ABSTRACT
Because life goes on, and because the writers here—Fuszara, Maleck-Lewy, Gaber, Lang, and Petö—show grace under pressure as they play the extraordinary hand history has recently dealt them, one perhaps obvious point seems understated in these texts: Since 1989, the pace and scale of change in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union are, taken together, simply unprecedented. And unlooked for. No one now immersed in the drama inadequately summed up in the inert term post-Communism expected changes this fundamental in their lifetimes. On the contrary, life was (for some grievously, for some more happily) static, insulated, predictable. When Western feminists speak of what is happening to women in the former Communist countries, the women in question can easily feel belittled—or grossly misunderstood—by a formulation so narrow, dry, and neat. If it weren’t for the common Eastern allergies to self-pity and rhetorical flights, surely women in the East would speak far more extravagantly than they do of the failure of Western imagination. The incalculability of such enormous changes can sometimes make “the women question” seem a relic of an innocent past, when categories of identity seemed relatively permanent and power struggles had a local habitation and a name.
