29
Feminism East and West1
Nanette Funk
Slavenka Drakulic, a writer from Zagreb, recently wrote an essay about an
American woman who had interviewed her and later wrote asking Drakulid to
submit an article on women in Yugoslavia for an anthology the American was
putting together. Drakulic laughed at the topics proposed in the letter, such as
an "analysis about women and democracy, the public sphere, civil society,
modernization, etc. A kind of Critical Theory approach." Drakulic was asked
specifically about "the kinds of interventions women have made in the public
discourse, e.g., about abortion, women's control over their bodies, what sorts of
influence women have had in the public discourse . . . "2
Drakulic regarded all
these questions as inappropriate, reflecting the typical American misunderstanding
of post-communist women. She was also annoyed at the American
woman's ease and readiness to publish about post-communist women after she
just "spent several weeks in Berlin. "3
And she was critical, if at points grudgingly
complimentary, about the American women's persona, clothes, and hair, calling
her "surprisingly, [for an American feminist, presumably] dressed with style."4
One can only imagine the reactions of that American woman upon reading this
account. Well, not quite, since 1 am that American woman. I wrote that letter
and the invitation was to contribute to this volume, which Slavenka Drakulic did.
My reaction was only made more bitter by my desire to speak to my past, to my
mother and grandmother, and all the women in my family who as Jewish women
from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had suffered, as
women as well as Jews, in those societies. I was hurt, outraged, and angry,
reactions exaggerated by reading the chapter while in a hospital bed in a bitterly
cold and drafty room on one of the coldest days of the year, bringing to mind the
I want to thank Linda Nicholson and Robert Roth for reading an earlier version of this
draft and for their cooperation and many helpful comments and suggestions.
Feminism East and West / 319
conditions in Moscow hospitals I had read about. Except that I was in one of the
"better" hospitals in New York.
Yet I began to reflect on this interaction. Were Slavenka Drakulic's essay and
my reaction only individual responses, they would not be significant. But they
are symptomatic of the risks, tensions, and difficulties inherent in discourse
between Eastern and Western women. In many post-communist countries contact
between Eastern and Western women has only been sporadic, and the tensions
have arisen only in individual instances and outbursts. But in Germany, where
there is a direct confrontation between East and West, these difficulties have
become systemic, playing havoc with the possibility of joint action and even
dialogue between East and West German women, and causing tremendous bitterness
and suspicion on both sides. It is therefore worthwhile to analyze what
underlies such tensions.
I.
First, Slavenka Drakuliďs comments reflect the tensions arising from the real
structural power and economic imbalances between Eastern and Western women
and the societies of which they are a part. In this particular case that imbalance
means that publishing in the West potentially brings greater recognition and
financial benefits than publishing in the East, and that some Western women
will have greater access to that publishing world than most Eastern women.
Paradoxically, the opposite was true in this case; this publishing project gave a
voice to post-communist women, and did not speak for them.5
Nor is it true that
Western women generally, even professional women, have such ready access to
publishing.
Second, because the East is being incorporated into the West, both the power
and status hierarchies as well as an individual's sense of worth, status, and
social respect are undergoing severe dislocation. Those who are among the most
respected, sometimes deservedly so, as in the case of Slavenka Drakulic, have
to insert themselves in a world that plays by somewhat different rules, has
different standards, and already comes complete with its own status and power
hierarchies. In Germany this has resulted in strong public attacks on the literary
merits of the most renowned East German writers, mainly women, including the
well-known author Christa Wolf. Resentments toward the West accumulate on
the part of post-communist women and form the background for their meetings
with Western women.
