Zsófia Lóránd is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. She focuses on the history of feminism in post-WWII Eastern Europe, covering the history of feminist movements in the region, feminist political thought in Croatia and Serbia after 1991 and a missing women’s perspective in the nationalist commemorations of Hungarian history. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia was published in 2018. We had a chance to talk with Dr. Lóránd during the Invisible University for Ukraine Winter School 2023 in Budapest about women in history, studies on women’s history in East Central Europe and the ways scholars deal with challenges of incorporating previously hidden voices in history.
Yevhen Yashchuk
We were thinking how to start this conversation, and we came to an agreement that it would be nice to ask about women as an object of study in history — a topic that has been so widely discussed in the past decades but still remains so thought provoking. What are your thoughts about the complexities of the recent developments in this field?
Zsófia Lóránd
It’s a huge question; actually, we are reaching this point when we have to go back to looking at women in history and women’s history because often, in light of the recent very important developments in gender history, we kind of forgot this aspect of focusing on women’s lives and women’s biographies. It became a little bit per se, and now it’s good to refocus on that as a field.
At the same time, I think that the introduction of women’s history into the discipline of history in the 70s was very important. How it changed dynamics and put so many other aspects of history into the spotlight that were not the case and still are not the case in Eastern-Central European studies, where we have so much to discover. I think what’s also a challenge is to revisit this earlier existing history in the field of women’s history because methodologies changed, approaches changed, and the way we have access to archives and its sources changed in the sense that we have much more. We need to acknowledge and cherish the work that people did before us and still make a contribution and still somehow show how things can be approached from a different angle or from a new aspect.
Kateryna Lysenko
You just mentioned that feminist frame partly affected or evoked interest in some other areas, could you elaborate on this a bit?
Zsófia Lóránd
The history of emotions became a big topic and it’s often not even acknowledged that it comes from feminist approaches to history and this whole idea of the personal being political. Even labor history became a much more dynamic field after it became clear that you can have very non-traditional approaches to history, non-traditional sources and different life stories we can integrate and speak about.
Kateryna Lysenko
And how does it correlate with the stereotypes? You know: women — emotions, women — peace? Can and should one keep the balance between paying attention to stereotypes, but not abusing them? If so, how?
Zsófia Lóránd
I think it’s good to embrace them, but of course not to reduce women to emotions or women’s history to the intimate sphere. It’s actually very interesting to discover how much more there is to do in certain fields, for instance, in diplomatic history which is still amazingly focused on male part of the story. The recent research of Glenda Sluga and her colleagues, both in the edited volume, Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500, and Sluga’s own book, The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon showed how important women were in the history of diplomacy and actually in creating the modern state relationship. Celia Donert’s recent work on women and socialist internationalism is another similar and very important intervention, as she looks at how women’s international networks during the Cold War brought women together from East and West, North and South, and exploring not only happy cooperation, but internal tensions too.
In my field and because I am mostly an intellectual historian, the latest big thing was the intervention of black women’s political thought, like in the work of Saidiya Hartmann, or recent research into Claudia Jones. This was a big turn, and it is something that not just me, but some other colleagues are trying to do — introduce marginalised women, women of colour, but also East European women into the existing Western cannons of political thought. That is quite the challenge, because there is a lot of resistance we face, especially from more traditional, white and mostly male, intellectual historians. On the other hand, I think that we cannot give up on these amazing interpretative and research tools that come from intellectual history. It is important finally to seriously think about women in this part of the world, about life, about politics, about their own life, but also about society. Just because they were not doing this in forms that are more accepted in different Western cannons doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant.
Yevhen Yashchuk
What were the challenges beyond the inclusion of this Eastern European context into the global studies on women history or women in history? Why are these challenges present, what are the issues that prevent these people from having these views on women, including those who are acting in the context of East Central Europe, into the broader studies that have been developing somewhere outside the region, for instance?
Zsófia Lóránd
We often fall between the cracks between the West and the Global South and we are just the lame Other of the West. For better or worse, we are not even exotic enough – which is a terrible, terrible kind of othering too, and it doesn’t prevent us from letting people drown on the shores of Europe. Eastern and Central Europe is invisible because it’s neither Western enough, nor Other enough. So there is this assumption that whatever has been happening in terms of intellectual production in East Central Europe was obviously just weaker and less developed, and mostly like an afterthought to what was happening in the West, while during the socialist period, we were all just imitating and following Soviet models and orders. I think that the only exception was a very short-lived period when dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe were interesting, which was also in the Cold War framework. When the Cold War was over, even this became uninteresting and largely ignored.
