#Elena Lagadinova

[dipnotski]

Kristen R. Ghodsee – Kızıl Savaşçı Kadınlar (2023)

‘Kızıl Savaşçı Kadınlar’, sosyalist kadın hakları aktivizminin tarihini bu tarihin önde gelen beş figürü üzerinden anlatıyor: Sovyetler’in kadınlara yönelik politikalarına şekil veren teorisyen, siyasetçi ve diplomat Aleksandra Kollontay; kendini halk eğitimine adamış Nadejda Krupskaya; Komünist Parti Kadın Birimi Jenotdel’in kurucularından İnessa Armand; efsanevi keskin nişancı Lüdmila…

[queen-mabs-revenge]

just pre-ordered this hell yeah

[azspot]

In this new book, written by American academic Kristen R. Ghodsee, the author’s message is blunt. “Unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.” Kristen is living in Trumpland, but has worked and travelled across Europe and has studied the effects of the end of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the transition to capitalism.

Kristen blasts her way through the history of state socialism showing the influence of well-known (and less well known) communist women such as Alexandra Kollontai who pushed through policies that promoted equality for women in all aspects of life. She is not an apologist for the authoritarian regimes: she shows how State socialist regimes needed women to work but they were often carrying the double burden of work and childcare.

Her own research, including the interviews she recounts with women who grew up in the Soviet era, really bring the book alive for me. It is fascinating to read Kristen’s interview with octogenarian Elena Lagadinova, the president of Bulgaria’s national women’s organisation. Bulgaria and across the Soviet Union used quotas to get more women in parliament and they did have higher percentages of women in political office than most of the Western democracies during the Cold War. Elena believed it was a combination of a patriarchal culture, and an authoritarian state that discouraged women in pursuing high office.

[traceydyer]

(Download PDF/Epub) Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe - Kristen R. Ghodsee

Download Or Read PDF Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe - Kristen R. Ghodsee Free Full Pages Online With Audiobook.

  [*] Download PDF Here => Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe

[*] Read PDF Here => Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe

 The overlooked revolutionary women of Eastern Europe and their contribution to socialist feminist history, from the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism by examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the 19th and 20th centuries. ? Alexandra Kollontai, the aristocratic Bolshevik ? Nadezhda Krupskaya, the radical pedagogue ? Inessa Armand, the polyamorous firebrand ? Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadly sniper ? Elena Lagadinova, the partisan turned scientist turned global women?s activistNone of these women were ?perfect? leftists. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause.Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the

[michellealsopbook]

(PDF) Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe - Kristen R. Ghodsee

Download Or Read PDF Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe - Kristen R. Ghodsee Free Full Pages Online With Audiobook.

  [*] Download PDF Visit Here => https://forsharedpdf.site/59496145

[*] Read PDF Visit Here => https://forsharedpdf.site/59496145

The overlooked revolutionary women of Eastern Europe and their contribution to socialist feminist history, from the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism by examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the 19th and 20th centuries. ? Alexandra Kollontai, the aristocratic Bolshevik ? Nadezhda Krupskaya, the radical pedagogue ? Inessa Armand, the polyamorous firebrand ? Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadly sniper ? Elena Lagadinova, the partisan turned scientist turned global women?s activistNone of these women were ?perfect? leftists. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause.Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the

[newbooks-tulibrary]

The left side of history : World War II and the unfulfilled promise of communism in Eastern Europe

In The Left Side of History Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of partisans fighting behind the lines in Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II: British officer Frank Thompson, brother of the great historian E.P. Thompson, and fourteen-year-old Elena Lagadinova, the youngest female member of the armed anti-fascist resistance. But these people were not merely anti-fascist; they were pro-communist, idealists moved by their socialist principles to fight and sometimes die for a cause they believed to be right. Victory brought forty years of communist dictatorship followed by unbridled capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today in democratic Eastern Europe there is ever-increasing despair, disenchantment with the post-communist present, and growing nostalgia for the communist past. These phenomena are difficult to understand in the West, where “communism” is a dirty word that is quickly equated with Stalin and Soviet labor camps. By starting with the stories of people like Thompson and Lagadinova, Ghodsee provides a more nuanced understanding of how communist ideals could inspire ordinary people to make extraordinary sacrifices.

[midlifewonderer]

16. Elena Lagadinova (1930-2017)

Born in the mountain town of Razlog, Bulgaria, Elena Lagadinova came from a poor family.   Her mother died when she was four, and her father raised her and her two older brothers, the oldest eighteen years her senior.  She grew up surrounded by their talk of revolution and political commitment, since her father had been an early supporter of the Bulgarian Communist Party and her oldest brother had fled to the Soviet Union to work with the Communist International.  

