The journal „History of European Ideas“ (Web); Isidora Grubački (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana), Zsófia Lóránd (Univ. of Vienna), and Emily Steinhauer (independent scholar) (Web)

Proposals by: 17.04.2026

In Eastern Europe, the long twentieth century—the period roughly between the 1890s and the 2000s—was marked by struggles for women’s rights, abruptly changing gender regimes, and a maelstrom of diverse as well as often monolithically dominant -isms. In these various contexts, women intervened into various male-centered discourses from a women-centered position, while writing, thinking, and arguing about processes of emancipation, education, (forced) modernization, the break with the traditional rural community, and many other themes which speak not only toward European but global processes too. As a recent collection of texts and contexts from the history of feminism and women’s rights in East Central Europe has shown, women’s interventions in the public sphere encompassed topics including war, sexuality, and the politicization of motherhood, to name only three. Yet, women from Central and Eastern Europe still remain marginal in the fields of European and global intellectual history, falling between the cracks of studies on the Western part of the Northern hemisphere, but also those, still largely male-dominated, of Central and Eastern Europe and even of the Global South. This omission means that the contributions of women from Eastern and Central Europe remain largely absent—not only in relation to the experience of the decades-long emancipation project of real existing socialism, but also in terms of longer-term negotiations with other ideologies such as agrarianism, nationalism, and anarchism, as well as the ways in which identity and belonging have been shaped by migration and shifting borders in this post-imperial space. These dynamics make the region specific and relevant as a region on a global scale.
This special journal issue examines women’s intellectual history in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the long twentieth century. However, rather than merely addressing an existing gap, it seeks to challenge and redefine the field as such by engaging with carefully selected case studies of women’s political thought in the region. The inclusion of women from Central and Eastern Europe into intellectual historical investigations means revisiting the gender of who produces intellectual discourses worthy of attention, from where they Continue reading →