The topic of Alexandrian women (aleksandrinke) is well researched in Slovene literature. There is a large amount of writing on the topic, yet there are still many unknowns and misunderstandings. The most famous interpretation of what being an Alexandrian woman was like in Slovene literature is the character of Lepa Vida. This literary character represents a woman that abandoned her home, husband and newborn child to serve in a foreign country far away and take care of someone else's child. As such, she was frowned upon and labelled a bad mother.
Alexandrian women mostly originated from the Goriška region, specifically the towns of Prvačina, Dornberk, Miren, and many other towns in the area. Contemporary living conditions were very harsh, which left many men unable to find or hold a job (Škrlj 2009, 146). Such circumstances made women, who had until then stayed in the background due to their participation in public spheres being unwanted and their family roles consisting mostly of being subservient to their husbands, step forward and start salvaging their families and whatever little wealth they had.
Each and every step of the domestic or economic liberation of women was frowned upon by society, which led to Alexandrian women (who abandoned their home to go work abroad in order to make money) being stigmatised and judged. Children who stayed home were paraded as victims of female migration and were presented as being left to their own devices, which was untrue in many cases. Families back then were very different from modern families. It was very common for families to share their homes with several generations, so the children who were left behind still had their fathers and other family members, in most cases grandmothers and grandfathers, but also aunts and uncles, other family members and sometimes even neighbours.
My master's thesis, entitled Family Life through Letters between Felicita Koglot Peric, an Alexandrian Woman, and Her Husband Franc Peric and Perception of Alexandrian Women in Contemporary Slovene Society, presents the position of Alexandrian women and the family situations in which they found themselves through the case of Felicita Koglot from the town of Bilje. I will present the position of children, the history of their childhood and adolescence; different types of families and their lifestyles, and hopefully shed some light on the circumstances of that period in order to help the reader to place the social phenomenon on the timeline. The relationships that were discovered through the correspondence are connected to the attachment theory, and have been analysed and described with that theory in mind.
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