Emancipating Rural Women in Interwar Yugoslavia:

Analysis of Discourses on Rural Women in Two 1930s Women‟s

Periodicals

By

Isidora Grubaĉki

Submitted to
Central European University
Department of History

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Comparative History

Supervisor: Professor Balázs Trencsényi

Second reader: Professor Francisca de Haan

Budapest, Hungary
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2017
 Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or
part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in
the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a
part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not
be made without the written permission of the Author.
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i
 Abstract

This thesis explores the ideas and, to a limited extent, practices of emancipation of rural women

in the interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia that preceded the radical

empowerment of women that took place with the establishment with socialist Yugoslavia in

1946. The thesis is a comparative discourse analysis of the ways two different periodicals edited

and published by women constructed the desirable roles of rural women in the 1930s. The

periodicals in question are: Seljanka: list za prosvećivanje žena na selu (1933-1935) [Peasant

Woman: Periodical for Enlightenment of Women in the Countryside], the only periodical in

interwar Yugoslavia published specifically for rural women, and Žena danas (1936-1940)

[Woman Today], a periodical that had a strong feminist, pacifist and antifascist stand with a

hidden communist agenda. By constructing the desirable image of rural women in the public

sphere, the discourses I analyze shaped the ideas of how and in which ways the changes in the

lives of rural women in Yugoslavia should occur. As this thesis argues, these discourses of

emancipation of rural women were influenced by different political and social ideologies of the

period, usually perceived as conflicting, such as eugenics, nationalism and traditionalism,

communism/socialism and feminism, and different approaches to Yugoslav nation-building,

integral and federal. By looking at these two periodicals, I show how the approach of the
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educated, elite women towards „the rural woman question‟ became more inclusive and more

radical as World War II was approaching and as „the woman question‟ got increasingly involved

with socialist ideology.

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 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisor Balázs Trencsényi for guidance, extremely helpful
comments and care he showed during the year and especially during the thesis writing process. I
especially want to thank him for being patient with all my confused questions and initial
insecurities about my work and my ideas.

I also want to thank my second supervisor Francisca de Haan for encouraging me and supporting
me in many ways, and for reading my texts carefully and with interest.

I owe much gratitude to Zsófia Lóránd, Elissa Helms, Tolga Esmer and Marsha Siefert for their
support at the time when I was the most confused with my work.

To Borbála Faragó – thank you for encouragement and useful talks about my writing and writing
in general.

I especially want to thank Ana Kolarić, Stanislava Barać and Dejan Ilić for, in many precious
ways, helping me get to where I stand now.

To all my colleagues who listened to my ideas and contributed to this thesis by recommending
literature and saying that it will all be fine – thank you.

Finally – to Igor, thank you for being there, always.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................................ iii
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1
I.1. The Sources ........................................................................................................................................ 6
I.1.1. Seljanka: list za prosvećivanje žena na selu (1933-1935) [Peasant Woman: Periodical for
Enlightenment of Women in the Countryside] ..................................................................................... 8
I.1.2. Žena danas (1936-1940) [The Woman Today] ......................................................................... 10
I.2. Methodology and Framework of Analysis ....................................................................................... 13
I.3. Outline of the Thesis......................................................................................................................... 22
Chapter 1 - Searching for the Context ........................................................................................................ 24
1.1. Feminism, Nationalism and Socialism: A short overview of women‟s organizations and discourses
of emancipation in Serbia and Yugoslavia before and after WWI ......................................................... 25
1.2. The Rural Context: Reconstructing the Problems and the Solutions of the Everyday Life of Rural
Women .................................................................................................................................................... 32
1.2.1. Transformations in the Family Life in Yugoslav Rural Areas .................................................. 32
1.2.2. Seljanka: Housewife, Wife, Mother – and Agricultural Worker .............................................. 35
1.2.3. The Representations of Rural Women in Žena danas............................................................... 41
1.2.4. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 46
Chapter 2 - Rural Women‟s Education in Seljanka and Žena danas .......................................................... 47
2.1. Seljanka: Informal Education of Rural Women in Interwar Yugoslavia ......................................... 48
2.1.1. Laza Marković and Eugenics in Vojvodina between 1904 and 1935 ....................................... 50
2.1.2. Informal Education and Eugenics: Constructing a Desirable Role of Rural Women ............... 56
2.2. The Discussion about Education and Pegagogy in Žena danas ....................................................... 63
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2.2.1. Educating rural women: Nikica Blagojević, Angela Vode and Vera Stein Erlich .................... 64
2.2.2. Exchanging knowledge: Education for Community and Women‟s Rights .............................. 71
2.3. Conclusions ...................................................................................................................................... 77
Chapter 3 – Constructing “Sisterhood” in Seljanka and Žena danas: Yugoslav nation-building and
International Networks................................................................................................................................ 79
3.1. Seljanka and the Construction of Yugoslav Peasant Sisterhood ...................................................... 80
3.2. Layers of Sisterhood in Žena danas ................................................................................................. 92
3.3. Conclusions .................................................................................................................................... 105

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 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 107
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 114
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 Introduction

In 2012, the exhibition Yugoslavia: From the Beginning to the End was opened in the

Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade. The exhibition was a major event as it gathered a

group of curators, sociologists and historians to propose a concept, content and organization of a

new permanent exhibition of the Museum of Yugoslav History.1 The stated aim of the exhibition

was to, “in a modern, attractive and objective way,” present “one of the most interesting and

most controversial state-building experiments in the 20th century.”2 Although the exhibition was

a genuine attempt to overcome the nationalist narratives and ask questions about the history of

the Yugoslav country, I found the depiction of Yugoslavia as a “controversial state-building

experiment” less objective than it was claimed. I was particularly struck by the representation of

women‟s emancipation in Yugoslavia. This – indeed very marginal - segment reproduced the

popular stereotypes about the history of women‟s emancipation in the socialist period, saying

that the women‟s emancipation in Yugoslavia began only after World War II, as well as that

even though after the war women got the right to vote and had more rights to work – nothing had

really changed.3

1
The authors of the exhibition were curator Ana Panić, sociologist Jovo Bakić and historians SrĊan Cvetković,
Ivana Dobrivojević, Hrvoje Klasić and Vladimir Petrović.
2
“Yugoslavia: From the Beginning to the End,” accessed May 15, 2017,
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http://www.mij.rs/en/exhibitions/69/yugoslavia-from-the-beginning-to-the-end.html.
3
The text goes as follows: “The process of women‟s emancipation began only after the end of World War II.
Women received the right to vote (in 1946) and became increasingly present on the job market. In spite of the
proclaimed equality, the situation of women in the first post-war years was far from idyllic.” In the continuation of
the text, however, the author chooses to focus in length on all the gender-relation issues that failed to be changed in
socialist Yugoslavia, concluding that “up to the break-up of Yugoslavia, in the most cases women remained the
lesser paid and lesser esteemed work force.” (Yugoslavia: from the Beginning to the End, ed. Ana Panić, transl. into
English by Jelena Bajić (Belgrade: Museum of Yugoslav History, 2014), 41.) Instead of focusing on the actual
women‟s struggles for political and other rights in the interwar period and after World War II, the author of the text
chose to emphasize all the segments in which the socialist system failed, thus making the narrative less about
women and their emancipation. Similarly, Donna Harsh concluded her chapter “Communism and Women” in The
Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism saying that “under communism, women did not achieve equality
with men. They did not attain self-determination or social autonomy,” but right after saying that “still, communism
dramatically changed women‟s social position.” Should the order of these two sentences change, the implications of

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 The text in question visibly understated the empowerment of women that came to force

after the establishment of the socialist Yugoslavia, not mentioning the fact that the 1946

constitution for the first time guaranteed full legal, economic and social gender equality for

women, that both girls and boys had the obligation to go to elementary school, as well as that

women finally gained the right to inherit and own property, to vote and to act politically.4 What

is more, in the 1950s, the state guaranteed legal equality of marital and extramarital children, and

the divorce and the right to abortion were liberalized.5 These were all radical changes that made

a huge difference in the lives of many Yugoslav women.

Very importantly, changes that came to power in 1946 did not happen in a vacuum, but

were preceded by decades of active involvement of women who, in many different ways, aimed

at improving the legal and social conditions Yugoslav women lived in. While there were active

women‟s organizations even before World War I, in interwar Yugoslavia, like never before (or

after) there was a plurality of women‟s organizations that had different aims and ideologies,

some considering themselves feminist and some rejecting this notion, that were also a part of a

wider network of women‟s organizations internationally.6

the text, I believe, would be different. (Donna Harsh, “Communism and Women,” in The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Communism, ed. Stepen A. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 501.)
4
Mari-Ţanin Ĉalić, Istorija Jugoslavije u 20. Veku [Geschichte Jugoslawiens im 20. Jahrhundert] (Beograd: Clio,
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2013), 268. Up until 1946, Serbian Civil Law was in force in Serbia since 1844, in which married women had as
much rights as feeble-minded people. See: Marija Draškić and Olga Popović-Obradović, “Pravni poloţaj ţene
prema srpskom graĊanskom zakoniku (1844-1946),” [Women‟s Legal Position According to the Serbian Civil Law
Code (1844-1946)] in Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 19. i 20. Veka 2 [Serbia in the 19th and 20th Century
Modernizing Processes 2. Women‟s Position as the Measure of Modernization], ed. Latinka Perović (Beograd:
Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1988), 11-25.
5
Mari-Ţanin Ĉalić, Istorija Jugoslavije u 20. veku, 268.
6
Even before World War I, in 1914 in Serbia there were thirty-two organizations in Srpski Ženski Savez [Serbian
Women‟s Alliance], which had already in 1911 became a part of the International Council of Women and
International Alliance of Women. (Thomas A. Emmert, “Ţenski pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the
1920s,” in Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav successor
states, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999): 35, and Leila J. Rupp,
Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women‟s Movement (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 16.)

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 The two initial monographs about the interwar women‟s movements were Jovanka

Kecman‟s Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941 (1978)

[Women of Yugoslavia in the Workers‟ Movement and Women‟s Organizations 1918-1941],

who approached „the woman question‟ in interwar Yugoslavia through the lens of the history of

workers‟ movement, and Neda Boţinović's Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku (1996) [The

Woman Question in Serbia in 19th and 20th Century], in which Boţinović offered a description of

women‟s organizations in interwar Serbia systematically dividing the organizations into

“proletarian” and “bourgeois.” 7 The fact that the history of interwar women‟s and feminist

movement has been embedded into state-socialist narratives and largely shaped by concerns

about the workers‟ movements might be one of the reasons this subject is often overlooked in the

mainstream narratives about emancipation of women in Yugoslavia.

In the first volume of Gender & History, the pioneer in Yugoslav women‟s history, Lydia

Sklevicky published an article challenging the socialist rejection of “bourgeois feminism,”

arguing that in interwar Yugoslavia “the claims of the very vocal and not so exclusive bourgeois

feminist movement did not differ from the claims of the so-called „proletarian women‟s

movement‟ as much as one would expect.”8 Thommas A. Emmert‟s text “Ţenski Pokret: The

Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s” also pointed to the gap in scholarly research on the

Serbian women‟s organizations in the interwar period, criticizing Jovanka Kecman for an
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analysis that largely ignored all the “bourgeois” organizations that, according to Kecman, only

7
Jovanka Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941. [Women of
Yugoslavia in the Workers Movement and Women‟s Organizations 1918-1941] (Beograd: Narodna knjiga: Institut
za savremenu istoriju, 1978) and Neda Boţinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji [The Woman Question in Serbia in 19th
and 20th Century] (Beograd: Devedesetĉetvrta, Ţene u crnom, 1996). (All translations from Serbo-Croatian are
mine, unless indicated differently.)
8
Lydia Sklevicky, “More Horses Than Women: On the Difficulties of Founding Women‟s History in Yugoslavia,”
Gender & History, Vol. 1. No. 1. (Spring 1989), 72.

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 partially encouraged women‟s liberation. 9 He noted that only several of the organizations

Kecman named “bourgeois” actually considered themselves feminist, and that the key feminist

organization was Društvo za prosvećivanje žene i zaštitu njenih prava [Society for the

Enlightenment of Woman and Defense of Her Rights], established in 1919 and shortly afterward

renamed into Ženski pokret [Women‟s Movement],10 the organization Sklevicky surely had in

mind when saying that its program did not differ greatly than that of the „proletarian women.‟

Emmert also warned that the accomplishments of various non-feminist interwar organizations11

should not be underestimated, even though they might be limited in scope, as the mere effort of

organizing women in the patriarchal society was in a way politicizing their activities.12

Entering the abovementioned discussion, this thesis aims to explore the ideas and, to a

limited extent, practices of emancipation of women in the interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats

and Slovenes / Yugoslavia that preceded the changes that came with the establishment of

socialist Yugoslavia. Specifically, it engages with the question of emancipation of rural women,

the major socio-economic group in Yugoslavia at the time.13 As Mary E. Reed has noted, most of

the sources about rural population are limited to those written by women and men outside of this

socio-economic group.14 Yet, in the interwar period, a heterogeneous group of elite, educated

women who organized within various women‟s organizations and who published periodicals

directed at a heterogeneous female audience was increasingly concerned about the difficulties
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Yugoslav rural women faced in everyday life. This thesis offers a comparative discourse analysis

9
Thomas A. Emmert, “Ţenski pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s,” 33-34.
10
Ibid., 36-37.
11
Those who rejected the term feminism.
12
Thomas A. Emmert, “Ţenski pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s,” 34.
13
According to the 1931 census, 76,58% of Yugoslav population lived in rural areas. In: Momĉilo Isić, “Privatnost
na selu,” [Privacy in the Countryside] in Privatni život kod Srba u dvadesetom veku [Everyday Life in Serbia in
Twentieth Century], ed. Milan Ristović (Beograd: Clio, 2007): 379.
14
Mary E. Reed, “Peasant Women of Croatia in the Interwar Years,” in Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe,
ed. Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 98.

4
 of two different periodicals edited by women that, by identifying the problems of rural women

and offering solutions to the detected problems, constructed the desirable role of rural woman in

interwar Yugoslavia, thus offering a model for a change in rural women‟s lives.

The periodicals in question are: Seljanka: list za prosvećivanje žena na selu (1933-1935)

[Peasant Woman: Periodical for Enlightenment of Women in the Countryside], the only

periodical in interwar Yugoslavia published specifically for rural women, and Žena danas (1936-

1940) [Woman Today], a periodical that had a strong feminist, pacifist and antifascist stand with

a hidden communist agenda. Understanding discourse in relation to power, I see it worthwhile to

compare the discourses of Seljanka and Žena danas because I believe that by constructing the

desirable image of rural women in the public sphere, they shaped the ideas of how and in which

ways the changes in the lives of rural women in Yugoslavia should occur. As this thesis argues,

the discourses of emancipation of rural women were influenced by different political and social

ideologies of the period, conventionally perceived as conflicting, such as eugenics, nationalism

and traditionalism, communism/socialism and feminism, as well as by different approaches to

Yugoslav nation-building, integral and federal.

Additionally, as the objects of my analysis are two monthly periodicals published in

Belgrade, but with an aspiration to be widely read in all parts of Yugoslavia, my research

addresses the complexity of constructing a community of Yugoslav women within the

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conflicting nation-building projects. Moreover, although the focus is on the discourses of

emancipation of rural women, the thesis aims to make a contribution to the discussion about the

interwar women‟s movements. Finally, as Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna

Loutfi indicated in the introduction to A Biographical Dictonary of Women‟s Movements and

5
 Feminisms, 15 in the context of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, nationalism and

socialism are the two ideologies that “stand out in their involvement with „the woman

question,‟” 16 also adding that women‟s involvement in nationalism and socialism “not only

allowed them to articulate certain demands […], but also to challenge the limits of those

ideologies or to criticize them from within." 17 This thesis follows the suggestion of A

Biographical Dictionary‟s editors, aiming to offer an “alternative feminist reading” of the

histories of nationalism and socialism in the Yugoslav context.

I.1. The Sources

Before I proceed to explain why I have chosen to look at discourses of emancipation of

rural women exactly in Seljanka and Žena danas, I will first point to some studies on which I

rely and which in certain aspects I challenge in this thesis.

When it comes to the question of Yugoslav rural women, there really is a huge gap in

historiography. In fact, the only monograph on this subject is Momĉilo Isić's book Seljanka u

Srbiji u prvoj polovini 20. veka [Peasant Woman in Serbia in the First Half of the 20th Century]

(2008), which presents the first wide-raging research on the position of rural women in Serbia in

the first part of the 20th century. Yet, even though Isić addresses some of the most important

questions concerning the conditions rural women lived in, the book remains mainly descriptive
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and does not address any theoretical questions, including the category of gender.

15
Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, ed., A Biographical Dictonary of Women‟s
Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe ; 19th and 20th centuries (Budapest, New
York: Central European University Press, 2006).
16
Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, “Introduction,” in A Biographical Dictonary of
Women‟s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th centuries, 6.
17
Ibid.

6
 Another key text about rural women is Vera Stein Erlich‟s 1964 socio-anthropological

study Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji [Yugoslav Family in Transition].18 This book is a

product of the major research Erlich had conducted in the late 1930s on the transformation in

family life in more 300 Yugoslav villages. Her insights on extended families, patriarchal system

in Yugoslavia and family transformation are especially valuable for understanding the changes

happening within the rural population since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and it

is even more exciting that the research on Yugoslav families was initiated while Erlich was

publishing her articles in Žena danas. So, curiously, while Erlich‟s book from the 1960s

contributes to the framework of this thesis, Vera Erlich‟s writings in Žena danas are the thesis‟

object of study.

Moreover, as this thesis is an analysis of two interwar women‟s periodicals (that is,

periodicals edited by women and published for women), it is important to mention that I follow

the recent research on Serbian women‟s periodicals done by literary historians Stanislava Barać

and Ana Kolarić. In her 2015 book Feministička kontrajavnost: Žanr ženskog portreta u srpskoj

periodici 1920-1941 [Feminist Counterpublic. The Female Portrait Genre in Serbian Periodicals

1920-1941], 19 Barać presents women‟s periodicals as central to what she calls the “feminist

counterpublic” in interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia. As her research

shows, there was an extraordinary amount of women‟s public engagement and conversations
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about women‟s position in Yugoslav public space between the two wars. In her study, Barać

analyzed the portraits of women in interwar women‟s periodicals, including Seljanka and Žena

18
The first edition of this study was published in 1964 in Zagreb under the title Porodica u transformaciji: studija u
tri stotine jugoslovenskih sela [Family in Transition: A Study in Three Hundred Yugoslav villages]. Then, it was
published in United States in 1966 under the title Yugoslav Family in Transition (Princeton University Press, 1966)
and again in Zagreb in 1971 under the title Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji [Yugoslav Family in
Transition].
19
Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost: Žanr ženskog portreta u srpskoj periodici 1920-1941 [Feminist
Counterpublic. The Female Portrait Genre in Serbian Periodicals 1920-1941] (Beograd: Institut za knjiţevnost i
umetnost, 2015).

7
 danas, thus conceptualizing a new female portraits genre within the field of literary history.

Importantly, Barać has done a systematic research on interwar women‟s periodicals, including

Seljanka and Žena danas, so her insights will often be an important reference point for me.

Ana Kolarić‟s recent doctoral dissertation Rod, književnost i modernost u periodici s

početka 20. veka: „Žena‟ (1911–1914) i „The Freewoman‟ (1911–1912).” [Gender, Literature

and Modernity in Periodicals from the Early Twentieth Century: Žena/The Woman (1911–1914)

and The Freewoman (1911–1912)] (2015) contributes, among other things, to understanding the

discourses of emancipation of Serbian women in Vojvodina before World War I.20 Her analysis

and interpretation help me make sense of the longue durée continuities and breaks in the

discourses of emancipation of women in Serbia and Yugoslavia in the first half of the twentieth

century.

I.1.1. Seljanka: list za prosvećivanje žena na selu (1933-1935) [Peasant Woman: Periodical
for Enlightenment of Women in the Countryside]

As Seljanka was the first and the only periodical in the interwar Yugoslavia dedicated

primarily to women in the countryside, it seems reasonable to choose it as a source for the

analysis this thesis aims for. 21 The periodical was published monthly, in Belgrade, between

January 1933 and December 1935. It was financed entirely from the subscriptions of the readers,

and the publishing was stopped due to the lack of money. The primary aim of the periodical was
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educational – it offered rural women knowledge that was, from the perspective of the editor

Darinka Lacković, considered necessary for the domestic duties of all rural women.

20
Ana Kolarić, Rod, književnost i modernost u periodici s početka 20. veka: Žena (1911–1914) i The Freewoman
(1911–1912) [Gender, Literature and Modernity in Periodicals from the Early Twentieth Century: Žena/The Woman
(1911–1914) and The Freewoman (1911–1912)]. PhD diss., University of Belgrade, 2015.
21
Stanislava Barać puts Seljanka in three different periodical contexts: first, women‟s periodicals, secondly, press
for or about rural population such as Selo (1919-1952), Komunističko selo (1920), Mlado selo (1926), Omladinsko
selo (1933) and others, and, thirdly, the context of the educational press. As I will show in this paper, Seljanka had
many similarities with the health periodicals from the period before World War I. (Stanislava Barać, Feministička
kontrajavnost, 281-282.)

8
 Importantly, Seljanka was also an unofficial publication of the King‟s Fund Domestic

School (Domaćiĉka škola Kraljevog fonda). This was an informal eight-month school for rural

women that took place in Sremski Karlovci near Novi Sad in the period between 1929 and, most

probably, 1935, and it followed the tradition of the domestic schools for women organized in

Serbia in the first half of the twentieth century.22 Whereas the organizer of these courses before

the war was Društvo za očuvanje narodnog zdravlja (Society for the Preservation of People‟s

Health), since 1922 the organization Ženski pokret is increasingly involved in these activities.23

Darinka Lacković, the main “character” in this “story,” was a member of Ženski pokret,

the organizer of the King‟s Fund Domestic School and the editor of Seljanka. It seems that her

idea was to establish a periodical that would serve as a platform for communication between her

and her former students, but also as educational material for all rural women to learn how to

perform their domestic duties properly. Unfortunately, I have not managed to discover more

information about Lacković, except that she had published an article in the periodical Žena [The

Woman] before World War I (this will be discussed later). Hopefully, future archival research

will shed more light on this interesting persona.

In the thesis, I link Seljanka with the eugenic discourses that, as I argue, largely shaped

the desirable role of rural women constructed in this periodical. Secondly, as the King‟s Fund

Domestic School was established in 1929, the same year King Aleksandar‟s royal dictatorship
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was initiated, I connect Seljanka with the idea of integral Yugoslavism as propagated by King

Aleksandar. Thereby, this periodical is a worthy source for understanding the relationship

between eugenics and nation-building projects in Yugoslavia, and, more importantly, the gender

22
Periodical Zdravlje [Health] contains a report of the first course organized for women in a village near Belgrade in
1905. The aim of this course was to teach rural women how to make good bread. See: “Društvo za ĉuvanje narodnog
zdravlja: škole za devojĉice“ [Society for the Preservation of People‟s Health: Schools for Girls], Zdravlje, 1906/10,
309-313.
23
Thomas A. Emmert, “Ţenski pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s,” 46.

9
 aspect of the way these two ideologies were entangled. Additionally, Seljanka is a valuable

source that offers information about the King‟s Fund Domestic School, thus making it possible

to get a less blurred picture of the informal education of rural women in Serbia and Yugoslavia

in the first part of the twentieth century, as well as to analyze closely the educational material

rural women were confronted with. Finally, the analysis of texts in Seljanka will reveal the

information about the everyday life of women in the countryside and the elements of their labor.

I.1.2. Žena danas (1936-1940) [The Woman Today]

The introduction to the 1966 reprint of Žena danas associates this publication primarily

with the work of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, illegal in Yugoslavia from 1921 to World

War II. 24 In fact, Žena danas was a product of collaboration between the liberal women‟s

organization Ženski pokret and young women from Communist Party of Yugoslavia who after

1935, as a part of the Popular Front strategy, “infiltrated” into a legal organization and

established Omladinska sekcija Ženskog pokreta [Youth Section of Women‟s Movement]. As I

show in this thesis, the periodical cannot be related only to the Communist Party, as it was also

associated with Gabrielle Duchêne and the Women‟s World Committee against War and Fascism

(WWCAWF) established in 1934. Furthermore, the periodical gathered a wide number of

antifascist left-progressive feminists, the majority of whom – but not all - were members of the
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Communist Party. To make a meaningful list of women who contributed to the work of Žena

danas would be a huge project in itself, as the lists in the historiography do not mention all

women. The names of the members of the publishing office were listed in the introduction to the

1966 reprint of Žena danas, yet the names of the editors are a valuable, but only a starting point
24
See: Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, “Uvod,” [Introduction] Žena danas. Brojevi 1/1936 –
33/1944. Fototipsko izdanje [The Woman Today. Issues 1/1936 – 33/1944. Facsimile edition] (Beograd:
Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, 1966), V-VIII. The existing historiography follows this
narrative. See, for example: “Ţena danas,” Žene Srbije u NOB [Women of Serbia in the National Liberation
Struggle], ed. Bosa Cvetić, (Beograd: Nolit, 1975), 69-81.

10
 for researching this periodical and the women who worked on it.25 While the existing narratives

mention, for example, Mitra Mitrović26 – the president of the Youth Section who after the war

had many functions in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia – they are silent about the Slovenian

communist feminist Angela Vode and Jewish left-progressive intellectual for Zagreb Vera Erlich

Stein, who, as I show in this thesis, largely contributed to Žena danas as well.

Twenty-nine issues of this feminist, pacifist and antifascist women‟s periodical were

published in the period between November 1936 and September 1940. The thirtieth issue was

confiscated by the censors in November 1940, and during the war (which started in Yugoslavia

in April 1941) three issues were published in 1943 by the antifascist women on the liberated

territory. After the war, it was revived as the official periodical of the Antifašistički Front Žena –

AFŽ [Women‟s Antifascist Front]. In my analysis, I will focus only on the 29 issues that were

published between 1936 and 1940.

