Sweeping through the Archive: Skoupa and the Pursuit of Greek Women’s History
by
Georgia-Taygeti Katakou
“Inside a suffocating situation, where women are silenced and some others decide to speak on their behalf, we decided to express a desire, but also a need” (Skoupa, 1979). [1] The need, for the nine women who collaborated to create and publish Skoupa: Gia to Gynaikeio Zitima (Broom: On the Women’s Issue), was “to restore some kind of connection with our own history” (Skoupa, 1979).[2] Five issues of the magazine appeared between 1979 and 1981, covering a range of issues, including political representation, sex, sexuality, and the body. The Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI) in Athens hold all five published issues of the magazine, which abruptly disappeared in 1981, following a crisis within the editorial team. In December 2022, as I was semi-successfully looking for traces of Greek Communist women in the archive, I stumbled upon Skoupa and could not stop reading through its pages. Skoupa’s editorials were bold, their tone acerbic, and the ability of the editors to morph into historians and translators not only impressed me, but made me want to quit my job and start a feminist periodical with my friends. Yet, the magazine was short-lived, published sporadically, and made no profit. In this article, I argue that, despite the brevity of Skoupa’s run, the magazine is an archive of Greek women’s frustrations and hopes - a repository of feeling (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). This is apparent from some of the topics taken up by the editors of Skoupa, such as women’s writing, translation, abortion, and the body.
To begin with, Skoupa had no recurring columns as such, but did present pioneering texts from the Greek women’s movement in each issue. For example, in issue two, Aggelika Psarra presented texts from four nineteenth century women’s periodicals, three of which she consulted in the Hellenic Parliament Archives, the fourth in a private collection (Psarra, 1979). Psarra engaged in the historical practice of excavating material from the archive, with the purpose of situating Skoupa in the long history of Greek women’s writing. In the same issue, the editors re-printed an autobiographical text written by Elizabeth Martinegou. Born in 1801, Martinegou is recognised as the first modern Greek female writer. There was a concerted effort to bring forward archival material from the history of Greek women’s emancipation and to showcase women’s own words. The editors paid particular attention to the emancipatory potential of women’s writing and to the role of novelists and journalists in women’s liberation struggles. Τhey saw themselves as part of a lineage of writers who fought for Greek women’s liberation. The editors of Skoupa engaged in this historical practice as a way of refusing the erasure of women’s history. “History,” the editors wrote, “might be without end, but women’s history has already ended” (Skoupa, 1979). Making women’s history a central theme in Skoupa was a way to forcefully oppose the “end” of women’s history and the silencing of women’s lived experiences.
This refusal underpinned the editors’ non-historical writing, too. The first issue of Skoupa included a multi-part feature on abortion, co-written by all editors (Skoupa, 1979). Between 100,000 and 500,000 abortions took place in Greece every year, despite it being strictly prohibited (Skoupa, 1979). The editors of Skoupa posited that the prohibition of abortion under Greek law was another way to silence Greek women. They argued that legalizing the provision of abortion “would break the barrier of silence, of guilt, of prudishness, of myths, of distortions around the matter” (Skoupa, 1979). This dynamic between silence and having a voice was, according to the editors, irrevocably tied to the gendering of social roles. Indicatively, Marina Papagiannaki wrote how “they told me I had to become a mother. To be able to speak, to have an opinion, to be vindicated” (Papagiannaki, 1979).
Over the course of Skoupa’s run, the editors developed a critical view of the political conversation around mothering and abortion. One amendment under discussion in the Greek parliament was to reduce the number of psychiatrists a woman would have to get approval from, before terminating her pregnancy. As it stood, if two psychiatrists confirmed that a woman was mentally unwell, an abortion could legally take place. The Skoupa editors pondered the relationship between motherhood and sanity and the figure of the “not sane mother.” With a not sane mother, they wrote:
it is better to send her to the psychiatrist, so he can give her a paper that says that she is not in her right mind, to then go to the obstetrician to become a former mother (from the deliberation in parliament, it is not clear whether the title “mother” that one acquires even through accidental pregnancy, can be kept after the abortion, and be added, during visiting hours, next to the title of housewife). Then the obstetrician will legally and nicely provide an abortion for the crazy mother and will give her (?) a receipt to take to her insurance, for her to “anonymously” (!) receive the equivalent of her LEGAL abortion. (Skoupa, 1979)
Evidently, the conceptualisation of women as mothers and housewives was strongly linked to them behaving within the realms of acceptability. Any diversion from that risked being associated with madness. The way in which access to a legal abortion relied on proving one’s madness and fitting into the archetype of the “crazy mother” reflected the fickleness of legality in this context. Furthermore, the Skoupa editors challenge the very stability of the term “mother.” Is a person that terminates their pregnancy a former mother, a mother, or neither? The Skoupa editors argued that women cannot exist “outside the traditional, patriarchal, androcratic triptych ‘woman-wife-whore’” (Skoupa, 1979). “Beyond,” they claimed, “exists madness” (Skoupa, 1979). These nine women expressed little trust toward not only the Greek state, but the entire apparatus that blocked their access to abortion. This included psychiatry and the medical establishment, a distrust also shown in the figure below, in which a pregnant body suffers intense pain in a sterilized medical space.
Alongside the sociopolitical analysis of the parliamentary debate on abortion, the Skoupa editors provided a literary lens through which experiences were shared. They printed anonymous, autobiographical or auto-fictional testimonies of those who had chosen to terminate their pregnancy. One anonymous testimony read:
‘Once, I had a snake in my chest - or a bit below my chest, it does not matter - and like something useless, it was thrown away. I did not even understand a thing, I had a snake and then I had none. And while I had it I was sad, and then I was happy I no longer had it and here ends the story with the snake, I once had for a little time below my chest’ (Skoupa, 1979)[3]
The author of this vignette used the metaphor of a snake to represent their terminated pregnancy. In the original Greek, the word translated above as chest, is “kórfos.” This colloquial word describes the space between the chest and upper arms. It is commonly used to affectionately describe holding someone between one’s arms, as well as for having a secret. Furthermore, the phrase “a snake in my arms” is frequently used to describe situations when one has been betrayed by someone presumed trustworthy. These were fitting metaphors for a terminated pregnancy, tapping into affection, secrecy, and betrayal, including the betrayal of the author’s own body.
In the auto-fictional text, Happening, the Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux reflected on the limits of language in describing the experience of seeking an abortion. Set in 1963 Rouen, Happening follows Annie Duchesne, a twenty-three-year-old university student who seeks to terminate her unwanted pregnancy, twelve years before the Veil Act that legalized abortion in France. In conversations about her unwanted pregnancy, no one mentioned “the word abortion, not even once. This thing had no place in language” (Ernaux 2019, 45). Annie admits that:
To convey my predicament, I never resorted to descriptive terms or expressions such as “I’m expecting,” “pregnant” or “pregnancy.” They endorsed a future event that would never materialize. There was no point naming something that I was planning to get rid of. In my diary I would write, “it” or “that thing,” only once “pregnant” (Ernaux 2019, 26).
The anonymous author of the vignette in Skoupa avoided any mention of terms such as baby, child, pregnancy, or abortion, much like Ernaux describes. Another auto-fictional vignette concluded that it is “better to be destroyed than go through this torture again” (Skoupa, 1979). This author, too, used words such as “torture” and “slaughter” to describe the twelve abortions they had, and did not refer to themselves as pregnant or expecting (Skoupa, 1979). It was only in 1986 that Greek Law 1609/86 allowed for the termination of pregnancy up to the first twelve weeks (Papadogiannis 2015, 31).
