Contenu du sommaire : Le genre de la guerre froide

Transnational history of the Cold War (1947-1963) tends to concentrate on protagonists from the Eastern and Western blocs. This article analyzes African women activists' links to three key international women's organizations during the Cold War: the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), the International Council of Women (ICW) and the International Alliance of Women (IAW). By focusing on the years prior to the UN Women's Conferences (1975-1995), the article proposes a new chronology for the history of women's international activism since the Second World War. It also argues that African women activists were full participants in Cold War history, subject to political and gender constraints certainly, but determined to make their struggles known across national borders. By so doing, it seeks to contribute both to a transnational history of African women and to rethinking the histories of decolonization usually written in terms of male actors. The key issue is that by making connections with international women's organizations, African women were challenging the “logic of blocs” and their respective “spheres of influence” during the Cold War. Firstly, African women activists did not always follow the diplomatic choices of their own countries, whether those were close to the West, the East, or non-aligned. Secondly, they often contacted several different international organizations, in order to identify the interlocutors most likely to support their causes. By making these choices, we argue that they were exercising what we have called “strategic pragmatism”.

This article addresses the WIDF's programs with non-European women in the so-called “developing countries.” The WIDF, created in Paris in 1945, defended anti-colonialism and anti-racism, and campaigned for equality between men and women “throughout the whole world”. The article explores connections between WIDF's campaigns for changing the status of women and economic development in the context of cultural competition during the Cold War. The documents analyzed here show that its programs in support of women in developing countries laid importance on solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle and on state support for motherhood and children. WIDF's presentation of its work for women from “developing countries” stressed its difference from the kind of work carried out by its Cold War adversaries. However, like Western development programs, most of those encouraged by the WIDF were influenced by the ideology of modernity and had little regard for pre-colonial or other specific forms of women's power and solidarity. Furthermore, women working for the WIDF often expressed their lack of confidence in women from the “developing countries”, and indeed sometimes had racist attitudes towards non-European women.

Even before the launch of the Sputnik space satellite in 1957, United States government personnel were concerned about impending shortages of manpower, particularly among scientists and engineers, and anxious that the Soviet mobilization of women into the labor force gave the communists a considerable advantage. Popular derision of the “unfeminine” qualities of Russian women clashed with the needs of the American economy, and ultimately the US government began to implement policies that would prepare the ground for the subsequent American feminist movement. This article analyzes the conflicting discourses of two primary sources from the late 1950s. Eastern Bloc commitment to women's education, training, and full employment forced the United States to reassess its position on the traditional family. Fear of Soviet technical superiority was, therefore, an important and generally overlooked factor driving the expansion of women's rights in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

Did the transformations experienced by socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 have no impact on masculinities? This article aims to challenge this widespread assumption by analyzing the debates on fatherhood in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Immediately after the war, new images of “socialist” caring fathers appeared in the GDR media. Debates focusing on a new conception of socialist and egalitarian fatherhood gained prominence especially from the 1960s on. They were initially marked by criticism of East German society and the regime for neglecting to pay attention to men's social role during the first two decades of socialist rule, and thus having had little influence on masculinities. These debates led in the 1970s and 1980s to an increase in concrete proposals on how to transform fatherhood, providing a new conception of what it meant to be a father in a socialist society. Although most of these proposals came to nothing, they testify to a desire to modify the gender relations of a society in the making, and in opposition to the West.

In the late 1940s, Soviet sports organizations and the Soviet National Olympic Committee joined the international sports federations and the International Olympic Committee. This allowed Soviet athletes to participate in competitions and to be included in the world sporting community. Soviet women athletes very quickly became prominent, winning many contests. Soviet participation in the Olympics had a double function with regard to its “image-abroad policy” (R. Frank). It was both demonstrating its achievements in terms of gender equality and enabling USSR delegations to win medals that were essential to prove Soviet supremacy in sport. This article aims to understand how the USSR administration and media constructed – both in practice and in representation – the superiority of Soviet sportswomen compared to other nations. Far from being isolated, members of the Soviet sports establishment adapted to international regulations, to the reactions provoked by the performances of USSR athletes, and to the controversies publicized in the media of their international opponents.

As soon as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was published in France in 1949, it was caught up in the intellectual divisions of the Cold War. But was this the case in the rest of Europe, as translations of the book appeared? Until now, comparisons of the book's reception and translations in different countries during the Cold War have not been attempted. Three recent historiographical turns have made it possible to approach this subject: the Cold War seen through the prism of gender, the study of the transnational circulation of The Second Sex, and feminist translation studies.

This article considers the rituals and ceremonies celebrating the French pro-communist activist, Eugénie Cotton, president of the Union of French Women (UFW) and of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), and the way Cotton was elevated to the rank of universal authority, exemplifying virtues not unrelated to the model of the Virgin Mary. This exploration of the enactment of the female version of the cult of the leader in the communist world during the Cold War contrasts with the masculine focus of the substantial historiographical production of the last twenty years on this topic. The paper examines the circumstances that gave birth to the “Cotton cult”, the key moments in its evolution, the mechanisms of its diffusion and the gender shifts in the process of its invention.

