The Women’s Movement in State-Socialist Czechoslovakia

Abstract

As we noted in Chapter 5, the Czechoslovak Communist Party had an active women’s movement before the state-socialist transformation, unlike the Soviet Union, where the communist women’s movement became prominent only after the October revolution. However, lacking a sufficiently strong and autonomous power-base, the Czech movement did not long survive the transformation, and the objective situation that emerged was not unlike that in the USSR — in 1952, the women’s section was abolished. The establishment of socialism legitimised the abolition of separate women’s organisations, and responsibilities for women’s issues were assigned to trades unions in the case of employed women, and to subcommittees of ‘national committees’ (similar to soviets) in that of fulltime housewives.