Vol. 9 (2023): Gender and materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the XX century

The article shows the trajectory of Yugoslav kitchen design between early 1950s and early 1970s, from its pathbreaking emergence within home economies institutions and women’s organizations to mass production, commercialization, and popularization by the furniture industry. Centered on two case studies –the Swedish kitchen designed by Branka Tancig in 1954 and Cocktail 68, designed by Biala Leban in 1968– the article explores temporal and qualitative changes in Yugoslav kitchenscapes with several critical junctions –women’s activism, home economics, kitchen design, and women’s (un)paid labor. We argue that the initial expert focus on producing simplified, efficient kitchens for modern households has been transformed in the light of economic, social, and artistic changes from the mid-1960s into an industry-driven promotion of elaborate and colorful kitchen designs. This transformation, however, should not be seen in a dichotomic manner; although the differences in design were strongly linked to changing materialities, and their symbolic values while promoting an entirely dissimilar type of user, all were a result of efforts in standardization and modernization driven by Yugoslav women’s professional activities in architecture, design, and home economics. By weaving together these different themes, we bring new insights into the history of Yugoslav design, materiality, science, women’s expertise, organizing labor, and transnationalism in the 1950s and 1960s.

The present article offers an analysis of the problem of women being mistreated during childbirth and abortion in the late Soviet Union based on the material of the samizdat and tamizdat publications by the Leningrad independent women’s movement. The underground feminists were the first to bring to light the persisting, but taboo problem of the physical suffering, humiliation and indifference women had to face at the Soviet maternity hospitals and abortion clinics. Breaking of this taboo among others resulted in their persecution by the KGB, exile, and imprisonment of several of the group members. However, the same problems were openly revealed and acknowledged by the Soviet authorities only ten years later, in the era of glasnost. This paper examines the main issues raised in the Leningrad feminists’ publications by situating them in a broader political and discursive context of the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Finally, it offers several insights into the factors that may have contributed to the persistence of the problem of women’s mistreatment within the healthcare system in the USSR despite the official claims about the continuous improvement of Soviet women’s and children’s conditions.

A small but committed community of Czech hobbyists maintains a large collection of socialist-era domestic appliances, including televisions, radios, refrigerators, and washing machines, repairing them and displaying them in informal exhibits. This article explores the history of these objects, how they came to be in the hands of collectors, and the role they played in mediating the late socialist Czechoslovak gender culture. It argues that socialist appliances are uniquely well suited to repair and renovation because they were produced in an environment without a culture of planned obsolescence, a profit motive, or a high expectation of innovation. Furthermore, because socialist appliances need regular repair and maintenance, which was often done by men, many men had intimate practical knowledge of even the most feminized machines (for example, vacuums and washing machines).

This article examines the 1990s transition from socialism to capitalism in Poland through the lens of the changing market of underwear. Based on oral history interviews, archival research of bra production companies, as well as an analysis of contemporary press reports, I examine how the integration of the Polish economy into the global capitalist system post 1989 influenced its sexual culture. This article shows how the end of the public sector’s monopoly on the production of underwear and the rise of the private sector introduced new form of bras that were codified as sexual by the media and manufacturers themselves. These new types of products mimicked Western European brands, distancing themselves from the socialist era underwear, and incorporated new technology designed to model and discipline female bodies. Through a deep analysis of a 1996 article on the bra business from The Electoral Gazette [Gazeta Wyborcza], the biggest daily newspaper in Poland, I show how the liberal media were ambivalent to such changes and portrayed it as differences between generations of women in the face of calls for stricter censorship from conservative politicians and the Catholic Church.

This article delves into the nuanced interplay between the domestication of women’s labor and writing practices in 1970s Poland, focusing on the literary community of Obory near Warsaw and the typewriter as a symbolic tool. Set against the backdrop of patriarchal norms, communist promises of emancipation, and late socialist consumption aspirations, Obory’s house of creative work melds women’s writing with both waged and unwaged feminized roles. Drawing on Alva Gotby’s notion of emotional reproduction, this investigation highlights enduring societal frameworks, particularly the structures of the heterosexual family, domestic roles, and genderspecific labor. Using oral histories, interviews with 1960s-70s translators, and 1978-1979 applications to the Polish Writers’ Union, the study incorporates Diana Taylor’s concepts of archive and repertoire. This approach captures the distinct practices of Obory’s women writers while reviving the embodied memory of their typing and the venue’s unique legacy.

I wrote this talk specifically for this conference and so my ideas are still raw. I am also not an historian, although my ethnographic research is deeply inflected with the oral historical narratives of my subjects. This is an exploratory text, still very much in progress, and I hope you will forgive the tentative nature of my reflections. This full text was first delivered as a keynote address on October 1, 2021, to the “Gender and materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century conference” at Sciences Po in Paris. A shorter version of the text was published in a Festschrift for the Bulgarian historian, Maria Todorova (see Ghodsee 2023, 235-246), with the support of the Leibniz Institute of Eastern and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany.

On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Zagreb, a few interested researchers and activists, supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe (RLS SEE) in partnership with Zagreb-based curatorial collective [BLOK], started to work on a project entitled Cartography of Resistance [Kartografija otpora]. The starting point is the underground networks established for the purpose of resistance to the fascist Ustasha [Ustaša] authorities during the Second World War on the territory of the Yugoslav countries (1941-1945), which were rooted in the interwar left-oriented labor movement and activism of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia [Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ].

The research has been carried out in two phases; during 2015 and 2016, and from 2020 until 2022. Both focused on spatial, organizational, political, gender and social aspects of the resistance movement. During the first phase emerged the website “kartografija-otpora.org” that mapped the resistance on the territory of the city of Zagreb. On the basis of research carried out in the second phase, the book entitled Kartografija otpora: Zagreb 1941.-1945. (ed. Josip Jagić, Marko Kostanić) was written and published. The book consists of nine chapters total, where the first three, written by Karlo Držaić, Saša Vejzagić and Josip Jagić, deal with the general institutional and social history of the resistance movement. Krešimir Zovak in his contribution tackles the Peoples’ Justice [Narodna Pravda], exploring controversial topic of Partisan courts. Barbara Blasin wrote about Antifascist Women’s Front in Zagreb, while Ana Lovreković dealt with women working for the Party’s Local Committee. Petra Šarin wrote about Agitprop and the underground printing services. Stefan Treskanica and Goran Korov, members of the team from 2015, investigated the phenomenon of Peoples’ Aid [Narodna pomoć] and explored the activities of the KPJ in the prewar period, between 1931 and 1941. The website was also updated on the basis of these findings with more than 200 locations of terror and resistance.

We asked the contributors about the content and specific importance of this book.

In this “Stop on Archives”, the author writes about songbooks that were published during World War II on the territory of Yugoslavia. These publications are discussed as an entry point into everyday experience of the communist-led antifascist resistance. Namely, in spite of the raging war and shortages of everything from food and clothes to arms and ammunition, materials that would facilitate leisure-related activities were in high demand. The songbooks, therefore, shed light on the existence of widespread enthusiasm for cultural activities during the war. They provided the opportunity for replacing fear and pain at least temporarily with shared enjoyment and fun. But also, because the content of the songs was adapted to the wartime circumstances and guided by the demands of politics and ideology, shared fun could include the sensation of hope in the better future as well.

Ce champ libre est l’œuvre de trois auteurs dont le principal, Éric Aunoble, a coordonné l’assemblage des textes. Après l’introduction générale écrite par Éric Aunoble vient un article du même auteur sur la préservation des sources en Ukraine, fruit d’une enquête de terrain. À la suite de ce texte vient un article du généalogiste Maxime Vichnevski, fruit de son expérience dans les archives de Saint-Pétersbourg (Russie). Ce champ libre se termine par une vignette sur les archives en Crimée annexée, écrite par un collègue vivant en Russie.