Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Ghodsee, 2019)

Ghodsee, K. (2019). *Second world, second sex: Socialist women's activism and global solidarity during the Cold War*. Duke University Press. PDF: 03 Theory and Transnational Feminisms/Ghodsee (2019) - Second World, Second Sex.pdf PDF PAGES 1 to 100 of 328. Text from the PDF text layer where present, otherwise Tesseract OCR (ind+eng); OCR errors remain. === [PDF page 1] === second world, second sex === [PDF page 2] === second world, Kristen Ghodsee Secon d Sex === [PDF page 3] === Socialist Women's Activism and Duke University Press Global Solidarity during the Cold War Durham & London 2019 === [PDF page 4] === © 2018 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Warnock Pro and Helvetica Neue by Copperline Books Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh, [date] author. Title: Second world, second sex: socialist women’s activism and global solidarity during the Cold War / Kristen Ghodsee. Description: Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018026169 (print) | lccn 2018029608 (ebook) isbn 9781478003274 (ebook) isbn 9781478001393 (hardcover: alk. paper) isbn 9781478001812 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Women’s rights — International cooperation — History — 20th century. | Feminism — International cooperation — History — 20th century. | Women political activists — History — 20th century. | International Women’s Year, 1975. | International Women’s Decade, 1976-1985. | Women and socialism. | Women — Political activity — Bulgaria. | Women — Political activity — Zambia. [Unreadable] lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026169 Cover art: Course participants in the WIDF-CBWM School for Solidarity, Bulgaria, 1980. === [PDF page 5] === For Elena Lagadinova and Irene Tinker === [PDF page 6] === Contents Abbreviations and Acronyms viii Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction. Erasing the Past 1 Part I. Organizing Women under Socialism and Capitalism 1. State Feminism and the Woman Question 31 2. A Brief History of Women’s Activism in Domestic Political Context: Case 1: Bulgaria 53 3. Emancipated Women and Anticommunism in the American Political Imagination 76 4. A Brief History of Women’s Activism in Domestic Political Context: Case 2: Zambia 97 5. Sandwiched between Superpowers 121 === [PDF page 7] === Part II. The Women’s Cold War 6. The Lead-Up to International Women’s Year 135 7. Historic Gatherings in Mexico and the German Democratic Republic 146 8. Preparing for the Mid-Decade Conference 160 9. The Third Week in July 174 10. School for Solidarity 186 11. Strategizing for Nairobi 198 12. Showdown in Kenya 207 Conclusion. Phantom Herstories 221 Appendix. A Few Reflections on the Challenges of Socialist Feminist Historiography 244 Notes 249 Selected Bibliography 283 Index 301 === [PDF page 8] === Abbreviations and Acronyms aapso Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization acwf All-China Women’s Federation aawc All-African Women’s Conference anc African National Congress bcp Bulgarian Communist Party British Library bsac British South Africa Company caw Congress of American Women cbw/cbwm Committee of Bulgarian Women/Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (This committee had two different names during its history) === [PDF page 9] === cedaw Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women cia Central Intelligence Agency (United States) cointelpro Counter-Intelligence Program (United States) cpusa Communist Party of the USA csw Commission on the Status of Women (United Nations) dfl Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party eap Endangered Archives Program era Equal Rights Amendment (United States) fbi Federal Bureau of Investigation (United States) fls Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women gad Gender and Development G-77 Group of 77 developing nations in the UN General Assembly huac House Un-American Activities Committee iish International Institute for Social History ilo International Labor Organization Abbreviations and Acronyms ix === [PDF page 10] === instraw United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women naimsal National Anti-Imperialist Movement for Solidarity with African Liberation nieo New International Economic Order ngo nongovernmental organization now National Organization for Women nsc National Security Council pawo Pan-African Women’s Organization pki Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia) rewa Revolutionary Ethiopian Women’s Committee TsDA Tsentralen Darzhaven Arhiv (Central State Archives. Bulgaria) United Nations unesco United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization unicef United Nations Children’s Fund unip United National Independence Party x Abbreviations and Acronyms === [PDF page 11] === unip-wb United National Independence Party-Women’s Brigade unip-wl United National Independence Party-Women’s League upp United Progressive Party usaid US Agency for International Development weal Women’s Equity Action League wid Women in Development widf Women’s International Democratic Federation wilpf Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom wree Women for Racial and Economic Equality wsp Women Strike for Peace Abbreviations and Acronyms xi === [PDF page 12] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 13] === Note on Translation and Transliteration All translations from the Bulgarian are mine or that of my former research assistant Mira Nikolova, unless the quotes derive from a Bulgarian source that has already been translated into English. In the endnotes and bibliography, all transliterations are mine. Transliterating the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet into Latin letters presents some challenges, as there are different traditions and much inconsistency regarding usage. The trickiest characters are the Bulgarian ф (which can be transliterated as “ff” or “v”), ъ (which can be transliterated as “a,” “u,” or “ŭ”), and ц (which is either “tz” or “ts”). Throughout the book, when doing my transliterations from the Bulgarian, I have chosen to use “v” for ф, “ts” for ц, and “a” for ъ. I also transliterate ж as “zh,” and я as “ya.” However, in the case of previously published materials and names already transliterated into Latin letters by the authors, I have reproduced the words in their published transliterated form. I have also retained the English spellings of well-known geographical names such as Sofia and Bulgaria (rather than Sofiya and Balgariya). As a result, there will be some inconsistencies in the text. === [PDF page 14] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 15] === Acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the making and was supported by generous grants from many institutions and foundations in the United States and Europe. The initial seeds for this project were planted while I was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2010 – 11. I am most grateful to Bowdoin College for providing me with various pots of seed money to fund some of my initial trips to Bulgaria and the Netherlands. The real breakthrough came when I won a generous grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2012, which gave me funds for travel to Zambia and the opportunity to buy some time off to conduct research. In 2014 – 15, I was a senior external fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, which generously hosted me for the entire academic year. In 2015 – 16, I benefitted from fellowships from the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich-Schiller- University in Jena, Germany, for five months, and from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki in Finland for three months. Once again, I won several small faculty development grants from Bowdoin College, and they graciously allowed me to take a two-year sabbatical leave. Finally, Diana and Matthew Webster lent me their home in London in August 2016, giving me the gift of unlimited and uninterrupted writing time so that I could finish the first draft of this book before my return to full time teaching. A wide variety of friends, mentors, and colleagues offered advice or read and commented on various sections of this manuscript over the eight years I have been working on it, including Maria Bucur, Anne Clifford, === [PDF page 16] === Krassimira Daskalova, Francisca de Haan, Susan Faludi, Jane Jaquette, Sandrine Kott, Sonya Michel, Maxine Molyneux, Joan W. Scott, Scott Sehon, Maria Todorova, Barbara Weinstein, and Sharon Wolchik. I am also deeply grateful for the many efforts of my former student, Mira Nikolova, who started as my research assistant in the spring of 2010 and continued to help with various aspects of this project over the next six years. Mira read through hundreds of pages of documents, sought out sources in the National Library, grappled with translations of official documents in convoluted bureaucratic Bulgarian, and organized the massive amount of paper brought back from Sofia to Maine. Mira’s thoughtful questions and dedicated support were invaluable to the completion of this project. Some of the material in chapter 1 was previously published as “State Socialist Women’s Organizations in Cold War Perspective: Revisiting the Work of Maxine Molyneux,” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 10 (2016): 111 – 21. Portions of chapter 2 appeared as “Pressuring the Politburo: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and State Socialist Feminism,” Slavic Review 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 538 – 62. Certain sections scattered over the three chapters on the United Nations conferences previously appeared in “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975 – 1985,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 49 – 73. I have also been inspired by and expanded on research that I used for my articles: “Internationalisme socialiste et féminisme d’État pendant la Guerre froide. Les relations entre Bulgarie et Zambie,” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire, no. 41 (2015): 115 – 137; “Research Note: The historiographical challenges of exploring Second World–Third World alliances in the international women’s movement,” Global Social Policy, 14, no. 2 (2014): 244 – 264; and “Revisiting the United Nations Decade for Women: Brief Reflections on Feminism, Capitalism, and Cold War politics in the Early Years of the International Women’s Movement,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33, no. 1 (2010): 3–12. I am grateful to the archivists at the Central State Archives in Bulgaria, the National Archives of Zambia, the International Institute for Social History in the Netherlands, the Sophia Smith Collection in Northampton, Massachusetts, and at the British Library in London. I am also deeply indebted to all of the women I interviewed in Bulgaria and Zambia, and particularly those who shared their personal archives with me. I am especially grateful to Virginia (Ginny) Hopcroft, the Bowdoin government docuxvi Acknowledgments === [PDF page 17] === ments librarian, for helping me track down key United Nations sources at the very beginning of this project. At Duke University Press, I feel blessed to be working with such an amazing editorial, design, and marketing staff. Courtney Berger has been an incredible editor, and her insightful comments and suggestions for revision improved the manuscript beyond measure. Sandra Korn, Sara Leone, Christine Riggio, Laura Sell, and the rest of the Duke University Press staff take excellent care of their authors. I am thankful for the insightful comments of the anonymous external reviewers, and for the copyediting of Susan Deeks. As always, I am grateful for the patience of my partner and daughter who supported me in innumerable ways as I worked on the manuscript. I feel like my daughter grew up while I wrote this book, following me around the world as I chased down sources and holed myself up to write. I am glad that my daughter had the chance to meet Elena Lagadinova in person at least once, because the latter provided so much support with this research project over the many years I worked on it. Lagadinova gave me access to her personal archive and shared her many memories with me over the scores of times we met between 2010 and 2017. Unfortunately, I kept interrupting work on this book to write three others. Although one of those, The Left Side of History, explored parts of Lagadinova’s life, it was my great hope that I would be able to share this one with her in print. But I delayed too long; Lagadinova died on October 29, 2017 at the age of 87. Finally, I thank Irene Tinker, my mentor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1990s and the person who first inspired my interest in the United Nations Decade for Women. I first met Irene in 1996, just a year after she attended the Beijing conference, in her final years of university teaching before her retirement. Irene was an endless font of insights and wisdom about the “global women’s movement,” and it was she who encouraged me to do research on the East European women who attended the world conferences. Irene Tinker served as a member of the board of directors at the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, and she remembered that they regularly received reports about the status of women in the Eastern Bloc countries. “I thought they were just propaganda at the time,” Irene recalled, “But maybe they were true.” I wrote my first article about the influence of the Cold War on women’s international development programs with Irene’s help, which was published in 2003. Since that first article fifteen years ago, Irene has been a generous interlocutor, reading my work Acknowledgments xvii === [PDF page 18] === and offering her feedback. She has not always agreed with me, but she has been a constant source of inspiration and motivation. Irene is really one of those women who has endeavored to pass her torch to the next generation of feminist scholars. I am truly awed by her decades of passion and perseverance. Although Elena and Irene never met, they were kindred spirits and shared a passion for women’s rights. Their efforts made the world a better place for those who came after them. They were my foremothers, and it is to both Elena and Irene that I dedicate this book. xviii Acknowledgments === [PDF page 19] === Introduction. Erasing the Past In September 1995, more than seventeen thousand women gathered in Beijing to attend the Fourth World Conference on Women. Diplomatic representatives of United Nations member states gathered to prepare an official conference document— the Platform for Action— while thousands of activists met at a separate forum for nongovernmental organizations (ngos) to discuss and debate women’s issues. Marking the twentieth anniversary of the International Women’s Year and the First World Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975, the Beijing conference celebrated two decades of women’s activism at the United Nations and the global movement for women’s rights it had inspired. There was only one problem. Women from the countries that had initiated the original call for an International Women’s Year back in the early 1970s were being “intentionally shut-out” of the discussions.1 Frustrated and ignored, several of these women circulated a “Statement from the Non-Region.” The statement included a map showing the location of their nations to remind their fellow conference-goers that they still existed.2 At issue was text in the conference document’s “Global Framework” chapter. In a paragraph on the geopolitical climate affecting women’s rights, the authors of the proposed Beijing Platform for Action had chosen to downplay the importance of what was, to many women in attendance, an event of massive political significance: the sudden and unexpected end of the Cold War. In the final document, the chaos and upheaval of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the violent revolution in Romania, the divorce of the Czech Republic from Slovakia, the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union, and the genocidal wars of Yugoslav succession (all of which af- === [PDF page 20] === fected hundreds of millions of women from Budapest to Vladivostok) received only two cursory sentences in the official conference document: “In Central and Eastern Europe the transition to parliamentary democracy has been rapid and has given rise to a variety of experiences, depending on the specific circumstances of each country. While the transition has been mostly peaceful, in some countries this process has been hindered by armed conflict that has resulted in grave violations of human rights.”3 The collapse of communism had radically shifted the geopolitical terrain of international relations across the globe, including in the socialist-aligned countries in the developing world, but the “transition” in Eastern Europe was acknowledged in the second half of exactly one of the 361 paragraphs of the Platform for Action. More important, women’s activists from the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe— what used to be called the “Second World”4 — were once leading voices at the United Nations. They included women such as Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, who led the Soviet delegation to the previous three un conferences. Elena Lagadinova — the youngest female partisan fighting against the Nazi-allied monarchy in Bulgaria during World War II — led her country’s delegation to the 1975 and 1985 conferences, and was a prominent organizer of women from the East European and socialist countries of the Global South. Lagadinova had been elected general rapporteur in Nairobi (the official spokeswoman for the conference to the world’s press) and in 1991 had received a medal from an American university honoring her achievements. Chibesa Kankasa of Zambia was a national heroine, a soldier in the struggle for her country’s independence from the British. Kankasa’s compatriot Lily Monze was the first Zambian woman to earn a university degree and would eventually serve as her nation’s ambassador to France. Kankasa and Monze held senior positions in the Zambian government, and both had attended the conferences in 1980 and 1985. Tereshkova, Lagadinova, Kankasa, and Monze were all proponents of various forms of socialism, and without these women —and their united opposition to the official delegations from the United States and its Western allies — the issue of women’s rights would never have garnered the attention of male politicians on either side of the Iron Curtain. But by 1995, their legacies were already being erased. Obscuring the contributions of East European women and socialist women from the developing countries allows for a particular story about the United Nations Decade for Women to be told, one that credits Western women and independent social movements for the progress of wom- 2 Introduction === [PDF page 21] === F IGUR E INT R O.1 Valentina Tereshkova and Elena Lagadinova, circa 1970. en’s rights during that era. But the Cold War context was just as important as any march or consciousness-raising session. Superpower rivalries played a key role in bringing global attention to the status of women in the mid-1970s. Although women had advocated for various rights long before the 1975 un International Women’s Year, members of the second sex still faced a vast ocean of legal, economic, and cultural barriers. In Western democracies, bias conspired to keep women in their domestic roles, and those who ventured out into the workforce struggled against pay discrimination, sexual harassment, and glass ceilings. In developing countries, poverty, colonialism, and patriarchal traditions combined to keep women subservient to, and economically dependent on, men. Even in the state socialist countries, which supposedly had solved the “woman question” through the abolition of private property and the full incorporation of women into the labor force, women staggered under the weight of the double burden of paid employment and domestic work. The first three world conferences — Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, and Nairobi in 1985 — forced national governments to expend new resources to examine laws, collect data, and create special women’s desks and ministries. Governments enacted measures to ensure women’s ownership and control of property, as well as improvements in women’s Introduction 3 === [PDF page 22] === F IGU RE IN TRO.2 Chibesa Kankasa, circa 1970. rights with respect to inheritance, child custody, and loss of nationality. In Copenhagen, Valentina Tereshkova, Chibesa Kankasa, and other representatives from un member countries signed the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (cedaw), a treaty that still serves as an international Bill of Rights for women. The convention explicitly protected women’s reproductive rights, and it encouraged nations to resist cultural norms and practices that oppressed women in the public and the private sphere. International events between 1975 and 1985 also challenged millennia of ideas about women’s “natural” roles and opened a new landscape of opportunities because two rival superpowers vied for the hearts and minds of the world’s women. This book recaptures some of the energy and enthusiasm that infused socialist women’s activism and argues that their contributions to the history of twentieth-century women’s rights should no longer be ignored. Leftist women in the Global South forged strategic alliances with their counterparts in Eastern Europe, which allowed them to amplify their collective voices on the international stage. 4 Introduction === [PDF page 23] === Recuperating the stories of women such as Elena Lagadinova and Lily Monze can help us rethink the possible role of state actors in challenging millennia of entrenched sexism and discrimination. The un Decade for Women provided a platform for women’s organizing across the boundaries of class, race, religion, ethnicity, and the nationstate, even as Cold War ideological positions divided women into the West (capitalist), the East (communist), and the Global South. But even these ideological positions did not map neatly onto political realities: there were plenty of socialists and communists in the capitalist West; the “communist” East was a flexibly defined group of nations that usually (but not always) supported the Soviet Union, including Southern countries such as Cuba and Vietnam.5 The developing countries represented a conglomeration of newly independent nations following various paths to economic development, either nonaligned or aligned with one of the two hegemonic power blocs. During the Cold War, and especially at the United Nations, these three loosely defined and ever-shifting blocs were often homogenized into what was then known as the First, Second, and Third Worlds. These three worlds supposedly represented the fault lines of geopolitics, and the women’s activists who participated in the United Nations were well aware of the deep divides that pitted governments against one another in the international arena. When asked in 2011 to comment on the role of women from Eastern Europe at the un conferences, Arvonne Fraser, a member of the official US delegation in Mexico and Denmark, recalled that the socialist women had been “a very strong presence” at the meetings, despite the few efforts to preserve the history of their activism. Indeed, women such as Elena Lagadinova helped shape the eleven-year period that gave birth to the “global women’s movement” or the “worldwide women’s movement,”6 terms that loosely refer to the networks of women that mobilized around, and participated in, the un conferences on women, including all of the official and unofficial preparatory meetings aimed at influencing the intergovernmental debates and parallel ngo forums. Of course, using a term such as the “global women’s movement” elides much complexity. From the beginning, women’s activism had been influenced by a wide variety of vastly differing political projects, and it is impossible to speak of one global “feminism.”7 Similarly, from the outset “global women’s movement” referred to a complex conglomeration of often competing movements that represented women from a broad range of ideological perspectives. Even within the Western capitalist countries, Introduction 5 === [PDF page 24] === F IG U RE IN TRO.3 Elena Lagadinova, Nairobi, 1985. there were multiple feminist perspectives and there was much internal struggle among varying groups of women advocating for different types of rights, whether they were social, economic, or political. But because the women’s activism catalyzed by the International Women’s Year and the un Decade for Women happened within a bounded time frame, subsequent feminist activists and authors have often found it convenient to speak of one singular global movement for women’s rights, a movement supposedly led by liberal feminists from the Western capitalist countries, the Gloria Steinems and Betty Friedans of Ms. Magazine and the National Organization for Women. But it was women from the Eastern Bloc countries who initially pushed for an International Women’s Year to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf), a global women’s organization that enjoyed consultative status with the Commission on the Status of Women (csw) at the United Nations.8 In 1972, the General Assembly voted to declare 1975 the International Year of Women, and the widf began