Power imbalances also exist at the level of discourse, where Western feminist
discourse is hegemonic in feminism, risking the suppression and distortion of
post-communist women's concerns. Western women, in speaking their own
language of feminism, do risk imposing standards of discourse, as I did, provoking
intellectual and political resentment, and sometimes shattering the possi-
320 / Nanette Funk
bilities of political cooperation, as has happened in Germany. Some questions
that Western women pose are indeed inappropriate. Yet in this case the questions
proposed in that letter to Drakulič became the themes of fascinating essays by
post-communist women themselves.6
In addition, since Western standards of style, dress, and cosmetics are being
imposed on post-communist women, these are the standards that Eastern women
aspire to, or are being judged by, not the reverse. Faced with these structural
differences Eastern women are at times resentful or self-conscious. Ina Merkel
of the former GDR expressed initial feelings of insecurity at being judged by
West German standards, seeing herself, her body, and her dress, suddenly quite
differently and more critically through a West German lens.7
This is one of the
many reasons that in Berlin, where the confrontation between East and West is
so direct, Eastern women prefer not to venture into West Berlin, but stay behind
the Wall that once was. Although it is true that Western women may have more
wealth, affordable access to Western clothes, and greater experience in dealing
with these standards, this is not true for all Western women—not even all
professional women. In many cases, defensiveness, resentment, and retaliation
are the response by post-communist women, again constrained by the need to
accommodate themselves to the new hierarchies into which they are plunged.
Western women can be insensitive and oblivious to all these structural inequalities.
They can also be arrogant in assuming that, after twenty years of a Western
women's movement, they know best the "real women's issues" or "what is to be
done" politically and individually. These are attitudes ex-GDR women frequently
confront in West German women.
Discourse between East and West is also pervaded by negative stereotypes on
both sides: of American and Western feminists as "man-haters" or of postcommunist
women as simply having bought into sexism and having subordinated
themselves to the family. The reaction by Drakulič, in which she presumed a
Western woman's ignorance of Eastern Europe or a certain style of dress for
American feminists, reveals the operation of just such stereotypes and how they
can be mistaken in a particular case.8
In addition, there are tremendous differences in culture,9
socialization, and
personality between Eastern and Western women, and in what Habermas has
referred to as the "Hfeworld," that stock taken for granted of unreflected beliefs
and world views. All these differences create tensions and hostility and harden
into prejudices, which have provoked confrontations and fractured meetings
between Western and Eastern women, especially in the united Germany. Women
in state socialist countries appear to be more oriented than Western feminists
toward children and the family, have different attitudes toward the individual and
the collective and to authority, are more skeptical of the benefits of paid work,
and have different attitudes toward men or toward collective action. Language
itself is a contested issue, as illustrated by West German women's resentment of
Feminism East and West / 321
East German women's use of male grammatical nouns to refer to all persons, a
form of speech that West German women had struggled hard to overcome.
In the face of all these differences, there is a tremendous risk of misunderstanding.
In particular, there is a risk of Western women's moralistic rejection
of post-communist cultural differences. This moralism can be predicated on a
lack of understanding of the meaning and origin of these practices10
—such as the
fact that a family orientation in state socialism provided an escape from state
control. Western moralism itself risks provoking a resentment and defensiveness
and hardened suspicion toward Western women as "know-it-alls.""
Post-communist women also do not want to be dominated by the priorities of
Western women, or to be swamped by debates among Western feminists that do
not resonate for them. East German women already have resentments on such
issues as well as toward the ignorance and lack of understanding West German
women have of their lives, their daily problems, their present and past.
U.S. women like myself who are particularly concerned about Eastern European
women often bring our own agenda, especially the ever-present consciousness
of the Holocaust, to our dealings with Eastern Europe. We are often Jewish
women confronting our own identity, our families' Eastern European and Russian
heritage, and our own experiences of Eastern European patriarchy and the
strengths and weaknesses of women in our families. This complex history provides
Jewish women with both an empathy and identification with post-communist
women and a concern about their relationship to cultures in which there was, and
still is, strong anti-Semitism.
As women wanting to work together, our goal should be to lessen our prejudices,
ignorance, and mutual suspicions, and to come to judgments in ways that
make possible cooperation between women. One cannot enter a dialogue between
Eastern and Western women without expecting disagreement, misunderstanding,
and mistakes. Drakulic's comments reveal the need for a dialogue regarded as a
joint enterprise directed toward understanding each other, rather than a battle to
prove the other wrong. Rather than being a threat, our differences should be seen
as an opportunity for mutual and collective self-reflection.
II.
