That also goes for Charlotte and Alice Masaryk, wife and eldest daughter of Tomáš G. Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s “founder”. During the First World War, when the later president’s struggle for national independence brought his family great suffering and himself exile, they stood by his side. And after 1918, both Masaryk and his family used their influence to promote equal rights for women, who were secured the vote by the independent Czechoslovakia’s constitution (see: First Republic). The president himself stressed the importance of women’s emancipation so intensely (“Women are often more valuable humans than men”) that he has been called the first Czech feminist. He even took his American wife’s maiden name Garrigue as his second surname to demonstrate that he considered her his equal.
Neither should one forget that the Catholic Church, which hardly can be accused of having a tremendously progressive stance towards women’s emancipation, has never enjoyed really massive support in Bohemia, traditionally the Czech state’s centre of political gravity. The Hussite Church, on the other hand, which emerged as a “national” church shortly after Czechoslovakia was established, took an overtly liberal stance on the issue of women’s liberation. Today, a clear majority of its approximately 100,000 registered members are females (see: Religion).
So, what will the future bring? By now, an entire generation of women who never had any personal contact with the communist regime have come of age. Unlike their elder sisters, they don’t automatically consider feminism to be a downright dirty word, and not few of them nourish ambitions of having a professional career.
Yet (early) marriage and subsequent motherhood still seem to be a more obvious and unambiguous goal for young Czech women than is common in Western and Northern Europe. And still, most Czech women expect to be treated as women (see: Dancing Schools). Okay, unlike Polish women they don’t fancy a chivalric kiss on their hand, but any well-mannered man is supposed to open the door for a woman, let her enter before him and, on some occasions, help her with her coat. In the Czech Republic, a man can even risk praising a woman’s beauty in public without being called a sexist monkey, or, as in Scandinavia, being knocked down on the spot.
In short: it seems that young Czech women are trying harder and harder to combine the cool self-confidence of a Western feminist with the proud womanliness of a South European sex bomb (see: Sandals and Socks). And — just to be a bit chauvinistic — it’s amazing how they succeed in doing it!
First Republic
Most countries have a certain period that they romantically cherish as their golden era. Thanks to their roller coaster history, the Czechs have more of these ups and downs than most other nations, but if there is one period which a vast majority of contemporary Czechs, right or wrong, would consider an indisputable golden era, then it is the First Republic — Czechoslovakia from its foundation in October 1918 to the tragic Munich Agreement almost precisely 20 years later.
It’s not hard to understand why. When the founding of Czechoslovakia was announced and the enthusiastic masses started to tear down any symbol of their former Austrian masters (or oppressors, as Czech nationalists would put it) a dream almost 300 years old had come true. But more than that: the creation of Czechoslovakia and the collapse of Austria-Hungary marked the end of the then-most-bloody war in man’s history. The monuments you can still see in almost any Bohemian and Moravian village are a reminder of the 210,000 young Czechs who lost their lives in the First World War’s meaningless slaughter.
The new state got off to a flying start, at least compared to the other countries that emerged from the ruins of the Danube monarchy. Hungary was demoted from a great power to a bankrupt “royal republic” that tumbled between economic crises and political turmoil, and Poland was soon thrown into a new war and a subsequent military dictatorship. The Czechs, on the other hand, had not only received national sovereignty after three centuries under the Austrians. They also expanded geopolitically, as both Slovakia and Trans-Carpathian Ruthenia (see: Ukrainians) were incorporated into their state.
The economy was another bright spot. Over 60 percent of the industry in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was located in Bohemia, and now it churned out goods to war-torn countries in the East and the West. In addition, new and visionary entrepreneurs, such as the Moravian shoe manufacturer Tomáš Baťa or the inventor and engineer Emil Kolben (actually a colleague of Thomas A. Edison), emerged on the scene. As a result, Czechoslovakia’s economy grew to become what common Czech wisdom stubbornly refers to as “the world’s tenth-largest economy”.
In reality, Czechoslovakia’s economy in the 1920s, broken down, in terms of GDP per head, was, according to the respected historian Vlastislav Lacina, the world’s seventeenth largest, placing itself right in front of Austria. But it was, thanks to extensive coal mining, the world’s seventh biggest exporter. Nevertheless, for most Czechs the First Republic is still associated with an economic boom that dwarfed most of the other countries in Europe.
Be that as it may, one fact remains undisputed: the end of the First World War’s carnage and the Czechs’ and Slovaks’ subsequent independence brought about a tremendous eruption of creativity, which recalls the atmosphere of Western Europe in the 1960s.
Take, for instance, the architect Josef Gočár, who redefined French cubism into the peculiarly Czech rondo-cubism. Or the poets Jaroslav Seifert (in 1984 awarded the Nobel prize) and Vítězslav Nezval, who worked out the basis of modern Poetism. In only a few years after 1918, the Barrandov studios right outside Prague (established by ex-president Václav Havel’s uncle Miloš) grew into one of the leading studios in the European film industry, with an average production of 80 movies annually.
The Čapek brothers’ R.U.R. (where the word robot was introduced) and The Insect Play gave European drama a virtual vitamin injection; the artist Alfons Mucha, who founded the graphic poster art as we know it today, further developed the unique symbioses between art nouveau and Czech folklore; and Jaroslav Hašek in 1924 revolutionized the history of literature with his flap-jawed, beer-drinking anti-hero Švejk.
Even more impressive is the fact that this eruption of creativity seethed with a spirit of relative tolerance. Certainly, the Czechs tend to exaggerate the harmony during this period, especially so in the dark years under the grossly intolerant Bolsheviks. It remains a fact that Czechoslovakia’s 3.2 million ethnic Germans, who clearly outnumbered the 2 million Slovaks, were not regarded as constitutionally equal to their Slav compatriots. But it’s a telling sign of the tolerance that a vast majority of the country’s Jews rapidly assimilated themselves.
In the end, however, neither prosperity, nor relative tolerance, blooming arts nor a liberal president Tomáš G. Masaryk helped Czechoslovakia very much. The First Republic survived its founder by a mere year and a half. Yet the nostalgic memories of this golden era and its cruel end have made their mark on modern Czechs.