A very tangled knot: Official state socialist women’s organizations, women’s agency and feminism in Eastern European state socialism

Abstract

This article discusses some current research claims on gender and state socialism in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989. It raises questions about claims by Revisionist Feminist Scholars that official state socialist women’s organizations were ‘agents’ on behalf of women, or women’s movements, perhaps feminist, and not ‘transmission belts’ of communist parties. State socialist policies are described as ‘friendly towards women’ and ‘pro-women’. In contrast, the author claims that these organizations both were and were not agents on behalf of women, and also prevented women’s agency. Meaningful women’s agency is not actually shown to occur intermittently throughout their history, but in two contexts – before 1955 or in moments of political rupture. Scholars do not distinguish the who, when, and what – Who could be agents? When could they be agents? And what kind of agents could they be? State policies, the author claims, were also at one and the same time ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ towards women, sometimes harming women. The author explores why this research is happening now, discussing research on Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Democratic Women’s Organization of Germany (DFD), the Democratic Association of Hungarian Women (MNDSZ), later renamed MNOT, the Romanian National Council of Women (CNF) and the Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Women’s Organization (AFZ).