Key-Note by HERESSEE-PI Zsófia Lóránd: "Negotiating Feminist Pasts and Women's Political Participation in 20th Century Central Europe in the Framework of Women’s Political Thought and Feminist Intellectual History"
21 February
Abstract: “Ten years ago, my talk would have focused on the missing women from East Central Europe and double marginalisations in intellectual history and histories of political thought. Whilst these issues remain pertinent, my current talk centres more on methodology, approaches, and contextual differentiation. I will examine the brief but exciting history of historiography on women’s political thought in the region, addressing some of the challenges regarding methodology, approach, and conceptual definitions (such as that of feminism). Using the recently published Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the 20th Century and my own ERC-funded project HERESSEE - "The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929-2001” as case studies, I will explore these issues in depth. Most notably, I will discuss several examples from her research that highlight the distinctiveness and potential of women’s political thought in East Central Europe. These cases reveal how this thought engages with mainstream political debates and ideologies about politics, the state, and society, prompting a rethinking of these concepts through the region's post-imperial, state socialist, and post-socialist experiences.”
HERESSEE-Panel: "Women’s Activism and Women’s Rights Discourses in Central and South Eastern Europe"
20 February
Manca Grgić Renko: "The Wives, Secretaries, Lovers: Invisible Work of Socialist and Communist Women in the Interwar Yugoslavia"
Abstract: This paper examines the invisible yet essential roles of socialist and communist women in interwar Yugoslavia, focusing on the "double secrecy" under which they operated. Since the “Obznana” decree of 1920/1921, which outlawed communist activities within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (SHS), communist and socialist organizing (but also thinking) had to be conducted illegally. Women, who were already excluded from formal political rights faced additional restrictions, making their participation in the movement both covert and complex. This paper explores how women’s revolutionary contributions were often overlooked, particularly within family and/or romantic structures, where they supported their activist husbands, lovers and families in ways largely unrecognized by historiography.
Isidora Grubački: The “Peasant Woman Question” in Socialist Yugoslavia - Antifascist Women’s Front and Women Activists’ Discourses on Peasant Women in the Late 1940s and 1950s
Abstract: Building on the works of historians who have written about postwar Yugoslav gender policies and the Antifascist Women’s Front (Antifašistički front žena, AFŽ), this paper explored the AFŽ from the perspective of the history of peasant women in early socialist Yugoslavia. More specifically, the paper will explore several women active in the AFŽ and their writings, speeches, and discussions about peasant women. Particular attention will be given to the question of continuity in women’s activism from the period before the Second World War.
Libora Oates-Indruchova: Discourses and Contexts of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the Czech Republic
Abstract: The presentation considers the contextuatizations of the UK’s Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the Eastern Bloc’s political connections and media presentation. It will discuss both its instrumentalization by the state actors to support the Eastern Bloc’s peace agenda and its subversive potential for civic movements from below. Finally, it will also consider the interplay of the Cold War politics and the gender culture of late state socialism.
Stefan Gužvica: Communism and the National Question in Bessarabia - The Political Views of Ecaterina Arbore-Ralli (1875–1937)
Abstract: The Romanian communist Ecaterina Arbore-Ralli was one of the most important figures in the International Women’s Secretariat within the Comintern. She was also one of the few communist women of the 1920s who played an active role in “masculine” high politics, rather than focusing exclusively on “feminine” issues such as social work, education, and war orphans. Herself a descendant from Moldavian aristocracy, Arbore-Ralli took a great interest in the contentious Bessarabian question, which was the point of conflict between the young Soviet Union and the newly unified Romanian state. The communists had hoped to utilize Bessarabia, once a part of the Russian Empire and a place of high workers’ and soldiers’ militancy in 1917, as a springboard for revolution in the Balkans and Central Europe. Romania, for its part, was a militantly anti-communist regime and a part of the Cordon sanitaire against the USSR. The communists embarked on the project of Moldovan nation-building in Bessarabia, expecting that class-based peasant nationalism could be turned into a socialist revolutionary force. Arbore-Ralli played a key role in the debates on Moldovan national identity, which reverberate in the Moldovan public space until this day. This paper will present the development of Arbore-Ralli’s views on the national question and her place in the Bessarabian debate. I will argue that Arbore-Ralli’s position in the debate casts doubt on a claim, widespread in historiography, that she was a “Trotskyist” and that this was the reason for her unlawful execution in 1937.