Until November 1940, the editors managed to escape the censorship and to continually

(although not every month as planned) publish progressive articles concerning education and

upbringing, motherhood, literature and art, but also the Spanish Civil War, international

conferences of women‟s organizations, etc. In the first issue of Žena danas, the editors explain:

Our aim is to gather around [the periodical] the biggest possible number of
women from all parts of our country, regardless of their religion, nationality and
political beliefs, so that, in the periodical, they [the women] could all find their
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25
The editors were: Mitra Mitrović, Milica Šuvaković, Olga Alkalaj, dr Dušica Stefanović, Nataša Jeremić, Zora
Šer, Ela Almuli, dr Irena Stefanović, Beška Bembasa, Olga Jojić, Bosa Cvetić, Fani Politeo-Vuĉković, Vojka
Demajo, Ela Nenadović, Dragana Pavlović, Milka Ţicina and Zojica Levi. Women who were killed during WWII
were: Olga Alkalaj, Beška Bembasa, Nataša Jeremić, Olga Jojić, Fani Politeo-Vuĉković, dr Dušica Stefanović, Zora
Šer and Milica Šuvaković. See: Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, “Uvod,” Žena danas. Brojevi
1/1936 – 33/1944. Fototipsko izdanje, VI.
26
For more about Mitra Mitrović, see: Latinka Perović, “De Profundis (za Mitru Mitrović: 1912-2001),“ [De
Profundis (For Mitra Mitrović: 1912-2001)] in Republika 259 (April 16-30, 2001), accessed May 31, 2017,
http://www.yurope.com/zines/republika/arhiva/2001/259/index.html; and: Stanislava Barać, “(Ne)pristajanje na
zaborav: Mitra Mitrović, portret revolucionarke” [(Not) Accepting the Oblivion: Mitra Mitrović, Portrait of a
Revolutionary], Komuna Links, accessed May 31, 2017, http://komunalinks.com/home/2017/1/23/nepristajanje-na-
zaborav-mitra-mitrovi-portret-revolucionarke.

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 own self and through the periodical evolve united and connected by the common
interests and aspirations. Mothers, housewives, workers, clerks and intellectuals,
all of you who have been for centuries treated as less worthy and lower than man,
we invite you to sincerely and devotedly cooperate with us on our common
periodical, which should be the most loyal interpreter of our spirit and the real
reflection of our common aspirations.27
As Žena danas was a Belgrade-based publication and as over 70% of women in Yugoslavia were

illiterate at the time, there were obvious limitations to reaching all women in the country. Yet, as

I will show, the editors made a conscious effort to communicate with the widest possible number

of Yugoslav women, to offer them new perspectives on issues related to work, politics,

motherhood, and to mobilize even the illiterate rural women for a change in the lives of all

Yugoslav women that would truly be revolutionary.

In the thesis, I will analyze the representations of rural women in the periodical, the

purpose of which, I argue, was to draw attention to the difficult life of Yugoslav rural women

and to offer new knowledge to the readers of the periodical about how peasant women live in

different regions of the country, and, secondly, to suggest educated women what they could do in

order to change the circumstances in which peasant women lives. They suggested an approach

that was a conscious effort to overcome the elitism of the earlier approach of women‟s

organizations, including Ženski pokret. Furthermore, I will analyze the reconfiguration of the

feminist ideology in the Yugoslav context after 1935 that took place along with the change of the
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approach towards the Yugoslav national question of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

Finally, by analyzing texts of Vera Stein Erlich and Angela Vode published in Žena danas, this

thesis will put light to the importance of these two women for the antifascist circle of women that

created Žena danas, thus challenging the official socialist interpretation of the events that led to

the radical empowerment of women after WWII.

27
“Uvodna reĉ” [Introductory Word], Žena danas, 1936/01, 3.

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 ***

Additionally, the two periodicals offer their visions about, to put it simply, how to and to

what extent rural women‟s position in society should in fact change. By looking at these two

publications, I contrast a discourse that searches for emancipation of women within the

framework of nationalist, traditionalist ideology, with a discourse shaped by feminist and

socialist ideas in Žena danas. Very importantly, these two periodicals were not published at the

exact same time. Published in the first half of the 1930s, Seljanka, as I will show, actually fits

very nicely the intellectual matrix of the liberal feminism of the 1920s, and even the period of the

before WWI. Žena danas, on the contrary, is an example of the radicalization of the feminist

discourses in Serbia and the other parts of Yugoslavia that came with the Popular Front strategy

and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia‟s adoption of a federal solution to the Yugoslav nation-

building problem. Hence, by looking at how the two discourses of emancipation of rural women

– shaped by different ideologies – offered different ideas about what the desirable role of rural

women should be, my intention is to show how the discourses of emancipation of rural women

actually radicalized as „the woman question‟ got increasingly involved with socialist ideology

during the 1930s.

I.2. Methodology and Framework of Analysis

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My understanding of discourse is primarily influenced by Foucault‟s interpretations of

discourse as a category structured by power and production of knowledge. 28 Understanding

discourse as “a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor

stable,” Foucault proposes a method of reconstructing the distribution of discursive elements by

28
See: Michel Foucault, "On Power," in: Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other Writings
1977-1984, tr. Alan by Sheridan and others, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 102-109.

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 looking for things that are said, but also those that are unsaid and concealed.29 When looking at

the discourses, it is important to look the various effects of the discourses, “according to who is

speaking, his position of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be situated.”30

My interest is to see how the everyday lives of rural women, their experiences and knowledge,

have been, in Foucault‟s words, “put into discourse.” 31 I intend to explore what kind of

knowledge about rural women was produced in the public sphere, relying on the idea that the

knowledge that was created in the two periodicals to a large extent constituted social subjects

and the relations between social individual and/or collective social subjects.32 In other words, I

explore how the strategies of power are manifested at a very local, often overlooked level.

As I argue, the discourses of emancipation of women I analyze are shaped by various

social and political ideologies, such as eugenics, socialism, feminism, traditionalism, antifascism,

pacifism and different versions of Yugoslav nation building. For Michael Freeden, ideologies are

“complex competitions over legitimizing alternative political vocabularies, competitions which

are never definitively resolved on the conceptual and semantic level.”33 I agree with Freeden‟s

explanations that ideologies “shape the access we gain to the political world.”34 Understanding

this means, in Freeden‟s words, “recognizing the tendency of ideologies to generate

comprehensive world views, in which even incremental changes may create chain reaction of

semantic adjustments.”35 Importantly, Freeden points to three things important for the study of
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ideology. First, political thinking always takes place within a context. Second, “ideologies are

29
Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 92-102.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., 11-12.
32
Norman Fairclough, “General Introduction,” to Critical Discourse Analysis. The Critical Study of Language
(London, New York: Longman, 1995), 6.
33
Michael Freeden, “Concepts, Ideology and Political Theory,” in Carsten Dutt ed., Herausforderungen der
Begriffsgeschichte (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), 54.
34
Ibid., 54.
35
Ibid., 60.

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 devices that select specific political meanings of concepts from a pool of available meanings;” as

the meanings of the concepts are contested, each ideology has to assign a certain meaning to a

concept.36 And third, ideologies do not assign meanings to the concepts in a vacuum, but only

within a network of other concepts.37 By looking at certain concepts, such as sisterhood, nation,

education, or, above all, the concept and category of rural women, I actually look at the way the

meaning of these concepts was shaped by competing ideologies in the 1930s Yugoslavia. When

it comes to the relationship between discourse and ideology, I should specify that I see discourse

as a communicative practice through which ideology is practiced, 38 or, as Freeden explains it,

“ideology is one form of discourse but it is not entirely containable in the idea of discourse.”39

When I look at discourse, I am interested in both the representation of reality and its

construction, and I bear in mind the individual and collective agency of those who participated in

creating the discourse, but I also take that the power of a discourse often exceeds the intended

ideological agendas.

The concept of the public sphere is essential for my analysis, and I find Nancy Fraser‟s

1990 article “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing

Democracy” a useful point of reference. In her article, Fraser pointed to the importance of Jurgen

Habermas‟s idea of the public sphere, as it is “an institutionalized arena of discursive

interaction” which allows distinction of the democratic associations from the state apparatuses
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and the market economy.40 Yet, she also aimed to contribute to the reconfiguration of the term by

challenging the four assumptions that she sees as central to what she calls a “bourgeois

36
Ibid., 57
37
Ibid.
38
Michael Freeden, Ideology, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106.
39
Ibid., 106.
40
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,”
Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990), 57.

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 masculinist” conception of the public sphere.41 First, she criticized the assumption that in reality

it is possible for all the individuals to enter a discussion in the public sphere as if they were

equals. As she argues, even when the inequalities of the participants are supposedly put aside,

these inequalities still affect the ways the subordinated groups participate in the public sphere,

including the fact that they are often simply not heard. 42 Secondly, she reflected on the

interaction among different publics, challenging the assumption that a single public sphere is

more democratic than the multiplication of the competing publics. Her view is that a single

public sphere does not leave space for the subordinated groups to address their own needs and

strategies. 43 In this context, she proposed the term “subaltern counterpublics” to name the

alternative publics formed by social groups historically excluded from the “bourgeois

masculinist” public – women, workers, people of color, etc.44 What she essentially proposes is an

a more sensible approach towards what she calls “contestatory interaction of different publics”

that would allow us to identify the mechanisms that keep some subordinate to the others. 45

Thirdly, she challenges the assumption that the discussion in the public sphere is limited only to

the issues that are relevant for everyone, arguing that there are no a priori boundaries between

the “public” and “private” interests, but that exactly through the public contestation it is decided

what is and what is not a matter of public concern.46 Finally, Fraser points to the problem of the

distinction between the civil society and the state, arguing for a new, post-bourgeois conception
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of the public sphere that would allow us to see public sphere as more than “autonomous opinion

formation removed from authoritative decision-making.”47 When talking about public sphere and

41
Ibid., 62.
42
Ibid., 63-65.
43
Ibid., 66.
44
Ibid., 67.
45
Ibid., 70.
46
Ibid., 71.
47
Ibid., 76.

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 (subaltern) feminist counterpublic in the thesis, I bear in mind Fraser‟s idea of the alternative

publics formed by women. I also follow Stanislava Barać who, in the Yugoslav context, located

the forming of the subaltern feminist counterpublic in the 1920s, as this was the time of the

proliferation of the women‟s and feminist periodicals and women‟s activities related to various

forms of gatherings, courses, international conferences, petitions for the universal suffrage rights

and for peace.48

Moreover, as I believe that a certain kind of change in the ways rural women live was

generated through the discourses of emancipation of women, the concepts of modernity and

gender fit my analysis very nicely. The notion of modernization relates primarily to the processes

that took place mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the industrialization of

production and the rapid urbanization. The key processes of modernization in the context

relevant for this research are the creation of the multi-national state and the rapid transformation

of the traditional family life in Yugoslavia that took place in the first half of the twentieth

century (I discuss this in details in the first chapter). Amazed by the contradictory experiences of

modernization, Marshall Berman described that the processes of modernization have caused a

range of visions and ideas that give men and women the “power to change the world that is

changing them, to make way through the maelstrom and make it their town,” making them both

subjects and objects of modernization. These visions and processes are part of what is called
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“modernism.”49

48
Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost: Žanr ženskog portreta u srpskoj periodici 1920-1941, 59.
49
Marshal Berman, “Introduction: Modernity – Yesterday, Today and Today,” in All that is Solid Melts to Air. The
Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988 [1982]), 88-89.

17
 However, as Roger Griffin recapitulated, modernity has also been associated with
50
catastrophe, fragmentation, incoherence and ambivalence, and described as a liminal,

transitional state of permanent crisis.51 Within this modernist context and often as a reaction to

the social processes of modernization, different social and political ideologies took shape. To

understand the discourse in Seljanka, I believe Griffin‟s framework of “palingenetic dynamic of

modernism” is valuable, as the solution to the highly ambivalent experience of modernity and the

alleged degeneration of society was sought not in transformation but in renewal. In other words,

terrified by what they saw as physical and moral decay in society, the scientific “experts” of the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came with the idea that the states should introduce

interventionist measures that would reduce the degenerative impact on the healthy population

and, consequently, renew the nation. 52 In this context, a “hybrid discourse” of scientific

nationalism occurred, a discourse that, as Griffin nicely put it, “fuses science and myth, academic

scholarship and populism, and the cult of knowledge and progress with “atavistic” assumptions

about the existence of an ethnic essence attached to an organic nation.”53 Right next to ultra-

nationalism, Griffin saw eugenics – basically the idea that race can be improved by scientific

intervention into breeding and inheritance - as an important manifestation of scientific

nationalism. 54 The analysis of the discourse in Seljanka will, hopefully, contribute to the

understanding of the ways eugenics was adapted into the peasant context of interwar Yugoslavia.
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Furthermore, for understanding the idea of change inherent to the discourse in Žena

danas, Berman‟s chapter on Marx, Modernism and Modernization is informative. Interestingly,

50
Roger Griffin, “Tunnel Visions and Mysterious Trees: Modernist Projects of National and Racial regeneration,
1880-1939,” in Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling eds., Blood and Homeland. Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in
Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), 420.
51
Ibid., 429.
52
Ibid., 427.
53
Ibid., 418.
54
Ibid., 436-437.

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 Berman points to the affinities between Marx and the modernists that were, according to him,

often overlooked.55 As opposed to the previous example, of interest here is Berman‟s claim that

what is inherent to Marx‟s both celebration and criticism of bourgeoisie, as Marx calls it, is the

idea of transformation of catastrophes, transformation as opposed to solid stability. In Berman‟s

words, “stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is

our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive,” and more, “Modern men and women must

learn to yearn for change: not merely to be open to changes in their personal and social lives, but

positively to demand them, actively seek them out and carry them through.”56 I see the discourse

in Žena danas as highly compatible with this idea, since the implicit and/or explicit message of

many of the texts mobilization for change. As the above quoted introductory text in Žena danas

says, the aim of the editors is to create a community of women and mobilize the to make a

certain change, the change, I would add, that concerns mainly women‟s rights, peace in the

world and mobilization against fascism than it concerns, at this specific historical point, fight

against “bourgeoisie.”

Another concept, or category, essential for my research is, of course, gender. In my

understanding of gender, I rely greatly on Jeanne Boydston‟s article “Gender as a Question of

Historical Analysis,” published in journal Gender & History in 2008,57 which aims at rethinking

some of the implications of using gender as a category of analysis as proposed in Joan W. Scott‟s
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1986 essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.”58 I agree with Boydston when

she points out to possible problems of using gender as a fixed and stable category of historical

55
Marshal Berman, “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Marx, Modernism and Modernization,” in All that is Solid
Melts to Air. The Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988 [1982]), 88-89.
56
Ibid., 95-96.
57
Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender & History, Vol.20 No.3 (2008): 558-
583.
58
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review, Vol.91,
No.5 (Dec., 1986): 1053-1075.

19
 analysis by emphasizing the inherent limitations of the processes of categorizations, these

processes being “simplifying, consolidating and universalizing.”59 Within this framework, as she

explains, the irregularities that do not fit are most often simply ignored or suppressed. 60 She

further explains that the dominant understanding of gender as a category of historical analysis is

a contemporary Western category, closely linked to feminist movements in Europe and United

States in the second half of the twentieth century.61 Very importantly, Boydston suggests asking

questions about gender relations in different societies, reminding the reader that “there is no

social experience solely constructed through the process of gender.”62 By asking questions about

gender relations, rather than assuming that gender is the male element in all societies, a feminist

historian can avoid making unnecessary generalizations that she would refute in other contexts.

So, when analyzing the category of rural women in discourses of Seljanka and Žena danas, I will

use gender as a question of historical analysis and as much as possible try to understand how the

desirable role of rural (often referred to as neprosvećena - uneducated) woman was constructed

in relation to the constructs of (rural) men and educated women, and in relation to categories

such as nationality, religion, region, class and age.

I also rely on certain concepts of postcolonial theory. Adrienne Rich‟s idea of “the

politics of location” is valuable especially for the third chapter, for when she says “I need to

understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a
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lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create,”63 it helps me realize the importance of

understanding women I write about in their own not only historical, but also geographical

59
Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” 560.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid., 561.
62
Ibid., 576.
63
Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985
(New York: Norton, 1994), 212.

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 contexts. Moreover, she points to the women‟s body as a “location” as well, which means that

when writing about women it is crucial to look at the politics of motherhood, abortion and

forcible sterilization, or, as Rich says, to “begin with the material.”64 But then, also, look at the

women‟s ideas not as abstractions “float[ing] along above the heads of ordinary people –

women,”65 but as something that also took place within a certain “location.” In the context of

Cold War and the United States‟ anticommunist discourse, Rich also warned that “words like

socialism, communism, democracy, collectivism – are stripped of their historical roots.”66 For this

exact reason, revisiting the different discourses of emancipation from the pre-WWII period, and

re-placing them in their own contexts seems important today. Additionally, I find Chandra

Mohanty‟s concept of “colonization” particularly helpful for analyzing the discourses of

educated women about uneducated women. She uses “colonization” as a discursive notion,

arguing that some of the feminist writings, as she nicely put it, "discursively colonize the

material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world,” thus producing

a homogenized image of a “singular 'third-world woman' - an image which appears arbitrarily

constructed but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of western humanist

discourse.” 67 Having this in mind, I will question whether and to what extent the editors and

writers of Seljanka and Žena danas “colonize” the diverse experiences of Yugoslav rural women.

Finally, as I called the discourses I analyze discourses of emancipation, I should clarify

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that I use this term to name the idea of change in the desirable role of rural women that each of

the discourses propagates. I understand the term as relational to what was, within the discourses,

considered as a desired mode of modernization. I hope to show, therefore, that the idea of

64
Ibid., 213.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 221.
67
Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review, no.30
(Autumn, 1988), 62-63.

21
 emancipation was conditioned by different ideologies and the worldviews these ideologies

generated, but also by the patriarchal relations that especially dominated the life in the

countryside.

To recapitulate, my thesis analyzes the discourses that aimed to make a change in rural

women‟s lives by constructing the desirable role of rural women in public sphere and by

engaging in different kind of educational practices. These discourses, as I aim to show, are

hybrid discourses influenced by social and political ideologies that might seem conflicting at the

first glance, such as eugenics, traditionalism and integral Yugoslavism in the case of Seljanka

and communism/socialism, feminism and pacifism in the case of Žena danas. By looking at

these two discourses, I want to show how the discourses of emancipation of rural women

radicalized and became more inclusive towards the rural women in the 1930s.

I.3. Outline of the Thesis

The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter aims to offer a context for

understanding the discourses of emancipation of rural women. In the first part, my goal is to

explore how „the woman question‟ was before World War I in Serbia and in interwar Yugoslavia

involved with two ideologies crucial for this context – nationalism and socialism. This part of the

chapter is primarily based on the recent research of literary historians Ana Kolarić and Stanislava
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Barać. Following Rudolf Bićanić‟s and Vera Stein Erlich‟s accounts of the rural life and family

in interwar Yugoslavia, in the second part of the first chapter I offer information about the

transformation in the family life in Yugoslav villages and the impact it had on the everyday life

of rural women. Then, I examine the representations and self-representations in Seljanka and

Žena danas, looking at how these two publications detected the problems concerning the lives of

rural women, and what solutions they offered.

22
 As both periodicals I analyze had (among other functions) an educational function, the

second chapter looks at contested conceptions of rural women‟s education in Seljanka and Žena

danas. In this context, I use the concept of education to talk about the ideas and practices that

concern changing the position of rural women through learning and gaining knowledge

previously unavailable to them. In this chapter I aim to answer the following questions: How did

women editing Seljanka and Ţena danas understand and practice the education of women? What

influenced their understanding? How did the publications discuss the question of illiteracy and

education of rural women? By looking at the publications of Laza Marković, a physician who

was in charge for the health section in Seljanka, and comparing them to the program texts in

Seljanka, I argue that education in Seljanka was strongly influenced by the contemporary

eugenic discourses and the official public health education system established in the interwar

period. In the second part, I look at Žena danas‟s texts that concern rural women‟s education and

that discuss the ways rural women should be approached. I specifically focus on the work of

Vera Stein Erlich, arguing that the approach towards education in Žena danas was under the

influence of the contemporary progressive ideas of the the school of individual psychology of

Alfred Adler and the “new pedagogy” practiced in Weimar Republic.

The third chapter again has two parts, and it addresses the problems of saying “we” in the

Yugoslav context, that is it addresses the difficulties of constructing an inclusive “sisterhood” in

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interwar Yugoslavia. Seljanka and Žena danas, both published in Belgrade, aimed at a readership

in whole Yugoslavia which was supposed to be active for a certain cause and to fight for change

in women‟s lives. How did the women imagine the sisterhood in relation to the national identity?

I argue in this chapter that these two conceptions of sisterhood were shaped by two opposed

nation-building projects, integral and federal Yugoslavism respectively. Additionally, I explore

23
 what the ideology of integral Yugoslavism meant, arguing that the Serbian nationalist narrative,

even though in this context put second place to the biological discourses of national renewal, was

still a strong element in the idea of integral Yugoslavism. In the case of Žena danas, I examine

the relationship between communism/socialism, feminism and nationalism in the period after

1935, during the Popular Front.

Chapter 1 - Searching for the Context

In this chapter, I engage with the two contexts essential for understanding the discourses

of rural women‟s emancipation in the interwar period. In the first subchapter I put light to the

discourses of women‟s emancipation in Serbia before World War I and point to the

diversification of the discourses of women‟s emancipation in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and

Slovenes / Yugoslavia in interwar period. As the focus is particularly on the ways „the woman

question‟ is involved with the nationalist and socialist ideologies before and after WWI, it offers

crucial information for situating Seljanka and Žena danas in the wider context of feminism in

Serbia and Yugoslavia. Yet, I must note that there is still a huge gap in knowledge about the

history of feminism in interwar Yugoslavia, so this is only a small part of the, until a more

comprehensive study is written on this subject.

The second subchapter searches for the information about the rural context in interwar
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period, focusing on the transformations in the family life in Yugoslav villages that had been

taking place since the second half of the nineteenth century. In the first part of this subchapter, I

search for the information about changes in Yugoslav rural areas in the accounts of Rudolf

Bićanić and Vera Stein Erlich. Then, I look at the representations and self-representations of

rural women in Seljanka and Žena danas. By focusing on both the said and unsaid in the sources,

my analysis in the sources in this subchapter aims to reconstruct the bias of the sources, by
24
 looking at which problems are said and/or unsaid concerning the labor and everyday life of rural

women. Importantly, this subchapter also serves as a background story for the two following

analytical chapters, which mainly focus on education and nation-building, respectively.

1.1. Feminism, Nationalism and Socialism: A short overview of women’s organizations and

discourses of emancipation in Serbia and Yugoslavia before and after WWI

The first discourses of women‟s emancipation among the Serbian elite can be traced to

the mid-nineteenth century, linked to the organization “United Serbian Youth,” the first Serbian

organization that accepted formal membership of women. The organization was established in

1866 in Novi Sad, and until its end in 1871 its core idea was that Serbian people could get closer

to European civilization through education and culture, which would consequently lead to a rise

of national consciousness and national liberation.68 Within the nationalist ideology, women and

men demanded education for women, because it would enable them to further educate their

children. 69 Hence, the first discourses of women‟s emancipation in the Serbian context were

conditioned by the dominant discourses of nation-building. According to Neda Boţinović, the

approach of different political groups – liberals, socialists and radicals – to the question of

women‟s emancipation did not diversify much after the breakup of “United Serbian Youth,”
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68
Neda Boţinović, Žensko pitanje u devetnaestom i dvadesetom veku, 34-39. See also: Draga Dejanović, “To
Serbian mothers,” in Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States, ed. Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny and Vangelis
Kechriotis, vol. III/1 of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945: Texts and
Commentaries (Central European University Press: 2010), 119-124, accessed May 27, 2017,
http://books.openedition.org/ceup/1977.
69
According to Neda Boţinović, the approach of different political groups – liberals, socialists and radicals – to the
question of emancipation of women did not diversify much after the breakup of “United Serbian Youth,” mainly
because they all had similar understanding of the goals of women‟s emancipation and that there were no (or a very
small number of) working-class women at the time. Yet, it would be interesting to think further about the
entanglement of feminist, nationalist and socialist ideologies from the 1860s and the way this entanglement
developed and changed over the years. See: Neda Boţinović, Žensko pitanje..., 48.

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 mainly because they all had similar understanding of the goals of women‟s emancipation and

that there were no (or a very small number of) working-class women at the time.70

As Ana Kolarić has shown in her recent dissertation about gender, literature and

modernity in periodicals Žena and The Freewoman, the discourses of women‟s emancipation in

the Serbian context were still sought within the framework of national-liberation in the years

before World War I. Žena (1911-1914) [The Woman] was edited by Milica Tomić, 71 who

worked and published together with her husband Jaša Tomić.72 Žena shows a strong continuity

with the discourses of emancipation and women‟s education from the late nineteenth century,

framed largely within the patriarchal idea of the role of the Serbian woman. In the 1910s context,

Jaša Tomić saw the family – not individual - as the basis of society, and noted that a woman

cannot exist outside of the circle of family and home, and Milica Tomić used the same family

and nation agenda to argue for the importance of women‟s emancipation.73

Regarding the periodical Žena, it is useful to note its construction of the women‟s role in

relation to the Balkan wars (and WWI), when women were represented as mothers and wives

who send their sons and husbands to war, but also as nurses who help the soldiers, which was

emancipatory as this was the first public job that women were allowed to do, although it reified

women‟s caring role.74 Moreover, women across the country experienced working on their own
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70
Neda Boţinović, Žensko pitanje..., 48. Yet, it would be interesting to think further about the entanglement of
feminist, nationalist and socialist ideologies from the 1860s and the way this entanglement developed and changed
over the years.
71
Milica Tomić (1859-1944) was a daughter of Serbian politician Svetozar Miletić, who took part in 1848 rebellions
and was later the mayor of Novi Sad. She went to school in Novi Sad, Budapest and Vienna, but when her father
was arrested, she took over part of her work and thus did not go to study medicine as it had been planned. Over the
years, she was active in Novi Sad, editing the women‟s periodical Žena, established the first women‟s library
Posestrima, and she collaborated with the Hungarian feminist and suffragist Rosika Schwimmer. For more about
Milica Tomić, see: In Serbian: “Milica Tomić,“ Knjiženstvo, accessed May 26, 2017,
http://knjizenstvo.etf.bg.ac.rs/sr/authors/milica-tomic, and in English: “Tomić, Milica,” Women Writers, accessed
May 26, 2017, http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/authors/show/4001.
72
The leader of the Serbian Radical Party in Vojvodina (part of Austria-Hungary at the time).
73
Ibid., 137-138
74
Ibid., 263

26
 without men on a large scale during World War I. As one article from 1922 says, “women were

left alone to protect the homeland, the children, and to await the enemy. [...] Within a year […]

the whole economy was in her hands.”75 In this new context, new questions emerged, such as the

women‟s right for public work and the political rights of women, including the right to vote.

