Beyond the National: Notes on the International Women’s Movement(s) in Žena (‘The Woman’)

Ana Kolarić

doi:10.20897/femenc/8514

Abstract

This article explores the role of news and short unsigned articles published in the magazine Žena (‘The Woman’) in the period 1911–1914, with a particular emphasis on the magazine’s permanent section ‘Various Notes’, which consisted of news about the various aspects of women’s lives and work. The magazine was owned and edited by Milica Tomic, the first Serbian woman to work as editor-in-chief. The group of women gathered around the magazine Žena used the unsigned section to shed light on the events and struggles which they considered significant, such as women’s suffrage, but could not advocate as their primary goal because of the restrictions posed by the patriarchal and traditional society in which they lived and worked. Thus, transnational aspect of the magazine Žena, conveyed in the news from abroad, enabled the editor and contributors to sometimes express more emancipatory and subversive ideas than they did in the articles which they themselves signed.

Highlights

The women’s movements around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been described as an international or transnational phenomenon (Cowman, 2016: 55–56; de Haan, 2017: 513)
Aleksijević’s article demonstrated that dominant discourse in the magazine Žena was shaped by a notion of the specific culture of womanliness: (Serbian) women were expected to keep all their ‘specific women’s traits’ – to be gentle, kind, caring – in order to get the right to education and work
It is important to briefly acknowledge that besides the question of women’s suffrage, other urgent issues made the object of the news and unsigned articles

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The women’s movements around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been described as an international or transnational phenomenon (Cowman, 2016: 55–56; de Haan, 2017: 513). Aleksijević’s article demonstrated that dominant discourse in the magazine Žena was shaped by a notion of the specific culture of womanliness: (Serbian) women were expected to keep all their ‘specific women’s traits’ – to be gentle, kind, caring – in order to get the right to education and work. Such a belief about essential gender difference – if and when needed – served conservatives and the defenders of the patriarchal order very well. Žena operated on different levels and with a voice that may seem self-contradictory, but represented strategy for opening up more than one way to imagine female empowerment and public action to an audience that was not already sympathetic to some of the more progressive/radical ideas present in international feminist networks

INTERNATIONAL CONGRESSES AND CONFERENCES

PROFFESSIONS FOR WOMEN AND THE GENDER PAY GAP

CONCLUSION