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Natascha Vittorelli, Frauenbewegung um 1900. Über Triest nach Zagreb (The women's movement around 1900. Through Trieste to Zagreb), Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2007, 294 pp., ?22.00 (pb), ISBN 13-978-3854094661
The comparatively small book under review here, which builds on the dissertation of the author, is intended to critically reflect and go beyond 'standardised versions1 of women's movements' histories' as well as to 'destabilise accepted (national) modes of narrating' this history. In order to accomplish this task the author sets out to 'confront themes, questions, and concepts in use in the historiography of women's movements with concrete historical reconstructions' (pp. 14-15). To achieve her goal, Natascha Vittorelli looks in four separate chapters at one protagonist, who spent most of her life in Slovenian and Croatian territories (and for a time lived in Prague), one Slovenian journal published in Trieste/Trst/Triest, one Serbian association in Novi Sad/Neusatz/ Ujvidek, and the women's movement in Zagreb/Agram/Zagrab. After 1918, these three cities belonged to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed in 1929 Yugoslavia. The narratives presented in the four chapters are intended to ?econtribute to broadening the thematic, theoretical as well as methodological repertoires of historiographies of women's movements and in this way to point beyond the regional contexts presented' (pp. 15.16). An annexe to the text contains short extracts, in German translation, from the first literary publication Misterjzene (The mystery of woman) by Zotta Kveder (1878.1926), the protagonist of the first chapter, and a useful list summarising bibliographical information on more than 120 individuals featuring in or related to the stories narrated in the book.
Thus, in essence, this is a book about selected activisms and organisations of women speaking Slavic languages in the south of the Habsburg Monarchy, and about some of the various modes in which their histories have been appropriated in public discourse and academic writing ever since. However, as a result of Vittorelli's endeavour to escape all kinds of definitions the non-specialist reader will have real difficulties in realising that the book is about Southern Slavic women's movements within the Habsburg Monarchy. Instead of giving this essential information, in the introduction and elsewhere, Vittorelli plays around the related complex and contradictory terminology and definitions. Later she exiles into short introductory '(fictive) lexicon entries' about the...