After World War I, the discourses of women‟s emancipation diversified significantly.

Women‟s organizations advocating for women‟s emancipation in the interwar period (and the

press connected to these organizations) are usually labeled as liberal, socialist and conservative. I

believe that the situation is far more complicated and is yet to be researched in detail. Apart from

the deeply transformative experience of the war, one of the main reasons why the situation

becomes more complex after the World War I is the establishment of the new country, the

Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Kingdom of Yugoslavia. With this change of context,

pre-war discourses of women‟s emancipation also transform: firstly, they can no longer be

centered on Serbian national-liberation narratives, and secondly, they are no longer primarily

linked to the nation-building narratives. After the war, the focus is mainly on the women‟s legal

emancipation and the fight for suffrage. But what happened with the strong Serbian nation-

building discourses in the interwar period? And, secondly, what was the political discourse of the

central feminist organization in the interwar period, Ženski pokret?

With the new country there were new questions about the emancipation of women, and
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new women's organizations that sought for equality in different ways. Already in 1919,

representatives from the whole Kingdom met in Belgrade and founded the Narodni ženski savez

Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca [National Women‟s Alliance of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes]. Their first

declared goals were: national unity, then equality of women and men before the law, equal pay

75
Zorka Krasnar-Karadţić, “Ţenski pokret kod nas i na strani,” in Ženski pokret 3, 1-2 (January-February 1922), 23-
24, as quoted in: Thomas A. Emmert, “Ţenski pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s,” 34-35.

27
 for equal work, equal education opportunities, struggle against prostitution and alcohol. But,

there were a lot of differences between the ways the representatives, especially Croatian and

Serbian, understood national unity. The most famous remark probably is that of Croatian

journalist Marija Jurić Zagorka, who argued not only that the Serbian women were in the

majority at the meeting, but that they showed “an unshakable, traditional patriotism.”76 Serbian

women sought to be “the first among equals” because of their heroism and sacrifices during the

national-liberation wars, and, what is more, Zagorka accused Serbian women of understanding

Yugoslavism as a territorial, and not a national, unitary concept, which, consequently, left a lot

of space for their Serbian patriotism and national sentiment.77 It is indicative that Croatian and

Slovenian women at the meeting wanted the Alliance to be called Yugoslav, while Serbian

women insisted that the name encompassed all three “tribal” names. 78 As Melissa Bokovoy

argued, Serbian women did not find it easy to renounce the earlier, nationalist discourse, and

consequently it was difficult to establish a unitary organization.79

As for the socialist discourses, the situation is very interesting and it challenges the strict

divide between the socialist and “bourgeois feminist” discourses and organizations, as present in

Neda Boţinović‟s and Jovanka Kecman‟s accounts. The crucial publication for understanding

the connections between the socialist and the liberal feminist discourses in the interwar period is

the periodical Ženski pokret [The Women‟s Movement], what Stanislava Barać calls the “central
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76
Zagorka, “Snimke iz Beograda,” Jutarnji list, 8 October 1919, 3, as quoted in: Melissa Bokovoy, “Kosovo
Maiden(s): Serbian Women Commemorate the Wars of National Liberation, 1912-1918,” in N. M. Wingfield and
M. Bucur, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
77
Ibid.
78
Ana Kolarić, Rod, književnost i modernost u periodici s početka 20. veka, 267.
79
Also, Melissa Bokovoy adds: “Commemorations in both Serbia and Croatia after the war privileged certain kinds
of experience and excluded others. Not only did commemorative activities tend toward privileging one national
group over another, but commemoration of the wars of national liberation privileged male experience over female
experience. Despite the visibility of women during the Balkan Wars and World War I, as combatants, non-
combatants, refugees, and victims, women‟s experiences became either secondary considerations or largely ignored
in the commemorative practices and traditions which emerged in Yugoslavia during the interwar period.” Melissa
Bokovoy, “Kosovo Maiden(s): Serbian Women Commemorate the Wars of National Liberation, 1912-1918,” 167.

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 institution of the feminist counterpublic in interwar Yugoslavia.”80 It was the official publication

of the society Ženski pokret, established first in 1919 in Belgrade and then in Zagreb, Ljubljana,

Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and other. In 1924, all the regional sections of this organization were

united into the Alijansa ženskih pokreta [The Alliance of the Woman‟s Movements], and from

that moment the periodical Ženski pokret is an official organ of this alliance, aiming to gather

women from all the regional sections of Ženski pokret and to follow their work.81 As the editors‟

approach was “intellectual elitism,” 82 the reading audience consisted mainly of the educated

middle-class feminists from the urban centers of the state. In the beginning of the 1920s, the

women from Ženski pokret demanded radical changes, as they aimed for the female suffrage

rights and the protection of women‟s rights. Yet, even though the change they demanded was

radical – it was not revolutionary, as it did not ask for the destruction of the social order. 83 Barać

notes that the periodical was a “melting pot of feminist and communist ideology,” 84 although in

the period of the royal dictatorship (1929-1934), the editors seem to have given up some of their

demands and focused more on the discourse of motherhood, although the feminist ideology was

to a large extent still preserved.85

Barać‟s examples give us a clue that the feminist and socialist ideologies among the

educated middle-class women in Yugoslavia were not entirely conflicting. Already in 1920,

Ženski pokret publishes Alexandra Kollontai‟s text about prostitution, whereas in 1922 and 1923
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there are several texts about Rosa Luxemburg that even send calls for revolution hidden within

the form of literary criticism, not interesting to censors.86 Very interestingly, there are also texts

80
Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost, 132.
81
Ibid., 131.
82
Ibid., 139
83
Ibid., 132
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid., 133.
86
Ibid., 149-152.

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 that criticize the limits of women‟s emancipation within the Soviet “communist experiment,” so

in 1927 Julka Hlapec ĐorĊević says that the problem is that women in Soviet Russia, even

though they have their own work, still do all the housework and the work around the children

without the help of their husbands. She concludes that, when it comes to „the woman question,‟

there is “a fiasco in USSR”.‟87 From 1933, Ženski pokret had a strong pacifist stance and it often

warned to the danger of the German national-socialism.88 Although there is not yet sufficient

research about how members of the Ženski pokret conceptualized feminism or women‟s

emancipation in the 1920s, Ajlojzija Štebi‟s 1930 article appears to be one of the key articles for

understanding how women (at least the non-socialist women) conceptualized the difference

between what she called “socialist and bourgeois women‟s movement.” Ajlojzija Štebi‟s view is

that, even though there used to be a sharp conflict between these two groups in the international

women‟s movement, “the socialist women‟s movement had a huge influence on the bourgeois

women‟s movement.” She adds that although the both “factions” exist in Yugoslavia, they are

not very strong so the two groups can work together for a common cause as “there are not yet

really profound and sharp differences” between them. 89 These examples show that the

differences between the “bourgeois” and the “socialist” discourses were not as distinct as one

might think. This is an important context for understanding the collaboration of the feminist

organization Ženski pokret and the younger women from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
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that established the Youth Section of Ženski pokret in 1935 and published Žena danas.

Finally, it is important to note here that Ženski pokret did not publish many articles about

rural women. However, women from the organization Ženski pokret had organized domestic

87
Julka Hlapec ĐorĊević, “Ţene i deca u Sovjetskoj Rusiji,” Ženski pokret, 1927/12, 4, as quoted in Stanislava
Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost, 153.
88
Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost, 133.
89
Ajlojzija Štebi, “Jedna paralela,” 1930/7-8, 2, as quoted in Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost, 134.

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 schools for rural women from 1922 to 1929. In 1929, Darinka Lacković started organizing the

King‟s Fund Domestic School. Darinka Lacković was a part of the 1920s feminist circles as

well, she was a contributor to the periodical Ženski pokret and, as I don‟t have exact information

about her, I can only assume that she also participated in the organizations of the school in the

earlier period. This, unfortunately, is a gap in this research, and my analysis of Seljanka is done

without knowing the details of how the feminists in the 1920s related to the conflicting nation-

building projects in Yugoslavia.

***

My intention in this part of the subchapter was to put light to the discourses of women‟s

emancipation in Serbia before World War I, and to, by looking at the continuities and

discontinuities in interwar period, point to two complexities when it comes to the „woman

question‟ in the context of Yugoslavia. The first mainly concerns the contested conceptions of

“Yugoslavia” between Serbian women and Croatian and Slovenian women right after WWI, and

the strong Serbian nationalist narratives that did not disappear in interwar Yugoslavia. The

second complexity is connected to the alleged distinction between the “bourgeois” and

“socialist” discourses of women‟s emancipation, which I aimed to challenge by showing how,

even though there were differences, these differences were considered as minor in the given

historical context.
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31
 1.2. The Rural Context: Reconstructing the Problems and the Solutions of the Everyday

Life of Rural Women

1.2.1. Transformations in the Family Life in Yugoslav Rural Areas

The discourses of emancipation of rural women in the interwar period were part of the

larger context of the contemporary feminist discourses in Yugoslavia discussed in the previous

subchapter. However, discourses of rural women‟s emancipation were also responses to the

processes of modernization and of transformation of the traditional patriarchal way of life that

had been taking place in the Balkans since the end of the nineteenth century. In the rural context,

the major consequence of the modernization processes was the dissolution of zadruga - the

traditional form of huge patriarchal family, in which different generations would live and work

in a collectively owned household. It was a hierarchical patriarchal community in which each

individual had a place and a task. Importantly, it was a self-sufficient unit of production, in

which the members worked together and shared the products of their labor.90

In his 1936 book Kako živi narod: život u pasivnim krajevima [How the People Lives:

Life in the Passive Regions], Rudolf Bićanić, young economist and a member of the Croatian

Peasant Party, offered a study about the way the rural population lived in the poorest regions in

Yugoslavia, allowing us to better understand the context in which the transformation of the
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traditional life was taking place. 91 The detail that probably reflects the peasants‟ troubles the

90
For more about South-Slav zadruga, see: Maria N. Todorova, “The problem of the South Slav zadruga” and
“Conclusion” in: Maria N. Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic
Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 127-166; and:
Elinor Murray Despalatovic, Preface to How the People Live: Life in the Passive Regions by Rudolf Bićanić, Joel
M. Halpern and Elinor Murray Despotović, transl. by Stephern Clissold (University of Massachussets Amherst,
1981 [1936]), accessed May 30, 2017, http://scholarworks.umass.edu/anthro_res_rpt21/1.
91
In 1935 Bićanić set out on a journey around the villages of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia as to get familiar
with the way the people – narod – actually lived. According to R.J.Crampton, this research was a part of the
Croatian Peasant Party and Peasant Economic Union‟s (Gospodarska Sloga) endevour to “improve the material and
cultural standard of the peasant‟s life,” by setting up of co-operatives. R.J. Crampton, review of the How the People

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 most is that, according to Bićanić, they felt the year 1935 had been worse even than 1917 - the

year remembered for disastrous hunger during World War I.92 All day and every day, peasants

were occupied with the struggle for survival and the effort to satisfy their primary needs.93 The

reason for the difficult life Bićanić saw in the economic crisis and the rapid “penetration of

capitalism into the village.”94 As Bićanić noticed perhaps with a touch of romanticism:

In the days when the peasant neither bought nor sold, there were no crises like the
one gripping the world today. The peasant consumed what he produced: he drank
his milk and his wine, ate his own poultry and mutton. Today the market snatches
it all away for next to nothing in return.95
In the interwar period, the rural population had been increasingly burdened with taxes and debts,

they had to sell the food they had produced cheaply while eating only corn porridge for each

meal, whereas their methods of farming remained undeveloped. To illustrate his point about the

undeveloped character of these areas entirely, Bićanić highlights that only one fourth of the

Croats have beds in their homes – usually one room in the house would serve as a bedroom and

all members of the household would sleep there together.96

While Bićanić was concerned about how people lived in the rural areas, social

anthropologist Vera Stein Erlich was more interested in how women lived in different regions, as

well as how their situation changed with the transformation of the old family way of life. In

1937, she had started her seminal research about the transformations in Yugoslav family life,
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which took shape in a study Yugoslav Family in Transition published in 1964.97 In this research,

Erlich was interested primarily in the consequences of the dissolution of the traditional

Live: Life in the Passive Regions by Rudolf Bićanić, Joel M. Halpern and Elinor Murray Despotović, in The
Agricultural History Review, Vol. 31. No. 2. (1983), 180.
92
Rudolf Bićanić, How the People Live: Life in the Passive Regions, 29.
93
Ibid., 28.
94
Ibid., 25.
95
Ibid., 61.
96
Ibid., 112-114.
97
Vera Stein Erlich, Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji (Zagreb: Liber, 1971)

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 patriarchal family life. What kind of difficulties did this change bring for the members of the

families? According to Erlich, there were both “light and dark” sides of these changes. The main

problem was that the nuclear families that would divide from a zadruga would do it with the

intention to work independently, but without predicting all the risks of independence, the hard

work within the household, as well as the problems of dependence on the market economy.98 As

Erlich informs us, the labor became more difficult, as there were no other household members as

a replacement for the hard work, so even the children had to start working at an early age. 99

Along with that, the position of women within the family changed as well, and the change was

ambivalent. Whereas in traditional zadrugas women had been in charge of the female jobs, such

as making clothes and food, at this point they started doing the heavy farm work as well. 100

Interestingly, women were in a less secure position, as they were not protected by the community

any more from, for example, domestic violence. But, at the same time, they were, as Erlich put it,

“starting to move more freely” and to form their lives more actively.101

I see the discourses of emancipation of rural women in these two sources as different

responses to the already ongoing changes in the lives of rural women. In the continuation of this

subchapter, I will look at the representations and self-representations of rural women in Seljanka

and Žena danas, with the intention to explore if and to what extent the problems detected

concerning rural women in the two sources differ, as well as what the solutions the editors
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potentially offer to the problems are. I will examine the content of the articles, particularly

focusing on the issue of women‟s labor and the way the women‟s labor was conceptualized in

the sources. However, I will also aim to reveal the silences, or, as Ann Stoler has written in a

98
Vera Stein Erlich, Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji, 391.
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid., 5.
101
Ibid., 393-394.

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 different context, my objective is to look at “what was „unwritten‟ because „everyone knew it‟,

what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it

could not be said.”102 In the case of Seljanka, I examine the program introductory texts along

with the remarkable correspondence between the former students and the editor published in the

section “Our Mail” in each issue. In the case of Žena danas, I look at the representations of rural

women, which put light to what was unsaid in to a large extent idealistic representations of life in

the countryside in Seljanka, but also point to the message(s) this periodical communicate about

the rural women to its readers.

1.2.2. Seljanka: Housewife, Wife, Mother – and Agricultural Worker

Here comes “Seljanka!” There are periodicals for almost every profession.
Specialized newspapers exist for teachers, priests, professors, engineers,
attorneys, merchants, craftsmen, women in towns and peasant men. Peasant
women, who can hardly read and who know so little, now finally get their own
periodical, because they need to hear and learn many things as well.103
Hence begins the introductory text of Seljanka, written by the editor Darinka Lacković. From the

first sentence, it is evident that the category “seljanka” [peasant woman] is perceived, above all,

as a profession. The aim of the texts published in this periodical was “to give lessons on:

science104 about cooking, health, agricultural domestic work – cooking, food preservation and

handwork.”105 The periodical, therefore, was basically to serve as a manual or a handbook and to
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educate rural women, thus providing them with knowledge necessary for the performance of

their domestic work. The category of rural women was primarily defined through the labor they

102
A. Stoler. “Prologue in Two Parts,” in: Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common
Sense (Princeton: Princeton University, 2009), 3
103
“Uvod” [Introduction], Seljanka, 1933/01, 2.
104
Originally, the author uses the word nauka, which in Serbian means science, but it can also mean knowledge in
general. I chose to translate it as science in order to emphasize the stand of the author that all the “domestic duties”
of rural women should be taken as seriously as, for example, science about health.
105
“Uvod,” Seljanka, 1933/01, 2.

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 are supposed to perform in their households, but how was the rural women‟s role in the

household constructed, and what did it imply?

“Naturally,” every woman works as a housewife, wife and a mother,106 and I will look at

what Seljanka prescribes to each of these functions. The housework of women consisted

primarily of the maintenance of family health and household hygiene. The aim of the health

institutions from the beginning of 20h century onwards was to improve extremely poor living

conditions in the countryside, and the advices are very similar to the public health discourses

both before and after World War I.107 The articles in Seljanka offer very basic information about

health and hygiene, for example how to boil soap, 108 how to cook healthy food and how to

rightly preserve it for winter.109 The letters and the program texts also indicate that the women

who had been previously educated in the school should further inform their family and other

women in the village of these important issues. However, since changing lifestyles was not easy,

women often wrote about difficulties they encountered in their homes. Responding to Ivanka

Kuzmanović‟s letter, Darinka Lacković writes:

I trust you when you say that you are struggling with your family to accept your
advice, I laughed when I read your letter in which you describe how your mother
was angry with you when you opened the window when they were asleep, so that
the fresh air comes in, what did she say? Why do we have fire, then, to heat the
outside? Mr. doctor will be very pleased when he hears that you managed to
introduce a spittoon in your home, your family must admit that it is much nicer to
spit in a spittoon then wherever in the house.110
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The changes women mostly write about include opening the windows, spitting in one place

instead of all over the house, and eating from separate plates. Ivanka Kuzmanović writes:

106
D., “Seljanka kao saradnik u poljoprivredi” [Peasant Woman as a Coworker in Agriculture], Seljanka, 1933/01,
5
107
This will be analyzed in length in the second chapter.
108
“Kuvanje sapuna” [Cooking Soap], Seljanka, 1933/01, 13.
109
“Naš kuvar“ [Our Cookbook], Seljanka 1933/02, 13.
110
Darinka Lacković to Ivanka Kuzmanović, Seljanka, 1933/02: 15.

36
 You should know how beautifully I tidied the house, everybody listens to me, I
made sweet cherry compote and jam, and they also like my cooked dishes. Only
one thing they don‟t want to listen, to eat from their own plate, I eat from my own
plate and they tell me we are not sick so you can eat with us. I explained to them
why it is not good to eat from the common pot.111
Interestingly, she adds that thanks to her teachers, she does not have to “live like cattle” any

more.112

Looking at these letters, it appears that the difference between the “old” and the “new”

way of life indeed was huge. The school seems to have made quite an impact on the everyday

life of – at least some - rural families. Even though a number of women complained that it was

hard to make changes, many wrote about their success in changing not only their home, but also

the wider community. Darinka Glogovac informed her teacher that everybody is satisfied with

her knowledge: “Every evening I give lectures, the older ones listen to me more or less, but the

younger ones have already learned almost all about hygiene.” 113 Also, Marina Cvijić-Kerović

from Bosnia wrote: “Every evening they ask me to instruct them and they even come from other

houses, so I practically lecture a class, so they start laughing how I speak so seriously and they

are amazed how I have managed to learn so much in eight months.”114 These examples illustrate

the successful impact this school and probably other similar schools had on the everyday life in

rural areas across country. Even though the number of women was not so large, the impact seems

to have been on a much wider scale.

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While the most explicit goal of the school was to improve rural women‟s knowledge in

performing their housework, the ideology of the school did not go against the common opinion

that every woman‟s role is to get married and give birth to a lot of children. The program of the

111
Ivanka Kuzmanović to Darinka Lacković, 1933/09, 15.
112
Ibid.
113
Darinka Glogovac to Darinka Lacković, Seljanka, 1934/01: 16.
114
Marina Cvijić-Kerović to Darinka Lacković, Seljanka, 1933/05: 14.

37
 school obviously encompassed the advice of the right way to get married. Because of this

specific education, the women who had gone to Domestic School were highly appreciated in the

village. Ljubica Grković from Hercegovina writes:

Now even our peasants say the school is good, and they appreciate our
knowledge, even though before they had thought that a girl that leaves home is
good for nothing. Now, Miss, I have a lot of suitors, I can say I am proposed by
peasants as well as by office bearers, but I will not decide without your
knowledge because I look at you as my guardian.115
Notably, this letter shows that Darinka Lacković had a profound influence on the girls. “I am

glad you got married, especially that you married into a peasant house,” she would write. 116 In

the letters, Darinka Lacković was often referred to as “the mother,” and she would even interfere

into the relation between the real mother and the daughter.117 A girl, therefore, should listen to

their parents, get married and then perform her duties as she had learnt in the school. In one of

the letters Vukosava Boglić, apparently Lacković‟s associate from Knin, describes how five

former students from the villages around Knin visited her for a couple of days and mentions how

she helped one of the girls: “Stana was at my place for three days, I talked to her a lot and I

explicated her the role in the house.”118 This implies that the “role in the house” was something

taken for granted.

Finally, the text “Mother” published in the second issue of Seljanka offers a description

of what being a mother implies. The text makes a clear differentiation between mothers and
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fathers; while mother is the one who primarily educates her children, father is only “a guest in

115
Ljubica Grković to Darinka Lacković, Seljanka, 1933/03: 16-17.
116
Darinka Lacković to Darinka Ćosić, Seljanka, 1933/04: 15-16.
117
In the letter to Slavica Krajaĉić from Karlovac, she writes: “I see from your letter that you are struggling with the
marriage, I am sure they do not let you marry who you want, listen to your mother, dear child, she is your best
friend. Write to me lengthily, so I will see who is right.” Darinka Lacković to Slavica Krajaĉić, Seljanka, 1933/03:
15.
118
Vukosava Boglić to Darinka Lacković, Seljanka, 1934/01: 14-15.

38
 the house,” always busy and unable to actually take care of the children. 119 Additionally, mothers

are also in charge of preserving national customs and, through telling folk tales to their children,

developing the national sentiment. 120 In this context, a clear division between “female” and

“male” work is made, while not a word was mentioned about the work men do. The implication

seems to be that it should not be questioned how men are “busy” and that all the work in the

house and connected to children is, naturally, women‟s work and women‟s only. When it comes

to motherhood, the aim was to raise children that are patriots and that gladly make sacrifices for

their homeland. 121

One of the crucial things concerning motherhood is knowledge about pregnancy, birth

and baby care. As I have explained, the discourse of Seljanka implied that every woman should

get married and that it was better to marry into a peasant house. Of course, the fact that marriage

implied having children was unsaid because that was very well known. In a letter to Ivanka

ĐorĊević-AnĊelković, Lacković writes:

For you peasant women, especially there, where there are no doctors and
midwives, it is necessary to know how you will manage. And you were all so shy
about it and some even got angry that you were told something about it. All of
you are future mothers and housewives and that knowledge is the most important
for you, because in villages a young woman might die only because she is not
informed, and because she takes the birth-giving for granted.122
Thus, knowledge about giving birth was not yet articulated among rural women, or if it was, it
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could not be said because it was considered shameful. Certainly, the absence of knowledge about

crucial issues related to childbirth was one of the causes of the highest mortality rates of newborn

children in whole Europe. Through the school and the periodical, Darinka Lacković and her

119
Đ. Karajovanović, “Majka” [Mother], Seljanka, 1933/02, 7.
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
122
Darinka Lacković to Ivanka ĐorĊević-AnĊelković, 1934/02.

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 associates aimed to make a change which, although limited by a traditionalist and patriarchal

worldview, still introduced profound changes into the lives of rural women.

So, according to Seljanka, the role of the peasant woman as a housewife, wife and a

mother was basically to cook, to keep the house clean and healthy in a way instructed by the

periodical, to give birth to children and to raise them in patriotic manners. However, Seljanka

added a new component to the rural women‟s “natural” labor: every peasant woman was to

become her husband‟s coworker in the agricultural production of the household. This, it appears,

reflects the already ongoing changes in the lives of rural women, which put women in a difficult

position as, next to their “natural” labor, now they had to do the heavy agricultural labor as well.

In Seljanka, there is an attempt to come to terms with this problem by explaining that agricultural

labor consists of the male and female part. Specifically, women‟s part consisted of: poultry

raising, dairy production and growing vegetables and flowers. In this sense, women‟s labor

gained an economic element as well, so it seems that the idea was to “liberate” women from the

hard work in the field by making the “women‟s” part of the work economically sustainable. The

writer of the periodical assumed that all the material needed in the household, such as material

for clothes and food, should be covered by the income the housewife makes.123 The following

chapter will engage with these ideas in detail.

Lastly, Seljanka offered one more interesting novelty to the everyday life of rural women.
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Namely, with the establishment of this periodical, some rural women got the opportunity to

become a part of a “public forum,” or, using Fraser‟s term, “subaltern counterpublic” created

through the mail section in which the letters were published. From the pragmatic, “business”

perspective, this public correspondence seems to have functioned as an encouragement for the

123
On the contrary, the larger income (presumably from the work of men) should be used for improvement of the
household in general, for example to mend the buildings, buy healthier cattle, buy more land, etc. D., “Seljanka kao
saradnik u poljoprivredi,” Seljanka, 1933/01, 6.

