Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe

The Eastern European state socialist regimes proclaimed women's emancipation in the late 1940s. Legislation was passed that radically altered women's position in societies of Eastern Europe.[1] New laws guaranteed women's equality in society and marriage, and women as well as men were required to become productive members of society by working for wages and engaging in political activism. Political leaders viewed women's presence in the work force as providing an opportunity to instill Communist ideology in new generations of women.[1]

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 and an over-representation of women in unemployment.[2]

In the Soviet Union this transition led to significant changes in all spheres including the labor market.[3][4][5][6] Whilst there was a gender pay gap in places such as the USSR, due to protective legislation that restricted women's employment in jobs that were considered dangerous or physically demanding which meant that due to the fact that in the centralized wage system, where market forces did not interfere, earnings within sectors were determined by the perception of a certain sector's productivity, laboriousness and social usefulness, women in Russia were highly concentrated in white-collar sectors such as education, healthcare, trade, food and light industry, their earnings were on average lower than those of men throughout the whole Soviet Union's history.[7] After the collapse, due to laws such as the Law on the State Enterprise (adopted prior to transition in 1987), meant that goods-producing enterprises had to meet their wage payment obligations from their own revenue. While this change scarcely affected women, as women were still concentrated in the "nonproductive" sector, it did affect the pay gap between women and men. The nonproductive sector, encompassing such sectors as education and healthcare, was still financed from the state budget and was therefore at greater risk of budgetary cuts, which occurred in the transitory period.[7] The dissolution of the former USSR also increased overall income inequality.[5][8][9] In this transitory period for many states there was economic disaster, and Stokes comments on how "many of the customary practices of ordinary life, such as the value of time, gender relations, the nature of public discourse, and the job environment, changed."[10] Due to women being concentrated in the lower tier of the income distribution, they were more vulnerable to such changes, and the rising inequality had an adverse effect on the gender pay differentials during the transition years.[8] Hansberry[5] and Gerry, Kim and Li[9] provide evidence that the increase in dispersion of incomes brought about by liberalization had a negative impact on the gender wage gap in Russia.

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.[2][11][12] An increase in gender discrimination in the workplace was also observed.[13] In Russia, pornography proliferated after the collapse.[14] Whilst in the former Yugoslavia an epidemic of mass rape occurred.[15] Slavenka Drakulić described the liberalization 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)

Fodor and Balogh, based on pre-collapse and post-collapse survey data, have said that opinions on women as homemakers and their contribution to the workforce, have changed little in Central and Eastern European states, and in contrast Western European states have greatly liberalized their views on such.[16]

Ghodsee also 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.[17] Yet also in Bulgaria, following the collapse the Pomaks saw a resurgence in orthodox forms of Islam, as many believed their "traditions were corrupted by communism". This encouraged a return to traditional gender roles for men and women. Ghodsee comments on how for some men this included more strictly policing their wives bodies than they had previously under the communist regime, and how also many women "seemed eager" to adopt such traditional gender roles.[18]

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.[19] Such views are often accused of being rooted in the common idea that Western cultures are better and must save "less developed" societies.[20][21] With regard to Central and Eastern European countries, the fall of communism had severely affected the whole society (including through violent wars such as Yugoslav Wars and post-Soviet conflicts), and in some cases, such as the fall of the heavy industry, men were worse affected. With regard to social policies, these have varied greatly by country, both during and after the fall of communism, given that former communist countries are not a monolith and there were and are differences between them (half of European countries are former communist countries). For example, while in Poland abortion was restricted in the 1990s, in other countries the fall of communism had actually led to the liberalization of reproductive rights, notably in Romania and Albania, which, during the communist period had aggressive natalist policies. Critics also 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. There are objections to painting feminism in Eastern Europe as "a matter of catching up with the West."[22]

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

• Corrin, Chris. Gender and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999.
• Drakulic, Slavenka. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. HarperCollins: New York, 1993.
• Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. The Politics of Gender After Socialism." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. Social Change, Gender, and Violence: Post-Communist and War Affected Societies. AA Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
• Saleel, Renata. The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism. London: Routledge, 1994