Abstract
This article contributes to the discussion on global women’s rights during the Cold War period by examining how improving the situation of mothers, and education and literacy for women, was presented in the documents and publications of the transnational Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). It shows that while the WIDF’s ideas concerning motherhood and education positively influenced the global discussion on women’s status and welfare in early Cold War period, technological innovations, together with the development of feminist thinking around reproduction and new pedagogical theories and methods that emerged in the late 1960s–1970s, diminished their global importance. The article is based on the analysis of the WIDF periodical publication, the journal Women of the Whole World, and on archival sources.
Feminist scholars and activists have criticized the effort to speak in the name of all “women,” due to their common position in respect to power (and in opposition to all “men”). The imagined “sisterhood” was seen as a counter-productive political construction by early Marxist feminists, who considered it problematic to ignore class differences. 1 Black American and postcolonial feminists stressed the complex hierarchies and differences between the past and present in connection to colonialism and its legacies. According to them, the concept of “global sisterhood” concealed these differences and hierarchies. In particular, Chandra T. Mohanty criticized the assumption that women are a homogeneous group with identical interests, perspectives, and goals, and similar experiences. 2 As Chiara Bonfiglioli has shown, women from the Global South who attended the first United Nations (UN) women’s conference in Mexico City in 1975 also protested Western feminists’ language of “sisterhood.” 3
In the context of recently burgeoning studies on cooperation between women from countries under state socialism (the “Eastern bloc”) and women in the Global South (or “developing countries”), questions about the content and character of this cooperation, in addition to hierarchies and conflicts between different groups of women, seem to be especially important. However, these issues have only just begun to be studied. 4 While Kristin Ghodsee stressed solidarity between Zambian and African women as the primary reason for the organization of courses for African women in Bulgaria in the late 1970s, 5 Elisabeth Banks focused on the cooperation between the Soviet and Mozambican Women’s Committees to show incongruencies in and a partial misunderstanding of the relationship between the two women’s organizations. 6
This article contributes to the discussion about global women’s rights during the Cold War by examining how the improvement of the situation of mothers and of education and literacy for women was presented in the documents and publications of the transnational women’s organization, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). The WIDF was founded in Paris in 1945 to defend women and children and prevent a new war. 7 The federation, which in the mid-1970s included women’s organizations from more than one hundred countries, considered itself a global actor; from 1967 on it held the status of an “observer” at the UN and actively cooperated with UNESCO and other UN organizations. 8 The WIDF was an influential international actor in global discussions on women’s rights during the Cold War, including the decisions on the International Women’s Year and the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979. 9 At the same time, the WIDF’s publications and declarations clearly indicated its position on the Cold War division: the WIDF often criticized American imperialism, accused the “Western bloc” of promoting an arms race and militarism, but was rather uncritical of the Soviet and “Eastern bloc” Cold War politics. In particular, the Soviet solution to the “women’s question” was presented as very successful. 10 The WIDF is known for paying special attention to the rights of women in developing countries and was involved in multiple activities promoting changes to discriminatory legislation, fostering the development of professional education, health services for women and mothers, girls’ schooling, and other improvements to women’s status. At the same time, previous research indicates some tensions and hierarchies among women inside and around this organization, particularly during the organization’s first decade, when its leadership was represented mainly by white European leftist women. 11
This article explores how the WIDF addressed the problems of motherhood and education, and how women from state socialist and developing countries, and communication between them, were presented in the WIDF’s publications and documents. It pays close attention to the lack of coherence in the WIDF’s work on issues of motherhood and education, and frictions in the presentations of these issues; those important for women of the “whole world.” I use WIDF’s official publications, including its journal, Women of the Whole World, as well as published declarations and reports. The WIDF journal was published from 1951 in several languages (primarily French, English, Russian, Spanish, and German, but from the 1960s on, it was also published in Arabic), but for this article, I relied on its Russian and English versions. The journal’s main editorial team was located in East Berlin.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, most of the content that was published in different languages was practically identical (the articles were translated); from time to time, their placement inside the journal differed; although in a very few cases, mainly in the 1950s, the journal editors could add material aimed specifically at those reading the journal in a particular language. In writing this article, I departed from the assumption that materials in the Russian and English versions of the journal were the same. I also analyze archival materials, primarily those preserved in Moscow, in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Archiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, later GARF) in the collection of the Committee of Soviet Women, the WIDF member organization. These materials consisted in part of WIDF official materials sent from East Berlin to the Committee of Soviet Women (further CSW) as a member organization, and partly of internal CSW reports and correspondence connected to the WIDF activities and the Soviet role in them. 12 Last, I use some materials preserved in the Blinken Open Society Archive (later the OSA) in Budapest. The last collection contains reports prepared by collaborators of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and some of the source media materials they used to prepare these reports.
