was used as one of the tools of government propaganda concerning the unity of communist societies. The communist states encouraged people to practice sports activities to create healthy, vital, and strong workers and citizens. Riordan and

523

524

Honorata Jakubowska

Cantelon (2003), in their analysis of mass sports in the USSR, listed among others its role in nation building, integration, maintenance of health, and hygiene, which concerned both men and women. In Poland, for example, the Communist Party emphasized the role of physical culture in family life and social integration (Mathur 2013). In Romania, the government encouraged women to practice gymnastics and yoga to foster their health as well as the public health of the nation (Petracovschi and Chin 2018). Within this ideological framing, sports politics was used as an ideological tool of gender equality and women’s liberation. Both men and women were required to practice physical activities to make their bodies more efficient for state purposes, such as to increase productivity. Female athletes were cast as patriots, part of the communist propaganda claiming that only communist political systems can provide for gender equality. However, there was “the vast gap between rhetoric and reality in women’s physical culture” (Mathur 2013, 26). This was perhaps more true in amateur sport, such as leisure, school, or university sport than in competitive sport (Földesi 2009). Women’s role in professional sport was even more ideologically driven. The promotion of women in sport was not based on gender equality or emancipatory politics, but on nationalist aims, such as bringing glory to a communist nation. In the period between 1960 and 1980, sports successes in international competitions, especially for women, were presented in CEE countries as demonstrating the supremacy of communism over western capitalism in an international political context and as proof of gender equality in a domestic context (Costache 2007; Mathur 2013; Edelman, Hilbrenner, and Brownell 2014; Jakubowska and Ličen 2019). These efforts included an organized doping system in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the USSR. Though both men and women were forced to dope, female athletes were more likely to be affected since the use of steroids gave better results in women, including bigger muscles (Edelman, Hilbrenner, and Brownell 2014, 608). These doping campaigns resulted in serious physical and psychological damage for many female athletes (Gerrard 2008; Dennis and Grix 2012). As a result of female athletes’ efforts, the communist states’ support for women’s sport, and the doping campaigns, female athletes from the Eastern Bloc dominated international sport in the 1970s and 1980s, winning a majority of medals in track and field or swimming competitions (Holden 2004, 640). The number of women on national teams increased, with individual athletes becoming more visible and recognized, even internationally; some of them were awarded the status of a national heroine, which came with some political and economic privileges (Hargreaves 1994, 224). For example, Polish sprinter Irena Szewińska, winner of seven Olympic medals between 1964 and 1976, was awarded a Commander’s Cross in 1974 and chosen four times as the best Polish athlete (Jakubowska and Ličen 2019), while Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, after her victory at the 1976 Olympics, was awarded a national state distinction “Hero of the Working Class” and became “an object of cult” (Costache 2007, 21). European and international sports officials, in the polarized geopolitical environment, grew concerned with the remarkable increases in the abilities of female athletes from the GDR and the USSR, which they saw as being accompanied by the “masculinization” of their bodies, assumed to be caused by testosterone, and introduced sex testing for only female athletes (Pilgrim, Martin, and Binder 2003; Wiederkehr 2009). Female athletes first underwent sex verification during the 1966 European Athletics Championships in Budapest, which were then formalized by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Over the years,

524

525

Women’s representation in sport

the methods of sex verification changed from the visual inspection of external genitalia to detection of the presence of the SRY gene found on the Y chromosome. In 1992, the IAAF suspended the sex verification procedure; seven years later, the IOC made the same decision. Pieper (2014) argues that the launch of sex verification resulted from the perception of sportswomen from CEE as “others” threatening male domination in sport, successes of western athletes, and the western image of femininity. However, this policy did not stop female athletes from the Eastern Bloc, although few of them resigned from the competitions, like Tamara and Irina Press, who were accused of being male or intersex, and others were excluded, sometimes unjustly, such as Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska (Pilgrim, David, and Binder 2003).

The privatization of leisure sport and the marketization of professional sport in the postcommunist era The fall of communism in CEE and the de-​politicization of sport caused the disappearance of compulsory physical culture and the appearance of leisure-​time sport. As sport, in general, is no longer an ideological tool for the state purpose, most physical activity has been relegated to leisure time. Although the state still promotes sport as a tool to enhance individual health, emphasizing its physical and psychological benefits, this discourse is focused on the individual citizen, not the state. It results from the sociopolitical and economic changes in the region, such as the establishment of democracy, processes of individualization, and the marketization of the sport and leisure sector. Similarly to western countries, these changes appear to have fostered gender differences in levels of physical activity in CEE. In Poland, 62 percent of women as compared to 42 percent of men never exercise or play sport; in Romania, 68 percent of women as compared to 58 percent of men; and in Hungary, 56 percent of women as compared to 49 percent of men (European Union 2017). The Czech Republic is an exception, with 42 percent of women and 40 percent of men never exercising or playing sport. Lower levels of women’s sport-​related activity should be perceived as a result of gender socialization, gender roles, and images (Pfister 2013) rather than a differentiated state policy toward men and women. The rate of physically active citizens is significantly lower in postcommunist countries than in the Scandinavian region or Benelux countries (European Union 2017). Bartolj and Slabe-​Erker (2015, 249) argue that there are two primary explanations: (1) the postcommunist neglect of the idea of “sport for all,” with current policy mainly oriented toward youth and professional sport; and (2) the overpricing or lack of sport infrastructure, especially in rural areas. The political and economic changes of 1989 to 1990 that took place in the CEE countries also had a significant impact on professional sport. Most importantly, the state-​ funded, centralized sport systems that existed in the communist era had to change their structure, financing, and management to deal with the significant reduction in state funding. Athletes, officially employed in state enterprises (Costache 2007), faced the forces of privatization that caused many factories to close, and many lost their means of support as well as their access to sports facilities. This practice affected women athletes perhaps even more than men as, being (potential) mothers, they were considered an “unreliable workforce” (Gál 2008). Analyzing Hungarian sport in the 1990s, Földesi (1999, cited by Gál 2008), calls Hungarian sport, athletes, and coaches, losers in the political changes.

525

526

Honorata Jakubowska

The new financial pressures meant that sponsors sought sports disciplines that have the biggest live and media audience, that is, men’s team sports competitions. Analyses of Polish television and press coverage revealed that media are dominated by men’s soccer (58 percent on TV in 2008, 57 percent in the press in 2011) and by men’s sport, mainly team sport (Jakubowska 2015; Kluczyńska 2011). The marginalization of women’s sport is also observed in the Hungarian press, both in textual and visual coverage (Gál, Velenczei, and Kovács 2010) and Croatian and Serbian television (Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities 2017). The biggest gap in funding between women and men can be observed in soccer (football), the most popular sport in Europe. In Croatia, big funding gaps have also been found in ice hockey, basketball, and volleyball (Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities 2017). Although men and women receive equal numbers of scholarships and awards from the governments (such as for earning an Olympic medal), the money that local authorities spend on sport differs according to gender.

Women’s (un)recognition in postcommunist professional sport Over time, women from CEE, similarly to women from other parts of Europe and elsewhere, have increased their participation in sports mega-​events such as the Olympic Games. The most successful female athletes in such events are widely recognized and get attention from media, sponsors, and sports federations. The examples are numerous, for example, tennis player Simona Halep from Romania, alpine ski racer Tina Maze from Slovenia, Hungarian runner Gabriella Szabó, hammer throw competitor Anita Włodarczyk from Poland. These successful female athletes are treated as national heroines, particularly when there are no male athletes with the same achievements in a particular sports discipline. As noted by Antunovic (2019, 65), “in the Central-​Eastern European context, female athletes symbolically represent national characteristics and the well-​being of the nation.” The contemporary postcommunist states use sport and the successful athletes to gain a political advantage (Földesi 2009), which is particularly visible in internal politics. The politicians burnish their image by meetings with successful athletes, presence at sports events, and supporting practices in social media; however, these practices are not usually gendered and depend on the athletes’ achievements and the popularity of the sports discipline in particular countries. Contrary to the communist era, female (as well as male) athletes’ successes should not be perceived as a result of the policies of the state. State policies are focused on amateur sport, construction of sports facilities, and financing athletes who are training for the Olympic Games (Kobiela 2011). The sports federations are responsible for organizations of sports competitions in particular disciplines, and a sports career is linked to belonging to a sports club. Although the politicians have some formal and informal influence on sports federations, for example concerning staffing, subsidy, or support in the organization of the sports mega-​events, CEE governments generally neglect sport. The exception is organization of sports mega-​events perceived as a chance for “a civilizational leap” that can be illustrated by the example of the Euro 2012 UEFA football championships, organized by Poland and Ukraine (Kossakowski 2019). Therefore, the status of female athletes has been subjected to market rules and depends on the financial situation of the clubs, individual sponsorship contracts, and media

526

527

Women’s representation in sport

visibility. Outside of the sports mega-​events that provide opportunities for female athletes to become “patriots at play” (Vincent and Crossman 2012, 87, see also Jakubowska and Ličen 2019), a lot of them do not receive sufficient financial support; moreover they are often not supported adequately after childbirth (Gál, Velenczei, and Kovács 2010). The decrease in state control has not meant that the management of professional sport, or coaching positions, has become less male-​dominated after the political turn in CEE. On the contrary, women still constitute a minority of coaches as the data from, for example the Czech Republic and Poland, reveal (Fasting and Knorre 2005; Włoch 2014; Żukowska and Żukowski 2009). Moreover, women are more likely to coach children and youth, and older athletes tend to have fewer female coaches (Bodnár 2012, as cited by Gál and Földesi 2018). Although, globally, women are a minority in the leadership positions of sports organizations, one can observe that in CEE countries, their proportion is lower than in Western and North Europe. Norway (37 percent) and Wales (29 percent) had the highest percentage of female members on National Sports Federations boards in 2013–​2014, while the lowest were found in Poland (9 percent), Czech Republic (11 percent), Italy (11 percent), Greece (12 percent) and Croatia (12 percent) (Adriaanse 2018). More recent available data confirm the low percentage of women among sports federation board members in Poland (12 percent) and Hungary (8 percent) (Jakubowska 2018; Gál and Földesi 2018; for Poland see also Organista 2017). Moreover, the same countries had the largest number of sports federations’ boards constituted only by men. As noted by Elling, Hovden, and Knoppers (2018, 181), broader social gender (in) equalities help explain women’s situation in sports management. Both Poland and Hungary rank much lower on the Gender Equality Index (2019) than the countries that have the highest ratios of women in sports federations, for example Norway and Sweden. In Poland and Hungary, the changes related to gender equality that have taken place in sports organizations, similarly to other areas of social life, were spurred by external bodies, such as the European Union (EU) and the IOC (Gál and Földesi 2018; Jakubowska 2018). At the same time, CEE feminist organizations have largely neglected sport, focusing their attention on other issues seen by them as more serious or urgent. The everyday situation of many female athletes is difficult, especially in team sport. Their concerns have started to appear on the agenda of higher-​level sports organizations. For example, the Czech Olympic Committee established a Women and Sport Committee in 1997. Among this committee’s activities were the organization of national seminars and conferences to discuss women’s status as sports leaders, coaches, and PE teachers, and cooperation with media (Fasting and Knorre 2005). In 1994, the first National Conference on Women and Sport took place in Hungary (Gál and Földesi 2018), and the next year, the first National Conference on the Role of Sport in Women’s Life took place in Poland. Its organizer—​the Polish Federation of Women’s Sport—​arranged similar conferences in the following years, published several books on women and sport, and presented awards to the best female athletes and their coaches. While women from CEE have started to organize changes to their status in sport, their activity is still on a much smaller scale than their colleagues from Western Europe, the United States, or Australia.

Conclusions Contemporary sport in CEE countries operate mainly according to the rules of the market. To be on an equal footing with men’s sport, they would have to get the same

527

528

Honorata Jakubowska

attention as men from mass media, sponsors, and sports organizations. The democratization of the CEE region, the current geopolitical situation, and the neglect of sport in the governments’ policies make it impossible for sportswomen to count on the state support that their predecessors had received. The politicians like to surround themselves with successful and recognized athletes to gain popularity; however, contrary to the previous era, these successes do not result from planned state policy. The gendered dimension of sport that used to be a part of the political game has become mainly dependent on market rules, independent of a state. The marketization of sport that took place in CEE after the collapse of the communist system has raised very similar problems to those experienced by female athletes in other European countries and the United States, such as marginalization in media coverage and less financing, as compared to men’s sport. In some aspects, the situation of sportswomen in CEE is worse than in Northern and Western Europe, illustrated by the low percentage of women on the boards of sports federations. The latter can be partially explained by the broader sociocultural context, such as bigger gender inequalities in this region or the less developed feminist movements. Given the many barriers that women still have to overcome, for example in politics or economics, it is not surprising that women’s discrimination in sport is not considered a priority. Comparison of sportswomen’s situations across the communist and postcommunist periods is challenging. There is no doubt that female athletes are now more independent from the state than before, but this carries both positive and negative consequences. While on the one hand, they are less used for political and ideological gain, on the other they are less financially secure and supported. The best female athletes have gained international recognition and earn a lot of money, although usually less than their male counterparts. The biggest gender differences are observed in the most popular team sports—​the less popular the sport, the smaller the gender differences. Gender differences in voluntary amateur sport have replaced the compulsory physical culture. Sport as a leisure activity is more popular among men than women, which is not, however, specific to the region. It is important that women have begun to organize changes to their situation in both amateur and professional sport. They have also obtained support from a scientific environment, demonstrated by a growing number of publications and conferences on women and sport in CEE countries. In the end, it should be noted that women’s status—​both inside and outside sport—​ differs in particular countries of CEE. Therefore, this chapter should be read as a description of some general trends and similarities rather than a detailed analysis focused on each country. The differences between countries that share a common history of women’s sport, that create their herstory and politics toward females in sport as separate and independent states, seem to be particularly interesting and worthy of further research.

