Читать книгу Seven Czech Women - Josette Baer - Страница 9

I selected the seven women on subjective grounds since, in my opinion, they represent the spirit and reality of seven distinct historical eras of Czech and Czechoslovak history. My three criteria for selection are: all of them have a Czech cultural and political identity; second, their visibility in the Czech, Czechoslovak and international public eye; and third, their physical presence in the Czech lands.

Compared with the volume on Slovak women, I have made three exceptions for this book with respect to visibility and physical presence. First, although she emigrated in 1948 after the Communist coup d’état, Eva ‘Mimi’ Jiránková’s story (chapter III) is a lively account of the liberties Czech women enjoyed in the First Republic (1918–1938) and how their lives changed with the beginning of the German occupation in March 1939. She was most probably the only woman in history whose husband was arrested by the Gestapo on her wedding night. Second, Nataša Lišková (chapter VI) is what one would call an ordinary citizen, that is, without ties to the Communist Party or influential relatives; she is not a celebrity. Yet, her personal account of the normalization provides us with a vivid picture how Czech women experienced the liberties of the Prague Spring and the post-68 tightening of the political screw dictated by Moscow. Bringing up children in the harsh political and economic realities of the Husák[4] regime was a daily ordeal. Third, as a world-famous top model, Tereza Maxová is highly visible in the Czech and international public sphere; she is not a resident of the Czech Republic, but frequently travels to Prague to support the activities of her foundation.

Thus, given that the Western reader is much more familiar with the names of famous Czech (-born) women such as Madeleine Albright, Olga Havlová, Marta Kubišová, Martina Navratilova, Božena Němcová,[5] Petra Kvitová and Ivana Trump, I took the liberty to make the exceptions mentioned above: Mrs Jiránková emigrated and she is not a celebrity. Mrs Lišková stayed in Czechoslovakia, and she is not a celebrity either, and Mrs Maxová is a celebrity who lives abroad.

Each woman can be seen as a symbol of her times representing the spirit and reality of the historical era in which she lives and acts. All seven women share their belief in women’s equality with men, political liberty and participation in a rule-of-law state and fraternity. They share the idea that caring for others in the sense of res publica, that which is common to all, is the social glue that keeps state, nation and government together. They share also a crucially important legacy of the Enlightenment: tolerance. Only tolerance as the civilized lack of interest in what others, my neighbour, my friend or my colleague, believes in allows for pluralism, which is the principal element of a democratic civil society.

My selection is not representative – and I don’t claim that it is. Furthermore, it is far from my intention to belittle or ignore the effort millions of Czech women made in the Austrian monarchy, during the two world wars, under the German protectorate and Communism to bring up their families. On top of scarce resources, they had to deal with an immense bureaucracy and a patronizing state that treated the citizens as children, depriving them of the most basic civil rights, such as the right to leave one’s country. After 1989, citizens had to deal with the harsh transformation of the economic system; Capitalism, with its often inhuman face, did not acknowledge a right to work.

It is far from my intention to make a moral judgement about those who emigrated; nobody who has not experienced daily life in a non-democratic political system, be it a monarchy run by the aristocracy and the clergy or a workers’ paradise governed by the Communist Party, should be judgemental of those who leave in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their families. My focus is on the seven Czech women who can teach us a lot about courage and commitment; they voice, through their activities, what millions of unknown Czech women were and are concerned with, sharing with them the often brutal experience of Czech and Czechoslovak politics.

Before I present the portraits, a brief note about the historical epochs dealt with in this volume: my principal aim was to avoid repetition. My selection of portraits should thus be understood as a deliberate choice designed to throw light on specific political events and realities that affected each nation and its history in their own particular way. Therefore, I do not deal with the Munich Agreement of 1938, Hitler’s dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and WWII in this volume, since I have dedicated chapter III of the Slovak volume to this period. Chapter IV of this volume is dedicated to the Communist Party’s assumption of power in February 1948 and the early years of Czechoslovak Stalinism, because I have not dealt with these years in the Slovak volume. The political liberalization starting in the 1960s and culminating in January 1968 with Alexander Dubček’s (1921–1992) election to First Secretary of the KSČ, the Prague Spring, the invasion and the normalization are presented extensively in chapter IV of the Slovak volume. Yet, the normalization affected the Czechs in a different way than the Slovaks; therefore, I present a brief summary of the normalization in the Czech part in chapter V, focussing on two specific aspects of those years.

The years following the separation of Czechoslovakia in 1993 are not dealt with in this volume, since I presented them in my oral history interviews with the Czechoslovak diplomat and Slovak politician Magdaléna Vášáryová (*1948) and former Slovak Prime Minister Iveta Radičová (*1957).[6] The interviews introduce the reader to the difficult years from 1994 to 1998 when Vladimír Mečiar (*1942) was Prime Minister of the young Slovak Republic. By contrast, there was no threat of a relapse into communist-style authoritarianism in the young Czech Republic. Western political orientation and the democratic and market-orientated spirit of the Czech government with the late Václav Havel (1936–2011) elected Czech President in 1993 dominated the years after 1993.

Naturally, the seven Czech women I chose are of the same singular importance for the Czech lands as their Slovak counterparts were for their nation. The two volumes are separate entities in their own right and complement each other with respect to the historical contexts presented in both volumes; the two together should be perceived as companion books, providing the reader with a comprehensive picture of women’s lives in the Czech lands and Slovakia, stressing the distinct political circumstances Slovak and Czech women had to cope with.