REPREZENTACIJA ŽENA NA RAZGLEDNICAMA PRVE POLOVINE 20. VEKA

Abstract

/ The paper deals with the postcards of the first half of the 20th century. The history of visual culture testifies to gender differences, the subordination of a woman, whose activities are mostly placed within the framework of “private”, closed, shaped by the virtues of love, intimacy and care for the family. Since visual media are powerful means of the social construction of reality, they are also indicators of prevailing social values. The creation and development of postcards coincides with the weakening of civil society, as a dominant social group, due to the penetration of socialist ideas. Accordingly, the averse of the maps show the cultural and moral values of the patriarchy, where man is the main figure in the family. These postcards belong to the collection of the National Museum in Leskovac and were chosen as one of the examples of simplicity and efficiency of circulating the meaning of Western European culture and analyzed in the context of the feminist theory in the era of the first wave of feminist activism (between 1848 and 1920) and its impact on a decade later. In southern Serbia, which was on the road to liberation from oriental cultural values at the time, torn between tradition and modernization, the products of mass culture from Western Europe could seem like something new and progressive, but in fact they were only another form of representation of gender differences through the constitution of stereotypes.