One—
Eastern European Male Democracies—
A Problem of Unequal Equality
I begin this query wondering what kind of relationship may develop between feminism and the Eastern European democratic struggles that began in 1989. Feminism and democracy are terms which have multiple and even conflicting meanings. Be that as it may, I remain committed to the "imaginings" encompassed in the radical potential of both feminist and democratic politics.
The revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe have resulted in a confrontation between socialism, capitalism, and democracy. The critique of totalitarian Communist statism by liberal democratic discourse holds promise for a redefinition of liberal rights which could include a radicalized notion of women's rights. As students in Czechoslovakia and Romania have said, "There is no socialist democracy or bourgeois democracy . . . there is either democracy or there isn't."[1] The prodemocracy movements emphasized the individual and individual rights to freedom of choice in speech, thought, and life opportunities. Participants in these movements demanded plural parties, political freedom, and freedom of speech. They wanted greater freedom of expression—in the marketplace, in the universities, and in political parties. Although there was much that the democracy advocates liked about socialism—such as its universal health care and subsidized housing—their demands were for more freedom, not more socialism.
The developments in Eastern Europe thus pose spectacular challenges to our understanding of liberalism and of Marxism. Of course, it is not an accurate reading of historical political theory to view capi-
talism and socialism as being diametrically opposed. Liberals have previously criticized capitalism for its inequality, and Marxists have criticized socialism for being insufficiently concerned with freedom of expression. John Stuart Mill, considered the father of modern liberalism, repeatedly criticized the inequalities of capitalist economic distribution,[2] and Rosa Luxemburg endlessly called for greater freedom of expression for dissenters of the Bolshevik revolution: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."[3]
Nevertheless, it was a strikingly new development for the Soviet state, through Gorbachev's attempts at glasnost and perestroika, to openly criticize the totalitarian past of "Communism" (the new, pejorative term for the old system) and to invoke aspects of a private market economy for the future. There is no political language set in place to embrace these developments as Eastern European countries, in myriad ways, try to incorporate political pluralism and individual freedom into market economies that still embrace a form of social planning. What presently exists is not completely liberal, completely capitalist, or completely socialist. This uncharted territory holds out the possibility for dislodging the patriarchal foundations of male gender privilege of capitalism (and liberalism) as well as socialism. Alternatively, patriarchy and its hierarchical sexual relations could be rethreaded.
If really new ground is to be broken, the insights of Western feminist theorists must refocus the discussion of democracy to include the racialized relations of sex and gender and familial structures and how these relations affect the individual and the economy. Such a refocusing does not mean the erroneous use of Western standards—or Western feminism—on Eastern European societies. Rather, it means rethinking the way democracy is being formulated, especially for women, looking specifically at how the new political structures resolve the conflict between the individual and the patriarchal, totalitarian state.
Many journalists and political analysts write that Eastern European women reject the Western style of feminism along with the enforced "statist" feminism of their previous totalitarian (often equated with Communist) regimes. Both Western liberal feminism and Communist enforced statist feminism share an emphasis on women's equality which purports to treat women like men: entry into the labor market is equated with equal rights. Both of these models obscure the fact that women are not treated equally in the market and, on the whole, occupy second-class citizenship in terms of job opportunities and pay. So neither model can seem liberating to women who are already in the market—at the
bottom rungs—and who are also responsible for the care of children and the household and the maintenance of everyday life. The overburdened woman has become a vivid image in the descriptions of Eastern Europe. Less vivid, but nevertheless real, is an emerging feminist consciousness.
I turn first to the way traditional liberal and socialist theories have viewed gender, and how these conceptions continue to affect Eastern European states today. In particular, I examine legislation that purports to grant women greater equality, such as statutes regarding maternity leave, child care, and reproductive rights. I then look more closely at one country in particular: the Soviet Union. I also analyze the writings of Vaclav Havel of the old Czechoslovakia, as representative of post-totalitarian state discourses on women's role in the new democracies. Finally, I examine a few dissident feminist voices that are beginning to challenge the patriarchal orientations of the revolutions of 1989.
I center my focus on gender relations between men and women: in the family, in the economy, in the consumer market, and in the realm of reproductive rights and abortion. This involves questions of the Church and its impact on the larger culture and its ethnic/religious/racialized politics. I slice through these issues, not to obfuscate them, but to find women within them, and then draw some broad theoretical strokes.
What's New and What's Old in Democratic Theory
The discussion of democracy in Eastern Europe has so far ignored both liberal feminist theory and socialist feminist theory, whether developed in the East or in the West. There is something very old about theories of democracy premised on a citizenry which is assumed to be male, and a politics which is reduced to the relations of power within the economy and the market. The fact that gender was insufficiently theorized by Marx and Lenin is problematic for socialist and democratic theory.[4] But the fact that it continues to be insufficiently recognized and theorized is problematic in a different way. The commitment to democracy for the 1990s should be informed by the feminist critiques of liberalism and socialism of the past two decades.
