| Note: | Summary: The purpose of this paper was to present and analyze, from cultural anthropological perspective, some challenges of growing up girls with mental disorders in villages in continental Croatia. The primary archival source on which it was based was the personal documentation of female adolescents who were hospitalized at the Stenjevec Psychiatric Hospital, today’s University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče, from 1919 to 1929. The research was conducted in the archives of the above mentioned Hospital. Only representative samples considered relevant to the presentation of the selected research topic are presented in this text. The paper discussed the causes and undesirable consequences on their emotional and social functioning caused by lack of knowledge about their sexual development. A girlhood of latter population’s was also viewed through the prism of their (un)successes in realization of love relationships and marriages with men. It was shown that the girls whose individual experiences were interpreted in this paper did not have the elementary informations on their own sexual maturation and sexuality. For example, in one case, the arrival of the first menstruation, emotionally destabilized one girl to such an extent that she needed to be hospitalized at the Stenjevec Psychiatric Hospital. Some of the theoretical assumptions of the humanities and social sciences dating from the second half of the 20th century suggested that cause of ignorance about the sexuality of the considered girls might be related to their upbringing in traditional Christian families and very low or no educational status. Further, the analysis of available archival material showed that, in exceptional cases, some of them became fascinated by the idea of “ideal” love because they were “over-reading” love novels. Judging by the psychiatric notes recorded in some girls’ patient files, it seems to be that their disappointments with their failure to realize these imagined “ideal” of love relationships and potential marriages, greatly contributed to the appearance and development of their mental disorders. At the end of this paper, the isolated example of a girl who burned her ex-fiance’s barn in protest as he left her after he had promised her marriage served to illustrate her step out gender stereotypes of rural girls in inter-war period in continental Croatia. That is, its purpose is to show that, in some cases, then girls explicitly resisted the patriarchy, but because of that they were often discriminated and marginalized in the society. The aim of shedding light on the aforementioned aspects of the girlhood of girls with mental disorders in a prominent geographical area was to reconstruct the then existing gender policies and to question whether, and if so, to what extent these settings contributed to the emotional and social (self)exclusion of some members of this social group. |
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