Celebrate Women's History Month

Rural women have not had a formative role in the public histories of Central Eastern Europe. Izabella Agárdi aims to correct that by concentrating on their life stories and their connections to general histories. She investigates how Hungarian-speaking, ordinary women in rural contexts born in the 1920s and 1930s remember and talk about the twentieth century they have experienced, and how, through their stories, they articulate historical change and construct themselves as historical subjects.


In her analysis, Izabella Agárdi traces the interactions between micro- and macro- narratives as well as the specific tools women of this generation appropriate to talk about personal memories of their often traumatic past. From these stories, a particular mnemonic community emerges, one that speaks from a highly precarious position ‘on the verge of history’. It is up to future generations whether these women’s experiences will be remembered or forgotten.

In the early 2000s, Liberian women wearing wrap skirts and white T-shirts, shouting: 'We want peace, no more war', attracted international attention. After almost fifteen years of civil war, the enduring active, multifaceted, and non-violent campaigning for peace by women's organisations contributed to the end of the fighting and the signing of a peace agreement between the warring factions. Although it is widely assumed that women's inclusion in peace processes yields greater attention to women's issues and needs in the aftermath of a conflict, this is only partly the case in Liberia. Thus, this analysis looks beyond the extraordinary commitment by women in Liberia and deals with the questions to what extent their role in the peace process has contributed to gender-sensitive outcomes in post-conflict Liberian society and why greater gender sensitivity was not achieved.

By focusing on manifestations of patterns of masculinity in the public and private spheres, Anne Theobald identifies factors at different levels of analysis within different time frames that elucidate the unexpected outcome. Not only does this provide for a more encompassing understanding of dynamics of gender relations and context-specific variables impeding gender sensitivity in post-conflict settings, but it also helps to refine prevailing theoretical approaches on gender in peacemaking and peacebuilding and to develop more holistic, context-specific, and efficient policy approaches, which can effectively lead to gender-sensitive peace.

To the older generations in her native Slovakia, Hana Ponická is well-known for her successful children’s books and courageous fight against the communist regime. Her psychological ordeal began in February 1977 when the elderly lady refused to sign the so-called anticharta, a condemnation of the human rights group Charter 77, which had published its first manifesto in the West on 1 January 1977. All Slovak and Czech artists had to sign the anticharta; they were forced by the regime to condemn the dissidents, the most prominent among them being Václav Havel (1936–2011), who were standing up against the violation of basic human rights enshrined in the Czechoslovak constitution following the conclusion of the CSCE treaty of Helsinki. Ponická, like most of her fellow artists, had neither read the Charter 77 manifesto nor the text of the anticharta; she thus refused to sign. Her courage prompted the regime to terrorize her psychologically.


This political biography is the first ever written about Ponická, despite her being a household name in Slovakia. Josette Baer’s analysis is based on Ponická’s memoirs of that cruel year of 1977, newspaper articles she published prior to 1971, when the regime effectively banned any critical voice from publication, and newspaper articles she published after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 to promote the establishing of a rule-of-law state and democracy.


The documents of the StB, the Slovak and Czech Security Services, are analyzed for the first time; they are evidence of how the StB tried to pressure the resilient and disciplined grandmother of three into obedience.


Oral history interviews with Dirk Matthias Dalberg, Vlasta Jaksicsová, and Mary Šamal inform the reader about the situation of the Slovak dissidents of Charter 77, how normal citizens lived in the regime, and how the Czech and Slovak exile communities in the USA saw the dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia.

Memory Is Our Home is a powerful biographical memoir based on the diaries of Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc, who was born in Warsaw before the end of World War I, grew up during the interwar period and who, after escaping the atrocities of World War II, was able to survive in the vast territories of Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan.

Translated by her own daughter, interweaving her own recollections as her family made a new life in the shadows of the Holocaust in Communist Poland after the war and into the late 1960s, this book is a rich, living document, a riveting account of a vibrant young woman's courage and endurance.

A forty-year recollection of love and loss, of hopes and dreams for a better world, it provides richly-textured accounts of the physical and emotional lives of Jews in Warsaw and of survival during World War II throughout Russia. This book, narrated in a compelling, unique voice through two generations, is the proverbial candle needed to keep memory alive.

Memory Is Our Home is a powerful biographical memoir based on the diaries of Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc, who was born in Warsaw before the end of World War I, grew up during the interwar period and who, after escaping the atrocities of World War II, was able to survive in the vast territories of Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan.

Translated by her own daughter, interweaving her own recollections as her family made a new life in the shadows of the Holocaust in Communist Poland after the war and into the late 1960s, this book is a rich, living document, a riveting account of a vibrant young woman's courage and endurance.

A forty-year recollection of love and loss, of hopes and dreams for a better world, it provides richly-textured accounts of the physical and emotional lives of Jews in Warsaw and of survival during World War II throughout Russia. This book, narrated in a compelling, unique voice through two generations, is the proverbial candle needed to keep memory alive.