This review article focuses on the significance of Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movements in East Central Europe by Barbara Einhorn. Published in 1993, it became one of the few transnational analyses of the early stages of the transition from state socialism, and a pioneering one. At the time, researchers from the region focused on their own countries, published in local languages, and rarely engaged with gender issues. Indeed, the shock of transformation, the shifting conditions of academic work, the focus on general social processes of those times, and the lack of initial interest in women's or gender studies resulted in a delayed engagement with gender in the region, and Barbara Einhorn's book became one of frontrunners on this topic. Several years later, a popular anecdotal opinion said that if you wanted to publish anything through the lens of gender on the transition in the region in an international journal, it must inevitably quote Cinderella Goes to Market.
The significance of Einhorn's study lies in her prophetic content, as she described the phenomena and processes that determined the direction of the transition in the region at their very early stage. Her predictions are still accurate, even though half of the states she analyzed no longer exist—her study is based on an analysis of Poland and Hungary as well as Czechoslovakia, which divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992, and the former German Democratic Republic, which at the time was part of a united German state undergoing the process of transition. In particular, her observation of patriarchal backlash, a process that reshaped the region, and the role of nationalist or ultra-right ideology, make the study farsighted, especially considering the impact of the anti-gender movement in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This is also one of first internationally recognized studies describing the process of delegitimizing abortion in Poland.
This is also a pioneering study of transition1 processes in Central and Eastern Europe viewed through the lens of gender, and a rare example of comparative research, thanks to Einhorn's background. Analysis of the transition process was challenging for researchers—insiders who found themselves in the middle of rapid and shocking changes that also affected academia. Eastern European scholars did not use gender analysis tools at that time; some of them had to switch into English as a language of transnational collaboration, and the previous patterns of international research networks disappeared, while new ones still had to be established. The very first narratives of transition focused only on its economic and political dimensions: implementing a free-market economy and democratization.
One result of neglecting the social dimension of the transition process was its gender-blind image depicted by the new field of transitology.2 A decrease in the number of women among the new political elites and a lack of gender experts were other important factors.
It took some time to observe and analyze the gendered face of the transition process. The worsening material status of women, connected to the rising unemployment among women, the gender wage gap, the horizontal and vertical segregation of the labor market on the basis of sex, the rollback of social services, and the feminization of poverty were observed in all of the countries of the region.3 The first analyses applying the lens of gender were developed by various academics, separated in different academic fields. Inequalities in the experience of transition for men and women became a topic of economic analysis first, while political scientists commented on the political aspects of this process, and others started to ask why abortion became the most immediate policy issue.4 Initial local studies, in local languages, raised the need for more complex, multidimensional analyses that resulted in some transnational studies, also published in English. But, at the very beginning of the transition, overall comparative analyses were lacking, and Barbara Einhorn's book was the first one. Of course, as Maxine Molyneux pointed out in her review of crucial publications concerning gendered transitions in Eastern Europe, it was not the only study; still, it seems to be the most comprehensive.5
The Study and Its Author
Barbara Einhorn was born in 1942 in New Zealand, the daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany. She received her BA from the University of Otago in 1963 and her MA in 1964. In 1972 she earned her doctorate, writing a dissertation on the novel in the GDR.6 In the 1980s, she worked for the University of Sussex, where she studied women's lives in the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. She also was involved in the nuclear disarmament movement, and in 1983 went to East Berlin to meet with the leaders of Women for Peace, where she was arrested by the East German political police, the Stasi. After her release, Einhorn was banned from re-entering the GDR. However, after the Berlin Wall fell, she returned to that city to conduct research on the transition at the Technical University Berlin and Humboldt University, and that work resulted in the 1993 publication of Cinderella Goes to Market. Later, Einhorn became professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, where she also served as associate editor of The European Journal of Women's Studies and a gender advisor to the United Nations’ women's program (UNIFEM), the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the World Bank.7
Cinderella Goes to Market presents an analysis of the gender of transition in the German Democratic Republic, the Czechoslovak Republic, Poland, and Hungary based on both analysis of the literature and interviews conducted by its author with women scholars, politicians, media personalities, and grassroots activists. Cinderella Goes to Market is a sociological study with a clear feminist approach. It utilizes the feminist construction of the division between public and private, supported by sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’ model of Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft [community/society]. It offers a diagnosis of the transition of former state socialist countries based on the redefinition and re-evaluation of the reproductive and productive roles of women. While the period of state socialism saw the devaluation of reproductive labor and the valuation of women's productive role, the postcommunist period brought about a reversal of this order. The revaluation of women's reproductive role, emphasized as a result of the new ideology of the family and the nation, as articulated by Einhorn, brought attacks on reproductive rights, pushing women out of the labor market and decreasing the number and role of women in politics. As Einhorn writes in the introduction: “Public discourse dominated by nationalist ideologies and often sanctified by the church defines the family as the basis of the ethnic or wider national groups, and gives it, and women as mothers within it, a mission in the name of that community.”8 That is why the last chapter of her book has the dramatic title, “Can Cinderella become a citizen?”
