Historiographies of East- and Southeast-European Women’s Movements: Debates on Specific and Common Developments in a European Context

A comment on Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak eds., Women’s Movements. Networks and Debates in post-communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Köln et. al 2006
Birgitta Bader-Zaar

My presentation will focus on the volume’s contributions dealing with the history of women’s movements, a field of special interest within my own research. I would like to emphasize right at the beginning, how important this book is for the history of East- and Southeast-European women’s movements as the collection manages to give an overview of this history in one single volume for such a multitude of countries. It is still not an easy endeavour to find information on East- and Southeast-European women’s and gender history in German- or English-speaking countries. As the contributors repeatedly stress in their historiographical outlines, this also applies to Eastern and Southeastern Europe itself, not only as a result of a lack of publications, but also of destroyed sources due to political upheavals and the two World Wars. Hence, this book provides both a source for dissemination of knowledge and a forum of communication, especially among scholars of post-communist countries. Allow me to note though, that a biographical appendix introducing the contributors with their professional backgrounds would have been helpful for communication, particularly as the contributors come from different disciplines.
The volume opens chronologically reverse, starting with the contemporary conditions and developments of women’s movements in post-communist countries, and then moves backwards from the era of Socialism to the history of women’s movements in the nineteenth century and the Interwar Years. This structure is not stringent though, as contributions on other research questions offer relevant information on the history of women’s movements too. Thus, several studies in the first part of the book on the period after 1989 address the early history of women’s movements to provide a context for present-day developments, e.g. Marta Kolá?ová for the Czech Republic, Veronika Wöhrer for Slovakia, Maca Jogan for Slovenia or, especially detailed, Irina Novikova for the three Baltic states. Novikova and studies by Natalia Pushkareva on Russia and Ganna Gerasymenko on the Ukraine survey the history of women’s movements down to the present. The other contributions collected in the special section on historical women’s movements cover this history until the beginning of the Soviet regime, respectively the Interwar Years, such as Krassimira Daskalova on Bulgaria, Lyudmyla Smolyar in a second contribution on the Ukraine, Roxana Cheschebec on Romania, Virginija Jureniene on Lithuania and Katarzyna Sierakowska on Poland. The section concludes with a contribution by Margaret McFadden on three international feminists of the Interwar Years – the Hungarian Rosika Schwimmer, the Lithuanian-American Emma Goldmann, and the Finn Hella Woulijoki – and is probably meant to counter the for the most part nationally oriented historiography of the volume.
The founding of women’s organizations is a recurrent theme of the contributions. The first associations were formed in the nineteenth century, targeting the education of girls and women. Higher education as well as admission to universities remained important demands in the early years of the women’s movements who wished to ensure women’s economic self-reliance. These were later followed by claims on political equality. Considering the social and political background of the organizations, contributions agree that active women usually came from the educated middle or upper class. Whether they had rural or urban backgrounds seems to have been linked to the degree of urbanization and political conditions. Novikova argues that the foundations of the women’s movement in the Baltic states did not rest on an identity crisis of urban and middle-class women as in Western Europe, but on rural women who championed collective social and political goals. These women did not perceive themselves as feminists. Therefore, Novikova includes philanthropic women’s organizations as well as those without emancipatory goals in her comprehensive overview. This aspect is also taken up in other contributions which argue that the involvement of the women’s movements in national movements led to a rejection of a more radical pursuit of emancipation. It is also reflected in decisions by the authors, whether to include social democratic and socialist or nationalist women’s organizations in their studies or not. Thus, definitions of the term “women’s movement,” vary regarding proximities to versus differentiation from non-emancipatory groups – and would certainly be worth more thorough debate.
Further topics are the goals of organizations, national and international networks as well as positions taken on specific problems. The First World War, during which women were active in relief operations, sometimes even in combat, is considered as a rupture that was followed by further breaks, the fascist regimes or the communist system in the Soviet Union. Especially Soviet conditions were singular, where gender relations were suddenly confronted with permissiveness: abortion was allowed and divorce facilitated, though these regulations were partly retracted after 1936. A survey of the contributions strikingly reveals to what degree East- and Southeast-European regions have been plagued by political upheavals during the last two centuries, especially those that lacked autonomy and subsequently fell under foreign rule, or, as was the case with Poland and the Ukraine, were divided. These political changes had a major impact on the women’s movements and their developments and should be compared more systematically.
Finally, I would like to discuss the contributors’ assessments of the history of women’s movements in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Major differences in their evaluations seem to be linked with the political status of the respective countries in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, contributors stress the strong links of women’s movements to national movements for regions that were ‘colonized’ and not autonomous, such as the Baltic states or the Ukraine. Irina Novikova, for example, points out common characteristics of non-sovereign European societies in the process of nation-building: all of them produced a myth of gender harmony and ascribed specific roles to women who were perceived as educators and guardians of national traditions in the context of nation-building (p. 141f). Ganna Gerasymenko and Lyudmyla Smolyar operate with the Ukrainian historiographical concept of ‘pragmatic feminism’: due to the adverse political conditions the status of women was to be raised without changes in gender roles and social relations. Some contributions emphasize the difference between women’s organizations originating from agrarian societies within a concept of nation-building and those defined as ‘Western’ (though it is not always clear which women’s movements account for the ‘Western’ ones). While Ganna Gerasymenko concludes that the Ukraine missed the twentieth century on account of its specific ‘feminist’ development (p. 394), Lyudmyla Smolyar portrays this development favourably, as the Ukrainian women’s movement, as she puts it, thus “managed to avoid the subconscious aggression towards traditional man which is so typical for Western feminism” and offered “an intermediate egalitarian route” which conformed to the “spiritual potential of Slavic women” (p. 411). We are familiar with this tension resulting from difference and emphases on ‘the other’ from postcolonial women’s movements. And the footnotes of many contributions in the volume reflect the influence of postcolonial theories on the East- and Southeast-European scientific community. Especially Biljana Kaši?, for example, discusses the problem of views filtered by ‘Western’ theories.
On the other hand, historians of sovereign states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Russia or Bulgaria, tend to contextualize the experiences and developments of the women’s movements in these countries in a collective history of European women’s movements and refer to many analogies with Western Europe, while also considering specific conditions such as the legal status of women or social and political relations. With its criticism of the nationalistic discourse of the women’s movement that led to its fragmentation, the contribution on Romania can be added to this category. Especially Krassimira Daskalova’s study of Bulgaria refuses the assumption of a ‘separate path’ (Sonderweg) and points out, among other things, the inclusion of Bulgaria in international women’s organizations. However, she also remains critical of a number of Western European assessments of East and Southeast-European conditions, thereby easing the way towards a possible convergence between ‘separatists’ and ‘inclusionists’.
The issue of differentiation and dissociation versus integration and inclusion of the history of East and Southeast-European women’s movements in a European context would require a detailed discussion of developments of women’s movements in Europe as a whole, especially regarding the question to what extent specificities or commonalities can be ascribed within this history. As the editors write: “The traditional imaginary boundaries within Europe that separate North and South, East and West,…, are called into question” (p. 9). In the truest sense of these words and in support of the editors we should pursue networking and communication as a truly European interaction.