French Film in Britain: Sex, Art and Cinephilia

In the quarter century since the fall of communist governments across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE), scholars have used increased access to archival sources and the fresh perspective created by time to begin to re-evaluate the Cold War. Yet, much of this new research remains centered on traditional topics like decision making amongst political elites, diplomacy, and espionage. Scholars are only beginning to explore the various and complex ways in which gender played a role in the Cold War conflict, either in terms of representation and language or as a core field in which the two sides competed, each advocating its way of life, including its gender system, as superior and in women's real interest. The volume explores several threads of the discourse about gender and the Cold War in CESEE: women as anti-fascist activists in Yugoslavia, narratives about the private lives and material desires of women in early Cold War films, the presentation of masculinity in the personal narratives of Soviet nuclear physicists. This theme is rounded out by the presentation of a 1946 report made by Ana Pauker, the unofficial leader of the Communist Party in Romania, and a special Forum of gender historians responding to questions about gender and the Cold War in Poland, Yugoslavia/Croatia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. This volume also presents a discussion of women's engagement in charity, philanthropy, and social reform movements in Carniola between 1848 and 1914; an exploration of family violence in Soviet Russia; and an analysis of pre-1945 publications on women's and gender history written in Hungary under state socialism; as well as a review essay, eleven book reviews, and a conference report.