The article consists of three parts. First, an overview of the WIDF’s position on how women’s rights as mothers, in addition to children’s and women’s rights to education, should be addressed globally and why. The next two parts look closely at two important discussions in women’s rights in the 1970s connected with motherhood and education. Thus, the second part deals with the WIDF’s approach to the issues of population control and reproductive choice in the mid-1970s, while the third part of the article discusses the WIDF’s conferences on the liquidation of illiteracy in Africa and the education of women in Latin America during the same period. Attention to these two discussions will help to explore a certain incoherence and friction in the representations of women in state socialist and developing countries.
Defending Mothers’ Rights and Supporting Equality of Access to Education
The presentation of women as mothers was at the center of the WIDF’s rhetoric and practical work: this transnational organization saw every woman as having interconnected roles of mother, worker, and citizen. The materials of the WIDF Congress in Copenhagen in 1953 suggest that this vision of woman’s roles should serve to unite women globally in the fight for their rights, for world peace, and for the future. 13
The WIDF considered mothers as important actors responsible for protecting the welfare and well-being of their children and, thus, the world’s future. In turn, improvement to the conditions for the protection of mother’s health and children’s health and education was seen as inseparable from the goal of disarmament: states should spend less money on acquiring arms and preparing for war to provide better conditions for mothers and children. Based on their “natural” criteria (the reproductive capacities of their bodies), all women were seen as interested in receiving support from the state as mothers. All mothers, including those living in dependent territories and colonies, had access to health care, childcare, and food as well as the possibility of being free from work in connection to childbirth and breastfeeding.
While the need for state support for mothers—as opposed to the view of motherhood as a “private” or “family” issue outside state intervention—was often at the center of WIDF events (see materials of the WIDF Congress in Vienna 1958 14 ), the right of all children (including girls) to go to school was assumed to be an obvious right, and by the late 1950s was not specifically discussed. However, the WIDF periodicals paid attention to difficulties accessing education in poor countries, and in regions where only part of the population was literate. 15 As in the case of motherhood, the WIDF publications on education also suggested that striving for peace (and stopping the arms race) would contribute to literacy in developing countries: “1 percent of the military budget and Africa will be literate!” stated the title of one of the articles in the WIDF journal from 1963. 16 The WIDF further saw the right for education for all children as hindered by government systems like apartheid, where schools were segregated by race; the WIDF publications severely criticized racial discrimination. 17
The WIDF was a transnational women’s organization that included member organizations from more than one hundred countries. As a global organization, the WIDF also paid attention to the protection of the rights of mothers and children in non-European countries, including in the colonies and dependent territories. For example, in 1948, the WIDF decided to send a delegation to several countries in Asia with the aim of exploring the situation of women in colonial and postcolonial countries. 18 Despite many political hindrances and practical difficulties, the delegation visited India, Burma, and Malaya, with a particularly extensive visit of India, which had only recently become independent. While visiting different industrial and agricultural workplaces, the Commission saw how poverty and a lack of medical help affected a large part of the population. 19 It also stated that women were performing difficult tasks at work (e.g., working as loaders), and did not have access to maternity leave; 20 furthermore, it paid attention to the fact that women working in mines were often losing their capacity to become mothers due to difficult working conditions. 21 Many children were also working hard instead of going to school. 22 The report attempted to bring awareness about existing problems and also called for changes.