As a girl, Lagadinova experienced World War II through the prism of her family, all of them partisans who were fighting a hopeless battle against the wartime fascist regime in the mountains surrounding her native Razlog.  Lagadinova herself helped in any way she could, first and foremost by covering up for missing brothers and her father, when he was gone, to protect the group they were part of.  She also occasionally joined them to help with supplies and other logistics.  At the age of fourteen she became a fully committed freedom fighter alongside her brothers and dad, one of the youngest partisans to fight actively in the mountains at that time.  

These were unproblematic choices for Elena, given her upbringing.  But they were truly extraordinary ones for a young woman in the place where she lived.  Women’s education and participation in public and especially political and military activities were far from the norm in Bulgaria at that time.  When the communists came to power, these activities in her youth provided a greater asset for her future path, but this was not what motivated Lagadinova.  She had grown up in utter poverty and with a solid education about the economic injustices of the system the communists were tearing down, so for her this was a matter of social justice and hope for a better life for everyone, not just her family.  

The new regime opened up other opportunities she eagerly sought.  She had worked hard to continue her studies during the war and afterwards she wanted to pursue higher education, something that most women, especially from a poor background, would not have been able to pursue before 1945.  Her academic talents proved as prodigious as her courage when fighting in the mountains, and she went on to complete a PhD in biology, with a focus on genetic research on a specific strand of wheat.  Her goal was to increase the productivity of that plant, and she was fully dedicated to this idea as a great tool for being able to produce more food for everyone.  She was thrilled at the idea that she could spend her life doing science research that would have immediate applications for the common good along the lines of her strong commitment to social justice.

However, Todor Zhivkov, the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, had other plans for Lagadinova.  In the 1960s, the communist regime was trying to reassess its policies towards women, because of the rapid decrease in birth rates.  The communists talked about gender equality as a basic tenet of their regime, but also wanted to mobilize a stable and growing labor force, the engine of economic growth in the universe of state-controlled economic planning.  Zhivkov asked Lagadinova, who was also a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party Central Committee, to undertake a comprehensive scientific study that would identify the problems connected with the decreasing birth rates and suggest solutions for redressing this issue.  

Lagadinova was not pleased to have to leave her research behind, but the questions she was being asked to address had enormous relevance for everyone and she understood this request as a move towards improving important components of the public policies of the communist regime, so she finally acquiesced.  The results of her study pointed towards issues that have become well known in the world today, but which were not being discussed in the communist bloc, much less fully addressed through major policy changes.  In neighboring Romania, the communist regime had ‘solved’ the problem of decreasing rate of births through a draconic anti-abortion law (1967).  Lagadinova provided a very different set of solutions.

Lagadinova’s recommendations were premised upon her understanding of women as equal partners to men in both public and private matters.  With the exception of the brief period of pregnancy and early childhood, women and men could and needed to work together as equal partners in managing their work/professional life and their familial needs and responsibilities.  To assist the goal of mobilizing both men and women towards greater participation in the paid workforce, she recommended: more generous parental leaves and greater guarantees regarding returning to the same work responsibilities; affordable and conveniently located childcare for all working parents; state investment in helping working families with various aspects of household chores, from cleaning services to affordable and nutritious eateries.  In addition, she wanted to see more pressure put on men via their party organizations to assume more familial and parental responsibilities.

With Lagadinova leading the way towards a comprehensive rethinking of how to alleviate women’s double burden as both paid workers and unpaid caretakers, Bulgaria soon became an important destination for reforming gender policies around the world.  During the  UN Decade of Women (1975—1985), she helped coordinate many international conferences for women from around the world, and hosted numerous international workshops aimed at training women to become better fund raisers, managers, and policy makers in matters of social welfare, education, and other gender-relevant issues.  

When the communist regime fell, Lagadinova was initially pushed aside like a dirty collaborator of an oppressive regime.  She had lived a modest life and garnered few personal benefits from the enormous efforts she made to improve all women’s lives.  Within the last decade, some people have come around to better appreciate her work, especially when the social benefits she had fought for started to be eliminated.  The recent book by Kristen Ghodsee, The Left Side of History.  World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe, offers an appreciative and beautifully written portrait of Lagadinova’s extraordinary life.

[womenwhokickass]

Elena Lagadinova: Why she kicks ass

She was the youngest female partisan fighting against the fascists in Bulgaria in WWII. Elena Lagadinova was only 14-years-old. 

The chain around her neck was connected to her pistol so she would not lose it. 

She joined her father and three brothers fighting against the German-allied Bulgarian government when she was 11, running messages to the partisans while also trying to finish school.

She was a Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, deputy to the National Assembly and President of the Committe of the Movement of Bulgarian Women.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

forgot i pre-ordered this - best suprise!