In the second part of my text about the famous intellectual woman Katarina Bogdanović (1885–1969), I analyze her diary notes and other archive materials showing that she was constantly in search of her true self and the limits of her freedom, engaged in an incessant examination of the existing state of society and social relations, all the while opposing the hierarchical and unquestioningly proclaimed authority: the patriarchy, educational establishments, political institutions, and the institution of the church and marriage. As a critical observer of the world and her role in it since her early youth, Katarina Bogdanović actively participated in cultural and social life, but simultaneously she was also creating a parallel world, thus using the mission and privilege given to philosophers and writers to anticipate or predict particular social phenomena and influence youth education, the formation of youth worldview, and the development of political culture in their environments.

In thirty-six chapters of her travelogue The New World or a Year in America, Jelena J. Dimitrijević describes 20^th-century America. Through her description of cities, festivities, daily life habits, and visits to universities, lectures and conferences, Jelena Dimitriijević enables us to follow the main area of her interest – women and their position. Apart from personal impressions and descriptions, in her travelogue, Jelena Dimitrijević also comments on periodical materials such as newspaper articles, pamphlets, and advertisements, and so provides an insight into the current social issues. The first part of this paper describes the socio-economic circumstances that women live in, while the other part focuses on the Anti-Suffrage Movement, and particularly on the antifeminist journalThe Woman Patriot (1918–1932) and its presence in the travelogue The New World or a Year in America. The last part deals with the social issues addressed by the articles published in The Woman Patriot.

Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska’s (1870–1946) life and work provide considerable insight into the conditions surrounding the new types of professional women of the early 20^th century. Her extensive published work transcended categories of pedagogy, social commentary, feminism and ethnography and appeared in a variety of formats from fiction to academic writing. This essay deals with a brief portion of Belović-Bernadzikowska’s life; the period from 1902 to 1914, in which she successfully transformed herself and her public persona from a schoolteacher in the schools of Bosnia and Herzegovina into a respected ethnographer and expert on women’s textiles. This was not a voluntary transformation; she was forced into a new career in 1902 when she was relieved of her position as a teacher by the Provincial Government. How she accomplished a professional reinvention is the topic of this essay; but she experienced other personal and political changes as well – including a rejection of her native Croat patriotism in favor of greater sympathy with the Serbs. These reinventions took several years, but a significant signpost of her growing success appeared in 1909. At this point she began to write for the scholarly (albeit controversial) German-language journal, Anthropophyteia, published by the renowned Balkan ethnographer and sexologist Friedrich Salomo Krauss. With a growing reputation outside the Slavic lands, Jelica was on her way to achieving the academic, scholarly acclaim she craved. For a time, she hoped to break through the gendered barriers that restricted female writers among the Southern Slavs.

High-School Moment (Gimnazijski trenutak) is the first collection of poems by Gordana R. Todorović (1933–1979), a forgotten Serbian woman poet who wrote in the period of neo-symbolism and neo-Byzantinism, leaving behind three hundred poems and a thousand neologisms. The collection was published in 1954, by the publishing house Novo pokolenje, and the following year it received Branko's Prize. By inspecting the reception of this work at the time of its creation and conducting a (post) structuralist analysis of the collection, by defining the scope of its themes and motifs, its lyric subject, verse, stanza and rhyme, and by dealing with its neologisms, this paper re-examines the emergence of High-School Moment in Serbian poetry – the significance and value of this collection in the opus of Gordana R. Todorović and in the history of Serbian literature.

This paper analyzes and compares two notable anti-slavery poems – Sarah Wentworth Morton’s “The African Chief” and Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s “To the First Slave Ship” – written in the early American Republic (between the American Revolution and the Civil War). Within our analysis we show that both “The African Chief” and “To the First Slave Ship” can be interpreted through a three-layered metaphysical social hierarchy made up of God, white slave-holder, and black slave. In both poems the roles awarded to each of the members of the hierarchy are the same – the black slave appears as the earthly martyr, the white slave-owner as the earthly master, whereas God assumes the role of mankind’s righteous heavenly judge poised to redeem the unjustly dehumanized Negro. However, though following the same general pattern, the two poems differ in how they specifically depict each of the three members of the hierarchy. The differences between the two poems in their respective images of God, white master, and enslaved Negro lead us to conclude that “The African Chief” contains a stronger criticism of slavery. The paper ends in a subjective statement that Wentworth Morton’s poem, due to the more pronounced sentimentalization of its black protagonist, is more likeable than Huntley Sigourney’s.

This paper presents the main segments of Alexandra Kollontai’s opus – her texts from periodicals, as well as her theoretical and fictional works. The paper is centered on her theory of “the new woman” and free love. It analyzes this author’s attitudes to relations between the sexes and the new morality, and the reactions that these attitudes of hers provoked. It particularly delves into her influence on the formation of a new female identity through periodical press. It provides an overview of the articles written by A. Kollontai and published in the following Soviet magazines – Работница, Коммунистка, Молодая гвардия, and Правда. Apart from that, the paper also points to the reception of her ideas in the Balkans, specifically in the magazine The Women's Movement. The last part of the paper deals with the literary works of A. Kollontai.

The aim of this paper is to show how Ling Shuhua (凌叔华, 1900‒1990) developed her literary career as a feminist writer in unfavorable environments, and to point to the strategies she used in order to adapt to the given circumstances. Instead of openly rebelling against the patriarchy and tradition, Ling Shuhua wrote stories in a style specific for classical literature which was unpopular at the time because of the efforts of the community to break with tradition, but with an ironic perspective on the flaws of the patriarchal traditional society. By doing so, she fulfilled the expectations of society, i.e. to write as an educated bourgeois lady, but at the same time succeeded in her intention to write in the name of silent female voices in China. On the other hand, she wrote her autobiography Ancient Melodies in English and, encouraged by Virginia Woolf (1882‒1941), published it in Great Britain. The language she used in this book and the manner in which she portrayed her childhood show that Ling Shuhua agreed to exotify herself in to order to please English readers and enter the foreign market, while simultaneously presenting her feminist views in another effort to establish herself as a feminist writer, this time in a foreign country.

This paper analyzes the contemporary trend of publishing books about exceptional women, written in the field of children’s literature. In the paper, the given trend is put into two contexts: the first context is that of collective biographies of women worthies, with a tradition that goes back to the antiquity, whereas the other one is determined by the genre of women’s portrait. Relying on theoretical works about both genres, the paper shows the ways in which contemporary books about exceptional women are part of the writing of women’s history, and of the construction of women’s identity. The other goal of this analysis is to show the complexity of the supposedly naively conceptualized books, through pointing out the narrative strategies and visual potential being used in the construction of identity.

This paper aspires to explore the connection between feminism and popular culture through the lens of key ideas presented in three books that deal with it – Feminism and Pop Culture, We Were Feminists Once (From Riot Grrrl to Cover Girl®, The Buying and Selling of a Political Movement) by Andy Zeisler, and Cosmopolitics by Maša Grdešić. Both authors emphasize the importance of approaching popular culture from a feminist angle in the context of contemporary consumer society, and the need for feminist intervention in existing forms of popular culture. Accordingly, the focus of the analysis is put on the interplay between feminism and various forms of popular culture and its practices. Apart from providing a historical overview of the development of relationship between popular culture and feminism, this paper also deals with various forms of feminism that emerged under the auspices of third-wave feminism and that work in favour of the capitalist demands of modern times – marketplace feminism, feminism of choice, and celebrity feminism. These hybrid forms of feminism illustrate only too well the commodification of feminism and the appropriation of feminist vocabulary as also topics of this study.