i UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Graduate School of Social Sciences
MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology
The Communist Woman and the Women of Communism
Student: Johana Musálková Student number: 10436790 Email: j.musalkova@gmail.com
Professor: Dr. Milena Veenis Second reader: Dr. Rob van Ginkel Third reader: Dr. Marie-Louise Jenssen
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Topic: Life Histories and Gendered Experiences: Opavan Women´s Experiences of Gender Relations and Work during the Communist Era in Czechoslovakia
Research question: How do women in Opava, The Czech Republic, born between the years 1924-1939, make sense of their everyday life experiences during the communist regime and how do they understand their dual role within both the public and private sphere?
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Abstract
In this paper I aim to provide an alternative understanding of the Czechoslovakian communist past articulated by Opavan women. I claim that the women´s lives during communism are often theorized in academia within a referential frame of oppression and subordination or alternatively of oppression and resistance. However, those frames of references do not reflect the women´s experiences of the past nor their life histories. The reason why they fail to justly represent Opavan women is because they implement a notion of a strict division between experiences on an individual level and experiences on a collective level. By the same token, those (miss-)representations tend to victimize the women living in state-socialism by applying that the socialist regime was by definition bad, immoral and thus forcefully implemented on its so-called „victims‟. In contrast, I argue that the women did not experience the Communist ideology as something external to them nor as a false consciousness. The women embodied the ideal of „the communist woman‟ and they fulfilled the ideal´s criteria to a great extent. The Opavan women´s internalization of the communist woman ideal (as well as of other ideals of womanhood), produced social actors which I call „the women of communism‟. Nevertheless the women´s highly self-idealized identity was often intruded by their experiences of dissatisfaction and of a lack. I do not interpret those experiences as a result of an alleged power struggle between the state-socialism regime and the people living under the socialist rule. Instead, following the Lacanian line of thinking, I understand those experiences as experiences of a „lacking subject‟ resulting from „the impossibility of identity‟.
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Table of content
Abstract ... iii
Introduction ... 1
1.0 The Grand Narratives ... 11
1.1. Historical Overview of the Czech Lands in the 20th Century ... 13
1.2. Historical Overview of the Woman Situation in the Czech lands in the 20th Century .. 17
2.0 Oral History and Alternative Interpretations of the Past ... 23
2.1 Oral Histories ... 24
2.2. Alternative Interpretations of the Past ... 31
3.0 Dominant Discourses of Womanhood ... 34
3.1 Symposium - An Illustration of four Distinctive Discourses ... 36
3.2 Grandmothers ... 41
4.0 The Private, Public and Fantasy Space... 43
4.1 Private and Public Space ... 43
4.2 Fantasy Space ... 47
Conclusion ... 51
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Introduction
It all began, as so many works within academia, with a particularly bothering question. The disturbing concern of mine which gradually evolved into the impulse to undertake this research had much to do with hard work, personal efficiency, femininity and the very fact, that we live in a world where a day is restricted to 24 hours and a week contains only seven days. That is what we have to work with. However, together with my ongoing university education in anthropology and sociology which introduced me to gender and labour studies, I developed a suspicion that the generation of my grandmother somehow managed to circumvent the laws of physics. Otherwise how would they have managed to have 1) a full time job which, at least for the first quarter of their working life, was composed of not five but six working days, together with 2) being mothers, primarily responsible for the wellbeing of their offspring, as well as 3) being the ones responsible for a tidy and cosy household, fresh and clean laundry (without possessing a washing machine at the beginning), tasty and nutritious homemade food (again, fridge and freezer were uncommon in Opava, the town where I grew up, until the early sixties) and of course, 4) being preferably a member of the Communist party or at least taking part in a Women´s league or in some of the numerous socialist committees. Who are those women and how did they do it? And did they actually manage to do it all?
Being triggered by the questions described above, I decided to return to my native town in order to find out answer(s) to how women in Opava, the Czech Republic, born between the years 1924-1939, make sense of their everyday life experiences during the communist regime and how do they understand their dual role within both the public and private sphere? During my fieldwork, at 11 am when I was sipping red wine at Světlana´s living room, surrounded by old books, Egyptian travel souvenirs and her five cats, I was looking at landscape paintings on the walls and listening to the always changing stories of her life, I came to realize that finding answers to my questions will be even more exciting than I could ever imagine. Even though the direction of my enquiry leads towards the socialist past, the actual time of the fieldwork is in the present. Therefore I am methodologically aware, that the women´s „making sense‟ and ‟understanding‟ of the past is happening in the present and by definition it must be influenced by the present time.
The question of the women‟s situation in Czechoslovakia during the state- socialism as well as the question of the women‟s situation in the Czech Republic during the state-democracy is greatly embedded in various literature and academic discussions. However, I claim that the women‟s representations embedded in the literature and academic discussions do not make justice to them. For instance, in her book „Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism: The Czech Republic after communism‟ the Australian scholar Jacqui True discusses four significant sides of the transformation: the family, the civil society, the labour market and the consumer market (True: 2003). Being influenced by the institutionalist and feminist approaches to globalization, the author stresses government policies and institutional reorganizations as the main cause of social changes (True: 2003). This understanding is beneficial in many ways, yet in my opinion, it creates an overly exaggerated and to some extent artificial gap between Czechoslovakia before and after the Velvet (known also as the
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Gentle) Revolution. She implies that Czech people (thus Czech women, thus women from Opava) went through the radical transformation almost from one day to another.
Indeed, many transformations happened fast within the family, the civil society, the labour market as well as the consumer market; nevertheless, many characteristics remained the same. For example, even after the revolution do Czech women in general prefer to keep their paid jobs within the labour market while they continue doing the lion´s share of homemaking. True explains this phenomenon by highlighting the fact that men and women have experienced the post-socialist transformation in vastly different ways because women were „hit‟ harder in terms of socioeconomic instability. Therefore they are „forced‟ to keep both the paid job as their means of subsistence and to continue to be the one responsible for the family issues and household (True: 2003).
Although such a description is valid to some extent, it is too narrow to provide the full explanation of the phenomenon of women‟s „double shift‟ within the Czech historical, economic, cultural and social context. For instance, it explains why women were and are now still keen to keep a paid job but it does not explain why they are equally keen to be the one responsible for most of the family affairs. Even though True presents in her book a historical background of the women situation during socialism and thus the book is relevant for this paper, in my opinion she is highly uncritical when applying the notion that Czechoslovakia during communism was inhabited by clear-cut categories of oppressors and oppressed. When referring to women´s work during state-socialism, she tends to victimize the women and to portrait them simply as the exploited ones. Not only do I disagree with such simplifications, but also I suggest that in order to understand the women´s willingness to accept excessive workload, the women´s own understanding of the matter should be taken into account.