This article examines those editions of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (NIL), the cinematic newsreels of the Cuban Revolution, that reflected women's participation in Cuban foreign affairs during the Cold War. One institutional actor in particular stands out: the Federation of Cuban Women, whose leaders' travels in Eastern bloc countries were monitored. This rapprochement with the “socialist camp” is also noticeable in editions of the newsreel dealing with Soviet fashion or women's sport, which were presented as models to follow. Women were also encouraged to defend the Cuban Revolution against the threat posed by the United States, by joining female militias, following the example of Vietnamese women combatants or the East German agent Tamara Bunke, aka “Tania”, which the NIL praises.

This article examines how Cold War ideologies contributed to the construction of public discourse on the social position of women in newly-independent, self-identified socialist and non-aligned Tanzania. To do so, it traces the explicit and implicit references to capitalism, socialism, and Marxism in the discourses on women published in the national Swahili-language press. Its journalists mobilized a set of images primarily in order to construct female models and counter-models, notably those of the hardworking peasant woman and the urban seductress. However, as the United Nations Women's Year (1975) encouraged the Tanzanian government to clarify its policies for women's emancipation, some articles began to re-evaluate the links between this ambition and both global and Tanzanian socialism.

The United Nations Decade for Women (1975-85) overlapped with a brief window during the Cold War, when newly decolonized nations seemed in the ascendant, having gained control of the UN General Assembly and several UN agencies, and ushered in UN endorsement of the New International Economic Order. This article briefly considers two networks launched by campaigning women intellectuals based in the Global South, which emerged at either end of the UN Decade. The Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), established in 1977, demonstrated that it was possible to radically reorient development schemes towards wellbeing and sustainability, rather than productivity and growth. The association Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), founded in 1984, included many of the same objectives, and even some of the same members as AAWORD, but it reflected the altered Cold War context which redirected development towards neoliberal solutions.

This article revisits the consecration and universalization of women's rights accompanying the four world conferences on women organized by the United Nations between 1975 and 1995. It questions the linear narrative of a “global feminism” that failed to take account of the tensions developed during the Cold War over divergent political interpretations of women's rights in the opposing, capitalist and socialist camps. After a brief overview of research findings focused on activist campaigning within the UN framework after 1975, the article considers the contexts in which the concept of “global feminism” was developed. It traces the social trajectory of one of its principal theorists, in order to clarify the social mechanisms that led in the early 1990s to the emergence of “global” ideological references, such as “women's human rights” and gender mainstreaming.

Based on a contemporary document, this article outlines the history of a little-known and short-lived organization: “the Liaison Bureau created at the international assembly of women 1960”, a meeting initiated by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). It also explains the role played there by the French activist, Marguerite Thibert, who was motivated by the hope of moving beyond the Cold War. But the political neutrality and balance necessary for speaking on behalf of all women came up against international tensions, which fueled anti-communism on one hand, and strategies for instrumentalizing solidarity on the other.

During the Cold War, international organizations, especially those associated with the United Nations, were used by the two superpowers to promote their own interests. UNESCO was one such platform. The Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first Soviet woman to address this forum in 1966. Tereshkova, who had in 1963 been the first woman in the world to make a space flight, used her UNESCO platform to introduce gender issues in the context of Cold War international relations. Beyond the power play between the states locked into the East-West confrontation, she attempted to voice universalist arguments for women's rights and development, in a speech marked at the same time by typical Soviet rhetoric.

During the India-Pakistan War, the United States linked the fate of its ally in that war to the credibility of US power. Gender provided the language in which President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger conceived of US credibility, a credibility constructed by and through clearly gendered language. Employing a gender-sensitive lens drawing on post-structural feminist analysis, this article analyzes recorded conversations in which Nixon and Kissinger allowed risk-intensive policy measures to harden into serious policy options, in order to appear “tough” and as if they were “coming off like men” [sic], at the height of the 1971 conflict. Nixon and Kissinger's conception of US credibility produced a highly unstable, dangerous basis for conducting a foreign policy that aspired to maintain the balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union.

During the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE), some women were subject to taxes, as can be ascertained from the fiscal parchment Mur 10, found in the caves of the wadi Murabba‘ât. This is not insignificant, since the relation between women and taxation was complex in Roman Judaea (6-135 CE). While women were taxpayers earlier than men in provincial taxation, they were on the contrary exempt from the payment of the temple taxes, which were considered as elements of identity for the Jewish people. The decision by the rebel leader to compel women to pay taxes was therefore all the more paradoxical, since by situating them as subjects (which was the meaning implied by taxation), Bar Kokhba was reducing structural inequality between men and women in an administrative context.

The textile activities associated with Penelope in the Odyssey appear to be relatively little represented on vases earlier than the Archaic and Classical eras. Yet both textual sources and archaeological data show that these activities were essential in ancient societies. This article re-examines certain scenes depicting the so-called “rattles”, which appear on a series of pitchers dating back to the Geometric period. Traditionally, these scenes have been interpreted in various ways: a sacred ceremony, banquet scene, musical performance or even board games. The aim here is to reassess these interpretations and to offer a different reading.