Feminism in Czechoslovakia since 1989 has been formed not solely by the expertise of state socialism, but in addition by altering views of how gender inequality was handled by the earlier regime. These have ranged from a critique of the ‘enslavement’ of girls to the speculation of ‘higher intercourse’. Nonetheless, what has been lacking is a constructive continuation of the story of socialist emancipation.
Feminism, gender inequality and the emancipation of girls are certainly not new phrases within the Czech Republic. Nor, for that matter, is criticism of them as ‘progressivist’ ideas imposed on ‘us’ by the West. Thirty years in the past, comparable debates shaped a part of the rising consciousness, reception and adoption of western feminisms of a predominantly liberal flip. The primary subject of the Slovak feminist journal Aspekt in 1993 was dedicated to The Delusion of Magnificence by the liberal American feminist Naomi Wolf (1990), who has extra just lately featured because the protagonist of Naomi Klein’s e-book Doppelganger: A Journey into the Mirror World (2023), concerning the world of conspiracy theories.
Like at this time, contributors within the early debates included well-known conservative voices endorsing a ‘pure’ gender order and conventional household values. Repugnant sexist statements and harsh rejections of ‘radical’ or ‘militant’ western feminists have been frequent, regardless that nobody had a transparent thought of what these phrases really meant. However the discussions after 1989 additionally led to a reassessment of the emancipation of girls below the earlier regime, inviting the query as to what varieties future developments ought to take.
Defend us from the Union of Ladies
Though these early debates have been largely restricted to educational circles and much from being genuinely public, they did filter into the media, spawning quite a few articles, indicating how vital the topic was thought-about on the time. Two main points dominated reflections of the expertise in Czechoslovakia: first, how the place of girls in numerous walks of life had been affected by state socialist insurance policies, compared to the West; second, to what extent – if in any respect – ladies had been conscious, and significant of, gender inequality below state socialism.
Within the early years after 1989 it had by no means crossed anybody’s thoughts to ponder feminism from the attitude of the advance of girls’s rights below state socialism. The Czech Union of Ladies (ČSZ) was seen merely as a cog within the equipment of the communist regime, which imposed laws on ladies with a adverse affect on their lives. The successor organisation of the ČSZ, which retained its title, largely stored its distance from activist feminist circles, sometimes even clashing with them (Zdeňka Hajná, the chair of the ČSZ, remembers in her memoirs her variations with the sociologist Jiřina Šiklová).
Certainly, the ČSZ was additionally the goal of the protests of November 1989. Demonstrations exterior the organisation’s Prague headquarters featured the banner ‘Saint Agnes of Bohemia, defend us from the Union of Ladies’. The slogan was additionally used within the Proclamation of Younger Moms, a bunch of activists who supported Civic Discussion board (the political motion that arose from the Velvet Revolution – ed.). Recalling the environment of the Nineteen Nineties, the Slovak feminists and theorists Jana Cviková and Jana Oravcová later mentioned: ‘For us, feminism meant openness and pluralism.’ Against this, they regarded state socialism and its strategy to ladies’s emancipation as ‘pressured unification and homogenisation’.
Nonetheless, a few of these discussing the standing of girls in socialist Czechoslovakia within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s (such because the sociologist and thinker Hana Havelková) contended that ladies have been extra emancipated than their western counterparts. This, they claimed, was primarily as a result of males had been extra severely affected by financial dispossession. Moreover, males had misplaced energy resulting from legislative modifications, such because the regulation on the democratisation of the household, which stripped them of their standing as ‘head of the household’. Alongside the overall transformation of social relations, they argued, these interventions helped to equalise gender relations, affecting the lives of individuals throughout society. Though accomplice relations in Czechoslovakia have been very totally different from the expertise of western feminist collectives, inter-gender relations in society general have been extra equitable than within the West, in line with this view.