Similarly, Sharon Wolchik, an American professor of Political Science and International Affairs whose work I discuss extensively in the second chapter also tends to portray Czechoslovakian women as being passively inscribed by dictatorial rules and exploited by their male counterparts (Wolchik: 1979). Both True´s and Wolchik´s work is in a very structuralist fashion filled with binary oppositions such as repression and freedom or the individual and the state. Those oppositions I believe are rather the outcome of an academic discourse than an experienced reality of Czechoslovakian women.
By the same token, Yurchak noticed, „that much of the academic and journal writing about Soviet socialism and the post-soviet transformation is built on assumptions that communism was „bad‟, „immoral‟ and „imposed‟, and/or was experienced as such by Soviet people‟ (Yurchak: 2003: 482). That is an assumption which Wolchik and True also take for granted without any attempt to problematize and question it. As we will see, a person´s life is more complex than that. This very fact does not allow us to understand it in terms of black and white. Likewise, the dividing line between the individual psychological level and the collective level is often too blurry to maintain the divide (Veenis: 2012). For example, I find it highly problematic (if not impossible) to distinguish to what extend were certain aspects of the women´s everyday life „imposed‟ on them by the socialist state ideology and to what extend were they embedded in the women´s own will.
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Marianne Ferber, American feminist economist specializing on the subject of women´s work and Phyllis Raabe, American sociologist, recognize the Czech women´s double shifts during communism and they also argue, again similarly as True, that even nowadays (2003) a very high proportion of women who are employed, almost all of them full-time, continue to do the lion´s share of homemaking. In contrast to True however, the authors suggest that it is not female labour exploitation imposed on the women but it is their strategy which „enables Czech women to have a high sense of personal efficacy and independence‟ (Ferber & Raabe: 2003: 407).
In other words, instead of focusing on social forces and seeing Czech women as victims, Ferber and Raabe look at the issue from the „agency‟ perspective. The authors realize that „most feminist social scientists in the West subscribe to the „affirmative action‟ or „equality‟ view, which emphasizes that the differences between men and women should be diminished. The differences are commonly seen by the „western feminist social scholars‟ as the main cause of inequality, Ferber and Raabe argue (Ferber & Raabe: 2003: 408). Indeed, both Wolchik and True subscribe to the notion that the differences between men and women should be overcome (True: 2003, Wolchik: 1979).
That is however, in a fairly sharp disagreement with Czech women activists who put far more positive emphasis on differences between women and men than most Western feminists do; for example Cermakova (Cermakova :1995) or Havelkova (Havelkova:1993, Havelkova:1996). Ferber and Raabe asses and that is precisely why „Western style‟ feminism has not been adopted in former Czechoslovakia (Ferber & Raabe: 2003). The „strategy‟ of Czech women; to bear the double burden (read as: „strategy‟ to maintain and improve their position in the labour market but without reducing their primary role in the family) instead of turning to the „Western style‟ feminism led, according to the authors, to the exceptionally generous governmental and employers „family friendly policies‟ (Ferber & Raabe: 2003: 408).
Even though the paper was written at the very beginning of the 21st century, it is highly reminiscent of what Ortner defined as the dominant theory of motivation in practice derived from the interest theory (Orther: 1984). “The model is that of an essentially individualistic, and somehow aggressive, actor, self-interested, rational, pragmatic, and perhaps with a maximizing orientation as well. What actors do, it is assumed, is rationally go after what they want, and what they want is what is materially and politically useful for them within the context of their cultural and historical situation” (Ortner: 1984: 151). It is difficult to apprehend that the „pragmatic‟ and „self- interested‟ women would work twice as much as men just for the sake of „the exceptionally generous governmental and employers „family friendly policies‟ instead of, for example, an attempt to possess a bigger share of material capital or higher representation of women in the government.
Both approaches discussed, the agency and the structuralist approach, have serious conceptual limitations. It is fairly surprising then, that those two represent the main discourse of the topic published in academia. Ferber and Raabe´s work has been presented in this paper as an advocate of the agency approach, however equally it could have been Matynia
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(Matynia: 1994), Kranichfeld (Kranichfeld: 1987) and others. Similarly, just to name a few of those who, together with True, represent the other position (the interpretation of Czech Women‟s situation during communism in terms of structure) one has to remember the very influential work of Holý (Holy: 1996), Čermáková (Cermakova: 1995), Havelková (Havelkova: 1993: 1996), etc. The structuralist approach to the topic is limited within the rhetoric notion of male domination / female subordination dichotomy. Works of Matynia, Kranichfeld, or Ferber and Raabe replace the structuralist concept of male domination / female subordination with the agency focused concept of male domination / female resistance1, however it still utterly fails to overcome the dichotomy itself.
It seems to me, that for the social scientists named above, the antagonism between woman and man represents a universal human condition. I have serious doubts that women from Opava understand retrospectively their everyday life´s experiences in those terms. Therefore it is time „to let them speak‟ so they can provide their very own narrative accounts of their personal histories and gendered experiences. Such an ethnographic research can illuminate many aspects of the debates discussed above. As Saba Mahmood, a professor of social and cultural anthropology, pointed out, it is not that social analysis should be restricted only to terms used by people which social scientists study. „Rather what I want to emphasize is the importance of being attentive to the elisions any process of translation entails, especially when the language of social science claims a self – transparent universal universalism, and the language used by „ordinary people‟ is understood as a poor approximation of their reality‟ (Mahmood: 2001:209, Foucault: 1980 [1977]). Moreover, not only is the discussion held solely between those two standpoints, but also to my best knowledge, no ethnographic research has been conducted so far to illuminate how the women themselves made sense of their everyday experience and how they understood their dual role within both the public and the private sphere.
Therefore I conducted research in the Czech Republic‟s eastern town named Opava between January and April 2013. During the fieldwork I focused mostly on oral histories and narrative accounts of nine Opavan women born between the years 1924 and 1939 with which I have conducted 29 interviews in total and obtained 34 hours of recorded material. In contrast to the material I have collected, I will present statistical data which will allow me to do some degree of comparison between several representative samples. For instance, it will illuminate how Czechoslovakian women as a proportion of full-time students changed in higher education between the years 1945 – 1975 or what percentage of women were in the labour force between the years 1948 – 1989 and when and how those numbers were changing over time. Finally, I will extensively discuss the secondary literature of the topic produced by various social science and history scholars.
