Feminism in Czechoslovakia since 1989 has been shaped not only by the experience of state socialism, but also by changing views of how gender inequality was dealt with by the previous regime. These have ranged from a critique of the ‘enslavement’ of women to the theory of ‘better sex’. However, what has been missing is a constructive continuation of the story of socialist emancipation.
Feminism, gender inequality and the emancipation of women are by no means new terms in the Czech Republic. Nor, for that matter, is criticism of them as ‘progressivist’ concepts imposed on ‘us’ by the West. Thirty years ago, similar debates formed part of the growing awareness, reception and adoption of western feminisms of a predominantly liberal turn. The first issue of the Slovak feminist journal Aspekt in 1993 was devoted to The Myth of Beauty by the liberal American feminist Naomi Wolf (1990), who has more recently featured as the protagonist of Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), about the world of conspiracy theories.
Like today, participants in the early debates included well-known conservative voices endorsing a ‘natural’ gender order and traditional family values. Repugnant sexist statements and harsh rejections of ‘radical’ or ‘militant’ western feminists were common, even though no one had a clear idea of what these terms actually meant. But the discussions after 1989 also brought about a reassessment of the emancipation of women under the previous regime, inviting the question as to what forms future developments should take.
Protect us from the Union of Women
Although these early debates were mostly limited to academic circles and far from being genuinely public, they did filter into the media, spawning numerous articles, indicating how important the subject was considered at the time. Two major issues dominated reflections of the experience in Czechoslovakia: first, how the position of women in various walks of life had been affected by state socialist policies, in comparison to the West; second, to what extent – if at all – women had been aware, and critical of, gender inequality under state socialism.
In the early years after 1989 it had never crossed anyone’s mind to contemplate feminism from the perspective of the advance of women’s rights under state socialism. The Czech Union of Women (ČSZ) was seen merely as a cog in the machinery of the communist regime, which imposed regulations on women with a negative impact on their lives. The successor organisation of the ČSZ, which retained its name, mostly kept its distance from activist feminist circles, occasionally even clashing with them (Zdeňka Hajná, the chair of the ČSZ, recalls in her memoirs her differences with the sociologist Jiřina Šiklová).
Indeed, the ČSZ was also the target of the protests of November 1989. Demonstrations outside the organisation’s Prague headquarters featured the banner ‘Saint Agnes of Bohemia, protect us from the Union of Women’. The slogan was also used in the Proclamation of Young Mothers, a group of activists who supported Civic Forum (the political movement that arose from the Velvet Revolution – ed.). Recalling the atmosphere of the 1990s, the Slovak feminists and theorists Jana Cviková and Jana Oravcová later said: ‘For us, feminism meant openness and pluralism.’ By contrast, they regarded state socialism and its approach to women’s emancipation as ‘forced unification and homogenisation’.
Nevertheless, some of those discussing the status of women in socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1990s and early 2000s (such as the sociologist and philosopher Hana Havelková) contended that women were more emancipated than their western counterparts. This, they claimed, was mainly because men had been more severely affected by economic dispossession. Additionally, men had lost power due to legislative changes, such as the law on the democratisation of the family, which stripped them of their status as ‘head of the family’. Alongside the general transformation of social relations, they argued, these interventions helped to equalise gender relations, affecting the lives of people across society. Although partner relations in Czechoslovakia were very different from the experience of western feminist collectives, inter-gender relations in society overall were more equitable than in the West, according to this view.
Nevertheless, a negative opinion of socialist emancipation prevailed in the 1990s. The legally codified equality between men and women guaranteed under state socialism was deemed to have existed on paper only (is there a social order anywhere where this is not the case?), contributing to the ‘enslavement’ of women through ‘overemployment’.
It’s all about sex
Lately, a much more favourable view of the socialist experiment has emerged. While mainly a result of international research, which has again started examining women’s emancipation under state socialism, the shift may also be understood as a reaction to the growth of neoliberal discourse. The role of women in state-run women’s organisations (women’s unions) is being reassessed and their role reframed in activist terms as a way of advancing social policies benefiting women. In this context, progressive legislative policies in the East are regarded as having spurred western governments to pay more attention to women’s issues as part of their Cold War competition with the Eastern Bloc. This popular research topic has generated numerous studies some, which have however reached conclusions that are questionable, to say the least.
Perhaps the best example of this approach is Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism (2018) by the American anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee. Although the title is more of a marketing ploy, since the book does not discuss sexuality in much detail, it has helped to spread the notion of sexual liberation of women under state socialism. Ghodsee draws on the Marxist critique of bourgeois marriage as a market transaction, and on economic theories of sexuality that regard sex as a commodity that women in capitalist societies exchange with men. Both rest on the assumption that women derive pleasure from sex only if it is not the subject of such a market transaction. Ghodsee contends that since most women were gainfully employed and their basic needs – housing, education and healthcare – were met, sex for them could be enjoyed with no strings attached.
