Women in Yugoslavia

Within the countries that would become a unified Yugoslavia in 1918, the movement for women's emancipation began at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was most prevalent in economically and culturally advanced regions, in which there were greater numbers of working women. These women joined trade unions and workers’ parties that aimed to redress workers’ grievances. They hoped to become more economically independent, thus assuming a more independent societal existence as well.

World War I created the possibility for this economic independence. The need for male soldiers during World War One provided many job vacancies that women filled. Women thus assumed a substantial role within national economies during the war. It was not obvious, however, that women would maintain this new economic position once men returned from the war-front.

Women also participated in the political realm during World War One. In Serbia and Montenegro, women contributed much to the war effort and “made sacrifices in fighting the aggressor". In the South Slav countries that were part of Austria-Hungary, women played a huge role in resistance efforts. They resisted the unjust wars and fought for a common South Slav state.

At the end of the war, it soon became clear that the women's part in the war or resistance efforts would not be rewarded. “Almost all the laws regulating the status of women remained the same, and economic conditions, slow economic development, unresolved national relations and social problems, all contrived to make women the most disenfranchised citizens in the country.”

Women suffered the most from severe economic conditions. They worked for much less pay than their male counterparts, within factories and domestic service alike. For instance, “in the clothing industry and commercial services, women could expect to make a maximum of 50% of men’s wages.” While only a small number of women actually worked within industry, their conditions were so harsh that they were in strike actions.

From a political perspective, many women ascribed to the Communist mantra because it “was the only one that called and consistently strove for a political and social equality of women.” Women felt marginalized by religious and conservative ideologies that stressed the importance of the woman as a housewife and mother. The first Conference of Socialist (Communist) Women of 1919 symbolized the growing need that women felt for an entirely new political system. A large number of bourgeois feminists even began to subscribe to the Communist view “that the emancipation of women would depend on the radical transformation of society."

During the war years, women underwent a rapid transformation. According to Barbara Jancar-Webster, this was not a “revolution in the Yugoslav woman’s experience but rather a foreshortening of the process of consciousness development.” The fact that women made further strides for their cause during the five years of the war than the twenty years of the interwar period was not a break in history but an indication that the intensity of the war allowed for greater participation of women in the cause.

Women became significant members of the National Liberation Movement and participated in all aspects of the anti-fascist resistance. Women occupied positions as fighters and as leaders. Seventy percent of the women fighters were under twenty years of age. They mobilized other women to gather supplies, cared for the sick and wounded, and sustained local economies. Though women proved themselves as politically and economically capable within the Partisan movement, a chauvinistic attitude was maintained.[1]

As mentioned in the interwar subsection, Yugoslav Socialists espoused gender equality. They declared that “‘in the course of the socialist revolution, significant results were achieved in advancing the socioeconomic position and role of women.’” Significant advances were in fact made in relation to the female literacy rate, university education, the workplace, and policies regarding divorce, abortion, and maternity leave. The advances made by women, however, were incomplete. Within areas of study and the workplace, women were mostly in traditionally female roles. For instance, “in 1979, 85% of all students in pharmacology were women; in social work, over 87%; and in two-year medical studies, 83%. By contrast, women represented only one-fourth of medical doctors.”

Women were furthermore not highly represented within leadership bodies. To be sure, there were cases of women that held prestigious positions within the Party. Firstly, Latinka Perović, a Serb woman, was Chief Secretary of the Communist Party 1968-1972, she was removed from office because her views were too liberal. Similarly, Savka Dabčević Kučar, a President of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia 1967–1969, was also dismissed for being too liberal. She became co-leader of the Croatian Spring movement in 1970-1971. Most notably, Milka Planinc, a Croat, was the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia 1982-1986. She was the only female to assume the head of government position within the socialist system. Though the cases of these women demonstrate that it was possible for women to reach high positions within the Communist Party, it was by no means commonplace. In fact, Planinc became president “partly in response to criticism from local feminists concerning the continued low representation of women in higher party echelons.”

In addition to closing off many positions to women in the public realm, Communism closed off many avenues for females in their personal realm. In her book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić vividly illustrates that for all its idealistic claims, Communism ignored the basic needs of women. “In the seventy years of its existence it couldn’t fulfill the basic needs of half the population,” Drakulić proclaims, as she describes the lack of sanitary towels or tampons made available to women during the Socialist era.

Yugoslav women yearned for other basic feminine products, such as make-up, which were taken for granted in the west. This led to a fascinating disconnect between Western and Eastern European feminists. While Western feminists felt stifled by the societal pressure to don bras and make-up, Eastern European feminists felt repressed because these feminine items were denied to them. In reference to her meeting with Western European feminists in 1978, Drakulić remarks that “we thought they were too radical when they told us that they were harassed by men on our streets… Or when they talked about wearing high-heeled shoes as a sign of women’s subordination. I remember how we gossiped about their greasy hair, no bra, no make-up.” In essence both groups were struggling for the same thing - the ability to express themselves as women without conforming to their respective society's expectations for women. For the Western European women, make-up, bras, and lingerie classified women as sex objects. For the Eastern European women, these items represented the ability to feel beautiful and express individuality.

According to Ramet, “in the age of politicized nationalism, the self-proclaimed defenders of ‘the Nation’ reinterpret the community in folk-mythological terms, reducing women to ‘womenfolk’ who need men's protection and construing feminists who dare to challenge the patriarchal agenda of the nationalists as witches.” The results of reactionary, right-wing measures adopted by the new nationalist states are vividly described by Drakulić. “‘We live surrounded by newly opened porno shops, porno magazines, peepshows, stripteases, unemployment and galloping poverty…Romanian women are prostituting themselves for a single dollar in towns on the Romanian-Yugoslav border. In the midst of all this, our anti-choice nationalist governments are threatening our right to abortion and telling us to multiply, to give birth to more Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks.’” The twentieth century as a whole unfortunately did not bring emancipation to Yugoslav women.

• Gender role
• Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe

• A Muslim Woman in Tito’s Yugoslavia by Munevera Hadzisehovic.
• How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Women of Yugoslavia.

• Drakulic, Slavenka. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. HarperCollins: New York, 1993.
• Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945. Arden: Denver, 1990.
• Kovacevic, Dusanka. Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War. Trans. Margot and Bosko Milosavljevic. Belgrade, 1977.
• Ramet, Sabrina P. “Introduction" (3-10), “In Tito’s Time” (89-105)” in Gender Politics in the Western Balkans, Ed. Sabrina P. Ramet. Pennsylvania State University:University Park, 1999.
• Texas A&M University Press Consortium
• Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership