Lydia Sklevicky

Lydia Sklevicky (1952 to 1990) was a Croatian feminist theorist, historian and sociologist, described as the first Croatian scholar to address the social history of women from a feminist perspective. She was born in Zagreb, then part of Yugoslavia, graduated from the University of Zagreb in 1976 with a double major in sociology and ethnology, and took her master's degree there in the sociology of culture in 1984. She worked at the Institute for the History of the Workers' Movement in Croatia. In the late 1970s she coordinated the first feminist meetings in Zagreb and in 1979 was one of the founders of the group Women and Society, which she coordinated in 1982 and 1983. With Žarana Papić she co-edited Towards an Anthropology of Woman (1983), the first book of feminist anthropology in Yugoslavia. She was killed in a car accident in Delnice in 1990, and her unfinished doctoral dissertation on the Antifascist Women's Front appeared in a posthumous collection in 1996.