planning an elaborate World Congress of Women to be hosted in East Berlin in the German Democratic Republic.9 Since the McCarthy era, the US government had considered the widf a “communist front” organization, so American women hoped there would be an official United Nations conference in a noncommunist country.10 Initially, 6 Introduction === [PDF page 25] === the US government did not want to waste money on a conference about women, but under domestic pressure it agreed to help sponsor an official un conference in Mexico so that the communists would not host the only global event for International Women’s Year.11 The Mexico City conference in 1975, and the two subsequent Copenhagen and Nairobi conferences, brought official representatives of the world’s governments together for deliberations under the auspices of the United Nations. Yet from the outset, little international consensus existed about what a women’s conference should strive to achieve. Many Western women, especially the Americans, expected the conference to focus on specific questions of legal and economic equality, as well as efforts to oppose the continued patriarchal oppression of women. A women’s conference was supposed to be about women. Women such as Tereshkova from the Soviet Union, Lagadinova from Bulgaria, and others from the communist bloc felt they had already earned legal and economic equality. They believed that the conference should provide an opportunity for women to speak about more pressing international issues, providing a forum where they could weigh in on global geopolitics and advocate for peace. Since men dominated the United Nations and most national governments, women needed an opportunity to make their voices heard. A women’s conference should be for women. Admittedly, the Second World position largely rested on essentialist assumptions about women’s true nature, or what some scholars have called “difference feminism” or “relational feminism.”12 Since women were mothers and primary caregivers, they were supposedly less inclined to violence, and international relations would be more peaceful, based on mutual understanding and cooperation, if women had power at the international level. Because women performed their care work in a wider societal context, representatives of the state socialist women’s organizations also believed that women’s issues could not be separated from the greater political and economic issues that shaped their lives. Women such as Kankasa and Monze from Zambia largely agreed with their counterparts in countries such as Bulgaria and East Germany and demanded that the official conference allow women to speak on issues of development, colonialism, racism, apartheid, imperialism, and the creation of a New International Economic Order (nieo), which would radically redistribute the world’s wealth.13 Indeed, by 1985 most women from the developing world (and quite a few women in the First World) had embraced the idea that feminist strug- Introduction 7 === [PDF page 26] === F IGU RE IN TRO.4 Valentina Tereshkova (center) and Elena Lagadinova (left), 1975. gles could not be separated from issues such as national independence and economic development.14 Women’s equality with men proved useless in a nation torn apart by war or in contexts of racial inequality. This position often frustrated liberal or “equality” feminists from the West who insisted on the primacy of “women’s issues,” which they took to mean the de facto legal and economic equality between men and women. As Irene Tinker, a prominent American women’s rights advocate put it, “We didn’t believe that men and women were the same, but if we didn’t say they were the same we wouldn’t get any of the male privileges.”15 This liberal feminist position came to dominate the politics of the official delegations of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other key Western countries.16 They wanted to focus on removing the barriers that prevented women from achieving the kind of independence and autonomy that men enjoyed and on achieving equity in both the workplace and the home. These liberal feminists often frowned on special labor protections for women workers or on gender-specific entitlements (such as 8 Introduction === [PDF page 27] === maternity leaves) because they introduced inequalities based on sex. They often referred to the discussion of other issues as “politicization,” an attempt to divert attention from the uncomfortable topic of sexual inequality.17 At Mexico City, a French delegate, Françoise Giroux, argued, “The International Women’s Year will have been another mockery if the results are subtly diverted toward either national or international political causes, no matter how pressing, respectable or noble their aims might be.”18 Tinker, who attended the ngo forums of all three conferences, believed that male politicians from the developing countries tried to use the women’s conferences to further their agendas: “Did women really have any chance of changing apartheid by voting about it at the conference? The answer is no. Take those issues to the [General Assembly].”19 Despite these protests, the world conferences did consider more than just women’s issues, and the American “equality” feminists and their allies found themselves outnumbered by the coalition of women representing the “difference” feminism of the Eastern Bloc and the countries from the developing world.20 Thus, superpower machinations (on both sides) profoundly shaped the contours of International Women’s Year and the un Decade for Women that followed, but by the 1995 conference in Beijing, the importance of the Second World contribution was being erased from the history of global women’s activism, prompting several East European women to circulate their “Statement from the Non-Region.” Yet anyone who goes back to read primary documents about the Decade can find evidence of the importance of superpower rivalry. In 1987, Arvonne Fraser wrote openly about the Cold War tensions in 1975: “American women learned that they could be the target of public vilification, which shocked many of them deeply... the new U.S. women’s movement had taught many American women to think of all women as friends, people united in a common cause. To find this not true, in their first international encounter, was, to some, an infuriating and very disappointing experience.”21 Other first-person accounts of the un conferences brim with references to Cold War conflicts. Jane Jaquette, an American political scientist who attended the parallel ngo tribune in Mexico City, also recalled that women from the developing countries challenged the leadership of American women: “I found North American feminists surprised to discover that not everyone shared their view that patriarchy was the major cause of women’s oppression, and that Third World women held views closer to Marx than Friedan.”22 In her 2005 intellectual history of women and the Introduction 9 === [PDF page 28] === United Nations, the Indian economist Devaki Jain explicitly wrote about how state socialist women supported the positions of women from the Global South: “By the 1960s, the majority of the members in the General Assembly were from the newly liberated countries and these nations and the Eastern bloc countries had become a strong presence in the un. [The Eastern Bloc] supported the stand taken by developing countries on various issues surrounding development, identity, political participation, and economic policies.”23 Women from the Third World found powerful allies in their state socialist counterparts, and the growing solidarity between the communist countries and the developing countries created a variety of ideological problems for the liberal feminists in the West, especially in the face of accusations that the very concept of feminism was just another form of cultural imperialism. Reporting on the first conference in Mexico City, one journalist wrote that some African women considered what they called “Western feminism” a neocolonialist plot to divide and conquer the men and women of newly independent countries in the Global South.24 In 2017, historian Jocelyn Olcott captured these tensions at the Mexico City conference in a chapter aptly titled “Betty Friedan versus the Third World.”25 Indeed, the United States failed to sign two key documents produced by the official women’s conferences and only selectively endorsed a third. The American delegation refused to support the “Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and their Contribution to Development and Peace” (1975) for a variety of reasons, but most famously because it equated “Zionism” with the words “racism” and “imperialism.” For the same reason, the House of Representatives passed a hasty resolution forbidding the US delegation from signing on to the Programme of Action of 1980, the official conference document supporting a wide range of women’s legal rights in terms of property, nationality, and child custody. Facing a similar fiasco in Nairobi, the US delegation threatened to walk out of the conference if the word “Zionism” appeared anywhere in the conference document. Only the careful diplomacy of the Kenyans averted disaster. Still, the Americans submitted reservations to twelve different paragraphs of the Forward-Looking Strategies, disagreeing with issues that ranged from Palestinian women’s rights and economic sanctions on the South African apartheid regime to the concept of “equal pay for work of equal value.”26 No other country took exception to as many paragraphs as the United States, and the Eastern Bloc countries had no reservations whatsoever. So where did this history go? Why did East European women in 10 Introduction === [PDF page 29] === Beijing feel compelled to circulate a map reminding other women’s activists that they still existed? Victors Writing History On March 6, 2017, Forbes magazine ran an article titled, “The First Woman in Space Turns 80, and You Probably Never Heard of Her.”27 Two years earlier, Foreign Affairs had published an article asserting that Elena Lagadinova was “the most important feminist you’ve never heard of.” 28 In 2011, Devaki Jain paid tribute to Vida Tomšič, a Yugoslav communist and women’s activist. “I know that Vida is not in your pantheon of goddesses,” Jain said, speaking to a largely American audience, “but she certainly is in mine.”29 All three women were giants during the un Decade for Women, but what unites them today is their obscurity in the historiography. Western women simply had/have more resources to record their histories (see my discussion of sources in the appendix), so the general story of international women’s activism at the United Nations has been dominated by the memoirs and oral histories of women from the United States. Attempts have been made to correct this imbalance. For example, Jain’s Women, Development, and the un: A Sixty-year Quest for Equality and Justice (2005) and Peggy Antrobus’s The Global Women’s Movement (2004) both tried to decenter the history of the un Decade for Women by focusing on the contributions of women from the Global South, but the perception of Western dominance remains. Commenting on the persistence of this trope, Peggy Antrobus writes, “As someone involved in many of the processes that have led to the construction of this worldwide movement, and a witness to the ways in which it has changed since the 1970s, largely through the influence of Third World feminists and women of col our in North America, I am amazed to find that its image remains one of a movement associated with white, middle-class women from North America and [Western] Europe.”30 Within the West, this view has been savaged by “Third World women” and women of color, many of whom attended the parallel forums for ngos and dissented from the official US position (especially in Nairobi). As a result, it is much easier to reclaim the history of socialist and communist women in China or in the Third World (Angola, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and so on) than it is to critically reevaluate the work of women from the Second World. Even when it is acknowledged that state socialist women were powerful actors on the international stage, their contributions are downplayed because of Introduction 11 === [PDF page 30] === F IGU RE IN TRO.5 Devaki Jain, 2011. the persistent stereotype that they were dupes of male communist elites back home.31 Moreover, while there are many books on the “global women’s movement,” none focus on the contributions of women from state socialist countries, and few include their voices, even when the Cold War context and the “politicization” of the meetings is explicitly mentioned. As Francisca de Hann has argued, Cold War stereotypes still deeply influence the historiography of women’s movements.32 Today, when historians and activists discuss conference tensions, they focus on conflicts between the Global North (Western capitalist countries) and the Global South. The former state socialist East is disappeared. For instance, one important volume collected autobiographical essays from twenty-seven women involved in the international women’s movement.33 The book, Developing Power: How Women Changed International Development (2004), edited by Arvonne Fraser and Irene Tinker, included women from the developing world but did not include one entry from a woman from the former Second World, as if the latter had no part in transforming the political and economic realities of developing countries during the Cold War. In Complicit Sisters: Gender and Women’s Issues across North-South Divides (2017), Sara de Jong demotes the former Second World to the Global South, effectively erasing the alternative history of state socialist women’s organizations in the former Eastern Bloc.34 Although Jocelyn Olcott’s The International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (2017), on the Mexico City conference, is far more attentive to the Cold War context and recognizes the antagonisms of the “Eastern Bloc and non-aligned delegates” versus the “Anglophone and West Europeans,” Olcott’s eviden- 12 Introduction === [PDF page 31] === tiary base consisted primarily of archives in the United States and Mexico.35 With the exception of Tereshkova, East European women are rarely named as individual actors and are largely absent from her narrative. This is not to assert that the contributions of Second World women were more significant than those of their colleagues in the Global South, but merely to recognize that they did indeed make important contributions. Although the omission of Eastern Bloc women most likely results from lack of access to the primary sources in East European languages, powerful social forces in the United States still conspire to squash or delegitimize histories that take East European or state socialist women’s activism seriously. It should not be forgotten that the US government targeted women with leftist sympathies after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The historian Landon Storrs demonstrated that advocates for women’s and consumer rights during the first Red Scare in the early 1920s were painted as communist sympathizers and thus discredited with the broader American public.36 In her Red Feminism, American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (2002), Kate Weigand recuperated many of the communist roots of American feminism and demonstrated how these links were deliberately severed and hidden to avoid suspicion and persecution during the second Red Scare.37 Daniel Horowitz exposed Betty Friedan’s pre-housewife activism in the Progressive Party (much to Friedan’s personal dismay),38 and Erik McDuffie explored the importance of the American Communist Party to the organizing of radical black feminists, docu menting their struggles against mainstream anticommunism.39 But in all cases, the history of leftist women’s activism remains marginal to the fantasy of feminist history that dominates the historiography of global women’s movements.40 Three broad reasons help to make sense of the way the victors have written this history. First, in the West, and in the US especially, anticommunist ideas remain strong, and they conspire to delegitimize anything socialist or communist. This was most obvious in the McCarthy era, when leftist feminists were accused of “un-American activities.” Beginning in 1948, the political climate was rife with paranoia and fear following the attack on the Congress of American Women (caw), the simultaneous savaging of the widf (which ultimately led to the suspension of their consultative status with the United Nations), and the ongoing insinuations against organizations such as Women Strike for Peace (wsp) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf).41 Leftist women’s activists felt compelled to distance themselves as much as pos- Introduction 13 === [PDF page 32] === sible from socialism in theory and in practice.42 The accusations of rightwing politicians that American feminists must be communists, and the fbi infiltration of domestic women’s organizations had a chilling effect on women’s rights advocates.43 Prudent American women kept safely apart from their counterparts in the Eastern Bloc. Thus, in addition to lack of resources and the lack of interest in their own countries, former women’s activists in Eastern Europe must contend with rigid stereotypes that have persisted long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.44 Second, those scholars and activists who have acknowledged the existence of state socialist women’s organizations nonetheless claim that these women lacked “real” power.45 Since they reported to male party leaders in the Politburo and considered class and racial injustice as just as egregious as sexual inequality, state socialist women were not pure feminists. Because the socialist state created and controlled the mass women’s organizations and prohibited independent women’s groups, all policies regarding women supposedly came from above, and Western observers believed that, rather than being the voice of women to the Party, state women’s organizations existed to promote the Party’s goals among women.46 Because the women in these committees were often members of the Communist Party and privileged the expansion of state welfare policies over the promotion of individual self-actualization and autonomy,47 they were seen as blind dupes of Marxist patriarchy, rendering them insufficiently concerned with true women’s issues.48 In Women under Communism (1978), Barbara Wolf Jancar asserts, “Throughout history, women have served the patriarchal establishment, whether as supporters of the status quo or as revolutionaries seeking to replace one variant of male political order with another. Women are continuing this support in the Communist countries.”49 Thirty-six years later, the American philosopher Nanette Funk continued to validate these stereotypes. Although Funk admitted that communism did “good things” for women, she insisted that communist women deserve little credit for societal changes because they worked within the Party structure: “Promoting women’s employment, if done only because of Party directives, makes one an instrument, not an agent or feminist. When women’s organizations acted as the state wanted, one needs further evidence that they did not act only because of the will of the state. If so, they were not agents of their own actions, proactive, but instruments.”50 In Funk’s view, then, there were no real feminists in the Eastern Bloc countries, and thus there could be no feminism in the Western conception of the word. Since state socialist women were often working for the 14 Introduction === [PDF page 33] === states that advocated for pro-women policies, they could be seen only as acting as an extension of the state, regardless of whether they personally shared the beliefs promoted by that state. If liberal feminists rejected the idea that state socialist women could be feminist agents (or agents at all), there is little wonder that they are written out of the history of feminism. Third, and perhaps most important for this book, is the fact that most of the women from Eastern Bloc countries and their socialist allies in the developing world would not have called themselves “feminists.” Indeed, as I discuss in depth in chapter 1, they reserved the word as an insult to be hurled at “bourgeois” women who hoped to increase their political and economic rights at the expense of their working-class compatriots. Socialist and communist women from the countries of Eastern Europe, along with socialist and communist women from a wide range of developingworld countries taking noncapitalist paths to development (Angola, Cuba, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and so on) and women members of socialist and communist parties in Western countries would refer to themselves as “women’s activists.” Many viewed women’s rights as a fundamental part of the socialist or communist ideal and did not believe that an independent women’s movement was necessary to achieve sexual equality with men. In fact, the Romanian philosopher Mihaela Miroiu has argued that “communist feminism” is a contradiction in terms.51 Scholars have struggled to name this particular brand of state-centric women’s activism, calling it “socialist feminism,” “state feminism,” “communist feminism,” or “left feminism.” But all of these attempts to name communist women’s activists “feminists” elides the idea that one might be able to work for the rights of women without being a feminist or that “communists” are as much in favor of women’s rights as “feminists.” Semantic disagreements aside, we must recover the forgotten history of state socialist women’s activists at the United Nations. First, the stereotype perpetuated by Funk and others (of socialist women as mere dupes of men with dictatorial power) is incorrect. Funk imagines a monolithic and rigid centralized state with little room for intervention by women. But what if women helped determine the “will of the state”? The leaders of state socialist women’s organizations, who were themselves members of both the Party and the state apparatus, might have wielded influence among their male comrades. What if these women truly believed that state ownership of the means of production provided the best possibility for women’s emancipation and willingly incorporated their demands into wider programs for revolutionary change? Rather than merely supporting Introduction 15 === [PDF page 34] === a male political order, what if communist women chose to become part of a new political program that had the emancipation of women as one of its central principles? This is not to deny the serious political constraints of working within a state socialist system; it is merely to question the idea that communist women suffered from false consciousness by believing that communism would bring greater social, legal, and economic equality. In the stories of the women I tell, I will show that they were often proactive agents, and not the mere instruments that Funk describes. Second, women in the developing world gained power and influence because of the Cold War, negotiating a place between the United States and the Soviet Union. As women’s activists rose up to make demands at the United Nations, they often found support from the women in the Eastern Bloc. In 2005, Devaki Jain lamented the end of the Cold War and the loss of the critical political space opened up by superpower rivalry: “The disintegration of the East and West blocs critically impacted the approach to development. The Socialist bloc had supported approaches that required a strong state, a thrust toward public provision of basic services, and a more equitable global economic program such as the New International Economic Order. It was often an ally of the newly liberated states as they attempted to forge coalitions such as the [Non-Aligned Movement] or the Group of 77 to negotiate with their former colonial masters.”52 Although my sources are limited to oral history interviews and the fugitive collections of the archival documents that I could find scattered across three continents (see the appendix), I have endeavored to present the events of the un Decade for Women from the perspective of Bulgarian and Zambian women who considered themselves women’s activists. In the chapters that follow I hope to explore some of the contacts between women in the state socialist countries and women in the Global South and how these networks of left-leaning women impacted the un Decade for Women. While they never achieved everything they claimed, state socialist countries (in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia) did make real strides in terms of women’s rights before the Western democracies and their allies in the developing world. The policies and programs put in place were implemented by the state, but they were often shaped by women working within that state, women empowered at different times and in different ways. Their state-centric approach to women’s issues was promoted throughout the Global South through solidarity exchanges promoted by mass women’s organizations. Yes, these exchanges often supported Eastern Bloc foreign policy goals in Africa, Asia, and Latin Amer- 16 Introduction === [PDF page 35] === ica, but they also empowered leftist women as agents of social change and forced local male elites to make space for women’s organizing. Third World leaders who wanted military, technical, or financial assistance from the Eastern Bloc had to at