Lydia Sklevicky's Feminist Collection at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb was officially formed in 1990, after the Institute inherited the materials left behind by Lydia Sklevicky after her tragic and sudden death, as well as the materials donated to the Institute's Library by her family after her death. But the actual year of the foundation of the Collection was 1976, when Sklevicky was hired and began collecting materials for her work. The collection consists of a newspaper and periodicals collection, a documentation section and a library, which testify to Sklevicky’s professional work and interests, and are primarily related to feminism and issues of women's rights in Yugoslavia and the world, while a smaller part of the collection is related to research into folkloric customs and new holidays in Croatia.
The Collection was originally located at the Institute in Zvonimirova Street in Zagreb, in Sklevicky's room on the fourth floor, which was left untouched after her death. In 2006, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research moved to Šubićeva 42, and with it the Sklevicky Collection. After the move, the collection was no longer physically consolidated; the newspaper and periodicals collection was separated and stored in the Library's archives, while the library from the Sklevicky collection was attached to the library fund under the separate LS signature. The documentation section remains a part of the documentation of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. The documentation and library parts of the collection are filed and processed, and are visible in the library catalogue and in the documentation database, while the newspaper and periodicals collection remains unlisted but is available to the public in the library's premises.
Lydia Sklevicky began dealing with the issues of women's rights and women's history in the mid-1970s as a feminist activist, in form of public forums and articles in newspaper publications, and as a scholar. Her first scholarly presentation on the subject of women's history was “From the struggle for rights to legal struggle” at the conference "The Social Status of Women and the Family in Self-management Socialism“ in Portorož in 1976. Sklevicky continued her scientific work on this topic in several research articles, her master's thesis and in an unfinished dissertation, and she also edited two proceedings of Anthropology of Women (1983) together with Žarana Papić and Women and Society. Sklevicky wrote a preface to Cultivating Dialogue (1987) which was officially edited by Rade Kalanj and Željka Šporer.
As an active feminist, Sklevicky worked in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade. Her activism is reflected in the materials found in this collection, from which a poster announcing a lecture held at the ŠKUC Gallery in Ljubljana on May 17, 1986, and organized by the feminist group Lilit may be singled out. Another example consists of two photographs (photographer: Dragan Papić) of Lydia Sklevicky taken at a forum held at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade on January 7, 1982.
The reason why Lydia Sklevicky's activity can be considered cultural opposition to the socialist regime is particularly evident in the thinking and testimony of her colleague Biljana Kašić, who feels that "socialism never accepted and recognized the feminists, to whom Lydia belonged, as heroines,˝ but quite seriously saw them as a threat to established patterns of social relations. Furthermore, Kašić believes that the feminist initiatives of the 1970s, including the "Women and Society" section of the Croatian Sociological Association, were – for the political authorities – too: “pro-Western,” “offensively emancipatory, dangerous.“ The most picturesque metaphor of this "harmless" political viewpoint is perhaps seen in the insistence on the historical invisibility of women, which Lydia opposed in her personal life and in her research. Soon Lydia's feminist history prompted a Party shift to the extent that the woman's history she was writing was labelled a mitigatory "good" and irrelevant. The regime clearly opposed anything different, and at the same time fostered the hypocrisy of its own historical constructions. To the representatives of political power and ideologically-driven historical researchers, archived women's stories were just empty declarations of support for "great" historical aspirations. "(Kašić, 1995, 36-37).
The materials from the Sklevicky Collection were used in the book Horses, Women, Wars after her death. The book was prepared by Dunja Rihtman Auguštin in 1996, and consists of published and unpublished works by Lydia Sklevicky dedicated to the “women’s question“ and women's issues in socialist Yugoslavia. Materials from the Sklevicky Collection were presented at a traveling exhibition of the European COURAGE project in the cities of Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, Warsaw and Bratislava in 2018.
