About the book

Sixty anthropological essays. Through 60 anthropological essays about the famous people and mass culture products, Svetlana Slapšak describes the 20th century from a special women’s point of view. The author calls her descriptions “icons”. She creates a women’s map of the 20th century with the help of texts by Agatha Christie, Anna Magnani, Angela Davis, Disney’s hereoines, Frieda Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and many other extraordinary women. The book also includes texts on images and objects such as a cigarette, chocolate, perfume, hand work, a scale, a women with a vacuum cleaner ... The connection between femininity, feminism and mass culture is very deep and important. The author warns that the influence of the mass culture should not be overlooked when thinking about women’s emancipation and stresses the key role of images, symbols, tales and stories that are “a popular mythology of a certain space and time,” Dr. Biljana Dojčinović-Nešić wrote in her review.