摘要：Feminists and women’s groups around the world have been struggling to achieve
some hard fought battles for equality and recognition for a very long time. Each
success and each step forward has given many a reason to celebrate. But each
success cannot be assumed to be complete, and “progress” is not inevitable. At
specific points in time and geographic regions, strides forward in the battle
towards equality have been followed by steps back -a re-patriarchalization of
sorts. In polities across Europe, women won reproductive rights and choices and
access to public life under some regimes, only to lose them with a change of
government under specific political, economic and social circumstances. This
paper assesses the impact of the rise to power of nationalist regimes,
particularly during periods of ethnic conflict and unrest, on the reproductive
rights of the women who lived through the periods. Four specific cases are
presented: Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia (later Croatia) and Revolutionary (and
post-Soviet) Russia. These four cases exemplify the transitions from
non-nationalist governments to nationalist and back. At each point, population
policies are altered and redrafted to reflect the political interests of those
in power. This paper shows that one step forward for women can and is followed
by two steps back when the nation’s “health” is put ahead of women’s health by
nationalist regimes.
