Dennica: A case study of women’s marginalization in Central European modernism

The article presents the case of Dennica, a women’s magazine founded in 1898 by Terézia Vansová that, for a brief time, served Slovak modernists as their press organ on the background of a larger phenomenon of marginalizing women from the Central European modernist movements. The study of the flagship magazines of the literary groups that developed in the Habsburg-Slavic area under the influence of Young Vienna – Young Poland, the Croatian pokret mladih, and the Czech modernist milieu around Moderní Revue – allows us to discern the conditions under which female collaborators were allowed access to those prestigious pages. On the other hand, the takeover of Dennica by František Votruba and his efforts to turn it into a Slovak modernist almanac bring a better understanding of the mechanism according to which the exclusion of women constituted the very condition for a group of male writers to be interpreted by the literary history in terms of a modernist movement. Indeed, according to literary scholars, if the Slovak modernist movement existed at all, it was only for a short period between 1907 and 1909, that is, when it took over a successful women’s magazine to put it to its use.