Nonetheless, a adverse opinion of socialist emancipation prevailed within the Nineteen Nineties. The legally codified equality between women and men assured below state socialism was deemed to have existed on paper solely (is there a social order anyplace the place this isn’t the case?), contributing to the ‘enslavement’ of girls by way of ‘overemployment’.
It’s all about intercourse
These days, a way more beneficial view of the socialist experiment has emerged. Whereas primarily a results of worldwide analysis, which has once more began analyzing ladies’s emancipation below state socialism, the shift may be understood as a response to the expansion of neoliberal discourse. The function of girls in state-run ladies’s organisations (ladies’s unions) is being reassessed and their function reframed in activist phrases as a means of advancing social insurance policies benefiting ladies. On this context, progressive legislative insurance policies within the East are thought to be having spurred western governments to pay extra consideration to ladies’s points as a part of their Chilly Struggle competitors with the Japanese Bloc. This well-liked analysis matter has generated quite a few research some, which have nonetheless reached conclusions which are questionable, to say the least.
Maybe the most effective instance of this strategy is Why Ladies Have Higher Intercourse below Socialism (2018) by the American anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee. Though the title is extra of a advertising ploy, because the e-book doesn’t talk about sexuality in a lot element, it has helped to unfold the notion of sexual liberation of girls below state socialism. Ghodsee attracts on the Marxist critique of bourgeois marriage as a market transaction, and on financial theories of sexuality that regard intercourse as a commodity that ladies in capitalist societies change with males. Each relaxation on the belief that ladies derive pleasure from intercourse provided that it isn’t the topic of such a market transaction. Ghodsee contends that since most girls have been gainfully employed and their fundamental wants – housing, schooling and healthcare – have been met, intercourse for them may very well be loved with no strings connected.
In her e-book Sexual Liberation, Socialist Fashion: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Sesire, 1945–1989 (2018), sociologist Kateřina Lišková argues that ladies have been sexually liberated already in the course of the Fifties, as a result of legalisation of abortion, and since the feminine orgasm had been the article of research by sexologists at the moment. Interesting as these conclusions might sound, Lišková presents no concrete proof of what this sexual liberation really entailed. It’s, after all, inconceivable to hold out retrospective research to find out whether or not, within the Sixties, ladies within the East loved intercourse greater than ladies did within the West.
Pleasure vs disciplining
The emphasis on the sexual liberation of girls below state socialism is partly a results of the adoption of the western perspective espoused by the second wave of feminism. To say that ladies in Czechoslovakia within the Fifties had the identical freedom to resolve about their very own our bodies and reproductive behaviour as American ladies a decade or two later is, to place it mildly, an exaggeration. Again then, contraception was briefly provide in Czechoslovakia and, judging by the data of the state-run abortion committees, most girls who wished to terminate their being pregnant within the Sixties lacked fundamental info on contraceptive strategies.
One must also level out that the discourse on the legalisation of abortion and the exploration of the feminine orgasm in Czechoslovakia was fairly totally different from the individualist, liberal spirit manifested within the slogan ‘My physique, my alternative’, whose main focus is ladies’s subjective expertise of sexuality. In Czechoslovakia, the feminine orgasm was studied for the needs of treating infertility, and the legalisation of abortion came about within the context of coping with ladies’s social and well being points, and with the intention of selling inhabitants progress.
Whereas modernising educational discourse in Czechoslovakia was undoubtedly extra progressive than the attitudes in some western nations, the query stays: what had supposedly enabled Czechoslovak ladies within the Fifties to derive extra pleasure from intercourse as a part of their sexual liberation? Kateřina Lišková believes it was gender equality in accomplice relations, which had been actively promoted alongside an emphasis on the ‘presence of deep emotions as a prerequisite of satisfying intercourse’. Nonetheless, in memoirs written by Czechoslovak ladies (which hardly ever point out intercourse), the Fifties don’t precisely emerge as a time once they found their our bodies as a supply of sexual pleasure.
