Politiques d'égalité des sexes après la Résistance : repenser le pouvoir dans la Grèce en guerre civile

Like elsewhere in occupied Europe antifascism saw the mobilisation of unprecedented numbers of marginalised women (and men) into the Greek communist-led resistance movement EAM/ELAS, and into politics for the first time. A carefully crafted mobilisational narrative which blended cultural nationalism with selective gender tradition, enabled the mass entry of women into the movement, and in turn, patriarchal boundaries expanded to accommodate the exceptional circumstances of foreign occupation. The mass participation of women arguably served as the most potent symbol of EAM’s dual purpose - as both a national liberation movement, and a social movement focused on social justice and the democratic transformation of national political culture. Many of the papers in this volume observe the radical challenge to, but also the resilience of traditional gender ideology, witnessed across the Resistance movements of Axis-occupied Europe, which shared similar modernization agendas. The scholarship concurs by and large, that however imperfectly realized, the equality politics of the Resistance and its practical application in the phenomenon of mass mobilization, had a transformative impact on gender relations, and laid the groundwork for the formation of new political subjectivities. This paper follows the momentum of shifting social norms and gender identities in the special case of post-War Greece, where escalating tensions between left and tight, culminated in full scale civil war by 1946, interrupting the momentum of social change. It is concerned particularly with the plight of the mass women’s movement, which grew out of the Resistance, a broad-based coalition intent on consolidating the gender political gains of the Resistance era, only to be confronted by the Civil War / Cold War as a new framework for women’s activism. The stage was set for the fragmentation of the movement and its reconstitution as an important cog in the machine of the communist war effort. At the heart of this paper is the thorny question of agency and legacy - how do we as historians evaluate the leftist/communist women’s movement in Greece after the Resistance, in the complex circumstances of Civil War which redefined its course, without reproducing the oversimplifications reminiscent of traditional Cold War historiography and indeed feminist historiography of communist activism during the Cold War.