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 women to pay yearly subscription to the periodical and to contribute to the work of the school

through recommending new students. The fact that the former students were supposed to

participate in recruiting new students meant that they had their share of responsibilities regarding

the whole organization. It was expected from them to write letters continuously and make effort

to find new participants. If a woman would not write for a certain period of time, the editor

would address her via a short letter in the periodical, asking her if anything is wrong. In this way,

the correspondence was maintained, and the women remained a part of a larger network of

women. The limits of this “subaltern counterpublic” formed of rural women will be discussed in

the third chapter.

1.2.3. The Representations of Rural Women in Žena danas

Periodical Žena danas dealt with the similar problems as Seljanka, although it brought

different views and different solutions to the problems. In the text “Peasant Woman – Franja

Vuĉinović,”124 the editors of Žena danas positively evaluated F. Vuĉinović‟s book Seljačka žena

[Peasant Woman], saying that the book‟s author “is right to be critical of those who always write

nicely about the countryside.” Furthermore, they added that “learning about the circumstances

rural women live in should serve as a kind of help in the process of approaching them, which is

why the booklet Seljačka žena is so welcome, because in the image of Croatian peasant woman
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we recognize those women from closer areas such as Belgrade, Morava, Southern Serbia or

Sandţak.” 125 At least two things are important here. First, the editors of Žena danas were

interested to learn about the actual experiences of women from different parts of the country,

which will be discussed in the following chapters. Secondly, the editors of Žena danas seem to

be in debate with those discourses that idealize the countryside, such as the one in Seljanka. It is

124
“Seljačka žena – Franja Vuĉinović” [„Peasant Woman‟ - Franja Vuĉinović], Žena danas, 1937/7, 17.
125
Ibid.

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 not surprising in this context that Žena danas offers information that is not talked about in

Seljanka, or simply that it approaches the same issues differently.

While Seljanka idealized the “profession” of peasant women, the text “The Life of a

Bosnian Peasant Woman” raised the problem of women being “sold” and “bought” in order to

perform cheap labor in the households they had been “married-into”. In Bosnian rural areas, for

example, it is common to marry fifteen-year-old boys just before they leave for the army, so that

the new wife can replace him in the household. Namely, it is cheaper to get a girl that would

work all day with no right to complain, than to pay for a wage earner that usually works only one

kind of job and demands time to rest.126 A young wife becomes a slave for the whole household;

“If the household has more members, the young woman becomes the servant of the whole

zadruga, she has to do all the hardest jobs nobody else wants to.”127

All the texts about rural women in Žena danas emphasize the incredible amount of work

women in the countryside face every day and all year long without a break, comparing women

explicitly to slaves. What does rural women‟s labor consist of? In autumn, when men have more

free time, women have to work around the cattle, to preserve food and to sew clothes for the

whole household.128 During winter, when men stay in the warm house and when all the streams

are covered with thick ice, “a peasant woman breaks the ice, takes the water, and in the coldest

possible weather she rinses the laundry.”129 When the summer comes, a peasant woman does not
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have a vacation like some other people:

She gets up at three in the morning, prepares the meal for work in the fields,
makes cornbread, feeds the chickens, cleans the house, and when the sun comes

126
“Ţivot Bosanske seljanke” [The Life of a Bosnian Rural Woman], Žena danas, 1938/11-12, 20.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid.

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 out she leaves for the fields. Often she must take lunch to the fields, […], because
men never carry pots… As soon as she gets to the fields, she starts digging.130
After an hour rest in the sun, even though the river might be nearby, she has no time to go

swimming, as more work awaits them at home; while men have a rest and wait for dinner, she

prepares dinner and does numerous other chores for the house.131 In other words, women‟s work

never ends.

The descriptions of women‟s labor in Žena danas are far from saying that more

responsibility in the household could mean more independence for a woman. In the text

“Development of Rural Women‟s Labor,” Pavle Mijović indentified the problem concerning the

increasingly difficult rural women‟s daily work. According to Mijović, in ancient time women‟s

labor consisted mainly of child-rearing and child-caring. However, with the disolution of the

tribal organizations in Montenegro and the development of agriculture, women‟s work

quantitatively and qualitatively changed. 132 This indicates to the difference between the way

Seljanka and Žena danas responded to the changes that were happening with the dissolution of

the old way of life which burdened women with additional woek. While in Seljanka the increase

in the ammount of work of rural women was used to pronounce women as equal to their

husbands – coworkers in agriculture, equal in difference -, in Žena danas the change is

negatively evaluated exactly because, rather than improving the position of peasant women or
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making them independent of their husbands, it simply increased the amount of women‟s work

and made her life more difficult.

This further opens the important question of the division of labor. Whereas the texts in

Seljanka are silent about what the work of men actually implied, Žena danas openly talked about

130
O.V. – uĉiteljica, “Kako ţena na selu provodi leto“ [How a Peasant Woman Spends Her Summer], 1938/16, 29.
131
Ibid.
132
Pavle Mijović, “Razvitak rada seoskih ţena” [Development of Rural Women‟s Labor], Žena danas, 1939/19, 09.

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 the privileged position of men. On Sundays, they say, men get into their white Sunday suits and

leave for communal gatherings, whereas women stay home to feed the cattle, clean up the barn,

prepare meals.133 While women work, men leave to a local kafana [guesthouse, inn], come back

to lunch and then go back to kafana, since they “have some work there.”134 Nevertheless, the

editors of Žena danas are careful to say that only women work hard: “Still, it would be wrong to

think that men‟s position is much better than women‟s. It is, but only in the way that he has

complete freedom, while a woman is subjected to him.”135 This points to the idea that both

peasant women and peasant men were exploited, but the emphasis was still on the fact that

women‟s position and women‟s labor was far more difficult than labor and position of their

husbands, for the reasons mentioned above. Finally, while men have their “days off” and the

rights to go out and socialize, women work without a break:

And when she almost falls down from all the work, then the husband comes back
from a festivity or a village drinking bout. She must serve him, take his dirty
shoes off, and for the smallest mistake his heavy, manly fist could be burdened on
her weak shoulders. Men who do not beat their wives in villages are rare.136
Women‟s labor briefly stops only during her other labor – childbirth. The problem,

according to Žena danas is that rural women would very often deliver a baby alone in the field.

After that, the practice was to go alone to the stream to wash herself only one day after the

delivery and, with no more delay, continue the work because it is shameful for the woman to rest
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after the childbirth. Furthermore, the article “What Needs To Be Done To Decrease Maternal

Mortality” brings criticism against the “rooted and false assurance, that reigns mostly among

men,” that Yugoslav women have a “superhuman resistance,” and that they are “heroic” because

133
“Ţivot Bosanske seljanke”, Žena danas, 1938/11-12, 20
134
O.V. – uĉiteljica, “Kako ţena na selu provodi leto,“ 1938/16, 29
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid.

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 they usually give birth in the field.137 The article argues that there is no exact information about

how many women die during the childbirth, and that because of ignorance and hard life

Yugoslav women workers and peasant women aged twenty-five looks like forty.138 Concerning

the problems of childbirth, the proposed solution is the following:

The most important factor is the state, the only effective solution. To appoint
enough county doctors, especially in the stagnant areas, to make sure not to leave
even one county without a doctor and a midwife. To open labor departments in
existing hospitals, to open new maternity hospitals, especially in rural areas, and
to strive to have a systematic plan for rural maternity hospitals.139
This citation illustrates the general attitude of the editorial board of Žena danas, conditioned, of

course, by the communist political ideology.

There is one more issue Seljanka is completely silent about. It appears that abortion was

not written (or talked) about in the school or the periodical because it could not be said. There

are several mentions of the abortion issue in Žena danas. The most striking example is Sofija

Mijović‟s story “Conversations” in which a poor, but healthy peasant woman Luca, married to a

drunk and pregnant for eleventh time, explains to her neighbors that she cannot abort, because a

women that does something like that is damned in the “other life.” Yet, what happens instead of

abortion shocks the reader profoundly. Instead of ceasing the pregnancy, Luca puts her newborn

babies unprotected in the cold and “prays to the God to take the child.” After two days, the child

would die, and she would say: “What can you do, God‟s will!” The same thing, then, happens to
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Luca‟s sixteen year old daughter. The narrator, however, depicts these women with empathy:

This Luca is a rarely kind human being, but the prejudice not to leave her husband, the
wish to educate her female child, threw her deeply. But, in the eye of her neighbor, Luca
is a good person. She is not lazy, nor corrupt, but too honest. Naivety made Luca go so

137
“Šta treba uraditi da se smanji smrtnost porodilja” [What Needs To Be Done To Decrease Maternal Mortality],
Žena danas, 1937/03, 14.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid.

45
 far as to call for God, to take her babies, because a baby in her cottage is so huge that she
could not bear to look around her so many hungry children.140
The problem, again, is not the individual human being, but poverty and prejudice that rule in the

society, thus disabling young, uneducated women to make a change. This text functions as an

explanation for those who are not informed of the problems rural women cope with, but also as

an incentive for women to think differently and to fight against prejudice and for education.

From this perspective, the discourse in Seljanka seems ignorant of the problems that many rural

women have to face with, such as being married to a drunkard and extreme poverty no women‟s

economizing. Therefore, Žena danas articulates a problem with a lot of empathy and care for

individual human being, but also with an insinuation how to solve it on a structural level.

1.2.4. Conclusions

The dissolution of the traditional huge patriarchal family in the Balkans – zadruga -

started taking place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, the traditional patriarchal

way of life began to disappear. This tendency continued rapidly in interwar period, and it

influenced the everyday life in rural areas greatly. With the rapid transformations of the family

life and the economic crisis of 1929, life for the rural population became increasingly difficult.

Life became difficult especially for women, as they, along with their traditional share of work, at

this point started doing the heavy work as well. In this context, discourses in Seljanka and Žena
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danas detect the problems in rural women‟s lives and offer solutions in their own way. While

there are some problems that are indicated in both periodicals, such as the incredible lack of

hygiene and high level of child mortality, the offered solutions are quite different. On the one

hand, the editor of Seljanka makes a selection of women she wants to work with and educate,

hoping that they would further educate other women and men in the villages. The discourse in

140
Sofija Mijović, “Razgovori” [Conversations], Žena danas, 1937/07, 21-22.

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 this periodical proposes a change in rural women‟s lives that concerns mainly educating women

in a way that would be useful for the wider community. However, it does not challenge the

traditional role of women as mothers and humble wives, subjected to men even when they are

the coworkers in the house. On the other hand, influenced by the communist ideology, Žena

danas points to the fact that women are often sold as labor force and explains how a peasant

woman is subjected to her husband within the family. The emphasis is on rural women‟s position

within the family (or within a zadruga) that correlates with the position of a slave.

While the discourse in Seljanka emphasized the direct, but limited, education of rural

women and put pressure on the women to make changes on their own, the discourse in Žena

danas implied a systematic approach that would help not just those privileged to be allowed to

go to school, but also those who would never have such an opportunity. The following chapter

looks more closely at the ideas and practices of education in Seljanka and Žena danas.

Chapter 2 - Rural Women’s Education in Seljanka and Žena danas

Education is certainly one of the most important aspects of the history of women‟s

emancipation. Historians have already pointed to the poor state of educational system in interwar

Yugoslavia, with a particular emphasis on the problem of women‟s education. In Serbia, for

example, even though the elementary education of female children had been obligatory since
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1882, less than 20% of school children in the following decades were female.141 In 1929, a law

stating that elementary education was compulsory for all children was (once again) put into

force, but the number of girls in schools increased only for a brief period. 142 The rural population

141
Momĉilo Isić, Seljanka u Srbiji u prvoj polovini XX veka (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji,
2008), 49.
142
Ibid., 50

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 steadily refused to send in female children to school, and obviously much more than laws was

needed to change this tendency in education.

Along with the (doubtful) efforts of the Yugoslav country to improve the formal

education and encourage the predominantly rural population to allow its children, both male and

female, to attend school, there were parallel efforts to make a change through informal

education. Both Seljanka and Žena danas responded to the patriarchal trends of refusing to send

children especially female children, to school. This chapter looks more closely into the, as I will

show, contested conceptions of rural women‟s education. To be precise, I use the concept of

education here for ideas and practices that concern changing the position of rural women through

learning and gaining knowledge previously unavailable to them. Therefore, the questions I want

to answer in this chapter are: How did women editing Seljanka and Žena danas understand and

practice the education of women? What influenced their understanding? How did the

publications discuss the question of illiteracy and education of rural women?

I argue that the ideas and practices of education in Seljanka were strongly influenced by

the contemporary eugenic discourses and the official public health education system established

in the interwar period, while the texts about education and pedagogy in Žena danas, especially

those of Vera Stein Erlich, indicate an important influence of the ideas of the school of

individual psychology of Alfred Adler and the “new pedagogy” practiced in Weimar Republic.
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2.1. Seljanka: Informal Education of Rural Women in Interwar Yugoslavia

I see Seljanka as a valuable source for exploring in more detail the informal education of

rural women in interwar Yugoslavia. Its health section might be the key to understanding the

periodical. In the context of the Yugoslav post-war demographic catastrophes, a shift from the

48
 curative to preventive medicine took place 143 and education of peasants became one of the

crucial elements in what was considered the preservation of the nation. Laza Marković, a

physician from Novi Sad, was in charge of the health section of the periodical and most probably

he was also the physician who had given lectures to the girls in the domestic school organized by

Darinka Lacković. Interestingly, Marković was also the author of many publications about public

health between 1904 and 1935. His ideas were part of the wider public health discourses specific

for Southeastern Europe in the interwar period, which aimed at the creation of eugenically

healthy nation and society in the newly formed state and were based on the assumption that

health, hygiene and eugenics “are complexly linked to political processes and state policies.”144

Looking at his earlier work makes it possible to better understand the connections between the

eugenic and public health discourses and the desirable role of rural women that was constructed

through these discourses and practices.

In this subchapter, I first look at different publications Laza Marković wrote in the period

both before and after World War I in order to identify his main ideas. Then, I trace the influence

of his ideas on the educational practice discussed in Seljanka. By exploring the connection

between women‟s education and public health discourses, I aim to show that Darinka Lacković‟s

domestic school and the discourse in Seljanka were under the strong influence of the

contemporary eugenic discourses and interwar Yugoslav public health policy. Furthermore, I aim
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to show that although the discourse in Seljanka puts rural women in the conservative position of

mothers, wives and housewives, it also seeks for emancipation of women within the framework

of scientific nationalism.

143
Vladimir Petrović, “Overview,” in The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900-1945 (London, New
York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 474.
144
Promitzer, Christian, Trubeta, Sevasti and Turda, Marius, “Framing issues of health, hygiene and eugenics in
Southeastern Europe,” in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest, New York:
Central European University Press, 2011), 1-3.

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 2.1.1. Laza Marković and Eugenics in Vojvodina between 1904 and 1935

Laza Marković (1876-1935) 145 was born to a merchant family in Tomaševac, Banat

(southern Austria-Hungary at the time). He graduated from the Serbian Orthodox Grammar

School in Novi Sad (Újvidék) in 1894 and subsequently pursued medical education in Budapest

as a stipendist of Endowment of Sava Tekelija (Thököly Száva). Before opening his own

physician‟s clinic in 1903 in Novi Sad, he had practiced medicine for several years in Budapest

and Germany. Laza Marković was a part of the intellectual circle very close to the Serbian

cultural institution Matica srpska and the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, which means

that he was as a part of the educated Serbian elite in Austria-Hungary. In the first decade of 20th

century, Marković wrote plays that were performed in the Serbian National Theatre. He was an

active physician in the wars; during the Balkan Wars (1911-1912) Marković went to Serbia and

worked together with dr Milan Jovanović Batut, and during World War I he was active in Novi

Sad. After the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, Marković

occupied a series of positions in state health institutions in the Banat, Baĉka and Baranja region

(Dunavska banovina [Danube region] after 1929).146

According to one of the rare accounts about his life, Laza Marković was the most popular

physician in Novi Sad. 147 After he had returned to Novi Sad and opened his private clinic,
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145
In this paragraph, I rely on the only two biographies of Laza Marković: Risto Jeremić, Prilozi za biografski
rečnik Srba lekara Vojvođana 1756-1940 [Contributions to the Biographical Dictionary of Doctors from Vojvodina
1756-1940], (Novi Sad, 1951), 82-83; A biography written by dr Karmen Maskarel, the granddaughter of Laza
Marković. Accessed April 20, 2017. http://blog.b92.net/text/25344/Dr-Laza-Markovic/.
146
Some of the positions he occupied are: the president of the District Committee of Anti-Tuberculosis League
(Oblasni odbor Antituberkulozne Lige), the president of the Union for the Protection of Children (Unija za zaštitu
dece), the president of the Anti-alcoholic Movement (Trezvenjaĉki pokret), the director of the Health Section of
Ministry of Health for Banat, Baĉka and Baranja (resorno ministarstvo Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca
postavilo za šefa Zdravstvenog odseka za Banat, Baĉku i Baranju, 1919-1924), the director of Inspectorate of
Ministry of Public Health (Inspektorat Ministarstva narodnog zdravlja, 1924-1929), the chief of Department of
Social policy and public health of Danube Region (naĉelnik odeljenja za socijalnu politiku i narodno zdravlje banske
uprave Dunavske banovine, after 1929).
147
Risto Jeremić, Prilozi za biografski rečnik Srba lekara Vojvođana 1756-1940 (Novi Sad: Medicinski pregled,
1952), 82-83.

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 Marković wrote a number of plays and monologues that were performed first in the Serbian

National Theatre and then increasingly in the countryside. The function of these plays was to

educate peasants by warning them about key problems concerning health, hygiene and eugenics.

Some of the recurring topics were alcoholism, venereal diseases, popular misbeliefs, and the

importance of health in marriage – the motives typical for health discourses of the time. Having

all this in mind, it is obvious that Laza Marković was an important public figure both before and

after World War I and that he participated in shaping the public (and popular) discourses about

health and hygiene in the Serbian and later the Yugoslav context. A closer look at his work

reveals more about his ideas about public health, as well as the ways these ideas influenced the

construction of the desirable role of women.

It seems that Laza Marković‟s plays from the 1900s were written specifically for the

Serbian elite theatre audience while his later monologues and dialogues were more intended for

the peasant audience. His first play, Pod novim slemenom [Under the New Roof], (1905) gained

success in the Serbian Novi Sad elite circles.148 A contemporary critic compared it to the best

peasant plays written at the time.149 The central theme of this play is in essence the greed for

money and luxury. The main character is a woman, Djula, whose greed causes the material and

moral decline of herself and her husband. The beginning of the play finds Djula married into a

happy, rich and successful family house – zadruga. However, she does not respect the rules of
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the traditional communal living, does not want to work like everyone else, instead she complains

that she is the only one working all the time. She persuades her husband to ask for his share from

his father so that they can leave and live under their own roof, be independent of his parents and

148
Laza Marković, Pod novim slemenom [Under the New Roof] (Novi Sad: 1904).
149
The writer of the critique highlights that the value of this play lies first in the quality of its structure, secondly, in
the fact that it represents the life of the actual peasants and not the village life through the village elite such as
priests, and, finally, that it reflects real life, not just some abstract ideas.“ See: L. Mrgud, Pod Novim Slemenom,” [L.
Mrgud, Under the New Roof] Letopis Matice srpske, [year 75], 237=3 (1906), 113-115.

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 be in charge of their own money. The proud father divides the house, renounces his son and the

couple leaves. However, due to his incapability to be “the man” of the house and her constant

need of the new dresses (which, importantly, she does not make herself but buys on the market),

they get into large debts and their house gets taken away. At that point, Djula accepts to go with

a rich neighbor who had always been in love with her. Finally, the angry and disappointed

husband takes a knife and kills his wife and himself.

Several important elements should be highlighted here. First, the author sees the zadruga

as an ideal prototype of the peasant family structure, a commune where everybody lives and

works collectively. The dissolution of the zadruga inevitably leads to a tragedy. Secondly, there

is a conflict between two generations; the father represents the older generation, he is referred to

as “the old Miletićevac,” 150 while the son is a representative of the younger generation and

obviously lacks capability, determination and patriarchal sentiments to preserve the good old

way of life and to resist the new, anti-traditionalist, capitalist trends. Thirdly, the character who

actually causes the whole problem is a woman who does not want to work in the collective or

work for herself but simply spends money by buying things. The dress is a paradigmatic example

here because, as a part of a traditional community, her job would be to produce the necessary

clothes for herself and for the family, and not to spend money and enter into capitalist relations

by buying unnecessary clothes someone else had produced. Finally, very importantly, Djula is
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the daughter of an alcoholic, which obviously explains her destructive nature. It goes without

saying that she had inherited the bad character from her father.

In more general terms, the discourse of this play reflects the contemporary concerns of

the dissolution of the traditional patriarchal family life in the form of zadrugas. The play stands

for a certain kind of rejection of capitalism and individual property. Furthermore, an important
150
This implies that he participated in the 1848 rebellions under the leadership of the politician Svetozar Miletić.

52
 element is what Maria Todorova calls “myth making,” meaning here the representation of the

zadruga as inherently a Slavic family institution in the line with the „Slavic spirit of peacefulness

and democratic cooperation“ as contrasted with “individualism, egoism and aggressiveness.”151

The causes of the dissolution of the healthy, old family life are greedy individualism and

alcoholism, which I identify as consequences of the modernization processes and the

introduction of the market economy to the villages discussed in the first chapter, and harmful

inheritance and a badly arranged marriage between an undetermined man and a daughter of an

alcoholic, which are the concepts of the eugenic ideas of the time. Already in Laza Marković‟s

early plays, thus, the traditionalist ideology is merged with the modern, scientific discourse of

eugenics.

In the following years, Laza Marković further elaborated his ideas in numerous

publications about public health and eugenics, mostly in the form of short one-act plays and

peasant dialogues that were performed in villages in front of peasants. In Ženidba i udadba ili

Kako će narod doći do dobrog podmlatka [Marrying Sons and Daughters or How Will the

Nation Get Fine Youth] (1920) the motives of alcoholism, badly arranged marriage and ideas

about health and eugenics are nicely put into a dialogue between a doctor and a peasant. This

booklet illustrates not only Laza Marković‟s understanding of eugenics, but also the form and the

content of the education peasants in Yugoslavia were subjected to in the first part of the
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twentieth century. In Ženidba i udadba, the author refers to World War I as the huge trauma for

the whole nation, as the losses among the people in these areas were highest in Europe. Laza

Marković‟s interpretation centers on the fact that not only were “the best, the most capable sons,

who were supposed to leave numerous children” killed during the war, but many others who had

151
Maria N. Todorova, “Conclusion” in Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic
Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 153-154.

53
 survived were infected by various venereal diseases, so the nation was significantly weakened.152

Where did Marković see a solution? The Romans and Greeks, adds Marković, were the most

enlightened nations in the world, and yet wild and uncultured, but healthy and fertile people

conquered them; the guilt of the Romans and Greeks was in turning away from nature and its

laws.153 This argument indicates a shift from the emphasis of the cultural legacy of the nation to

the biological discourses seen as crucial for a healthy nation and a successful state. The shift

from cultural to health education is also visible in Laza Marković‟s work, having in mind that his

earlier plays had been written specifically for the theatre, while later on he focused more on the

popularization of health and hygiene among the peasants. 154 This shift from the cultural to the

biological discourses will be further discussed in the third chapter.

After the introductory remarks of the author, a conversation between the peasant and the

doctor begins, in which the doctor explains – in a way understandable to the peasant – the

important elements in the process of marriage. The way the doctor talks to the peasant is

amusing for the contemporary reader, because the problems of marriage are explained through

comparisons to crops and cattle. At first, the doctor praises the watermelon he had bought from

the peasant a day earlier. The peasant explains the watermelon is so large, red and sweet because

the seed of the watermelon was good as well – it was, the peasant boasts, the seed of the largest

and sweetest previous year‟s watermelon. In order to have a good crop, one needs to have the
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152
Laza Marković, Ženidba i udadba ili Kako će narod doći do dobrog podmlatka (Novi Sad: 1922), 3.
153
Ibid., 54-55.
154
Yet, even though the discourses of national liberation seem to not have been primary any more, the continuation
of the dominant Serbian national liberation discourse from the period before World War I appears unchanged in the
new context. . A good illustration for this claim might be the fact that although Marković writes about the new
country, he still emphasizes that he talks of the Serbian nation, saying that it is important for every Serbian house to
have healthy and strong youth, so that the Serbian people could keep their homes and fields and even make them
bigger through the economic and educational struggle that every nation has with its neighboring nations” (Laza
Marković, Ženidba i udadba, 54). Also indicative is a monologue written for the opening of the Red Cross in Novi
Sad, in which Pavle Orlović, who had been killed in the Kosovo Battle in 1389, explains to the peasants why they
are lucky to have Red Cross, unlike him and his friends who had died in the battle with no chance to be cured (Laza
Marković, “Duh Pavla Orlovića“[Pavle Orlović‟s Ghost] in Mati: Komad u jednom činu, [Mother. A Peace in One
Act], Novi Sad: 1928).

54
 best seed. Further on, the doctor asks the peasant how come his horse is so beautiful. Not

unexpectedly, the peasant describes how he had bred together the finest mare and the finest

horse. Step by step, the doctor leads the peasant to the actual topic of the conversation –

marriage. The peasant is wrong to think that for a good marriage the dowry of the bride is more

important than her health. By careful mathematic calculation, the doctor and the peasant come to

the conclusion that the illness of the bride costs more than the money she can bring to the house.

The damage is twofold: in money and in offspring.155

Finally, the doctor explains the principle of natural selection through the example of

piglets, since it is commonly known that only the stronger piglets survive while the weaker ones

are not strong enough to struggle for food. In the animal world, the stronger species kill the

weaker ones so that they could remain alive.156 This resonates with the idea that only the most

capable people and nations are supposed to live and to conquer the others. Consequently, the role

of the state is to educate the people how to preserve their health in order to lead a more capable,

productive life within the traditionally given family and national frameworks. The solution to

problems such as alcoholism, venereal diseases, syphilis - but also bad sight, inclination toward

quarreling, rabbit mouth, bad teeth and many others – is first of all careful of arrangement of

marriages which would prevent the unfit to have descendants. In case this is not enough,

Marković also proposes forbidding certain people to marry and have children, but also
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sterilization of all the misfit, including tramps and lazy people. However, Marković‟s attitude

towards sterilization seems ambiguous. Even though he often mentioned sterilization, he always

155
Laza Marković, Ženidba i udadba, 7-21
156
Ibid., 22-29

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 emphasized that in practice it is more important to strive for the positive eugenics by promoting

the marriage between those who are considered healthy enough to reproduce.157

So far, I have pointed to Laza Marković‟s main ideas, illustrating a subtle shift from the

peasant plays he had written for theatre in 1900s to the short dialogues he wrote for peasants in

the 1910s and 1920s. I have focused on those publications that concern life in the countryside.