Liberalism and Marxism both privilege the economy as the core of society. The world of paid work defines the possibilities. Thus, the former Soviet Union as well as other Eastern European countries declared that women had equality because they were a part of the paid labor
force. Liberal theory privileges the economy as well, but does so by distinguishing between the public (market) and private (family) spheres. The liberal democratic state does not declare the equality of women to be part of state discourse: her equality is not theorized as such. Rather, she has the freedom either to enter paid work or to perform unpaid work at home. Thus, socialism focuses on supposed economic equality; liberalism, on individual freedom of choice.
In neither instance is woman either really equal or really free: gender equality cannot be equated with the right to work, and individual freedom is not sufficient when women's and men's contributions are not valued similarly in the first place. In the United States as well as in Eastern European countries, most women only have the freedom to choose to work in the lowest paying sectors of the economy, and if they do so choose, they must not only work their jobs but also take the major responsibility for rearing children, buying consumer goods, and maintenance of the home. True, Lenin wanted to socialize housework—whatever that means.[5] J. S. Mill believed that although a woman should have the choice of whether she worked for wages, most women (obviously married, middle-class women) would choose not to.[6]
So where are we? Someplace between liberal and socialist visions of patriarchal society, where the tension between individual freedom and gender equality is not resolved. This place—in-between—is traversed by democratic theory. This place is where we must finally recognize the heterogeneity of power and dislocate the economy as the core of democracy. Liberals and Marxists alike assume that the essentials include food, shelter, and clothing, and that these essentials are provided for in the economy. This, then, is the first order of business: get people what they need. But societies need to reproduce themselves sexually; this is also a core need. And people like to be sexual as well. So there are at least three interconnected cores here.
Marx and Engels recognized early on in their discussions that the division of labor arising from the sex act is the first division of labor.[7] They also then promptly forgot about it by assuming that it became the same as the division which arises from private property. Other Marxists followed suit. Communism, the supposed "positive transcendence of private property," [8] would emancipate women. Democracy would come to women via the transformation of the economy.
Liberal theory promises less, because liberalism does not promise emancipation to either women or men. Instead, it promises opportunity. Like socialism, it privileges the economy and denies any sexual
division of labor or gender hierarchy. A woman's labor in the family—the activity of sexual reproduction and childrearing—is hidden in the political sense, because liberal theory only theorizes the relations of the market economy. Women are made absent in terms of their engendered place in the family. If they appear, they do so as workers, demanding equal pay in the labor force or equal rights before the law in the public sphere.
"Mommy Politics"—
Protective Legislation
The kernel of women's rights in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, and former East Germany has been women's right to work for pay.[9] In reality, women's pay is lower than men's, and women's domestic responsibilities are not defined as work. As part of the legacy of Marxism, gender continues to have no political or theoretical status: patriarchal gender differentiation is treated as appropriate. Hildegard Maria Nickel calls this "patriarchal equal rights policy."[10]
Sexual egalitarianism, as defined by statist doctrine, had two components. It equated women's equality with her entrance into the market, and it singled women out for "protection." Protective legislation enacted provisions such as subsidized day care and maternity leaves, which assisted women in their traditional gender roles. Thus, the institution of motherhood was enforced alongside and within the market. Woman was supposed to be treated as equal—that is, treated like a man—once this gender differentiation was put in place. This supposed equality presumed inequality in the first place. Woman was a mother first, then supposedly equal. In this instance, maternity leave served to conceal the patriarchal structure of society.[11]
The totalitarian notion of "state-enforced feminism," which was really neither feminist nor egalitarian, has, according to Ruth Rosen, discredited the discourse of sexual equality.[12] As a result, feminism itself is identified in these countries with a burdensome and deformed equality and state abuse of power. By 1948 in Czechoslovakia, for instance, women's equality was declared a fundamental law of the land, while the gendered institutions of marriage and motherhood were protected by the state.[13] This combination guaranteed women's paid maternity leave and their inscribed gender role as mothers.
Protective legislation has been carried out in sporadic and suspect ways. Mainly, it has set women apart as potential bearers of children.
Protective legislation is contradictory at best, not because treating men and women differently is necessarily unfair, but rather because such legislation constrains women's choices in order to ensure their domesticity. It enforces the differentiation of women from men. This is not the same as recognizing specialness in ways that allow for greater freedom of choice in the long run, after special provisions are made. The state intervenes on behalf of patriarchy, rather than affirming women's equality by creating access for them.
Protective legislation in socialist statism has created a complicated and troublesome picture. It is insufficient and problematic, yet it is sometimes better than nothing. It can provide partial relief to women in an already bad situation even as it reinforces gender discrimination. Legislation providing maternity leave and day care for children has provided much-needed assistance for women in Eastern Europe; at the same time, it has enforced domesticity. Although there is a big difference between assistance and equality, women do not want to give up the former without the assurance of the latter.