In contrast to the lack of rights among women in Asian countries who were fighting for independence or had achieved it only recently, the WIDF journal presented the experiences of women living in countries under state socialism and deemed the protection of mothers and the education of children as very positive. The WIDF journal’s publications about the situation of mothers and children in these countries did not mention difficulties or problems concerning health care or education, indicating, however, that such problems were common in the past, and were skillfully dealt with by the Soviet/state-socialist authorities in the earlier years of the process of building socialism. While the example of Central Asia was often used to showcase the Soviet achievements at the colonial borderlands, 23 the Central Asian experience was seen as especially convincing when it came to demonstrating the possibility of going from women’s seclusion and illiteracy to a rapidly growing level of both literacy and women’s involvement in productive work outside of the home. 24 The articles published in the WIDF journal demonstrated care for mothers and the accessibility of education for women in the countries of state socialism. 25 International guests could also visit some of the institutions for mothers and children—schools and hospitals—while attending conferences and other events in Central Asia. The study tours organized by the WIDF for representatives of women’s organizations from Latin American, African, and Asian countries were intended to convince them of the benefits of the socialist system.
For example, the article published in the first issue of the WIDF journal from 1963 informed readers about a seminar on the education of African women taking place in Tashkent, Central Asia, in September 1962. 26 This seminar was organized in cooperation with UNESCO and brought together representatives of women’s organizations from some fifteen African countries and some dependent territories in Africa. Guests were invited to visit universities, maternity hospitals, kindergartens, factories, and cultural institutions in all the Central Asian Soviet republics, with the WIDF journal writing about guests being positively impressed by the changes that the Soviet power brought to this formerly “backward” region. The article was accompanied by pictures demonstrating Soviet achievements: children in kindergarten in Kyrgyzstan dancing the national dance, Uzbek female translators speaking three languages, and happy Central Asian girls in school uniforms. 27
Together with reports on international congresses, workshops, and study visits, the WIDF journal also published more analytical articles dedicated to women’s work, education, and care for mothers and children. For example, in 1975, the journal published a comparative overview on support for mothers and children in state socialist countries with reference to the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (thus implying that state socialist countries had special achievements in following the principles expressed in the declaration). The article compares the number of days of maternity leave in different countries, the number of specialized hospitals for children, as well as the number of children enrolled in elementary schools. To stress the importance of socialism for positive changes in women’s and children’s lives, the article noted that in the case of Cuba, the actual number of children enrolled in elementary schools in 1959 was three times larger than it had been the previous year (1958) before the Cuban Revolution. 28 This information is compared to data on (mainly, but not exclusively) Western countries, indicating child poverty, and a “catastrophic” shortage of teachers in some schools in West Germany. Finally, the article published some UN data about the low levels of schooling in Africa and in some other parts of the world.
The connection between women’s education, women’s access to work, and the social progress (development) of the country was the subject of many publications in the journal. For example, in 1959, Luisa Vicentini, a WIDF journalist from Chile, published an article dedicated to the lack of correspondence between education that women in many countries receive, and the jobs available to them. 29 Looking at announcements of women who wanted to find work in her country, Chile, Vicentini found large discrepancies between market demands and the women’s (lack of) education, professional skills, and lack of the childcare facilities. Thus, the author of the article suggested that overcoming discrimination in the job market required extensive effort, including expansion of the possibilities for improving qualification, the creation of childcare facilities, and the fight against discriminatory legislation limiting women’s ability to work. Another article by Lilavati Banker from the same year, 1959, was dedicated to “Women and Industrialization in India.” Like Vicentini, Banker suggested there were inconsistences between women’s education and the job market; getting an education as a girl does not necessarily lead to a well-paid and qualified job afterward. In particular, the author noted that even if India had a law demanding the availability of nurseries at enterprises where married women are working, this law was often ignored by the administration, including through direct violations like registering married women working there as non-married. 30
These and similar publications in the WIDF journal suggested that the right to education was seen by the WIDF as primarily connected to remunerated work in the public sector. Therefore, the main aim of such publications was possibly to convince readers of the need for women to not be educated less than men to be able to work like them. Due to this visible connection between the education of women and women’s remunerative work, the WIDF publications probably paid little attention to other aspects of education, including the discussion about the gendered content of education or different forms and styles of teaching.
