Theoretical Issues of Gender in the Transition from Socialist Regimes

Abstract

This article applies a gender perspective to a consideration of the recent economic and political reforms in Eastern and Central Europe. After an introduction and a brief overview of recent empirical studies of the impact of women's economic, political, and social status, the paper explores the difficulties inherent in attempts to create an East-West dialogue on women's interests. The article proposes that these difficulties can be articulated by 1) identifying whether a political regime uses an essentialist (men and women have fundamentally different biological natures) or a social constructionist (most observed differences between men and women are socially created) view to define the nature of women; 2) identifying how these distinct views of gender relations are articulated in the philosophical underpinnings of the two political regimes (the liberal Western system that strictly separates the public and private spheres while assigning different activities for men and women and the socialistic/communistic system that subordinates social reproduction to the sphere of production); and 3) comparing how these views have been articulated in social and institutional arrangements of gender relations in the two regimes. The article then claims that an understanding of the interaction between gender relations, political theory, and social practices in both the West and the East is essential for understanding the problems involved in discussions of the political-economic transition and how it affects men and women.

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