When the American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), one of the founders of the International Alliance for Women's Suffrage, came to Prague in 1908 to lecture before German-speaking groups of women in the city, a beautiful young teacher asked her to address Czech women as well. Catt readily obliged. She could not have known, then, that this determined Czech feminist and nationalist, Františka Plamínková (1875-1942) would become, in time, a familiar figure on the international circuit of women's organizations, known as “Madame Plam” and would be executed by the Nazis as a member of the Czech resistance.

For her fight against fascism and for the liberation of her nation Plamínková was awarded, posthumously in 1950, the Czechoslovak Order of the Gold Star by the Ministry of National Defense. But then her name disappeared, along with thousands of other names from the First Czechoslovak Republic, as Stalinist repression set in. A plaque affixed to the building once her residence on Staroměstské Square tells us little about this energetic, dedicated patriot and fighter for women's rights. In 1993, the Gender Institute in Prague opened its doors, and, today, as feminism begins to awaken in the Czech Republic, the work and accomplishments of Františka Plamínková should be instructive.

The association of nationalist consciousness and feminist ideology in Slovakia in the late nineteenth century was a protracted and uneven process. This conclusion rests upon the results of this study which examines the feminist and nationalist views of Slovak women intelligentsia who were at the forefront of Slovak nationalist efforts. It explores responses of leading Slovak women to the following issues of nationalist concern: traditional Slovak patriarchy, women's education, and Western feminism. It demonstrates that in Slovakia, gender was not the primary factor determining women's loyalties; there were other connecting allegiances and loyalties to the nation and the community. Slovak women developed their own unique concept of gender equality that aided Slovak nationalist efforts. In doing so they employed the language of motherhood, domestic duties, and religious commitment.

Around the turn of the century, a small group of Slovak women intelligentsia attempted to reconcile their own agenda with contemporary nationalist, social, and political currents. Spurred by nationalist efforts of the Slovak male intelligentsia, middle-class women tried to determine what type of new nationalist woman should replace the traditional woman. This question was answered by five women, in four very distinct ways: (1) Ľudmila Ríznerová-Podjavorinská portrayed the goals of Western feminism as a danger to Slovaks; (2) Elena Maróthy-Šolthésová and Terézia Medvecká Vansová encouraged the growth of Christian feminism; (3) Marína Ormisová-Maliaková favored the introduction of pragmatic feminism in Slovak nationalist efforts; and (4) Hana Lilge-Gregorová argued for the establishment of Western feminism as the basis of social and national development. Although the personal lives of these five women represent the social and national distress of the Slovak people, they also show women's fight for the acceptance of new ideas which would improve the fate of their sisters and their nation. Yet this small collection of feminist intellectuals could not and did not effect Slovak public opinion in any substantial way. Their influence, except perhaps that of Hana Lilge-Gregorová, did not stretch beyond the Slovak urban middle-class milieu.

In sweeping away the Tsarist political empire, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 also challenged a way of life. It provided opportunities for women in Siberia, the Sibiriachki, and in the rest of Russia, to change their lives. The revolution's democratic and Marxian socialist policies, carried to these women by the zhenotdel, determined officials in the women's department of the Communist Party, created wide possibilities for change. This essay examines Siberian women's responses—both negative and positive—to the revolution's teachings about women's rights and their equality with men. Women's cultural backgrounds—ethnic, educational, urban and rural—influenced their responses to the revolutionary call to claim their rights, their successes and failures in efforts to defend themselves from violence, their efforts to achieve health care and education, and their progress toward greater political and economic equality. This essay also explores conditions on the eve of the revolution, illustrating the variety of strata existing in Siberia's vast lands. It discusses the significant advances in women's self-awareness and their changing activities in the early and mid-1920s. The Party's political mobilization of women expanded into a critique of the social status quo. Subsequently, in the late 1920s and 1930s, the context for their activities was radically altered: political and social criticism were no longer acceptable. For women the gains of the revolution were corrupted and women lost more than they had previously gained. While one can see the throttling of the women's revolution as an indication of its fundamental weakness, one can also see it as the Party's response to a movement that was gaining strength and raising questions about the Party's primacy.

When Ita Myshkind learned that her husband had remarried before delivering the official get (bill of divorcement), she filed criminal charges against him in state court. “My husband,” she claimed, “Wishing to use my capital and valuable possessions, married me with the premeditated intention of divorcing me.” She complained that a few months after their marriage, he deserted her and married a certain Dveira Rafaelovich; and it was only after this blatant violation of the law that her husband hastily drew up the get without any rabbinic supervision. Efroim Myshkind, however, sharply contested his wife's account, asserting that he had sent a messenger to deliver the writ of divorce in the presence of two witnesses. “It is not at all difficult for a Jew to divorce his wife,” he wrote, “especially if she does not have a good reputation like Ita Kreines [here he used her maiden name], who spent an entire year abroad with different acquaintances.” But at the trial, the husband failed to prove that the get had satisfied all the requirements of Jewish law, much less that his wife had actually received the document. More important in the state's view, he had violated Russian civil law, which required a “spiritual authority” (in this case, a state rabbi) to supervise the divorce procedure. In October 1884, the Minsk court convicted the husband of bigamy and sentenced him to five months and ten days in prison.

