# Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe

Part of a series on :
Feminism :
History
Feminist history
History of feminism
Women's history
American
British
Canadian
German
Waves
First
Second
Third
Fourth
Timelines
Women's suffrage
Muslim countries
US
Other women's rights
Women's suffrage by country
Austria
Australia
Canada
Colombia
India
Japan
Kuwait
Liechtenstein
New Zealand
Spain
Second Republic
Francoist
Switzerland
United Kingdom
Cayman Islands
Wales
United States
states :
Intersectional variants
Fat
Lesbian
Lesbian of color
Radical lesbianism
Separatist
Sex-positive
Transfeminism
Postgenderism
Vegetarian ecofeminism
Socialist
Anarchist
Queer
Jineology
Marxist
Critical theory
Standpoint
Materialist
Ecofeminist
Postcolonial
Global
Transnational
Xenofeminism
Multicultural
Africana womanism
Black
Hip hop
Lesbian
Ratchet
Chicana
Lesbian
Indigenous
Native American
Multiracial
Romani
Womanism :
Other variants
Anti-abortion
Equity
Femonationalism
Maternal
Postfeminism
Reactionary
State
Carceral
Imperial
Embedded
Gender-critical or trans-exclusionary
Victim
White :
Religious variants
Atheist
Buddhist
Christian
Mormon
New
Womanist
Asian
Neopagan
Dianic Wicca
Reclaiming
Ecofeminist
Hindu
Islamic
Jewish
Orthodox
Sikh :
Movements and ideologies
4B movement
Analytical
Anti-fascist
Anti-pornography
Cyberfeminism
HCI
Networked
Difference
Cultural
Neo
Ecofeminism
Eugenic
Individualist
Lipstick
Stiletto
Liberal
Equality
Social
Labor
Libertarian
Post-structural
Postmodern
Radical
Political lesbianism
Separatist
Technofeminism
Women's liberation :
Concepts
Antinaturalism
Choice feminism
Cognitive labor
Complementarianism
Literature
Children's literature
Diversity (politics)
Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Effects on society
Equality
Female education
Female genital mutilation
Femicide
Femonationalism
Feminism in culture
Feminist movement
African-American women's suffrage movement
Art movement
In hip hop
Feminist stripper
Formal equality
Gender equality
Gender quota
Girl power
Honor killing
Ideal womanhood
Invisible labor
Internalized sexism
International Girl's Day and Women's Day
Language reform
Feminist capitalism
Gender-blind
Likeability trap
Male privilege
Matriarchal religion
Media
Men in feminism
Misogyny
Trans
Oedipus complex
Opposition to feminism
Pro-feminism
Protofeminism
Purplewashing
Racism
Reproductive justice
Sex workers' rights
Sexual harassment
Sexual objectification
Substantive equality
Toxic masculinity
Transmisogyny
Triple oppression
Violence against women
War on women
Women's empowerment
Women-only space
Women's health
Women's rights
Women in the workforce :
Outlooks
Bicycling and feminism
Criticism of marriage
Views on BDSM
Views on pornography
Views on prostitution
Views on sexual orientation
Views on sexuality
Views on transgender topics
SCUM Manifesto :
Theory
Feminist method
Gender studies
Gender mainstreaming
Gynocentrism
Kyriarchy
Male gaze
Matriarchy
Women's studies
Men's studies
Patriarchy
Écriture féminine
Areas of study
Anthropology
Archaeology
Architecture
Art
Art criticism
Literary criticism
Film theory
Science fiction
Biology
Composition studies
Criminology
Pathways perspective
Economics
FDPA
Geography
International relations
Constructivism
Legal theory
Pedagogy
Philosophy
Aesthetics
Empiricism
Epistemology
Ethics
Justice ethics
Existentialism
Metaphysics
science
Political ecology
Political theory
Pornography
Psychology
Therapy
Revisionist mythology
Sex wars
Sexology
Sociology
Technoscience
Theology
womanist theology :
By continent/country
Africa
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Egypt
Ethiopia
Ghana
Mali
Nigeria
Senegal
South Africa
Albania
Australia
Bangladesh
Canada
China
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Republic of Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Latin America
Argentina
Brazil
Chile
Haiti
Honduras
Mexico
Paraguay
Trinidad and Tobago
Lebanon
Malaysia
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Northern Cyprus
Norway
Pakistan
Philippines
Poland
Russia
Saudi Arabia
South Korea
Sweden
Syria
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Vietnam
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
History of women :
Lists and categories
Lists
Articles
Feminists
by nationality
Literature
American feminist literature
Feminist comic books
Feminist songs
Conservative feminisms
Ecofeminist authors
Feminist art critics
Feminist economists
Feminist philosophers
Feminist poets
Feminist rhetoricians
Jewish feminists
Muslim feminists
Feminist parties
Suffragists and suffragettes
Women's rights activists
Women's studies journals
Women's suffrage organizations
Categories
Women's rights by country
Feminists by nationality :
Feminism portal :
vte :
Eastern Bloc :
Republics of the USSR
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Byelorussia
Estonia
Georgia
Kazakhstan
Karelia-Finland (1940–1956)
Kirghizia
Latvia
Lithuania
Moldavia
Russia
Tajikistan
Turkmenia
Transcaucasia (1922–1936)
Ukraine
Uzbekistan :
Allied and satellite states
Afghanistan (1978–1989)
Albania (until 1961)
Angola
Benin
Bulgaria
China (until 1961)
Congo
Cuba
Czechoslovakia
East Germany (until 1989)
Ethiopia
Grenada (1979–1983)
Hungary
Kampuchea
Laos
Mongolia
Mozambique
North Korea
Poland (until 1989)
Romania (until 1989)
Somalia (until 1977)
South Yemen
Vietnam (North Vietnam, PRG)
Yugoslavia (until 1948) :
Related organizations
Warsaw Pact
Comecon
Cominform
World Federation of Trade Unions
World Federation of Democratic Youth :
Opposition
Anti-Soviet partisans
Albania
Bulgaria
Croatia
Poland
Romania
Serbia
Ukraine
Guerrilla war in the Baltic states
Soviet occupation
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Operation Jungle
Protests and uprisings
Poland 1944–1989
Poznań 1956
1980–89
Plzeň 1953
East Germany 1953
Georgia 1956
Hungary 1956
Novocherkassk 1962
Prague 1968
Invasion
Moscow
Czechoslovakia 1976–1990
Romania 1977
Kazakhstan 1986
Brașov 1987
Tbilisi 1989
Ukraine 1989–1991
Baku 1990
Lithuania 1991
Riga 1991
Dissent
Soviet
Poland
East Germany
to Hong Kong
North Korea :
Cold War events
Marshall Plan
Czechoslovak coup
Tito–Stalin split
Berlin Blockade
Korean War
Secret Speech
Sino-Soviet split
Albanian–Soviet split
De-satellization of the Socialist Republic of Romania
Berlin Wall
Cuban Missile Crisis
Vietnam War
Cuban intervention in Angola
Afghan War
1980 Moscow Olympics
1984 Los Angeles Olympics
Gulf War :
Fall
Singing Revolution
Polish Round Table Agreement
Revolutions of 1989
Fall of the Berlin Wall
January Events
Barricades in Latvia
Breakup of Yugoslavia
Yugoslav Wars
End of the Soviet Union
Post-Soviet conflicts
Fall of communism in Albania
Dissolution of Czechoslovakia :
vte :
Changes in gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism have been an object of historical and sociological study.

