220111 Advocating for women behind the Iron Curtain: Eastern European women's voices (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

After World War II, state socialist regimes were established in Eastern Europe that initially all owed their allegiance to the Soviet Union. These regimes shared a politico-ideological framework, though national contexts produced local variations and chronologies. Part of the shared ideological framework targeted the revolutionary reshaping of women's role in the respective societies, which was seen as a key component of the larger project. Drawing on the ideas of early communist ideologues and Soviet practices of the 1920s and 1930s, women were expected to achieve equality with men by joining the workforce. The party-states waged sweeping propaganda campaigns and took numerous measures, often with the involvement of the respective women’s organizations to attain this goal. To what extent did such aspirations yield results? How did women across Eastern Europe experience these policies as women, wives, and mothers? Making use of the recently published, unique compendium: Lóránd, Zsófia, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz (eds.), Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century, the seminar centers women’s voices to investigate various aspects of (attempted) social change. From Latvia to Bulgaria, political writings and literary texts help explore Eastern European women’s life worlds during state socialism.

Course outline:
1. Introduction
2. The agency debate
3. Postwar transitions and lefts
4. New (Communist) women
5. Religion after the Communist takeover
6. The silent(?) majority: Women in the countryside
7. Inside the party-adjacent women’s organizations
8. Discussion week
9. Socialist women in the international scene: transnational organizations
10. Engagement with women across the Global South
11. Motherhood and fatherhood
12. The double burden – domestic work
13. Violence against women
14. Lesbian lives
15. The lessons of (socialist) emancipation - late socialism. Closing discussion