Did Women's Rights Have a Place in Eastern European Human Rights Dissent? The Case of Charter 77 and Czechoslovakia, 1977–1992

The Czechoslovak oppositional initiative Charter 77 produced dozens of documents on human rights between 1977 and 1992. Yet it never dedicated a separate document to women's rights, even if the issue of women's equality was well represented in global human rights discourse at the time. This article explores this absence in Charter 77's intellectual production. It analyses in detail several Charter documents and samizdat publications that touched upon issues of women's equality, showing that some Charter signatories were ready to acknowledge that the socialist state granted women formal equality, while suggesting that neither material conditions nor cultural norms provided full emancipation. However, a more prevalent critique marked the socialist agenda of women's emancipation as something that restricted women's individual freedom in their personal lives. I argue that in their legalistic approach, the Charter milieu largely lacked the conceptual tools to explore discrimination against women as the manifestation of the broader imbalance of power between men and women beyond the law.