Blind Spots in Post-1989 Czech Historiography of State Socialism: Gender as a Category of Analysis

Abstract

Gender is rarely considered in the works on state socialism in Czech history writing. Given the prominence of the equality of the sexes in communist rhetoric and the heated anti- and pro-feminism media and intellectual debates of the 1990s, the omission stands out as a remarkable loss of opportunity in historical research. It also defies logic. For if “emancipation” and “equality” were so strongly present in pre-1989 discourse and women constituted half the population, does it not follow that the plain demographic fact should drive the interest of researchers to inquire where this population was, what it did, and what it had to say? The question has so far attracted primarily sociologists, but how does it fare in historiography? What are the losses of the absence and the gains of the inclusion of a gender perspective on the history and memory-making of state socialism? This article will first consider the status quo of gender blindness in Czech historiography and its possible reasons in the context of the legacy that state socialism left to social sciences and humanities: the legacy of expertise, disciplinary legitimation and epistemological legacy. A discussion of the consequences of the near absence of gender history and analysis from post-1989 interpretations of state socialism in historiography follows: blind spots and loss of knowledge, lack of precision and a gender bias of historical accounts, and perpetuation of false legacy. Finally, the article discusses the gains to Czech historiography, memory-making and international discussion, if scholars do consider gender.

Memory politics has been a fierce battlefield in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc during state socialism and after and the Czech Republic is no exception. The stages of the struggle over national memory are many: politics, media, culture—and historiography, the subject of this special section of EEPS. As in other postsocialist countries, in the Czech Republic the struggle is also formalized through the establishment of an institute of national memory: the Czech Parliament passed the law for the founding of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, whose mission is to research and document the periods of Nazi occupation and of the Communist rule, in June 2007. ¹

Given the focus of this special section and my position as an interdisciplinary researcher of gender, my aim is to take stock in this article of the place of gender issues and gender perspective in post-1989 Czech historiography of state socialism—and, by extension in memory-making. The immediate impulse for this undertaking, for which I cannot be grateful enough, was a review of Vyvlastněný hlas: Proměny genderové kultury české společnosti 1948-1989 (An Expropriated Voice: Transformation of Gender Culture in Czech Society, 1948-1989) ² by the Czech historian Adéla Gjuričová. She reproached the editors and the authorial collective for not citing contemporary Czech historians, while also observing that, in turn, Czech historians did not cite gender research. ³ This article is a response to that critique.

I will begin with an anecdote. Some time in the mid-1990s, I wanted to do a similar inventory-making project. I tried to collect all university syllabi in the Czech and the Slovak Republics that covered at least in a single class anything that had to do with feminism, gender, or women. ⁴ When I approached the then head of the Department of Czech History at one of the old Czech universities with my question, he told me that the subject was covered by sociology in the Czech Republic, not by history. I was quite sure that he was wrong, for I knew that there were already then at least some classes, if not whole courses on women’s and gender history taught in his department. His answer was intriguing, though. He did not dismiss gender as feminist nonsense, dangerous ideology imported from the “West” or some such, as it could have been expected in those early years of the discipline of gender studies in the Czech Republic. In fact, he gave the impression that gender perspective was a legitimate scholarly pursuit—only, as far as the discipline of history was concerned, gender was not relevant. I was wondering how could any category of analysis be not relevant to history, but did not press the point.

I had never done anything with that early project, although the collection of syllabi from the 1990s is still my personal archive, but continued making inventories of gender studies in the Czech Republic and compiling bibliographies. As others have pointed out, some humanities and social science disciplines have been more, and others less, welcoming to gender and feminist analysis. Jan Matonoha and Petra Hanáková, for example, categorized Czech literary and film studies among the unwelcoming disciplines, ⁵ also linguistics has had a long history of hostility toward feminist perspectives, ⁶ while Czech sociologists have produced reams of studies centred on gender and based on gender theories since the fall of the communist regime. ⁷

The sociologists began by pondering the relevance of “Western feminism” for the society transforming fast from state socialism in the 1990s. ⁸ Czech scholars were, arguably, the most prolific in these debates among the East Central European countries before the turn of the millennium. ⁹ The underlying context of their argument was the legacy of the omnipresence of “women’s emancipation” and “equality between the sexes” in communist rhetoric, principles guaranteed also by the Czechoslovak constitution since the foundation of an independent state in 1918. Their by now well-written-about concern turned, similarly to other East Central European countries, around the discomfort that “women’s emancipation” connoted “communism” to many. They inquired whether the ideals of Western feminism were the same as the bleak state-socialist experience with emancipation and, if not, in what ways. They asked whether, if Western feminism stemmed from an entirely different historical context, its feminist and gender theories could be used to analyse Czech society.

