1 10 6 http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/797b342eee10ea788255f9439840f070.pdf 5e8972fd79c08471ec8ed5a4e22e6459 PDF Text Text �Impressum THE LOST REVOLUTION – WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING Original title: IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA (2016) Year of publishing: 2018 Published by: Association for Culture and Art CRVENA www.crvena.ba www.afzarhiv.org On behalf of the publisher: Danijela Dugandžić Edited by: Andreja Dugandžić and Tijana Okić Ilustrations edited by: Adela Jušić Ilustrations by: Adela Jušić, Aleksandra Nina Knežević, Kasja Jerlagić, Sunita Fišić, Nardina Zubanović Translated by: Emin Eminagić, Mirza Purić and Tijana Okić Proofreading by: John Heath Visual identity, Graphic Design, Layout by: Leila Čmajčanin Translation is made possible by the grant from Mediterranean Women’s Fund. We would like to thank them for their continued and generous support of the Online archive of Antifascist struggle of women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia Free copy not for commercial use. �Chiara Bonfiglioli Ajla Demiragić Andreja Dugandžić Adela Jušić Danijela Majstorović Boriša Mraović Tijana Okić SARAJEVO, 2018 �Contents 4 Introduction 10 About the Illustrations 16 Chiara Bonfiglioli AFŽ activists’ biographies: an intersectional reading of women’s agency 42 Nardina Zubanović Illustrations 50 Ajla Demiragić Roses are red, violets are blue, me luvly teacher, i believe in you: The role and the position of the People’s (progressive) teacher in the crucial years for the construction of a new socialist society in Bosnia and Herzegovina 82 Aleksandra Nina Knežević Illustrations 88 Danijela Majstorović The creation of the new Yugoslav woman – emancipatory elements of media discourse from the end of World War II 121 Kasja Jerlagić Illustrations 126 Boriša Mraović Heroism of Labor The Women’s Antifascist Front and the Socialist Dispositive 1945–1953 152 Sunita Fišić Illustrations 156 Tijana Okić From Revolutionary to Productive Subject: An Alternative History of the Women’s Antifascist Front 200 Adela Jušić Illustrations 206 Biografije 210 Glossary, Acronyms and Periodicals �INTRODUCTION A WORD FROM THE EDITORS ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ TIJANA OKIĆ �4 ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ, TIJANA OKIĆ INTRODUCTION A WORD FROM THE EDITORS The volume we present to the public is one of the results of many years of work by the comrades of the Crvena Arts and Culture Association on the digitisation of documents to create an Archive of the Antifascist Struggle of the Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia (http://afzarhiv.org). The idea of the archive was born in 2010, when we started to research the history of the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ), under the aegis of the project, “What has our struggle given us?”. Realising that the history of the largest women’s organisation in our part of the world was by and large unknown to us, we partly turned our efforts to make the archive public into an exploration of a facet of history which has always been, and remains, relegated to the margins. The archive, in its present form, is limited to the materials collected in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but our idea from the very outset was to create a Yugoslav archive – an idea based on the realisation that only collective work can open new areas of research and enrich knowledge. In this sense, the archive is ours, it belongs to no one in particular, and therefore it belongs to everyone. It is in process, becoming, and this is precisely what manifests its basic purpose: to publicly and critically think our own past. We would like to extend an open invitation to everyone to contribute materials, editorial work, and otherwise, and get involved in the collective project of making a more comprehensive archive. At present, the archive comprises a part of the archives of the AFŽ, books and periodicals, stenographic notes, minutes and reports, as well as other materials, and it also contains works of oral history, interviews with surviving members of the AFŽ, a history which Yugoslav historiography failed to record. Archives are usually seen as repositories of objective truth, or spaces of authenticity where history speaks to us. The archive also legitimates professional history as a scientific discipline, concerned with the past “as it really happened” (Ranke), and founded on the critical scrutiny of sources (Quellenkritik). For Derrida, there is no ‘authentic’ beginning of any archive, since any beginning, is always already determined by political or scientific authority.1 All archives constitute assemblages of spoken or written words, images and documents, precisely as ‘historical sources’. Access to these sources is restricted, while the state employs scribes or clerks to furnish narratives of state order, legitimacy and continuity. It is not simply that an act of pre-selection precedes the formation of the archive; often it is the wholesale removal of ‘irrelevant’ materials, as in the ‘rubbish dumps’ of discarded ancient papyri, that upon subsequent discovery forms the basis of archival knowledge of the past. 1 Derrida, Jacques Mal d’Archive Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 5 The origins of this particular archive are no different. The decision to establish a central Yugoslav AFŽ archive, and archives in each of the federal republics, can be found in the archive itself. On 20 February 1950, the Central Committee of the Women’s Antifascist Front (CK AFŽ) took the decision the decision to establish a commission for the archiving of documents.2 Republic committees were instructed to start working on “the collection and sorting of historical materials from the history of the progressive Yugoslav women’s movement – dating from before, during and after the war.” The available archival material is incomplete and covers the period from 1942 to 1951, that is to say, from the founding of the AFŽ to two years before its dissolution. The material covering the period of the People’s Liberation Struggle (henceforth NOB) is limited, while the immediate aftermath of the war is covered much more extensively. After its dissolution, the archives of the AFŽ formed part of the Institute for the History of the Worker’s Movement, and were eventually taken over by the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In spite of several attempts, we have not been able to ascertain if the material was lost or destroyed during the siege of Sarajevo. What we do know is that a process of archiving took place, in the sense of a committal to the archives, of filing and forgetting, whereby the archive was consigned, in Marx’s words, to the “gnawing criticism of mice”. The filing away was indeed thorough. Thus, as early as 1955, with the publication of the first volume of “The Women of Croatia in NOB”, the AFŽ was replaced by a new subject – “women in NOB”. This marked the beginning of the practice of writing the history of women, focusing on their role in the liberation war by republic or region, but not on the antifascist movement of Yugoslav women, i.e. on the AFŽ.3 Similar publications pertaining to other republics only appeared several decades later.4 “The Women of Serbia in NOB” was published on the thirtieth anniversary of victory over fascism, whilst the Bosnian-Herzegovinian edition appeared in 1977 and was not related to any anniversary. Unlike the Serbian and Croatian editions, it was edited not by the former leaders of the AFŽ, but by (male) employees of the History Institute, Sarajevo (successor to the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement). 2 Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Dopis Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH od 3. marta 1950. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 317/50, 1950. str. 2. 
 3 The thirtieth anniversary of the AFŽ finally saw the publication of the synthesis, “The struggle of Yugoslav women in the war”); see Dušanka Kovačević, Dana Begić, et al. Borbeni put žena Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Leksikografski zavod Sveznanje, 1972). 4 The Montenegrin edition appeared in 1969, the Slovenian in 1970, the Macedonian in 1976. �6 ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ, TIJANA OKIĆ INTRODUCTION A WORD FROM THE EDITORS No comprehensive history of the mass antifascist movement of Yugoslav women was ever written in socialist Yugoslavia. The history of the AFŽ was by and large dissolved into the history of the NOB, into that of women tout court, and finally into the figure of the female partizanka. The AFŽ thus died two deaths. The first when it was dissolved in 1953, the second in the official memory of the past, where it remained as a spectral trace, the presence of an absence (Derrida), giving way to a new foundational state narrative, which omitted even the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP).5 All historical and scientific enquiry is led by a logic of question and answer, of problematics and the questions that they generate. Such enquiry is itself historically and politically determined. This volume draws on studies of the work and activity of the AFŽ in particular and women in Yugoslavia in general by Lydia Sklevicky, Svetlana Slapšak, Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, Gordana Stojaković and Ivana Pantelić. Its aim is to open a new discussion and to keep this important heritage alive. Reappropriation of this heritage is an important step in arming a new liberation movement in the struggle against patriarchal, fascist and capitalist tyranny. *** What is the significance of an archive that once formed part of the archives of a people’s state, which then disintegrated into separate nation states? What does the archive mean to us today? Thinking one’s own history is the basic precondition and imperative of any critical relation towards the past which pretends to understand the past as something more than and different to its mere remembrance. Those who remember the past by monumentalising it are condemned to forget it and learn nothing from it, while those who remember by forgetting are doomed to repeat it. By rejecting the history of the AFŽ, we risk marginalising the whole of its experience and failing to draw the lessons it may offer us today. 1989 represents a turning point and a line of demarcation – democracy begins only where communism ends. This view comes to characterise the entire recent past of this region, in the course of which a “state of immaturity”, in the literal, Kantian sense, has been imposed upon the post-Yugoslav countries and the rest 5 Hoare, Marko Attila, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 7 of Eastern Europe. Boris Buden has described this state of immaturity as a “democracy in nappies”6 which requires tutors who, being adult and knowing the rules of proper behaviour, maintain the political status quo by discharging the ideological function of masters of permissible speech and behaviour. The rise of historical revisionism after 1989 deprived us of the ability to understand by ourselves the turning points of our own history. Thus the struggle of the Yugoslav communists, the men and women who fought in the Partisan army, as well as the afežeovke (members of the AFŽ), is today in part - the “totalitarian” part – inscribed in an history of defeat, and hence of totalitarianism, whilst an unchained historical revisionism is recorded in the victorious annals, the mythological state-building narratives of new, free, democratic and progressive societies. What appears as a remainder in this picture is antifascism. Antifascism is one of the few legacies of the Yugoslav past that one is “allowed” to discuss publicly. At the same time, it has been completely emptied of its political charge and content, separated from the actual, lived historical experience, depoliticised and individualised, reduced to the experience of victory over fascism, with the obligatory erasure of Yugoslavism and communism as its constitutive elements, without which there would have been no victory, either in Yugoslavia or in Europe. What, then, might it mean to return to the heritage of the AFŽ seventy-odd years later, after another bloody war which has left Bosnia and Herzegovina ravaged, plundered and divided? This volume is an attempt to consider this question. It does not pretend to offer final and definite answers, and its intent is ostensibly quite simple – to initiate and open a debate, which is why it does not present an ideologically one-sided representation of the AFŽ. Instead, going beyond the simple patriarchy thesis and the revisionist concept of totalitarianism, it seeks to contribute to the collective knowledge of a movement which still inspires awe. We might say, paraphrasing Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, that this volume was conceived as a research tool, a compass to help us navigate through the labyrinth of archive materials, but also as an attempt to illuminate the contradictions inherent in the archive, contradictions which are the outcome of historic events but at the same time their driving force.7 6 Buden, Boris, Zona prelaska. O kraju postkomunizma. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012. 7 In the introduction to their collection of primary sources on the revolutionary movements in Italy after 1968, Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni discuss precisely the problem of presenting archives and oral history, and how one might conceivably represent the complexity of research that is simultaneously within and without the period covered by the book. See: L’orda d’oro 1968-1977. La grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015). �8 ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ, TIJANA OKIĆ INTRODUCTION A WORD FROM THE EDITORS In their different ways, the essays seek to examine on the one hand, revolutionary ruptures and, on the other, the contradictions of a moment which marked a historical turning point for women in our region. They question the episodes of a struggle that we must constantly start and accomplish anew. The experience of victory and defeat, past and present, both the AFŽ’s and our own, is a reminder that our new and future struggles and fronts, the battles yet to be won, stand open before us and and testify to the creation of the possible even where everything seemed impossible. The revolution took place. Let’s start another one! Tijana Okić & Andreja Dugandžić �ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS ADELA JUŠIĆ �10 ADELA JUŠIĆ ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS “To render women visible is the first step towards questioning the customary relations between the general and the particular in the hierarchy of relevance in the writing of history.”1 Not only is there precious little material on the political activities of women, what little we have has been neglected and is on the verge of disappearing completely. One of the ways of trying to save history from oblivion is to engage with it through art. The art produced in the Yugoslav lands in the second half of the last century is full of painterly and sculptural depictions of scenes from World War II. The scenes predominately depict soldiers in decisive battles. In addition to the depictions celebrating the triumph over fascism, we often see artistic compositions celebrating the socialist man rebuilding the war-torn country. Depictions of men predominate; women, although often present on the canvass or relief, are rarely protagonists. When it comes to People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB) monuments, they rarely depict women exclusively. Rarer still are those depicting female historical figures. Women are usually personifications of liberty, victory, revolution, etc. “Women are depicted as bearers of tradition even as they fight shoulder to shoulder with their brothers in arms and colleagues, gun or hoe in hand, child tugging at their skirts.”2 Due to the lack of depictions of the heroic struggle and labour of women who contributed to the defence and development of socialist Yugoslavia, we reached for the stories available in the online Archive of the Antifascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, the documents which testify to the political activities of women in this period. For this volume we decided to produce illustrations which would deal with the key topics of the Archive: women in the struggle, labour heroism, resistance, etc. Together with artists Sunita Fišić, Nardina Zubanović, Aleksandra Nina Knežević and Kasja Jerlagić we selected documents, articles and stories we thought we should try to immortalise in art. As an artist and feminist, I have examined the topic of the participation of women in the NOB and Women’s Antifascist Front in many works produced over the last five years. The topics I engage with in my work as an artist include the represen1 Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996, p.14. 2 Knežević, Saša. ‘Sjećanje i mjesta sjećanja. Rodna perspektiva spomenika iz NOB-a’, p. 9. (WAF Archive, accessed on 9 December 2016, available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/ show/355). �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 11 tation of women in the NOB, women’s narratives and oral histories, as well as other “sub-topics” related to women’s history in this important period. As I did in some of my previous works, here, too, I am dealing with the topic of the woman in the struggle. For one of my illustrations I used a map from the book Sutjeska 1943-733 as the background. It’s a facsimile of a sketch outlining the operations of German, Italian and Bulgarian troops in the canyons or the rivers Piva and Sutjeska. On the map showing the operations of the enemy forces I repeatedly show several female silhouettes in a combat position, prone with a gun. Another contribution of mine, in a textual form, describes a woman in combat, a soldier, prone, her gun pointing away from the enemy. She is not shooting, but sleeping. Also, she is not an abstract figure, like in the abovementioned illustration, but an actual historical personage – Mitra Mitrović, a prominent anti-fascist and participant in the NOB, an important political figure in the post-war period. Instead of showing her sleeping likeness, I wrote down her frontline memories: “Cannons roaring, rifles cracking, chaos all around me, and I’m sleepy… And so I get some sleep, freshen up, and press on. That’s how I survived.” The reproductive role of the woman is another topic I deal with. In one of the illustrations, I foreground a realistically drawn woman with three children, whilst in the background we see the great steel construction of the freshly inaugurated bridge over the river Sava and the sign which reads “FIVE-YEAR PLAN – A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR PEOPLES”. I am connecting the FiveYear Plan with the post-war policies affecting mothers and women. I am trying to point out that economic progress and the future of the country in general were closely connected with the issue of reproduction. Sunita Fišić’s work was inspired by a document from the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina – a memorandum by the county committee of the AFŽ Bijeljina about the heroic work of women of this county engaged in the construction of agricultural co-operative halls and lists the example of 56-year-old Blerta Hodžić, who, “[has been] working with the brick layers from day one, nimbly climbing up and down the scaffolding, fetching brick and mortar.”4 The artist uses the ink wash technique to repeat the same female silhouette working on the construction of the co-operative hall. This highlights the physical strength 3 Belgrade: Monos, 1973. 4 Central Committee of the WAF BiH, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽa u Bijeljini Glavnom odboru AFŽa – o radu žena Janje na izgradnji zadružnih domova’, Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, Box 4, 1370/2, 1948. �12 ADELA JUŠIĆ ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS and endurance of the woman working heroically on the scaffold and carrying heavy construction material, which is usually considered a man’s job. Kasja Jerlagić also illustrates the heroism of labour. Her allegorical drawing with five figures carrying a large, heavy log, represents rural women who built the country stone by stone, log by log. The artist here is not inspired by only one specific document, article or testimony; instead, she is trying to illustrate the truth: in the post-war years, women put in an enormous number of (wo)man hours of all kinds of voluntary work, from tillage to the construction of roads and bridges, shoulder to shoulder with men, playing a key role in the building of a new Yugoslavia. Another subject Kasja Jerlagić deals with, in a very realistic pencil drawing, is resistance. Her illustration on this topic was inspired by Olga Marasović’s article titled “Stanodavka jedne ilegalke” (A Resistance Fighter’s Landlady). Olga describes the courage which the Bašagić sisters showed when the police came to their house: “Talking to the police, the Bašagić sisters displayed the experience of seasoned resisters, members of the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP).”5 Thanks to their fearlessness, the police did not spot anything suspicious, and left their home in a short while. In the illustration we see two police officers at the house door, opened by one of the sisters who gesticulates with her whole body communicating that there is nothing hidden in the house and that all their suspicions are baseless. The work points out the boldness of the rural women who played important roles in a dangerous time and selflessly risked their lives, and the lives of the members of their households, in order to help the resistance movement forces which at the time operated underground, preparing to form military fronts and liberate the country from the fascist occupiers. Nardina Zubanović’s expressive illustrations were inspired by an event which took place in the city of Mostar early in December 1941. The main protagonists of a mass protest called “Operation Viktorija” were Mostar women who gathered en masse at Tepa, the city market, to protest against famine and privation, demanding to be given turnip of a variety known as Viktorija. Incensed, they went to the mayor’s home to call him to account and demand food. The protest continued and turned into looting and vandalising of the purchasing offices, after which the women uprooted vegetables from the farmers’ gardens in order to 5 Jasmina Musabegović et al., Žene Bosne i Hercegovine u narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi 1941-1945. godine: sjećanja učesnika. Sarajevo: History Institute, 1977. Available from: WAF Archive, accessed on 9 December 2016, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/105, see: Olga Marasović, Stanodavka jedne ilegalke, p. 9. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 13 conceal the fact that the protest was in fact a deeply political action against the occupiers and collaborationists. The protest was finally broken up by the police. Aleksandra Nina Knežević uses the digital drawing technique to treat the topic of International Women’s Day, or more specifically the official slogans used to celebrate this holiday. The slogans greet the women of China and express support to their struggle against fascism, celebrates the unity of the democratic women’s movement, affirm the role of people’s teachers in the upbringing of the new socialist man, as well as the role of rural women in the improvement of the economy, consolidation of the existing co-operatives and the establishment of new ones. The slogans tell us something about what women in the post-war Yugoslavia were preoccupied with on their holiday. Through the illustrations featured in this volume, we deal with the Archive’s key topics: the heroism of labour, resistance, women in the struggle, personal narratives and memories. This gesture of post-factum illustration of never before illustrated events, performed through the subjective experience of the artists who are trying to fill the blank pages of the female side of history, is above all a token of gratitude to all the heroines known and unknown. The stories we recount here are stories of an era, of a struggle, of a heroic age. Thus, these illustrations do not only reflect the spirit of the age or depict specific events, they do so in the present moment, from today’s perspective, not only as an historical depiction of the past, but as a contemporary political act. Adela Jušić ��AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI �16 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY Introduction The experience of entering an archive is always an affective experience, an encounter. As Antoinette Burton notes, “history is not merely a project of factretrieval (…) but also a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention – processes set in motion by, among other things, one’s personal encounter with the archive, the history of the archive itself, and the pressure of the contemporary moment on one’s reading of what is to be found there”.1 The process of history writing is always mediated by our assumptions, partiality and position. Faced with the vast array of material contained in the Women’s Antifascist Front (henceforth AFŽ) archive in Sarajevo, I chose to start from the published memoirs, photographs and oral history interviews, in order to establish a possible connection through personal stories, visual objects and sound, which could complement the research on digitalized documents – mainly organizational papers testifying the widespread, capillary work of the AFŽ after WW2. The richness of this archive allows for an affective connection with the stories of the women who were part of the AFŽ, while being aware that the encounter with their voices – or the voices of those close to them - has much to do with our own selection, interpretation and invention, or, in other words, with our own location.2 A figure that emerges prominently is the one of Vahida Maglajlić, the only Bosnian Muslim national heroine, who is remembered by her friends, family and comrades as an extraordinarily generous, lively and free-spirited comrade, a portrait confirmed by her beautiful short-haired photographs circulating on the web. The interview with her youngest brother Alija, in particular, made clear how much of her personality contributed to her activist choices, and also how much she did and how much more she could have done for other women, if she didn’t lose her life in the Resistance.3 It is very uncanny that we can still talk to those who lived Second World War. But we are not going to be able to talk to the people who witnessed the war and the Resistance indefinitely. And so I think that this archive is particularly significant, as a project that is still in the making and that is not closed, as a living archive of one of the most significant 1 Antoinette M. Burton, Archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2005, 7-8. 2 Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Nomadic Theory as an Epistemology for Transnational Feminist History” in Iris van der Tuin and Bolette Blagaard, eds., The Subject of Rosi Braidotti London. Bloomsbury, 2014. 3 Andreja Duganžić i Adela Jušić, “Intervju sa Alijom Maglajlićem,” Archive of antifascist struggle of women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, accessed on October 6th, 2016., http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/16 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 17 grassroots antifascist Resistance movements in Europe during World War Two, whose legacy has been increasingly marginalized and made invisible with the end of socialist Yugoslavia and with the growing hegemony of revisionist nationalist historiographies. What is also not close – and will never be - is the issue of women’s emancipation, and of feminism, through time and space, and in the post-Yugoslav region more specifically. Through the archive we can find snippets and glimpses of women’s agency and of their long-lasting quest for social justice, freedom and equality during and after World War Two, as in the case of women from the Sreski odbor in Teslić, who asked in 1947 to be included in the reports of the AFŽ magazine Nova Žena published in Sarajevo, after repeatedly sending articles. They also specifically demanded more knitting models and advice on childcare, because that’s what local women felt was most useful.4 Within the dominant interpretative framework of women’s history during socialism, this report, as well as others, could be read solely as an as immediate proof of patriarchal consciousness, and as socialism’s failure to undermine prescribed gender roles.5 As I argue 4 “In our opinion, at least one of the issues to be dealt with in the section dedicated to our village should relate to the interests of our comrades living in villages: housekeeping, generally on women mothers and children, washing, cooking possibilities feasible for them. From the conversation with our comrades we found out it would be desirable that the Nova Žena publishes various sewing patterns and other things useful for it. (…) Comrades like when the children are being written about. One mother says: impatiently I look forward to each new Nova Žena because there are very useful advices about children. Following the advice from Nova Žena, I liberated my children from gilt, so harmful for their gentle organism. Our comrades wonder, how i sit that much is written on other counties, but nothing on Teslić, nothing, as if we were sleeping. We sent few articles for the New Žena, but untill today nothing about us came out“ Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Sreski odbor Teslić Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – povjerenstvo za štampu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, f. 1178/1, 1947. 5 In anthropological terms, patriarchy defines societies based on the domination of men over women and children, in terms of authority, property and labour. Historically, families in the Balkans are patrilineal and based on male authority over the extended household. In more recent times, the term patriarchy has been strongly re-associated to Balkan societies after the emergence of new nationalist regimes and after the gendered violence occurred during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Socialist regimes in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, in turn, have often been defined by local feminist scholars as a form of “state patriarchy”, in which the state exercised control over women’s productive labour, while being unable to transform men’s control over women’s bodies and labour in the private sphere (see notably the works of Žarana Papić and of Mihaela Miroiu on Romania). Such critiques, however, were also often read by Western scholars through pre-existing Cold War stereotypes, and gradually crystallized in what Kristen Ghodsee and Kateřina Lišková define as “common knowledge”, namely a range of simplified, dominant claims that are reinstated almost ritually when dealing with women in state socialism and state socialist women’s organizations in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Such claims had the result of denying the possibility of women’s agency under the regime �18 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY in this essay, however, it is important to look beyond, and to resist reading the complexity of women’s lives in the WW2 and immediate post-war era through simplified narratives about the success or failure of socialist emancipation, or through the presence of absence of authentic agency.6 Through the archive, we can, instead, understand in depth the ambivalence and complexity of that time. It is hard to imagine today the degree of poverty and exploitation experienced by most women across Yugoslavia in the mid-1940s, and how powerful and appealing must have been the newly emerging gendered imaginaries, which associated women’s emancipation to peace, freedom from foreign occupation, literacy, work, and a clean, healthy home. As AFŽ activists quickly learned, however, centuries-old patriarchy could not be easily undone, and was intimately tied to women’s deprivation, such as in the case of a Muslim woman in Visoko in 1947, who said she would have been happy to leave the full face-veil, but had nothing else to wear for the time being.7 Similar details can give a measure of women’s lives and struggles in that time, and help us to understand the contradictions of women’s history in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a history that has been less prominent within the literature on women’s and feminist movements in the post-Yugoslav space, which has itself been in the making during the last two decades.8 By engaging with the AFŽ archive, we get of allegedly homogeneous state patriarchy. See Kristen Ghodsee and Kateřina Lišková, “Bumbling Idiots or Evil Masterminds? Challenging Cold War Stereotypes about Women, Sexuality and State Socialism”, Filozofija i društvo XXVII (3), 2016, 489-503. 6 On this discussion about the (im)possibility of women’s agency under state socialism, see Nanette Funk, “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (2014): 344–360. Kristen Ghodsee, “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2015): 248–252. Francisca De Haan, et. al. (2016), “Forum: Ten Years After, Communism and Feminism Revisited”, Aspasia, 10. 7 “In relation to taking off the veil the situation in our conty is not exactly perfect. There are comrades who took it off and those who want to do it, but cannot for now, since they have nothing to wear. They do not have money to buy it immediately, but they will try to get something. They are saying that they want to look with their own eyes” Republican Committee of the AFŽ BiH, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ Visoko Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – mjesečni izvještaj za oktobar i novembar’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1290/1, 1947. Similar cases of women bringing up the lack of other garments are mentioned for other locations, which makes us wonder if women found class-based reasons to avoid the changes, seen that the opposition to such measures was also strong among women themselves, see later in this essay. 8 Fabio Giomi, “Introduction” in Aida Spahić et al. Women Documented. Women and Public Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th century. Sarajevo: Sarajevo Open Center, 2014. Gorana Mlinarević and Lamija Kosović (2011) Women’s Movements and Gender Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Aspasia, Vol. 5, p. 128-38. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 19 to know the complex, fragmented and uneven history of women’s engagement, and we encounter women who were often the bravest of that generation, or simply those who happened to find themselves in a certain intolerable situation, and tried to do something about social injustice, the persecution of others, and their own survival. Our engagement with their engagement is a way to counter the invisibility of the antifascist legacy, and of its impact on women’s lives.9 In this article, I am reading the experience of the AFŽ through the lenses of intersectionality, that is, through a feminist research methodology that considers gender relations in intersection with other relevant factors of social differentiation such as class, geographical location, ethnicity, age, nationality and sexual orientation.10 I analyse women’s biographical differences within the organization, and the ways in which the AFŽ functioned in fact as a bridge between women of different geographical locations, educational backgrounds, ethnicities, classes and political experiences, promoting new forms of solidarity and new life opportunities against patriarchal oppression, but also reproducing new hierarchies and forms of control over prescribed women’s roles, for instance in the case of veiled Muslim women. Throughout the article, on the basis of different material (archives, oral history interviews, and published sources), I consider how women’s individual stories were tied to the collective framework of gendered “modernity” and “backwardness” promoted by the organization, and how differences among women had a role in the articulation of AFŽ practices dedicated to the construction of modern and emancipated femininities after 1945. The hierarchical difference between a minority of urban, educated, politicized AFŽ leaders and the peasant and working class women who constituted the rank-and-file base of this organization is characteristic of wartime and postwar women’s mass activism in Yugoslavia. Differences among women are also a key to understand the organization of AFŽ archives across the post-Yugoslav space. As Zagreb historian Lydia Sklevicky has shown in her seminal work, antifascist women’s organizations were hierarchically structured, in a pyramidal way.11 A fundamental distinction existed between the politicized women who 9 On the concept of engagement, see Adriana Zaharijević, Pawning and Challenging in Concert: Engagement as a Field of Study, Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (2), 2016. 10 Texts on intersectionality are numerous, but for an introduction, see Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar and Linda Supik (eds)., Framing intersectionality: debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 11 Lydia Sklevicky, “Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of postrevolutionary Yugoslavia” In: Angerman, A., Binnema, G., Keunen, A., Poels, V. & Zirkzee, J. (eds.) Current Issues in Women’s History. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. �20 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY constituted the avant-garde of women’s organizations (the “emancipated” or “enlightened”) and the (peasant, working class or uneducated) “feminine masses”. The organization itself was functioning through village or city committees composed of ordinary members, who would then elect delegates to the county and regional committees, which were in turn united under the republican and federal committees. Archival sources are reflecting such organization: next to the representative, agit-prop documents (programmatic statements, speeches given during mass meetings and public occasions, or the press), we find the more reflexive, internal debates, such as transcriptions of central committees and internal reports produced by the local and intermediate cadres of the organizations, who are reconstructing the conditions and problems of a specific area.12 The local, republican and federal AFŽ cadres, therefore, were waging a battle against what they defined as “backward” conceptions of the position of women, encountering fierce resistance from men and party authorities at the local level, but also from women themselves, since very different femininities co-existed and conflicted in Yugoslavia during World War Two and in the immediate post-war period.13 In the next sections, I will explore a number of women’s individual biographies, in relation to gendered imaginaries of tradition and modernity, and in relation to women’s factors of social differentiation within the organization. Women’s agency between “progressiveness” and “backwardness” Several biographical collections on the lives of female partisans and activists were published during the socialist era, strongly emphasizing women’s bravery, party loyalty and sacrifice for the liberation of the country. In turn, the scholarly works published after 1989 generally dealt with women’s experiences from a gendered perspective, on the basis of the new feminist paradigm of women’s history. While U.S. historian Barbara Jancar-Webster interviewed former partisans for her monograph on women in the Yugoslav resistance, Zagreb scholar Lydia Sklevicky conducted in depth archival research on the AFŽ during World War Two and in the post-1945 era. The general interpretative framework of these work tends to emphasize communist party and state control over women’s mobilizations, documenting in particular antifascist women’s gradual loss 12 On this, see also Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi, Zagreb: Ženska Infoteka, 1996. 13 Chiara Bonfiglioli (2014), Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia, Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, vol. 8, pp. 1-25. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 21 of autonomy during the consolidation of the socialist regime.14 The dissolution of the AFŽ in 1953 is read as the ultimate proof of such process.15 While feminist critiques of patriarchal structures during the socialist era are very valuable, the tendency to see women’s interests as inevitably opposed to state and party interests has the result of undermining the subjective break in traditional gender roles represented by women’s participation to the partisan struggle and by their activism within the AFŽ. This dominant narrative also tends to undermine and dismiss women’s agency, especially when it comes to AFŽ leaders. JancarWebster writes, for instance, that: “For a while, women communists experienced the power and responsibility that derived from creating and turning the AFZ into an effective service and procurement organization in the rear. When they were called to account and told to turn the organization into a communist-style mass organization, they did as they were told. The women who sacrificed their lives to defeat the invaders and protect their homes were in a very real sense victims of the Party that called them to its standard.”16 In the rest of the passage, the author associates women’s lack of autonomy in the AFŽ to women’s powerlessness in socialist Yugoslavia, and to gender violence during the Yugoslav wars, framing Yugoslav women’s lives in terms of constant victimization, from World War Two until the present. In her recent and thoroughly researched monograph, Jelena Batinić has similarly argued that partisan authorities skillfully managed to adapt their language to the daily needs of peasant and illiterate women, while at the same time considering women a reserve army in the antifascist mobilization, and while being unable to dispel traditional gender roles in combat units and in the organization of the mass resistance. Ultimately, her monograph does not challenge existing interpretations of women’s 14 Barbara Jancar-Webster, Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 Denver Colo: Arden Press, 1998. See also from the same author, “Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.) Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi. See also from the same author “Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of post-revolutionary Yugoslavia” in A. Angerman, G. Binnema, A. Keunen, V. Poels and J. Zirkzee, eds. Current Issues in Women’s History, London and New York, Routledge 1989. 15 For a critical discussion of this narrative, see Jelena Tešija, “The End of the AFŽ – The End of Meaningful Women’s Activism? Rethinking the History of Women’s Organizations in Croatia, 1953 – 1961”, Master thesis, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, 2014. 16 Jančar-Webster, Barbara “Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement”, 85. Emphasis added. �22 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY participation to the Resistance and of women’s activism in the AFŽ.17 As a result of such interpretations, AFŽ militants’ biographies, agency and subjective processes of politicization remain under-researched, notably when it comes to leaders and intermediate cadres, who were invested with leadership tasks during World War Two and in its aftermath. Lydia Sklevicky, for instance, explicitly rejected oral history with former participants, who were still retaining public authority at that time: “Most of the women participants, usually the ones who were the high-ranking members of the organisation and still held considerable positions of power afterwards, are eager to present their own experiences, visions and memories as the only true version.”18 While these interpretations have the merit of cautioning us against an excessively romantic image of the AFŽ experience, they also ultimately undermine women’s roles as organizational and political leaders, and their different degrees of agency in promoting new gender imaginaries that attempted to establish a “universalizing” discourse of women’s equality across classes, geographical locations and ethnicities. They also conceal that new possibilities for political engagement, education and labour emerged after World War Two, allowing masses of women to undertake different choices, and making possible an unprecedented generational break in women’s self-determination as citizens and workers. As I have shown in my dissertation, new political discourses and practices of women’s activism in the Cold War era had a transnational character and went beyond Cold War borders.19 Patriarchy, or, in other words, male domination within public structures and in the private sphere, certainly did not cease to exist despite the official socialist politics of women’s emancipation. Discourses and practices of women’s emancipation had uneven effects, primarily due to the pre-existing strong household patriarchal traditions and unevenness of women’s lives across the region, but also due to the creation of new forms of social differentiation.20 As different documentary movies have shown, beside the traditional and widespread double burden, women’s experiences of gender (in)equality and social mobility during socialism were 17 Batinić, Jelena, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 18 Sklevicky, “Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation”. Emphasis added. 19 Chiara Bonfiglioli, Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1953), PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht, 2012. 20 Rory Archer, Igor Duda, Igor and Paul Stubbs, eds., Social inequalities and discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 23 very much influenced by their biographical trajectory, and particularly by their education, class and family politics. 21 Despite the ideal of Yugoslavia as a classless society, different forms of capital (political, social, economic and cultural) shaped the extent to which women could take advantage of the new possibilities opened to them in the field of education and labour. Moreover, a “wrong” political or religious background could compromise such advancements, while educated women in key positions risked incurring into harsh political repression at times of turmoil, as it happened after the Soviet-Yugoslav split.22 What I am arguing here, therefore, is for a more nuanced assessment of women’s participation within the AFŽ, one that takes into account intersecting factors of social differentiation and their constant fluidity, rather than assuming an immediate opposition between “women” and “the state”, particularly in a context of highly fragmented and decentralized state power. A biographical and intersectional approach also allows us to map the continuities between women’s engagement within feminist organizations and cultural associations in the interwar period, and their leadership within the AFŽ during wartimes and in the post-war era, avoiding a paradigm of absolute discontinuity between «feminist» and «proletarian» women’s movements.23 Another element of continuity, is the interpretative framework of modernity vs. backwardness which read gender relations in rural areas, and particularly among Muslim communities, as an ultimate sign of backwardness and as a result of feudal Ottoman oppression. This framework existed already in the interwar era, and became particularly strong throughout the AFŽ existence in the post-war period.24 Female activists, therefore, found themselves at the crossroads of these contradictions, between different conditions of political engagement, and between different injunctions related to modern vs. backward ways of living. Women’s individual aspirations to education, work and marriage intersected with new forms of collective organising and new utopian gendered imaginaries. Poverty and social justice were also strong elements of motivation when it cames to paths of engagement. In the rest of this section, 21 See notably Sanja Iveković’s documentary Borovi i jele (2002), as well as Želimir Žilnik’s Jedna Žena, Jedan Vek (2012) and, earlier, Vera i Eržika (1981). 22 Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja. Zagreb: Centar za Ženske Studije, 2008. 23 Emmert, Thomas A. “Ženski Pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 24 Ibidem. See also Pamela Ballinger and Kristen Ghodsee, “Socialist Secularism. Religion, Modernity, and Muslim Women’s Emancipation in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, 1945-1991”, Aspasia 5 (2011): 6-27. �24 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY therefore, I will provide some biographical material that illustrate the complex political trajectories of female activists, particularly for women of Muslim background. I will also provide two examples in which education and class were an important gateway to political engagement, to illustrate how different factors of social differentiation played a role in women’s mobilization. These examples are not meant to be representative of the whole situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina or in the rest of Yugoslavia, also since the available published and archival sources are privileging the pespectives of female leaders rather than the ones of rank-and-file members. Rather, through these case studies I aim to suggest that intersectional and biographical approaches might be productive for new fresh prespectives and interpretations of the AFŽ archival legacy. When looking at AFŽ activists’ aspirations towards personal freedom and equality, Vahida Maglajlić (1907-1943) deserves to be recalled25. The eldest of ten siblings, born in Banja Luka in a respected Muslim family, whose father was the local kadija, or judge, Vahida expressed a strong, lively personality since her youth, when she was first a tomboy and then a highly skilled weaver and tailor. After finishing a girls’ only vocational school, she dreamt of continuing her studies at the teachers’ high school in Zagreb. Her father, however, did not allow her to study further, while her brothers were all studying and specializing in different professions. Her activist brother Efrem, however, started to bring her clandestine left-wing literature, which she would read avidly, secretly from her father, gradually becoming a communist activist. Due to her free-spirited attitude, Vahida quickly abandoned the full face-veil (zar) and even cut her hair short to the dismay of her parents, following the fashion of the times. She had a strong influence on other Muslim women and girls, whom she frequently encouraged to pursue an education, and with whom she organised a number of excursions through cultural associations such as Gajret. Shortly before the war, she became the secretary and then the president of Ženski Pokret, the women’s association in which young left-wing women organized before engaging in clandestine partisan work. The kadija house in Banja Luka became a core site of antifascist activities under Ustasha occupation. Vahida Maglajlić, together with other notable comrades such as Dušanka Kovačević and Rada Vranješević, frequently used the full veil as a device for hiding and for secret meetings with other clandestine fighters. Vahida was eventually arrested and tortured, but managed 25 See notably Mila Beoković, Žene heroji. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1967. For other biographical accounts on Vahida Maglajlić, see Himka Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Zapisi o Vahidi Maglajlić. Banja Luka: Glas, 1973. and from the same author Rođena za burno doba: životni put narodnog heroja Vahide Maglajlić. Kragujevac: Dečje Novine, 1977. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 25 to escape from the local prison into the liberated territory.26 Before being killed by German troops in April 1943, Vahida was especially engaged with Muslim women in the area of Cazin, mobilizing them in support of the partisan movement. She was elected as part of the The Central Committee of the AFŽ during its first conference in the liberated area of Bosanski Petrovac in December 1942. The position of Muslim women became particularly sensitive in the post-war era, also due to the complex political position of Muslim citizens during World War Two.27 In the late 1940s, the AFŽ engaged in the campaign against the zar or feredža, a garment which covered face and body, equivalent to today’s burqa, which culminated in several laws against the full face-veil across Yugoslavia in 1950 and 1951, at a time in which «the simultaneous harnessing of religion and liberation of women became a potent symbol of progress and modernity». 28 The veil was strongly Orientalised and negatively associated with the historical legacy of the Ottoman empire.29 A biography that fully showcases the ambivalences of women’s emancipation in the post-war era is the one of Didara Dukazdjini, a seventeen-year-old ethnic Albanian girl raised in a wealthy family in the town of Prizren, who was told by her father that she had to abandon her feredža/ferexhe, the full Islamic veil that covered her head and face when she ventured outside the house. 30 The local communist authorities had invited the most important families in town to set the example, in order to establish the new socialist values in the traditional and underdeveloped region of Kosovo. In 1947 a Party directive arrived, about convincing the most influential people in the city of the necessity for women to take off their veils (…) My father was present in the first of those meetings, and immediately made a decision: his daughter was going to take off the veil. Of course, he did not ask my opinion. My father’s decision seemed to me the most horrible punishment. I was shocked, stunned, with no force to oppose him when he told me that he had given his word to the local Party committee. I cried all night. I was seventeen. I wanted to get married and I did not want to be different from other girls of my age.31 26 Žene Heroji, 216-218. 27 Hoare, Marko Attila, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History. London: Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2013. 28 Socialist Secularism, 12. 29 For a discussion of Islamic veiling in Bosnia-Herzegovina in a long-term historical perspective, see Andrea Mesarič, “Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo. Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 22(2), 2013: 12-34. 30 Malešević, Miroslava, Didara. Životna priča jedne Prizrenke. Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar, 2004. 31 Didara, 39. �26 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY Didara was shocked by her father’s decision. She thought she could not survive the shame of going out “naked” in the streets. Upon deciding that she had to take off the veil, her father also decided that she would enroll in a teacher training course. Three months later, Didara obtained employment as a teacher, since for the literacy campaign, literate workers who could teach in the different villages of Kosovo were in great demand. Two years later, at age nineteen, Didara fell in love with Toša, a Serbian communist militant, who proposed to her: “Communist from head to toe, he did not care at all about the difference in our national backgrounds”.32. In order to marry the man she loved, and in order to avoid an arranged marriage with an Albanian man, Didara had to escape from her father’s house, severing relations with her parents for several years to come. She later became a member of the AFŽ, and as “living example” of women’s emancipation, she was sent to different villages to recruit other Albanian women for the activities of the Popular Front. While the case of Didara is exceptional, it is also an illustration of the extraordinary social and political transformations that took place in Yugoslavia in the immediate post-war period, and of the implications they had for women. The AFŽ archives from Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also from other former Yugoslav republics, indeed testifies of the strong interest for education and improvement in living standards expressed by women of different ethnicities, also as a result of the new opportunities available to them, and as a result of the efforts placed by the AFŽ in grassroots literacy programs, sanitation campaigns and attempts to reduce infant mortality in rural areas. At the same time, campaigns such as the one against the full veil were received with mixed feelings, since they subverted traditional communal ways of life. The fact that women’s illiteracy was widespread in former Ottoman territories such as Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo, enhanced the connection between “backwardess, religion (especially, but not only, Islam) and female oppression” in the eyes of AFŽ leaders.33 The laws against the veil, therefore, was often read by Muslim women themselves as specific threat against their community, reinforcing the separation between Muslim women and AFŽ activists of different ethnic origin. Similar perceptions, for instance, are documented for Muslim women in the Sandjak province of Serbia, who openly described their shame at having to abandon the veil in public.34 In one of the few autobiographies from the region that was translated into English, Sanđak-born scientist Munevera Hadžišehović (born 1933) recalls similarly 32 33 34 Didara, 47. Socialist secularism, 16. http://sandzakpress.net/ispovijesti-sandzackih-zena-nakon-prisilnog-skidanja-zara-i-feredze1951-godine �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 27 feelings of discrimination and isolation as a result of her Muslim background, while also noting the support received by the socialist state, first as a promising student, then as a scientist employed by a public research institute in Belgrade, and finally as a single mother in the 1970s and 1980s.35 These biographical accounts of upper class women of Muslim background provide a glimpse of the contradictions and ambivalences that were at stake in the rapid process of social modernization which affected women in socialist Yugoslavia from 1945 onwards, and also allow us to see that a variety of intersecting social factors were affecting individual life trajectories. Two other important factors that led to political engagement were education and class. Young students were highly represented in the antifascist movements, as highlighted by the biographies of other women heroes from Bosnia-Herzegovina, such as students Dragica Pravica (1919-1943) and Radojka Lakić (1917-1941), and student and clerk (for lack of possibility of becoming a teacher) Rada Vranješević (1914-1944). An interesting figure in this group is Sida Marjanovic (born 1921 in Bosanski Alexandrovac near Banja Luka), a former student of the gymnasium in Mostar and of the conservatory in Banja Luka, member of the communist youth and member of the resistance. She worked first as nurse, then as a political worker, and finally she was in charge of radio programs and publications until the Bosanski Petrovac conference of 1942. Afterwards, she was engaged in establishing AFŽ sections on the Kozara mountain in both liberated and occupied territory. During the struggle, she witnessed the death of Vahida Maglajlić and other comrades in April 1943 and gave birth to a daughter in October 1943.36 After the war she was vice-president of the Republican Committee and the secretary of the AFŽ in the city of Banja Luka. She continued to work in the media and became the director of Bosnafilm, authoring several engaged documentaries and successively writing the script for the well-known partisan movie The Battle of Neretva, a battle she had herself witnessed.37 She later became a diplomat specialized in cultural exchanges, and was the first president of the Association of Film-Makers of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 35 Hadžišehović, Munevera, A Muslim Woman in Tito’s Yugoslavia. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavija Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH – biografije narodnih odbornica, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 7, 2526/5, 1949. Her short biography is contained in a list of women activists in people’s committees from December. I could only find the date of birth and a few indications on her life online. I am also collecting biographical information from the following books: Himka Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Rođena za burno doba: životni put narodnog heroja Vahide Maglajlić. Kragujevac: Decje Novine, 1977. Dragoje Lukić, Rat i djeca Kozare, Narodna Knjiga 1984. 37 Sida Marjanović, Na Neretvi… Sarajevo: 1950. 36 �28 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY Beside teachers and students, the antifascist movement was also joined by women who became politicized through working class circles and trade unions. Due to women’s concentration in the garment sector, textile workers were especially active in the antifascist movement in the interwar period, and were at the head of several strikes.38 A prominent figure in this sense was Judita Alargić (Novi Sad 1917), who got radicalized as a textile worker in the interwar period and was successively occupying important political tasks within the party and the AFŽ during and after the war. She was the only female representative from Vojvodina at the Bosanski Petrovac conference where she became part of the AFŽ Central Committee.39 She continued to be active in socialist women’s organizations, The Union of Women’s Association of Yugoslavia (SŽD) and Conference for the Social Activities of Women of Yugoslavia (KDAŽ), after 1953. Despite her high political position, she kept being interested in the fate of female workers, as proven by her intervention during a 1954 SŽD leaders’ meeting, in which she lamented that women in the garment industry were working in terrible conditions for miserable wages, with no one to take care of their children: “in any other system these workers would strike, but this is a socialist country and people understand the situation. We are however indebted to help them as much as we can”.40 This last quote points at the contradictions of the socialist system when it came to addressing class and gender inequalities, something of which female activists were deeply aware. In the next section, I will consider how ethnic and class differences among women were tackled by the Women’s Antifascist Front in the late 1940s and early 1950s, especially when dealing with women living in rural areas. I will also look at the differences between socialist ideals and social reality, namely at the tension between the idealised model of the new socialist woman (literate, working, politically active) and women’s widespread illiteracy and political passivity. Again, I am interested here in an intersectional reading of women’s agency, and at the ways in which differences in class, ethnicity and education shaped the discourses and practices of the AFŽ. 38 Lagator Špiro and Čukić Milorad, Partizanke Prve proleterske. Beograd, Export-press, 1978. Kecman, Jovanka Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941. Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1978. 39 See the biographical portraits collected by Gordana Stojaković http://www.zenskestudije.org. rs/01_o_nama/gordana_stojakovic/AFZ/afz_licnosti.pdf 40 “In any other system these workers would go on strike, but this is a socialist country and people understand the situation, and it is our duty to help them as much as one can.” Beograd, Arhiv Jugoslavije, fund 354: kutija 1: Zapisnici i stenografske sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretariata SZDJ i sa savetovanja SZDJ 1954-1961. Zapisnik 6.3.1954, p. X/3. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 29 Socialist ideals and social reality: AFŽ activists’ work on the ground In the post-war era, antifascist female activists were still motivated by the strong militant ethos that emerged during the antifascist Resistance. The values of constant activism and self-sacrifice for the liberation of the country had led to the partisans’ victory, also largely thanks to women’s political participation. Mass mobilization, therefore, continued to be seen as a necessary tool to reconstruct a devastated country and to strengthen the so-called gains of the revolution, namely the radical transformation of class and property relations against political and class enemies. After 1945, following the Soviet model, Yugoslav leaders were increasingly radical when it came to the propagation of class struggle on a national and international level, and this eventually led to contrasts with the Soviet leadership. The Soviet-Yugoslav split of June 1948 enhanced this radical stance, at least in its immediate aftermath, when Yugoslavia found itself isolated internationally, and in need to mobilize the population in support of its authorities. The late 1940s and early 1950s, therefore, were times in which a high degree of political mobilization and social control was promoted by the authorities, with “passivity” figuring as one of the greatest sins when it came to the political realm. Politicized female leaders, generally raised in urban areas and more educated than the vast majority of the female population, with a long experience of militancy since the interwar period, carried on the ethos of self-sacrifice and constant political mobilization, and were keen to propagate their values among “the female masses”. So, what was the idealized image of the socialist “new woman” propagated by the AFŽ and how was it enforced on the ground? What were the activists’ expectations and how did they meet with the reality of women’s lives across the country, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina? The women’s press, with its agit-prop character, can give us an idea here of such projections and imaginaries. One significant editorial by Bogomir Brajković, published in Nova Žena shortly before the liberation, appealed to the Croatian women of Bosnia-Hercegovina, stating that many of them had already joined the partisan struggle, while another part of the Croatian community had trouble to follow the right political path. The editorial explicitly stated that Croatian and Muslim women were on the same level of backwardness than Serbian women in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but that Serbian women has managed to elevate themselves in the course of the partisan struggle. Serbian women were characteristically more prominent in the struggle in Bosnia, also due to their harsh persecution under the collabo- �30 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY rationist regime of the Independent State of Croatia of which Bosnia was part.41 Croatian women from BiH were invited to join the struggle in order to elevate themselves as well, following the example of Croatian women from Croatia, who strongly contributed to the Resistance in Istria, Lika, Slavonia and Dalmatia. Croatian women were explicitly invited to establish a sisterhood with Muslim and Serbian women, in the name of the common victimization suffered at the hands of a common enemy (the occupying Axis forces and the local collaborationist forces).42 On the one hand, the AFŽ magazine was attempting to alleviate ethnic conflicts among women, and to act, as Jelena Batinić writes, as a “transethnic mediator”43, promoting what will be officially defined as the doctrine of “brotherhood and unity”. On the other hand, ethnic divides had to be taken into account when designing strategies for women’s interethnic mass mobilization. Differences among women, however, were not only shaped by ethnicity, but also, more importantly, by their degree of political awareness, which also often overlapped with ethnic belonging, as in the case of Croatian and Serbian women mentioned above. In a Nova Žena editorial from 1946, the writer reflected on the fact that women had become a true political force. Still, many of them could not be considered antifascists, to the distress of the most engaged activists who attempted to mobilize them. The author argued that depoliticized women had to be approached with understanding and care, since even those who were passive or behaving in an oppositional way had also been victimized by fascism. Their stance was mainly due to ignorance or to the negative influence of family members, especially in the case of peasant or working class women. Only a few women were to be considered authentic “enemies” (neprijatelji), and these were collaborationist women of loose morals, or class enemies, mainly women who had lived off the work of others in old Yugoslavia, and wanted to turn back time to pre-war conditions. The article also summoned antifascist women to show less “sectarianism”, especially when it came to Serbian female activists, who showed mistrust towards Muslim or Croatian women who had acquired political responsibility.44 Class struggle was supposed to supersede existing ethnic ha41 See: Jancar-Webster, Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, and Batinić, Women and Yugoslav partisans. 42 “Serbian woman, whose immeasurable sufferings were recorded by the great Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor in his poem “Orthodox mother”, is giving her hand to Croatian and Muslim woman and wnats them to mutually cure the wounds afflicted by the common enemy. And patriotic consciouss Croatian women looks at the Serbian and Muslim women as her sisters. This siterhood, consecrated by the innocent blood of numerous victims, all Bosnian-Herzegovinian women must guard as sanctity.”Nova Žena, br.2, 5, «Hrvatice Bosne i Hercegovine». 43 Batinić, op.cit., 218. 44 Nova Žena br.6, p.15, «Pitanja, u koja treba da se udubimo». �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 31 tred and divisions, with women being invited to jointly mobilize for the common good. At the same time, political awareness had to be shared among women of different political orientations, in the attempt to gain the sympathy of female citizens who had been at the margins of public life. The late 1940s witnessed a truly capillary effort on the part of the AFŽ to create the preconditions for women’s activism through mass literacy campaigns, as well as through massive recruitment in voluntary labour brigades and in the new industrial labour force. AFŽ members were also engaged in the creation of welfare structures for orphans, maternity clinics, and in the opening of crèches for female workers and their children. By sharing cultural, economic and political capital among so-called backward women, AFŽ leaders aimed to expand the socialist regime’s legitimacy among women, and to make use of women’s work for purposes of reconstruction and mobilization. Yet, the weakness of political “cadres” at the local level was very often apparent, and so was the fact that the organization could not reach and involve all women – especially women in rural areas – across the country. Despite their socialist ideals, which strongly emerge in propaganda material such as the women’s press, AFŽ leaders were deeply aware of the difficulties in changing women’s position. During a plenum of the AFŽ’s Republican Committee of BiH held in March 1948, prominent Bosnian leader Dušanka Kovačević lamented that the organization had not managed to reach all women, especially in villages, due to the gap between urban and rural realities. Kovačević explicitly stated that the organization had to take into account, and make use of, peasant women’s agency: Comrades, what I notice in this meeting is the relation towards the peasant woman, some comrades said that peasant women are illiterate, that they are not skilled, and so on. We cannot talk like this, comrades. We cannot talk about the inability of peasant women, we cannot and won’t listen to that, it’s not possible to always put the issue in terms of ‘if we would have more urban women, more teachers, it would be easier’. See instead what we should do. We want to make political cadres out of peasant women. The peasant woman showed during war what she was able to do, she gave a lot during the war, she is a big patriot of our country, and she needs knowledge. This is our debt towards that woman and we can help her. We should struggle to raise more village cadres.45 45 “Comrades, for me this meeting revealed something, relation towards peasant-woman, when some comrades talked about the peasant women as illiterate, incapable…etc..We, comrades, cannot speak this way. We cannot talk about the peasant-woman’s incapability, we cannot and will not always listen about it, and we cannot always put things like this: if only we had more citizens, teachers, etc…it would be easy. Then you would see what we could do! What we want comrades is �32 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY This speech testifies that AFŽ leaders were aware of the potential of peasant women’s agency. Creating cadres in villages, however, appeared extremely difficult, since the most talented activists often moved from AFŽ cells to local institutions, preferring to work for the People’s Liberation Front than among women (an issue also analyzed in depth by Sklevicky)46. Oftentimes, notable male party members resisted the wives’ participation in the work of the organization, and opposed the work of the AFŽ at the local level.47 The reports from the town of Vareš, for instance, well exemplify similar phenomena.48 Generally, local peasant AFŽ members were village housewives, with three or four years of education, who had become politicized during the war, due to war losses and involvement of family members. Their political level, however, did not always appear satisfactory, particularly when it came to leadership skills. In a list of biographical sketches of AFŽ members who attended a political course in Sarajevo, many students were described as inadequate to take up a cadre position (rukovodilac). Inadequacies most often stemmed from lack of education, or limitations due to personal character, which made leadership difficult (“tiha”, “šutljiva”, “voli intrigirati”, “ne voli da diskutuje”, “nedisciplinovana”, “nije dovoljno bistra”, “prilično zaostala, skoro je skinula zar”). Women who were too young, too old, or in bad health to turn the peasant into the director, head. She [peasant women] has shown what she can do during the war, she gave a lot in the war, she is a big patriot of our contry and needs education. She is our comarde, and we have to help her. We need to work harder to educate and equip more peasant women directors” Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Zapisnik IV Plenuma Glavnog Odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu, 13 marta 1948. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2912/32, 1948. 46 Sklevicky, Konji, Žene,Ratovi, 120-121; 137. 47 Bonfiglioli, Women’s Political and Social Activism. 48 “In the regional organisation in Vareš, one big mistake is related to the fact that the comrade who is also a head of a Committee lives the Party life in the local organisation, where she dedicates all her time, and because of it her work in our Regional AFŽ section is neglected (..) In Vareš, the wife of the member of the SNO refuses to work in the AFŽ and she is happy to point that out everywhere“ Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Zapisnik 1 October 1950’, ”. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4288/?, 1950. The situation in Vareš was described as organizationally very weak in another report, which lamented that wives of party members and notable personalities were avoiding work, and that their husbands justified it. The influence of the Catholic Church, moreover, was said to be most important for local women than any conference by the AFŽ or Popular Front. The wife of a local secretary, for instance, constantly attended Catholic masses and stayed away from AFŽ meetings due to some personal antipathy with a local activist, even if they were both partisans during the war. Muslim party members were also not allowing their wives to take off the veil. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ Vareš Oblasnom odboru AFŽ-godišnji izvještaj o radu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 91/1, 1949. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 33 were also considered unable to direct the local section, and so were those with unconventional morals (“nesređen porodični život”). Many candidates showed potential for political work, but needed help and further learning and studying. Generally, but not always, there was a correlation between years of schooling, willingness to learn and the possibility of being selected as a local leader. The ideal new female village cadre, thus, had to be outspoken, disciplined, hardworking, willing to learn and willing to help others. 49 Seen these difficulties in creating local cadres, and in order to bridge the gap between urban and rural realities, AFŽ leaders placed a great attention towards education and transformations in overall living standards, seeing an immediate connection between women’s emancipation and social development in village communities. A speech by AFŽ president Vida Tomšič sent by the Central Committe (Centralni Odbor) in Belgrade to the Republican Committee (Glavni Odbor) of BiH in September 1948, for instance, stated that women’s backwardness was a legacy of old Yugoslavia, and that’s what made work among women so important. Talking in her name and in the name of other AFŽ leaders, she stated: We should teach women to hate their inequality (neravnopravnost), which today still for many thousands of women is practically hidden under the veil and under other less visible habits. We should liberate our female masses from superstition, different stereotypes and so on. This is a long and tiring work. Similarly, through the work of our organizations, we should clean, paint and rearrange our homes, get rid of old fireplaces, bring in beds, teach how to keep cleanliness and decent health standards. (…) We cannot think of building socialism without simultaneously raising the living standards, and specifically without considering the emerging aspirations for a better living of our working masses, especially at the village level.50 49 Some of the less successful students, for instance, were described as follows: “D.B., Bos. Dubica, born in 1923, has 4 years of elementary education, vice-president of the County AFŽ Committee. Though she is young and has all the conditions to develop, she did not show particular interest for studying. She does not feel responsible and is not disciplined in work. If she is to be named head, she would have to be familiarised with these mistakes. Thus far, she was not politically elevated and needs to read and learn more.” Successful students were described along these lines: “N.D., Mostar, born 1918, has 4 years of elementary education. She has all the preconditions to be independent director, head, she is familliar wit the AFŽ work, and is eager to know more about it. Disciplined and shows the will for studying harder. She takes the correct attitude in relation to political events. Has comradely relation to other comrades and is willing to help them. ” The County Committee of the AFŽ Sarajevo, ‘Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH Oblasnom odboru AFŽ BiH – karakteristike polaznica političkih kurseva’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 9, 352/6, 1950. 50 “We have to teach our woman to hate her inequality, still hidden in thousands of cases behind the feredža and other, though less visible habits, we have to liberate the masses ouf our women from �34 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY The need to promote women’s education, as well as hygienic norms, was also related to the very high rates of infant mortality across the country, and to the socialist state’s aspiration to provide its citizens, and especially women, children and war invalids, with social protection and assistance. A great part of AFŽ work, therefore, consisted in educational activities that had the aim to propagate new daily habits and to raise the living standards of the population. The faith placed by prominent AFŽ activists into peasant women’s agency and ability to improve their daily lives is perhaps best illustrated by the biography of another notable figure active in the organization, namely Rajka Borojević. A teacher and partisan from Herzegovina, she took shelter with her husband and two children in rural Serbia during the war, and felt indebted to the local peasant population. After founding the Vitaminka food processing factory in Banja Luka, together with her husband, she moved to the village of Donji Dubac in the early 1950s, and started her first workshops with peasant women in 1954. Later she founded the Dragačevo weavers’ cooperative, which employed 420 women in the early 1960s. 51 A member of the plenum of the Central Committee of the AFŽ in the late 1940s, Rajka Borojević had already led cultural-political courses for peasant women in Banja Luka. During the plenum in Sarajevo mentioned earlier, she reported on such courses, describing the program designed for female villagers. The women attended conferences, visited children’s homes, a home for invalids as well as many factories, where they met “many female shock-workers about whom they had heard previously, but without believing their stories when they were told at conferences”. The villagers also saw how books and newspapers were printed, and were taken to the theatre, the cinema and various political events. They were also “placed in the different homes of the best activists, so that they could see how to cook, how to raise children, something that is lacking the superstition, various predjudices and so on..Equally, through the work ouf our organisation we need to clean, paint, wash our houses, throw out the midleage customs, put the beds inside the houses, teach women how to keep the place clean and maintain the basic hygiene conditions (...) we cannot imagine the construction of socialism without, at the same time, raising the aspirations to improve the life of our working masses, in particular those in villages” Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Centralni Odbor Beograd Glavnom Odboru AFŽ Bosne i Herzegovine›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2051/1, 1950. 51 Rajka Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet (Beograd: Etnografski muzej, 2006), first edition 1964. See also Natalja Herbst, ‘Women in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The Example of Rajka Borojević and the Dragačevo Women’s Cooperative’, in Roswita Kersten-Pejanić, Simone Rajilić, and Christian Voß, (eds.), Doing Gender-Doing the Balkans. München, Berlin, Washington D.C.: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012. See also the recent artistic project on Rajka Borojević curated by her granddaughter Ana Džokić, Taking Common Matter into Your Own Hands (last accessed 19.10.2016). http://www.stealth.ultd.net/stealth/25_taking.common.matter.into.your.own.hands.html �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 35 in the villages”.52 Borojević also discussed issues of schooling and the situation in the orphanages, which she invited AFŽ activists to visit in order to provide war orphans with the love and warmth they missed, since their parents had sacrificed themselves for the liberation of the country. A similar combination of pedagogy, ethics of care and solidarity is present in Borojević’s later biographical account of her work in Donji Dubac in the mid-1950s, where she recalls the difficulties she faced when starting the first workshops with local peasant women in the Serbian countryside. The author recalls her feelings when she arrived for the first time in the village after the war: I am especially glad because once again, like during the war, I feel closeness with these people. I’m thinking of how I could help them. This idea is not new. I have it since the war days. I brought it here - as a promise to myself. I am the closest to women. They are increasingly coming to see me. Coated, dressed up as during a holiday. They entrust me with their difficulties. I advise how best I can. I show them household tasks, I talk about the care and upbringing of children. I realize it all happens in bits and pieces.53 The rest of the diary retells Borojević’s encounter with local customs and superstitions, detailing her daily struggle against peasant women’s lack of hygienic norms when it comes to childbirth, childrearing and daily living. It took Rajka Borojević a long time to convince local husbands that they course would be beneficial for their wives. The activist even publicly denounced one of the husbands who had beaten up his wife for taking part in the course, through an article in the Belgrade daily Politika (she, however, omitted his name, threatening him that she would have revealed it if he would do it again). Her classes in Donji Dubac included a theoretical part (hygiene of the home, women’s hygiene and 52 “They saw many firms and factories, they saw many women udarnice that they earlier only heard about, but did not believe when they were mentioned at the Conference. They saw how books and newspapers are printed. They went to theaters, cinema, manifestations, reading groups, teaparties, etc… They were put into the houses of our most advanced activists and were thus able to see how to cook, raise and educate their children, and to learn everything that our village still lacks.” Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH , ‘Zapisnik IV Plenuma Glavnog Odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu, 13 marta 1948 Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8 5, document number missing/7, 1948. 53 “I am very pleased to feel closeness with this people, just like during the war. I ma thinking how to help them. This idea was did not come yesterday. I have been thinking about it since the war. I took it from here/ as a promise to myself. I am closest to women. They arrive more and more. Coated, wearing make up, all ready, like for some fest. They confide their miseries to me. I advise them, as much as I can. I show them things related to household, about raising and educating their children. I understand — all this is really only partial and not much.” Rajka Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet, 7. �36 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY sexual education, first aid, childcare, alcoholism, food, etiquette) and a practical part (cooking, serving, preparing preserves, making soap, dying textiles, knitting and sewing, collecting aromatic and medical plants, beekeeping, cultivation of raspberry, handwork, singing).54 Women walked several miles from various surrounding villages to attend. From the village, they were even taken to study visits in Belgrade, where they went to the cinema for the first time in their lives, and later to Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Kumrovec (Tito’s birthplace) and Zagreb. In the early 1960s, the Dragačevo weaving cooperative was launched, to increase women’s economic independence in the community. Women’s position in the village gradually improved, and in 1967, the newly founded House of Culture even hosted the finals of the “best husband” competition, during which women openly assessed the most respectable prospective mate, as shown in the original documentary from that time.55 The building itself had been funded with self-organised “best husband” parties in the surrounding villages.56 Rajka Borojević’s activism, which started within the AFŽ and continued well beyond the demise of the organization in 1953, well exemplifies the combination of utopian imaginaries, collective values and individual aspirations which animated left-wing leaders in their attempt to emancipate women – especially village women – across Yugoslavia. A number of women who had come out of the partisan experience embraced socialist values and strived to improve women’s position, particularly from a social and economic perspective, in line with the idea that overall social progress had to be achieved also through the improvement in women’s conditions. While elements of social control and topdown emancipation were present, AFŽ activists were also aware of the situation on the ground, and of the gap between socialist ideals and reality, which they tried to bridge as best as they could, sharing social, economic and cultural capital with other women. 54 Rajka Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet, 39. 55 https://vimeo.com/134070626 56 http://www.stealth.ultd.net/stealth/25_taking.common.matter.into.your.own.hands.html �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 37 Conclusion This essay provided an intersectional reading of women’s position within the AFŽ, arguing for the need to further explore women’s social differences in order to understand the complexity of women’s positions within the organization. The paper strives to overcome dominant interpretations of AFŽ organizational dynamics, which mainly focus on the opposition between women’s and state’s interests, and discusses instead the individual biographies of some key activist figures (Vahida Maglajlić, Didara Dukazdjini, Sida Marjanović, Judita Alargić and Rajka Borojević), in order to show the importance of women’s subjective aspirations to equality, freedom and social justice, and the ways in which they were translated into collective political engagement. As I argue in the paper, the AFŽ was not only an instrument of political mobilisation and social control, but also a mean to exercise solidarity and care, by sharing cultural, political and social capital among women. AFŽ leaders, who were generally educated, politically experienced and whose engagement was embedded in the revolutionary ethos of the partisan Resistance, strived to promote their values among illiterate, apolitical women, and to bridge the gap between urban and rural words. Hierarchies between politically active and passive women were established, especially when it came to Muslim women, who were specifically singled out as backward and forced to abandon their veils. Nonetheless, because of peasant women’s contribution to the antifascist struggle, their social and political agency was recognized, while ethnic and religious identities were not seen as fixed, but as something that could be gradually transformed through education, knowledge and political engagement. AFŽ activists themselves had experienced these transformations, and were keen to provide similar opportunities to other women. Among AFŽ members, therefore, there were fundamental differences in terms of ethnicity, class, political background and education, as well as different degrees of political and social agency. Yet, the organization encouraged women to cross boundaries, from the city to the countryside and back, across national groups and across class differences. AFŽ activists propagated the socialist ideal of women’s equality and emancipation against all odds, through alphabetization courses, courses about hygiene, voluntary work brigades, and various means of local mobilization. The AFŽ archive testifies of the richness of such capillary activities, since the reports from the ground are extremely detailed and precise, providing a precious source for women’s history. The archive material can help us reconstructing differences between communes, regions and republics, so that in fact the AFŽ archives can be used to compare women’s conditions �38 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY across the unevenly developed Yugoslav federation. The archive also allows us to study how federal directives on women’s emancipation were translated and negotiated at the local level. Women’s individual life paths and stories, as shown in this essay, are another crucial theme that deserves to be explored further, through a combination of archive material, oral history, memoirs and secondary literature published during the socialist era. While the memoirs, biographies and compilations of stories on female partisans that were written during socialism are generally dismissed as ideologically biased and hagiographic, they can nonetheless provide useful historical information on the dominant values and imaginaries of that time. I will conclude this essay with a last passage from Rajka Borojević’s autobiography, which makes clear the value of memoirs for historical research, and highlights the utopian values that animated AFŽ leaders: The Belgrade – Bar railway will also connect these villages to bigger centers. The highway Belgrade – Titovo Užice will be half shorter than the one going through Kragujevac. Roads, railways, houses, schools, power lines...they go further and further, deeper into the hills and in the former remote areas. The time will come when a stranger will wonder if Dubac really was a remote village. The villages are changing faster and faster. These ones as well. The eletrification already changed them so much. And in the villages, inevitably, what is new is replacing the old. It’s now possible to reach Busenjači by walk, only with half an hour walk, that’s right. I sing and I remember those very, very had travels and the hard work. There were way many. That is the destiny of pioneers. But the fight for the new, and for the better, is beautiful! New women are really blossoming, and that’s why I am happy.57 57 “Pruga Beograd—Bar primaknuće i ova sela većim centrima. Auto-put Beograd—Titovo Užice biće upola kraći od onog preko Kragujevca. Putevi, pruge, domovi, škole, dalekovodi. .. prodiru sve dalje, sve dublje u brda. U nekadašnje zabačene krajeve. Doći će vreme kada će se došljak čuditi: zar je Dubac bio zabačeno selo? Sela se menjaju sve bržim tempom. I ova. Koliko ih je već izmenila elektrifikacija. I u selima, neminovno, staro u-stupa mesto novom.Pešačim lrema Busenjači. Tačno je tako — samo pola sata pješačenja. Pevam i sećam se onih vrlo, vrlo teških putovanja i teškoća u radu. Bilo ih je mno-o-o-go. To je sudbina pionira. Ali —lepa je borba za novo, za bolje! Zaista niču nove žene. I zato sam vesela.” Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet, p. 223. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 39 Archival Materials: Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘ Sreski odbor Teslić Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – povjerenstvo za štampu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, f. 1178/1, 1947. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘ Sreski odbor AFŽ Visoko Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – mjesečni izvještaj za oktobar i novembar’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1290/1, 1947. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavija Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH – biografije narodnih odbornica, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 7, 2526/5, 1949. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, fond 354: kutija 1: Zapisnici i stenografske sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretariata SZDJ i sa savetovanja SZDJ 1954-1961. Zapisnik 6.3.1954, p. X/3. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Zapisnik IV Plenuma Glavnog Odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu, 13 marta 1948. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovina, Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2912/32, 1948 Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Zapisnik 1 October 1950’, ” Arhiv of Bosne i Hercegovina, Sarajevo, Box 8, 4288/?, 1950 Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ Vareš Oblasnom odboru AFŽ-godišnji izvještaj o radu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 91/1, 1949 Oblasni Odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, ‘Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH Oblasnom odboru AFŽ BiH – karakteristike polaznica političkih kurseva’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Box 9, 352/6, 1950 Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Centralni Odbor Beograd Glavnom Odboru AFŽ Bosne i Herzegovine’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2051/1, 1950 Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH , ‘Zapisnik IV Plenuma Glavnog Odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu, 13 marta 1948, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 5, document number missing/7, 1948 Bibliography: Archer, Rory, Duda, Igor and Paul Stubbs, eds., Social inequalities and discontent in Yugoslav Socialism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016). Ballinger, Pamela, and Kristen Ghodsee, “Socialist Secularism. Religion, Modernity, and Muslim Women’s Emancipation in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, 1945-1991”, Aspasia, 5, 2011. Batinić, Jelena, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2016). Beoković, Mila, Žene heroji (Sarajevo, Svjetlost, 1967). Bonfiglioli, Chiara, Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1953), PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht, 2012. �40 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AFŽ ACTIVISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES: AN INTERSECTIONAL READING OF WOMEN’S AGENCY Bonfiglioli, Chiara “Nomadic Theory as an Epistemology for Transnational Feminist History” in Iris van der Tuin and Bolette Blagaard, eds., The Subject of Rosi Braidotti (London, Bloomsbury, 2014). Bonfiglioli, Chiara, “Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia”, Aspasia, 8, 2014. Borojević, Rajka, Iz Dubca u svet, (Zadružna knjiga, 1964). Burton, Antoinette M., Archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). De Haan, Francisca, et. al. “Forum: Ten Years After, Communism and Feminism Revisited”, Aspasia, 10, 2016. Emmert, Thomas A., “Ženski Pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Funk, Nanette, “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4), 2014. Ghodsee, Kristen, and Kateřina Lišková, “Bumbling Idiots or Evil Masterminds? Challenging Cold War Stereotypes about Women, Sexuality and State Socialism”, Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (3), 2016. Ghodsee, Kristen, “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2), 2015. Giomi, Fabio, “Introduction” in Aida Spahić et al. Women Documented. Women and Public Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th century (Sarajevo: Sarajevo Open Center, 2014). Hadžišehović, Munevera, A Muslim Woman in Tito’s Yugoslavia (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2003). Herbst, Natalja, ‘Women in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The Example of Rajka Borojević and the Dragačevo Women’s Cooperative’, in Roswita Kersten-Pejanić, Simone Rajilić, and Christian Voß, (eds.), Doing Gender-Doing the Balkans (München, Berlin, Washington D.C.: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012). Hoare, Marko Attila, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History. (London: Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2013). Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata, Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja (Zagreb: Centar za Ženske Studije, 2008). Jancar-Webster, Barbara, Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 (Denver, Colo., Arden Press, 1998). �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 41 Jancar-Webster, Barbara, “Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.) Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Kecman, Jovanka, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941 (Beograd, Narodna knjiga, 1978). Lagator, Špiro Lagator and Milorad Čukić, Partizanke Prve proleterske (Beograd, Exportpress, 1978). Lukić, Dragoje, Rat i djeca Kozare (Beograd, Narodna Knjiga, 1984). Lutz, Helma, Vivar, Maria Teresa Herrera, and Linda Supik (eds)., Framing intersectionality: debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies (Burlington, Ashgate, 2011). Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Himka, Zapisi o Vahidi Maglajlić (Banjaluka, Glas, 1973) Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Himka, Rođena za burno doba: životni put narodnog heroja Vahide Maglajlić (Kragujevac, Decje Novine, 1977). Malešević, Miroslava, Didara. Životna priča jedne Prizrenke (Beograd, Srpski genealoški centar, 2004). Marjanovic, Sida, Na Neretvi… (Sarajevo, 1950). Mesarič, Andrea,” Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo. Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 22(2), 2013: 12-34. Mlinarević, Gorana and Lamija Kosović, “Women’s Movements and Gender Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, Aspasia, Vol. 5, 2011. Sklevicky, Lydia, “Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of postrevolutionary Yugoslavia” In: Angerman, A., Binnema, G., Keunen, A., Poels, V. & Zirkzee, J. (eds.) Current Issues in Women’s History. (London and New York, Routledge, 1989). Sklevicky, Lydia, Konji, Žene, Ratovi, (Zagreb, Ženska Infoteka, 1996). Tesija, Jelena, The End of the AFŽ – The End of Meaningful Women’s Activism? Rethinking the History of Women’s Organizations in Croatia, 1953 – 1961, Master thesis, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, 2014. Zaharijević, Adriana, “Pawning and Challenging in Concert: Engagement as a Field of Study”, Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (2), 2016. Stojaković, Gordana, Mapa AFŽ-a Vojvodine 1942-1953 (Novi Sad, 2007), http://www.zenskestudije.org.rs/01_o_nama/gordana_stojakovic/AFZ/afz_ licnosti.pdf �NARDINA ZUBANOVIĆ Technical pen drawings ����Thieves! �We want bread! ��ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU1: THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA 1 Letter by a girl named Vojka Beaković. This short letter by a war orphan who was transported from BiH to Slovenia for respite over the winter, testifies, amongst other things, to the ability of teachers to organise instruction successfully even in wartime, and to build rapport with their pupils. Here I quote it in its entirety: “Hello comrade teacher, first of all one should ask if you’ve started teaching year three. Me dear teacher, please let me know who has made it into year three, and who hasn’t. Have Milanka and Dana passed, they were doing quite well while I was there. I haven’t started over here yet, they say we’ll start this winter, and in summer I’m coming over again for you to teach me. Roses are red, violets are blue, me luvly teacher I believe in you. Dear teacher are you almost married yet? Because there is no time to waste, I beg of this letter to make haste. On a wooden bench I’m sat, in me right hand I’ve got a pen, in me left a kerchief white, I’m shedding tears as these words I write. Dear teacher reach out your hand to shake my own before the break of dawn, blossom ye roses, sprout tiny seed, do you teacher still remember me. I would give anything to be a bird on the wing and fly over to you. Long live comrades Tito and Stalin.” The letter was published in the section titled “Letters from the Children in Slovenia” in the magazine Nova žena 8 (1945), 12. The same issue features a detailed account of the departure of the first group of orphans for wintering in Slovenia. I thank Danijela Majstorović for bringing this letter to my attention. AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ �50 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA 1. Introduction Early debates on the invisibility of women in Yugoslav history were initiated as late as the mid-1980s,2 and the greatest contribution to the promotion and strengthening of feminist historical research of autonomous women’s organisations and associations was made by the late Lydia Sklevicky, the feminist theorist who left us too soon.3 In her work4 she consistently criticised the traditional approach to the ‘grand topics’ of political, military and diplomatic history, and stood up for the research and analysis of historical change in everyday life, the relationship between sex and gender, and the writing of a (new social) history of women.5 Although the second half of the 1980s was marked by feminist-orientated works6 and a renewed interest in women’s issues,7 this positive trend in research was brought to a halt by wartime8 as well as post-war socio-political developments This research was preceded by philosophical debates aiming to shed light on the position of women in socialism. Cf. Nadežda Čačinovič-Puhovski, „Ravnopravnost ili oslobođenje. Teze o teorijskoj relevantnosti suvremenog feminizma“, Žena 3 (1976): 125–128; Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, „Moć žene u patrijarhalnoj i suvremenoj kulturi“, Žena 4–5 (1980); Blaženka Despot, „Žena i samoupravljanje“, Delo 4 (1981): 112–116; Nada Ler-Sofronić, „Subordinacija žene – sadašnjost i prošlost“, Marksistička misao 4 (1981): 73–80. In addition to these works, one of the first feminist-orientated studies, authored by the sociologist Vjeran Katunarić, should also be mentioned; it also points to the problem of reducing ‘the Woman Question’ to the status of a general social issue, which avoids active opposition to those who maintain domination’. Cf. Vjeran Katunarić, Ženski eros i civilizacija smrti (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1984), 239. Also, a matter of exceptional importance is the international conference “Drugarica žena. Žensko pitanje-novi pristup?” organised in Belgrade in 1978, where the inequality of women in socialism in different social and political spheres was publicly discussed for the first time. 3 Died in a traffic accident in 1990, aged 39. 2 Sklevicky, Lydia. “Karakteristike organiziranog djelovanja žena u Jugoslaviji u razdoblju do drugog svjetskog rata”, Polja 308 (1984); and “Žene i moć – povijesna geneza jednog interesa”, Polja 309 (1984). Here I reference the versions from the posthumous volume of Lydia Sklevicky’s works titled Konji, žene i ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996., edited by Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. 5 Cf. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, op. cit. p. 15. 4 6 Cf. edited book Žena i društvo. Kultiviranje dijaloga, Zagreb: Sociološko društvo, 1987, featuring papers by distinguished feminist theorists of the day: Rada Iveković, Žarana Papić, Blaženka Despot, Lydia Sklevicky, Andrea Feldman, Vesna Pusić, Željka Šporer, Gordana Cerjan-Letica, Vera Tadić, Vjeran Katunarića, Đurđa Milanović, Jelena Zuppa, Ingrid Šafranek, Slavenka Drakulić. 7 Senija Milišić made a pioneering contribution to Bosnian-Herzegovinian historiography of the day by researching the processes of emancipation of Muslim women in BiH. Cf. Senija Milišić „Emancipacija muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini nakon oslobođenja 1947 – 1952 (Poseban osvrt na skidanje zara i feredže)”. Master’s thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, 1986. 8 According to Ines Prica, war yet again “postponed the tasks and the closing of planned gaps which certain periods leave behind in scholarly records or scholarly conscience, for times of peace.” Ines Prica, “ETNOLOGIJA POSTSOCIJALIZMA I PRIJE. ili: Dvanaest godina nakon „Etnologije socijalizma �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 51 and cultural and educational policies. The questions of the Women’s Antifascist Front’s (henceforth AFŽ) legacy and/or the emancipation of women in the People’s Liberation Struggle (henceforth NOB) and during the socialist period were considered anew from a feminist point of view as late as the beginning of the new millennium.9 In this regard, a phenomenon of particular import is the emergence of a new generation of women scholars, in the region and beyond, who have explored, for their master’s and doctoral theses, certain aspects of women’s engagement in the NOB and the AFŽ.10 Although Bosnian-Herzegovinian historiography still does not indicate that an institutional framework for the systematic study of the modern history of women will be established in the foreseeable future,11 it should be pointed out that i poslije”, in: Lada Feldman Čale and Ines Prica, eds. Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006, p. 21. 9 See, among other things: Slapšak,Svetlana, Ženske ikone XX veka, Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek – Čigoja Štampa, 2001.; Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. Dom i svijet. O ženskoj kulturi pamćenja, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008.; Bosanac, Gordana. Visoko čelo: ogled o humanističkim perspektivama feminizma, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2010; Jambrešić Kirin, Renata and Senjković, Reana, Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 4, 2010; 71–96; Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao građanke, Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju – Evoluta, 2011. ; Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. „Žena u formativnom socijalizmu“, in: Refleksije vremena 1945-1955 Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2013. 10 Cf. Batinić, Jelena. “Proud to have trod in men’s footsteps: Mobilizing Peasant Women into the Yugoslav Partisan Army in World War II”, (MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2001), and idem, “Gender, Revolution, War: The Mobilization of Women in the Yugoslav Partisan movement in World War II” (PhD thesis, Stanford University 2009); Stojaković, Gordana. „Rodna perspektiva u novinama Antifašističkog fronta žena u periodu 1945-1953”, (PhD thesis, University of Novi Sad, 2011), Bonfiglioli, Chiara. Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957) (PhD thesis, Utrecht University, 2012), and Jelušić, Iva. Founding Narratives on the Participation of Women in the People’NOB in Yugoslavia (MA thesis, Central European University, 2015). Some of these research papers were based on the first studies of the participation of women in the NOB conducted at American universities. Cf. Reed, Mary Elizabeth. Croatian women in the Yugoslav Partisan resistance, 1941–1945 (PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1980.) and Webster, Barbara Jancar. Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, Denver: Arden Press, 1990. Most of these works were subsequently published as monographs. 11 Studies about women in the post-war period are more often sponsored by NGOs and civic associations then by official institutions or history departments. Cases in point would be the books by Tanja Lazić, Ljubinka Vukašinović and Radmila Žigić, Žene u istoriji Semberije Bijeljina: Organizacija žena Lara, 2012, and by Aida Spahić et al., Zabilježene – Žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku, Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE, 2014. For instance, only one BA thesis of that kind was defended at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo: Emira Muhić, Žena u socijalizmu u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1945. do 1971. godine prema časopisu ‘Nova žena.’ (BA thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, 2012.) �52 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA the establishment of the online Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia12 has been a significant step forward in the archiving of materials13 pertaining to the engagement of women in the NOB and the AFŽ,14 if nothing else. The archive makes it possible for new generations of female scholars and researchers as well as artists and cultural operators to conduct research15 and offer new answers to questions related to the unfinished processes of emancipation and participation of women in the political, cultural and educational life of the community. Thanks to the invitation extended to me to participate in the production of a publication which aims, among other things, to affirm the Online Archive, I received the opportunity to explore, to an extent at least, a prominent revolutionary figure – the progressive people’s teacher, or more precisely, her role and tasks in the revolutionary activities and the establishment and construction of the new social order. Despite the fact that people’s teachers garnered enormous respect and admiration in BH society, they mostly remained timeless heroines, symbolical figures, “anonymous accomplices, fellow travellers, fellow fighters, associates”, most of whom have yet to go down in history “with their full names and surnames, with their roles, functions, thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears”.16 12 The archive was created in the course of the activities of the association for culture and the arts “Crvena”, Sarajevo. More about the archive and the project at http://www.afzarhiv.org/o-nama 13 For more details on the state of archivalia on WWII, the incompleteness of the fonds and the collections, see: Kujović, Mina. “Stanje arhivske građe o Drugom svjetskom ratu u Bosni i Hercegovini” in: Šezdeset godina od završetka Drugog svjetskog rata: kako se sjećati 1945. godine. Proceedings, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006, pp. 217–235. As early as 1953, the first systematic triennial gathering of archivalia or records on women’s wartime was started. For more on the launching of this archive and its scope in its initial phase see: Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. Dom i svijet, pp. 31–33. 15 With due awareness of the numerous difficulties in creating female history through archivalia, press clippings, recorded accounts and oral sources. For more on certain challenges facing research see: Bonfiglioli, Chiara. “Povratak u Beograd 1978. godine: Istraživanje feminističkog sjećanja” in: Glasom do feminističkih promjena, eds. R. J. Kirin and S. Prlenda, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2009, pp. 120–131. 14 16 Milić, Anđelka. “Patrijarhalni poredak, revolucija i saznanje o položaju žene, Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 19. i 20. veka”, Položaj žene kao merilo modernizacije: naučni skup, Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1998. Quoted in: Petrović, Jelena. “Društveno-političke paradigme prvog talasa jugoslavenskih feminizama”, ProFemina special issue (2011): 59–81, 62–3. The author explains that the purpose of female history is not to fill the gaps in the existing historiographical canon, but to transmit the knowledge based on the female historical experience and everything that had been systematically left out. This approach makes it possible finally to break “the endless circle of discovering and forgetting female history, emancipation and resubjugation, from the infinite renewal of the patriarchal order of values and relations which returns with a vengeance with every new historical episode.” Ibid. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 53 To demand that they be recorded in history, together with all the other forgotten, neglected or erased figures of women workers and revolutionaries from BiH, is the only way to break the “endless circle of discovering and forgetting women’s history, emancipation and oppression, from the endless restoration of the patriarchal order of values and relations which becomes more and more ruthless in every subsequent historical episode.”17 1.1. The Framework and the Aim of the Paper Even though many researchers18 in our historiography have explored the topic of the historical development of BiH school system from the Ottoman period to the end of WWII, relatively little19 has been written about the characteristics of the teachers’ professional activities and their contribution to the social and cultural development of the community. Although there had been trained teachers in BiH as early as the end of the 18 century, and even though they left a deep mark on the development of culture as such, Mitar Papić notes that “this was written about only sporadically […] and we still do not have a single synthesis which would show 17 Milić, in: Petrović, “Socio-Political Paradigms”, op. cit. 63. 18 Including: Pejanović, Đorđe, Historija srednjih i stručnih škola u BiH, Sarajevo, 1953.; Esad Peco, Osnovno školstvo u Hercegovini od 1878. do 1918., Sarajevo 1971; Mitar Papić, Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme austrougarske okupacije (1878-1918), Sarajevo, 1972, Istorija srpskih škola u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. godine, Sarajevo 1978.; Hrvatsko školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. godine, Sarajevo 1982., Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini (1918 – 1941), Sarajevo, 1984., Hajrudin Ćurić, Muslimansko školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. Godine (Muslim Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina until 1918), Sarajevo, 1983, and Azem Kožar, “Osnovno školstvo u toku Drugog svjetskog rata (1941-1945)” and : Osnovno školstvo u Tuzli (istorijski pregled) Tuzla, 1988. 19 In addition to the works which appeared in publications such as “Zbornik sjećanja treće poslijeratne generacije učiteljske škole u Derventi juni 1951. godine” or “Zbornik radova 100 godina učiteljstva u Bosni i Hercegovini” and the papers presented at a symposium organised in Sarajevo in 1987 to mark the centennial of the first school of education in the country, the role of the teacher was examined in more detail by Mitar Papić in his books Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1941. do 1955. godine, Sarajevo, 1981, and Učitelji u kulturnoj i političkoj istoriji BiH, Sarajevo (Svjetlost, 1987) and, to an extent, by Mato Zaninović in his study titled Kulturno-prosvjetni rad u NOB-u (1941 – 1945), Sarajevo, 1968, and Snježana Šušnjara, “Učiteljstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme Austro-Ugarske”, Anali za povijest odgoja 12 (2013): 55–74. An MA thesis was defended at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo in 2014, titled „Uloga učitelja u prosvjetnim, političkim i kulturnim promjenama u BiH od 1945. do 1951. godine”. The author Ademir Jerković examines the material conditions of teaching during and after the war and looks at teachers’ contribution to the general cultural and educational progress in BiH; a BA thesis on the position of teachers during the Austro-Hungarian occupation was also defended. See: Anđa Bandić, Društveni položaj učitelja u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme Austro-Ugarske (BA thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, 2011.) �54 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA that we have never had a profession in BiH whose contribution could bear comparison to that of the teaching profession”.20 However, none of these sporadic notes written before the 1990s specifically examined the status and the social role of female teachers or their contribution to the development of the school system in BiH. Moreover, although it was precisely the teachers who championed the establishment of professional associations (as early as 1896, Marija Jambrišak and Jagoda Truhelka called on teachers to unite along class lines, which was realised with the formation of the Teachers’ Club in the reading room of the Croatian Teachers’ Hall in Zagreb in 190021), Jovanka Kecman, in a study devoted to working and professional women’s associations, deals with the status of progressive teachers in the 1930s by examining their activities solely as part of the progressive teachers’ movement and the activities of the Communist Party.22 That is to say, the information on specific aspects of the teachers’ activities remained rather fragmentary, and was mentioned in passing in papers which treated the broader topic of education, or the teachers’ movement. The trend continued after the 1990s war, with only a handful of papers dealing to an extent with the education of women in the BiH school system or with prominent female educators and cultural figures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.23 20 Papić, Mitar. Učitelji u kulturnoj i političkoj istoriji Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1987, p. 3. 21 Quoted in: Suzana Jagić, “Jer kad žene budu žene prave: Uloga i položaj žena u obrazovnoj politici Banske Hrvatske na prijelazu u XX. stoljeće”, Povijest u nastavi 11 (2008): 77–100, 83–4. 22 The author justifies this bias by citing the fact that progressive female teachers in the interwar period did not form separate professional associations. Cf. Jovanka Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941, Belgrade, 1978, p. 373. 23 Cf. Kujović, Mina. Muslimanska osnovna i viša djevojačka škola sa produženim tečajem (1894-1925) – prilog historiji muslimanskog školstva u Bosni i Hercegovini”, Novi Muallim 41 (2010): 72–79; and idem, “Hasnija Berberović – zaboravljena učiteljica – prilog historiji muslimanskog školstva u Bosni i Hercegovini”, Novi Muallim 40 (2009): 114–118; Šušnjara, Snježana. “Jagoda Truhelka”, Hrvatski narodni godišnjak 53 (2006): 239–256.; idem, “Jelica Belović Bernadrikowska”, Hrvatski narodni godišnjak 54 (2006): 66–76., idem, “Školovanje ženske djece u BiH u vrijeme osmanske okupacije 1463.-1878, Školski vjesnik 4. (2011); and idem, “Školovanje ženske djece u Bosni i Hercegovini u doba Austro-Ugarske (1878.-1918.), Napredak 155 (4) (2014): 453–466. In her comprehensive study on the position of women in society in 19th- and 20th-century Serbia, Neda Božinović also offers a general overview of the social status of teachers in the lands which made up the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as a short overview of the circumstances in BiH during the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. Cf. Neda Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji: u XIX i XX veku, (Belgrade: “Devedesetčetvrta” and “Žene u crnom”, 1996). It should be pointed out that most of these works do not engage critically with the traditional historiography and move towards filling the gaps in the existing historical models (markedly ethno-national in character after the last war). The focus is on the effort to fit distinguished female figures into the existing canon, �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 55 Like most topics related to the socialist heritage, the topic of the progressive teachers’ movement is either neglected or mentioned only in passing in general overviews of the development of the teaching profession in BiH, and not a single monograph on progressive women teachers has been published hitherto. But, as I attempt to demonstrate in this paper, it is precisely in the figure of the woman teacher that all the contradictions of becoming the new working woman in socialism are inscribed. At the same time, having become the possessor of an aversive excess of memory24 of socialism and anti-fascist struggle in the aftermath of the war in BiH, the figure of the (progressive) people’s teacher can also point to possible alternative models of thinking the present moment, marked by processes of faux emancipation and aggressive repatriarchisation of women. The paper examines the role and position of the (progressive) people’s teacher from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, considering this to have been a crucial period of comprehensive transformation of the state-operated system of mass primary education in which the new type of teacher was constructed. The figure of the woman teacher is especially indicative in this regard. The process of the formation of a new type of teacher builds on the effort to completely change the social position of women 25 and create a new type of woman26 in BiH27 first via Party edicts during the NOB, and subsequently via constitutional and legal solutions. and there is almost no discussion of how and why one of the most popular female professions remained historically unrepresented, and no discussion of the still-pressing issues of educational systems and education of girls and women. More on the concept of gender as a “societal organisation of sexual difference” in historical research in: Joan W. Scott, Rod i politika povijesti (Gender and the Politics of History), Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1988, 2003, and Feminism and History, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. 24 Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata. “Politike sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke kulture”, Lada Feldman Čale and Ines Prica eds., Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006. p. 157. 25 Cf. Katz, Vera. “O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953.”, Prilozi 40 (2011): 135–155. 26 In her speech at the Second Session of ZAVNOBiH, Danica Perović pointed out that the new figure of the woman was “was a female combatant who has grown and matured politically during the struggle, emancipated herself and is able to lead and make decisions on every issue pertaining to the struggle and the life of the people.” Cf. Govor Danice Perović na Drugom zasjedanju ZAVNOBiH-a u Dokumenti 1943–1944, Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1968, p. 200. 27 These changes affected all of Yugoslavia, yet several papers point out the substantial differences between the previous economic and socio-cultural circumstances in different parts of this former state. The countries which comprised the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and subsequently the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, had somewhat different social orders, and substantially different demographic make-ups. This necessarily meant substantial differences and specificities regarding �56 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA Assuming that the educational system can be seen as a tangle of discourses, knowledge, legal and institutional arrangements of the ruling regimes and social structures that for a long time had ensured and legitimised first the exclusion, then the discrimination of women in education and teaching, this period is interesting because it was precisely during those twenty years that the number of primary school women teachers soared. At the same time, female teachers were officially made equal to their male colleagues; the new government provided equal living and working conditions and – nominally, at least – strove to improve the traditionally unfavourable financial circumstances of teachers. The intention behind this paper is to outline the numerous social duties of the teachers during the NOB, first and foremost in spreading literacy and educating women to meet the needs of the general mobilisation during the NOB, and their selfless, committed work on raising and educating children and spreading literacy among adults over the first few years following the liberation of the country as part of the five-year reconstruction plan. The main goal of the paper is to trace the trajectory of the progressive teacher from a revolutionary figure forged in the struggle for a new, more equitable social order to a figure that is gradually depoliticised and rendered passive, as part of a wider process of feminisation of the teaching profession. 2. Material Conditions of Work and the Administrative and Legal status of Female Teachers During the Austro-Hungarian Occupation and the Interwar Period Ever since the beginning of the development of a (state-operated) school system in BiH,28 which dates from the early days of Austro-Hungarian rule in this country, female teachers, as civil servants, had to work in accordance with markedly discriminatory public service laws and by-laws which greatly contributed to the deterioration of the working conditions and advancement opportunities for female teachers. the position of women in these countries – from marital status and access to education to the right to act in the public sphere. Examining this question in a separate Bosnian-Herzegovinian context seems justified precisely because of those differences and specificities. 28 During the Ottoman rule in BiH, education was private and religious only. After the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austro-Hungarian authorities opened more and more state schools, the so-called “People’s Primaries”, which operated alongside the existing private religious schools, and their curricula, textbooks and reading lists were mandated by the state. At the beginning of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of BiH, 535 so-called sybian-mekteb schools were active in the �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 57 In spite of the increase, compared to the Ottoman period,29 in the number of female primary schools, as well as female teacher training schools,30 the AustroHungarian authorities did not actually strengthen the processes of female emancipation, nor did they think it was in their interests to increase the number of women in public service. As Suzana Jagić writes, in the Austro-Hungarian period, alleged bodily and spiritual differences between the sexes were used as a pretext for different approaches to the education31 of women and men, and for their difcountry (this is to be taken with a grain of salt; a paper by Snježana Šušnjara claims that in 1876 there were 917 mektebs), 54 Catholic schools and 56 Serb Orthodox schools; towards the end of the Austro-Hungarian rule in BiH, in the school year 1912/13, there were 331 state schools in addition to the religious schools. Taken from: Mitar Papić, Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme austrougarske okupacije 1878-1918, Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša. 1972. 29 The first girls’ school in the Ottoman period was opened in Sarajevo, as late as the school year 1857/58, thanks to the tenacity, selflessness and dedication of the teacher Staka Skenderova, the first woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina to write a book (Ljetopis Bosne 1825—1856.). The second girls’ primary was established in 1866 by the Protestant suffragette Miss Adelina Paulina Irby. Both schools were boarding schools, and both were attended by girls of all faiths. Seeing that some of the pupils became teachers after graduation, we may treat these schools as the first girls’ schools of education in BiH. Five years after Miss Irby opened her school, nuns from Zagreb opened the first Catholic girls’ school in Sarajevo. The Sisters of Charity of St Vincent De Paul soon opened schools in Mostar (1872), Dolac near Travnik (1872), Banja Luka and Livno (1874). Muslim girls, as a rule, attended religious schools (mektebs). The data on the schools comes from the studies by Mitar Papić, Istorija srpskih škola u BiH (A History of Serb Schools in BiH), Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1978; and Snježana Šušnjara “Školovanje ženske djece u Bosni i Hercegovini u doba Austro-Ugarske”, op. cit. 30 In 1884, alongside a separate department of Miss Irby’s Institute for Teacher Education, the congregation of the Daughters of Divine Charity was given the permit to start a private school for female teachers in a monastery in Sarajevo which would use Austro-Hungarian curricula. Only towards the end of the Austro-Hungarian administration, in 1913, did the primary and secondary school for Muslim girls in Sarajevo launch a three-year teacher education course for Muslim secondary girls’ school graduates. In 1914, the Serb secondary school for girls obtained the status of a public school, but it closed that same year when WWI broke out. From 1911 onwards, in addition to the religious schools, teacher education was also provided at the state-run school for female teachers in Sarajevo, known as the female preparandija (Germ. Präparandenschule). In addition to Sarajevo, secondary schools for girls were established in Mostar (1893) and Banja Luka (1898), but in spite of the increase in the number of female primaries the number of pupils stayed very low, which is best illustrated by the fact that in BiH in 1910, 88.05% of the population was illiterate – 83.86% of Croat women, 95% of Serb Women and 99.68% of Muslim women. Data taken from Papić, Mitar, Školstvo u Bosni (Education in Bosnia), and Božinović, Neda, Žensko pitanje, op. cit. 31 As Dinko Župan relates, pedagogical discourse in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy supported sex policies by producing knowledge on different traits exhibited by sexes on which gender roles were based. It was precisely in the secondary schools that the desirable female identities were shaped. Župan writes: “The main traits the female students were to develop at the secondary school for girls were piousness, sincerity, chastity, meekness, shyness, modesty and taciturnity.” A female identity developed along these lines was represented as natural and immutable. But this identity was only �58 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA ferent positioning in society.32 Thus in this markedly patriarchal society,33 women, as “lesser beings”, were not only assigned different roles and tasks, but their freedom to operate in the public sphere was limited too. The public service, as a potential arena for the engagement of women, did not approve of the hiring of women, as it was considered that women belonged in the private realm of the home where their chief roles included those of homemakers, wives and mothers. Thus women were hired as public servants almost exclusively in the field of education. Although the number of female teachers was constantly rising, Austro-Hungarian authorities did nothing to create a legal framework which would ensure the improvement of the professional and material conditions for women teachers. On the contrary, the Act on the Rights and Relations in the Teaching Profession subjected women teachers to multiple discrimination. In addition to their salaries being lower than those of their male colleagues, and their advancement made more difficult by the so-called pay grades, they were not allowed to marry; that is, if they did marry, they would be permanently banned from teaching. An exception was made for marriages to male teachers, in which case the female teacher’s salary would be halved and she would lose the right to paid accommodation and other employment benefits.34 All female teachers graduated from teacher training schools before they turned seventeen, but many would start working as teaching assistants at fifteen or sixteen. As a rule, after graduation, they would be posted to female primaries. They were allowed to work at male primaries only if there was a shortage of male teachers, and could only teach junior years. They would win the right to teach at secondary schools only in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. As for advancement seemingly universal, because the female identity was criss-crossed by a web of other identities (class, religious, ethnic). Thus, for instance, every class had a unique way of implementing the universal determinants of womanhood. The desirable behaviour of a mother, wife and a homemaker varied across classes. Cf. Župan, Dinko. “Viša djevojačka škola u Osijeku (1882-1900)”, Scrinia slavonica 5 (2005), 366–383. 32 Cf. Jagić, “Jer kad žene”, p. 80. The author points out that women were educated with the sole purpose of becoming good wives and mothers, because only an educated mother and wife was able to “lay the religious and moral groundwork for the kind of upbringing on which the well-being of the homeland would depend.” Ibid. Given that patriarchy can be thought in various ways today, and that it is not a self-explanatory system, I am taking my cue from Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, who lists “the domination of men in the workplace, decision-making and property relations [...] as well as the separation of women from the public sphere and their subordination” as the basic features of patriarchy. Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja. Etnologija naše svakodnevice. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1988. p. 193. 34 Cf. Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje, op. cit. p. 80. 33 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 59 and pay grades, the process was very slow, and women would, at best, reach pay grade three towards the end of their careers. Thus, for instance, teacher Hasnija Berberović took her first teachers’ oath in 1909, and her last in 1934. She spent 29 years teaching, and was retired in 1939 for health reasons, but, as Mina Kujović points out, it is questionable whether this hard-working teacher was able to enjoy her well-deserved pension of 1475 dinars, seeing that she was committed to a mental hospital, and her pension was deposited with the court.35 Even after the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), there was no significant improvement in the financial circumstances and working conditions of women teachers. The problems faced by teachers remained the same in the newly-formed kingdom; teachers still lived in financial hardship, which is best illustrated by their excessive debts due to extremely low salaries36 recorded in some banates, as well as a large number of resolutions on the issue adopted all over the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.37 Teachers who championed the cause of progressive education38 and were active in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia,39 or openly supported the Party were 35 Cf. Kujović, “Hasnija Berberović – zaboravljena”, p. 116. 36 While other civil servants had salaries ranging from 2,900 to 7,500 dinars, teachers were paid 705 to 2,500 dinars. Reč istine br. 1 (1940), 6. Quoted in: Rade Vuković, Napredni učiteljski pokret između dva rata Beograd: Pedagoški muzej, 1968, p. 109. 37 The resolutions regularly demanded matching remuneration to the prices of essential items, matching the salaries of married female teachers to those of male teachers (“equal pay for equal work”), abolishing the III price grade, the rejection of group V just as with other civil servants, etc. Cf. Vuković, Napredni učiteljski, p. 93. 38 Progressive schooling is understood as schooling based on socialist ideas. As early as 1873, Serbian teachers in Zemun launched the socialist teachers’ Učitelj which gathered progressive teachers from the Vojvodina region; in Serbia proper, a social democratic teachers’ club was established in 1907 and it stood for free compulsory universal education at all schools, i.e. for the idea that the state should build and maintain people’s schools. Cf. Vuković, Napredni učiteljski, 10. As early as 1908, the pedagogic book series Budućnost served as a platform for progressive pedagogy and had an increasingly strong influence on the teaching profession. However, whereas a certain percentage of the teaching cadre in Serbia and Croatia belonged to various socialdemocratic organisations, teachers from BiH, as a rule, did not enter political life openly during the Austro-Hungarian rule, and were therefore less in touch with revolutionary pedagogic ideas. It was only after 1920, and the Congress of Teachers of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that the number of progressive teachers in BiH rose. Mitar Trifunović Učo especially distinguished himself as one of the first active members of the workers’ movement and a Communist Party of Yugoslavia MP. Cf. Papić, Učitelji, pp. 45, 46. 39 After the Protection of Security and Social Order Act was passed and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia banned (by a decree known as “Obznana”) in 1921, the party went underground. The decree also banned the Communist Teachers’ Club, as well as the party and union press. The 6 �60 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA at best transferred to other banates or subjected to frequent controls, arrests and protracted trials; some spent years in prison, including a number of female teachers. For instance, teacher Lepa Perović, a distinguished Party activist, was arrested for revolutionary activities and transferred from Bosnia to Serbia, only to be fired from public service in 1937. Teacher Draginja Savković spent three months in remand before she was arraigned and charged with spreading communist ideas and propaganda, but the charge was dropped due to a lack of evidence. After the trial she remained under constant police surveillance, and was transferred to another county.40 Persecution and arrests continued during World War II. Ilinka Obrenović-Milošević, known as the Red Teacher, was pregnant when she was arrested for collecting food and clothes for Partisan fighters and deported to the Banjica concentration camp. A similar fate befell the progressive teacher Živka Vujinović-Bula, who spent eleven months in the Banjica camp, and was fired from her post upon release.41 In addition to the legally mandated rights and obligations, the profession faced specific problems in the teaching process itself as well as in extracurricular activities in the community, especially where the population was largely illiterate. This was usually the case in rural areas. Working in the country was much more difficult because rural school buildings often did not meet the most basic of requirements for work, and instruction was, as a rule, organised in a single classroom. Jovanka Kecman notes that female teachers were mostly employed in the country after they graduated from teacher training schools. In addition to their work at school, they had the obligation to participate in the activities of all cultural organisations and charities operating in their counties, as well as to organise literacy courses and housekeeping courses which educated women on the importance of hygiene, a healthy diet and household economy. In spite of their much greater workload, female teachers were underpaid – in some cases their salaries were up to 50% lower than those of their male colleagues.42 January Dictatorship abolished permanent employment for teachers and put them under police surveillance, while it continued to persecute, fire and imprison them. More in: Vuković, Napredni učiteljski, 14, 15. 40 In: Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, op. cit. pp. 381, 82. 41 Quoted in: Radisav S. Nedović, Čačanski kraj u NOB 1941-1945: žene borci i saradnici, Čačak: Okružni odbor SUBNOR-a, 2010., pp. 59–63. 42 In: Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, op. cit. 373. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 61 3. The Development of the Progressive People’s Teacher on the Eve of World War II and During the People’NOB On account of their social engagement in the country, women teachers enjoyed a good reputation among the villagers and were influential in the community, all the more so because they respected local customs, lived by the village rules and were therefore treated as full members of the community. For this reason, the Communist Party, having strengthened and massified the progressive teachers’ movement, would lay particular stress on training female teachers for so-called political work in the rural areas.43 Since young teachers received their first posts in villages and towns as a rule, the political mission of the progressive teachers’ movement focused almost exclusively on these rural areas. Seeing that the CPY operated illegally from 1921 to 1936, their legal activities among teachers took the form of starting culture and publishing collectives. The progressive teachers of BiH started their own “Petar Kočić” collective as late as August 1939, at the Teachers’ Congress 44 held in Banja Luka, having previously operated through the “Vuk Karadžić” and “Ivan Filipović” collectives. These collectives organised gatherings of teachers, where the so-called Pedagogy Weeks, organised during winter holidays between 1938 and 1941, were especially important, as political and ideological lectures were held and discussions on important issues and problems of the profession.45 From 1936 onwards, the activities of these collectives, and their work with progressive female teachers were especially intensified.46 In addition to these gatherings, progressive teach43 Ibid. p. 375. 44 At this congress, i.e. at the Nineteenth Annual Supreme Session, the representatives of political groups submitted three candidate lists for the executive, steering and other committees and organs of the Yugoslav Teachers’ Association. Three political groups were active within this umbrella organisation – the Yugoslav Radical Union (YRU) or the New Teachers’ Movement, a group built round the so-called class line of bourgeois democrats, and a group gathered round the Učiteljska straža journal including the teachers’ co-operative “Vuk Karadžić”, which gathered communists and other progressive teachers, male and female. At the congress, the communists submitted a list which represented the interests of the third group of teachers. Seeing that it was third in succession, this group was subsequently called Treća učiteljska grupa (Teachers’ Group Three). More in: Rade Vuković, Napredni učitelji, pp. 74–88. The congress was notable for gathering female teachers from all over the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in a separate meeting, to discuss the legal and financial status of female teachers. On that occasion the female teachers motioned again to create female departments within regional teachers’ association. Cf. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, n.dj., p. 381. 45 Cf. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, op.cit. p. 375. 46 Ibid. p. 374. �62 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA ers developed their political, cultural and educational activities through people’s libraries and reading rooms.47 Of the several magazines they published, Učiteljska straža (Teachers’ Guard) was of particular note. Since progressive teachers were mostly assigned to villages, they became the core membership of the Communist Party in rural areas; more specifically, in Bosnia, we are talking about villages in Bosanska Krajina, areas around Sarajevo, Mt Romanija, Semberija, and East Herzegovina. It was in these areas that most teacher-WW2 volunteers, recipients of the 1941 Partisan Commemorative Medal, lived and worked.48 Whilst the authorities in the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina administrated by the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) were committed to creating a new state-run education system, Croatian in character, by endeavouring to “[…] breathe into its first laws the ‘ustasha spirit and the Croatian national spirit’ […] in the spirit of anti-Semitic policies accompanied by racial laws”,49 the leadership of the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP) endeavoured to implement the CPY programme and the NOP Platform from the very beginning of the uprising, and worked on developing and improving popular enlightenment schemes by running literacy programmes on a massive scale and renewing and developing the regular education system in the aforementioned (free) territories.50 According to a report by the teacher Mica Krpić, organised work in education commenced as early as April 1942 in villages around the town of Drvar, where the first cultural and educational committees were established along with literacy courses with classes three times a week.51 Cultural and educational work spread over Mt Kozara and the villages of the Podgrmeč region, where literacy 47 An article titled Vrijeme zrenja published in a volume of testimonies about the engagement of women of Mostar in the pre-war period describes various activities of women which took place at the library and reading room. More in: Mahmud Konjhodžić, Mostarke, fragmenti o revolucionarnoj djelatnosti i patriotskoj opredjeljenosti žena Mostara, o njihovoj borbi za slobodu i socijalizam, Mostar: Opštinski odbor SUBNOR-a, 1981., pp. 36–38. 48 Cf. Papić, Učitelji u kulturnoj, 67. Teacher recipients of the 1941 Commemorative Medal are: Vera Babić, Mila Bajalica, Jela Bićanić, Milka Čaldarović, Dušanka Ilić, Milica Krpić, Danica Pavić, Jela Perović, Lepa Perović, Nada Prica, Mica Vrhovac and Zaga Umićević. Ibid, p. 82. 49 Gladanac, Sanja. “Uspostava državnog školstva na području Velike župe Vrhbosna”, Husnija Kamberović ed., Bosna i Hercegovina 1941: Novi pogledi. Zbornik radova. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju u Sarajevu, 2012: 67–97, 74, 75. 50 Cf. Kožar, Azem. “O nekim aspektima obrazovno-odgojne politike Narodnooslobodilačkog pokreta na području Bosne i Hercegovine 1941-1945”, Šezdeset godina od završetka Drugog svjetskog rata: kako se sjećati 1945. godine. Zbornik radova, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006, pp. 235–248, 236 and 237. 51 Zaninović, Kulturno posvjetni rad, p. 20. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 63 courses were led by, among others, teachers Mica Vrhovec, Ivanka Čanković, Jela Perović and Anka Kulenović.52 After that, educational departments were established to organise courses preparing young people for work in schools and literacy courses. In addition, teachers Nijaz Alikadić and Cecilija Čebo wrote the first textbook for pupils, the Primer of Livno (Livanjski bukvar).53 After the First Session of the Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije – AVNOJ) which took place in Bihać in late November 1942, the Educational Department of the Executive Committee of the AVNOJ was tasked with organising educational activities in the liberated territories. The Department adopted a series of regulations, including the Instruction on Primary School Work, along with a number of requests and instructions to Narodno-oslobodilački odbori (NOO) to open new primary schools and literacy courses, as well as syllabi for primary schools, courses and the people’s university.54 Kožar argues that these documents of the Educational Department are “an historically significant clue for the reform of education in the spirit of the ideology of the NOP’s forces. They mark a new era in the development of schools”.55 From late 1942 onwards, conditions for organising literacy courses in the free territories as well as in the Partisan units were improving, largely thanks to the empowerment of the AFŽ as a mass political organisation.56 In addition to the courses for literacy course leaders, the AFŽ also organised political education courses for women, regionally and nation-wide. Lectures were given by, among others, Mara Radić, Nata Hadžić-Todorović (in the region of Bosanska Krajina) and Radmila Begović and Milka Čaldarević (in Eastern Bosnia). The AFŽ also set up culture groups comprising poetry recitation sections, event organisation sections, and sections for reading radio news and Partisan press. 52 Zaninović, op. cit. p. 21. This textbook had only 44 pages and was a cross between a primer and an exercise book. It is notable because, among other things, it represents an historical document which features, for the first time, content promoting different educational, pedagogic and ideological values. Cf. Mihailo Ogrizović (1962). Quoted in Papić, Učitelji u kulturnoj, p. 74. 54 In: Kožar, “O nekim aspektima”, op. cit. 55 Kožar, “O nekim aspektima”, op. cit. 53 56 The first national conference of the AFŽ Yugoslavia was held from 6–8 December 1942 in Bosanski Petrovac. The tasks defined during the conference preparations were agreed upon, and two basic sets of tasks which the AFŽ was to carry out during the war were confirmed: assisting the armed forces and ensuring the normalisation of life in the liberated territories, and achieving political and cultural emancipation of women and their integration as equals into the NOB and the fight for a new society. Cf. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, op. cit. pp. 25–26. �64 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA In November 1943, the AFŽ organised the First Educators’ Conference in the free territories on the topic of literacy courses and drafting a comprehensive primary school primer.57 Zaninović notes that a new groundwork was laid for the organisation of literacy courses with the liberation of large tracts of territory, while from 1944 onward it was compulsory for the courses to last 30 days with classes four times a week.58 The end of 1944 saw the beginning of a large-scale process of setting up new schools in the liberated territories. However, the spreading of the network of primary schools and the rise of other forms of educational activities put the issue of staffing on the agenda. Just before the war, there were 1043 primary schools in BiH employing 2,321 teachers instructing 150,783 pupils, that is, 65 pupils per teacher.59 At the end of the 1944/45 school year there were 577 schools with 82,705 pupils, 359 male teachers and 741 female teachers.60 Given that, according to incomplete data, 173 male teachers and 80 female teachers were killed during the war,61 it is clear why restaffing was to become one of the key challenges of the new educational policies. As a temporary solution, the decision was made to start training temporary teaching staff while the war was still on, to have them fully trained after the war. Teaching courses were set up and all young people who had completed at least two years of secondary school were invited to enrol. The first course was carried out in Sanski Most in May 1943. Another was then held in Lipnik, and by the end of the war courses with the same syllabus were organised in several other towns in BiH. Most attendees graduated from teaching schools and universities after the war and became the vanguard of new educational policies in BiH.62 It should be pointed out that seminars were organised for new teachers and those who joined the movement and the NOB at a later stage, in which they were acquainted with the goals of the NOB and the educational policies implemented by the People’s liberation committees, as well as with the basic ideas of the progressive teachers’ movement.63 57 In: Papić, Učitelji u, pp. 78, 79. 58 Zaninović, Kulturno posvjetni rad, 158, 159. 59 In: Papić, Mitar. Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini 1941-1945, pp. 4–11. 60 Zaninović, op. cit. p. 176. 61 Ibid. pp. 187, 190. 62 For more on these courses see: Zaninović, Kulturno prosvjetni, n. dj., pp. 124, 180–184. 63 Zaninović, op. cit, p. 185. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 65 Thus, in addition to the progressive female teachers who started their revolutionary struggle in the interwar period and became prominent political and revolutionary figures,64 another type of people’s teacher emerged during the war: a young woman who had completed a few years of secondary school and had voluntarily joined the struggle, or had become a fellow traveller. These women were trained for teaching in courses started during the war. As a rule, they went on to graduate from teacher training colleges and continued to work in education until retirement. 3.1. Five Year Reconstruction Plan: New Challenges and Old Burdens for the Teachers Educational policies of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia led to an illiteracy rate of around 75% in BiH in 1941. This undesirable situation was exacerbated by terrifying material and human losses, and thus after the war BiH faced enormous illiteracy rates, especially among women,65 as well as a lack of professionals, especially in education, and a large number of destroyed or damaged school buildings.66 This slowed down the planned tempo of the reconstruction of the 64 A good example is the career of Rada Miljković, who started out as a progressive teacher, became a successful agitator and finally a soldier killed in action in 1942 near Bugojno; in 1953 she was post humously awarded the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia. A detailed account of her revolutionary path is available here: http://www.savezboraca.autentik.net/licnosti_rada_ miljkovic.php 65 In her article titled Narodno prosvjećivanje (The People’s Enlightenment), Danica Pavić points out that the new people’s government, unlike the previous unpopular one, set the enlightenment of the masses as a priority. Referring to the data gathered by the educational arm of the G.N.O. (People’s City Committee) she states that 13,591 illiterate persons were recorded in Sarajevo after liberation, 10,765 of them women, mostly Muslims (9,072) and homemakers (9,563), and argues that women were obviously the greatest victims of a lack of education. With great enthusiasm, she relates how 118 literacy courses were launched in Sarajevo, and how women, many of them over 50 years of age, “impress with their eagerness and thirst for knowledge”, in spite of the material hardship. In her opinion, the extent to which women were excluded from public and cultural life in the pre-war Sarajevo is best illustrated by the fact that many of them, although born and raised in Sarajevo, went to the cinema for the first time as part of their literacy courses and saw two films (Days and Nights and PE Parade in Moscow) which left such a deep impression on them that they discussed them on several occasions during the course. In the last part of her article, the author makes an assessment of the AFŽ courses, and thinks that the course teachers, mostly regular teachers from Sarajevan primary schools, organisationally assisted by the AFŽ and youth, successfully realised the course activities, and that “during this winter campaign alone, the people’s government managed to teach more people to read and write than the previous unpopular regime managed in decades.” In: Nova žena: list Antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine, Year 2, issue 13 (1946), 9. 66 Just after the war, there were 684 primary schools in BiH, 1,288 teaching staff, and 97,116 pupils. Quoted in: Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, Socijalistička Republika Bosna i Hercegovina, separat uz II izdanje Zagreb, LZ, 1983., p. 230. �66 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA country set down in the Five-Year Plan,67 which is why the improvement of education was one of the priorities of the new Yugoslav and Bosnian-Herzegovinian government. It was necessary to reconstruct damaged schools and build new ones, as well as educate new teachers. At the same time, the newly-formed socialist state and the CPY had specific expectations from teachers.68 Among other things, in the first years after the war, the process of construction or reconstruction of institutions of culture went in parallel with the construction and reconstruction of schools. Libraries and reading halls were opened, along with co-operative halls and culture halls. All these institutions were mainly managed by teachers, often without any kind of compensation. All of this made the teacher’s job extremely difficult in the first post-war years. However, in this period primary schools were in the focus of the state and socio-political organisations, which fired the teachers’ enthusiasm.69 I will now make use of the testimonials quoted below to try to roughly sketch the extremely difficult working conditions the people’s teachers were facing, but also their unquestionable enthusiasm. First, one should mention the literacy courses, that is, one of the most important, most massified social actions of the day – the so-called literacy campaign. In five popular enlightenment actions carried out from 1945 to 1 October 1950, 42,196 literacy courses were organised and 670,874 people were taught 67 The 1947–1951 five-year plan provided for the development of new industrial branches, restauration of old companies, mechanisation of mining, improvement of agricultural production, construction of new roads, extension of the network of cultural and educational institutions and development of healthcare and social care institutions. 68 Cvijetin Mijatović, minister of education in the first post-war government of the People’s Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, pointed out when he opened a course for teacher trainers: “The basic task of a teacher at our school is upbringing, not in a general sense, but in the spirit of the NOB. […] Instruction and appropriate relations with schoolchildren should be abuzz with the spirit of the new instruction, and the glorious past of our peoples, their desires and goals they sought to attain […] We want free, bald, energetic people, not minions.” In the countryside, “a teacher is not the teacher of children alone. In a situation where he is the only intellectual in his village, he has to bear the brunt of socially committed work, strive primarily to elevate the area in which he resides. A village teacher, who works in difficult conditions, must not separate himself from the village, but he also must not accept the backwardness; instead, he should drive the village forward. Tasks outside of school in which teachers should participate are work in village co-operatives, literacy courses and reading rooms, and other tasks related to cultural elevation.” Cf. Cvijetin Mijatović, “Govor na otvaranju kursa za prosvjetne instruktore održanog u Sarajevu u ljeto 1946”, Prosvjetni radnik 7 (1946), 6. 69 Cf. Papić, Učitelji u, n. dj. 88. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 67 to read and write.70 The people’s teachers’ contribution was enormous,71 since the courses ran under their supervision. Teachers taught 3,099 courses along with regular monthly or fortnightly counselling with course leaders to ensure highest-quality work. As Papić stresses, “enormous effort and overtime work were woven into [this undertaking], because every teacher taught, in addition to the courses, one or two classes at a regular school. The work started early in the morning and finished at night.”72 This is how teacher Slavica Bureković from Sarajevo, who served in the village of Pokrajčići near Travnik, described her experience of organising and leading literacy courses: Teachers were tasked with spreading literacy, that was one of the biggest steps society was to take. There were very many illiterate people indeed, among them great numbers of young men and women. We teachers organised literacy courses even at come-togethers. The instruction usually took place late at night, when the teachers were free, after their classes at the regular school. I brought many women to literacy, I reckon seventy per-cent of attendees were women. I organised these courses not only in my home, but also in hamlets. On a few occasions I was remunerated for my work.73 Krunoslava Lovrenović, a teacher from the village of Ričice near Zenica, recounted that the courses were organised in winter months, from late October to late March or early April. They were mostly organised late at night, because we teachers worked with regular pupils during the day. At times we didn’t have enough paraffin [for the lamps] and we had to be extremely economical, watch the consumption. I’ve had a mother and daughter or a father and son sharing a desk. An exam had to be sat at the end of the course. Our attitude was clear – ignorance is our arch nemesis, the sooner we vanquish it the sooner we will get out of poverty.74 70 Quoted in: Jerković, Uloga učitelja u prosvjetnim, p. 20. 71 However, this does not necessarily mean that the support of female teachers was unconditional and that there were no obstructions to the many tasks. Thus, for instance, the monthly report of the Sarajevo County Committee of the AFŽ, no.1/48, relates that female teachers at first agreed to organise lectures and a general knowledge course, but, when it was launched, they sent word that they were too busy and unable to teach the course. Sreski odbor AFŽ-a za srez Sarajevski, ‘Izvještaj o stanju radu organizacije za decembar 1947, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 4, folder 5, 1948. 72 Papić, Učitelji u, 88. 73 Statement made by Slavica Bureković to Ademir Jerković. Cf. Jerković, “Uloga učitelja u”, op. cit. p. 21. 74 Jerković, “Uloga učitelja u prosvjetnim”, op. cit. 28. �68 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA Working in rural areas after the war remained the most demanding form of teacher engagement, just as it was before the war, and the new state continued the practice of assigning young female teachers to the country. The hardness of the teachers’ work was reflected by the fact that they were burdened with extracurricular activities and they had to perform several functions at the same time. In rural schools, teachers also managed and administrated their schools and had to submit performance reports on a regular basis. At the same time they were saddled with great teaching loads and had to work in crammed classrooms. Pupils attended combined classes. In rural schools, teachers often had to work with over a hundred pupils at the same time.75 In addition, the material conditions of work and life in rural schools were exceedingly difficult. Village teachers were entitled to free lodging and heating fuel.76 However, as most villages could not provide these entitlements, teachers either had no place to stay, or were given one to two rooms in the school itself, mostly in disrepair, without running water and sanitation. There are many eloquent testimonials from the day. When in 1951 teacher Krunoslava Lovrenović came to the village of Mošćanica near Zenica, she found the school in dire condition. This is how she describes it: The school had two classrooms and a hall, and we also had a school kitchen. I don’t know if it even had bread at the time. There was a stove in the middle of the classroom. Both Muslim and Orthodox children went to my class together. When teacher Ljepša Džamonja and I first arrived, there weren’t even any locks on the doors. We taught so-called combined classes. First and third grade, or second and fourth, all together in one classroom in which instruction took place. First you teach one grade, then the other. As you work with the group you have to talk to, you assign the other group to draw something, to keep them still. The children were nice, well-behaved and tidy. Orthodox girls wore blouses with long black skirts and always plaited their hair, while Muslim girls wore Turkish trousers and blouses. Each wore whatever footwear they had – woollen socks, hide shoes or galoshes. There were shelves in the hall for coats. In winter, they would come to school wading through deep snow […]. Nobody provided firewood for the school, each child would bring a split log in the morning.77 75 Teacher Slavica Bureković taught combined classes at the school in the village of Pokrajčići near Bila attended by 110 pupils, while teacher Olga Kurilić from Vrbljani worked with 220 children at her school and successfully managed fourteen courses. In: Jerković, “Uloga učitelja u”, pp. 28–29. 76 Cf. Uredba o pravu na besplatan stan i ogrjev, 56/46–626 – Uredba o pravu na besplatan stan i ogrjev učitelja narodnih osnovnih škola u selima, 46/48, 488. 77 In: Jerković, “Uloga učitelja u”, p. 35. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 69 Seeing that literacy courses in the country were organised in winter, teachers were often unable to exercise their right to holidays, and they worked hard during the school winter break. Yet, in spite of the exceedingly difficult material conditions of work, it seems that teachers, as a rule, carried out their tasks enthusiastically. This can be seen from the many testimonies and recorded interviews with teachers. Thus, for instance, in the Nova žena magazine, teacher Mileva Grubač from Višegrad went into raptures about working with women in her literacy course in the village of Dušća. She first relates how she was asked by the women from that village to “come and teach them, too” and promised to come on Sundays, as she was busy working at school or at the literacy courses in Višegrad. This is how she describes her first visit to the village, and the first class: On Sunday, they sent a boy to fetch me lest I got lost and wandered about trying to find the village. I went up the Drina, thinking about that wonderful river, celebrated in song, bloodied. She flows quiet and blue, as though she remembers no evil. Steep hills tower above her banks, and on the patches of flatlands traces of aerial bombs can be seen. Here and there, the steel frame of a building juts out from the ground, loomed over by a factory chimney. These are the remnants of “Varda”, the erstwhile saw mill. I finally arrive in the village. I am welcomed by women with primers and writing tablets. Merry was our first class, when our grow-up pupils, with great patience and determination, began to write their first letters in unsteady strokes.78 With their enormous enthusiasm and engagement, progressive people’s teachers laid an important cornerstone for the building of a new state. Together with their colleagues, female teachers organised schools across the country and created new educational policies. In their struggle for new schools they not only changed the curricula, but also established completely new relations with their pupils. Rigid classroom hierarchy was abolished, and new learning and work practices were introduced, based on mutual trust and respect. The teachers were often full of parental concern for their pupils. Instead of corporal punishment they reasoned with pupils, nurtured a competitive spirit and camaraderie.79 This earned teachers a reputation, as well as the recognition and respect of the whole community, especially children and their parents. In addition, they organised cultural events in the areas where they served, and often worked at cultural institutions, from libraries and public reading rooms to amateur theatres and athletics societies. 78 Nova žena: list Antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine, year 2, no. 13, 1946, p. 20. 79 Cf. Zaninović, Kulturno prosvjetni, op. cit. p. 186. �70 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA One such exemplary teaching career is that of people’s teacher Nasiha Porobić.80 She was born in 1928 in Derventa. When the Partisans were in Derventa for a day in 1944, she joined the movement as a sixth-former. She was wholly unprepared when she joined the Partisans; at first she served as a nurse in Teslić, then she was elected to act as a delegate at a congress in Sarajevo, and after the war she went to the village of Korače, where she taught 146 pupils. First she completed a teacher training course in Banja Luka, and went on to study to be a teacher of Serbo-Croat. She worked during her studies. She organised all extracurricular activities at school, took part in all competitions for pupils and organised events. She stressed that she loved her calling and her pupils more than anything, and that she even neglected her family, two children and husband because of work. She received several awards and honours, including the Order of People’s Merit With a Silver Star. I repeatedly listened to the recording of the interview with Nasiha Porobić, attempting to work out what it is in her voice and the way in which she answered the questions that has an unsettling effect, why her answers rouse a vague feeling of unease. No, her account is not a testimony of the futility of the struggle which, in her own words, gave her what she was able to receive. Her life was not without purpose, and there is no remorse. Nasiha claims that, if she could do it all again, she would not change anything, but this time she would join the struggle “with a bit more caution and better preparation. I’d take at least two changes of clothes. I wouldn’t just plunge headlong into it.” What is unsettling is not the resignation in her voice, or her conciliatory tone – these are probably just the distance that comes with old age, or perhaps even a wisdom with which we assess our own decisions at the end of our lives. What is disturbing is the passive voice in the narration which suggests that Nasiha accomplished so much in her rich, fulfilling life, but had too little time actually to live this rich life. What is unsettling is the fact that she, like most women who participated in revolutionary struggle, uncritically agreed to support the myth of the woman who gladly gives up her life in favour of building the state and society of the future.81 However, that is one side of the coin. It is important to keep in mind that, in spite of the fact that great masses of women accepted the role of self-sacrificing her80 Interview with Nasiha Porobić conducted by Elvira Jahić in January 2016. The interview is stored in the Audio Collection of the Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/415. 81 Cf. Jambrešić-Kirin, Dom i svijet, 27. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 71 oines, modern-day Iphigenias, there existed systemic gaps, or conscious strategies of dealing with women, in this case people’s teachers, strategies that saw to it that the process of transformation from the oppressed to the progressive teacher remained unfinished. 3.2. Between the Emancipation and the Feminisation of the Teaching Profession If we are talking about the specificities of female socio-political organising in WWII, the massive scale of association, as well as the participation of large numbers of rural women and women of all social and ethnic backgrounds, are brought up as a rule.82 Ivana Pantelić83 argues that the mass mobilisation of women and their decision to join the Partisans was influenced by the mass arrival of female teachers to rural areas after 1918. In various ways, these teachers worked towards the emancipation and empowerment of women. Although people’s teachers, along with nurses and female fighters, were distinguished activists of the anti-fascist movement and the NOB, they were not invited to participate in the executive bodies of the government and the highest bodies of the party during and after the war.84 On the contrary, the emancipatory figure of the teacher-fighter from the NOB gradually transformed into the figure of the great selfless mother who is supposed to raise a new generation through the process of compulsory primary education. As noted by Amila Ždralović, the mass participation of women in combat units during the war 82 Cf. Dušanka Kovačević et al. Borbeni put žena Jugoslavije, Belgrade: Leksikografski zavod Sveznanje, 1972, pp. 209–210. Available at http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/71 83 Pantelić, Ivana. “Yugoslav female partisans in World War II”, Cahiers balkaniques 41 (2013), 3. Available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/files/original/f47c848c2d081c22905ba11a9d869fd3.pdf 84 This was the case not only with people’s teachers, but with all women who participated in the revolution. Although women’s accomplishments in the NOB were much spoken of, their service was not adequately rewarded, that is, when the new government was formed, women were not given an opportunity to participate in its legislative and executive bodies. In her comparative analysis of data on women on the battlefield and women as delegates to ZAVNOBiH and AVNOJ, Vera Katz shows that the representation of women in political bodies was not commensurate with their participation in the NOB. For instance, there were no women ministers in the first post-war government of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Cf. Katz, “O društvenom položaju”, pp. 139, 141. This trend continued in the post-war period; thus, for instance, there were only 4.7% of women at the Constituent Assembly of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1948, as well as on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. �72 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA also meant the beginning of struggle against the traditional notions of the woman’s role and place in society, in their families as well as in the units they were joining. From the stories about female partisans it may be concluded that in their units many of them were in charge of patriarchally defined female tasks, such as cooking and sewing. However, at the same time they do tasks patriarchally defined as male, and they often volunteer for the most difficult assignments. In this way they helped break traditional notions and stereotypes of the woman’s place and role in society.85 Thus was popularised the figure of the woman-mother, oppressed and kept in a state of ignorance by the patriarchal bourgeois order, who not only manages to bring herself to literacy in the revolutionary struggle by attending a literacy course, but also enters the educational process from the anonymity of the private sphere and teaches others. In Mi se borimo i učimo (We Fight and We Learn), a regular section in the AFŽ magazine Žena kroz borbu (Fighting Woman), one such transformation of a woman was described in an article about a celebration organised by the 16th Muslim Brigade in June 1944 at which distinguished fighters were decorated: A mere year ago, Zumreta was hauling heavy ewers of water, scrubbing cobbles in courtyards, labouring in other people’s houses, far from books and any semblance of cultural life and work. Today she is being honoured as the best educator and cultural worker in her brigade […] Zumreta has acquired so much knowledge that she has been able to lead and teach others.86 However, from the mid-1950s onward, it was precisely these attempts by women to ensure equality and new positions and social roles through selfless commitment, caring for others, volunteering and doing the hardest jobs that led to the loss of their hard-earn positions, after they had borne the brunt of the effort to rebuild the country which lay in ruins.87 In other words, they returned (more precisely: they were returned) to the confines of the traditional patriarchal roles. Thus, as Vjeran Katunarić puts it, the new socialist woman slipped from the heroic figure of the woman-fighter to the figure of the tame homemaker and ‘fashion-conscious’ woman: 85 Ždralović, Amila, “Drugi svjetski rat i iskustva bosanskohercegovačkih žena”, Zabilježene, 76. 86 Žena kroz borbu: list Antifašističkog fronta žena istočne Bosne, year 2, no. 3/ 8, 1945. 87 According to Ivana Pantelić, from the mid-fifties onwards, lay-offs of women workers in the industrial and state sectors were on the rise. Cf. Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao, op. cit. 124–25. