Focusing on the case of Yugoslavia and Yugoslav women's involvement in four major international women's organizations of the time, this open access book is the first examination of how feminist ideas were shaped by the political experiences of the leading women activists of the era. It reveals how Yugoslav interwar activists forged cooperation across political and national divides and across state borders during a period of rapid political change in East Central Europe.
Based on extensive new primary research, Interwar Women's Activism in Yugoslavia explores the meanings of the concept of feminism in historical context and reflects on how feminist political alliances and activists' shared visions of the future and social change changed from the 1920s to the 1930s. The study of women activists' writing reveals not only the original feminist critiques of the social and political system in the newly founded Yugoslav state, but also of the broader situation in Europe, and above all the rise of fascism. The book argues for a rethinking of the history of European interwar feminisms from the perspective of political generations by considering both the state-building feminist generation of the 1920s and the antifascist feminist generation of the 1930s. In the process, it crafts a novel analytical framework of feminist political languages to analyse the different political positions of feminists of both generations.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Institute of Contemporary History, Slovenia.