Women in Transition From Post Feminism to Past Femininity

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 by: Dr. Sam Vaknin

"[In]... the
brothels off Wenceslas Square, in central Prague, [where] sexual
intercourse can be bought for USD 25 - about half the price charged at
a German brothel... Slav women have supplanted Filipinos and Thais as
the most common foreign offering in [Europe]." (The Economist, August
2000, p.18)

"I'm also wary of the revolutionary ambition
of some feminist texts, with their ideas about changing present
conditions, having seen enough attempted utopia's for one lifetime"
(Petr Príhoda, The New Presence, 2000, p. 35).

"As
probably every country has its Amazons, if we go far back in Czech
mythology, to a collection of Old Czech Legends, we come across a very
interesting legend about the Dévín castle (which literally means 'The
Girls' Castle'). It describes a bloody story about a rebellion of
women, who started a vengeful war against men. As the story goes, they
were not only capable warriors, they had no mercy and would not
hesitate to kill their fathers and brothers. Under the leadership of
mighty Vlasta, the "girls" lived in their castle, "Dévín", where they
underwent a severe military training. They led the war very
successfully, and one day Vlasta came up with an shrewd plan, how to
take hostage a famous nobleman, Ctirad. She chose the lovely Sárka from
the body (sic!) of her troops and had her tied up to a tree by a road
with a horn and a jar of a mead out of her reach, but in her sight. In
this state, Sárka was waiting for Ctirad to find her. When he actually
really appeared and saw her, she told him a sad story of how the women
from Dévín punished her for not following their ideology by tying her
to the tree, mockingly putting a jar and a horn (so that she would be
always reminded that she is thirsty and helpless) near by. Ctirad,
enchanted by the beautiful woman, believed the lure and untied her, and
when she handed him the mead, he willingly drunk it. When he was drunk
already, she let him blow the horn, which was a signal for the Dévín
warriors to capture him. He was then tortured in many horrible ways, at
the end of which, his body was woven into a wooden wheel and displayed.
This event mobilized the army, which soon afterwards destroyed Dévín.
(Very significantly, this legend is the only account of radical
feminism in Czech Lands.)" ("The Vissicitudes of Czech Feminism" by
Petra Hanáková)

"We myself...and many others are not in
search of global sisterhood at all, and it is only when we give up
expecting it that we can get anywhere. It is each other's very
'otherness ' that motivates us, and the things we find in common take
on greater meaning within the context of otherness. There is so much to
learn by comparing the ways in which we are different, and which the
same elements of women's experience are global, and which aren't, and
wondering why, and what it means" (Jirina Siklová)

"It is difficult to carry three watermelons under one arm." (Proverb attributed to Bulgarian women)

"The
high level of unemployment among women, segregation in the labour
market, the increasing salary gap between women and men, the lack of
women present at the decision making level, increasing violence against
women, the high levels of maternal and infant mortality, the total
absence of a contraceptive industry in Russia, the insufficiency of
child welfare benefits, the lack of adequate resources to fund current
state programs - this is only part of the long list of women's rights
violations." (Elena Kotchkina, Moscow Centre for Gender Studies,
"Report on the Legal Status of Women in Russia")

Communism
was men's nightmare and women's dream, or so the left wing version
goes. In reality it was a gender-neutral hell. Women under communism
were, indeed, encouraged to participate in the labour force. An array
of conveniences facilitated their participation: day care centres,
kindergarten, daylong schools, abortion clinics. They had their quota
in parliament. They climbed to the top of some professions (though
there was a list of women-free occupations, more than 90 is Poland).
But this - as most other things in communism - was a mere simulacrum.

Reality
was much drearier. Women, however mettlesome, groaned under the "triple
burden" - work, marital expectations cum childrearing chores and party
activism. They succumbed to the lure and demands of the (stressful and
boastful) image of the communist "super-woman". This martyrdom - now
threatened by the dual Western imports, capitalism and feminism -
served as a fountain of self-esteem and a source of self-worth in
otherwise gloomy circumstances.

Yet, the communist
inspired workplace revolution was not complemented by a domestic one.
Women's traditional roles - so succinctly summarized by Bismarck with
Prussian geniality as "kitchen, children, church" - survived the
modernizing onslaught of scientific Marxism. It is true that power
shifted within the family unit ("The woman is the neck that moves the
head, her husband"). But the "underslippers" (as Czech men
disparagingly self-labeled) still had the upper hand. In short, women
were now subjected to onerous double patriarchy, both private and
public (the latter propagated by the party and the state). It is not
that they did not value the independence, status, social interaction
and support networks that their jobs afforded them. But they resented
the lack of choice (employment was obligatory) and the parasitic rule
of their often useless husbands. Many of them were an integral and
important part of national and social movements throughout the region.
Yet, with victory secured and goals achieved, they were invariably
shunned and marginalized. As a result, they felt exploited and abused.
Small wonder women voted overwhelmingly for right wing parties post
communism.

