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Journal of Women's History 15.2 (2003) 207-213



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Voices of the Other from the 'Other Europe':
Recovering East-Central European Women's Literary Heritage

Jelena Batinic


Celia Hawkesworth, ed. A History of Central European Women's Writing. Studies in Russia and East Europe. New York: Palgrave, 2001. xviii + 323 pp.; map. ISBN 0-333-77809-X (cl).
Ilona Lacková. A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia. Recorded, translated from Romani, and edited by Milena Hübschmannová. Translated from Czech by Cartleton Bulkin. Hatfield-Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000. vii + 224 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-902806-00-X (pb).

Women's historians and feminist literary critics have long labored to recover the histories of hitherto forgotten women and to rediscover their writings lost to or simply excluded from cultural and historical commentary as well as from the literary canon. In the past three decades, the scope of feminist criticism has expanded beyond restoring neglected women and their texts to literary history. Works that range from a concentration on women's subordination in and exclusion from literature and attempts to establish an alternative canon, over écriture feminine and gynocritics, to gender theory and studies that focus on gender constructions and representations in literary discourse in general have fundamentally changed both the fields of literary criticism and cultural history. 1 But as far as East-Central European history (and, more broadly, Eastern European history as a whole) is concerned, not even the first step of uncovering and reclaiming women's work has, until recently, been taken seriously. With some rare exceptions—the Polish poet and the Nobel Prize laureate Wyslawa Szymborska or the widely acclaimed Croatian feminist essayist and novelist Slavenka Drakulic´—East European women's literary contribution is practically unknown to an English-speaking audience. Women writers, particularly those of pre-modern times, are rarely recognized even in their respective cultures. This can be explained in part by the fact that local scholarship has proved largely resistant to feminist approaches and methods of women's history. Moreover, among Anglo-American women's historians and literary critics, this region and its cultures have long been terra incognita.

This state of affairs is fortunately beginning to change due to several recent developments. First, local women's groups emerged, initially in [End Page 207] the former Yugoslavia in the late 1970s, and then, with the collapse of communism, throughout Eastern Europe. Gaining momentum in the region, feminist scholarship is extending to include literature and the arts alongside its principal focus on questions of women's rights and social status. Second, Anglo-American scholars have slowly but increasingly begun to take interest in East-Central European women and their histories. There is, finally, another, particularly encouraging development. It lies in the fact that not only Western and local feminists but also local scholars in general—and, among them, those not necessarily associated with feminism—have started concentrating on women's cultural heritage. The results of these changes are represented in part by the two books reviewed here. Although they stand as two different projects—one is an anthology of scholarly essays that offer essential information on an impressive number of women writers, while the other is a transcribed oral life story of a remarkable Roma playwright from Slovakia—both provide valuable contributions to the establishment of a much-needed English-language source base on East-Central European women.

Celia Hawkesworth's edited volume, A History of Central European Women's Writing, aims to provide a broad picture of women's literary activity in Central Europe from medieval times to the mid-1900s. The phrase "Central Europe" has been the subject of much controversy. In the communist era, the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian dissidents used it in revolt against both the Soviet encroachment and the continued practice in the West of indistinctly lumping together all cultures of the "other Europe." It referred to their countries, which lay but in their view did not belong, culturally or otherwise, to the East of...

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