I was reading an article today about women’s rights in post-1989 ex-Soviet Bloc countries. I started thinking about the old Soviet constitution, which is full of wonderful language—many of the same nice-sounding concepts that we’d consider “progressive” today and that we also find in Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto of 1919. The Soviet Constitution was a one big dead letter, of course; and Mussolini compromised away his early socialist ideals for popularity and, later, power.
The article had quotations from leaders of woman-themed NGOs and many made the point that as communism fell and states moved toward democracy, some rights important to women, such as the right to unconditional abortion, were taken away. The reason was to show that political progress, as commonly understood, could actually mean a net regress in rights for a certain segment of the population. In this case, the segment was half the population!
What struck me, however, was not the reaction to rights taken away; but the seeming blindness to rights gained. Remember the old joke about being granted a wish, but with the catch that whatever you get, your neighbour gets twice as much (“I wish for my arm to be cut off” is the punchline)? I think something similar was at play here. Clearly, citizens of these newly non-communist countries gained a say in the political process via free[er] elections. Though elections had been held prior to 1989—some right after the war ended—what good is an election if each voting booth is next to an incinerator and the communist winner walks away with a stunning 95% majority? Now people had a real voice.
But, relatively to one another, they mostly had the same individual strength of voice. Women, in this case, didn’t gain anything in relation to men. Before 1989, neither men or women could influence who ruled. After 1989, both could. Hence, even though women did gain a new power, it was not specifically a female power. And what was taken away—unconditional abortion—was specifically female.
There’s also the issue that the right to vote was gained only in fact. In theory, it had been around. Yet it’s dangerous to say that it wasn’t a new right. If in one hundred years we read an article like the one I read, we will get a false picture of things.
The reason I thought about the Soviet constitution and Fascist Manifesto is different: if history is reconstructed through documents and “important” documents overpower others, how long until someone takes my examples at face value and forgets (or “forgets”, for those of us who are more cynical) that they were not actually representative of reality?
In my hypothetical 100-years-later article, the author will seem to be authoritative if he or she says that abortion was taken away and nothing was gained. He or she may even point to something like the Soviet constitution to refute the notion that 1989 brought with it the vote. After all, the beautiful language of the official and “important” document says it right there: everyone has the right to vote.
The conclusion will follow: in 1989, women gained nothing and lost the right to unconditional abortion; in communist times, people enjoyed greater individual freedom and had more rights than they did after communism fell.
I wonder how many past societies we’ve unrightly condemned or praised based on words that didn’t correspond to practice. In historians’ defense, the words may be all that they had access to or that we have left. Indeed, what is good history may still be bad truth.
This Defeasible Life 