The Migration of Taste: Women, Local Manufacturing, and Global Marketing in Socialist Czechoslovakia

East Bloc countries often undertook efforts to bring hard currency into their chronically strained economies, efforts that resulted in multidirectional movements of people, ideas, images, tastes, and goods across Cold War borders. In socialist Czechoslovakia glass products were an important source of exports that consumers around the world found attractive and purchased. This included the glass jewelry made in the northern Bohemian town of Jablonec nad Nisou (known as Gablonz to the town’s Germans, most of whom were expelled after 1945). This paper will briefly examine the roles of Czechoslovak women in the manufacturing of this jewelry during the socialist period, including their work in factories and at home placing arrays of small, cut glass stones into necklaces, bracelets, and hair ornaments. The paper’s focus will be on women’s roles in the global marketing of this jewelry during the Cold War. Women worked modelling the jewelry in elaborate, thoughtfully planned international trade fairs held in Jablonec and around the world, and their images appeared in magazines, brochures, and other advertisements distributed at home and abroad. I will present some of these images when I deliver my paper. The glamorous images of the models used for marketing this global fashion wear contrast with the mundane work of the women manufacturing the jewelry and their very limited presence in positions of economic and political power in socialist Czechoslovakia. Through this contrast, I will argue that while the roles of women in the migration of taste contributed to the porousness of Cold War borders, their roles in manufacturing speak to the persistence of a dense, difficult-to-transgress gender divide between men and women in socialist Czechoslovakia despite Communist Party rhetoric about equal rights for women.