Yet, even after the demise of communism,
Western feminism failed to take root in Central and Eastern Europe
(CEE). The East Coast Amazons from America and their British
counterparts were too ideological, too Marxist, too radical and too
men-hating and family-disparaging to engender much following in the
just-liberated victims of leftist ideologies. Hectoring,
overly-politicized women were a staple of communism - and so was
women's liberation. Women in CEE vowed: "never again".

Moreover,
the evaporation of the iron curtain lifted the triple burden as well.
Women finally had a choice whether to develop a career and how to
balance it with family life. Granted, economic hardship made this
choice highly theoretical. Once again, women had to work to make ends
meet. But the stifling ethos was gone.

Communism left
behind it a legal infrastructure incompatible with a modern market
economy. Maternal leave was anywhere between 18 and 36 (!) months, for
instance. But there were no laws to tackle domestic or spousal
violence, women trafficking, organized crime prostitution rings,
discrimination, inequality, marital rape, date rape and a host of other
issues. There were no women's media of any kind (TV or print). No
university offered a gender studies program or had a women's studies
department. Communism was interested in women (and humans) as means of
production. It ignored all other dimensions of their existence. In
sputnik-era Russia, there were no factories for tampons or sanitary
bandages, for example. Communism believed that the restructuring of
class relations will resolve all other social inequities. Feminism
properly belonged to the spoiled, brooding women of the West - not to
the bluestockings of communism. Ignoring problems was communism's way
of solving them. Thus, there was no official unemployment in the lands
of socialism - or drugs, or AIDS, or unhappy women. To borrow from
psychodynamic theories, Communism never developed "problem constancy".

To
many, women included, communism was about the perversion of the
"natural order". Men and women were catapulted out of their
pre-ordained social orbits into an experiment in dystopy. When it
ended, post communism became a throwback to the 19th century: its
values, mores and petite bourgeois aspirations. In the exegesis of
transition, communism was interpreted as an aberration, an interruption
in an otherwise linear progress. It was cast as a regrettable
historical accident or, worse, a criminal endeavour to be vehemently
disowned and reversed.

Yet again women proved to be the
prime victims of historical processes, this time of transition. They
saw their jobs consumed by male-dominated privatization and male-biased
technological modernization. Men in the CEE are 3 times more likely to
find a job, 60-80% of all women's jobs were lost (for instance in the
textile and clothing industries) and the highest rates of unemployment
are among middle aged and older women ("unemployment with a female
face" as it is called in Ukraine). Women constitute 50-70% of the
unemployed. And women's unemployment is probably under-reported. Most
unrecorded workers (omitted from the official statistics) are women.
Where retraining is available (a rarity), women are trained to do
computer jobs, mostly clerical and low skilled. Men, on the other hand,
are assigned to assimilate new and promising technologies. In many
countries, women are asked to waive their rights under the law, or even
to produce proof of sterilization before they get a job. The only ray
of light is higher education, where women's participation actually
increased in certain countries. But this blessing is confined to
"feminine" (low pay and low status) professions. Vocational and
technical schools have either closed down entirely or closed their
gates to women. Even in feminized professions (such as university
teaching), women make less than 20% of the upper rungs (e.g., full
professorships). The tidal wave of the rising cost of education
threatens to drown this trend of women's education. Studies have shown
that, with rising costs, women's educational opportunities decline.
Families prefer to invest - and rationally so - in their males.

Women
witnessed the resurgence of nostalgic nationalism, neo traditionalism
and religious revival - social forces which sought to confine them to
home, hearth, spouse and children and to "liberate" them from the
"forced labour" of communism. Negative demographic trends (declining
life expectancy and birth rate, numerous abortions, late marriage, a
high divorce rate, increasing suicide rate) conspired to provoke a "we
are a dying nation" outcry and the inevitable re-emphasis of the
woman's reproductive functions. Fierce debates about the morality of
abortion erupted in bastions of Catholic fundamentalism (such as Poland
and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania) as well as in citadels of rational
agnosticism, such as the Czech Republic. Curiously, prostitution and
women trafficking were accepted as inevitable. Perhaps because they
catered to masculine needs.