To the extent that changes toward a free market endanger maternity and child care provisions, women in Eastern Europe are reluctant to embrace them. They fear loss of their jobs. Their particular status—defined by domestic, wage, and consumer labor—defines specific problems for them. The changes toward greater democracy pose a more complicated challenge for women than for men: the free market endangers much of what has been guaranteed to women in the past, and it is not clear what it can bring them as women in the future, if it continues the patriarchal stance of the old socialism and of Western capitalism. Already assistance to Eastern European countries from the International Monetary Fund has been made contingent on the sale of state industry and the initiation of an austerity program that dramatically cuts back all social services.[14] These cutbacks will have particularly negative effects on women, who are already hard-pressed by a triple day of labor.
Such changes may be the most complicated for the women of East Germany, where the support systems for women in paid employment with children were some of the best. Although many East German feminists have critically labeled the special provisions "mommy politics," they are well aware of the import of these services for working mothers.[15] These provisions included shorter work weeks for women with two or more children; one paid day off a month for women who were over forty, were married, or had children under sixteen years of age; a
year of maternity leave with pay amounting to about 80 percent of one's salary; and free day care and infant care centers.[16] East German women clearly had an array of social benefits to lose: maternity and paternity leave, comprehensive medical care, job guarantees, first-trimester abortion on demand, free contraceptives, and more.[17]
Since 1989, women of the former East Germany have been hard hit. Child care centers have closed or raised their prices. More and more women have been forced out of work and are on welfare. Single mothers are disproportionately represented among the unemployed, as are women over fifty and women with college degrees. The new social agenda and economic infrastructure are returning women to the home as the economy worsens.[18] It is right to fear that new legislation will fail to address the complicated reality of women's specific needs and universal human rights.
In Poland, where equality on the basis of gender had been guaranteed by the constitution in 1952, protective legislation was well established. By 1968 women were entitled to one year of unpaid maternity leave, which was extended to a three-year leave in 1972. The new "post-Communist" government has already limited women's entitlements. Women report continuing discrimination in government and labor. They have been hit the hardest by unemployment.[19] Those women who continue to work are in the textile, food, and pottery industries, where they hold unsafe and monotonous jobs. Almost all of these women workers remain solely responsible for household labor.
Similar events are happening throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary, under the previous regime, women had twenty-four weeks of maternity leave at full pay, followed by a three-year leave at partial salary with a promise of job tenure. The new market economy does not promise anyone a job after a three-year absence.
When protective policies assist women in their domesticated roles, they enforce the existing gender code. Yet such policies can also lessen discrimination, as they can lessen women's responsibilities for children and domestic chores. It is in this spirit that Rosen calls for a gender democracy based on "equality with a difference," which recognizes the need for parental leave, child care, and family life supports.[20]
Reproductive and Contraceptive Rights
In most Eastern European countries, reproductive rights for women have remained outside the purview of equality. If women are treated like
men, reproductive issues are silenced, because no man ever needs an abortion, and no man needs contraception to prevent his own pregnancy. This standard of "likeness" functions in liberal democratic as well as socialist theory. Neither recognizes reproductive rights as essential. Both systems were constructed with men (and their nonreproductive bodies) in mind. This narrow vision set the context for statist notions of equality. Such myopia has continued in the new democracies. There has been no concerted effort to address the need for sex education, the availability of contraceptives, or the fundamental right to abortion. Indeed, in several countries legislation on reproductive issues has become more restrictive.[21]
In Poland, for example, abortion was legalized in 1956 and was available without restrictions until 1990. The new government has imposed regulations for state-run hospitals requiring examination of the woman by two gynecologists and a psychologist.[22] Moreover, the government has repeatedly attempted to push anti-abortion legislation through Sejm, the Polish parliament. In May 1991, the government's legislation banning abortions was rejected; instead, lawmakers adopted a nonbinding resolution that called on the government to ban abortions by private doctors. But by spring 1993, Poland had the most restrictive law on abortion of any country in Eastern Europe. The government also ended subsidies for birth control pills in May 1991. The cost of a month's supply of pills increased from ninety cents to three dollars.[23] Reproductive rights in Poland remain a fundamental arena of conflict, both within the state and between the state and the Catholic church.
