(Re)Gendering Science: Policies, Practices and Discourses in Socialist Contexts and Beyond

This special issue is based on two premises.

First, both socialism as an ideology and communist regimes encouraged women’s participation in science. To this day, countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia, and Latin America have a higher proportion of female scientists (around 40% or more) compared to regions like Western Europe and North America (just over 30%), East Asia (a little over 20%), or South and West Asia (under 20%). However, it is precisely these regions, with greater women’s participation in science, that are less represented in the history and historiography of science, and whose scientific contributions tend to be underrated or ignored altogether. Ironically, even in dictionaries and encyclopedias specifically dedicated to women in science, these regions are consistently underrepresented, with most entries coming from Western Europe and North America, a few from South and East Asia, and only a handful from Eastern Europe or the Global South. This special issue aims to shift the focus from “Western science” – too often equated with “real” or “modern” science – toward a more inclusive perspective, analyzing the politics, practices, and discourses of science and women’s involvement within it in state-socialist countries and, more broadly, in socialist environments.

Second, while communist regimes encouraged women’s involvement in science, they also produced specific forms of gender inequality. Although women gained increased opportunities for education and scientific careers, their roles remained largely peripheral within the scientific community. Men continued to occupy the most prominent and powerful positions, maintained visibility in the public communication of scientific developments, and often claimed credit for scientific achievements. The few exceptions to this trend often had political or propagandistic motivations aligned with the logic of the Cold War, and typically occurred in scientific fields considered “feminine”, such as child and elderly care. Additionally, women’s identities were downplayed by authoritarian regimes, subsumed under the broader, politically significant identity of “working people”. In this context, the special issue aims to gather both individual and collective case studies that recover the lost voices of women in science. It also seeks to examine the complex interplay of factors that either encouraged or hindered women’s access to scientific fields and how women negotiated their scientific status, developing strategies for professional achievement. We are also interested in how gender identities were constructed in socialist and state-socialist contexts, and how these identities influenced men and women’s interaction with and within science, as well as the processes of knowledge creation.

An important focus of our special issue is the academic mobility of women scientists and their scientific networking – both crucial strategies for navigating hostile scientific environments and creating professional opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible.

We use the term “science” to refer to STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) as well as the social sciences. We are interested in the making, education, institutionalization, and communication of science, as well as scientific perspectives related to production, but also to domestic life, and family care.

We welcome contributions from various fields of research, including history of socialism/communism, history of science, women’s history, Cold War studies, gender and feminist studies, or any other related areas of interest, approached from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Topics may address (but are not limited to) the following aspects:

- Policies that encouraged/excluded women from scientific endeavors
- Women and scientific practices in socialist contexts
- Sites of science (professional vs. amateur science; laboratory vs. home)
- Women international organizations and science
- Transnational/global networks of women’s scientific collaborations (professional associations, international conferences, mobility, field work, scientific friendships)
- Women’s recruitment and promotion in scientific fields
- Women and the public communication of science
- Representations of women and gender in science
- (In)visibility of women in science

Contributors are kindly asked to write abstracts in English that do not exceed 500 words.

Deadline: 2nd of December 2024.
You may submit your proposals at: hce-online@iiccmer.ro, irina.matei@fspub.unibuc.ro, mia.jinga@gmail.com.

Selected authors will be notified by the 15th of December 2024.
The deadline for the final draft of the paper is the 15th of May 2025.

The academic journal History of Communism in Europe is edited by The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, published by Zeta Books and indexed in EBSCO, CEEOL, PDC, Google Books. It is a journal open to all inquiries that have the objectivity, complexity and sophistication required by any research on the issue of communism, as well as on the different aspects of totalitarianisms of 20th Century Europe. These scholarly investigations must remain an interdisciplinary enterprise, in which raw data and refined concepts help us understand the subtle dynamics of any given phenomenon.