The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Zsófia Lóránd

   Pages 1-27

3. “Neither Class, nor Nature”—(Re)Turning to Feminism in the Social Sciences and Humanities

   • Zsófia Lóránd

   Pages 29-83

4. Feminist Dissent in Literature and Art: Sisterhood, Motherhood and the Body

   • Zsófia Lóránd

   Pages 85-135

5. Feminism in the Popular Mass Media

   • Zsófia Lóránd

   Pages 137-169

6. Reorganising Theory: From Kitchen Tables to the Streets, from Theory to Activism

   • Zsófia Lóránd

   Pages 171-222

7. Conclusion

   • Zsófia Lóránd

   Pages 223-230

8. Back Matter

   Pages 231-270

   PDF

This book tells the story of new Yugoslav feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, reassessing the effects of state socialism on women’s emancipation through the lens of the feminist critique. This volume explores the history of the ideas defining a social movement, analysing the major debates and arguments this milieu engaged in from the perspective of the history of political thought, intellectual history and cultural history.
 
Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, societies in and scholars of East Central Europe still struggle to sort out the effects of state socialism on gender relations in the region. What could tell us more about the subject than the ideas set out by the only organised and explicitly feminist opposition in the region, who, as academics, artists, writers and activists, criticised the regime and demanded change?

• gender history
• socialism
• women's movement
• sexual revolution
• feminism

“Lóránd presents a detailed history of the emergence and growth of feminism in Yugoslavia. … Lóránd’s study provides an important and welcome intervention. Her book reveals the unique expression of feminism in Yugoslavia, and in doing so helps to nuance the history of both life under state socialism and feminism itself. In many ways, the story of new Yugoslav feminism will be familiar to readers.” (Jane Freeland, German Historical Institute London Bulletin, Vol. 44 (1), May, 2022)

• University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

  Zsófia Lóránd

Zsófia Lóránd is an intellectual historian of feminism in post-WWII state-socialist Eastern Europe. Since her time at the Central European University in Budapest, she has held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen. 

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