Past and Present 2013 Donert 180 202

Women’s Rights in Cold War Europe:Disentangling Feminist Histories

Celia Donert

I

In 1945 the UN Charter became the first international declaration to refer to

the equal rights of women as well as men in support of fundamental human

rights and peace, and against the ‘scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime

has brought untold sorrow to mankind’.1 This declaration was undoubtedly a

landmark in the internationalization of women’s rights.2 Human rights,

rather than the principle of nationality that had been intended to secure

the post-1919 peace, were viewed after 1945 as ‘critical for tackling the

forms of chauvinism that nurtured belligerence’.3 Yet the UN Charter was

adopted just as the western-led feminist international networks that had

promoted women’s rights since the mid-nineteenth century—in connec-

tion with campaigns for universal suffrage, social reform, temperance, and

peace—had been thrown into disarray by the massive social and political

transformation of Europe after the Second World War.4 A still greater

irony, as Karen Offen points out in her magisterial study of European fem-

inisms from 1700 to 1950, was that during the 1950s and 1960s, as western

1 Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945: Preamble.2 Marilyn Lake, ‘From Self-Determination (via Protection) to Equality (via Non-

Discrimination): Defining Women’s Rights at the League of Nations and the United

Nations’, in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (eds), Women’s Rights

and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2001); see also

Arvonne S. Fraser, ‘Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s

Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 21:4 (1999), 853–906.3 Glenda Sluga, ‘National Sovereignty and Female Equality. Gender, Peacemaking, and the

New World Orders of 1919 and 1945’, in Jennifer A. Davy, Karen Hagemann, and Ute

Katzel (eds), Frieden–Gewalt–Geschlecht: Friedens- und Konfliktforschung als Geschlech-

terforschung (Essen, 2005), 166–83. More broadly see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.),

Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011).4 Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings. The First International Women’s Movement

(Oxford, 2000); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women. The Making of an International

Women’s Movement (Princeton, 1997).

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organized feminism appeared to have fallen silent, the banner of international

women’s rights was taken up by the communist regimes in the Soviet Union

and central and eastern Europe ‘in language wholly reminiscent of the great

eruptions of French feminist protest since the French Revolution’.5

Communist support for women’s rights was emphatically not ‘feminist’, re-

flecting the Bolshevik—and Marxist—understanding of ‘feminism’ as a

bourgeois ideology promoted by upper-class women seeking to advance

their own interests at the expense of class solidarity.6 Nonetheless, the inclu-

sion of non-discrimination clauses on the basis of gender, as well as nation-

ality and race, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the result of

lobbying from the communist states in alliance with the women’s

movement.7

The history of East European engagement with women’s rights in interna-

tional politics after World War II remains largely unexplored, however, par-

ticularly the period from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. A closer investigation

of the archives of East European Communist parties and women’s organiza-

tions reveals that this period, often characterized in feminist historiography

as an era of female political apathy ‘between the waves’ of first- and

second-generation feminism, was actually rich in transnational exchanges

between women activists who made crucial contributions to the form and

content of international women’s rights during the UN Decade for Women

launched in 1975. This article traces those transnational circulations, focusing

on three key periods: the deeply ambivalent engagement of Communist

women functionaries with international women’s rights in the late 1940s;

the way in which East European women’s organizations framed sex equality

in the language of world peace during the 1950s; and finally, the turn towards

internationalizing a ‘socialist’ vision of women’s rights through the United

Nations in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The article focuses on the internationalization of women’s rights at the

national, regional (Soviet) and international levels (UN / WIDF), focusing

on the often-strained relationships between the mass women’s organizations

of the East European people’s democracies, national Communist parties,

5 Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA, 2000),

387.6 Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary

Russia (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 2; Marilyn Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Socialist Construc-

tion and International Career of the Concept ‘‘Bourgeois Feminism’’ ’, American His-

torical Review, 112: 1 (February 2007), 131–58.7 Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting, and

Intent (Pittsburgh, PA, 2000).

Women’s Rights in Cold War Europe 179



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the Women’s International Democratic Federation (a Soviet-sponsored

international non-governmental organization founded in Paris in 1945),

and the various agencies of the United Nations. The emphasis is less on the

content or implementation of women’s rights than their importance for East

European propaganda and diplomacy. Images and representations of

womanhood were undoubtedly as rich and malleable a source as children

were for Soviet cultural diplomacy, as Catriona Kelly has recently shown.8

However, the concern here is more with the ideological debates and institu-

tional complexities faced by Communist women functionaries who were

assigned the task of promoting a ‘socialist’ vision of women’s equality—

sometimes against their will—by the mostly male leadership of the national

Communist parties.

The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) was a global

organization claiming millions of members in almost every country of the

world, which enjoyed consultative and later advisory status at the UN

(although as will be explained in greater detail later, this status was withdrawn

between 1954 and 1967 for reasons also related to Cold War geopolitics).

Established to combat fascism and increase Communist party membership

by promoting new forms of political activism and providing material assist-

ance to national women’s organizations, the WIDF was one of many organ-

izations within the socialist bloc attempting to build a spirit of socialist

internationalism around the world. The WIDF cultivated a popular and par-

ticipatory self-image that was undoubtedly not shared by all its members. In

many cases, this type of transnational organizing was perceived as yet another

party imposition. However, the WIDF is a crucial element in the history of

socialist internationalism, the processes and legacies of which historians are

only beginning to reveal.9 As Francisca de Haan has written, historians have

tended to dismiss the WIDF as a Soviet-backed front organization, and its

members as communists who thus—by definition—could not be feminists.10

8 Catriona Kelly, ‘Defending Children’s Rights, ‘‘In Defence of Peace’’: Children and Soviet

Cultural Diplomacy’, Kritika, 9:4 (Autumn 2000), 711–46.9 See e.g., Masha Kirasirova, ‘ ‘‘Sons of Muslisms’’ in Moscow: Soviet Central Asia Med-

iators to the Foreign East, 1955–1962’, Ab Imperio, 4 (2011), 106–32; Eric and Jessica

Allina-Pisano, ‘ ‘‘Friendship of Peoples’’ after the Fall: Violence and Pan-African Com-

munity in Post-Soviet Moscow’, in Maxim Matusevich, Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa:

300 Years of Encounters (Trenton, N.J., 2006).10 On the disappearance of the WIDF from histories of women’s transnational organizing

see Francisca de Haan, ‘Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of

Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Demo-

cratic Federation (WIDF)’, Women’s History Review, 19:4 (2010) 547–73.

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Both these judgments, De Haan argues, can be traced back to the Cold War

scares of the McCarthy era, when the House Un-American Activities

Committee shut down the WIDF-affiliated Congress of American Women

on the grounds that it was a tool of the Soviet peace offensive. Yet as recent

studies based on Soviet archives and the personal papers of members show:

The World Congresses of Women and the WIDF congresses that

followed them provided the opportunity for women from a wide

variety of backgrounds and from around the globe, irrespective of

the supposed divide imposed by the iron curtain, to gather together

to exchange ideas and to discuss issues of mutual interest and con-

cern. It is now evident that women’s international networks thrived

in the post-war years, despite the cold war.11

At the same time, this essay argues that a full understanding of the post-war

trajectory of women’s international rights cannot confine itself to a study of

women’s transnational organizing. Further histories come into play here,

above all, the social history of East European socialist regimes. Recent research

shows that the East European mass women’s organizations—viewed during

the Cold War as the ‘transmission belts’ of party-state ideology—in contexts as

different as Stalinist Poland or Maoist China were constantly ‘walking a fine

line between advocating women’s interests and being named ‘‘bourgeois fem-

inists’’ for seeming to insist on the primacy of gender issues’.12 Thus while De

Haan correctly argues that the WIDF should not be viewed as a mere puppet of

Stalinism,13 the influence of Soviet and East European regimes, as well as

western Communist parties, cannot be underestimated, not only for the pol-

itical and institutional context, but for the self-understanding of the activists

involved, and their views on the place of sex equality among the large political

questions of the times. The transnational circulation of ideas about women’s

equality during the Cold War may at times have been motivated by solidarity

between women as women across geographical and geopolitical divides, but

was more often hemmed around by national loyalties, ideological cleavages,

11 Melanie Ilic, ‘Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange, and the Women’s International Demo-

cratic Federation’, in Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklossy (eds), Reassessing Cold

War Europe (London, 2010).12 Wang Zheng, ‘ ‘‘State Feminism’’? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist

China’, Feminist Studies, 31:3 (Autumn 2005), 519–53; in the same issue, Basia

Nowak, ‘Constant Conversations: Agitators in the League of Women in Poland during

the Stalinist Period’, 488–520.13 De Haan, ‘Continuing Cold War Paradigms.’