## Historical context

The Eastern European state socialist regimes proclaimed women's emancipation in the late 1940s. Legislation was passed that radically altered women's position in societies of Eastern Europe. New laws guaranteed women's equality in society and marriage, and women as well as men were required to become productive members of society by working for wages and engaging in political activism. Women's participation in the workforce continued to increase through the period, with some countries seeing 50% of the workforce being made up of women by the end of the communist period. In most countries the right to abortion was codified into law by the end of the 1950s.
Political leaders viewed women's presence in the workforce as providing an opportunity to instill communist ideology in new generations of women.
Though such advancements were made, Soviet and Warsaw-pact governments generally framed feminism a "bourgeois ideology".

## Changes in post-communist states
### Government

With the transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies and democracies, many states saw a dramatic drop in the number of women represented in state parliaments. Such an example can be seen in the parliament of Albania where the number of women representatives fell from 73 to 9 in the first post-collapse elections. The transition also saw a reduction in women's participation in the new political systems. These factors have made it difficult for women to advocate for women's rights in central and eastern Europe after the transition.

### Employment

The transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies saw an over-representation of women in unemployment that had not existed before in the central and eastern European countries. Though there was variation in this change depending on the country. In the former Soviet Union this transition led to significant changes in all spheres including the labor market. Whilst there was a gender pay gap in places such as the Soviet Union, due to protective legislation that restricted women's employment in jobs that were considered dangerous or physically demanding which meant that due to the fact that in the centralised wage system, where market forces did not interfere, earnings within sectors were determined by the perception of a certain sector's productivity, laboriousness and social usefulness, women in Russia were highly concentrated in white-collar sectors such as education, healthcare, trade, food and light industry, their earnings were on average lower than those of men throughout the whole of the Soviet Union's history, a similar concentration of women in the workforce and a similar trend were also seen in the German Democratic Republic. After the collapse, due to laws such as the Law on the State Enterprise (adopted prior to transition in 1987), meant that goods-producing enterprises had to meet their wage payment obligations from their own revenue. While this change scarcely affected women, as women were still concentrated in the "nonproductive" sector, it did affect the pay gap between women and men. The nonproductive sector, encompassing such sectors as education and healthcare, was still financed from the state budget and was therefore at greater risk of budgetary cuts, which occurred in the transitory period. Women continued to have lower wages than men after the collapse, with increases in the wage gap in most countries, this occurred alongside an increase in the overall income inequality. In this transitory period for many states there was economic disaster, and Gale Stokes comments on how "many of the customary practices of ordinary life, such as the value of time, gender relations, the nature of public discourse, and the job environment, changed." Due to women being concentrated in the lower tier of the income distribution, they were more vulnerable to such changes, and the rising social inequality had an adverse effect on the gender pay differentials during the transition years. Rita Hansberry, Christopher Gerry, Byung-Yeon Kim and Carmen Li provide evidence that the increase in dispersion of incomes brought about by liberalisation had a negative impact on the gender wage gap in Russia.
Beyond income equality, the transition increased the gender discrimination in workplaces. Many women left professional and managerial positions that women had occupied previously due to the ongoing removal of state childcare services in central and eastern European countries. Due to family considerations, it was predicted in 1993 that many women would leave the work force and consolidate in occasional, short-term, seasonal, undeclared, and other kinds of precarious work, and this has been shown to have been the case in later research.
Éva Fodor and Anikó Balogh, contrary to other researchers, based on pre-collapse and post-collapse survey data, have said that opinions on women as homemakers and their contribution to the workforce, have changed little in central and eastern European states, and in contrast western European states have greatly liberalised their views on women within the home and workforce.
The transition also saw a shift in most economies from heavy industry to light industry, this saw many men made redundant from jobs within heavy industry moving into light industry which had been a highly feminised sector of the economy during the communist period.

