CONCEPT

MEMORY AND OBLIVION

In 1906 Hannah Arendt is born in Königsberg.

The first law on women's suffrage is passed in Finland in 1906. Today they discuss the issue of women bishops.

In 1933, the Association of Working Girls and Women, together with the Association of Academically Educated Women and the Women's Movement, organises meetings in support of their legal right to abortion. They are referred to as ''swine'' from one Ljubljana pulpit.

In 1971 Swiss women are given the vote; in most of the European countries they attained this entitlement after the Second World War – including France, the cradle of the notion of civil equality.

In 1938 and 1939 Angela Vode publishes a two-volume work entitled Gender and Destiny, for which clerical papers deem her to be “no better than a doormat on which everyone wipes their boots”. In 1944 she is deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

In 1500 Agostino Strozzi writes: ''If women, like men, had been allowed to write about the past, how radiant and shining they would have been.”

In 2003 General Women's Association 1901-1945 is published. This edition contains information that in 1928 there were approximately 22 women associations in the Ljubljana area, and in 1938 about 54 within the Drava Banat. They were active in politics, culture, professional arenas, benevolent endeavours, charities and the religious field.

In 1906, a fifteen-year-old Slovene emigrant orphan steps ashore on Ellis Island. In 1926, as Marie Prisland, she founds the Slovenian Women's Union of America – the largest Slovenian women's association in the USA – over which she presides for twenty years. America’s Slovenian Women's Union still exists to this day.

In Memories of Days of Slavery, Angela Vode recollects how on a cold May morning in 1944 nurse Anka came into the Slovenian block and whispered: ''Anica Černe was brought from Neu Brandenburg, dead. She’s in the quarter with other cadavers in a chest. One of you should go with me to see if it is really her.''

Memories of Days of Slavery written in 1945 is first published in 2000 in the third volume of Angela Vode's collected works entitled Memory and Oblivion.

The first work by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is published in New York in 1951.

In 1790, Marquis de Condorcet writes: ''No individual has proper rights unless all people share the same rights; and whoever turns against the rights of anyone else – regardless of their creed, colour or gender – by doing so loses their own rights''. Four years later he becomes a victim of the French Revolution.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall falls and together with it also the last European totalitarian empire.

In 1941 Virginia Woolf commits suicide. Her anti-war work, Three Guineas, is first published in the Slovene language in 2001, and a translation of her famous essay A Room of One's Own in 1998, seventy years after its original publication.

Of approximately three million Jews in Poland, only 2.5 percent are still alive in 1945; in France survivors amount to a little under three percent. Of the 126,000 Jews deported from Austria, only 4,500 return alive in 1945.

In 1945 Hannah Arendt writes: ''The problem of evil will be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe – as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.''

Fifty years later, in 1995, Srebrenica falls.

In 1995 Ljubljana witnesses its first City of Women international festival of contemporary arts. Selected by Zdravko Duša and entitled The Veiled Landscape, CoW presents the first anthology of Slovene women's writing in the English language.

In 1931, Anica Černe writes the following poem:

Sometimes I wish

that there was no truth

that there was no searching

that all of us, people,

walked around dressed in white dreams.

Dr. Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik

President of the Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture – City of Women