Gender Politics and Post-Communism

Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Nanette Funk, Magda Mueller, Nanette Funk, Magda Mueller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429759000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In the wake of communism's decline, women's concerns had become increasingly important in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Yet most discussions of post-communism changes had neglected women's experiences.

Originally published in 1993, this title was the first collection of its kind, presenting original essays by women scholars, politicians, activists, and former dissidents from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, along with essays by Western feminists and scholars. They discuss gender politics during the often turbulent transition and crises of post-communism, offering vivid accounts and analyses of the conditions facing women in each country.

1

Thinking Gender: Bulgarian Women’s Im/possibilities

Rossica Panova, Raina Gavrilova, and Cornelia Merdzanska

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Who is the Bulgarian woman? Overburdened and overexploited, she hardly has time to look at herself, to think about her identity, which depends so much on social mirroring: the way in which others—the family, the group, community, and society—see her. Historical patriarchy is still omnipotent in Bulgarian ways of thinking, reacting, and living, which the Bulgarian woman has internalized. This constrains her search for identity. The contemporary Bulgarian woman has inherited three different models and traditions of women’s roles: the Oriental, the patriarchal Eastern Orthodox, and the totalitarian-socialist. She is a strange hybrid of idiosyncratic features, influences, and world views, hence the difficulty she finds in identifying, defining, and accepting herself, even at the end of the twentieth century.

The Bulgarian language abounds in gynophobic expressions about women and a specific usage of the gender category very similar to that found in English, with a strong pejorative connotation. Such English concepts and phrases as “women’s sicknesses” (for minor diseases), “women’s poetry” (sentimental, low-quality work), “women’s fears” (stupid, groundless fears), or “women’s talk,” might not be found word for word in Bulgarian, but the connotations of inferiority, underestimation, and vulgar simplification remain. If we compare the words “bachelor” and “spinster” (even “old maid”) in the two languages, we see that they are not simply equivalent, gender-marked members of a binary opposition such as that between “married” and “single.” In both languages one might well say, “Nellie hopes to meet an eligible bachelor,” while rarely asserting that “Robert hopes to meet an eligible spinster.” In Bulgarian one finds the same jokes about women drivers, the same centuries-old stereotypes of women as over-emotional, passive, and instinctive while men are viewed as rational, active, and intellectual.

In order to understand the contemporary woman in Bulgaria, however, one must recognize that the legacy she has received is a conflicted one. The Slav and Protobulgarian traditions, which form the basis for contemporary Bulgarian society, did not emphasize sexual differences, and, as far as we can tell, regarded the two sexes more or less equally. The Christianization imposed in the ninth century did not seriously affect the structures of everyday life and social roles. Yet while the blame placed on women for committing the primordial sin never really motivated social behavior, Christianity encouraged a set of presumptions and attitudes that definitely assigned women an inferior place and sacralized a paternalistic attitude.

After Bulgarian lands were conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1396, the Islamic religion, though adopted by only a small percentage of the Bulgarian population, enormously influenced gender roles and relations for all. Women, regarded by Islam as inferiors subject to countless restrictions, were confined to the house. In the streets, they were exposed to shouted obscenities, sexual insinuations, and open advances. Even Christian women dared not leave their neighborhood unattended. For a woman to appear in the bazaar was unthinkable; the only public place she was permitted to visit was the church. There, the Christian religion furthered discrimination, assigning women to the second-floor gallery of the church, separated from the men by a screen.

Only in the last few decades before the liberation in 1878, with its deep changes and increased openness, did women gain access to some public institutions: public schools, lecture rooms, associations of their own. Even then, the family and household remained the only generally accepted and approved spheres for women. No women ever served on the board of a public institution or governing body. Public activities and appearances of women, even the expression of opinion, were considered highly inappropriate. The few professional women and schoolmistresses, despite the recognition of their usefulness, were easy prey to gossip, and almost all fell victim to nasty rumors. Immediately after marriage, they quit teaching and joined the silent and obedient group of housewives.

Yet in the “private” sphere, both in town and country, Bulgarian women were held in high respect. Their judgment on household affairs, marriage of children, and child rearing was unchallenged. They had a strong say in the family economy, as many of them earned additional income in domestic industries. In customary law peasant women held the right to inherit and possess land, which their dowry usually included; after divorce they were permitted to take back their possessions. In large families where more than two generations lived together, when the husband died his role was assumed by his wife, not the eldest son.

After World War II, however, a new model of social development was introduced and forced upon the Bulgarian people—the alien, transplanted model of totalitarian socialist thinking, which, while claiming to liberate women, imposed new limitations on her. The totalitarian system established the cult of the collective and denied the individual. Yet the male figure turned out to be the personification, the embodiment of the totalitarian code, which under the officially proclaimed ideal of freedom and equality silenced and suppressed any public sphere or the possibility of alternative decisions and dialogue.