References Adriaanse, Johanna A. 2018. “Europe in World Perspective: The Sydney Scoreboard Global Index for Women in Sport Leadership.” In Gender Diversity in European Sport Governance, edited by Agnes Elling, Jorid Hovden, and Annelies Knoppers, 11–​19. Abingdon: Routledge. Antunovic, Dunja. 2019.“‘Turned into the Women’s Journal:’ Representation of Sportswomen in Hungary’s Sports Magazine.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 54 (1): 63–​85. Bartolj, Tjasa and Renata Slabe-​Erker. 2015. “Differences in Leisure Time Physical Activity Predictors in Europe.” Polish Sociological Review 2 (190): 239–​254.

528

529

Women’s representation in sport Bodnár, Ilona. 2012. “Az edzői munka mint foglalkozási életpálya.” [“Coaching as a professional career.”] PhD diss., Semmelweis Egyetem. Costache, Irina. 2007. “Femininity at Play: A Case Study on a Romanian Women’s Football.” MA thesis, Central European University. Dennis, Mark and Jonathan Grix. 2012. Sport Under Communism. Behind the East German ‘Miracle.’ London: Palgrave Macmillan. Edelman, Robert, Hilbrenner, Anke, and Susan Brownell. 2014. “Sport under Communism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, edited by Stephen A. Smith, 603–​616. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elling, Agnes, Hovden, Jordi, and Annelies Knoppers. 2018. “Meta-​ analyses. Data and Methodologies.” In Gender Diversity in European Sport Governance, edited by Agnes Elling, Jorid Hovden, and Annelies Knoppers, 179–​191. Abingdon: Routledge. European Union. 2017. “Special Eurobarometer 472: Sport and Physical Activity.” 1–​ 133. Brussels: European Commission. Fasting, Kari and Nada Knorre. 2005. Women in Sport in the Czech Republic. Report. Oslo & Praha, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and Czech Olympic Committee. Földesi, Gyöngyi S. 1999. Félamatőrök, félprofik. Magyar olimpikonok (1980–​ 1996) [Semi-​ amateurs, Semi-​professionals. Hungarian Olympics (1980–​1996)]. Budapest: MOB. —​—​—. 2009. “Post-​transformational Trends in Hungarian Sport (1995–​2004).” Physical Culture and Sport Studies and Research 46 (1): 137–​146. Gál, Andrea. 2008. “Social Status of Hungarian (Sports) Women Before and After the 1989–​1990 Political System Change.” European Journal for Sport and Society 5 (2): 195–​210. Gál, Andrea and Gyöngyi S. Földesi. 2018. “Hungary: Unquestioned Male Dominance.” In Gender Diversity in European Sport Governance, edited by Agnes Elling, Jorid Hovden, and Annelies Knoppers, 70–​80. Abingdon: Routledge. Gál, Andrea, Arpád Velenczei, and Atilla Kovács. 2010. “An Unchanged Situation in a Changing Society: The Hungarian Case.” In Sportswomen at the Olympics: A Global Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage, edited by Toni Bruce, Jorid Hovden, and Pirrko Markula, 141–​152. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Gender Equality Index. 2019. https://​eige.europa.eu/​gender-​equality-​index/​2019. Gerrard, David F. 2008. “Playing Foreign Policy Games: States, Drugs and Other Olympian Vices.” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 11 (4): 459–​466. Girginov, Vassil. 1998. “Capitalist Philosophy and Communist Practice: The Transformation of Eastern European Sport and the International Olympic Committee.” Culture, Sport, Society 1 (1): 118–​148. Grant, Susan. 2011. “The Politics and Organization of Physical Culture in the USSR during the 1920s.” The Slavonic and East European Review 89 (3): 494–​515. Hargreaves, Jennifer. 1994. Sporting Females. Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports. London: Routledge. Holden, Constance. 2004. “An Everlasting Gender Gap?” Science 305 (5684): 639–​640. Jakubowska, Honorata. 2015. “Are Women Still the ‘Other Sex’? Gender and Sport in the Polish Mass Media.” Sport in Society 18 (2): 168–​185. Jakubowska, Honorata. 2018. “Poland: Underrepresentation and Misrecognition of Women in Sport Leadership.” In Gender Diversity in European Sport Governance, edited by Agnes Elling, Jorid Hovden, and Annelies Knoppers, 59–​69. Abingdon: Routledge. Jakubowska, Honorata and Simon Ličen. 2019. “The Role of Newspapers in the Formation of Gendered National Identity: Polish Coverage of Women’s and Men’s Basketball Championships.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 54 (3): 302–​324. Kluczyńska, Urszula. 2011. “Męska dominacja i piłka nożna. Analizy medialnych prezentacji.” [“Male Domination and Football. The Analysis of Media Representation.”] In Karuzela z mężczyznami, edited by Katarzyna Wojnicka and Ewelina Ciaputa, 65–​90. Kraków: Impuls. Kobiela, Filip. 2011. “From State Socialism to Free Society: Sport in Poland from 1945 until Present Day.” In The Interaction of Sport and Society in the V4 Countries, edited by Gyongyi Szabo Földesi and Tamas Dóczi, 85–​93. Budapest: HSSS. Kossakowski, Radosław. 2019. “Euro 2012, ‘the Civilizational Leap’ and the ‘Supported United programme’: A Football Mega-​event and the Evaluation of Fan Culture in Poland.” Soccer & Society 20: 729–​743.

529

530

Honorata Jakubowska Mathur, Nameeta. 2013. “Women’s Physical Culture in Poland from the Late 19th Century until the Collapse of Communism.” Człowiek i Społeczeństwo XXXVI (1): 15–​38. Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities. 2017. “Equality between Men and Women in the Sport Programmes through Audiovisual Media Services.” www.rirm.org/​wp-​content/​ uploads/​2018/​02/​Study-​Gender-​Equallity-​in-​SPORTS-​PROGRAMMES_​2017_​ENGLISH_​ ANGLAIS.pdf. Organista, Natalia. 2017. “Underrepresentation of Women in Sports Organizations. Polish, British and International Organizations—​A Comparative Analysis.” Central European Journal of Sport Sciences and Medicine 19 (3): 55–​66. Petracovschi, Simona and Jessica W. Chin. 2018. “Sports, Physical Practice, and the Female Body, 1980–​1989: Women’s Emancipation in Romania under Communism.” Critical Studies in Media Communication. www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​15295036.2018.1516045?journalCode= rcsm20. Pfister, Gertrud. 2003. “A World Power in Women’s Sport. Women without Power in Sport: Gender, Power and Sport in East Germany.” www.idrottsforum.org/​articles/​pfister/​pfister.html. –​–​–​–. 2013. “Gender and Sport: Empirical Data and Theoretical Considerations.” Człowiek i Społeczeństwo XXXVI (1): 39–​56. Pieper, Lindsay Parks. 2014. “Sex Testing and the Maintenance of Western Femininity in International Sport.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 31 (13): 1557–​1576. Pilgrim, Jill, David Martin, and Will Binder. 2003. “Far from the Finish Line: Transsexualism and Athletic Competition.” Media & Entertainment Law Journal 13: 495–​549. Riordan, James and Hart Cantelon. 2003. “The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” In European Cultures of Sport Examining the Nations and Regions, edited by James Riordan and Arnd Krüger, 89–​102. Bristol: Intellect Books. Vincent, John and Jane Crossman. 2012. “‘Patriots at Play:’ Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the Gold Medal Contenders in Men’s and Women’s Ice Hockey at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.” International Journal of Sport Communication 5 (1): 87–​108. Wiederkehr, Stefan. 2009. “‘We Shall Never Know the Exact Number of Men who Have Competed in the Olympics Posing as Women’: Sport, Gender Verification and the Cold War.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 26 (4): 556–​572. Włoch, Renata. 2014. Bariery równouprawnienia płci w sporcie [Barriers to Gender Equality in Sport]. Warszawa: Fundacja Instytut Społeczno-​Ekonomicznych Ekspertyz. Żukowska, Zofia and Ryszard Żukowski. 2009. “Sport kobiet—​szanse i zagrożenia.” [“Women’s Sport—​Opportunities and Threats.”] In Sport kobiet w Polsce—​stań badań, edited by Teresa Socha and Józef Bergier. Warszawa: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki, Krajowa Federacja Sportu dla Wszystkich, AWF Józefa Piłsudskiego w Warszawie.

530

531

51 GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND DISABILITY IN POSTSOCIALIST CENTRAL-​E ASTERN EUROPE Teodor Mladenov

Contemporary intersections between androcentrism, heterosexism, and ableism in the postsocialist countries of Central-​Eastern Europe (CEE) are historically conditioned by the region’s state socialist past, as well as by more recent neoliberal transformations since the disintegration of state socialism at the end of the 1980s. The combined impact of these historical forces on gender, sexuality, and disability in present-​day CEE calls for a critical and intersectional analysis. This approach to studying the postsocialist region prioritizes continuity and intersectionality over narratives of historical rupture and preoccupations with single, discrete identities. More specifically, I argue that state socialist productivism, biological reductionism, and institutional confinement interacted with welfare state retrenchment, re-​traditionalization of society, and creeping marketization to enhance the oppression of women and of homosexual and disabled people in mutually reinforcing ways. Simultaneously, oppression was countered with active responses in the private and public realms. Similar to hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality that oppress women and homosexual people by establishing systems of androcentrism and heterosexism, hegemonic constructions of disability oppress people with impairments by entrenching ableism (Campbell 2009, 5). Echoing feminists’ distinction between sex and gender, disability scholars and activists have distinguished between individual/​biological impairment and social/​political disability, conceptualizing the latter as restrictions imposed upon people with impairments by the way society is organized (Oliver 1996). Ableism means presuming or imposing a corporeal standard that prioritizes certain individual features as inherently positive or fully human and, accordingly, negates other characteristics—​to wit, those conventionally denoted as impairments—​as inherently negative and unwanted (Campbell 2009, 5). Moreover, as compulsory able-​ bodiedness (McRuer 2002, 89), ableism has an oppressive impact on everyone and not only on people with recognized impairments. Androcentrism, heterosexism, and ableism intersect in various ways. Before introducing the historical specificity of these intersections in the postsocialist CEE, I will first present their general features. Androcentrism and heterosexism are as much underpinned and organized by ableism as the latter is structured along the lines of the former: “The most successful heterosexual subject is the one whose sexuality is not compromised by 531

532

Teodor Mladenov

disability (metaphorized as queerness); the most successful able-​bodied subject is the one whose ability is not compromised by queerness (metaphorized as disability)” (McRuer 2002, 94). Such intersections, complemented by classism, racism, and otherisms, have shaped actual oppression under conditions of modernity, capitalist and (post)socialist alike. Pervasive othering (Shakespeare 1994, 290–​293) has imposed cultural restrictions and material barriers upon disabled people’s sexual agency, while disabled people’s gender identities have been undermined by ableist normativity. Coupled with heightened eugenic sentiments, in many parts of the world such restrictions, barriers, and normativities have found legislative and institutional expression via explicit limitations imposed—​ sometimes violently—​upon disabled people’s sexual and reproductive rights (Human Rights Watch 2011). Disability studies scholars (e.g., Begum 1992; Morris 1993; Shakespeare, Gillespie-​ Sells, and Davies 1996) have argued that disabled people are systematically desexualized, which includes but goes beyond manifestly violent practices such as forced sterilizations and involuntary abortions. Considering that (hetero)sexual agency is routinely asserted as “the essential element of full adult personhood” (Shakespeare, Gillespie-​Sells, and Davies 1996, 10), desexualization severely undermines the social standing of disabled people. Less frequently, disabled people are perceived as hypersexual rather than asexual, but this only confirms their othering and similarly excludes them from prevailing heteronormativity (Loeser, Crowley, and Pini 2017, l). As far as gender is concerned, some scholars have argued that the intersection between ableism and androcentrism is more harmful to disabled women than disabled men, subjecting the former to dual oppression (Begum 1992, 70). However, the notion of cumulative disadvantage has been subject to debate because of its potential to deny the agency of disabled women and to misrepresent disabled men as privileged when they may actually be similarly oppressed by hegemonic masculinity (Morris 1993, 89–​90; see also Benjamin 2001).