“Can Cinderella Become a Citizen?”
In her study, first of all, Einhorn describes the emergence of the new ideology, centered on the family and the nation, as a dominating pattern of public discourse, and the redefinition of gender roles through two parallel processes: (1) relegating women to the private sphere in the name of the national interest; and (2) displacing women from participation in the labor force by planting them squarely back in the family, their “primary sphere of responsibility.”9
The changing position of women in the new, transforming labor market was observed in all states of the former Eastern bloc, but the ideological component of this phenomenon was not often articulated by other researchers, and neither was the impact of the renewal of national ideologies evident. For example, some of the first studies concerning labor market inequalities in Poland, Henryk Domański's Zadowolony niewolnik? [Grateful slave?]10 and Zadowolony niewolnik idzie do pracy [Grateful slave goes to work],11 focused on labor market data, gender stereotypes and women's self-stereotypes, and attitudes toward work in Poland and other Central and Eastern Europe states12 compared to the West, while social and political factors, such as ideology, were neglected. In contrast, Einhorn observes not only women being pushed out of the labor market, but also the redefinition of women's political participation. After decades of both the official sanctioning and sometimes the façade of women's emancipation and political representation13—when Eastern bloc women's political participation indexes outnumbered their Western counterparts—at the beginning of the democratization process, when reformed and reconstructed political institutions lost their earlier façade character and regained the democratic, representative sense, the number of women engaged in politics radically declined. According to Małgorzata Fuszara, in 1990 the representation of women in parliament fell in Bulgaria from 21 percent to 9 percent, in Czechoslovakia from 30 percent to 6 percent, in Hungary from 21 percent to 7 percent, in USRR from 35 percent to 14 percent.14 Women who were involved in democratic opposition and dissident movements together with men, often in equal proportions, somehow disappeared when those milieus transformed into new political elites.15 They would require a decade or more, plus new instruments such as gender-quota systems, to regain a similar level of representation.
Feminism was not very popular under communism. Its second wave hardly crossed over the Iron Curtain, and viewed through the lens of state propaganda it seemed like another Western luxury. Although Western democracy or the market economy could be attractive for inhabitants of the Eastern bloc, feminism seemed just the opposite. As Slavenka Drakulić recollects, feminism was considered something needed only in “bourgeois countries,” and feminists were considered a danger, importing foreign ideology into the country.16 Feminism was also considered unnecessary; as Amanda Sloat diagnosed, “the demagogic communist agenda had damaged awareness of women's rights by emphasizing women's (supposed) emancipation.”17 Moreover, the Western feminist agenda had little to do with Eastern European women's needs. I recollect a story, told to me by a former English philology student who had the occasion to meet—and translate for—some Western feminists visiting Poland. “They were demanding the right to abortion and to the labor market, all rights that we had already had,” she told me, to explain why their demands seemed completely uninteresting to her, and probably many other Polish women at the time. Work was mandatory for Polish women, and many women dreamed of getting rid of that burden to be left with only one job—household chores and childcare. Access to abortion seemed so obvious in the 1970s and 1980s that no one imagined that it could ever be denied. Moreover, the concept of human rights was a complete fantasy then, so people in Poland were completely ignorant about the field of reproductive rights. At the beginning of the transition, negative connotations of feminism still prevailed, and feminism was also associated with the reality of state socialism and discredited past ideologies.18 Some women welcomed the idea of doing the job of a housewife, even if it meant a step back in their emancipation, because they were so exhausted by the double burden of having two jobs, the paid one and the second at home. And the limitations in access to abortion were not welcomed at all, but nobody asked women about their opinion on that subject.
