Blaming Feminists Is Not Understanding History: A Critical Rejoinder to Ghodsee’s Take on Feminism, Neoliberalism and Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Kristen Ghodsee has got a point. Feminism, as it developed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and later in the period of EU accession, was engaged in a complex “dance” with emergent capitalism in the region. Not all feminists were involved—many were skeptical from the start, but the dance continued nonetheless, with profound consequences for women in the region. Nancy Fraser’s (2009) argument makes a lot of sense in Eastern Europe not just because mainstream feminism enabled neoliberalism, or allowed itself to be seduced by its charms, but because neoliberalism itself has been gendered in ways few people acknowledged. We did not dismantle the welfare state—we destroyed it at an astonishing pace. The process was a gendered one because transition to market economy involved, among other things, dismantling social provisions in the realm of care. The burden of childrearing, elderly care, and care-work required by the sick and people with disabilities—all of these were abandoned by the state and became invisible labor, performed, of course, mostly by women. The shift was masked with traditionalist ideas about women as natural caregivers but few people believed that. The burden was just too great to be naturalized by sugary references to “women’s special talent” (or “genius,” Pope John Paul II called it).