State socialism and its legacy Throughout the state socialist period, policymakers approached issues of gender, sexuality, and disability by following productivist strategies, values, and visions that valorized productive labor as the ultimate source of individual and collective wellbeing (Hartblay 2014; Mladenov 2018). On the one hand, the productivist thrust of the state socialist project propelled the merger of the woman and the man “into a universal labor entity which [was] gradually deprived of its distinctive gender characteristics” (Popova 2011, 307). On the other hand, motherhood was idealized, institutionally prioritized and presented as indispensable for (early) childhood development (Shmidt 2014, 26), particularly during late socialism. In this context, both disabled men and women appeared as incomplete or defective workers and were officially certified as such by heavily medicalized disability assessment systems underpinned by biologically reductionist approaches. For example, Soviet defectology—​an approach to studying and educating disabled children and adults, which emerged in the USSR in the 1920s (Grigorenko 1998, 194)—​attributed the social disadvantages faced by disabled people to their individual bodily or mental “defects” and became extremely influential in disability policymaking in the Soviet Union, as well as in many state socialist countries in CEE (Phillips 2009, n.p.; Rasell and Iarskaia-​Smirnova 2014, 3). The heavy medicalization and stigmatization of disability was subsumed from an early stage in the development of the new regime to the productivist aim of creating a 532

533

Gender, sexuality, and disability

totally administered society of workers. The imperative of enhanced industrialization (Dale 2011, 2) was complemented in state socialist countries by the strategy of ensuring full employment. These priorities have oriented disability policy toward (re)insertion of disabled people into paid work. For example, Petar Antov, deputy director of the Bulgarian State Social Security Institute during the first years of socialist transition in Bulgaria, stressed the importance of the “invalids’ ” work placement “because it is about satisfaction of the need for labor of the Soviet person and together with this about preserving the workforce for industry and agriculture” (1950, 14). Those who were unfit for work placement were either confined to their homes or segregated in residential institutions, with the latter option being preferred by social policymakers and experts on productivist grounds: “Should an able-​bodied member stay back at home to look after a sick person, the family budget would be strongly affected and society would lose a work force unit that could be put to more appropriate use” (Golemanov and Popov 1976, 32). Confinement was made possible through medicalization of disability and the creation of an extensive infrastructure of segregated facilities for social care, coupled with architectural inaccessibility and sheer lack of community services (Phillips 2009). In its domestic form, confinement infantilized disabled people, while in its institutional form, it imposed depersonalization, bloc treatment, rigid routines, deprivation of privacy, and denial of self-​determination, following the general pattern of Goffman’s “total institutions” (Tobis 2000, 11)—​that is, establishments imposing ubiquitous control over every aspect of the lives of their residents. Under such conditions, disabled people’s sexual agency was heavily repressed, while the possibility of being subjected to sexual abuse and other forms of violence was omnipresent. Moreover, the juxtaposition of disability and sex “was a taboo in public discourse, since it was perceived [by policymakers] as a particular menace to the ‘purity’ of Soviet society” (Sumskiene and Orlova 2015, 372). Disabled men experienced the full force of state socialist medical-​productivist invalidation because although partly de-​gendered, the shibboleth of the “universal labor entity” nevertheless retained certain key features of traditional masculinity such as physical prowess. For example, Rasell and Iarskaia-​Smirnova (2014, 5) point out that “[w]‌hether heroic labourers, medal-​winning sportspeople or victorious soldiers, there was an official championing and near fetishisation of bodily strength, functioning and ability” in state socialist societies. Similarly, disabled women were systematically excluded from the socially valued statuses because pervasive cultural and material barriers made it virtually impossible to meet the demands of heroic laboring in addition to expectations of heroic motherhood. This is not to say that under state socialism, the agency or resistance of disabled people was impossible, but that they certainly were heavily constrained, as testified by reports highlighting the ways in which authorities used to suppress self-​ expression and collective mobilization in the Soviet residential institutions for social care (Phillips 2009).

Postsocialist neoliberalization Post-​1989 reforms in CEE were of a neoliberal flavor and produced significant social costs, such as unemployment, dislocation, poverty, and rising inequality (Ferge 2010; Grigorova 2016; World Bank 2003). For many women, neoliberal transformations in CEE meant relegation to low paid, precarious jobs or complete withdrawal from the labor market, together with declining childcare and healthcare provision, the spread of 533

534

Teodor Mladenov

gender-​based violence, and an increase in the trafficking of vulnerable women (Ferge 1997; Tobis 2000; Zaviršek 2006). These processes contributed to disempowerment and gradual re-​traditionalization of postsocialist societies that effectively effaced (meager) state-​socialist advancements in women’s emancipation and gender equality (Ferge 1997, 166–​172). Poverty has been feminized, with single mothers and solitary old women disproportionately represented among poor people (Jäppinen, Kulmala, and Saarinen 2011, 2). A traditional, passive version of femininity has been promoted by the mainstream media, conservative politicians, and religious institutions (Ferge 1997, 164–​166), its counterpart being the aggressive, rude, and possessive masculinity of the postsocialist mobster (Mladenov 2014, 157). This passivity attributed to the feminine role, which has been rehashed by postsocialist neoliberalization, partially overlaps with, but remains distinct from, the passivity traditionally assigned to disabled people (Morris 1993, 88), which state socialism not only had failed to challenge but had effectively reified through medical-​productivist invalidation. Sexual objectification of women (e.g., in pornography) has its counterpart in asexual objectification of disabled people, as in charity advertising (Shakespeare 1994, 288). As examples, I have explored mechanisms of postsocialist objectification in a study of a Bulgarian online discussion on sexuality and disability (Mladenov 2014), while Kolářová has developed an analysis of cultural representations of disability in postsocialist Czechoslovakia in which she has gone so far as to argue that under conditions of postsocialist neoliberalization, “any form of social belonging for crips [sic] other than under the rubrics of paternalizingly charitable humanism was (and remains) virtually impossible” (2014, 269). However, asexual objectification does not protect disabled women from sexual violence—​it just means that their experiences and stories of abuse are routinely disregarded (Zaviršek 2006, 194–​195). Another consideration is that traditional motherhood and homemaking imposes able-​ normative requirements upon women’s bodies, aptitudes, and minds, which makes it difficult for disabled women “to gain access to institutions such as the family” (Begum 1992, 75). For example, in her analysis of family experiences of Russian women with motor impairment, Iarskaia-​Smirnova (2011, 109) has argued that kinship structures, medical professionals, and lack of institutional support deprive disabled women of their “right and desire to have a child.” In the postsocialist region, neoliberal neopatriarchy (Campbell 2014) reasserted state socialist constructions of idealized motherhood, while welfare state retrenchment additionally prevented disabled women from becoming mothers and homemakers due to insufficient and/​ or inadequate public community-​ based support (Iarskaia-​Smirnova 2011, 121). The sexual and reproductive agency of those confined to residential settings for social care has been actively restricted. With many families reduced to poverty, and public provision being cut, the number of children and adults in residential institutions in CEE increased significantly in the 1990s (Tobis 2000, 23), while the living conditions in these settings “drastically deteriorated” (World Bank 2003, 24). In a more recent analysis that draws on reports from monitoring visits of disability and human rights organizations in residential institutions in Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, and Croatia between 2005 and 2011, Sumskiene and Orlova (2015) highlight the systemic violation of disabled women’s sexual and reproductive rights in these settings, including forced sterilizations and involuntary abortions administered on pregnant women with intellectual impairments. The demise of stable jobs, deindustrialization, and unemployment has had a negative impact on postsocialist men as well. Culturally, neoliberal marketization revived traditional masculinity by emphasizing entrepreneurship, competition, self-​interest, 534

535

Gender, sexuality, and disability

and self-​sufficiency (Cornwall 2016). It should be noted here that critical disability scholars have regarded neoliberalism as inherently ableist (Goodley, Lawthom, and Runswick-​Cole 2014, 981), whereas feminists have considered neoliberalism as converging with “a neopatriarchal gender order” (Campbell 2014, n.p.). In this context, postsocialist men found themselves confronted with a reasserted expectation of male breadwinning that was hard to fulfill through poorly paid, precarious service-​sector jobs. This contradiction has been experienced as personal failure, which has pushed many postsocialist men toward self-​destructive behavior such as alcoholism and suicide (World Bank 2003, 62–​63). As Morris (1993, 89) points out, “the consequences of the failure to measure up to what is socially defined as being a man can be devastating.” Such crises of masculinity have been vividly described in gender-​sensitive studies of postsocialist transformations (e.g., Burawoy, Krotov, and Lytkina 2000, 61). For disabled men, neoliberal masculinity has been doubly devastating—​first, because passivity traditionally associated with disability has been incongruent with hyper-​ability presupposed by “neoliberal-​ableism” (Goodley, Lawthom, and Runswick-​Cole 2014, 981), and second, because support for independent living (in the form, for example, of personal assistance services) has been largely inadequate or absent. Moreover, the very concept of independent living has been lost in its neoliberal translations, which have misrepresented it as self-​sufficiency—​independent living presupposes relations of interdependence that are negated when the concept is misconstrued as self-​sufficiency (Mladenov 2016, 1232–​1235). A related occurrence with a strong impact on gender and disability in postsocialist CEE has been transnational migration (León-​Ledesma and Piracha 2004). Emigration has depleted domestic capacities to provide care, which has reduced the opportunities for disabled people to receive assistance with daily tasks—​with the heavily feminized healthcare and social care workforce draining out of CEE, the availability of both formal and informal support for those who relied on it domestically has decreased (Jäppinen, Kulmala, and Saarinen 2011). A similar assessment of the intersectional problems caused by care migration in CEE—​particularly acute for countries such as Ukraine and Moldova, which have tended to “send” but not “receive” carers during the postsocialist period—​has been provided by Sowa-​Kofta (2017, n.p.).

Postsocialist agencies It may seem that the suffering, injustices, and oppressions endured by disabled women and men along the intersecting lines of androcentrism, heterosexism, and ableism over the decades of postsocialist neoliberalization in CEE have left little scope for agency. However, Central-​Eastern Europeans have found creative and even heroic responses to postsocialist transformations. A widespread manifestation of postsocialist agencies in the private realm has included “domestic” coping strategies (Smith and Rochovská 2007, 1174–​1175). For women, “domesticating” postsocialist deprivations has meant continuing engagement in traditional homemaking activities such as household food production; for disabled people, such strategies have included recourse to informal support, as well as home-​made adaptations where “family members invent new devices and contraptions, making them from any materials available” (Iarskaia-​Smirnova 2011, 114). In public, suffering and injustices have partially been offset through the rise of the postsocialist civil society. Following the neoliberal pattern of “privatization by NGO [non-​ governmental organizations]” (Harvey 2005, 177), as well as objective necessity, many 535

536

Teodor Mladenov

women’s and disabled people’s organizations prioritized the provision of services and in-​ kind support to their members (Fröhlich 2012; Holland 2008; Ivancheva 2015). However, this model of service-​oriented civil society, encouraged by neoliberal reformers in order to decentralize provision and reduce reliance on the state, has been unsustainable—​NGOs have been strongly reliant on external funding and occasional declines in such sources of support have threatened their very existence. Moreover, service-​oriented civil society has depoliticized the grassroots—​for example, at the beginning of the 2010s, Coelho (2012, 22) characterized the NGO sector in Kosovo as “donor dependent” and “largely apolitical and disconnected from society at large.” Such depoliticization has affected both women’s and disabled people’s civil society initiatives (Ivancheva 2015; Korolczuk 2016; Mladenov 2018). Postsocialist transformations have also witnessed the emergence of a small number of nonconformist, advocacy-​oriented women’s and disability groups and organizations, which have been most vocal and visible. In the case of women, such initiatives have included campaigns for adequate childcare policies, critiques of neoliberal austerity, and struggles against domestic violence (Ivancheva 2015; Korolczuk 2016); in the case of disabled people, grassroots mobilizations have targeted medicalization, segregation, confinement, and stigma, helping to initiate deinstitutionalization reforms (Phillips 2012, 35). Examples include campaigns for community-​based alternatives to institutionalization in Bulgaria (Mladenov 2018, 109), Croatia (Phillips 2012, 33), and Hungary (MEOSZ 2019, n.p.). Deinstitutionalization reforms have been actively promoted within the EU by the European Commission since the early 2000s (Mansell et al. 2007, 3), but evidence shows that, while legally committing to deinstitutionalization, a number of CEE countries including Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia, have actually used EU Structural Funds to maintain and renovate institutional settings (Parker and Bulic 2016, 32–​33). For their part, activists have remained largely marginalized in official policymaking bodies and, since the exit of external donors from the region post-​EU accession, have endured chronic underfunding (Fröhlich 2012; Holland 2008; Ivancheva 2015; Mladenov 2018). But fragile as they have been, such bottom-​up, oppositional initiatives provide the best hope for the future of women’s and disabled people’s emancipation and justice in the region. In conclusion, it should be emphasized that ableism, androcentrism, and heterosexism are not only mutually reinforcing but also mutually constitutive axes of oppression. Therefore, it is as important to include ableism in considerations of androcentrism and heterosexism as it is to take androcentrism and heterosexism into account when studying ableism. Moreover, including ableism in intersectional analyses of the postsocialist region of CEE sheds new light on the historical continuity between state socialism and postsocialist neoliberalization by illuminating the ways in which state socialist productivism, biological reductionism, and institutional confinement have interacted with welfare state retrenchment, re-​traditionalization of society, and the creeping marketization that followed 1989.

References Antov, Petar. 1950. Trudat na ogranicheno rabotosposobnite v SSSR i u nas. [The Labor of Those with Limited Ability to Work in the USSR and in Our Country]. Sofia: Saiuz na postradalite ot voynite i fashizma. Begum, Nasa. 1992. “Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda.” Feminist Review (40): 70–​84. Benjamin, Shereen. 2001. “Challenging Masculinities: Disability and Achievement in Testing Times.” Gender and Education 13 (1): 39–​55.