Last, the WIDF publications connected their claim to improving professional help to women in the case of childbirth, care for reproductive health, and childcare to women’s special social and political roles due to their “natural” predispositions, as well as “maternal” capacities, responsibilities, and functions. This strategy could be used by women’s organizations in countries outside of Europe in the struggle to improve women’s and children health and material conditions. The premises of this construction were not free from friction and incoherence—indeed, not all the women saw themselves as mothers or considered their role as mothers to be central in their lives. Repeating the presentation of the happy mothers in the countries of state socialism, where maternal care is guaranteed by the state, left no space to discuss other aspects of reproduction, including those in state socialist countries, like the desirability of having a child, or the role of fathers. Neither did the focus on “happy mothers” allow WIDF functionaries to differentiate between the different needs of women, including differences created as part of the imperial politics of the Soviet center toward non-Russian borderlands. 31 Indeed, the centrality of children and the productive work of women’s lives seemed taken for granted, “natural,” and as not requiring any justification. As I demonstrate below, the development of modern contraception and of feminist ideas about the possibility of different life scenarios for women would come to seriously disturb this vision.
Confronting “Population Control”
While discussions on “population control” and “birth control” attracted global attention during the interwar period, the first attempts at implementing these programs belong to the 1950s (see, for example, the Swedish program in Sri Lanka, the former Ceylon 32 ). However, in opposition to the “care for mothers and children,” these discussions seem to be rather invisible in the documents of the WIDF up until the very late period of global discussions around the “population crises” of the 1970s. 33
The countries of state socialism strongly promoted state support for motherhood as their answer to the problems of poverty, inequality, and, later on, underdevelopment. However, during the first decades of population control programs, the WIDF did not express a specific position in respect to these programs: neither were they propagated by the WIDF nor were they declared to be ineffective or as damaging to women’s interests. Reading the publications of the WIDF journal, it is possible to think that during the earlier days of the WIDF, the issue of population control was still not marked as strictly a Cold War issue; thus, some variations of opinion were allowed. For example, the fourth congress of the WIDF in Vienna adopted a resolution, “Necessary conditions helping a woman to fulfil the roles of mother, worker, and citizen,” stressing the need for social and state support for mothers. 34 The publication of the congressional resolution was accompanied by comments by several guests from different countries, and it was there that it is possible to read the opinion of an Indian delegate to congress, who spoke about the importance of control over population growth in countries such as India, where the population is growing very quickly. 35
During the preparation period of the UN population conference in Bucharest in 1974, Western media continued to express a preoccupation with population growth. For instance, some of the media materials preserved in the OSA show that the fears of a soon-doubled population of the Earth were widely circulating. 36 For example, an article published in The New York Times in May 1973 urged more money be invested in population control. 37 It informed that a symposium of demographers, diplomats, and physicians in Rensselaerville, New York, demanded two billion US dollars “to curb population growth in the world’s poor countries,” thereby bringing a direct connection between poverty and “excessive” reproduction. 38
However, in contrast to the 1950s, the development of new technologies and new methods of contraception, including the accessibility in most Western countries of oral contraception—“the pill”—influenced Cold War discourse in connection to reproduction. A special role in this discursive change belonged to the feminist grassroot activism of the 1960s and 1970s, claiming women’s rights to their bodies and women’s right to make decisions about the reproductive capacities of their bodies, thereby influencing women’s attitudes toward maternity. 39
The creation of modern contraception divided state socialist countries, while some, such as GDR (German Democratic Republic) or Czechoslovakia, widely introduced family planning and made oral contraception available. 40 Still, it is important to note that while modern contraception was available in Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia and several other state socialist countries in Eastern Europe preserved some legacies of eugenics and practiced stratified reproduction in respect to Roma. 41 Several other countries followed pro-natalist politics, notably the Soviet Union, where modern contraception was not available, and abortion became the most widespread form of birth control, making the Soviet country the “abortion empire” According to Mie Nakachi. 42 However, pronatalist politics in Romania led to the outlawing of abortion in 1966. 43 As I will show, these divisions led to further frictions in respect to family planning on an international level.
