HCE 8

History of Communism in Europe vol. 8 – 2017:  The Other Half of Communism: Women’s Outlook

Argument: Voices of Women on the Two Sides of the Iron Curtain: Agents, Agency, Sources

Luciana M. Jinga
University of Angers, The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes
and the Memory of the Romanian Exile
 

Debating Gender in State Socialist Women’s Magazines: the Cases of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia

Julia Mead, Kristen Ghodsee
University of Chicago/University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: Contrary to the accepted Cold War stereotypes about state socialist mass women’s organizations, we will show that Communist leaders were attentive to the construction of gender roles and used women’s magazines as a forum to discuss openly the changing ideals of masculinity and femininity. Through a discourse analysis of articles in Vlasta (Czechoslovakia) and Zhenata
Dnes (Bulgaria), our article will interrogate the categories of “man” and “woman” and their  negotiation during the Communist era on the pages of official state magazines. In the Bulgarian case, we will discuss key articles that explicitly dealt with the importance of fathers and fatherhood, as for the case of Czechoslovakia, we will examine a series of articles and letters in which women’s union leaders and ordinary citizens discuss women’s entry into the workforce that had previously been the purview of men.

The Big Contradiction. Feminism and Communism in the Magazine Lotta Continua. 1968-1978

Graziano Mamone
University of Genoa
Abstract: A new feminist ideology can be outlined by examining the magazine “Lotta Continua”, official newspaper of the homonymous Italian extra-parliamentary group. Riots in factories and universities were closely reported in the magazine, which painted a society still affected by strong gender inequalities. Split between an opposition to official communism and the spontaneity of the
working class conflict, women emerged from family isolation. The great achievements of the Italian feminist movement were reported according to the point of view of the dissident communism. While in Italy the feminist movement was on the rise, the organisation was approaching its end, also due to its conflict with feminist protests. This paper wants to re-construct the image and the representation of left-wing feminism, in a crucial moment for the history of Italian society and communism.

Comrade First, Baba Second: State Violence against Women in  Communist Romania

Luciana M. Jinga
University of Angers, The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes
and the Memory of the Romanian Exile
Abstract: The paper focuses on the manifestations of structural and symbolic violence against women during the communist regime by addressing the most important mechanisms and embedded beliefs that allowed the proliferation of spousal violence in communist Romania, in what I see as a continuation of the interwar patriarchal state, and a bridge to the new discriminatory policies developed by the democratic structures, after 1990.

Peasant Women in Public Life and in Politics in the Rákosi Era. The First Woman főispán’s Career in Hungary

Ágota Lídia Ispán
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of Ethnology
Abstract: ‘Woman questions’ were emphasized in common speech during the time of the party-state in Hungary. In the 1950s this was symbolized by women tractor drivers, Stakhanovites in construction industry, or women who were present in public life and in politics. Mrs Mihály Berki, née Magdolna Szakács was one of the first emblematic female politicians who was appointed the first
peasant woman főispán [honorary prefect] from a village at the end of 1948. The central elements of her life story were the social and geographical mobility: how could she adapt to the new roles and environments? What kind of competences did she need? How did she acquire them? Did the image of a peasant woman politician with a kerchief change during her career? I intend to outline a wider social context in connection with the determining features of her career such as her being a female, her peasant background and her institutional socialization.

Widows of the Revolution. Women in Polish Political Elite 1949–1956

Łukasz Bertram
University of Warsaw
Abstract: The aim of this article is to present the collective portrait of the 40 women occupying the highest posts in the communist party and state apparatus in Poland during the Stalinist period. It focuses on the vast majority of people involved in the communist movement, while it also examines the cases of Socialists and women from the younger generation. The first part of the study presents the milieus they came from, their educational and professional careers and – above all – the motivations and patterns of their political engagement. The second part engages with their position in the structures of power, as well as the circumstances of their political advances and declines. The key biographical category is that of “widowhood”, understood both literally – considering the percentage of women whose husbands were killed by Soviets or Germans – and symbolically – as a bitter disappointment with the Idea and its realization.

Rhetoric and Ritual: Neo-Protestant Women and Gender Equality in Communist Romania

Iemima Ploscariu
Dublin City University
Abstract: In communist Romania, as in other Central and East European communist countries, women became fellow workers in the building of the new proletariat state. However, there was a discrepancy between state rhetoric and the treatment of women in reality. Though not the most targeted faith group in communist Romania, neo-Protestant women faced, nevertheless, multiple levels of marginalization, due to their sex and to their religion. These women re-appropriated the state’s gender equality rhetoric and, along with their faith, produced a sense of personal agency, which allowed them to overcome barriers in their various communities.

From Party Leaders to Social Outcasts. Women’s Political Activism during the Establishment of Communist Power in a Polish Industrial Town (Żyrardów, 1945-1948)

Jan A. Burek
European University Institute
Abstract: The author presents the changing role of women and of the attitudes towards them in the PWP (the Polish Workers’ Party) and the PSP (the Polish Socialist Party) in a midsize industrial town in Central Poland in the years 1945-1948. During the war, women of the PWP were promoted to the highest positions in the party structures, however, due to the quick reaffirmation of gender roles in the post-1945 period, they were relegated to lower posts. Their political influence was thereafter limited solely to the care sector which was considered their natural domain. In turn, the PSP gained importance in the post-war period only after A. Tomaszewska, a woman and an influential prewar
labour organizer, took charge of it in 1946. Under her leadership, the Socialists renewed their ties with women workers of the town’s main textile factory and challenged the Communist party.