536

537

Gender, sexuality, and disability Burawoy, Michael, Pavel Krotov, and Tatyana Lytkina. 2000. “Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia.” Ethnography 1 (1): 43–​65. Campbell, Beatrix. 2014. “Neoliberal Neopatriarchy: The Case for Gender Revolution.” openDemocracy, January 6. www.opendemocracy.net/​5050/​beatrix-​campbell/​neoliberalneopatriarchy-case-​for-​gender-​revolution. Campbell, Fiona Kumari. 2009. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coelho, Joseph. 2012. “Vehicles for Transformation, or Tools for the Status Quo? Civil Society and International Statebuilding in Kosovo.” The Western Balkans Policy Review 2 (2): 1–​26. Cornwall, Andrea. 2016. “Introduction: Masculinities under Neoliberalism.” In Masculinities under Neoliberalism, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Frank Karioris, and Nancy Lindisfarne, 1–​28. London: Zed Books. Dale, Gareth. 2011. “Introduction: The Transition in Central and Eastern Europe.” In First the Transition, Then the Crash. Eastern Europe in the 2000s, edited by Gareth Dale, 1–​20. London: Pluto Press. Ferge, Zsuzsa. 1997. “Women and Social Transformation in Central-​Eastern Europe: The ‘Old Left’ and the ‘New Right.’” Sociologický časopis [Czech Sociological Review] 5 (2): 159–​178. https://​nbn-​resolving.org/​urn:nbn:de:0168-​ssoar-​54208. —​—​—​. 2010. “Key Specificities of the Social Fabric under New-​Capitalism.” Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 1 (2): 3–​28. Fröhlich, Christian. 2012. “Civil Society and the State Intertwined: The Case of Disability NGOs in Russia.” East European Politics 28 (4): 371–​389. Golemanov, Hristo and Miroslav Popov. 1976. Social Welfare in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Translated by Dimitar Lambrinov. Sofia: Sofia Press. Goodley, Dan, Rebecca Lawthom, and Katherine Runswick-​ Cole. 2014. “Dis/​ ability and Austerity: Beyond Work and Slow Death.” Disability & Society 29 (6): 980–​984. Grigorenko, Elena. 1998. “Russian ‘Defectology’: Anticipating Perestroika in the Field.” Journal of Learning Disabilities 31 (2): 193–​207. Grigorova, Vanya. 2016. Bedni sreshtu bedni [Poor against Poor]. Sofia: Kolektiv za obshtestveni interventsii. http://​solidbul.eu/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​05/​Социално-​подпомагане_​preview20.pdf. Hartblay, Cassandra. 2014. “A Genealogy of (Post-​)Soviet Dependency: Disabling Productivity.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 34 (1). Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holland, Daniel. 2008. “The Current Status of Disability Activism and Non-Governmental Organizations in Post-Communist Europe: Preliminary Findings Based on Reports from the Field.” Disability & Society 23 (6): 543–​555. Human Rights Watch. 2011. “Sterilization of Women and Girls with Disabilities. A Briefing Paper.” New York: Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/​news/​2011/​11/​10/​sterilizationwomen-​and-​girls-​disabilities. Iarskaia-​Smirnova, Elena. 2011. “‘A Girl Who Liked to Dance’: Life Experiences of Russian Women with Motor Impairments.” In Gazing at Welfare, Gender and Agency in Post-​socialist Countries, edited by Maija Jäppinen, Meri Kulmala, and Aino Saarinen, 104–​124. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ivancheva, Mariya. 2015. “‘The Spirit of the Law’: Mobilizing and/​or Professionalizing the Women’s Movement in Post-​Socialist Bulgaria.” In Mobilizing for Policy Change: Women’s Movements in Central and Eastern European Domestic Violence Policy Struggles, edited by Andrea Krizsán, 45–​84. Budapest: Center for Policy Studies, Central European University. Jäppinen, Maija, Meri Kulmala, and Aino Saarinen. 2011. “Introduction: Intersections of Welfare, Gender, and Agency.” In Gazing at Welfare, Gender and Agency in Post-​socialist Countries, edited by Maija Jäppinen, Meri Kulmala, and Aino Saarinen, 1–​12. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kolářová, Kateřina. 2014. “The Inarticulate Post-​ Socialist Crip: On the Cruel Optimism of Neoliberal Transformations in the Czech Republic.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8 (3): 257–​274. Korolczuk, Elżbieta. 2016. “Neoliberalism and Feminist Organizing: From ‘NGO-​ ization of Resistance’ to Resistance against Neoliberalism.” In Solidarity in Struggle: Feminist

537

538

Teodor Mladenov Perspectives on Neoliberalism in East-​ Central Europe, edited by Eszter Kováts, 32–​41. Budapest: Friedrich-​Ebert-​Stiftung. León-​Ledesma, Miguel and Matloob Piracha. 2004. “International Migration and the Role of Remittances in Eastern Europe.” International Migration 42 (4): 65–​83. Loeser, Cassandra, Vicki Crowley, and Barbara Pini. 2017. “Introductory Essay: Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness.” In Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness, edited by Cassandra Loeser, Vicki Crowley, and Barbara Pini, xxv–​lxxiv. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mansell, Jim, Martin Knapp, Julie Beadle-​Brown, and Jeni Beecham. 2007. Deinstitutionalisation and Community Living—​Outcomes and Costs: Report of a European Study. Volume 2: Main Report. Canterbury: Tizard Centre, University of Kent. McRuer, Robert. 2002. “Compulsory Able-​ Bodiedness and Queer/​ Disabled Existence.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, Volume 1, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 88–​99. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. MEOSZ, Mozgáskorlátozottak Egyesületeinek Országos Szövetsége (The National Federation of Organisations of People with a Physical Disability). 2019. “Deinstitutionalisation in Hungary runs against the principles of the CRPD.” Position statement. Budapest: National Federation of Associations of Persons with Physical Disabilities. https://​enil.eu/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2019/​06/​ MEOSZ-​statement-​on-​the-​Hungarian-​deinstitutionalisation-​strategy_​final-​version.pdf. Mladenov, Teodor. 2014. “Breaking the Silence: Disability and Sexuality in Contemporary Bulgaria.” In Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy and Everyday Life, edited by Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-​Smirnova, 141–​164. London: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2016. “Disability and Social Justice.” Disability & Society 31 (9): 1226–​1241. —​—​—​. 2018. Disability and Postsocialism. London: Routledge. Morris, Jenny. 1993. “Gender and Disability.” In Disabling Barriers—​Enabling Environments, edited by John Swain, Vic Finkelstein, Sally French, and Mike Oliver, 85–​92. London: SAGE. Oliver, Michael. 1996. Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. London: Macmillan. Parker, Camilla, and Ines Bulic. 2016. European Structural and Investment Funds and People with Disabilities in the European Union. Study for the PETI Committee. Brussels: European Parliament. Phillips, Sarah D. 2009. “‘There are no Invalids in the USSR!’: A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29 (3). —​—​—​. 2012. “Implications of EU Accession for Disability Rights Legislation and Housing in Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” Journal of Disability Policy Studies 23 (1): 26–​38. Popova, Gergana. 2011. “Preodolyavaneto na pola prez parvoto desetiletie sled 9 septemvri 1944 g.—​ utopichnata kulminatsiya na marksistkiya feminizam.” [“Overcoming Gender in the First Decade after 9 September 1944—​the Utopian Climax of Marxist Feminism.”] In Pol i prehod: 1938–​1958 [Gender and Transition: 1938–​1958], edited by Krasimira Daskalova and Tatyana Kmetova, 299–​310. Sofia: Tsentar za izsledvaniya i politiki za zhenite. www.cwsp.bg/​ upload/​docs/​Sbornik_​final.pdf. Rasell, Michael and Elena Iarskaia-​ Smirnova. 2014. “Conceptualising Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.” In Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy and Everyday Life, edited by Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-​Smirnova, 1–​17. London: Routledge. Shakespeare, Tom. 1994. “Cultural Representation of Disabled People: Dustbins for Disavowal?” Disability & Society 9 (3): 283–​299. Shakespeare, Tom, Kath Gillespie-​ Sells, and Dominic Davies. 1996. The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. New York: Cassell. Shmidt, Victoria. 2014. “Sentenced to Turbulence: Ideas and Institutions of Child Protection in Post-​Soviet Space.” In Family and Childhood Policies in Post-​Socialism, edited by Victoria Shmidt, Elena Iarskaia-​Smirnova, and Zhanna Chernova, 13–​35. Moscow: Variant, Center for Social Policy and Gender Studies. Smith, Adrian and Alena Rochovská. 2007. “Domesticating Neo-​Liberalism: Everyday Lives and the Geographies of Post-​Socialist Transformations.” Geoforum 38 (6): 1163–​1178.

538

539

Gender, sexuality, and disability Sowa-​Kofta, Agnieszka. 2017. “Central and Eastern European Countries in the Migrant Care Chain.” Background paper, United Nations expert group meeting on the theme “Care and Older Persons: Links to Decent Work, Migration and Gender”, New York, December 5–​7, 2017. www.un.org/​development/​desa/​ageing/​wp-​content/​uploads/​sites/2​ 4/​2017/​11/​Care-​migration-​in-​ CEEC_​Agnieszka.pdf. Sumskiene, Egle and Urtė Lina Orlova. 2015. “Sexuality of ‘Dehumanized People’ across Post-​ Soviet Countries: Patterns from Closed Residential Care Institutions in Lithuania.” Sexuality and Culture 19 (2): 369–​387. Tobis, David. 2000. Moving from Residential Institutions to Community-​based Social Services in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2003. Social Development in Europe and Central Asia Region: Issues and Directions. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://​siteresources.worldbank.org/​EXTECARE GTOPNGOCIVSER/​Resources/​Social_​Development_​Strategy.pdf. Zaviršek, Darja. 2006. “Disabled Women Everyday Citizenship Rights in East Europe: Examples from Slovenia.” In Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Jasmina Lukic, Joanna Regulska, and Darja Zaviršek, 62–​87. Aldershot: Ashgate.

539

540

INDEX

ableism 531–​532, 535, 536 abortion: assisted reproduction debates and 486; Catholic opposition to 130; high rates driven by lack of contraception 238; interwar criminalization of 190; new eugenics and 238–​239; Orthodox opposition to 191; Roma women pressured into 241; see also individual countries; reproductive health in Eurasia Actionist art movement 85, 86 adoption 24 Afghanistan, Soviet invasion of 196, 202 agency, definition of 207 Agenda Europe 268 Albania 4, 238, 442, 446 Alexeyeva, Liudmila 368 Alexievich, Svetlana 202 Alyokhina, Maria 173–​177 ambiguity as analytical tool 353 Amnesty International 22, 400 AnaLize 23 Andics, Elisabeth 147 ANO party (Czech Republic) 519 Another Way 250 Antifascist Women’s Front (AFŽ) 335 anti-​gender movements 23, 383, 384, 431; anti-​elitist posture 266, 269, 270, 271; child-​ in-​danger theme 267; Catholic Church 184, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270; conservative family values 266, 267, 270; enabled by weakness of CEE women’s/​feminist movements 271; fake news 269; gender studies attacked by 269; interfaith alliances 268; intersectionality and 5; Orthodox Church 267, 268, 270, 184; pedophilia smear 267, 268, 270; progressive legislation attacked by 269; as protest against neoliberalism 270; public schools as

campaign target 268; as resistance to EU, UN, and the West 150, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 384; as response to gender constructivism 267; right-​wing populism, synergy with 266, 268, 270–​271, 272; Russian promotion of 270, 458; Soviet propaganda, “gender ideology” linked with 266, 271; trans-​regional funding of 12; Vatican involvement 266, 267 anti-​modernism 209 antisemitism: fascism and 210, 211; nationalist antisemitism 192–​193, 238; sex-​trafficking smear 296, 297; see also Holocaust, sexuality in Antonov, Anatoly 270 Applebaum, Molly 314 Arbour, Louise 418 Armand, Inessa 220, 223 Armenia 13, 400, 429, 494, 495; see also Nagorno-​Karabakh conflict Arrow Cross (Hungary) 183, 209, 210, 211, 212 Artiukhina, Anna 221, 222 Aspasia 9, 12 Aspekt 157 Asquith, Herbert 109 assisted reproduction (ART): abortion debates and 486, 488; antisemitic discourse and 489; biomedical industry development 483; Catholic opposition 488–​489; class and ethnicity preferences 485; declining fertility rates 485, 486–​487; diversity of national policies 483, 489–​490; ethnonationalist views 484, 485, 487, 488–​489; feminist opposition 485; feminist support 485, 488; increasing use of 483; intersectional perspective 484; “IVF children,” othering of 488–​489; LGBTQ and 486, 488; national

540

541

Index regulation and subsidy 484; power relations in biomedical space 483; regulation and subsidy in Poland 487–​488; religious opposition 484, 485; single women and 488; western ART tourism in CEE 484–​485, 487; western clientele for CEE genetic material 483 austerity, as it affects gender equality and women’s work 120, 167–​168, 169, 353, 358, 363, 364, 380, 383 Austria: alimony law 306; female support for Dolfuß regime 308; prostitution 298; women’s political parties 304; see also Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy Austrian League against the White Slave Trade 296 Austrian Society for the Control of Venereal Disease 293 Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy: Bismarckian social welfare 515; Catholic Church 10; Czech women’s movement 125–​126; cultural variety of 95–​96; female sexuality, policing of 189; homosexuality, limited tolerance of 183; inheritance practices 10; Jewish women 96–​97; national movements, women’s involvement in 96, 97, 125–​126; prostitution 188–​189, 279; Slovak women’s movement 125–​126; Stadion constitution 293 women writers 100–​101, 126; women’s activism, variety of 95–​96; women’s education, fight for 97–​98; women’s philanthropic organizations 96, 97; women’s professional organizations 98–​99; women’s salons 96–​97; women’s trans-​ethnic alliances 99–​100; see also sex work in Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy Azerbaijan 429, 468, 494, 495, 497; see also Nagorno-​Karabakh conflict B.a.B.e. (Croatia) 157 Babović, Spasenija 334 Baltic states see Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania Bandera, Stepan 209 Băsescu, Traian 359, 362 Bayandur, Anahit 429 Beauvoir, Simone de 267 Bebel, Auguste 110 Beijing Platform for Action see United Nations Belarus 115, 117, 283, 400 Benedict XVI 267 Bikont, Anna 138 Bokor, Hanna 147 Bosnia 10, 157, 160 Brazil 268 Brezhnev, Leonid 84–​85 bride kidnapping see Central Asia, post-​Soviet Brnabić, Ana 387, 388

