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This book tells the story of new Yugoslav feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, reassessing the effects of state socialism on women's emancipation through the lens of the feminist critique. This volume explores the history of the ideas defining a social movement, analysing the major debates and arguments this milieu engaged in from the perspective of the history of political thought, intellectual history and cultural history. Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, societies in and scholars of East Central Europe still struggle to sort out the effects of state socialism on gender relations in the region. What could tell us more about the subject than the ideas set out by the only organised and explicitly feminist opposition in the region, who, as academics, artists, writers and activists, criticised the regime and demanded change?

AbstractThis article analyses five years of the magazine Asszonyok (Women) the main forum for discussing women's rights between 1945 and 1949 in Hungary. The magazine was published by the Magyar Nők Demokratikus Szövetsége (the Hungarian Women's Democratic Federation), an umbrella organization created mostly by women from the communist movement. This analysis is centred around the idea of internationalism and how it became a means for socialist women's emancipation, proof of the political power of the new women's organization, and a platform of political education. It also symbolized the new era of peace after the war, peace becoming one of the slogans of the socialist women's movement globally. The broadening international platform of transfers became a terrain where political languages about race, class, and gender were slowly but steadily taking shape. Solidarity with women across the globe became one of the main tenets of communist women in Hungary. However, solidarity had its limits. As is shown here, identification with the right political agenda was even more important than aspects of race and class. This was one of the most important ways in which socialist women's rights and feminism were diverging from each other, despite the broad spectrum of shared elements on their agenda.

A compendium of one hundred sources, preceded by a short authors bio and an introduction, this volume offers an English language selection of the most representative texts on feminism and womens rights from East Central Europe between the end of the Second World War and the early 1990s. While communist era is the primary focus, the interwar years and the post-1989 transition period also receive attention. All texts are new translations from the original. The book is organised around themes instead of countries; the similarities and differences between nations are nevertheless pointed out. The editors consider women not only in their local context, but also in conjunction with other systems of thought-including shared agendas with socialism, liberalism, nationalism, and even eugenics. The choice of texts seeks to demonstrate how feminism as political thought was shaped and organised in the region. They vary in type and format from political treatises, philosophy to literary works, even films and the visual arts, with the necessary inclusion of the personal and the private. Womens political rights, right to education, their role in nation-building, women, and war (and especially women and peace) are part of the anthology, alongside the gendered division of labour, violence against women, the body, and reproduction

Following the convulsions of 1968, one element uniting many of the disparate social movements that arose across Europe was the pursuit of an elusive "authenticity" that could help activists to understand fundamental truths about themselves-their feelings, aspirations, sexualities, and disappointments. This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the politics of authenticity as they manifested themselves among such groups as Italian leftists, East German lesbian activists, and punks on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Together they show not only how authenticity came to define varied social contexts, but also how it helped to usher in the neoliberalism of a subsequent era

Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-communism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (as well as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular