Aspasia

The year 2010 marked the centennial of International Women’s Day (IWD); the year 2011 marked the centennial of its first celebrations, which took place in Austria, Denmark, Germany, partitioned Poland, Switzerland, and no doubt other places. Inspired by these events, the theme section of this volume deals with “A Hundred Years of International Women’s Day in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe,” with articles focusing on Russia, the Polish lands, and Greece. In addition, we review the book Frauentag! (Women’s Day!), a collection of essays that accompanied an exhibition in Vienna on the occasion of IWD’s first centennial; and the News and Miscellanea section features a report on recent IWD-related events in Ukraine, including two exhibitions.

The year 2010 was the centennial of Clara Zetkin's proposal for an annual women's holiday, which became known as International Women's Day, and 2011 was the centennial of its first celebrations. The first ten years of the holiday's existence were a particularly tumultuous time in world history, with the advent of World War I, revolutionary upheavals in some of the major combatant countries, and the demise of the German, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. During this time, International Women's Day celebrations quickly gained great popularity, and in 1917 sparked the February Russian Revolution. This article focuses on the development of the holiday from its U.S. and Western European origins and goal of women's suff rage, to its role in empowering Russian women to spark a revolution, and its re-branding as a Soviet communist celebration. Special attention is paid to the roles of two prominent international socialist women leaders, Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, in shaping the holiday's evolution.

This article investigates International Women's Day (IWD) in Poland as a historical and current event. In 1911, the first IWD was observed by Polish feminists who belonged to a "nation without a state." This first celebration marked the beginning of the first stage of the history of IWD in the Polish lands. One hundred years later, women's marches took place again on 8 March. This article examines how Polish feminists celebrated and organized IWD in Galicia and Congress Poland in 1911 and beyond. The article sheds light on the relationship between the liberal and socialist women's movements in Poland during the years 1911–1914. This study contributes to Polish women's history and to the feminist memory culture of IWD. Using our analysis of the history of the origins of IWD in Poland, we also consider whether or not the demands of 1911 are still relevant to the present day.

This article examines the history of International Women's Day (IWD) in Greece from its first celebration in 1924 until 2010. IWD was introduced in Greece by the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and remained a communist ritual for fifty years. After the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, the anniversary gradually acquired a wide acceptance and has since been adopted by feminist groups and organizations, trade unions, and parties from the entire political spectrum. The article follows the transformations of the celebration, explores its nebulous genealogy and the myths about its origins, and discusses its impressive ability to survive in diverse socio-political contexts.

Since the early 1920s, following the Bolshevik Revolution, Clara Zetkin, the renowned German socialist, politician, and fighter for women's rights, argued that only communism provided complete emancipation for women because it brought equality both in theory and in practice. Zetkin used her periodical Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (The communist women's international) (1921-1925) to convince women of the virtues of joining Soviet Russia (later the Soviet Union) in worldwide revolution rather than succumbing to the empty promises of feminist movements in capitalist nations. From reports of International Women's Day celebrations to statistical reviews of the institutions established to aid working women, Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale used the example of Soviet Russia to illustrate what life for women entailed in a country that had experienced a successful communist revolution. The Soviet model portrayed in Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale was optimistic and illustrated what Zetkin anticipated her female readers dreamed for themselves. The periodical, thus, became a tool of communist propaganda to convince women that supporting international communism was the most effective path for obtaining equal economic and social rights with men.

This article examines Maria F. Karlova's relatively unknown travelogue about her visit to Ottoman Macedonia and Albania in 1868. She was a sister of the prominent Slavist scholar and diplomat Alexander F. Gil'ferding and traveled with him. She appears to be the only known Russian female traveler to publish a travelogue about the Ottoman Balkans until the late 1870s. Karlova constructs her gender identity through elite lenses against three principal backdrops: the Turkish province, Europe, and Russia. She offers an example of how gender and class can be inserted into discourses about Russian identity and Russia's place in Europe's symbolic map of modernity. She also introduces gender issues into debates about Russia's political interests and Slavophile views about the Balkans. This article argues that Karlova asserts her sense of belonging to European elite culture in order to raise the issue of women's emancipation. The travelogue provides insights into the process of gender construction in Russia. The intertwined themes of gender, class, and national identity are compared to contemporaneous Victorian women's travelogues.

This article discusses the experiences of Russian nurses in World War I. An examination of Russia's sisters of mercy—as Russian nurses prior to 1918 were called—in World War I reveals the significance of women's medical service and exposes the fallacy of the notion of war as a distinctly male experience. Russian women's wartime nursing experiences share many of the features of the male war experience. Although conventional wisdom draws lines of demarcation between the active killing and dying of combat and the passive nurturance and support of nursing, in reality, Russian women's wartime medical service blurred such separations. In many ways, the narratives of female medical personnel mirror those of male combat personnel. The nurses who served in Russia during World War I indicate clearly the variety of ways that women intersected with and were affected by the war and the inadequacies of gendered notions of wartime experience.

The text below was published by Olga Zakuta as a brochure in 1917. Olga Zakuta was a member of the Board of the Vserossiiskaia Liga Ravnopraviia Zhenshchin (Russian League for Women’s Equal Rights) when she wrote this vivid description of the demonstration of 19 March 1917 in revolutionary Petrograd that won Russian women suffrage. Little else is known about her.

