Women and the gendered politics of work in Central and Eastern Europe, and internationally, in the twentieth century: activism, governance, and scale (original) (raw)
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Brill, Studies in Global Social History, Volume: 51, 2023 Open Access: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004682481/BP000001.xml In: Through the Prism of Gender and Work Authors: Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann The introductory chapter provides a historiographic and thematic framing for the contributions and, we hope, for future research. The first section discusses the existing historiography of the region, highlighting the long history of writing on women's labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and its adjacent territories within and across the borders of different types of empires and nation-states, and across vastly diverse political regimes. The second section discusses key contributions of the chapters assembled in the volume to the study of women's (and sometimes men's) quests for the improvement of the lives and working conditions of women, pointing to their interconnections and highlighting their contributions to the development of long-term and transregional approaches to the history of women's labour struggles. The third section expands on the rationale for studying women's labour struggles from a long-term, transregional, integrative, and critical perspective, further discusses insights emerging from the volume and other scholarship, and highlights challenges as well as directions for ongoing and future research in the field of women's labour activism.
Brill, Studies in Global Social History, Volume: 51, 2023
Open Access: https://brill.com/display/title/68995?language=en Volume Editors: Selin Çağatay, Alexandra Ghit, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann This book examines women’s activism in and beyond Central and Eastern Europe and transnationally within and across different historical periods, political regimes, and scales of activism. The authors explore the wide range of activist agendas, repertoires, and forums in which women sought to advocate for their gender and labour interests. Women were engaged in trade unions, women-only organizations, state instituions, and international and intellectual networks, and were active on the shopfloor. Rectifying geopolitical and thematic imbalances in labour and gender history, this volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of women’s activism, social movements, political and intellectual history, and transnationalism. Contributors are: Eloisa Betti, Masha Bratishcheva, Jan A. Burek, Selin Çağatay, Daria Dyakonova, Mátyás Erdélyi, Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner, Eric Fure-Slocum, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Maren Hachmeister, Veronika Helfert, Natalia Jarska, Marie Láníková, Ivelina Masheva, Jean-Pierre Liotard-Vogt, Denisa Nešťáková, Sophia Polek, Zhanna Popova, Büşra Satı, Masha Shpolberg, Georg Spitaler, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, Johanna Wolf and Susan Zimmermann.
ABSTRACT. In the years following the end of the cold war in 1989, Western feminist scholars and activists expressed disappointment in the failure of the newly democratic Eastern and Central European countries to sustain mainstream women’s rights movements and achieve a marked increase in women’s participation within the new political parties and political life in general. The authors, historians of Hungarian women’s movements with a broad East-West perspective, offer a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Following an outline of the main stages of Hungarian women’s movements and women’s political participation, they focus on two instances in twentieth-century Hungarian history that resulted in a rapid transition from antidemocratic regimes to liberal, parliamentary systems: the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the 1990 re-introduction of free parliamentary elections. DOI 10.1080/08038740410004623
Barna Emília; Csányi Gergely; Gagyi Ágnes and Gerőcs Tamás (2017): East-Central European feminist activism in the context of uneven development in the EU, and ways to move forward. In: Kováts Eszter (ed.) The Future of the European Union Feminist Perspectives from East-Central Europe. Budapest: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Budapest. (2017) 69-79. In this paper, we analyse points of connection between the feminist movement, the European Union, and the gendered division of labour in East-Central Europe with the methodology of world-systems analysis. The method and theoretical framework of world-systems analysis enables us to understand, first, that the European Union is the product of a certain historical-world economic phase. Second, that the southern and eastern expansion of the EU is embedded into a different world economic phase. Third, that the history of (feminist) movements of given nation states or regions cannot be understood merely through the social history of those nation states; rather, it has to be considered that (feminist) movements are also embedded in economic macro-processes. Fourth, that relations of dependency arising from unequal development are expressed in them. And fifth, that the relationship between informal and formal work is a hierarchical one: through their combination, informal work acts as a subsidy to the cost of formal labour, thus contributing to the accumulation of value on higher levels of the chain and within the household relation; female reproductive labour generally acts as a subordinated subsidy to male labour; and the contradicting logics of accumulation through unequal household relations, and love and care as part of reproductive relations, makes the household an intrinsic front of battles and compromises of human life within capitalism.
The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations: Annual Review, 2010
After the cloud of the Cold War lifted, a meaningful exchange of information about the political and social conditions in Eastern Europe emerged with new-found hope. Twenty years after the regime transformation, the dust may have settled enough after the dramatic change of guards in the postcommunist region to produce an account of how well democratization and diversity have fared, especially with gender perspective in mind. Women's issues in the postcommunist transitions became one of the most challenging issues in this exchange, in terms of both the practice and theory of democracy and diversity. The focus on women provides a much-needed dialogue across the historically entrenched lines of separation between East and West and communist times and contemporary democratization. The lessons emerging from women's activism in Central and Eastern Europe can provide a bridge between Western and Third World feminist analyses. Women's groups increasingly enter into contact with various international organizations in their efforts to pressure governments and change popular perceptions of women's status.