Personal testimony was central to both the women’s liberation movement and feminist print culture. Testimonies, such as the ones above, left textual traces of “bad feelings” (Waters 2016, 447). Fear was a recurring motif in Skoupa articles: fear “of the first time, fear of her body, fear of pregnancy, of cold, of illness, fear of simply the unknown” (Skoupa, 1979). Melanie Water argues that bad feelings expressed in feminist periodicals, “might serve as a magnet around which the politics of feminism can be negotiated and critiqued” (Waters 2016, 447). The frustration, anger, and pain shared on the pages of Skoupa were the “bad feelings” that created “magnetizing connections” between the personal and the political, the editors and the readers, the magazine and the movement, and “most challengingly – the theories and experiences associated with emancipation” (Waters 2016, 448). Waters has written on how affect theory can enhance our understanding of these magnetizing connections. Affect has been described as “the visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1). Affects are “pre-subjective, embodied sensations” (Waters 2016, 448). Waters explains that in the context of feminist periodicals, affect “is the current that animates and electrifies” the relationship between the personal, the political and the social, as it exists both on and off the pages of the magazine (Waters 2016, 448).
The relationship between feeling and language, embodied sensations and their expression, became an ongoing discussion in the pages of Skoupa, especially in connection with the body. The editors described “our body,” as “our subjugation, in flesh and bone” (Skoupa, 1979). They said the relationship between women and their bodies was “a constant restriction of expression, on every level, of expression of every type” (Skoupa, 1979). Language, they argued, was inadequate to capture a woman’s relationship with her body; there was a discrepancy between the “code you use to communicate,” and what “you have time and time again felt” (Skoupa, 1979). The editors embraced the motif of the witch as a figure that could help them express their embodied experiences.
Witches were described by the Skoupa editors as “evil beings,” tormented by fear (Skoupa, 1979). “We, the ones who live today, even without corsets, pointy heels or long nails” (Skoupa, 1979), they wrote, consciously inserting themselves into this community of witches. In so doing, they admitted to being tormented by fear. And the “antithesis of our fear,” the editors stated, is “submission” (Skoupa, 1979). The editors of Skoupa presented the motif of the witch as a figure who exists beyond language and can represent the evasive relationship that they had been trying to capture. The figure of the witch became part of Skoupa's visual and textual lexicon. It is no coincidence that the title they chose for their magazine was “Broom,” playfully alluding to a witch on a broom, the very image featured on the cover of the first issue of Skoupa. Yet, a broom is also a symbol of the domestic responsibilities that women are tasked with. Much like their writing on abortion, which suggested that when a woman stops behaving “acceptably,” she is designated as mad, the use of the motif of the broom points to a tension between acceptability and what lies beyond. Beyond the banality of domestic chores and the broom as a cleaning tool, there is also the possibility for the broom to be a method of escape and an act of defiance.
Much like witches on a broomstick, the editors of Skoupa were engaged in a constant “displacement of the self” during the magazine’s run (Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014, 557). Translation was at the core of Skoupa’s ethos. The editors translated literary, autobiographical, and political texts from Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Leonora Carrington, Alexandra Kollontai, and Lea Melandri, among others. These were translated either by one editor or collaboratively, mostly from English, French, and Italian. For example, the translation of Woolf’s essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” was a collaborative effort of Fani Ziozia, Marianna Kondyli, Georgia Papageorgiou, Marina Papagiannaki, and Angelika Psarra (Skoupa, 1979). The desire to draw from non-Greek realities, resulted in a Greek periodical that was continuously translating feminist texts and images and relating them to the contemporary struggles of Greek women. This willingness to practice translation shows that the editors were interested in putting Greek women’s history, and Greek women, in conversation with international women’s history.
