Where Have All the Women Gone? Women and the Women's Movement in East Central Europe

Where have all the women gone? This may seem a frivolous question: they haven't evaporated after all. But what has evaporated, it seems, along with the euphoria and the optimism, the hopes and dreams of a year ago, is the energy and potential for change on the part of women themselves. Gone too are both the much-vaunted economic independence and the resultant self-confidence of forty years of official commitment to a policy of'emancipation' for women. Certainly, the notion that women going out to work is the norm as it was in the state-socialist countries of East Central Europe for the past forty years is up for reconsideration in the process of economic restructuring. Will the need to shed labour push women out of the labour force and back into primary responsibility for the family? There are some signs that women themselves may accept this relegation with a sigh of relief. What does this imply for our own views on what it means to be liberated? Women's role is very much in question in the current transition period in East Central Europe. Hence the question in the title about women speaking for themselves, defending or demanding equal rights and equality of opportunity. For women in Western Europe these shifts demand a fundamental rethinking of our preconceptions. Bringing together voices from East and West in this volume can be regarded as a first step in a mutual process of rethinking feminism within and helping to define the parameters of a new Europe. In terms of political representation, women were active at all levels in pre-1989 peace, human rights and other opposition or dissident movements in East Central Europe. Examples were Barbel Bohley and Ulrike Poppe of Women for Peace in the GDR who went on to become leading figures amongst the founders of New Forum and Democracy Now, two of the movements responsible for the 'turning point' in autumn 1989. In Charter 77, 18 per cent of the signatories and 31 per