least pretend to care about women’s issues, and when compared with countries at similar levels of economic development, the state-centric approach provided ample empirical evidence that socialism challenged sexual inequality in traditional patriarchal societies.53 Third, although the US tried to delegitimize anything socialist for the better part of the twentieth century, the activism of Eastern Bloc women and their state socialist allies in the Global South did increase attention to international women’s issues in the capitalist West. During the Cold War, the West had to deal with the international perception that state socialist countries were the only champions of the socially weak. At the United Nations, the Soviet Union and its allies often accused the capitalist West of failing to improve the lives of women, youth, workers, and racial minorities, accusations that forced attention to marginalized groups and proved productive for the creation of new international conventions to protect social and economic rights. For example, the French Swiss historian Sandrine Kott has shown that superpower rivalry at the International Labor Organization (ilo) had a positive effect on the negotiations about, and eventual creation of, international treaties on forced labor.54 In particular, Kott argues that coalitions between the Eastern Bloc countries and nations in the developing world forced concessions from the advanced capitalist countries. Cold War tensions not only protected workers from different forms of forced labor but also reified a new political language in which work was seen as an important social right. In the end, the world’s workers benefited from the ideological tensions that manifested themselves at the ilo. “Indeed,” she writes, “the conflict between the two blocs, like the decolonization process, demarcated a favorable period for defining the juncture between human and social rights. In this respect, the alliance between officials from southern and communist countries could have a catalyzing effect.”55 Similarly, the ongoing activism of socialist women in the Second and Third Worlds may have increased Western attention to the importance of domestic women’s rights. The British sociologist Maxine Molyneux, for example, suggested that “East-West rivalry” proved partially responsible for the rapid “catching up” of the Western democracies with regard to women’s issues in the 1970s and 1980s.56 The demonstrated progress— the legal rights, professional opportunities, and social entitlements enjoyed by Introduction 17 === [PDF page 36] === East European women — as well as women in Cuba, China, Vietnam and other nations pursuing a state socialist path to development—may have pressured Western governments to address women’s issues. The coalition of Second World and Third World activists claimed that only socialism could guarantee women’s rights, and Western democracies may have felt compelled to defend their record, especially when faced with domestic constituencies who could point to the purported achievements of the communist world. As Arvonne Fraser explained in her memoir She’s No Lady (2007), “Nations have egos,” and American feminists “played on that.”57 In this book, I argue that socialist women’s activism — particularly the networks forged between women in Eastern Europe and the Global South — proved to be a catalyst for the rapid expansion of women’s rights in the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, telling the stories of state socialist women’s organizations allows us to reconsider the nature and goals of contemporary feminism. Nancy Fraser, Susan Faludi, and others have argued that Western feminism has been coopted by the economic project of neoliberalism, with its fetishization of unfettered free markets, emaciated states, and dismantled social safety nets. In 2009, Fraser published a stunning critique of contemporary liberal feminism’s abandonment of social justice issues and its narrow focus on identity politics. Her article, titled “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” outlined how “the dream of women’s emancipation [was] harnessed to the engine of capitalist accumulation.”58 Rather than challenging the structures of inequality that oppressed women, liberal feminists (such as those who concentrated on supporting women’s autonomy in a world of legally guaranteed sexual equality with men) unwittingly paved the way for the expansion of an economic system that ultimately increased the wealth and power of patriarchal, capitalist elites. This was a far cry from the initial intentions of the feminist project: “All told, second-wave feminism espoused a transformative political project, premised on an expanded understanding of injustice and a systematic critique of capitalist society. The movement’s most advanced currents saw their struggles as multi-dimensional, and simultaneously against economic exploitation, status hierarchy and political subjugation. To them, moreover, feminism appeared as part of a broader emancipatory project, in which the struggles against gender injustices were necessarily linked to struggles against racism, imperialism, homophobia and class domination, all of which required transformation of the deep structures of capitalist so- 18 Introduction === [PDF page 37] === ciety.”59 It bears repeating that, while Western feminisms were always diverse, a certain dominant liberal perspective (championed by organizations such as the National Organization of Women) infused the politics of the official delegations to the un women’s conferences between 1975 and 1985. This US government-sanctioned version of feminism looked at women’s issues in isolation from their larger social, political or economic context; it was a feminism that focused on equality of opportunity within the existing economic structure, with an implicit or explicit acceptance of that structure as fundamentally just. A recent legacy of this type of liberal feminism (what the socialists used to call “bourgeois feminism”) can be found in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013), by Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. Millions of copies have been sold of the book, which provides a hyper-individualized program for women to succeed in corporate America. Sandberg admonishes women to work harder, to get their partners to work harder, and to overcome their internalized gender roles. As Nancy Fraser notes, “Where feminists once criticised a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to ‘lean in.’ A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised ‘care’ and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy.”60 Sandberg is not likely to challenge the underlying structures of the economy; nor will she point out that the economic system is based on ever increasing inequality and exploitation, even if that exploitation predominantly affects women. The stories of the women I tell in these pages deserve to be heard, not only because they have largely been forgotten, but also because these women championed a different vision of activism that continued to critique the structures of capitalist societies and couched women’s issues within broader issues of social injustice, even as the liberal feminist strand became more dominant in the advanced capitalist countries. This liberal feminism focused narrowly on achieving rights that could exist without the public provision of social services for women (such as maternity leaves and childcare) by claiming that special state supports for women perpetuated inequality between men and women who should be treated as if they were biologically indistinguishable. The socialists recognized that men and women were different (specifically with regard to their childbearing capacities) and argued that equity between men and women could be achieved only by state intervention.61 They further critiqued the specific Introduction 19 === [PDF page 38] === focus on equality as usually benefiting only a minority of elite women and that women’s rights granted within a fundamentally unfair economic system could easily be reversed by future male leaders. The advocacy efforts of women from the socialist world played an important role in the development of the global women’s movements during the Cold War, and telling some of the women’s individual stories and recuperating their perspectives might help contemporary liberal feminism free itself from its unfortunate attachment to the worst form of capitalism. Although these women were not perfect, and we should be careful not to ignore the ways they might have been complicit with authoritarianism in their own countries, we must admit that women living in the state socialist countries benefited from progressive legislation and equal rights far earlier than women in the Western democracies. Women’s organizations in the East European countries also actively advocated for women’s rights, both at home and abroad. Until the beginning of the 1970s, the Soviet Union and its allies dominated the international discussion of women’s issues at the United Nations and at their world congresses on women, organized and sponsored by the Women’s International Democratic Federation.62 Long before 1975, the widf had been a powerful vehicle for promoting the political interests of colonial and postcolonial countries around the world.63 By the late 1960s, as new nations were born in Africa and Asia, women’s rights had become a rallying cry of socialist and communist movements throughout the developing world as Eastern Bloc countries provided financial and logistical support to help set up state women’s organizations based on the East European model, resulting in social, political, and economic gains for women across the globe. By producing a less lopsided version of this history, we can not only correct a historical misperception but can help to turn feminism back into the broader and more liberatory project it was designed to be. Bulgaria and Zambia The ideal way to write the story of state socialist women’s activism would be to do a massive overview of all of the Eastern Bloc countries and their socialist allies in the Global South, but in these pages I focus on two case studies. Given the limitations of time and resources, this book examines the history of the United Nations women’s conferences from the perspectives of Bulgaria and Zambia in the hope that their unique geopolitical positions can provide a glimpse into what an alternative historiography 20 Introduction === [PDF page 39] === FIGU RE IN TRO.6 widf office staff, 1985, East Berlin. might look like. Although I initially started my research in Bulgaria because it was the post-socialist country I knew best, I was surprised to learn that the Bulgarian women’s committee had been the de facto leader of the Eastern Bloc countries during the un Decade for Women — and, indeed, that its president, Dr. Elena Lagadinova, had served as the general rapporteur for the conference in Nairobi.64 Because Bulgaria was a small, recently poor, and largely agricultural country, it shared many structural characteristics in common with the newly emerging countries of the developing world. Bulgaria also claimed “postcolonial” status because it had been subsumed within the Ottoman Empire for five centuries. The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (cbwm) used this history to strengthen its links with women in Africa and Asia. The Bulgarian case provides one example of how a state socialist women’s committee operated in practice, although I understand that in some respects the Bulgarian committee was exceptional. Compared with other state women’s committees in the Eastern Bloc, the Bulgarians had more independent financing and autonomy. Their president for more than two decades was a national heroine — the youngest female partisan fighting Introduction 21 === [PDF page 40] === F IGU RE IN TRO.7 Elena Lagadinova, 2013. against the Nazi-allied Bulgarian monarchy during World War II.65 Furthermore, under the thirty-five-year rule of Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria was a “soft socialist” country, with a less repressive apparatus than its northern neighbors in the Warsaw Pact.66 In 1968, Zhivkov had taken tentative steps toward a more open society until the Prague Spring forced a cautious retreat.67 Despite this, the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (sometimes also known as the Committee of Bulgarian Women (cbw) enjoyed new authority after 1968 with the power to propose legislation and take delinquent enterprises to court if they failed to grant maternity leaves or relocate pregnant women to less strenuous jobs.68 Bulgaria also had a prominent female member of the Politburo, Tsola Dragoicheva,69 and Sonya Bakish, the editor-in-chief of Bulgaria’s state women’s magazine, was the wife of the country’s prime minister.70 These powerful women made a crucial difference. But aside from these specific details, the cbwm operated under constraints similar to those of the women’s committees in other state socialist countries. Bulgaria was an authoritarian state with only two legal parties: the Bulgarian Communist Party and its junior partner, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union. The state forbade independent organizations, and the cbwm monopolized women’s issues. Most (but not all) leaders of the women’s committee were members of the Communist Party and were 22 Introduction === [PDF page 41] === committed communists. They shared a suspicion of Western-style “bourgeois” feminism and tended to essentialize women’s roles as mothers and caregivers. Finally, although they managed to pass legislation, they were not always capable of enforcing it. Despite their explicit powers of “societal control,” they still faced a sometimes immovable socialist bureaucracy and a paranoid state security apparatus. Although I am deeply cognizant of the varieties of state socialism and hesitant to homogenize the region, I believe that the experiences of the cbwm during the United Nations’ International Women’s Year and the subsequent Decade for Women can at least give us a small glimpse into the experiences of women on the other side of the Iron Curtain, even if these experiences are not perfectly generalizable. Women’s committees in all state socialist countries focused more on expanding state entitlements for women and families than on trying to challenge patriarchal culture in the home. They were openly pronatalist in their policies and justified their activities in terms of larger Communist Party goals. Perhaps most significant, they operated in closed societies that violated political rights such as freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. Bulgarians, like residents of other state socialist countries in the twentieth century, suffered surveillance by the secret police, shortages of consumer goods, and restrictions on travel. Finally, and most important, in the international arena, Bulgaria, like other countries in Eastern Europe, had to be mindful of the larger foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union. In these things, Bulgaria shared much in common with its Warsaw Pact brother countries. Zambia represents a case study of a technically nonaligned country that in practice was aligned with the Eastern Bloc. Of course, one landlocked postcolonial African nation cannot represent the entirety of the socialist-leaning developing world. But Zambia presents an interesting case study because it achieved independence from Britain in 1964, and Kenneth Kaunda, the nation’s first president, continued to rule Zambia until 1991. Kaunda’s ideological vision consisted of an “African humanism” that concerned itself with earthly action and put people, not profits, at the center of government policy. Inspired by other secular humanist traditions, Kaunda and leaders like him rejected capitalism and parliamentary democracy as foreign imports into Africa, imposed during the colonial era to justify the exploitation of the local population. Like many other countries emerging from colonialism, Zambia initially attempted to walk the path of democratic nonalignment. But eight un- Introduction 23 === [PDF page 42] === stable countries surrounded Zambia, many with ongoing civil wars between autochthonous populations and white settler colonialists. In 1972, Kaunda, fearing internal divisions instigated by external forces, rewrote the Zambian constitution and declared Zambia a “One Party Participatory Democracy.” The constitution of Zambia’s Second Republic banned all parties except for Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (unip). With Western Europeans and Americans supporting white, racist regimes such as those in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, the Zambians eventually accepted generous Soviet aid to support and arm the independence fighters living in camps within Zambia’s borders. I chose Zambia as my second case study because, although nonaligned, it maintained robust contacts with women from the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe. After visiting Zambia and interviewing the leaders of the Zambian equivalent of the cbwm, I also learned that the unip Women’s League had a similar structure as its Bulgarian counterpart and that the Zambian women’s movement was state-based and discouraged independent women’s organizing.71 As in the Bulgarian case, the leader of the unip Women’s Brigade (which later became the Women’s League), Chibesa Kankasa, was a national heroine, a fighter for Zambian independence who served in the government for almost thirty years. My interviews and archival research made clear that Zambian women’s activists benefited from Eastern Bloc material and logistical support between 1975 and 1985, a period that coincided with a veritable explosion of activities around women’s issues in Zambia — issues that would lose prominence after 1991, when Kaunda allowed multiparty elections and fell from power. Like Bulgaria’s, Zambia’s situation is unique, but I also believe that it can provide insight into the struggles of women’s committees within countries of the Global South trying to navigate their way through the evermounting tensions of the Cold War. Rival superpower blocs competed for influence in the countries newly freed from colonialism and provided resources for a wide range of development projects. Perhaps the biggest losers of the collapse of communism in East Europe were the developing countries. In 1994, two American political scientists argued that the end of the Cold War would allow Western governments to reduce foreign aid for African countries experimenting with humanism-inspired socialism: From independence on, the Third World, especially the African part of it, played an undeservedly important role in international politics. The Third World countries set the West off against the East in 24 Introduction === [PDF page 43] === a bidding war for their support. The West spent more than $225 billion to curry favor with often corrupt and incompetent and sometimes bloody tyrants. The West’s guilt feelings over colonialism have ended, and even humanitarian aid is drying up. But the final blow to the Third World, especially to the African part of it, came with the termination of the cold war in 1989; the West will no longer have to support authoritarian regimes and socialist economies to keep them from going communist.72 Zambia happened to be one of the “socialist economies” that benefited from the “bidding war” between East and West, and this bidding war extended to women’s issues. Countries such as Zambia became testing grounds for which economic system could better provide a postcolonial pathway to economic development and true liberation for women. This issue was particularly fraught in the context of southern Africa, where national selfdetermination and the oppressive system of apartheid in South Africa overshadowed “pure” women’s issues. While the US Agency for International Development (usaid) supported women’s “basic needs” (the name for a United Nations Development Program effort that emphasized the need to support a specific package of goods and services that included such things as clean water, shelter, education, and access to healthcare), Eastern Bloc countries such as Bulgaria supported Zambian women’s demands to end institutionalized racism by arguing that attention to women’s basic needs should include racial and sexual equality. In the war for the hearts and minds of the Global South, therefore, the Eastern Bloc often had the upper hand, and the steady loss of women in the developing world to the “communists” had a real impact on the global discourse on women’s rights as debated at the United Nations during the Decade for Women. Furthermore, women from the Third World provided new ideas and strategies for women’s organizing to their activist colleagues in the Eastern Bloc, and the circular exchange of information between the two groups strengthened their collective power at the un. There are many stories of women’s activists that Western feminists have never heard of — women such as Elena Lagadinova, Maria Dinkova, Sonya Bakish, Ana Durcheva, Chibesa Kankasa, Lily Monze, and Senior Chieftainess Nkomeshya Mukamambo II. They fought for women’s rights in their own way, using the rhetorical tools available to them within specific cultural and historical contexts. They may not have been “feminists” in the classic sense, since they did not prioritize women’s interests above issues Introduction 25 === [PDF page 44] === F IGU RE IN TRO.8 Chibesa Kankasa, 1979 (far left). of class or race or national self-determination (a position we might today call “intersectionality”). But they believed that women’s issues were deeply embedded in larger political contexts. They saw no point in advocating for the equality of black men and women under a system of apartheid or for equal pay for equal work when the entire working class survived on less than subsistence wages. The socialists believed that women’s equity with men required some form of state intervention and necessitated a structural change in an economic system that devalued reproductive labor and care work. They believed that rights extended to women within a fundamentally unjust system would benefit only a minority of women and could too easily be taken away. The politics of recognition, to use Nancy Fraser’s phrase, should never take precedence over the politics of redistribution. Part I of this book lays the groundwork for the careful reading of the un Decade for Women that follows in part II. Chapter 1 deals with the theoretical literature on state feminism and the origins of the persistent stereotypes that color the dominant Western view of state socialist women’s organizing. Chapters 2 – 4 examine the intersections of women and socialist discourses of emancipation in the Bulgarian, American, and Zambian contexts to give readers a necessary historical grounding in the differing situations of women in the lead-up to the International Women’s Year. Although these chapters cover the same period of time, it is essential 26 Introduction === [PDF page 45] === to understand the specific domestic contexts in which women’s activism took place, even if this means covering the same chronological ground more than once. Chapter 5 rewinds the clock once more to examine the geopolitics of the Cold War and the way countries such as Zambia found themselves sandwiched between rival superpowers. Part II turns to the specific preparations for the events of the International Women’s Year and the subsequent un Decade for Women. The chapters follow chronologically and narrate the history of the un events from the perspective of Bulgarian and Zambian women, with occasional reflections on American reactions to the work of the state socialists. In the conclusion, I discuss the importance of remembering these stories as part of a political project to rescue feminism from its current role as handmaiden to neoliberalism. In 2010, the historian Augusta Dimou exposed how German history textbooks written after 1989 obscured the European roots and international appeal of socialism and ignored “the massive impact of leftist intellectual influences on the articulation of the liberation movements in the third world, in spite of the fact that decolonization is a standard topic in history textbooks on the twentieth century.”73 Dimou argued that officials in the German government intentionally suppressed a history of the state socialist past that included perspectives beyond the usual tropes of totalitarianism—the secret police, travel restrictions, and consumer goods shortages. Recognizing the positive influence of the Eastern Bloc on struggles for national liberation means recognizing a positive legacy of state socialism in Eastern Europe, something that may feel politically dangerous in the current historical moment. But academic freedom, a core principle of democratic societies, demands that intellectual inquiry remain independent of political manipulation. Intellectuals in communist countries once labored under the shackles of compulsory Marxism, a situation widely criticized by the advocates of freedom of thought and conscience. In 2018, it seems essential that researchers producing scholarship in the United States push back against the less visible, but no less binding, constraints of hegemonic neoliberalism. This does not require a wholesale rehabilitation of the state socialist past, nor a blindness to the real crimes and brutalities of twentieth-century communist regimes