Aspasia

As we begin Volume 13, Aspasia would like to take this opportunity to congratulate several of our contributors. First, congratulations to Rochelle Ruthchild on her receipt of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Outstanding Achievement Award (see the citation “In Recognition: Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild” following this introduction). In addition, Emily Gioielli's article, “‘Home Is Home No Longer’: Political Struggle in the Domestic Sphere in Postarmistice Hungary, 1919–1922,” which appeared in Volume 11 (2017), received an honorable mention for the 2018 Mark Pittaway Article Prize in Hungarian Studies by the Hungarian Studies Association. Aspasia is pleased to extend its congratulations to Rochelle and Emily.

It is with great pleasure that Aspasia offers its congratulations to Dr. Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, the 2018 recipient of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies’ Outstanding Achievement Award. A historian of the Russian woman suffrage movement, Dr. Ruthchild played a foundational role in the development of women's history within Russian and Eastern European studies. She helped to establish the Association of Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) in 1988, serving as its first president. She also contributed to the inaugural volume of Aspasia in 2007, and has served as an editor of this journal for over a decade. She is an exemplary scholar, a champion of women's studies and women's achievements, as well as a mentor to colleagues and students in the United States and abroad.

On 12 October 2018, without any public statement or explanation, the responsible Hungarian authorities removed the two-year MA degree program in gender studies, first accredited in Hungary in 2007 and overhauled in 2016, from the list of approved study programs. (Students currently enrolled in any such master's degree at any university in the country can finish their course of studies as usual.) For the MA degree program in gender studies established in 2017 at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, a state university and the largest university in terms of student numbers in the country, this equals abolition. For the two-year MA program in critical gender studies at Central European University (CEU) it means the loss of Hungarian accreditation, by which the degree was formally recognized in the European Union. This combines with the fact that CEU has lost the right to enroll new students into its US programs operated in Hungary, and more generally to operate in Hungary as an American institution (though this still is subject to legal encounters). Already in March 2017, at the time when the higher education reform was announced that would result in making CEU's continued operation in Hungary impossible, the government discussed a report on “a number of questions of the gender studies MA degree,” and representatives of the small Catholic coalition partner of the government led by Viktor Orbán's Fidesz/Hungarian Civic Alliance, the Christian Democratic People's Party, publicly denied the legitimacy of gender studies as an academic subject.

Based on some forty duels that took place in Athens between 1870 and 1918, this article examines the different connotations middle-class dueling assumed in the political culture of the period. Drawing on newspaper articles, monographs, domestic codes of honor, legal texts, and published memoirs of duelists, it reveals the diversified character of male honor as value and emotion. Approaching dueling both as symbol and practice, the article argues that this ritualistic battle was imported to Greece against a background of fin de siècle political instability and passionate calls for territorial expansion and national integration. The duel gradually became a powerful way of influencing public opinion and the field of honor evolved into a theatrical stage for masculinity, emanating a distinct glamor: the glamor of a public figure who was prepared to lay down his life for his principles, his party, the proclamations he endorsed, and his “name.”

There is a recent trend, mainly in the field of historiography but also in art history, toward the exploration of female autobiographical discourse, whether it concerns written (autobiographies, correspondence), painted (self-portraits), or photographic data. On the basis of the highly fruitful gender perspective, this article seeks to present and interpret the numerous photographs of the well-known Greek painter Thaleia Flora-Caravia. These photographic recordings, taken almost exclusively from the painter's unpublished personal archive, are inextricably linked to the artist's self-portraits. This kind of cross-examination allows the reader to become familiar with the mosaic of roles and identities that constitutes the subjectivity of female artists in Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This article analyzes the Gulag memoirs of four women political prisoners—Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, Liudmila Miklashevskaya, Nadezhda Joffe, and Valentina Grigorievna Ievleva-Pavlenko—to examine the interplay of motherhood and survival. Each was a mother of small children sentenced to forced labor camps in the northern polar regions of the Soviet Union. Motherhood played a complex role in their survival. The rupture in family relations, particularly the separation from their children, magnified the psychological and emotional stress of their incarceration. Yet, being a mother in the camps provided a compelling motivation to stay alive. It helped them to sustain a sense of normalcy by connecting them to their former lives and to the family unit that represented stability and sustenance amid the bleakness of their Gulag existence.

This article discusses disability memoirs written by mothers of disabled sons during state socialism in Poland. It recovers an often forgotten experience of living socialism as a mother of a disabled child and analyzes disability as a category of difference that, unlike gender or class, was not reordered by the socialist state. It argues that disability reconfigured motherhood as a political institution under state socialism and shows that a child's disability permitted women to become politically disobedient subjects. Disability allowed women who were responsible for their children's overcoming disability to make demands on the state and criticize it for the lack of sufficient accommodations and resources. At the same time, the article highlights the violence embedded in the relationship between a disabled son and his mother.

