ABSTRACT
Feminist ideas and calls for gender equality, just like any other political agenda, do not enjoy unchallenged popularity anywhere in the world. The hostility, however, with which they were met in East Central Europe (ECE) after the demise of the Communist regimes was remarkable. State-socialist countries, after all, have gone a long way in improving women’s status, access to education, and reproductive health, and most of them had a history of pre-Communist women’s movements. In short, one would have expected that new agendas and conceptual frameworks concerning the equality of the sexes would be viewed with a range of opinions, rather than with an outright negative bias, because politicians, experts, and lay people were all used to having the idea of women’s emancipation around. In the Czech Republic, the media slighted women’s issues and attacked self-declared or “suspected” feminists, governments avoided funding women-focused activities, and feminist researchers earned scorn from many of their (male and female) colleagues. At the same time, however, from the very early 1990s, there were women’s issues NGOs and researchers looking into the equality of the sexes with a critical eye. Somewhere in this tumult the notion appeared in academia in the 1990s that feminism was imported to (presumably feminism-free) Czech society/culture—and to ECE as a whole—and that it occurred after 1989. Moreover, scholars who were advancing the discussion of feminist issues in ECE themselves used the “import” label. Jiřina Šiklová entitled one of her articles, rather unhappily, “McDonald’s, Terminators, Coca Cola Ads—and Feminism?: Imports from the West” and Jiřina Šmejkalová used similar language—“exotic import”—in an overview of Czech feminist sociology. 1 These scholars did not represent an isolated, elitist group of intellectuals, but drew on a long tradition of what I call here “gender critique”: 2 ideas and representations challenging stable gender roles tied to biological sex, or at least trying to broaden the existing range of masculinities and femininities, which featured in a variety of discourses even during late state socialism. 3