However, given all these differences, one is confronted with the question of
whether a fruitful and meaningful dialogue is at all possible, whether Western
feminism's issues, claims and goals can be anything other than "relative," appropriate
in the West but not in the East. An argument that might be made would
go roughly as follows: "Eastern women want something different from western
women. They want to return to the home and leave the paid work force. Western
women cannot engage in an authoritarian form of cultural imperialism telling
Eastern women what to desire. Eastern women have different cultural and histori-
322 / Nanette Funk
cal backgrounds and different values from Western women. Paid work may be
emancipatory and a goal of feminism in the West, but not in the East. A women's
movement in the East will confront different issues, have different values, demands
and goals."
In what follows I want to reject such an argument while acknowledging that
it contains partial truths. I will argue that in spite of the differences between
Eastern and Western women's desires and among Eastern women themselves,
Eastern and Western women have much in common and women's movements
East and West can share many concerns, values and goals. The preceding argument,
I will argue, misinterprets the desires of post-communist women, the
relationship between women's desires, and the goals of a woman's movement,
as well as the goals of Western feminism. I will begin my examination by first
considering the reasons post-communist women give for their desires and the
values that underlie those reasons. I will focus particularly on the purported postcommunist
women's desire not to be in the paid labor force. The goals of women's
movements East and West, it will be shown, should be similar in many ways. I
will then relate this discussion to the transformation of the public and private
spheres in post-communism.
L
Post-communist women's reasons for not wanting to work in the paid labor
force fall into three categories: a cost-benefit analysis in which the price of paid
work is too high; a greater concern for the collective family good over their own
individual benefit; and an essentialist position that women's nature is different
from men's, that women's nature is to be in the home.
In some post-communist countries one set of reasons predominates over others.
In the former East Germany the third set of reasons appears to play a rather minor
role, while it may play a stronger one in some Slavophil traditions in the former
Soviet Union. In all of these rationales we can find various degrees of commonality
with Western women's desires and with feminist values, in spite of the
differences that may appear on the surface.
Women's desire to leave paid work depends most commonly on an implicit
cost-benefit analysis. The reasoning seems to be as follows: the double burden
of work and family responsibilities threatens mental and physical health and wellbeing
(by producing exhaustion, fatigue, stress, and sickness); the long work days
threaten intersubjective needs by restricting chances to be with one's family;12
paid
work requires "gender alienation," having to be "like a man"; although paid work
can be meaningful, it is all too often boring and absurd and provides only limited
autonomy, given low salaries. Certainly, paid work provides some benefits and
satisfactions, such as friendship, solidarity, relief from boredom at home, some
economic goods, and a degree of respect and autonomy. Yet in spite of these
benefits, the harm it generates is above any acceptable threshold.
Feminism East and West / 323
One immediately recognizes that this is a form of reasoning very common in
the West. Further, women who reach such a conclusion (and these by no means
include the majority of post-communist women) appeal to the very same qualities
to which Western feminists appeal: health and well-being, respect and selfrespect,
dignity, self-realization, self-determination, autonomy, freedom, and
justice. Relations with family are one way of trying to satisfy intersubjective
needs, even when those relations are distorted by oppressive structures. One can
hardly have respect and self-respect if work requires one to be "like a man". But
this does not provide justification for claiming that the cost-benefit rationale
reveals a basic difference in Eastern and Western goals, forms of reasoning, or
values. Rather, the assessment of costs and benefits are different, both because
of different circumstances and different expectations. This does not justify a
claim that Eastern women's movements must be fundamentally different from
Western feminist ones.
There are, however, those post-communist women who in such a cost-benefit
analysis would give greater priority than do Western women or Western feminists
to the intersubjective goal of being with children and activities in the home. But
if one considers the reasons for this, it will be seen that this, too, does not provide
grounds for assuming irreconcilable differences or fundamentally different prior-
ities.
The emphasis on family pleasures by some Eastern women reflects that under
state socialism, women and men had more possibilities to experience some small
degree of satisfaction in the home than elsewhere. One couldn't travel; there were
limited "leisure-time" activities and virtually no public sphere. Options outside
the home were regularly blocked. The home was thus preferable to some women,
in spite of the oppression within the home itself. It is not that being with one's
family was necessarily of greater intrinsic worth than other goods, but that some
women's expectations (even if illusory) for realizing this good were greater than
those for any other good. Women especially turned to their children as a source
of meaning.13
The family also became the substitute arena for activities that in
the West might be found in the public sphere. For example, it was here that one
could more safely discuss social, cultural, and political issues. Rather than being
the antithesis of the public sphere, the family became an ersatz public sphere.u
Eastern women also used their commitments to the family as a strategy to sidestep
participation in the discredited political system.