but, rather, a more nuanced examination of how some socialist ideals, including that of state-supported women’s emancipation, shaped the course of our collective history for the better. Introduction 27 === [PDF page 46] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 47] === Part I. Organizing Women under Socialism and Capitalism === [PDF page 48] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 49] === 1. State Feminism and the Woman Question In August 2010, I drove to the remote village of Gabarevo. I had scheduled an interview with a ninety-year-old Bulgarian woman named Krastina Tchomakova. She had worked for many years with the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (cbwm) and attended the first United Nations World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 as part of her country’s official delegation. The problem with interviewing nonagenarians, however, is that time does not operate consistently across the generations. When I arrived at Tchomakova’s cottage, she was sitting outside in her garden waiting for me in front of a huge pile of tomatoes, cucumbers, and green onions. After a friendly greeting, I understood that her nephew was preparing some fresh chicken in the kitchen. “Please don’t go to any trouble. I’m not hungry. It’s too hot to eat,” I explained in Bulgarian. “I would just like to ask you some questions about International Women’s Year and your work with the Committee.” “It’s not too hot to eat,” she said. “I’m hungry. I want to eat salad.” She slid a knife across the table toward me and pointed to a bowl. Tchomakova was small and a bit hunched over. She wore a loose, light pink cotton smock and squinted her eyes at me. The heat blurred the air, and the nephew brought me a glass of water. Perhaps she would talk while I cut the vegetables, I thought, but I had no way of taking notes. I did not bring my digital recorder because I knew from previous experience that older Bulgarians spoke less freely when I recorded them. I sat down, pulled the cutting board toward me, and began chopping. “Can you tell me about how you became interested in women’s issues?” I said. I sliced an onion, and my eyes watered. === [PDF page 50] === F IGU RE 1.1 Krastina Tchomakova, 2010. “The onions are fresh from my garden. Very tasty,” she said. “How did you come to work for the Committee?” I rubbed my eye with the back of my wrist. She waved a hand. “After lunch. I’m hungry.” I had hoped to meet her for two hours, but she clearly wanted to make a day of it. I inquired again about her work for the women’s committee. She discussed an aphid that attacked her tomatoes and the challenges of beekeeping. I asked about Mexico City. She told me about the medicinal uses of stinging nettles. I considered aborting my mission, but I had come all this way. Tchomakova had memories of life in Bulgaria before World War II, and she was twenty-four years old when the Bulgarian communists came into power in 1944. Her mind seemed sharp, and she could tell me firsthand about the radical changes in women’s lives during the forty-five-year communist era. She had lived through it all, and because of her work with the cbwm, she had played a part in realizing those changes. I understood the perils of oral history interviews with someone of her vintage; she might embellish accounts to make herself look good. Of course, Tchomakova would tell me things the way she remembered them, and I would be dealing with 32 chapter one === [PDF page 51] === her specific take on historical events. Like Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, the same tale could be told from many different points of view, and I would be getting only Tchomakova’s version. But with two decades lived before communism, and two decades after, no one could have as rich a perspective as she. I was desperate to hear it. There were not too many Tchomakovas left in 2010. I asked her another direct question about the International Women’s Year, but she wanted to gossip about the other women I had interviewed. She chatted for another hour as we ate lunch, ignoring me. She complained about the state of Bulgaria and the corruption of contemporary politicians. Almost two hours into our meeting, I finally got frustrated. “I would love to hear about your time in Mexico. Was 1975 the first time you visited that country?” She stared at me, her eyes blank. I was about to pack my things when she sighed. “I was born in 1920, just three years after the Russian Revolution. And I hated that my brothers worked less than my sisters because we stayed at home while they went to school. I wanted to learn to read, too.” I took out my notebook. “In Mexico, we showed the world what socialism could do for women,” she continued and proceeded to speak uninterrupted for the next ninety minutes. She made my trip to Gabarevo well worth the effort. After that first encounter, I met Tchomakova once more, in March 2012, and our two interviews helped me understand the behind-the-scene details of how the state socialist program for women’s emancipation had worked on the level of individual lives. The vast majority of the scholarship I had read about women in the Eastern Bloc focused on the level of policy and implementation. It concentrated on the nonindependence of the women’s committees and the ways in which the socialist project for solving the “woman question” differed from the efforts of first and second wave feminists in the Western democracies. But at ninety-two, Tchomakova told me a story about women’s emancipation in Bulgaria from an eyewitness point of view. In her mind, one of the most important achievements of state socialism in her country was the progressive support given to women and families, support that was a fundamental component of her own socialist beliefs. Krastina Tchomakova joined the Bulgarian Communist Party (bcp) in 1938. She read the works of Marx and Engels in secret, dreaming of a different world than that of interwar Bulgaria. A tsar with fascist sympathies State Feminism 33 === [PDF page 52] === ruled her country, and in 1941 the Bulgarian prime minister signed the Tripartite Pact and joined the Axis powers in World War II. In 1944, the local communists (supported by Moscow) overthrew their government — in a revolution or a coup d’état, depending on whom you asked. Tchomakova rose quickly through the Party ranks. Her early efforts focused on expanding educational opportunities for girls and teaching illiterate women to read. After a decade of working in the cities and villages surrounding Gabarevo, Tchomakova moved to Sofia to help organize women workers in the trade unions. Her passion for women’s issues and her fierce loyalty to the bcp landed her a job at the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement. For twenty-seven years she worked in the cbwm, trying to put her socialist beliefs into practice. I had found letters written by Tchomakova in the Central State Archives and knew she was a fierce advocate for women’s right to education and to join male-dominated professions. Tchomakova penned many impassioned missives to hold male political elites accountable to their own core principles regarding the woman question. Tchomakova took her inspiration from a long line of socialist thinkers who proposed state-centric solutions to women’s issues. Although women had been arguing for their rights since the days of the French Revolution, it was the German socialist August Bebel who published the impassioned tome Woman and Socialism in 1879.1 In his exhaustive account of the history of women’s subjugation, Bebel argued that private property and bourgeois monogamous marriage perpetuated women’s oppression. Only with the overthrow of bourgeois property relations could women break the chains that bound them to men in a patriarchal system of domination. Written in the late 19th century, Bebel’s vision of women living in socialist societies might have read like science fiction given the prevailing conditions of women’s lives at the time: In the new society woman will be entirely independent, both socially and economically. She will not be subjected to even a trace of domination and exploitation, but will be free and man’s equal, and mistress of her own lot. Her education will be the same as man’s.... She chooses an occupation suited to her wishes, inclinations and abilities, and works under the same conditions as man.... She studies, works, enjoys pleasures and recreation with other women or with men, as she may choose or as occasions may present themselves. In the choice of love she is as free and unhampered as man. She woos 34 chapter one === [PDF page 53] === or is wooed, and enters into a union prompted by no other considerations but her own feelings. This union is a private agreement, without the interference of a functionary, just as marriage has been a private agreement until far into the middle ages. Here Socialism will create nothing new, it will merely reinstate, on a higher level of civilization and under a different social form, what generally prevailed before private property dominated society [emphasis in original].2 The collective ownership of the means of production and the full incorporation of women into the labor force provided the first steps toward this egalitarian future. Bebel believed that women were the equals of men, but (long before the notion of social constructivism or gender performativity) he asserted that the conventions necessary to support the institution of private property proscribed women’s roles in society. As a Bulgarian peasant growing up in interwar Bulgaria, Tchomakova (and women like her) understood firsthand how agrarian poverty limited opportunities for all Bulgarians, but especially girls. Bebel’s work inspired that of Friedrich Engels, and his book later excited the minds of countless young women who stumbled upon The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). For instance, Maria Dinkova was a journalist who served with Tchomakova as a member of the official delegation to Mexico City in 1975. Born in 1928, Dinkova was in her late teens when she first discovered socialist literature on the woman question. In the year after Bulgaria became a communist country, the new government mass-produced works of classic socialist theory and made them available to the population. Writing retrospectively in 2003, Dinkova described her first encounter with a work of nonfiction as something almost supernatural: I have spent a significant part of my life searching for statistical correlations among the particles, cells, and the elements of human society. Because of this, I have long held the conviction that the magical is intrinsic to the universe, to what we call a society, as well as to the life path of the individual.... Some of the most important things in my life have happened in a magical way. The first serious book (i.e., not a novel or a poetry collection) I bought, and that opened my eyes to scholarly literature, was The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Engels. I saw it inadvertently on a bookstand on a corner on a main street in Plovdiv in 1945, and I picked it up, State Feminism 35 === [PDF page 54] === solely because of the intriguing title. I was only seventeen — a student dressed in her black apron — a little girl, but with a very famous work by a great pioneering teacher in her hands. Engels kindled in me a permanent interest in the problematic issues of women and the family. After reading Engels, I started studying Ancient Society by Lewis Morgan... [and] surveyed Lily Braun’s The Woman Question and August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism. The fact that several years later I would have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the great women’s revolution that was powerfully unraveling throughout the twentieth century was really magic: a coincidence of numerous fortuitous circumstances.3 Dinkova’s autodidactic education on the woman question relied on these classic socialist texts. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels postulated that humankind once lived in a primitive communal matriarchy where all property was shared in common by large group families with women in charge.4 The key to sexual equality among the hunters and collectors lay in women’s economic contributions. Even if there existed a gendered division of labor, women’s work was valued equally to men’s in sustaining the extended family or clan. Engels proposed that the establishment of private property led to the final overthrow of the “mother right,” precipitating the subjugation of woman. Where there is promiscuity in group marriage (or serial monogamy where parties are free to leave at any time), only maternity can be assured. To ensure that accumulated land and property passed to legitimate sons, Engels suggested that women’s bodies became a form of private property. To protect their accumulated assets, wealthy men constructed the state, which in turn created laws and the means by which to enforce those laws: the police. Using the power of their new state, men ensured the fidelity of their wives with legal marriage contracts and penal codes criminalizing adultery (for women). Since women constituted the first class of people to be oppressed by private property, Engels argued, they had everything to gain from its overthrow, thus rendering women the natural allies of the communist cause.5 The German socialist Clara Zetkin built on the ideas of Bebel and Engels and believed that socialism was morally superior to capitalism because only the former could guarantee the full realization of women’s talents and capabilities.6 The Russian Alexandra Kollontai also became a strident advocate for women’s rights, including a new sexual morality 36 chapter one === [PDF page 55] === F IGUR E 1.2 Maria Dinkova, 1976. that would free women from their economic dependence on men. Kollontai believed that love and sexuality should be completely untethered from economic considerations, comparing the “winged eros” of romantic relations between equals to the “wingless eros” of relationships between men and women determined by the laws of supply and demand.7 But in a world without birth control, and steeped in thousands of years of patriarchal culture relegating women to the private sphere under the control of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, how could women’s emancipation be realized in practice? How could a poor peasant girl such as Krastina Tchomakova, born in rural Bulgaria to illiterate parents, ever rise up to become a member of an official diplomatic delegation to a United Nations conference halfway across the world? Socialists argued that women needed to work together with men to overthrow bourgeois elites and that they should do this without creating separate, women-only organizations or movements. This penchant for working within the larger party structures derives from the initial debates during the First International Conference of Socialist Women in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907. The congress occurred immediately before State Feminism 37 === [PDF page 56] === the International Socialist Congress, and women delegates from fourteen countries attended the meeting. Fifty-eight women — in their long belle époque dresses, hats, and gloves — met to determine the future direction of the socialist movement’s policy toward their working sisters. The agenda focused on uniting the socialist parties of Europe around the common cause of winning universal suffrage for women as part of the general campaign to gain voting rights for all workers. In her book on prerevolutionary women’s activism, Rochelle Ruthchild argues that early twentieth-century Russian feminists were all socialists, and all socialists were feminists (in the sense that the two projects were indistinguishable from each other),8 but elsewhere in Europe a deep chasm often separated the “bourgeois feminists” from the socialist women. In 1907, the German Social Democrats (led by Zetkin) demanded full suffrage for all women, but socialist representatives from Austria, Belgium, England, and France advocated for “qualified” women’s suffrage, meaning that only wealthier, educated women would earn the right to vote. According to Kollontai (at the time an exile from tsarist Russia), the English socialist delegates had fallen under the sway of “bourgeois feminists,” and the French and Belgian socialists feared that universal women’s suffrage would increase the power of the Catholic Church in democratically elected parliaments.9 The German Social Democrats countered that equality between men and women was a fundamental principle of socialist doctrine, and therefore universal suffrage for men must be accompanied by universal suffrage for women. This would instantly double the political power of the working class. Zetkin’s opponents from Britain and France believed that demanding universal suffrage for women would impede the possibility of winning limited suffrage for educated women. The German delegates argued that universal suffrage for women would be supported by increased efforts to educate them. Expanding literacy would give women access to socialist literature, and they could learn to vote in their own economic interests. On this matter, Zetkin and the German Social Democrats won the day, and the label “feminist” became associated with the position of the British and French women who had argued for limited suffrage. Fear of being labeled “feminists” influenced the discussions of how socialists should organize their work among proletarian women. From the point of view of socialist women, feminists in the United States and the United Kingdom organized independently of broader social movements and too often concentrated on the narrow issue of voting rights. For socialists, the bourgeois feminists had little critique of the political and eco- 38 chapter one === [PDF page 57] === nomic system within which they lived, demanding only to be more fully embedded within capitalism as equal citizens with equal rights. Although this was a caricature of the complexity of Western women’s movements (some of which had more comprehensive platforms for social change), it was a stereotype that shaped the ongoing conflicts between socialists and feminists for decades to come. Delegates to the First International Conference of Socialist Women in 1907, therefore, resisted the idea of independent women’s organizations, claiming that these organizations would split the proletariat into rival camps and undermine class solidarity. The German Social Democrats, supported by Kollontai, argued that “an independent grouping of proletarian women within the party has clear organizational advantages. Such an organization would make it possible to concentrate the attention of the party on the specific needs and requirements of women workers, and would also make it easier to rally around the party the generally less aware female members of the proletarian class” [emphasis in the original].10 Kollontai also felt that proletarian men lacked understanding of the importance of women’s issues for the broader socialist cause. In order to reach them, Kollontai believed that women needed to work alongside men, reminding them that true liberty for the proletariat required women’s emancipation: In order to inculcate in their comrades the proper attitude to the question of equal rights for women workers in every sphere and draw them into the struggle to attain in practice equal civil rights for women, women have only one course — to unite their forces around the party. Women workers must set up a women’s secretariat, a commission, a bureau within the party, not in order to wage a separate battle for political rights and defend their own interests by themselves but in order to exert pressure on the party from within, in order to compel their comrades to wage their struggle in the interests of the female proletariat as well.11 Thus, even before the Russian Revolution, and before any state was in control of implementing women’s emancipation “from above,” socialist women conceived that a separate women’s bureau working within a socialist (or communist) party would guarantee that progressive men took women’s issues seriously and that working as part of the Party (to “exert pressure” on their male comrades from inside the rank and file) provided the best avenue for achieving women’s emancipation. State Feminism 39 === [PDF page 58] === In the years following the Stuttgart conference, the mobilization of socialist women in Europe expanded dramatically. According to Kollontai, the German Social Democratic Party had ten thousand women members in 1907, but this number grew to eighty-two thousand in 1910, an increase of 720 percent.12 By 1910, the women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality) enjoyed a circulation of eighty thousand. In the same year, the Second International Conference of Socialist Women convened in Copenhagen on August 26 – 27, just before the Eighth International Congress of the Second International. It was here that Tchomakova’s foremothers tried to create a practical program to realize their vision of women’s emancipation. The fourth point on the socialist women’s agenda laid down the basis for all subsequent socialist policies regarding state responsibilities toward women workers.13 Under the title “Social Protection and Provision for Motherhood and Infants,” the women of the Second International demanded an eight-hour working day and a prohibition on the labor of children younger than fourteen. They argued that pregnant women should have the right to stop work (without previous notice) eight weeks before delivery, and should enjoy paid “motherhood insurance” (i.e., maternity leave) of eight weeks if the child lived, which could be extended to thirteen weeks if the mother was willing and able to nurse the infant. Women would be paid for a six-week leave in the case of stillborn children, and all working women would enjoy these benefits, “including agricultural laborers, home workers and maid servants.”14 To support women’s dual function as workers and mothers, these policies would be paid for by the permanent establishment of a special maternity fund out of tax revenues. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin, Kollontai, and other Bolsheviks initially strove to put many of these policies into practice.15 For his part, Lenin objected to Kollontai’s proposals for a new communist sexual morality, but he did believe that women’s domestic work should be socialized. Instead of burdening individual women with household chores and childcare, the Soviet state proposed to build kindergartens, crèches, and public canteens and laundries.16 By 1919, the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party passed one of Kollontai’s resolutions calling for an increase of the Party’s specific work among women. She secured a state commitment to increase socialized facilities to alleviate women’s domestic responsibilities.17 The year 1919 also saw the creation of the Zhenotdel, a special women’s section established within the Central Committee of the Communist Party that emerged from the earlier Women’s Bureau formed after the Revolution.18 Kollontai believed that the 40 chapter one === [PDF page 59] === new communist state would remain committed to the woman question as long as women worked within the Party to prod reluctant male comrades in the correct direction. But enthusiasm for women’s emancipation soon evaporated in the face of more pressing economic and military issues, especially the civil war. In her book The Baba and the Comrade (1997), historian Elizabeth Wood detailed the trials and tribulations of the Zhenotdel and its inability to overcome Party hostility to its work. Even though solving the women’s question was seen as a fundamental goal of the revolution, there was always a problem of separating out women’s issues from the pressing challenges of class inequality. Soviet leaders had no interest in promoting feminism, because “feminism,” as it was known at the time in both its Western European and Russian variations, was considered suspect as the ideology of upper-class women who strove to further their own interests without concern for general social injustices and inequities.19 Indeed, Wendy Goldman argues that many former Zhenotdel activists were among the most vociferous supporters of its demise, because they preferred to work on the woman question as part of the other “general work” of the party.20 But Wood also argues that while the Party agreed to create the Zhenotdel to support its larger revolutionary goals, and to provide an incentive for the greater participation of women in the Party’s work, for a brief moment the Zhenotdel forged ahead with its own agenda: “[More] and more of their staff members began to make demands on women’s behalf and to criticize the regime for its failings. Not surprisingly, the party leaders did not react well to these criticisms and grasped at the nearest weapon to quiet the women’s section activists. The weapon they chose was the one most feared by the activists themselves, the charge of ‘feminist deviationism.’ This charge, leveled in 1923 together with other coercive measures, effectively forced the sections to take a more obedient and less independent stance.”21 Thus, even before Lenin’s death in 1924, and despite some successes at improving women’s education and reimagining Soviet tropes of womanhood, the Zhenotdel became a more docile vehicle for the Party’s work among Soviet women. The ideas and programs proposed by Kollontai and her colleagues were ignored or resisted, as the Party focused instead on industrial and military development. Stalin dissolved the organization in 1929, supposedly because all of its tasks had been completed and the woman question solved. Lenin’s successor ushered in an era of renewed conservatism and restored traditional patriarchy, reversing many of the early gains for women.22 State Feminism 41 === [PDF page 60] === Despite the Zhenotdel’s ultimate failure to represent women’s interests, it is fascinating that its structure so closely resembled the one imagined in the discussions of the women of the Second International. Indeed, this model of the state women’s committee or section working within the Party would serve as a template for the establishment of later committees and leagues in the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe and their allies (such as Zambia) in the developing world, although there would be many local variations. But because the Soviet Union was the first and most powerful country in the communist world, the failure of the Zhenotdel in the 1920s tainted the view of all subsequent socialist women’s committees. My curiosity about the Zhenotdel, and the way it is remembered in the international history of women’s movements, led me to Gregory Massell’s The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919 – 1929 (1974).23 The book, one of the first by a Western-trained scholar using primary Soviet sources to investigate women’s issues behind the Iron Curtain, provided an intimate look at the operations of the Zhenotdel in Central Asia and its program of what contemporary Croatian feminist Slavenka Drakulić derides as “emancipation from above.”24 Massell explored how Soviet activists targeted Muslim women and how women’s emancipation from oppressive local patriarchal norms became a substitute for the revolutionary politics of the working class, which hardly existed in rural Central Asia. Soviet leaders imagined that the emancipation of women would lead to a fundamental reorganization of traditional society, preparing the way for a new socialist consciousness in everyday life. Massell’s book documents the massive failures of this women’s revolution from above and the impotence of the Zhenotdel to protect radicalized and emancipated Muslim women from the backlash of their local communities, where patriarchal authority proved impervious to communist modernization narratives. Massell also shows how the Zhenotdel collaborated with the sometimes violent state campaign to liberate Central Asian women in spite of themselves and how powerless the women’s organization was to effect any real local change. Furthermore, women’s emancipation was not sought as an end in itself aimed at “enhancing women’s individuality or increasing their choices.”25 Rather, it proved a byproduct of the state socialists’ need for women’s labor in countries undergoing rapid industrialization. But Massell minces no words in pointing out that women in Central Asia were little better than chattel in the early twentieth century. Yes, the 42 chapter one === [PDF page 61] === Soviets wanted to crush the local Central Asian elites and modernize the “backward” parts of its empire, but it was not merely Soviet propaganda that Muslim women were oppressed. For the women of the Zhenotdel, Massell shows that the emancipation of Muslim women took on a crusadelike fervor. They understood that their actions served larger party goals, but they also abhorred the material conditions of Central Asian women’s lives. They sincerely believed that the new Soviet state had the power to liberate women. Furthermore, according to Massell, many local Muslim women welcomed the Soviet program for their emancipation and would have benefited from more (rather than less) state intervention on their behalf. In the Central Asia of the 1920s, emancipation from below was all but impossible. Most women were illiterate, uneducated, and controlled by men. To the extent that Massell judges the experiment with revolution from above a failure, he does so by recognizing that administrative decrees and legal reforms were not enough to undo centuries of local tradition regarding the role of women in society. The desperate measures taken by the Soviets to enforce women’s liberation (e.g., public de-veiling) spawned a violent backlash that created a local and coordinated resistance to Soviet modernization programs. The most fascinating passage from Massell’s book comes almost four hundred pages into the text, providing an important glimpse onto the role of the Zhenotdel vis-à-vis the central Stalinist state. On December 10, 1928, Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia, delivered a keynote address to the Fourth All-Union Zhenotdel Conference of Party Organizers among Eastern Women in Moscow. Massell describes the scene as a tense one, with Krupskaia (at great risk to her own personal safety) delivering a speech critical of Stalinism and his heavy-handed methods in front of an audience filled with “Stalin’s henchmen.”26 Krupskaia deployed language that “very few (if any) Soviet communists could have dared to use under such circumstances.”27 Massell marvels at Krupskaia’s unwillingness to embrace Stalinist tropes: “Her discussion of the issues at stake was singularly free of stereotyped ideological references to class conflict, or to counterrevolutionaries, deviationists, saboteurs, and other alleged enemies of the people.”28 Massell continues: While Krupskaia’s address was for the most part cautiously worded, and was replete with vaguely assenting references to the current party line, its crucial segments bore all the marks of an intellectual and State Feminism 43 === [PDF page 62] === moral crisis. Lenin’s widow in effect rejected some of the most important premises underlying the notion of a revolution from above. She rejected a revolution by administrative command, especially when it involved a sweeping, dogmatic, and ruthless assault on human communities and sensibilities. Hers was, quite obviously, a plea for gradualism, and for toleration of a modicum of social and cultural pluralism. It was an urgent plea for respect for, and sensitive adaptation to, local conditions and peculiarities.29 That Krupskaia used the Zhenotdel congress as a forum to discuss an alternative paradigm for work among women and ethnic minorities, in public view of Stalin’s paranoid agents, suggests that perhaps the goals of achieving women’s emancipation took precedence over toeing the Party line. Krupskaia recognized that Stalin’s heavy-handed method failed to yield real results for Muslim women, and may have even worsened the material conditions of their lives. But Krupskaia’s speech reminds us that even during the Stalinist era, women’s activists may have nurtured alternative visions of how to implement their goals, particularly with regard to including grassroots input from local women. But these nuances were lost when Western women started writing about Eastern Bloc women’s organizations during the Cold War. The failure of the Zhenotdel came to symbolize the failures of state socialist women’s organizing and their emphasis on working within the Party to promote “emancipation from above.” Feminists demanded independent women’s organizations working outside the established political parties and state bodies. For example, in an interview conducted in 2011, Maria Dinkova recounted a conversation she had with an American feminist in the 1980s. Dinkova was discussing her role as a women’s activist in the cbwm, but her American interlocutor was skeptical: She wanted to know if I was a volunteer or whether I was paid by the state to advocate for women’s issues. She seemed to think that you could only be a feminist if you were a volunteer. I told her that I was paid by the state, but that if I was not paid by the state I would be a volunteer. I told her that I was lucky to have a state that would pay me to do the work that I wanted to do. But she said that you could not change the state if you were part of the state.30 Similarly, Ana Durcheva, a member of the cbwm who served as the treasurer of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in East Ger- 44 chapter one === [PDF page 63] === many in the 1980s, also complained that Western women discredited the work of her organization because it was affiliated with the East German state and received funding from the governments of socialist countries around the world, including the Soviet Union. In March 2012, she explained that she grew exasperated with the Western feminist valorization of nongovernmental organizations (ngos): “I would say, ‘Sorry, we are not an independent organization. Our organizations are state organizations.’ That’s how it worked in our countries. Different countries have different ways of doing things. We did good work for women around the world. It is the work that should matter, right?”31 Tchomakova, too, believed that the domestic successes of the cbwm (discussed in the next chapter) hinged on their ability to propose legislation and to review all laws affecting women and families from inside the state. But state socialist women’s organizing continues to be derided in the West. In the liberal feminist literature on women’s movements, statebased women’s activism (in which women are employees of the state) is analytically referred to as “state feminism.”32 According to Amy Mazur and Dorothy McBride, the term “state feminism” entered American academic and policy-making parlance in the 1980s, originating out of the experience of women working successfully within Scandinavian national contexts.33 When applied to Western democracies, the term names a particular arrangement whereby women integrate themselves into established corridors of power. But Western German sociologists had earlier deployed the same phrase to describe women’s organizing in the German Democratic Republic. The West Germans “criticized established women’s agencies and party-sponsored groups as a way of controlling women and co-opting women’s movements, rather than encouraging an autonomous approach to women’s rights.”34 Thus, while state feminist projects could be efficacious in the West, scholars often considered them detrimental to women’s organizing in the state socialist East and the Global South. In 1978, the political scientist Barbara Wolfe Jancar wrote, “The inability of women in Communist societies to organize independently clearly hampers female political participation. The national women’s committees cannot be said to represent women.”35 Jancar’s book, Women under Communism (1978), and a dissertation by the American political scientist Sharon Wolchik,36 were the first studies that attempted a sustained examination of the inner workings of communist women’s organizations across the Eastern Bloc. In both cases, the texts were written before the critical interventions of postcolonial State Feminism 45 === [PDF page 64] === studies, and it was Western-trained political scientists who were defining the “appropriate” goal of a true feminist movement: the emancipation of women as autonomous, individual subjects. Jancar writes, “The fact of the matter is that in no Communist country do we find policies toward women — or men for that matter — directed at their self actualization.”37 Jancar does not explain this concept of self-actualization other than to say that the goals of feminism have entered a new stage: “The question [of feminism] is not how to better one’s material standard of living, but how to improve the quality of one’s life,” and that “the current women’s movement in the United States exemplifies this new stage.”38 Presumably, Jancar’s use of the term “self-actualization” grows from the work of the psychologist Abraham Maslow and his famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow published his hierarchy in Motivation and Personality (1954), where physiological needs such as food and shelter form the base of the pyramid.39 Once these needs are met, people seek safety, love and belonging, and esteem. Self-actualization (some kind of individualist and often spiritual fulfillment of one’s inherent potential) represents the tip of the pyramid, supposedly the most advanced human need, which can be fulfilled only when all of the previous needs have been met. Betty Friedan also used the term “self-actualization” in The Feminine Mystique, claiming that American women were trapped at the lowest level of the pyramid and needed opportunities to seek self-actualization through work outside the home. Maslow’s hierarchy has been criticized for being too ethnocentric because it valorizes a kind of hyper-individualism that is uncommon in more communally oriented societies,40 but Jancar followed Friedan and asserted that the pursuit of self-actualization must be the primary goal of a feminist movement. Since mass women’s organizations focused more on material needs and collective action than on self-actualization, they were not considered “feminist” in the liberal conception of the word.41 So one problem with the persistent stereotypes of state socialist women’s organizations is that they emerge from a liberal feminist politics that is universalistic and insensitive to cultural variation in women’s definitions of “self-actualization.” For example, in her study of the Egyptian women’s mosque movement, the anthropologist Saba Mahmood argued that pious Islamic women find self-actualization through practicing the affects and comportments necessary to embody the form of submission that they deem appropriate for women.42 These Egyptian women embrace a politics of submission and use their shared commitment to the Islamic feminine ideal as the basis for public action, thus leading Mahmood to question the 46 chapter one === [PDF page 65] === feminist valorization of the emancipated political subject. If pious Muslim women embracing their headscarves can be feminist agents, then why not communist women who willingly trade individual political rights for a centralized state that endeavors to provide basic needs for all? Expanding on Mahmood’s work, the anthropologist Amy Borovoy, a scholar of Japan, and I argued that feminist political projects need not only concern themselves with the creation of individual, autonomous political subjects.43 The idea that women’s so-called self-actualization requires them to be liberated from social obligations reifies a particular conception of women’s emancipation. If self-actualization is about improving “the quality of one’s life,” then women may decide that improving the material conditions of their families or communities or even states is an important part of their own sense of self-fulfillment. Relevant here are the critiques of Maslow’s ethnocentrism and Friedan’s white, middle-class biases. Western liberal feminism may assume a subject position that is linked to the specific Anglo-American historical context. A second set of issues with the received wisdom about state socialist women’s organizations is that it privileges independent ngos over statebased policy agencies and women’s mass organizations, even when there is clear evidence of the latter’s significant achievements in terms of women’s literacy, education, legal equality, reproductive rights or incorporation into the labor force (all achievements contributing to women’s “selfactualization”). If these achievements are grudgingly recognized, they are quickly discredited because they came from the “top-down” rather than from the “bottom-up.” For example, McBride and Mazur argue: Women’s policy machinery will reach high levels of state feminism, on the one hand, when the state is defined as a site of social justice and has the structural capacity to institutionalize new demands for equality, and on the other, when society sustains widely supported feminist organizations that challenge sex hierarchies through both radical politics from outside and reform politics in unions and parties.... If these conditions do not exist, then although politicians may establish women’s policy offices, these units will have a hard time either influencing women’s equality policy or empowering women’s interests in society or both. As the contrasting case of Poland shows, when feminist organizing is absent and the state is impervious to democratic influence, women’s policy machinery may even be used as a tool for authoritarian control.44 State Feminism 47 === [PDF page 66] === It is perhaps this connection with the state that allows Western liberal feminists to write socialist women’s organizations out of the history of the international women’s movement. For instance, in their book Comparative State Feminism, Mazur and McBride (writing as Dorothy McBride Stetson) use the one case of communist Poland to argue that state feminism is only effective and desirable when there are independent women’s organizations operating outside of the formal structures of the state. And yet if one reads Jean Robinson’s chapter on Poland, it appears that the Liga Kobiet, although constrained by its dependence on the Communist Party, was able to influence women’s equality policy and empower women’s interests in society.45 Although Robinson agrees that an “independent civil society” is necessary for successful state feminism, she acknowledges that the Liga Kobiet, in its efforts to protect abortion and introduce sex education into schools, opposed both the Polish state and the Catholic Church and that this did “suggest that the [Liga Kobiet] was more than merely a propaganda tool for the party.”46 Outside Eastern Europe, the British sociologist Maxine Molyneux studied women’s organizations in socialist countries such as Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Yemen during the 1970s and 1980s. Although Molyneux emphasized that state-based women’s organizations justified their programs in terms of larger party goals, her extensive research positions their failures and achievements in historical and sociopolitical context. For instance, Molyneux accepted that legal equality and incorporation into the formal labor force never completely eradicated patriarchy at the domestic level, and state socialist women’s committees often pushed pronatalist policies and reinforced women’s primary responsibility for household labor. Yet unlike Jancar, Molyneux had no interest in imposing Western feminist standards on women’s movements in the developing world. In 1977, Molyneux traveled to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) to study how women’s position had evolved since their independence from the British a decade earlier. Molyneux interviewed local leaders of the Yemeni Women’s Union, the state socialist women’s organization.47 In her introduction to these interviews, Molyneux provided important contextualization for the Western reader: As in all such socialist countries, it is often extremely difficult to discern what is really happening behind the official claims, and a degree of defensive evasiveness characterizes the responses to even sympathetic western investigators. Yet in the PDRY as in Cuba, Vietnam and 48 chapter one === [PDF page 67] === China, it is evident both that there have been substantial changes in the position of women as a result of the revolution, and that there are major areas which state policy has left untouched, and where the conception of women’s emancipation being implemented is, by western feminist-socialist criteria, a partial one. Yet whilst it is possible and necessary to criticize the Yemeni process for being incomplete, such criticisms must be made within a framework of what is, and what is not, possible in these very poor, beleaguered countries.48 Molyneux further explained that the progress of the women’s movement in the PDRY could not be compared with women’s movements in the United States or the United Kingdom, where women struggled against different cultural and political obstacles. Instead, she insisted that the PDRY should be compared with other developing countries — particularly, other Arab countries — and specifically with North Yemen. Molyneux asserted that despite a stronger economy and a pro-Western political orientation, the government of North Yemen had made little effort to improve the legal, social, or economic position of its women, and in this context, the women of South Yemen had made considerable progress. She finished with a pointed warning: “When evaluating this material it is therefore important to recognize the dangers of unconsciously transporting the assumptions and expectations of the western women’s movement to a very different society, and thereby underestimating many of the real gains that have been made and the many real difficulties which are being faced.”49 In a later book, Molyneux revisited the question of state socialist women’s organizations and their relative efficacy, providing a balanced retrospective on what the state socialist countries did and did not achieve for women.50 Discussing both the former state socialist societies of Eastern Europe and former and existing societies in the developing world, Molyneux investigated some of the tensions inherent in state socialism’s policies toward women’s emancipation: Yet if state socialism was a failure in terms of its goals, the claims its rulers made about the changes it had wrought were more than mere rhetoric: communist parties presided over some of the most dramatic and widespread attempts at social change in modern times.... As a result of the policies adopted by communist states, women’s socio-economic position was radically transformed: under communist party rule women acquired new rights and obligations; they en- State Feminism 49 === [PDF page 68] === tered the public realm in substantial numbers, as workers and political actors; they attain similar, if not superior, levels of education to men; and the family was modernized and placed on a foundation of legal equality between the sexes. On any conventional definition of progress, let alone one based on feminist criteria, as far as the situation of women was concerned, the communist states merit some recognition.51 This demand for recognition was even more important for countries in the Global South, where a vast gulf existed between the status of women in the capitalist states versus those in the communist states. In the lessdeveloped countries that pursued a state-led path to economic development, Molyneux argued that women “obtained greater legal equality, access to health, education at all levels and practical support for entry into employment.”52 She also surveyed the record of communist countries in outlawing traditional practices that reinforced women’s subordinate position in society: the banning of foot binding in China, the eradication of divorce by repudiation and female genital cutting in South Yemen, and the ending of women’s seclusion in Central Asia. Despite failing to live up to all of their promises, Marxist-Leninist parties, wherever revolutionary governments came to power, granted women full legal equality, expanded literacy campaigns, promoted education and professional training, and encouraged full labor force participation. Although these policies supported the central socialist goals of rapid economic development and modernization (which required women’s productive and reproductive labor and often resulted in the notorious “double burden”) women enjoyed more rapid material improvements in the state socialist countries of the developing world. This resulted directly from ideological commitments to women’s emancipation and the state’s empowerment of women’s organizations to achieve these aims. According to Molyneux, “Women’s organizations, controlled by the ruling party, were given some scope for furthering the policy aims of the party with respect to women and provided ‘women’s issues’ with some visibility and legitimacy. As a consequence, it could be claimed with some accuracy that in such developing communist states, women suffered less publicly sanctioned discrimination on the basis of sex than did those in comparable capitalist states.”53 Furthermore, Molyneux challenged the uncritical Western feminist preference for autonomous women’s organizing, asking whether advocacy 50 chapter one === [PDF page 69] === for women’s gender interests needed to be linked exclusively to any one organizational form. Molyneux recognized that “autonomous organizations” (those groups of women advocating through independent actions) constituted the organizational form “that is most closely identified with feminist definitions of women’s movements.”54 She saw that this feminist definition of a proper “women’s movement” ignored a vast array of women’s activism that had been successful in helping women achieve their strategic gender interests in different national contexts. In her seminal article “Analysing Women’s Movements” (1998), Molyneux asked: What do we do with the women’s organizations and their sizeable memberships in the existing and former socialist states? These are usually excluded from being considered women’s movements on the grounds of autonomy, if not on the grounds of interests. Yet they deserve consideration in order to evaluate their significance both as political phenomena and for what they signify for their participants.... Women’s interests cannot be “read off” from the organisational form in which they are expressed; the mere fact of an organisation’s autonomy or internal organisational structure does not indicate that it is a privileged vehicle for the expression