Participants

Discussion

Intellectual history of East Central and Southeastern Europe has paid relatively little attention to the political thought generated by national women’s movements, within dissident circles and state women’s organizations. The participants of this roundtable will discuss reinterpretation of the story of feminism in the region in relation to state socialism and, conversely, the history of state socialism through the lens of feminism as it emerges from their work within the project HERESSEE hosted at the University of Vienna (https://heressee.univie.ac.at/). The discussants reflect the diversity of the European continent and their individual studies draw on local sources of knowledge production of women’s rights and feminism, among others, on oral history interviews, journalism and popular women’s magazines, literary and art works, samizdat publications and party documents. They situate local histories in regional and transnational contexts, in order to integrate feminist political thought, women’s rights discourses and their authors in East Central Europe into the broader European intellectual tradition.