After publishing a two-part Forum about women’s and gender studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) in Aspasia (vols. 4 and 5), this and the next issue of Aspasia will host a Forum about the “state of the art” of women’s and gender history in the same region. Women’s history as we know it as an academic discipline appeared in Western countries in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Many practitioners in this period came from social history and/or were influenced by the overall progressive political climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Another important characteristic of the earlier period is that women’s history was one of the forerunners in women’s studies. But as important as this period was for the formation of our field, in many countries around the world women’s history is much older and was practiced by women and men in many different contexts and different ways, as the work of both Western—Gerda Lerner, Bonnie Smith, Natalie Zemon Davis, to name but a few, and East European historians has shown. Although we do not exclude the earlier developments in the field, the major aim of this Forum is to bring together contributions about the situation of women’s and gender history in CESEE during the past few decades.

Svetla Baloutzova, Demography and Nation. Social Legislation and Population Policy in Bulgaria, 1918–1944, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press (Central European University Press Studies in the History of Medicine, vol. 1), 296 pp., $45.00/ €39.95/£35.00 (hb), ISBN 978-963-9776-66-1.

Katerina I. Dalakoura, I ekpaideusi ton gunaikon stis hellenikes koinotetes tis Othomanikis autokratorias (19os aionas–1922). Koinonikopoiesi sta protipa tis patriarchias kai tou ethnikismou (Women’s education in the Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire (19th century– 1922). Socialization according to the models of patriarchy and nationalism), Athens: Gutenberg, 2008, 450 pp., € 33.50 (pb), ISBN 978-960-01-1173-6.

Biljana Dojčinović, Susreti u tami. Uvod u čitanje Virdžinije Vulf (Encounters in the dark. An introduction to reading Virginia Woolf), Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2011, 136 pp., €5 (pb), ISBN 978-86-519-0814-2.

Umut Erel, Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship: Life-Stories from Britain and Germany, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, 220 pp., £55, ISBN 978- 0-7546-7494-8 .

Haim Gerber, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 944), Farnham-Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, pp. xvi + 296, £72.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-7546-6985-2.

Oksana Kis’, Zhinka v tradytsiinii Ukraïnskii kul’turi (Woman in traditional Ukrainian culture), L’viv, Ukraine: National Academy of Ukraine, 2008, 271 pp., ISBN 978-966-02-5072-7.

Ivan Elenkov and Daniela Koleva, eds., Detstvoto pri sotsializma: Politicheski, institutsionalni i biografichni perspectivi (Childhood under socialism: Political, institutional and biographical perspectives), Sofia: Center for Advanced Studies-Sofia/Riva, 2010, 208 pp., 11,40 lv, ISBN 978-954-320-281-2.

Theodore Koulouris, Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011, 242 pp., US$114.95 (hb), ISBN 978-1-4094-0445-3.

Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009, 330 pp., US$42.00 (hb), ISBN 978-08-758-0406-4.

Dalia Leinarte, Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–1970, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010, 234 pp., ISBN 978-90-420-3062-6.

Heidi Niederkofler, Maria Mesner, Johanna Zechner, eds., Frauentag! Erfindung und Karriere einer Tradition (Women’s Day! Invention and career of a tradition) (= Kataloge des Österreichischen Museums für Volkskunde, vol. 93), Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2011, 344 pp., €29.80 (pb), ISBN 978-3-85409-585-9.

Kristina Popova, Marijana Piskova, Margareth Lanzinger, Nikola Langreiter, and Petar Vodenicharov, eds., Women and Minorities Ar- chives: Ways of Archiving, Sofia and Vienna: SEMARSh, 2009, 291 pp., ISBN 978-954-9590-03-6.

Natalia Pushkareva, Gendernaia teoriia i istoricheskoe znanie (Gender theory and historical knowledge), St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 2007, 496 pp., ISBN 978-5-91419-007-8.

During the Soviet regime the meaning of International Women’s Day (IWD) in Ukraine changed dramatically: its original feminist essence was substituted with communist propaganda aimed at women’s mobilization for the construction of a radiant communist future. In recent decades 8 March turned into a holiday of spring, women’s beauty, and love, celebrated both in public settings and in Soviet families. By the late 1980s, Soviet citizens had interiorized the new ways to celebrate this day at which men and boys were expected (or even required) to solemnize the “eternal femininity” of their counterparts by expressing their love, respect, and attention to women and girls of all ages, to greet them with flowers and gifts and to fulfill all their (rather modest) wishes one day a year. The leaders of the Communist Party and the heads of local authorities developed the new tradition of publishing their holiday greetings to female citizens in the media, while directors of enterprises congratulated their female employees in more tangible ways, from flowers and letters of commendation to financial bonus or career promotion. While celebrating “Soviet women―the most liberated women in the world,” nobody was to speak about the multitude of gender inequalities persisting in late Soviet society, as the so-called woman question was proclaimed solved in the USSR long ago.

Igor Kon, a full member of the Russian Academy of Education and an outstanding Russian anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, and teacher who opened up a series of new directions in each of these areas, including a gender perspective, unexpectedly died on 27 April 2011. He did not show his illness, remaining youthful looking until the end. A shining example of openness to all that was new and to personal freedom, he was modest, unbelievably self-sufficient, and able to explain the advantages of such a life choice. Igor Kon wrote about his life, full of difficulties, and the history of his overcoming them, in his autobiography 80 let odinochestva (Eighty years of solitude), published in 2008, which became an instant best seller in Russia. It was read not only by members of his generation but also by young people.