Aspasia

Over the past two decades, Aspasia has played a transformative role in the development of women’s and gender history across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). This Special Anniversary Forum demonstrates Aspasia’s function as an intellectual infrastructure connecting scholars across linguistic, disciplinary, and geopolitical boundaries, fostering new generations of researchers and making regional scholarship visible within global feminist historiography. Across the contributions, several common themes emerge: the recovery of women as historical actors; the expansion of research to incorporate everyday life, memory, sexuality, migration, and activism; and the growing importance of comparative and entangled histories that transcend national frameworks. The contributions reveal significant regional differences shaped by post-socialist transformations, nation-building projects, democratic transitions, and, increasingly, authoritarian and anti-gender backlashes. They highlight the enduring entanglements between scholarship and activism, particularly where gender studies face political pressure or where historical knowledge serves contemporary struggles for equality and democratic participation. Together, these reflections position Aspasia not only as a chronicle of a field but also as one of its principal architects.

Based on an analysis of archival documents, personal files, correspondence, registration lists, and publications, this article explores the ideological foundations of the Armenian fairy tale “Anahit,” published in 1881 by the renowned children’s author Ghazaros Aghaian (1840–1911). The tale sought to instill in young Armenian girls their nationalist double burden, combining duty to the Armenian nation with the widespread ideal of domesticated womanhood. Since its publication, the tale has remained a popular choice for young readers of Armenian literature. It successfully survived the ideological campaigns under Stalin and was adapted into a ballet (1940) and a film (1947) to convey the regime’s propaganda line to the youth. This article is the first effort to place “Anahit” in its social and historical context, with the aim of understanding the ideological potency of the tale.

This article investigates how the Ukrainian women who participated in the Norilsk Gulag Uprising remember their involvement in this event to understand how identity, namely gender and nationality, functioned during the Uprisings of 1953–1954. The source base comprises witness testimony of participants, including oral interviews conducted decades after the event in question, full-length memoirs written in the late Soviet period, and letters and short memoirs collected in the early 2000s. Testimonies by female Ukrainian participants affirm the importance of national identity to the uprisings but reveal a new lens through which to read the event: gender. Traditional gender norms, marked by a deeply ingrained value for solidarity, emerged as a prominent aspect of the women’s strike.

In the 1920s and 1930s, globally dispersed anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian nationalists used their Ukrainian-language press to cohere and defend the boundaries of their imagined community. On the pages of women’s and youth periodicals in particular, motherhood and intermarriage were hotly debated by both editors and readers. These debates centered on concerns about the reproductive futurity of the nation and often placed a disproportionate amount of blame on young Ukrainian women for not attracting or choosing a Ukrainian man. Though young Ukrainian women defended themselves against such accusations, they did not reject the basic premises of the debates: that marriage leads to children, and that mothers exert special influence over their children’s national identification. This article brings under-examined interwar periodicals together with existing scholarship on motherhood, intermarriage, nationalism, and national indifference to show how interwar Ukrainian nationalists sought to defend the boundaries of their stateless nation and ensure its reproductive futurity by discouraging would-be mothers from intermarrying.

This article examines the role of one of the oldest and most prominent women’s organizations in the United States, the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA), in shaping the cultural memory of the Holodomor during the Cold War era. UNWLA developed a distinct gendered repertoire of commemorative practices that combined maternal symbolism, religious ritual, and civic activism, positioning Ukrainian women as moral authorities and custodians of collective trauma. Drawing on discourse analysis, theories of communal ritual, and postmemory, the article shows how UNWLA transformed mourning and remembrance into sustained cultural and political engagement. By situating UNWLA’s work within the broader Ukrainian American diaspora, this study highlights the contribution of women’s activism to Cold War memory politics and complicates the existing historiography on Holodomor commemoration.

This article is an introduction and translation of the proceedings from an extraordinary session of Splošno slovensko žensko društvo (General Slovenian women’s society, SSŽD), held on 27 October 1923, convened to address urgent international organizational matters. The primary issue concerned participation in the upcoming Little Entente of Women (LEW) assembly in Bucharest and the selection of a Slovenian delegate. The minutes record the selection of Vera Albrechtova to represent the SSŽD in Bucharest and to manage diplomatic tensions. The document also highlights the relationship between the women’s organization and the Yugoslav foreign ministry that demanded the exclusion of Bulgarian women in exchange for financial support.

