Elisabeth Kulakowsk, freelance journalist
Women
held some 14 million of the 26 million jobs that have disappeared in eastern Europe
since 1989. Some, like this Romanian woman, have gone back to work in the fields.
Three young women caught unawares by a photographer in Moscow’s Gorki Park.
‘Each year,
60,000 women in Bulgaria are beaten by their partners and only one per cent of rapes
are reported to the police’
|
Women’s status
After the October 1917 revolution, the Soviet
Union proclaimed the emancipation of women through a “harmonious blending” of work
and motherhood. The communist Family Laws, adopted in 1919, amended in 1926 and 1936
and later passed on to the satellite countries, guaranteed women a large number of
rights. |
|
Ten courses The main aims of eastern Europe’s women’s
movements are to: |
Women are starting to
react to the fallout from eastern Europe’s economic transition which has hit them
hard, bringing growing poverty, social decline and prostitution
In Romania
and Russia, they have started by highlighting domestic violence. In Poland, they
are fighting for legal abortion. In Bulgaria and Hungary, they campaign to make girls
aware of the dangers of making “easy money” through prostitution. Women everywhere
in eastern Europe are trying to organize in defence of their rights. They have an
uphill job on their hands.
The political and economic changes which have swept the former countries of the Soviet
bloc since the early 1990s have generally pushed women aside, both economically and
in terms of their presence in government and administration. Equality of the sexes
is still written into all the national constitutions of central and eastern Europe.
But the reality is quite different.
The
first to be fired
A UNICEF
report, Women in Transition,1 which looks at 27 formerly communist
states, confirms this in detail. “While communism brought women many advantages,
especially in education and health care, it did not manage to bring real equality
of the sexes,” said UNICEF director-general Carol Bellamy when the report came out
in September 1999. “Today, in the transition to a market economy, the situation of
women is deteriorating.”
Since 1990, in every country of the region except Hungary, economic restructuring
has especially affected industries with a large number of women workers. Where there
are both male and female employees, the women have been laid off before the men,
in line with well-known discriminatory practices which send women “back to their
homes”.
“Of the 26 million or so jobs that have disappeared in eastern Europe since 1989,
about 14 million were held by women,” says Bellamy. Today unemployment among women
is about five per cent higher than among men.
Employers, especially in Poland, will sometimes ask a job applicant to take a test
to prove she is not pregnant. In Bulgaria and Romania, the newspapers are filled
with blatantly sexist job advertisements.
Because of the seriousness of the economic crisis, governments have sharply cut social
welfare expenditure. They have also abolished many laws passed under communism that
gave privileged status to single mothers and mothers with young children, and provided
for infants through day-care allowances or crèche facilities. The ending of
these benefits has reduced women’s chances of getting a job or finding a new one.
And when women do have a job, they get paid less than their male colleagues. The
gap in pay is an average 24 per cent in Russia, 16 per cent in Poland and 15 per
cent in Hungary, UNICEF says. According to specialists, the
result is a “feminization of poverty”.
One of the most serious consequences of the economic crisis and the opening of national
borders is the growing number of young women who are being lured into prostitution
or enmeshed in international sex rings. About half a million young women from eastern
Europe, including Russia, are now prostitutes in the West, according to the Polish
NGO La Strada and the Vienna-based International Organization for Migration. Regina
Indsheva, head of the Women’s Alliance for Development, in Sofia, says, “10,000 Bulgarian
prostitutes are ‘on the market’ every year in the countries of the European Union.”
Sexually transmitted diseases, including Aids, are spreading. One young woman in
every 100 in Russia has syphilis, according to UNICEF. In the 27 countries surveyed in the
report, cases of HIV infection rose from 30,000 in 1994 to 270,000 by the end of
1998, says Bellamy. In addition, there is rising alcoholism and drug addiction among
younger and younger women, especially in Russia.
Domestic violence against women, a taboo subject that was totally hidden under communism,
has recently made headlines for the first time in Romania and Poland. The UNICEF
report says that “a survey in Moscow showed that more than one in three divorced
women had been beaten by their husbands.” Conjugal violence is forbidden by law in
Russia, but in most cases the attacker runs no risk of prosecution. In Armenia, Bulgaria
and Georgia, hitting a spouse is not illegal. In Slovenia, it is only punished in
“serious” cases but not where there is only “light” injury, defined by the law as
“a fractured nose, rib, light contusions and punched-out teeth.”
Each year, “60,000 women in Bulgaria are beaten by their partners and only one per
cent of rapes are reported to the police,” says Indsheva, whose Alliance is campaigning
against the indifference of the authorities.
