Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe

by Ann Snitow, Susan Faludi (Foreword by)

Overview

A feminist organizer in East Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall reveals the struggles of women fighting for their rights during the rise of the Right in Europe

Visitors tells the story of Ann Snitow’s adventures as a Western feminist helping to build a new, post-communist feminist movement in Eastern Central Europe. Snitow stumbles onto this fast-changing, chaotic scene by chance, but falls in love with the passionate feminists she meets in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. What kinds of feminism should they hope for?

Visitors is a book about forging enduring relationships and creating formerly unimaginable institutions—a feminist school, the Network of East-West Women, women’s centers, gender studies programs. It is about unity amid fractiousness and perseverance through uncertainty, Snitow’s flickering lodestar. Visitors moves gracefully between vivid anecdote, political analysis, and unsparing introspection. It is richly peopled with “brilliant” comrades and vexing detractors alike, all described with respect and humor. Every sentence is imbued with the experience and insight of this sui generis feminist activist, writer, and pedagogue of 50 years. Most of all, Visitors is the story of friendship, the heart and sinew of the leaderless feminist movement.

Reading like the best historical novel, it is intimate and worldly, resolutely unsentimental yet finally, even as the political skies darken, optimistic in the conviction that feminism can make life meaningful, fascinating, fun, pleasurable—and better for everyone, even as better is redefined again and again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613321324
Publisher:	New Village Press
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ann Snitow was Professor Emerita of Literature and Gender Studies at Lang College, The New School. A longtime activist, Snitow cofounded The Network of East-West Women, No More Nice Girls, Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, Take Back the Future, and New York Radical Feminists. She co-founded the women’s studies program at Rutgers University and gender studies programs at The New School, where she taught for three decades. Snitow’s best-known book is The Feminism of Uncertainty. Visitors is her sixth book.
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and the author of the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. Her recent memoir, In the Darkroom, won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.

Table of Contents

Foreword Susan Faludi xi

Introduction 1

1 First Visitors 7

2 Airplane 17

3 It Began 21

4 Money 27

5 First Trip, 1991 35

6 The Meeting: Dubrovnik, June 7-9, 1991 59

7 Czechoslovakia 89

8 After Dubrovnik 117

9 Teaching Feminism in East Central Europe 157

10 Who Names Change? 191

11 Some Returns Are Impossible 219

12 Why? 241

13 Against the Sense of an Ending: 2015/2016 257

14 Out of This Wood Do Not Desire to Go 277

Afterword 285

Acknowledgments 287

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

12/16/2019

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"This is an inspired piece of personal journalism that takes us to Eastern Europe where we follow the social and political adventures, over a period of twenty five years, of one of the great feminists of the Second Wave. As Ann Snitow discovers the historic antagonism to women’s rights that marks the region, she also experiences the remarkably courageous women who are spending their lives fighting it. Richly informed, emotionally centered, beautiful written, Visitors is a book to be read by all who crave a deeper understanding of the times in which we live."

Vivian Gornick

"Ann Snitow’s extraordinary gifts for friendship and organizing spill off the pages of this illuminating memoir, which lights up a formerly obscure but important aspect of our history. The lucky reader gets to follow Ann and her new friends as they create a broad, potent network of feminist activists practically from scratch in the ruins of Soviet communism."

Alix Shulman

"This is an inspired piece of personal journalism that takes us to Eastern Europe where we follow the social and political adventures, over a period of twenty five years, of one of the great feminists of the Second Wave. As Ann Snitow discovers the historic antagonism to women’s rights that marks the region, she also experiences the remarkably courageous women who are spending their lives fighting it. Richly informed, emotionally centered, beautiful written, Visitors is a book to be read by all who crave a deeper understanding of the times in which we live."

From the Publisher