Preliminary Programme

No sooner did the communists come to power in Romania than they made women the main target of their modernization campaign. Gender equality became the regime’s new watchword. This was reflected in legislation about voting rights and in the new family and labor codes. Unfortunately, the undemocratic nature of the regime meant that all this legislation soon rang hollow. Legal emancipation became void of any real substance owing to the workings of the communist bureaucracy and the cadres’ narrow viewpoint.
My presentation aims at finding out how gender equality was perceived by women themselves through a discourse analysis. I interrogate women who lived during communism in Romania on their life experiences regarding gender equality in its concrete dimension. I am interested, on the one hand, how gender equality was materialized in their everyday life, and, on the other, how this experience is remembered today. Thus, my analysis will focus on women narratives of their daily life during communism, 25 years after the demise of this regime. (Show less)

My paper is the result of international research project entitled „Regaining the future by rebuilding the past: Women’s narratives of life during communism” (conducted by in Poland, Romania and the former German Democratic Republic). The aim of presentation is to focus part of result of that project dedicated the East German generation of mothers – predecessors of builders of communism (born in the ’40s and ‘50s) and their daughters – successors (born in the ‘60s and ‘70s), whose life was determined by the consequences of the Second World War in the context of a communist state - in different ways. Thus, this project is anchored on three traditions of scholarly studies: social history, women studies and cultural studies. It aim is to participate in important stream of European studies of women’s history in Central and Eastern Europe in the postwar period (1945-1989), by investigating women’s life. The applying here methods are oral history, IdI (individual‘s in depth interviews), narratives of life, granted theory and content analysis - to recount individual histories and reconstruct social rules and principles of social order on micro- social levels.
Called upon to participate with their labour in the challenging task of reconstruction, the women born during and just after the war were nevertheless deprived in many cases of the social and economic capital of their parents. Thus, as we have suggested, one of their first objectives was to rebuild – and if possible enhance – the social and economic capital that the previous generation had possessed. Many women of the time showed courage and perseverance and attained professional and personal success. But does this necessarily mean that they managed to develop socio-economic capital that could be passed on successfully to the next generation? And if so, did this next generation of women, born in the ‘60s and ‘70s, benefit from the achievements of their parents? Or is it the case that, owing to the economic and social crisis of the socialist bloc, they were also required, if not to start from scratch, then at least to channel some of their work towards preserving the gains in socio-economic and cultural capital achieved through considerable efforts by their elders? These questions frame our working hypothesis. To answer them, we are going to investigate how women from Poland and the former GDR, struggling with the material legacy of the war and the difficulties of life under the communist regime, found ways to rise to the challenge before them, namely, “to rebuild the past so as to regain the future”. (Show less)

The increase interest of the researchers on communism past (historians, sociologists, anthropologists) about the method of oral history interacts perfectly with popular history which performs diversity of memories and transmits it’s into the wide audience. Underlying this interaction is entered in the tradition of oral history and the popular history with their subjective nature. But the women’s life stories about their communist past deserve for something more than popularity. They deserve for their own history. Here comes us to the succor unorthodox histories as well as micro-history, everyday life history, postcolonial history and/or gender studies. All of them, though in different ways are emancipating the women - witnesses of the past as the main actresses of the past as well as historical narration. Moreover, these unorthodox histories have underlying value as intersubjective character of historical narration. Meanwhile, it is important to find out the intersubjective character of historical narrative from systematic, in-depth and comparative studies of women's life stories about communism. Only under these conditions the individual experiences (the women as the witnesses of the past and main actresses of historical narration) is justified the general considerations. Just then the general considerations about communist period do not hide the stories of women’s lives as similar and/or different, as a common/different life experiences/narrations of co-witnesses from other communist countries.
The aim of this paper is the practical exercise how to write unorthodox history of women during communist period supporting they presence as witnesses of the past in historical narration. The results of our international research project entitled „Regaining the future by rebuilding the past: Women’s narratives of life during communism” is the starting point to discuss possible strategies giving voice to women as the heroins of the history during the period of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. (Show less)

The area of studies from social sciences history focused on social science history of women in Middle- East Europe after World War II is still ( using metaphor ) a construction site. Slight, quite little achievements in this matter during communism in Poland arouses rapid need to make up this deficiency. After 1989 there is more and more work covering that issue. Sociology considered as bourgeois science was victimized and in different it’s sub disciplines margin of freedom wasn’t large. During the whole period of communism but especially stalinism a censorship was imposed to sociological researches ( which had mainly qualitative character.) But this problem was more urgent in macrostructure than microstructure approach. So – researchers incarcerated in positivist’s quantitative paradigm, dominated in this time and interested in microstructure’s approaches , had much more freedom and independence than macrostructure analysts. Women, her professional work and - so called social promotion are one of the main passwords written down on the communism’s flag. But at the same time this is the subjects from the area of social microstructure, there is more “released.” Though even here had emerged typical, limited catalogue of topics and reflected this limitations- types of empirical sociological researches connected with this issues. Especially this typical topics were: changes of the families in conditions of socialist industrialisation and urbanisation, the professional position of women and their family, processes of secularization of families, models of families in the social environment of workers, types of families in the Communist’s Poland, urban’s families, contemporary families, changing roles of women in contemporary society, women- house- work etc.
This subjects - paradoxically, didn’t give the voice to the women themselves, not mentioning about the fact, that these subjects were reflected only in “industrial sociology” or “industrial way of producing data”, as used to say opponents about qualitative, positivist’s paradigm of sociology . The main task and the main research problem is to compare existing in different sources and still rising oral history of women in Poland after transformation (such researches didn’t up to 1989) with sociological literature about women before transformation. The more detailed problems will emerge contextually from the more clarified studies on this topic. (Show less)