Annotation Contains 150 biogrpahical portraits of women and men who were active in, or part of, the women's movement and feminisms in 22 countries in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Based on the scholarship of a global team of diverse authors, this wide-ranging handbook surveys the history and current status of pro-women thought and activism over millennia. The book traces the complex history of feminism across the globe, presenting its many identities, its heated debates, its racism, discussion of religious belief and values, commitment to social change, and the struggles of women around the world for gender justice. Authors approach past understandings and today’s evolving sense of what feminism or womanism or gender justice are from multiple viewpoints. These perspectives are geographical to highlight commonalities and differences from region to region or nation to nation; they are also chronological suggesting change or continuity from the ancient world to our digital age. Across five parts, authors delve into topics such as colonialism, empire, the arts, labor activism, family, and displacement as the means to take the pulse of feminism from specific vantage points highlighting that there is no single feminist story but rather multiple portraits of a broad cast of activists and thinkers. Comprehensive and properly global, this is the ideal volume for students and scholars of women’s and gender history, women’s studies, social history, political movements and feminism.

Profiling more than 1400 print and electronic sources, this book helps connect librarians and researchers to the most relevant sources of information in genealogy and biography.

Covering territory from Russia in the east to Germany and Austria in the west, The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700 explores the origins and evolution of modernity in this turbulent region. This book applies fresh critical approaches to major historical controversies and debates, expanding the study of a region that has experienced persistent and profound change and yet has long been dominated by narrowly nationalist interpretations. Written by an international team of contributors that reflects the increasing globalization and pluralism of East Central European studies, chapters discuss key themes such as economic development, the relationship between religion and ethnicity, the intersection between culture and imperial, national, wartime, and revolutionary political agendas, migration, women’s and gender history, ideologies and political movements, the legacy of communism, and the ways in which various states in East Central Europe deployed and were formed by the politics of memory and commemoration. This book uses new methodologies in order to fundamentally reshape perspectives on the development of East Central Europe over the past three centuries. Transnational and comparative in approach, this volume presents the latest research on the social, cultural, political and economic history of modern East Central Europe, providing an analytical and comprehensive overview for all students of this region.

Since the late 1980s, there has been an explosion of women’s writing in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe greater than in any other cultural period. This book, which contains contributions by scholars and writers from many different countries, aims to address the gap in literature and debate that exists in relation to this subject. We investigate why women’s writing has become so prominent in post-socialist countries, and enquire whether writers regard their gender as a burden, or, on the contrary, as empowering. We explore the relationship in contemporary women’s writing between gender, class, and nationality, as well as issues of ethnicity and post-colonialism.

As the first and only book in any language on contemporary women’s movements in Hungary, this groundbreaking study focuses on the role of women’s activism in a society where women are not yet adequately represented by established parties and political institutions. Drawing on eyewitness accounts of meetings and protests, as well as first-person interviews with leading female activists, Katalin Fábián examines the interactions between women’s groups in Hungary and studies the unique brand of democracy they have forged in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Through her analysis, she demonstrates how democratization and globalization—with their attendant range of challenges and opportunities—have led women to redefine public-private divides.

The term “crisis,” with its complex history, has emerged as one of the pivotal notions of political modernity. As such, reconstructing the ways the discourse of crisis functioned in various contexts and historical moments gives us a unique insight not only into a series of conceptual transformations, but also into the underlying logic of key political and intellectual controversies of the last two centuries. Studying the ways crisis was experienced, conceptualized, and negotiated can contribute to the understanding of how various visions of time and history shape political thinking and, conversely, how political and social reconfigurations frame our assumptions about temporality and spatiality. A historical region wedged in between various competing imperial centers, East Central Europe has been an area often associated with crisis phenomena by both internal and external observers. Seeking to employ the regional gaze as a vantage point to reflect on issues which are relevant well beyond those countries between the Baltic and the Adriatic, this project is also in dialogue with a number of recent transnational attempts to rethink political and intellectual history with regard to the recurrent epistemological frames that structure the political and cultural debate. This book will thus be useful both for researchers, from the field of intellectual history and numerous adjacent fields, and graduate university students alike.

Sixteen essays “apply the intersectional theory in an inspiring way in the analysis of gender issues in the past and in contemporary Czech society” (Aspasia). In this wide-ranging study of women’s and gender issues in the pre- and post-1989 Czech Republic, contributors engage with current feminist debates and theories of nation and identity to examine the historical and cultural transformations of Czech feminism. This collection of essays by leading scholars, artists, and activists, explores such topics as reproductive rights, state socialist welfare provisions, Czech women’s NGOs, anarchofeminism, human trafficking, LGBT politics, masculinity, feminist art, among others. Foregrounding experiences of women and sexual and ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic, the contributors raise important questions about the transfer of feminist concepts across languages and cultures. As the economic orthodoxy of the European Union threatens to occlude relevant stories of the different national communities comprising the Eurozone, this book contributes to the understanding of the diverse origins from which something like a European community arises. “While the collection demands that we understand Czech uniqueness, at the same time it is at its best when this uniqueness comes into focus through comparative study.” —Feminist Review “A colorful bouquet offering an overview of directions taken by Czech feminist scholarship since the 1990s.” —Slavic Review

“A tour de force . . . speaks powerfully to questions that are being currently debated in Romania, Poland, and Hungary.” —Jeffrey C. Isaac, author of Democracy in Dark Times What is it like to be a woman living through the transition from communism to democracy? What effect does this have on a woman’s daily life, on her concept of herself, her family, and her community? This book presents the stories of women in Romania as they describe their experiences on the journey to democratic citizenship. In candid and revealing conversations, women between the ages of 24 and 83 explain how they negotiated their way through radical political transitions that had a direct impact on their everyday lives. Women who grew up under communism explore how these ideologies influenced their ideas of marriage, career, and a woman’s role in society. Younger generations explore how they interpret civic rights and whether they incorporate these rights into their relationships with their family and community. Beginning with an overview of the role women have played in Romania from the late eighteenth century to today, Birth of Democratic Citizenship explores how the contemporary experience of women in postsocialist countries developed. The women speak about their reliance on and negotiations with communities, ranging from family and neighbors to local and national political parties. Birth of Democratic Citizenship argues that that the success of democracy will largely rely on the equal incorporation of women in the political and civic development of Romania. In doing so, it encourages frank consideration of what modern democracy is and what it will need to be to succeed in the future.