Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe

Literature and women’s studies professor Snitow (The Feminism of Uncertainty), who died in 2019, chronicles her activism in post-Communist East-Central Europe in this vivid memoir. After traveling to Dubrovnik, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia, in 1991 to attend the area’s first feminist conference, she helped found the Network of East West Women (NEWW) just weeks before civil war broke out. For the rest of her life, she visited every summer to teach at a New School pilot program in Kraków and attend NEWW meetings throughout the region. She writes candidly of her misgivings about her mission, aware of “the bad American habit of invasion” and noting that “western feminism felt more invasive to some of the women I was meeting than western capitalism.” The arrival of new freedoms was dramatic, she observes, but so was “a nostalgic desire for traditions repressed under Communism—the return of the family, patriarchy and church.” Though East-Central Europe’s fledgling (and fragile) feminism could not block rising ethnocentrism, it did offer “the only enduring model of an anti-nationalist political practice,” as with antiwar action group Women in Black, which became an international symbol against ethnic violence. With eloquence and insight, Snitow provides an impassioned account of her movement’s struggles and accomplishments.[em] (Mar.) [/em]