Jointly, all this vividly shows how fully the public/private distinction is not
fixed and ahistorical. The fundamental dichotomy in state socialism was, in fact,
between the family and state. The family thus had a very special and powerful
status as the primary institution that stood in opposition to the state. Women who
wanted to be in the "private" sphere wanted something different than what would
be meant by a Western woman's orientation toward the family.
Women's interest in the family under these particular social and political
conditions thus does not indicate an intrinsic difference between Eastern and
324 / Nanette Funk
Western values but a difference in the historically specific social meaning of the
family. Under such complex conditions, where there was more possibility for
freedom in the family than elsewhere, Western women would also give more
attention to the family. In addition, in the United States, there has been an
emphasis among feminists in the 1980s on family and children, and on the
tensions between work and the family. Thisrenewed emphasis, however problematic,
raises questions about whether the difference in actual desires between U.S.
women and post-communist women is very great.
Post-communist women cannot, however, always be construed as rejecting
paid work on the basis of an implicit cost-benefit analysis, with its presuppositions
of weighing individual goods. In some cases they reject an emphasis on their
own individual good in favor of a collective end,15
such as the good of their
children and family. But here, too, to draw a conclusion that the goals of postcommunist
women's movements must be basically different from those in the
West or that the form of reasoning is radically different is not warranted.
To the extent that this emphasis on the collective good indicates an undervaluation
of the lives of women, this is the very issue the women's movement confronted
in the West. It does not indicate any basic difference between the two
cultures. An Eastern women's movement would not have to give legitimacy to
this underestimation of the worth of women's lives any more than did the Western
women's movement.
But the lesser emphasis on the individual good may also be due to a traditional
culture and half-modernized state socialist culture that did not place such great
value on the individual and individual autonomy. This value, however, as well
as the actual individual/collective relationship, is presently undergoing transformation,
and reevaluation in the East. For very different reasons, the individual/
collective relationship is also under revision, if only gradually, in the West.
Greater attention in the West is beginning to be given to collective goods such
as the environment and, in the feminist movement, the value of autonomy is
being reexamined and greater importance is being attached to relational goods.
Even more attention needs to be given to these issues in the future. Neither culture
is so inflexible and fixed on this issue that one can conclude they are irrevocably
committed to fundamentally different values. It rather suggests that both East and
West women would benefit from further reflection on these topics.
Thus, whatever the cause, the emphasis on the collective good does not entail
the Eastern and Western women havefundamentally different values or that there
must be a fundamentally different orientation of Eastern and Western women's
movements.
What, then, of post-communist women who reject paid work because of an
essentialist belief that it is women's nature to be in the home? Doesn't this provide
evidence that there are fundamental differences between East and West? Although
it is a problem many women who adopt this form of essentialism often do so to
Feminism East and West / 325
argue that women should not be forced, either politically or economically, to
enter paid work. They do not want the role of woman simply to be modeled on
the male role; they want the role of homemaker to provide a legitimate alternative
for women. Women who offer both essentialist and cost-benefit rationales often
express their underlying desire as the desire to have a choice of whether to stay
in paid work or not, in stark contrast to the situation in many state socialist
countries. Clearly, there are strong gender-role presuppositions in speaking of
such a "choice" for women. But a women's movement can recognize this desire
by acknowledging that, indeed, women's role should not be modeled on men's,
and that women who want to return to the home should not be castigated when
society offers women only second-class positions in the paid work force, a double
burden, and no meaningful position in the political sphere.
In addition, a meaningful "choice" between paid work and remaining in the
home requires the social policy and structural conditions—in the home, in gender
roles, at the workplace, in the labor market—that would enable women to do
either, to stay home or not. Such a choice requires adequate day care and the
absence of institutional discrimination against women in employment. But these
are the same concrete demands made by Western feminism.
However, a post-communist women's movement does not have to adopt this
essentialism and incorporate all women's desires into its program and advocate
that women should leave the paid work force. In general, one has to distinguish
between the desires some women may have, and the desires it would be appropriate
for a women's movement in each country to advocate. Not to make this
distinction would be to adopt a version of an unacceptable "subjective welfarism,"
stating that the welfare and emancipation of women is defined as a satisfaction
of all women's present subjective desires. Feminism is not committed to such a
position and is not necessarily representative of all women's desires, since it
recognizes that existing desires have been constituted under problematic conditions.
