Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction. South by East: World Literature's Cold War Compass
- Part I Contexts and Frames
- Part II Books and Writers
- 4 Sedition as Realism: Frank Hardy's Power without Glory Parts the Iron Curtain
- 5 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack and ‘Women on the Path of Progress’
- 6 Walter Kaufmann: Walking the Tightrope
- 7 Fictionalizing Australia for the GDR: Adventure Writer Joachim Specht
- 8 To Do Something for Australian Literature': Anthologizing Australia for the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s
- Part III Literary Exchange
- Contributors
- Index
5 - Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack and ‘Women on the Path of Progress’
from Part II - Books and Writers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction. South by East: World Literature's Cold War Compass
- Part I Contexts and Frames
- Part II Books and Writers
- 4 Sedition as Realism: Frank Hardy's Power without Glory Parts the Iron Curtain
- 5 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack and ‘Women on the Path of Progress’
- 6 Walter Kaufmann: Walking the Tightrope
- 7 Fictionalizing Australia for the GDR: Adventure Writer Joachim Specht
- 8 To Do Something for Australian Literature': Anthologizing Australia for the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s
- Part III Literary Exchange
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
During the Cold War, rhetoric surrounding gender roles and family structure often figured prominently in the political and ideological battles between the countries of the communist (socialist) Eastern Bloc and the capitalist West. Following the Second World War, ideas about the ‘proper’ place of women in the home, the workplace and the world were already in a state of general upheaval in these societies in the wake of economic, political, social and demographic changes brought on by decades of war and industrialization. These ideas and realities would continue to undergo drastic changes in both the East and West throughout the Cold War, but the tendency to invoke them as evidence of the supposedly diametrically opposed values of the corresponding societies was at its height as tensions first escalated in the 1950s, slowly becoming less politically relevant as second-wave feminism gained prominence in the West during the following decades and the political détente of the late seventies cooled the dichotomous East-West rhetoric to some extent.
Of course, when it came to ‘women's issues’, neither political ideals nor societal attitudes were ever divided cleanly by the Iron Curtain. The specific circumstances of countries on both sides heavily influenced the ways in which socialist or capitalist ideologies, and women's issues in relation to these, took hold. In East Germany, for example, the post-war population of approximately 19 million consisted of 3 million more women than men, making the mobilization of the female workforce a necessity (something that was easily compatible with socialist ideology), while in Australia many women who were ‘called upon to take up responsible jobs during the war […] [were] sent back to “the home front”’ as troops returned. Susan Sheridan asserts that in Australia
the 25 years that followed World War Two […] were the dire years of political and social conservatism – Menzies’ conservative government and Australia's Cold War against political and social radicalism; the (marriage and) baby boom, and the growth of suburbia as a way of life; dominant ideologies of unrelieved domesticity for women, and assimilation for Aboriginal people and the newly arrived immigrants.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Australian Literature in the German Democratic RepublicReading through the Iron Curtain, pp. 117 - 138Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016