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and painful personal decisions. This was by no means only true for eastern

Europe: Helen Laville has forcefully shown how US women’s organizations

were continually obliged to negotiate national (state) interests in their inter-

national work, a particularly revealing find given the massive propaganda

value of ‘voluntary’ and ‘private’ organizations in US Cold War conceptions

of freedom and democracy.14

The story of women’s rights also fits into a larger history of post-1945

Europe that no longer analyses the post-war trajectories of European societies

‘simply as a function of their position vis-a-vis the two antagonistic Cold War

empires’.15 Looking beyond the competing models of Americanized liberal-

democratic consumer society in the West and Stalinist dictatorship in the

East, such a history would rather be built around:

different periodizations, different patterns of development, other

commonalities and distinctions, unexpected connections, new

ways of understanding the relationship of the war to its aftermath,

new ways of relating the second half of the century to the first, new

ways of relating Europe to the rest of the world.16

II

Europe was still in turmoil when the Union des Femmes Francaises, a mass

organization created by the PCF from scattered resistance committees across

France, began organizing an international congress of anti-fascist and pro-

gressive women to be held in liberated Paris in November 1945. While the

Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee later claimed the initiative for the

event, the founding congress of the Women’s International Democratic

Federation was by no means a purely Communist affair. For the liberal

Czech women’s rights activist and lawyer Milada Horakova, recently freed

from a Nazi concentration camp, the Paris congress was part of the battle

against fascism and for world peace, and thus deserved the support of ‘our

Czechoslovak women’, an argument based on national as much as female

14 Helen Laville, Cold War Women. The International Activities of American Women’s Orga-

nizations (Manchester, 2002).15 Frank Biess, ‘Introduction: Histories of the Aftermath’, in Frank Biess and Robert Moel-

ler (eds), Histories of the Aftermath. The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe (New

York and Oxford, 2010), 3.16 Geoff Eley, ‘A Disorder of Peoples: The Uncertain Ground of Reconstruction after 1945’,

in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds), The Disentanglement of Populations. Migra-

tion, Expulsion, and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9, (Basingstoke, 2011).

182 Celia Donert



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solidarity.17 Horakova travelled to Paris in her capacity as the non-partisan

head of the Council of Czechoslovak Women, as an official delegate of the

Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, then under the leadership of Jan Masaryk.

She was accompanied by Anezka Hodinova, one of the most powerful female

Communist functionaries in post-war Czechoslovakia, and a long-term KSC

member who had recently returned to Prague from wartime exile in London.

Women’s rights were accorded a prominent place in the congress reso-

lutions adopted by the 850 women from 40 countries who met in Paris.

Without explicitly mentioning ‘feminism’, the WIDF put forward proposals

that echoed earlier feminist programmes to address discrimination against

women as workers, mothers, and citizens, as well as organizing world con-

gresses, regional seminars, study visits, fact-finding missions, petitions, and

campaigns that kept women’s rights a live issue at a time when organized

feminism was in disarray, ‘this time in harness to an anticapitalist, anti-

imperialist socio-political program spearheaded by the Soviet Union’.18

Contemporary observers from the long-established women’s organizations,

such as Margery Corbett Ashby, the American president of the International

Alliance of Women, were startled and grudgingly respectful of the promin-

ence of women’s rights in the WIDF programme, yet scorned the ‘undemo-

cratic’ nature of the proceedings and the strident anti-colonialism:

The programme of the Federation is excellent and practical as re-

gards women’s status and opportunities but actually in their

monthly paper they write nothing but violent attacks on

‘Imperialism’, British massacres in India, Dutch in East Indies, at-

tacks in U.S.A. and British administration in Germany and their

softness towards Franco and fascism generally. It is entirely political

in its color and activities . . .19

The WIDF founding congress could in some sense be viewed as a gathering of

progressive women whose ‘hopes for a better world’ would soon be dashed by

the onset of the Cold War.20 Yet in other respects the vision of women’s rights

at the congress was a pragmatic response to the dramatic transformation of

17 Narodnı archiv Ceske republiky (NA), f. UV KSC c. 22–Ustrednı komise zen, a.j. 89 / 1:

Dr Milada Horakova: Zprava o jednanı Prıpravneho vyboru Mezinarodnıho svetoveho

kongresu zen v Parızi.18 Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 387.19 Susanne Hertrampf, ‘Zum Wohle der Menschheit’: Feministisches Denken und Engagement

internationaler Aktivistinnen 1945–1975 (Herbolzheim, 2006), 199.20 Francisca de Haan, ‘Hoffnungen auf eine bessere Welt: Die fruhen Jahre der Internatio-

nalen Demokratischen Frauenfoderation (IDFF/WIDF) (1945–1950), Feministische




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women’s citizenship after the war. Provisional post-war legislatures across

Europe—in which women delegates to Paris were also represented—had in

the previous months enacted long sought-after legislation awarding political

rights to women for the first time in France, Belgium, and Italy, or reinstating

rights revoked by fascism in West Germany, Austria, or Czechoslovakia. Yet

the achievement of female suffrage did not occasion much public debate in

western Europe, as Martin Conway writes, suggesting that this landmark

owed less to a sea-change in attitudes toward gender than a consensus

around the post-war democratic ethos, one based on national states, bur-

eaucracies, planning, parliamentary politics, and a quiet life of ‘negative free-

dom’.21 Women’s claims to equality had been bolstered by wartime economic

mobilization, yet as demonstrated by the WIDF concern for protecting

female citizens as mothers as well as workers, the resulting citizenship

claims still centred on maternity.22 Protection of the family, in both East

and West, was a bulwark of the post-war settlement.

Gendered perceptions of fascism profoundly influenced post-war con-

ceptions of women’s citizenship, whether in the civic education programmes

of Allied military governments that tended to view women as the witless

victims of Nazi rule, standing outside politics by the maternal role assigned

them in the Third Reich,23 or the condemnatory attitudes of Communist

politicians who saw women—especially those who did not work—as the

enthusiastic devotees of fascism. Speaking to a closed meeting of the SED

Women’s Secretariat in late 1948, at a time when the East German DFD was

still struggling to acquire WIDF membership, Elli Schmidt warned that the

reactionary tendencies of German women—especially housewives—was all

the more reason to integrate them into international organizations. Schmidt

Studien Zeitschrift fur interdisziplinare Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 27:2 (2009),

241–57.21 Martin Conway, ‘Democracy in Postwar Western Europe. The Triumph of a Political

Model’, European History Quarterly, 32:1 (Jan. 2002), 59–84.22 Geoff Eley, ‘Corporatism and the Social Democratic Moment: The Postwar Settlement,

1945–1973’, in Dan Stone (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History

(Oxford, 2012).23 Re-education programmes for women in post-war West Germany and Japan are dis-

cussed by Helen Laville, Cold War Women; Marianne Zepp, Redefining Germany. Reed-

ucation, Staatsburgerschaft und Frauenpolitik im US-amerikanisch besetzten

Nachkriegsdeutschland (Gottingen, 2007), Karen Garner, ‘Global Feminism and Postwar

Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947’, Journal of World

History, 15:2 (June 2004), 191–277; Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and

the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia, 2008).

