Family Conceptions at the Intersection of Feminism,Public Health,and Nationalism in Czechoslovakia (1918–1939)

Introduction

In 1934, a physician named Ludmila Dewetterová wrote in her report on the conclusions of the international congress of the Medical Women's International Association: “usage of contraception can lower the number of abortions, both therapeutic [prescribed for health reasons] and criminal.” ¹ Her report is just one of many examples where women experts suggest a reconsideration of family conceptions as a hermitically sealed political category in Czechoslovakia. In this article, I suggest that even the liberal Czechoslovak political elites were anxious about the notion of depopulation, which led them to overlook the societal needs for modernizing family planning. Czechoslovak policies on family and reproduction thus remained an ideological and political question. At the same time, I argue that women experts fueled the ongoing public, political, and specialists’ debates on the sexual liberation of women in Czechoslovakia not only as a matter of ideological and moral importance, but also as a key issue of public health, social justice, and reproductive rights. The largely marginalized accomplishments of these Czechoslovak women in current scholarship bring me to the suggestion that mainstream feminist scholarship limited itself by disregarding the wide range of non-Western women's movements, among them the activism of Czechoslovak women experts. ²

Despite the strength of women's activism in the First Czechoslovak Republic, where women experienced their own significant struggle for social justice, gender equality, and freedom of choice, current scholarship has marginalized or failed to recognize their notable contribution to impacting the state's attitudes toward family planning. Indeed, numerous women actors criticized the reluctance of the state to give up or modernize the pre-war laws regarding family policies. Like many other countries, Czechoslovakia followed pronatalist trends in the belief that this would increase the birthrate, which had dropped dramatically as a consequence of the First World War and the so-called Spanish flu. Some countries banned the advertisement and sale of contraception and increased the criminal penalties for abortions, or prohibited them completely, apart from in extraordinary cases where a woman's life was in danger. ³ The efforts to increase the birthrate while lowering the number of illegal abortions featured in public discourse in the First Czechoslovak Republic as well.

By looking at the activities of Czechoslovak women experts who were encouraging sexual liberation and supporting wider accessibility of contraception, dissemination of knowledge about birth control, and the decriminalization of abortion, I aim to re-consider the role of women in society in the East. ⁴ Focusing on an investigation of academic and popular journals featuring scientific voices and viewpoints, particularly those of physicians – sources produced exclusively by women – I wish to emphasize the impact of women not only on social practices of birth control as a matter of public health, but also on public debates related to family planning as a state interest. The analysis of different sources produced by women actors aims to portray the women's movement in the East, in Czechoslovakia in particular, in contrast to the mainstream liberal feminism in the West. Indeed, an understanding of the latter seems to be insufficient to comprehend both the acute, yet geographically and culturally different struggle of women in the East, and the history of the feminist movement there, which also differed to that in the West. ⁵ As Lorna Finlayson claims, contemporary disciplines maintain the dominance of the Western liberal framework, and so becoming political inside and out, which limits our understanding of the world, including the history of the women's movement in the East. ⁶ Thus, by stepping beyond the frequently re-produced historical claims that there was a rather insignificant feminist movement in the East, I aim to debunk the myth of ‘second-class’ feminism there. ⁷ In doing so, I consider decoloniality an important tool to unfold what the hegemonic Western knowledge failed to do.

Instead of the Literature Review and Methodology: The White Savior Complex and Primitivism of the East ⁸

