‚Giftige Früchte der Mutterschaft‘ in der kroatischen Frauenliteratur der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

Abstract The article analyses the strategies used by Croatian female authors for writing about the myth of motherhood in the first half of the 20th century. The focus is on the representative literary works and relations between traditional role expectations and attempts to offer alternative models for women’s lives. The paper also deals with the problem of female identity marked by the masculine domination and social repression in the patriar­chal culture. The female writers’ underlying issues are discussed on the basis of a combination of close tex­tual reading and topic-based analysis. In the conclusion, the paper emphasizes the brave criticism of the myth of motherhood as one of the main characteristics of the Croatian female authors’ writings in the first half of the 20th century.