Reproducing Gender: Politics, publics and everyday life after socialism. (Reviews).

Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Edited by Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. x plus 443 pp.).

In the decade since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, how have women fared? How has the process of "marketization" resulted in different opportunities for women and men? What defines women's and men's differential access to democratic political processes? How has the legacy of state socialism shaped conceptions of gender difference and defined the language of feminist politics? Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, the editors of this volume, have had much to say about these topics elsewhere, but in this impressive collection of sixteen articles, their role is that of scholarly entrepreneurs, organizing conferences in Tuscany and Budapest and coordinating a massive research project that involved sociologists, economists, cultural historians, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and legal theorists. Participants in this collaborative project include a leavening of scholars from the United States and New Zealand, but the volume draws most heavily on the work of scholars from the eastern European countries they study. In their contributions, they offer a range of methodological approaches to the analysis of the experience of women and the ways in which "woman" has been deployed as a political category in Poland, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

The editors organize the articles under three main rubrics. In "Reproduction as Politics," Eleonora Zielinska, Sharon L. Wolchik, Eva Maleck-Lewy, Myra Marx Feree, Irene Dolling, Daphne Hahn, and Sylka Scholz focus on the ways in which the politics of reproductive rights and abortion have redefined the boundaries between public and private and between the state's prerogative and the rights of individuals. In most cases the restriction of access to abortion has not been accompanied by social policies that make it easier for women to raise children. And as the authors make clear, when abortion is on the agenda, much more is at stake than women's reproductive rights. Abortion becomes a medium for discussions of competing conceptions of families, the state, and the relationship of gender and nationalism. Particularly interesting are two articles that address a unified Germany, where for East German women, "loss of abortion rights became tied to a general sense of loss--of status and identity as an East German, an d of the social benefits of the G.D.R." (Maleck-Lewy/Ferree, 110). Case studies from other eastern European underscore Zielinska's observation that battles over abortion, though waged in the context of democratic institutions, have revealed that "democracy remains 'democracy with a male face.'" (53)

In "Gender Relations in Everyday Life," Mira Marody, Anna Giza-Poleszczuk, Katalin Kovacs, Monika Varadi, Julia Szalai, and Adriana Baban offer a range of case studies that extend from an analysis of the forms in which femininity is represented in the media in contemporary Poland to the changing markets for women's labor and women's views of sexuality--male and female--in contemporary Romania. In Poland, the image of woman as "brave victim" who juggled the competing responsibilities of family and work and who confronted discrimination in a patriarchal society gave way after 1989 to an idealized vision of the woman who was highly successfully professionally and whose status was determined by achievements in the world outside the home. If the model of noble self-sacrifice gave many Polish women a "moral upper hand in their domestic lives" (Marodyl/Giza-Poleszczuk, 163), the model of glamorous professional has been achieved by only a small elite. In the Hungarian case analyzed by Szalai, "marketization from belo w" has opened up new opportunities for some women in the service sector. Home-based labor, often done by women under communism, has become commodified under capitalism. However, such jobs are most often occasional, bringing no chances for long-term employment, benefits, or career advance. As Kovacs and Varadi make clear, Hungarian women who worked in industries controlled by the state under socialism have lost their jobs and their dignity. And Baban describes how the end to the Ceausecu regime in Romania meant the collapse of horrifyingly repressive pro-natalist policies, but left women juggling other impossible alternatives as they faced the demands of a male-defined competitive economy and expectations that at home they would remain subordinate to a patriarchal order.

The news is little better in "Arenas of Political Action: Struggles for Representation." In this section, Malgorzata Fuszara, Joanna Goven, Laura Grunberg, Krassimira Daskalova, Zorica Mrsevic, and Jasmina Lukic suggest how difficult it has been for women to have an impact on parliamentary politics and how limited are the possibilities for their political involvement in other arenas. Even when women become involved politically, they are loath to identify themselves as feminists. Feminism, debunked under state socialism, is now stigmatized as "western" and antithetical to new conceptions of east European nationhood and "tradition." Although NGOs in Romania have mobilized many women, enabling them to overcome a historic antipathy to politics of all sorts, these organizations come nowhere close to addressing social concerns from a feminist perspective. When Romanian women are asked if they have a "positive role model for a woman leader," few say yes and those who answer in the affirmative have only Margaret That cher to offer. "NGOs," Grunberg concludes, "are busy helping women but not emancipating them." (324) One stunning exception to this generally dismal rule is Mrsevic's account of the development in Belgrade of a hotline for women and children who are victims of violence, what Mrsevic identifies as "the first time in Balkan history that women have been able to formulate their own 'herstory'--to promote it, write about it, and assess its living legacy." (392)

There is no nostalgia in this book, no attempt to claim that things were better under communism, but there are also few indications that women have benefited tremendously from the introduction of market economies and democratic politics into Eastern Europe. The editors emphasize that "the economic and political processes of the 'transition' in Eastern Europe are not gender neutral" (4), and anyone who required convincing need only read the contributions to this important book. Those whose circumstances have improved are few in number--entrepreneurial elites in Hungary, young women who have specific skills and whose looks conform to the expectations embodied in fashion magazines. For many others, the end to paternal socialist states has frequently been accompanied by the introduction of more oppressive forms of patriarchal rule, conceptions of the nation that emphasize woman's role as wife and mother and depict feminism as a dangerous import, and the deligitimization of the categories of class analysis that mi ght allow women to make sense of the emergence of new forms of social stratification and income inequity. There is no turning back, but there is also little sense that the future is particularly bright. The authors are better at describing problems than they are at crafting possible solutions, but sober assessments of what is wrong is doubtless an essential first step toward defining strategies for change. The particular strength of the volume is that it includes many essays by scholars who are living what they analyze; eastern Europe is nor viewed from within universities across the Atlantic, rather it is assessed by a number of scholars who are working in the countries they describe. And as much as their contributions may illuminate the reasons for the absence of an active feminist political presence in nations that discredited feminism as a bourgeois anathema, their work is powerful testimony to the existence of a vital community of feminist social scientists who are asking important questions and demonstr ating that "transitions" in eastern Europe are inadequate unless they are analyzed in a framework that incorporates gender as a central category of analysis.