Pioneer Serbian Women Physicians and Their Activist Role in Women’s Rights: Dedicated to Lidija Dmitrijev

Abstract

Pioneer Serbian Women Physicians and Their Activist Role in Women’s Rights*Dedicated to Lidija Dmitrijev Gordana Stojaković The articles published by Dr. Unna Ruhnow in the German magazine Illustrirte Zeitung in March and July of 1898 were my inspiration to write about the first women physicians of the Serbian nation.1 In the two texts, published under the same title “Prakticirende Aerztinnenn der Gegenwart,”2 Runhow provided biographies of 28 European women physicians, including five women physicians from Serbia. My aim is to review, in this context, the available historiographical data about the first women physicians in the Serbian nation. In addition, I present the results of research on women’s movements in Vojvodina3 and Serbia that show that these women physicians were among the founders and leaders of numerous women’s organizations, a connection not yet recognized by Serbian historiography.4 The introduction provides the basic information about the first women physicians and their experiences in breaking new ground in the profession. [End Page 109] For this, I relied on the work of Eric Luft, which was published on the 150th anniversary of women entering the medical profession.5 Luft, in addition to giving biographies of the first educated European women physicians, paid special attention to the context in which women were allowed to study medicine. An important part of his work is his discussion of the participation of these pioneer women physicians in the struggle for women’s rights. Following his pattern, I compare the experiences of European and Serbian women physicians fighting for professional acknowledgment and for women’s rights. Research on the first women physicians in Serbia has shown that they did not lag behind their European colleagues in these efforts. To illustrate the prejudices in the patriarchal societies of Europe and Serbia that women had to overcome, I have used information about the way women’s sexuality was represented in popular publications of the time, Gerling’s evojke koje ne treba eniti —Opomene i savjeti6 is an example.7 The version in Serbo-Croatian was published in Zagreb and Belgrade in 1923, and the publisher noted that the work, originally published in Vienna, had been translated into French, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Polish and that it had sold over 200,000 copies in a year. The right of women to participate in the medical profession, first as midwives and later as physicians, was considered a very important step in the process of women’s liberation. The advantage for female patients of communicating with same sex caregivers, and the possibility of achieving a higher level of support and understanding than was the case with male physicians, were constantly highlighted and emphasized. Women working in the medical profession were expected to educate and support other women in terms of hygiene, health, and sexual behavior. English Suffragettes emphasized “the urge to study human nature and psychological factors which affect the behavior of the sexes.”8 They sought to reinterpret sexual identity through scientific studies of human nature and, later on, to reconstruct the role of women in society. I suggest that similarities between European and Serbian efforts concerned the organization of charitable foundations and the fight for women’s rights and [End Page 110] that the differences involved the deconstruction of the traditional sexual identity of a woman in a patriarchal society. Nevertheless, for both European and Serbian women physicians entering the medical profession, it was considered a great step in the process of women’s emancipation and their inauguration into the public sphere, which had formerly been accessible only to men. Early Medical Schools for Women and Some of the First Women Physicians in Europe During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Germany and France were the most liberal societies with respect to the medical education of women and midwifery schools. Owing largely to the work and agitation of midwife Justine Dittrich Siegemund (1638–1705),9 midwifery was taken seriously and approached scientifically in Germany. At the beginning of nineteenth century, there were a few midwifery schools in Berlin, and one of them was connected to Berlin University. The work of midwife Marie Ann Victorie Boivin (1783– 1841)10 influenced the improvement of midwifery’s...