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215 10. Gender Equality in Slovenia Continuity and Changes in the 1990s Milica G. Antic´ Gender Equality in Socialist Slovenia In Socialist times, people were considered to be equal. According to the Slovenian constitution, they were equal regardless of nationality, race, sex, language, and so on. Everyone was said to belong to the working class. All of the adult inhabitants of the Socialist state were workers: physical workers, scientific workers , pedagogical workers, cultural workers, political workers, and so forth. The equality of working people was the core of the constitution and considered a given. Women were equal, too—but equal as workers. What was meant by “workers’ gender equality”? Gender equality at that time meant that women, as well as men, had the same basic social rights (e.g., access to education, paid employment, equal pay for equal work).1 Working mothers had certain special rights (e.g., social benefits, paid maternity leave, child care) in employment.2 These were primarily social rights, but among them were also some important individual rights. A significant one is the right to abortion on demand that took effect in the mid-1970s, mostly thanks to Vida Tomšič, a prominent party politician.3 Women and men had equal political rights as well, in the sense that they could be active in the Communist party and other sociopolitical organizations at all levels and enjoy equal voting rights.4 Women as a social group had not been considered as having other special rights. Even their organization, the Antifascist Women’s Association (AFŽ), established during World War II, was dissolved in 1953 for the same reason.5 Furthermore, it was widely believed that women had no special needs or rights other than those they were entitled to as members of the working class. A new organization called the Women’s Joint Association had been in existence until 1962, but it operated under the careful supervision of the Communist party and was renamed the Conference for the Social Engagement of Women.6 Gender equality was therefore mainly understood as equality within a social class. Seeking equality in other fields was seen as a bourgeois deviance and a radical feminist demand that Socialism would not allow. The implementation of gender equality under Socialism had been given to different politicians, among whom were prominent women (e.g., Vida Tomšič) Antić 216 who were responsible for “working with women,” and to the committee for women’s sociopolitical activities of the Socialist Alliance of Working People. However, it was widely believed that the most important work had already been done with regard to the equalization of women and men through Socialist legislation . Therefore, the new movement was called feminism or state feminism and was widely criticized.7 As early as the late 1980s and the early 1990s, some political agents or exponents of new political ideologies competed in introducing some of the “good old values” that, in their view, had been scorned during the Socialist era.8 Individual liberty and basic human rights related to political pluralism have been reinvented. With them, basic liberal and democratic values have also been reinvented , but nationalism and religion (as two very appealing sets of values) also gained new strength.9 As one theorist argues, in the Western world the “postmodern cultural order is marked by value heterogeneity.”10 This could also be said of the changing societies after the collapse of the Communist and Socialist regimes. In Slovenia, for example , a combination of old values (some that are struggling for survival or have already disappeared, along with well-developed social rights) and new liberaldemocratic ones (mainly the first and second generations of citizens’ rights) competed with nationally and religiously “founded” values.11 To a certain degree, all of them were connected to women’s lives and gender equality, the meaning and value of which were also changing. However, first we should ask, what is gender equality—or better, how was gender equality understood at that time? Gender Equality in Post-Socialist Slovenia After the change of political regime from a one-party mode to political pluralism , there was a short period in the development of Slovenian post-Socialist society in which strong right-wing and nationalistic political parties tried not only to grasp political power but also to reinstate some traditional values, which had, in their opinion, been destroyed under the Socialist system. The old collective working class had been partly replaced by a new collective nation, and...

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