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Battling for Peace
The Transformation of the Womenâs Movement in Cold War Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe
Melissa Feinberg
During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in the fight against Nazi Germany. But even before the war was over, tension began to grow between the Soviet Union and its capitalist comrades in arms. The Soviets and the Americans, it turned out, had very different ideas about how to shape the peace that would follow Germanyâs surrender. In a remarkably short period of time, these former allies began to see each other as enemies. Each imagined that the other wanted to destroy it and its preferred way of life, creating either a completely Communist or capitalist world. In a speech given in the United States less than a year after the end of the war, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called Communism a âperil to Christian civilizationâ and declared that the Soviet Union had erected an âiron curtainâ that cut western Europe off from the Soviet-dominated eastern half of the continent. Josef Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, responded in kind, comparing Churchill and his American allies to Hitler and implying that they were simply imperialists who wanted to colonize Europe for their own gain.1 Even though the conflict between the two sides did not devolve into actual battle, the animosity between them was so great that their struggle was likened to a war: the Cold War.
In postwar Europe, the Cold War became an inescapable part of life. After World War II ended in 1945, many European nations hoped to chart a course between the two superpowers, maintaining political and economic ties with both the United States and the Soviet Union. However, the possibility of neutrality quickly disappeared. By the end of 1948, the Iron Curtain imagined by Winston Churchill in 1946 had become a reality. The Soviet Union, feeling threatened by the West, decided to consolidate its influence over the countries of eastern Europe. With Soviet assistance, local east European Communist Parties created their own authoritarian socialist regimes that were allied with the USSR.2 Meanwhile in western Europe, the United States created its own network of economic and military alliances, cemented together with the economic assistance of the Marshall Plan and the foreign policy of the Truman Doctrine, which declared that the United States would fight Communism all over the globe. Largely on the basis of their geographical location, most European governments found themselves compelled to join one of these two competing blocs, either Communist or capitalist. Alongside their governments, private organizations and ordinary people were forced to take one side in the conflict between the superpowers and show that they approved of their countryâs new allegiance. Those who failed to publicly support âtheirâ side faced serious political, legal, and economic consequences, whether they lived in the capitalist West or in the Communist East.
As the conflict between the US and the USSR intensified, governments in both the capitalist and Communist camps began to insist that anyone who espoused their enemyâs ideology was also their enemy. These enemies could be lurking anywhere: in the house next door, in the workplace, even within the government itself. During the first years of the Cold War, European and American governments alike urged their citizens to be constantly on the lookout for these potential traitors. In the heightened atmosphere of suspicion that reigned during the decade from 1945 to 1955, many people became convinced that there were indeed spies in their midst, actively working to sabotage their country for the other side. This rather hysterical fear of unseen enemies and saboteurs was present on both sides of the Iron Curtain, although it was more developed in the East, where newly established Communist governments spent the first years of their rule frantically trying to classify their subjects as either reliable or dangerous. Led by the conviction that âWestern warmongering imperialistsâ were bent on destroying socialism and engulfing Europe in a nuclear war, eastern Europeâs Communist cadres were committed to purging unreliable elements in their societies by any means necessary.
Women and womenâs organizations were also affected by the paranoid political atmosphere of the early Cold War. Like all other groups, womenâs organizations had to take sides and align themselves with one of the competing ideological camps. In eastern Europe, local womenâs movements were gradually forced to accept Cold War realities and accommodate themselves to Communist rule. This was often a violent process, as those who refused to adopt the Communist party line were forcibly removed from their places in public life. This chapter shows how this occurred within the country of Czechoslovakia. In this nation, conflicts over whether or not to support Communism split the once proudly non-partisan Czech womenâs movement, creating bitter enmities. After the Communist faction had taken over, it then used its victory to deal with those women it now considered its enemies.
The Cold War created conflicts between women not only within individual countries, but also internationally. This chapter illustrates this kind of conflict by looking at the so-called battle for peace. In Czechoslovakia, as in all of eastern Europe, the victorious Communists used the idea of peace to mobilize women as Cold War fighters. Taking part in the battle for peace was a requirement for anyone who didnât want to be branded as an enemy of socialism. The association of women with peace politics was certainly not new to the era of the Cold War. When they decided to build a peace movement dominated by women, European Communists were building on a long tradition of womenâs peace campaigns. In this case, however, they used that tradition for partisan purposes. The leaders of the Communist peace movement declared that only the Soviet Union could guarantee peace and prosperity in Europe. Their politicized stance caused the United States to condemn the peace campaign and castigate American women who wanted to take part in an international womenâs peace movement, calling them traitors and Communist fellow travelers. In the political climate of the Cold War, cooperation along gender lines, even in the name of peace, was largely jettisoned in favor of ideological loyalties.
