Mare Ainsaar

The article analyses the impact of the dif- culties in balancing work and family on the plan to have children in Estonia. The theoretical framework is Aijzen’s planned behavior theory and the data were derived from the survey “Factors Influencing the Birth Rate in Estonia”, administered among people of 20-40 years of age in 2008.

The results of the behavioral model demonstrated that the plan of having children was associated with attitudes and perceived behavioral control, but there was no association with norms and values. The use of the structural model made it possible to analyse the pattern of the plans of having children more sensitively than the usual regression models. The study showed that people who live with a partner and have more positive attitudes towards having children have more rm plans of having child- ren. Di culties in work-family balance do influence the birth rate, but in a uni ed complex with other problems. The article describes the spread of problems associated with work-family balance that a ect the birth rate among different social groups: men, women, employed, unemp- loyed, different ethnicities, people with and without children, groups with different value orientations.

30% of people surveyed who are delaying childbirth noted that the plan of having a child is generally associated with work-family balance and 38% were worried about the shor- tage of child-care facilities. For 20-22% of the respondents the problem was a gap or interruption in their career. This was mentioned more frequently by employed people, women and those who did not have children yet. 11% were afraid that the parents of small children are poorly treated in the workplace, 4% believed that their employer would not like the birth of a child. In comparison with 1999, in 2008 there was a signi cant decrease in the concern about the discrimination of the parents of small child- ren in the workplace and the obstacles set by employers.

Tiina Veikat

The aim of the present essay is to provide a survey of the joint development of journal- ism and feminism in France in 1830-1930. e inspiration for the essay was a seminar on French women journalists at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry 3 which showed that scholarship on media and women’s studies has only begun. However, women journalists deserve considerable attention because without the many anonymous or little known women journalists and reporters the later recognized feminist writers would not have been able to write what they did. The women journalists covered in the present article are the foundation on which the later generations have been able to construct their success story. 

The notable French women journalists include Saint-Simonists, Delphine de Girardin, Séverine, George Sand, Titaÿna. They created or adapted styles and modes of writing, journalistic genres and approaches to journalism as such (e.g., Sèverine who went to the mines in order to write her report, thereby changing journalistic practices). The author also hopes that the present text invites Estonian gender scholars to write on the development of Estonian journal- ism, women’s thought and rst and foremost feminism in the Estonia of the past century to introduce the possibly completely unknown women authors who have dared and wanted to make their voice heard in the journalistic arena. Hommageto them! I would like to close with the call of Hélène Cixous from her „The Laugh of the Medusa“ (Le Rire de la Méduse): „Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies — for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put her- self into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement.“ 

Hannaliisa Uusma

The article analyzes the practices and experiences, attitudes and meanings related to the construction of masculinity on the example of the legendary Estonian punk band Vennaskond. The article considers both the international rituals and norms of punk and rock music tradition more generally as well as the possible influence of the post-socialist society and cultural space on Vennaskond’s patterns of constructing masculinity. In other words, the article focuses on rocking masculinity in (post-socialist) Estonia. 

The article is based on a qualitative socio- logical study conducted in 2013−2014. The results have been reached by synthesizing two types of empirical data (interviews with band members and song lyrics) and by combining qualitative sociological methods of data collection and analysis. 

Andra Siibak, Kristi Vinter

The article is based on focus group inter- views with pre-school children conducted in the fall of 2010 and will discuss the media favourites of 5-7 year-olds and the ways in which these could be employed in media education and gender sensitive education. 

The interviews showed that children’s screen favourites are extremely gender stereotyped: boys like superheroes (Batman, Superman, Bakugan, Transformers), while girls’ favourites are pretty princesses, fairies and cute animals. It was also revealed that children are eager to emulate the behaviour, emotions, attitudes and activities of their favourites, bringing what they have seen on the screen into the daily life of pre-school through a social imitation game. 

On the basis of the results of the study we believe that children’s media favourites provide useful material for gender sensitive and value education. We believe that phenomena seen in popular culture can be successfully used in pre-school education and make suggestions for how children’s media favourites can be used to teach children not just analytical thinking and the skill of analysing media messages, but also how to be a human being more broadly. 

Rebeka Põldsam

The article analyses three case studies from contemporary Eastern European art 2007- 2011. First, the article seeks to define and map the different circulating meanings of the concept ‘queer’ in order to open the theoretical backgrounds of the case studies. The first case study is Anna-Stina Treumund’s and Jaanus Samma’s „Queer sticker book“ (2011) that is a Western-style grassroots activist fanzine as well as a location-specific user-friendly product for Estonian queers and equality activists. The second case study is the work of Polish curator Pawel Leszkowicz that is in its rhetoric primarily opposed to the extreme conservative movements in Poland. He creates homoerotic exhibitions dedicated to sexuality that attempt to understand Polish society within EU equality directives and ideals. The final case of the article is Serbian queer immigrant artist Ana Honer who works in Austria and whose deeply theory-driven lecture-performances provocatively explore the power relations between Self and Other, East and West. The article as a whole seeks to interpret the ethical ambitions of queer art practices and means for achieving them. Sometimes more wide-ranging, sometimes more modest, the practices aim to change the present situation. 

Tiiu Kuurme

Schools as institutions that recreate gender stereotypes have been studied internationally for decades. In Estonian educational research this shadow function of schools has yet to attract attention. Estonian Women’s Associations Roundtable coordinated a project that studied the perceptions and interpretations of teachers and other people linked to education in order to find out how they see manifestations of gendered differences and problems in the daily life of schools. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten educators and the results were interpreted in the light of international literature in the field. The analysis showed that differences in gendered expectation are perceived and behavioural differences are noticed, but they are explained as a natural inevitability. School reality is not associated with the problem of gender equality. Gender stereotypes are also not perceived to be problematic. The continuation of such a situation may diminish the quality of life in adulthood for both genders and diminish the value of education. 

