Women’s Rights in Central Europe: A Twentieth-Century History

Description: The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new era of women’s rights as human rights in a world of liberal democracy. Yet in recent years, women’s rights and “gender ideology” have been at the forefront of the culture wars raging around the world. Central Europe offers a particularly fertile example of these competing approaches, both of which assume that a Western vision of women’s rights has been imposed upon the post-communist East. By contrast, this lecture argues that contemporary struggles over women’s rights in Central Europe are a product of the region’s own history. Looking beyond the Cold War binaries that assumed women’s rights were defined in fundamentally different ways in East and West, this lecture argues that women’s rights in twentieth-century Central Europe - and beyond - were shaped by shared experiences of empire, nation-building and citizenship as much as the battle between communism and capitalism. 

About the speaker: Celia Donert is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on East Central Europe in the twentieth century, with particular interests in the history of gender, nation, citizenship and human rights. She is the author of The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge, 2017) and collected volumes on power and everyday life in socialist dictatorships, the legacies of the Romani Holocaust, and women’s rights as human rights.