New date and time: Tuesday 13 February at 12 noon
An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Libora Oates-Indruchová (Visiting Research Fellow, 2024)
Reception of the Greenham Common protests in the Czech press.
The amount of research on the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp since it was first set up in 1981 positions this activist mobilization as a defining phenomenon of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. In the scholarship on East Central Europe there has been growing interest in the global involvement of the Eastern Bloc countries in women’s activism, but a link to the Greenham Common protests has been only little explored, although the newspapers of the time did report on it. My research project at IASH aims at a comparative perspective on the media reception of women’s peace activism East and West within the tenets of Cold War politics. With what agenda did the communist media report on women’s peace activism? How did the representation in the communist press differ from the presentation in the British press in that respect? What does it all amount to in terms of addressing gender and women’s issues in Communist Czechoslovakia —and also post-1989? I take the Czech press as an example and look at the coverage of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the main Czech dailies of the 1980s: the Rudé právo (the main daily of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) and the Mladá fronta (the daily of the Union of Socialist Youth). Complementary to this is the coverage in Women of the Whole World, a magazine of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. From the British press, I draw on the coverage in the Morning Star and The Guardian. For context, I draw on existing research on the media reporting on the Camp in the British press and on the global involvements of Communist women’s organizations in the peace movement.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
Passcode: 6aSe7GF7