Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe

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Changes in gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism have been an object of historical and sociological study.^[1]

Historical context

The

Political leaders viewed women's presence in the workforce as providing an opportunity to instill communist ideology in new generations of women.^[2]

Though such advancements were made, Soviet and Warsaw-pact governments generally framed feminism a "

With the transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies and democracies, many states saw a dramatic drop in the number of women represented in state parliaments.^[10][11] Such an example can be seen in the parliament of Albania where the number of women representatives fell from 73 to 9 in the first post-collapse elections.^[12] The transition also saw a reduction in women's participation in the new political systems.^[13][14] These factors have made it difficult for women to advocate for women's rights in central and eastern Europe after the transition.^[15]

Employment

The transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies saw an over-representation of women in unemployment that had not existed before in the central and eastern European countries.

Beyond income equality, the transition increased the gender discrimination in workplaces.^[28][29] Many women left professional and managerial positions that women had occupied previously due to the ongoing removal of state childcare services in central and eastern European countries.^[30][31] Due to family considerations, it was predicted in 1993 that many women would leave the work force and consolidate in occasional, short-term, seasonal, undeclared, and other kinds of precarious work,^[32] and this has been shown to have been the case in later research.^[33]

Éva Fodor and Anikó Balogh, contrary to other researchers,

The transition also saw a shift in most economies from heavy industry to light industry, this saw many men made redundant from jobs within heavy industry moving into light industry which had been a highly feminised sector of the economy during the communist period.^[35]

Reproductive rights and sexual violence

Some rights, such as reproductive rights which had been achieved under the previous socialist regimes were subsequently challenged in countries after the fall of those regimes.^[36] The restriction of access to abortion in the years immediately after the collapse saw mass protests from women in Czechoslovakia and Poland,^[37] with the number of legal abortions conducted per year in Poland dropping by over 30,000 from 1991 to 1993.^[38]

In Russia, pornography proliferated after the collapse,^[39][40] whilst in the former Yugoslavia an epidemic of mass rape occurred.^[41] Slavenka Drakulić described the liberalisation of the economy and society in Yugoslavia as:

We live surrounded by newly opened porno shops, porno magazines, peepshows, stripteases, unemployment and galloping poverty [...] Romanian women are prostituting themselves for a single dollar in towns on the Romanian-Yugoslav border. In the midst of all this, our anti-choice nationalist governments are threatening our right to abortion and telling us to multiply, to give birth to more Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks.

— How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1993)^[42]

With the negative economic situations many women found themselves in during the market liberalisation of the economies, human traffickers became prominent in trafficking women around central and eastern Europe, and to western Europe from central and eastern Europe for prostitution.^[43]

Health

The transition led to a reduction in the life expectancy of people across society in many countries, though to a lesser extent for women.^[44]

The example of Bulgaria

Economic participation

Kristen Ghodsee comments how whilst many suggest that all women in Bulgaria were negatively affected by the collapse, some groups of women did relatively well after the collapse, specifically those in the tourism industry, who had higher levels of general education, work experience with Westerners and knew Western foreign-languages.^[45] Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović points out how at the same time women made up two thirds of the unpaid workers present in Bulgaria during the transition.^[33] Mariya Stoilova found that women's economic activity in post-socialist Bulgaria was most affected by the age of the women, with older women who were in employment during the socialist system having the lowest rate of economic activity in post-socialist Bulgaria, and while younger women still faced sexist discrimination in employment opportunities, they were more economically active than older age groups of women.^[46]

Religious reaction

Following the collapse the

Psychotherapists reported that reports of domestic violence increased in Bulgaria during the transitionary period, attributing this increase to the serious economic problems many families and households faced.[50]

Controversies

There is controversy with regard to the view, which is often promoted in the western Europe, according to which the fall of communism had a disproportionate negative effect on women in those countries, and there is criticism of stereotypical views presented in the media about the status of women from this region both during and after the fall of the communism.

Critics argue that the claims made by the former communist regimes regarding the official data about the situation of women under those communist governments should not be taken for granted,^[citation needed] as while there were laws that supported gender equality in the Soviet Union, these were not well or always followed.^[60]

See also

• Women in Albania
• European sexuality leading up to and during World War II
• Marxist feminism
• Feminism in Russia
• Women in the Russian Revolution
• The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe

References