Women were largely absent from Lithuania's history school exam, sparking a debate – do we celebrate them enough? According to author Aurelija Auškalnytė, there are plenty of them in the country's history – they just need to be seen.
In the book she edited, Women Who Built Lithuania, Auškalnytė describes 100 of them – and says she could have included many more, if it were not for space constraints. Movements for women’s rights and suffrage began in Lithuania not much later than in Western Europe, she says, although women here had to struggle against greater odds, such as restricted access to education.
Read more: Absence of women in Lithuania’s history exam sparks debate among historians and educators
In an interview with LRT.lt, Auškalnytė discusses the absence of women in history curriculum, obstacles faced by women in the 19- and 20-century Lithuania, and which of them persist to this day.
This year’s history exam notoriously did not contain questions about women, while only one is included in the school history curriculum. Some historians have called this an oversight, while others say there are simply not many female historical figures. Do you think the authors of the curriculum genuinely couldn’t find important women or simply did not want to find them?
However that happened, I was very happy that we started talking about it, since it’s not a new issue. I have looked at textbooks many times and I have seen the situation. It is an old problem, so it is good that [the history exam] created a stir, that people have come to their senses, even those who prepare the curriculum had to answer for themselves.
That we are beginning to acknowledge is already a breakthrough. It is clear from the reactions that some [authors of the curriculum] were late to start thinking about issues of gender equality. Some are ready to improve the curriculum, while some others may be hostile, and we have heard some public statements that ‘there were no women in history’.
For comparison, what if, for example, in the United States they said “we did not have black people, there is nothing to write about them until Barack Obama”. This means that a group – that has been marginalised, discriminated against and disparaged – has not been able to rise to high office – and is therefore not worth talking about.
In your book Women Who Built Lithuania, you describe 100 notable women, while the authors of the curriculum were able to come up with only one.
We wrote a book about 100 women, but my biggest conundrum was that I couldn’t include other very interesting personalities because there were too many. There were women in every field.
During the national revival movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the role of women was particularly important. Perhaps because Lithuanian men also had very limited rights and when they were fighting for national emancipation, women fought alongside them. [...]
In the introduction, you write that “the feminist or suffragist movement in Lithuania started not much later than elsewhere in the world. Although it may not have started at all.” Why?
In Western Europe, in America, there were many more educated women who had the resources to engage in activism. In Lithuania, there were only a handful of women who could get an education.
We have fascinating stories. For example, Paulina Kalvaitytė-Karvelienė started school when she was practically an adult, because her parents wouldn’t let her, but she simply insisted on going to school with younger kids. When she was in her 30s, despite all the pressure, she said she did not want to get married, that she wanted to go to university, and she became a radiologist.
This is an absolutely exceptional case, which shows how extremely difficult it was to go against your environment. You had to have the will to convince everyone that you needed education. This is one of the conditions for women to become conscious of their own condition and to start fighting for its improvement. In Lithuania, all this happened by miracle. [...]
In the end, there was a movement. Was it thanks to strong individual women, or were there other favourable circumstances?
All the power structures were regrouping at that time and I think there was a window of opportunity. But I would very much like historians to look into this, because there are very few researchers and historians of women’s movements.
You also write that “the organised women’s movement in Lithuania never associated itself solely with the struggle for women’s rights. It went hand in hand with the national consciousness”. Can we say that this women’s movement was feminist? Were these women feminists?
We can say that some of them considered themselves feminists. We have to understand that these concepts have also changed. For example, during the first wave of feminism, the suffragettes were very important. The explicit goal was women’s rights.
For example, Ema Goldman, who came from Lithuania, was giving illegal lectures to women about pregnancy planning in late 19-century America. This was a punishable offence. It is as feminist as it gets – this is a striking example of how modern feminist ideas were expressed a century and a half ago. Incredible.
Many women who remained in Lithuania spoke about feminism, but the closer we get to today, the fewer we find strong statements that “I am fighting for women’s rights, I am a feminist”, even though the activities these women engaged in could be seen from a feminist point of view.
This is probably because the word has been stigmatised. We need to change that. However, here I must be sure to clarify what feminism is. The essence of feminism is that a woman is a human being just like man, that the value of women and men is the same. [...]
Going back to your book, what surprised you most when you read women’s stories?
I was surprised by my own feelings and the inner discoveries I made while reading those stories. Finally, after so many years, I have found historical women with whom I can identify, where the details of their lives, their reflections felt extremely close. I might not have found those aspects in someone else’s life story before, because you usually read about men.
Some of these women were sort of already well-known, but their psychological lives had not been very much explored. For example, Ona Šimaitė [Vilnius University librarian who was saving Jews during the Holocaust] is a personality that is relevant to modern women.
