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Otherness in First Republic Czechoslovak Representations of Women while leftist magazines emphasized social issues. In both decades, images of older women represented either solid, often feminist, respectability or rural backwardness, while images of young women stressed attractiveness and, for the Czechs, modernity. To review, the fact that by the second half of the 1920s most First Republic imagery showed Czech women as modern, well dressed, competent, and goodlooking suggests that Czechs not only valued modernity strongly but expressed it, in part, through the image of the intelligent, attractive, competent, working New Woman, a woman who was educated and voted. These women were represented without markers of ethnic specificity; in the urban, internationalist Czech context, they could be read as being any modern young woman. Thus, images of modern womanhood in Czech publications could be read as either Czech or as Czechoslovak, but images of old women and Slovaks frequently suggested backwardness. Slovak publications were directed at a more narrowly Slovak and perhaps Ruthenian readership, and the samples examined emphasized imagery of Slovaks and Ruthenians rather than of Others within Czechoslovakia. Images of Ruthenians in Czech publications usually accompanied articles about poverty and poor conditions in that region and were often censored by the government, whereas Slovak publications made less of a separation between Slovak and Ruthenian life. In conclusion, during the 1920s and early 1930s, both Czech and Slovak periodicals generally avoided imagery of what we might call internal Others—citizens regarded as different or alien—although exotic Others were a staple of photo-heavy magazines for both capitalist and leftist audiences, and political cartoons did not hesitate to take on the Nazi threat over the border, for example, showing German women as fat and ugly. Capitalist Czech magazines usually emphasized similarity to other modern European nations; leftist magazines emphasized similarity to the international proletariat and peasantry; and Slovak magazines emphasized Slovak identity but with a sense of solidarity toward Ruthenian and other eastern European peoples. Images of women, to a greater degree than images of men, were used to represent a range of possibilities, from modernity and the charmingly traditional to the backward, miserable, or downright primitive. However, given that the imagery of internal Others was generally friendly in intent prior to 1933, showing images of poverty in order to arouse sympathy rather than disdain, and that Sudeten Germans and Roma were almost ignored, we can conclude that during this period both capitalist and leftist periodicals in the Czech lands envisioned a united Slavic state with strong international ties. Slovak periodicals also envisioned a united Slavic state, but one whose identity was focused on Slovakia and Ruthenia rather than on Czechoslovakia as a whole. 447