As Barbara Einhorn started her academic career in literary studies (her doctoral thesis, defended in 1973, published finally in 1978, was Der Roman in der DDR, 1949–1969: Die Gestaltung des Verhältnisses von Individuum und Gesellschaft; eine Analyse der Erzählstruktur [The novel in the GDR, 1949–1969: Shaping the relationship between the individual and society; an analysis of the narrative structure]), her later studies also dealt with literature, culture, and women's images in mass media. She presents analyses of East German, Polish, Czech, and Russian literature, focusing on dualistic representations of the nation, including the Virgin Mother and Mother Russia. This is the moment where the figure of Cinderella, the significant symbol used in the title, appears. Einhorn suggests that the worker-mother could be a socialist-realist heroine, as her career and individual aspirations are subordinated to men. And this is the literature where Cinderella may, finally, speak for herself, as Einhorn's analysis of GDR literature shows. But the transition period brought back the duality of women's images, split between maternity and pornography,19 and most obviously seen in the mass media.
The final chapter of the book asks, “Can Cinderella become a citizen?” The analysis showed that the revival of civil society promised by the postsocialist20 transition was in fact accompanied by an erosion of women's rights, so the question mark ending this title is not surprising. Several years later, women's movements criticized the notion of “democracy without women.” In fact, this chapter predicts obstacles with democracy, democratization, and finally de-democratization in the postsocialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. This chapter also summarizes Einhorn's analysis of the social and political reality described in previous chapters as crucial for the emerging counter-democratic direction of the transition process. Anti-democratic or nondemocratic scenarios were not discussed seriously in 1993, by transitologists or political scientists. As Barbara Einhorn demonstrated, applying the lens of gender in the analysis resulted in at least questioning the democratic character of the transition—since it excluded half of society. One of the most anti-democratic phenomena described by Einhorn occurred in the area of reproductive rights, attacked in nearly all postsocialist countries, foretelling the future success of the anti-abortion and anti-gender movements.
“Democracy without women means half democracy,” banner of the Green Party (Zieloni 2004), Women's Day Manifa Demonstration, Łódź, 8 March 2005, photo by Anna Błaszczyk (reproduced with permission).
Citation: Aspasia 18, 1; 10.3167/asp.2024.180109
Einhorn argues that “neither state socialism, nor the newly democratic societies seem able to provide the environment in which women could develop their full potential as equal citizens.”21 Critics of the transition tended to focus on neoliberal policies, but Einhorn, by comparing socialist states with postsocialist ones, perceives the new political direction as national, as if predicting the future nationalist populist governments of Viktor Orbán's Hungary or Jaroslaw Kaczyński's Poland.
Reproductive Rights, the Arena of the Anti-Gender Movement
The most important merit of Barbara Einhorn's book is that she included the issue of reproductive rights, especially the growing anti-abortion movement, which was otherwise neglected at the time. Anti-choice and anti-abortion policies have been crucial issues for the anti-gender movement. Those topics (present even in the 1970s and 1980s) dominated first public discourse, then political agendas, until they finally affected the process of de-democratization in Central and Eastern Europe in the following decades. Einhorn observes that “[t]he abortion question is no more than the most prominent and most hotly debated of a whole cluster of issues involved in reproductive rights for women,” including also the right to safe and affordable birth control, sex education, ante-natal and post-natal care, and choice about sexuality.22 In fact, these issues became the most active and most successful arena for the anti-gender movement. Still, attacks on reproductive rights seem to have been the very first activity of that movement in the region.23
Einhorn describes the former reproductive policies of state socialist countries and their common anti-choice turn in transforming Central and Eastern European states, even beyond the four main countries she studied. She presents a deep assessment of the anti-abortion turn in Poland, and describes similar processes in Hungary, Croatia, and Romania, and she includes Bosnian war rapes when discussing reproductive rights. She also comments on the phenomenon of anti-abortion exhibitions, probably present not only in Croatia.24
Einhorn links the nationalist desire to raise the birth rate and implement limitations on legal abortion, reminiscent of Stalin's 1936 abortion ban and the role of the image of Mother Russia, in her chapter devoted to images of women in literature and mass media.25 She concludes that, “the way in which women's reproductive role is currently being hitched to the nationalist wagon in some East Central European countries has severe implications for women's right to self-determination as citizens enjoying equal rights with men.”26 She also notes the phenomenon of racism fueling some anti-abortion campaigners,27 and this is similar to observations about contemporary anti-abortion and anti-gender movements.
Thirty Years After
Three decades after Cinderella Goes to Market, Einhorn's study is both a historic, or rather herstoric, study of the first years of postsocialist transition and a diagnosis of the new phenomena that are still determining politics in Central and Eastern Europe. In the first years of the transition, Einhorn was able to observe early signs of de-democratization, a process identified and named several years later by Charles Tilly.28 Her final question—whether Cinderella can become a citizen—points out a crucial weakness of the transition, namely, exclusion of women and their rights from the process of rebuilding the democratic order. Not only attacks on reproductive rights, but also pushing women out of the labor market and political power, eliminated the chance for women to gain equal citizenship rights. This process was supported by a new ideology assigning women to the private sphere, replacing past ideological mythologies of femininity applied by state socialist regimes and leaving women still without real political agency. Thirty years later, we observe and experience the huge impact of the phenomenon diagnosed now as the global anti-gender movement. Its beginnings were neglected by the majority of researchers, but Barbara Einhorn's analysis might be read as a pioneering study documenting its first successes.
Anti-gender mobilization has been observed since the beginning of this millennium,29 but recent studies tracing its roots prove that it must have been operating earlier. Klementyna Suchanow, author of a study on the global connections of the Polish anti-gender movement, points out relationships between Polish anti-gender movement organizations and the Brazilian group “Tradição, Família, Propriedade” [Tradition, family, property], founded in 1960, and with several branches or sister organizations located in several Latin America states, and even Europe.30 Her most significant finding is the links between the Polish organization Ordo Iuris31 and the “Tradition, family, property” network and other well-known anti-gender organizations around Europe.32 Ordo Iuris is the most visible anti-gender organization in Poland, and it maintains several branches in other European countries. Its activities include—among others—anti-abortion lobbying. Suchanow places Ordo Iuris among the initiators of the anti-abortion law proposals submitted in 2016 as a citizens’ project. According to Joanna Banasiuk and Aleksander Stępkowski,33 the bill's preparation was coordinated by the National Centre of Pastoral Family Counselling (Krajowy Ośrodek Duszpasterstwa Rodzin); all organizations involved in “protecting life” took part in the preparations,34 and its text was prepared by Ordo Iuris.35 The draft bill demanded complete delegalization of abortion and criminal punishment for everyone involved in the procedure, including the woman. The anti-abortion dimension of the anti-gender movement is evident in Poland, where the state still faces new projects seeking to further restrict access to abortion, even after the Constitutional Court decision from 2020/21 banned abortion on an embryo-pathological basis, and bills to limit access to abortion have been proposed in most countries of the region, often following the example of practices established in Poland. Calls to limit access to abortion were noted by Barbara Einhorn in all countries she studied in the early 1990s.