In her book Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Sesire, 1945–1989 (2018), sociologist Kateřina Lišková argues that women were sexually liberated already during the 1950s, due to the legalisation of abortion, and because the female orgasm had been the object of study by sexologists at that time. Appealing as these conclusions may sound, Lišková offers no concrete evidence of what this sexual liberation actually entailed. It is, of course, impossible to carry out retrospective studies to determine whether, in the 1960s, women in the East enjoyed sex more than women did in the West.
Pleasure vs disciplining
The emphasis on the sexual liberation of women under state socialism is partly a result of the adoption of the western perspective espoused by the second wave of feminism. To claim that women in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s had the same freedom to decide about their own bodies and reproductive behaviour as American women a decade or two later is, to put it mildly, an exaggeration. Back then, contraception was in short supply in Czechoslovakia and, judging by the records of the state-run abortion committees, most women who wished to terminate their pregnancy in the 1960s lacked basic information on contraceptive methods.
One should also point out that the discourse on the legalisation of abortion and the exploration of the female orgasm in Czechoslovakia was quite different from the individualist, liberal spirit manifested in the slogan ‘My body, my choice’, whose primary focus is women’s subjective experience of sexuality. In Czechoslovakia, the female orgasm was studied for the purposes of treating infertility, and the legalisation of abortion took place in the context of dealing with women’s social and health issues, and with the aim of promoting population growth.
While modernising academic discourse in Czechoslovakia was undoubtedly more progressive than the attitudes in some western countries, the question remains: what had supposedly enabled Czechoslovak women in the 1950s to derive more pleasure from sex as part of their sexual liberation? Kateřina Lišková believes it was gender equality in partner relations, which had been actively promoted alongside an emphasis on the ‘presence of deep feelings as a prerequisite of satisfying sex’. However, in memoirs written by Czechoslovak women (which rarely mention sex), the 1950s don’t exactly emerge as a time when they discovered their bodies as a source of sexual pleasure.
For example, in her memoirs Convictions: My Life with a Good Communist (1979), Jo Langer wrote about her relationship with the leftwing Slovak intellectual Oskar Langer, whom she married in 1934. The Langers and their communist friends practiced free sexual relations on ideological grounds: ‘According to the second-hand Soviet ideology of those days, in our circles it was considered good to have sex because a physically frustrated person was unlikely to be fully fit to devote his capacities to the cause.’ However, Langer illustrated her experience of marital sex by recounting how she once turned on the light during intercourse only for her husband to instantly switch it off: ‘Yes, he regarded it as shameful, not out of some kind of shyness but because it was pleasurable and we were not entitled to pleasure, given there was so much suffering and poverty in the world.’
This kind of communist morality, which dismissed all bodily pleasures as ‘vestiges of bourgeois attitudes’ (an attitude mocked by writers in the 1960s) and held that partners in a relationship were meant to work together for a higher cause, rather than to belong to and live for one another, was not shared by society as a whole. Partner relations fulfilling various needs continued to exist – suffice it to mention the sexual exploits of the participants of youth brigades and other similar organised activities, which were the stuff of legend. Nevertheless, the question remains whether the gender equality promoted in the 1950s was really capable of undermining, reviving or redefining sexual practices rooted in patriarchal frameworks.
Liberation and experimentation
Being outspoken about sexual experiences, fantasies and wishes played a crucial role in women’s sexual liberation in the West. In this respect, the developments behind the Iron Curtain ran parallel to those in the West, since in Czechoslovakia sexuality did not become a topic of public debate until the 1960s, albeit in a socialist–disciplinarian context.
For example, in a 1962 article entitled ‘Is it necessary to reinvent love?’, published in the journal Host do domu, the philosopher Irena Dubská criticised short-term sexual relations in the West, which she regarded as a sign of individualism and an escape into privacy from an alienated, bureaucratised world. Instead of seeing sexual practices in western societies – information about which had trickled into the media from scholarly circles – as part of a modernizing movement, she condemned it as a sign of the technologisation and rationalisation of sex. She championed the integration of love into society-wide communal relations and a new unity of emotions, thought and action, without explaining how this goal was to be achieved.