This article investigates the experiences of Polish Displaced Persons (DPs) through the lens of sexuality, analyzing their perceptions of liberation and life in DP camps in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria (1945–1951). It draws on a wide array of sources, including archival material, memoirs, and letters. Employing Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of carnival and the carnivalesque, it argues that the dynamics of DPs’ sexual and romantic encounters, analyzed as emotional experiences, can be characterized as having a carnivalesque structure of oppression, eruption, and normalization. It demonstrates how the eruption of sexuality (including sexual violence) was connected to the wider problems Poles faced, including feelings of emasculation, war trauma, and the challenges of rebuilding a community in exile. Polish elites, acting mostly within a Catholic conservative register, boosted normalization by combatting perceived “immorality” and promoting family values. To this end, they cooperated with international organizations and the Allied military in an attempt to contain venereal disease, prostitution, and abortion. Many of these efforts focused on policing women's bodies and regulating their sexuality, as a part of rebuilding the nation after the hecatomb of war.

Translation of a letter from Narcyza Żmichowska to Wanda Grabowska, 26 January 1864. Published in Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, ed., Narcyssa i Wanda: Listy Narcyzy Żmichowskiej do Wandy Grabowskiej (Żeleńskiej) (Narcyssa and Wanda: Letters from Narcyza Żmichowska to Wanda Grabowska [Żeleńska]) (Warsaw: Dom Książki Polskiej Spółka Akcyjna, 1930), pp. 32–34.

Over the past half decade, philosopher and political scientist Mihaela Miroiu published a series of short autobiographical stories that were eventually collected in a book, Cu mintea mea de femeie [With my woman's mind] (Bucharest: Cartea românească, 2017), which was reviewed in Aspasia (vol. 12) in 2018. While the whole volume deserves an international audience, I have selected the story “Medusa's Smirk,” for translation because it sheds light on a topic little known, yet extremely important, in the lives of many women: sexual violence. Discussing sexual violence was a taboo topic under communism, and many women suppressed their traumatic memories of violence both seen and experienced. Yet accounts such as the one shared below have circulated orally and deserve further attention from scholars. For another relevant account, see http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/12/sex-in-the-time-of-communism/.

Alin Ciupală, Bătălia lor: Femeile din România în Primul Război Mondial (Their battle: Women in Romania during World War I), Iași: Polirom, 2017, 392 pp., 48 illustrations, RON 39.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-9-73466-577-8.

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 287 pp., 11 illustrations, GBP 24.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-31611-862-7.

Maria Bucur, Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, xi +149 pp., $24.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-350-0265-4.

Maria Bucur, The Century of Women: How Women Have Transformed the World Since 1900, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018, x + 232 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-4422-5739-9.

Jelena J. Dimitrijević, Sedam mora i tri okeana: Putem oko sveta (Seven seas and three oceans: Traveling around the globe), edited by Biljana Dojčinović, Belgrade: Laguna, 2016, 445 pp., price not listed (paperback), ISBN 978-86-521-2306-3.

Jelena J. Dimitrijević, Pisma iz Indije (Letters from India), second edition, edited by Ana Stjelja, English translation by Željko V. Mitić, Hindi translation by Latika Chawda, Belgrade: A. Stjelja, 2017, 106 pp., price not listed (paperback), ISBN 978-86-918903-6-0.

Kelly Hignett, Melanie Ilic, Dalia Leinarte, and Corina Snitar, Women's Experiences of Repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, London: Routledge, 2018, xiii, 196 pp., $123.09 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-04692-4.

Lisa Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, xiii, 278 pp., $29.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-131-622690-2.

Milena Kirova, ed., Mara Belcheva: Poezia (Mara Belcheva: Poetry), Volume 1, Sofia: Kibea, 2018, 268 pp., BGN 17 (paperback), ISBN 978-954-474-728-2.

Milena Kirova, ed., Mara Belcheva: Proza i prevodi (Mara Belcheva: Prose and translations), Volume 2, Sofia: Kibea, 2018, 350 pp., BGN 19 (paperback), ISBN 978-954-474-729-9.

Vanya Georgieva, Ekaterina Karavelova—Lora Karavelova: Kulturnoistoricheskiat sjuzhet “maiki-dushteri” v bulgarski context (Ekaterina Karavelova—Lora Karavelova: The cultural-historical subject “mothers-and-daughters” in the Bulgarian context), Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2017, 543 pp., BGN 25 (paperback), ISBN 978-619-01-0073-7.

Slobodanka Peković, Časopisi po meri dostojanstvenog ženskinja: Ženski časopisi na početku 20. veka (Journals suited for respectable women: Women's journals from the early twentieth century), Novi Sad-Beograd: Matica srpska, Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2015, 378 pp., RSD 550 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-7946-154-4.

Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost: Žanr ženskog portreta u srpskoj periodici 1920–1941 (The feminist counterpublic: A genre of woman's portrait in the Serbian periodical press from 1920 to 1941), Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2015, 436 pp., RSD 1100 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-7095-224-9.

Judith Szapor, Hungarian Women's Activism in the Wake of the First World War: From Rights to Revanche, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 207 pp. 102.60 USD (hardback), ISBN 978-1-350-02049-8.

Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová, eds., Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2016, 325 pp., no price listed (hardback), ISBN 978-0-25302-189-2.

Athena Athanasiou, Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, xii +348 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4744-2015-0.

Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu, Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2018, 189 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-25302-564-7.

Katherina Dalakoura and Sidiroula Ziogou-Karastergiou, Hē ekpaideusē tôn gynaikôn, gynaikes stēn ekpaideusē: Koinônikoi, ideologikoi, ekpaideutikoi metaschēmatismoi kai gynaikeia paremvasē (18os–20os ai.) (Women's education, women in education: Social, ideological, educational transformations, and women's interventions [18th–20th centuries]), Athens: Greek Academic Electronic Manuals/Kallipos Repository, 2015, 346 pp., e-book: http://hdl.handle.net/11419/2585, ISBN: 978-960-603-290-5. Provided free of charge by the Association of Greek Academic Libraries.

Melissa Feinberg, Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 232 pp., $74.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-064461-1.

Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger, and Birgitta Bader Zaar, eds., Gender and the First World War, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 276 pp., £69.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-349-45379-5.

Oksana Kis, Ukrayinky v Hulahu: Vyzhyty znachyt’ peremohty (Ukrainian women in the Gulag: Survival means victory), Lvіv: Institute of Ethnology, 2017, 288 pp., price not listed (paperback), ISBN: 978-966-02-8268-1.

Ana Kolarić, Rod, modernost i emancipacija: Uredničke politike u časopisima “Žena” (1911–1914) i “The Freewoman” (1911–1912) (Gender, modernity, and emancipation: Editorial politics in the journals “Žena” [The woman] [1911–1914] and “The Freewoman” [1911–1912]), Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2017, 253 pp., €14 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-7718-168-0.

Agnieszka Kościańska, Zobaczyć łosia: Historia polskiej edukacji seksualnej od pierwszej lekcji do internetu (To see a moose: The history of Polish sex education from the first lesson to the internet), Wołowiec: Czarne, 2017, 424 pp., PLN 44.90 (hardback), ISBN 978-83-8049-545-6.

Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó, eds., The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700, New York: Routledge, 2017, 522 pp., GBP 175 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-58433-3.

Zsófia Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2018, 270 pp., €88.39 (hardback), €71.39 (e-book), ISBN 978-3-319-78222-5.

Marina Matešić and Svetlana Slapšak, Rod i Balkan (Gender and the Balkans), Zagreb: Durieux, 2017, 333 pp., KN 168 (hardback), ISBN 978-953-188-425-9.

Ana Miškovska Kajevska, Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s, London: Routledge, 2017, 186 pp., £105.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-69768-3.

Ivana Pantelić, Uspon i pad “prve drugarice” Jugoslavije: Jovanka broz i srpska javnost, 1952–2013 (The rise and fall of the “first lady comrade” of Yugoslavia: Jovanka Broz and Serbian public, 1952–2013), Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2018, 336 pp., RSD 880 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-519-2251-3.

Fatbardha Mulleti Saraçi, Kalvari i grave në burgjet e komunizmit (The cavalry of women in communist prisons), Tirana: Instituti i Studimit të Krimeve dhe Pasojave të Komunizmit; Tiranë: Kristalina-KH, 2017, 594 pp., 12000 AL Lek (paperback), ISBN 978-9928-168-71-9.

Žarka Svirčev, Avangardistkinje: Ogledi o srpskoj (ženskoj) avangardnoj književnosti (Women of the avant-garde: Essays on Serbian (female) avant-garde literature), Belgrade, Šabac: Institut za književnost i umetnost, Fondacija “Stanislava Vinaver,” 2018, 306 pp., RSD 800 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-7095259-1.

Şirin Tekeli, Feminizmi düşünmek (Thinking feminism), İstanbul: Bilgi University, 2017, 503 pp., including bibliography, appendices, and index, TRY 30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-605-399-473-2.

Zafer Toprak, Türkiye'de yeni hayat: Inkılap ve travma 1908–1928 (New life in Turkey: Revolution and trauma 1908–1928), Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2017, 472 pp., TRY 40 (paperback), ISBN 978-605-09-4721-2.

Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 380 pp., 31.45 USD (paperback), ISBN 978-0-520-29229-1.