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Vesela Tutavac and Ilse Korotin, eds., "Wir wollen der Gerechtigkeit und Menschenliebe dienen Frauenbildung und Emanzipation in der Habsburgermonarchie-der südslawische Raum und seine Wechselwirkung mit Wien, Prag und Budapest ("We wish to serve justice and humanity ..Women's education and emancipation in the Habsburg Monarchy-the South Slav space and its interaction with Vienna, Prague, and Budapest), Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2016, 380 pp., €31.10, ISBN: 978-3-70690-850-4.
The edited volume contains fifteen contributions on activist and creative women and their endeavors and œuvre. These women, between the 1830s and the interwar period (and sometimes beyond), were engaged in one way or another with the South Slav space. The introduction to the book groups the women in three categories: those who spent (most of) their lives in the South Slav region and had an impact on its societies and politics; women who-mostly from various parts of the Habsburg Monarchymigrated to and lived in the South Slav space; and women "with a large sphere of action and a European or international sphere of influence" (12-14).
The volume delivers on its promise to foreground interconnection across space, language, and culture within and beyond the Habsburg Monarchy. It brings together (in the German and the English language) important knowledge, most of which is presented with due reference to original, unpublished, and published sources and material.
One highlight contained in the volume is the study by Brigitte Fuchs on the campaign centered in Bohemia for "female doctors for women." Women activists asserted that Muslim women in the occupied (from 1908 annexed) province of Bosnia and Herzegovina were in need of treatment by female doctors, and used this argument to promote the employment of women physicians in the Habsburg Monarchy. Fuchs describes the overall campaign and the development in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her study gives detail about each of the seven women who indeed became state-employed health officers in the province, and the role of one of them, Anna Bayerová, in bringing about-a complete novelty in the monarchy-formal employment of these women and the related service law issued by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. The women...