Transnational Feminist Scholarship? Viola Klein, Magdalena Sokołowska and the Sociology of Women's Work (1950s-1960s)

• In Event: Women Experts and Feminist Knowledge Production in East Central Europe, 1945-1989

Abstract

The paper addresses the construction of feminist sociological knowledge in 1950s-1960s Poland, focusing on transnational circulation of expertise. It explores the expertise and academic trajectories of two women sociologists: Viola Klein who emigrated from interwar Czechoslovakia and developed her career in the West, being one of the first scholars who argued that women's roles are socially constructed, and Magdalena Sokołowska, Polish sociologists and medical doctor, whose analysis and conceptualization of women's work in the 1960s also challenged gender stereotypes, drawing on research developed in the Polish context as well as inspirations from Klein's work.

Author

• Natalia Jarska, Inst of History PAS (Poland)