As a researcher, I focused on a group of local women born prior to 1939, heterosexual, married/divorced/widowed, with Czech nationality, having had at least one child and being for most of their life full time employed. The aim of the research was to collect their personal narratives, life histories and understandings of the women´s everyday
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experiences. How do they make sense of their personal histories during socialism? To obtain an answer to this question becomes even more appealing and challenging as Czechoslovakia went through a transition from a socialist to a capitalist regime in 1989. Therefore it is essential to keep in mind, that the past which is the focus of this paper is being articulated by the women within the realm of the present.
The reason why it is important is because the official grand narrative of the socialist past has been changed in regards to the new liberal-democratic regime. The transition from state-socialism to state-democracy also brought along significant changes of the realm of values embraced by the majority of the Czech population. I believe that those changes within the whole society are also reflected in the women´s individual narratives and conceptualizations of their experiences. Even though this paper focuses on individuals and their understanding of the past and their ways of making sense of the past, the individual is a product of the social. Therefore I suggest keeping both in mind.
The project brings also many personal challenges. The fact of being a female born in Opava (even though my family moved to Prague in my early age) leaves me somehow split in two halves. On the one hand, there is an academic interest driven by an aspiration to deliver ethnographic material, and in order to do so successfully, „the distancing of self‟ (Ohnuki-Tierney: 1990: 1) from what is investigated has been traditionally seen as essential by social sciences. In other words, social sciences and Anthropology in particular operate traditionally within the assumption of a fundamental distinction between the self and other (Abu-Lughod: 1991) However, on the other hand, all the childhood memories I have, the personal encounters I experienced as well as a partial sense of belonging to those I will focus on, could enrich, I believe, the forthcoming paper significantly. Being aware of „the special dilemmas‟ (Abu-Lughod: 1991: 137) I am about to face, I am still convinced that many possibilities can be derived from my „halfie‟ position, such as the possibility to unsettle the boundaries between self and other, oppression and suppression, domination and resistance and many others. Abu–Lughod, however, focuses not only on one but on two critical groups operating within the anthropological discipline: „halfies‟ and feminist. To be clear from the very start, the aim is to present an alternative account of the socialist past which goes even against the feminist accounts presented in the first chapter while remaining woman centred.
The research´s specific aim is to provide an alternative account of the socialist past, which was experienced by women from Opava. Specifically, the goal is to collect their personal narratives, life histories and understandings of the women´s everyday experiences. How do they make sense of their personal histories during socialism? The two already existing and dominant theoretical approaches concerning Czech women´s situation during socialism and post-socialism have been identified and discussed. Moreover their serious conceptual limitations were highlighted. The structuralist approach is bounded within the rhetoric of male domination / female subordination dichotomy. Whereas the agency approach replaces the structuralist concept of male domination / female subordination with its alternative notion of male domination / female resistance; however it still fails to overcome the dichotomy itself.
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As presented above, new directions of an academic inquiry on the topic have been proposed, such as to present an alternative account of the socialist past articulated by the women themselves. I believe that it is time to overcome both structural and agency approaches as well as to dismantle the binary oppositions applied to the topic by social scientists. Instead, a voice should be given to women from Opava to articulate how they themselves make sense of their personal histories through their narrative activity. The narrative activity here is approached as inseparable from the person´s self and it is treated as a fundamental means of making sense of their experience. In contemporary official discourses, the women are highly victimized. However, the women do not portray themselves as victims in their narratives. Similarly, they do not make sense of their experiences through the rhetoric of victimization.
Let us keep in mind then, that even though the research is to a great deal retrospective, in order to capture how women from Opava make sense of their everyday experiences during the Communist era, I have to keep both the past and the present in mind. During both the fieldwork and writing the present paper I treated the women´s oral history, their narrative accounts and public memory as inextricably entangled. Historians Paula Hamilton from the United States and Linda Shopes from Australia pointed out that oral history, understood as an established form for active memory making, both reflects and shapes public memory (Hamilton & Shopes: 2008: 2). Therefore it is my goal to stay conscious of all three; namely oral history, narrative accounts and public memory.
Various advocates of the oral history method used to explain its value in terms of “uncovering unknown stories” or “giving voice to the unheard, the secret” (Hamilton & Shopes: 2008: 2). An American and Italian scholars Luisa Passerini, Ronald Grele, Michael Frisch, and Alessandro Portelli articulated clearly that oral histories provide means of how to move beyond what people remember, or the contend of the interviews, to the question of why they remember what they remember. What is the meaning of people´s recollections? (Hamilton & Shopes: 2008). In this study, one of the themes that forcefully presented itself in the material is the issue of the closed border situation during the state-socialism. The question remains why all the women from my material recollected the memory of not being able to travel. Or to put it the other way, why did they recollect their fantasies of traveling abroad when they were speaking about their personal efficiency?
In Frisch´s prominent book called A Shared Authority, he deems oral history to be “a powerful tool for discovering, exploring and evaluating the nature of the process of historical memory” (Frisch: 1990: 188). It can explain to a certain degree 1) how people make sense of their past, 2) how they connect individual experience and its social context, 3) how the past becomes part of the present and 4) and how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them (Frisch: 1990). Therefore the collection of oral history is a crucial method for this research because the aim of this paper is to enrich and to a certain degree challenge the grand narrative representations of Czechoslovakian women during socialism which obscure Czechoslovakian women´s (and thus Opavan women´s) diverse life experiences and contested desires.
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Thus, a turn towards an individual person and her life history is in this case the best methodological decision because conducting life history, as a method, focuses mainly on the cultural scripts as well as narrative devices individuals use to make sense of experience. While I presume that the cultural scripts incorporated in Opavan women´s life histories will be mostly shared, the narrative devices might differ significantly. By using the life history method, I focused on the strategies speakers use to fashion coherence from the disparate and potentially contradictory experiences in their life. This method allows also for an extensive examination of the phenomena of transition and change within a human life. I conducted nine life histories at the beginning of my fieldwork which provided me with general information about the people I researched. As a next step, the second method of data collection used was extensive, one-on-one semi-structured interviews.
Life histories and semi- structured interviews as the data collection techniques are both dependent on social interactions between the interviewer and interviewee. In addition to those two methods, I conducted several focus group interviews. The reason why I believe it was beneficial to use that method is, that the focus group interview fully recognizes the value of social interaction per se as an important source of data, insights and understanding. The social interaction between group members produced a dynamic and insightful exchange of information that would not have been possible in any one-on-one interview situation. Also, as I hoped for, the group interview served to trigger numerous and deeper collective memories.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to systematically conduct interviews with the women´s husbands or ex-husbands. Most of the husband already deceased or the women are not in contact with them and they were not keen to arrange an appointment for me. Therefore, similarly as in the women´s narrative, the men played rather a „missing father/husband‟ role remaining a mystery for this study.
