Was Charter 77 Interested in Women’s Rights?

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Czechoslovak Dissidence: Charter 77 in Transnational Perspective

Abstract

The Czechoslovak oppositional initiative Charter 77 produced dozens of documents on human rights between 1977 and 1989. Yet it never dedicated a separate document to women’s rights, even if the issue of women’s equality was well represented in the global human rights discussions of the time. This paper addresses this absence in Charter 77’s intellectual production. Based on an analysis of several Charter documents that touched upon issues of women’s equality, it shows that some Charter signatories were ready to acknowledge the socialist state granted women formal equality, while suggesting that neither material conditions nor cultural norms provided for full emancipation. But more prevalent was a critique that saw women’s emancipation as restrictive of freedom in the personal sphere. This presentation argues that Charter 77’s legalist approach did not grant it the language to formulate a critique of women’s rights as a problem that had not only a legal, but significantly also a cultural dimension.

Author

• Veronika Pehe, Institute of Contemporary History CAS (Czech Republic)