The changes connected to the availability of effective contraception also led to the transformation of global language and politics through suggesting a freedom of access to reproductive control: materials produced by the American government and preserved in the OSA in Budapest presented the United States as caring for women by making “family planning assistance available to all who could otherwise not afford it.” Furthermore, defining the number and spacing of children began to be presented as a human right: “Parents in our country are exercising their basic human rights to freely determine the number and spacing of their children.” 44 Such declarations did not take into account the violations of the reproductive rights of women of color in the United States, widely criticized by African American feminists. 45 Finally, going back to the official American publications around the 1974 UN Population Conference, with reference to the authority of the Assistant Secretary General of the UN, Helevi Sipilä, some of them directly stressed “the interrelationships of the status of women and family planning.” 46
Therefore, even before the UN Population Conference in Bucharest, as well as during and after it, the issues of families and women’s control over reproduction moved into the focus of the cultural Cold War confrontation. According to the American feminist Betty Friedan’s memories, quoted in Bonfiglioli 2016, the Bucharest conference showed “a curious alliance of the Vatican, the Communists and the Third World nations” against a woman’s ability to exert control over the reproductive capacities of her body. 47 In practice, liberal “Western” feminists supporting birth control as a means of women’s empowerment found themselves in the same “camp” with those who feared an uncontrolled growth of the population in the global “South.”
It was in the context of this geopolitical confrontation that the WIDF journal published an extensive report on the conference in Bucharest under the title, “Population and Development, a Socio-economic Problem. UNO Conference in Bucharest.” 48 The article largely reproduced the narrative about the importance of state support for motherhood, and of every woman’s aspiration to become a mother. Indeed, briefly acknowledging “the right of the couple to decide how many and when to have children,” the report noticed that this right should be coupled “with the equal rights of the woman in the family, protection of mother and child.” The population problem discussed at the conference was presented as connected to the “wellbeing and happiness of humanity throughout the whole world,” while the attempts to control the population in developing countries without consent—like “compulsory and involuntary sterilization”—were described as a violation of women’s rights. 49 However, most of the article was centered around the importance of transforming socioeconomic conditions around the globe, specifically in “developing countries,” in order to support mothers and children. The article insisted that these countries must gain control over their natural resources, as well as access to technological and scientific progress, while women there should participate in productive labor in order to guarantee wealth and prosperity for the population of developing countries. The WIDF publication also listed military spending and the arms race as one of the central hindrances to economic prosperity. Finally, the report invited changes to the global perspective on women’s participation in the development and social change: “Women, on equal footing to men, must play their part in development and peace.” 50
While this invitation, made by one of the biggest women’s transnational organizations, to think more seriously about women’s participation in development, could have proved important and convincing, the political effect of such a declaration was partly damaged through other contexts surrounding the UN Population Conference. First, it was the physical placement of the UN Conference in Bucharest, the capital of the state socialist Romania, where an abortion ban had been in force since 1966 and where abortion used to be the main method of birth control. Between 1966 and 1989 abortion in Romania could be performed only in a few exceptional cases. 51 As the OSA collection dedicated to RFE/RL reports on the Bucharest conference suggests, many Western media actors and experts accused Romania of acting in violation of human rights, and some population experts questioned Romania’s suitability as a site for population conference. 52
These visible frictions—between the WIDF’s care for mothers to ensure women’s “happiness” and the lack of rights of Romanian women, the hosts of the conference, to make decisions about the reproductive capacities of their own bodies—could be detected by the Western participants of the UN population conference. Yet, due to the state socialist regime of censorship, other contradictions, frictions, and incoherencies of the politics presented in the WIDF publications as state socialist care for mothers only became visible to the public later on. Without undertaking a full overview of these incoherencies, here I will mention only two of such later revelations. The first is connected to feminist texts that appeared five years after the Bucharest UN conference in the Soviet dissident journal Zhenschina i Rossia. Authors of this underground publication were forced to leave the Soviet Union soon after the first issue, accusing Soviet authorities of having difficult conditions for mothers, which existed due to the triple burden (that included burden of motherhood together to waged work and household duties); obstetric violence in the maternity hospitals, bad care in kindergartens, and a particularly hard life for women who are bringing up their children alone. 