In 1991, the American legal scholar David Kennedy expressed his worries about Western attitudes towards the East. He feared that the cultural and political arrogance and snobbery toward Eastern Europe during the Cold War era might have been replaced by a similar disdain toward these countries as states in transition. According to him, the dominant image of efforts to integrate Central and East European countries into the West was understood as a “return to normalcy” and 1989 as a rupture that finally “released the East from primitivism.” ⁹ Today, despite the formally claimed political unification and historical legacy represented by the EU, the Western perspective towards the East embodies many residues of Cold War prejudice and contempt, or even of hostilities that existed prior to the Cold War. ¹⁰ As Denise Roman writes, “geopolitically, there are almost no separations from Western Europe – other than the historical treatment of Eastern Europeans as ‘lesser’ Europeans, and Eastern Europe as the traditionally ‘backward,’ ‘uncivilized,’ ‘other.’” ¹¹ Ivan Kalmar defines such a mindset with an umbrella term – Eastern Europeanism – a patronizing attitude of the West towards Eastern Europe. ¹² Thus, an increasing number of scholars have become interested in exploring the potential usefulness of applying an approach of decoloniality to the territories of Eastern Europe, which proves beneficial when thinking about the dynamics of the East–West relationship in the context of the current dominance of the West, and the legacy of the East. ¹³

However persistent they may be, the colonial attitudes of Western academia towards the East are not solely responsible for the inaccurate image of the history of the women's movement there. Shortly after 1989, Western European and American “entrepreneurs,” including feminists, began to flock to the East. ¹⁴ While in some cases, this gave rise to an invaluable exchange between the East and the West, in other instances those who arrived in the East could be considered Western “feminist missionaries,” who originally aimed to extend sympathetic gestures of sisterhood, yet their arrival was often accompanied by a patronizing attitude that limited the value of their “mission” to the women in the East. The Czech sociologist and pioneer of gender studies in the Czech Republic, Jiřina Šiklová, also wrote that “Western feminists sometimes barge in without first trying to understand the culture they are entering.” ¹⁵ And so, by forcing the Western ideals of feminism, reflecting predominantly the values of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, this liberal feminism often failed to recognize and appreciate the position of women of different races, cultures and classes, or the power dynamics that exist and play out among women with transnational backgrounds. ¹⁶

The general Western societal attitude toward the East, feminists included, has been reflected in scholarship as well. The overly represented Western white, middle-class, liberal (or mainstream) feminism almost exclusively refers to feminist theory and scholarship generated in North America and Western Europe. It tends to neglect the history of the fluid and continual work of women activists outside of this cultural and geo-political context by reducing feminism down to actions of certain figures and movements in the West. ¹⁷ Indeed, mainstream feminist theory is modeled on Western realities, as Allaine Cerwonka correctly suggests, and due to this uneven relationship between Western and Eastern academia, scholars from Central and Eastern Europe “are expected to act as ‘transmitters’ of Western knowledge and theory instead of as agents of new knowledge.” ¹⁸ Thus, scholars in the East are expected to effectively repurpose the theoretical apparatus established by Western researchers and apply them to Eastern realities. If forced to transmit what Western academia believes is unmistakable, both Eastern and Western scholars are only left with a rather narrow possibility to produce new knowledge based on actual historical realities and facts, instead of reproducing the existing, “pre-constructed,” and often incorrect narrative. Here my paper offers a study of women experts and their major involvement in debates on conceptions of the family at the intersection of feminism, nationalism, and public health, which have been largely overlooked, deliberately diminished, or intentionally ignored as “second class” feminism.

Pronatalism against Feminism?

Across Europe, women and men sought to limit the size of their families by using various methods of birth control, including terminating pregnancies. At the same time, prompted by the experience of World War I, which caused many deaths and a population decline, every European country desired population growth. Family policies of these countries thus developed health care and administrative systems which – according to Dagmar Herzog “intervened – in both restrictive and supportive ways – in the private lives and even directly in the bodies of citizens.” ¹⁹ The newly recognized Czechoslovak Republic, which proclaimed a parliamentary democracy in 1918, was no exception. ²⁰ Additionally, the country had to establish a stronger and unified ruling element within a multi-national state, and thus to create a synthetic Czechoslovak nation, instead of accepting a nation of Czechs and a nation of Slovaks. This sense of fragile “advantage” in demographics and uncertainty in its future developments manifested as a pervasive fear of possible extinction that was omnipresent throughout political circles, religious circles, and growing number of academics. ²¹ Despite this, the country did not manage to increase the birthrate, even during the period of stabilization in the 1920s. ²²

