Shaking the Empire, Shaking Patriarchy: The Growth of a Feminist Consciousness Across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: The Growth of a Feminist ... in Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought)

This study offers an overview and critical analysis of emerging women's movements and of a feminist consciousness in women's literature across the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between its constitution as a Dual Monarchy in 1867 and its demise in 1918. It is the first one, on the one hand, to assemble, in the English language, information pertaining to the women's movement on the whole territory of Austria-Hungary while adding new and original research data to it; and to present, on the other hand, a selection from original feminist documents and women's literary texts in English translation from German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Italian. Taking into account the National, regional, trans-regional as well as international aspects of the various strands of the women's movement within the monarchy, the authors demonstrate the variety of women's emancipatory activism, ideas and creative output in this complex multiethnic and multi-lingual state, a topic, that on the whole is still little known within the English-speaking world. A comprehensive study of this kind is a unique contribution to both the history of the international women's movement and to women's writing. It offers a succinct analysis of the developments regarding the fight for women's educational, professional, and political rights among the many nationalities of the monarchy while also presenting original texts in translation that illustrate these and other struggles faced by women striving for emancipation during the last decades if the 19th and the beginning if the 20th century.