Revolution Begins at Home: The Women of Czech Dissent

An evening dedicated to women active in the Czech dissent movement and Charter 77 during the Czechoslovak communist regime of the 1970s and 1980s. Sociologist and gender scholar Marcela Linková and journalist Nada Straková will be joined by former dissident Kamila Bendová and DJ and writer Tobiáš Jirous to talk about the recent publication Revolution Begins at Home: The Women of Czech Dissent (eds. Linková & Straková, 2017) and the ways in which women engaged in the different currents of political and cultural resistance.

Published in 2017 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Charter 77, Revolution Begins at Home: The Women of Czech Dissent is a collection of interviews portraying twenty-one women who weren’t afraid to stand up to the Normalisation regime in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s. By engaging in the struggle against totalitarianism, they wanted to play their part in creating a better existence for themselves and their children.

These fascinating interviews conducted by the books´ editors Marcela Linková and Nadežda Straková contribute to our understanding of the ways in which women engaged in the different currents of the Czech dissident manifesto Charter 77 (the intellectuals, the Christians, the reform Communists and the cultural underground), in both, large cities and in the countryside. The publication highlights the fact that one-third of Charter 77 spokespeople were women and seeks to create a more gender balanced discourse surrounding this part of Czech history.

An English translation is due in spring 2019.

Tickets £7.92 book on Eventbrite via link below.

Photograph from secret police archives taken by a secret police officer who was following Ivanka Hyblerová (code name balerina) in 1981 when she was nine months pregnant.