Among over five hundred people buried in “revolutionary necropoles” in Moscow and Petrograd in the first decade after the October Revolution of 1917, only ten were women. Who were they, why were they accorded this rare honor, and what do their stories reveal about the stereotypization of women’s place in early Soviet Russia? This article seeks to answer these questions by analyzing the stories of three women buried in the Red Square necropolis in 1917–1924, against a counterexample of one woman who was not. The research contributes to filling a gap in the studies of early Soviet funeral practices that have to date predominantly been either non-gendered or male centered.
In this article, I chart the contributions of Polish women activists before and during International Women’s Year. Following the actions of three high-profile women—Krystyna Gromek, Wanda Tycner, and Zofia Wasilkowska—I focus on the “imagined international community” shaped by leaders of the movement and reveal the diversity and complexity of Polish women’s international activism at home and abroad. By exploring how these women deployed their expertise and exerted influence both on how the International Women’s Year agenda was addressed on a national scale and how the situation in Poland was presented to the rest of the world, I challenge claims that the Polish women’s movement at this time had turned away from internationalism. I also show that women’s internationalism prioritized global struggles of the women’s movement over current political demands.
The online conference “Diachronic Perspectives on the Condition of Women in the European Space: Image, Representation, Reality” is part of the IFSGen Conference Series, launched in 2023 by IFSGen, the Romanian Network for Women’s and Gender Studies ( https://ifsgen.umfst.ro/en/ ). The most recent conference took place online from 5–6 December 2024 and brought together more than fifty experts from various Romanian cities, including Arad, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Iași, Sibiu, Târgu Mureș, Reșița, and Timișoara, along with participants from the United States, Italy, and Greece. This event united specialists from a variety of research institutes and centers, as well as museographers, archivists, librarians, master’s students, and doctoral students.
This article analyses a subliminal backlash against feminism, paradoxically within the cultural context that based its legitimacy in a discourse of human rights, namely the literary activities of the then anti-establishment, dissident activism in former pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. Employing the terms “injuring identities” and “wounded attachments” coined by Judith Butler and Wendy Brown, respectively, this article criticizes Czech dissident literature for the paradox of unproductive contradiction, arguing that while fully absorbed, constituted, and arguably blinded by its fight against the official regime, it ignored the gender oppression that it itself participated in. Focusing on Czech dissident and exile literary texts from the 1970s and 1980s, this article discusses the ways gender was silenced by interpellating readers through positive values, which were, however, at the same time wounding.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a massive monument-building campaign carried out in the People’s Republic of Albania. Most of these monuments were dedicated to the Partisan antifascist resistance during World War II, and most of them depicted male figures, but some memorials commemorated women killed as part of the postwar struggle to build socialism. Drawing on archival research and newspaper accounts, this article examines the monument to the Four Heroines of Mirdita , inaugurated in 1971. The article analyzes what this monument can tell us about gender relations in state-socialist Albania during the period of the Ideological and Cultural Revolution, and about the patriarchal efforts to shape the female body as an imaginative construct.
