Marta Verginella, ed. <i>Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918</i>

Even nowadays, a considerable part of historical scholarship on women and women’s movements focuses primarily within national frameworks. As Francisca de Haan argued in 2017, “many feminist historians today continue to work within the national paradigm. It was and remains important to write these histories in order to understand the central place of gender and gender struggles in national economic, social, political, and cultural contexts.”1 However, as de Haan states in another paper, historians started to consider it important to explore inter/transnational dimensions of the history of women’s movements due to the rise of postcolonial and transnational perspectives in historiography since the 1980s.2 Nonetheless, in East Central Europe, even after the change of the regimes during 1990, the history of women’s movements was studied primarily in a national framework, which can be explained by different factors (e.g., lack of financial support and project funds, of international cooperation, of language skills, etc.). Only after the 2000s did researchers in the region adopt inter/transnational perspectives, building on the realization that feminism and women’s movements have not operated in isolation within national borders.The volume edited by Marta Verginella is an innovative example of in-depth and comparative research on women’s networks and biographies on the fringes of the Habsburg Monarchy.3 Her initiative resonates with de Haan’s call to “decentralize” the scholarship on the history of women’s movement and women’s activism.4 Thus this book with its eight chapters proposes a more vigorous and intensive inclusion of the East Central European and Northern Adriatic regions in this scholarship, instead of continuing to focus predominantly on Western Europe.The primary aim of this volume is to close the research gap related to women’s activity and women’s social networks on the peripheries of states in East Central Europe. It discusses the role of women both individually and collectively in nation-building and nationalization in the following regions: Cisleithania (mostly in the Austrian Littoral), Rijeka, and Transylvania. Here, women’s movements were intertwined with movements for national cultural awareness, political presence, and even national political independence. The chapters present an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of the biographies of women teachers, journalists, and artists “to demonstrate how these individuals became promoters and cocreators of national culture, to illustrate how they viewed their own nationality, and to understand how some of them transcended national and cultural boundaries in their professional and private lives” (1).In the introductory chapter (1–31) by Marta Verginella, we find an exemplary analysis on the interconnection of the concepts of women and nation. She also surveys the fluctuation of women’s rights related to every aspect of their lives and the differences in the characteristic features of women’s movements. She explains that “in the process of imagining the national community,” women were traditionally considered “responsible for ‘keeping the pure genealogy’” (5–6). She also states that during the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more women belonging to different layers of society crossed national borders. Furthermore, Verginella analyzes the multicultural character of the peripheries of the Habsburg Monarchy and urges historians to pay more attention to this geopolitical space. She also emphasizes that the chapters in this volume do not deal with the cultural, political, and financial capitals of the monarchy such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, or Krakow, to which the bulk of historians’ attention has been devoted. Instead, they focus on the peripheries, on cities like Trieste, Rijeka (Fiume), Timișoara (Temeswar), and Sarajevo. At the end of the introduction, she provides a compact yet comprehensive survey of women’s circles in the abovementioned regions and concludes that “transgressing class-related and national borders became an ace up the sleeves of individual educated women . . . who used it to gain their own freedom and public visibility” (20).In the second chapter (33–63), Irena Selišnik and Marta Verginella study and compare the forms of women’s activism related to national movements involving Slovene, German, and Italian women who lived in Ljubljana and the Austrian Littoral. They explore the characteristic features of newly established women’s networks and the possibilities of women’s activists to transcend the frames of national women’s movements. They argue that from the 1880s, nation did not mean solely “a national brotherhood of men” (53), but it became gradually open to women as well.Oana Sorescu-Iudean and Vlad Popovici examine the main pillars of Romanian women’s civil society in Transylvania and Hungary along with the introduction of its most important periodicals (65–85). They assert that the development of civil society in Transylvania was closely interconnected with the process of nation-building. They cover the period between 1848 and 1918 and juxtapose the struggle of Romanian women in Transylvania against the denationalizing Hungarian state.In the next chapter (87–104), Natka Badurina focuses on the role played by education and popular instruction on gender relations in the multinational Adriatic Littoral. Her starting point is the following metaphor: “Children are like women: they must have personal interest in the teacher if they are to work under his instruction joyfully and profitably” (87). Surveying the highly different life trajectories and teaching experiences of three women, she claims that there is an essential link between language and national identity, modern pedagogy, and women’s rights. She also highlights that all three women discussed in the chapter were almost entirely forgotten in the twentieth century.In the next section (105–24), dedicated to the analysis of the literary and travel experiences of the hardly known Russian pedagogue Elizaveta de Vitte, Christina Cugnata focuses on the construction of a Slavic cultural network before 1914. She examines Vitte’s travelogues describing the cities of Ljubljana and Trieste, along with her notes on her meetings with the local Russian groups. She concludes that according to Vitte, the conflict was hardly between Russia and Europe but rather between the Slavic and the German world. The study also focuses on the experiences and personal and educational background of Elizaveta Ivanovna, another female traveler.A woman journalist of Jewish origins living and working in Gorizia and Trieste is examined in the next chapter, by Tullia Catalan (125–41). She describes how a female journalist was able to become involved in political journalism and in the Italian irredentist movement, which was rather unusual before World War I. Carolina Coen Luzzatto managed to become the first female director of an Italian-language political newspaper. Via her life the author investigates the issue of conflicting loyalties and the factors that contributed to Luzzatto’s ardent Italianism.The sixth chapter, written by Xavier Andreu-Miralles (143–61), adopts a biographical perspective and focuses on the life of Lola Montez, a nineteenth-century dancer, who is well known even today. On first glance, this subject seems to be outside the context of the volume, but Montez’s biography opens up new perspectives related to the subjects of nationalism and transnationalism.The painter Ivana Kobilca is the central figure of the next chapter, written by Urška Strle and Bety Žerovc (163–95). While the text seemingly focuses on the microhistorical level, it also reflects on certain macrohistorical processes while relying on the egodocuments of Kobilca. These indicate that her family played a significant role in launching her artistic career and that she was very well embedded and proactive in the formulation of her social network.The starting point of the last chapter, written by Katja Mihurko Poniž, is that toward the end of the nineteenth century new professions opened to women, making it possible for them to seek financial independence. As Poniž states, employment and financial independence brought along new challenges, among which the most important was the managing of a successful job with being a wife and a mother. These challenges are demonstrated through the life of Slovenian writer, playwright, translator, and journalist Zofka Kveder. From her correspondence, Poniž argues that Kveder “wanted to ‘have it all’—a successful professional and happy family life,” but she had to face many obstacles that prevented this.One of the most important conclusions of this volume is that national activism did not directly bring the emancipation of women in the southeastern regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. However, it “generate[d] the ability to distance oneself from nationalist suppositions in the name of feminism and overcoming of the national frameworks in favor of transnational connections” (20). Verginella and the chapter authors provide a nuanced understanding of women’s movements in the multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural Habsburg periphery and further destabilize national narratives. Thus, as highlighted previously, this book is a new and important step toward the more thorough inclusion of East Central Europe and the territory of the northern Adriatic into the continuously expanding historiography. Historians, however, still have a lot of work to do to make the women’s history of these regions visible.