With the establishment of the new country and Državna škola za narodno prosvećivanje [Public

School for Popular Education], his ideas become part of the official Yugoslav policy. 158 As the

next part of this subchapter will show, the education of rural women in Lacković‟s school was

based on the ideas identified in Marković‟s publications.

2.1.2. Informal Education and Eugenics: Constructing a Desirable Role of Rural Women

Marković‟s theoretical assumptions concerning eugenics are based on the idea that the

preservation of the nation and “the race” is a prerequisite of the existence of the state.159 In order

to “preserve the race,” the extremely bad health conditions in villages across the country had to

be changed and, in line with the ideas of eugenics, the inheritance of the bad characteristics had

to be stopped. In order to do this, the education of rural women needed to improve as well. As

Mary E. Reed nicely put it, “peasant women held the key to needed health reforms in the

villages,” because it was they who cleaned the house and cared about children.160 Additionally,
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she added that in the interwar period, peasant women were “trapped in the disintegration of the

157
Ibid., 38-40.
158
It is important to note that Laza Marković was only one of the actors important for the popular health education
and eugenics theories. While Marković was obviously in charge of the region around Novi Sad, the most active
promoters of the preventive medicine in Belgrade were Milan Jovanović Batut and Uroš Krulj. For the limited scope
of this thesis, I am focusing here solely on Marković, for two reasons: first, I find his publications as precious for
understanding Seljanka, and, second, even though he was such an important figure in Novi Sad, it seems that he is
almost completely uknown at the moment.
159
Laza Marković, Zadaci narodne uprave za unapređenje rasne higijene i evgenike [Objectives of the People‟s
Bureau for Advancement of Racial Hygiene and Eugenics] (Novi Sad, 19??), 5.
160
Mary Reed, “Peasant Women in Croatia in the Interwar Years,” in Sharon L. Wolchik and, Alfred G. Meyer,
eds., Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 100.

56
 extended family structure, an agrarian depression, and the transition to a cash economy.” 161 The

informal schools for rural women, such as the one organized by Darinka Lacković, through their

discourse and practice constructed a desirable role of rural women with the ambiguous aim to at

the same time preserve the traditional way of life in rural areas (more specifically, to preserve

the extended family structure and to avoid transition to cash economy as much as possible) and

in a very specific manner to modernize and improve the living conditions in the countryside. I

understand this modernization within Griffin‟s framework, as a renewal of the healthiest national

elements conducted by the scientific experts, thus as a form of scientific nationalism.162

The education of rural women in informal schools offered knowledge that was considered

necessary for improving the household health conditions and lowering the extremely high

mortality rates of newborn children (hygiene, childbirth and childcare, reading and writing,

cooking) as well as preserving the self-sufficient character of the household as much as possible

(growing food, embroidery and making clothes). However, the program of the school appears to

have encompassed much more. In terms of eugenics, it was in line with Marković‟s proposition

that the state measures should focus on quantitative, rather than qualitative race hygiene, with the

crucial help of the social hygiene program, “the goal of which is to preserve life of individuals

and the society to the final limits, overlooking their qualities, especially the qualities of their

inherited values and abilities.”163 Yet, he adds that qualitative and positive eugenics is important
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as well, and that it is crucial to encourage healthy people to reproduce.164 Within this context, the

161
Ibid.
162
Roger Griffin, “Tunnel Visions and Mysterious Trees: Modernist Projects of National and Racial regeneration,
1880-1939,” 436-437.
163
According to Marković, in order to have a eugenically healthy nation, each family was supposed to have at least
three to four children. Laza Marković, Zadaci narodne uprave za unapređenje rasne higijene i evgenike, 20.
164
Ibid., 21.

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 education in informal schools also implied a certain model how to marry rationally and wisely in

order to prevent the inheritance of bad characteristics.

From the reports and letters in Seljanka it is evident that Lacković went around

Yugoslavia herself searching for women from “good village houses” that would be allowed to go

to this school.165 At a later point, Lacković indicated more specifically that the future student

needs to be a peasant woman older than fifteen who still wears and makes national clothes, and

that she has to be “necessarily from a good house, so that she could be allowed to apply her new

knowledge upon return.” 166 I mentioned in the previous chapter that girls would not marry

without having in mind the advice they had received in school, and that their role as mothers was

taken for granted. The question is then, what kind of family were they advised to marry into? In

the text “Large and happy families,” Darinka Lacković wonders: “Will the happy times ever

come back, when the daughter-in-law would not ask her husband to leave the zadruga, but she

would enjoy the house full of youngsters, and she would love her parents in law as her own?”167

The ideal prototype family is, obviously, still an extended peasant, patriarchal family, with the

traditional male and female roles and a strict division of labor. In the school, girls were therefore

most likely taught to respect the peasant house they marry into and to have many children. Their

labor consisted of producing and cooking food, cleaning the house properly and making all the

necessary clothes for themselves and the family, thus minimizing the capitalist connections with
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world. If we have in mind that this was the time of the economic crisis and that peasants were, as

Bićanić informed us in his How the People Live, practically starving, it seems that the

responsibility for the self-sustainability of the household – related, of course, to the self-

165
Darinka Lacković, “Izbor novih uĉenica i obilaţenje svršenih uĉenica Domaćiĉke škole Kraljevog fonda”
[Selection of New Students and Visitation of the Graduated Students of the King‟s Fund School], Seljanka, 1934/06:
8.
166
Darinka Lacković to Stanojka M. Jovanović, Seljanka 1935/12, 14.
167
Darinka Lacković, “Velike i sretne porodice” [Large and Happy Families], Seljanka, 1935/03:6.

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 sustainability of the nation - was put on women. To recapitulate - in the beginning of the century,

Laza Marković wrote plays for the elite Novi Sad audience warning on the consequences of the

dissolution of zadruga. In the early 1930s, Seljanka responded to the crisis still holding to the

traditional way of life, as it is the only way towards the renewal of the nation.

Yet, despite the fact that this discourse is essentially traditionalist, anti-capitalist, anti-

individualistic and patriarchal, the peasant family still needed to go through a limited

modernization in order to be healthy and stable. I would point here to particular, even though

slight, changes in the gender relations. First, even though the relationship between men and

women still remains defined within the traditional patriarchal framework, within this framework

rural women were (finally!) given the opportunity and the incentive to pursue some kind of

education and to learn how to read and write, which is in any case the first step to any kind of

emancipation. Secondly, for the first time, rural women got in touch with the basic knowledge

about childbirth and childcare. The discourse about sexual knowledge was obviously shaped to

serve the purpose of the state. Nevertheless, it still made women conscious about what was

awaiting them.

Thirdly, in the previous chapter I wrote that, along with the “natural” labor of women

(“occupation” of the mother, wife and a housewife), education in the domestic school aimed to

transform women into the equal coworkers in the household. According to the discourse in
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Seljanka, women‟s labor gains an economic element, as she becomes in charge of raising the

poultry, making dairy products and growing vegetables. Lacković saw this new, rational division

of labor as good, as “only this kind of the division of labor in the household leads to progress,”

thus leading to the transformation of rural women from “slaves” to “coworkers.”168 If, according

to Lacković, all the income the housewife makes should cover all the material needed for the
168
Seljanka, 1933/01, 6

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 household, the implication was that a peasant woman should have their own budget. Here I see a

rational, progressive element put in the traditionalist framework.

Furthermore, as Laza Marković articulated it, each individual, whether male or female,

became subjected to a higher cause of the preservation of the “race” and the creation of the “new

ethics,” different from the previously accepted social or Christian ethics. This also meant that the

“educational work must be performed intensively with both male and female youth of all social

classes.”169 Not only was this a radical proposition in terms of arguing for intensive education of

all human beings, regardless of the gender or class, but it also led to a change in the

understanding of the public and private sphere. Marković argued that the state, the church and

the society should start overlooking marriages carefully.170 Thus, he argued that the state should

interfere into the private sphere of the Yugoslav citizens. This, it seems, was a version of the

“new motherhood” ideas in Germany and Britain in the beginning of the twentieth century that

argued for a “combination of enlightened reproductive decision making and careful nurture”

which would produce healthy offspring.171 Adapted to the Yugoslav, patriarchal context, “new

motherhood” was embedded into the nationalist ideology and the arguments for the well-being of

a woman were merged with eugenic arguments that connected the well-being of a mother and a

well-being of the nation.

To understand this phenomenon better, in her text about feminism and eugenics in
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Germany and Britain, Ann Taylor Allen reminds us that in 1900s Germany, politically

progressive feminists were sympathetic towards some of the elements of the eugenics movement,

as the public overviewing of the reproduction would mean decrease of the husbands‟ rights to

169
Ibid., 30.
170
Laza Marković, Zadaci narodne uprave za unapređenje rasne higijene i evgenike, 27
171
Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900-1940: A Comparative Perspective,” in
German Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Oct., 2000), 481.

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 control the households and reproduction. 172 In the case of Yugoslavia, the concern for „the

woman question‟ was in a dialogue with the concerns of eugenicists, and it seems to have

increased women‟s autonomy. Not only that, but this approach also left space for challenging the

double standards that the society had for men and women. A brilliant example is Marković‟s

play performed in 1924 in Novi Sad, in which a woman, accused of cheating on her husband and

having someone else‟s child, explains in front of the court that she is innocent and that she had

conceived a child through artificial insemination with a help of a doctor. The man is wrong to

have had sexual relations before marriage, since it disabled him to have children, and the woman

says in her defense: “My wish is not to justify myself, but I just want to emphasize, that the

society has double standards for men and women.”173 Again, it is confirmed that the role of a

woman is to be a mother, but the questioning of the double standards concerning men and

women is definitely a novelty. Not only did Marković openly raise the question of the double

standards when it came to the sexual activity of men and women, but he did so though the voice

of a woman.174

***

To recapitulate, my aim in this subchapter was to make a connection between the

domestic schools organized by Darinka Lacković in the early 1930s with the eugenic and public
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health discourses as presented in the leading Novi Sad physician Laza Marković‟s publications.

The eugenic discourse of Laza Marković was largely shaped by the concern for the

172
Ibid.
173
Laza Marković, Mati: Komad u jednom činu od Laze Markovića (Novi Sad: 1928), 40.
174
In fact, Marković had several stories like that. One of them, printed even in Seljanka, was originally published in
the 1923 as a part of a collection of two monologues and one short play which presents the “hell” of the household
in which the husband is an alcoholic. This story is written in the form of a confession of a woman who had killed her
husband - an alcoholic, a gambler and a womanizer - in the moment of a great humiliation. In the monologue, the
focus is not on the moral of the story, but on the opportunity of the woman to express herself. Laza Marković, U
paklu: dva monologa i slika u jednom činu [In Hell: Two Monologues and A One-Act Scene] (Novi Sad: 1923).

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 transformations of the traditional, patriarchal way of life that was taking place along with the

dissolution of the zadrugas. After the demographic catastrophes of World War I, the education of

the peasants was seen as crucial for the preservation of the eugenically healthy nation in the

newly formed state. By looking at the discourse of Seljanka along with the work of Laza

Marković, I could identify how „the woman question‟ was involved with the nationalist ideology

based on the biological discourses. There are many progressive elements in Seljanka. First and

foremost, the emphasis is put on women‟s education. Then, women are for the first time talked to

about childbirth and childcare, which was crucial as it made them conscious about what was

awaiting them. Third, women‟s labor in the house gained an economic element and, with their

own budget, women were supposed to take care of the household. Fourth, women‟s right for

well-being was sought trough the argument that a well-being of a mother means well-being of

the nation. These were all attempts to seek for the women‟s rights and equality within the

ambiguous eugenic discourse that aimed for both preservation of the old forms of family life and

the renewal of the nation through scientific modernization.

Yet, the question remains whether a form of women‟s emancipation actually took place.

The context in which Darinka Lacković and Laza Marković worked was rural and extremely

patriarchal, and even the state could not force peasants to send their daughters to school. The fact

that Darinka Lacković intended to transform rural women from “slaves” to “coworkers”
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indicates that she was aware of the terrible position of Yugoslav rural women, and that her

intention was to help improving their way of life. Both Laza Marković and Darinka Lacković

spent many years working in the field of peasants‟ education, and even though they framed their

arguments for the education of peasants within the framework of the national strength and

progress, they argued for education for all. Yet, I agree with Stanislava Barać who calls this a

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 175
“false emancipatory discourse,” as it only increased the amount of women‟s labor.

Additionally, this discourse put huge pressure on women to act in a certain new way in their

communities, without offering them any other possibility than to marry into a peasant family,

work endlessly and have as many healthy children as they can, for the sake of the nation. This

discourse aimed to give women more autonomy through education, sexual education,

independent work within the household and, very importantly, the right for well-being as a

mother, but the discourse also emphasized and strengthened the “natural” roles of women and

the gendered division of labor.

2.2. The Discussion about Education and Pegagogy in Žena danas

Žena danas will offer you the best entertainment and instruction with its prose; it
will help you develop your personality through its principled articles; it will get
you familiarized with the work of women in the last three years here and in other
places; it will offer help to mothers via its pedagogical advice; to young women, it
would offer a possibility to find a solution for the many difficulties life puts in
front of them today; finally, it would familiarize you with the life of women from
all parts of the country.176

This is the text of one of the advertisements for Žena danas. The editors, as we see, were very

conscious about the educational function of their publication, given that they wanted to help

women develop their worldviews, educate their children and know about what feminist activists

were doing in the world. When it came to „the rural woman question‟, the editors did not pretend
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to be communicating with rural women directly, as they were of course aware of the high

illiteracy rate and the difficult circumstances in which rural women lived. In the first chapter, I

175
Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost, 286.
176
“Svaka ţena treba da nabavi komplet Žene danas” [Every Woman Should Get All Issues of Žena danas], Žena
danas, 1939/24, 28.

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 showed how the representations of rural women in Žena danas continually pointed to the never-

ending work of rural women, as well as their subordinated position in the patriarchal family.

My aim in this subchapter is to understand the ideas and practices of education of rural

women. I will look at the texts in Žena danas that concern women‟s activism and the ideas about

the practical work that needs to be done in order to change the difficult circumstances rural

women live in. I believe that the function of these texts was to serve as a model of how to

approach rural women and their problems. When evaluating Franjo Vuĉinović‟s book Seljačka

žena,177 for example, the editors particularly pointed to the fact that the book can “serve as a kind

of help in the process of approaching them.”178 I argue that the way educated women imagined

educating peasant women was influenced by contemporary pedagogy. I will specifically focus on

Vera Stein Erlich, who, as I intend to show, was influenced by “new pedagogy” practiced in

Weimar Republic and by the individual psychology of Alfred Adler.

2.2.1. Educating rural women: Nikica Blagojević, Angela Vode and Vera Stein Erlich

Countryside nurse Nikica Blagojević frequently wrote about her experiences of working

with and talking to rural women. In the text “Our Peasant Woman,” she explained that the best

way one can approach rural women is to “go to the river or near the place they work, and they

[the peasant women] will come on their own and ask questions.” 179 According to Nikica
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Blagojević, rural women are “hungry of knowledge.” The main goal of approaching them, as she

explicitly stated, was to invite them to organize: “Tell them then about women‟s miseries. You

have to know well their needs, their lives and language. Invite them to organize. They will all be

177
See page 41.
178
“Seljačka žena – Franja Vuĉinović” [Peasant Woman - Franja Vuĉinović], Žena danas, 1937/7, 17.
179
Nikica Blagojević, “Naša seljaĉka ţena“ [Our Peasant Woman], Žena danas 1937/5-6: 13.

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 with you…”180 This text points to two things. First, it sends a message to the reader that rural

women should be invited to organize and, secondly, it implies this would be possible if rural

women would hear about the miseries of other women. This is only one of the articles in Žena

danas that attempted to present the ways educated women could approach rural women and talk

to them, which I discuss in this subchapter. In another article, with the aim of opposing the

opinion of a “reactionary” writer who thinks that women‟s destinies are in the hands of men, the

editors state that „to us, on the contrary, it is clear that women‟s destinies are in their own hands

and that they will, in the community with progressive men, build themself a nicer and a worthier

future.”181 Therefore, it is clear that all women must be in charge of changes in their own lives,

which implies that women from urban areas cannot fight for the rights of rural women instead of

the rural women. It is also evident, however, that educated women considered themselves

responsible for approaching rural women and explaining them why it was important to organize

in any way. The invitation to rural women to organize, then, was a call to join a community of

women who want to fight for their own rights and for change. While Nikica Blagojević‟s texts

and representations are mainly based on her personal experience of working in the countryside as

a nurse, similar texts written by Angela Vode, Slovenian feminist and communist, and Vera

Stein Erlich, a Jewish leftist intellectual from Zagreb, additionally contain theoretical layer worth

taking closer look at. Both articles I will focus on here are published in the eight issue of Žena
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danas.

Angela Vode (1892-1985) was a Slovenian activist, feminist, teacher, member of the

antifascist movement and one of the founders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In the

interwar period, she was also a member of many Slovenian women‟s and feminist organizations,

180
Ibid.
181
Ibid.

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 including Žensko gibanje [Women‟s Movement], and she participated in the activities of the

international women‟s organizations such as Little Entente of Women, International Alliance of

Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship and International Council of Women. In 1939, she

was expelled from the Communist Party because she refused to accept Stalin‟s Non-aggression

pact with Hitler. She was imprisoned in 1944 by German fascists as a political prisoner, and after

the war by the Communist Party as she had criticized the governmental and educational system

in the newly formed country. In the 1980s her work was rediscovered and published in three

volumes in Slovenian. Vode published several articles in Žena danas, and I will analyze her

articles in the thesis, in this and in the following chapter.182

Angela Vode‟s text is a report about communication between Slovenian (female) students

and rural women. Students organized a camp in a Slovenian rural area, with the aim to try to

bring closer the students and the peasants and to overcome the gap between women in rural and

urban areas. According to Vode, the students went near a village, constructed tents, and went to

the village to work and talk to people. Vode reported how students described this activity:

“We came closer to the people and the children. In the beginning, they were
distrustful – what did we want from them? They have become apathetic from the
sufferings, but somehow we managed to break the ice. On Sundays, when people
have the most free time, we gave lectures.”183
The students learned that the peasants want “progress,” but “those in charge of that do not think
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about the people‟s needs.” 184 While the camp was just a minor attempt, one of the students

concluded that they have at least “gained some knowledge, […], to find out how and what should

be done,” adding finally that “not politics – those people need bread and a little, at least a little

182
For more about Angela Vode, see: Karmen Klavţar “VODE, Angela (1892–1985),” in Francisca de Haan,
Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women‟s Movements and Feminisms.
Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2006), 604-607.
183
Angela Vode, “Kako slovenaĉka studentkinja pokušava da se pribliţi seljaĉkoj ţeni“ [How Slovenian Students
Try to Approach Peasant Women], Žena danas, 1937/06, 9.
184
Ibid.

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 bit of rest…”185 This sudden conclusion that the peasants don‟t need politics but bread and rest

indicates a possible preconception that what peasant men and peasant women needed to gain was

political education in order to organize. If this preconception had existed before the students‟

visit, it was, as it appears, challenged during the actual conversations with the peasants. What

could have been a simplified call for political education (and agitation) of peasants was thus

replaced by a more complex understanding that educated women and students have to actually

talk to the peasants first in order to understand what they really need and what kind of help the

peasants themselves would find useful.

The relationship between educated students and peasant women in this way becomes

based on exchange of knowledge: educated women are to learn from peasant women about their

experiences and needs, so that they could be able to appropriately share the knowledge they had

been privileged enough to gain. As Vode explains, what stands behind these students‟ activist

practices is assuredness that “every person that had an opportunity to gain higher education must

be aware that their education cannot stay the dead capital, but that they are obliged to offer as

much as possible of their wealth to the others.“ Therefore, the exchange of knowledge and

creation of new knowledge about how different groups of women live is crucial for creation of a

wide community of Yugoslav women.

Vera Erlich Stein‟s text “How Women Live in Different Regions” further theorizes the
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mentioned ideas by asking the following questions:

“How do women live, how do mothers live, how do young girls live in villages
and in towns? How does their youth pass, do they participate actively in important
decisions or are they simply passive objects, led by blind incidence or the older
members of the family?”186

185
Ibid.
186
Vera Štajn Erlih, “Kako ţene ţive u raznim krajevima” [How Women Live in Different Regions], Žena danas,
1937/08, 4.

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 Following this set of questions, Erlich sets out to explain how it is often assumed that rural

women in all parts of the country live under the same circumstances, while in reality it is crucial

to understand the differences. One of the examples concerns violence against women; as she

notes, it is often rumored that husbands beat their wives. However, Erlich argues that while in

Zagorje in Croatia men openly beat their wives in front of their neighbors who never interfere to

save the woman, in Montenegro to beat one‟s wife in public would be a huge disgrace. This

shows that every phenomenon has a context behind it, therefore a system of knowledge should

be created in which every phenomenon would be explained as a symptom of human relations.187

Vera Stein Erlich‟s criticism is very analogous to historian Jeanne Boydston‟s arguments, who

maintains that gender relations should be always explored and not assumed to be known.

Moreover, Vera Erlich Stein states that this kind of research is „educational work, work

on changing the old and unrighteous relations,“ adding that „objective scientific work changes

life because it leads people to awareness about the unrighteousness that exist and that can be

changed.“188 I have argued elsewhere that Erlich understood scientific and theoretical work as an

activist practice.189 In order to understand the relationship between her scientific work and the

activism inherent to it, it is useful to have in mind her own education and intellectual influences,

as well as her work. Vera Stein Erlich (1897-1980) was a psychologist, sociologist,

anthropologist, educator, feminist and Jewish progressive intellectual.190 As Feldman nicely put
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it in probably the most detailed biography of Erlich so far, Vera Erlich Stein “provides a telling

example of the ways in which an extraordinary individual tried to come to terms with a

187
Ibid.
188
Vera Štajn Erlih, “Kako ţene ţive u raznim krajevima,” Žena danas, 1937/08, 4.
189
Isidora Grubaĉki, “Angaţman Vere Štajn Erlih u ĉasopisu Ţena danas (1936-1940)“ [Vera Stein Erlich's
Engagement in Magazine Ţena Danas/Woman Today (1936-1940)] in: Collection of Articles: The Magazine
“Woman Today”. Forthcoming, to be published in 2017 by the Institute of Literature and Arts, Belgrade.
190
Feldman, Andrea, “Vera Erlich Stein: Odyssey of a Croatian Jewish Intellectual,” in Judith Szapor, Andrea Peto,
Maura Hametz, and Marina Calloni, eds, Jewish intellectual women in Central Europe, 1860-2000: twelve
biographical essays (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 327-348.

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 patriarchal society in the otherwise fragmented political culture of interwar Yugoslavia.” 191

Interested in art and psychology, Erlich was educated in Zagreb, Berlin and Vienna, where she

attended Alfred Adler‟s lectures on individual psychology and graduated from university in

1924.192 Vera Erlich and her husband, Beno Stein, held a leftist intellectual salon in the 1930s,

which event Josip Broz Tito would visit occasionally. Although more information about Erlich‟s

education is not available in the so-far written biographies, intellectual influences on her work

could be reconstructed from her own publications in the early 1930s. In 1933 and 1934 she

published three books as a part of the “new pedagogy” edition of Minerva publishing house in

Zagreb. The topic of these books was theory and practice of new schools and new pedagogy

Erlich came into touch with during her stay in Germany and Vienna. The names of the books in

question are: Kolektivni rad u savremenoj školi (1933) [Collective Work in Contemporary

School], Individualna psihologija u školskoj praksi (1934) [Individual Psychology in School

Practice] and Metoda Montessori u školi (1934) [Montessori Method in School].

Vera Erlich Stein dedicated these books to all the teachers, youth and parents dissatisfied

with the current state of school education and who would like to contribute to the transformation

of the educational system.193 In her evaluation of the methods, she put emphasis on the degree of

its relevance for the community. In the third book, Erlich problematizes the Montessori Method,

asking whether the goals of this method are progressive, given that it is an essentially
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individualist method and that it assumes that all children in all positions are equal. 194 On the

other hand, she saw the values in the collective method as practiced in school in Berlin between

1918 and 1933 and the school practice of Viennese individual psychologists exactly in the ways

191
Ibid., 328.
192
Ibid., 329.
193
Vera Erlich Stein, Kolektivni rad u savremenoj školi [Collective Work in Contemporary School] (Zagreb:
Minerva, 1933), 4-5.
194
Vera Erlich Stein, Metoda Montessori [Montessori Method] (Zagreb: Minerva, 1934), 4.

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 it emphasized the importance of education for community. In the collective method, Erlich

particularly valued the fact that children collectively chose the topics of general and

contemporary importance, then studying it in details. In this way, the curriculum was not based

on some abstract ideas but on knowledge necessary for everyday life.

As for the method of individual psychology, Erlich emphasized that it was based on the

idea of social determination, which, as she explained, means that concrete social circumstances

influence the ways every individual is formed. However, as the society influences the formation

of every individual, so does the individual change the society, thus the relationship between the

individual and society is interdependent. 195 Clearly, Alfred Adler‟s 196 individual psychology

theory and practice was a significant influence on the Vera Stein Erlich‟s ideas. What Alfred

Adler was essentially interested in was the relationship between the individual and community.

