What can women do to change the totalitarian cultural context?

Abstract

This article describes women's situation and how it has been changing in Central/Eastern Europe. An assessment of future options is presented in the context of an alternative view on what really happened to Soviet-type societies in 1989: The proposed interpretation is that it was not, as is widely believed, the beginning of a transition from totalitarianism to democracy, but something quite different—a liberation of the dominant class. Whereas societies of Eastern Europe were not socialist in any historically legitimate sense, they incorporated a complex set of measures aimed at fulfilling the socialist promise to women. But these ambivalent measures did not have essential liberating potential. The article analyzes the ideological turn in women's issues of the 1970s as part of the deepening legitimation crisis of the power elite. It shows how this conservative anti-feminist campaign prepared the framework of value reorientation which, after November, 1989, made it possible to raise male dominance in Eastern Europe to a new, higher stage. The role of women in the dissident subculture is discussed. In some fundamental way, coming to power after 1990 contradicted the proud pathos of resistance to domination which was inherent in the very identity of women-dissidents. After November, 1989, women who were once most active in the dissident subculture silently withdrew from everyday politics. The future of the women's movement, the article claims, depends on the future of civil society, and on the advancement of grassroots activism in particular.