Zofka Kveder (1878–1926), a Slovenian writer, playwright, translator, editor and campaigner for women’s rights, was associated in Gorizia with the publisher Andrej Gabrščik, with whom she published a collection of short prose Odsevi (Reflections) (1902), and with the lawyer, translator and editor of the magazine Naši zapiski, Anton Dermoto. On 24 January 1910, she also gave a highly acclaimed lecture in Gorizia. At the time, the newspaper Rdeči prapor wrote: “The writer Mrs. Zofka Kveder Jelovškova gave us a very nice lecture on feminism yesterday, the 24th. m., on feminism. She spoke beautifully and calmly — as she said — without aspirations. She had great success.” She writes about Gorizia in her novella Gabrijela, where she describes the first-person narrator’s encounter with a classmate in a park in the immediate vicinity of the Trade House.
Here, of course, it is widely believed that women demand emancipation and equality because we want to be like men. Our desire for better education, social independence, freedom of individual development are perceived as a desire for the woman’s transformation into a curious, unseemly middle sex that has shed off all the allure of the woman’s essence and soul, but cannot yet ascend to the indifference and strength of the man’s character, or better yet, man’s ways. Emancipation is perceived here as an opposition against the family, against the woman’s first and natural calling; women’s social independence appears as an effigy that makes our courteous males see wooden spoons, brooms and nappies dance before their eyes. They see women’s social independence utterly transforming everything that man and wife once had together. But their fear is a laughable concern, for the wife will always cherish her family and shall gladly return from the independence of her own work and effort to the calm of her happy life at home.