Paper short abstract:

To fight retraditionalization in Croatia, older female intellectuals and artists are being interviewed, in order for their emancipated lives to become examples for younger women. What is the best way to use collected women’s heritage to sustain the utopia of better future lives for women?

Paper long abstract:

In the light of neo-patriarchy in Croatia, the fact that younger generations of women are unaware of the struggles of older women for equality with men, it is important to collect women's life stories, especially intellectuals and artists, who have been educated and wanted more from their lives than domestic and nurturing roles traditionally assigned to them. It is for this purpose that interviews with intellectual women and women artists are being recorded, mostly outsiders who didn't quite 'fit' into the societal norms, including socialist. They tell their life stories, explain their choices and their relationship to the dominating patriarchal culture. The goal is to make their stories exemplary for younger women, their lives becoming new possibilities that can be 'used' in younger women's lives (C. Heilbrun).

Is the idea of 'knowledge and experience transfer' from older generations to the young a utopia, or does it have grounds in reality? And what are the possibilities to get younger generations of women, but also men, to hear them, acknowledge them, and consider them valuable or important? Stored in an archive, women's stories will stay on the margins, just for a small academic circle to study. Should the interviews be made into a documentary film, a book, a series of public lectures and/or workshops? In other words, how to use women's heritage and experiences from women's history to sustain the utopia of better and fuller future lives for women, free from the bounds of the once again dominant patriarchal model in Croatia?