of women’s interests nor, indeed, that it is entirely free from authority, either internally with respect to the organisation concerned or with regard to external influence.55 Less than a decade later, the Chinese historian Wang Zheng picked up Molyneux’s torch, critiquing the limited “intellectual parameters of feminist scholars” in her examination of the All-China Women’s Federation (acwf).56 Zheng questioned the idea that the acwf was merely an organ of the Chinese Communist Party. She posited that, although they worked within the system, Chinese women challenged the patriarchal order using the language of communism as an ideological tool:57 “The lack of desire or imagination to excavate women’s role in the policy making process in the socialist state may have much to do with a fast-held assumption about the socialist state: it is too centralized and monolithic to have any space for women’s intervention.”58 Through a careful discourse analysis of the acwf’s publications, Zheng demonstrated that the women’s activists intentionally deployed Communist Party language to promote pro-women policies. Because of the continued suspicion of bourgeois feminism, Chinese women’s activists claimed that their work supported state goals, even as they used those goals as a cloak for their own agendas. State Feminism 51 === [PDF page 70] === In my research on Bulgaria, I found many examples of how the cbwm published articles critical of the government under cover of Communist Party rhetoric. The problem with this strategy is that subsequent historians or activists fail to place these articles in their proper political context and take the communist rhetoric literally, as proof of slavish devotion to male party elites. For example, in an article critical of the cbwm published in 1992, the Bulgarian scholar Roumyana Slabakova asserted that the cbwm was a “key totalitarian organization” by quoting the language it used to justify its existence as a separate mass organization: “Ever since the victory of the socialist revolution in Bulgaria in 1944 the Committee of Bulgarian Women has had the basic task of rallying round the policy of the government, of the Front for the Fatherland, and of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and of involving [members] in [implementing] the main tasks the development of society [calls for] at all stages.”59 Slabakova undermined the value of the extensive sociological research undertaken by the Committee to support its policy agendas, discussing nothing about the content of this research and pointing instead to the arrangement of names in the bibliography. Because Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Todor Zhivkov were placed above the alphabetized list of references, Slabakova claimed, the analysis and conclusions of these studies could not be trusted. Following Zheng’s work, however, one could read these sources less dogmatically. If the Committee and the articles it published were pursuing policies or programs that might be construed as bourgeois feminist, the prominent citation of Marx and Engels might work to ensure that their research was not censored. Moreover, citing Marx and, especially, Engels reminded their male Party colleagues that women’s issues were a core concern of communism’s ideological fathers and could not be ignored. The key idea here is that a significant disjuncture might exist between what state socialist women’s committees did and what they said they were doing when they explained their actions to their male comrades. According to a quote widely attributed to Margaret Mead, “What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things.” In much the same way that the now independent feminist ngos frame their programs around donors’ priorities, state women’s organizations had to negotiate the political constraints of their various one-party states. Women such as Krastina Tchomakova and Maria Dinkova worked within the political constraints of the world they inhabited. Indeed, many socialist women framed their activism in terms that might make them seem subservient to the male party elite. But what if more was going on behind the scenes? 52 chapter one === [PDF page 71] === 2. A Brief History of Women’s Activism in Domestic Political Context Case 1: Bulgaria On July 1, 2011, I interviewed Pavlina Popova, a journalist who worked at Zhenata Dnes (The Woman Today), the official magazine of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (cbwm), from 1970 to 1981. She had also served as the head of an informal section of the Journalists Union, reporting on issues of women and the family. We met in front of the National Library in Sofia on a warm day and agreed to walk to the café of the Artists Union on Shipka Street. As we strolled, she smiled at me and said in English, “Bulgaria was the most progressive country in terms of maternity leaves and family policy among the socialist countries.” “And not the Soviet Union?” I said. She laughed. “Yes. The Bulgarian Politburo was angry, and the Soviet Politburo was also angry. Bulgaria had no right to be that far ahead of the Soviet Union on anything.” We found an outside table, and I asked her to tell me about her background. “I am from Sofia and I graduated in journalism. I spent three years working for the magazine Nov Zhivot [New Life] in Kurdjali. This was my mandatory national service after graduation.” “And then you came back to Sofia?” “Yes, and I worked for a magazine here before I started for Zhenata Dnes.” So how did she end up at Zhenata Dnes? She told me that she had submitted an article for the magazine, and the editor-in-chief had been impressed. Sonya Bakish had been a member of the editorial collective since 1958 and served as its editor-in-chief for seventeen years.1 Born in 1925, === [PDF page 72] === Bakish was the Jewish Bulgarian wife of Stanko Todorov, a member of the Politburo and the longest-serving prime minister of Bulgaria. As editor, Bakish determined to make the magazine relevant to real Bulgarian women. Beginning in 1965, she hired a team of young journalists who believed that, while socialism had solved some of women’s problems, it had created a host of new ones, particularly for new urban residents cut off from their traditional family networks.2 Bakish had hired Maria Dinkova, and after she read Popova’s article, she immediately invited Popova also to work for the magazine as a member of the editorial board. But Popova was not a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. “This would have been a problem in a lot of other magazines or newspapers,” Popova said. “But Sonya made me a member of the editorial college [board] almost immediately. Only Party members were supposed to be able to join the editorial college [board], but Sonya was a very strong personality and took a lot of personal initiatives.” Popova stayed on under Bakish until her retirement in 1980. When Eleonora Turlakova became the new editor-in-chief of Zhenata Dnes in 1981, she kept Popova on the board for almost an entire year before Popova was forced to resign because of her lack of Party membership. Yet for more than a decade, Popova had served as the key contact person between the magazine and the experts for family planning and demographic issues in the Council of Ministers. During the communist era, journalists were highly trained and respected and were often experts in their fields. I guessed that Popova was well informed about women’s issues to be allowed to coordinate with the Council of Ministers as a nonmember of the Communist Party. She was also in charge of responding to readers’ letters. Reflecting on her eleven years at the magazine, Popova claimed that Zhenata Dnes was a “factory of ideas.” “Can you give an example?” I asked. “Well, the idea of the ‘second shift’ for women. It was the first time in this country that anyone actually thought about this. It was very difficult for women at the time, to have a job, to have children, and [to deal with] men with a very Oriental attitude. All Bulgarian women understood this problem, but no one had a name for it. When they wrote this article on the second shift, it was something everyone understood. This idea of the second shift was born in Zhenata Dnes. It was there that the journalists were thinking about real women’s problems. We were not great writers. We were not the most erudite journalists. But we had a huge social impact. We were doing something.” 54 chapter two === [PDF page 73] === “But how? Weren’t your articles being read by censors?” “We criticized the government, but we did it in very subtle ways. I wrote something that was critical of the government, and Sonya told me that I had to use euphemisms. Sonya taught me how to use the words ‘somewhere’ and ‘someone’ strategically. To always write euphemistically. The smart people could figure it out, and the others wouldn’t be able to catch on. They would let it pass, because they would read things literally. They didn’t catch on. But we knew our readers would understand the euphemism. This was one of the benefits of working for a magazine like Zhenata Dnes.” Dinkova had told me that Zhenata Dnes’s “second shift” article got the magazine in trouble because the censors thought the title implied that women were working more than eight hours a day at their formal jobs, something that would have put Bulgaria in violation of a treaty with the International Labor Organization. The censors in the Central Committee had only looked at the title; they had not read the article and thus did not realize that “second shift” referred to women’s domestic duties in the home. Once Bakish explained this, Zhenata Dnes was allowed to publish the article. Bakish also encouraged her journalists to write about sexual issues that had never before appeared in the pages of Zhenata Dnes. Popova told me, “The Central Committee was absolutely opposed to talking about sex. They said, ‘Soon you will be teaching young girls how to take their panties down.’ ” Like Lenin before them, the communist authorities felt uncomfortable with sexuality and considered the topic a “bourgeois” concern.3 But the response to the articles from the public was very positive, and despite the objections of the censors in the Central Committee, Bakish persisted. According to Popova, Zhenata Dnes was the only publication in Bulgaria discussing these issues, and these articles further expanded the magazine’s readership. “Were any of them censored?” Popova shrugged. “Of course. You know, we didn’t have press freedom here. The biggest problem with being a journalist at that time was that if you criticized one person in the Party, you were seen to be criticizing the entire Communist Party, the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union, and Marx and Engels and Lenin.” Popova sighed. “It was a bad part of living at that time. Sonya Bakish was a very powerful person and she stood behind her journalists. But we were always talking about these things in secret, hid- Bulgaria 55 === [PDF page 74] === ing our opinions. We were not allowed to criticize anyone. Whatever we wrote went straight to the Central Committee. We could not write what we wanted then. All of that work was so interesting to me, we had such social experiences, but we were also being put through the wringer of communism.” Popova watched me writing in my notebook and said, “I am not saying everything was bad. There were so many good things done for women and the family.” I asked her whether she had worked closely with Krastina Tchomakova and the other women in the cbwm. “Sonya gave me no time to work on anything but the magazine. We received about a thousand letters a month, and Sonya wanted every single letter to have a reply from the editorial staff.” Popova once kept a ledger with a record of every letter received, and told me that their number steadily increased throughout her eleven years at the magazine. In 1980, Bakish hired two young assistants to help Popova respond to all of the mail, but for the entire 1970s Popova did it alone. “What did women write about?” I asked. “So many things,” she answered. “There was no psychotherapy in Bulgaria, and people did not have a place to share their problems. Zhenata Dnes became the psychotherapist of the nation. It was the only place where people could complain and get an answer. People had no one to talk to about their problems, and there were many problems, the ordinary problems of life. Complete strangers wrote to the magazine because they thought that we understood.” These letters to the editors became an important part of the identity of the magazine and provided a quasi-democratic forum for Bulgarian women to express their thoughts and opinions, allowing them to weigh in on social issues and feel that they were part of a broader national community of women. Popova told me the story of a young Bulgarian man who wrote a letter to Zhenata Dnes to explain that he was heartbroken because his girlfriend said she would not wait for him when he left for his mandatory two-year military service. The young man asked for tips on how to keep his girlfriend during his conscription, and the magazine received five boxes of letters from concerned readers offering sympathy and advice. Popova also explained that at some point the editorial board decided to get rid of the magazine’s fashion pages. So many letters arrived that Bakish reinstated them, even though she worried that they fueled accusations that the magazine was “bourgeois.” “The Bulgarians are graphomaniacs!” Popova said. 56 chapter two === [PDF page 75] === One of the downsides of Popova’s job was reading semiliterate letters: “I wanted to publish a humor column about the stupidest letters that we received. But Sonya wouldn’t let me. She thought it was cruel to make fun of people with less education. She thought we had to be sensitive of people’s feelings. I never got to do the column, but it would have been very funny.” “I’ve been through the archives, and I’ve never seen any of these letters. Do you know if someone kept them?” I asked. Popova’s face fell, and she bowed her head. “I think they got thrown away,” she said. “When I was forced to leave the editorial [board], I took all of the letters related to my research on masculinity with me, but I don’t think anyone looked after the others. We did not think about the possibility of change then, that these letters would be important to history.” Popova sighed gain. “We lost a lot of good things after these changes.” Women’s Activism in Bulgaria Well before Dinkova and Popova were writing for Zhenata Dnes, women’s organizing had a long history in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Women’s Union was founded in 1901,4 and Clara Zetkin herself claimed that Bulgaria had one of the strongest socialist women’s movements as early as 1922.5 But it was only with the 1947 Dimitrov Constitution that women earned full legal equality with men. After World War II, the Bulgarian Communist Party (bcp) disbanded or coopted independent prewar women’s organizations and embarked on a state-led program for women’s full emancipation, informed by the socialist principles spelled out in the Second International and in the context of a dramatic demographic imbalance caused by the loss of so many Bulgarian men in the war. The bcp faced a wide variety of problems, including a high rate of infant and maternal mortality. To emancipate women and incorporate them into the labor force, childbirth needed to be made much safer, and the state had an active interest in ensuring that Bulgarian babies survived past their first year. For peasant women living in prewar Bulgaria, the situation had been dire. For instance, I met with Dr. Genoveva Mihova, a demographer at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences who worked for the cbwm in the late 1980s. Mihova spoke at length about the improvements that the communists brought in terms of reducing maternal and infant mortality, starting with the story of her own family. Like Tchomakova, Mihova came from a peasant background. Before she was born, her mother had given birth to four children. The first child was born prematurely and died. “If Bulgaria 57 === [PDF page 76] === this child had been born in a hospital, it probably would have survived,” Mihova told me. “But we were a poor family in the village, and the child was born at home with a midwife. They had no technology to keep the child alive.” Her mother then had three more children. The oldest was six years old and the youngest was nine months old when an epidemic of small pox hit their village. The six-year-old died first, followed three months later by the baby. Only one child remained out of four full pregnancies and deliveries. After 1944, Mihova’s mother realized she was pregnant again. The communists had liberalized abortion, so she went in to terminate her pregnancy. The doctor agreed to the procedure but advised that her one surviving child would be lonely without a sibling. If she gave birth in one of the new maternity clinics, her child was likely to survive. Mihova’s mother worried that she could not afford a hospital birth, but the doctor assured her that the new state would pay for it. Genoveva was that fifth child. “Communism did a lot to eradicate those childhood diseases and to improve health conditions for women and children throughout the country. This should not be underestimated,” she explained. “I would not be here otherwise.” During the early decades of communism in Bulgaria, amid the purges, show trials, and forced collectivization, political efforts were also concentrated on increasing women’s literacy, improving their education and training, and incorporating them into the formal labor force. This was all work carried out by bcp activists such as Tchomakova. As a young woman in her mid-twenties, Tchomakova mobilized women to help rebuild a country devastated by war. Although the Party certainly encouraged these initial goals because of postwar labor shortages and the demands of rapid industrialization through central economic planning, the ideological rhetoric of early socialist thinkers also influenced them. In addition to granting women full legal equality, Bulgaria (like other East European nations) liberalized divorce laws, guaranteed reproductive freedoms, and provided enhanced social protections to single mothers and children born out of wedlock. Women could keep their maiden names after marriage, had the right to own their own property, and to dispose of their own incomes. Although patriarchal traditions remained strong in the home, the communist government ensured equal access to all educational institutions, often encouraging women to pursue opportunities in traditionally male-dominated professions.6 The expropriation of private property was accompanied by a concomitant assault on male authority in the family. 58 chapter two === [PDF page 77] === The spirit of the first postwar decade is captured in a 1954 state-produced documentary film Аз Съм Трактористка (I Am a Woman Tractor Driver, 1954). The twenty-five-minute film celebrates the lives of young independent women helping to build a modern, industrial economy. The film explores the lives of young women working in an actual women’s tractor brigade in the Bulgarian city of Pazardjik. It opens with a peasant girl writing a letter to the head of the tractor brigade to inquire how she too could become a tractor driver. The remainder of the film constitutes the reply of the brigade leader to the peasant girl, and describes how socialism is providing new opportunities for women who are now the equals of men. In the final moments, the protagonist describes to the peasant girl that Bulgarian women can now be anything that they want as a flickering montage shows images of women working in traditionally male jobs. The final shot shows a young woman in the cockpit of an airplane, smiling up at the camera, and then jetting off into the bright communist future. To a certain extent, the bcp lived up to these early promises to emancipate women, especially for those in rural areas. The postwar efforts of the bcp reduced infant and maternal mortality rates and expanded electricity, water, and sewage networks, vastly improving the lives of ordinary Bulgarians.7 Over a relatively short period of thirty years (1950 – 80), the predominantly agrarian Bulgarian society was transformed into an industrial one. In 1956, 70.7 percent of the workforce was concentrated in the agricultural sector; 22.1 percent, in the industrial sector; and only 7.2 percent, in the professional services sector.8 By 1988, only about 20 percent of the workforce was involved in agricultural work, while 61.2 percent was employed in the industrial sector and 18.8 percent was employed in the services sector.9 Even if the bcp could not live up to all of its promises, women’s lives changed dramatically.10 Women formed a large part of the newly industrialized workforce, and soon they accounted for about half of the workers in almost every sector. By the mid-1980s, 44.7 percent of the workers in industry were women, as were 53.6 percent of the workers in the trade sector; 68.9 percent of those in education; 65.3 percent of those in finance, credit, and insurance; and almost 40 percent of those in public administration.11 Furthermore, women accounted for an increasingly larger portion of a variety of managerial and executive positions.12 All of these changes precipitated a decline in the birthrate, which threatened Bulgaria’s continued economic growth. At the historical moment in which American women began fighting for access to men’s colleges and fair employment Bulgaria 59 === [PDF page 78] === opportunities, the Bulgarians were already tackling the problem of workfamily balance. Elite communist women, working within the corridors of established power, spearheaded these efforts, despite the constraints of working within a nondemocratic state. Writing retrospectively in 2003, Dinkova argued that the most progressive leap forward for Bulgarian women came during the third decade of communist rule.13 In her own recounting of the early days of this “great women’s revolution,” Dinkova attributes its early success to two women working within the structure of the bcp. Both of them were committed Marxists and had been politically active in the struggle against the Naziallied Bulgarian monarchy during World War II. Both were empowered to act on behalf of Bulgarian women, and like later state feminists in Scandinavia, each woman used her position of authority and influence to push through policy changes that would help to improve the material conditions of Bulgarian women’s lives. The first was Sonya Bakish, the longtime editor-in-chief of Zhenata Dnes, who died in 2010. Like Popova, Dinkova maintained a very high opinion of Bakish even decades after the end of communist rule. Although Bakish was the wife of one of the most powerful men in Bulgaria, Dinkova recalled that Bakish refused to take advantage of any privileges: “She commuted with the busses, trollies, and trams of the public transportation. She did not use the cars serving her husband, which, although against protocol, was widely practiced by other members of families of high status. She did not even use the editorial office’s car, which would have been perfectly acceptable.”14 Under Bakish’s leadership, Zhenata Dnes became one of the publications with the largest circulation in Bulgaria.15 The magazine had started in 1945 with twenty-four pages and a circulation of twenty thousand.16 By 1976, issues had forty-eight pages and a circulation of 400,000 copies in Bulgarian and 120,000 in Russian.17 In a letter to Alexander Lilov, a secretary of the Central Committee, the cbwm complained that there were at least 100,000 Bulgarian women who wanted a subscription to the magazine, but the Committee was unable to meet this demand because it had used up its paper quota.18 By the end of the 1970s, Zhenata Dnes printed 500,000 Bulgarian and 100,000 Russian copies for a total population of about 4.5 million women, meaning that almost one in every seven Bulgarian women received the magazine.19 Zhenata Dnes not only supported the discussion of women’s issues among women domestically; it also became a valuable platform encour- 60 chapter two === [PDF page 79] === aging dialogue between the Committee and ordinary working women.20 Although Zhenata Dnes promoted socialism and celebrated the achievements of other centrally planned economies, it also catered to the popular interests of its subscribers. Mixed in among the articles about the superiority of state socialism, the magazine published poetry, short fiction, travel articles, horoscopes, features on arts and crafts, recipes, sewing patterns, fashion pages, and even a personals section where lonely Bulgarian men could place small ads. Indeed, the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova argued that Zhenata Dnes grew popular precisely because it refrained from overly ideologizing the everyday issues about which women wanted to read.21 The magazine created an “imagined community” of Bulgarian women from different ages, professions, and educational levels.22 The revenue from subscriptions to the magazine went directly into the budget of the women’s cbwm, and it supported the committee’s independence from the central communist authorities.23 Unlike the Liga Kobiet in Poland, which was dependent on the Communist Party for its finances,24 the cbwm had its own discretionary funds, which it used to underwrite a wide variety of domestic initiatives, including