184 Celia Donert



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recalled that the first task of the East German women’s organization had been

to launch a propaganda campaign about the international peace movement

against resistance from both bourgeois women and communists:

Many of our comrades were new to the party in 1945, or after the

Vereinigung [with the SPD] and brought with them the old party

traditions in women’s work. Our comrades from the SPD or KPD

had not been involved with the bourgeois women’s movement nor

the international women’s movement, which also worked on a

bourgeois basis.24

As a result the DFD had organized a summer school in 1947 where Emmy

Damerius (Koenen) spoke about the international women’s movement. The

resolutely working-class and party-loyal Koenen embodied most of the

stereotypes about East German communists who had begun their political

careers in the KPD; her wartime exile in Great Britain had only stiffened her

anti-capitalist resolve and she threw herself into the reconstruction of the

women’s movement when she returned to Soviet-occupied Germany.25

In the territories now under Soviet control, the social and political conse-

quences of occupation and war, swiftly followed by the violent retribution

and mass displacement of peoples after the Nazi defeat, profoundly shaped

women’s status. Demographically, women were in the majority in many

European countries—above all, in Germany. The millions of refugees and

expellees pouring into the SBZ from the Eastern territories and the

Sudetenland were more predominantly female than the native civilian popu-

lation. Moreover, as Donna Harsch has written, Germany’s eastern zone was

occupied by an exhausted Red Army, which unlike the American and British

forces had no surplus military stocks to share with civilians, and worse,

‘vengeful, exhausted, and impoverished soldiers visited their wrath on

women in a violent swell of rape’.26 The rapes cost the Soviet authorities a

massive loss of trust among the East German population.27 Abortion

24 SAPMO-BArch DY30/IV: ‘Stenographische Niederschrift uber die Konferenz des

Frauensekretariats des ZS am 15. und 16. Dezember 1948 im Zentralhaus der Einheit

zu Berlin’, bl. 10–11.25 Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries. German Communists and their Century

(Cambridge, MA, 2003).26 Donna Harsch, The Revenge of the Domestic. Women, the Family, and Communism in the

German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 20.27 See Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupa-

tion, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); Kirsten Poutros, ‘Von den Massenvergewalti-

gungen zum Mutterschutzgesetz: Abtreibungspolitik und Abtreibungspraxis in




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instantly became a pressing public issue after the war; doctors performed

abortions ‘on a fast assembly line’ with the full knowledge of German and

occupation authorities while in the Soviet Zone socially and ethically indi-

cated abortions were legalized—briefly—by the end of 1947.28 Food was

scarce, housing was disastrous—especially in the bombed cities of Magde-

burg, Dresden, and Berlin—and the family seemed to be in crisis, with rapidly

rising divorce rates and an epidemic of STDs caused by rape, promiscuity,

and prostitution.

Across central and eastern Europe women’s rights were reconstructed from

the ground up as women’s committees took on the immediate tasks of hu-

manitarian relief for their local communities. This was the hour of West

Germany’s ‘rubble woman’, whose heroic work later formed part of the na-

tional mythology of the Federal Republic on its journey from post-war villain

to Cold War victim (although the rubble women themselves would receive

little compensation from the West German welfare state).29 Communist

women activists and male party leaderships saw an opportunity to mobilize

women through these local groups. Women soon became a special object of

state policy across the eastern bloc, largely as a function of Communist party

campaigns for total employment, mass political mobilization, and popula-

tion growth.30 In later years, socialist regimes’ success in emancipating

women would be touted as proof of their ability to conquer ‘backwardness’

in eastern Europe through economic development and modernization, a

model that was later promoted in cultural diplomacy directed at the newly

independent states in Africa and Asia. The legal cultures of the new socialist

republics were shaped by the system of family values endorsed by the Soviet

Union, and Lauren Kaminsky has argued that:

The official and unofficial attitudes toward sex, gender, and the

family central to state socialism in central and eastern Europe had

their roots in the tension between the utopian sexuality and

Ostdeutschland, 1945–1950’ in Richard Bessel und Ralph Jessen (eds), Die Grenzen der

Diktatur: Staat und Gesellschaft in der DDR (Gottingen, 1996), 170–98.28 Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex. The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion

Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford, 1997), 193–99.29 Elizabeth Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Women: Memories of Germany’s ‘‘Crisis Years’’

and West German National Identity’, American Historical Review, 101:2 (April 1996),

354–95.30 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism: A Comparative-

Historical Essay (Princeton, NJ, 2000).

186 Celia Donert



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conservative morality that shaped family life in the Stalin-era Soviet

Union.31

National legal and cultural traditions were also important, however, and the

socialist state’s retreat from radical ideals of sex equality in Czechoslovakia,

for example, was driven equally by the resistance these experiments engen-

dered within Czech working-class culture.32

Landmark pieces of legislation affecting women—such as the GDR’s Law

on the Protection of the Mother and Child and Women’s Rights, or Czecho-

slovakia’s Family Code—were used as part of the propaganda campaigns that

linked national women’s organizations with Soviet and international initia-

tives. The parades and mass celebrations of International Women’s Day ac-

complished this in a ritualized fashion, as in East Germany on 8 March 1952,

when ‘hundreds of social facilities, kindergartens, sewing rooms and com-

pany stores’ were opened and presented as ‘a further step’ towards imple-

menting the law on the protection of the mother and child.33 Women’s social

rights were understood as the embodiment of state policies, realized through

material guarantees, rather than justiciable claims against the state.34 Legis-

lation from other countries was closely monitored, as were UN debates. Thus

the DFD received a report following the adoption of the 1952 UN convention

on the political rights of women noting USSR criticisms of the lack of guar-

antees the convention provided for their implementation. Asserting that

women in ‘capitalist countries’ lacked political rights, the report noted that

‘Soviet proposals for clauses guaranteeing political rights to women regard-

less of race, skin colour, nationality, social status, assets, language, and reli-

gion were rejected in ECOSOC.’35 The WIDF and other international

non-governmental organizations also played an important role by dissem-

inating such information. Thus the DFD received a report from the Inter-

national Association of Democratic Lawyers, which had discussed women’s

rights at their 1953 meeting in Prague, commenting that ‘the comparative

31 Lauren Kaminsky, ‘Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union’, Cen-

tral European History 44:1 (2011), 63–91.32 Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London, 2004).33 SAPMO-BArch, DY31/508: DFD Abt. Polit. Massenarbeit, ‘Internationaler Frauentag

1952’ bl. 6.34 Inga Markovits, ‘Law or Order: Constitutionalism and Legality in Eastern Europe,’ Stan-

ford Law Review, 34 (Feb. 1982), 513–613.35 SAPMO-BArch, NY 4145 / 69 (Nachlass Kathe Kern): DFD–Bundesseketariat, Gesamt-

deutcher Abtlg., 8 Abschr./2.7.52/Hi.–Rechte der Frau, 5.4.1952: ‘Politische Rechtlosig-

keit der Frauen in kapitalistischen Staaten’.




