Jalušič, Vlasta: How We Attended a Feminist Highschool

Jalušič, Vlasta: How We Attended a Feminist Highschool

Title How We Attended a Feminist Highschool
Type Interview, Research Text, Theoretic Text, Theory
Date 2002
City of production Ljubljana, Slovenia
Production Založba /*cf.
Language Slovene
URL Kako smo hodile v feministično gimnazijo [PDF]
Registration number CoW-2002-PUB-807

Collaborators

Collaboration ANDREJKA ČUFER, Darja Zaviršek, Vlasta Jalušič, Suzana Tratnik, Milica G. Antić, Nives Brzić, Mojca Dobnikar, Metka Mencin, Mirjana Nastran Ule, Tanja Rener, Nataša Sukič, Dora Škerjanc Battelli, Renata Šribar, Lili Vučenović

Synopsis

The book is divided into two parts. The first part consists of an overview and analysis of women’s groups and their political, social, and cultural activities. The author establishes that, during the period discussed, independent women’s groups in the former Yugoslavia encouraged and carried out many more activities than one might think, judging by the little attention these groups received. In the ‘transitional period’, they played an important activist and conceptualising role, and their actions produced, among other things, truly practical and more or less enduring achievements: for instance, intervention in the political pluralism and constitutional regulation of the Republic of Slovenia (Women for Politics group); organisations against violence (a hotline for women and children who are victims of violence); institutionalised results (the Women’s Policy Commission in the National Assembly, the Governmental Office for Women’s Policy); and the sensitising of the broader public to politically important questions that had previously been marginalised or even stigmatised (such as homosexuality and same-sex communities). The working methods, structure, and durability or transience of these groups reveal that they engaged in the same kinds of innovative activity that characterised the Western feminist groups that so influenced the methods and structures of other social and socio-cultural organisations. In the second part of the book, interviews with fourteen women leaders from various feminist groups active in the eighties and nineties include questions about the beginnings of New Feminism in Slovenia, their personal feminist engagement, the formation of groups, new identities, conflicts, differences, and these groups’ influence on the broader political context. But these interviews constitute much more than just another historical sourcebook; they reflect the part of the past that wasn't making history and recall a time when it was impossible to believe that defeats could ultimately lead to victory.

Source: City of Women

Artist's statement

Milica G. Antić, Nives Brzić, Mojca Dobnikar, Metka Mencin, Mirjana Nastran Ule, Tanja Rener, Nataša Sukič, Dora Škerjanc Battelli, Renata Šribar, Lili Vučenović

Artist, artistic group

Production

Založba /*cf.