Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union ed. by Joanna Regulska and 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, heavyset woman came out on the catwalk to show off her daywear, eveningwear, and swimwear, each time wearing the same kerchief and shapeless blue dress. The message of the Wendy’s commercial was the clear advantage conferred by having freedom of choice, a freedom sadly unavailable in the Communist world. This edited volume by Joanna Regulska and Bonnie Smith shows, by contrast, that women in Europe—West and East—exercised their agency both during and after the Cold War, 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, whereas 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 an essay that examines how World War I is interpreted in post-Cold War Serbia (where a militarized narrative about the war paints the Serbian nation in gendered terms—as an abused and raped female body—which serves to distract attention from the atrocities committed by Serbs 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 healthcare workers. (I had never heard about this particular example of transnational struggle over labor rights, and I welcome 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 alike were using the nurses to pursue their own economic goals, thus inducing them 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 Great 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, as well as 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, that women were supposedly choosing how many children to bear—and nothing is mentioned about lesbians in post-1945 Eastern Europe.) Another chapter investigates women’s involvement in the field of social work in Yugoslavia before and after World War II, showing (via a comparison with the USSR) that social policy in the Communist world departed from its reputed...