53 The second revelation was made much later, as early as during Perestroika, and refers to the situation of working women and mothers in Uzbekistan, the Central Asian Soviet republic during the 1960s through 1980s, which used to be presented to guests from developing countries as being one of the best examples of Soviet care for mothers. The materials of the special issue of the Uzbekistan’s journal of Academy of Sciences dedicated to Soviet politics for the emancipation of women in Uzbekistan demonstrated a vulnerable situation for working mothers, particularly those living in the countryside, due to a lack of childcare facilities and a high level of unwanted childlessness as a result of difficult working conditions and the low accessibility of prophylactics. 54
Thus, in contrast to the 1950s–1960s, when the WIDF’s ideas on state care for mothers could rather effectively influence maternity politics in many newly independent countries, in the later period, the WIDF strategy of protecting motherhood visibly ignored the aspirations of many individual women inside state socialist countries. These incongruencies were pointed out by the “Western” Cold War counterpart as early as in the mid-1970s, but practical differences in the care for mothers between the state socialist (white) republics of the Soviet center and the former colonial borderlands in Soviet Central Asia, as well as discrimination of Roma women, only became public toward the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. 55 Furthermore, the assumptions about women’s “natural” predestination to motherhood and patriarchal institution of (heterosexual) motherhood were criticized by feminist thinkers (like Adrienne Rich in her 1976 book Of Woman Born) and challenged by women’s grassroots organizations. 56 This period was also characterized by the growing resistances of non-white and non-European women’s activists to the Western epistemic privileges of identifying and finding remedies for the world’s problems that contributed to questioning top-down ideas about “women’s happiness” coming from the “Eastern bloc.” 57 These radical new ideas, spreading over borders of countries and continents, however, were hardly (or not at all) accessible to women living under state socialism and were not reflected in WIDF politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dealing with Illiteracy and Hindrances to the Education of Women in the 1970s
After discussing some incoherencies in how the WIDF journal addressed issues of reproduction, this section explores some frictions between state socialist countries and postcolonial and developing countries in the sphere of education. As I noted earlier, in WIDF publications, education for women was usually connected to the possibility of women’s productive work, which in turn would contribute to the economic development and cultural progress of the country. Hence, the WIDF considered it important to support education for women globally and was a co-organizer and active participant in the international events dedicated to the liquidation of illiteracy among women, and to the improvement of women’s education. In this activity, the WIDF primarily cooperated with UNESCO, which, according to Louis Porter, was one of the UN organizations in which the Soviet Union achieved a bigger influence. 58 With the support of UNESCO, WIDF organized several conferences on women’s education in different parts of the world, including a conference in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in February 1970.
The conference in Khartoum brought together women from twenty-three countries in Africa and the Middle East and was probably the conference that was represented by the WIDF journal in the most detailed way, as an entire special issue was dedicated to it. 59 The Sudanese Women’s Union, a member of the WIDF, was the main host of the conference, which enjoyed the organizational and financial support of the WIDF and the UNESCO. The archival materials preserved in Moscow demonstrate that political instability in Sudan was seen by WIDF representatives as a possible hindrance to the conference, although these problems and preoccupations were not reflected in the Women of the Whole World publication of the conference materials. 60 The document indicates that as early as several months before the seminar, representatives of the organizing Committee from Sudan had undertaken impressive work: collecting financial support and advertising the seminar through a public celebration of the day of the liquidation of illiteracy, publishing the special pamphlet, and preparing weekly TV and radio programs and through a distribution of materials with the help of Khartoum University. 61 The Women’s Union of Sudan also reached an agreement with the Ministry of Education, according to which the women’s union could use all the premises of the Ministry for organizing schools and literacy courses for women. The local committee also prepared a program of visits and excursions, which included tours of the new housing complex in one of the city districts, and of social institutions and department for adult education, as well as some entertainment activities. 62 However, these efforts were not reflected in the journal’s publications.
