OCR
Otherness in First Republic Czechoslovak Representations of Women During this period, Czech women not only became artists, writers, composers, and office workers but also pilots, motorcyclists, and race car drivers—a development that the mainstream women’s magazine Eva highlighted with one-page photo essays of women from around the world in unusual fields of endeavor and by providing a page on women and work in each issue. Meanwhile, new laws abolished the requirement that women employed in the civil service be unmarried and acknowledged their right to the same salaries as men. However, while interwar Czechs generally believed that women had a right to intellectual and political equality, in practice, women’s rights remained subsidiary to the rights of family and nation and did not take precedence over essentialized concepts of womanhood; a woman was female first, a citizen second. This became more noticeable once legal experts began the labor of revising inherited Austrian legal codes to align them with the egalitarian promises of the constitution and when the economic downturn of the 1930s prompted widespread opposition to double-income families.° Furthermore, throughout the interwar period, most Czech feminists continued to tie feminism to nationalism and to emphasize sexual purity—a stance that made explicit feminism unappealing to the younger generation.” This generational distinction would become very noticeable in mainstream Czechoslovak visual culture, where images of the older generation tended to show these women as dignified and respectable, very much comparable to their male counterparts, while younger women were represented in more diverse ways that included the suffering proletarian mother, the urban showgirl or gold-digger, and the nicely dressed members of the bourgeoisie. Czech Periodicals Looking first at Czech imagery from the 1920s and early 1930s, the magazine Moderni divka stressed fashion and preparing young women for love and marriage (ill. 201). During its brief existence, it showed no interest whatsoever in the Other beyond providing brief readings in foreign languages such as French. Its imagery centered on young, cautiously modern women and its readers either were Czech or read Czech. A few years later, the handsomely produced and more successful Eva presented articles on culture, fashion, décor, and fitness accompanied by a welldesigned mix of photography and illustration. Eva presented the modern woman as short-haired, active, and young—a rational, thrifty, well-dressed working woman. Eva’s mix of photography (often of American women, French fashions, or exotic peoples but also of Czech women writers and performers) and lively, often colorful illustration created a look that was both modern and sophisticated. Its modern ® Regarding women’s legal situation during the First Republic, I summarize the pioneering work of Feinberg 2006. 7 See for example Masaryk a Zeny, Prague, 1930, an anthology including praise of the president's position on monogamy. 443