For instance, in her memoirs Convictions: My Life with a Good Communist (1979), Jo Langer wrote about her relationship with the leftwing Slovak mental Oskar Langer, whom she married in 1934. The Langers and their communist mates practiced free sexual relations on ideological grounds: ‘In line with the second-hand Soviet ideology of these days, in our circles it was thought-about good to have intercourse as a result of a bodily pissed off particular person was unlikely to be totally match to dedicate his capacities to the trigger.’ Nonetheless, Langer illustrated her expertise of marital intercourse by recounting how she as soon as turned on the sunshine throughout intercourse just for her husband to immediately change it off: ‘Sure, he regarded it as shameful, not out of some sort of shyness however as a result of it was pleasurable and we weren’t entitled to pleasure, given there was a lot struggling and poverty on the planet.’
This sort of communist morality, which dismissed all bodily pleasures as ‘vestiges of bourgeois attitudes’ (an angle mocked by writers within the Sixties) and held that companions in a relationship have been meant to work collectively for a better trigger, reasonably than to belong to and stay for each other, was not shared by society as an entire. Companion relations fulfilling numerous wants continued to exist – suffice it to say the sexual exploits of the contributors of youth brigades and different comparable organised actions, which have been the stuff of legend. Nonetheless, the query stays whether or not the gender equality promoted within the Fifties was actually able to undermining, reviving or redefining sexual practices rooted in patriarchal frameworks.
Liberation and experimentation
Being outspoken about sexual experiences, fantasies and needs performed an important function in ladies’s sexual liberation within the West. On this respect, the developments behind the Iron Curtain ran parallel to these within the West, since in Czechoslovakia sexuality didn’t turn into a subject of public debate till the Sixties, albeit in a socialist–disciplinarian context.
For instance, in a 1962 article entitled ‘Is it essential to reinvent love?’, printed within the journal Host do domu, the thinker Irena Dubská criticised short-term sexual relations within the West, which she thought to be an indication of individualism and an escape into privateness from an alienated, bureaucratised world. As a substitute of seeing sexual practices in western societies – details about which had trickled into the media from scholarly circles – as a part of a modernizing motion, she condemned it as an indication of the technologisation and rationalisation of intercourse. She championed the combination of affection into society-wide communal relations and a brand new unity of feelings, thought and motion, with out explaining how this aim was to be achieved.
Within the late Sixties, elements of the Czechoslovak press carried articles arguing that whereas contributing to a social and financial emancipation of girls, the concepts of the Prague Spring had allowed sexual behaviour to proceed to be framed by way of classes and requirements created by males. They claimed that by selling the picture of marital equality, ladies’s sexual behaviour was influenced by a romanticised thought of affection. The journalist Helena Klímová, for instance, recommended unbridled extramarital sexual relations and dismissed normative concepts of sexual behaviour, contending that every part is ‘regular’ in intercourse so long as it occurs with the mutual consent of the events concerned.
Public discourse of this era signifies that, unsurprisingly, sexual liberalisation or certainly, experimentation, came about in Czechoslovakia within the Sixties. The query stays, nonetheless, of what affect this had on gender equality. For instance, in her e-book Každý krok je volba (‘Each step is a alternative’, 2023), the painter Věra Nováková recalled her involuntary place in a love triangle, setting her expertise within the context of the Sixties vogue of sexual liberation.
The modernization of society
What little dialogue there was of sexuality exterior of scholarly discourse below state socialism occurred largely within the second half of the Sixties. When it comes to ladies’s emancipation, the emphasis was on the collective spirit reasonably than sexuality; Alexandra Kollontai’s concepts about free love have been largely rejected as decadent.
Following the 1948 communist takeover, three points dominated within the official reflections on the place of girls in society: first, ladies have been anticipated to contribute to the rebuilding of society, normally by way of activism on an area, group stage; second, they have been supposed to realize emancipation by way of their function within the office – which could additionally assist them realise their full potential – and their contribution to the constructing of a brand new society; and third, of their capability as moms, ladies have been to lift new residents for the socialist state, which rewarded them financially for procreating.
