Gender Issues

ISSUES OF GENDER ACROSS A VARIETY OF CEU PRESS PUBLICATIONS

This compilation features books of the Central European University Press, published since its establishment in 1993, that have some relevance to the issue of gender. After the latest release, titles in the backlist are arranged by content: contemporary topics are on top, older themes below. For more substantial information about the content and availability, please click on the covers of the book, or on the links inserted into the citations.

“Mobility and migration also affected women. They were traditionally needed as nurses and servants in wealthy households, but the number of female factory workers and shop clerks also rose considerably. The professionalization of women teachers was a steadily growing trend. Women also began to work as clerks in offices.”—Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire.
“Milena Mrazović ran the Bosnische Post until 1898, making it a meaningful actor of Sarajevo’s cultural scene, and herself a pioneer of female entrepreneurship in the country.”
“Women’s solidarity was obvious in Lemberg, 1909, when a demonstration of some 200 Polish, Jewish and Ruthenian suffragettes gathered in front of the Diet (Sejm). Two delegates were let in by the police and were thus able to hand over a petition demanding women’s suffrage.”
“The pragmatism of women and their late arrival on the national field made them a target for both nationalists and socialists, not to speak of religious leaders who wanted to confine them to home and church.”

“The recent rise of state-sponsored anti-gender movements in post-communist countries flies in the face of the very spirit of an open society.”—Open Society Unresolved.
“A reappearance of expressively masculine, and populist forces has led to the embracing of anti-genderism in different national contexts, with the Hungarian, Polish, and Russian cases offering three similar but distinct variations.”
“Legislators and judges have repeatedly expressed hostility toward gender-progressive EU regulations, arguing that laws need to be objective and neutral.”
“Polish and Slovak bishops issued a declaration arguing that the 2011 Istanbul Convention relies unduly on the concept of gender and thus ‘contradicts human experience and common sense,’ violating religious freedom and parents’ right to the education of children.”
“The Roman Catholic critique of gender has continued under the leadership of the more liberal-leaning Pope Francis. In Tbilisi he argued: ‘A great enemy of marriage today is the theory of gender.’”

“Bringing together studies on women’s activisms—ranging from, mutual societies in the early 20th centuries to the transnational circulation of ideas on vocational training in the 1960s, and female migrants’ activism in the 21st centu­ry—this collection contributes to an inclusive understanding of the contours of women’s activism around work and labor.”—Women, Work, and Activism.
“We ask: how can women’s labor activism in a variety of men- and women-dominated contexts be ‘thought together,’ and how does this help bring about conceptual advancement in the history of women’s work-related activism?”
“The tremendous achievements during the 20th century in terms of women’s civic, political, social, and economic rights are not a definitive conquest. Recent developments represent a threatening scenario.”
“The world is undergoing a deep and unpredictable economic crisis and a new wave of loss of work opportunities unleashed by a viral pandemic. Today, women’s employment is at greater risk than men’s.”

CEU Press titles with a gendered focus:

“Policymakers and activists consider human trafficking to be one of the most dramatic challenges of the global world, alongside terrorism and drug trafficking.”
“The noticeable increase in the production of feature films, television dramas, and documentaries focusing on trafficking in people invites closer scrutiny, for the representation of trafficking and its violence can be as perilous as it is helpful in combating this twenty-first century major human rights violation.”
“The Whistleblower (2010) breaks the gender hierarchy. While the main character, Kathryn Bolkovac, a dedicated Nebraska police officer, confronts her male colleagues and the perpetrators of trafficking, the female Secretary of the UN Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom protects her.”