During the negotiations for German unification, abortion rights could not be agreed upon.[24] Abortion was restricted in West Germany, whereas it was unrestricted during the first trimester in the East. The parties reached a compromise that allowed both the East German and the West German laws to remain in place for two years. The abortion law subsequently passed, in June 1992, is a compromise between West Germany's restrictive and East Germany's more permissive laws. It permits abortion in the first three months of pregnancy if the woman states that she is in distress and if she has been through officially sanctioned counseling. After the first trimester, abortion can be performed only if there is a threat to the woman's life, or if the fetus has no chance for survival. Opinion polls in Germany show that 75 percent of all Germans—male and female—support the right to abortion in the first trimester.[25]
In Romania, women have started to gain some recognition of reproductive rights, especially as compared with the extreme control exer-
cised by the previous "pro-family" regime, in which the state "protected" the interests of mothers and children.[26] Under Ceausescu, abortion and contraception were illegal, and multiple unwanted pregnancies were a reality, as attested by the large number of children in orphanages. The new government lifted the abortion ban in December 1989, reducing the number of abandoned newborns in Romanian maternity wards to a trickle.[27]
It remains to be seen whether other Eastern European countries will expand or erode recognition of women's reproductive rights. These societies are dominated by traditional values about women's role as mother. Such values operate as an inflexible cultural model which denies women their right to reproductive choice and, in the end, their sexual equality. Feminists in countries such as Sweden and Denmark have argued that control over reproductive issues affects women's lives more profoundly than any equality legislation could ever do. They acknowledge technological innovations like the contraceptive pill and the IUD as revolutionary for women's moves toward democracy.[28] One wonders what the possibilities can be for women in Poland or the Commonwealth of Independent States, where there is outright hostility to women's reproductive choices. I turn now to a more in-depth look at one of these countries: the former Soviet Union.
A Closer Look—
Soviet Society and the "Woman Question"
The Soviet state was the first government in history to declare women's emancipation, in 1917; it wrote that emancipation into law and made abortion legal in 1920. (Abortion was later criminalized under Stalin, in 1936, and then reliberalized in 1955.) Article 35 of the 1977 Constitution declared equality of rights between women and men. Yet protective legislation has barred women from as many as 460 occupations, in order to protect their maternal function and their gender roles. Motherhood, rather than parenthood, is at issue in this legislation; biologism exists right alongside Soviet egalitarianism.[29] But there is no consistency in this protectionism. Women have always done heavy labor in the countryside and have been the rubbish collectors and street cleaners in the cities.[30]
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Soviet society had the largest number of women professionals and specialists on the globe, although few filled the top ranks; close to 90 percent of its female pop-
ulation were in the work force.[31] However, there was an average gap of about 30 percent between men's and women's wages; women predominate in low-paid, feminized occupations, and nearly one-half of the female work force is employed at unskilled manual labor.[32]
By the fall of 1992, economic turmoil was causing untold suffering for Russian women. In Moscow, 70 percent of the newly unemployed were women between the ages of 45 and 55. Women's economic degradation can be seen in the overwhelming number who have become peddlers and prostitutes.[33]
Add to this precarious economic situation the place of abortion in most Russian women's lives, both before and since 1989. The average Soviet woman has six to eight abortions in her lifetime. But it is not unheard of to have as many as eighteen.[34] Women's health care is of key concern to women, particularly in terms of the availability of safe abortions under humane conditions. Because of waiting lists in Soviet hospitals, anywhere from 4 to 8 million abortions are performed illegally each year.[35] A major concern of Soviet women is a more adequate supply of reliable contraceptives. At present, diaphragms come in only three sizes. It is almost impossible to get condoms, and there is no spermicidal cream.
The problem of safe abortions and available contraceptives reflects more than a troubled consumer economy. Perestroika focuses on the economic market, as though consumerism is ungendered. But there is a patriarchal structure that underlies consumer products and the activity of consumerism itself. For instance, there is a particular scarcity of labor-saving devices for the Soviet household; women do most of the endless shopping and waiting; lines are too long, and shopping takes too much time; children's nurseries are ill-equipped and scarce; contraceptives are almost impossible to buy. Many of these consumer issues directly affect and reflect the sex and gender hierarchy of society. And they in part constitute what Gorbachev calls the "decay of family life" under the old policies. But instead of restructuring the economy to respond to the needs of women and their families, the Soviet state wants to refocus women toward their roles at home.[36] As women are redirected toward the home, the home will not be liberalized or democratized. Whatever restructuring there will be will take place in the economy.
There will most probably be an increase in the gender segregation of the labor force and a renewed interest in woman as mother. Women will be freed from their involuntary emancipation and will be "al-
lowed" to return to their families. This rejection of woman's emancipation may become part of the general reaction against Communism and may derive a certain legitimacy from it. The corruptness of the Communist state, which never really emancipated women, can be used to justify returning woman to her womanly duties as a form of "emancipation." But this is a vision of patriarchal democracy which harkens back to eighteenth-century France and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the process of rejecting totalitarian Communism, patriarchal gender relations can be rearticulated.
In Gorbachev's Perestroika, his plan for restructuring Soviet society, he states that women have been given ". . . the same right to work as men, equal pay for equal work, and social security. Women have been given every opportunity to get an education, to have a career, and to participate in social and political activities." He does not compare the theory with practice. For him, the problem lies elsewhere: "We have failed to pay attention to women's 'specific' rights and needs arising from their role as mother and homemaker, and their indispensable educational function as regards children." He argues that women do not have enough time for their special domestic and familial roles. He blames the slackening of family ties on ". . . making women equal with men in everything." Perestroika means returning women to ". . . their purely womanly mission."[37] Gorbachev proposed, beginning in 1991, an extra six months of tenured, although unpaid, maternity leave.