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 73 Immediately after the war, [the figure of the woman-fighter] was supplanted by the woman from the socialist poster, the woman-builder in the factory, at the construction site, at sporting events, etc. That figure reflected the revolutionary zeal of the young people of both sexes, as well as the spontaneous assimilation of women into male activities. A strong flash of light gradually faded from culture and was overwhelmed by the evolution of standard patriarchal culture. Women were pushed into the private sphere, and as the living standard of the family rose, the patterns of petty bourgeois life were renewed […]. The tabloid press exploded in the 1960s as a consequence of the strengthening of the role of the market in the Yugoslav economy. The female press, focused on fashion and makeup, faithfully copies the Western model of the female body, the female inner life and sentimentality. Jacqueline Onasis and similar characters overshadowed the emancipating figures of female social-realist culture, female fighters, workers and athletes.88 In the post-revolutionary period, the figure of the progressive teacher follows the same path of transformation previously taken by all revolutionary female figures. Thus the people’s teacher, on the wings of the ideals of labour, first became a shock worker who, working more and more to meet the needs of her great metaphoric89 family, only to gradually put on (or be thrown into) the chains of patriarchy and tradition of the previous regimes. Her performing of the traditional and ‘natural’ female roles of the nanny of the nation, the caring mother of all pupils and their mostly illiterate parents, left the people’s teacher, like other working women in socialism, with less and less “time for self-management”. Not having time meant “being outside of time, outside of history, being left with your biological nature”90 permanently stuck in the state of becoming91 a progressive teacher. 88 Katunarić, Vjeran, Ženski eros i civilizacija smrti, Zagreb: Naprijed, 1984, pp. 236, 237 89 According to L. Sklevicky, during the revolution and the construction of the new woman, the proper family was perceived as contradictory, given that it was necessary on the one hand, but represented an obstacle for the new social roles of women. As a solution, she offers something she calls the “metaphorical family”, in which the attributes of a true community of humans are ascribed to the movement and the NOB. Cf. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, 48. 90 Despot, Blaženka, “Žena i samoupravljanje”, Delo 4 (1981): 112–117, p. 115; see more in: Blaženka Despot, ‘Žensko pitanje’ u socijalističkom samoupravljanju in: Lydia Sklevicky, ed., Žena i društvo. Kultiviranje dijaloga. Zagreb: Sociološko društvo, 1987; and idem, Žensko pitanje i socijalističko samoupravljanje, Zagreb: Cekode, 1987. 91 Tatjana Jukić thinks it is “indicative that communism shows structural affinity for women in places where for Deleuze the woman is also a platform for becoming, the devenir femme, where for Deleuze the woman signifies the logic and the dynamics of becoming which lies in the background of every subsequent identity and identification. Such a woman, a devenir-femme, much like the spectre from �74 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA However, it would be false to suggest that the struggle of the progressive teacher for full emancipation, independence, better material conditions of work and appropriate remuneration92 was left unfinished93 just because teachers obediently agreed to play the imposed roles and operate under unfavourable circumstances. We are dealing with a different, more complex phenomenon. Relying on Bloch’s claim about the women’s movement being obsolete or supplanted or delayed, and his hypothesis that after revolution it is the movement’s turn as a self-realisation of femininity, Nadežda Čačinović94 examines the quality of being delayed as a new element within the classical doctrine of the workers’ movement, and, among other things, she notes that the possibility of a different self-realisation of femininity in post-revolutionary societies is still delayed, and that femininity reappears as an old greatness.95 Čačinović explains that the very effort to include everyone in the work process, especially in the division of managing duties, is considered positive progress. In principle, it is acknowledged that ‘the New Woman’ is human and capable of superior achievements whilst performing all the traditional female roles (consoler, feeder, healer). However, she concludes, “the inner unsustainability of that role is acknowledged as ‘overburdening’, a euphemism which conceals the draining of women and a complete lack of improvement regarding the male role”.96 the opening line of the Communist Manifesto, haunts then everything which subsequently develops as the gender politics of socialism. By the same token, this would mean that the gender politics of socialism is always and a priori inadequate, because it necessarily fails to grasp that structural affinity between the woman and communism”. See: Jukić, Tatjana. “Žena kao revolucija: od Garbo do Tita.” ProFemina Special Issue (2011): 33–39, p. 34. 92 Renata Jambrešić-Kirin talks about the conflicting simultaneity and stratification of female roles “which produced the triply burdened ‘super-woman’: a worker, a mother/homemaker and a publicspirited citizen who sought role models in at least three different ideospheres”. Renata JambrešićKirin, “O konfliktnoj komplementarnosti ženskog pamćenja: Između moralne revizije i feminističke intervencije” ProFemina Special Issue (2011): 39–53, p. 47. 93 In her new critical reading of the position of the working woman in socialism, Vlasta Jalušič argues that the newly attained emancipation which reduced the woman to a worker actually prevented women from transforming into a complete political being. Cf. Jalušič, Vlasta, “Women in PostSocialist Slovenia: Socially Adapted, Politically Marginalized”, Sabrina Ramet ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press 1999, p. 112. 94 Nadežda Čačinović, “Odgovor na pitanje: kakva je sudbina ženstvenosti s obzirom na emancipaciju” was originally published in the magazine Žena in 1978. Cit. Čačinović, Nadežda, U ženskom ključu: ogledi u teoriji kulture, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2000. 95 Ibid. pp. 14–15. 96 Ibid. 15. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 75 This process, from the emancipation to the feminisation of the teaching profession, should first and foremost be seen from a wider ideological level of operation within which the hijacking and the abuse of traditional values in a new context takes place.97 Thus, even during the preparations for the mass agitation of women and the broad masses and their inclusion in the NOB, the leadership of the movement and its chief ideologues concluded that the existing tradition should not be openly questioned, because “respecting the tradition is a better/ more expedient form of propaganda and a way to expand the movement”.98 As Lydia Sklevicky shows, neither the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CCCP) nor any other governing body of the NOP was trying to change traditional values; instead, the focus was on trying to modify them to suit the new historical moment. Therefore, “traditional ‘female values’ are not questioned or integrated into some new value system, but their emancipatory charge is reflected by their utility in spreading and strengthening the NOP.”99 In the case of the progressive teachers’ movement and the position of the progressive female teacher in the NOB, emancipatory values were insisted on only to the extent that this insistence was conducive to the successful achievement of the general goals of the struggle. This is why, Sklevicky explains, a pragmatic approach to traditional cultural values was developed, especially patriarchal ‘female’ values of reverence, selflessness, honour and honesty,100 the values which had become the cornerstone of all the social functions women had in the war. Thus it was believed that motherhood and its socialising role helps lay the groundwork for, among other things, brotherhood and unity.101 Hence the figure of the progressive teacher was modelled on the figure of the caring mother who raises generations of pupils – children – in the new spirit of the times. 97 Pointing out the fact that normative and operative ideology formulate the essential values of a political system differently, and that they diverge the most in the spheres of culture and nation, Siniša Malešević; in a case study of post-war Yugoslavia, analyses dominant ideologies, their form, content and the ways in which they attain legitimacy, and shows that it is possible to spot significant differences in the articulation of the new ‘socialist consciousness’ within these two types of ideology. “Whereas normative ideology poses [the socialist consciousness] in the context of universal liberation and the emancipation of human beings from tradition, authority and exploitation, operative ideology uses and appeals to familiar images of the morally superior and purified community, images derived from the popularly well-known and recognisable religious tradition”. Malešević, Siniša, Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State. London: Routledge, 2002, p. 142. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, p. 46. Through an analysis of particular narratives Sklevicky shows that propaganda used folk literature formulas, even liturgical language. Ibid. 99 Ibid. 47. 100 Ibid. 56. 101 Ibid. 43. 98 �76 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA However, this trend continued during the post-war construction of a new socialist society. Although the authorities, in principle, made it possible for women to realise their political rights, the right to work, education and the protection of motherhood, and publicly promoted the idea of gender equality in all the spheres of activity, in the words of Renata Jambrešić-Kirin Yugoslav ideologues did not practise a radical break with the cultural forms of pre-revolutionary society based on the idea of gender differences and compatibility […] Yugoslav politicians eagerly resorted to the traditional repertoire of gender roles and symbols.102 The process of feminisation103 of the teaching profession and the degradation of its social status (and, therefore the disempowering of women) began with the insistence on the figure of the teacher as a caring mother who sacrifices herself for the good of the community as a whole, and the claims that women manage to get things done and are better at teaching, which is ‘merely’ an extension of their ‘natural’ roles and a honing of their ‘innate capabilities’. As some feminist research104 has shown, gender stereotypes and gendered professional structures largely came about thanks to the rhetoric of a ‘proper/natural female profession’ which showed teachers as objects of knowledge, not active agents/ subjects. Similarly, their professional activities and their work as educators were not seen as the practising professional skills based on their education, which led to the gradual abandonment of progressive ideas about permanently honing pedagogical methods and improving classroom activities. Thus the concept of feminisation of the teaching profession meant not only an increase in the number of female teachers, but also low status and inadequate remuneration, which necessarily led to the profession’s loss of social significance and a radical reduction of its power. 102 Jambrešić-Kirin, Žene i dom, op. cit. pp. 20, 21. 103 The feminisation of the teaching profession has been a global phenomenon since the 1960s; many sociologists argue that the drastic increase in the number of women among teaching staff in primary schools indicates that the role of the mother and homemaker extends into paid professional posts. Cf. Šime Pilić, Knjiga o nastavnicima. Split: Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Splitu, 2008. 104 Inter alia: M. Grumet, “Pedagogy for patriarchy: the feminization of teaching”, Interchange, 12 (2–3) 1981, pp. 165–184; Acker, ed. Teachers, Gender and Careers, Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1989; P. Munro, Subject to fiction: Women teacher’s life history narratives and the cultural politics of resistance. Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1989. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 77 4. In Lieu of a Conclusion The initial premise of this paper is that the figure of the progressive teacher reflects the limits of the professional emancipation of women as well as the consequences of the incompleteness of the process of construction and/or transformation of the woman as a new, independent, liberated and equal subject in a better, more humane society. As the paper points out, in spite of the fact that women have made up the bulk of the teaching cadre since the end of WWII, research has so far paid little attention to the gender dimension of teaching. From 1918 to the beginning of WWII there was a rise in rural education and an increase in the number of young professional female teachers who joined the progressive teachers’ movement. Because female teachers were still in an exceptionally unfavourable financial position at the time and were subject to a law which discriminated against them by stipulating that they were to be paid less than men and by prohibiting marriage, except to other teachers, progressive female teachers fought for equal working conditions, equal rights and equal pay. New socio-cultural revolutionary policies which were promoted and spread during the war led to radical changes in the status of female teachers. Many progressive female teachers, especially in the countryside and in the free territories in BiH, actively participated in these changes as well as in the implementation of educational reforms and the introduction of a new social order. Although the figure of the peoples’ progressive teacher was constructed as a distinguished female revolutionary figure by the new government and the new official ideology, after the war they were less and less politically active and intellectually committed to further empowerment and professional independence. Such development of the figure of the female teacher and the practice of female teaching is partly the result of the fact that the professional skills were treated as innate rather than acquired skills that required additional learning and honing. The teachers’ profession was increasingly feminised until the 1980s, when what was left of the teachers’ revolutionary efforts was a limited amount of cultural capital and a symbolic role. Thus the transformation of the figure of the people’s progressive teacher could be ironically and succinctly represented in three images: from a teacher with a gun in one hand and a primer in the other, to a teacher with a red carnation tucked in her lapel, to a mid-eighties teacher who expected her pupils to give her a #16 lipstick on International Women’s Day. �78 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU THE ROLE AND THE POSITION OF THE PEOPLE’S (PROGRESSIVE) TEACHER IN THE CRUCIAL YEARS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW SOCIALIST SOCIETY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA Unfortunately, in the tumultuous post-war years of transition to a market economy, female teachers have lost even this symbolical importance and standing. In the tempestuous sea of educational reforms and the continued reorganisation of primary education, the female teacher is no longer seen as a strong figure who shapes new generations and inculcates positive values in them. The teaching profession is further marginalised and devalued, and the rights and freedoms teachers enjoy in their work with pupils are limited and checked. Thus, it seems to me, one should advocate the establishment and empowering of a professional organisation of female teachers which would find a way to act and formulate new progressive teaching policies, in spite of all the imposed divisions and segregation in the BiH education system.105 Feminism teaches us that for any kind of female professional association we need to find authentic figures from the past, predecessors we can rely on and build a more just, more responsible society. In that regard, this paper also pleads for research of the teaching profession and the status of female teachers conducted from a feminist and historical standpoint, research that would take a gender perspective and draw attention to the history of the development of this profession in BiH, in order to identify the structures which have continually oppressed female teachers and still keep them in an unfavourable position. Translated by Mirza Purić 105 More on this issue in: Dvije škole pod jednim krovom. Studija o segregaciji u obrazovanju. Sarajevo: Centar za ljudska prava i ACIPS, 2012. Study available at: http://www.shl.ba/images/brosure/ Dvije_skole_pod_jednim_krovom.pdf �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 79 Bibliography: Bonfiglioli, Chiara. “Povratak u Beograd 1978. godine: Istraživanje feminističkog sjećanja,” in: Glasom do feminističkih promjena, R. J. Kirin i S. Prlenda, eds. Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2009, 120–131. 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Belgrade, Biblioteka XX vek – Čigoja Štampa, 2001. Šušnjara, Snježana. “Školovanje ženske djece u Bosni i Hercegovini u doba Austro-Ugarske (1878. – 1918.).” Napredak 155 (4) (2014) : 453 – 466. Vuković, Rade. Napredni učiteljski pokret između dva rata. Belgrade, Pedagoški muzej, 1968. Zaninović, Mato. Kulturno-prosvjetni rad u NOB-u (1941–1945) Sarajevo, 1968 Ždralović, Amila. “Drugi svjetski rat i iskustva bosanskohercegovačkih žena.” in: Aida Spahić et al., Zabilježene – Žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE, 2014. Župan, Dinko. “Viša djevojačka škola u Osijeku (188.-1900.)” Scrinia slavonica 5 (2005.), 366-383. �ALEKSANDRA NINA KNEŽEVIĆ Digital illustrations Working women, let us conquer knowledge and learning. Let us become masters of our trades. Let us become shock workers, innovators and rationalisers. Let us develop socialist labour competition. Red salute to women shock workers whose efforts help speed up the realisation of the plan – building socialism in our country! Long live 8th March, international day of solidarity of women in the struggle against warmongers! �Long live the unity of the democratic movement of women – a strong factor at the peace front! Women of Yugoslavia reject the defamation of our beloved country, our Central Committee and Comrade Tito, under whose leadership we are building socialism! People’s teachers – live up to your name and help raise the new socialist man! AFŽ ��Peasant women, let us strive to improve our economy, let us strengthen the existing co-operatives and start new ones. Let us fight for greater yields. Long live the socialist transformation of the village! �Red salute to the women of China, who stand together with their people on the brink of the final victory over the enemy in their struggle for freedom and independence and for new social relations. �THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ �88 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II The end of WWII is the period of construction of the new Yugoslav woman who actively participates in the war, educates herself and enters the world of work, whilst the emancipation of women from the shackles of patriarchal culture was one of the “undisputable tasks of the Women’s Antifascist Front (henceforth AFŽ)”.1 In that period, which saw an historical breakaway from predominantly agrarian economics and a society in which education was mostly reserved for women from the upper social strata, the conditions were met for the education of women on a scale never seen before, and for the launching of a process of modernisation, which could not have taken place without a serious disruption of patriarchal culture.2 This emancipation did not put an end to patriarchy, far from it; but if we look at the women’s media from that period (Naša žena, Glas, Žena u borbi), we see that women are represented and equal subjects: they are combatants, nurses, workers, People’s Heroes (narodni heroji), etc., rather than passive on-lookers. A Yugoslav woman was to be modern and educated, dedicated and determined, “neither a Serb, nor Croat, nor a Muslim,” but rather all three, a Yugoslav. The aim of this chapter is to look at the issues of the magazine Nova žena from 1945–1946 available in the AFŽ archive, and describe the main emancipatory discourses addressing women, outline the argumentative and rhetorical strategies, metaphors and lexical and grammatical elements used to constitute this new Yugoslav woman, as well as to establish links between these historiographic insights and today’s so-called post-socialist moment in history. 1. Entering the Archive In Yugoslav post-socialism, after all the wars, the plundering of the commons, the ethnic cleansing, rape and the associated historical revisionism, the regime of gender inequality still contests the affixation of feminine suffixes to words denoting occupations, for instance, fighter–fighteress.3 By way of response, the Banja Luka poet Dragan Studen titled his collection of poems Borkinje (Fighteresses), as early as 1982. In the opening poem he speaks through a woman, a fighter, warrior who is addressing us in the future: 1 Sklevicky, Lydija. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. pp. 25. 2 Ibid. pp. 135. 3 http://www.blic.rs/kultura/kako-reci-zena-borac-ili-borkinja/k7r6r7e �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 89 We shall write it down in coal We shall fan the fire And be remembered If we step into the picture Hanging on the wall Only ourselves we will resemble We shall never stop Tossing the soil out of the trench Lest it smother us Thickened time We shall slice into slices And the hopeless knife Shall burn in the core If we step into the picture hanging on the wall We will remain there Forever and for evermore Writing about the experience of women in WWII, some forty years after the fact, he reminds us that “in harm’s way […] is our way out […] in our doom is our survival”, hinting that in the decisive moments of world history people went to fight and die to be able to live. This collection is part of a larger archive on women in the Narodno-oslobodilačka borba (henceforth NOB), and it inspired me to write about the AFŽ archive today, on the semi-periphery of Europe in late-stage capitalism, in post-war, post-socialist countries like today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thanks for the great step forward made by women – peasants and workers, first and foremost – are owed to female organising under the auspices of the AFŽ. The AFŽ was active from 1943 to 1953, first in the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (DFJ) and subsequently in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FNRJ) and it made possible a wide participation of women in all spheres of People’s liberation struggle. Although the AFŽ initially was not focused on female issues, but rather on harnessing the volunteer energy of millions of women to ensure victory in the struggle against fascism4, it was an organisation which, during WWII and the Yugoslav socialist revolution, undoubtedly influenced the modernising change that women fought for and won. 4 Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941–1945. Denver: Arden Press, 1990. pp. 122. �90 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II If the point of archival research is to find a lived experience in the past in order to demonstrate that what we know and the way we speak and act have not been around since the beginning of time and will not be around till the end of time, and are therefore subject to change, then the archive is not the sum of all the documents it preserves, but an historical framework for the conditions of a statement.5 A reactivation of past statements may offer guidelines on how to set ourselves free from our own archive, “impossible for us to describe”,6 to be able to think and act differently today. The intention is not to “try to restore what has been thought, wished, aimed at, experienced, desired by men in the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse” but to “join [analysed discourse] in its identity” by understanding it through “a rewriting […] a regulated transformation of what has already been written.”7 The meeting of female struggles from two different historical moments, the present one and that from seventy-odd years ago, is necessary not only for the fight against historical revisionism, but also for thinking of a new kind of political action aimed towards achieving equality for all. The crisis in which we live resembles the one from the 1930s and 1940s, given that the processes of the restauration and rehabilitation of these crises are yet again connecting capitalism, fascism and rising inequality. As we learn from the report by Cana Babović presented at the First State Anti-Fascist Conference of the AFŽ held on 8 December 1942, it was precisely the anti-fascist struggle during the Spanish Civil War, and the position of women in the USSR, where women enjoyed “full equality” and “participation in the economic and political life of the country” that inspired Yugoslav anti-fascist women to start publishing as early as the 1930s: During the bloody events in Spain in 1936, when our women began their struggle against war and fascism, we saw the emergence of “Žena danas”, a gazette of young anti-fascist women, in Belgrade. The journal had an enormous role to play in the gathering and organising of women. It reached every corner of our country, showed women what fascism had in store for them, raised their political awareness, deepened their hatred of fascism and gave them strength in their struggle for equality. The same role was played by the gazette of Croatian anti-fascist women “Ženski svijet”.8 5 Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. 1972. pp. 128–129 6 Ibid., 130. 7 Ibid., 152. 8 Babović, Cana. “Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ” report presented at the First State Conference of the AFŽ, 8 December 1942, Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/231, accessed on 20 September 2016. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 91 Although I relied on all kinds of documents available in the digital AFŽ archive, the basis of this research is formed by the journal Nova žena9 as the first gazette of the AFŽ BiH, the first issue of which was published in February 1945, and the last issue available in the archive, issue 20, in November 1946. As a propaganda tool of the AFŽ and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), in addition to the subscriptions and membership fees, it was financed through the “selling of collected rags to the ironworks.”10 11 The journal was distributed to women in villages and towns to help bring them to literacy and attract them to the tasks and the work of the organisation. In early 1946, the journal had a circulation of 10,000 copies, and by July 1947 it had reached 22,000.12 Although it focuses on a short period of time at the very end of the war or the beginning of peacetime, the analysis presented in this chapter examines the fifteen issues of the magazine published in the period 1945–1946, describes how this “new” Yugoslav woman was constituted through media discourse and establishes links between such historical insights and today’s life in the so-called “desert of post-socialism.”13 I was primarily interested in the emancipatory elements of media discourse promised to women by the new socialist era in which the new woman was made. I see these elements, in the broadest possible sense, as the largest scale inclusion of women in the social and political life of the new Yugoslavia and BiH, entering the world of work, gaining rights, learning to read and write, etc.14 What is the relationship between modernisation, emancipation and patriarchy in this context? Modernisation was brought to BiH precisely by socialism after 1945,15 through the largest scale education of everyone, especially women, as its precondition. Nova žena unabashedly addresses women as equal subjects and 9 The magazine Nova žena was mostly published in Sarajevo, but several issues were published in Belgrade. The first issue was set and printed in Cyrillic, whilst the subsequent issues used both Cyrillic and Latin alphabet. It was the official gazette of anti-fascist women of BiH. Issues 7, 11, 15, 16 and 19 are unavailable and were not included in the analysis. 10 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Okružni Odbor AFŽ Sarajevo Zemaljskom Odboru AFŽ-a – Zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945” Arhiv BiH, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/6, 1945. 11 What was probably meant is “scrap iron” (translator). 12 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, ‘Materijali sa Drugog Kongresa AFŽ-a BiH održanog 12 – 13 jula 1947’, Arhiv BiH, Kutija 3, 1543/109, 1947. 13 Horvat Srećko and Štiks Igor, Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism. London: Verso, 2015. 14 Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao građanke: društvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji, 1945-1953, Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, Evoluta, 2011. 15 Sklevicky, Lidija. Konji, žene, ratovi, Zagreb: Ženska infoteka. 1996. pp. 134. �92 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II represents them as such: they are fighters, nurses, workers, people’s heroes, etc., not passive onlookers. The entry of women to the labour market because of the demands of urbanisation, industrialisation, reconstruction and construction itself meant a serious disruption to patriarchal culture,16 and one can talk about women’s emancipation from the shackles of patriarchy in BiH and Yugoslavia only in the context of the socialist state. As for the relationship between the emancipatory and modernising on the one hand and the patriarchal on the other, I see the Balkan patriarchy as a complex of hierarchical values engraved into the social structure of pre-modern, agrarian, pastoral economies and culturally traditional, religious societies in which the dominant role is played by men while women are subjugated in the context of the protective family and household.17 In the early days of the NOB, women started to fill “vacant positions of power” through their participation in the fight, the work of the CPY and the People’s Front (Narodni front, henceforth NF), and through organised work in the AFŽ in the rear.18 In this sense, we can tentatively talk about temporary depatriarchalisation or depatriarchalising potential as a temporary loosening of patriarchal regimentation brought about by a mass organisation of women ready to fight and ready for change, free education, access to the world of work19 and social mobility within a generation for all, especially for women. With all this in mind, based on the Nova žena corpus available in the archive, I analyse the role of the AFŽ under the following aspects: a. The role of the AFŽ in an international context b. The role of the AFŽ in the struggle against fascism and the struggle for equality (depatriarchalising potential) c. The role of the AFŽ in the creation of the new Yugoslav woman through joint struggle and sisterhood of Croat, Muslim and Serb women, and d. The role of the AFŽ in the process of the largest-scale literacy drive in the history of BiH 16 Ibid., 135. 17 Halpern, Joes, Kaser Karl, and Wagner, A.Richard. “Patriarchy in the Balkans: Temporal and Cross-Cultural Approaches” in: Household and the Family in the Balkans, ed. Karl Kaser. Graz: University of Gratz Lit Verlag, 2012, pp. 49. 18 Dugandžić, Andreja and Jušić, Adela “Intervju sa Stanom Nastić,” Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, accessed on 21 November 2016, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/285. 19 This was the case with my parents, who were born in BiH in the early 1950s in rural poverty, but were able to study in Novi Sad and Sarajevo, find appropriate jobs in Bihać and become middle class in Yugoslav socialism. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 93 and in reference to the present moment in the underdeveloped and impoverished post-Dayton BiH, possibly the largest “desert of post-socialism” in which the possibility of social change is hardly discernible, excepting the short-lived protests of February 2014. This can be seen from: 1. The peripheral status of BiH society in relation to the EU countries, and the lack of internationalisation which affects the comparability and visibility of the social demands and struggles in the centre and on the periphery 2. Insufficient collective mobilisation of women in the new post-socialist state, in spite of the proliferation of identity politics and gender mainstreaming which promotes liberal ideas of female human rights, individualism and entrepreneurship and disregards, for instance, the rights of women workers and the unemployed. 3. The lack of a definite relation to fascistoid policies due to the nationalisms enshrined in the Dayton constitution stoked by anti-Yugoslav and anticommunist sentiments which mask the relations of inequality contingent on authoritarian capitalism of the new post-socialist state and are “natural allies” of the Balkan patriarchy (post-socialist repatriarchisation) 4. The rise of illiteracy, inaccessibility of education for the broad masses, and generally bad and corrupt education in the country. 2. Why the Archive? Some Theoretical and Methodological Insights The Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) is politically committed to social change,20 and it sees identities as contextually contingent and dynamic moments which are constructed, perpetuated and deconstructed within a discourse, and therefore assume different forms.21 Considering the historical and political context, as well as the earlier research on the AFŽ, I approached the texts via an analysis of the topics as hierarchicalised semantic textual macrostructures,22 topoi as basic argumentative structures of discourse,23 as well as standard tropes such as metaphors and similes. In addi20 Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989 21 Wodak, Ruth, De Cillia, Rudolph, Reisigl Martin and Liebhart, Karl. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: EUP, 1999, pp. 3–4. 22 Van Dijk, Teun. Elite Discourse and Racism. London: Sage, 1993, pp. 33. Žagar, Igor. “Topoi in critical discourse analysis”. Školsko polje Vol. 20 (5/6) (2009), 47–75. 23 �94 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II tion, I attempted to establish the relevance of the emancipatory potential of the day for the present moment in BiH through an analysis of these problems and the discourses attached to them. In a methodological sense, I see Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA)24 as a way to show how a reinvented tradition and past are doctored to fit the present moment: the AFŽ propaganda from 1945–1946 responded to the actual needs of women, but that could not have been discerned by reading Nova žena only, it was necessary to read archived minutes of AFŽ meetings too. Our present persistently appeals to tradition, but the AFŽ is omitted from that tradition. Useful in that regard is the cultural-materialist insight that tradition is an element which makes possible the continuity of past and present, but also an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social cultural definition and identification. […] From a whole possible area of past and present, in a particular culture, certain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis and certain other meanings and practices are neglected or excluded.25 In researching women’s discourse and discourse about women at a given historical moment, another particularly useful insight is provided by Gadamer’s26 observation that the more complicated the content we need to understand, the more individual elements become relevant, which in turn necessarily makes our horizon of understanding richer and broader. Entering an archive from WWII is important for gaining transgenerational insights into the past of Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Yugoslav women from that period, as well as for examining its interpretative productivity in relation to the problems women in BiH are facing today. Only then can we (tentatively) speak of a fusion of these horizons (Horizontsverschmelzung) which makes possible the actualisation of Benjaminesque The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) tries to minimise the risk of excessive subjectivity on the part of the researcher. This subjectivity is also subject to inclusion or exclusion, and to act through triangulation, its fundamental constitutive principle, on the basis of the widest possible variety of information, methods, theories, background information, etc. In this regard, DHA attempts to “integrate much available knowledge about the historical sources and the background of the social and political fields in which discursive “events” are embedded” (Wodak 2011, 65) in order to “denaturalize the role discourses play in the (re)production of noninclusive and nonegalitarian structures under certain social circumstances” (Wodak 2015, 2). In doing so, this Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Discourse Studies method sees discourse as connected with other semiotic structures and material institutions which jointly reproduce society through semiosis as the process of signification. 25 Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. pp. 115. 26 Gadamer, Hans, Georg. Istina i metoda. Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1978. 24 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 95 historiography of the oppressed where, acting in the light of “experience with the past”, a “battling, oppressed class” is the “subject of historical cognition.”27 It is precisely this oppression that remains constant when it comes to thinking and acting after experiencing war and its aftermath, which brought loss, poverty and peripherality, nationalism, unemployment and precarity, and illiteracy, all of which survive to this day. All this together makes it more difficult for women, but also for men, to organise and change their social position, by contributing to the creation of such an oppressed class which loses its combativeness due to its inability to articulate its own position as the subordinated class. In this regard, knowledge about the AFŽ is crucial for a transhistoric fusion of the horizons because it carries the potential to imagine struggle and a different world, precisely because they articulated this position and tried to solve the problems in an organised manner. I attempt to show this through critical analysis of the elements I have recognised as having been emancipatory at the time, and to address them in relation to the present moment. The task of the historical materialist is to constructively attempt to (re)articulate the historiographic form without returning nostalgically to a past story, recognising it instead as “a mark, a trace.”28 Only in a rupture, “[w]here thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, [and] yields a shock” lies “a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past.”29 In addition, archival research is never just “the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” because the meta-archive and the original of any text exist only “in the times to come.” If we wish to find out what the archive means, “we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never.”30 At any rate, the first step is the interpretation of archivalia which “illuminate[s], read[s], interpret[s], establish[es] its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself in it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it.”31 27 Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm Chowdhury, Aniruddha. “Memory, Modernity, Repetition: Walter Benjamin’s History”. Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2008 (143), 36. 29 Benjamin, op.cit. 28 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. pp. 27. 31 Ibid., 67. 30 �96 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II 3. The AFŽ and the New Woman 3.1. The AFŽ and the International Context The peripheral status of BiH society in relation to Europe is the consequence of internal strife in BiH itself, a country in which the only manifestation of internationalism is geopolitical loyalty to Russia, Croatia or Turkey. This is exacerbated by exclusivist, sometimes fascist political practices of Western Europe and North America, such as the control of the increasing numbers of migrants and workers from BiH and other peripheral countries, the rigorous visa policy, the volatility of the conditions for EU accession and the treatment of the Balkans and BiH as a “case”. Today there are virtually no forums in which women from the so-called first and the third world participate and make decisions on an equal footing, whilst the Europeanisation in BiH, conducted via the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the EU Special Representative (EUSR) is nothing but colonisation of an underdeveloped Other via the introduction of liberal democracy, privatisation of public companies, the so-called free market, economic reforms and austerity. This Europeanisation is negotiated with ethnonational political elites only.32 Nova žena in the period 1945–1946 was characterised by a strong internationalist spirit brought to bear on the issues regarding the “East” as well as the “West”. There was quite casual talk of the “brotherhood of Bulgarian people and our people”33 and the “role played by the women of Albania in the struggle for the freedom of their homeland” (Nova žena 8: 17–18, 1945). In May 1946 we learn that 3,000 apprentices from all over Yugoslavia, “[of whom] 150 [were] from BiH” were accepted for apprenticeships in “the brotherly Czechoslovakia” in order to receive their vocational training over three to four years (Nova žena 14:12, 1946). Many issues featured social-realist narratives, mostly from the Soviet context, which described work enthusiasm, shockworkership and the self-sacrificing nature of the “fair-complected” Russian woman as an embodiment of the partisan promise of post-war life.34 In the August issue (Nova žena 5:6, 1945), we read about the visit of a delegation of Soviet women to Sarajevo referred to as “the joy and happiness we dreamed of for years”: 32 Majstorović, Danijela, Vučkovac, Zoran and Pepić, Anđela, “From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: Post-2014 Economic Restructuring as Europeanization Discourse/Practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15(4) (2015), 661–682. Nova žena, Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, 8: 5, 1945., http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/c130e1fc9258a352e2e949767c6990e9.pdf Note – due to the large number of citations from the Nova Žena magazine, they are integrated in the running text and contain issue number, page number and the year of publication. The issues of Nova žena referred to here are available online at www.afzarhiv.org in the category Periodicals. 34 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., pp. 119. 33 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 97 The raptures peaked when Evgeniya “Zhenya” Zhigulenko – a pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union who flew the aeroplane the delegation arrived on showed up on the balcony. She is an approachable and agreeable woman whom we met a long time ago through Polina Osipenko, Valentina Grizodubova and other brave women pilots we read about and admired even as they were just training for the great feats they were to accomplish in the war of people’s liberation. Zhenya greeted us on behalf of the Red Army fighters, on behalf of the women who are now returning from the army to work in fields and factories, to carry out the task of reconstructing the country with as much success as they had in fighting fascism. Although the purpose of such reporting was to raise international antifascist consciousness and boost morale, such pieces valorised courage, female togetherness and solidarity. Homage to the heroism of a woman who fought in the war and flew an aeroplane to Sarajevo, even though she had to “return from the army to work in fields and factories”, is not something that can be found in today’s media. If she is mentioned at all, it is as a pilot of an airline, not a Red Army pilot. This Stakhanovitesque promise of social mobility achieved by going from a peasant to a kolkhoz leader or a state official, and social care provided to pregnant workers whereby “the future mother feels the care of the collective” is not recognised as newsworthy by today’s media. Joint international mobilisation is present in humanitarian efforts, such as cancer prevention or domestic violence prevention, but joint antifascist fight is and remains a blind spot of today’s media. Work, partnership and motherhood are treated in an individualist, consumerist manner, with frequent appeals to the topos of the “super woman”35 36 who is always dolled up, has a fantastic job and education, three kids and a husband, and is able to do (and buy) anything. When it comes to the participation of Bosnian-Herzegovinian women in international female organisations, we see that they were zealously preparing for the First International Congress of Women, convened on 26 November 1945 on the motion by “comrade Cotton”, the founder and president of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). The WIDF and Eugénie Cotton are to a great extent absent from Western feminist historiography,37 although the 35 Majstorović, Danijela and Mandić, Maja. “What It Means to Be a Bosnian Woman: Analyzing Women’s Talk Between Patriarchy and Emancipation” in Living With Patriarchy—Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects Across Public Spheres, ed. Danijela Majstorović i Inger Lassen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 97. 36 Majstorović, Danijela. “(Un)Doing Feminism in Post-Yugoslav Media Spaces”. Feminist Media Studies 16(6) (2016), 1093–1108. 37 De Hahn, Francisca “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991.” http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com/help/view/the_womens_ �98 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II WIDF was the biggest and most influential international female organisation after 1945. From its beginnings the WIDF developed a profile of a leftist and feminist organisation which gathered communist women but also progressive noncommunists from all over the world, including the US, Soviet Union and China.38 When we entered Palais de la mutualite on 2 November, many of us saw the trappings of a great international conference for the first time: long desks at which delegations sat and went through documents and notes, on every desk plates with inscriptions such as China, India, Latin America, the USSR, Yugoslavia, Romania – the names of forty countries, forty nations that want the eradication of fascism, democracy and peace; then there are loudspeakers, spotlights, interpreters who make announcements in three different languages; above the podium a great emblem of the Congress – a dove with an olive branch and a globe. Just before the opening, the hall was echoing with nervous hubbub in several dozen different languages. (Nova žena 12:5, 1946) The Bosnian-Herzegovinian delegates participated in these congresses on equal footing and reported about them, which further points to a strong internationalist drive of female organisations and movements with a wider political agenda, female organisations from the so-called Third World, as well as those with a socialist, socialist-feminist or pro-communist orientation. As cold war attacks on the WIDF had a “negative impact on the state and location of, and access to, the WIDF archive and the possibility of gathering materials through oral histories”, the accomplishments of this organisation were not inscribed in the collective feminist memory. Because a searchable, digitalised AFŽ archive was not available until recently, the organisation, being part of a socialist state structure, saw its feminist potential denied by Western feminists,39 while historians and anthropologists who recognised feminism in female socialist organisations in Eastern and South-eastern Europe were labelled revisionists.40 41 Thus Lepa Perović reinternational_democratic_federation_widf_history_main_agenda_and_contributions_19451991, accessed on 20 September 2016. 38 Writing about some of the reasons for such exclusion, de Haan lists the accusations of pro-Soviet activities made by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949, when the influence of the WIDF started to weaken, and the focus of Western feminist historiography shifted mostly to liberal feminism and gender (author). 39 Funk, Nanette. “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 21(4) (2014), 344–360. 40 Bonfiglioli, Chiara. “Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945–1957)”, PhD thesis, University of Utrecht, 2012). 41 Ghodsee, Kristen. “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2015), 248–252. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 99 lates that the preparatory committee of the Congress “included delegates from England, America, Soviet Union, China, France, Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy, Hungerry [sic], Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Portugal, Australia, Catalobia [sic], Belgium, Greece, Czechoslovakia and Sweden” and that it decided to “include delegates from the countries which are still not represented” and that “colonies, too, may have their representatives who will be completely independent” (Nova žena 8:5–6, 1945). 3.2. The Fight against Fascism and Attaining Equality The goals of the Paris congress of women were to achieve co-operation of women worldwide on the following, rather progressive programme, which outlines the same issues the AFŽ insisted on during and after the war: 1. Destroy fascism and ensure democracy 2. Prepare a bright future for new generations 3. Give women the rights listed in the International Charter of Women. As mothers: the right to bear children in a world free from horrors, poverty and war, in which every government will provide them with necessary social and health protection and appropriate housing. As workers: the right to work in all branches of industry and practise all professions, to receive equal pay for equal work, the right to access vocational education on an equal footing with men, the right to be appointed to responsible positions; the ending of exploitation of women as a cheap labour force and the improvement of working conditions. As citizens: equality with men before the law and full democratic freedom of expression, the right to vote and sit on judicial councils and participate in government and international institutions (Nova žena 8: 5–6, 1945). Anti-fascist struggle and the attainment of equality such as suffrage were among the goals in Yugoslavia even before the congress, thanks to the influence of the anti-fascist struggle in Spain and the attainment of equality by Soviet women. According to Cana Babović, who spoke at the State Conference of the AFŽ on 8 December 1942, these two demands represented a key difference between bourgeois feminists and Yugoslav anti-fascists who were jointly active in the “female movement” of the day even before the war broke out in 1941, and eventually led to a schism: Progressive women of Yugoslavia, that is, anti-fascists, thought that the struggle of women against fascism and war was best lead by gathering and connecting women in a single organisation. Anti-fascists joined exist- �100 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II ing feminist organisations and started the work of all women of Yugoslavia against war and fascism. Among the actions taken by women in their struggle for equality, the most notable was the drive for suffrage which was organised in the entire country, led by anti-fascists and had at the time, in 1939, a distinct anti-war and anti-fascist character. […] The leadership of the bourgeois feminist organisations disgracefully betrayed the women’s struggle, renouncing their own anti-war programme so that they would not have to fight fascism too, the two being inseparable. During the great struggle for the right to vote, they were not only passive, they also sabotaged the struggle of the anti-fascists.42 War was close at hand and great numbers of women were left unorganised, so the CPY needed to “mobilise women through the AFŽ to ensure victory in the war as well as to convince women that the victory of the Partisans will mean a brighter future for them.”43 In that regard, the AFŽ was “the most fascinating example of a relatively small group of communists working meticulously on the ground, in wartime conditions, and quickly succeeding in convincing great masses of women to help in partisan warfare in exchange for new rights after the war.”44 Still, the relation of equality between men and women was ambivalent the whole time. On the one hand, it was undeniable that the top echelons of the Party were male-dominated and steeped in patriarchal tradition, as female partisans were wont to say that they “were sent” and “allowed” to do things.45 Such “male politics” were connected with the strict military and political discipline necessary to win the war, which is corroborated by the fact that, in spite of the lip service paid to the equality of women to men in political life and all areas of social activity, at the First Session of the Country Anti-Fascist Council for the People’s Liberation of BiH (henceforth ZAVNOBiH) there were only four women out of 247 delegates: Mevla Jakupović, a worker from Tuzla, Zora Nikolić, a worker from Sarajevo, captain Danica Perović from Banja Luka, head of the XI Division hospital and Rada Vranješević, a student and member of the Central Committee of the AFŽ.46 On the other hand, according to Milka Kufrin, “equality of men and women existed only at the platoon level”,47 which was confirmed in earlier interviews by the few surviving female Partisans in BiH, Stana Nastić from Sarajevo and Milica 42 Babović, “Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ”. 43 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., pp. 114–116. 44 Katz, Vera. “O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953.” Prilozi 40 (2011), 138. 45 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., p. 106. 46 ZAVNOBiH, dokumenti 1943-1944, vol. I, (Sarajevo: IP Veselin Masleša, 1968), 58–63. 47 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., p. 99. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 101 Stanarević from Banja Luka. By fighting alongside men in the anti-fascist struggle, women won freedom they never knew before and started to actively work on their enlightenment and the improvement of their social position. “Those who quietly put up with all the hardship before the war”, “have been elevated to the rank of valiant freedom fighters (Nova žena 1:6, 1945)” determined to never go back “to the old ways”. It is precisely the relation between “the old ways” and “the new” which was changed during the anti-fascist struggle that makes up the dominant topos in Nova žena, whereby it is observed of the old ways: Let us remember the old ways. In our peasant households it was important for a woman to be strong and obedient. We had to do the hardest work, without any recognition. […] We were illiterate, we had no idea what was happening in the world and what was upon us. They said it was not a woman’s business. It is no wonder then that we are so firmly attached to the struggle. […] That is why we are all united in our struggle for the old ways to never return. (Soja Ćopić, Nova žena 1:7, 1945). When it comes to family rights – the “new ways” that were sweeping through social and political life – as early as 1942 the Regulations of Foča (“Fočanski propisi”) were drafted as the first legal act of socialist Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav woman won the right to vote and run for office, civil marriage and divorce were introduced, as well as equality before the law, recognition of the rights of children born out of wedlock, equal pay for equal work, and access to hospitals and kindergartens, all typical socialist demands. It is precisely in Nova žena 1946 9 and 1946 10 1–3 that we read that “children born out of wedlock [had] equal rights as the children born in wedlock”, which had previously been unimaginable, as if “marriage and family, in comrade Kardelj’s words, were too serious institutions for the state to leave them to some other organisations”, and the state organised kindergartens for mothers to be able to work. The state of female workers’ rights where few women make their living in nonagrarian economy in a country which had just emerged from a war is best illustrated by the 1931 census data. According to the Census, BiH had 1,138,515 women (around 46 percent) and 1,185,040 men, while “84.1 percent of the population [was] made up of peasants living from agriculture, forestry and fishing”.48 On the other hand, Dobrojević49 claims that “in 1951, according to the official statistics, 48 Brkljača, Seka. “Bosna i Hercegovina u prvim godinama Drugog svjetskog rata od 1939. do 1941. godine,” in: Bosna i Hercegovina 1941: novi pogledi : zbornik radova, ed. Husnija Kamberović (Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2012), 16. 49 Ivana Dobrivojević, “Od ruralnog ka urbanom: modernizacija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine u FNRJ 1945–1955” in: Identitet Bosne i Hercegovine kroz historiju: zbornik radova, ed. Husnija Kamberović (Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2011), 19. �102 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II the number of female workers was 90 percent higher than in 1939”, while “the most dramatic rise was recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the number of women in work increased two and a half times.” The post-revolutionary period represented an historical break with the agrarian economy and capitalism of “the old Yugoslavia” and created jobs for everyone, especially women, but it was not without its contradictions. Still, this shift in valorisation of work carried the promise of a new way life never before seen. This is what Vida Tomšić, the first chairwoman of the AFŽ, in her report titled “O radu i zadacima žena na socijalnom staranju” (“On the Work and the Tasks of Women in Social Care”): As we are trying to build a strong Yugoslavia that could stand on its own feet economically we are facing the great task of creating better life conditions for the broadest working masses […] This is not just about renewing the old Yugoslavia, we are aiming higher. We are trying to create a way of life that never existed in Yugoslavia before. (Nova žena, 5:4, 1945). Although the emancipation of women in socialist Yugoslavia did not mean the end of patriarchy or jobs for all women, it did have an enormous positive impact on the attainment of equality and made it possible for masses of women to enter the world of work50 by “aligning the interests of women with the interests of the proletariat”51 during WW II. In addition, the combativeness, anti-fascism, internationalism and political enlightenment working in conjunction helped women organised in the AFŽ, especially in its early years, until 1947, “to think like statesmen first and foremost”, which essentially laid the groundwork for the realisation of all the equal rights won in battle.52 3.3. Common Struggle: National Sisterhood and Unity In her two poems titled “Uz mangal” (“By the Hot Coal Pan”) and “Žena s transparentom” (“The Woman With a Protest Sign”) (Nova žena 12:27, 1946) Razija Handžić talks about “Muslim women old and new”. Describing the way they move, in the former poem she says: “In grim garbs and black veils as though in a dream they glide away, like blinded birds, like vestals accurs’d, on they glide on a sunny day”, and in the latter: “to reach the women at the congress, swaying like heavy seas, the one in the veil holding a sign would wade through blood, it seems”. 50 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., p. 2. 51 Ibid., 122. 52 Ibid. 117. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 103 Revolutionary ardour, struggle, unity and literacy drives were highlighted through “the new”, while the valorisation of individual suffering and sacrifice in the struggle against fascism was transformed into a matter of national importance.53 Of national importance for the new Yugoslavia were also “equality and co-operation between all the nations and Croat-Serb sisterhood”, while “for the tradition-bound Muslim women […] joining and working for the AFŽ meant a new life.”54 Still, an analysis of Nova žena indicates that it was upper-class Muslim women like Vahida Maglajlić, “the only Muslim (Bosniak) People’s Hero”, her mother Ćamila (kadi’s wife) and her whole family in Banja Luka who led the way in spreading the ideas of the NOB and the AFŽ among women of all faiths.55 The interpellation into the modern and educated “Yugoslav” woman was conducted through the ZAVNOBiH ideology, according to which she was “neither a Serb, nor a Croat, nor a Muslim” but all three at the same time as a Yugoslav, and all three groups were fighting fascism together. Zealous work on building the unity of women in BiH regardless of their ethnic and religious affiliation during the NOB was necessary to massify the AFŽ to two million members not only through discourse but through unified anti-fascist praxis as well. Through the prism of today’s ethnically divided BiH, this simultaneous interpellation of Serb, Croat and Bosniak (Muslim) women seems nothing short of incredible, as do the words of Dušanka Kovačević, who legitimised this unity by invoking their joint struggle for freedom: For the lives of our children, for the peace of our homes, to make sure killing and slaughtering should never return, we joined hands. The unity of Serb, Muslim and Croat women shall explain to the world where our strength to fight and our belief in triumph comes from. At the Congress, Serb, Muslim and Croat women will talk about their children who are liberating the country together, about the work they do together. About Serb women who collected seed for a burnt Muslim village, about Muslim women who brought gifts to hospitals and died for freedom in concentration camps. Our unity will be the women’s most beautiful gift to the Congress, to our young country, her happiness and future (Nova žena, 1:6, 1945). In the same issue, a piece by Jela Bićanić “Muslimanke u borbi” (“Muslim Women in the Struggle”) touchingly describes the suffering of Mrs Maglajlić, the kadi’s 53 54 55 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., pp. 117. Ibid., 116. Duganžić, Andreja and Jušić, Adela. “Intervju sa Alijom Maglajlićem,” Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, accessed on 21 November 2016., http://www.afzarhiv.org/ items/show/16. �104 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II wife and the mother of the people’s heroine Vahida Maglajlić, whom “they locked up, furious about being unable to catch her son. But nothing could break this mother whose three children fell in combat, and the fourth is now in a concentration camp. She is still cheerful and believes in our victory. ‘When we come to Banja Luka, I shall lead the celebratory kolo’, she often says, ‘and I’ll be wearing three red stars by my heart!’” “During the first autumn of our people’s struggle Ajša Karabegović left her hometown. In the free territories she displayed exemplary commitment in nursing our fighters at the hospital in Jošavac. Chetnik criminals have cut her wonderful spirited life short.” “At the same time, a mass action to help the Partisans was underway. Raifa Čorbegović smuggled hand grenades in a pram, under her baby.” “The mother of the Sarač sisters had to see her daughters shackled by the fascist, yet she kept smuggling leaflets and ammunition in and out of Banja Luka.” In these quotes we see the rise of a new Muslim woman who subverts patriarchal culture by smuggling leaflets under her veil56 or grenades in her pram in order to build a new BiH in Yugoslavia. Just like her neighbours, she proudly sent her children to war, relishing the newly-forged brotherhood and unity of our peoples. The topos of sacrifice and courage is intertwined with love, which serves as a justification of the sacrifice: “As long as we love one another so!” [Mrs Maglajlić] said directly. “That is why we have no regrets. Five of my children are fighting. Three of my fighters have fallen. And I am not crying. Mothers of heroes do not cry.” In the article “One su pale za slobodu” (They Fell for Freedom) in the same issue it is stated that Vahida Maglajlić “gathers women, brings Muslim, Serb and Croat women together in a common struggle. Vahida’s sincere and proven love of people opens up the hearts of bereaved Serb mothers, who accept her as one of their own.”(Nova žena 1:14, 1945). Anti-fascism, both professed and lived, has always been averse to nationalisms, which now employ historical revisionism to rehabilitate former fascists and collaborationists in the cultural and political mainstream after the wars of the 1990s:57 58 at the Congress of Serbian Women 56 Rada Vranješević also used a veil to smuggle illegal post although she was not a Muslim. 57 Radanović, Milan. Kazna i zločin: snage kolaboracije u Srbiji: odgovornost za ratne zločine (1941-1944) i vojni gubici (1944-1945) (Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2015). 58 Čović, Bartul. “Povijest pišu gubitnici”. Novosti, http://www.portalnovosti.com/povijest-pisugubitnici, accessed on 10 September 2016. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 105 alone, these women “indicted those who, in the name of ‘Serbness’, have killed tens of thousands of Serbs in concentration camps and dungeons”, who “have killed the finest sons of Serbia or turned them over to Germans” and “stoked hatred and killing among the fraternal peoples of Yugoslavia” (Nova žena 1:14, 1945). By condemning these practices in the strongest possible terms, Nova žena purposely created an ideological matrix for building a new unity on the experience of suffering on all sides: The women of Bosnia and Herzegovina have put in great effort and made great sacrifices. The enemy spared no one. […] Ustašas slaughtered Serb children, chetniks found their “revenge” in the blood and screams of Croat and Muslim civilians. (Nova žena 1:6, 1945) At the first county conference of the AFŽ held in the county of Bihać it was said that “after the presentations, many women, old and young, Muslims, Serbs and Croats, talked about their labour, their struggle, their suffering, about the crimes of the occupiers, of ustashas and chetniks”, that they were “meeting freely for the first time in [their] lives to decide their own fate” and that they were “happy to participate in the political life of their people.” (Nova žena 1:19, 1945) Joint labour also strengthened the unity of women of different ethnic backgrounds: The property of A. Mešić, the enemy of the people, has been planted with maize for our poor. A hundred acres of land is to be hoed and moulded! Serb, Muslim and Croat women are stepping up one by one, old and young, peasants and city women. (Nova žena 5:13, 1945) The strengthening of the unity of people, as the new political Yugoslavness, on the wings of the struggle against fascism, went hand in hand with the recognition of all ethnic and religious particularities through which unity was built on the basis of the pain and horrors of the war in which women, too, participated actively. The article “Hrvatice Bosne i Hercegovine” (Croat Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina) (Nova žena 1945 2:3–4) states that “Croat women must realise that the NOB is the fulfilment of the centuries-old aspirations of Croats” and draws a parallel between the struggle of Matija Gubec, “the immortal leader of Croat peasantry”, against the nobility in the Peasants Uprising of 1573 and the NOB, as both conflicts had elements of class struggle. In this strategy of recontextualising or equating the struggles of the Croatian people in the last five centuries with the NOB, the NOB becomes a reflection of “the centuries-old aspirations of Croats”, something “the finest Croat patriots have given their lives for throughout the glorious Croatian history” (Nova žena 1945 2:3). Thus the Croatian goals are equated with the Yu- �106 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II goslav goals, as opposed to the ISC (Independent State of Croatia) ones, because the ISC is “a monstrous criminal creation.” The biblical metaphor of a blind man in the dark whom Jesus bade see, quite easy for the broadest masses to understand, was used to say that the (Croatian) people “has been blind so far”, meaning in the ISC period, but “has come to see now” through the NOB (ibid.). Yet, such reports of unity were actually addressing the lingering problem of nationalism, about which we can find out more not so much from the magazine itself, but rather from the minutes of meetings of the AFŽ’s Sarajevo and Banja Luka county-regional (sreski, regionalni) committees. Nova žena wrote, in cushioned language, about priests “openly hostile to the NOB” who nonetheless had “great influence” on women as one of the reasons why many Croat men and women remained outside of the NOB (Nova žena 1945 2:3-4). But from the minutes of the AFŽ meetings we learn that the situation on the ground was far more severe and that the magazine served as a tool of propaganda that responded directly to the problem of nationalism and religious divisions. From the minutes of the Okružni Odbor of the AFŽ Sarajevo held on 25 November 1945 we find out that the influence of the clergy among Croats was extremely strong, that “nuns rip down Narodni Front’s posters” and that “in the Croat village of Čajdaš, many balls were cast into the blind box” which the priests refer to as “the faith box”. We also learn that “few Serb women in the municipality of Zaborac turn out for meetings” and that they “do not want to mingle with Muslims at all, especially those from across the Drina”, but also that “chetniks obstruct the women’s work” – just before the elections they “distributed flyers and opened fire, so that women are afraid to engage in work.” From the minutes of meetings of the Okružni Odbor of the AFŽ Banja Luka we also learn about chetniks threatening to “cut off the hair of women who go to vote”, and that “this is what happened in the districts of Piskavica, Prnjavor and Srbac.”59 It was clear that 1945 was a crucial year; these articles were published in February, when the war was yet to end officially, but it was obvious enough that the Narodni Front with Josip Broz at its helm would emerge the victor. Because there is no research from 1945 about it, it is thankless work speculating about how common people felt at the time and whether they sidelined their ethnic background and affiliation in favour of the new Yugoslavness. Yet, in these articles we glean significant ideological interpellation of common people into Yugoslavness, buttressed by the common experience of suffering under fascists, and by the desire to build a new, better life. 59 Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Banja Luka - Izvještaj o radu Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Banja Luka od 26.11.1945.’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 118/1, 1945. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 107 3.4. Mass Literacy Campaigns When it comes to features that distinguished BiH from other republics of the SFRY, it must be said that BiH had the highest rate of female illiteracy at the time, second only to that of Kosovo and Macedonia. Due to the customs and traditions of the Ottoman Empire, women in BiH, especially Muslims, but also rural Christians, were much more isolated from public life, including education.60 61 A wide range of rights and the visibility of female fighters may have played the most important role in the mobilisation of young, educated women and workers. Still, they cannot take all the credit for the movement’s massive two-million membership. According to Mitra Mitrović,62 “for the first time in their lives, peasant women were appreciated for their everyday work – stitching, cooking, planting, grinding the grain for more people than just their family.” With this cohort, which comprised the majority of women at the time, education and literacy drives played a major role in their mobilisation. The People’s Liberation Movement (NOP) created a new figure of a woman in BiH, bold, combative and determined. Those who quietly put up with all the hardship before the war, have been elevated to the rank of valiant freedom fighters. The doors of people’s government, schools and courses have been opened to women. Thirsty for knowledge, they have started to learn (Nova žena 1:6, 1945) In a society in which education was reserved for women from higher social strata, conditions were met for mass education of women as a precondition for modernisation. “We should launch a proper campaign against illiteracy”, said comrade Olga Kovačić. “Not a single child in our villages, towns and cities, not a single woman shall remain illiterate.” (Nova žena 5:5, 1945) On page 20 of the first issue of Nova žena, just before the masthead which reveals that the issue was printed in Sanski Most, there is an editor’s note: “Dear comrade, you are holding the first issue of the gazette of women of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Broad masses of our women wish to learn, to become enlightened. They demand the press, they demand answers to the many questions which interest them.” Here – and in subsequent issues, too – we see insistence on mass literacy, especially female literacy, which followed other emancipatory efforts. 60 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., pp. 27–31. Popov Momčinović, Zlatiborka, Giomi, Fabio and Delić, Zlatan. “Uvod: period austrougarske uprave” u Zabilježene – žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku, ed. Jasmina Čaušević. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar and Fondacija Cure, 2014., pp. 24–26. 62 Jancar-Webster, op. cit., pp. 142. 61 �108 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II The second issue is dominated by an article titled “Bosna i Hercegovina neće ostati nepismena” (“Bosnia and Herzegovina Will Not Remain Illiterate”) (Nova žena 2:7, 1945) from which we find out that the occupation found the country in a state of great backwardness, to which people were “until recently, mostly resigned.” In the same issue it is stated that “according to 1931 data, the state of literacy was as follows: in Bosnia, 31 percent are literate, and 69 percent illiterate. In Herzegovina, 34 percent are literate, 66 percent illiterate. The illiteracy rate is disproportionately higher among womenfolk. In Bosnia, 39 percent of men are literate, in Herzegovina 55 percent, whilst in Bosnia and Herzegovina only 15 percent of women are literate.” (Nova žena 2:7, 1945). It is also stated that 12,500 adults learnt to read and write behind the front lines during the struggle. The magazine writes about this enthusiasm and the idea of progress for all walks of life using lyrical yet folksy language: The force of the uprising filled the masses with an enthusiasm for culture. Until recently mostly resigned to their backwardness, the young and old, women and children all wished to learn to read and write. Pen and paper have become part of our fighters’ combat kit. […] A girl knits socks, sings songs of struggle straining to embroider letters on a towel, kerchief and socks. A little shepherd tends to his flock, engraves his first letters into a spindle and a water bottle, asks every fighter he meets for a pen and paper, to teach himself to write. Girls and women keep their favourite book of songs and stories of struggle in their bosom. Literacy becomes mandatory, at the front and in the rear. An illiterate nurse, writing her first letters, shouts: “I thought this was much harder, I thought I was never going to learn …” A woman from Podgrmeč teaches herself to write using her son’s tablet. Even old women in the region of Podgrmeč are wont to say: “It is a sin to remain illiterate in this day and age.” The credit for spreading literacy primarily goes to the popular movement which “took illiterate Serb, Muslim and Croat women to a literacy course, so that together they may learn to read and write.” (ibid.) The alarming illiteracy rates necessitated that those who were able to read and write teach those who were unable. Bringing people to literacy was a volunteering effort, and every woman shockworker engaged in reconstruction was expected to “find a comrade who will devote her free time, strength and love to introduce her to books.” (Nova žena 5:13, 1945). In the same article, young members of the AFŽ and Young Communist League say that “we must learn if we want to teach,” because “pen and paper will teach us to appreciate the rights we have won and help us understand our freedom and equality, to learn the duties of a free, upstanding citizen” and also “put us at liberty, as new mothers, to raise our children for a rich, happy life in a new, born-again Yugoslavia.” (Nova žena, 5:13, 1945). From the minutes of the �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 109 first meeting of the educational arm of the Central Committee of the AFŽ, held on 23 November 1945, we learn that in the interest of effectiveness four subsections were formed: a sub-section for the liquidation of illiteracy, a sub-section for political education, a sub-section for general education and a sub-section for courses. “Illiteracy” is a metaphorical enemy, and as such needs to be “liquidated”, a “campaign should be launched” against it (ibid.), and we need to “arm ourselves with knowledge”. Literacy courses and press readings were organised at gettogethers in each hamlet and village where “the press is read in groups”, “the radio is listened to collectively”, and there were “mobile libraries” as well as “NF reading groups”.63 In addition to the AFŽ’s social affairs section, in charge of children’s homes and homes for the disabled, a propaganda section in charge of campaigns, radio and press, as well as an education section in charge of bringing youth and adults to literacy were growing stronger in BiH, which made literacy a precondition for the construction of the “new” woman: Then the 60-year-old Zlata Halić signed up for the course and sent a message to other women: “Shame on all the young women who aren’t signing up. I’ll be the first to go, though I’ve got one foot in the grave, I want to die literate.” Darinka Tasić from the village of Bijela […] learnt all the letters in eight days. This is a wonderful example which show how new free women amaze with their work, just as they amazed with their heroism in battle. (Nova žena 5:13, 1945). 4. The Significance of the AFŽ Today: Ethno-Capitalism, Repatriarchisation, Illiteracy Although subjective, as becomes a qualitative analysis, what has been crucial for me is reading the archive as an exercise in critical literacy. It is important especially because of the generations for whom historical revisionism by ethnonational-capitalist elites has literally blocked all socialist and anti-fascist horizons. After the destruction of the SFRY and the emergence of new nationstates, the knowledge and experiences of the Yugoslav NOB, in spite of their contradictions, have been completely neglected and revised through neoliberal, anti-communist narratives. I will try to unpack these claims by describing their interaction. 63 Glavni Odbor of the AFŽ BiH, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a - zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/nedostaje broj stranice, 1945. �110 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II In spite of the proliferation of identity politics and twenty years of so-called gender mainstreaming, which promoted liberal ideas of women’s human rights,64 individualism and entrepreneurship, today there is very little “basis for collective mobilisation of women”,65 unlike in the period of creation of the new Yugoslav woman. In spite of all the limitations and stages of Yugoslav modernity, it must be said that patriarchy survived in the SFRY, especially in the private sphere66 where, for instance, domestic violence remained a taboo into the 1980s.67 This was never completely solved, in spite of the efforts undertaken by feminists in the 1970s,68 and the representation of women in Yugoslav film in the late 1980s was such that it recontextualised the women’s demand for the benefits of socialist modernity, such as employment, as insufficient motherhood.69 “Killing the actual woman was preferable to letting the traditional ideal of the woman as a mother die”,70 and Badema, the “bad mother” from Ademir Kenović’s film Kuduz was ultimately killed by an ethnically conscious man who kills “for our cause”, who is “a hero, not a criminal”, which, according to Jovanović, foreshadows the 1990s wars that brought ethnic homogenisation and spelt the end of socialism, for which they needed repatriarchisation. The post-socialist period saw a stricter division between two “seemingly separate, but in reality networked and interdependent spheres of productive and re64 Helms, Elissa. Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar BosniaHerzegovina. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 65 Kaneva, Nadia. “Mediating Post-socialist Femininities: Contested Histories and visibilities”. Feminist Media Studies 15 (1) (2015), 12. 66 Dunja Rihtman Auguštin, Etnologija naše svakodnevnice. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1998. 67 Majstorović, “(Un)Doing Feminism in Post-Yugoslav Media Spaces”, 1096. 68 In the 1970s, Yugoslavia saw the arrival of the second wave of feminism, encouraged by the student protests of 1968. In 1978, the international conference “Drug-ca – Žensko pitanje. Novi pristup?”. (Tovarish/Tovarka – the Woman Question: New Approach?) The conference was the first tumultuous appearance of feminists on the public scene in the socialist Yugoslavia. The focus on the woman question and the problem of the sexual division of labour was highlighted by the prominent slogan of the confederation: “Proleteri svih zemalja – ko vam pere čarape?” (Workers of the world – who washes your socks?). The topics included patriarchy, the intersection of feminism and Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis, as well as identity, sexuality, language and the invisibility of women in culture and scholarship. Also discussed were the everyday lives of women, discrimination in the public and private sphere, women’s double burden, violence and the survival of traditional patriarchal roles. (Čaušević 2014) 69 Nebojša, Jovanović, “Bosanski psiho: Kuduz, rat spolova i kraj socijalizma”. Sarajevske sveske: Da li je Balkan muškog roda” 39/40 (2013), 156–175. 70 Ibid., 167. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 111 productive labour” which have been “hierarchically reorganised.”71 Reproductive work was naturalised through repatriarchisation as exclusively women’s, whilst ethno-nationalism and the Dayton division of the country as desirable affiliations in the new capitalist society further galvanised these relations. According to Močnik:72 In tightening the control and discipline, whatever tools are at hand will do: religious ideology, ethnic loyalty, traditional values, the renewal of the patriarchal family, the resurrection of traditional patterns, “retraditionalisation” – all of these are new modes of socialness coerced by contemporary capitalism. The contemporary capitalism which we have in BiH today as a species of the so-called authoritarian capitalism73 typical of all ex-Yugoslav countries whose captains are mostly profiteers of the 1992–1995 war ensured the division of assets through ethnic cleansing and subsequent privatisation. It ensured the return of patriarchy, which established continuity with the legacy of the colonial, agrarian, pre-socialist era. As was the case before WWII, the collusion of institutionalised religion and ruling elites in the new post-socialist era in which power is evenly distributed between the clergy and ethno-capitalists, society has been retraditionalised74 75 and gender roles and relations repatriarchised, which goes hand in hand with the rising poverty and unemployment. I base the repatriarchisation hypothesis on the depatriarchising potential of the socialist period, which is at odds with the present rise of misogyny, discrimination, exploitation and violence76 as integral parts of the process of restauration of capitalist relations. Within these relations, social reproductive labour is “classi71 Burcar, Lilijana “Iz socijalizma natrag u kapitalizam: repatrijarhalizacija društva i redomestifikacija žena”. Dva desetljeća poslije kraja socijalizma. Zagreb: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014, pp. 114. 72 Močnik, Rastko. “Dvije vrste fašistoidnih politika”. Novosti, no. 677 (2012). http://arhiva. portalnovosti.com/2012/12/dvije-vrste-fasistoidnih-politika1/, accessed on 20 August 2016. 73 Dolenec, Danijela. “Prema reartikulaciji otpora ekonomskom liberalizmu”. http://slobodnifilozofski.com/2016/09/prema-reartikulaciji-otpora-ekonomskom-liberalizmu.html (2016), accessed on 10 October 2016. 74 Popov-Momčinović, Zlatiborka. Ženski pokret u Bosni i Hercegovini: artikulacija jedne kontrakulture. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE and Centar za empirijska istraživanja religije u BiH, 2013. 75 Leinert Novosel, Smiljana. Žena na pragu 21.stoljeća – između majčinstva i profesije (Zagreb: Ženska grupa TOD, EDAC, 1999), 18. 76 Marina Blagojević, “Mizoginija: nevidljivi uzroci, bolne posledice” in Mapiranje mizoginije u Srbiji: diskursi i prakse, drugo izdanje, ed. Marina Blagojević (Belgrade: AŽIN, 2002), 31–55. �112 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II fied as non-labour, not worth a mention”,77 which endangers women’s economic self-sufficiency and puts them “in a position of complete or partial dependence on their families […] reducing them to the level of socially and politically disenfranchised subjects, that is, second class citizens”,78 which says something about intergenerational solidarity as opposed to state intervention in the field of care. Today, it is precisely this type of unpaid labour that the feminist critique of the socalled care economy79 sees as further facilitating the exploitation and devaluation through the hidden “sexual contract”80 of patriarchal capitalism. “Anti-communist revisionism has become the dominant way of remembering socialist Yugoslavia”, which in turn “conveniently coincides with the neoliberal economic measures of the new political elites.81 Theorists today speak about the so-called post-fascism of the elites in contemporary practices of the new liberal capitalist states reflected in racism, homophobia, the abolition of workers’ rights, media manipulations, bureaucratic apparatuses which crush dissent within institutions and hate-mongering campaigns against dissident groups and individuals. In such a world, a woman solves problems by “buying the product”, while unpaid domestic labour and motherhood, ideologised as “natural”, in fact create invisible surplus value for capitalism. While class inequality within all groups deepens, especially among women, an organisational effort is missing because the left cannot articulate these contradictions and the struggles attached to them. Discourse after the 1992–1995 war in BiH has permanently broken up the former sense of togetherness among women by producing solely Bosniak, Serb and Croat victims, and there has been little effort to turn the experience of war into a common experience of suffering on all sides. This wartime suffering has been exacerbated by post-war suffering embodied in the experience of transition and the precariousness of life in what used to be a common economic and political space, and is now two entities and a district in BiH. Except for the handful of leftleaning feminists with a class consciousness, who do not merely follow the liberal agendas of the numerous women’s and human rights organisations, we do Burcar, “Iz socijalizma natrag u kapitalizam: repatrijarhalizacija društva i re-domestifikacija žena”, 114. 78 Ibid., 115. 77 Folbre, Nancy. Who Cares? A Feminist Critique of the Care Economy. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014. 80 Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 79 81 Krašovec, Primož. “Svi anti-komunisti su tigrovi od papira”. http://slobodnifilozofski.com/2010/06/ primoz-krasovec-svi-antikomunisti-su.html, accessed on 20 September 2016. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 113 not have a single political voice attempting to gain the trust of masses of women by simultaneously calling on Serb, Bosniak and Croat women to stand up for their rights as enemies of the rising ethnonationalist fascism. Such interpellations inherent in referring to all women in BiH, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks, as Bosnian and Herzegovinian (just as they were once referred to as new Yugoslavs), remain, unfortunately, marginal and unorganised. Seeing that they are not articulated in the programme of any political party, they remain outside of discursive practice, as their introduction is considered too risky for the ruling Dayton order. Last but not least, when it comes to education, the results of the 2013 census indicate that, 70 years after WWII, not only has illiteracy in BiH not been eradicated, at 2.82 percent it is also highest in the region, compared to 1.9 percent in Serbia and 0.8 in Croatia82. Of the 89,794 illiterate persons in our country, 77,557 are women. The living experience of the Dayton order, which has been furthering ethnic exclusion and isolation for over twenty years (this is also shown by the census results – both entities are to a great extent ethnically homogeneous),83 renders impossible any large-scale effort to organise women that would work towards a state-sanctioned policy of promoting literacy and education for women, especially those from rural areas, and those of advanced age.84 With all of this in mind, we see that the changes and efforts made by the AFŽ during WWII were emancipatory, especially for the women who had previously never enjoyed any kind of privileges – peasants, workers, youth. Whilst most of this legacy has been completely destroyed, some remnants of it can still be barely discerned, smothered under the wave of robbery and privatisation. In a patriarchal ethno-capitalist hegemony that is today’s BiH, led by nationalist parties as the main political actors backed by EU agencies, tradition cherry-picks a past to match the manufactured present, in order to create a sense of continuity. Rada Vranješević and Vahida Maglajlić do not figure in this past, especially not at the same time. The AFŽ Archive represents, if nothing, a counter-hegemony 82 Arnautović, Marija. “Popis u BiH: Nacionalnost važnija od pismenosti”, 30 June 2016. http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/popis-bih-nacionalnost-vaznija-od-pismenosti/27831061.html, accessed on 13 September 2016. 83 As for the ethnic structure by entity, there are 74 percent of Bosniaks in the Federation of BiH, 22.4 percent of Croats and 3.60 percent of Serbs. In the Republika Srpska there are 81.51 percent of Serbs, 2.41 percent of Croats and 13. 99 percent of Bosniaks. In Brčko District there are 42.36 percent of Bosniaks, , 20.66 of Croats and 34. 58 percent of Serbs (Arnautović 2016). More at: http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/popisni-rezultatinakon-25-godina-u-federaciji-vecina-bosnjaciu-rs-srbi/27830387.html. 84 http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/u-bih-gotovo-90000-nepismenih �114 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II in response to these regimes by introducing into discourse powerful actors, women of all social and ethno-national backgrounds, who organise, charge at the enemy, work and build and change the existing social relations. 5. For Some Future “Grand Times” How to “write down in charcoal” to “fan the fire”, to remember these struggles not as a “picture hanging on the wall” in which we are stuck “forever and forevermore”, but as fuel for the active mobilisation of today’s women, now that most female veterans and fronties (AFŽ members) are deceased, and the knowledge of the struggles is absent from the public sphere, as well as everyday life. Insights into transgenerational, suppressed knowledge shed light on the battles won by the women of the day riding on a wave of revolution, but these discourses need to be reactivated by placing them in “a homogenous and empty time” into a time “which is fulfilled by the here-and-now”, otherwise “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”85 Writing about the great organisation and movement that is the AFŽ requires great effort, first and foremost because of the unavailability of the main actors and archives, as well as because of the complexity of the relations within and around it. The AFŽ’s influence was greatly weakened, especially after the directive of the Central Committee of CPY from January 1944 when the CPY dissolved its internal hierarchy.86 In the article titled “Za čvršću povezanost među odborima AFŽ-a” (“For a Closer Connection Between the AFŽ’s Committees”) (Nova žena 6:9-10, 1945) we see a trend of abolishing the organisations internal hierarchical structure and submitting to the Narodni Front, that is, people’s liberation committees joined by the so-called “progressive women”.87 The article begins with a generalisation that it is “natural that every organisation made up of living beings should expand and develop”, heralding the end of the AFŽ and its marginalisation in relation to the NF.88 89 The decision is legitimised in the article via claims that the “strict submission of the lower-level [AFŽ] committee to the higher-level one has started to separate women from the people’s movement as a whole” and that the organisation had become “too cramped to receive new female anti-fascists” so “instead of closed, cliquish AFŽ committees, broad people’s committees (NO) are being created now.” 85 Benjamin, op. cit. Jancar-Webster, op. cit., p. 148. Sklevicky, op. cit., p. 120. 88 Ibid. 89 Jancar-Webster, op. cit. 86 87 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 115 It was precisely Sklevicky90 who wrote in most detail about the vertical mobility of women, the ambiguity of the AFŽ’s tasks in relation to the NF and the phasing out of direct work with women; in the latter two she saw the end of this organisation in 1953, after which the AFŽ remained “at the margins of the text of history.”91 With the women’s organisation evidently lacking “autonomy of the goal” and the “latent fear” of “feminist deviations” in parts of the Party ranks, it was clear that the revolutionary zeal of the AFŽ and its depatriarchalising potential,92 discernible from Nova žena, would not last long enough to carry out total depatriarchisation of either Bosnian-Herzegovinian or Yugoslav society, both of which, in fact, needed “more socialism.” Today there is no broad-based participation of women in everyday political, social and economic life in BiH, and nobody articulates why female engagement would be necessary in the first place. We see similar observations in the closing speech given at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the AFŽ Croatia by the chairwoman Cana Babović, who said “that we have got nothing in particular, nothing specific, some issue to fight for as women, is a different matter.”93 Women fighters recognised the meaning of Yugoslav national unity forged in the anti-fascist struggle. They had won the battles for literacy, education and equal pay, putting socialist and feminist ideals in practice as much as they could. The Yugoslav woman, who had won her emancipation, equality and access to the world of work by fighting Nazi Germany and traitors shoulder to shoulder with her comrades-in-arms, knew that she was the backbone of the struggle, and that she must be the backbone of the new society forged in battle: So Croatian, Slovenian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Dalmatian, Macedonian, Voivodinian and Serbian women parted ways, each went to her homeland overcome by the joy of living in such grand times, working on the large part of the effort to build a new life. And in each of their souls a decision was solidifying, unshakeable as a vow: we, women, have been the backbone of the NOB, the backbone of the superhuman effort of our peoples to free their motherland, but from now on we will be the backbone of her magnificent reconstruction, of her happy future. (Nova žena 5:5, 1945) 90 91 Sklevicky, op. cit., 121 Ibid., 113. Although they had rights, women in the SFRY started to exercise them only in the 1960s. Katz (2011, 154) argues that “the equality of men and women […] rested more on the laws than on some crucial change of relations in everyday life. The Bosnian-Herzegovinian woman started to exercise her rights won in the 1940s only in the 1960s, when society started to achieve more substantial economic progress.” In this regard we may also talk of some thirty years of depatriarchalising potential. 93 Sklevicky, op. cit., pp. 122. 92 �116 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ THE CREATION OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV WOMAN – EMANCIPATORY ELEMENTS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE FROM THE END OF WORLD WAR II This cache of the AFŽ media texts from the end of WWII reveals a promise of a socialist revolution with a profusion of emancipatory opportunities for women of all classes, ages and ethnic backgrounds, especially for the great majority of unemployed, poor women who can only be further exploited by capitalism. To write about that which cannot be suppressed in the AFŽ’s experience is to reclaim it through contemporary socialist and feminist political practices as the Blochian principle of hope in which social utopia creates awareness of and abolishes human and female misery. It is to reject and resist the status quo in which feigned nationalism laced with patriarchy has been masking mass exploitation under ethno-capitalists for two decades now by producing kids for war and unpaid labour. To “fuse the horizons” from an historical distance is to repoliticise the status quo by providing a “meeting point” for some future grand times where we will able to organise for struggle. The knowledge about these horizons represents an alternative history crucial for understanding future social struggles for a more egalitarian society, for resisting not only the capitalist mode of production but also the production of “kids for war” which reverberates in the verses of the contemporary Sarajevan poet Dijala Hasanbegović:94 I’m not giving you kids for war: I’m telling you with my palms facing upwards palms sticky from the acrid yellow cords which the cutthroats shall never cut. Translated by Mirza Purić 94 Dijala Hasanbegović, “Djeca za rat”, http://darkocvijetic.blogspot.ba/2014/01/veliki-odmordijalahasanbegovic.html, accessed on 10 September 2016. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 117 Archival Materials: Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ – Zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945.’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/6, 1945. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Materijali Drugog kongresa AFŽa BiH održanog 12 – 13. Jula 1947’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1543/109, 1947. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Banja Luka - Izvještaj o radu Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Banja Luka od 26.11.1945.’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 118/1, 1945. Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a - zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/nedostaje broj stranice, 1945. Bibliography: Arnautović, Marija. “Popis u BiH: Nacionalnost važnija od pismenosti”. 30. 6. 2016. http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/popis-bih-nacionalnost-vaznija-odpismenosti/ 27831061.html Babović, Cana. “Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ” referat predstavljen na I Zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ, 08.12.1942. Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/231 Benjamin, Walter. 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Ghodsee, Kristen. 2015. “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2015): 248–252. Halpern, Joel, Kaser, Karl i Richard A. Wagner. “Patriarchy in the Balkans: Temporal and Cross-Cultural Approaches”. In: Household and the Family in the Balkans. Ed. Karl Kaser, 47-64. University of Graz. Graz: Lit Verlag, 2012 Hasanbegović, Dijala. 2013. “Ne dam djecu za rat”. (http://darkocvijetic.blogspot.ba/2014/ 01/veliki-odmor-dijala-hasanbegovic.html) Helms, Elissa. Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Horvat, Srećko and Igor Štiks. Welcome to the Dessert of Postsocialism. London: Verso, 2015. Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945. Denver: Arden Press Inc., 1990. Jovanović, Nebojša. 2013. “Bosanski psiho: Kuduz, rat spolova i kraj socijalizma. 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London: Sage, 2015 ZAVNOBiH, dokumenti 1943-1944, knj. I, Sarajevo: IP Veselin Masleša, 1968, 58–63 http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/u-bih-gotovo-90000-nepismenih Žagar, Igor. “Topoi in critical discourse analysis”. Školsko polje Vol. 20 (5/6), (2009): 47–75 �KASJA JERLAGIĆ Pencil drawings ����Heroism of Labor The Women’s Antifascist Front and the Socialist Dispositive 1945–1953 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ �126 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 1. Introduction Any attempt to understand and valorize the rise and decline of the Women’s Antifascist Front in Yugoslavia (AFŽ) today is faced with the question of how to read and comprehend the organization’s archive. The problem is broader, however, and has to do not only with the AFŽ archive, but also with the archive as an institution that enables contemporaneity through a critical view into the past, as it appears precisely in the archives (where they exist) that constitute history as such.1 The AFŽ was formed in 1942 during the Second World War [and is the result of long-term attempts to mobilize and organize women within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), when the leaders of the people and the nascent state were faced with difficult and urgent organizational and political questions. The AFŽ integrated itself into the tradition of the international socialist movement, which, from the 1930s onwards, developed the idea of a Popular front as a response to the fascist mobilization and rise to power. Tremendous physical effort is imbued into the AFŽ’s history, first and foremost in organizing the resistance against the local collaborators and the foreign occupation forces, followed by the post-war reconstruction of the country and the formation of the state structures. The history of the AFŽ, however, bears witness to the dynamic convergence between strong social organizations and ideas and masses of ‘common’ and ‘small’ women, who together with their male comrades created Yugoslav history. Though this history continues to live as a memory of the few, the reconstruction of such a convergence is made rather difficult by the intricate historical developments, the mutation of our political glossary and the abandonment of previous socio-political formations. Some of the basic insights of the more recent critical and feminist insights into the women’s history (especially those relating to the questions of patriarchy’s historic character and the effect of such a construct on the writing of history) can help with the reconstruction. The pioneering return to this unwritten history undertaken by Lydia Sklevicky is based precisely on this perspective insisting on the fundamental importance of the content of the women’s question.2 Analysing different understandings of the idea of continuity within historiography and history, anthropologist Svetlana Slapšak notes that the idea of “continuity which in historiography does not have a very good position given that it is often used as Parikka, Jussi. „Archival Media Theory An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology“ in Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013., p. 7. 2 Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi, ed. Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. 1 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 127 a tool of nationalist imaginaries, in women’s history means something else. It is inscribed into a socio-cultural formation which we known for a long time now, whose real origins are almost unknown, and which still cannot be classified as the past – the patriarchy“. The present and the AFŽ are thus related precisely by this particular continuity, given that “it has no connection to ethnic mapping, it cannot be aligned with a religious conglomerate or an ideology”.3 From this perspective, the AFŽ’s organizational history, its internal relations as well as relations toward other elements of the nascent society can be reconstructed as a reconstitution of patriarchal culture. This leaves us with the question of how to understand the history of the abovementioned continuity despite the AFŽ. More recent debates on the AFŽ analyze the way and the extent to which the traditions of socialism and feminism collide and are expressed and combined in the history of the organization. Maca Gržetić, in her speech at the first Congress of the AFŽ Croatia in July of 1945, emphasized that women were “doubly unfree and as twice as oppressed until the victory of the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP) in our country”. Although it is hard to pinpoint what exactly she was referring to, we can assume that she had important questions regarding the two traditions in mind. Unfortunately, the idea of double unfreedom, as a criterion that could serve as an indicator of the real freedom of women, was never examined seriously, hence there was no plan for a double liberation.4 After the war, the AFŽ is strongly integrated into the new order led by the Party as the ruling societal power which considers the woman question as subordinate to the general goals of the Party.5 Thus the Party, at least in principle, considered that the woman question would be solved through a progressive realization of the popular socialist rule. Given that even the AFŽ, almost without exception, advocated this position, the important question arises as to how one of the two constituent intellectual traditions embodied in the movement was eliminated and whether the archive can tell us something about that. On the other hand, if we leave this question aside for now, we can say that the AFŽ was undoubtedly an exceptional organizational societal formation which, as Adrijana Zaharijević notes, gave the woman question “a singular and autono3 Slapšak, Svetlana. “Balkanske žene: rod, epistemologija i istorijska antropologija“, ed. Babić-Avdispahić, Jasminka, Bakšić-Muftić, Jasna, and Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2009. p. 63. 4 Sklevicky, 98, 107-108. 5 Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941 – 1945, Denver: Arden Press, 1990. p. 20. �128 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 mous status that emerged in the spirit of a specifically socialist arrangement of governance”.6 Over a relatively unique and long historical period, the AFŽ was ensuring, in a most direct way, the social and economic reproduction of society and the new social order through constant reproductive work and unpaid public work on a massive scale. This leads us to the second, fundamental question: what is to be gained from returning to this organization and its epoch today when our participation in society is reduced more and more to individual labor on the market valorized in monetary terms only, while patriarchal oppression remains deeply structured in hybrid physical, transitional and digitally mediated spaces? Can it point us to some significant questions and can it teach us anything? In order to at least touch upon some of these questions, in this paper I focus on the post-war period until the abolition of the AFŽ (1953). My ambition is to at least partially reconstruct the dynamics of the creation of the heroic figure. My thesis (and my hope) here is that a return to this path – a return to the female in constructing the heroic – can outline a new heroic figure that could intervene into the present as an emancipatory figure. Something of this “figure that is coming” can be discovered through an open, critical and creative return to collective action, which has already been exemplified in our history. There are three basic theoretical concepts I rely on here. The first is Foucault’s concept of the dispositive. I understand the dispositive as a wide institutional and conceptual framework and circuit which directs societal activity in general. It is within this framework that the figure (relatively productive in symbolic terms) that intrigues me most is constituted, i.e. the heroic figure. In this sense, the second important theoretical concept I lean on is related to the reflections of Alain Badiou, who seeks to point out the theoretical and political path towards the reconstitution of the heroic as a figure that could extricate humanity from the quagmire of the present.7 Last but not least, I rely on the concept of anthro6 Zaharijević, Adriana. “Fusnota u globalnoj istoriji: Kako se može čitati istorija jugoslovenskog feminizma?” Sociologija 57:1 (2015), 76. However, Zaharijević adds: “Yet it was within that same order, in the moment when the socialist arrangement based itself self-consciously on an even more fundamental equality in self-management, that the independence of the woman question was abolished. From that moment onwards it was treated as an integral part of the class question, which is a key issue of society, an issue that all other issues could be reduced to.” See the debate initiated by Nanette Funk’s text: ‘A very tangled knot: Official state socialist women’s organizations, women’s agency and feminism in Eastern European state socialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21, No. 4 (2014): 344-360; and the response to this text in Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History: Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in Terminis? 1 (2007); Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited, 10, 2016. 7 Badiou, Alain. Philosophy for Militants, New York/London: Verso, 2012., p. 42 – 47. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 129 potechnology – a historically constructed set of basic epistemological assumptions about the technological construction of society through “proper upbringing” – which Ugo Vlaisavljević suggested as one of the imperative tools for the analysis of Yugoslav socialism.8 When about it comes to the AFŽ itself, my basic theoretical and empirical reference is the work of Lydia Sklevicky, to whom we owe not only the renewed interest in the AFŽ, but also some important methodological and theoretical insights. The primary materials I use for illustrating the dynamics of the construction and articulation of the heroic are the materials from the Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia.9 2. The Socialist Dispositive, Heroism and the Education of Society The dispositive is a useful analytical tool as it enables us to have an all-encompassing view of the set of social and political relations that play a constitutive role in the formation of a society. In a general sense we can understand it as a strategic formation that responds to small or large scale needs. Foucault defines the dispositive as a “heterogeneous collection consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic attitudes, in short that which is said as well as that which is left unsaid […] the dispositive is a system of relations that can be established among these elements.”10 Relying on Foucault’s definition, Giorgio Agamben defines the dispositive as “a set of practices and mechanisms (both linguistic and non-linguistic, juridical, technical and military) aiming to face an urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate”.11 The dispositive thus at the same time encompasses a set of practices and a set of institutions and their respective discourses as 8 Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Lepoglava i univerzitet – Ogledi iz političke epistemologije, Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2003. 9 The Archival corpus is part of the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. The Archive was digitized between 2013 and 2015 by Crvena, while part of the archive was made available at: www.afzarhiv.org. 10 We can find this “definition” in the translator’s note in the Serbian edition of Michel Foucalt’s The Will to Knowledge – History of Sexuality (Mišel Fuko, Volja za znanjem – Istorija seksualnosti I). Transl. Jelena Stakić: Karpos, 2006, p30. Also see: Jefferey Bussolini, “What is a Dispositive? Foucault Studies 10, 2010, pp. 85-107. 11 Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, p.8. For a critical review see: Pasquinelli, Matteo, “What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault, Cangulihem and Goldstein, “Parrhesia Journal 22, 2015: 7989. Available at: www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia22/parrhesia22_pasquinelli.pdf �130 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 well as their linkages that structure the relations within each individual sphere of action. It includes biological and bodily, conceptual, material and institutional efforts to construct a socialist world as a new world, which in practice are realized as the work of organizations and institutions committed to structuring the relations of material construction of society, and its conceptual foundation. Thus we can interpret the project of creating socialist Yugoslavia as a dynamic construction of the socialist dispositive whose task it is to organize the newly established labor, political, and production relations. It is within this strategic space that the AFŽ is developed as a distinct element that, in a given historical moment, articulates itself as a response to a specific and urgent need for the creation of a new society. The general process of dispositive construction operates, from its very beginning, with one significant figure around which it seeks to organize societal energy: the figure of the hero. Historically, the figure of the hero was usually associated with the imaginary and praxis of war, although some traditions developed on somewhat different principles. Up until the French Revolution, the figure of the hero as an individual “warrior” predominated, but was replaced by the democratic and collective figure of the soldier in the revolution.12 Badiou believes that “our task is to find a new heroic figure, which is neither the return of the old figure of religious or national sacrifice, nor the nihilistic figure of the last man” which should be a “paradigm of heroism from beyond war, a figure that would be neither that of the warrior nor that of the soldier.”13 All socialist projects, to a lesser or greater degree, were attempts to connect the figure of the hero with labor as a process, and thus establish heroism of labor as the most important societal value. Yugoslavia’s history, especially the early years of the second Yugoslavia, is a history of one such attempt. During this period, a demand was repeatedly made for heroism as a unifying signifier that should directed the efforts to create a new society. It was an important element of “anthropotechnology”, the general task of which is to educate in a predefined manner. The economic model was simple: “electrification and industrialization”, however, Vlaisavljević claims that things were much subtler. According to him, the basic element of the transformation upon which a new society was built was in fact an epistemological revolution that was realized as a “technological revolution which in its ‘real essence’ was an industrial revolution”, and even though it was realized “with power-lines and columns reaching to the remotest villages”, in another sense it was actualized as a discourse “that described a new human and technological reality, while having 12 Badiou, Alain. Philosophy for Militants, New York/London: Verso, 2012 13 Ibid. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 131 an educational effect”.14 Anthropotechnology, as the knowledge of “technology of liberation”, as a technological solution to societal labor as the basic mechanism of the production of people, in a general sense includes material construction of the human world, as well as the processes of proper upbringing of humans. Here one must seek an explanation for the relatively quick abandonment of mass-organizational forms – especially in the case of women’s organizing – which then determined the general character of the political and economic development of the new state in a period of tumultuous post-war consolidation. 3. A Society of the People How was the dispositive established immediately after the war? In the public political dictionary, words and phrases such as “socialism”, “communism”, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or the “socialist state” were mostly omitted. The figure of the people constructed in the Narodno-oslobodilački rat (NOR) emerged victorious from the war, hence the political discourse is dominated by the peoples’ democratic terminology: “the peoples’ rule”, “the peoples’ democracy”, “the rule of the working people”, “the peoples’ state”, etc. The Constitution of 1946 does not mention the word “socialism” but rather formulates “the principle of the rule of the people through their representative bodies – peoples’ councils and peoples’ assemblies”.15 The state-crafting ideology was the continuation of the People’s Liberation War (NOR) tradition, the core cadre of which consisted of frontmen within the CPY. In August 1945, the People’s Front of Yugoslavia (Narodni front, henceforth NF/NFJ) was established as a coalition of different groups and political parties lead by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.16 Even though it initially consisted of a number of weak political organizations, the NF was quickly homogenized by “assimilation of bourgeois groups, that adopted the program and lost their earlier individuality, or by the departure of the groups that could not keep up with the development inspired by the CPY”.17 The forces outside of the NF submitted to the political pressure and were removed.18 The 14 Vlaisavljević, p. 50. 15 Babić, Nikola. Na putevima revolucije. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1972., p. 125. 16 Bilandžić, Dušan. Historija Socijalističke Federativne Republiike Jugoslavije – Glavni procesi 1918. – 1985., Zagreb: Školska knjiga 1985. P. 110. 17 In Tito’s opinion, as noted by Bilandžić, the opposition “did not put forth a single idea that would be better than what we put forth in the program of the Narodni Front. They [the opposition] have no program at all. It is that old camp of enemies of the people pulling the wheel of history back, while the wheel spins them around itself and will, of course, eventually crush them.” Bilandžić, History, 103. 18 Petranović notes: “Narodni Front Jugoslavije (NFJ) also comprised bourgeois parties that approached it at the end of the war. Formally speaking, the NFJ’s principles provided for a multi- �132 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 main force of the NF consisted of “mass organizations” – the United Alliance of Anti-Fascist Youth, the AFŽ, United Trade Unions of Workers and Employees of Yugoslavia. The Party’s ideas and its political platform “found their formal and public expression in the programs of the mass organizations it created”19, while the real control of decision-making posts in the newly formed bodies enabled the Party to dominate all levels of social organization. Thus, as early as 1947, the NF, through progressive industrialization, became “an apparatus for the execution of specific state tasks and economic operation, losing its markers as a political organization”.20 Building up on the foundations of the heroic popular armed resistance, the mass inclusion of the people in work during the reconstruction project, was constructed as an important social value and duty, and this task was given to mass organizations. The Fifth Congress of the CPY emphasized the mobilization of the masses “in the struggle for socialism” and highlights the problem of bureaucratization as a large obstacle to attracting the masses. Political work with the masses was defined as the Party’s main task, whereas the NF was tasked with “explaining the tasks and paths of our socialist development, the fight against the remnants of the reaction, the interpretation of concrete measures of the popular government in the construction of socialism”, while developing “new relations between party structure that would maintain party particularities within the organization and its steering bodies – which was an expression of internationalist tendencies and aspirations to involve all patriotic and democratically inclined citizens in the program of further revolutionary-democratic development – but the significance of such multi-party structure was diminished by other provisions. First and foremost, the existing parties had to accept the NFJ’s program, while their members had to join the NFJ’s local councils. There were some minor elements of coalition, with some exceptions, in the governing structures of the NFJ. The real existing political relations were far more important than the formal aspects of this issue. Ever since its founding, the NFJ built itself as a unique organization of masses that accepted and acknowledged the CPY’s rule. The existing bourgeois groups could not endanger the political solidity of the organization without an external intervention, as they were small and weak. The path toward democratic development, according to the NFJ, did not lead through a multi-party organization, but rather its negation.“ Cf. Branko Petranović, Istorija Jugoslavije 1918.–1988.: Treća knjiga: Socijalistička Jugoslavija 1945.–1988., Belgrade: Nolit, 1988, 43. Mass organizations made an effort to isolate the “noncommunist” aspects of their own traditions such as “old trade-unionism” among workers or “feminist deviations” in the AFŽ. The election preparations during the summer and fall of 1945 included “political cleansing” during which “those opposing revolutionary measures were out, and those who would implement these measures more consistently entered government bodies.” Bilandžić, op. cit. p. 104. 19 Skleivcky, op. cit. p.108; Čupulo Dalibor. “Razvoj političkog i pravnog sistema Jugoslavije u poslijeratnom periodu, 1945.–1968. – Pristup istraživanju i litetatura” PP 7, 1988: 203-204. 20 Petranović, op. cit. p.57. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 133 the working class and the working masses towards labor in organizing socialist competition and elevate shock work” was a separate task.21 Through the NF, the people issued a general demand to the people to take up work on a voluntary basis and to push themselves to the limit. Here it is important to point to the ambiguous position of the Narodni Front of Yugoslavia and the AFŽ, which, according to Lydia Sklevicky, unites the positions of the order in whose name it acts. Organizational discourse was deeply integrated into the regime’s narrative structures, and at the same time it discovered their clash with the social reality of the position of women, which articulated itself through the real connections inherent in movements, especially those movements whose main aim is massification. This dual position points to a very specific configuration of power and control. It consists of societal forces that consolidated the leading role of the Party and the real political experience of countrywide mobilization of the movement. The Party eliminated the basic political question of the structure of governance and took on the task of directing general social development as economic, while removing the question of power from the equation of the new social contract.22 Although the history of Yugoslavia would still be marked by various articulations of the national and workers’ question, the “economic base” remained the main focus of the efforts to create social and political structures. In 1946, general competition was introduced, that was transformed into a “mass movement, comprising 60% of workers and civil servants”.23 Although today it is difficult to understand the scope and character of such a mass mobilization, it represented a turning point in the creation of Yugoslav society. The majority of the population was rural, while workers made up a much smaller portion of the population. The country received limited influx of funds and donations in goods; however “in a devastated country, facing general shortages and extinguished foreign trade – the mobilization of the masses [was] the only means of reconstruction”.24 An important example is the mass mobilization of youth. The 21 Resolution of the Fifth Congress of the CPY on the basic upcoming organizational tasks of the CPY. Available at: http://www.znaci.net/00001/138_77.pdf 22 Bilandžić, p. 111. 23 Petranović, p. 79. 24 Bilandžić writes: “The formation of the modern working class mainly from the ranks of peasantry had actually just begun. Due to its fewness, youth and inadequate involvement in the armed revolution, the great turn of the tide was the direct accomplishment of the working class, but of the Communist Party – its political leadership. However, the working class recognized in this a new revolutionary step that would prevent it from being reduced to a tool of economic power and the political rule of the bureaucratic and technocratic class, which is the direction the revolution �134 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 youth movement emerged from the war with a vast legacy of direct participation in combat, and thanks to this a considerable number of leadership positions were occupied by young people. Continuity was established between fighting in the war and the reconstruction of the country; the reconstruction was “an essential […] part of the great fight on the battlefield where tens of thousands of young men and women lost their lives”. With the formal post-war establishment of the youth movement at the First Congress of the United Alliance of the Anti-Fascist Youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina held in Sarajevo from April 6-9 1945 the youth joined the competition. The peak of mass mobilization of youth were the Youth Work Actions that existed as a movement and an organization until 1988 – although their impact was significant only in the late 1940s.25 Data shows that until 1947, almost 85% of the youth participated in the labor actions. By 1948, the model of mass voluntary engagement of the youth typical of the first post-war years points towards a productive convergence of impulses emitted by the social order, staged through a mass organization with the sense that the only possible way was forward. During this period, Petranović claims, “volunteering not only made up for the missing financial resources and machinery, but expressed a new attitude toward labor”26, which is clearly illustrated by the phenomenon of work actions. These actions, however, were not mere labor drives, but also an anthropotechnological element of the new regime. They had a particular political and educational character as they “forged and hardened new people with a new understanding of labor. A new working collective is formed that is proud of its labor, of that which its members create with their own hands.”27 would have necessarily taken had it remained based on the old, received ideas and theories.” Bilandžić, p. 207.; Petranović notes: “For ‘selfless work’, one would receive the title of a shock worker. In 1946, labor competition turned into a mass movement that included 60% of workers and civil servants. The press popularized the Stakhanovite movement in the USSR, which in Yugoslavia will bring about heroes of labor such as Alija Sirotanović and his successors. Masses of workers, peasants and especially youth gave breadth to voluntary labor and infused it with enthusiasm.” Petranović, p. 207. Vejzagić, Saša. The Importance of Youth Labour Actions in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1948-1950: The Case study of the Motorway “Brotherhood-Unity”. Master’s Thesis (Budapest: Central European University, 2013). 4. The fact is that almost 60 years of this organization (1941-1988) still remains under-researched. See also: Muhamed Nametak “Uloga omladinskih radnih akcija u stvaranju socijalističkoga društva u Bosni i Hercegovini 1945. – 1952. godine”, Časopis za Savremenu Povijest3 [2014]: 437-452. 26 Petranović, op. cit. p. 81, my italic. 25 27 Erak, Zoran, ed. Tito i mladi, Belgrade: Mladost 1980., p. 19. Actions also function as immediate spaces of education and upbringing, even in the most literal sense: during only two actions, �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 135 Soon, however, voluntary mass labor was gradually replaced by paid industrial labor, for technical reasons and in accordance with “the technological” paradigm upon which the new regime rested. By 1948, the mass model of social engagement became symbolically less effective and started to lose its real mobilizing power. However, as late as 1949, the Party leadership maintained its position that only the broad masses can be the bearers of the revolution. Edvard Kardelj, a long-standing high-ranking official of the CPY said Socialism can only grow out of the initiative of the million-strong masses, with the adequate role of the proletarian party, that is, the most advanced socialist forces. Therefore, the development of socialism cannot follow any path other than that of constant deepening of socialist democracy in the sense of ever-greater self-management of the masses, and drawing them to the state apparatus – from the lowest bodies to the highest, in the sense of participating in the managing of every single company, institution, etc.28 Here we can still see a very firmly articulated idea of mass socialism, as well as hints of something we may call the idea of the mass state along with a somewhat limited role of the Party. The developments, however, took a different direction: after the transformation of 1950, when the economy was organized on more and more original and newly-established principles, mass organization started to fade as the basic element of social development. 4. The Paradigm of Production The dispositive is never a homogenous field, but is rather constructed at the intersection of societal forces that affirm and question it. This is particularly visible in Yugoslavia after the Second World War where Chetnik and Ustasha forces were still operational, individual’s participation in the war was being checked and verified, the figure of the people was strengthened and the basic institutional structure of the new state was built. The flipside of this process were the objective circumstances in which an attempt was made to realize certain material and symbolic goals. The construction of Yugoslav socialism, until June 1948, was based on close practical and theoretical relations with the USSR headed by Stalin. Thus the early post-war period mainly consisted of practical activities aimed at establishing a Soviet model with two basic aspects: state-ownership and cenBrčko-Banovići railroad and Šamac-Sarajevo railroad, in 1946 and 1947 respectively, almost 22.000 young people were brought to literacy. Nametak, op. cit. p. 446. 28 Kardelj, Edvard. Quoted from Vladimir Barakić’s speech at a commemoration in February 1979 in Josip Arnautović et al. ed. Edvard Kardelj, 1910-1979, Belgrade: News Agency Tanjug, 1979, p. 29. �136 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 tral planning, which was to be effected by a range of economic and administrative measures such as price control, limitations on free trade, fixed rent and wages, organized supply system, etc. As a follow-up, in 1945, gradual nationalization was introduced, starting with the redistribution of large landowners’ agricultural resources and the estates of collaborators. In 1946, private capital in mining, industry, banking, wholesale, and transport was nationalized, followed by the nationalization of retail and service industries. Planning was codified with the adoption of the 1946 Constitution, and as early as the following year a basic planning apparatus was established. In 1947, the first five-year plan was elevated to “the level of a national patriotic goal”.29 By eliminating the influence of private capital and transitioning to stateownership, the new order succeeded in establishing what was considered the basis of the socialist project. The initial results were very good. In 1947, with great effort, the pre-war production levels were reached. Through the growth of investment and a large number of new jobs, mass urbanization and industrialization were accelerated and promoted.30 The Cominform Bureau Resolution of June 28 1948, thoroughly shook up the ideological identification of the Yugoslav communist leadership and considerably influenced the transformation of the socio-economic model. Soon after the Resolution was passed, the CPY leadership at its fifth congress, although still confused, maintained its allegiance to the Soviet line and decides to answer the Soviet accusations by accelerating and widening collectivization and nationalization efforts.31 Economic consequences were felt soon after. Agreements with the USSR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc were terminated, loans were terminated as well, and economic boycott ensued, forcing Yugoslavia to establish new import and export relations. Under such conditions, mass mobilization became an essential political and economic strategy. In December 1948, the state introduced a system of special acknowledgements, “moral stimula29 Vera Katz, Social and Economic Development of Bosnia and Herzegovina 1945-1953. Sarajevo: Institute for History, 2011, p. 14. On the goals of the five-year plan also see: Babić, p. 131. 30 For investment, cf. Branko Horvat, Privredni sistem i ekonomska politika Jugoslavije, Belgrade: Institute for Economics, 1970, p. 34; In terms of employment, in 1945 there were 461.000 workers; in 1946, 721.000, that is, 260.000 new workers; in 1947, 1.167.000, i.e. 446.000 new workers; in 1958, 1.1517.000, i.e. 350.000 new workers, and in 1949 1.990.000, i.e. 473.000 new workers and civil servants. 31 Dedijer, Vladimir. Izgubljena bitka Josifa Visarionoviča Staljina, Belgrade: Rad, 1978, p. 186. Collectivization slowed down only at the end of 1949, following the decisions passed at the CPY Plenum on December 29 and 30 of the same year. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 137 tions”, and emphasized the symbolic figure of the shock worker, the champion and the hero of labor, as well as a range of other particularly valuable forms of labor in agriculture, which was supposed to stimulate zealous labor.32 Heroism of labor was thus institutionalized as an officially recognized status incentive. Despite these efforts, morale began to dwindle. In 1950, the country was hit by a severe draught, which drastically reduced the revenue from agriculture. That same year, the enormous growth in employment also started to lose momentum, with just a little over 15,000 new workers being employed in the following three years.33 As a response to the ideological clash and economic deadlock, a critique of bureaucratization and the fundamental Soviet ideas about the relation between ownership and management was developed. The notion that “socialist social relations cannot be actualized on the basis of state-ownership and state management of the economy, as this leads to the bureaucratization of the entire political system”34, soon became prevalent and was adopted as the programmatic stance of the Party. In this we find the basis of the revolution within the revolution that would actualize itself through an original model of management of economic activity. In 1950, the groundwork for self-management was laid with the adoption 32 Bilandžić notes: “To ensure greater commitment of workers and civil servants in the workplace, it was decided to pass federal regulations in order to try to introduce norms for all labor, therefore the regulations laid down the amount of remuneration in proportion with the norm. Federal regulations also instituted a system of moral stimulation. The Law on Honorary Titles for Toilers from December 8, 1948, introduces the following honorary titles: shock worker, champion of socialist labor, meritorious agricultural worker, distinguished cooperating agricultural worker; and for worker collectives: shock collective, champion collective of socialist labor; for cooperatives: cooperative striving for high yields, meritorious cooperative, champion cooperative of the people’s republic, champion cooperative of the FNRJ (People’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).” Bilandžić, op. cit. p. 123. The Law on Decorations and Distinctions (November 14, 1955) classified the Order of the Hero of Socialist Labor as a decoration for distinguished service by a citizen, ranked second, after the Medal of the Great Star of Yugoslavia and before the Order of People’s Liberation. According to this law, the Order of the Hero of Socialist Labor was awarded to: “…individuals, military units, institutions, economic and social organizations that achieve exceptional work achievements or results, thus earning special credit for the economic, social, scientific or cultural development of the country”. The content and scope of the formal acknowledgements were amended several times by 1976, after which they remained unchanged; see: http://www.hrvatskanumizmatika.net/ 33 In the first three years of the five-year plan 1.269.000 new workers were employed. The following year registers a considerable decrease. Between 1950 and 1954, only 15.000 new workers were employed, while between 1964 and 1967 the number of employed drops from 3.608.000 in 1964 to 3.561.000 in 1967. Bilandžić, p.114; Horvat, Privredni sistem, p. 27. 34 Babić, op. cit. p. 134; Bilandžić, op. cit. p. 208. �138 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 of the Basic Law on Managing State-Owned Companies and Higher-Level Economic Associations by Worker Collectives. The following year, the first five-year plan was extended by a year, but its goals were never accomplished, nor was a final report on it ever published. Soon, “the economic system was completely changed, and by the end of 1951 centrally planned economy became a thing of the past”.35 5. The AFŽ, the Great Turn of the Tide and the Woman Question What was happening with the organization of women during these turbulent times? After its foundation in 1942, the AFŽ focused on organizing women activists, whose tasks mainly had to do with war-related activities. The AFŽ “sprang up from the people’s anti-fascist movement organized and led by the CPY”;. its edifying work “in the spirit of the Anti-Fascist Front’s program“ put “thousands and thousands of women in the vanguard of the fight against fascism”.36 As of 1944, the organization focused on recruiting new members on a mass scale, abandoning its original activist orientation. Thus the AFŽ, along with other large voluntary associations, joined the mass voluntary movement to reconstruct postwar Yugoslavia and puts in thousands of hours of voluntary labor. The activities and directions of the AFŽ are deeply integrated in the NF. In her closing address to the First Congress of the AFŽ of Croatia, in July 1945, Kata Pejnović summarized the basic tasks of this organization (in: Sklevicky): 1) strengthening brotherhood and unity, cleansing the country from the remnants of fascism, 2) strengthening the people’s rule, 3) reconstruction of the homeland through the development of a broad initiative, through discovery of new forms of shock work, the change of relationships towards labor, 4) edification of the young, caring for children, assisting medical services and the Yugoslav army and 5) combating illiteracy.37 35 Horvat, op. cit. p. 11. The new economic system was established in 1952, by replacing central planning with planning of the so-called “basic proportions” (e.g. accumulation rate and distribution of investments), the devaluation of the Dinar, introduction of the market mechanism as the price regulator in most production and commerce spheres, and giving some companies independence, which meant the creation of conditions for the decentralization of the economy. After that, until 1956, work was based on annual plans. 36 Centralni Odbor of the AFŽ “Postavke o AFŽ-u”, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 63/4, 1949. 37 Sklevicky, op.cit. p. 97. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 139 Lydia Sklevicky places the first three into the category of “frontline goals”, whereas the other two she labels as specifically women’s tasks, as they consist of “the socialization of [women’s] reproductive labor”.38 However, one must not overlook the fact that the general goals, in the long-term, were only achievable if the specifically women’s goals were achieved. How else could one secure the intergenerational transmission of the changed attitude towards labor and the lesson of brotherhood and unity – which was supposed to secure the people’s rule? Here we see the complexity of the women’s task. New shock work was to complete difficult specific tasks, care for a large population of children, bring society to literacy, but also mobilize the masses without losing sight of the basic edification goals. 5.1. The Woman Question and the Question of the Heroic In 1944, Vladimir Nazor stated: “The woman question, as far as we are concerned, has been resolved”. His historical metaphor of this resolution was illustratively built into the title of his “From Amazon to Partisan” lecture, which outlined the heroic history of women as fighters, politicians and rulers, and resolved it in the figure of the female partisan. In her discourse analysis of the AFŽ Conference in Sinj in 1944, Lydia Sklevicky notes: “Only the phrase ‘comrades, women fighters’ acknowledges the identity of women commensurate with their own achievements”39, or: the heroic ability of the woman was proven in war, which rendered the women’s question resolved. The resolution, however leaves the “patriarchal prefix of traditional culture untouched by doubt”, and instead of trying to “change the traditional values”, they are “modified according to the new context/historical moment”, which creates the framework within which the “emancipatory charge” is used for the “widening and strengthening of the Narodno-oslobodilački pokret (NOP)”.40 Although the CPY felt, as a matter of principle, that the woman question was resolved, the Party leadership considered the organization of women necessary. In the fall of 1945, the CPY ordered “the Party’s managing bodies to pay closer attention to the development and advancement of the AFŽ’s work”.41 The specifIbid. 97. On reproductive work in general and on some of its contemporary characteristics and linkages to international processes of capital circulation and the restructuration of labor relations see: Frederici, Silvia. Revolution at the Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, 2012. 39 Sklevicky, op.cit. p. 50. 40 Ibid. pp. 47-51. 41 Petranović, op.cit. p. 53. 38 �140 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 ically female part of the task of creating a new society was not laid down beforehand, but was to be defined “when the gunfire dies down, when the ruins are cleaned up, when the new home is built”.42 However, before the specific tasks were defined, within the AFŽ itself an open call for shock work was issued. In a letter by the Central Committee of the AFŽY to the Republican Committee of the AFŽBiH (June 4 1945), a call was issued to women stating that they should apply themselves to “shock work in their everyday tasks” during the preparations of the First Congress and “take on new obligations before the congress”.43 There was no time for organizing competition, but it was “precisely because of this [that] it is necessary to intensify women’s activity in all organizations, everywhere, in all lines of work, and this must continue after the congress”.44 At the AFŽ BiH’s second congress, Tito referred to women comrades who “distinguished themselves during the war, but now, in peacetime, they do not participate in public life, or in the political or creative work in the community.” In this way they “become alienated from the vast majority of our women who have understood their duties and the spirit of the new Yugoslavia.” What was that spirit like, and what were the duties? Tito answered these questions quite succinctly, on the same occasion, making a remark that falls under the domain of work ethic: “No one can ever claim that they have given enough of themselves to society if they are still capable of physical and mental labor”.45 There it is, a direct call to heroic engagement that gives to society the greatest possible gift, the gift of heroism, the gift of life. It establishes a paradigm that needs to be infused with different content, one that transcends its origin in the heroic war sacrifice and establishes something different. Heroic labor was to be actualized as part of the general efforts of society as a whole, and in April 1947, it was cast in the form of a five-year economic development plan. The general goals of this plan were: 1) Overcoming economic and technological backwardness, 2) strengthening the country’s economic and military might, 3) strengthening and developing a socialist economic sector, 4) increasing the general well-being of the population. Although this plan did not contain specifically women’s tasks, the AFŽ used it as a measure of its own gen42 Sklevicky, op. cit. p. 55. 43 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a “Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH”. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 1/12, 1945. 44 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a “Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH” 45 II kongres Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije: održan u Beogradu 25, 26, 27 januara 1948. Sarajevo: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine, 1948, Kutija 6;
available at: http://www. afzarhiv.org/files/original/00d53e25cc67684ddcbf27af4ff8d839.pdf 
 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 141 eral contribution to society. A “battle” was fought over the plan and it “places the task of mobilizing the women’s workforce with the organization”.46 A part of the AFŽ Archive contains a multitude of reports on women comrades who “completed” the goals of the five-year plan, and on many who did not, as well as on the necessity to always to more. The effort to realize the plan becomes the framework within which it is possible to work heroically. This, in accordance with the inclusion paradigm and the basic interpretative framework, meant volunteering a certain amount of work hours thus “saving the state money”. After the adoption of the plan, tasks were discovered that were described and understood as explicitly heroic: Our women will set out as a tight-knit army of labor comprising fraternal Serb, Muslim, and Croat women into the fray for the triumph of the reconstruction and rebuilding of our country. By working to elevate the masses culturally and intellectually, helping to realize the economic plan, and by investing the utmost enthusiasm into our work, we will create a new form of heroism, the HEROISM OF LABOR […]47 Determined to do the best they can, women created a “new form of heroism”. It was a heroism that was not like a “rank” that could have been awarded to one woman or one man who could carry it like a medal. It was an effort for the community, a collective heroism built on a mass effort of voluntary labor that worked thousands of bodies to exhaustion before it faced the fact that the set goals were unattainable precisely because they were of heroic proportions, because they implied that one could always work more, harder. Only in a mass effort was it possible to produce the super-human, the heroic – as only the heroic was worthy of the heroically fallen heroes. Here we find the basic lesson of the dispositive as the technology of the social: labor will transform society, and in order to truly transform it, we need to work heroically. The construction of the heroic past, that is, the continuity of the heroic, started immediately after the war. In 1945, an instruction to “gather materials, specific data, photographs, etc.” was distributed. This testifies to the attempt to record the baseline for unification and take stock of women’s immediate engagement in warfare up to that point, which included the heroic wartime sacrifices, but 46 Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine – o vođenju evidencije raspoložive ženske radne snage’. Arhiv Bosne I Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 2 711/1, 1947. 47 Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, ‘Referat- Plenarni sastanak Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bosanski Brod’, Arhiv Bosne I Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1554/4, 1947. �142 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 also the “traditional victims” of the atrocities committed “against women and children by the enemy” or “mothers who have lost their sons in combat” who “distinguish themselves with their bravery”.48 Such activities would continue, but the focus would shift somewhat. For example, in a letter from February 1949, the Central Committee of the AFŽ of Yugoslavia, as part of the preparations for a March 8 exhibition, asked the Republican Committee of the AFŽ Bosnia and Herzegovina to gather data including “various documents on women’s labor before the war/strikes, photographs of strikes, manifestos, resolutions of the Party on women’s labor[…]” and other documents illustrating the life of women in cooperatives and other areas of activity at the time.49 In her address to the Second Congress of the AFŽY, Mitra Mitrović-Đilas points out that the set of female characteristics defined in the war, “now must be further edified and nurtured in a spirit of a conscious relationship toward labor […] in the spirit of work discipline and responsibility, in the spirit of readiness for new efforts and overcoming of all obstacles”. The motive of the heroic had a deep presence and the transition from the wartime heroic to its new form was obvious: “Let the new figure of the woman who builds socialism, like the figure of women war heroes, grow out from these characteristics. Let the nurturing these characteristics be our task […]”50 In this example we see how the relationship with the wartime heroic is maintained as constitutive, making heroes and heroic names the guarantors of socialization of children and adults alike.51 5.2. The AFŽ in Transition How was the AFŽ affected by the wider socio-economic transformation that started with the conflict with the Soviet Union and the opening towards the West that would later considerably influence the foreign policy position as well as the position within the international economic relations52? In the internal CPY discussions on the AFŽ (during 1947/48), the opinion that a unique women’s organi48 Centralni Odbor AFŽ, “Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH”, 1945. 49 Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, “Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH – povodom organizacije 8. martovske izložbe” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 6, 137/1, 1949. 50 II Congress of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia: Belgrade, January 25–27, 1948, 15. 51 On the socialization of adults see: Ugo Vlaisavljević, Rat kao najveći kulturni događaj: ka semiotici etnonacionalizma, Sarajevo: Meuna-fe Publishing, 2007, pp. 35-50. 52 For a historical analysis of these processes and their consequences today see: Živković, Andreja. “From the Market… to the Market: The Debt Economy After Yugoslavia” in Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia, eds. Horvat, Srećko, Štiks, Igor. London/New York: Verso. 2015. pp. 45-64. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 143 zation was needed prevailed, but the question of “how and through which organizational forms [to] connect the revolutionary power of women with the power of the working class and the people as a whole, with the aim of their complete liberation”53 was also raised. The CPY defined the NF as the main political power, transferring the woman question to the NF, while within the CPY committees for work with women were abolished. In practice, the NF was, for the most part, never too concerned with the woman question, which created an open space for the political work of the AFŽ. The AFŽ, along with other organizations, entered the general social competition for the reconstruction of the country early on, but toward the end of the 1940s, the physical and practical limits of shock work started to show. The AFŽ’s organizational structure underwent several changes, which ultimately sapped the strength of its organizational structures.54 At an AFŽ meeting in March 1949 in Sarajevo, it was concluded that “not all tasks of the NF are our tasks”, but that “the most important task during the elections is to bring out all women to the polls”. The basic task was to bring 100% of women to the elections.55 There were still signs that the tasks of this organization were being internally redefined and that there was still dissatisfaction among active women from time to time with the fact that there were almost no women in governmental bodies.56 Previous work was critically evaluated: “We have degraded the woman activists to the level of an errand girl, when we should have elevated her to the role of a political leader”.57 And there we have it, a yardstick of the organization’s success: a woman as a political leader. 53 Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX I XX veku, Belgrade: Pinkpress, 1996, p. 161. 54 Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Bosanska Gradiška Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije žena za mjesec august’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 838/1, 1947. “When the Narodni Odbori were being fused together, we failed to fuse the local AFŽ committees, so our organization dispersed considerably…” 55 Oblasni Odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevska oblast – najava takmičenja u čast izbora za Narodne izbore,, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4/1, 1949. 56 In a letter from September 1947, the County Committee of the AFŽ Doboj, notes that the NF did not help with the larger political engagement of women and mentions the dissatisfaction of the female comrades which they expressed thus “if we can labor voluntarily shoulder to shoulder with our male comrades, then we can also be appointed to the councils.” Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, “Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Doboj Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije za mjesec august”. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Box 2, 842/1, 1947. 57 Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja rukovodioca reonskih odbora AFŽ-a grada Sarajeva – 30.- 31. mart, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 6, 776/6, 1949. �144 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 The third Congress of the AFŽ Yugoslavia was held in October 1950. According to the conclusions of the congress, the AFŽ was integrated into the NF, which from that moment on was in charge of the AFŽ’s political and educational work. The focus of the AFŽ shifts towards more particular women’s issues, mother and child protection, maintenance of children’s institutions, etc.58 The AFŽ archive holds hundreds of reports that testify to the work of the “mother and child” division and the almost complete cessation of political work. It was insisted on employment as the main condition for equality. On the other hand, the majority of women still lived in the rural areas, and only a few were employed in the cities; the conservative stance towards the inclusion of women in industrial relations still had a firm hold over society.59 However, even before these points of view were articulated, the scope of action was considerably narrowed. At the first plenum of the Sarajevo region in February 1950, there were only two items on the agenda: 1) the question of the elections for the Assembly of the FNRJ; and 2) the AFŽ’s work on youth education. Both items were accepted unanimously.60 These examples of organizational speech suggest a decisive effect of societal change on the AFŽ’s work. Steps towards decentralization, in the cessation of collectivization efforts after the unrest in 1950 and the general course of action in the fight against bureaucratization inevitably pressured the work and the structure of the women’s organization. All socio-political organizations redefined their own identity and form, after the Party did so in November of 1952 at the Sixth Congress, when it changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, breaking away from the Soviet model of a classic centralized party. During the congress, “the new concept of the CPY was more clearly defined, rejecting the path to state socialism, and accepting the struggle for the construction of a selfmanaging society in Yugoslavia”. At the time, there was still insistence on working toward women’s emancipation. Tito espoused this viewpoint and emphasized the need to leave the old views on the societal role of women. In January of the following year, the NF changed its name to the Socialist Alliance of the Working People, thus the socialist workers pushed the people to the end of the line of representation.61 58 Božinović, op. cit. p. 154. 59 Ibid. p. 154. 60 Oblasni Odbor AFŽ-a, ‘I Plenum AFŽ-a Sarajevske oblasti održan 22.02.1950. godine – zapisnik’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 422/1, 1950. 61 Božinović, op. cit. pp. 166-167. In other words, well before the Constitution of 1974, the people were replaced with the working man, the only real subject of the socialist project; cf. Zaharijević, op. cit. p. 75. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 145 The critique here is much more pronounced. The NF believed that “the AFŽ did not change their content and methodology fast enough, working people grew into builders of socialism much faster”; as a result “separate political work with women either became superfluous, or required substantial changes”.62 The NF did not ask for the AFŽ to be abolished, but believed that, in keeping with the socio-economic changes, the AFŽ also had to take measures towards decentralization. At the AFŽ’s Fourth Congress, Milovan Đilas, then a member of the Politburo of the CCCPY, advocated that – due to the change of circumstances – the existence of this organization had become undesirable. On that note, even the AFŽ leadership believed that the AFŽ “became an obstacle for work among women” and that “changes are necessary in the organization of women themselves, and in the forms of political work among them”. Accordingly, a resolution declared that a separate organization would “separate women from the common effort to solve societal problems, encourage the false thinking that the question of women’s position is somehow a separate one and not a question that concerns our entire society, all fighters for socialism.”63 On the basis of these resolutions, the AFŽ was formally abolished and transformed into the Alliance of Women Associations. There was a substantial change in the semantic content: the words front and anti-fascism were removed – the symbols of women’s participation in the people’s revolution. Although socialism was “formally introduced” into the name of the basic social organization, there was no place for it in the name of the organization that formally succeeded the AFŽ. It was the real and the symbolic end of that which the AFŽ represented.64 The AFŽ, like central planning a few years prior, was consigned to history, marking the end of an era. How did the base react? There are few sources that can tell us about this. Neda Božinović notes that, long after the abolition of the AFŽ’s, women, especially in rural areas, often asked leading women in the organization “why did you abolish our AFŽ”, as this rearranged the relationship with the male part of the population, who “gloated”, telling women: “enough of your shenani62 Božinović, op. cit. p. 165. 63 Ibid. 64 Vera Katz summarizes the evolution of the organization’s work as: “a relatively small group of communists managed, through meticulous work on the ground, in wartime conditions and in a very short period of time, to convince large masses of women to aid the partisan war, so they could attain new rights after the war. The program succeeded completely, so much so that the women’s political organizing became a danger to communists soon after the war and the AFŽ was abolished. After that, the ideological turn would survive a peculiar combination of a consumeristpatriarchal model imposed on women, while a majority of the promised rights survived.” See: Vera Katz, “O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953.” Prilozi 40 (2011), p. 138. �146 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 gans”; or “it’s over, it’s over!”; or “no more!” Men had “their bars, football and even the Narodni Front”, while an initiative that gathered women “eager to hear and talk about their female things” disappeared.65 This points to the character of the loss the end of this organization represented. It is a known fact that the bulk of the AFŽ’s work was directed towards rural areas, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which remained predominantly rural long after the war. In rural areas, the AFŽ undoubtedly presented an avantgarde platform that offered for the first time in the (women’s) history of this region a possibility to imagine something like a collective women’s political subject formed through “gathering” and talking about “[women’s]” things. Once this platform, the space for gathering and opening up possibilities’ to speak about creative possibilities of self-definition and collective action was lost as well. 6. Labor, Heroism, and the Woman Question a Thousand Years Later The problems of practical and technical organizational structures of the selfmanaged production and consumption system would become a lasting challenge of the Yugoslav socialist project. The dispositive was supposed to receive its definitive legal expression when the Yugoslav socialist project’s avant-garde process saw its culmination in the introduction of the Law on Associated Labor. During this period, many “honestly believed that the transformation towards self-management would lead to a ‘Republic of associated labor’”.66 Ivan Stojanović believes that such a narrative was a mythologization that saw in the legislation related to self-management “programs of the epoch and the future, not laws needed to regulate the behavior of social subjects and economic operators of today” which in turn made it possible for “hyper-normativism” and “hyperinstitutionalization” to eliminate the basis of self-management, the “selfinitiative and self-organizing of people and their work collectives.”67 Thus the form that women’s organizing took after the war should be viewed as an attempt to answer the urgent call to organize society by reformulating labor and gender relations in a specific historical moment. In the earliest stages of 65 Božinović, op. cit. p. 170. 66 Petranović, op. cit. p. 468. 67 Stojanović, Ivan. Kuda i kako dalje? Zapisi o odnosima i protivrečnostima ekonomije i politike, Belgrade: Ekonomika, 1989, pp. 15-16. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 147 the effort to build socialism, the AFŽ, along with other organizations that were part of the NOM, was established as an element of a broad, general struggle headed by the CPY. In the post-war period, its edifying role came to the fore. Faced with a demand for heroism, the women’s organization took on the general educational and edifying role, as well as the general task of organizing work with women, on the ground of the mass social mobilization. Some materials point to a particular dimension of autonomy that did not belong to the organization as a structure made up of committees, but rather to the women who, with the help of the organization, created a space that made possible at least a fragile path towards emancipation, if not true emancipation itself. This is certainly one of the farthest-reaching consequences of the organization’s dissolution, as it led to the disappearance of an open space for women’s political organizing that contained the possibility of a double liberation. The dissolution also led to the disappearance of the only possible arena and the only possible form of women’s activity. A partial insight into this historical era of the women’s movement can help us better understand the convoluted web of instructions that contain today’s labor and gender policies. The Heroic remained an important signifier of socialism for a long time. It would be necessary to trace its construction even after 1953 and describe the transition, completely expected from the point of view of socialism’s technological paradigm and the theoretical evolution of its bearers and leaders, from massheroism to the next form of the heroic, in which the collective effort of the masses is substituted with biotechnological labor of self-managed companies and corporations.68 It should be determined if the connection with the original heroic acts was maintained, and if so, how. The practice of naming factories and institutions after people’s heroes indicates that it was, and that there was an effort to homogenize the material progress and transition are within the same horizon. It can be assumed that heroism was supposed to act as binding tissue connecting the heroic of the (woman) soldier, the heroic of the masses, and modern industrial collectives. The question remains how effective this binding was, and for how long. It points to the fact that socialism in the second Yugoslavia failed to emancipate the heroic from the soldier-warrior figure. The heroic figure that witnessed the dissolution of Yugoslavia was already spent. In a certain sense, when it comes to industrial heroism, worthy of the heroic were ultimately only 68 In addition to this highest honor, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor was instituted late in 1968, and was awarded to 245 collectives by the end of 1980. These collectives included teaching, learning and research institutions, as well as self-managed industrial enterprises as well as construction companies. See: Heroji rada Jugoslavije, Belgrade: Zavod za informacione sisteme, 1981, p. 4. �148 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 those self-managed collectives that “employ and do good business”. Here we find ourselves faced with a completely transfigured picture of individual heroes whose acts and deeds are no longer in their hands. Instead, the heroic intention must adapt to the powers of the market, successes and failures in the market competition. Today, this figure, too, is a thing of the past; successful companies are respected, but not as collective projects of hundreds of thousands of workers, but rather as manifestations of the entrepreneurial vision of owners and managers. Heroes constructed after the bloody and complicated dissolution of Yugoslavia are again exclusively heroes of war, heroes of defeats and victories on the battlefield, not heroes of agriculture or industry. The end of Yugoslavia brought about total privatization of labor and production relations, the privatization of ownership and management, executed as the adoption and institutionalization of the Western model, and the process is still ongoing. This transformation was (and still is) accompanied by a discursive superstructure that reinterprets labor as a means for producing a society into labor as a disciplinary technique of bodies, a mechanism transforming us individually into capital, forcing us to adopt the changed conditions and means of labor, supply and demand, as well as organizational innovations. Is it then possible, under such conditions, at least roughly to outline some new heroic figure? What kind of heroic labor would it entail? Work collectives are less and less sources of pride, and dynamic elements of one’s identity, and are increasingly seen as despised places of everyday exploitation (unless they are former giant state-owned companies that were destroyed or split up leaving behind not only misery and decay, but also complex identity-related consequences which are yet to be analyzed). There is no doubt that the heroic, that which can respond to the urgent challenges of today that threaten to consume not only human life, but also the conditions for it, must be created through a collective effort – for which we lack a name and a format. This reveals the difficulty of the task faced by all who dream of liberation. Undoubtedly, liberation must include the liberation of women, which may be the only thing that can make possible for us to name and initiate a project of universal liberation. The name and description of such a project, along with the outlines of a new heroic figure can only come from the future, to paraphrase Marx’s famous words, but a collective effort of the future can only be launched as an act of facing up to the forces of the present. Translated by Emin Eminagić �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 149 Archival Materials: Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a “Postavke o AFŽ-u”, Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, Box 8, 63/4, 1949. Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH “Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH”. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 1/12, 1945. Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, “Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH”, 1945. II Congress of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belgrade, January 25-27 1948, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 6; available at: http://www. afzarchive.org/files/original/00d53e25cc6768ddcbf27af4ff8d839.pdf Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ Bosne i Hercegovine – o vođenju evidencije raspoložive ženske radne snage’. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 2 711/1, 1947. Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a ‘Referat- Plenarni sastanak Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bosanski Brod’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1554/4, 1947. Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, “Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH – povodom organizacije 8. martovske izložbe” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 6, 137/1, 1949. Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Bosanska Gradiška Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije žena za mjesec august’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 838/1, 1947. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevska oblast – najava takmičenja u čast izbora za Narodne izbore,, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4/1, 1949. Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, “Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Doboj Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije za mjesec august”. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 842/1, 1947. Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja rukovodioca reonskih odbora AFŽ-a grada Sarajeva – 30.–31. mart, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 6, 776/6, 1949. Sreski Odbor AFŽ-a, ‘I Plenum AFŽ-a Sarajevske oblasti održan 22.02.1950. godine – zapisnik’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 422/1, 1950. Bibliography: Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Arnautović, Josip et al. ed. Edvard Kardelj, 1910-1979. Belgrade: Novinska agencija Tanjug, 1979. �150 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROISM OF LABOR THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT AND THE SOCIALIST DISPOSITIVE 1945–1953 Babić, Nikola. Na putevima revolucije. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1972. Badiou, Alain. Philosiphy for Militants. New York/London: Verso, 2012. Bilandžić, Dušan. Historija Socijalističke Federativne Republiike Jugoslavije – Glavni procesi 1918. – 1985. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1985. Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku. Belgrada: Pinkpress, 1996. Bussolini, Jeffrey. „What is a Dispositive?“ Foucault Studies 10 (2010) 85-107. Čupulo, Dalibor. „Razvoj političkog i pravnog sistema Jugoslavije u poslijeratnom periodu (1945-1968) – Pristup istraživanju i literatura“. Povijesni prilozi 7:1 (1988): 203—248 Dedijer, Vladimir. Izgubljena bitka Josifa Visarionoviča Staljina. Belgrade: Rad, 1978. Erak, Zoran. ed. Tito i mladi. Beograd: Mladost, 1980. Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. ed.: Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, 2012. Fuko, Mišel. Volja za znanjem – Istorija seksualnosti I. trans. Jelena Stakić. Loznica: Karpos, 2006. Kecman, Milorad. ed. Heroji rada Jugoslavije. Belgrade: Zavod za informacione sisteme, 1981. Horvat, Branko. Privredni sistem i ekonomska politika Jugoslavije. Belgrade: Institut ekonomskih nauka, 1970. Katz, Vera. Društveni i ekonomski razvoj Bosne i Hercegovine 1945-1953. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2011. Katz, Vera. „O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953“, Prilozi 40 (2011), 135-155. Jancar-Webster, Brabara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941 – 1945. Denver: Arden Press, 1990. Nametak, Muhamed. „Uloga omladinskih radnih akcija u stvaranju socijalističkoga društva u Bosni i Hercegovini 1945. – 1952. godine“, Časopis za savremenu povijest 3 (2014): 437-452. Pasquinelli, Matteo. „What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault, Canguilhem, and Goldstein. “ Parrhesia Journal 22 (2015) 79-89. available at: www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia22/parrhesia22_pasquinelli.pdf Petranović, Branko. Istorija Jugoslavije 1918 – 1988 - Treća knjiga: Socijalistička Jugoslavija 1945 – 1988. Beograd: Nolit, 1988. Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi. Ed. Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 151 Slapšak, Svetlana. „Balkanske žene: Rod epistemologija i istorijska antropologija“ in: Rod I nauka. Eds. Jasminka Babić-Avdispahić, Jasna Bakšić Muftić and Ugo Vlaisavljević, 57-73. Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2009. Stojanović, Ivan. Kuda i kako dalje? Zapisi o odnosima i protivrečnostima ekonomije i politike. Beograd: Ekonomika, 1989. Vejzagić, Saša. The importance of Youth Labour Actions in Socialist Yugoslavia (1948-1950): The case study of the Motorway „Brotherhood-Unity.“ MA thesis. Budimpešta: Central European University, 2013. Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Lepoglava i univerzitet – Ogledi iz političke epistemologije. Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2003. Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Rat kao najveći kulturni događaj: ka semiotici etnonacionalizma. Sarajevo: Meuna-fe Publishing, 2007. Zaharijević, Adriana. „Fusnota u globalnoj istoriji: Kako se može čitati istorija jugoslavenskog feminizma?“ Sociologija, Vol. 57:1 (2015), 72-89. Živković, Andreja. „From the Market…to the Market: The Debt Economy after Yugoslavia“ in Welcome to the Desert of Post-socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. Eds. Horvat, Srećko and Štiks, Igor. 45-64. London/New York: Verso, 2015. ��SUNITA FIŠIĆ Ink drawings ��FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT TIJANA OKIĆ �156 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT But you, when the time comes Where man can help his fellow man Remember us With forbearance. Brecht 1. Introduction, or Beginning After the End of History – Thinking the Women’s Antifascist Front Again and Anew Thinking the Women’s Antifascist Front (henceforth AFŽ) today, 74 years after its formation and 63 years after its “dissolution”, requires a lot more than merely knowing the (archival) facts. Although the facts cannot and should not be neglected, it is our duty to put them in their, and then in our, historical context. But what is the relation between these two contexts and should we persevere with this problem, insisting on political continuities? And which and what kind of continuities would these be? Is it not precisely the alleged closure of the revolutionary horizon, a rupture in historical memory expressed in various ideologies of “transition” and the “end of history”, which separates our time from that of the AFŽ? In such a balance of forces, thinking the AFŽ would mean using the old language in new circumstances to rewrite and imagine anew the possibility of action, a space where, to begin with, we could, by ourselves, once again think our own history. This is exactly why we will proceed from the question posed by Daniel Bensaïd: “What conceivable politics is there without history…and what imaginable history without a political invention of the possible”1 If there is no politics without history, then neither is there any history without politics, and standing between them is precisely the space of the possible. How to rise up and endure after the experience of defeat, which the alleged end of history proclaims as the beginning and the end of every thought of possible utopias and/or strategies? Contemporary historiography, in the wake of a wave of historical revisionism lasting already more than fifty years, routinely minimizes and negates any experience that offers even a shred of political resistance to the dominant revisionist image of the age. This is where problem areas appear and this is what I want to consider here in relation to the history of the AFŽ in Yugoslavia and today. In other words, to avoid the monumental and antiquarian2 portrayal of our own history, we need to think 1 Bensaïd, Daniel. Éloge de la politique profane. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008. p. 355 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. O koristi i šteti istorije za život. Belgrade: Grafos, 1977. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 157 Yugoslavia critically, which means that, as feminists, we must speak of the first and the second death of the AFŽ. Writing about these two deaths does not mean facing up to the past, as the revisionists of today demand – nor does it mean imprisoning oneself in the past, since our relation to the past is always anchored in place, time and, in Foucauldian terms, the body from which we write: thus it is mediated by both accumulated experience and interpretations of the past, and equally by the burden of the present. Writing about the two deaths of the AFŽ simply means reading the past not from the resignation of the present moment the misery and despair of a transition where the desire to see a better tomorrow, in the midst of today’s poverty, is read back into the past – but from tomorrow’s future. To read the AFŽ’s past in this manner means not denying its emancipatory character or doing away with its utopian impulse. It means to recognize it, embrace it, and precisely to act from a present that gazes towards the future. Eppur si muove - despite repression, hopelessness, and poverty. I write the following pages in the belief that the only trace worth following is precisely the “principle of hope”. To paraphrase Ernst Bloch, I would like read the AFŽ archive as the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous (die Ungleichzeitigkeit). However, this sort of reading entails certain consequences. Namely, it must necessarily proceed from an analysis of the contradictions inherent to the Yugoslav conception of the ‘woman question’ if it is ever to arrive at the problems and contradictions of today. In this sense, the specter haunting this work is the specter of Marxism. All of our analyses on the post-Yugoslavia left/lefts have failed miserably in the attempt to apply basic Marxist categories of production and reproduction to Yugoslavia, while at the same time we are taught to list all the institutions of the Yugoslav welfare state, as if they represented the socialisation of family and everyday life, without making clear that we are not dealing with the same things. More importantly, we do not emphasize that social services were paid for on the basis of value produced on the market, and paid twice over: by male and female workers who serviced the market. That is why the dissolution of the AFŽ should be seen as Yugoslavia’s failure to establish a socialist-communist social order, despite proclaiming socialism as the ruling and foundational idea of society. The first death of the AFŽ already occurred in Yugoslavia, not only with its formal “self-abolition” in 1953, but also much earlier, in 1944, as Lydia Sklevicky suggests. The second death occurred after 1989, drowned by a wave of historical revisionism in which women’s history could only be rewritten/erased through an “invention of tradition”, where there was and is no place either for the figure of the afežeovka (member and activist of the AFŽ) or that of the partizanka (women Partisan soldiers). For these reasons, the left should not take the assumptions imposed by historical revisionism as the starting point of its own historical �158 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT understanding. It should not be a mirror image of revisionism. Enzo Traverso states that we must resist “the temptation…of certain communists, historians, and political scientists [specifically, Domenico Losurdo] who turn [Ernst] Nolte’s revisionist scheme on its head and represent Stalinism as a product of a grave fascist threat: exaggerated and pitiable, criminal in its final outcome, but nevertheless derivative and reactive”.3 In this sense, Daniel Bensaïd warns us to reject the juridical (“tribunalisation”) function of history, without renouncing historical judgment.4 This essay is greatly inspired by Darko Suvin’s last book, Splendour, Misery and Possibilities, An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia, but with two important additions: the first being that it continues exactly where Suvin left off – from the problem of the organisation and position of women. I share Suvin’s opinion that “there existed a strong emancipatory sense…although always threatened and later betrayed“.5 The second is that I date this betrayal to a somewhat earlier period than Suvin. Additionally, but no less importantly, I would like to emphasize that I rely on the pioneering studies of the work and activities of the AFŽ written by Lydia Sklevicky, Gordana Stojaković, and Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, women responsible for some of the most important steps in this field, and this work is a contribution to the critique they commenced. It is impossible to fully acknowledge the profound impact of their work on mine. Reading them, I have come to the conclusion that history of the AFŽ sections of the different federal republics can be taken pars pro toto. Hence, I focus on other elements, which, through their work, opened up the space for mine. I refer the reader to their work should they wish to learn something of their own (women’s) history. There are three important issues in understanding the history and then the dissolution, i.e. the so-called self-abolition of the AFŽ: a) the historical forgetting of some political continuities, especially on the left; b) the relations the public and private in postwar Yugoslavia; c) the issue of market reform and the relationship between production, subsistence, and reproduction in relation to the family and household. When it comes to the family, my views on patriarchy are to an extent influenced by Göran Therborn6 and his understanding of the dynamics of family Traverso, Enzo, De l’anticommunisme. L’histoire du xxe siecle relue par Nolte, Furet et Courtois, L’Homme et la société, 2001/2: 169–194, p.189. 4 Bensaïd, Daniel, Qui est le juge? Pour en finir avec le tribunal de l’Histoire. Paris: Fayard, 1999, p. 127 3 Suvin, Darko, Samo jednom se ljubi. Radiografija SFR Jugoslavije. Beograd: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014, p. 23. (English edition: Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Leiden: Brill, 2016, p11). 6 Therborn, Göran, Between Sex and Power, Family in the World 1900–2000. London: Routledge, 2004. 5 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 159 relations. Namely, he shows that the family in and of itself does not have any internal dynamic of change until it is influenced by external factors. These external factors are the subject of this text. 2. On the Prehistory of the AFŽ Attempts to think the AFŽ historically are often characterized precisely by a lack of historical consciousness. The AFŽ is mostly portrayed, especially on the left, as an organisation that came into existence without any prior influences, as something sui generis. Such a view is part of a general historical forgetting – present in an especially questionable form on the post-Yugoslav left – where we remember the past either selectively or reactively. Historical amnesia has disastrous consequences. One of the most disastrous is an ahistorical understanding of what became of ‘the woman question’ and the position of women in the first, and then in the second Yugoslavia. Bearing in mind that the AFŽ was a unique and unprecedented organisation, but by no means the first women’s revolutionary movement in Yugoslavia, it is necessary to recall forgotten and forbidden models. A minimum of historical consciousness and intellectual honesty demands that we do not forget the activities of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) between the two world wars, or the activities of the women’s civic associations and movements preceding the AFŽ. This is necessary if we are not to “read our own history as a mistaken footnote”7. Not reading our “own history as a mistaken footnote” in the case of AFŽ means talking about some continuities in women’s organising. Precisely for this reason, I would like to offer one possible historical analogy, fully aware of the dangers of reasoning by analogy. By way of analogy, to the extent that it allows, I will follow the development of the AFŽ in section 2.3, indicating some important differences in comparison with the Soviet Zhenotdel, and thus, if nothing else, open a space for future thought and research. The aim of the following section is precisely, in opposition to historical forgetting, to establish a theoretical framework which considers the formation of the AFŽ as the final outcome of at least three sources, currents, and tendencies preceding it. We are referring primarily to women’s organising within the Socialist and subsequently Communist Party of Yugoslavia, to women’s and feminist movements between the two world wars, to the youth sections of the women’s movements which played a crucial role in the subsequent front politics of the CPY, and finally, to the Zhenotdel as a forbidden model. 7 Adriana Zaharijević, Fusnota u globalnoj istoriji: kako se može čitati istorija jugoslovenskog feminizma. “Sociologija” Vol. LVII: 72-89, 2015. p. 86 �160 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT 2.1. Women’s Organisation within the Workers’ Movement The women’s sections of the communist movement, the methods and goals of their work, are the direct heritage of the Second International (the Socialist International, 1889–1916) and particularly of the decisive role of Clara Zetkin in imposing the practice of the women’s organisation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany on the entire International. Clara Zetkin is responsible for two fundamental innovations.8 The first is related not only to questions of politics but also to those of the organisation: the woman question cannot be separated from the question of class. The second is even more important: the idea that women, although exploited as workers, are subjected to a specific type of oppression which implies specific, historically conditioned methods of organisation and political activity of women and women workers. Following the resolutions of the Second International, every socialist (then known as social-democratic) party was obliged to incorporate women’s sections and committees in its work, and publish magazines covering women and women’s issues. Thus, in years preceding the formal establishment of the AFŽ, the activity of the pre-World War I socialist movement in the region, and thus that of the later CPY, was directed towards organising women workers and founding women’s sections and committees. Although few in number, women socialists (and communists) organised activities within their ranks. Thus, to take one of many examples, in March 1919 the Regional Secretariat of Women Socialists of Bosnia and Herzegovina organised literacy and other classes for women.9 In April of that same year, the Unification Congress of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Yugoslavia (Communists) was held in Belgrade, where a Central Secretariat of Women Socialists (Communists) was elected. Its statute states that the Secretariat “considers itself a part of the Party whole…rules out any separate women’s organisation, and considers itself a technical-executive committee for agitation and organising women”.10 The relationship between the women’s secretariat and the Central Party Council was such that “according to instructions issued by the Central Party Council of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Yugoslavia, the Central Secretariat of Women Socialists (Communists) issues directives for women’s activities in general”11. The “Theses on methods and forms 8 What follows is my reading of Zetkin’s articles collected in the edited volume Clara Zetkin, Selected Writings, New York: International Publishers. Ed. Philip S. Foner, foreword by Angela Davis. I would like to thank Ajla Demiragić for this book. 9 Kecman, Jovanka, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941. Belgrade: Modern History Institute, 1978, p. 93. Historijski Arhiv KPJ, Vol. 2, Kongresi i Zemaljske konferencije 1919-1937. Belgrade: History department of the CPY, 1949, pp. 24–26. 11 Ibid., p. 25. 10 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 161 of work of the Communist Parties among women” adopted in 1921 at the Third Congress of the Comintern (the Communist International, 1919–1943), later also adopted by the CPY, arguably did not represent a significant innovation in existing socialist practice other than in the fact of demanding, in more explicit terms, the involvement of women as equal members in the work of communist parties and other proletarian organisations. This continuity was embodied by Clara Zetkin, the former Secretary of the International Women’s Bureau of the Second International, who in 1920 became Secretary of the International Women’s Secretariat of the Communist International. The second part of the Statute of Women Socialists (Communists), adopted at the Belgrade Unification Congress in 1919, states that work with youth is one of the special tasks of the women’s movement: “because women are, by nature, the most suited for and competent in this work […] and it should be carried out according to contemporary pedagogical principles and, from a purely practical point of view, lead to an overall education”.12 The purpose of the work was to prepare the youth to be “loyal members of the proletarian movement”.13 In those days, rarely did any socialist movement question the fundamental and primary social role of women, that is, the role of women as mothers and primary carers responsible for the education and upbringing of new generations. Later on we will see that Tito, like Stalin, insisted that the primary task of the “new woman” was bound up with her specific biological function as mother, but we will also see how Alexandra Kollontai, and the avant-garde of the Bolshevik Revolution, maintained that the socialist revolution had to grow over into a sexual one. Thinking the AFŽ historically enables us to once again question different models of women’s emancipation on the left, bearing in mind its importance for us today. On the one hand, we have the model of economic emancipation which follows the argument that economic independence will necessarily, by mathematical progression, result in the emancipation of women through wage-labour. On the other hand, there is the model of Alexandra Kollontai and the Zhenotdel, for whom the socialisation of care work is not merely the first prerequisite for women’s entry into wage-labour, but is considered an end in itself, one of the objectives of communism as the self-management of the direct producers. While CPY leaders, from Tito to Vida Tomšić, Mitra Mitrović, and Cana Babović, also affirmed a certain continuity of work among women as the foundation for the later activity of the AFŽ, from an historical point of view it is also important to insist on specific ruptures. It is necessary to differentiate periods of activity and 12 Ibid. p. 26. 13 Ibid. p. 26 �162 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT the political perspectives that conditioned them. In the so-called “revolutionary period”, i.e. the period of the painful birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, characterized by strikes, peasant uprisings, and nationalist guerilla resistance to Belgrade, the women’s work of the Party came down to organising working women. Following the so-called “Proclamation” of 30 December 1920, the CPY was formally proscribed, but operated under various semi-legal fronts, and work with women was transferred to the trade unions. From the 30s onwards, there was a tendency to extend the influence of the CPY to mass organisations like the women’s movements. In 1935, with the definitive imposition of the Comintern policy of the Popular Front in the struggle against fascism, the final rupture occurred.14 From that point onwards, participation and entrism in bourgeois women’s organisations, in order to form special (front) organisations, became the starting point and model for creating an all-class women’s alliance in a progressive struggle for the equality of women, against war and fascism. This approach represents a break with the model of Clara Zetkin, who refused any kind of cooperation between the labour movement and “bourgeois feminists” (Frauenrechtlerinnen or ‘women’s righters’), for example in the struggle for female suffrage, or civil rights and equality, as well as with her opposition to the creation of separate non-party women’s organisations. This example shows us how the Yugoslav communist movement reshaped itself according to Stalinist models in the direction of limiting the struggle for the emancipation of women to a democratic phase whose key task was defeating fascism and defending the Soviet Union. From the beginning of the Second World War, the struggle to realise the democratic perspective of national liberation and women’s equality collided with a political problem, i.e. a barrier: the alliance between Stalin and the Allies. Although we cannot discuss this policy in detail here, it is important to emphasize that Yugoslavia and China were the only states in which the revolutionary and democratic forces managed to overcome these barriers, unite the people in antifascist struggle against the ancien régime, and open up the horizon of social revolution. From revolutionary Spain to the French Popular Front, to the Italian and Greek resistance movements, blind obedience to Stalin’s dictate meant the downfall of the revolution. Historically, we would also have to take into consideration the presence of a paradoxical and creative synthesis and enrichment of bourgeois feminism and Yugoslav communism, the organisational, moral, and political precondition for one of the biggest mass movements of women ever seen in Europe: the AFŽ. 14 Sklevicky, Lydia, Organizirana djelatnost žena Hrvatske za vrijeme NOB-e 1941-1945. Available at: https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/158396 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 163 2.2. “Elective Affinities”: the Women’s Movement and Communism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia The feminist and women’s civic associations of Yugoslavia initiated some of the first campaigns for women’s literacy, gave literacy classes, worked on raising consciousness of the woman question and women’s rights, and engaged in propaganda work by publishing newspapers. From the 1920s right up to the end of the 1930s, one of the most important of these was the Feminist Alliance, which in 1926 changed its name to the Alliance of Women’s Movements. In Notes on the feminist history of the city of Zagreb, 1919–1940, Gordana Stojaković lists the longforgotten names of all the important representatives of the feminist and women’s movements of the day, whose personal commitment and agitation represented first steps enabling women to come out of the invisibility of the private sphere into the public realm.15 Although these were all women from rich families, literate, often university educated, their demands aimed at the equality of all women. In her history, The Woman Question in Serbia in the 19th and 20th Centuries, written more than half a century after the dissolution of the AFŽ and in the teeth of the bloody collapse of the second Yugoslavia, Neda Božinović, a former activist in the Serbian section of the AFŽ, goes out of her way to underline and reaffirm the legacy of the pre-1945 women’s movement in which she was formed: […] already from the time - before the Second World War – I became involved in the women’s movement, I was impressed by the women who founded and developed it. I have no less regard for the women of my generation who, especially during the war, did not spare themselves, but laid down their lives, giving their all to realise the fundamental preconditions for women’s liberation. It is my profound belief that women of all generations, in their own times, with all its and their own limitations, did all that could be done. This work is […] an attempt to present in one place the history of the women’s movement in Serbia, to point out the efforts and the resolve of women themselves to contribute to change, to transform their status, and both the support and resistance they encountered. For they are largely forgotten – history has hardly anything to say about them.16 For this reason, it is not enough to simply say that we need to take into consideration the historical context, and all the limitations and obstacles that feminists encountered, to grasp just how progressive their demands were. In fact, a revolu15 The text is available at: http://pravonarad.info/?p-350 16 Ženski pokret, January/February, 1937, pp. 5–6. I am thankful to Gordana Stojaković for forwarding me these two issues of the review. �164 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT tion and a further 20 years were needed for these demands to be met, and even then only partially! Neda Božinović confirms that the feminist programs of the interwar period were not only adopted by socialist Yugoslavia, but also served as the basis for its laws and legislative practice all the way up to the mid-1960s.17 It is worth underlining the two most important contributions (innovations) of the feminist and women’s movement, which were of paramount importance for the later development of the woman question. One of the most important demands was for the reform of civil law and the unification of all the legal codes valid in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In fact, it is often forgotten today that there was no uniform legal system in the Kingdom. According to the Alliance magazine Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement), there were six legal territories with six different codes of civil law.18 But one thing they all shared: women were in a legally subordinate position, completely dependent, both physically and materially, on male family members. The Alliance put forward two highly important reforms to civil law: a) the jurisdiction of secular, civil courts in all matters, the abolition of the father’s and husband’s authority, b) the recognition of the equal rights of women to dispose of themselves and their property, introducing the concept of acquired property and equal right to inheritance. The second element refers to social legislation where the Alliance offered the following solutions: [that] employers strictly enforce the ban on night shifts for women, on women working before and after childbirth, make sure to provide children’s shelters according to their legal obligations, where children would be looked after by trained female personnel, to ensure hygienic conditions at work, especially proper ventilation, setting up kitchens, separate wash rooms for men and women, changing rooms etc.; with a view to establishing the most effective maternity protection for women employed in industry, crafts, the home and in agriculture, we propose: that the Employee Insurance Act be extended to cover the agricultural workforce; that the 1922 Employee Insurance Act be amended to regulate the insurance period for obtaining the right to maternity allowance, the duration of maternity leave, the right to maternity support, child accessories and breastfeeding support [...]19 The Alliance of Women’s Movements also called for the introduction of female labour inspectors to enforce the implementation of both the above demands and 17 Božinović, Neda, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku, Beograd: Žene u crnom, 1996. p. 262. 18 Ženski pokret, op.cit. 19 Ibid. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 165 already existing laws. The same demands are to be found in the socialist women’s journal Equality (Die Gleichheit, 1892–1923), founded and edited by Clara Zetkin. The claim of the historian Lidia Sklevicky that the AFŽ “was and remains the only legitimate heir of this movement”20 concurs with that of the former AFŽ militant Neda Božinović. Although the majority of histories present narrative accounts of the women’s movement, or concern themselves with prominent figures, conference resolutions, or descriptions of organisations, thus far not a single comprehensive social history of women in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia has been written. In the absence of such a history, I would like to emphasize a few important elements. The emergence and proliferation of prominent and important women’s movements, from the left-leaning to the religious and charitable, is the result of what, in Bloch’s terms, we could call the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, or more simply, in Lenin’s words, uneven development. Whilst from a legal perspective, women basically remained minors, immature, and subordinated principally to the authority of elder men, and secondarily to their sons, while every second woman was illiterate, the inter-war period was nevertheless, according to the anthropologist Vera Erlich, “a time of crisis […] of general unrest and conflict in the family”.21 The traditional forms of the patriarchal family (the extended family, zadruga, and multigenerational households) began to disintegrate – but not in Macedonia or among Muslim populations – with the further penetration of the money economy into subsistence agriculture. Fathers could no longer command in the old way, and the relations between young men and women became freer. Losing the real protection of partriarchal custom, peasant women found themselves caught between, on the one hand, the patriarchal legal order, and on the other, the freedom of unlimited exploitation in the market. Women’s employment trends, often meaning in reality the replacement of male workers by women and children, were conditioned not only by male deaths in the First World War, but also by the sharp demographic changes that followed. For example, in 1921, 40% of the population of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was under the age of 14.22 In addition, the fragmentation of landholdings continued in the already impoverished countryside, increasingly forcing the rural population to seek additional sources of income. The rising class of worker-peasants, and of 20 Sklevicky, p. 81. 21 Erlich, Vera S. “Das Erschutternd Gleichgewicht in der Familie, aus eine Jugoslawischen Studie”. Quoted in: Holm Sundhaussen, Historija Srbije od 19. do 21. veka, p. 296. Belgrade: Clio, 2009. 22 Čalić, Žanin-Mari. Socijalna istorija Srbije 1815.-1941. Belgrade: Clio, 2004, pp. 253–254. �166 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT female and child labour, represented a reserve army of the unemployed, enabling employers to reduce both the cost of labour and wages. The new era of total war, with its erasure of boundaries between front and rear, also called into question the gendered boundaries between the private and the public. Thus, it was during the First World War that, due to the absence of men, women were able to occupy important social functions, which they managed to keep (at least in the cities) even after demobilisation.23 In the cities, under the influence of Western trends, women attended schools, universities and fought for greater political rights. Around 20% of the overall university population were women, who under the strong influence of liberal and socialist ideas of gender equality turned against sexual double standards. It was not simply a question of rejecting of outmoded customs, but also, according to the Youth Section of the Women’s Movement of Serbia, of the fact that the “dictatorship and its reactionary forces [...] had implemented their regressive measures against women and threatened them with taking away the few rights they have acquired.”24 The above processes were decisive as they conditioned and enabled the formation of a CPY core and AFŽ cadre on the very eve of war. The cadre mostly consisted of a young group of female village school teachers and workers who, having acquired education or work experience in the cities, brought back liberal and progressive ideas to the countryside, and university-educated, young bourgeois women, who under the influence of communist ideals, in a Turgenevian drama of mothers and daughters, clashed with the “ladies” from the feminist movement. By the mid1930s a new generation of young women, female students and female workers joined the existing women’s and feminist organisations. Faced with the menacing shadows of war and fascism, the youth sections of the women’s movement strove, under communist influence, to unite the feminist with the antifascist movements. For example, in the struggle for the right to vote in 1939 in Serbia, “for the first time a broad social movement accepted the idea that freedom and democracy could be applied to the oppressed half of society – women”.25 In 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, former members of youth sections of the women’s movement, members of the Movement of University-Educated Women and other women’s organisations all participated in preparations for an armed uprising, and spontaneously founded women’s antifascist committees – the forerunners of the AFŽ. 23 Čalić, Žanin-Mari. Historija Jugoslavije u XX veku. Belgrade: Clio, 2013, p. 123. 24 Bilten “Ženski pokret kroz omladinsku sekciju”, izveštaj br. 2. Januar 1940, in: Bosa Cvetić (ed.), Žene Srbije u NOB-i, pp. 56-9. 25 Božinović, Neda, Položaj Žene u Srbiji u XiX i XX veku, Belgrade: Žene u crnom, 1996, p. 260. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 167 A national pre-congress conference of the CPY held in May 1939, on the eve of war, debated the incorporation of women as equal members in the activities of the Party and other labour organisations, an issue that had been on the party agenda since its very foundation two decades before. Fearing that mobilisation and repression would decimate the party leadership, Tito now saw women as potential leading cadre that was “unknown to the class enemy”. This was precisely the source of the idea that “there must not be a single forum without female members. If the majority of members have thus far underestimated the importance of involving women in the CP – they must now realise that forming female Party cadre is our most important organisational task”.26 If the chronic habit of male comrades to consider work with women as women’s work was roundly criticised then, in the wake of the moral collapse of the leadership of the women’s movement in the face war and repression, feminism was the greater danger. As Vida Tomšič argued in 1940, in a speech delivered to the party congress: “Feminism presents the common demands of women of all classes separate from the demands of working people. By emphasizing the common demands of women, in opposition to and in struggle against men, feminism hides the class basis of the woman question, and in so doing, deflects the female masses from fighting capitalism and class society in general.”27 This could have been said, and with equal justice, by Clara Zetkin circa 1890. But the party, under the auspices of the Popular Front, was itself separating general democratic questions from the struggle against capital: it was the hour of the democratic antifascist alliance. 2.3. The AFŽ as a Revolutionary Movement According to official figures, some two million women participated in the People’s Liberation Struggle (henceforth NOB), certainly one of the largest organised movements of women anywhere during the Second World War. 100,000 women fought as partizanke, while 2000 achieved officer’s rank. 25,000 partizanke were killed and over 40,000 were wounded in battle. If we remember the all-embracing conditions of fascist terror and genocide, inter-communal massacres orchestrated by collaborationist forces, and the total collapse of social and economic life, then the achievement of the AFŽ, the organised, multinational, mass antifascist movement of peasant women, is nothing short of awe-inspiring. 26 See: Proleter, no. 1–2, January/February, 1940, p. 6. 27 Vida Tomšić, quoted in: Šolja Marija (ed.), Žene Hrvatske u NOB-u, Vol. I, pp. 1–8. �168 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT From the very beginning of the uprising, with the establishment of the People’s Liberation Army (NOV) and expansion of liberated territories, elections were held to the new organs of revolutionary struggle, the People’s Liberation Committees (henceforth NOO), in which all citizens over the age of 18, regardless of religion, gender or nationality, could vote. Women’s suffrage was born of their participation in the struggle for a new constituent power, the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP). The AFŽ mobilised women to vote in the first elections based on universal suffrage in the Yugoslav lands and encouraged them to put themselves forward as candidates for election. By the end of the war, 3000 women had been elected to village and municipal NOOs in Bosnia alone. However, as in the CPY, far fewer women were elected to higher bodies. Five women were elected to the revolutionary government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the State Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ZAVNOBIH), four times fewer than to the equivalent State Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH), where the AFŽ section was by far the strongest. There was only one woman delegate to the historic first session of the Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) in Jajce, where the NOOs declared themselves the legitimate and sovereign government of Yugoslavia – Kata Pejnović, President of the Central Committee of the AFŽ, who was elected to the Presidency of AVNOJ. At the second session of AVNOJ in Bihać, female delegates made up only 4% of the total, and only two women were elected to the Presidency, Spasenija Babović and Maca Gržetić, both members of the Central Committee of the AFŽ. One of the first founding documents of the AFŽ, in which the objectives and methods of the organisation are outlined, is Circular Letter number 4 of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia of 1941. The letter speaks of the formation of the AFŽ and its role in ““activating and connecting the broad layers of women and involving them in the People’s Liberation Struggle”; it was to include “all women...regardless of their political, national, or religious affiliation.” The AFŽ’s future organisational structure was first sketched here. Like the Party, it too was territorial and electoral, rising from a series of neighbourhood, city, county and regional groups up to the Republican Committee; and centralised, with lower committees being subordinated to higher ones. The AFŽ’s primary task was to ensure support for the Partisan units, and the AFŽ itself became a component of the People’s Front (Narodni Front, henceforth NF).28 The struggle for equality between the sexes appears in a list of further political tasks. It was to become the second core concern of the AFŽ. 29 28 29 Bakarić-Šoljan, Marija (ed.), Žene Hrvatske u NOB-u, Vol I, str. 57. Ibid., p. 57. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 169 At the First Congress of the AFŽ in Bosananski Petrovac in 1942, the organisational continuity of the AFŽ was confirmed by Tito himself: “and finally I would also like to say that the AFŽ, which exists for some time now, and has finally obtained its organisational form, is truly one of the organisations that have sprung up from below”.30 Two other important documents from the First Congress attest to the fact that the AFŽ is a women’s organisation but not separate from other organisations of the NOB. These are the reports given by Cana Babović and Mitra Mitrović, who was the Secretary of the Youth section of the Women’s Movement of Serbia and one of the leading women in the Party.31 They give an overview of the prewar work of the organisation and confirm that its formation was the result of many years of activity and struggle by the women of Yugoslavia for a more just world. Both should be read as programmatic, especially given the fact the AFŽ adopted its statutes much later, but also because the CPY is presented as the bearer of the struggle against fascism and for the equality of all. The emphasis on the importance of the CPY represents a subtle shift from the politics of the Popular Front, which once again confirms the aforementioned fact that the CPY at the same time followed but also deviated from the hard line of the Popular Front. From the very beginning, the CPY understood that (to paraphrase Mitra Mitrović) it was waging a struggle and war in which the distinction between front and rear had been erased. It was no longer possible to consider the front as male and the rear as female domains. Hence, without the support of women and total mobilisation the popular uprising could not have grown over into a nation-wide struggle and insurrection. Women had to be mobilised for the struggle, but more importantly for the work in the rear, vital for supplying the army and the NF, for relaying messages, and facilitating communication between higher- and lower-level committees of the Party, as well as between the AFŽ committees. The peasantry represented a major problem in this regard. Since peasants made up the majority of the population, the course of the struggle depended on the degree of their mobilisation into Partisan ranks. Just as important was the proclamation of equality between men and women, the promise of a better future and social justice on which the entire revolutionary undertaking rested: destroying the old and creating the new. 30 ‘Tito to Women of Yugoslavia, available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/92 31 Cana Babović, Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ-a, available at http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/231 Mitra Mitrović, Antifašistički pokret žena u okviru Narodno-oslobodilačke-borbe, available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/232 �170 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT The struggle of the Partisans drew upon guerilla strategies, but also on the local traditions of peasant rebels, the uskoks and the hajduks, the First and the Second Serbian Uprisings (1804–1817), the 19th century peasant revolts against the Ottoman Empire in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Women’s Revolutionary Army Committees of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) which participated in the Ilinden Uprising of 1903, the women guerilla fighters of the Montenegrin resistance to Austro-Hungarian occupation from 1916 to 1918, as well as other insurgencies against earlier occupiers. In his memoirs, Milovan Djilas recalls that the Party consciously used „ancient traditions and myths“ in order to present the NOB as the continuation of „the centuries-old struggle of our freedom-loving peoples”.32 Jelena Batinić33 shows how the CPY constructed the figure of a new woman, linking it to epic figures of South Slav folklore. Partisan femininity rested on two pillars: the noble heroine who proves her honor and worth (i.e. equality) in battle, and the mother demanding that her dead children be avenged. The embodiment of the latter was Kata Pejnović, known among the people as “Mother Kata”, who called for revenge at the First National Congress of the AFŽ. The first figure is comparable to the role of young peasant women as fighters and nurses, and the second with the role of older peasant women, mothers who carried out traditional women’s jobs in the rear. Together, they had an enormous mobilising potential among the peasantry since they contained elements of tradition that aroused patriotic feelings and prompted people to join the fight. These figures of the new woman were united on front cover of the very first issue of Žena u Borbi (Woman in Struggle), the journal of the AFŽ Croatia, in the image of a woman, babe in arm, gun in hand. Fusing the traditional with the new and modern, the CPY took an entirely legitimate step, creating the conditions for a possibility of a revolutionary overthrow. Although neither Chetniks nor Ustashas underestimated the importance of women, in their propaganda women remained inferior and were tied to church, home, and children.34 Clearly differentiating itself on this issue, the CPY gained a strategic advantage over the forces of occupation and collaboration. 32 Đilas, Milovan, Wartime. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, p. 227. 33 Batinić, Jelena, Women and Yugoslav Partisans. A history of World War II Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 34 On women and the Ustashas, see: Bitunjac, Martina, Le donne e il movimento ustascia. Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2013; Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata and Senjković, Reana, Puno puta bi vas bili..., Narodna umjetnost, 42/2, 2005, pp. 109–126. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 171 In her Report on the Organisational Question, Cana Babović emphasised that the struggle the AFŽ was leading was the struggle of the CPY, hence the main task that lay before the movement was “total support for our army”. She fiercely attacked “bourgeois” feminist movements to drive home the point that the goal of equality was subordinate to the general aims of the NOB. The second important task was publishing magazines to help mobilise women and thus also assist the army. The magazines were supposed to promote the political education of women, which was also stated as one of the aims of the organisation itself. Internal party and archive documents repeatedly complain that women, even many AFŽ activists, were ignorant not only of their role in the NOB, but even that this struggle was being fought for their own rights. Only through the political education of women was it possible to ensure that all women understood the importance of the struggle and the necessity of uniting all women antifascists (regardless of class, religion, and nationality) for the struggle against fascism. But in order to “raise [political] consciousness”, the overwhelming illiteracy of peasant women first had to be eradicated, and so literacy classes, covering also hygiene, housekeeping, and the political objectives of the NOB were organised on liberated territories by the Party cadres that led the AFŽ. The third important element was activities in the liberated territories aimed at strengthening the people’s government and supporting the People’s Committees. Mitra Mitrović posed the aim of equality within these broader objectives, stating in her report that “orphanages and kindergardens are being built in the liberated territories”. One of the points of interest of her speech is the description of the way women transformed themselves in struggle and through struggle, taking on the same positions as men. Women proudly pointed out how they took over men’s roles and proved their “heroism, courage, and competence” in the struggle. And while one of the most important contributions was undoubtedly that, in a moment of crisis, women - as Partisans - through a transgression of traditional gender roles - were at all allowed to enter the political arena, this act of joining the struggle for a more just society never in essence questioned gender relations and norms, but rather repeated and perpetuated them (which is also confirmed by both congress reports). Although CPY strategy largely depended on successfully mobilising women into the movement and struggle, the mobilisation of women into the AFŽ coexisted with traditional attitudes, and the women who contributed to the Partisan cause did so, as a rule, by performing traditional women’s tasks and chores: cleaning, washing, looking after and caring for others. Thus, from the outset, the work of the AFŽ was conceived strictly as women’s work, largely resting on the tradi- �172 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT tional model of “feminine” nature and “female” qualities. And while this strategic concession brought the Partisans a significant advantage during the war and enabled women to also affirm themselves as revolutionary subjects, in the postwar period the contradictions of gender roles took on a different trajectory. Problems in the work of the AFŽ already arose in its initial phase. Although Lydia Sklevicky 35 speaks of the initial phase as the phase of autonomy, basing herself on Mitra Mitrović’s report to the First Congress of the AFŽ, I do not find any evidence of it there. It is more likely that she confused the reports of Cana Babović and Mitra Mitrović, because the former explicitly states that the “Central Committee of the AFŽ will strive to make our organisations independent over time”. On the basis of the available archival evidence, I conclude that these strivings remained on paper. The AFŽ never was nor did it ever become an autonomous organisation. From the outset, the work of the AFŽ was subordinated to the NF, and the latter was directly subordinated to the CPY. Although the AFŽ had limited operational autonomy, it never had full organisational autonomy. Operational autonomy was more prevalent in the occupied territories; since the flow of the information from the CC CPY and the NF to the committees of the AFŽ was much more difficult, it meant that AFŽ committee members had to find a way to act on their own. Therefore, I consider the repeated claims on the left concerning the autonomy of the AFŽ to be completely unjustified, as is demonstrated by numerous archive documents. To attribute the AFŽ the autonomy it never had means not to historicise but rather to mythologize it. The main aim of the autonomy myth is to legitimise the liberal or second wave feminist thesis that the women’s movement should be politically and organisationally independent of the left. From this follows a metaphysical dualism, first posited in the work of Sklevicky, between a largely heroic phase of the AFŽ and a diabolic phase of increasing subordination to the Party, culminating in dissolution in 1953. But, even if this were true, it would not explain the limits to women’s emancipation either during or after the war. The autonomy thesis evacuates the central political stakes, that is, the question of political strategy in relation to the general goals of the revolution and to the meaning of emancipation: the conflict noted above between the model of economic emancipation and that of the abolition and withering away of the family, classes and the state in communism, which will be dealt with later. The Central Committee of the CPY’s letter of January 1944 represents the first step towards an even greater centralisation of the AFŽ, is confirmed as policy 35 Sklevicky, Organizirana djelatnost žena Hrvatske za vrijeme NOB-e 1941-1945, p. 108. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 173 at the Fifth Congress of the CPY when a second redistribution of tasks between the NF and the AFŽ occurred, and the AFŽ becomes an administrative organ of the NF and is no longer concerned with the political education of women. The archives also testify to problems that surfaced after the war. Internal reports repeatedly mention that wives of the officials and members of the People’s Front did not participate at all in the work of the AFŽ.36 This presented a problem for many women, and some took it as a sign that they too should not participate in the work of the committees. The reports also state that male comrades did not allow female comrades to attend courses or that the wives of officials “proudly stated” that they did not want to work in the organisation.37 It would not be wrong to say that in the midst of the revolution the very idea that women were equal to men was revolutionary. The very idea had already met with resistance from the outset, and it was precisely because of this that women had to find ways to prove they were not backward and ignorant. All this affected the AFŽ’s work. Thirty years later, Dušanka Kovačević, one of the leading members of the AFŽ of Bosnia and Herzegovina, described it thus: by turning their back on tradition, which weighed them down, women became […] morally, physically, and psychologically different, not in the sense that they acquired male traits as it is often thought, but that they were becoming what was necessary for the freedom of the people and the revolution. Women and girls found their place in the revolution, which is more important than the personal destiny written in the history of women, but they instinctively sought to escape the fate of their mothers and grandmothers. Perhaps for the first time in history, women were creating their own ideal of womanhood, regardless of what men wanted. That ideal was built on the standard of revolution and triumph over the enemy. Values such as loyalty to the people, courage, knowledge, and initiative suppressed the age-old standards that required women be obedient, not interfere in the affairs of men, to stay at home, etc. Men changed less. Many of them accepted this new woman, a comrade, as a necessary, but also temporary feature of the war, part of the harsh realities of war.38 36 Republican Committee of the AFŽ Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dopis sreskog odbor AFŽ-a Velika Kladuša, Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 37 For instance: Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik plenarnog sastanka Sreskog odbora AFŽ- održan 26.9.1948. godine” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 84/48, 1948. Oblasni Odbor, “Zapisnik Plenarnog sastanka AFŽ-a u Bihaću održanog u prostorijama u vjećnici G.N.O dana 9.2.1950. godine”, p. 2. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 1061/5, 1950. Oblasni Odbor AFŽ-a, “Zapisnik sa sastanka sekretarijata Oblasnog odbora za oblast sarajevsku koji se održaje 10.1.1950. godine”, Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, 1053/4, 1950. 38 Žene BiH u NOB-u, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1977, pp. 38–38, my emphasis. �174 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT However, in the existing archive documents the struggle of the CPY is nowhere bound up with the struggle against capitalism, which is a function of the aforementioned question of revolutionary strategy and greatly conditioned the reaction that in turn largely shaped the later policy of the CPY. The fact that from 1935 onwards the program of the CPY balanced between an independent revolutionary policy and the politics of the Popular Front, produced two significant results: on the one hand, the revolutionary policy secured the opening of the revolutionary field and created conditions for the possibility of revolution; but on the other, pursuing the politics of the Popular Front prevented the CPY from relating the struggle against fascism, which was its number one goal, to the struggle against capital and capitalism. This is especially important for understanding the position of women in Yugoslavia and the relationship between production and reproduction, as well as the form this relation took in the 1950s, as can be seen in the archive documents. 2.4. Of what is “Zhenotdel” [not] the name? I have stated above that I will try to examine the limits of a possible historical analogy. In the AFŽ archive, in later female Partisan biographies, and in most of the works of Yugoslav historiography dealing with “the woman question”, one sees something that for the purposes of this paper I will call a symptomatic absence. Namely, the literature on the Yugoslav communist movement and the AFŽ does not even mention the Soviet Zhenotdel (Женотдел), or its main protagonists Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Konkordiya Samoilova, and Klavdiia Nikolayeva. Even a random Google search barely provides any results in Serbo-Croatian, and the few positive results are connected solely with the name of Alexandra Kollontai. The fact that there is barely any mention of the Zhenotdel is surely the result of the erasure of its history – firstly from Soviet, and then necessarily from all the other Eastern Bloc historiographies, including the Yugoslav. This absence necessarily gives rise to the following questions: at the time of the formal establishment of AFŽ was it forbidden to speak in Yugoslavia of the Zhenotdel, which by then had ceased to exist? Was the model of the Zhenotdel one that had to be forgotten and was not to be referred to or remembered? And finally, the main question: what is the difference between the AFŽ and the Zhenotdel? The structure of the AFŽ greatly – but not entirely – imitated that of the Zhenotdel.39 This alone is enough to talk about the Zhenotdel as an absent model, and – in the period of the AFŽ’s formal establishment – also as a forbid39 See: Stites, Richard, Zhenotdel: Bolshevism and Russian Women, 1917-1930, Russian History, Vol. 3, no. 2, p. 182. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 175 den model, since Yugoslavia at that time entirely followed Stalin’s politics of the Popular Front.40 Today, it is a commonplace in Soviet historiography that the October Revolution introduced one of the most progressive bodies of legislation ever to be enacted. It is a well-known fact that the February Revolution of 1917 – led by women demanding an end to a war that deprived them of the most basic necessities – was a catalyst and a trigger for later revolutionary events. Shortly after February, and after a great deal of pressure and demonstrations led by women and supported by Bolshevik and bourgeois feminist agitation, the Provisional government granted universal suffrage. Following the establishment of the first Soviet government in December 1917, divorce was legalised, marriages and civil partnerships were made equal in the eyes of the law, thereby recognising the rights of children regardless of whether born in or out of wedlock. In November 1920, abortion was legalised for the first time in history, while backstreet abortions now carried heavy sentences. This was followed (on 30 December 1922) by the New Land Code, which represented the most profound and systematic legislative attempt to break traditional patriarchal, cultural and legal-property relations and norms. The attempt to change traditional patriarchal relations, affecting the greatest part of the population, was obliged to grasp the problem at its root and hence caused the most resistance. This law made possible the equality of men and women in the Dvor [the peasant homestead]; the management of the household became equally the affair and obligation of both partners, and women were granted equal inheritance rights to the property of the Dvor.41 All the above laws were the outcome of the drive and determination of Alexandra Kollontai, who after the revolution became People’s Commissar for Social Welfare.42 The abolition of the family, 40 Supplementary evidence that Soviet models were never far from the minds of the leaders of the AFŽ may be seen in the frequent use of Soviet jargon, for example the significant reference to besprizorniki, that is, the millions of orphans of the Civil War whose care and accommodation were given over to the Zhenotdel. See: Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 2, 149–147, as well as “Zapisnik sa održanog savjetovanja žena iz grada i sreza Zenice po pitanju formiranja raznih društava a u vezi zaključka sjednice Izvršnog odbora C.O. AFŽ-a” 41 On the laws of the early post-revolutionary period, as well as later Stalinist counter-revolutionary measures see: Schlesinger, Rudolf (ed.), The Family in the U.S.S.R., Documents and Readings, Routledge, 2000. 42 While historians disagree as to the precise contribution of Alexandra Kollontai to drafting Soviet family law and the formation of the Zhenotdel, Carol Eubanks Hayden is convinced that without her individual efforts many things would have remained on paper. See her doctoral dissertation: Feminism and Bolshevism: The Zhenotdel and the Politics of Women’s Emancipation in Russia 1917– 1930. University of California, Berkeley, 1979. �176 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT inconceivable without a complete and radical overturning of gender and patriarchal norms, was one of the key characteristics of Bolshevik revolutionary theory which drew “upon accepted Marxist theory (Engels, Bebel) and on the work of native Russian Marxists, such as Kollontai and Krupskaya”.43 The conception of gender roles as fluid and fluctuating is one of the basic ideas behind the idea of communal living, the attempts (only partially successful) to fulfill the utopian dream of creating institutions for the socialisation of housework, the sharing of household chores and obligations, and the “withering away” of the family as a unit of social reproduction, together with the state and classes.44 The ideas that guided the leaders of the October Revolution represent the only attempt thus far to realise communism not only in the ownership of the means of production but also in the abolition of the family, which they considered no less a part of the revolutionary transformation of society. By deconstructing and overturning the rigidity of gender markers and categories, which had held women in a subordinate position for centuries and bound them to housework - which, in the words of Lenin, “dulls, stultifies and enslaves”45 - they strove to realise these ideals. That is precisely why, as early as 1905 and 1909 respectively, Kollontai and Krupskaya voiced the importance and necessity of organising proletarian and peasant women through special groups, committees, or sections. However, the idea of founding a separate women’s organisation within the party remained unrealised until 1917. In that year, the prewar Bolshevik newspaper for women workers, Rabotnica,46 was revived, serving as one of the main propaganda tools for agitation and work amongst women. The story of the Zhenotdel is a story of how a specifically women’s organisation was formed despite internal Party resistance. The diversity of positions amongst the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution is perhaps best portrayed by the fact that both male and female party members opposed its foundation. On this basis a conflict arose between Alexandra Kollontai and Klaudia Nikolaeva47 during the First Conference 43 Carol Eubanks Hayden, The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party, Russian History, Vol, no. 2, 1976, pp.150–173. 44 Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1989. It is interesting that Stites dates these aspirations to the period from 1917 to 1930, which coincides with the establishment and the activities of the Zhenotdel. 45 Lenin gave unreserved support to the work and activities of the Zhenotdel and spoke on several occassions at women’s congresses organised by the Zhenotdel. See: Stites, 1989, op. cit.; Hayden, 1976 op. cit. See Hayden, 1976, op. cit.; Stites, 1976, op. cit. It is important to note that Rabotnica was launched following the International Socialist Women’s Congresses held concurrently with the conferences of the Second International in Stuttgart in 1907 and Copenhagen in 1910. 47 Nikolaevna would later become the director of the Zhenotdel. 46 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 177 of Petrograd Women Workers held on 6 November 1917, where Nikolaeva along with Konkordiya Samoilova opposed the formation of a women’s section within the Party.48 At the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Bolsheviks held in April 1917, Alexandra Kollontai motioned that a meeting of female delegates be held to form a women’s department within the Bolshevik Party. In September that same year a women’s section was established, but it would only obtain the status of a Party department (otdel) in 1919 after considerable political pressure and mobilisation. The decisive event was the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women organised by Kollontai and Armand in November 1918 with the help of workers, peasants and other delegates from all over Russia who came to Moscow in the teeth of the perils and hardships of the civil war. Carol E. Hayden points out that the organisation of women in a separate department (Zhen-otdel) in the midst of civil war was all the more significant because it was necessary to defend and consolidate the revolutionary government to enable the enactment of its laws and decrees. The Bolsheviks thus found themselves in the contradictory position of having to “appeal to women as a separate group in order to convince them that they were not a separate group”.49 In its work, the Party was acutely aware of both the inadequacy of formal legal equality and the pressing need to strengthen and enforce the law. Armand and Kollontai worked to the limits of endurance, traveling all over the country, organising women factory workers and peasants, involving them in the work of the Zhenotdel and the revolutionary wave in general. They agitated not only among women factory workers and peasants, but also the unemployed, wives of military personnel, etc. It is in this particular context that Carol E. Hayden talks about an important principle of the Zhenotdel, “agitation by deeds, not words”, while Richard Stites points out that the true context of the Zhenotdel is that the “formal, legislative program of emancipation (the only one usually noted by historians) had to be given meaning in the social revolution from below”.50 One of the main mechanisms for accomplishing “agitation by deeds” was the system of delegates (delegatki). The essence of this system was that the women workers and peasants elected delegates who would spend three to six months as apprentices (praktikantki) at Zhenotdel headquarters, visit and acquaint themselves with the work of courts, Party departments, hospitals, and other institutions, getting to know their rights in order to be able to expose irregularities in the application of 48 Hayden, 1976, op. cit. 49 Ibid. 50 Stites, 1976, op. cit., p. 176. �178 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT laws and regulations in their factories, homes, and villages. According to Stites, the delegatki“as a rule, saw much, and reported honestly”. The goal was clear: training female personnel to achieve more thorough and comprehensive changes in everyday life and the socialisation of housework. Wendy Zeva Goldman remarks that membership in the Zhenotdel forever changed the lives of thousands of women workers, peasants, housewives, and domestic servants who gained experience through the apprenticeship system and passed it on to others.51 In spite of its enormous influence, and importance for the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of women, the work of the Zhenotdel was from the start weighed down with prejudice and problems. Male and female party members of all ranks opposed the establishment and work of the Zhenotdel, accusing it of feminist deviations, forcing its female members to constantly justify themselves and explain that their work had nothing to do with such deviations. Conflicts broke out, with presidents of provincial committees in Central Asia committing acts of violence against women involved in the work of the Zhenotdel, and there was even a case of a Zhenotdel office being burned down, as well as cases of domestic violence where husbands beat their wives for daring to go to “women’s” meetings.52 In a letter from 1920, Konkordiya Samoilova wrote that their colleagues gave them sexist nicknames such as ‘granny center’ (Tsentro-baba) or ‘commissariat of grannies’ (bab-kom). Many high-ranking female members of the Party refused to work in the Zhenotdel, considering it inferior and unbecoming, and sought recognition in the affairs of men.53 Enormous problems arose in the work of the Zhenotdel in the aftermath of the Civil War, with the demobilisation of the Red Army and the introduction of the market mechanisms of the New Economic Policy. Soviet enterprises were obliged to adhere to profit criteria and women bore the brunt of the resulting wave of layoffs. In 1922, although representing approximately a quarter of the labour force women accounted for some 60% of the unemployed. There was less and less money in the budget for the Zhenotdel and its tasks while the mass unemployment of men and women merely exacerbated the financial squeeze on the organisation. After the death of Inessa Armand, the first director of the Zhenotdel, and the removal of Alexandra Kollontai (who joined the Workers’ Opposition against the 51 Goldman, Wendy Zeva, Women, the State and Revolution, Soviet Family Policy and Social Life 1917–1936. Cambridge University Press, 1993. On the changes the Zhenotdel brought about, see also: Stites, Richard: Did the Bolshevik Revolution Improve the Lives of Soviet Women – available at: http://faculty.sfhs.com/lesleymuller/ap_euro/Debates/debate_soviet_women.pdf 52 Hayden, 1976, op. cit., p. 161. 53 Clements, Evans, Barbara, The Bolshevik Women, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 179 emerging one-party state), there followed a series of female directors whose work became more and more difficult under the glare of the Stalinist apparatus. From 1924 and the doctrine of “socialism in one country”, little by little the Stalinist counterrevolution began to hollow out the heritage of the October Revolution. In 1930 the Zhenotdel was abolished by Party decree under the pretext that equality between men and women had been achieved, “that women had been ‘advanced’ to the level of men”,54 and the activities of the Zhenotdel were transferred to the AgitProp section of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In 1936, the counterrevolution was finally able to deliver the coup de grâce to the cultural gains of the revolution, reinstating tsarist laws against abortion and homosexuality, and making divorce practically impossible through various legal impediments. In this way the emancipatory potential of the October Revolution was erased, and the idea of the abolition (withering away) of the family and the elimination of patriarchal and gender roles and norms was forever thrown into the dustbin of history. We have seen that the Zhenotdel arose from the previous revolutionary mobilisation of women in order to defend the Soviet government and the achievements of the revolution from counterrevolutionary attack during the Civil War, while the AFŽ, even before the fascist invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, was conceived as an organisation for mobilising women for a war of national liberation, based on alliances with both the Yugoslav Government in Exile and the Allies. If we compare the Zhenotdel and the AFŽ as women’s organisations in countries where revolutionary overthrows took place, one of the most important differences lies in the fact that in the case of the Zhenotdel the function of political mobilisation became more important over time, while in the case of the AFŽ less so. The AFŽ focused less and less on political mobilisation and more on the distribution of goods, the work of the mother-child section and social issues in general. These two organisations faced similar, if not exactly the same, difficulties, ones necessarily faced by any attempt to change centuries-old relations, traditions and beliefs. Both the Zhenotdel and the AFŽ radically changed the lives 54 Wood, Elizabeth A., The Baba and the Comrade. Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Although Elizabeth Wood’s research is extraordinary, I disagree with her (revisionist) assessment that women were “the reserve army of the revolution, a group to be drawn to the labour pool and into the political struggle when needed and to be dismissed when no longer needed”. It is precisely the Zhenotdel, the subject of her book, that embodies the attempt to make the struggle universal, because without the joint efforts of both women and men there could be no material realisation of revolutionary principles. For the same reasons, I disagree with the analysis of Jelena Batinić, which follows Wood and sees Soviet politics as undifferentiated top-down emancipation. �180 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT of the women who participated in their work. However, the fact remains that different means were used for different ends. Namely, the Bolsheviks, and therewith also the Zhenotdel, fought against capitalism from the outset, and therefore against the bourgeois form of the family. In the case of the CPY and the AFŽ, the struggle against capitalism, for communism, was not a constituent part of the struggle, but was presented as the real objective only after the CPY assumed power. Because of this, the Yugoslav revolution never declared, even for a moment, the abolition of the family. Today the aspirations of the Zhenotdel exist only in a specialised historical literature, and no longer have a name or a place. The abolition of the family, the specter announced in the Communist Manifesto, no longer haunts anyone or anything.55 3. From Revolutionary Subjects to the Productive Subject By the 30s, the Soviet model of women’s emancipation came down, as Barbara Clements wittily puts it, to the „emancipated worker and the happy homemaker.”56 For Stalin, they formed the two pillars of the female productive subject: “women make up half the population of our country […] they constitute a great army of labour and are fit to raise our children”.57 In theory, the economic independence of women in a socialist economy would lead to their full emancipation. Eric Hobsbawm notes: For while major changes, such as the massive entry of married women into the labour market might be expected to produce concomitant or consequential changes, they need not do so - as witness the USSR where (after the initial utopian-revolutionary aspirations of the 1920s had been abandoned) married women generally found themselves carrying the double load of old household responsibilities and new wage earning responsibilities without any change in relations between the sexes or in the public or private spheres.58 In all economies based on free wage-labour, the status of the “emancipated female worker” is subordinate to her social function of mother. Such a vision of 55 Marx, Karl, Engels, Friedrich, Manifest komunističke partije (Manifesto of the Communist Party), available at: http://staro.rifin.com/root/tekstovi/casopis_pdf/ek_ec_586.pdf 56 Clements, E. Barbara, A History of Women in Russia, from the Earliest Times to the Present, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, p. 429. 57 Cited in: Filipova, Jelena, Iz USSR, Šta je dala ženi velika Oktobarska socijalistička revolucija, in Nova žena, year 2, no. 20, November, 1946, p. 20. 58 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London: Abacus, p.313 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 181 the new woman was also present in Yugoslav practice. At the Third Congress of the AFŽ in 1950, Tito declared: “I think, comrades, that you should primarily carry out, with all your strength and enthusiasm, duties proper to your specific obligations, such as, for example, caring for women, mothers, caring for children’s hygiene and for children in general, health, and the education of women in Yugoslavia”.59 We find no evidence in the archives that the idea of abolishing the family ever existed in Yugoslavia, as we saw by contrast in the case of the Russian revolution. No such steps were ever taken in Yugoslavia. During the war, the AFŽ journal, Žena u Borbi (Woman in Struggle), proselytised the Soviet formula of wage-labour and motherhood, introducing its readers to a new productive subject, “the free and equal citizen of a socialist country”, whose achievements as tractor driver, shock worker and chemist were commended as models to be emulated. Hence we should not be surprised that the first constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (1946) was almost identical to that of the USSR of 1936. For example, abortion continued to be illegal under the new constitution, it was only later (in the early 60s) that it was liberalised, and made legal by the Constitution of 1974. Where Yugoslav and Soviet practice were to differ was in the degree to which the new woman depended on mechanisms of state or market accumulation for her reproduction. All revolutions may be essentially defined by their approach to women. In form, they can be modernising-emancipatory or patriarchal. The difference is that the former aim at the emancipation of women, emphasizing equality, while the latter bind women to the family and emphasize sex (therefore also gender) differences.60 All great revolutions proclaimed a new type of woman. Yugoslavia, as we have seen, was no exception. If we know that “the position of women in any society depends on how that society organzies basic human functions, such as reproduction, subsistence and production”,61 then it is important to examine all the contradictions present from the outset in the manner in which the organisation of these basic functions is approached. Here, when we address the Yugoslav past and future, we must discuss the mutual interpenetration of the modernising59 From Tito’s speech at the Third Congress of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia, 1950., available at: http://afzarhiv.org/items/show/481 60 Mogadham, Valentine M., Gender and Revolutionary Transformation, Iran 1979 and Eastern Central Europe 1989, Gender & Society, June 1995, pp. 328–356. 61 Woodward, Susan L., The Rights of Women: Ideology, Policy and Social Change in Yugoslavia, in: Susan L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Mayer (eds.), Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe, Duke University Press, Durham. 1985, pp. 576–636. �182 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT emancipatory and the patriarchal conceptions of the position and role of women in revolution, or more precisely in the post-revolutionary period. To talk about this interpenetration is precisely to remain true to the AFŽ, i.e. to understand the historical trajectory of its development and dissolution as deeply antagonistic. Only in this way can we understand the fundamental antagonism that existed and exists when it comes to the position of women in society. While in the context of postwar Yugoslavia the creation of a new woman was, on the one hand, rhetorically emphasized as one of the main goals and tasks of the new government, on the other hand, we can observe how the reality became divorced from the militant ideals in which women had confirmed themselves as subjects of revolutionary struggle. The end of the war meant a fresh start in building a new country and new society. The old order was demolished and the new one was on the agenda, which required the unification of all available forces and resources for the renovation and reconstruction of the country, but also the introduction of a whole series of political-legal acts and new mobilising strategies. Maxine Molyneux62 points out that one of the main tasks of every post-revolutionary government in Third World countries or those ruled by an ancien régime is the progressive replacement of the old by the new, for the sake of accelerated economic development and social change. This entails “creating a centralised, secular, and more egalitarian social order”. Creating such an order depends on implementing laws that are also valid in rural areas where customary law predominates. Following the adoption of the 1946 Constitution, a gradual enactment of new, standardized legal regulations followed.63 One of the most important achievements for women was the abolition of legal differences existing in the six legal territories of the former Kingdom. For instance, Susan Woodward64 points out that the authority of fathers in Yugoslavia was substituted by the authority of the state, which did indeed displace the predominantly patriarchal and patrilocal structure of society. With the 1946 Constitution,65 the CPY took the first step in creating the conditions for bettering the lot of women. Subsequently, uniform legislation and civil court jurisdiction were introduced in matters of marital, famMolyneux, Maxine, Socialist Societies Old and New: Progress Towards Women’s Emancipation, Feminist Review, Summer 1981, pp. 1–34. 63 Božinović, 1996, op- cit., pp. 157–158. 64 Woodward, 1985, op. cit. 62 65 The AFŽ was mobilised in discussing the issues of the Constitution, as seen in for example: Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavije, Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, 10. Decembar 1945, and Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, Kutija, , 1/ 135, 1945. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 183 ily, labour and criminal law, thus fulfilling the demands of the women’s movement from the 1930s. In this way, what women had achieved by force of arms was given formal legal sanction. But what had they achieved by force of arms? Equality or equality of rights, to use Marx’s distinction? Already in the first (wartime) phase of the AFŽ’s activities, there was mostly talk of “equal civil and social rights”, but not of equality. If equality was mentioned, it was in the context of equality with men, which once again brings back to equal rights and making men’s and women’s rights equal. The unquestionable, enormous, and indescribable historical merit of the CPY remains that, for the first time in history, women in Yugoslavia became, legally speaking, persons. That is, as Ivana Pantelić66 splendidly observes, women became citizens – which the archival documents confirm. Women fought for and won the right to vote, to education, employment, and equal pay for equal work (at least nominally); there was a public healthcare system, maternity and child protection, maternity leave, etc. This overturning of a patriarchal legal order of rule by fathers shook social relations from top to bottom and ensured a greater degree of autonomy and independence for women. Even today, exposed as we are to ever more powerful and violent assaults by conservative and neoliberal policies, we stand on the ground and heritage of these victories. Many feminists and theorists67 have already pointed out that the Yugoslav political project ran into problems as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s. All these writers recognise that the revolutionary heroine, the new woman, had to remain her old self, i.e. the question of general social emancipation (and with it the emancipation of women) was increasingly seen as secondary. Since Yugoslav politics was conditioned by both internal and external factors, which in turn determined the trajectory of social and economic relations, this primarily affected the aforementioned organisation of production, reproduction, and subsistence. What interests me here is, taking Marxist and feminist analyses into consideration and following the archival evidence, to show how these conditions affected the position of women. To understand this it is first necessary to grasp the incommensurability of the concepts of modernity and of revolution – revolution as the destruction of a state order and the establishment of a new one. These concepts are not identical although they both imply a radical rupture with the past, the idea of historical 66 Pantelić, Ivana, Partizanke, građanke, Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, Evoluta, 2011. 67 For instance: Lydia Sklevicky, Gordana Stojaković, Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, Susan Woodward, and Svetlana Slapšak. See bibliography below. �184 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT progress, and a vision of the future as open horizon. Moreover they are radically opposed to one another. As Perry Anderson reminds us, each has a distinct temporality: “The characteristic time of ‘modernity’ is continuous, and all encompassing, like the process of industrialisation itself: at its most extended, nothing less than the totality of the epoch itself. The time of revolution is discontinuous, and delimited: a finite rupture in the reproduction of the established order, by definition starting at one conjuncture and ending at another.”68 Modernity is characterized by Benjamin’s empty, linear time “in which each moment is perpetually different from every other by virtue of being next, but – by the same token – is also the same, as an interchangeable unit in a process of indefinite recurrence.”69 The time of capitalist reproduction is a time that finds its purest ideological expression in the teleological concept of modernisation. By contrast, the act of revolution is broken, discontinuous, a moment of condensed political transformations that opens up a revolutionary space. But this also necessarily means opening a new, different temporality, which cannot be reduced to the linear time and linear unfolding of events characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, i.e. the endless production of commodity relations. Socialist revolutions entail three discontinuous and contradictory conjugations of the revolutionary event and processes in time: a sudden transition from democratic to social revolution, a prolonged transition from political revolution (transformation of the legal-political order) to cultural revolution (transformation of customs), and finally a transition from national to world revolution.70 Thus, we have here discontinuities, broken and differential temporalities and rhythms of class struggle, i.e. revolution and counterrevolution, economic experiment, cultural revolution, and social emancipation, in which neither events nor processes in time proceed in a straight line; we cannot know them in advance, nor can we be sure of the outcome. It is precisely for this reason that Antonio Gramsci emphasized that we should not confuse “the explosion of political passions […] with cultural transformations which are slow and gradual” because “changes in ways of thinking do not occur through fast, simultaneous, and generalised explosions”.71 Thus we see the defeat of the utopian and fragmented temporality opened up by the Russian Revolution, the defeat of the time of the Zhenotdel, of the revolution 68 Anderson, Perry, A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso, 1992. pp. 46–47. 69 Ibid., p. 30. 70 Bensaïd, Daniel, Le pari mélancolique, Paris: Fayard, 1997. p. 73. 71 Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderno 24, Giornalismo, §3, in: Quaderni del carcere, Vol III, Torino: Einaudi, 1975, p.2269; cited in: Anderson, 1992, op., cit. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 185 in everyday life (byt) and the abolition of the family, and their replacement by the temporality of the “Soviet new class”, “socialism in one country”, “Thermidor in the family”, and the formation of the modern, nuclear family. And I think it is precisely here that we should look for the reasons and causes of the slowing down of the emancipation process in Yugoslavia. If patriarchy is more than just a set of social values but also has something to do with the mode of production, then we can say that in the Yugoslav case modernisation as the reproduction of market relations is precisely the key element bridging the reproduction of patriarchy. The moment a gradual self-limitation set in there also appeared an apologetics that denied the existence of relations of domination and subordination, their systemic causes, and the fact that – precisely because they are systemic – they reproduce themselves automatically over time. The reproduction of patriarchy takes the form of modernity through the legal and political division between the private and the public and is best seen in the distinction between equality of rights and equality. Therefore, following the young Marx, we will distinguish between equality of rights and equality.72 From the perspective of the Marxist theory of emancipation as disalienation, and of demands for (radical) equality, these concepts should not be reduced to one another. As the young Marx already demonstrated, equality of rights does not imply equality, other than in the formal sense. Formal, i.e. juridical equality presents real social relations in a mystified form, concealing the real material inequalities existing between formally free and equal citizens. At the same time, the separation of economic from political power represents their production as two separate spheres, the “economic” and the “political”, i.e., the sphere of civil society as a sphere of free, private contracts between ownerspossessors, and the sphere of the political as one in which we, as citizens, enjoy universal legal-political rights. As G.M.Tamás reminds us, the very production of the private-public distinction means precisely that the sphere of free exchange between free owners of labour-power is also the sphere of limitless domination and exploitation of wage-labour. The freedom peculiar to free labour also tells us something about the formal equality of gendered labour. Within the modern, nuclear family there is no exchange of values, and men and women enter into contract as free and equal in order to reproduce their own labour-power and the labour-power of future generations. Since the woman is responsible for social reproduction, her free choice to enter into family relations is an expression of the fact that owners of labour-power 72 Marx, Karl, Prilog kritici Hegelove filozofije prava, Beograd: Kultura, 1957. �186 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT can access the means of subsistence only through the market. Given that the market continues to value private labour as socially necessary labour, the formal equality of the male and the female worker is the precondition for the division of the bourgeois subject into bourgeois and citizen, male and female genders, the private and the public, the economic and the political, and all other possible separations and alienations characteristic of commodity fetishism. Thus we can also apply Marx’s critique of formal equality to the contradictions which, immediately after the war, led to the first difficulties in realising socialist ideals in Yugoslavia. From subjects of revolution and revolutionary subjects, women became citizen-owners (of their own labour-power). With this, the revolution was effectively stopped, processes of general social emancipation slowed down, and the question of the emancipation of women was postponed to some distant future time. The majority of documents in the archives from this period testify to the emancipation of women being increasingly understood exclusively as an economic category, to an insistence on the greater usage of female labour (with the constant problem of a lack of institutions that would socialise the burden of reproduction, especially conspicuous in less developed areas/republics), thereby reducing emancipation to the contractual, wage-labour form. In the archives we find testimonies to the new progressive measures whose goal was to increase the participation of women in public life, production processes, and economic activities, but we also find field reports that tell a somewhat different story. It is logical to ask why and how was it possible that after the revolution, despite legal equality and exceptionally progressive laws, women still remained unequal. The answer is offered by the aforementioned distinction between the private and the public, based on the Marxian category of free wage-labour. According to Maxine Molyneux, it is often overlooked, although it is of the utmost importance, that the formal equality (equal of rights) obtained by women only after revolution, and the fact that women sometimes perform “non-female” work, in no way contradict a persistent sexual-gender division of labour, and the failure to diminish or eradicate the burden of housework and responsibility between the sexes.73 In what follows, relying on documentary evidence, I will try to demonstrate how these contradictions were manifested in the Socialist Federal Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SRBiH), but also in Yugoslavia as a whole. 73 Molyneux, 1981, op. cit. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 187 In the first postwar years, the AFŽ entered a phase oriented, in the words of Gordana Stojaković,74 toward “consolidation, renovation, and reconstruction”. In addition, it was important that other structures, like the NF, continue their work unhindered. Hamdija Čemerlić, representing the NF, stated at the Congress of the AFŽ of Bosnia and Herzegovina (AFŽBIH) on 8 June 1945: Through their efforts and accomplishments, our women have forever earned their political rights and forever become equal to our men. There is no sowing and no harvest without the great efforts of our women. Caring for invalids, tending our wounded soldiers, looking after orphans – these are all your achievements. This is what you have done until now, and this is what you will continue to do.75 This example illustrates the tendency to expect women to accept the “biological and natural” roles they had played throughout history, but now under new circumstances – as equals enjoying all rights attached to the status of formal-legal equality. In this phase, the AFŽ’s work was organised through the work of sections: mother-child, cultural-educational, and social-health. The archives contain detailed information about the extent of women’s involvement in the renovation and reconstruction of the country; in organising and preparing elections, constructing infrastructure and new buildings, painting walls, running literacy courses in villages and hamlets, running lectures on domestic science, housekeeping, hygiene, prevention of infectious diseases, approved methods of childcare and upkeep of the home, superstition, and midwifery courses, etc.76 They 74 Gordana Stojaković argues that there were three phases of AFŽ activity. Although her focus is the AFŽ of Vojvodina, the same argument can be applied to the AFŽBiH. The first phase of supporting the NOB lasted from 1942–1945; the second phase, in which the remit was expanded to postwar consolidation, renovation and reconstruction, lasted from 1946–1949; and the third phase of dissolution, involving a shift to the provision of social services and care work, lasted from 1949– 1953. See: Partizanke, žene u narodno-oslobodilačkoj borbi, in: Duško Milinović and Zoran Petakov (eds.), Partizanke, žene u narodno-oslobodilačkoj borbi, Novi Sad: Cenzura, 2010, p. 13. 75 Welcoming speech of dr. Hamdije Čemerlića at the First Congress of the AFŽ BiH on June 8, 1945, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, 1945, Kutija 1, available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/272 76 For instance: Glavni Odbor AFŽBiH, Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Sreski izvještaj AFŽ-a za srez sarajevski Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (elections, building a children’s summer camp, national education, literacy courses), Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 4, 1137/48, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Dopis Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Doboj Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a za BiH, 7.2.1947. godine” (report on the work of the health section, literacy courses) Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 2, 199/47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Sreski Odbor AFŽ-a Bijeljina, Zapisnik sa sastanka Sekretarijata Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (organising women for construction of the Bijeljina-Rača railway). Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 1182, 1948. �188 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT prove that the tasks assigned to AFŽ members were nearly always related to their biological perception as women, mothers, sisters, and comrades, who were expected to fulfil all norms and requirements inherent in their “natural” roles. The plenary session of the Republican Committee of the AFŽBiH in 1946 reaffirmed these tasks, as well as the importance of voting.77 However, it quickly become clear that the AFŽ’s work in the second phase was linked to modernisation – mass shock working, construction and industrialisation – together with all the other obligations arising from the gender division of labour and its perpetuation. After political work was transferred to the NF, the AFŽ became an organisation with exclusively social functions, in cooperation with the Front and the ministries. The year 1948 was a turning point: the break with Stalin and conflict with the Cominform, the turn toward market mechanisms, and accordingly, with the introduction of self-management, the first economic reforms. Fearing attack and invasion, the state initially mobilised the masses for labour and non-stop production. After 1949 and Yugoslavia’s admission to the UN Security Council the threat of war receded. Yugoslavia turned to self-management, which was, in its first phase, supposed to increase profitability in investments and production, thus accelerating the accumulation of capital. Under the logic of production, women became the first “suspects”. In the words of Vida Tomšić, the first postwar president of the AFŽ, “they were regarded as unprofitable labour due to maternity”.78 However her argument nevertheless assumes that women, as free and autonomous wage-labourers, were in reality labour-power that produced value and surplus value. Field reports preserved in the archives illustrate how the country turned to the market and how this affected women and the AFŽ’s work. This period would prove to be paradigmatic since it conditioned the later approach toward women and the system of social production, reproduction, and subsistence. With the coming to power and gradual demobilisation of the mass antifascist movement, the AFŽ became less and less a revolutionary organisation, and more and more an administrative body of the NF. The AFŽ performed background functions related to the social preconditions for the mass entry of peasant women into the 77 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH,“Zapisnik sa plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a BiH održanog 05. i 06.06.1946.” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo, 116/46, 1946. Available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/332 78 Quoted in: Stojaković, Gordana: “Vida Tomšič – zašto je ukinut AFŽ”, 2014b; available at: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/353 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 189 industrial workforce, while at the time of (failed) collectivization one of its tasks was to organise the entry of women into the cooperatives. We find numerous reports describing the organisation of 8th March Women’s Day celebrations, which always culminated in competitions between women workers from different counties to see who could fulfil production norms “more closely, better, faster” and produce more goods. Although cooperatives and agro-industrial combines were introduced after 1945, the state never fully carried through the formal expropriation of landed property, so the category of rural private ownership never disappeared. Susan Woodward79 argues that the progressive laws explicitly relating to the protection of women, children, and family, taken separately, are merely logical means to an end. However, as she notes with such brilliance, we only see the real picture when all these laws are taken as a whole: in fact the new policies prepared what was a compromise between the commitment to prohibit wholesale all those customs and laws seen to demean women on the one hand, and the need for families to take responsibility for tasks the government was not ready to assume, on the other, with a vision of relations between men and women as equal, nurturing, voluntary, and free (that is “private”).80 In other words, Susan Woodward observes the same thing in Yugoslavia as does G. M. Tamás in the case of the Soviet Bloc, namely that the distinction characteristic of market society between the private and the public persists despite the fact that the East Bloc countries were indeed more egalitarian. Tamás emphasises that truly socialist societies are societies in transition to a social order without wage-labour, the production of commodities, money, a strict gender division of labour, material, social and cultural inequalities, without a state in the sense of superiority, institutions of the repressive state apparatus like the army, the police, prisons, camps, churches, compulsory doctrines, and oppressions of all kinds.81 Taking into account the discontinuous and unequal temporality of revolutionary change noted above, this is the measure of Yugoslav and any other possible and imaginable socialism (let alone communism) – this, and not the greater equality that existed in Yugoslavia and other Eastern Bloc societies. 79 Woodward speaks of the feminisation of agricultural labour, one of the consequences of introducing market mechanisms. See Woodward, 1985, op. cit. 80 Ibid., p.430–431. 81 G. M. Tamás, Normative orders; available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZyKxnPUrVo �190 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT Tamás’s analysis is outstanding because it shows that what is posited by classical liberal philosophy – labour as a private act entered into of one’s own (private, autonomous) will, which therefore does not belong to the public, political sphere – also survived in really-existing socialism. Therefore, in ‘really-existing socialism’ (and this also applies to Yugoslav socialism), labour is in its essence free wage-labour which, regardless of the institutions of workers’ self-management and associated labour, falls within the rule of exchange value. Given that the nature of labour remained private, so remained the reproduction of systemic exploitation and domination, i.e. market exchange motivated by profit, leading to what we find in the archives from 1950 onwards: mass lay-offs of women workers, pregnant women, and female labour in general (despite legal prohibitions and extremely progressive measures protecting mothers and children82). In other words, the moment when respecting the law became too expensive, and profit had to be made, women were the first to suffer. Thus, reports from the field contradicted the laws adopted the year before and AFŽ members were evidently deeply disorientated. In a memo to the Information Department of the Central Committee of the CPBiH, the Republican Committee of the AFŽ wrote,83: “credits worth 1,700,000 dinars were earmarked for the construction of a kindergarten in Brezničani, but nothing so far has been done about this […] out of a total of 75 workers, the enterprises have sacked 50 women, some of whom are on sick 82 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Izvještaj Centralnog odbora Beograd sa sastanka socijalno-zdravstvenog saveta pri Komitetu za socijalno staranje pri Vladi FNRJ Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 3, no. 1124-47, 1947: A set of laws and directives on the protection of pregnant women and mothers with newborn babies was adopted, giving women in employment the right to maternal leave six weeks prior to and six weeks after childbirth. These laws entitled them to take breaks from work in order to breastfeed every three hours during the first six months after childbirth. In 1949 these directives were amended to include additional relief for mothers and came as the result of more favorable economic conditions in the country as a whole. The new amendments granted shorter working hours to pregnant women and mothers who lived far from their place of work. For these women, the working day was 4 hours long during the first six months after childbirth, and this particular arrangement could be prolonged for up to three years if there was valid reason. During that time, the mother received 75% of her salary for six months, 50% after that. Women were entitled to a vacation after three months of maternity leave. The directives prohibited assigning pregnant woman tasks that required overtime work, night shifts, and provided for the transfer of women to easier jobs. The directive on establishing crèches and kindergartens obliged every company with over 200 female employees (there were over 100 such companies in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) to open a crèche with their own funds to provide working mothers with a place for their children. In the journal Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement) from 1937 we read almost identical proposals for the protection of pregnant women and maternity rights as were to become law in socialist Yugoslavia. See: Ženski pokret, 1937, op. cit., pp. 10–11. 83 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, “Dopis glavnog odbora AFŽ CK KP BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine”, Kutija 9, 497/50, 1950. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 191 leave and some pregnant”. With the introduction of self-management, reports come back with a mass of information regarding layoffs of women, budget cuts, a lack of crèches and nurseries, and hence the impossibility for women to advance themselves politically because they had no one to whom they could leave their children. All this hit women in more ways than one, so that the decisions adopted by a consultation meeting of leaders of county and regional branches of the AFŽBiH84 state as one of the main tasks of the organisation: “In addition to carrying out agitation for the involvement of women in the economy, our organisation has to provide housing for women, oversee the living and working conditions of women in the economy. To make sure that firms do not reduce the number of workers at the expense of pregnant women and women with children”. If we place this in a wider perspective, it becomes clearer that the emancipation of women was increasingly thought of as the “emancipation from the constraints of the traditional social order, rather than the broader meaning of liberation from all forms of oppression”.85 Consequently, the 1950s generally represent a regression in relation to the proclaimed equality. The dominant role of women was increasingly bound up with motherhood, a virtually Fordist model of the nuclear family was promoted, together with monogamous relationships and the consolidation of the gender division of labour in both the home and industry. Women’s employment now began to decline, the trend continuing in the following decades. Barbara Jančar-Webster points out that the process of industrialisation already entailed the feminisation of certain sectors and professions in the inter-war period, and the same trend persisted in the second Yugoslavia.86 In the Kingdom, industry (textile, tobacco, services) employed approximately 200,000 women 84 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zaključci sa savjetovanja rukovodilaca sreskih i oblasnih organizacija AFŽ-a Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, 422/50; Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik plenuma oblasnog odbora AFŽ-a za Mostarsku oblast održanog 18.5.1950. godine, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, 1071/6, 1950. The information in this document also points to the same trend. In a meeting between activists from Sarajevo and Mostar, Ševala Tanović, a committee member from Gacko, stated: “The entire work of our organisation relies on full-timers. Women are opposed to kindergartens. Three heavily pregnant comrades were fired a month ago. The Secretariat of the AFŽ asked for them to be rehired, pointing to the improper attitude toward pregnant women. The effort to have them rehired failed. When an explanation was requested as to why they were not fit for work, the following was stated of one of the female comrades: she has three children, and is about to have a fourth. We do not need that kind of employee, and in her place we will hire a man.” (My emphasis.) The mass layoffs of the 50s are also documented by Ivana Pantelić: see, Pantelić, 2011, op. cit. 85 Molyneux, Maxine, Family Reform in Socialist States: a Hidden Agenda, Feminist Review, 1985, 47– 64, p. 52. 86 Jančar-Webster, Barbara, Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941-1945. Arden Press: Colorado, 1990, p. 17, 165. �192 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT workers, while in 1939 domestic servants comprised the largest group of workers outside agriculture. In the second Yugoslavia, women also constituted a less skilled workforce: they were employed in industrial sectors with lower pay, were generally more likely to be unemployed and represented a reserve army of labour. In my opinion, Susan Woodward has successfully exploded the myths of women’s equality in Yugoslavia, which have today attained the status of legend: the pressures on women to enter the labour force that are familiar in the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were never present in Yugoslavia. The share of women in the social sector labour force actually declined during the 1950s and has grown only gradually since 1957 to reach, by the late 1970s, those levels associated with Western European averages (about 33 percent), rather than those of high participation countries of Scandinavia or Eastern Europe. On the other hand, women have been disproportionately subject to unemployment since the government began gathering unemployment data in the early 1950s.87 Only on the basis of uneven market development can we understand the astonishing data presented by Tea Petrin and Jane Humphries: „the share of women workers in the total active labour force and the gross female labour force participation rate are little different in the post-war period as compared with the 1920s and 1930s. Especially egregious is the fact that in 1931 women represented 33.5% of the total labour force, and the number barely rose to 36% in 1971”.88 From the 1950s, documents in the archives display what in later years and decades would become and remain a chronic problem for Bosnia and Herzegovina, only worsening over time due to increasing inequality between the federal republics. Thus we read that, “the budget did not approve the building of day care centers”;89 while a woman from the Ukrina enterprise stated that, “the company needs a daycare facility, but there is no building to house one. Women with young children are sent home to feed them, while other women leave their children with their neighbors because there is nowhere else to leave them”.90 Self-management gave enterprises and economic actors greater freedom to decide about their work, while the consequences of market-based decision-making Woodward, 1985, op.cit., p. 549. See also: Tea Petrin and Jane Humphries, Women in the SelfManaged Economy of Yugoslavia, Economic Analyses and Workers’ Managment, 1, XIV, 1980, p. 77. 88 Petrin and Humphries, 1980, op. cit., pp. 71–73. 87 89 Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja s rukovodiocima srezova održanog 24. i 25. januara 1950.” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, str. 2 Kutija 8, no. of document unknown 1950. 90 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, „Zapisnik sa OOAFŽ-a održanog u Tuzli 14.2.1950.” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 276, 1949-1950 
 �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 193 only exacerbated the position of women as a whole. All the problems observed in the capitalist West at the time were also present in Yugoslavia: the feminisation of certain industries and professions, which is to say that women always worked in low pay sectors, there was a gender pay gap, almost no women in managerial positions, whilst in the Yugoslav case the gender pay gap in the poorer republics stood out even more due to structural differences. The end result for poorer parts of the country, like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, could only be even greater inequalities in development. Thus, from 1959 to 1979 the coverage (of children up to seven years of age) of nurseries and kindergartens rose from 2.4% to 10% in Yugoslavia as a whole. Of course, they were mostly children of skilled and semi-skilled workers, with a large number of middle class children as well. This followed the same trend as in the West: middle class parents benefited most from the institutions of the welfare state. However, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1959 and 1979 the number of crèches, kindergartens and nurseries reached 137, but only 3.2% of children found places. If we compare this to Slovenia, the most developed republic, where 616 such institutions were established in the same period, covering 27.7% of children, the consequences of unequal market development are crystal clear.91 4. After the End, a Beginning instead of a Conclusion It was my intention in this work to reconstruct a historical event and through such a reconstruction trace the history of the AFŽ. The AFŽ was formally dissolved in 1953 and its then President, Vida Tomšić, gave the reason that, “we have fulfilled one of our tasks to a considerable degree, if such a thing can be said of a country […] in a certain sense, in some parts of our country, and especially in the cities, we have achieved equality”.92 In this, she was merely repeating what was said in the Soviet Union when the Zhenotdel was dissolved in 1930. But the fact that in Serbia, for instance, a law on equal inheritance was only adopted in 195593 is sufficient proof that her claim was plainly false. At the point of the dissolution 91 Milić, Anđelka, Berković, Eva and Petrović Ruža, Domaćinstvo, porodica i brak u Jugoslaviji. Belgrade: Institute for Sociological Research of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, 1981, p. 102. The data contained in this work confirms that the same trends existed in Yugoslavia as in the Western countries at the time, and, more importantly, that since the 1950s we can observe greater inequalities between poorer and richer republics and their consequences for the structure of education, healthcare, and society in general. 92 Cited in: Stojaković, 2014b, op. cit. 93 Gudac-Dodić, Vera, Under the Aegis of Family, Women in Serbia, The Journal of International Social Research, Vol. 3 no. 13, 2010. p. 112. �194 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT of the AFŽ, many laws that were gradually implemented in the 1960s and 1970s had not yet been adopted, so we cannot even speak of equal civil rights. Already by the mid-1950s, the narrative of the AFŽ disintegrated and was dissolved into that of the NOB, which became the centerpiece and the ideological pillar of the state apparatus. The AFŽ collective was supplanted by individual heroines who had their very own names and surnames, words and deeds. Thus was the history of the AFŽ first revised and the division between the private and the public institutionalised. If Svetlana Slapšak94, in her analysis of the film Slavica (1947), talked of the death of the figure of the partizanka, perhaps we should say that it was preceded by the death of the afežeovka, even though the AFŽ was only officially dissolved five years later. In death, the partizanka lives on and recedes into a glorious past, becoming a symbol of postwar socialist Yugoslavia. She is the subject of officially sanctioned historical memory as promoted by state commemorations, historiography, and memorials. She becomes part of the glorious past, while female citizens as productive subjects become figures of the present and the future. The fact that there is no historical overview of the engagement of Yugoslav women as a whole in the AFŽ, while there exist many histories of women’s participation in the NOB, suggests that the AFŽ started to disappear from public memory as early as the mid-1950s when the first, Croatian work on the role of women in the NOB was published. It would take three whole decades after the end of the war for the first Bosnian work to appear. In that time much had changed. The memories of the AFŽ survivors, the very nature of the revolution, the country and its laws – all were changed. But, one thing remained the same. Women were still unequal and did not enjoy equal rights. That is why Lydia Sklevicky’s gender analysis of school textbooks is timeless. Women became or remained invisible citizens, while references to horses and men continued to govern the dominant historical and educational narratives95. It is impossible to see Vida Tomšić’s statement that women “turned to fashion and antiquated modes of behaviour […] as witnessed in the daily newspapers”, as anything other than moralising because it completely disregards the class differences which started to appear in Yugoslav society, not just between classes, but also within the working class. They started to appear due to the denial of the simple fact that the division between the public and the private, the economic and the political, still existed. Women still produced labour-power, yet the burden of reproduction remained in 94 Slapšak, Svetlana. Ženske ikone XX veka. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2001. 95 Sklevicky shows that references to horses (and men) far supercede references to women in school textbooks. See: Konji, žene, ratovi (Horses, women, wars), op.cit. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 195 the private sphere. The peculiarity of labour-power is that it not only produces value but is also the only commodity that is not produced in the direct process of production. Since the private reproduction of labour-power in the family does not produce value, i.e. it produces it only indirectly, it has as such no exchange value. Hence female labour-power has less value on the market because it is considered, more or less, as a temporary supplement to family income. Such was also the case in Yugoslavia. The progressive measures implemented by the state in fact shifted responsibilities from traditionally male preserves and professions, so that from the outset a growing burden of private and privatised reproduction fell to women. That is precisely why women oscillated between “profitable” and “non-profitable” labour-power – and that is why the end of the AFŽ initiates the forgetting of the fact that without the socialisation of the burden of reproduction there can be no socialist society. Today, when formal rights and freedoms – won through hard struggle – collapse like a house of cards under the onslaught of political reaction and its economic assaults, the domination of the market (and fathers, priests, and leaders) becomes increasingly without limit. The entire burden of social reproduction is transferred to the working class in general and to women in particular. What then would the AFŽ mean today? What political lessons can we draw? First and foremost, the left’s response to contemporary historical revisionism cannot and must not be revisionist. The second lesson has already been indicated: Marx and Fourier’s claim that the position of women is the measure of humanity’s progress, meaning here that the defeat of women’s emancipation was at the same time necessarily the defeat of the revolution. As Lenin used to say, the longevity of a revolution depends on the extent to which women are actively involved. The third, but no less important lesson is that the halting of the revolution does not mean it is impossible. On the contrary, the AFŽ demonstrates that although we cannot repeat the past we can learn from it that only through joint political struggle – which is also always a struggle for (but not only for) rights – can we emancipate ourselves and the conditions in which we live. Emancipation can only come from collective efforts, which, paraphrasing Bensaïd, must never abandon itself to the idea that revolution is impossible. That is the final and most important lesson of the history of the AFŽ and of Yugoslavia. Translated by: Tijana Okić �196 TIJANA OKIĆ FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT Archival Materials: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Dopis sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Velika Kladuša, Arhiv BiH, Kutija 2, 901/47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Izvještaj Centralnog odbora Beograd sa sastanka socijalnozdravstvenog saveta pri Komitetu za socijalno staranje pri Vladi FNRJ Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Kutija 3, br. 1124-47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja predsjednica i sekretara sreskih odbora AFŽ održan u Sarajevu 20.1.1949. godine, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, ” Kutija 7a,? 1949., Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik s plenuma za oblast Bihać,? Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, br. dokumenta nepoznat, 1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik plenarnog sastanka Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a održan 26.9.1948. godine, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 84/48, 1948. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, Zapisnik Plenarnog sastanka AFŽ-a u Bihaću održanog u prostorijama u vjećnici G.N.O dana 9.2.1950. godine, str. 2. Arhiv Bosne i Hrecegovine, Kutija 9, 1061/5, 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik sa sastanka sekretarijata Oblasnog odbora za oblast sarajevsku koji se održaje 10.1.1950. godine, 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 1082/4, 1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH, Pozdravna riječ dr. Hamdije Čemerlića sa Prvog kongresa AFŽ-a BiH od 08.06.1945, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, 1945, Kutija 1, 1945. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Sreski izvještaj AFŽ-a za srez sarajevski Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 4, 1137/48, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Dopis Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Doboj Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a za BiH, 7.2.1947. godine (izvještaj o radu zdravstvene sekcije, analfabetski tečajevi), Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 2, 199/47, 1947., Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik sa sastanka Sekretarijata sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bijeljina Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (organiziranje žena za rad na izgradnji pruge Bijeljina-Rača), 1948. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 1182, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a, Zapisnik sa plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a BiH održanog 05. i 06.06. 1946., Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 116/46., 1946. Plenum je održan u Napretkovoj čitaonici, a pored članica AFŽ ispred NF-a bio je prisutan Ljubo Babić. dostupan na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/332 Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Dopis glavnog odbora AFŽ CK KP BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 497/50, 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Zaključci sa savjetovanja iz rukovodilaca sreskih i oblasnih organizacija AFŽ-a Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, 422/50 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik s plenuma oblasnog odbora AFŽ-a za Mostarsku oblast održan 18.5.1950. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 197 Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja sa rukovodiocima srezova koji se održaje 24. i 25. januara 1950. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, str. 2 Kutija 8, ? 1950. 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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ��ADELA JUŠIĆ Combined technique �ADELA JUŠIĆ Combined technique Cannons roaring, rifles cracking, chaos all around me, and I’m sleepy … And so I get some sleep, freshen up, and press on. That’s how I survived. �ADELA JUŠIĆ Pencil drawing ��BIOS CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ TIJANA OKIĆ NARDINA ZUBANOVIĆ ALEKSANDRA NINA KNEŽEVIĆ SUNITA FIŠIĆ KASJA JERLAGIĆ ADELA JUŠIĆ �206 BIOS CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI currently works as a EURIAS Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and also works with the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism in Pula on the NEWFELPRO programme. She graduated in political science in Bologna and completed her postgraduate and doctoral studies in Gender Studies at the Culture and History Institute in Utrecht. From 2012 to 2014 she worked at the University of Edinburgh as a post-doc and associate at the CITSEE project. In her thesis she examined women’s social and political engagement in Italy and Yugoslavia (1945–1957). She has published a number of papers on the history of women in a European context. In recent years she has been researching the effects of post-socialist transition and deindustrialisation on gender relations in the former Yugoslavia, with a focus on textile workers. AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. At the Department of Comparative Literature and Librarianship she teaches Introduction to the Study of Literature, Introduction to Narratology, and Feminist Literary Theories. She has also worked as an associate at the Interdisciplinary Post-Graduate Gender Studies Programme at the University of Sarajevo. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo; the topic of her thesis was Prikaz rata u tekstovima bosanskohercegovačkih spisateljica: žensko ratno pismo 1992.-1995. (Representation of War in Texts by Bosnian-Herzegovinian Women Writers: Women Writing War 1992–1995.) Her research focuses on feminist theories, theories of narration and literarytheoretical research on war literature. DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ is a reader in English linguistics and cultural studies at the Faculty of Philology, University of Banja Luka. She has published over thirty articles on representation, ethnicity, gender, discourse analysis, media and film, as well as three monographs: Diskurs, moć i međunarodna zajednica (Discourse, Power and the International Community) (2007, Filozofski fakultet, Banja Luka), Youth Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Social Science Approaches (2013, Palgrave, London) and Diskursi periferije (Discourses of the Periphery) (2013, Biblioteka XX vek, Belgrade). She has edited three conference proceedings: Living with Patriarchy: Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects Across Cultures (2011, John Benjamins, Amsterdam), U okrilju nacije: konstruisanje nacionalnog i državnog identiteta kod mladih u Bosni i Hercegovini (Under the Wing of the Nation: the Construction of National and State Identity in Bosnian-Herzegovinian Youth) (2011, CKSP, Banja Luka), and Kritičke kulturološke studije u post-jugoslovenskom prostoru (Critical Cultural Studies in a Post-Yugoslav Space) (2012, Filološki fakultet, Banja Luka). She has produced �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 207 and directed two documentary films: Kontrapunkt za nju (Counterpoint for Her) (2004) and Posao snova (Dream Job) (2006). She has taught at and visited many institutions of higher education at home and abroad, co-founded the BASOC (Banja Luka Social Centre) and as an activist she fights against nationalism and historical revisionism, for social justice and workers’ issues. She tries to live her life and raise her son in line with the principles of feminism. BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ is a researcher, editor and a member of the operations team at the Association for the Arts and Culture “Crvena”, where he researches the political economy of the urban question, management of urban resources, and urban mobilisation. He is currently preparing extensive research on rave culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1996–2006. He has published articles in international journals and proceedings, and has edited the volume Šta da napišem na zidu? (What Shall I Write on the Wall) published by “Crvena”. He has won the Open Society Fund Research Fellowship (2013–2014), the ERSTE Fundation Social Research Fellowship (2015–2016), and in September and October 2013 he was guest researcher at the Centre for Democracy Studies in Aarau, Switzerland. He has worked with a number of local and international organisations and academic institutions researching migration, electoral systems, local governance and political theory. TIJANA OKIĆ was born in Sarajevo in 1986. She read philosophy and sociology and obtained a Master’s degree in philosophy in Sarajevo, where she subsequently worked as an assistant lecturer-instructor. Since 2015 she is enrolled in PhD programme in philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. She has published several philosophical texts. Tijana organised and participated in the Plenums after the 2014 riots in Sarajevo. She is a contributing editor of the Viewpoint magazine. She translates from several languages, enjoys poetry and fiction. She currently lives between Sarajevo and Pisa. NARDINA ZUBANOVIĆ was born in Sarajevo in 1987. In 2014 she graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, where she is currently pursuing post-graduate studies. She uses different media, from sculpture to spatial intervention/installation, performance, photography and video. In 2009 she established the informal cultural organisation “Kolektiv Kreaktiva”, which has produced over 30 art events (exhibitions, workshops, concerts and performances) and has co-operated with over 100 cultural workers from all over the world. In addition to co-ordinating and programming for “Kolektiv Kreaktiva”, Nardina Zubanović has curated and participated at numerous solo and group exhibitions and art workshops in the region and be- �208 BIOS yond, in co-operation with institutions and associations such as the Historical Museum of BiH, (Exhibition ZID 2015), The National Gallery of BiH, (Sara Art Fair, 2015), The Seventh Art Club, (Bahanalije), Sarajevo, BiH, 2014, La Kultur Centre, (Dani otvorenog ateljea), Sarajevo BiH, 2015 and 2016, Land Art Colony, Javorwood Festival, Jahorina, BiH, 2016, Factory of Memories, Tirana, Albanija and Sarajevo, BiH, 2015, Actopolis, Crvena, Sarajevo, BiH, 2016, etc. ALEKSANDRA NINA KNEŽEVIĆ was born in Sarajevo in 1973. She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cetinje, Montenegro, Department of Graphic Design. Her playful typography and illustration work is marked by a pure, modern idea, and it communicates easily in an international visual language. She has received numerous international prizes and honours, and her work has been featured in many specialised art and design magazines (Communication Arts, Luezers Archive, Print, Typo, Fontmagazine …). In 2010 she featured in the Lürzer’ s Archive 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide 09–10 list. In the period between 2006 and 2010 she was Head of the Association of Applied Artists and Designers BiH (ULUPUBiH). She works as a freelance designer and inhouse designer and illustrator at the publishing house Buybook in Sarajevo. Her project Sarajevo Dingbats won the 2014 annual prize of the Collegium Artisticum group. SUNITA FIŠIĆ was born in Livno in 1989. She lives and works in Sarajevo, where she studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Besides other artistic media, she is works with forms such as illustration, painting and street art. She has participated in numerous exhibitions around the world, including: Wall Painting, LAB-1, Eindhoven, Hollang, 2016; Painting workshop, Grassroots project, Kolektiv Kreaktiva, LA Kultur, Sarajevo, BiH, 2015; Split 3D Street Art Festival, Split, Croatia, 2015; Beton IV Festival 3D street art, Sarajevo, BiH, 2015; Mostar Street Art Festival, decorating the walls in the city of Mostar, BiH, 2015; Individual Exhibition and Wall Painting, LAB 1, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, Holland 2014; Pecha Kucha art presentation, SOS Design Festival, Kriterion, Sarajevo, 2014; Individual exhibition of digital works, Bitola Open City Festival, Macedonia, 2014; Wall painting workshop, entrance of the Zetra Olympic Hall, Kids festival, Sarajevo, 2014; Mostar Street Art Festival, decorating the walls in the city of Mostar, 2014; Collective exhibition Inicijacija, Yage, Collegium Artisticum, 2014, etc. �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING 209 KASJA JERLAGIĆ was born in Sarajevo in 1996, where she lives and works. She studies at the Printmaking Department, Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. She has just begun her career as an artist, and has so far participated in only one collective exhibition – Kupujmo domaće at the Duplex100m2 gallery in Sarajevo in 2016. She volunteers at Duplex100m2 and the 11/07/95 gallery, and works at the Charlama gallery in Sarajevo, led by the artist Jusuf Hadžifejzović. ADELA JUŠIĆ (1982) was born in Sarajevo, where she lives and works. She took a Master’s degree in printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Sarajevo, in 2007, and holds another Master’s degree in human rights and democracy at the University of Sarajevo and the University of Bologna. She co-founded the Association for Culture and the Arts “Crvena”, where she has worked since 2010. Adela Jušić has exhibited at nearly 100 international exhibitions, including the Manifesta 8 biennial, Murcia, Španija; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Balkan Inisight, Pompidou Center, Paris, France, etc. She has participated in several residential programmes for artists umjetnike/ce (ISCP, New York; Kulturkontakt, Vienna; i.a.a.b. Basel, etc). She won the 2010 Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist, Henkel Young Artist Prize CEE 2011, and the special prize of the October Salon, Belgrade, 2013. She has participated in a number of panels, workshops and conferences (London School of Economics, Royal College of Art, London, UK, etc.). �210 GLOSSARY, ACRONYMS AND PERIODICALS Glossary, Acronyms and Periodicals AVNOJ AFŽ afežeovke CC CPY chetniks DFJ feredža FNRJ hajduci kadija kadinica CPBiH CPH CPY CPSU NDH NF NOB NOF NOO NO NOP NOR NOV partizanke Anti-Fascist Council of People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia Women’s Antifascist Front members and activists of the Women’s Antifascist Front Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia Serb-nationalist rebels, in particular members of Draža Mihailović’s ‘Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland’ Democratic Federal Yugoslavia burka, a veil covering the face and body worn by Muslim women Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia Christian anti-Ottoman rebel or outlaw judge in the Ottoman period wife of the judge in the Ottoman period Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina Communist Party of Croatia Communist Party of Yugoslavia Communist Party of the Soviet Union Independent State of Croatia, Axis puppet-state established in Occupied Croatia and BosniaHercegovina in April 1941 People’s Front People’s Liberation Struggle People’s Liberation Front People’s Liberation Committees People’s Committees People’s Liberation Movement People’s Liberation War People’s Liberation Army Female Partisan soldiers �THE LOST REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S ANTIFASCIST FRONT BETWEEN MYTH AND FORGETTING SFRJ SKOJ udarnice ustasha uskoci WIDF ZAVNOBiH ZAVNOH 211 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFRY League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia, the CPY’s youth organisation female shock workers ‘Insurgent’, a Croat fascist Croatian anti-Ottoman naval irregulars or pirate Women’s International Democratic Federation State Anti-fascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina State Anti-fascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Croatia Organisational Structure of the AWF/AFŽ 1: Centralni Odbor AFŽ-a Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a Mjesni Odbor AFŽ-a Okružni Odbor AFŽ-a Regionalni Odbor AFŽ-a Sreski Odbor AFŽ-a Zemaljski Odbor AFŽ-a Central Committee of the AFŽ of Yugoslavia Republican Committee of AFŽ (each of the republican organisations of the AFŽ was led by a Republican Committee) Local Committee of the AFŽ District Committee of the AFŽ Regional Committee of the AFŽ County Committee of the AFŽ Country Committee of the AFŽ List of Periodicals and Newspapers Ženski pokret Nova Žena Žena u borbi Naša žena Glas 1 As the word ‘councils’ is normally used in English translations of AVNOJ, ZAVNOBiH and ZAVNOH, we have rendered the ‘odbori’ of the AFŽ as ‘committees’. The structure of AFŽ Committees was hierarchical, that is they were organised on the top-down principle. �Acknowledgments: We would like to thank everyone, from Burma to Beijing, from Sweden to Texas, who contributed to the crowdfunding campaign which raised the initial funds for the digitisation of archival materials as part of the Šta je nama naša borba dala? (What Has Our Struggle Given Us?) project. We also wish to thank the staff of the Historical Museum and the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, without whose help the Archive of the Anti-Fascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina would not be possible. Also, we wish to thank the numerous organisations and persons who have supported our work and enriched the Archive: the Museum of the Second Session of the AVNOJ, UABNOR Centre Sarajevo, the Association of Anti-Fascists and Veterans of the National Liberation War of Tuzla canton, the Mediterranean Women’s Fund, Eve Ensler, Nina Karač, Feđa Kulenović, Boro Jurišić, Elvira Jahić, Stana Nastić, Lucija Mravić, Šemsa Galijašević, Alija Maglajlić, Nasiha Porobić, Milka Jakšić, Miholjka Reljić, Jelena Lazić, Ankica Đurić, members of “CRVENA” and many others. ��� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Istraživački radovi Knjiga Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The lost revolution – Women’s Antifascist Front between myth and forgetting Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Edited by: Andreja Dugandžić and Tijana Okić Illustrations edited by: Adela Jušić Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Published by: Association for Culture and Art CRVENA www.crvena.ba www.afzarhiv.org Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe with funds of the German Federal Ministry for Economic and Development and by Mediterranean Women’s Fund Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Association for Culture and Art CRVENA Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 63-M Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 211 pages Adela Jušić Ajla Demiragić Aleksandra Nina Knežević Andreja Dugandžić Boriša Mraović Chiara Bonfiglioli Danijela Majstorović Kasja Jerlagić Nardina Zubanović revolution Sunita Fišić Tijana Okić women's activism women's emancipation Women’s Antifascist Front World War II Yugoslavia (History) http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/e815c0c2228658133368576635f49b1f.pdf 34e501fac095c19ec1e7c517c23dffd4 PDF Text Text 1/2/2016 Women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia | CITSEE.eu Search CITSEE Studies CITSEE Stories Interviews and Discussions Country Profiles OP-Eds News CITSEE TV Related Content Photo Reportage CITSEE Blog CITSEE Research Project About Project Project Team Working Papers Links Contact us Home » CITSEE Story Becoming citizens: the politics of women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia Chiara Bonfiglioli In 1947 Didara Dukagjini, a seventeen-year-old ethnic Albanian girl raised in a wealthy family in the town of Prizren, was told by her father that she had to abandon her feredža/ferexhe, the full Islamic veil that covered her head and face when she ventured outside the house. The local communist authorities had invited the most important families in town to set the example, in order to establish the new socialist values in the traditional and underdeveloped region of Kosovo. Didara was shocked by her father’s decision. She thought she could not survive the shame of going out “naked” in the streets. Upon deciding that she had to take off the veil, her father also decided that she would enrol in a teacher training course. Three months later, Didara obtained employment as a teacher, since for the literacy campaign, literate workers who could teach in the different villages of Kosovo were in great demand. Two years later, at age nineteen, Didara fell in love with Toša, a Serbian communist militant, who proposed to her: “Communist from head to toe, he did not care at all about the difference in our national backgrounds” (Malešević 2004: 47). In order to marry the man she loved, and in order to avoid an arranged marriage with an Albanian man, Didara had to escape from her father’s house, severing relations with her parents for several years to come. She later became a member of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ), an organization founded during the Resistance to involve women in politics. As a http://www.citsee.eu/citsee-story/becoming-citizens-politics-women%E2%80%99s-emancipation-socialist-yugoslavia 1/5 �1/2/2016 Women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia | CITSEE.eu of Yugoslavia (AFŽ), an organization founded during the Resistance to involve women in politics. As a “living example” of women’s emancipation, she was sent to different villages to recruit other Albanian women for the activities of the Popular Front. While the case of Didara is exceptional, it is also an illustration of the extraordinary social and political transformations that took place in Yugoslavia in the immediate post-war period, and of the implications they had for women. Citizens, workers, mothers: framing equality and difference In 1946, for the first time, women’s rights as political, social and economic beings were inscribed in the new Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as a result of women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance during World War Two. The provisions dedicated to women’s equality were modelled on the 1936 Soviet Constitution, and thus reflected a radical revolutionary stance on previous class, gender and national inequalities. The main concern of Yugoslav legislators was to come to terms with the different family law provisions that subsisted in different regions of old Yugoslavia. From the point of view of family law, the old kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-1941) was divided into six different juridical areas. In certain parts the Austrian civil code from 1811 was applied, in others the Serbian civil code of 1844, while in predominantly Muslim areas religious law ruled. The new legislation hence aimed to unify family law and to overcome discriminatory provisions, notably the discriminatory treatment of woman in relation to economic rights, inheritance, custody of children and the birth of ’illegitimate‘ offspring. Article 24 of the Yugoslav Constitution inscribed women’s equality in the Constitution, stating that: “[w]omen have equal rights with men in all fields of state, economic and social-political life.” At the same time, women’s difference as mothers was inscribed in the very same article, which continued: “Women have the right to the same pay as that received by men for the same work, and as workers or employees they enjoy special protection.  The state especially protects the interests of mothers and children by the establishment of maternity hospitals, children’s homes and day nurseries and by the right of mothers to a leave with pay before and after childbirth.” The idea of women’s social motherhood – modelled after the same idea in the Soviet Union – was very important in Yugoslavia in the immediate post-war period. According to this idea, women contributed to society not only in their equal engagement in the public sphere, but also in their contribution to the reproduction of society because of their ability to give birth. The state, therefore, had to recognize that motherhood constituted a social contribution, and accordingly had to provide adequate welfare measures for mothers and children. Women’s emancipation as a feature of socialist modernization While during the Second World War the AFŽ was created in order to involve women in politics and to support the partisan struggle, in the late 1940s the AFŽ was in charge of implementing socialist politics of women’s emancipation, targeting in particular the most backward, rural areas of Yugoslavia. Despite the fact that women’s juridical, economic and social rights had been inscribed in the new Yugoslav Constitution, AFŽ militants were immediately confronted with the gap that existed between these rights and women’s everyday lives. The reports written by AFŽ local sections in the late 1940s and early 1950s testify to the extent and the degree of patriarchal domination, physical exploitation and lack of education in which the majority of women lived, notably in the countryside, and to the scarcity of resources of which the organization disposed in its fight against these phenomena. AFŽ activists describe the majority of women as exploited in their domestic, agricultural and industrial work. In the late 1940s the organization targeted in particular “the most backward and passive masses of women”, and saw itself as the institutional body in charge of the modernization of women’s lives, notably in rural areas, which constituted the majority of households in the Yugoslav Federation. In fact, in a number of speeches, AFŽ leader Vida Tomšić[i] reasserted the idea proposed by Fourier, and popularized by Marx, according to which the condition of women in a society gives the measure of the development and civilization of that same society. The persistence of patriarchal and “backward” households in rural areas, and particularly in the southern regions of Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Metohija, was seen as an obstacle to the modernization of the country and to its socialist achievements. http://www.citsee.eu/citsee-story/becoming-citizens-politics-women%E2%80%99s-emancipation-socialist-yugoslavia 2/5 �1/2/2016 Women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia | CITSEE.eu From darkness to enlightenment: the campaign against feredže Already in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the interwar period, Serbian, Croatian and Slovene elites perceived the regions which had for a long time been dominated by the Ottoman Empire – the republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and the regions of Kosovo and Metohija – as the most backward and underdeveloped areas, notably because of the diffusion of Islam. The existence of a consistent Slavic speaking population who had converted to Islam was seen as an unwanted legacy of the Ottoman occupation. Orientalist conceptions about Islam were interiorized by communist elites, who also doubted the political loyalty of these populations. Since the Slavic-speaking Muslim population of Bosnia and the Albanian-speaking population of Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro participated only marginally in the antifascist Resistance, moreover, the mark of civic backwardness was coupled with a mark of political backwardness. The campaign against the full veil or feredža/ferexhe, which covered the whole body and face, ran from 1946 until the early 1950s, when the different republics approved a number of laws forbidding the full veil. This wasn’t a new idea: Serbian and Croatian feminist women’s organizations had already written about the need to “liberate” their Muslim sisters from the slavery of the veil in the first half of the twentieth century. The campaign against the feredža/ferexhe was marked by a far-reaching faith in humanism and historical progress, and by a strong ideal of socialist modernization, of which women’s emancipation was seen as an intrinsic component.   A report published in the journal Žena Danas in March 1951, recounts the journey of 400 Muslim men and women from Macedonia to Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and the coast. The article is significantly titled “The first excursion of unveiled faces.” For many participants, this was their first departure from their native village, and among them were many women who have abandoned their veil. Marija Marinčić writes in particular about a young Turkish woman, Azbija, who had taken off the veil and had learned her first words in Macedonian: “The veil, I took off the veil.” Marinčić continues, describing Azbija: “She [Azbija] looked at me. In that moment I felt that all that was old in her had died, that she felt as free as I did. In her gaze there was warmth and a great joy: – I used to live like a beast (životinja), now I know that I am a human being (čovek).” An unfinished revolution: women’s citizenship in post-Yugoslav states In the 1970s, thirty years after the inscription of women’s rights in the Yugoslav Constitution, the country had undergone a rapid process of modernization and urbanization. Women’s literacy and  access to the labour market had reached unprecedented levels; inequalities in women’s rights had   been reduced enormously compared to the interwar years.[ii] Yet, women’s full equality was far from realized. In the 1970s and 1980s feminist activists throughout Yugoslavia denounced the failure of the egalitarian policies implemented by socialist authorities, who claimed to have solved the “women’s question” once and for all. Second wave feminists exposed the gap between the formal rhetoric of socialist equality and the gendered discrimination which persisted at the material and symbolic level, notably in the less developed republics of the Federation (Meznarić 1985). They denounced the sexist imagery of the press, as well as the widespread diffusion of domestic violence throughout the country. Nonetheless, socialist politics appeared progressive in comparison to the process of “retraditionalisation” of gender relations which took place in the 1990s. As pointed out by feminist activists in the region, the egalitarian discourse promoted by socialist authorities was suddenly replaced during the break-up of Yugoslavia by the overtly sexist discourse of nationalist regimes, which portrayed women’s emancipation as an “unnatural” effect of the socialist system. Women were represented in essentialist ways, as http://www.citsee.eu/citsee-story/becoming-citizens-politics-women%E2%80%99s-emancipation-socialist-yugoslavia 3/5 �1/2/2016 Women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia | CITSEE.eu biological reproducers of the nation, while gendered and sexualised metaphors were used to construct essentialist national and ethnic identities (Iveković and Mostov 2002). The war rapes perpetrated during the Yugoslav conflict, moreover, showed that women’s bodies had become a terrain of political, social and ethnic warfare (Žarkov 2007).  It became clear that gender inequalities and violence against women increased in times of political and social conflict (NikolićRistanović 2000), and that women’s political, social and economic rights could be easily threatened by processes of political “transition”, with devastating effects (Papić 1999).  Women’s everyday lives in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia have undergone profound political, economic and social changes as a result of the post-socialist, post-conflict transition, and as a consequence of processes of Europeanization and globalization affecting the region. Women’s citizenship rights remain a contested terrain in post Yugoslav states, twenty years after the end of socialism and the beginning of the Yugoslav wars. Sources Erlich, Vera Stein 1966. Family in transition; a study of 300 Yugoslav villages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Iveković, Rada, and Julie Mostov. 2002. From gender to nation. Ravenna: Longo. Jeraj, Mateja. 2006. Vida Tomšić. In Biographical dictionary of women's movements and feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe : 19th and 20th centuries, edited by F. d. Haan, K. Daskalova and A. Loutfi. Budapest ; New York: CEU Press/Central European University Press. Malešević, Miroslava. 2004. Didara. Životna prica jedne Prizrenke. Beograd: Srpski genealoski centar. Meznarić, Silva. 1985. Theory and Reality: The Status of Employed Women in Yugoslavia. In Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe, edited by S. L. Wolchik and A. G. Meyer. Durham: Duke University Press. Nikolić-Ristanović, Vesna, ed. 2000. Women, violence and war: wartime victimization of refugees in the Balkans. Budapest: Central European University Press. Papić, Zarana. 1999. Women in Serbia: Post-Communism, War and Nationalist Mutations. In Gender politics in the Western Balkans: women and society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav successor states, edited by S. P. Ramet. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Žarkov, Dubravka. 2007. The Body of War. Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia. Durham and London: Duke University Press. [i] Vida Tomšić (1913-1998, born Bernot), became an antifascist activist in the interwar period, when she was a law student at the University of Ljubljana. In 1934 she joined the Communist Party, whose Central Committee she entered in 1940. She was arrested and tortured by the occupation forces during the war, and her husband Tone Tomšić was executed. After the war she held key positions in the Slovenian and Federal government, simultaneously acting as a leader of the AFŽ. She contributed to the revision of the 1974 Constitution, promoting women’s rights, family planning, and the rights to contraception and abortion. Tomšić also advocated women’s rights in international settings, such as the United Nations. For an extensive biography of Vida Tomšić, see Jeraj (2006). [ii]  For an overview of patriarchal relations in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, see Erlich (1966). -----------------Photo 1: Post-war Sarajevo. Courtesy of NŠK - Narodna in študijska knjižnica (Slovene National and Study Library), Trieste. Photo 2: Didara Dukagjini with her husband in Dragaš/Sharr, Kosovo (1949). Courtesy of Miroslava Malešević CITSEE Story Bosnia-Herzegovina Slovenia Citizenship Emancipation Updated on: 24 October 2012 Croatia Kosovo Macedonia Partisans Women http://www.citsee.eu/citsee-story/becoming-citizens-politics-women%E2%80%99s-emancipation-socialist-yugoslavia Montenegro Serbia 4/5 �1/2/2016 Women’s emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia | CITSEE.eu 0 Comments 1  CITSEE ⤤ Share  Recommend 3 Login Sort by Best Start the discussion… Be the first to comment. WHAT'S THIS? ALSO ON CITSEE ‘What’s in a name?’ The Dilemmas of ReNaming Yugoslav Gypsies into Roma Farewell to our social rights? 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Title A name given to the resource Becoming citizens: the politics of women's emancipation in socialist Yugoslavia - Chiara Bonfiglioli Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived www,academia.edu http://www.citsee.eu Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 13-IR Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 5 pages Chiara Bonfiglioli citizens women's activism women's emancipation Yugoslavia http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/a66a7031509bd0253d46e002208fe4e9.pdf 1eab15e929ef5d1a656dd2ddbf6d23fc PDF Text Text Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 4 COLD WAR INTERNATIONALISMS, NATIONALISMS AND THE YUGOSLAV–SOVIET SPLIT The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia Chiara Bonfiglioli Introduction In the Italian and in the Yugoslav context, similarly to other European contexts,1 the geography and timing of women’s political movements after 1945 had deep connections to the geographies, temporalities and utopian imaginaries of the antifascist Resistance, of communist internationalism, of working-class and New Left movements.2 These radical geographies and imaginaries, however, were also extraordinarily ambivalent when it came to gender.3 After the partial disruption of the gender order provoked by women’s participation in the Resistance, the beginning of the Cold War implied the ‘exclusion of radical possibilities’ and a return to the consensual signifiers of home and family, ‘suturing an idealised domesticity to the threatened security of the nation and its way of life’.4 In two countries divided by a major Cold War fault line and by a contested border between ‘West’ and ‘East’, gendered bodies and allegorical female figures served as key discursive devices to re-signify ideological and ethnic boundaries.5 At the same time, as Helen Laville points out in her Cold War Women, ‘however important this use of women as symbols [ … ] it should not elide the actual contribution of women to international relations as active participants’.6 My current research project consists of a transnational and diachronic study of encounters and connections between Italian and Yugoslav women active in antifascist and left-wing politics in the early Cold War period (1945–57). I am interested mainly in two internationalist women’s organisations, the Unione Donne Italiane (Union of ˇ Italian Women, UDI) and the Antifašisticki Front Žena (Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia, AFŽ), and in their role in fostering women’s rights before the emergence of second-wave feminist groups after 1968. I explore the ambivalent linkages between women’s history and Cold War political history, in an attempt to locate women’s agency not outside but within changing geopolitical and historical settings. Scholars have pointed to the scarcity of transnational comparisons when it comes to �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 60 Transnational women’s activism the ‘transitional years’ that followed the Second World War.7 Studies of women’s political activism during the Cold War are now in the making, and are starting to address women’s international organisations as well as the interactions between international and national women’s movements.8 Writing on the history of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Francisca de Haan has singled out ‘one of the most tenacious Cold War assumptions’ about left-wing internationalist women’s mobilisations, namely the idea that Communist women ‘were merely using the notion of women’s rights for reasons of Communist political propaganda’.9 Struggles for women’s rights were perceived as impossible behind ‘the Iron Curtain’. This metaphor revived a pre-existing Orientalist framework, indicating a separation between an enlightened West, the ‘Eastern Bloc’, and ‘the Rest’.10 In the Italian context, the persistence of the ethnicised label of ‘Slavo-communists’ best exemplifies the entanglement of ideological and racist labelling during the twentieth century and beyond.11 My aim, therefore, is not only to overcome Cold War assumptions about ‘communist’ women’s lack of agency, but also to challenge the negative coupling of ‘communism’ with the non-European, non-Western Other. Communists existed in Western Europe, too: ‘In Italy, a few years ago, more than one third of the citizens declared themselves as such. Now most of them are silent, their past is erased in the [collective] memory.’12 In addition, my research seeks to explore the effects of the way in which new geopolitical configurations were grafted upon previous political and historical legacies originating from Fascism, antifascism and the Second World War as a civil war.13 In the Italian and Yugoslav cases, in fact, the usage of ‘communism’ as a disparaging label not only is a lasting effect of Cold War legacies, but also is connected to the long-lasting legacies of fascism and imperialism, legacies that have resurfaced after 1989 within revisionist historiography.14 In the following sections I focus on transnational encounters between antifascist Italian and Yugoslav women who were leaders of the UDI and of the AFŽ between 1945 and 1957, in three different political phases and constellations.15 While focusing on transnational encounters, I also refer to the way in which geopolitical changes affected women’s organising in the multi-ethnic Italian–Yugoslav border area. The formation of the AFŽ and UDI during the antifascist Resistance (1941–45) Both the AFŽ and the UDI were founded in the midst of the Second World War to mobilise women in the struggle against Nazi-Fascism. The two organisations were open to all women of antifascist belief, and were created mainly as part of the strategy of ‘national fronts’ developed by the Yugoslav and the Italian communist parties under the directives of the Soviet Union.16 As a result of women’s wide participation in the conflict, Italian and Yugoslav women obtained the right to vote and to be elected one year after the end of the war, in 1946.17 The Yugoslav AFŽ was founded in 1942 as part of the National Liberation Movement. Its basic goal was to provide clothing, shoes and food supplies to the army. The first �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 61 national conference of the AFŽ took place in Bosanski Petrovac in December 1942, and in November 1943, 243,000 women were reportedly members of the AFŽ in Croatia alone. Officially, 2 million women had joined the organisation by the end of the war and 100,000 fought as partisans in the Liberation Front.18 In the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, the AFŽ became very important, organising women’s reconstruction work in a country left in ruins by four years of Nazi-fascist occupation and civil war. The country was mainly rural, with great differences in wealth between the northwestern and south-eastern republics as well as between urban and rural areas. The AFŽ councils ran hospitals, orphanages, schools, nursing and first-aid courses, and a great number of alphabetisation courses for illiterate women in the rural areas.19 Women who had become politicised in the interwar period constituted the core of the AFŽ leadership.20 This first generation of leaders (mostly in their thirties and forties at the end of the war) was composed of outstanding women from all over Yugoslavia, generally highly educated, mainly with an urban background, and born within families that had a tradition of leftist engagement. They took part in illegal communist activities in the 1930s, during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and often joined legal women and youth organisations in the pre-war period. Many of these women fought as partisans, and often had been imprisoned or tortured, or had suffered terrible personal losses during the Second World War.21 Without having the same widespread character as in Yugoslavia, women’s participation in the struggle in northern Italy was nonetheless significant. According to sources of the National Association of Italian Partisans, there were 35,000 female partisans enrolled in the partisan brigades; 20,000 ‘patriots’, with auxiliary functions; and 70,000 women organised by the Gruppi di difesa della Donna e per l’assistenza ai Combattenti della Libertà (Groups for the defence of women and for the assistance to freedom fighters, GDD). The GDD was created in November 1943 in Milan at the initiative of the Communist Party, but also included women from other political currents (Liberal, Socialist, Christian-Democrat and Action party).22 On 12 September 1944, in liberated Rome, women leaders belonging to different political parties (Communist, Socialist, Christian-left) met under the form of a temporary steering committee and launched an appeal for the creation of a unitary association of women, the UDI, with the idea of unifying antifascist women of different political backgrounds, as well as antifascist women in northern and southern Italy. Later, and not without some resistance, the northern GDD merged with the UDI, which became a nationwide organisation. The UDI had 400,000 members in 1945, and grew to approximately 1 million members in the late 1940s.23 The UDI leadership included two generations of militants in 1945: one was the generation of older communist women, who had experienced antifascism, clandestine activities and exile in France or the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s; the other was the generation of younger antifascists who had joined the Resistance after 1943. As for the ‘base’ of local militants, it included many women who had suffered extreme social injustice as workers and peasants and political repression under Fascism, as well as personal losses as wives and mothers during the war. They found a way to express their discontent and to organise through the GDD and UDI. From 1945 onwards, �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 62 Transnational women’s activism UDI women were engaged in the urgent tasks of reconstruction, assistance to destitute children and war orphans, fighting for equal salaries for female workers and peasants, and organising welfare provision for working mothers and housewives. UDI leaders also played an important role in getting the Constituent Assembly to pass women’s equal right to vote and to be elected.24 The AFŽ, UDI and the ‘Yugoslav example’ (1945–48) In 1945, immediately after the Liberation, both the UDI and the AFŽ had their founding Congresses. In late November–early December 1945, the UDI and AFŽ took part in the Paris founding meeting of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Already in 1945, however, it was evident that the geopolitical situation in Italy and Yugoslavia was very different, and that the destiny of left-wing forces was deeply tied to their respective geopolitical positions within the new West/East spheres of influence. While the Yugoslav Communist Party managed to liberate the country with very limited external support, and to seize power with little opposition from the side of the Allies, the Italian Communist Party belonged to an antifascist national unity government, and had to take into account the large-scale presence of Anglo-American troops on Italian soil, which made any revolutionary effort too risky, even potentially leading to civil war, as in Greece.25 The situation was particularly complicated in the border area between Italy and Yugoslavia, affected by old and new ideological and national divisions. This area, and particularly the city of Trieste, previously under Fascist occupation, was liberated in May 1945 by the Yugoslav Army, and placed since June 1945 under the Allied Military Government (AMG).26 The territories of Istria and Dalmatia, annexed by Italy in 1919, were liberated from Nazi-fascist occupation by the Yugoslav Army, and definitively assigned to socialist Yugoslavia by the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947. Between 200,000 and 350,000 ethnic Italians – as well as Slovenes and Croats – left Istria for fear of reprisals by Yugoslav partisans, in what came to be known in Italy as the Istrian exodus.27 The pro-Italian and conservative press opposed the Slavic rule of formerly Italian lands, emphasised the cruelty of Partisans’ retaliations, and strove to portray Trieste as ‘a bulwark of democracy and of Western civilisation’ in the Mediterranean.28 On the other hand, working-class Slovenes, Croats and Italians welcomed the Yugoslavs as liberators, and favoured the idea of Trieste becoming the ‘seventh’ Yugoslav Socialist Republic, following the Yugoslav government’s claim over the city. Pro-Yugoslav associations spoke of Italo-Yugoslav brotherhood and emphasised the joint effort of all antifascists in the area. They included the Unione ˇ Donne Anti-fasciste Italo Slovene/Slovensko-italijanske antifašisticne ženske zveze (Union of Antifascist Italian and Slovenian Women, UDAIS/SIAŽZ),29 created in August 1945, which affiliated the Italian Donne Antifasciste Triestine (Antifascist Women of Trieste, DAT) ˇ and the Slovene Antifašisticki Front Žena (Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ) of Trieste. However, the leadership of the Italian Communist Party resented post-war Yugoslav hegemony over the Triestine leftist movement, as well as Yugoslav’s leaders’ plan to annex Trieste. Other conflicting issues were the presence of Italian war prisoners still �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 63 detained in Yugoslavia, as well as the protection the Italian government and Allied troops offered to Italian Fascist and local collaborators who had committed war crimes during the occupation of the Balkans. The internationalist engagements of the Yugoslav and Italian communist parties, therefore, were at odds with reciprocal national interests, and with the attempt of each communist party to legitimate itself not only in internationalist but also in patriotic terms.30 The first post-war encounters between Italian and Yugoslav women must be placed within this complex framework of antifascist solidarity and internationalism, and potential national and ethnic conflicts due to the historical legacies of Fascism and the Second World War. A delegation of four Italian women from the UDI attended the first national AFŽ congress in June 1945 in Belgrade. Jole Lombardi, an UDI member from the socialist party, assured the Yugoslav comrades ‘that the Italian people and the Italian women are sincerely antifascist’.31 During the first national UDI congress, held in Florence in October 1945, a representative of the UDAIS of Trieste32 reminded her audience that Slovene and Italian women faced the gallows together, and helped fighters of all nationalities as mothers, spouses and sisters. She also stressed the positive aspects of the Yugoslav liberation of Trieste, against the allegations of the pro-Italian press, which described the presence of the Yugoslav Army as a fate worse than the German occupation.33 The theme of motherhood as a basis for antifascist solidarity and struggle for peace would be a constant of WIDF campaigns in the early Cold War years, coexisting with images of women as Resistance fighters and heroes, bravely facing enemy trials and torture. When looking at the names and biographies of women who were sentenced by the Fascist Tribunale Speciale, it is evident that many came from the multi-ethnic areas of Trieste, Fiume and Pola. For Slovenian and Croatian women, antifascist resistance coincided with the patriotic struggle for national recognition, against twenty years of Fascist domination of Slavic national minorities in the border area.34 Even before official encounters between UDI and AFŽ women, the echo of Resistance struggles in Yugoslavia and within the Italian–Yugoslav border area had reached Italian antifascists. Marisa Rodano, UDI leader and antifascist militant in Nazi-occupied Rome during her youth, for example, recalled an encounter with a group of Slovene girls while in prison, and in particular her sense of ‘unconditional admiration: they, they were the real revolutionaries, they ran the risk of the death penalty and had done important things for the cause’.35 The ‘Yugoslav example’ thus had a strong influence on Italian antifascists – including women – in the immediate years after the conflict.36 The Yugoslav partisans started to fight much earlier, and had managed to successfully liberate the country and to establish a revolutionary socialist government afterwards. Moreover, the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement – differently from the Italian Resistance groups – was keen to glorify its female partisan heroes, and to emphasise that the fight for liberation had brought women’s full equality.37 Along these lines, a letter sent by Pina Palumbo, from the UDI National Directive Committee, to the AFŽ Central Committee in February 1946 after a visit to Yugoslavia stated: ‘We, Italian women, have a lot to learn from you since, despite the great sacrifices of our glorious partisan struggle, fascism, internal capitalism and American �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 64 Transnational women’s activism imperialism still dominate in our country; so with your example we must work and strenuously fight in order to end this forever.’38 The idea that the revolutionary Slovene women could be an example for their Italian sisters was also present in 1945 UDAIS documents from Trieste and Monfalcone, which portrayed Slovene women as more ‘mature and more experienced in the struggle’, and closer to the emancipated Soviet women.39 The ideal of fratellanza Italo-Slovena, Italo-Slovene brotherhood, moreover, was supposed to overcome ethnic and national tensions that persisted on the ground.40 The strength of the Yugoslav ‘example’ is also proved by some plans for summer trips to Yugoslavia made by the UDI in summer 1948. Around ninety UDI members were to be selected for the travel, and the leadership asked each UDI section to choose the right representatives: ‘representatives of a factory, or of an agricultural firm, and anyway [ … ] worthy of the highest trust from all the workers, for their morality and their merits’. The reason was that the ‘Yugoslav friends have the desire to receive mainly female workers from the basis (factory workers, peasants, teachers, clerks), the most interested in [women’s] labour rights in Yugoslavia’.41 On their side, as their texts show, the AFŽ leaders were keen to present themselves as successful followers of Soviet-style emancipation.42 But these summer trips to Yugoslavia never took place: on 28 June 1948, the Cominform – the Communist Information Bureau founded in September 1947 and affiliating the communist parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Italy, France and Yugoslavia under the direction of the Soviet Union – published its infamous ‘Resolution’ against the Yugoslav Communist Party, and Yugoslavia was expelled from the Socialist Bloc.43 After the Cominform Resolution (1949–54) Recent studies on the basis of Soviet archives have substantially confirmed the main motives behind the Cominform Resolution of June 1948, which marked the beginning of the Soviet–Yugoslav conflict and had a number of consequences in the rest of the Soviet satellite states: Stalin could barely tolerate the Yugoslavs’ attempt to annex Trieste and their open support of communist forces in the Greek Civil War, and felt challenged by Tito’s plan to create an independent Balkan Federation, together with Albania and Bulgaria.44 The split with the Soviet Union has been the key factor determining Yugoslavia’s unique geopolitical position between the two blocs, and its subsequent foreign politics of Non-Alignment with either side. Following the Second Cominform Resolution of November 1949, which definitively excluded the Yugoslav Communist Party from the socialist bloc, the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia was expelled from the W IDF, which was aligned by then on Soviet foreign politics.45 One astonishing example of how previous internationalist discourses could be reversed is Spanish Pasionaria Dolores Ibarruri’s speech at the WIDF Moscow Council of November 1949: Those who were included as representatives of Yugoslav women no longer participate in [the Council’s] work. If they are gone, it’s because under their �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 65 mask of antifascists they were hiding their true face of deceitful, vile spies and creatures of fascist leaders. Even in the era of the Yugoslav people’s liberation ´ war against the Nazi invaders, these ‘representatives’, Mitra Mitrovic and Vida ´ Tomšic, were agents of the Gestapo and of the Italian police.46 The Cominform declarations, in fact, did not target the Yugoslav people as a whole, but instead appealed to the ‘masses’ (occasionally to ‘women’) and incited them to overthrow their illegitimate representatives.47 The split reverberated most strongly within the Yugoslav Federation, where a number of antifascist militants and leaders sided with the Soviet Union. The pro-Soviet attempts to overthrow the Yugoslav leader general Tito did not succeed, however, but were followed within Yugoslavia by a violent wave of political repression, often indiscriminate, against alleged ‘IBeovci’ – followers of the Cominform (Inform Bureau, IB). Thousands of party members and former partisans, men and women, were arrested and sent to prison camps, notably to the infamous island of Goli Otok.48 Many Italian workers and militants residing in zone B and in Yugoslavia, faithful to the Soviet Union, were incarcerated as well, and so were many women identified as wives, sisters and mothers of the ‘enemy’.49 On the other side of the border, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) broke its relations with the Yugoslav party and diffused Cominform propaganda against ‘Tito-fascism’ – albeit in a less violent form than other European communist parties.50 In 1951 the PCI expelled two prominent leaders from Emilia-Romagna – Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi – and accused them of being ‘Titoist traitors’.51 The polarisation was particularly fierce in the border area, where ideological tensions overlapped with pre-existing national and political ones, and where proCominform, anti-Tito activities often coincided with patriotic agendas, and with the goal to maintain Trieste within Italian borders.52 In the Free Territory of Trieste53 ´ the communist forces were divided between pro-Tito forces led by Branko Babic, and pro-Cominform forces led by Vittorio Vidali (both groups included Italian and Slovene militants). Although we don’t have enough research yet, there are hints that women’s organisations were an active component of these struggles, and that, in turn, these ideological struggles deeply affected the lives of women who were engaged in politics, particularly in the Italo-Yugoslav border area.54 Similarly to what was happening among Triestine communists, after the Cominform Resolution the UDAIS was divided between a pro-Tito UDAIS, which retained the old name, and a pro-Cominform Unione Donne Democratiche (Union of Democratic Women, UDD). The two rival organisations tried to gather support from worker and peasant families through, for example, competing over social work activities such as the organisation of summer colonies or the distribution of presents to children for Christmas.55 The AFŽ was also clearly ‘embedded’ in the struggle against Cominform supporters on the Yugoslav territory: a 1949 Resolution by the AFŽ Central Committee instructed militants on the necessity to ‘actively unmask those among women who are kulak, war-kulak and Inform Bureau spokespersons’.56 The AFŽ leadership also �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 66 Transnational women’s activism promoted numerous ‘popularising’ meetings across the country in which women were instructed about the WIDF’s unjust behaviour towards Yugoslavia, and encouraged to send letters of protests. Conversely, UDI leaders followed the WIDF decision, and as a national branch of the Federation broke off their relations with Yugoslav representatives. Similarly to the AFŽ leadership, UDI and PCI leaders also expressed concern about the presence of possible dissidents within their organisations.57 At the same time, AFŽ and UDI reports on the Cominform controversy suggest that most of the local militants (peasant women, factory workers and housewives) were scarcely interested in ideological debates, or did not seem to understand the core of the dispute. The main reason for this ‘lack of interest’, particularly in Yugoslavia, was probably the fear of political repression, and of being imprisoned for having said ´ something ‘wrong’.58 Dissident and former prisoner Eva Grlic reported in her memoirs that politicised teachers, journalists, party officers and factory workers were detained in the female section of the prison island of Goli Otok, but also some simple peasants who had no notion of politics whatsoever.59 AFŽ and UDI leaders’ concern with geopolitical conflicts and with the application of the correct party line, against the ‘lack of interest’ or ‘passivity’ of the militants from the base, seems to indicate that a separation between ‘women’ and ‘communist’ agendas, or the vision of ‘communist women’ as manipulated, is misleading. Instead, we need more studies on women’s different political loyalties, and on the different roles they played within Cold War ideological conflicts, notably when they occupied leadership positions. De-Stalinization and reconciliation efforts (1955–57) After the death of Stalin in March 1953, and the London Memorandum between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1954 (assigning Trieste to Italy), tensions started to ease between the Italian Communist Party and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. But it was only after the first sign of Soviet–Yugoslav reconciliation (manifested through Khrushchev’s trip to Belgrade in June 1955) that contacts between the Italian and the Yugoslav communist parties were re-established. They increased after the epochal Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s crimes and introduced his new line of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the socialist and the capitalist bloc, as well as the idea that different forms of transitions to socialism were possible. The infamous Cominform was also dissolved in 1956. PCI secretary Palmiro Togliatti and communist MP and member of party leadership Luigi Longo visited Yugoslavia during 1956, apologised for past errors and praised the Yugoslav way to socialism, in order to argue for a similarly autonomous strategy in the Italian context.60 From 1957 onwards, the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties had regular bilateral relations and exchanged delegations (of political leaders, trade unions, and communist youth).61 Women’s organisations were also fast in re-establishing connections: in April 1956 two Yugoslav delegates attended the Fifth UDI Congress; in that same month, during the WIDF Council in Beijing, WIDF president Madame Eugénie Cotton proposed �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 67 to readmit the Yugoslav women’s organisation.62 The UDI delegation present at the WIDF Beijing Council supported this proposal, noting that the UDI already had ‘friendly relations’ with the Yugoslavs and aimed at further collaboration in the future. The representatives from Yugoslavia, however, declined the offer to re-enter the WIDF. Nonetheless, they accepted to participate in further congresses as observers, and to cooperate on specific issues of common interest.63 In line with Tito’s foreign politics of non-alignment, Yugoslav women were keen to establish a number of bilateral relations with European, Asian and African organisations, and to foster the line of autonomous ‘national ways to socialism’ within international organisations such as the WIDF. From 13 to 15 September 1957, an UDI delegation travelled to Ljubljana, capital of the Republic of Slovenia. The delegation members’ high positions make evident that this encounter was supposed to seal a new epoch of bilateral relations: UDI President Marisa Rodano, secretary-general Rosetta Longo, national secretary Giuliana Nenni and WIDF vice-president Maria Maddalena Rossi were part of the group. WIDF secretary general Carmen Zanti was supposed to be present but in the end did not attend the meeting. Note the presence of women involved at high levels in the WIDF, and of both socialist and communist women.64 The Yugoslav delegation was equally composed of the highest representatives, belonging to the Directive Committee of the Savez Ženskih Drustava (Union of Women’s Societies, SŽD), which had replaced the AFŽ since 1953, and other important organisations. Included ´ were Vida Tomšic, member of the SŽD Directive Committee, federal deputy, member of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) and secretary of the Central Committee of the League of Communists (LC) of Slovenia; Mara Naceva, SŽD vice-president, federal deputy and secretary of the Control Commission of the Central Committee of the LCY; Milka Kufrin, member of the SŽD Secretariat, federal deputy and president of the Association of Yugoslav cooperatives; Blaženka Mimica, member of the secretariat of the Association for the Protection of Childhood of Yugoslavia; Dr Aleksandra Janda Ðuranovic, secretary of ´ the Association of Women Graduates; Marija Šoljan-Bakaric, secretary of SŽD Croatia; Angelca Ocepek, president of SŽD Slovenia, deputy of Slovenia, member of ´ the Central Committee of the Slovene LC; Olga Vrabic, federal deputy, member ´ of the Executive Committee (government) of Slovenia; Ada Krivic, president of the Association of the Friends of Childhood, deputy and member of the Slovene Executive Committee; Meta Košir, member of the Directive Committee of SŽD Slovenia and director of the magazine Nasa Žena (Our Woman); Majda Gaspari, ¸ secretary for the Commission of work among women in the Alliance of the Working ´ People (ASPL) of Slovenia; Jelica Maric, member of the SŽD secretariat.65 Despite the reconciliation, however, women’s transnational and inter-ethnic cooperation was not always easy. The situation in the border area, in particular, remained tense. As mentioned earlier, the Cominform Resolution had split left-wing organisations in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. In 1955, after years of violent rivalries with the Titoists, many Triestine communists – including the leaders of the UDD – were not ready to accept the reconciliation between Yugoslavia and the rest of the socialist �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 68 Transnational women’s activism bloc. Many Triestine communists had welcomed the Cominform Resolution. The Soviet denunciation of Yugoslav leaders as ‘nationalists’, in fact, was in conformity with their everyday experience of Yugoslav hegemony over the leftist forces in the border area. For many Italian militants living in Trieste, in particular, the Resolution brought an end to Yugoslav hegemony and a return to the strategic line promoted by PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti.66 Now the new Soviet line disowned the 1948 excommunication of Yugoslavia as a Stalinist machination (plotted by the chief of the Soviet secret police, Beria), and redeemed Tito and his collaborators. With an unprecedented gesture of insubordination against the PCI party line, the chief of Triestine communists Vittorio Vidali made public in a local newspaper that he disagreed with Khrushchev’s declarations, since ‘we supported that Resolution [ … ] with our documents, our sufferings, our experiences, without the intervention of Beria or imperialist agents’.67 All Trieste party leaders were asked to travel to Rome for a PCI Direction meeting, in which they were harshly reprimanded for this gesture, and forced to publicly apologise.68 These shifts in the official ‘Truth’ promoted by the Soviet Union and by the Italian Communist Party were also strongly resented by Triestine communist leader Laura Weiss (1933–89). Laura Weiss was part of the local Jewish bourgeoisie, and had been persecuted with her family since the Italian Fascist Race Laws of 1938. After the war she was involved in the Trieste communist party and in trade unionism, together with her father Ernesto, a natural scientist and teacher. Trained as a medical doctor, Laura Weiss strongly engaged in social work and in struggles for women’s emancipation and antiracism. In 1949 she was elected as communist party representative for the local council, and became a prominent figure in foreign politics, representing the Partito Comunista del Territorio Libero di Trieste (Communist Party of the Free Territory of Trieste, PCTLT) at different international meetings. She was also part of UDAIS, and in 1949 was elected in the WIDF Council.69 Close to party boss Vittorio Vidali, she became his partner, and after his death she was curator of his personal archive.70 In 1955 and in the following years, Laura Weiss could not come to terms with the de-Stalinization process, nor with the new Soviet line about Yugoslavia. In 1956 she wrote to Vittorio Vidali that perhaps it was time for her to leave the party, since ‘[i]t is for me inconceivable that in the USSR there was a situation of such terror that leaders can be exempted from responsibility of having accepted direction methods that contrasted with our principles for 20 years [from 1936 till 1956], and that no one raised his voice [ … ]. I am not satisfied with a way of acting that seems to say: now that Stalin is dead [ … ] everything will be all right.’ She continued that the idea of a ‘politically useful’ truth – which included the new rehabilitation of Tito – had become ‘unbearable’ for her, and that therefore she might leave the communist party.71 In the end she stayed, but was somehow marginalised over the years, due to her critical position towards the national PCI leadership based in Rome. In 1960, Laura Weiss did resign from her position as UDD director, since she was against the entry of a group of former ‘Titoist’ Slovene women – part of the feminine section of the Unione Socialista Indipendente (Independent Socialist Union, USI) – within the organisation.72 Already in 1960, Jole Deferri, representative of the UDD �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 69 in Trieste, wrote to the UDI leaders in Rome about the difficult reconciliation between UDD and USI women, difficulties related to nationalist feelings.73 These episodes indicate that despite the official reconciliation between Yugoslav and Italian women’s organisations in the mid-1950s, specific national and ideological tensions persisted in the border area of Trieste in the following years. Conclusion This article focuses on the relations between Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organisations from the immediate post-war period until 1957, thus providing a reconstruction of the entangled history of women’s antifascism and internationalism across Italo-Yugoslav borders. Challenging the negative, Orientalist coupling of ‘communism’ with the non-European, non-Western Other, it has retraced a common European history of antifascism and internationalism, at the crossroads between East and West. The transnational circulation of radical utopias and imaginaries across Cold War borders was retold from the perspective of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organisations. During the Second World War and in the early Cold War period, a great number of women in Italy and Yugoslavia engaged in discourses and practices of antifascism and internationalism. By showing women’s political and strategic engagements at the transnational, national and local levels, this study has demonstrated that left-wing women’s organisations played an active role in Cold War geopolitical and ideological struggles. Against the assumption that ‘communist’ women were deprived of agency, the essay explored the ambivalent linkages between women’s history and Cold War history, locating women’s agency within changing geopolitical and historical settings. The transnational dimension of this study further showed that women’s international, national and local organising was entangled with multiple political loyalties. Leaders of the Italian and Yugoslav women’s organisations played a crucial role in negotiating between these multiple loyalties. Further research on women’s political agency during the Cold War years, in my view, needs to investigate differences between women, notably between those who acted as representatives of political organisations, and the ‘masses’ of women who were represented (in the political and in the symbolic sense). As I have tried to make clear, women’s internationalist organisations were not at all marginal, but rather crucial in the enactment of the multiple alliances and divisions that were part of everyday Cold War politics. Notes 1 G. Eley, ‘From welfare politics to welfare states. Women and the socialist question’, in H. Gruber and P.M. Graves (ed.), Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars, New York: Berghahn Books, 1998, p. 519. 2 For a similar historicization, see R. Jambrešic-Kirin, Dom I Svijet: O Zenskoj Kulturi Pametnja [Home and the World: On Women’s Cultural Memory], Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008, p. 213. 3 For a recent discussion of the ambivalent relation between socialism and feminism, see the Forum in Aspasia, 1, 2007, 197–201. �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 70 Transnational women’s activism 4 Eley, ‘From welfare politics to welfare states’, p. 542. See also N. Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation, London: Sage, 1997; G. Scott-Smith and H. Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960, London: Frank Cass, 2003; P. Major and R. Mitter (eds), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History, Portland: Frank Cass, 2003; F. Gori and S. Pons, The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943–53, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996. 5 G. Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo–Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, p. 1; C. Duchen and I. Bandhauer-Schöffmann (eds), When the War Was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956, London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000, p. 3. 6 H. Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations, Manchester, UK and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 5. 7 Duchen and Bandhauer-Schoffmann (eds), When the War Was Over, p. 1. 8 Laville, Cold War Women; K. Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 9 F. de Haan, ‘Continuing Cold War paradigms in western historiography of transnational women’s organisations: the case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF)’, Women’s History Review, 19(4), 2010, 547–73, p. 556. 10 Ibid.; see also L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 11 For a discussion of post-1989 examples, see J. Pirjevec, Foibe: Una Storia D’Italia [Foibe: An Italian History], Torino: G. Einaudi, 2009; P. Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003; see also E. Collotti, ‘Sul Razzismo Antislavo [‘On anti-Slavic racism’]’ in A. Burgio (ed.), Nel Nome Della Razza: Il Razzismo Nella Storia d’Italia 1870–1945 [In the Name of the Race: Racism in the History of Italy, 1870–1945], Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. 12 V. Foa, M. Mafai and A. Reichlin, Il Silenzio Dei Comunisti [The Silence of Communists], Torino: Einaudi, 2002, p. 3. 13 C. Pavone, Una Guerra Civile. Saggio Storico Sulla Moralità Nella Resistenza [A Civil War. A Historical Essay on Morality during the Resistance], Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006. About World War II as an ‘international ideological civil war’, see E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, London: Michael Joseph, 1994, p. 144. 14 For an overview of the persistence of World War II’s divided memories in Europe after 1989, see J. W. Müller, Memory and Power in Post-war Europe. Studies in the Presence of the Past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. In Italy, right-wing revisionist discourses are entangled with previous forms of anti-Slavic racism or ‘frontier Orientalism’ that belong to the Italian nationalist and Fascist tradition. See again Ballinger, History in Exile; Sluga, The Problem of Trieste; and S. Mihelj, ‘Drawing the east–west border: narratives of modernity and identity in the Julian region (1947–54)’, in T. Lindenberger, M. Payk, B. Stover and A. Vowinckel (eds), European Cold War Cultures: Societies, Media, and Cold War Experiences in East and West, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009. 15 All translations from Italian, Serbo-Croatian and French are mine. In this chapter I cannot include the original quotations for reasons of space. The research is based on original archival research in Italy and former Yugoslavia, notably: UDI Central Archive and Gramsci Institute in Rome; Livio Saranz Institute and Slovenian National Library in Trieste; the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade; the Croatian National Archives in Zagreb; and the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana. It also includes semistructured oral history interviews and analysis of memoirs and official publications of former AFŽ and UDI members. 16 For that strategy, see J. Barth Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer, London: I.B. Tauris, 1986, p. 156. 17 See A. Rossi-Doria, Diventare Cittadine: Il Voto Delle Donne in Italia [Becoming Citizens: Women’s Vote in Italy], Firenze: Giunti, 1996; and I. Pantelic, Partizanke Kao Gradanke: �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 71 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 Drustvena Emancipacija Partizanki U Srbiji, 1945–1953 [Female Partisans as Citizens: The Social Emancipation of Partisans in Serbia, 1945–53], Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2011. B. Jancar-Webster, Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1990, pp. 143–44. L. Sklevicky, ‘Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of post-revolutionary Yugoslavia’, in A. Angerman, G. Binnema, A. Keunen, V. Poels and J. Zirkzee (eds), Current Issues in Women’s History, London and New York: Routledge, 1989. See also L. Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi [Horses, Women, Wars], Zagreb: Ženska Infoteka, 1996. Jancar-Webster, Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 48. F. de Haan, K. Daskalova and A. Loutfi (eds), A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, ´ Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006; L. Perovic, Snaga ˇ licne odgovornosti [The Power of Personal Responsibility], Beograd: Helsinski odbor za ljudska prava u Srbij, 2008. See the website of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani, www.anpi.it/donnee-uomini; J. Slaughter, Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945, Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1997. M. Rodano, Memorie di Una Che C’era: Una Storia dell’Udi [Memories of Someone Who Was There: A History of UDI], Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2010, p. 20; M. Michetti, M. Repetto and L. Viviani, Udi, Laboratorio di Politica Delle Donne: Idee e Materiali Per Una Storia [UDI, Laboratory of Women’s Politics: Ideas and Materials for a History], Roma: Cooperativa libera stampa, 1994. F. Pieroni Bortolotti, ‘Introduction’, in Donne e Resistenza in Emilia Romagna: Atti Del Convegno Tenuto a Bologna Il 13–14–15 Maggio 1977 [Women and the Resistance in EmiliaRomagna: Proceedings of the conference held in Bologna 13–14–15 May 1977], Vol. 1, Milano: Vangelista, 1978. See also M. Casalini, Le Donne Della Sinistra: 1944–1948 [Women of the Left: 1944–48], Roma: Carocci, 2005. About the post-war activities of the UDI, see W. Pojmann, ‘“Join Us in Rebuilding Italy”: Women’s Associations, 1946–1963’, Journal of Women’s History, 20(4), 82–104. E.R. Terzuolo, Red Adriatic: The Communist Parties of Italy and Yugoslavia, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985. In 1947, under the Italian–Yugoslav peace treaty, the Free Territory of Trieste (TLT) was established. The AMG took over the administration of zone A of the TLT, including the city of Trieste, while zone B was under Yugoslav military administration. In 1954 the border between zone A and B became the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. See also B.C. Novak, Trieste, 1941–1954: The Ethnic, Political, and Ideological Struggle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Ballinger, History in Exile, p. 2. Stuparich, quoted in Mihelj, ‘Drawing the east–west border’, p. 281. UDAIS stands for the Italian name of the organisation, while SIAŽZ stands for its Slovenian name. In this chapter I refer to the organisation using the Italian acronym, UDAIS. See Terzuolo, Red Adriatic. Jole Lombardi, 1 June 1945, I AFŽ Congress. Roma, Archivio Centrale (hereafter AC) UDI, fondo DnM, 45.3 A. Her name has been transcribed in the archive as ‘Marta Vemecic’, but probably this should be Marija Bernetic, the late 1940s UDAIS leader. Intervention by ‘Marta Vemecic’ [Marija Bernetic] at the First UDI Congress, 20–23 October 1945. Roma, AC UDI, UDI Cronologico, B7, file 69. The Yugoslav delegation had been denied visas for this UDI conference; women from UDAIS, that is, Slovene and Italian women from zone A of the FTT, could participate. See Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, p. 162. See www.anpi.it/donne-davanti-al-tribunale-speciale M. Rodano, Del Mutare Dei Tempi [On the Changing of Times], Vol. 1, Roma: Memori, 2008, p. 191. �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d 72 Transnational women’s activism 36 Yet the Yugoslav ‘example’ also contained an implicit reproach towards Italian communists; see Terzuolo, Red Adriatic, p. 221. ´ 37 For a reflection on the gendered imaginary of the Yugoslav Resistance, see R. Jambrešic ´ Kirin and R. Senjkovic, ‘Legacies of the Second World War in Croatian cultural memory. Women as seen through the media’, Aspasia, 4, 2010, 71–96. For a comparable reflection on the Italian case, see Casalini, Le donne della sinistra. 38 Pina Palumbo, comitato direttivo nazionale UDI, facsimile no. 9, page 96, in Le Front Antifasciste des Femmes de Yougoslavie au sein du Mouvement International des Femmes, 1951, IISG archive, Amsterdam. 39 Relazione del DAT del 25 agosto 1945, Arhiv Republike Slovenije (hereafter ARS), ˇ Ljubljana: Glavni odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašisticne ženske zveze (Main Board of the Slavic-Italian Anti-fascist Women’s Association), AS 1576, k. 2B. 40 UDAIS documents from 1945 to 1948 include references to everyday political and national tensions (referred to as ‘sectarism’ or ‘sciovinism’) between Italian and Slovene women engaged in the organisation; Ibid. 41 Letter of June 1948 by Baldina di Vittorio, Roma, AC UDI, fondo DnM 48. 3, file 6. 42 ‘Zapisnik sa sastanka CO AFŽ sa rukovodiocima propagandne sekcije i kulturno prosvjetnih otseka Glavnih Odbora AFŽ’, 10 June 1948. Zagreb, Državni Arhiv – Fund AFŽ-KDAŽ – HR HDA 1234–35-k. 58 – ‘Sjednice, Plenumi, Sastanci, 1946–59’, pp. 4–5. 43 See R. H. Bass and E. Marbury, The Soviet–Yugoslav Controversy, 1948–58: A Documentary Record, New York: Prospect Books, 1959. ´ 44 J. Perovic, ‘The Tito–Stalin split. A reassessment in light of new evidence’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 9(2), 2007, 32–63. 45 Until spring 1949, the Soviet–Yugoslav rift seemed solvable, and Yugoslav leaders were hoping to be readmitted into the socialist bloc. Only after the Second Cominform Resolution of November 1949, defining the Yugoslav leaders as a gang of fascist assassins and spies, was the split considered definitive. 46 ‘Conseil de la Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes, Moscou 17–22 novembre 1949’, supplement de la revue La Femme Soviétique [Soviet Woman] no 6, 1949, ´ 12. For a short biography of Vida Tomšic in English, see De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi (eds), A Biographical Dictionary, pp. 575–79. 47 See Bass and Marbury, The Soviet–Yugoslav Controversy. 48 I. Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. ´ 49 Jambrešic-Kirin, Dom i Svijet; G. Scotti, Goli Otok: Italiani Nel Gulag di Tito [Goli Otok: Italians in Tito’s Gulag], Trieste: LINT, 1997. 50 According to Terzuolo, Red Adriatic, pp. 122–25, the PCI was slow and hesitant in starting the campaign against Yugoslavia, perhaps because in July 1948 Togliatti himself was seriously injured in an assassination attempt. 51 Ibid., pp. 139–43. 52 Ibid., pp.155–58. See also N. Troha, Chi avrà Trieste? Sloveni e italiani tra due Stati [Who will get Trieste? Slovenes and Italians between two States), Trieste: IRLSM Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2009. 53 See note 26. 54 Terzuolo, Red Adriatic, rarely mentions women’s organisations. About women’s mobilisations in relation to the Allied Military Government in Trieste, see Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, pp. 111–32. ˇ 55 ARS, Ljubljana: Glavni odbor Slovensko–italijanske antifašisticne ženske zveze, AS 1576, k. 3, 2d. ˇ ˇ 56 Resolucija o Narodnim Zadacima Treceg Plenuma CO AFŽ Jugoslavije Održanog 4 i 5 Juna 1949 u Beogradu. Zagreb, Državni Arhiv – Fund AFŽ-KDAZ – HR HDA 1234–35-k. 58-’Sjednice, Plenumi, Sastanci, 1946–59. 57 See, for example, Verbale della riunione della commissione femminile del 26–27 gennaio 1950, Fondo Mosca, busta 233 fascicolo 17 – sezione femminile 1949–50, Istituto Gramsci, Roma. �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d Cold war internationalisms and nationalisms 73 58 For a brilliant illustration, see Emir Kusturica’s movie When Father Was Away on Business (1985), based on an autobiographical scenario of Abdulah Sidran, whose father had been deported to Goli Otok. ´ 59 E. Grlic, Memorie da un Paese perduto. Budapest. Sarajevo. Zagabria [Memories from a lost land. Budapest. Sarajevo. Zagreb], Milano: Scheiwiller, 2005. The original edition in ´ Croatian, Sjecanja [Remembrances], is from 1997. 60 Terzuolo, Red Adriatic, pp. 181–90. 61 Ibid., pp. 165–203. 62 Quoted in Women of the Whole World (journal of the WIDF), no. 7, 1956, 10–11 (IISG collection, Amsterdam). 63 Ibid., no. 12, 1956, 14. 64 Giuliana Nenni and Rosetta Longo were part of the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party, PSI). On the meaning of this, see further Terzuolo, Red Adriatic, p. 199. 65 Correspondence AFŽ-UDI of July–August 1957. Roma, AC UDI, fondo DnM, 53.3–22, f. 9, 1957. 66 See Terzuolo, Red Adriatic, pp. 146–47. About the different strategies of the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties after 1945, and about their clash in Trieste, see P. Karlsen, Frontiera Rossa. Il PCI, il Confine Orientale e il Contesto Internazionale 1941–1955 [Red Frontier: The PCI, the Oriental Border, and the International Context, 1941–55], Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 2010. 67 Vittorio Vidali, ‘Le dichiarazioni del compagno Kruscev ed i comunisti triestini’, Il Lavoratore, 30 May 1955; see also Longo’s reply in L’Unità, 1 June 1955. 68 PCI Secretariat meetings of 7 and 8 June 1955. Fondo Mosca, Verbali Segreteria 1944–48, MF194, Istituto Gramsci, Roma. 69 A. Andri, T. Catalan, S. Urso and A. Verrocchio, Le Carte dei Weiss. Una Famiglia tra Ebraismo e Impegno Politico [The Weiss Papers. A Family between Jewishness and Political Engagement], Trieste: Istituto Livio Saranz/La Mongolfiera Libri, 2007. 70 M. Passi, Vittorio Vidali, Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1991, pp. 90–91. 71 Quoted in Andri et al., Le Carte dei Weiss, pp. 117, 147. The original letter is deposited at the Laura Weiss fund, f44, d961, Istituto Livio Saranz, Trieste. 72 Letters reproduced in Andri et al, Le Carte dei Weiss, pp. 148–50. 73 Jole Deferri (Unione Donne Democratiche/Zveza Demokraticnih Zena) to Comitato di Presidenza UDI, 6/5/1960. Roma, AC UDI, fondo DnM, 60-3-27, f. 9. �Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 18/07/2012; 3B2 version: 9.1.406/W Unicode (May 24 2007) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/KCG/2-Pagination/TandF/WNAM/ApplicationFiles/9780415535755.3d � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Istraživački radovi Ostalo Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cold War Internationalisms, Nationalisms and the Yugoslav-Soviet Split: The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women's Front of Yugoslavia - The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women's Front of Yugoslavia - Chiara Bonfiglioli Description An account of the resource Women’s Activism brings together twelve innovative contributions from feminist historians from around the world to look at how women have always found ways to challenge or fight inequalities and hierarchies as individuals, in international women’s organizations, as political leaders, and in global forums such as the United Nations. The book is divided into three parts. Part one, brings together four essays about organized women’s activism across borders. The chapters in part two focus on the variety of women’s activism and explore women’s activism in different national and political contexts. And part three explores the changing relationships and inequalities among women. This book addresses women’s internationalism and struggle for their rights in the international arena; it deals with racism and colonialism in Australia, India and Europe; women’s movements and political activism in South Africa, Eastern Bengal (Bangladesh), the United Kingdom, Japan and France. Essential reading for anyone interested in women’s history and the history of activism more generally Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Women's Activism Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present Edited by Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, Krassimira Daskalova, www.academia.edu Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Routledge, Chiara Bonfiglioli Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 12-IR Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant pages 69-73 Antifascist Front of Women Chiara Bonfiglioli Cold war Internationalism Nationalism The Union of Italian Women Union of Italian Women Womens' Front Yugoslav-Soviet Split http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/6ddd554425a4e713c4adb37d4d8b78dc.pdf ee5a8f3356335064e57832138e2b2704 PDF Text Text �Impressum Naslov publikacije: IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA Godina izdanja: 2016. Izdavač: Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost CRVENA Sarajevo www.crvena.ba Za izdavača: Danijela Dugandžić Urednice: Andreja Dugandžić i Tijana Okić Urednica ilustracija: Adela Jušić Ilustracije: Sunita Fišić, Aleksandra Nina Knežević, Kasja Jerlagić, Adela Jušić, Nardina Zubanović Prijevod teksta Chiare Bonfiglioli sa engleskog jezika: Selma Asotić Lektura: Mirjana Evtov Grafičko oblikovanje i priprema za štampu: Leila Čmajčanin Tiraž: 300 Štampa: Dobra knjiga, Sarajevo ISBN: 978-9926-8131-0-9 CIP - Katalogizacija u publikaciji Nacionalna i univerzitetska biblioteka Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo 329.7-055.2(497.1)”1942/1953”(082) 316.66-055.2(497.1)(082) “Supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe with funds of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development” Sadržaj zbornika isključiva je odgovornost izdavača. Free copy not for commercial use. IZGUBLJENA revolucija : AFŽ između mita i zaborava / Chiara Bonfiglioli ... [et al.]. - Sarajevo : Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost Crvena, 2016. - 199 str. : ilustr. ; 24 cm Biografije: str. 196-199. - Bibliografija: str. 186-189 ; bibliografske i druge bilješke uz tekst. ISBN 978-9926-8131-0-9 1. Bonfiglioli, Chiara COBISS.BH-ID 23574534 �Chiara Bonfiglioli Ajla Demiragić Andreja Dugandžić Adela Jušić Danijela Majstorović Boriša Mraović Tijana Okić SARAJEVO, 2016. �Sadržaj 4 Uvodna riječ 10 O ilustracijama 16 Chiara Bonfiglioli Biografije aktivistkinja AFŽ-a: intersekcionalna analiza ženskog djelovanja 40 Nardina Zubanović Ilustracije 48 Ajla Demiragić Šećer sladak a bombone ljute, ja se draga učiteljice pouzdavam u te: uloga i položaj narodne (napredne) učiteljice u prijelomnim godinama izgradnje novog socijalističkog bosanskohercegovačkog društva 78 Aleksandra Nina Knežević Ilustracije 84 Danijela Majstorović Stvaranje ‘nove’ jugoslovenske žene: emancipatorski elementi medijskog diskursa s kraja II svjetskog rata 116 Kasja Jerlagić Ilustracije 120 Boriša Mraović Heroizam rada: Antifašistički front žena i socijalistički dispozitiv 1942.-1953. 144 Sunita Fišić Ilustracije 148 Tijana Okić Od revolucionarnog do proizvodnog subjekta: alternativna historija AFŽ-a 190 Adela Jušić Ilustracije 196 Biografije �UVODNA RIJEČ ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ TIJANA OKIĆ �ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ, TIJANA OKIĆ 4 UVODNA RIJEČ Zbornik koji predstavljamo javnosti jedan je od rezultata dugogodišnjeg rada trudbenica Udruženja za kulturu i umjetnost Crvena ka digitalizaciji dokumenata za Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije (http://www.afzarhiv.org/). Ideja za kreiranje Arhiva rodila se još 2010. godine, kada smo u okviru projekta “Šta je nama naša borba dala?” počele istraživati historijat Antifašističkog fronta žena (AFŽ). Uvidjevši da nam je historija najveće ženske organizacije na našim prostorima u velikoj mjeri nepoznata, naši napori da Arhiv učinimo javnim dijelom su i potraga za onom stranom historije koja je uvijek bila i ostala na marginama. Arhiv je u svojoj trenutnoj formi ograničen na građu prikupljenu u Bosni i Hercegovini, ali je naša ideja od početka bila stvaranje jugoslovenskog arhiva – ideja koja počiva na svijesti da se samo kolektivnim radom mogu otvarati nova polja istraživanja i obogaćivati kolektivno znanje. U tom smislu, Arhiv je naš, ničiji pojedinačno, i baš zato, svačiji. On je u procesu, u nastajanju i upravo se tu očituje njegova osnovna namjera: javno i kritički misliti vlastitu prošlost. Upućujemo zato i otvoreni poziv svima da doprinesu građom, obradom i prilozima i tako se uključe u kolektivni projekat izrade jednog sveobuhvatnijeg arhiva. Trenutno, sadržaj arhiva obuhvata dio arhivske građe, periodiku i knjige, stenografske zabilješke, zapisnike i izvještaje kao i druge materijale, a sadrži i elemente usmene historije preživjelih i živućih aefžeovki, historije koju je jugoslavenska historiografija propustila zabilježiti. Arhive najčešće zamišljamo kao repozitorije objektivne istine, mitske autentične prostore iz kojih nam progovara sâma historija. Arhivi legitimiraju historiju kao profesionalnu disciplinu koja se bavi prošlošću onakvom “kakva je doista bila” (Ranke) i koja je zasnovana na kritičkom ispitivanju izvora (quellenkritik). Jacques Derrida1 tvrdi da ne postoji “autentični” početak arhiva budući da je svaki početak već unaprijed (pred)određen političkim ili znanstvenim autoritetom. Pristup arhivima kao historijskoj građi je zaštićen, a država upošljava činovnike (učenjake, historičare) koji proizvode narative o državnom poretku, legitimnosti i kontinuitetima. Arhiv zbog toga nije naprosto neka unaprijed dana ili određena selekcija dokumenata, nego naprotiv, rezultat namjernog odbacivanja materijala kao što je primjerice bio slučaj sa odbacivanjem antičkih papirusa koji su, nakon što su otkriveni, postali izvor (arhivskog) znanja o antici. 1 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008). �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA Porijeklo arhiva o kojem je ovdje riječ nije ništa drugačije. Odluka da se formira Arhiv AFŽ-a Jugoslavije i svake republike zasebno nalazi se već u samom Arhivu. Centralni odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavije 20. 2. 1950. donosi odluku o formiranju Komisije za rad na arhiviranju dokumenata2. Odluka nalaže republičkim odborima AFŽ-a da počnu raditi na “prikupljanju i obradi historijskog materijala iz istorije naprednog pokreta žena Jugoslavije – kroz period predratni, ratni i posleratni”. Raspoloživa arhivska građa je nepotpuna i odnosi se na period 1942.-1951. godine, što će reći na period od osnivanja AFŽ-a do dvije godine prije njegove disolucije. Građa koja pokriva period NOB-a je ograničena, dok je period neposredno poslije rata pokriven u znatno većem obimu. Nakon disolucije Arhiv AFŽ-a BiH bio je dio građe Instituta za historiju radničkog pokreta, da bi ga konačno preuzeo Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine. Unatoč pokušajima, nismo saznale da li je materijal izgubljen ili uništen za vrijeme opsade Sarajeva. Ono što znamo jeste da se dogodio proces arhiviranja kao pohranjivanja, pospremanja i zaboravljanja u kojem je Arhiv, Marxovim riječima, prepušten “glodarskoj kritici miševa”. Pospremanje je bilo vrlo temeljito pa je već 1955. godine, objavljivanjem prvog toma Žene Srbije u NOB-u, AFŽ zamijenjen novim subjektom: “ženama u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi”. Tu počinje ispisivanje historije žena koje se bavi ulogom žena u oslobodilačkom ratu po republikama i regijama, ali ne i ulogom AFŽ-a Jugoslavije.3 Druga republička izdanja pojavila su se tek decenijama poslije.4 Kolekcija Žene Srbije u NOB-u objavljena je na 30-u godišnjicu pobjede nad fašizmom, dok se bosanskohercegovačko izdanje pojavilo tek 1977. godine i nije bilo vezano ni za kakvu godišnjicu. Za razliku od hrvatskog i srpskog izdanja, bh izdanje su uređivali članovi Instituta za istoriju. Za vrijeme postojanja SFRJ nikada nije napisana sveobuhvatna historija AFŽ-a Jugoslavije, čija masovnost za nas danas predstavlja nedostižnu tlapnju, sablast koja nas iz prošlosti gura u budućnost borbe, pa se ona 2 Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Dopis Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH od 3. marta 1950. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 317/50, 1950. str. 2. 3 Na tridesetu godišnjicu osnivanja AFŽ-a konačno je objavljena historija “Borbeni put žena Jugoslavije”, više u: Dušanka Kovačević, Dana Begić et al. Borbeni put žena Jugoslavije (Beograd: Leksikografski zavod Sveznanje, 1972.). 4 Crnogorsko izdanje pojavilo se 1969. godine, slovensko 1970. godine, makedonsko 1976. godine. 5 �ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ, TIJANA OKIĆ 6 UVODNA RIJEČ uveliko utopila u historiju NOB-a, historiju žena tout court i u figuru partizanke. AFŽ je tako umro dva puta. Prvi puta disolucijom 1953. godine, a potom i u službenom sjećanju na prošlost, gdje je ostao kao sablasni trag ili prisutnost odsutnosti (Derrida), ustuknuvši pred novim narativom SFRJ, iz kojeg je isključen čak i Narodnooslobodilački pokret5. Svako je historijsko i znanstveno istraživanje historijski i politički određeno: ono se vodi logikom pitanja i odgovora, teorijskih problema i pitanja koja iz njih slijede. Ovaj se zbornik naslanja na studije o radu i djelovanju AFŽ-a i žena u Jugoslaviji uopće – Lydije Sklevicky, Svetlane Slapšak, Renate Jambrešić-Kirin, Gordane Stojaković, Ivane Pantelić – i nastoji pokrenuti novu diskusiju i održati ovo važno naslijeđe živim. Reaproprijacija ovog naslijeđa bitan je korak u naoružavanju novog oslobodilačkog pokreta u borbi protiv patrijarhalne, fašističke i kapitalističke tiranije. *** Šta uopće znači Arhiv koji je dio arhiva države naroda, nakon čijeg raspada su se stvorile nacionalne države? Šta znači Arhiv za nas danas? Misliti vlastitu historiju: pretpostavka je to i imperativ svakog kritičkog odnosa prema prošlosti koji pretendira da prošlost shvati kao nešto više i drugačije od pukog sjećanja na nju. Oni koji se prošlosti sjećaju monumentalizirajući je, osuđeni su na to da je zaborave i da iz nje ne nauče ništa, a oni koji je se sjećaju zaboravljajući - osuđeni su na to da je ponove. Odbacujući historiju AFŽ-a, riskiramo to da marginaliziramo ovo cjelokupno iskustvo AFŽ-a i propustimo lekcije koje može imati za nas danas. 1989. godina predstavlja prelomnu tačku kada se povlači linija demarkacije: demokracija počinje samo tamo gdje završava komunizam. Ovaj stav će obilježiti svu skoriju prošlost ovih prostora, tokom koje je postjugoslavenskom prostoru, kao uostalom i ostatku Istočne Europe, u doslovnom – kantovskom – značenju, “nametnuto stanje nezrelosti” o kojem je Boris Buden govorio kao o “demokraciji u pelenama”6, koja zahtjeva tutore koji, 5 Marko Attila, Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6 Boris Buden, Zona prelaska. O kraju postkomunizma, prev. Hana Ćopić (Beograd: Fabrika knjiga, 2012). �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA kao odrasli, kao oni koji znaju pravila ispravnog ponašanja, održavaju politički status quo, vršeći ideološku funkciju gospodara dopuštenog govora i djelovanja. Uspon historijskog revizionizma nakon 1989. oduzeo nam je mogućnost da sami razumijemo prelomne tačke naše vlastite historije. Tako se borba jugoslavenskih komunista, partizanki i partizana, ali i afežeovki, jednim svojim dijelom – onim “totalitarnim” – upisuje u historiju poraza, pa time i totalitarizma, dok se oslobođeni historijski revizionizam pobjednički upisuje u mitološke državotvorne narative o novim, slobodnim, demokratskim i progresivnim društvima. Ono što se u ovakvoj slici pojavljuje kao ostatak jeste antifašizam. Antifašizam je jedno od rijetkih naslijeđa jugoslavenske prošlosti o kojem je danas “dopušteno” javno govoriti. Istovremeno, potpuno je ispražnjen od političkog sadržaja i naboja, odvojen od realnog, življenog historijskog iskustva, depolitiziran i individualiziran, reduciran na iskustvo pobjede nad fašizmom, dakako, uz obavezno brisanje jugoslavenstva i komunizma kao njegovih konstitutivnih elemenata, bez kojih, ni u Jugoslaviji, a ni u Evropi, ne bi bilo pobjede nad fašizmom. Šta onda može značiti povratak naslijeđu AFŽ-a BiH nakon 70 i nešto godina i drugog krvavog rata koji je Bosnu i Hercegovinu ostavio opljačkanom, opustošenom, osiromašenom i podijeljenom? Zbornik koji predstavljamo javnosti pokušaj je da se razmišlja o ovom pitanju. Bez pretenzije da ponudi definitivne i konačne odgovore, namjera je ovog zbornika naizgled sasvim jednostavna – pokrenuti i otvoriti raspravu. Zbog toga zbornik ne ispisuje ideološki jednostranu reprezentaciju AFŽ-a, nego, s onu stranu patrijarhata i revizionističke ideje totalitarizma, nastoji doprinijeti kolektivnom znanju o pokretu koji još uvijek izaziva strahopoštovanje. Parafrazirajući Nannija Balestrinija i Prima Morona, mogle bismo kazati da je zbornik zamišljen kao instrument rada, kao kompas koji nam pomaže da se krećemo u labirintu arhivske građe, ali i kao pokušaj da se osvijetle kontradikcije sadržane u samom arhivu, kontradikcije koje su ishod historijskih događaja, ali istovremeno i njihov ključni motor 7. 7 U svojoj dokumentarističkoj kolekciji o revolucionarnim pokretima u Italiji između 1968.1977. Nanni Balestrini i Primo Moroni u uvodu raspravljaju upravo o tome kako predstaviti arhive, usmenu historiju i kako uopće predstavljati svu kompleksnost istraživanja koje je istovremeno unutar i izvan vremena na koje se knjiga odnosi. U: Nanni Balestrini i Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro 1968-1977. La grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2015). 7 �8 ANDREJA DUGANDŽIĆ, TIJANA OKIĆ UVODNA RIJEČ Tekstovi na različite načine nastoje istražiti revolucionarne lomove s jedne, i kontradikcije historijskog trenutka, koji je za žene na našim prostorima označio historijski preokret, s druge strane. Ispituju epizode borbe koju nam uvijek iznova valja otpočinjati i dovršavati. Iskustvo pobjede i poraza, afežeovsko i naše, prošlo i sadašnje, podsjetnik je da naše nove i buduće borbe i frontovi, bitke koje trebamo izvojevati, stoje otvoreni i svjedoče o stvaranju mogućeg tamo gdje je sve izgledalo nemoguće. Revolucija se dogodila. Započnimo još jednu! Urednice �O ILUSTRACIJAMA ADELA JUŠIĆ �ADELA JUŠIĆ 10 O ILUSTRACIJAMA “Učiniti žene vidljivima prvi је korak kojim se stavlja u pitanje uobičajen odnos općeg i posebnog u hijerarhiji relevantnosti pisanja povijesti.”1 Pored toga što je u našoj istoriji jako malo materijala koji govori o političkoj djelatnosti žena, ono malo što imamo, zapostavljeno je i prijeti da bude potpuno izgubljeno. Jedan od načina da od zaborava pokušamo spasiti istoriju je da se njome bavimo kroz umjetnost. Umjetnost jugoslovenskog prostora iz druge polovine prošlog stoljeća obiluje slikarskim i skulptorskim predstavama scena iz Drugog svjetskog rata. To su uglavnom predstave vojnika u odlučujućim bitkama. Pored predstava koje slave pobjedu nad fašizmom, česte su umjetničke kompozicije koje veličaju socijalističkog čovjeka u izgradnji ratom razorene zemlje. Predstave muškaraca preovladavaju, a žene, iako počesto prisutne na platnu ili npr. reljefu, rijetko su protagonistkinje. Kada je riječ o spomenicima NOB-u, rijetki su oni koji prikazuju isključivo žene, a još rjeđi među njima su oni koji prikazuju određene istorijske ličnosti. Ženska figura uglavnom je personifikacija slobode, pobjede, revolucije i slično. “Žene su prikazane kao nositeljice tradicije i kada se rame uz rame bore sa svojim kolegama suborcima i radnicima. U jednoj ruci puška/motika, a za skutom dijete.“2 U nedostatku scena herojske borbe i rada žena koje su doprinijele odbrani i razvoju socijalističke Jugoslavije, posegnule smo za pričama koje su dostupne na online Arhivu antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, za dokumentima koji govore o ženskim političkim aktivnostima ovog perioda. Za ovaj zbornik odlučile smo producirati ilustracije koje će se baviti ključnim temama Arhiva: žena u borbi, heroizam rada, ilegalni rad i slično. Zajedno sa umjetnicama Sunitom Fišić, Nardinom Zubanović, Aleksandrom Ninom Knežević i Kasjom Jerlagić odabrale smo dokumente, tekstove i priče za koje smatramo da zaslužuju da ih kroz umjetnički rad pokušamo ovjekovječiti. Kao umjetnica i feministkinja proteklih sam pet godina temu učešća žena u NOB-u i AFŽ-u tretirala kroz mnoge svoje radove. Reprezentacija žena 1 Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. str. 14. 2 Knežević, Saša. ‘Sjećanje i mjesta sjećanja. Rodna perspektiva spomenika iz NOB-a’. str. 9. (AFŽ Arhiva, pristupljeno 9. prosinca 2016., dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/355.). �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA u NOB-u, ženski narativi i oralna historija, jednako kao i druge “podteme” ženske istorije ovog, za nas važnog perioda, teme su koje zaokupljaju moj umjetnički rad. Kao i u nekim od svojih prethodnih radova, i ovdje se bavim temom žene u borbi. Kao podlogu za jednu od ilustracija koristim mapu iz knjige “Sutjeska 1943-73”3. Radi se o faksimilu skice dejstava njemačkih, italijanskih i bugarskih trupa u kanjonu Pive i Sutjeske. Na mapi koja pokazuje djelovanje neprijateljskih sila ponavljam nekoliko ženskih silueta koje su prikazane u borbenoj poziciji, sa puškama, u ležećem stavu. Moj drugi prilog zborniku, u formi teksta, opisuje ženu u borbi, vojnikinju u ležećem položaju, čija puška nije uperena u neprijatelja. Žena ovdje ne puca, već spava. Takođe, ona više nije apstraktna figura kao na prethodnoj ilustraciji, već istorijska ličnost - Mitra Mitrović, istaknuta antifašistkinja i učesnica NOB-a, važna politička akterka u periodu nakon rata. Umjesto predstave Mitre Mitrović koja spava, ispisujem njena sjećanja sa fronta: “Grme topovi, puške, oko mene haos, a meni se spava... I ja ti odspavam, osvježim se i poslije dalje. Zato sam i preživjela.” Reproduktivna uloga žene moja je druga tema. Na jednoj od ilustracija u prvom planu predstavljam realistično iscrtanu ženu sa troje djece, dok se iza, skoro prijeteći, ukazuje velika željezna konstrukcija tek otvorenog mosta na rijeci Savi na kojem se nalazi natpis: “PETOGODIŠNJI PLAN SRETNIJA BUDUĆNOST NAŠIH NARODA”. Povezujem Petogodišnji plan i politike prema ženi i majki koje su sprovođene u tom poratnom periodu. Ovom ilustracijom želim ukazati na to da su ekonomski napredak i budućnost zemlje uopšte, bili usko povezani s pitanjem reprodukcije. Rad Sunite Fišić inspirisan je dokumentom iz Arhiva Bosne i Hercegovine - dopisom sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bijeljina u kojem se govori o udarničkom radu žena ovog sreza na izgradnji zadružnih domova, te se navodi primjer 56-ogodišnje Blerte Hodžić koja “od prvog dana svakodnevno radi zajedno sa zidarima, žustro se penje na skele i donosi malter i ciglu.”4 Umjetnica u tehnici laviranog tuša i crteža perom i tušem više puta ponavlja istu žensku figuru u radu na izgradnji zadružnog doma. Time naglašava njenu 3 Beograd: Monos, 1973. 4 Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽa u Bijeljini Glavnom odboru AFŽa - o radu žena Janje na izgradnji zadružnih domova’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 4, 1370/2, 1948. 11 �ADELA JUŠIĆ 12 O ILUSTRACIJAMA fizičku snagu i izdržljivost u udarničkom radu, radu na skelama, zidanju i prenošenju teških zidarskih materijala, koji se, nerijetko, shvaća kao isključivo muški rad. Kasja Jerlagić također se bavi ilustriranjem heroizma rada. Njen alegorijski crtež sa pet figura koje nose preveliki i preteški balvan, predstavlja žene iz ruralnih područja, koje su gradile zemlju kamen po kamen, balvan po balvan. Umjetnica u ovom radu nije inspirisana samo jednim specifičnim dokumentom, tekstom ili svjedočenjem, već nastoji ilustrirati istinu: žene su u poratnim godinama kroz dobrovoljni rad, kroz ogroman broj sati provedenih na najrazličitijim poslovima, od obrade poljoprivrednog zemljišta, do izgradnje puteva i mostova, rame uz rame s muškarcima, odigrale ključnu ulogu u izgradnji nove Jugoslavije. Druga tema koju Kasja Jerlagić obrađuje kroz vrlo realističan crtež olovkom je tema ilegalnog rada. Ilustracija Kasje Jerlagić na ovu temu inspirisana je tekstom Olge Marasović “Stanodavke jedne ilegalke”. Olga opisuje sa kakvom su hrabrošću sestre Bašagić reagovale na dolazak istražnih organa u njihovu kuću: “U razgovoru sa policijom sestre Bašagić pokazale su iskustvo već oprobanih ilegalaca, pripadnika NOP-a.“5 Upravo zbog njihovog hrabrog držanja, policija nije zapazila ništa sumnjivo, te se, nedugo zatim, udaljila od kuće. Na ilustraciji vidimo dva policijska službenika na vratima kuće koja im otvara jedna od sestara, gestikulirajući cijelim svojim tijelom da se u toj kući ništa ne skriva, te da su sve njihove sumnje neutemeljene. Ovaj rad ukazuje na odvažnost seoskih žena koje su u tim opasnim vremenima imale važne uloge i nesebično rizikovale svoj i život svojih ukućana kako bi pomogle snagama otpora, koje su tada još uvijek djelovale samo u ilegali, spremajući se na trenutak izlaska na vojne frontove na kojima će osloboditi zemlju od fašističkog okupatora. Ekspresivne ilustracije Nardine Zubanović inspirisane su događajem sa početka decembra 1941. godine u Mostaru. Glavne akterke masovnog protesta nazvanog “Operacija Viktorija” bile su mostarske žene koje su se u velikom broju okupile na Tepi, tj. gradskoj pijaci, protestirajući protiv 5 Jasmina Musabegović et al, “Žene Bosne i Hercegovine u narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi 19411945. godine: sjećanja učesnika. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 1977. dostupno na: AFŽ Arhiva, pristupljeno 9. prosinca 2016., http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/105., vidi priču Olge Marasović, Stanodavke jedne ilegalke. str. 9. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA gladi i oskudice, tražeći repu zvanu Viktorija. Razljućene su se uputile prema kući načelnika, pozivajući ga na odgovornost i tražeći artikle za prehranu. Protest se nastavio pljačkom i vandaliziranjem ekonomata, nakon čega su žene iz bašči poljoprivrednika čupale povrće, kako bi prikrile da je ovdje, zapravo, bila riječ o duboko političkoj akciji protiv okupatora i kolaboracionista. Protesti su zaustavljeni intervencijom policijskih snaga. Aleksandra Nina Knežević se u tehnici digitalnog crteža bavi temom Osmog marta, konkretnije službenim parolama za proslavu ovog praznika. Parolama se: pozdravljaju žene Kine i daje im se podrška u borbi protiv fašizma, slavi jedinstvo demokratskog pokreta žena, afirmira uloga narodnih učiteljica u vaspitanju novog socijalističkog čovjeka, uloga seljanki u unaprijeđivanju privrede, učvršćivanju postojećih zadruga i stvaranju novih. Ove parole govore nam kojim su se temama žene u poratnoj Jugoslaviji bavile na svoj praznik - Osmi mart. Kroz ilustracije u ovom zborniku dotičemo se ključnih tema Arhiva: heroizma rada, ilegalnog rada, političkog rada, žene u borbi, ličnih narativa i sjećanja. Ova gesta naknadnog ilustriranja nikad ilustriranih događaja, performirana kroz subjektivne doživljaje umjetnica koje pokušavaju dopuniti praznine ženske strane istorije, gesta je, prije svega, zahvalnosti svim znanim i neznanim herojkama. Priče koje ovdje prenosimo, priče su jednog vremena, jedne borbe i jednog herojskog doba. Ove ilustracije stoga, ne samo da odražavaju duh tog vremena ili oslikavaju neke događaje, nego se tim vremenom i tim događajima bave iz sadašnjosti, iz današnje perspektive, ne samo kao istorijski prikaz prošlosti, nego kao politički čin današnjice. Adela Jušić 13 ��BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI �16 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA 1. Uvod Ulazak u arhiv je uvijek uzbudljivo iskustvo i emotivan susret. Riječima Antoinette Burton „historija nije samo otkrivanje činjenica (…) već podrazumijeva i niz složenih procesa odabira, tumačenja, pa čak i invencije, a sve ih pokreće, između ostalog, osobni susret sa arhivom, historija samog arhiva, te pritisak sadašnjeg trenutka koji uvjetuje naše čitanje arhivske građe”1. Pisanje historije uvijek je uvjetovano našim pretpostavkama, pristrasnošću i gledištima. Pronašavši u Arhivu antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije iznimno raznovrsnu građu, odlučila sam krenuti od objavljenih memoara, fotografija i usmene historije (intervjua), ne bih li kroz lične priče, vizuelne predmete i zvučne zapise ustanovila eventualnu vezu koja upotpunjava istraživanje digitaliziranog materijala – uglavnom organizacijskih dokumenata koji svjedoče o široko rasprostranjenom, kapilarnom radu Antifašističkog fronta žena nakon Drugog svjetskog rata. Bogatstvo ovog arhiva omogućava emotivno povezivanje sa sudbinama članica AFŽ-a, imajući pri tom na umu da je susret sa njihovim glasovima – ili glasovima njima bliskih ljudi – uvjetovan činom odabira, tumačenja i invencije, drugim riječima, našom vlastitom pozicijom.2 Figura koja se osobito ističe jest Vahida Maglajlić, jedina narodna heroina iz reda bosanskih muslimanki, koju prijatelji i prijateljice, porodica i saborci i saborkinje, opisuju kao nevjerovatno plemenitu, energičnu i nezavisnu drugaricu. Njihove opise upotpunjavaju fotografije prelijepe, kratko ošišane Vahide Maglajlić, koje se mogu pronaći na Internetu. Možda je Vahidin najmlađi brat Alija u jednom intervjuu ponajbolje objasnio koliko je karakter Vahide Maglajlić utjecao na njen aktivizam, koliko toga je postigla, i koliko je još mogla postići da nije izgubila život u narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi.3 Fascinantno je da još uvijek možemo razgovarati sa ljudima koji su preživjeli Drugi svjetski rat. Ali nećemo vječno imati mogućnost direktnog kontakta sa svjedocima Drugog svjetskog rata i pokreta otpora. Stoga ovaj Arhiv smatram izvanredno značajnim, budući se radi o projektu koji je još u uvijek u izradi, koji nije zatvoren. Ovo je živući arhiv jednog od najznačajnijih izvornih antifašističkih pokreta otpora u Evropi Drugog svjetskog rata, pokreta 1 Burton, Antoinette M. “Archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. str. 7-8. 2 Bonfiglioli, Chiara. “Nomadic Theory as an Epistemology for Transnational Feminist History” u: Iris van der Tuin i Bolette Blagaard, ur., The Subject of Rosi Braidotti. London, Bloomsbury, 2014. 3 Dugandžić Andreja i Jušić, Adela. “Intervju sa Alijom Maglajlićem”, Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, pristupljeno 6. novembra 2016. godine, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/16 �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 17 čije se nasljeđe u postjugoslavenskom periodu sve više marginalizira i zaboravlja uslijed rastuće hegemonije revizionističke, nacionalističke historiografije. Još jedno pitanje koje nije zatvoreno, niti će ikada biti, jest pitanje emancipacije žena, i feminizma, u svim periodima i na svim mjestima, u ovom konkretnom slučaju na postjugoslavenskom prostoru. U Arhivu pronalazimo djeliće i fragmente koji svjedoče o djelovanju žena i njihovoj dugoj borbi za socijalnu pravdu, slobodu i ravnopravnost tokom i nakon Drugog svjetskog rata, na primjer u djelovanju žena sreskog odbora u Tesliću koje su 1947. godine, nakon što su više puta slale svoje članke, zahtijevale da ih se uvrsti u list Nova žena koji je AFŽ objavljivao u Sarajevu. Zahtijevale su i više članaka sa raznim uzorcima za šivanje i savjetima o podizanju djece, jer je lokalnim ženama upravo takav sadržaj bio najkorisniji.4 U okviru dominirajućih tumačenja ženske historije u socijalizmu, ovakvi zapisi bili bi okarakterizirani isključivo kao neposredan dokaz patrijarhalne svijesti i neuspjeh socijalizma da ospori postojeće rodne uloge.5 Međutim, kako dokazujem 4 “Po našem mišljenju trebalo bi da bar na jednoj strani pod rubrikom za naše selo piše šta najviše interesuje naše drugarice na selu, o domaćinstvu, opšte o ženama majkama, djeci, o kuvanju koja nisu neizvodljiva za njihove prilike. Iz razgovora sa drugaricama bilo bi poželjno da izlaze u listu „NOVA ŽENA” razni uzorci i drugo po nešto iz šivanja (...) Koliko vole drugarice kad se piše o djeci. Jedna majka kaže; sa nestrpljenjom očekuje svaki broj „NOVE ŽENE” jer uvijek ima o djeci vrlo poučni savjeta. O savjetu pročitano u „NOVOJ ŽENI” ja sam moju djecu oslobodila glista, koje tako štetno djeluju na nježnji dječiji organizam. Naše se drugarice pitaju, o mnogim Srezovima piše po više članaka a o Tesliću ništa, kao da mi spavamo. Slali smo nekoliko puta članke za „NOVU LISTU” ali do danas ništa o nama.” Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor Teslić Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – povjerenstvo za štampu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1178/1, 1947. 5 Gledano antropološki, patrijarhatom se nazivaju ona društva gdje muškarci imaju moć nad ženama i djecom, u smislu vlasti, imovine i rada. Balkanske porodice su tradicionalno patrilinearne i organizirane na principu muške dominacije nad proširenom porodicom. Pojam patrijarhata počeo se još jače vezivati za Balkan nakon uspostavljanja novih nacionalističkih režima i nakon rodno zasnovanog nasilja tokom jugoslavenskih ratova iz devedesetih. S druge strane, feministkinje su socijalistički režim u Jugoslaviji, ali i drugdje, opisale kao „državni patrijarhat” u kojem je država kontrolirala ženski produktivni rad, ali nije bila u stanju promijeniti kontrolu muškarca nad tijelima i radom žena u privatnoj sferi (pogledati djela Žarane Papić i Mihaele Miroiu iz Rumunije). Zapadni naučnici i naučnice često su takve kritike tumačili kroz prizmu postojećih hladnoratovskih stereotipa, što je na koncu stvorilo fenomen kojeg su Kristen Ghodsee i Kateřina Lišková definirale kao „opće znanje”, tj. niz dominantnih, banalnih tvrdnji koje se stalno ponavljaju kad god se govori o ženama u državnom socijalizmu ili ženskim organizacijama iz tog perioda u centralnoj, istočnoj i jugoistočnoj Evropi. Korištenjem takvih tvrdnji poricala se mogućnost i sposobnost žena da djeluju unutar navodno homogenog režima državnog patrijarhata. Vidjeti: Ghodsee, Kristen i Lišková, Kateřina „Bumbling Idiots or Evil Masterminds? Challenging Cold War Stereotypes about Women, Sexuality and State Socialism”, Filozofija i društvo XXVII (3), 2016: 489-503. �18 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA u ovom radu, izuzetno je važno taj interpretativni okvir proširiti i oduprijeti se svođenju kompleksnog ženskog iskustva u Drugom svjetskom ratu i neposredno nakon njega na pojednostavljene narative o uspjehu ili neuspjehu socijalističke emancipacije, ili na pitanje istinske slobode djelovanja žena u socijalizmu.6 Ovaj Arhiv nam pomaže da shvatimo svu ambivalentnost i složenost tog perioda. Danas je teško i zamisliti stupanj eksploatacije i siromaštva žena širom Jugoslavije sredinom četrdesetih godina prošlog stoljeća, kao i svu snagu i privlačnost novonastajućeg rodnog imaginarija koji emancipaciju žena neizostavno vezuje s mirom, oslobađanjem od stranog okupatora, opismenjavanjem, radom i čistim zdravim domovima. No, kako su aktivistkinje AFŽ-a ubrzo spoznale, višestoljetni patrijarhat, usko vezan sa siromaštvom žena, ne poništava se tako lako. To nam pokazuje i slučaj jedne muslimanke iz Visokog koja je 1947. godine rekla da bi rado skinula zar, ali da nema šta drugo obući.7 Ovakvi detalji daju uvid u tadašnji život žena i njihove probleme, te pomažu boljem razumijevanju proturječnosti ženske historije Bosne i Hercegovine, historije nedovoljno zastupljene u literaturi o ženskom i feminističkom pokretu na postjugoslavenskom prostoru, a koja i sama nastaje tek u protekle dvije decenije.8 Proučavanjem arhiva AFŽ-a upoznajemo složenu, fragmentiranu i neravnomjernu historiju ženskog angažmana, susrećemo žene često najhrabrije u svojoj generaciji, ali i žene koje su se naprosto zatekle u nemogućoj situaciji, te pokušale učiniti nešto u vezi sa društvenom nepravdom i progonom drugih, ili za vlastitu egzistenciju. Svojim angažmanom na njihovom angažmanu suprotstavljamo se brisanju antifašističkog nasljeđa i njegovog utjecaja na živote žena.9 6 Za daljnju raspravu o (ne)mogućnosti žena da djeluju unutar državnog socijalizma vidjeti Funk, Nanette. „A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, br. 4 2014: 344–360. Ghodsee, Kristen, „Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, br. 2 (2015): 248–252. De Haan, Francisca et. al. (2016), „Forum: Ten Years After, Communism and Feminism Revisited”, Aspasia, 10. 7 „U vezi skidanja zara na srezu nije najpoželnije. Ima drugarica koje su skinule, a ima i onakvih koje namjeravaju skinuti zar, ali da za sada ne mogu, iz razloga tog što nemaju u šta da se preobuku. Nemaju novca da odma nabave, ali da će nastojati da što brže nadju, govoreći da i one žele da što brže pogledaju očima.” Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – mjesečni izvještaj za oktobar i novembar’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1290/1, 1947. Žene iz drugih mjesta također su navodile nedostatak odjevnih predmeta, pa se postavlja pitanje da li su one zapravo pronašle klasni izgovor da izbjegnu promjene kojima su se i same protivile, o čemu će biti govora kasnije. 8 Giomi, Fabio. „Uvod” u Aida Spahić et al. Zabilježene: žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. Vijeku. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, 2014. Mlinarević, Gorana i Kosović, Lamija (2011): „Women’s Movements and Gender Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, Aspasia, svezak 5, str. 128-38. 9 O konceptu angažmana vidjeti Zaharijević, Adriana. „Pawning and Challenging in Concert: Engagement as a Field of Study”, Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (2), 2016. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 19 U ovom radu iskustvo AFŽ-a promatra se sa stanovišta intersekcionalnosti, tj. koristeći feminističku istraživačku metodologiju koja rodne odnose razmatra u sprezi sa drugim važnim faktorima društvene diferencijacije kao što su klasa, geografski položaj, etnička pripadnost, životna dob, nacionalnost i seksualna orijentacija.10 Analiziram razlike u biografijama članica ove organizacije, te metode kojima je AFŽ zapravo funkcionirao kao most između žena sa raznih geografskih područja, žena različitog stepena obrazovanja, žena iz različitih etničkih grupa i klasa, te žena sa različitim političkim iskustvom – promovirajući nove oblike solidarnosti protiv patrijarhalne potlačenosti i otvarajući nove životne prilike, ali i uspostavljajući nove hijerarhije i nove načine kontroliranja propisanih ženskih uloga, kao na primjer u slučaju pokrivenih muslimanki. Koristeći raznovrsne materijale (arhivska građa, usmena historija sačuvana kroz intervjue, objavljeni izvori), razmatram kako se lične priče žena uklapaju u zajednički okvir rodno definiranih koncepata „moderniteta” i „zaostalosti” koje je koristila ova organizacija, te kako nakon 1945. godine razlike među ženama utječu na osmišljavanje praksi AFŽ-a posvećenih stvaranju modernih i emancipiranih feminiteta. Ratni i poslijeratni masovni aktivizam žena u Jugoslaviji obilježen je hijerarhijskim jazom između nekolicine urbanih, obrazovanih i politiziranih rukovoditeljica AFŽ-a i članstva organizacije koje su uglavnom sačinjavale seoske žene i radnice. Razlike među ženama ključne su i za razumijevanje organizacije arhiva AFŽ-a širom postjugoslavenskog prostora. Antifašističke ženske organizacije bile su ustrojene hijerarhijski, piramidalno, kako u svom pionirskom radu pokazuje zagrebačka historičarka Lydia Sklevicky11. Postojala je fundamentalna razlika između politiziranih („emancipiranih” ili „prosvijetljenih”) žena, koje su činile avangardu ženskih organizacija, i (seljačkih, radničkih ili neobrazovanih) „ženskih masa”. Sama organizacija djelovala je kroz mjesne odbore čije su članice birale delegatkinje za okružne i regionalne odbore. Na vrhu piramide stajali su glavni i centralni odbori. Ovakvo ustrojstvo organizacije odražava se i u arhivskoj građi: pored reprezentativnih, agitprop-dokumenata (programske izjave, govori održani na masovnim sastancima i javnim prigodama, članci iz štampe), tu nalazimo i tragove dubljih, internih rasprava, npr. prijepise Centralnog odbora i interne izvještaje u kojima lokalni i srednji kadrovi organizacije opisuju stanje i probleme 10 Postoji mnogo radova o intersekcionalnosti: za uvod vidjeti Lutz, Helma, Herrera Vivar, Maria Teresa i Supik, Linda. (ur.), Framing intersectionality: debates on a multi-faceted conceptin gender studies. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 11 Sklevicky, Lydia. „Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of postrevolutionary Yugoslavia” u: Angerman, A., Binnema, G., Keunen, A., Poels, V. & Zirkzee, J. (ur.) Current Issues in Women’s History. London i New York: Routledge, 1989. �20 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA na pojedinim područjima.12 Lokalni, republički i federativni kadrovi AFŽ-a, dakle, vode bitku protiv onog što se definira „primitivnim” poimanjem uloge žena, no na lokalnom nivou nailaze na snažan otpor, ne samo muškaraca i partijskih organa, nego i samih žena, s obzirom na to da tokom i neposredno nakon Drugog svjetskog rata u Jugoslaviji koegzistiraju i sukobljavaju se vrlo različiti feminiteti.13 U nastavku ću istražiti biografije nekolicine žena u odnosu na rodno definirane predodžbe tradicije i moderniteta, te u odnosu na društvenu diferencijaciju žena unutar same organizacije. 2. Djelovanje žena između “naprednosti” i “zaostalosti” Tokom socijalističke ere objavljeno je nekoliko zbirki o životima partizanki i aktivistkinja. U njima se prije svega naglašava hrabrost žena, njihova odanost Partiji i žrtvovanje za oslobođenje zemlje. S druge strane, naučni radovi objavljeni nakon 1989. godine gledaju na iskustvo žena uglavnom iz rodne perspektive, kroz novu feminističku paradigmu ženske historije. Dok američka historičarka Barbara Jancar-Webster za svoju monografiju o ženama u jugoslavenskom pokretu otpora intervjuira bivše partizanke, zagrebačka akademičarka Lydia Sklevicky podrobno istražuje arhivsku građu o radu AFŽ-a tokom i neposredno nakon Drugog svjetskog rata. U interpretativnom okviru oba njihova djela naglašava se da su mobilizaciju žena kontrolirale komunistička partija i država, te da je ženski antifašistički pokret tokom konsolidacije socijalističkog režima postepeno gubio autonomiju.14 Završnim činom ovog procesa smatra se raspuštanje AFŽ-a 1953. godine.15 Feminističke kritike patrijarhalnih struktura u socijalizmu nesumnjivo 12 Vidjeti također: Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, Žene, Ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska Infoteka, 1996. 13 Bonfiglioli, Chiara. (2014), „Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia”, Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, svezak 8, str. 1-25. 14 Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945. Denver, Colorado: Arden Press, 1998. Vidjeti „Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement” iste autorice u Sabrina P. Ramet (ur.) Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi. Vidjeti „Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of post-revolutionary Yugoslavia” iste autorice u: A. Angerman, G. Binnema, A. Keunen, V. Poels i J. Zirkzee, ur. Current Issues in Women’s History. London i New York: Routledge 1989. 15 Za kritičku raspravu o ovome narativu vidjeti Tešija, Jelena. „The End of the AFŽ – The End of Meaningful Women’s Activism? Rethinking the History of Women’s Organizations in Croatia, 1953 – 1961”, magistarski rad, Odsjek za rodne studije, Centralnoevropski univerzitet, Budimpešta, 2014. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 21 su veoma značajne, ali tendencija viđenja interesa žena kao inherentno suprotnih državnim i partijskim interesima dovodi do podcjenjivanja subjektivnog raskida sa tradicionalnim rodnim ulogama koji se desio zahvaljujući učešću žena u partizanskoj borbi i aktivizmu žena unutar AFŽ-a. Ovaj dominirajući narativ također podcjenjuje i obezvrjeđuje rad žena, posebno kada je riječ o rukovodstvu AFŽ-a. Barbara Jancar-Webster, na primjer, kaže: Pretvorivši AFŽ u učinkovitu pomoćnu organizaciju, komunistkinje su neko vrijeme imale priliku uživati u osjećaju moći i odgovornosti. Kada ih se pozvalo da AFŽ pretvore u komunističku masovnu organizaciju, one su to i učinile. Žene koje su se žrtvovale da poraze okupatora i odbrane svoje domove postale su, u pravom smislu te riječi, žrtve partije koja im je nalagala vlastite standarde.16 Autorica nadalje povezuje nedostatak autonomije žena unutar AFŽ-a sa nemoći žena u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji, kao i sa rodno zasnovanim nasiljem tokom jugoslavenskih ratova, definirajući tako živote ovdašnjih žena kao stalnu viktimizaciju, od Drugog svjetskog rata do danas. I Jelena Batinić iznosi slične tvrdnje u svojoj nedavno objavljenoj iscrpnoj monografiji, navodeći da je partizanska vlast vješto prilagodila jezik dnevnim potrebama seoskih i nepismenih žena, ali da je žene u antifašističkoj mobilizaciji doživljavala kao rezervnu armiju i da nije uspjela promijeniti tradicionalne rodne uloge, ni pri organiziranju masovnog otpora, niti unutar bojnih jedinica. Ova monografija u osnovi ne osporava postojeća tumačenja ženskog učešća u pokretu otpora i ženskog aktivizma unutar AFŽ-a.17 Usljed takvih interpretacija ostaju nedovoljno istražene biografije vodećih aktivistkinja AFŽ-a, kao i njihovo djelovanje i subjektivni procesi politizacije, posebno kada je riječ o rukovodećim i srednjim kadrovima, koji su tokom i nakon Drugog svjetskog rata obavljali rukovoditeljske zadatke. Lydia Sklevicky, na primjer, otvoreno odbacuje usmenu historiju bivših učesnica AFŽ-a koje su u to doba još uvijek uživale znatan javni ugled: „Većina učesnica, posebno onih koje su bile na visokom položaju u organizaciji i još uvijek se nalaze na pozicijama moći, žele predstaviti vlastito iskustvo, stavove i uspomene kao jedinu istinitu verziju događaja”18. 16 Jancar-Webster, „Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement”, str. 85. kurziv dodala autorica. 17 Batinić, Jelena. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 18 Sklevicky, „Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation”. Kurziv dodala autorica. �22 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA Iako je dobro što nas ovakva tumačenja upozoravaju da ne gajimo isuviše romantičnu sliku o iskustvu AFŽ-a, ona u suštini podrivaju ulogu žena kao organizacijskih i političkih rukovoditeljica, i zanemaruju različite stupnjeve truda uloženog u promoviranje novih rodnih predodžbi kojima se nastojao uspostaviti „ujedinjujući” diskurs ženske ravnopravnosti bez obzira na klasu, geografsko područje ili etničku pripadnost. Takva tumačenja također prikrivaju da se nakon Drugog svjetskog rata javljaju nove mogućnosti političkog angažmana, obrazovanja i rada koje masama žena nude mogućnost izbora i omogućavaju nesvakidašnji generacijski raskid u samoodređivanju žena kao građanki i radnica. Kako sam pokazala u svojoj disertaciji, novi su politički diskursi i prakse ženskog aktivizma u eri Hladnog rata bili transnacionalni i prekoračivali granice zacrtane Hladnim ratom.19 Patrijarhat ili, drugim riječima, dominacija muškaraca u javnim strukturama i privatnoj sferi, dakako nije prestao postojati bez obzira na zvaničnu socijalističku politiku ženske emancipacije. Diskursi i praksa ženske emancipacije imali su nepostojan učinak, prvenstveno zbog već postojeće snažne patrijarhalne tradicije porodica i neujednačenosti životnih prilika žena u različitim regijama, ali i zbog stvaranja novih oblika društvene diferencijacije.20 Brojni dokumentarni filmovi pokazuju da žensko iskustvo rodne (ne)ravnopravnosti i društvene mobilnosti u socijalizmu nije uvjetovano samo tradicionalnim i široko rasprostranjenim dvostrukim bremenom žena, već i različitim životnim putevima žena, posebno različitim stupnjem obrazovanja, različitom klasom i porodičnom politikom.21 Usprkos težnjama Jugoslavije ka besklasnom društvu, razni su oblici kapitala (političkog, društvenog, ekonomskog i kulturnog) određivali mjeru u kojoj i žene koriste nove prilike na polju obrazovanja i rada. Napredovanje žena na ovim poljima moglo je spriječiti i „nepodobno” porijeklo, političko ili vjersko, a u kriznim situacijama obrazovane žene na ključnim pozicijama riskirale su da se nađu pod teškom političkom represijom, kako se desilo u slučaju raskida Sovjetskog saveza i Jugoslavije.22 19 Bonfiglioli, Chiara. Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945–1953.), doktorska disertacija, Univerzitet u Utrechtu, 2012. 20 Archer, Rory, Duda, Igor i Stubbs, Paul ur., Social inequalities and discontent in Yugoslav Socialism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. 21 Vidjeti dokumentarac Borovi i jele (2002.) Sanje Iveković, te dokumentarce Želimira Žilnika Jedna žena – jedan vek iz 2012. i Vera i Eržika iz 1981. 22 Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata. Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja. Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 23 Ovdje, dakle, zastupam suptilniji pristup procjeni ženskog učešća u AFŽ-u, pristup koji razmatra međusobno povezane faktore društvene diferencijacije i njihovu stalnu fluidnost, a ne inherentne suprotnosti između „žene” i „države”, posebno u kontekstu krajnje fragmentirane i decentralizirane državne vlasti. Izbjegavajući paradigmu potpune nepovezanosti „feminističkih” i „proleterskih” ženskih pokreta, biografski i intersekcionalni pristup omogućava i praćenje kontinuiteta učešća žena u feminističkim organizacijama i kulturnim udruženjima u periodu između dva rata, kao i rukovođenja AFŽ-om tokom ratnih i poslijeratnih godina.23 Dodatni element kontinuiteta je i interpretativni okvir koji suprotstavlja savremenost i zaostalost, gdje se rodni odnosi u ruralnim područjima, posebno u muslimanskim zajednicama, tumače kao krajnji znak zaostalosti i rezultat feudalnog osmanskog potlačivanja. Ovaj okvir je postojao i između dva svjetska rata, ali je posebno izražen tokom djelovanja AFŽ-a u posljeratnom periodu.24 Aktivistkinje su se dakle, našle na raskršću ovih kontradikcija: sa jedne strane različiti uvjeti političkog angažmana, a sa druge različiti zahtjevi naprednog i nazadnog načina života. Individualne težnje žena na polju obrazovanja, rada i bračnog života preplitale su se sa novim oblicima kolektivnog organiziranja i novim utopijskim rodnim predodžbama. Pošto su siromaštvo i socijalna pravda bili važna motivacija političkog angažmana, u nastavku ću predstaviti upravo biografije koje pokazuju svu složenost političkih putanja aktivistkinja, posebno onih muslimanskog porijekla. Da bih pokazala ulogu faktora društvene diferencijacije u mobilizaciji žena, predstavit ću i dva primjera gdje su važni pokretači političkog angažmana bili obrazovanje i klasa. Ovi primjeri dakako nisu reprezentativni za čitavu Bosnu i Hercegovinu, ni čitavu Jugoslaviju, tim više što među dostupnim, objavljenim i arhivskim izvorima dominira perspektiva rukovodstva AFŽ-a, a ne običnih članica. Kroz analizu ovih slučajeva predočavam kako se intersekcionalnim i biografskim pristupom otvaraju nove perspektive i dolazi do novih tumačenja arhivskog nasljeđa AFŽ-a. 23 Emmert, A. Thomas. „Ženski Pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s” u Sabrina P. Ramet (ur.), Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 24 Ibidem. Vidjeti i Ballinger, Pamela i Ghodsee, Kristen. „Socialist Secularism. Religion, Modernity, and Muslim Women’s Emancipation in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, 1945-1991”, Aspasia 5 (2011): 6-27. �24 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA Među aktivistkinjama AFŽ-a koje su težile ličnoj slobodi i ravnopravnosti ističe se Vahida Maglajlić (1907-1943)25 rođena u Banjoj Luci, u uglednoj muslimanskoj porodici. Kćerka lokalnog kadije (sudije), najstarija od desetero djece, Vahida već u djetinjstvu ispoljava živahan, snažan karakter; muškobanjasta djevojčica će postati izuzetno vješta tkalja i krojačica. Sanjala je da po svršetku ženske strukovne škole nastavi školovanje na pedagoškoj gimnaziji u Zagrebu, ali otac joj to nije dozvolio, iako su sva njena braća studirala i obučavala se za različita zanimanja. No, njoj je njen brat Ekrem, aktivista, donosio ilegalnu ljevičarsku literaturu koju je ona, krišom od oca, pomno čitala, postepeno prerastajući u komunistkinju. Vahida je zbog svog nesputanog duha ubrzo prestala nositi zar i čak je, u skladu sa tadašnjom modom, a na veliko zaprepaštenje svojih roditelja, odrezala kosu. Vahida je bila uzor mnogim muslimanskim ženama i djevojčicama koje je stalno ohrabrivala da se školuju, i za koje je organizirala brojne posjete kulturnim društvima poput Gajreta. Neposredno pred početak rata, Vahida je postala sekretarka, a potom i predsjednica Ženskog pokreta, organizacije ljevičarki koje su kasnije stupale u ilegalne partizanske aktivnosti. Kuća Vahidnog oca-kadije postala je tokom ustaške okupacije Banje Luke žarište antifašističkih aktivnosti. Vahida Maglajlić je, kao i njene saborkinje Dušanka Kovačević i Rada Vranješević, zar koristila da bi neopaženo stigla na sastanke ilegalaca i ilegalki. Vahida je konačno uhapšena, ali je, nakon mučenja u lokalnom zatvoru, uspjela pobjeći na slobodni teritorij.26 Prije nego su je u aprilu 1943. godine ubile njemačke snage, Vahida je jako puno radila sa muslimankama na području Cazina, mobilišući ih za partizanski pokret. U decembru 1942. godine, na prvoj konferenciji AFŽ-a u Bosanskom Petrovcu, Vahida je izabrana za članicu Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a. Nakon Drugog svjetskog rata položaj muslimanki postaje izuzetno osjetljivo pitanje, dijelom i zbog složenog političkog položaja muslimana u tom ratu.27 Krajem četrdesetih AFŽ započinje kampanju protiv zara i feredže koja vrhunac doseže usvajanjem niza zakona kojima se u Jugoslaviji zabranjuje pokrivanje čitavog lica, 1950. i 1951. godine – u vrijeme kada je „uporedna kontrola religije i oslobođenje žena postalo značajan simbol napretka i moderniteta”28. Pitanje 25 Vidjeti Beoković, Mila. Žene heroji. Sarajevo, Svjetlost, 1967. Za druge biografske prikaze života Vahide Maglajlić vidjeti Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Himka. Zapisi o Vahidi Maglajlić. Banjaluka: Glas, 1973. i Rođena za burno doba: životni put narodnog heroja Vahide Maglajlić. Kragujevac: Dečje Novine, 1977., iste autorice. 26 Žene Heroji, 216-218. 27 Hoare, Marko, Attila. The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History. London: Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2013. 28 Socialist Secularism, 12. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 25 vela je orijentalizirano i u negativnom smislu povezano sa historijskim nasljeđem Osmanskog carstva.29 Svu ambivalentnost poslijeratne emancipacije žena pokazuje biografija Didare Dukazdjini, sedamnaestogodišnje Albanke iz bogate prizrenske porodice. Njoj je otac naredio da skine feredžu30 nakon što su lokalne komunističke vlasti tradicionalnog i zaostalog Kosova pozvale najuglednije porodice da svojim primjerom pokažu uvođenje novih socijalističkih vrijednosti. Godine 1947. stigla je direktiva Partije da se radi na ubeđivanju najuticajnijih ljudi u gradu o neophodnosti da žene skinu feredže (...) Moj otac je bio na prvom takvom sastanku i odmah je doneo odluku: njegova kćerka će da skine feredžu. Naravno, mene ništa nije pitao. (...) Tatina odluka došla mi je kao najstrašnija kazna. Stajala sam u šoku, zabezeknuta, bez snage da mu se suprotstavim, da išta pitam, kad mi je saopštio da je dao reč Mesnom odboru Partije. Celu noć sam plakala. Nisam mogla da zamislim užasniju situaciju od te u koju me je gurao rođeni otac. Imala sam sedamnaest godina, želela sam da se udam, da se ne razlikujem od svojih vršnjakinja.31 Didaru je ta očeva odluka šokirala. Izaći „gola” na ulicu njoj se činilo sramotom koju ne bi mogla preživjeti. Didarin otac je, odlučivši da će mu kćerka skinuti feredžu, naumio i to da ona pohađa kurs za učiteljice. Didara se nakon tri mjeseca i zaposlila kao učiteljica, zahvaljujući velikoj potražnji za pismenim radnicima i radnicama koji mogu predavati na kosovskim selima. Didara se dvije godine kasnije, kao devetnaestogodišnjakinja, zaljubljuje u Tošu, militantnog srpskog komunistu koji joj nudi brak. „Komunista od glave do pete, Toša nije pet para davao na različitost našeg nacionalnog porekla”32. Da bi se udala za muškarca koga voli i izbjegla ugovoreni brak sa Albancem, Didara je morala pobjeći iz očeve kuće, čime za narednih nekoliko godina potpuno prekida odnose sa roditeljima. Kasnije se učlanjuje u AFŽ koji je šalje da kao „živi primjer” ženske emancipacije po selima regrutira Albanke za aktivnosti Narodnog fronta. Didarin slučaj, koliko god izuzetan, ilustrira nevjerovatne društvene i političke transformacije koje su se nakon Drugog svjetskog rata dešavale u Jugoslaviji, kao i implikacije tih transformacija po žene. 29 Za detaljnu raspravu o pokrivanju muslimanki u Bosni i Hercegovini iz historijske perspektive vidjeti Andrea Mesarič, „Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo. Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 22(2), 2013: 12-34. 30 Malešević, Miroslava. Didara. Životna priča jedne Prizrenke. Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar, 2004. 31 Didara, 39. 32 Didara, 46. �26 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA Arhiv AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine, ali i drugih republika bivše Jugoslavije, dokazuje da su žene raznih etničkih grupa bile izuzetno zainteresirane za obrazovanje i poboljšanje životnog standarda. Njihov interes je dijelom potaknut novostvorenim prilikama, ali i naporima koje AFŽ ulaže u pokretanje lokalnih programa opismenjavanja, sanitacije i smanjenja stope smrtnosti novorođenčadi u ruralnim područjima. S druge strane, kampanje poput one protiv nošenja feredže izazivaju suprotstavljene reakcije, budući da podrivaju tradicije zajednica. Visoku stopu nepismenosti na teritorijama nekadašnjeg Osmanskog carstva, prvenstveno u Bosni, Makedoniji i Kosovu, rukovodstvo AFŽ-a smatra dodatnim dokazom povezanosti „zaostalosti, religije (osobito, iako ne isključivo, Islama) i potlačenosti žena”33. Zakon o zabrani nošenja zara i feredže stoga su i same muslimanke često tumačile kao poseban oblik napada na njihove zajednice, što izaziva produbljivanje jaza između muslimanki i AFŽ-ovih aktivistkinja iz drugih etničkih grupa. Slična mišljenja su dokumentirana i među muslimankama iz Sandžaka u Srbiji koje su otvoreno opisivale koliko ih je sramota skinuti zar u javnosti.34 U jednoj od rijetkih autobiografija s tog područja prevedenih na engleski, Munevera Hadžišehović, naučnica iz Sandžaka (rođena 1933. godine), govori kako se osjećala diskriminirano i izolirano zbog svog muslimanskog porijekla, ali opisuje i podršku koju je dobila od socijalističke države, najprije kao izvrsna studentica, potom kao naučnica zaposlena u javnom istraživačkom institutu u Beogradu, a naposljetku kao samohrana majka tokom sedamdesetih i osamdesetih godina prošlog stoljeća.35 Prikaz biografija muslimanki iz viših klasa pruža uvid u karakter proturječnosti i ambivalentnosti procesa brze društvene modernizacije koja je obuhvatila žene u Jugoslaviji nakon 1945. godine, a istovremeno prikazuju isprepletenost raznih društvenih faktora koji su utjecali na živote žena. Obrazovanje i klasa su očito predstavljali važne faktore političkog angažmana. Naime, u antifašističkom pokretu je učestvovao veliki broj mladih studentica, što potvrđuju biografije ostalih žena narodnih heroina iz Bosne i Hercegovine, poput studentica Dragice Pravice (1919-1943) i Radojke Lakić (1917-1941), te studentice i činovnice (jer nije mogla postati učiteljica) Rade Vranješević (1914-1944). Posebno zanimljiva figura je Sida Marjanović (rođena 1921. u Bosanskom Aleksandrovcu blizu Banje Luke), nekadašnja učenica mostarske gimnazije i banjalučkog konzervatorija, članica 33 Socialist secularism, 16. 34 http://sandzakpress.net/ispovijesti-sandzackih-zena-nakon-prisilnog-skidanja-zara-iferedze-1951-godine 35 Hadžišehović, Munevera. A Muslim Woman in Tito’s Yugoslavia. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 27 Saveza komunističke omladine i učesnica pokreta otpora. Radila je kao medicinska sestra, politička radnica i bila nadležna za radijski program i publikacije sve do konferencije u Bosanskom Petrovcu 1942. godine. Nakon toga je učestvovala u osnivanju odbora AFŽ-a na slobodnoj i okupiranoj teritoriji Kozare. Učestvovala je u borbama aprila 1943. godine, kad su poginule mnoge njene saborkinje uključujući i Vahidu Maglajlić, a u oktobru iste godine rodila kćerku.36 Nakon rata je imenovana potpredsjednicom Glavnog odbora i sekretarkom AFŽ-a u Banjoj Luci. Nastavila je raditi u medijima, postala direktorica poduzeća Bosnafilm, te napisala scenarije za nekoliko angažiranih dokumentaraca, te za čuveni partizanski film Bitka na Neretvi, o bitki u kojoj je i sama učestvovala.37 Kasnije se bavila diplomatijom, uglavnom na polju kulturne razmjene, te postala prva predsjednica Udruženja filmskih radnika Bosne i Hercegovine. Pored učiteljica i studentica, antifašističkom pokretu su se priključivale i žene politizirane kao dio radničke klase, kroz sindikate. S obzirom na koncentraciju ženske radne snage u tekstilnoj industriji, u antifašističkom pokretu između dva svjetska rata osobito su bile aktivne tekstilne radnice, koje su predvodile i nekoliko štrajkova.38 Ovdje se izdvaja Judita Alargić (Novi Sad, 1917.), u međuratnom periodu radikalizirana kao tekstilna radnica, koja u ratu i poslijeratnih godina zauzima važne političke pozicije u Partiji i AFŽ-u. Konferenciji u Bosanskom Petrovcu prisustvovala je kao jedina predstavnica Vojvodine, i postala članica Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a.39 I nakon 1953. godine aktivno djeluje u socijalističkim ženskim organizacijama (SDŽ i KDAŽ). Iako je dospjela na visoke političke pozicije, nikada se nije prestala interesirati za sudbinu radnica, što pokazuje i njena intervencija na sastanku rukovodstva SDŽ-a 1954. godine, kad ističe da žene u tekstilnoj industriji rade u strašnim uvjetima, za mizerne nadnice, a nemaju nikog ko bi se brinuo o njihovoj djeci: „ti radnici bi štrajkovali u svakom drugom sistemu, ali ovo 36 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavija Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH – biografije narodnih odbornica’, Kutija 7, 2526/5, 1949. Kratku biografsku skicu o njoj moguće je pronaći na listi aktivistkinja u glavnim odborima iz decembra. Na internetu je moguće pronaći samo datum rođenja i nekoliko crtica iz života. Biografski podaci također su preuzeti iz sljedećih knjiga: Himka Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Rođena za burno doba: životni put narodnog heroja Vahide Maglajlić. Kragujevac: Dečje Novine, 1977. Lukić, Dragoje, Rat i djeca Kozare, Narodna Knjiga, 1984. 37 Sida Marjanovic, Na Neretvi… (Sarajevo, 1950). 38 Lagator, Špiro i Čukić, Milorad. Partizanke Prve proleterske. Beograd, Export-press, 1978. Kecman, Jovanka Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941. Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1978. 39 Vidjeti biografske prikaze koje je sakupila Gordana Stojaković http://www.zenskestudije.org.rs/01_o_nama/gordana_stojakovic/AFZ/afz_licnosti.pdf �28 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA je socijalistička zemlja i ljudi razumiju situaciju, ali mi smo dužni da im pomognemo koliko god možemo.”40 Ovaj citat pokazuje sve proturječnosti pokušaja rješavanja rodne i klasne nejednakosti unutar socijalističkog sistema. Aktivistkinje su ih bile itekako svjesne. U narednom poglavlju ću analizirati kako se Antifašistički front žena krajem četrdesetih i početkom pedesetih prošlog stoljeća hvata u koštac sa etničkim i klasnim razlikama među ženama, osobito kada se radi o ženama iz ruralnih područja. Istražit ću i jaz između socijalističkih ideala i društvene stvarnosti, tačnije tenziju između idealizirane slike nove socijalističke žene (pismene, zaposlene, politički aktivne) i sveprisutne nepismenosti i političke pasivnosti žena. I ovdje me zanima intersekcionalno tumačenje ženskog djelovanja, te utjecaj klasnih, obrazovnih i etničkih razlika na diskurs i praksu AFŽ-a. 3. Socijalistički ideali i društvena stvarnost: terenski rad aktivistkinja AFŽ-a Antifašistkinje su i nakon rata snažno motivirane borbenim duhom antifašističkog pokreta otpora. Partizani su pobjedu izvojevali zahvaljujući neprestanom aktivizmu i žrtvovanju za oslobođenje zemlje, u velikoj mjeri zahvaljujući i političkom učešću žena. Stoga se smatralo da je masovna mobilizacija i dalje neophodna za obnovu razrušene zemlje i zaštitu takozvanih tekovina revolucije, to jest radikalne transformacije klasnih i imovinskih odnosa s ciljem poražavanja političkih i klasnih neprijatelja. Prateći sovjetski model, jugoslavensko rukovodstvo nakon 1945. godine sve radikalnije poziva na klasnu borbu na nacionalnom i internacionalnom nivou, što u konačnici dovodi do sukoba sa sovjetskim rukovodstvom. Raskidom Jugoslavije sa Sovjetskim Savezom, 1948. godine ova radikalna pozicija postaje još izraženija, barem u periodu neposredno nakon raskida kad se Jugoslavija našla izolirana na međunarodnoj sceni, te je stanovništvo trebalo mobilizirati za podršku vlastima. Stoga krajem četrdesetih i početkom pedesetih prošlog stoljeća vlast snažno promovira političku mobilizaciju i društvenu kontrolu, a „pasivnost” u političkom životu smatra se najvećim grijehom. Politizirane rukovoditeljice, mahom odrasle u gradskim sredinama i obrazovanije od većine ženskog stanovništva, sa dugogodišnjim iskustvom borbenosti još od međuratnog perioda, i dalje djeluju u duhu požrtvovnosti i neprestane političke mobilizacije, i svoje vrijednosti nastoje širiti i među „ženskim masama”. 40 Beograd, Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond 354: kutija 1: Zapisnici i stenografske zabilješke sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretarijata SZDJ i sa savetovanja SZDJ 1954-1961. Zapisnik 6.3.1954, p. X/3. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 29 Kakvu je zapravo socijalističku „novu ženu” promovirao AFŽ i kako se taj ideal provodio u praksi? Šta su aktivistkinje očekivale i kako su se suočavale sa stvarnošću života žena širom zemlje, posebno u Bosni i Hercegovini? Za spoznavanje prirode tih ideala i predodžbi može poslužiti agitprop-štampa namijenjena ženama. Neposredno prije oslobođenja, Nova žena objavljuje značajan uvodnik kojim se Bogomir Brajković obraća Hrvaticama u Bosni i Hercegovini, navodeći da se veliki broj Hrvatica već priključio partizanskoj borbi, ali da jedan dio hrvatske zajednice još uvijek ne uspijeva odabrati ispravan politički put. Uvodnik eksplicitno navodi da hrvatske i muslimanske žene pate od iste zaostalosti kao i Srpkinje u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji, ali da su se ove potonje uspjele osloboditi kroz partizansku borbu. Srpkinje su u borbama u Bosni i Hercegovini učestvovale u puno većem broju, što se može objasniti i činjenicom da ih je proganjao kolaboracionistički režim Nezavisne države Hrvatske u čijem se sastavu nalazila i Bosna i Hercegovina.41 Hrvatice iz BiH pozvane su da se pridruže borbi povodeći se primjerom Hrvatica iz Hrvatske koje su značajno doprinijele pokretu otpora u Istri, Lici, Slavoniji i Dalmaciji. Hrvatice se izričito pozivaju na sestrinstvo s muslimakama i Srpkinjama, a u ime zajedničkog iskustva žrtve pod čizmom zajedničkog neprijatelja (okupatorskih snaga Osovine i domaćih kolaboracionista).42 S jedne strane, časopis AFŽ-a pokušava ublažiti etnički sukob među ženama i, kako kaže Jelena Batinić, igrati ulogu „međuetničkog medijatora”43, propagirajući doktrinu koja će na koncu biti definirana kao „bratstvo i jedinstvo”. S druge strane je pri izradi strategija za masovnu međuetničku mobilizaciju žena valjalo uzeti u obzir i etničke podjele. Razlike među ženama nisu bile uvjetovane samo etničkom pripadnošću, nego, što je još važnije, stupnjem političke osviještenosti, ali se često dešavalo da se ta dva faktora preklope, kao u gorenavedenom slučaju Hrvatica i Srpkinja. Jedan od uvodnika Nove žene iz 1946. godine razmatra činjenicu da su žene postale istinska politička sila. Na žalost najangažiranijih aktivistkinja koje pokušavaju mobilizirati žene, većinu se žena ipak nije moglo smatrati antifašistkinjama. Uvodnik iznosi da depolitiziranim ženama valja prilaziti s razumijevanjem i pažnjom, jer su sve žene žrtve fašizma, i one pasivne i one koje su ponašaju opozicionarski. Stav ovih 41 Vidjeti: Jancar-Webster, Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, i Batinić, Women and Yugoslav partisans. 42 „Srpska žena, čije je neizmjerne patnje ovjekovečio veliki hrvatski pjesnik Vladimir Nazor u svojoj pjesmi „Majka pravoslavka”, pruža ruku hrvatskoj i muslimanskoj ženi i želi da zajednički liječe rane koje im je nanio zajednički neprijatelj. I rodoljubive svjesne Hrvatice gledaju u srpskim i muslimanskim ženama svoje sestre. To sestrinstvo, posvećeno nevinom krvlju bezbrojnih žrtava, sve bosansko-hercegovačke žene moraju čuvati kao svetinju. „Nova žena, br.2, 5, „Hrvatice Bosne i Hercegovine”. 43 Batinić, Women and Yugoslav partisans, str. 218. �30 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA potonjih tumači se kao rezultat neznanja ili negativnog utjecaja članova porodice, posebno u slučaju žena seljanki i radnica. Samo se nekolicinu žena moglo smatrati istinskim neprijateljima, a to su kolaboracionistkinje lakog morala, ili klasni neprijatelji – žene koje su u prijašnjoj Jugoslaviji živjele od rada drugih i priželjkivale povratak prijeratnog stanja. Uvodnik poziva antifašistkinje na otpor „sektaštvu”, posebno u slučaju srpskih aktivistkinja i njihove podozrivosti prema muslimankama ili Hrvaticama koje su osvojile određeni stupanj političke odgovornosti.44 Klasna borba morala je nadjačati postojeću etničku mržnju i podjele, i žene su pozvane na zajedničku mobilizaciju u ime općeg dobra. Istovremeno je trebalo podići političku svijest među ženama različitih političkih orijentacija, da bi se pridobile simpatije ženskog građanstva na marginama javnog života. Krajem četrdesetih AFŽ počinje iznutra stvarati preduvjete za ženski aktivizam kroz masovne kampanje opismenjavanja i masovno regrutiranje u dobrovoljne radne brigade i novu industrijsku radnu snagu. Članice AFŽ-a učestvuju i u osnivanju struktura socijalne skrbi za siročad, te porodiljskih klinika i jaslica za djecu radnica. Dijeleći kulturni, ekonomski i politički kapital sa takozvanim pasivnim ženama, rukovodstvo AFŽ-a pokušava među ženama učvrstiti legitimitet socijalističkog režima i rad žena iskoristiti za obnovu i mobilizaciju. Ali se ipak često očituje slabost političkih „kadrova” na lokalnom nivou, kao i činjenica da ova organizacija ne dopire i ne uključuje sve žene diljem zemlje – naročito u ruralnim područjima. Unatoč socijalističkim idealima jasno izraženim u propagandnim materijalima poput ženske štampe, rukovodstvo AFŽ-a bilo je duboko svjesno poteškoća u mijenjanju položaja žena. Na plenumu Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a BiH održanog u martu 1948. godine, istaknuta bh. rukovoditeljica Dušanka Kovačević izražava žaljenje što ova organizacija nije uspjela doprijeti do svih žena, posebno onih u selima, zbog jaza između gradske i seoske realnosti. Ona eksplicitno navodi da organizacija mora uključiti i iskoristiti snagu i sposobnost seoskih žena: Drugarice, meni je na ovom sastanku pao u oči odnos prema ženi-seljanki, kada su pojedine drugarice govorile da su žene-seljanke nepismene, da nema sposobnih žena itd. Mi, drugarice, ne možemo tako govoriti. Ne možemo govoriti o nesposobnosti žene-seljanke, ne možemo i nećemo da slušamo o tome i ne možemo postaviti uvijek stvar tako: da imamo više građanki, učiteljica, itd. bilo bi lako. Da vidite šta bi mi onda uradili. Mi hoćemo da od seljanke stvorimo rukovodioca. Ona je pokazala u ratu šta 44 Nova žena: God. 1, br. 6, ‘Pitanja, u koja treba da se udubimo’, 15, 1945. http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/74c7a03e1f6ad2c383759272bb8da3da.pdf �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 31 može, ona je dala ogromno mnogo u ratu, ona je veliki patriota naše zemlije i njoj treba nauke. To je naš dug prema toj ženi i mi joj moramo pomoći. Treba se pomučiti oko toga da uzdignemo još seljanki rukovodioca.45 Ovaj govor dokazuje da su rukovoditeljice AFŽ-a bile svjesne neoslobođenog potencijala žena sa sela. Ispostavilo se, međutim, da je obrazovati kadrove u selima krajnje teško, jer najbolje aktivistkinje često prelaze iz ćelija AFŽ-a u lokalne institucije, i radije rade za Narodni front, nego među ženama (Sklevicky je detaljno analizirala ovaj problem).46 Često se istaknuti članovi Partije protive učešću svojih supruga u radu AFŽ-a i ometaju aktivnosti lokalnih ogranaka ove organizacije.47 Izvještaji iz Vareša pružaju primjer takvih dešavanja.48 Članice AFŽ-a u selima uglavnom su bile domaćice, sa tri ili četiri razreda osnovne škole, politizirane uslijed ratnih gubitaka i učešća članova svojih porodica u ratu. Razina njihove političnosti, međutim, nije uvijek bila zadovoljavajuća, posebno kad se radilo o rukovoditeljskim sposobnostima. Na popisu biografskih skica članica AFŽ-a koje su pohađale političku obuku u Sarajevu, mnoge su polaznice opisane kao nedorasle rukovoditeljskim pozicijama. Neadekvatnosti su najčešće proizlazile iz nedostatnog obrazovanja ili ograničenja osobne naravi (“tiha”, “šutljiva”, “voli intrigirati”, “ne voli da diskutuje”, “nedisciplinovana”, “nije dovoljno bistra”, “prilično zaostala, skoro je skinula zar”). Nepodobnima za rukovođenje lokalnih odbora smatrane su i žene premlade, prestare ili lošeg zdravlja, ili „nesređenog porodičnog života”. Mnoge kandidatkinje su iskazale potencijal za politički angažman, ali 45 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Zapisnik IV plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu, 13. marta 1948.’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2912/ 32, 1948. 46 Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi, str. 120-121; 137. 47 Bonfiglioli, Women’s Political and Social Activism. 48 „U sreskoj organizaciji Vareša je jedna velika greška što drugarica koja je rukovodioc organizacije živi partiskim životom u mjesnoj organizaciji pa radi čega ona svoje težište rada baca na mjesne zadatke dok zadatke po sreskoj organizaciji AFŽ-a radi toga zapostavlja (...) U Varešu žena sekretara SNO neće da radi u organizaciji AFŽ-a i to uvijek i svagdje naglašava. ” Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Zapisnik 1. oktobar 1950’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4288/?, 1950. U drugom izvještaju organizaciona situacija u Varešu okarakterizirana je kao veoma loša. Također se napominje da supruge članova partije i istaknutih ličnosti ne žele raditi, a da ih njihovi muževi opravdavaju. U izvještaju se također tvrdi da je lokalnim ženama puno više stalo do Katoličke Crkve nego do bilo koje konferencije AFŽ-a ili Narodnog fronta. Na primjer, supruga jednog lokalnog sekretara uredno je posjećivala katoličke mise, ali se nije pojavljivala na sastancima AFŽ-a, zato što nije bila u dobrim odnosima sa jednom od aktivistkinja, iako su tokom rata obje bile partizanke. Također, muslimanski članovi partije nisu dozvoljavali svojim ženama da skinu zar. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ Vareš Oblasnom odboru AFŽ –godišnji izvještaj o radu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 91/1, 1949. �32 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA su trebale dodatnu obuku i obrazovanje. U većini slučajeva, ali ne uvijek, izbor lokalnih rukovoditeljica ovisio je o njihovom stepenu obrazovanosti i spremnosti da uče. Dakle, idealna seoska rukovoditeljica morala je biti otvorena, disciplinirana, vrijedna, željna znanja i spremna pomoći drugima.49 Uvidjevši koliko je teško obučiti lokalne kadrove i premostiti jaz između urbanog i ruralnog, rukovodstvo AFŽ-a počinje insistirati na obrazovanju i poboljšanju životnog standarda, pošto se emancipacija žena u seoskim zajednicama dovodila u usku vezu sa društvenim razvojem. U govoru Vide Tomšič, predsjednice AFŽ-a, poslanog iz Centralnog odbora u Beogradu u Glavni odbor u BiH u septembru 1948. godine, navodi se da je zaostalost žena zaostavština stare Jugoslavije i da je zbog toga rad sa ženama izuzetno važan. Govoreći u svoje ime i u ime ostatka rukovodstva AFŽ-a, ona kaže: Mi moramo ženu naučiti da mrzi svoju neravnopravnost koja se danas još kod mnogih hiljada njih praktički krije iza feredže i drugih, iako manje vidnih navika, mi moramo osloboditi mase žena od sujeverja, raznih predrasuda itd. Isto tako moramo preko rada naših organizacija očistiti, okrečiti, oprati naše kuće, izbaciti iz nijh srednjevekovna ognjišta, unijeti u kuće krevet, naučiti održavanju čistoće i osnovnih higijenskih uslova (...) mi ne možemo zamisliti izgradnju socijalizma bez istovremenog podizanja standarda života, a naročito bez istovremenog podizanja težnje za poboljšanjem života naših radnih masa, naročito na selu.50 Promoviranje obrazovanja žena i higijenskih standarda bilo je važno, kako za smanjivanje stope smrtnosti novorođenčadi u čitavoj zemlji, tako i za težnju socijalističke države da svima, a posebno ženama, djeci i ratnim invalidima, osigura socijalnu zaštitu i pomoć. Stoga AFŽ znatan dio svojih aktivnosti usmjerava na 49 Primjer opisa manje uspješne polaznice: „D.B., Bos. Dubica, rodjena 1923 godine, završila 4 razreda osnovne škole, pretsjednica SO AFŽ-a. Iako je mlada i ima uslove da se razvija nije pokazala naročito interesovanje za učenje. Ne osjeća se odgovorna i nije disciplinovana u radu. Ukoliko bi bila rukovodilac potrebno joj je ukazati na te greške. Dosada nije politički bila uzdignuta te treba više da čita i uči.” Uspješne polaznice opisivale su se na sljedeći način: „N.D., Mostar grad, rod.1918 god., završila 4 razreda srednje škole. Ima uslove da bude samostalan rukovodilac, pozna rad organizacije AFŽ-a i nastoji da ga još bolje upozna. Disciplinovana je i ima volju za učenje. Zauzima pravilan stav prema svim političkim događajima. Ima drugarski odnos prema drugaricama i voljna je da i ostalim pomogne u učenju.” Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, ‘Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH Oblasnom odboru AFŽ BiH - karakteristke polaznica političkih kurseva’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 9, 352/6, 1950. 50 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Centralni odbor u Beogradu Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine – o podizanju standarda života radnih ljudi’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2051/1, 1948. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 33 obrazovanje stanovništva, promoviranje novih životnih navika i podizanje životnog standarda. Koliko su istaknute aktivistkinje AFŽ-a vjerovale u seoske žene i njihovu sposobnost da poboljšaju svoju svakodnevicu možda najbolje ilustrira biografija Rajke Borojević, još jedne figure koja se ističe u radu ove organizacije. Rajka Borojević je bila učiteljica i partizanka iz Hercegovine koja se u ratu sa mužem i dvoje djece sklonila na selo u Srbiju, gdje im je pomoglo lokalno stanovništvo, zbog čega im je bila neizmjerno zahvalna i osjećala prema njima dug. Rajka Borojević je zajedno sa mužem u Banjoj Luci osnovala Vitaminku, tvornicu za preradu voća i povrća, a početkom pedesetih seli u selo Donji Dubac i 1954. godine počinje raditi prve radionice sa seoskim ženama. Kasnije je u Dragačevu osnovala tkalačku zadrugu koja je do kraja šezdesetih zapošljavala 420 žena.51 Prije učešća u plenumu Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a krajem četrdesetih, Rajka Borojević je u Banjoj Luci organizirala obuku iz politike i kulture za seoske žene. Tokom gorenavedenog plenuma u Sarajevu, imala je priliku govoriti o tim obukama i opisati programe osmišljene za seoske žene. Žene su učestvovale u konferencijama, posjećivale domove za djecu, dom za invalide i brojne tvornice gdje su upoznale „mnoge udarnice o kojima su prije samo slušale a nisu vjerovale kada se na konferenciji o njima pričalo”. Te žene sa sela vidjele su kako se štampaju knjige i novine, išle u pozorište i kino, te prisustvovale raznim političkim događajima. Te žene su bile „raspoređene po kučama naših najboljih aktivistkinja tako da su imale prilike da vide i u kući kako se kuha, podižu djeca, da nauče sve ono što selo još nema”.52 Borojevićka je govorila i o školovanju i stanju u sirotištima, te pozvala aktivistkinje AFŽ-a da posjete sirotišta i da ratnoj siročadi, čiji su se roditelji žrtvovali za oslobođenje zemlje, pruže prijeko potrebnu ljubav i nježnost. I u kasnijoj autobiografskoj knjizi, gdje Borojevićka opisuje svoj rad u Donjem Dubcu pedesetih godina prošlog stoljeća, primjetna je slična kombinacija pedagoškog pristupa, etike brige i solidarnosti. Borojevićka opisuje poteškoće koje je morala savladati pri organiziranju prve radionice sa lokalnim seoskim ženama u ruralnoj Srbiji i svoje emocije nakon dolaska u selo poslije rata: 51 Borojević, Rajka. Iz Dubca u svet Beograd: Etnografski muzej, 2006., prvo izdanje iz 1964. Vidjeti također Natalja Herbst, ‘Women in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Primjer Rajke Borojević i ženske kooperative Dragačevo, Kersten-Pejanić, Roswita, Rajilić, Simone u: Christian Voß, (ur.), Doing Gender-Doing the Balkans. München, Berlin, Washington D.C. : Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012. Vidjeti i nedavni umjetnički projekt „Uzeti zajedničku stvar u svoje ruke” inspiriran Rajkom Borojević, kojeg je pokrenula njena unuka Ana Džokić (pristupljeno 19.10.2016.) http://www.stealth.ultd.net/stealth/25_taking.common.matter.into.your.own.hands.html 52 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Zapisnik IV plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu 13. marta 1948’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 5, nedostaje broj dokumenta/7, 1948. �34 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA Naročito se radujem što opet, kao i za vreme rata, osećam bliskost sa ovim narodom. Razmišljam kako bi im pomogla. Ta ideja nije od juče. Nosim je još iz ratnih dana. Ponela sam je odavde — kao obećanje samoj sebi. Ženama sam najbliža. One sve više dolaze. Presvučene, doterane kao za praznik. Poveravaju mi svoje muke. Posavetujem koliko umem. Pokazujem im i poslove iz domaćinstva, govorim o podizanju i vaspitanju dece. Vidim — sve je to na parče i sasvim malo.53 U nastavku dnevnika Borojevićka opisuje svoj susret sa lokalnim običajima i sujevjerjem, te borbu protiv niskih higijenskih standarda u svakodnevnom životu seoskih žena, kao i pri porađanju i odgajanju djece. Dugo joj je trebalo da uvjeri muževe da je obuka korisna njihovim suprugama. Ova aktivistkinja je čak javno osudila muškarca koji je svoju ženu pretukao zbog učešća u obuci, a preko članka objavljenog u beogradskom dnevnom listu Politika (nije, doduše, navela njegovo ime, ali je zaprijetila da će otkriti njegov identitet ponovi li se nešto slično). Časovi koje je držala u Donjem Dubcu sastojali su se od teorijskog dijela (kućna higijena, ženska higijena i seksualno obrazovanje, prva pomoć, vaspitanje djece, alkoholizam, ishrana, bonton) i praktičnog dijela (kuhanje i posluživanje, pripremanje zimnice, pravljenje sapuna, bojenje tkanine, pletenje i šivanje, sakupljanje aromatskog i ljekovitog bilja, pčelarstvo, uzgajanje malina, ručni rad, pjevanje).54 Žene su kilometrima hodale iz obližnjih sela da bi učestvovale na tim radionicama. Te žene su imale priliku posjetiti Beograd i po prvi put u životu otići u kino, a kasnije su išle u Sarajevo, Banju Luku, Kumrovec (Titovo rodno mjesto) i Zagreb. Tkalačka zadruga u Dragačevu počela je raditi početkom šezdesetih; cilj je bio osigurati ekonomsku neovisnost žena. Položaj žena u selu postepeno se poboljšavao, a 1967. godine u novootvorenom Domu kulture čak je održano i finale takmičenja za „najboljeg muža”, gdje su žene otvoreno ocjenjivale najpodobnije buduće partnere, o čemu je tada snimljen i dokumentarni film.55 Izgradnja Doma kulture finansirana je zahvaljujući sijelima za izbor „najboljeg muža” prethodno organiziranim u okolnim selima.56 Aktivizam Rajke Borojević, započet sa AFŽ-om i nastavljen dugo nakon gašenja te organizacije, odličan je primjer kombinacije utopijskih imaginarija, kolektivnih vrijednosti i individualnih težnji ljevičarskog rukovodstva da širom Jugoslavije emancipira žene, osobito one sa sela. Mnoge žene koje su iskusile partizansku 53 Borojević, Rajka Iz Dubca u svet, 7. 54 Ibid., Iz Dubca u svet, 39. 55 https://vimeo.com/134070626 56 http://www.stealth.ultd.net/stealth/25_taking.common.matter.into.your.own.hands.html �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 35 borbu usvojile su socijalističke vrijednosti i nastojale poboljšati položaj žena, posebno društveni i ekonomski, u skladu sa idejom da se ukupni društveni napredak ne može postići bez poboljšanja položaja žena. Iako je bilo naznaka društvene kontrole i emancipacije od vrha nadole, aktivistkinje AFŽ-a bile su svjesne situacije na terenu i postojanja jaza između socijalističkih ideala i stvarnosti, ali su taj jaz pokušavale premostiti kako su znale i umjele, dijeleći sa drugim ženama društveni, ekonomski i kulturni kapital. 4. Zaključak Ovaj rad pruža intersekcionalnu interpretaciju položaja žena u Antifašističkom frontu žena (AFŽ), zastupajući stanovište da je svu složenost položaja žena u toj organizaciji moguće razumjeti tek kroz podrobnije istraživanje društvenih razlika među ženama. Radom se nastoje prevazići dominirajuća tumačenja organizacione dinamike AFŽ-a te se, umjesto naglašavanja suprotnosti interesa državnih interesa i interesa žena, predstavljaju biografije nekolicine ključnih aktivistkinja (Vahida Maglajlić, Didara Dukazdjini, Sida Marjanović, Judita Alargić i Rajka Borojević) da bi se prikazala važnost individualnih težnji žena ka ravnopravnosti, slobodi i socijalnoj pravdi, kao i razni načini pretočavanja tih težnji u političko djelovanje. AFŽ, kako tvrdim u ovom radu, nije bio samo instrument političke mobilizacije i društvene kontrole, već i način jačanja solidarnosti i brige kroz zajedničko sudjelovanje u kulturnom, političkom i društvenom kapitalu. Rukovodstvo AFŽ-a, sačinjeno uglavnom od obrazovanih žena s političkim iskustvom čije je djelovanje bilo ukorijenjeno u revolucionarnom duhu partizanskog otpora, pokušalo je svoje vrijednosti propagirati među nepismenim apolitičnim ženama i premostiti jaz između grada i sela. Bile su ustanovljene hijerarhije između politički aktivnih i pasivnih žena, posebno u odnosu na muslimanke koje su bile smatrane nazadnima i primoravane na skidanje zara. Bez obzira na to, društvena i politička važnost seoskih žena bila je prepoznata zahvaljujući njihovom doprinosu antifašističkoj borbi, a na etničke i vjerske identitete gledalo se kao na nešto promjenjivo, nešto što se može postepeno transformirati obrazovanjem, znanjem i političkim djelovanjem. Aktivistkinje AFŽ-a su, iskusivši ove transformacije na svojoj koži, željele i drugim ženama ponuditi sličnu priliku. Dakle, među članicama AFŽ-a postojale su ogromne razlike u smislu etničke i klasne pripadnosti, političkih stavova i obrazovanosti, kao i političke i društvene moći. Ali je ova organizacija poticala žene na prevazilaženje podjela i razlika između grada i sela, između različitih nacionalnih grupa i klasa. Aktivistkinje AFŽ-a su, uprkos svim poteškoćama, propagirale socijalistički ideal ravnopravnosti i �36 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA emancipacije žena, organizirajući programe opismenjavanja, kurseve o higijeni, volonterske radne brigade i razne oblike lokalne mobilizacije. Arhiv AFŽ-a je svjedočanstvo raznovrsnosti kapilarnog djelovanja i, s obzirom na preciznost i detaljnost izvještaja s terena, predstavlja dragocjen izvor ženske historije. Arhivska građa AFŽ-a omogućava nam otkrivanje razlika među općinama, regijama i republikama, i poređenje položaja žena unutar nejednako razvijene jugoslavenske federacije. Kroz Arhiv također možemo analizirati kako su se federalne direktive o ženskoj emancipaciji tumačile i provodile na lokalnom nivou. I individualne životne priče žena, kako pokazuje ovaj rad, još su jedna ključna tema koju bi valjalo dodatno istražiti koristeći se arhivskom građom, usmenom historijom, memoarima i sekundarnom literaturom objavljenom tokom socijalističke ere. Iako se memoari, biografije i zbirke priča o partizankama pisani u socijalizmu obično smatraju ideološki pristrasnim i hagiografskim, u njima su sadržane korisne historijske informacije o dominantnim vrijednostima i predodžbama tog doba. Ovaj rad zaključujem citiranjem posljednjeg pasusa autobiografije Rajke Borojević koji ističe važnost memoara za historijsko istraživanje i naglašava utopijske vrijednosti koje su nadahnjivale rukovoditeljice AFŽ-a: Pruga Beograd-Bar primaknuće i ova sela većim centrima. Auto-put Beograd-Titovo Užice biće upola kraći od onog preko Kragujevca. Putevi, pruge, domovi, škole, dalekovodi... prodiru sve dalje, sve dublje u brda. U nekadašnje zabačene krajeve. Doći će vreme kada će se došljak čuditi: zar je Dubac bio zabačeno selo? Sela se menjaju sve bržim tempom. I ova. Koliko ih je već izmenila elektrifikacija. I u selima, neminovno, staro ustupa mesto novom. Pešačim prema Busenjači. Tačno je tako — samo pola sata pješačenja. Pevam i sećam se onih vrlo, vrlo teških putovanja i teškoća u radu. Bilo ih je mno-o-o-go. To je sudbina pionira. Ali — lepa je borba za novo, za bolje! Zaista niču nove žene. I zato sam vesela.57 57 Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet, 223. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 37 Arhivska građa Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor Teslić Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – povjerenstvo za štampu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1178/1, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – mjesečni izvještaj za oktobar i novembar’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1290/1, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ-a Jugoslavija Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH – biografije narodnih odbornica’, Kutija 7, 2526/5, 1949. Beograd, Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond 354: kutija 1: Zapisnici i stenografske zabilješke sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretarijata SZDJ i sa savetovanja SZDJ 1954-1961. Zapisnik 6.3.1954, p. X/3. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Zapisnik IV plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu, 13. marta 1948.’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2912/ 32, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Zapisnik 1. oktobar 1950’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4288/?, 1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ Vareš Oblasnom odboru AFŽ –godišnji izvještaj o radu’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 91/1, 1949. Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, ‘Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH Oblasnom odboru AFŽ BiH – karakteristkinje polaznica političkih kurseva’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 9, 352/6, 1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Centralni odbor u Beogradu Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine – o podizanju standarda života radnih ljudi’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 5, 2051/1, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Zapisnik IV plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a održanog u Sarajevu 13. marta 1948’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 5, nedostaje broj dokumenta/7, 1948. Bibliografija Archer, Rory, Duda, Igor and Paul Stubbs, eds., Social inequalities and discontent in Yugoslav Socialism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. Ballinger, Pamela, and Kristen Ghodsee, “Socialist Secularism. Religion, Modernity, and Muslim Women’s Emancipation in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, 1945-1991”, Aspasia, 5, 2011. Batinić, Jelena, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Beoković, Mila, Žene heroji. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1967. Bonfiglioli, Chiara, Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1953), doktorska disertacija, University of Utrecht, 2012. �38 CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI BIOGRAFIJE AKTIVISTKINJA AFŽ-A: INTERSEKCIONALNA ANALIZA ŽENSKOG DJELOVANJA Bonfiglioli, Chiara, “Nomadic Theory as an Epistemology for Transnational Feminist History” in Iris van der Tuin and Bolette Blagaard, eds., The Subject of Rosi Braidotti London:Bloomsbury, 2014. Bonfiglioli, Chiara, “Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia”, Aspasia, 8, 2014. Borojević, Rajka, Iz Dubca u svet. Zadružna knjiga, 1964. Burton, Antoinette M., Archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. De Haan, Francisca, et. al. “Forum: Ten Years After, Communism and Feminism Revisited”, Aspasia, 10, 2016. Emmert, Thomas A., “Ženski Pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Funk, Nanette, “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21 (4), 2014. Ghodsee, Kristen, and Kateřina Lišková, “Bumbling Idiots or Evil Masterminds? Challenging Cold War Stereotypes about Women, Sexuality and State Socialism”, Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (3), 2016. Ghodsee, Kristen, “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2), 2015. Giomi, Fabio, “Introduction” in Aida Spahić et al. Women Documented. Women and Public Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th century. Sarajevo: Sarajevski Otvoreni Centar, 2014. Hadžišehović, Munevera, A Muslim Woman in Tito’s Yugoslavia. College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Herbst, Natalja, ‘Women in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The Example of Rajka Borojević and the Dragačevo Women’s Cooperative’, in Roswita Kersten-Pejanić, Simone Rajilić, and Christian Voß, (eds.), Doing Gender-Doing the Balkans. München, Berlin, Washington D.C.: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012. Hoare, Marko Attila, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History. London: Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2013. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata, Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja. Zagreb: Centar za Ženske Studije, 2008. Jancar-Webster, Barbara, Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945. Denver, Colo., Arden Press, 1998. Jancar-Webster, Barbara, “Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement” in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.) Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 39 Kecman, Jovanka, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918194.1 Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1978. Lagator, Špiro Lagator and Milorad Čukić, Partizanke Prve proleterske. Beograd: Exportpress, 1978. Lukić, Dragoje, Rat i djeca Kozare. Beograd: Narodna Knjiga, 1984. Lutz, Helma, Vivar, Maria Teresa Herrera, and Linda Supik (eds)., Framing intersectionality: debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies. Burlington, Ashgate, 2011. Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Himka, Zapisi o Vahidi Maglajlić. Banjaluka: Glas, 1973. Maglajlić-Hadžihalilović, Himka, Rođena za burno doba: životni put narodnog heroja Vahide Maglajlić. Kragujevac: Dečje Novine, 1977. Malešević, Miroslava, Didara. Životna priča jedne Prizrenke- Beograd:Srpski genealoški centar, 2004. Marjanović, Sida, Na Neretvi… Sarajevo, 1950. Mesarič, Andrea,” Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo. Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 22(2), 2013: 12-34. Mlinarević, Gorana and Lamija Kosović, “Women’s Movements and Gender Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, Aspasia, Vol. 5, 2011. Sklevicky, Lydia, “Emancipated integration or integrated emancipation: the case of postrevolutionary Yugoslavia” In: Angerman, A., Binnema, G., Keunen, A., Poels, V. & Zirkzee, J. (eds.) Current Issues in Women’s History. London and New York, Routledge, 1989. Sklevicky, Lydia, Konji, Žene, Ratovi. Zagreb, Ženska Infoteka, 1996. Tesija, Jelena, The End of the AFŽ – The End of Meaningful Women’s Activism? Rethinking the History of Women’s Organizations in Croatia, 1953 – 1961, Master thesis, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, 2014. Zaharijević, Adriana, “Pawning and Challenging in Concert: Engagement as a Field of Study”, Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (2), 2016. Stojaković, Gordana, Mapa AFŽ-a Vojvodine 1942-1953. Novi Sad, 2007. Dostupno na: http:// www.zenskestudije.org.rs/01_o_nama/gordana_stojakovic/AFZ/afz_licnosti.pdf �NARDINA ZUBANOVIĆ Crteži rapidografom �������ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE1: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA Navedeno prema pismu djevojčice Vojke Beaković. Ovo kratko pozdravno pismo ratnog siročeta koje je iz BiH prebačeno u Sloveniju da se preko zime okrijepi i odmori, između ostalog svjedoči i o tome kako su učiteljice čak i u ratnim godinama uspijevale uspješno organizirati nastavu i uspostaviti prisan odnos sa đacima. Navodim pismo u cijelosti: „Zdravo drugarice učiteljice, Prije svega pitati se treba jesi li počela učiti drugi razred. Draga učiteljice piši mi ko je prešao na drugi razred, ko nije. Jel prešla Milanka i Dana, dosad su dobro učile, dok sam ja bila. Ja ovamo nijesam još počela, kažu da ćemo učiti zimus, a na ljeto ja ću opet tamo tebi da me ti učiš. Šećer sladak, a bombone ljute, ja se draga učiteljice pouzdavam u te. Draga učiteljice jesi li se gotovo udala? Iz kamena voda curi molim pismo da požuri. Evo sjedoh na jelovu klupu, uzeh pero u desnicu ruku, a u lijevu maramicu bijelu, pismo pišem suze brišem. Draga učiteljice pruži ruku da se rukujemo prije zore i bijela dana, cvati ruža sitno sjeme sjećaš li se učiteljice mene. Ja se sjećam tebe, al nemam krila da doletim tebi mila. Živio drug Tito i Staljin“. Pismo je objavljeno u rubrici „Pisma djece iz Slovenije“ Nova žena 8 (1945), 12. U istom broju potanko je prikazan odlazak prve skupine ratne siročadi na zimovanje u Sloveniju. Zahvaljujem Danijeli Majstorović što mi je skrenula pozornost na ovo pismo. 1 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ �48 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA 1. Uvodna napomena Prve diskusije o ‘nevidljivosti’ žena u okviru jugoslavenske povijesti pokrenute su tek sredinom 80-ih godina minulog stoljeća2, a neupitno najveći doprinos promociji i osnaživanju feministički angažiranih povijesnih istraživanja ženskih autonomnih organiziranja i udruživanja dala je Lydija Sklevicky, prerano preminula3 feministička teoretičarka koja je u svojim radovima4 sprovela dosljednu kritiku tradicionalnog pristupa ‘velikim temama’ političke, vojne i diplomatske historije, zalažući se za istraživanja i analize povijesnih mijena svakodnevnog života, odnosa spola, roda, te općenito razvoja (nove socijalne) historije žena.5 I premda je druga polovina 80-ih prošla u znaku feministički orijentiranih radova6 i pojave novog interesa za ženska pitanja7, ovaj pozitivni istraživački trend bit će zaustavljen kako ratnim8 tako i poratnim društveno političkim gibanjima i 2 Ovim istraživanjima prethodile su filozofske rasprave u kojima se rasvjetljava položaj žena u socijalizmu. Usp. Nadežda Čačinovič-Puhovski, „Ravnopravnost ili oslobođenje. Teze o teorijskoj relevantnosti suvremenog feminizma“, Žena 3 (1976): 125–128; Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, „Moć žene u patrijarhalnoj i suvremenoj kulturi“, Žena 4–5 (1980); Blaženka Despot, „Žena i samoupravljanje“, Delo 4 (1981): 112–116; Nada Ler-Sofronić, „Subordinacija žene – sadašnjost i prošlost“, Marksistička misao 4 (1981): 73–80. Pored ovih radova valja spomenutii jednu od prvih feministički orijentiranih studija, sociologa Vjerana Katunarića, koja također ukazuje na problem reduciranja ‘ženskog pitanja’ na općedruštvena pitanja, čime se izbjegava ‘aktivno suprotstavljanje nosiocima dominacije’. Usp. Vjeran Katunarić, Ženski eros i civilizacija smrti. (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1984), 239. Pored ovih radova je od iznimnog značaja i Međunarodna konferencija „Drugarica žena. Žensko pitanje-novi pristup?“ organizirana u Beogradu, 1978. godine, na kojoj se po prvi put javno raspravljalo o nejednakosti žena u socijalizmu i stvarnoj poziciji žena u različitim društveno-političkim sferama djelovanja. 3 Poginula je u saobraćajnoj nesreći 1990. godine u svojoj trideset devetoj godini. 4 Sklevicky, Lydia. „Karakteristike organiziranog djelovanja žena u Jugoslaviji u razdoblju do drugog svjetskog rata” Polja 308 (1984); i „Žene i moć – povijesna geneza jednog interesa” Polja 309 (1984). U ovom radu referiram prema posthumno objavljenoj knjizi radova Lydie Sklevicky, koju je priredila Dunja Rihtman Auguštin, Konji, žene i ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. 5 Usp. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, op.cit. str. 15. 6 Usp. zbornik radova Žena i društvo. Kultiviranje dijaloga, Zagreb: Sociološko društvo, 1987., u kojem su zastupljeni radovi istaknutih feminističkih teoretičara i teoretičarki tog vremena: Rade Iveković, Žarane Papić, Blaženke Despot, Lydie Sklevicky, Andree Feldman, Vesne Pusić, Željke Šporer, Gordane Cerjan-Letica, Vere Tadić, Vjerana Katunarića, Đurđe Milanović, Jelene Zuppa, Ingrid Šafranek, Slavenke Drakulić. 7 U Okviru bh. historiografije tih godina Senija Milišić poduzela je pionirski poduhvat istražujući procese emancipacije muslimanske žene u BiH. Usp. Senija Milišić „Emancipacija muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini nakon oslobođenja 1947 – 1952 (Poseban osvrt na skidanje zara i feredže)“. Magistarski rad na Filozofskom fakultetu u Sarajevu, 1986. 8 Rat će i ovog puta, riječima Ines Price, „zaduženja, popunjavanja zacrtanih praznina koje pojedina razdoblja ostavljaju iza sebe u znanstvenoj evidenciji ili pak savjesti pomaknuti za neka mirnija �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 49 kulturno-prosvjetnim politikama. Pitanja ‘ostavštine’ AFŽ-a i/ili emancipacije žena u NOB-u i socijalizmu nanovo će se razmatrati iz feminističke vizure tek početkom novog milenija.9 U tom kontekstu posebno je značajna pojava nove generacije znanstvenica, u regionu i šire, koje su u okviru magistarskih i doktorskih disertacija istraživale pojedine aspekte ženskog angažmana u NOB-u i AFŽ-u.10 Iako unutar bh. historiografije još uvijek ne postoje naznake da će se u dogledno vrijeme uspostaviti institucionalni okvir za sistematsko izučavanje moderne povijesti žena,11 treba istaknuti da je kreiranjem internetskog arhiva vremena“. Ines Prica, „ETNOLOGIJA POSTSOCIJALIZMA I PRIJE. ili: Dvanaest godina nakon „Etnologije socijalizma i poslije“, u: Lada Feldman Čale i Ines Prica, ur. Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma, Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006. str. 21. 9 Između ostalih, vidjeti: Slapšak,Svetlan. Ženske ikone XX veka, Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek – Čigoja Štampa, 2001.; Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. Dom i svijet. O ženskoj kulturi pamćenja, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008.; Bosanac, Gordana. Visoko čelo: ogled o humanističkim perspektivama feminizma, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2010;, Jambrešić Kirin, Renata i Senjković, Reana. „Legacies of the Second World War in Croatian Cultural Memory: Women as Seen through the Media“, Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 4, 2010. ; 71–96; Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao građanke, Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju – Evoluta, 2011. ; Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. „Žena u formativnom socijalizmu“, u: Refleksije vremena 1945.-1955. Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2013. 10 Usp. Batinić, Jelena. „Proud to have trod in men’s footsteps: Mobilizing Peasant Women into the Yugoslav Partisan Army in World War II”, (magistarski rad, Ohaio State University, 2001), i idem, „Gender, Revolution, War: The Mobilization of Women in the Yugoslav Partisan movement in World War II“ (doktorska disertacija, Stanford University 2009); Stojaković, Gordana. „Rodna perspektiva u novinama Antifašističkog fronta žena u periodu 1945 – 1953“ (doktorska disertacija, Univerzitet u Novom Sadu, 2011), Bonfiglioli, Chiara. „Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957)“ (doktorska disertacija, Utrecht University, 2012), te Jelušić, Iva. „Founding Narratives on the Participation of Women in the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia“  (magistarski rad, Central European University, 2015). Neka od ovih istraživanja nastaju na temelju prvih studija o učešću žena u NOB-u realiziranih na američkim sveučilištima. Usp. Reed, Mary Elizabeth. „Croatian women in the Yugoslav Partisan resistance, 1941-1945“ (dok. disertacija, University of California, Berkeley, 1980.) i Webster, Barbara Jancar. Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945, Denver: Arden Press, 1990. Većina navedenih radova naknadno su objavljeni kao monografije. 11 Studije o ženama u poslijeratnom periodu češće nastaju u okviru nevladinih organizacija ili udruženja građana nego pod okriljem zvaničnih institucija, odnosno odgovarajućih odjela za izučavanje povijesti. Takav je slučaj npr. s knjigama Tanje Lazić, Ljubinke Vukašinović i Radmile Žigić, Žene u istoriji Semberije (Bijeljina: Organizacija žena „Lara“, 2012. i Aide Spahić et al., Zabilježene – Žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE, �50 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA Antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije12 napravljen znakovit iskorak barem u arhiviranju građe13 o ženskom angažmanu u NOB-u i AFŽu.14 Ovaj arhiv omogućava novim generacijama znastvenica i istraživačica, ali i umjetnica i kulturnih djelatnica, da istraže15 i ponude nove odgovore na pitanja u vezi s nedovršenim procesima emancipacije i participacije žena u političkom, kulturnom i prosvjetnom životu zajednice. Zahvaljujući pozivu za sudjelovanje u izradi publikacije koja, između ostalog, ima za cilj i afirmaciju Online arhiva Antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, dobila sam priliku da bar donekle istražim jednu od istaknutih revolucionarnih figura – narodnu naprednu učiteljiicu, točnije njenu ulogu i zadaće u okviru revolucionarnih aktivnosti i uspostave i izgradnje novog društvenog poretka. Usprkos činjenici da su narodne učiteljice u bh. društvu uživale ogromno poštovanje i divljenje, one su ostale, najvećim dijelom, bezvremene heroine, simboličke figure odnosno „anonimne saučesnice, saputnice, saborci, saradnice“ koje, osim rijetkih slučajeva, još uvijek nisu ušle u povijest „sa svojim punim imenom i prezimenom, sa svojim ulogama, funkcijama, mislima, osećanjima, nadama i strahovima”16. 2014. dok je, primjerice, na Filozofskom fakultetu u Sarajevu obranjen tek jedan takav završni diplomski rad: Emira Muhić, „Žena u socijalizmu u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1945. do 1971. godine prema časopisu ‘Nova žena’“. Završni diplomski rad, Filozofski fakultet u Sarajevu, 2012. 12 Arhiv je napravljen u okviru aktivnosti Udruženja za kulturu i umjetnost „Crvena“ iz Sarajeva. O arhivu i projektu više na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/o-nama 13 Detaljnije o stanju arhivske građe o Drugom svjetskom ratu, necjelovitosti fondova i nepotpunim zbirkama, vidjeti: Kujović, Mina. „Stanje arhivske građe o Drugom svjetskom ratu u Bosni i Hercegovini“ u Šezdeset godina od završetka Drugog svjetskog rata: kako se sjećati 1945. godine. Zbornik radova, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006., str. 217-235. 14 Već je 1953. godine pokrenuto prvo trogodišnje sistematsko prikupljanje građe odnosno podataka o aktivnostima žena u ratu. O pokretanju ovog arhiva, njegovim dometima u prvoj fazi, vidjeti više: Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. Dom i svijet, str. 31-33. 15 Svakako uz nužnu svijest o višestrukim istraživačkim poteškoćama tvorbe ženske povijesti pomoću arhivskog materijala, novinskih izvještaja i napisa, zabilježenih svjedočenja i usmenih izvora. O nekim istraživačkim izazovima vidjeti više: Bonfiglioli, Chiara. „Povratak u Beograd 1978. godine: Istraživanje feminističkog sjećanja“ u: Glasom do feminističkih promjena, ur. R. J. Kirin i S. Prlenda, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2009. str.120-131. 16 Milić, Anđelka. „Patrijarhalni poredak, revolucija i saznanje o položaju žene, Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 19. i 20. veka“, Položaj žene kao merilo modernizacije: naučni skup, Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1998. Navedeno prema: Petrović, Jelena. „Društveno-političke paradigme prvog talasa jugoslavenskih feminizama”, ProFemina Specijalni broj (2011): 59-81, 62-3. Autorica pojašnjava da cilj povijesti žena nije da popunjava prazna mjesta postojećeg povijesnog kanona već da prenosi znanja utemeljena na ženskom iskustvu povijesti na svemu što se sistematski izostavljalo. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 51 Zalagati se za njihov ulazak u povijest, zajedno sa svim drugim zaboravljenim, zanemarenim ili izbrisanim figurama radnica i revolucionarki BiH, jedini je način izlaska iz „beskonačnog kruga otkrivanja i ponovnog zaborava ženske istorije, emancipacije i ponovnog potčinjavanja, iz beskonačnosti obnavljanja patrijarhalnog poretka odnosa i vrednosti, koji u svakoj istorijskoj epizodi postaje sve suroviji“17. 1.1. Okvir i cilj rada Iako se u okviru domaće historiografije veći broj istraživača i istraživačica18 bavio temom povijesnog razvoja bh. školstva od osmanskog perioda do kraja Drugog svjetskog rata, o specifičnostima profesionalnog angažmana učiteljica i učitelja i njihovom doprinosu kulturnom i društvenom razvoju zajednice postoji relativno mali broj radova19. Premda je obrazovanih učitelja i učiteljica na prostoru BiH bilo još od kraja 18. stoljeća te iako je njihovo djelovanje ostavilo dubok trag na razvoj Ovakav pristup ujedno omogućava da se napokon izađe iz „beskonačnog kruga otkrivanja i ponovnog zaborava ženske istorije, emancipacije i ponovnog potčinjavanja, iz beskonačnosti obnavljanja patrijarhalnog poretka odnosa i vrednosti, koji u svakoj istorijskoj epizodi postaje sve suroviji.“ Ibid. 17 Milić, u: Petrović, „Društveno-političke paradigme“, op.cit. 63. 18 Između ostalih: Pejanović, Đorđe, Historija srednjih i stručnih škola u BiH, Sarajevo, 1953.; Esad Peco, Osnovno školstvo u Hercegovini od 1878. do 1918, Sarajevo 1971.; Mitar Papić, Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme austrougarske okupacije (1878-1918), Sarajevo, 1972, Istorija srpskih škola u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. godine, Sarajevo 1978. ; Hrvatsko školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. godine, Sarajevo 1982., Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini (1918 – 1941), Sarajevo, 1984., Hajrudin Ćurić, Muslimansko školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. godine, Sarajevo, 1983, te Azem Kožar, “Osnovno školstvo u toku Drugog svjetskog rata (1941-1945)” u: Osnovno školstvo u Tuzli (istorijski pregled), Tuzla, 1988. 19 Pored radova objavljenih u publikacijama poput „Zbornik sjećanja treće poslijeratne generacije učiteljske škole u Derventi juni 1951. godine“ ili „Zbornik radova 100 godina učiteljstva u Bosni i Hercegovini“ odnosno nekoliko radova prezentiranih na simpoziju organiziranom u Sarajevu 1987. godine a u povodu obilježavanja stogodišnjice otvaranja prve učiteljske škole u BiH, ulogom učitelja bavio se detaljnije Mitar Papić u knjigama Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1941. do 1955. Godine, Sarajevo, 1981. i Učitelji u kulturnoj i političkoj istoriji BiH, Sarajevo (Svjetlost, 1987.) te donekle i Mato Zaninović u studiji Kulturno-prosvjetni rad u NOB-u (1941 – 1945), Sarajevo, 1968., i Snježana Šušnjara, „Učiteljstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme Austro-Ugarske”, Anali za povijest odgoja 12 (2013): 5574. Na Filozofskom fakultetu u Sarajevu 2014. godine obranjena je magistraska radnja pod naslovom „Uloga učitelja u prosvjetnim, političkim i kulturnim promjenama u BiH od 1945. do 1951. godine”, u kojoj Ademir Jerković istražuje materijalne uslove rada učitelja u ratnim i poratnim dešavanjima i sagledava doprinos učitelja općem kulturno-prosvjetnom napretku BiH, te jedan završni diplomski rad koji se bavi položajem učitelja za vrijeme austrougarske okupacije BiH. Vidjeti: Anđa Bandić, „Društveni položaj učitelja u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme Austro-Ugarske” (završni diplomski rad, Filozofski fakultet u Sarajevu, 2011.) �52 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA sveopće kulture, o tome se, kako naglašava Mitar Papić: „pisalo sporadično (...) i još uvijek nemamo jedne sinteze koja bi pokazala da mi u BiH nismo imali (...) jednog intelektualnog poziva koji bi se mogao čak i upoređivati sa onim što su učitelji dali“20. Međutim, prije 90-ih čak ni u tim sporadičnim osvrtima nije nastao niti jedan rad koji zasebno razmatra status i društvenu ulogu učiteljica ili njihov doprinos razvoju školstva u BiH. Štoviše, iako se još za vrijeme austrougarske vladavine upravo učiteljice zalažu za osnivanje strukovnih, profesionalnih udruženja (a Marija Jambrišak i Jagoda Truhelka već 1896. godine pozivaju učiteljice na staleško udruživanje koje će se uspješno realizirati pokretanjem Kluba učiteljica u okviru čitaonice Hrvatskog učiteljskog doma u Zagrebu 1900. godine21), Jovanka Kecman će se u studiji posvećenoj ženskim radničkim i profesionalnim udrugama, statusom naprednih učiteljica 30-ih godina 20. stoljeća pozabaviti promatrajući njihovu djelatnost i aktivnosti isključivo u sklopu naprednog učiteljskog pokreta i aktivnosti Komunističke partije22. Dakle, saznanja o pojedinim aspektima djelovanja učiteljica ostaju vrlo fragmentirana i navode se usputno u sklopu radova koji tretiraju širu problematiku školstva, odnosno učiteljskog pokreta. Ovakav trend se nastavlja i nakon rata 90-ih, te je otada objavljeno svega nekoliko radova koji se donekle bave obrazovanjem žene u bh. školstvu ili istaknutim ženskim učiteljskim kulturnim figurama s kraja 19. i početka 20. stoljeća.23 20 Papić, Mitar. Učitelji u kulturnoj i političkoj istoriji Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1987. str. 3. 21 Navedeno prema Suzana Jagić, „Jer kad žene budu žene prave: Uloga i položaj žena u obrazovnoj politici Banske Hrvatske na prijelazu u XX. stoljeće”, Povijest u nastavi 11 (2008):77-100, 83-4. 22 Autorica ovakav uklon opravdava činjenicom da napredne učiteljice u međuratnom periodu nisu oformile zasebne strukovne udruge. Usp. Jovanka Kecman, „Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941. Beograd, 1978. str. 373. 23 Usp. Kujović, Mina. „Muslimanska osnovna i viša djevojačka škola sa produženim tečajem (1894 - 1925) - prilog historiji muslimanskog školstva u Bosni i Hercegovini”, Novi Muallim 41 (2010): 72-79; i idem, „Hasnija Berberović – zaboravljena učiteljica – prilog historiji muslimanskog školstva u Bosni i Hercegovini”, Novi Muallim 40 (2009): 114-118; Šušnjara, Snježana. „Jagoda Truhelka”, Hrvatski narodni godišnjak 53 (2006): 239-256.; idem, „Jelica Belović Bernadrikowska”, Hrvatski narodni godišnjak 54 (2006): 66-76., idem, „Školovanje ženske djece u BiH u vrijeme osmanske okupacije 1463.-1878.”, Školski vjesnik4. (2011); i idem, „Školovanje ženske djece u Bosni i Hercegovini u doba Austro-Ugarske (1878. – 1918.)”, Napredak 155 (4) (2014.): 453 – 466. U opsežnoj studiji o poziciji žene u Srbiji u 19. i 20. stoljeću, Neda Božinović nudi i opći prikaz statusa učiteljica u onim republikama koje su ušle u sastav KSHS, odnosno Kraljevine Jugoslavije, uz kraći osvrt na prilike u BiH tijekom vladavine Osmanlija i Austrougara. Usp. Neda Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji: u XIX i XX veku, (Beograd: „Devedesetčetvrta” i „Žene u crnom”, 1996). Bitno je istaknuti da većina ovih radova ne zauzima kritički stav prema tradiconalnoj historiografiji i kreće se ka popunjavanju ‘ praznih mjesta’ postojećih povijesnih (u poratnom periodu naglašeno etno-nacionalnih) modela. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 53 Poput većine tema koje se vezuju za socijalističko nasljeđe, i tema naprednog učiteljskog pokreta ili se zanemaruje ili tek usputno spominje u okviru općih prikaza razvoja učiteljstva na tlu BiH, dok o naprednim narodnim učiteljicama do danas nije objavljena niti jedna monografija. No, kao što ću pokušati pokazati u ovom radu, upravo su u toj figuri upisane sve kontradikcije postajanja novom radnom ženom u socijalizmu. Istovremeno, kao ona koja u bh. poraću i tranziciji postaje nositeljica zazornog viška sjećanja24 na socijalizam i antifašističku borbu, figura narodne (napredne) učiteljice može ukazati i na moguće alternativne modele mišljenja aktualnog trenutka obilježenog procesima lažne emancipacije i agresivne repatrijarhalizacije žena. U radu će se razmatrati uloga i pozicija narodne (napredne) učiteljice od kraja 30-ih do početka 50-ih godina 20. stoljeća, budući da je to bio prijelomni period sveobuhvatne transformacije državnog sustava masovnog osnovnog školstva gdje se konstruirao i novi tip učiteljice. Figura učiteljice posebno je indikativna u tom smislu. Proces tvorbe novog tipa učiteljice direktno se nadovezuje za nastanak ili, točnije, nastojanja da se tijekom NOB-a kroz partijske odluke, a potom ustavnim i zakonskim rješenjima u cijelosti promijeni društveni položaj žena25 i kreira novi tip žene26 u BiH27. Težište se stavlja na pokušaj da se istaknute ženske figure afirmiraju i uklope unutar postojećeg kanona, a skoro uopće se ne raspravlja o tome kako i zašto je došlo do zanemarivanja povijesnog prikaza jedne od najmasovnih ženskih profesija i još uvijek gorućeg pitanja školstva, obrazovanja djevojčica i žena. O važnosti koncepta roda kao „društvene organizacije spolne različitosti“ u povijesnim istraživanjima više u: Joan W. Scott, Rod i politika povijesti, Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1988, 2003. i Feminism and History, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. 24 Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata. „Politike sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke kulture“, Lada Feldman Čale i Ines Prica ur., Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006. str.157. 25 Usp. Katz, Vera. „O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.­ 1953.“ Prilozi 40 (2011): 135-155. 26 U govoru na Drugom zasjedanju ZAVNOBiH-a, Danica Perović je istaknula da je novi lik žene „ženaborac koja je u toku borbe politički izrasla i sazrela i oslobodila se da vodi i odlučuje o svim pitanjima borbe i narodnog života.“ Usp. Govor Danice Perović na Drugom zasjedanju ZAVNOBiH-a u Dokumenti 1943– 1944, Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1968, str. 200. 27 Ove promjene su zahvatile cijelu Jugoslaviju, no više radova ističe bitnu različitost ranijih ekonomskih i društveno-kulturnih prilika u različitim dijelovima ove bivše države. Zemlje koje su ušle u sastav Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, te kasnije Kraljevine Jugoslavije, imale su donekle drugačiji društveni i državni poredak, te bitno drugačiji sastav stanovništva. Samim tim su postojale i bitne razlike i specifičnosti u vezi s položajem žena u tim zemljama – od bračnog statusa preko učešća u procesu obrazovanja do prava djelovanja unutar javne sfere. Razmatranje ovog pitanja unutar bh. konteksta kao zasebne cjeline čini mi se opravdanim upravo zbog tih razlika, odnosno specifičnosti. �54 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA Polazeći od pretpostavke da se školstvo može promatrati kao splet diskursa, znanja, pravnih i institucionalnih aranžmana vladajućih režima i društvenih struktura koje su dugo vremena na prostoru BiH legitimirale i osiguravale najprije isključivanje, a potom i diskriminaciju žena u okviru procesa obrazovanja i profesionalnog pedagoškog učiteljskog angažmana, ovaj period zanimljiv je i zato što će upravo u tih dvadesetak godina doći do drastičnog porasta broja učiteljica u osnovnom obrazovanju. Učiteljice će ujedno po prvi put biti formalno izjednačene sa svojim kolegama; nova vlast će im osigurati iste mogućnosti za rad i život kao i učiteljima i, bar nominalno, nastojati unaprijediti tradicionalno vrlo nepovoljni materijalni položaja učiteljskog kadra. Nakana ovog rada je da u osnovnim linijama prikaže brojne društvene dužnosti učiteljica tijekom NOB-a, prvenstveno njihovog rada na opismenjavanju i edukaciji žena za potrebe opće mobilizacije tijekom NOB-a, pa do njihovog predanog i požrtvovanog rada na odgoju i obrazovanju djece i opismenjavanju odraslih u prvim godinama po oslobođenju zemlje, u okviru tzv. petogodišnjeg plana obnove. Osnovni cilj rada je iscrtati putanju kretanja od revolucionarne figure narodne napredne učiteljice, nastale kroz borbu za novi i pravedniji društveni poredak, do figure koja se postupno depolitizira i pasivizira u okviru feminizacije ove profesije. 2. Materijalni uslovi rada i formalno pravni status učiteljica u vrijeme austrougarske okupacije i u međuratnom periodu Od početaka razvoja sistematskog (državnog) školskog sustava u BiH28 koji datira od uspostave austrougarske uprave nad ovom zemljom, učiteljice su, kao državne službenice, djelovale u skladu s izrazito diskriminatornim zakonima o državnim službenicima i propisanim školskim zakonima koji su u velikoj mjeri doprinosili kreiranju nepovoljnih uslova za rad i profesionalno napredovanje učiteljica. 28 U osmansko doba BiH školstvo je bilo isključivo konfesionalno i privatno. Nakon aneksije Bosne i Hercegovine, austrougarska vlast uz već postojeće konfesionalne privatne škole postepeno otvara sve veći broj državnih škola, tzv. „narodnih osnovnih škola” kojima država propisuje nastavne planove i programe, udžbenike i školsku lektiru. Početkom austrougarske okupacije na prostoru BiH je djelovalo 535 tzv. sibian- mekteba (što valja uzeti s rezervom jer sam u radu Snježane Šušnjara naišla na podatak da je 1876. bilo registirano 917 mekteba), 54 katoličke škole i 56 srpskih konfesionalnih škola, a pred kraj austrougarske vladavineu BiH, u školskoj godini 1912/13, pored konfesionalnih škola je postojala i 331 državna škola. Podaci navedeni prema: Mitar Papić, Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme austrougarske okupacije 1878-1918, Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša. 1972. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 55 Usprkos porastu broja ženskih osnovnih škola u odnosu na osmanski period29, kao i većeg broja učiteljskih škola za žene,30 austrougarske vlasti zapravo nisu osnaživale procese emancipacije žena, niti smatrale da im je u interesu povećati broj žena unutar javnih službi. Naime, kako navodi Suzana Jagić, u austrougarskom periodu su (navodne) tjelesne i duhovne razlike među spolovima korištene kao osnovni adut za različite pristupe u obrazovanju31 žena i muškaraca, te njihovo 29 Prva ženska škola u osmanskom periodu počinje s radom u Sarajevu, tek u školskoj godini 1857/58, a zahvaljujući upornosti i nesebičnom zalaganju učiteljice Stake Skenderove koja je ujedno bila i prva žena u BiH koja je napisala knjigu (Ljetopis Bosne 1825—1856.). Drugu žensku osnovnu školu osnovala je 1866. godine protestantska sufražetkinja miss Adelina Paulina Irby. Uz obje te škole djelovao je i internat, i u obje škole su se školovale djevojčice svih konfesija. Budući su neke učenice ovih škola po završetku naobrazbe i same postajale učiteljice u ovim školama, ove škole se mogu tretirati i kao prve učiteljske škole za djevojčice na prostoru BiH. Pet godina nakon otvaranja škole Miss Irby, redovnice iz Zagreba otvaraju prvu katoličku žensku školu u Sarajevu. Ove časne sestre iz reda Sv. Vinka ubrzo zatim otvaraju škole i u Mostaru (1872.), Dolcu kod Travnika (1872.), Banjoj Luci i Livnu (1874.). Muslimanke su u ovom periodu u pravilu pohađale konfesionalne škole (mektebe). Podaci o školama navedeni prema studijama Mitra Papića, Istorija srpskih škola u BiH, Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1978. i Snježane Šušnjara „Školovanje ženske djece u Bosni i Hercegovini u doba Austro-Ugarske“, op.cit. 30 Pored zasebnog odjela miss Irbynog zavoda za školovanje učiteljica, 1884. godine i kongregacija Kćeri Božje ljubavi dobija dozvolu da u okviru samostana u Sarajevu pokrene privatnu žensku učiteljsku škola koja radi po planu i programu učiteljskih škola austrougarske monarhije. Tek krajem ove uprave, 1913. godine, pri osnovnoj i višoj djevojačkoj muslimanskoj školi u Sarajevu pokreće se trorazredni tečaj za obrazovanje učiteljica za muslimanke koje su svršile višu djevojačku školu, a 1914. godine viša srpska djevojačka škola dobija status javne škole ali zbog početka Prvog svjetskog rata iste te godine i prestaje sa radom. Osim u konfesionalnim školama, od 1911. godine edukacija učiteljica se vršila i u državnoj ženskoj učiteljskoj školi u Sarajevu, nazvanoj ženskom preparandijom. Osim u Sarajevu, više ženske škole osnovane su u Mostaru (1893.) i u Banjoj Luci (1898.) ali usprkos porastu broja ženskih osnovnih škola broj učenica u tim školama ostaje vrlo nizak, o čemu najbolje svjedoči podatak da je u BiH 1910. godine od ukupno 88,05% nepismenih, bilo 83,86% nepismenih Hrvatica, 95% Srpkinja i 99,68% muslimanki. Podaci nav. prema Papić, Mitar. Školstvo u Bosni, n.dj. i Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje, op.cit. 31 Kako navodi Dinko Župan, u Austro-Ugarskoj monarhiji je pedagoški diskurs podržavao spolnu politiku tako što je proizvodio znanja o spolnim karakteristikama na kojima su bile utemeljene rodne uloge. Upravo će se u srednjim školama oblikovati poželjni ženski identiteti. Tako Župan navodi: „Glavne karakteristike koje su učenice trebale zadobiti putem odgoja i obrazovanja u višoj djevojačkoj školi bile su: pobožnost, prostodušnost, čednost, krotkost, stidnost, skromnost i šutljivost.“ Na ovaj način izgrađeni ženski identitet predstavljao se kao prirodan i nepromjenjiv. No ovaj identitet je samo naizgled bio univerzalan jer je jedinstveni ženski identitet bio ispresijecan nizom drugih identiteta (klasnim, vjerskim, etničkim). Tako je npr. unutar svake klase dolazilo do specifične primjene univerzalnog određenja žene. Poželjno ponašanje majke, supruge i kućanice razlikovalo se s obzirom na njihovu klasnu pripadnost. Usp. Župan, Dinko. „Viša djevojačka škola u Osijeku (188.-1900.)”, Scrinia slavonica 5 (2005), 366-383. �56 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA različito pozicioniranje u društvu.32 Tako su unutar ovog izrazito patrijarhalnog društva33 žene kao ‘manje vrijedna bića’ dobijale ne samo drugačije zadaće i uloge, već im je bila limitirana i sloboda djelovanja unutar javne sfere. Ni javne službe, kao moguće područje angažmana žena, nisu na angažman žena gledale s odobravanjem jer se smatralo da žene pripadaju privatnom prostoru doma, i da su njihove glavne uloge uloge uspješnih domaćica, supruga i majki. Stoga su žene kao javne službenice bile angažirane skoro isključivo u školstvu. Premda će broj učiteljica biti u stalnom porastu, austrougarske vlasti nisu učinile ništa na kreiranju pravnog okvira koji bi osigurao poboljšanje profesionalnih i materijalnih uslova rada učiteljica. Naprotiv, Zakon o pravima i odnošenjima učiteljstva višestruko je diskriminirao učiteljice. Osim što su im plate u startu bile niže od plata učitelja i napredovanje u službi usporeno kroz tzv. platne razrede, učiteljice se nisu smjele ni udavati, odnosno bi – u slučaju udaje – automatski dobijale trajnu zabranu djelovanja u službi. Izuzetak su bili brakovi sklopljeni s učiteljima, no u tom slučaju su plate učiteljica bivale prepolovljene i učiteljice gubile pravo na plaćenu stanarinu i sve druge pogodnosti službe.34 Sve učiteljice koje su se školovale u ženskim učiteljskim školama svršavale su školovanje s nepunih sedamnaest godina, no mnoge su kao pomoćne učiteljice počinjale raditi već s petnaest ili šesnaest godina. Po završetku školovanja u pravilu su postavljane u ženske osnovne škole; u muškim školama su mogle raditi samo u slučaju da učitelja nije bilo, a i tada isključivo u nižim razredima. Pravo da budu profesorice i predaju u svim razredima srednjih škola ostvarit će tek u okviru Kraljevine Jugoslavije. Što se tiče službeničkog napredovanja i platnih razreda učiteljica, kako je već istaknuto, proces je bio vrlo spor i učiteljice su u najboljem slučaju tek pred kraj službe uspijevale stići do trećeg stupnja. Tako je, primjerice, učiteljica Hasnija Berberović prvu učiteljsku zakletvu polagala 1909. a zadnju 1934. godine; u službi je provela punih dvadeset devet godina. Godine 1939. je penzionirana zbog bolesti no, kako ističe Mina Kujović, pitanje je koliko je ova vrijedna učiteljica uživala svoju zasluženu penziju od 1.475 dinara, budući 32 Usp. Jagić, „Jer kad žene”, 80. Autorica navodi da su se žene isključivo obrazovale kako bi postale dobre supruge i majke jer samo obrazovana majka i supruga može udariti „religiozno-moralne temelje odgoja o kojem će ovisiti blagostanje domovine.“ Ibid. 33 Budući da se danas patrijarhat može promišljati na različite načine i da on po sebi nije samorazumljiv sistem, ovdje pojam rabim na tragu određenja Dunje Rihtman-Auguštin koja kao osnovne odlike patrijarhalnosti navodi „dominaciju muškaraca u radu, odlučivanju i u imovinskim odnosima (...) i odvojenost žena od javnog života te njihovu podređenost.“ Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja. Etnologija naše svakodnevice. Zagreb: Školska knjiga,1988. str. 193. 34 Usp. Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje, op.cit. 80. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 57 je zbog bolesti smještena u duševnu bolnicu a njena penzija je za to vrijeme bila deponirana na sudu.35 Ni nakon sloma Austro-Ugarske i formiranja Kraljevine Srba Hrvata i Slovenaca, kasnije Kraljevine Jugoslavije, uslovi rada učiteljica i njihov materijalni status neće se značajno popraviti. Učiteljski problemi su i u novoformiranoj državi ostali isti; učitelji i učiteljice štoviše nastavljaju živjeti u ekstremno teškim materijalnim uslovima, o čemu možda najbolje svjedoči njihovo prekomjerno zaduživanje u pojedinim banovinama, zbog iznimno niskih plata36, kao i veliki broj rezolucija koje su o toj problematici donesene na učiteljskim konferencijama širom Kraljevine Jugoslavije.37 Učiteljski kadar koji se zalagao za napredno školstvo38 i djelovao u okviru Komunističke partije Jugoslavije39 ili otvoreno simpatizirao Partiju bio je, u blažim slučajevima, prinudno prebacivan na službu u druge banovine, izlagan čestim kontrolama, hapšenjima i dugotrajnim sudskim procesima; neki od njih su u zatvoru 35 Usp. Kujović, “Hasnija Berberović – zaboravljena”, n.dj., 116. 36 I dok su ostali državni službenici primali platu od 2.900 do 7.500 dinara, učitelji i učiteljice su primali platu u iznosu od 705 do 2500 dinara. Reč istine br. 1 (1940), 6. Navedeno prema Rade Vuković, Napredni učiteljski pokret između dva rata Beograd: Pedagoški muzej, 1968., str. 109. 37 U rezolucijama se redovito zahtijevalo izjednačavanje prinadležnosti u srazmjeru s cijenama životnih namirnica, izjednačavanje prinadležnosti udatih učiteljica sa prinadležnostima učitelja po principu „za jednak rad, jednaka nagrada“, ukidanje III razreda skupoće, odbijanje V grupe kao i kod ostalih službenika itd. Usp. Vuković, Napredni učiteljski, n. dj. 93. 38 Pod naprednim školstvom podrazumijeva se školstvo utemeljeno na socijalističkim idejama. Srpski učitelji su u Zemunu već 1873. godine pokrenuli socijalistički pedagoški časopis Učitelj koji je okupljao napredne učitelje Vojvodine, a u Srbiji se 1907. godine osniva i Klub učitelja i učiteljica socijaldemokrata koji se, između ostalog, zalaže za opće obavezno i besplatno školovanje u svim školama, tj. za to da država podiže i izdržava narodne škole. Usp. Vuković, Napredni učiteljski, n. dj. 10. Pedagoška biblioteka Budućnost već od 1908. godine djeluje kao tribina napredne pedagogije i sa sve snažnijim političkim utjecajem na učiteljstvo. Međutim, dok je izvjestan dio učiteljskog kadra Srbije i Hrvatske pripadao socijaldemokratskim organizacijama, učiteljski kadar iz BiH u vrijeme austrougarske vladavine po pravilu nije stupao u otvoreni politički život, i manje je bio u doticaju sa revolucionarnim pedagoškim idejama. Tek će nakon 1920. godine, i Kongresa učitelja Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenca, doći do porasta broja progresivnih učitelja na tlu BiH; kao jedan od prvih aktivnih učesnika radničkog pokreta i poslanik KPJ posebno će se istaknuti Mitar Trifunović Učo. Usp. Papić, Učitelji, n. dj. 45, 46. 39 Objavljivanjem Obznane i donošenjem Zakona o zaštiti bezbjednosti i poretka, 1921. godine započinje period ilegalnosti KPJ. Obznanom je zabranjen i rad Kluba učitelja komunista, kao i izlazak partijske i sindikalne štampe. Šestojanuarska diktatura ukida i stalnost službe, a učiteljski kadar stavlja pod nadzor policije, te napredne učitelje i učiteljice nastavlja progoniti, otpuštati i zatvarati. Vidjeti više: Vuković, Napredni učiteljski, n.dj., 14,15. �58 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA proveli i više godina. Tako je bilo i s nekolicinom učiteljica. Primjerice, učiteljica Lepa Perović je, kao istaknuta partijska radnica, uhapšena zbog revolucionarnih aktivnosti i potom prebačena iz Bosne u Srbiju, da bi 1937. godine bila otpuštena iz državne službe. Učiteljica Draginja Savković provela je tri mjeseca u istražnom zatvoru, potom izvedena pred sud zbog širenja i propagiranja komunističkih ideja, ali je u nedostatku dokaza oslobođena optužbe. Po okončanju procesa je ostala pod stalnim policijskim nadzorom, te premještena u drugi srez40. Ovi progoni i hapšenja nastavljaju se i tijekom Drugog svjetskog rata. Ilinka ObrenovićMilošević, koju su zvali Crvena učiteljica, bila je uhapšena trudna, pod optužbom da je prikupljala odjeću i hranu za borce, te deportirana u Banjički logor. Slična sudbina je zadesila i naprednu učiteljicu Živku Vujinović-Bulu koja će u logoru Banjica provesti jedanaest mjeseci, a potom biti otpuštena iz službe.41 Pored zakonom propisanih prava i obveza, učiteljsko zvanje imalo je i niz specifičnosti u samom obrazovno-odgojnom procesu, kako u radu u nastavi i školi, tako i u angažmanu u sredinama gdje se službovalo, posebno tamo gdje je stanovništvo bilo mahom nepismeno. To je prije svega bio slučaj sa učiteljevanjem na selu. Rad na selu bio je puno teži zato što u takvim sredinama školske zgrade vrlo često nisu zadovoljavale ni minimalne zahtjeve za rad i cjelokupna nastava se u pravilu organizirala u jednom odjeljenju. Jovanka Kecman navodi da su se učiteljice po završetku učiteljske škole zapošljavale uglavnom na selu. Pored rada u školi, učiteljice su imale i posebene obaveze sudjelovanja u svim kulturnim i karitativnim organizacijama koje su djelovale u datom okrugu, kao i obavezu organiziranja analfabetskih tečajeva i tečajeva iz domaćinstva na kojima su educirale žene o važnosti povećanja higijene i zdrave ishrane ili racionalnom vođenju domaćinstva. Usprkos činjenici da su seoske učiteljice imale puno veći obim poslova, one su bile najslabije plaćene, te ponekad dobijale i 50% manju platu od plate učitelja.42 3. Razvojni put narodnih naprednih učiteljica pred početak Drugog svjetskog rata i tijekom NOB-a Učiteljice su, upravo zbog šireg društvenog angažmana na selima, uživale velik ugled među seljanima i utjecale na zajednicu tim prije što su, poštujući lokalne običaje i živeći po pravilima sela, tretirane kao punopravne članice zajednice. I zato 40 U: Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, op.cit. 381, 82. 41 Navedeno prema Radisav S. Nedović, Čačanski kraj u NOB 1941-1945: žene borci i saradnici, Čačak: Okružni odbor SUBNOR-a, 2010., str. 59 -63. 42 U: Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, op.cit. 373. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 59 će, nakon osnaženja i omasovljenja naprednog učiteljskog pokreta, Komunistička partija, u duhu marksističke naobrazbe, poklanjati posebnu pažnju osposobljavanju seoskih učiteljica za tzv. politički rad na selu43. Naime, budući da je mladi učiteljski kadar u pravilu svoja prva namještenja dobijao na selu ili u varošima, te da politički progresivni učitelji i učiteljice skoro nikada nisu dobijali službu u gradovima, politička misija naprednog učiteljstva smjestila se gotovo isključivo na selu. Budući da je od 1921. do 1936. godine KPJ djelovala ilegalno, svoj legalni rad i djelovanje među učiteljskim kadrom realizirala je pokretanjem kulturno-izdavačkih zadruga. Napredni učiteljski kadar BiH tek je u okviru Kongresa učitelja44 organiziranog u Banjoj Luci augusta 1939. godine osnovao Zadrugu „Petar Kočić”, do tada djelujući u sklopu Učiteljskih kulturno-izdavačkih zadruga „Vuk Karadžić” i „Ivan Filipović”. Preko ovih zadruga organizirani su susreti učitelja i učiteljica, gdje su posebno važni bili tzv. pedagoški tjedni organizirani tijekom zimskih raspusta u periodu od 1938. do 1941. godine, kad su održavana ideološko – politička predavanja i vođene diskusije o važnim pitanjima i strukovnim problemima45. Rad s naprednim učiteljicama i aktivnosti ovih zadruga posebno će se intenzivirati od 1936. godine.46 Pored ovih periodičnih okupljanja, napredni učitelji i učiteljice svoj su politički i kulturno-prosvjetni rad razvijali kroz narodne biblioteke i čitaonice,47 aktivno radeći u okviru nekoliko časopisa i listova među kojima se posebno izdvaja glasilo Učiteljska straža. 43 Ibid. str. 375. 44 Na ovom Kongresu, odnosno Devetnaestoj glavnoj godišnjoj skupštini, predstavnici političkih grupa podnijeli su tri kandidatske liste za izbor izvršnog, nadzornog i drugih odbora i organa Jugoslovenskog učiteljskog udruženja. Unutar ovog krovnog učiteljskog udruženja inače su djelovale tri osnovne politicke grupacije –Jugoslovenska radikalna zajednica (JRZ) ili Novi učiteljski pokret, grupacija oko tzv. staleške linije građanskih demokrata i skupina oko „Učiteljske straže“, te Učiteljska zadruga „Vuk Karadžić“ kojoj su pripadali komunisti i drugi napredni učitelji/učiteljice. Komunisti su na ovoj skupštini podnijeli listu koja je zastupala interese treće učiteljske političke grupacije. Budući da je bila treća po redu, ova grupa će potom biti prozvana Treća učiteljska grupa. Vidjeti više u: Rade Vuković, Napredni učitelji, 74-88. Inače će ovaj kongres biti značajan i po tome što će na zasebnom sastanku okupiti učiteljice iz raznih dijelova Kraljevine Jugoslavije – da bi prodiskutirale pravnomaterijalni status učiteljica. One su tom prilikom ponovo podnijele zahtjev za unošenje prijedloga o stvaranju ženskih odsjeka unutar sreskih učiteljskih udruženja. Usp. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, n.dj., 381. 45 Usp. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, op.cit. str. 375. 46 Ibid. str. 374. 47 U tekstu pod naslovom Vrijeme zrenja objavljenom u knjizi svjedočenja o angažmanu žena Mostara u predratnom periodu, opisane su razne aktivnosti žena u okviru biblioteke i čitaonice. Vidjeti više: Mahmud Konjhodžić, Mostarke, fragmenti o revolucionarnoj djelatnosti i patriotskoj opredjeljenosti žena Mostara, o njihovoj borbi za slobodu i socijalizam, Mostar: Opštinski odbor SUBNOR-a, 1981., str. 36-38. �60 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA Kako su, kako je već istaknuto, napredni učitelji i učiteljice mahom bili smješteni po selima, oni će postati osnovna snaga KP na selu i to, kada govorimo o BiH, selima na prostoru Bosanske krajine, potom u okolini Sarajeva i području Romanije, Semberije i istočne Hercegovine. Upravo je na ovoj teritoriji radio najveći broj učiteljskog kadra prvoboraca i prvoborkinja, nosilaca Spomenice 1941.48 Dok je tijekom rata na teritoriji BiH pod upravom NDH, vlast predano radila na stvaranju novog državnog hrvatskog školstva tako što je „prvim pravnim aktima nastojala udahnuti ‘ustaški i hrvatski nacinalni duh’ (...) u duhu antisemitske politike popraćene rasnim zakonima“49, rukovodstvo NOP-a je od početka ustanka, nastojeći realizirati program KPJ i Platforme NOP-a, radilo na razvoju i unapređenju narodnog prosvjećivanja i to kroz masovno opismenjavanje stanovništva i obnavljanje i razvoj sistema redovnog obrazovanja na gore naznačenoj (slobodnoj) teritoriji BiH50. Prema izvještaju učiteljice Mice Krpić, organizirani prosvjetni rad počinje već od aprila 1942. godine u selima oko Drvara, gdje su osnovani prvi kulturnoprosvjetni odbori i analfabetski tečajevi na kojima se nastava odvijala tri puta sedmično.51 Kulturno prosvjetni rad se proširio i po Kozari i selima Podgrmeča gdje su organizirani analfabetski tečajevi kojima su rukovodile, pored ostalih, i učiteljice Mica Vrhovec, Ivanka Čanković, Jela Perović i Anka Kulenović.52 Potom su osnovani i prosvjetni odsjeci koji su organizirali i tečajeve na kojima su pripremali omladinu za rad u školama i na analfabetskim tečajevima. Pored toga su učitelji Nijaz Alikadić i Cecilija Čebo izradili i prvi udžbenik za osnovne škole, tzv. Livanjski bukvar53. 48 Usp. Papić, Učitelji u kulturnoj, n. dj., 67. Učiteljice – nositeljice Spomenice 1941. godine su: Vera Babić, Mila Bajalica, Jela Bićanić, Milka Čaldarović, Dušanka Ilić, Milica Krpić, Danica Pavić, Jela Perović, Lepa Perović, Nada Prica, Mica Vrhovac i Zaga Umićević. Ibid, 82. 49 Gladanac, Sanja. „Uspostava državnog školstva na području Velike župe Vrhbosna”, Husnija Kamberović ur., Bosna i Hercegovina 1941: Novi pogledi. Zbornik radova. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju u Sarajevu, 2012: 67-97, 74,75. 50 Usp. Kožar, Azem. „O nekim aspektima obrazovno-odgojne politike Narodnooslobodilačkog pokreta na području Bosne i Hercegovine 1941-1945”, Šezdeset godina od završetka Drugog svjetskog rata: kako se sjećati 1945. godine. Zbornik radova, Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006, str. 235-248. 236 i 237. 51 Zaninović, Kulturno posvjetni rad, str. 20. 52 Zaninović, op.cit str. 21. 53 Ovaj udžbenik imao je svega 44 stranice i bio je kombinacija bukvara i čitanke. Značajan je, pored ostalog, jer predstavlja povijesni dokument u kojem se po prvi put pojavljuje sadržaj drugačije odgojne, obrazovne i ideološke vrijednosti. Usp. Mihailo Ogrizović (1962). nav. prema Papić, Učitelji u kulturnoj, n. dj.,74. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 61 Nakon Prvog zasjedanja AVNOJ-a, održanog u Bihaću krajem novembra 1942. godine, Prosvjetni odsjek Izvršnog odbora AVNOJ-a dobija zadatak da na slobodnoj teritoriji organizira prosvjetne aktivnosti. Odsjek usvaja niz propisa, među kojima i Uputstvo za rad u osnovnim školama i pozive i uputstva NOO-ima za otvaranje osnovnih škola, analfabetskih tečajeva, kao i programe rada osnovnih škola i tečajeva, te narodnog univerziteta54. Kako tvrdi Kožar, ovi dokumenti Prosvjetnog odsjeka IO AVNOJ-a „predstavljaju historijski značajan putokaz za reformu školstva u duhu ideologije snaga NOP-a. S njima škola ulazi u nov period svoga razvoja“55. Od kraja 1942. godine, velikim dijelom zahvaljujući i osnaživanju AFŽ-a kao masovne političke organizacije žena56, poboljšavaju se uslovi za organizirane analfabetske tečajeve na slobodnoj teritoriji, ali i u partizanskim jedinicama. Na zemaljskim i oblasnim tečajevima AFŽ-a, pored tečajeva za osposobljavanje i pripremu rukovodilaca analfabetskih tečajeva, organiziraju se i tečajevi političkog obrazovanja žena i predavanja na kojima su aktivno djelovale, između ostalih, Mara Radić, Nata Hadžić-Todorović (za oblast Bosanske krajine), te Radmila Begović i Milka Čaldarević (u istočnoj Bosni). Pored ovih tečajeva, AFŽ je organizirao kulturne grupe u okviru kojih su oformljene recitatorske sekcije, grupe za organiziranje priredbi, te sekcije u kojima su se čitale radio-vijesti i partizanska štampa. U novembru 1943. godine organizira se Prva konferencija prosvjetnih radnika na slobodnoj teritoriji na kojoj su glavne teme bile izrada cjelovitog bukvara za osnovnu školu, i analfabetski tečajevi.57 Kako navodi Zaninović, organizacija analfabetskih tečajeva se oslobađanjem velikih teritorija postavlja na nove osnove, a od kraja 1944. godine uvodi i obavezno trajanje tečajeva od 30 dana, po četiri puta nedjeljno.58 Od kraja 1944. započinje proces masovnog otvaranja osnovnih škola na oslobođenom teritoriju. 54 U: Kožar, „O nekim aspektima”, op.cit. 55 Kožar, „O nekim aspektima”, op.cit. 56 Prva zemaljska konferencija AFŽ-a Jugoslavije održana je od 6. do 8. decembra 1942. godine u Bosanskom Petrovcu. Zadaci definirani tijekom pripreme Konferencije, na Konferenciji su usaglašeni te potvrđene dvije osnovne skupine zadataka koje je AFŽ trebao realizirati tijekom rata: s jedne strane, pomoć vojsci i osiguravanje normalnog odvijanja života na oslobođenoj teritoriji, s druge politička i kulturna emancipacija žena i integracija na ravnopravnim osnovama u NOB-u i borbi za novo društvo. Usp. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, op.cit. 25-26. 57 Up, Papić, Učitelji u, n. dj. 78, 79. 58 Zaninović, Kulturno posvjetni rad, n.dj., 158, 159. �62 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA No, širenje mreža osnovnih škola i porast ostalih oblika prosvjetnih aktivnosti nameće pitanje učiteljskog kadra. Pred sami početak rata na području BiH je djelovalo 1.043 osnovne škole sa 2.321 uposlenim učiteljem/učiteljicom, a nastavu pohađalo 150.783 đaka, znači u prosjeku 65 đaka po učitelju/učiteljici59. Na kraju školske godine 1944/45 radilo je ukupno 577 škola s 82.705 đaka, 359 učitelja i 741 učiteljicom60. S obzirom na to da je tijekom rata, prema nepotpunim podacima, poginulo 173 učitelja i 80 učiteljica61, jasno je zašto će upravo obnova učiteljskog kadra postati jedan od gorućih izazova novih prosvjetnih politika. Kao privremeno rješenje, odlučeno je da se još tijekom rata započne sa procesom osposobljavanja tzv. privremenog učiteljskog kadra kojem bi poslije rata bilo omogućeno stjecanje pune učiteljske spreme. Osnivaju se učiteljski tečajevi na koje se pozivaju svi mlađi omladinci i omladinke sa bar dva završena razreda srednje škole. Prvi tečaj održan je u Sanskom Mostu u maju 1943. godine. Potom je u Lipniku otvoren je i drugi tečaj, a do kraja rata su tečaji sa istim programom organizirani u još nekoliko gradova BiH. Većina polaznika i polaznica ovih tečajeva po završetku rata završit će učiteljske škole i fakultete te postati predvodnici novih prosvjetnih politika na prostoru BiH.62 Bitno je napomenuti da su za nove učitelje i učiteljice, kao i za one koji su se kasnije pridružili pokretu i NOB-u, organizirani i seminari na kojima ih se upoznavalo s ciljevima i zadacima NOB-a i prosvjetnim politikama koje su sprovodili narodnoslobodilački odbori, te s osnovnim idejama naprednog učiteljskog pokreta.63 Tako će, pored naprednih učiteljica koje su u međuratnom periodu započele svoju revolucionarnu borbu i tijekom rata postale važne političke i revolucionarne figure64, u samom NOB-u nastati još jedan tip narodne učiteljice: omladinke sa nekoliko završenih razreda srednje škole ili gimnazije, koje dobrovoljno stupaju u borbu ili su simpatizerke Partije. One će se osposobiti za rad u školi kroz učiteljske tečajeve pokrenute u ratu. U pravilu će sve učiteljice – omladinke po završetku rata završavati pedagoške akademije i sve do mirovine nastaviti rad u prosvjeti. 59 U: Papić, Mitar. Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini 1941-1945, 4-11. 60 Zaninović, op.cit. str. 176. 61 Ibid. 187, 190. 62 Detaljnije o ovim tečajevima u: Zaninović, Kulturno prosvjetni, n. dj.,124, 180-184. 63 Zaninović, op.cit, str. 185. 64 Kao dobar primjer može se navesti učiteljski put Rade Miljković, od napredne seoske učiteljice, uspješne agitatorice do vojnikinje koja 1942. godine gine u borbi kod Bugojna, a 1953. godine biva proglašena narodnim herojem. Detaljan prikaz njenog revolucionarnog angažmana dostupan na: http://www.savezboraca.autentik.net/licnosti_rada_ miljkovic.php �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 63 3.1. Petogodišnji plan obnove: novi izazovi i stara opterećenja za učiteljice Prosvjetna politika Kraljevine Jugoslavije dovela je do toga da je 1941. godine u BiH bilo nepismeno oko 75% stanovništva. Ovu nepovoljnu sliku još više će pogoršati zastrašujući materijalni i ljudski gubici, tako da se BiH po završetku rata suočava sa ogromnim razmjerama nepismenosti, posebice žena65, kao i sa nedostatkom stručnog kadra, naročito učiteljskog, te s velikim brojem razrušenih ili devastiranih škola.66 Sve to je usporavalo planirani tempo obnove zemlje zacrtan Petogodišnjim planom67. Stoga je unapređenje školstva i prosvjetnih prilika bio jedan od prioriteta nove jugoslovenske i bh. vlasti. Trebalo je obnavljati porušene učionice i graditi nove škole, te školovati nove učitelje i učiteljice. Istovremeno su novoformirana socijalistička država i KPJ imali specifična očekivanja od učitelja i učiteljica68. Pored ostalog, u prvim poratnim godinama paralelno 65 U tekstu pod naslovom Narodno prosvjećivanje, Danica Pavić ističe da je novoformirana narodna vlast, za razliku od ranije „nenarodne vlade“, među prioritetne zadatke postavila rad na općenarodnom prosvjećivanju. Pozivajući se na podatke koje je prikupilo Prosvjetno odjeljenje G.N.O. autorica navodi da je nakon oslobođenja u Sarajevu evidentirano 13.591. nepismenih osoba, od čega 10.765 žena, među njima najviše muslimanki (9.072) i domaćica (9.563), te da su očito žene bile najveće žrtve neprosvjećenosti. Autorica sa velikim zanosom opisuje kako je u Sarajevu pokrenuto 118 analfabetskih tečajeva i kako žene, među kojima i veliki broj onih starijih od 50 godina, „zadivljuju svojom voljom i željom za znanjem“ usprkos raznim materijalnim nedaćama. O tome koliko su žene u prijeratnom Sarajevu bile isključene iz javnog i kulturnog života, po mišljenju autorice ovog priloga najbolje govori činjenica da mnoge od njih, premda rođene i ostarjele u Sarajevu, tek u okviru analfabetskog tečaja prvi put zajedno otišle u posjet kinu i tom prilikom pogledale dva filma (Dani i noći i Parada fiskulture u Moskvi) koji su na polaznice tečaja ostavili tako dubok dojam da su o njima diskutirale u više navrata tijekom tečaja. U zadnjem dijelu prikaza, autorica nudi ocjenu analfabetskih tečajeva AFŽ smatrajući da su rukovoditeljice, mahom učiteljice sarajevskih osnovnih škola, uz pomoć organizacija AFŽ-a i omladine, uspješno realizirale te aktivnosti i da su „narodne vlasti samo u toku ove zimske kampanje narodnog prosvjećivanja, uspjele da opismene više ljudi nego što su to raniji nenarodni režimi učinili decenijama“. U: Nova žena: list Antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine, God. 2, br. 13 (1946), 9. 66 Netom po okončanju rata u BiH je bilo ukupno 684 osnovnih škola, 1.288 nastavnog osoblja te 97.116 đaka. Navedeno prema Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, Socijalistička Republika Bosna i Hercegovina, separat uz II izdanje Zagreb, LZ, 1983., str. 230. 67 Petogodišnjim planom 1947.-1951. bio je predviđen razvoj novih industrijskih grana, obnova starih preduzeća, mehanizacija rudarstva, usavršavanje poljoprivredne proizvodnje, izgradnja novih puteva, proširenje mreže kulturnih i prosvjetnih ustanova te razvijanje zdravstvenih i socijalnih ustanova. 68 Cvijetin Mijatović, ministar prosvjete NRBiH u prvoj poslijeratnoj vladi, istaknuo je na otvaranju kursa za prosvjetne instruktore: „Osnovni zadatak učitelja u našoj školi je vaspitanje, i to ne uopšte, nego u određenom smjeru u duhu NOB. (..) Kroz nastavu, kroz pravilne odnose sa djecom treba da živi i struji duh nove nastave, stalna prošlost, težnja i stremljenja naših naroda (…) Hoćemo �64 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA sa procesom obnove i izgradnje škola teče i proces rekonstrukcije ili izgradnje ostalih kulturnih ustanova. Otvarane su biblioteke i čitaonice, zadružni domovi i domovi kulture. Sve ove ustanove uglavnom vode učitelji i učiteljice, često bez ikakve dodatne materijalne nadoknade. Zbog svega navedenog učiteljski posao je prvih poslijeratnih godina bio iznimno težak. No, u ovom periodu su osnovne škole u samom centru pažnje države i društveno-političkih organizacija, a to još više podstiče entuzijazam u radu učitelja.69 Kroz nekoliko narednih svjedočenja pokušat ću, bar u općim crtama, prikazati esktremno teške uslove rada, ali i neupitan entuzijazam narodnih učiteljica u ovom periodu. Najprije treba spomenuti analfabetske tečajeve odnosno jednu od najmasovnijih i najvažnijih društvenih akcija u tom periodu – tzv. kampanju opismenjavanja. Od 1945. godine do 1. oktobra 1950. godine, u okviru pet akcija narodnog prosvjećivanja organizirano je 42.196 analfabetskih tečajeva u kojima je opismenjeno 670.874 lica.70 Pomoć narodnih učiteljica u akcijama prosvjećivanja bila je ogromna71 budući da su se tečajevi odvijali pod njihovim nadzorom. Učitelji i učiteljice vodili su 3.099 tečajeva, uz to održavajući i redovna mjesečna ili petnaestodnevna savjetovanja sa rukovodiocima tečajeva, kako bi se osigurao što bolji rad. Kako naglašava Papić, u ovaj poduhvat „utkan je ogroman trud i prekovremeni napori jer je svaki učitelj pored održavanja tečaja vodio jedno ili dva odjeljenja redovne škole. Rad je počinjao jutrom a završavao se kasno uveče“72. Evo kako učiteljica Slavica Bureković iz Sarajeva, koja je službovala u Pokrajčićima pored Travnika, opisuje svoje iskustvo organiziranja i rukovođenja analfabetskih tačejava: slobodne, odvažne, poletne ljude, a ne da budu podanici“ dok na selu „učitelj nije samo učitelj djeci, nego u situaciji kad je on jedini intelektualac na selu, mora biti i nosilac društvenog rada u prvom redu da kulturno uzdiže kraj u kojem živi. Učitelj u seoskoj školi radeći pod teškim uslovima ne smije se odvojiti od sela, ali se ne smije ni miriti sa zaostalošću nego treba da vuče selo naprijed. Poslovi van škole u kojima trebaju učestvovati učitelji su rad u seoskim zadrugama, analfabetskim tečajevima, čitaonicama i na drugim poslovima u vezi sa kulturnim uzdizanjem.“ Usp. Cvijetin Mijatović, „Govor na otvaranju kursa za prosvjetne instruktore održanog u Sarajevu u ljeto 1946”, Prosvjetni radnik 7 (1946), 6. 69 Usp. Papić, Učitelji u, n. dj. 88. 70 Navedeno prema Jerković, „Uloga učitelja u prosvejetnim”, 20. 71 No, to svakako ne znači da je potpora učiteljica bila bezuslovna i da nije bilo i povremenih opstrukcija u izvršavanju mnogobrojnih obaveza. Tako se, primjerice, u mjesečnom izvještaju Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a, Sarajevski srez, br.1/48, navodi da su učiteljice najprije pristale da organiziraju predavanja i tečaj općeg znanja, ali da su, kada je tečaj pokrenut, javile da su prezaposlene i da neće moći održavati kurs. U; Fond AFŽ, Kutiji 4, Folder 5. 72 Papić, Učitelji u, n. dj., 88. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 65 Učitelji su dobili zadatak da opismene narod, to je bio jedan od najkrupnijih koraka društva. Nepismenih je bilo uistinu mnogo, a među njima veliki broj mladića i djevojaka. Mi, učitelji, smo analfabetske tečajeve organizirali i na sijelima. Obično se nastava provodila u kasnim večernjim satima kada su učitelji bili slobodni, kad prestane redovna škola. Mnogo žena sam opismenila tokom ovih tečaja, računam da je bilo sedamdeset posto žena. Inače, analfabetske tečajeve organizovala sam ne samo u mojoj kući nego i po zaseocima. Nekoliko puta sam za svoj rad dobila novčanu nagradu.73 Krunoslava Lovrenović, učiteljica iz Ričica kod Zenice, ispričala je da su analfabetske tečajeve organizirali u zimskim mjesecima, od kraja oktobra do marta, odnosno početka aprila. Oni su uglavnom bili organizirani u noćnim satima, jer smo mi učitelji radili u toku dana sa redovnim učenicima. Nekad nismo imali dovoljno petroleja i morali smo se krajnje racionalno ponašati, strogo smo vodili računa o potrošnji. Imala sam slučajeve da u istoj klupi sjede majka i kćerka ili otac i sin. Inače, poslije tečaja opismenjavanja polagao se ispit. Stavovi su bili jasni – neznanje je naš najveći neprijatelj i što ga prije savladamo brže ćemo izaći iz općeg siromaštva.74 Kao i u ranijim periodima, rad na selu je i nakon rata ostao najzahtjevniji oblik učiteljskog angažmana, a novoformirana država nastavila je s praksom prvih namještenja mladih učiteljica – na selu. Težina učiteljskog posla na selu ogledala se u dodatnom opterećenju vannastavnim aktivnostima kao i u obnašanju nekoliko funkcija istovremeno. Naime, u seoskim školama je učiteljski kadar ujedno bio i upraviteljski i administrativni, te su morali redovno dostavljati izvještaje o radu škole. Istovremeno su bili opterećeni velikim nastavnim normama i radili u prepunim učionicama. Đaci su nastavu pohađali u kombiniranim odjeljenjima. U seoskim školama vrlo se često radilo sa više od stotinu đaka istovremeno.75 Pored toga su materijalni uslovi rada i života u seoskim školama bili iznimno teški. Seoski učitelji i učiteljice imali su pravo na besplatan stan i ogrjev.76 Međutim, kako im većina seoskih 73 Izjavu je Slavica Bureković dala Ademiru Jerkoviću. Usp. Jerković, „Uloga učitelja u“, op.cit. 21. 74 Jerković, „Uloga učitelja u prosvejetnim“, op.cit. 28. 75 Učiteljica Slavica Bureković imala je kombinovana odjeljenja u školi Pokrajčići kod Bile u kojoj je bilo 110 učenika, dok je učiteljica Olga Kurilić iz Vrbljana u školi radila sa 220 djece i uspješno kontrolirala četrnaest tečajeva. U: Jerković, „Uloga učitelja u“, n.dj., 28-29. 76 Usp. Uredba o pravu na besplatan stan i ogrjev, 56/46-626.