Mitsou-Pappa specifically wrote on translation and the role of the translator for the third issue. The impetus came from the publication of Annie Leclerc’s Parole de femme, translated into Greek by a man, Nikos Sideris. Mitsou-Pappa penned a scathing critique of this translation in a piece entitled “Women’s Words in Men’s Hands,” in which she described Sideris’ work as “translational sacrilege” (Mitsou-Pappa, 1979). She accused Sideris of making fundamental mistakes even when it came to translating simple words such as “travail” which he translates as “weight,” but is instead “work” (Mitsou-Pappa, 1979). Mitsou-Pappa argued that Sideris distorted the text and attempted to tame Leclerc’s daring language (Mitsou-Pappa, 1979). And while there is “of course, no law that defines that ‘feminist’ books should be translated by women,” Mitsou-Pappa found it strange that “from so many women translators, professional and not, a man was found, with little knowledge of French to translate into our language a demanding and often challenging text” (Mitsou-Pappa, 1979). Leclerc’s text “openly declares war against men’s language,” and its translation by a man betrays its very meaning (Mitsou-Pappa, 1979).
Implicit in the frustration over this mistranslation was an element of refusal, “the refusal to have one’s work translated, and therefore re-signified” by men (Bracke, Morris, Ryder 2018, 220). The refusal to be translated has been articulated by feminist and postcolonial thinkers as a way to oppose cultural homogenisation and resist “a process of sweeping global translation of locally embedded words and thoughts into English or another ‘Northern’ or globally hegemonic language” (Bracke, Morris, Ryder 2018, 220). In this case, however, the resistance to translation was a resistance to men embedding women’s words and thoughts into a hegemonic, patriarchal rhetoric. Mitsou-Pappa recognised how Sideris mistranslated the text to make it less radical. What is more, the “translational turn” has invited consideration of how “translation exceeds the linguistic transfer of meaning from one language to another,” and instead encompasses much wider practices (Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014, 557). To speak is to engage in translation; it involves the “opening the self to the other,” and is “a process of displacement of the self” (Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014, 557). Translation brings with it the “moral obligation to uproot ourselves, to be, even temporarily, homeless so that the other can dwell, albeit provisionally, in our home” (Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014, 557). The Skoupa editors acted as writers, historians, translators. It was this multiplicity of roles that enabled them to reclaim the past and capture the present of Greek women.
Skoupa held a unique position in Greek print culture, despite its short, sporadic run. It is an archive of emotions; the emotions of its editors, who magnetized their audience in the late 1970s, yet ultimately failed to sustain the running of the magazine. When I encountered their work in ASKI, the editors’ words moved me and motivated me to think about the relationship between history, archiving, and translation. In Skoupa, translation involved more than moving texts across borders. The editors brought Greek women and Greek women’s history into conversation with their international counterparts, allowing for the movement of emotions and experiences across languages. The tasks of archivists, historians, and translators are intertwined, as we try to document how we labour through texts, images, and emotions, across borders.
References
Bracke, Maud Anne, Penelope Morris, and Emily Ryder. 2018. “Introduction. Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1950s–1980s).” Gender & History 30, no. 1 (March): 214–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12358.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Delap, Lucy. 2021. “Feminist Business Praxis and Spare Rib Magazine.” Women: A Cultural Review 32 (3): 248-271. https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2021.1972657.
Ernaux, Annie. 2019. Happening. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Lima Costa, Claudia de, and Sonia E. Alvarez. 2014. “Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39 (3): 557–63. https://doi.org/10.1086/674381.
Papadogiannis, Nikolaos. 2015. “Red and Purple? Feminism and Young Greek Eurocommunists in the 1970s.” European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 22 (1): 16–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2014.983424.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 1-25. Durham: Duke University Press.
Waters, Melanie. 2016. “‘Yours in Struggle’: Bad Feelings and Revolutionary Politics in Spare Rib.” Women: A Cultural Review 27 (4): 446-465. https://doi-org.eui.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/09574042.2017.1301131.
[1] I am thankful to the staff at the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI), in Athens, for their help during my research stay. All material is used with permission. All translations and transliterations from Skoupa are mine, unless stated otherwise. This piece was written with support from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.).
[2] The editors were: Efi Avdela, Fani Ziozia, Marianna Kondyli, Leda Moschona, Mariliza Mitsou-Pappa, Georgia Papageorgiou, Maria Papagiannaki, Ida Florentin, Anna Fragkoudaki, and Aggelika Psarra.
[3] Italics in the original.