In the interwar period, his ideas were largely influenced by the experiences of the war. In the text

“Individual Psychological Education” from 1920, for example, he concluded that although the

therapy by the methods of individual psychology could be successful in individual cases, to

make society better one needs much more than that. Therefore, he started applying his methods

195
Vera Erlich Stein, Kolektivni rad u savremenoj školi, [Collective Work in Contemporary School] (Zagreb:
Minerva, 1933), 15.
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196
(This footnote is based on the following article: Michael P. Maniacci, “An Introduction to Alfred Adler” in Jon
Carlson and Michael P. Maniacci, eds., Alfred Adler Revisited (Routledge: New York, 2011), 1-10). Alfred Adler
(1870-1937) was a psychiatrist, physician, author, professor and scientist from Vienna. Adler worked at the same
time as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, but has developed his theory in opposition to Freud‟s and Jung‟s theories,
disagreeing with Freud, among other things, that repression was a consequence of living in a community and that
women were inferior to men. Adler claimed that “only poorly adjusted individuals had to repress their drives,” that
“people who were raised well and with love and compassion” could achieve to be adjusted members of a community
and that the reason why women might have more difficulties in adjusting than men is “because of the social
situation in which they found themselves,” being “treated like second-class citizens and told from an early age that
men were more powerful” (Ibid., 3). Being rejected by the scientific and academic community (both medical and
psychiatrist), Adler decided to turn to people themselves and started teaching and helping people directly. According
to Maniacci, Adler‟s work was not research driven, meaning that his goal was not to prove a theory, but to help
people: “He wanted individuals to compensate for their weaknesses and unfortunate circumstances of life. He
wanted to make life fair and better for all.” (Ibid., 9).

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 to the wider society, arguing for education throughout people‟s whole life.197 According to a text

about Adler‟s individual psychological education, “in taking on the challenge of improving the

world through applying and developing his psychology in education and community, Adler was

taking on entrenched establishments. In addition to the schools, he was confronting other

professions to become involved with the challenge of improving child development and

education.”198 In a nutshell, Adler‟s idea was that human society can only change and progress

possible through education that is not only aimed at the individual human being, but prepares

individuals and groups for communal life.

2.2.2. Exchanging knowledge: Education for Community and Women’s Rights

If after this brief digression about Vera Erlich‟s and Alfred Adler‟s main ideas we come

back to the texts in Žena danas, we might notice that what connects all these different texts are

ideas of education, knowledge, community and progress. What was, then, the ideal of education

of women? According to the abovementioned articles, rural women were hungry of knowledge

and educated women should approach them and offer them knowledge. Yet, the idea was not to

approach rural women with an already prepared (political) program, but with questions, openness

and readiness to learn about them and from them in order to understand what kind of knowledge

they might need. Only through a mutual exchange of knowledge can a real community of women
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be created. For this reason, I see the representations of rural women in Žena danas as a part of

the learning process about how rural women live across Yugoslavia. As in the views of Alfred

Adler, activists and writers in Žena danas believe that “society can only progress within the

197
Guy J. Manaster, „Individual Psychological Education,“ in Jon Carlson and Michael P. Maniacci, eds., Alfred
Adler Revisited (Routledge: New York, 2011), 129.
198
Ibid.

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 context of social collaboration, which includes working toward similar goals,”199 so they also

explain how educated women may enter into communication and collaboration with rural

women, thus creating a wider community. Hence, rural women‟s education and the creation of a

community of women were clearly influenced by Alfred Adler‟s ideas of individual psychology

and his theory of children‟s formation and education.

In fact, the ideas of children‟s education in Žena danas were quite similar to the ideas of

education of rural women, and in these texts feminist, socialist and even antifascist elements can

be (even more easily) discovered. For example, one of the often discussed issues in Žena danas

was biological inheritance. In the call to mothers to write to the editors about the problems they

have in bringing up their children, the editors argue against inheritance theories, detecting that

the reason for a “bad nature” of their children cannot be inheritance, but it is most usually

pedagogy of the parents that tends to reach for the means such as strict discipline and

punishments.200 Theories of inheritance are not, however, dismissed completely; yet, in order to

develop the inherited characteristics, a child must have “sufficient nutrition, enough sun, clean

air, work and leisure,” etc, which is conditioned by the family‟s wealth. Thus, children are often

not unproductive in schools because of their inherited characteristics, but because of bad

economic circumstances.201 Furthermore, in an excerpt from Angela Vode‟s book Pol i sudbina

[Sex and Destiny], Vode argues that the old educational ideals that make a strict distinction
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between boys and girls are the cause of the failure of children‟s education for the contemporary

world. Just like Vera Erlich in all of her works on pedagogy, Angela Vode detects one of the

causes of inequality between men and women in early education, and, as we might conclude,

199
Bret A. Moore, “The Progress of Mankind,” in Jon Carlson and Michael P. Maniacci, eds., Alfred Adler Revisited
(Routledge: New York, 2011), 35.
200
Uredništvo Žene danas, “Jedna majka nam se obratila” [A Mother Wrote To Us], Žena danas, 1938/10, 14.
201
Dr Mita Đurić, “Ekonomsko stanje i uspeh u školi” [Economic Standard and Success in School], Žena danas,
1937/7, 22.

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 promotes co-education of girls and boys. 202 The main “enemy” of this (new) approach is the

sentence told by many fathers, quoted by Vode: “I would rather see three daughters dying

suddenly, than accept that my son has fallen.”203 Finally, as Vera Erlich‟s “new pedagogy” books

were antifascist warning about the dangers of what is perceived as fascist education, so does

Žena danas warn about the militarist education in Germany, in a text in which a mother tells how

her son is taught in school to support the war for a pure “Arian race.”204

All this, I believe, is very important for understanding the way the editors and writers of

Žena danas imagined approaching rural women, aware that the knowledge personal development

was conditioned by the extremely poor and patriarchal circumstances in which they had been

brought up.205 Yet, even though this was the aspiration, in practice it was not always possible to

follow the advice. A special issue edited by women from Bosnia (of which I will write more in

the following chapter), is a telling example of the ways educated women in Bosnia tried to

approach rural women. Even though rural women needed, as the editors highlight, bread, work,

light rooms, warm food and clothes, what the editors can offer them is knowledge, knowledge to

overcome the “life unworthy of a human being.”206 In the article “If children can do it, so can

we,” Vukica Grbić describes the time when she invited peasant women to a meeting and

proposed them to create an organization called Društvo domaćica [Society of Housewives].” As

the text is written in a dialogue between the author and the peasant women, it illustrates the way
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202
Angela Vode, “Da li današnje vaspitanje odgovara svojim zadacima?“ [Does Today‟s Education Correspond
With Its Goals?], Žena danas, 1938/9, 15.
203
Ibid.
204
“Hansov rodjendan” [Hans‟s Birthday], Žena danas, 1936/01, 18.
205
“Still our peasant woman gives birth in the fields, in the barn, still by her and her children‟s side in sickness sit
old women [and not the doctors], still hundreds and hundreds of women and children die because of the lack of
knowledge, superstition and bad economic and hygienic circumstances […].” (“Reĉ Redakcije” [The Editors‟ Word]
Ţena danas, 1939/24, 3. Grupa ţena koje su pripremile Bosansko-Hercegovaĉki broj, “Iskustva ţena koje su
opremile Bosansko-Hercegovaĉki broj” [The Experience of Women Who Edited the Bosnian and Herzegovinian
Issue], Ţena danas, 1939/24, 28.)
206
Ibid.

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 she approached women, implicitly teaching the reader how to proceed (“Dear sisters, I am glad

that I can see us women at a gathering. I invited you to meet and to talk, because you too have

the right to leave the house for a bit.”) What she proposed does not seem revolutionary at all –

the idea is to create a society and organize meetings where women could attend lectures and

learn how to, like in domestic schools, take care of the house better and read. Yet, inviting rural

women to gather and talking to them about rights already in the second sentence was

revolutionary at the time, especially if we have in mind the conception of education in Seljanka,

where women were familiarized primarily with their duties, but not actually with their rights.

Even though this society resembles domestic school, it seems that the society was a form of

“innocent” gathering that was to serve for more radical goals, which in the given context was

talking to rural women that they have rights.

In Seljanka, the idea of education was quite hierarchical, when the rural women would

simply “receive” already prepared set of knowledge from the teachers. In the case of Žena danas,

it seems that there was more space for dialogue and for the exchange of knowledge between

educated and uneducated women. Not only were urban, educated women to learn about how

rural women live in different parts of the country, but rural women were to learn about other

activities of educated women, such as women‟s struggle for their political rights. “Tell them

about the miseries of women,” Nikica Blagojević suggested. This also included the knowledge
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about women‟s fight for suffrage. The 1939 October issue, along with a condemnation of the war

that had started on September 1, brings a “A Call for the Right to Vote,”207 in which all women

were invited to sign a petition for suffrage. The call was addressed to rural women as well, and it

ended with a message that literate women should read the call to illiterate women. The idea was

that even illiterate women should have the right to vote. 1940 January issue brings reports of the
207
“Apel za pravo glasa” [Appeal for the Right to Vote], Žena danas, 1939/25, 3.

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 biggest women‟s organized campaign for suffrage. The reports explains that this public activity

was not successful, but although the main goal was not achieved, Marija Velimirović saw a

triumph in a way this activity gathered a large number of women, including rural women, and

not only those who had already been for the cause earlier. 208 The same issue also brought a

handwritten letter signed by “peasant women from Lika” (Croatia), who explain how they went

around the villages in Lika and explained to the women why they should sign the petition for

women‟s suffrage. As the letter explains, other rural women from Lika got familiar with the

suffrage issue for the first time and started discussing it, which is a big step.209 There were also

reports on rural women getting in conflict with their husbands because they had signed the

petition, and similar reports of the women teachers who, as it appears, were the main actors of

this widespread suffrage activity. 210 Interestingly, when rural women would hear from the

teachers that in some other countries women could actually vote, they would stop being

suspicious of the proposal and would agree to sign the petition (“Here, give me, I want to sign as

well. Why haven‟t we asked for this right before?”)211 If these reports are accurate, it actually

proves that many rural women indeed were “hungry” of knowledge, and that they would be

happy to enter into dialogue with educated women that would approach them. Even more

importantly, it shows that in 1939, during the biggest public activity of Yugoslav women who

demanded suffrage, rural women got familiar with the idea that, even if they are illiterate, they
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should have the right to vote.

***

208
Marija Velimirović, “Rezultati jedne borbe” [The Results of a Struggle], Žena danas, 1940/26, 3-4.
209
“Pismo seljanki iz Like” [A Letter from Lika Rural Women], Žena danas, 1940/26, 6.
210
“Naša akcija kroz selo i grad” [Our Campaign In Villages and in Towns], Žena danas, 1940/26, 10-12.
211
Ibid., 11.

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 This subchapter explored the ideas and practices of education in Žena danas, focusing

mostly on articles of Angela Vode and Vera Stein Erlich. Vera Erlich Stein‟s work and Alfred

Adler‟s individual psychology were useful for understanding the broader theoretical framework

that influenced the formation of ideas of women who participated in the creation of this

periodical. Through the periodical, the editors and the contributors pointed to the importance of

learning about rural women and consistently aimed to show how and for what reasons educated

women could approach rural women. Education of rural women was based on the idea that an

exchange of knowledge needed to happen between urban, educated women and rural, uneducated

women. Not only was important for educated women to learn about how other women live in

different parts of the country, but for the rural women it was important to learn about how other

women suffer, how they organize to fight for their rights and how, in many countries of the

world, women have a right to vote. Additionally, the examples of the education of children

showed that the ideas of education in Žena dnaas also had feminist, socialist and antifascist

elements, which correlated with the ideas of women‟s emancipation.

Over the years, it seems, many left-progressive women had been trying to approach rural

women, as they felt obliged to help them somehow. Women could only progress if they worked

for the mutual goal, thus it was important to talk to rural women, make them conscious about

their political rights, and mobilize them to organize among themselves. As Angela Vode‟s text
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showed, this was often hard, as rural women often lived in very difficult circumstances and

needed to first satisfy their primary needs. As the years past, it seems though, the situation was

changing, and in 1939 there is an example of rural women from Lika who take part in to that

point the biggest women‟s petition for suffrage. Rural women would sign the petition, but they

would also go and talk to other rural women and explain them what the petition was about. The

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 reports of the activity of women for the suffrage rights show that rural women did actually

respond to the new information when it was well explained to them. Thus, the conclusion is that

the education and also political mobilization of rural women was indeed hard, but that huge steps

were made in these years leading to World War II.

2.3. Conclusions

In the context of transformation of family life in rural areas and disappearing of the old,

patriarchal way of life in zadrugas and in the context of increasing amount of women‟s labor,

when women had to start doing hard agricultural labor along their husbands, both conceptions of

education analyzed in this chapter aimed at changing and modernizing rural women‟s lives in a

certain way. These ideas and practices of education constructed the desirable role of rural

women, thus projecting the goals and the limits of the emancipation of rural women. The ideas of

education in Seljanka were shaped by eugenic and public health ideas that originated from the

period before World War I, but became a part of the official state discourse in the 1920s. The

domestic schools were a part of the urban elite‟s efforts to educate the rural population. The

change in rural women‟s lives was sought within a strict framework of a traditional and extended

peasant family and the nation that was supposed to, through the improvement of rural women‟s

lives, get stronger through renewal. „The woman question‟ in Seljanka was involved with a
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hybrid discourse of “scientific nationalism.” The aim was to, paradoxically, at the same time

preserve the traditional way of life (zadruga) and to improve the women‟s position. It seems that

the desirable image of rural woman was an enlightened, literate woman with more autonomy

within the traditional family, who took care of the family and the household and even had her

own budget which helped her rationalize the household economy. Yet, her role within the nation

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 remains, above all, reproductive, and the education was based on the strict division of labor,

which further reified the constructed difference between women and men.

Žena danas shows that the long tradition of the efforts to educate rural women was

continued, but that the approach significantly changes. Influenced by the contemporary

pedagogy, such as Alfred Adler‟s individual psychology and so called “new pedagogy” methods

practiced in Berlin and Vienna, women connected to Žena danas with the lead of Vera Erlich

Stein and Angela Vode attempted to overcome the hierarchical relationship of educated /

uneducated by promoting the idea of the exchange of knowledge between the two groups. As

they claimed, rural women were hungry of knowledge; yet, they should not be approached with

the already prepared political program, but (also) with questions, readiness to listen and to

explain in a way understandable to them. Whereas Seljanka was based on the separate education

of men and women, Žena danas promoted coeducation of girls and boys, as it saw one of the

causes of inequality of women and men in the ways they are traditionally educated. The ideal of

education also sought for a balance between an individual and collective, with the implicit view

that the progress is possible only through the education of the individuals for the community. So,

„the woman question‟ was in the case of Žena danas embedded into the concern for the social,

but it was, very importantly, still concerned about women and their rights. Whereas Seljanka is

based on the narrative of renewal and preservation, Žena danas yearns for transformation and for
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a radical change in Yugoslav rural women‟s lives. The biggest to that point suffrage campaign

showed that many rural women, although illiterate and uneducated, would join the cause for

women‟s rights, only if they would get familiarized with the contemporary happenings.

Through these ideas and practices of education, shaped, respectively, by eugenics and

contemporary pedagogy, there was an attempt to create a community of women. The following

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 chapter analyzes different conceptions of sisterhood, constructed through Seljanka and Žena

danas.

Chapter 3 – Constructing “Sisterhood” in Seljanka and Žena danas: Yugoslav

nation-building and International Networks

In one of her key texts “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” (1984), Adrienne Rich

draws attention to the problem of saying “we” without contextualization and making general

claims about “all women,” adding that it is necessary to always specify “where, when, and under

what conditions have women and been acted on, as women.”212 Moreover, she problematizes the

idea that the experience of some women can be relevant for the liberation of all women,

especially the female proletariat – “uneducated, ill nourished, unorganized and largely from the

Third World.”213 Seljanka and Žena danas, both published in Belgrade, aimed at a readership in

whole Yugoslavia. Both aimed at creating an “imagined community” 214 of sisters – which I will

name sisterhood – that was supposed to be active together for a certain cause and fight for

change in women‟s lives. The aim was, of course, to include rural women into this sisterhood

created primarily by educated women. But, then, if (Serbian) women from Belgrade were

creating a community that was to include rural women from all parts of the country, how did

they come to terms with saying “we”? Did they make claims about “all Yugoslav women”? How
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did they imagine this sisterhood in relation to the national identity? I argue in this chapter that

these two conceptions of sisterhood were shaped by two opposed nation-building projects,

integral and federal Yugoslavism respectively.

212
Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985,
114.
213
Ibid., 222-223.
214
Benedict Anderson, “Introduction,” Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London, New York: Verso, 2006 [1983]), 1-7.

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 By looking at the way the sisterhood was constructed in Seljanka along the lines of

integral Yugoslavism, I intend to show that the Serbian nationalist narrative, even though put

second place to the biological discourses of national renewal, was still a strong element in the

idea of integral Yugoslavism. In the first subchapter, I also explore the (dis)continuities in the

discourses of emancipation of rural women in Seljanka with the discourse in a pre-WWI

periodical Žena, exploring Darinka Lacković‟s motivation for only partial politization of rural

women. In the second part of the chapter, by exploring the connections between nationalism,

feminism and communism in Yugoslavia during the Popular Front, I intend to show that the

federal approach to the Yugoslav national problem took shape along with the attempt for

reconceptualization of feminist ideology and a more inclusive approach towards the rural

women.

The questions I will try to answer at least partially in this chapter are the following: What

was the (implicit) nation-building agenda in the two periodicals? What were the elements of two

different approaches? How was, in relation to the national question, an imagined community of

women constructed, and how were rural women included in this sisterhood? What was the

relation of these discourses with the discourses of emancipation of women and national-

liberation narratives dominant in the period before World War I (specifically in Serbia)? What

were the other political discourses these two periodicals were competing with? Were Yugoslav
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(rural) women seen as a part of a wider, international community of women?

3.1. Seljanka and the Construction of Yugoslav Peasant Sisterhood

The approach to Yugoslavism in Seljanka, I argue, is shaped by the ideology of integral

Yugoslavism of King Aleksandar, which basically means that Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian

national identities were “erased” in the name of narodno jedinstvo [national unity]. Yet, as I will

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 show, this actually did not suppress a strong Serbian cultural character propagated in Seljanka.215

Moreover, the sisterhood Darinka Lacković tried to create was a hierarchical network of

teachers, doctors and humanitarian women on the one side, and peasant women – the students

who one-sidedly received the knowledge the teachers considered important – on the other. While

in the previous chapters I have mainly discussed the program of the school and its connection to

eugenic ideas, here I will explore the hidden curriculum216 of the King Fund‟s Domestic School.

As educational theorists Michael W. Apple and Nancy R. King indicated, “the relationship

between ideology and school knowledge is especially important for our understanding of the

larger social collectivity of which we are all a part,” as it enables us to understand how the

stratification and inequality are produced and/or perpetuated.217 Thus, in Seljanka, I look at the

hidden curriculum in terms of nation-building and the ambivalent politization of women that

takes place through the school.

On January 6, 1929, King Aleksandar Karadjordjević proclaimed a royal dictatorship by

suspending the constitution of the Kingdom, prohibiting all the parties and societies with tribal or

confessional characteristics and by dissolving the parliament. In light of increasing national

tensions in the country, the King emphasized that it was his “sacred duty to preserve the unity of

the nation and State by all means.”218 In October the same year, the name of the country was
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215
Andrew Wachtel suggests that there were three possible models of cultural unification. First, the romantic model,
when the existing (read: Serbian) culture would be chosen as a standard one; secondly, a multicultural model that
would combine elements of the “tribal” cultures; and, thirdly, the supranational model, not based on the “tribal”
cultures. Seljanka would fit into the first model. See: Andrew Wachtel, “Creating a Synthetic Yugoslav Culture,” in
Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 81.
216
For the term “hidden curriculum” see, for example, Michael W. Apple and Nancy R. King, “What Do Schools
Teach?,” Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4, Curriculum Theorizing since 1947: Rhetoric or Progress? (1977), 341-
358.
217
Michael W. Apple and Nancy R. King, “What Do Schools Teach?,” Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4,
Curriculum Theorizing since 1947: Rhetoric or Progress? (1977), 356.
218
'Royal proclamation abrogating the Constitution and dissolving the Parliament of the Serb-Croat-Slovene
Kingdom', Belgrade, 6 January 1929, Yugoslavia Through Documents: From its Creation to its Dissolution

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 changed into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the country was divided into new administrative

unities named after rivers in order to avoid the national connotations (although the majority of

the population in six out of nine of these territorial units, banovine, was Serbian).219 The final

goal was merging the state and the nation, and creating an integral Yugoslav national identity.

While the country remained “as centralized as it had been throughout the 1920s,” the

main change was that the ideology of integral Yugoslavism was supposed to suppress the sub-

identities within the Yugoslav nation thus “transforming” Serbs, Croats and Slovenes into

Yugoslavs.220 This was a result of what Djokić called the “volatile twenties,”221 when there were,

to put it simply, competing nation-building projects within the newly-formed country. The most

obvious conflict was between the Croatian nation-building project led by Croatian Peasant

Party‟s leader Stjepan Radić and the “Great Serbian” nation-building project led by Nikola

Pašić‟s People‟s Radical Party.222 After 1929, various organizations were established with the

goal of creating/strengthening the ideology of integral Yugoslavism, and organizations and

newspapers increasingly took the prefix Yugoslav. 223 As I showed in the first chapter on the

example of the unification of Narodni ženski savez Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, competing nation-

building discourses were present among the women‟s organizations as well. Unfortunately, a

more comprehensive research regarding the Yugoslav women‟s organizations and their

connection to conflicting nation-building projects has not yet been done. In this chapter, my hope
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(compiled by Snezana Trifunovska), Dordrecht, 1994, 190-91. As quoted in: Dejan Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A
History of Interwar Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 68-69.
219
Mari-Ţanin Ĉalić, Istorija Jugoslavije u 20. veku, 145.
220
Dejan Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia, 73- 74.
221
Ibid., 40.
222
For more about this, see: Ivo Banac, “The Radicals,” and “The Hard Opposition” in The national question in
Yugoslavia : origins, history, politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992 [1984]), 153-169 and 226-
260.
223
Branko Petranović, Kraljevina Jugoslavija: 1914-1941, vol. 1 of Branko Petranović, Istorija Jugoslavije: 1918-
1988. (Beograd: Nolit, 1988), 183.

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 is to point to some of the main concerns in when it comes to the complexities of constructing a

“sisterhood” in interwar Yugoslavia.

According to historian Marie Ţanin-Ĉalić, the national unity under the royal dictatorship

was being constructed on the basis of conservative values and patriarchal culture, or, in other

words, the idea was to preserve what was already there, and not to change it through

revolutionary social transformation.224 The example of Seljanka strengthens this argument, as the

King‟s Fund Domestic School appeared 1929 in the context of the dictatorship, organized by

Darinka Lacković. 225 I find it reasonable to link Seljanka to the integral Yugoslav nation-

building ideology as the school was established in 1929 and funded by the King‟s Fund which

was, according to Lacković.226 Although in Seljanka there are no explicit claims about the idea

of nationhood, I think that it is possible to read the implicit ideas of the Yugoslav national

identity from the way this sisterhood of rural women was constructed through and in the

periodical. What kind of sisterhood was constructed, and what were the connections between this

peasant sisterhood and the idea of nation?

To understand the hidden curriculum of the school, it is first important to know how the

students of the school were chosen. This unusual eight-month school was in a small Vojvodina

town Sremska Kamenica, it was not easy for Darinka Lacković to persuade the parents of women

from different parts of Yugoslavia to let their daughters leave the house and go that far for a long
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period of time. According to Lacković‟s own accounts, she would go across the whole country

searching for women from different regions. In fact, she made a conscious effort to have an equal

224
Mari-Ţanin Ĉalić, Istorija Jugoslavije u 20. veku, 145.
225
“Domaćiĉka škola Kraljeva Fonda u Kamenici” [King‟s Fund Domestic School in Kamenica], Seljanka, 1933/04,
4. According to a text in Seljanka, Ženski pokret organized the first domestic course for women in 1922.
(“Domaćinski teĉajevi po selima” [Domestic Courses in the Countryside], Seljanka, 1933/01, 7.
226
King‟s Fund was established, according to Lacković, by the King in 1922 to help the “progress of the villages
and the nation.” (“Domaćiĉka škola Kraljeva Fonda u Kamenici,” Seljanka, 1933/04, 4.)

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 number of groups from different parts of the country, which is evident from a letter Lacković

wrote to a colleague from Banja Luka, asking her to find one Orthodox and one Muslim girl,

while she would find the Catholic girl in another place.227 Going away from home, the girls from

the whole country would spend four months with each other and meet Lacković and other

women and men working in the school. By remaining in communication with their teacher after

the school and helping Lacković find new students, the girls would stay a part of this community

of women.

The result was that the activities of rural women were, in this way, politicized. Probably

for the first time, rural women were gathered around a common interest identified in the King‟s

Fund Domestic School which was a presented to them as a symbol of progress of rural women,

villages, and, consequently, the whole nation. Thomas A. Emmert raised a question about the

effort of organizing women in Yugoslav patriarchal society, emphasizing that there were many

women‟s organizations in the interwar period that did not consider themselves feminist, but that

their activities were still politicized. 228 Even though the discourse in Seljanka aimed at

emancipating rural women and politicizing their activities, there is still a question to what extent

and how this approach to emancipation of women in interwar Yugoslavia was at the same time

strengthening the limits of their emancipation. What I mean here is the fact that their network

was embedded into the framework of a patriarchal society. Unlike other women‟s periodicals,
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Seljanka did not offer any information about the other women‟s activities in Yugoslavia and in

the world – it never mentioned the struggle for women‟s political rights, suffrage, and at that

time even the women‟s increasing involvement in the struggle against fascism. In fact, rural

women were not to become familiar even with the activities of Ženski pokret, unless it was the

227
Darinka Lacković, A letter to Stanojka M. Jovanović, Seljanka, 1935/12, 14.
228
Ibid., 34

84
 domestic school for rural women organized in the previous years. The question remains why

rural women were excluded from the feminist subaltern countrpublic. One of the answers is that

rural women could not become a part of the feminist subaltern countrpublic, because „the rural

woman question‟ was embedded into the narrative of national renewal through the regeneration

of the old patriarchal way of life. One could argue that this was the only way to frame „the rural

woman question‟ in this specific context. Yet, framing „the rural woman question‟ strictly within

the limits of the nationalist narrative of biological renewal led to a paradoxical situation that the

nationalist narrative that would enable the discourse of emancipation would at the same time

draw the limits of this emancipation.

