Toward an Integrative Approach to Women’s Political Thought in East Central Europe: Cases from Slovenia and Beyond in the Long Twentieth Century

Project code: J6-70219 

While scholars have argued for decades that histories of political thought have largely ignored women’s contributions and lacked a gendered perspective, the study of women’s intellectual history and political thought has finally gained momentum in recent years.  Yet in Slovenia and East Central Europe more broadly, the canon of the history of political thought has remained almost entirely male-centered, whereas historians of women’s history have only recently began to approach women’s history through the lens of intellectual history. Entering this rapidly growing research field, the present project uncovers, explores, and contextualizes a full spectrum of women’s political thought in twentieth-century East Central Europe (ECE).

The project’s main aim is to establish and advance an integrative approach to the history of women’s political thought. In this, we are inspired by the recent shift in feminist labor history, calling for “a long-term, transregional, integrative, and critical approach” to women’s labor studies (Çağatay et al., 2024). In the context of this project, an integrative approach encompasses: integrating women’s political thought into the existing histories of political thought, while simultaneously changing them; exploring feminist and non-feminist aspects of women’s political thought; considering the dynamic between the personal and political; and focusing on a new set of topics and concepts of political thought.

The project asks: How and what did women think politically in twentieth-century Slovenia and ECE? How can a focus on women’s intellectual biographies help us reconsider both women’s and gender history and the history of political thought in the region? How can the study of women’s political thought reconfigure the way we write the histories of Slovenian and East Central European political thought? More specifically: how does the history of the uses and meanings of classical political concepts like power, legitimacy, justice, liberty, freedom, equality, and rights in the history of political thought change when historians focus on women’s contributions in this realm? How did different ideologies—mainly liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and nationalism—overlap in different cases of women’s political thought? Moreover, how did various streams of feminist political thought relate to women’s non-feminist political thought?

Through a variety of case studies, the project focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on cases from Slovenia and beyond, the latter carrying two distinct meanings: (1) the Habsburg/post-Habsburg and Yugoslav space (mainly Belgrade, Zagreb, and Prague); and (2) the transnational dimension, relevant for analyzing specific cases.

Besides the INZ team (see below), the project has several external project members and affiliates:

• Dr. Kristina Andělova, Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences
• Dr. Manca G. Renko, Marie-Curie fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte at the University of Vienna and Research Assistant at the Institute of Contemporary History Slovenia
• Prof. Ana Kolarić, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade
• Veljko Stanić, PhD candidate at Sorbonne Université

OBJECTIVES:

While the aim of this project is to establish an integrative history of women’s political thought, the project has four more specific research and capacity building objectives.

• O1: Redefining Women’s Biographies in Slovenia and East Central Europe
  This objective seeks to transform how women’s biographies are conceptualized in Slovenia and the broader East Central European region. By producing and publishing new intellectual biographies of key female political thinkers in Slovenia and beyond in an online database, the project will highlight their political thought.
• O2: Expanding the Canon of Slovenian and Regional Political Thought
  The project aims to critically challenge and broaden the established canon of Slovenian political thought, which often revolves around the simplified narrative of the “three camps” (liberal, socialist, and Catholic) in the interwar period and the focus on socialist political thought during the state-socialist period. Through a series of articles, several workshops, and two special journal issues, the project will illuminate the diversity and complexity of these contributions, offering a more comprehensive perspective.
• O3: Exploring the Full Spectrum of Women’s Political Thought
  This objective focuses on creating a more inclusive framework for analyzing women’s political thought, one that considers not only feminist, but also non-feminist dimensions of their contributions to the public sphere. By providing a nuanced understanding of these ideas and the contexts in which women operated, the project additionally deepens our understanding of feminisms and of the socio-political environments that shaped them.
• O4: Capacity Building and Scholarly Collaboration
  The project also prioritizes capacity-building. It does so by fostering collaboration with international scholars in the field of women’s intellectual history, and by bringing together senior, mid-career, and early-career researchers, as well as PhD students, to create a vibrant research network. This collaborative framework aims to cultivate new knowledge, mentorship opportunities, and sustained academic engagement across generations of scholars.