Desires formed under the absence of conditions of free and open discourse,
or in the absence of consideration of relevant issues, whether in the West or the
East, can hardly have the same status as those desires and beliefs women would
be likely to have after fuller discussion. Moreover, a women's movement recognizes
that new socioeconomic conditions demand new perspectives,'6
and that
women's desires and beliefs are likely to change because of these rapidly changing
conditions. To recognize all this is not to dictate to women what their real needs
are, creating a "dictatorship over needs." The women's movement instead would
create a forum for women and encourage their participation in a discourse to form
these new perspectives.
Thus, whatever reason post-communist women have for wanting to leave the
paid workforce, it does not reflect an irreconcilable difference between Eastern
and Western values; it does not mean Eastern and Western women's movements
must have different goals.
326 / Nanette Funk
2.
It is important to note that women's increasing unemployment has not been •.
matter of choice.17
Given recent projections of vast unemployment in the fornu-i
USSR and projecting from the available data on unemployed women in whk h
women make up almost two-thirds of the unemployed in several countries (sudí
as the former East Germany) unemployment will be overwhelmingly forced .-n
women. Removal of women from the labor market is one means post-corninun^i
societies are using, whether passively or actively, for the quasi-modernizatMi
under way to replace a state patriarchy with a Western form of male dominati •::.
to deal with unemployment, and to redefine the social role women. Wonu-n
themselves, are not being asked.
Women might prefer to be able to choose whether or not to work, but it docsi '•
follow that they are now choosing not to work. To have the choice not to w »•they
would have to be in stable marriages with husbands with stable jobs mäkni:a
family wage. However, nothing is stable in post-communism, and «one of thw.conditions
generally hold.IK
The economic necessity to work, the desponde: k;at
being unemployed, all form evidence that unemployment is not a choice. M;m\
women are single mothers or are in unstable marriages, given 30 to 40 peavin
divorce rates. If they have husbands, the husbands are often unemployed .»i
inadequately compensated, and more than twojobs in a family are often nečesaní *
for survival, as in Hungary or Poland.
Many women also stay home because day care is closing, conditions arc po-M.
or children are disoriented by the massive social transformation. Since the wor i; n
is more likely to be unemployed or making a lower salary than the man, it ofI-.-Í:
makes economic sense for her to stay at home. Here, of course, there i. ••
parallel to the West. Discrimination in hiring plays a major role in women"-»
unemployment.
There is also the simple question of whether women, in any of the sccv»
discussed above, actually want to return to the home. In many countries theiv i--
no reliable data about this, and it most likely varies between countries and so*:i.
classes. Where surveys have been done, as in the former GDR,19
Soviet Uni-'ii.
and Bulgaria,20
only a small percentage of women say they would want to rclnr:
to the home, even if they could afford to do so. In addition, Eastern women ol MI
do not want to leave the paid labor force completely, but to work "pari-iuiv"
when they have children under three, where "part-time" can include a viriumh
full-time day according to Western standards (since the state socialist work .:.n
was typically eight and a half hours a day).21
ni.
What is clear is that post-communism not only involves a transformal ion -'l
the public sphere, but also a transformation of the family, the boundaries bclwivi:
Feminism East and West / 327
the public and private sphere, and the nature of the private sphere. Such transformations
require fundamental normative changes. Women's position is central to,
and symbolic of, all these changes. As the family loses the special significance
it had under state socialism, women are more restricted to the family, and
excluded from the new public sphere as it grows in importance. Modernization
has, historically, often been harmful to women.22
One cost of the rationalization
and modernization now going on is the sacrifice of women's well-being, much
as occurred under communist rationalization.