“Like their counterparts in Turkey, Bosnian Muslim progressives seem to have perfectly integrated one of the key points of the Orientalist discourse; gender relations, and in particular the position of women, ought to be seen as the main markers of Muslim civilizational inferiority.”—Making Muslim Women European.
“For the progressives, the transformation of the social position of women, and with it gender norms within the Muslim community, were the precondition for the survival and success of the Muslim population as a whole within the Yugoslav polity, and by extension in Europe.”
“Bosnian Muslim progressive intellectuals imagined Turkey to be a sort of paradise of appropriate gender relations, where—to quote their own expressions—'female emancipation’, ‘male-female equality’ and even ‘feminism’ had finally been realized on earth, sooner and better than in Western Europe.”

  • Presenting and discussing wartime victimization of refugees in the Balkans.
  • A collection of essays on women and war mirrored in the arts, ranging from women in novels, films and songs or on posters around World War II, up to recent armed conflicts.
  • The biographical portraits of 150 women and men who were active in women’s movements and feminism in Eastern European history. 
  • An academic monograph about an extraordinary Jewish woman from the 16th century.

Women in literature: 

In the CEU Press Classics series, Avala is Falling is about a young person’s search for her own identity. When published in 1978, “it was greeted as an example of a kind of text described as ‘jeans-prose’: a first-person narrator’s rebellious, youthful tone, colored by adolescent slang”—Voices in the Shadows.
The author, Biljana Jovanović (1953-1996), “was among the first women writers to introduce a new kind of self-conscious female character to South-Slavic literature. The novels are peppered with references to everyday life under former Yugoslav ‘soft communism’. Jovanović’s civic resistance to the nationalism and wars of the late 1980s and 1990s was strongly permeated with feminist ideas”—from the Biographical Dictionary.

The series of east and central European modern classic literature (CEU Press Classic) is rich in other characters of women specific of place and time. The book by the Nobel Prize winner author includes examples of the oppression of women in historical Bosnia and the disaster that ensues if any should defy the established rules. A Slovak classic guides through the moving trajectory of love and morality, while the tussles of a young woman between tradition and modernity in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia are depicted by a Czech author. The novel about – or rather around – an unmarried woman depicts the fin de siècle Hungary. A frigid society “doll” is the title character of the great Polish historical novel.

An anthology of women authors thinking about Europe – Ursula (Hamburg), Ilma (Zürich), Daniela (Prague), Mirela (Sofia), Lidia (Lisbon), Emine (Berlin), Dubravka (Amsterdam), and Mara (Riga).

“In an age of intensified migration in Europe, transnational women writers are an enriching and challenging factor in many European literatures thanks to the many issues discussed in their novels: identity, nationality, ethnicity, gender and language.”—on transnational literature and gender in translation.
“Ugrešić uses Lewis Carroll’s mirror to focus attention on the abrupt and fundamental changes her world underwent after the collapse of Yugoslavia, and also through her exile and migration.”
“In many other women writers of diaspora, narrative memory confronts the theft of history, and writing enables alternative remembrances and histories to emerge. The work of commemoration remains the only access to forgotten and erased stories and pasts.”

Novels written after the military intervention of 12 March 1971 in Turkey share a common ground which is rich in images of men and women craving for power: general isolation, sexual-emotional frustration, and a traumatic sense of solitude and alienation. (Future will tell what literary works will be generated by the aborted coup in July 2016.)
“This book is an attempt to understand gender from the perspective of masculinities with Turkey’s military periods as the backdrop, especially the coup of 1971, which traumatized the climactic 1968 spirit in Turkey.”
“Whether satiric or realistic, March 12 novels elaborate the ways masculinities and femininities settled in the traumatized power hierarchy of the period, questioning modernist utopias and authoritarian pressures.”
“The idea of women as objects of exchange, forced definitions of gender, performative acts to fulfill these forced definitions, and problems about hegemony, hegemonic masculinity, and male homosocial bonding to keep patriarchal power in hand in various types of solidarity and institutions are all at work in March 12 novels. These books question common notions about sex and gender, and center around the fluidity of identity.”

