Women and Gender in Postwar Europe

The stereotypical image of East European women during the Cold War was captured in a notorious 1980s Wendy's commercial depicting a mock Communist-run fashion show. Under the command of an East European–accented announcer, a plain, heavyset woman came out on the catwalk to show off her daywear, eveningwear, and swimwear, each time wearing the same kerchief and shapeless blue dress. The message of the Wendy's commercial was the clear advantage conferred by having freedom of choice, a freedom sadly unavailable in the Communist world. This edited volume by Joanna Regulska and Bonnie Smith shows, by contrast, that women in Europe—West and East—exercised their agency both during and after the Cold War, if under sometimes radically constrained choices.The topic of the book—gender in Eastern and Western Europe during and after the Cold War—is vast. This vastness is simultaneously an advantage and a disadvantage. Chapters cover aspects of the social, economic, and political history of the region and its two geopolitical subdivisions, examining commonalties and differences in the gender order. Some chapters cover both Eastern and Western Europe, providing a cross-bloc comparative analysis, whereas others are single-country case studies. The chapters are ably researched and are likely to inspire scholars to continue and extend (into other country cases) the work presented here.Yet the book lacks a clear organizing principle tying the chapters together in anything more than a loose sense. A chapter on the paradigms of masculinity in post–Cold War Lithuania (and the particular challenges faced by gay men and working-class men) thus resides next to an essay that examines how World War I is interpreted in post–Cold War Serbia (where a militarized narrative about the war paints the Serbian nation in gendered terms—as an abused and raped female body—which serves to distract attention from the atrocities committed by Serbs in the mid-1990s). That chapter neighbors a study of the plight of highly educated South Korean nurses who were brought to West Germany during the Cold War and forced into positions as hospital cleaners, later leading to a transnational mobilization (from Germany to Korea) for the rights of healthcare workers. (I had never heard about this particular example of transnational struggle over labor rights, and I welcome the author's insights into the way the nurses became aware of the violation of their own rights as women in the context of patriarchy, as well as of the ways the South Korean and West German governments alike were using the nurses to pursue their own economic goals, thus inducing them to protest and to develop a rather cosmopolitan identity.)The book also includes case study chapters on Cold War civil society in West Germany (of the “provocative” public type as well as the less formal kind, such as women's centers and the alternative press), on the diverse strategies of women's activism in post–Cold War Poland, and on the way motherhood was portrayed in psychoanalytic radio shows in Great Britain after World War II. A second chapter on motherhood—focusing on France—examines how the reassertion of traditional women's roles following World War II coexisted with a countercurrent of women's sexual agency, including women's pursuit of lesbian relationships, as well as the use of illegal contraception and abortion. (Here, a somewhat shallow comparison to the USSR falls flat, as Soviet women's high abortion rates are cited as evidence of women's agency—that is, that women were supposedly choosing how many children to bear—and nothing is mentioned about lesbians in post-1945 Eastern Europe.) Another chapter investigates women's involvement in the field of social work in Yugoslavia before and after World War II, showing (via a comparison with the USSR) that social policy in the Communist world departed from its reputed homogeneity.Two chapters are more explicitly comparative, exploring ideologies of consumerism and paid work across Eastern and Western Europe. The latter chapter examines women's attitudes toward working outside the home in postwar Europe, as well as the prevailing ideologies in Eastern and Western Europe that characterized women's paid labor as either beneficial or undesirable, respectively. The essay shows that this initial divergence was later replaced by a certain convergence as gender ideologies changed.Taken together, the book's chapters highlight the differences and similarities in understandings of gender on each side of the Iron Curtain. The first two chapters, however, were the ones I found most fascinating with regard to the politics of the Cold War. These illuminated how the inter-superpower competition (following World War II) turned the women's rights movement into something of a fiasco at the international level (creating rifts in the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women) and at the state level in postwar Czechoslovakia. The latter chapter is a blow-by-blow analysis of how the broad-spectrum, multiparty women's movement in Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Communist Party–run women's organization. This process included the violent purging of the heads of other, non-Communist women's groups and illuminates one of the mechanisms of dictatorship at the small-scale political level. The chapter's author concludes that the victorious women's association—tied as it was to the Czechoslovak Communist Party—was ultimately unable to exercise agency and work for women's interests, having been reduced to serving as “a mere arm of the male-dominated Communist state” (p. 29). The Czechoslovak Communists had divided and conquered the country's women's activists by whipping up a highly gendered campaign “for peace” (p. 29) and then dissolving the non-Communist women's organization altogether.The volume's introduction by Smith and conclusion by Regulska frame the book well, providing some larger-picture context for the chapters. But in a few places in the introduction, Smith makes assertions about “Europe” that do not apply to the Soviet bloc (e.g., “As American goods also flooded the European market, women were to learn about and buy those products, too,” p. 4; “In the 1950s ... soft-porn magazines ... arrived on European newsstands,” p. 5; “homosexuality came under explicit attack, even being equated with communism,” p. 4, emphasis added). This could be confusing or misleading for students unversed in the political-ideological history of Europe after 1917. That said, the introduction contains eye-openers (such as Smith's contention that West German grocery stores after World War II were legally prevented from being open after 5:00 p.m. as a means of preventing women working outside the home from purchasing groceries for their families). Such observations illustrate the themes common across postwar Eastern and Western European states, such as the value placed on population growth and the concomitant unavailability of contraceptives across the region, as well as the rise of consumerism and governments’ attempts to improve popular living standards as a way to bolster the legitimacy of their rule. The individual chapters likewise provide fascinating and informative glimpses into a wide range of countries and topics, examining them under a gender lens. Scholars of the Cold War, of Europe, and of gender studies would all stand to gain from reading this diverse, detailed, and insightful work

Communism · European union · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law