Intersections of feminisms and neoliberalisms: post-state-socialist Estonia in a transnational feminist framework

The first European Feminist Research Conference took place in August 1991 in Aalborg, Denmark. More than ninety women from Eastern Europe were invited as well, including several women from Estonia, for whom this was their first trip abroad and their first encounter with international academic feminist circles. In an emotional interview, a sociologist from Estonia recalled arriving at the conference center on August 19 to find Eastern European women crying.1 There was panic, fear and despair. She recounted that CNN was only showing news from Moscow and there was silence about what was happening in the Baltic states. The organizers were compassionate and trying to be helpful but did not fully grasp the circumstances. The contrast between the day and the night was indescribable: during the day, sitting among hundreds of European feminists, being taken aback by the variety of issues that seemed totally alien to her, and at night, sitting by the phone, trying to reach her loved ones back home in the heady days when Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union.