Student Spotlight with Julia Mead, Summer 2024

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! I’d like to begin with one about your time in the Czech Republic. You’ve earned several research grants, including two Fulbright Fellowships, to complete research abroad. How have those grants facilitated your research? How integral to your work has travel been?

I did most of the archival research for my dissertation from September 2021 to June 2022 with the support of a Fulbright IIE research grant (I had to decline the other grant- a Fulbright Hays- because it would have covered the same period). During that year, I visited a dozen archives and had the time and space to read deeply in the collections relevant to my dissertation. Most of those were in Prague and Ostrava, the Czech Republic’s coal mining capital. Some of my best research moments happened when I stumbled across a source whose existence totally surprised me. For example, I found a collection of records from a state-run marriage counseling center at the Ostrava Municipal Archive. I was lucky to have developed a good relationship with the archivist there, and he anonymized them for my use. These sources formed the backbone of the first dissertation chapter I wrote when I got back to Chicago, which is largely about domestic violence in coal mining families. Before coming across the listing for that collection in the finding aid, I didn’t even know that there were state operated marriage counseling centers in socialist Czechoslovakia!

Your article, “The Kingdom of Antique Televisions: Reparability and the Afterlives of Socialist Electronics,” argues that there was a distinct “household maintenance” culture that discursively shaped masculinity in Soviet Czechoslovakia. How did this construction of masculinity fit with other gendered norms in the same period?

That article grew out of some internet sleuthing I did during the dark days of Covid lockdown. As I was writing my dissertation proposal, I discovered that there is a robust community in the Czech Republic of people who restore socialist era domestic electronics—TVs, radios, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, etc. I became interested in why they devoted so much time to machines from a period not known for producing high-quality goods. (Think of how the much unloved Yugo car was a chronic punchline on American TV). When I arrived in the Czech Republic for my research year, I became determined to understand what made this community of tinkerers tick—so I reached out to them, and they kindly talked with me and showed me their workspace.

I learned two things: firstly, that these modern-day hobbyists were working in a long tradition of do-it-yourself maintenance that they traced back to the late socialist period. Secondly, socialist-era electronics are particularly friendly to DIY maintenance. They rarely were built with specialized parts, so it is easy to salvage one machine for parts to repair another. They were also built in an economic context plagued by scarcity and with very little incentive for planned obsolesce, so a lot of these machines are super durable. In my article, I tried to bring these two ideas together in the concept of “socialist domestic technical masculinity” (I know this is a mouthful, but it was the framework that ultimately satisfied both peer reviewers…).

In the literature on gender and everyday life during state socialism, a number of scholars describe the late socialist period (in Czechoslovakia this means 1969-1989) as a time when the private realm became the center of many people’s emotional and intellectual lives. The thinking goes that the public sphere was plagued with secret police, empty political sloganeering, and constrictions on freedom of expression and movement, so many people turned their attention to their families, friends, hobbies, and interests at home. But we also know that many domestic activities are feminized: cooking, sewing, cleaning, caring for children, and so forth. In my article, I argue that tinkering with domestic electronics (many of which were indeed feminized, like vacuum cleaners) was one way in which men carved out a distinct and sufficiently masculine position within late socialist domesticity. Electronic maintenance was seen as technical, complex, and intellectually demanding and therefore an appropriately masculine sphere of homemaking. Socialist domestic technical masculinity was a way of preserving a distinction between men’s and women’s work even when the classic liberal framework of separate spheres (public/masculine versus private/feminine) collapsed.

In two other pieces, “What has Socialism Ever Done for Women,” co-authored with Kristen R. Ghodsee, and “Why Millennials Aren’t Afraid of Socialism,” you make the case that socialism, despite the negative connotations and failings of the Soviet Union, has some striking benefits. What are they and what do you think is most promising?

There are a few policies that Kristen (who was my mentor when I was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College) and I highlight in our article. Socialist states legalized abortion much earlier than anywhere else; they built daycares, cafeterias, and public laundries to help ease women’s domestic labor; they incorporated women into the formal workforce and supported their education, including in technical fields like science and engineering. Each of these accomplishments deserves a major caveat: abortion was illegal under Stalin and in Ceaușescu’s Romania; the daycares, cafeterias, and laundries were never sufficient in number or resources to eliminate women’s domestic duties; women’s professional opportunities were constrained based on their political backgrounds (as men’s were); and there was still a substantial gender pay gap.

