All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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The professional purge of female employees at the Belgian Regie voor Telegrafie en Telefonie (RTT) (Department of Telecommunications) after World War II: a gender analysis of epuration files
| This paper deals with the professional purge in Belgium after the Second World War, a subject that has thus far not been studied by historians. It is particularly suitable for analysis from a gender perspective. International research has shown that the persecution of collaboration was gendered and was based on constructions of masculinity and femininity. Using the ‘epuration’-files of the RTT – who was an important state-employer of women employees - and by making use of qualitative and quantitative techniques, our research project reconstructs and analyzes ‘profiles’ of suspects of collaboration and the discourse about collaboration through the perspective of gender. This paper will first outline a brief history of the purge in Belgium and within the RTT. Then we will take a look at what the statistical analysis tells us about the gendered character of the purge of the ‘unworthy’ employees. Finally we will focus on the discourse on these women and connect it to the ‘panique morale’ who dominated in Western Europe the public discourse. One of our conclusions reveals that the professional purge has enlarged significantly the number of people who got involved in the post-war purge process in general. Between the culprits of ‘crimes’ who could legally seen not be considered for persecution by the military courts, such as the ‘horizontal collaborators’ or ‘opinion offenders’, we have find a high number of women who were punished for crossing the borders of ‘descent female behaviour’ and who had violated the collective conventions of ‘good citizenship’.
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