'Party Meetings Will No Longer Be Beer Idyll': Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Women Functionaries in Party Schools after 1945 and Their World of Thinking

• In Event: Women's Emancipation in Politics and State Socialism in Central and East Europe

Abstract

In this paper, I will focus on training women Communist Party of Czechoslovakia functionaries in the first years after the Second World War. I will first discuss the organizational network of political schools from party headquarters to districts and the representation of women in this robust system. In the central part of the article, I want to give voice to the women communist functionaries themselves. Using unexploited sources of personal origin so far, I will try to get a look into their minds. How did the weeks spent in the closed environment of the party courses transform their perception of Marxism-Leninism, the party, society, and themselves? What forms did the revolution take in their minds towards which the training was directed? I would like to contribute to the debate about the possibilities and limits of women's emancipation in Stalinism, specifically in its efficient and resilient Czechoslovak version.

Author

• Václav Kaška, Masaryk U (Czech Republic)