Researchers of the anti-gender movement also warn about its anti-democratic character. Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, in their book Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment, conceptualize anti-gender mobilizations as part of broader conflict, “where what is truly at stake is the future of democracy.”36 In addition, Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte in “Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe” warn against the threat not only for the direct targets of anti-gender struggles, but also for democracy.37 Although Kuhar and Paternotte define the anti-gender movement as “a complex constellation of global actors” built by various national organizations38 and focus on both Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, the scale of the real political impact of this movement is much stronger in Eastern Europe and seems to accompany the anti-democratic direction of political change there. The anti-gender movement has been involved in the development of models of illiberal democracy, both in European Union states, such as Hungary and Poland, and countries classified as evidently nondemocratic, including Russia and Belarus. Now, after the Russian attack on Ukraine, data revealing the role of Putin's Russia in the movement makes the topic much more alarming and immediate.39
The anti-gender movement focuses mainly on opposing gender equality, reproductive rights, sex education, the Istanbul convention, and LGBTQ+ rights. Moreover, in some countries, like Russia40 or Poland,41 the state has coopted the anti-gender movement to combat “gender ideology;”42 in this way, the anti-gender movement succeeds and is transformed into a powerful political actor. The main actors and allies of anti-gender movements often consist of anti-abortion groups, religious conservatives, Catholic dignitaries, nationalists and populists, and far right groups, and these are the same political actors that Einhorn associated with the threats to women's citizenship in the beginning of the 1990s.
Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk view the anti-gender movement as an emanation of the ideology of anti-genderism, based on a set of convictions about the nature of man, “natural law,” and human dignity that is consistent with Christian dogma, pointing out its theological roots.43 Anti-genderism, sometimes viewed mainly as a religious trend, is also described as a transnational countermovement to feminism, and a reaction to the “undemocratic ways” in which gender equality measures were introduced in the first place in Eastern European states. Anti-genderism is also viewed as “anti-feminism,” as an attack on gender studies and public education, or as an effort to oppose marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights.44 Moreover, in former socialist countries, according to Graff and Korolczuk, “anti-genderism takes on a distinctly nationalist form: resistance to Western ideologies of gender equality is presented as a mark of national sovereignty and a chance to regain a rightful place in the moral geography of Europe.”45 Today, homophobia and—more recently—also transphobia are the most visible faces of the movement, but its first battlefield was anti-abortion activity, observed in the region since the beginning of the transition. In Poland, the anti-abortion campaign succeeded twice: in 1993, when the Parliament passed the first anti-abortion bill, and in 2020, when the Constitutional Court decided that abortion in cases where the fetus has serious and irreversible birth defects is unconstitutional. The Polish case seemed isolated, as similar demands or pressures in other countries did not result in the delegalizing of abortion, but the anti-abortion movement has been observed in all countries of the former Eastern bloc, and is still active.
In her book, Barbara Einhorn noted strong pressure against reproductive rights, and described not only the Polish case and its subsequent anti-abortion law, but also the first anti-abortion posters—which juxtaposed pictures of dead fetuses with photos of concentration camp corpses in Croatia—from as early as in 1990.46 She also identified a racist component of pro-natalist intensification that redefined women's obligations in nationalist terms, seeing such developments as dangerous for women's rights. She noted the same pattern in the pre-1989 period in Russia, where women were urged to produce more children to neutralize the effect of the high birth rate in the Central Asia Soviet republics, as well as in Romania, where abortion and contraception were denied and women were defined as “breeding chambers for the Great Romania.”47 She also pointed out the same racist background in 1991 in Hungary, where appeals to women to have more babies contained unspoken but easily understood anti-Gypsy subtexts, and in Serbia or Kosovo, where women were urged to produce babies for the nation.48 Similar race-based pro-natal propaganda is observed today in Hungary and in Poland.
