Female doctors dominated Soviet medicine by the 1930s, and in the 1970s, 30% of surgeons in the USSR were women. Because central planners valued physical labour and heavy industry over intellectual ...or service work, there was still a gendered division of labour in the planned economy. Once there, women could provide care for the sick and the elderly at a great cost saving to the state. ...the transition to free markets was accomplished with the unremunerated care work of women in the private sphere. When asked if, taking into account the effects of inflation, their salaries were lower in 2001 than they were in 1996, more than three-quarters of respondents agreed that they were worse off. ...health-care workers in these four countries claimed that the ability to live on their salaries was one of their “greatest worries”. ...of these ongoing legacies of economic “shock therapy”, sociologists and anthropologists find widespread nostalgia for the state socialist past across eastern Europe.
Muslim Lives in Eastern Europeexamines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic ...world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.
Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region's state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women's embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks' new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria's Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.
Crashing the Party Ghodsee, Kristen R.
World policy journal,
07/2018, Letnik:
35, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Ghodsee discusses the radical legacy of a Soviet-era feminist Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian aristocrat with a zeal for social justice and women's rights. Kollontai believed that women needed to ...participate in the labor force to become economically independent of men. In her view, sexual relations between men and women were poisoned by capitalism: With no means to support themselves, women had no choice but to sell themselves to men, either as wives or prostitutes. In her 1909 pamphlet, "The Social Basis of the Woman Question," Kollontai asserted that this gender oppression had its roots in the family.
Professor mommy Connelly, Rachel; Connelly, Rachel; Ghodsee, Kristen
2011., 2011, 2011-08-16
eBook
Professor Mommy is a guide for women who want to combine the life of the mind with the joys of motherhood. The book provides practical suggestions gleaned from the experiences of the authors, ...together with those of other women who have successfully combined parenting with professorships. Professor Mommy addresses key questions—when to have children and how many to have; what kinds of academic institutions are the most family friendly; how true or not true are the beliefs that many people hold about academic life, and so on—for women throughout all stages of their academic careers, from graduate school through full professor. The authors follow the demands of motherhood all the way from infancy to the teenage years. At each stage, the authors offer invaluable advice and tested strategies for juggling the demands and achieving the rewards of an academic career and motherhood. Written in clear, jargon-free prose, the book is accessible to women in all disciplines, with concise chapters for the time-constrained academic. The book's conversational tone is supplemented with a review of the most current scholarship on work/family balance and a survey of emerging family-friendly practices at U.S. colleges and universities. Professor Mommy asserts that the faculty mother has become and will remain a permanent fixture on the landscape of the American academy.
During the UN Decade for Women, representatives of the world's governments came together for the first time to discuss the issues of equality, development, and peace in official intergovernmental ...forums, opening up an unexpected new front in the ongoing Cold War. While western women were concerned with legal and economic equality, socialist women in the Eastern Bloc argued that women's equality with men was useless in a world full of racism, violence, underdevelopment, colonialism, and war. Over the course of the decade, women from the developing world came to embrace the idea that feminist struggles could not be separated from the underlying political and economic conditions in which women lived, aligning themselves more closely with the socialist world. Through a case study of the Bulgarian Women's Movement, this article presents the UN Decade from the socialist women's point of view, and argues that their contributions to the early international women's movement should no longer be ignored. Adapted from the source document.
National women's organizations were a ubiquitous feature of all of the eastern European communist nations. Although the specificities of these organizations varied from country to country, they were ...all state-run mass organizations variously charged with mobilizing domestic women and representing their nations at international forums concerning women's rights. In the west, these state women's organizations were treated with suspicion; they were often viewed as tools of authoritarian control, mobilizing women to fulfill party goals. It is rarely considered that eastern bloc women may have used their privileged relationship with the Communist Party to promote policies that actually helped women, or that they could push back at male patriarchal elites by appealing to higher communist principles regarding the woman question. This article is a case study of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement. It demonstrates that this organization, despite its entanglement with the state bureaucracy, was relatively successful in pressuring the Bulgarian Politburo into expanding rights and entitlements to women between 1968 and 1990.
Between 1975 and 1985, there were three U.N. conferences on women held in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi. This article is a brief reflection on the tensions that informed these first 10
years of ...the international women's movement seen from the point of view of the American women who believed that their leadership of that movement was being challenged by the strident anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Soviet Union and its allies. Soviet support for the international women's conferences was instrumental in forcing otherwise reticent American politicians to take the emerging international women's movement seriously. Fearing that socialist women would hijack the deliberations with their anti-capitalist “peace” agenda, U.S. congressmen became actively involved in constructing a definition of “appropriate” women's issues for the U.S. delegates attending the conferences, laying the bedrock of what would later become the relatively hegemonic, internationalized form of Western feminism that would ironically be exported to Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in 1989.
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