Aspasia

This year, 2025, is a year of significant anniversaries. In this year, we recognize among many other important events the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution; the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist Uprising in Russia; the 90th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s birth; the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the formation of the United Nations; the 60th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination; the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the start of the Cambodian Genocide, the signing of the Helsinki Accords, and the launch of Saturday Night Live; the 40th anniversary of the Schengen Agreement; the 10th anniversary of the Paris Climate Accords; and the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd. Among the many lists of notable anniversaries for 2025 that one can find on the internet, however, none include recognition of the event we are celebrating in this issue—the 50th anniversary of the United Nations’ International Women’s Year (IWY). As the start of the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985) that sought to promote women’s rights and opportunities, IWY and the conferences that launched it recognized both the progress made and limitations faced by women around the world, and these efforts played an important role in the spread of a global women’s rights agenda in the late twentieth century. The absence of any significant recognition of the momentous events of IWY is perhaps not surprising, given the concerted anti-gender stances taken in recent years by the leaders of far too many countries. Indeed, its absence only serves to reinforce the continuing invisibility of women, a sub-theme that many of the authors in this issue address.

The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the United Nations International Year of Women (IWY) and for this interview, Kristen Ghodsee, author of Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) spoke with Jocelyn Olcott, author of International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (Oxford University Press, 2017), about her book, the overall importance of IWY for global feminism, and future directions for further research. The interview was held over Zoom on 18 January 2024 and transcribed from their one-hour conversation. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

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.

This article explores the implementation of United Nations–proclaimed International Women’s Year (IWY, 1975) in the USSR. Based on an analysis of archival documents of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Soviet Women’s Committee (SWC), this article shows that the SWC members of the Soviet IWY Commission had their own agenda, which sometimes clashed with that of their male colleagues, and which took years to be realized, even partially. The SWC women instrumentalized the international Cold War rivalry in defining women’s rights for their own interests in domestic policymaking, thus making a strong case against the assumption that the SWC was “a puppet” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The following articles by Anastasia Papushina and Raino Isto are part of the forum “Materiality and (In-)Visibility: Women in Socialist and Post-Socialist Public Spaces” developed by Julie Deschepper, Milica Prokić, and Hana Gründler.¹ This forum is derived from the eponymus trans-disciplinary research project they lead together. The project evolved through a series of conversations with scholars working on Ukraine, Albania, the Czech Republic, Yugoslavia, and Russia, a slow conference which ran over the course of 2020 and 2021. Through this broad regional focus, the project explores the multiple presences of women within socialist and post-socialist public spaces, focusing on their representations, monumentalizations, and memorializations. These two articles presented here build on the proceedings of one of the project’s core outcomes, the international workshop “She is Made of Stone—Women in Socialist and Post-Socialist Public Spaces,” which took place in September 2021 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.²

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.

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.

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.

Barbara Alpern Engel, Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 268 pp., $43.50 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-350-01446-6.

Marina Tsvetaeva, The Story of Sonechka, trans. from Russian by Irina Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve, Boston: Academic Studies Press Imprint Cherry Orchard Books, 2025, 162 pp, $150.00 (hardback), ISBN 97988871980-40.

Agnes Andeweg and Heidi Kurvinen, eds., Transnational Feminism in Non-English Speaking Europe, c. 1960–1990, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 247 pp., €142.99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-3-031-69137-9.

Anna Borgos, Women in the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: Girls of Tomorrow, London and New York: Routledge, 2021, 202 pp., £145.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-367-65086-5.

Selin Çağatay, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tesija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, Boston: Brill, 2023, 569 pp., Open access, ISBN: 978-90-04-68246-7.

Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz, eds., Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2024, 700 pp., €280.00, ISBN: 978-9-633-86453-1.

Petya Pachkova, Homosexuality in the Modern World, Belgrade: Center for Open Access in Science, 2024, 242 pp., price not listed (ebook), ISBN: 978-8-681-29412-3.

Milena Balcheva-Bozhkova and Ramona Dimova, Women Artists: New Horizons Between the Two World Wars, Sofia: National Academy of Art in partnership with Sofia City Art Gallery and State Agency Archives, 2023, 432 pp., 130 BGN (hardback), ISBN: 978-9-542-98879-3.

Valentina Mitkova and Ilko Penelov, eds., Zhenskite litsa na istoriata: sbornik v chest na Krassimira Daskalova (The women’s faces of history: Collection in honor of Krassimira Daskalova), Sofia: Sofia University Press, 2024, 550 pp., BGN 35 (hardback), ISBN: 978-9-540-75936-4.

Anna Müller, An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023, 376 pp., $50.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-821-42497-1.

Alexis Peri, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024, 304 pp., £ 29.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-674-98758-6.

Margarite Poulos, Refugee to Revolutionary: A Transnational History of Greek Communist Women in Interwar Europe, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2024, 276 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-826-50716-7.

Daniela Deteşan, Georgeta Fodor, and Claudia Septimia Sabău, eds., Incursiune în istoria femeilor din spaţiul românesc (secolele XVI–XXI): surse, direcţii şi teme de cercetare (Exploring the history of women in Romania (16th–21st centuries): Sources, directions, and research themes), Târgu Mureş: University Press and Cluj-Napoca: Editura Mega, 2024, 321 pp., RON 60 (paperback), ISBN: 978-9-731-69867-0, ISBN: 978-6-060-20872-3.

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.