Indeed, in feminist lore and
theory, both nationalism and capitalism are "patriarchal". Nationalism
allocates distinct and mutually exclusive roles to men and women. The
latter are supposed to act as homemakers and have babies. Capitalism
encourages the formation of impregnable male elites, disseminates new
technologies mainly to male monopolies, eliminates menial and low
skilled (women's) jobs and puts emphasis on masculine traits such as
aggression and competitiveness. No wonder female political
representation in parliaments and governments diminished dramatically
since 1989. When powerless, under communism, CEE parliaments were
stacked with women. Now that they are more potent elected bodies, they
are almost nowhere to be seen. The few that infiltrated these august
institutions are relegated to "soft" committees (social issues,
usually) devoid of budgets and of influence. It is very much like under
communism when the decision making party echelons were predominantly
male. The only influential women then were dissidents but they seem to
have rejected the fruit of their labour, democracy, in favour of
tranquility and peace of mind - or to have been usurped by an emerging
male establishment. Despite an education in economics, they are
under-represented among business executives, the owners of privatized
enterprises and the beneficiaries of favourable pay regulations and tax
systems.

This erosion of their economic base coupled
with the drastic decreases in child benefits, in the length of maternal
leave, in the number of public and, thus, affordable child care
facilities and in other support networks led to a swift deterioration
in the social status and leverage of women. With their only effective
contraceptive - abortion - restricted, maternal mortality exploded. So
did teenage pregnancy - a result of the curtailing or absence of sex
education. The rate of sexually transmitted diseases went through the
roof. Violence against women - rape, spousal abuse, date rape - became
epidemic. So did skyrocketing street prostitution. Widowed women - an
ever more common phenomenon in CEE - are destitute and reduced to
begging as the pensions of the lucky ones are ground to nil by a rising
cost of living and IMF prodded stinginess. There are also more
quotidian problems (often neglected by the media hungry and soundbite
craving feminists) like pitiful divorce maintenance payments or
decrepit maternity wards in crumbling hospitals.

Yet,
women's reaction to all this was notable in its absence. After decades
of forced activism and imposed altruism, the imported Western
individualism mutated in CEE to malignant egotism. A sliver of the
female population did well in local government and as entrepreneurs.
The rest (especially the old, the rural, the less educated) stayed at
home and seemed to fancy this novel experience of dependence. A
generational divide emerged. Younger women discovered the joys of
conspicuous consumption and mind numbing pop "culture". They
constituted the masses of career opportunists, the new managerial
class, shareholders and professionals - a pale imitation of the yuppies
of America. Older women retreated - heaving a sigh of relief - into
home and family, seeking refuge from the intrusion of tedious public
matters. Economic realities still forced them to seek a job and steady
income (often in a family business or in the informal economy, with no
job security or regulated labour conditions) but their activism
vanished into newfound and demonstrative reclusiveness.

Yet,
even the young entrepreneurs often fare badly. They lack the necessary
business skills, the knowledge, the supportive infrastructure, or the
access to credit. The older women cannot work long hours, lack skills
and, when officially employed, are expensive, due to the burden of the
still effective social benefits. Thus, women can be mostly found in
services, light industry and agriculture - the most non lucrative
sectors of the dilapidated economies of CEE. And speaking of the social
benefits not yet axed - their quality has deteriorated, access to them
has been restricted and supplies are often short. The costs of public
goods (mainly health and education) have been transferred from state to
households either officially (a result of the commercialization of
services) or surreptitiously and insidiously (e.g., patients required
to purchase their own food, bed sheets and medication when
hospitalized).

To blame it all on a botched transition
is now in vogue. Yet, many of the problems facing the wretched women of
CEE were evident as early as 30 years ago. The feminization of poverty
is not a new phenomenon, nor is the feminization of certain professions
and the attendant decline in both their status and their pay. Under
communism, women felt as exhausted and as guilt-ridden as they feel
today. They were considered unreliable workers (which they were, what
with a lifetime average of 10 abortions and 2 children). Their
offspring endured an alienated childhood in the brutal and faceless
gulag of day care centres maintained by indifferent bureaucrats.
Juvenile delinquency, a high divorce rate, single motherhood and
parasitic fathers were all swept under the ideological carpet by
communism. Even communism's only achievement - the inclusionary
workforce - was an elaborately crafted illusion for consumption by
wide-eyed Western intellectuals. In the agrarian societies which
preceded communism, women worked no less. And women were not allowed to
work night time or shifts or in certain jobs, nor were they paid as
much as men in equal functions. Job advertising is sex-specific and
sexist to this very day (in stark violation of dead letter
Constitutions).

Discarding the baby with the leaking
bathtub has been a hallmark of transition. Communism has done a lot for
women (one of its very rare achievements). Some of these foundations
were sound and durable and should have been preserved to build upon.
Yet the apathy of women and the zeal of power hungry men converged to
yield an old new world: patriarchal, discriminatory and iniquitous. The
day of CEE feminism will come. But first, CEE has to become more
Westernized.

About the Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" and "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East". He is a columnist in "Central Europe Review" and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101, Go.com and searcheurope.com. He is the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia. His web site: http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/

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