Soviet women have responded to these issues in a variety of ways. Surveys have shown that many rural women prefer to work and show little interest in leading domestic lives.[38] A 1990 poll showed that only 20 percent of Russian women "want to stay at home."[39] In other studies, professional women say their work and their children are the most important aspects of their lives. There are women like Tatyana Mamonova, a Russian feminist, who write openly in criticism of the sexism of Soviet culture.[40] Others, like Tatyana Tolstaya, feel that "a Soviet woman's dream is to not have to work."[41] This is the view of Soviet women which is depicted regularly by the Western press and by Francine du Plessix Gray in her much-publicized Soviet Women, Walking the Tightrope . She presents Soviet women as thinking they have "too much equality."[42]
The gist of the argument of Soviet Women is that Soviet women neither need nor want Western-style feminism. Gray clumps all Soviet women at one extreme and all Western feminists at the other; the latter are viewed as clinging to the tenet of early liberal feminism (à la Betty
Friedan) that women want the right to work and not to be relegated to the home.[43] As Gray puts it, "American women are still struggling for the freedom to, whereas Soviet women are now struggling for freedom from ."[44] Actually, today there is much more similarity than difference between the two societies in this realm. Most women want some relief from their double day of labor in the United States and their triple day (including the time spent on queues) in Soviet society. Some believe the solution to their frustrations would be getting a job; others desire a better job or a job requiring fewer hours; others see a need for a reorganization of domestic labor; and still others wish for all of these things. And some women express their general disdain with their present lot as the Leningrad novelist Daniil Granin did: "Feministka is a strictly pejorative term in our country."[45]
A Soviet woman interviewed by Gray advises, "We must own up to our great differences and stop fearing them. . . . To differ doesn't mean to stand lower."[46] This statement is an indictment of the Soviet statist approach to equality of the sexes. For some Soviet women, perestroika appears to hold out a promise that they will only work if they wish to; they will no longer have to. It offers their husbands the potential to earn more money and to free their wives from the necessity of jobs. These women joke that they are all for perestroika if it will wake up the lichnost, the individualism, in their men. They say that "one of the aims of perestroika is to motivate men to work as well as women." They speak of the passivity of Soviet men and of their own resourcefulness. "Women can do everything; men can do the rest."[47] However inchoate the feelings of Soviet women are, they bespeak a tension surrounding gender relations. Gray somewhat simplistically concludes that, instead of a women's movement, Soviet society needs a men's movement. For her, women already have power because of their role in the inner emotional life of the family.
But there is a difference between being important—especially in the circumscribed world of the family—and having power. If you have power, you do not wait on queues and you do not have multiple unsafe and illegal abortions. When you have power, you take part in making the rules. Instead, the rules are made for Soviet women, and the rules treat women not as individuals but as mothers. They do not get to choose this assignment—which is different than saying that no woman would choose motherhood if left free to do so. Rather, it says that the designation of women as mothers is a political construction which deprives women of choice. Moreover, the options are constricted: the reality of
motherhood in Soviet society is different from the abstract wish to have a child; the requirements of feeding, queuing, and patenting are daunting.
Whose democracy does perestroika envision? I do not think it is women's. Yelena Khanga, a Soviet journalist based in New York City, would agree. She deplored the total demoralization she found among women in Moscow on her visit in the fall of 1991. Glasnost, the cultural side of perestroika, had brought fashion magazines, music videos, and Western images of feminine beauty to Moscow "without Western feminist ideas about female brains and competence."[48] Women in Moscow need a feminism to make perestroika democratic for them, too.
Havel and His Patriarchal Democracy
Things do not look much better for the women of Eastern Europe when we examine the philosophical writings of one of the leading spokespersons of the new democracies. Vaclav Havel, playwright, former dissident, and president of Czechoslovakia (until its division), has come to represent the democratic spirit of the revolutions throughout Eastern Europe.[49] He has been a searing critic of the totalitarian state and its destruction of people's inner selves. His distrust of the state has led to his "antipolitical" stance on politics: that individuals must know and trust themselves rather than any political ideology. It is unclear, however, whether women are included in Havel's vision of a new democracy or his radical indictment of totalitarian statism.
In his latest writing, Havel prefers to speak without political labels. He no longer calls himself a socialist, although he identified as such about a decade ago. Havel says, "I stopped calling myself a socialist without changing my political opinions."[50] Now the word socialism seems hollowed of meaning for him. It means a market economy for Gorbachev, massacring students for Li Peng, and bulldozing his people for Ceausescu.[51] Havel sees it as obscuring, rather than illuminating, one's vision of what is possible.