Memoirs of women from various times and places:

  • The celebrated psychologist shares her traumatic wartime memoir.
  • Thirteen Estonian women from Hilja (b. 1905) to (Tiia b. 1973), remembering Soviet times, presented with scholarly care.
  • Memories of a Serbian woman Natalija (1880-1956), based on her diaries and other memorabilia.

Further titles from the backlist, current issues on top, the historical dimension of gender below:

"While women were very active in dissident movements, they frequently assumed an auxiliary, heavily gendered, and subordinate position to the men who dominated these movements.”—a debate about the current state of East-West relations.
“Yugoslav feminists understood from their readings that the West was far from great for women. While the dialogue between East and West was a highly productive one, the other opposition groups in Yugoslavia were mainly blind and often hostile to feminism.”
“In our own time, women as well as homosexuals have very successfully used human rights language to campaign for their concerns.”
“With the fading of the original vocabulary of feminism, we are now left with gender, a concept that is even easier to demonize.”

“Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski of Łódź warned that ‘gender’ would bring the ‘denial of God’ and ‘death of civilization.’—a collection of essays on current Polish politics.      
“Just as the Church criticized Marxist and Nazi ideology, and was persecuted for it, so now it is criticizing gender ideology.”
“In the Polish case, gender as a word has never been translated and functions in the English form, which only adds to its vagueness in common use.”
“Women’s procreative rights are in danger of being further curtailed and there will be little to no room is left for LGBT rights. Instead, homophobia is on the rise.”
“The conservative aims do not take into account the dominant moods in society.”
“Xenophobic nationalism targets both refugees and a range of perceived domestic enemies, including gay activists and other ‘genderists,’ the few remaining or returning Jews, the small German and Ukrainian minorities, most intellectuals, and practically anyone on the left.”

“As Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek commented after the Sejm approved the European convention against domestic violence, ‘I survived Nazism, I survived communism, I will survive genderism, too.’ This statement reflects the conviction of a large portion of the episcopate that ‘genderism’ is a new aggressive ideology, comparable to Nazism or communism not (yet?) in its disastrous effects, but in its total character and revolutionary implications.”—current values in Poland.
“In textbooks, gender stereotypes tend to be much sharper than in reality; as a result, the world presented in the textbook shows more gender discrimination than the real world.”
“In the cinema of national remembrance the patriarchal vision of gender relationships, very often simply indicating the polarization of sexes, causes the symbolic exclusion of women from the public space, depriving them of subjectivity and leaving the role they played in the history of the country unspoken.”

“In its stance on Europe Russian conservative discourses distinguished between something referred to as ‘classical European values’ and the contemporary state of affairs in the EU. This distinction underpins the gender geopolitics of othering Europe as the so-called ‘Gayropa,’ i.e., a Europe that is morally degenerate and has lost touch with its own traditions, the original or authentic Christian European values.”—on constructing Russia as a supranational entity.
“A rhymed headline in the popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda represented Ukraine’s alternative of choosing between Eurasian and European integrations respectively as the choice between a ‘common home’ and ‘the EuroSodom’”
“Recent research on Russian social networks suggests that in 2013–2014, that is, in the run up to the Vilnius Eastern Partnership summit and immediately after it, they were rife with images portraying a geopolitical choice as an ethical one, with synonymies growing common between homosexuality and drug abuse or homosexuality and pedophilia.”

“Women are dramatically underrepresented at the top of academic positions—namely professorships. Only every fourth professor is female in Europe. Comparing the years 2011 and 2014, there is no significant change over time.”—a collection of essays on higher education.
“Interestingly, western European countries have fewer female graduates than eastern European countries. Latvia, Estonia and Poland show the highest number of female graduates; in these countries, women graduate twice as often as men do.“
“The comparison of the 2014 and 2017 results shows an increase in the percentage of women for business studies, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. Although electrical and mechanical engineering have a very low percentage of female students, there is a tendency for more women to study these engineering subjects.”

