Women all over Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe have been contemplating, discussing, and fighting for their rights across a broad range of political streams. Feminist and socialist women often engaged in highly adversarial yet mutually transformative exchanges about how women's place in life, politics, and society should change. These debates were heavily framed by the context of state socialist women's emancipation across the region between 1917 and 1989. Arguments between feminism and socialism over the place of class and gender in progressive politics were reinvigorated in unexpected ways by the Marxist renaissance and second-wave feminism across East Central Europe.

Women in Yugoslavia developed a feminist critique of the persistence of socialist patriarchy as early as the mid-1970s, and many of the new feminist thinkers were inspired by Marxist revisionism, including the Lukacs School. The philosopher Agnes Heller's work from the early 1970s was one of their main inspirations. This lecture draws on the Yugoslav feminist interpretations of Heller's work and the broader potential of Marxist feminism in the writing of Nada Ler Sofronic, Blazenka Despot, and Nadezda Cacinovic to map the relevance of Marxist revisionism for these authors, and as a path to reinterpreting Heller's early work on women, the family, and feminism.

Zsófia Lóránd is an Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and is affiliated with the Research Center for the History of Political Transformations (RECET). Her monograph, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia, explores the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s and was published in English in 2018 and in Croatian in 2020. She co-edited Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women's Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the 20th Century (2024). She is currently Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project HERESSEE: The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women's Rights Discourses in East Central Europe, 1929 to 2001.

Der Vortrag ist Teil der Vortragsreihe Prague Histories Forum, die gemeinsam von den Prager Außernstellen des DHI Warschau, des Collegium Carolinum und des GWZO Leipzig organisiert wird. In diesem Wintersemester 2026/27 widmen wir uns dem Thema „Gender & Queer in East Central Europe".

Alle Vorträge der Reihe finden Dienstags von 15:50–17:20 Uhr in der Kunstfakultät der Prager Karlsuniversität statt.

Venue: Špork Palace, Hybernská 3, Prague 1 | Room 303, attic floor

All of the “Prague Histories Forum” lectures will be accessible online via Zoom. Please register here:
https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/yq0DKEQFRjS4TW3N2dNDeA

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