From Slovenka to Ženski svet: Slovene Feminism in Trieste between Cosmopolitism and the National Struggle, 1897-1928.

Central Europe Seminar Series with Marta Verginella.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Trieste was the Habsburg Monarchy’s most important port city and the site of a fierce national struggle between Slovenes and Italians. From 1897 to 1902, the first Slovenian women’s newspaper Slovenka was published in Trieste and its first editor, Marica Nadlišek, was at the centre of an extensive social and intellectual network spanning the Slovene, Habsburg and South Slavonic worlds. Slovenka was at the margins of the national movement, yet it became a focal point of Slovene feminism and women's pan-Slavism. The outbreak of war in 1914, along with the subsequent collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of fascism, decimated intellectual circles in Trieste. Those Slovene women who decided not to emigrate to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) had to give up their feminist and political ideals and devote themselves to national defence work in hopes of mitigating the consequences of fascism and forced italianization of the Slovene population.

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