After Stalinism: women in Europe

May 18, 1994
Issue 

BARBARA EINHORN is the author of Cinderella Goes to Market, a book on the experiences of women in eastern and central Europe following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes there. She is based at Sussex University, principally in the Women's Studies Centre, and is also associated with the School of European Studies. In Sydney as a guest speaker at the International Green Left Conference at Easter, she was interviewed by MELANIE SJOBERG.

In your book, you cover nationalism in relation to Eastern Europe. You indicate that its recent development is an expression of seeking identity which can be traced back to the 19th century. Can you explain how this nationalism is being constructed?

Nationalism has emerged as people have been searching for something to fill the vacuum left by the demise of state socialism. It has been described by Hungarian socialist Ishkan Rev as a kind of collective forgetting, a way of erasing the state socialist past. It is a fact that during this period most people colluded with the regime on a day to day basis; it's hard to put your head on the chopping block and only the purest people were prepared to be heroes in that sense.

So most people had their daily acts of collusion, which in retrospect they feel bad about. Consequently, they have construed the whole state socialism experience as some foreign import imposed upon them by the Soviet Union, and they were the innocent victims. Now that it's gone they can identify themselves as Hungarian, for example, and define themselves in Hungarian terms. They can think about it in this historical way and reflect on their once glorious past.

In that past, of course, there was a very gender-defined hierarchical family structure, and the power relations were very clear. The man defended the family, along with the wider ethnic group, against invaders. In Poland, for example, during the wars of partition, he was off fighting or imprisoned in the course of that war. The woman was a maternal but very strong figure — after all, she had to hold things together and provide for the family while he was not there.

At the same time, woman is the nation; Polonia was the queen of Poland, but also supposed to be related to the Virgin Mary, so in the Polish case you have woman equated with the nation and with religion. In the Polish case the agency is the Catholic Church, going back to traditional family values. In the other cases, even Russia, the Orthodox Church is very strong.

It suits the state to promote these ideologies now because they want women out of the work force. They need to shed labour. This a convenient ideology of where women should be.

During the period of glasnost in the Soviet Union, it was revealed that there had been a great deal of history which had been rewritten under Stalin, accurate history had been blanked out. Are similar processes occurring now in eastern Europe when you talk about this collective forgetting?

It isn't that conscious or organised. It is an instinct that people have to forget what is bad and remember what is good. It isn't just the daily accommodations with the regime. In the case of East Germany, there was a huge army of unpaid informers. Most families would have had an informer. So people don't really want to examine that history, it is better to mythologise the past.

Western feminist writing has taken up several debates about why gender segmentation of jobs occurs. Can you make any contribution to this discussion from your experiences?

One of the ways that it happens in the west is through schooling and gender-differentiated subject choice. In East Germany, for example, there was absolutely unified schooling with everybody doing the same subjects, so that wasn't a factor.

Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary all had two separate types of secondary school: a humanities-based route to tertiary education, where girls dominated, and the technical-based schools, where boys dominated. That meant that girls were at least 50% of university students, but still in the traditional subject areas. There was some entry to male-dominated areas, like medicine and economics, but as medicine became female-dominated, it lost status and remuneration.

White collar workers were badly paid relative to skilled blue collar workers. This was because of the priority on industrialisation. The predominance of boys in technical schooling meant that at the point where they entered the work force they already had an apprenticeship under their belt, they were entering as skilled workers. Women were "unskilled".

You shouldn't overlook that there was some entry into previously male occupations, but it wasn't widespread. There were still traditional notions of what was suitable work. Girls were 99% of trainees for secretarial work and in the textile and garment industry. One of the big industries to collapse has been textile and garment, which has left a huge regional concentration of female unemployment in Poland and parts of East Germany.

There are many differences in the experiences of women in the region compared to Western feminist developments. Can you talk about the dialogue that is being established and some of the lessons that we could draw from this process?

The dialogue has been difficult. Western feminists tend to come with their preconceptions about how things should be. Conversely, eastern European feminists and women activists tend to regard western feminism with suspicion because they think of it as anti-men.

They see their role in the family traditionally as a strong one. Hungarian sociologist Julia Salay said that during state socialism women were very important in making the networks in the informal sector that provided the necessities of life, helped small businesses, cultivating plots or maintaining solidarity with friends and family.

That gave them experience in an activist sense to talk about the revival of civil society, renewing the networks and informal associations which were banned during the state socialist period. She thought that women would set up consumer groups in the new situation.

My first reaction to that was that, it is hardly an expression of great political activism, but really we have to rethink our assumptions. If you think about Latin America some of the most effective actions were Mothers of the Disappeared or the housewives banging saucepans in the streets of Santiago, during the dictatorship in Chile. Women as mothers and housewives have been very effective politically.

Eugena Shivprova, who runs gender studies in Prague, said that women will get politically active but she argues that they will value their traditional role as mothers and somehow incorporate it into activity.

I also think that, although we don't acknowledge it very often, western feminists have underestimated the costs of entry into the labour force: being always stressed out, feeling guilty and inadequate toward your children or your job or both.

Being torn between dual roles is something East German women have been living, so they are very wary. They didn't experience their right to work as a gain; they experienced it as a burden was imposed on them by the state. Maybe we can learn from that and seek other ways to reconcile the roles.

The German example is interesting, because not only did they have different life experiences, but it has led to a different notion of what feminism is actually about. East German women are concerned about saving jobs, fighting against the closure of child-care facilities and setting up women's refuges. They are very concrete activist goals. The West German women are all into high theory. There is no meeting of minds.

In a way, East German women are still concerned about equality of opportunity, West German women are all into this difference theory. How can you put those two things together?

We could use this as an opportunity to reconceptualise the conditions for women's empowerment or for a society based on social justice which has gender equality at its core. To reach that point, you really have to listen. It requires sensitivity and so often activists are not very good at being tolerant.

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