“Societal marketing formulates both economic and noneconomic goals. Sometimes the ratio of objectives tips the scale toward the noneconomic objectives as the goal is not to involve as many people as possible in socially important activities (donation, voluntary work, selective waste collection, etc.) but to raise awareness regarding socially useful and important values (women’s equality, domestic violence, the importance of reading, etc.).”—a book on corporate social responsibility (CSR).
“Cultural corporate citizenship allows corporations to reflect on differences between identities, such as the so-called ‘pink economy,’ which produces goods for consumers with a homosexual identity.”
“The European Commission issued a directive according to which the proportion of women on the boards of large corporations must be increased to 40 percent by 2020.”

Participation in the Kosovar nationalist movement offered new channels through which women could enter the public space in the otherwise deeply traditional society. Nevertheless the authors of this book find that women’s civic engagement and contribution in Kosovo has been continuously silenced by mainstream remembrance and historical accounts. Most feminist scholars in the region are still unable to speak about Kosovo and have created superficial accounts of women’s experience there. This is why the Norwegian team attempted to unearth what is often a buried account of women’s participation in nation, state and peace building projects in Kosovo. They detected how gender relations have figured in and shaped notions of civic participation in Kosovo as part of civic engagement in national, state and post-war projects.

“The feminist discourse on democracy in Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s works along three major lines of conceptual interpretation: 1) feminists saw civil society and active citizenship, mostly in the sense of ‘ethical civil society,’ as the carrier of democracy, 2) they placed emphasis on democracy as being incomplete unless women were included and patriarchal values overwritten, 3) nonetheless, they treated democracy as a counter-concept to nationalism and xenophobia on the one hand, and state socialism on the other”.
“At the patriotic end of the scale in Croatia, the organizations were openly anti-Serbian to such an extent that they refused any cooperation with Serbian feminist organizations. When it came to the question of rape, the ethnic aspect overruled the gender aspect.”
Feminist discourses are analyzed alongside the nationalist discourse in the early 1990s in the volume that explores the past twenty-five years of east-central Europe in the perspective of intellectual history.

How to handle links between nationalism, racism and gender discrimination and similar issues in teaching?

Is Virgin Mary in Catholic religious life an emancipatory figure for women or confirmation of patriarchal oppression? The research about a Marian apparition provided a scholarly opportunity to explore its impact on the state of affairs in the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, including the role of women within the church.
In August 2002 two little girls from a village in Transcarpathia “saw the most beautiful white Lady. She was standing on a cloud, embellished with wonderful blossoms that did not touch the ground.”
The Catholic women in Transcarpathia still largely accept male dominance, but some subversive practices have emerged in recent years that point to significant gender-related shifts in reconfigurations of power relationships.

“Despite their active participation in the war, female combatants were denied their role as heroic fighters of World War II and instead were often used in the Soviet Union, including Soviet Lithuania, solely to construct the ‘identity of masculinity’ after the war.”—Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism.
“The film scholar notices that women during their wartime duties are usually presented as mothers, sisters, daughters, wives or lovers of the soldiers. They are likewise portrayed through female cliches, and are shown as collecting flowers, doing their hair, dancing, changing their clothes, speaking about men and children.”
“The war memory in the Ninth Fort Museum was mostly a narrative of male martyrdom. During the war, female Jewish combatants were not always welcomed as active fighters either and were regarded as weak and not ready to take part in combat missions. After the war, this discrimination based on gender did not disappear.”

“Unlike the socialists and communists, Catholics rejected work out­side of the home as the basis of female emancipation.”—Precarious Workers.
“In 1963, the law forbidding the dismissal of women workers for reasons of marriage passed. The law outlawed layoffs for marriage and declared spinsterhood clauses contained in contracts null and void.”
“Inspired by the battles of the olive harvesters, another group of southern Italian workers, mostly women, the jasmine pickers demanded a conference be organized to investigate their difficult working conditions.”
“Flexibility and personal freedom were associated, an idea that was particularly popular in Italy during the eighties, especially in women’s theory on liberation from work.”
“The ‘Sexyshock Project’ began after a demonstration on June 30, 2001, which saw about 3,000 women invade the streets of Bologna to defend public consultants and Law 194 on abortion.”

The study on the sovereignty movement taking place in Tatarstan pays special attention to the changing conditions of women; the book on Kalmykia does so with a statistical approach, and “Buryat women quickly adopted new educational and career plans in the later Soviet period.”

Essays on family life and childhood in Soviet times and in post-Soviet Russia and the Baltic States. Subjects include motherhood, childbearing, single mothers, divorce etc: How these used to be, or have recently been, perceived and handled in this corner of the world. Throughout the last century, the family in Eastern Europe and Russia faced a number of dramatic social transformations that came with the promise of a better life but have not necessarily lived up to the expectations of the people who had to endure their results. Several of the essays contextualize their cases by referring to models of family policies and practices elsewhere, particularly in Sweden.

“Young and successful Eastern European female artist seeks gentleman for marriage. This marriage would enable her to freely move around and accompany her exhibitions to the West. In exchange accommodation in her home country and local art contacts are offered.” This ad was published in the French daily paper, Libération in 1980, connected to a performance at the Paris Biennial.
Artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the west between 1945 and 1989 are presented and analyzes in a collective book with 35 contributors.
“The ‘socialist way of women’s emancipation’ that in Eastern European societies ran parallel to the second wave of modern feminism, was both a social and artistic movement. True, this ‘emancipation’ had its many flaws and caused discontents, but it also propounded an intense political rhetoric on ‘women’s equality’ and implemented actual pieces of legislation and very real social policies, which together brought enormous and documented changes to women’s lives and identities.”

“Countless women conspirators were largely overlooked in research about Solidarity, they wrote, manufactured, and distributed… Almost simultaneously to women’s active contribution to the Polish underground movement, even more explicit forms of feminist samizdat started to emerge, most prominently in Russia in the late 1970s… In Yugoslavia, too, a feminist movement emerged in 1978”.
Separate subchapters pay tribute to women in the exhaustive analysis of underground literature in the Cold War.
Samizdat production was also a male-dominated activity. But women’s sense of the importance of personal contact and their continuous efforts to cultivate relationships established close ties between a great number of activists. As they linked the core centers of uncensored activities, they played an eminent role in maintaining the social aspect of samizdat.
In turn, women’s social skills were crucial in establishing and maintaining the community. Many of the women used their inconspicuous shopping bags or handbags to smuggle large amounts of leaflets or copies from a site of samizdat production to a space where material would be collated and distributed.

“Women’s wage discrimination was a non-issue in the state-socialist world of the 1960s.”—from a book on labor under communism.
“In communist Poland saleswomen held one of the most underpaid, unpopular, and untrustworthy jobs in the country; simultaneously iconic and despised, the saleswoman was probably the most ambivalent figure of everyday communism.”
“After the mass participation of Yugoslav women in both the antifascist resistance and postwar reconstruction, a patriarchal backlash had occurred since the 1950s: the numbers of women elected to republican and district committees rapidly decreased, as did the number of women employed in industry.”
“In our plant many women from the countryside who have farms work there. Their husbands also work. They have a life like in paradise.”

“The low presence of women in all political structures during the last twenty-five years can be attributed to the post-communist propaganda that demonized women’s presence in politics based on a mythology that women in the communist-era leadership were numerous and incompetent.”
The place of myths is discussed in the memory politics in a number of East-European countries.
“After 1989, the women who held positions of authority in the Romanian Communist Party were represented, without exception, as the incarnation of absolute evil.”
“The roots of the myth of a sinister presence of women in politics can be identified in the distinctive features showed by the former communist countries in Eastern Europe after the fall of the communist regimes. We can add the sexist, misogynist attitudes that came as a return to what some called ‘traditional values’ from before the communist era.”