Any analytic social theory of the transformation in post-communism needs to
pay special attention to the family, its changed meaning, the transformation of
the role of women and the way in which women's authentic participation in a
newly forming public sphere could change the very nature of practices in the
public sphere itself. Unfortunately this is not the case in the theory most frequently
used to analyzepost-communism, the theory of post-communism as the formation
of civil society. In contrast to the Eastern European proponents of this theory,
Western advocates of civil society theory—John Keane, Klaus Offe, Karl Hinrichs,
Helmut Wiesenthal,24
and Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato—do at least
mention the family and include it in civil society. But even here, as exemplified
by Cohen and Arato's extensively developed theory of civil society, the transformation
of the family plays at best a minor role in the discussion. Although Cohen
and Arato include the family in civil society, they discuss it infrequently and
say that "we make the public spheres of societal communication and voluntary
association the central institutions of civil society."25
They do not ever raise the
issue whether the political forms of the public sphere may themselves be more
amenable to men than to women.
Cohen and Arato, and other civil society theorists, distinguish civil society
from the economic system. By placing the family within civil society, they
thereby distinguish the family from the economy. Although the family is not
regulated solely by the economic consequences of actions, such a distinction
between civil society and the economy seriously risks underemphasizing the way
in which economic processes, considerations, and consequences do significantly
regulate actions in civil society and the family in particular. Family and individual
decisions—that one must work to have individual goods, or that the heterosexual,
two-parent family will live where the man works because of his higher salary and
greater job opportunities—are economically regulated decisions fundamental to
many other family decisions. Theproblem of too sharply distinguishing the family
from the economic reveals the general problem of the distinction between civil
society and the economy.
IV. Conclusion
None of the above discussion should be interpreted as denying real cultural
differences East and West and among post-communist countries themselves.
328 / Nanette Funk
What I have argued is that in spite of the differences in tradition, culture,
personality, beliefs and desires there is much in common between Eastern and
Western women's issues and goals and in particular, in regard to the issue of paid
work. Contemporary women's programs East and West will differ because of
economic, political, and cultural differences. What a women's movement will
demand will of course depend on the reconstituted socioeconomic system—
whether in Romania or Bulgaria it will be an agricultural society, for example.
In spite of cultural differences, the problematics are similar: Women's right to
abortion, the right to jobs, and prevention of rape and violence against women
are becoming important women's issues in post-communist women's movements
as they have in the West. The issue of respect for sexual preference is beginning,
however tentatively, to be raised in some countries.
Moreover, post-communist women's articulation of their desires and resentments
about work can help to strengthen the paradigm of the employed woman
for the women's movement in the West. Given the greater participation of women
in the work force in the West compared to thirty years ago when the second-wave
women's movement started, there is, in fact, similarity between Eastern and
Western women's needs. Western women, now overwhelmingly in the work
force, confront the same tensions as do post-communist women. Post-communist
women's concerns should reinforce for Western feminism that work simpliciter
is not the goal. Rather, a feminist demand must be for meaningful work in a
rationally organized, humane society that reconciles the importance of the collective
good and intersubjective needs of all persons with the instrumental needs of
society. Work must be organized accordingly, for all persons while preserving
justice.
The problems Eastern women confront in the conservative turn in some Eastern
countries or the repressive nationalist threats in others, resonate with problems
women face in the West. Post-communist women's critical examination of Western
feminism can provide us with fresh insights into our own history and theories.
The paradigmatic "woman" is no longer who she once was in the early secondwave
women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the white upper middle
class woman trapped on the "pedestal" or in a domestic prison. Post-communist
developments also make vivid the importance of women's participation in the
political public sphere. Post-communist women's needs epitomize second wave
feminism, stage two.
There will continue to be many differences, and justifiably so, between women's
movements in the East and the West, in methods, strategies, and intermediate
goals. But none ofthat should preclude a fruitful, mutually beneficial dialogue
or justify a conclusion of fundamental, irreconcilable differences between East
and West women's movements. In spite of all the differences that have come to
light between women of the West and the East, which must be kept in mind,
there is much that we have in common and much that we can learn from each
other.
Feminism East and West / 329
Notes
1. I use the term "East" in this essay to refer to the former USSR and the countries of
the former Eastern bloc, of Eastern and South Central Europe.
2. Slavenka Drakulič, "A Letterfrom theUnited States: TheCritical Theory Approach,"
in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: W. W. Norton,
1992), pp. 126-127.
3. Ibid., p. 126.
4. Ibid.
5. Given that Ms. Drakulic has published extensively in the West, it would have been
appropriate to temper such resentment in this case.
