Women in Transition - From Post Feminism to Past Femininity
By: Sam Vaknin | Posted: 17th August 2005
Women in Transition - From Post Feminism to Past Femininity
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
"[In]... the brothels off Wenceslas Square, in central Prague,
[where] sexual intercourse can be bought for USD 25 - about half the
price charged at a German brothel... Slav women have supplanted
Filipinos and Thais as the most common foreign offering in [Europe]."
The Economist, August 2000, p.18
"I'm also wary of the revolutionary ambition of some feminist texts,
with their ideas about changing present conditions, having seen
enough attempted utopia's for one lifetime."
Petr Príhoda, The New Presence, 2000, p. 35
"As probably every country has its Amazons, if we go far back in
Czech mythology, to a collection of Old Czech Legends, we come
across a very interesting legend about the Dévín castle (which
literally means 'The Girls' Castle'). It describes a bloody story
about a rebellion of women, who started a vengeful war against men.
As the story goes, they were not only capable warriors, they had no
mercy and would not hesitate to kill their fathers and brothers.
Under the leadership of mighty Vlasta, the 'girls' lived in their
castle, 'Dévín', where they underwent a severe military training.
They led the war very successfully, and one day Vlasta came up with
an shrewd plan, how to take hostage a famous nobleman, Ctirad. She
chose the lovely Sárka from the body (sic!) of her troops and had
her tied up to a tree by a road with a horn and a jar of a mead out
of her reach, but in her sight. In this state, Sárka was waiting for
Ctirad to find her. When he actually really appeared and saw her,
she told him a sad story of how the women from Dévín punished her
for not following their ideology by tying her to the tree, mockingly
putting a jar and a horn (so that she would be always reminded that
she is thirsty and helpless) near by. Ctirad, enchanted by the
beautiful woman, believed the lure and untied her, and when she
handed him the mead, he willingly drunk it. When he was drunk
already, she let him blow the horn, which was a signal for the Dévín
warriors to capture him. He was then tortured in many horrible ways,
at the end of which, his body was woven into a wooden wheel and
displayed. This event mobilized the army, which soon afterwards
destroyed Dévín. (Very significantly, this legend is the only
account of radical feminism in Czech Lands.)"
"The Vissicitudes of Czech Feminism" by Petra Hanáková
"We myself... and many others are not in search of global sisterhood
at all, and it is only when we give up expecting it that we can get
anywhere. It is each other's very 'otherness' that motivates us, and
the things we find in common take on greater meaning within the
context of otherness. There is so much to learn by comparing the
ways in which we are different, and which the same elements of
women's experience are global, and which aren't, and wondering why,
and what it means."
Jirina Siklová
"It is difficult to carry three watermelons under one arm."
Proverb attributed to Bulgarian women
"The high level of unemployment among women, segregation in the
labour market, the increasing salary gap between women and men, the
lack of women present at the decision making level, increasing
violence against women, the high levels of maternal and infant
mortality, the total absence of a contraceptive industry in Russia,
the insufficiency of child welfare benefits, the lack of adequate
resources to fund current state programs - this is only part of the
long list of women's rights violations."
Elena Kotchkina, Moscow Centre for Gender Studies, "Report on the
Legal Status of Women in Russia"
Communism was men's nightmare and women's dream, or so the left wing
version goes. In reality it was a gender-neutral hell. Women under
communism were, indeed, encouraged to participate in the labour
force. An array of conveniences facilitated their participation: day
care centres, kindergarten, daylong schools, abortion clinics. They
had their quota in parliament. They climbed to the top of some
professions (though there was a list of women-free occupations, more
than 90 is Poland). But this - as most other things in communism -
was a mere simulacrum.
Reality was much drearier. Women, however mettlesome, groaned under
the "triple burden" - work, marital expectations cum childrearing
chores and party activism. They succumbed to the lure and demands of
the (stressful and boastful) image of the communist "super-woman".
This martyrdom - now threatened by the dual Western imports,
capitalism and feminism - served as a fountain of self-esteem and a
source of self-worth in otherwise gloomy circumstances.
Yet, the communist inspired workplace revolution was not
complemented by a domestic one. Women's traditional roles - so
succinctly summarized by Bismarck with Prussian geniality
as "kitchen, children, church" - survived the modernizing onslaught
of scientific Marxism. It is true that power shifted within the
family unit ("The woman is the neck that moves the head, her
husband"). But the "underslippers" (as Czech men disparagingly self-
labeled) still had the upper hand. In short, women were now
subjected to onerous double patriarchy, both private and public (the
latter propagated by the party and the state). It is not that they
did not value the independence, status, social interaction and
support networks that their jobs afforded them. But they resented
the lack of choice (employment was obligatory) and the parasitic
rule of their often useless husbands. Many of them were an integral
and important part of national and social movements throughout the
region. Yet, with victory secured and goals achieved, they were
invariably shunned and marginalized. As a result, they felt
exploited and abused. Small wonder women voted overwhelmingly for
right wing parties post communism.
