ABSTRACT
The goal of this book is to give a taste of what women in and from East Central Europe thought about politics amidst the stormy changes that characterized the twentieth century. The broad geographical and chronological reach is all the more necessary to counter the ways in which East Central Europe as a region and especially East Central European women as thinkers and intellectuals are underrepresented both in European and in global canons of political thought and intellectual history. This is both the reason for and the consequence of East Central (or Eastern) Europe being seen as intellectually and politically inferior to the West. Presenting the former as an under-performing epigon of the latter supposedly justifies the region’s irrelevance on the global scene. In István Bibó’s words from 1946, this region—”the area east of France, between the Rhine and Russia”—is commonly seen as one that “suffers from an original backwardness.” 1 The main reasons, in Bibó’s argument, were the region’s alleged inherent inability to achieve “a Western-type democratic development,” 2 and the area’s alleged character as a “hotbed of various befuddled, foggy, and deceptive political philosophies.” 3 For a region with such apparent heavy baggage to have vivid traditions of women’s rights movements and feminist thought was unimaginable. This assumption became a self-fulfilling one, discouraging the search for such women who made and continue to make meaningful contributions to any collections of feminist thought. Such an assumption thus reinforces the preexisting belief in the “original backwardness” of East Central Europe. However, this region not only saw the emergence of philosophers such as Ágnes Heller and Angela Vode, writers such as Wisława Szymborska and Dubravka Ugrešić, but also harbors a wide range of innovative reflections on nationalism, socialism, and liberalism as they appeared in the region. Growing interest in the work of such canonical thinkers as Clara Zetkin, Aleksandra Kollontai, and Rosa Luxemburg (whose thought focused less on women, but whose life and contribution to socialist thoughtmerits the attention of feminist scholarship) marks only the beginning of thorough research into the rich intellectual life of women thinkers from East Central Europe. This volume contributes significantly to such an effort.
