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During Socialism, the “women’s issue” was among the key state policies in Albania. The emancipation issue followed a pattern similar to other socialist countries, called the “women’s emancipation model”. It was part both of the state rhetoric and the general need to include women in the “socialist transformative processes”. This involved policies that supported women’s participation in the productive labour force, as well as the introduction of new laws that promoted the equality between men and women.A reconfiguration of gender roles and the gender division of tasks occurred during socialism. In Albania, this process had two distinct phases. From 1944 onward women’s emancipation was thought of in terms of their participation as an additional force in the post-war reconstruction effort, even though sporadic and aligned with the primary political needs of the regime. The second phase occurred during the ‘60s following the Party’s directive “For the complete emancipation of women” (1967). This phase was considered strategic as it coincided with the efforts to industrialize the country and to eventually fully centralize the control over the territory.This paper aims to investigate the entanglements between gender propaganda and gender practices. For this purpose, we analyse various party speeches and policies as well as examples of “heroines” and propaganda movies. A thorough analysis of State Archives and other documents was undertaken to substantiate this investigation.
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L’étude de la dénonciation n’est pas un sujet nouveau dans l’historiographie mondiale. Elle bénéficie de prémisses importantes, reparties très inégalement par époques historiques ou par régions géographiques. Il s’impose de constater, sans entrer dans les détails des préoccupations en la matière, l’importance qu’a connue la recherche de ce phénomène dans l’antiquité gréco-latine, dans la république vénitienne de l’époque pré-moderne et moderne ou dans la France révolutionnaire. La chute du Mur a considérablement apporté à l’ordre du jour cette direction d’études, dans le contexte de l’intérêt plus général pour l’histoire du monde communiste. En effet, comment comprendre le fonctionnement de ce monde sans prendre en compte son mécanisme complexe, entremêlant le bruit de la propagande et le silence du secret ? Nous souhaitons proposer une direction de recherche à partir de l’évaluation de l’historiographie la plus récente et de la méthodologie qu’elle suggère.
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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.
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In this highly effervent century, with the advent of the Reformation, perhaps the most dear word of that period was reform, with the meaning of renovation, reorganization, not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but also of states, education and politics in general, under the auspices of that strange religion called „Calvino-Turkism,” a bizarre connection, at first glance, between the West and the East, between Islam and Christianity, at the confluence between the two worlds, on these places full of history of Transylvania, the edict of religious tolerance in Turda, which consented to the four accepted religions: Lutheranism, Calvinism, Catholicism and Unitarianism, but also the union of 1600 or the unification of Mihai Viteazu. Both events take place at the same time as giving Transylvania the status of autonomous principality by the Ottoman Empire. Are these pure coincidences of history, or are we able to distinguish certain cause-effect correlations between them? This is the one of the aim of this article.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The writing of a history of the communist regime in Romania, before 1989, was a real challenge because the official historiography was ideologically distorted and written in the so-called ”wooden language”. However, even during the regime, Romanian historians, exiled or living in the country, and Western historians, for whom communist Romania was a partially mapped study space, did write histories which differed from the officially sanctioned versions.The historian of the communist regime in Romania appears as an intellectual with a complex personality which, depending on the circumstances, could be classified into several categories. He could be the dissident resident, who wrote about the regime while living under it; the exiled dissident who started writing under the protection of foreign citizenship or without giving up the Romanian citizenship; the Western historian who experienced the regime's repression or the one who has developed a special professional interest for Romania.This taxonomy also reflects two great coordinates of the discourse practiced by historians, which was determined by biographical motivations and professional concerns.The borders of the classification proposed by this article (which represents a segment of a PhD thesis) are extremely permeable. Affiliation to a category is not exclusive. For example, a dissident resident might at some point become a dissident in exile, as happened to Victor Frunză. Or a foreign historian could evolve from professional concerns to personal ones, as is the case of Dennis Deletant.The work of the nominated historians, even if in some cases it was written and published abroad before 1989, falls within the period 1990-2015 because it was edited and re-edited in the Romania during that time. Other selection criteria were also the special conditions for elaborating and publishing volumes about the regime, the novelty of the discourse, the pioneering aspect in the topic approach, the impact on publication, the author's notoriety as well as his contacts with post-communist Romania.
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It is a review of the book «Religions in Pagan Bulgaria (Historiographical Approaches 1980–2015)» by the Bulgarian medievalist Tsvetelin Stepanov (Stepanov, Tsvetelin. Religii v ezicheska Bălgariya (Istoriografski podhodi 1980–2015). Sofiya: Paradigma Publ., 2017. 255 p.). Ts. Stepanov’s new work represents the religious situation in the early medieval Bulgaria through the analysis of the Bulgarian historiography of 1980–2015 on a broad comparative historical background and in the light of modern methodological approaches. The reviewer considers Ts. Stepanov’s book as an indicator of the methodological transition from the «revolutionary» model of knowledge development according to T. Kuhn to the «program» model of its growth following I. Lakatos. The reviewer believes that such a transition is necessary for the research of the religious situation in the territory where in the 7th–9th centuries there was a complex interaction between the remnants of the autochthonous and alien population groups, including the early Bulgars and Slavs, which resulted in the creation of the early medieval Bulgarian state.
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Almost everyone has heard the legend of cruel Elisabeth Báthory who bathed in the blood of young virgins to preserve eternal youth. The countess is also known as one of the bloodiest women in Europe. She is registered on the world list of Guinness records as the biggest serial killer of all time. However, there is a doubt whether she committed all crimes attributed to her. Thus, the article presents two alternative biographies of the Hungarian aristocrat: one that derives from legends, and the other that is based on historical facts recently determined by contemporary researchers of the topic.
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