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study of legal developments in different countries will doubtlessly provide

our sections with numerous ideas’.36

Running propaganda efforts such as the vast Stockholm peace petition in

1950 became one of the most important tasks of the mass women’s organ-

izations in eastern Europe. These Janus-faced campaigns were aimed at

demonstrating the mass mobilization of socialist womanhood to both inter-

national and domestic publics. As we have seen, a fundamental component of

WIDF propaganda was its staggeringly huge membership figures: one Soviet

publication boasted about 135 million members in 64 countries by 1951.37

Yet Czech and East German women functionaries were quite aware that this

was a trick of the light, the numbers generated by the complicated member-

ship structure of the WIDF and its affiliated organizations. Shortly after the

Czechoslovak Communist Party had liquidated all women’s organizations to

create the Union of Czechoslovak Women, the leading women functionaries

complained that the union was both an umbrella organization representing

all Czechoslovak women internationally in the WIDF [by coopting all women

members of any social organization], and a mass organization with individual

membership on a national basis. For the purposes of ‘large actions’ such as

International Women’s Day, peace campaigns, or solidarity protests against

the persecution of WIDF women such as Lilly Wachter, Raymond Dien, or

Eugenie Cotton, they noted that: ‘We manage to mobilize these group mem-

bers for cooperation. But we haven’t managed to solve this problem of co-

operation in the daily tasks of the CSZ and the systematic political education

of women.’38 The CSZ lobbied the Party leadership for more resources, com-

plaining that its local branches were staffed predominantly by unpaid volun-

teers; the few ‘political’ (paid) activists were focusing mainly on getting

women into employment rather than political education. Thus a large

number of women in smaller towns and villages were not yet members of

‘any organization of the National Front’ and thus were left dangerously ‘vul-

nerable to enemy propaganda’.39

The duty of national women’s organizations to boost WIDF membership

figures was also used as a justification for attempts to increase their national

membership, often a difficult task given the jealously guarded division of

competencies and political influence between trade unions, cooperatives,

36 Ibid., Resolution der Ratstagung der Internationalen Vereinigung Demokratischer Juristen.37 Cited in Melanie Ilic, ‘Soviet Women’.38 NA Praha, f. 1261, KSC-UV-Ustrednı komise zen, a.j. 67: Zprava o situaci v Ceskoslo-

venskem svazu zen (1951).39 NA Praha, UV KSC-Ustrednı komise zen, f. 1261, a.j. 67/5, s. 59–62: Zprava o cinnosti

CSZ (1951).

188 Celia Donert



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and other social organizations in socialist regimes. Thus in late 1948, Elli

Schmidt tried—unsuccessfully—to convince the SED leadership that the

DFD should be able to create branches in the (heavily feminized) agricultural

and consumer cooperatives on the grounds that it would boost WIDF mem-

bership figures and East Germany’s reputation abroad. The suggestion came

at a moment when the DFD was battling to increase shop-floor representa-

tion to the fury of the trade union factory committees, a strategy that was

swiftly quashed by the party leadership and resulted in a purge of the DFD

leadership, and a significant reduction of its political competencies.40

At the 1953 WIDF Congress in Copenhagen women’s equality was placed

at the top of the programme, though still firmly entrenched in the language of

rights and working-class emancipation.41 Similar shifts towards a discourse

of rights took place at the national level: for the French UFF, for example, the

Copenhagen Congress marked an important turning point in its reorienta-

tion towards women’s rights.42 The PCF, a champion of women’s rights at

liberation, had subsequently dropped this cause for fear of alienating the large

number of housewives in the UFF.43 By the mid-1950s, however, ‘peace’ had

lost its mobilizing appeal, and the UFF hoped that women’s rights might

again prove able to mobilize women on a national scale. As Andree

Marty-Capgras, a UFF delegate to Copenhagen, asked upon her return:

‘Which woman will refuse to struggle for her own rights?’44 The women’s

rights agenda held out the hope of reaching out to a wider range of women,

from the abandoned wife or widow to the young girl hoping for professional

training or the woman wishing to defend a right to work.45

A corollary to the move away from a militant emphasis on ‘peace’ was the

WIDF decision to expand its membership to further national organizations,

as well as encourage cooperation with international organizations such as the

WILPF (only recently branded ‘fascist’ in fierce WIDF attacks) and the

Association of Women Lawyers, which were ‘not only present at the congress

but also had voting rights’. More than 70 states were represented at the

40 Harsch, Return of the Domestic, on the battle for shopfloor representation.41 NA Praha, f. UV KSC 22, a.j. 123 Zprava o prubehu kongresu Mezinarodnı demokraticke

federace zen a o ucasti ceskoslovenske delegace.42 Sandra Fayolle, ‘L’Union de Femmes Francaises: Une organization feminine de masse du

parti communiste francais 1945–1965 (PhD diss., Universite Paris I, 2005), 277 ff.43 Sylvie Chaperon, Les annees Beauvoir (1945–1970) (Paris, 2000); Fayolle, ‘L’Union de

Femmes Francaises’.44 Cited in Fayolle, ‘L’Union de Femmes Francaises’, 279.45 Fayolle, ‘L’Union de Femmes Francaises’, 280.




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congress, and the proceedings were translated into 7 languages. The Czech

delegation reported that:

In many capitalist countries, but especially in the colonial lands, the

bourgeoisie tried to prevent the mobilization of women through the

greatest persecution, so that many invited delegates were im-

prisoned or at best had their passports confiscated.

The fact that the congress took place in a ‘capitalist’ state was interpreted as

proof of the ‘great split’ emerging in the capitalist states in relation to

‘American imperialism’.46

III

Women’s rights were swiftly embedded in Soviet and East European cultural

diplomacy ‘in defence of peace’ as the ideological contest with the West

intensified in 1947. Thus the WIDF appears as a precursor to the World

Peace Council in the history of the ‘Communist peace campaign’ against

nuclear weapons.47 Through the 1950s, international campaigns for

women’s rights were framed in the language of peace. Images of heroic

motherhood—and innocent childhood—were as crucial to peace campaigns

as the popularization of scientific knowledge about the bomb. The symbolic

connection between femininity, motherhood, and peace had an ancient his-

tory that had found political expression in the ‘separate spheres’ philosophy

animating the feminist pacifism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. Yet after 1945 WIDF women such as the French physicist Eugenie

Cotton were at pains to distance their defence of ‘peace’ from pre-war ‘paci-

fism’, while the WIDF launched a smear campaign against the largest and

most important feminist pacifist body, the Women’s International League

for Peace and Freedom, which it branded ‘fascist’, and attempted to have

its UN consultative status revoked.48 At the same time, the post-war period

saw a continuation of maternalism among women’s organizations among

Catholics in France, and pacifists in the US, as well as communists in both

countries.49 The WILPF was reconstituted in West Germany, and

46 Narodnı archiv, Praha: f. UV KSC 22, a.j. 103: Zprava o prubehu kongresu Mezinarodnı

demokraticke federace zen a o ucasti ceskoslovenske delegace.47 Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb. Vol. 1: One World or None: A History of

the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford, 1993).48 Melanie Ilic, ‘Soviet Women’.49 Sylvie Chaperon, Les annees Beauvoir.

