1. Concept, Goals, and Partnership
The project was the result of a collaboration between two leading institutions: the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History (UARWH), which was responsible for the project concept, scholarly content, and engagement of the expert community, and the Center for Urban History, which provided technical, media, and financial support.
Support: the project was carried out with the financial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Ukraine.
Main goal: to create a virtual space for discussion of 20th-century Ukrainian history through a gender lens. The project was part of the preparation for the large-scale conference “Women’s Dimensions of the Past: Ideas, Experiences, Representations”.
2. Implementation
Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team succeeded in assembling a strong roster of lecturers from various institutions:
- Institute of Ethnology, NAS of Ukraine (I. Cherchovych, M. Baidak, O. Kis)
- Ukrainian Catholic University (V. Moskalets, I. Starovoit)
- Franko University of Lviv (H. Bodnar)
- Lviv National Academy of Arts (V. Kosiv)
- Institute of History of Ukraine, NAS of Ukraine (O. Stiazhkina)
- Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, NAS of Ukraine (M. Havryshko)
The lecturers are emerging and established Ukrainian researchers in the fields of history, cultural studies, and literary studies, whose work offers vivid examples of applying a gender approach to analyzing historical experiences and cultural representations of women and men in the context of modernization processes in Ukraine.
- Production: during November–December 2020, 10 lectures were professionally recorded and edited. The videos featured rich illustrative material: archival photographs, source quotations (from reminiscences, press), statistical data, and diagrams.
- Format: events were held as online premieres on the Zoom platform with specially invited expert discussants, which deepened the level of discussion on each topic. Video recordings of the lectures and discussions are available on the Center for Urban History website here (https://www.lvivcenter.org/discussions/gender-space-modernity/).
3. Outcomes: Lecture-Discussion Series and an Online Educational Course
The project evolved from a series of individual lecture-discussions into a systematized online course on the REeSOURCES platform. The full cycle now consists of 10 lectures spanning the period from the late 19th to the late 20th century:
- Oksana Kis (introductory lecture): “The View on Modernity Through a Gender Lens” — the theoretical foundation of the course.
- Ivanna Cherchovych: “The Poor and the Pregnant in Lviv in the Late 19th Century: Survival Experiences.”
- Mariana Baidak: “Divided by the War: Transformation of Family Relations During the Great War.”
- Vladyslava Moskalets: “Passageways, Coffee Places, and Bazaars: Women and Spaces of Consumption in Early 20th-Century Lviv.”
- Halyna Bodnar: “Unfinished War: Biographical Narratives in Letters to Lviv Authorities, 1944–1945.”
- Vasyl Kosiv: “Male Images of Ukrainians in the Posters of Soviet Ukraine, 1945–1989.”
- Bohdan Shumylovych: “Feminine and Masculine in Visual Voyages Between Urban and Rural in Soviet Ukraine.”
- Olena Stiazhkina: “Eating à la Soviet in the Film Texts of the 1960s – Mid-1980s.”
- Iryna Starovoit: “A Journey into the Whirlwind with Stops in Lviv: Dagny Juel, Debora Vogel, Yevgenia Ginsburg.”
- Marta Havryshko: “Women in Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Summer 1941 in Eastern Galicia: Victims, Perpetrators, and Rescuers.”
4. Impact and Significance
- Audience: the project attracted a broad viewership — from students and educators to museum professionals and activists. Interest was recorded from foreign universities (Jagiellonian, Lund, Ruhr University Bochum, and others).
- Educational resource: course materials (videos, syllabi, primary sources) are available for free use by university educators.
- Scholarly impulse: the project fills a gap in gender history within Ukrainian education and stimulates the development of critical historical studies, revealing how modernization transformed the roles and responsibilities of men and women. The lectures serve as a springboard for further discussions about the gendered dimensions of the past, about the advantages and limitations of various types of sources for studying and interpreting complex gender-inflected experiences. They demonstrate the heuristic potential of the gender approach to studying the recent past by revealing the gendered particularities of the modernization experience across different historical contexts in urban space.
The project has become an important contribution to the development of critical historical studies and a step toward integrating gender history into Ukraine’s academic landscape.