Women Periodical Editors: Gender and Vocation

Abstract

The paper is the result of the work on the Ph.D. thesis entitled Women Periodical Editors in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia: Biographical, Literary-Historical, and Typological Aspects. It is an adapted subchapter of the introductory segment of the thesis (the complete introductory segment outlines the theoretical-methodological, historical and interpretive framework of the central reconstructions of the women editors’ biobibliographies). In this paper, the focus is on periodical studies. First, the author refers to the broader scientific research context in which the PhD thesis was created and to which it strives to contribute, both within national and European disciplinary frameworks. Second, in the segment titled “Editorial Problem in Periodical Studies,” attention is focused on the most influential attempts within this discipline to establish the theory of “editors” and editorship, as well as to offer classifications and typologies of the models of editing the periodical press through the prism of the editorial instance. The particular focus is put on the significant contribution of Matthew Philpotts, based on Bourdieu’s theoretical concept of habitus. At the same time, recent (feminist) revisions of these conceptions are taken into account — above all, those offered by Fionnuala Dillane. For the first time in our academic community, the reference is made to the most current tendencies in the field of periodical studies, which primarily concern the issue of women editors. The second part of the paper, “Women Periodical Editors in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia: Gender as a Vocation”, supports the previously explained feminist revisions of the editorial problem and finds its basis in them. This time, the emphasis is on the historiographical approach to periodicals. Attention is focused on the specifics of the historical context and the corpus of periodicals which are examined. It is explained why — while studying this corpus — it is necessary to keep a distance from the existing models, typologies and conceptualizations of editors and editorship, and to give priority to the (micro)contexts and previous research of the interwar women’s and feminist press. The author presents working hypotheses regarding the typology of women’s and feminist periodicals, on the one hand, and the issue of women editors, on the other hand. Two striking tendencies in the context of the women’s and feminist periodical press in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia are especially considered: the fact that women (editors) most often acted in the domain of “feminist counterpublics,” i.e., almost exclusively edited these two types of the periodical press, and the fact that many of them were also writers, literary theorists and/or critics. A number of new research questions, which will be privileged in the thesis itself, are motivated by these coincidences: those concerning the dialectic of individualism and collectivism, public and private spheres, authority, (self)perception of (editorial) habitus, as well as the reconciliation of feminist, literary, authorial and editorial engagement/identity of the interwar women editors.