The purpose of this paper is to establish the differences between the male and female variants of Bildungsroman, as well as to follow the development of the female ones, from its beginning to the 20th century. As a result of great historical, social and cultural changes in society, as well as of the modernist movement, this kind of novel experienced significant changes. Women novelists became even more aware of their awakening to limitations, which are still determined by a patriarchal society.

This article argues that postcolonial concepts of hybridity, Orientalism and the subaltern can provide a hermeneutic starting point for interpretation of Jelena Dimitrijevic’s novel The New Women, a Serbian modernist female fiction representing life of women in the affluent Ottoman circles in Thessalonica at the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century. Half of the article is a theoretical introduction into three concepts and their wider theoretical implications. The other half deals with the novel itself and all its inherent paradoxes, aspiring to show Jelena Dimitrijevic’s proto-theoretical awareness of these problems avant la lettre, long before they were conceptualized by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Both the theoretical introduction and the interpretation touch upon the problem of Maria Todorova’s concept of Balkanism as well.

This paper discusses the essays by Isidora Sekulić from the point of view of gender studies. The first part explains the reasons for the essay being an ideal form of women’s participation in culture and why Isidora Sekulić often used it when referring to foreign and domestic female writers. What the genre under scrutiny allowed to its user was formal and thematic independence, strengthening the voice of a female author as well as the expression of her intellectual beliefs. The next part of the paper presents Isidora Sekulić’s essay written in 1911: Is Constantin Brunner right? and her polemic with the claims of German philosopher C. Brunner regarding the inferiority of woman’s mind. Finally, the paper presents Sekulić’s essays devoted to the European women writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Selma Lagerlőf and François Sagan, and Serbian female writers (Danica D. Hristić, Danica Marković, Jelena Dimitrijević, Jelisaveta Ibrovac, Milica Janković, Vida J. Radović, Smilja Đaković, Milica Kosić Selem). On this basis, Isidora Sekulić’s evolution from a universal to a strongly gender-oriented attitude is presented.

 

The text is about Jelica Belović Bernadzikowska, a writer, ethnographer and teacher, and about her work on self-affirmation and the affirmation of her contemporaries. Bernadzikowska’s effort to describe and present the work of Serbian women in the cultural domain is seen in the light of the specific notion of culture she uses in her monograph on textile art (1907) and connected to the work and reception of her contemporaries who were presented in the almanac Serbian Woman (1913).

This text deals with some issues related to women’s emancipation in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Here we wish to present how first feminist societies were established, and what their role in the society was. We also gave an overview on the legal system and women’s position in it. The First feminist organization was established in 1919 in Belgrade, and after that in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo. One of the main goals for Yugoslav feminists was the issue of getting suffrage for women. But these feminists did not have much success because of the many obstacles they had to face, one of them being the fact that a unique legal system had not been established in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

The way three Serbian female writers (Milica Stojadinović, Jelena Dimitrijević and Isidora Sekulić) treated clothing, and the way in which the women’s magazines at the beginning of 20th century wrote about dresses or hats, tell а lot about social status, and cultural and social qualification. Clothing displays dependence and slavery, but also a release, it articulates sex differences, and most of all, it is the reflection of individuality and a personal attempt to mark one’s place in society.

The nineteenth century in Europe was marked by the strong women’s movement which was focused on women’s suffrage and political equality. Although most of the movement’s participants and supporters shared the same main goals, their priorities varied among countries, nations and communities. As participants in the national liberation movement, Serbian women believed that their emancipation and achievement of political equality were in the national interest. Using as a reference point several classic works of feminist scholarship, this essay explored various discourses related to the women’s emancipation, “women’s question” and “women’s rights” as they were represented in the women’s journal Žena / Woman. By so doing, the essay tried to show how certain historical and geopolitical contexts affect women’s struggle for equal political rights. Moreover, it emphasized the importance of archival research for establishing and better understanding of the history of Serbian feminist movement.