Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women's Movements in East Central Europe

by Barbara Einhorn

With the collapse of state socialism, women in Eastern and Central Europe are now faced with more than the double burden of paid and domestic labor. Soaring unemployment is driving women out of the workplace, and nationalist ideologues are urging them to reassume their “primary responsibility”—to produce babies for the nation. Lack of childcare and attacks upon abortion rights are narrowing choices. Can these issues provide the catalyst for transforming the embryonic women’s groups into something like a mass women’s movement? Or will the current allergy to feminism prevail? Many women now claim to have suffered from “too much emancipation” under socialism, and are seeking what they see as new forms of freedom in femininity and maternity.

Barbara Einhorn’s timely account of women’s position before and after the demise of state socialism in Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary shows how the issues of gender are today at the heart of potentially explosive processes of social and political transformation. Her book provides incisive sociological, economic and political analysis, along with perceptive commentary on the ways in which the changes in women’s daily lives are being represented in literature and in the media.

Genres: History, Feminism

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

Reviews

[Veronika Valkovicova]

A wonderful book written almost 30 years ago about the gendered and state-socialist past of Central and Eastern Europe and its potential future. The author looks at topics such as female employment, care work, political representation and activism, as well as the representation of women within the state-controlled media. However, the true beauty of this book shows in its ability to predict what was yet to come in 1991, when the author finished the first manuscript.

[Kerry]

Topics covered include state socialism and "the woman question," reproductive rights, women and the economy, women in politics, feminism and women's movements, and how women are portrayed in the media. Good for building a background for current research.