Purple on Red. (Euro)communists and Feminists in the Global 1970s
The project examines the encounter between communist party activism and the feminist movement after 1968. It contends, namely, that the reform efforts of major West European communist parties in the 1970s—aka Eurocommunism—comprised a little-known shift regarding the ›women’s question;‹ as a result, communist women intervened on feminist debates and repertoires of contestation, fueling a challenge to gender norms within their parties and renewed forms of activism beyond them. While the epicenter of this ›interweaving‹ of communism and feminism was Italy, the project reconstructs red feminism’s emergence in other contexts (Spain; Brazil) in the 1970s. The recent ascent of communist women to office in Chile and Austria suggests the topic is of more than historical interest. Thus, the project also surveys the contemporary iterations of the overlap between communist and feminist political cultures—and the enduring tensions between struggles for social justice and gender equality.
Victor Strazzeri was born in São Paulo, Brazil. After a BA in Social Sciences (2003–06) at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and an MA in Social Work from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2009–11) he earned his PhD in Political Science (2017) from the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on Max Weber's relationship to German Social Democracy. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Historical Institute of the University of Berne (2017–2019) and at the University of Geneva (2020–21). He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Federal University of São Paulo and has held Visiting Fellowships in Rome, Alicante and Ljubljana. From 2019 to 2024 he coordinated the project Internationalization of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (Berlin Institute for Critical Theory/Rosa Luxemburg Foundation). He published The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy. The ›labour question‹ and the genesis of social theory in Imperial Germany (1884–1899) with Brill in 2022.
»Beyond the Double Blind Spot: Relocating Communist Women as Transgressive Subjects in Contemporary Historiography«, in: Gender & History 36/2 (2024), p. 755–774.
»Transnational women’s activism in Eurocommunist politics: the entangled cases of Italy and Spain (1974–1982)«, in: HISPANIA NOVA – Primera Revista De Historia Contemporánea on-Line En Castellano. Segunda Época, 1 – extraordinario (2024).
»The interweaving: communist women and feminism in 1970s Italy«, in: Contemporary European History, online (27 March 2023, p. 1021–1037).
mit Paola Stelliferi (Hg.), Transnational feminist movements in history, (= Sonderheft: Contemporanea: XIXth and XXth Century History Review 4 (2023).
The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy: the ›labour question‹ and the genesis of social theory in Imperial Germany (1884–1899), Leiden 2022.
Die Begegnung von kommunistischer Parteipolitik und feministischer Bewegung ist eine fast unbekannte, aber folgenreiche Episode im politischen Leben Westeuropas nach 1968. In Italien, Frankreich und Spanien wurden die 1970er-Jahre nämlich nicht nur vom Aufstieg der neuen sozialen Bewegungen, sondern auch von der letzten Blütezeit des Parteikommunismus geprägt.