Brother films 84 Bulgaria: abortion 238, 486; anti-​gender movements 269, 270, 272; assisted fertility 486; electoral gender quotas 446; fascism 209; homosexuality 248; Network of East-​ West Women and 157; Orthodox Church 249, 486; Roma, discrimination against 241; state socialist women’s organizations 32, 148, 442; women’s NGOs 31; work placement of invalids 533 Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation 157 Butler, Judith 267 Bydlińska, Zofia 138 Cairo Conference on Population and Development see United Nations Care International 429 case study method: bias towards Russian data 52–​53; cultural anthropology approaches 54, 56–​57; participatory action research (PAR) 54, 56; political science approaches 53, 54–​56 Catholic Church: abortion, opposition to 130; anti-​gender movements, participation in 12, 266, 267; assisted reproduction, opposition to 488; fascism, involvement in 209; nationalism, alliance with 191; nineteenth-​ century hostility to feminism 126; resurgent conservatism 24; Solidarity and 136 Ceaușescu, Elena 442, 443 Ceaușescu, Nicolae 148, 358 Center for Reproductive Rights (US) 157 Center for Women War Victims (Croatia) 160 Center for Women’s Studies at Vilnius University 157 Central Asia, post-​Soviet: advantages of bride kidnapping for men 465–​466; consensual vs. non-​consensual bride kidnapping 468; corruption 469; divided local views on bride kidnapping 462–​463, 467–​469; divided local views on polygyny 462–​463, 466–​467; divorce 466; economic advantages of polygyny for women 466, 467; importance of marriage declining 469; marriage–​ respectability association 462, 466, 469–​470, 497; migration 467; nationalism 462, 469; resurgence of traditional practices in 1990s 462, 468; returned brides, ostracism of 464; ritual expenses of marriage 465–​466; scholarly debates on marriage practices 463; social status of second wives 467; social stratification, increase of 465; social value of marriage 463–​464; Tajikistan 466, 467; see also reproductive health in Eurasia Central Asia, pre-​Soviet 464–​465 Central Asia, Soviet: assessing female emancipation in 228–​229; “backward woman of the East” 227, 229, 231, 233;

541

542

Index colonial politics, continuity with 227, 228, 229, 231, 233; forced marriage banned 462, 464–​465; hujum 228–​229, 233; illiteracy 230; Islam, campaign against 228, 230; March 8 killings 228, 229, 233; modernization of as showcase 228; nikah 465; persistence of banned practices 465; polygyny banned 462, 464–​465; resources for transformation inadequate 230, 231, 233; Special Commission for the Improvement of Work and Everyday Life of Women 230, 231, 232; surrogate proletariat, women as 228, 464; transforming women’s labor 231–​232; transforming women’s private lives 232–​233; unveiling 72, 184, 228–​229, 233, 465; women’s education, emphasis on 230, 231; Zhenotdel 228, 230 Chechnya 371, 468, 473 Chekhova, Maria 109 Chirikova, Lidia 372 Civic Democratic Party (Czech Republic) 519 civil unions 22, 24 class struggle vs. culture war 29, 31–​32 Clinton, Hillary 401 Cold War: anti-​communist rhetoric 208; critique of its hegemonic narratives 46–​47; hegemonic narratives of 11, 42, 43–​46, 48, 146; institutional networks during 14; as obstacle to international war crimes tribunal 417; woman question rivalry 119, 120 Comaneci, Nadia 524 Commission for the Improvement and Study of Female Labor and Industry (Soviet) 223 Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement 148 Committee of Soviet Women 119 Committee for Women’s Voting Rights (Czech) 126 communism see individual countries; Marxist-​ feminist theory; socialist and communist gender ideology comparative method: breadth vs. depth 53–​54; disciplinary boundaries as hindrance 58–​59; multi-​case comparison 53; qualitative vs. quantitative 54, 62; sociological mixed methods 57–​58; underuse of 52 Conference of Working Women (Soviet, 1917) 220 Congress of Women (Poland) 34, 151 connective action 146, 151 Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings 477–​478 Copelan, Rhonda 156 Council of Europe 22, 24, 251, 260, 262–​263, 269, 354, 389, 453, 477, 518 Council of Romanian Women 148 COVID crisis 4, 253

Croatia: anti-​gender movements 269, 270, 272; electoral gender quotas 446; fascism 183, 209, 211–​212; inheritance practices 10; nineteenth-​century feminists 99; Office for Gender Equality 382; professional sport 526, 527; public attitudes to gender roles 66 culture war vs. class struggle 29, 31–​32 custody of children 24; see also single motherhood in post-​Soviet Russia Czech Republic: anti-​gender movements 12; assisted reproduction 484; explicit familialism 518; female elected politicians 443, 446; Government Council for Equal Opportunities 382; leisure-​time sport 525; MEPs 447; professional sport 527; secularity of state 24; sterilization of Roma 241 Czech Women’s Lobby 150 Czechoslovakia, communist: abortion 238; childcare services 517; early education centers 517; family allowances 516; homosexuality 248; maternity leave 516; parental leave 516; Roma, discrimination against 239, 240, 241; Stalinist vs. post-​ Stalinist women’s emancipation 236–​237; state socialist women’s organizations 442; sterilization 239, 241 Czechoslovakia, First Republic: abortion 130, 307; civil marriage 306; democratic success of 125, 126–​127; divorce 127, 306; early education centers 515; eugenics 190; female support for authoritarian nationalism 309; homosexuality 130, 191; interwar female politicians 305, 280; liberal vs. socialist feminism 130; nationalist–​feminist alliances 128; prostitution 298–​299; sexuality, conservative views on 129–​130; socialist vs. middle-​class feminism 125; stateless women 307; Washington Declaration 127; Women’s National Council (WNC) 125, 128, 129, 130; women’s political rights, advances in 127–​128; women’s private rights, slow advance in 129 Decade of Women (UN) 147, 148 decolonialism 76–​77 Dekhtereva, Sofia 108 del Ponte, Carla 418 Dembińska, Zofia 147 democratization: abortion and 486; gender and 13, 19, 166, 257, 260, 263, 280, 353, 517; illiberal turn 34, 92, 370; LGBTQ and 249, 250, 253; neoliberalism and 163, 165, 366, 367; second wave feminism and 121; sport and 528 Diehl, Guida 308 disabled people: ableism underpinned by androcentrism and heterosexism

542

543

Index 531–​532, 536; activist groups 536; advocacy movements in residential institutions 533; civil society support for 535–​536; cumulative disadvantage 532; desexualization of 532, 533, 534; domestic coping strategies 535; emigration of care workers, shortage caused by 535; feminine/​disabled passivity, overlap of 534; forced sterilization and abortion 532, 534; homemaking and motherhood, access to denied 534; impairment vs. disability 531; medicalization of 532, 533, 536; neoliberal masculinity oppressive to men; othering of 532; residential institutions 533, 534; socialist productivist attitude to 532–​533; violence against 533, 534 Diversity and the European Public Sphere—​toward a Citizens’ Europe (EUROSPHERE) 167 divorce: anti-​gender opposition to 268, 269; custody rights 24; diversity of traditions 10; polygyny and 465, 466, 467; postsocialist increase 23, 495; women’s right under socialism 33, 116; see also individual countries Dodziuk, Anna 138 Dolfuß, Engelbert 308 domestic violence see violence, gender-​based and individual countries D.O.R. (Romania) 23 Drakulić, Slavenka 155, 156, 157; see also Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates: authoritarian mentality vs. neoliberalism as enabler of backlash 33–​34; culture war vs. class struggle 29, 31–​32; evaluation of socialist gender regimes 32–​33; participants in 28–​29; west-​centric theory 30; western donors as agents of neoliberalism 31–​32 Dugin, Aleksander 270, 272 Dziwisz, Stanisław 488 East German Institute of Nutritional Research 344 East Germany see German Democratic Republic (GDR) Economic Benefits of Gender Equality in the EU (EIGE) 168 emancipation, genealogical vs. linear history of 145, 146 Engels, Friedrich 116, 118, 267 Equality Kindergartens 269 Erenberg, Ilya 199 Ermanskii, Osip 105, 107 Estonia: anti-​communism, hegemony of 13; assisted reproduction 484; dual-​earner household norm 519 female elected politicians 261, 263, 443, 446; Gender

Equality Act 381; gender mainstreaming 13; Gulag victims 323; religious interference in state 24 eugenics: post-​WWII 238–​239; prewar and WWII 189–​191, 210, 237, 258; see also Roma Eurasian Union 13 EUREQUAL 66 Eurobarometer 65 European Union (EU): accession to, effects on transnational feminism 150, 163, 166–​169, 383–​384; anti-​gender hatred of 266; Armenia and 13; childcare targets 381–​382; compliance gap on gender standards 167, 354, 380, 381, 384, 437; economics above social policy 380, 381; enlargement agenda 379; equality of rights vs. equality of results 380; Eurocentrism and 74; European Social Fund 383; evaluation of gender results lacking 381; funding support for women’s organizations 383; gender laws and standards 11–​12, 18, 19, 65, 150, 381, 383; gender mainstreaming 11–​12, 13–​14, 25, 146, 147, 150, 151, 167, 168, 271, 379, 380, 381, 518, 519; LGBTQ rights 251, 387–​393; liberal individualism, limits of 380; neoliberal bias 381; social welfare and 518; soft laws 381; women representatives at 447; women’s employment eroded after accession to 21; women’s labor force participation rates 260 European Women’s Lobby (EWL) 150, 156, 161, 166, 383 Evangelical Christians 268 experimental research 63–​64, 66 Fai, Boris 147 Fall, Susanne 313–​314 fascism in interwar CEE: analytical concepts inadequate for 212; anti-​communist rhetoric, western research distorted by 207; anti-​fascist rhetoric, Soviet research distorted by 208; antisemitism 210, 211; denunciation of liberal and socialist gender emancipation 209–​210; eugenics and 210; Historikerinnenstreit 208; motherhood, cult of 183, 210, 211, 212; Nazis and Fascists as model 207, 210–​211; opposition to women’s employment and suffrage 210, 211–​212; postcommunist research slow to focus on women 209; soldier, cult of 211; uniforms for women 210; victim–​perpetrator dichotomy as research obstacle 209; violence, cult of 211; violence, women’s participation in 212; women’s agency overlooked in research on 208, 213; women’s challenge to official programs of 212–​213; women’s

543

544

Index labor 211–​212; women’s participation downplayed or exoticized in research on 208; women’s participation as resistance to conservative patriarchy 210; women’s support solicited 209 Female Teachers’ Association of the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia 98 FEMEN 86, 92, 458; backlash over depictions of Muslim women 173, 175; claims to feminism debated 172–​173; collapsing border between politics and art 174; emigration from Ukraine 175, 177, 178; felling of Kyiv cross 174–​175; French actions 175; global media and 175; origin as collective 172; parodic strategy 174; reappearance in 2018 176; sextremism 175–​176; western liberal audiences unreceptive to 176, 177–​178 Feminist Association (Budapest) 99 feminist democratic theory 35 feminist methodology/​ies 53, 55, 62, 63 Feminist Network (Budapest) 157 feminist and women’s movements in CEE&E: domestic violence, awareness of raised 92; feminist activism vs. women’s movements 91; increasing authoritarian hostility to 92; mixed fate under communism 91–​92; welfare focus of 92 Fidesz (Hungary) 519 Filosofova, Anna 104, 107, 108 foreign donors to women’s organizations: austerity squeeze after financial crisis 167–​169; civil society funding model 164–​165; class, gender, and race bias 168; counter-​strategies to 166, 167; democratization agenda 25, 163, 165; depoliticization of activism 166; EU accession and 166–​169; fragmentation of women’s movement 166, 168; governance feminism 167; intersectionality undermined by 168–​169; neoliberalization agenda 25, 163, 165, 167; NGOization 165–​166, 429; philanthrocapitalism 165; short-​term quantifiable project bias 164–​165, 168; urban elite bias 166; US-​based INGOs 165; see also transnational feminism France 269 Frauenpartei (Austria) 304 French Revolution 197, 267, 309 Freud, Sigmund 267 Freudo-​Marxism 117 Freund, Kurt 248 Friedan, Betty 146 Funk, Nanette see Drakulić–​Funk–​ Ghodsee debates Fuszara, Małgorzata 156

Garrigue, Charlotte 128 gender, definition of 3 gender equality in interwar period: abortion 307; family and marriage laws 306–​307; female support for authoritarian nationalism 308–​309; legal equality vs. traditional gender roles 303, 305, 306, 307, 309; nationalist and Catholic female opposition 307; stateless women 307; suffrage 303; tension between democracy and ethnic nationalism 303–​304; white-​collar jobs 305–​306; women politicians, small numbers of 304; women’s political parties, failure of 304 gender regimes 9, 10, 12, 16, 29, 45, 46, 249, 251, 258, 366–​371, 505 gender studies in CEE&E 3–​5; backlash in last decade 14, 23, 67, 75, 80, see also anti-​gender movements; communist legacy and 4, 11; disciplinary boundaries as hindrance 58–​59; fluidity as principle 18–​26; global framework 14–​15; lag of 9; national 13–​14, 16; post-​Cold War flourishing 11, 14, 23, 41; periodization 18; postcommunism as framework 353; queer studies 15; regime types, effects of 91, 92, 279; regional 9–​13, 16; western paradigms, resistance to 4–​5, 15, 151, 187, see also Drakulić–​Funk–​Ghodsee debates General Austrian Women’s Association 99 Geneva Conventions 419 Georgia 12, 19, 22, 23, 408, 484, 487, 494, 495 German Democratic Republic: abortion 238; collective eating establishments 279, 280, 343, 345–​346, 347; divorce 347; everyday feminist struggles 45; gender equality gains 343–​344; homosexuality 248, 250; kitchen labor, male participation 346–​347; kitchen labor as obstacle to wage labor 344–​345, 347–​348; prosperity by Eastern bloc standards 344; public attitudes, vs. West German 66; science of cooking 346; sports doping 524; Stasi 344; women in workforce, high rate of 343–​344; women’s cooking as emotional symbolism 347 Germany, post-​unification: Russian LGBT immigrants 399–​400 Germany, pre-​partition: abortion 307; eugenics 190, 191; interwar female politicians 304; state employment of women 306; stateless women 307; see also Nazis Geybullaeva, Arzu 429 Ghodsee, Kristen see Drakulić–​Funk–​ Ghodsee debates global financial crisis (2008) 5, 163, 167, 270, 353, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 383 Global South 119, 150

