Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movements in East Central Europe
By Barbara Einhorn
Verso, 1993. Australian distributors Allen and Unwin
280 pp. $34.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
"I think our East European experience has not been a trivial one, and that we must learn from each other", Bulgarian academic Dimitrina Petrova told a conference on 200 years of feminism at Sussex University in December 1992. Dimitrina's call for dialogue forms the last words in Barbara Einhorn's Cinderella Goes to Market , a detailed study of the impact on women of the current upheavals in east central Europe, and how women's groups there have responded to them.
It would appear that the call for dialogue has been eagerly taken up by Western feminists. Einhorn, who lives in Brighton, England, gets a lot of phone calls from women's movement activists, the media and academics looking for contacts in the former socialist states.
Unfortunately, Einhorn told Â鶹´«Ã½, the "dialogue" has been weighted too heavily in one direction. For feminists from western Europe, it is relatively easy to slip over the "border". Many have a lot of advice to give, but little knowledge of the real experiences of their eastern counterparts.
"Unless they are really diplomatic, they can make things worse", says Einhorn. The women they are going to meet can begin to feel they are the subject of a "colonialist view; they feel like animals in a zoo, interesting phenomena". In this situation, there is no mutuality; those subject to the cursory "study" are too penniless, too exhausted by the struggle to survive, to take a trip in the other direction.
Einhorn quotes a west German feminist, who notes that despite persistent efforts, women from either side of the phantom Berlin Wall "constantly renew our prejudices about each other. Western women are arrogant, know-alls, anti-men and anti-children, dogmatic and intolerant. Eastern women are conformist, good mummies, obsessed with men and not a bit radical."
The situation is becoming embarrassing: Jirina Siklova, who runs a feminist studies centre in Prague, makes no secret of her growing hostility to some of the well-meaning advice-givers she finds on her doorstep.
There are the rare individuals and groups doing useful work, says Einhorn. French feminists, for example, have been involved in joint projects to provide sex education and contraceptives to beleaguered Polish women; a US women's group has provided funds for Siklova's gender studies centre in Prague and the Hungarian Feminist Network.
Such work is important not simply because it assists, but because it provides an opportunity to reflect on the experiences and strategies of women's movements in the East and the West.
The didactic confidence of some Western feminists may be out of place, suggests Einhorn, considering that women's rights are in reverse in many of their own countries. Einhorn points to some of the "big questions" that could be the subject of a real dialogue: What are the prerequisites for improving women's personal autonomy and social status? Can the market emancipate women? Can rights be implemented from above, or must they emanate from grassroots struggle?
Einhorn's contribution to the dialogue is an overview of the 40-year history of state socialism's emancipation by decree, during which women were mobilised into the work force and provided with the social services necessary to keep them there, while beliefs about men and women's "real" social roles remained frozen somewhere in the years immediately preceding the second world war.
She explains the "allergy to feminism" throughout the region (which remains so strong that even Jirina Siklova refuses to call herself a feminist), an understanding of which is crucial to those wishing to engage in dialogue without offending.
Her overview of the role of the fossilised official women's unions is funny and tragic. For example, in 1989, when over 90% of East German women were in the work force, the ageing activists of the Democratic Women's Union of Germany were still organising housewives into sewing circles in order to encourage them to go out and get jobs — a campaign begun in the early '50s which no-one thought to put a stop to.
She also gives details of the new independent women's groups (which, with very few exceptions, do not identify as feminist) and their response to an onslaught which is stripping away their reproductive rights, closing down child-care centres, exhorting them to breed for the nation, playing on guilt and exhaustion to get them to accept mass sackings and stay at home and be beautiful mothers.
Einhorn, a long-time feminist and peace activist who worked with dissident peace groups in the 1980s (for which she was briefly jailed by the East German secret police), will be a keynote speaker at the International Â鶹´«Ã½ Conference in Sydney during Easter.