This publication highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, it examines how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, it deals with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth is analysed how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country's borders.
The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. But personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding gender roles. The notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless.