Alfred G. Meyer

Feminism, Socialism, and Nationalism in Eastern Europe

The conference for which the contributions to this volume were written dealt with the relationship between Marxism and feminism in the part of Europe that since the end of World War II has come under communist rule. The many questions these contributions raise can be grouped under two main headings: first, what have the concerns of women been in Eastern Europe? Has there been a feminist movement, and what was its relationship to various other political movements—socialism, liberalism, and nationalism? Second, what have approximately forty years of East European socialism done for women? The space the conference gave to the second of these questions was disproportionately larger than that devoted to the nature of East European feminist movements; indeed, one of the most important topics belonging to the first topic was left out altogether, either because it was considered too complex to be fitted in or because the participants' acquaintance with it was taken for granted. This is the relationship between feminism and Marxism. In this chapter I examine this relationship, placing the problem into the East European context as much as possible. In doing this, I dwell on the differences between East European feminism and its counterparts farther west; in many cases my remarks take the form of raising questions for which as yet we do not have answers.

Marxism and Feminism: Theoretical Considerations

Women in the Western world who, for whatever reasons, became conscious of being oppressed have always been drawn to radical movements. That is only natural, because feminist consciousness itself is a protest against the prevailing order. The more patriarchal the relations in any society, the more revolutionary any feminist sentiment will seem. Consequently, feminists tend to identify with movements on the left, and in Europe they participated actively in every one of the many revolutions that have occurred since 1789. From early on they also participated in the socialist movement as journalists, agitators, and organizers of women workers. Most of the radical women from America and Western Europe with whose lives I am acquainted remained self-conscious feminists after joining male-dominated revolutionary or reform movements.

The lives of radical women are now being studied extensively, but we still do not know enough about the process by which they were radicalized. My impression is that a large number of feminists in radical movements came from upper classes and that many of them were endowed with outstanding intellectual and organizational talents. To be talented and female and a member of a privileged class can be very alienating because the talents are given no proper outlet, and thus the privileges easily appear empty or phony. If such gifted young ladies also receive a religious upbringing, which they then take seriously, Christian morality easily turns into a strong stimulus for social criticism. Almost every American or West European radical feminist of the nineteenth century with whose life I have become acquainted came into radical politics through the path of an earnest commitment to religion. This is true also of many Russian feminists, but whether it applies in Eastern Europe is still an unanswered question.

Radical movements in their turn have tended to be sympathetic to the cause of women and often have made women's emancipation part of their own programs. That is true of the most radical spokesmen of the French Revolution, such as Condorcet and von Hippel; it applies to such men as Godwin and John Stuart Mill and to some of the Utopian Socialists, particularly Fourier, whose strong endorsement of women's liberation Engels and Marx quoted with approval. In the case of Marxism, the relationship to the cause of women's emancipation is quite complex, however, and deserves to be explored in some detail.

As a protest movement, Marxism has been concerned with the alienation of labor, a process Marx and Engels traced back to the beginnings of human civilization but that they saw as being carried to extremes under capitalism. Marx and Engels regarded productive labor as the expression of the human essence. We are distinct from animals by being endowed with intelligence and purposiveness and, therefore, have the capability to recreate the world in our image by "appropriating" it. The human species does this by means of productive labor. But with the institution of private property in the means of production, labor is alienated because property enables its owners to exploit the labor of others by appropriating the products of their labor for the benefits of the privileged class. From a mode of self-actualization, productive labor thus turns into mere drudgery, an imposed and hateful activity. Capitalism, according to Marx, intensifies this alienation because it has converted all human relations into market relations and has thus transformed all human qualities and potentials, including talents, skills, and labor power, into commodities. We can regain our humanness only by abolishing this entire system and the institution of private property on which it is based.

For Marx and Engels the history of humanity is the story of how our species has struggled to secure the material means for survival and comfort. It is a tale of...