In the late 1960s, parts of the Czechoslovak press carried articles arguing that while contributing to a social and economic emancipation of women, the ideas of the Prague Spring had allowed sexual behaviour to continue to be framed in terms of categories and standards created by men. They claimed that by promoting the image of marital equality, women’s sexual behaviour was influenced by a romanticised idea of love. The journalist Helena Klímová, for example, commended unbridled extramarital sexual relations and dismissed normative ideas of sexual behaviour, contending that everything is ‘normal’ in sex as long as it happens with the mutual consent of the parties involved.
Public discourse of this period indicates that, unsurprisingly, sexual liberalisation or indeed, experimentation, took place in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. The question remains, however, of what impact this had on gender equality. For example, in her book Každý krok je volba (‘Every step is a choice’, 2023), the painter Věra Nováková recalled her involuntary position in a love triangle, setting her experience in the context of the 1960s vogue of sexual liberation.
The modernization of society
What little discussion there was of sexuality outside of scholarly discourse under state socialism happened mostly in the second half of the 1960s. In terms of women’s emancipation, the emphasis was on the collective spirit rather than sexuality; Alexandra Kollontai’s ideas about free love were largely rejected as decadent.
Following the 1948 communist takeover, three aspects dominated in the official reflections on the position of women in society: first, women were expected to contribute to the rebuilding of society, usually through activism on a local, community level; second, they were supposed to achieve emancipation through their role in the workplace – which might also help them realise their full potential – and their contribution to the building of a new society; and third, in their capacity as mothers, women were to raise new citizens for the socialist state, which rewarded them financially for procreating.
From a present-day perspective, this discourse may appear conservative and homogenising in a discriminatory way – for example, the fact that women were perceived as mothers while men were not perceived as carers (parental leave for fathers was introduced only in the 1980s and only in exceptional cases). However, in the context of the times it appeared progressive. After World War II, several projects in the visual arts showed commitment to women’s emancipation, notably the series of collective exhibitions organised by the avantgarde architect Augusta Müllerová, which drew on the widespread postwar enthusiasm for participating in public affairs. These and other events aimed at promoting new social policies (such as free nationalised education or legislation obliging fathers to pay maintenance to children born out of wedlock) were another way in which the postwar government set itself apart culturally from the discourse of the wartime Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Instead of presenting motherhood in terms of the old, traditional values, Christianity or indeed racial purity, the new discourse focused on a more just society of the future in which children were to play an important role and enjoy equal status and access to education. In fact, these goals were also championed and pursued in various forms in the interwar period by communist women such as Jožka Jabůrková, Luisa Landová-Štychová and Marie Švermová.
‘Our women’ in a new era
After 1989, in addition to the narrative of ‘overemployment’ under state socialism, a conservative normalisation narrative emerged foregrounding the nuclear family. Here, the woman’s primary role was seen to be that of a mother spending a considerable part her life on long ‘maternity leaves’. The pre-1989 state policies on the position of women in society and their integration in the work process were discredited. Legislation introducing a four-year ‘parental leave’ was not adopted until 1995, with some political parties advocating an extension to six years while still considering it a social benefit solely for women.
Although opinions may differ regarding the social policies of the normalisation years (1969-1989 – ed.), it is indisputable that public opinion in Czechoslovakia was to a major extent shaped by official socialist ideology. The sociologist and Charter 77 signatory Jiřina Šiklová, who as a former dissident was instrumental in 1991 in establishing Gender Studies in Czechoslovakia, may have distanced herself from the Czech Union of Women, yet her own views were cast in similar terms. By referring to ‘our women’, she made use of the ‘official’ pre-1989 terminology, and her rhetoric and focus on advancing the field of social work were based on the conviction that care and attention should be given to every sector of society. For this reason, most of the ideas and theories promoted by feminists based at elite western universities, who started visiting Czechoslovakia after 1989, struck her as controversial and divorced from ‘life’s real problems’.
A continuity with the socialist framework is also apparent in the way human rights were discussed the 1990s. Some of those involved believed that the priority was to establish civic society, and that feminism should follow suit only once this goal had been achieved. At the same time, the experience of state socialism, which regarded the emancipation of women as an integral part of the emancipation of society as a whole, was rejected because of its universalising discourse and for not being sufficiently critical of the patriarchal system.
With hindsight, rather than fully embracing a liberal feminism based on individualism, it might have been preferable to re-evaluate the socialist experience, while at the same time adopting some of the ideas of leftwing feminism developed in parallel in the West. New, left-leaning feminist policies in the Czech Republic could have drawn on values based on opposing individualism and commercialisation, while incorporating such aspects as care for local communities and the environment. However, discussions of the socialist emancipation of women after 1989 have not gone beyond defining the participants’ own positions vis-à -vis the West and have, sadly, failed to come up with a ‘third way’.