With increasingly liberal and progressive attitudes towards gender equality, more women became active in politics, and more women entered the National Assembly in Czechoslovakia. Indeed, the majority of the women MPs represented the most progressive forces in Czechoslovak legislature, especially in topics related to gender equality, health care for women and children, and family planning. ²³ However, a significant part of Czechoslovak society and its political representatives embodied a continuation of pre-1918 conservativism, often connected with Catholic dogma. ²⁴ Regarding the question of family policies and family planning, this meant understanding abortions and contraception as a “refusal of maternity,” or as Mindy Jane Roseman claims, evidence that a woman was shunning her “natural” role as a mother and thereby defying the nation. ²⁵ And while the Czechoslovak Republic aimed to create its own identity and family culture and to distinguish itself from its new neighboring countries – Hungary and Austria, it also inherited a number of particularities concerning family life and family planning from the former Austria-Hungary. ²⁶ Indeed, the juridical system of Austria-Hungary was adopted by the Czechoslovak Republic through the Act no. 11/1918, which stated that all hitherto regional and imperial laws and regulations would remain in force. ²⁷ This also meant that the legal regulation of abortion and the murder of newborns in the Czech lands differed from that of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Russia, and so, throughout the existence of the Czechoslovak Republic, a dualism within the criminal law existed. ²⁸ The latter territories adopted Legislative Article 5/1878 on Crimes and Offenses, also known as the Codex Csemegi – Csemegi Code. ²⁹ In the Czech lands, the Austrian Criminal Code, as amended in 1852, applied. ³⁰ Although during the existence of the Czechoslovak Republic, there were efforts to partially liberalize the abortion laws, none of the proposals were successful, and the only possibility to terminate a pregnancy was if it could be proven that the woman's life or health was endangered. ³¹ The continuing Czechoslovak adherence to Austro-Hungarian laws and the persistent promotion of demographic growth stood in opposition to the society's developments, its needs, and to the liberalization of Czechoslovak women, who called for social justice, equality of the sexes, and freedom of choice in family planning.

Hitherto, the pre-war women's movement of Czech and Slovak women had recognized the urgency of their responsibility and role within the Czech and Slovak national emancipation – or national revival – movement, rather than within the international feminist movement. ³² Believing that “[Czechoslovakia] emancipated not only all the Czechoslovak people, but especially its women, to whom it gave suffrage and whom it essentially placed in public life on a level with men,” ³³ many politicians assumed that there was no place or reason for any further progress in equalizing women. Indeed, there was a relative cohesion and agreement between men and women both in the Czech lands and Slovakia, which had originated in the nineteenth century when the Czech and Slovak nation was formed as a counterpart of the ruling German and Hungarian-speaking population of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. While the national revivals of the Czech and Slovak nations differed from each other with certain specific features, both maintained the notion that Czech men and women shared a common enemy – the Monarchy, and its Austrian part in particular. Similarly, this applied to Slovak men and women whose common enemy was the Hungarian “oppressor.” ³⁴ The national struggle against the German and Hungarian elements increased the unity of all who identified as Slovaks and Czechs. Encouraging the education of women and supporting suffrage meant that Slovak and Czech men understood the importance of the woman's role in the national struggle and saw women as their allies in the shared and united fight against the Austria-Hungarian Monarchy. ³⁵

Yet, soon after the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic, women, organized in various movements, became more outspoken when challenging the double standard of sexual morality, inequality within the institution of marriage, negligence towards women's health, and the disregard for the growing desire for birth control. However, their arguments did not cast men as opposition, but guided by historical experience, they rather sought a cooperative partnership with men in their struggle. It should not be forgotten that the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, influenced by his wife, Charlotte Garrigue, was considered a defender of women's rights and equality of the sexes. ³⁶ Thus, in the Czechoslovak Republic, more debates on family planning and birth control involving politicians, scientists, and other specialists entered the social discourse. However, not much changed in the area of reproduction policy and abortion, since none of the proposed bills legalizing abortions were successful until after the dissolution of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Despite the availability of some birth control methods, illegal abortions remained the main means of family planning. ³⁷ Additionally, access to different methods of birth control was majorly limited due to high prices, and thus a person's socio-economic status ultimately played the most crucial role in family planning.