Although since 2020-21 abortion in Poland has practically been totally banned,49 the anti-abortion movement is still powerful, and there are still new demands to eliminate the last remnants of reproductive rights. Billboard campaigns did not disappear after the Constitutional Court delegalizing abortion on the grounds of fetal impairment; rather, just the opposite occurred as Poland faced the biggest and the most expensive anti-abortion billboard campaigns in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Advertisements by the foundation “Our children—education, health, faith” (Nasze dzieci—edukacja, zdrowie, wiara) used pro-natalist slogans, but closer analysis reveals that this campaign was based on the same ideas as a Hungarian campaign from 2018. This Hungarian campaign was broadcast by the ultraright political movement Hozz Világra Még Egy Magyart Mozgalom (Bring Another Hungarian into the World Movement), founded probably in 2013. Not only did the campaign appeal to Hungarians to have more children, but even subtly applied the so called “theory of great replacement” to elicit xenophobic or racist emotions.50 One of the billboards used in the Polish street campaign in 2021 is presented below. In the first line of its text, dziś represents “today” compared with the 1980s and the 1950s. In fact, if the infographic illustrated fertility rates, it would not be accurate, as these rates were closer to a maximum of 3.5 in the 1950s and 2.5 in the 1980s.51 A Hungarian video included nearly the same infographic, using the same icons, although with different dates and data, suggesting that around 1900 a family had approximately 5.2 children, in the 1970s two, and today only 1.2.52
This transnational collaboration of a Polish foundation responsible for huge billboard campaigns, pretending to act on its own and trying to hide the role of its international network, led us to Hungary, where Einhorn observed similar appeals three decades earlier. Another example directs us eastwards, to Belarus, where the anti-gender movement targeting access to abortion helped to create the first no-abortion zone in the city of Lahoysk in 2013. It resulted from an “experiment” conducted there by a—nominally—nongovernmental organization Matulya [Mommy], specializing in promoting “natural methods of family planning” and “informing on threats of abortion and contraception.” As a result of an agreement between the Ministry of Health and the Belarusian Orthodox Church under the “Right to Life” program, Matulya conducted a training in a hospital in Lahoysk that resulted in the decision of its staff to not perform abortions in that hospital.53 There are also places in Russia and Chechnya where access to abortion is limited this way, or through “days without abortion.”54 Another actor that was noted in the Polish case and pointed out by Einhorn appears here as well: the church, working hand in hand with the state.
Billboard; the text reads: “Where are THOSE children,” Lodz 2021, author's archive.
Citation: Aspasia 18, 1; 10.3167/asp.2024.180109
These contemporary examples suggest that the anti-abortion and anti-gender equality direction of transition that Einhorn pinned down in the early years of transition still play a crucial role in the process of sociopolitical change in Central and Eastern Europe, and are not limited to those few countries she analyzed in her study.
Conclusion
Cinderella Goes to Market is not only a historical milestone in the analysis of the postsocialist transition in Central and Eastern Europe, but also a prophetic diagnosis of phenomena that determined this process across the next decades. Also, the range of her study is unique; it is a multi-layered analysis, combining observations in various fields to form a complete picture.
As a result, Barbara Einhorn's book remains essential reading for contemporary studies of sociopolitical change in the Central and Eastern European region. Thirty years after the book's publication, we do in fact observe the huge impact of the anti-gender movement there, directed against gender equality, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights.55 For all of these reasons, Einhorn's work remains relevant, especially in the context of contemporary observations and discussions about the dangers of the anti-gender movement.
Notes
Two terms were used in those times, “transformation” and “transition,” but as the field of transitology addressed only the latter, and it seems to be more adequate to the totality of social, economic, and political change, I prefer using “transition.”
Peggy Watson, “Re-thinking Transition: Globalism, Gender and Class,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 2, no. 2 (2000): 185–213, here 190.
Agnieszka Rochon and Agnieszka Grzybek, “Introduction,” in Gender Issues 2009: Gender Equality Discourse in Times of Transformation, 1989–2009 (Warsaw: Heinrich Bőll Stiftung, 2009), 5–9, here 7; Maxine Molyneux, “Gendered Transition in Eastern Europe,” Feminist Studies 21, no. 3 (1995): 637–645, here 2.
Judith Kiss, “The Second ‘No’: Women in Hungary,” Feminist Review 39 (1993): 49–59, quoted by Peggy Watson in “Re-thinking Transition,” here 190.
Maxine Molyneux, Gendered Transitions in Eastern Europe, “Feminist Studies,” 21, no. 3 (1995), 637–645.