To understand this paradox better, it might be important to bear in mind that Darinka

Lacković‟s views were formed in the context of the period before WWI, when women found the

ways of articulating their demands through nationalist narratives. In fact, Darinka Lacković

published an article in the pre-WWI periodical Žena as well, arguing there for the women‟s

political equality. She explained that “a modern woman has long ago stopped being her

husband‟s maidservant,” inviting women to “…liberate women! Give them freedom, let them

come out of their four narrow walls! Educate them differently.” 229 This might be a way to

understand Lacković‟s motivations for working with rural women, as she wanted to liberate them

by offering them different education. Importantly, the emancipation in Seljanka was sought in
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negotiation with the girls‟ families, as it was the only possible way to communicate with the

women at all. So, in order to do that, Lacković‟s choice of strategy was to emphasize women‟s

difference from men and to form a “sisterhood” that was based on the rural women‟s role of a

mother, wife and a housewife. In Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women‟s

229
Darinka Lacković, “Cilj i zadatak ţenskog pokreta” [The Objective and Goal of the Women‟s Movement], Žena,
1912/09, 541.

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 Movement, Leila J. Rupp talked in a similar way about the difficulties of forging the

“international bonds of womanhood,” saying that there were many versions of ideology of

difference that could bring women together – it could be violence against women, it could be

women‟s common experience of subordination, or it could be women‟s roles of mothers. 230 In

the case of Seljanka, the “sisterhood” was constructed on the basis of the shared identity of rural

women and as mothers of the Yugoslav nation.

In Seljanka, we can see that the discourse of emancipation of rural women and the

discourse of nation-building converged in a similar way as in the pre-war discourse illustrated on

the example of the periodical Žena. Both discourses aim for the improvement of the lives of

women through education, but strictly in the limits of the family and home. Milica Tomić and

Darinka Lacković had the same argument: education of women is crucial as they are the first

teachers of their children. Yet, there are two important differences. First, in the pre-WWI

context, women who were involved in the struggle for women‟s rights were members of the

educated class of women who requested education for themselves using the discourse of

national-liberation. Twenty years after that, Darinka Lacković enters into a hierarchical teacher-

student relationship, offering knowledge considered important for rural women, but also keeping

silent about things such as women‟s suffrage. There is another discontinuity with the discourse in

Žena I suggest, even though the need to educate girls in the two cases of Žena and Seljanka was
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justified by the needs of the nation. Before the war, the emphasis was on the Serbian cultural

national-liberation narratives, whereas in the interwar period these narratives became secondary

to the eugenic discourses of health and hygiene. Thus women‟s role within the nation remained

reproductive (in both biological and cultural terms) and the division of labor remained as strong

as ever. But, the focus shifted from the Serbian national-liberation narratives which served to
230
Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 101.

86
 intensify the romantic national sentiments of the people thus preparing them for wars for

liberation, to the scientific discourse about health that aimed at securing and strengthening the

already liberated nation.

But what, then, happened with the strong cultural national-liberation discourses from

before WWI? I argue that this was a part of Seljanka‟s hidden curriculum, through which this

diverse group of women was to be integrated. Their “sisterhood” was primarily based on their

rural backgrounds, with the presumption that they all had similar problems for which the school

offers appropriate solutions. However, while they were assumed to share the identity of peasant

women, which was in fact constructed through the school and the periodical, the religious,

cultural, linguistic or political diversity of Yugoslavia Seljanka hardly mentioned, or even

ignored. For instance, the periodical was printed entirely in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, which

was an obvious problem, given that Seljanka was supposed to be read in all parts of the country.

In a letter to representatives of the Zagreb association Jugoslovenski ženski savez [Yugoslav

Female Association], Lacković wrote that she understood that the readers from Croatia would

prefer to have Seljanka printed in the Latin alphabet, but that this was impossible at the given

moment. Former students from Split had the same problem. Concerning language, the letter

written by ĐurĊa Nikolić from Tavor-Skoplje is particularly interesting, when she writes: “I am,

thank God, well and healthy. I can tell you, dear Miss, that when I visit other houses and talk
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about what I have learnt in school, they marvel at how I speak and they ask me if I am Serbian or

Macedonian, and they tell me well done, how nice you speak.” 231 This shows not only that

speaking Serbian was encouraged, but that there was an aspiration to categorize Macedonians as

Serbians. This is in line with Andrew Wachtel‟s claim that Macedonians were expected to

231
ĐurĊa Nikolić to Darinka Lacković, Seljanka 1934/08, 15-16

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 assimilate into the nation-building process as South Serbians, and not as a distinct national

group.232

Along with similar lines, the fact that there were various religious traditions in

Yugoslavia was mentioned only once, when two women of different religions (one is Serbian

Orthodox Christian and the other, even though it is not explicated, probably Catholic Christian

since the letter is addressed to a Slavonian village in Croatia) visited each other during the

religious feasts. In this letter, Lacković says how nice it is that one girl visited the other one for

religious celebration, even though her religion is different. However, while other religions are

not mentioned at all, the letters about Serbian Orthodox family saint celebrations (slava) are

quite frequent. According to the letters, the school taught women how to make ritual bread

(slavski kolaĉ) for the celebration of slava, even though it was specifically a Serbian tradition

that must have been unimportant to women with other religious backgrounds. Moreover, on the

first page of the 1933 January issue of Seljanka, Darinka Lacković wished all the readers Marry

Christmas, which the Serbian church celebrated on January 7th. Finally, even though literary

excerpts in Seljanka are rare, it is hard to overlook that the first issue of Seljanka brought a folk

song about Serbian saint, St. Sava, as well as the text of the Serbian Orthodox Lord‟s Prayer

“Oĉe naš.” At the same time, Seljanka was completely silent about Muslims. In the context of

the period before World War I, Ana Kolarić showed in her analysis of Žena that the Balkan wars
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were seen as a part of the centuries long struggle against Turks. 233 The myth of the Kosovo battle

became (or remained?) one of the key elements of Serbian nation-building narrative.

Consequently, Serbian national-liberation narratives were defined as opposed to the

232
Andrew Wachtel, “Creating a Synthetic Yugoslav Culture,” in Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature
and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 72.
233
Ana Kolarić, Gender, Literature and Modernity..., 256.

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 234
Turkish/Ottoman tradition and strongly excluded Muslim communities. According to

Wachtel, the Ottoman threat that existed before the World War I vanished in the interwar period,

so the Serbs and Croats claimed that Yugoslav Muslims were Serbian or Croatian descendants,

hence a part of the Serbian or Croatian nationality. 235 How this, as Leila J. Rupp calls it,

“pervasive Christian spirit” affected Muslim women in Bosnia and other parts of Yugoslavia, is

another important story to tell.236 What I can notice at this point is that in Seljanka – there are no

letters signed by names that could be easily associated with Muslim women.

All this relates to the question of what Wachtel calls the “Serbianization of Yugoslavia”.

While in theory the initial idea of unification did not imply this principle of the prevailing

Serbian element dominating in the Yugoslav context, in the practice the latter seems to be the

case. As Darinka Lacković was associated with Ženski pokret, in the future research it is

important to find out if and to what extent the nationalist element in Seljanka was similar or

different to the nationalist element in Ženski pokret, and if Darinka Lacković‟s implicit

(unintended?) nation-building project was a norm or an exception in the world of Ženski pokret.

As we know for now, the agenda of Ženski pokret was, in a way, pro-Yugoslav, as the goal was

the collaboration of all the regional Ženski pokret organizations. But, as I showed here, in the

1920s and the early 1930s context, pro-Yugoslav could actually very easily mean conservative

and pro-Serbian.
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Nonetheless, there were competing nation-building processes in Yugoslavia, the most

important one being associated with the Croatian Peasant Party. Mary E. Reed wrote about the

Croatian Peasant Party‟s activities the Croatian villages in the interwar period, led by Mara

234
Ibid., 263
235
Andrew Wachtel, “Creating a Synthetic Yugoslav Culture,” in Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature
and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 72.
236
Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 55.

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 Matoĉec, who often traveled to villages to organize plays or give lectures. 237 According to Mary

E. Reed‟s text, the activities organized by the Croatian Peasant Party did not differ much from

the activities organized by Darinka Lacković. They, too, organized domestic courses for women,

put emphasis on the production of clothing and the traditional way of village life, organized

literacy campaigns and propagated health reforms.238 Another similarity between Seljanka and

the Croatian Peasant Party‟s discourse was that, even though women were equal with men,

women‟s place primarily was in the home.239 This shows that, while these two approaches to

emancipation of women to a large extent overlapped, the main difference was the national

element; integral Yugoslavism was to a large extent, in fact, Serbian, whereas the Croatian

Peasant Party‟s approach was based on Croatian nationalism.

***

A nice parallel can be made here with how transnational women‟s organizations

functioned in the interwar period, thus perhaps suggesting that the approach of Seljanka was not

that unusual or unexpected. As Leila Rupp notices, while the three major transnational women‟s

organizations (the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women and the

Women‟s International League for Peace and Freedom) in theory accepted women of all races,

nations, religion, etc., in practice these organizations were mostly formed by elite, Christian,

older women of European origin.240 The unacknowledged assumptions about the “superiority and
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natural leadership of Euro-American societies” was one of the causes of the, in the end, pretty

237
Mary E. Reed, 104
238
105-106
239
107
240
Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 51.

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 much homogeneous organizations that set boundaries for inclusive participation, even if these

boundaries were unintended.241

In the case of Seljanka, I analyzed the implicit nation-building elements in a discourse I

connect to King Aleksandar‟s ideology of integral Yugoslavism, thus aiming to point to

difficulties in saying the Yugoslav “we” in this period. The sisterhood in Seljanka was

constructed on the basis of the assumed peasant and Yugoslav identity of women included in the

project, which was part of the, perhaps even unintended, “hidden curriculum” of Seljanka and

the King‟s Fund Domestic School. Strikingly, Lacković would invest great effort to find women

from all parts of Yugoslavia whose fathers were willing to let them spend eight months in a

school in Vojvodina. Yet, while being primarily concerned about the scientific knowledge

necessary for rural women across Yugoslavia, Seljanka “colonized” the experiences of non-

Serbian women by implicitly propagating the Serbian national model through the Yugoslav

nation-building discourse, thus marginalizing non-Serbian women in this community. Looking at

the pre-WWI discourse in Žena, it seems plausible that the strong elements of the Serbian

identity was a consequence of Darinka Lacković‟s historical and geographical “location,” that is,

the fact that both her feminism and her nationalism were formed in the period when Serbian

national-liberation discourses dominated the public sphere. Thus, although there was a shift from

romantic to scientific nationalism, the romantic elements were still preserved, together with the
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gendered division of labor and women‟s reproductive role within the family and the nation.

All this contributes to two Wachtel‟s remarks. First, he sees the failure of the first Yugoslav state

was in its “inability to create a consensus regarding the twin concepts of the Yugoslav nation and

its culture.” 242 And, second, he suggests that after WWI the “Serbian politics remained the

241
Ibid., 52.
242
Andrew Wachtel, “Creating a Synthetic Yugoslav Culture,” 68.

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 province of the older generation.”243 How a younger generation of women struggled with these

problems in the period after 1935 will be the topic of the following subchapter.

3.2. Layers of Sisterhood in Žena danas

In this subchapter, I look at how “sisterhood” was constructed in Žena danas, arguing

that the way the editors and contributors came to terms with saying the Yugoslav “we” and

overcoming the earlier nationalist biases was by accepting the federalist approach to the

Yugoslav national question. As I will show in this subchapter, to understand the nation-building

element in this “sisterhood,” it is important to have in mind the Yugoslav Communist Party‟s

shift in the approach towards the national question, which I will explain shortly. Along with that,

however, there was young communist women‟s attempt to reconceptualize the feminist ideology,

and to, by forming Ženski pokret‟s Youth Section, overcome the elitism of Ženski pokret and

create a community of women that would be truly inclusive. Thus, I identify four layers of

“sisterhood” in Žena danas, and they concern: the international networks Žena danas was

involved with, as it was connected to the Communist Party and the Women‟s World Committee

against War and Fascism; the collaboration of young antifascist women who formed Ženski

pokret‟s Youth Section with an older generation of women from Ženski pokret; the national

question; the editors‟ conscious effort to overcome the elitism of Ženski pokret and include a
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wide number of Yugoslav women.

To understand the Žena danas editors‟ relation to the national question, it is initially

important to bear in mind that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Communist

International‟s approach towards the Yugoslav national question went through several phases in

the interwar period. Up until at least 1934, the communists had difficulties to decide what kind of

243
Ibid., 76.

92
 strategy towards the national question to advance - a nice way to put is that “the KPJ

programmatically tested all the viewpoints that are at all possible about Yugoslavia and about the

national question in Yugoslavia.”244 At first, the national question was largely ignored, and the

communists mostly supported Yugoslav unitarism. Then, between 1925 and 1934 the Comintern

was essentially in favor of exploitation of the national question for the cause of destroying the

“Versailles cordon” in the Balkans. 245 Namely, after 1918, the Comintern perceived the

Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as “a hegemonic expansion carried out by the political

and military elites of Serbia,” and a product of the “unjust 1919 Versailles peace conference.”246

A change towards the national question in Yugoslavia came with the introduction of the Popular

Front strategy in 1935. At the 1935 plenum in Split, the Party concluded that “a solution to the

national question within a Yugoslav context needed to recognize multinationalism and the right

of different groups to self-determination.”247 From that point, the answers to the national tensions

were sought within the federal model of Yugoslav country. 248 The Communist Party of

Yugoslavia from then on supported the establishment of national parliaments not only in Croatia

and Slovenia, but also in Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Vojvodina.249

Žena danas was published in this Popular Front context. The available historiography,

and by this I mean primarily Jovanka Kecman‟s and Neda Boţinović‟s monographs, as well as

the section about Žena danas in the 1975 publication Žene Srbije u NOB [Women of Serbia in
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National-Liberation Struggle], I believe fails to paint a nuanced picture of the happenings during

244
Jozo Iviĉević, “Odrednice unitaristiĉkog nacionalnog programa I I II kongresa KPJ,” Hrvatski znanstveni
zbornik, vol. 1 (1971), no. I, 135, as quoted in: Ivo Banac, The national question in Yugoslavia : origins, history,
politics, 332.
245
Branko Petranović, Kraljevina Jugoslavija: 1914-1941, 216.
246
Aleksa Djilas, “The Yugoslavism and the Separatism of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia,” in The Contested
Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953, 55-56.
247
Ibid., 40.
248
Hilde Haug, “Towards Yugoslav Federal Unity under Comintern Influence,” in Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia
(London, New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012), 37.
249
Ibid., 42.

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 the Popular Front by making a strict division between the “socialist” and the “bourgeois”

women‟s movements. Their narratives were basically tainted by the fact that the Popular Front in

Yugoslavia was ultimately not entirely a success story. It was challenged all along by many

difficulties throughout the period, including the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact on August 23,

1939 to which the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was not sure how to react. 250 At the fifth

Land Conference in October 1940 in Zagreb, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia abandoned the

Popular Front. 251 The collaboration of Ženski pokret and the Youth Section went through

difficulties as well. In January 1940, the members of the Youth Section accused Ženski pokret‟s

leaders of depoliticizing the movement at a time when depoliticization meant giving up the key

demands of the program, and therefore they left the organization. From that point, the communist

women distanced themselves from, how they started calling them again, the “feminists.” In

november 1940 the censors confiscated Žena danas‟s thirtieth issue, but the three following

issues of Žena danas were published during the war, under the leadership of Mitra Mitrović (the

editor from the beginning) and Olga-Kovaĉić Kreaĉić.252 After the war, Žena danas became the

organ of the Antifašistički Front Žena [The Antifascist Women‟s Front], the official women‟s

organization in the newly formed, socialist Yugoslavia.

The 1975 publication Žene Srbije u NOB emphasized the influence of the Communist

Party on Žena danas‟s establishment. In this publication that aimed to offer an official narrative
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about women in the national-liberation struggle, the main subject of the segment about Žena

250
Apart from the Non-aggression Pact issue, there was a disagreement berween the main KPJ line and the strategy
of the KPH – Komunisiĉka partija Hrvatske [Croatian Communist Party]; whereas Tito and the KPJ thought the
KPH was acting to independently, the leaders of the KPH, formed in 1938, felt that they needed to address the
particular circumstances in Croatia. There was also a conflict with the leftist intellectual circles in Zagreb led by the
well-know writer Miroslav Krleţa, who was a supporter of communism but also openly criticized Stalinism. See:
Hilde Haug, “Towards Yugoslav Federal Unity under Comintern Influence,” in Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia
(London, New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012), 51-55.
251
Ibid., 55.
252
Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, “Uvod,” Žena danas. Brojevi 1/1936 – 33/1944. Fototipsko
izdanje. (Beograd: Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, 1966), V-VIII.

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 danas was the Party which “entrusted the establishment of the periodical to the young

communists from the Youth Section of Ženski pokret.”253 Certainly, Žena danas had much to do

with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and it is a fact that, as a part of the Popular Front

strategy, young communist women were instructed to “infiltrate” into the existing women‟s

organizations and legalize their activities (as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had been

outlawed since 1921). Yet, I suggest that, if we look at Žena danas from a perspective of Ženski

pokret and the Yugoslav feminist organizations, and not only the Communist Party of

Yugoslavia, we might get a different picture that, instead of the Party, puts women and their own

activities at the front of our interest. As I have mentioned earlier, the introduction into the 1966

reprinted version of Žena danas,254 as well as existing historiography, does not talk about the

understanding of feminism and the approach to the national question in this period, it does not

mention women such as Vera Stein Erlich, who contributed hugely to Žena danas but was not a

member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, or Angela Vode, who was expelled from the

party in 1939 when she disagreed with the Stalin-Hitler Non-aggression pact. It also does not put

emphasis to Žena danas‟s connection with the Women‟s World Congress against War and

Fascism, which I will elaborate in the following paragraph. All this is crucial for understanding

the “sisterhood” constructed in Žena danas.

Opening the first page of the first Žena danas issue, the reader notices that the
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introductory text for Žena danas was signed by the name of Gabrielle Duchêne. Gabrielle

Duchêne was a French feminist and pacifist who in August 1934 at the Women‟s World

Congress against War and Fascism in Paris initiated the establishment of the Women‟s World

253
Bosa Cvetić, ed., Žene Srbije u Nob (Beograd: Nolit, 1975), 69.
254
See: Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, “Uvod,” Žena danas. Brojevi 1/1936 – 33/1944.
Fototipsko izdanje. (Beograd: Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost ţena Jugoslavije, 1966), V-VIII.

95
 Committee against War and Fascism (WWCAWF).255 Duchêne was also one of the founders of

Women‟s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1915, as well as the president

of the French section of this international women‟s organization. 256 In the recent article “The

Strained Courtship between Antifascism and Feminism,” Mercedes Yusta challenged the opinion

that this women‟s organization was simply directed by the Communist International and that it

had no program of its own.257 Not all antifascist women were, as Yusta showed, members of the

Communist Party. Actually, she argues that the organization was a “cultural melting pot” of

different, as she named them, “political sensibilities.”258 Ultimately, she maintains that women‟s

antifascist mobilization resulted in creating a discourse that was an intersection of the antifascist,

pacifist and feminist matrixes.259

So, although Žena danas‟s editors were the members of the Communist Party, it certainly

owed much to the WWCAWF as well. In the introductory text to Žena danas, Gabrielle Duchêne

basically invited Yugoslav women to join the cause for peace and freedom.260 Over the years,

Žena danas published reports about the work of Women‟s World Committee against War and

Fascism. Also, the periodical visually resembled the French periodical Les Femmes dans l‟action

mondiale, published in Paris by the French Committee against War and Fascism from 1934 to

1939. Even the content was sometimes “transferred” to the Yugoslav edition, such as the text
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255
See: Francisca de Haan, The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and
Contributions, 1945-1991. Accessed May 28, 2017,
http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com/help/view/the_womens_international_democratic_federation_widf_history_main_ag
enda_and_contributions_19451991.
256
Yugoslavia became a member of the WILPF in 1934. See: Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 18.
257
Mercedes Yusta, “The Strained Courtship between Antifascism and Feminism: From the Women‟s World
Committee (1934) to the Women‟s International Democratic Federation (1945),” in Rethinking Antifascism. History,
Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 169.
258
Mercedes Yusta, “The Strained Courtship between Antifascism and Feminism…,” 170.
259
Ibid., 168.
260
Gabriela Dišen, “Novo polje rada za ţene” [New Field of Women‟s Work], Žena danas, 1936/01, 2.

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 about the celebration of four years of the Women‟s World Committee in 1938.261 Following

Yusta‟s argument mentioned in the end of the previous paragraph, I suggest that Žena danas was

a product of a wide coalition of Yugoslav (and international) antifascist (communist and left-

liberal) feminists who, as WWCAWF, created a distinctive discourse focusing on peace, the fight

against fascism and the women‟s political, social and even national rights. The basis of this wide

coalition was the collaboration of young communists who formed the Ženski pokret‟s Youth

Section and women from Ženski pokret who had already at least a decade of feminist activism

behind them.

Already in the first issue of Žena danas, there was an attempt to reconceptualize the

notion of feminism, by presenting the “new feminism:”

Recently a strong movement can be noticed among women. It can be said that
women massively enter into the already established feminist organizations, and
continue creating new ones. While for decades women‟s organizations were the
object of ridicule and tasteless jokes, today they represent a significant factor in
public life. Although the program has not changed so much, feminism itself has
gone through great changes. The changes were influenced by the external
circumstances, and the program has gained a special, deeper meaning. Pre-WWI
feminism, based on the assertion that it was neutral and that it would not choose
sides, now […] had to take a stand.262
The element that came to the first place at this point was the need to take a stand against fascism.

Žena danas did not dismiss the work of earlier feminist organizations, understanding their work

as important for women. Yet, it did challenge the “neutrality” of those organizations, including,
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as it appears, Ženski pokret as well. Eventually, in the early 1940, the neutrality of Ženski pokret

was the main reason of the “final” conflict between these two groups of women.

In the introduction to A Biographical Dictonary, Francisca de Haan, Krassimira

Daskalova and Anna Loutfi raise question about the category of socialist or communist

261
“Ĉetvorogodišnjica Svetskog komiteta ţena” [Four-Years Anniversary of the Women‟s World Committee], Žena
danas, 1938/16, 20.
262
“Novi feminizam“ [New Feminism], Žena danas, 1936/01, 4.

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 feminists. As they explain, “arguments against „communist feminists‟ have pointed to the fact

that first socialists and later communists have denounced and attacked the women‟s movement

as „bourgeois,‟ and made explicit their aversion to „feminism.‟” 263 Yet, many examples in A

Biographical Dictionary suggest that there were many women who could identify as both, and

one of them is Angela Vode. The example of Angela Vode‟s text “Feminism in Slovenia” is

particularly interesting for the discussion whether the term “communist feminism” is

contradiction in terminis,264 adding to it the question of nationalism as well. In this text, Vode

gave an overview of the feminist movements in Slovenia, discussing all the Slovenian women‟s

societies (in fact, Vode was member of almost all of them!). According to Karmen Klavţar, who

wrote a biography of Angela Vode in A Biographical Dictionary, Vode was a member of

Splošno slovensko žensko društvo [General Slovene Women‟s Society], Društvo učiteljic

[Associatian of Women Teachers], the president of Zveza delavskih žena [Union of Working

Women], Ženski pokret [The Woman‟s Movement] – between 1927 and 1937 she was the

president and the secretary of this organization -, and others. Meanwhile, she was also one of the

founders of the Communist party in 1920, and remained a member until the 1939 Stalin-Hitler

Non-Aggression pact, which she did not support and for which she was expelled from the

party.265 There are two points Vode made in the text in Žena danas. The first point is that Ženski

pokret did not manage to gather a wider community of women, and it is important because it
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reflects the attempt of the editors of Žena danas to, through establishing the Youth Section of

Ženski pokret, make the Yugoslav feminist movement less elitist. Secondly, Vode makes a point

that the women from Savez radničkih žena, even though they believed that the woman question

263
Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, “Introduction,” in A Biographical Dictonary of
Women‟s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th centuries, 8.
264
See also: Mihaela Miroiu, “Communism was a State Patriarchy, not State Feminism,” in Aspasia Vol. 1 (2007),
197-201 and Natalia Novikova, “Communism as a Vision and a Practice,” in Aspasia Vol. 1 (2007), 202-206.
265
Karmen Klavţar “VODE, Angela (1892–1985),” 604-607.

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 could only be solved through the class struggle, felt that an organization that represented only

women‟s interests was indeed necessary.266 This, in fact, shows that the views of Angela Vode

were both socialist/communist (class struggle) and feminist (women‟s political rights), and that

she insisted on the importance of separate women‟s organizations and even was part of those

women‟s organizations the socialists traditionally considered as “bourgeois.” Finally, she did

write about women‟s movements in Slovenia, thus sharing knowledge about the activities among

this national group and connecting it, though Žena danas, with the Yugoslav woman question.

The way Žena danas presented the tradition of women‟s movements in Yugoslavia shows

that reconceptualization of feminism went along with the change in the approach to the national

question, which reflects the Communist Party of Yugoslavia‟s shift towards the national question

as well. In a 1938 issue, Smilja Ivanović interviewed Milica Tomić, the editor of Žena, in which

Milica briefly - and obviously not very willingly - talked about the difficulties she had had to

graduate from high school and to be working publicly as a woman. 267 While Milica Tomić

refused to talk of her work - fearing that her opinions and worldviews “would come into

collision” with the contemporary women‟s cause and the new worldviews - the author of the

article expresses a great deal of respect towards this woman, in addition by putting the interview

on the second page of the issue. Thus, the early feminist activity within the Serbian national-

liberation struggle was seen as a precursor of the contemporary women‟s struggle.

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Of course, this was in line with the new approach of Communist Party of Yugoslavia

towards the Yugoslav national question. As I already mentioned, from then on, the Communist

Party supported the establishment of the national parliaments in Macedonia, Bosnia and

Herzegovina, Montenegro and Vojvodina. Obviously – and very interestingly – this also affected

266
Angela Vode, “Feminizam u Slovenaĉkoj” [Feminism in Slovenia], Žena danas, 1937/5-6, 2.
267
Smilja Ivanović, “Susret sa Milicom Jaše Tomića“ [A Meeting with Milica Jaše Tomića], Žena danas, 1938/11-
12, 3.

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 the representations of rural women in Žena danas. The editors of Žena danas recognized the

diversity of the social contexts in which Yugoslav rural women lived and aimed to explore

whether and how rural women were oppressed in different parts of Yugoslavia. In this light, it is

thought-provoking that most of the texts that show “how women live in different parts of the

country” focus on women in Vojvodina, Montenegro and Macedonia and, most frequently, on

Bosnia and Herzegovina. 268 It is even more striking that these texts seem to represent these

regions as, in a way, “backward,” meaning that typically they portray rural women and/or

women who had not yet organized within a movement. This opens the question of elitism of the

women publishing in Žena danas. In her study, Stanislava Barać argued that the conception that

aimed at discussing how women live in different parts of the country “expresses an anti-elitist

stand of the editors, in which a hierarchy between the center and the periphery is erased.” 269 The

“Muslim woman question” in Žena danas seems a good example to reflect on whether and to

what extent the editors succeeded in erasing the hierarchy between them and the women from

different areas, which then helps us better understand what kind of “sisterhood” they were

constructing.

The way Muslim women were portrayed in Žena danas appears ambivalent. At least in

the first issues of Žena danas, the Muslim women‟s situation is perceived as backward. The

model for the modernizing processes in the region of Bosnia is found in Ataturk‟s Turkey, as
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Bosnia was at the time, in Vera Erlich‟s words, much “more oriental” than Turkey. 270 A text

about Istanbul in the beginning of the first issue of the periodical describes Istanbul as a place

268
For example: M. Dj., “Ţena u Crnoj Gori” [A Woman in Montenegro], Žena danas, 1937/07, 8; “Ţivot Bosanske
seljanke” [Life of a Bosnian Peasant Woman], Žena danas, 1938/11-12, 20; Marija Strnac, “Ţena Vojvodjanskog
sela ponovo nosi odeću koja je sama izatkala i kuva u zemljanim loncima” [Women from Vojvodina Villages Again
Make Their Own Clothes and Cook in Clay Jars] Žena danas, 1938/16, 27.
269
Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost…, 209-210.
270
Vera Erlich, Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji, 426.

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 where everyone could “breathe a sigh of relief” again, especially women who were liberated

after centuries of prejudice and “religious fanatism.” In Istanbul, the text recounts, women are

dressed in European fashion, they sit at the same table with their husbands, and they talk freely

with each other. 271 The photographs of a literacy course and a portrait of a woman judge

accompanying the text send an implicit message to the reader that after the struggle against

illiteracy, women will have a possibility to be judges – just like women in Istanbul. This text is

followed by the article “The Muslim Woman in Bosnia Today,” explaining that female children

are often deprived of education, as in this patriarchal society a woman‟s work is in the house,

and that they often have to marry at an early age, thirteen to fifteen. But then, the end of the text

sends the following message: a change is indeed possible: the times are changing, and the

emancipatory potential in the lives of Muslim woman is seen in education and work.272

The fact that Muslim women were given special attention might indicate that there was a

general opinion within this progressive circle of women and men that Muslim women needed

some kind of special help. Vera Erlich Stein‟s introduction to her key book Jugoslovenska

porodica u transformaciji gives a clue to the general prejudiced concerns about Muslim women,

but also to the existence of the voices that warned against this attitude that put Muslim women at

a lower position in the hierarchy of women. In the introduction to her book, Vera Erlich

explained how her major research on Yugoslav families in rural areas had been initiated:
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It started in 1937, when some students from Bosnia suggested me to write articles for the
progressive periodicals about the position of Muslim women. They were embittered that
their sisters were narrow-minded and “trapped” and that often times they had to marry
against their own will, so they asked me to start a struggle for their emancipation. They

271
“Bahrija Nuri Hadţić o Istanbulu” [Bahrija Nuri Hadţić about Istanbul], Žena danas, 1936/01, 5.
272
“Današnja muslimanka u Bosni“ [The Muslim Woman in Bosnia Today], Žena danas 1936/01, 8.

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 did not succeed in convincing me to take part in the struggle against burca and hijab, but I
gladly accepted to do a research on Muslim family life.273
I understand this as Vera Stein Erlic‟s awareness of the inability to judge other women‟s way of

life, or to talk instead of them. Instead of “struggling against burca and hijab,” Vera Erlich

thought, as I have shown in the previous chapter, that a systematic research about how women

live in different parts of the country could actually help those women more, as those who wanted

to help would then have actual knowledge about what kind of help could be appreciated. Yet, it

is important to note that this was not Vera Erlich‟s individual attitude only. In the text “Research

on Families” - published in May 1937, at the time the research on families was just starting, -

Erlich described Žena danas as a platform for the exchange of observations about families, for

which both the editors and Erlich would be, as she said, “truly grateful.”274

My final example about the “Muslim woman question” concerns the twenty-fourth issue

of Žena danas, a special issue for August-September 1938, particularly interesting because it was

edited by women from Bosnia. In 1938, Žena danas‟s editors had asked women from Bosnia

connected to the Communist Party and Ženski pokret to form a group of women that would

prepare a special issue about the problems and lives of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina.275

This issue was, according to the editors, a way of connecting women from different parts of the

273
Gradually, the research spread to the other parts of the country, as the teachers from the whole country wanted to
contribute to the reseach on the family realtions in rural areas, with a special focus on the women‟s position in the
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families, and the phenomena of selling and buying women, etc. More than 300 teachers from rural Yugoslav areas
participated in the research of Vera Erlich, completing a survey that Erlich had sent them about the family life in the
areas in which they work. While the research was taking place, the danger from the occupation was increasing. In
April 1941, Germans occupied Croatia, and Vera Erlich – carrying her research papers with her - escapes first to
Dalmatia, and then to Vis and south Italy. The research, she recounts, remained safe with her. Vera Erlich Stein,
“Umjesto predgovora,” Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji, 13-17.
274
Vera Erlich Stein, Istraţivanje u porodici, 1937/04-05, 8.
275
In a chapter published in the 1977 book Ţene Bosne i Hercegovine u Narodnooslobodilaĉkoj borbi: 1941-1945
godine: sjećanje uĉesnika, Dana Begić even describes that during the celebrations of the 8th of March, women from
the communist circles even spent time reading and analyzing the articles from Ţena danas. (Dana Begić, “Osvrt na
napredni pokret ţena u Bosni i Hercegovini izmeĊu dva rata” [An Overview of the Progressive Women‟s Movement
in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Interwar Period], in Žene Bosne i Hercegovine u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi -
sjećanje učesnika [Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the National Liberation Struggle – Memories of the
Participants] (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1977), 27-29.)

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 country and including them into the newly forming “sisterhood.” The Belgrade editors reminded

the readers of the twenty-fourth issue that Žena danas had always aimed to be a periodical of all

the women and to give voice women from all parts of our country.276 In the end of the twenty-

fourth issue, the editors from Bosnia share their experiences with the readers, explaining that it

was the first time they organized to edit an issue and that the experience was (in my

interpretation) empowering. 277 At the same time, they are inviting women from Montenegro,

Macedonia and Vojvodina to do the same which, of course, was a call for an exchange of

knowledge and experiences. Also, I see it as a call for a continued building of the Yugoslav

sisterhood that could be based only on understanding on each other‟s perspectives. Finally, I read

it as a call to organize and do something to change the situation in women‟s lives around

Yugoslavia.

***

As I searched for different aspects of sisterhood in Žena danas, I focused on four main

aspects. The first layer of this sisterhood is the international. Žena danas was indeed connected

to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, but it was also connected to Gabrielle Duchêne and the

international organization she had initiated in 1934, the Women‟s World Committee against War

and Fascism. Women who had created the antifascist circle in Yugoslavia during the Popular

Front were part of the international sisterhood of women that took a decisive stand for women‟s
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rights, for peace and against fascism, starting from 1934. 278 The establishment of the Ženski

pokret‟s Youth Section was, of course, a part of the strategy of the Communist Party during the

276
“Reĉ Redakcije” [The Editors‟ Word] Žena danas, 1939/24, 3.
277
Grupa ţena koje su pripremile Bosansko-Hercegovaĉki broj, “Iskustva ţena koje su opremile Bosansko-
Hercegovaĉki broj” [The Experience of Women Who Edited the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Issue], Žena danas,
1939/24, 28.
278
For the events after the war and the creation of Women‟s International Democratic Federation, a successor
organization of Women‟s World Committee against War and Fascism see: Francisca de Haan, The Women's
International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991.

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 Popular Front, when the members of the illegal party would “infiltrate” within the established,

legal organizations and consequently be able to work publicly. Yet, their collaboration seems to

have been more than just a party strategy, as Žena danas promotes the tradition of the feminist

movements both before and after WWI. As I have shown in this subchapter, there was also an

attempt to reconceptualize feminism by constructing anti-fascism as a crucial element, followed

primarily by women‟s political rights, such as the right to vote. So, Žena danas also indicates the

layer of sisterhood, although a fragile sisterhood, of a younger generation of communist

feminists and older liberal feminists who had been a part of Ženski pokret since the early 1920s.

Their collaboration ended in January 1940, when the Youth Section accused the leaders of

Ženski pokret of stepping back from the mobilization of the widest possible number of women to

fight for their rights at the time when it was the most important. “To support the depolitization of

Ženski pokret today,” they claimed, “means to be against its own program,” adding that

“passivity today means leaving women to wander without orientation in the whirlpool of

events.”279

The third layer of the sisterhood in Žena danas concerns the national question, which was

reconceptualized along with the notion of feminism, as the Communist Party came up with the

federal Yugoslav solution. Thus, as a response to the national tensions throughout the 1920s, as

well as the failed integral Yugoslav model of King Aleksandar, the national question was used in
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a way that allowed Žena danas to deal with the regional and national differences in a non-

nationalistic way. Importantly, Žena danas set out to preserve the memory of many women who

had contributed to the feminist cause, including those who were active within the movement for

the Serbian national-liberation, such as Milica Tomić. The fourth layer of sisterhood concerns

279
“Izjava Omladinske sekcije Ženskog pokreta” [The Statement of Ženski pokret‟s Youth Section], Žena danas,
1940/26, 17.

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 the fact that the editors came to terms with saying “we” by considering the specific “location” of

women within the country, especially in the case of rural women. Regional and historical

differences were actively valued. To an extent, however, the texts about Muslim women were

patronizing, as the educated women here, to use Mohanty‟s term, “colonized” Muslim women‟s

experience and aimed to impose a specific model of emancipation, which was based on

education, work and women organizing for their rights. At the same time, Vera Erlich was

warning that entering the struggle against burca and hijab might not be the best idea. Therefore,

the editors in Žena danas made a conscious effort to overcome the elitism of Ženski pokret and

to be understood by the widest possible number of women, as well as to base the periodical on an

exchange of knowledge about women‟s lives.

3.3. Conclusions

This chapter examined the different ways women who edited periodicals in Belgrade

attempted to create a sisterhood that would include, in the case of Seljanka, many Yugoslav

peasant women and, in the case of Žena danas, all Yugoslav women, including peasant women.

It examined how women came to terms with the national problem in Yugoslavia and the specific

cultural and national “location” of various women across the country. As I looked at the

discourses of women located in interwar Serbia, I explored whether and how the strong Serbian
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national-liberation discourses from the period before WWI influenced the way the sisterhood of

women was constructed through the periodicals, which also affected the way the Yugoslav

national identity was conceptualized.

As the introduction to the Biographical Dictionary suggests, in Central, Eastern and

South-Eastern Europe, the answer to „the woman question‟ was in most cases sought within the

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 two wider questions – the „national question‟ and the „social question.‟ 280 Seljanka fits its

arguments of rural women‟s emancipation within the national question, largely shaped the

Serbian national-liberation narratives from before WWI. Although the discourse in Seljanka

aimed to promote the integral Yugoslav identity, there were many Serbian cultural elements

within this discourse, such as the alphabet, language, Orthodox religion, etc. I suggest that one of

the reasons for this is the fact that Darinka Lacković‟s view on the woman question was shaped

in the period before WWI, but also the fact that in the interwar period there was a shift from the

cultural discourses of natonal-liberation to the biological (scientific) discourses of national

renewal. Thus, Darinka Lacković‟s effort to improve the living conditions of Yugoslav women

was extraordinary, but it largely ignored the differences of rural women from various Yugoslav

regions and thus “colonized” the experience of rural women that was not compatible with the

Serbian idea of what Yugoslav identity means. The younger generation of women working on

Žena danas challenged the “Serbianization of Yugoslavia.” Following the new, post-1935 the

Communist Party of Yugoslavia‟s approach towards the national question, women who edited

and contributed to Žena danas took a different approach towards the national question. They

were careful to address the differences in the lives of women in Yugoslavia according to their

“locations,” by painting the regional portraits of Yugoslav women. Along with the shift towards

the national question, they aimed to reconceptualize feminism, keeping the memory of the
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feminist struggle along with the national-liberation struggle before WWI, accepting Ženski

pokret‟s feminist goals such as political rights of women, but also adding a strong pacifist and

antifascist element to it.

280
Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, “Introduction,” 6.

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 Whereas the sisterhood Seljanka constructed was not a sisterhood of equals, but a

hierarchical community of women active in various women‟s organizations and rural women

who were not familiarized with women‟s liberation struggles in Yugoslavia and in the world, the

sisterhood of Žena danas was imagined to be one that would connect women from international

organizations, such as Gabrielle Duchêne, to the illiterate rural women across Yugoslavia to

whom, ideally, Duchêne‟s text would be read. Žena danas shows a conscious effort to overcome

the elitism of other women‟s organizations, such as Ženski pokret, while the constant calls to

women from around Yugoslavia to write about their experiences and how they lived shows a

strong will to build a community that would be based on dialogue and on an exchange of

knowledge.

Conclusion

With the rapid dissolution of the traditional, patriarchal way of life, rural women found

themselves in an increasingly difficult position or, as Griffin put it in a slightly different context,

“a liminal, transitional state of permanent crisis.” 281 Although it is hard to make firm claims

about rural women‟s life and labor in zadrugas, different sources suggest that with the

dissolution of the extended families, the structure of rural women‟s labor changed as well, as in a
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household based on individual family it was not easy to find a replacement for work that needs to

be done. Often, even, women had to engage with the hard agricultural labor along with their

“traditional” female jobs in the house. Furthermore, during World War I, women worked as

nurses, which was one of the first public jobs they were allowed to do in Serbia. Many women

were left alone in their homes, which significantly changed the labor relations because, as was

281
Roger Griffin, “Tunnel Visions and Mysterious Trees: Modernist Projects of National and Racial regeneration,
1880-1939,” 429.

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 quoted earlier, “within a year […] the whole economy was in her [women‟s] hands.”282 Within

this context of shaken stability, I identified two discourses that took shape as a response to the

ongoing changes – one that sought to preserve the old way of life and the other that pursued a

transformation of the way rural women lived together with a transformation of the social

relations. Interestingly, within both discourses there was a strong concern for „the woman

question,‟ and there was a genuine attempt to improve the situation of rural women. The two

discourses called for modernization and progress, yet very differently conceptualized.

The discourse in Seljanka is a „hybrid discourse‟ in which „the woman question‟ was

involved with the nationalist ideology of the renewal of the nation and the regeneration of the

traditional, patriarchal way of life through modern, eugenic measures. Within this framework, a

traditional role of rural women as a mother, wife and a housewife could not be challenged. Yet,

changes were negotiated within the traditional limits of women‟s role. Seljanka aimed for a

transformation of rural women from “slaves” in the house to “coworkers” who are equal in the

household. As mothers, rural women for the first time got in touch with knowledge about

childbirth and childcare, essential for their well-being, and in the sphere of marriage they were

advised how to marry smartly, which was a reflection of eugenic ideas of a healthy marriage. In

the domain of housework, a strict division of labor was constructed and women‟s labor gained an

economic element, thus giving women more autonomy within the household. Yet, although there
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were many progressive elements in this discourse, it still put a huge pressure on women and

reified and strengthened their productive and nurturing role. Finally, although rural women were

a part of a subaltern counterpublic created through Seljanka, it seems that they had no access to

282
Zorka Krasnar-Karadţić, “Ţenski pokret kod nas i na strani,” in Ženski pokret 3, 1-2 (January-February 1922),
23-24, as quoted in: Thomas A. Emmert, “Ţenski pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s,” 34-35.

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 the feminist counterpublic as they were not familiarized with the public activities of women

across Yugoslavia and the world.

Žena danas constructed a more radical desirable role of rural women. Certainly, Žena

danas shared many concerns with Seljanka, such as the concern about illiteracy and difficult

position of rural women, but its approach was based on an attempt to overcome the elitism of the

earlier activists. The editors continually pointed to the importance of learning about rural women

and consistently aimed to show how and for which reasons educated women could approach

rural women. Whereas the relationship between educated women and rural women in Seljanka

remained strictly hierarchical, and while the experience of rural women was homogenized, Žena

danas put emphasis on the exchange of knowledge between urban, educated and rural,

uneducated women. For educated women, it was important to learn about rural women‟s

experiences across the country, and they had even a moral responsibility to share their

knowledge with those who were not as lucky as them to have had formal education. On the other

hand, it was important for rural women to learn about the struggles of feminists in Yugoslavia

and in the world. As the war was approaching, rural women were increasingly familiarized with,

but also included in, the political struggles of women in Yugoslavia. In 1939, rural women from

Lika even organized themselves to help with the petition in the biggest (and the last) suffrage

campaign in this country. This indicates that, in the years leading to World War II, huge steps
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were made in the sphere of political mobilization of all women in Yugoslavia, including rural

women.

Furthermore, apart from exploring the models of change in rural women‟s lives, this

thesis also aimed to understand how Seljanka and Žena danas fit into the larger matrix of

feminist tradition in Serbia and Yugoslavia, although a comprehensive history of feminism in

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 interwar Yugoslavia is yet to be written. In her text “Communism as a Vision and a Practice,”

Natalia Novikova reminded us that, as feminism (as an ideology, intellectual tradition or

organized movement) is “closely linked to a particular cultural, ideological, and political

setting,” studying feminism means “examining both a variety of historical contexts, traditions,

norms and political possibilities for the development of women‟s activism, and also different

strategies to attain feminist ideals.”283 Therefore, by looking at how the „rural woman question‟

was involved with the nationalist and socialist ideologies in the interwar period, my idea was to

look at the longue durée continuities and interruptions in the discourses of women‟s

emancipation and to shed light to the way the relationship of feminism with these two ideologies

changed.

The analysis of Seljanka indicated a strong connection with the liberal-nation building

project from the period before World War I. Although with the establishment of the Kingdom of

Serbs, Croats and Slovenes the pre-war discourses of women‟s emancipation somewhat

transformed, they were still closely linked to the concept of the nation. In the new context, the

focus was no longer primarily on the cultural nation-building discourse, but it shifted to the

biological discourses of national renewal. Interestingly, whereas within the elite women‟s circles

the dominant questions at this period were women‟s legal emancipation and suffrage, rural

women were, in line with the eugenics idea, seen as the main agents for the renewal of the
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nation. Thus, there was continuity in the feminists‟ involvement with nationalism and eugenics

from the period of before World War I to, at least, the beginning of the 1930s. In this context, it

was difficult to create a truly inclusive “sisterhood” of Yugoslav women, as the competing

nation-building projects could not be negotiated easily.

283
Natalia Novikova, “Communism as a Vision and a Practice,” 202.

110
 At the same time, throughout the 1920s, liberal feminist discourse was in constant

negotiation with the socialist ideology as well. As some women from Ženski pokret claimed,

there were no major differences between the “bourgeois” and the “socialist” women‟s

movements in Yugoslavia at the time. Although the relationship between these two women‟s

movements throughout the 1920s and 1930s (also) awaits further research, I aimed to show that

the negotiation between these two “sides” between 1935 and 1940 is the key for understanding

how the feminist discourse (and practices) radicalized as World War II was approaching. In

Yugoslavia, in the period of Popular Front, the notion of feminism was reconceptualized, with

the concept of peace becoming the dominant element of the feminist ideology. Women who

worked together on Žena danas created a discourse (and a platform) that was an intersection of

feminist, antifascist and pacifist ideologies. Along with the changed approach towards feminism,

there was a shift to the understanding of nationalism as well. As in 1935 the Communist Party

changed their relationship towards the national question and started seeking the solution for the

national tensions in the idea of federal Yugoslavism, saying the Yugoslav “we” and constructing

a “sisterhood” of Yugoslav women became, as before World War I, not only possible but also

progressive. Of course, one must not forget that the new approach to the Yugoslav nationalist

question was a response to the rise of the fascist and the far-right ideology. As the far-right

nationalist became a dangerous threat, the communists aimed at reconceptualization of the

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national question in a way that was not nationalistic but open to nationalist and regional

differences.

I also raised a question of the absence of the women‟s side of the Yugoslav Popular Front

story in the existing historiography. The reason for that might be the fact that, as it seems for

now, the older generation of liberal feminists decided to depoliticize the organization as the

111
 danger of war was approaching, which women from the Youth Section saw as a betrayal to their

common antifascist cause and left Ženski pokret in January 1940. After the split with Ženski

pokret, the communist women started distancing themselves from “the feminists,” as they called

them from that point. World War II in Yugoslavia started in April 1941, and many women who

worked on Žena danas ended up killed in the war exactly for being involved with this

publication and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Yet, this thesis showed that Žena danas

cannot be associated solely with the Communist Party, as it was also a part of the network of

antifascist women initiated in 1934 by the French socialist feminist Gabrielle Duchêne and the

newly formed Women‟s World Committee against War and Fascism. Žena danas was indeed a

platform that gathered a wide number of antifascist – liberal and communist – Yugoslav women,

who took part in what I see as a progressive feminist movement crucial for understanding 1930s

feminism in interwar Yugoslavia. In this period, remarkable women such as Vera Stein Erlich

and Angela Vode, not mentioned in the socialist narratives, contributed significantly to the

feminist intellectual matrix of the interwar period.

Understanding interwar feminist ideology and ideas and practices of different women and

women‟s organizations, means understanding better the intellectual and political environment in

the years that led to the radical empowerment of women and the establishment of the socialist

Yugoslavia. However, the involvement of „the woman question‟ with the nationalist ideology
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and eugenics in the atmosphere of the general politicization in the 1930s could also lead to the

involvement of women with the radical nationalist discourses. This, I must note, is the “dark

side” of the story missing from my narrative. Involvement of „the woman question‟ with the

nationalist question, as well as, perhaps, the distancing of the communist women from “the

feminists,” could also give a clue to the question why women in socialist Yugoslavia did not

112
 achieve equality with men. What makes the Yugoslav interwar feminist story even more

interesting is that Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that had a conscious feminist

movement in the 1970s, which was followed by, again, a strong pacifist feminist grass-roots

movement that emerged opposing the 1990s wars.284 In Yugoslavia, it seems that the feminist

discourses have always been in negotiation, or in a strong opposition to, nationalist and socialist

ideologies. While this is true for other countries of the region as well, 285 I believe that the

continuity of women‟s organizing and feminist discourses in Yugoslavia makes Yugoslavia a

particularly interesting study case for understanding the connections between feminist, socialist

and nationalist ideologies in Southeastern Europe.

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284
See: Zsofia, Lorand. Learning a Feminist Language: The Intellectual History of Feminism in Yugoslavia in the
1970s and 1980s. PhD diss., Central European University, 2014.
285
See, for example: Krassimira Daskalova and Susan Zimmermann, “Women‟s and Gender History,” in The
Routledge History of East Central Europe Since 1700, ed. Irina Livezeanu, Árpád von Klimó (New York:
Routledge, 2017), 278-322, especially 306-307.

113
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1933
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 Đ. Karajovanović, “Majka” [Mother], Seljanka, 1933/02, 7.
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120
 1937
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1938
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and Cook in Clay Jars] Žena danas, 1938/16, 27.
O.V. – uĉiteljica, “Kako ţena na selu provodi leto“ [How a Peasant Woman Spends Her
Summer], 1938/16, 29.

1939
Pavle Mijović, “Razvitak rada seoskih ţena” [Development of Rural Women‟s Labor], Žena
danas, 1939/19, 09.
121
 “Svaka ţena treba da nabavi komplet Žene danas” [Every Woman Should Get All Issues of Žena
danas], Žena danas, 1939/24, 28.
“Reĉ Redakcije” [The Editors‟ Word] Žena danas, 1939/24, 3. Grupa ţena koje su pripremile
Bosansko-Hercegovaĉki broj, “Iskustva ţena koje su opremile Bosansko-Hercegovaĉki
broj” [The Experience of Women Who Edited the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Issue],
Žena danas, 1939/24, 28.
“Apel za pravo glasa” [Appeal for the Right to Vote], Ţena danas, 1939/25, 3.

1940
Marija Velimirović, “Rezultati jedne borbe” [The Results of a Struggle], Ţena danas, 1940/26, 3-
4.
“Pismo seljanki iz Like” [A Letter from Lika Rural Women], Ţena danas, 1940/26, 6.
“Naša akcija kroz selo i grad” [Our Campaign In Villages and in Towns], Ţena danas, 1940/26,
10-12.
“Izjava Omladinske sekcije Ženskog pokreta” [The Statement of Ženski pokret‟s Youth
Section], Žena danas, 1940/26, 17.
CEU eTD Collection

122