Havel fears that the term perestroika is starting to resemble the word socialism . He prefers to write of "post-totalitarianism," or "anti-political politics," because he sees these as nonideological constructions. The heart of his writing is antistatist. He has a strong antagonism toward undeserved privilege and enforced inequities. He writes: "I think that everyone, as far as possible, should have the same chances."[52]
According to Havel, most Czechs and Slovaks are not hostile to so-
cialism; rather, they criticize socialism as it has been practiced for failing to live up to its principles. Whatever the term, Havel argues that our enemy is no longer totalitarianism, but rather "our own bad qualities."[53] His presidential program, therefore, focuses on bringing "spirituality" "moral responsibility," "humaneness," and "humility" into politics in order to ". . . make clear that there is something higher above us, that our deeds do not disappear into the black hole of time, but are recorded somewhere and judged, that we have neither the right nor a reason to think that we understand everything and that we can do everything."[54] His focus is on the individual as well as on a higher order that judges us. God alone can save us.[55] There is an uneasy blend of liberal individualism and religiosity in his "antipolitical" politics.
Havel leaves God in place as he dissolves much of modernism: rationalism, scientism, and positivism. For him, Communism was the perverse extreme of the modern construction of "universal systemic solutions." The crisis of Communism can be read as a part of the crisis of generality, universality, and objectivity. And the answer cannot be found in new scientific recipes or new universals.[56] The answers will be more local and specific.
Havel is committed to economic democracy. Capitalism is no simple answer for him: "Enormous private multinational corporations are curiously like socialist states."[57] Anonymous unaccountable bureaucracies exist in both economic systems. Instead, he believes, economic units must be set up to renew their relationships with individuals on a continuing basis. Havel subscribes to open competition for power as the only real guarantee of public control. Part of this process is the "rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love"[58] The economic organization of society must also be decentralized and should ensure maximum diversity. He prefers small enterprises that respect the specific nature of different localities and different traditions that resist the pressures of uniformity by maintaining a plurality of modes of ownership and economic decision-making.[59] This sounds good. However, historically, traditional patriarchal families have often existed within small business economies.
A democratic, legalistic approach is necessary but insufficient for Havel—as are all political constructions. In the end, it is the individual, with the help of God, who will allow the "truth" to prevail. The concept of "truth" itself appears problematic for Havel's stance, but he believes that the truth remains open. In the end, it is not political order for which Havel searches, but rather meaning in life for individuals. No
legal or political system can ensure this. My query remains: Are these individuals men and women, or just men?
The totalitarian state represents "special interests" for Havel. Somewhat contradictorily to his critique of modernism, he argues that the state must represent universal needs. In rejecting state totalitarianism, he argues, democratic theory needs to recognize that the universal condition is also particular and specific. Socialist theory assumed that the proletariat represented the universal need of humanity. Liberal theory assumes the universalist stance of rights. However, there are specific needs which must be recognized within the proletariat: the needs of individuals, of men and women, and of ethnic factions and religious groups. Universalism does not ensure democracy; it merely promises that democracy can exist.
Havel's vision of democracy focuses on and privileges the economy as the arena of democracy. Democracy requires that the relations "between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work" do not lose sight of the personal connection.[60] There is no mention of women and their work, and nothing to indicate even that "man" is used in the "generic" sense here. Nor does Havel's analysis include the home and the work found there, or the special relations of men and women to these spheres and to each other.
Does Havel believe that women can also construct the meanings of truth? Can we assume that Havel's critique of privilege extends to male privilege? Can we assume that when Havel argues that everyone should have equal chances in life, he includes women? Or does the birthing of children, or domestic responsibilities, define women's options differently? And why are we left to assume so much?
It is not at all clear what Havel envisions for the family or the Church. He argues that there is a higher order of religion that should constrain all politics. But religion has hardly been a democratic friend of women. This is particularly true of the Catholic church in Eastern Europe.
Havel's use of language surely tells us something. He writes only about men, naming them as "men." His metaphors are based in male preoccupations. He writes of moral "impotence" and the "castration" of culture.[61] When we explore more carefully the imagery of gender in Havel's writing, his commitment to democracy for women becomes more troublesome. One worries that Havel is not just forgetting to include women in his "post-totalitarian" thoughts—that, in fact, a post-patriarchal construction of democracy is not what he has in mind.[62]
In discussing his criticism of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, Havel says that United States troops should not be separated from their "mothers" forever. Why not speak of parents in this instance? When speaking of the difficulty of life, he states, "I only think that everything today is somehow harder and rougher, that one has to pay more dearly for things and that the dream of a freer, more meaningful life is no longer just a matter of running away from Mommy, as it were, but a tough-minded everyday confrontation with the dark powers of the New Age."[63] Woman is represented as someone men desire to escape from. He uses the category of motherhood as an inevitable construction and engenders it as such. What about fathers or the nonsexually specified "parent"? Language matters.
In his play Temptation, he criticizes the irrationality of bureaucracy and the sale of people's souls to the devil.[64] He establishes this critique through stereotypes of gender and sexuality. Marketa, a working-class woman, represents the pure and good in a womanhood undefiled by intellectuality. In contrast, Vilma, a professional woman, is a scientist and represents corruption. Women's choices in the play are thus restricted to the classic ones of either angel or whore. Moreover, the director of the institute, who represents evil, is homosexual. This symbolism represents an exclusionary sexual and gender politics. Women's choices are predetermined and seriously curtailed, and homosexuality is problematized. Patriarchal privilege is written all over this play.
