ABSTRACT
Given the recent changes in eastern and central Europe, some have attempted to formulate them in terms of the reconstruction of civil society. Many Western feminist analyses of the relationship between women and the state have shown this independence' to be largely illusory, as it is the state which constructs, and often keeps surveillance of, the private domain, especially of the lower classes. However, in Third World societies there is often only partial penetration of the state into civil society, especially in its rural and other peripheral sections. In such cases, gender and other social relations are determined by cultural and religious customs of the national collectivity. This may also happen in private domains' of ethnic and national minorities in the state. It is not only in the private domain', however, that gender relations are differential in the state. Often the citizenship rights and duties of women from different ethnic and racial groupings are different.