Barbara Einhorn, Der Roman in der DDR, 1949–1969: die Gestaltung des Verhältnisses von Individuum und Gesellschaft; eine Analyse der Erzählstruktur [The novel in the GDR, 1949–1969: Shaping the relationship between the individual and society; an analysis of the narrative structure], Monographien Literaturwissenschaft 40 (Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1978).
Entry “Barbara Einhorn,” Biographical Encyclopedia, https://prabook.com/web/barbara.einhorn/3741081 (accessed 6 April 2023); Barbara Einhorn's profile on the University of Sussex website https://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/803 (accessed 6 April 2023); entry “Barbara Einhorn”, Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Einhorn (accessed 6 April 2023).
Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market. Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993), 7.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 258.
Henryk Domański, Zadowolony niewolnik? Studium o nierównościach między kobietami i mężczyznami w Polsce [Grateful slave? A study on inequalities between women and men in Poland] (Warsaw: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii, Polska Akademia Nauk,1992).
Henryk Domański, Zadowolony niewolnik idzie do pracy: Postawy wobec aktywności zawodowej kobiet w 23 krajach [Grateful slave goes to work: Attitudes toward women's economic activity in 23 countries] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 1999). The titles of Henryk Domański's books originate from the paradox of the “grateful slave” described by Catherine Hakim, “Grateful Slaves and Self-Made Women: Fact and Fantasy in Women's Work Orientations,” European Sociological Review, no. 7 (1991): 101–121.
Barbara Einhorn used the term “East Central Europe.” Today “Central (and) East Europe” is more often used by researchers writing about this region, and I apply it when writing about the present.
I refer here to the gap between the declared equality of men and women in Eastern bloc states, which also played a propaganda role, and the reality of discrimination policies and practices. Slavenka Draculic, interview by Nanette Funk, Robin Ostow, and Michael Bodeman (Nanette Funk, Magda Müller, Robin Ostow, Michael Bodeman, and MatthiasWeiss, “Dossier on Women in Eastern Europe,” Social Text, no. 27 (1990): 88–122, here 117), mentions not only forced emancipation, but also “equality on paper.” Amanda Sloat describes a “supposed emancipation” in “The Rebirth of Civil Society: The Growth of Women's NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe,” European Journal of Women's Studies 437, no. 2 (2005): 437–452, here 448, http://doi.org/10.1177/1350506805057100.
Małgorzata Fuszara, “Udział kobiet we władzy” [Women's participation in power] in Kobiety w Polsce 2003 [Women in Poland 2003] (Warsaw: Fundacja Centrum Praw Kobiet, 2003), 125–148, here 129.
Rochon and Grzybek, Introduction, 7; such a process in Poland was analyzed by Shana Penn in Solidarity's Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Drakulić, interview by Funk, Ostow, and Bodeman, 109.
Sloat, “The Rebirth of Civil Society: The Growth of Women's NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe,” 448.
Ibid., 442.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 243.
Barbara Einhorn describes the pre-transition political system as “state socialism;” consequently I decided to label the transition period as “postsocialist,” rather than the more widely used “postcommunist” in English-language studies on politics and the transition.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 257.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 75.
Andrea Pető describes reproductive rights as a battlefield: Andrea Pető, “Reproductive Rights as Battlefield in the New Cold War: A Historical Comparison of Illiberal Gender Politics regarding Reproductive Rights in Hungary,” in Global Contestations of Gender Rights, ed. A. Scheele, J. Roth, and H. Winkel (Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2022), 227–244.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 94.
Ibid., 77.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid, 104.
Einhorn does not use the term de-democratization. Charles Tilly, who focused on this problem, developed this approach in 2007. See Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment (London: Routledge, 2022), 15.
Klementyna Suchanow, “Nowe Średniowiecze?” [New Middle Ages?], Gazeta Wyborcza [Electoral journal], 24 March 2018: https://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/7,124059,23183138,organizacji-antyaborcyjnych-przybywa-w-polsce-i-na-swiecie.html (accessed 14 October 2022); Klementyna Suchanow, To jest wojna: Kobiety, fundamentaliści i Nowe Średniowiecze [This is war: Women, fundamentalists, and the new Middle Ages] (Warsaw: Agora, 2020).