The main analytical method I am using is the discourse analysis. That means that I have analysed the interview data at a macro-sociological level as social texts. I have decided to employ this method because the discourse analysis “studies practices of producing knowledge and meanings in concrete contexts and institutions” (Talja: 1999: 460) as well as it “systematizes different ways of talking to make the perspectives and starting points on the basis of which knowledge and meanings are produced in a particular historical moment” (Talja: 1999: 461). During my fieldwork, but also when I was utilizing secondary data and literature, it became glaring that not only different actors (informants, various feminist scholars, governmental institutions, historical institutions, etc.) tell different stories, but each of the actors I encountered expressed serious inconsistencies in „their very own‟ narrative.
Those narrative inconsistencies proved to be a highly immanent aspect of the women´s personal narrative. At first I was stunned by the inconsistency as I was expecting the women´s narrative to be as united as possible. Following Erving Goffman‟s line of thoughts, my expectation was based on a premise that only united and coherent self-narrative allows for successful representation (Goffman: 1959). In other words, if the self-narrative is split up into several conflicting claims, it is almost impossible to maintain through the narrative a consolidated social identity. The women´s tendency towards narrative
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inconsistencies was particularly predominant during longer group interviews and when comparing what the informants said during the group interview and then among four eyes. Throughout this paper I focused on those consistency errors and overlaps, in those different voices of every narrator, and through the discourse analysis I attempted to find their internal logic (or internal coherence) and thus untangle and identify them. Moreover, the consistency errors in the women´s narratives prompted me to focus on the different discourses and their inconsistencies in order to glimpse at what remained unspoken of.
In order to discuss the issues mentioned above, it is essential to clearly articulate what I mean by the terms I use. By Opavan woman for instance, I mean a person who is a female and who officially lived in Opava for a significant period of time between the years 1948 and 1989 when the socialist regime took its place in Czechoslovakia. Also in this particular paper I refer to an Opavan woman as to a person who was born in the 1920´s and 1930´s, was/is married, has/had at least one child and had at some point of her life a full time employment. These were the criteria when I was selecting the informants. The year of birth was important, because I wanted the women to have a direct and conscious experience and memories of the Second World War and the after-war events. Furthermore I wanted them to have spent a significant time living in Opava, as my fieldwork was based in Opava and numerous questions I hoped to be resolved were directly related to Opava. Their marital status, motherhood and employment were important criteria because I wanted to investigate how they understand their dual role within the public and private sphere. If they were not married/divorced/widows, mothers and employees, the research variables and thus the entire research would change drastically. Finally, whether she is or she is not of Czech ethnicity was not considered.
When I discuss a household in this paper, I am referring to a unit of society where individuals - usually family members- both cooperate and compete for resources. It is also the primary place where individuals confront and reproduce societal norms, values, power, and privilege. Gender norms expressed within the household are reinforced and reflected in larger institutions of society. Even though the word „household‟ is often used in other papers interchangeably with the word „family‟, in this specific paper the household is where the family lives. It is important to understand that household has a significant spatial dimension and is treated here as a place of production and labour, which is usually delivered by an adult female living in the household.
By Gendered relations I mean various gendered associations between two or more individuals, institutions or things. „Gendered‟ refers to the associations/relations to be defined by the experience of being male or female. In this sense, gendered relations do not refer to any form of domination per se. Gendered relations are a specific type of experience which is derived from and constructed of personal narratives. The personal narrative, which in this sense „produce‟ the experience, is being told within a socially constructed realm of being male or female, therefore it is a „gendered‟ personal narrative/experience.
Socialist era refers to the period starting by the events of the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d´état, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia assumed undisputed control over the
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government of Czechoslovakia and ending with the event of the Velvet Revolution at late 1989.
Czechoslovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed between the years 1918 (when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and 1993 (when a peaceful dissolution into The Czech Republic and Slovakia took place). Czechoslovakia historically formed seven times: First Republic 1918-1938, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and The Slovak Republic 1939-1945, Third Republic 1945-1948, Czechoslovak Republic 1948-1960, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic 1960-1989, Czechoslovak Federal Republic 1989-1992. From 1993 onwards the Czech Republic and Slovakia are separated.
Finally, the structure of this paper is organized into an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter presents a historical overview of the Czech Lands in the 20th century. It intentionally focuses only on the official grand narrative of the history process codified in the elementary and high school textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education and the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR). The second part of the „Grand Narratives‟ chapter deals with a historical overview of the Czechoslovakian women situation in the Czech lands in 20th Century. The narrative of the women situation will be based largely on interpretations of scholars named: Sharon Wolchik, Jacqui True, Hana Havelková, Jiřina Silková, Marrianne Ferber and Phyllis Raabe. After extensive library based research on the topic I gained a notion that their work represents the main stream of the academic understanding and conceptualization of the position of women during the state-socialism era in Czechoslovakia and thus they create the academic grand narrative of the subject.
The second chapter „Oral history, memory, personal narrative‟ offers an alternative understanding of the Czech socialist past as well as the women´s situation in it. It is based on three life history accounts: Olga´s, Hedvika ´s and Heidi´s. Those narratives highlight the diverse life experiences and contested desires of the women interviewed. Furthermore, it is suggested in this chapter, that Arnold van Gennep´s concept of „liminality‟, further elaborated by Victor Turner´s notion of „communitas,‟ can faithfully capture the women´s experiences of phases in their lives. I find those two terms particularly relevant because they overcome to a great degree the dividing line between experiences on individual and on communal level. For instance, the after war period was described and experienced by the women as time of ecstasy and jouissance: as the time when the differences between people were blurry, the social restrictions obsolete and the future could bring anything the women fantasised of. In the liminal phases characterized by experiences of communitas, it is hardly possible to distinguish between personal and communal experiences.
The third chapter theorizes the women´s tendency to provide coherent, unified narratives of their past. Furthermore, the conditions for occurrence of consistency errors as well as its consequences are discussed in this chapter. I argue that when consistency errors occurred, the women started to provide various accounts, ether justifying or explaining the inconsistency, which exposed four significant discourses presented in the women´s
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narratives. Those four discourses are namely: the official discourse, the bourgeois discourse, the idealized-self discourse and the idealized West discourse. Also, the indispensable, yet underestimated role of the informant´s mothers is brought up to light in this chapter.
