Jiřina Šiklová

[3] In 1968, Šiklová was forced to leave her position at Charles University and worked as a janitor until 1971, when she was employed as a researcher and social worker at a Prague hospital.

Her involvement with Czech dissent led her to be jailed in 1981,[4] and she was hounded by the StB, the Communist Czechoslovak secret police, and frequently brought in for interrogation.

In her writings on the experience, she noted that while women were literally involved in the "dirty work" of copying and distributing samizdat texts, they were rarely written about or acknowledged for their contribution to Czech dissent.

[6] One of Šiklová's focuses in her writing was what she termed the "Gray Zone" – the clandestine collaboration between the dissidents and reform-minded Communists who remained in the Party.

[9] Though she was interested in and wrote about the role of women in Czech society, she was not exposed to Western feminist theory until after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.