Friends and Enemies in the Czech Womenâs Movement
Events in Czechoslovakia, a small country located in the very center of the European continent, provide us with an excellent example of how the fears and enmities of the Cold War could affect local politics. Just after the end of World War II, Czechs and Slovaks largely agreed on what they wanted for their country: they hoped to achieve a mix of what each side in the Cold War represented. They wanted the right to personal freedom and to choose their leaders in free elections. But they also wanted their government to guarantee a basic standard of living for all of its citizens. In 1945, all four of the major Czech political parties, the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KomunistickĂĄ Strana ÄeskoslovenskĂĄ or KSÄ), the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, the National Socialist Party â a long-standing Czech party in no way related to the German Nazi party â and the Christian-oriented Peopleâs Party, claimed to support some combination of socialism and democratic government.3
Despite the fact that they supposedly had the same goals, these four political parties soon became suspicious of each other, largely over their links, real or imagined, to one of the two superpowers and their ideology. The Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party had close personal and ideological ties to the Soviet Union. This led them to distrust the National Socialists and the Peopleâs Party, which were more oriented toward the West. Further complicating this picture, the Communists feared that even their Social Democratic allies werenât loyal enough to the Soviet Union, and the Peopleâs Party worried that the National Socialists werenât sufficiently capitalist to be fully trusted. Soon these suspicions had grown to the point that each party doubted the motives of all those who didnât carry its own membership cards. By the time of the first postwar elections in May 1946, the partisan rancor had reached a fever pitch. During the election campaign, each party furiously attacked all the others. The KSÄ called the National Socialists reactionaries and claimed that they harbored former Nazi collaborators. The National Socialists and the Peopleâs Party warned voters about the dangers of the âtotalitarianâ Communists, who would bring social justice only by taking away individual freedom. The National Socialists derided the Social Democrats for merely being Communists in poor disguise, and the Social Democrats responded by calling the National Socialists âa party without action, without a program, and without character.â4 Finally, the Peopleâs Party also attacked the National Socialists, even though this party was its most likely ally, and mocked them for claiming to be socialist while still supporting private property rights.
Part of this bitter contest between the parties was a battle to win womenâs allegiance. As the parties openly admitted in their appeals to female voters, women were a majority of the electorate and the party that could command their ballots would be the victor.5 Every Czech party in 1946 angled for feminine support by claiming that it was the true champion of womenâs rights. It was, however, the Communists who were most successful in claiming women as new members, and this undoubtedly contributed to their spectacular performance in the 1946 elections, when they received more votes than any other party and won the prime ministerâs chair for their leader, Klement Gottwald.6 For the next few years, the Communists continued to attract droves of new adherents. After a membership drive in May 1947, the KSÄ was able to claim over 445,000 female members, a number that far surpassed the number of women who joined their closest competition, the National Socialists.7
This intense partisan competition for womenâs allegiance caused enormous rifts in the Czech womenâs movement. Before 1945, one of the remarkable things about Czech feminists was that they were often able to work beyond party lines. Women from the various socialist parties were able to make common cause with women from right-leaning parties in the name of womenâs rights.8 After 1945, this was rarely the case. One woman, Milada HorĂĄkovĂĄ, a lawyer who had been prominent in Czech feminist organizations since the mid-1920s, tried to create a new non-partisan feminist organization to work for the common interests of Czechoslovak women. It was called the Council of Czechoslovak Women (CCW). While the CCW did manage to bring some women together, it was not able to recreate the atmosphere of the prewar womenâs movement. Its meetings were soon made almost impossible by partisan infighting.9
Communist women leaders found it hard to accept the CCW because Milada HorĂĄkovĂĄ, who became its president, was a member of the Czechoslovak National Assembly for the National Socialist party and therefore of dubious ideological character. At a meeting of the Communist Partyâs Central Womenâs Commission in 1946, the KSÄâs leading women admitted that an organization like the CCW might be good for Czechoslovak women, but they could not countenance the idea of working seriously with HorĂĄkovĂĄ. Womenâs Commission members were more concerned with defeating those they believed were their political enemies than with building a multiparty coalition to defend womenâs interests. Because they suspected that HorĂĄkovĂĄ was led by a partisan desire to hurt the Communists, they did their best to hinder her and the CCW, even though they shared many of the same goals, including giving women greater access to the workforce, equal pay for equal work, and new marriage laws. Blinded by partisan warfare, they saw only enemies around them, and declared that âThe reaction is concentrating, looking for ways to strengthen the reactionary front and disempower usâ by blaming the Communist-led government for Czechoslovakiaâs economic problems. They put all their energy into fighting this political opposition, putting off other work until they had dispensed with their competition.10
The Communists were not the only ones to take this kind of attitude. The National Socialists, the party identified with the largest number of Czech feminists before 1945, also began to emphasize partisan loyalty over all else. The leader of the National Socialist womenâs section, FraĹa ZemĂnovĂĄ, was fiercely anti-Communist. She refused to allow her underlings to cooperate with Communist womenâs groups and instead directed them to battle the Communists at every opportunity. As one example, she sternly directed local National Socialist womenâs organizations not to participate in celebrations in honor of International Womenâs Day because it was a Marxist holiday. When one of her district-level leaders allowed National Socialist women in several towns to be âluredâ to Womenâs Day events in March 1947, ZemĂnovĂĄ angrily wrote to discipline her and make sure it never happened again. According to ZemĂnovĂĄ, the Communist women were âdouble crossersâ who were only interested in using events like Womenâs Day for their own partisan agitation.11 Throughout 1947, she furiously organized her troops for political war, writing in a letter to one of her subordinates that the âbiggest battle for democracy and the independence of the state lies in front of us.â12 As she told the head of the National Socialist womenâs group in the town of HornĂ LitvĂnov, the Czech nation did not take kindly to terror and would not easily submit to Communist domination. It was in resistance to such terror that they had âbroken up Austria, fought Hitler to the death, and believe me, we will also disperse this red cloud over our borders.â13
Throughout 1947 and into 1948, as the Cold War intensified and the conflict between the supporters of the United States and the Soviet Union became more heated across Europe, political animosities infected all areas of the Czech womenâs movement. Partisan infighting overturned old friendships and party loyalty came to mean more than feminist convictions. CCW president Milada HorĂĄkovĂĄ, for example, was hurt that some women who had worked with her quite amicably before the war now saw her as an enemy. One of her former feminist colleagues, the judge Zdenka PatschovĂĄ, initially tried to get HorĂĄkovĂĄ to join the Communists and threatened her when she refused, saying, âIf we win, we must arrest you, and if you are brought into my court, I must sentence you ...
