CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Grubacki, Isidora |
|---|---|
| Title | Emancipating Rural Women in Interwar Yugoslavia: Analysis of Discourses on Rural Women in Two 1930s Women's Periodicals |
| Summary | This thesis explores the ideas and, to a limited extent, practices of emancipation of rural women in the interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia that preceded the radical empowerment of women that took place with the establishment with socialist Yugoslavia in 1946. The thesis is a comparative discourse analysis of the ways two different periodicals edited and published by women constructed the desirable roles of rural women in the 1930s. The periodicals in question are: Seljanka: list za prosvećivanje žena na selu (1933-1935) [Peasant Woman: Periodical for Enlightenment of Women in the Countryside], the only periodical in interwar Yugoslavia published specifically for rural women, and Žena danas (1936-1940) [Woman Today], a periodical that had a strong feminist, pacifist and antifascist stand with a hidden communist agenda. By constructing the desirable image of rural women in the public sphere, the discourses I analyze shaped the ideas of how and in which ways the changes in the lives of rural women in Yugoslavia should occur. As this thesis argues, these discourses of emancipation of rural women were influenced by different political and social ideologies of the period, usually perceived as conflicting, such as eugenics, nationalism and traditionalism, communism/socialism and feminism, and different approaches to Yugoslav nation-building, integral and federal. By looking at these two periodicals, I show how the approach of the educated, elite women towards ‘the rural woman question’ became more inclusive and more radical as World War II was approaching and as ‘the woman question’ got increasingly involved with socialist ideology. |
| Supervisor | Balázs Trencsényi |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/grubacki_isidora.pdf |
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