Women Communists and the Polish Communist Party: from  “Fanatic” Revolutionaries to Invisible Bureaucrats (1918-1965)

Natalia Jarska
Polish Academy of Sciences
Abstract: The paper aims at tracing a collective portrait and the trajectories of a group of about forty women active in the communist movement after Poland had regained independence (1918), and after the Second World War. I explore the relations between gender, communist activity, and the changing
circumstances of the communist movement (conspiracy/state socialism). I argue that interwar activities shaped women communists as radical, uncompromising, and questioning traditional femininity political agents, accepted as comrades at every organisational level. This image and identity, though, contributed to the creation of the gender division of political work after the war, when women were assigned specific roles as guardians of revolutionary past. The post-war situation of state socialism with the communist party as the ruling party assigned women mainly to invisible, secondary positions.

The Season of Transgression Is Over? The Union of Italian Women and the Italian Communist Party: Reaction, Negotiation and Sanctioned Struggles in Local and Global Context 1944-1963

Rachele Ledda
University of Naples L’Orientale
Abstract: This contribution aims to outline the birth and development of the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) in regard to its relations with the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) from 1944 to 1963. The present research has drawn mainly from archival sources. UDI was born as a multi-party women’s organization but the hegemony of the Communist women would de facto bring it under the influence of the PCI. The Italian Communist Party tried to perform a normative and normalizing task. By the logic of the Cold War, women were relegated to deal mainly with the defence of peace, both nationally and internationally. From the international point of view, UDI was among the founding  organizations of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). Gradually, the Unione began to accrue dissent even within the WIDF, leading to an internal struggle on the path to emancipation that the organization was already developing within its national context.

Fighting their War during a “Foreign” War. Women anti-Fascist/Communist Activism during World War II in Romania

Ştefan Bosomitu
The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile
Abstract: The article discusses this intricate issue of women’s anti-Fascist/communist activism during World War II in Romania. I am particularly interested in the relationship that developed between the Romanian Communist Party and the women who joined the movement in the complicated context of World War II. The article is attempting to assess whether women’s increased
involvement in the communist organization was due to the previous and continuous politics of the RCP, or it was a mere consequence of unprecedented circumstances. The article also addresses issues related to the legacy of the anti-Fascist/communist women’s struggle during World War II, in their attempt to establish postwar public careers, but also the manner in which their efforts and activisms were recognized and/or recompensed (or not) after the war.

Communism as a Generational Herstory: Reading Post-Stalinist Memoirs of Polish Communist Women

Agnieszka Mrozik
Polish Academy of Sciences
Abstract: The objective of this article is to revise the dominating narrative of communism as male generational history. With the aid of memoirs of communist women, many of whom started their political activity before WWII and belonged to the power-wielding elites of Stalinist Poland, the author shows that the former constituted an integral part of the generation which had planned a revolution and ultimately took over power. Their texts were imbued with a matrilineal perspective on the history of communism: the authors emphasized that other women had strongly motivated them to become involved in politics. However, the memoirs revealed something more: as an attempt to establish new models of emancipation and to transmit them to younger generations of women, they were to rekindle the memory of women as the active agent of that part of Polish history which contemporary feminists refuse to remember.

Women and Their “Radiant Future”: Construction of Communism in the USSR in Women’s Letters to the Government (1960s)

Alexandr Fokin
Chelyabinsk State University, Ural State University
Abstract: In 1961, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a new program of the C.P.S.U. was adopted. The adoption of the Third Program of the C.P.S.U. was accompanied by a “nationwide discussion”. People expressed their opinions regarding the draft of the new Program at
meetings and lectures and in their letters to various institutions. Naturally, not all the women actively demanded changes; for some there was probably no such thing as “women’s communism”. However, the individual and collective letters attest to the complex of expectations that may be analyzed within the conceptual framework of “women’s communism”. The body of letters to various publications illustrate the most popular measures which, according to the letter writers, should have been implemented during the period of the “full-scale construction of communism” and, therefore, were thought of as intrinsic elements of communism.

Post-Stalinist Body Economy: Female Corporeality, Desire, and Schizophrenia

Anna Carr
National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”
Abstract: The article provides an argument on the Soviet system of the early post-Stalinist years reflected in Haidamaky by Yurii Mushketyk. Through the concept of “body economy” inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, it investigates the case of the female corporeality hidden in the novel. The article contests that the female body is part of the economy of desire flows which connected it to the male body. It also states that, after the death of Stalin, the reorganised Soviet regime demonstrates schizophrenic states as reflected in Mushketyk’s Haidamaky.

The Mother in the Yugoslav Partisan Myth: Creative Revisions and Subversive Messages in Women-Centred Narratives

Iva Jelušić
Central European University
Abstract: The foundations of the narrative about the partisan war in socialist Yugoslavia (1941 – 1945) drew from the familiar tradition of folktales and prompted the moulding of a group of characters who, as a rule, followed a pre-established sequence of events, offering a rather polished image of the People’s Liberation Struggle (Narodnooslobodilačka borba, NOB). This paper will focus on one archetype that found its place in the war myth–the partisan mother. The aim of the paper is to illustrate how the women who experienced the armed conflict in Yugoslavia described women’s wartime engagement. More specifically, it shows the extent of their participation in the promotion of the officially established image of the partisan mother and the aspects in which their narrative reimagined, enriched and challenged the heritage of the People’s Liberation Struggle.

REVIEW

Christopher B. Balme, Berenika Szymanski-Düll, Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 350 p.

Ana Teodorescu
Babeș-Bolyai University, The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes
and the Memory of the Romanian Exile