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that view — national histories tend to be structured around the national group whose identity is usually per ceived as being singular. Even when nationalities fail to establish a strong and enduring state, the overpowering force of the idea of the state in the area is so strong that peoples who have failed repeatedly to create and pre serve a viable state write their own histories around the issue of the state .4 Nationalities that had not preserved or established viable political states wrote histories extolling their aborted statehood to validate their claims to sovereignty. Yet for all the stress on the people, the historiography of the area is particularly poor on chron icling social and community activities and organizations. Studies of the area have focused upon states and impe rial expansion, religion and ideological developments. Simultaneously, they have stressed, be it positively or negatively, nationalism as an ideology asserting com munal allegiance to a historic group, its spiritual values, and its heroic deeds. Poets are often the enduring sym bols of Eastern European nations, and they do much to popularize nationalism. Poets do not focus upon the mundane nor upon a precise reflection of reality, so their vision transports reality to a higher conception that others find attractive. Political and social activists often find in the poetry justification their actions. Thus the nineteenth century Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, spoke lovingly of Lithuania as his motherland, and this senti ment is shared by his twentieth century counterpart, Czeslaw Milosz. Poles accept such statements as patrio tic sentiments for a greater historical Poland. Thus, the question arises whether the poets are merely fuzzy on their geography or are all Poles imperialistic? But are these the right questions? Almost all of the works written about Eastern Europe approach their topic from the vantage point of the writer rather than taking their cue from the material itself. Such is also the case with works devoted to the history of women. Older works tend to focus upon the contribu tions women made toward the preservation of national identity, while more recent ones analyze and document women’s revolutionary role. Neither of these approaches even remotely reaches the Rankian dictum that history should reflect the events themselves, and not the vision of the observer or the writer. The existence of a do cumented philosophical and literary base of the develop ment of nationalism and of a rich poetic description of nationalism has blinded most of us to one of the simplest reasons for its popularity — nationalism promised a better quality of life to its followers. A focus on what women did in their community organizations can help define the actual practice of nationalism as contrasted with its theory or ideology. Issues of definition and scope, of the use of termino logy developed to reflect other realities are some of the major problems confronting the student of Eastern Europe. The same issues plague the study of women. Women’s studies, or the incorporation of the history of women, the development of women’s organizations can be compared to the study of the history of peoples, as contrasted with that of states .5 Simply put, women’s issues are nothing but the rights of men extended upon the entire population. By the same token, issues that have concerned women, i.e., health, education, welfare, child-care, etc. reflect societal issues which, since so ciety did not pay primary attention to them, devolved upon women. But most scholars writing on Eastern Europe, most Eastern European scholars, and a large part of the East European population do not see women’s issues in those terms. The very historians who defend the need to study peoples and nations, and not only states, underestimate the importance of civil society and of women. It is not uncommon that women themselves remain blind to the importance of their own history. To be continued... 1 Among the recent exceptions is the report on the hundred Muscovite mothers who demonstrated before the Russian Soviet Parliament in the spring of 1991 and succeeded in seeing Boris Yeltsin, and the decision of the Polish Sejm to keep abortion legal, largely because of the pressure of women. 2 We must keep in mind that in this area, as in many other parts of the world national and state boundaries are not con gruent, hence the national liberation movements are often directed at the central government. The position of women in the European parts of the Soviet Union (and former Russian Empire) does not differ substantively enough to warrant a div ision between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, while some of the nationalities in the USSR are better understood within the context of Eastern Europe. Hence, in this article I subsume the European lands of the USSR under the heading Eastern Europe. 3 See, for instance, George Klein and Milan J. Reban, The Politics of Ethnicity in Eastern Europe. East European Mono graphs, Boulder; distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1981. Alfred G. Meyer, a political scientist who has written widely on Marxism, on Central and Easstern Europe, and on women, succinctly pointed out that “National and eth nic consciousness have come to be closely linked to move ments of liberation and revolution, including those calling themselves Marxist... The implications of such a statement would be that the revolutions of our century, often carried out with the expressed aims of doing away with the contradictions of capitalism, have instead, reproduced them, though in novel form; and ethnicity is revealed as a principle of social organiza tion (or production relations) fundamentally at odds with glo bal production processes.” Alfred G. Meyer, “Eastern Europe: Marxism and Nationalism,” in ibid. pp. 7-11, quotation from p. 11. 4 For instance, a recent overview of the history of Ukraine by Orest Subtelny, Toronto University Press, 1988 is structured around the issues of statehood and modernization, neither of the two of particular relevance to Ukrainians. s We can date this development early nineteenth cen tury, especially after Johann Herder wrote his Ideen zur Phil- osophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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