“The interviews asked whether the husband was helping his wife with the household chores, particularly in looking after the children, which was appreciated as a merit… One conspicuous difference was the appearance of young women compared to women in the past: instead of plaits, young women now sported short haircuts following the urban fashion. The ethnographers were left with the impression that ‘generally, the everyday clothes and formal dress used on holidays are not different from the outfits of the average woman in Sofia, like office staff girls, young intelligent workers, and others’.”
“Bourgeois” sociology was an anathema in the Soviet Bloc, yet valuable records survived from Soviet-style ethnographic surveys in the 1950s, like the one in Bulgaria in the book about remembering communism.
The chapter on memories of childhood under communism discussed single motherhood, illegitimate children, and adoption. “Once the mother signed a renouncement statement, the child became ‘public’ to the fullest extent. Their continually increasing numbers led to the creation of new homes in almost all district centers”.

“In the second half of the 1940s, mainly unmarried women or married women who still did not have children were the only ones to work outside of the home.”—Everyday Life under Communism and After.
“In peasant families women served the male members of the family and ate only after the men had finished or while standing in a place separate from the men.”
“The unique way in which village women walked—tiny quick steps were taken as the upper body was held in a straight, upright position while the head remained erect, the hips swung rhythmically, and the arms were allowed to hang or swing at the sides—was not only the result of the clothing they were wearing, but also added to the overall effect of maintaining a good appearance.”
“The ideological and mythologized image of the working woman gradually faded away as it gradually became more natural for the female role to be more and more closely attached to that of a wage earner.”

“’If it’s a young woman—stir her ambition; if it’s a mother—get to her through her child—educational reform, showing concern for the child’s health, free school, extra meals, free textbooks, access to universities—this will win the women over for the Party,’ said one activist in June 1946.”—Reassessing Communism.
“’Does the right to divorce mean that my husband can divorce me anytime he wants?’; ‘Will I be entitled to keep my husband’s surname after divorce?’; ‘How can I prove paternity and demand child support from a man who denies he is the father?’ Judging by such press releases we may surmise that the amendment of family law was a subject of great interest to Polish women.”
“Most of the female TV show characters have set out along the path of modernity and enjoy their emancipation, a fact deeply disturbing for the male characters in the comedies.  The clash of tradition and modernity exploited as a comic element usually follows the same pattern: men represent tradition and women represent modernity.”

“The so-called Family Act of 1952 erased patriarchal family patterns by instituting marriage as the equal partnership of ‘two working people,’ and it ended discrimination against women regarding property ownership, divorce procedures, and child custody. Importantly, it gave equal rights to children born out of wedlock.”—Protected Children, Regulated Mothers.
“During a general amnesty in the summer of 1953 there were 674 women, among the 25,000 persons released from prison, who had been sentenced because of an abortion.”
“The authorities actively used the institution of child protection in an attempt to regulate the sexual behavior of two specific groups of women: lone mothers and single young women. Sexuality outside the framework of marriage and the nuclear family posed the danger that women would refuse to participate in the productive work that was considered essential to build communism and reject their traditional roles as wives and mothers in the family.”

“Applying a gender perspective to the study of traumas associated with the ‘fighting and suffering’ memory can help to challenge the monumentalism of these traumas and make the experiences of women visible.”
A book on Soviet deportation memoirs from the Baltic States.
“The deportees’ diaries are full of references to the early deaths of small children, pregnant women, and elderly people from suffocation, congestion, heat, and dehydration inside the train carriages.”
“The local people looked in disbelief how the deported women gathered natural flowers, arranged them in their rooms or planted along the walls of the houses they lived in.”
“Women resistance fighters in Lithuania were unlikely to challenge gender roles by trying to establish themselves as leaders of partisan units or political organizations.”

