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Karla Huebner
Otherness in First Republic Czechoslovak
Representations of Women
With the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918, women throughout this "mul¬
tinational nation-state" (Huebner 1993) achieved the vote and constitutional
promises of legal eguality. Widespread Czech acceptance of female higher ed¬
ucation and political eguality suggests that the Czech New Woman did not
provoke the same degree of anxiety in her compatriots as did New Women in
France and Germany.' In fact, popular visual imagery of Czech women often
made them a symbol of modernity (Huebner 2011). Yet Czechs were only one
ethnic group—though as it turned out, the dominant one—in a country that
was also home to many Slovaks, Germans, Ruthenians (Rusyns), and members
of other ethnicities. The urban Czech ideal of a fashionable, active, efficient
young woman was not necessarily meaningful to or valued by members of all
ethnicities within Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, by the late 1920s, Czech im¬
agery of young Czech women as a sign of modernity often contrasted with the
use of older or Slovak women as a visual symbol of backwardness. This paper
examines how Czech and Slovak women, both constituents of the newly founded
Czechoslovakia, were constructed in Czech and Slovak visual imagery during
the 1920s. To what extent were there commonalities or contrasts between im¬
ages of older and younger women or Czech and Slovak women, and between
leftist and traditional or advertising and fine-art depictions? To what extent did
Czech and Slovak periodicals picture women of the “other” ethnicity, and for
that matter how often did they show women from other ethnic groups within
Czechoslovakia? By analyzing a sampling of representations from First Republic
Czech and Slovak periodicals, this paper sheds light on some of the ways Czech
and Slovak women were imagined, pictured, and ultimately expected to perform
separate versions of modernity and nationality that offered different benefits to
Czech and Slovak viewers.
While periodicals published in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s and early
1930s used many photos of modern women, in fact, many of these photos were of
foreign origin and Czech and Slovak periodicals depicted their own New Women
more often via drawings and sketches than via photography. Numerous sketches,
! The term New Woman has meant somewhat different things depending on location and decade,
but most frequently (between about 1890 and 1940) New Woman refers to a nontraditional woman,
often but not always feminist. The New Woman as an international phenomenon is explored in Otto
and Rocco 2011.