Havel writes about his wife, Olga, that she is "someone who could respond to my own mental instability, offer sober criticism of my wildest ideas, provide private support for my public adventures."[65] In his letters to her from prison, he instructs her to be more independent in the practical areas, where she had "often complained I've suppressed your initiative."[66] In another letter, he writes: "Be calm, serene, cheerful, industrious, sociable, kind to everyone, optimistic . . . dress nicely . . . study my letters carefully and try to carry out the tasks I set you." And, in yet one more letter, he directs: "This temporary emancipation from my domination is allowing you to develop your own identity. But of course, I am happiest of all to see that you are living and acting—if I may put it this way—in my spirit."[67] Perhaps one should not make too much of these letters. After all, they are private letters written under severe stress and the constraints of prison. And yet, these letters were published with his agreement for the public to read, to let us know better who Havel is. I do not think he is a post-patriarchal democrat.
As for Olga, she has stated that although life is very difficult for Czech women with their triple work shifts, and although woman's status must change, she does not see the need to differentiate women's rights from those of old people or children. "Laws must be enacted to ease the burden of women, but there are more pressing things to be done in our society."[68]
The brief thoughts on feminism Havel records are unsettling and troubling. When a group of Italian feminists visited Prague seeking women's signatures to a petition demanding "respect of human rights, disarmament, demilitarization," and so on, Havel received them with disdain. He says he assumed the women were middle-class and thought the petition inappropriate. He explains that he does not mean to ridicule feminism, because "he knows little about it" and "assumes that it is not merely the invention of a few hysterics, bored housewives, or rejected mistresses." Yet he nonetheless believes "that in our country even though the position of women is incomparably worse than in the West, feminism seems simply 'dada.' "[69] For Havel, feminism is a foreign import. His views did not keep several Czech women from signing the petition, however.
Nor do they gibe with Alena Heitlinger's views on the status of women in Czechoslovakia or the need for feminism there. She writes that the legacy of Communism has left Czech and Slovak women particularly vulnerable under the new regime. Women continue to be marginalized politically. Economic restructuring is creating the involuntary unemployment of women. This loss of jobs is masked by a rhetoric calling for women's domesticity.[70]
As long as feminism, however it is defined, is thought of as "dada" by leaders in Eastern Europe, the struggle toward real democracy will be much more difficult. Totalitarianism and bureaucratic statism cannot be fully dismantled without addressing the unquestioned patriarchal privileging of men in the state, the economy, and the home. Democracy must be formulated for family life, as well as the market, if it is to have real meaning for everyday life. Existing liberal democratic and socialist theories of sexual equality are insufficient. Paternalist protectionist policies do not work. Neither do universalist ones.
Unfortunately, the questions that Havel's vision of democracy elicits have been put on hold. Instead, the Czech and Slovak republics have become mired in the process of privatization. Havel fears that the legacy of statist Communism may run too deep for Czechs to move truly beyond it. Racialized patriarchy may run too deep as well.
Eastern European Feminism
Like the women in the Commonwealth of Independent States, women throughout Eastern Europe have responded in diverse ways to the post-totalitarian turmoil. Some women see staying home as new and progressive in light of the unequal burdens of the forced equality of the past. These women see the right to work as one of the old state lies that forced them into unskilled jobs, subsistence wages, and triple shifts of work. To these women, feminism sounds similar to the old Communism. In the "emerging male democracies," these women "have so many worries that the least of them is whether they are emancipated or not."[71]
Other women, who identify themselves as feminists, demand that the new governments recognize the equality of women. However, there is no easy resolution to the issues of how special legislation recognizing women's particular responsibilities should be woven into a new, radicalized vision of democracy, or how special legislation can be designed that does not relegate women to a secondary status or "mommy track." Maud Edwards argues that the institutionalized ideology of equal status and equal treatment provides no guarantee of material or real equality. In fact, such an ideology can sustain oppression by concealing it,[72] as it has in many Eastern European states.
Women's mistrust of the statist rhetoric encompassing sexual equality creates a complicated politics which defines much of the context surrounding "women's issues" in Eastern Europe. To the extent that abortion has replaced other contraceptive choices as a means of birth control, the demand for condoms or diaphragms can be seen as a liberation from repeated abortions. To the extent that pornography represents a rebellion against state coercion, it may be embraced by some as a statement of individual freedom. To the extent that the family functioned as a private sphere of resistance against the Communist state, women value the role they played in this sphere[73] and feel protective of it. An effective feminist politics must thread these concerns through a renewed critique of the patriarchal formulations of both socialism and capitalism.