At the dawn of the new millennium, these epistemological discussions died down. The new generation of researchers was more interested in the applications of “Western” gender and feminist theories to empirical data, without a further questioning of their relevance. This empirical interest began to extend also to the state-socialist past, and at the time of writing there is a respectable amount of sociological research taking a historical perspective on gender. ¹⁰ The main question that I will seek to answer in this article is the following: if the gender dimension of state socialism attracts such research interest from sociologists, how does it fare in the discipline of history, where one would expect it to find a “natural” home? A second question follows from the first: what are the losses of absence and the gains of the inclusion of a gender perspective on the history and memory-making of state socialism?

In order to answer these questions, I have dredged the contents of key Czech history journals, book production on contemporary history, Academia.edu and ResearchGate social networks, as well as the publications of historians with Czech institutional affiliations internationally in the last twenty years. ¹¹ I was searching not only for any texts that had women as their subjects, and/or used “gender” as a category of analysis, but also any texts that treated the more obvious gender-relevant areas, such as social and cultural history and the history of everyday life. It is very possible that something slipped through my “net,” but the corpus of texts that I accumulated ought to provide an adequate basis for the argument that I present below.

The overall conclusion of my search is that, with the exception of a handful of gender historians, gender is rarely or not at all considered in the works on state socialism in Czech history writing, although there has been some increase in interest in the last five years. ¹² Granted, to be able to take advantage of the potential of gender as “a category of historical analysis” ¹³ to generate new knowledge requires at least some background in gender theory and that is not everybody’s taste. But when one considers the prominence of the equality of the sexes in communist rhetoric ¹⁴ and the heated anti- and pro-feminism media and intellectual debates of the 1990s, ¹⁵ this omission testifies to a remarkable loss of opportunity in historical research and defies logic. For if “emancipation” and “equality” (rovnoprávnost) were so strongly present in the pre-1989 discourse and women constituted half the population, does it not follow that the plain demographic fact should drive the interest of researchers to inquire where this population was, what it was doing, and what it had to say? Seeking answers to these questions would produce descriptions and mine the archives for sources. A deeper analytical level would then be achieved if researchers systematically mobilized the category of gender, even if they remained just within the gender binary: Was this half of the population doing or saying different things than the other, and why?

The contribution of the analytic category of gender to historiography is similar to the inclusion of any other category of analysis, such as class, ethnicity, or physical (dis)ability, to mention just the most frequent ones. It “provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction.” ¹⁶ Joan Scott argues in her seminal article that researchers of gender, apart from opening new topics of inquiry, “provide new perspectives on old questions,” ¹⁷ because they tend to pose their questions from the positions of the less privileged, rather than those in the position of power. ¹⁸ Deploying the analytical category of gender thus allows rearticulations of symbolic meanings and metaphors, of hierarchies in social institutions and organizations, of the very notion of politics, and of how historical change occurs. ¹⁹

In the rest of this article, I will first consider the status quo of gender blindness in greater detail, before looking into the possible reasons for this phenomenon among Czech historians and its consequences to post-1989 interpretations of state socialism. I will conclude with a discussion on the contribution of a gender perspective to Czech historiography, when the authors do include it.

The weak representation of historians in research on gender issues of state socialism is a bit of an anomaly even within Czech gender history. The publications on the nineteenth-century women’s movement and women’s social and cultural participation are numerous, ²⁰ although all of them except Jitka Malečková’s fall under women’s, rather than gender, history. ²¹ They explore women’s activities, concerns, and status, rather than employing the category of gender analytically and relationally in the sense defined by Scott when considering historical change. The interest in women and gender has been gathering also around the interwar period, although significantly fewer publications exist there. ²² When one searches for a gender perspective among historians on state socialism, however, one finds that with a few exceptions only two authors regularly publish in that field: Věra Sokolová and Denisa Nečasová. ²³ The former was the first to address such topical issues as the forced sterilization of Roma women that began during the Nazi occupation ²⁴ and the lives of non-heterosexual people under state socialism. ²⁵ The latter began to fill the gaping void of our knowledge of the relationship between the state women’s organizations and the Communist Party. ²⁶ In recent years, another historian, Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, began to publish on the gender history of state socialism. She previously published occasionally on gender, but on earlier periods. Her recent work with a team of psychologists on intergenerational narratives brings together oral history and the study of emotions. ²⁷ Thankfully, that is not all the gender work accomplished thus far on state socialism, as I have shown above. An increasing number of researchers venture into this field: apart from the sociologists, also scholars from literature, cultural, and even legal studies and art historians—but rarely historians. ²⁸