How do women from Opava understand their dual role within both the public and private sphere‟ will be theorized in the last chapter. Moreover, the phenomenon of the closed borders is conjectured in regards to the women´s understandings. The main argument of the chapter is that the women I have interviewed conceptualized both, the private and the public space as places where work had to be done. The borders between the private and public sphere are often blurry, not providing a clear division between leisure and work because both spaces are related to the women´s productivity. However, I argue that there is also a phantasy space, created by the idealized-west discourse and often articulated by the women in terms of the closed border phenomenon.
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1.0 – The Grand Narratives
Because my main focus lays on Opavan women´s „sense making‟ of everyday life experiences, I find it appropriate to provide a very short general introduction into the history of the Czech lands in 20th century2. Thus it will be clear what diplomatic-political factors affected the women´s lives, such as being born into the atmosphere of the First republic, conscious experience of Second World War, tensed contradictions following the after war German exodus, the show trials of 1950, the Prague Spring, the Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and so on. In order to provide such a historical introduction, I decided to base it on the official state narrative of the 20th century history.
In the same time, it is essential to keep in mind, that even though the research is to a great extent retrospective, in order to capture how women from Opava make sense of their everyday experiences during the Communist era, I have to keep both the past and the present in mind. The women´s personal oral histories, their narrative accounts and official popular memory (as well as counter memories) are inextricably entangled. It would be naïve to presume, that present interpretations of the Czechoslovakian state-socialist history, embodied in the present popular memory is not to a certain degree reflected in the women´s narratives.
Therefore, the two sources I used, when writing this very short introduction of the official grand narrative, are the history online portal Moderní dějiny (modern history) 3, site which is financially supported and controlled by various political institutions such as the European Union, the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, the Pant the Civil Association and the International Visegrad Fund. The latter refers to Visegrad Four, or V-4, an alliance of central European states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) established for the purpose of cooperation and furthering of their European integration. The second source I used when referring to the communist era is Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů4
(The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) which manages the „correct‟ interpretation of the Czechoslovakian communist past. For example, the content of elementary and secondary school history textbooks is under the Institute‟s competence and supervision. In the official statement explaining the functions of the Institute, it was proclaimed that the Institute “studies and impartially evaluates the time of non-freedom and the time of Communist totalitarian power; examines the anti-democratic and criminal activity of state bodies, especially its security services, and the criminal activity of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), as well as other organizations based on its ideology” (Italic added) 5.
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The Czech lands (or also Lands of the Bohemia Crown) originally refer to the lands connected by feudal relations under the joint rule of the Bohemian (Czech) kings. In modern history the Czech lands usually refer to lands of Bohemia (Prague is the capital), Moravia (Brno is the capital) and Silesia (nowadays the main city in Silesia is Ostrava, yet, historically and culturally it was Opava) and those three lands compose the Czech Republic.
3http://www.moderni-dejiny.cz [accessed 21/06/2013] 4http://www.ustrcr.cz/en [accessed 16/06/2013] 5
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The two organizations are indeed politically highly influential and thus powerful social actors in interpreting the Czechoslovakian history of the 20th century, especially in terms of general public education and in creating the official popular memory6. In the same time, the two organizations reflect and advocate contemporary believes, morals and values such as freedom, liberal democracy, European integrity and free markets. That believes, morals and values are appreciated and cherished in present-day state-democracy while they were significantly underplayed during the era of state-socialism. Reversely, what had been valued during the socialist era is nowadays underemphasised or entirely rejected. The women I have interviewed seemed to puzzle between the two discourses of the past in their narratives, often adopting parts of it, then challenging the rests, or producing somehow hybridized versions of the both discourses and the women´s experiences.
As historians Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes pointed out, oral history, understood as an established form for actively making memories, both reflects and shapes popular memory (Hamilton & Shopes: 2008: 2). The two scholars deem that the oral history method can be perceived as a way of “uncovering unknown stories” or “giving voice to the unheard, the secret” (Hamilton & Shopes: 2008: 2). Therefore it is my goal to stay intentionally conscious of all three; namely oral history, narrative accounts and popular memory. The Opavan women´s stories, their oral history as well as the narrative accounts do indeed differ greatly from the official state narratives thus creating what we can call counter memories (Foucault: 1975) or vernacular memories (Bodnar: 1993). In what ways and to what degree do the memories and conceptualizations differ will be discussed in the following chapters.
After introducing the official historical interpretation of the Czech lands in the 20th century, I will also present a historical overview of the Czechoslovakian women situation in the 20th Century. For the second part of this chapter, „the historical overview of the women`s situation in Czech lands in 20th Century‟, the interpretation of the past will not be narrated chronologically as it is the case for „the historical overview of the Czech Lands in the 20th century‟, but rather thematically, i.e. „in regards to education and political representation‟, „in regards to work‟ and „to family‟. Moreover, I will base the interpretation largely on findings of Sharon Wolchik, an American professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Jacqui True, an Australian scholar focusing mostly on gender and international relations, and of joint work of Marianne Ferber, an American feminist economist specializing on the subject of women´s work, and Phyllis Raabe, an American sociologist. As I stated in the introduction, I find their representations of Czech women during the state-communism beneficial in numerous ways. All of them significantly elaborated the Czech women´s situation during the communist regime in terms of dichotomy of structure (male domination/female subordination) and agency (male domination/female resistance). Also, the
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By „popular memory‟ I refer to Michael Foucault´s (Foucault: 1975) understanding of the struggle between „counter-memory‟, an alternative and subterranean form of remembering that resist, or come between, official, dominant version of the past. Foucault asserted that through media (books, magazines, television, cinema) the „powerful others‟ are manipulating by popular memory, “people are shown not what they are, but what they must remember having been” (Foucault: 1975: 85).
Alternatively, John Bodnar (Bodnar: 1993 in his less power charged account of „public memory‟, which is, in my opinion identical to Foucault`s „popular memory‟, asserts, that common manifestations of public memory are for example names of streets and squares, memorials and monuments, holidays, commemorations and so on.
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scholars, and many others, brought up several fundamental topics such as ‟women in the labour force‟, „double burden‟, „gender roles‟, „state and private patriarchy‟, „reproduction and welfare‟, and so on.
In its own way, their narrative also represents the main stream of the academic understanding and conceptualization of the position of women during the state-socialism era in Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, many of the interpretations articulated by the scholars named above, and generally accepted within academia, affect the popular memory. However, I argue that many of the questions and answers the scholars provide could be also seen from a discourse analyses point of view which could illuminate various misunderstandings and confusions as well as deepen the commonly shared knowledge of the matter.