Yet, even after the demise of communism, Western feminism failed to
take root in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The East Coast
Amazons from America and their British counterparts were too
ideological, too Marxist, too radical and too men-hating and family-
disparaging to engender much following in the just-liberated victims
of leftist ideologies. Hectoring, overly-politicized women were a
staple of communism - and so was women's liberation. Women in CEE
vowed: "never again".
Moreover, the evaporation of the iron curtain lifted the triple
burden as well. Women finally had a choice whether to develop a
career and how to balance it with family life. Granted, economic
hardship made this choice highly theoretical. Once again, women had
to work to make ends meet. But the stifling ethos was gone.
Communism left behind it a legal infrastructure incompatible with a
modern market economy. Maternal leave was anywhere between 18 and 36
(!) months, for instance. But there were no laws to tackle domestic
or spousal violence, women trafficking, organized crime prostitution
rings, discrimination, inequality, marital rape, date rape and a
host of other issues. There were no women's media of any kind (TV or
print). No university offered a gender studies program or had a
women's studies department. Communism was interested in women (and
humans) as means of production. It ignored all other dimensions of
their existence. In sputnik-era Russia, there were no factories for
tampons or sanitary bandages, for example. Communism believed that
the restructuring of class relations will resolve all other social
inequities. Feminism properly belonged to the spoiled, brooding
women of the West - not to the bluestockings of communism. Ignoring
problems was communism's way of solving them. Thus, there was no
official unemployment in the lands of socialism - or drugs, or AIDS,
or unhappy women. To borrow from psychodynamic theories, Communism
never developed "problem constancy".
To many, women included, communism was about the perversion of
the "natural order". Men and women were catapulted out of their pre-
ordained social orbits into an experiment in dystopy. When it ended,
post communism became a throwback to the 19th century: its values,
mores and petite bourgeois aspirations. In the exegesis of
transition, communism was interpreted as an aberration, an
interruption in an otherwise linear progress. It was cast as a
regrettable historical accident or, worse, a criminal endeavour to
be vehemently disowned and reversed.
Yet again women proved to be the prime victims of historical
processes, this time of transition. They saw their jobs consumed by
male-dominated privatization and male-biased technological
modernization. Men in the CEE are 3 times more likely to find a job,
60-80% of all women's jobs were lost (for instance in the textile
and clothing industries) and the highest rates of unemployment are
among middle aged and older women ("unemployment with a female face"
as it is called in Ukraine). Women constitute 50-70% of the
unemployed. And women's unemployment is probably under-reported.
Most unrecorded workers (omitted from the official statistics) are
women. Where retraining is available (a rarity), women are trained
to do computer jobs, mostly clerical and low skilled. Men, on the
other hand, are assigned to assimilate new and promising
technologies. In many countries, women are asked to waive their
rights under the law, or even to produce proof of sterilization
before they get a job. The only ray of light is higher education,
where women's participation actually increased in certain countries.
But this blessing is confined to "feminine" (low pay and low status)
professions. Vocational and technical schools have either closed
down entirely or closed their gates to women. Even in feminized
professions (such as university teaching), women make less than 20%
of the upper rungs (e.g., full professorships). The tidal wave of
the rising cost of education threatens to drown this trend of
women's education. Studies have shown that, with rising costs,
women's educational opportunities decline. Families prefer to
invest - and rationally so - in their males.
Women witnessed the resurgence of nostalgic nationalism, neo
traditionalism and religious revival - social forces which sought to
confine them to home, hearth, spouse and children and to "liberate"
them from the "forced labour" of communism. Negative demographic
trends (declining life expectancy and birth rate, numerous
abortions, late marriage, a high divorce rate, increasing suicide
rate) conspired to provoke a "we are a dying nation" outcry and the
inevitable re-emphasis of the woman's reproductive functions. Fierce
debates about the morality of abortion erupted in bastions of
Catholic fundamentalism (such as Poland and, to a lesser degree,
Lithuania) as well as in citadels of rational agnosticism, such as
the Czech Republic. Curiously, prostitution and women trafficking
were accepted as inevitable. Perhaps because they catered to
masculine needs.
Indeed, in feminist lore and theory, both nationalism and capitalism
are "patriarchal". Nationalism allocates distinct and mutually
exclusive roles to men and women. The latter are supposed to act as
homemakers and have babies. Capitalism encourages the formation of
impregnable male elites, disseminates new technologies mainly to
male monopolies, eliminates menial and low skilled (women's) jobs
and puts emphasis on masculine traits such as aggression and
competitiveness. No wonder female political representation in
parliaments and governments diminished dramatically since 1989. When
powerless, under communism, CEE parliaments were stacked with women.
