When they rewrote the constitution in 1971 they elevated the right to maternity leave as a constitutional principle""We were well ahead of all of the other countries when we went to Mexico City in 1975 for the First World Conference on Women.
When I lived in Hungary in the late sixties, working women were entitled to three years' paid maternity leave -- perhaps as an alternative to building more day care facilities, or perhaps to encourage the birth rate. I do not remember what the main objective was, but I can vouch for the fact that the countries of the Eastern bloc were way ahead of the West when it came to working mothers.
According to Ghodsee's Wiki:
"Contrary to the prevailing opinion of most feminist scholars in the 1990s who believed that women would be disproportionately harmed by the collapse of communism, Ghodsee argued that many East European women would actually fare better than men in newly competitive labor markets because of the cultural capital that they had acquired before 1989." Alas, the testimonies in The Left Side of History contradict that expectation, for 'democracy' trashed much of what was accomplished under Communist rule. As Lagadinova explains:
"A lot of people think communism was about equality. But it was not about equality; it is impossible to have perfect equality. People are too different""It was about justice".It was about building a society that would work for the many rather than enriching the few."Elena waves her arm at the window: "And now, you see what we have? So many people are without medicine; so many children are on the street. They are not going to school. Prostitutes make more money than doctors and judges. People are poorer now than they were before the war, while the rich live in mansions with swimming pools."
After 1989, Bulgaria became a 'democratic' country, but it also became a miserable one. After January 1, 2007, Bulgaria officially joined the European Union and earned the distinction of being its poorest member state. By 2011, the European Commission found that 44% of Bulgarians had experienced 'severe material deprivation'".Communism was not the only political dream that had disappointed.
Ghodsee describes a meeting with a group of retired professional women to discuss the changes they had witnessed. A historian admitted: 'I hated communism: not being able to get the books I wanted, or articles from the West. Having to use Marxist theory. But recently I've come to see that perhaps I did not understand it so well. I saw it only from the university. But for ordinary people I suppose it was different. I think there were some good things about the system that I didn't see because I was so angry about the books."
Another historian is described by Ghodsee as disapproving of "the marketization of historical scholarship-- with (Bulgarian) scholars dispatched into the archives to find evidence for whatever thesis Western donors wanted to prove."
When the women at the meeting ask her for a story about communism from the American point of view, Ghodsee tells them how as a child she practiced hiding under her school desk during nuclear bomb drills. But the memory suddenly provokes doubts about her work: "Would I become an apologist for totalitarianism if I tried to document the progress of women in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1989?"
Notwithstanding her misgivings, it is with real anger that she reports that members of the wartime government allied with Nazi Germany who had committed crimes against humanity, were posthumously declared 'victims' of Communism, complete with monuments erected by the 'democratic' government. Reading this in the spring of 2015, when signs of a fascist revival are all around us, is chilling.
Combining traditional ethnography with the stylistic conventions of creative nonfiction, Ghodsee's book reads like a memoir. Inspired by the work of Clifford Geertz, this technique, known as "literary ethnography," produces academic texts that are meant to be accessible to a wider audience, and Ghodsee's succeeds masterfully at that task, and not only in The Left Side of History.
After reading it, I was intrigued by the title of a short e-book listed on Amazon: A Million Unattributed Cucumbers crystalizes Ghodsee's doubts about the validity of her professional trajectory. It is the best 99 cent read around, in which the line between ethnography and literature comes close to blurring. I know what she means when she reports typical US cocktail exchanges in which fellow academics are not sure whether Bulgaria is in Europe or South America, or that kids tease her daughter at school for spending summers with her grandparents in"..Sofia.
But the story is actually about spying. As Ghodsee tells us:
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