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The situation of women was improved in many respects under the totalitarian state socialist system. However, the improvement was brought about from the top down, without civil participation and control. Also, many legal and financial dispositions concerning the family, women and gender relations were fundamentally conservative. Such politics may not be seen as left-wing. The socialists never analysed their mistakes in this respect, so that a consistent left-wing agenda on family and gender policy is still missing irrespective of whether they are in government or in opposition. Since the collapse of the old system, many new ‘right’ trends have gained ground. Conservative trends are harming the reproductive rights of women and are questioning the legitimacy of their work outside the home. Economic crisis and monetary pressures are leading to a wholesale reorganisation of former social policy dispositions, with a minimal state, the scaling down of universal and social insurance benefits, the spread of individually targeted social assistance and market or quasi-market solutions. This results in increasing child and female poverty. Also, the situation of women on the labour market is worsening because of the weakening of rights and the play of ‘free’ market forces. The attitudes of women have been changing during and after ‘socialism’. This is one of the foundations of further changes. The other and most important one is that in the new system civil and political rights have been strengthened. This is a gain for civil society in general. These rights allow the assertion of group interests, hence they may effectively serve the interests of women. For this to happen, however, it will take time, but this seems the only asset of women in the face of a ‘patriarchal’ state and an unrestrained market. Czech Sociological Review, 1997, Vol. 5 (No. 2: 159-178) 1. The ‘Old Left’ – Before and After It will take a long time before it is possible to give a credible brief account of the performance of the Soviet-type state socialist systems or totalitarian socialism. The difficulties of a fair assessment are not easily overcome in the case of women either, all the less *) My own experience is limited to Hungary. Since there have been not only politically induced similarities but also extremely important differences among the countries of the bloc, I tried to gather information on other countries as well, so as to avoid unwarranted generalisations. The systematic account of the various (similar or different) trends is a task which is yet to be done. The paper was originally prepared for the conference Family, sexuality and labour markets: the role of symbolic politics in the assault on the welfare state, University of Bergen, Norway, May 26-28, 1995, and then rewritten in early 1997 thanks to an extended stay in the Institute of Human Studies, Vienna. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers of the Czech Sociological Review for making useful comments. **) Direct all correspondence to Professor Zsuzsa Ferge, Dept. of Social Policy, Eötvös Lóránd University, Muzeum krt. 4/c, Budapest 1088, phone + 36 1 266 1008, e-mail ferge@ludens.elte.hu Czech Sociological Review, V, (2/1997) 160 because politics varied a lot during the 40 or 70 years in question. Let us start this tentative and cursory assessment with some ‘objective’ trends. The ‘equality of women’ was long a declared objective of politics. One of its foundations was the equalisation of formal rights. Acts were adopted at an early stage of the system assuring equal rights for women in politics (the right to vote and to be elected), and within marriage. This meant among other things the abolition of legal and social discrimination against illegitimate children, the right to divorce or to inherit, and so forth.1 Whether all these rights materialised or not is a different issue. While women certainly went to vote (the right having become an unconditional must for both sexes), they have remained vastly underrepresented in all leading positions.2 Another foundation was the enhancement of educational opportunities. The schooling of girls up to tertiary level was encouraged with no small success. For instance, the rate of girls in higher education went up from a pre-war level of 20 percent or less to over 50 percent. In this case there was no real pressure, and sometimes – particularly in earlier periods – some positive discrimination may have been applied in favour of women.3 Nonetheless, the educational structure of girls has remained somewhat crooked in all the countries. They have been overrepresented in educational channels leading to less wellremunerated or less ‘marketable’ jobs (such as teaching), and underrepresented particularly in vocational training and in the technical sciences. These – more or less spontaneous – one-sided options of girls has led to some segregation both in educational institutions and, as a consequence, also in the world of work. Whether the survival of traditional female educational and professional choices (operating usually against the long-term interests of women) was biologically or socially conditioned was a matter for debate even at the time [Ferge 1983]. The most important pillar of ‘emancipation’ was certainly the gainful employment of women. In all the countries 80 to 90 per cent of women had gainful employment at the end of the eighties. The anti-women bias – the underrepresentation of women on the higher levels of the job-hierarchy, a more or less segregated job-structure, and the 20 or 30 percent lower pay for women even in similar jobs plagued state-socialist countries by and large as much as most countries in Western Europe (with the possible exception of Sweden and Norway). It is nowadays a controversial issue to what extent the politics of the gainful employment of women was motivated by strong ideological pressures; by the need of man1) One (male) Hungarian sociologist long maintained that the system gave more rights to women than to men, allowing women to destroy the social fabric by undermining the family, socialising children in a feminine way etc. [Hernádi 1988]. 2) It is a rare pleasure to look at the paintings or photos representing the members of the ‘Politbureau’, of the Central Committee or the Council of Ministers in any of the countries at any point in time. Women are always conspicuous by their absence. One could find at most one or two ‘token’ women in those illustrious bodies. The ratio of female MPs was 30 percent at most. 3) In later years, in Hungary at least, some negative discrimination against women could be detected in fields where they had become overrepresented, like in law, or where strong male interests could successfully prevail to curtail the entrance of women. In fact, the relationship between the prestige and the earnings of a profession on the one hand, and its degree of feminisation on the other had been uncovered already in the sixties and has been demonstrated systematically ever since [e.g. Sullerot 1968, Koncz 1985] which explains the increasing vocality of male interests. Zsuzsa Ferge: Women and Social Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe 161 power for extensive industrialisation; by the aspiration to hold down wages (so that only families with at least two earners could manage); or by the political will to the exert maximum control over the population. It is also debated whether the high activity rate of women was only forced on society from the top down, or whether there was also a push in this direction from the bottom up. Put more simply, the debate is about whether women wished to work or were only coerced to do so. In all probability, many of the above factors and perhaps others too, played some role in shaping the final outcome. The impact of symbolic coercion or violence (to enforce the norm to work outside the home) is undeniable, and so are its negative effects, such as the overburdening of women, and the weakening of the already declining family. It may also be that retrospective evaluation is highly influenced by the later political climate. Right around the time of the collapse of the system it was indeed fashionable to vilify everything belonging to the past, so that all the facts and measures concerning women were interpreted by many as the malevolent intervention of a macho state wronging women. In the later years opinions have become more nuanced. This diversity of evaluation is easy to detect in the literature both East and West. It is emphatically present in the current Eastern literature. For instance, Siemienska [1994] sees the work of women in Poland as being only enforced from above. According to Panova et al. [1993: 17] in Bulgaria “the right to work outside the family (...) turned into a burden, a compulsion”. In Ostner’s [1994: 52] formulation based on survey results “East-German women not only wanted but had to work to make ends meet”. Analysing historical evidence, Havelková [1993: 64] suggests, though, that “In the Czech case, the high employment of women (...) was not resented by women as much as is sometimes claimed today in sweeping criticisms against the totalitarian system”. Szalai [1991] has also many doubts and queries. I am unable to arbitrate in these debates. On the basis of personal experience and of some – always debatable4 – statistics, it seems to me that in the early years the aspiration of women for more freedom played a larger role, and the feeling of pressure from above was weaker than in the later decades. This may only be an optical illusion, because I was just at the beginning of my adult life in the post-war years and strongly identified with the socialist view on the work of women. However, Heinen [1995: 95] notes also for Poland that according to surveys done at different periods, there was a shift between the sixties and the eighties in women’s attitudes towards work from a more ‘positive’ to a more ‘critical’ attitude. The work of women outsi

Women and Social Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe. The 'Old Left' and the 'New Right'