Now that they are more potent elected bodies, they are almost
nowhere to be seen. The few that infiltrated these august
institutions are relegated to "soft" committees (social issues,
usually) devoid of budgets and of influence. It is very much like
under communism when the decision making party echelons were
predominantly male. The only influential women then were dissidents
but they seem to have rejected the fruit of their labour, democracy,
in favour of tranquility and peace of mind - or to have been usurped
by an emerging male establishment. Despite an education in
economics, they are under-represented among business executives, the
owners of privatized enterprises and the beneficiaries of favourable
pay regulations and tax systems.
This erosion of their economic base coupled with the drastic
decreases in child benefits, in the length of maternal leave, in the
number of public and, thus, affordable child care facilities and in
other support networks led to a swift deterioration in the social
status and leverage of women. With their only effective
contraceptive - abortion - restricted, maternal mortality exploded.
So did teenage pregnancy - a result of the curtailing or absence of
sex education. The rate of sexually transmitted diseases went
through the roof. Violence against women - rape, spousal abuse, date
rape - became epidemic. So did skyrocketing street prostitution.
Widowed women - an ever more common phenomenon in CEE - are
destitute and reduced to begging as the pensions of the lucky ones
are ground to nil by a rising cost of living and IMF prodded
stinginess. There are also more quotidian problems (often neglected
by the media hungry and soundbite craving feminists) like pitiful
divorce maintenance payments or decrepit maternity wards in
crumbling hospitals.
Yet, women's reaction to all this was notable in its absence. After
decades of forced activism and imposed altruism, the imported
Western individualism mutated in CEE to malignant egotism. A sliver
of the female population did well in local government and as
entrepreneurs. The rest (especially the old, the rural, the less
educated) stayed at home and seemed to fancy this novel experience
of dependence. A generational divide emerged. Younger women
discovered the joys of conspicuous consumption and mind numbing
pop "culture". They constituted the masses of career opportunists,
the new managerial class, shareholders and professionals - a pale
imitation of the yuppies of America. Older women retreated - heaving
a sigh of relief - into home and family, seeking refuge from the
intrusion of tedious public matters. Economic realities still forced
them to seek a job and steady income (often in a family business or
in the informal economy, with no job security or regulated labour
conditions) but their activism vanished into newfound and
demonstrative reclusiveness.
Yet, even the young entrepreneurs often fare badly. They lack the
necessary business skills, the knowledge, the supportive
infrastructure, or the access to credit. The older women cannot work
long hours, lack skills and, when officially employed, are
expensive, due to the burden of the still effective social benefits.
Thus, women can be mostly found in services, light industry and
agriculture - the most non lucrative sectors of the dilapidated
economies of CEE. And speaking of the social benefits not yet axed -
their quality has deteriorated, access to them has been restricted
and supplies are often short. The costs of public goods (mainly
health and education) have been transferred from state to households
either officially (a result of the commercialization of services) or
surreptitiously and insidiously (e.g., patients required to purchase
their own food, bed sheets and medication when hospitalized).
To blame it all on a botched transition is now in vogue.Yet, many of
the problems facing the wretched women of CEE were evident as early
as 35 years ago. The feminization of poverty is not a new
phenomenon, nor is the feminization of certain professions and the
attendant decline in both their status and their pay. Under
communism, women felt as exhausted and as guilt-ridden as they feel
today. They were considered unreliable workers (which they were,
what with a lifetime average of 10 abortions and 2 children). Their
offspring endured an alienated childhood in the brutal and faceless
gulag of day care centres maintained by indifferent bureaucrats.
Juvenile delinquency, a high divorce rate, single motherhood and
parasitic fathers were all swept under the ideological carpet by
communism. Even communism's only achievement - the inclusionary
workforce - was an elaborately crafted illusion for consumption by
wide-eyed Western intellectuals. In the agrarian societies which
preceded communism, women worked no less. And women were not allowed
to work night time or shifts or in certain jobs, nor were they paid
as much as men in equal functions. Job advertising is sex-specific
and sexist to this very day (in stark violation of dead letter
Constitutions).
Discarding the baby with the leaking bathtub has been a hallmark of
transition. Communism has done a lot for women (one of its very rare
achievements). Some of these foundations were sound and durable and
should have been preserved to build upon. Yet the apathy of women
and the zeal of power hungry men converged to yield an old new
world: patriarchal, discriminatory and iniquitous. The day of
Central and Eastern European feminism will come. But first, Central
and East Europe has to become more Westernized.
==============================================================
AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
About the Author
Occupation: Webmaster
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia. Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
Contact him at
http://samvak.tripod.com
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Tags: amazons, present conditions, sexual intercourse, femininity, wenceslas square, utopia, sam vaknin, malignant self love, sad story, military training, filipinos, no mercy