Doris took me to the IVF clinic that she once attended in the bruised Polish port of Szczecin, and left me standing there. “Welcome,” she said before driving off, “to reproductive tourism.”
That’s all it takes, a two-hour drive from Berlin, to understand how the 1989 revolutions have changed the lot of European women. “Thirty five per cent of our patients are German,” says Rafal Kurzawa, a big, curly-haired, 42-year-old gynaecologist who heads the Vitro Live clinic, pointing to the photographs of twins and thank-you notes from Cornelia and Heinz, Lucy and Wolfgang (not Doris because she gave up).
Now here’s the thing: Szczecin — charmless Szczecin, battered by war and numb-skulled socialist planners, was the starting point of the Iron Curtain that snaked southwards to Trieste. For Germans, East or West, it was another world. Yet today they go there to get pregnant by test tube because the borders are open and because German laws on fertility treatment are stricter than Polish ones.
To return to Berlin I hopped on a minibus. Dr Kurzawa’s waiting room had been full of radiant, faintly excited women grasping for the mystery of birth. The minibus, by contrast, was full of fidgeting young women, one of whom insisted on being sick behind a roadside shrine. Remarkably, they were silent for the whole trip.
“What was up with them?” I asked the driver as the last passenger left.
“Don’t want to know,” he grunted, but pointed to his stomach. Only later did I understand the gesture: the Polish women were travelling to Germany to terminate pregnancies. German abortion laws are relatively liberal; Polish law stipulates that pregnancies can be terminated only if carrying to term will threaten the mother’s life, or if she is a victim of rape. Even if these conditions are met, many doctors refuse to abort on moral grounds. Hence abortion tourism.
German women travelling to Poland to get pregnant; Polish women travelling to Germany to abort. Since 1989 the Continent has taken a strange turn for women, and not all of it positive. The women of the East have entered a new age of ambiguity, a period of deep uncertainty about their roles as mothers, as workers and as supposedly free agents in a free world that is nonethe less subject to subtle restraints.
Is it fair to pronounce women the losers of the 20-year-old revolutions? Have they lost more than they gained? Has the deceptive simplicity of the Cold War been shoved aside, only to be replaced by new moral conundrums and new forms of doctrinal government?
There have been notable success stories , in particular sportswomen — such as the ice skater Katarina Witt, an Olympic gold medal-winner for East Germany — who flourished after the two states merged. Witt went on to become a professional skating entertainer and a judge on the German equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing. Politically, though, few women have made the transition — apart from Angela Merkel, who 25 years ago was a research scientist at the East Berlin Institute for Physical Chemistry. But she had no dissident credentials; primarily she had an eye for the main chance. Her latest Cabinet includes no one from eastern Germany and only four of her 14 ministers are women.
The fact is, the 1989 revolutions were cooked up by men. In East Germany a few women — Bärbel Bohley (a painter and dissident who, after the fall of the Wall, ran Bosnian reconstruction programmes and organised the return of Balkan refugees) and Ulrike Poppe (another dissident, now head of studies at the Evangelical Academy in Berlin) — were influential in the peace movement of the early and mid 1980s; formidable fighters with stamina. In Poland, the sociologist who dreamt up the concept of a “self-limiting revolution” was Jadwiga Staniszkis, who cast a caustic eye on the often preening male leaders of Solidarity. But on the whole the changes were plotted by hairy, chain-smoking men in book-lined living rooms or draughty factory canteens. And for them, the likes of Betty Friedan, the shock troops of women’s lib, were not just offstage Westerners but incomprehensible messengers from the Planet Zog.
The Western feminists from the 1980s were campaigning for equal job opportunities and the end of male-dominated professions. But in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and East Germany, women already made up half the workforce. They were in management positions. They were senior doctors, engineers, town planners. And they were on equal pay. There was universal childcare; the whole early education system was structured around the needs of working women.
One of the most shocking steps on the Western road to female equality was a magazine cover in West Germany depicting 100 well-known faces under the headline “We have had abortions”. A sacred cow buckled at its knees. In the East, though, abortion had long been legal and a socially accepted part of women’s lives; it was not unusual for a woman to have six or seven abortions in her twenties. Partly this was due to ignorance about efficient birth control; partly to a lack of access to the Pill. But one thing was for sure: it was not a taboo waiting to be breached. Only in Romania was abortion banned — the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was worried about declining birth rates.
