Lydia Sklevicky (7 May 1952 â 21 January 1990) was a Croatian feminist theorist, historian and sociologist. "The first Croatian scholar to address the social history of women from a feminist perspective, SklevickyâÂÂs contribution to the disciplines of history, sociology and anthropology was uniqueâÂÂin many respects unrivalled todayâÂÂas was her contribution to feminism."
Lydia Sklevicky was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia) on 7 May 1952. She graduated from the University of Zagreb in 1976 with a double major of sociology and ethnology and subsequently worked for the Institute for the History of the Workers' Movement in Croatia. She gave birth to a daughter in 1978. Sklevicky received her M.A. from Zagreb in the sociology of culture in 1984. She was killed in an automobile accident in Delnice, Croatia, on 21 January 1990.
Sklevicky coordinated the first feminist meetings in Zagreb in the late 1970s and was one of the founders of the group Women and Society () in 1979. She served as the group's coordinator in 1982âÂÂ83 and later volunteered for the Zagreb-based SOS Hotline for abused women and children. With à ½arana PapiÃÂ, she co-edited the first book of feminist anthropology in Yugoslavia in 1983, entitled Towards an Anthropology of Woman (Antropologija à ¾ene). In the late 1980s she was a columnist for the women's magazine World (), addressing "numerous topics including abortion, the female body, witches and âÂÂrespectableâ feminists". A posthumous collection of her work, including her unfinished Ph.D. dissertation, Emancipation and Organization: The Antifascist WomenâÂÂs Front and Post-revolutionary Social Change. (PeopleâÂÂs Republic of Croatia 1945âÂÂ1953) ()), was published in 1996 in Horses, Women, Wars ().