190 Celia Donert



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W.O.M.A.N. and the Westdeutsche Frauenfriedensbewegung were

established.50

The shift from ‘pacifism’ to ‘peace’ in East European women’s movements

was by no means a simple imposition of Soviet ideology, however. Already

at the first post-war congress of the WILPF in Luxembourg, the long-term

Czech pacifist Lola Hanouskova had expressed her deep disillusion-

ment with the failure of the WILPF to prevent the Nazi invasion of

Czechoslovakia and stressed: ‘In our experience it is impossible to be pacifists

as we were then. Our path leads from integral pacifism to real pacifism.’51

Women from central and eastern Europe had been prominent in the WILPF

between the wars; the radical Hungarian pacifist Rosika Schwimmer had

inspired its creation with her speaking tour in the US after the outbreak of

World War I. At Luxembourg in 1946, however, Czechoslovak delegates de-

fended the transfer of Germans and Hungarians as fundamental for the peace,

and were suspicious of proposals to base the future work of the League on

‘human rights’ regardless of whether the individual was a ‘friend or former

enemy’.52 This was entirely consonant with post-war conceptions of democ-

racy as (national) social justice, as defended by Czech politicians such as

Edvard Benes. ‘Universal’ suffrage in post-war Czechoslovakia, for example,

was explicitly formulated as a mechanism of exclusion as well as inclusion: the

April 1945 Kosice Programme denied political rights to traitors and collab-

orators.53 On a broader level, however, the problems faced by the WILPF after

1945 were indicative of a bigger post-war shift in the West, as well as eastern

Europe, from the middle-class elitist pacifism of the interwar years towards

broad-based peace movements that defined peace in terms of social justice

and not merely the absence of war.54

Western feminists had used essentialist ideas about womanhood as a civ-

ilizing influence on masculine politics as a corollary to demands for equality

50 Irene Stoehr, ‘Frieden als Frauenaufgabe? Diskurse uber Frieden und Geschlecht in der

bundesdeutschen Frauenbewegung der 1950er Jahre,’ in Jennifer Davy et al. (eds)

Frieden-Gewalt-Geschlecht.51 NA Praha, UV KSC 22, a.j. 90: Zprava o zasedanı Exekutivy MZL v Lucemburku,

31.7–4.8.1946.52 NA Praha, UV KSC 22, a.j. 90: Zprava o zasedanı Exekutivy MZL v Lucemburku,

31.7–4.8.1946.53 Natali Stegmann, ‘Gleichheitspostulat und innere Differenzierung. Geschlechtliche

und andere Hierarchisierungsmuster in der tschechoslowakischen Politik bis 1948’ in

Claudia Kraft (ed.), Geschlechterbeziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem zweiten Weltk-

rieg (Munchen, 2008).54 Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Situating Peace Movements in the Political Culture of the Cold

War’ in Ziemann (ed.), (Essen, 2007).




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based on natural rights, particularly in the pacifist wing of the feminist move-

ment that gained in strength after the First World War. Feminists of all pol-

itical orientations had entertained high hopes for the civilizing potential of

the interwar institutions of international government, the League of Nations

and the International Labour Organization, which they lobbied on issues

such as equal pay, the prohibition of the ‘white slave trade’ (prostitution),

protective labour legislation for pregnant and nursing women as well as chil-

dren, the nationality of married women, and an international ‘equal rights

treaty’.

The WIDF was expelled from France and moved to East Berlin in early

1951. The GDR was languishing in international isolation as a result of the

West German Hallstein Doctrine, refused diplomatic recognition or mem-

bership in international organizations. The DFD described the presence of the

WIDF in East Germany as ‘extraordinarily significant. International ques-

tions occupy an important place in the daily tasks of the Democratic

Women’s League of Germany.’55 Through the 1950s the DFD and other

women’s organizations promoted transnational contacts that aimed to

battle the fascist legacy and build a new form of ‘socialist’ internationalism.

East German women were painfully aware of their isolation, which they dis-

cussed at a meeting with the SED Women’s Secretariat after returning to

Berlin from the 1948 WIDF Congress in Budapest. Maria Rentmeister

urged the necessity of continuing to work with the WIDF, stressing that

‘this was not an international congress, no, that is not the right word. It

was a world congress.’56 Attempting to bridge this gap, the DFD organized

exchanges with women from western Europe, other socialist countries or

post-colonial countries; study visits; letter and postcard-writing campaigns

between female factory employees across the socialist bloc; friendship asso-

ciations; donations of money, clothes, and medicine in solidarity actions for

the victims of ‘imperialist aggression’ across the globe. In spring 1951, for

example, 28 French UFF women—‘women from the French border regions,

who had suffered so unimaginably from the brutal, fascist Hitler occupation

that they believed they would never again set foot in that land that meant only

terror to them’—made a ‘friendship visit’ to Berlin. This event was publicized

in half a million brochures under the title ‘It’s worth fighting for the smiles of

our children’.57

55 SAPMO-BArch DY 31/508.56 SAPMO-BArch DY 30 /IV 2./1.01/105: Stenographische Niederschrift uber die Konfer-

enz des Frauensekretariats des ZS am 15. und 16. Dezember 1948 im Zentralhaus der

Einheit zu Berlin, bl. 10–11.57 SAPMO-BArch DY 31/508: bl. 9.

192 Celia Donert



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A peace campaign launched by the WIDF and communist women’s or-

ganizations in eastern and western Europe during the Korean War exempli-

fies the transnational practices used by women activists in their campaigns for

women’s rights, and the way in which national interests and political loyalties

affected these campaigns, above all through the close connection between

discourses of women’s equality and those of peace in international propa-

ganda. The focus of the WIDF peace campaign was a brochure entitled ‘We

Accuse’, the result of a fact-finding mission to Korea by WIDF women from

18 countries in spring 1951, just as UN troops had halted the surprisingly

successful Sino-North Korean winter offensive. This brochure claimed to

reveal evidence of atrocities committed against civilians by US forces in

Korea, including the use of germ warfare and it formed the centrepiece of

the international propaganda efforts for the East German and Czechoslovak

women’s organizations in 1951. The DFD printed half a million copies, for

example, far exceeding any of its other publications for that year. In

Czechoslovakia the women’s union was given the task of publicizing the

results of the WIDF Korea brochure through the press, radio, propaganda

materials, and local meetings and discussions with women, coupled with

collections of winter clothing and shoes for Korean women.58 Still greater

energies were poured into the solidarity campaign for Lilly Wachter, a

middle-aged housewife from Rastatt in Baden who was put on trial by the

court of the Allied High Commission in Stuttgart in autumn 1951 for alleged-

ly spreading communist propaganda.59

In Europe—and especially Germany—the Korean War was the catalyst for

debates about rearmament and the use of nuclear weapons, challenging the

image of the feminized, pacific Germany that had characterized the post-war

years. In the GDR the SED elite also jumped on the Korean War as an op-

portunity to stabilize the regime and build support for German unification by

insisting on western aggression and manipulating widespread popular fears

among the East German population that a divided Germany could indeed

become a European Korea.60 In order to maximize the impact of the Korean

War propaganda on the East German population, the SED leadership delib-

erately attempted to link atrocities in Korea with German memories of the

Second World War, as stated in a Central Committee directive to ‘highlight

58 NA Praha, UV KSC f. 22, a.j. 104: Navrh popularisace poznatku vysetrujıcı komise

MDFZ, ktera se vratila z Koreje.59 SAPMO-BArch DY 30/1240.60 Michael Lemke, ‘Wahrnehmungen und Wirkungen des Koreakrieges im geteilten

Deutschland’, in Christoph Klessmann und Bernd Stover, Der Korea-Krieg. Wahrneh-

mung—Wirkung—Erinnerung, (Koln, 2008), 74–98.