### Reproductive rights and sexual violence

Some rights, such as reproductive rights which had been achieved under the previous socialist regimes were subsequently challenged in countries after the fall of those regimes. The restriction of access to abortion in the years immediately after the collapse saw mass protests from women in Czechoslovakia and Poland, with the number of legal abortions conducted per year in Poland dropping by over 30,000 from 1991 to 1993.
In Russia, pornography proliferated after the collapse, whilst in the former Yugoslavia an epidemic of mass rape occurred. Slavenka Drakulić described the liberalisation of the economy and society in Yugoslavia as:
   We live surrounded by newly opened porno shops, porno magazines, peepshows, stripteases, unemployment and galloping poverty [...] Romanian women are prostituting themselves for a single dollar in towns on the Romanian-Yugoslav border. In the midst of all this, our anti-choice nationalist governments are threatening our right to abortion and telling us to multiply, to give birth to more Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks.
With the negative economic situations many women found themselves in during the market liberalisation of the economies, human traffickers became prominent in trafficking women around central and eastern Europe, and to western Europe from central and eastern Europe for prostitution.

### Health

The transition led to a reduction in the life expectancy of people across society in many countries, though to a lesser extent for women.

## The example of Bulgaria
### Economic participation

Kristen Ghodsee comments how whilst many suggest that all women in Bulgaria were negatively affected by the collapse, some groups of women did relatively well after the collapse, specifically those in the tourism industry, who had higher levels of general education, work experience with Westerners and knew Western foreign-languages. Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović points out how at the same time women made up two thirds of the unpaid workers present in Bulgaria during the transition. Mariya Stoilova found that women's economic activity in post-socialist Bulgaria was most affected by the age of the women, with older women who were in employment during the socialist system having the lowest rate of economic activity in post-socialist Bulgaria, and while younger women still faced sexist discrimination in employment opportunities, they were more economically active than older age groups of women.

### Religious reaction

Following the collapse, the Pomaks of Bulgaria saw a resurgence in orthodox forms of Islam and Christianity, as many believed their "traditions were corrupted by communism", with similar sentiments seen in other groups. This encouraged a return to traditional gender roles for men and women. Ghodsee comments on how for some men this included more strictly policing their wives' bodies than they had previously under the communist regime, and how also many women "seemed eager" to adopt such traditional gender roles. With the lack of autonomous feminist movements during the socialist period of Bulgaria, women's rights in the post-communist country has not had a great grassroots base, and is instead conducted mainly through professional NGOs.

### Violence against women

Psychotherapists reported that reports of domestic violence increased in Bulgaria during the transitionary period, attributing this increase to the serious economic problems many families and households faced.

## Controversies

There is controversy with regard to the view, which is often promoted in the western Europe, according to which the fall of communism had a disproportionate negative effect on women in those countries, and there is criticism of stereotypical views presented in the media about the status of women from this region both during and after the fall of the communism. Such views are often accused of being rooted in the common idea that western cultures are better and must save "less developed" societies. This is linked to objections in painting feminism in eastern Europe as "a matter of catching up with the West."
With regard to central and eastern European countries, the fall of communism had severely affected the whole society (including through violent wars such as Yugoslav Wars and post-Soviet conflicts), and in some cases, such as the fall of the heavy industry, men were worse affected. With regard to social policies, these have varied greatly by country, both during and after the fall of communism, given that former communist countries are not a monolith and there were and are differences between them (half of European countries are former communist countries). For example, while in Poland abortion was restricted in the 1990s, in other countries the fall of communism actually led to the liberalisation of reproductive rights, such as in Albania, especially during the later stages of the communist period, which saw aggressive natalist policies.
Critics argue that the claims made by the former communist regimes regarding the official data about the situation of women under those communist governments should not be taken for granted, as while there were laws that supported gender equality in the Soviet Union, these were not well or always followed.