544

545

Index globalization: empowerment of some women 15; negative effects on women 15; see also neoliberalism Goldman, Emma 116 Golubeva, Vera 221 Gorbachev, Mikhail 202, 367 Gościmińska, Wanda 149 Gräfe, Heinrich 344–​345 Gregorová, Hana 100 Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia 327 Grotewohl, Otto 344 Gudonytė, Natalija 324 Gulag: children, providing for 325; family units 325; gendered traumas 323–​324, 325, 326–​327; homosexuality 325; hunger and food 324; internal colonization policy 328; rape 326; return from 327; sexual barter 324–​325; sexual slavery 324, 326; subjective vs. objective testimony 322; surrogate families 325–​326; voluntary sex and love 325; women a minority 323; women’s testimonies of 327 Gurevich, Anna 105 Gurevich, Liubov 109 “Gypsy” see Roma Habsburg Empire see Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy Hainisch, Marianne 98 Halep, Simona 526 heteronormativity: binary entanglement of gender category 41, 42, 47, 48, 49; Christian enforcement of 10, 15; as cornerstone of nationalism 187; Islamic enforcement of 10; trans people as threat to 251; unassailability in Russia 83 heteropatriarchy 76, 77 Heydrich, Reinhard 305 Himmler, Heinrich 315 Hlinka Guard (Slovak) 209 Hodinova, Anezka 147 Holocaust, sexuality in 279; blackmail sex 315, 317, 318; camps and ghettos as sites of violence 315–​316; dependencies intensified 314; fluidity of violence and agency 317; forced nudity 315–​316; forced sex work 315, 316; gender markers, deprivation of 316; men selling sex 317–​318; menstruation 316; racial defilement law 314, 315; rape 314–​315; rational relationships 317; same-​sex desire in the camps 318; sexual barter as women’s agency 313, 314, 316–​317; sexual othering 318; sexual violence as power mechanism 315; under-​researched 313 Homeros-​Lambda National Association of Homosexuals (Hungary) 250

homosexuality see LGBTQ homosociality 80 Horáková, Milada 129 Horthy, Miklós 308 host ideology 207 Human Rights Watch 371 human trafficking: antisemitic trafficker stereotypes 192; Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy 292, 293, 295–​297, 299; captured Russian soldiers 473, 474; child adoption trafficking 475, 476–​477; criminal justice response vs. prevention and victim assistance 472, 473–​474; debt bondage 476; disadvantaged origins of victims 476; as disorganized crime 477; distracting attention from domestic violence and sexual assault 474; domestic vs. international sex trafficking 475; EU and 384, 437, 454, 456, 477; fake jobs 472–​473; gendered and racialized perceptions of 472, 473, 474, 475, 478; labor trafficking 474, 475–​476; neoliberalism and 407, 473; NGOs 474, 475, 477; non-​white victims occluded 472; Palermo protocol 473, 474; patriarchal protectionist rhetoric 474; as pretext for limiting women’s mobility 402; Romania 359, 362; Russian neglect of 474–​475, 477–​478; Ukraine 453, 455, 456, 457, 459; victim-​blaming of women 473; women cast as victims 15, 74, 406, 409, 411; women perpetrators 477 Hungarian Association of Women Office Workers 99 Hungarian Feminist Association 304 Hungary, communist: abortion 238; childcare services 517; early education 517; homosexuality 248, 249, 250; market economy elements 516; maternity leave 516; parental leave 516; Roma, discrimination against 239, 240–​241 Hungary, postcommunist: anti-​gender movements 12, 22, 269, 270, 272; assisted reproduction 487, 489; child support 519; female elected politicians 443; fertility policies 15; gender studies programs 23; optional familialism 518; professional sport 525, 526, 527; secularity of state 24; trans people 253 Hungary, pre-​communist: antisemitism 192; authoritarianism 308; early education centers 515; eugenics 190, 210, 238; fascism 183, 209, 210, 211, 212; homosexuality 191–​192, 194; interwar female politicians 304; post-​WWI decline 127; prostitution 298; stateless women 307; see also Austro-​ Hungarian Monarchy Hynie, Josef 248

545

546

Index illiteracy 117 inheritance practices 10 Institute for Collective Catering (GDR) 345 instrumentalist gender essentialism 437 International Alert 429 International Council of Women 104, 127 International Criminal Court 420 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): creation of 417; evidentiary requirements for rape conviction 420; inclusion of women 418; Krstic judgment 422; limits of as remedy 422–​423; narrative of victimhood 421–​422; official gender advisor 418; rape as crime against humanity 419; rape as gender-​based persecution 421; rape as genocide or ethnic cleansing 420–​422; Witnesses and Victims Section 420; women’s rights activism, influence of 418, 419 International IDEA 65 International Labor Organization 14, 147 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 22, 359 International Organization for the Family see World Congress of Families International Planned Parenthood Federation 22 International Woman Suffrage Alliance 127 International Women’s Day 103, 110, 115, 224, 259, 455 International Women’s Health Coalition 22 International Women’s Year 147 Inter-​Parliamentary Union 65 intersectionality 3, 4, 34–​35, 54, 59, 151; assisted reproduction and 484; in Austro-​ Hungarian Monarchy 101; disabled people and 531–​532, 535, 536; European identity deployed against 168–​169; genderphobia analysis 253; LGBTQ migration 402; Network of East-​West Women and 158, 161; new eugenics and racialism 238–​242; postcommunist transition and 353; socialist model of 115–​116; quantitative research on 64, 65 intimacy in migrant life 354; exotic dancers 409–​410; generational differences 409; intimacy as conceptual approach 407, 408; intimate services 409–​410; mothering 410–​411; sexuality as agency 410; victim discourse, limiting effects of 407, 408, 411 Iron Guard (Romania) 183 Islam: anti-​gender movements, participation in 268; Central Asia and 228, 230, 465; inheritance practices 10; in Nagorno-​ Karabakh 428; patriarchal structure 422; polygyny 465; resurgent conservatism 24, 408; Soviet Union and 228, 230 Israel 398–​399

Istanbul Convention 156, 262–​263, 269, 354, 453 Italy 207, 210, 212, 269, 270, 272, 293 Ivecović, Sanja 135 Jaszczukowa, Maria 149 Jesenská, Milena 309 Jesenská, Růžena 100 Jews: anti-​gender movements, Orthodox participation in 268; eugenics, target of 190, 191; homosexuality policed 187, 193; see also Holocaust, sexuality in John Paul II 136, 488 Joliot-​Curie, Irene 147 Jones, Claudia 147 juncture, critical 4, 18 Kadyrov, Ramzan 371 Ka-​Tzetnik 314 Kaffka, Margit 100 Kal’manovich, Anna 106 Kalniete, Sandra 259 Karadzic, Radovan 421 KARAT Coalition 149, 383 Kariņš, Krišjānis 262 Károlyi, Mihály 304, 308 Ka-Tzetnik 314 Kazakhstan 66, 232, 400, 477, 496, 497 Kertbeny, Károly 247 Kesić, Vesna 421 Khakamada, Irina 369 Kharuzhaya, Vera 118–​119 Khetagurovite campaign 73 Khrushchev, Nikita 10 Kienle, Elsa 307 Kinsey, Alfred C. 267 Kitchen Debate 10 Kłobukowska, Eva 525 Kobrynska, Natalia 99 Kobylianska, Olha 100 Koch, Ilse 318 Kohout, Josef 317–​318 Kolditz, Walter 315 Kollontai, Alexandra 104–​105, 106, 109–​110, 116, 117, 184, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224 Kommunistka 220–​221, 222 Komov, Aleksei 270 Kosmos 23 Kosovo 74, 389, 392 Krásnohorská, Eliška 98, 126 Krupinskaia, Marta 15 Krupskaya, Nadezhda 223 Krzywonos, Henryka 134, 135 Kuby, Gabriele 267, 270, 272 Kuchma, Leonid 455 Kuczalska-​Reinschmitt, Paulina 99 Kudelli, Praskov’ia 109

546

547

Index Kulik, Ewa 138 Kuskova, Ekaterina 105, 107 Kveder, Zofka 99, 100 Kvinna Till Kvinna 429 Kyrgyzstan 73, 75, 400, 468, 496 Kyzy, Burulai Turdaaly 468 La Strada 456, 458 Labuda, Barbara 139, 140 Lakhova, Elena 368 Landová-​Štychová, Luisa 298 Latvia: abortion 258; anti-​gender movement 12; assisted reproduction 484, 487; divorce 258; EU accession 257, 261–​262, 263; eugenics 258; female political representation 257, 261, 262, 263, 443; gender equality perceived as Soviet aberration 257, 259, 260; Gulag victims 323; homosexuality 24, 249; independence movement, women’s role in 259; Istanbul Convention 262–​263; post-​Soviet ethnic exclusion 260; post-​Soviet gender equality elusive 257, 259, 261, 262, 264; post-​Soviet pronatalism 259; pre-​Soviet pronatalism 258; reproductive rights 263; restorationist discourse 260, 262, 263; Soviet gender ideology 258; women’s suffrage 210, 258 Law and Justice Party (Poland) 488, 519 League of Austrian Women’s Associations 99 League of Nations 14 League for Women’s Equal Rights (Russia) 108–​109 Leferowa, Helena 147 Lenin, Vladimir 85, 343 LGBTQ: anti-​gender movements, target of 184, 194, 251–​252, 267, 268, 271, 387, 431; decriminalization as gradual process 249, 253; democratic deficit, homophobia and 250–​251; disease model of homosexuality 247; European Union and 251, 387–​393, 447; ethnic identity and 74; feminist alliances with 151; funding loss after financial crisis 168; grassroots mobilization 249–​251; HIV/​ AIDS 250; homonationalism 251; hostile academic environment in CEE 191; male same-​sex desire more visible than female 246; nineteenth-​century criminalization 246; norm visibility 447; polarization of global sexual politics 397–​398, 399; post-​socialist decriminalization 249; post-​Stalinist period 247–​249; Russian hostility to 80, 82, 83, 87; Russian LGBTQ communities in the West 397–​403; Serbia 249, 387–​393; sodomy as gender-​neutral category 246; transgender people 22, 42, 77, 252, 267 liberal democracy, effects on gender equality 367 Lithuania: Act on Equal Opportunities 381; female elected politicians 261, 263, 443;

Gulag victims 323, 324, 326, 327; male breadwinner household norm 519; optional familialism 518; religious interference in state 24 Little Entente of Women 12 Liubimova, Serafima 230, 232 Łuczywo, Helena 138, 140 Luxemburg, Rosa 116 MacKinnon, Catharine 420–​421 Makk, Károly 250 Marcinkevičius, Justinas 327 Marcus, Isabel 156 Maróthy-​Šoltésová, Elena, 97 marriage: same-​sex 24; women’s role in 24 Marx, Karl 116 Marxist-​feminist theory 44, 115–​116; in Czechoslovakia 130; liberating women vs. making women useful 118; libertarian sexuality 117; neo-​Marxist feminism 167; socialist paradigm vs. recognition paradigm 116, 120, 146 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 128, 129 masculinity (Russian): Conchita Wurst scandal 82; deficiency vs. excess 80; gay propaganda law 82; heteronormativity unassailable 83; homoeroticism, different standards of 81–​82; homosexuality, hostility to 80, 82, 83, 87; homosociality 80, 83–​84, 87; male gaze and 81; military and 83–​84; new capitalist economy as man’s world 80; political power, masculinization of 81, 84–​86; Putin and 81, 83, 84, 86; sexualized violence 85–​86; Ulyanovsk “Satisfaction” video 82–​83; western gender scholarship unassimilated 81, 83 Matvienko, Valentina 370 Mayreder, Rosa 99, 100 Maze, Tina 526 Meisel-​Hess, Grete 100 MeToo 25, 371 Michnik, Adam 136, 140 migration: ambiguity of 354; asylum 400–​402; anti-​migrant populism 75, 169; Central Asians 467; deterritorialization of national culture 397; disabled people and 535; European identity as exclusive 168; intimacy and 406–​411; orientalisms and 74; post-​ Soviet migrant women workers 57, 406–​411; restrictive migration policies 477; Romanian 358, 360, 361, 362–​363; Russian-​speaking LGBTQ communities in the West 397–​403; Soviet expansion and 73; women, proportion of increasing 406; see also sex work Miliukov, Paul 109 Miliukova, Anna 107 Milošević, Slobodan 388

