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Accepted Paper:
Prague mothers between dissent and post-communist activism
Doubravka Olsakova
(Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences)
The paper analyses an informal group of Prague Mothers, who identified themselves as non-dissident activists in the mid-1980s, who not only challenged dissident actions before 1989 but also shaped the social space after 1989, as each of them fundamentally influenced a segment of Czech social policy.
Paper long abstract:
The Prague Mothers group was an informal group of women who, in the mid-1980s, distinguished themselves as a non-dissident activist group. Charter 77 called for an activist approach in one of its statements, but soon backtracked. Nonetheless, the Prague Mothers profiled themselves as a specific group of environmental activists who stood outside dissent. At the beginning of their actions in 1985, they tried to find out the real state of the environment in Prague, and on the occasion of the conference of European environment ministers in Prague in 1985, they organised children's happenings in the city centre, which they combined with the signing of the first petitions to improve the state of the environment in the CSSR.
The aim of this paper is not only to analyse their functioning and actions before 1989, but also to look at how they influenced the transformation of the social space after 1989, as each of them influenced in a quite fundamental way one of the segments of social policy in the Czech Republic, from urban policy to early childhood care or children's groups.