Women Editors in Interwar Yugoslavia Between the Struggle to Write and the Struggle for Rights: Katarina Bogdanović and Paulina Lebl Albala

Abstract

What did it mean to be a woman periodical editor in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia? What was the price of constant efforts made by some women periodical editors to reconcile the private and public, individual and collective, the desire for creative freedom or belonging to the literary community on the one hand, and feminist engagement on the other? How were their habitus and identity shaped between the struggle to write and the struggle for (women’s) rights? In this paper, I partially answer these and similar questions – which I cover more extensively in my doctoral dissertation in progress Women Periodical Editors in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia: Biographical, Literary-Historical and Typological Aspects – using the magazine Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement, 1920–1938) and the (auto)biographies of its founders and first editors, Katarina Bogdanović and Paulina Lebl Albala, as the subject of a case study. The interdisciplinary framework in which I operate consists of periodical studies, gender studies, intellectual history and literary studies.