Aspasia

This is the third volume of Aspasia, with a focus on the gender history of everyday life. The questions in which we were interested included: How have broad institutional frameworks – religious, social, economic, political, and cultural – related to the ways in which average women and men negotiated their gender identities, and, vice versa, how have (changes in) gender identities and relations influenced broader institutional frameworks? Our call for papers also asked more specific questions: How have assumptions of religious institutions about gender norms shaped the everyday religious practices and spirituality of laywomen and men? How have sexual norms impacted how women and men perform and negotiate their sexual identity in their daily lives? What changes did state socialism bring to women’s and men’s gender identities and daily lives, and how did that change over time?

This article looks into the representations of the figure of the Balkan man-woman in missionary and travel accounts from the turn of the twentieth century. I read these early proto-ethnographic texts, both written and visual, dialogically – as points of intersection between observers and the observed, with the aim of addressing the question of how professional transgressors – travellers and missionaries – perceived and culturally ‘translated’ female gender-transgressors who were enjoying the role and status of social men in northern Albanian and Montenegrin societies, and whose gender identity was heavily based on their daily performance of male chores and on the possession of male privileges, such as smoking, socialising with men and wearing arms.

The article deals with the institution of ‘village nuns’, a form of religious celibacy among Bulgarian Catholics in the Plovdiv region during the first half of the twentieth century. The primary concern of this article is the structuring and functioning of the institution of village nuns, viewed from the perspective of the fractal dichotomy strategy–tactics, belonging to the paradigm of fractal dichotomies including religious culture–traditional culture, clergy/male celibacy-–nuns/female celibacy, masculinity–femininity. The sources used in the research are of different types: census registers, parochial books, civil registers of births and deaths, household registers, property tax registers, various publications of the Catholic Church in Bulgaria, and ethnographic field material collected by the author. The methodology employed combines various qualitative methods: the gatekeeper and snowball methods, structured and semi-structured interviews, the biographical method and the comparative method. The analysis shows that the nuns’ institution can be treated as a turning point at which female tactics turn into strategies and bring about certain power shifts affecting gender relations.

This article uses a comparative transnational model for a study of women’s resistance in Yugoslavia, with particular reference to the Independent State of Croatia. It challenges the dominant paradigm of active resistance in Hitler’s Europe as a largely masculine and military activity. Historians have long recognised the contribution of women to resistance in Yugoslavia; however, an ideologised and politically driven interpretation of wartime behaviour, combined with an overemphasis on active resistance, has militated against a nuanced approach towards the study of dissent in its diverse manifestations. This article proposes that a woman-centred focus on the social, everyday aspects of resistance is illuminating on definitions of and the preconditions necessary for successful resistance as well as on the subject of collaboration and conformism in the Second World War.

This essay explores a body of 340 poems created by political prisoners who were accused of and imprisoned for anti-state activity in late 1940s and 1950s Stalinist Poland. Evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, I understand the process of composing a poem as the result of a prisoner’s need to document the world around her/himself, as a psychological activity that contained diffi cult prison experiences, as a negotiation of emotional and often conflicting states, and as a social practice through which prison poets affected themselves and the people around them. Situated somewhere at the intersection of the personal and political, poetry became one of the most powerful sites of resistance. In addition to evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, this essay also explores gender differences and similarities in the body of 340 poems discussed here and in the social function of the prison poems.

This article focuses on a little-known aspect of everyday life in socialist Bulgaria: the act of consulting a clairvoyant for health issues, thereby dealing with the broader process of medicalisation of healing. It is grounded on files from consultations with the renowned Bulgarian seer, prophetess and healer baba Vanga, which were collected between 1966 and 1974. These highly specifi c historical sources allow me to analyse late twentieth-century ideas and notions of health and disease, of pain and suffering, and thus to access social realities, cultural practices and representations of healing under socialism. By scrutinising the categories used in these records, the article delineates the relationship between the seer-healer, her patients, and the state institutions involved in the regulation of this process.