- Uredba o pravu na besplatan stan i �66 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA sredina nije mogla obezbijediti ova prava, bili su stambeno neobezbijeđeni ili na korištenje dobijali jednu do dvije prostorije u samoj školi, mahom oštećene i bez tekuće vode i kanalizacije. O tom periodu rječito govore brojna svjedočanstva. Kada je učiteljica Krunoslava Lovrenović 1951. godine došla u selo Mošćanicu kod Zenice, zatekla je školu u vrlo teškom stanju. Evo kako opisuje prilike u školi: Škola je imala dva razreda i hodnik, imali smo i školsku kuhinju. Ne znam da li je u to vrijeme bilo kruha. Peć je stajala nasred razreda. Kod mene su skupa išla i pravoslavna i muslimanska djeca. Kad smo učiteljica Ljepša Džamonja i ja došle, nije bilo ni brave na vratima. Mi smo obavljali nastavu u tzv. kombinovanim razredima. Prvi i treći razred, drugi i četvrti, sve u istoj prostoriji i tu se obavljala nastava za oba razreda. Prvo s jednim, pa onda s drugim. Dok radite sa ovima kojima morate nešto da pričate, ovoj drugoj djeci zadate da nešto crtaju, da miruju. Djeca su bila fina, dobro vaspitana i uredna. Pravoslavne curice su nosile bluze i malo duže crne suknje i obavezno pletenicu, a muslimanke su bile u dimijama i bluzama. Od obuće je nosio šta je ko imao, vunene čarape, opanke ili kaloše. U hodniku su bile police gdje su se skidali. Djeca su zimi dolazila i po dubokom snijegu (...) Niko nam nije nabavljao drva, nego svako dijete je ujutro donijelo po jedno drvo.77 Budući da su se na selu analfabetski tečajevi organizirali zimi, učitelji i učiteljice nerijetko nisu mogli ostvariti ni pravo na odmor, već su marljivo radili i tijekom zimskog raspusta. No, usprkos tako teškim materijalnim uslovima za rad, učitelji su, čini se, u pravilu entuzijastično izvršavali predviđene obaveze. To je vidljivo iz mnogih svjedočenja i zabilježenih razgovora sa učiteljicama. Tako primjerice, u listu Nova Žena, učiteljica Mileva Grubač iz Višegrada sa zanosom prikazuje rad sa ženama na analfabetskom tečaju u selu Dušća. Učiteljica Grubač najprije navodi kako je na molbu žena iz tog sela „da dođe i njih uči“, obećala da će dolaziti nedjeljom budući je ostalim danima zauzeta radom u školi i na analfabetskim tečajevima u Višegradu. Evo kako opisuje svoj odlazak u selo, i prvi čas: U nedjelju su poslali po mene jednoga dječaka da se ne bih izgubila i lutala trazeći ih. Idem uz Drinu i razmišljam o toj divnoj, mnogo opjevanoj rijeci, a još više okrvavljenoj. Teče mirna i plava, kao da ne pamti nikakvog zla. Njene obale nadvisila su strma brda, a po gdjekojoj ravnici vide se tragovi avionskih bombi. Ponegdje viri iz zemlje gvozdena konstrukcija neke zgrade ogrjev učitelja narodnih osnovnih škola u selima, 46/48, 488. 77 U: Jerković, „Uloga učitelja u“, n.dj.,35. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 67 koju nadvisuje fabrični dimnjak. To su ostaci »Varde«, nekadanje industrije drveta. Napokon stižem u određeno selo. Dočekuju me žene sa bukvarima i tablicama. Radostan je bio naš prvi čas na kome su naše velike učenice nevještim potezima, sa puno volje i strpljivosti, otpočele prve poteze pisma.78 Ogromnim entuzijazmom i angažmanom narodne napredne učiteljice položile su važan kamen temeljac u izgradnju nove države. Zajedno sa svojim kolegama, učiteljice su diljem BiH organizirale škole i kreirale nove prosvjetne politike. U toj borbi za nove škole nisu mijenjale samo nastavne programe već uspostavljale i posve nov odnos sa đacima. U učionici je ukinut krut hijerahijski odnos i uspostavljene nove prakse učenja i rada, utemeljene na uzajamnom povjerenju i poštivanju. Učiteljice su često bile pune roditeljske brige za sve đake. Umjesto fizičkog kažnjavanja, prakticirale su se metode uvjeravanja, njegovao se takmičarski duh i jačalo drugarstvo.79 Zbog svega toga su učitelji i učiteljice uživali velik ugled u društvu, i priznanje i poštovanje cijele zajednice, posebice djece i njihovih roditelja. Pored toga su, kako je već istaknuto, aktivno radile u skoro svim kulturnim manifestacijama u sredinama gdje su službovale, a nerijetko su djelovale u svim kulturnim institucijama – od biblioteka i javnih čitaonica do amaterskih pozorišta i sportskih sekcija. Jedan takav egzemplaran učiteljski put predstavlja i angažman narodne učiteljice Nasihe Porobić.80 Ova učiteljica rođena je 1928. godine u Derventi. Tijekom jednodnevnog boravka partizana u Derventi 1944. godine, pristupa pokretu kao učenica V razreda gimnazije. U partizane odlazi posve nepripremljena; isprva radi kao bolničarka u Tesliću, potom je izabrana kao delagatkinja na kongresu u Sarajevu, a poslije rata odlazi na službu u školu u selo Korače, gdje radi sa 146 đaka. U Banjoj Luci je završila najprije tečaj, a kasnije i akademiju za nastavnicu srpskohrvatskog jezika. Paralelno je studirala i radila. U školi je organizirala sve učeničke aktivnosti, štampala knjige, sudjelovala sa djecom na svim konkursima i organizirala priredbe. Naglašava da je učiteljski poziv i svoje đake voljela više od svega, te da je zbog te velike ljubavi zanemarila čak i svoju porodicu, dvoje djece i muža. Dobitnica je više priznanja za rad, pored ostalog i Ordena zasluga za narod sa srebrnom zvijezdom. 78 Nova žena: list Antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine, god. 2, br. 13, 1946 g., str. 20. 79 Usp. Zaninović, Kulturno prosvjetni, op.cit. 186. 80 Intervju sa Nasihom Porobić vodila Elvira Jahić u januaru 2016. Intervju pohranjen u Audio zbirci Arhiva antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/415. �68 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA Pokušavala sam, više puta preslušavajući intervju sa Nasihom Porobić, odgonetnuti šta to djeluje uznemirujuće u njenom glasu i načinu na koji odgovara na pitanja, zašto njeni odgovori stvaraju nejasan osjećaj nelagode. Ne, njena ispovijest nije svjedočanstvo zaludnosti borbe od koje je, kako kaže, dobila onoliko koliko je mogla primiti. Njen životni put nije bio zaludan, i nema kajanja. Učiteljica Nasiha tvrdi da bi, kad bi mogla, sve isto ponovo napravila, samo bi ovog puta u borbu „krenula opreznija, bolje bi se pripremila, barem dvije presvlake bi sa sobom ponijela. Ne bi više išla grlom u jagode“. Uznemirujući nije ni njen pomirbeni ton ni rezigniranost u glasu jer to će prije biti staračka distanca ili čak mudrost s kojom se pred kraj života često postavljamo prema vlastitim životnim odlukama. Uznemirava, zapravo, trpno stanje iz kojeg se pripovijeda i koje sugerira da je učiteljica Nasiha u svom bogatom i ispunjenom životu toliko toga radila i puno postigla, ali da je malo, premalo vremena imala da taj i tako bogat život i proživi. Uznemirava to što je ona, poput većine žena revolucionarne borbe, pristala da cijelog svog života nekritički podržava mit o ženi koja se rado odriče svoga života u ime izgradnje buduće države i društva81. Međutim, to je samo jedna strana medalje. Važno je imati u vidu da, pored toga što su žene masovno pristajale na ulogu samožrtvujućih heroina, Ifigenija modernog doba, postoje i sitemski propusti ili, pak, svjesne strategije u pogledu odnosa prema ženama, u konkretnom slučaju prema narodnim učiteljicama, strategije koje su osigurale da proces transformacije od potlačene do napredne učiteljice ne bude, zapravo, nikada u potpunosti dovršen. 3.2. Između emancipacije i feminizacije učiteljske profesije Kada se govori o specifičnosti društvenog i političkog organiziranja žena u Drugom svjetskom ratu, u pravilu se ističe masovnost ženskog udruživanja i participacija velikog broja žena sa sela, žena iz različitih društvenih slojeva, te žena različite etničke pripadnosti82. Po mišljenju Ivane Pantelić83, na masovnu mobilizaciju žena i njihov ulazak u revolucionarnu partizansku vojsku utjecao je upravo masovniji dolazak učiteljica na sela nakon 1918. godine, učiteljica koje su na razne načine radile na emancipaciji i osnaživanju žena. 81 Usp. Jambrešić-Kirin, Dom i svijet, n. dj., 27. 82 Usp. Dušanka Kovačević et al. Borbeni put žena Jugoslavije, Beograd: Leksikografski zavod Sveznanje, 1972. 209-210. Rad dostupan na http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/71 83 Pantelić, Ivana. „Yugoslav female partisans in World War II”, Cahiersbalkaniques 41(2013), 3. Rad dostupan na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/files/original/f47c848c2d081c22905ba11a9d869fd3.pdf �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 69 I premda su, pored bolničarki i borkinja, upravo narodne učiteljice bile istaknute aktivistice antifašističkog pokreta i NOB-a, ni one neće biti pozvane da s podjednakim društveno-političkim angažmanom sudjeluju u radu izvršnih organa vlasti i najviših partijskih tijela u ratnom i poslijeratnom periodu.84 Naprotiv, emancipacijski lik učiteljice-borkinje iz narodnooslobodilačke borbe postepeno će se transformirati u lik požrtvovane velike majke koja kroz proces obaveznog osnovnog obrazovanja treba odgojiti novu naprednu generaciju. Kako primjećuje Amila Ždralović, masovno uključivanje žena tijekom rata u borbene jedinice značilo je i početak borbi sa tradicionalnim predrasudama o mjestu i ulozi žene, kako u njihovim porodicama tako i u jedinicama u koje su odlazile. Iz priča o partizankama može se zaključiti da su mnoge od njih u svojim jedinicama bile zadužene i za patrijarhalno definisane ženske poslove kao što je kuhanje i šivanje. Međutim, u isto vrijeme obavljaju i poslove koji su patrijarhalno definisani kao muški poslovi, a na najteže zadatke se često dobrovoljno prijavljuju. Na taj način su razbijale tradicionalne predrasude i stereotipe o mjestu i ulozi žene u društvu.85 Tako će se posebno popularizirati lik žene-majke koju je patrijarhalno-buržoaski izrabljivački poredak tlačio i držao u stanju neznanja, ali koja u revolucionarnoj borbi ne samo da se uspijeva opismeniti, kroz anafabetski tečaj, već postaje i ona koja iz anonimnosti privatne sfere ulazi u obrazovni proces i podučava ostale. U listu AFŽ-a Žena kroz borbu, u stalnoj rubrici Mi se borimo i učimo, opisujući proslavu Muslimanske brigade u junu 1944. godine i dodjelu nagrada zaslužnim borcima i borkinjama, jedna takva transformacija žene prikazana je na sljedeći način: Još prije godinu dana, kod kuće Zumreta je vukla ibrike, prala avlijsku kaldrmu, radeći po tuđim kućama, daleko od knjiga i svakog kulturnog života 84 Ovo nije bio samo slučaj narodnih učiteljice, već općenito svih žena koje su uzele aktivno učešće u revoluciji. Premda su se stalno isticale zasluge žena u NOB-i, njihov doprinos nije bio na odgovarajući način nagrađen, odnosno u novoformiranoj vladi žene neće biti priliku da uzmu učešće i radu izvšnih zakonodavnih tijela. U komparativnoj analizi podataka o broju učesnica na bojištu i broju vijećnica u radu ZAVNOBIH-a i AVNOJ-a Vera Katz pokazuje da zastupljenost žena u političkim tijelima nije bila adekvatna u odnosu na broj aktivnih učesnica u NOB-i. Primjerice u sastavu Prve vlade Bosne i Hercegovine nijedna žena nije dobila niti jednu resornu funkciju. Usp. Katz, „O društvenom položaju”, n.dj.,139, 141. I u poslijeratnom periodu ovaj trend će se nastaviti, pa je tako, primjerice, 1948. godine u Ustavotvornoj skupštini FNRJ, kao u i CK KPJ bilo svega 4,7 % žena. 85 Ždralović, Amila. „Drugi svjetski rat i iskustva bosanskohercegovačkih žena”, Zabilježene, n. dj.,76. �70 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA i rada. Danas je nagrađena kao najbolji kulturno prosvjetni radnik u svojoj brigadi (....) Zumreta je stekla toliko znanja da je mogla druge voditi i učiti.86 No, upravo ova nastojanja žena da kroz nesebično zalaganje i brigu za druge, dobrovoljni rad i obavljanje često najtežih poslova osiguraju svoju ravnopravnost u društvu i nove pozicije i društvene uloge, u poratnom periodu dovode do toga da će žene, nakon što iznesu svu težinu obnove razrušene zemlje, od sredine 50-ih pa nadalje gubiti teškom mukom stečene pozicije87. Drugim riječima, ponovo će se vraćati (točnije: biti vraćene) u okvir patrijarhalnih tradicionalnih uloga. Tako će, riječima Vjerana Katunarića, od herojskog lika žene-borca, nova žena u socijalizmu ponovno ‘skliznuti’ u lik pripitomljene kućanice i ‘modno osviještene’ žene: Neposredno poslije rata (lik žene-borca op.a.) zamijenjen je ženom sa socrealističkog plakata, ženom-graditeljkom u tvornici, na gradilištima, sportskim natjecanjima, itd. Taj lik je odražavao revolucionarni polet oba spola u tadašnjoj omladinskoj generaciji i spontanu asimilaciju žena u muškim aktivnostima. Snažan blijesak u kulturnoj tradiciji postupno se izgubio i bio preplavljen evolucijom standardne patrijarhalne kulture. Žena biva potisnuta u privatnu sferu a uporedo sa porastom životnog standarda porodice obnavlja se shema malograđanskog života (...) Eksplozija žute štampe nastaje šezdesetih godina kao posljedica jačanja tržišta u jugoslavenskoj privredi. Ženska štampa, usredotočena na modu i kozmetiku, vjerno preslikava zapadni model ženskog tijela, interijera i sentimentalnosti. Jacqueline Onasis i slični likovi bacili su u sjenu asimilatorske likove žene socrealističke kulture borkinje, radnice, sportašice.88 U postrevolucionarnom periodu lik napredne učiteljice slijedi putanju transformacije koju su doživjele sve revolucionarne ženske figure. Tako će i narodna učiteljica, na krilima ideala rada, najprije postati udarnica koja će se, sve više radeći na zadovoljavanju potreba svoje velike metaforičke89 porodice, postepeno zatvarati (ili biti zatvorena) u tradicionalne (patrijarhalne) okvire/okove ranijih režima. Obnaša86 Žena kroz borbu: list Antifašističkog fronta žena istočne Bosne, God. 2, br. 3/ 8, 1945 87 Ivana Pantelić navodi se da je od sredine 50-ih bio u porastu broj otkaza radnicama u industrijskom i državnom sektoru. Usp. Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao, op.cit.124-25. 88 Katunarić, Vjeran. Ženski eros i civilizacija smrti, Zagreb: Naprijed, 1984. str. 236, 237 89 L. Sklevicky ukazuje na to da je u periodu revolucije i izgradnje nove žene stvarna porodica poimana kao proturječna budući s jedne strane potrebna, no s druge prepreka novim društvenim ulogama žena. Zato se kao rješenje nudi ono što Sklevicky naziva metaforičkom porodicom, u kojoj se atributi istinske ljudske zajednice pridaju pokretu i narodnooslobodilačkoj fronti. Usp. Sklevicky, Konji, žene, n. dj., 48. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 71 jući tradicionalne ‘prirodne’ ženske uloge odgajateljice ‘nacije’, brižne majke svih đaka i njihovih mahom nepismenih roditelja, narodnoj je učiteljici, kao i ostalim radnim ženama socijalizma, ostajalo sve manje „vremena za samoupravljanje“ a „ne imati vremena znači biti izvan vremena, izvan povijesti, ostati na svojoj biološkoj prirodi“90 i trajnom stanju postajanja91 ‘naprednom’ učiteljicom. No, bilo bi netočno sugerirati da je borba napredne učiteljice za potpunu emancipaciju, samostalnost i bolje materijalne uslove rada i odgovarajuću naknadu za rad92 ostala nedovršena93 samo zato što su učiteljice bespogovorno pristale na obnašanje nametnute uloge i djelovanje pod nepovoljnim uslovima. Posrijedi je drugi, kompleksniji fenomen. Naime, tragom Blochove formulacije o ženskom pokretu koji je zastario ili je, pak, nadomješten ili odgođen, i teze da ženski pokret nakon revolucije dolazi na red kao samoozbiljenje ženstvenosti, Nadežda Čačinović94 razmatra ‘odgođenost’ kao novi element unutar klasične doktrine radničkog pokreta te, između ostalog, primjećuje da je ta mogućnost drugačijeg samoozbiljenja ženstvenosti u postrevolucionarnim društvima i dalje odgođena, 90 Despot, Blaženka. „Žena i samoupravljanje”, Delo 4 (1981): 112 – 117, 115; vidjeti više: Blaženka Despot, „‘Žensko pitanje’ u socijalističkom samoupravljanju“ u: Lydia Sklevicky, ur., Žena i društvo. Kultiviranje dijaloga. Zagreb: Sociološko društvo, 1987,; i idem, Žensko pitanje i socijalističko samoupravljanje, Zagreb: Cekode, 1987. 91 Tatjana Jukić smatra da je „indikativno što komunizam pokazuje strukturni afinitet sa ženom, i to ondje gdje je žena za Deleuzea također platforma za postajanje, devenir femme; gdje žena za Deleuzea označava logiku i dinamiku postajanja u podlozi svakoga kasnijeg identiteta i identifikacije. Takva žena, devenir-femme, nalik na sablast iz prve rečenice Komunističkog manifesta, progoni tada sve što se poslije razvija kao rodna politika socijalizma. Istom mjerom, to bi značilo da je rodna politika socijalizma uvijek i unaprijed neadekvatna, već zato što nužno ne uspijeva zahvatiti taj strukturni afinitet žene i komunizma“. Vidi: Jukić, Tatjana. „Žena kao revolucija: od Garbo do Tita.“ ProFemina Specijalni broj (2011): 33-39, 34. 92 Renata Jambrešić Kirin govori o konfliktnoj simultanosti i raslojenosti ženskih uloga „koja je proizvela trostruko opterećenu ‘super-ženu’: radnicu, majku/domaćicu i društveno angažiranu građanku koja je svoje uzore tražila barem u tri različite ideosfere“. Renata Jambrešić Kirin „O konfliktnoj komplementarnosti ženskog pamćenja: Između moralne revizije i feminističke intervencije“ ProFemina Specijalni broj (2011): 39-53, 47. 93 U novim kritičkim čitanjima pitanja pozicije radne žene u socijalizmu, Vlasta Jalušič će ustvrditi da upravo ostvarena emancipacija koja je ženu svodila na radnika zapravo nije dopuštala da se preobrazi u cjelovito političko biće. Usp. Jalušič, Vlasta. „Women in Post-Socialist Slovenia: Socially Adapted, Politically Marginalized“, Sabrina Ramet ur., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press 1999. str. 112. 94 Nadežda Čačinović, „Odgovor na pitanje: kakva je sudbina ženstvenosti s obzirom na emancipaciju“ prvobitno je objavljen u časopisu Žena 1978. godine. U ovom radu tekst navodim prema: Čačinović, Nadežda. U ženskom ključu: ogledi u teoriji kulture, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2000. �72 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA te da se ženstvenost nanovo pojavljuje kao stara veličina95. Pozitivnim napretkom se smatra, kako pojašnjava Čačinović, već i samo nastojanje da svi budu uključeni u radni proces, posebice u raspodjelu odgovornosti za upravljanje. ‘Novoj ženi’ načelno se priznaje da je čovjek i da samostalnim radom može ostvariti vrhunska dostignuća, istovremeno obnašajući sve tradicionalne ženske uloge (tješiteljice, hraniteljice, iscjeljiteljice). Međutim, zaključuje autorica, „unutrašnja neodrživost te uloge priznaje se samo pod očitom natuknicom ‘preopterećenosti’, eufemizmom koji skriva iscrpljivanje žena i nikakve pomake u muškoj ulozi“96. Ovaj proces od emancipacije do feminizacije učiteljske profesije prije svega valja promatrati sa šire ideološke razine djelovanja unutar kojeg dolazi do preuzimanja i zloupotrebe tradicijskih vrijednosti u novom kontekstu.97 Tako su, još tijekom priprema za masovnu agitaciju žena odnosno širih narodnih masa i njihovo priključenje NOB-u, rukovodstvo pokreta i njegovi čelni ideolozi zaključili da se postojeća tradicija ne smije otvoreno osporavati, već da je „poštovanje tradicije bolji/probitačniji oblik propagande i ekspanzije pokreta“98. Kako pokazuje Lydija Sklevicky, ni CK KPJ, ni ostali upravljačku organi NOP-a nisu zapravo nastojali promijeniti tradicijske vrednote, već se naglasak prebacuje na njihovu modifikaciju u odnosu na novi povijesni trenutak. Zato „tradicijske ‘ženske vrednote’ ne bivaju osporene niti integrirane u neki novi vrednosni sustav, već se njihov emancipatorski naboj očituje u korisnosti za širenje i jačanje NOP-a“99. U konkretnom slučaju naprednog učiteljskog pokreta i pozicije narodne napredne učiteljice u NOB-u, na emancipatorskim vrijednostima insistiralo se samo u mjeri koja osigurava uspješno izvršenje općih ciljeva borbe. Zato je, kako pojašnjava 95 Ibid. 14-15. 96 Ibid. 15. 97 Ukazujući na to da normativna i operativna ideologija različito formulišu i osnovne vrijednosti političkog sistema te da se ove dvije ideologije najviše razlikuju u sferi kulture i nacije, Siniša Malešević u svojoj analizi identifikacije dominantne ideologije, njihove forme, sadržaja i postizanja legitimnosti kroz studiju slučaja poslijeratne Jugoslavije, pokazuje da je moguće uočiti bitne razlike u artikulaciji ‘socijalističke svesti’ u okviru ova dva tipa ideologije. „I dok normativna ideologija tu svest povezuje s opštom emancipacijom ljudi i oslobođenjem od tradicije, autoriteta i eksploatacije, operativna ideologija se poziva na moralnu superiornost izabrane i pročišćene zajednice i u tom smislu koristi slike izvedene iz dobro poznate i javnosti prepoznatljive religijske tradicije“, kao i postojećih modela tradicionalne kulture. Malešević, Siniša. Ideologija, legitimnost i nova država. Prev. Slobodanka Glišić. Zagreb, Beograd; Jesenski i Turk i Edicija Reč, 2004., str. 240. 98 Sklevicky, Konji, žene, n. dj. 46. Kroz analizu pojedinih narativa Sklevicky pokazuje kako su propagandni sadržaji koristili formule narodne književnosti, pa čak i liturgijski jezik. Ibid. 99 Ibid. 47. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 73 Sklevicky, i uspostavljen pragmatički pristup naspram tradicionalnih kulturnih vrijednosti, što je posebno bio slučaj sa tradicionalno (patrijarhalnim) ‘ženskim’ vrijednostima, poput pijeteta, požrtvovanosti, časti i poštenja,100 vrijednosti koje su postale temelj svih socijalnih funkcija koje su žene izvršavale u ratu. Tako se vjerovalo da se posredstvom uloge majke i njene socijalizacijske uloge stvaraju, između ostalog, temelji bratstva i jedinstva.101 Stoga će se i napredna učiteljica graditi kroz figuru brižne majke koja u novom duhu odgaja generacije đaka – djece. No ovaj trend će se nastaviti i u izgradnji poratnog, novog socijalsitičkog društva. Odnosno, premda će vlast ženama načelno omogućiti ostvarivanje političkih prava, prava na rad, prava na školovanje i zaštitu materinstva, te javno propagirati ideju rodne ravnopravnosti u svim sferama javnog djelovanja, riječima Renate Jambrešić-Kirin jugoslavenski ideolozi nisu prakticirali radikalni prekid s kulturnim formama predrevolucionarnog društva utemeljenim na ideji rodne različitosti i kompatibilnosti (….) Jugoslavenski su političari spremno posegnuli za tradicijskim repertoarom rodnih simbola i uloga.102 Insistiranjem na figuri učiteljice kao brižne majke koja se dobrovoljno žrtvuje za dobrobit cijele zajednice, odnosno tvrdnjama da se žene lakše snalaze i bolje obavljaju profesiju učiteljce koja je ‘tek’ nastavak ženskih ‘prirodnih’ uloga i razvijanje njenih ‘urođenih sposobnosti’, započinje proces feminizacije103 te profesije i snižavanja njenog društvenog statusa, a samim tim i moći žena. Naime, kako su pokazala pojedina feministička istraživanja104, spolne stereotipije i orodnjene profesionalne strukture dobrim su dijelom nastale zahvaljujući retorici ‘ženske istinske/prirodne profesije’ koja je prikazivala učiteljice kao objekte znanja, a vrlo rijetko kao aktivne/djelatne subjekte. Po analogiji se ni njihov profesionalni 100 Ibid. 56. 101 Ibid. 43. 102 Jambrešić-Kirin, Žene i dom, op.cit. 20, 21. 103 Feminizacija nastavničke profesije prisutna je u svjetskim razmjerima od šezdesetih godina 20. stoljeća, a mnogi sociolozi ukazuju na to kako se drastičnim porastom broja žena među nastavnim osobljem u osnovnim školama zapravo uloga domaćice i majke proteže i na plaćeni posao u uslužnim profesijama. Usp. Šime Pilić, Knjiga o nastavnicima. Split: Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Splitu, 2008. 104 Između ostalih: M Grumet, „Pedagogy for patriarchy: the feminization of teaching”, Interchange, 12 (2-3) 1981., str. 165-184.; Acker, ur. Teachers, Gender and Careers, Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1989.; P. Munro, Subject to fiction: Women teacher’s life history narratives and the cultural politics of resistance. Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1989. �74 AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ: ŠEĆER SLADAK A BOMBONE LJUTE, JA SE DRAGA UČITELJICE POUZDAVAM U TE: ULOGA I POLOŽAJ NARODNE (NAPREDNE) UČITELJICE U PRIJELOMNIM GODINAMA IZGRADNJE NOVOG SOCIJALISTIČKOG BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKOG DRUŠTVA angažman i pedagoški rad nisu vrednovali kao prakticiranje profesionalnih kompetencija utemeljenih na njihovoj naobrazbi, edukaciji i usavršavanju, što je vodilo i ka postepenom napuštanju ideja naprednog školstva o permanentnom usavršavanju pedagoških metoda i poboljšavanju nastavnih aktivnosti u učionici. Stoga pojam feminizacije učiteljske profesije ne znači samo porast broja učiteljica, već označava i nizak status i slabu materijalnu naknadu za obavljeni posao, što je nužno vodilo tome da ova profesija s vremenom izgubi na društvenom značaju i da se njena moć radikalno umanji. 4. Umjesto zaključka Polazna premisa rada bila je to da se kroz lik napredne učiteljice mogu pratiti svi limiti ženske profesionalne emancipacije kao i posljedice nedovršenosti procesa tvorbe i/ili transformacije žene u nov, neovisan, oslobođen i ravnopravan subjekt boljeg i humanijeg društva. Kako je u radu istaknuto, dosadašnja su istraživanja malo pažnje posvetila rodnom aspektu učiteljstva usprkos činjenici da žene od kraja Drugog svjetskog rata do danas čine glavninu učiteljskog kadra. Od 1918. godine do početka Drugog svetskog rata došlo je do porasta seoskog školstva i pojave većeg broja mladih profesionalnih učiteljica koje se priključuju radu i aktivnostima naprednog učiteljskog pokreta. Budući da se u tom periodu učiteljice još uvijek nalaze u iznimno nepovoljnom materijalnom položaju i djeluju u okviru zakona diskriminatornog kako u smislu nižih plata tako i u smislu zabrane sklapanja braka osim sa učiteljima, napredne učiteljice istovremeno su se borile i za osiguranje jednakosti u radnim uvjetima i za jednaka prava i istu naknadu za obavljeni posao. Nove društveno-kulturne revolucionarne politike koje se počinju propagirati i širiti tijekom rata dovele su do radikalne promjene statusa učiteljica. Mnoge napredne učiteljice, posebice na selima i na slobodnoj teritoriji BiH, uzele su aktivno učešće u ovim promjenama i aktivno sudjelovale u sprovođenju prosvjetne reforme i uspostave novog društvenog poretka. I premda će figuru narodne napredne učiteljice novi organi vlasti i nove službene ideologije konstruirati kao jednu od istaknutih revolucionarnih ženskih figura, one će nakon rata, usljed politika školstva koje su im nametale iznimno zahtjevne radne obaveze, biti sve manje politički aktivne i intelektualno angažirane na planu dodatnog osnaživanja i profesionalnog osamostaljivanja. Takav razvoj figure i prakse ženskog učiteljstva velikim dijelom je rezultat činjenice da se njihov profesionalni angažman tretirao kao urođena, a ne stečena vještina koja kao takva zahtijeva i dodatni trud i stručno �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 75 usavršavanje. Učiteljska profesija će sve više biti feminizirana, da bi koncem 80ih od revolucionarnog angažmana učiteljica ostao ograničeni kulturni kapital i simbolička uloga. Tako bi se tranformacija lika narodne napredne učiteljice mogla sažeto i ironijski predstaviti kroz tri slike: od učiteljice sa puškom i bukvarom u ruci, preko učiteljice sa crvenim karanfilom za reverom, do učiteljice koja, sredinom 80-ih, očekuje da joj đaci povodom osmomartovske proslave praznika žena poklone crveni karmin marking 16. Nažalost, u turbulentnim godinama poraća i tranzicije, izgubio se i ovaj simbolički ugled i značaj učiteljica. U uzburkanom moru prosvjetnih reformi i kontinuiranog procesa reorganizacije osnovnog obrazovanja, učiteljica se više ne promatra kao jaka figura koja oblikuje nove generacije i usađuje im pozitivne vrijednosti. Učiteljska profesija dodatno se marginalizira i obezvrjeđuje, a njihova prava i slobode u radu sa đacima sve više limitiraju i kontroliraju. Stoga, čini mi se, treba pledirati da se, napokon, u BiH osnaži i formira stukovno udruženje učiteljica koje bi, usprkos svim uspostavljenim podjelama i segregaciji u aktualnom bh. školstvu,105 pronašle način da djeluju i kreiraju nove napredne učiteljske politike. A kako nas uči feminizam, za bilo koji tip ženskog strukovnog udruživanja važno je pronaći autentične figure iz prošlosti, prethodnice na koje se oslanjamo i prethodnice sa kojima gradimo pravednije i odgovornije društvo. U tom smislu, ovaj rad pledira i za pokretanje sistemskih feminističko-povijesnih istraživanja učiteljske profesije i statusa učiteljica, istraživanja koja bi iz rodne perspektive usmjerila pozornost na povijesni prikaz razvoja ove profesije u bh. kontekstu, a kako bi se uočile strukture koje kontinuirano tlače učiteljice i još uvijek ih drže u nepovoljnom položaju. 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O ženskoj kulturi pamćenja, Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008. „O konfliktnoj komplementarnosti ženskog pamćenja: Između moralne revizije i feminističke intervencije“ ProFemina Specijalni broj (2011): 39-53, 47. „Žena u formativnom socijalizmu,“ u: Refleksije vremena 1945.-1955. Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2013. Jerković, Ademir. „Uloga učitelja u prosvejetnim, političkim i kulturnim promjenama u BiH od 1945. do 1951. godine,“ Magistarski rad, Filozofski fakultet u Sarajevu, 2014. Jukić, Tatjana. „Žena kao revolucija: od Garbo do Tita.“ ProFemina, Specijalni broj (2011): 33-39. Katunarić, Vjeran. Ženski eros i civilizacija smrti. Zagreb: Naprijed, 1984. Katz, Vera. „O  društvenom  položaju  žene  u  Bosni  i  Hercegovini  1942.­1953.“ Prilozi 40 (2011): 135-155. Kecman, Jovanka. Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 19181941. Beograd, 1978., 373. Konjhodžić, Mahmud. Mostarke, fragmenti o revolucionarnoj djelatnosti i patriotskoj opredjeljenosti žena Mostara, o njihovoj borbi za slobodu i socijalizam. Mostar: Opštinski odbor SUBNOR-, 1981., 36-38. Kožar, Azem. „O nekim aspektima obrazovno-odgojne politike Narodnooslobodilačkog pokreta na području Bosne i Hercegovine (1941-1945),“ Šezdeset godina od završetka Drugog svjetskog rata: kako se sjećati 1945. godine. Zbornik radova. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2006., 235-248. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 77 Kujović, Mina. “Hasnija Berberović - zaboravljena učiteljica - prilog historiji muslimanskog školstva u Bosni i Hercegovini.” Novi Muallim 40 (2009): 114-118. Malešević, Siniša. Ideologija, legitimnost i nova država. Prev. Slobodanka Glišić. Zagreb, Beograd; Jesenskii Turk i Edicija Reč, 2004. Mijatović, Cvijetin. „Govor na otvaranju kursa za prosvjetne instruktore održanog u Sarajevu u ljeto 1946.“ Prosvjetni radnik 7 (1946). Milišić, Senija. „Emancipacija muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini nakon oslobođenja 1947 – 1952 (Poseban osvrt na skidanje zara i feredže)“ Magistarski rad, Filozofski fakultet u Sarajevu, 1986. Nedović, Radisav S. Čačanski kraj u NOB 1941-1945.: žene borci i saradnici. Čačak: Okružni odbor SUBNOR-a, 2010. Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao građanke. Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju – Evoluta, 2011. „Yugoslav female partisans in World War II,“ Cahiersbalkaniques 41(2013.) http://www.afzarhiv.org/files/original/f47c848c2d081c22905ba11a9d869fd3.pdf Papić, Mitar. Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme Austrougarske okupacije 1878-1918. Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1972. Istorija srpskih škola u BiH. (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1978.) Školstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini od 1941. do 1955. godine. (Sarajevo, 1981) Učitelji u kulturnoj i političkoj istoriji Bosne i Hercegovine. (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1987.). Petrović, Jelena. „Društveno-političke paradigme prvog talasa jugoslavenskih feminizama“ ProFemina Specijalni broj, (2011):59-81. Pilić, Šime. Knjiga o nastavnicima. Split: Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Splitu, 2008. Prica, Ines. „Etnologija postsocijalizma i prije ili dvanaest godina nakon“ Etnologije socijalizma i poslije,“ u: Lada Feldman Čale i Ines Prica, ur., Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma. Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006. Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja. Etnologija naše svakodnevice. Zagreb: Školska knjiga,1988. Scott, Joan W. Rod i politika povijesti. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1988 i 2003. Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene i ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. Slapšak, Svetlana. Ženske ikone XX veka. Beograd, Biblioteka XX vek – Čigoja Štampa, 2001. Šušnjara, Snježana. „Školovanje ženske djece u Bosni i Hercegovini u doba Austro-Ugarske (1878. – 1918.).“ Napredak 155 (4) (2014) : 453 – 466. Vuković, Rade. Napredni učiteljski pokret izmešu dva rata. Beograd, Pedagoški muzej, 1968. Zaninović, Mato. Kulturno-prosvjetni rad u NOB-u (1941 – 1945) (Sarajevo, 1968 Ždralović, Amila. „Drugi svjetski rat i iskustva bosanskohercegovačkih žena.“ u: Aida Spahić et al., Zabilježene – Žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE, 2014. Župan, Dinko. „Viša djevojačka škola u Osijeku (188.-1900.)“ Scrinia slavonica 5 (2005.), 366-383. ��ALEKSANDRA NINA KNEŽEVIĆ Digitalne grafike ����STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ �84 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA Kraj drugog svjetskog rata period je kad se konstituiše nova jugoslovenska žena koja aktivno učestvuje u ratu, obrazuje se i ulazi u svijet rada a emancipacija žena od stega patrijarhalne kulture bila jedan od “neprijepornih zadataka Antifašističke fronte žena (AFŽ)”.1 U tom periodu, koji predstavlja istorijski prekid sa prvenstveno agrarnom privredom i društvom u kojem je obrazovanje bilo rezervisano uglavnom za žene iz viših društvenih slojeva, dolazi do stvaranja uslova za najmasovnije obrazovanje žena do tad i proces modernizacije koji se nije mogao odvijati bez ozbiljnog narušavanja patrijarhalne kulture2. Daleko of toga da je ova emancipacija značila kraj patrijarhata ali praćenjem ženskih medija iz tog perioda (Naša žena, Glas, Žena u borbi) primjećuje se da se žene predstavljaju kao ravnopravni subjekti: one su borkinje, bolničarke, radnice, narodni heroji i sl. a ne pasivne posmatračice. “Jugoslovenska” ženu trebala je biti moderna i obrazovana, požrtvovana i odlučna, “ni Srpkinja, ni Hrvatica ni Muslimanka” već upravo to sve, kao Jugoslovenka. Cilj ovog poglavlja jeste da, prateći časopis Nova žena u periodu 1945-1946 iz dostupnog arhivskog materijala o AFŽ-u, opiše glavne emancipatorne diskurse koji se obraćaju ženama, ocrta kroz kakve argumentativno-retoričke strategije, metafore i leksičko-gramatičke elemente ova “nova” jugoslovenska žena biva konstituisana, kao i da ustvrdi poveznice između ovih istorijskih uvida sa današnjim, (nazovi) postsocijalističkim trenutkom. 1. Ulazak u arhiv U jugoslovenskom post-socijalizmu, nakon ratova, pljačke javnog dobra, etničkog čišćenja i silovanja i njima pripadajućeg istorijskog revizioinizma, gdje režim rodne “neravnopravnosti” i dalje osporava davanje ženskih prefiksa na neka zanimanja, poput onog za borac-borkinja3”, banjalučki pjesnik Dragan Studen je odgovorio već 1982., nazivajući svoju zbirku upravo Borkinje. U prvoj pjesmi progovara kao žena, borkinja, ratnica koja se obraća nama u budućnosti: 1 Sklevicky, Lydija. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. str. 25. 2 Ibid. Str. 135. 3 http://www.blic.rs/kultura/kako-reci-zena-borac-ili-borkinja/k7r6r7e �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 85 Beležićemo ugljenom oživeti žar i biti zapamćeni Uđemo li u sliku na zidu obešenu samo sebi bićemo slični Nećemo prestati Zemlju iz rova da izbacujemo Da nas ne zatrpa Vreme zgusnuto na kriške seći ćemo a nož beznadežan izgoreće u jezgru Uđemo li u sliku na zidu obešenu tu ostaćemo za vek-navek On nas, pišući o iskustvu žene u Drugom svjetskom ratu, četrdesetak godina kasnije, podsjeća da nam je “u zlu…izlaz” a “opstanak u propasti”, nagovještavajući da se upravo u lomovima svjetske istorije išlo u borbu i smrt da bi se živjeti moglo. Ova zbirka pjesama predstavlja dio šire arhive o ženama u Narodno-oslobodilačkoj borbi (NOB-u) i bio mi je inspiracija za pisanje o arhivu Antifašističkog fronta žena (AFŽ-u) danas, na evropskoj poluperiferiji kasnog kapitalizma, u postratnim i postsocijalističkim državama poput današnje Bosne i Hercegovine (BiH). Veliki iskorak za mase žena, prvenstveno seljanki i radnica kod nas, duguje se ženskom organizovanju unutar AFŽ-a koji je djelovao u periodu između 1942-1953 u tadašnjoj, prvo Demokratskoj Federativnoj Jugoslaviji (DFJ) a potom Federativnoj Narodnoj Republici Jugoslaviji (FNRJ) omogućivši ženama Jugoslavije i BIH najšire učešće na svim poljima narodnooslobodilačke borbe. Iako AFŽ u početku nije bio usmjeren na ženska pitanja već na prikupljanje volonterske energije miliona žena da se osigura pobjeda u borbi protiv fašizma4, riječ je o organizaciji koja je u toku jugoslovenske socijalističke revolucije i Drugog svjetskog rata nedvojbeno imala veliki uticaj na modernizacijsku promjenu za koju su se žene borile i izborile. 4 Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941-1945. Denver: Arden Press, 1990. str. 122. �86 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA Ako je smisao arhivskog istraživanja u prošlosti pronaći življeno iskustvo kako bi se danas pokazalo da ovo što znamo, kako govorimo i djelujemo nije oduvijek ni zauvijek i da jednako tako može biti promijenjeno, onda arhiv nisu svi sačuvani tekstovi već je arhiv istorijski okvir za uslov nekog iskaza5 6. Reaktivacija prošlih iskaza može da ponudi smjernice da se preko prošlosti probamo osloboditi “zarobljenosti u sopstevenom arhivu koji ne možemo opisati”7 kako bismo mogli/e drugačije misliti i djelovati u današnjem trenutku. Namjera nije da se “uspostavi ono što su ljudi u trenutku (nekog) govora mogli da misle, smeraju, iskušavaju, žele” već da se analiziranom diskursu “pridružimo u identitetu” razumjevši ga kroz “ponovno pisanje, tj. uređeni preobražaj… onog što je već napisano”8. Susret ženskih borbi u dva istorijska trenutka, onom prije sedamdeset i kusur godina i ovom današnjem, neophodan je ne samo za borbu protiv istorijskog revizionizma već i za mišljenje novog političkog djelovanje ka jednakosti za sve. Kriza u kojoj živimo slična je onoj tridesetih i četrdesetih godina prošlog vijeka budući da se kroz procese njihove restauracije i rehabilitacije ponovo dovode u vezu kapitalizam, fašizam i porast neravnopravnosti. Kako saznajemo iz referata Cane Babović na Prvoj zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ-a održanoj 8. decembra 1942., upravo su antifašističke borbe tokom Španskog građanskog rata te položaj žena u SSSR-u, gdje su žene “uživale punu ravnopravnost” i “imale puno učešće u privrednom i političkom životu zemlje”, inspirisale jugoslovenske antifašistkinje da krenu s prvim publikacijama već tridesetih godina prošlog vijeka: U vreme krvavih događaja u Španiji 1936. kada su naše žene organizovano počele da vode borbu protiv ratani fašizma, pojavljuje se list mladih antifašistkinja u beogradu “Žena danas” (sic). Taj list odigrao je ogromnu ulogu u okupljanju i organizovanju žena, list je prodirući u svaki kutak naše zemlje pokazivao ženama Jugoslavije šta fašizam donosi ženi, podizao njenu političku svest, produbljivao mržnju prema fašizmu i pružao joj snagu u njenoj borbi za ravnopravnost. Istu ulogu kao “Žena danas”, odigrao je i list hrvatskih antifašistkinja “Ženski svijet”9. 5 Svi prevodi odlomaka neprevedenih tekstova sa engleskog na srpskohrvatski jezik su autorkini. 6 Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. 1972. str. 128-129 7 Ibid.., 130. 8 Fuko, Mišel. Arheologija znanja. Beograd: Plato, 1998. str. 152. 9 Babović, Cana. “Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ” referat predstavljen na I Zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ, 08.12.1942, Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/231), pristupljeno 20. septembra 2016. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 87 Mada sam se u toku istraživanja oslanjala na različite dokumente dostupne u digitalnoj arhivi AFŽ-a, bazu za ovo istraživanje predstavlja list Nova žena10 kao prvo glasilo AFŽ-a BiH čiji je prvi broj izašao u februaru 1945. a posljednji broj dostupan u arhivi, dvadeseti, u novembru 1946. Kao propagandno oružje AFŽ-a i Komunističke partije (KPJ), osim pretplate i članarina, časopis se finansirao i štampao, između ostalog, i kroz “prodaju skupljenih krpa željezari”11 i potom distribuirao ženama u selima i gradovima BiH kako bi se opismenile i privukle radu i zadacima ove organizacije. Početkom 1946. godine, tiraž lista je 10 000 primjeraka a već u julu 1947. godine dostiže tiraž od 22 000 primjeraka12. Iako koncentrisana na kratak vremenski period samog kraja rata odnosno početka mirondopskog perioda, analiza predstavljena u ovom poglavlju ima za cilj da, prateći petnaest izdanja ovog časopisa u periodu 1945-1946, opiše kako ova “nova” jugoslovenska žena biva konstituisana kroz medijski diskurs te da ustvrdi poveznice između ovih istorijskih uvida sa današnjim životom u tzv. “pustinji postsocijalizma”13. U prvom redu su me zanimali emancipatorski elementi medijskog diskursa koje je ženama obećavalo novo, socijalističko vrijeme u kojem se ova nova žena stvarala i njih u najširem smislu posmatram kao do tad najmasovnije uključivanje žena u društveno-politički život nove Jugoslavije i BiH, ulazak u svijet rada, sticanje prava, opismenjavanje i sl.14. U kakvim su odnosima modernizacija, emancipacija i patrijarhat u ovom kontekstu? Modernizaciju u BiH donosi upravo socijalizam nakon 194515. kroz najmasovnije opšte obrazovanje svih a naročito žena kao njen preduslov. Nova žena već na prvi pogled vidljivo zaziva i predstavlja žene kao ravnopravne subjekte: one su borkinje, bolničarke, radnice, narodni heroji i sl. a ne pasivne posmatračice. Sam ulazak žena na tržište rada zbog zahtjeva urbanizacije, industrijalizacije, obnove 10 Časopis Nova žena izlazio je većinom u Sarajevu a u nekoliko brojeva u Beogradu. Prvi broj je štampan na ćirilici dok su ostali štampani na mješovitoj upotrebi čirilice i latinice. U pitanju je službeno glasilo antifašistkinja BiH a nedostaju brojevi 7, 11, 15, 16 i 19 te ovi časopisi nisu bili uključeni u analizu. 11 Glavni odbor AFŽ ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ - Zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945.’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/6, 1945. 12 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Materijali Drugog kongresa AFŽa BiH održanog 12 – 13. Jula 1947’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1543/109, 1947. 13 Horvat Srećko i Štiks Igor, Welcome to the Dessert of Post-Socialism. London: Verso, 2015. 14 Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao građanke: društvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji, 1945-1953, Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, Evoluta, 2011. 15 Sklevicky, Lidija. Konji, žene, ratovi, Zegreb: Ženska infoteka. 1996. str. 134. �88 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA i izgradnje značio je ozbiljno narušavanje patrijarhalne kulture16 i o ženskoj emancipaciji od patrijarhalnih stega u BiH i Jugoslaviji može se jedino govoriti u kontekstu socijalističke države. Govoreći o odnosu emancipacijskog i modernizacijskog naspram patrijarhalnog, balkanski patrijarhat posmatram kao kompleks hijerarhijskih vrijednosti ugraviran u društvenu strukturu predmodernih, agrarnih, pastoralnih ekonomija i kulturološki tradicionalnih i religioznih društava u kojoj dominantna uloga pripada muškarcu i u kojoj su žene potčinjene u kontekstu zaštitnički orijentisane porodice i domaćinstva17. U ranim danima NOB-a, kroz zajedničko učešće u partizanskoj borbi, radu KPJ i Narodnog fronta te organizovan pozadinski rad unutar AFŽ-a18, žene su počele zauzimati “upražnjeno mjesto moći”. U ovom smislu se i može uslovno govoriti o privremenoj depatrijarhalizaciji ili depatrijarhalizacijskom potencijalu kao privremenom popuštanju patrijarhalnih stega koje su iznjedrili masovna organizovanost žena spremnih na borbu i promjenu, mogućnosti besplatnog obrazovanja, ulazak u svijet rada19 te socijalna mobilnost unutar jedne generacije za sve a posebno žene. S ovim u vezi, ulogu AFŽ-a BiH na osnovu korpusa Nove žene dostupnog u arhivi analiziram kroz: a. Ulogu AFŽ-a u međunarodnom kontekstu, b. Uloga AFŽ-a u borbi protiv fašizma i ostvarenju ravnopravnosti (depatrijarhalizacijski potencijal) c. Ulogu AFŽ-a u procesu kreiranja nove, jugoslovenske žene kroz zajedničku borbu i sestrinstvo Hrvatica, Muslimanki i Srpkinja i d. Ulogu AFŽ-a u procesu namasovnijeg opšteg opismenjavanja žena u u BiH istoriji. 16 Ibid., 135. 17 Halpern, Joes, Kaser Karl, i Wagner, A.Richard. “Patriarchy in the Balkans: Temporal and CrossCultural Approaches” u Household and the Family in the Balkans, ur. Karl Kaser. Graz: University of Gratz Lit Verlag, 2012. str. 49. 18 Dugandžić, Andreja i Jušić, Adela “Intervju sa Stanom Nastić,” Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, pristupljeno 21. novembra 2016., http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/285. 19 Ovo je konkretno bio slučaj mojih roditelja rođenih na selu u BiH početkom 1950-tih, koji su iz siromaštva bili u mogućnosti da završe fakultete u Novom Sadu i Sarajevu nakon čega su našli odgovarajuće poslove u Bihaću i tako postali srednja klasa u jugoslovenskom socijalizmu. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 89 a s obzirom na današnji trenutak u nerazvijenoj i siromašnoj, postdejtonskoj BiH, kao možda najvećoj “pustinji postsocijalizma” u kojoj se sem kratkotrajnih februarskih protesta 2014 slabo naziru mogućnosti društvene promjene. Ovo se naročito vidi u 1. perifernom statusu BiH društva u odnosu na zemlje EU i nedostatku internacionalizacije što utiče na samjerljivost i vidljivost socijalnih zahtjeva i borbi u centru i na periferiji 2. nedovoljnoj kolektivnoj mobilizaciji žena u novoj postsocijalističkoj državi uprkos proliferaciji identitarnih politika i rodnom mainstreamingu koji promoviše liberalne ideje ženskih ljudskih prava, individualizam i preduzetništvo a zanemaruje npr. prava radnica i nezaposlenih 3. nemanju jasnog odnosa prema fašistoidnim politikama usljed dejtonskiugrađenih nacionalizama potpirivanih kroz antijugoslovenstvo i antikomunizam, koji maskiraju odnose nejednakosti uslovljene autoritarnim kapitalizmom nove postsocijalistiške države a kojima je balkanski patrijarhat “prirodni saveznik” (postsocijalistička repatrijarhalizacija) 4. nepismenosti odnosno nedostupnosti obrazovanja za najšire društvene slojeve i generalno loše i korumpirano obrazovanje u zemlji. 2. Zašto arhiv? - Neki teorijsko-metodološki uvidi Diskursivno-istorijski metod kritičke analize diskursa (CDA) identitete vidi kao kontekstualno zavisne i dinamične momente koji se konstruišu, perpetuiraju i dekonstruišu unutar nekog diskursa te u skladu s tim poprimaju različite oblike20 i politički je posvećen društvenoj promjeni21. S obzirom na dostupan istorijsko-politički kontekst i ranija istraživanja o AFŽ-u, tekstovima iz ovih novina pristupala sam preko analize tema, kao hijerarhizovanih semantičkih makrostruktura teksta22, toposa, kao osnovnih argumentativnih struktura u diskursu23, te standardnih tropa poput metafora i poređenja. Osim toga, pokušaj mi je bio da kroz ove probleme i njima pripadajuće diskurse ustvrdim relevantnost emancipatorskog potencijala u tom periodu s obzirom na današnji trenutak u BiH. 20 Wodak, Ruth, De Cillia, Rudolph, Reisigl Martin i Liebhart, Karl. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: EUP, 1999. str. 3-4. 21 Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989. 22 Van Dijk, Teun. Elite Discourse and Racism. London: Sage, 1993. str. 33. 23 Žagar, Igor. “Topoi in critical discourse analysis”. Šolsko polje Vol. 20 (5/6) (2009), 47–75. �90 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA Diskursivno-istorijsku analizu24 metodološki posmatram kao način na koji se prokazuje kako se nanovo izmišljena tradicija i prošlost kroje da bi odgovarale sadašnjici: propaganda iz perioda AFŽ-a 1945-1946 reagovala je na stvarne probleme žena s kraja rata ali o tome se nije moglo saznavati samo čitajući Novu ženu već i arhivski materijal dostupan sa sastanaka AFŽ-a. Naša sadašnjica se neumorno poziva na tradiciju ali u toj tradiciji AFŽ-a nema. U tom smislu, koristan je kulturno-materijalistički uvid da je tradicija elemenat koji omogućuje kontinuitet prošlosti i sadašnjosti ali i da je ona kombinacija “namjerno selektivne verzije prošlosti koja se uobličava i uobličene sadašnjosti koja onda moćno djeluje u procesima društvenog i kulturnog definisanja i identifikovanja. […] Iz cjelokupnog mogućeg prostora prošlosti i sadašnjosti u određenoj kulturi, određena značenja i prakse bivaju naglašeni dok druga značenja i prakse bivaju zanemareni ili isključeni”25. Kad je riječ istraživanju diskursa žena i o ženama u datom istorijskom trenutku, koristan je Gadamerov26 uvid da što je komplikovaniji sadržaj koji treba da shvatimo, to više pojedinačnih elemenata postaje relevantnima, a time širi i bogatiji mora biti i horizont shvatanja. Ulazak u arhiv iz perioda Drugog svjetskog rata važan je kako zarad sticanja transgeneracijskih uvida u prošlost bosanskohercegovačkih i jugoslovenskih žena tog perioda tako i zbog sagledavanja interpretativne produktivnosti s obzirom na današnje probleme s kojima se žene u BiH susreću. Samo se tad, uslovno, može govoriti o stapanju ovih horizonata (die Horizontverschmelzung) koje omogućuje aktualizaciju benjaminovske istoriografije podjarmljenih gdje u svjetlu “iskustva sa prošlošću”, djelujući, “borbena, podjarmljena klasa…piše istoriju za sebe”27. 24 Diskursivno-istorijski metod (DHA ili engl. discourse-historical approach) nastoji da minimalizuje rizik pretjerane istraživačke subjektivnosti, koja takoše podliježe uključivanju i isključivanju, i da kroz triangulaciju, kao svoj fundamentalni i konstitutivni princip, djeluje na osnovu što raznovrsnijih podataka, metoda, teorija, pozadinskih informacija itd. U ovom smislu DHA pokušava da “integriše velike količine dostupnog znanja o istorijskim izvorima i pozadini društvenog i političkog polja u kojima je neki diskurzivni događaj utisnut” (Wodak 2011, 65) kako bi “dentauralizovao ulogu koju diskursi igraju u proizvodnji neinkluzivnih i neegalitarnih struktura pod određenim društvenim uslovima” (Wodak 2015, 2). Pri tom ovaj metod unutar kritičke analize diskursa ili kritičkih studija diskursa, diskurs vidi u vezi sa ostalim semiotičkim strukurama i materijalnim institucijama koji zajedno reprodukuju društvo kroz semiozu kao process davanja značenja. 25 Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. str. 115. 26 Gadamer, Hans, Georg. Istina i metoda. Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1978. 27 Benjamin, Walter. “Istorijsko-filozofske teze” u Eseji. Beograd: Nolit, 1974. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 91 Upravo ova podjarljmljenost ostaje konstanta kad je riječ o mišljenju i djelovanju nakon iskustva rata i poraća kao gubitka, siromaštva i periferalnosti, nacionalizma, nezaposlenosti i prekarnosti, i nepismenosti koji opstaju sve do danas. Svi skupa dodatno onemogućavaju organizovanje žena, ali i muškaraca, da promijene svoj društveni položaj doprinoseći stvaranju te podjarmljene klase koja svoju borbenost gubi u nemogućnosti da artikuliše sopstvenu pozicije potčinjenog. Znanja o AFŽ-u su u ovom smislu ključna za transistorijsko stapanje horizonata jer nose potencijal zamišljanja drugačijeg svijeta i borbe upravo jer su ovu poziciju artikulisala i organizovano pokušala riješiti što ću pokušati i da pokažem kroz kritičku analizu elemenata koje sam prepoznala kao emancipatorne tada kao i da o tome kažem ponešto u odnosu na sadašnji trenutak. Zadatak istorijske materijalistkinje je da konstruktivno pokuša da (re)artikuliše istoriografsku formu bez da se nostalgično vrati priči iz prošlosti već da je “prepozna kao biljeg i trag”28. Samo u rupturi “gdje se mišljenje, u konstelaciji zasićenoj napetostima, iznenada zaustavlja…i zadaje šok” leži “revolucionarna šansu u borbi za podjarmljenu prošlost”29. Pored toga, baviti se arhivskim istraživanjem nikad nije samo “pitanje…prošlosti. To nije pitanje koncepta koji ima veze sa suočavanjem s prošlošću koje nam je već na raspolaganju ili nam nije na raspolaganju, nekim konceptom arhiva koji je moguće arhivirati. To je pitanje budućnosti, pitanje same budućnosti, pitanje odgovora, obećanja i odgovornosti za sutrašnjicu jer meta-arhiva i originala postoje samo “u budućnosti”. Ako želimo da znamo šta arhiv znači, “to ćemo samo saznati u vremenima koja dolaze. Možda. Ne sutra, već u vremenima koja dolaze, kasnije ili nikada”30. Prvi korak je svakako interpretacija arhivske građe koja “rasvijetljava, čita, i tumači svoj objekat upisujući se u njega, otvarajući ga i obogaćujući ga dovoljno da s pravom ima svoje mjesto u njemu”31. 28 Chowdury, Aniruddha. “Memory, Modernity, Repetition: Walter Benjamin’s History”. Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2008 (143), 36. 29 Benjamin, op.cit. 30 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. str. 27. 31 Ibid., 67. �92 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA 3. AFŽ i Nova žena 3.1. AFŽ i međunarodni kontekst Periferni status BiH društva u odnosu na Evropu posljedica je internih trvenja u samoj BiH u kojoj je jedini internacionalizam predstavlja geopolitička lojalnost Rusiji, Hrvatskoj ili Turskoj. Ovome doprinose i ekskluzivističke a ponekad i fašističke političke prakse Zapadne Evrope i Sjeverne Amerike, poput kontrole nad sve većim brojem migranata i radnika iz BiH i drugih zemalja periferije, rigoroznog viznog režima, volatilnosti u preduslovima za članstvo u EU, posmatranja Balkana i BiH kao “slučaja”. Danas gotovo da nema foruma u kojem ravnopravno učestvuju i odlučuju žene tzv, Prvog i Trećeg svijeta a evropeizacija u BiH, koja se odvija preko Kancelarije Visokog predstavnika (OHR-a) i Specijalnog predstavnika Evropske Unije (EUSR-a), ne predstavlja ništa drugo do kolonizaciju nerazvijenog Drugog kroz uvođenje liberalne demokratije, privatizacije javnih firmi, i tzv. slobodnog tržišta, ekonomskih reformi i mjera štednje i o kojoj se pregovara isključivo sa etnonacionalnim političkim elitama32. Novu ženu u periodu 1945-1946 karaketrisao je jak internacionalni duh kako po pitanju “Istoka” tako i “Zapada”. Posve se normalno govorilo o “Bratstvu bugarskog i našeg naroda” 33 te “Ulozi žena Albanije za slobodu svoje domovine” (Nova žena 8: 17-18, 1945). U maju 1946. vidimo da je 3000 šegrta iz čitave Jugoslavije, od kojih “u prvom transportu 150 iz BiH”, primljeno na šegrtstvo u “bratskoj Čehoslovačkoj” kako bi se tokom tri do četiri godine stručno obrazovali (Nova žena 14:12, 1946). U dosta brojeva javljala se i socrealistična priča, većinom iz sovjetskog konteksta koja je opisivala pregalništvo, udarništvo i žrtvovanje ruske žene “svijetla lica” kao otjelovljavljenje partizanskog obećanje života nakon rata34. U avgustovskom broju (Nova žena 5:6, 1945), čitamo o posjeti delegacije sovjetskih žena Sarajevu kao “radosti i sreći o kojima smo godinama sanjale”: 32 Majstorović, Danijela, Vučkovac Zoran i Pepić Anđela, “From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: Post-2014 Economic Restructuring as Europeanization Discourse/Practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15(4) (2015), 661-682. 33 Nova žena, Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, 8 : 5, 1945., http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/c130e1fc9258a352e2e949767c6990e9.pdf Napomena – imajući u vidu značajan broj navoda iz časopisa Nova Žena, u daljnjem će tekstu ovi navodi biti integrisani u tekst i slijediti citate sa naznačenim brojem izdanja, brojem stranice i godinom izdanja. Korišteni brojevi časopisa Nova žena dostupni su online na www.afzarhiv.org pod kategorijom Periodika. 34 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 119. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 93 Kad se na balkonu pojavila Jevgenija Žiguljenko - Ženja, heroj Sovjetskog Saveza i pilot, koja je sama dovezla delegaciju, oduševljenje je dostiglo vrhunac. To je pristupačna i bliska žena koju već odavno poznajemo preko Poline Osipenko, Valentine Grizodubove i drugih hrabrih pilotkinja o kojima smo čitale i divile im se još onda kad su se osposobljavale za velika djela koja su ostvarile u narodnooslobodilačkom ratu. Ženja nas je pozdravila ispred boraca Crvene armije, ispred žena koje se danas vraćaju iz vojske na miran rad u fabrikama i poljima, da bi izvšile zadatke obnove zemlje onako uspješno kao što su završile borbu protiv fašizma. Iako je svrha ovakvog tematiziranja i izvještavanja bila je uspostavljanje internacionalne antifašističke svijesti i podizanje morala, kroz ove napise pozitivno su se valorizovali hrabrost, žensko zajedništvo i solidarnost. Isticanje herojstva žene koja se bori u ratu kao pilotkinja te avionom dolazi u Sarajevo, makar se “nakon vojske” i morala “vratiti na miran rad u poljima”, nema nigdje u današnjim medijima a ako i ima, o njoj se piše kao piltokinji neke aviokompanije ali nikako Crvene armije. Ovo stahanovitsko obećanje socijalne mobilnosti kroz napredak od seljanke do rukovotkinje kolhoza ili državne funkcionerke, te društvene brige o radnicama trudnicama gdje “buduća majka osjeća brigu kolektiva”, današnji mediji ne prepoznaju. Zajedničke međunarodne mobilizacije ima u borbama humanitarnog karaktera poput prevencije raka ili nasilja u porodici, međutim zajednička antifašistička borba ostaje slijepa mrlja današnjih medija. Rad, partnerstvo i materinstvo se tematizuju individualistički i konzumeristički, često se pozivajući na topos tzv. “super žene”35 36 koja je uvijek dotjerana, ima vrhunski posao i obrazovanje, troje djece i muža i koja može (da kupi) sve. Kad je riječ o učešću bosanskohercegovačkih žena u međunarodnim ženskim organizacijama vidimo da se one revnosno pripremaju za Prvi međunarodni kongres žena u Parizu, čije je sazivanje 26. novembra 1945. predložila “drugarica Koton”, osnivačka predsjednica Međunarodne demokratske ženske federacije (Women’s International Democratic Federation ili WIDF). WIDF-u i Evgenie 35 Majstorović, danijela i Mandić, Maja. “What It Means to Be a Bosnian Woman: Analyzing Women’s Talk Between Patriarchy and Emancipation” u Living With Patriarchy—Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects Across Public Spheres, ur. Danijela Majstorović i Inger Lassen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 97. 36 Majstorović, Danijela. “(Un)Doing Feminism in Post-Yugoslav Media Spaces”. Feminist Media Studies 16(6) (2016), 1093-1108. �94 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA Cotton su prilično odsutne iz Zapadne feminističke istoriografije37 iako je to bila najveća i najuticajnija ženska međunarodna organizacija nakon 1945. koja se od početka profilisala kao lijeva i feministička okupljajući brojne komunistkinje ali i progresivne nekomunistkinje širom svijeta uključujući SAD, Sovjetski Savez i Kinu38. Mnoge od nas, ulazeći 25. novembra u “Palais de la mutualite”, prvi put smo vidjele dekor jedne velike međunarodne konferencije: dugi stolovi oko kojih sjede delegacije i listaju bilješke i dokumentacije. Po stolovima natpisi “Kina”, “Indija”, “Latinska Amerika”, “SSSR”, “Jugoslavija”, “Rumunija”, imena četrdeset zemalja, četrdeset naroda, koji hoće istrebljivanje fašizma, demokratiju, mir; zatim glasnogovornici, reflektori, tumači, koji već daju neka obavještenja na tri razna jezika; nad tribinom veliki amblem Kongresagolub sa maslinovom grančicom i globus. Pred otvaranje, salom odjekuje nervozni žamor na nekoliko desetina raznih jezika. (Nova žena 12:5, 1946) Bosanskohercegovačke delegatkinje su ravnopravno učestvovale na ovim kongresima i izvještavale o njima, što dodatno upućuje na snažan internacionalni zamah ženskih organizacija i pokreta sa širom političkom agendom, ženskih organizacija tzv. Trećeg svijeta kao i onih sa socijalističkom, socijalističko-feminističkom ili prokomunističkom orijentacijom. Kako su hladnoratovski napadi na WIDF “negativno uticali na stanje, lokaciju i pristup arhivi WIDF-a” te na mogućnosti prikupljanja materijala kroz metod usmene istorije”, dostignuća ove organizacije nisu se upisala u kolektivno feminističko sjećanje. Donedavna nedostupnost digitalizovane i pretražive arhive AFŽ-a imala je kao konsekvencu da se ovoj organizaciji, kao dijelu državne socijalističke strukture, ospori feministički potencijal od strane Zapadnih feministkinja39 i da se revizionistkinjama nazovu istoričarke i antropološkinje koje su prepoznavale feminizam u ženskim socijalističkim orga- 37 de Hahn, Francisca “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991.” http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com/help/view/the_womens_ international_democratic_federation_widf_history_main_agenda_and_contributions_19451991, pristupljeno 20. septembra 2016. 38 Kad govori o nekim od razloga ovog isključivanja, de Haan navodi optužbe Komisije za neameričke aktivnosti SAD-a (U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee ili HUAC) iz 1949. za prosovjetsko djelovanje, kada WIDF-ov uticaj u SAD-u slabi, ali i fokusiranje Zapadne feminističke istoriografije glavnog toka uglavnom na liberalni feminizam i rod (prim. aut.). 39 Funk, Nanette. “A Very Tangled Knot: Oficial State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 21(4) (2014), 344–360. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 95 nizacijama u Istočnoj i Jugoistočnoj Evropi40 41. Lepa Perović tako navodi da su u incijativni odbor Kongresa “ušle delegatkinje Engleske, Amerike, Sovjetske Unije, Kine, Francuske, Španije, Jugoslavije, ltalije, Madžarske (sic), Rumunije, Poljske, Bugarske, Brazilije, Portugalije, Australije, Katalobije (sic), Belgije, Grčke, Čehoslovačke i Švedske” te da incijativni odbor odlučio da se “proširi delegatkinjama iz zemalja koje još nisu zastupljene” te da “i kolonije mogu imati u njemu svoje pretstavnike koji će biti potpuno nezavisni” (Nova žena 8: 5-6, 1945). 3.2. Borba protiv fašizma i ostvarenje ravnopravnosti Ciljevi pariškog svjetskog kongresa žena bili su usmjereni na saradnju žena cijeloga svijeta na sljedećem, prilično progresivnom programu koji ocrtava i ono na čemu je tokom ratnih godina i kasnije insistirao i AFŽ: 1. Uništiti fašizam i osigurati demokratiju 2. Pripremiti srećnu budućnost novim pokoljenjima, 3. Dati ženi prava izražena u Internacionalnoj povelji žena. Kao majci: pravo da rađa djecu u svijetu kojt je oslobođen strahota, bijede i rata, u svijetu u kome će joj svaka vlada osigurati neophodnu socijalnu i zdravstvenu zastitu i pristojne stanove. Kao radnici: pravo da radi u svim granama industrije i da se bavi svim profesijama, da za jednak rad prima jednaku nagradu, da ima iste mogućnosti kao i muškarac za stručno obrazovanje i da joj se povjere odgovorni poslovi; da se ukine eksploatacija žene kao jeftine radne snage i da joj se poboljšaju uslovi rada. Kao građanki: jednakost sa muškarcem pred zakonom i puna demokratska sloboda izražavanja, mogućnost da glasa i da bude član sudskih vijeća i međunarodnih ustanova i vlasti (Nova žena 8: 5-6, 1945). 40 Bonfiglioli, Chiara. “Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945–1957)”, doktorska disertacija, University of Utrecht, 2012). 41 Ghodsee, Kristen. “Untangling the Knot: A Response to Nanette Funk”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2015), 248–252. �96 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA Antifašistička borba i ostvarenje ravnopravnosti poput prava glasa, zbog snažnog uticaja borbi protiv fašizma u Španiji i ostvarene ravnopravnosti sovjetskih žena, u Jugoslaviji datiraju još odranije. Prema riječima Cane Babović na Zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ-a 8. decembra 1942., ova su dva zahtjeva predstavljala su ključnu razliku između u početku zajedničkog angažmana žena u tadašnjem “ženskom pokretu” građanskih feministkinja i rada antifašistkinja Jugoslavije čak i prije početka rata 1941. godine dovodeći do njihovog raskola: Napredne žene Jugoslavije, a to su bile antifašistkinje, smatrale su da se borba žena protiv rata i fašizma može najlakše voditi tako da se žene okupe i povežu u jednoj ženskoj organizaciji. Antifašistkinje su stupile u već postojeće feminističke organizacije i otpočele su rad svih žena u Jugoslaviji protiv rata i fašizma. Među ostalim akcijama koje su žene vodile za svoju ravnopravnost bila je najizrazitija akcija za pravo glasa koja se vodila u čitavoj zemlji, a koju su predvodile antifašistkinje i koja je u to vrijeme /1939/ imala izraziti karakter protiv rata, borbe protiv fašizma…vođstvo građanskih feminističkih organizacija sramno je izdalo borbu žena pa su se čak i odrekle svog programa tj. borbe protiv rata, da se ne bi trebale boriti i protiv fašizma, jer su ta dva pojma nedeljiva. A kada se vodila velika borba za pravo glasa one nisu bile samo pasivne nego su i sabotirale borbu žena antifašistkinja42. Rat je bio na pomolu a veliki broj žena je ostao neorganizovan i KPJ je imala potrebu da “kroz AFŽ mobiliše ženu da se pobijedi u ratu kao i da ubijedi žene da će kroz pobjedu partizana budućnost za njh biti svjetlija”43. U tom smislu, AFŽ je “najfascinantniji primer kako je relativno mala grupa komunista uspela da temeljnim radom na terenu i u ratnim uslovima, a za vrlo kratko vreme, ubedi velike mase žena da potpomognu partizanski rat, kako bi posle rata dobile nova prava”44. Ipak, svo ovo vrijeme, odnos ravnopravnosti između muškaraca i žena bio je ambivalentan. S jedne strane neosporne su bile muška dominacija i patrijarhalna tradicija političkog vrha KPJ, budući da su partizanke govorile “kako su bile poslane” i “kako su im dozvolili” da nešto urade45. Ovakva “muška politika” bila je u vezi sa snažnom vojničkom i političkom disciplinom neophodnom kako bi se dobio rat i u prilog ovome govori činjenica da su na Prvom zasijedanju ZAVNOBiH-a, uprkos deklarativnom insistiranju na ravnopravnosti žena sa muškarcima u političkom životu i u svim oblastima društvene djelatnosti, od 42 Babović, “Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ”. 43 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 114-116. 44 Katz, Vera. “O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953.” Prilozi 40 (2011), 138. 45 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 106. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 97 247 vijećnika/ca, samo su četiri vijećnice bile žene: Mevla Jakupović, radnica iz Tuzle; Zora Nikolić, radnica iz Sarajeva; Danica Perović, kapetan (sic) iz Banje Luke, upravnica bolnice XI divizije i Rada Vranješević, studentica, član Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a.46 S druge strane, prema riječima Milke Kufrin “jednakost (žena i muškaraca) postojala je jedino u četi”47 i to su u ranijim intervjuima potvrdile rijetke preživjele partizanke u BiH, Stana Nastić iz Sarajeva i Milica Stanarević iz Banjaluke. Ratujući zajedno s muškarcima u antifašističkoj borbi, žene su osvojile do tad nepoznatu slobodu i aktivno počele raditi na sopstvenom uzdizanju i jačanju svog društvenog položaja. “One koje su do prije rata podnosile ćutke sve tegobe”, “uzdigle su do smionih boraca za slobodu (Nova žena 1: 6, 1945)” ne želeći da se ikada više vrate “na staro”. Upravo taj odnos “novog” i “starog” koji se promijenio tokom antifašističke borbe dominantan je topos i u Novoj ženi pri čemu je staro: Sjetimo se kako je bilo ono staro. U našim seljačkim kućama glavno je bilo da žensko bude snažno i pokorno. Morale smo da radimo najteže poslove, a niko nam ih nije priznavao…Bile smo nepismene i nismo znale šta se događa u svijetu i šta nam se sprema. Govorili su da se žena to ne tiče. Zato nije čudo što smo mi danas tako čvrsto vezane za borbu…Zato smo sve složne u borbi da nam se staro više ne vrati. (Soja Ćopić, Novoj ženi 1: 7, 1945). Kad je riječ o porodičnim pravima kao ovom “novom” koje je osvajalo društvenopolitički život, već u Fočanskim propisima, kao prvom pravnom propisu socijalističke Jugoslavije iz 1942. godine, jugoslovenska žena dobija pravo da bira i da bude birana, uvode se građanski brak i razvod, jedankost pred sudom ali i priznanje vanbračne djece, te jednaka plata za jednak rad, pristup bolnicama i vrtićima, što su bili klasični socijalistički zahtjevi. Upravo u Novoj ženi 1946 9 i 10: 1-3, u kojoj se govori o ženi, djeci, braku i porodici u novom Ustavu, čitamo da “vanbračna djeca imaju jednaka prava sa bračnom”, što je do tad bilo nepojmljivo, kao da su “brak i porodica, prema riječima druga Kardelja, isuviše ozbiljne institucije u državi da bi ih ona prepuštala nekoj drugoj organizaciji” i upravo će država organizovati dječije vrtiće da bi majke mogle raditi. O radničkim ženskim pravima kad veoma malo žena živi od neagrarne privrede a zemlja je upravo prošla kroz rat, najbolje govore podaci o predratnom stanju vidljivi iz rezultata popisa stanovništva iz 1931. U njima stoji da u BiH ima 1.138.515 (oko 46 ZAVNOBiH, dokumenti 1943-1944, knj. I, (Sarajevo: IP Veselin Masleša, 1968), 58-63. 47 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 99. �98 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA 46%) žena naspram 1.185.040 muškaraca od čega “84,1% stanovnika čini seljaštvo koje živi od poljoprivrede, šumarstva i ribolova”48. S druge strane, Dobrijević49 navodi da je “1951. godine broj žena radnica, prema zvaničnim statističkim podacima, bio za 90% veći nego 1939. godine” kao i da je “najdramatičniji porast zabeležen u Bosni i Hercegovini, gde je broj zaposlenih žena povećan dva i po puta”. Postrevolucionarni period predstavljao je svakako istorijski prekid sa agrarnom privredom i kapitalizmom “stare Jugoslavije” i stvaranju novih radnih mjesta za sve a naročito žene i on nije bilo bez kontradiktornosti. Ipak ova promjena u vrednovanju rada nosila je obećanje posve novog, do tad neživljenog života o kojem govori i Vida Tomšić, prva predsjednica AFŽ-a, u referatu “O radu i zadacima žena na socijalnom staranju”: Istovremeno kada nastojimo da ostvarimo jaku Jugoslaviju koja bi i u privrednom pogledu čvrsto stala na svoje noge postavlja se pred nas veliki zadatak da stvorimo bolje uslove za život najširim masama radnog naroda... Ne radi se tu samo o obnovi stare Jugoslavije, ide se za nečim što je više. Ide se za tim da se stvori takav život kakvog u Jugoslaviji uopšte još nije bilo. (Nova žena, 5:4, 1945). Iako emancipacija žena u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji nije značila kraj patrijarhata, niti poslove za sve žene, izjednačavanjem “interesa žena interesima proleterijata”50 tokom Drugog svjetskog rata i socijalističkog obećanja ipak je ostvarila ogroman pozitivni uticaj na sticanje jednakosti i omogućila masovni ulazak žena u svijet rada51. Pored ovoga, sprega borbenosti, antifašizma, internacionalizma i političkog prosvjećivanja ženama organizovanim unutar AFŽ, naročito u njegovim prvim godinama, do 1947. “pomagala (je)… da se u prvom redu nauče državnički misliti”, što je suštinski predstavljalo temelj za ostvarenje svih onih u borbi stečenih ravnopravnosti52. 48 Brkljača, Seka. “Bosna i Hercegovina u prvim godinama Drugog svjetskog rata od 1939. do 1941. godine,” u Bosna i Hercegovina 1941: novi pogledi : zbornik radova, ur. Husnija Kamberović (Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2012), 16. 49 Ivana Dobrivojević, “Od ruralnog ka urbanom: modernizacija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine u FNRJ 1945–1955” u Identitet Bosne i Hercegovine kroz historiju: zbornik radova, ur. Husnija Kamberović (Sarajevo: Institut za 
istoriju, 2011), 19. 50 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 122. 51 Ibid., 25. 52 Ibid. 117. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 99 3.3. Zajednička borba: nacionalno sestrinstvo i jedinstvo U dvije pjesme (Nova žena 12: 27, 1946), “Uz mangal” i “Žena s transparentom”, Razija Handžić govori o “starim u novim muslimankama”. Opisujući njihovo kretanje, u prvoj pjeva da one “u dugom sablasnom ruhu, promiču gluho kao kroz san, ko uklete duvne, ko slijepe ptice, sa crnim velom kroz sunčan dan” a u drugoj, da “ka moru žena, talasalo što se na svoj kongres prvi, jedna u zaru sa transparentom, ko da bi prešla i preko krvi”. Kroz “novo”, se isticao revolucionarni elan, borbu, jedinstvo i opismenjavanje a valorizacija pojedinačnog stradalništva i žrtvovanje u borbi protiv fašizma bivala je transformisana u stvar od nacionalne važnosti”53. Upravo su od nacionalne važnosti za novu Jugoslaviju bili ključni “jednakost i saradnja između nacionalnosti te hrvatsko-srpsko sestrinstvo” dok su za “tradicijom vezanije Muslimanke…rad i priključenje AFŽ-u su značile i novi život”54. Ipak analiza Nove žene, ukazuje da su upravo muslimanske žene višeg društvenog položaja poput Vahide Maglajlić, “jedine muslimanke (Bošnjakinje) narodnog heroja”, njene majke Ćamile (kadinice) i čitave porodice iz Banjaluke bile zapravo liderke u širenju ideja NOB-a i AFŽ-a među pripadnicama svih konfesija55. Interpeliranje u “jugoslovensku” ženu koja je moderna i obrazovana ostvarivalo se preko zavnobihske ideologije da ona nije “ni Srpkinja, ni Hrvatica ni Muslimanka” već upravo to sve, kao Jugoslovenka i da se sve one bore protiv fašizma. Pregalnički rad na stvaranju jedinstva žena u BiH bez obzira na etničku i vjersku pripadnost tokom NOB-a bio je nužan za dvomilionsko omasovljavanje AFŽ-a ne samo kroz diskurs već i kroz jedinstvenu antifašističku praksu. Iz vizure etnički podijeljene BiH danas, prosto je nevjerovatno ovo simultano interpeliranje Srpkinja, Bošnjakinja (Muslimanki, a do 1974. muslimanki prim. aut.) i Hrvatica kao i riječi Dušanke Kovačević koja o ovo jedinstvo legitimizuje njihovom zajedničkom borbom za slobodu: Za živote naše djece, za mir naših domova, da nikada više ne bude klanja i ubijanja-mi smo se ujedinile. Jedinstvo Srpkinja, muslimanki i Hrvatica objasniće čitavom svijetu otkud nam snaga za borbu, otkud nam vjera u 53 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 117. 54 Ibid., 116. 55 Duganžić, Andreja i Jušić, Adela. “Intervju sa Alijom Maglajlićem,” Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, pristupljeno 21. novembra 2016., http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/16. �100 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA pobjedu. Srpkinje, muslimanke i Hrvatice pričaće na kongresu o svojoj djeci koja zajednički oslobađaju zemlju o zajedničkim poslovima koje obavljaju. O Srpkinjama koje sakupljaju sjeme za popaljeno muslimansko selo, o muslimankama koje nose darove u bolnicu i umiru po logorima za slobodu. Naše jedinstvo biće najljepši dar žena kongresu, našoj mladoj državi, njenoj sreći i budućnosti (Nova žena, 1: 6, 1945). U istom broju, priča Jele Bićanić “Muslimanke u borbi” dirljivo opisuje stradanje kadinice Maglajlić, majke narodne heroine Vahide Maglajlić, iz Banjaluke koju “zatvoriše bijesni što nisu mogli uhvatiti njezina sina…No ništa nije moglo skršiti tu majku kojoj je troje djece palo u borbi, dok je jedno i sada u logoru. Ona i dalje vedro vjeruje u pobjedu. – Kad dođemo u Banju Luku, prva ću na stanici povesti “kozaru”, često govori ona, - I tada ću kraj srca tri crvene zvijezde staviti!” “Prve jeseni narodne borbe napustila je rođeni grad Ajša Karabegović. Na slobodnoj teritoriji ona je krajnjom požrtvovnošću njegovala borce u jošavčkoj bolnici. Četnički zlikovci prekidoše i taj divni poletni život.” “Ujedno se provodila široka akcija za pomoć partizanima. Raifa Ćorbegović pronijela je bombe u kolicima, pod djetetom.” “Majka sestara Sarač gledala je svoje kćeri u fašističkim okovima, pa ipak je i dalja kroz Banju Luku pronosila letke i municiju.” U ovim odlomcima vidimo stvaranje i jedne nove muslimanske žene koja subvertira stege patrijarhalne kulture tako što pod zarom56 neopaženo rastura letke ili kolicima pronosi bombe da bi sa svojim suborkinjama i suborcima gradila novu BiH u Jugoslaviji. Ona je ta koja kao i njene komšinice požrtvovano šalje djecu u rat radujući se novoostvarnom bratstvu i jedinstvu među narodima. Topos žrtvovanja i hrabrosti isprepleten je sa ljubavlju kojom se ovo žrtvovanje opravdava: “Samo kad smo doživjeli da se ovako volimo!” rekla je neposredno (kadinica Maglajlić). “Zato ništa i ne žalimo. Moje je petero djece pod puškom, a tri su mi borca pala. I ne plačem. Majke junaka neće plakati.” U tekstu “One su pale za slobodu” u istom broju, spominje se da Vahida Maglajlić “okuplja žene, sjedinjuje muslimanke, Srpkinje i Hrvatice, u zajedničkoj borbi. Iskrena ljubav Vahidina prema narodu, koju je na djelu dokazivala, otvara srce ojađenih srpskih majki i one je primaju kao svoju” (Nova žena 1:14, 1945). Anti56 I Rada Vranješević je takođe koristila zar da bi pokrivena rasturala ilegalnu poštu iako nije bila Muslimanka (prim.aut.) �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 101 fašizam, deklarativni i življeni nije trpio nacionalizme koji danas kroz istorijski revizionizam rehabilituju nekadašnje fašiste i kolaboracioniste u glavnom kulturno-političkom toku nakon ratova 1990tih57 58: samo na kongresu žena Srbije, ove žene su podigle “optužbu protiv onih koji su u ime “srpstva” pobili desetine hiljada Srba po logorima i tamnicama, “koji su ubijali najbolje sinove Srbije ili ih predavali Nijemcima” i “raspirivali mržnju i međusobno ubijanje među bratskim narodima Jugoslavije” (Nova žena 1:14, 1945). Preko najoštrije osude ovih praksi, Nova žena ciljano stvara ideološku matricu za gradnju novog zajedništva preko iskustva stradanja na svim stranama: Veliki su napori i žrtve žena Bosne i Hercegovine. Neprijatelj nije ništa poštedio…Ustaše su klale srpsku djecu, a četnici su se “svetili” u vrisku i krvi muslimanske i hrvatske nejači (Nova žena 1:6, 1945) Na prvoj okružnoj konferenciji AFŽ-a na bihaćkom okrugu rečeno je da su “poslije pročitanih referata, mnoge starije i mlađe žene, muslimanke, Srpkinje i Hrvatice govorile o svome radu, borbi i patnjama, o zločinima okupatora, ustaša i četnika”, kao i da se “po prvi put u svom životu slobodno sastaju i rješavaju o svojoj sudbini” te da su “radosne što su doživjele da učestvuju u političkom životu svoga naroda” (Nova žena 1: 19, 1945). Zajednički rad je takođe osnaživao zajedništvo među ženama različite etnoreligijske pripadnosti: Imanje narodnog neprijatelja A. Mešića zasijano je kukuruzom koji je namijenjen našoj sirotinji. 100 dunuma zamlje treba okopati i ogrnuti! Javljaju se od reda Srpkinje, Muslimanke i Hrvatice, građanke, seljanke, stare i mlade. (Nova žena 5: 13, 1945) Razvijanje narodnog jedinstva na krilima borbe protiv fašizma, kao novog političkog jugoslovenstva, pratilo je priznanje svih etničkih i vjerskih partikularizama preko kojih se gradilo jedinstvo na temelju zajednički pretrpljene boli i strahote rata u kojem su i žene aktivno učestvovale. U tekstu “Hrvatice Bosne i Hercegovine” (Nova žena 1945 2: 3-4) stoji da “hrvatske žene moraju shvatiti da se kroz narodnooslobodilačku borbu ispunjavaju vjekovne težnje hrvatskog naroda” povlačeći vezu između borbi kmeta Matije Gupca, tog “neumrlog vođe hrvatskih seljaka”, 57 Radanović, Milan. Kazna i zločin: snage kolaboracije u Srbiji: odgovornost za ratne zločine (1941-1944) i vojni gubici (1944-1945) (Beograd: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2015). 58 Čović, Bartul. “Povijest pišu gubitnici”. Novosti, http://www.portalnovosti.com/povijest-pisugubitnici, pristupljeno 10. septembra 2016. �102 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA protiv plemića tokom Seljačke bune 1573. sa narodnooslobodilačkom borbom budući da su obe u sebi sadržavale elemente klasne borbe. Kroz ovu strategiju poistovjećivanja odnosno rekontekstualizacije borbi hrvatskog naroda unazad pet vijekova sa NOB-om, NOB postaje odraz “vjekovnih težnji hrvatskog naroda” i ono za šta su u “njegovoj slavnoj prošlosti davali živote najbolji hrvatski rodoljubi” (Nova žena 1945 2: 3). Hrvatski se ciljevi tako poistovjećuju sa jugoslovenskim a ne endehazijskim jer je NDH “nakazna tvorevina zločinaca”. Kroz biblijsku se metaforu slijepca u tami, koji na Isusovu riječ progleda, veoma shvatljivu širokim narodnim masama, navodi da je (hrvatski) narod, “dosada slijepac”, misleći na period NDH, kroz NOB zapravo “progledao” (Ibid.). Ipak, ovakvi napisi o zajedništvu su zapravo adresirali i dalje prisutan problem nacionalizma o kojem čitamo malo manje u samoj novini a malo više u zapisnicima sa sastanaka sa okružnih odbora AFŽ-a u Sarajevu i Banjaluci. Dok Nova žena ublaženo govori o svećenicima sa “otvoreno neprijateljskim stavom prema NOB-u” koji “na žene imaju veliki upliv”, kao razlogu zbog čega su mnogi Hrvati i Hrvatice ostali izvan NOP-a (Nova žena 1945 2: 3-4), iz zapisnika sa sastanaka AFŽ saznajemo da je situacija na terenu bila daleko problematičnija i da su novine služile kao propaganda koja je direkto odgovarala na problem nacionalizma i vjerske podjele. Iz zapisnika sa Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo od 25.11.1945., u kojem se dosta govorilo o izborima održanim 11. novembra 1945., saznajemo da je uticaj klera kod hrvatskog naroda bio izuzetno jak, da “časne sestre trgaju izborne plakate Narodnog fronta” i da se “u Čajdašu, hrvatskom selu puno kuglica ubacilo u ćoravu kutiju” koju su popovi nazvali “kutijom za vjeru”. Saznajemo i to da se “Srpkinje u zaboračkoj opštini slabo odazijvaju sastancima” i “da naročito one s druge strane Drine neće uopšte da se miješaju sa muslimankama” ali i da “četnici ometaju rad žena” budući da su “pred izbore ubacili letke i pripucavali tako da se žene boje pristupiti radu”. Iz zapisnika sa Okružnog odbora AFŽ-Banja Luka s kraja novembra 1945. saznajemo i o četničkim prijetnjama da će žene iz kotorvaroškog kraja “ošišati samo ako idu na glasanje” kao i da “su se isti slučajevi dešavali i na srezu Piskavica, Prnjavor i Srbac”59. Jasno je bilo da je 1945. godina preloma pri čemu se ovi tekstovi javljaju u mjesecu februaru kad rat tek treba da se zvanično završi ali je isto tako jasno da će Narodni front na čelu sa Josipom Brozom izaći kao pobjednik. Nezahvalno je govoriti jer o tome ne postoje istraživanja iz 1945. kako se običan narod osjećao i koliko je zapravo susprezao svoje etničko porijeklo i pripadnost u odnosu na 59 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Banja Luka - Izvještaj o radu Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Banja Luka od 26.11.1945.’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 118/1, 1945. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 103 novo jugoslovenstvo. Ipak iz ovih tekstova vidi se znakovita ideološka interpelacija običnog svijeta u jugoslovenstvo potpomognuta zajedničkim iskustvom stradanja od fašista i želje za novim, boljim životom. 3.4. Masovno opismenjavanje Kada je riječ o specifičnostima BiH u odnosu na ostale republike SFRJ, prvo se mora istaknuti da je BiH tada imala, pored Kosova i Makedonije, najveću stopu nepismenosti među ženama. S obzirom na običaje i tradicije Osmanskog carstva, žene u BiH, posebno one islamske vjeroispovijesti mada i ruralne hrišćanke, bile su mnogo izolovanije iz sfere javnog života uključujući i obrazovanje60 61. Širok opseg prava kao i vidljivost borkinje možda su igrali navažniju ulogu u mobilizaciji mlađih i obrazovanijih žena i radnica. Ipak dvomilionsku masovnost pokreta svakako nisu obezbjeđivale samo one. Prema riječima Mitre Mitrović62 “po prvi put u njihovim životima seljanke su bile cijenjene zbog svojih svakodnevnih poslova poput šivenja, kuhanja, sađenja, mljevenja žita za svrhu veću od porodične” a upravo kod ove većinske ženske populacije u tom periodu, veliku ulogu u mobilizaciji igralo je opismenjavanje i obrazovanje. NOP je stvorio novi lik žene u BiH, borbene, smjele i odlučne. One koje su do prije rata podnosile ćutke sve tegobe, uzdigle su se do smionih boraca za slobodu. Pred ženama su se otvorile vrata narodne vlasti, škola i kurseva. One su, željne znanja, počele učiti (Nova žena 1: 6, 1945) U društvu u kojem je obrazovanje bilo rezervisano samo za žene iz viših društvenih slojeva, stvaraju se uslovi za najmasovnije opšte obrazovanje žena kao preduslov za modernizaciju. “Treba da objavimo pravi pohod protiv nepismenosti”, - rekla je drugacica Olga Kovačić. Ni jedno dijete u našim selima i gradovima, ni jedna žena ne smije ostati nepismena...” (Nova žena 5:5, 1945) Na strani 20. prvog broja Nove žene prije impresuma, koji navodi da se prvi broj štampao upravo u Sanskom Mostu, stoji poruka naslovljena sa “Drage drugarice, 60 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 27-31. 61 Popov Momčinović, Zlatiborka, Giomi, Fabio i Delić, Zlatan. “Uvod: period austrougarske uprave” u Zabilježene - žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku, ur. Jasmina Čaušević. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar i Fondacija Cure, 2014. str. 24-26. 62 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 142. �104 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA izlazi prvi broj lista bosansko-hercegovačkih žena… Široke narodne mase naših žena žele da uče, da se prosvjećuju. One traže štampu, one traže odgovor na mnoga pitanja koja ih interesuju.” Upravo iz ovoga, a to će kasniji brojevi i potvrditi, vidimo jedno insistiranje na masovnom opismenjavanju, naročito žena koje prati ostale emancipatorske napore. Već u drugom broju, dominira tekst naziva “Bosna i Hercegovina neće ostati nepismena” (Nova žena 2: 7, 1945) u kojem saznajemo da je okupacija zatekla zemlju u velikoj zaostalosti s kojom su “do juče uglavnom bili izmireni”. U istom broju se navodi da je “prema podacima iz 1931 godine pismenost obilježena ovim stanjem: u Bosni ima 31 posto pismenih, ili 69 posto nepismenih. Hercegovina ima 34 posto pismenih, ili 66 posto nepismenih. Nepismenost je nesrazmjerno veća kod ženskog svijeta. U Bosni ima 39 posto pismenih muškaraca, a u Hercegovini 55 posto dok je pismenost žena u Bosni i u Hercegovini svega 15 od sto” (Nova žena 2: 7, 1945). Takođe se navodi podatak da je u toku borbe u pozadini naučilo čitati i pisati 12 500 odraslih. O ovom poletu i ideji napretka za sve slojeve idilično, narodno-lirski pišu i novine: Sa snagom ustanka narodne mase ponio je kulturni polet. Do juče uglavnom izmireni sa svojom zaostalošću, kroz borbu za slobodu, stariji i mlađi, ljudi, žene i djeca zaželjeli su da nauče čitati i pisati. Olovka i papir postala je sastavni dio ratne spreme naših boraca. … Djevojka plete čarape, pjeva pjesmu o borbi i napreže se da izveze slova na peškiru, rupcu i čarapama. Čobanče, čuvajući stoku, urezuje prva slova na preslici i čuturici i traži od svakog borca koga sretne olovku i papir da uči pisati. Omladinke i žene čuvaju u njedrima omiljenu pjesmaricu i priču iz borbe. Pismenost postaje obaveza na frontu i u pozadini. Nepismena bolničarka, pišući prva slova, uzvikuje: »Mislila sam da je mnogo teže, da nikad neću naučiti...« Žena iz Podgrmeča uči se pisati na tablici svoga sina i često se čuje i od starica toga kraja: “Grehota je danas nepismen ostati”. Zasluga za opismenjavanje prvenstveno se pripisuje narodnom pokretu koji je “poveo na tečaj nepismene Srpkinje, muslimanke i Hrvatice da zajedno uče čitati i pisati” (Ibid.) Alarmantna nepismenost poziva one koje znaju čitati i pisati da poučavaju druge a opismenjavanje sprovodilo volonterski jer je svaka udarnica na poslu obnove trebala “naći drugaricu koja će joj u kratkom slobodnom vremenu posvetiti svoje snage i svoju ljubav da je upozna s knjigom” (Nova žena 5: 13, 1945). U istom članku mlade skojevke i afežeovke kažu da “moramo učiti ako želimo druge učiti” jer “će nas knjiga i olovka naučiti da cijenimo prava koja smo izvojevali i pomoći da shvatimo našu slobodu i ravnopravnost, da upoznamo dužnoti časnog i slobodnog građanina” ali i “osloboditi nas da kao nove majke odgojimo svoju djecu �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 105 za srećan i bogat život u novoj, preporođenoj Jugoslaviji” (Nova žena, 5: 13,1945). Iz Zaključaka sa prvog sastanka Prosvjetne sekcije Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a od 23.11. 1945. saznajemo da se zarad boljeg rada formiraju četiri podsekcije: podsekcija za likvidaciju nepismenosti, podsekcija za vaspitno-politički rad, podsekcija za opšteobrazovni rad te podsekcija za tečajeve. “Nepismenost” je metaforički neprijatelj i treba ga kao takvog “likvidirati” odnosno “obaviti pohod” na njega (Ibid) a “znanjem se trebamo naoružati”. Čitanje štampe i opismenjavanje se organizuje po prelim i sijelima, u svakom selu i zaseoku gdje se “zajednički čita štampa”, “skupno sluša radio”, a postoje i “pokretne knjižnice” kao i “čitalačke grupe Narodnog fronta”63. Pored sekcija AFŽ-a za poslove socijalnog karaktera, koja se bavi invalidskim i dječijim domovima, u BiH jačaju i tzv. propagandna sekcija zadužena za kampanje, radio i štampu te prosvjetna sekcija zadužena za opismenjavanje kako mladog tako i starijeg svijeta čineći pismenost preduslovom za izgradnju “nove” žene bez obzira na dob: Tada se za tečaj prijavila stara 60-godišnja Zlata Halić i ostalim ženama poručila: “Neka se sve mlade stide što ne idu na tečaj. Ja ću poći prva iako sam već jednom nogom u grobu, ali hoću da umrem pismena. Darinka Tasić iz sela Bijele…naučila je za osam dana da piše sva slova. Ovo je divan primjer, koji pokazuje kako nove slobodne žene zadivljuju svojim radom kao što su u borbi zadivljavale svojim junaštvom. (Nova žena 5:13, 1945). 4.0. Značaj AFŽ-a u kontekstu današnjice: etnokapitalizam, repatrijarhalizacija, nacionalizam, nepismenost Iako subjektivno, kako kvalitativnoj analizi i priliči, ključno za mene bilo je čitanje arhiva kao vježbe iz kritičke pismenosti danas naročito zbog generacija kojima je istorijski revizionizam etnonacionalno-kapitalističkih elita doslovno ukinuo socijalističke i uopšte antifašističke horizonte. Rušenjem SFRJ i etabliranjem novih nacionalnih država, znanja i iskustva jugoslovenske narodnooslobodilačke borbe (NOB-a) i živućeg socijalizma, uprkos njegovim kontradiktornostima, posve su zapostavljena i revidirana neoliberalnim, antikomunističkim, nacionalističkim i patrijarhalnim narativima. Pokušaću ove tvrdnje raspakovati navodeći kako vidim spregu njihovih međusobnih odnosa. 63 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a - zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/nedostaje broj stranice, 1945. �106 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA Uprkos proliferaciji identitarnih politika i dvadeset godina tzv. rodnog mainstreaminga koji je promovisao liberalne ideje ženskih ljudskih prava64, individualizam i preduzentištvo, danas se nudi malo “osnova za kolektivnu mobilizaciju žena”65 za razliku od perioda stvaranja nove jugoslovenske žene. Uprkos ograničenjima i fazama jugoslovenskog moderniteta, mora se reći i to da je patrijarhat tokom SFRJ opstajao, naročito u privatnoj sferi66 gdje je sve do 1980-tih godina, primjerice, nasilje u porodici još uvijek bio tabu67. Ovo se nije do kraja riješilo, uprkos nastojanjima feministkinja 1970-tih68, a reprezentacije žena u jugoslovenskom filmu krajem 1980-tih su već takve da ženski zahtjev za beneficijama socijalističkog moderniteta, poput zaposlenja, rekontekstualizuju kao nedostatno majčinstvo69. “Trebalo je ubiti stvarnu ženu nego dopustiti da umre tradicionalni ideal žene-majke”70 i upravo će Bademu, tu “lošu majku” u Kenovićevom filmu Kuduz, na koncu ubiti etnički osviješćen muškarac koji “ubija za našu stvar” koji je “heroj a ne zločinac,” nagovještavajući prema Jovanoviću ratove devedesetih koji su nosili etničku homogenizaciju i kraj socijalizma i za koju im je repatrijarhalizacija bila nužna. U postsocijalističkom periodu, zaoštrava se i podjela na dvije “naoko odvojene, no u stvarnosti umrežene i međusobno ovisne sfere takozvanoga produktivnog i reproduktivnog rada” koje su “hijerarhijski nanovo reorganizirane”71. Kroz repa64 Helms, Elissa. Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar BosniaHerzegovina. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.  65 Kaneva, Nadia. “Mediating Post-socialist Femininities: Contested Histories and visibilities”. Feminist Media Studies 15 (1) (2015), 12. 
 66 Dunja Rihtman Auguštin, Etnologija naše svakodnevnice. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1998. 67 Majstorović, “(Un)Doing Feminism in Post-Yugoslav Media Spaces”, 1096. 68 Sedamdesetih godina u Jugoslaviji dolazi drugi val feminizma, podstaknut studentskim demonstracijama 1968. godine, a 1978. održava se i međunarodni skup “Dug-ca – Žensko pitanje. Novi pristup?”. Skup je predstavljao prvi buran izlazak feministkinja na javnu scenu u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji, a fokus na žensko pitanje i problem rodne podjele poslova istaknuti su i zvučnim sloganom konfederacije “Proleteri svih zemalja – ko vam pere čarape?”. Teme rasprave na konferenciji bile su patrijarhat, spoj feminizma i marksizma, feminizma i psihoanalize, te identitet, seksualnost, jezik i nevidljivost žena u kulturi i nauci. Razgovaralo se i o svakodnevnom životu žena, diskriminaciji u javnoj i privatnoj sferi, dvostrukoj opterećenosti žena, nasilju i opstajanju tradicionalnih patrijarhalnih uloga. (Čaušević 2014) 69 Nebojša, Jovanović, “Bosanski psiho: Kuduz, rat spolova i kraj socijalizma”. Sarajevske sveske: Da li je Balkan muškog roda” 39/40 (2013), 156-175. 70 Ibid., 167. 71 Burcar, Lilijana “Iz socijalizma natrag u kapitalizam: repatrijarhalizacija društva i re-domestifikacija žena”. Dva desetljeća poslije kraja socijalizma. Zagreb: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014. str.114. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 107 trijarhalizaciju, reproduktivni rad je naturalizovan kao isključivo ženski a etnonacionalizam i dejtonska podjela, kao vrsta poželjne pripadnosti u novom kapitalističkom društvu, dodatno su galvanizirali ove odnose. Kako Močnik72 navodi: U jačanju nadzora i zaoštravanju discipline dobro dođu oruđa koja su pri ruci: religiozna ideologija, etnička lojalnost, tradicionalne vrijednosti. tzv. obnova patrijarhalne obitelji, uskrsnuće tradicionalnih obrazaca, “retradicionalizacija” – sve su to novi načini društvenosti, koje iznuđuje suvremeni kapitalizam. Savremeni kapitalizam koji danas imamo u BiH kao vrstu tzv. autoritarnog kapitalizma73 karakterističnog za sve zemlje nastale raspadom bivše SFRJ čiji su nosioci većinom bili profiteri rata 1992-1995 osigurao je raspodjelu sredstava kroz etnička čišćenja a potom privatizacije. Kroz njega se patrijarhat se zapravo “vratio” praveći kontinuitet sa naslijeđem kolonijalnog, agrarnog predsocijalističkog doba. Kroz spregu institucionalizovane religije sa vlastodršcima, baš kao i prije Drugog svjetskog rata, i novog, postsocijalističkog doba u kojem je moć jednako tako koncentrisana kod etnokapitalista i klera, javile su se društvena retradicionalizacija74 75 i repatrijarhalizacija rodnih uloga i odnosa koje idu ukorak sa trendom siromaštva i rastom nezaposlenosti. Tezu o repatrijarhalizaciji zasnivam na depatrijarhalizacijskom potencijalu socijalističog perioda koji je u suprotnosti sa današnjim porastom mizoginije, diskriminacije, iskorištavanja i nasilja76 kao sastavnim dijelovima procesa restauracije kapitalističkih društvenih odnosa. Unutar njih društveno-reproduktivni rad se “klasifikuje kao ne-rad koji nije vrijedan spomena”77 zbog čega ekonomska 72 Močnik, Rastko. “Dvije vrste fašistoidnih politika”. Novosti, br. 677 (2012). http://arhiva. portalnovosti.com/2012/12/dvije-vrste-fasistoidnih-politika1/, pristupljeno 20. avgusta 2016. 73 Dolenec, Danijela. “Prema reartikulaciji otpora ekonomskom liberalizmu”. http://slobodnifilozofski.com/2016/09/prema-reartikulaciji-otpora-ekonomskom-liberalizmu.html (2016), pristupljeno 10. oktobra 2016. 74 Popov-Momčinović, Zlatiborka. Ženski pokret u Bosni i Hercegovini: artikulacija jedne kontrakulture. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE i Centar za empirijska istraživanja religije u BiH, 2013. 75 Leinert Novosel, Smiljana. Žena na pragu 21.stoljeća – između majčinstva i profesije (Zagreb: Ženska grupa TOD, EDAC, 1999), 18. 76 Marina Blagojević, “Mizoginija: nevidljivi uzroci, bolne posledice” u Mapiranje mizoginije u Srbiji: diskursi i prakse, drugo izdanje, ur. Marina Blagojević (Beograd: AŽIN, 2002), 31-55. 77 Burcar, “Iz socijalizma natrag u kapitalizam: repatrijarhalizacija društva i re-domestifikacija žena”, 114. �108 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA samodovoljnost žena biva dovedena u pitanje stavljajući ih “u djelomični ili potpuni položaj ovisnosti o ostalim članovima obitelji…na razinu socijalno i politički obespravljenih subjekata. tj. drugorazrednih državljana”78, što je odraz međugeneracijske solidarnosti naspram državne intervencije u područje brige. Upravo ovakav neplaćeni rad danas u feminističkoj kritici tzv. ekonomije brige79 stvara dodatne uslove za izrabljivanje i potcjenjivanje žena preko skrivenog “polnog ugovora”80 patrijarhalnog kapitalizma. “Antikomunistički revizionizam postao je prevladavajući način sjećanja na socijalističku Jugoslaviju” koji opet “zgodno koincidira sa neoliberalnim ekonomskim mjerama novih postsocijalističkih elita81. Danas teoretičari govore o tzv. postfašizmu elita u savremenim praksama novih liberalnih kapitalističkih država a koji se ogleda u rasizmu, homofobiji, dokidanju radničkih prava, medijskim manipulacijama, birokratskim aparatima koji guše neslaganje unutar institucija te huškačkim kampanjama protiv disidentskih grupa i pojedinaca. U takvom svijetu žena rješava problem “kupujući proizvod” a neplaćeni rad u kući i materinstvo, ideologizirani kao “prirodni”, zapravo stvaraju nevidljivi višak vrijednosti za kapitalizam. Dok se sve više produbljuje klasna nejednakost među svima a posebno ženama, organizovanja nema jer ljevica ne uspijeva da artikuliše ove protivrječnosti i njima pripadajuće borbe. Diskurs nakon rata 1992-1995 u BiH, proizvodeći isključivo bošnjačke, srpske i hrvatske žrtve, trajno je razbio nekadašnje zajedništvo među ženama i malo je bilo napora da se od ratnog iskustva stvori jedno zajedničko iskustvo stradanja na svim stranama. Ovo ratno stradanje dodatno je pogoršano poratnim stradanjem oličenim u iskustvima tranzicije i prekarnosti života u nekadašnjem zajedničkom ekonomskom i političkom prostoru sada dva entiteta i jednog distrikta u BiH. Osim rijetkih lijevo orijentisanih feministkinja koje imaju sluha za klasnu svijest, a ne samo liberalni dnevni red brojnih ženskih i ljudskopravaških organizacija, nemamo ni jedan politički glas koji na barem približno sličan način želi da zadobije masovno povjerenje žena, simultano zazivajući Srpkinje, Bošnjakinje i Hrvatice da zajednički ustanu u odbrani svojih prava ili kao protivnice narastajućeg fašizma etnonacionalista. Takve interpelacije u političkom obraćanju svim ženama u BiH, 78 Ibid., 115. 79 Folbre, Nancy. Who Cares? A Feminist Critique of the Care Economy. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. 2014. 80 Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988. 81 Krašovec, Primož. “Svi anti-komunisti su tigrovi od papira”. http://slobodnifilozofski.com/2010/06/ primoz-krasovec-svi-antikomunisti-su.html, pristupljeno 20. septembra 2016. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 109 i Hrvaticama, i Srpkinjama i Bošnjakinjama kao Bosankama i Hercegovkama, kao nekad novim Jugoslovenkama, insistirajući na njihovom zajedništvu kroz borbu, nažalost, ostaju marginalne i neorganizovane. Budući da nisu artikulisane programskom agendom trenutno niti jedne stranke ili pokreta, one ostaju van diskurzivne prakse, jer se njihovo uvođenje smatra preriskantnim po vladajući dejtonski poredak. Na kraju, ali ne i najmanje važno, kad je riječ o obrazovanju, rezultati popisa iz 2013. upućuju na to da sedamdeset godina kasnije, nepismenost u BiH od 2,82%, ne samo da nije iskorijenjena već je najveća u regiji u usporedbi sa 1,96% u Srbiji, te 0,8 posto nepismenih u Hrvatskoj82, pri čemu je od 89.794 nepismenih u našoj zemlji 77.557 žena. Živuće iskustvo dejtonskog poretka koji već preko dvadeset godina dodatno pospješuje etničku izolovanost i isključivost, što takođe pokazuju rezultati popisa budući da su entiteti u velikoj mjeri etnički homogeni83, dodatno čini nemogućim svako veće međuetničko žensko organizovanje koje bi išlo ka državnoj politici širenja pismenosti i obrazovanja za žene naročito iz ruralnih sredina i u trećoj životnoj dobi. 84 Kada sve ovo uzmemo u obzir kao današnji trenutak, vidi se da su promjene i nastojanja tokom perioda Drugog svjetskog rata za vrijeme djelovanja AFŽ-a bili emancipatorni naročito za one žene koje do tad nisu uživale nikakve privilegije, seljanke, radnice, omladinke. Ostaci ovog naslijeđa u talasu postsocijalističke otimačine i privatizacija danas se samo naziru, a većina ih je potpuno urušena. U patrijarhalnoj, etnokapitalističkoj hegemoniji kakva je danas u BiH, a koju predvode nacionalističke stranke kao glavni politički akteri sa agencijama Evropske Unije, tradicija tako bira sukladnu prošlost kako bi proizvedenoj sadašnjosti obezbijedila neometan kontinuitet. U toj prošlosti nema ni Rade Vranješević niti Vahide Maglajlić, a naročito ih nema skupa. Arhiv AFŽ-a predstavlja, ako ništa, kontrahegemoniju ovim režimima uvodeći u diskurs snažne akterke, žene, bez obzira na klasu i etnonacionalnost, koje se organizuju, jurišaju na neprijatelja, rade i grade, te mijenjaju postojeće društvene odnose. 82 Arnautović, Marija. “Popis u BiH: Nacionalnost važnija od pismenosti”, 30.6. 2016. http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/popis-bih-nacionalnost-vaznija-od-pismenosti/27831061.html, pristupljeno 13. septembra 2016. 83 Kada je riječ o nacionalnom izjašnjavanju u entitetima u FBiH živi 74 posto Bošnjaka, 22,4 posto Hrvata i 3,60 posto Srba. U Republici Srpskoj živi 81,51 posto Srba, 2,41 posto Hrvata i 13, 99 posto Bošnjaka. U Distriktu Brčko živi 42,36 posto Bošnjaka, Hrvata 20,66 i Srba 34, 58 posto (Arnautović 2016). O rezultatima popisa vidjeti vise na http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/popisni-rezultatinakon-25-godina-u-federaciji-vecina-bosnjaci-u-rs-srbi/27830387.html. 84 http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/u-bih-gotovo-90000-nepismenih �110 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA 5. Za buduće “veliko vrijeme” Kako “bilježiti ugljenom” da bi se “oživjela žar”, da bismo pamtili ove borbe ne kao “slike na zidu obešene” u kojima se ostaje “za vek-navek”, već kao aktivno mobilizacijsko gorivo za današnje žene, kad su borkinje i afežeovke uglavnom pokojne, a znanja o ovim borbama slabo prisutna u javnoj sferi, ali i u svakodnevnom životu? Uvidi u transgeneracijsko, suzbijeno znanje, rasvjetljavaju borbe osvojene na talasu revolucije za koje su se izborile žene tog perioda, ali ove diskurse treba reaktivirati smještajući ih “van homogenog praznog vremena” u vrijeme “ispunjeno sadašnjošću”, jer u protivnom “ni mrtvi neće biti sigurni pred neprijateljem, ako pobijedi”85. Pisati o ovom velikim organizacijama i pokretima AFŽ, iziskuje ogroman napor prvo zbog nedostupnosti njihovih glavnih akterki, arhiva, a i zbog složenosti veza i odnosa u i oko njih. Uticaj AFŽ-a, naročito nakon direktive CK iz januara 1944. kad je KPJ rasformirao njegovu unutrašnju hijerarhiju86 uveliko slabi. U članku “Za čvršću povezanost među odborima AFŽ-a” (Nova žena 6: 9-10, 1945) vidimo trend ukidanja interne hijerarhijske strukture unutar ove organizacije zarad potčinjavanja Narodnom frontu, odnosno narodnooslobodilačkim odborima u koji odlaze tzv. “napredne žene”87. Tekst počinje generalizacijom da je “prirodno da se svaka organizacija sastavljena od živih bića širi i razvija” nagovještavajući sam kraj AFŽ-a i njegovu marginalizaciju u odnosu na Narodni front88 89. U članku se ta odluka legitimizuje tvrdnjama da je “stroga odgovornost nižeg odbora višem”, pri čemu se misli na odbore AFŽ-a, počela “odvajati (žene) od opšeg narodnog pokreta” te da je organizacija “postala pretijesna da primi nove antifašistkinje”, pa su se “mjesto često začaurenih i zatvorenih odbora AFŽ-a počeli stvarati “široki narodni odbori”. O nejasnoćama zadataka AFŽ-a u odnosu na Narodni front, prestajanju sa radom sa ženama i vertikalnoj mobilnosti samih žena kod nas najdetaljnije piše upravo Sklevicky90 nazirući u tome i kraj ove organizacije 1953 koja ostaje “na margini teksta povijesti”91. Uz evidentan nedostatak “autonomije cilja” organizacije žena 85 Benjamin, op.cit. 86 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. str. 148. 87 Sklevicky, op.cit. str. 120. 88 Ibid. 89 Jancar-Webster, op.cit. 90 Sklevicky, op.cit. 121 91 Ibid., 113. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 111 te “latentni strah” od “feminističkih zastranjivanja”, koji je postojao kod dijela Partije, bilo je jasno da revolucionarni zanos AFŽ-a i njegov depatrijarhalizacijski potencijal92, vidljiv i u pisanju Nove žene, neće biti dovoljno izdržljiv niti dug da iznese cjelovitu depatrijarhalizaciju bosanskohercegovačkog niti jugoslovenskog društva kojemu je zapravo trebalo “više socijalizma”. Baš kao što danas nema širokopojasnog učešća žena u svakodnevnom, političkom, društvenom i privrednom životu BiH, niti artikulacije zbog čega bi ženski angažman zapravo bio potreban u BiH, kod predsjednice Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a, Cane Babović, vidimo sličan osvrt kad na Plenumu Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a Hrvatske u završnoj riječi kaže “druga je stvar, što mi nemamo nečega posebnoga, specifičnoga, neko pitanje za koje bi se mi kao žene trebale boriti”93. Borkinje su prepoznavale značaj nacionalnog, jugoslovenskog jedinstva ostvarenog kroz antifašističku borbu, izvojevavši bitku za pismenost i obrazovanje te jednaku plaćena za jednak rad sprovodeći koliko su mogle u praksi socijalističke i feminističke ideale. Jugoslovenska žena, koja je svoju emancipaciju, ulazak u svijet rada i ravnopravnost sticala tako što je rame uz rame sa svojim saborcima ratovala protiv snaga nacističke Njemačke i domaćih izdajnika, znala je da je stub borbe ali i da mora biti stub novog društva nastalog kroz borbu: Odlazile su Hrvatice, Slovenke, Crnogorke, Bosanke, Dalmatinke, Makedonke, Vojvoađanke, Srbijanke, žurila se svaka svome kraju obuzeta dubokom radošću sto zivi u ovom velikom vremenu (prim.aut. D.M:), što radi na velikom djelu stvaranja novog zivota. A u duši svake od njih čvrsne odluka nepokolebiva kao zavjet: mi žene bile smo stub narodnooslobodilačake borbe, stub natčovječanskih napora naših naroda u borbi za slobodu svoje otadžbine, odsada ćemo biti stub njene veličanstvene izgradnje, njene srećne budućnosti. (Nova žena 5:5, 1945). Arhiv afežeovskih medijskih tekstova s kraja Drugog svjetskog rata otkriva obećanje socijalističke revolucije sa pregršt emancipatornih mogućnosti za žene bez obzira na klasu, dob ili etnički predznak posebno kad je riječ o velikoj većini 92 Uprkos pravima, žene u SFRJ počinju da ih ostvaruju tek 1960tih godina. Katz (2011, 154) navodi da je “jednakost muškarca i žene više…počivala na zakonskoj regulativi, a manje na suštinskoj promjeni odnosa u svakodnevnom životu. Svoja prava iz četrdesetih bosanskohercegovačka žena počela je više koristiti tek od šezdesetih godina 20. stoljeća, kada je i bosanskohercegovačko društvo počelo bilježiti veći ekonomski napredak.” U ovom smislu takođe možemo govoriti o depatrijarhalizacijskom potencijalu od nekih tridesetak godina. 93 Sklevicky, op.cit.str. 122. �112 DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ STVARANJE ‘NOVE’ JUGOSLOVENSKE ŽENE: EMANCIPATORSKI ELEMENTI MEDIJSKOG DISKURSA S KRAJA II SVJETSKOG RATA nezaposlenih, siromašnih žena koje kapitalizam može samo još vise ekspolatisati. Pisati o onom što se ne može suzbiti u afežeovskom iskustvu znači ponovo ih prisvojiti kroz današnje socijalističko-feminističke političke prakse kao blochovski princip nade u kojoj društvena utopija osvještava i dokida ljudsku i žensku bijedu. Ono znači ne pristati na i odupirati se statusu quo u kojem navodni nacionalizam protkan patrijarhatom već dvije decenije maskira masovnu eksploataciju etnokapitalista proizvodeći djecu za rat i neplaćeni rad. “Stopiti horizonte” sa istorijske distance znači repolitizirati taj status quo omogućivši “mjesto susreta” za neko buduće veliko vrijeme gdje ćemo se, kad se sretnemo, moći organizovati za borbu. Znanja o njima predstavljaju alternativnu istoriju ključnu za razumijevanje budućih društvenih borbi za egalitarnije društvo, ne samo kad je u pitanju otpor kapitalističkoj proizvodnji već i proizvodnji “nove djece za rat” što bolno odjekuje u kriku savremene sarajevske pjesnikinje Dijale Hasanbegović94: Ne dam djecu za rat govorim vam dlanova okrenutih prema gore dlanova ljepljivih od kiselih žutih vrpci koje krvnici nikad neće prerezati. Arhivska građa Glavni odbor AFŽ ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ - Zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945.’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/6, 1945. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Materijali Drugog kongresa AFŽa BiH održanog 12 – 13. Jula 1947’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1543/109, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Banja Luka - Izvještaj o radu Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Banja Luka od 26.11.1945.’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 118/1, 1945. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Okružni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a - zapisnik sa sastanka Okružnog odbora AFŽ-a Sarajevo održanog 24. i 25.11. 1945’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 13/nedostaje broj stranice, 1945. 94 Dijala Hasanbegović, “Djeca za rat”, http://darkocvijetic.blogspot.ba/2014/01/veliki-odmor-dijalahasanbegovic.html, pristupljeno 10.septembra 2016. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 113 Bibliografija Arnautović, Marija. “Popis u BiH: Nacionalnost važnija od pismenosti”. 30. 6. 2016. http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/popis-bih-nacionalnost-vaznija-odpismenosti/27831061.html. Babović, Cana. “Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ” referat predstavljen na I Zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ, 08.12.1942. Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/231. Benjamin, Walter. “Istorijsko-filozofske teze”. Eseji. Beograd: Nolit, 1974. Blagojević, Marina. “Mizoginija: nevidljivi uzroci, bolne posledice”. 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 Majstorović, Danijela, and Maja Mandić. “What It Means to Be a Bosnian Woman: Analyzing Women’s Talk Between Patriarchy and Emancipation.” U Living With Patriarchy— Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects Across Public Spheres, 81-109. Ur. Danijela Majstorović and Inger Lassen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 115 Majstorović, D. “(Un)Doing Feminism in Post-Yugoslav Media Spaces”. Feminist Media Studies 16 (6) (2016): 1093-1108. Majstorović, Danijela, Zoran Vučkovac i Anđela Pepić. 2015. “From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: Post-2014 Economic Restructuring as Europeanization Discourse/Practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15(4) (2015): 661-682. Močnik, Rastko. “Dvije vrste fašistoidnih politika”. Novosti, br. 677. Decembar 2012. http://arhiva.portalnovosti.com/2012/12/dvije-vrste-fasistoidnih-politika1/. Nova žena – list Antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine, Arhiv antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije, Periodika, http://afzarhiv.org/items/browse?collection=5 Pantelić, Ivana. Partizanke kao građanke: društvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji, 19451953. Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, Evoluta, 2011. Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Popov-Momčinović, Zlatiborka. Ženski pokret u Bosni i Hercegovini: artikulacija jedne kontrakulture. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, Fondacija CURE i Centar za empirijska istraživanja religije u BiH, 2013. Popov Momčinović, Zlatiborka, Giomi, Fabio i Zlatan Delić. “Uvod: period austrougarske uprave”. U, Zabilježene - žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku, 16-38. Ur. Jasmina Čaušević. Sarajevo : Sarajevski otvoreni centar : Fondacija Cure, 2014. Radanović, Milan. Kazna i zločin: snage kolaboracij u Srbiji: odgovornost za ratne zločine (1941-1944) i vojni gubici (1944-1945). Beograd: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2015. Rihtman Auguštin, Dunja. Etnologija naše svakodnevnice. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1998. Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. Studen, Dragan. Borkinje. Beograd: Obeležja, 1982. Van Dijk, Teun. Elite discourse and Racism. Sage, 1993. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 
 Wodak, Ruth., De Cillia, Rudolph., Reisigl, Martin. and Liebhart, Karl. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: EUP, 1999. Wodak, Ruth. Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual (2nd. Ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011. Wodak, Ruth. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage, 2015. ZAVNOBiH, dokumenti 1943-1944, knj. I, Sarajevo: IP Veselin Masleša, 1968, 58-63 http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/u-bih-gotovo-90000-nepismenih Žagar, Igor. “Topoi in critical discourse analysis”. Šolsko polje Vol. 20 (5/6), (2009): 47–75. �KASJA JERLAGIĆ Crteži olovkom ���HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ �120 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. 1. Uvod Bilo kakav pokušaj da iz današnjice razumijemo i valoriziramo dinamiku uspona i pada Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije (AFŽ) suočava se sa pitanjem kako čitati i razumjeti arhiv te organizacije. Problem je širi i ne tiče se samo arhiva AFŽ-a već arhiva kao institucije koja savremenost omogućava kao kritički pogled u prošlost, onakvu kako se pojavljuje u arhivima – tamo gdje oni postoje – koji konstituiraju istoriju kao takvu.1 AFŽ je formiran 1942. godine u jeku Drugog svjetskog rata (a ishod je dugotrajnijih pokušaja mobiliziranja i organiziranja žena u okviru KPJ), kada se pred vođe naroda i države u nastajanju postavlja niz teških i hitnih organizaciono-političkih pitanja. AFŽ se ugrađuje u tradiciju međunarodnog socijalističkog pokreta koja od 30tih godina razvija ideju narodnog fronta kao odgovor na fašističko mobiliziranje i osvajanje vlasti. U istoriju AFŽ-a upisan je ogroman fizički napor, najprije u organizaciji otpora domaćim kolaboracionističkim i okupatorskim snagama, a potom i na postratnoj izgradnji zemlje i struktura države. Historija AFŽ-a, međutim, svjedoči i o dinamičnom susretu snažnih društvenih organizacija i ideja i mase ‘običnih’, ‘malih’ žena koje su, zajedno i istovremeno sa svojim saborcima, stvarale jugoslavensku istoriju. Iako ova istorija još uvijek živi kao pamćenje nekolicine, rekonstrukciju ovog dinamičnog susreta uveliko otežava kompleksni istorijski razvoj od tada do danas, mutacija našeg političkog pojmovnika i napuštanje prethodnih društvenopolitičkih formacija. Rekonstrukciju mogu pomoći neki od osnovnih uvida novijeg kritičko-feminističkog preispitivanja ženske istorije, prije svega oni koji se odnose na pitanja istorijskog karaktera patrijarhata i efekata ove formacije na samo pisanje istorije. Pionirski povratak ovoj neispisanoj istoriji koji je poduzela Lydia Sklevicky počiva upravo na ovoj perspektivi koja inistira na fundamentalnom sadržaju ženskog pitanja.2 Razmatrajući različita razumijevanja ideje kontinuiteta u istoriografiji i istoriji žena antropologinja, Svetlana Slapšak primjećuje da „kontinuitet [koji] u istoriografiji nema naročito dobar položaj jer je često oruđe nacionalističkog imaginarija, u istoriji žena znači nešto drugo. On se upisuje u jedan socijalno-kulturni oblik koji poznajemo veoma dugo, kome ne znamo prave početke, a ni danas ga ne možemo svrstati u prošlost – patrijarhat“. AFŽ i naše vrijeme povezuje upravo taj kontinuitet, budući da on „nema nikakve veze sa etničkim mapiranjem, ne može 1 Parikka, Jussi. „Archival Media Theory An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology“ u Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ur. Jussi Parikka, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013., str. 7. 2 Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi, prir. Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 121 se svrstati na jedan verski konglomerat niti na ideologiju“3. Iz ove perspektive, organizaciona istorija, unutrašnji odnosi AFŽ-a i odnosi organizacije spram drugih elemenata društva u nastajanju mogu biti rekonstruisani i kao rekonstitucija patrijarhalne kulture. Onda je pitanje s kojim se suočavamo: kako razumjeti historiju pomenutog kontinuiteta uprkos AFŽ-u? Novije rasprave o AFŽ-u ispituju u kojoj se mjeri i na koji način u istoriji organizacije sudaraju, izražavaju i kombiniraju dvije tradicije: socijalistička i feministička. Maca Gržetić u svom govoru na prvom kongresu AFŽH u julu 1945. godine ističe da su žene „do pobjede Narodno-oslobodilačkog pokreta u našoj zemlji bile dvostruko neslobodne, dvojako potlačene“. Iako je teško definitivno utvrditi na šta je tačno mislila Gržetićka, možemo pretpostaviti da je na umu imala važna pitanja koja se tiču ovih dviju tradicija. Nažalost, ideja dvostruke neslobode, kao kriterija koji bi mogao poslužiti kao mjera stvarne slobode žena, nije ozbiljnije razmatrana, pa nije ni bilo ni plana dvostrukog oslobođenja.4 AFŽ iz rata izlazi čvrsto integriran u novi poredak predvođen Partijom kao vodećom društvenom snagom koja žensko pitanje, od samih početaka, smatra subordiniranim opštim ciljevima Partije.5 Dakle, za Partiju je žensko pitanje, barem u principu, trebalo biti riješeno progresivnom realizacijom narodne socijalističke vladavine. S obzirom na to da i AFŽ gotovo bez ostatka zastupa ovaj stav, otvara se bitno pitanje o tome kako je eliminisana jedna od dvije konstituirajuće intelektualne tradicije otjelovljene u pokretu, te da li nam arhiv može o tome nešto otkriti? S druge strane, ukoliko ovo pitanje za sada ostavimo po strani, može se reći da je AFŽ nesumnjivo bio iznimna organizaciona društvena formacija čijim je posredstvom žensko pitanje, u periodu postojanja ove organizacije, riječima Adriane Zaharijević „posedovalo singularan i samostalan status, nastao u duhu specifično socijalističkog aranžmana upravljanja“6. U jednom relativno 3 Slapšak, Svetlana. „Balkanske žene: rod, epistemologija i istorijska antropologija“ u Rod i nauka, ur. Babić-Avdispahić, Jamsinka, Bakšić Muftić, Jasna i Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2009. str. 63. 4 Sklevicky, op.cit. 98, 107-108. 5 Jancar-Webster, Barbara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941 – 1945, Denver: Arden Press, 1990. str. 20. 6 Zaharijević, Adriana. „Fusnota u globalnoj istoriji: Kako se može čitati istorija jugoslovenskog feminizma?“ Sociologija 57:1 (2015), 76. Zaharijević međutim potom dodaje: „No, upravo će u okvirima tog istog uređenja, i to u trenutku kada socijalistički aranžman postaje samosvesno zasnovan na još temeljnijoj jednakosti u samoupravljanju, samostalnost ženskog pitanja biti i �122 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. dugom istorijskom periodu, AFŽ je najneposrednije osiguravao (i socijalnu i ekonomsku) reprodukciju društva i novog društvenog poretka, i to neprekinutim reproduktivnim radom i masovnim javnim besplatnim radom. Iz toga proizlazi drugo i osnovno pitanje: šta nam danas – kad je naše učešće u društvu sve više svedeno na pojedinačni rad na tržištu valoriziran isključivo u monetarnoj formi, a patrijarhalna opresija duboko strukturirana u hibridnim fizičkim, prelaznim i digitalno posredovanim prostorima – može značiti povratak ovoj organizaciji i ovoj epohi, da li nas može uputiti na neka bitna pitanja i da li nas nečemu može naučiti? Kako bih bar načeo neka od ovih pitanja u radu se fokusiram na period od kraja rata do kraja postojanja Antifašističkog fronta žena (1953.) i nastojim parcijalno rekonstruisati dinamiku konstrukcije herojske figure. Moja je teza (i nada) da povratak ovim putem – upravo kao povratak ženskom u konstrukciji herojskog – može naznačiti obrise neke nove figure herojskog koja bi bila u stanju da u sadašnjost intervenira kao emancipacijska figura. Nešto od ove ‘figure koja dolazi’ može se otkriti kroz otvoren, kritički i kreativan povratak kolektivnom djelovanju koje je u našoj istoriji jednom već oprimjereno. Tri su osnovna teorijska koncepta na koja se oslanjam. Prvi je Foucaultov koncept dispozitiva. Dispozitiv shvatam kao široki institucionalno-idejni okvir i sklop koji usmjerava opštu društvenu aktivnost. Unutar ovog okvira konstruira se (relativno simbolički djelatna) figura koja me ovdje posebno zanima: figura herojskog. U tom smislu, drugi važan teorijski pojam na koji se oslanjam vezan je uz razmatranja Alaina Badiouoa koji nastoji naznačiti teorijsko-politički put ka rekonstituciji herojskog kao figure koja bi čovječanstvo mogla izglaviti iz gliba sadašnjice.7 Konačno, oslanjam se na koncept antropotehnologije – kao istorijski konstruiranog seta osnovnih epistemoloških pretpostavki o tehnološkoj konstrukciji društva putem „ispravnog vaspitanja“ – koju je kao interpretativni alat pogodan za analizu jugoslavenskog socijalizma predložio Ugo Vlaisavljević.8 Kada je u pitanju sam AFŽ, osnovna teorijsko-empirijska referenca mi je rad ukinuta. Ono od tada počinje da se tretira kao integralni deo klasnog pitanja, koje se predočava kao ključno društveno pitanje na koje se sva ostala mogu redukovati.“ Vidjeti i raspravu koju je pokrenuo tekst Funk, Nanette. ‘A very tangled knot: Official state socialist women’s organizations, women’s agency and feminism in Eastern European state socialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21, No. 4 (2014): 344-360, te odgovore na taj tekst objavljene u Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History: Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in Terminis? 1 (2007); Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited, 10, 2016. 7 Badiou, Alain. Philosophy for Militants, New York/London: Verso, 2012., str. 42 – 47. 8 Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Lepoglava i univerzitet – Ogledi iz političke epistemologije, Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2003. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 123 Lydie Sklevicky kojoj dugujemo ne samo obnovljeni interes za AFŽ nego i vrlo važne metodološke i teorijske uvide. Kada je u pitanju primarni materijal koji koristim za ilustraciju dinamike konstrukcije i artikulaciju herojskog, uglavnom se oslanjam na materijale Arhiva antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine i Jugoslavije.9 2. Socijalistički dispozitiv, heroizam i vaspitavanje društva Dispozitiv predstavlja korisno analitičko oruđe jer omogućava obuhvatan pogled na sklop društvenih i političkih odnosa koji igraju konstitutivnu ulogu u formiranju nekog društva. U opštem smislu moguće ga je razumjeti kao stratešku formaciju koja odgovara na potrebe većeg ili manjeg opsega. Foucault određuje dispozitiv kao „heterogen skup koji se sastoji od diskursa, institucija, arhitektonskih formi, regulacionih odluka, zakona, administrativnih mera, naučnih izjava, filozofskih, moralnih i filantropskih stavova, ukratko, ono što se izgovara kao i ono što se ne izgovara... dispozitiv je sistem odnosa koji se može uspostaviti među tim elementima“10. Oslanjajući na Foucaultovu definiciju, Giorgio Agamben definira dispozitiv kao „set praksi i mehanizama (i lingvističkih i nelingvističkih, juridičkih, tehničkih i vojnih) koji ciljaju na hitnu potrebu i manje ili više neposredne efekte“11. Dispozitiv, dakle, istovremeno obuhvata i sklop praksi i sklop institucija, ali i govor o praskama i institucijama, kao i njihova povezivanja koja strukturiraju odnose unutar svake od pojedinih sfera djelovanja. Njime su obuhvaćeni biološko-tjelesni, idejni, materijalni i institucionalni napori na izgradnji socijalističkog svijeta kao novog, koji se praktično realiziraju kao djelovanje organizacija i institucija posvećenih strukturiranju odnosa materijalne izgradnje društva i njegovom idejnom utemeljenju. Tako i projekat stvaranja socijalističke Jugoslavije možemo interpretirati kao dinamičnu konstrukciju socijalističkog dispozitiva čiji je zadatak usmjeriti i organizirati novouspostavljene radne, političke i proizvodne odnose. U tom strateškom prostoru se AFŽ razvija 9 Arhivska građa dio je građe Arhiva Bosne i Hercegovine u Sarajevu. Arhiva je u periodu od 2013. do 2015. godine digitalizirana naporima poduzetim pod okriljem organizacije Crvena, a dio arhiva je i bibliografski obrađen i dostupan na: www.afzarhiv.org 10 Ovu „definiciju“ nalazimo u napomeni prevoditeljice u: Mišel Fuko, Volja za znanjem – Istorija seksualnosti I, prev. Jelena Stakić, Loznica: Karpos, 2006., str. 30. vidi i: Jeffrey Bussolini, „What is a Dispositive?“ Foucault Studies 10, (2010), str. 85-107 11 Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009., str. 8. prevod moj. Za kritički tretman vidi: Pasquinelli, Matteo. „What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault, Canguilhem, and Goldstein,“ Parrhesia journal 22, 2015: 79-89. dostupno na: www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia22/parrhesia22_pasquinelli.pdf �124 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. kao poseban element koji se u datom istorijskom momentu artikulira kao odgovor na specifičnu urgentnu potrebu izgradnje novog društva. Proces opšte izgradnje dispozitiva od samog početka operiše jednom značajnom figurom oko koje nastoji organizirati društvenu energiju: figurom heroja. Istorijski se herojska figura u pravilu vezivala uz imaginarij i prakse rata iako se neke tradicije razvijaju i na nešto drugačijim osnovama. Do francuske revolucije prevladava figura heroja kao figura individualnog „ratnika“, a nju revolucijom smjenjuje demokratska i kolektivna figura vojnika.12 Badiou smatra da je naš „zadatak da se pronađe nova herojska figura koja nije ni povratak stare religijske figure ni figure nacionalne žrtve, niti nihilističke figure posljednjeg čovjeka“ koja bi trebala biti „paradigma heroja s onu stranu rata, figura koja neće biti ni ona ratnika niti ona vojnika“13. Svi su socijalistički projekti u većoj ili manjoj mjeri bili pokušaji da se upravo figura heroja poveže s radom kao procesom, te da se time heroizam rada normira kao najvažnija društvena vrijednost. I jugoslavenska je istorija, posebno prve godine druge Jugoslavije, istorija jednog ovakvog pokušaja. U ovom periodu se opetovano ispostavlja zahtjev za herojstvom koji kao ujedinjujući označitelj treba usmjeriti svaranje novog društva. Bitan je to element „antropotehnologije“ čiji je generalni zadatak da vaspitava na unaprijed definisani način. Ekonomski je model bio jednostavan: „elektrifikacija i industrijalizacija“ ali su, kako tvrdi Vlaisavljević, stvari bile mnogo suptilnije. Po Vlaisavljeviću je fundamentalni element preobrazbe na kojoj izrasta novo društvo epistemološka revolucija koja se realizira kao „tehnološka revolucija koja je u svojoj ‘stvarnoj osnovi’ bila industrijska revolucija“ i koja se, iako u fizičkom smislu realizirana „dalekovodima i stubovima koji su vodili do najzabitijih sela“ u drugom smislu realizirala kao diskurs „koji je opisivao novu ljudsku i tehnološku stvarnost, djelujući vaspitno“14. Antropotehnologija, kao znanje o „tehnologiji oslobađanja“, kao tehnološko rješenje društvenog rada kao osnovnog mehanizma proizvodnje ljudi, u opštem se smislu sastoji od materijalne izgradnje čovjekovog svijeta, ali i od postupaka ispravnog vaspitanja ljudi. Ovdje treba tražiti objašnjenje za relativno brzo napuštanje masovnih organizacionih formi – a posebno ženskog organiziranja – koje tada određuju generalni karakter političko ekonomskog razvoja nove države u periodu burne postratne konsolidacije. 12 Badiou, op.cit. str, 46 – 47. 13 Ibid., 45 – 46. 14 Vlaisavljević, op.cit. str. 50. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 125 3. Društvo naroda Kako se dispozitiv uspostavlja neposredno poslije rata? U javnom političkom rječniku, riječi „socijalizam“, „komunizam“, „diktatura proletarijata“ ili „socijalistička država“ najčešće se ne spominju. Figura naroda konstruisana u Narodnooslobodilačkom ratu izlazi iz rata kao pobjednik, pa i u političkom diskursu dominira narodna demokratska terminologija: „narodna vlast“, „narodna demokracija“, „vlast radnog naroda“, „narodna država“ i slično. Ustav iz 1946. godine ne spominje riječ „socijalizam“ već formuliše „princip narodne vlasti koju narod ostvaruje preko svojih predstavničkih tijela – narodnih odbora i narodnih skupština“15. Državotvorna ideologija se nastavlja na tradiciju narodnooslobodilačkog rata čiju ljudsku bazu čine frontovci unutar KPJ. U augustu 1945. godine formira se Narodni front Jugoslavije (NF/NFJ) kao koalicija različitih grupa i političkih partija s vodećom ulogom Komunističke partije Jugoslavije.16 Iako inicijalno sastavljen od niza slabih političkih organizacija, NF se brzo homogenizira „asimilacijom građanskih grupa, koje su usvajanjem programa gubile svoju raniju individualnost, ili otpadanjem onih građanskih snaga koje nisu mogle da slede razvitak koji je inspirisala KPJ“17. Snage van Narodnog fronta podvrgavaju se političkom pritisku i otklanjaju ih se.18 Osnovnu snagu NF čine „masovne orga15 Babić, Nikola. Na putevima revolucije, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1972., str.125. 16 Bilandžić, Dušan. Historija Socijalističke Federativne Republiike Jugoslavije – Glavni procesi 1918. – 1985, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1985. str. 110. 17 Po Titovom mišljenju koje navodi Bilandžić, opozicija „nije dala ni jednu ideju koja bi bila bolja od onoga što smo mi dali u programu Narodnog fronta. Ona uopšte i nema programa. To je onaj stari lager neprijatelja naroda koji vuku točak historije natrag, a točak ih okreće oko sebe i, razumije se, smrviće ih“. Bilandžić, Historija, 103 18 Petranovć navodi: „U sastavu NFJ nalazile su se i građanske stranke koje su mu krajem rata prišle. Formalno gledano, načela NFJ su predviđala višestranačku strukturu zadržavajući posebnost tih stranaka u organizaciji i njenim rukovodećim telima — što je bio izraz međunarodnih obzira i težnje za angažovanjem svih rodoljubivih i demokratski raspoloženih građana na programu daljeg revolucionarno-demokratskog razvitka — ali su joj na specifičan način umanjivala značaj drugim odredbama. Pre svega, postojeće stranke morale su da prihvate program NFJ, a njihovo članstvo da se uključi u njegove lokalne odbore. Nebitnih elemenata koalicije bilo je, s nekim izuzecima, samo u višim rukovodstvima NFJ. Od ove formalne strane pitanja daleko su bili bitniji stvarni politički odnosi. NFJ se od svog osnivanja izgrađivao kao jedinstvena organizacija masa, koje su prihvatale i priznavale rukovodstvo KPJ u njemu. Postojeće građanske grupe nisu mogle da bez spoljne intervencije ugroze političku čvrstinu organizacije, jer su bile malobrojne i slabe. Put demokratskog razvitka, prema koncepciji NFJ, nije vodio preko višestranačke organizacije političkog života, nego preko njene negacije.“ Up. Branko Petranović, Istorija Jugoslavije 1918 – 1988: Treća knjiga: Socijalistička Jugoslavija 1945 – 1988, Beograd: Nolit, 1988., 43. Masovne organizacije se angažuju da se izoliraju „nekomunistički“ dijelovi vlastitih tradicija poput „starog sindikalizma“ �126 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. nizacije“ – Ujedninjeni savez antifašističke omladine, AFŽ i Jedinstveni sindikati radnika i namještenika Jugoslavije. Ideje i platforma Partije „nalaze svoj formalni i javni izraz u programima masovnih organizacija koje je ona stvorila“19 dok stvarna kontrola pozicija odlučivanja u novoformiranim tijelima omogućava Partiji dominaciju na svim nivoima društvene organizacije, pa tako već 1947. godine NF postaje, sa postepenom industrijalizacijom, „aparat za izvršavanje konkretnih državnih zadataka i privredne operative, gubeći oznake političke organizacije“20. Na osnovama herojskog narodnog oružanog otpora, tokom projekta obnove se masovno uključivanje naroda, ovaj put u rad, konstruiše kao važna društvena vrijednost i obaveza, a masovne organizacije dobijaju zadatak realizacije ovog zadatka. Peti kongres KPJ stavlja naglasak na mobilizaciju masa „u borbi za socijalizam“ i ističe problem birokratizacije kao veliku prepreku privlačenju masa. Politički rad s masama definira se kao glavni zadatak partijskog djelovanja a zadatak NF-a i masovnih organizacija kao: „objašnjavanje zadataka i puteva naše socijalističke izgradnje, zadataka borbe protiv ostataka reakcije, tumačenje konkretnih mera narodne vlasti u izgradnji socijalizma“ dok je poseban zadatak bio razviti „nov odnos radničke klase i radnih masa uopšte prema radu, da organizuju socijalističko takmičenje i podižu udarništvo...“21 Kroz NF narod ispostavlja narodu opšti zahtjev da dobre volje prione na posao i da radi do granica izdržljivosti. Važno je ovdje ukazati na dvostruku poziciju NFJ, koja vrijedi i za AFŽ, a koja, prema mišljenju Lydie Sklevicky, ujedinjuje pozicije poretka kroz koji djeluje i pokreta u čije ime djeluje. Organizacijski govor će biti duboko integrisan unutar narativnih struktura režima, ali će istovremeno otkriti i njihov sraz sa društvenom realnošću ženskog stanja koji se artikulira kroz stvarna povezivanja svojstvena pokretima, posebno onima čiji je osnovni cilj omasovljavanje. U ovoj dvostrukoj poziciji treba vidjeti specifičnu konfiguraciju moći i kontrole. Sačinjavaju je društvene snage koje konsolidiraju vodeću ulogu Partije i stvarno političko iskustvo mobilizacije zemaljskog pokreta. Partija među radništvom ili „feminističkih zastranjenja“ u AFŽ. Pripreme za izbore za narodne odbore provedene tokom ljeta i jeseni 1945. godine podrazumijevali su „političko čišćenje“ tokom kojeg su: „[o]tpadali ... oni koji su bili protiv revolucionarnih mjera, a ulazili u organe vlasti oni koji će dosljednije ostvarivati te mjere.“ Bilandžić, op.cit., str. 104. 19 Sklevicky, op.cit. str. 108.; Čupulo, Dalibor. „Razvoj političkog i pravnog sistema Jugoslavije u poslijeratnom periodu 1945-1968. - Pristup istraživanju i literatura,“ PP 7 1988: 203-248. 20 Petranović, op.cit. str. 57. 21 Rezolucija V Kongresa KPJ o osnovnim narednim zadacima organizacije KPJ; dostupno na: http://www.znaci.net/00001/138_77.pdf �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 127 eliminira osnovno političko pitanje strukture vladanja i preuzima zadatak usmjeravanja opšteg društvenog razvoja kao ekonomskog, isključivši pitanje moći iz jednačine novog društvenog ugovora.22 Iako će istorija Jugoslavije i dalje biti obilježena različitim artikulacijama nacionalnog i radničkog pitanja, „ekonomska baza“ ostaje osnovna preokupacija kreacije društveno političkih struktura. Uvedeno je opšte takmičenje koje se 1946. godine pretvara u „masovan pokret, koji je obuhvatao 60 procenata radnika i službenika“23. Iako je danas teško pojmiti razmjere i karakter ovako masovne mobilizacije, ona je doista označila prekretnicu u stvaranju jugoslavenskog društva. Većinu stanovništva sačinjavalo je seosko stanovništvo dok je radništvo obuhvatalo značajno manji procenat populacije. U zemlju pristižu ograničena finansijska sredstva i robne donacije, međutim „u uslovima opustošenosti zemlje, opšte oskudice, ugašene razmene s inostranstvom — mobilizacija masa [je] bila jedino sredstvo za izvođenje obnove“24. Važan primjer je slučaj masovnog organiziranja omladine. Omladinski pokret iz rata izlazi sa naslijeđem ogromnog direktnog ratnog angažmana zahvaljujući kojem značajan broj rukovodećih pozicija zauzimaju upravo mladi. Uspostavlja se kontinuitet između borbe u ratu i obnove zemlje; obnova je „sastavni... dio one velike borbe na bojnom polju u kojoj su ginule desetine hiljada omladinaca i omladinki“. Na formalnom poslijeratnom utemeljenju omladinskog pokreta u BiH tokom prvog Kongresa Ujedinjenoga saveza antifašističke omladine Bosne i Hercegovine od 6. do 9. aprila 1945. u Sarajevu, i omladina se priključuje natjecanju. Vrhunac masovne mobilizacije omladine jesu Omladinske radne akcije koje su sve do 1988. godine postojale i kao pokret i kao organizacija – iako su zaista 22 Bilandžić, op.cit. str. 111. 23 Petranović, op.cit. str. 79 24 Bilandžić piše: „Modema radnička klasa zapravo se tek stvarala uglavnom iz redova seljaštva. Zbog njezine malobrojnosti, mladosti, pa i nedovoljne angažiranosti u oružanoj revoluciji, samo djelo velike prekretnice nije njezino neposredno djelo, već čin Komunističke partije, točnije — njezina političkog vrha. Ali radnička klasa vidjela je u tome nov revolucionarni korak koji će zaustaviti proces da ona postane puko oruđe ekonomske moći i političke vlasti birokratskotehnokratskog upravljačkog sloja, u što bi se revolucija neizbježno morala izroditi da je ostala na starim naslijeđenim idejno-teorijskim osnovama.“ Bilandžić, op.cit. str. 207.; Petranović navodi: „Za ‘samopregoran rad’ u toku takmičenja sticalo se udarničko zvanje. Tokom 1946. radno takmičenje se pretvorilo u masovan pokret, koji je obuhvatao 60% radnika i službenika. Štampa je popularisala stahanovski pokret u SSSR-u koji će u Jugoslaviji dovesti do pojave heroja rada poput Alije Sirotanovića i njegovih sledbenika. Mase radnika i seljaka, naročito omladine, davale su dobrovoljnom radu polet i širinu.“ Petranović, op.cit. str. 207. �128 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. značajno djelovale samo krajem 40tih prošlog vijeka.25 Podaci pokazuju da je do 1947. godine u radnim akcijama učestvovalo i do 85 procenata omladine. Masovni dobrovoljni angažman omladine karakterističan za prve poratne godine upućuje na produktivni susret impulsa koji poredak odašilje i uprizoruje kroz masovnu organizaciju i osjećaj da se može samo naprijed. U ovom periodu, tvrdi Petranović, „dobrovoljnost nije samo nadoknađivala finansijska sredstva i mašine nego i iskazivala nov odnos prema radu“26, što fenomen radnih akcija jasno ilustrira. Te akcije, međutim, nisu samo puki radni napor već i element antropotehnologije novog režima. One imaju poseban političko-vaspitni karakter jer „kuju i prekaljuju i izlaze iz rada novi ljudi sa novim pojmovima o radu. Stvara se jedan radni kolektiv koji se ponosi svojim radom, ono što on stvara svojim sopstvenim rukama“27. Ubrzo se, međutim, masovni dobrovoljni rad, iz prije svega tehničkih razloga i u skladu sa „tehnološkom“ paradigmom na kojoj počiva novi režim, postepeno zamjenjuje plaćenim industrijskim radom. Do 1948. godine masovni model društvenog uključivanja postaje sve manje simbolički efektan i počinje gubiti stvarnu mobilizacijsku snagu. Ipak, čak i 1949. godine, među vođstvom Partije vlada stav da samo široke narodne mase mogu biti nosioci revolucije, te Edvard Kardelj, dugogodišnji visoki funkcioner KPJ, govori: Socijalizam može da raste samo iz inicijative milionskih masa, uz pravilnu ulogu proleterske partije, odnosno najnaprednijih socijalističkih snaga. Prema tome, razvitak socijalizma ne može ići nikakvim drugim putem nego putem stalnog produbljivanja socijalističke demokratije u smislu sve veće samouprave narodnih masa, u smislu sve većeg privlačenja k radu državne mašine – od najnižeg organa da najviših, u smislu učešća upravljanja u svakom pojedinom preduzeću, ustanovi, itd.28 25 Vejzagić, Saša.The importance of Youth Labour Actions in Socialist Yugoslavia 1948-1950: The case study of the Motorway „Brotherhood-Unity“, Magistarska teza (Budapest: Central European University, 2013). 4. Činjenica je da skoro 60 godina ove organizacije (1941–1988.) ostaje još uvijek slabo istražena tema.; vidi i: Muhamed Nametak, „Uloga omladinskih radnih akcija u stvaranju socijalističkoga društva u Bosni i Hercegovini 1945. – 1952. godine“, Časopis za Savremenu Povijest 3 (2014): 437-452. 26 Petranović, op.cit. str. 81., kurziv moj 27 Erak, Zoran. ur. Tito i mladi, Beograd: Mladost, 1980., str. 19. Akcije funkcioniraju i kao neposredni prostori vaspitanja i obrazovanja, čak i u krajnje doslovno: samo tokom dvije radne akcije, Brčko – Banovići i Šamac – Sarajevo, 1946. i 1947. godine opismenjeno je gotovo 22.000 mladih. Nametak, op.cit. str. 446. 28 Kardelj, Edvard. navedeno iz govora Vladimira Bakarića na komemorativnoj sjednici iz februara 1979. u: Josip Arnautović i dr. ur. Edvard Kardelj, 1910-1979, Beograd: Novinska agencija Tanjug, �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 129 Vidimo ovdje još uvijek vrlo čvrsto artikulisanu ideju masovnog socijalizma, kao i naznake nečega što bismo mogli nazvati ideja masovne države uz donekle limitiranu ulogu partije. Razvoj je međutim ubrzo krenuo drugim pravcem: nakon transformacije 1950. godine, kada se ekonomija organizira na sve originalnijim, novouspostavljenim principima, jenjava i masovno organiziranje kao temeljni element modusa društvenog razvoja. 4. Paradigma proizvodnje Dispozitiv nikada nije homogeno polje već se konstruira ispresjecan društvenim silama koje ga potvrđuju i dovode u pitanje. Ovo je posebno vidljivo u Jugoslaviji nakon Drugog svjetskog rata. U periodu o kojem govorimo, širom Jugoslavije još uvijek su operabilne ustaške i četničke snage, ispituje se i utvđuje učešće pojedinaca u ratu, ojačava se figura naroda i tek se sklapa osnovna institucionalna struktura nove države. Druga strana ovog procesa su objektivne okolnosti unutar kojih se nastoje realizirati materijalni i simbolički ciljevi. Izgradnja jugoslavenskog socijalizma do juna 1948. godine počiva na bliskim praktičnim i teorijskim odnosima sa SSSR-om na čelu sa Staljinom. Zbog toga se rani poslijeratni period uglavnom sastojao od praktičnih aktivnosti na uspostavi sovjetskog modela sa dva osnovna elementa: državnim vlasništvom i centralnim planiranjem, što je trebalo omogućiti nizom ekonomskih i administrativnih mjera poput kontrole cijena, ograničavanja slobodne trgovine, utvrđivanja najamnina i plata, organiziranog snabdijevanja itd. Na istom se tragu 1945. godine poduzima i progresivna nacionalizacija koja počinje redistribucijom veleposjedničkih poljoprivrednih resursa i posjeda kolaboratora. Godine 1946. nacionalizira se privatni kapital u rudarstvu, industriji, bankarstvu, trgovini na veliko i saobraćaju, a kasnije i u malotrgovini i ugostiteljstvu. Planiranje je ozakonjeno Ustavom iz 1946. godine i već naredne godine se uspostavlja osnovni aparat za centralno planiranje. Godine 1947. donosi se prvi petogodišnji plan postavljen „na razinu općenarodnog patriotskog cilja“29. Eliminišući utjecaj privatnog kapitala i realiziravši prelaz na državno vlasništvo, novi poredak uspijeva ostvariti ono što se smatralo osnovom socijalističkog projekta. Inicijalni rezultati su bili vrlo dobri. Godine 1947. dostiže se, uz ogromne napore, stepen predratne 1979., str. 29. 29 Vera Katz, Društveni i ekonomski razvoj Bosne i Hercegovine 1945-1953., Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2011., str. 14. O ciljevima prvog petogodišnjeg plana vidi i: Babić, op.cit. str. 131. �130 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. proizvodnje. Kroz rast investicija i velik broj novih radnih mjesta, ubrzavaju se i podstiču masovna urbanizacija i industrijalizacija.30 Rezolucija Informbiroa od 28. juna 1948. godine temeljito protresa ideološko samopoimanje jugoslavenskog komunističkog vrha i u značajnoj mjeri utječe na transformacije društveno-ekonomskog modela. Rukovodstvo KPJ na svom V kongresu, nedugo nakon Rezolucije, još uvijek, iako zbunjeno, stoji na sovjetskoj liniji te odlučuje da na sovjetske optužbe odgovori djelima koja podrazumjevaju daljnje ubrzanje i proširenje kolektivizacije i nacionalizacije.31 Uskoro će se osjetiti i ekonomske posljedice. Raskidaju se ugovori sa SSSR-om i drugim zemljama Istočnog bloka, poništavaju se krediti i zavodi ekonomski bojkot zbog kojeg je Jugoslavija prisiljena uspostavljati nove uvozne i izvozne veze. U ovakvim uslovima, masovna mobilizacija postaje urgentna političko ekonomska strategija. Država u decembru 1948. godine uvodi sistem posebnih priznanja, „moralnih stimulacija“, te ističe simboličke figure udarnika, prvaka, heroja rada i niz drugih posebno vrijednih oblika radnog angažovanja u poljoprivredi, što je trebalo stimulisati posvećeni rad.32 Heroizam rada se tako institucionalizira kao zvanično prepoznat 30 Za investicije up. Branko Horvat, Privredni sistem i ekonomska politika Jugoslavije, Beograd: Institut ekonomskih nauka, 1970., str. 34.; Kada je u pitanju zapošljavanje, u 1945. godini radništvo obuhvata 461 000 osoba, u 1946. godini 721.000, dakle novih 260.000, u 1947. godini 1.167.000, dakle novih 446.000, u 1948. godini 1.517.000, dakle novih 350.000, a u 1949. godini 1.990.000 dakle 473.000 novih radnika i službenika. 31 Dedijer, Vladimir. Izgubljena bitka Josifa Visarionoviča Staljina, Beograd: Rad, 1978., str. 186. Kolektivizacija je usporena tek krajem 1949. godine odlukama plenuma KPJ održanog 29. i 30. decembra 1949. godine. 32 Bilandžić navodi: „Radi većeg zalaganja radnika i službenika na radnom mjestu propisima savezne vlade bilo je utvrđeno da se svaki rad pokuša normirati, pa se s tim u vezi propisima određivala i visina nagrade prema visini norme. Savezni propisi utvrdili su i sistem moralne stimulacije. Zakonom o počasnim zvanjima trudbenika od 8. prosinca 1948. godine uvode se ova počasna zvanja za radne podvige: udarnik, prvak socijalističkog rada, junak socijalističkog rada narodne republike, junak socijalističkog rada FNRJ; zaslužni zemljoradnik, zaslužni zemljoradnik zadrugar, istaknuti zemljoradnik zadrugar narodne republike, istaknuti zemljoradnik zadrugar FNRJ; a za radne kolektive: udarni kolektiv, kolektiv prvak socijalističkog rada, kolektiv prvak socijalističkog rada narodne republike, kolektiv prvak socijalističkog rada FNRJ; za zadruge: zadruga borac za visoki prinos, zaslužna zadruga, zadruga prvak narodne republike, zadruga prvak FNRJ.“ Bilandžić, op.cit. str 123. Orden junaka socijalističkog rada Zakonom o odlikovanjima (14, 11. 1955.) svrstan je u odlikovanja za građanske zasluge, kao drugi u rangu, iza Ordena Jugoslavenske velike zvijezde a ispred Ordena narodnog oslobođenja. Prema ovom zakonu Orden junaka socijalističkog rada dodjeljivao se „ ...pojedincima, vojnim jedinicama, ustanovama i privrednim i društvenim organizacijama koji izvrše izvanredne radne podvige ili pokažu druge izvanredne rezultate i time steknu osobite zasluge u oblasti privrednog, društvenog, naučnog i kulturnog razvitka zemlje“. Sadržaj i obuhvat formalnog priznanja mijenjaju se i dopunjavaju nekoliko puta do 1976. godine, nakon čega se više ne mijenjaju; vidi na: http://www.hrvatskanumizmatika.net/ �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 131 statusni stimulans. Moral, uprkos tim naporima, ipak opada. Godine 1950. zemlja je dodatno pogođena jakom sušom, što drastično smanjuje poljoprivredni prihod. Iste te godine posustaje dotadašnji ogromni rast zaposlenosti i u naredne tri godine biva zaposleno tek nešto preko 15.000 novih radnika.33 Kao odgovor na ideološki sukob i ekonomski zastoj, razvija se kritika birokratizacije i osnovnih sovjetskih ideja o odnosu vlasništva i upravljanja. Uskoro prevladava stav da se „socijalistički društveni odnosi ne mogu ostvarivati na osnovu državne svojine i državnog upravljanja privredom, jer to dovodi do birokratizacije cjelokupnog političkog sistema“34, što ubrzo postaje i programski stav Partije. Tu nalazimo osnovu revolucije u revoluciji koja će se realizirati originalnim modelom upravljanja ekonomskim poslovima. Godine 1950. se Osnovnim zakonom o upravljanju državnim preduzećima i višim privrednim udruženjima od strane radnih kolektiva postavljaju temelji samoupravljanja. Naredne godine je prvi petogodišnji plan produžen za godinu dana, ali nikada nije dovršen niti je o njemu ikada objavljen konačni izvještaj. Uskoro je „privredni sistem bio potpuno izmenjen i do kraja 1951. godine centralno planirana privreda je pripadala istoriji“35. 5. AFŽ, velika prekretnica i žensko pitanje Šta se za vrijeme ovog turbulentnog perioda dešava sa organizacijom žena? Ta organizacija se nakon formiranja, ratne 1942. godine, fokusira na organiziranje aktivistkinja čiji se zadaci uglavnom vezuju za ratne aktivnosti. AFŽ je „ponikao na bazi opšteg narodnog antifašističkog pokreta koji je organizovala i kojim je rukovodila KPJ“ i radom na vaspitanju u „duhu programa Antifašističkog fronta, hiljade i hiljade žena“ stavljaju se „u prve redove boraca protiv fašizma“36. Od 1944. godine ova organizacija usmjerava napore ka masovnom uključivanju novog članstva, čime napušta užu aktivističku orijentaciju. Tako se AFŽ, zajedno sa 33 Za tri godine prvog petogodišnjeg plana zaposleno je 1.269.000 novih radnika. Sljedeća godina donosi značajan pad. U periodu 1950—1954. godine zaposleno je samo 15.000, a u periodu 1964— 1967. godine broj zaposlenih opada sa 3.608.000 u 1964. godini na 3.561.000 u 1967. godini. Bilandžić, op.cit. str. 114; Horvat, Privredni sistem, str. 27. 34 Babić, op.cit. str. 134; Bilandžić, op.cit. str. 208. 35 Horvat, op.cit. str. 11. Novi privredni sistem ustanovljen je 1952. godine zamjenom centralnog planiranja, planiranjem tzv. „osnovnih proporcija“ (npr. stope akumulacije i raspodjele investicija), devalvacijom dinara, uvođenjem tržišnog mehanizma kao regulatora cijena u većinu proizvodno prodajnih sfera, i davanjem samostalnosti pojedinim preduzećima, što je značilo postavljanje uslova za decentralizaciju ekonomije. Nakon toga, sve do 1956. godine radiće se na osnovu godišnjih planova. 36 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Postavke o AFŽ-u’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 63/4, 1949. �132 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. drugim velikim dobrovoljnim udruženjima, priključuje masovnom dobrovoljnom pokretu i u izgradnju poratne Jugoslavije ulaže stotine hiljada sati dobrovoljnog rada. Aktivnosti i usmjerenja AFŽ-a duboko su integrisane u NF. Kata Pejnović u završnoj riječi Prvog kongresa AFŽ Hrvatske u julu 1945. godine, sažima osnovne zadatke ove organizacije (u: Sklevicky): 1) učvršćenje bratstva i jedinstva, čišćenje zemlje od ostataka fašizma, 2) učvršćenje narodne vlasti, 3) izgradnja i obnova domovine razvijanjem široke inicijative, pronalaženjem novih udarničkih načina rada, promjenom odnosa prema radu, 4) odgoj mladih naraštaja, zbrinjavanje djece, pomoć zdravstvenim službama i jugoslavenskoj armiji i 5) suzbijanje nepismenosti.37 Lydia Sklevicky prva tri cilja smješta u opšte „frontovske“ a zadnja dva označava kao specifične ženske, budući se sastoje u „socijalizaciji njihovog reproduktivnog rada“38. Ne smije, međutim, promaći činjenica da je opšte ciljeve u dužoj vremenskoj perspektivi bilo moguće postići samo ostvarenjem ženskih ciljeva: jer kako se drugačije mogla osigurati generacijska transmisija promijenjenog odnosa prema radu i pouka bratstva i jedinstva – čime je trebalo učvrstiti narodnu vlast? Tu se očituje sva kompleksnost ženskog zadatka. Valjalo je novim udarničkim radom obaviti teške specifične zadatke, zbrinuti ogromnu populaciju djece, opismeniti društvo, ali i mobilizirati mase ne gubeći iz vida temeljne vaspitne ciljeve. 5.1. Žensko pitanje i pitanje herojskog Vladimir Nazor 1944. godine izjavljuje: „Žensko pitanje za nas je riješeno“. Ilustrativna je njegova istorijska metafora tog rješenja naznačena u naslovu predavanja „Od Amazonke do partizanke“ koja ocrtava herojsku istoriju žena kao borkinja, političarki i vladarica a razrješava je u figuri partizanke. Analizirajući diskurs sa konferencije AFŽ-a u Sinju 1944. godine, Lydia Sklevicky primjećuje: „Tek sintagma ‘drugarice, žene borci’ priznaje [ženama] identitet u skladu s vlastitim zaslugama“39, ili: herojska sposobnost žene dokazana je u borbenom uključivanju u rat što, onda, svako daljnje žensko pitanje čini riješenim. Rješenje ipak, ostavlja 37 Sklevicky, op.cit., str. 97. 38 Ibid, 97. O reproduktivnom radu uopšte i o nekim njegovim savremenim karakteristikama i uvezivanjima u međunarodne procese cirkulacije kapitala i restrukturiranja radnih odnosa vidi: Federici, Silvia. Revolution at the Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Oakland: PM Press, 2012. 39 Sklevicky, op.cit. str. 50. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 133 „sumnjom netaknut, patrijarhalni predznak tradicijske kulture“ te, umjesto da se „nastoji na promjeni tradicijskih vrednota“, radi se „na njihovoj modifikaciji u odnosu na novi kontekst/povijesni trenutak“ što stvara okvir unutar kojeg se „emancipatorski naboj“, koristi „za širenje i jačanje NOP-a“40. Iako je načelni stav KPJ da je žensko pitanje riješeno, partijsko rukovodstvo smatra organizaciju žena neophodnom. U jesen 1945. godine KPJ nalaže „partijskim rukovodstvima da obrate veću pažnju na razvitak i unapređenje rada AFŽ-a“41. Poseban ženski dio zadatka stvaranja novog društva nije dat unaprijed već ga je trebalo definisati „kada utihne oružje, kada se razgrnu ruševine i sagradi novi dom“42. Ipak, prije nego što su definisani specifični zadaci, i unutar samog AFŽ-a je ispostavljen opšti poziv na udarnički rad. U pismu Centralnog odbora AFŽJ Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (od 4. juna 1945. godine) upućuje se poziv ženama da u pripremama Prvog kongresa prionu na „udarnički rad, na udarnički rad na njihovim svakodnevnim dužnostima, da pored svojih dužnosti preuzmu pred kongres još neku obavezu“43. Nema vremena za organizaciju takmičenja, ali je „baš zato potrebno... da se kroz sve organizacije, u svim mjestima, na svim poslovima, pojača aktivnost žena, koju treba produžiti i poslije kongresa“44. Na drugom kongresu AFŽ BiH Tito referira na drugarice „koje su se u ratu dobro pokazale, ali koje sada u miru ne učestvuju u javnom životu, u političkom i stvaralačkom radu za zajednicu“. Na taj se način one „otuđuju od ogromne većine naših žena koje su shvatile duh nove Jugoslavije i svoje dužnosti“. Kakav je taj duh i kakve su dužnosti? Najsažetiji odgovor daje Tito, istom prilikom, dajući napomenu koja spada u domenu radne etike: „Nikad ne može niko smatrati da je dao dovoljno od sebe za zajednicu, ako je sposoban fizički i umno za dalji rad“45. Eto direktnog poziva na herojski angažman koji u herojskom daru, najvećem mogućem daru zajednici, u daru života, uspostavlja paradigmu kojoj valja dati drugačiji sadržaj, onaj koji prevazilazi i napušta svoj izvor u herojskoj ratnoj žrtvi, te uspostavlja nešto drugačije. 40 Ibid., str. 47-51. 41 Petranović, op.cit, str.53. 42 Sklevicky, op.cit. str, 55. 43 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 1/2, 1945. 44 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH’ 45 II kongres Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije: održan u Beogradu 25, 26, 27 januara 1948. Sarajevo: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine, 1948, Kutija 6; dostupno na : http://www.afzarhiv.org/files/original/00d53e25cc67684ddcbf27af4ff8d839.pdf �134 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. Herojski rad je trebalo realizirati unutar opšteg napora cijelog društva, a u aprilu 1947. godine on dobija formu petogodišnjeg plana privrednog razvoja. Generalni ciljevi tog plana bili su: 1) savladavanje ekonomske i tehnološke zaostalosti, 2) jačanje ekonomske i vojne moći zemlje, 3) jačanje i razvijanje socijalističkog sektora privrede, 4) povećanje opšteg blagostanja naroda. Iako ovaj plan ne donosi specifično ženske zadatke, AFŽ u odnosu na njega procjenjuje sopstveni angažman opštem društvenom doprinosu. Za plan se vodi „bitka“ koja pred „organizaciju stavlja zadatak moblisanja ženske radne snage“46. Dio arhiva AFŽ-a sadrži niz izvještaja o tome kako su pojedine drugarice „ispunile“ ciljeve petogodišnjeg plana, ali i onih koji kazuju kako mnoge nisu, te kako je uvijek potrebno uraditi još više. Angažman na realizaciji ovog plana postaje okvir unutar kojeg je moguće raditi herojski. Ovo je, u skladu sa paradigmom uključivanja i u skladu sa osnovnim interpretativnim okvirom, značilo dati određeni broj dobrovoljnih radnih sati i na taj način „uštediti novac državi“. Nakon usvajanja tog plana, pronalazimo zadatake opisane i shvaćene kao eksplicitno herojske: Naše će žene poći kao čvrsto zbijena radna vojska, zbratimljene Srpkinje, muslimanke i Hrvatice u borbu za pobjedu obnove i izgradnje naše zemlje. Radeći na kulturno prosvjetnom uzdizanju širokoh masa, pomažući ostvarenje privrednog plana, ulažući najviši radni elan, mi ćemo stvoriti novi oblik heroizma, HEROIZAM RADA...47 Žene će, dakle, odlučne da urade najviše što mogu, stvoriti „novi oblik heroizma“. Riječ je o heroizmu koji nije onaj koji kao „čin“ biva pripisan jednoj ženi ili muškarcu koji mogu ponijeti orden. U pitanju je napor za zajednicu, kolektivni heroizam iza kojeg stoji masovni napor dobrovoljnog rada koji će iznuriti hiljade tijela prije nego se suoči sa činjenicom da su postavljeni ciljevi nedostižni upravo zato što su herojskih proporcija, zato što podrazumijevaju da se uvijek može raditi još više, još snažnije. Tek je u masovnom kolektivnom naporu bilo moguće proizvesti 46 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ Bosne i Hercegovine – o vođenju evidencije raspoložive ženske radne snage’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 711/1, 1947. 47 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Referat- Plenarni sastanak Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bosanski Brod’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1554/4, 1947., velika slova u originalu. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 135 nadljudsko, herojsko – jer samo je herojsko dostojno herojski umrlih heroja. Tu pronalazimo osnovnu instrukciju dispozitiva kao tehnologije društvenog: rad će preobraziti društvo, a da bi ono zaista bilo preobraženo, potrebno je raditi herojski. Konstrukcija herojske prošlosti, odnosno kontinuiteta herojskog, počinje odmah poslije rata. Godine 1945. distribuira se instrukcija o „sakupljanju materijala, konkretnih podataka, fotografija i sl.“ što svjedoči o nastojanju da se evidentira polazna tačka ujedinjenja trenutnog stanja i dotadašnjeg neposrednog ratnog angažmana žena, koji uključuje i herojsku ratnu žrtvu, ali i ‘tradicionalnu žrtvu’ zvjerstava koje je „nad ženama i djecom počinio neprijatelj“ ili „majki koje su izgubile sinove u borbi“ a koje se posebno „ističu svojim hrabrim držanjem“48. Ovakve će se aktivnosti nastaviti i kasnije, s nešto izmijenjenim naglaskom. Tako se npr. u pismu iz februara 1949. godine CO AFŽJ, u okviru priprema za osmomartovsku izložbu, od republičkog odbora za BiH traži prikupljanje podataka koji uključuju „razna dokumenta o radu žena prije rata/štrajkovi, fotografije štrajkova, proglasi i rezolucije Partije o radu sa ženama...“ kao i druge dokumente koji pokazuju tadašnji život žena u zadrugama i u drugim poljima aktivnosti49. U obraćanju na Drugom kongresu Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije, Mitra Mitrović Đilas napominje kako je sklop osobina žene artikulisan u ratu sada potrebno „dalje vaspitavati i njegovati u duhu svjesnog odnosa pram radu... u duhu radne discipline i odgovornosti, u duhu spremnosti na napore, na savlađivanje svih teškoća“. Motiv herojskog je duboko prisutan, i očita je konstrukcija prelaza od ratnog herojskog ka njegovom novom obliku: „iz tih osobina, neka poput lika naših junakinja iz rata izraste novi lik žene iz izgradnje socijalizma. Neka vaspitavanje tih osobina bude zadatak...“50 U ovom primjeru vidimo kako se veza sa ratnim herojskim održava kao konstitutivna, čime heroji i herojska imena postaju garantori ispravne socijalizacije, ne samo djece već i odraslih.51 48 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH’, 1945. 49 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH – povodom organizacije 8. martovske izložbe’ Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 6, 137/1, 1949. 50 II kongres Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije: održan u Beogradu 25, 26, 27 januara 1948.,15 51 O pitanju socijalizacije odraslih vidi: Ugo Vlaisavljević, Rat kao najveći kulturni događaj: ka semiotici etnonacionalizma, Sarajevo: Meuna-fe Publishing, 2007., posebno: 35-50. �136 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. 5.2. AFŽ u prelazu Kako je šira društveno-ekonomska transformacija čije su začetke uspostavili sukob sa Sovjetskim Savezom i otvaranje prema Zapadu, što će u godinama kasnije značajno usloviti i vanjskopolitičku poziciju i poziciju unutar internacionalnih ekonomskih odnosa,52 utjecala na AFŽ? U raspravama (1947–1948.) o AFŽ-u unutar KPJ prevladava stav o potrebi posebne ženske organizacije, ali se ističe pitanje „kako i preko kojih organizacionih formi revolucionarnu snagu žena spojiti sa snagama radničke klase i čitavog naroda u cilju njihovog potpunog oslobođenja?“53 KPJ na svom Petom kongresu definiše NF kao glavnu političku snagu, čime žensko pitanje prelazi u političku nadležnost NF, dok se u KPJ ukidaju komisije za rad sa ženama. U praksi se NF uglavnom nije posebno bavio ženskim pitanjem, što je kreiralo slobodan prostor za politički rad AFŽ-a. AFŽ se rano, zajedno sa drugim organizacijama, uključuje u opšta društvena takmičenja za izgradnju zemlje, ali se krajem 40ih sve snažije pokazuju fizičke i praktične granice udarništva. Organizacija AFŽ-a prolazi niz promjena, što narušava snagu organizacijskih struktura.54 Na sastanku AFŽ-a marta 1949. godine u Sarajevu konstatuje se da „nisu svi zadaci Narodnog fronta naši zadaci“ već da je „osnovni zadatak na izborima izvesti sve žene na izbore“. Osnovni cilj je na izbore izvesti 100 procenata žena.55 Još uvijek postoje znaci da se zadaci ove organizacije interno redefinišu, i da ponegdje među aktivnim ženama vlada nezadovoljstvo zbog toga što žena gotovo nema u organima vlasti.56 Dotadašnji rad se procjenjuje dosta kritički: „Mi smo ponizili ime aktivistkinja na trčkaralo, a 52 Za istorijsku analizu ovih procesa i njihove današnje posljedice vidi: Živković, Andreja. „From the Market…to the Market: The Debt Economy After Yugoslavia“ u Welcome to the Desert of Postsocialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia ur. Srećko Horvat, Igor Štiks. London/New York: Verso. 2015. str. 45-64. 53 Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku, Beograd: Pinkpress, 1996, str. 161. 54 Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Bosanska Gradiška Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije žena za mjesec august’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 838/1, 1947. „kada je uslijedilo fuzionisanje mjesnih Narodnih odbora, mi nismo uspjeli da fuzionišemo i Mjesne odbore AFŽ-a, tako da nam se organizacija dosta rasplinula...“ 55 Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevska oblast – najava takmičenja u čast izbora za Narodne izbore, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4/1, 1949. 56 U pismu iz septembra 1947. Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Doboj, ističe kako NF nije pomagao većem političkom aktiviranju žena i pominje nezadovoljstvo drugarica formulirano riječima „kad smo u stanju rame uz rame sa drugovima polaziti na dobrovoljne radove – onda možemo i u odbore.“ Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Doboj Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije za mjesec august’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 842/1, 1947. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 137 trebamo je izdići do uloge političkog rukovodioca“57. Eto jasnog mjerila uspješnosti rada te organizacije: žena kao politički rukovodilac. Treći kongres AFŽ-a Jugoslavije održan je u oktobru 1950. godine. Po zaključcima Kongresa, AFŽ se integriše u NF koji od tog trenutka treba rukovoditi političkim i vaspitnim radom AFŽ-a. Težište rada AFŽ-a se pomjera na uža ženska pitanja, zaštitu majki i djece, održavanje dječijih ustanova itd.58 Arhiv AFŽ-a stotinama izvještaja svjedoči o radu sekcije „majka i dijete“ i gotovo potpunoj obustavi političkog rada. Insistira se na zapošljavanju kao osnovnom uslovu ravnopravnosti. S druge strane, ogromna većina žena još uvijek živi na selu i tek su malobrojne zaposene u gradu, a i dalje je rasprostranjen konzervativni stav o uključivanju žene u industrijske proizvodne odnose.59 No, i prije artikulisanja takvih stavova, očit je značajno reduciran okvir djelovanja. Na prvom plenumu Sarajevske oblasti u februaru 1950. godine postoje samo dvije tačke dnevnog reda: 1) Pitanje izbora za skupštinu FNRJ i 2) Rad AFŽ-a na vaspitanju podmlatka, i one bivaju jednoglasno usvojene.60 Ovi primjeri organizacijskog govora sugerišu presudan utjecaj društvenih promjena na rad AFŽ-a. Pomaci ka decentralizaciji, prekidanje kolektivizacije nakon nemira 1950. godine i opšti kurs borbe protiv birokratizacije neminovno su značili i pritiske na rad i ustrojstvo organizacije žena. Sve društveno-političke organizacije redefinisale su sopstveni identitet i formu nakon što je to učinila i Partija u novembru 1952. godine, na svom Šestom kongresu, promijenivši ime u Savez komunista Jugoslavije, i tako se udaljivši od klasične centralizovane partije sovjetskog tipa. Tokom kongresa je „preciznije određena nova koncepcija KPJ [...] odbačen put što je vodio u državni socijalizam, a prihvaćena borba za izgradnju samoupravnog društva u Jugoslaviji“. Tada se još uvijek insistira na radu na ženskoj emancipaciji. Zastupajući takav stav, Tito ističe potrebu napuštanja zastarjelog gledanja na društvenu ulogu žene. U januaru naredne godine NF mijenja ime u Socijalistički savez radnog naroda, čime socijalističko radništvo potiskuje narod na kraj reda predstavljanja.61 57 Glavni odbor AFŽ, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja rukovodioca reonskih odbora AFŽ-a grada Sarajeva - 3031. mart, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 6, 776/6, 1949. 58 Božinović, op.cit. str. 162. 59 Ibid. str. 154. 60 Oblasni odbor AFŽ, ‘I Plenum AFŽ-a Sarajevske oblasti održan 22.02.1950.godine - zapisnik’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 422/1, 1950. 61 Božinović, op.cit. str. 166-167. Drugim riječima narod je, mnogo prije nego što je to zvanično potvrđeno Ustavom iz 1974. godine, zamijenjen radnim čovjekom, jedinim pravim subjektom socijalističkog projekta; up. Zaharijević, op.cit. str. 75. �138 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. Tu kritika postaje puno izraženija. NF zastupa stav „da AFŽ nije dovoljno brzo menjao svoj sadržaj i metode rada, da su radni ljudi brzim tempom izrastali u graditelje socijalizma“ što je za posljedicu imalo to da je „poseban politički rad sa ženama ili postao izlišan, ili je tražio bitne izmene“62. NF nije tražio ukidanje AFŽ-a ali je smatrao da, u skladu sa opštim društveno-ekonomskim promjenama, i AFŽ mora poduzeti mjere u smjeru decentralizacije. Na Četvrtom kongresu AFŽ-a, Milovan Đilas, tada član Politbiroa CK KPJ, zastupa stav da je – zbog promijenjenih okolnosti – postojanje te organizacije nepoželjno. Na tom tragu, i samo rukovodstvo AFŽ-a zastupa stanovište da je AFŽ „postao kočnica za rad među ženama“ i da „su nužne promene u organizaciji samih žena, kao i u organizaciji i formama političkog rada među njima“. U skladu s tim se donosi i zaključak po kojem bi posebna organizacija: „izdvajala žene iz zajedničkih napora u rešavanju društvenih problema, podržavalo pogrešno mišljenje o tome da je pitanje položaja žene nekakvo odvojeno žensko pitanje, a ne pitanje naše društvene zajednice, pitanje svih boraca za socijalizam“63. AFŽ se na temelju ovih zaključaka ukida i formalno transformiše u Savez ženskih društava. Velika je promjena semantičkog sadržaja: odstranjeni su front i antifašizam – znakovi ženskog učešća u narodnoj revoluciji. Iako je socijalizam „zvanično uveden“ u ime osnovne društvene organizacije, čak ni za njega nije bilo mjesta u imenu organizacije koja je formalno naslijedila AFŽ. Bio je to i stvarni i simbolički kraj onoga što je AFŽ predstavljao.64 AFŽ, kao i centralno planiranje nekoliko godina ranije, odlazi u istoriju. Jedna era je završena. Kakve su bile reakcije u bazi? Malo je izvora koji o tome nešto otkrivaju. Neda Božinović navodi da su dugo nakon ukidanja AFŽ-a „žene, naročito na selu, često rukovodećim ženama prebacivale ‘što ukidoste naš AFŽ’“ jer je to ponovo presložilo odnose s muškim dijelom populacije koji je „likovao“ i „govorili su im: „dosta je vašeg bilo!“; ili: „gotovo je, gotovo!”; ili: „nema više!“ Muškarci su imali „svoje kafane, fudbal, pa i Narodni front“ a nestala je inicijativa koja je okupljala žene „željne... da štogod čuju i da razgovaraju o svojim ženskim stvarima“65. 62 Božinović, op.cit. str. 165. 63 Ibid. 64 Vera Katz sažima evoluciju rada organizacije: „relativno mala grupa komunista uspela da temeljnim radom na terenu i u ratnim uslovima, a za vrlo kratko vreme, ubedi velike mase žena da potpomognu partizanski rat, kako bi posle rata dobile nova prava. Program je u potpunosti uspeo, toliko da je žensko političko organizovanje već posle nekoliko godina postalo opasnost za komuniste, i AFŽ je rasformiran. Posle toga, ideološki obrat je preživeo neobičnu kombinaciju potrošačkog i patrijarhalnog modela nametnutog ženama, ali dobar deo obećanih prava je preživeo.”; vidi: Vera Katz, „O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953.“ Prilozi 40 (2011), str. 138. 65 Božinović, op.cit, str. 170. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 139 Ovo ukazuje na poseban karakter gubitka kojeg je značio kraj ove organizacije. Poznato je da je glavnina AFŽ-ovog rada bila usmjerena na rad po selima, posebno u BiH koja dugo nakon rata ostaje dominantno ruralna sredina. AFŽ je na selu bez sumnje predstavljao avangardni prostor koji je po prvi put u cijeloj (ženskoj) istoriji ovih prostora ponudio mogućnost da se zamisli nešto kao kolektivni ženski politički subjekt koji se formira kroz „okupljanje“ i razgovor o „svojim“ stvarima. Jednom kada je izgubljen ovaj prostor okupljanja koji je bio i otvaranje polja mogućnosti, nestalo je i mjesto govora kao kreativne mogućnosti samodefinicije kolektivne akcije. 6. Rad, heroizam i žensko pitanje hiljadu godina kasnije Problemi praktične i tehničke organizacije ustrojstva sistema samoupravljačke proizvodnje i potrošnje postaće i trajni izazov cijelom jugoslavenskom socijalističkom projektu. Kulminaciju ovog avangardnog procesa predstavlja Zakon o udruženom radu kojim je dispozitiv trebao dobiti svoj definitivan pravni izraz. U ovom su periodu mnogi „iskreno verovali da će samoupravna transformacija dovesti do ‘Republike udruženog rada’“66. Ivan Stojanović smatra da se radilo o mitologizaciji koja je u zakonodavstvu o radu vidjela „programe epohe i budućnosti a ne zakone kojima je nužno regulisati ponašanje društvenih i privrednih subjekata u današnjici“ što je dovelo do toga da „hipernormativizam“ i „hiperinstitucionalizam“ eliminišu osnovu samoupravljanja, „samoinicijativu i samoorganizaciju ljudi i njihovih kolektiva“67. Tako i formu koju žensko organiziranje uzima nakon rata treba vidjeti kao pokušaj da se u jednom specifičnom istorijskom trenutku na urgentni zahtjev organiziranja društva odgovori formulom koja će reformulisati i radne i rodne odnose. U najranijim fazama izgradnje socijalizma, AFŽ se, isto kao i druge organizacije koje su bile dio NOP-a, uspostavlja kao element široke, sveopšte borbe na čijem čelu stoji KPJ. U postratnom dobu, u prvi plan dolazi njihova vaspitna uloga. Na temeljima masovnog društvenog mobiliziranja, suočena sa zahtjevom herojstva, ženska masovna organizacija preuzima opštu obrazovno vaspitnu ulogu ali i generalni zadatak organiziranja rada sa ženama. Neki materijali upućuju na posebnu dimenziju autonomije koja nije pripadala organizaciji kao strukturi odbora već ženama koje su uz pomoć organizacije kreirale prostor koji je omogućio, ako ne istinsku emancipaciju, onda barem krhke osnove da se krene putem emancipacije. Ovo je sigurno jedna od najdalekosežnijih posljedica raspuštanja 66 Petranović, op.cit. str. 468. 67 Stojanović, Ivan. Kuda i kako dalje? Zapisi o odnosima i protivrečnostima ekonomije i politike, Beograd: Ekonomika, 1989. str. 15-16. �140 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. organizacije, jer time nestaje otvoreni prostor političkog organiziranja žena koje je sadržavalo mogućnost dvostrukog oslobađanja. Raspuštanjem te organizacije nestali su jedno moguće polje i jedna moguća forma ženskog djelovanja. Djelomični uvid u ovu istorijsku eru ženskog pokreta može pomoći jasnijem sagledavanju zamršene mreže instrukcija u kojoj se nalaze današnje radne i rodne politike. Herojsko će još dugo ostati važan označitelj socijalizma. Bilo bi potrebno slijediti njegovu konstrukciju i nakon 1953. godine i opisati prelaz od masovnog herojstva, sasvim očekivan iz ugla tehnološke paradigme socijalizma, kao i teorijske evolucije njegovih nositelja i vođa, na narednu formu herojskog u kojoj je kolektivni napor masa zamijenjen biotehnološkim radom samoupravnih preduzeća i korporacija.68 Trebalo bi vidjeti da li se i kako u ovom prelazu nastoji održati veza sa originalnim herojskim činjenjem, na što upućuju fabrike i institucije nazvane imenima narodnih heroja, što opet upućuje na nastojanje da se materijalni pomak i prelaz homogenizira unutar identičnog horizonta. Moguće je pretpostaviti i da je heroizam trebao osigurati vezivno tkivo između herojskog vojnika i vojnikinja i herojskog masa i modernih industrijskih kolektiva. Ostaje pitanje do kada i kako ovo ulančavanje ostaje efektivno. Vezivanje heroja vojnika i socijalističkog heroizma upućuje na to da socijalizam druge Jugoslavije nije uspio herojsko emanciprati od vojničko-ratničke figure. Herojska figura koja će dočekati raspad Jugoslavije bila je već potrošena. U određenom smislu, u industrijskom heroizmu, na kraju cijele sekvence, dostojni herojskog postaju oni samoupravni kolektivi koji „zapošljavaju i uspješno posluju“. Tu smo pred potpuno transfiguriranom slikom individualnih heroja čije činjene i čin nisu više neposredno u njihovim rukama, već se herojska namjera mora prilagoditi silama tržišta, uspjesima ili neuspjesima u tržištom takmičenju. I ova je figura danas stvar daleke prošlosti, uspješne firme su cijenjene, ali ne kao kolektivni projekti stotina i hiljada radnika i radnica već kao demonstracije vizije i preduzimljivosti vlasnika i menadžera. Heroji konstruisani nakon krvavog i zamršenog raspada ponovo su isključivo heroji rata, poraza i pobjeda na bojnom polju, nikako na polju agrikulture ili industruje. Kraj Jugoslavije je donio sveopštu privatizaciju radnih i proizvodnih odnosa, privatizaciju vlasništva i upravljanja, izvedenu kao usvajanje i institucionaliziranje, uslovno rečeno, zapadnog modela, i taj proces još uvijek traje. Ovu transformaciju je pratila (i nastavlja da prati) 68 Osim ovog najvišeg priznanja, krajem 1968. uspostavljen je i Orden rada sa crvenom zastavom koji će do kraja 1980. godine zaslužiti 245 kolektiva, koji obuhvataju nastavne, školske i istraživačke institucije, ali i industrijska samoupravna preduzeća kao i građevinska preduzeća; vidi: Heroji rada Jugoslavije, Beograd: Zavod za informacione sisteme, 1981., str. 4. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 141 diskurzivna nadgradnja koja rad kao sredstvo proizvodnje društva reinterpretira u rad kao disciplinsku tehnika tijela, i mehanizam kojim se pojedinačno transformišemo u kapital i prilagođavamo promjenama uslova i sredstava rada, ponudi i potražnji, te organizacijskim inovacijama. Može li se onda u ovakvim okolnostima, makar i u grubim crtama, naznačiti nekakva nova herojska figura; i kakav bi to herojski rad obuhvatalo? Radni kolektivi su sve manje izvori ponosa i dinamični elementi identiteta, a sve više prezrena mjesta svakodnevne eksploatacije (ukoliko nisu nekadašnji giganti čije je rasparčavanje i uništavanje ostavilo ne samo materijalnu bijedu i propast nego i složene identitetne posljedice koje tek valja analizirati). Nema sumnje da se herojsko, ono koje može ponuditi odgovor na urgentne izazove sadašnjice koji prijete da kroz ljudsko djelovanje i sumanutu ekonomsku utrku iscrpe ne samo živote već i uslove za život, mora kreirati kroz kolektivni napor – za koji nam nedostaju i ime i format. Tu se otkriva sva težina zadatka koji stoji pred svima koji sanjaju oslobođenje. Oslobođenje nesumnjivo mora obuhvatiti i oslobođenje žena, koje možda jedino može omogućiti da se imenuje i povede projekat univerzalnog oslobođenja. Ime i opis jednog takvog projekta, zajedno sa obrisima nove herojske figure mogu, parafrazirajući poznate Marksove riječi, doći samo iz budućnosti, ali kolektivni napor budućnosti otvoren samo kao suočavanje sa silama sadašnjosti. Arhivska građa: Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Postavke o AFŽ-u’, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 63/4, 1949. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 1/2, 1945. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH› 1945. II kongres Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije : održan u Beogradu 25, 26, 27 januara 1948. Sarajevo: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 6, 1948.; dostupno na : http://www.afzarhiv.org/files/original/00d53e25cc67684ddcbf27af4ff8d839.pdf Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ Bosne i Hercegovine – o vođenju evidencije raspoložive ženske radne snage›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 711/1, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Referat- Plenarni sastanak Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bosanski Brod›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 3, 1554/4, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Pismo Centralnog odbora AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH›, 1945. �142 BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ HEROIZAM RADA ANTIFAŠISTIČKI FRONT ŽENA I SOCIJALISTIČKI DISPOZITIV 1945.–1953. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ BiH – povodom organizacije 8. martovske izložbe› Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 6, 137/1, 1949.  Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‹Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Bosanska Gradiška Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije žena za mjesec august›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 838/1, 1947. Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo,  Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevska oblast – najava takmičenja u čast izbora za Narodne izbore, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 4/1, 1949. Glavni odbor AFŽ, ‘Sreski odbor AFŽ-a Doboj Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a – izvještaj o radu organizacije za mjesec august›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 2, 842/1, 1947.   Glavni odbor AFŽ, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja rukovodioca reonskih odbora AFŽ-a grada Sarajeva - 30-31. mart, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 6, 776/6, 1949. Oblasni odbor AFŽ, ‹I Plenum AFŽ-a Sarajevske oblasti održan 22.02.1950.godine zapisnik›, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 8, 422/1, 1950. Bibliografija: Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Preveli David Kishik i Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Arnautović, Josip i dr. ur. Edvard Kardelj, 1910-1979. Beograd: Novinska agencija Tanjug, 1979. Babić, Nikola. Na putevima revolucije. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1972. Badiou, Alain. Philosiphy for Militants. New York/London: Verso, 2012. Bilandžić, Dušan. Historija Socijalističke Federativne Republiike Jugoslavije – Glavni procesi 1918. – 1985. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1985. Božinović, Neda. Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku. Beograd: Pinkpress, 1996. Bussolini, Jeffrey. „What is a Dispositive?“ Foucault Studies 10 (2010) 85-107. Čupulo, Dalibor. „Razvoj političkog i pravnog sistema Jugoslavije u poslijeratnom periodu (1945-1968) – Pristup istraživanju i literatura“. Povijesni prilozi 7:1 (1988): 203—248 Dedijer, Vladimir. Izgubljena bitka Josifa Visarionoviča Staljina. Beograd: Rad, 1978. Erak, Zoran. ur. Tito i mladi. Beograd: Mladost, 1980. Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Uredio: Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, 2012. Fuko, Mišel. Volja za znanjem – Istorija seksualnosti I. Prevela Jelena Stakić. Loznica: Karpos, 2006. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 143 Kecman, Milorad. ur. Heroji rada Jugoslavije. Beograd: Zavod za informacione sisteme, 1981. Horvat, Branko. Privredni sistem i ekonomska politika Jugoslavije. Beograd: Institut ekonomskih nauka, 1970. Katz, Vera. Društveni i ekonomski razvoj Bosne i Hercegovine 1945-1953. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2011. Katz, Vera. „O društvenom položaju žene u Bosni i Hercegovini 1942.-1953“, Prilozi 40 (2011), 135-155. Jancar-Webster, Brabara. Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941 – 1945. Denver: Arden Press, 1990. Nametak, Muhamed. „Uloga omladinskih radnih akcija u stvaranju socijalističkoga društva u Bosni i Hercegovini 1945. – 1952. godine“, Časopis za savremenu povijest 3 (2014): 437-452. Pasquinelli, Matteo. „What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault, Canguilhem, and Goldstein.“ Parrhesia Journal 22 (2015) 79-89. Dostupno na: www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia22/parrhesia22_pasquinelli.pdf Petranović, Branko. Istorija Jugoslavije 1918 – 1988 - Treća knjiga: Socijalistička Jugoslavija 1945 – 1988. Beograd: Nolit, 1988. Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi. Odabrala i priredila Dunja Rihtman Auguštin. Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996. Slapšak, Svetlana. „Balkanske žene: Rod epistemologija i istorijska antropologija“ u Rod i nauka. Uredili Jasminka Babić-Avdispahić, Jasna Bakšić Muftić i Ugo Vlaisavljević, 57-73. Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2009. Stojanović, Ivan. Kuda i kako dalje? Zapisi o odnosima i protivrečnostima ekonomije i politike. Beograd: Ekonomika, 1989. Vejzagić, Saša. The importance of Youth Labour Actions in Socialist Yugoslavia (1948-1950): The case study of the Motorway „Brotherhood-Unity.“ Magistarski rad. Budimpešta: Central European University, 2013. Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Lepoglava i univerzitet – Ogledi iz političke epistemologije. Sarajevo: Centar za interdisciplinarne postdiplomske studije, 2003. Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Rat kao najveći kulturni događaj: ka semiotici etnonacionalizma. Sarajevo: Meuna-fe Publishing, 2007. Zaharijević, Adriana. „Fusnota u globalnoj istoriji: Kako se može čitati istorija jugoslavenskog feminizma?“ Sociologija, Vol. 57:1 (2015), 72-89. Živković, Andreja. „From the Market…to the Market: The Debt Economy after Yugoslavia“ u Welcome to the Desert of Post-socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. Uredili Srećko Horvat i Štiks, Igor. 45-64. London/New York: Verso, 2015. ��SUNITA FIŠIĆ Crteži tušem ��OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-a TIJANA OKIĆ �148 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A Ali vi, kad najzad dođe vrijeme Da čovjek čovjeku bude drug, Spomenite se nas S trpeljivošću Brecht 1. Uvod ili početak nakon kraja historije: misliti AFŽ opet i iznova Misliti Antifašistički front žena danas, 74 godine nakon njegova formiranja i 63 godine od njegove „disolucije”, zahtijeva mnogo više od prostog poznavanja (arhivskih) činjenica. Premda činjenice ne možemo i ne smijemo zanemariti, naša je dužnost staviti ih najprije u njihov, a potom i naš historijski kontekst. No, koja je veza između ova dva konteksta i trebamo li ustrajavati na njoj insistirajući na političkim kontinuitetima? O kojim i kakvim kontinuitetima bi uopće bila riječ? Nije li ono što naše vrijeme razlikuje od vremena AFŽ-a upravo navodno zatvaranje revolucionarnog horizonta, ruptura u historijskom pamćenju iskazana u raznim ideologijama tranzicije i kraja historije? U takvom odnosu snaga, misliti AFŽ značilo bi u ovim novim okolnostima starim jezikom ispisati i nanovo imaginirati mogućnosti djelovanja unutar kojeg bismo, za početak, sami ponovno mogli misliti svoju vlastitu historiju. I baš zbog toga ćemo krenuti od pitanja koje postavlja Daniel Bensaïd: „kakvu politiku zamišljati bez historije… i kakvu historiju zamišljati bez političke imaginacije mogućeg?”1 Ako politike nema bez historije, onda ni historije nema bez politike, a između njih je otvoren upravo prostor mogućeg. Kako ustati i opstati nakon iskustva poraza koje je navodni kraj historije postavio kao početak i kraj svakog mišljenja o mogućem utopije i/ili strategije? Suvremena historiografija, na valu historijskog revizionizma koji traje već više od pedeset godina, sasvim rutinski minimizira i negira svako iskustvo u kojem postoji i minimum političkog otpora dominantnoj revizionističkoj slici slijeda i događaja. I upravo tu se otvaraju problemska mjesta o kojima u ovom tekstu želim govoriti u odnosu na historiju Antifašističkog fronta žena u Jugoslaviji i danas. Drugim riječima, da bismo izbjegli monumentalno i antikvarno2 viđenje vlastite historije, Jugoslaviju moramo misliti kritički, što znači da kao feministice moramo pisati 1 Bensaïd, Daniel. Éloge de la politique profane. Pariz: Albin Michel, 2008. str. 355 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. O koristi i šteti istorije za život. Beograd: Grafos, 1977. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 149 o prvoj i drugoj smrti AFŽ-a. Pisati o dvije smrti ne znači suočiti se sa prošlošću, kako bi to današnji revizionisti htjeli – niti znači zarobiti se u prošlost budući da je naš odnos sa prošlošću uvijek ‘ukotvljen’ mjestom, vremenom pa (foucaultovski govoreći) i tijelom iz kojeg pišemo: dakle posredovan je i akumuliranim i iskustvom-interpretacijom prošlosti i bremenom sadašnjosti. Pisati o dvije smrti AFŽ-a naprosto znači ne čitati prošlost iz rezigniranosti sadašnjeg trenutka – iz jada i bijede tranzicije koje u prošlost učitavaju želju da u njoj uslijed siromaštva sadašnjosti vide bolje sutra – nego iz budućnosti sutrašnjice. Ovako čitati AFŽovsku prošlost znači ne odreći joj njen oslobodilački karakter i ne oduzeti mu utopijski impuls. Znači prepoznati ga, sakupiti ga, i upravo s njim djelovati iz sadašnjosti koja gleda u budućnost. Eppur si muove, unatoč represiji, beznađu i siromaštvu. Sljedeće stranice ispisujem u uvjerenju da je trag koji nam valja slijediti upravo ‘princip nada’. Parafrazirajući upravo Ernsta Blocha, arhiv AFŽ-a želim čitati kao simultanost ne-simultanog (Ungleichzeitigkeit). No, ovakvo čitanje sa sobom nosi i određene posljedice. Ono, naime, nužno mora krenuti od analize kontradikcijā inherentnih jugoslavenskom poimanju tzv. ženskog pitanja kako bi uopće moglo doći do problemā i kontradikcijā danas. U tom smislu, bauk koji kruži ovim radom jest bauk marksizma. Sve naše analize na ljevici/ljevicama postjugoslavenskog prostora slavno su propale u pokušaju da na Jugoslaviju primijene osnovne marksističke kategorije proizvodnje i reprodukcije, dok smo istovremeno naučeni na taksativno nabrajanje institucija države blagostanja kao da one predstavljaju socijalizaciju obitelji i svakodnevnog života, ne naglašavajući da to nije ista stvar. I još važnije: ne naglašavamo da se za te usluge plaćalo upravo temeljem proizvodnje vrijednosti na tržištu, i to dvostruko: plaćali su ih radnice i radnici kao serviseri tržišta. Disoluciju AFŽ-a zato treba posmatrati kao neuspjeh Jugoslavije da uspostavi socijalistički-komunistički društveni poredak, unatoč proklamiranju socijalizma kao vladajuće i noseće ideje društva. Prva smrt AFŽ-a dogodila se već u Jugoslaviji, ne samo njegovim formalnim ‘samoukidanjem’ 1953. godine, nego mnogo ranije, već 1944. godine, kako sugerira Lydija Sklevicky. Druga smrt dogodila se nakon 1989. godine pod najezdom vala historijskog revizionizma unutar kojeg se ženska historija nanovo mogla ispisati/izbrisati samo ‘izmišljanjem tradicije’ u kojoj nije bilo i nema mjesta ni za figuru AFŽ-ovke ni za figuru partizanke. Ljevica kao početno mjesto svog historijskog razumijevanja ne bi smjela uzimati postavke koje nameće historijski revizionizam. Ona ne smije biti obrnuta slika revizionizma. Zbog toga Enzo Traverso navodi da moramo odbiti „iskušenje… određenih komunista, historičara i politologa [riječ je o D. Losurdu] koji preokreću nolteovsku [Ernst Nolte] revizionističku shemu i staljinizam predstavljaju kao �150 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A proizvod teške fašističke prijetnje: pretjeran i žaljenja vrijedan, kriminalan u svojim krajnjim ishodima, ali najzad deriviran i reaktivan3.  U tom smislu i Daniela Bensaïd nas upozorava da moramo odbiti juridičku (tribunalizacijsku) funkciju historije, ali ne i odreći se donošenja (historijskog) suda.4 Ovaj esej je uvelike inspiriran posljednjom knjigom Darka Suvina „Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije”, uz dva važna dodatka: prvi je da ovaj rad kreće upravo tamo gdje je Suvin stao – od pitanja organizacije i položaja žena. Dijelim Suvinov stav da je „postojao snažan emancipacijski smisao – iako uvijek ugrožavan, a kasnije izdan”5. Drugi je da ovu izdaju smještam nešto ranije no Suvin. Uz to, ništa manje važno, želim naglasiti i to da se oslanjam na pionirske studije o radu i djelovanju AFŽ-a čije su autorice Lydija Sklevicky, Gordana Stojaković i Renata Jambrešić-Kirin. Riječ je o ženama koje su na ovom polju napravile neke od najvažnijih koraka, i ovaj rad je prilog kritici koju su one započele. Mnogi dijelovi ovog rada sadrže neizrecive poticaje došle iz čitanja njihovih radova. Čitajući ih, došla sam do zaključka da se u velikim i važnim dijelovima historija različitih republičkih AFŽ-ova može uzimati pars pro toto. Zbog toga u svome radu fokus stavljam na druge elemente koji su preko njihovih čitanja otvorili prostor za moje. Čitaoce upućujem na njihov rad ukoliko žele naučiti nešto o vlastitoj (ženskoj) historiji. U radu ću pokušati pratiti historiju i disoluciju AFŽ-a kroz tri poglavlja. Za pokušaj razumijevanja historije, a potom i disolucije tj. navodnog samoukidanja AFŽ-a, važna su tri pitanja: a) historijski zaborav nekih političkih kontinuiteta, posebice na ljevici; b) odnos privatno-javno u poratnoj Jugoslaviji; c) problem tržišnih reformi i odnosa između proizvodnje, subsistencije i reprodukcije u odnosu na pitanje obitelji i kućanstva. Kada je riječ o obitelji, moja razmišljanja o patrijarhatu polaze od Görana Therborna6 i njegovog razumijevanja patrijarhata i dinamike obiteljskih odnosa. On naime pokazuje da obitelj za sebe i po sebi ne posjeduje nikakvu unutarnju dinamiku promjene sve dok na nju ne utječu izvanjski faktori. O tim izvanjskim faktorima je riječ u ovom radu. 3 Traverso, Enzo, De l’anticommunisme. L’histoire du xxe siècle relue par Nolte, Furet et Courtois, L’Homme et la société 2001/2: 169-194., str.189. 4 Bensaïd, Daniel, Qui est le juge? Pour en finir avec le tribunal de l’Histoire. Paris: Fayard, 1999. str. 127 5 Suvin, Darko, Samo jednom se ljubi. Radiografija SFR Jugoslavije. Beograd: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014., str. 23 6 Therborn, Göran, Between Sex and Power, Family in the World 1900-2000. London: Routledge, 2004. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 151 2. O prehistoriji AFŽ-a Pokušaji da se AFŽ misli historijski nerijetko su obilježeni upravo nedostatkom historijske svijesti. AFŽ je uglavnom, posebice na ljevici, portretiran kao organizacija koja nastaje 1942. godine bez ikakvih prethodnih utjecaja, kao nešto sui generis. Takvo promatranje AFŽ-a dio je sveopćeg historijskog zaborava – u posebno upitnoj formi prisutnog na postjugoslavenskoj ljevici – gdje se prošlosti sjećamo ili selektivno ili reaktivno. Historijski zaborav ima pogubne posljedice. Jedna od najpogubnijih jest ahistorijsko shvaćanje o tome šta se događalo sa ženskim pitanjem i položajem žena u prvoj, a potom i u drugoj Jugoslaviji. Imajući u vidu to da AFŽ jest bio jedinstvena i nikad prije viđena organizacija na području Jugoslavije, no ni u kojem slučaju prvi ženski revolucionarni pokret, potrebno se sjetiti zaboravljenih i zabranjenih uzora. Minimum historijske svijesti i intelektualnog poštenja nalažu da ne zaboravimo djelovanje KPJ između dva svjetska rata, ali ni djelovanje ženskih građanskih udruga i pokreta koji su prethodili AFŽ-u. To je nužno kako ne bismo dopustili da „vlastitu istoriju čitamo kao pogrešnu fusnotu”7. Ne čitati „vlastitu istoriju kao pogrešnu fusnotu” u slučaju AFŽ-a znači govoriti o nekim kontinuitetima ženskog organiziranja. Upravo bih zbog toga, potpuno svjesna opasnosti analize koja se oslanja na analogiju, željela ponuditi i jednu moguću historijsku analogiju. Kroz nju ću, onoliko koliko dopušta, u drugom dijelu ovog poglavlja pratiti razvoj AFŽ-a ukazujući na neke bitne razlike u odnosu na sovjetski Ženotdel i time, ako ništa drugo, otvoriti prostor za buduća istraživanja i razmišljanja. Cilj ovog poglavlja jest upravo da protiv historijskog zaborava postavi teorijski okvir8 koji formiranje AFŽ-a promatra kao konačni rezultat najmanje tri izvora, struje i tendencije koje su mu prethodile. Riječ je prvenstveno o ženskom organiziranju unutar socijalističke, a potom i komunističke partije Jugoslavije, o ženskim i feminističkim pokretima između dva svjetska rata, o omladinskim sekcijama ženskih pokreta koje su odigrale ključnu ulogu u kasnijoj frontovskoj politici KPJ i, konačno, o Ženotdelu kao zabranjenom uzoru. 7 Adriana Zaharijević, Fusnota u globalnoj istoriji: kako se može čitati istorija jugoslovenskog feminizma. „Sociologija Vol. LVII : 72-89, 2015. str. 86 8 Ovaj okvir je nezamisliv bez radova Jovanke Kecman, Nede Božinović, Lidije Sklevicky, Gordane Stojaković �152 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A 2.1. Žensko organiziranje u radničkom pokretu Ženske sekcije u komunističkom pokretu, njihove metode i ciljevi rada direktno su naslijeđe Druge internacionale (Socijalistička internacionala 1889–1916.) i posebno odlučne uloge Klare Zetkin u nametanju prakse ženske organizacije SPD-a na cijelu Internacionalu. Klara Zetkin je zaslužna za dvije fundamentalne inovacije.9 Prva nije vezana samo uz pitanja politike, nego i organizacije: žensko pitanje ne može biti odvojeno od klasnog. Drugo je još važnije: ideja da su žene, premda eksploatirane kao radnice, podvrgnute specifičnoj formi opresije koja podrazumijeva i specifične historijski uvjetovane metode organizacije i političkog djelovanja žena i radnica. Nakon rezolucija Druge internacionale, sve socijalističke (tada su nosile ime socijal-demokratske) partije morale su u svoj rad inkorporirati ženske komitete, odbore, te izdavati časopise koji se bave ženama i ženskim pitanjem. Tako je, dugi niz godina prije formalnog osnivanja AFŽ-a, i djelovanje socijalističkog pokreta u regiji – pa i KPJ – bilo usmjereno na organiziranje žena i osnivanje ženskih sekcija i komiteta. Iako malobrojne, socijalistkinje (i komunistkinje) organizirale su akcije unutar svojih redova. Tako je u martu 1919. godine Pokrajinski sekretarijat žena socijalista (socijal-demokrata) Bosne i Hercegovine organizirao analfabetske i druge tečajeve namijenjene ženama10. U aprilu iste godine uslijedio je Kongres ujedinjenja Socijalističke radničke partije Jugoslavije (komunista) održan u Beogradu, gdje je izabran Centralni sekretarijata žena socijalista-komunista. U statutu je rečeno da sekretarijat „sebe smatra kao dio partijske cjeline… [i] isključuje svaku zasebnu organizaciju žena, a smatra se tehničkim-izvršnim odborom u agitaciji i organizaciji žena”11. Odnos sekretarijata žena sa Centralnim partijskim vijećem bio je takav da „prema instrukcijama Centralnog partijskog veća SRPJ (k) Centralni sekretarijat žena socijalistakomunista daje direktive za celokupni rad žena”12. Teze o „međunarodnom komunističkom pokretu žena”, usvojene 1920. godine na Drugom kongresu Kominterne (Komunistička internacionala, 1919–1943.), kasnije usvojene i unutar KPJ, ne predstavljaju bitniju inovaciju već postojeće socijalističke prakse, osim možda utoliko što eksplicitnije zahtijevaju uključivanje žena kao ravnopravnih članova 9 Ono što slijedi je moje čitanje članaka Klare Zetkin sabranih u zborniku Clara Zetkin, Selected Writings, New York: International Publishers. Ur. Philip S. Foner, predgovor Angel Davies. Ajli Demiragić zahvaljujem na ovoj knjizi. 10 Kecman, Jovanka, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918-1941. Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1978. str. 93 11 Istorijski arhiv KPJ, tom 2, Kongresi i Zemaljske konferencije KPJ 1919-1937. Beograd: Istorijsko odeljenje CK KPJ, 1949. str. 24-26 12 Ibid., str. 25. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 153 u rad komunističkih partija i drugih proleterskih organizacija. Ovaj kontinuitet otjelovljuje Klara Zetkin koja je bila sekretar Međunarodnog ženskog biroa Druge internacionale a 1920. godine postala sekretar Međunarodnog ženskog sekretarijata Komunističke internacionale. Drugi dio statuta žena socijalista-komunista, donesenog na istom Kongresu 1919. godine, navodi rad s mladeži kao jedan od specijalnih zadatka ženskog pokreta: „jer su žene prirodom svojom najpozvanije i najkompetentnije za taj rad… a taj rad se treba odvijati prema modernim pedagoškim načelima, a sa čisto praktičnog gledišta na cjelokupno vaspitanje”13. Svrha ovog rada bila je pripremanje mladeži da budu „odani članovi proleterskog pokreta”14. U to vrijeme je rijetko koji socijalistički pokret dovodio u pitanje fundamentalnu i primarnu društvenu i socijalnu ulogu žena, odnosno ulogu žena kao majki i primarnih njegovateljica odgovornih za odgoj i uzdizanje novih generacija. Kasnije ćemo vidjeti da Tito, poput Staljina, insistira na tome da je primarni zadatak „nove žene” vezan uz njenu specifičnu biološku funkciju majke, ali ćemo vidjeti i kako avangarda boljševičke revolucije Alexandra Kollontai ustvrđuje da socijalistička revolucija mora prerasti u seksualnu revoluciju. Misliti AFŽ historijski omogućava nam da još jednom ispitamo različite modele ženske emancipacije na ljevici, imajući u vidu i važnost za nas danas. S jedne strane, model ekonomske emancipacije koji slijedi liniju argumentacije da će ekonomska neovisnost nužno, matematičkom progresijom, rezultirati emancipacijom žena kroz nadničarski rad. S druge strane, model Aleksandre Kollontai i Ženotdela za koje socijalizacija socijalne brige nije prvi preduvjet za ulazak žena u nadničarski rad, nego se smatra ciljem po sebi, jednim od ciljeva komunizma kao samoupravljanja direktnih proizvođača. Dok su vođe, od Tita preko Vide Tomšič do Mitre Mitrović i Cane Babović, također afirmirali određeni kontinuitet rada među ženama kao temelj za kasnije aktivnosti AFŽ-a, sa historijske točke gledišta važno je insistirati i na određenim rupturama. Potrebno je razlikovati periode djelovanja i političke perspektive koje su ih uvjetovale. U revolucionarnom periodu, tj. periodu bolnog „rađanja” Kraljevine SHS obilježenog štrajkovima, seljačkim ustancima i nacionalnim gerilskim otporom Beogradu, fokus KPJ bio je isključivo organiziranje radnih žena. Nakon tzv. Obznane od 30.12.1920. godine, rad KPJ postaje ilegalan odnosno polu-legalan, a rad među ženama prebačen je u sindikalne organizacije. Od 30ih godina postoji tendencija proširivanja utjecaja na masovne organizacije poput ženskih pokreta. Definitivnim nametanjem Kominternine politike narodnog 13 Ibid. str. 26 14 Ibid., �154 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A fronta u borbi protiv fašizma iz 1935. godine, nastaje konačna ruptura.15 Otada sudjelovanje i ulazak u ženske buržoaske organizacije, radi formiranja posebnih (frontovskih) organizacija, postaje polazište i model za stvaranje sveklasnog ženskog saveza u progresivnoj borbi za jednakost žena, protiv rata i fašizma. Takav pristup predstavlja raskid s modelom Klare Zetkin koja je odbijala bilo kakvu suradnju radničkog pokreta i buržoaskog feminizma u borbi za npr. pravo glasa, građanska prava i jednakost, kao i sa njenim protivljenjem stvaranja zasebne vanpartijske ženske organizacije. Na ovom primjeru možemo vidjeti kako se jugoslavenski komunistički pokret preoblikovao po uzoru na staljinističke modele u kretanju koje je borbu za emancipaciju žena ograničilo na demokratsku fazu u kojoj je jedini i ključni zadatak bio poraz fašizma i obrana Sovjetskog Saveza. Od početka Drugog svjetskog rata borba za ostvarenje demokratske perspektive nacionalnog oslobođenja i jednakost žena susreću se s političkim problemom, odnosno barijerom: savezom između Staljina i saveznika. I premda ovdje ne možemo detaljno raspravljati o ovoj politici, bitno je istaknuti da su Jugoslavija i Kina bile jedine države u kojima su revolucionarne i demokratske snage uspjele prevazići ove barijere, ujediniti narod u antifašističkoj borbi protiv starog poretka (ancien régime) i otvoriti perspektivu društvene revolucije. Od revolucionarne Španjolske, preko francuskog narodnog fronta, do talijanskog i grčkog pokreta otpora, slijepa poslušnost Staljinovom diktatu značila je sunovrat revolucije. Historijski bismo također trebali uzeti u obzir postojanje paradoksalne i kreativne sinteze i obogaćivanja buržoaskog feminizma i jugoslavenskog komunizma kao organizacijskog, moralnog i političkog preduvjeta za jedan od najvećih masovnih pokreta ikada viđenih na našim prostorima: AFŽ. 2.2. “Odabrane srodnosti”: ženski pokret i komunizam u Kraljevini Feminističke i ženske građanske grupe pokrenule su neke od prvih kampanjā za opismenjavanje žena, analfabetske tečajeve, radile na podizanju svijesti o ženskom pitanju i pravima, bavile se i propagandnim radom kroz izdavaštvo novina. Od 20-ih pa do kraja 30-ih godina XX stoljeća jedna od najvažnijih ženskih i feminističkih organizacija u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji bila je Feministička alijansa, koja 1926. godine mijenja ime u Alijansa ženskih pokreta16. Gordana Stojaković u tekstu „Crtica o feminističkoj istoriji grada Zagreba 1919-1940”17 navodi imena svih važnih predstavnica feminističkih i ženskih pokreta koje su osobnim zalaga15 Sklevicky, Žene Hrvatske u NOB-u 16 Kecman, Božinović, Stojaković 17 Tekst dostupan na: http://pravonarad.info/?p=350 �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 155 njem i agitacijom napravile prve korake za izlazak žena iz sfere privatnog i nevidljivog u sferu javnog. Iako je riječ o ženama iz bogatijih obitelji, pismenim, često i fakultetski obrazovanim, njihovi su zahtjevi bili usmjereni na jednakost svih žena. Neda Božinović, jedna od aktivistkinja AFŽ-a Srbije u knjizi „Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku” svjesno nastoji naglasiti i potvrditi naslijeđe predratnog ženskog pokreta koji ju je formirao: [...] još od vremena kada sam pre Drugog svetskog rata prišla ženskom pokretu impresionirale su me žene koje su začinjale i razvijale ženski pokret. Ne manje osećanja gajim prema ženama svoje generacije koje su, naročito u ratu, ne štedeći sebe, pa ni svoje živote, dale svoj puni doprinos za ostvarenje fundamentalnih pretpostavki ženskog oslobođenja. Moje duboko ubeđenje je da su žene svih generacija, u svom vremenu sa svim njegovim i svojim vlastitim ograničenjima, uradile što je bilo moguće. Ovaj rad je... pokušaj da se na jednom mestu prikaže istorija pokreta žena u Srbiji, da se ukaže i na napore i upornost samih žena da doprinesu promenama, da menjaju svoj status, na podršku i osporavanja koje su u tome imale. Jer, one su umnogom zaboravljene – o njima istorija malo piše.18 Zbog toga nije dovoljno samo ustvrditi da se moraju razumjeti historijski kontekst i sva ograničenja i prepreke s kojima su se feministice susretale da bismo shvatili koliko su njihovi zahtjevi bili progresivni. Bila je potrebna revolucija i još dvadeset godina kako bi se ovi zahtjevi ispunili, i to ne u potpunosti. Neda Božinović potvrđuje da su feministički programi međuratnog perioda u SFRJ ne samo bili prihvaćeni nego su se zakonska rješenja SFRJ formulirala na osnovu tih programa sve do sredine 60-ih godina.19 Potrebno je ukazati na dva najvažnija doprinosa (inovacije) feminističkog i ženskog pokreta koji su za kasniji razvoj ženskog pitanja bili od presudne važnosti. Jedan od najvažnijih ispostavljenih zahtjeva bio je promjena građanskog zakonika i ujedinjavanje pravnih propisa važećih u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji. Naime, danas se često zaboravlja da u toj Kraljevini nije postojao jedinstven pravni sustav. U časopisu Alijanse Ženski pokret navodi se da u Jugoslaviji postoji šest pravnih područja na kojima važe različiti propisi građanskog zakonika.20 Ali svima su im bili zajednički podređeni položaj žene i potpuna fizička i materijalna ovisnost 18 Ženski pokret, januar februar, 1937. str. 5-6, zahvaljuem Gordani Stojaković na proslijeđivanju dva broja ovog časopisa. 19 Božinović, str. 262 20 Ženski pokret, januar februar, 1937. str. 6-15. �156 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A žene o muškim članovima obitelji. Alijansa je iznijela dva najvažnija prijedloga rješenja akata građanskog zakonika: a) nadležnost sekularnih, građanskih sudova u pogledu svih predmeta, ukidanje očinske i muževljeve vlasti, b) priznanju jednakog prava ženama da raspolažu sobom i imovinom, uvođenje stečene imovine, jednako pravo na nasljeđivanje. Drugi element se odnosi na socijalno zakonodavstvo za koje je Alijansa ponudila sljedeća rješenja: [d]a poslodavci vode strogu kontrolu o izvođenju zabrane noćnog rada za žene, o radu žena pre i posle porođaja, da se staraju o tome da poslodavci otvaraju dečja skloništa prema zakonskoj obavezi, u kojima će nadzor voditi stručno žensko osoblje; da vode računa o higijenskim uslovima rada, naročito o ispravnoj ventilaciji, osnivanju kuhinja, umivaonica, odvojenih za muške i ženske, garderobama itd; da se postigne što efikasnija zaštita materinstva za žene uposlene u industriji, zanatima, kućanstvu i poljoprivredi predlažemo: da se proširi zakon o osiguranju radnika i na poljoprivredno radništvo; da se uspostave propisi zakona o osiguranju radnika iz godine 1922 u pogledu roka osiguranja za sticanje prava na pomoć o porođaju, trajanja porodiljske zaštite, potpore za porođaje, opreme za dete i potpore za dojenje… 21 Alijansa ženskih pokreta iznijela je i zahtjev za uvođenjem ženskih radnih inspektora kako bi se osiguralo sprovođenje gore navedenih zahtjeva i već postojećih zakona. Iste zahtjeve nalazimo i u socijalističkom ženskom časopisu Jednakost (Die Gleichheit, 1892–1923.) koji je uređivala Klara Zetkin. Tvrdnja Lidije Sklevicky da je AFŽ „bio i ostao jedinim legitimnim nasljednikom ovog pokreta”22 slaže se sa tvrdnjom Nede Božinović. Premda se mnoštvo tekstova bavi narativima ženskih pokreta, istaknutim figurama, rezolucijama ili opisima organizacija, do sada nije napisana nijedna sveobuhvatna socijalna historija žena u Kraljevini. U odsustvu takve historije, želim istaknuti nekoliko važnih elemenata. Pojava i proliferacija istaknutih i važnih ženskih pokreta, od onih lijevo orijentiranih do religijskih i dobrotvornih, rezultat je onoga što bismo Blochovim rječnikom mogli nazvati simultanost nesimultanosti ili još jednostavnije, Lenjinovim riječima, nejednakim razvojem. I dok su žene u pogledu prava u suštini ostale malodobne i nezrele, podređene autoritetu najprije starijih muškaraca a potom i sinova, dok je svaka druga žena bila nepismena, period između dva svjetska rata je ipak, prema Veri Erlich, bio 21 Ibid. 22 Sklevicky, str. 81 �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 157 period „kriznog vremena... opšteg nemira i konflikta u porodici”23. Tradiconalne forme patrijarhalne obitelji (zadruga i višegeneracijsko domaćinstvo) sve više su se raspadale – no ne i u Makedoniji i među muslimanskim stanovništvom – a novčana privreda je sve više prodirala u poljoprivredu. Očevi više nisu mogli zapovijedati na isti način, a odnosi među mladim muškarcima i ženama rapidno su se mijenjali i postajali slobodniji. Žene sa sela gubile su stvarnu zaštitu patrijarhalnih običaja i našle se između patrijarhalnog pravnog poretka s jedne i neograničene slobode eksploatacije tržišta s druge strane. Trendovi zapošljavanja ženske radne snage, koji su u stvarnosti često značili zamjenu muške radne snage ženskom i dječjom, bili su uvjetovani ne samo smrću dijela muške populacije u Prvom svjetskom ratu nego i ratom izazvanim naglim demografskim promjenama. Tako je primjerice 1921. godine 40% stanovništva Kraljevine Jugoslavije bilo mlađe od 14 godina.24 Uz to je na ionako osiromašenom selu nastavljena fragmentacija zemljišnih posjeda, što seosko stanovništvo prisiljava da sve više traži dodatne izvore prihoda. Rastuća klasa radnika-seljaka, odnosno ženska i dječja radna snaga, predstavlja rezervnu armiju nezaposlenih, što poslodavcima omogućuje da smanje cijenu rada i nadnica. Brisanjem granica između pozadine i fronta, nova era totalnog rata dovodi u pitanje i rodne granice između privatnog i javnog. Tako su žene tokom Prvog svjetskog rata zbog odsustva muškaraca zauzele važne društvene funkcije koje (barem u gradovima) uspijevaju zadržati čak i u periodu demobilizacije.25 U gradovima su, pod utjecajem zapadnjačkih trendova, žene pohađale škole, univerzitete i borile se za veća politička prava. Na univerzitetima je bilo oko 20% ženske populacije koja se, pod snažnim utjecajem liberalnih i socijalističkih ideja o jednakosti spolova, okreće protiv dvostrukog seksualnog morala. Nije se radilo samo o odbijanju zastarjelih običaja, nego o tome da su „diktatura i njene reakcionarne snage… sprovele prema ženama svoje nazadne mere i zapretile im novim oduzimanjem i ono malo stečenih prava”26. Upravo su gore navedeni procesi u osvit rata omogućili i uvjetovali i formiranje jezgra KPJ i kadra AFŽ-a. Taj kadar je činila mlada grupa seoskih učiteljica i radnica 23 Erlich, Vera S. „Das Erschütternd Gleichgewicht in der Familie, aus eine Jugoslawischen Studie” Citirano u: Holm Sundhausen, Historija Srbije od 19. do 21. veka. str. 296. Beograd: Clio, 2009. 24 Čalić, Žanin-Mari., Socijalna istorija Srbije 1815-1941. Beograd: Clio, 2004. str. 253-254. 25 Čalić, Žanin-Mari. Historija Jugoslavije u XX veku. Beograd: Clio, 2013, 123. 26 Bilten „Ženski pokret kroz omladinsku sekciju”, izveštaj br. 2. Januar 1940, u: ur. Cvetić, Bosa, Žene Srbije u NOB-i, str. 56-9. �158 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A koje su, stekavši u gradu obrazovanje odnosno radničko iskustvo, donosile natrag u sela slobodarske i progresivne ideje, te buržoaska univerzitetski obrazovana omladina koja se pod utjecajem komunističkih ideala, u turgenjevskoj drami majki i kćeri sukobila s „gospođama“ iz feminističkog pokreta. Tako se sredinom 30-ih godina prošlog stoljeća nova generacija mladih žena, studentica i radnica pridružuje postojećim ženskim i feminističkim organizacijama. Povezujući pitanja jednakosti s borbom protiv rata i fašizma, omladinske sekcije su uspjele feministički pokret povezati sa antifašističkim. U borbi za pravo glasa 1939. godine, u Srbiji se primjerice dogodilo to da je „po prvi puta jedan široki društveni pokret prihvatio ideju da se sloboda i demokracija mogu odnositi na potlačenu polovinu društva: žene”27. Nekadašnje pripadnice omladinskih sekcija ženskog pokreta, pokreta Univerzitetski obrazovanih žena i drugih članica ženskih organizacija sudjelovale su u pripremama za oružanu pobunu 1941. godine i spontano osnovale ženske antifašističke komisije – prethodnice AFŽ-a. Godine 1939. u maju se održava Zemaljsko savjetovanje KPJ na kojem se u osvit rata raspravlja o uključivanju žena kao ravnopravnih članova u rad Partije i drugih proleterskih organizacija, a što je Partija imala u planu puna dva desetljeća ranije. Tito, strahujući da će mobilizacija i represija desetkovati partijsko vodstvo, vidi u ženama potencijalne kadrove koji su „klasnom neprijatelju nepoznati”. Upravo iz toga proizlazi ideja da „ne sme biti ni jednog foruma bez ženskih članova. Ako je većina kadrova do sada podcenjivala važnost uvlačenja žena u KP – onda sada moraju postati svesni činjenice da je stvaranje ženskih partijskih kadrova naš najvažniji organizacioni zadatak”28. Muški članovi Partije bili su kritizirani što na rad sa ženama gledaju kao na ženski rad, ali kada se vodstvo ženskog pokreta, suočeno s ratom i prijetnjom represije povuklo iz političke borbe, još veći problem postaje feminizam. Na partijskom kongresu 1940. godine Vida Tomšič izjavljuje: „[f]eminizam postavlja zajedničke zahtjeve žena sviju slojeva odijeljeno od zahtjeva radnog naroda. Naglašavanjem zajedničkih ženskih zahtjeva u suprotnosti i u borbi protiv muškaraca feminizam sakriva klasnu osnovu ženskog pitanja, te time odvraća masu žena od borbe protiv kapitalizma kao i protiv klasnog društva uopće”29. Isto ovo, i s jednakim pravom, mogla je reći i Klara Zetkin oko 1890. godine. No, KP u tom trenutku vodi politiku u okviru narodnog fronta i zapravo ne povezuje opća demokratska pitanja sa borbom protiv kapitala budući da govorimo o vremenu demokratskog antifašističkog saveza. 27 Božinović, Neda, Položaj Žene u Srbiji u XiX i XX veku, Beograd: Žene u crnom, 1996. str. 260 28 Tito, 1939, objavljeno u: Proleter, br. 1-2, januar-februar, 1940, str. 6.
 29 Vida Tomšič, citirano u: Šoljan Marija, ur. Žene Hrvatske u NOB-u, Vol I, str. 1-8. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 159 2.3. AFŽ kao revolucionarni pokret Prema službenim brojkama, dva je miliona žena sudjelovalo u NOB-u: ta brojka čini najveći ženski organizirani pokret u Drugom svjetskom ratu. Borilo se 100.000 žena (partizanki) a njih 2.000 su dobile vojni čin. 25.000 partizanki je ubijeno, a preko 40.000 ranjeno u borbi. Dodamo li ovome stravične slike fašističkog terora i genocida, međunacionalne masakre kojima su orkestrirale kolaboracionističke snage i totalni kolaps društvenog i ekonomskog života, postignuća AFŽ-a, u principu organiziranog pokreta masa seljanki, vrijedan je najmanje dubokog naklona. Širenjem oslobođenih teritorija, od početka ustanka bivaju uspostavljani Narodno oslobodilačka vojska (NOV) i organizirani izbori u Narodnooslobodilački odbori (NOO) u kojima su mogli glasati svi punoljetni građani, bez obzira na religiju, spol ili nacionalnost. Pravo glasa žena nastalo je u borbi i iz borbe za novu vlast. AFŽ je mobilizirao žene za prve istinski slobodne i jednake izbore ikada viđene na tlu Jugoslavije, te ohrabrivao žene da se i same kandidiraju. U samoj BiH je do kraja rata u seoske i mjesne odbore NOO-a bilo izabrano 3.000 žena. No, kao i u KPJ, u više organe vlasti izabrano je mnogo manje žena nego muškaraca. U revolucionarnu vlast BiH (ZAVNOBiH) izabrano je samo pet žena, četiri puta manje nego u njegov hrvatski ekvivalent – ZAVNOH, budući da je AFŽ u Hrvatskoj bio daleko najjači i najorganiziraniji. Na historijskom zasijedanju Antifašističkog vijeća narodnog oslobođenja (AVNOJ), gdje su se narodnooslobodilački odbori proglasili legitimnom i suverenom vladom Jugoslavije, sjedila je samo jedna žena – Kata Pejnović, predsjednica Izvršnog odbora AFŽ-a, izabrana u Predsjedništvo AVNOJ-a. Na drugom Zasijedanju AVNOJ-a, u Bihaću, žene su činile 4% ukupnog članstva, a u Predsjedništvo su izabrane samo dvije – Spasenija Cana Babović i Maca Gržetić, obje članice Izvršnog odbora AFŽ-a. Jedan od prvih osnivačkih dokumenata AFŽ-a kojima se precizira cilj i način djelovanja, jest Okružnica broj 4. Centralnog komiteta komunističke partije Hrvatske iz 1941. godine gdje se govori o osnivanju AFŽ-a i njegovoj ulozi „u cilju aktiviziranja i povezivanja širokih slojeva žena i njihovog uvlačenja u narodnodnooslobodilačku borbu bez obzira na njihovu političku, nacionalnu i vjersku pripadnost”. Ovim dokumentom je po prvi put skicirana buduća organizacijska struktura AFŽ-a koja je, poput partijske, bila teritorijalna i izborna, i penjala se od nižih kvartovskih, gradskih, oblasnih i sreskih do Glavnog odbora; bila je centralizirana, a niži odbori su bili podređeni višim. Prvobitni zadatak AFŽ-a bio je da osigura potporu partizanskim odredima, a sam AFŽ je ušao u sastav �160 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A Narodnooslobodilačkog fronta.30 Na listi političkih ciljeva i zadataka AFŽ-a pojavila se i borba za jednakost među spolovima, što je trebalo postati drugim centralnim pitanjem djelovanja AFŽ-a. Na prvom Zemaljskom kongresu AFŽ-a u Bosanskom Petrovcu, vezu sa prijašnjim aktivnostima AFŽ-a potvrđuje Titovo obraćanje: „[n]a koncu bih htio da kažem još to da je Antifašistički front žena, koji postoji već odavno, a sada je dobio i svoju organizacionu formu, jedna od organizacija koja je ponikla odozdo….”31. O tome da AFŽ jest ženska organizacija, ali ne odvojena od drugih, svjedoče druga dva važna dokumenta prvog Zemaljskog kongresa AFŽ-a. Riječ je o referatima Cane Babović i Mitre Mitrović, tajnice omladisnke sekcije ženskog pokreta i jedne od glavnih ženskih figura Partije.32 One se također osvrću na rad u predratnim godinama, potvrđujući da je formiranje AFŽ-a rezultat dugogodišnjeg rada i borbe žena Jugoslavije za pravedniji svijet. Oba referata bi trebalo čitati kao programatska, posebno zbog činjenice da je AFŽ svoj statut usvojio mnogo kasnije, kao i zbog činjenice da se KPJ u oba referata spominje kao nosilac borbe protiv fašizma, a za jednakost svih. Isticanje važnosti KPJ predstavlja suptilan odmak od politike narodnog fronta, čime se ponovno potvrđuje gore navedeni podatak da je KPJ istovremeno slijedila (za što također nalazimo primjere u referatima) ali i odstupala od trvrde linije narodnog fronta. KPJ je od početka razumijevala da (parafrazirajući referat Mitre Mitrović) vodi borbu i rat u kojima se briše razlika između pozadine i fronta. Više nije bilo moguće front smatrati muškim, a pozadinu ženskom. Stoga ustanak naroda nije mogao bez podrške žena i apsolutne mobilizacije prerasti u općenarodnu borbu i pobunu. Žene je bilo potrebno mobilizirati za borbu ali, još važnije, za pozadinski rad od kojeg je ovisilo snadbijevanje vojske, narodnog fronta, prenošenje poruka i uopće komunikacija viših i nižih komiteta KP, kao i odbora AFŽ-a. Veliki problem u tom smislu predstavljalo je seljaštvo. Budući da je seljaštvo činilo većinu stanovništva, cilj daljnjeg toka borbi počivao je upravo na stupnju mobilizacije seljaka u partizanske redove. Jednako važna bila je i proklamacija jednakosti muškaraca i žena, obećanje bolje budućnosti i socijalne pravde na kojem je počivao cijeli revolucionarni podvig: rušenje starog i stvaranje novog. 30 Žene Hrvatske u NOB-u, Vol I, str. 57. 31 Tito ženama Jugoslavije, dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/92 32 Cana Babović, Organizaciono pitanje AFŽ-a, dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/231, Mitra Mitrović, Antifašistički pokret žena u okviru narodno-oslobodilačke-borbe dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/232; svi naglasci su moji �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 161 Borba partizana naslanjala se na gerilske strategije ali i na lokalne tradicije hajduka i uskoka, Prvog i Drugog Srpskog Ustanka (1804–1817.), seljačke pobune protiv Otomanskog carstva u BiH 19. stoljeća, ženske revolucionarne vojne komitete VMRO-a koji su sudjelovali u Ilindanskom ustanku 1903. godine, ženske gerilske borce crnogorskog otpora autrougarskoj okupaciji od 1916. do 1918. godine, kao i ustaničke pobune protiv ranijih okupatora. Milovan Đilas, primjerice, navodi da je Partija svjesno koristila „drevne tradicije i mitove“ da bi predstavila NOB kao nastavak „vjekovne borbe naših slobodoljubivih naroda”33. Analiza Jelene Batinić34 pokazuje kako je KPJ figuru nove žene stvarala povezujući je s epskim figurama južnoslavenskog folklora. Partizanska ženstvenost počivala je na dva stuba: plemenite junakinje koja svoju čast i vrijednost (odnosno jednakost) dokazuje u bitkama, i majke koja poziva na osvetu svoje mrtve djece. Oličenje ove potonje bila je Kata Pejnović, u narodu poznata kao „majka Kata“, koja je na osvetu pozvala na Prvoj Zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ-a. Prva figura porediva je s ulogom mladih seljanki kao borkinja i bolničarki, a druga s pozadinskom ulogom starijih seljanki, majki koje su obavljale tradicionalne ženske poslove. Zajedno su među seljaštvom imale ogroman mobilizacijski potencijal budući da su sadržavale elemente tradicije, što je utjecalo na buđenje patriotskih osjećanja i stupanje u borbu. Ove figure nove žene naslovnica prvog broja časopisa Žena u borbi slikom ujedinjuje u ženu koja jednom rukom drži dijete, a drugom pušku. Spajajući tradicionalno sa novim i modernim, KPJ čini sasvim legitiman korak kojim stvara upravo uvjet mogućnosti za revolucionarni prevrat. Iako ni ustaše ni četnici nisu zanemarivali važnost žena, u njihovim prikazima žene su i dalje bile nejednake i vezivane uz crkvu, kuću i djecu.35 Načinivši jasnu razliku u odnosu na poimanje žena, KPJ osigurava stratešku prednost nad okupatorskim i kolaboracionističkim snagama. U svojem referatu o organizacijskim pitanjima AFŽ-a, Cana Babović podcrtava da je borba koju vodi i koju će voditi AFŽ – borba KPJ, stoga se kao glavni zadatak pokreta uopće zahtijevalo „potpuno obezbeđenje naše vojske”. Cana Babović u svom referatu oštro napada „buržoaske” feminističke pokrete kako bi pokazala da je cilj jednakosti podređen općim ciljevima NOB-a. 33 Djilas, Milovan, Wartime. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. str. 227. 34 Batinić, Jelena. Women and Yugosav Partisans. A history of World War II Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 35 O ulozi i mjestu žena u ustaškom pokretu vidjeti više u radovima: Bitunjac Martina, Le donne e il movimento ustascia. Rim: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2013.Renata Jambrešić-Kirin i Senjković Reana, Puno puta bi vas bili... Narodna umjetnost, 42/2, 2005, str. 109-126 �162 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A Drugi važan zadatak AFŽ-a bilo je izdavanje časopisa koji je trebao služiti za mobilizaciju žena, a time i kao pomoć vojsci. Časopisi su trebali služiti i za političko uzdizanje žene, što je također navedeno kao jedan od ciljeva organizacije. Unutarpartijski dokumenti, kao i dokumenti Arhiva, ponavljaju da mnoge žene, čak i aktivistice AFŽ-a ne samo da ne razumiju svoju ulogu u NOB-u, nego ne razumiju niti da se borba vodi za njihovu jednakost. Samo političkim uzdizanjem žena bilo je moguće osigurati da sve žene shvate važnost borbe i nužnost okupljanja svih antifašistkinja (bez obzira na klasu, religiju i nacionalnost) u borbi protiv fašizma. Kako bi se podigla „politička svijest” najprije je trebalo iskorijeniti masovnu nepismenost, tako su na oslobođenim teritorijama partijski kadrovi koji su vodili i AFŽ odmah pokretali analfabetske tečajeve, tečajeve o higijeni, domaćinstvu i političkim ciljevima NOB-a. Treći važan element rada AFŽ-a bio je rad na oslobođenoj teritoriji s ciljem učvršćivanja narodne vlasti i podržavanja narodnih odbora. Govoreći o oslobođenoj teritoriji i važnosti upostave narodne vlasti, Mitra Mitrović u svom referatu navodi da se već „sada na oslobođenoj teritoriji podižu dečiji domovi”. Jedna od zanimljivosti njenog referata jest i prikaz načina na koji su se žene transformirale u borbi i kroz borbu – zauzimajući istu poziciju kao i muškarci. Žene uključene u narodnooslobodilačku borbu ponosno su isticale kako su zauzele muško mjesto i u borbi dokazivale svoje „junaštvo, hrabrost i sposobnost”. I dok je jedan od nesumnjivo najvažnijih doprinosa bio taj da je u kriznom trenutku omogućeno da „transgresijom tradicionalnih rodnih uloga” žena – kao partizanka – uopće stupi u poredak političkog, ovo stupanje u borbu za pravednije društvo u svojoj suštini nije dovelo u pitanje rodne odnose i norme nego ih je ponavljalo i perpetuiralo (što potvrđuju i referati Cane Babović i Mitre Mitrović). Iako je strategija KPJ uvelike ovisila o uspjehu uvođenja žena u pokret i borbu, mobilizacija žena u AFŽ koegzistirala je sa tradicionalnim shvaćanjima, a žene koje su doprinosile partizanskoj borbi činile su to u pravilu obavljanjem tradicionalno ženskih zadataka i poslova: čišćenjem, pranjem, njegovanjem i brigom za druge. Rad AFŽ-a tako se od početka formira isključivo kao ženski rad koji u velikoj mjeri počiva na tradicionalnom modelu koji ističe „žensku” prirodu i „ženske” kvalitete. I dok je u ratu taj strateški ustupak partizanima donio prevagu a ženama omogućio da se potvrde i kao revolucionarni subjekti, u poratnom periodu kontradikcije rodnih uloga zadobijaju drugačiju putanju. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 163 Problemi u radu AFŽ-a pojavili su se već u njegovoj prvoj fazi. Iako Lydija Sklevicky36 o prvoj fazi djelovanja AFŽ-a govori kao o fazi autonomnosti, pozivajući se na referat Mitre Mitrović sa Prvog zemaljskog zasijedanja AFŽ-a, ja u referatu Mitre Mitrović ne pronalazim dokaze za to. Prije će biti da je Lydija Sklevicky zamijenila referate Cane Babović i Mitre Mitrović, jer u referatu Cane Babović eksplicitno stoji „da će Centralni odbor nastojati da se naše organizacije vremenom osamostale”. Čitanjem arhivskih dokumenata utvrdila sam da je ipak sve ostalo na nastojanju. AFŽ nikada nije bio niti postao autonomna organizacija. Rad AFŽ-a je od početka bio subordiniran djelovanju NF, a NF je bio direktno podređen KPJ. Premda je AFŽ imao ograničenu operativnu autonomiju, nikada nije imao potpunu organizacijsku autonomiju. Operativna autonomija je bila izraženija na okupiranom teritoriju, budući da je protok informacija od CK KPJ i NF do odbora AFŽ-a stizao mnogo teže, što je značilo da su odbornice AFŽ-a same morale pronalaziti načine djelovanja. Stoga i na ljevici ponavljane tvrdnje o autonomiji AFŽ-a smatram potpuno neopravdanim, što pokazuje i mnoštvo dokumenata Arhiva. Pripisivati AFŽ-u autonomiju koju nikada nije imao zapravo znači ne historizirati ga, nego ga mitoligizirati. Glavni cilj mita o autonomiji jest legitimirati liberalne teze drugog vala feminizma koji tvrdi da bi ženski pokret trebao biti politički i organizacijski neovisno od ljevice.37 Iz ovakvog viđenja proizlazi metafizički dualizam koji Lidiju Sklevicky vodi ka postavljanju teze o pretežno herojskoj fazi AFŽ-a i pretežno dijaboličkoj fazi podređenosti Partiji koja kulminira disolucijom AFŽ-a 1953. godine. Sve i da ovo uzmemo kao istinito, to ne objašnjava ograničenja ženske emancipacije za vrijeme i poslije rata. Teza o autonomiji na taj način u suštini zamagljuje centralni politički ulog tj. pitanje političke strategije u odnosu na ciljeve revolucije i značenje emancipacije: konflikt između modela ekonomske emancipacije i abolicije (komunističkog ukidanja) obitelji, klase i države o kojima će biti riječi kasnije. Direktivno pismo CK KPJ iz januara 1944. godine prvi je korak ka još većoj centralizaciji AFŽ-a potvrđenoj i na V Kongresu KPJ kada se događa druga preraspodjela zadataka između NF-a i AFŽ-a, kad AFŽ postaje izvršni organ NF-a i više se ne stara o političkom uzdizanju žena. Arhiv svjedoči i o problemima nakon završetka rata. Izvještaji u više navrata spominju da žene funkcionera i članova NF-a ni na koji način ne sudjeluju u radu AFŽ-a.38 To je mnogim ženama 36 Sklevicky, žene Hrvatske u NOB-i, str. 108. 37 O čemu govori i Lilijana Burcar, više u: Burcar Lilijana, Restavracija kapitalizma: repatriarhalizacija družbe, str. 113-142, Ljubljana, Sophia, 2015. Lilijani Burcar se zahvaljujem jer mi je poslala svoju poticajnu knjigu koja predstavlja do sada jedini pokušaj objašnjenja položaja žena u tranziciji. 38 Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Dopis sreskog odbor AFŽ-a Velika Kladuša, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, �164 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A predstavljalo problem, a nekima i znak da ni one ne bi trebale sudjelovati u radu odbora. Jednako se tako navodi i da drugovi ne daju drugaricama da pohađaju tečajeve, ili pak da žene funkcionera „s ponosom ističu” da ne žele raditi u organizaciji.39 Nećemo pogriješili ako kažemo da je usred revolucije i sama ideja da su žene jednake muškarcima predstavljala revoluciju. Sama ideja je već od samih početaka nailazila na otpor, i upravo su zbog toga žene morale iznalaziti načine da dokažu da nisu zaostale i glupe. Sve to se odražavalo i na rad AFŽ-a. Trideset godina kasnije, Dušanka Kovačević, jedna od centralnih figura AFŽ-a BiH, to opisuje ovako: žene su …okrećući leđa tradiciji koja je sputavala njihove snage, moralno, fizički i psihološki postale drukčije, ne u smislu da su sticale osobine muškaraca kako se to često misli, nego su postajale ono što je bilo potrebno slobodi naroda i revoluciji. U revoluciji su žene i djevojke našle mjesto što je važnije od lične sudbine zapisane u istoriji žene, ali su nagonski tražile izraz iz sudbine svojih majki i baba. Prvi put u istoriji, valjda, žena je izgrađivala svoj sopstveni ideal žene, nezavisno od toga kakvu ženu želi muškarac. Taj ideal gradila je mjerilima revolucije i pobjede nad neprijateljem. Vrijednost kao što su odanost narodu, hrabrost, znanje, preduzmljivost potiskivale su stara mjerila koja su od žene tražila poslušnost, nemiješanje u muške poslove, zatvorenost u kući, itd. Muškarci su se manje mijenjali. Mnogi od njih su prihvatili tu novu ženu, drugaricu, kao nužnu, ali i prolaznu ratnu pojavu, dio surove ratne stvarnosti.40 No, čitavoj je arhivskoj građi zajedničko to da se borba KPJ gotovo ne povezuje s borbom protiv kapitalizma, što ima veze sa već spomenutim strateškim revolucionarnim pitanjem. To je umnogome odredilo reakciju koja je bitno uvjetovala kasniju politiku KPJ. Činjenica da je program KPJ od 1935. godine balansirao između nezavisne revolucionarne politike i politika narodnog fronta proizvela je dva značajna rezultata: s jedne strane je revolucionarna politika osigurala Kutija 2, 901/47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Zapisnik sa savjetovanja predsjednica i sekretara sreskih odbora AFŽ održan u Sarajevu 20.1.1949. godine”, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 7a, ? 1949., Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, “Zapisnik s pleuma za oblast Bihać” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, br. dok. ?, 1950… 39 Primjerice: Glavni dobor AFŽ BiH, “Zapisnik plenarnog sastanka Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a održan 26.9.1948. godine” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 84/48, 1948. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, “Zapisnik Plenarnog sastanka AFŽ-a u Bihaću održanog u prostorijama u vjećnici G.N.O dana 9.2.1950. godine, str. 2. Arhiv Bosne i Hrecegovine, Kutija 9, 1061/5, 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, “Zapisnik sa sastanka sekretarijata Oblasnog odbora za oblast sarajevsku koji se održaje 10.1.1950. godine”, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 1053/4, 1950. 40 Žene BiH u NOB-u, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1977. str. 38-38, italic T.O. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 165 otvaranje revolucionarnog polja i stvorila uvjet mogućnosti revolucije, no s druge strane je slijeđenje politika narodnog fronta onemogućilo KPJ da borbu protiv fašizma, koju je stavljala na prvo mjesto, poveže s borbom protiv kapitala i kapitalizma. Ovo je posebno važno za razumijevanje položaja žena u Jugoslaviji i razumijevanje odnosa proizvodnje i reprodukcije, kao i forme koju je ovaj odnos poprimio već 50-ih godina prošlog stoljeća, a o čemu i Arhiv svjedoči. 2.4. Čega Ženotdel (ni)je ime? U prethodnom dijelu teksta je navedeno da ću pokušati ispitati granice jedne moguće historijske analogije. U arhivu AFŽ-a, u kasnijim biografijama partizanki i u većini djela jugoslavenske historiografije koja se bave ženskim pitanjem, uočava se nešto što ću za potrebe ovog rada nazvati simptomatičnim odsustvom. Naime, literatura o jugoslavenskom komunističkom pokretu i AFŽ-u ni ne spominje sovjetski Ženotdel (Женотдел) ni njegove glavne protagonistice Aleksandru Kollontai, Inesu Armand, Nadeždu Krupskaju, Konkordiju Samojlovu i Klaudiju Nikolaevnu. I nasumična Google pretraga o Ženotdelu jedva da daje rezultate na našem jeziku, a u tim malobrojnim rezultatima se spominje isključivo uz ime Aleksandre Kollontai. To da se Ženotdel ni danas gotovo ne spominje zasigurno je rezultat brisanja historije Ženotdela – najprije iz sovjetske, a onda nužno i svih istočno-blokovskih historiografija, uključujući i jugoslavensku. Pitanja o odsustvu Ženotdela nameću se sama od sebe: da li je u vremenu formalnog uspostavljanja AFŽ-a u Jugoslaviji bilo zabranjeno govoriti o Ženotdelu koji je do tada prestao postojati? Da li je model Ženotdela bio model kojeg se moralo zaboraviti i na kojeg se nije smjelo pozivati niti ga se prisjećati? I, u konačnici, glavno pitanje: koja je razlika između Ženotdela i AFŽ-a? Struktura AFŽ-a je u velikoj mjeri – ali ne u potpunosti – oponašala strukturu Ženotdela.41 I već je stoga o Ženotdelu moguće govoriti kao o u odsutnom modelu a – u periodu formalnog osnivanja AFŽ-a – i kao o zabranjenom modelu, budući da tada Jugoslavija u potpunosti slijedi Staljinovu politiku Kominterne i politiku narodnog fronta42. 41 Više u: Stites, Richard, Zhenotdel: Bolshevism and Russian Women, 1917-1930, Russian History, Vol. 3, br. 2, str. 182. 42 Ideja da za potrebe ovog teksta po prvi puta uopće pokušam napraviti kratku komprativnu analizu Ženotdela i AFŽ-a, javila se nakon što sam u arhivu AFŽ-a pročitala Dopis centralnog odbora AFŽ-a iz Beograda Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a za BiH od 30.1.1947. godine u kojem se govori o propustu vezanom za ”problem djece palih boraca koloniziranih po porodicama. Propust je bio taj da je izdržavanje djece postalo vrsta zarade. Mnoge su porodice uzimale djecu da za sebe izvuku stalnu mjesečnu korist” Centralni odbor AFŽ-a predlaže da se osmisle novi načini upravljanja ovim pitanjem i da se pronađu načini da se ovoj djeci da pravilan politički odgoj (T.O). Glavni Odbor AFŽ BiH, �166 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A Opće mjesto specijalističkih rasprava o sovjetskoj historiografiji danas zauzima analiza pravnih akata i normi uvedenih nakon velike Oktobarske revolucije, budući da govorimo o jednom od najprogresivnijih zakonodavstava ikada igdje uvedenih. Dobro je poznata i činjenica da je februarska revolucija 1917. godine – koju su predvodile žene zahtijevajući prestanak rata koji ih je lišio osnovnih životnih namirnica i uvjeta za život – bila katalizator i okidač za kasnija revolucionarna zbivanja. Neposredno nakon revolucionarnih zbivanja 1917. godine i nakon mnogo pritisaka i demonstracija predvođenih ženama, a za koje su agitirali i buržoaske feministice i boljševici, Privremena vlada je ženama dala univerzalno pravo glasa. Nakon uspostave revolucionarne vlasti u decembru 1917. godine legaliziran je razvod, ujednačena prava bračne i vanbračne zajednice a time i priznanje djece bez obzira na to da li su rođena u formalnoj ili neformalnoj zajednici. U novembru 1920. godine legaliziran je abortus, po prvi puta u historiji, a izvođenje abortusa izvan za to predviđenih institucija donosio je najstrožije zatvorske kazne. Uslijedio je (30.12.1922.) zakon o zemljišnom posjedu koji je predstavljao možda najdublji i najsistematičniji pravni pokušaj razbijanja tradicionalnih patrijarhalnih kulturnih i pravno-posjedničkih obrazaca i normi. Pokušaj promjene tradicionalnih patrijarhalnih obrazaca, onaj koji pogađa najveći dio populacije, morao je biti isti onaj koji sasijeca problem u korijenu i izaziva najviše protivljenja. Ovim zakonom omogućena je jednakost muškaraca i žena na Dvoru, upravljanje kućanstvom bilo je jednako mogućnost i obaveza i žene i muškarca, žene su dobile pravo nasljeđivanja zajedničke imovine Dvora…43 Svi navedeni zakoni umnogome su bili rezultat osobnog zalaganja Aleksandre Kollontai koja je nakon revolucije postala komesarkom za socijalna pitanja.44 Abolicija obitelji, nemisliva bez potpunog i radikalnog dokidanja rodnih i patrijarhalnih normi, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 2, 149-47, kao i ”Zapisnik sa održanog savjetovanja žena iz grada i sreza Zenice po pitanju formiranja raznih društava a u vezi zaključka sjednice Izvršnog odbora C.O. AFŽ-a”, gdje je drugarica Mardić Olga predložila da se formira društvo za pomoć besprizornoj djeci. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9,1082/4, 1950. 43 O zakonskim propisima i normama ranog postrevolucionarnog perioda, kao i kasnijim staljinističkim kontrarevolucionarnim mjerama vidjeti više u: Rudolf Schlesinger (ur.), „The Family in the U.S.S.R., Documents and Readings”, Routledge, 2000. 44 Premda u historiografiji postoje sporovi oko toga koliku je ulogu Aleksanda Kollontai imala pri donošenju progresivnih obiteljskih zakona i samom formiranju Ženotdela, Carol Eubanks Hayden je odlučna u svojoj ocjeni da bi bez individualnog zalaganja Aleksandre Kollontai mnogo toga ostalo mrtvo slovo na papiru. Vidjeti npr. doktorsku disertaciju Carol Eubanks Hayden „Feminism and Bolshevism: The Zhenotdel and the Politics of Women’s Emancipation in Russia 1917-1930.” University of California, Berkley, 1979. Iako je Kollontai kasnije podnijela ostavku na to mjesto, nije prestala raditi u drugim partijskim tijelima. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 167 bila je jedna od ključnih karakteristika boljševičke revolucionarne teorije koja se „oslanjala i na marksističke klasike, ali i na djela ruskih marksistkinja poput Kollontai i Krupskaje”45. Fluidnost i fluktuacija poimanja rodnih uloga jedna je od osnovnih ideja koje stoje iza ideje komunalnog življenja, pokušaja i djelomično ostvarenog utopijskog sna o stvaranju institucija socijalizacije kućanskog rada, dijeljenja kućanskih poslova i obaveza, te „iščezavanja” obitelji kao proizvodne jedinice zajedno s državom i klasama.46 Ideja kojom su se vodili vođe Oktobarske revolucije predstavlja dosad jedini pokušaj da se komunizam ostvari ne samo vlasništvom nad sredstvima za proizvodnju, nego i abolicijom obitelji, budući da su to smatrali ništa manje važnim dijelom revolucionarne preobrazbe društva. Dekonstruiranjem i dokidanjem rigidnosti rodnih određenja i kategorija koje su ženu vijekovima držale u podređenom položaju i vezivale ju za kućanski rad koji je, kako je rekao Lenjin, „zatupljuje, oglupljuje i porobljava”47, nastojali su sprovesti ideale u djelo. Upravo su zbog toga, još od 1905. odnosno 1909. godine, Kollontai i Krupskaja iznosile ideje o važnosti i nužnosti organiziranja žena proleterki i seljanki kroz rad posebne grupe, komiteta ili sekcije. Međutim, njihove ideje o osnivanju posebne unutarpartijske ženske organizacije ostale su nerealizirane sve do 1917. godine. Iste godine nastavljeno je izdavanje predratnog časopisa Rabotnica48 koji je služio kao jedno od glavnih propagandnih oruđa agitacije i rada među ženama. Priča o Ženotdelu je priča o tome kako se, unatoč unutarpartijskom protivljenju, ipak formirala specifično ženska organizacija. Raznolikost pozicija u boljševičkoj partiji za vrijeme Oktobarske revolucije možda najbolje ocrtava činjenica da su se osnivanju Ženotdela protivili i članovi i članice Partije. Tako je u decembru 1917. na Prvoj konferenciji petrogradskih radnica došlo do sukoba između Alleksandre Kollontai i 45 Carol Eubanks Hayden, The Zhenotdel and the Boslhevik Party, Russian History, Vol, br. 2, str. 150-173., 1976. 46 Stites, Richard, „Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution”, Oxford University Press, 1989. Zanimljivo je da Stites ova stremljenja smješta upravo u period od 1917. do 1930., budući da taj period koincidira sa osnivanjem i djelovanjem Ženotdela. 47 Lenjinove riječi. Lenjin je inače sve vrijeme davao bezrezervnu podršku radu i djelovanju Ženotdela i nekoliko puta je govorio na kongresima žena koje je sazvao Ženotdel. Vidjeti: Stites, Hayden. 48 Vidjeti više u: Carol Eubanks Hayden, The Zhenotdel and the Party, Russian History Vol. 3, br. 2, str. 150-173., 1976., Richard Stites, Zhenotdel: Bolshevism and Russian Women, 1917-1930, Russian History, Vol. 3, br. 2, str. 174-193., 1976. Važno je istaknuti da je i Rabotnica pokrenuta nakon Međunarodnih ženskih socijalističkih kongresa održanih za vrijeme konferencija Druge internacionale u Stutgartu 1907. i Kopenhagenu 1910. godine. �168 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A Klaudije Nikolaevne49 koja se, uz Konkordiu Samoilovu, protivila formiranju ženske sekcije unutar Partije.50 Na Sedmom sveruskom kongresu boljševika održanom u aprilu 1917. godine Aleksandra Kollontai predlaže sastanak delegatkinja radi formiranja ženskog odjeljenja unutar boljševičke partije, i u septembru iste godine formalno se uspostavlja odjeljenje koje će 1919. godine, nakon uspješne političke agitacije i mobilizacije, dobiti status partijskog odjela (otdel). Prelomni događaj bio je Sveruski ženski kongres kojeg su organizirale Kollontai i Armand, uz pomoć radnica, seljanki i drugih delegatkinja koje su iz cijele Rusije došle u Moskvu izlažući se opasnostima i pogibijama građanskg rata. Carol E. Hayden ističe da je formiranje žena u poseban odjel (Žen-otdel) u jeku građanskog rata tim značajnije što je trebalo obraniti i konsolidirati revolucionarnu vlast, ali i omogućiti ostvarenje zakonskih rješenja i dekreta revolucionarne vlasti. Boljševici su tako bili u kontradiktornoj poziciji jer su „ženama morali pristupati kao odvojenoj kategoriji kako bi ih uvjerili da to nisu”. Rad boljševičke partije karakterizirala je svijest o nedovoljnosti nominalne pravne jednakosti, te o potrebi jačanja i osiguranja primjene zakona. Armand i Kollontai su radile do granica izdržljivosti, obilazile cijelu zemlju, organizirale tvorničke radnice i seljanke uključujući ih u rad Ženotdela i uopće u revolucionarni zamah. Agitirale su ne samo među radnicama i seljankama, nego i među nezaposlenima, suprugama vojnog osoblja itd. Carol E. Hayden upravo u tom kontekstu govori o važnom principu Ženotdela, a on je glasio „agitacija djelima, ne riječima”, dok Stites ističe da je pravi kontekst Ženotdela taj da se „formalnom, legislativnom programu emancipacije moralo dati značenje u društvenoj revoluciji odozdo”51. Jedan od glavnih sistema kojim se ostvarivala „agitacija djelima” bio je sistem praktikanstva. Suština ovog sistema bila je u tome da radnice i seljanke među sobom odaberu delegatkinje koje su kao praktikantkinje provodile tri do šest mjeseci u centrali Ženotdela, obilazile i upoznavale se sa radom sudova, partijskih odjeljenja, bolnica i ostalih institucija, upoznavajući svoja prava da bi kasnije mogle ukazivati na nepoštivanje pravila i zakona u svojim fabrikama, kućanstvima, selima. Prema Richardu Stitesu, praktikantkinje su „u pravilu vidjele mnogo, a izvještaje podnosile iskreno”. Cilj je bio jasan: osposobljavanje ženskih kadrova kako bi se postigle što dublje i sveobuhvatnije promjene svakodnevnog života i socijalizacija 49 Nikolaevna će kasnije postati direktoricom Ženotdela. 50 Carol Eubanks Hayden, The Zhenotdel and the Party, Russian History Vol. 3, br. 2, str. 150-173 51 Stites, ibid., str. 176 �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 169 kućanskog rada”52. Wendy Zeva Goldman ističe da je članstvo u Ženotdelu zauvijek izmijenilo živote hiljada radnica, seljanki, domaćica i sluškinja koje su kroz sistem praktikanstva stekle iskustva koja su prenosile drugima.53 Unatoč tom ogromnom utjecaju i važnosti za svakodnevni život stotina hiljada žena, rad Ženotdela je od početka bio opterećen predrasudama i problemima. Članovi i članice Partije na višim i nižim nivoima protivili su se osnivanju i radu Ženotdela, optužujući ovu organizaciju za feminističku devijaciju, i prisiljavajući članice Ženotdela da se stalno pravdaju i objašnjavaju kako njihov rad nema veze sa feminističkim devijacijama. Dolazilo je i do sukoba u kojima su provincijski predsjednici komiteta u Centralnoj Aziji vršili nasilje nad ženama uključenim u rad Ženotdela, zabilježen je i slučaj spaljivanja ureda Ženotdela, kao i slučajevi obiteljskog nasilja gdje su muževi tukli svoje supruge koje se odvaže otići na „ženske” sastanke.54 Konkordia Samoilova u jednom pismu iz 1920. godine piše da su ih kolege seksistički nazivali „babski centar i bab-kom”. I mnoge visokopozicionirane članice Partije odbijale su rad u Ženotdelu smatrajući ga manje vrijednim i nedostojnim, te potvrdu tražile u muškom pokretu.55 Ogromni problemi u radu Ženotdela počeli su nekoliko godina nakon završetka građanskog rata, uvođenjem tržišnih mehanizama NEP-a, koji je koincidirao sa demobilizacijom boraca Crvene armije, čime je na ionako ugroženom tržištu rada ženska radna snaga postala još ugroženijom. U proračunu je za Ženotdel i njegove zadatke bilo sve manje novaca, a masovna nezaposlenost muškaraca i žena samo je doprinosila smanjenju troškova predviđenih za rad Ženotdela. Nakon smrti Inese Armand, prve direktorice Ženotdela, te razrješenja Aleksandre Kollontai (koja je pristupila Radničkoj opoziciji protiv jednopartijske države) uslijedio je niz imenovanja direktorica koje su sve teže radile pod paskom staljinističkog aparata. Od 1924. godine i socijalizma u jednoj državi, staljinistička kontrarevolucija malo pomalo nagriza tekovine Oktobarske revolucije. Godine 1930. partijskim dekretom je Ženotdel ukinut pod izlikom da je „postignuta jednakost muškaraca i žena, te da su žene uzdignute na nivo muškaraca”56, a aktivnosti Ženotdela 52 Carol Eubanks Hayden, The Zhenotdel and the Party, Russian History Vol. 3, br. 2, str. 166. 53 Wendy Zeva Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, Soviet Family Policy and Social Life 19171936. Cambridge University Press, 1993. O promjenama koje je donio Ženotdel vidjeti i: Stites, Richard: Did the Bolshevik Revolution Improve the Lives of Soviet Women – dostupno na: http://faculty.sfhs.com/lesleymuller/ap_euro/Debates/debate_soviet_women.pdf 54 Carol Eubanks Hayden, The Zhenotdel and the Party, Russian History Vol. 3, br. 2, str. 161. O 55 Clemens, Evans, Barbara, The Bolshevik Women, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. 56 U: Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade. Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Indiana University Press, 1997. Iako je istraživanje Elizabeth Wood izvanredno i zaista u svakom �170 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A prebačene su unutar djelovanja AgitPropa. Godine 1936. kontrarevolucija uspijeva zadati konačni udarac civilizacijskom napretku postignutim revolucijom, vraćajući carističke zakone kojim su zabranjeni abortus i homoseksualnost, a razvod je bio gotovo nemoguć zbog raznih pravnih ograničenja. Time je izbrisan emancipacijski potencijal velike Oktobarske revolucije, a ideja abolicije (iščezavanja) obitelji i ukidanja patrijarhalnih i rodnih normi i uloga zauvijek spremljena u ropotarnicu historije. Vidjeli smo da Ženotdel nastaje iz prethodne revolucionarne mobilizacije žena kako bi se u napadu kontrarevolucije za vrijeme građanskog rata obranila sovjetska vlast i tekovine revolucije, dok je AFŽ, čak i prije invazije na Jugoslaviju, koncipiran kao organizacija za mobilizaciju žena za rat narodnog oslobođenja u kojem se formalno traži savezništvo i s jugoslavenskom vladom u egzilu i sa saveznicima. Usporedimo li Ženotdel i AFŽ kao ženske organizacije u zemljama gdje se dogodio revolucionarni prevrat, jednom od najvažnijih razlika među njima ispostavlja se to što je političko-mobilizacijska funkcija u slučaju Ženotdela postajala sve važnijom, a u slučaju AFŽ-a sve manje važnom, i sve manje podrazumijevajući političku mobilizaciju a sve se više fokusirajući na dobavljanje dobara, rad sekcije majka-dijete i uopće pitanja socijalnog karaktera. Ove dvije organizacije susretale su se sa sličnim, ako ne i istim poteškoćama s kojima se nužno susreće bilo koji pokušaj promjene stoljetnih tradicija i vjerovanja. I Ženotdel i AFŽ su izmijenili živote žena koje su sudjelovale u njihovom radu. Međutim, nepobitnom ostaje činjenica da su se za ostvarenje različitih ciljeva koristila različita sredstva. Dakle, boljševici, a time i Ženotdel, od početka su se borili protiv kapitalizma pa zbog toga i protiv buržoaske forme obitelji. U slučaju KPJ i AFŽ-a borba protiv kapitalizma, za komunizam, nije bila sastavni dio borbe nego je kao stvarni cilj predstavljena tek nakon zauzimanja vlasti. Zbog toga jugoslavenska revolucija nikada nije, čak ni na pet minuta, proglasila aboliciju obitelji. Ženotdelovska stremljenja danas postoje samo unutar usko specijalizirane historijske literature, i više nemaju ni ime ni mjesto: abolicija obitelji, sablast najavljena u Komunističkom manifestu. Sablast koja danas više nikoga ne proganja i ničim ne kruži.57 smislu vrijedno proučavanja, ne slažem se s njenom (revizionističkom) ocjenom da su „žene bile rezervna armija revolucije, uvučene na tržište rada i političke borbe kada je to bilo potrebno i odbačene kada to nije bilo potrebno”. Upravo Ženotdel, o kojem je ona i napisala knjigu, svjedoči o pokušaju da se borba univerzalizira jer bez zajedničkih napora žena i muškaraca ne može biti materijalnog postvarenja revolucionarnih principa. Zbog istih razloga se ne slažem niti sa analizom Jelene Batinić, koja slijedi argument Elizabeth Woods i u sovjetskoj politici vidi neizdiferenciranu emancipaciju odozgo. 57 Marx, Karl i Engels Friedrich, Manifest komunističke partije, dostupno na: http://staro.rifin.com/root/tekstovi/casopis_pdf/ek_ec_586.pdf �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 171 3. Od revolucionarnih subjekata do produktivnog subjekta Do 30-ih godina sovjetski model emancipacije sveo se, duhovitim riječima Barbare Clements, na „emancipiranu radnicu i sretnu domaćicu”58. Za Staljina su baš njih dvije bile stub proizvodnog ženskog subjekta: „žene sačinjavaju polovinu stanovništva naše zemlje... one sačinjavaju ogromnu radnu armiju i one su pozvane da vaspitaju našu decu”59. Ekonomska neovisnost žena u socijalističkoj ekonomiji je u teoriji trebala voditi do pune emancipacije žena. Međutim, to se nije desilo. Eric Hobsawm primjećuje: Jer iako se od velikih promjena, kakva je masovni ulazak udatih žena na tržište rada moglo očekivati da će proizvesti propratne ili naknadne promjene to nije bilo nužno: o čemu svjedoči SSSR (nakon što su početne revolucionarno-utopijske težnje iz 20-ih godina napuštene) gdje su se udate žene u većini našle pod dvostrukim bremenom starih dužnosti u kući i novih dužnosti zarađivanja plate, bez ikakve promjene u odnosima između spolova ili u javnoj i privatnoj sferi.60 U svim ekonomijama zasnovanim na slobodnom najamnom radu, status „emancipirane radnice” podređen je njenoj društveno-socijalnoj funkciji majke. Vizija takve nove žene bila je prisutna i u jugoslavenskoj praksi. Tito, na trećem Kongresu AFŽ-a Jugoslavije 1950. godine, izjavljuje: „Ja mislim, drugarice, da vi u prvom redu svom svojom snagom i elanom treba da vršite dužnosti koje proističu iz tih vaših specifičnih obaveza, kao što je, na primer, briga o ženama majkama, briga o higijeni djece i briga o djeci uopšte, briga o zdravlju, o vaspitanju žena u Jugoslaviji...”61 U Arhivu ne nalazimo potvrdu da je u Jugoslaviji ikada postojala ideja abolicije obitelji kao što je, vidjeli smo, postojala u Ruskoj revoluciji. Osim retoričkih, u Jugoslaviji drugi koraci nikad nisu poduzeti. Za vrijeme rata je AFŽ-ov časopis Žena u borbi prenoseći sovjetsku formulu najamnog rada i majčinstva uvodio pojam novog proizvodnog subjekta „slobodne, ravnopravne građanke socijalističke zemlje” i vožnju traktora, udarništvo i postajanje kemičarkom kao glavna postignuća koja bi čitateljice trebale imitirati. Stoga ne treba 58 Clements, E. Barbara, A history of women in Russia, from the earliest times to the present, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012., str. 429. 59 cit. Jelena Filipova, Iz SSSR-a, Šta je dala ženi velika Oktobarska socijalistička revolucija, u Nova Žena, godina 2, br. 20, Novembar, 1946., str. 20. 60 Hobsbaum, Erik, Doba ekstrema, historija kratkog XX veka 1914-1991, Beograd: Dereta, 2002, str. 238. 61 Iz govora Josipa Broza Tita, Treći kongres Antifašističkog fronta žena Jugoslavije, 1950. �172 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A iznenaditi činjenica da je Ustav FNRJ bio gotovo identičan Ustavu SSSR-a iz 1936. godine. Primjerice, abortus u Ustavu FNRJ nije bio legaliziran i tek je kasnije (početkom 60-ih) liberaliziran, te ozakonjen Ustavom iz 1974. godine. Jugoslavenska i sovjetska praksa razlikovale su se u stupnju u kojem je nova žena za svoju reprodukciju ovisila o mehanizmima države ili tržišne akumulacije. Sve se revolucije suštinski mogu odrediti u odnosu na to kako pristupaju ženskom pitanju. Stoga po svojoj formi mogu biti modernizacijsko-emancipacijske ili patrijarhalne. Razlika između prvih i drugih u tome je što prve smjeraju na emancipaciju žena i naglašavaju jednakost, a druge ženu vezuju uz obitelj i naglašavaju spolne (pa time i rodne) razlike.62 Upravo zbog toga su sve velike revolucije dosad uvijek propagirale novi tip žene. Jugoslavija, vidjeli smo, nije izuzetak. Ukoliko znamo da „položaj žene u bilo kojem društvu ovisi od toga kako to društvo organizira osnovne funkcije poput reprodukcije, subsistencije i proizvodnje”63, onda je važno sagledati kontradikcije od početka prisutne u načinu pristupa organiziranju ovih osnovnih funkcija. Tu, upravo zbog danas i sutra, moramo govoriti o međusobnom prožimanju ovih dvaju poimanja mjesta i uloge žene u revoluciji ili, preciznije, u postrevolucionarnom periodu kada je riječ o Jugoslaviji. I upravo govoriti o ovom prožimanju znači ostati vjeran AFŽ-u, odnosno shvatiti historijsku putanju razvoja i disolucije AFŽ-a kao duboko antagonističnu. Samo tako možemo razumjeti fundamentalni antagonizam koji je postojao i postoji kada je u pitanju mjesto žena u društvu. Dok je u kontekstu poratne Jugoslavije stvaranje nove žene s jedne strane retorički naglašavano kao jedan od glavnih ciljeva i zadataka nove vlasti, s druge strane možemo pratiti kako se stvarnost udaljava od ostvarivanja borbenog ideala kojim su se žene (samo)potvrdile kao subjekti revolucionarne borbe. Kraj rata je za Jugoslaviju značio novi početak u izgradnji nove zemlje i novoga društva. Srušen je stari poredak i trebalo je uvesti novi, što je zahtijevalo ujedinjenje svih raspoloživih snaga i resursa radi obnove i izgradnje zemlje, ali i uvođenje niza političko-pravnih akata i novih mobilizacijskih strategija. 62 Valentine M. Mogadham, Gender and Revolutionary Transformation, Iran 1979 and Eastern Central Europe 1989, Gender&Society, June 1995, str. 328-356 63 Woodward, Susan L. The Rights of Women: Ideology, Policy and Social Change in Yugoslavia, str. 576-636 u: Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe. Ur: Susan L. Wolchik i Alfred G. Mayer, Duke University Press, Durham. 1985. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 173 Maxine Molyneux64 ističe da je u postrevolucionarnom periodu progresivna zamjena starog novim jedan od glavnih zadataka svake revolucionarne vlasti zemalja Trećeg svjeta ili zemalja gdje je vladao ancien régime, radi ubrzanog ekonomskog razvoja i društvene promjene. To podrazumijeva „stvaranje centraliziranog, sekularnog i egalitarnijeg društvenog poretka”. Stvaranje takvog poretka ovisi i o uvođenju istih zakona u ruralna područja gdje prevladava običajni zakon. Nakon donošenja Ustava 1946. godine postupno je uslijedilo uvođenje novih, standardiziranih zakonskih propisa.65 Za žene je jedno od najvažnijih postignuća bilo ukidanje pravnih razlika postojećih u prethodnih šest pravnih područja Kraljevine. Susan Woodward66 primjerice ističe da je u Jugoslaviji vlast očeva zamijenjena vlašću države, što jest poremetilo dominantno patrijarhalnu i patrilokalnu strukturu jugoslavenskog društva. KPJ nakon Ustava iz 1946. godine67 čini prvi korak ka stvaranju uvjeta za poboljšanje položaja žena. Uslijedilo je uvođenje jedinstvenih zakona i obaveza nadležnosti građanskih sudova za pitanja bračnog, radnog i krivičnog prava, čime su se ispunjavali zahtjevi ženskog pokreta iz 30-ih godina. Žene su time formalno-pravno zadobile ono što su puškom izborile. Ali šta je to što je bilo izboreno puškom? Jednakost ili jednakopravnost? Još u prvoj (ratnoj) fazi djelovanja AFŽ-a uglavnom se govori o „građanskoj i društvenoj jednakopravnosti” ali ne i o jednakosti. Ako se jednakost i spominjala, bilo je to u kontekstu jednakosti s muškarcima, što nas opet vraća na jednakopravnost i izjednačavanje prava žena i muškaraca. Neospornom i golemom, neizrecivom historijskom zaslugom KPJ ostaje to da su žene nakon izborene pobjede u Jugoslaviji po prvi puta u historiji postale, pravno govoreći, osobe. Odnosno, kako to sjajno primjećuje Ivana Pantelić68, žene su postale građanke – što arhivski dokumenti potvrđuju. Žene su se izborile za pravo glasa, pravo na obrazovanje, zaposlenje, jednaku plaću za jednak rad (makar nominalno); postojao je javni sustav zaštite zdravlja, zaštita materinstva i djeteta, porodiljski dopusti, itd. Sve to je dubinski pretreslo društvene odnose koji su počivali na patrijarhalnom pravnom poretku vlasti očeva, te ženama osiguralo veći stupanj autonomije i neovisnosti. I 64 Molyneux, Maxine, Socialist Societies Old and New: Progress Towards Women’s Emancipation, Feminist Review, Summer 1981, str. 1- 34. 65 Božinović, Neda, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku, Žene u Crnom: Beograd, 1996. str. 157-158. 66 Woodward, Susan L. op.cit 67 AFŽ je bio mobiliziran u pitanjima rasprave oko Ustava, Centralnog odbora AFŽ-a Jugoslavije Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH od 10.12.1945. godine, Glavni Odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, 1/ 135, 1945. 68 Pantelić, Ivana, Partiznake kao građanke, Beograd, Institut za savremenu istoriju, Evoluta, 2011. �174 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A danas, izložene sve jačim i težim napadima konzervativnih i neoliberalnih politika, stojimo na tlu i naslijeđu izborenom tada. Mnoge su feministice i teoretičarke69 već ukazale na probleme s kojim se jugoslavenski politički projekt susreo već kasnih 40-ih i početkom 50-ih. Bez ulaska u analize pojedinačnih djela, ukratko bismo mogli reći da sve one prepoznaju da je revolucionarna heroina i junakinja, ta nova žena morala p/ostati stara, odnosno da je pitanje opće društvene emancipacije (a time i emancipacije žene) sve više shvaćano kao sekundarno. Pošto je jugoslavenska politika bila uvjetovana i unutarnjim i vanjskim faktorima koji su pak uvjetovali smjer kretanja društvenih i ekonomskih odnosa, to se odrazilo najprije na gore spomenutu organizaciju proizvodnje, reprodukcije i subsistencije. Mene ovdje zanima to da, uzimajući u obzir marksističke i feminističke analize, slijedeći Arhiv, pokušam pokazati kako su se ove uvjetovanosti odrazile na položaj žena. Da bismo to razumjeli potrebno je prepoznati nesumjerljivost između koncepcije revolucije, kao moderniteta, i mobilizacije – revolucionarni događaj kao dokidanje jednog poretka i stvaranje novog. Ove koncepcije nisu identične iako podrazumijevaju raskid sa prošlošću, progres i otvaranje horizonta budućnosti. Štoviše, radikalno su suprotstavljene. Perry Andreson nas podsjeća da svaka od njih ima zasebnu temporalnost: „karakteristično vrijeme ‘modernosti’ je neprekidno i sveprožimajuće kao i sami proces industrijalizacije: kao najekstenzivnije, upravo totalitet same epohe. Vrijeme revolucije je isprekidano i razgraničeno: određena ruptura u reprodukciji uspostavljenog poretka, koja po definiciji počinje u jednoj konjunkturi i završava u drugoj”70. Modernost označava benjaminovsko prazno linearno vrijeme „u kojem je svaki trenutak različit od drugog samom činjenicom da dolazi poslije, ali istovremeno je i isti kao zamjenjiva jedinica u procesu beskonačnog ponavljanja”71. Vrijeme kapitalističke reprodukcije je vrijeme koje svoj najjasniji ideološki izraz ima upravo u teleološkom konceptu modernizacije. Čin revolucije je isprekidan, diskontinuiran, trenutak zbijenih političkih transformacija koje otvaraju revolucionarni prostor, ali to nužno znači i otvaranje nove, druge temporalnosti koja se ne može svesti na linearno vrijeme i linerani razvoj događaja vezanih uz kapitalistički način proizvodnje, tj. beskonačne proizvodnje robnih odnosa. 69 Primjerice: Lydija Sklevicky, Gordana Stojaković, Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, Susan Woodward (iz sasvim drugog ugla), Svetlana Slapšak. 70 Anderson, Perry, A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso, 1992. str. 46-47. 71 Ibid., str. 30. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 175 Socijalističke revolucije podrazumijevaju tri diskontinuirane i kontradiktorne konjugacije revolucionarnog događaja i procesualnog trajanja: nagli prijelaz od demokratske ka društvenoj revoluciji; produženi prijelaz od političke revolucije (trasnformacija pravno-političkog poretka) ka kulturnoj revoluciji (transformacija običaja) i konačno prijelaz od nacionalne ka svjetskoj revoluciji.72 Riječ je, dakle, o diskontinuitetima, rastrganim i diferencijalnim temporalnostima i ritmovima klasne borbe, tj. revolucije i kontrarevolucije, ekonomskog eksperimenta, kulturne revolucije i društvene emancipacije u kojoj ni događaji ni procesi u vremenu ne slijede ravnu crtu; ne možemo ih znati unaprijed, niti možemo biti sigurni u ishod. Antonio Gramsci upravo zato naglašava da ne bismo smjeli miješati „ekspolzije političkih strasti…sa kulturalnim transformacijama koje su spore i postupne” jer se “promjene u načinima razmišljanja ne događaju kroz brze, simultane i generalizirane ekspolzije”.73 Tako vidimo poraz utopijske i fragmentirane temporalnosti koju je otvorila Ruska revolucija, poraz vremena Ženotdela i abolicije obitelji, koje je zamijenila temporalnost „sovjetske nove klase”, socijalizam u jednoj državi, „Termidor u obitelji” i formiranje moderne, nuklearne obitelji. I mislim da upravo tu treba tražiti razloge i uzroke usporenju procesa emancipacije u Jugoslaviji. Ako patrijarhat nije samo skup društvenih vrijednosti nego ima veze i s načinom proizvodnje, onda možemo ustvrditi da je u jugoslavenskom slučaju upravo modernizacija, kao reprodukcija tržišnih odnosa, ključni element kojim se premostio patrijarhat. Onoga trenutka kada je došlo do postupnog samoograničenja nastupila je i apologija koja negira odnose dominacije i subordinacije, njihove sistemske uzroke i činjenicu da se – upravo zato što su sistemski – vremenom sami reproduciraju. Reprodukcija patrijarhata zadobija formu modernog kroz pravno-političku podjelu privatno-javno, a nju najbolje vidimo u razlici između jednakopravnosti i jednakosti. Zato bi, slijedeći mladog Marxa, bilo dobro razgraničiti pojmove jednakopravnosti i jednakosti.74 To znači da, sa stajališta marksističke teorije emancipacije kao dezalijenacije i zahtjeva za (radikalnom) jednakošću, ove pojmove ne bismo smjeli svoditi jedan na drugi. Jednakopravnost ne implicira jednakost, osim u formalnom smislu, kako je opisao još mladi Marx. Za sada se vrijedi prisjetiti da, za mladoga Marxa, formalna odnosno juridička jednakost predstavlja formu 72 Bensaïd, Daniel, Le pari mélancolique., Paris: Fayard, 1997. str. 73 73 Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderno 24, Giornalismo, §3, u: Quaderni del carcere, Vol III, Torino: Einaudi, 1975. str. 2269. 74 Marx, Karl, Prilog kritici Hegelove filozofije prava, Beograd: Kultura, 1957. �176 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A mistifikacije stvarnih društvenih odnosa. Njome se prikrivaju stvarne materijalne nejednakosti formalno slobodnih i jednakih građana. Razdvajanje ekonomske od političke moći istovremeno predstavlja i njihovo proizvođenje kao dviju različitih sfera: „ekonomske” i „političke”. Drugim riječima, o sferi građanskog društva govorimo kao o sferi slobodnih privatnih ugovora između vlasnika-posjednika, a o sferi političkog kao o sferi u kojoj kao građani imamo pravno-politička prava. Kako nas podsjeća Tamás, proizvodnja distinkcije privatno-javno je— baš zato jer je sfera slobodne razmjene između slobodnih vlasnika radne snage— istovremeno i sfera bezgranične dominacije i eksploatacije najamnog rada. Sloboda svojstvena slobodnom radu govori nam nešto i o formalnoj jednakosti orodnjenog rada. Unutar moderne, nuklearne obitelji ne vrši se nikakva razmjena vrijednosti, a muškarci i žene u ugovor ulaze kao slobodni i jednaki kako bi reproducirali vlastitu radnu snagu i radnu snagu budućih generacija.  Pošto je žena odgovorna za društvenu reprodukciju, njen slobodni izbor da stupi u obiteljske odnose izraz je činjenice da se za vlasnike radne snage pristup sredstvima za subsistenciju odvija isključivo na tržištu. Budući da tržište nastavlja vrednovati privatni rad kao društveno nužni rad, formalna jednakost ženskog i muškog radnika uvjet je podjele buržoaskog subjekta na buržuja-građanina, muški-ženski rod, privatno-javno, ekonomsko-političko i sve moguće separacije i alijenacije karakteristične fetišizmu robe. Marxovu kritiku formalne jednakosti tako možemo primijeniti i kada govorimo o kontradikcijama koje su, neposredno nakon završetka Drugog svjetskog rata, dovele do prvih poteškoća u realiziranju socijalističkog ideala u Jugoslaviji. Žene su od subjekata revolucije i revolucionarnih subjekata postale građanke – vlasnice svoje radne snage. Time je revolucija efektivno zaustavljena, procesi opće društvene emancipacije usporeni, a pitanje emancipacije žena odgođeno za neko buduće vrijeme. Mnoštvo dokumenata iz ovog perioda koje pronalazimo u Arhivu svjedoči o tome da je emancipacija žena sve više shvaćana isključivo kao ekonomska kategorija, da se insistiralo na povećanom korištenju ženske radne snage (uz konstantni problem manjka institucija koje bi socijalizirale teret reprodukcije, što će posebno doći do izražaja u manje razvijenim dijelovima/republikama) čime je emancipacija svedena na ugovornu, nadničarsku formu. U Arhivu nalazimo svjedočanstva o novim progresivnim mjerama čiji je cilj povećanje aktivnosti i sudjelovanja žena u javnom životu, procesima proizvodnje i gospodarskim aktivnostima, ali nalazimo i izvještaje s terena koji otkrivaju nešto �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 177 drugačiju priču. Logično je postaviti pitanje zašto i kako je bilo moguće da žene nakon revolucije, unatoč zakonskoj jednakosti i iznimno progresivnim zakonima, i dalje ostanu nejednake? Odgovor nudi upravo spomenuta distinkcija privatnojavno, utemeljena na marksističkoj kategoriji slobodnog najamnog rada. Po Maxine Molyneux, često se previđa, iako od presudne važnosti, to da formalna jednakost (jednakopravnost) koju žene po prvi puta zadobiju nakon revolucija, kao i to da žene ponekad obavljaju „ne-ženske” poslove, podrazumijeva dva važna elementa: upornu spolno-rodnu podjelu rada i neuspjeh da se umanji ili iskorijeni teret kućnog rada i odgovornosti među spolovima.75 U nastavku ću, slijedeći Arhiv, pokušati pokazati kako su se ove kontradikcije ispoljavale u SFRBiH (ali i u Jugoslaviji). U prvim je poratnim godinama rad AFŽ-a ušao u fazu koja je, riječima Gordane Stojaković76, usmjerena na „jačanje, obnovu i izgradnju”. Pored toga je bilo važno nastaviti s neometanim radom drugih postojećih struktura, poput Narodnog fronta (NF). Tako i Hamdija Čemerlić, kao član Narodno Oslobodilačkog Fronta (NOF), na Kongresu AFŽ-a BiH (08.06.1945.) drži godine govor u kojem kaže: [n]aše žene su svojim naporima i zaslugama stekle za uvijek svoja politička prava i zauvijek se izjednačile sa našim muškarcima… Nema sjetve i nema žetve da naša žena ne unosi veliki napor oko toga posla. Briga oko invalida, njegovanje naših ranjenih boraca, zbrinjavanje siročadi sve je to vaše djelo. Vi ste dosada na tom radile i vi ćete odsada na tom raditi.77 Ovaj primjer, čini mi se, jako dobro pokazuje tendenciju očekivanja da žene prihvate „biološke i prirodne” uloge koje su obavljale kroz historiju, ali sada u novim okolnostima – kao formalno-pravno jednake s mogućnošću uživanja svih prava koja iz toga proizlaze. Rad AFŽ-a u ovoj fazi bio je organiziran kroz rad sekcija: majka-dijete, kulturno-prosvjetna i socijalno-zdravstvena. Arhiv pruža detaljne podatke o tome koliko su vremena i rada žene dale na obnovi i izgradnji 75 Molyneux, Maxine, Women in Socialist Societies Old and New. ProgressTowards Women’s Emancipation. Feminist Review 1981: 1-34. 76 Gordana Stojaković navodi da su postojale tri faze rada AFŽ. Iako ona govori o AFŽ-u Vojvodine, isto se može primijeniti i na AFŽ BiH. Prva faza stvaranja i podrške NOB-u 1942-1945, druga faza širenje aktivnosti na jačanju, obnovi i izgradnji 1946-1949 i treća faza gašenja u kojoj se promovira ekonomija njege i brige, 1949-1953. Partizanke, žene u narodno-oslobodilačkoj borbi, str. 13. Ur: Duško Milinović i Zoran Petakov, Novi Sad: Cenzura, 2010. 77 Pozdravna riječ dr. Hamdije Čemerlića sa Prvog kongresa AFŽ-a BiH od 08.06.1945, Arhiv BiH, Fond – Zbirka / Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH, 1945, Kutija 1, 1945. dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/272 �178 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A zemlje, radeći na organiziranju i pripremi izbora, podizanju infrastrukture, novih objekata, krečenju, organiziranju analfabeteskih tečajeva po selima i zaseocima, držeći predavanja o domaćinstvu, održavanju kuće, higijeni, sprječavanju zaraznih bolesti, njezi djece, ispravnom načinu brige za djecu i domaćinstvo, praznovjerju, držeći babičke škole itd.78 Arhiv nam tako pokazuje da su zadaci dodjeljivani afežeovkama u suštini uvijek bili vezani uz njihovu biološku percepciju kao žena, majki, sestara i drugarica od kojih se očekuje da ispune sve norme i propise koji proizlaze iz njihovih „prirodnih” uloga. To se potvrđuje i na sastanku plenuma glavnog Odbora AFŽ-a BiH 1946. godine; to, i važnost izlaska na izbore.79 Međutim, veoma brzo postaje jasno da se rad AFŽ-a u drugoj fazi vezuje uz modernizaciju – masovni udarnički rad, izgradnju i industrijalizaciju zemlje i sve druge poslove koji proizlaze iz činjenice da je postojala i perpetuirala se rodna podjela rada. Tako je bio raspoređen i rad u afežeovskim sekcijama: majka-dijete, socijalno-zdravstvena i kulturnoprosvjetna (koja je ujedno trebala služiti za politički rad). Nakon što je politički rad u potpunosti prebačen u domen NF-a, AFŽ postaje organizacija koja je, u suradnji sa NF-om i ministarstvima, trebala ispunjavati isključivo socijalne funkcije. Godina 1948. predstavlja zaokret: raskid sa Staljinom i sukob s Informbiroom, okretanje ka tržišnim mehanizmima i u skladu s time prve ekonomske reforme uvođenjem samoupravljanja. Inicijalno, u strahu od napada i invazije, država mobilizira mase za rad i nastavak neometane proizvodnje. Prijetnja rata i invazije postaju stvar prošlosti nakon 1949. godine i ulaska Jugoslavije u Vijeće sigurnosti UN-a. Jugoslavija se okreće samoupravljanju koje je u prvoj fazi trebalo osigurati povećanje rentabilnosti ulaganja i proizvodnje i time ubrzati akumulaciju kapitala. Budući da se država vodila logikom proizvodnje, prvi „sumnjivci” postaju žene, na koje su, riječima Vide Tomšič, prve poratne predsjednice AFŽ-a, „zbog 78 Primjerice: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Sreski izvještaj AFŽ-a za srez sarajevski Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (izbori, izgradnja dječjeg ljetovališta, narodno prosvjećivanje, analfabetski tečajevi), Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 4, 1137/48, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Dopis Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Doboj Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a za BiH, 7.2.1947. godine” (izvještaj o radu zdravstvene sekcije, analfabetski tečajevi), Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 2, 199/47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Sreski Odbor AFŽ-a Bijeljina, Zapisnik sa sastanka Sekretarijata Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (organiziranje žena za rad na izgradnji pruge Bijeljina-Rača). Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 1182, 1948. 79 Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, “Zapisnik sa plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a BiH održanog 05. i 06.06. 1946.” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, 116/46., 1946. Plenum je održan u čitaonici Napretka, a pored članica AFŽ-a, ispred NF-a bio je prisutan Ljubo Babić. dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/332 �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 179 materinstva gledali kao na nerentabilnu radnu snagu”80. Snaga njenog argumenta nestaje samom pretpostavkom da su žene kao slobodni i autonomni najamni radnici upravo radna snaga koja proizvodi vrijednost i višak vrijednosti. Pažljivim iščitavanjem Arhiva iz tog perioda pratimo izvještaje s terena koji ukazuju na način odvijanja okretanja ka tržištu i na to kako taj proces pogađa žene i rad AFŽ-a. Upravo ovaj period pokazat će se kao paradigmatski, budući da je uvjetovao sav kasniji odnos prema ženama i sustavu društvene proizvodnje, reprodukcije i subsistencije. Dolaskom na vlast i postupnom demobilizacijom masovnog antifašističkog pokreta, AFŽ sve manje biva revolucionarna organizacija a sve više tek administrativni organ NF-a. AFŽ obavlja pozadinske funkcije u vezi s društvenim i socijalnim preduvjetima za masovni ulazak seljanki u industrijsku radnu snagu, a za vrijeme procesa neuspjele kolektivizacije ima zadatak da organizira pristup žena u zadruge. U Arhivu tako iščitavamo masu dokumenata o organizaciji proslave 8. marta koje se uvijek završavaju radnim natjecanjima, a žene iz raznih srezova se natječu u tome koji će srez ‹više, bolje i jače› ispuniti normu i proizvesti više robe. Iako se nakon 1945. godine uvode zadruge i kombinati, država nikad nije do kraja sprovela formalnu eksproprijaciju, te kategorija privatnog seoskog vlasništva nije nestala. Susan Woodward81 u svojoj analizi navodi da su progresivni zakoni koji se izrijekom odnose na zaštitu žene, djece i obitelj, uzeti odvojeno, samo logična sredstva za ono što je trebalo postići. Ona, međutim, sjajno primjećuje da pravu sliku dobijamo tek kada se ovi zakoni sagledaju svi zajedno: Ono što je zapravo kompromis između obaveze da se potpuno zabrane svi oni običaji i zakoni koji nipodaštavaju ženu, s jedne strane, i potrebe da obitelji preuzmu odgovornost za zadatke koje država nije spremna preuzeti, s druge, ove nove politike su prikrile vizijom odnosa između muškaraca i žena kao jednakih, njegujućih, voljnih i slobodnih (dakle „privatnih”)82 Drugim riječima, Susan Woodward govoreći o Jugoslaviji zapravo primjećuje istu stvar koju primjećuje i G.M. Tamás kada govori o zemljama sovjetskog bloka, 80 Citirano prema: Stojaković, Gordana: „Vida Tomšič- zašto je ukinut AFŽ”; dostupno na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/353 81 Susan L. Woodward, The Rights of Women: Ideology, Policy and Social Change in Yugoslavia, str. 417-459 u: Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe. Ur: Susan L. Wolchik i Alfred G. Mayer, Durham: Duke University Press, 1985. Woodwardica govori o feminizaciji poljoprivrednog rada, jednoj od posljedica uvođenja tržišnih mehanizama. 82 Woodward, Susan L. op.cit 430-431 �180 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A naime to da distinkcija tržišnog društva privatno-javno opstaje unatoč činjenici da su istočnoblokovska društva doista bila egalitarnija. Tamás podcrtava to da su stvarna socijalistička društva društva u tranziciji ka socijalnom poretku bez najamnog rada, robne proizvodnje, novca, stroge rodne podjele rada, materijalnih, socijalnih i kulturalnih nejednakosti, bez države u smislu superiornosti, institucija opresivnog aparata poput vojske, policije, zatvora, kampova, crkava, obaveznih doktrina i opresija svakojake vrste83. Iz ove perspektive, uzimajući u obzir isprekidanu i nejednaku temporalnost revolucionarne promjene o kojoj je bilo riječi, ovo je mjerilo jugoslavenskog i svakog mogućeg i mislivog socijalizma (a kamoli komunizma); ovo a ne veća jednakost koja je postojala u jugoslavenskom i drugim istočnoblokovskim društvima. Tamáseva analiza je sjajna jer pokazuje da ono što je uspostavila klasična liberalna filozofija – rad kao privatni akt u koji se ulazi (privatnom, autonomnom) voljom i koji zato ne pripada javnoj, političkoj sferi – opstaje i u real-socijalizamu. Dakle, rad u društvima realnog socijalizma (a isto vrijedi i za jugoslavenski socijalizam) u svojoj suštini je slobodni najamni rad koji, bez obzira na institucije radničkog samoupravljanja i udruženog rada, potpada pod vladavinu razmjenske vrijednosti. Budući da je priroda rada ostala privatnom, i dalje je postojala reprodukcija sistemske eksploatacije i dominacije odnosno tržišne razmjene motivirane profitom84 koja je i mogla dovesti do onoga što u Arhivu pratimo od 1950. godine: 83 G.M. Tamás – Normative orders, dostupno na: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZyKxnPUrVo 84 Glavni odbor AFŽ-a, BiH, Izvještaj Centralnog odbora Beograd sa sastanka socijalno-zdravstvenog saveta pri Komitetu za socijalno staranje pri Vladi FNRJ Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Kutija 3, br. 1124-47, 1947: Donesen je niz uredba o zaštiti trudne žene i majke dojilje, kojim se u radnom/službeničkom/ odnosu daje majci koja je u radnom odnosu pravo na porođajno odsustvo i to 6 nedelja prije i 6 nedelja poslije porođaja. Ova uredba daje majci pravo da može prekidati svoj posao radi dojenja svaka 3 sata i to za vrijeme 6 mjeseci poslije porođaja. 1949. godine ova uredba je izmijenjena i dopunjena novim olakšanjima, za majku, što je došlo kao rezultat povoljnijeg ekonomskog položaja u zemlji uopšte. Tako nove uredbe o izmjenama i dopunama uredbe o zaštiti trudnih žena majki dojilji koja stanuje dalje od mjesta rada omogućava skraćemo radno vrijeme. Radno vrijeme u tom slučaju traje samo 4 časa, sve do kraja 6 mjeseci poslije porođaja, a ovo radno vrijeme može da se produži i do navršene treće godine života ako za to ima opravdanih razloga. Za to vrijeme majci pripada 75% ukupne plate u vremenu od 6 mjeseci, a kasnije 50 %. Žena poslije 3-mjesečnog porođajnog odsustva ima pravo da koristi godišnji odmor. Ova uredba zabranjuje upošljavanje trudne žene na prekovremenom radu, zabranjuje noćni rad a predviđa prebacivanje trudne žene na lakši posao. Uredba o stvaranju jaslica i vrtiča obavezuje svako preduzeće koje ima preko 200 (u Kraljevini je bilo više od 100) uposlenih radnica, da iz svojih sopstvenih vlastitih sredstava otvaraju takve ustanove, te time osiguravaju majkama u radnom odnosu smještaj njihove djece.” U časopisu Ženski pokret iz 1937. čitamo da su ovakve zakonske odredbe u gotovo identičnoj formi bile prisutne i u Kraljevini. Ženski pokret br. 1-2, 1937. str. 10-11. (posebno identično sve što je u italic, T.O). �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 181 masovna otpuštanja radnica, trudnica i uopće ženske radne snage (unatoč zakonskoj zabrani i izrazito progresivnim i poticajnim mjerama za zaštitu majke i djeteta). Drugim riječima, onoga trenutka kada je poštivanje zakona postalo preskupo, a profit nužno morao biti ostvaren, na udaru su prve bile žene. Tako su izvještaji koji dolaze s terena bili u kontradikciji sa legislaturom donesenom godinu ranije, a afežeovke očigledno zbunjene svime što se događalo. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH tako u dopisu poslanom CK KP BiH, odjeljenju za informacije85, piše: „… predviđen je kredit od 1.700.000 dinara za izgradnju obdaništa u Brezničanima, ali se po tom pitanju još ništa nije učinilo… preduzeća su od 75 radnika otpustila 50 žena među kojima ima i žena na bolovanju i u drugom stanju“. U izvještajima nakon uvođenja samoupravljanja stalno pristižu informacije o otpuštanjima žena, o rezanju budžeta, nedostatku jaslica i vrtića, te mogućnosti da se žene politički uzdižu, jer nemaju kome ostaviti djecu. Sve to je višestruko pogađalo žene, tako da Zaključci sa savjetovanja rukovodilaca sreskih i oblasnih organizacija AFŽ-a BiH iz 1950. godine86 kao jedan od zadataka AFŽ-a navode: „pored sprovođenja agitacije za uključenje žena u privredu naša organizacija treba da vodi brigu o smještaju žena, uslovima života i rada žena u privredi. Voditi računa da preduzeća ne smanjuju broj radnika na račun trudnih žena i žena sa djecom“. Stavimo li ovo u širi kontekst, sve jasnijim postaje da je emancipacija žena sve više bivala shvaćana kao „emancipacija od ugnjetavanja starog poretka, a ne emancipacija od svih oblika opresije“87. Posljedično, 50-te godine generalno predstavljaju regresiju u odnosu na proklamiranu jednakost. Dominantna uloga žene sve se više vezivala uz majčinstvo, promovirao se gotovo pa fordistički model 85 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, “Dopis glavnog odbora AFŽ CK KP BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine”, Kutija 9, 497/50, 1950. 86 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zaključci sa savjetovanja rukovodilaca sreskih i oblasnih organizacija AFŽ-a Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, 422/50; Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik plenuma oblasnog odbora AFŽ-a za Mostarsku oblast održanog 18.5.1950. godine, Arhis Bosne i Hercegovine, 1071/6, 1950. I u ovom dokumentu podaci ukazuju na isti trend. U razgovoru aktivistica iz Sarajeva i aktivistica mostarskog sreza za riječ se javila odbornica Tanović Ševala iz Gackog koja je saopćila: „Sav rad naše organizacije leži na profesionalcu. Žene se protive otvaranju obdaništa. Tri drugarice pre mjesec dana pred porođajem otpuštene su iz službe. Sekretarijat AFŽ-a tražio je da se ponovno prime u službu i ukazao na nepravilan stav prema ženama trudnicama. U tome se nije uspjelo da se dotične ponovno povrate u službu. Kad se je tražilo zašto one ne mogu biti u službi navode na primjer za jednu od drugarica slijedeće: ona ima troje djece, a sada će roditi i četvrto. Takvog mi službenika ne trebamo, a na njezino mjesto primit ćemo jednog muškarca.” Kurziv T.O. O masovnim otkazima 50-ih svjedoči i knjiga Ivane Pantelić Partizanke, građanke. 87 Molyneux, Maxine, Family Reform in Socialist States: a Hidden Agenda, Feminist Review, 1985. 4764, str. 52 �182 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A nuklearne obitelji, monogamnih veza i, generalno govoreći, učvršćivanje rodne podjele rada – i u kućanstvima i u industriji. Došlo je do opadanja zaposlenosti žena, a taj trend se se nastavlja i u narednim desetljećima. Barbara Jančar-Webster ističe da je proces industrijalizacije već u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji podrazumijevao feminizaciju određenih industrijskih sektora i zanimanja, a isti trend se nastavio i u drugoj Jugoslaviji, što statistike jasno pokazuju.88 Ovdje je važno napomenuti da su industrijski sektori (tekstil, duhan, uslužne djelatnosti) u Kraljevini bili sektori koji su zapošljavali 200.000 radnica, dok su kućne pomoćnice 1939. godine činile najveću grupu radnica izvan ne-poljoprivrednog sektora. Ishod je bio taj da su žene i u drugoj Jugoslaviji žene činile manje kvalificiranu radnu snagu: žene su bile zaposlene u slabije plaćenim industrijskim sektorima i generalno su u većoj mjeri bile nezaposlene i sačinjavale rezervnu armiju rada. Mislim da je mitove o jednakosti žena u Jugoslaviji koji su danas dostigli status legende posebno efektno razbila Susan Woodward: pritisak na žene da uđu na tržište rada koji je bio prisutan u ostatku Istočne Europe i Sovjetskog saveza nikada nije postojao u Jugoslaviji. Udio žena u radnoj snazi društvenog sektora u stvari je 50-ih godina opao, a od 1957. godine postupno rastao da bi tek kasnih 1970-ih dostigao nivoe zapadoeuropskog prosjeka (oko 33%), ali ne i nivoe visoke participacije u skandinavskim zemljama i u Istočnoj Europi. S druge strane, od ranih 1950ih, otkad Vlada počinje sakupljati podatke o nezaposlenosti, žene su bile nesrazmjerno podložne nezaposlenosti.”89 Samo na temelju nejednakog tržišnog razvoja možemo razumjeti nevjerovatni podatak koji iznose Tea Petrin i Jane Humphries: u ukupnom udjelu ženske radne snage na tržištu ukupno aktivne radne snage i u bruto stopi participacije ženske radne snage bilo je veoma malo promjena. Ostaje slučajem za sebe podatak da su 1931. godine žene predstaljale 33.5% ukupne radne snage, a da se taj broj do 1971. godine jedva popeo do 36%.90 U Arhivu od 50-ih godina pratimo i ono što će u kasnijim godinama i desetljećima za BiH postati i ostati kronični problem, a vremenom će se uslijed produbljivanja nejednakosti među republikama samo pogoršavati. Tako izrijekom čitamo da „budžetom nije odobreno otvaranje 88 Barbara Jančar-Webster, Women&Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941-1945. Arden Press: Colorado, 1990., str. 17, str. 165 89 Woodward, Susan L., op.cit, str. 549, Tea Petrin i Jane Humphries, Women in the Self-Managed Economy of Yugoslavia, Economic Analyses and Workers’s Managment, 1, XIV, 1980, str. 77 90 Petrin, Humphries, op.cit str. 71-73. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 183 jaslica”91 dok žena zaposlena u preduzeću Ukrina govori „da u je u preduzeću otvaranje jaslica neophodno, ali zgrade za jaslice nema. Žene koje imaju sasvim malu djecu pošalju kući da ih nahrane, dok ostale žene svoju djecu ostavljaju u komšiluku zato što ih nemaju gdje smjestiti”92. Samoupravljanje je omogućilo da firme i privredni subjekti u većoj mjeri odlučuju o svome poslovanju, a posljedice uvođenja tržišnih mehanizama samo su dodatno pogoršale položaj žena uopće. Postojali su svi problemi koje u tom periodu možemo pratiti i na kapitalističkom Zapadu: feminizacija određenih industrijskih sektora i zanimanja što će reći da su žene uvijek radile u slabije plaćenim sektorima, postojao je rodni jaz u plaćama, žena na direktorskim pozicijama gotovo da nije bilo, a u jugoslavenskom slučaju u siromašnijim republikama rodni jaz u plaćama se, uslijed strukturnih razlika očitovao još više. Krajnje posljedice su za siromašnije dijelove, poput BiH i Kosova, mogle su značiti samo još veću nejednakost u razvoju. Tako je između 1959. i 1979. godine postotak korisnika (djeca do sedam godina starosti) jaslica, vrtića i zabavišta za cijelu Jugoslaviju rastao od 2,4% do 10%. Naravno, većinom je bila riječ o djeci kvalificiranih i polukvalificiranih radnika, ali isto tako i o velikom broju djece srednje klase. To pokazuje isti trend kao i u Zapadnim zemljama: od institucija države blagostanja najveću korist imali su roditelji srednjeklasnog statusa. U BiH je između 1959. i 1979. godine broj jaslica, vrtića i zabavišta dostigao brojku 137, ali je u njih bilo smješteno samo 3,2% djece. Usporedimo li to sa Slovenijom gdje u istom periodu postoji 616 ovakvih institucija koje koristi 27.7% djece, sasvim je jasno kakve posljedice uvjetuje nejednak razvoj tržišta.93 91 Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja s rukovodiocima srezova održanog 24. i 25. januara 1950.” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, str. 2 Kutija 8, br. dokumenta nepoznat 1950. 92 Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, „Zapisnik sa OOAFŽ-a održanog u Tuzli 14.2.1950.” Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 276, 1949-1950 93 Milić, Anđelka, Berković, Eva i Petrović Ruža, Domaćinstvo, porodica i brak u Jugoslaviji. Beograd: Institut za sociološka istraživanja Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu, 1981., str. 102. Daljnji podaci koje nalazimo u ovoj knjizi poprilično su poražavajući i potvrđuju iste trendove kao i u zemljama Zapada u isto to vrijeme i, još važnije, potvrđuju da od 50-ih godina možemo pratiti sve veće promjene između siromašnijih i bogatijih republika i posljedice tih promjena na stanje i strukturu obrazovanja, sustav zdravstvene zaštite, te društvo uopće. �184 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A 4. Početak nakon kraja, umjesto zaključka Namjera mi je bila ovim radom rekonstruirati jedan historijski događaj i, kroz tu rekonstrukciju, pratiti historiju AFŽ-a. AFŽ je formalno ukinut 1953. godine, a tadašnja predsjednica AFŽ-a Vida Tomšič, kao jedan od razloga ukidanja AFŽ-a, navodi „da smo u izvjesnoj mjeri, ako se to može kazati za cijelu zemlju, jedan od naših zadataka prilično izvršili... u izvjesnom smislu u nekim dijelovima naše zemlje a naročito u gradovima, već postigli da je žena ravnopravna”94. Ponovila je isto ono što je u Sovjetskom Savezu rečeno 1930. godine, kada je ukinut Ženotdel. Ali podatak da je, primjerice u Srbiji, zakon o jednakosti u naslijeđivanju uveden tek 1955. godine95, govori dovoljno u prilog tvrdnji da je izjava Vide Tomšič bila naprosto – neistinita. U trenutku ukidanja AFŽ-a nisu bili usvojeni ni mnogi zakoni postupno uvođeni do 60-ih i 70-ih godina, tako da ne možemo govoriti čak ni o građanskoj jednakopravnosti. Narativ o AFŽ-u već se do sredine pedesetih rastvorio i rastopio u narativu o NOB-u koji je postao središnjim mjestom i ideološkim uporištem državnog aparata. Kolektiv AFŽ-a je zamijenjen heroinama sa točno određenim imenom i prezimenom, likom i djelom. Tako je izvršena prva revizija afežeovske prošlosti u kojoj se ujedno dogodila i podjela na privatno i javno. Ako je Svetlana Slapšak96 u svojoj analizi filma Slavica (1947.) govorila o smrti partizanke, možda se može reći da smrti partizanke prethodi smrt afežeovke, iako AFŽ službeno nestaje tek pet godina kasnije. Partizanka u smrti preživljava i odlazi u slavnu historiju, postajući simbolom poratne Jugoslavije. Na nju se odnosi službeno i sankcionirano historijsko sjećanje koje su promovirale državne komemoracije, historiografija i memorijali. Ona postaje dijelom slavne prošlosti, a građanke kao proizvodni subjekti postaju figurama sadašnjosti i budućnosti. Činjenica da ne postoji niti jedna jugoslavenska historija djelovanja žena u AFŽ-u, a da postoje mnoge o djelovanju žena u NOB-u, sugerira da je AFŽ iz javnog pamćenja počeo nestajati već sredinom 50-ih kada izlazi prvo, hrvatsko izdanje o ulozi žena u NOB-u. Do bh. izdanja će proći više od puna tri desetljeća od kraja tog rata. Za ta tri desetljeća se promijenilo mnogo. Promijenila su se sjećanja preživjelih žena, promijenilo se lice i naličje revolucije, promijenila se država, promijenili su se zakoni. No, jedno je ostalo isto. Žene su i dalje nejednake i neravnopravne. Zato je analiza Lydije Sklevicky još uvijek bezvremena. Žene su 94 Gordana Stojaković, Vida Tomšič – zašto je ukinut AFŽ; i svi ostali navodi Vide Tomšič koje koristim i parafraziram preuzeti su iz ovog teksta. 95 Gudac-Dodić, Vera, Under the Aegis of Family, Women in Serbia, The Journal of International Social Research Vol. 3 br. 13, 2010. str. 112. 96 Slapšak, Svetlana. Ženske ikone XX veka. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek. 2001. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 185 (po)stale nevidljive slobodne građanke, a konji i muškarci su nastavili vladati dominantnim historijskim i obrazovnim narativima. Izjavu Vide Tomšič da su se žene „okrenule modi i prevaziđenim načinima ponašanja… pojava koja je vidljiva u dnevnim novinama” ne mogu nego shvatiti kao moralizatorsku zato što u potpunosti zanemaruje klasne razlike koje se počinju pojavljivati već u jugoslavenskom društvu, među klasama, ali i unutar radničke klase. Počinju se pojavljivati upravo zato što se negirala prosta činjenica da je i dalje postojala podjela na privatno i javno, ekonomsko i političko. Žene su i dalje proizvodile radnu snagu, a teret reprodukcije je i dalje bio u sferi privatnog. Osobina radne snage je to da ona, ne samo da proizvodi vrijednost, nego je i jedina roba koja nije proizvedena u procesu proizvodnje. Budući da privatna reprodukcija radne snage u obitelji ne proizvodi vrijednost, odnosno da je proizvodi samo posredno, kao takva nema razmjensku vrijednost. Zbog toga ženska radna snaga na tržištu ima manju vrijednost jer ju se manje-više smatra privremenim dodatkom obiteljskom dohotku. To je bio slučaj i u Jugoslaviji. Mjere koje je uvela država zapravo su maknule teret sa onih mjesta i zanimanja koja su tradicionalno bila muška, a na žene je od početka padao samo veći teret privatne i privatizirane reprodukcije. Upravo zato su žene oscilirale između „rentabilne” i „nerentabilne” radne snage – i zato je kraj AFŽ-a bio početak zaborava činjenice da bez socijalizacije tereta reprodukcije, nema socijalističkog društva. Danas, kada se – mukom i borbom izborena – formalna prava i slobode ruše kao kula od karata pod najezdom političkog reakcionizma i njegova ekonomskog napada, dominacija tržišta (i očeva, svećenika i vođa) postaje sve bezgraničnijom. Sav teret socijalne reprodukcije prenosi se na radničku klasu generalno, i na žene partikularno. Šta bi onda danas značio AFŽ? Kakve političke lekcije možemo naučiti? Prva i najvažnija je ta da odgovor ljevice na historijski revizionizam današnjice ne može i ne smije biti revizionistički. Druga lekcija koju nam pokazuje historija AFŽ-a već je izrečena: Marxova i Fourrierova, da je položaj žena mjerilo napretka čovječanstva, što bi u slučaju o kojem je ovdje bilo riječi značilo da je poraz emancipacije žena istovremeno i nužno bio i poraz revolucije. Kao što je Lenjin običavao reći: trajnost revolucije ovisi o tome u kojoj mjeri u njoj sudjeluju žene. Treća, ništa manje važna, jest da zaustavljena revolucija ne znači i njenu nemogućnost. Naprotiv, AFŽ nam pokazuje da prošlost ne možemo ponoviti, ali iz nje možemo naučiti da samo u zajedničkoj političkoj borbi – koja je uvijek i borba za (ali ne i samo) prava – možemo emancipirati sebe i uvjete u kojima živimo. Emancipacija može doći samo iz kolektivnih napora, koji, parafrazirajući Bensaïda, nikada ne smiju zapasti u uvjerenje da revolucija nije moguća. To je zadnja i najvažnija lekcija AFŽ-a i jugoslavenske prošlosti. �186 TIJANA OKIĆ OD REVOLUCIONARNOG DO PROIZVODNOG SUBJEKTA: ALTERNATIVNA HISTORIJA AFŽ-A Arhivska građa: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Dopis sreskog odbor AFŽ-a Velika Kladuša, Arhiv BiH, Kutija 2, 901/47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a, BiH, Izvještaj Centralnog odbora Beograd sa sastanka socijalnozdravstvenog saveta pri Komitetu za socijalno staranje pri Vladi FNRJ Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Kutija 3, br. 1124-47, 1947. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja predsjednica i sekretara sreskih odbora AFŽ održan u Sarajevu 20.1.1949. godine, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, ” Kutija 7a, ? 1949., Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik s pleuma za oblast Bihać, ? Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, br. dokumenta nepoznat, 1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH,Zapisnik plenarnog sastanka Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a održan 26.9.1948. godine, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 5, 84/48, 1948. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, Zapisnik Plenarnog sastanka AFŽ-a u Bihaću održanog u prostorijama u vjećnici G.N.O dana 9.2.1950. godine, str. 2. Arhiv Bosne i Hrecegovine, Kutija 9, 1061/5, 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik sa sastanka sekretarijata Oblasnog odbora za oblast sarajevsku koji se održaje 10.1.1950. godine, 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 1082/4, 1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH,Pozdravna riječ dr. Hamdije Čemerlića sa Prvog kongresa AFŽ-a BiH od 08.06.1945, Arhiv BiH, 1945, Kutija 1, 1945. Primjerice: Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Sreski izvještaj AFŽ-a za srez sarajevski Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (izbori, izgradnja dječijeg ljetovališta narodno prosvjećivanje, analfabetski tečajevi), Arhiv BiH, Kutija 4, 1137/48, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Dopis Sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Doboj Glavnom odboru AFŽ-a za BiH, 7.2.1947. godine (izvještaj o radu zdravstvene sekcije, analfabetski tečajevi), Arhiv BiH, Kutija 2, 199/47, 1947., Glavni odbor AFŽ-a BiH, Zapisnik sa sastanka Sekretarijata sreskog odbora AFŽ-a Bijeljina Zemaljskom odboru AFŽ-a BiH (organiziranje žena za rad na izgradnji pruge Bijeljina-Rača), 1948. Arhiv BiH, Kutija 5, 1182, 1948. Glavni odbor AFŽ-a, Zapisnik sa plenuma Glavnog odbora AFŽ-a BiH održanog 05. i 06.06. 1946., Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 1, 116/46., 1946. Plenum je održan u Napretkovoj čitaonici, a pored članica AFŽ ispred NF-a bio je prisutan Ljubo Babić. dostupan na: http://www.afzarhiv.org/items/show/332 Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Dopis glavnog odbora AFŽ CK KP BiH, Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Kutija 9, 497/50, 1950. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA 187 Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Zaključci sa savjetovanja iz rukovodilaca sreskih i oblasnih organizacija AFŽ-a Arhiv BiH, Kutija 9, 422/50, italic kao i Oblasni odbor AFŽ-a Sarajevo, Zapisnik s plenuma oblasnog odbora AFŽ-a za Mostarsku oblast održan 18.5.1950. Glavni odbor AFŽ BiH, Zapisnik sa savjetovanja sa rukovodiocima srezova koji se održaje 24. i 25. januara 1950. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, str. 2 Kutija 8, ? 1950. Oblasni odbor AFŽ Sarajevo, Zapisnik sa OOAFŽ-a održan u Tuzli dana 14.2.1950., Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine Sarajevo, Kutija 9, br. 276. 1949-1950 Časopis Alijanse ženskih pokreta, Ženski pokret, br. 1-2, 1937. godina. 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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ��ADELA JUŠIĆ Kombinovana tehnika �ADELA JUŠIĆ Kombinovana tehnika �ADELA JUŠIĆ Crtež olovkom ��BIOGRAFIJE CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ TIJANA OKIĆ NARDINA ZUBANOVIĆ ALEKSANDRA NINA KNEŽEVIĆ SUNITA FIŠIĆ KASJA JERLAGIĆ ADELA JUŠIĆ �196 BIOGRAFIJE CHIARA BONFIGLIOLI trenutno radi kao EURIAS Junior Fellow u Beču (Institut za humanističke znanosti, IWM), a sa Centrom za kulturološka i povijesna istraživanja socijalizma (CKPIS) u Puli surađuje u okviru programa NEWFELPRO. Završila je preddiplomski studij političkih znanosti u Bologni, te diplomski, postdiplomski i doktorski studij na Institutu za povijest i kulturu (program Rodni studiji) u Utrechtu. Od 2012. do 2014. godine radila je na Sveučilištu u Edinburghu kao postdoktorantica i suradnica na projektu CITSEE. U doktorskoj disertaciji bavila se ženskim političkim i društvenim aktivizmom u Italiji i Jugoslaviji (1945-1957). Objavila je više radova o povijesti žena i feminizma u europskom kontekstu. Posljednjih godina istražuje utjecaj postsocijalističke tranzicije i deindustrijalizacije na rodne odnose u bivšoj Jugoslaviji, s posebnim naglaskom na radnice u tekstilnoj industriji. AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ radi kao docentica na Filozofskom fakultetu Univerziteta u Sarajevu. Na Odsjeku za komparativnu književnost i biliotekarstvo izvodi nastavu iz predmeta Uvod u znanost o književnosti, Uvod u naratologiju i Feminističke književne teorije. Pored angažmana na Odsjeku za komparativnu književnost i bibliotekarstvo, bila je angažirana i kao suradnica na interdisciplinarnim postdiplomskim rodnim studijama Univerziteta u Sarajevu. Doktorirala je na Filozofskom fakultetu u Sarajevu, sa temom Prikaz rata u tekstovima bosanskohercegovačkih spisateljica: žensko ratno pismo 1992.-1995. Istraživački interes usmjeren joj je na feminističke teorije, teorije pripovijedanja, te književno-teorijska istraživanja ratne književnosti. DANIJELA MAJSTOROVIĆ vanredna je profesorica anglističke lingvistike i kulturoloških studija na Filološkom fakultetu Univerziteta u Banjoj Luci. Autorka je preko trideset članaka na temu reprezentacije, etniciteta, roda, diskursne analize, medija i filma, kao i tri monografije: Diskurs, moć i međunarodna zajednica (2007, Filozofski fakultet, Banja Luka), Youth Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Social Science Approaches (2013, Palgrave, London) te Diskursi periferije (2013, Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd). Urednica je tri zbornika: Living with Patriarchy: Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects Across Cultures (2011, John Benjamins, Amsterdam), U okrilju nacije: konstruisanje nacionalnog i državnog identiteta kod mladih u Bosni i Hercegovini (2011, CKSP, Banja Luka), te zbornika Kritičke kulturološke studije u post-jugoslovenskom prostoru (2012, Filološki fakultet, Banja Luka). Producirala je i režirala dva dokumentarna filma: Kontrapunkt za nju (2004) i Posao snova (2006). Predavala je i gostovala na brojnim domaćim i stranim visokoškolskim ustanovama. Jedna je od pokretačica Banjalučkog �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA socijalnog centra i kao aktivistkinja bori se protiv nacionalizma, istorijskog revizionizma, zalažući se za socijalnu pravdu i radnička pitanja. Trudi se da živi i odgaja sina u skladu s feminističkim načelima. BORIŠA MRAOVIĆ, istraživač, urednik i saradnik, dio je operativnog tima Udruženja za kulturu i umjetnost Crvena, gdje se bavi istraživanjem političke ekonomije urbanog pitanja, upravljanjem urbanim resursima i urbanom mobilizacijom, te priprema obimno istraživanje rave kulture u Bosni i Hercegovini 1996.-2006. Objavljivao je tekstove u međunarodnim časopisima i zbornicima, a urednik je zbornika Šta da napišem na zidu? u izdanju Crvene. Dobitnik je istraživačkih stipendija Fonda otvoreno društvo (2013-2014), ERSTE Fondacije za društvena istraživanja (2015-2016), a u septembru i oktobru 2013. godine bio je gostujući istraživač Centra za demokratske studije Aarau, u Švicarskoj. Radio je sa nizom lokalnih i međunarodnih organizacija i akademskih institucija na istraživanjima koja se bave migracijama, izbornim sistemima, lokalnom upravom i političkom teorijom. TIJANA OKIĆ rođena je u Sarajevu 1986. godine. Studirala je filozofiju i sociologiju, a potom magistrirala filozofiju na Filozofskom fakultetu u Sarajevu, gdje je poslije bila uposlena u zvanje asistentice. Od 2015. godine pohađa doktorski studij filozofije na Scuola Normale Superiore u Pisi. Objavila je nekoliko filozofskih tekstova. Organizirala je i aktivno sudjelovala u radu Plenuma u Sarajevu 2014. godine. Članica je uredničkog tima Viewpoint magazina. Prevodi sa nekoliko jezika, uživa u čitanju poezije i romana i priprema doktorat. Trenutno živi na relaciji Sarajevo – Pisa. NARDINA ZUBANOVIĆ rođena je 1987. godine u Sarajevu, BiH. 2014. godine diplomirala je na Akademiji likovnih umjetnosti, Univerzitet u Sarajevu, odsjek skulptura, gdje trenutno pohađa magistarske studije. U svom umjetničkom radu koristi različite medije, od skulpture do prostorne intervencije/instalacije, performansa, fotografije i videa. 2009. godine osnovala je neformalnu kulturnu organizaciju Kolektiv Kreaktiva koja je producirala preko 30 umjetničkih događaja (izložbe, radionice, koncerti i performansi) i surađivala sa više od 100 kulturnih radnika/ca iz cijelog svijeta. Pored toga što koordinira i osmišljava program Kolektiv Kreaktive, Nardina Zubanović kurirala je i učestvovala na brojnim samostalnim i grupnim izložbama i art radionicama u regiji i svijetu, u suradnji sa institucijama i udruženjima kao što su: Historijski muzej BiH, izložba ZID 2015; Nacionalna galerija BiH, Sara Art Fair, 2015; Klub ljubitelja sedme umjetnosti, Bahanalije, Sarajevo, 197 �198 BIOGRAFIJE BiH, 2014; Centar La Kultur, Dani otvorenog ateljea, Sarajevo BiH, 2015. i 2016; Land Art kolonija festivala Javorwood, Jahorina, BiH, 2016; Factory of Memories, Tirana, Albanija i Sarajevo, BiH, 2015; Actopolis, Crvena, Sarajevo, BiH, 2016, itd. ALEKSANDRA NINA KNEŽEVIĆ rođena je u Sarajevu, 1973. godine. Diplomirala je na Akademiji likovnih umjetnosti, Cetinje, Crna Gora, na odsjeku za grafički dizajn. Radovi Aleksandre Nine Knežević se odlikuju čistom i suvremenom idejom, jednostavno komuniciraju internacionalnim vizualnim jezikom, a predstavljeni su kroz razigranu tipografiju i ilustraciju. Za svoj rad primila je brojna međunarodna priznanja i nagrade, a njeni radovi su objavljivani u mnogim časopisima specijaliziranim za umjetnost i dizajn (Communication Arts, Luezers Archive, Print, Typo, Fontmagazine…). 2010. godine uvrštena je među 200 najboljih svjetskih ilustratora/ki (Luerzer’s Archive: 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide 09-10). U razdoblju od 2006. do 2010. godine bila je predsjednica Udruženja likovnih umjetnika primijenjenih umjetnosti i dizajnera BiH (ULUPUBiH). Radi kao freelance dizajnerka i kao dizajnerka i ilustratorka knjiga izdavačke kuće Buybook u Sarajevu. Za svoj projekat Sarajevo Dingbats, 2014. godine dobila je godišnju nagradu sarajevskog Collegium artisticuma. SUNITA FIŠIĆ rođena je u Livnu 1989. godine. Živi i radi u Sarajevu. Studira na Akademiji likovnih umjetnosti u Sarajevu, na Nastavničkom odsjeku. Pored ostalih medija, bavi se illustracijom, slikarstvom i uličnom umjetnošću. Učestvovala je na brojnim izložbama širom svijeta, od kojih se izdvajaju: Oslikavanje zida, LAB-1, Eindhoven, Holadija, 2016; slikarska radionica, Grassroots projekat, Kolektiv Kreaktiva, LA Kultur, Sarajevo, BiH, 2015; Split 3D Street Art Festival, Split, Hrvatska, 2015; Beton IV Festival 3D street art, Sarajevo, BiH, 2015; Mostar Street Art Festival, uljepšavanje zidova grada Mostara, BiH, 2015; Samostalna izložba i oslikavanje zida, LAB 1, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, Holandija 2014; Pecha Kucha prezentacija umjetničkih djela, SOS Dizajn Festival, Kriterion, Sarajevo, 2014; Samostalna izložba digitalnih radova, Bitola Open City Festival, Makedonija, 2014; Radionica oslikavanja zidova na ulazu u Olimpijsku dvoranu Zetra, Kids festival, Sarajevo, 2014; Mostar Street Art Festival, uljepšavanje zidova grada Mostara, 2014; Kolektivna izložba Inicijacija, Yage, Collegium artisticum, 2014, itd. �IZGUBLJENA REVOLUCIJA: AFŽ IZMEĐU MITA I ZABORAVA KASJA JERLAGIĆ je rođena 1996. godine u Sarajevu, gdje živi i radi. Studira na Akademiji likovnih umjetnosti Univerziteta u Sarajevu, odsjek grafika. Kasja Jerlagić nalazi se na samom početku svoje umjetničke karijere, te je do sada učestvovala samo na jednoj kolektivnoj izložbi - Kupujmo domaće u galeriji Duplex100m2, Sarajevo, BiH, 2016. godine. Volontira u sarajevskim galerijama Duplex100m2 i galeriji 11/07/95, te odnedavno radi u Charlama galeriji u Sarajevu, koju vodi umjetnik Jusuf Hadžifejzović.   ADELA JUŠIĆ je rođena 1982. godine u Sarajevu, BiH, gdje živi i radi. Magistrirala je grafiku na Akademiji likovnih umjetnosti, Univerzitet u Sarajevu 2007. godine, te je 2013. magistrirala ljudska prava i demokratiju, Univerzitet u Sarajevu i Bologni. Suosnivačica je Udruženja za kulturu i umjetnost Crvena, u kojem radi od 2010. godine. Adela Jušić je izlagala na oko 100 internacionalnih izložbi, uključujući bijenale Manifesta 8, Murcia, Španija; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Njemačka; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, München, Njemačka; Balkan Inisight, Pompidou Center, Paris, Francuska, itd. Učestvovala je na više rezidencijalnih programa za umjetnike/ce (ISCP, New York; Kulturkontakt, Vienna; i.a.a.b. Basel, itd). Dobitnica je nagrade Young Visual Artist Award za najboljeg/u mladog/u bosanskog/u umjetnika/cu 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price CEE 2011, i specijalne nagrade Oktobarskog salona, Beograd, 2013. godine. Bila je učesnica brojnih panela, radionica i konferencija (London School of Economics, Royal College of Art, London, UK, itd). 199 �Zahvale: Svima, od Burme preko Pekinga, od Švedske do Texasa koji su u sklopu projekta Šta je nama naša borba dala? doprinijeli crowdfunding kampanji kojom je prikupljen inicijalni fond potreban za digitalizaciju arhivske građe. Zahvaljujemo se osoblju Historijskog muzeja i Arhiva Bosne i Hercegovine, bez čije pomoći stvaranje Arhiva antifašističke borbe žena Bosne i Hercegovine ne bi bilo moguće. Također, brojnim drugim organizacijama i osobama koje su podržali naš rad i obogatili sadržaj Arhiva: Muzej II zasjedanja AVNOJ-a, UABNOR Centar Sarajevo, Savez antifašista i boraca NOR-a Tuzlanskog kantona, Mediterranean Women’s Fund, Eve Ensler, Nina Karač, Feđa Kulenović, Boro Jurišić, Elvira Jahić, Stana Nastić, Lucija Mravić, Šemsa Galijašević, Alija Maglajlić, Nasiha Porobić, Milka Jakšić, Miholjka Reljić, Jelena Lazić, Ankica Đurić, članice i članovi CRVENE i mnogi drugi. ��� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Istraživački radovi Knjiga Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Izgubljena revolucija: AFŽ između mita i zaborava Description An account of the resource Za izdavača: Danijela Dugandžić Urednica ilustracija: Adela Jušić Ilustracije: Sunita Fišić, Aleksandra Nina Knežević, Kasja Jerlagić, Adela Jušić, Nardina Zubanović Prijevod teksta Chiare Bonfiglioli sa engleskog jezika: Selma Asotić Lektura: Mirjana Evtov Grafičko oblikovanje i priprema za štampu: Leila Čmajčanin Tiraž: 300 Štampa: Dobra knjiga, Sarajevo ISBN: 978-9926-8131-0-9 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Urednice: Andreja Dugandžić i Tijana Okić Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost CRVENA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource decembar 2016. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe with funds of the German Federal Ministry for Economic and Development Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost CRVENA Language A language of the resource SH, BH Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 12-IR Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 204 str. 2016. AFŽ Ajla Demiragić Boriša Mraović Chiara Bonfiglioli Danijela Majstorović revolucija Tijana Okić http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/35984d6f608bd3223ca27c5370c5437e.pdf 889be534db44b463d1308f7e93b05794 PDF Text Text REVOLUTIONARY NETWORKS Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957) REVOLUTIONAIRE NETWERKEN Politieke en Sociaal Activisme van Vrouwen in Italie en Joegoslavie tijdens de Koude Oorlog (1945-1957) (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 14 september 2012 des middags te 12.45 uur door Chiara Bonfiglioli geboren op 24 januari 1983 te Bologna, Italie �Promotor: Prof. dr. R. Braidotti �A mia nonna Linda, Una ragazza degli anni Quaranta To my grandmother Linda, A girl of the 1940s �Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . Chapter 1 Theoretical and methodological framework of the research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 1  Women’s history in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. . . . . . . . 24 1.1  Temporalities: the antifascist foremothers and the feminist generation. . . . . . 24 1.2  Women’s political history across time and across national borders. . . . . . . . . 27 2  Women’s history during the Cold War: uncovering agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3  Trans-European feminist genealogies: challenging the East-West divide. . . . . . . 33 . 4  Reading the cultural Cold War through a gender lens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 5  Cold War Orientalism and post-Cold War ethnography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 6  Research methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 6.1  Designing a research method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 6.2  Visits to archives in Italy and the former Yugoslavia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 6.3  Archival sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 6.4  Autobiographies, biographies and oral history interviews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 6.5  Lost and found in translation: language and narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 6.6  Across Europe: traveling locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 6.7  Across generations: subjectivity and agency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 . Chapter 2 Women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 . Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 1  The Second World War in Italy and Yugoslavia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 1.1  The beginnings of the antifascist struggle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 1.2  Italian and Yugoslav women’s encounters across borders during the war. . . . 65 �2  The foundation of the afž and the udi during the antifascist Resistance. . . . 68 2.1  Women’s resistance in Yugoslavia: the Antifascist Women’s Front (afž). . . 69 2.2  Women’s resistance in Italy: the Groups for the Defense of Women (gdd) and the Union of Italian Women (udi). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 . 3  Assessing the impact of women’s participation in the Resistance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 3.1  Images of female fighters in Yugoslavia and Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 3.2  Motherhood, “women” and femininity as consensual signifiers. . . . . . . . . . . . 79 3.3  Beyond representation: women’s agency in feminist historiography. . . . . . . . 82 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Chapter 3 The afž, the udi and the task of postwar reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 1  Women’s social work of national reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 1.1  The first postwar afž congress (Belgrade, June 1945). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 1.2  The first postwar udi Congress (Florence, October 1945). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 1.3  udi and afž engagements in social work in the postwar years . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 1.4  The paradigm of social motherhood after 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 2  The 1946 Italian and Yugoslav Constitutions: formulating women’s rights . . . . 100 2.1  Overcoming women’s inferiority as a legacy of previous regimes. . . . . . . . . . 100 2.2  Women’s equality as citizens and workers, women’s difference as mothers. . . 101 2.3  Women’s equality as a “prize” or as a “natural outcome” of the Resistance. . . 104 3  The pedagogic character of antifascist women’s organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 3.1  The udi and the afž as avant-gardes: educating the feminine masses. . . . . . . 106 3.2  “Wearing trousers”: udi and afž leaders rejecting “work among women”. . . 109 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Chapter 4 Women’s internationalism after 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 1  The Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 1.1  The widf founding congress (November 1945, Paris) and the initial activities of the widf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 �2  Transnational encounters in the postwar period: the Yugoslav example. . . . . . . . 123 2.1  Yugoslav women’s international recognition and the claim over Trieste. . . . . 124 2.2  Italian women abroad: the uncoupling of Italian identity from Fascism. . . . 128 2.3  The ambivalence of the Yugoslav model for Italian militants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 3  The Italo-Yugoslav border area as a microcosm of Cold War battles. . . . . . . . . . . 135 3.1  For a Yugoslav Trieste: the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (udais).136 3.2  “Let’s learn how to talk”: women’s class-based activism in a multi-ethnic city. 142 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Chapter 5 From comrades to traitors: the Cominform Resolution of 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 1  The Soviet-Yugoslav split and its consequences on women’s internationalism. . . . . 151 1.1  The First and Second Cominform Resolutions (June 1948 – November 1949). . . 151 1.2  The isolation of Yugoslav delegates at the Women’s International Exhibition .155 1.3  “Sisterhood was no longer innocent”: the second widf Congress in Budapest. 159 1.4  The break of udi-afž relations and the exclusion of the afž from the widf. 163 2  Intra-communist wars in Yugoslavia, Italy and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. 170 2.1  The making of Yugoslav “Cominformists” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 2.2  Enemy making: The afž and the udi amidst Cold War struggles . . . . . . . . . . 174 2.3  The effects of the Cominform Resolution in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. 179 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Chapter 6 Into the field: the afž, the udi and the practice of emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 1  The afž in the early Cold War era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 1.1  afž campaigns in 1948–1953: women’s equality as a modernization project . . . . 189 1.2  From darkness to enlightenment: the campaign against feređže. . . . . . . . . . . 192 . 1.3  Feminist historiography and the dissolution of the afž in 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . 196 1.4  The women’s question as a social question: the iv and last afž Congress. . . . 199 2  The udi in the early Cold War era. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 2.1  udi campaigns in 1948-53: class conflicts and solidarity networks. . . . . . . . . . 205 2.2  Peasant movements in Southern Italy: a “woman with no name” . . . . . . . . . . 208 �2.3  The udi support of of war rape victims in Cassino province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 2.4  Feminist historiography and the debate on the autonomy of the udi . . . . . . . 214 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Chapter 7 After 1956: national ways to women’s emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 1  The impact of 1956 on Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations. . . . . . . . . . . . 228 1.1  A new climate within the udi: redefining emancipation and autonomy . . . . . 228 1.2  Critical observers: Yugoslav sdž leaders and the widf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 2  Women’s internationalism and its discontents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 2.1  The widf and the geopolitical crises of 1956 in Suez and Hungary . . . . . . . . . 235 2.2  Contesting Soviet hegemony: the widf Helsinki Plenum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 2.3  The 1957 Ljubljana meeting between Italian and Yugoslav leaders. . . . . . . . . . 241 2.4  Women’s questions: autonomy, contraception and abortion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 3  The difficult reconciliation in the Italo-Yugoslav border area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Concluding remarks and suggestions for future research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 1  Women’s transnational activism in Cold War Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 2  Gendering Cold War politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 3  Post-Cold War feminist narratives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 List of abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 . Samenvatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 ��Acknowledgements Writing a doctoral dissertation is definitely more about the journey than about the destination. Although I am solely responsible for the final contents of the dissertation, and thus for its destination, I would like to thank the many fellow travelers who made this journey possible. First of all, I am immensely grateful to the extraordinary women who agreed to be interviewed and to share with me their personal stories. A heartfelt thank you to Gordana Bosanac, Marisa Rodano, Ester Pacor, Luciana Viviani and Vinka Kitarović, whose storytelling allowed me to travel in time and to understand the degree of political passion involved in women’s politics. I am immensely grateful to my PhD supervisor Rosi Braidotti. Your generosity, energy and deeply inspiring intellectual support sustained me along the way. Thank you for believing in this project from the start – even when it wasn’t there yet – and for encouraging me to be open to discoveries, while at the same time keeping in check my Pindaric flights with a healthy dose of realism. The ogc Institute at Utrecht University provided me with generous financial and educational support, for which I am deeply grateful. Thank you to José van Aelst for her warm support. The Graduate Gender Programme has been a wonderful academic community, both for a master student and a PhD researcher. I have greatly benefited from the feedback of members of staff and colleagues, as well as from the PhD Reading/Writing seminars. Thank you Berteke Waaldijk for your kind support and generosity during these years. Many thanks also to the staff of the Graduate Gender Programme, and particularly to Rosemarie Buikema, Sandra Ponzanesi and Trude Oorschot. I also wish to thank all the fellow PhD researchers in Utrecht, and particularly those who became close friends in the course of time: Arla Gruda, Domitilla Olivieri, Doro Wiese, Koen Leurs and Sabrina Marchetti. Thank you for your invaluable support at the various stages of the dissertation. In Utrecht, I greatly benefited from the visits of Andrea Peto and Luisa Passerini, and from their methodological advice. I am also grateful for the comments received from professors in other departments or universities in the Netherlands. Thank you to Ido de Haan for reading two chapters at an earlier stage, and to Hanneke Hoekstra for her feedback during the 2011 PhD day of the Netherlands Research School of Gender studies. During the course of the research I presented and discussed my work in various academic settings outside the Netherlands. I had the privilege to take part in the 2010 Summer Institute of the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University, New York. I also immensely benefited from conference Unequal Sisters: Women, Gender, and Global Inequalities in Historical Perspective organized by the International Fed- 9 �eration for Research on Women’s History at the Aletta Institute for Women’s History in August 2010, and from the workshop on Intimate Internationalism: Women Transforming the Political in Postwar Europe at Potsdam University in October 2010. In Amsterdam and in Potsdam, I could count on Francisca de Haan for feedback and extremely inspiring conversations. Thank you also to Xavier Bougarel and Fabio Giomi for their feedback during the Afebalk seminar in Paris in May 2011, and to Ioana Cirstocea for her comments in Paris and at the esf workshop in Strasbourg in November 2011. Many thanks also to Rada Iveković for her support. I am also grateful to the Center for Women’s Studies in Zagreb, and particularly to Renata Jambrešić-Kirin and to Rada Borić for their help and suggestions at the beginning of the project. I am indebted to the competent and helpful staff of the numerous archival institutions I have visited, and to the professors and colleagues who helped during the fieldwork. My first thank you goes to the staff of the Aletta Institute for Women’s History in Amsterdam, a wonderful place to dive into women’s history. In Italy, I am thankful to the staff of the following institutions: Archivio Centrale udi, Casa Internazionale delle Donne (Archivia) and Istituto Gramsci in Rome; Narodna in Studijska knijžica, Istituto Regionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione nel Friuli Venezia Giulia and Istituto Livio Saranz in Trieste. At Istituto Saranz, Ariella Verrocchio was particularly kind and helpful. In Trieste, I am also thankful to Gloria Nemec and Patrick Karlsen for sharing their knowledge of the Julian Region. In Slovenia, I am thankful to the staff of the Arhiv Republike Slovenije and particularly to Metka Gombač. Thank you also to the staff of the Hrvatski Državni Arhiv in Zagreb, and of the Arhiv Jugoslavije in Belgrade. In Belgrade, Milovan Pissarri’s jokes were a welcomed break from the archival boxes; equally important was his help in transporting around Belgrade the thousands of photocopies I made. Thank you to Dubravka Sekulić for making sure that those precious copies would safely reach the Netherlands. Thank you also to Pietro Bianchi for finding a 1957 movie from East Germany in no time. Throughout my research I was also lucky to be able to compare views with a number of colleagues and friends from the former Yugoslavia. Ana Miškovška Kajevška shared her knowledge and her archival discoveries on feminism and women’s activism with immense generosity. Thank you also to Vladimir Unkovski-Korica for commenting upon an early draft of Chapter 6, and for helping me not to get lost in the conundrums of Yugoslav selfmanagement. Thanks also to Katja Šrklj, Ivana Pantelić, Damir Arsenijević, Gal Kirn, Jelena Petrović and Zsofia Lorand for sharing inspiring articles and suggestions. In the Netherlands, and during my fieldwork trips, I could count on a wonderful revolutionary network of friends from Zagreb, Rijeka and Zadar, who provided shelter, food, company and much more. These are Agata Juniku, Renata Marusić, Marko Medved and Srđan Rahelić. In Ljubljana, I could count on the welcoming home of Tea Hvala. In Belgrade, Marijana Mitrović and Katarina Lončarević have been amazing colleagues, hosts and friends; they did all that was possible, and even more, to make me feel welcome in the city. 10 �Throughout these four years, long-lasting friendships across Europe were a source of energy, warmth and inspiration. In Paris, I could rely on the friendship and encouragement of Karine Bomel, Manuel Bochaton and Adrien Arrous. Thank you also to Jean-Numa Ducange for supporting me at the beginning of this project. My thoughts also go to Jacques Mucchielli, a brilliant writer and a dear friend who is no longer among us, and to my late teacher Daniel Bensaid, whose writings keep inspiring me. In Bologna, Giulia Ventura has always been there for me. I could also rely on the warm support and friendship of Alessandra Landi. I also enjoyed the conversations with fellow Balkan traveler Francesco Mazzucchelli. Thank you also to Gabriella Alberti for inspiring and supportive skype conversations across the Channel. In Rotterdam, I am immensely grateful to Heleen Schröder for being such a wonderful friend, and for taking care of the proofreading of this thesis so skillfully. I am also thankful for the generosity and warm hospitality of Carla and Piotrek Świątkowski. During my life in the Netherlands I enjoyed the company of many wonderful people. A heartfelt thank you to Adda Ingolfsdottir, Aetzel Griffioen, Annabel van Baren, Attilia Ruzzene, Duncan Chapple, Efrat Zehavi, Eliz-Mari Lourens, Gerdien Smit, Gijs van Wiechen, Giulia Maci, Jill Alpes, Sara R. Farris, Silvia Radicioni, Stefania Azzarello, Roxana Morote and Virginia Virtù. Last, I would like to acknowledge the fundamental, unwavering support received from my family in Italy throughout the research process, which made all the difference. Thank you to my parents Manuela and Moreno, my sister Elena, my uncle Daniele and his family, and to our family friend Carlo. A thought goes to the memory of my beloved grandfather Mario, who left us in 2009. This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother Linda, who has been a constant source of love, learning and inspiration. 11 �Introduction Sometime in the mid-1930s, in a village near the city of Modena, Italy, a girl of eight dared to ask a local Fascist chief: “Why you do not give my dad a job?” Her father, a member of the local communist party, could not get any manual work in the village, but had to support his wife and his five children by building streets in the Italian colony of Ethiopia. A picture of that worker – tanned by the long hours spent under the scorching sun, smiling among other street builders in post-1945 Italy – is one of the iconic pictures in my family. That girl who revolted against injustice at the age of eight is my maternal grandmother, the first antifascist woman I ever met, and the one I grew up with. I was born in “red Bologna”, in what has been defined as “the region of Italy with the strongest left-wing traditions and the highest density of Communist Party membership in Western Europe” (Gundle 2000: 1). Crossed by the Gothic Line in the Second World War, it was also the Italian region with the strongest armed Resistance, and the theatre of particularly violent retaliations against civilians during the Nazi occupation of Northern Italy. The antifascist Resistance became the founding myth of Bologna’s postwar history and of its communist administration, lasting from 1945 until 1999. In 1989, the year that marked the end of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and of communist parties in Western Europe, I was only six years old. But memories of the Partisan struggle were present in many families, and outlasted the so-called “end of history”. From my grandmother, I heard stories about my communist great-grandfather who “helped out the boys to get to the mountains” during World War Two, and about my grandmother being saved from a bad injury caused by bomb shrapnel, at the age of twelve, thanks to the penicillin provided by the Partisans. More family memories appeared since I have embarked on this research. The same communist great-grandfather allegedly kept a picture of Stalin at home, while a great-uncle, then sixteen years old, had escaped to Yugoslavia after the war to avoid being put on trial for his partisan activities. “Fascism” and “antifascism” were still operative political categories when I became involved in politics in my high school years. I joined a group of students who called themselves “born from the Resistance”, a form of protest against the first rightwing city council’s proposal to modify the city’s statute and to eliminate the phrase “Bologna is a city born from the Resistance”. The myth of the antifascist Resistance outlasted the Cold War, and was reappropriated by contemporary movements for global justice, in the midst of neo-liberal discourse and wars on terror. 12 �More than in any other place in Europe, when visiting my friends living in the former Yugoslavia, I encountered a similar nostalgic trace of the Resistance myths, and family memories of the antifascist struggle. But while our memories of war were distant echoes of stories told by our grandparents, across the Adriatic the Yugoslav wars (1991-1995) had just taken place. These “last wars”1 had destroyed the multicultural Yugoslav Federation born from the antifascist Resistance, through violence and through forgetting. The massacre of Srebrenica (July 1995) was the largest one in Europe since World War Two. Despite its closeness to Italy, the former Yugoslavia, starting from its very name, was placed in an historical time that “we Europeans” had supposedly overcome. Both the common past and the common present tended to be ignored in mainstream discourse, from the Fascist invasion of Yugoslavia during World War ii to the responsibilities of the international community during the “last wars”. In post-Cold War historical revisionism in Italy, moreover, the antifascist Resistance and the idea of communism had been increasingly equated with the Balkans, placed in a dangerous zone at Italy’s Oriental border. The right-wing label of “Slavo-communist” epitomizes how antifascism was equated with violence, and associated with the Balkan Other, as if antifascist Resistance and communist ideas had never existed in Italy, or in Western Europe. It was a winding path that led me to formulate the research questions for this dissertation. I started out studying the feminist movements of 1970s Italy and Yugoslavia, and I noticed some interesting parallels. In both countries, second wave feminists contested the Marxist doctrine of their respective communist parties, according to which women’s emancipation was subordinate to class struggle. In both countries, feminist activists had to confront their foremothers, the partisan women who had fought in the antifascist Resistance and who had engaged in women’s mass organizations such as the Italian Women’s Union and the Antifascist Women’s Front. Moreover, while researching transnational connections between feminist women in Italy and Yugoslavia in the 1970s, I found hints of earlier exchanges between antifascist women in Italy and Yugoslavia after World War Two. In the 1970s, Italian feminists felt that their Yugoslav sisters had a lot to learn from them. Yugoslav feminists were invited to give up their illusions about socialist emancipation, and to engage in their autonomous struggle against patriarchy (Bonfiglioli 2011a). This is a far cry from the situation in 1946, when Italian antifascist women felt that they had a lot to learn from their neighboring Yugoslav comrades, since they had managed not only to liberate their country, but also to carry out a successful socialist revolution after the war, like in the Soviet Union. Between the Second World War and the second wave of feminism, however, lay the uncharted historical period of the Cold War. While many scholarly publications dealt with women in the Resistance, and with 1970s feminist movements, the con1 The expression “last wars” in the post-Yugoslav successor states refers to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, to distinguish them from the previous war, that is Second World War. 13 �nections between different generations2 of antifascist and feminist activists were under-researched. Since after 1989 the communist and socialist legacy in both Western and Eastern Europe has been largely discredited, the experiences of women within communist parties and mass organizations (particularly in the early Cold War years) remain largely unexplored. In order to fill in these gaps, I worked with the following research questions: Which forms of women’s activism existed in Italy and Yugoslavia in the Cold War period? How did Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations contribute to women’s emancipation in their respective countries? The transnational dimension of the “women’s question”3 in postwar and Cold War Europe is also largely overlooked. The research available tends to have a national focus, or to use a comparative focus that is still affected by a Cold War paradigm. Generally, Italy is compared to countries in Western Europe, and Yugoslavia with other countries from the former Eastern bloc. In post-Cold War Europe, the material and imaginary division between West and East still haunts women’s and feminist history. This led to another set of research questions: which transnational connections were established between Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations in the Cold War period? Which discourses about women’s emancipation circulated between East and West, across Italo-Yugoslav borders? In this study I trace a transnational history of women’s antifascism and internationalism in Italy and Yugoslavia during the Cold War, challenging the post-Cold War, Orientalist idea of the “Balkans” as existing in a time zone outside “Europe”. In this, the study has been inspired by post-colonial and post-socialist scholars who have challenged the Western image of the Other as distant not only in space, but also in time. As anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983: 92) argues, “somehow we must be able to share each other’s past in order to be knowingly in each other’s present”. The research stems from an autobiographical and scholarly interest in the way historical, geographical and political locations shape women’s and feminist history, and the production of feminist knowledge. As Rosi Braidotti (2011a: 16) writes, a “location” is “not a self-appointed and self-designed subject position, but rather a collectively shared and constructed, jointly occupied spatiotemporal territory. A great deal 2 I am using here the concept of generation not in the sense of a determined age group but in the sense of a political generation, namely a generation sharing a common significant political experience, as suggested by Luisa Passerini (2006: 15). Passerini explicitly mentions the generation of the antifascist Resistance and the 1968 generation as examples of this usage of the concept of generation in current historical studies. See also Passerini (1996). 3 The ‘women’s question’ or the ‘woman question’ is a term that has been employed since the second half of the nineteenth century to designate a number of social problems related to women’s role in the modern industrial society. In Marxist theory, this formulation was used to tie the resolution of women’s oppression to the advent of a socialist society. State socialist regimes – including Yugoslavia – claimed to have solved the women’s question in the Cold War era, through advanced legislation, equal access to education and labor, and the socialization of child care. This Marxist formulation was challenged by second wave feminist movements. Adrienne Rich (1986) for instance wrote: “We are not ‘the woman question’ asked by somebody else; We are the women who ask the questions.” 14 �of our location, in other words, escapes self-scrutiny in that it is so familiar, so close, that one does not even see it.” It is this “jointly occupied spatiotemporal territory” that I have tried to investigate here, by providing a transnational genealogy of antifascist women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia, and in the Italo-Yugoslav border area between 1945 and 1957. Exploring this location entailed a personal journey. I discovered sides of Italian history that were previously unknown to me. I was also plunged into learning the official language of the former Yugoslavia, often defined by post-Yugoslav citizens as “our language” (naš jezik), for lack of less problematic definitions. Before I embarked on months of archival research in Rome, Belgrade, Trieste, Ljubljana and Zagreb, I had no idea of the richness of the multi-lingual material that I would encounter. In order to do justice to this material I chose to limit my study to the years 1945-1957. Women’s organizations founded during the Resistance, such as the Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia, continued to function in the postwar and early Cold War period, with millions of affiliated members in their respective countries. For many women who had taken part in the Resistance, the postwar and early Cold War period was a moment of fervent activism at the regional, national and international level. The historical traces of this intense period were scattered in a myriad of national and local archives, mostly consisting of minutes of meetings, reports, and correspondence from the 1940s and 1950s. The main sources for this dissertation are archival documents that I selected and translated from Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and French. Although I conducted a number of oral history interviews, and I analyzed a wide array of autobiographies and memoirs written by key antifascist women from Italy and the former Yugoslavia, archival sources constitute the backbone of the dissertation. Oral history interviews and autobiographies represent a crucial complement to the archival research, guiding my interpretation of the archival documents. The dissertation is based on three main theses. The first thesis is that antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia. As a result of historical and epistemological erasures, the story of women’s political activism in the Cold War period is largely untold. Throughout the dissertation, therefore, I reconstruct the different forms of women’s activism and explore the complexities and limits of left-wing women’s political agency and subjectivity. I focus in particular on the female leaders of antifascist women’s organizations, and on their position towards the base of rank-and-file militants, and towards the “feminine masses” they strived to reach. I also investigate to what degree Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations were autonomous from their respective communist parties. My second thesis is that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations were crucial in promoting women’s emancipation in the Cold War period. Antifascist women’s organizations allowed a multitude of women to take part in politics for the first time, and promoted women’s literacy on a large scale, as well as access to work and political participation. On the basis of a Marxist faith in modernization and his- 15 �torical progress, antifascist female leaders fought against women’s juridical, economic and social inferiority, at the risk of being accused of “feminism” by their male comrades. Contrary to the common belief that women’s organizations disregarded the private sphere, I shall demonstrate that women’s oppression in the private sphere and male violence were actively challenged. Furthermore, traditional conceptions of family and motherhood were reformulated in a progressive sense. Thirdly, I posit that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations provided women with imaginary and physical connections across national and Cold War borders, not only between East and West but also between the West, the Second World and the Third World. These connections have largely been forgotten. As I shall demonstrate, however, women’s antifascist internationalism allowed progressive ideas about women’s emancipation to circulate across borders. I explore the bilateral and multilateral relations of the Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front, and their shifting position within the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). This study focuses on women’s activism during the Cold War, a theme that has been traditionally neglected in women’s and feminist historiography. The Cold War era – itself situated “between the waves”, that is, the first and the second waves of feminism (Carlier 2009) – has usually been represented as a period lacking in activism. I aim to challenge this view by exploring the national and international activities of two women’s organizations founded during the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, the Italian Women’s Union (Unione Donne Italiane – udi) and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije – afž) between 1945 and 1957. In particular, I look at the connections between the leaders of these two organizations, and at their role in setting a national and international agenda for the “woman’s question” during the Cold War and before the emergence of the second feminist wave. I use the cases of Italy and Yugoslavia to explore what Svetlana Slapšak (2000a) describes as the “complicated, dynamic and rather disappointing love affair between women and left-wing movements” in the second half of the twentieth century. As Geoff Eley argues referring to Western Europe, “whatever the detailed complexities and contradictions in the relationship of women to socialism, it is a salient fact of twentieth-century political history that female enfranchisement followed the fortunes of the Left. When socialist projects captured the popular imagination (…) the space was also open for expanding women’s participation” (Eley 1998: 519). Particularly significant with respect to the complex relationship between the women’s movement and the left, is the history of women’s internationalist and antifascist organizations created during Second World War. While the udi and afž leaders were to a large extent communist party militants engaged in party politics, they also had the task to ameliorate women’s everyday lives and to promote women’s rights on a nation-wide scale. For this, they relied on the egalitarian discourses promoted by communist parties, nationally and internationally. The task of women’s emancipation, however, created conflicting loyalties: at the national level male activists often resisted women’s participation and encouraged a gendered division of political labor within 16 �the party, while at the international level broader geopolitical issues such as peace and disarmament were given a primacy over women’s emancipation. In addition to their activities at the local level, women’s organizations were also active producers of Cold War cultural discourses at an international level. They were producing what Buck-Morss (2000) calls “dreamworlds”, or imaginary projections that stemmed from East-West connections. Through women’s organizations affiliated to the Women’s International Democratic Federation, progressive ideas circulated across Cold War borders, ideas about equal rights for women in the public sphere, but also ideas about women in the private sphere, particularly motherhood. Motherhood was conceived of as a social phenomenon that had to be taken care of by state institutions through welfare and health provisions. A telling example of transnational circulation of ideas on progressive conceptions of motherhood is the one of the Lamaze method of childbirth. French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze learnt the method of “painless childbirth” in the Soviet Union, and he experimented with it in the maternity ward at the Parisian Metallurgists’ Polyclinic, known as Les Bluets, from 1951 onwards (Michaels 2011). After 1989, traces of post-socialist nostalgia can be found not only in Eastern Europe and in the successor states of former Yugoslavia, but also in Italy and France, two Western European countries where communist parties played an important political and social role in the second half of the twentieth century. The utopian trace of socialism’s unfulfilled promises – of women’s emancipation and liberation, of social justice, of multi-national and multi-ethnic coexistence – can be found in the contemporary nostalgic accounts of former left-wing activists, both in Italy, a capitalist country that hosted the largest communist party in Western Europe, and in Yugoslavia, a socialist country that abandoned the Soviet bloc in 1948, and became geopolitically closer to the West and to the Third World in later years (Bonfiglioli 2011b; Castellina 2011; Foa, Mafai and Reichlin 2002; Luthar and Pušnik 2010). By comparing Italy and Yugoslavia, I intend to challenge Cold War mental and scholarly mappings between the First, Second and Third World (Chary and Verdery 2009). The comparison between these two different geopolitical contexts arises not only from their geographical proximity, but also from a personal desire to highlight commonalities and processes of “transculturation” (Cerwonka 2008) and “translation” (Iveković 2010) beyond the usual epistemic “East-West” division of feminist ideas and women’s activism across Europe. As a number of scholars have shown, Cold War mappings are still very much present in the assessment of women’s organizations and feminist ideas in post-Cold War Europe. Gender scholars from Eastern and Central Europe have pointed to the hegemony of Western liberal feminist thought, as well as to the ‘othering’ of women living in post-socialist states, through the academic and scholarly confinement of Eastern European “difference” (Blagojević 2009; Cerwonka 2008; Ghodsee 2010; Regulska 1998). This process of “othering” and victimization is even stronger in the case of the Balkans since the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation in the 1990s (Bakić-Hayden 1995; Helms 2003; Todorova 1997). Mainstream Orientalist discourses construct the Balkans as different from Europe not only in space, but also in time. 17 �Because of their connection to socialist regimes, women’s state organizations in Eastern Europe have often been represented as “transmission belts” of state ideology. In feminist literature, these organizations have frequently been portrayed as detrimental to women’s rights and interests, and their members have been described as manipulated and deprived of agency (Cirstocea 2011; Nowak 2009; Penn and Massino 2009). The same happened with communist women’s organizations in the West, and with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which connected West, East and the global South (De Haan 2010a). I agree with Raluca Popa when she argues that “it is important to challenge this stigma and to recover and reassess the history of communist women’s activism, not only for women’s history but also for understanding political history; it offers crucial insights into the actual working of communist regimes at the interface between official discourses and party power, and the everyday lives of elite individuals” (Popa 2009: 74). Even in Western Europe and in the United States, Cold War and post-Cold War anti-communism had the effect of obscuring the continuities between the radical women’s movements and organizations of the 1940s and 1950s and the feminist second wave (MacLean 2002; Storrs 2003). Recent studies have explored the importance of women’s left-wing, labor and antiracist activism in Cold War times, and the influence of Marxism and antifascism in the United States and Canada, also via the emigration of Jewish exiles from Europe (Cobble 2004; Horowitz 1998; Lerner 2002; Thorn 2010; Weigand 2001). Scholars are now debating the “theoretical and historical relationship between feminism, communism and (state) socialism” (De Haan 2007), as in the Forum hosted by the first number of the review Aspasia in 2007. New research also emphasises how different forms of women’s international activism were shaped by Cold War struggles and national interests, notably in relation to un conferences and assemblies on the status of women (Ghodsee 2010; Laville 2002; Popa 2009). Cold War debates on women’s emancipation were transnational, and emerged in connection to left wing, antifascist and antiracist movements. By proving this point, the study aims to provide a different narrative of European feminist genealogies (Griffin and Braidotti 2002), one that challenges the contemporary mainstream framing of “Western” feminist histories. As Hemmings has convincingly argued, contemporary discourses tend to frame gender equality as “Western, capitalist, and democratic, and the West, capitalism, and democracy themselves as sites that create the possibility of, and reproduce, rather than hinder, gender equality” (Hemmings 2011: 9). This framing of gender equality is based on a temporal fantasy of “a shared oppressive past, already moved beyond in the West, but culturally present for the South and the East” (2011: 149). In this way, gender equality is described as a Western trademark that can be exported globally, in the non-Western or post-socialist context. By showing the “entangled history” (Werner and Zimmerman 2006; Carlier 2010) of women’s antifascist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia, I contest the Cold War historical fantasy of a “time lag” between Western and non-Western Europe, between Italy and former Yugoslavia, between capitalism and socialism. Large numbers of women living in Italy, Yugoslavia, and in other countries across Europe shared the experience of political repression, violence, injustice and threat of direct extermina- 18 �tion under Nazi-Fascism. Many participated in the clandestine and dangerous work carried out during the antifascist Resistance and many shared the personal losses suffered during the war. In 1945, antifascist women in Italy and Yugoslavia engaged enthusiastically in the reconstruction effort. They placed their hopes in the new political systems that emerged after the war, and actively worked to bring an end to poverty and class oppression, as well as to promote women’s rights and women’s participation in the political realm. Quintessentially interdisciplinary, this research is placed at the intersection between women’s and feminist history, Cold War political history, post-socialist and post-colonial studies. I will now describe how these different disciplines are interwoven within each chapter. The first chapter of my dissertation contains the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the research. I discuss in some detail the different scholarly debates to which I wish to contribute, namely current debates about women’s activism during the Cold War period, as well as debates on European feminist genealogies across East and West. I define the theoretical frameworks that allowed me to navigate across the empirical material I had selected, particularly the frameworks of the “cultural Cold War” and of “Cold War Orientalism”, articulated from a gendered perspective. I provide an outline of contemporary scholarly debates about women’s history in Italy and post-Yugoslav successor states, and discuss the possible reasons for which antifascist women’s activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia has been written out of history. In the final part of Chapter 1 I describe the research methodology; I cite the reasons for the choice of an historical narration, and I discuss the types of document analyzed throughout the dissertation, highlighting their potentials and their limitations. I end the chapter by reflecting on my own post-Cold War, feminist, transnational, multi-lingual location, discussing how it influenced my relation towards the Cold War era and towards the generation of antifascist women of Southern and South-Eastern Europe I choose to study. In the remainder of the dissertation I organize the empirical material collected from archival research, oral history interviews and autobiographies in an historical narrative. The empirical part of the dissertation is divided into six chapters, conforming to both a chronological and thematic order. Each chapter in a different way argues the three main theses of the research: I demonstrate that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics, that they were crucial in promoting women’s equal rights in the Cold War period, and that they provided women with imaginary and physical connections across national and Cold War borders. Each chapter is introduced by an episode from a life story of an antifascist Italian or Yugoslav militant. This gives an immediate, tangible example of the complex political issues unraveled within each chapter, but also makes apparent how women’s personal stories were entangled with broader geopolitical narratives. Chapter 2, Women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, provides an introduction to the complex history of the antifascist Resistance across the Italo-Yugoslav border. The chapter describes how transnational encounters between antifascist 19 �women had already started during World War Two, in Fascist jails or in concentration camps, such as the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbruck. I compare the historiography about women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, relying on the secondary literature which describes the foundation of Italian and Yugoslav women’s antifascist organizations, the Union of Italian Women (udi) and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž). Chapter 3, The aftermath of the war: the udi, the afž and the task of reconstruction, examines the postwar activities of the udi and afž at the local level. Archival documents about the 1945 congresses of the two organizations are described, contextualized and compared, analyzing the definitions of women’s emancipation adopted by antifascist female leaders in postwar Italy and Yugoslavia. The chapter shows how antifascist women’s activism continued in the postwar period, notably in the field of reconstruction and social work, as well as in the drafting of women’s political, economic and social rights in the new Yugoslav and Italian Constitutions of 1946. This chapter mainly contributes to the second thesis of this dissertation, demonstrating that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations were crucial in promoting women’s emancipation in the postwar and Cold War period. In contrast to the preceding emphasis on udi and afž local activities in favor of women’s emancipation, Chapter 4, Women’s internationalism after 1945, focuses on the active role played by antifascist women’s organizations in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia, and on the connections established by udi and afž members across borders. Based on extensive archival research, the chapter recounts how Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations established bilateral and multilateral relations within the framework of the newly founded Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). The case of the antifascist women’s organization of Trieste, the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (Unione Donne Antifasciste Italo-Slovene – udais), is also introduced in this chapter, illustrating how ideas about women’s emancipation circulated at the international, national and local level. Chapter 5, From comrades to traitors: the Cominform Resolution of 1948, provides an analysis of the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948-1949, focusing on its impact on Yugoslav, Italian and Italo-Slovene women’s organizations in Trieste. In particular, I discuss the exclusion of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia from the Women’s International Democratic Federation in 1949. The chapter affirms the notion that women’s organizations were active producers of Cold War narratives, and indicates how these narratives contributed to political repression and to the creation of internal and external enemies. The transnational perspective allows me to highlight the role of the widf, the afž, the udi and udais in the production of Cold War narratives, and the part played by the leaders of these organizations in promoting the interests of their respective communist parties at the international level. Chapter 6, Into the field: the afž, the udi and the practice of emancipation, covers a number of activist campaigns conducted by afž and udi in the less developed, rural areas of Italy and Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1953. The campaign against the full veil (feređže) in Yugoslavia and the campaign in favor of Italian women victims of rape by Allied soldiers in wwii are pertinent examples. While the previous chapter examined 20 �how women’s organizations aligned themselves with their respective communist parties in international politics, this chapter highlights the conflicts that arose between women’s organizations and communist party cadres at the local level, on issues such as violence against women and the gendered division of labor within the party. Issues that have been widely debated by feminist historians, such as the degree of political autonomy of the udi and the afž in the early Cold War period, as well as the dissolution of the afž in 1953, are discussed in detail. In Chapter 7, After 1956: national ways to women’s emancipation, I analyze the changes in the Cold War geopolitics of 1956, and its effects on women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia and Trieste. In this chapter I discuss the new “autonomous” political line chosen by the udi in these years as well as Italian and Yugoslav female leaders’ critique of Soviet hegemony. I examine how antifascist leaders worked to transform the methods and goals of the Women’s International Democratic Federation by strengthening the focus on women’s rights. I look, moreover, at Yugoslav female leaders’ engagement in the politics of Non-Alignment, in connection with Third World women’s organizations and decolonization movements. The main three theses of the dissertation are reestablished in this chapter: Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics, favoring the circulation of progressive ideas about the “women’s question” across Cold War borders, including the Italo-Yugoslav border. 21 �Chapter 1 Theoretical and methodological framework of the research Introduction Listening today to the voices of women from the past, one sees not only the mistaken choices which should not to be repeated, but also the unspent reserves of utopian energy. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. (Lydia Sklevicky, quoting Walter Benjamin’s Fifth thesis on the concept of history)4 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zagreb feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky (1952-1990) started to investigate women’s postwar history in the Yugoslav context from a gender studies perspective, conducting some pioneering research on the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia during Second World War and in the postwar period. While researching women’s history before and after the socialist revolution, the feminist historian was confronted with the ‘invention of tradition’5 promoted by the socialist authorities, according to which “women have always been ideally integrated into the revolutionary (socialist, communist) tradition” (1989a: 70). According to this ‘invented tradition’, women’s emancipation was an inevitable consequence of the socialist revolution, and not a result of longstanding women’s struggles. Despite the fact that women’s emancipation was presented as a consequence of socialism, however, predominant historical narratives followed a typical patriarchal pattern. Yugoslav history schoolbooks, in fact, figured “more horses than women” beside the usual male heroes (Sklevicky 1989a). Lydia Sklevicky confronted the official version of women’s history promoted by socialist authorities, which, she argued, had erased women’s agency throughout history. She challenged the patriarchal character of dominant socialist 4 Sklevicky’s original passage (1996: 69) goes as follows: “Osluškivanje glasova žena iz prošlosti danas može ukazati podjednako na pogrešne izbore koje ne bi trebalo ponavljati, kao i na neistrošene rezerve utopijske energije. Jer sa svakom sadašnjosti može u nepovrat iščeznuti slika prošlosti, u kojoj ona nije znala prepoznati sebe (Walter Benjamin).” 