From a present-day perspective, this discourse might seem conservative and homogenising in a discriminatory means – for instance, the truth that ladies have been perceived as moms whereas males weren’t perceived as carers (parental depart for fathers was launched solely within the Nineteen Eighties and solely in distinctive instances). Nonetheless, within the context of the occasions it appeared progressive. After World Struggle II, a number of tasks within the visible arts confirmed dedication to ladies’s emancipation, notably the collection of collective exhibitions organised by the avantgarde architect Augusta Müllerová, which drew on the widespread postwar enthusiasm for collaborating in public affairs. These and different occasions aimed toward selling new social insurance policies (corresponding to free nationalised schooling or laws obliging fathers to pay upkeep to kids born out of wedlock) have been one other means during which the postwar authorities set itself aside culturally from the discourse of the wartime Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
As a substitute of presenting motherhood by way of the previous, conventional values, Christianity or certainly racial purity, the brand new discourse centered on a extra simply society of the longer term during which kids have been to play an vital function and luxuriate in equal standing and entry to schooling. In actual fact, these objectives have been additionally championed and pursued in numerous varieties within the interwar interval by communist ladies corresponding to Jožka Jabůrková, Luisa Landová-Štychová and Marie Švermová.
‘Our ladies’ in a brand new period
After 1989, along with the narrative of ‘overemployment’ below state socialism, a conservative normalisation narrative emerged foregrounding the nuclear household. Right here, the girl’s main function was seen to be that of a mom spending a substantial half her life on lengthy ‘maternity leaves’. The pre-1989 state insurance policies on the place of girls in society and their integration within the work course of have been discredited. Laws introducing a four-year ‘parental depart’ was not adopted till 1995, with some political events advocating an extension to 6 years whereas nonetheless contemplating it a social profit solely for ladies.
Though opinions might differ concerning the social insurance policies of the normalisation years (1969-1989 – ed.), it’s indeniable that public opinion in Czechoslovakia was to a serious extent formed by official socialist ideology. The sociologist and Constitution 77 signatory Jiřina Šiklová, who as a former dissident was instrumental in 1991 in establishing Gender Research in Czechoslovakia, might have distanced herself from the Czech Union of Ladies, but her personal views have been solid in comparable phrases. By referring to ‘our ladies’, she made use of the ‘official’ pre-1989 terminology, and her rhetoric and give attention to advancing the sphere of social work have been primarily based on the conviction that care and a spotlight must be given to each sector of society. For that reason, a lot of the concepts and theories promoted by feminists primarily based at elite western universities, who began visiting Czechoslovakia after 1989, struck her as controversial and divorced from ‘life’s actual issues’.
A continuity with the socialist framework can also be obvious in the way in which human rights have been mentioned the Nineteen Nineties. A few of these concerned believed that the precedence was to determine civic society, and that feminism ought to observe swimsuit solely as soon as this aim had been achieved. On the similar time, the expertise of state socialism, which regarded the emancipation of girls as an integral a part of the emancipation of society as an entire, was rejected due to its universalising discourse and for not being sufficiently important of the patriarchal system.
With hindsight, reasonably than totally embracing a liberal feminism primarily based on individualism, it may need been preferable to re-evaluate the socialist expertise, whereas on the similar time adopting among the concepts of leftwing feminism developed in parallel within the West. New, left-leaning feminist insurance policies within the Czech Republic may have drawn on values primarily based on opposing individualism and commercialisation, whereas incorporating such points as take care of native communities and the surroundings. Nonetheless, discussions of the socialist emancipation of girls after 1989 haven’t gone past defining the contributors’ personal positions vis-à -vis the West and have, sadly, didn’t provide you with a ‘third means’.
