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MARTHA BOHACHEVSKY-CHOMIAK WOMEN AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF EASTERN EUROPE The peasants, who constituted the rank-and-file membership of the Union, were at best barely literate and as wary of modernization as peasants in other parts of the world. The rhetoric of selfless nationalism for the cause of enslaved “Mother Ukraine” could not attract the mother of five who eked out a living on a minuscule rented plot of land. Yet the Women’s Union spread quickly, and the educated Ukrainians credited national ism with this success. So did the Poles who had been socialized by the same education and the same type of literature as the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians triumphed in the spread of the popularity of the women’s move ment, which doubled the voting strength of the Ukrain ians. The Poles feared it and vainly tried to set up a competing government-sponsored women’s organization. But the Ukrainian women’s Union succeeded where the Polish government failed, because the government was unwilling and unable to channel funds into Ukrainian territories. The Women’s Union effectively promoted grass-roots self-help from agricultural programs to med ical and trade training ones. The women quickly realized that their programs could be implemented only if they had political power, because of the centralization of Pol ish economy. Hence, they became extremely active in the electoral campaigns and in political life in general, using the organizational leverage of the Women’s Union. The activities of the women were geared toward amelioration of the physical conditions of life for their families and for themselves. In this respect Ukrainian women were no exception to the women’s movement. What makes their story telling however is the discre pancy between their being simply written off as a patrio tic women’s movement and the reality of the Women’s Union being mainly engaged in rural development. The women’s movement in Western Ukraine dem onstrated that women will respond en m a ss e to a movement that is aimed at increasing the standard of living in the village, offering the women marketable skills and providing them the know-how to create better conditions in the home. In return, women accepted expressions of the ideology. When we assess the activity of the community organizations we see that the immediate goals of the nationalist movement, especially among the peasants, were very practical rather than ideological. I wonder whether we indeed are correct in simply pinning a label of nationalism upon them. Is nationalism as we define it in terms of European ideology and politics an ex p o s t facto motivation developed by those who wrote memoirs in much the same fashion as women who in the eight eenth century wrote memoirs cast their experiences in the language which they learned in school? Will closer study of the community organizations of the cities in the Russian Empire in the last years of the century provide enough information to speak of an unarticulated liber- lism or of nascent community activism? I suspect it might. When we separate the demands of the current movements for greater autonomy or independence within Yugoslavia, Czecho-Slovakia, and the USSR from the rhetoric, we see that they are as much economically as nationally motivated. The economic exploitation of the “peripheries” by the center is as much a factor in the discontent as is national discrimination. Closely con nected are ecological concerns of individual areas which also argue for decentralized control, since the central government destroyed the resources and polluted the atmosphere of the “provinces.” The point is — and this is important for the study of contemporary eastern Europe also — that development was too dry, too abstract an idea for even its practition ers to realize that this is what they were doing. They called it nationalism. This is the nationalism of the East ern Europeans, in large measure a precursor of the nationalism of the peoples of Asia and Africa. But we are so attuned to nationalism as an outgrowth of Euro pean philosophy, as being based on Herder, Schelling, on the German Romantics, that we fail to perceive the genuinely practical nature of the movement. Here wo men’s studies, which force us to look at the so called “small deeds” rather than the grandiose explanations, can help us discover the reality behind the accepted terminology. Poets often wrote about the nation, endowing it with a philosophical transcendence that was not upper most in the minds of the practitioners of small deeds that created it. Historians do likewise. In the process we lose sight of the small deeds that make the movement which we then name. Refocusing with the women in sight shifts the perspective. This can be seen by study ing the Soviet Union. The current transformation of the USSR depends on the dismemberment of the single command structure and on decentralizing authority. If Moscow refuses to accede to the just demands of the local units, it will have to reestablish centralized control that will under mine Russian democratic forces. Hence, Russian demo 20 “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ГРУДЕНЬ 1991 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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