Gender in historical research:

“Children born out of wedlock were taken away from their mothers and given up for adoption, the mothers, or fallen women, ending up in Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church, separated from society. The state cooperated with the Church and did nothing to stop the widespread abuse.”—Ireland's Helping Hand to Europe.
“On their way to Berlin the Soviets looted hospitals, robbed patients of their watches, and raped nurses. Many women contracted venereal diseases and between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ were born in Berlin.”
“All pregnant women in Saxony, over 30,000, would receive one kilo of Irish sugar each.”
“A woman complained that large families were being privileged. ‘Has one forgotten that quickly’, she remarked, ‘that is was precisely Nazi women who for the sake of getting favours and impressing Nazis offered the Führer children?’”

“The average age of the women perpetrators was 38 years”. The meticulous analysis of the archival documents about the trials over wartime atrocities in Hungary administered in the so called people’s courts produced a great number of similar findings. On the whole, 18 percent of suspects in these trials were women, rather high in the light that before 1945 only a very small percentage of women had been active in public life.
This unique research examined how political justice functions from a gender perspective. One of the main questions was to identify the extent to which the justice mechanisms operated differently depending on whether a man or a woman was the defendant.

“Any requests from Soviet citizens for permission to get married are to be rejected on the spot. No questions or requests for an exception are to be entertained.” – from a 1946 document, unearthed during decade-long archival research that, accompanied by numerous oral history interviews, explored the deportation of civilians from Czechoslovakia to the USSR. Even pregnant married women were forced to be repatriated, causing the breakup of families.
Most of the abducted tens of thousands were from the Slovak regions (including ethnic Germans and Hungarians). Women in a number of towns pooled their efforts to bring about the return of their husbands. The women of Kežmarok put together a delegation which in December 1945 managed to reach President Beneš and Archbishop Beran but apart from words of encouragement and comfort they could not help the women to bring their husbands home.
Life in the Soviet camps was merciless especially for women. To go through pregnancy and give birth must have been an incredible test. The chances that a woman in labor, and especially the child, would survive were minimal.

Women took part in the anti-Soviet partisan resistance in the forests of Lithuania.

“From the 1920s on, more and more women filled leading positions in the psychoanalytical movement as training analysts, editors, and professors. Many of these women achieved status in the profession or enhanced their academic reputations in the 1930s.”—from a book on the history of “psy-sciences”.
“The patient thinks that, by revealing her secrets, she will be absolved by the force of the confession, and her cooperation with the doctor results in healing”—about letters, diaries and life stories that prostitutes leaving brothels confidently passed on to the doctor in the Women’s Hospital in Cluj in the 1920s.
”Völkisch groups, among them renowned German psychiatrists, used the term ‘weakling’ to stigmatize war invalids, women, and left-wing politicians; these groups became scapegoats in the postwar German society.”

“I would never marry in the traditional way. Elopement is magical. It creates a stronger feeling, of doing it your own way.” The statement by one of the Bosnian women interviewed in the frame of the anthropological research is by no way an exception. A survey in 2013 proved that a higher proportion (94%) of the women in Bosnia-Herzegovina who eloped are still married than what was the case with women who did not elope.
The tradition is shared nearly identically by each national group: Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. Elopements empower women: “the young woman has more independence than the young man, who must win the consent of his parents for the marriage before bringing the girl he wants to marry to their home. The girl herself exercises a certain independence and exemplifies a sense of autonomy”. In about half of the cases, however, the couples also arrange for a traditional wedding.

An academic anthology displays texts, authored – among others – by women as travellers – Dragojla (1839), Lucja (1841), Polixena (1842), Dora (1863), Kallirhoe (1909), Isidora (1914, 1951), Mimika (1950), Kazimiera (1957), Milica (1987), and Vesna (1999).