The big point I wanted to make in “Why Millennials Aren’t Afraid of Socialism,” which I wrote in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, was that Cold War thinking is really unproductive. There is no need to evaluate each of the policies I listed above as evidence of either the success or failure of Socialism writ large; rather, we can ask to what degree they improved specific women’s lives, and what elements would be useful now. (One thing that I would personally love to see would be more communal dining options. There are huge economies of scale in cooking, and I really hate doing dishes.) It was my hope back in 2016 that my generation—born after the end of the Cold War—would form a different conception of socialism than our parents have, one that is historically informed but not exclusive bound to Cold War binaries.

Your research combines politics, gender, and energy in Czechoslovakia during the socialist period. What are your key arguments and how does this work tie in with your more public-facing writing?

My dissertation, “Socialist Rust Belt: Energy, Masculinity, and the End of Czechoslovak Socialism,” traces the rise and fall of the Czechoslovak coal economy from 1948 to 2004 and its relationship changing norms of masculinity. The Czech Lands were the industrial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Eastern Bloc, and are a really rich context in which to study the social history of energy. Coal miners in socialist Czechoslovakia held an elite social position and earned more money than they could spend in the country’s under-stocked shops. They also received preferential access to housing, cars, state-sponsored vacations, domestic appliances, and delicacies such as oranges and bananas.

I argue that socialist miners embodied a distinct form of masculinity, which I call “comradely masculinity,” characterized not by their status as breadwinners, but by their camaraderie in dangerous, physical work. After 1989, the state coal industry was rapidly privatized through a process of economic “shock therapy” overseen by Western financial advisers. Many coal workers lost their jobs, their pensions, and their homes—in short, the security they had long taken for granted. Despite the profound post-socialist political and economic transformation, I show how miners rejected a new masculine ideal of “entrepreneurial masculinity,” characterized by financial and sexual risk taking, and continued to cling to comradely cooperation despite post-socialist politicians’ efforts to instill an ethos of capitalist individual competition in former coal workers.

This is definitely a continuation of my interest in socialist gender history, but with a slightly different twist. Studying masculinity can be tricky because, unlike femininity, it is an unmarked category—understood as default. But I think it is really important to understand mining masculinity in particular because miners were at the heart of making socialist Czechoslovakia run. Domestic coal was the major source of energy for the whole socialist period, and every aspect of economic, political, and cultural life depended in some way on a steady supply of coal.

You have also done some teaching in the Department of History, including lecturing in Energy in World Civilizations II. What are some of the highlights of your teaching experiences?

Right now I am wrapping up teaching my owns section of Energy Civ II. It has been a tremendously rewarding experience, and I have learned a great deal from my students. Back in 2020, I was part of the reading group that germinated the early seeds of the Energy Civ curriculum (along with Professors Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Liz Chatterjee, as well as fellow grad students Robert Suits and Rohan Chatterjee). Last year I was a TA for Liz’s section of the course, and now I’m teaching it on my own. It is a special thing to have seen it come to fruition and become a popular core sequence. Most of the students in my class are STEM majors, and it has been a particular pleasure to introduce them to the humanistic dimensions of energy. Because of my interest in the history of gender and sexuality, I added a session this year on sex work and the oil industry that generated a really exciting and robust discussion.

I was also really fortunate to co-teach a course in Winter 2024 with my adviser, Tara Zahra, on the history of East Central Europe. I learned so much from teaching with Tara about how to design a syllabus, how to facilitate respectful classroom discussions, and how to prepare an engaging lecture. I was particularly delighted to give the final lecture of the class on the collapse of state socialism, a topic dear to my heart.

Of course, research, writing, and teaching is not all you do. What are some activities outside of your work as a historian that you enjoy?

I love fiber crafts! My main passion is quilting. My mom taught me to sew when I was little, and I picked it back up when I returned from my archival research in Europe. It’s been nice to work on sewing projects while I’ve been writing my dissertation—it helps me unwind, be present, and do something creative that isn’t history writing. There are actually quite a few history grad students who moonlight as crafters. We get together every few weeks to work on our crafting projects and eat pizza; it’s a really special community to me. Unfortunately, my sewing machine is in the repair shop right now, so I’ve been teaching myself to knit socks while I wait to get it back. Alas, I don’t have the same maintenance skills as the Czech electronics enthusiasts I interviewed, so I can’t fix it myself.