“Women have always had harder lives”

This chapter seeks to understand the reasons behind the current paradoxical situation of gender issues in the Czech Republic by examining the heritage not only of state socialism but also of the previous period of the first Czechoslovak Republic. It argues that subtle changes in gender norms of femininity and masculinity can be detected in oral recollections. The chapter focuses on the norms guiding the femininity of the women interviewed. These norms emerged in the context of specific gender roles the women held in their lives – first as daughters; then as wives, daughters-in-law, and mothers; and finally as grandmothers recollecting their lives. The older women's essentialist view of gender relations might be attributed to the absence of a relevant feminist discourse during the last decades of the communist era and, probably, in the contemporary period as well.