5 Sklevicky borrows this formula from Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983). As defined by Hobsbawm, the term encompasses “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” (1983: 1). 22 �histories of her time, which excluded women as historical subjects. After a meeting with the surviving editor of the 1939-1941 women’s journal Ženski Svijet, Sklevicky wondered: “How was it possible that a tradition of struggle, of commitment with the highest personal costs, and which would have energized generations of women, had been simply wiped out of my generation’s historical consciousness?” (1989a: 68). The dominant historiography of the Second World War, in which women were excluded as autonomous historical subjects, was unchallenged in Yugoslavia and Italy until the 1970s. Only with the emergence of second wave feminism was the history of women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance – a founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia and of republican Italy – beginning to be investigated in depth, through archival research and through oral history (Sklevicky 1989a; Pieroni Bortolotti 1978b). As a researcher, I am the beneficiary of the feminist challenge to orthodox historiography about the antifascist Resistance in the Second World War. There exists, however, a comparable gap within feminist history writing: while women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance and women’s involvement in the second feminist wave were treated as crucial events for women’s history, the Cold War period in Italy and Yugoslavia was rarely researched. The Cold War has for a long time been considered a period of conservatism and moderation, in which women’s political participation in state institutions or party politics had scant relevance for subsequent generations of female activists. In this chapter I argue that this vision of Cold War women’s lack of political agency is itself an ’invented tradition’, which risks obscuring the radical genealogies of European feminism in Western and Eastern Europe, and the multilayered character of women’s activism in the Cold War period. I also argue for the need to overcome a strictly national framework when engaging with women’s political activism in Italy and Yugoslavia during the Cold War. In the first section of this chapter I provide a literature review of women’s and feminist history in Italy and the former Yugoslavia. I particularly examine the influence that second wave feminism had on the writing of women’s history of the antifascist Resistance and of the Cold War period. In the next sections I address current scholarly debates on Cold War women’s activism, as well as current debates about European feminist genealogies, which have deconstructed an image of post-socialist, Eastern European women as absolutely “different” from their Western counterparts. I also reflect on the importance of new historical studies of the Cold War, as well as of post-socialist and post-colonial studies for this research, and finally provide a detailed account of the methodological framework chosen for this book. 23 �1. Women’s history in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area 1.1. Temporalities: the antifascist foremothers and the feminist generation In short, the history which Yugoslav children are taught is the history of wars, uprisings, and conflicts (…) [m]en stand up proudly on the stage of history in their own right, illustrated by the relative variety of their activities and occupations, while women are in the majority of cases depicted as wives, mothers, daughters, old women; in the most positive case, as fellow travellers. (Lydia Sklevicky 1989a: 70) The “women of the Resistance” were always “mothers and spouses” of the house, performing a double work, a double duty, and if nobody spoke of a double death, it was only because in the world one dies – even women – only once. And they liked the family as it was; they abhorred abortion, they hadn’t even desired the right to vote, so that, ultimately, if these allegations are to be taken seriously, we cannot understand why they sided with the antifascists… (Franca Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a: 9-10) In the late 1970s and 1980s the prevailing image of women who had taken part in the antifascist Resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy was a “pacified”, reassuring one, in which women appeared only as mothers, spouses, daughters of heroes, or as sacrificial martyrs (Sklevicky 1989a; Pieroni-Bortolotti 1978a; Rossi-Doria 2000). Feminist historians in Yugoslavia and Italy interrogated the erasure of women’s agency from the dominant historiography of the Resistance. In this way, they questioned the public memory of the antifascist Resistance, a founding myth of the Yugoslav and Italian postwar political systems. . Italy after 1968 saw a veritable boom of historical publications related to women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance and to women’s engagements in politics. Feminist groups coexisted with student movements and with the groups of the “extra parliamentary” left. This opened up an intellectual and political space for historical research on subaltern subjects. The anti-authoritarian turn of the new social movements inspired pioneering studies of women, peasants, Southern workers, factory workers, mental patients, prisoners, and so on (Passerini 1992, 1996, 1998, 2011; Pieroni Bortolotti, 1978b). The oral history publications of these years were aimed at recovering the personal voices and life stories of female partisans (Bruzzone and Farina 1976; Guidetti Serra 1977), as well as the voices of female party militants and antifascist leaders (Scroppo 1979; Lilli and Valentini 1979). These feminist initiatives dovetailed with the more institutional historiography and official commemorations of the antifascist Resistance.6 6 24 An important conference on women in the antifascist Resistance in the region of Emilia- �In Yugoslavia, the emergence of social movements and grassroots activism after 1968 was more limited due to the specific authoritarian organization of the socialist state. The critique of socialist authorities was less likely to be expressed through innovations in historical narration, a domain that was traditionally monopolized by the state authorities. Dissident critiques were expressed instead through a return to leftwing Marxist philosophy, via the dissident circle formed around the Praxis journal (Sher 1977), as well as through experimental artistic practice (Đuric and Šuvaković 2003) and film-making, notably through a series of experimental, desecrating movies, which became known as “the Black Wave” (Kirn, Sekulić and Testen 2011). Dissident circles rarely discussed feminism and were in fact often reproducing patriarchal stereotypes (Slapšak 2002; Žikić 2010). Apart from Sklevicky’s pioneering archival research, other historical works on women’s participation in the Yugoslav Resistance maintained an ideological, hagiographic character throughout the 1970s, and did not focus in any way on women’s subjective experiences (Batinić 2009: 8; Verginella 2009). Despite these political and social differences, however, in both countries the main “moral authority” over antifascist memory still belonged, in the 1970s, to the political parties that were considered the heirs of the antifascist Resistance. These were the League of Communists in Yugoslavia, at the head of the state apparatus, and the Communist Party in Italy, which, by the late 1970s, had become partially integrated within state institutions through its strategy of “historical compromise” with the ChristianDemocracy (Rutar 2007; Sassoon 2003). In both countries, communist parties represented the “reason of the state” in the eyes of the new social and dissident movements born after 1968, whose demonstrations and demands had been regularly condemned and repressed by national and local authorities.7 Feminist activists, notably, faced the condemnation of feminism by state authorities, and the conservatism of the official left when it came to burning issues such as divorce and abortion bills in Italy, or when it came to the widening gap between juridical equality and women’s everyday lives in Yugoslavia.8 In the discussions on the “women’s question”, second wave feminists were confronted with the moral authority of their older antifascist foremothers, affiliated to political parties well as to official Romagna was organized in 1977. Leading women’s historians of the time, communist Franca Pieroni Bortolotti and Christian-Democrat Paola Gaiotti de Biase, edited the three volumes of conference proceedings. See Pieroni Bortolotti (1978a) and Gaiotti de Biase (1978). 7 About 1968 in Italy and Yugoslavia, see Klimke and Scharloth (2008); about student protests and 1968 in Yugoslavia, see Pervan (1978); see also Tomic and Atanackovic (2009); about Italy’s social movements during after 1968, see Lumley (1990). 8 See Bonfiglioli (2008). About feminist movements in Italy, see the recent anthology curated by Bertilotti and Scattigno (2005). About the gap between formal equality and women’s everyday lives in socialist Yugoslavia, see Meznarić (1985), Woodward (1985) and Ramet (1997). 25 �women’s organizations, such as the Conference for the Social Activities of Women of Yugoslavia (kdaž)9 and the Union of Italian Women (udi).10 While the generation of antifascist women was skeptical towards the emergence of feminism, which they saw as an extremist, bourgeois, overtly intellectual phenomenon, which risked alienating the majority of female public opinion, feminist activists perceived women’s organizations such as the kdaž and the udi as too ideological, moderate, and outdated in their bureaucratized and hierarchical functioning (Jancar 1988; Chiavola Birnbaum 1986; Bonfiglioli 2008). This generational divide was part of the “radical disidentification” of the post-1968 generation from the old left (Braidotti 2011a: 78), seen as complicit with Soviet imperialism, and notably with the Soviet military interventions in Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968). Because of these generational, political and theoretical divides, women’s organizations affiliated to communist internationalism, such as the udi and the kdaž, were never considered as part of feminist history, even if these organizations were considerably transformed due to the entry of younger militants in their ranks throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Hellman 1987; Dobos 1983). As a consequence, the feminist reading of women’s activism in the Cold War period – and of women’s mass organizations – was necessarily filtered by their difficult encounter with these same women’s organizations in the 1970s. By then, these organizations had become fully integrated in state institutions. The udi and the kdaž claimed a continuity with the heritage of the Resistance, and their leaders were often the same as in the immediate postwar period. This made it very difficult for feminist historians to conceive of women’s radical engagement in the Cold War period, and to consider early Cold War women’s organizations as different from what they later became. This generational and political conflict led, in my view, to the “invention of tradition” about the lack of women’s activism in the Cold War period. What appeared to be missing in the Cold War period in the eyes of feminist militants was, in fact, not women’s activism – but rather a specific form of gender-based, non-institutional, autonomous women’s activism based on theories of sexual difference – which came to be identified as the proper form of feminist activism in the 1970s.11 9 The main Yugoslav women’s organization was named Antifascist Women’s Front (afž) until 1953. After 1953 the afž was replaced by the Union of Women’s Society (sdž), see Chapter 6 for a discussion of this transformation. In 1961 the organization was renamed into the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (kdaž), and this name was maintained until the end of the socialist regime. 10 About the emergence of feminism and the conflict with the previous generation of women in Yugoslavia, see notably Jancar (1988); see also Ramet (1997). About the Italian case, see Guadagni (1985), Zuffa (1987) and Hellman (1987). 11 For instance, in their second volume dedicated to Italian feminist thought, Kemp and Bono (1993: 5) write: “So you could say that Italian feminism started with women’s movements after the Second World War. For example, one could cite the Unione Donne Italiane (Union of Italian Women) (udi), the great women’s movement which was created immediately after the war by left-wing women. But I [Paola Bono] would locate the beginning of the feminism we are talking about at the end of the 1960s when, paradoxically, the emancipatory struggle had been largely achieved...” [Emphasis added]. While forced to acknowledge the importance of post- 26 �In Italy this became, in time, the hegemonic narrative of women’s history, one that even antifascist women themselves yielded to.12 The “non-institutional” stance of Italian feminism has been defined as its “most distinctive feature” in recent years.13 In the successor states of Yugoslavia, however, the new divides created by the wars of the 1990s superseded these generational divides.14 Post-1989 nationalist regimes attempted to erase the memory of antifascism and of multi-ethnic coexistence during socialist Yugoslavia. Conversely, feminist and anti-war movements from the 1990s onwards have re-appropriated the antifascist, multi-ethnic heritage of the socialist period, as a way to fight against nationalist discourses.15 1.2. Women’s political history across time and across national borders Having indicated in the previous section the reasons behind the lack of scholarly literature on Cold War women’s activism, I shall now proceed to map out the available literature about women’s antifascist Resistance and the early Cold War period. I discuss the existing studies and propose a new theoretical reading, which challenges current feminist interpretations. I point at the exclusions produced by these interpretations and argue for the need to reintegrate Cold War women’s activism within women’s political history in Italy and Yugoslavia. I also examine the confinement of scholarly literature within existing national borders, and argue instead for a comparative approach that takes into account the shifting nature of borders in this region of Europe. As shown in the previous pages, second wave feminists’ difficulty to identify with their antifascist foremothers was related to the specific political and generational power struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. The disidentification from former generations of women – and the relation between historical amnesia and feminist movements war women’s movements for emancipation, the authors exclude these movements from their genealogy of “Italian feminism”, since in their view the achievement of juridical and political equality did not eliminate women’s oppression on a subjective and symbolic level. 12 As Pojmann (2005: 197) notes, “Italy’s feminist groups certainly seized power from the older women’s associations and have re-written narratives of the women’s movement. The ’68 generation is now in charge, in fact. The World War ii generation is slowly passing.” About the Italian case, see also the recent testimony of Luisa Passerini (2011). See also Chapters 6 and 7. 13 See Pravadelli (2010: 61-62), commenting upon Bono and Kemp (1991). See also Kemp and Bono, Introduction (1993). 14 The encounter between the antifascist generation and the anti-nationalist movements is best exemplified by the figure of Neda Božinović, former partisan and afž leader, who joined the anti-nationalist feminist group “Women in Black” in 1990s Belgrade (Božinovic et al. 2001; Stojaković, Jankov and Savić 2002). About the tragic historical break represented by the Yugoslav wars, see Papić (1999). See also the conclusion of this dissertation. 15 About nationalism and historical revisionism see Kirn (2009). About nostalgia and the memories of socialism in the post-Yugoslav context see Velikonja (2008); Luthar and Pušnik (2010). A good example of post-socialist feminist re-appropriation of the antifascist heritage is Sanja Iveković’s artwork, in particular Gen xx and Nada Dimić. 27 �– has been widely debated in feminist and gender history. Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort (1985 quoted by Passerini 1992: 671) have noted that “amnesia is indigenous to feminism... asserting that it is born every time that it is reborn, feminism appears not to have a memory of past struggles.” Furthermore, Passerini (1992: 672) commented that “this analysis captures two aspects of the women’s movement: its anxiety to innovate and its need for repeated foundations, both of which tend to cut it off from the past, since it rejects antecedents of any type.” Other scholars have pointed out that feminist discourses are inevitably bound up with a certain temporality and historicity, and that the complaint about the lack of transmission across generations is in itself a feminist fiction. To presuppose some forms of automatic transmission across feminist generations, in fact, would entail a generational, linear logic of time (Adkins 2004), portraying history as a teleological family drama, through a narrative of loss, progress or return (Hemmings 2011). The intervention I am proposing here, however, is not a complaint about second wave feminist paradigms and the lack of generational transmission or recognition, but rather a reading of the political effects of the emergence of the feminist second wave on the predominant narratives of women’s history in Italy and the former Yugoslavia. What concerns me here is a form of selective amnesia, a partial narrative which excludes women’s activism during the Cold War from women’s political history, constructing a binary framework in which women’s spontaneous and radical participation in the antifascist Resistance is opposed to women’s institutionalized, moderate activism in the Cold War period. As mentioned earlier, in fact, feminist historiography in Italy and the former Yugoslavia produced a wide array of scholarly work on women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance (see for instance, Addis Saba 1998; Batinić 2009; Bravo and Bruzzone 2000; Bruzzone and Farina 1976; Casalini 2005; Gagliani 2006; Jeraj 2005; Pantelić 2011; Sklevicky 1996; Stojaković 2010, 2011). Women’s mass participation in the antifascist Resistance has, in fact, remained until today a crucial reference point for women’s and feminist movements in Italy and in the post-Yugoslav successor states. The feminists’ need to preserve a positive identification with the antifascist Resistance, despite the conflict with left-wing parties and women’s organizations claiming absolute authority over the antifascist heritage, however, produced a series of narratives that tended to separate the period of the Second World War from the Cold War period, thus severing political connections between women’s antifascist Resistance and women’s activism in the Cold War period. A common concern of feminist historiography of both the women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and that of Yugoslavia is the attention towards gendered discourses and gendered representations. Feminist historiography focuses on the extent to which women’s participation in the Second World War signified a disruption, or a continuation, of conservative gender orders (see next chapter). Generally, while women’s access to armed fighting and war zones is interpreted as a temporary and extraordinary disruption of traditional gender orders, scholars deem traditional gender regimes to be reinstated after the war, leading to a re-naturalization of the family as the basis for social, economical and moral reconstruction, and to a cooptation of women’s spontaneous political engagement within top-down, hierarchical institutions, such as politi- 28 �cal parties and mass organizations – notably in communist-led Yugoslavia (Batinić 2009; Casalini 2005; Slapšak 2002; Sklevicky 1996). This narrative undoubtedly tells part of the story, but it also contributes to an obscuring of women’s activism and of political participation in the Cold War period, since the institutionalization of women’s organizations in the postwar period is often read as a form of cooptation within the male-dominated institutions of political parties and the state. This narrative is often reproduced even in those works dealing with the connections between the antifascist Resistance and the immediate postwar period (Sklevicky 1996; Casalini 2005). This “non-institutional” or “anti-institutional” stance of second wave feminism in Italy and the former Yugoslavia (Griffin and Braidotti 2002) has led to an incredibly rich scholarship on gendered discourses and cultural representations of femininity, as well as on individual life stories, oral histories and feminist methodologies (see for instance Bertilotti and Scattigno 2005; Blagojević, Kolozova and Slapšak 2006). Women’s broader political history, however, – particularly contemporary political history – had generally been neglected (Rossi-Doria 2010; Passerini 1991; Verginella 2009). Paradoxically, it is Anglophone scholars who have engaged in the writing of political histories of Italy and Yugoslavia, both when it comes to the history of the communist left and to women’s political history.16 Two U.S. professors, Barbara Jancar-Webster and Jane Slaughter, are the authors of the most systematic political histories of women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance in Yugoslavia (1990) and Italy (1997). As for the Cold War period, women belonging to the antifascist generation have also written some valuable contributions to the terrain of women’s political history in Italy and Yugoslavia (Božinović 1996; Gaiotti de Biase 1978; Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a; 1978b; Perović 2006; Rodano 2010). Drawing on a wide array of new empirical material in different languages, I construct a political history of women’s activism across national and ideological borders during the Cold War. Different bodies of scholarly literature, produced at different points in time and in different geopolitical contexts, are combined to construct this history. When trying to establish a transnational comparison between the Italian and the Yugoslav context, however, the problem of methodological nationalism17 repeatedly became apparent. While some recent historical publications deal with the history of the Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they are generally adopting a regional or national framework for Italy, and, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, a framework based on the new post-Yugoslav nation states, i.e. Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and so on (Casalini 16 Two books dealing with the political history of Italian feminism were written by Canadian scholar Judith Adler Hellman (1987) and by Italo-American professor Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (1986). More generally, the political history of the left in Italy and Yugoslavia has been the object of a long-standing interest among Anglophone scholars before 1989, precisely because of the exceptional character of the Italian Communist Party in Western Europe and of the Yugoslav system of self-management in Eastern Europe. See for instance Sassoon (1981) and Kertzer (1996) for Italy, and Lendvai (1969), Johnson (1972) and Rusinow (1977) for Yugoslavia. 17 For a critique of methodological nationalism, and for discussions about “methodological cosmopolitanism”, see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2008); see also Braidotti (2011a and 2011b). 29 �2005; Gabrielli 2005; Jeraj 2005; Liotti et al. 2002; Pantelić 2011; Pojmann 2008, 2011). A methodological and theoretical inspiration for transnational comparisons came from a number of publications dealing with women’s and social history in the multinational and multi-ethnic Italo-Yugoslav border area (Ballinger 2003; Sluga 1994, 1996, 2001; Di Gianantonio 2007; Rossi and Di Gianantonio 2006; Rossi et al. 2004; Troha 2007). These recent publications show that the geographical unity of the “nation state” is not always the most appropriate one, notably in the case of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, where the frontiers between nation-states have changed in quick succession in the course of the twentieth century (see next chapter). In framing this transnational comparison I was also influenced by Anna Loutfi’s theorization of “feminist geopolitics” (2009), and by her questioning of nation-states and national identities as a unit for feminist history in a region shaped by the legacy of multi-national empires.18 I will come back to the problems of establishing transnational and multi-lingual comparisons in the methodological section of this chapter. Before continuing to the methodology section, however, I would like to point to some other scholarly debates which have inspired this research and to which I wish to contribute. I shall discuss new research on Cold War women’s activism, as well as post-1989 debates about East-West feminist encounters and European feminist genealogies. I will also refer to a new strand of Cold War studies marked by a “cultural turn”, which is directly relevant to my own project, as well as to the possibility of combining insights from post-socialist and post-colonial studies in the study of women’s history in the Cold War period. 2 . Women’s history during the Cold War: uncovering agency As described in the previous section, for a long time the Cold War has been characterized as a conservative period for gender relations, in which women’s activism was practically non-existent. Transnational comparisons of women’s activism during the Cold War have been rare (Duchen and Bandhauer-Schoffmann 2000: 1). The historical interpretation of the Cold War period as one in which women’s activism was absent or irrelevant has been common not only in Italy and Yugoslavia, but also in other European countries, as well as in the United States and Canada. As mentioned earlier, second wave feminism contributed voluntarily or involuntarily to this interpretation, or “invented tradition”. In Britain, Summerfield (2000: 18) identified a “transformation thesis”, that is “the idea that the war had produced a modern woman” in 1950s 18 This reflection was developed by Loutfi in her work as a co-editor of the Biographical Dic- tionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms, Central, East and South Eastern Europe, nineteenth and twentieth Centuries (De Haan, Daskalova, and Loutfi 2006), A question posed by Loutfi is particularly pertinent for this research: “How valid is it for feminist biographers to use the nation state as a primary coordinate for organizing, framing and giving meaning to feminist history and individual life trajectories? And how can feminist biography that unambiguously frames its subject in terms of a primarily national identity avoid reproducing the unacceptable exclusions of class, caste, “race”, ethnicity, social status, etc?” (Loutfi 2009). 30 �and 1960s popular culture and academia. 1970s feminist historiography, however, argued for “the continuity thesis” between the pre-war and the postwar period, contributing to disseminate the idea of a gender backlash in the Cold War period. In the United States, the idea that women went back home at the end of the war and spent the 1950s as unsatisfied housewives became widely popularized, particularly after the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan wrote about “the problem that has no name”, white middle-class women’s dissatisfaction with their lives as housewives and mothers in the suburbs, laying the foundation for second wave feminist theorizations in the United States. As historians Rupp and Taylor have argued in their pioneering 1990 book Survival in the Doldrums, however, not all women abandoned public activism after 1945. Moreover, as Daniel Horowitz has recently shown (1998), Betty Friedan herself had been a radical activist in the war and immediate postwar period, and her earlier writings emerged from her engagement with antifascist and left-wing activism.19 McCarthyism and anti-communism, however, violently affected the postwar progressive generation. As a response to widespread anti-communism, in fact, Friedan concealed the left-wing political engagement of her formative years throughout the rest of her life. The case of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique serves as an example of the widespread erasure (and self-censorship) of the important connection between feminist and leftwing movements in the 1940s and 1950s. It is thus emblematic of the forgetting of the “radical genealogies” of the feminist second wave as a result of Cold War anticommunism.20 The concept of a 1940s and 1950s “radical genealogy” of the American feminist second wave – and the concealment of this genealogy as a result of McCarthyism and anti-communism – has recently been advanced by MacLean (2002), in a review of renowned gender historian Gerda Lerner’s autobiography, Fireweed (2002). Lerner’s autobiography is extraordinary in many ways. In contrast to Friedan, Gerda Lerner decided to reveal in her old age what she had censored for five decades, namely her pro-communist and radical engagement in the Congress for American Women (caw), the American branch of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) – 19 Bettye Goldstein’s (who later adopted her married name Friedan and Americanized her first name) political engagement started when she was in Smith College and Berkeley between 1941 and 1943. After the war, she worked as a labor journalist, in the journal ue News, of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a radical trade union (1998: 121). As a result of McCarthyism and of her disappointment with the left, in the 1950s Friedan gradually abandoned her engagements, working as a freelance writer and dedicating herself to her family in the suburbs. See Horowitz (1998). 20 The radical genealogy of second wave feminism is particularly clear when it comes to Western Europe: another foundational book of twentieth century feminism, Simone De Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, was published in 1949. A figure like De Beauvoir exemplifies the connections between 1940s and 1950s radical activism and 1970s feminism. The Second Sex was criticized by both Catholic and communist commentators, notably for its challenging of women’s traditional roles as wife, mother and for its discussion of reproductive rights in a generally pronatalist climate. For an overview of the reception of the book in different Western and Eastern European countries, and in Serbia, see Jovanović (2010). 31 �which was disbanded in 1949 under McCarthy by the House of Un-American Activities Committee (huac). Lerner, a Jewish-Austrian student born in Vienna in 1920, had emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s to escape anti-Semitism, and had gravitated to the civil rights and anti-racist movements in wartime America. Similar to Friedan, she could transpose some of her activist experiences in her scholarly work, becoming the first gender historian to write about African-American women’s activism in the 1960s. Contrary to anti-communist assumptions against Marxist and socialist women’s organizations, recent studies are showing how these organizations struggled for women’s equal rights in a moment of social conservatism; these new studies are highlighting the connections between the radical women’s movements of the 1940s and 1950s and the feminist second wave in the United States and Canada (Horowitz 1998; Cobble 2004; MacLean 2002; Storrs 2003; Thorn 2010; Weigand 2001). In the previous paragraphs I have pointed at the ways in which American feminist history has focused on the rediscovery of women’s radical activism in the 1940s and 1950s. In the next paragraphs I will outline other historical studies that aim at uncovering women’s political agency in the Cold War period. These are studies engaging directly with women’s internationalism, showing that women’s organizations played a significant role in everyday Cold War politics, on different political sides (Brennan 2008; Ghodsee 2010; Ilič 2010; Laville 2002; Penn and Massino 2009). I shall contribute to this field, by addressing the activities of the influential left-wing woman’s organization, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) from 1945 to 1957, from the perspective of its Italian and Yugoslav members. The women’s organizations that form the focus of my research, the Union of Italian Women (udi) and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž), were in fact the national branches of this international federation. Throughout my research, I consider the shifting positioning of Italian and Yugoslav members within the Federation, and how this relates to the transformations of the Federation during the different phases of the Cold War. Until the recent scholarly work of De Haan (2010a), Ilič (2010) and Penn and Massino (2009), the widf has generally been portrayed as a “chain of transmission” of Soviet hegemony during the Cold War period. Although the Federation generally promoted the Soviet line in foreign politics, however, the organizations affiliated as national branches maintained a great degree of autonomy from widf headquarters when it came to internal political matters and respective national loyalties. Even when engaged in Cold War internationalism, in fact, “national loyalty remain[ed] of primary concern for most women” (Laville 2002: 8). As I intend to show, the Federation was far from homogeneous, and different national and political positionings emerged during its various Congresses and meetings. Multiple forms of political loyalties coexisted: widf activists could be aligned to the foreign politics of the Soviet bloc, while fighting at the same time for women’s emancipation and women’s rights in their own countries and internationally. Precisely because it has been perceived for a long time as a tool of Soviet hegemony, the widf has not been widely studied within histories of women’s internationalism. In her challenge to this view, Francisca de Haan cites as a reason “one of the 32 �most tenacious Cold War assumptions” about left-wing internationalist women’s mobilizations, namely the idea that Communist women “were merely using the notion of women’s rights for reasons of Communist political propaganda” (de Haan 2010a: 12). In Western anti-communist discourses, in fact, communist female militants were generally portrayed either as gullible, manipulated women, or as cunning, ruthless executors (for an illustration of this discourse, see the 1949 huac report on the Congress of American Women), but in any case devoid of individual agency, an agency that was unquestioningly attributed to enlightened Western subjects (De Haan 2010a; Laville 2002). The conceptualization of communism and feminism as mutually exclusive ideologies is itself a product of Cold War mental mappings. As I will show in section three of this chapter, and in the course of the dissertation, Cold War political discourses were highly gendered, and the topic of women’s emancipation was used across both Eastern and Western blocs as a competing terrain of modernization and mass consumption (Reid 2002). In a Cold War mirror game, socialist authorities in Eastern Europe appropriated the theme of women’s social and economic equality, which they identified with women’s full emancipation; since patriarchy and women’s oppression were defined as byproducts of capitalism and class exploitation, feminism was described as a bourgeois phenomenon far from the interests of the majority of women. Western liberal discourses, conversely, defined “proper feminism” exclusively in terms of women’s political and civil freedom, discrediting women’s demands for social and economic justice as a form of communist propaganda (Ghodsee 2010). In this Cold War mapping, then, women’s emancipation and modern female bodies became powerful symbols used in the ideological battle between the blocs. At the same time, as Helen Laville points out in her Cold War Women, “however important this use of women as symbols (…), it should not elide the actual contribution of women to international relations as active participants” (Laville 2002: 5). While being aware of the symbolic character of Cold War gendered discourses and representations, I intend however to focus on women’s political experiences and agency during the Cold War period. The following observation made by Laville could also be applied, in my view, to women’s Cold War history in Italy and former Yugoslavia: “While gender is becoming an increasingly central trope to studies of the Cold War, women as actors, rather than as symbols, metaphors and poster-girls for American democracy, remain elusive” (2002: 8). A number of recent scholarly works are highlighting women’s political agency in everyday Cold War politics, on different sides, and across the East-West divide (Penn and Massino 2009; Ghodsee 2010). 3 . Trans-European feminist genealogies: challenging the East-West divide The second section of this chapter brings me to another strand of scholarly discussion to which I would like to contribute with my dissertation, concerning trans-European feminist genealogies and transnational encounters between women living in Western 33 �and Eastern Europe.21 This polemic emerged at the center of feminist debates after 1989, and has continued over the last two decades. In what is considered to be the first reader in European women’s studies, Griffin and Braidotti (2002: 3) point to the fact that the migration of feminist knowledge has usually followed very specific paths globally, as well as within Europe, with a prevailing hegemony of the English language and a greater visibility of Anglophone feminist knowledge production: “This means that whilst the work of many American and British feminist authors is the object of widespread dissemination, feminists from (other) European countries struggle to get their work known.” This imbalance in circulation and visibility is due to the greater institutionalization of gender and women’s studies departments in the Anglophone world, and to the hegemony of the English language as the global lingua franca (Griffin and Braidotti 2002). A further imbalance exists, moreover, between feminist knowledge produced in European countries belonging to the Western bloc and European post-socialist countries. Scholars who live and work in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe have repeatedly noted the hegemony of Western liberal thought after 1989. Post-1989 EastWest feminist encounters were marked by reciprocal misunderstandings, connected to the different gender orders and to the different life experiences of women in capitalist and socialist regimes (see for instance De Soto 2000, about encounters between women living in East and West Germany; about encounters between women from Eastern and Western Europe, see Blagojević, Duhaček and Lukić 1995; about women migrating from Eastern to Western Europe, see Passerini et. al. 2007). Marina Blagojević (2009: 17) summarizes these encounters as follows: “(...) Eastern feminists were eager to travel to the West and to learn, and Western feminists were eager to “teach” and to feel the zest of the new women’s movements. But there was also disillusionment on both sides, and some issues remained unresolved, almost twenty years after the first encounters.” According to Blagojević, misunderstandings are “still largely unresolved, due to the fact that critical thinking and open debate about knowledge paradigms is virtually impossible within the framework of the vast imbalance of resources and power.” Western feminists who travelled to post-socialist countries after the end of the Cold War were often displaying a “certain colonial attitude and style” towards their Eastern colleagues (Slapšak 2002: 148). The process of discursive victimization of women living at the periphery of Europe increased with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, during which the entire region of the Balkans became “orientalized” in Western political and media discourses.22 Since the Yugoslav wars (1992-1995), gender regimes and women’s lives in the former Yugoslavia have been the object of transnational media and feminist attention. War rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in particular, were extensively covered by transnational media and governmental and non-governmental advocacy groups. Gender and feminist scholars have produced a vast amount of literature on the issue of mass rapes taking place in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. 21 For a critical appraisal of the concept of Europe and European identity, see Stråth (2000). 22 See among others Bakić-Hayden (1995); Todorova (1997); Bjelić and Savić (2002); Kašić (2000). 34 �Transnational mobilization and advocacy, however, were not devoid of tensions and conflicts. A pressing example of these tensions is the representation of war rapes in general, and of women victims of rape in particular, which has been a contested site of feminist intervention.23 Generally, the language of gender mainstreaming, was imported in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina by foreign ngos and international donors (Helms 2003), on which local women’s groups depended financially. This dependency was problematic since foreign intervention tended to impose Western assumptions onto local feminist groups and ngos. This imbalance in power also had consequences for knowledge production. Particularly when it comes to the former Yugoslavia, local feminist and scholars have often been treated as transmitters – rather than as creators – of knowledge – by foreign feminist activists, leading to a “shared feeling of exploitation” (Blagojević 2009: 17). Since the possibility to publish and to obtain research funding is directly connected to one’s geographical location, this has limited the circulation of knowledge produced by scholars from the semi-periphery (Blagojević 2009). In addition, the post-socialist world is often treated as a homogeneous entity in Western publications, despite the great internal differences among the countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and despite the fact that “the socialist world, or the ‘Soviet bloc’, was far from unified” (Slapšak 2002).24 In Anglophone women’s studies journals, for instance, the formula “women in Eastern Europe” is usually taken to designate a unified experience, often constructed on the basis of a number of generalizations extrapolated from a single country or region. Furthermore, Eastern “difference” is displayed and used to construct “Western feminism” as an equally unified category (Cerwonka 2008). With my dissertation I wish to challenge the construction of this absolute “difference” between women’s history in Western and Eastern Europe after 1989, as well as Orientalist narratives that place women’s history in the Balkans in a different time zone from Europe, a time zone defined by “ancient ethnic hatreds” and gendered victimization. In my dissertation I treat women’s history in Italy and Yugoslavia as an entangled history (Werner and Zimmermann 206), investigating the impact of Soviet and Yugoslav conceptions of women’s emancipation on left-wing women’s organizations in Italy and in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. By underlining the interconnectedness of Cold War women’s history across the physical and imaginary borders separating capitalism and socialism, Western and Eastern Europe, Italy and Yugoslavia, I aim to demonstrate how contemporary Western narratives about Eastern “difference” are themselves an historical, situated construction. 23 See notably the controversy between Zagreb feminist Vesna Kesić (1994) and U.S. feminist Catherine MacKinnon (1994). About the different positionings taken by feminist groups and individual on this subject, see Batinić (2001); Engle (2005); Miškovska Kajevska (2006); Žarkov (2007); Helms (2003). 24 As Slapšak (2002: 147) reminds us, “In fact, very few qualities characteristic of a ‘bloc’ could be said to have applied to the whole of the Eastern and Central European area, although the crucial term ‘socialism’ was an identifier of all the states. The main epistemic problem today in researching the history of women in Eastern European socialist societies (...) lies therefore in the extremely dispersed, non-systematized and differentiated knowledge of both earlier and recent cultures of the area, its many languages, its semiotic and anthropological diversity.” 35 �4 . Reading the cultural Cold War through a gender lens In this section I shall discuss the recent developments in Cold War scholarship that are relevant to my research, namely the impact of the “cultural turn” in Cold War studies. In recent years, the field of Cold War studies has moved towards a comparative socio-cultural history of the postwar and Cold War era.25 The Cold War is increasingly seen not only in its political and military aspects, but also in its cultural and ideological ones. David Caute (2003: 1) has stated that “[t]he cold war between the Soviet Union and the West was simultaneously a traditional political-military confrontation between empires, between the pax americana and the pax sovietica, and at the same time an ideogical and cultural contest on a global scale and without historical precedent.” Both the Western and the Eastern bloc reclaimed the heritage of European Enlightenment in terms of progress and modernization ideals, while addressing themselves to their internal mass constituency through mass media and cultural institutions in order to persuade them of the superiority of their mode of life. To quote Caute again (2003: 4), “the ussr and the usa both strove, in this ‘century of the masses’, to out-educate, out-perform, out-write, out-produce, out-argue, outshine the other.” Scholars are thus increasingly employing the concept of “cultural Cold War”.26 The reflections on the Cold War as a cultural contest have been taken up by Susan Buck-Morss in her work Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West (2000). Buck-Morss argues: “the construction of mass utopia was the dream of the twentieth century. It was the driving ideological force of industrial modernization in both its capitalist and socialist forms” (2000:ix). Her thesis is that both the “East” and in the “West” shared a similar faith in the modernizing project. At the same time, each “dreamworld” offered the possibility to conceive of an alternative system than one’s own.27 The end of the Cold War, hence, was not just a replacement 25 See for instance Major and Mitter (2004). Major and Mitter (2004: 3) define “socio-cul- tural” as “an umbrella term to encompass the mass experience of events – social history in its broad sense of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’, but often in extraordinary circumstances. Likewise, cultural does not necessarily imply the literary or artistic endeavour of high culture, but popular culture and general mentalities too.” For a cultural and social history of the 1940s and 1950s in Europe, see also Bessel and Schumann (2003). 26 If the concept of “cultural Cold War” can be productive, “the increasingly inter-disciplinary character of Cold War studies has not necessarily contributed to a greater agreement on the main issues involved” as Scott-Smith and Krabbendam (2002) argue. There is a serious “danger that socio-cultural interpreters using a Cold War framework might read the Cold War into every issue, every event” (Major and Mitter 2004: 17-18) or the risk to look for “a cold war ‘smoking gun’ behind all cultural activity.” That is why I will focus on specific case studies and contextualize them, considering the Cold War historical and political framework, but also national and local frameworks retaining their specificity and autonomy within the broader Cold War setting. 27 “Dreamworlds are not merely illusions. (...) For critical intellectuals from the East, the existence of a nonsocialist West sustained the dream that there could be “normalcy” in social life. For 36 �of formerly socialist systems with capitalist democracies. Rather, “this fundamental shift in the historical map shattered an entire conception of the world, on both sides” (2000:x). This led to a “shattering of the dreams of modernity – of social utopia, historical progress, and material plenty for all”, to quote again Buck-Morss, both in the former East and in what has recently been defined as “the former West”, i.e. post-Cold War Western Europe (Bonfiglioli 2011b). This new approach to the social and cultural aspects of the Cold War open up a series of new themes of research that can be productive for historians and for cultural theorists, as well as for scholars of gender. In my dissertation, I discuss how Cold War discourses were gendered and at the same time I point at the way in which both Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations were active producers of Cold War “dreamworlds” across borders. The field of women’s rights, in fact, was a terrain in which the opposed “dreamworlds” clashed (Ghodsee 2010). An excellent example of how a study of gender and consumption can shed light on the Cold War era is Susan E. Reid’s article “Cold War in the Kitchen. Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev” (2002). The importance of the Cold War competition in the sphere of domesticity and consumption is made evident in the famous “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Khrushchev, which took place during the American National Exhibition held in Moscow in the summer of 1959, in front of a kitchen cabinet.28 Reid notes that “the domestic and conventionally feminine setting for this confrontation between the superpowers was not as incongruous as it might appear; in the context of ‘peaceful economic competition’ the kitchen and consumption had become a site for power plays on a world scale” (Reid 2002: 223). 5 . Cold War Orientalism and post-Cold War ethnography The increased attention towards issues of cultural representation during the Cold War period has also meant the encounter between fields that were traditionally separated, the fields of Cold War studies, post-socialist studies, and post-colonial studies. A new concept of “Cold War Orientalism” (Klein 2003) has surfaced in recent scholarship, to describe the ways in which socialism, anti-communism and Orientalism intersected in different global theatres of the Cold War. Major and Mitter (2004: 7) note: There has been a remarkable interest elsewhere in the past two decades in the concept of alterity, of the historical Other, particularly in post-colonial theory. An application to the Cold War of Saidian ‘orientalism’, originally catering to nineteenth-century imperialism, would be highly instructive. Whereas previously alterity was often metaphorical, the Cold War literalized otherness. (...) Cold War orientalism would therefore have to be compared and contrasted with the other distorting mirror of ‘occidentalism’. their counterparts in the West, the existence of the noncapitalist East sustained the dream that the Western capitalist system was not the only possible form of modern production” (2000: 238-239). 28 The text of the dialogue between Nixon and Khrushchev can be found here: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=176 37 �An investigation of Cold War Orientalism and ‘occidentalism’ in the region of Italy and South-Eastern Europe can complement the already existing field of postcolonial studies that have taken the Balkans as a case study. After Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978) and particularly as a result of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a rich subfield of research has developed, examining the way in which Orientalist discourses about the Balkans circulated in the West and in Western Europe, from the Ottoman era until the present days.29 Yet, in this abundance of publications about balkanist discourses and “nesting orientalisms” (Bakić-Hayden 1995), the Cold War period has significantly been omitted. Sabina Mihelj (2009) argues that “this blind spot is part and parcel of two closely related tendencies that long dominated the study of the Cold War: the tendency to avoid the discussion of culture, and the associated assumption that during the Cold War, ethnicity, nationality, and race were trumped by ideology, international politics, or class.” In her investigation of Cold War ideologies in the Italo-Yugoslav border area, Mihelj applies the framework of Cold War “divided dreamworlds” to Italy and Yugoslavia. She combines this perspective with an approach that takes into account “the persistence of older mental mappings” – such as the legacies of Fascist imperialism, anti-Slavic racism, and conflicting Slavic nationalisms. In my research I subscribe to this comparative perspective, by taking Italy and Yugoslavia as “divided dreamworlds” of modernization and mass utopia. Moreover, following the examples of Mihelj (2009), Sluga (2001) and Ballinger (2003), I look at the ways in which the cultural Cold War intersected with previous forms of nationalism and nesting orientalisms in the region. These were historical legacies of Fascist imperialism and the Second World War as a European civil war (Hobsbawm 1994: 144). In the Italo-Yugoslav border area, in particular, these historical legacies produced divided memories and competing historical narratives.30 With the exception of Sluga (1994; 2001), scholars have generally neglected the issue of gender and of gendered Orientalism during the Cold War period. In my study, I treat Cold War Orientalist discourses as a fundamentally gendered phenomenon. As Nira Yuval-Davis writes: “gendered bodies and sexuality play pivotal roles as territories, markers and reproducers of the narratives of nations and other collectivities” (1997: 39) By drawing an historical parallel between women’s history in Italy and Yugo29 See for instance: Bakić-Hayden (1995); Bjelić and Savić (2002); Iordanova, 2001; Jezernik (2004); Todorova (1997); Wolff (1994). 30 A chief example of World War Two divided memory is the post-1989 Italian debate over the issue of foibe. These are natural pits spread in the Italo-Yugoslav border area, and came to stand for retaliations perpetrated by Yugoslav partisans during the Liberation of the area in 1943 and 1945 (since a number of victims were allegedly thrown into these pits). In 2004 a national “Day of Remebrance” for foibe victims and for Italian exodus from post-1945 Istria has been established by Italian authorities, officially entering Italy’s public memory. On the other hand, there is no public remembrance of Fascist crimes and concentration camps for “allogenous”, i.e. Slavic minorities and populations under the Fascist occupation before and during World War Two. On this debate see Pirjevec (2009); Ballinger (2003); see also Collotti (1999). About post1945 divided memories in Europe, and their reinterpretation after 1989, see Müller (2002). 38 �slavia during the Cold War period, I seek to explore the effects not only of Cold War divides on women’s political engagements, but also the way in which new geopolitical configurations were grafted upon previous nationalist and Orientalist ideologies, ideologies which were themselves deeply gendered. In the contemporary Italian context, the persistence of the label of “Slavo-communists” best exemplifies the entanglement of ideological and racist labeling throughout the twentieth century, and beyond. 31 The aim of this project, therefore, is not only to contest Cold War assumptions about “communist” women’s lack of agency, but also to challenge Cold War Orientalism, that is the negative coupling of “communism” with the non-European, non-Western Other. In combining post-socialist studies, post-colonial studies and Cold War studies, I am taking my cue from Chari’s and Verdery’s (2009) critique of the division between post-colonial studies and post-socialist studies and their invitation to “think between the posts”, in order to write what they define as a “post-Cold War ethnography”.32 From the perspective of post-socialist anthropology and ethnography, Verdery and Chari note that post-colonial studies have remarkably ignored the once-named “Second World”, while concentrating on the interaction between the First and the Third World. This is a long-standing result of what they define – after Pletsch (1981) – as “the Cold War division of intellectual labor”.33 Chari and Verdery therefore claim: “It is time to liberate the Cold War from the ghetto of Soviet area studies and postcolonial thought from the ghetto of Third World and colonial studies. The liberatory path we propose is to jettison our two posts in favor of a single overarching one: the post-Cold War” (2009: 29). I subscribe to this plea by Chari and Verdery, and attempt to integrate insights from post-colonial and post-socialist studies within a single post-Cold War ethnog31 About gendered and ethnicized representations of communist Partisans during World War Two, see Chapter 2, “Women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia”. 32 The genealogy of the two different fields is summarized by the Chari and Verdery as follows: “‘Postsocialism’ began as simply a temporal designation: societies once referred to as constituting ‘actually existing socialism’ had ceased to exist as such, replaced by one or another form of putatively democratizing state” (2009: 10). On the other hand postcolonial studies emerged not after the sudden collapse of “actually existing colonialism”, but “at least two decades after the highpoint of decolonization, as a critical reflection both on colonialism’s ongoing presence in the project of post-independence national elites and in notions of nationalism, sovereignity, accumulation, democracy, and the possibility of knowledge itself. Over time, ‘postsocialism’ too came to signify a critical standpoint, in several senses: critical of the socialist past and of possible socialist futures; critical of the present as neoliberal verities about transition, markets, and democracy were being imposed upon former socialist spaces; and critical of the possibilities for knowledge as shaped by Cold War institutions” (2009: 11). 33 “Three-Worlds ideology provided a meta-theory, according to Pletsch, for carving up the disciplines such that the First World was studied chiefly by mainstream economics and sociology, the Second World chiefly by political science, and the Third World chiefly by anthropology and development studies. Among the powerful presumptions of Three-Worlds ideology were that the Second World could join the First if it were freed from ideological constraints, while the Third World might “modernize” if its “traditional culture” could be overcome” (Chari and Verdery 2009: 18). 39 �raphy of women’s activism in the Cold War period. This also allows me to highlight the multiple connections that existed between the socialist camp and the Third World during the period I analyze. This is even more evident in the case of Yugoslavia, which benefited from its non-aligned stance towards the Western and Eastern block after the expulsion from Cominform in 1948, and became part of the Non-Aligned Movement, federating anti-colonial movements in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Both post-colonial and post-socialist studies can benefit from an approach that takes into account “the continuing social and spatial effects of Cold War power and knowledge” (Chari and Verdery 2009: 11). The possibility to bridge the divides between different geopolitical contexts, and between different epistemological fields in the post-Cold War period, is also theorized by Rada Iveković (2010) in her inspiring work about the politics of translation. Translation is intended here not only as a linguistic process, but also as a conscious political effort to overcome long-standing epistemological borders and normative exclusions which are constitutive of modern political systems. As Iveković argues (2010: 47), “[i] t is not merely a matter of ‘learning’ foreign languages. It is a matter of operating multiple entry points into systems in order to be able to converse and translate from one episteme to another, in a postcolonial and post-Cold War situation and under conditions of utter inequality of languages (...). I call such work translation.” Throughout this dissertation I adopt this broader, political concept of translation, using various multi-lingual sources as “entry points” into different geopolitical and epistemological systems, in order to build a transnational, multi-lingual narration of women’s activism in the Cold War period. 6. Research methodology In this section I will account for my methodological choices in the dissertation, reflecting on the research process and on the criteria used to select and process the empirical material. I will explain the choice for archival research and the decision to complement the archival documents with other types of source material, such as oral history interviews, biographies and autobiographies, offering a reflection on the potentiality and limits of the different types of sources. The stylistic choice for an historical narration will be accounted for, as well as the ways in which this monolingual historical narration was produced through a process of selection and translation of a variety of sources in different languages. It is important to point out here that this dissertation, while based on empirical sources, is nonetheless a subjective, situated narration of the past, and not an objective representation of the past itself. In this sense, what I offer in this dissertation is my own narration of the past-as-history (Munslow 2007). The research questions of the dissertation were substantially transformed in the course of empirical research. The experimental aspects of the dissertation (trans-national comparison, multi-lingual sources, interdisciplinary approach) led me to adapt my analytical methods and narrative choices to the empirical sources, on the basis of a constant process of self-reflection on my own personal and scholarly location. 40 �Towards the end of this section I shall reflect on my own post-Cold War, feminist location, and reflect on the tensions that arise when investigating forms of subjectivity and agency that belong to women of another generation (Passerini 1991, 1998; Scott 2010). I will also account for my transnational, multi-lingual position, and reflect on what it meant to conduct such a study of Southern and South-Eastern Europe while based in the Netherlands. I will come back to issues of language, narration and location throughout this section. 6.1. Designing a research method Women’s and feminist history in Italy and in the former Yugoslavia is generally framed within the borders of the nation-state, even when these national and ethnic borders have been constantly changing over the centuries. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, this was especially the case in the last twenty years. While the existing literature is very rich on the subject of women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance and there are also many accounts of second wave feminist movements in Yugoslavia and Italy, the context of the Cold War has, as I have stated, scarcely been researched, particularly when it comes to transnational connections between female militants in the Cold War period. I have had, therefore, to design an interdisciplinary, transnational research method in order to respond to my own interdisciplinary, transnational research questions: which forms of women’s activism existed in Italy and Yugoslavia in the Cold War period? Which connections were established between Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations in the Cold War period? In which way did Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations contribute to women’s equality and emancipation in their respective countries? This interdisciplinary research is placed at the intersection of women’s and feminist history, Cold War political history, gender theory, and post-socialist studies. Before starting this dissertation, however, I had no previous training in contemporary history or in methodologies of historical research. My own scholarly background is in political science and gender studies, and during my graduate studies I started to become interested in oral history. I made use of a combination of feminist methodologies and oral history interviews (Gluck 1996; Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002; Passerini 1991, 1998; Portelli 1998) for my Master’s thesis on the international feminist conference “Comrade Woman”, held in Belgrade in 1978 (Bonfiglioli 2008). For the current project, however, it soon became clear that due to the scarcity of secondary literature on women’s activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia – and due to the advanced age of female protagonists of the antifascist Resistance – an historical exploration of archival sources was a necessary step. The choice for archival research is also dictated by the transnational framework of the research, and by the large chronological span adopted. While oral history interviews had been extremely useful in uncovering the atmosphere and the impression of a specific event like a past feminist conference, the method of oral history presented a number of limits when wanting to reconstruct “what really happened” (Portelli 1998) in terms of women’s 41 �activism in the postwar period. The historical, geopolitical and ideological context in which Cold War women’s activism was situated was likely to be affected by a number of successive “epistemological breaks”34 (second wave feminism, the end of the Cold War, the break-up of Yugoslavia), which would have definitely affected the way in which Cold War activism is retold and remembered. Of course, I am constructing the transnational framework of the research, on the basis of my own positioning and scholarly background, and I am aware of the risk of superimposing this framework onto the experiences and perceptions of former antifascist activists, who were mainly attached to a “national” or “local” political framework.35 While still including oral history interviews, biographies and autobiographies to guide my historical interpretation of the Cold War women’s activism in relation to more recent historical developments, I decided therefore to rely mainly on historical, empirical research based on archival documents, with the aim of reconstructing an historical narrative about women’s experiences in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia. I treated archival, published and oral history sources in a complementary, nonhierarchical way, as means to construct a story that was not yet there. Sometimes the archival documents were “silent” or limited on certain issues, while interviews or autobiographies allowed me to uncover those silences and provided the missing links I was looking for. In the following paragraphs I will provide an overview of the archival institutions I visited and of the type of archival sources I selected, reflecting on their potential and their limits. I will also elaborate on the ways in which archival sources, as well as oral history interviews and autobiographical sources were analyzed and combined within a single historical narrative. 6.2. Visits to archives in Italy and the former Yugoslavia While living in the Netherlands, throughout the four years of my study I undertook several fieldwork trips to collect material for the research and to learn Serbo-Croatian 34 I borrow here the concept of epistemological break, or rupture épistemologique, coined by French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. The term was re-adapted by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (see Balibar 1978). These major historical events implied not only historical and geopolitical change, but also a change in epistemological regimes of intelligibility. See Papić (1999) about the Yugoslav wars and Iveković (2006) about the end of the Cold War. About the need to translate across different conflicting epistemologies, see Iveković (2010). 35 When interviewing two former leaders of the Union of Italian Women (udi), Marisa Rodano and Luciana Viviani, for instance, I noticed that the question of international relations was not particularly salient to them, since they perceived themselves mainly as having worked for political change within Italy. My questions on their travels to the Soviet Union, or on their reaction towards the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc, were met with some silences, and pushed the interviewees to distance themselves from the Italian Communist Party’s allegiance to Moscow in the postwar period. About the issue of silence in oral history interviews, see Passerini (1998). 42 �(or Croato-Serbian).36 One first element to take into account when dealing with archives of the Union of Italian Women (udi) and of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž) is that they are not located in a single institution, but rather scattered according to the political and historical legacies of the two organizations in Italy and in the former Yugoslavia. The distribution of udi archives reflects the strong regionalism present in Italy, and the stronger diffusion of the organization in Northern and Central Italy.37 The distribution of afž collections reflects the division of Yugoslavia into six republics, and the transformation of these republics into nation-states during the 1990s. While the udi national headquarters were located in Rome, and the majority of the material of the association can now be found at the udi Central Archive in Rome, there are many other smaller archives in the main cities of Northern and Central Italy, hosting the archives of the local udi branches. Similarly, while the holdings of the federal headquarters of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž) are located in Belgrade, in the Archives of Yugoslavia, each successor state of the former Yugoslavia hosts the archive of the former republican branch of the afž, for instance the Croatian state archives host the collection of the afž Croatian republican branch, and so on. The integration of the Antifascist Women’s Front into the apparatus of the Yugoslav state had led to the incorporation of afž collections within the national state archives of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, which are public institutions, easily accessible to the researcher. I had much more difficulties in accessing the udi Central Archive in Rome, which is managed by the contemporary Unione Donne in Italia – now a women’s ngo – and whose opening hours are limited by the current lack of funding which plagues cultural institutions in Italy. As for the archives of women’s organizations in the region of Trieste and Gorizia, they are dispersed between the State archives of Slovenia, in Ljubljana, the Slovenian library of Trieste, and the Institute Livio Saranz, also in Trieste. The first month-long explorative visit to the Croatian State Archives (Hrvatski Državni Arhiv) in Zagreb was conducted in July 2009, in combination with a Croatian language course. A three weeks stay in Rome followed in October 2009, during which I visited the Central Archive of the Union of Italian Women (Archivio Centrale udi). During these two visits I collected data about Italo-Yugoslav bilateral relations, as well as the data about the main congresses of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations, in the period from 1945 until 1978. After these first exploratory visits, I could design a chronological and thematic framework for the dissertation, based on both 36 While I am conscious of how contested this formulation has become after the break-up of the sfry, throughout the thesis I use the old official formulation instead than the contemporary formulations Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian, since I am mainly dealing with archival documents written during the existence of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1991). 37 The organization was particularly developed in Northern and Central Italy, as a result of the antifascist Resistance, and of the strong popular base of the communist and socialist party. Its presence was instead quite weak in the South of Italy, traditionally dominated by the Christian-Democratic Party. For an history of udi sections in different Italian cities of Northern and Southern Italy, see Hellman (1987). 43 �Cold War political history in Italy and Yugoslavia and on the history of the Union of Italian Women (udi) and of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž). The setting of this historical framework required a considerable study of secondary literature about the Cold War, about Italian and Yugoslav antifascist Resistance, about the history of communist parties in Europe, as well as about the political history of the Italo-Yugoslav border area in the Cold War period. I decided to include the history of the border area due to its significance to Italo-Yugoslav geopolitical relations. I particularly address women’s organizing in the contested city of Trieste, namely the Union of Antifascist Italo-Slovene Women (Unione Donne Antifasciste Italo-Slovene – udais). I explore the connections between Trieste (the location of udais) and Rome and Belgrade, where the national headquarter of the udi, and the federal headquarters of the afž were respectively located. Once the structure of the dissertation was in place, I undertook a longer fieldwork journey to the region, visiting archival institutions in Ljubljana, Trieste, Belgrade and Rome in the autumn-winter of 2010. In Ljubljana I visited the Slovenian state archives (Arhiv Republike Slovenije), which surprisingly hosted many documents in Italian about women’s organizations in the border area. In Trieste I visited the Slovenian Library (Narodna in študijska knjižica/ Biblioteca Nazionale Slovena e degli Studi), which also hosted material about women’s organizations in the area, as well as the Institute Livio Saranz, where I examined the personal archival collections of communist female leaders Laura Weiss and Marija Bernetić, which contained significant data about the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (udais) and its connections with the udi and the afž. In Trieste I also visited the Istituto Regionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione nel Friuli-Venezia Giulia (irsml), which hosts primary and secondary sources concerning the history of antifascism and of left-wing movements in the border area. In Belgrade, I spent three weeks at the former Yugoslav archives (Arhiv Jugoslavije), collecting material on the afž, its relations with the udi, and their respective relations with the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). I also paid a short visit to the Gramsci Institute in Rome, which hosts the archival holdings of the Italian Communist Party (pci), and to the archive of the Women’s International House (Casa Internazionale delle Donne – Archivia), which hosts the full collection of the udi magazine Noi Donne. During this second trip I could collect a much wider array of material, and assess the importance of these archives for Cold War women’s history. Thanks to a deeper understanding of the Cold War era, and thanks to a considerable improvement of my command of Serbo-Croatian, I could now fully experience the “intensity of the archival encounter” (Robinson 2010), and be literally and physically immersed in another time and space, constructing forms of empathy with the women I came across in the archive, and making sense of dialogues and speeches from more than sixty years ago. The fieldwork reports to my supervisor became veritable “confessions of archive pleasure” (Burton 2005: 8) in which I would list my multiple discoveries, shaped by my own affective investment within the archive. As Antoinette Burton notes, in fact, “history is not merely a project of fact-retrieval (…) but also a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention – processes set in mo- 44 �tion by, among other things, one’s personal encounter with the archive, the history of the archive itself, and the pressure of the contemporary moment on one’s reading of what is to be found there” (2005: 7-8). Once immersed in the pleasures of archival discoveries, I was also confronted with the complexity and the breadth of the material available. I therefore decided to limit the time-span of the research to the period from 1945 to 1957 in order to be able to analyze the various aspects of Cold War women’s activism in greater depth, and in order to do justice to the multilayered and dynamic character of this historical era. This chronological limitation, however, was also chosen for reasons of historical periodization, both in terms of women’s history and in term of Cold War history in Italy and Yugoslavia. The years 1956-1957 mark the end of the high tide of the Cold War, the beginning of the de-Stalinization process, and the reconciliation between the Soviet and Yugoslav communist leaders. These phenomena led to a new cooperation between Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations, after almost seven years of conflict due to the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the socialist bloc in 1948 (see Chapters 5 and 7). At the same time, while limiting my dissertation to the years 1945-1957, I continued to collect material and information about the history of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations in the following decades, taking into account the general developments and transformations of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations during the different phases of the Cold War. I became particularly interested in the encounters between the generation of antifascist female militants and the generation of second wave feminists, both in Italy and in Yugoslavia (see earlier in this chapter). I also studied biographies and autobiographies written by antifascist women after the end of the Cold War (see later in this section). In this way I could assess how the historical study of women’s activism in the Cold War period has been affected by different successive historical events and “epistemological breaks” (second wave feminism, the end of the Cold War, the break-up of Yugoslavia). Once the fieldwork was completed, I ordered the collected archival sources according to chronological and thematic criteria, into five different sections: the first contains all the documents related to the local and international activities of the udi, the afž, udais and the widf between 1945 and 1948; the second pertains to the material connected to the Cominform Resolution of 1948 and to its effect on Italian, Yugoslav and Italo-Yugoslav women’s organizations; a third section deals with thematic documents on the campaigns for women’s emancipation conducted by the udi and the afž between 1948 and 1953. A fourth section is dedicated to the national and international activities of the udi, the afž, udais and the widf between 1953 and 1957, and a fifth contains subsequent material on the 1960s and 1970s. These sections, roughly corresponding to the different chapters of the research, came to constitute a new transnational archive in itself, to which I could come back for my analysis. At the same time, I had already started analyzing the sources during the gathering of material on archival visits. For each of the archival institutions I visited, I drew up a list of the material I consulted and copied, selected relevant passages, and made critical notes. These notes later served as guidelines to navigate across the as database 45 �of hundreds of pages of original documents I had copied. When writing a chapter, therefore, I would start by consulting the different information databases on each archive – checking for instance the information available on the year 1956 in the Zagreb, Belgrade or Rome documents – and so retrieve to the original documents for analysis, selection and translation. 6.3. Archival sources In order to understand a distinguishing feature of the archival sources from the Cold War period, it is important to take into account the material production of these documents. This is directly linked to the organizational structure of the respective women’s organizations. As historian Lydia Sklevicky has shown in her seminal work about the afž (1996, 1989b), antifascist women’s organizations were hierarchically structured, in a pyramidal way. A fundamental distinction was made between the politicized women who constituted the avant-garde of women’s organizations (the “emancipated” or “enlightened”) and the (peasant, working class or uneducated) “feminine masses”. This distinction not only existed in a practical sense, but was also defined and theorized upon in in the documents of the women’s organizations, following a Leninist approach towards party work and mass organizing. The hierarchical distinction between the leaders and the support base is an important determinant to the character of the sources examined in this dissertation. In order to make historical comparisons, I have focused on the documents produced at the national or federal level of these two organizations, namely the Central Committees in Rome and Belgrade, rather than, for example, on the history of the udi in the city of Ferrara, or on the activities of the afž in the republic of Macedonia. This meant that I have analysed sources that were mainly produced by the leadership of these organizations. This focus was dictated not only by the need to compare the activities of the organizations at the national level, but also by my desire to study transnational relations across borders. The women elected at the highest instances of the udi and afž were also generally the ones in charge of ‘international relations’, and those who attended widf congresses abroad.38 Despite the differences between the political contexts of the two countries, by comparing the executive bodies of the two organizations I could observe how a small number of female leaders tended to accumulate functions of authority both within their respective communist parties and within women’s organizations. By leaders I mean those women who were part of the federal and national central and executive committees of the udi, afž and udais, who took part in international meetings and delegations abroad. The fact that a relatively small number of women accumulated a wide range of tasks both in Italy and in Yugoslavia can be 38 Similarly, De Haan (2010b) notes that the available sources on the widf – published sources, but also personal documents, such as private correspondence – tend to privilege the view of ‘key figures’ within the organization, leaving aside the contributions of the ‘masses’ of ordinary members. 46 �ascribed to the Leninist, centralized character of communist decision-making, and also to the constant lack of educated and reliable political cadres, particularly female cadres – after 1945.39 Women such as Maria Maddalena Rossi, Marisa Rodano, Luciana Viviani, Vida Tomšić, Mitra Mitrović, Neda Božinović, Laura Weiss and Marija Bernetić shared a similar position within their organizations in the postwar period. They established themselves as the ones in charge of the education, modernization and guidance of the “feminine masses”, promoting access to political participation and the struggle for citizenship and welfare rights for large strata of the population. The udi and afž female leaders differentiated themselves from their support base precisely because of their political training, their cultural capital, their ability to reflect upon the political agenda of the women’s organizations. Conscious as they were of the historical role of their organizations, in later years these leaders frequently took up the task of ‘history-making:’ collecting and ordering archives, organizing anniversaries and commemorations, writing their memoirs and autobiographies (see Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998; Rodano 2008a, 2008b, 2010; Viviani 1994; Božinović 1996; Milosavljević 2008). As I will discuss later in this section, this production is most evident in Italy, while in the former Yugoslavia the break-up of the socialist Federation has lead to a marginalization of antifascist voices. Consistent with the hierarchical structure of the women’s organizations, the leaders of the udi and afž acted as decision-makers and mediators between the communist party organizations and the everyday needs of laywomen. Not only did the leaders of these organizations engage in a number of internal political discussions “behind the scenes”, but they also coordinated public, mass-based mobilizations such as national congresses and demonstrations. The focus on the sources produced by the leaders of the udi and the afž, therefore, allowed me to explore the different sides of these organizations. On the one hand, the public side of these organizations is reflected in the documents produced for the rank-and-file members and the general public during national or federal Congresses and meetings. On the other hand, one can infer the internal decision-making strategies employed by the leaders, from the reports of closed meetings (central committees, executive committees, republican board committees). As Sklevicky emphasizes (1996: 72; 1989b), it is very important, from a methodological perspective, to distinguish between two types of sources: 1) The representative, agit-prop documents, such as the programmatic statements given to rank-and-file militants to foster the party line, the speeches given during mass meetings and public occasions, or the press produced by the women’s organizations (Žena, Žena Danas, Nasa Žena and other journals in Yugoslavia, Noi Donne in Italy, Donne in Trieste). 2) The more reflexive, internal discourse and debates, such as private correspondence, or the stenographic transcriptions of central committees, where the leaders 39 I came across this complaint about the lack of qualified cadres in archival sources many times. See notably Chapters 5 and 6. See also Sklevicky (1989b, 1996). 47 �discuss freely and are less limited by the official party line. Within these documents we find heated discussions and disagreements about the political strategies that are to be followed, disagreements that do not emerge openly in the public sphere. The internal reports produced by the intermediate cadres of the organizations, such as the leaders of the regional or republican boards, are also examined within this second category. This distinction between representative and reflexive documents can be applied to another set of sources, namely the international correspondence between the leaders of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations, and between them and the Women’s International Democratic Federation. These “international” sources were often in French, the lingua franca of communist internationalism. While the statements given by the leaders of women’s organizations during an international congress will typically be representative, i.e. more ideological, the internal discussions between female leaders of different nationalities tend to be more reflexive, i.e. more open and critical. The national/federal and international sources reflect the hierarchical structure of the women’s organizations, and the way in which udi and afž leaders positioned themselves not only in relation to their male party comrades, but also in relation to the majority of other women that they would like to represent or reach. This was in fact a heterogeneous group: rank-and-file members, “apolitical” women or women not belonging to any political party, Catholic women, working women and mothers, peasant women from the countryside, women from national and ethnic minorities. Within national or international congresses, however, the female leaders tended to speak in the name of “Italian women”, or “Yugoslav women”, or women from the region or the city (“Triestine women”). At the same time, because of the socialist and universalist stance of organizations such as the udi and the afž, and because of the pyramid-like structure based on the local village section/cell, the flow of information travels not only from the center to the peripheries, but also the other way around: the local and regional delegates bring to the national congresses a number of empirical inquiries conducted “in the field”, informing the leaders of the conditions of the organizations in the different regions, cities and localities (see for instance Chapter 6). Even if the organization leaders produced the majority of sources I have analyzed, these sources nonetheless contain important information about – and sometimes the voices of – women from the base, for instance rural women from the South or working mothers in the factories. Whenever possible, I have tried to quote the (often mediated) voices of intermediate cadres, or of rank-and-file members (see also De Haan 2010b for a discussion on the missing voices of ordinary widf members from published and written sources). In order to give a broader, more diversified view of women’s mass participation in Cold War politics, I include the case of the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (udais) in Trieste. The study of this local antifascist women’s organization, influenced by the afž and the udi, but shaped by the specific multi-ethnic and multi-cultural context of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, allows an examination of women’s multiple engagements at the local, national and international level. In the archives of Trieste I had access to documents produced by local militants “from the base”, including 48 �the extraordinary reports of semiliterate working class women and housewives who traveled to the afž Congress of 1945 (see Chapter 3). This helps give an understanding of the ways in which progressive ideas about women’s internationalism and women’s emancipation circulated not only across borders, but also across the different social strata, and across the different decisional levels of antifascist women’s organizations (national/federal, regional/republican, local). Another important topic to consider when working with archival sources are structural silences and omissions. While highlighting the functioning of antifascist women’s organizations in the early Cold War period, and the power relations at stake in their functioning, the archival holdings of the udi and afž are, however, quite limited concerning the subjective, individual experiences of their members. Regarding traumatic geopolitical events, such as the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948 and its subsequent “intra-communist wars” (see Chapter 5), the archival sources are generally silent about the impact of these events on the members of women’s organization. The silence is even greater concerning the issue of political repression and enemy making, and particularly about the political prison camp of Goli Otok, an issue which started to be discussed in Yugoslavia only from the late 1980s onwards. In this case there are alternative accounts extant, to be found in the post-Cold War memoirs of Eva Grlić and Alfredo Bonelli, former inmates of Goli Otok. 40 In this section I have discussed the type of archival sources examined in the dissertation and pointed out a number of problematic issues arising during the analysis. In the next section I address the other types of sources that helped me to complement the material collected within the archives. 6.4. Autobiographies, biographies and oral history interviews This dissertation is based on extensive archival research. Nevertheless, oral history interviews, biographies and autobiographies have also proven a valuable additional source of information and interpretation. These complementary sources allow me to partly compensate for the silences and limits of the archives on certain specific events, such as the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948, or to delve more deeply into the individual life stories of some antifascist women affiliated to the udi, the afž and the udais. Throughout the study therefore, I refer to a number of biographical and autobiographical sources on antifascist women in the former Yugoslavia and Italy that have been published in recent years. These sources allow an immersion in the atmosphere of postwar and Cold War political activism, and show history through the eyes of antifascist women who had been the protagonists of that epoch. For Yugoslavia, I made use of a recent collection of women’s life stories under socialism (Dijanic et al. 2004). I also benefited from Gordana Stojaković’s biographies of 40 A similar silence surrounded events and phenomena that have started to be discussed openly only after the end of the Cold War, for instance the mass rapes perpetrated by the Soviet Army in 1945 Berlin.On this topic and on the discussions it provoked in post-Cold War Germany see Grossmann (1995 and 2003). 49 �afž members in Novi Sad (2010), and from the biography of Neda Božinović, former partisan, afž leader, and member of Women in Black in the 1990s (Stojaković, Jankov and Savić 2002). Another biography of Božinović was published in French (Božinovic et. al. 2001), and Neda Božinović herself wrote a history of women’s movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Serbia, which also contains biographical information (see Božinović 1996). Another important biographical source is an extensive interview with Latinka Perović, leader of the Conference for the Social Activities of Women (kdaž) in the 1960s and later a prominent member of the reformist current of the Serbian League of Communists, which was marginalized in 1971 (Milosavljević 2008). I also refer to a biography written by anthropologist Miroslava Malešević (2004) about her mother-in-law, Kosovar Albanian afž militant Didara Đorđević-Dukađini. I retell some of the stories about Didara in Chapter 6, when I deal with the afž campaign against the veil and for health sanitation in Kosovo in the late 1940s. For the chapter on the Soviet-Yugoslav split (see Chapter 5) I make use of the autobiography written by Eva Grlić (2005), a Jewish antifascist woman from Zagreb, who fought in the antifascist Resistance and was later deported to the prison camp of Goli Otok. There are a great many autobiographies of Italian antifascist women published after 1989, containing rich material about the Union of Italian Women in its different historical phases. I consulted the autobiography of udi leader Marisa Rodano (2008), as well as Luciana Viviani’s autobiographical stories (1994). Other publications that I found especially useful are the autobiographies of Teresa Noce (1974), Ada Gobetti (1973), Rossana Rossanda (2005), Luciana Castellina (2011), Marisa Ombra (2009) and Bianca Guidetti Serra (2009). These personal histories by left-wing women of different generations, religious/cultural background and political orientations describe a wide spectrum of women’s political subjectivities and experiences, from the 1920s and 1930s, through Second World War and antifascist Resistance, until the Cold War period. The autobiographies published after 1989, in particular, allow me to examine the subjective implications of postwar political engagements as well as the construction of the historical memory of women’s antifascism after 1989. These more recent sources also give some account of the generational conflicts between the former antifascist leaders and the younger generation of “neo-feminists” after 1968. In order to gain some more in depth understanding of women’s political engagement in the Cold War period, during my fieldwork trips I also conducted five oral history interviews with women who had been engaged in politics during the antifascist Resistance and the postwar period in Italy, Yugoslavia and Trieste. Since the purpose of the interviews was to gather information about women’s political activism during the Resistance and in the Cold War period, I deliberately focused on the political engagement of my informants, and on the major Cold War events that affected their militantism. I asked question about my interviewees’ choice for political engagement, as well as about women’s activism during the Resistance and the Cold War period. I first interviewed Marisa Rodano41 (born in 1920 in Rome), former partisan, founding member of the Union of Italian Women in 1944 and udi president from 41 The interview was conducted at Marisa Rodano’s home on the 16th of December 2009. I contacted Marisa Rodano through the staff of the National Archive of udi in Rome. 50 �1956 to 1960. She also belonged to the group Sinistra Cristiana (Christian Left), which became part of the pci in 1945. I prepared for the interview using Marisa Rodano’s recent autobiography (2008. See also her recently published history of the Union of Italian Women, 2010). My interview with Marisa Rodano, as well as her two recent books, were invaluable sources, giving me an understanding of the different political lines present within the Union of Italian Women, and of how the udi changed through time (see especially Chapter 6 and 7). We also discussed the transnational connections established by the udi in the postwar period. In her role as president of the udi, in fact, she was one of the Italian delegates to the Ljubljana meeting with Yugoslav women in 1957 (see Chapter 7). In 2010 I interviewed another Italian woman who had been involved in the antifascist Resistance. Luciana Viviani42 (1917-2012), was a former partisan and founding member of the Union of Italian Women, one of the first communist female members of the Italian Parliament (1948-1968), and herself an historian of the udi, whose national archive she contributed to re-organize in the 1990s (see Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998). Luciana Viviani published a book of autobiographical stories in 1994, which helped me to formulate the questions for the interview. This interview was particularly helpful in delineating the political differences between the North and South of Italy after 1945, as well as giving a sense of the complex encounter between the antifascist and the feminist generations in the 1970s. In 2011, I read about a woman from former Yugoslavia, who had been a partisan in Emilia-Romagna, on the main feminist website of Bologna. That is how I was introduced to Vinka Kitarović43 (born 1926), antifascist student and member of the Yugoslav communist youth (skoj), from Šibenik, Croatia, who was arrested and deported by the Italian Fascist police to a correction house in Italy, and managed to join the antifascist Resistance in the area of Bologna in October 1943. She was decorated with the grade of captain, remained to live in Bologna, and continued to be active in the anpi, the Italian Partisans’ Association. The interview with Vinka allowed me to see how antifascist women in Italy and Yugoslavia had already established cross-border connections during the Second World War (see Chapter 2). In the autumn of 2010, I also arranged a meeting with Ester Pacor, born in 1952 in Trieste, member of the communist youth and of the udi since the early 1970s. She is active today within the Trieste local authorities, promoting women’s rights and intercultural dialogue through the local udi section. In 1991 Ester Pacor wrote a Master’s thesis on the Union of Italian Women in Trieste from 1943 to 1970 – which she graciously shared with me – based on interviews with udi women from the antifascist generation, of which her mother was also part (see Pacor 1991). Ester Pacor recounted her feminist engagement for abortion rights as a young udi member, and spoke about the ways in which the older and younger generation interacted within the organization in the 1970s. The interview was conducted at Luciana Viviani’s home on the 9th of April 2010. I contacted Luciana Viviani through the staff of Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Rome. 43 The website was www.women.it, by Associazione Orlando, Bologna. I contacted Vinka Kitarović through the anpi, the National Association of Italian Partisans. The interview with Vinka was conducted on the 6th of April 2011 at the Bologna central section of anpi. 42 51 �Illuminating on the topic of the encounter between the antifascist and the feminist generation in 1970s in Yugoslavia, was an interview with retired sociology professor Gordana Bosanac (born 1936) in Zagreb. Gordana Bosanac was part of the Zagreb section of the socialist Conference for the Social Activity of Women (kdaž) in the 1960s and 1970s. She is the author of a recent book on feminism as a form of humanism (Bosanac 2010). Bosanac’s interview contributes to an understanding of the contentious interaction between the antifascist generation and the feminist generation in 1970s Zagreb. She spoke about the editorial board of the kdaž journal, Žena, in which younger intellectual women developed their own analyses and writing skills, before founding the feminist group “Woman and Society” in 1980. As is clear from the above, the women I interviewed are themselves history makers and authoritative figures, who are producing significant interventions in the contemporary public sphere. The oral history interviews – together with their essays and autobiographies – allowed me not only to gather relevant historical information, but also to construct a political interpretation of the shifting dynamics and developments of the women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia and Trieste during the Cold War, and of the ways in which they are remembered in the post-Cold War era. It is worth noting that the narratives of my interviewees generally had a national or local focus, and that I was the one asking about transnational relations between the women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia. Oral history interviews, thus, gave me greater insight into the national specificities of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations, while the archive material sources allowed me to map Cold War transnational networks of women’s activism. 6.5. Lost and found in translation: language and narrative Because of the use of such a wide array of sources in different languages (SerboCroatian, Italian, Slovenian and French) and from different times, a constant, political work of translation across languages and across epistemological borders (Iveković 2010) has been a crucial and inseparable component of the research process. While adopting a comparative, transnational approach throughout the research, my national standpoint and my native language had nonetheless an impact on the research process. Whereas at the outset my command of Serbo-Croatian was limited, in the last two years of my study I was able to navigate the archives and to read closely the archive material I had collected in the previous years. While able to read and collect material in Serbo-Croatian, I of course still make fieldwork notes in Italian, my native language, and Italian archival documents, secondary literature and autobiographical sources remain easier to access. Moreover, the publication of autobiographical sources has been more extensive in Italy than in the successor states of former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. In order to compensate for this personal and scholarly imbalance in favor of Italian sources, I strove to collect more archive material for the former Yugoslavia. In designing the structure of the dissertation I attempted as much as possible to dedi- 52 �cate an equal number of pages to Yugoslav and Italian women’s organizations in each chapter, and to match a range of comparable information for each organization in the same chronological period. In order to make the text of the dissertation more readable, when referring to archival sources I give the English translation in the main text, and provide the original quotation in the footnote, so that the original source is immediately available. When translating from published works, however, I only give the English translation in the main text, and refer to the page of the publication in the footnote. I have organized the heterogeneous material in a chronological narrative. For certain chapters (notably Chapters 3 and 6), however, I establish a thematic structure within the chronology, in order to be able to draw comparisons between udi and afž discourses on women’s emancipation. In order to tell these forgotten stories, I have chosen a chronological narrative style. This style may often appear more descriptive than analytical or theoretical, but is in fact the result of a number of theoretical and analytical choices made during fieldwork research, as well as during the selection and translation of the collected material. I chose the descriptive style of the dissertation in order to construct a story about women’s activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia out of heterogeneous sources, a story which makes audible women’s individual and collective voices. The style I have adopted is undoubtedly influenced by my background in qualitative methods and oral history, and has been greatly inspired by the narrative style employed by Italian oral historians Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli in their works. In a way, I treat women’s voices from the archive as I would have treated excerpts from an oral history interview. Accordingly, the dissertation is a subjective, authored narration of the past, which is neither arbitrary (since it is based on empirical research), nor is it an objective, unmediated representation of the past itself. In this sense, this study remains my own partial narration of the past-as-history (Munslow 2007; Passerini 1991, 1998; Portelli 1998). 6.6. Across Europe: traveling locations My own spatio-temporal location (Braidotti 2011a; Rich 1986), as an Italian national living in the Netherlands since 2006, and conducting research on Italy and the former Yugoslavia, undoubtedly shaped the making of this dissertation. As mentioned in the Introduction, since I was born in Italy and in Western Europe, I became interested in researching the former Yugoslavia in order to challenge the still ongoing Western – and Italian – “Orientalization of the Balkans.” At the same time, while living in the Netherlands, I became aware not only of West-East but also of North-South divides within Europe, and of my own position as “southern” migrant – albeit a white and privileged one – in the North of Europe. The current Italian “brain drain” (fuga dei cervelli), a result of Italy’s high youth unemployment, means that qualified researchers from all over Italy can be found in all the major universities of North-Western Europe and the United States. Italian politics have increasingly come to be perceived as an 53 �exception in the European landscape, grouped with Greece, Spain and Portugal as part of the “garlic lands.”44 In talking to my colleagues from the former Yugoslavia and Albania, I could find a number of similarities in our experiences of “two-tier” Europe, and in our projects of intra-European migration from the South and South East to the North West of Europe, in search of research funding and better life opportunities. But whereas I, thanks to my eu passport, could enjoy a high degree of mobility within the Schengen space, my colleagues and friends from the successor states of former Yugoslavia and Albania had to undergo all sorts of bureaucratic proceedings to obtain a visa and to stay in the Netherlands for work and study. The legacies of Cold War and post-Cold War events – such as the break-up of Yugoslavia – still have a great impact on citizenship rights, defining who is entitled to qualify as “European”, and who is not. Even after living in the Netherlands for six years, when traveling to the former Yugoslavia I feel more at home than in Northern Europe. This probably has to do with language skills and shared cultural habits, but is also due to similarities in political life. The political radicalization of the youth and the polarization between left and right is much more evident in the South of Europe than in the Dutch consensual mode of politics. In Zagreb, Belgrade, or Ljubljana, I often compare notes with my friends on the degree of corruption, widespread injustice, class inequality and repressiveness of the state apparatus of our respective countries. As reaction to right-wing populist hegemony, historical revisionism and neo-racism in our countries, we are keen to rediscover the counter-memory of antifascism, working class movements, antiracism and in the case of the former Yugoslavia, the lived reality of multi-ethnic and multicultural existence in socialist times. Due to the contemporary context of economic crisis and of increasing class inequalities, moreover, third wave feminist movements in Bologna and Rome, but also in Zagreb, Ljubljana and Belgrade have started to focus on issues such as neo-liberalism, labor and welfare rights, precarity and social justice, as well as on intersections between gender, class, ethnic and sexual discriminations. The theme of women’s different class and generational positions is powerfully resurfacing in the debate about feminism(s) and feminist genealogies in Italy (Di Cori 2007; Passerini 1991, 2011; Fantone 2007; Toffanin 2011). Something similar is happening in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, caught between the economic crisis, the corruption of local elites and the ambivalent promise of European integration (see the volume curated by Gržinić and Reitsamer 2007; see also the recent issue of the journal ProFemina on Yugoslav feminism curated by Petrović and Arsenijević 2011). A recent slogan by the Cure feminist collective for the 8th of March in Sarajevo stated: “I don’t want carnations, I want a job!” I believe that my own connection with contemporary social and political movements in Southern and South-Eastern Europe influences what I am be able to see and judge as significant during my research in the archives, and affects my openness to the “voices from the archives.” In a way, my own location entrains an empathic vision 44 54 ‘Knoflooklanden uit de euro’ , Metro, 8.9.2011. �towards the postwar, antifascist generation. Their fights, losses and sacrifices for a better world, and their faith in historical progress and social justice after a war that had devastated the core of Europe, appear once again urgent in post-Cold War Europe. In the next section I shall address the methodological tensions that arise when conducting historical research about women of another generation. 6.7. Across generations: subjectivity and agency As described in the previous section, my specific geopolitical, generational and intellectual location led me to develop a form of empathy towards the internationalist endeavor and towards the issues raised by women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia after 1945. Nonetheless, for the post-Cold War feminist researcher there are a number of methodological questions that arise when reading 1940s and 1950s sources about women’s activism during the Cold War era. Since gender relations, as well as femininities and the shifting concept of “women”, are historically situated (Riley 1988; Scott 1986; 2010; Jambrešić-Kirin 2008), concepts like women’s emancipation or equality, or women’s subjectivity and agency, have to be framed in relation to their historical context, without forgetting the tensions created by the temporal distance which separates the researcher from her research subjects. When positioning myself towards the antifascist generation of women who were active in politics in Italy and Yugoslavia – and in my assumption that women’s emancipation and women’s subjectivities are central questions – I am confronted with the fact that these concerns are not contemporary to the time of the women I research, a methodological problem already analyzed by Chodorow (1989), Passerini (1991), and Scott (2010). In her essay “Seventies Questions for Thirties Women: Gender and Generation in a Study of Early Women Psychoanalysts”, feminist psychologist Nancy Chodorow noted that the category of gender had a very different significance for female psychologists who had been active in the 1930s than it did for her or her contemporaries. In the course of her interviews, Chodorow observed that this older generation of women did not attribute a great significance to gender in their life path, while she was herself hypersensitive to gender, a result of her second wave feminist engagement (Chodorow 1989; Passerini 1991). Commenting upon Chodorow’s work, historian Luisa Passerini argues that as feminist researchers, “we should be particularly attentive to our own normative models relative to gender, and accept the tension between us and the women we study, between our time and our culture on the one hand, and their time and their culture on the other” (1991: 193). The task of “restituting subjectivity”45 to the women of the past, as Passerini argues, requires an effort of imagination combined 45 Luisa Passerini (1998: 54) defines subjectivity as a term which includes «both the aspects of spontaneous subjective being (soggettività irriflessa) contained and represented by attitude, behavior and language, as well as other forms of awareness (consapevolezza) such as the sense of identity, consciousness of oneself, and more considered forms of intellectual activity. The importance of this term, moreover, is that it embraces not only the epistemological dimension but also that concerned with the nature and significance of the political.” 55 �with historical research, in order to understand “which sense is attributed by the historical actors to their actions, their lives, their thoughts” (1991: 190). In positioning myself towards the antifascist generation of women who were active in Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia – and in assuming the centrality of women’s political agency – I am confronted with the fact that this assumption is not contemporary to women I research. In the postwar period, in fact, women’s emancipation and women’s equality were generally framed as components of broader social emancipation, democratization and modernization, and not as autonomous theoretical or social issues (Božinovic 1996; Ascoli 1979; Gaiotti De Biase 1978). As I will describe in the Chapter 2, even women’s participation in party politics was often framed in the masculine gender, since politics was by definition a male domain. Femininity, however, was reinstated in the realm of family life and motherhood, a realm thought of as complementary to women’s engagement in the public sphere, even among female politicians. Another crucial value for both men and women of the partisan generation, was collective sacrifice for the party. An example of the specific gendered subjectivity of antifascist women can be found in a 1959 obituary about an important afž politician, Angelca Očepek, written by afž leader Bosa Cvetić. Cvetić describes Očepek as “a modest revolutionary, a good comrade, a gentle mother and wife” and praises her in a direct address: “your life path has been full of fight and self-reliance, and your life optimism so great that until the last day you have thought about the happiness of others, about your family, about others, about the party in which you were born and in which you died.” 46 The postwar ideal of a complementarity between public and private roles, and antifascist militants’ dedication to party and family life, have often been read as conservative and moderate by the second wave generation of feminist historians, since women’s past individualities and subjectivities were subsumed by collective institutions such as the family or the party. In my own mediation across shifting temporalities, positioning myself critically towards the antifascist generation, meant, in a way, that I had to position myself critically also towards the second wave feminist generation, and towards their theoretical and political critique of the antifascist foremothers of women’s organizations. While I take into account the second wave feminist critique of antifascist women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia, and notably their critique of the non-autonomous character of women’s organizations, I feel compelled to situate their reflections in the specific historical and generational context of the 1970s, in which younger feminist groups experienced the patronizing attitude of older, former partisan women 46 (“Skroman revolucionar, dobar drug, plemenita majka i žena – sve je to bilo očliceno u tebi Angelca. Tvoj životni put bio je pun borbe i samopregora, a tvoj životni optimizam tako veliki da si do poslednjeg dana mislila na sreću drugih, na svoju porodicu, na drugove, na partiju u čijem si se krilu takoreći rodila i u čijem si krilu umrla.” 3.6.1959.) In this obituary, revolutionary (revolucionar) and comrade (drug) are in the male gender, while mother and wife are in the female gender (plemenita majka i žena). These formulations can give a measure of the distance between past and contemporary subjective values and between the different embodiments of femininity. 56 �within state authorities, women’s organizations and communist parties.47 Women’s Cold War activism was criticized from a feminist standpoint because of its lack of autonomy, but this critical concept was itself a historical product of second wave feminism. As Joan Scott has recently argued, It was feminist politics that brought “women” into view as an object of historical investigation. But, ironically, the project of creating a subject for contemporary feminism (an active, protesting collectivity, asserting its rights, seeking emancipation from oppression) tended to blur the lines of difference, whether temporal, cultural or social. “Gender” was meant to historicize and relativize women and to conceive of them as integral to history, not simply as agents, but as “women.” The point was that the current subject of feminism (our collectivity) could not be projected retrospectively or laterally. Scott’s recent observations on the historicity of gender relations are particularly pertinent to my project. While I am constructing “women” as an object of historical investigation, the objective conditions and the subjective investments under which antifascist women became active in politics in the Cold War period are radically different from the conditions and assumptions that brought feminist scholars and activists to formulate their demands thirty years later, and radically different from my own training as a gender scholar in the post-Cold War era. To quote again from Scott (2010: 12): “Gender” suggested that we had to problematize the very notion of how we came to think of ourselves the way we did. It was not self-evident that women were conscious of themselves as “women”, not at all clear that “our bodies” defined “ourselves”. There was no “false consciousness” about what it meant to be a woman (even if consciousness-raising was a mobilizing technique). Rather there were appeals to specific interests and experiences that, at a particular moment, got organized under the sign of “women”. The questions were how and when that happened and under what conditions? This warning about the changing historical category of “women” has been crucial for this research, in which I try to grapple not only with antifascist women’s activism in the Cold War period, but also with the ways in which it had been overlooked by second wave feminist historiography. In which way did antifascist women define and frame women’s emancipation after 1945? Which issues were treated as urgent and discussed, which issues were left aside? Most importantly, who framed the “women’s question” at the time and for which audiences? In which way was the antifascist, universalistic framework of postwar women’s emancipation reframed within second wave feminist historiography? Although I acknowledge the absence or the limits of 47 These generational conflicts, however, are not clear cut, and a number of scholarly works have shown that the udi and the kdaž in the late 1970s often provided the first site in which younger activists could develop their intellectual and militant skills, before “breaking away” as feminists from established institutions. See Hellman (1987) and Dobos (1983). 57 �women’s autonomous political organizing after 1945, and while I maintain a critical stance towards the dogmatisms, hierarchies and complicities that were characteristic of communist parties and women’s organizations in the Cold War period, I believe that the forms of autonomous feminist organizing experienced in the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and in the United States cannot be taken as the touchstone of women’s activism throughout history, projecting the subject of feminism, as Scott argues, into the past or into the future. As I will argue in the following chapters, the absence of autonomous political organizing among the antifascist female activists cannot be equated to a lack of agency. The concept of agency has been recently revived by a number of scholars in investigations of female subjects that had been traditionally excluded from the Western, liberal imagination of feminism, such as “Third world women” (Mohanty 2003) and pious Muslim women (Mahmood 2006). Studies such as those by Mohanty and Mahmood contest the concept of “false consciousness” (itself derived from Marxist theory) that had been widely used in feminist critique to designate women who would act against their gender interests. I argue that antifascist women’s agency in the Cold War period is expressed through a number of political engagements, in which gender relations, class relations and national/ethnic relations are interrelated and co-constitutive. When reading 1940s and 1950s sources, what comes to the fore is my own academic standpoint, influenced by a training in gender theory, more than by feminist activism as such. As a gender scholar, I have been sensitized to a poststructuralist, intersectional approach48, which takes into account not only gender differences, but also the ways in which other forms of difference and inequality – such as race/ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, age – are intertwined with each other and in turn shape gender relations. It is with this intersectional gaze that I set out to study women’s Cold War activism. This has been my way to find a scholarly and activist location between the postwar, universalistic language of class spoken by antifascist women and the language of autonomy and sexual difference developed by second wave feminist scholars. Having said this, I am not trying here to propose a narrative of progress, loss, or return (Hemmings 2011), using post-structuralist feminism and intersectionality as a “better” method to write women’s history. Instead, I am reflecting on my own implicit assumptions and standpoints, which have become the lens through which I could unravel women’s political agency and subjectivities after 1945. Looking at the entanglement of individual and collective identities – and at the intersections between issues of gender, sexuality, class, age, nationality, race/ethnicity in the Cold War period – has helped me to show that gendered identities and subjectivities were never completely subsumed by the Marxist, class-based discourses that dominated women’s organizations. Instead, issues of gender, femininity, motherhood and sexuality kept resurfacing in the documents and in the reports written by the members of the udi and by the afž. 48 On intersectionality as a theory and as a method in gender studies, see the recent anthology edited by Lutz et al. (2011). 58 �At the same time, since the leaders of postwar antifascist women’s organizations such as the udi and the afž distanced themselves from “feminism”, which they identified with an interwar “bourgeois” phenomenon, I chose not to define them as Cold War feminists, Marxist feminists, socialist feminists, or civic feminists, since these definitions would have sounded to them like a contradiction in terms.49 Instead, I have tried to show how these organizations strove to foster women’s rights and women’s emancipation on the basis of a Marxist approach, with its implied faith in historical progress, mass organizing, and state institutions as tools for social transformation. By highlighting the very different positions of the leaders of women’s organizations and the “feminine masses”, I demonstrate that that different forms of femininity existed within these organizations, and that the leaders of women’s organizations themselves constructed a sociological category of “women” that was far from their own experience as communist militants. While striving to show the limits of this hierarchical, top-down approach, I also emphasize the potential of some of the struggles led by Cold War antifascist women’s organizations on themes such as women’s welfare and labor rights, or against racism and against social injustice, struggles that have regained a profound significance in the current European context. In this chapter I have given a literature review covering the main aspects of my chosen topics, and addressing especially the theoretical implications of history writing across temporalities, borders and generations. I have emphasized the influence of feminist theory in shaping this historiography. I have outlined current scholarly debates about Cold War women’s activism, and about European feminist genealogies. I have accounted for the methodological choices of the project and described the process of data gathering from a wide range of sources. I have also discussed my own geopolitical and scholarly location as researcher, and the way it shaped my theoretical and methodological approach. In the next chapter I will embark upon an account of women’s participation to the antifascist Resistance in wartime Italy and Yugoslavia. For a discussion about Eastern European “state feminism” see issue one of the journal Aspasia, no.1, 2007. As an example of the attempt to present postwar women’s movements in Italy as proto-feminists and gender-based, see Tambor (2010) and Pojmann (2008). Interestingly, the proto-feminist character of postwar women’s movement is constructed by overemphasizing the cooperation between women of different political backgrounds, notably between women from the udi and women from the cif, the Catholic association close to the Christian-Democratic Party. Tambor goes as far as claiming that “[t]he particular intensity of Italy’s Cold War rivalries was subverted, critiqued, and even outright rejected by a coalition of women from both Left and Right”, a statement which, in my view, obscures the fact that the communist/anticommunist divide was a crucial factor of political identification in the Cold War period. 49 59 �Chapter 2 Women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia Introduction They [the Italian partisans] told us: “If you want we can help you to go home. But if you want you can come [to fight] with us instead”…And I thought: “all Europe is on fire, people are revolting everywhere, so if I stay with you and fight with you, I will be fighting for my people, too.” And I always liked that phrase (...) Actually, I feel flattered. I say to myself, “Look at you Vinka, at seventeen you were not stupid at all.” 1 (Interview with Vinka Kitarović, 2011) The Second World War was a total war, in which civilian populations – particularly in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union – were involved in armed conflict, foreign occupation, violence and mass death on a unprecedented scale.2 Deportation to other countries was also a mass phenomenon, which brought away thousands of civilians from their native cities and villages. Like Vinka Kitarović, a 16-year-old high school student who resisted against the Fascist occupation in her hometown of Sibenik, on the Dalmatian coast, who was deported in 1942 with other eleven “subversive” girls from her class to Italy, and locked in a reformatory for underage prostitutes in Bologna. In 1943, thanks to a bomb alert, Vinka managed to escape and join the armed 1 “Loro ci dissero, se volete noi cerchiamo di aiutarvi per andare a casa vostra. Se invece volete venire con noi (..) Ma io pensai, è in fiamme tutta l’Europa, la gente si ribella dappertutto, quindi se io rimango con voi e combatto con voi, io combatto anche per la mia gente. E ti dirò che questa è una frase che mi è sempre piaciuta. Non ero mica stupida come bambina, tutto sommato. Perché non te lo invento, è così, e me ne compiaccio, dico, Vinka a 17 anni non eri proprio stupida.”  Interview with Vinka Kitarović, Bologna, 6/4/2011. 2 See the essays collected in the anthology edited by Bessel and Schumann, 2003, and in particular Grossmann 2003; Lagrou 2003; De Haan 2003. As these essays make clear, although the trauma of Second World War was later “nationalized” in the different countries, different populations were submitted to very different degrees of violence and persecution, with the genocide of Jews and the war on the Eastern Front as the most extreme form of violence. Differences in ethnic group, class, nationality, gender shaped the successive experience of displacement, as Grossmann shows in her brilliant essay about differing experiences of Germans and Jews in 1945 Berlin. 60 �Resistance in the cities of Bologna and Modena, where she became a courier under the names of “Vera” and “Lina”, carrying weapons and munitions for the antifascist guerrilla. Vinka’s story shows how the lives of people in different countries could become interrelated during World War Two, and the transnational character of the Resistance to foreign occupation and Nazi-fascism. The Second World War was also an “international ideological civil war” between progress and reaction (Hobsbawm 1994: 144). Since all Europe was on fire, as she recalls, Vinka decided to stay and fight for the Resistance in Italy. After the war, she went on with her life in Bologna, returning to Yugoslavia only during the summer. Due to the specific character of World War Two in Italy and Yugoslavia, women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance was a mass phenomenon that involved thousands of women of different classes and cultural backgrounds. In this chapter I provide an historical account that serves to introduce the rest of the thesis. In the case of wartime Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, a transnational comparison of the different militant strategies proves very significant, due to the mutual influence of Nazi-fascist politics, antifascist struggles and civil war in the two bordering countries. In the first section, I give a brief overview of the Second World War and antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, in order to show the entangled history of Fascism and antifascism across the Italo-Yugoslav border. As I will show in this section, physical and imaginary encounters between antifascist militants, men and women, happened already during the war, which involved forced and voluntary mobility of populations across borders. In the second section, I describe in detail the formation of women’s mass organizations during the Second World War, looking at the parallel foundation of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije – afž) in 1942 and of the Groups for the defense of woman and for assistance to freedom fighters (Gruppi di difesa della donna e per l’assistenza ai Combattenti per la libertà – gdd) in 1943, which were transformed in 1944-1945 into the Italian Women’s Union (Unione Donne Italiane-udi). For strategic reasons, the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties organized and encouraged different forms of women’s participation in the liberation struggle; women’s antifascist organizations had a large degree of organizational autonomy during the war period. I look at women’s different forms of participation in the Resistance in the Italian and the Yugoslav context, and at the specific role of the gdd/udi and the afž, establishing an historical parallel in terms of political and organizational strategies. In the third section of this chapter, I juxtapose current scholarly debates on women and the Second World War in Italy and Yugoslavia, showing that in both countries women’s political participation in the Resistance remained highly controversial and ambivalent, creating a profound and yet uneven subversion of gender roles. Images of brave female fighters coexisted with figures of sacrificial mothers, more apt to symbolize national unity. “Women” as symbolic signifiers were crucial to nation building, but also to the establishment of a new social order. While the gendered representations of women in the Italian and Yugoslav Resistance have been studied in depth, the issue of women’s political agency has been explored to a lesser extent. Against interpreta- 61 �tions seeing the transition from the war to postwar period as a gendered backlash, I argue that individual and collective experiences of Resistance were far more complex and heterogeneous than symbolical representations would suggest. I therefore explore recent scholarly contributions stressing women’s political agency during World War ii in Italy and Yugoslavia, a theme that I investigate further for the postwar and Cold War period. 1. The Second World War in Italy and Yugoslavia 1.1. The beginnings of the antifascist struggle The entangled history of the Italo-Yugoslav border area and of this region can be traced to the end of the First World War, with the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since 1919, Italy had expanded its North-Eastern borders to Trieste, Istria and part of Dalmatia, incorporating a consistent Slavic minority. With the instauration of the Fascist regime in 1922, the myth of the “mutilated victory” and of the unredeemed Eastern lands was mobilized by Mussolini to promote a violent policy of cultural assimilation towards Italy’s Slavic subjects, and to justify an expansionist politics towards the newly founded Kingdom of Yugoslavia.3 The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (or Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca) was formed in 1918 and it reunited the previously independent Kingdom of Serbia with the territories formerly governed by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, under the Serbian dynasty of Karađorđević. Belgrade policies of centralism, however, stirred the resistance of the other ethnic constituencies, notably the Croats, and finally led to the abolishment of the parliamentary Constitution and to the establishment of King Alexander’s dictatorship in 1929.4 Italian Fascist authorities further attempted to destabilize the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, by promoting ethnic divisions and by supporting Croat and Macedonian fascist and nationalist organizations such as the Ustasha and the Macedonian vmro, who also had training camps in Italy. These organisations proved victorious in destabilizing the Yugoslav Kingdom when king Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille in 1934, most probably with Italian logistic support (Conti 2008). Fascist imperialist politics reached their peak with the beginning of the Second World War, when Italy invaded parts of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Italy annexed Albania in 1939, following German annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and proceeded to invade Greece in 1940. In April 1941, Italian troops were part of the Axis coalition of Nazi, Hungarian and Bulgarian soldiers that occupied and partitioned the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Axis occupied the territory 3 About the history of Italy’s « Oriental border » and about Fascist imperialism in the Balkans, see Cattaruzza (2007); Rodogno (2006); Conti (2008). 4 About the history of interwar Yugoslavia and the issue of nations and nationalities, see Banac (1984); Đokić (2007). 62 �of the Kingdom by splitting it up among their allies. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi puppet-state, ruled by the fascist militia known as the Ustasha. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy. Approximately 650.000 troops from the Italian Royal Army were assigned to the control of the Istrian and Dalmatian borderlands, as well as of the provinces of Ljubljana and Montenegro that had been annexed to Italy.5 In line with earlier policies of “denationalisation” and with a conception of Slavic populations as racially inferior, the Italian military government was particularly violent in administering the annexed territories.6 A great number of people, mainly civilians, fell victim to the “preventive repression” against any possible resistance. This repression includes mass deportation of populations, concentration camps and burning and looting of villages. Only for the province of Ljubljana, 13.000 victims are estimated (Conti 2008: 70). The figures for the deported Slavic populations, both in the annexed territories and in Italy itself, have been estimated in the order of 60.000 –100.000 (Conti 2008: 70). The Italian Royal Army also collaborated with Nazi troops, as well as with the Ustasha regime in their rounding-up and extermination of antifascists, Jews, Serbs and Roma. They also sided with Chetniks7 and Slovene anti-communist forces. In this context of total war, the heretofore-clandestine Yugoslav Communist Party8 started to organise a resistance struggle against Nazi-fascism and its local supporters. Joining the Resistance was often one of the few possibilities to survive the total war waged in towns and villages and the deportation for those who were targeted by the Ustasha regime because of their ethnic identities, notably Serbs and Jews. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union with “Operation Barbarossa” on the 22nd of 5 A detailed recostruction of Second World War in the territories of Italy and Yugoslavia is beyond the scope of this thesis. For a cultural and social history of World War Two in Italy see however Pavone 2006; for Yugoslavia see Tomasevich 2001. 6 “The emphasis over the Slavic threat, the dark menace implicit in the same concept of Balcania [Balkan land] and its usage not only for propaganda aims, as a synonym for every sort of wickedness, the reference to the “Balkan infection” that could not be cauterized strongly enough by any weapon: this became the everyday discourse of the press, the radio, the propaganda, and of military and political action” (Collotti 1999: 58). 7 A royalist guerrilla army of resistance to the Nazi occupation, the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland – better known as the Chetniks – was constituted under the command of Draža Mihailović and initially supported by the Allies. However, while initially fighting against the Germans, the Chetniks also opposed the communist forces, which led them to accept Axis support in their fight against the partisans. See Tomasevich (2001). 8 The Yugoslav Communist Party – legally founded in 1919, gained quickly support (65.000 members at the end of the 1920), becoming the third main party of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by 1921. It was outlawed in 1921, and more strongly repressed after the coup d’état establishing a dictatorship in the hands of the king Alexander in 1929. Internal conflicts and illegality reduced its members to 2.122 (100 women) in 1928. However, after 1935 the Party underwent a profound reorganization, and Josip Broz “Tito” assumed the leadership in 1936 (Jancar-Webster 1990: 24). 63 �June 1941, the ussr launched an appeal for partisan resistance in Western Europe to ease the situation on the Eastern front. In the Yugoslav territory the Partisans formed the 1st Sisak Partisan Detachment in 1941, which was also the first armed resistance unit in Europe. On December 22 the first Proletarian Assault Brigade (Proleterska Udarna Brigada) was created, as the first regular Partisan military unit. The different Partisan detachments merged into the People’s Liberation Army (nov) and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia (poj) in 1942. The Liberation Movement grew to become the largest resistance force in occupied Europe, with 800,000 men organized in 4 field armies. Since early 1942 the Comintern journal praised the Yugoslav partisan struggle, as the “example to be followed everywhere in Western Europe” (Urban 1986: 157). The Italian Communist Party had also called for mass antifascist resistance after the invasion of the Soviet Union, and in late July 1941 Umberto Massola, member of pci foreign bureau, first reached Milan, after having crossed the Italo-Yugoslav border (Urban 1986: 161). The first Italian partisan units were in fact formed in the summer-autumn of 1943. In July 1943, Allied troops landed in Sicily. On the 25th of July, Mussolini was dismissed as Prime Minister by the Grand Council of Fascism, and replaced with Marshal Badoglio. On the 8th of September 1943, the king announced that he had signed an armistice with Allied troops, which marked Italy’s capitulation. After Italy’s unconditional surrender there followed the landing of the Allies in the South, the confused disbanding of the Royal Army, and the Nazi occupation of Northern and Central Italy. Even if Italian partisan units only truly started to operate in the autumn of 1943, the instructions about the formation of partisan units in Northern Italy had been drafted long before, and were deeply influenced by the neighboring “Yugoslav example”. Under Moscow’s guidelines, “the pci clearly sought to comply with the Comintern’s order to promote armed resistance based on the Yugoslavian pattern” (Urban 1986: 162). Immediately after Italy’s surrender, on the 9th of September 1943 the main antifascist parties formed the Committee for National Liberation in Rome, and invited the population to join the Resistance against the Nazis (Ginsborg 2003). The Committee for National Liberation included the representatives of six pre-fascist parties: “the Communist, Action (progressive republicans), Socialist, Christian Democratic, Republican, and Liberal” (Novak 1970: 96). According to the “Salerno strategic shift” (svolta di Salerno), the Italian communist party agreed to cooperate with the other antifascist forces before deciding upon the question of the Italian Monarchy. In March 1944, Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti returned to Italy from his Moscow exile.9 At the end of the war, there were approximately 100.000 active members in the armed Resistance, and thousands of other supporters. The Communist and the Action Party troops were the most significant and best organized, outnumbering the bands formed by former army officers of royalist background, and Catholic and so9 Palmiro Togliatti (1893-1964) was a founder of the pci in 1921 and served as the chief of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death in 1964. He moved to the Soviet Union in 1926 to escape Fascist repression. There he became a leader of the Communist International, and was sent to Spain during the civil war. In 1944 he returned to Italy, where he took part in the antifascist unity government until 1947. For an extended biography of Togliatti, see Bocca (1973). 64 �cialist troops. The American and British troops, who backed conservative forces and the king in the South, looked at these developments with anxiety. Even in Yugoslavia, the Anglo-American allies initially supported the Chetnik royalist guerrilla linked to the Serbian Monarchy in exile in London. Soon it became clear, however, that the secret Communist Party, reorganized into the Yugoslav National Liberation Front led by Josip Broz Tito10, was the most effective and organized underground force; the Partisans were also best able to gain the support of the local populations, since they promised to establish a new order that could be embraced by all the ethnic groups of the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The first civic authority within the framework of the National Liberation movement was established on the 26th of November 1942: “over two hundred Partisan representatives of various parties, organizations, and ethnic or religious groups met in the Bosnian stronghold of Bihac to form themselves into a Yugoslav Antifascist Council of National Liberation, known by its initials as avnoj” (Petrovich 1947: 505). Britain finally insisted upon the Yugoslav king to recognize the National Liberation Front – hegemonized by the communists – as the sole legitimate Yugoslav underground (Novak 1970: 91). 1.2. Italian and Yugoslav women’s encounters across borders during the war The echo of the Yugoslav antifascist struggles had reached Italian antifascists since the beginning of the war, becoming a very significant model during the Resistance: “the Yugoslavs exercise a specific fascination on the [Italian] communist and working class base, since they seem to unify in their struggle the three wars, the patriotic war, the civil war and the class war” (Pavone 2006: 305). Some cooperation between Italian and Slovene antifascists already started at Italy’s Eastern border in 1942, and increased after the 8th of September 1943. In a recent collection about women’s history in Trieste, historian Anna di Gianantonio (2004) argues that “many Resistances” existed in Italy, and that the specificity of the Resistance at the Oriental border was clearly determined by the influence of the Yugoslav model. There the struggle started much earlier than in the rest of Italy, also as a response to the Fascist politics of “Italianization” against the Slavic minority, which had led the local Slovenes to organize a number of solidarity networks under Fascism. After the German occupation in 1943, the armed Resistance in the Italo-Yugoslav border area soon assumed the character of an underground guerrilla war, to which the Nazi commanders responded with counter-insurgency policies, terrorizing civilians and exploiting ethnic differences to their advantage. Di Gianantonio wrote the life story of the woman who is considered to be the first Italian partisan courier (staffetta), 10 Josip Broz (1892-1980), known under his nom-de-guerre as Tito, , became a soldier of the Red Army and a member of the Soviet communist party after World War One. He was the founder of the Yugoslav communist party in 1920 and one of its leaders until World War Two. In the mid-1930s he again spent some time in Moscow where he was part of the Comintern. He led the antifascist Resistance in Yugoslavia and became the life-long leader of the sfry. He died in 1980. For a detailed biography of Tito, see Dedijer (1980) ; Đilas (2000). 65 �Ondina Peteani (1925-2003), an 18-year-old worker in the dockyards of Monfalcone (a harbor town in the Italo-Yugoslav border area), later deported to Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. The decision to take part in the Resistance was influenced by a number of factors, such as class, ethnicity and ideological orientation. Slovene women living in Trieste and Monfalcone, for instance, were more rapidly politicized during Fascism because of the national and cultural oppression they suffered. During the Resistance, Slavic-speaking women often received worse treatment when arrested, as related by some Italian female comrades imprisoned with them (Di Gianantonio 2007: 73, 85). Marisa Rodano, future udi leader and Catholic antifascist militant in Nazi-occupied Rome, recalls in her autobiography that while she was imprisoned for antifascist activities, she heard from the nuns that “a group of Slovenian girls, very subversive and what is more, non-believers” was detained in the same prison. She imagined that “they must have been involved in an attempt at armed revolt that took place in Trieste or in the annexed Slovenian territory.” And then she adds: “I do not remember anymore if I saw them in person or if I exchanged few words with them. But I must have known something more, for in my memory a sense of unconditional admiration has remained vivid: they, they were real revolutionaries, they ran the risk of death penalty, they had done important things for the cause” (Rodano 2008a: 191). After the 8th of September 1943, with the disbandment of the Italian royal army, many Italian men found themselves in the Balkans where they had fought as soldiers, and decided to join the Yugoslav resistance. According to historian Giacomo Scotti (2011: 7), there were around 40.000 Italian soldiers who fought with Yugoslav partisans. Many men and women from Yugoslavia who had been deported to Italian prison camps, moreover, managed to escape after the 8th of September 1943, and joined the Resistance in Italy. A recent volume (Martocchia 2011) dedicated to Yugoslav partisans within the Italian Resistance lists approximately 200 internment camps for Slavic citizens in the Italian Kingdom, with around 100.000 deportees from Yugoslavia in these camps. Around 500 Yugoslav partisans are buried in Italy. The book recalls the important contribution of Yugoslav fighters and other foreign soldiers to some first Resistance battles. Liberated Southern Italy, moreover, served as a military rear guard for Yugoslav communist activities, and hosted a number of partisan training camps. This history gives an idea of the imaginary and material legacies of Fascist and antifascist history across the Italo-Yugoslav border during World War Two, legacies which would continue in the postwar and Cold War era, as I will show in the next chapters. Deportation during the Second World War was, as I have mentioned earlier, a mass phenomenon, and many antifascist women from Italy and Yugoslavia met – together with other women of different national backgrounds – in the concentration camps. I have mentioned the story of Vinka Kitarović, student from Sibenik, Croatia, who joined the Resistance in Emilia-Romagna after having experienced the Fascist deportation when she was seventeen. Another student from Croatia, antifascist Julka Desković, managed to escape Fascist prisons, and became active in the Resistance in the region of Bologna. She died in Ravensbruck11 shortly before the Liberation. Julka 11 Ravensbruck was a women’s concentration camp, situated 90 km north of Berlin. More than 80 per cent of inmates were considered political prisoners, and served as forced labor in 66 �Desković’s story has been collected in a volume that was originally published in Italy in 1978, titled Le donne di Ravensbruck (The Women of Ravensbruck). It was edited by historian Anna Maria Bruzzone and by former deportee Lidia Beccaria Rolfi, and it contained the life stories of five Italian women who had been deported to Ravensbruck female concentration camp for political reasons. It was in places like Ravensbruck that antifascist women from different nationalities met. Some, if they survived, like Ondina Peteani, went on to be active in Cold War politics (Di Gianantonio 2007). The entangled history of Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women is evident in the friendship between Julka Desković and Italian antifascist militant Nella Baroncini, which started during their imprisonment in Ravensbruck.12 After having witnessed the death of her mother and of her elder sister, and the displacement of her sister Lina in another camp, Nella Baroncini found herself alone. Lying ill in the infirmary of the camp, Nella became friends with Julka, who, she said, was like a sister to her. Julka was pregnant when she arrived in the camp; the father of the child was an Italian worker and communist antifascist leader, Renato Giachetti (1903-1964). The baby girl was born in Ravensbruck at Christmas 1944: “Once the little nurse of the new born babies even managed to bring her so that she could see her from the window: such a beautiful girl! She was called Slobodenka, which means free” (Beccaria Rolfi and Bruzzone 2003: 269). The baby managed to survive thanks to the young nurse, until February 1945, when another nurse forgot the gas heater on, killing her and a number of babies placed in the upper part of the barracks. Julka’s health continued to deteriorate, also due to recently having given birth. Julka and Nella remained together in the infirmary until the Liberation, and were saved a number of times from the gas chambers by the Slavic women doctors working there, since they hid them from the infirmary lists. “After the Liberation this doctor told to me and Julka: ‘At least, I managed to take you off the list three or four times’. If I survived, it was thanks to these women doctors: they were also the surrounding factories, mainly textile factories. The camp opened in May 1939 and was in function until April 1945. Around 130.000 women of different nationalities were deported there, of which 40.000 were Polish and 26.000 were Jewish. Children were also deported with their mothers. Women died of hunger and exhaustion, but also of inhuman medical experiments and extermination. A provisional gas chamber was added in 1944. About the medical experiments conducted in Ravensbruck on Polish women, see http://individual.utoronto.ca/jarekg/Ravensbruck/ (last accessed 3/4/2012). A collection of interviews by Ravensbruck survivors can be found at the database of Lund University, Sweden : http://www3. ub.lu.se/ravensbruck/index_eng.html (last accessed 3/4/2012). 12 Nella Baroncini (born in Bologna in 1925) was deported together with her sisters Lina (born in 1923) and Iole (1917-1945) and her mother Teresa (1893-1945). Their father, a socialist, Adelchi was also arrested and killed during the war. The whole family had been denounced by a co-worker of the father, and was found in possession of a clandestine press with a number of printing machines. All the three sisters joined the Resistance by producing underground leaflets and newspapers. Nella and Lina’s accounts, in which they relate their attempt to take care of their mother and of their elder sister in the camp, and the intertwining of individual and family memories of Ravensbruck, are very moving (see Beccaria Rolfi and Bruzzone 2003). 67 �deportees” (Beccaria Rolfi and Bruzzone 2003: 271). Nella survived, while Julka died a few days after the Liberation. This story gives a hint of the multiple inter-subjective and political connections that were created by antifascist networks of solidarity and struggle across borders, in the midst of deportation, suffering and mass death. These stories show that transnational mobility, both forced and voluntary, was widespread during the Second World War. A combination of sources in different languages can help to retrace stories that go beyond an exclusively national historical framework, such as the life stories of Julka Desković and Vinka Kitarović. The topic of the cosmopolitanism of the antifascist generation will return throughout this book. In the following section I will retrace women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, accounting for the foundation of women’s mass organizations during Second World War. 2 . The foundation of the afž and the udi during the antifascist Resistance In this section I describe the foundation of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia and of the Union of Italian Women during the antifascist Resistance, showing the commonalities and differences between these two organizations. Since these organizations became important institutions for women’s activism in the postwar and Cold War period, it is worth examining their creation in the war period, and their successive developments after the Liberation. During the Second World War, the creation of women’s organizations such as the afž and the udi served to link the older generation of politicized antifascist revolutionaries with the working class and peasant women who supported the partisan struggle in the war years. Unlike in other European contexts, the antifascist struggle in Yugoslavia and in Northern Italy was a truly popular phenomenon, which garnered the support of the local population. This popular support has often been overemphasized in both countries in the postwar era for reasons of political legitimacy (Sassoon 2003; Rutar 2007-2008). Nonetheless, thousands of people in different regions of Italy and Yugoslavia were involved in the struggle, constituting the basis of the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties’ popularity in the postwar period. While I use the territorial units of “Italy” and “Yugoslavia” for the sake of comparison, it is important to keep in mind the complexity of the regional, cultural and ethnic identities in the territories at stake, the dynamic character of antifascist organizing during the war, and the different “many Resistances” (Di Gianantonio 2004) which were fought in different parts of Northern Italy and across the Yugoslav territory. Also, it is important to keep in mind that the civil war and foreign occupation of Yugoslavia was much more violent and more disruptive for civilian populations than in Italy (Lagrou 2003; Judt 2005).13 13 While population losses in Yugoslavia have been estimated above one million inhabitants out of a total population of 16 million, in Italy population losses were significantly lower, approximately around 440.000 out of 43 million inhabitants (130.000 civilians and 310.000 military). See next chapter. 68 �2.1. Women’s resistance in Yugoslavia: the Antifascist Women’s Front (afž) In this sub-section I will describe women’s participation in the Yugoslav national liberation struggle, and in particular the foundation of the Antifascist Women’s Front (afž)14, the Yugoslav women’s mass organization whose work continued in the postwar period. The contribution of women to the Yugoslav liberation war was unprecedented in Europe: official statistics of the socialist period report 100.000 women fighting as partisans, and two million participating in various ways to the support of the National Liberation Movement.15 It has been calculated that approximately 25.000 women died in battle, 40.000 were wounded, and 2000 of them acquired the officer’s rank (Jancar-Webster 1990: 46). However, very few acquired the highest position in the military hierarchy. Only 92 women were designated as national heroes (JancarWebster 1990: 64). They were by no mean a homogeneous group; they represented all nationalities, ages and classes, and joined the movement for very different reasons, contributing in very different ways (Jancar-Webster 1990: 74). The fact that the Yugoslav communist party had promised to constitute a Federation in which all nationalities would have an equal place, made it possible to embrace the struggle as patriotic one, especially for inhabitants of countries such as Macedonia, or ethnic minorities whose right to self-determination has never been considered before. The persecuted Jewish minority also joined the Resistance in great numbers (Loker 1977), and so did the Orthodox population persecuted by the Ustasha regime in the independent state of Croatia. Other subjective reasons mentioned by former partisan women are: a desire for social justice and the horror of Nazi-fascism and local dictatorship, personal losses and dramatic events due to the civil war, a new sense of companionship and belonging, as well as the Party’s program of radical political, social and economic change (Jancar-Webster 1990: 69-71); many women joined the liberation movement in order to survive, in a context of total war and constant insecurity (Wiesinger 2009). In keeping with the division between occupied and progressively liberated territories, women would perform a variety of tasks, particularly as fighters and nurses in the army, but also as couriers, cooks and typists. Nevertheless, according to JancarWebster (1990), being a fighter in the mountains was a status preferred to the risky underground activities of couriers in the occupied territories. Women of all ages also played a very important role away from the front, working in agriculture, bringing supplies to the troops, taking care of the wounded and the orphans, especially within 14 This chapter is mainly based on the work of two authors, U.S. feminist historian Barbara Jancar-Webster, who published a volume on women and revolution in Yugoslavia in 1990, and late Lydia Sklevicky, a Zagreb-based feminist anthropologist, whose studies on women’s emancipation and the afž were published in the 1990s. I am also relying on Batinić’s recent PhD dissertation (2009) on gender and partizanke during Second World War. A study of female partisans based on oral history interviews has also been recently published in German (Wiesinger 2008); while I am unable to read German, in this chapter I will refer to an article in Serbo-Croatian, which summarizes the findings of the book (Wiesinger 2009). 15 The source of information is the Military Historical Institute in Belgrade. 69 �the framework of organizations such as the Communist Youth Organization (skoj), local or provincial National Liberation Councils (noo) or local sections of the Party, as well as within the Antifascist Women’s Front (afž). The Antifascist Women’s Front, or the afž, was founded in an attempt to mobilise large masses of women in the struggle against the occupation and in support of the Liberation Front. Since the majority of the population lived at the time in rural areas, the organisation strived to gain consensus among peasant women (Batinić 2009). The Yugoslav communist party emitted a directive in November 1942, following an earlier directive issued in the Croatian section one year before, establishing the creation of the afž sections in all cities and villages, then to be centralised into district, provincial and regional levels. This directive explicitly stated that the organization was meant to be part of the National Liberation Movement, and that its basic goal was to provide clothing, shoes, and food supplies to the army (Jancar-Webster 1990: 123-125). The organization was hierarchical and “each of its levels was represented by its own council, the lower ones (village, city) having a broader base consisting of ordinary members, whereas the higher ones (county, region), were composed of delegates, all of them united by the republic’s council and consequently by the federal council” (Sklevicky 1989b: 99). Women who had already had experience of legal and illegal communist activities in the inter-war period constituted the core of the afž federal leadership. A fundamental distinction separated a small core of urban female leaders in the republic and federal councils, who had an education and had started illegal political activities in the interwar period, from the mass of peasant fighters and nurses, 70 per cent of whom were estimated to be younger than 20 years of age (Jancar-Webster 1990: 48). A part from young partisans, the local afž membership was composed mainly of older villagers, often mothers and widows who had lost part of their families in the war. Despite this major difference, afž leaders managed to find a language suitable to the daily concerns of peasant women, and to mobilise their traditional skills in service of the struggle.16 The support of the female population in the villages became crucial for Partisans’ victory (Batinić 2009). The first generation of AFŽ leaders – who were also simultaneously party members – included many outstanding women from all over Yugoslavia, generally highly educated and from families that had a tradition of leftist engagement. They took part in illegal revolutionary activities in the 1930s, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, after the banning of the communist party in 1929. They often joined legal women and youth organizations in the pre-war period, using these organisations to spread socialist and antifascist ideals.17 This generation included Lidija Šentjurc (1911-2000), Vida Tomšić 16 “It is a testament to the communists’ exceptional wartime astuteness that they found a way to put peasant women’s traditional labor skills to use in a systematic and organized fashion. In the Party’s institutional practice, much like in its rhetoric, the traditional and the revolutionary coexisted. Rather than confronting village ways, Party women tried to adapt and direct them toward the Partisan cause. afž activists frequented traditional village gatherings and joined women’s conversations about their daily concerns” (Batinić 2009: 139). 17 In 1923 the Alliance of Feminist Societies in the State of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Al- 70 �(1913-1998) and Olga Vrabić from Slovenia, Bosa Cvetić (1914-1972), Spasenija Cana Babović (1907-1977), Mitra Mitrović (1912-2001), Milka Minić and Judita Alargić in Serbia and Vojvodina, Anka Berus (1903 – 1981), Olga Zerdig Kovačić, Vanda Novosel, Marija Šoljan and Kata Pejnović (1899-1966) in Croatia. Kata Pejnović, the first afž president, was an exception among urban, relatively young, highly educated leaders, since she was an older, self-taught peasant from the poor rural area of Lika. Her husband and her three sons, who had fought in the Resistance, had been killed in the war ; after these losses she started to wear a black headscarf, which she never abandoned (De Haan, Daskalova and Loutfi 2006). She became an icon of sacrificial motherhood during the Resistance (Batinić 2009). She wasn’t the only one who paid a high personal price for her antifascist choice. Many afž leaders had spent long periods in jail or concentration camps, had been tortured, or had suffered terrible personal losses during the war. Latinka Perović18, kdaž president in the 1960s, relates that she initially had some generational conflicts with older kdaž women who had been part of the Resistance. After some time, she discovered about one of the older women she had troubles with, Milka Lasić, lawyer and pre-war Communist, that her husband had been killed in Jasenovac concentration camp, and that her child had been disappeared by the Ustasha regime (Milošavljević 2008). Other female partisans had had to leave their children behind (Batinić 2009). Vida Tomšić had spent a considerable time in Italian jails during the war, while her antifascist husband had been sentenced to death. The first national conference of the afž took place in Bosanski Petrovac on the 6th of December 1942, and was attended by 166 delegates from all over Yugoslavia. In November 1943, in Croatia alone 243.000 women were reportedly members of the afž, and by the end of the war two million women had officially joined the organization (Jancar-Webster 1990: 143-44). In fact, women’s participation in the afž was uneven and largely depended on the situation in the different regions. Women’s couniancija Feminističkih Društava u Državi S.H.S.) was formed. The Alliance was affiliated with the International Alliance for Women’s Right to Vote. Its neutral position allowed it to exist even when, after the coup d’état of 1929, trade unions and other political associations, as well as the communist party, were banned. In the 1930s therefore, many young communist women successfully managed to ‘infiltrate’ legal women’s organizations and youth associations. The youth section of the Women’s Alliance was led by future kpj leaders such as Mitra Mitrović, and published the journal Žena Danas. Large mobilizations for the suffrage and strikes against the high cost of living were organised by the Alliance in the late 1930s, while between 1939 and 1941 peace marches and mass demonstrations for peace took place in all main towns (Jancar Webster 1990: 35). 18 Latinka Perović (born 1933 in Kragujevac) is a Serbian historian and former politician. She graduated in philosophy and obtained a doctorate in political sciences. She was president of the Conference for the Social Activity of Women from 1961 until 1964. She was secretary of the League of Communists of Serbia between 1968 and 1972, but was dismissed from politics since her views were considered too liberal. Since the mid-1970s she has been engaged in historical research, and in the post-1989 period she has been engaged in public initiatives for the democratisation of Serbian society. A volume was published recently, containing interviews and essays on her life and work (see Mirošavljević 2008). 71 �cils and commissions were formed from previous cores of underground resistance, but only Croatia saw the emergence of an organised and autonomous structure (see Sklevicky 1989b; 1996). In the rest of the Yugoslav territory, these structures emerged unevenly between 1942 and 1945, corresponding with the liberated zones and with the degree of implantation of the partisan movement: “Where the organization was most active and effective was among Serbian women in the war-torn parts of Bosnia and Croatia and among nationalist Slovenian and Croatian women on the Dalmatian littoral” (Jancar-Webster 1990: 157). Mobilisations and activities – even if directed by the Party – initially occurred spontaneously; strict central supervision was difficult due to the uneven distribution of liberated and occupied areas (Jancar-Webster 1990: 136-37). Not only did the afž local councils provide the army with supplies, money and medicine, but they also ran hospitals, orphanages, schools, nursing and first-aid courses, and a great number of alphabetization courses for illiterate women. The afž war-period journals19 incited women to contribute to the national struggle, promoted solidarity among nationalities and exalted women’s sacrifices in the war. These journals promised a better future, but without providing details about the future political system or the Soviet political system. They presented Tito as a national hero rather than a Communist (JancarWebster 1990: 115-117). In the immediate postwar years, the afž had the task of integrating women within the Popular Front, and of consolidating the revolutionary changes in society: “the explicit stress was on teaching women of all social strata to accept these changes” (Sklevicky 1989b: 98). In the following chapters, activities of the afž in the postwar period will be investigated . 2.2. Women’s resistance in Italy: the Groups for the Defense of Women (gdd) and the Union of Italian Women (udi) In this sub-section I will describe the historical process of women’s participation of in the Italian Resistance, from the creation of the Groups for the Defence of Women until the foundation of the Union of Italian Women20, the women’s mass organization 19 According to Gordana Stojaković (2011: 29-30), around thirty journals addressing women’s issues were published in the different regions of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1942-1944. In the period after 1945, the following journals were published in the different republics : Žena Danas, Woman Today (afž Yugoslavia, Belgrade, from 1943 till 1981) ; Glas Žena Srbije, The Voice of Women, Serbia (afž Serbia, Belgrade, 1945-1946) ; Žena u Borbi, Woman in the Struggle (afž Croatia, 1946-1953) ; Napredna Žena and Makedonka, Progressive Woman and the Macedonian (afž Macedonia, with parts in Turkish and Albanian) ; Nasa Žena, Our Woman, (afž Slovenia, Ljubljana 1949-1977 ; Radnica, The Female Worker (Trade unions of Yugoslavia and afž, 19481950) ; Nasa Žena, Our Woman (afž Montenegro, 1947-1978) ; Nova Žena, The New Woman, (afž Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1944-1971). The afž in Vojvodina published three journals in the early 1950s, Glas Žena in Serbo-Croatian and two others in Romanian and Hungarian. 20 As mentioned in Chapter 1, the literature on this topic is extensive, as this issue is at the center of attention of Italian historians, particularly feminist oral historians. Here I will mainly make use of Jane Slaughter’s monograph on the Italian Resistance (1997), as well as on Franca 72 �whose work in the postwar period I analyse. The Italian Antifascist Resistance was, as mentioned earlier, limited to the Nazi-fascist occupated Northern and Central regions of Italy; the Allies had landed in the Sicily in July 1943 and from there slowly advanced northwards. Without having the same widespread character as in Yugoslavia, women still participated in the struggle in Northern Italy to a significant degree. According to anpi (National Association of Italian Partisans) sources, women’s participation in the Resistance in Italy can be measured as follows: 35.000 women were enrolled in the partisan brigades; 20.000 were “patriots” with auxiliary functions; in total 70.000 women were organized by the Groups for the Defense of Women.21 In the testimonies of women who had participated in the Resistance, Fascism is described as an experience of constant violence, intimidation and social injustice. The inferior social status of women was part of this violence, since Fascism promoted an idea of women as exploitable workforce and as vessels for the reproduction of the nation (Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a: 57). The sexist imagery of Fascism, moreover, was coupled with racist and anti-Semitic imagery.22 The lack of political freedom coincided with the lack of individual freedom. Working class women and peasant women were at the core of the popular protest against Fascism since the beginning of the war. Factory strikes and “agitations” for food distribution started in Emilia in 1940. After Italy’s capitulation in 1943, demands for better working conditions and against exploitation were starting to be coupled with political demands. The Nazi occupation of Northern Italy eliminated the hope to get out of the war quickly, and increased popular discontent. On the 8th of September 1943, when the armistice with the Allies was made public, and when Nazi troops started to occupy Northern and Central Italy, women found themselves in the position to “defend” and hide former prisoners and deportees as well as Italian soldiers from the disbanded Royal Army. Partisan guerrilla attacks and Nazi retaliations escalated during the spring and summer of 1944, when inhabitants of entire villages were massacred for having allegedly supported the Partisans. The popular opposition became linked to survival, to escaping massacres and forced deportation to Germany. The “Groups for the defense of Woman and for the assistance to Freedom Fighters” (Gruppi di difesa della Donna e per l’assistenza ai Combattenti della Libertà) were Pieroni Bortolotti’s (1978a) study of women in the Resistance in the region of Emilia-Romagna, which quotes from an large number of questionnaires filled in by antifascist women themselves. I will also consider Maria Casalini’s recent work (2005), which looks at the continuities and discontinuities of gender models not only between Second World War and Cold War, but also between the Fascist period and the Republic after 1945. 21 According to these same anpi sources, 683 women were shot or died during fighting, 1750 were injured, 4633 were arrested, tortured, and condemned by fascist courts; 1890 were deported to Germany. 512 were awarded the status of war commissaries, while 16 received golden medals for their partisan activities. 22 In 1944 the prefect of Modena allowed women who alleged having been raped by a “non-Aryan” citizen to have an abortion: this amounted to an invitation to denounce the Jews who hadn’t yet been deported, and to displace attention from the sexual violence of German troops against local women (Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a: 136-138). The Nazis and Fascists also accused the cnl government in 1945 of allowing “negroes to marry Italian women” (Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a: 19). 