Utilising socialist legislation, propaganda and oral history interviews, this article analyses how women’s identities and roles – as well as gender relations – were reformulated as a result of women’s participation in paid labour in socialist Romania. Although some women regarded work as burdensome and unsatisfying, others found it intellectually fulfilling, personally rewarding and, in certain respects, empowering. For example, work improved women’s economic position and offered them an array of social services, which, although inadequate in a number of ways, were welcomed by many women. Moreover, work increased women’s physical and social mobility, which in turn provided them with greater freedom in directing their own lives and in choosing a partner. Finally, the experience of being harassed by male co-workers and of combining work outside the home with domestic responsibilities motivated some women to rethink their status both within the workplace and the family, and to renegotiate their relationships with male colleagues and partners. Although women never achieved full equality in socialist Romania, by creating the conditions for women’s full-time engagement in the workforce, state socialism decisively shaped the course of women’s lives, their self-identities and their conceptions of gender roles, often in positive ways.

Drawing on feminist conceptualisations of the body, this essay analyses Iva Pekárková’s novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (published as Péra a Perutě [Feathers and wings] in 1989, translated into English in 1992), to show how this contemporary Czech writer challenges the metaphor of the female body as a container through which communist propaganda in Czechoslovakia offi cially sanctioned and established a normative female identity in maternal, economic and civic functions. I seek to demonstrate how Fialka, the female protagonist who lives under the Czechoslovak communist regime of the 1980s, critiques discursive and epistemic formations that conceptualised the female body as a vessel for reproduction and labour and denied the female body the authority to function as a source of knowledge. Striving to spotlight the body in its cognitive role, I argue for an understanding of the body not as an instrument of knowledge or a neutral medium that enables knowledge production but, rather, as a condition of the possibility of knowing.

It is not the first time a journal is attempting a livelier format of intellectual exchange among academic specialists in the history of Russia/the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But it is the first time that specialists working on questions of gender in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe are coming together to discuss a theme, theory and methodology issue together in this fashion, across a vast area and a very rich and differentiated scholarship. My interest in generating this dialogue is connected to my graduate training in the early 1990s, which came at a point when the social history of Eastern Europe was starting to gain new dimensions, linked to oral history and to the evanescent everyday life field that was gaining an important foothold at that time through the work of Alf Lüdtke and a group of social historians and historical sociologists working at University of Michigan and a few other institutions at that time. I was also becoming interested in gender as a category of historical analysis and found the Alltagsgeschichte approach embraced by this group of scholars particularly conducive to making gender topics visible and relevant in historical research and writing.

Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović, ed., Women, Violence and War: Wartime Victimization of Refugees in the Balkans, trans. Borislav Radović, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2000, 300 pp., £13.95 (pb), ISBN 978-963-9116-60-3.

Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović, ed., Zene, nasilje i rat (Women, violence, and war), Belgrade: Institut za kriminološka i sociološka istraživanja, 1995, 207 pp., €10.00 (pb), no ISBN mentioned.

Ann Taylor Allen, Women in Twentieth-Century Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 208 pp., $28.95 (pb), ISBN 1-4039-9374-2.

Efi Avdela, Le genre entre classe et nation. Essais d’historiographie grecque (Gender between class and nation. Essays on Greek historiography), Paris: Syllepse, 2006, 205 pp., €20.00 (pb), ISBN 2-84950-045-3.

Françoise Thébaud, Ecrire l’histoire des femmes et du genre (Writing women’s and gender history), Lyon: ENS Editions, 2007, 312 pp., €24.00 (pb), ISBN 978-2-84788-093-9.

Christien van den Anker and Jeroen Doomernik, eds., Trafficking and Women’s Rights, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 256 pp., $74.95 (hb), ISBN 10-1-4039-4995-6; ISBN 13-978-1-4039-4995-0.

Audrey Guichon, Christien van den Anker and Irina Novikova, eds., Women’s Social Rights and Entitlements, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 255 pp., $74.95 (hb), ISBN 10-1-4039- 4992-1; ISBN 13-978-1-4039-4992-9.

Sirkku K. Hellsten, Anne Maria Holli and Krassimira Daskalova, eds., Women’s Citizenship and Political Rights, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 240 pp., $79.95 (hb), ISBN 10-1-4039-4994-8; ISBN 13-978-14-039-4994-3.

