Female students in Serbia

In the first years of post-insurgency Serbia, educated people were even rarer than cannons. It was a land of equal peasants without a clear social elite, consisting only of a few merchants, local princes or abbots of monasteries. The situation was better among the Serbs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the first educated girls and women of that time should be sought in that area.

However, as early as 1832, there were 16 girls among the few Belgrade students, and the first elementary school for girls was founded in 1845 in Paraćin. Ten years later, that number grew to 30 "women's" schools, and in 1863, the Higher Women's School was founded in Belgrade, whose primary goal was the education of future teachers. Katarina Milovuk, a native of Novi Sad, was appointed manager. She received her education in Russia, where she also passed the pedagogic state exam, and moving to Serbia as a nineteen-year-old, she became the director of the school, which she managed for thirty years. She also initiated the founding of the Belgrade Women's Society, which starts the magazine "Domaćica", which, according to the laws in force at the time, had to have men as responsible editors for a long time. Among other things, Milovuk is the author of the textbook History of the World in a Short Overview for Women (1871), published by the Main Serbian Bookstore JD Lazarevic, in volumes that were published once a month.

FEMALE STUDENTS STOP BEING AN EXCEPTION

photos: historical archive of Belgrade

The Great School in Belgrade, as the forerunner of the University of Belgrade, was founded in 1863 and consisted of three departments (future faculties): Philosophical, Technical and Legal. In the Principality of Serbia at that time, a huge number of girls were illiterate, and various regulations, regardless of the fact that there was no explicit prohibition, discouraged women from trying to enroll in the only higher education institution in the young Principality.

While Josif Pančić was at the head of the College, Draga Jočić entered the Faculty of Philosophy as a part-time student in 1871. After only one semester, she went to Zurich and enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine, which she studied until the outbreak of the Serbian-Turkish wars in 1876, when she returned to her homeland and joined the Serbian war medical service. After the end of the wars, she returned to her studies, completed them in 1879 and became the first woman with the title of Doctor of Medicine in independent Serbia. This success gains even more weight if you compare it to the fact that the first girls who received higher education in Europe graduated in 1868.

Draga Jočić became a physician's assistant in 1881 at the State Hospital, despite the fact that the commission of the Ministry of the Interior "nostrified" her title, which was only recognized after the First World War.

The first female students to graduate from the faculties in Belgrade were Leposava Bošković and Kruna Dragojlović, both of whom graduated in 1891. By the way, the University of Belgrade was founded in 1905 with its headquarters in the Kapetan-Misha building and classrooms, a magnificent building at the time, and female students ceased to be an exception because they were formally enabled to study regularly. Before the First World War, girls made up ten percent of the student population, which was close to the European average.

photo: historical archive of Belgrade

BRICK BY BRICK

After 1918, the number of female students at the University of Belgrade constantly increased, and soon the establishment of a female student dormitory became an urgent need in the ruined capital of the Kingdom of SHS. When the Association of Female Students of the University of Belgrade was founded in 1921, the main goal was to build a dormitory for girls. That goal sometimes seemed unattainable, because the competent authorities did not listen to the construction of a modern home suitable for its purpose.

While there was still enthusiasm, various actions were organized, such as charity parties, packages with symbolic bricks were sent throughout the Kingdom in order to collect as much money as possible for the purchase of the plot and the construction of the building itself. But all those activities did not collect enough funds, so at the end of the twenties, the Minister of Education Boža Maksimović gave a building in Uzun Mirkova Street, from the endowment fund, for that purpose, with the payment of rent.

In 1930, the newspaper "Zenski pokret" published a report by Poleksija Stošić about the living conditions in the home in Uzun Mirkova street. At that time, 42 female students were accommodated in it, the conditions are described as adequate, with a reproach to the coal mine owners who refuse to donate firewood to this institution. The Home's kitchen was characterized with the highest rating "because it was arranged like a kitchen of a larger style restaurant", and the meals consisted of "white coffee for breakfast, soup and one dish for lunch, and dishes for dinner and very often compote". On Thursdays and Sundays, they received a roast with salad and dough.

"When they don't get the dough, then they get the fruit", Stošić writes, which would remind today's reader of the recent video about the reception of the student column in Stara Pazova, when the author, while filming the tables with all the deacons that the citizens brought out in front of the students, "sremically" quantified the amount of food with "there are still three hundred meters", and where at the end, seeing a small pile of fruit arranged like a still life, he stated: "here, there is also fruit". This emphasizes that the efforts of all those fruit growers who recognized the social moment and shared their hard-earned product with students and people who are on the move and on the streets these days should not be left in the lurch. And we all know very well who welcomes such offers.

In the meantime, a dormitory for students was built in King Aleksandar Obrenović Boulevard, as an endowment of King Aleksandar Karađorđević (formerly "Lola"), a dormitory for Gajret "Osman Đikić" for male and female students of the Muslim religion in Dalmatinska Street, and a boarding school at the Faculty of Theology.

Finally, in 1931, things moved from the deadlock, the Belgrade municipality gave the student association a plot of land in Ratarska street (today's 27. Marta), construction began, three years later the building was "put under the roof", and only after a donation of 300000 dinars from Queen Marija Karađorđević was the building completed.

photo: historical archive of Belgrade

HOME AND FACE

Despite all the delays in the construction, the politicians had the nerve to use this topic for pre-election purposes, so on the pages of the daily newspaper "Vreme" from November 28, 1936, we can find a striking headline: "Ms. Augusta, wife of the Prime Minister Mr. Ph.D. Milan Stojadinović, she contributed 1.000 dinars to the Student Home". By the way, Augusta Stojadinović was the daughter of the owner of the hotel "Bela Venecija" in Corfu, where the Government of the Kingdom of Serbia sat during the exile from 1916-1918. It was in that hotel that she met her later husband, then an official in the Ministry of Finance. We attribute the aforementioned title to her husband and his propaganda team.

The home received its first tenants in early 1937 and was named "Queen Maria". After the Second World War, the home was named after Vera Blagojević (student, partisan and national hero) and today it forms an organizational unit with the former home of Gajret in Dalmatinska Street.

I leave it to each of us to guess what Draga's, Katarina's and Vera's reactions would be if they could see today the female students of almost all universities in Serbia who participate with such a clear goal, with so much energy and will in all activities during the blockades and become victims of cowards of both sexes who attack them for reasons known only to them.