Designers from the margins: women’s organisations as agents of design production in 1950s Yugoslavia

Debates around kultura stanovanja (domestic culture) defined the design profession in 1950s Yugoslavia. In magazines, exhibitions, public lectures and competitions, architects, designers and artists sought to educate Yugoslav citizens about cultured ways of living in a modern socialist state. Though the discourse about kultura stanovanja was deeply gendered and mostly addressed women – as both consumers and idealised socialist workers – those shaping it were largely men. Indeed, in histories of post-war Yugoslav design, discussions of gender are largely missing. Women – as main users – are mostly silent, present in the margins but never brought to the foreground.

Still, it would be wrong to assume that women were passive recipients of top-down aesthetic and moral dogmas about cultured domesticity. Rather, they were marginal, but active agents shaping post-war material culture and design in self-managed socialist Yugoslavia. Their active engagement can be seen in the work of women’s organisations as official, collective bodies through which kultura stanovanja was to be absorbed in everyday life.

In this talk, I will argue that women’s organisations formed powerful channels through which women could exert influence on design production of the period. In this context, such organisations will be examined as key actors in the very process of design, for they were actively engaged in commissioning, development, production and consumption of mass-produced goods and housing.

With a particular focus on socialist Yugoslavia, in itself a marginal space in the histories of modernity, the paper will examine design production as a collaborative process, shaped by negotiations between designers, architects, government organisations and their publics. As such, this paper questions the way marginal actors have often been neglected or written out of design histories, seeking to consider not only the way women’s histories can be written into design histories, but also how a wider set of collaborative, decentralized practices can be accounted for as integral to design production.