The Intellectual Heritage of Feminist Political Thought during Early State Socialism. The Cases of the GDR, Hungary and Yugoslavia

Project Information

EEURSOCFEM

Grant agreement ID: 841489

DOI

10.3030/841489

Project closed

EC signature date 10 April 2019

Start date 1 August 2019

End date 13 May 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 224 933,76

EU contribution

€ 224 933,76

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EEURSOCFEM (The Intellectual Heritage of Feminist Political Thought during Early State Socialism. The Cases of the GDR, Hungary and Yugoslavia)

Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2021-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Intellectual Heritage of Feminist Political Thought during Early State Socialism. The Cases of the GDR, Hungary, and Yugoslavia

This project explored the comparative and transnational intellectual history of feminist thought and women’s rights discourses in three East Central European countries: the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Yugoslavia from 1945 until 1956, the early years of de-Stalinisation. Drawing on a wide range of sources in four languages, and integrating the voices of women from ethnic and sexual minorities, this innovative project aimed at tracing the circulation and transfer of feminist ideas in the region during the crucial period of ‘building socialism’, when communist regimes were implementing radical policies to achieve the emancipation of women.

The project’s overall objectives were to trace the individuals (intellectuals, artists, journalists, or other thinkers) who defined the discourse of women’s emancipation after 1945; to show the continuity, on the level of ideas as well as individuals, before and after 1945; and to contribute to the debates about memory politics and women’s emancipation regarding this period. The latter point is the one with the most obvious societal relevance, which was however organically supported by the first two objectives: Through the multifaceted ways in which women contributed to and generally shaped the ways women’s emancipation was conceptualised in these three East Central European countries, the research could offer a balanced analysis of the era, neither falling into the trap of treating women’s emancipation during early socialism as purely a top-down, authoritarian process (as often portrayed in contemporary ethno-nationalist right-wing political discourses), nor over-romanticising what early socialism did for women.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The planned work on the project was altered during the pandemic. The project, however, kept its focus on the thinkers and ideas that shaped the debate and interplay between socialism and feminism in the interwar period and during the early phase of socialism in Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the GDR. The research was conducted in Budapest, Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Berlin. The project’s focus was expanded to a large-scale collection of sources and introducing their authors in a volume of source texts entitled Texts and Contexts from the History of Women’s Rights and Feminism in East Central Europe.

The planned training and career development at the Host Institution could continue flawlessly: Professor Celia Donert, who supervised this project from start, and the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge did their best to accommodate my access to all events and meetings at the Faculty, and I also joined Wolfson College as a Junior Research Fellow, broadening my interdisciplinary scope of activities. The IEF was indeed decisive in enabling me to make the transition from an early-career researcher to a fully independent scholar.

Overview of the results and dissemination:
- Journal article “International Solidarity as the Cornerstone of the Hungarian Post-War Socialist Women’s Rights Agenda in Women’s Magazines”, International Review of Social History, Vol. 67. Special Issue 30. 2022. 103-129.
- Edited volume of source texts Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights. East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century. With Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz. Budapest – New York: CEU Press. Forthcoming in 2023.
- Beyond the already published article and the edited volume in press, during the course of the project, I began the preparations of a co-edited journal special issue (with Isidora Grubački and Emily Steinhauer) about women’s political thought in East Central Europe, to be submitted to peer review to the journal of Modern Intellectual History in mid/late 2023.
- Three articles to be submitted by August 2023, resulting from the project:
o “Women and Democracy in the Work of Women Intellectuals in Post-1945 Hungary”. Special issue “It’s Complicated. Social Struggles and the Entanglement of Political Participation and Fundamental Rights”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften / Austrian Journal of Historical Studies 2025/1
o “Marxist Feminism and Violence against Women in the Work of the Croatian Philosopher Blaženka Despot“. Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, Volume II, Issue 3, 2023.
o “Communist women between radicalism and consensus interwar Hungary.” Political Crisis in Central Europe in the Interwar Period and Today”, ed. Martin Schulze Wessel, Brill, 2024.

- Wikipedia articles about the most important characters are to be uploaded after the publication of the articles above, so that my work can be referenced.

- Conference talks at the ASSEES and BASEES conventions, the European Congress on World and Global History, the Imre Kertész Kolleg’s (Jena) Annual Conference, and workshops and smaller scale conferences in Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Spain, the UK, among others.

- Workshop series of 5 workshops about women’s political thought, with the participation of about 30 scholars working on Central and Eastern Europe. Online, University of Cambridge.
- Workshop “Marginalised Women and Socialism”, Spring 2022, University of Cambridge.
- Two summer schools about intellectual history in East Central Europe, both with a day focusing on women’s intellectual history, in cooperation with the Research Netword Intellectual History in East Central Europe https://intellectualhistoryece.wordpress.com/
o July 2021 Ljubljana, Institute of Contemporary History
o July 2022, Jena, Friedrich Schiller University and Imre Kertész Kolleg

The training I received from my supervisor, Professor Donert, and the research support team at the University of Cambridge in research project management (including grant-writing), public engagement, and research impact were crucial in helping me win an ERC Starting Grant in 2022.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

My work pushed forward the debate within the field of women’s and gender history about the status of women’s emancipation in the region, allowing for a critical, yet not politically anti-communist approach to the region’s history. It also contributed to the extension and beyond-the-state-of-the-art way of thinking about intellectual history, one that allows for the use of mixed methods and an unusual source base, such as women’s magazines, art work and activist documents. Achieving wider societal change takes time, but my research findings about inertia in political institutions when it comes to tackling discrimination and violence against women in the past, despite slogans about the importance of women’s equality and emancipation, shows how said inertia contributed to the maintenance of the phenomenon. This is in direct parallel with today’s policies and lack of institutions eliminate women’s subordination.
- Public talks (selection):
o “Metamorphoses. #MeToo and feminism in East and West”, organised by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Berlin (2020)
o 2021: Roundtable | Transformation Back and Forth: Feminism, Gender, and What Else?, University of Regensburg (2022)
o 2021: “Feminist Crime Fiction, Violence against Women and Historical Research” – book talk (2021)
o 2020: “Yugoslav Feminism and Socialism” – Women’s Free University (in Hungarian) (2020)
o Feminist Book Festival on Women’s Day, Zagreb (2020)

An article about the first visit of Hungarian women to the partisan women in Belgrade in 1945