In 1991, I
was among 75 women who met in Dubrovnik,
Yugoslavia (which at that moment still existed), and founded the Network
of East-West Women<https://neww.org.pl/opening-the-electronic-curtain-by-sonia-jaffe-robbins/>.
NEWW was created to support women activists, writers and artists, and academics
in the newly noncommunist countries of Eastern Europe, and over the years, NEWW
connected women’s centers to the then new mass medium called the internet.
I worked
for NEWW for its first few years and got to know some amazing activist women in
such countries as Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Croatia. Today I
met with one of them, who I hadn’t seen or spoken with for years. Lenka
Simerska, from Prague, was NEWW’s first social/economic Fellow in the early
2000s, interning at WEDO, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization,
and taking a course in labor studies at Rutgers. Currently, she works in the
Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, presently heading the program to
reduce the gender pay gap in her country. And this week she was in New York at
the United Nations for meetings of the Commission on the Status of Women.
It was
really great to see Lenka and catch up with her work, her family, and life in
the Czech Republic, sometimes now called Czechia, though she said that is not
official. There’s been some talk about changing the name to Bohemia — a
one-word name for a country is supposed to be preferable? — which refers to the
largest historical region of the Czech Republic. But that ignores other
regions, like Moravia and parts of Silesia. Czechia is also now host to many
Ukrainian refugees, and cutbacks in energy that comes from Russia is causing
many Czechs to be softening their support for Ukraine.
I wanted to add a photo here of the two of us, but for some reason the internet hasn't yet passed it from my phone to my laptop. Maybe someone knows whether it might be in my iCloud account and how I might find it?
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I’m participating in the 16th annual Slice of
Life Challenge over at Two
Writing Teachers.
This is day 9 of the 31-day challenge. It’s not too late to make space
for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager
to read what you have to slice about. Join in!