Kateryna Lysenko
Basically, we are all narrating, and we live in this post-whatever-it-means, this post-world. In this particular postwar situation, for instance, how are your women portrayed and what is the form of a woman in the post-world? How do you see it as a researcher of Eastern Europe in this post-frame of postwar, postmodernism, postfeminism and how the woman is portrayed there?
Zsófia Lóránd
I think there’s a lot of different causes and what is definitely fascinating is this post-feminist phase, and I agree that it’s a very contested term, but I think that we can use it strategically because there was a very important turn in East Central Europe. It is the difference between your generation and my generation because we had to ‘learn the feminist language,’ and you grew up with that. It is Angela McRobbie’s idea about ‘normalization’ (this is my word, to play a bit with the socialist past here too) of feminist ideas and feminist language that happened, but also it brings along the emptying out of the language and taking away of the political message. Mass culture portrayal of female empowerment is quite symbolic, and when you do social research, you find out that women are not much more empowered than they were, and this is a global phenomenon.
What is different in Eastern Europe is that we had our own homegrown version of women’s emancipation during socialist period which also didn’t work perfectly well. In my book The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia, I showed that this process was very dynamic — you make certain steps to achieve gender equality, but you don’t succeed. At some point, you stop taking steps and critically reassess what you did and what you didn’t do. A lot of things that happened were important, but most of the problems are still not resolved.
In a postmodern sense, it allows a lot of experimentation that you couldn’t do before, but it also destabilizes the subject and applies a very heavy constructionist approach to everything. You often lose your subject or your ground to speak, and the whole turn to new materialism or even this new archival turn in historiography is very much a (rather appropriate) reaction to that. For feminist historiography and women’s history, this is excellent because now we can go back to sources, but we can also claim a lot of things that were not considered proper historical sources as historical sources today. There are a lot of endeavors to create different archives of women’s history, although with digitalization, it is tricky.
Yevhen Yashchuk
You did research on Yugoslavia after the Second World War and how feminism developed in that context. You mentioned that there were attempts to emancipate women in different ways, but they kind of stopped at a certain moment and didn’t succeed. When Yugoslavia fell, we see that there were new, independent countries emerging with a long period of transition. How do you see the research in women’s history in this period of transition when everything that was previously established was questioned, challenged and a new context came into play? What new opportunities and obstacles emerged within the new states, with the whole period of transition from socialist to post socialist, from one country to many countries?
Zsófia Lóránd
I will start with the socialist. What is crucial about the case of Yugoslav case in the 70s and 80s is that it brings a homegrown form of feminism. Of course, they were inspired by what we call the ‘second-wave of feminism’ in the West. The women who had problems with the socialist system also realized that this system did a lot of things that were crucial for women and found out that there were women outside Yugoslavia who were unhappy with a lot of things, and this discovery triggered these discussions about the socialist system as well. What they showed, and this is relevant for the entire socialist period in the second half of the 20th century, is how patriarchy survived despite the women’s emancipation policies and discourses that were present there. Both methodologically and from a disciplinary perspective, they had very different approaches from their Western counterparts. Politically, there were differences because some people were approaching from a more postmodern and a liberal feminist approach, but some came in the form of a radical feminist perspective, or from what they called a feminized Marxism. From the perspective of political thought, it was also very interesting how they were picking up Marxist concepts and reclaiming them. Moreover, they reinterpreted concepts such as racism, which in the socialist context was attributed to the West, but then Marxist feminist authors said that women’s oppression is a form of male racism against women. It was very interesting, and this became the only case of a very elaborate, organized feminist form of what I categorize as dissent. They were not dissidents in the way people in the Soviet Union or in Central Europe traditionally were, but whilst they believed in dialogue with and improvement of the socialist state, they remained consistently critical of one of the proclaimed bigger successes of socialism, women’s equality.
Kateryna Lysenko
I definitely agree that Marxism and feminism are in the same box somewhere in my head because they are both really sensitive to and are based on history and language, particularly how they are constructed. So we also wanted to ask you a bit about Marxism and feminism in the contested, but at the same time intertwined, context of war heroization and victimization and how to work with these in terms of gender studies.