Non-reproductive sexuality, and thus sexual nonconformity, created anxieties about national survival across the whole spectrum of Czechoslovak political parties that supported pronatalism. ³⁸ While the majority of politicians, scientists, medical and legal professionals, and religious leaders all agreed that it was necessary to lower the number of illegal abortions, and thus increase the number of births, the women's movement argued differently, and seemingly stood in opposition. Women sought to lower the rates of infant death, improve women's health, and increase financial support for mothers; they also desired safe and accessible methods of birth control and called for the legalization of abortion.

Family Planning and Women Experts

If we reject Eastern Europeanism when analyzing the involvement of women actors in family planning in Czechoslovakia, the agency of women experts appears to be autochthonous, yet well-integrated within the international context, and dynamically developing within the local circumstances. ³⁹ From 1920, it was predominantly the women in Czechoslovak politics, especially Františka Plamínková and Betty Karpíšková, who aimed to liberalize family policies, including those related to birth control and abortions. In 1932, the last, unsuccessful attempt to change the law criminalizing abortions took place in the Czechoslovak Republic before its dissolution in 1938/1939. ⁴⁰ While the political discussion was forced to abate, the debates did not vanish but moved to different societal spheres, such as those of academics. Many scientists, physicians in particular, were able to influence politicians and convince them of their right to recommend medical and health-related care. The same physicians were also able to express concerns about a range of social ills, such as urban poverty, alcoholism, malnutrition, and unemployment, as well as matters related to family policies, such as low birthrates, at the same time high rates of child mortality, and increasing numbers of illegal abortions, and incorporated these topics into discussions about the interests of national health, and thus a potential population increase. ⁴¹ Women scientists, too, were part of the discussion. By introducing the following cases showing a range of women's voices, I suggest that women were active and outspoken within women's unions and clubs, but also as experts at various scientific associations, or as individuals with certain agendas, worldviews, and political beliefs. Indeed, women's voices were more often present in interwar European society than before, yet in comparison with their male counterparts, women's suggestions were often marginalized.

In 1932, the most prestigious Czechoslovak medical journal Praktický lékař (General Practitioner) reported on the 5^th International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (hereafter WLSR ⁴² ), which took place in Brno in September 1932. ⁴³ At the event, which was originally planned to take place in Moscow, 85 speakers discussed the topic of sexual liberation. ⁴⁴ They also addressed social inequality, protection of unmarried women and children born out of wedlock, as well as the separation of church and state, sexual education, birth control, eugenics, legal issues related to sexuality, such as homosexuality, prostitution, and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. ⁴⁵ Together with the founder of the WLSR, Magnus Hirschfeld, ⁴⁶ one of the most significant and revolutionary figures was a journalist Elise Ottesen–Jensen representing Sweden, known for her activities as a sex educator, a feminist, and an anarchist, who understood birth control as part of a woman's right to have control over her own body and sexuality. ⁴⁷

