Abstract
The article compares the approaches of two women from the Prague middle-estates background to politics at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. R.
Tyršová (1854-1937), a publicist, art historian, ethnographer and charity worker, and T. Nováková (1853-1912), a writer, journalist and ethnographer, were contemporaries and knew one another from their childhood.
They were brought up in Czech-oriented patriotic families and both became prominent and reputable personalities. For her whole life through, Tyršová kept the "old", patriotic conception of politics understood as a fight for the national emancipation, to which everything, including the social problems as well as the issue of the women's suffrage and the equality of women's rights, must be subordinated.
She refused to be engaged in these fields and, for example, she advised women not to be involved in "political party activities" as late as in the year 1929. Nováková left this conception of engagement in the name of the nation and as an editor of the modern journal Ženský svět (since 1896) she opened artistic, social as well as politic perspectives to its female readers.
Under her supervision, the journal served as a tribune supporting the women's suffrage at the very beginning of the 20th century. T.
Nováková died exactly in the year 1912, when the first women, Božena Viková-Kunětická, was elected as a member of parliament.