Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. We use the term “state socialism” in the title of and introduction to this book to refer to the type of political, economic, and social welfare system that existed in postwar Eastern Europe. This was different from the social democracy practiced by some Western European democracies, which, while providing social services and benefits to the population did not advocate the complete overthrow of the market economy and the leading role of one political party. At the same time, since the parties in power during this period identified as communist and because policymakers, scholars, and people of the region often employ the term “communist” or “socialist” when referring to the system (political, economic, and/or social welfare) that existed in postwar Eastern Europe, we recognize the validity of using these terms. 2. See, for example, Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (New York, 1993); Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (London, 1993); Chris Corrin, ed., Superwomen and the Double Burden: Women’s Experiences of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York, 1993); Marilyn Rueschemeyer, ed., Women in the Politics of Postcommunist Eastern Europe (Armonk, 1994); Barbara Lobodziknska, ed. Family, Women, and Employment in Central- Eastern Europe (Westport, 1995); Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, 2000); Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., The Politics of Gender After Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, 2002); Kristen Ghodsee, Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Durham, NC, 2005); Jasmina Lukic´, Joanna Regulska, and Darja Zaviršek, eds., Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe (Aldershot, UK, 2006); and Janet E. Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, Living Gender after Communism (Bloomington, IN, 2006). 3. Notable works on the topic include: Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceaus¸escu’s Romania (Berkeley, 222 N o tes 1998); Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April, 1999): 399–425; Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley, 2002); Éva Fodor, Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995 (Durham, NC, 2003); Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor, 2005); and Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, 2007). 4. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884; Honolulu, 2001) and August Bebel, Women and Socialism (1879; New York, 1910). 5. For example, by 1970, 74.9 percent of women (aged twenty to fifty-nine years) were employed outside the home in Romania; 76.6 percent in Poland; 76.3 percent in Czechoslovakia; and 61.6 percent in Hungary. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, women’s level of employment was as follows: the United Kingdom, 54.2 percent; France, 51.2 percent; and Sweden, 49.8. Yearbook of Labor Statistics (Geneva, 1975). 6. On the double and triple burden see, for example, Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? Experiences from Eastern Europe (London, 1974); Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism (New York, 1989); Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics; Einhorn, Cinderella; Corrin, Superwomen; and Harsch, Revenge. In some cases women’s multiple burdens led to more egalitarian relationships between husbands and wives. See Jill Massino, “Something Old, Something New: Marital Roles and Relations in State Socialist Romania,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 1 (forthcoming 2010). 7. See Maria Todorova, “Historical Tradition and Transformation in Bulgaria: Women’s Issues or Feminist Issues,” Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 3 (Winter, 1994): 129–43. 8. This question was posed by Hilda Scott in Does Socialism Liberate Women? 9. See, for example, Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2002); Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN, 1997); Melanie Ilic, ed., Women in the Stalin Era (London, 2002); Melanie Ilic, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood, eds., Women in the Khrushchev Era (London, 2004); Carola Sachse, Das Hausarbeitstag: Gerechtigkeit und Gleichberechtigung in Ost und West, 1939–1994 (Gottingen, 2002); and Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (Pittsburgh, 2002). 10. See, for example, Haney, Inventing; Penn, Solidarity’s Secret; Harsch, Revenge, and Basia A. Nowak, “Constant Conversations: Agitators in the League of Women in Poland during the Stalinist Period,” Feminist Studies 31, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 488–518. For the Soviet Union, see Beatrice N o tes 223 Farnsworth and Lynne Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women (New York, 1992) and Goldman, Women at the Gates. 11. According to the Cold War paradigm, communist politics in the East European satellites were orchestrated by the Soviet Union, and a self- interested ruling elite controlled all aspects of life through terror, coercion, and intimidation. Void of individual power and agency, the people who inhabited these countries led dismal and drab lives characterized by material want, fear, and a general malaise. 12. See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Socialism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, 2002); David Crowley and Susan E. Reid,eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford, 2002); Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000); and Anne Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds., Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca, 2006). 13. On studying dissent from a gendered perspective, see Maria Bucur, “Gendering Dissent: Of Bodies and Minds, Survival and Opposition under Communism,” in “Beyond Little Vera: Women’s Bodies, Women’s Welfare in Russia and Central/Eastern Europe,” ed. Angela Brintlinger and Natasha Kolchevska, Ohio Slavic Papers 7 (2008): 131–52. 14. See, for example, Hilda Scott, Women and Socialism: Experiences from Eastern Europe (London, 1976); Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women under Communism (Baltimore and London, 1978); Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, 1978); Alfred G. Meyer, “Feminism, Socialism, and Nationalism in Eastern Europe,” in Women, State, and Party (Durham, NC, 1985), 13–30; Joan Landes, “Marxism and the Woman Question,” in Promissory Notes; and Einhorn, Cinderella. 15. For an exemplary overview of women’s movements in Eastern Europe, see Francisca De Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest, 2006). 16. See, for example, Joanna Goven, “Gender and Modernism in a Stalinist State,” Social Politics (Spring 2002): 3–28; Andrea Peto˝, “Women’s Associations in Hungary: Demobilization and Remobilization, 1945– 1951,” in When the War Was Over: Women, War, and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956, ed. Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann (London, 2000), 132–45; Penn, Solidarity’s Secret; and Anna Reading, Polish Women, Solidarity and Feminism (London, 1999). 17. For illuminating explorations of this issue, see the forum “Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in Terminis,” in Aspasia: International Yearbook 224 N o tes of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History vol. 1 (March 2007). 18. For an excellent defense of this approach in investigations of gender in Eastern Europe, see Maria Bucur, “An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe,” AHR Forum: “Revisiting ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1375–89. 19. See Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75; and Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Cultural Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773–97. 20. Krassimira Daskalova, “‘Voices of Their Own’: Between Oral History and Gender History,” in Voices of Their Own: Oral History Interviews of Women, ed. Krassimira Daskalova, trans. Elitsa Stoitsova and Ralitsa Muharska (Sofia, 2004), 9. 21. On the important role of oral history in the construction of civil society in Romania, see Maria Bucur, “The Ethics of Oral History and the Construction of a Civil Society,” Memoria.ro., http://www.memoria.ro/ index.php?location=view_article&id=1316 (accessed on: March 1, 2009). 22. On communist nostalgia, see Doh C. Shin and Peter McDonough, “Nostalgia for Communism vs. Democratic Legitimation in Eastern and Central Europe,” Central European Political Science Review 3, no. 8 (Summer 2002): 20–46; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2002); and Kristen Ghodsee, “Red Nostalgia?

Load more