ABSTRACT
What will the new Europe mean for women? Will the same processes that have exploded national and ideological boundaries and remapped the geographical terrain of politics also break down the patriarchal divisions bound up with the old European order in both West and East? Judged by the historic moment of women’s involvement in the revolutions of ‘1989’, the prospects already look bleak. ‘Where have all the women gone’? (Einhorn, 1991:16). This summary of failed hopes reflects upon developments which everywhere in East and Central Europe seem to have turned the clock back on the promise of women’s full participation in the democratic process. Not only have the costs of economic transition fallen disproportionately on women, in terms both of higher unemployment rates and of the contraction of public child-care provisions (Corrin, 1992). What little public space was guaranteed to them under the old regimes, i.e. in the formal representations on decision-making bodies, has all but collapsed: ‘Women are being “liberated” into the home’ (The Guardian, 1 May 1992). At the frontiers of ‘1992’, the most pessimistic projections conveyed similar apprehensions: in a Europe unified by the imperatives of a single, deregulated market the majority of working women would be relegated to a new economic underclass of poorly paid, ill-protected and under-skilled workers. Moreover, lack of organisational resources and lobbying power at the political level would but replicate the conditions which define their status as second-class citizens in most European nation-states (Labour Research, October 1989:19-20; Local Government Information Unit, Briefing, September 1989:2-3).
