Katarina Milovuk

Katarina Milovuk was appointed director of the then newly founded Women's Grande école in Belgrade in 1863. This was the first institution of higher learning open to women in Serbia, and the only one until 1891: first a three-year program, it offered four years in 1866, five in 1879, and six in 1886, and mainly focused as a training college for female teachers within the national school system.

In the mid-19th century, Western European ideas of women's rights began to spread among the urban middle classes in Serbia, especially focused on giving women higher knowledge to make them suitable as mother-teachers and intellectual partners of their husbands. In 1875, Katarina Milovuk founded the first women's organization in Serbia: the Women's Society of Belgrade, which was to be the dominating women's organisation in Serbia until the establishment of the Circle of Serbian Sisters in 1903. The society was primarily focused on humanitarian issues such as helping poor women and children, particularly war orphans.

In 1897, she applied to be enrolled in the voters' register and when refused, she launched an official complaint that was rejected with a 2:1 vote at the lower court.„Katarina Milovuk”. Knjiženstvo,teorija i istorija ženske književnosti na srpskom jeziku do 1915 She did not appeal, but in 1903 she wrote to the Serbian King Alexander asking for the women's at least passive right to vote, claiming the right of choice and responsibility for that choice made as being a fundamental human right.Cvekić, Mirjana: „Живот је бајка – Катарина Ђорђевић Миловук” (Life is a Fairy Tale - Katarina Đorđević Milovuk), Politikin zabavnik No. 3243, 2014 In 1913, speaking at the International Woman Suffrage Alliance congress in Budapest, she appeared in public for the last time less than two months before her death.Dedić, Marija (31. 7. 2014). „Kolovođa srpskih sestara Katarina Milovuk”. Novosti, 31 July 2014

Visa zenska skola u Beogradu.jpg|The building of the Higher Women's School in Belgrade, built in 1860 and demolished in 1930

Beogradsko zensko drustvo - Uprava.jpg|Management of the Belgrade Women's Society, 1894

Katarina Milovuk photo.jpg|Photograph of Katarina Milovuk with orders, with her signature

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• Natalija Matić Zrnić, Jill A. Irvine & Carol S. Lilly: [https://books.google.com/books?id=fH__wlUW_tYC&q=katarina&pg=PA17 Natalija. Life in the Balkan Powder Keg 1880–1956.] Central European University Press. 2008
• Sabrina P. Ramet: [https://books.google.com/books?id=9qv9HK6AViwC&dq=katarina+milovuk&pg=PA92 Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and ...]
• Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu [https://books.google.com/books?id=gxcrBwAAQBAJ&dq=katarina+milovuk&pg=PA238 From Traditional Attire to Modern Dress: Modes of Identification, Modes of ...]
• Marina Vujnovic [https://books.google.com/books?id=0UpvTRpKCGMC&dq=katarina+milovuk&pg=PA53 Forging the Bubikopf Nation: Journalism, Gender, and Modernity in Interwar ...]
• Celia Hawkesworth [https://books.google.com/books?id=rGSqi3EKxL4C&dq=katarina+milovuk&pg=PA102 Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia]

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Category:1844 births

Category:1913 deaths

Category:Serbian women's rights activists

Category:Serbian feminists

Category:19th-century Serbian educators

Category:Serbian women activists

Category:Serbian women educators

Category:Serbian schoolteachers