Although there is little agreement over what feminism is exactly, or its appropriate role in creating post-patriarchal democracies between women in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, feminist voices are emerging.[74] Shortly after the German revolution in November 1989, a manifesto was drawn up by the Lila Offensive, a Berlin women's group that is part of the Autonomous Women's Asso-
ciation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The Autonomous Women's Association is a "societal-cultural concept to ensure that women will not be cut short in the new political process."[75] The Lila Manifesto represents one of the first independent statements of women's interests in the new East Germany, and it articulates the promise that these women saw in the recent revolution. It systematically attacks the gendered formulations of what the authors term "centralized, administrative socialism."[76] The manifesto, subtitled a "working paper," indicts the conflicts between paid work and motherhood for women; the underpaid and undervalued status of jobs performed by women; and the assignment of household labor to women. The women of the Lila Offensive declare that "the women's question in the GDR has not been resolved" and that the "elimination of capitalist means of production is indeed a prerequisite, but no guarantee of the cessation of patriarchal repression."[77]
These women are anticapitalists and self-defined feminists. They view sexual equality as "one of the most basic values of a socialist society." "Feminism means for us, the protection and representation of women's interests, with the ultimate goal of achieving equality between the sexes, irrespective of lifestyle and love relations." The women of the Lila Offensive demand that women be given a more active place in political decision making at all levels; that the right to work be guaranteed to every woman and man; and that their nation be based upon the principles of antifascism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Stalinism. They specifically demand that there be no social decline for women as a result of the restructuring of the labor force and the consequent dismissals and replacements; that legislation support the compatibility of motherhood and fatherhood with employment; that social policy measures assigned one-sidedly to mothers be removed; and that the rights and duties of fatherhood be clearly spelled out. In the realm of sexual self-determination, they call for a guaranteed right to abortion and the humanization of health services, especially in terms of gynecological care.
Feminists of the Lila Offensive know that their problem is not too much equality, but rather, too little of it. They recognize that protective legislation does not in and of itself acknowledge women's rights, but rather protects gender privilege for men, unless it is committed to a sexual egalitarianism which is post-socialist and post-capitalist.
Feminist reaction to the new "emerging male democracies" continues to develop. The Yugoslav Independent Alliance of Women has been created as an independent, non—party-affiliated, and transnational
women's organization. In Poland, the anti-abortion legislation sponsored by the government in 1989 created at least a dozen new groups with feminist concerns.[78] The feminist challenge in all of these countries is to address a radicalized democracy which unsettles the gendered structures of both statist socialism and "free" markets.
It is within the flux of ideas from socialism, capitalism, liberalism, and democracy that the richness of feminist theory and politics can be found. Feminist theory, even in its liberal version, recognizes the importance of individual identity within the collectivity. A feminist must recognize the collective category of women. Nevertheless, gender identity is never identical to one's individuality, and one's individuality cannot be subsumed by collectivity. The individual can never be fully conceptualized outside her community, as in liberal democratic theory, nor can she be subsumed by the community or the state, as in socialist theory. With feminism as a starting point for a new democratic theory, we begin with the tension between individuality and collectivity rather than making false starts toward one or the other.
I distinguish here between liberal individualism, which pictures an atomized and disconnected person in competition with others, and a post-patriarchal individuality that recognizes the capacities and diversity of individuals, although as a part of a community that can either enhance or constrain their development.[79] The individual is no longer seen as separate and apart from others, as in patriarchal liberalism; nor is the individual subsumed by the collective or the state, as in patriarchal socialism.
Racism and nationalism currently abound throughout Eastern Europe. Particular legacies of patriarchal privilege are being unearthed as the divestment of Communism uncovers older patriarchal traditions rooted in ethnic Slavic cultures, Catholicism, and racial conservatism with overtones of antisemitism. The human disaster produced by ethnic conflicts between Serbia and Croatia bespeaks the remains of the fascist politics of World War II. The hatred between some Hungarians and Romanians is rooted in deeply racialized and nationalistic loyalties. Gypsy women in Hungary have been singled out as scapegoats and have been coerced into undergoing sterilization. In the new Germany, Nazi Skinheads represent a growing right-wing movement which is particularly fascinated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the United States.[80] These expressions of racial and ethnic hatred pose serious threats to a non-patriarchal vision of democracy, in part because they keep gender oppression in place.
So we are left trying to imagine a democracy that is not patriarchal or torn apart by racial hatred. The Eastern European struggles toward democracy in 1989 looked hopeful and promising. Today they look much more dismal. Nationalism, racism, and sexism seem to have stunted the possibilities for democratic markets. But the story is not yet complete. In the meantime, feminists must fight for affirmative state policies which will nurture a racial and sexual equality that does not assume sameness of treatment as the standard. Feminists need to envision an activist state that does not intervene on behalf of patriarchal interests. The critique of bureaucratic statism is crucial for Western feminists as we demand greater access from our own states for abortion, for jobs, for treatment of AIDS. Let us move now to a discussion of these issues closer to home, in the United States.