547

548

Index Minerva 98 Mironova, Zoya 147 Mirovich, Zinaida 109 Mizulina, Elena 371, 474 Moldova 12, 400, 408, 410, 411 Mosse, Martha 318 movements, grassroots 22, 25, 151 Murmelstein, Benjamin 318 Mūrniece, Ināra 262 Myshko, Yelena 176 Nabiullina, El’vira 370 Nagorno-​Karabakh conflict 354; authoritarianism 431; economic impact 428; forced displacement 427–​428, 429, 430, 431; gendered scholarship on 354, 426–​427; historical roots of 426; Minsk Group 430–​431; “native” vs. “foreign” gender roles 428, 429; reproductive health impact 495; Russian arms dealing 430; survival sex 428; traditional gender roles revived 428, 429; underage marriages 428; war widows and bereaved parents 427; women excluded from political arena 430; women peace advocates 429–​430; women’s NGO activity 429 NaNe Domestic Violence Project (Budapest) 157 Napoleonic Code 23, 247 National Alliance of Hungarian Women 308 national machineries for gender equality 382–​383 nationalist gender ideologies in CEE: abortion, criminalization of 190; antisemitism 192–​193; ethnic vs. linguistic nationalism 188, 189–​190; eugenics 189–​191, 237; female sexuality and ethnic purity 187, 188, 189, 193; homosexuality 191–​192, 193–​194; male sexuality less constrained 188–​189, 192, 193; military masculinity glorified 189; patriarchal family 188, 190; prostitution 188–​189; religion, alliances with 190, 191; see also populist right-​wing authoritarianism, contemporary nativism 209 Naval’ny, Aleksey 372 Nazism 183, 192, 280; eugenics, racialization of 237; German women profited by 208; homosexuality condemned 247; in CEE 207, 212; intimate life, control over 280; occupation of Czech lands 305; rapes by soldiers 313; uniforms for women 210; women dismissed from civil service 306; women excluded from political power 308; see also Holocaust, sexuality in neoliberalism: activist resistance to 34; anti-​genderism as protest against 266, 270; communism, victory over 11; demographically focused 249; erosion of

reproductive labor support 120; EU and 381; feminist alleged enabling of 28, 29, 77, 121, 154, 160; migration, spur to 406–​407; neopatriarchy 534; precarious labor 34, 120, 364, 406–​407; racialization as organizing principle 76; right-​wing populism as response to 266; social inequality widened by 367; structual gender inequalities ignored by 15, 19; uncertainties of 361; women heavily burdened by 31, 121, 157, 364, 533–​534 Network of East-​West Women (NEWW) 12, 28, 149; Board of Directors 161; Book and Journal Fund 157; communication difficulties 160–​161; former state socialist women’s organizations and 157–​158; foundation support for 159; immigration support 159; International Steering Committee 156, 160–​161; intersectionality, commitment to 158, 161; Legal Committee 156, 157; neoliberalism, avoiding complicity in 160; On-​Line Committee 156; Polish headquarters 156; as transnational feminist donor 157–​158; university support for 159; US dominance, steps to avoid 155–​157 New School University for Social Research 159 NGOs/​NGOization 165–​166, 429 Nicholas II 103, 108, 197, 286 Nikolaeva, Konkordia 220 Nikoleyeva, Tatiana 147 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 4, 20, 22, 261 Novi Sad/​Újvidék/​Neusatz Women’s Association 97 Nowakowska, Ursula 156 Nukhrat, Antonina 232 Nuremberg Trials 419 Obama, Barack 401 oil curse theory 66–​67 Okhmatmlad 222 Old Believers 289 Orbán, Viktor 29, 268, 269, 487 Ordo Iuris Institute 268, 269–​270 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe 430 Orientalism 74 Orłowska, Edwarda 147 Orthodox Church: abortion 191; anti-​gender movements, participation in 12, 268; assisted reproduction 486; heteronormativity, enforcement of 15; homosexuality, condemnation of 249; prerevolutionary patriarchy and 220; regional variation of 10; resurgent conservatism 24; Russia, power in 13 Ossowska, Ewa 134 Ottoman Empire 4, 10, 76, 183, 187, 188, 237, 426

548

549

Index Pan Israeli Portal of Russian speaking GLBTs 399 Party of Regions (Ukraine) 458 Pavlensky, Pyotr 86, 178 Pawlicka, Małgorzata 138 Peeters, Marguerite 267 perpetrator research 209 Petkevich, Tamara 325, 326 Pető, Andrea 28 Pieńkowska, Alina 134 Plamínková, Františka 125, 126, 127, 128, 305 Plenipotentiary for Women (Poland) 446 Pokrovskaia, Maria 110 Poland, communist: abortion 22, 149, 238; Academy of Sciences 13; Belarus and 117; Catholicism 136, 148; child support 149; childcare services 517; divorce 149; early education centers 517; family allowances 516; feminism, 1980s growth of 139–​140; fertility policies 15; food price protests 23; Gulag victims 323, 325, 326, 327; health and labor legislation for women 149; homosexuality 249, 250; maternity leave 516; parental leave 516; physical culture 524; Stalinist challenge to conservatism 236; state socialist women’s organizations 148; sterilization 239; see also Solidarity movement Poland, postcommunist: abortion 151, 262, 437, 486; anti-​gender movements 12, 22, 35, 140, 267, 269, 270, 272; “black protest” 151; Catholic Church 24, 518; domestic violence law 157; electoral gender quotas 446; homosexuality 251; implicit familialism 518; leisure-​time sport 525; MEPs 447; misogyny 140; Network of East-​West Women and 156; professional sport 526, 527; reproductive rights limited 518; resistance to neoliberalism 34; retirement age 519; right-​wing populism 35, 140; shock therapy privatization 359; see also assisted reproduction in Poland Poland, pre-​communist: early education centers 515; homosexuality decriminalized 247; independence struggles 136; interwar female politicians 304; nineteenth-​century feminists 99; Polish Mother 307, 325, 327; post-​WWI poverty 127; wives’ property rights 306 policy experimentation 64 Polish Feminist Association 140, 157 Połtawska, Wanda 318 polygyny see Central Asia, post-​soviet Popova, Nina 147 populist right-​wing authoritarianism, contemporary 20, 35, 92, 140, 168–​169, 173, 184; anti-​gender movements and 266, 268,

270–​271; detrimental to gender equality 366, 437, 438, 519; homophobia 193, 438; patriarchy 193; religious nationalism 193 pornography 30, 86, 420–​421, 534 postcoloniality 3, 4, 35, 173; decolonial interventions 76–​77; Eurocentrism and 71, 73, 74–​75, 76–​77; feminism/​anti-​racism divide 75–​76; “friendship of peoples” ethnic hierarchies 72; gender policy as Soviet imperial tool 72, 73; internalized imperialism 75–​76; liberal humanism and 76; orientalist regional hierarchies 74–​75, 184; sex trafficking and 74; Soviet alliances with third world anti-​imperialists 71; Soviet Union as imperial formation 71, 72, 76; travel restrictions 74; white ethnic identity 74 poststructuralism 41 Pragierowa, Eugenia 147 Prague Gender Center 157 Prague Spring 33 Press, Tamara and Irina 525 Prokudin-​Gorskii, Sergei 286 prostitution see sex work psychoanalysis 117 Purishkevich, Vladimir 108 Pussy Riot 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92; anonymous members, exit of 176; Cathedral performance 173, 372; claims to feminism debated 172–​173; collapsing border between politics and art 174; ECHR suit 174, 176; EuroCup disruption 176–​177; global media and 175, 177; imprisonment 174; origin as collective 172, 173; trial (2012) 173, 174, 175; videos banned 174; western liberal audiences receptive to 175, 176, 177–​178 Putin, Vladimir 29, 81, 83, 84, 86, 174, 175, 176, 177, 202, 366, 370, 371, 372, 474, 511 Quality in Gender Equality Policies (QUING) 167 quantitative research: benefits of 63; data poverty for CEE&E 61; experimental 63–​64, 66; institutional and policy research 64–​65; intersectionality and 64, 65; partition of Germany as natural experiment 66; public opinion research 65–​67; qualitative vs. 54, 62–​63 Quarteera 400, 402 racism 11, 168 Replika 23 reproductive health in Eurasia: birth spacing 494, 497; decreasing desired family size 493, 495; expansion still incomplete 494; high abortion and low contraception rates 492, 493; intrauterine contraception popular 494, 497; low marriage age 496–​497; male

549

550

Index contraceptives ignored 494; men ignored in outreach 494; nationalist pronatalism 496; patriarchal traditionalism 496; population decline threat 495–​496; post-​Soviet improvement 492, 493–​494; rapid first births 497; regional and ethnic variation in access 492; reproductive coercion by states 498–​499; rural women poorly served 494; sex-​selective abortion 496, 497–​498; traditional high-​failure contraception 494; UN and NGO involvement 493; unmarried and newly married women poorly served 494; war and 495 Riehl, Regine 293–​294 Roma (“Gypsies”) 75, 184, 251; abortion encouraged for 241; antinatalism, target of 240–​241; assisted reproduction and 485, 487; eugenics, target of 191, 238; forced sterilization 241; holocaust 239; male sexuality policed 187; post-​WWII racialist thinking, target of 239–​240 Romania, communist: abortion 22, 148, 238, 241, 358; alternative heterosexual relations 48; declining living standards in 1980s 358, 363; employment guarantee 359; Gulag victims 322, 323, 326, 327; homosexuality 249; physical culture 524; pronatalism 358; Roma, discrimination against 240, 241; state socialist women’s organizations 148; Romania, postcommunist: abortion 22, 486; ambiguities of transition 357–​358, 364; anti-​ gender movements 269; childcare 361, 362; corruption 358, 359, 363; emigration 358, 360, 361, 362–​363; EU accession 358, 362, 363; female elected politicians 65; fertility rate 361, 362; gender equality state machinery 383; gender pay gap 360; gender studies programs 23; global financial crisis 358, 359, 360, 361, 362; homosexuality 249; leisure-​ time sport 525; National Agency for Equal Opportunities 446; neoliberal uncertainties 361; Orthodox Church 24, 249, 357; poverty 359; privatization 359; reproductive freedom hampered 357; Roma, discrimination against 358, 363; successful women 357, 360, 362; welfare cuts 359; women affected worse by transition 357, 359–​360; women in workforce, high rate of 360; women’s divergent views on transition 358, 362 Romania, pre-​communist: abortion 191; eugenics 189, 190, 191, 238; fascism 183, 209, 211; Orthodox Church 10, 191; women’s philanthropic organizations 96 Romanian Feminist Working Group 157 Romanian Women’s Association for the Support of Poor Orphaned Romanian Girls 96

Rumkowski, Chaim 318 RUSA LGBT 401 Russia, post-​Soviet: abortion 369, 474, 511; anti-​gay legislation 400; anti-​gender movements 12, 22, 80, 87, 266, 270, 272, 458; authoritarianism bad for gender equality 366, 370, 371; childcare 370; civil society, funding of 55; cultural diversity 12–​13; democracy, erosion of 370; divorce 506; domestic violence 369, 371, 372, 474, 511; female elected politicians 366, 368, 370, 371; foreign assistance for gender activists 55–​56, 369; homosexuality decriminalized 369, 398; household labor burden on women 507, 510, 511; labor immigrants 407–​408; LGBTQ emigration 397–​403; LGBTQ, intolerance of 371, 398, 400, 474; oil curse theory 66–​67; Orthodox Church 13, 24, 369, 372, 511; privatization 366, 369, 372; pronatalism 370, 510, 511; property rights 371; proportional representation 64–​65; state capacity breakdown 367, 370; traditional gender roles revived 367, 369, 370, 402, 510; war with Ukraine 458–​459; welfare cuts 370; women affected worse by transition 366, 370; women’s organizing 55; see also human trafficking in post-​Soviet Russia; single motherhood in post-​Soviet Russia Russia, pre-​Soviet: 1861 emancipation 283, 287; 1905 Revolution 104, 108, 290; autocracy 103–​104, 108; clothing of peasant women 285–​286; cultural diversity 12–​13; customary law for peasants 284, 285, 287–​288; domestic violence 279, 280, 286, 287, 288–​289; extra-​legal punishment 287; infant mortality 286; literacy rates 285; marital separation 289; migration, internal 285; nuclear families, increase in 288; Orthodox Church 10, 13, 283, 287, 288, 289; peasant society, patriarchal structure of 283, 284; post-​emancipation gains for peasant women 284–​286; prostitution 286; religious devotion as resistance to patriarchy 289; sexual norms 286–​287; songs as assertive medium for peasant women 279, 287; Stolypin land reforms 105, 283, 284, 289, 290; WWI, impact on peasant women 290 Russian Gay and Lesbian Group of West Hollywood 398 Russian LGBTQ migrants 354; asylum 400–​402; driven by Russian anti-​gay legislation 400–​401, 402; in Germany 399–​400; in Israel 398–​399; rights-​based activism, avoidance of 398; in USA 398, 400–​402; visibility, avoidance of 398–​399; women under-​represented 402–​403

550

551

Index Russian Revolution: February Revolution 110, 197; female soldiers 198; peasant women’s experiences 290; women’s bread riots as starting point 115; utopian ambitions of 116 Russian and Soviet military-​masculine ideal: attributes of 199; citizen rights and 197–​ 198; continuity of 196, 197, 198–​199, 202; decoupled from ethnic nationalism by Soviets 198; disrupted by Soviet female soldiers 197–​198, 200–​201; femininity idealized by contrast to 197; homosociality and 83–​84, 199; pacifist challenge to 199–​200, 202; patriotism and 197, 199; postwar disillusion, growth of 201–​202; Putin’s cult of WWII 202; reaffirmed by state after WWII 201; Stalinist enforcement of 200; threatened by war trauma 196, 201, 203; undermined by Soviet gender equality doctrine 197–​198, 200–​201, 203; Yeltsin-​era criticism of 202 Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society 104 Rutha, Henz 191 Sabinina, Maria 107 Salvini, Matteo 268 Samutsevich, Yekaterina 173–​174 Sarajlić, Nafija 100 Schwimmer, Rózsa 99, 304, 305 Second Independent Women’s Forum (Russia) 157 second wave feminism 146 Sekulić, Isidora 100 Sellers, Patricia Viseur 418 Sentsov, Oleg 176 Serbia: anti-​discrimination legislation 389–​390; Belgrade Pride parades 387, 390, 391–​392; EU accession 387–​393; homophobia 390; LGBT rights legislation 389–​391; nationalist politics 389, 390, 391, 392; Orthodox Church 390, 391; professional sport 526; symbolic politics, LGBT and 388, 392; trans and bisexual people 388 sexual violence: as war crime 354 sex work in Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy 279; local police jurisdiction 293; mobility of 293, 295; nationalism and 188–​189; registration with police 292, 293, 295; seasonal character of 293; successor states, regulatory continuity of 297–​298; tolerated but not legal 292; varying regulation of 292–​295; venereal disease as motive for regulation 294–​295, 297, 298; vice police 293, 294, 297; Viennese regulation 293–​294; white slave sex trafficking panic 295–​297, 299, 472 Shabanova, Anna 104 Shachko, Oksana 178