The special issue published speeches of the conference participants, including those of the Sudanese government and of WIDF representatives, as well as long lectures by important female guests invited to share their countries’ experiences of the liquidation of illiteracy, such as Zukhra Rakhimbabaeva, speaking on Central Asia, and Claudia Navarro, who described the Cuban campaign on the liquidation of illiteracy in 1961. 63 In her speech, “On the Experiences of Eradicating Illiteracy among Women in the USSR,” Rakhimbabaeva stressed the special role of the state in liquidating illiteracy in Uzbekistan, and detailed the different periods of Soviet work on women’s education in non-Russian parts of the country. 64 She presented the role of the Soviet Russian center very positively without mentioning authoritarian and colonial aspects of these politics. It is also remarkable that after presenting, in detail, the Soviet educational campaign in Central Asia, Rakhimbabaeva addressed the conference participants as “sisters,” a form of address used by many African women, thus suggesting a similarity in the position of women in Uzbekistan and Africa. 65
The journal also published conference presentations by several representatives of the Sudanese Women’s Union and a few other African women’s organizations. These texts made clear visible differences in local experiences of fighting illiteracy, and discussed local methods of working with women, as well as the aims and content of the education, per se. For example, Magdalena Resha, a representative of the African National Congress (ANC), and a member of the Secretariat of the Pan-African Women’s conference, in her talk gave an overview of the reasons for illiteracy on the African continent, bringing together slavery, colonialism, capitalism, feudalism, and imperialism: the “dominating nation or class” was always trying to keep the exploited in ignorance. 66 Resha presented education for women as the most important task for the development of Africa. Fatima Ahmet Ibrahim, the head of the Sudanese women’s organization, also connected illiteracy to the legacies of colonialism, but instead focused on the issue of the “uneducated mother” as a barrier to development of the country, and also as bringing problems to her family and to society as a whole. 67 According to Ibrahim, if the mother does not know the basic facts about nutrition, her children’s health will affect the entire family; neglecting education also results in many other problems in the family, including divorce and polygamy. Among others, two representatives of the Revolutionary Union of Congolese Women, Marie-Jose Mankele and Emiliene Botoka, drew attention to the importance of giving an education to African housewives: “Educating women means making them aware of their role as capable housewives and mothers, responsible for the health, and the moral, physical, and cultural education of their children.” 68 Thus, in opposition to the WIDF’s attempts to make a connection between education for women and their productive work in the national economy (as it was elaborated by the WIDF in the context of the cultural Cold War), several African women activists instead stressed other aspects of the importance of women’s education, including nation-building, health, and the family psychological well-being.
Many presenters also discussed the location, the schedule of courses for the liquidation of illiteracy, and the materials to be used. For example, Abdel Aal, another representative of the Sudanese Women’s Union, suggested that the time between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. is convenient for mothers whose children go to school or daycare, again implying that the campaign for the education of women should be organized in such a way that it would not endanger established household routines and patterns of women’s responsibilities inside the household. The conference also included a discussion about different incentives for women’s education, including the possibility of combining teaching to read and write with teaching women other skills which might be useful for the family economy. Such skills, according to the conference speakers, could include sewing and weaving, as well as acquiring knowledge about hygiene, pregnancy, nutrition, and the education of children. While some speakers presented these extra skills as a possibility for making courses more attractive to women due to women’s hope of securing money through obtaining these skills, others hoped it would be a way of improving the cultural development of the country. Consequently, as it is possible to see, the presentations at the conference in Khartoum published by the WIDF journal offered a variety of ways of approaching the problem of illiteracy.
In contrast to the multiplicity of approaches to the education of women discussed in Khartoum, the report on the conference on education of women in Latin America that took place in Lima, Peru, in 1974 (published in Women of the Whole World in 1975) demonstrated less diversity and paid less attention to the local creative solutions of education problems. According to the WIDF journal report, the seminar in Peru “was indeed a dialogue” between five hundred delegates from fifty-four organizations from Peru and other Latin American countries. 69 However, the journal articles conformity when it came to education’s main function as a preparation of women for productive work (“For every improvement of educational standard, there is a corresponding increase in the rate of employment” 70 ). In opposition to the hopeful atmosphere in Khartoum, the journal presentation of the conference in Peru seems gray: the journal does not give many positive examples of the development of women’s education (except for Cuba), even for countries such as Argentina where literacy and school enrollment levels for girls and women were high. Paying a lot of attention to inequality in the access to education of different groups of women depending on their incomes and place of living, the journal pays much less attention to pedagogical innovations (even if the ideas of the Brazilian Paolo Freire are already popular in many countries) or to the content of the education. Neither did the report pay much attention to the educational rights of the indigenous population: only in the case of Bolivia was it possible to read about the highest illiteracy rates among Quechua and Aymara people, but it was rather unclear what did women’s organizations do to change the situation. 71 This left readers with an impression about the lack of agency of Latin American women, except for the speech by Aleida Leon from Cuba who, addressing special and already historical educational campaign of early 1960s, presented an impressive picture of this campaign realized by the Cuban government in which women were said to actively participate.
