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440 Karla Huebner Otherness in First Republic Czechoslovak Representations of Women With the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918, women throughout this "multinational nation-state" (Huebner 1993) achieved the vote and constitutional promises of legal eguality. Widespread Czech acceptance of female higher education 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 imagery 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 images 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.
