Aspasia

This is the fourth volume of Aspasia, an international peer-reviewed yearbook, the aim of which is to provide a forum for the best scholarship in the field of interdisciplinary women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The articles published in Aspasia contribute to the expansion and enrichment of the field of women’s and gender history by making it more inclusive and by constructing bridges between the scholarship produced in and beyond the region. In addition they make it possible to challenge and deconstruct widespread notions about the ‘otherness’ and/ or ‘backwardness’ of the region by allowing us to expand our knowledge of a part of Europe that has a complex, though little known, gender and women’s history, and to situate these histories within broader contexts. A number of items included in this volume, not only articles but also book reviews and contributions to the Forum and News and Miscellanea, take up the challenges of deconstructing superficial notions about the region and of offering comparative perspectives.

This study argues that the changing relationship between paid work, unpaid work and paid care work and social services, and the struggle over this relationship and its implications, constituted key factors in shaping the ‘state socialist’ gender regime in Hungary from 1949 to the 1980s. The study is based on a wealth of recent scholarship, original sources and Hungarian research conducted during the state socialist period. It tries to give a balanced and inclusive analysis of key elements of women’s and gender history in the state socialist project of ‘catching-up development’ in a semi-peripheral patriarchal society, pointing to constraints, challenges and results of this project. Due to the complex interaction of a variety of actors and factors impacting on and shaping the state socialist gender regime not all women were affected in the same way by state socialist politics and gender struggles. Women’s status and opportunities, as well as gender relations, differed according to class, ethnicity and economic sector. As a rule, the gender struggle over state socialist family and gender arrangements in Hungary sought to reduce or temper tensions and conflicts by avoiding substantial or direct attack against the privileges of men both within the home and elsewhere.

This article explores attitudes towards sex and sexuality in First Republic Czechoslovakia (1918–1938), focusing on the urban Czech population. By looking at articles, advertisements and references to sex and sexuality in Czech periodicals from 1920 to 1935, it shows that inter-war Czechoslovaks were enthusiastic participants in closely linked discourses about hygiene, physical culture, sex education, birth control and sex reform, and provides evidence that Czech discourse about sex and sexuality was al- most always – apart from erotica and pornography – closely tied to discourse about health, hygiene and social reform. The article also shows how inter-war Czechoslovaks participated in the struggle for sexual minority rights. By exploring these discourses, this article helps place Czech ideas about sexuality within the larger framework of European ideas about sexuality, especially in relation to the German discourses with which Czech writers and activists were in constant dialogue.

This article examines several sex manuals from Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania for the ideologically-infused sex norms they contain. These manuals constructed a sexual ideal that located pleasure in the marital couple rather than in the individual, defining ‘normal sexuality’ as heterosexual and privileging its collective significance as an act for reproduction over the experience of pleasure by an individual. This collective model of pleasure was key to the construction of the communist subject as a member of a collective rather than as an autonomous individual. While this collective subject had roots in Romanian pre-communist traditions, communist sex experts rejected conventional gender roles according to which women are subordinate to men. Subsequent comparisons with contemporaneous American sex manuals reveal that the Romanian communist discourse on pleasure differed significantly from that of popular American sex advice of the same period.

This article shows how the model of the ideal patriotic woman, established through propaganda activities between two competitive ideologies in Croatia during the Second World War, have been transformed and adapted to accommodate diverse genres of memory culture from 1945 until the present day. In order to indicate the inter- relation of media-ideological constructs and self-definition, the authors have compared cultural representation models of ‘acceptable’ and ‘obnoxious’ females in war time with ethnographical interviews conducted with women at the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Antifašistički front žena (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front, AFŽ) Istrian Conference in 2004. The contrast between recollections and culturally constructed official memory shows how the memories of women, as autonomous historical subjects, resist the imposed collective amnesia on the anti-fascist movement, although these women also leave many ‘unsuitable truths’ untold about their subordinate role within the anti-fascist movement.

Invariably invoked in gender studies, such fundamental terms and concepts as sexual difference, masculinity and femininity, fatherhood and motherhood, as well as patriarchy, teem with complexities and ambiguities. Gender as a category in feminist psychoanalytic discourse grew out of a series of debates about how and where to formulate the problem of cultural construction. Do cultural socialisation and the internalisation of norms determine gender? Is gender part of a linguistic network that precedes and structures the formation of the ego and the linguistic subject? After approximately four decades of feminist and gender scholarship, the competing answers outnumber the repeated questions in the lively multi-vocal debate that shows no sign of abating.