While the declaration adopted by the seminar listed many progressive goals, including the rejection of racial discrimination in education, a demand for more nurseries and social security in rural areas, the development of vocational education, and the same education for boys and girls in the same school, the presentation of the conference for the WIDF readers demonstrated a certain incoherence between the intention of solving problems through the cooperation of women from different continents and the presentation of the region and its women as lagging behind in respect to the educational demands of development. 72 It indicated hierarchical relationships rather than the implied solidarity through “sisterhood.” It is also good to note that around the same time the education in the state socialist countries also demonstrated growing hierarchies. Indeed, the research published in the 1990s revealed growing stratification of the access to higher education during the 1970s–1980s in the Soviet Union. 73
Conclusion
On the base of the studied materials, I conclude that the WIDF drafted its work plans by assuming certain similarities among all women, the most important of which being the assumption that all women are, or will be, mothers, and that all women should contribute to the development of their countries. To mother happy and healthy children and to contribute to the well-being of society, women were expected to gain support from the state, creating special institutions assisting their functions as mothers (maternity leave, kindergartens and nurseries, educational and cultural activities) and assisting to women’s access to education. Women living in colonial and developing countries were seen by the WIDF as those who can learn about benefits of this approach during seminars and study trips; they were expected to use the knowledge they received to transform their states, economies, and societies when back home. Despite declarations of friendship (and in some moments, even use of “sisterhood,” indicating close emotional cohesion), WIDF’s journal publications and archival documents suggest hierarchical relationships of one-directional “learning.” Indeed, the opposite situation—situations in which women from “Eastern bloc” countries were expected to learn from women in developing countries—was rare.
Such incoherence between state socialist discourse on women’s emancipation and its practical realization remains largely undiscovered by the researchers of state socialist feminism, due to difficulties accessing data on political practice as opposed to much more easily accessible official publications (like “Soviet Woman” or the WIDF journal). While the journals and reports of organizations continue to be important sources for learning about main events and discourses, they do not allow us to see incongruencies, which often demand archival materials and oral history sources.
Indeed, the article in the WIDF journal suggests that the WIDF succeeded in inspiring some women’s organizations from developing countries with its vision of care for mothers and education. Despite the appeal of these ideas, some frictions and incoherencies were connected to their presentation and application. The incoherence was larger in connection to care for mothers. Indeed, while the WIDF’s claim for need of state support for maternity was positively perceived by women in many young and revolutionary states, as was rejecting the politics of “population control” as a form of politics of domination, the popularity of the WIDF politics in respect to motherhood was somewhat subverted in the late 1970s due to the WIDF’s tendency to mainly ignore the diversity of women’s attitudes toward the reproductive capacities of their bodies, heterosexual normativity, and plans about becoming mothers. Also, the development of feminist grassroots activism in the 1970s and the 1980s led to the radicalization of claims on women’s control over their bodies and reproductive justice; such claims were mainly ignored by the organization. Furthermore, the growing protests and criticisms from inside the camp against the prohibition of abortion in Romania and widespread inhuman conditions for abortion and childbirth in the Soviet Union increasingly shadowed the WIDF’s global project.
As for education, the WIDF seminars on the elimination of illiteracy, like the one in Khartoum in 1970, offered not only the possibility of learning from the experiences of the Soviet Central Asian and Cuban women, but also broad exchanges of knowledge between African women practically involved in fighting illiteracy. This success, connected to the preparation of this conference involving Sudanese and African women’s organizations, was not repeated at later events addressing women’s education. The WIDF report about the conference in Lima presented by the Women of the Whole World indicates growing distance between its participants, presenting expert knowledge, from the practical work involved in solving multiple problems of education and illiteracy in Latin America. Despite its expert role, the WIDF did not problematize the content of education or bring attention to education about gender equality or indigenous cultures and languages.
Thus, the WIDF’s ideas on motherhood and education positively influenced global discussion on women’s status and welfare in the early Cold War, but technological innovations, the development of feminist thinking, and new pedagogical theories and methods in the 1960s and 1970s diminished their global importance. The image of woman as mother, worker, and citizen that was distributed by the WIDF globally suffered not only due to the hierarchization of women into more and less “progressive” countries, but also due to growing frictions between women inside of the “Eastern bloc” itself.
