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In the West, the 1970s were the decade of rapid sexual liberalization. Similarly, in state-socialist Poland new approaches toward sex and nudity also gained momentum. Female nudes started being printed in the popular press and displayed in gallery rooms. Simultaneously, early feminist artists such as Natalia LL, Teresa Murak, and Ewa Partum experimented with nudity to question gendered discourses and social norms. This article compares popular nude photography exhibitions with the works of women artists to analyze two approaches toward female nudity that developed in 1970s Poland. Thus, it showcases the ambiguities surrounding the project of socialist sexual modernity and highlights confl icting visions of femininity and liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of knowledge production about the former Eastern Bloc in the American and Polish academic contexts. It explores how debates about authority and authenticity are embedded in the deeper histories of area studies and in long-standing confl icts dating from the earliest years of the fi eld of Slavic and East European Studies. The discussion about authority and authenticity within feminist circles mirrors larger confl icts between proponents of the totalitarian thesis and the so-called revisionists. The confl icts between these two schools precipitated a continuing epistemic crisis that also infects the academic cultures of Eastern Europe and is exacerbated by the neoliberalization of academic knowledge production. The epistemic cultures perpetuating Cold War stereotypes may lead to self-censorship or dissuade young researchers from studying the gendered aspects of lived experience in the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the use of selected contemporary sociological research and prolific collections of largely unpublished memoirs, this article analyzes men's attitudes toward the paid employment of women--particularly married women--in post-Stalinist Poland. The personal narratives reveal an increasing acceptance of women's work outside the household over time and across generations. A significant shift in Polish men's attitudes to a greater acceptance of women's paid employment took place in the younger generation, born in the 1930s and 1940s and socialized after World War II. However, hostile attitudes of working-class men toward working women persisted, based on a continuing aspiration to uphold the male breadwinner family model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a contextualized analysis of disabled Polish war veterans' memoirs published in 1971. This set of documents constitutes a remarkable source for understanding how masculinity and male corporeality are narrated and negotiated between politics, social and family lives, private and public spheres. The article focuses on the conventions and conditions of war-disability discourse production in Poland during the long sixties; it also highlights biographical tensions between appreciation of veterans' masculinity in political discourse and their often emasculated position in social structures, families and private lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between men, spousal violence, and politics in Romania in the 1950s and aims to analyze how the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), as an institution, dealt with spousal violence perpetrated by its officials. The RCP was a significant player within state socialist regime. Thus, the way the Party managed the discussed cases of spous al violence gives an idea about how gender relations functioned in reality, beyond the official discourse and the letter of the law. This article argues that spousal violence was the result of inequality within the family and a manifestation of patriarchy and male dominance. This analysis draws on files from the archive of the Committee of Party Control of the Central Committee of the RCP, which contains cases of Party members with a history of spousal violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to shed more light on the topic of state socialist feminism in Eastern Europe by focusing on part of the biography of one of the most visible women's activists and political functionaries in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe after 1944, Tsola Dragoicheva. It should be considered as a contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the character of state socialist measures toward women and the "gender contract" in the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe between 1944 and 1989. It does not pretend, however, to cover and evaluate Dragoicheva's entire life (or to agree with everything she did) or to create an exhaustive picture of state socialist measures toward women in Bulgaria (nor does it underestimate the significance of structured gender inequalities, which often remain unnoticed); rather, it discusses some facts and procedures dealing with "women's issues" that researchers have only vaguely covered so far. The study is based on various archival materials from Bulgarian and international archives, and on the periodical press from the period under consideration, oral history interviews, and scholarly publications relevant to this topic. It is part of an ongoing project on Gendering Balkan Nation-States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses writing on women's and gender history in the pre-1945 period, written and published in Hungary under state socialism. Education, struggle for social change, legal history, and the history of work formed the four most important clusters in this rich body of historiography. Considering the position of these publications in the state-socialist or Cold War period and in Central Eastern European historiography and their uneasy relation to gender history as established since the 1980s, we can characterize them as a triply marginalized body of writing. The article pinpoints how the authors connected the history of women and gender to larger processes of emancipation, other categories of analysis, and transnational perspectives in historical writing, and explores their contribution to the historiography of women and gender in the twentieth century and to the intellectual history of state socialism. It also discusses why this historiography has fallen into oblivion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the examples of socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to propose some new directions for rethinking scholarly understandings of 'secularism' and the ways in which socialist secularizing projects were intricately intertwined with questions of gender equality. Current scholarly debates on the genealogy of secularism root its origins in the Catholic/Protestant West, and systematically ignore cases from the former communist world. This article takes two cases of Balkan states to explore the theoretical contours of what we call 'socialist secularism.' Although Bulgaria and Yugoslavia's experiences of socialist secularism differed in the degree of their coerciveness, this article examines the similarities in the conceptualization of the secularizing imperative and the rhetoric used to justify it, specifically the rhetoric of communist modernism and women's liberation from religious backwardness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the changing relationship between paid work, unpaid work and paid care work and social services, and the struggle over this relationship and its implications, constituted key factors in shaping the 'state socialist' gender regime in Hungary from 1949 to the 1980s. The study is based on a wealth of recent scholarship, original sources and Hungarian research conducted during the state socialist period. It tries to give a balanced and inclusive analysis of key elements of women's and gender history in the state socialist project of 'catching-up development' in a semi-peripheral patriarchal society, pointing to constraints, challenges and results of this project. Due to the complex interaction of a variety of actors and factors impacting on and shaping the state socialist gender regime not all women were affected in the same way by state socialist politics and gender struggles. Women's status and opportunities, as well as gender relations, differed according to class, ethnicity and economic sector. As a rule, the gender struggle over state socialist family and gender arrangements in Hungary sought to reduce or temper tensions and conflicts by avoiding substantial or direct attack against the privileges of men both within the home and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the social understandings of medicine and health in socialist Bulgaria through an analysis of consultations with the prophetess and seer Vanga Dimitrova. The article describes traditional and alternative folk medicine, the belief in Christian and pagan faith-healing and their relationship to the socialist ethos, and the medicalization of healing. Other subjects under discussion include the gender and power relations existing between a female prophetess and a male-dominated medical community, the Bulgarian relationship between religion and medicine, and the universal health care system run by the socialist state.

The article analyzes socialist legislation, propaganda and oral history interviews to investigate how women's roles, identities and gender relations were changed due to women's participation in paid labor in socialist Romania. The article discusses women's reactions to paid labor and how work improved their economic position and increased their physical and social mobility. Some women rethought their status within the workplace and the family as a result of being harassed by male co-workers and of having to balance work and domestic duties.