Linguistic Policy and Pedagogical Issues in the Schools of the Austro-Hungarian Littoral: The Participation of Women in the Public Debate

The topic of schools in the Habsburg Littoral territory at the turn of the century raises important questions on the rights of minorities, the links between language and national identity, the development of a modern pedagogy, workers’ rights, social position of women and their many intersectional crossings. The way in which some women entered into this debate demonstrates how their gender and geographical marginal position could lead to a greater awareness of the complexity of social relations. Everyday life in a multinational area, reflected on from the women’s point of view, as well as greater opportunity for international exchanges, represented a fertile soil for innovative thoughts. This certainly does not mean that the intellectuals on the border were free from the conditioning of their education or social status. The female figures described in this chapter (Giuseppina Martinuzzi, Gemma Harasim, Marica Nadlišek Bartol, and Ivanka Anžič Klemenčič), are all different in terms of the national and social context in which they grew up and worked. Despite these differences there is a strong convergence among them in terms of their democratic and transnational ideas which links their individual fights for emancipation – whether female, national or class – into a single plot. The female intellectuals discussed here were, however, all almost entirely forgotten during the twentieth century. This was certainly linked to the violence with which, after the First World War, the idea of the national and the nation state emerged on the political scene. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that despite the fact that each of the four women sought to cross national borders in their work, their memory, where one exists, is restricted to a single nation: the Trieste of today struggles to recognise an important part of its own history in the journal Slovenka; modern day Fiume almost completely ignores its citizen Gemma Harasim, while Giuseppina Martinuzzi is known by only a small number of scholars.