Ideological bigotry strongly affected the family, women’s professional groups, and the overall gender framework of society. The gravest effects resulted from the so-called “liberation of women from the chains of capitalism.” According to socialist ideology, the Bulgarian woman was to rise out of the darkness of her uneducated slavery and servitude to her husband, father-in-law, the family, and children. But where did she come to? She became trapped in the double slavery of both her traditional role of wife and mother and her new role as a member of the paid labor force. Women, according to the taxonomy of totalitarianism, were incorporated into a family structure conceived as the “smallest cell of socialist society” in the newspeak of communism; the traditional and proud responsibility of women to raise their children was altered.

Bulgarian society came to be built on vertical and horizontal structures that rendered it more readily controlled and governed. Children between seven and nine years old were organized in schools in Chavdar organizations, named after a revolutionary communist antifascist brigade from the resistance movement in 1943—44. Nine-to fourteen-year-olds were automatically transferred to the Pioneers, named after George Dimitrov, the hero of the Leipzig trial in 1933 and leader of the Comintern. At high school, at age fourteen, they became members of Comsomol, the Young Communist League. All of these groups were extremely hierarchical organizations with very strict rules, strong discipline, and elaborate rituals, slogans, emblems, uniforms, hymns, oaths, charters, and constitutions. Every member of the family was expected to join other “organizations”: professional groups, ad hoc groups, amateur and sports groups.

What were the bounds of im/possibility for the Bulgarian woman? She was allowed, and even assigned, to bear and raise children, to keep house, and to do the shopping, which meant lining up for at least two hours daily. Like an ant, she carried huge shopping bags to work and back home. She was also awarded the “honor” of doing the cleaning, cooking, and ironing, teaching the children the alphabet, doing arithmetic and homework with them, playing with them, and, of course, regularly entertaining guests, usually her husband’s friends. There were also great possibilities—to make sacrifices and compromises to keep the marriage together “for the sake of the children.” All these activities, and many others, too, were performed free of charge in the woman’s “free” time—sixteen hours a day plus forty-eight hours on Saturdays and Sundays, again in the name of the husband and the children.

But the greatest “possibility” for 90 percent of Bulgarian women was the right to work outside the family, the exercise of their so-called labor rights eight and a half hours a day. Unfortunately, this human right turned into a burden, a compulsion, for most women had to work out of necessity; the men could not earn enough money to make ends meet.

What has been within the bounds of impossibility, then? For the Bulgarian woman, it has been impossible to have the economic, moral, and cultural opportunities to enjoy life, to enjoy herself, to betray her husband, to go out for a spree, to have hobbies and interests, to get a rest. In public life, except for a tiny group of intellectuals, these women have no means of being properly appreciated, of making a career, of earning scientific titles and ranks, awards, and prestigious positions. The majority of the Bulgarian women take their pride in cooking, in the shining bathroom, the nursery, the bedroom, and the success of their children. According to statistics, about 90 percent of employed Bulgarian women work as kindergarten and primary school teachers, nurses, low-level office workers, sales attendants, and manual workers. The figures from 1988 are as follows:

34.6% of women work in industry

18.3% of women work in agriculture

11.8% of women work in service trades

10.2% of women work in education

7.7% of women work in health service.¹

Only 1.6 percent work in management, decision-making, and administrative spheres. Males control access to institutional power and have molded ideology, economics, philosophy, culture, art, and politics to suit their needs.

Even in the newly elected Parliament only 32 of 400 members are women. There is only one woman leader of a political party among over fifty officially registered political parties in Bulgaria. It is not difficult to reach the conclusion that the ex-socialist Bulgarian society, even in the 1990s, is still a flawless patriarchy, despite the claim of a “victorious socialism” and despite the democratic changes begun in 1989. All power—political, financial, institutional, social, scientific—is entirely in male hands. The myth of the emancipated working socialist woman has already been debunked. The Bulgarian woman was sent to work and enmeshed in the system of building socialism, in which one is above all not a person but human building material, a working hand, a cheap work force, a cog in the huge mechanism of the system at work. For the past forty-five years the Bulgarian woman has been perceived primarily as a working woman, a toiler in all the spheres of manual labor and dirty drudgery. The women most highly praised for their contribution to the building of socialism have usually been those who milk cows, who are weavers, spinners, kolhoz and peasant women. The history textbooks were filled with the names of eminent weavers putting into practice the methods of Mr. X. This was the way in which history presented women, and these groups of women were given appreciation in the form of medals and speeches—a stunning example of a hypocritical strategy to institutionalize inequality as well as a general miserable standard of living.

