Original scientific paper
Misogyny in the Works of the Eighteenth-Century Croat Writers of Dubrovnik
Slavica Stojan
Abstract
The eighteenth century saw the affirmation of gender equality as a distinctive value of the civilized society of Europe. Education was no longer a privilege of the nobility, and young, accomplished ladies from the well-todo commoner families of Dubrovnik were not an exception. An active process of change could also be anticipated in the day-to-day lives of common working women, who contributed in their own way to the establishment of a new middle class. By doing so, they audaciously challenged the antiquated yet dominant ideology of gender difference, based on the centuries-long notion of «separate spheres,» according to which the role and nature of women were determined by the limits of their households. Literary men, preachers, and others in support of conservative views raised their voice against manifestations of women’s consciousness, their accusations often being imbued with bitter misogyny. Women and their emergence into the public scene were held to be the cause of all the adversities that befell the city of Dubrovnik- the loss of freedom, economic stagnation, pestilence, etc. In the mid-eighteenth century and particularly at the turn of the ninetheenth century, Dubrovnik witnessed two antithetical views relating to the issue of women’s position in society: one view saw a woman as a rational individual, creating her own secular attitude towards life, while the other, more traditional view envisaged a woman in the role of an obedient, compliant daughter and wife, an unpredictable creature that could easily be seduced and led astray. Although women’s legal and family status, engagement in public life, and education were deeply marked by traditional and institutional male domination, in these protests we feel the first expressions of the successive and mature emancipation of women.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
11758
URI
Publication date:
19.6.2001.
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