Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union ed. by Joanna Regulska, Bonnie G. Smith (review)

The stereotypical image of East European women during the Cold War was captured in a notorious 1980s Wendy’s commercial depicting a mock Communist-run fashion show. Under the command of an East European–accented announcer, a plain, heavy-set woman came out on the catwalk to show off her daywear, eveningwear, and swim-wear, each time wearing the same kerchief and shapeless blue dress. The Wendy’s commercial implied that freedom of choice was an advantage sadly unavailable in the Eastern bloc. Regulska and Smith’s edited volume shows, by contrast, that women in Europe—West and East—during and after the Cold War exercised their own agency, if under sometimes radically constrained choices.

The topic of the book—gender in Eastern and Western Europe during and after the Cold War—is vast. This vastness is simultaneously an advantage and a disadvantage. Chapters cover aspects of the social, economic, and political history of the region and its two geopolitical subdivisions, examining commonalties and differences in the gender order. Some chapters cover both Eastern and Western Europe, providing a cross-bloc comparative analysis, while others are single-country case studies. The chapters are ably researched and are likely to inspire scholars to continue and extend (into other country cases) the work presented here.

Yet the book lacks a clear organizing principle tying the chapters together in anything more than a loose sense. A chapter on the paradigms of masculinity in post–Cold War Lithuania (and the particular challenges faced by gay men and working-class men) thus resides next to one that examines how World War I is interpreted in post–Cold War Serbia (there, a militarized narrative about the war painted the Serbian nation in gendered terms—as an abused/raped female body—which served to distract attention from the Serbian atrocities committed in the mid-1990s). That chapter neighbors a study of the plight of highly educated South Korean nurses who were brought to West Germany during the Cold War and forced into positions as hospital cleaners, later leading to a transnational mobilization (from Germany to Korea) for the rights of health-care workers. (I had never heard about this particular example of transnational struggle over labor rights and welcomed the author’s insights into the way the nurses became aware of the violation of their own rights as women in the context of patriarchy, as well as of the ways the South Korean and West German governments used the nurses to pursue their own economic goals, leading the women to protest and to develop a rather cosmopolitan identity.)

The book also includes case study chapters on Cold War civil society in West Germany (of the “provocative” public type as well as the less formal kind, such as women’s centers and the alternative press), on the diverse strategies of women’s activism in post–Cold War Poland, and on the way motherhood was portrayed in psychoanalytic radio shows in Britain after World War II. A second chapter on motherhood—focusing on France—examines how the reassertion of traditional women’s roles following World War II coexisted with a countercurrent of women’s sexual agency (including women’s pursuit of lesbian relationships and the use of illegal contraception and abortion). Here, a somewhat shallow comparison to the USSR falls flat, as Soviet women’s high abortion rates are cited as evidence of women’s agency—that is, women were choosing how many children to bear—and nothing is mentioned of lesbians in post-War Eastern Europe. Another chapter investigates women’s involvement in the field of social work in Yugoslavia before and after World War II and shows (via a comparison with the USSR) that social policy in the Eastern bloc departed from its reputed homogeneity.

Two chapters are more explicitly comparative, looking at ideologies of consumerism and paid work across Eastern and Western Europe. The...