rebellious & adapted: Women's lives in Austria

The national exhibition at Kirchstetten Castle in Neudorf near Staatz revolved around Austria's women and their history. The location was not chosen at random: The baroque castle has been owned by the Suttner-Gatterburg family since 1723, from which Bertha von Suttner, one of the great “rebels”, descended. 20 million schillings (the equivalent of 1.45 million euros) was invested in the renovation of the castle.

In 35 rooms, visitors had the opportunity to trace women's history through women's stories. “Every era had its conformist and rebellious women,” says exhibition curator Elisabeth Vavra, who not only wanted to show interesting exceptions, but also highlight the typical living conditions of each era.

There was an abundance of material on the subject of “Women's lives in Austria”, and there were also many different ways of presenting it. Curator Elisabeth Vavra took an unconventional and rebellious path with the exhibition, as she herself said: “It is not limited to conveying dry facts about the living conditions of women over the course of Austria's thousand-year history, but it is also not limited to the mere presentation of individual fates.

She takes a third approach: she interweaves the two threads of the narrative. She follows a narrative thread that focuses on the personal history of individual women and interweaves it with the history of women's lives through the centuries.”

The women presented in the exhibition were extremely diverse in their origins and fates: there were the writers Mrs. Ava, Bertha von Suttner and Ingeborg Bachmann and the politicians Marianne Hainisch, Rosa Mayreder and Auguste Fickert. What would the artists have been without their muses? Alma Mahler inspired Kokoschka, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Gropius and Werfel, Carolina Obertimpfl he was adored by Friedell, Csokor and Altenberg, but married Adolf Loos. Austrian dancers such as Fanny Elsler, Grete Wiesenthal and Gertrud Bodenwieser revolutionized dance theater.

In the exhibition, however, visitors also encountered the anonymous: women in the countryside, women who had to do without a household of their own and were in the service of others, and those who lived on the margins of society. The exhibition repeatedly attempted to build a bridge between historical themes and the present in order to do justice to the topicality of many of the issues addressed: “For example, reformers fought against the corset: the corset became a symbol for the ‘disciplining’ of the female body. The corsets of the past have been replaced by the dietary regulations of the present,” says curator Vavra. 

The first Lower Austrian Provincial Exhibition was held in 1960, and on August 28, 1998, the seven millionth visitor was honored: Elisabeth Magenschab from Schrems. “However, the value of these exhibitions is not only measured by the number of visitors, but also by their function as a source of inspiration, as a trigger for an awareness of tradition and as a conveyor of knowledge,” said Governor Erwin Pröll.

Kirchstetten Castle