While the journal Dějiny-Teorie-Kritika, established in 2004 and “dedicated to a critical assessment of historiography and its methods,” but without a limitation as to the period, regularly publishes articles on gender topics, ²⁹ Soudobé dějiny, the journal of the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, one of the two Czech research institutions that specifically cover the history of state socialism, has published only two articles employing gender as an analytic category since its foundation in 1993. ³⁰ Both of them appeared as late as 2011: Rudolf Kučera’s useful overview of mainly German-language literature on masculinities in twentieth-century wars that specifically mobilizes the category of “gender” and “gender history,” ³¹ and Anna Hájková’s account of women in the Theresienstadt ghetto that also explicitly uses “gender.” ³² The journal has covered topics such as ecology, social memory, television and film, biographic research, migration, leisure, cookbooks and cuisine, social policy, and history of everyday life, but not one has touched on gender analysis, although on all of them there is rich international literature that includes a gender perspective. For international comparison, the editor of Central European History (CEH), Andrew I. Port, counted that the journal published 12.6 per cent of all articles between the years 1990 and 2014 on “gender, women, family”; following up on his report, Karen Hagemann and Donna Harsch established that in 2017 it was 10 per cent. ³³ The authors also observed that the number of articles on post-1945 gender history had been greater than on any other period since 2010. ³⁴

The Institute of Contemporary History itself then does not seem to have gender aspects on its agenda, which is all the more surprising that its leading figures have had many and long-term co-operations with researchers from among gender milieus. Miroslav Vaněk, the foremost Czech oral historian and the head of the Institute, has been working with gender researchers associated with the excellent Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London. Michal Kopeček, Head of the Department of the History of Ideas and Conceptual History, has never shunned gender researchers and invited them to present at various events. Indeed, together with Pavel Kolář, he co-authored an extensive overview of Czech post-1989 historiography, in which the authors mention gender history at several places and specifically identify “institutional conservatism” as a key obstacle to its development in the Czech context. ³⁵ The institute’s Working Group on the History of Postsocialism then includes two researchers with a previous history of gender research or interest in gender-relevant topics, Petr Roubal and Adéla Gjuričová. Roubal’s work on state-socialist mass gymnastic performances ³⁶ was concurrent with the international scholarly discussions on the body that thrived from the 1990s onwards. Adéla Gjuričová worked on Růžena Vacková, a woman intellectual and a political prisoner, in the early 2000s ³⁷ and later on eroticism and nudity in the post-1989 public space, ³⁸ but just like Roubal has moved to a different area of inquiry. It is a pity because, as the diagnosis pronounced here shows, gender aspects of state socialism is clearly an underpopulated research field, so there is a potential for both the individual and the institution to stake a territory and make a mark.

The research agenda of the other institute with the mission to research state socialism, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, does not include any projects with a gender focus either, although its Department of Education, the unit whose primary concern is not research, has recently directed attention to issues of gender. It produced several videos and classroom materials for teachers with the “family-gender” tag within their larger project “History in the 21st Century.” ³⁹ The content of the materials, apart from making women visible, also specifically addresses gender aspects of state socialism. They go beyond stereotypical presentations and stimulate critical thinking by providing a range of perspectives and suggesting questions for classroom discussion.

What are the reasons for this reluctance to address gender in the research agendas of contemporary history? Several gender historians have identified the general aversion to theory in postsocialist historiographies as the key inhibitor to gender history. ⁴⁰ Sylvia Kuzma-Markowska then lists “the dominance of political history, . . . general lack of interdisciplinary approaches, reluctance to feminism, structural inflexibility and hierarchy that characterize Polish universities” as further inhibitors in Polish historiography. Some of her items resonate also with Nečasová’s explanation of the Czech context: “Descriptive accounts of political and event history still dominate the Czech history community, and those are not particularly open to gender approaches but neither are they open, for example, to anthropological or cultural-historical approaches. This is particularly true of contemporary history.” ⁴¹ Nečasová further argues that the aversion of Czech historiography to theory is a legacy of the compulsory Marxist–Leninist theoretical perspective in the past and hence the fear of ideologization of historical research. ⁴² A similar diagnosis formulated by Kolář and Kopeček includes gender history by implication:

Due to the insufficient examination of the legacy of Marxism, new theoretical approaches to historical writing are often considered to represent a cloaked return of Marxism, and, thus, are “violations of history.” The belief in value-free research and the possibility of separating “lies” (myths) from “the truth” (scholarly knowledge) is constitutive of most of Czech historiography. ⁴³

