Aspasia

As I write this introduction, Russia's war in Ukraine is well into its third year, voters in Russia returned Vladimir Putin to another presidential term, and the 2024 presidential election in the United States looms. Despite some electoral results that suggest a slight movement away from far-right ideologies, recent years have seen a resurgence of efforts to reassert patriarchal controls over societies around the world, often through attacks on women's reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ communities. Perhaps surprisingly, Central and Eastern European efforts are being used as models to be adapted in other places. For example, far-right politicians and commentators in the United States have embraced Hungarian President Viktor Orbán's conception of “illiberal democracy” and have sought to implement similar policies, notably in efforts to curtail access to abortion, in attacks on transgender medical treatments, and through bans on books deemed offensive to family values, among others. In addition, laws that criminalize homosexuality and near total abortion bans in Poland, Hungary, and Russia, among others, undermine citizenship rights for significant segments of the population in our region.

This article addresses the issue of the struggle of female veterans of the independence movement in Poland for the right to co-found the Polish army in peacetime, and to participate in defense and civic policy. The author portrays a community of women who, based on their wartime experiences, seek to establish their position as experts with practical and theoretical knowledge of the work of the war's second front. It seems important how the aspirations of female soldiers fit into the progressive emancipation of women and, on the other hand, the growing conservatism and backlash of European authoritarian regimes. This article shows the international context, the legal embedding, and the insertion into the current of state modernization.

Women participated in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle in numbers unparalleled to previous and the following wars in the region. Women's activism, above all in the Antifascist Front of Women, and the inclusion of women in the Yugoslav Partisan army are the focus of this contribution. By considering these emblematic examples of women's wartime efforts, the extreme violence they faced in large part because of their active participation in warfare, and their (mis)treatment in practices of remembrance, this text emphasizes the continuing necessity for feminist scholarship to recognize and preserve the achievements of past women's struggles.

Amid numerous armed conflicts today, militarization is a priority for many countries, heightening the urgency of examining its impact on women, particularly those in the military. This article focuses on the comparative analysis of several aspects of women's military service in the USSR and Great Britain during World War II to show how these states mobilized women to meet military needs in wartime while still maintaining gender hierarchies. The findings call for a substantial reevaluation of gender roles in military contexts and underscore the importance of inclusive and equitable policies for servicewomen in contemporary defense strategies.

Despite its longstanding, rich, and regionally unique tradition, Polish women's (para)military involvement has long not been integrated into (inter)national memory and scholarship. This “problem of invisibility” has since been addressed on the national level by the twenty-first century “herstorical turn”—a wave of revisionist interventions into memory culture. This article discusses three new and distinctive challenges—or “problems of invisibility”—that emerge for Polish (para)military herstory as it travels from the national to the international circuit of knowledge production: 1) the limitations of “methodological nationalism”; 2) the Western-centric biases of gender and militarism scholarship; and 3) the anti-militarist silences inherent in feminism itself. I argue that integrating these underrepresented and geographically peripheral experiences and narratives can enrich global feminist knowledge on gender and militarism.

With inter-state war plaguing the region, the studies of this forum highlight the problem of historical precedent failing to inform discussions of gender and war in Central and Eastern Europe. As a response, this article highlights their common points of focus across the national histories of Polish, British, Yugoslav, and Russian women's militarization in the twentieth century. The discussion considers the potential for women's militarization to serve emancipatory purposes historically as well as its ambivalent contemporary implications for the region's warring societies. The article argues that a productive direction for future discussion will extend to the masculine values and embodied practices that women's successes in military training and combat disrupted.

The legal significance of rape in twentieth-century Greece remains an understudied topic in modern Greek historiography. Drawing on legal and police documents, this article examines changes in perceptions of rape by state authorities over the course of a half century (1922–1976). More specifically, it explores how law professors and the police leadership defined “who is harmed” and “who harms” in the criminal act of rape. The article argues that, although the issue of rape has attracted the attention of legal experts and the police, the latter have directed their efforts to further their own institutional and political agendas rather than toward the protection of victims.

Drawing on legal cases from the Aegean islands across the twentieth century, this article charts informal attempts to settle incidents of sexual violence in Greece and their evolution over time. The harm caused to the victims underlined the dominant moral codes, and compensation in money or material goods was not an obvious outcome. The fact that individuals sometimes chose to trade severe physical and moral damage mostly for money did not mean that they refrained from recognizing such harms as serious. On the contrary, such outcomes continued long-established practices in interpersonal dispute resolution, demonstrating the range of possibilities that Greek rural populations had inside and outside of court and their complex relations with the state and the judicial system.

This article delves into the poetry of Sore Kahan (1885–1941), a Jewish writer from Belarus who wrote in Yiddish. Her poems reflect a pivotal period in the development of Soviet Yiddish culture, and this article presents the way in which Kahan's writing intersects with the social changes brought by the consolidation of Bolshevik power in 1917. It investigates the role of women writers in secular Jewish culture in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, spotlighting their contributions. It explores how Yiddish served as a tool for expressing the Soviet state's objectives, while also delving into the historical context portrayed in Kahan's poetry. Through literary analysis, it uncovers the meanings and values within these poems, analyzing their alignment with and deviation from the state's demands.