Although Ita Myshkind did not achieve all her objectives (namely, forcing her husband to divorce his second wife), she did prevail on two important issues: securing material support and ensuring that her husband would not go unpunished for his crime. That a provincial Jewish woman could utilize the Russian legal system to obtain justice raises two important questions: first, when and why did some women begin to resort to the state; and second, how effective were their efforts and what was the impact on Jewish women and their society as a whole?

Once upon a time there lived a rich widow, with a beautiful face and vigorous body, not old and not young, by the name of Mother Russia. She had been married twice, the first time to the peasant-bogatyr Mikula Selianinovich, and the second to the no less renowned warrior-bogatyr Il'ia Muromets.

Her husbands had left her countless riches. And God had blessed both her marriages with many children. For the most part, her children were hard-working people and valiant warriors. They worked their father's land and protected it from hostile neighbors.

But, as always happens, the family was not without its black sheep. Mother Russia also had some children who were good-for-nothings, idlers, drunkards, and empty-headed chatterboxes. And it was not surprising that these good-for-nothings grabbed power over all the widow's other children.

As the loving mother began to grieve and take ill from their indecent debauchery, they assumed control over her and all her possessions. And they began to squander and drink up her wealth, and to send all sorts of healers to try and cure their sick mother.

During the conservative period in Hungary between the two world wars, three unusual young women, Erzsébet Árvay, Judit Kárász, and Viola Tomori, joined a vanguard of youth who claimed to lead a new generation of Hungarians. As members of the Szeged Youth, they took up the cause of the peasantry of the Great Hungarian Plain, an isolated and neglected population presumed to bear “original Hungarian characteristics.” Until recently, the relationship between gender and nationalism in studies on Eastern Europe has been neglected. Current developments in post-communist societies have sharpened our realization that historical periods are experienced differently and have different implications when seen from the vantage point of women rather than men. Intriguing questions are raised concerning these women's participation in the Szeged Youth Movement and their active role with the peasantry. In a society often characterized as restrictive and limiting, what was the experience of the young woman activist? Was she accepted by her peers as their intellectual equal? How did she feel about her final place in national affairs? These questions are elusive and complex, yet the example of the Szeged Youth Movement in the 1920s and 1930s provides a compelling study of the intersection of gender and national identity in the Hungarian context.

During the interwar period in Hungary, the question of the fate of the Hungarian “nation”—which included the Hungarian population in the territories lost after World War I—took precedence over all others. This was true in respect to women's issues as well. The peace settlement was viewed as a national tragedy, reviving fears that the Hungarians or magyarsag would disappear, swallowed up by the surrounding Germanic and Slavic peoples. Virtually the whole population believed that the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which had reduced the Hungarian state to two-thirds of its former size, leaving 33.5% of the ethnic Hungarian inhabitants outside the borders, had been unjust and should be revised. The government under Prime Minister István Bethlen struggled to restore economic stability and to regain acceptance by the Western powers, on whom revision of the treaty depended. Certain moderate reforms were introduced, including the extension of the franchise to women and the broadening of educational opportunities. Yet, social insurance reforms for the urban populations were not extended to the masses of peasantry and rural proletariat, which still constituted over half of the population. In fact, the need to maintain the support of the large landowners precluded any extensive land reform, and Hungary remained a country of large estates.

How do I define Azerbaijani women's identity? This is very complicated, because we have been influenced by Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus and Islam … Every day we have to wear different masks and juggle multiple identities. You cannot find a single or typical Azeri female identity. You cannot generalize any type to the whole population of Azeri women since we vary so much.

Recent scholarship has poignantly argued that the founding of modern “Western” nation-states is to a large degree a product of their drawn out colonial encounters with “the East.” It is convincingly argued that “the West” constructed its own self-assured, national and supra-national identities in the process of “discovering” and “inventing” the exotic yet inferior “East.” Furthermore, a diverse body of scholarship has delineated the central role of discourses on gender and sexuality in the development of Western societies and, in particular, nation-states. If the image of “pious mother” became key to Western national self-images, it was the counter-image of the women of the harem—veiled, oppressed, and mysterious—that typified representations of Eastern barbarism. Furthermore, Western economic and political penetration of its colonies was to a large degree justified by the “gendering” of the “irrational Orient” versus the “rational Occident.” The “liberation” of Islamic women from their “oppression” as typified by the veil became central to Western “civilizing” missions, which had far-reaching echoes on the frontiers of European society.