Welcome back to the ‘architecture of food’, our third issue produced collaboratively with chlorophyll magazine. New pieces are published weekly, alternating on chlorophyll’s and FFJ’s websites. Today, Lea Horvat explains how women in the Belle Époque Habsburg South carved out places for themselves in public cafés — as customers, owners, or employees.
Women at the Tables of Empire
By Lea Horvat
‘She enters a small room. It's filled with people, mostly men, with the occasional woman, but always accompanied. Everyone is dressed according to middle-class norms. No woman is alone. Yet, she boldly takes a seat. A strong, healthy woman approaches her, greets her, asks a question, and then brings her dinner.’
In the autobiographical novel Stone on the Road (Kamen na cesti) published in 1938, Zagreb journalist, author, and women’s rights activist Marija Jurić Zagorka expresses the unease of a woman alone in a restaurant, coffeehouse, or pub.
Mirjana, Zagorka’s alter ego, is turned away from an ‘elegant guesthouse where she used to eat in childhood with her mother,’ with the brief explanation: ‘Sorry, we do not serve unaccompanied misses.’ Next establishment, next attempt. An attentive innkeeper reseats Mirjana away from ‘men who are measuring you up’, yet the bohemian intellectuals and artists greet her with the same ‘crudish laughter’. ‘Why couldn’t a woman come here with honest intentions? Why do the people who should defend women from prejudice think like this?,’ Mirjana asks, hurrying to leave. At home, she downplays the discomfort: ‘I’m so unbearable(…). They have been drinking a bit. It’s nothing, nothing.’
READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL.
Lea Horvat is a postdoctoral lecturer at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, Department of Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. Her second book project focuses on coffee, gender, and labor on the southern semiperiphery of the Habsburg Empire. Her monograph Harte Währung Beton, a cultural history of socialist mass housing in Yugoslavia, was published 2024 by Böhlau. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Hamburg and an MA in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb. She is the editor and co-founder of the platform Women* Write the Balkans.
Catch up with the previous pieces from the ‘architecture of food’ issue:
Meat and Two Veg
Shellshocked
Priceless
No Catch
On Your Heart
The Whistleblower
Culture Club
The Making of Maamoul
No English Menu, Please
Fold in the Cheese