ABSTRACT
The Czech transition from socialism to capitalism provides an opportunity to examine key contradictions that exist between socialism and a capitalist market system and their corresponding ideologies. The aim of this chapter is to show how individual women attempt to reconcile these contradictions by looking at how they experience the transition to a market system. In the summer of 1995, I had the opportunity to conduct in-depth interviews in Prague with five prominent Czech women activists, intellectuals, and founders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). All of these women currently live in Prague, range in age from 20 to 55, and are actively involved in civic work in the non-governmental sector.1 The interviewees’ professions include sociology, political science, law, and public administration. Their civic initiatives in the last five years encompass the founding and directing of civic organizations which address civic education, Roma (Gypsy) rights, AIDS prevention for prostitutes, and include a women’s center, and a magazine for lesbian and bisexual women and a small legal information centre.2 Intellectuals and professionals, these women make up part of a yet small Czech middle-class, and in this sense, they belong to a privileged elite. While they by no means represent the experiences, positions or sentiments of all Czech women, these women offer particularly dynamic interpretations of the post-communist transition precisely because of their civic and political activism, the analysis they bring to the transition, and their access to the new market.
