“As probably every country has its Amazons, if we go far back in Czech mythology, to a collection of Old Czech Legends, we come across a very interesting legend about the Dévín castle (which literally means ‘The Girls’ Castle’). It describes a bloody story about a rebellion of women, who started a vengeful war against men. As the story goes, they were not only capable warriors, they had no mercy and would not hesitate to kill their fathers and brothers. Under the leadership of mighty Vlasta, the ‘girls’ lived in their castle, ‘Dévín’, where they underwent a severe military training. They led the war very successfully, and one day Vlasta came up with an shrewd plan, how to take hostage a famous nobleman, Ctirad. She chose the lovely Sárka from the body (sic!) of her troops and had her tied up to a tree by a road with a horn and a jar of a mead out of her reach, but in her sight. In this state, Sárka was waiting for Ctirad to find her. When he actually really appeared and saw her, she told him a sad story of how the women from Dévín punished her for not following their ideology by tying her to the tree, mockingly putting a jar and a horn (so that she would be always reminded that she is thirsty and helpless) near by. Ctirad, enchanted by the beautiful woman, believed the lure and untied her, and when she handed him the mead, he willingly drunk it. When he was drunk already, she let him blow the horn, which was a signal for the Dévín warriors to capture him. He was then tortured in many horrible ways, at the end of which, his body was woven into a wooden wheel and displayed. This event mobilized the army, which soon afterwards destroyed Dévín. (Very significantly, this legend is the only account of radical feminism in Czech Lands.)”
“The Vissicitudes of Czech Feminism” by Petra Hanáková
“We myself… and many others are not in search of global sisterhood at all, and it is only when we give up expecting it that we can get anywhere. It is each other’s very ‘otherness’ that motivates us, and the things we find in common take on greater meaning within the context of otherness. There is so much to learn by comparing the ways in which we are different, and which the same elements of women’s experience are global, and which aren’t, and wondering why, and what it means.”
Jirina Siklová
“It is difficult to carry three watermelons under one arm.”
Proverb attributed to Bulgarian women
“The high level of unemployment among women, segregation in the labour market, the increasing salary gap between women and men, the lack of women present at the decision making level, increasing violence against women, the high levels of maternal and infant mortality, the total absence of a contraceptive industry in Russia, the insufficiency of child welfare benefits, the lack of adequate resources to fund current state programs – this is only part of the long list of women’s rights violations.”
Elena Kotchkina, Moscow Centre for Gender Studies, “Report on the Legal Status of Women in Russia”
Communism was men’s nightmare and women’s dream, or so the left wing version goes. In reality it was a gender-neutral hell. Women under communism were, indeed, encouraged to participate in the labour force. An array of conveniences facilitated their participation: day care centres, kindergarten, daylong schools, abortion clinics. They had their quota in parliament. They climbed to the top of some professions (though there was a list of women-free occupations, more than 90 is Poland). But this – as most other things in communism – was a mere simulacrum.
Reality was much drearier. Women, however mettlesome, groaned under the “triple burden” – work, marital expectations cum childrearing chores and party activism. They succumbed to the lure and demands of the (stressful and boastful) image of the communist “super-woman”. This martyrdom – now threatened by the dual Western imports, capitalism and feminism – served as a fountain of self-esteem and a source of self-worth in otherwise gloomy circumstances.
Yet, the communist inspired workplace revolution was not complemented by a domestic one. Women’s traditional roles – so succinctly summarized by Bismarck with Prussian geniality as “kitchen, children, church” – survived the modernizing onslaught of scientific Marxism. It is true that power shifted within the family unit (“The woman is the neck that moves the head, her husband”). But the “underslippers” (as Czech men disparagingly self-labeled) still had the upper hand. In short, women were now subjected to onerous double patriarchy, both private and public (the latter propagated by the party and the state). It is not that they did not value the independence, status, social interaction and support networks that their jobs afforded them. But they resented the lack of choice (employment was obligatory) and the parasitic rule of their often useless husbands. Many of them were an integral and important part of national and social movements throughout the region. Yet, with victory secured and goals achieved, they were invariably shunned and marginalized. As a result, they felt exploited and abused. Small wonder women voted overwhelmingly for right wing parties post communism.