1.1 Historical Overview of the Czech Lands in the 20th Century
1900 – 1938 – Austria-Hungary and the First Republic
The Czech lands, formerly known as the Bohemian lands are located in Central Europe. The country entered the 20th century as part of the Austrian Empire, being the industrial powerhouse of the monarchy. Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, the Republic of Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918. The new country incorporated Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. Therefore, the country‟s population spoke Czech, Slovak and Ruthenian but also Polish, Hungarian and German. The period between the two World Wars is commonly called the era of the First Republic, run by President Tomáš Garigue Masaryk, who was trained as a sociologist with strong pro-democratic, humanist and feminist feelings. He is commonly seen as a national hero and a symbol of Czechoslovak democracy. Despite several financial crises the Republic of Czechoslovakia was experiencing an economic boom and currency strengthening. Socio-culturally, the country even furthered the process of secularization, liberation, female emancipation as well as the right of free speech was proclaimed7.
In 1921 the Communist Party was established, enjoying support not only from Czechoslovakians belonging socio-economically to the working class, but also from numerous intellectuals and artists. It lost part of its popularity after 1929 when due to advancing bolshevisation the party opted to the Soviet Union and to the Communist International residing in Moscow. After 1929 several influential figures of Czechoslovakian society resigned from their post within the Communist party, mostly because they intended to advance the Czechoslovakian political sovereignty rather than the Communist International´s one. Not even after ten years of existence, the Czechoslovakian Communist party utterly lost its independence as a regular political party and it became fully dependant on orders from Moscow.
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Illustration 2: Map of Austria-Hungary 1914. Opava is the capital of Silesia (number 11).
1938 – 1945 – The Second Republic and the Protectorate
After the Munich Agreement, the Third Reich led by Adolf Hitler gained the largely German speaking Sudetenland. The country was renamed from the Republic of Czechoslovakia to only Czechoslovakia. Slovakia and the Subcarpathian Ruthenia gained first a greater autonomy within the state and soon after were separated. The remaining Czech territory was occupied by Germany, which transformed it into the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The protectorate was proclaimed to be a part of the Third Reich. The German occupation ended on the 9th May 1945 with the arrival of the Soviet and American armies and the Prague upspring. The year of 1938 is seen as a year of invasion and is not celebrated, the 9th of May is celebrated as the first day of peace.
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Illustration 3: Linguistic map from 1930 where the red parts indicate places with a majority of German speaking population. Interestingly, Opava (called by German speaking Czech population and by Germans Troppau) was often referred to as an „island in the ocean‟ because mostly German speaking Opavan citizens were surrounded by mostly Czech speaking rural areas.
1945 – 1948 – The Third Republic, Victorious February and the German Exodus After the end of the Second World War Czechoslovakia was restored but without the Carpathian Ruthenia which until today is on Ukrainian grounds. Czechoslovak politicians began to declare dependence on the Soviet Union and by 1945 most of the Czechoslovak industry was already nationalized. The first post-war parliamentary elections in 1946 were won by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The election result was reflected in the composition of the government. Two years later, the events of February 1948 became to be known as the Czechoslovakia coup d´état or „Victorious February‟, when the Communist Party with the Soviet backing assumed undisputed control over the government of Czechoslovakia.
After the Second World War the question rose of how to approach the German speaking citizens in Czechoslovakia. Between the years 1945 – 1951, based on the principle of collective guilt, the majority of the entire German minority in Czechoslovakia was expelled or evacuated8 to Germany and Austria. With slight differences, most sources on the „Moderní dějiny‟ portal estimate that around 3 million Sudeten Germans were expelled and that over 30`000 were fatal victims of public lynching. Interestingly, the portal does not discuss to any degree what has happened with the property (land, real estate, etc.) of the expelled Germans.
8 According to the lecture „Vysídlení Němců a proměny českého pohraničí 1945 – 1951‟ given by Adrian von
Arburg on the 6th of March 2013 at Klub Art, Opava, in German this event is rather commonly referred to as “expulsion” while in Czech it is generally referred to as “evacuation”.
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1948 – 1960 Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR)
Czechoslovakia became a communist country. Two years after the „Victorius February‟ the show trials started. The two organizations, the Modern History Portal as well as the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes thoroughly discuss the phenomenon of the show trials and indicate them as one of the most depraved appearance of the Communist regime terror. “Without doubt, executions of political opponents are one of the worst and most disgusting forms of terror in the broad repertoire of persecution used by totalitarian regimes to seize and maintain power. In Czechoslovakia, such killings took place soon after the communist takeover of February 1948”9
. The most famous name of the trial victims is Milada Horáková, prodemocracy politician and a lawyer, who was sentenced to death with twelve of her colleagues. Two years later, the second series of show trials started, this time associated with main victim Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the KSČ.
In 1953, the government announced a currency reform which sparked a full-scale revolt against the Communist regime by factory workers in Pilsner. The centre of the city was only reclaimed by authorities with the help of more than 10,000 security police and numerous army tanks. In 1960, the so-called Socialist Constitution was adopted, with the adjective socialist now appearing in the name of the country, and the leadership role of the communist Party enshrined in the text10.
1960 – 1989 Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR)
In 1968, leading newspapers published Ludvík Vaculík´s appeal „Two Thousand Words‟ which expressed support for the democratization movement and cautioned against anti-Communist and outside interference (read as the threat of Soviet occupation)11. In August of the same year, Soviet and forces from four other Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia to quash the reforms implemented by the Czechoslovak Communist Party12. A period between the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and the Velvet revolution is interpreted by The Institute as the period of hard-line socialist re-entrenchment.13 In 1988, the first opposition demonstration was permitted to take place in Prague´s Škroupovo náměstí (Shkroupa´s square) during the Human Rights Day, coinciding with the visit of the French President Francois Mitterand.
1989 – Czechoslovak Federal Republic and the Czech Republic
After fifty years, Czechoslovakia returned to a liberal democracy through the fairly calm Velvet Revolution. The regime “relinquished power over the course of several weeks,
9http://www.ustrcr.cz/en/documentation-of-people-executed-on-political-grounds-in-1948-1989[accessed 06/05/3013] 10 http://www.ustrcr.cz/en/milestones-in-recent-czech-history-1938-1989[accessed 06/05/3013] 11http://www.ustrcr.cz/en/milestones-in-recent-czech-history-1938-1989 [accessed 06/05/3013] 12http://www.ustrcr.cz/en/milestones-in-recent-czech-history-1938-1989 [accessed 06/05/3013] 13 http://www.ustrcr.cz/en/project-the-events-of-1989-in-czechoslovakia [accessed 24/05/3013]
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under the strong pressure of the opposition and the public”14
. In 1993, the country non-violently split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Czech Republic went through economic reforms and in 2006 was recognized by the Wold Bank as a “developed country”. From the international point of view, the Czech Republic became a member of Visegrád Group in 1993, NATO in 1999 and of the European Union in 2004.
