Primary school teachers have been complaining for a long time about history curricula, in which prehistoric, ancient, medieval, modern and modern history must be covered. But the events of the last 100 years are often not covered at all, and certainly not how people lived on a daily basis. This is what Johana Jonáková, director of Gender studies and the project Czechoslovakia in the memory of women, wants to change.
Therefore, they chose the stories of 10 women from different social strata and with different fates to tell them they showed what was eaten, worn, how they had fun, where they worked, what bothered them and the like. Videos and all materials are freely available to teachers and the public. In the podcast, Jonáková immediately remembered two phenomena that seem very distant to children today.
Abortion Commission
“One story mentions that the daughter of the woman in question went to some club, and when she saw that everyone was standing in line for tangerines, she joined the queue instead of the club, she endured it and came home late with tangerines. She was used to queues, so when there are tangerines, we go to stand there,” the director described how queues were a matter of course.
Difficult times were experienced by women in the 1970s and 1980s when they were going to have an abortion and had to have it approved by the abortion commission. “It was attended by doctors and representatives of the people. Which were ordinary people from the city, mostly housewives. If a woman wanted to artificially terminate a pregnancy, she had to go through the public assessment here to see if her request was adequate. It wasn’t just her personal decision,” she described the humiliating assessment of abortion commissions.
Johana Jonáková and the creative director of the project, Jan Dufek, revealed in the Blesk Podcast what female survivors of the socialist era miss the most, what fates in life affected the creator the most and how the fire in 1988 in the only paper production line in Slovakia affected women:
