Born: 16 June 1851, Georgia
Died: 7 August 1938
Country most active: Georgia
Also known as: NA
Ekaterine Gabashvili was a Georgian writer, educationist and feminist who fought for social reform and women’s emancipation.
She was born Ekaterine Tarkhnishvili, daughter of an aristocratic family in Gori, which was then part of Imperial Russia. After her primary education, she attended the city’s best school, Madam Favre’s private boarding school. Concerned about the circumstances of the peasants, at age 17 she opened a private school for the education of peasant children. When she was 19, she married Aleksandre Gabashvili, eventually raising 11 children.
Her writing was influenced by two works on the emancipation of women that had been translated into Georgian: Harriet Taylor Mill’s The Enfranchisement of Women and Fanny Lewald’s Für und wider die Frauen. She began mobilizing Georgian women, establishing groups in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Gori and Khoni focused on the publication and translation of relevant women’s literature. In 1897, she founded a women’s professional school, which led to girls’ schools around the country.
Gabashvili was active member in the Society for the Advancement of Learning Among Georgians. In 1890, with Anastasia Tumanishvili-Tsereteli, she co-founded Jejili, a journal that published children’s literature, to support interest in the genre in Georgia.
She wrote several novels and stories about the sorrows of village school teachers and peasant life. Her novels Love Affair in Big Kheva and While Sorting Maize challenged the social norms of the day, calling for personal freedom and romantic love. In the 1900s, she shifted from fiction to autobiography. In 1958, a movie Magdanas lurja (Magdana’s Donkey), based on one of Gabashvili’s novels, won prizes at the international film festivals at Cannes and Edinburgh.