Lydia Sklevicky

From Monoskop
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Lydia Sklevicky (7 May 1952, Zagreb–21 January 1990, Delnice) grew up in a middle-class family that left Saint Petersburg following the October Revolution of 1917 to settle in Yugoslavia. She enrolled and in 1976 completed her studies in sociology and ethnology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. Soon after, Sklevicky became an assistant at the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement in Croatia, where she worked until 1988. For the next two years, she worked at the Institute for Folklore Research. She died tragically in 1990, in a car accident near Delnice in Croatia.

Almost every review of Lydia Sklevicky’s life and work refers to the way in which she was characterized by the philosopher and feminist theorist, her colleague and friend, Rada Iveković. Iveković described her as a feminist začinjavka, an inaugurator, initiator, or pioneer of feminism in the 1970s in socialist Yugoslavia, historiographically referred to as neofeminism or new Yugoslav feminism. During her fifteen-year-long career, Sklevicky focused on the critical examination of the history of women and women’s rights, primarily on the territory of Yugoslavia, and thus became the first Croatian and Yugoslav scholar to address the social history of women on the basis of the intellectual achievements of second-wave feminism.

In 1984, Sklevicky defended her master’s thesis, entitled “Women and Power: The Historical Genesis of an Interest,” based on a critique of the traditional study of history that tends to ignore the female perspective. Founding her research on the hypothesis that any women’s public activity with the aim of achieving equality is at the same time emancipatory, she explored the characteristics of the organized activities of women throughout the existence of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia until the end of the Second World War. The translated source text below is an overview of Sklevicky’s master’s thesis, but also of the intellectual foundations on which she wrote a series of texts and began to write her doctoral dissertation. Indicative in this respect is her (later) use of research undertaken by Rajka and Milan Polić. Commenting on their findings, which were based on the quantitative analysis of materials in history textbooks in Croatia—and which showed that there were more horses than women mentioned—Sklevicky ironically noted that women’s history in Yugoslavia is needed “also because it is an indisputable fact that women in Yugoslav society make up (slightly more than) half of the population, and also because they have always outnumbered horses.”

Her doctoral dissertation, which thematically and methodologically continues the work started in her master’s research, remained unfinished. It is entitled Emancipation and Organization: The Role of the Women’s Antifascist Front in the Postrevolutionary Changes of Society (Croatia 1945–1953), and in it the author set out to question the country’s project of women’s emancipation and the role of women in socialist society. To this day it remains a foundational historical text in which the conditions of the emergence and wartime development of the Women’s Antifascist Front in Croatia has been most thoroughly considered.

Sklevicky was a member of the Zagreb Historical Society’s Section for Research of Women’s History “Nada Klaić,” and one of the founders of the group Woman and Society, established in 1979 under the auspices of the Croatian Sociological Society. At the time, the latter was led by Rudi Supek, a famous sociologist, philosopher, and one of the founders of the Praxis School of Marxism. During the academic year 1984–85, she led the postgraduate seminar on women’s history in Yugoslavia as a part of the Section’s activity.

Sklevicky was also active outside of academic circles. Thanks to the activities of new feminist groups in the spring of 1988 the first SOS helpline in Yugoslavia for women victims of violence was launched in Zagreb, where Sklevicky volunteered. Academic women such as Sklevicky and Rada Iveković worked together on the helpline with women from other backgrounds, such as the motor behind the Zagreb helpline, the ballet dancer and anti-violence activist Vesna Mimica. Writing for the Zagreb-based glossy women’s magazine Svijet [World], Sklevicky also informed the broader public about a range of relevant issues for women from a feminist perspective, her topics including marriage, family, abortion, and the female body. (2024)

Publications[edit]

  • "Od borbe za prava do prave borbe" [From the Struggle for Rights to the Real Fight], Žena 34:3, May–Jun 1976, pp 52–59. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • trans., Erica Jong, Voće i povrće [Fruits and Vegetables], Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske, 1981. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • "Ženske studije u osamdesetim godinama" [Women’s Studies in the 1980s], Revija za sociologiju 1–4, 1982, pp 157-162. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • Antropologija žene (editor, with Žarana Papić), Belgrade: Prosveta, 1983, 396 pp; repr., Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, and Centar za ženske studije, 2003. Publisher. Reviews: Olga Supek-Zupan (Narodna umjetnost), Zorica Ivanović. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • "Karakteristike organiziranog djelovanja žena u Jugoslaviji u razdoblju do Drugog svjetskog rata" [Characteristics of Women’s Organized Activity in Yugoslavia in the Period Before World War II], Polja 308, 1984, pp 415–17; and 309, 1984, pp 454–56. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • "AFŽ kao potencijalni čimbenik procesa kulturne mijene tijekom razdoblja NOB-e", Problemi: revija za kulturo in družbena vprašanja 23:251/252, 1985, pp 71-74. (Serbo-Croatian)
    • "The Women’s Antifascist Front as a Potential Factor in the Process of Cultural Change", intro. Iva Jelušić, trans. Jelena Babšek Labudović, in Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women's Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century, eds. Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2024, pp 243-254. (English)
  • Žena i društvo: Kultiviranje dijaloga [Woman and Society: Cultivating the Dialogue] (editor), Zagreb: Sociološko društvo Hrvatske, 1987. (Serbo-Croatian)
  • “More Horses than Women: On the Difficulties of Founding Women’s History in Yugoslavia", Gender and History 1:1, Spring 1989, pp 68–75. (English)
  • Konji, žene, ratovi [Horses, Women, Wars], ed. Dunja Rihtman Auguštin, Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996.
  • Žene i moć: Povijesna geneza jednog interesa [Women and Power: The Historical Genesis of an Interest], eds. Andrea Feldman and Marijana Kardum, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku–Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 2020.

Literature[edit]

  • Rajka Polić, Milan Polić, "Dječji udžbenici o (ne)ravnopravnosti među spolovima" [Children’s Textbooks on Gender (In)Equality], Žena 37:1, Jan–Feb 1979, pp 12–28.
  • Kruh & ruže 3: "Lydia Sklevicky – Tematski broj časopisa povodom pete godišnjice smrti" [Lydia Sklevicky—On the Occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of Death], eds. Biljana Kašić, Đurđa Knežević, and Anamarija Starčević Štambuk, 1995, pp 4–41.
  • Đurđa Knežević, "Lydia Sklevicky", Radio Gornji Grad. Regionalni časopis za književnost, kulturu i društvena pitanja u prijelomu epohe, 20 Jan 2020.

See also[edit]

Links[edit]

Retrieved from "https://monoskop.org/index.php?title=Lydia_Sklevicky&oldid=135614"