“The Habsburg administration explained the takeover of Bosnia-Herze­govina as a ‘civilizing mission.’ The central and contested figure in this discourse was the ‘Muslim woman,’ in which Islam’s ‘backwardness’ and Bosnia-Her­zegovina’s otherness culminated. A veiled figure, she had withdrawn herself from Habsburg male view and was orientalized as both dirty and desirable.”
A volume on the intertwined relationship between public health and nation building.     
From 1918 on, the newly independent “Poland became ‘a living laboratory’ for experiments in modern life; this constellation created a space of possibilities, full of opportunities and challenges, in which established so­cial, political, economical, ethnic, and gender relations were ordered anew.”
Although, in the GDR, women benefited from a policy that promoted their integration into the labor market, which contributed undoubtedly to their emancipation, ‘socialist marriage’ was far from equalitarian, and women still performed most domestic tasks.

About a third of the monograph on emotions focuses on the gender dimension of the processes that brought emotions to the fore of public interest and debate. The author analyses how perceptions of honour, rage, power or love varied in time according to social class, age, religion, and national belonging. "Emotional gender features and differences as they had been discussed in detail since Rousseau's and Kant's times remained surprisingly stable throughout the nineteenth century." And today? "Girls, indeed, no longer blush when greeted by male peers. But they still cultivate emotional styles and practices quite different to those of boys."

"The higher marriage rate among Jews in late eighteenth-century Bohemia was a fact. In a society where most children were born inside wedlock it led also to higher fertility among Jews. Jewish women breastfed longer, and this was a very important factor for improving the chances of a child's survival during the first six months of life." The population growth of Jews was therefore higher than in the total population." But then, faster modernization of the Jewish population led to a decline in births earlier than in other segments of the society. "In 1930, the share of married people was smaller in almost every age group in the Jewish population than in the total population. The proportion of never-married Jewish women exceeded that of gentiles in every age group. The share of divorcees was also larger in the Jewish than in the total population."

“Often some burgher’s wife would venture to put on a hoop skirt, but she would always be snubbed, and that is why hoop skirts blossomed only among the most distinguished ladies. A hoop skirt was an under-skirt made of cloth attached to three rings made out of whalebone.”— as broadcast from the 18th century.
“So-called devotiates lived close to their cloisters or entirely within the cloisters. They devoted themselves to religious service, abandoning their household interests. There were not many males among them, but a hundred times more females and, with the exception of a few genuinely pious souls, mostly consisted of hypocrites, quarrelers, gossipers, calumniators, and drunks.”
“The drivers, stable-masters, and other assistants, growing bored over the course of so many hours, made sport both of each other and of passers-by. Should some young woman walk by, she would be assailed by the most vulgar language possible: ‘Hey, how’s my little slut?!’ ‘I hear she slept with the priest!’”

“In most European countries the number of men accused of witchcraft was around 20 to 30 percent”—from a book on witchcraft.
“Researchers have long analyzed the male to female ratio of witchcraft accusations to demonstrate that in most instances witch-hunting looked like woman- hunting.”
“Men brought charges on behalf of their wives or other female relatives who were in fact the main initiators of the accusation. Usually it was a woman who initially had a quarrel, spread gossip, or was insulted, and her male relative only represented her in court in front of the judges. Seen this way, witchcraft trials in Ukraine seem to be women’s business.”
“Women used love magic for two purposes: to take revenge either on the unfaithful husband or his lover, or to restore the husband’s feelings and thus restore family life.”

Libuše, the legendary ancestor of Czechs “was a woman unique among women, prophetic in her thoughts, brisk in her speech, with a chaste body, of virtuous manners, unmatched in deciding people’s disputes, and kind to everybody and exceptionally likable, honor and glory of the female sex wisely dispensing male affairs."—from the bilingual edition of The Chronicle of the Czechs.
“The girls of that land grew up unbridled and elected leaders for themselves; they also went to war like young warriors and took part manly in hunting. And so not the men, but the girls themselves consorted with whichever men whenever they wanted.”
“Ever since the time after princess Libuše’s death, our women are subject to men.”