ABSTRACT
The status of women changed dramatically over the course of the long twentieth century. 1 Women’s social standing improved overall in the public and private spheres, although rather unevenly in the various segments of social life. The rise in women’s access to education proved to be advantageous: from low literacy and negligible high school graduation rates at the turn of the century, to their outnumbering men in higher education today. Their involvement in paid work was rather low in the first half of the century but rapidly increased under state socialism; yet, it was followed by a decline during the post-socialist years, both in absolute numbers and compared to the West. With the exception of suffrage, the field of politics marks the smallest, most uneven gains for women, particularly in terms of elected office. In the private realm, women gradually gained more freedom with marriage equality in the mid-twentieth century and divorce became more readily accessible (which women in Central and Eastern Europe sought more often than men). Abortion became available to most women in our region by 1957, about a dozen years before this crucial reproductive right was legalized in the West (and with the infamous exception of Romania, it was never repealed in our region). The recognition of same-sex desire was by far the longest and most arduous of sexual liberation processes, which marked some early victories (i.e. with the decriminalization of homosexuality in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1961, also long before the West), yet which still has a long way to go (as not a single country in our region bestows equal rights on gays and lesbians in the realm of the family).