By supporting the organization of the Congress at the state-run Faculty of Medicine at Masaryk University, Czechoslovakia showed its rather progressive and liberal attitude toward sexual liberation. ⁴⁸ The Czechoslovak committee was represented by numerous professors, and physicians, including the physician, Dr. Sonková, from the Union of Czechoslovak Women Physicians, which was established not in opposition to male colleagues, but with their support, and aimed to defend the interests of women physicians within the profession and to promote women's welfare from a medical point of view. ⁴⁹ Women professionals were a minority within the Czechoslovak committee, and a similar disproportion between women and men was reflected among participants at the congress. Among Czechoslovak female physicians, the opinions about sexuality and family planning were heterogenous, thus not every member of the Union was on the same page when it came to birth control and abortion. For example, one of the three founding members, Anna Honzáková, opposed the attempt to legalize abortions in 1920, claiming that legalizing abortion would harm women both medically and morally, as it would allow them to avoid taking responsibility. While rejecting the idea of social justifications for abortion, Honzáková, unlike the dogmatic Union of Catholic Women, nevertheless supported the promotion of contraception. ⁵⁰ While the participants of the congress were far from being unanimous, the general agreement included considering legalization of abortion for social reasons, which was mainly supported by arguments about women and men from the lowest classes whose poverty deepened with every additional child born. ⁵¹ Additionally, it was acknowledged that working-class women suffered the most from the criminalization of abortion not only because of the punishments themselves, but also because illegally performed abortions often resulted in health issues or, in some cases, even death. For many, legalization of abortion was not seen as an optimal solution, however, a general agreement was reached that, until problems related to the inaccessibility of contraception were solved, safe abortions would remain the only solution. ⁵²

In the aftermath of the congress, one of the participants, Julka Chlapcová-Gjorgjevičová, a Serbian writer and translator living in Czechoslovakia, and the first woman in Austria-Hungary to receive a doctorate in 1906, ⁵³ wrote a report suggesting that the key to the equality was sexual reform, including birth and fertility control. ⁵⁴ By this, she did not suggest impunity in cases of abortion, but liberating women by providing access to contraception. Chlapcová-Gjorgjevičová was one of the most progressive and critical voices in the women's movement in Czechoslovakia. In her article entitled The Catholic Church and Birth Control, she claimed that, despite the fact that the Czechoslovak Republic was a secular state because the majority of Czechoslovak citizens were predominantly Roman Catholics, the Catholic Church and its teaching had the greatest impact on the society. ⁵⁵ According to her, the Catholic Church represented by the Pope vigorously refused all methods of birth control and herewith condemned any sexual intercourse other than in the interests of reproduction. Chlapcová-Gjorgjevičová was referring to the papal encyclical of Casti Connubii issued in 1930 by Pius XI., in which abortion was described as the intentional murder of an innocent person and any justification for abortion was rejected outright. ⁵⁶ The Catholic Church also renounced all forms of birth control, chemical or mechanical, but allowed the so-called “natural family planning,” ⁵⁷ meaning the practice of avoiding pregnancy by abstaining from sexual intercourse when the woman is fertile. ⁵⁸

Chlapcová-Gjorgjevičová stressed that the authorities in the Catholic Church were guilty of limiting knowledge about the methods of birth control while ordering people to keep reproducing, or suggesting they live ascetically. In these ways, she argued, the Church was intentionally slowing down any developments in science. ⁵⁹ On the other hand, the modernizing trends within the society caused fear, not only among religious leaders, but also among many conservative politicians, who saw the potential “gender disorder” and “unregulated sexuality and reproduction” as a threat to their understanding of sexuality, which was based on the biblical instruction to humanity to be “fruitful and multiply, and fill the Earth” (Genesis 1:28). ⁶⁰ Thus, the only sexual intercourse they saw as a morally purposeful was where the couple had a commitment to reproduce.

Another example of women's expert knowledge comes from an international congress of the Medical Women's International Association (MWIA), which took place in Stockholm in August 1934. ⁶¹ While many members of the MWIA clearly had a feminist agenda, the main aim of the Association was to promote the newest research and urgent issues of societies around the globe. ⁶² In 1934, the topic of the congress was Physical Education – Birth Control. The MWIA's International Conferences produced knowledge on a national level that got transferred into international knowledge as the results of the conference were taken back to each participating state. In Czechoslovakia, the report about the conference findings on the social and health benefits of birth control for women was published in Praktický lékař. ⁶³ Thereby, the Czechoslovak women doctors who participated in the conference not only recommended further research on birth control and promoted the use of its various methods among Czechoslovak women and men, but they kept questioning the prevalent criminalization of abortions as well. While knowledge from the congress did affect professional, public, and political debates on birth control and abortion in Czechoslovakia, none of the states ultimately applied any of the suggested changes. ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, this example shows the involvement of Czechoslovak women physicians on an international level, as well as their public and professional engagement with local conditions.