What was the actual state of affairs? According to statistical data there are more women than men in Bulgaria: 4,516,000 women vs. 4,433,000 men in 1985.² Yet women are treated as a “minority group,” or as a subgroup of men. Women’s longevity exceeds men’s—74.39 years vs. 68.17 years (1986)³—but this just gives women a longer time in harness, a longer life of drudgery.

At the same time, because of being a worker first, and then a mother, the Bulgarian woman does not have the time or financial opportunities to fulfill successfully her “reproductive” role. Over the past ten years there has been a marked decrease in population. Inquiries have demonstrated that regardless of mental or manual work, Bulgarian women rarely give birth to more than two children. A breakdown of who has a third child is as follows:

3.1% among intellectual women

10.2% among women doing mechanized physical work

16.3% among women manual workers.⁴

Similar results are seen if one compares the educational level of mothers. Women with only a primary-school education have an average of 1.98 children, while those with secondary education have 1.57 and those with higher education 1.47 (1985).⁵

It is more than obvious that the prestige and well-being of the Bulgarian socialist “emancipated” woman is a sham. On the contrary, she is not free, she is exploited twice, at home and at work, twice muted, twice excluded from history, politics, and social life. The best example to illustrate the hypocrisy is in the myth of March 8th, International Women’s Day, and how it has been observed. This single day is intended to make amends for the rest of the 364 days of humiliation throughout the year. The holiday is celebrated with flowers, presents, speeches, even seats offered to women on the bus. Usually women dress up, have their hair done, and in general act the part of the perfect object of sexual desire. This seems a most disgusting possibility for women’s advancement, but many women get trapped, smile, and laugh—probably to keep from crying.

Worst of all, the Bulgarian woman has taken for granted and internalized even the condescending male look at her; she rarely aims for self-awareness, let alone self-fulfillment. Her identity is in many ways double. Her body is both a decorative object and a draught animal, her consciousness both that of mother and wife and that of wage earner and intellectual, her free will submitted both to family interests and state chains. Small wonder that she is a split personality; her two halves belong to different spheres, and therefore she can be happy and satisfied neither at work nor at home. She is very often hypersensitive, hypertense, and cantankerous. If this extreme situation is called the “superwoman syndrome” in the United States, then in Bulgaria 90 percent of our women are superwomen, or rather, super-toiling pseudo-emancipated women. A woman’s constant effort to define her real place and identity is sabotaged by layers of tradition, ambiguous at its very roots. The controversy between the denial, for centuries, of her civil rights in public, and the high respect she enjoyed at home, between the deprecatory attitude of Islam and the strong erotic appreciation in a previous semi-oriental society—the clash between possibilities and reality, between propaganda and facts, has added up to more confusion than most women have to endure.

Bulgarian women realize that the right to work and to be financially independent and self-sufficient is an irreversible human right, but within the framework of totalitarian socialism, this right was also a compulsion. Socialism kept some of its promises, and a woman’s job is guaranteed for three cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Women and Post-Communism
• 1. Thinking Gender: Bulgarian Women’s Im/possibilities
• 2. The Winding Road to Emancipation in Bulgaria
• 3. The Bulgarian Case: Women’s Issues or Feminist Issues?
• 4. Women in Romania
• 5. Women in Romania: Before and After the Collapse
• 6. A Few Prefeminist Thoughts
• 7. Are Women in Central and Eastern Europe Conservative?
• 8. The Emancipation of Women: A Concept that Failed
• 9. The Impact of the Transition from Communism on the Status of Women in the Czech and Slovak Republics
• 10. Women and Nationalism in the Former Yugoslavia
• 11. Women and the New Democracy in the Former Yugoslavia
• 12. Women’s Time in the Former Yugoslavia
• 13. Women in the German Democratic Republic and in the New Federal States: Looking Backward and Forward (Five Theses)
• 14. The Women’s Question as a Democratic Question: In Search of Civil Society
• 15. Lesbians and Their Emancipation in the Former German Democratic Republic: Past and Future
• 16. “But the Pictures Stay the Same …” The Image of Women in the Journal Für Dich Before and After the “Turning Point”
• 17. The Organized Women’s Movement in the Collapse of the GDR: The Independent Women’s Association (UFV)
• 18. Abortion and German Unification
• 19. “Totalitarian Lib”: The Legacy of Communism for Hungarian Women
• 20. Feminism and Hungary
• 21. No Envy, No Pity
• 22. Gender Politics in Hungary: Autonomy and Antifeminism
• 23. Abortion and the Formation of the Public Sphere in Poland
• 24. Political Change in Poland: Cause, Modifier, or Barrier to Gender Equality?
• 25. Feminism in the Interstices of Politics and Culture: Poland in Transition
• 26. Soviet Women at the Crossroads of Perestroika
• 27. Finding a Voice: The Emergence of a Women’s Movement
• 28. Eastern European Male Democracies: A Problem of Unequal Equality
• 29. Feminism East and West
• Contributors
• Index