the funding of key studies that provided empirical evidence for the problems of families in Bulgaria. Despite the continued oversight of the censors in the Central Committee, Bakish’s stewardship not only increased the publication’s readership, but it also enhanced the cbwm’s ability to respond to the needs of ordinary women. The second important figure in the Bulgarian women’s movement was a geneticist who had little experience with women’s issues. As Bakish and her journalists tried to transform the discussion of women’s issues in the state-controlled media, Elena Lagadinova endeavored to put some of their suggestions into practice. Lagadinova served as the president of the cbwm for twenty-two years and was among the most prominent women in the socialist bloc during the un Decade for Women. Like Bakish, Lagadinova fought in World War II. The youngest female partisan in a family of national heroes, she began at age eleven as a yatak running messages to her father and brothers in the mountains.25 When she was fourteen, the gendarmes burned down her home, and she joined her brothers as a fullfledged soldier with her own handgun, earning the guerrilla nickname “the Amazon.” After the war, Lagadinova went to the Soviet Union, where she earned a doctorate in biology. When she returned to Bulgaria, she was appointed as an agricultural geneticist at an institute affiliated with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Lagadinova spent thirteen years as a Bulgaria 61 === [PDF page 80] === F IGU RE 2.1 Elena Lagadinova, 1979. working scientist, eventually earning her habilitation and a national medal in honor of her successful creation of a more robust winter wheat hybrid.26 By 1968, Bulgarian women had been fully incorporated into the labor force, but at the cost of future population growth. The Politburo fretted that fewer Bulgarian babies were being born. Anecdotal evidence suggested that women found it difficult to combine productive labor in the formal economy with reproductive labor in the home. The demographer Genoveva Mihova blamed this decline on the rapid increase in women’s education as well as the rural-to-urban migration that characterized the first two decades of communism.27 As with demographic transitions elsewhere, education and urbanization meant a shift from large extended to small nuclear families. Mihova believed that this was an inevitable part of the modernization process and a symbol of women’s progress. But fewer babies meant fewer workers. The Committee of Bulgarian Women (cbw) dealt mostly with international issues between 1950 and 1968.28 Beginning in the 1960s, the cbw had nurtured bilateral contacts with women’s organizations and movements in the developing world. For instance, one stenographic protocol from a meeting of the cbw held on March 17, 1965, demonstrates that Bulgarian women were in close contact with key women leaders in Mali.29 The protocol shows the Committee discussing the material aid that could be sent to Mali in response to a letter from Aoua Keita, a radical African 62 chapter two === [PDF page 81] === F IGUR E 2.2 Elena Lagadinova as a partisan, 1944. woman who was an active militant in the African Democratic Assembly, which was fighting for independence in all of the French African colonies.30 The cbw had a budget of 5,000 Bulgarian levs to support women’s movements in other countries and agreed to spend 1,000 levs for pencils, notebooks, typewriters, printing machines, and other supplies for Mali in support of the women’s movement there. The cbw recognized that Keita was one of the most important women in Africa and hoped to invite her to Bulgaria. The same protocol shows another 1,000 levs supporting the Bulgarian Red Cross in its efforts to provide food aid to Angola and a commitment to send 500 – 700 levs’ worth of aid to support women’s organizations in India. But the statute of the cbw changed in response to the demographic crisis. In 1967, Todor Zhivkov handpicked Lagadinova, and she reluctantly Bulgaria 63 === [PDF page 82] === left her scientific career to become the president of the new Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement. The 1968 reorganization of the women’s committee increased its authority over all issues related to women and families, including the ability to propose legislation and to sue state enterprises that failed to comply with the laws protecting female employees.31 Lagadinova was a scientist, not a politician, and under her leadership the demographic problem became a scientific question in need of a solution. In terms of international work, after the Bulgarian women’s committee was reconstituted with enlarged powers in 1968, and under Lagadinova’s leadership, the cbwm began sending and receiving a wide variety of delegations from socialist-oriented countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (including a much publicized visit by the recently freed American Angela Davis in 1972).32 Moreover, Lagadinova openly rationalized her proposal to host the 1972 Council Meeting of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) in Bulgaria as a way to forge stronger alliances with women from the newly independent countries after the widf pressured the csw to celebrate an International Women’s Year to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the widf in 1975.33 Domestically, Lagadinova led a mass organization with a structure similar to all other mass organizations in Bulgaria at the time.34 At the national level, the cbwm had a Political Bureau that consisted of a president (Lagadinova) and several secretaries (including Tchomakova) who were the de facto leaders of the cbwm. These women represented the mass organization to the Bulgarian government and on the international stage. The women in the Political Bureau technically were elected at national conferences, but these elections often confirmed political appointments. At the regional level, the cbwm had a branch in each of Bulgaria’s municipalities.35 The municipal branches had their own local bureaus, with their own presidents and secretaries, elected at municipal conferences by their local constituencies.36 Only the members of the national Political Bureau and the presidents of the municipal bureaus were paid employees of the state. All other positions were filled by women volunteers who had formal employment obligations elsewhere. Despite the additional burden of this volunteer work, the cbwm had active support from ordinary women across the country.37 Part of the reason for its broad constituency was the committee’s opendoor policy to all Bulgarian women, whether they were official members of the Communist Party or not. Unlike many organizations, the cbwm 64 chapter two === [PDF page 83] === FIGU RE 2.3 Elena Lagadinova (at right) with Angela Davis (center), 1972. accepted women who, like Popova, were bezpartien (without party affiliation). Also, the cbwm’s activities were open to all, and local women had the opportunity to suggest activities that they wanted to have sponsored in their towns and villages. Veselina Grueva, the national secretary in charge of domestic activities from 1975 to 1990, explained to me in 2011: “All of the ideas for the women’s programs came from the women’s organizations themselves. They could initiate the things they wanted, and we would sponsor them. We worked with a lot of different partners in society to realize these programs. And we made a lot of progress in increasing the cultural level of women in the rural areas. It was very inspired work.”38 The detailed records of the women who participated in its Third National Congress in 1979 confirm the representative nature of the cbwm.39 According to the official ledgers, 809 delegates were in attendance, representing all walks of Bulgarian life. While 651 of the delegates were members of the bcp, 44 were members of the Bulgarian Agricultural National Union, 38 were members of the Komsomol, and 76 were “without party.” There was also a wide range of ages and professions: 142 delegates were younger than thirty-five, and 107 delegates were older than fifty-five, the Bulgaria 65 === [PDF page 84] === retirement age for Bulgarian women. One hundred and twelve delegates had only a primary school education, and seventy were employed in agricultural labor. From these 809 delegates, the conference was responsible for electing 171 members to be direct representatives to the National Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and to choose its thirteen bureau members. Of these 171 members of the national committee, 121 had university education; forty-five had secondary school educations; and five had only primary school. The range of professions was very diverse, as were the women’s ages: twenty-three of the new members chosen in 1979 were younger than thirty, and seventy-two members were younger than forty.40 Thus, although the cbwm was a state organization led by a member of the Communist Party, it strove for representativeness, recognizing the diversity of the Bulgarian women it claimed to represent. Since the cbwm was a mass women’s organization, it did homogenize “women” into a single category of analysis, ignoring such categories of ethnicity and religion — and, certainly, sexuality. It also tended to essentialize women as mothers and caregivers, a trend that was common throughout many maternalist women’s movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite these admitted shortcomings, the cbwm tried to include as many different women as possible within its leadership and saw strength in unity against the entrenched patriarchal structure of Bulgarian society. The Revolution Begins With Lagadinova at the helm of the cbwm, Bakish fired the opening shots in the “great women’s revolution.”41 Zhenata Dnes published a series of articles addressing the problems of Bulgarian women in the late 1960s. These included an exposé by the journalists Penka Duhteva and Maria Dinkova on the working conditions of women employed in construction enterprises and an article discussing why Bulgarian women in the town of Kazanlak were not having a third child in their families.42 Fearing that the bureaucrats in the Central Committee might prevent the publication of an article that was overtly critical of communist policies, Bakish ran the latter piece accompanied by a boldfaced quote from an article Lenin published in Pravda in November 1921. It was the first sentence of a longer passage that enjoins the Bolsheviks not to rest on their revolutionary laurels: The best way to celebrate the anniversary of a great revolution is to concentrate attention on its unsolved problems. It is particularly ap- 66 chapter two === [PDF page 85] === propriate and necessary to celebrate the revolution in this way at a time when we are faced with fundamental problems that the revolution has not yet solved, and when we must master something new (from the point of view of what the revolution has accomplished up to now) for the solution of these problems [emphasis added].43 Quoting Lenin allowed the editorial collective at Zhenata Dnes to promote the idea that tackling new problems was an appropriate endeavor for communists to pursue — one that was sanctioned by the great father of the Russian Revolution himself. Bakish and her editorial collective could demonstrate their loyalty to the system while simultaneously saying that the system was not doing enough to address women’s issues. Using this tactic, Zhenata Dnes also published articles on sexology, premarital sex, and single motherhood, as well as Popova’s exposé on the changing contours of Bulgarian masculinity, all topics that might be considered too “bourgeois” for a communist women’s magazine. Another example of the activism of the editorial collective at Zhenata Dnes and the political bureau of the cbwm was a national survey conducted in 1969. In order to reverse the falling birthrate, Lagadinova wanted to collect data to understand why women were not having more children. Had Bulgarian women recently developed a preference for smaller families? Or was the low birthrate an artifact of social conditions that made it difficult for women to have the number of children they actually wanted? Although sociology was a suspicious discipline in most communist countries, the only way to get this information was to ask women directly. With the permission of the Central Committee of the bcp, Bakish and Lagadinova were able to mount a massive survey effort in coordination with the Central Statistical Office, the Georgi Dimitrov Center for Scientific Investigations and Training, and the Labor Research Institute. The survey, “Women in Production, Social Life and the Family,” consisted of multiplechoice questions. It was distributed to all subscribers of Zhenata Dnes and received 16,060 anonymous replies from around the country.44 The survey produced three key findings. The first was that most Bulgarian women said that they wanted more children than they currently had. Thirty-three percent of the women surveyed only had one child, but fewer than 15 percent said that they wanted to have only one child. About 50 percent of the women surveyed had two children, but 57 percent of the women surveyed said that two children was their ideal. The number of women who wanted three children was almost double that of the women Bulgaria 67 === [PDF page 86] === who actually had three children. Overall, the survey found that while Bulgarian women in 1969 had an average of 1.84 children, they wanted to have an average of 2.28 children. The survey also asked a series of questions about how women combined work and family responsibilities. It found that only 22.8 percent of the children younger than seven were cared for in state-funded kindergartens or crèches.45 Bulgarian women also reported that 8 percent of children younger than seven were left at home by themselves while their parents were at work. Women were now incorporated into the labor force, but the survey found that they were desperately cobbling together childcare. Although they tried to use grandparents and husbands as much as possible, the primary responsibility for looking after young children still fell on mothers. When Bulgarian women were asked, “What prevents you from having more children?” 22 percent said they felt they were already too old, and 26 percent claimed they did not have the strength to work and raise children at the same time. A further 20 percent responded that they did not have the “material resources” to have another child, and 11 percent felt that their homes were not big enough. Thus, more than half of the women surveyed claimed that scarcity of time or resources prevented them from having the number of children they wanted. Time budget data highlight the severity of this situation. The survey found that, while women spent eight hours a day at work, they spent an additional one to two hours commuting to and from the workplace. On top of this, they spent four-and-a-half hours cooking, cleaning the house, standing in line for household necessities, washing and ironing, and working on private agricultural plots. These fourteen-and-a-half-hour days meant that women had little time for the other activities that the communist government claimed were important for its citizens. Lagadinova and Bakish confirmed what individual Bulgarian women already knew: they had no time to spend with their children, let alone in social and political activism, further education and training, reading literature, participating in cultural activities or any other forms of sport or recreation. It was clear that communist emancipation for women in the workplace had done little to relieve women’s responsibilities in the home, and this double burden explained the falling birthrate. Exhausted women made individual decisions that resulted in a national crisis.46 Bulgarian women had been emancipated in theory, but in practice they were suffering under the massive pressure of a society that valorized motherhood but refused to support it with concrete resources. 68 chapter two === [PDF page 87] === Once the nature of the problem became clear, the cbwm began to consider different policies to allow women to have the larger families they said they wanted.47 One solution was to reduce the obligation for women’s employment outside of the home. For both ideological and practical reasons, however, Lagadinova and Bakish refused to pursue this course. First, socialist doctrines demanded the full participation of women in society in order to reduce their economic dependence on men and to ensure sexual equality. Second, most communist countries, including Bulgaria, needed women’s labor to forge ahead with rapid industrialization. Third, mass literacy campaigns and an almost universal commitment to women’s education and training meant that the communist state had already invested heavily in developing the human capital of women. Not to make use of their skills would be a waste of talent, particularly since women now dominated the white-collar professions of law, medicine, education, and banking.48 Finally, for many Bulgarian women, paid employment outside the home, even if compulsory, was a form of self-actualization. The survey found that women wanted to be both mothers and workers. They merely desired help in balancing these two responsibilities.49 Another way to increase the birthrate was to severely limit women’s access to abortion, the primary form of birth control. By 1969, the number of abortions far outstripped the actual birthrate.50 Bulgaria’s northern neighbor had already placed heavy restrictions on access to abortion in 1966 after decades of liberal abortion policies. Indeed, Romania became the most repressive pronatalist regime in all of the Eastern Bloc.51 The Bulgarian communist elites did consider a similar policy of restricting abortions, but the cbwm, like the Liga Kobiet in Poland, strongly recommended against this course of action. Instead, the Committee advocated for a massive expansion of state entitlements for mothers. Rather than forcing women to retreat from the labor force or compelling them to have babies, the cbwm proposed to socialize as much domestic labor as possible, following the ideas of the women’s conferences of the Second International and the early policies of the Zhenotdel in the Soviet Union. Their proposal called on the state to dramatically expand the construction of crèches and kindergartens. They also advocated for a new policy of maternity leaves that would allow women up to two years of paid leave from the labor force with a guarantee that their jobs would be held for them in their absence. Furthermore, time spent on maternity leave was to count as labor service toward women’s pensions. Bulgaria 69 === [PDF page 88] === The cbwm proposal also included a provision for child allowances, which the state would pay to new mothers on the birth of a baby. These allowances would steadily increase with each subsequent child, up to three children. The cbwm advocated for the expansion of workplace cafeterias where meals could be prepared for women to take home after their factory shifts. Ideally, these policies would reduce the double burden on individual women.52 At the time when this was proposed in 1970, no other socialist country had such a generous set of maternity provisions in place to support working mothers,53 and the USSR would not get a comprehensive maternity leave policy until 1981.54 In the West, only the Scandinavian social democracies were as progressive in terms of supporting women in their quest to combine employment with motherhood. And while these measures certainly reinforced the idea that maternity was a social responsibility of women and valorized women’s roles as workers and mothers without a similar valorization of men as workers and fathers, they did what Bulgarian women said they wanted. In this case, women’s interests aligned with the interests of the Communist Party. Later, the maternity law was amended so that fathers and grandparents could take the “maternity” leave in the place of the woman, and a key Politburo decision included language about reeducating men to be more active in the home: The reduction and alleviation of woman’s household work depends greatly on the common participation of the two spouses in the organization of family life. It is therefore imperative a) to combat outdated views, habits, and attitudes as regards the allocation of work within the family; b) to prepare young men for the performance of household duties from childhood and adolescence both by the school and society and by the family.55 Despite their efforts to include men, the cbwm preferred to socialize as much domestic labor as possible. But this would be expensive, drawing resources away from the development of heavy industry, which was an economic priority. Luckily, the cbwm had three key allies. The first was Tsola Dragoicheva, who had founded the original Bulgarian Popular Women’s Union and had gone on to become one of the most senior members of the Bulgarian Politburo.56 Bakish’s husband was also a Politburo member, and he may have lent support to his wife’s cause. Todor Zhivkov’s daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova was quickly working her way up through the political 70 chapter two === [PDF page 89] === ranks and undoubtedly had influence over her father, a widower.57 She had worked with the cbwm and Zhenata Dnes on the promotion of Bulgarian arts and culture and would attend the first un Women’s Conference in Mexico City with Lagadinova. Zhivkova probably had a hand in promoting women’s issues behind the scenes. At the same historical moment when US President Richard Nixon vetoed the idea of a nationally funded childcare system and the Equal Rights Amendment (era) was meeting resistance from individual states that refused to ratify it, the Bulgarian Politburo issued an official decision on March 6, 1973. The decision, “Enhancing the Role of Women in the Building of a Developed Socialist Society,” authorized massive budget expenditures to expand state supports for women.58 Perhaps more important, the Politburo instituted only a limited ban on abortions. Abortion remained safe, legal, and easily available for all single and divorced women, as well as for women caring for two or more children (even if those children were not biologically her own). The only women who could not attain legal abortions were married women with fewer than two children in their care. Lagadinova and the cbwm opposed this measure. “No woman should be forced to have a child that she does not want,” Lagadinova told me in 2012. “It is bad for the child, and it is bad for society.” In practice, the Bulgarian medical community refused to cooperate with the ban, and most women could easily circumvent it.59 Another important component of the 1973 decision was that it strengthened the role of the cbwm in ensuring that Bulgarian enterprises implemented the new laws. Since 1968, the Committee had been empowered to carry out something called naroden kontrol (people’s control) or obshtestven kontrol (societal control).60 Lagadinova and her colleagues had the right to represent women to other state agencies. For instance, they could make sure that pregnant women were moved to more suitable work posts if their current jobs were too strenuous. Furthermore, if an employer did not give a woman maternity leave, or did not hold her job for her during her absence, a woman could complain to the cbwm, which could take up the matter with the enterprise directors. After the Politburo decision, the cbwm became more aggressive. It sent representatives out across the country to ensure that enterprises utilized the resources necessary to build on-site crèches for lactating mothers. The Committee also gave regular updates to the Central Committee of the bcp about whether the decision was being fully implemented. In Bulgaria 71 === [PDF page 90] === a letter to the Central Committee in 1977, Lagadinova chastised the government for failing to build the number of crèches and kindergartens to which it had committed.61 A similar letter was sent to Stanko Todorov, complaining that there were still eighteen thousand children without childcare places and blaming the government for not allocating the necessary resources to fulfill the plan.62 In a different report to Todorov, Lagadinova explained in exhausting detail the appropriate architectural and interior designs for crèches and kindergartens.63 On a more mundane level, the cbwm dispatched inspectors to make sure that women had clean bathrooms and functioning cafeterias in their workplaces and that cafeteria food was of a sufficient quality. In 1975, for instance, Lagadinova wrote a “warning note” to Professor Ivan Illchev, vice-president of the Council of Ministers and president of the Commission on Living Conditions, complaining that the Hristo Mihailov factory in Mihailovgrad did not have a workers’ cafeteria. She noted that 830 of the 1,007 workers were women, who were forced to bring their own meals and eat at their work stations. The Committee insisted that a cafeteria be built immediately.64 One of the most interesting departments in the cbwm was the “complaint” section. As with Zhenata Dnes, women from all over Bulgaria wrote letters asking the Committee for advice on both personal and professional issues. Veselina Grueva worked in the complaint department for fifteen years, traveling around the country encouraging women to contact the cbwm and promising that the Committee would do its best to make sure that women’s needs were addressed. Like Pavlina Popova, Grueva and her colleagues in the complaint section claimed that they tried to answer every letter they received, even if the cbwm was unable to grant the writer’s request. The Committee had two lawyers who volunteered their time to help deal with legal questions and officially forwarded complaints to other state agencies.65 In a 2011 interview in Sofia, Grueva recalled: This was very democratic. We [sometimes] met with women and listened to their concerns. We wrote protest letters on their behalf. For instance, when they passed the new Family Code in the 1980s, we spent a lot of time helping women to figure out the new laws and how they could be applied to their personal lives. We were very democratic. This is a form of democracy, to talk to the population, to listen to their concerns, and to act on them. It was not all black at the time. Yes, it was a totalitarian government, but we took a lot 72 chapter two === [PDF page 91] === of initiatives to work on behalf of women and the work that we did was very valuable.66 In the cbwm archives I discovered numerous letters written to the Central Committee on behalf of Bulgarian women. The cbwm demanded the expansion of the domestic production of goods that would benefit women and children. For instance, if you had a flat-footed child, there was no domestic supply of arch supports for footwear. The cbwm successfully lobbied to have a local factory produce them.67 In one report from the cbwm on the production of toys and sports equipment, the Committee put forth detailed proposals for the production of high-quality, age-appropriate toys for small children in the kindergartens and various sporting goods for children in primary and secondary school.68 In another letter to the Central Committee, Lagadinova wrote to protest the lack of high-quality clothing being produced in Bulgaria, explaining, “The clothes which can be found now in the stores for our citizens are the ugliest that can be seen.”69 She complained that the Ministry of Trade and Services was not doing its job: “Jersey dresses, which are very practical, are rarely available in the stores. When they are, there are only limited sizes and are not in the most fashionable styles.” She went on to state that, while the supply of men’s underwear was adequate, “women’s and youth underwear” was available only in limited quantities and were not produced “in all the sizes or patterns or colors that the population is seeking.” 