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the cruelties [Grausamkeiten] inflicted on women and children’ during the

Korea campaign.61

The WIDF report on Korea was a straw in the flood of propaganda sup-

porting the Soviet ‘peace offensive’ that had been unleashed with the

Stockholm Peace Appeal of 1950.62 World Peace Council protests against

US policy in Korea maintained the ‘emphasis on scientific horror that had

characterized its earlier denunciation of the Bomb’ and culminated in a

330,000 word report on the alleged use of germ warfare (accusations also

made by the Chinese and Soviet governments) authored by a WPC commis-

sion of inquiry.63 The WIDF merged accusations about the use of germ war-

fare with claims about the rape and torture of civilian women and children. In

the United States the State Department became so concerned about the effect

of the WIDF claims about Korean atrocities on impressionable women that

leading US women’s organizations were pushed to issue a counter-statement

that redefined their concept of ‘peace’ in line with US national security inter-

ests.64 Public letters from Eleanor Roosevelt reinforced the message that

‘peace’ must be understood—especially by women’s organizations—in op-

position to Soviet usage of the word, which ‘has nothing in common with our

aspirations and struggles for a real peace with freedom and justice under the

United Nations Charter’.65 For the German participants on the Korea mis-

sion, meanwhile, the fact that Jacob Malik, the Soviet ambassador to the UN,

had used the report to justify his June 1951 proposal for cease-fire talks be-

tween the belligerents on the Korean peninsula was a great measure of their

success.66

Lilly Wachter was represented as a typical West German housewife in the

flood of GDR propaganda released in both East and West Germany after her

arrest, in the form of pamphlets, postage stamps, radio plays, and demon-

strations. In his notes on the trial, the British barrister likewise portrayed her

61 SAPMO-BArch, DY 30 J IV 2/3/141: Protokoll Nr. 15 der Sitzung des Sekretariats der

SED, 28.9.1950, cited in Michael Lemke, ibid., 79.62 Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb.63 Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, 185.64 Helen Laville, ‘The Memorial Day Statement. Women’s Organizations in the ‘‘Peace

Offensive’’ ’, Intelligence and Security, 18:2 (June 2003), 192–210.65 Eleanor Roosevelt’s reply to Dorothy Thompson’s ‘Women’s Manifesto’, 21 December

1951, cited in Laville, ‘The Memorial Day Statement’. WIDF responses to Eleanor Roose-

velt’s letter, WIDF files, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.66 SAPMO-BArch NY 4090/481: Letter from Lilly Wachter and Hilde Cahn to Otto

Grotewohl.

194 Celia Donert



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as ‘an ordinary, sensible, working-class German’.67 GDR representations of

Wachter as a housewife fighting politically for peace were a somewhat clumsy

attempt to negate the stereotypical image of the militant communist worker-

activist, yet also reflected attempts since the early 1950s within the SED, KSC,

but also the PCF to reach out to housewives as a political constituency. The

image jabbed at the gender politics of the Federal Republic and Adenauer’s

‘ill-tempered comments that the opposition to his politics was a fluke, a

deception by Soviet propaganda and the work of a few indefatigable pastors,

pacifists, and Communists’ as well as the ‘unfortunate, if natural, tendencies

of Germans and especially of women to be nervous in the aftermath of war’.68

Propaganda also depicted Wachter as a ‘victim of fascism’ while—unsurpris-

ingly given the wave of anti-Semitism that was rolling out from the Soviet

Union—making no mention of the fact that she was half-Jewish.69

The East German DFD shows clearly that the international activities of

communist women were shaped not only by the East-West superpower con-

test but by national interests and loyalties within Europe. The Lilly Wachter

campaign in West Germany was carried out by the DFD (West) which set up

solidarity committees, distributed propaganda, and organized talks and pro-

tests on her behalf. During the 1950s the DFD was incorporated not only into

the work of the WIDF, but also—in its function as a member of the National

Front—into the SED ‘Westdeutschlandpolitik’. By the mid-1950s the DFD

was one of some 36 East German organizations and committees that were

carrying out ‘gesamtdeutsche Arbeit in der Bundesrepublik’ by sending func-

tionaries to the West, making personal German–German contacts, or main-

taining a branch in the FRG.70 The DFD was also represented in the SED

Politburo Commission for Work in West Germany. In West Germany, on the

other hand, the flow of propaganda was controlled by the Federal Ministry for

Intra-German Relations. Women’s organizations suspected of communist

sympathies, especially those with a programme based on peace and a political

67 SAPMO BArch NY 4238/113: Report by Mr D. N. Pritt Q.C., President of International

Association of Democratic Laywers, on Prosecution of Frau Lilly Wachter before the US

Courts of the Allied High Commission for Germany, and on her appeal to the US Court

of Appeal in Frankfurt in Sept 1951–February 1952.68 Michael Geyer, ‘Cold War Angst. The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament

and Nuclear Weapons’ in Hanna Schissler, The Miracle Years. A Cultural History of West

Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, N.J., 2001).69 SAPMO-BArch DY30/1240.70 Heike Amos, Die Westpolitik der SED 1948/49-61: ‘Arbeit nach Westdeutschland’ durch die

Nationale Front, das Ministerium fur Auswartigen Angelegenheiten und das Ministerium

fur Staatssicherheit (Berlin, 1999), 206.




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discourse stressing motherhood, were placed under observation by this min-

istry.71 Indeed, Wachter’s trial took place at the same time as the creation of

the West German Women’s Peace Movement, founded by the Catholic ‘ma-

ternalist’ pacifist Klara Maria Fassbinder in autumn 1951.72 Fassbinder was

judged a fanatic and a danger by the head of the women’s section at the

Ministry and faced political reprisals in West Germany for her attempts to

bring the women’s peace movement into cooperation with oppositional

Protestant circles around Martin Niemoller, the movement for a neutral

Germany, and the Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei of Gustav Heinemann and

Helene Wessel. From the perspective of the SED, Lilly Wachter belonged

among these potentially sympathetic West German peace activists.73

Nonetheless, the discursive connection between women’s rights, mother-

hood, and peace would continue to provide inspiration for women’s trans-

national organizing through the late 1950s and beyond, suggesting that the

break between women’s peace activism before and after 1968 may not be as

decisive as some accounts suggest. Events such as the 1955 World Congress of

Mothers in Lausanne brought women together. After the congress the British

socialist Dora Russell used the contacts she had made to organize a women’s

‘Caravan of Peace’ that travelled through eastern Europe in 1958.74 At

Lausanne, an invitation from the Chinese Women’s Federation resulted in a

delegation of 14 German women visiting China for four weeks in 1956 (8 from

the DDR and 6 from the BRD; of these 2 were SPD members, one a member of

the peace movement and 3 KPD members). Kathe Kern, who took part in the

trip, recorded her experiences in a notebook, reports to the MfAA, and in talks

that she gave around the DDR upon her return. One such talk recalled that each

woman brought a teddy bear as a ‘Berlin greeting to the Chinese children’, and

described the women’s delight at being allowed a day’s stopover in Moscow.

(‘We visited the big agricultural exhibition with the beautiful pavilions of the

Soviet republics, and slurped the best creamy fruit ice-cream I’ve ever tasted in

a cafe on Gorkistrasse.’) Then they flew to Irkutsk, where they boarded a

Chinese aircraft during ‘the most superb sunset’ and crossed the Gobi desert,

71 Irene Stoehr, ‘Frieden als Frauenaufgabe? Diskurse uber Frieden und Geschlecht in der

bundesdeutschen Frauenbewegung der 1950er Jahre’, in Jennifer Davy et al. (eds)

Frieden-Gewalt-Geschlecht.72 Gisela Notz, ‘Klara Marie Fassbinder and Women’s Peace Activities in the 1950s and

1960s’, Journal of Women’s History, 13:3 (Autumn 2001), 98–123.73 SAPMO-BArch, NY 4090/667 (Nachlass O. Grotewohl): Stellungnahmen und Erklarun-

gen aus der BRD und Berlin zur Remilitisierung der BRD und fur einen Friedensvertrag.74 Rachael Heaven, ‘The Women’s Caravan of Peace. A Very British Failure?’ MA Disserta-

tion, University of Birmingham.

