Unraveling a Tradition, or Spinning a Myth? Gender Critique in Czech Society and Culture

Abstract

The hostility that met feminist ideas and gender equality issues in east central Europe (ECE) after the demise of the Communist regimes was accompanied by a notion that feminism wasimportedto these societies after 1989. In the Czech Republic, the record of the publishing output by feminist scholars in the 1990s, however, speaks against this myth. Drawing on existing scholarship and the author's own research on cultural discourses of gender and on socialist state science policies and censorship, this article argues that there has been a long tradition of gender critique that was present in a variety of discourses even during late state socialism. It proposes that the feminist impulse began in the 19th century and continued in some form throughout the 20th century. It then examines how the myth of the feminist import came to exist and what were the possible sources of the hostility toward feminism in the 1990s.