Redi Koobak, Raili Marling

The article proceeds from the much-discussed research of Clare Hemmings on the stories feminists tell in English-language gender studies journals about the past and present of feminism and the ‘political grammar’ of these narratives. We believe that such research needs to be replicated in the periphery and semiperiphery because, despite the centrality of the politics of location in feminist theory, transnational feminist narratives are still predominantly in English and Western-centered. e article aims to analyze the story of Estonian academic feminism as it unfolds in the journal Ariadne Lõng, the perhaps most stable gender studies institution in postsocialist Estonia. We seek to find out what Estonian gender studies are imagined to be and to do. Specifically, we are interested in whether there is a self-evident consensus in the journal and what role the general narrative plays in the wider gender political context. We analyzed editorials, original research articles, translations and the fore- and afterwords of translation that explicitly mention Estonian or Eastern European feminism or gender studies or the reception of feminism or gender studies in Estonia. We looked at citational practices and the assumptions that are taken for granted. 

Our analysis yielded two central results. First, Estonian gender studies are additive, not integrative. The articles in the journal cover a wide range of subjects, demonstrating the work Estonian scholars have done to establish gender perspectives in their disciplines. Articles are rooted in specific disciplines and there are no interdisciplinary analyses or discussions of gender studies as a discipline and its transdisciplinary methods. Second, the story of Estonian gender studies has not yet critically engaged with its past and its relationship with Western feminist theory. In the post-Soviet period Western feminist theories were of utmost importance in raising new critical questions and perspectives. Yet even today there are no problematisations of the concept of ‘Western feminism’ and its centrality in transnational discussions. We speculate that the lack of critiques of Western perspectives can be explained by the fact that Estonian gender studies have had to work on establishing themselves inside different disciplines and that one of the tools used in the process was the prestige of Western, especially Anglophone, academia. 

Katrin Kivimaa

Recent years have seen the increasing popularity of feminist curatorial analysis within the study of contemporary art, inspired by exhibitions in the central Western art institutions. The present article will cover the history of feminist exhibitions in the three Baltic countries starting from the mid-1990s to 2012, tracing a content- based and generational continuity that characterizes the phenomenon, despite uneven development patterns. e article specifically focuses on Estonia where the history of feminist art and feminist political agenda have had a most significant impact on the curatorial practice. 

Kairit Kaur

Most women living in the region probably could not read or write in the Middle Ages. The first educational centres for Baltic women were probably Cistercian nunneries on the basis of which the first Lutheran girls’ schools were founded in the bigger towns a after the Reformation. Women’s reading materials primarily included texts belonging to the Christian canon, prayer books and hymnals. Their writing probably tended to be limited to everyday communication. 

First Baltic women writers appear in the 17th century, first as so-called „learned women“ and pioneers in women’s occasional poetry. „Learned women“ tended to be the daughters of educated or rich bourgeois fathers. Roughly the same period sees the emergence of noblewomen who produced extensive „spiritual recipe books“. We see first examples of autobiographies by the end of the century. 

The Great Northern War created a long gap in women’s printed works. Women’s names appear again only in around 1740 but first only as imagined by men – as the authors of fictitious readers’ letters in the first moral weeklies of the Baltic countries. At the time when women’s own voice was not heard in the public sphere, they were active in the reception of pietist Herrnhut literature. Starting from the 1760s first texts probably written by actual women appeared in Baltic German magazines. By the late 1770s women were in the literary sphere – the period saw the publication of the first review by a woman, also the first poetry collections. In the 1780s Baltic women writers broke out of anonymity. 

There was a major shift in the 1790s when Rousseau-inspired bourgeois ideal of the „natural“ woman was established according to which a woman had to be completely dedicated to her husband and children and withdraw from the public sphere. Women’s texts vanished from the media and there are no known poetry collections until 1817. If women could write poetry at all, it was within the intimate circle of family and friends. There were attempts to direct women’s reading. However, the first major autobiographies also date from the 1790s. At the turn of the century, the first novel by a woman was published. 

The beginning of the 19th c. sees an increasing acceptance of women’s activities in the public sphere that are closely connected to the domestic duties of bourgeois women (cooking, home economics, child rearing). Women could also appear as writers in connection with these areas. The first drama text by a woman was published in the late 1820s. 

Kadri Aavik

Today’s Estonia is characterized by the ethnicity- and language-based segregation of acquaintance networks that influences Russian-speaking people’s chances of advancing in workplace hierarchy. Studies conducted this far indicate that in the case of Russian-speaking population the lack of social networking may become an obstacle to realizing one’s proficiency in Estonian. Access to prestigious positions is especially limited for Russian-speaking women, as they have been excluded from social networks that facilitate access to such positions because of their gender and ethnicity.

The article analyses, by employing intersectional analysis, the representation of social capital in the work narratives of Russian-speaking women and the meanings assigned to it. The focus is on the experiences of the so-called marked group in terms of gender and ethnicity: Russian-speaking women with higher education and good Estonian pro ciency who are either unemployed or work in menial jobs in Tallinn and Tartu.

The results show that the participants considered social capital an important means for finding work and improving one’s work status in today’s labor market, but also believed that they had few opportunities for using acquaintances for finding work. They discursively expressed disempowerment in the context of finding work both through formal and informal channels. The boundaries of social networks were perceived to be based primarily on ethnicity.

The narratives also demonstrate how Estonian labor market and society at large are characterized by norms that prefer Estonianness, masculinity and youth and thus construct Russian-speaking women as marked and as deviating from the norm, as so-called „internal others“.