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Otherness in First Republic Czechoslovak Representations of Women advertisement for this book and may have been chosen to situate erotic love as titillatingly alien to the kind of sexual and marital lives experienced by Zena’s readers. Reflektor, a leftist photomagazine also aimed at the working class, was not specifically directed at women. It emphasized international coverage and international solidarity among workers and the oppressed. Thus, the serious-looking German proletariat leader Ruth Fischer was not out of place on an early cover (Reflektor, 1925). Likewise, photographs of Russian Communist women gave evidence that even the most ragged could be ideologically strong (Reflektor, 1925). However, while Reflektor published photos from all over the world, it was not particularly interested in showing cultural Others within Czechoslovakia. Most photographs from within Czechoslovakia were of crowd scenes such as May Day gatherings. The magazine did, however, begin to make a point of showing poverty at home among Slovaks (Reflektor, 1925) (ill. 193). It emphasized that life was even worse in sub-Carpathian Ruthenia by showing “idiots” there whose condition was presumably the result of poverty and poor nutrition (Reflektor, 1925). The leftist press typically referred to the region as Czechoslovakia’s colonies and stressed the suffering that Masaryk’s democratic government had failed to alleviate. Returning to the pleasures of capitalism, the anglophile men’s magazine Gentleman, which focused on what might be considered male dandyism, included some images of young urban women, mainly in sketches and in ads for social dance venues, but the magazine did not normally portray cultural Others unless those Others were high-status or famous, like the African-American dancer Josephine Baker (Gentleman, Prague, 1927) (ill. 195). During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the general-interest photomagazine Svetozor provided an international selection of images that included slender young Czechs and women from all over the world. Whether on the cover in Dr. Desiderius’s cover sketch for Svétozor of a New Woman standing insouciantly reading a newspaper while presumably waiting for a tram to take her to work (Svétozor, Prague, 4 October 1928) (ill. 196) or in ads in which she tells incredulous older and head-scarved women that her beautiful laundry smells so good because she buys Hellada’s Sotka soap (Svétozor, Prague, 1928-29) (ill. 197), the New Woman is everywhere; but other Czechoslovak women are less visible. Trn, a Czech humor publication originally targeted at students, published numerous cartoons by both domestic and foreign artists. While the dominant topics of these varied from year to year, it is fair to say that overall most fell into the categories of politics, sex, and daily life. Nonetheless, during the 1920s and early 1930s, Slovaks, Rusyns, and Roma were not of particular interest for Zim. Other women had to be more exotic than that, a role filled by Africans around the time of the Paris colonial exposition (7rn, Prague, 1929). As we have begun to see, both Czech and Slovak periodicals showed Slovaks as primarily rural, whether as quaintly folkloric characters in kroÿ or as impoverished, exhausted farm laborers. By the late 1920s, however, Czech women were almost 445