The argument presented in this article draws on these discussions and takes stock of the situation in Czech contemporary historiography a decade later. In the context of the legacy state socialism left to social sciences and humanities, we can identify at least three interrelated reasons for the near absence of gender history in contemporary Czech historiography: the legacy of expertise, disciplinary legitimation, and epistemological legacy. As to the first reason, Jitka Malečková showed how communist historiography co-opted the nineteenth-century women’s movement into its dominant narrative of the national movement. ⁴⁴ This contributed to making the women’s movement as such invisible in the communist account of history, but it also produced a side effect: talking about women’s place in history was not a taboo and there was a community of historians knowledgeable of the issues and sources. The approach through “movement” then provided a legitimizing conceptual framework. It can be argued that work within that framework had the necessary contextual preconditions to continue also after the demise of the communist ideological domination. Research work on the interwar period does not have the “movement” framework available as a legitimizing device, because after the creation of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 national movement is no longer a mainstream paradigm for Czech historiography of that period. This research also begins to appear later than the work on the nineteenth century, namely, after other legitimizing contexts were established: Masaryk’s support of women’s equality issues, repressions against “bourgeois” women’s associations after the communist takeover, and the martyrdom of the leading figures of women’s activism, Františka Plamínková and Milada Horáková. ⁴⁵ Thanks to these other frameworks and contexts, researchers on both periods can make do with writing about “women” rather than “gender,” and most of them do exactly that. Researchers interested in state socialism, by comparison, find themselves in a very different situation, without a legitimizing context and without a pre-existing conceptual framework. ⁴⁶ This requires a more detailed explanation.

I argued elsewhere that the pernicious legacy of communist ideology, at least with regard to critical approaches to gender, was to “produce the notion . . . that women’s emancipation in the Eastern bloc was a communist idea.” ⁴⁷ Gender historians Melissa Feinberg, Jitka Malečková, and Denisa Nečasová had shown how it was accomplished discursively and in institutional practice by taking over women’s organizations, their property and magazines, and the narrative of the women’s movement. ⁴⁸ The sociologist Hana Havelková had argued that the Communist Party took over also the agenda of the women’s movement and she coined the term “expropriation” (Enteignung) for the overall strategy. ⁴⁹ It follows that any forays into topics concerning women or gender in the state-socialist era would be at risk of being seen as aligning themselves with the communist ideology. In the 1990s, there were certainly voices from among the ranks of émigré intellectuals, then endowed with considerable moral capital, that saw a parallel between feminist politics and communism. ⁵⁰ Part of the problem was the vocabulary of “equality” (of the sexes) and “emancipation” (of women) used by both. It could therefore hardly have provided a viable conceptual framework for inquiries into state-socialist gender history. ⁵¹

This brings us to the third reason that inhibits research on gender aspects of state socialism: epistemological legacy. The 1990s brought the revival of a key epistemological discussion of the 1960s and the Prague Spring, the call for “pure science” (or “value-free research” in the argument of Kolář and Kopeček) in social sciences and humanities. In the context of the 1960s, it meant “a scholar’s right not to work within [the] explicitly ideological doctrine [of Marxism-Leninism].” ⁵² It is then hardly surprising that the feminist emphasis on writing from a clearly articulated political positioning proved indigestible in the Czech post-1989 scholarly environment. The unfortunate consequence of the “pure science” doctrine is positivist “objectivity”, the “gaze from nowhere.” ⁵³ For the purposes of this article, I will call it universalism, because history written from this position makes “universal” claims: seemingly “objective,” value free, unaffected by the researcher’s positionings and by the social relations of knowledge production. In contrast, current gender research builds on the impulse of feminist epistemology that had begun in the 1980s and emphasized partiality and situatedness of all knowledge and knowledge production. ⁵⁴ This work followed, among others, from the ideas of Louis Althusser on Ideological State Apparatuses ⁵⁵ and Michel Foucault on discourse ⁵⁶ that lay foundations to the post-structuralist turn in social sciences and humanities. Of the many twists of this turn, the one important for the present argument is the turn away from the pursuit of impartial, universal knowledge and toward the acknowledgement that all knowledge comes from somewhere—ideology, discourse, or the unconscious, depending on which theoretical school one subscribes to. In the context of these discussions, all that feminist epistemology and feminist methodologies ⁵⁷ that developed from it do is require that the researcher lays bare and reflects on her own ideological premises and therefore on the reach of her conclusions and not claim their universal validity, because that makes the knowledge gained from those conclusions more precise. From a universalist, perspective, however, therein lies the limitation of gender approach to history writing.

Times have changed since the 1990s and working on areas that featured in communist rhetoric perhaps no longer threatens researchers with loss of legitimacy. There is little ground to believe that this kind of continuity would still apply. The doctrine of “pure science” and the ghost of universalism are a different story—and not only in historiography. Petra Hanáková noted the aversion of mainstream Czech film studies to gender analysis, Jan Matonoha in literature, ⁵⁸ and even in sociology, with its respectable body of gender specialists, it is a rare occurrence if an article on a “general” topic cites a single work with a gender focus. It follows that, in this context, gender history or gender perspective on history can only be seen as a marginal field, a subfield of “real” history. If one chooses it as a research orientation, one may risk one’s status among historians, which for a junior academic equals a diminished prospect of employment.

