Published titles “Slovenian girls, stay at home! But if you do leave, do not bring shame to your home- Go Girls! When Slovenian Women land and your nation.” Left Home is not about researching Zvone Žigon: IZ SPOMINA V From a booklet entitled Če greš na tuje (If you go abroad), published in 1934. PRIHODNOST and writing only about female emi- Mihael Kuzmič: SLOVENSKI IZSELJENCI “Man is a head, woman is a heart; he bears reason, she bears emotion.” gration, some kind of “women’s mi- IZ PREKMURJA V BETHLEHEMU V Janez Bleiweis, an important figure in Slovenian political, social, and cultural life in the gration”, but is among other things ZDA 1893–1924 second half of the 19th century, in his lecture in Graz in 1866. focused on understanding the com- Zvone Žigon: IZZIVI DRUGAČNOSTI SEZONSTVO IN IZSELJENSTVO V “Housewife, wife, and mother. Three roles that the Creator ensconced in women’s plexity, multi-facetedness and of PANONSKEM PROSTORU (edited by hearts. A housewife, who props up three corners of the house, who like a bee tirelessly course the multi-gendered aspect of Marina Lukšič - Hacin) takes care of a hundred tiny, often invisible things... A mother! Above all a mother! To migrations. This can only be done by Marie Pislar Fernandez: SLOVENCI V be a mother is the most natural thing... A mother, who in a blessed union gives birth focusing on a missing but constitu- ŽELEZNI LORENI (1919–1939) skozi to a new generation for the nation and for God, and through sacrifice and suffering družinske pripovedi / SLOVÈNES EN raises them to be valuable members of human society... Today the Slovenian mother tive part of migration processes – the LORRAINE DU FER (1919–1939) à must perform an enormous task: at home to prevent the planned dechristianisation migration of women. Therefore, to travers des récits de familles of society and families from destroying our nation’s future, and abroad to make sure “make visible” that which was, as the Jure Gombač: ESULI ALI OPTANTI? that the young generation, who were given life by their Slovenian mothers, does not title of one of the most famous femi- Zvone Žigon: LJUDJE ODPRTIH SRC forget whose blood flows through their veins and does not forget the sacred tradition Dan Shiffman: KORENINE of our fathers.” nist books says, “hidden from histo- MULTIKULTURALIZMA From Svobodna Slovenija, the primary printed media of the Slovenian political emigrant ry”, or in the words of the best-known Maša Mikola: ŽIVETI MED KULTURAMI community in Argentina, published in 1951. Slovenian researcher of “women’s his- Damir Josipovič: UČINKI When SlovenianWomen Left Home tory”, to “write women” into the body PRISELJEVANJA V SLOVENIJO PO “Long live America, where women are first!” DRUGI SVETOVNI VOJNI Marie Prisland, Slovenian emigrant in the U.S., in her book From Slovenia – to Amer- of knowledge on migration and into SPET DOMA? (edited by Marina Lukšič - ica, published in 1968. knowledge in general. This “writing Hacin) GO Girls! Marina Lukšič-Hacin of women”, must not be just a mat- Natalija Vrečer: INTEGRACIJA KOT When Slovenian Women & Jernej Mlekuž ter of supplementing and placing into ČLOVEKOVA PRAVICA Left Home by edited Rozina Švent: SLOVENSKI BEGUNCI V context previously overlooked events, AVSTRIJI (1945–1950) phenomena, and occurrences, but in HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL GO GIRLS! fact must be a project of critically sift- PERSPECTIVES ON SLOVENIAN ing through the entire body of migra- MIGRATION (edited by Marjan Drnovšek) tion studies and thereby reproducing Janja Žitnik Serafin: VEČKULTURNA gender-determined knowledge. SLOVENIJA ISBN 978-961-254-170-5 Kristina Toplak: »BUENAS ARTES« KRILA MIGRACIJ (edited by Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik and Jernej Mlekuž) Mojca Vah Jevšnik: BUILDING PEACE 9 789612 541705 13 € FOR LIVING ZALOŽBA ZRC http://zalozba.zrc-sazu.si GoGirls_ovitek_11.indd 1 11.12.2009 8:26:17 MIGRACIJE MIGRANTKE Inštitut za slovensko izseljenstvo in migracije ZRC SAZU Slovenian Migration Institute at SRC SASA MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 1 10.12.2009 10:38:30 Digitalna verzija (pdf) je pod pogoji licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ prosto dostopna: https://doi.org/10.3986/9789610502937. CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 314.151.3-054.72-055.2(497.4) GO girls! : when Slovenian women left home / edited by Marina Lukšič-Hacin, Jernej Mlekuž ; [English translation Peter Altshul, Barbara Skubic, Mojca Vah Jevšnik]. - Ljubljana : Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2009. - (Migracije / Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU ; 19. Migrantke ; 2) ISBN 978-961-254-170-5 1. Lukšič-Hacin, Marina 248905728 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 2 10.12.2009 10:38:30 GO GIRLS! When Slovenian Women Left Home Edited by Marina Lukšič-Hacin Jernej Mlekuž Ljubljana 2009 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 3 10.12.2009 10:38:30 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 4 10.12.2009 10:38:30 Contents INTRODUCTION Go-go girls & Go, go girls!? Jernej Mlekuž 9 HISTORY AND CONCEALMENT Slovenian girls, stay at home! Marjan Drnovšek 17 CONCEALMENT AND PATRIARCHY Man is an idea, woman is matter; man is a head, woman is a heart Marina Lukšič-Hacin 63 PATRIARCHY AND REPRESENTATION Housewife, wife, and mother. Three roles that the Creator ensconced in women’s hearts Jernej Mlekuž 87 REPRESENTATION AND SELF-REPRESENTATION Long live America, where women are first! Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik 109 Bibliography 133 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 5 10.12.2009 10:38:30 Contributors 148 A Note on the Pictures 150 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 6 10.12.2009 10:38:30 INTRODUCTION MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 7 10.12.2009 10:38:30 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 8 10.12.2009 10:38:30 Go-Go GIRLs & Go, Go GIRLs!? Jernej Mlekuž GO-GO GIRLS? No, no. The girls who have left the area of present-day Slovenia for cen- turies have not, at least in large numbers, worked as go-go dancers. Well, at any rate, to researchers of “Slovenian emigration”, as this nationally constitu- tive subject, dedicated to “Slovenian manners and matters”, is unfortunately labelled, Slovenian emigrant go-go girls are unknown. We probably wouldn’t find many of them in other unsavoury profes- sions which Slovenian emigrant women (and of course also men) were warned about by church men. Three such men, discussed among other mat- ters by Marjan Drnovšek in the chapter entitled “History and Concealment” – in a sort of kaleidoscopic exploration of the history of the emigration of women from the territory of present-day Slovenia and the history of Slov- enian emigrant women – issued a warning in a booklet entitled Če greš na tuje (If You Go Abroad), published in 1934, in a special chapter entitled “For Slovenian Girls”: “Slovenian girls, stay at home! But if you do leave, do not bring shame to your homeland and your nation.” And how were “Slovenian girls” supposed to avoid this shame? How else but through faith, church at- tendance, reading religious periodicals, staying in contact with their parents, and avoiding contact with men. In short, by avoiding immoral acts which would infect their soul and their blood: “Protect yourself against immorality! […] Think of the terrible diseases with which you can poison your blood as the consequence of such a life.”1 1 It was and is not only the Catholic Church that alluded to and continues to allude to such “immoral acts”. Marjan Tomšič, a modern Slovenian writer, in his novel Grenko morje. Ro- man o aleksandrinkah (The Bitter Sea. A Novel about Alexandrian Women) (2002), and particularly in his collection of short stories Južni veter. Zgodbe slovenskih Egipčank (South- ern Wind. Stories of Slovenian Egyptian Women) (2006), in which he describes the lives of Slovenian nannies, maids, servants, and nursemaids in Egypt (these emigrant women from Primorska in the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries were eventually referred to as aleksandrinke, or Alexandrian Women), shows these women as morally fall- 9 MIGRACIJE_19_OK.indd 9 10.12.2009 10:38:30 The Catholic Church undoubtedly took the emigration of Slovenian women very seriously, and the inverse would likely hold to a great degree: (too) many Slovenian emigrant women took the church sermons and teach- ings very seriously. Too seriously! As Marina Lukšič-Hacin writes in the chapter entitled “Concealment and Patriarchy” – in a kind of critical theory of gender dichotomy – in the new, emigrant environment, many emigrant women remained faithful to the Catholic teachings of their original envi- ronment, in which men and women were assigned clear and unmistakable roles: “Man is an idea, woman is matter; man is a head, woman is a heart.” Divisions into biological and social, nature and culture, private and public, emotional and rational, body and mind, which defined and restricted women to the “home”, often remained unshaken in the “wider world”. Furthermore, catchphrases like “housewife, wife, and mother” some- times came to their fullest expression only in the “wider world”. In the chapter entitled “Patriarchy and Representation”, a study of how the stere- otypical patriarchal view of women can be taken to extremes, Jernej Mlekuž writes about how the Slovenian political emigrant community in Argentina, in their struggle against the communist regime in the homeland, zealously and haughtily flaunted the ideologised image of woman as “housewife, wife, and mother”. In the primary print medium of the Slovenian political emi- grant community, Svobodna Slovenija (Free Slovenia), the following words are brandished in an article entitled “To Our Mothers”: “We, who are not and do not want to be communists, have totally different views of women and mothers. We see women as mothers within the circle of the family and with a child in her lap. Housewife, wife, and mother. Three roles that the Creator ensconced in women’s hearts.” But let’s not create the wrong impression.