This selected correspondence exposes both the strategies and limits of managing internal tensions within interwar transnational feminism. Focusing on Bulgaria’s contested membership in the Little Entente of Women (LEW) and the movement’s entanglement with state diplomacy, the letters reveal constraints of feminist attempts to bridge the post–World War I divide between victorious and defeated states. They highlight Františka Plamínková’s mediating role during her LEW presidency, alongside persistent Yugoslav–Bulgarian conflicts over minority issues. While LEW branches could reconcile internal feminist differences, antirevisionist and nationalist positions—reinforced by foreign policies—undermined prospects for a feminist alternative to official diplomacy. Archival correspondence from two Czechoslovak women’s organizations, read against Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) documents, shows that both Romanian and Czechoslovak diplomats intervened to block Bulgaria’s admission. Initial MFA support gradually shifted into direct interference in shaping LEW’s agenda, ultimately aligning the organization with the Little Entente’s military‑diplomatic pact in the 1930s.

This article offers the first English translation of Alexandra Kollontai’s 1913 memorial essay on August Bebel, “The Great Champion of Women’s Rights and Freedom,” together with an introduction that situates the text within the socialist women’s movement and Marxist theories of women’s emancipation. It argues that far from being a simple obituary, Kollontai’s essay is at once a political tribute, compressed intellectual history, and programmatic meditation on gender, class, and social transformation. Reading the essay alongside Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, the introduction shows how Kollontai casts Bebel as a foundational theorist of women’s emancipation while crystallizing her own account of proletarian women’s distinct position. It also traces the text’s shifting political life across late imperial and early Soviet contexts. It therefore endeavors to recover a neglected document of socialist feminist thought.

Raisa Borovsky, Siberian Summer: An Autobiography, Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press, 2026, 583 pp., 34.95 $ (paperback), ISBN: 9798887198569.

Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa and Susan Zimmermann, Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A New Transnational History, London: UCL Press 2025, XXXII + 683 pp., £65.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-180-008-928-0.

Heidi Hein-Kircher, Elisa-Maria Hiemer and Denisa Nešťáková eds., Challenging Norms: Family Planning as a Reflection of Social Change in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2025, 378 pp., €110.75 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-80539-964-3.

Yulia Gradskova, East–South Women Internationalism at the Cold War Periphery: Coming Together in Tashkent, Havana and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025, 312 pp., (open access), ISBN: 978-166-694-343-6.

Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia from Revolution to Autocracy, New York: Ecco, 2025, 489 pp., $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-06-287912-7.

Mariusz Kalczewiak, Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025. 428 pp., $50.00 (paperback), 978-025-307-383-9.

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 354 pp., $39.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-100-900-891-4.

Tijana Matijević and Milica Resanović eds., Svi se plaše roda: aktuelna osporavanja i upotrebe pojma u Srbiji (Everyone is afraid of gender: Contemporary contestations and uses of the concept in Serbia), Belgrade: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, 2025, 355 pp., open access, ISBN: 978-86-6190-024-2.

Mikuláš Pešta, Student Internationalism and the Global Cold War: The International Union of Students in Socialist Prague, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026, 312 pp., open access, ISBN: 978-135-042-554-5.

Gareth Pritchard and Vesna Drapac, Paramilitarism and European Society in the 1940s, Regimes of Violence, World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 274 pp., €117.69 (eBook), ISBN: 978-3-031-74971-1.

Anna Shadrina, The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia, London: UCL Press, 2025, 175 pp, £25.00, ISBN: 978-1-80008-908-2.

David Selim Sayers, Gender in Ottoman Constantinople, Paris: Institute of Critical Thinking, 2024, 112 pp., ISBN: 978-2-494635-08-1.

Zorana Simić, Emancipacija kao vokacija: urednice periodike u Kraljevini SHS/Jugoslaviji (Emancipation as a vocation: Women periodical editors in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia), Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2025, 380 pp., open access, ISBN: 978-86-7095-366-6.

Bailey Stone, Women in the Great European Revolutions: Gender, Culture, Class, and the State. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 314 pp., $120 USD, £95 (hardback), ISBN: 979-8-76515-322-2.