Reinventions: Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska’s Ethnographic Turn

Abstract

Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska’s (1870–1946) life and work provide considerable insight into the conditions surrounding the new types of professional women of the early 20^th century. Her extensive published work transcended categories of pedagogy, social commentary, feminism and ethnography and appeared in a variety of formats from fiction to academic writing. This essay deals with a brief portion of Belović-Bernadzikowska’s life; the period from 1902 to 1914, in which she successfully transformed herself and her public persona from a schoolteacher in the schools of Bosnia and Herzegovina into a respected ethnographer and expert on women’s textiles. This was not a voluntary transformation; she was forced into a new career in 1902 when she was relieved of her position as a teacher by the Provincial Government. How she accomplished a professional reinvention is the topic of this essay; but she experienced other personal and political changes as well – including a rejection of her native Croat patriotism in favor of greater sympathy with the Serbs. These reinventions took several years, but a significant signpost of her growing success appeared in 1909. At this point she began to write for the scholarly (albeit controversial) German-language journal, Anthropophyteia, published by the renowned Balkan ethnographer and sexologist Friedrich Salomo Krauss. With a growing reputation outside the Slavic lands, Jelica was on her way to achieving the academic, scholarly acclaim she craved. For a time, she hoped to break through the gendered barriers that restricted female writers among the Southern Slavs.