6. The posing of questions was itself regarded as part of a free and open dialogue in
which the questions themselves could be, and were, challenged, revised, and even
rejected.
7. Ina Merkel, . . . und Du, Frau an der Werkbank: Die DDR in den 50er Jahren
(Berlin: Elephanten Press, 1990), p. 7.
8. I had, in fact, not just gone to Berlin for a few weeks, but had had regular contact
in Germany and parts of Eastern Europe for the last twenty years.
9. In Germany the differences even extend to how one takes leave of another person.
Former GDR women shake hands, which West German women reject as unduly
formal and a practice they rejected in 1968.
10. West German women see these family-oriented practices as the very same ones they
had rebelled against in 1968, but they ignore the different cultural meaning these
practices had under state socialism.
11. In the former GDR West Germans are ironically referred to as "Besserwessis"
("Those-who-know-better-than-the-rest-of-us-Westerners"). East German women
are equally critical of West German culture, regarding West German women as antichildren,
or too quickly unsetüed by the presence of children.
12. The long work day sometimes required sending children to week-long overnight day
care, relatives in the countryside, or almost nine hours each day in day care.
13. See Havelkova and Goven in this volume.
14. See Havelková and Lissyutkina in this volume.
15. See Havelková in this volume.
16. See Joshua Cohen, "Maximizing Social Welfare or Institutionalizing Democratic
Ideals? Commentary on Adam Przeworski's Article," in Politics and Society (March
1991), pp. 39-58.
17. See Nickel in this volume.
18. In some cases, husbands leave women because of the shame of not being able to
support the family, leaving the women alone with children. There are also many
single parents.
19. Intheex-GDR, when asked if they would give up theirjobs if their husbands made
330 / Nanette Funk
more money, only 3 percent of women said they should (see Nickel, Chap. 13 this
volume).
20. See Petrova in this volume.
21. See Nickel in this volume.
22. Krisztina Mänicke-Gyöngyösi, "Frauen Osteuropas zwischen Tradition und Moderne:
Eine Einführung," introduction to lecture series, 1991-92, Frauen und Frauenthemen
in der Forschung am Osteuropa-Institut, Free University, Berlin (unpublished
program).
23. Karl Hinrichs, Claus Offe, and Helmut Wiesenthal, "Time, Money and Weifare
State Capitalism," in Civil Society and the State, ed. John Keane (London: Verso
1988), p. 226. See also Christopher Pierson, "New Theories of State and Civil
Society: Recent Developments in Post-Marxist Analysis ofthe State," Sociology 18,
no. 4 (1984): 563-571; and Míhaly Vajda, "East Centra! European Perspectives,"
in Keane, Civil Society and the State, pp. 330-360.
24. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 411.
Contributors
Maria Adamik is a sociologist at the EFTE University in Budapest. She is
cofounder of the Hungarian Feminist Network and has written on women and
Hungarian social policy.
Tatiana Böhm was Minister Without Portfolio in the last German Democratic
Republic government, headed by Modrow, and represented the independent
Women's Organization in the Round Table in 1990. She has lectured widely
on women and is currently working at the Office of Women in Brandenburg,
Germany.
Enikö Bollobás was appointed Minister Counselor and Deputy Chief to the
Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1990. Dr. Bollobás was Associate
Professor of American Studies at Jozsef Attila University of Szeged and Eotvos
Lorand University of Budapest from 1977 to 1990. She has published extensively
in Hungarian and internationally. Her professional interests include women's
studies, American studies, and Judaism. She has been active in Hungarian opposition
politics since the early 1990s, was a founding member of the Hungarian
Democratic Forum, and founded the political discussion group "Hungarian Feminists"
in 1989.
Irene Dolling is Professor of Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin
(East). She was founder of the interdisciplinary Center of Women's Studies at
Humboldt University in 1989 and is the author of many articles on women and
several books, the latest being Der Mensch und Sein Weib.
Slovenka Drakulič is a well-known novelist, feminist, and cofounder of the first
feminist group in the former Yugoslavia, Women in Society in 1974. She is also
a cofounder of the Network of East/West Women, founded in 1991. She has
published two novels and two books of essays, one of which is Deadly Sins of
Feminism (1984). How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed and her