196 Celia Donert



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‘which lay yellow and arid in the midday heat, until finally behind the legendary

Great Wall of China the new China spread out beneath us like a huge

well-tended garden in the lush green landscape of Peking.’ In a more restrained

report to the MfAA, Kern noted succinctly that the experience of Chinese

women would be very helpful for the DFD and for the ‘national struggle of

west German women’; although being a developing country China was very

different to the DDR, the problems in work with women were the same.75

In both East and West Germany the Korean War did apparently evoke fears

that Germany could become a second Korea, but this did not lead the popu-

lation in either the Federal Republic or the GDR to support the rearmament

and militarization proposed by both Adenauer and Ulbricht.76 Nor did the

Korea campaign, which became part of the SED’s West German policy, in-

crease popular support for the political unification of Germany. Instead the

war acted as a catalyst for a general German rejection of rearmament and bloc

integration.77 Furthermore, West German public opinion on peace seems to

have been much more deeply influenced by the bloody June 1953 uprising in

East Berlin than the Korean War. Nonetheless, the West German protest

movements of the late 1950s did form a site for the most far-reaching inte-

gration between communists and non-communists after the KPD was

banned, and communists collaborated in many towns with non-partisan

groups of ‘friends of peace’ and in the campaign for conscientious

objection.78

When Lilly Wachter was sent to jail, the German borders were still porous

and the Federal Republic, still burdened with high unemployment and the

waves of refugees pouring in from the east, had not yet proved itself as an

‘economic miracle’. Over the following years, social meanings of peace in

both East and West Germany would increasingly focus on material security,

although this was not always equated with Americanization. The ‘consuming

woman’ who acquired such cultural power within West German conceptions

of social market democracy was rather different from the ascetic housewife-

as-peace-activist. As we have seen, the East Berlin uprising of June 1953, itself

75 SAPMO-DDR, Berlin, Nachlass Kathe Kern, NY 4145/73, handwritten notes on trip to

China; Report to MfAA China desk, 10 November 1955 ‘Ergebnisse der China-Reise der

1. Gesamtdeutschen Frauendelegation’; untitled report or talk on trip to China, 1959.76 Michael Lemke, ‘Wahrnehmungen und Wirkungen des Koreakrieges im geteilten

Deutschland.’77 Michael Lemke, ibid., 80.78 Till Kossler, Abschied von der Revolution: Kommunisten und Gesellschaft in Westdeutsch-

land 1945–1968 (Dusseldorf, 2005), 409.




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caused by material dissatisfaction, caused more concern among West

Germans than the Korean War: Immediately afterwards, the SED placed

Elli Schmidt—formerly responsible for the DFD—in charge of fielding citi-

zens’ complaints about consumer policy in the GDR.79

IV

Disagreements between national delegates over the link between women’s

status and world peace surfaced at the UN Committee on the Status of

Women at its annual session in 1955. Discussing whether women’s status

had risen internationally as a result of the 1952 UN Convention on Women’s

Political Rights, delegates from the Soviet Union, Belarus, and Poland as-

serted that women could only exercise their rights in conditions of peace, and

argued that the CSW should thus support the Soviet proposal to the UN

General Assembly for a nuclear weapons ban in order to halt the international

arms race. The Soviet proposal for peace through disarmament was similar to

the position espoused by western women’s international organizations

during the 1930s, Karen Garner has noted, but the western women who

spoke at the CSW not only opposed the plans but argued that the discussion

was ‘ ‘‘outside the Commission’s terms of reference’’, thus effectively shutting

down a discussion of women’s role in peacemaking in the CSW forum’.80 As

the US responses to the WIDF Korea brochure have already shown, Soviet

peace initiatives were characterized by the US administration as peace defined

narrowly as the absence of war, ‘without guarantees for personal freedoms,

protection of human rights or realisation of social justice’.81

The shift from militant Stalinist discourses of peace towards Khrushchev’s

peaceful coexistence from 1956 moved the internationalization of women’s

rights in a new direction that was increasingly focused on the United Nations.

This was consonant with the Soviet Union’s approach to human rights in

cultural diplomacy more generally, which also increased its involvement after

1956 in international governmental and non-governmental organizations

such as the ILO and UNESCO, or WFUNA (through the Soviet national

79 Katherine Pence, ‘You as a Woman Will Understand. Consumption, Gender and the

Relationship between State and Citizenry in the GDR‘s Crisis of 17 June 1953’, German

History 19:2 (2001), 218–52, and Pence, ‘Women on the Verge: Consumers Between

Private Desires and Public Crisis’ in Paul Betts and Katherine Pence (eds), Socialist

Modern. East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Michigan, 2008).80 Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Govern-

ance, 1925–85 (Manchester, 2010), 181.81 Ibid., 182.

198 Celia Donert



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association to promote the UNO).82 Through the 1960s and 1970s Soviet and

East European women’s rights propaganda focused less on battling the legacy

of fascism in Europe and increasingly targeted Asia, Africa, and Latin

America, supplementing the rhetoric of peace with calls for women’s equality

through economic development and national liberation. Yet the peaceful

resolution of European conflicts—above all, the problem of Germany—

had not yet been achieved, and at the turn of the 1960s disputes over the

relationship between feminism and peaceful coexistence threatened to des-

troy the WIDF from within. The main problem now was the growing split

between eastern and western Communist parties, which manifested itself in

the furious criticism of the East European women’s organizations of Italian

leadership of the WIDF under Carmen Zanti.83

Through the 1960s the socialist regimes focused on internationalizing

women’s rights at the UN through the binding human rights covenants on

civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights adopted by the General

Assembly in 1966 and 1967. The aim was not to denounce human rights as a

bourgeois ideology but to redefine rights in line with socialist aims, in par-

ticular by placing a strong emphasis on social and economic rights. At the

same time, the socialist bloc joined forces with the non-aligned countries in

lobbying for a separate Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of

Discrimination against Women, the forerunner to the binding Convention

of the same name that would enter into force in 1979.

Dissatisfaction with the work of the WIDF among the communist women

of the people’s democracies seems to have been steadily growing through the

1950s. In 1953 the Czech Women’s Union began to complain that the peo-

ple’s democracies were being politically marginalized within the WIDF, des-

pite having to bear the brunt of the high membership costs, noting that

Czechoslovakia was constantly used as a transit country for delegates trav-

elling between Moscow and western Europe on their visits to international

events such as the World Peace Congress, and the general lack of planning

82 Jennifer Amos, ‘Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Dec-

laration of Human Rights, 1948–1958’ in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Human Rights in the

Twentieth Century, 147–65; on East German foreign policy more generally, Johannes

Paulmann (Hg.), Auswartige Reprasentationen. Deutsche Kulturdiplomatie nach 1945

(Koln, 2005). On ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ human rights activism in the GDR, Ned

Richardson-Little, ‘The Exploitation of Man by Man Has Been Abolished: Dictatorship,

Dissent and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945–1990’ (Ph.D. dissertation in progress,

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).83 SAPMO-BArch DY 30 IV 2/17/110: DFD, Bericht–Internationales Frauentreffen in

Kopenhagen vom 21.-24.4.1960 und die Arbeit der IDFF.




