The Women’s Museum in Hittisau in the heart of the Bregenzerwald region has been a place of encounter that gives voice to women’s issues for 20 years. The museum was founded in the year 2000 by Elisabeth Stöckler. Since that time, it has housed more than 45 exhibitions on topics related to women in culture, society, the arts or architectural history. The museum highlights both regional and international aspects. To complement the exhibitions, the Women’s Museum in Hittisau offers a substantial number of specially organised custom tours, lectures, workshops, concerts, readings and film presentations. The communications programme is differentiated and offers both adult- and child-specific events.

Current Exhibition
Pursued. Engaged. Married. Saving Marriages of Jewish Women into Exile.

In March 1938, a race against time begins for Austrian Jews. Some Viennese Jewish women save themselves through a marriage of convenience with a foreign citizen. The exhibition at the Women’s Museum in Hittisau traces the lives and different fates of twelve Austrian Jewish women. These marriages are concluded pro forma, out of solidarity or for money, in order to get to a country where Jews are not (yet) persecuted. Women who are already in exile enter into marriages of convenience to escape statelessness or to obtain a work permit.

Twelve women’s stories, including Stella Kadmon, Hilda Monte and Alma Rosé, tell of the different life stories and the opportunities and risks of a marriage of convenience as a survival strategy – with different outcomes. Only a few women later tell about their sham marriages.

• More about the current exhbition at Women’s Museum in Hittisau
  6 March – 30 October 2022

Award winning architecture

The building, which was erected in 2000 by the Vorarlberg architectural firm Cukrovicz Nachbaur Architekten, is the recipient of several awards and was erected on the edge of a ravine that slopes steeply down to the Subersach stream at the site of an erstwhile gravel pit. The building houses a Women’s Museum as well as the local fire service and the Hittisau-Bolgenach music club’s rehearsal room.

While the fire service is oriented slightly towards the main street in the up-sloping terrain, the Women’s Museum in contrast is a wooden cuboid that seemingly floats above the fire service and opens up towards the village centre via a large glass front. A radical materials concept further reinforces the separation of the two functional areas by different spatial orientations. The fire service is composed of concrete, galvanised steel and glass. Meanwhile, the Women’s Museum follows the regional building tradition of only using untreated domestic silver fir for the walls, ceilings and floors.