1.2 Historical Overview of the Women Situation in the Czech lands in the 20th Century All citizens shall have equal rights and equal duties. Men and women shall have equal status in the family, at work and in public activity. The society of the working people shall ensure the equality of all citizens by creating equal possibilities and equal opportunities in all fields of public life.
ČSSR CONSTITUTION, ARTICLE 20 The frequently mentioned phenomenon, that Czech women are supposedly “more interested in furthering human rights and national goals rather than fighting specifically for women´s rights” can be, according to Ferber and Raab, explained historically, because Czech women played a noteworthy role during the national emancipatory struggle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Ferber&Raabe: 2003: 410). As the Czech feminist forged an alliance with liberal nationalist, the question for women´s right became integrated into the quest for a greater autonomy for Czechs – men and women. The female intellectual elite played a significant role in the national cultural revival, producing widely read and generally admired literature. The need of Czech men and women to unite against external oppressors for nation-state purposes supposedly led to a strong cohesion between the sexes (Ferber&Raabe: 2003, Sikolová: 1997, Havelková: 1996). In addition, Ferber and Raabe argue that the acceptance of political equality for women immediately after the Czechoslovakian independence from the Empire in 1918 was responsible for the relatively greater representation of women among elected officials than in most other countries during the interwar period.
After the Second World War, there was an attempt to create new political and social order in Czechoslovakia. “As part of this process, efforts were made to improve the status of women and to incorporate them as full participants in a socialist society.” (Wolchik: 1979: 583). The communist elites “proclaimed their commitment to female equality and enacted a constitution which guaranteed women equal rights in all areas of life. These guarantees were supplemented by a variety of legal and administrative measures prohibiting discrimination against women in employment and affirming the state´s responsibility to assists women in performing their maternal functions” (Wolchik: 1979: 583). Sharon Wolchik initially believed that these political goals would have very positive and liberating effects on the Czechoslovakian hypothesis back in the late 1970´s that in Czechoslovakia the “changes in women´s status in certain areas of life, such as education and employment, would be reflected
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in corresponding changes in political and family roles” (Wolchik: 1979: 584). Her second hypothesis was that women´s positions within society will be better in Czechoslovakia compared to other Communist and “Western” European states. However, as Wolchik concluded in 1979, “the institution of the socialist system has not led to equality for women in Czechoslovakia. Nor is the status of women significantly better in this country than in other, less-developed socialists states” (Wolchik: 1979): 584). Both this conclusion, as well as the very nature of her two hypotheses I estimate as highly problematic.
Wolchik´s first hypothesis is clearly derived from the Marxist expectation that changes in women´s economic status would lead to a more equal division of work within the household. The second hypothesis is drawn from considering the common determinant of female political participation in western and socialist countries. That practically means, as Wolchik deemed, that Czechoslovakian women had favourable conditions for post-World War II efforts to change their own role (Wolchik: 1979): 584). In other words, the common obstacles to change in the women´s role were less severe; the country was enjoying a high level of industrialization before the Communists came to power, it had high levels of overall as well as female literacy, and last but not least, the catholic church as well as the religious traditions had only very little influence within society (Wolchik: 1979): 584). Furthermore, according to Ferber and Raab, the absence of a Czech aristocracy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as during the era of the First Republic helped create the egalitarian tradition that has led sway ever since (Ferber&Raab: 2003: 410).
In regards to education, the comparatively high level of educated women in the First republic was further enhanced during the Communist era (Ferber&Raabe: 2003: 413). The number of women as a percentage of secondary education students‟ rose significantly between the years 1935 to 1970. Concretely, from the total number of secondary education students in 1935, approximately 35 per cent were female and they also constituted slightly over 40 per cent of all students in higher education. In 1950, women represented 42 per cent of secondary students and twenty years later, women represented 61 per cent of all secondary students15. From the numbers presented it is possible to conclude that the education opportunities for women in Czechoslovakia have increased noticeably since the 1930´s (Wolchik: 1979: 585). At this point it is also important to state that the increase in access to education for women reflects partly the increasing educational opportunities for the population as a whole. However, the steady increase in the proportion of female students indicates that women´s access to education increased more rapidly than that of the population as a whole (Wolchik: 1979).
Even though the socialist system has led to near equality of education opportunities for women and men, it has not led to the elimination of differences between the sexes, Wolchik argues (Wolchik: 1979: 587). It is a statistical fact that at the secondary and higher education level, girls continued to encompass the largest proportion of students in both general education and teacher training programs. The number of females in vocational education has increased as well, but girls who chose this type of education continue to
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specialize in traditional female areas (Wolchik: 1979: 587, Ferber&Raabe: 2003: 413). However, Wolchik‟s interpretation of this statistical data is that the sex-related differences in educational specialization continue to illustrate a persistent variance between men and women in the labour force and therefore the gender equality has not been reached (Wolchik: 1979: 587).
I believe that such an argument is heavily grounded on the presumption adopted by a number of Anglo-American feminist scholars that the only way towards the men´s and women´s equality is through the elimination of the gender differences. However, this approach has not been adopted within the majority of the Czech society nor by Czech feminist scholars such as Havelkova or Siklova (Havelkova:1993, 1996, Siklova: 1997). Moreover, this gender-neutral perception has often been seen by Czech feminist scholars as another ideology implemented on „us‟ by the “Other”. Indeed, both Havelkova and Siklova identify the thorny issue of feminization of certain industries; however, they rarely see the core of the problem in the fact that women tend to choose certain industries over anothers. The problem is the very social mechanism of patriarchy resulting in impoverishment of the feminine industries. In other words, in contrary to Wolchik´s understanding, the problem is not that some industries are more attractive for men and others for women, the problem arises when the industry becomes less financially and socially appreciated because it is feminized (Havelkova:1993, 1996, Siklova: 1997).
Despite the improvement of women´s educational levels, Walchik argues, and their greater involvement in work outside the homes, women continued to be excluded from the exercise of political power in Czechoslovakia (Wolchik: 1979: 592). From a survey conducted in the early 1970´s it is possible to assess that women had less interest and information about politics and they were less frequently members of the Communist Party (Wolchik: 1979: 592). Similarly, they were less active in political activities in the factories and work places (Slejska: 1965: 518). The proportion of female party members reached its peak in 1949 with 33 per cent and has since gradually diminished despite the elite´s efforts to encourage more women to join the party (Wolchik: 1979: 592).
However, in my opinion, the limited involvement of women in the political representation hardly stands as evidence for the supposed failure of the female emancipatory process. The very nature of Wolchik´s argument is controversial in my view, because it presupposes that the female participation in politics and in the Communist party was seen as the desired aim. In contrary, it seems that to become „political‟ was something the women I have interviewed aimed to avoid. Especially after the Warsaw pact invasion in 1968 the Czechoslovakian political sphere became seen as associated and led by the “Other”, the Soviet Union. To use Mary Douglas‟s words, it became impure, polluted and thus dangerous (Douglas: 1966).
In regards to work, in Czechoslovakia, there has been a considerable increase in women´s participation in the labour force especially since World War II (Ferber&Raabe: 2003: True: 2003, Wolchik: 1979). The women´s proportion in the total labour force increased drastically since the Second World War and soon it became one of the highest
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proportions from the countries behind the Iron Curtin and considerably higher than in the Western countries (Wolchik: 1979: 586) (Wolchik: 1979: 586). In order to understand the significance of female employment in everyday life of the Czechoslovakian society, it should be recognized that around 85 per cent of all women in the productive ages was by the year 1970 employed (Magdolen: 1973: 25, Wolchik: 1979: 58). Czechoslovakia adopted ambitious industrialization plans based on a labour intensive strategy of economic development which required the use of all available labour resources. That could be seen as one of many relevant explanations why women were encouraged to enter the labour force. Similarly, the economic necessity coincided with the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on women´s participation in production as the precondition for female emancipation. A variety of moral and financial incentives was used to encourage women to enter the labour force. Chief among these were wage structures which necessitated two incomes for most households (Wolchik: 1979: 587).
In order clarify the persistence of sex-related differences despite constitutional guarantees of equal pay for equal work Wolchik discusses several factors influencing the differences. Firstly, women were concentrated in certain low-priority branches of the economy. “Women comprised a far larger proportion of the labour force in health and social services, education, and trade and public catering than in construction, transportation, and science and research, all fields with high average wages” (Wolchik: 1979: 589). ).When refereeing to sociologist Jiří Fremr findings, Wolchik claimed that even in the heavily feminized branches of the economy sex-related differences in wage existed (Wolchik: 1979, Fremr: 1965). Secondly, even though women´s education and qualification levels rose significantly in Czechoslovakia during 20th century, many women did not possess the qualifications required to perform skilled work, which is also partly the case for my informants. Thus the underutilization of women´s skills also contributes to keeping women´s wage at lower levels (Wolchik: 1979). Thirdly, Wolchik argued that persisting inequality of women in the sphere of work was also evident in their minimal representation in leadership positions (Wolchik: 1979). Based on a study conducted in the early 1970´s, women were less willing to accept leadership positions than men. They also tended to be interested in lower level functions, while most men aspired to middle or top level positions (Wolchik: 1979: 591).
In regards to family, Wolchik as well as True trace several inequalities in the position of women they have identified to the lack of changes in the roles of both men and women in the family (Wolchik: 1979, True: 2003). “Despite assumption of new roles in the economy, women continue to carry the traditional female responsibility for caring for the home and family” (Wolchik: 1979: 596). “Traditional conception of the women as guardian of the home and the man as the family´s link to the outside world also influenced the use of free time […] as a result of the unequal division of household responsibilities; women had appreciably less free time” (Wolchik: 1979: 596). All of the researchers, (Wolchik: 1979, True: 2003, Ferber & Raabe: 2003) are well-aware of the potential conflict between women´s roles as economic producers and their social role of being responsible for the family affairs. It has been also theorized, that the difficulty of carrying a „dual burden‟ traumatizes women as they feel that
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they cannot do both equally well (Corrin: 1992). The demanding struggle of fulfilling both social roles can lead to the women feeling of low-self-esteem and guilt (Corrin: 1992). Wolchik moreover argues, that “the traditional division of labour within the home also limits women´s participation in politics. Given the difficulty most women have in performing their two essential roles, it is understandable that they would be hesitant to fill the free time available with political activity […] women´s professional participation is hindered in more subjective ways by the traditional concepts of their roles in the home” (Wolchik: 1979: 597).
Ferber and Raabe adopt quite a different understanding of the Czechoslovakian women´s dual role. “The unique feature of the Czech perspective on „women´s place‟ is the blend of belief in women´s special role in the family, with complete acceptance of their role as wage earners” (Ferber&Raabe: 2003: 416). Based on national opinion surveys which Raabe and Marie Čermáková conducted in 1995, Ferber and Raabe concluded that Czech women acknowledge gender responsibilities; they feel responsible for household chores and family well-being, but at the same time they usually do not derive their social status from being wives and mothers, nor do they accept subordinate positions16. Correspondingly, both men and women are likely to see paid work and homemaking as complementary for women (Ferber: Raabe: 2003: 418).
In a sharp contrast to Wolchik´s and True´s „female exploitation” perception, Ferber and Raabe (as well as prominent Czech sociologists Hana Havelková (1993) and Jiřina Siklová (1997)) argue that “Czech women tend to take great pride in successfully combining the two, rather than worrying that having a job means their neglect their families […]” (Ferber & Raabe: 2003: 418). In other words, instead of focusing on social forces and seeing Czech women as victims, the authors argue that the women´s „double burden‟ is not female labour exploitation imposed on the women but it is a „strategy‟ which enables Czech women to have a high sense of personal efficacy and independence. In my opinion, Ferber and Raabe only exchanged the signs of a Wolchik´s mental equation from oppression/subordination into oppression/resistance; however, they failed to overcome the dichotomies itself.
The historical tour I provided in this first chapter was perhaps slightly hard-headed for a reader, however I came from the premises that “memory is continually made and remade in the present from present perspectives and for present purposes” (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, & Levy: 2011: 249). Therefore, in order to answer the research question, the official state narrative of the Czechoslovakian history of 20th century, which to a significant degree constitutes the public or so called popular memory, was introduced. I treat collective memory as a constitutive feature of collective identities and thus it underwrites cultural practices (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, & Levy: 2011: 249).
Milan Kundera, a well-known Czech novelist asserted, that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (Kundera: 1983: 3). During my fieldwork I became empirically aware that meaning of the past is essentially contested. The narrative accounts of the women I interviewed provided different versions of the past, often
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