The obvious consequences of the near-absence of gender history and analysis of state socialism are—as would be the case with the absence of any other category of analysis—blind spots and loss of knowledge, the latter being particularly relevant in oral history. Małgorzata Fidelis on Poland, Donna Harsch on the GDR, and Ildikó Asztalos Morrel on Hungary ⁵⁹ showed the influence of gender stereotypes in party politics on women’s employment status and material conditions in industry and agriculture. Theirs are just some examples of nuanced historical analyses that challenge the notion of the communist commitment to the equality of the sexes. With the exception of Nečasová’s book, there are no counterparts to these works in the Czech context. This is not to disregard or diminish in any way the merits of the sociological inquiries into gender themes of state socialism. Those are important contributions from within the disciplinary tenets of sociology, they enrich our knowledge of the past, its continuities and discontinuities to the present, and add to the interdisciplinary dialogue. Historians, too, have their research methods, their theoretical approaches, and their disciplinary discussions on which to build and which to question. Knowledge produced from those foundations is, by definition, different and, therefore, irreplaceable by work produced from another disciplinary context. And if, in the course of working on their detailed historical analyses, the historians reach into the stores of knowledge of other disciplines and produce truly interdisciplinary work, so much the better. Their work on gender is needed not only for making our knowledge of state socialism more complete, but as historiography is a key actor in contemporary memory politics, it is critical for the process of memory-making. The sociologist Marcela Linková concludes her afterword to a recently published book of interviews with women dissidents with the following bewilderment: “From today’s perspective, it is particularly interesting to ask, why we have not followed up on the continuity of [the lived reality of women’s emancipation in the Czech Lands] after 1989 and why it is continually crowded out of our historical, social and scholarly memory.” ⁶⁰ It is truly astounding that we do not have historical research available on central issues of the communist ideology, such as women’s employment, health, education, or consumerism. ⁶¹ Such research is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of state socialism, as Sandrine Kott and Françoise Thebaud asserted:

The question is not only to discover what socialism does to gender, but also to use the concept of gender to develop our understanding of socialist societies and regimes. . . . Post-communist societies, just like the societies and regimes of “real socialism,” are, and will be, better understood through a gender perspective. ⁶²

A logical extension of this argument is that the concept of gender contributes also to our understanding of continuities and discontinuities since state socialism’s demise. If we do not know where and how represented women were in various professions and fields of study, for example, we are lacking a basis for understanding the development in these areas since.

There are also less obvious, although equally grave, consequences: lack of precision in the interpretations of history and a heavily gendered account of history. The precision issue is down to the “pure science” doctrine and universalism and plagues even works that step well outside of the mainstream in many other respects. Michal Pullmann, for example, challenges the dominating “totalitarian model” for interpretations of state socialism in his paradigm-changing Konec experimentu (The End of an Experiment) and presents the refreshing and conceptually much richer thesis of an “ideological consensus” between the rulers and the general population in the last years of state socialism. ⁶³ How much more subtlety and depth would his argument gain if he included further categories into his analysis of the leading dailies and of Party documents: not just gender, but also age, social status, and ethnicity! The result would have been a rich fabric of the relations between the various social groups and the communist power that would allow the hierarchies, positionings, and perhaps also the vested interests and motivations of these groups to come into the fore.

The lack of depth and precision due to the neglect of gender analysis is regrettable, but largely to the cost of the author (he could have reaped greater benefits from his considerable labour) and corrigible (somebody else can take this work as a base and continue the analysis). There is no better example of this, after all, than the work of Michel Foucault: entirely gender-blind, his theories proved immensely fruitful for gender analyses in history and other disciplines. Accounts of history delivered through unreflected gendered positionings, however, cause damage to our historical knowledge. Paradoxically, sometimes distortion occurs when authors “discover” gender. Jiří Pernes’s book Komunistky s fanatismem v srdci (Women Communists with Fanaticism in Their Hearts) ⁶⁴ is a case in point. It includes the portraits of ten women, all of them active Communist Party members, but with a variety of life trajectories: from the unrepentant Communist functionary and normalization actress Jiřina Švorcová to the Charter 77 signatories Ludmila Jankovcová, Marie Švermová, and Gertruda Sekaninová-Čakrtová. It is hard to divine wherein lay their fanaticism other than in the simple fact that they were all politically active women. Why is Gusta Fučíková’s steadfast following of the doctrine fanatic, but Julius Fučík is merely enthusiastic (zapálený)? ⁶⁵ Statistically, the leadership of state-socialist institutions and organizations was prevalently male and, therefore, a far greater number of male Communist Party members would have “political activity” and unflagging adherence to the doctrine as their common denominator. Yet there is no book that would apply the label “fanaticism” to them as the defining feature. The explanation that offers itself is that “political activity” is coded masculine, which makes the women with that characteristic unfeminine. Pernes, provides his own explanation:

