New review in the January 2020 issue of Kultur Austausch

January 17, 2020 Kristen Ghodsee

With this book Ghodsee contributes a slice of women's history on the era before the fall of the Berlin wall. She includes pictures of women on the world stage who are mostly unknown, because the East’s success stories remained untold for too long (to avoid any signs of leniency towards the long-gone unjust regimes). She tells how the Cold War arms race permeated all areas of society, how in 1961 John F. Kennedy laid the legal foundations for the "First Commission on the Status of Women", which later helped spark the U.S. women’s movement with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. Part of the reason the USA bid farewell to the ideal of the woman at the stove as the "American Way of Life" was the Russian woman Valentina Tereshkova, who was the first woman in space to orbit the earth 48 times. According to the book, it was feared that socialist states had an advantage in the development of new technologies because they had twice as many bright minds - in Russia women were better educated and the brightest were recruited to work in science.

Jagoda Marinic

Also available in German