This review article focuses on Cinderella Goes to Market (1993) by Barbara Einhorn, and its significance three decades later. Einhorn's work is a unique pioneering study on the postcommunist transition in Central and Eastern Europe viewed through the lens of gender, and was also the first internationally recognized analysis. Today the observations of its author seem prophetic, as national ideologies hand-in-hand with anti-gender movements threaten not only women, but also citizenship as a pillar of democracy. The attacks on women's reproductive rights described by Einhorn were the very signs of changes to come in the region, from pressures to restrict access to sex education, contraception, and abortion, to no-abortion zones in Belarus or Russia, to delegalizing abortion in Poland.

Nurie Muratova, Zheni otvad archiva: Nevidimite istorii na zhenite v Bulgaria (Poreditsa ‘Archivi na zheni i maltsinstva’, vol.6) [Women beyond the archive: Invisible histories of women in Bulgaria (Women and Minorities Archives Book Series, vol. 6)], Blagoevgrad: Neofit Rilsky University Press, 2021, 273 pp., 19 BGN (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-00-0259-0.

Zeynep Zafer and Nurie Muratova, Mefkyure Mollova: tyurkologiya v izgnanie, Biografichno izsledvane [Mefküre Mollova: Turkology in exile, A biographical study], Blagoevgrad: Neofit Rilski University Press, 2022, 351 pp., 16 BGN (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-00-0316-0.

Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec, eds., Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2021, vii +433 pp., $105.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-963-386-378-7.

Agata Jakubowska, Sztuka i emancypacja kobiet w socjalistycznej Polsce: Przypadek Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś (Art and Emancipation of Women in Socialist Poland: The Case of Maria Pinińska-Bereś), Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2022, 348 pp., PLN 54 (paperback), ISBN 978-83-235-5647-3.

Przemysław Wielgosz, ed., Ludowa historia kobiet (The people's history of women), series: Ludowa historia, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo RM, 2023, 255pp., 44.99 zł (€10) (paperback), ISBN 978-83-8151-215-2.

Hana Krutílková, Disciplinované buřičky: Ženy v politických stranách na Moravě do roku 1914 (Disciplined agitators: Women in political parties in Moravia before 1914), Brno: Matice Moravská, 2022, 368 pp, 312 Kč (hardback), ISBN 978-80-87709-31-3.

Věra Sokolová, Queer Encounters with Communist Power: Non-Heterosexual Lives and the State in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989, Prague: Karolinum Press, 2021, 242 pp., 380 CZK (e-book), ISBN: 9788024652009.

Tanya Petrovich, Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024, 256 pp, ebook, ISBN: 978-1-4780-2780-5.

Radeya Gesheva, Enigmi i paradigm pri niakoi italianski pisatelki ot XX vek (Enigmas and paradigms in the work of some twentieth-century Italian female writers), Sofia: Paradigma Publishing House, 2023, 275 pp., 20 BGN (paperback), ISBN 978-954-326-506-0.

Denisa Nestáková, Be Fruitful and Multiply: Slovakia's Family Planning under Three Regimes, 1918–1965, Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institute, 2023, 276 pp., €58 (hardback), ISBN: 978-3-87969-485-3.

Teodora Karamelska, Vyarvasht, no ne religiozen: Bulgarski kontexti na holistichnata spiritualnost (Believer, but not religious: Bulgarian contexts of holistic spirituality), Sofia: NBU Press, 2023, 236 pp., 19 BGN (paperback), ISBN 978-619-233-259-4.

Jana Kočišková, Ženy v politice: Role a postavení vrcholných političek v Československu 1948–1968 (Women in politics: The role and position of top women politicians in Czechoslovakia 1948–1968), Prague: Karolinum, 2022, 400 pp., 450 Czk (paperback), ISBN 978-80-246-5162-0.

Claudia Septimia Sabău and Oana-Ramona Ilovan, eds., Perspectives on Gender in Romania (Gender and Development 1), Cluj-Napoca–Târgu Mureș: Presa Universitară Clujeană – University Press Târgu Mureș, 2022, 270 pp, free download, ISBN 978-606-37-1545-7, ISBN 978-973-169-780-2.

The first issue of Arşivde Kadın ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Dergisi (Women and gender in the archives journal) appeared as an open-access e-journal on 8 March 2024. It is planned to be issued biannually, in March and September.

The idea of publishing such a journal originated with Aslı Davaz, a founding member of the Women's Library and Information Center Foundation in Istanbul. The periodical is published by Davaz and Başak Öztürk. Their subsequent discussions on what kind of publication it should be, its content, frequency, and name shaped its final form. The journal started as an independent publication, but it might become a publication of the Women's Library in the future.