Women were attracted by the charm of the communist ideal just as men. Due to their emotional set up, the majority of them approached the Party politics absolutely uncritically and their enthusiasm was more likely to turn into fanaticism than in the case of men. ⁶⁶

Needless to say, he does not provide any references for this thesis that drives his entire narrative. The biological fact is self-evident for him; to the point of fanaticism, one might say. The author’s thesis is all the more puzzling, when one learns that six out of the ten women were disciplined in various ways for their criticism of the Party line. The historian remains locked within a stereotype that corresponds neither to the political demographics, nor to the social dynamics of the latter half of the twentieth-century, but dates back rather to the era of the early twentieth-century suffrage movement. The prevailing public opinion then took the very notion of any political participation of women to be a contradiction to the definition of femininity and the women’s role. The female face of communist “fanaticism” posits a disturbing memory-making image, because it espouses a popular notion rather than results from an analytical reflection, as one would have every right to expect from a work of historical scholarship.

Another kind of history writing through unreflected gendered positionings is the opposite of the case just described: blindness to one’s own gendered vision of the world that translates into methodological flaws and results in gender asymmetries in historical accounts. Histories of East Central European social movements are a prime example and the history of Solidarność by now a notorious case brought to light by Shana Penn. ⁶⁷ She asked the obvious question: Any broad popular movement attracts both men and women, so where are the women in the canonical narrative of Solidarność? She traced the process by which women’s voices and faces were erased from the history of the fall of the communist power in Poland. She presents a counter-narrative and evidence that it was, in fact, the women who saved the movement during the time of the martial law. Her “archaeological” work has been recently continued by the Polish writer and film maker, Maria Dzido, who is specifically interested in the women’s perspective on the activities and memory of Solidarność. ⁶⁸ We know from both these revisionist works that considerable power was at stake in constructing the narrative of Solidarność that made women invisible. Nevertheless, the gendered coding of concepts like “activity” and “heroism” in public discourse also participated in the process. ⁶⁹

The history of the Czech dissent, including the Charter 77 movement, shows a similar gender bias, as Jiřina Šiklová pointed out more than a decade ago; she also identified some of the gaps in the narrative that ought to be filled with women. ⁷⁰ In the last five years, two publications added to this counterbalancing act of returning the women into the story: Lenka Krátká’s article on women’s visibility and invisibility in dissent ⁷¹ and Bytová revolta: Jak ženy dělaly disent (A living room revolution: How women did dissent), a collection of twenty-one interviews with dissident women by Marcela Linková and Naďa Straková. ⁷² Šiklová’s is the first brief outline of the problem, Linková and Straková’s a document, rather than an analytical counter-narrative like Penn’s and, alas, Šiklová and Linková are sociologists, Straková a journalist—none of them historians. Only Krátká’s is an oral historical analytical study that works with interviews with dissident women recorded in the 1990s and asks the question “if the dissident movement, in subverting the ruling communist power, also subverted gender order in society.” ⁷³ Her answer is in the negative, while Linková’s conclusion from the much later interviews (some of them with the same women) for their book is considerably more ambiguous on that point. ⁷⁴ The discrepancy, nevertheless, points to the knowledge potential of a deeper comparison between the two sets of interviews and tickles one’s curiosity as to how much of the story is still untold.

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 has so far fallen victim to the discursive masculine coding of concepts associated with public political expression, with no redress in sight. ⁷⁵ The invaluable collection of one hundred interviews with the student leaders of 1989, 100 studentských revolucí (100 student revolutions), by Milan Otáhal and Miroslav Vaněk ⁷⁶ includes only fifteen interviews with women. Its sequel, Sto studentských evolucí (One hundred student evolutions) by Miroslav Vaněk, Petra Schindler Wisten, Jana Wolhmuth Markupová, and Veronika Pehe, includes, by definition, also only about 20 per cent (18 out of 92) interviews with women. ⁷⁷ To his credit, Vaněk in co-authorship with Pavel Mücke has made an effort toward greater gender sensitivity in Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society, and I will return to this work below in greater detail. ⁷⁸

