Suchergebnisse

The Cold War era has generally been represented as a moment of conservatism when it comes to women's activism. While women's political participation in the Second World War had been studied in detail, women's political and social activism in Cold War Europe has remained under-researched. In my dissertation, I show the liveliness of women's political and social activism in Italy and Yugoslavia in the early Cold War period (1945-1957), demonstrating that women's antifascist organizations played an important role in everyday Cold War politics, at the local and at the international level. The thesis studies in particular the local and international activities of the Union of Italian Women (UDI) and of the Antifascist Women's Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ), two women's organizations founded during the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, which continued to play an active political role after 1945. It also takes into account the activities of the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (UDAIS) in the contested border city of Trieste. The dissertation is based on extensive fieldwork research in Italian and former Yugoslav archives. Oral history interviews and autobiographies represent a crucial complement to the archival research. Archival documents, and excerpts from oral history interviews and autobiographies in Italian, Serbo-Croatian and French are translated and organized into a single historical narrative, which demonstrates the entangled history of women's antifascist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia after 1945. By writing this entangled history, I show that transnational connections were established by women across the Italo-Yugoslav border, and across Cold War borders. I explore the bilateral and multilateral relations of the UDI, AFŽ and UDAIS, and their shifting position towards the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). This dissertation is founded upon three main theses. The first thesis is that antifascist women's organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics ...