In the first post-revolutionary years the Bolshevik government saw Tatar and Bashkir women as important allies. Muslim women from the Volga-Ural region were to be educated and taught about their rights, and this educational campaign was seen as contributing to the development of the new socialist society. Women’s ignorance was seen by the Soviet authorities as an obstacle to progress which had to be overcome with the help of the new institutions like Commissions for the Improvement of the Work and Everyday Life of Women.
Essay by
Yulia Gradskova
Interviews from three communities in a Russian region illustrate that there are many new opportunities for potential women entrepreneurs, while there are also many at times unpredictable obstacles to overcome.
Essay by
Ann-Mari Sätre
Maria Janion is Poland’s undisputed intellectual authority – but she is relatively unknown abroad. Maria Janion is a professor emeritus of literature. Her studies of Romanticism led Janion to see the specificity in Poland’s cultural development. As a public intellectual, Janion has always intervened in the political discourse. In recent years, she has put her authority to use to support the feminist movement and the reawakened new Left.
Essay by
Teresa Kulawik & Renata Ingbrant
The Polish professor in literature, Maria Janion, writes on Polish identity, and its interpretation and reinterpretation, its crisis and the process of shaping a new Polish imagery. There is a ongoing dialog between the past and the present and a constant struggle between the free Poland and the posthumous life of Romanticisim.
Essay by
Maria Janion
Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women 1945—1970, Edited and adapted by Dalia Leinarte, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi 2010, 234 pages
By
Andrea Petö
“Why is there no happiness in the East?” was the, according to many, provocative title of a conference put on by CBEES and Södertörn University September 8–10 of this year.
The organizers of the conference, Teresa Kulawik, Renata Ingbrant and Youlia Gradskova, wanted to bring together feminist scholars for a discussion about conditions facing feminism in the East and in the West after the Berlin Wall, as well as the role of the EU and politics in the development of feminism.
By
Ninna Mörner
Here the author discuss questions of normality, deviation from norms, and power relations through a selection of Polish student essays that address both gender relationships and the relationship between East and West. The working assumption is that theories of gender and the East— West relation can enrich each other and thus help achieve greater understanding of how both power systems work, individually, and combined.
Essay by
Karin S Lindelöf
A close reading of Ginzburg’s diaries shows how a fight against a shrinking living space is conducted on two levels: the purely physical fight for survival during the famine in Leningrad and the intellectual fight in a cultural environment increasingly dictated.
Essay by
Irina Sandomirskaja
At the exact time that voices in the Swedish public debate increasingly questioned obstacles to women’s participation in professional work on an equal footing with men, the opposite tendency could be observed in Soviet Russian debates. Here an excerpt from a paper presented at the Aleksanteri Institute’s ninth annual conference.
By
Helene Carlbäck
One result of efforts to halt trafficking is that the situation of those at risk becomes more difficult. So say NGOs and researchers. When women are sent home, they end up in a more vulnerable position – often they go back to trafficking.
By
Ninna Mörner
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