Zsófia Lóránd
In the Yugoslav case, a lot of women volunteered for the Yugoslav Army; according to the official sources, 800,000 women were mobilized. This is a mythical number though. In the early years of the SFRY, it was part of the state narrative to acknowledge those mostly young, partisan women who were killed during the war. Those who survived were promoted and received awards as national heroes. Some of them became ministers in the first government, which was quite exceptional in the region, except for maybe Poland. This support for the partisan commemorations was important, but even these stories were fading and it didn’t change the way that the rest of history was approached at all. Women were still missing from every other aspect of history. A historian from Yugoslavia, Lydia Sklevicky, had a very famous article with the title More Horses than Women, which showed that there were more horses in history books than women. However, the Yugoslav case presented a different acknowledgement of the role of women in the war, other than their traditional portrayal as mothers and even workers, stepping up to replace men in the factories. The war in the nineties was quite different. It manifested a complete return to very traditional approaches to gender. However, especially in the Croatian Army, a lot of women volunteered and there is very little research about that, which is very interesting and I wonder how the current Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war is going to change this research. In Ukraine, it is very important for Zelensky to have a liberal-progressive, EU-conforming gender agenda, and Putin is an enemy also for his anti-gender, anti-LGBTQ politics. Some colleagues who know Ukrainian history and politics much better than I do even think that women joining the Ukrainian military in this war will change the nature of the military itself. I’m more pessimistic about that or at least remain worried, but it is very interesting to see this emergence of progressive politics and militarism.
Yevhen Yashchuk
But so far, there are no attempts to research women’s stories during the war. There is one recent example of a fiction book called The Shadow King which tells a story of Ethiopian women’s involvement in a struggle in the 1930s. It was written by an author of Ethiopian origin, who positioned herself and her relative’s as actors in a story of women who have been involved in the struggle, in this story about the war, a story which is traditionally not supposed to be women’s story. Do you see any kind of way how fiction may help to bring women’s voices in a better way? Can this help to make the voices louder and to bring visibility to a broader audience?
Kateryna Lysenko
Also in the context of your book, as the recorded interviews are sensitive, how do you work with them as factual materials? How do you frame these interviews, and not overuse them once you start using them?
Zsófia Lóránd
I think that the Ethiopian case is an excellent example where fiction breaks the silence. And it’s very important to get literary voices heard amongst the broader population, more people read novels than historiography. But I also think that it’s very important to differentiate between these genres, and I know a lot of writers who do extremely thorough archival research for their historical writing (someone I know personally, also her methods, is Éva Cserháti, her first historical crime fiction is out in English too), but these two professions are still very different. Writers often have more freedom and they are also less restrained by the institutional frameworks, by what the discipline is doing, what colleagues are doing, what the grant applications are about, what we have to teach. Writers can just do more.
This is what happened with the rapes by the Soviet Army in Central and Eastern Europe. The first open discussion about it in the Hungarian case was a novel, One Woman in the War. Alaine Polcz, the woman who wrote the novel, was not a writer but a wife of one of the most important dissident writers. As a wife, she was often helping him with his work; she was editing his texts and some of the books were more or less co-written. At the same time, this woman became one of the most progressive psychotherapists in Hungary; she was the first who introduced hospice care into the Hungarian system. So she worked on death and also how to process that. She published an autobiographical novel about her experiences of being raped by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. This was the first, very explicit narrative. Knowledge, and especially feminist knowledge about WWII rapes was very powerful during the Yugoslav Wars because that was the point when women, writers, scholars, and activists already had this feminist knowledge about the previous tragedy and the crimes committed. People were much more reflective of what should be happening, and women very consciously started writing and putting into art these kinds of experiences which led, of course, to much more documentation, much more diverse source base, and much more diverse discourse on the topic. War rape is now a crime against humanity and a war crime. While this does not help the women raped in Ukraine as we speak, there is a framework in which what happens to them is seen as a crime, there is a langauge to communicate what happened to them, there is a legal system which does not relativise their suffering. In a bigger picture, this is still very little, but for Alaine Polcz, it took around 40 years for her to be able to speak up publicly about her experience.
Back to the literary sources: what I did for my book and what I’m doing in my new research is that I’m treating art, including literature, separately from the rest of the sources because I want to keep the interpretation open. This is a very big challenge for me because I’m studying political thought. When you use art as your source for history of political thought, you nevertheless restrict the meanings in order to fit it into your interpretation and into your analytical framework.
The other thing I use is oral history, which is also quite unusual for intellectual historians. I wanted to make sure that my research was driven by archival sources because I was focusing on a very specific period, and it was clear that the war in the 1990s changed the memory of everybody, which is totally understandable. Moreover, a lot of knowledge only came to us after the collapse of socialist regimes. I couldn’t rely on these oral history interviews as my ultimate sources, but I also didn’t want to question the way that people remember because I thought it is their absolute right to remember the way in which they want, and it is not my job in this book to question it. What I want is to tell the story of the 1970s and the 1980s.
Instead of analyzing the interviews, I used them to provide a context, and I used them as quotes at the beginning of every chapter. I chose a couple of quotes that brought us into the spirit of the time, and that way I give space to their voices and to their memories without starting to say, this person didn’t remember it correctly or to start questioning how they interpret the past. At the same time, if there were contradictions in written sources, it was very important to highlight them because it was also a part of how the ideas were developing through these contradictions, through the misunderstanding, through the misinterpretation: like linguistic misinterpretation of certain sources or not understanding where a certain American text was coming from, what it meant in its own context. For example, one author was reading an American anti-feminist anthem as a feminist text, without realizing that this was anti-feminist. This kind of misreading was part of the story that here, in Eastern and Central Europe and even in Yugoslavia, feminists (and everyone) had very sporadic access to what was happening in the US feminist scene in 1974. This is how they understood it, and this is how it made sense to integrate it.
Yevhen Yashchuk
You conducted these oral histories with intellectuals who were involved in the processes of developing intellectual thought in the socialist spirit, and you also involved these archive materials. How visible were women in the context of that time? There is the concern that when we are talking about women, they are underrepresented not only in our narratives about the past but also in their own context. How do you acknowledge their role without forgetting about the obstacles that they actually had at their time?
Zsófia Lóránd
And also we should ask, how do we do this without making this a story of complaining and just constantly complaining about how unfair this was? This is a huge challenge. For me to do this research about the Yugoslav feminism was wonderful, and it was also kind of easy because I just had the best cases ever where women were visible. They became professors; they became super important. They were already important at the time, but then during the war, they became one of the leading anti-war voices and they became internationally acknowledged intellectuals. Some of these women already became very successful writers before the collapse of Yugoslavia. Slavenka Drakulic was already extensively published in English; Sanja Ivekovic, a visual artist, was already exhibiting her work everywhere. It is also because the Yugoslav art scene was well integrated into the international, meaning the Western art scene. Of course, I could talk about patriarchy and I could talk about the obstacles, but only in light of what women still managed to achieve.
For the other cases, where women were less visible, we can show how important they were, either within their own communities or how important they were in sustaining the visible structures and the visible discourse. I tried to read a lot about Ukrainian dissidents, and it’s clear that it was women who were holding down the fort. When the men were imprisoned, they were the ones lobbying for them to become free, they were creating their own discourse and their own political strategies. What we have to do in this case is to acknowledge that these were just as important political strategies. These kinds of actions were just as important for the future as what men did in the more visible part of the story. I think that these kinds of stories also were in the early 20th century, in the interwar period, in the creation of the socialist systems after 1945. Instead of complaining and buying into the fact that they were not important, we need to show how they were important, how they were creating knowledge in different ways.
Kateryna Lysenko
However, often the result of research is that women do not share the part of responsibility for all of the atrocities that were happening in the 20th century because they were in the background. How do we complexify this to show that women were a part of the system, fighting for and against it? How do we preserve this complexity in an elegant way?
Zsófia Lóránd
The story of women as perpetrators is a part of the story of women’s hidden voices in history. The way we are silent about them as invisible heroes, we are also silent about them as perpetrators, and we have to do research on both. Andrea Pető recently wrote a book about women in the Arrow Cross in Hungary, Invisible Perpetrators (Láthatatlan elkövetők). I am doing something like this with my research on the creation of early Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe because the women who came from the activist circles in the interwar period stayed in politics after the war and survived, became a part of the establishment, and therefore they were complicit to a lot of crimes that also happened in the creation of the early Soviet regimes and the Stalinist purges. We need to do this kind of research because it is important to dispel this myth, and it adds to women’s visibility, adds to their agency; it shows that womens acted in history in many ways. What we try to prove is not that women have always been wonderful in history, but that they were there.
Yevhen Yashchuk
And women were in dissent as well. During the lecture you delivered for the course History of Public Sphere at IUfU last Autumn, you mentioned that women were involved in dissident activities, and dissidents attempted to create an alternative public sphere in Socialist Hungary, for instance. However, the problem was that women were mostly present as participants, not as creators of those gatherings, so they were not very visible because of male dissidents who were in charge of the gatherings and talks. How do we deal with this history of dissident movements which is traditionally presented as a heroic story of creating alternative voices which challenged contemporary politics and brought new activities. How do we nuance this story while acknowledging that these people were questioning the oppressive structures of the socialist regimes?
Zsófia Lóránd
It is something we just have to do, but it is very difficult because we go against the myth that men and women were fighting together against ‘totalitarianism’. It wasn’t totalitarianism in 1989, and they were not equal in the fight. Research is also difficult because there are very few sources. So what we expect is that the people who were there, who were present, who were part of it, and especially women, will tell us how they experienced it, critically. And over time this is going to be even more difficult, not only because we will lose the people we can talk to, but it is going to be increasingly difficult to do these kinds of very intrusive interviews with elderly people. To be clear: we need women to tell us how the men, these former heroes of 1989, thrived on their patriarchal privileges.