Shapir, Olga 107 Shcheglovitov, Ivan 108 Shchepkina, Ekaterina 109 Shevchenko, Inna 174–​175 Shishkina-​Iavein, Poliksena 109 Sholokhov, Mikhail 199, 200 single motherhood in post-​Soviet Russia: child support unenforced 506; continuum of singleness 506; data gaps 505; grandmotherly care 506, 507, 509; increasing frequency of 506; maternity capital program 510; normalcy of 506; practical realism 506; privatization of motherhood 506, 510; refamilialization 505–​506, 510; regional disparities 505; as source of relative freedom 506, 509, 511; state support diminished 505, 509, 510 Slovakia: anti-​gender movements 269, 270; equal opportunities state machinery 382; explicit familialism 519; fascism 209; female elected politicians 443; women’s organizations 97 Slovenia: anti-​gender movements 22, 269, 270, 272; assisted reproduction 484; electoral gender quotas 446; Employment Relationship Act 381; explicit familialism 518 Slutsky, Leonid 371 Snitow, Ann 155, 159 Sobchak, Ksenia 372 Sobol, Liubov’ 372 social media 20, 23, 25, 82, 174, 267, 269, 372, 401, 526 Social Platform 166 social welfare: capability approach 519; definition of 514–​515; defamilialization vs. degenderization 518; early education/​ childcare separation 515, 517, 518; EU anti-​discrimination requirement 518; late communist birth rate concern 516; late communist fall in women’s paid labor 516; late communist under-​investment in childcare 517; parental leave for fathers 518; post-​socialist cuts 514; post-​socialist familialism, varieties of 518; post-​socialist gender conservatism, influence on 517–​518; post-​WWII mobilization of women’s labor 515–​516; post-​WWII pronatalism 516; pre-​WWII legacies 515; right-​wing populism driving pronatalism and regendered policy 519 socialist and communist gender ideology: Cold War critique of gender emancipation failures 43–​44; de facto maintenance of traditional gender structures 33, 43–​46, 91, 164, 219, 532, 533; emancipation vs. equality 219–​220; family planning 239; homosexuality 184,

551

552

Index 247–​249, 438, 533; “incompatibility” with feminism 44–​45, 92; intersections with ethnicity and race 184; mobilizing women’s labor 515, 516, 532; pronatalism 238, 239, 515, 516, 532; socialism first or feminism first dilemma 221; women’s emancipation as explicit goal 3, 10–​11, 13, 19, 21, 22, 91, 164, 183, 219, 515, 532 Socialist Unity Party (GDR) 45 Soldiers’ Mothers (Russia) 369 Solidarity movement 33; anti-​political disposition 136; Catholic allegiances 136, 443; evolutionary social transformation, commitment to 133, 138; feminist disillusion with 133, 139–​140, 443; Gdańsk Accords 134, 136–​137; gender-​conservative nature of 134; historical documentation of 135; male leadership 134; patriarchal attitude to women 137, 139, 140; Press Agency 138; “third space” for women 133, 135–​136, 137–​138; Tygodnik Mazowsze 138; underground leadership by women 92, 138–​139; women’s spontaneous actions foundational to 134–​135 Sorokin, Vladimir 84, 85, 86 South East European Social Survey Project (SeeSSP) 65 Soviet modernity as part of western modernity 72, 76 Soviet Union: abortion 44, 91, 116, 224, 237, 238, 334, 336, 508; alternative heterosexual relations 48–​49; Civil War 198, 220; collective eating establishments 343; Constitution (1924) 198; Constitution (1936) 335; defectology 532; diverse impact of gender policies 13; divorce 221, 223, 224, 237, 334, 508; Electoral Law 110; fading commitment to women’s liberation 43–​44, 45–​46, 196–​197, 223; Family Codes 44, 116, 508; Family Laws 334, 508; full-​time employment for women 368; homosexuality decriminalized 116–​117, 247; housework unsocialized 118, 507; labor protectionism for women 120, 121; labor rights for women 120; masculinity, anxieties about 80–​81, 247; military service by women 118–​119, 197–​198, 200–​201; New Economic Policy (NEP) 220, 221, 222; Perestroika 327, 328, 367–​368; physical culture 524; pronatalist policies 368, 508; single motherhood 507–​509; sports doping 524; women’s education and professional development 117–​118; see also Central Asia, Soviet; Russian Revolution; Stalinist regime; Zhenotdel Spain 269 Spiridonova, Maria 105

sport: doping system 524; female athletes as socialist gender equality symbols 524; feminist organization in postsocialist period 527; international sporting success as socialist propaganda 524; leisure-​time sport decline in female participation 525; marketization of sport, women disadvantaged by 525–​527; sex verification tests 524–​525; socialist physical culture ideology 523–​524 Spurek, Sylwia, 156–​157 Stalin, Joseph 81, 85, 199, 200, 221, 233, 337 Stalinist regime 280; abortion ban 236, 237, 238; complex transference to peripheries 333; contradictory approach to gender norms 46, 91; gendered testimonies of 322; homosexuality condemned 247, 249; intimate life, control over 280; masculinity, ethos of 81; pronatalism 238; women’s emancipation compared to post-​Stalinist period 236–​237, 240 standpoint feminism 63 Starovoitova, Galina 368 state socialist women’s organizations 32, 148, 149, 154, 157, 164, 382, 442 Stolypin, Peter 103–​104, 105, 283, 289, 290 Stop Gender! (Ukraine) 458 Szabó, Gabriella 526 Szajn 23 Szálasi, Ferenc 211 Szczęsna, Joanna 138 Szederkényi, Anna 100 Szewińska, Irena 524 Tajikistan 232, 466, 467, 494, 496, 497 Tarasiewicz, Małgorzata 156 Tereshkova, Valentina 119 Third World see Global South Tito, Josip Broz 334 Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda 173–​177 Tomczyk, Zofia 149 Tomšič, Vida 334 Tormay, Cécile 194, 308 Toyen 130 Tradition, Family and Property 268, 272 transgender see LGBTQ transnational feminism: building on socialist-​ era activism 151; CEE’s non-​region status 145, 150; East–​West networks and postsocialist feminism 149; EU accession and 150, 163, 166–​169; failure to understand CEE region 145–​146; governance feminism 167; historical rehabilitation of socialist feminism 146–​147, 148; impact on local gender politics 148; institutionalization of 149–​151; legalistic strategies 163, 167; neoliberalism, alleged complicity with 154, 158, 160, 167; participatory activism vs. 151;

552

553

Index professionalization of 149–​151, 163, 165, 166–​167; western domination, criticized for 154, 159; Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 147, 148; see also foreign donors to women’s organizations; Network of East-​West Women triple burden 258 Truhelka, Jagoda 99, 100 Tumlířová, Marie 309 Turkey 408–​411 Turkmenistan 398, 495 Tymoshenko, Yulia 458 Tyrkova, Ariadna 106, 107

kitchen labor 342; McCarthyist attitude to homosexuality 247; queer studies parochial in 15; racial justice movements 71; Russian LGBTQ immigrants 398, 400–​402; second wave feminism 146; single motherhood racialized and pathologized 506; stateless women 307; welfare state debate 29; see also Network of East-​West Women USAID 165, 493 Ustaša 183, 209, 211–​212 Uzbekistan 73, 229, 231, 232, 233, 398, 494, 497, 499

Ukraine: assisted reproduction 484, 487; corruption 457; displaced persons 458–​459; domestic violence infrastructure 457; domestic violence legislation 453, 456–​457, 459; EU candidacy 453, 454, 455, 456, 458; Euromaidan 458; FEMEN and 173, 174, 176, 177, 458; foreign assistance for gender activists 453–​454, 457, 459; gender violence commitments unfulfilled 456–​457, 459; homophobia 400, 458; hybrid authoritarian regime 456; migration to post-​Soviet Russia 408; nineteenth-​century feminists 99; Orange Revolution 456; peasant society, patriarchal structure of 283; public patriarchy 454; revolution (2013–​2014) 176; Russian geopolitical pressure 453, 454; sex trafficking 453, 456, 457, 459; sexual harassment legislation 453; Soviet legacies 453, 454–​455, 457; violent political change 19; war with Russia 458–​459; Yanukovych’s attack on gender activists 458 Ulmanis, Kārlis 258 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 246 Union of the Russian People 108 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics see Soviet Union United Nations 20; Beijing Conference on Women 147, 149, 267, 382, 418, 429; Cairo Conference on Population and Development 267, 499; on contraceptives access 493; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women 22, 147, 454, 455; Development Programme 456; as donor in CEE 165; Palermo Protocol 473; Security Council Resolution 1325 430, 431; UNIFEM 429; on violence against women 24; women’s organizations, influence on 119; see also International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia United States: anti-​gender movements, Christian right participation in 12, 193, 268; eugenics 190, 191; funding for CEE NGOs 165, 456; funding for gender studies 12;

Verdun, Marie-​Francoise 178 Verzilov, Pyotr 175 Viennese Women’s Employment Association 98 Vīķe-​Freiberga, Vaira 261 violence, gender-​based: bride kidnapping as 463, 468; on collective farms 337; disabled people 533, 534; domestic 92, see also individual countries; EU and 379, 384, 437; global feminist interventions 55; in Gulag 322, 324, 326; homophobic 81, 83, 391, 400, 402; intimate partner violence 58, 262; neoliberalism and 533–​534; NEWW and 156, 157, 158, 160; obscured by traditional family values 137; political activism on 23, 25, 92, 164, 166, 369, 447, 536; postsocialist states unwilling to tackle 22, 24–​25, 64, 359, 371, 372, 474, 510–​511; rape and sexual violence 86, 100, 137, 238, 286, 288, 313, 314–​316, 317, 318, 319, 322, 324, 326, 455, 458, 473, 476, 534; Romani women 241; Russian peasant women 279, 286, 288; Soviet failure to address 91; Soviet forced unveiling 227, 228, 233; UN and NGO campaigns 24, 429, 430; war and 429; in women’s fiction 100; Zhenotdel and 117; see also human trafficking; International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia; Istanbul Convention; Ukraine violence against women in war, international law on 354, 418–​420 Voina 85–​86, 173 Vol’kenshtein, Olga 105 Vrba, Jiří 318 Vučić, Aleksandar 387, 392 Walentynowicz, Anna 134 Wałęsa, Danuta 135 Weltfish, Gene 147 Winter, Sara 176 Włodarczyk, Anita 526 Women in Black (Yugoslavia) 160 Women of Russia 368–​369 Women’s 8th of March Alliance 34 Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice 420

553

554

Index Women’s Center (Czechoslovak First Republic) 309 Women’s Congress (Russia, 1908): capital punishment, opposition to 108; eclecticism of 106; feminist vs. socialist debates 106, 107, 109–​110; organization of 104; police monitoring of 104–​105; progressive democratic consensus of 106, 107–​108, 109; reactionary condemnation of 108; social makeup of 105; as subversive heterotopia 103, 105, 108, 110; suffrage debates 106–​107; wide influence of 103, 108–​110 Women’s Consortium of Ukraine 456 Women’s Department of Polish Workers Party 148 Women’s Equal Rights Union 106, 108, 109 Women’s Human Rights Training Institute (Bulgaria) 157 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 147, 148 Women’s National Council (Czechoslovak First Republic) 305, 307 Women’s Parliamentary Group (Poland) 445 women’s representation in postcommunist politics: childcare as barrier to 445; collapse of in 1990s 441; de facto assignment to “women’s issues” committees 443, 446; descriptive representation, gradual increase in 443–​446; electoral systems 64–​65, 445; EU, representatives at 447–​448; executive representation 443, 445; gender quotas 441, 446; higher education and 445; legacies of communist period 442–​443; legislative successes 446–​447; media negativity 445; party discipline 443–​445; reluctance of elected women to identify as feminist 443; structural barriers 441; substantive representation 446–​447; women-​unfit-​for-​ leadership stereotype 445 Women’s Section see Zhenotdel World Bank 22, 359 World Congress of Families 12, 268, 270 World Family Organization 193 World Health Organization (WHO) 57, 269 World Values Survey (WVS) 65, 66

Yanukovych, Viktor 177, 456, 457–​459 Yeltsin, Boris 368, 369, 370, 474 Yugoslavia 280; abortion 336; agrarian collectivization 337; Antifascist Women’s Front (AFZ) 335, 337; divorce 335–​336, 337, 339; domestic violence 337; Eurocentric feminism and 77; Family Law 335; gender studies after break-​up 23; homosexuality 248; illiteracy 335; industrial workers, female 336–​337; Marxist feminism criticized 120; Muslim communities 337–​338; Partisans, female 333, 334–​335; self-​management 337; Soviet model for gender policies 333, 334, 335, 338; Stalinist purges 334; unveiling 338; violent political change 19; women’s KPJ membership 334; women’s NGOs as peace activists 32, 160; see also International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia Yushchenko, Viktor 456 Zaharijević, Adriana 28 Zemínová, Fráňa 298 Zetkin, Clara 221 Zhenotdel 91, 117, 118; assessing success of 222, 224–​225; “backwardness” of women 223–​224; in Central Asia 228, 230; Civil War work 220; closure of 222; domestic sphere, reinforcing women’s association with 224; emancipation outside the party 221; increasing compliance to party 221; female unemployment, protest against 220, 221; “feminist deviations” 221; founding of 219, 220; illiteracy 223; labor rights 223; maternity and childcare 222–​223; party subordination and emancipation, difficulty of reconciling 219; prostitution 223; publishing activities 222, see also Kommunistka; recruiting and educating women 222; support for progressive legislation 223; women’s health 223 Zhivkova, Ludmila 442 Zielińska, Eleanora 156 Živena 97 Zona Prava 175

554