Czechoslovak ophthalmologist Ludmila Dewetterová, as a representative of Czechoslovak medicine, wrote a report about the main findings of the congress concerning the birth control for the medical journal Praktický lékař. She too was a member of the Women's National Council, ⁶⁵ where she was responsible for the activities of the department “Mother and Child,” debating the abortion paragraph – §144 – as an urgent issue. ⁶⁶ The report by Dewetterová discusses several matters regarding family planning in respective countries. The committee agreed on the importance of birth control and educating couples about its methods, but it also pointed out many flaws in the state family policies. The representatives suggested that working class women in cities and rural areas were significantly disadvantaged when it came to accessing contraception and knowledge about methods of birth control compared to women from middle and upper classes. ⁶⁷ The Central Europe Committee included countries from what we understand as West – Austria and France, and the so-called East – Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, which suggests that there was no notion of what is today understood as a separate entity of Eastern Europe. While showing certain differences in attitudes on family planning, all members agreed that only the usage of various methods of birth control could help to decrease the number of abortions – those for health reasons and those identified as criminal. Furthermore, the committee found that knowledge of contraception methods did affect the number of children born out of wedlock in the cities, where more people were familiar with birth control, while in rural areas the lacking knowledge about the practices of birth control caused a higher number of children to be born out of wedlock or brought more women to the decision to undergo illegal abortions.

Within the Central European Committee, Poland embodied the most liberal and progressive attitudes toward birth control, abortion, but also sexual education and the treatment of infertility in both men and women. The progressiveness of Poland had an impact on the discussion, but the members from the countries with more conservative family policies did not see any possibilities to adopt Poland's advanced measures in family planning. France, e.g., represented the completely opposite pole – abortion there was criminalized and penalized, even though the committee member from France claimed that there were more pregnancies ending in termination than in birth in France. Yet, according to the French committee members, any education about birth control or any other promotion or advertisement of contraception was unthinkable. Czechoslovakia was caught between promoting sexual liberation, on the one hand, and the need to increase the birthrate on the other. The state, as well as the members of the committee, did not agree on decriminalizing abortion, but did agree on opening up the discussion on considering social or individual (not only health) indicators for abortion. A proposal was made to support research on chemical contraception, free up the contraceptives market, educate the masses about birth control, and thus to fight criminal abortions and their harmful impact on women's bodies. The women physicians in Czechoslovakia understood birth control mostly as a tool to prevent abortions as a societal illness. Thus, they did not perceive motherhood and family planning as a private decision, but rather as public issue in the interests of the nation. No extensive resolution was reached on the issue of birth control at the Stockholm conference in 1934. However, the participants emphasized the significance of the event, which was regarded as the materialization of up-to-date research interests that were now available for the medical community at a national level and for the purposes of international comparison and exchange.

Reconsidering the Role of Feminism in Family Policies in the East

The history of expert knowledge of sexuality and birth control is also the history of family planning, which helps to determine the agency of women and men or the range of possible actions available to them to control their fertility. The case of Czechoslovak women experts demonstrates the significance of women's voices in shaping family conceptions between their own feminism, the state's nationalism, and public health. The Czechoslovak case also shows that there is no single story of feminism, and therefore also no option of viewing feminism only through one lens. Despite the formal political unity represented by the EU and its Eastern European members, the legacy of the Cold War and the continuation of the cultural division between East and West has led to a tendency to condescend or overlook the history of the women's movement, especially in the East, and its involvement in policy-making around family planning. ⁶⁸ Furthermore, the lacking research on the women's movement and family planning in the East embodies a continuation of prejudices, misunderstanding, and simplification of women's involvement in policy-making in general, and practices of family planning as both private decisions and a national affair in the past. As a result of these two factors, scholarship has tended to entrench an idea that the contribution of Czechoslovak women in challenging and changing the state's policies towards women and their bodies was negligible. Understandably, the work of Czechoslovak women activists, politicians, and scientists was not an exact replication of the feminist movement in the West. On the one hand, it was formed as a reflection of dominant political thinking in the wider European context – both in the West and in the East. On the other hand, it reflected the local environment and the needs at that time for addressing particular social issues within Czechoslovak society.

