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Central European Collections: The Periphery Challenging the Center

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Global Voices from the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition

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Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the works sent from the Habsburg Empire to the Woman’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The competing Austrian and Bohemian collections epitomized two different cultures of Central European female modernism. They exemplified the rivalry between the Slavic and German realms in the monarchy. The imperial ideologies implemented in the Austrian selection were challenged by the Bohemian display. The Bohemian selection was a tool of cultural affirmation and secessionist aspirations connecting women’s and national emancipation. Analyzing the pattern of authors’ productivity and situating them in the historical context pinpointed core figures and transnational networks of women’s activism, their generational composition, and their role in the center-periphery dynamics of the monarchy. German-language women writers from across the Habsburg Empire represented the ideologies of a cosmopolitan leisured class in the Austrian selection. The Bohemian authors were middle-class educators and activists. The content revealed two discourses of femininity. In the Bohemian collection, language and literacy were the dominant political manifestation of bourgeois domesticity. The Austrians displayed literary production of transnationally active members of the intellectual bourgeoisie. The visual spectacle of decorative needlework designed by bourgeois women revealed tensions of class and invisibility of laboring women.

To name one’s archive is a perilous matter; it can suggest that these texts “belong” together, and that the belonging is a mark of one’s own presence. What I offer is a model of the archive not as the conversion of self into a textual gathering, but as a “contact zone.” (Ahmed, 2015, p. 14)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Maria Lasocka’s (1851–1904) epistolary collection Wspomnenia rodzine (“Family memories” 1892) in Polish, French, and Italian, with a Geneva imprint, represented Poland.

  2. 2.

    This atmosphere in the realm of attitudes and values, aesthetics, and material culture has been widely documented by cultural historians (Mitterbauer & Smith-Prei, 2017; Dalbello, 2002, p. 68, 2005; Morton, 1979; Schorske, 1981).

  3. 3.

    Among the historians who addressed this aspect of nationality and the empire were Robert Okey (1986, pp. 82–83) and Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh (2018).

  4. 4.

    The item was carried in the issue of 10 November 1891: 244–245. This monthly magazine continued the Lehrerinnen-Wart, a monthly dedicated to the interests of female teachers.

  5. 5.

    The announcement appeared on 10 January 1892: 9–10.

  6. 6.

    Humpal Zeman (Josefa Humpalová-Zemanová in Czech) (1870–1906) was an immigrant and transatlantic feminist activist.

  7. 7.

    Source: Report of 21 July 1893 (5) as quoted in Wadsworth and Wiegand (2012, p. 52).

  8. 8.

    Dvořák, then director of the National Conservatory of America, composed his New World Symphony (No. 9) in 1893. For illustration, cf. The Czech and Slovak American Genealogical Society of Illinois (CSAGSI).

  9. 9.

    One appeared in Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 19 August 1893, p. 10.

  10. 10.

    Of the 69 authors, 68 were women, 1 with a male co-author for one work. Additionally, four undifferentiated works were by anonymous authors or collective works.

  11. 11.

    The authors’ bio-bibliographic profiles, dates of first editions, alternative names, and participation in women’s networks were inferred from WorldCat Identities, Wikidata, Österreichische National Bibliothek’s Ariadne project, “Frauen in Bewegung 1848–1938,” Literarische Landkarte der deutschmährischen Autoren, Gerritsen Women’s History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, the Transdifferenz project, and Marianne Nigg’s Austrian women writers’ biographies (1893).

  12. 12.

    Wikidata, s.v.; Blumesberger (2002, p. 1379, section 10612); She was a member of the Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen Wien (est. 1885) (Nigg 1893, pp. 55, 136). For an article in Dutch on Thilo, who was known internationally, see Hirsch in Gerritsen Women’s History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs.

  13. 13.

    Transdifferenz, s.v.

  14. 14.

    Literarische Landkarte, s.v.; WorldCat Identities, s.v.

  15. 15.

    WorldCat lists over 1340 works by and about Němcová. Her Czech and Slovak short stories, legends, and fairy tales and a novel Babička (“The Grandmother” 1855) are still popular and widely translated.

  16. 16.

    Ariadne project “Frauen in Bewegung,” s.v.

  17. 17.

    Based on unedited residual phrasing “Ich bin ...” (“I am ...”) in the first person in one entry (Nigg, 1893, p. 50).

  18. 18.

    Nigg states that she chose the pseudonym to honor Archduke Maximilian, later Emperor of Mexico (1893, p. 19), who bought the island in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  19. 19.

    Ariadne project “Frauen in Bewegung,” s.v.; Blumesberger (2002), s.v.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Lydia Jammersnegg of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Ariadne—Frauen- und genderspezifische Information und Dokumentation for her research help and Anselm Spoerri for commenting on drafts of this chapter.

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  1. School of Communication and Information, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Marija Dalbello

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Correspondence to Marija Dalbello .

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  1. School of Communication and Information, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Marija Dalbello

  2. Department of English, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Sarah Wadsworth

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Dalbello, M. (2023). Central European Collections: The Periphery Challenging the Center. In: Dalbello, M., Wadsworth, S. (eds) Global Voices from the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42490-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42490-8_6

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