Or [author and victim of Soviet deportations] Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, who is such a philosopher, though we only know her as someone who wrote a memoir about exile. And it’s not just a memoir – it contains an entire world and her personal relation towards, say, the Soviet atrocities. Reading that, you can also rethink your own attitudes.
In addition to well-known women, you also describe others who are not. You write that women made fundamental contributions to the development of education, healthcare and social care. You describe how the first policewoman in Lithuania was interviewing children in the street to find out if they weren’t abandoned. And night watches at Kaunas train station helped to ensure that poor girls who arrived in the city had a choice other than prostitution. Which women should we know more about?
We should not only talk about the first policewoman herself, but also about who organised all this, who fought for it, who went to the institutions to get this post. It was organised by Vincenta Matulaitytė-Lozoraitienė, who is usually identified as the wife of [Lithuanian foreign minister] Stasys Lozoraitis, while her own impressive activities are neglected.
In the interwar period, we had a short period to implement these ideas, some of which took off just before the war. There were achievements, but they were not sustained, because the historical circumstances changed completely. But if you look at them, you can find women who are less visible, because they sometimes took the bureaucratic route, they set up organisations and associations.
We know really very little about women politicians and the political work they did between the wars – people graduate from school without ever learning that several women ran for president.
It is not enough to dwell on women “heroes” who achieved a lot. We often chose heroic stories when we were writing the book, but we need to make clear that women, just like men, are everywhere, and that their life stories are diverse. It would be important to discuss women criminals, women in different life situations.
Minorities are also forgotten in history lessons – we do not find many descriptions of Jewish women, and we are not very familiar with the history of Polish women who lived in Vilnius between the wars, even though it may be very important to us too.
The history of sexual abuse and harassment, that part of history that we would find in the stories of our grandmothers, is not discussed at all. We need to tell these stories – not only the facts, but also the effect that they had on women’s psychology, the extent to which violence and abuse limited their opportunities.
What did women face when they were operating in fields perceived as masculine? Was there censure from society or open discrimination?
Women in different situations faced different obstacles. Someone from a higher-class family, with more opportunities, might hit a higher or different ceiling.
In the end, even very determined and militant women sooner or later hit their ceiling, at some point. You graduate with an outstanding degree, but the university doesn’t take you on, you have to teach in a provincial school, you don’t get a grant, you don’t get to work on the research that you want to work on. There was a lot of that.
For example, Vyda Kęsgailaitė-Ragulskienė studied mechanics. She opened the door to the lecture theatre and saw 200 men inside, not a single woman. She opened the door and closed it again. It took time to get the courage. Her heart probably sank to her heels, because this was not a safe environment to enter. We can only guess how many derisive comments, how many put-downs she suffered. [...]
Let’s talk about safety – you mentioned several times a woman might have been afraid to take the unconventional route because she didn’t feel safe. Do you mean physical safety, emotional safety?
Even today, a girl who walks home alone after dark feels unsafe, she feels she needs to look around carefully in case she is followed. We live in a society that underappreciates and violates women, and we live with a constant worry about how to protect ourselves.
For women who are breaking stereotypes, the risk has always been even greater. If you go to an environment where there are usually no women, there is a good chance that you will be subjected to degrading jokes about yourself, your appearance, often sexually-charged.
You don’t want to be in an environment where you experience sexual harassment, you want to run away as far as possible. All this is what women had to endure. Those experiences still exist. [...]
We say even today that it is harder for women to balance family and work, but it was probably even harder before?
As a result, we have many stories of women who have achieved a lot and did not build a romantic relationship, a family. It is partly because [author and activist] Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė did not start a family that she was able to work more for the state and society. Her achievements are truly enormous, such as a foundation to support gifted students.
But we have to understand what it meant for her as a person not to have a close romantic relationship, to experience loneliness. That is the price she paid.
Some of the problems haven’t disappeared. And we can still draw inspiration from the stories of those women.
These stories can inspire the courage to liberate today’s girls and women, to give them the two essentials of security and freedom. Then we will have more intellectual and human resources to deal with the climate catastrophe, geopolitical crises, social upheavals. The girls will not be put down – and who knows what they’ll be able to do for Lithuania.
We do not know how history would have turned out if we had upheld gender equality from the very beginning. We can still do it – it is a huge untapped potential. It is important that we are now talking more about it, that more and more people see that it is abnormal to have a history textbook that says nothing about women.
This is the first step towards gender equality. It seems to me that it is now firmly underway, and I am proud of our society for being prepared to rethink these issues, to hear what feminism is.
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