Historical experience from the period of national struggle against Austria-Hungary taught both Slovak and Czech women to see men as their allies. This is demonstrated, e.g., in men's encouragement towards the establishment of women's expert associations, women's inclusion in the most prestigious academic medical journal Praktický lékař, and the support of women MP's law proposals by their male counterparts. This clearly did not mean that women had absolute support among their male colleagues or an equal position in terms of gender roles, yet it does show that women were considered essential for united actions towards a certain goal. However, the vision that every man and woman, at least those considered to be Czechoslovak (or Czech and Slovak), would celebrate the newly established state with no opposition turned out to be wishful thinking. Indeed, the Czechoslovak state, which was fighting against a decreasing birthrate and increasing numbers of illegal abortions, had to face the contra-arguments of those who were predominantly targeted by their family policies – women. Significant numbers of women from various milieus, with different political or ideological agendas, among them experts, fought against the pronatalism of the state, which was influenced by the traditionalism, conservativism, and dogmatism of the Catholic Church, where sexuality was only seen in terms of its usefulness for reproduction. Thus, the work and activities of women scientists, and physicians in particular, represented the most progressive forces in the Czechoslovak society.

While, these women were not working under one umbrella organization, and did not share a united feminist ideology, their activities had an impact on public and political discussions leaning towards major changes in family policies, concerning, e.g., the treatment of children born outside of wedlock, pre and postnatal care of women, and decriminalization of abortion. Despite the strong opinions against criminalizing abortions, some female actors, keeping in mind the very recent national struggle, offered ‘solutions’ for population growth, promoting alternatives to abortions, such as various birth control methods, health and social care for children and mothers, etc. Their progressive force and their arguments were, on the one hand, opposing the uncritical pronatalism of the state, but on the other hand, they were offering alternatives to the dysfunctional status quo of outdated Czechoslovak laws, adopted from the former Austria-Hungarian juridical system. While the issue of family planning found its place in political and public discussion, it continued to be considered a national affair rather than a matter of individual choice. The feminist activism of these women emerged from these specific issues rather than by following mainstream feminism as represented by the West.

Careful research on the field of feminism in the East, which has been left unattended or misinterpreted for decades, will help to debunk the myths and rhetoric rooted in the Cold War era. Re-thinking preexisting ideas about East Central and Eastern Europe as a space of sexual wilderness, nonmodernity, and backwardness might bring about a fresh, unbiased view on the feminism, sexuality, and family planning in the East. ⁶⁹ By applying decoloniality to the field of gender studies, feminism, and social history of the East, we can thus step aside from Eastern Europeanism and see the autochthonous developments without the notion that the West is a default for studying every aspect of every society. ⁷⁰ Therefore, socio-political activities within the cultural and social field of Czechoslovak women suggest that further comparative research is needed for us to better understand the women's movement in the East as another model of feminism, and an alternative to Western modernity. ⁷¹ Decolonizing the women's movements of the East could challenge but also broaden views of elite Western mainstream feminism and Western scholarship. In this way, investigating the women's movement and activism of women from the East might contribute to a broader understanding of feminism. ⁷² However, instead of efforts to assimilate, forcefully transmit or repeat the existing knowledge produced by Western scholarship, Allaine Cerwonka suggests that both East European scholarship and the study of the women's movement in the East need to obtain a degree of power, which would then challenge the mainstream feminism and its privileged position. ⁷³ Furthermore, the West, and the Western feminism and scholarship may still not be ready to acknowledge and share their privilege, or as Jiřina Šiklová pointed out, “only when we realize these differences, limitations, as well as the specificity of differing points of view, is it worth continuing the discussion.” ⁷⁴