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within the organization.84 By the late 1950s the East European members were

in open revolt against WIDF leadership, now directed at the Italian president

Carmen Zanti, whom Ilse Thiele accused of ignoring WIDF rules and collab-

orating instead with feminist organizations. At a WIDF meeting in

Copenhagen in 1960, there was a bitter dispute between East and West

German delegations over Walter Ulbricht’s Deutschlandplan. Thiele made

a strong plea to the SED Central Committee for renewed controls over the

WIDF.85

Shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion that crushed the Prague Spring in

August 1968, the Soviet Union initiated annual meetings with Communist

functionaries in charge of women’s issues from eastern Europe, Cuba,

Vietnam, and Korea to discuss strategies and international activities.

Regaining control of the WIDF—which had regained consultative status at

the UN in 1967 after a 13-year hiatus, and would be upgraded to advisory

status in 1969—was a priority.86 At the same time, socialist governments

were registering the emergence of a feminist movement in the West, which

they viewed—mistakenly—as the resurgence of the bourgeois movement for

women’s equal rights. The failures of revolutionary state socialism, as well as

the sexism and patriarchal attitudes of the western Communist parties, like-

wise became central to feminists who emerged from the New Left, largely for

the negative reference point they provided in accounts of women’s liber-

ation.87 Nonetheless, the numerous accounts of revolutionary socialism’s

failure to liberate women provided different lessons for western feminists

than those that led to the ‘human rights explosion’ of the late 1970s, which,

as Samuel Moyn argues, was driven by western intellectuals’ fascination for

the utopian politics of morality envisaged by East European dissidents such as

Vaclav Havel.88

84 NA Praha, f. UV KSC 22, a.j. 104, Ceskoslovensky svaz zen, 5. 12. 1952, ‘‘Diskuse o

MDFZ’’, based on discussion between Czechoslovak representative to WIDF and secre-

tariat of VCZ.85 SAPMO-BArch DY 30 IV 2/17/110: DFD, Bericht–Internationales Frauentreffen in

Kopenhagen vom 21.-24.4.1960 und die Arbeit der IDFF.86 SAPMO-BArch DY 30 / IV / A2 / 17: Information uber eine Zusammenkunft leitender

Funktionarinnen der Frauenbewegung aus der Sowjetunion, Bulgarien, Polen, der DDR,

Ungarn, der CSSR und Rumanien, Berlin, den 11. Dezember 1968.87 Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Women’s Movement and Organizing for Socialism’ in Sheila

Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright (eds), Beyond the Fragments: Feminism

and the Making of Socialism (London, 1980).88 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. A Recent History of Human Rights (Cambridge, MA,

2010).

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Through the 1970s the socialist bloc directed its energies in the field of

international women’s rights towards the creation of an International

Women’s Year at the United Nations, a proposal first put forward by the

WIDF at a UN CSW meeting in 1972.89 Over the next couple of years,

women’s rights were negotiated by more conventional diplomatic means,

through the permanent representations of socialist regimes to the UN in

New York in their debates over the themes for International Women’s Year,

and how these themes should be defined. Equality, development, and peace,

were the themes chosen, and this article has given weight to the argument

already advanced by Raluca Popa in a brilliant essay: Contrary to the claims

made by feminist scholars that each of the three themes of IWY mapped neatly

onto the three geopolitical blocs of the 1970s (First World, equality; Second

World, peace; Third World, development), women activists from socialist

regimes contributed as much to defining norms of equality at the interna-

tional and national levels, as they did for peace.90 The symbolic culmination of

post-war campaigns by Soviet and East European states to internationalize a

‘socialist’ vision of women’s rights was the World Congress of Women in

International Women’s Year held in East Berlin in October 1975.91 This con-

ference has been almost entirely written out of histories of the UN Decade for

Women, overshadowed by the bigger, glitzier, and more memorable UN

Conference on Women in Mexico City that took place in July that same

year.92 Yet the Congress shows how competing discourses of women’s

rights as human rights emerged in the 1970s outside the narratives of the

new human rights histories, in this case as a result of interactions between

socialist regimes—with heavy involvement from the secret police—with

international left-wing NGOs, UN agencies, and feminist groups.

89 Raluca Popa, ‘Translating Equality Between Women and Men Across Cold War Divides:

Women Activists from Hungary and Romania and the Creation of International

Women’s Year’, in Jill Massino and Shana Penn (eds), Gender Politics and Everyday

Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (London, 2009), 59–74.90 Popa, ‘Translating Equality Between Women and Men’.91 For a more detailed exploration of the Congress see Celia Donert, ‘Wessen Utopie?

Frauenrechte und Staatssozialismus im Internationalen Jahr der Frau 1975’ in Jan

Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds) Moral fur die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er

Jahren (Gottingen, 2012).92 On Mexico City see Jocelyn Olcott, ‘Globalizing Sisterhood: International Women’s Year

and the Limits of Identity Politics’, in Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and

Daniel Sargent (eds), Shock of the Global (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Jocelyn Olcott, ‘Cold

War Politics and Cheap Cabaret: Performing Politics at the 1975 United Nations Inter-

national Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City’, Gender and History, 22:3 (Novem-

ber 2010), 733–54.




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The erasure from histories of women’s rights of the 1975 East Berlin

Congress, which was attended by 2,000 people, including the star guests in

attendance at Mexico City such as Black Panther Angela Davis and Hortensia

Bussi de Allende, widow of the assassinated Chilean President, may seem

testimony to the defeat of Soviet and East European attempts to internation-

alize a vision of women’s rights that would be recognized as specifically ‘so-

cialist’.93 Yet this was not so much an ideological defeat, as Cold War

narratives would have it, but located in the unravelling of the post-war pol-

itical settlement. As historians increasingly focus on the 1970s as a decade of

unprecedented global change, the defeat of the universalist vision of women’s

rights offered by state socialism at the East Berlin World Congress of Women

further confirms that, although the Soviet Union would only collapse in 1989/

91, the ‘post-war settlement’s reliable solidities were already breaking apart in

the 1970s, reeling from the shocks of 1968. Politics dramatically registered the

societal transformations occurring in what Eric Hobsbawm rightly called the

‘golden age’, whose consequences for urban living, access to education, and

patterns of consumption unfolded on either side of the boundary between

East and West. Then, with disconcerting rapidity, the global economic down-

turn of 1973–4 ended the post-war boom, shelving its promises of permanent

growth and continuously unfolding prosperity. In those terms, the core of the

post-war settlement lies in the years 1947–73.’94 The origins of debates about

women’s rights as human rights—as discussed at the 1993 UN Conference in

Vienna—thus do not lie in the triumph of ‘western’ democracy after 1989 and

utopian visions of a ‘minimalist’ politics of morality based on human rights,

but in a longer post-war history of painful debates about the place of gender

equality within ‘maximalist’ political programmes that inevitably involve the

state in the implementation of individual political rights.95

93 The standard reference articles on the history of women’s rights at the UN in the 1970s do

not mention the World Congress; more recent works on women’s organizing refer to it

but not in any detail. For example, Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda:

Women’s NGOs and Global Governance (Manchester, 2010); Arvonne S. Fraser, ‘Becom-

ing Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights’, Human Rights

Quarterly, 21:4 (Nov 1999), 853–906; Judith Zinsser, ‘From Mexico to Copenhagen to

Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–1985’, Journal of World History,

13:1, (2002), 139–68; Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (eds),

Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, (Basingstoke,

2001).94 Geoff Eley, ‘Corporatism and the Social Democratic Moment’.95 The references to minimalist and maximalist human rights visions are from Samuel

Moyn, The Last Utopia.

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