Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc

When Snitow began her travels to East Central Europe in 1991 as a feminist organizer and teacher, she was surprised to find that, though there were post-communist women with feminist ideas and wishes, these women were isolated amid a massive repudiation of everything from the Cold War past, including the communist rhetoric of female emancipation. For complex historical reasons, independent feminist movements, present in the region from the nineteenth century, had become ideologically and socially homeless at the end of the twentieth. This piece offers a catalogue of twelve reasons why feminism is ignored, repudiated, called irrelevant, grossly insulted, made a joke, or, sometimes, treated with a useful skepticism in the region. The list is polyglot and often internally contradictory and explores regional debates about the value of: identity politics (or any form of politics); of essentialism; of the traditional family; of readings of the past and future, etc.