Ann Snitow

Ann Snitow at the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Network of East-West Women (NEWW), with Malgorzata Tarasiewicz (director of NEWW), Wanda Nowicka, Roma Ciesla, and Barbara Limanowksa. (Photo Phoebe West)

Ann Snitow (1943–2019) was a co-founder of Network of East-West Women (NEWW). Ann Snitow was a professor of literature and the director of gender studies from 2006 to 2012 at The New School, and a member of Dissent’s editorial board.

About

From Natasha Lewis, Senior Editor Dissent:

Ann Snitow dedicated her life to feminism as a scholar and activist. The first piece she published in Dissent, in 1989, was a rigorous history of the U.S. feminist movement in which she participated. In the years and months leading up to her death last August, she devoted her energy to writing an account of her political work in Central and Eastern Europe. She finished the book days before she died. We are honored to publish this excerpt, in which Ann tells the story of the founding meeting of the Network of East-West Women, the organization she cofounded in 1991 and worked within for nearly three decades.

All Were Rebels: The Founding of the Network of East-West Women

The Meeting in Dubrovnik, June 7–9, 1991 was a gathering of Eastern and Central European feminists organized by American feminists. It aimed to discuss the impact of political changes in the region on women's rights. Ann Snitow's article published posthumously in Dissent Magazine in Winter 2020: Some of the individuals mentioned in the article:

• Slavenka Drakulic (Yugoslavian writer)
• Sonia Jaffe Robbins (American organizer)
• Vaclav Havel (former Czech dissident and politician)
• Loretta Ross (African American feminist)
• Ellen Willis (American feminist)
• Agnes Hochberg (cofounder of the Hungarian Feminist Network)
• Serbian activist Sonja Licht (mentioned)
• Bell Hooks (mentioned)

"Dissent" magazine

In 2009 the Democratic Socialists of America aligned Dissent Magazine masthead Editorial Board members were;

Bernard Avishai, Joanne Barkan, David Bensman, Marshall Berman, Paul Berman , H Brand, David Bromwich, Luther Carpenter , Jean L Cohen, Mitchell Cohen, Bogdan Denitch , Jeff Faux, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Todd Gitlin, Murray Hausknecht, Agnes Heller, Jeffrey Isaac, Michael Kazin , Martin Kilson, Erazim Kohak, William Kornblum, Jeremy Larner, Susie Linfield, Kevin Mattson, Deborah Meier, Harold Meyerson, Nicolaus Mills , Jo-Ann Mort, Brian Morton, Carol O'Cleireacain, George Packer, Martin Peretz, Anson Rabinbach, Ruth Rosen, James Rule, Alan Ryan, Patricia Sexton, Jim Sleeper, Ann Snitow, Cornel West, Sean Wilentz, Dennis Wrong.

Women's Movements On-line: The New Post-Socialist Revolution

Women's Movements On-line: The New Post-Socialist Revolution

Ann Snitow was mentioned for her role in the role in the Network of East-West Women at the SAIS Review, 1996:

Women's Movements On-line: The New Post-Socialist Revolution by Shana Penn

Jelica Todosijevic, feminist activist and email trainer in Serbia, comments:

"Last year at about this time, we [women in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union] discovered e-mail. After that, nothing was like before. Now we are no longer imprisoned by state limitations and censorship. Now we can read and learn the same things that the rest of the world does and contribute with our own experiences."

Six years ago this autumn, when the communist bloc collapsed and its hermetic borders opened, thousands of westerners began entering the region, driven by curiosity for the people and forces that effect social change. As one US human rights activist wrote that winter, 'The revolutions were astounding to witness. The bit of democracy that has been won is precious and fragile, and we in the West share responsibility for protecting it, now that the excitement and drama is being replaced by the very real demands of political and economic change."

Shana Penn is executive director of Network of East-West Women, In Washington, D.C. and a writer completing a book about women's roles in anti-Communist opposition movements in central Europe.

For their contributions, Ms. Penn wishes to thank: Roma Ciesla, Jyothi Kanics, Eliza Klose; Marjorie Lightman, Sonia Jaffe Robbins, Amy Rubin, Ann Snitow, Jelica Todosijevic, Victoria Vrana, and Galina Vendiktova.