The Czechs in a Nutshell

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”.