Jasmina Lukić, Joanna Regulska and Darja Zavirsek, eds., Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006, 319 pp., $114.95 (hb), ISBN 10-0-7546-4662-9; ISBN 13-978-0-7546-4662-4.

Heather Widdows, Itziar Alkorta Idiakez and Aitziber Emaldi Cirión, eds., Women’s Reproductive Rights, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 264 pp., $79.95 (hb), ISBN 10-1-4039-4993-X; ISBN 13-978-1-4039-4993-6.

Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002, 356 pp., $34.00 (hb), ISBN 0-8229-4185-6. Eva Plach, The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006, 262 pp., $42.95 (hb), ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1695-2.

Anna Żarnowska and Andrzej Szwarc, eds., Kobieta i małzeństwo. Społeczno-kulturowe aspekty seksualności. Wiek XIX i XX (Woman and marriage. Sociocultural aspects of sexuality. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2004, 518 pp., PLN 44.00 (pb), ISBN 83-7181-314-7.

Anna Żarnowska and Andrzej Szwarc, eds., Kobieta i rewolucja obyczajowa. Społeczno-kulturowe aspekty seksualności. Wiek XIX i XX. (Woman and the sexual revolution. Sociocultural aspects of sexuality. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2006, 569 pp., PLN 42.50 (pb), ISBN 83-7181-401-1 and 978-83-7181-401-3. p

Monika Bernold and Johanna Gehmacher, eds., Autobiographie und Frauenfrage. Tagebücher, Briefwechsel, Politische Schriften von Mathilde Hanzel-Hübner (1884–1970) (Autobiography and the woman question. Diaries, correspondence and political writing by Mathilde Hanzel-Hübner (1884–1970), L’Homme Archiv 1, Quellen zur Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2003, 270 pp., €45.00 (pb), ISBN 3-205-77393-4.

Christa Hämmerle and Edith Saurer, eds., Briefkulturen und ihr Geschlecht. Zur Geschichte der privaten Korrespondenz vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute (Letter cultures and their gender: on the history of private correspondence from the sixteenth century until today), L’Homme Schriften 7, Reihe zur Feministischen Geschichtswissenschaft, Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2003, 316 pp., €35.00 (pb), ISBN 3-205-99398-5.

Marianna D. Birnbaum, The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes

Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950

Linda Garland, ed., Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200

Milena Kirova, Maya Boyadzhievska and Biljana Dojcˇinovic´-Nešic´, eds., Glasove: Nova humanitaristika ot balkanski avtorki (Voices: New humanitarian studies of women writers from the Balkans)

Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity. Abortion, Adultery and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective

Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti and Ioanna Laliotou, eds., Women Migrants from East to West. Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe 263

Ralf Roth and Robert Beachy, eds., Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750–1940

Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak, eds., Women’s Movements. Networks and Debates in Post-Communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Lucienne Thys-S¸ enocak, Ottoman Women Builders. The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan

Galina Valtchinova, Balkanski yasnovidki i prorochici ot XX vek (Balkan visionaries and prophetesses in the twentieth century)

Natascha Vittorelli, Frauenbewegung um 1900. Über Triest nach Zagreb (The women’s movement around 1900. Through Trieste to Zagreb)

Dubravka Žarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia

Frauen in Bewegung (Women in motion) is a joint endeavour of Ariadne, the Women’s and Gender Documentation Centre at the Austrian National Library, and the Department of Contemporary History at Vienna University. For two and a half years (2006–2009) the project was financed by the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Austrian Science Fund). Under the leadership of Helga Hofmann-Weinberger (Austrian National Library) and in cooperation with Johanna Gehmacher (Department of Contemporary History, Vienna University) Frauen in Bewegung has been conducted as an interdisciplinary project. While Lydia Jammernegg was responsible for the documentary part of the project, Natascha Vittorelli dealt with the historiographical components. In doing so, the documentation and historiography of women’s movements were closely interlinked. The following description focuses on the documentary part of the project and explains the aims, the structure and some of the results of the documentation and digitalisation work, which is presented on the web.