Early communists believed the "woman question" was secondary to the revolution. Restructuring class relations would inevitably lead to the emancipation of women, and thus any separate focus on the issue was a waste of time and effort. Measures were passed from above, by the state, to ensure equality of women in the work place and in society. However, as Einhorn perceptively indicates, this legislation emancipated women as workers, and not as citizens. There was no emancipation of social roles; women were simply required to add to their existing burdens: in addition to wives and mothers, they were to become workers and active communists (the "triple burden"). Social structures and mentalities remained unchanged within the family, and the nuclear family was transmorgrified into the socialist family. Today, in reaction to this past, women who cannot reject the primary "job" of wife and mother, are only too happy (in many cases) to cast off the extraneous responsibilities "imposed" upon them by the previous regime. Thus many East European women desire today to leave employment and politics to the men, to divide responsibilities between the public sphere — capitalism and politics (male), and the private sphere — home and family (female).

There is also increasing identification between feminism and state socialism (as gender-equality laws were initially enacted in most of these countries by the communists), and of socialism as "emasculating" the male population. According to Einhorn, men and women felt forced out of their "natural" roles, into new (and foreign) areas of responsibility and action by state socialism. Pre-1989 legislation has been completely rejected, irrespective of any intrinsic merit. Instead, the appeal is to 19th century nationalism, to an idealized era when women were not yet citizens, and instead stayed home and "made babies for the nation." An era of exclusionary and ethnic citizenship, but a time when men and women could know, and feel secure in, their social roles.

Women's movements that do exist today are often explicitly anti-feminist. However there has been some mobilization, particularly in Poland and the former German Democratic Republic, over access to abortion. The opposition of the Polish Catholic Church and the Federal German Government has coalesced women around this issue. Einhorn believes that more attacks on women's citizenship rights in these countries are inevitable, but that when women feel their reproductive rights and employment opportunities to be truly personally threatened (especially in a period of economic difficulty), they will begin to fight to protect themselves as citizens