During the Second World War, legions of Soviet women behind the lines participated in war-time production in both industry and agriculture. Soviet propaganda, despite the overwhelming numbers, contributions and sacrifices of women, graphically portrayed them in ways that both re-established the pre-war patriarchal gender relations of the Stalinist era and circumscribed women’s wartime experiences. This article examines how, during the initial and la er years of the conflict, and in the important and under- studied source of Soviet poster propaganda, the symbolic configuration and recon- figuration of femininity and the female image was transmitted through shifting official policies and attitudes on the role of women. While early posters portrayed women’s wartime participation as atypical, temporary and unwomanly, propaganda by the end of the war featured hyper-feminised representations of women while the Soviet state moved to reassert political controls and institutionalise conservative gender policies to serve the needs of war and reconstruction.

This article examines the process of symbolisation in the images of women in Soviet cinema. It argues that during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) many female characters served as symbolic representations of the country itself, of Mother Russia, determined to defeat the enemy and ready to endure hardships and to cope with deprivation and grief. The start of the resistance against Nazi Germany called for many more depictions of women than was typical in the thoroughly masculinised culture of the 1930s. At the same time, wartime images of women were quite abstract: they recalled posters and often relied on a symbolically charged mise-en-scène.

This article analyses the performances of the Polish cabaret singer-cum-movie star, Hanka Ordonówna/Ordonka, during the Second World War, and subsequent representations of her through physical monuments and biographical treatments in print and on film. It locates Ordonka in the context of female performers entertaining the troops, the lone woman on the front socially approved for her tasteful display of a morale-boosting sexuality before an audience of largely male combatants. ‘War, Women and Song’ argues for Ordonka’s exceptional case due to her popular pre-war celebrity and her own war time experience, when she shared or witnessed her compatriots’ tragic fate of occupation, deportation, mass death and, in many cases, permanent exile. In her war work, Ordonka doubly incarnated for her audiences a lost pre-war culture of urbane sophistication and eroticised charm and a war time victim turned conventional national heroine when she spearheaded a rescue mission of five hundred Polish children orphaned by Soviet atrocities. Ordonka came to represent to her nation both an irresistible lover and an exemplary surrogate parent with the qualities of a self- sacrificing matka polka (Polish mother).

Every volume of Aspasia includes an ‘Aspasia Discussion Forum’ in which a particular topic is highlighted or debated. Aspasia dedicates this year’s (2010) and next year’s (2011) Forums to the field of women’s and gender studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). The idea came from a round-table on Gender Studies in CESEE organised by Aspasia editor Maria Bucur for the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Philadelphia in November 2008. The pieces included here by Agnieszka Graff and Mihaela Miroiu were first presented at that round-table. The other participants wrote their contributions especially for Aspasia. The five texts in this Forum are a wonderful be- ginning of our discussions about the establishment and development of women’s and gender studies in CESEE in the last two decades. Next year we will continue with the presentation of the state of the art in this field in other important East European contexts. During the period under consideration, the category of ‘gender’ appeared as an analytical tool in the realm of historical research in CESEE as well. To follow these developments, the 2012 issue of Aspasia will host a Forum dedicated specifically to the appearance and progress of women’s and gender history as a field of study and an academic discipline in the region.

Elif Ekin Aksit, Kızların Sessizlig ̆i. Kız Enstitülerinin Uzun Tarihi (The silence of girls: The long history of female institutes)

Tzvetana Boncheva, Brak I semejstvo pri balgarite katolitsi ot Plovdivsko prez parvata polovina na XX vek (Marriage and family life of the Bulgarian Catholics from the Plovdiv region during the first half of the twentieth century)

Zora Bútorová et al, She and He in Slovakia: Gender and Age in the Period of Transition

Christine von Oertzen, The Pleasure of a Surplus Income: Part-Time Work, Gender Politics, and Social Change in West Germany, 1955–1969

Karl Kaser, Patriarchy after Patriarchy: Gender Relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500–2000

Alaine Polcz, One Woman in the War. Hungary 1944–1945

Zoltán Rostás and Theodora-Eliza Va ̆ca ̆rescu, eds., Cealalta ̆ juma ̆tate a istoriei. Femei povestind (The other half of history: Women telling their stories)

Suzanne Stiver Lie, Lynda Malik, Ilvi Jõe-Cannon and Rutt Hinrikus, eds., Carrying Linda’s Stones: An Anthology of Estonian Women’s Life Stories

Laurie S. Stoff, They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution

Nina Vodopivec, Labirinti postsocializma (The labyrinths of post-socialism)

Anna Zarnowska, Workers, Women, and Social Change in Poland, 1870–1939

Tatyana Zhurzhenko, Gendernyye rynki Ukrainy: politicheskaya ekomomiya natsionalnogo stroitelstva (The gendered markets of Ukraine: The political economy of nation building)

Kadin Eserleri Kütüphanesi Ve Bilgi Merkezi Vakfi: The First and Only Women’s Library and Archives in Turkey

Women’s Memory: The Problem of Sources. A Conference Report

Ann.: Women Writers in History: Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture

Ann.: MATILDA: Joint European Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender History

Ann.: Aletta – Institute for Women’s History (the Former IIAV)