All Were Rebels: The Founding of the Network of East-West Women

Abstract

All Were RebelsThe Founding of the Network of East-West Women Ann Snitow (bio) Ann Snitow dedicated her life to feminism as a scholar and activist. The first piece she published in Dissent, in 1989, was a rigorous history of the U.S. feminist movement in which she participated. In the years and months leading up to her death last August, she devoted her energy to writing an account of her political work in Central and Eastern Europe. She finished the book days before she died. We are honored to publish this excerpt, in which Ann tells the story of the founding meeting of the Network of East-West Women, the organization she cofounded in 1991 and worked within for nearly three decades. —Natasha Lewis, Senior Editor The Meeting, Dubrovnik, June 7–9, 1991 In the midst of our feverish last-minute planning for what became the founding meeting of the Network of East-West Women, the U.S. State Department placed a travel advisory on Yugoslavia. I called, and they advised us to call off the meeting. A war was scheduled for late June. We had worked a year to bring this group of Eastern and Central European feminists together. Were we now to postpone focusing on women's interests in deference to what always gets named as more urgent—nationalist cries of crisis and cynically manipulated threat? Who gets to make history? Wise or not, we refused to cancel. Participants feared, or refused to fear, according to their temperaments and histories; but finally everyone came—more than fifty women from the East, twenty from the West. They all refused the usual command to women in times of war fever: Step back; wait. We were horrified by the impending disaster but also half-disbelieving that a war could be scheduled in this way, as if by rational design. We never could have imagined the extent of the hysteria and political violence that was about to come. Instead, our meeting posed a general question with which we were to constantly wrestle in the years ahead: What is included [End Page 145] Click for larger view View full resolution Ann Snitow at the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the NEWW in Krakow in June 2016, with Małgorzata Tarasiewicz (director of NEWW), Wanda Nowicka, Roma Ciesla, and Barbara Limanowksa. (Phoebe West) in the concept "the political"? Feminism had made broad revisions to what politics should rightly include—the realms usually called "private," such as sexuality and the very structures of daily social life. It was clear to all those attending the meeting that every piece of received political rhetoric was about to be tossed in the air, a crazy confetti to land who knew where. All of the women at the meeting were renegades in one way or another; all were rebels who had bitten the hand that had fed them before the fall of communism and were not going to line up with uncritical enthusiasm for a new world order either. They were students, teachers, writers, and journalists—all cultural workers of various sorts. From many standpoints, they were skeptics. In being self-proclaimed feminists, they were idealists, yes, but ironic idealists. Together in Dubrovnik In one of those little collisions of history, we chose Dubrovnik ("gem of the Adriatic," travel agents say)—then in Yugoslavia, now in Croatia—as our meeting place. Some of the women participating had never been out of their own countries before, and the Yugoslavian writer Slavenka Drakulić urged that the pleasures of this beautiful place should be part of what we organizers were offering to women weary to the bone. I liked her attitude. After my first trip, I was beginning to understand the complex dynamics of resistance to feminism in the region. Rest and meals cooked by someone else in the nice Hotel Lero might be as useful to such [End Page 146] overworked and politically beleaguered women as hours of strategic conversation. Let there be pleasure—or at least a moment to breathe; let the conference proceed: As You Like It, or What You Will. (Over the years, we tried to hold on to this faith in let-it-be organizing...