70 The Committee also did research on Western supermarkets in an attempt to reduce the burdens associated with shopping in a communist country.71 Infertility was another complaint of women who wrote letters to the committee. After commissioning a study, the cbwm learned that a significant number of cases were the result of male infertility caused by untreated venereal disease. Once this was realized, the cbwm lobbied the military to make sure that all draftees were screened for diseases when they returned to base after a leave of absence. Both the cbwm and Zhenata Dnes further attempted to redistribute some of the household labor to men by promoting the idea that Bulgarian men should be equal partners in the home. Zhenata Dnes even ran a series of articles discussing the role of fathers and encouraging men to help their wives around the house, featuring photos of Bulgarian men knitting, boiling laundry, and feeding a baby.72 Of course, not all of the cbwm’s efforts were successful, particularly their attempts to challenge the traditional Bulgarian patriarchy. In one bold proposal, Lagadinova lobbied the Union of Architects to rethink the Bulgaria 73 === [PDF page 92] === traditional design for apartment blocks. The idea was that the first floor of every block would have an indoor playground and a pub where men could sit together and watch the children, giving their wives some time away from home. In the few rural cities where this was tried, however, men resisted the idea that watching children was their responsibility, especially when grandmothers lived nearby.73 In another case, the cbwm apparently proposed that marrying couples should write up prenuptial contracts to clearly delineate the distribution of resources in the case of a divorce. The authorities refused this idea because they thought it introduced too much calculation into what should be an institution based on love.74 Another major problem that the cbwm faced was women’s ongoing frustration with the lack of disposable diapers (which Bulgarians refer to generically as Pampers) and the dearth of feminine hygiene products.75 Long before the environmental movement, communist planners felt that disposable products such as feminine napkins and Pampers were wasteful.76 There were no domestic facilities that produced them, and the Bulgarian government refused to use hard currency to have them imported. However, Bulgarian women knew these products existed in the West. Their lack of availability in the socialist countries was often seen as a sign that their governments were growing increasingly out of touch with women’s needs. The cbwm tried to argue that these products, although important, were not as important for women as having paid maternity leaves, kindergartens, and child allowances. But their arguments fell on deaf ears. Ongoing consumer shortages were one of the biggest frustrations of life for women living in centrally planned economies, something many of them still recall vividly to this day.77 Yet another problem plaguing many mass organizations in Bulgaria was the tendency toward gerontocracy. The first generation of women’s activists such as Tchomakova were ideologically committed to the precepts of communism and remembered the abysmal situation of women and peasants before World War II. But women born after 1945 took a lot of the achievements of the first generation for granted, forgetting about the material realities of rural living. By the second postwar generation, many younger women did not see communism as a radical and progressive ideology but merely as a hopelessly bureaucratic and stifling political system, which forbade them jeans, rock music, and travel to the West. These generational divides affected the membership of the women’s committee, as fewer young women were willing to volunteer for social labor. The leadership of the cbwm aged and slowly lost touch with the dreams 74 chapter two === [PDF page 93] === and aspirations of their more youthful constituents. In the long run, this made the women’s committee less dynamic and sustainable. Moreover, although the cbwm made significant strides forward, it did so under a system that constrained the type of civil and political rights championed by women in the Western democracies. Issues of homosexuality went undiscussed, and women did not have the option to stay home with their children after the age of three; no woman could choose to be an economically dependent housewife. Pointing out the real progress enjoyed by Bulgarian women does not erase the many problems confronting women who lived in a centralized state with an economy of shortage. Independent women’s organizations were prohibited, and women who promoted individual self-actualization above the state-proscribed roles of mother and worker had few champions within the cbwm. Moreover, many ordinary women resented the perceived privileges of women such as Lagadinova, Dinkova, and Tchomakova, who lived in Sofia, could ride in the committee’s special Mercedes-Benz (used for hosting visiting dignitaries), and could travel abroad, particularly to the West. Despite all of these caveats, Bulgarian women made massive strides in a relatively short period of time through “emancipation from above” relative to other countries at similar levels of development in 1945. And compared with the postwar situation in the United States, Bulgarian women were leagues ahead of their American sisters by the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. Bulgaria 75 === [PDF page 94] === 3. Emancipated Women and Anticommunism in the American Political Imagination Arvonne Fraser was born on a farm in rural Minnesota in 1925, five years after Krastina Tchomakova was born in Bulgaria. Both women came from poor families who lived off the land, and the contours of their everyday lives were similar, despite the social, cultural, and historical differences between Bulgaria and the United States. Fraser’s farmhouse had no electricity or running water, and only the kitchen and dining rooms were heated by burning wood, kerosene, or corncobs. Like Tchomakova, Fraser rose up out of her humble background through political involvement —specifically, in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (dfl) — to become a member of an official delegation to the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City. Although the US State Department forbade the Americans from speaking with their counterparts in the communist countries (even if they met by chance in the ladies’ room), Tchomakova and Fraser would have had much to chat about. Recalling her youth, Fraser writes, “Expectations for farm girls in the late 1920s were limited. You were supposed to grow up, go to school, find a job for a while, then get married and settle down. Settling down meant having children and being content with what life handed you.”1 Fraser embraced education as a way out of this destiny, and she graduated from her high school with good grades and valuable experience editing her school’s newspaper. At seventeen, she sped off to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to enroll in a trade school so she could find a good job. World War II was in full swing, and women’s labor was desperately needed to staff the factories now whirring at full employment. Fra- === [PDF page 95] === ser also found herself drawn to the university, where she took courses in philosophy and sociology and dove into the world of Minnesota politics. After the war, Fraser became a campaign secretary for Hubert Humphrey in a new party that combined the Farmer-Labor Party with the Minnesota Democratic Party. Arvonne Fraser was twenty-two years old when she caught her first glimpses of the anticommunism that would politically define the late 1940s and 1950s in the United States. “Within the dfl there was a conflict between traditional liberals and more radical socialists, who, in the pressure-cooker of the nascent Cold War, were deemed to be dangerous ‘Reds,’ ” she writes. “Under Humphrey’s auspices, a local chapter of [the] Americans for Democratic Action... had been formed to take on the challenges of ridding the newly-merged dfl party of its Communist influences.”2 Humphrey had been a wildly successful mayor of Minneapolis, and in June 1948 Fraser was offered a job as a secretary-receptionist in Humphrey’s campaign for the US Senate. Fraser was an avid Humphrey supporter and considered herself on the “right wing” of the dfl, often called the “university crowd.” Fraser supported rights for minorities but shunned the radical politics of the Old Left: The 1948 dfl convention battle was between what came to be known as the party’s left and right wings. The right wing — though still definitely left of center politically — supported the Marshall Plan to restore Europe from the shambles of World War II. Left wingers were radical Farmer-Laborites and former or concurrent members of the Communist Party, who opposed the plan and supported Henry Wallace for president instead of the incumbent president, Harry Truman.... It was a vicious fight — too vicious, I later believed, but I held my tongue.3 Although Fraser had one failed starter marriage to a returning veteran, she met the love of her life working on the Humphrey campaign, Donald Fraser. They married and had six children together, and Arvonne became a political juggernaut in support of her husband’s congressional career. Donald Fraser served eight terms in the US Congress, and Arvonne became an active congressional wife, traveling frequently with her husband on diplomatic missions overseas. Arvonne Fraser did not start out as a feminist, but the burgeoning US women’s movement, her own experiences as a congressman’s wife in Washington, and her desire for work after her Emancipated Women and Anticommunism 77 === [PDF page 96] === children were grown eventually lured her into forming a Washington, DC, chapter of the Women’s Equity Action League (weal). Through the political connections of her husband’s congressional staff members, Arvonne was sent to help represent the US women’s movement in Mexico City. I first interviewed Arvonne Fraser on the phone in 2005. Back then, I was a newly minted assistant professor interested in the politics of international women’s organizing during the Cold War. I met her in person in 2011 at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and although she had written and published many books and articles, she struck me as more of an activist and a politician than a scholar. Her answers always seemed thoughtful and curated, and she spoke with authority, with full confidence in her own views. As the child of farmers and a left-liberal, Fraser considered herself a solid Democrat. But she was also an anticommunist and an avid defender of women’s right to independent organizing. Her personal history reflects the predominant culture in the United States, and she spent many years as a mother and housewife before she became an advocate for women’s rights. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the media and popular culture reinforced the idea that traditional femininity and family life were the bulwarks of the freedoms granted by American democracy.4 For example, Fraser was twenty-one on March 9, 1946 (one day after International Women’s Day), when the New York Times reported that American and British women were being “hailed in Moscow.” Buried on page 15, among the wedding notices, engagement announcements, and a report about the possible increase in the availability of silk for women’s stockings, a short article discussed the content of a new manual for Communist Party cadres, which asserted that fully one-third of the industrial labor force in the United States was made up by women during World War II. This fact apparently refuted “all superstitions and prejudices, formerly current in capitalist countries, that women were not capable of working beside men in industrial plants.”5 The article went on to cite Soviet statistics comparing the status of women in the United States to those in the Soviet Union and ended with a quote from a Moscow newspaper: “It is only the Soviet Government... that for the first time in history has guaranteed to women genuine equality with men in all spheres of state, social, economic and cultural activities and led them on the highway to a free, creative, and happy life.”6 But this Soviet definition of a “free, creative, and happy life” clashed with the newly emerging domestic bliss envisioned in the United States, 78 chapter three === [PDF page 97] === and Soviet championing of women’s status worked to squelch the few voices for women’s emancipation in the West. Although fears of communism had been used to silence women’s rights activists before World War II,7 McCarthyism proved a more oppressive political context. The prevalent discourse asserted that only communists would want to destabilize the naturally monogamous, nuclear, and patriarchal family in order to give women equality with men, a narrative one also found in West Germany, where fears of communist influence confined women’s roles to what was locally known as the kkk: Kinder-Küche-Kirche (children, kitchen, church).8 In her groundbreaking book Homeward Bound (2008), Elaine Tyler May documented how the culture of the Cold War impacted the idealization of American gender roles and reified a particular vision of domesticity, convincing most Americans that stable families provided the best defense against Soviet plans for world domination: “According to the cold war ethos of the time, conflict within the United States would harm our image abroad, strengthen the Soviet Union, and weaken the nation, making it vulnerable to communism.... the real dangers to America were internal ones: racial strife, emancipated women, class conflict, and familial disruption.9 The government feared political instability at home, and the equation of feminism and communism proved a useful tool to white, heterosexual American men interested in preserving their patriarchal privilege. The historian Landon Storrs explored the imagined links between feminism and communism during the first and second Red Scares and argued that “right-wingers viewed communism as a challenge not only to capitalist class relations but also to prevailing gender and race hierarchies. For them, the need to stabilize white male supremacy was one important reason to oppose communism.”10 In an era when the feminine ideal glorified the docile mother and dedicated housewife who never worked outside the home, most of these right-wing men despised the idea of feminism and “used popular antifeminism as a tool in their battle against leftist and liberals.”11 But it was not only white men who upheld the postwar status quo. White women also contributed to the anticommunist crusade, both at home and abroad, often following directives from Washington politicians. In her book Cold War Women (2002), Helen Laville documents how many middle- and upper-class women’s organizations collaborated with the US government in its anti-Soviet propaganda war, hoping that their Emancipated Women and Anticommunism 79 === [PDF page 98] === openly anticommunist stance would deflect accusations that they, too, were “subversive.” Although these organizations were independently organized, they had no problem supporting the foreign policy aims of the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (cia).12 Women’s employment had been a necessity of the war years, but their continued desire to work outside the home was considered a pathology after the war was over. For example, the book Modern Woman (1947) argued that a woman’s desire for formal employment undermined her happiness and destroyed the masculine pride of her husband. Written by a psychiatrist and a social historian, the book reached the nonfiction bestseller lists in the United States and championed biologically determined sex roles, which if challenged by women, led to their neuroses. Women’s wish for authority amounted to nothing more than “penis envy,” which led to the undesirable emasculation of her husband and the eventual breakdown of marital harmony.13 But why would women desire employment outside the home? And what would make women reject their “naturally” submissive role as wives and mothers? Real and imagined communists proved a convenient scapegoat. Modern Woman’s authors placed the blame for these “intensely humiliating” experiences at the feet of Marx and Engels and Soviet support for the cause of women’s rights: “Although the Russians in recent years will have nothing of feminism, the political agents of the Kremlin abroad continue to beat the feminist drums in full awareness of its disruptive influence among the potential enemies of the Soviet Union. Political partisans of the Soviet regime therefore, launched the Women’s International Democratic Federation in November 1945, in Paris. This organization will, outside Russia, probably continue to promote the theories of feminism and what it can of neurotic disorder.”14 Domestically, American politicians and media elites also feared that women would constitute a Soviet fifth column against capitalism and democracy and worried about women’s political gullibility in the face of communist propaganda about sexual equality. “The Soviet Attack on Women’s Minds,” an article published in McCall’s magazine in 1953, opined: “The Communists have carefully calculated the influence of women on the next generation as well as on this one and have devoted an immense proportion of their world war to capturing the hearts and minds of women all over the world. Moscow regards women second only to youth as the most highly sought after ally in the struggle for communism.”15 One important casualty of the equation of women’s rights with communism was an independent women’s organization crushed by the Amer- 80 chapter three === [PDF page 99] === ican government at about the same time that Bulgarians were consolidating all of their prewar women’s organizations into one official women’s committee. The Congress of American Women (caw) was founded on March 8, 1946, a year after the first meeting of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) in France. That the leaders of caw chose the first International Women’s Day after the Paris conference to found their own organization was no accident; they saw themselves as advocates for women’s rights and world peace and, later, for anticolonial and antiracist causes, much like the widf. Although a decidedly leftist organization, the widf was “the largest and probably most influential international women’s organization of the post-1945 era,” with many communist and noncommunist members from around the globe.16 From the early correspondence among caw members it is clear that they were strong advocates for peace, internationalism, and women’s rights. Many were affiliated with the Old Left and had volunteered in the Spanish Civil War. Some were members of the Communist Party of the USA (cpusa). The strong international bent of the caw attracted both black and white women to its ranks, including Susan B. Anthony II, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the artist Muriel Draper. Gene (Regina) Weltfish — a student of Franz Boas and professor of anthropology at Columbia University — served as the organization’s president.17 The social worker Thyra Edwards served as the organization’s executive secretary. Edwards was the granddaughter of runaway slaves, and eventually became a labor, civil rights, and women’s rights activist, writing articles and traveling internationally to deliver public lectures. Radicalized by the Spanish Civil War, she joined the cpusa while she was living in New York in the 1930s and visited the Soviet Union.18 The early correspondence of the caw consists primarily of letters to and from Edwards, who actively worked to recruit women to the organization.19 The state investigation of the caw commenced in 1948, and in 1949 the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) issued a report condemning the organization and the widf as “communist fronts.” The committee’s report quotes extensively from the literature and proceedings of the caw and the widf, using their own words to demonstrate how communism had infiltrated organizations purporting to support the equality between men and women: “Proclaimed originally as the ‘first women’s political-action organization since the suffrage movement,’ the Congress of American Women is just another Communist hoax specifically designed to ensnare idealistically minded but politically gullible Emancipated Women and Anticommunism 81 === [PDF page 100] === women [emphasis added].”20 Although the caw and the widf advocated for women’s issues in addition to their larger political work around peace, the huac belittled their feminist goals and concentrated on their political ties to the Soviet Union: The Congress of American Women is an affiliate of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which was founded and supported at all times by the international Communist movement. The purpose of these organizations is not to deal primarily with women’s problems, as such, but rather to serve as a specialized arm of Soviet political warfare in the current “peace” campaign to disarm and demobilize the United States and democratic nations generally, in order to render them helpless in the face of the Communist drive for world conquest [emphasis added].21 The members of huac further opined: The chief purpose of the Congress of American Women is to act as part of a world-wide pressure mechanism among women, in support of Soviet foreign and domestic policy. From its inception this group has displayed a marked anti-American bias. Its real aims are discreetly hidden behind a smoke screen of such attractive idealistic bait as equal rights for women “in all aspects of political, economic, legal, cultural, and social life,” the extension of educational and health benefits, [and] child care.... The Congress of American Women and its international parent body [the widf] assume that these purposes have reached their fruition in the Soviet Union and that the United States is chiefly derelict along these lines.22 Particularly troubling for the huac were the reports that the Soviet Union “was pictured as a veritable paradise for women where all of their problems had long been solved.”23 Indeed, the huac reported with incredulity that an “unmarried” delegate from the British Labour Party had the audacity to discuss pay inequality between men and women in the majority of countries and to “state flatly” that: “Only in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria do laws exist guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work.”24 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also criticized the “bourgeois democracies” for granting women’s rights “only piecemeal” and “after tremendous struggle.”25 Flynn argued that women’s activists should use the USSR to “demonstrate to American women” that only the communists are the active champions of women’s issues. 82 chapter three