engleski

“I wanted to be somebody”: Learning from the Past and Making Women’s Life Stories Matter

The article describes a feminist oral history project researching the lives of several Croatian intellectual women, aiming to enrich women’s history with accounts of their subjective experience. The article outlines the necessity of conducting such a project, its practical challenges and conclusions that were drawn from the interviews. Croatia and the rest of Europe are facing retraditionalization, which has disrupted women’s lives and women’s history. The younger generations of women often embrace conservative trends uncritically, while at the same taking feminism’s outcomes for granted, unaware of the fact that women’s rights once gained are not irreversible but depend on fragile socio-political circumstances. This can be challenged by the use of oral history. Younger women could feel empowered by the older women’s struggle for equality and more fulfilled lives. The private struggles – especially those of educated women outsiders – have the capacity to overcome the generational differences and make real changes.

oral history, feminism, interview, women's history, intellectual women

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