The exclusion of women from historical research extends also to intellectual history, namely, to histories of academic disciplines. In May 1989, Martin Potůček asked Czech social scientists, among other questions, what the damage and lasting consequences had been to their disciplines during normalization (i.e., in the period 1969–1989). The sociologist Miroslav Purkrábek wrote: “I consider as the greatest damage to sociology . . . the drain of talented men from sociology, or rather, low interest in the discipline from among the young generation. Younger sociologists are ever more frequently women.” ⁷⁹ One would therefore assume that sociology was a heavily feminized discipline during that time—and presumably also post 1989, if it was mainly women who were trained into the field. Yet, the two hundred pages of the more than six hundred–page tome Dějiny české sociologie (The history of Czech sociology) that are devoted to the period of state socialism give the standard narrative from one great father figure to the next. ⁸⁰ The only woman that deserved a separate section on her work introduced with a heading is Erika Kadlecová, a sociologist of religion. ⁸¹ Other women sociologists are mentioned here and there, but few are granted more space than one sentence or a discussion of any of their works (Irena Dubská, Blanka Filipcová, Hana Librová, Lenka Kalinová, Ludmila Kárníková, and Jiřina Šiklová). The thirty-eight pages of bibliography for the chapter on state socialism include fewer than seventy entries with women’s names as authors or co-authors, including translations, that is, less than two entries per page—certainly no “feminization” in the canon creation of the discipline. It might be that Purkrábek’s statement was exaggerated and that what he diagnosed as drainage of male blood meant in reality that more drops of female blood dripped into the field compared to the 1960s, but that men remained in prevalence. In the light of my own oral history research of Czech scholarly publishing, I rather conclude that although young men may not have entirely disappeared from sociology during normalization, there were also a considerable number of active female researchers. ⁸² I was specifically looking for informants who were recommended by their peers as respected for the work they did between 1969 and 1989. There was no shortage of women in the recommendations. Excluding them from the history of the discipline results in a distorted picture and, consequently, a false legacy.

In the last part of this article, I would like to consider several studies from the recent years that show how our knowledge of state socialism can be advanced if the authors who are not expressly gender historians are open to gender perspectives and even more so, when they are prepared to consider gender as an analytic category. The first group includes the voluminous publication Volný čas v českých zemích 1957–1967 (Leisure time in the Czech lands, 1957–1967) by Martin Franc and Jiří Knapík published already in 2013. ⁸³ They note gendered inequalities in the availability of leisure time and also discuss whether prostitution should be seen as an economic activity rather than as a “hobby,” as it was sometimes categorized in official statistics in the period of their investigation. ⁸⁴ Their typology of how people spent their leisure time, however, does not take that additional step toward analytical reflection of gender. They make several observations that such and such activity was mainly associated with men (DIY; kutilství) and another type of activity with women (handicraft; ruční práce), ⁸⁵ but remain at the descriptive level. They could have considered, for example, the implications of the gendered divisions of leisure activities for social interactions and, by extension, for their potential to bring together communities of people and opinions—a concern with clear political implications.

Both authors made an even more consistent effort to gender the lived experience of state socialism in their later collective work, Mezi pionýrským šátkem a mopedem: Děti, mládež a socialismus v českých zemích 1948–1970 (Between a pioneer scarf and a moped: Children, youth and socialism in the Czech lands 1948–1970). ⁸⁶ Nevertheless, even here the account largely stops at stating that boys did this and girls that. An account that stands out in that respect is an analytical inquiry into the representations of sexuality and partnership in popular-educational books for youth by one of the guest authors, Christiane Brenner of Collegium Carolinum in Munich. ⁸⁷ She is posing deeper questions about the links between the ideological position of the Party-state that proclaimed equality between the sexes and the socialization into rather traditional gender roles promoted by these books.

Also some Czech historians have made inroads into using gender analytically to inform on broader issues. Vaněk and Mücke begin similarly to Knapík and Franc with reporting on the differences between the views expressed by women and by men in their project on an oral history of Czech society. ⁸⁸ Their book draws on three hundred interviews (p. 7) and includes 139 biographical notes of the narrators quoted within its pages. Although only fifty-six, or 40 per cent, of these belong identifiably to women, ⁸⁹ which hardly corresponds to the demographics of Czech society, the authors include several gender-relevant topics and make numerous explicitly gendered insights. The topics include pregnancy and contraception (pp. 47–48), entering marriage (p. 48), family (pp. 52–53 ff) and masculinity (p. 118). The authors observe, for example, the following:

The men’s greater reluctance to talk spontaneously about their families may have stemmed from the traditional gender roles: in their eyes, it was their job to look after the material well-being of the family (the world of work). . . . Men born in the 1960s would more likely provide a more balanced view of their lives, including the roles they took on in the family. (pp. 44–45)

Some of the women interviewed questioned the term “maternity leave,” which in Czech implies a “holiday.” Many female narrators joked that it must have been coined by men, because no mother, knowing what such a leave entailed, would ever consider it a holiday. (p. 53)

