Crises of feminism and democracy in the interwar period: Yugoslav and Czechoslovak entanglements

In 1927, the Ljubljana-born and Belgrade-based feminist Alojzija Štebi (1883–1956), president of the nationwide Yugoslav self-identified feminist organization, the Alliance of Women’s Movements (Alijansa ženskih pokreta, AŽP), published an article titled “Whose crisis?” in her organization’s official periodical, Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement, 1920–1938). In this article, Štebi reflected on what she saw as a general crisis of the parliamentary system and of democracy in contemporary Yugoslavia. Several years later, Štebi’s fellow activist, the Serbian-born, Prague-based feminist Julka Chlapcová-Djordjević (1882–1969), who was active in both Yugoslav and Czechoslovak feminist circles in the interwar period, wrote about a different kind of general crisis: that of the feminist movement. More specifically, in May 1933, in one of many of her contemporary texts in which she discussed what she called the “petrification” of the feminist movement, Chlapcová-Djordjević emphasized the “stagnation” of all the European feminist movements. She further noted that the Yugoslav one (which Štebi had been leading) was the most problematic. Both Štebi and Chlapcová-Djordjević were born in the early 1880s in Austria-Hungary, and their political and intellectual formation was in pre–World War I Austria-Hungary. Likewise, both Štebi and Chlapcová-Djordjević were part of what we can broadly call the interwar liberal feminist movement in Yugoslavia. Yet, their feminist political languages differed substantially and embodied different strategies to achieve the transformation of women’s position in society. It was from their different ideological positions that they conceptualized these two crises—of democracy and of feminism, respectively—and this chapter addresses their differing ideological position and the connection between the two discourses of crises.