Writing Women's History in Eastern Europe: Toward a "Terra Cognita"?

In a summarizing "state-of-the-art" volume on writing women's history published in 1991, East European women's history was presented as a big promise for the future.¹ This euphoric expectation was born after the collapse of communism and it expected theoretical and thematical innovation from the "East" presented as "terra incognita." In this context, Eastern Europe refers to the former Soviet Bloc. Nearly ten years after a conference about writing women's history, very few illusions remain about "terra incognita" and about the ways how to make it "terra cognita." During the first women's history conference organized on Eastern Europe, in Minsk, Belarus, Karen Offen in her plenary speech summarized developments in women's history since 1991 and the steps to be taken in Eastern Europe.² In her talk (and later in her published paper), Offen highlighted present theoretical debates in writing women's history and outlined the tasks for the nearly sixty women's historians from twenty-four Eastern European countries: "Both excavation and recuperation are required, and of course, theorizing as well, but theorizing on solid evidence. As in an archaeological dig, evidence must be located, excavated, sifted, and evaluated."³ The results of the conference very much proved that recovering women's past—the archaeological work—is still in the early phases after ten years of democracy in Eastern Europe. But one question remains: should women's historians become archaeologists and go back in time to identify themes and issues in their own historiography?

Women's and gender historians are imprisoned by their institutional framework. They are required to organize conferences with an interdisciplinary character, inviting contributions from such different disciplines as literature, sociology, history, and political science in different parts of Europe because gender history is not recognized as an independent field of study. Although conferences are interdisciplinary, they still perpetuate the borders of various disciplines. As a result, women's history is developing mainly through conferences and subsequent published volumes.⁴ These volumes are contributing to the process of accumulating knowledge and making women visible. Nearly each East European country has produced a first collection of conference papers on their own "national" women's history. But very few of these papers had actually been developed later into monographs, and even fewer of them are used in the classroom. It may be that our expectations were too optimistic in the early 1990s: we expected a boom in women's history, in a field crippled not only by institutional and disciplinary boundaries but also by national hegemonies and overarching frameworks of history writing.

A historiographical overview of writing women's history and history of gender in Eastern Europe in the past twelve years needs to pursue three goals. First, it should give a general overview of feminist theory on women and history, defining history, as Pierre Nora does, as a place of remembrance, analyzing who shall remember and what shall be remembered, that is, who shall control the past and our memory about the past.⁵ Second, it should cover the development of the historiography focusing on women's roles in the past. Finally, it should analyze the thematic developments of the field. In this brief article, I address only the second topic, and in doing so, I would like to share my personal reflection as an "East European" historian and educator who witnessed the developments of the past ten years. I was fortunate to be a part of this shift, focusing on issues related to writing women's history in Eastern Europe: institution building, translations, and empowering educational experiments.

Institution Building

Writing history as a profession has preserved to this day the character of hierarchical craft workshops of the Middle Ages. Craft-man-ship(!) is taught at the university, through the rituals and steps of being accepted in the workshop. In my first postgraduate class on writing women's history in 1993 in Budapest, I had more male than female students. By the end of the 1990s, this trend reversed and I found myself in a position of teaching classes about gender history...