In addition to satisfaction in a well-made product, women workers often stressed the pleasure they felt in being able to match the men. Aside from their dissatisfaction about being unfairly compensated as compared to the men, women cherished the feeling of being appreciated. The respect they got in the workplace could sometimes make up for the lack of recognition they got from their families. Even if these were “Communist” honors, the narrators were rightly proud of them. (p. 131)

Men and women remembered their free time from different angles. Men basically separated their time into two categories: work hours and free time, with family time as a side topic. Women also divided their time into two major categories: the workday and family time, with free time as a side topic—but even that mostly spent with their families. (p. 147, emphasis added)

All of these quotations are acute and perceptive observations on the gender order of state socialism and, by extension, its legacy. The last quotation is particularly remarkable, because in it the authors begin to move from the “men versus women” perspective to “gender as a category of analysis,” namely, to the restructuring of “time” through the lens of gender and the gender order and that is truly a new paradigm through which one could study state socialism. Contextualization within the existing body of gender research would have allowed the authors to take their material to this next analytical level. ⁹⁰

Petr Roubal and Jan Mervart have begun to do precisely that. Roubal placed his work on the mass gymnastic performances of Czech state socialism, the Spartakiads, in the context of gender research and demonstrated the productivity of gender as an analytic category in his interpretation of the choreography of the performances of the 1970s and 1980s as that of one happy socialist family. ⁹¹ Mervart’s book chapter on Czech normalization is then perhaps the first instance of a Czech contemporary historian writing on a topic outside of gender and referring to works by gender scholars (the legal scholar Barbara Havelková and the sociologist Radka Dudová) to illustrate the general features of the studied subject. ⁹² After this first excursion into gender research, Mervart continued with looking at the political thought of Czech “Marxist humanists” of the 1950s and 1960s. ⁹³ In this most recent work, it clearly transpires what can be gained for Czech historiography and also international scholarly discusion, if “gender” becomes a part of a larger canvas. Mervart subjects the work of several Marxist intellectuals to scrutiny as to how they conceptualized “human being”—and, similarly to Denisa Nečasová’s work on the topic, ⁹⁴ arrives at the conclusion that the rhetoric of emancipation and gender equality notwithstanding, these thinkers clearly took the “male” and “masculine” as the norm for “human”; if they mentioned women at all, then more or less as a separate category. When I have found this discourse in the realm of the popular, namely, in mainstream journalistic reporting of the late 1980s, ⁹⁵ it was perhaps predictable, but given the historical association of Marxism with emancipatory thought, one could and would expect to find more explicit differentiation in the texts of Marxist intellectuals. Mervart’s finding also does not come as a surprise to a feminist researcher, as it is the underlying premise of much of feminist work, ⁹⁶ but it contributes to the uncovering of a so-far hidden corner of Czech intellectual history. Even more importantly, it creates an opening for a theoretical discussion on the similarities between “Western” and “Eastern” thought of the time and their implications—this is so far a little explored area, as the prevalent focus has been on the differences between the two worlds.

Should Czech historiography be concerned about the weak representation of gender analysis in its mainstream on the one hand, and in the contribution that its inclusion can bring on the other? It is—or should be—a rather rhetorical question. A demand for a comprehensive and accurate description of the past, as well as theoretical and methodological precision, is more than a feminist grudge, as I hope I have shown in this article. Both professional standards and the international standing of the discipline are at stake. Accounts of history that do not consider various categories of analysis, be it class, ethnicity, or gender, to mention just the traditional “holy trinity,” command less and less international interest. Although they are useful for international researchers as resources, because they provide factual information on what Czech archives contain or what the state policies regarding this or that area were, they have value as contributions to international historiographical discussions, only if they bring new conceptual insights. And that is less likely, if they do not meet the analytical standards. To improve on the current situation, work is needed in two areas: gender balance in research and including gender as an analytic category into historical analysis. The former does not require any specialized knowledge other than a demographic reflection: what is the proportion of men and women (let us stay with just the gender binary for now) in a given research area? The researcher’s obligation is then to make sure that the ratio is at least approximately maintained during data collection and the final written account. The latter, employing gender analytically, does require mastering specialized knowledge and not everybody is prepared to do it. And not everybody has to. We do not all have to be gender researchers. What we do have to be, however, is aware that gender exists as a category of analysis and that including it will have consequences for the interpretation of almost any topic in history research—as will many other categories. Both the universalistic and the gender lens produce biased, or partial, visions; there is no way around it. The difference is that universalistic interpretations are guilty of unreflected bias, while gender analyses lay their bias and therefore limitations bare and, consequently, provide more precise knowledge. A gender perspective also makes visible hidden nooks and crannies of history and, what is more important, it opens new questions and proposes new paradigms for critical examination and revision of historical interpretations.