Politically, it is also difficult, especially because the liberal dissidents are those who lost the transition between their time and ours, with how we arrived at the current, political moment. How do we strategically do this research from a political perspective without giving more ammunition to politicians such as Orbán against liberals, human rights activists, and leftist intellectuals? That is why this type of research is not booming and blooming.
Yevhen Yashchuk
From the perspective of gender, I have a question about the positionality and agency of the researcher. We had a discussion with István Sánta, and he mentioned that, as an anthropologist, he is trying to interview people who are living in the area in Hungary where he is currently residing. Those people are mostly women, and he would like to talk with them about the stories of the Second World War or the postwar period. He acknowledges the problems that his positionality as a male scholar is kind of interrupting into this sphere of women studies, and he acknowledges the challenges he is facing because of his gender but still cannot overcome these problems completely. When a male researcher enters this field, how do we work with the positionality of his gendered background?
Zsófia Lóránd
I think that men need to enter this field with a lot of humility. The first thing they have to do is to acknowledge all of the other women who have worked in the field before them. Unfortunately, it happens that men pretend that they just came up with the best idea ever about women’s history. Usually these people who come from a higher academic position, and because they are men, their opinion gets much more attention than women’s. At the same time, your gender is both a limit and an opportunity when it comes to anthropology or oral history because your position will influence what information you get and what information you don’t. To stay with my own experience, what is often a problem for me, even with the research on Eastern Europe, is that although I am Eastern European, I come from a Western institution with Western funding, which already creates a problematic hierarchy. I am also educated, and I am white. What was helpful for me is that I had many years of grassroots activism behind me, and that created a common platform with the women I was talking to. We had similar experiences as activists and that created trust.
I think it is also important that if you share some of your personal stories and you are willing to reveal things, it also helps with getting trust. This also means that, as a scholar, you put some of your own personal experiences into the game, you put them at stake, you show vulnerability, but you do it in a fair way.
Kateryna Lysenko
I understand Professor Sánta who says that it is a sensitive topic. He was a male and did not know whether he had the right to do his research. At the same time, I think to some extent there is a fear of aggressive language. As a male, you have a certain prejudice, something like this. It sounded like he was scared by angry women who said “Don’t do this.”
Zsófia Lóránd
Men should be, if not scared, self-conscious and self-reflexive. Not because women are aggressive, but because (white) male scholars have monopolized so much of women’s past, as well as the past of minorities. It is a huge topic at the moment with Romani history, who can do this and how do we do this? I want to do something, but how should I do this ethically? Everything you say is always filtered through your position, and then if you have more power, you have a higher position, other people will listen to you, and then you again will silence the voices of those who are marginalized. I think that the only ethical way to do this is with a lot of doubt and a lot of humility, and it is okay to be afraid, not of the angry women but of not doing a good enough job, of silencing those who don’t have access to the resources you do.
Kateryna Lysenko
Should women also be afraid of the things they are dealing with, or is it still kind of different for men and women right now?
Zsófia Lóránd
I think it is not only a gender issue, it is also a class issue and a geographical question. My colleagues in Hungary can lose their jobs for doing certain research, the kind of research I can do in Cambridge or Vienna. There is this kind of privilege that you have to be aware of. When you do the research, and you set the agenda, that is a huge responsibility. For example, the war rapes: I was doing a bit of research about how it was thematized and explained, and there were a lot of efforts, especially during the socialist period, to minimize this and silence it. So how you do this research is super sensitive.
Kateryna Lysenko
What, then, is feminism? Right now this question is tricky because ‘-isms’ are quite clearly dying, but the idea behind feminism is great. Right now, what is it for you, and what are its possible forms after this ‘-isms’ phase of feminism?
Zsófia Lóránd
I think that feminism is about the idea that women are people and humans, and should be treated as such. Of course, this is a very complex statement because how are they equal and how should they be equal? How do we achieve that? What we identify as the roots of their oppression is critical because that is how we tackle the problem. From the perspective of political thought, I think it is crucial that feminism locates the main source of oppression in patriarchy and is openly addressing patriarchy and the problem of gender-based oppression. To me personally, feminism includes oppression from the roots, from the basics, from the moment we are conceived and how expectations are immediately attached to the existence as men and women. This is not something we can fully overcome in the future, but the goal is to change the ways we have different access to resources, to knowledge, to respect, to safety, to free time, to everything based on our gender, and this is something that we need to find. I don’t know what the future of feminism is, but it should be something along these lines.