The 14 articles included in this special issue contribute to the general discussion on gender and communism/state socialism in the context of the Cold War. Firstly, the contributions denounce the research paradigm imposed by the Cold War, the inexorable us/they delimitation, with the villain always on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Bringing together research offering an overall picture of European countries, Western democracies or those belonging to the communist bloc, reveals unexpected similarities and differences that otherwise would be difficult to grasp. Secondly, the articles reflect the present-day scholarship on the recent communist and post-communist European past, an advancement made possible by the resurgence of a new generation of researchers interested to reevaluate the dynamic of communist parties and their relation to women. Lastly, all the papers are important contributions to women’s history, paving the way towards new research that would help uncover the lost voices of women in our history.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARGUMENT
Luciana M. JINGA – Voices of Women on the Two Sides of the Iron Curtain: Agents, Agency, Sources
I. Depicting Gender in Communist Magazines
- Julia MEAD and Kristen GHODSEE – Debating Gender in State Socialist Women’s Magazines: The Cases of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia
- Graziano MAMONE – The Big Contradiction. Feminism and Communism in the Magazine Lotta Continua. 1968-1978
- Luciana M. JINGA – Comrade First, Baba Second: State Violence against Women in Communist Romania
II. Activist Women For or Against
- Ágota Lídia ISPÁN – Peasant Women in Public Life and in Politics in the Rakosi Era. The First Woman Főispán Career in Hungary
- Łukasz BERTRAM – Widows of the Revolution. Women in Polish Political Elite 1949–1956
- Iemima PLOSCARIU – Rhetoric and Ritual: Neo-Protestant Women and Gender Equality in Communist Romania
- Jan A. BUREK – From Party Leaders to Social Outcasts. Women’s Political Activism during the Establishing of Communist Power in a Polish Industrial Town (Żyrardów, 1945-1948)
- Natalia JARSKA – Women Communists and Polish Communist Party: from “Fanatic” Revolutionaries to Invisible Bureaucrats (1918-1965)
- Rachele LEDDA – Is The Season Of Transgression Over? The Italian Women Union and the Italian Communist Party: Reaction, Negotiation and Sanctioned Struggles in Local and Global Context 1944-1963
- Ştefan BOSOMITU – Fighting their War during a “Foreign” War. Women Anti-Fascist/Communist Activism during World War II in Romania
III. His Narratives – Her Narration: Women in Texts
- Agnieszka MROZIK – Communism as a Generational Herstory: Reading Post-Stalinist Memoirs of Polish Communist Women
- Alexandr FOKIN – Women and their ‘Radiant Future’: the Construction of Communism in USSR in Women’s Letters to the Government (1960s)
- Anna CARR – Post-Stalinist Body Economy: Female Corporeality, Desire, and Schizophrenia
- Iva JELUŠIĆ – The Mother in the Yugoslav Partisan Myth: Creative Revisions and Subversive Messages in Women-Centered Narratives
Review
- Ana TEODORESCU – Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War. Editors: Balme, Christopher B., Szymanski-Düll, Berenika (Eds.), 2017
ISSN: 2069-3192 (paperback)
ISSN: 2069-3206 (electronic)
ISBN: 978-606-697-070-9 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-606-697-071-6 (ebook)