In Poland, abortion has stirred up tremendous debate. It was allowed between 1959
and 1993, and was then severely restricted until 1996, when it was permitted again
before being banned once more a year later except in cases of rape, a deformed foetus
or when the mother’s life is in danger. These decisions have been greatly influenced
by the Roman Catholic Church. More than 30,000 secret abortions take place in Poland
every year, according to local NGOs. The Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning,
founded in 1991, is campaigning along with other organizations for legalized abortion.
Romania has gone in the opposite direction. There, abortion was banned between 1965
and 1989 by the Ceausescu regime and was allowed without restriction after 1990.
This led to a sharp drop in the hitherto very common practice of abandoning unwanted
children in dead-end “orphanages”. In many countries (including Hungary, Lithuania,
Slovenia, Slovakia and Ukraine), access to abortion has been either challenged or
restricted.
Equality
slogans with a hollow ring
Barbara Labuda, an
adviser on social questions to the president of Poland, was a fervent advocate of
women’s rights in the 1980s in Solidarnosc, eastern Europe’s first independent trade
union. This tiny blonde-haired woman, who founded the women’s group in parliament
in Warsaw, admits she is sometimes disheartened by the lack of involvement, especially
political involvement, of women in eastern Europe.
Only 13 per cent of the members of Poland’s parliament are women. In Bulgaria, the
figure is 10.4 per cent, in the Czech Republic 10 per cent, in Estonia 12.9 per cent,
in Hungary 8 per cent, in Romania 7 per cent, in Slovakia 14.7 per cent and in Slovenia
7.8 per cent.
Demands by women for a better social status are still generally scorned in eastern
European societies. “The slogan about equality of the sexes was drummed into us for
years by the communist party, but we knew perfectly well it did not correspond to
reality,” says Labuda. “This is why women now are very wary of us.”
Women feel crushed by a very heavy daily burden which discourages activism, says
Erzsebet Szabo, Hungary’s official mediator between the government and citizens complaining
about abuses by public officials.
Networking
businesswomen
Bellamy is less pessimistic.
For a start, democratization in eastern Europe has led to the setting up of many
women’s associations and NGOs that are very active campaigners. In the Czech Republic,
for example, 70 per cent of the members of NGOs are women, and 85 per cent of NGOs
were run by women
in 1984. Poland, where civil society was the first to organize during the communist
regime, has some 200 associations and groups working to promote the cause of women
or defend their rights. The dozen biggest of them have at most 100 members. Romania
has about 60 women’s associations, as do Albania and Bulgaria.
Women are also getting more and more involved in business. In nine of the countries2
studied by UNICEF, a quarter of commercial companies
are headed by women. In Bucharest, Cristina Grigorescu runs AFIR which, with 100
members, is eastern Europe’s first businesswomen’s association. In all the other
countries in the region, businesswomen are forming networks, especially to fight
the reluctance of banks to provide credit to women.
The
Beijing connection
A turning point for
women’s organizations in eastern Europe came in 1995. That year, for the first time,
they were able to take part freely in the United Nations International Women’s Conference
when it met in Beijing. They made new contacts, with each other and with Western
organizations. Since then, the KARAT Coalition has brought together 10 associations
(from Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Romania,
Slovakia, Ukraine and Hungary) and holds regular conferences.
In all the countries, such organizations are just starting out on a long journey
and their achievements so far are few. But they are all still fighting, and counting
on support from younger generations, to ensure that women of the post-communist era
are not labelled as “second-class citizens” and that democracy can thus be truly
respected in their countries.
1 The report was produced by UNICEF’s Regional Monitoring Project (MONEE) at the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy. It analyses in detail how the fall of communism has affected the 150 million women and 50 million girls who live in central and eastern Europe, in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and in the Baltic states.
2 The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia.
• The Women in Transition report can be consulted on the Internet at <http://unicef-icdc.org>
• The Information Centre for Women’s Associations (OSKA) publishes a list of all women’s organizations in Poland that can be ordered by email: <oska@oska.org.pl>
• KARAT Coalition: <http://www.karat.org>
• Albania: Women in Development Association, Jeta Katro Beluli: <jkatro@hotmail.com>
• Bulgaria: Women’s Alliance for Development, Regina Indsheva: <wad@olb.net>
• Czech Republic: Gender Studies Center, Linda Simerska: <gender@ecn.cz>
• Macedonia: Union of Women’s Organizations of Macedonia: <sozm@mt.net.mk>
• Poland: Women’s Association for Gender Equal Status, Kinga Lohman: <kingacom@waw.pdi.net>
