From Publishers Weekly

The commonly held view that women in Communist Eastern Europe uniformly suffered under the double or triple burden of paid work, household duties, and child care gets a more nuanced examination in this collection. Many essays are based on interviews with women who lived through those years and reveal their lives in all their complexity. For example, Basia Nowak details how members of the Polish League of Women felt supported in their traditional roles as mothers and wives as well as benefiting from revolutionary ideas of women's equality. Ana Hoffman's interviews with rural women in Serbian Yugoslavia reveals how they gained self-esteem and a measure of freedom from patriarchal control by participating in state-supported folk song festivals. Raluca Maria Popa describes the crucial role women activists in Hungary and Romania played in creating the U.N.'s International Women's Year in 1975. Co-editor Penn's interviews with two Polish women activists from two generations highlight how feminism developed within varying political and personal contexts. In Bulgaria, Ulf Brunnbauer analyzes how women actually functioned within the contradictions of Communist rhetoric of equality and preindustrial gender expectations just a generation away. A few articles suffer from academic language, but overall the collection is rewarding for its insights and exposure of women's lived experiences.
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Review

“The commonly held view that women in Communist Eastern Europe uniformly suffered under the double or triple burden of paid work, household duties, and child care gets a more nuanced examination in this collection. Many essays are based on interviews with women who lived through those years and reveal their lives in all their complexity…overall the collection is rewarding for its insights and exposure of women’s lived experiences.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“This book enriches our understanding of the legacies of state socialism and the ways in which gender in these societies even today continues to be shaped by the living practices of the past. This is a robust and broad-ranging set of studies that remind us not only of the failures of socialism but also alert us to the ways in which women’s lives were changed and indeed empowered because of the opportunities and challenges of that era.”--Jean C. Robinson, Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

“This volume offers a comprehensive and unique portrait of women living under socialism, capturing in a distinctive way the multiplicity of tensions in everyday life that provided new opportunities and resources to women (and for that matter, to men also), in an omnipresent state that forced upon them certain ideologies and limitations. This volume provides an extraordinary opportunity to hear women’s voices and learn through their lives about the ambiguities of socialism.”--Joanna Regulska, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Geography, Rutgers University