Its full official name is Fundacja Instytut na rzecz Kultury Prawnej Ordo Iuris [Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture]. In Polish, ordo iuris (Latin) may be translated as the “legal order.”
Suchanow, “Nowe Średniowiecze?”
Aleksander Stępkowski is the co-founder and first president of Ordo Iuris. He later served as Undersecretary of State in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acting first president of the Supreme Court, and, finally, its spokesperson.
Banasiuk and Kwaśniewski enumerate representatives of Human Life International, Polska Federacja Ruchów Obrony Życia [Polish Federation of Movements to Protect Life], Fundacja Mama i Tata [Mummy and Daddy Foundation], CitizenGo, Stowarzyszenie Kultury Chrześcijańskiej im. ks. Piotra Skargi [Father Peter Skarga Association of Christian Culture], Fundacja Życie [Foundation Life], Fundacja PRO—Prawo do życia [Foundation PRO—right to life], Centrum Wspierania Inicjatyw dla Życia i Rodziny [Support center for initiatives for life and family], Instytut na Rzecz Kultury Prawnej Ordo Iuris [Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture], Fundacja Nazaret [Nazareth Foundation], plus “respectable” authorities in the field of life protection: Prof. Bogdan Chazan, Att. Olgierda Pankiewicz, Att. Jan Łopuszański, Halina Nowina-Konopczyna, Nikoleta Broda, Kaja Godek, and father Ryszard Halwa. See Joanna Banasiuk and Aleksander Stępkowski, “Obywatelski projekt ‘Stop Aborcji’—prawne i doktrynalne uzasadnienie inicjatywy oraz ocena jej przebiegu” [Civic “stop abortion” project—legal and doctrinal justification of the initiative and evaluation of its progress], Teologia i Moralność [Theology and morality] 12, no. 2 (22) (2017): 179–190, here 180,
Banasiuk and Stępkowski, “Obywatelski projekt ‘Stop Aborcji’—prawne i doktrynalne uzasadnienie inicjatywy oraz ocena jej przebiegu,” 180.
Graff and Korolczuk, Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment, 3.
Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality (New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 256.
Ibid., 271.
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018); Suchanow, To jest wojna.
Kevin Moss, “Russia as the Saviour of European Civilization: Gender and the Geopolitics of Traditional Values” in Anti-gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, ed. Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte (New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 195–214.
Agnieszka Graff and Elzbieta Korolczuk, “Worse than Communism and Nazism Put Together: War on Gender in Poland” in Anti-gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, 75–94.
Kuhar and Paternotte, eds., Anti-gender Campaigns in Europe, 254.
Graff and Korolczuk, Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment, 19.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 27.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 94. The same campaign was identified in Poland in 2005.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 105.
The Polish Constitutional Court decided that abortion on embryo-pathological grounds is unconstitutional in October 2020; the regulation entered into force in January 2021.
Izabela Desperak, ”Skąd antyaborcjonisci wzięli TE dzieci? Trop prowadzi na Węgry” [Where did the anti-abortionists take THOSE children from? The trail leads to Hungary],Krytyka Polityczna [Political Critique], 22 November 2022, https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/kampania-gdzie-sa-te-dzieci-siec-antygender-wegry/ (Accessed 9 February 2023).
Statistics Poland, “Demographic Atlas of Poland,” https://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/other-studies/other-aggregated-studies/demographic-atlas-of-poland,16,1.html, 2017, 35 (accessed 1 January 2024).
Desperak, “Skąd antyaborcjoniści wzięli TE dzieci?” The video was available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFqZuRw_oDI] (accessed 14 November 2022) until 2022, and was recently removed by YouTube because it violated the hate speech standards.
Izabela Desperak, “Jak białoruski Łohojsk został pierwszym miastem bez aborcji” [How Belarussian Lahoysk became the first no-abortion town] Krytyka Polityczna, 6 December 2017, https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/jak-bialoruski-lohojsk-zostal-pierwszym-miastem-bez-aborcji/?hide_manifest (accessed 7 February 2023).
Suchanow, To jest wojna, 299.
Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market, 104.