Christine Bergmann, an East German who later became Minister for Family and Women in the united Germany, is convinced that the communist states, for all their obvious failures, developed a modern image of women in society. “For a long time we didn’t really know what the Western feminists were trying to say: we already had equal opportunities, at least up to a point. Our glass ceiling was set by Communist Party membership, not by gender.”
Bergmann, now 70, was a department head in the East German Pharmaceutical Institute. The only way to climb the ladder was to become a Communist. So she stayed where she was. “It’s important that we don’t paint women as the losers of 1989,” she says, “because we were all winners. The old system had its advantages; it was advanced in some ways but of course it stifled discussion. The system patronised you. All those concessions to women – they were forced on the regime because of male shortages.”
A similar point is made by Eva Kanturkova, one of the few Czech women dissidents (only 18 per cent of the Charter 77 human rights manifesto signatories were women). The communist state bent to the needs of women not out of a kind of socialist feminism but because it understood that women were a vital labour resource; letting them stay at home was a frivolous act. “Feminism was eradicated from our society,” says Kanturkova, “and by its insensitive transformation became a new way of enslaving women through forced employment.”
Communism gave women certain advantages but its motives were wrong — and the general repression of society also affected women; there were plenty of women in jail on dubious charges. Women rose in society but at a price.
The tricky bit of the eastern narrative starts when Communism dies. In a short time, women in Central and Eastern Europe found themselves beached by history. East Germans were merged into a supremely capitalist all-German state in which women were paid, on average, 23 per cent less then men. Within months of the fall of the Wall, 21 per cent of women were unemployed, there was a 25 per cent drop in marriages, 12 per cent fewer children were born. That was followed by a massive migration of East German women westwards in search of work. The result: ageing men-only rural communities, soaring divorce rates and stranded children.
The westward migration of women is not just an East German phenomenon. There is even a Polish TV soap opera called Londoners, which chronicles the fractured lives of women who have moved to Britain to work as nurses and waitresses, leaving behind husbands and children. In Berlin, working mothers frustrated by an educational system that closes schools at lunchtime try to square the circle by employing, often illegally, women from Ukraine who have abandoned their families. No wonder happiness indices suggest that women are becoming steadily more miserable actors in the industrialised world.
Could it be that, crudely speaking, capitalism is bad for women? “It certainly hurts those of us in the sandwich generations,” says Lena, a women’s rights lawyer in Poznan, Poland. “If you are 40, the chances are you are bringing up small children — paying kindergarten fees — and looking after ageing parents whose pensions are now hopelessly inadequate. OK, it was always like this, under the communists and today. The difference is that the State helped to ease this family crisis a bit. Schools were more flexible and did not cost anything; pensions were adequate.” She draws on her second cigarette in a ten-minute chat. “Communism was going nowhere but it gave a kind of order to women’s lives, and confidence. What do we have now? We have to be good workers, good mothers, good daughters, good lovers — we are bombarded by these demands and it is driving us crazy.”
Talking to women across Central Europe, I heard similar complaints. There is a longing not for the return of communism but for order, a patterned existence that allows women to breathe again.
Women have been buried, one Czech woman told me, under the rubble of communism and are scrambling like trapped coalminers for an air pocket. That is why in Poland, alongside the women furious with the clericalisation of society, you will find many women who accept the Catholic Church as a positive social force. Seen by some women as intrusive, the Church is viewed by others as the only solid counterweight to the corruption of their children. A recent film, Galerianki, showed how teenage girls have taken to approaching strangers in the ubiquitous shopping malls and offering oral sex in return for a new mobile phone. “They say to themselves that there’s nothing wrong with accepting presents and showing gratitude,” says the film-maker Katarzyna Roslawiec. “They don’t see it as prostitution.”
Mothers, then, are searching for some form of moral authority in society to shield their daughters.
None of this really suggests that East European women have lost out since 1989 — merely that the world has become less predictable, more competitive, more dangerous, more physically tiring but also more interesting and rewarding.
The economist Thomas Kralinski argues that East German men, rather than women, will be the long-term losers of the transfer from communism to capitalism. “In 15 years’ time young women will make up two thirds of pupils sitting their school-leaving exam,” he says. Boys are underperforming in schools and are more likely to drop out early. The combination of women who are far better educated than men and a chronic preponderance of men in East German communities will lead eventually, Kralinski says, to a shift in the balance of power between the sexes. Women who have moved west in search of more money and enhanced status will head back east — and will be in a position to demand better schools, more family-friendly communities and the feminisation of politics. Who knows? The East could become Amazonia, with the men becoming the new servant class.
Now that would be a revolution.
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