73 �created in Milan in November 1943, on the initiative of the Communist Party, but grouping women already active in other areas. They later merged (together with some women from the Liberal, Socialist, Christian-democrat and Action party) into the Groups of the Defense of Woman (gdd). In the autumn of 1944, they were recognized as an independent organization by the clnai, the Liberation Committee coordinating the Resistance in Northern Italy. The goal of the gdd was to organize the Resistance to Nazi-fascism everywhere and with every possible means, and “to mobilize and unite women of all social classes, of all faiths and political opinions” (Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a: 79). The Northern gdd also established connections with Resisting forces in Rome (Rodano 2010: 20). Some of the women involved in the antifascist Resistance in Northern Italy and Rome had been revolutionary militants from an early age, and participated in the foundation of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. Under Fascism they were frequently persecuted and arrested, but they continued to organize revolutionary communist activities, often from exile in France or the Soviet Union. Some took part in the Spanish Civil War. This older generation included personalities such as Camilla Ravera (1899-1988), Teresa Noce (1900-1980), Adele Bei Ciufoli (1904 –1974), Rita Montagnana (1895-1979) and Maria Maddalena Rossi (1906-1995). Since the beginning of the war, antifascist militants, both communists and those from other political currents, attempted to channel the already existing discontent among the popular classes. On the one hand, the Italian communist party steered the vanguard of older women who had an experience of antifascism since the 1920s and the 1930s towards the feminine “masses”. On the other hand, many women who had suffered extreme social injustices as workers and peasants, political repression as antifascists, and personal losses as wives and mothers, found a way to express their discontent through the gdd. As Slaughter (1997: 35) reminds us, “the various courts of the Fascist government had sentenced more than 300 women to prison or confinement between 1926 and 1943.”23 Against this background, Pieroni Bortolotti argues, “the gdd had a first, decisive, liberating function. While women who had already been communists were led to be involved in the gdd, an increasing number of female antifascists from the working classes started to perceive the party who organized their meetings, speaking of their emancipation, as their party” (Pieroni Bortolotti 1978a: 79). As Casalini notes, while the functionaries of women’s organizations generally felt that they had followed the line of the party, the militants from the base saw the birth of women’s organizations as a “spontaneous process, which combine[d] gender solidarity, humanitarian efforts and a utopian component” (Casalini 2005: 85). Many women born in the 1920s joined the Resistance. According to Jane Slaughter’s sample of 936 partisan women, in 1943 27.4 per cent of the sample was 19 or younger, with 42.4 per cent between 20 and 29, and 15.4 per cent between 30 and 39. Family connections – antifascist parents or husbands – were important mobilizing 23 The confino (confinement) was a repressive method adopted by Fascist authorities against political opponents. It consisted in segregating them in remote, poor villages, thus exiling them from public life. 74 �forces in joining the Resistance, but so were daily struggles for survival and personal rebellions against everyday injustice. Catholic student groups and even Fascist associations among university students increasingly became cores of illegal activity. Slaughter (1997: 49-50) concludes that there was “no single motive for women’s participation in the Resistance”; the rebellion of the youth was largely spontaneous and had a limited connection to political parties: “[a]s women joined the Resistance, they no doubt had a vague sense of who the enemy was and what they hoped to change, but their goals can best be described as practical and immediate rather than strategic and long-term.” Political parties and organizations tried to channel these energies, and new communist female leaders emerged from this younger generation, among them Nadia Spano (1916-2006), Nilde Iotti (1920-1999), Angiola Minella Molinari (19201988), Carmen Zanti (1926-1979), Maria Michetti (1922-2007), Luciana Viviani (19172012), Marisa Rodano (born 1920), Baldina di Vittorio Berti (born 1920) and Teresa Mattei (born 1921). From the spring of 1944 women became more active not only as staffette (couriers) but also as fighters. As Jane Slaughter (1997: 51) summarizes, “Women were visible in all areas of resistance activity, especially as staffette (couriers) and partisans with both the Brigades and smaller assault groups (the gap/ sap) (…) They created and staffed medical services, recruited and organized the populace, arranged demonstrations, distributed antifascist literature, worked in the information services, or simply collaborated by supplying provisions, hiding partisans, and aiding Jews and other deportees and their families. In many cases, women had multiple functions or moved from one activity to another.” The category of “partigiana” could include activities ranging from “combat and military command (including formal rank) to serving as guides and cooking and sewing for a mountain partisan brigade” (1997: 55). Women in the gdd in occupied Northern Italy also became improvised journalists, and from 1943 they started circulating various clandestine leaflets of different political orientations. The leaflet connected to the pci took the name of Noi Donne (We, women).24 In June 1944, a proper journal entitled Noi Donne was published in Naples (in the Allied-liberated South), under the initiative of women belonging to the communist party (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 8). On the 12th of September 1944, in liberated Rome, women leaders from different political parties (Communist, Socialist, Christian-left)25 in a temporary steering committee and launched an appeal for the 24 A journal with the same name existed since 1937, as the bullettin of Unione Donne Italiane, Italian Women’s Union, an association of Italian antifascist women based in Paris and connected to the internationalist fight of the French popular front and of the Spanish Republic. Female members of the socialist party chose instead the name La compagna (the comradess), for their journal, sharing the name of a socialist publication founded by Camilla Ravera in the early 1920s. 25 The steering commitee included the following members: communist Rita Montagnana, promotor of the committee and Togliatti’s wife at the time, and other two historical pci leaders, Egle Gualdi and Maria Baroncini (partner of Mauro Scoccimarro); Marisa Rodano and Luigia Cobau for the Christian left (psc- Partito della Sinistra Cristiana, later part of the pci); for the Socialist Party, Giuliana Nenni, Pietro Nenni’s daughter, and Maria Romita, wife of Giuseppe 75 �creation of a unitary association of women, the Union of Italian Women, with the idea to unify antifascist women of different political backgrounds, as well as antifascist women in Northern and Southern Italy. Women from the Christian-Democratic party were invited but refused to join, and in March 1945 created the Italian Feminine Center or cif (Centro Italiano Femminile), a federation of female Catholic associations. I shall comment upon the unitary, broader political character of the udi in the following chapters, and point to how it was connected to the strategy of “progressive democracy” designed by pci leader Togliatti. The udi’s immediate organizational goals were to establish contacts with the National Liberation Committee (cnl), to promote a press campaign inviting women to join the association, and the publication of a special issue of the journal Noi Donne. The long term goals included: women’s right to vote at the administrative and political level, the addressing of urgent issues of displaced people, war prisoners, children in need and trade union demands and the constitution of provincial and local committees. The basic unit of the association was the local Circolo, whose seat had to be autonomous and separate from the ones of political parties; all the provincial sections were linked to a provincial committee, and all the provincial committees were subservient to the National Committee located in Rome (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 266-7). Women from all political and religious backgrounds were invited to join, with the exception of “the elements compromised by Fascism (who had public tasks), or known as immoral, or able to disaggregate the association (dishonesty, arrogance)” (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 267). In this second section I have provided an historical background of women’s antifascist Resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy. In the next section I will proceed to discuss the historiographical interpretation of women’s participation in the Second World War from a gendered perspective. 3 . Assessing the impact of women’s participation in the Resistance After having described the main historical characters of women’s participation in the Resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy, I would like to reflect, in this section, on the impact of this participation on gender relations, comparing historical debates in Italy and the former Yugoslavia. As mentioned in the previous chapter, it is only with the emergence of second wave feminist groups and movements that the history of women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance started to be investigated in depth, through both archival research and oral history. Women’s mass participation in the antifascist Resistance has remained until today, in fact, a crucial reference point for women’s and feminist movements in Italy and the post-Yugoslav successor states. Women’s entry into politics during the antifascist Resistance is generally identified with a break in the traditional gender order, a break that is generally perceived as only temporary, and as Romita; for the Action Party, Bastianina Musu, mother of Resistance fighter and staffetta Marisa Musu; for the Liberal Party, Josette de Menasce Lupinacci and for the Labour Democracy (Democrazia del Lavoro), Emilia Siracusa Cabrini (Rodano 2010: 24-25). 76 �having quickly been put to an end by the Cold War backlash. My comparison of the Italian and the Yugoslav contexts will focus on three main issues which have occupied historians of the Resistance: 1) the subversive image of female fighters; 2) the re-signification of traditional female roles, notably motherhood, during and after the war and 3) women’s everyday experiences and their personal antifascist choices beyond gendered discourses and symbols. The relationship between gendered representations and real women as political subjects, as well as the continuities and discontinuities in gender regimes are at the core of these debates. In the last part of this section I will argue that a focus on women’s political agency, rather than on gendered representations, can open up new insights in women’s political history, and can highlight how former partisan women, after the radical experience of the antifascist Resistance, continued to pursue their political engagement in the postwar and Cold War period. 3.1. Images of female fighters in Yugoslavia and Italy According to feminist historians in Italy and in the former Yugoslavia, women’s access to armed struggle during World War Two was perceived as temporary and extraordinary (Batinić 2009: 84), and was generally framed in the masculine gender. When women prove that they are able to fight and to assume high political tasks, they are seen – and see themselves – in a different light, in terms of bravery and worthiness, qualities that imply the assumption of a symbolic male gender. This phenomenon has been defined as one of substitution of gender roles (Sklevicky 1996; Casalini 2005). There are a number of examples in which female political leaders define themselves or are defined as comrades or fighters in the male gender.26 According to Casalini, this signals the persistence of the stereotype according to which “women who adopted attitudes and demonstrated abilities that are typically associated with masculine identity lose their own sexual connotation in other people’s eyes” (Casalini 2005: 73). Sklevicky make similar remarks in relation to women fighters in the Balkans. In this region at the crossroad between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empire a number of feudal traditions of gender change existed, for instance the phenomenon of sworn virgins in Montenegrin and Albanian mountains (Young 2000), or the tradition of women taking up weapons to substitute the father, brother or husband in war (Sklevicky 1996: 38). In both cases, women do not access emancipation as women, but assume a masculine identity through the implementation of male clothing and male tasks, since femininity cannot be identified with decision-making and violence. Women’s historians note that this new temporary order in fact coexisted with the previous gender order: many reserves towards women’s participation in the struggle, and many concerns about their moral and symbolical status as fighters persisted 26 For instance when the brother of Anna Cinnani, partisan from Piemonte, told her: “Remember, you are not a woman, but a communist (un comunista, m.), and you are fighting in the Resistance” (Pavone 2006: 544). 77 �(Batinić 2009; Slaughter 1997; Bravo and Bruzzone 2000). Archival documents relate a variety of episodes when “moral panic” arose in relation to the presence of women within Partisan detachments. The embarrassment towards women fighters was also due to the constant presence of enemy propaganda. Nazi-fascist and collaborationist publications portrayed female partisans in particular as promiscuous beings, gone to the woods because of the promise of “free love”. Italian nationalist publications in Trieste, for instance, used sexualized racist imagery as a way to de-legitimize the Slavic Partisans (Nemec 2000; Ballinger 2003). This imagery becomes even more negative when the subversion of gender roles is accompanied by a subversion of class and race hierarchies, as in the case of Yugoslav partisan struggle in Istria (Sluga 1994, 2001). Historian Gloria Nemec (2000) has singled out a racist and sexist caricature of the Slavic female partisan, or drugarica, published in the Italian nationalist newspaper Il Grido dell’Istria.27 Italian nationalist descriptions of “slavo-communists” generally suggest “a propensity to militarism, collectivism, and violence, as well as primitivism” (Mihelj 2009: 8).28 Something similar happened in Slovenian and Croatian anti-communist publications, which used a sexualized language to denounce the activities of the communist Partisans (Kranjc 2006; Jambresic-Kirin and Senjkovic 2010).29 In order to counter enemy propaganda, but also because of shared conceptions about proper male and female roles, women were often relegated to less valued – although not less dangerous – tasks behind the front lines, to provide assistance and support to male fighters (Batinić 2009). This attention towards the moral image of the Resistance, for instance, caused many Italian Liberation Committees (cnls) to exclude women from the Liberation parades in Italy, or let them parade only with banners identifying them as nurses. Sometimes, even partisan women themselves seemed to share the negative moral values attached to the female presence in partisan units. A woman fighter declined to be part of the parade on Liberation Day, and admitted 27 The clandestine newspaper Il Grido dell’Istria (Istria’s cry) portrayed the Yugoslav female partisan – la drugarizza – (drugarica in Slavic means female comrade) with a caricature and the following comment: “A delicate flower of progressive femininity. She knows 57 ways to torture a person, she can kill a man especially if Italian in 15 ways, all “made in Yugoslavia”; she is lending herself to the needs of free love even with no need of chocolate and she can give birth while standing on her feet; she uses soap scarcely, once a year, on occasion of the Marshal’s birthday; she has a particular love for someone’s else property; she can cry for six hours “Živio and Smrt” [Life and Death]. Here’s the woman that all true progressives wish to have as wife, sister or mother.” (9 of December 1945). The caricature can found at: http://www.unioneistriani.it/grido/ popup.html (last accessed 3/4/2012). 28 Moreover, the Yugoslav male partisan is depicted within early Cold War caricatures (see illustrations in Ballinger 2003) as grinning, dark skinned, and sexually threatening towards Italian women; this shows the difficulty in drawing a line between racism against colonial subjects and racism against Slavic minorities at home or in the neighbouring Balkans, particularly during Italy’s imperial conquest of the region. 29 “As the war advanced, the Ustasha official organs published frequent messages about ‘two worlds – two women’, one being the ‘world of the woman-mother’, the other the ‘world of the woman-beast’, who, obsessed with the ‘theories of free love and emancipation’, was deemed to have become ‘public chattel’” (Jambresic-Kirin and Senjkovic 2010: 77). 78 �that the male comrades “were right” about not letting women march together with men, since the watching crowd immediately singled out the few women present as “prostitutes” (Casalini 2005: 75). Despite similar taboos and concerns in relation to women’s presence in the army, the positive representation of female fighters is with no doubt stronger in the Yugoslav context than in the Italian one, and is probably a consequence of the stronger relevance of the Resistance as a foundation myth for the new socialist regime. The images published in the journal Women in Struggle (Žena u borbi) during the war years express these new values: photographs show women that work, study, attend demonstrations, talk in public and also women with a weapon in one hand and a child in the other, strong and independent (Sklevicky 1996: 31-32; see also Wiesinger 2009). Portraits of beautiful female partisans are frequently published in propaganda brochures about the new Yugoslav Federation in 1945 and 1946, as the highest point on the scale of women’s emancipation. Other images include veiled women and female peasants working, learning to read, and voting for the first time. In the Italian left-wing press, however, apart from a few heroic representations within the war years publication Noi Donne, women’s participation as partisans isn’t explicitly glorified. The female partisan is an exception that challenges the mainstream moral. In the press, women are generally described not as partisans but as supporters and collaborators, or as the weeping mothers, spouses and sisters of dead freedom fighters (Casalini 2005). The “choice” to take part in the struggle is described most often as a male one, while women are allegedly “forced” by the war to act in extraordinary ways. Very few photos of women with weapons exist, and sometimes, like in a picture of female partisans of the Montefiorino republic, are explicitly farcical.30 Because in Italy the continuities with the previous social order were greater, and because communists searched for compromises with other political forces, the subversion of gender roles during the conflict was made far less visible. It is no coincidence that the only woman in arms in the Italian communist press in the liberation period was a Soviet Partisan (Casalini 2005: 76). In the next section I will pursue this discussion of the re-signification of gender relations in the postwar period and describe how women’s gendered roles were framed in war and postwar discourses in Yugoslavia and Italy. 3.2. Motherhood, “women” and femininity as consensual signifiers In the previous section I have addressed the issue of women’s armed participation in the war, a phenomenon entailing a temporary disruption of gender roles. According to many feminist historians, however, as the Liberation approaches, women are once In this picture three women are posing for the camera as partisans under the gaze of a man who is mockingly pointing a weapon at them. Two women clumsily hold rifles, contrasting with the very feminine dress of one of them. The one in the center holds a mattarello (traditional cooking tool) covered by a sfoglia, a layer of fresh pasta (2006: 72). The picture can be seen at http:// download.kataweb.it/mediaweb/image/brand_espressonline/2009/09/10/1252573818928_3donnepartigiane.jpg (last accessed 1.5.2012) 30 79 �again assigned traditional gender roles and tasks. When the war ends, the priority shifts towards national reconstruction and towards the legitimacy of the new political governing forces. The institution of the family is gradually re-naturalized as the basis for social, economical and moral reconstruction. Both in Italy and in Yugoslavia, post’45 political regimes have to limit the disruptive potential of civil war, and the threatening potential of class divides in a context of great poverty and social inequalities. The category of “women” and the traditional female values of motherhood and care can be gradually re-signified in the direction of political unity and reconstruction. In the Yugoslav context, women are invited to join the liberation struggle not only as citizens but more frequently also as mothers: women’s “affective potential” can well serve the struggle for national liberation. Next to the extraordinary figure of the female combatant stands the figure of the heroic mother: Batinić (2009) convincingly shows how traditional figures of sacrificial mothers from Balkan epics and folklore, such as the Jugovic mother or the Kosovo Maiden31, are mobilized in the partisan press when describing the experiences of young partisans or the pain or peasant women who have lost their loved ones in the war. The affective potential of motherhood is exemplified in a speech given by Jela Bićanić at the first conference of the afž in Croatia. She states that women, as mothers, are able to pass on the hatred of fascism to their children and to other children; moreover, they can ease the disruptive effects of civil war in the new socialist society, spreading reconciliation among the different nationalities and social strata.32 Traditional functions of motherhood can mobilize a number of emotions that are functional to the establishment of brotherhood and unity. Women, through motherhood and social reproduction, can symbolize the rebuilding of national unity and the future social reconstruction. A similar discourse can be found in a speech by Ferruccio Parri33 at the udi’s first congress in October 1945. After stating that women should not repeat “the same things that we men do, often so badly” in the political, social, economic, and intellectual field, Parri argues: “[t]his sensitivity of yours must be directed towards the problems of education and assistance, the problems of motherhood, which are yours, the problems of modern assistance, of ancient charity but understood in a new way, with a different orientation, as a social duty. This duty cannot be fulfilled with bureaucratic coldness, as is usual for men, but can be fullfilled well if animated by a feeling, by that feeling that you can offer better than we can (…).”34 Women’s honor and women’s 31 For a discussion of the Kosovo myth from a gendered perspective, see Slapšak (2000b). 32 “Women! Raise children who love their neighbors and country, and eradicate hatred from your hearts. Let’s make hatred disappear between Serbs and Croats, city dwellers and villagers, because we all contributed equally to this struggle.” Quoted by Sklevicky (1996: 43). 33 Ferruccio Parri (1890 – 1981), Partisan and leader of the Action Party, was Italy’s Prime Minister in the second half of 1945, the first after the proclamation of the Republic. 34 “Questa vostra sensibilità va indirizzata verso i problemi dell’educazione e dell’assistenza, i problemi della maternità, che sono vostri, i problemi dell’assistenza moderna, della carità antica ma intesa con diverso concetto, intesa con diverso orientamento, intesa come un dovere sociale, il quale dovere non può essere risolto con freddezza burocratica com’è uso dei maschi, ma può essere ben risolta se animata da un sentimento, da quel sentimento che voi sapete portare meg- 80 �bodies, therefore, are strictly connected to national honor and national borders, and become a metaphor of the progress and of the morals of the nation that has to be reconstructed. Against the enemies’ allegations of communists wanting to dissolve the family, the kpj and the pci instead reinforce the idea of the family as a potential basis for moral and national reconstruction. Lydia Sklevicky (1996) has noted the contemporary presence of old and new values within the afž, while Bravo and Bruzzone (2000: 225) have addressed the promotion of motherly virtues by the Italian left in 1945. Within the afž and the udi there is a new formulation of social models and social relations, and yet a persisting ambivalence towards traditional culture. The traditional gendered division of labor and the separation between male and female, public and private, is not displaced but rather pragmatically reincorporated in the new political context. According to Sklevicky (1996: 56), what takes place is a “process of reinterpretation” through the merging of new and old values, so that the “new values modify the cultural meaning of the old forms”. Traditional feminine values such as piety, endurance, honor and dignity are readapted in the new political direction, and become part of the representation of the ideal “new woman”, creating a continuum of values that coexist with social and political change. Bravo and Bruzzone (2000: 223-228) note that the symbolism of motherhood can mean that gender roles are once more naturalized; at the same time, women can adopt a discourse of motherhood to vindicate their power in society and politics. In the next chapter, I will show how antifascist women’s organizations reinterpreted a traditional value such as ‘motherhood’ in a new way in the Cold War period. Against an interpretation that would define the shift from gendered images of heroic female fighters to images of mothers as necessarily conservative, and the transition from the war to the postwar period as a necessary return to the traditional gender order, it is important, in my view, to keep in mind the fundamental ambivalence in the symbolic function of gendered discourses and practices, and female bodies. In Yugoslavia, the picture of the “new woman” embodies symbolically the “poetics of the future” from which the revolution draws its imaginary potential. In Italy, this utopian potential is more easily contained, but nevertheless the signifier of the women’s participation in the political arena can stand as symbol of progressive values and democratization.35 At the same time, while emancipatory values have a “revolutionary and mobilizing effect”, traditional values represent a base of stability for the social order (Sklevicky 1996). Women’s interests (as spouses and mothers, workers and housewives) can appear to transcend political, religious, and class divisions, and thus can signify lio di noi. (…) Per noi (democratici) nel vincolo famigliare c’è qualcosa di fondamentale per il progresso civile, per il miglioramento civile che prima di tutto è un miglioramento morale.” Archivio Centrale udi Roma, fondo cronologico, 1 congresso udi – sabato 20-martedi 23 ottobre 1945, B7 fascicolo 66. 35 This is exemplified by Togliatti’s famous 1945 statement: “Democracy needs women, women need democracy” (La democrazia ha bisogno della donna, la donna ha bisogno della democrazia, litt. Democracy needs the Woman, the Woman needs democracy). 81 �unity, compromise and reconciliation.36 As the kpj and the pci needed to compromise between revolutionary discourses and the reconstruction of the social order, the discourse on woman’s position in society oscillated between emancipatory and traditional during the war years and in the immediate postwar period. In concluding this section, we may note that the dialectic between revolutionary moments and return to order affects the symbolical representations of women and gender relations in broader society (Sklevicky 1996; Jambresic-Kirin 2009; Bravo and Bruzzone 2000). “Women”, as symbolic signifiers, do not only represent the border of the national group (Yuval-Davis 1997), but also the borders of the shifting social order, between tradition and modernity, conservation and change. However, while these ambivalences in gendered relations and representations are important in order to understand the transition from the war to the postwar period, gendered representations do not encompass the whole range of individual and collective experiences lived by women during the Resistance, nor their great sense of pride and entitlement which resulted from their participation in the struggle. In the next section I will discuss some scholarly contributions that explicitly emphasize women’s agency during the Resistance. 3.3. Beyond representation: women’s agency in feminist historiography Women were not just victims or martyrs; their own positive identification with female roles, their own perception of how these roles should be fulfilled, and their own notions of rights due them as females pushed them to act. Traditional roles did not dissolve but rather expanded, assumed new value, or became politicized. Women were not simply defending what was, but what they thought should be, the female experience. (Slaughter 1997: 4) In the preceding sections I have compared women’s and feminist historical analyses of two particularly powerful figures of the Italian and Yugoslav Resistance: the figure of the female fighter and the figure of the mother. In this section I’d like to move beyond gendered representations and discourses and reflect upon studies that have discussed women’s agency during the Resistance. As Slaughter emphasizes in the above quotation, we should be careful not to reduce women to heroic martyrs or passive victims. It is important, instead, to give space to individual and collective experiences of women’s political agency during the Resistance, beyond more or less conservative gendered representations that prevailed in the postwar period. The choice to join the Resistance was determined, according to Di Gianantonio (2004: 12), 36 In the case of the udi, the undetermined category of “women” is ideally suited to serve the pci’s political strategy of democratic compromise and the consensus among antifascist forces. Among udi leaders, complex negotiations took place in order to assure equal representation of women from different parties within the udi (Rodano 2010: 43-44). 82 �by an intertwining (intreccio) of subjective and geopolitical and historical factors, “between political and cultural tradition and personal choice, between oppositional behaviors entrenched in collective memory and necessary adaptations to the changing conditions of the liberation war, between crystallized habits and breaks provoked by the war” (2004: 12). As mentioned in the previous chapter, women’s and feminist historians in Italy and Yugoslavia tend to construct the Second World War as a temporary disruption of the old gender order, and the postwar period as a moment of conservative backlash. For many antifascist women, however, the participation in the antifascist Resistance represented a radical break, which changed their life path in the postwar period. There are hints that even traditional female practices and tasks as care takers assumed a totally different significance in the context of the liberation struggle. As Jancar-Webster writes, reporting an observation of the partisan leader Mitra Mitrović: …for the first time in their lives peasant women were shown open appreciation for the performance of their routine tasks. Knitting, weaving, baking, planting, and milling became valuable for a purpose larger than the family. Women felt a new respect and a new appreciation for themselves. They eagerly opened their homes to the partisans and to orphans. Women also performed local government duties in the absence of a permanent government structure, taking over tasks formerly performed only by men. This service gained public recognition for the women and gave them a new sense of self-esteem (Jancar-Webster 1990: 142). This sense of respect and self-esteem was directly connected to the experience of political decision-making within the Resistance. Franca Pieroni Bortolotti (1978a: 72) draws similar conclusions when pointing to the “change of direction” of traditional female values in the liberated areas: Women restore the meaning of institutions for the people, in the liberated areas. Yes, the meaning of institutions, but institutions that are different from the traditional ones, and in a way that is quite different from the traditional way, even if they often start from the real conditions, those offered by tradition. For instance, women try to reorganize first of all the health system, the distribution of food, the clinics, and the survival of children, old people and those who are ill. In a word, they try to provide for the immediate needs of a community. This is the only principle, when in ’44 no one yet discusses women’s suffrage, no one even asks if women will be consulted about the future of the country, for instance on the choice between republic and monarchy. Thus even before having gained the right to vote, many women felt that their contribution during the Resistance was fundamental to the success of the liberation movement, and to the survival of local communities and of their most vulnerable inhabitants (the children, the elderly and those who were ill or injured). Gender roles, as evidenced by these analyses, are therefore invested both with traditional and with 83 �revolutionary meanings, even when women’s new political agency expresses itself through old “feminine” activities. For women engaged in the partisan struggle, femininity often represents a strategic tool that can be deployed in the political and armed Resistance. As Slaughter (1997: 63) recalls, gender stereotypes are often used in a strategic way, as in other experiences of guerrilla war, and the sex-segregation of 1940s patriarchal societies becomes “a resource that women used and leaders relied upon in their struggle.” Fascists and Nazis, in fact, “were probably more inclined to view women as wives, mothers, or potential companions rather than as political enemies. This is not to ignore the violence and brutality with which women were treated if they were suspected and discovered. Nevertheless, age-old sexual assumptions gave women a “cover” men did not have.” Because of this possibility to strategically rely on gendered stereotypes, women could carry clandestine publications, weapons and bombs on their persons. They could also rely on traditional feminine networks, building support for the struggle in the community (Slaughter 1997: 70). In her interview, Vinka Kitarović recalled a number of episodes in which she carried dynamite and weapons while working as staffetta in the region of Bologna. Often, she and her fellow female comrades encountered a German patrol, and managed not to be discovered by “fooling around” (facevamo le sceme) and by flirting with the German soldiers, since “we were not ugly” (non eravamo brutte). At the same time, while being able to use femininity in a strategic way, women were aware of the high risks involved in their actions: “You needed to find in yourself the courage, ‘now I have to overcome the fear’. And then, when it was over, your legs were trembling.”37 A number of women in Italy and Yugoslavia dared to risk their lives for the cause, and fought alongside the men; they realized that their role was fundamental to the success of the movement (Slaughter 1997; Jancar-Webster 1990). As both Batinić and Slaughter note, in the memoirs of former female combatants, the time spent in the partisan brigades is often remembered as a moment of extraordinary solidarity, fraternity, and equally shared enthusiasm between male and female fighters. Partisan women gained a sense of worthiness and entitlement that would accompany them throughout their lives. Slaughter makes an explicit comparison between the Italian Resistance and the Yugoslav Resistance on this point. She quotes Barbara Jancar’s conclusion which warns that “the sense of togetherness achieved in participation in a common cause is not the same as equality” (Slaughter 1997: 53, quoted from JancarWebster 1990: 99). Certainly women’s presence in the Resistance was not immediately conducive to women’s full equality. Many women, however, fought for their own individual freedom, and continued to fight for women’s full equality within women’s organizations in the Cold War period. Taking part in the Resistance often represented a subjective, personal break with the previous gender order, which led to the choice to be politically active after 1945 (see Di Gianantonio 2007). For many women the entry into antifascist politics in the 1930s and 1940s represented a radical opening of new life possibilities. Teresa Noce, in her 1973 autobiography, remembers: 37 “Avevi bisogno di trovare in te quel coraggio, ‘ora devo vincere la paura’. Che poi, quand’era finito, ti tremavano le gambe.” Interview with Vinka Kitarović, 6th of april 2011. 84 �Some years ago I went to visit Vera Ciceri Invernizzi [a former partisan and leader of the gdd] in a hospital in Milan where she had a serious operation. Happy to see me, recalling our meeting a long time ago in Paris, the dear comrade said to me “Just think! If you had not recruited me I’d have stayed a housewife all my life and thought of nothing but washing floors and cooking for my husband. Thanks to you, I became a communist and had a beautiful and interesting life (quoted in Cammett 1981: 174). Teresa Noce was deeply moved when she heard these words, since she was aware of the Fascist persecution and imprisonment that Vera and her husband had suffered. Despite high personal risks, a number of women in Italy, Yugoslavia and in the rest of Europe had engaged in antifascist activities during the interwar period and during World War Two, gaining a sense of entitlement and a passion for politics that would accompany them all their lives. As I will show in the next chapters, in the postwar and Cold War era antifascist women put their organizational skills and their personal engagement in service of left-wing political parties and women’s organizations, such as the Union of Italian Women, the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Conclusion In this chapter I have sketched an historical background for the rest of the thesis, comparing women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy. In the first section, I give a brief historical overview of antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia during the Second World War, in order to show the entangled history of Fascism and antifascism across Italo-Yugoslav borders. As shown in this section, a number of cross-border encounters between Yugoslav and Italian antifascist militants, including women, already occurred during the war. Italian and Yugoslav antifascist militants met in jails or in concentration camps for political prisoners, such as the women’s camp Ravensbruck. After the capitulation on the 8th of September, some men and women deported to Italy from occupied Yugoslavia joined the Italian resistance, while some Italian soldiers waging war in the Balkans joined Tito’s partisans. In order to give an idea of the intensity of these transnational contacts, I recount the stories of Vinka Kitarović, a student from Croatia who became a partisan courier in the region of Bologna, and of the friendship between Nella Baroncini and Julka Desković, two young antifascist women who met as inmates of Ravensbruck concentration camp. In the second section of the chapter, I analyze the formation of women’s antifascist organizations during World War ii, looking at the parallel foundation of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije – afž) in 1942 and of the Groups for the Defense of Woman and for Assistance to Freedom Fighters (Gruppi di difesa della donna e per l’assistenza ai Combattenti per la libertà – gdd) in 1943, which were transformed in 1944-1945 into the Union of Italian Women (Unione Donne Italiane-udi). I highlight different forms of women’s participation in the Re- 85 �sistance in the Italian and Yugoslav contexts, and notably the fact that these organizations connected an avant-garde of politicized antifascist women with the peasant and working class masses who opposed war and foreign occupation. I also point out that while the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia was founded exclusively by communist militants, the Union of Italian Women gathered women from different political forces (Communist, Socialist, Christian-left, Action Party), which were part of the Italian antifascist coalition. The broader composition of the udi will be discussed more in the further chapters, since it had an impact on the organizational dynamics and on the autonomy of the association in the Cold War period (see Chapter 6). In the third section of this chapter, I connect scholarly debates about women in World War ii Italy and Yugoslavia, showing that in both countries women’s political participation in the Resistance was highly controversial and ambivalent, creating a profound and yet uneven subversion of gender roles. Gendered representations as symbolic signifiers were crucial to nation building, but also to the establishment of a new social order. Nonetheless, as I show by referring to a number of scholarly contributions, as well as to the interview with Vinka Kitarović, the individual and collective experiences of women in the Resistance were far more complex and heterogeneous than symbolic representations would suggest. I therefore argue that a focus on women’s political agency, rather than on gendered representations, can open new insights in women’s political history. Female partisans’ political agency, in fact, did not come to an end with the Second World War, but continued in the postwar and Cold War period, when a number of these former partisans became part of the leadership of left-wing political parties and women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia. In the next chapter I shall proceed to analyze the activities of Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations in the immediate postwar period, looking at the ways in which the afž and the udi engaged in national, social and political reconstruction between 1945 and 1948. In the next chapters I will demonstrate that antifascist women’s political activism was not limited to the war years, but rather continued after 1945 in different forms, locally and internationally. 86 �Chapter 3 The afž, the udi and the task of postwar reconstruction Introduction Even though I did not like feminine work, as I have said, I agreed to work for women with other female comrades, especially since in Milan there was an urgent problem to be solved. We were approaching winter, a winter that would be harsh, harsher maybe than the war winters that had passed. The children in Milan, especially the smaller ones, were in danger. Weak, malnourished from the deprivations they had endured, how could they survive another winter of hunger and cold? We, communist women, what could we do for the children of Milan, for “our” children? (Teresa Noce 1974: 365) In the autumn of 1945 the war was over, but the task of social, economic and political reconstruction had just started. The issue of assistance to children in need was a pressing one. From 1945 until the early 1950s, udi social activities in aid of poor children took place in many different cities. The first city to set the example was Milan, where political parties were re-organizing after the end of the war, as were the women’s organizations. Due to shortages of food and coal, the living conditions in postwar Milan were especially harsh for children. Communist leader Teresa Noce1 had the idea to seek help from the communist party section of Reggio-Emilia, a “red city” in which the fertile agriculture assured a greater amount of resources. After some time, the pci 1 Teresa Noce (1900-1980), a working class seamstress and self-taught journalist, was among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. First wife of communist leader Luigi Longo, in 1926 she expatriated with him to Moscow and Paris, where she contributed to the first clandestine editions of Noi Donne. In the 1920s and 1930s Teresa Noce undertook several clandestine trips to organize antifascist activities in Italy. In 1936 she went to Spain with the international volunteers supporting the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and became the editor of the journal of the Italian volunteers in the International Brigades. She took part in the antifascist Resistance in France, and was deported in 1943 to the concentration camp Ravensbruck, and later to the forced labor camp Holleschein. After the war, she was one of the 21 women elected to the Italian Constituent Assembly, and had an important role in drafting the 1946 Constitution. After the war she became communist mp and president of fiot, the trade union of female textile workers. In 1950, she was the proponent of the law assuring welfare rights to working mothers (see Chapter 6). 87 �in Reggio-Emilia agreed to host two thousand children for the winter of 1945. A group of communist women2, united around Teresa Noce in a small office, started to organize the departures, and were quickly overwhelmed by the amount of requests coming from hungry, desperate children across the city.3 Without any previous experience, and with the help of doctors, associations and private citizens, the communist militants managed to vaccinate children, to gather shoes and clothes, and with the help of Allied troops to obtain a train and food rations. After an epic journey lasting a whole day, the two thousand children managed to reach Reggio Emilia, where they spent the entire winter of 1945. This chapter focuses on the immediate postwar period, notably on antifascist women’s activism at the national level in Yugoslavia and Italy, from the summer of 1945 to the beginning of 1948. I thus contribute to the literature about women’s political agency in postwar times, and show how great numbers of antifascist female militants in Italy and Yugoslavia continued to be active after the end of World War ii, engaging in national and local reconstruction efforts as well as in the struggle for women’s rights. Contrary to the common belief, the end of the war did not, in fact, imply the end of women’s activism initiated during the Resistance years. It implied instead a transformation of the possible forms and structures of engagement, and the beginning of mass organizing in favor of women’s rights. This chapter will focus on the local and national activities of the two major antifascist women’s organizations of this period, the Union of Italian Women (udi) and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž). In the first section of the chapter I compare women’s engagement in the postwar reconstruction efforts in the two neighboring countries. I look at the two founding congresses of the udi and the afž in 1945, and at the ways in which udi and afž female leaders and delegates defined the most urgent tasks of the organizations. Both organizations identified women’s equal access to the public sphere as a primary goal, promoting the right to vote, the right to be elected, and the right to take part in education and in the labor market as equal to men. At the same time, as the speeches of communist leaders Vida Tomšić and Rita Montagnana show, the Marxist idea of 2 Luciana Viviani was also part of this group. As she recounted in our interview, in Milan she had the task to “re-organize the old feminine commissions [of the pci]”. This meant getting in touch with the older generation of women, who had been forced into exile in France or the Soviet Union during Fascism, as well as with the younger generations, those who had become activists through the experience of the partisan struggle. The communist group of Milan was thus composed both of antifascist women who had become activists in the 1920s and 1930s, and of the younger “war generation”, that is, “the girls who distinguished themselves in the war actions, previously students from upper class families, leading a normal life.” Interview with Luciana Viviani, 9th of April 2010. 3 “There were many hungry children. The humid and cold weather was coming and there was no coal. There were innumerable pitiful cases. There were children who slept in crates of sawdust to get warmer, without sheets or blankets, children abandoned or left with elderly relatives who did not have the strength and means to look after them. Some children were ill, so we had to exclude them from the list and try to get them in hospitals. There were filthy children, full of scabs and lice” (Noce 1974: 367). 88 �women’s social motherhood – modeled after the same idea in the Soviet Union – was very important in the immediate postwar period. According to this idea, women contributed to society not only in their equal engagement in the public sphere, but also in their contribution to the reproduction of society because of their ability to give birth. The state, therefore, had to recognize that motherhood constituted a social contribution, and accordingly had to provide adequate welfare measures for mothers and children. In the second section of this chapter I examine a second aspect of the idea of “social motherhood” promoted by the udi and the afž. According to this view, women were seen as naturally more inclined to social work, assistance and reconstruction after the devastation caused by the war. The udi and the afž, therefore, engaged in assistance on a large scale, with impressive results in the fields of women’s education and assistance to children. Although second wave feminists have mainly read these social activities as a continuation of women’s traditional gender roles, I argue that maternalist discourses were a form of strategic essentialism (Thorn 2010). They led to a transformation of the traditional conceptions of motherhood that had existed in the interwar period, and they contrasted with other, more conservative visions of motherhood promoted by conservative forces, notably the Catholic Church. The conception of women’s emancipation put forward by the udi and the afž was clearly different from the traditional feminine model dominant in both countries; women’s new roles in the polity were vested with new meanings, and connected to the new democratic politics of social justice – although in Yugoslavia the democratic process quickly ended because of the communist party’s monopoly of state power. In the third section of this chapter I examine the role of female antifascist leaders in fostering women’s rights in the new Italian and Yugoslav constitutions, both approved in 1946; I look in particular at how these organizations mobilized women, articulating egalitarian discourses at the political and juridical level, while stressing women’s natural roles as mothers and social workers. Finally, in the fourth section, I compare the ways in which the udi and the afž articulated their role as avant-garde, and planned ‘enlightenment’ projects for the “feminine masses”; this chapter thus also discusses how the subjectivities of the female leaders differed from the subjectivities of “rank-and-file” militants. The discussion of the relation between women’s organizations and their respective communist parties is developed in detail in Chapter 5. 1. Women’s social work of national reconstruction In the second half of 1945, the European continent was completely shattered by the Second World War. It is difficult to conceive of the dimensions of this catastrophe today: “It is estimated that about thirty-six and a half million Europeans died between 1939 and 1945 from war-related causes (equivalent to the total population of France at the outbreak of war)” (Judt 2005: 17-18). Italy and Yugoslavia were both countries in chaos, impoverished and devastated by the conflict. Buildings and infrastructures 89 �were in ruins, and food was scarce. Deportees and internally displaced persons were trying to find their lost family members and to return home.4 The situation was particularly serious in Yugoslavia, where nearly 10 per cent of the population had perished, and hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned by the war.5 To quote Tony Judt (2005: 17) again, [t]he true horrors of war had been experienced further east. The Nazis treated western Europeans with some respect, if only the better to exploit them, and western Europeans returned the compliment by doing relatively little to disrupt or oppose the German war effort. In eastern and southeastern Europe the occupying Germans were merciless, and not only because local partisans – in Greece, Yugoslavia and Ukraine especially – fought a relentless if hopeless battle against them. Italy, too, was deeply affected by the conflict after 1943, because of Allied bombings, fighting on the ground and Nazi retaliations against the Resistance. Widespread poverty and food shortages continued long after the end of the war.6 Children were living in critical conditions, particularly in the big Northern cities and in Naples, which had been hit repeatedly by Allied bombings. Women’s organizations such as the afž and the udi – which had already established antifascist solidarity networks during the war – engaged immediately with the social work of reconstruction. Already in 1945, immediately after the liberation, both organizations organized their first founding congresses. In order to do this they had to overcome a number of material and financial obstacles. Accounts from the time tell of incredible journeys in the midst of extreme poverty to reach the congress locations, and of enthusiastic solidarity efforts made in order to host and to feed the hundreds of women delegates. 4 “The problem of feeding, housing, clothing and caring for Europe’s battered civilians (and the millions of imprisoned soldiers of the former Axis powers) was complicated and magnified by the unique scale of the refugee crisis. This was something new in the European experience. All wars dislocate the lives of noncombatants: by destroying their land and their homes, by disrupting communications, by enlisting and killing husbands, fathers, sons. But in World War Two it was state policies rather than armed conflict that did the worst damage” (Judt 2005: 22). About postwar related trauma in Europe, see the collection edited by Withuis and Mooij (2011). About unrra humanitarian relief in postwar Europe, see Zahra (2011). 5 “Yugoslavia lost 25 percent of its vineyards, 50 percent of all livestock, 60 percent of the country’s roads, 75 percent of all its ploughs and railway bridges, one in five of its pre-war dwellings and a third of its limited industrial wealth – along with 10 percent of its pre-war population”(Judt 2005: 17). 6 “Italians, who suffered two consecutive years of hunger in 1945 and 1946, had the lowest average food levels of all the west European populations in the spring of 1947” (Judt 2005: 86). 90 �1.1. The first postwar afž congress (Belgrade, June 1945) The Yugoslav afž held its first postwar congress in Belgrade in June 1945, immediately after the second congress of the Slovenian afž branch in Ljubljana. Belgrade had been liberated in the autumn of 1944, well before Italy and the rest of Europe, liberated in the spring of 1945. Ordinary Italian and Slovene antifascist women from Trieste wrote some detailed travel accounts of their visit to Belgrade7, and these travel accounts give an impression of the destruction of the country in 1945. Lina Morandotti writes of the ruined landscapes on the way between Zagreb and Mostar, and of her encounters with the many Italian former soldiers who are trying to get back home. At the station of Vinkovci they meet another train full of refugees: On our wagon full of Italo-Slovenian women from Trieste, all of a sudden two young Triestine women arrive, formerly detained in a concentration camp. They recognize the comrades; hugs, kisses, tears follow; they are sisters and they ask: “Is our mother alive? What’s left of Trieste after the bombings?” They want to know everything; such happiness; such joy; their parents are alive; Trieste hasn’t been destroyed; now it’s their turn to tell us of those concentration camps, those tortures…they are exhausted but comforted by the thought of getting closer to the homeland. 8 The country is full of devastation and sorrow, but also full of enthusiasm and optimism, because the war has ended. The local population is very welcoming towards the guests from Trieste. They share their rationed food and their homes with them, and express their gratitude towards the liberation movement. Lina Morandotti even “slept in a bed with a husband and wife since there was no other possibility.” Her and the other reports contain a number of references to the amounts of food received during the travel, a sign that food scarcity was a big concern in 1945. The 1945 afž Congress starts on the 17th of June, and is attended by 960 delegates from Yugoslavia and 500 guests from women’s organizations in the Allied countries, the Soviet Union and Britain, as well as antifascist women from France, Italy, Albania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary (Božinović 1996: 154). Marshal Tito himself introduces the meeting, and a minute of silence is observed to commemorate those who fell in the war. Then afž leaders, foreign delegates and delegates from the different Yugoslav regions alternate on stage for three days. In his speech, after having congratulated women for their heroism during the For a reflection on the hegemony of the Yugoslav forces in Trieste, see the next chapter. “Sul nostro vagone composto di Trieste [Triestine] Italo-Slovene, irrompono due signorine triestine internate in campi di concentramento si riconoscono con le compagne abbracci, baci, lacrime, sono due sorelle chiedono la nostra mamma vive ? Trieste che cosa è rimasto dai bombardamenti ? tutto vogliono sapere quanta felicità quanta gioia i genitori sono vivi Trieste non è stata distrutta ora sono loro che raccontano quei campi di concentramento quelle torture… sono stanchissime le sostiene la felicità di avvicinarsi sempre più alla patria” (sic), Lina Morandotti, relazione, no date, in Ljubljana, Archiv Republike Slovenije, as 1576, Glavni odbor Slovansko-Italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze, box 1, folder iia. 7 8 91 �war, Tito enumerates a series of “tasks” that await women and the whole country: “the consolidation of our popular government, the care for children and for the future young generations, the consolidation of brotherhood and unity, the reconstruction of the country.”9 He particularly insists on women’s role in strenghtening the popular government and the brotherhood and unity among the people, against the enemies that are still omnipresent, and against those who spread hatred among the different nationalities. He also stresses that women have the task to educate the youth in “a new spirit, the spirit of love towards our country, our Yugoslavia.” The speech of Vida Tomšić10 at the congress is also significantly centered on the issue of the protection of mothers and destitute children after the human losses of the war. Tomšić reminds her listeners that in the old Yugoslavia, motherhood for working women had not meant “happiness, but big worries”, and that infant mortality had been the highest in Europe. She promises that in the new country the laws will not merely remain on paper, but instead that the state will provide hospitals, kindergardens for working mothers and houses for war orphans.11 Tomšić invites women to care for the youth as mothers, but also as social workers: “As one woman yesterday said, we fought for the happiness of our children, but even if all my children fell in war, there are still hundreds of thousands of children to whom we can offer our love.”12 Tomšić urges women to do their best to solve this situation, while waiting for the reconstruction of state apparatuses. The new state in return will be engaged to provide social justice for all, helping those who are in need, so that “in Yugoslavia there will not be even one poor child”, and that “a mother will not worry when her child is born.”13 In fact, she states, “[r]eal women’s emancipation cannot happen with9 “Naši najvažniji zadaći su učvršenje naše narodne vlasti, vaspitanje djece, našeg mladog narastaja, naših budućih pokolenja, učvršenje bratsva i jedistva, izgradnja naše zemlije” p.1., “Maršal Tito o novim zadačima žena  ”, i Kongres afž Jugoslavije, Beograd, 19-6-1945, fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-1-52. Beograd-Arhiv Jugoslavije. 10 Vida Tomšić (1913-1998, born Bernot), became an antifascist activist in the interwar period, when she was a law student at the University of Ljubljana. In 1934 she joined the Communist Party, whose Central Commitee she entered in 1940. She was arrested and tortured by the occupation forces during the war, and her husband Tone Tomšić was shot. After the war she held key positions in the Slovenian and Federal government, simultaneously acting as a leader of the afž. She contributed to the revision of the 1974 Constitution, promoting women’s rights, family planning, and the rights to contraception and abortion. Tomšić also advocated women’s rights in international settings, such as the United Nations. For an extensive biography of Vida Tomšić, see Jeraj (2006). 11 Tomšić stated that as a result of the occupiers’ war against civilians, there were 534.000 orphans, and 1.200.000 destitute children and youth in Yugoslavia. Vida Tomšić, “Socijalno staranje kao jedan od najvažnijih zadataka Antifašističkog Fronta Žena u obnovi zemlje ”, pp. 1-10, I Kongres afž Jugoslavije, Beograd, 19-6-1945, fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-1-125. Beograd-Arhiv Jugoslavije. 12 “Kako je juće kazala jedna žena na našem kongresu: borile smo za sreću naše dece, ali kad bi izginula sva moja deca, još uvek ostaju stotine hiljada dece kojima ćemo pruziti svu našu ljubav. ” Ibidem, p.3. 13 “Maršal Tito je u svojim razgovorima sa ženskim delegacijama mnogo puta ističao te 92 �out practical concern for mothers and children, without those protections that will honor a woman’s motherhood and help her with a sufficient number of houses for mothers and children, public canteens, social care for children, so that she can carry out her motherly functions as she always wished to do.”14 The concrete schema for the resolution of the women’s question in Yugoslavia had already been formulated by Vida Tomšić in 1940 as follows: “political parity – protection of women’s reproductive function – socialization of the education of children – education – work” (Sklevicky 1996: 51). In the next three sections, I compare afž and udi discourses about women’s juridical, political and social rights. 1.2. The first postwar udi Congress (Florence, October 1945) The udi founding congress was held in October 1945 in Florence, a few months after those of the afž. The congress saw the participation of 298 female delegates from 78 provinces (out of a total 93), representing the 400.000 members of the organization. Foreign delegations were also present.15 The first udi congress emphasized the importance of the association’s “unity”, meaning the unity of antifascist women from different political parties (pci, psi, PdA, Christian Left). A number of speeches stressed how women’s cooperation beyond parties and faiths had concretely materialized during the war when required to face the urgency of postwar reconstruction and assistance.16 In the face of these reconstruction tasks, the sense of loss and the urgency at the Congress was very strong, and is related as such by former udi members in their history of the udi: What occupies the sensitivity of the participants is the vision, the memory of those women who had been killed and tortured, the testimony of the mothers who had seen their children killed in front of their eyes; the misery evoked by episodes such as the one of the delegate from Centuripe (Agrigento [Sicily]), who arrived at the congress barefoot and was able to wear a pair of shoes only thanks to the solidarity zadatke žena i mi smo mu svaki put odgovarale da u Jugoslaviji neće biti ni jednog deteta siročeta .” p. 7 ; “Nova Jugoslavija mora postati srećna domovina majke i deteta. Majka se ne sme više bojati rođena svoga deteta. ” Ibidem, p.8. 14 “Istinske ravnopravnosti žena nema i ne moze biti bez stvarne brige za majku i dete, bez takve zastite koje ce poštovati materinstvo žene i omogučiti joj sa dovoljnim brojem materinskih i decijih domova, javnih kuhinja, sa državnom brigom za dete, da obavlja svoje materinske funkcije onako kako to žena od davnine želi. ” Ibidem, p.10. 15 American, British, Czechoslovakian, Albanian and French delegations were present. The Yugoslav delegation was not accorded the necessary visas, but Slovene women from Trieste participated in the congress together with the Trieste delegation (see next chapter). 16 About women’s cooperation in postwar Italy across political parties, and also between leftwing and Catholic organizations, see Pojmann (2008) and Gaiotti De Biase (1978). 93 �of the other participants; the recurrent descriptions of children and young girls who prostitute themselves because of hunger and misery, particularly in the big cities.17 Widespread poverty, social injustices and childhood destitution were the most urgent problems. An equally urgent problem was caused by the return of war veterans. Because of widespread unemployment, male war veterans were strongly arguing against women’s employment. The udi attempted to resist the sacking of women, by organizing war veterans’ committees in order to foster solidarity between women and war veterans. In her speech at the Congress, communist worker and trade unionist Maddalena Secco pointed out: “we are very sensitive to the fact that war veterans and former deportees need work, we are sensitive to this because it concerns our brothers, husbands, sons. But we say that it is unfair to say today, as we hear everywhere in Italy, that women must go home. (…) Women didn’t leave their homes voluntarily, but because they had to make a living. If there have to be lay-offs, they must be made on the basis of workers’ needs, and not on the basis of sex” (quoted in Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 289). This egalitarian position prefigured the udi’s struggle for female workers’ equality, or “equal pay for equal work”. Another speech at the Congress, by pci leader Rita Montagnana18, shows how a conception of women’s complementary roles as spouses and mothers did not mean in any way a reproduction of previous Fascist conceptions of women as inferior beings. Montagnana states: “Men – who after long years of fascist dictatorship were used to consider the woman as an instrument of pleasure, or as a machine to fabricate children, or as a servant who works for unlimited time and without any compensation – had found, to their surprise, women alongside themselves in the struggle for freedom” (quoted in Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 279). In other words the break with fascist values and sexual politics that had taken all men, even antifascist ones, “by surprise”. Montagnana continues: “The modest and quiet women of our sections (circoli), have managed, without noise or exhibitionism, to do so many good things that they have convinced even the most skeptical of their abilities and their seriousness” (quoted in Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 279). She concludes: “there are thousands and thousands of women who are getting ready to fulfill more important tasks tomorrow, defying the legend that women can only take care of cooking, sewing, washing. They demonstrate that they can be good 17 Michetti, Repetto and Viviani (1998: 16). 18 Rita Montagnana (1895-1979) was born into a Jewish, communist family of eight children in a popular neighborhood of Turin. Trained as a seamstress, she took part in the ‘red Biennal’ of 1919-1921, and with her brother Mario Montagnana she participated in the foundation of the Italian Communist Party in Turin in 1921. She married future pci leader Palmiro Togliatti in 1924, migrating with him to France, Spain and the Soviet Union. She was one of the founders of the udi in 1944 and she organized the first 8th of March celebrations in Italy. In the postwar period, Togliatti separated from Rita Montagnana and started a life long relationship with younger communist militant and udi member Nilde Iotti (1920-1999). After 1958, Rita Montagnana abandoned public life, to care for her son Aldo, whose mental illness had deteriorated with time. For a story of the family Montagnana, between national and international engagement, see Levi and Montagnana (2000). 94 �spouses, good wives and even good administrators of the public sphere, and that one does not exclude the other, but rather completes it” (quoted in Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 280). Similar to that of Tomšić, Montagnana formulates a program that includes political and social roles for women, while reinstating women’s gendered roles in the private sphere. As Giulietta Ascoli (1979: 118) notes, together with more “egalitarian” demands, the udi Congress also expressed demands that were “specific” to women and to their role in the private sphere. While this formulation of women’s roles may appear moderate, and while it was probably also a way of preventing possible anticommunist attacks, its statements were nonetheless quite progressive in comparison to the declarations made by Pope Pius xii at that time. The Vatican, in fact, rejected equal rights for women and the possibility for women to work outside the home, while reinstating motherhood as a natural destiny.19 The theme of women’s political emancipation had already been advanced a few months earlier, in June 1945, at the National Conference of Communist Women, when pci leader Palmiro Togliatti had spoken of the importance of women’s emancipation for the advancement of Italian democracy, stressing notably the need to put an end to Italian women’s cultural backwardness, and to struggle for “women’s parity with men in all the aspects of political, social and economic life.” He had also stressed the need for the udi to be open to Catholic women, and urged the udi to avoid subordinating itself to Communist Party propaganda, as some communist women did.20 As mentioned in the previous chapter, the foundation of the udi was closely connected to the pci strategy of “progressive democracy”. The udi had been envisioned by pci leader Palmiro Togliatti as a democratic front that could affiliate women from different political parties within the antifascist unity government. The existence of the udi was necessary in order to construct a “progressive” hegemony among the feminine masses, and to gain women’s consensus by organizing women on the basis of their material interests (housing, food, children, social and economic rights, political education etc.). As made evident by a number of historical sources, however, the communist patronage over this organization was never absent. Interpreting the birth of this organization in 1944 as “autonomous” or “spontaneous” would be mistaken (Gaiotti de Biase 1978; Rodano 2010; see Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 for a detailed discus19 Pius xii stated: “Every woman is destined to become a mother […] The true woman can see and understand all the problems of human life only from the point of view of the family […] Equal rights with men – leading to the abandonment of the house in which she had been a queen – has subjected the woman to the same amount and time of labor. ” The pope added that the woman who works outside the home is “dazed by the restless world in which she lives, dazzled by the appearance of false luxury, and becomes greedy for nefarious pleasures. ” Quoted in Ascoli (1979: 119). 20 “The Union of Italian Women is a different thing, it is an organization in which you must go and collaborate with all other women, of every faith and opinion, without making udi sections into agencies of the Communist Party; you should mostly try to include the greatest possible number of working women into these sections.” Arhiv Republike Slovenije, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze, box 3. 95 �sion of the concept of autonomy). As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, moreover, a number of hard-liner pci militants, including many notable communist women such as Teresa Noce, were highly skeptical of the idea of a womanonly “unitary” organization. They rejected the assumption that women’s emancipation could be a goal in itself, disconnected from class struggle (hence Togliatti’s warnings about the need to conceive of the organization as a broader alliance). This does not mean that the udi was simply a “transmission chain” of the party, nor that udi women had no political agency of their own; the same can be said of the afž. The numerous discussions about the need for women-only organizations within their respective communist parties demonstrate that they cannot be reduced to mere appendages of those parties. While a number of communist women were skeptical about a unitary women’s organization separate from the communist party, many udi members of different political backgrounds sincerely adhered to the idea that the nation-wide issue of women’s emancipation could transcend party and class interests. As I will show in Chapter 7, from the mid-1950s the strategy of the udi progressively shifted from party-based and class-based activism to gender-based activism, well before the great transformations which overtook the organization in the 1970s, with the emergence of second wave feminism. 1.3. udi and afž engagements in social work in the postwar years The udi and the afž were immediately engaged in reconstruction work in the postwar period, both in material21 and in human terms. The greatest effort went towards the assistance of destitute children and war orphans. In Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of children lost one or both parents in the war.22 Through the afž in the different localities, women immediately started to organize for the opening of houses and clinics for orphans. As former afž leader Neda Božinović23 relates, women collected food and money, worked in hospitals as voluntary nurses, visited the wounded and organized national canteens. As for the nursery homes, where the paid staff was mini21 In Yugoslavia, a number of young women joined the youth brigades for volunteer work formed in the immediate postwar period to engage in activities of physical reconstruction. This work included the clearance of ruins in bombed cities and the construction or reconstruction of bridges and railways, such as the building of the 92 kilometers railway Brčko-Banović in Eastern Bosnia. 22 Božinović (1996) reports 280.000 orphans, while Judt (2005) estimates 300.000. During her 1945 speech Vida Tomšić stated that there were half a million orphans in Yugoslavia. 23 Neda Božinović (1917-2001) was born in Kotor, Montenegro. She graduated from the faculty of Law in Belgrade in 1939, and got actively involved in antifascist activities before and during World War ii. After the war she became engaged in the afž and she had several important decision-making functions until the mid-1970s. At the beginning of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, she engaged once again in anti-war women’s movements, and notably in the activist anti-war group “Women in Black”. She also published several articles on women’s activism, and a monograph on the women’s question in Serbia in the nineteenth and twentieth century (Božinović 1996). 96 �mal and responsible for food and supplies, a few women took charge of the organization: “they maintained the children’s hygiene, bathed them, mended clothes for them, sewed toys, entertained them, baked sweets, organized a small library, took them to their homes on Sundays and feast days, and in other ways expressed their concern and love, showing them how a stay in a home could be pleasant or at least tolerable. They publicly criticized the abuse or negligence committed by the management of the nurseries or government authorities, and demanded that the afž participate in the management of the children’s homes” (Božinović 1996: 153-154). The afž members were also engaged in opening kindergartens and summer holiday camps, as well as in providing clinics for pregnant women, mothers and children. Zaviršek (2008: 3) summarizes the activities of the afž as follows: “‘collecting information’ about individuals and families in need and reporting the ‘situation in the field’ to higher local authorities; distributing material aid to the most needy and organizing housing for war orphans; and organizing educational seminars on hygiene, infant mortality, and child care (…).” Due to the lack of doctors and skilled personnel in Yugoslavia during and after the war, the afž organized courses for women to become midwives, nurses and teachers in the rural areas and in the most isolated areas (Božinović 1996: 154). No less important, as Zaviršek (2008: 3) notes, was the construction of “a new socialist subjectivity” among women (see next sections). The immediate postwar activities organized by the udi were also centered on assistance to children. As noted by Marisa Rodano, former udi leader, “a women’s association, in those times, could not disregard children. They were everywhere, and there were a lot, since, after the war, the baby boom had exploded (…) They sneaked into all meetings and assemblies, the women always had some of the youngest in their arms; the older ones were restless, noisy, undisciplined, during the activities they ran all over the place (…)” (Rodano 2010: 66). The most striking action of the postwar years was the large initiative organized by the Italian Communist Party, in which thousands of poor children from Milan, Rome, Cassino and the South of Italy were transferred to the richer areas of EmiliaRomagna and Tuscany during the winter of 1945-1946. After Milan, whose case I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, more relocations were repeated elsewhere in Italy. Farmers and sharecroppers from the “red regions” agreed to host and feed poorer children for three months. The initiative was repeated on the eve of Christmas 1946, when 12.000 children from the poor neighborhoods of Naples were sent to the center of Italy for the winter. Despite the adverse propaganda of the Church, and despite the material difficulties of the relocation, this initiative would prove to have long-lasting effects, both for the children and for their families. As Luciana Viviani24 24 Luciana Viviani (1917-2012) grew up in a family of the Napolitan bourgeoisie. She was the daughter of theatre actor and author Raffaele Viviani. After having obtained a degree in Literature, she engaged in the antifascist Resistance in Nazi-occupied Rome together with her former husband. In 1945 she was in charge of reorganizing the feminine commissions of the pci in Milan, and from 1946 she was elected as communist mp for four terms. She was also among the founders of the udi, and she contributed to rearrange the Central Archive of the udi in the 1990s. She was also the editor of an anthology of analyses and original documents retracing the 97 �stated in our interview, “that was a great solidarity initiative, that would open many doors to communism among Neapolitan popular classes. Seeing this initiative, being hosted in these houses for three months, they understood that the communist party said the right things, and also did them. Not only did the party say the right things, but it also did them.”25 1.4. The paradigm of social motherhood after 1945 As shown by Vida Tomšić’s and Rita Montagnana’s speeches during the afž and the udi congresses, the idea of women’s social motherhood – modelled after the same idea in the Soviet Union – was very important in the postwar period.26 This discourse claimed that in the Eastern people’s democracies women could have children “without worrying about them”, since the state had accorded special welfare and healthcare provisions to mothers and working mothers, and had collectivized a number of services (canteens, kindergartens, etc.) that partially liberated women from individual domestic work. This discourse proved very appealing also outside of Yugoslavia among Italian and Trieste antifascist women, and the Soviet example of socialized motherhood was used to ask for similar provisions from their respective ’capitalist‘ governments (see next chapter). This model had been elaborated with the creation of the movement of wifeactivists (obshchestvennitsy) in the Soviet Union in the pre-war Stalinist period. As Neary describes, in the mid-1930s “a heightened emphasis on motherhood as a civic contribution and a broadened definition of maternal responsibilities combined with pronatalism and official co-optation of the family as a potential locus for the instillation of Soviet values.” Motherhood was identified as “a Soviet woman’s right and duty” (Neary 1999: 400; see also Ilič 2001). In the interwar period, moreover, political regimes all over Europe encouraged women’s civic duties through maternalist languages; Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in particular, “combined state intervention with voluntarism on the part of socio-economically privileged women in an attempt history of the udi (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998). Since the late 1970s, Luciana Viviani took part in the feminist movement. In the last thirty years of her life she lived in Rome with her partner, feminist philosopher Rosetta Stella. 25 “Ne hai sentito parlare dei diecimila bambini napoletani che furono ospitati dalle famiglie di braccianti e di contadini delle zone centrali. Quella fu una grande iniziativa di solidarietà, che però aprì molte porte che erano chiuse al comunismo nei ceti popolari napoletani. Perché di fronte ad una iniziativa di questo genere, tre mesi ospiti in queste case, capirono che quello che diceva il partito comunista, diceva delle cose giuste, e poi le faceva anche. Non solo le diceva, ma lo faceva anche. Quindi fu un’iniziativa che rafforzò molto il partito comunista a Napoli e nel resto del Mezzogiorno .” Interview with Luciana Viviani, 9th of April 2010. 70.000 children would take the “trains of happiness” in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including the children of Southern peasants, who were struggling for land reforms in Puglia and were violently repressed by the government and the local land owners. On the politicization of assistance and social work in Italy during the Cold War, see the next chapter. 26 For a comparison between Yugoslav and Soviet discourses, see Zaviršek (2008). 98 �to encourage reproduction and remake working-class and peasant households in the service of party and state” (Neary 1999: 401). The paradigm of social motherhood was not limited to welfare provisions, but invested the symbolical sphere as well. The image of women as natural caretakers, peace-makers and peace-builders remained very powerful in the aftermath of the war, and was reappropriated by left-wing, internationalist and pro-Soviet anti-war women’s movements in the Cold War period elsewhere in Europe (see for instance Withuis 2000 for the Dutch case, and Ghodsee 2010). These findings resonate with recent scholarship about the Canadian and us context. In his article, Thorn (2010) speaks of maternalism as a form of “strategic essentialism” in the context of left-wing women’s organizations in 1950s and 1960s Canada.27 Second wave feminists have often interpreted the reinstatement of motherhood in the postwar period as a form of backlash and return to domesticity, and have privileged the “continuity thesis” with respect to gender relations after World War Two (Summerfield 2000; see also Sklevicky 1996 and Casalini 2005). As Summerfield (2000: 18) argues, however, “the feminist critique of the advocacy of women’s dual role, and reinterpretation of it as a double burden which underpinned women’s subordination, had the effect of obliterating the difference between the modernist and traditionalist accounts, and of treating them as a monolithic discourse supporting women’s marginalization and oppression.” As I have tried to show, however, within left-wing Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations, discourses about women’s complementary roles as citizens and mothers challenged the legacies of previous authoritarian regimes. These discourses were often invested with new meanings and connected to politics of social change.28 In the Italian context, notably, social work become highly politicized and assumed an oppositional character towards the Christian-Democratic government in the Cold War years, so that it would be reductive to read women’s engagement in the field of assistance as a confinement of women to traditional female roles (Noce 2006; see also next chapter). In the following section I examine how women’s suffrage, as well as social and economic rights, were inscribed in the new 1946 Italian and Yugoslav constitutions, and the different ways in which provisions concerning women were drafted in the two countries. 27 About maternalist discourses and their importance for the creation of modern welfare states, see Gordon (1990); Bock and Thane (1991); Skocpol (1992); Koven and Michel (1993). 28 This argument recalls what Karen Offen has defined as “relational feminism”, citing the example of nineteenth century France: women’s biological difference and complementary role as mothers seems not to “conflict directly with women’s self-realization and self-fulfillment as a moral and intellectual being” (1988: 145). 99 �2 . The 1946 Italian and Yugoslav Constitutions: formulating women’s rights 2.1. Overcoming women’s inferiority as a legacy of previous regimes Upon examining discourses and practices surrounding the issue of women’s emancipation in Italy and Yugoslavia, it is important to consider in detail the unprecedented legislative changes that concerned women after 1945. A number of citizenship rights – and notably women’s right to vote – were recognized for the first time in Europe after World War ii.29 Even if it would be difficult to deny women the right to vote after their contribution to the war effort and to the antifascist struggle, women’s political, economic and social equality was not a given, and especially in Italy it had to be fought for by female representatives in the Constituent Assembly. From the collection of debates surrounding the ’women’s question‘ in the Constituent Assembly in Italy, it is evident that communist, socialist and Christian-Democrat female representatives had to argue multiple times against the idea of women’s natural inferiority. This idea was still circulating among a number of male delegates, and was inscribed in the family code inherited from the Fascist period, the so-called Codice Rocco, which, as De Grazia notes, “weigh[ed] like a great albatross on the legal emancipation of women in postfascist society” (De Grazia 1992: 88).30 From the Constituent Assembly debates, moreover, it is clear that delegates belonging to the udi often argued for the establishment of concrete welfare provisions, and directly connected the protection of women and the family to economic and social measures that could ease the misery and inequality of the lower classes. While Christian-democrat female delegates defended a traditional moral and private conception of the family against state intervention, communist and socialist women were keen to reinforce the institution of the family and of motherhood on a more equal basis, connecting family life with broader democratic social changes, even though the 29 Other countries to extend suffrage to women between 1944 and 1948 are: France (1944); Liberia and Guatemala (1945) ; Cina, Albania, Japan, Romania, Panama, S. Salvador (1946) ; Bulgaria, Venezuela, Argentina and Birmania (1947) ; Costarica and Israel (1948) (Pieroni Bortolotti and Buttafuoco 1987: 273-275). 30 Fascist pro-natalist policies not only forbade abortion, but also made contraception propaganda part of the crimes against the “integrity and sanity of the race” (De Grazia 1992 : 55) ; the Rocco penal code punished female adultery much more severely than male adultery, and de facto recognized the legitimacy of ‘honor crime’ committed by men towards their adulterous wives, sisters and daughters, since this murder would be punished with between three and seven years of imprisonment. Rape was also seen as an ‘honor crime’, and a rapist could get away unpunished by marrying his victim (De Grazia 1992: 90) Moreover, women were forbidden a number of professions, such as teaching history, philosophy, Latin and Italian in high schools. In 1938 a new law established that public and private offices would reduce their female workers to 10 percent of their total staff (De Grazia 1992: 166). The measures contained in the Fascist family code would start being dismantled only in the 1970s. Divorce was allowed in 1974, abortion in 1978, while the measures about adultery and “honor crime” were abolished only in 1981. 100 �image of what a “democratic family” would look like remained very vague.31 As for the 1946 Yugoslav Constitution, the provisions dedicated to women’s equality were modeled on the 1936 Soviet Constitution, and thus reflect a more radical revolutionary stance on previous class, gender and national inequalities. The main concern of Yugoslav legislators was to come to terms with territorial and religious difference, and notably with the different family law provisions that subsisted in different regions of old Yugoslavia. From the point of view of family law, the old kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-1941) was divided in six different juridical areas. In certain parts the Austrian civil code from 1811 was applied, in others the Serbian civil code of 1844, while in Muslim areas religious law ruled. The new legislation hence aimed to unify family law and to overcome discriminatory provisions, notably the discriminatory treatment of woman in relation to economic rights, heritage, custody of children and the birth of ’illegitimate‘ offspring.32 The issue of family law and women’s equality was closely interrelated with the issue of equality among the different ethnicities/nationalities and regions that composed the new Federation. It was also connected to the issue of historical backwardness, that I will address in the next section. 2.2. Women’s equality as citizens and workers, women’s difference as mothers Both in Italy and Yugoslavia, afž and udi representatives placed women’s rights in a patriotic, progressive framework of national liberation and renewal, distancing themselves from pre-war feminist movements who had advocated women’s suffrage. In both new Constitutions women’s equality is formulated as women’s right to elect and be elected, women’s right to receive equal pay for equal work, women’s right to enjoy special welfare protection as mothers, and women’s right to be equal partners within the family. In the constitutional formulations of women’s rights – as citizens, workers and mothers – the combination of social and natural needs emerges. In the Italian Constitution (1948), the equality of all citizens is confirmed in article 3: “All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions”, while political equality appears in article 48, which states that “all citizens, male and female, who have attained their majority, are voters. The vote is personal and equal, free and secret.” In the Yugoslav Constitution (1946), the comparable article 23 states that “all citizens, regardless of sex, nationality, race, creed, level of education or place of residence, who 31 Communist politician Nadia Spano about the polemics on the Constitution and the “defense of the family”, commented: “Defense from whom? Nobody threatens the family, we are all determined to reconstruct it, to reinforce it; but we cannot forget that the familial institute has been destroyed and weakened by a regime that has oppressed Italy for too long, fascism. (…) Today, to reinforce the institute of the family means to struggle for democracy (…) this is what Italian women expect from us, they want new bases for their family” (quoted in Morelli 2007: 78). 32 The Austrian civil code, for instance, stated that “women, the foul and the blind” could not be witness of testamentary declarations (Kovačić 1947). 101 �are over eighteen years of age, have the right to elect and be elected to all organs of state authority.”33 It is worth noting that in the Yugoslav Constitution34 the article comparable to the Italian article 3, that is article 21, does not refer to gender differences: “All citizens of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia are equal before the law and enjoy equal rights regardless of nationality, race and creed. No privileges on account of birth, position, property status or level of education are recognized. Any act granting privileges to citizens or limiting their rights on grounds of difference of nationality, race and creed, and any propagation of national, racial and religious hatred and discord are contrary to the Constitution and punishable.” It is evident here that the concern of the Yugoslav legislators lies in the so-called ’national question‘, that is the reconciliation of different nationalities in a Federative state after a violent civil war.35 Unlike the Italian Constitution, which is based on a conception of sovereignty that recalls a traditional Western European mono-ethnic nation-state36, the Yugoslav Constitution, while establishing a multi-national Federation, creates a form of shared sovereignty among the different “peoples” (nations/ethnicities) that compose the country.37 Regarding women’s rights as workers, article 24 of the Yugoslav Constitution includes these rights in a more general provision of equality in all aspects of public life, stating that “[w]omen have equal rights with men in all fields of state, economic and social-political life. Women have the right to the same pay as that received by men for the same work, and as workers or employees they enjoy special protection. The state especially protects the interests of mothers and children by the establishment of maternity hospitals, children’s homes and day nurseries and by the right of mothers to a leave with pay before and after childbirth.”38 The Yugoslav Constitution, as this passage 33 The official English translation can be found here : http://www.senato.it/istituzione/29375/ articolato.htm 34 English version from the website : http://www.worldstatesmen.org/Yugoslavia_1946.txt 35 See the model article in the 1936 ussr Constitution  : “Article 123. Equality of rights of citizens of the ussr, irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law.” The English translation of the Soviet constitution is available at the following link : http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html 36 See art. 1 : “Italy is a Democratic Republic, founded on work. Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised by the people in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution. ” 37 See art. 1 (“The Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia is a federal people’s state, republican in form, a community of peoples equal in rights who, on the basis of the right to selfdetermination, including the right of separation, have expressed their will to live together in a federative state.”) and art. 2 (“The Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia is composed of the People’s Republic of Serbia, the People’s Republic of Croatia, the People’s Republic of Slovenia, the People’s Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the People’s Republic of Macedonia and the People’s Republic of Montenegro.”) 38 See again the comparable article in the 1936 Soviet Constitution (art.122) “Women in the ussr are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and 102 �shows, recognizes state duties to provide women as mothers and working mothers with welfare provisions, including hospitals, nurseries, and paid leave, on the model of the 1936 Soviet Constitution.39 As for the Italian Constitution, the equality of women as workers is stated in article 37: “Working women are entitled to equal rights and, for comparable jobs, equal pay as men. Working conditions must allow women to fulfill their essential role in the family and ensure appropriate protection for the mother and child. The law establishes the minimum age for paid labor. The Republic protects the work of minors by means of special provisions and guarantees them the right to equal pay for equal work.” Despite the efforts of pci and udi representatives, no substantial welfare provisions are guaranteed in this article. The expression “appropriate protection” remains quite general, and the article subordinates women’s right to work to their “essential role in the family”.40 Welfare provisions are, however, established for large families, mothers and children in need, in article 31: “The Republic assists the formation of the family and the fulfillment of its duties, with particular consideration for large families, through economic measures and other benefits. The Republic protects mothers, children and the young by adopting the necessary provisions.” The central place of the traditional family, advocated by Christian-Democrats in the Constituent Assembly, is also evident from articles 29, 30 and 31. In article 29 “[t] he Republic recognizes the rights of the family as a natural society founded on marriage. Marriage is based on the moral and legal equality of the spouses within the limits laid down by law to guarantee the unity of the family.” Although the equality of the partners is recognized, this equality is limited by the need to maintain the unity of the family, which is generally seen as a hierarchical unity (Gaiotti de Biase 1978: 93). The family as a “natural society” echoes the Catholic conception of the family based on religious marriage, and the penal code inherited from Fascism contributes to enforce gender discrimination in the private sphere. Moreover, even if the protection of sopolitical life. The possibility of exercising these rights is ensured to women by granting them an equal right with men to work, payment for work, rest and leisure, social insurance and education, and by state protection of the interests of mother and child, prematernity and maternity leave with full pay, and the provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens.” In 1936, abortion was forbidden in the ussr. This norm was repealed in 1955. 39 Yugoslavia follows the Soviet Union also in its measures towards abortion, allowed only for medical reasons since 1936, because of Stalinist pro-natalist policies. Abortion for non medical reasons will be legalised only after the break with the Soviet Union, in the early 1950s. “Yugoslavia, responding to demands from women’s organizations, decriminalized in article 140 of its 1951 Penal Code both self-induced abortion and the obtaining of an abortion that did not meet existing legal requirements. Indeed, Yugoslavia was the first people’s democracy to enact such a rule in its penal code prior to the Soviet Union’s return to a more liberal approach. In 1952 Yugoslavia adopted legislation permitting abortion for “medical and social reasons,” which were not precisely defined at that time but which clearly went beyond purely medical reasons.” (Zielinska 1993: 52-53); other Eastern European countries started to liberalize their abortion laws in the mid-1950s (Zielinska 1993). See also Chapter 7 about feminist discussions of abortion rights in Italy and Yugoslavia. 40 As Gaiotti de Biase reminds us, the adjective ‘essential’ was added after numerous debates among the different party representatives (1978: 94). 103 �called ’illegitimate children‘ is a topic of heated debate, and despite pci and udi calls for equality, their protection is subordinated to the rights of the ‘legitimate’ family.41 Real equality of children born out of wedlock will be fully applied only decades later, so that a number of illegitimate children would carry the infamous label “son of N.N.” [lat. nescio nomen, unknown name] until the reform of the family code in 1975. Because communist policy does not recognize religious marriages, the Yugoslav Constitution instead treats marriage as a civil contract, and children born out of wedlock as equal to other children, at least on paper: “Matrimony and the family are under the protection of the state. The state regulates by law the legal relations of marriage and the family. Marriage is valid only if concluded before the competent state organs. After the marriage, citizens may go through a religious wedding ceremony. All matrimonial disputes come within the competence of the people’s courts. The registration of births, marriages and deaths is conducted by the state. Parents have the same obligations and duties to children born out of wedlock as to those born in wedlock. The position of children born out of wedlock is regulated by law. Minors are under the special protection of the state.” Here again, the main concern of Yugoslav legislators is to accomodate territorial and religious difference, and notably the different family law provisions that existed in different regions of old Yugoslavia. 2.3. Women’s equality as a “prize” or as a “natural outcome” of the Resistance In the previous sections I have attempted to show that the new Italian and Yugoslav Constitutions significantly reflected women’s participation in the war effort, and for the first time attempted to address women’s inferior status as citizens. The utopian, revolutionary vision of antifascist movements and parties in both countries brought about a number of progressive changes in legislation, once again more radical in Yugoslavia, since communist authorities could follow the Soviet model and did not have to compromise with other forces. The Italian pci delegates, by contrast, had to compromise with Christian-Democrat and socialist views, which were less keen to subvert the traditional patriarchal family, and were wary of the implications of state intervention in individual freedoms and family rights. At the same time, women’s rights as individual beings – or, in the contemporary formulation, women’s rights as human rights – were not presented as a goal in itself, but rather were as a prize for self-sacrifice in war, “a right conquered by women in their heroic struggle for the liberation of their homeland” (Marisa Rodano, quoted by Casalini 2005: 71). In the Italian left-wing press, as noted by Gaiotti de Biase (1978: 55), “Art.30: It is the duty and right of parents to support, raise and educate their children, even if born out of wedlock. In the case of incapacity of the parents, the law provides for the fulfillment of their duties. The law ensures to children born out of wedlock every form of legal and social protection, which is compatible with the rights of members of the legitimate family. The law lays down the rules and limitations for the determination of paternity.” 41 104 �the references to women’s emancipation “either coincided with political participation or merged with the common aspiration to a society freed from misery, hunger, exploitation, unemployment.” Nonetheless, many Italian women remember their first visit to the polls on the 2nd of June 1946 as a moving, thrilling event, marking the beginning of a new political consciousness and a first step towards democracy. To state that this event did not have repercussions on gender relations, therefore, as Maria Casalini does42, risks undermining women’s agency as citizens and voters. In comparison to Italian debates and publications, women’s legal equality in Yugoslavia was more often presented not as a process, but as a given. In both countries, however, women allegedly didn’t look for emancipation per se. Instead, they achieved parity in recognition of their wartime contribution. In Yugoslav documents, equality was presented as a natural outcome of the revolutionary struggle of liberation and as a natural result of the new socialist government, as in Mitra Mitrović’s speech during the Bosanski Petrovac conference (1942): “We did not enter into this struggle with some pretensions for equality. There was not space for this in such moments, nor was this the most important thing, nor did women mobilize for this in such great numbers. But equality is here, quicker than could have been expected. She (ravnopravnost, f.) has arrived, and was gained in the only possible way, through a common struggle with the people (narod), for common freedom” (quoted in Sklevicky 1996: 28). Parity or equality was often described here as an inevitable result of the revolution. 43 An official 1947 afž brochure, for instance, stated that with the revolution “was liquidated once and for all in Yugoslavia the ‘women’s question’, the question of equal rights for women and men, since the new Yugoslavia, truly democratic, born from the struggle, could not be anything but a State in which women are equal to men in all rights” (Kovačić 1947). The idea that the ’women’s question‘ had been solved through legal rights will be at the center of feminist critiques in the 1970s (Sklevicky 1989a; see also Jancar 1988). In the next section I will continue to explore the issue of women’s emancipation and its connection to historical backwardness, looking at the ways in which udi and afž women dealt with “backward” conditions and customs among the “feminine masses” in the aftermath of World War ii. 42 Maria Casalini’s claim is that “in Republican Italy the exercise of the right to vote seems to mark a sort of balance with women’s ‘right patriotism’, without repercussion for the traditional structure of gender relations” (Casalini 2005: 33). 43 The foundation of women’s equality was traced back to the 1941 liberation committees and to the 1943 avnoj declaration. Vida Tomšić repeatedly claimed in international congresses and afž documents that women’s right to vote had already been declared in 1941 in the liberated Partisan areas, and only ratified in 1946. 105 �3 . The pedagogic character of antifascist women’s organizations 3.1. The udi and the afž as avant-gardes: educating the feminine masses In the aftermath of the Second World War, characterized in both countries by extensive poverty and destruction, the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties, as well as the udi and the afž, were adapting their political avant-gardism to the new context of mass politics, and were turning towards the needs of the lower classes in order to gain consensus and legitimacy among women. Particularly in rural and southern areas, but also in the peripheries of great cities, there were many women refugees and internally displaced people living in miserable conditions. The illiteracy rate was higher among women than men, even more so in less developed regions and rural areas.44 Another extremely serious problem immediately after the war was infant mortality, again affecting women and children who lived in less developed areas most severely.45 It was in this context of extreme class, educational and spatial inequalities – intersecting with patriarchal norms in matters of sexuality and marriage – that a number of educated antifascist women felt impelled to engage in the struggle to ameliorate the living conditions of the lower classes – and specifically women’s living conditions in Italy and Yugoslavia. After the war, the field of direct welfare intervention became a priority for women involved in the udi and the afž. From the archival sources, it is apparent that udi and afž leaders and intermediate cadres – mainly urban, educated, and thus privileged women – were appalled by the experience of direct contact with women from the lower and rural strata of society, often suffering from the hardest living conditions.46 Another important underlying goal of the Italian and the Yugoslav com44 If in Italy the level of illiteracy was 13,8 per cent on average in 1941, and 12, 90 per cent in 1951, with women rating 15,20 per cent (as recorded in the census), in Yugoslavia the rates were much higher. Sklevicky quotes some official statistics according to which in 1931 the average illiteracy rate for the population over the age of ten was of 44,6 per cent, with men rating 32,3 per cent and women 56,4 per cent. In 1953, average male illiteracy has dropped to 14,1 per cent, while women’s illiteracy was of 35,8 per cent. Enormous disparities remained between the different Yugoslav regions. In 1953, after 8 years of alphabetization campaigns, 82,5 per cent of women in Kosovo and 80,7 per cent of women in Bosnia-Hercegovina were illiterate, as opposed to 14,6 per cent of women in Slovenia (Sklevicky 1996: 105-106). 45 In Yugoslavia, the rates of infant mortality were 139 (out of 1000 births) in the years 1935-39 and 102 in 1949, with 133 in Kosmet and 79 in Slovenia in 1947 (see Sklevicky 1996: 100-101). In Italy the rate was 96 in 1939, but Central and Southern regions such as Abruzzo, Basilicata and Campania had rates that were more than double the national average. The situation improved slowly, while the gap between more and less developed regions persisted. In the years 1956-60, the average rate for Yugoslavia was 93 (while Austria: 41; Czechoslovakia: 30; Denmark: 23; Mexico: 80, see Sklevicky 1996: 101). In 1957, Italy still has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in Europe, and in the 1960s a great number of children were dying because of different infections. Italy scored better only than Yugoslavia, Portugal and Poland (See Luzzi 2004). 46 See for instance the memoirs of Marisa Rodano (2008) and Luciana Viviani (1994). About 106 �munist parties – served by the udi and the afž – was to gain nation-wide consensus and political legitimacy among the population; this could only be realized, according to Marxist theory, if the masses acquired an historical awareness of their political conditions, and decided to organize for a better life by engaging in collective actions and organizations. The pedagogic stance of communist parties and women’s organizations, therefore, was combined with a faith in historical progress and in the possibility of individual and collective change. It relied upon the idea that the masses could be approached, mobilised and educated by left-wing forces that were able to respond to their needs. In Italy, this strategy was also needed in order to counter the influence of the Catholic Church on female voters, traditionally seen by socialists and communists as a potential pool of reactionary consensus, due to the influence of local priests. The religious influences among women were also a matter of concern for Yugoslav communists.47 According to classical Marxist theory, women’s equal access to education and labour – together with the collectivization of services such as kindergartens and canteens and the socialization of motherhood – would liberate women from the slavery conditions of the private family unit.48 Due to the shortage of manpower and of skilled labourers at the end of the war, Yugoslav authorities were keen to foster women’s participation in the workforce, while in Italy the end of the war coincided with a strong pressure against women’s labour by male war veterans who wished to be re-integrated in the labour market. Social and economic emancipation, however, had to be accompanied by cultural emancipation and modernization. In line with modernist ideas of historical progress, both the udi and the afž were particularly engaged in the task of modernizing and “humanizing” the most backward rural areas, where traces of “feudalism” appeared in the cultural and social customs and daily lives of men and women. Religiosity and local superstitions were particularly targeted in the early postwar years in Yugoslavia, where the Muslim veil covering the whole body was forbidden in 1947 (see Chapter 6), the living conditions of peasant populations in pre-war Yugoslavia see Erlich (1966). 47 About the pedagogical stance of Italian and Yugoslav communist parties towards the masses and towards society, see Bellassai (2000); Bokovoy (1997); Kertzer (1996); Lilly (2001). 48 The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State was published by Engels in 1884, and it has been foundational for the way in which internationalist socialist movements had envisioned women’s emancipation from the end of nineteenth century onwards. Engels argued that the organisation of the family in primitive society, with matriarchy and common ownership, was radically different from its organization in industrialised society. Due to the advent of capitalism, these ancient forms had been replaced by the patriarchal family based on private property. This reversal in the “division of labour within the family” caused the devaluation of women’s status. According to Engels, women could be made “the equal of man” again by “taking part in production on a large, social scale” and by reducing domestic work to an “insignificant amount of her time.” This could be made possible by “modern large-scale industry”, which demanded women’s participation, and whose technical advances made the end private domestic labour possible by making it “a public industry.” See Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Chapter ix, online edition: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm) 107 �while in Italy the focus of the udi was on exploitative labour relations and miserable living conditions in the countryside. In an official afž brochure, we read: “The female peasants, before this war, used to live in ignorance, like slaves, similar to the herds of sheep they looked after” (Kovačić 1947). Within the afž, a clear difference was established between the “enlightened” women, who were part of the higher, national and republican decisional organs, and also of the National Front, and the “not so enlightened” women (Sklevicky 1996: 120) whose work was limited to the local sections. A strong emphasis was placed on the need to “activate” women, through education, training and political involvement. Leader Anka Berus stated for instance: “extending the work on the political enlightenment (prosvečivanje) of women, the afž will help broad masses to learn to think politically, and will include them in a real resolution of all general and national problems…”(quoted in Sklevicky 1996: 117). Since 1941, an enormous effort of alphabetization was made by the afž towards women, with slogans such as “Death to illiteracy – culture is a weapon against the enemy” (Smrt nepismenosti – prosvjeta je oružje protiv neprijatelja) (quoted in Sklevicky 1996: 30). Courses were also given on political education, on the liberation struggle, on the newly founded governing structures (avnoj, zavnoh), and on the achievements of the ussr. In order to “activate” women, a number of afž leaders were sent to newly created sections in rural areas and villages. Sometimes they had to compromise with local customs, for instance before the 1943 Bosanski Petrovac conference, when Marija Novosel was charged with taking two Muslim women to the conference, and managed to take Asnija Pajić only after having guaranteed to her husband that she would travel with her, return with her, and make her sleep in a Muslim household during her stay (Sklevicky 1996: 45). Similar images of darkness and enlightenment were used in a report written for the udi National Council in 1946 by delegate Orabona from Bari. After stating that the udi in Southern Italy had only 15.000 members, she went on to say that in many factories 40 per cent of adult women were illiterate and signed with a cross. She continued: “these women did not understand anything at all: they only asked for something to eat and didn’t want to know anything else. Seeing these humiliating conditions, we said to ourselves that our first initiative should consist in bringing a bit of light and to form them as only a luckless creature can be formed.”49 Then she detailed efforts to establish alphabetization classes in Bari. The difference between rural areas and towns, South and North, were described in terms of a dichotomy between enlightenment and progress and darkness and backwardness. udi activists attempted to bridge these regional gaps. In her report, Orabona also mentioned the solidarity efforts by udi women in Milan, who sent clothes to the udi section in Bari: “I have seen some women crying. Knowing that [other people in] Milan thought of them has been extremely beneficial. In those rural centers, were they feel cut off as if they were 49 “Queste donne non capivano niente di niente : chiedevano solo da mangiare e non volevano sapere nulla. Date le condizioni umilianti ci siamo dette che la prima iniziativa doveva essere quella di portare un po’ di luce e di formarle come si forma una creatura che non ha il minimo di fortuna.” udi, Consiglio Nazionale, 13-14 gennaio 1946. Archivio Centrale udi, Roma. 108 �Zulus50, they start to understand that they are entering the frame of Italian life and when they approach us they say, ‘really, Milan took an interest in us’.”51 3.2. “Wearing trousers”: udi and afž leaders rejecting “work among women” Antifascist women in Italy and Yugoslavia, and particularly communist women, shared a great faith in the possibility of change through solidarity and through direct economic and social intervention; they also shared a great faith in political interventions on the social reality, resulting in a complex interaction between grassroots needs and top-down solutions. The situation on the ground was very difficult, and often the masses of working and peasant women resisted the changes that were proposed – sometimes enforced – by women’s organizations. Also, the personal assumption of political responsibility and the adherence to the strict codes of revolutionary militantism was a long and painstaking process among rank-and-file members: udi and afž leaders in their national meetings frequently complained about the “weaknesses” on the ground and pointed out the large amount of political labour required from committed militants, because of the lack of qualified intermediate “cadres” that could relay national decisions to and implement them in the different provinces.52 A number of ambivalences thus existed in the discourses formulated by afž and udi leaders when speaking about the “feminine masses”. These ambivalences can be explained by looking at their different speaking positions, and by taking into account class, cultural and political differences among women. Casalini (2005: 82) suggests that the contradictory image of the female militant found in left-wing publications – emphasizing women’s heroism and democratic spirit on the one hand, while denouncing women’s deep ignorance and lack of interest in politics on the other – can be explained by the gap between the traditional image of Italian women, and the image that some of the militants have of themselves. As mentioned in Chapter 1, female communist leaders’ personal emancipation and self-realization depended upon their entry in male-dominated parties, and upon their adhering to rigid class-based and party-based ethics. Among communist parties’ male members, “work among women” was often seen as secondary and instrumental, and as less valuable than “universal” party work. 50 This term, mutuated from the name of the African tribe, is still popularly used in Italian to indicate savagery and lack of education. 51 “Ho visto delle donne che piangevano. Il fatto di leggere sul giornale che Milano aveva pensato a loro è stata una cosa quanto mai benefica, perchè in quei centi rurali, dove si sentono tagliati fuori come se fossero addirittura degli zulù, cominciano a capire che entrano nel quadro della vita italiana e quando ci vengono vicino dicono veramente Milano si è interessata di noi.” udi, Consiglio Nazionale, 13-14 gennaio 1946. Archivio Centrale udi, Roma. 52 On the issue of the formation of communist cadres and on the notion of communist selfcritique, see Bellassai (2000) for Italy and Sklevicky (1996) for Yugoslavia. 109 �Many afž and udi leaders, therefore, would agree to work with the “feminine masses” in compliance with party discipline, but always half-heartedly. This is evident for instance in a 1946 speech by Togliatti, addressed to the communist women of the udi. Togliatti complained that when asked to get involved with political tasks within the udi, some communist women …[r]eject the invitation by saying that it is not worthy to do work among women, since women do not understand anything, or because the work among them is a real chore, or boring or something. This resistance can be found also among very valiant female comrades, who, however, once they have acquired certain experiences and capacities of party work, seem to have ideologically worn trousers, and do not wish to work with women any longer (Togliatti, quoted in Casalini 2005: 83, emphasis added). Here we witness again a phenomenon of substitution (see Chapter 2), and the idea that the access to “universal” party work and party functions can elevate a number of women beyond the usual concerns of the feminine masses. Indeed, for many female militants, women’s equal value had to be proved through militant activism within the party, and not through specific women’s organizations. This was specifically the case for the older generation of Italian women, who clandestinely struggled against Fascism, such as Teresa Noce, whom I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and whose position is exemplary of the older communist generation. But younger women, too, identified more as communists than as women: their relation towards the “feminine masses” was necessarily a complex one. Sklevicky remarks on a similar situation within the afž. The afž leaders were often struggling to be taken seriously by their male counterparts in the communist party, and were often regarded with contempt for dedicating themselves to work among women. As a result, some activists “[did] not like to work with women”, since this work is surrounded by “a sense of inferiority” despite constitutionally guaranteed equality (Sklevicky 1996: 121; see also Zaviršek 2008). Sklevicky (1996: 121) quotes a report by the afž secretary of the Vinkovac district, in which she argues that the function of the organization is to familiarize less politicized women with activism. The women who are already politicized should engage directly in the National Liberation Front. When this doesn’t happen, women “are forced to listen to the same thing twice”, one time in the afž meetings and the other in National Front meetings. In time, the most active and most politicized women are converting to other tasks, abandoning the despised “feminine work”. Sklevicky (1996: 121) ironically comments: “women’s vertical mobility through the afž has already started to take its toll!” The discussion of the differences and similarities between “universal” party-work and “feminine work” is crucial, and will eventually lead to the dissolution of the afž in 1953. This debate about the need for separate women’s organizations will be considered further in Chapter 6. The hierarchical difference between the leaders of the antifascist women’s organizations, and the women who constituted the rank-and-file base of these organizations, is an intrinsic part of postwar and Cold War women’s mass activism. I explore and discuss this issue throughout the book, also in relation to the production and 110 �interpretation of sources mainly written by the few leaders of these organizations (see in particular Chapter 1). As I argue in the following chapters, when looking at how udi and afž leaders acted and spoke as political representatives of “Italian women” and “Yugoslav women” in their international encounters, the top-down, pedagogic character of postwar women’s organizations emerges even more explicitly. Conclusion This chapter dealt with the national activities of Italian and Yugoslav women’s antifascist organizations in the immediate postwar period, and with the definitions of women’s rights and women’s roles formulated by these organizations. In the first section I described how, in the midst of widespread poverty and destruction, the udi and the afž managed to organize their first congresses in 1945, in two countries devastated by the Second World War. I have also shown how these organizations immediately engaged in the reconstruction effort, with impressive results in the fields of women’s education and assistance to destitute youth and communities. Contrary to common belief, women’s political activism in the two countries continued well beyond the Second World War through antifascist internationalist women’s organizations such as the udi and the afž. The historical examples cited in this chapter demonstrate the first thesis of my research, namely the fact that women were active participants in political and social struggles after the end of World War ii. In the previous sections I discussed the idea of social motherhood taken from the Soviet regime, and the maternalist language of female activists, which constituted a powerful form of strategic essentialism, which allowed them to argue for welfare provisions as well as for women’s inclusion in the polity on the basis of their supposedly different “nature”. In the next chapter I will show how the idea of “social motherhood” circulated across borders, from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia to Italy via Trieste, through the physical and imaginary links established by women’s internationalism in the postwar period. Demands for social motherhood and welfare provisions were accompanied by demands for legal, economic and social equality in the public sphere, notably women’s right to vote and be elected and women’s right to fully access education and the labour market. In the third section of this chapter I analyzed how the Italian and Yugoslav Constitutions, both approved in 1946, formulated women’s rights as citizens, workers and mothers, marking an important discontinuity with the pre-war period. This proves that women’s antifascist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia were crucial in promoting women’s rights, and in raising women’s awareness about the possibility to exercise these rights. While showing the impressive results of women’s postwar activism, I have also attempted to show the limits of these earlier Marxist formulations, which did not conceive of women’s individual rights and emancipation as a goal in itself. Rather, women’s equal rights were seen as an inevitable outcome of socialist revolution in Yugoslavia or as a necessary result of the democratization process in Italy. As I will relate in Chapter 6, however, this initial faith in the modernizing power of laws and in 111 �state intervention was put into question by the persistence of discrimination against women despite formal legal equality. In this chapter I have also highlighted the limits of top-down decision-making, and described the important differences between an avant-garde of women leaders and the “feminine masses”, which remains a constant element of women’s antifascist organizations in the early Cold War period. In the next chapters, I shall explore more in depth the position of udi and afž leaders and their role in formulating a national and international agenda for women’s organizing. 112 �Chapter 4 Women’s internationalism after 1945 Introduction In that September of 1947, in which we arrived at the work camp to build the first modern railway that would connect Samac to Sarajevo (…), the image of [Josip] Broz Tito was everywhere. He was the first communist leader who conquered me; about Palmiro Togliatti in fact I knew far less, also because his life seemed less adventurous and he looked like a professor, while Tito was very handsome, with his military beret and a red star over it (…) The evenings in Zenica were wonderful. There I discovered almost everything that constituted the basis of my cognitive heritage. An avalanche of information fills the gap in which I had been living during the war. The world appears all of a sudden immense, and my street, via Vallisteri in Parioli, microscopic. (Luciana Castellina 2011: 231-238) In her recent memoir based on her 1943-1947 youth diaries, Luciana Castellina1 tells the story of her journey across Eastern Europe in 1947. The young Italian militant travelled with a communist youth delegation to Prague for the World Youth Festival in July 1947. After having celebrated her 18th birthday with comrades of different nationalities in the “Titova college” of Prague, a student house renamed after Yugoslav President Tito, Castellina decided to take a train with two male English comrades to join a volunteers’ work brigade in Zenica, Bosnia, to build the Samac-Sarajevo railway. Young people of all nationalities surrounded Castellina in her long train journey and in the work camp in Yugoslavia. In Zenica, the young militant even received a diploma of udarnica, i.e. shock worker2, which she treasured all her life. 1 Luciana Castellina (born 1929), is a politician, journalist and writer. She was part of the Italian Communist Party from 1947 until 1969, when she became one of the founders of the dissident newspaper Il Manifesto. This group was expelled from the pci. From 1974 till 1984 she was a member of the far left Partito di Unità Proletaria per il Comunismo, which became part of the pci in 1984. She was elected as European mp in 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994. 2 The term udarnik (shock worker) is a Soviet term indicating a super productive worker. The term was widely used from 1929 onwards within the framework of the Five Year Plan. Workers were encouraged to display productivity through competition in the factories, earning thus the ti- 113 �The transnational meetings in Zenica were an encounter with the world for a young woman who had grown in an upper class half-Jewish family, in Trieste and in the exclusive Roman neighborhood of Parioli, where she used to play tennis with Mussolini’s daughter, her schoolmate. The international fascination with the newly founded socialist Yugoslavia in the immediate postwar period3, and the transnational connections established between Italian, Yugoslav and Italo-Slovene women’s organizations in Trieste between the end of 1945 and the summer of 1948 will be the subject of this chapter. The period between the end of 1945 and summer 1948 is characterized by the geopolitical setting that emerged as a result of World War Two, and at the same time is marked by the beginning of the Cold War confrontation between the Eastern and the Western blocs. Italy and Yugoslavia are situated in the midst of this confrontation: the Italo-Yugoslav border becomes, at least until 1948, the line dividing the West from the East, while the contest over the city of Trieste involves not only Italy and Yugoslavia, but also the Anglo-Americans and the Soviet Union, and their redefinition of spheres of influence in Europe. Already in 1945, it was evident that the geopolitical situation in Italy was very different from that of Yugoslavia, and that the destiny of left-wing forces was deeply tied to their respective geopolitical positions within the new East/West spheres of influence. While the Yugoslav Communist Party managed to liberate the country with very limited external support, and to seize power with little opposition from the Allies, the Italian Communist Party belonged to an antifascist national unity government, and had to take into account the large-scale presence of Anglo-American troops on Italian soil, which made any revolutionary effort too risky, even potentially leading to civil war, as it had in Greece.4 The situation was particularly complicated in the border area between Italy and Yugoslavia, affected as it was by old and new national and ideological divisions. This area, and particularly the city of Trieste, which had been under Fascist occupation, was liberated in May 1945 by the Yugoslav Army, and from June 1945 placed under the Allied Military Government (amg).5 The territories of Istria and Dalmatia, annexed by Italy in 1919, were liberated from Nazi-fascist occupation by the Yugoslav Army, and definitively assigned to socialist Yugoslavia by the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. Between 200,000 and 350,000 ethnic Italians – as well as Slovenes and Croats – left Istria for fear of reprisals by Yugoslav partisans, in what came to be known in tle of shock workers. The term was also used in the Soviet satellites and in Yugoslavia after 1945. 3 The international support for the Yugoslav partisan struggle already began during World War Two. For instance, some antifascist Swiss doctors chose to join the partisans brigades in Yugoslavia, as related in the 2006 documentary by Daniel Künzi, Missions chez Tito. Les missions de la centrale sanitaire suisse en Yougoslavie 1944-48. 4 See Terzuolo (1985). 5 In 1947, under the Italian-Yugoslav peace treaty, the Free Territory of Trieste (tlt) was established. The amg took over the administration of zone A of the tlt, including the city of Trieste, while zone B was under Yugoslav military administration. In 1954 the border between zone A and B became the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. See Novak (1970). 114 �Italy as the Istrian exodus.6 The pro-Italian and conservative press opposed the Slavic rule of formerly Italian territories, emphasised the cruelty of Partisan retaliations and strove to portray Trieste as ‘a bulwark of democracy and of Western civilisation’ in the Mediterranean.7 Conversely, working-class Slovenes, Croats and Italians welcomed the Yugoslavs as liberators, and favoured the idea of Trieste becoming the ‘seventh’ Yugoslav Socialist Republic, in line with the Yugoslav government’s claim over the city. Pro-Yugoslav associations spoke of Italo-Yugoslav brotherhood and emphasised the joint effort of all antifascists in the area. Fascinated by the neighbouring socialist republic, a number of Italian workers and former partisans – particularly those living near Italy’s Eastern border, in the region of Friuli – decided to emigrate to Yugoslavia in the years 19461947, in search of job opportunities and a better life.8 The leadership of the Italian Communist Party, however, resented postwar Yugoslav hegemony over the Triestine leftist movement, as well as Yugoslav leaders’ plan to annex Trieste. Other points of disagreement were the presence of Italian war prisoners still detained in Yugoslavia, and the protection the Italian government and Allied troops had offered to Italian Fascist and local collaborators who had committed war crimes during the occupation of the Balkans. The internationalist engagements of the Yugoslav and Italian communist parties, therefore, were at odds with respective national interests, and with the attempt of each communist party to legitimate itself not only in internationalist but also in patriotic terms.9 The bilateral and multilateral encounters between Italian and Yugoslav women in the postwar period must be placed within this complex historical and geopolitical framework, of antifascist solidarity and internationalism, but also of potential national and ethnic conflicts related to the Julian Region, due to the historical legacies of Fascism and the Second World War. The dynamics of women’s transnational encounters are also largely dependent on the shifting relationship between the Italian and the Yugoslav communist parties between 1945 and 1948. In this chapter I address the transnational encounters that took place between udi and afž members in the aftermath of the war, notably in years from the Liberation of Italy and Yugoslavia in 1945, until the Cominform Resolution of June 1948.10 These encounters were not only bilateral, but also situated within the multilateral setting of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf), an antifascist, internationalist and transnational organization founded in Paris in December 1945, with which the udi and the afž had, as founding members, been affiliated from the See Ballinger (2003: 2). Stuparich, quoted in Mihelj (2009: 281). Their stories have been recently collected in the form of an audio-documentary. The documentary is composed of oral history interviews with peasants and workers from the city of Monfalcone and the region of Friuli. See Giuseppini (2008). 9 See Terzuolo (1985). 10 The Cominform Resolution implied the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Eastern block, and the expulsion of afž from Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). I will return to this episode in detail in the next chapter. 6 7 8 115 �beginning. The Women’s International Democratic Federation is a very significant international platform for antifascist women from different countries in these postwar years, and gender and women’s historians are only starting to assess its importance. By looking at the activities of the Italian and Yugoslav members of the widf, I wish to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debates about the widf, and about its longstanding erasure from women’s and feminist history (De Haan 2010a; Weigand 2001; Ghodsee 2010). In the first section of this chapter I discuss some of the postwar activities of the widf in the years 1945-1947, in order to give an overview of the main goals and activities of this organization in the postwar period. In the second section of the chapter I examine the importance of the international sphere for the udi and the afž, analyzing the encounters, correspondences and interactions between Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women, both bilaterally and in relation to the foundation of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. This reconstruction aims to show that Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations and their members actively engaged in Cold War political struggles. National interests and conflicts over the city of Trieste emerged and were transposed into the international arena by the udi and the afž. At the same time, antifascist unity and communist internationalism favored the establishment of links of cooperation, and strengthened the role of the Yugoslav revolutionary model as an example for Italian male and female militants. The Yugoslav Federation – the closest neighboring socialist country modeled after the Soviet Union – raised great hopes among Italian antifascists, who resented Italy’s postwar conservative politics. In the third section, in order to stress the importance of the neighboring socialist “dreamworld” (Buck-Morss 2000), I introduce the case study of women’s postwar organizing in the border city of Trieste, and of the udais, the Union of Antifascist Italo-Slovene Women in the Julian Region, which was more influenced by the Yugoslav afž – and by its Slovenian branch – than by the Italian udi. The case study of Trieste is crucial in understanding the significance of the dream of the socialist East for antifascists living in the contested border area. The case of the udais – and its relationship with the udi, the afž and the widf – shows the geopolitical specificity of Cold War Trieste. The singularity of the local geopolitical setting greatly affected women’s organizing and their political mobilizations. The case of Trieste also illustrates women’s crucial role in promoting postwar and early Cold War ideological discourses (which were themselves highly gendered). In this chapter, therefore, I not only describe women’s transnational activism developed in the early Cold War period between Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area, but also show how local, national and international activism were interrelated in complex, multi-layered ways. 116 �1. The Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) – Destroy Fascism, - Guarantee democracy and peace in the world, - Ameliorate women’s conditions, - Prepare a happy future for the generations to come. In sum, this means working for the triumph of justice in all the domains. This is our big dream. (Eugénie Cotton’s opening speech at 1945 widf founding congress).11 The Women’s International Democratic Federation must be viewed as an instrument of Soviet political warfare with military objectives primarily in mind. (Report on the Congress of American Women, by the Committee on Un-American Activities, huac 1949: 24) The history of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf), a mass organization affiliating millions of women internationally, has been ignored for decades as a result of the Cold War anticommunist legacy. The Committee of Un-American Activities (huac) under McCarthy had, in fact, depicted this organization as “an instrument of Soviet political warfare” in 1949. The members of its American branch, the Congress of American Women (caw), were in fact the objects of a fierce redbaiting campaign (Lerner 2002; Storrs 2003; Horowitz 1998). With this study I wish to contribute to the growing post-Cold War scholarly literature on the widf, which has started to unravel the forgotten history of this organization, and its significance for women’s transnationalism in the twentieth century (De Haan 2010a; Ilič 2010). Despite having been represented in a stereotypical fashion, the widf was, in fact, a complex political entity that cannot be reduced in any way to a simple instrument of Soviet propaganda. As I will show in this chapter, the Women’s International Democratic Federation affiliated in 1945 women from different background and political orientations, who were genuinely invested in the project of an internationalist, antifascist, anti-colonial and pacifist federation of women. Some widf members had been long-standing feminists and social reformers before the war (De Haan 2010a; Weigand 2001; Lerner 2002). Although the Soviet political line was enforced upon the 11 “De notre Conférence doivent sortir des solutions constructives. La plus importante sera sans doute la création d’une grande Association internationale qui coordonnera l’activité de toutes ses adhérentes vers les buts que nous nous sommes données: – détruire le fascisme – assurer dans le Monde la démocratie et la paix – Améliorer la condition des femmes – Préparer un avenir heureux aux futures générations. Ce qui veut dire, en somme, travailler à faire régner la justice dans tous les domains. Tel est notre grand rêve.” Discours d’ouverture de Madame Cotton, Congrès Constitutif, 26.11.2010-1.12.1945, Paris, Palais de la Mutualité. In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-115. 117 �widf as of Cold War tensions started to mount (1949-1953, see Chapter 5), a number of dissenting voices were always present. As Ilič notes (2010), the widf “served not only as a forum for estensive cultural exchange during the decades of the Cold War, especially where the status of women was concerned, but also as a site in which the cultural gaps that existed between women from different nations could be identified and discussed.” The existence of multiple political and national positions within the widf is alluded to throughout this study, by referring to the perspective of both its Italian and Yugoslav members. As shown by a number of scholars, from the mid-1950s the Federation was deeply affected by the emergence of women’s anti-colonial movements, and gradually became a global organization in favor of women’s rights across the world, contributing to initiate and promote the 1975 un decade for women (De Haan 2010a; Caine 2010; Ghodsee 2010; see also Chapter 7). In the first part of the chapter I will look at the widf founding Congress in 1945, and at some of the widf activities in the postwar period, arguing that a number of resolutions and reports approved by the widf were extremely groundbreaking for their times. widf analyses developed a class-based, anti-colonial, anti-racist analysis of women’s conditions, or what would be defined today an intersectional analysis, combining a critique of gender, race and class relations. In the next section I describe how the widf worked for women’s emancipation and women’s rights, in the context of to issues like fascism, colonialism and racial discrimination, and I emphasize the role played by Italian and Yugoslav members within the widf since its founding Congress in 1945. 1.1. The widf founding congress (November 1945, Paris) and the initial activities of the widf Between the 26th of November and the first of December 1945, the widf Constitutive Congress was held in Paris at the Palais de la Mutualité, and was attended by representatives from Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Chili, China, Czechoslovakia, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, the United States, Finland, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Morocco, Mexico, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, the ussr, Uruguay, France and Yugoslavia. The women who were present identified themselves as having fought a common struggle against war and fascism. Many of them had been arrested for their antifascist activities; some had been tortured, and others had lost members of their families during the war. This contributed to a general feeling of international solidarity during the first widf congress. As an Indian delegate said, This war has taught us to love each other, to get close to each other. It helped us to understand that the destiny of other men cannot leave us indifferent, that the freedom and happiness of each depends upon the freedom and the happiness of all. We have learnt that the freedom of a nation, of a race, is linked to the destiny of the 118 �whole of humanity, and that the misfortune of a people announces and prepares the misfortune and catastrophe of other peoples, too. 12 Within different reports of the widf founding meeting in 1945, one notes a strong feeling of women’s antifascist solidarity, beyond differences of ethnicity, race and religion. Italian women’s accounts of these meetings are not always devoid of racial and ethnic stereotyping, proving the resilience of colonial representations in postwar Europe. But the focus is nonetheless on the fact that women from different nationalities and social backgrounds share the same antifascist engagement. Antifascist militant Ada Marchesini Gobetti13 tells about the first Paris widf meeting as follows: “I will tell you, even from a picturesque point of view, there were women of all species: there were Indians, Algerians, some with towels around their heads, some Chinese, some Americans, women of all types we could imagine: women from different worlds, who all spoke the same language.”14 In her inaugural speech at the 1945 Constitutive Congress, widf President Eugénie Cotton15 commemorated the victims of the war and stressed the “immorality” of fascist ideology. She said that the “immorality of a doctrine that negated the dignity of the human being, which exploited man more harshly than the beast, who systematically put science at the service of the most barbaric cruelty, appalled the consciousness of all honest people.” Antifascism was presented not as a political position, but as an issue of “moral sanity and wisdom: we cannot allow madmen and criminals 12 Quoted in Mitra Mitrović, “Importance d’une unione démocratique des femmes du monde entier” in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-386. 13 Ada Marchesini Gobetti (born Prospero, in Turin, 1902-1968) was a teacher, translator and journalist. In 1923 she married Piero Gobetti, a socialist writer and politician, who died in exile in Paris in February 1926 as a result of being assaulted by Fascist squads for his antifascist positions. Widowed, and with a month-old baby, Ada Gobetti continued her antifascist activities. In 1937 she married Ettore Marchesini. During Second World War she, together with her eighteen-year-old son, engaged in the Resistance struggle in the Turin region, providing connections between Italy and France (See Gobetti 1973). After the war she was affiliated with the Action Party (Partito d’Azione) and became vice-mayor of Turin. In 1956 she joined the communist party. All her life she was engaged in teaching and in alternative pedagogies. 14 “Anche dal punto di vista pittoresco vi dirò che c’erano donne di tutte le specie : c’erano le donne indiane, quelle algerine, alcune con degli asciugamani in testa, c’erano delle cinesi, delle americane, insomma c’erano donne di tutti i tipi che noi potessimo immaginare : donne di mondi diversi che parlavano tutte lo stesso linguaggio.” Ada Gobetti, Consiglio Nazionale dell’udi, 13-14 gennaio 1946, in Archivio Centrale udi, Roma, fondo cronologico, B7 fascicolo 89. 15 Eugénie Cotton (born Feytis, 1881-1967) was a scientist and a communist politician. After having graduated in Physics in 1904, she became a teacher in the École Normale Superieure de Jeunes Filles in Poitiers. In 1913 she married Aimé Auguste Cotton, a physician and teacher in the École Normale of Saint-Cloud. Later she became a director of the École Nationale Supérieure in Sèvres. A member of the French Communist Party, she supported German and Spanish antifascist exiles in the 1930s. During the Second World War she was forced to leave her academic position by the Vichy government, and her husband was imprisoned during the German occupation. She was one of the founders of Union des Femmes Françaises in 1944, and the president of the widf from 1945. 119 �to act as they wish.” The main tasks of the newly founded women’s Federation, therefore, were the destruction of Fascism, the establishment of peace and democracy, the achievement of better lives for women and children, or, “to sum up, working in order that justice will triumph in all the domains.”16 This ideal of social and political justice in all domains was expressed through a number of resolutions approved during the 1945 Paris Congress. In the Resolution on the economic, juridical and social situation of women17, widf members pointed out that women had demonstrated their equality with men in the struggle against fascism. Nonetheless, in “almost all countries” – with the implicit exception of the Soviet Union – women had an inferior status, and in most of colonial countries they were still in a slave-like state. The Resolution stated that full freedom and democracy could only exist if women were fully included in political and social life. The Resolution demanded women’s right to vote and to be elected, equal education, work and equal welfare, and equality in marriage, divorce, and inheritance. It also recommended the creation of institutions that would allow women to reconcile their duties as citizens, mothers and workers; the administration of justice in the postwar reconstruction effort, the elevation of general living standards, the end of black marketeering and the unequal distribution of resources, the provision of affordable accommodations, water and electricity in the countryside, as well as invalidity pensions for those in need. In another Resolution on the problems of children and education – the text of which was prepared by the Yugoslav delegation – the damage to children and the youth caused by Fascism and Nazism were listed in detail. Schooling under fascism was “in service of their ideology of violence, contempt and hatred of the human being.”18 Education, therefore, had to be truly democratized, and free access to schools had to be guaranteed, also in colonial countries. Significantly, after the experience of Italianization of schools under Fascism, the Yugoslav delegation stressed the importance of mother tongue education, also in colonial countries, where many children were still schooled in a foreign language, the language of the colonizers.19 As a result of the antifascist alliance between the ussr, the usa, Britain and France, the issue of colonialism was not yet raised at the 1945 widf founding Congress.20 After the beginning of the Cold War and the break between the former West16 “Discours d’ouverture de Madame Cotton”, Congrès Constitutif, 26.11.2010 - 1.12.1945, Paris, Palais de la Mutualité. In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-107. 17 Ibidem. 18 “Résolution sur la situation économique, juridique et sociale des femmes”, Congrès Constitutif, 26.11.2010 - 1.12.1945, Paris, Palais de la Mutualité. In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-295. 19 “Résolution du Congrès International des Femmes des 26-30 Novembre 1945 sur les problèmes de l’enfance et l’éducation” Congrès Constitutif, 26.11.2010 - 1.12.1945, Paris, Palais de la Mutualité. In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-303. 20 In an article published in the magazine Žena u Borbi after the Yugoslav delegates had been expelled from the Federation, in the early 1950s, afž leader and former president Anka Berus noted that during the 1945 widf Congress the representatives of the four great Allies, the ussr, the usa, Britain and France had had a leading role, while colonized countries only had a sec- 120 �ern and Soviet Allies, however, the widf representatives became very vocal about colonialism. During the 1947 Prague Council a Report on the colonial problem and on the situation of women and children in colonial and semi-colonial countries was distributed.21 This report referred to the United Nations’ increasing engagement with the independence and the self-determination of colonial territories22, and explicitly referred to the 1945 San Francisco un charter. The report claimed that colonial methods were completely illegitimate, and that no one, seeing the misery of the colonies and the exploitation of their inhabitants, would believe that colonialism could ever have any “civilizing” effect. Instead, all peoples, including colonial peoples, were now part of a global movement for emancipation which had started during the war against fascism.23 The report also analyzed the condition of women in the colonies in detail. Every woman in the colonies was designated as a “slave of a slave”, to describe women’s double oppression, under patriarchy and under colonialism. Essentialist depictions of colonial women were also criticized as instrumental to colonial domination: “First of all we should strongly reject the widespread argument surrounding the woman in the colonies, according to which in this or the other colony “the woman will not be able to emancipate herself since she’s the being sacrificed to religion, ancient customs etc…she is too passive and subjected to the will of her parents, brothers or husband.” Against these essentialist arguments, the widf report pointed out the many differences among colonial peoples, and that many advanced civilizations had developed in ondary position. Berus mentioned that the 1945 Congress resolution denounced fascism, but failed to mention imperialism in order not to upset the Western powers. Delegations from the colonies, however, would sarcastically note that colonial exploitation and terror did not differ from what they heard during the Congress about fascist acts in the occupied countries. Anka Berus, “Sječanja sa osnivačkog kongresa mdfž 1945. godine u Parizu”, Žena U Borbi, In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-412. 21 “Rapport sur les Problèmes Coloniaux et la Situation des Femmes et des Enfants Dans les Pays Coloniaux et Semi-coloniaux”, Conseil de la fdif, Prague, 26 Février 1947. in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-18-189. 22 Although this is rarely remembered at present, in 1947 the Western powers still maintained most of their colonial possessions, so that more than a quarter of countries and 689 million inhabitants were under colonial domination, according to the widf report. The colonial powers included Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Denmark, but also the U.S. if one counted their domination in the Philippines. Moreover, countries like Spain and Portugal remained under a Fascist dictatorship, while in Greece a civil war had started between pro-Western monarchic troops and pro-Soviet communist guerrillas. The widf report also contained a condemnation of the French intervention in Vietnam against the Vietminh movement. 23 At the end of World War Two, a number of revolts started in colonial territories, such as the Sétif and Guelma revolt in Algeria in May 1945, which was violently repressed by the French. The connection between the antifascist Resistance and the anticolonial struggle is also made evident in the biographies of anticolonial leaders, for instance in the biography of Martinican intellectual and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who fought in the French Army in World War ii , and later opposed french colonialism in Algeria. See Cherki (2006). 121 �Africa and Asia, so that it would be “impossible to attribute to all women in the colonies the same defects or characters.”24 Instead, as the Indian representatives reported, it was British conservatives who had blocked any law that could ameliorate women’s status, saying “it would offend our [Indian] religious prejudices.”25 In that same 1947 widf Prague council, another Resolution condemned the discrimination of “Negro women” and racial segregation in the South of the United States, following a report of the Congress of American Women on the “condition of Negro women”. The report analyzed in detail the double discrimination suffered by Afro-American women in the fields of citizenship, health, accommodation and labor. The condition of domestic workers and service workers particularly was considered in detail, illustrated with a number of statistical data. In the Southern states, the legacy of slavery was still present, and the report stated that Black women still “fell prey” to White men as they had during slavery.26 The resolutions mentioned here – covering only some of the campaigns developed by the Women’s International Democratic Federation in the immediate postwar years – show that this international organization and its national branches merit more in depth study, and that the widf wasn’t at all a homogeneous entity. Moreover, as De Haan (2010a) has noted, the widf deserves to be studied particularly in relation to decolonization movements and Third World women’s struggles against racism and colonial exploitation. In a recent keynote lecture, historian Barbara Caine (2010) has 24 “Nous devons d’abord réfuter énergiquement un argument amplement répandu concernant la femme des colonies, c’est celui qui consiste à dire dans telle ou telle colonie, ‘la femme ne parviendra point à s’emanciper elle est l’être sacrifié par la religion, les coutumes ancestrales, etc…elle est beaucoup trop passive et soumise à la volonté de ses parents, de ses frères ou de son mari.’ Il y a lieu de remarquer que les peuples coloniaux représentent des différences très grandes et extrèmement nombreuses, entre eux. (…) Par conséquent, il y a diversité de races, de religions, de coutumes et de civilisations, il est donc impossible d’attribuer à toutes les femmes des colonies les memes défauts ou traits de charactère.” Rapport sur les Problèmes Coloniaux et la Situation des Femmes et des Enfants Dans les Pays Coloniaux et Semi-coloniaux, Conseil de la fdif, Prague, 26 Février 1947. In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-18-206. 25 “Il est intéressant de rapporter ici la déclaration d’une déleguée des Indes au Congrès International constitutif de Novembre 1945: ‘(Aux Indes), Pendant plus de cent ans, toute législation sociale progressive a été freinée par les conservateurs britanniques qui se sont succèdés. Ils disent que cela offenserait nos préjugés religieux. Ainsi donc nos anciennes loix féodales nous pétrifient et nous emprisonnent.” Ibidem. 26 See “Rapport sur les femmes nègres aux États-Unis, préparée par le Congrès des Femmes Americaines…” and “Resolution sur la situation des femmes nègres aux Etats-Unis”, adoptée à l’unanimité par le Conseil de la fdif, à Prague, le 26.2.1947, in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-18-213. As Weigand has stressed in her Red Feminism, “progressive feminists” linked to the caw and to the American Communist Party had developed an analysis of multiple oppressions and paved the way for second wave feminist and Civil Rights movements. They “sustained a small but vibrant women’s movement through the 1940s and 1950s and transmitted influential terminology, tactics, and concepts to the next generation of feminists” (2001: 3). 122 �highlighted the importance of a trip to Eastern Germany and the Soviet bloc for South African anti-apartheid activist Lillian Ngoyi, within the framework of the widf. Further research on this organization and on the transnational interactions between its members could prove illuminating for intersectional feminist analysis, and would deepen our understandings of the potential and limits of transnational feminist and women’s rights networks. It could also highlight a number of connections between the so-called Second and Third world during the Cold War, and the importance for the formation of anti-colonial movements of the connection to the socialist bloc (see Chari and Verdery 2009; see also Lee 2010). Since this is not within the scope of my research, I have only mentioned some of the key issues at stake when opening the forgotten, fragmented and under-researched archive of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, a major organization affiliating thousands of women across the world and whose political and social activism extended from 1945 until 1989.27 I discuss the phenomenon of decolonization and its impact on Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations in greater detail in Chapter 7. In the next section I will describe how Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations contributed to the foundation of the widf after 1945, and how they established bilateral and multilateral relations in the aftermath of the war. 2 . Transnational encounters in the postwar period: the Yugoslav example In 1945 some of the women that had been involved in the Union of Italian Women and in the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia actively contributed to the foundation of the Women’s International Democratic Federation28 and formed the national branches of the Federation. Several diplomatic trips and bilateral exchanges between delegations of different internationalist women’s organizations started taking place. When engaging in international activities abroad, however, the representatives of the Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations occupied very different geopolitical positions. Italian women traveling abroad felt strongly that they had to bear the burden of guilt for Fascist crimes and oppression towards other populations, despite their personal antifascist engagement. For this reason, Italian antifascist women attempted to work towards a redefinition of Italian national identity, one that would encompass the antifascist struggle, and uncouple the equation between Italy and the Fascist regime. Unlike the Italian antifascists, Yugoslav antifascist women had been part of the most successful Resistance movement in Europe, one that needed only marginal support from the Allies, and that managed to establish a revolutionary regime afterwards. Yugoslavia was the “dutiful daughter” of the Soviet Union, and the Yugoslav representa- 27 An organization with this name in fact still exists today, and its headquarters are located in Brasil since 2007. See http://www.fdim-widf.org/ 28 The countries that made up the initial steering committee were France, Britain, Belgium, China, Spain [with exiled republican representatives, notably Dolores Ibarruri], Italy, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. 123 �tives could express their pride in international meetings, positioning themselves as models for the rest of Europe, and South-Eastern Europe in particular. As I will show in the following pages, the different positions of Italian and Yugoslav delegations are apparent in their interaction with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, as well as in the statements given by Italian and Yugoslav representatives when participating in congresses of other women’s organizations abroad. At the same time, during transnational encounters Italian and Yugoslav women strived to find a common antifascist, internationalist language despite national divisions and past legacies of conflict. In this section I will analyze the different political stances of Yugoslav and Italian women’s delegations during widf postwar congresses. Secondly, I will reconstruct the Italo-Yugoslav encounters that took place in the postwar period, and highlight the strong fascination with the Yugoslav model that emerged among the antifascist left in Italy and in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. 2.1. Yugoslav women’s international recognition and the claim over Trieste Yugoslav women enjoyed a position of great admiration and respect during international meetings after the war. At the first 1945 widf congress in Paris, the Yugoslav delegation was “loudly and warmly acclaimed”, and the heroic Yugoslav anti-Nazi resistance was celebrated in a number of speeches, alongside the heroic struggle of the Soviet Union. According to Anka Berus29, “the name of comrade Tito raised enthusiasm among all the delegates.”30 In her praise of Yugoslavia, the legendary Dolores Ibarruri31 warmly remembered the Yugoslav antifascists who were part of the 29 Anka Berus (1903-1991) was born in Split, and graduated in Literature in Ljubljana. She joined the workers movement as a student, and continued as a teacher of the girls’ gymnasium in Split, where she was soon targeted by the authorities for her unconventional ideas. In 1936 she was arrested for her revolutionary activities and detained for two years in the Požarevac prison. In 1939 she was imprisoned in the camp Lepoglava for two months, and later assigned to forced residency in Celje, Slovenia. From there she joined the Resistance in Zagreb, where she engaged in antifascist activities against the Ustasha regime. In 1942 she moved to the liberated territory and had an important role in organizing the Resistance and the insurrection in the Croatian Littoral. After the war, she was minister of the Croatian government from 1945 to 1949 and Minister of Finances of the Croatian Republic from 1950 to 1953. She was awarded the title of National Hero for her partisan activities. 30 Anka Berus, “Sječanja sa osnivačkog kongresa mdfž 1945. godine u Parizu”, Žena U Borbi, In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-412. 31 Dolores Ibarruri (1895-1989), also known as La Pasionaria, was the most prominent Spanish female antifascist politician. Born in a poor miners’ family in the Basque country, and married to a socialist miner, she took part in the general strike of 1917. She had six children, four girls who died very young, one who outlived her mother, and a son who was killed during Second World War in the battle of Stalingrad. From 1920 she was active in the communist party, and in 1931 she moved to Madrid, where she became the editor of the journal Mondo Obrero. She was a delegate to the Moscow Comintern in 1933. Elected to the Republican Parliament in 1936, she became a Republican leader during the Spanish Civil War (she coined the famous 124 �international brigades during the Spanish civil war.32 Upon suggestion of the Italian delegation, the widf approved a statement of congratulations for the founding of the new Yugoslav Republic on the 29th of November 1945.33 The high esteem in which Yugoslav representatives were held is illustrated in a report about the congress by afž leader Mitra Mitrović.34 In her article for the official newspaper Borba (subsequently translated into French), Mitrović reported that: Our country, thanks to the struggle against Fascism and the democratic system that it’s realizing, occupied an important place during the Congress, among so many countries from the whole world (…) Anka Berus was always at the presidency of the Congress, doctor Olga Milošević read the report – prepared by Yugoslavia – on the protection and education of children, and in every commission a representative of Yugoslavia was present. Our delegation was proud, and rightly so, of the part our women had taken in the struggle for freedom; of their heroism, or their unity and of our organization counting three million women. Our struggle, and the results we have obtained, are quoted as an example by the antifascist women of the whole world.35 slogan “No Pasaran !”). After the victory of Franco in 1939 she went into exile in Moscow. From 1944 until 1960 she was the Secretary General of the pce, the Spanish Communist Party. She returned to Spain in 1975 after the demise of Franco’s fascist regime, and was elected to the Spanish Parliament in 1977. 32 Anka Berus, “Sječanja sa osnivačkog kongresa mdfž 1945. godine u Parizu”, Žena U Borbi, In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-412. 33 “Les organisations Italiennes adhérentes à la Féderation Démocratique Internationale des Femmes Proposent que le télegramme suivant soit addressé à la nouvelle République Yougoslave : ‘La Féderation démocratique Internationale des Femmes réunies à leur premier Congrès salue avec enthusiasme la Nouvelle République Yougoslave et félicite les vaillantes populations qui, par leur courage et leur sacrifice ont permis se réaliser dans leur pays une véritable démocratie. La Féderation démocratique Internationale des Femmes salue l’assemblée Constituante qui va affirmer dans la Constitution tous les droits que les femmes yougoslaves ont conquis dans le Combat.’” Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (19421953) 141-17-379. 34 Mitra Mitrović (1912-2001) was born in Užička Požega, Serbia, in a working class family. She studied Literature at the University of Belgrade, where she conducted clandestine communist activities. She also became the president of the youth section of the interwar Women’s Alliance. Mitrović organized demonstrations for equal rights for women and was editor of the monthly Žena Danas from 1936 onwards. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1941, she was detained in the concentration camp Banjica, from which she managed to escape. From September 1941 she had important responsibilities in the Serbian liberation movement, where she worked in the Agit-Prop and organized the first afž Congress of Bosanski Petrovac. After the war she was a leading member of the party, and among other tasks she held the position of Minister of Education in the Serbian Republic. She was married to communist leader Milovan Đilas from 1936 until 1952. Because she supported her husband in his dissident activities, she was marginalized from politics in the early fifties, at the age of 41. See Perović (2001). 35 Mitra Mitrović, “Importance d’une unione démocratique des femmes du monde entier” in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-386. 125 �Mitra Mitrović expresses here a strong sense of pride for the efforts accomplished, a pride that also entitled Yugoslav women to situate themselves as an example to the neighboring countries: “the Balkan and Central European countries wait for our help and see us as a powerful support, thanks to the experience and the force of our movement, and thanks to the democracy being built in our country, as the delegates from all neighboring countries have declared to us.” 36 In her memories of the Congress, Anka Berus relates that all other delegations were interested in the afž activities, and asked them for advice, notably the Albanian and the Bulgarian delegations. The afž mediated between the Czechoslovak and Hungarian delegations in discussing the fate of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia.37 Moreover, since it was difficult to reach the countries of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the immediate postwar aftermath, Yugoslav representatives were asked by the widf to serve as a relay between Paris and women’s organizations in the rest of the Balkans.38 Another very clear sign of the prominence of the Yugoslav delegation was the request from the widf to hold the next congress in Belgrade in 1947.39 The Yugoslav delegates, therefore, certain of their national successes and of their international support, could also express their claim over the contested harbor city of Trieste in international meetings. As I will show in section three of this chapter, the battle for the assignment of Trieste to Yugoslavia became one of the first major Cold War battles in Europe. An argument in favor of a Yugoslav Trieste was the ethnic composition of the city, in which many Slovenes lived (see Chapter 2). Equally important was the idea that because of the war sacrifices of the antifascist patriots, the city deserved to be assigned to the socialist camp, and not to Italy, since Italy was seen as not yet fully democratic and always prey to conservative tendencies (see further in this chapter, section 3).40 36 Among the tasks the widf Congress gave to the afž, Mitrović mentioned “aider par notre example et notre sécours immédiat les mouvements dans les pays voisins, – pays balcaniques, pays d’Europe centrale, – qui, à cause de notre expérience et de la force de notre mouvement (..) attendent de nous une aide et attendent de nous un puissant appui.” Ibidem. The role of Yugoslavia as a regional power in the Balkans would eventually lead to the 1948 conflict with the Soviet Union. See Chapter 5. 37 Anka Berus, “Sječanja sa osnivačkog kongresa mdfž 1945. godine u Parizu”, Žena U Borbi, In Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-412. 38 Letter from Nicole de Barry to Olga Milosević, on behalf of Comité d’Initiative International pour la préparation et l’organisation d’un congrès international des femmes, Paris, 16.10.1945. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-17-39. 39 As explained in Chapter 5, this would never happen. The second widf congress would be held in Budapest in the spring of 1948 and afž would be expelled from the widf in the autumn of 1949. 40 Luciana Castellina heard similar arguments in Zenica in 1947. Her British comrades, notably, stated: “You [Italians] were Fascist, they [the Yugoslavs] have lost one million seven hundred thousand people in the war.” After this, she recalled, “I am upset: the Trieste I know, my family, is Italian. I still knew little about the way in which the Fascists treated the Slovenes and only now do I start to understand what the war that has led my country to occupy Yugoslavia 126 �After the widf Congress in Paris, the Yugoslav claim over Trieste was expressed once again during the first udi Congress, held in Florence in October 1945. The Yugoslav delegation did not obtain visas for the Congress, but the representative41 of the Union of Italian and Slovene women (udais) of Trieste gave a speech that reflects the Yugoslav stance. As I will show in section 3, Trieste left-wing organizations were in fact dominated by the hegemony of Yugoslav politics from 1945 to the summer of 1948, and supported the transfer of the city from Italy to Yugoslavia. The Trieste representative made the following statement in Florence: For the liberation of Trieste, Italians and Slavs have fought united and Tito’s troops have sacrificed 6000 men to liberate the city. I’d like some comrades to come to Trieste, and to ask the Triestini how Tito’s Army had behaved. In forty days we constituted our popular government, with two thirds Italians and one third Slavs. And in these few days we have built kindergartens and schools, and provided food to the city. On the 12th of July the Yugoslav troops had to abandon Trieste. And what happened? In Trieste the freedom fighters, those who always fought against fascism, are imprisoned, while those who are guilty are set free.42 The udais representative stressed the brotherhood of Italian and Slavic partisans, and emphasized the benefits of the 40 days of Yugoslav administration instaured in the city after the arrival of Yugoslav partisans on the 1st of May 1945, until the Allied troops took over the command of the contested city. The 40 days of Yugoslav administration – that the udais describes in a very positive light – were portrayed in the pro-Italian press in Trieste and Italy as an invasion of the city by hordes of “Orientals” and as a fate worse than German occupation, exploiting previous anti-Slavic and anticommunist feelings. Workers and peasants in Trieste, on the other hand, favourably anticipated the possible annexation of the city by socialist Yugoslavia (see Sluga 2001; see also section 3 of this chapter). has been (…). I do not dare to respond, but I feel uneasy, upset” Castellina (2011: 246). 41 Her name has been transcribed in the archive as ‘Marta Vemecic’, but this should most probably be Marija Bernetić, the late 1940s udais leader. Intervention by ‘Marta Vemecic’ [Marija Bernetić] at the First udi Congress, 20-23 October 1945. Rome, ac udi, udi Cronologico, B7, file 69. The Yugoslav delegation had been denied visas for this udi conference; women from udais, that is, Slovene and Italian women from zone A of the ftt, could participate. 42 “Per la liberazione di Trieste, italiani e slavi hanno lottato uniti e le truppe di Tito per liberare la città hanno sacrificato 6000 uomini. Sarebbe mio desiderio che qualche compagna potesse venire a Trieste e chiedesse ai triestini come si è comportato questo esercito di Tito. Durante quaranta giorni abbiamo costituito il nostro potere popolare formato di due terzi di italiani e un terzo di slavi. E in questi pochi giorni abbiamo costruito asili, scuole, abbiamo provveduto all’approvigionamento della città. Il 12 luglio le truppe jugoslave dovettero abbandonare Trieste. Cosa successe? Successe questo : che a Trieste i combattenti per la libertà, quelli che hanno lottato sempre contro il fascismo, oggi si mettono in galera e si rilasciano invece quelli che sono colpevoli.” Ibidem. 127 �2.2. Italian women abroad: the uncoupling of Italian identity from Fascism Italian delegates from the udi and other left-wing organizations, in their first international encounters after twenty years of isolation under Fascism, were attempting to redeem the image of Italy abroad, by trying to show that Italy wasn’t only Fascist Italy, but rather that “another Italy” had existed and fought against Fascism from the very beginning. In her report on the widf 1945 Congress, Ada Gobetti relates that some Italian comrades were surprised when they heard the representatives of other countries speaking about Fascist oppression and violence. Some Italian comrades thought, “they are resentful against us”, meaning against Italians. Gobetti explains that this could be an understandable, reflex reaction. However, she added: It was important to thoroughly separate the responsibilities of the Italian people from Fascism. Our comrade [Camilla] Ravera gave a magnificent presentation in which she declared in front of women of the whole world that Italy has never been Fascist Italy, and she coined a beautiful phrase that got a lot of praise, that is: ‘in Fascist Italy, Italy addressed the world not from the balcony of Piazza Venezia, but from the rooms of the Tribunale Speciale’ [the court judging political prisoners]; and she knew it well [Ravera had spent several years in exile and in prison]. She took up the task to show what Fascism really was. Even if Fascism was named after the Italian case, we should not say that it has been only an Italian phenomenon (…).43 Once she had stated that Fascism wasn’t only an Italian phenomenon, Camilla Ravera44 (as reported by Ada Gobetti) explained that there were different forms of 43 “(…) io ho notato che qualcuna delle nostre compagne delegate quasi si sorprendevano quando sentivano parlare le delegate di un altro Paese di oppressione e della violenze fasciste, e dicevano : “Qui ce l’hanno con noi.” Poteva essere qualche cosa come epidermica ed una cosa comprensibile. In ogni modo era opportuno che si scindessero bene le responsabilità del popolo italiano dal fascismo. La nostra compagna Ravera ha fatto una magnifica esposizione in cui ha veramente dichiarato davanti a tutte le donne di tutto il mondo che l’Italia non è stata mai l’Italia fascista ed ha detto una bella frase che è tanto piaciuta e cioè che nell’Italia del fascismo, l’Italia ha parlato al mondo non dal balcone di Palazzo Venezia, ma dalle sale del Tribunale Speciale ; e lei ne sapeva qualche cosa. Si è incaricata di far sapere che cosa era il fascismo. Se noi abbiamo dato il nome al fascismo, non dobbiamo dire che il fascismo sia un fenomeno soltanto italiano.” Ada Gobetti, Consiglio Nazionale dell’udi, 13-14 gennaio 1946, in Archivio Centrale udi, Rome, fondo cronologico, B7 fascicolo 89. 44 Camilla Ravera (1889-1988), a socialist teacher from Acqui Terme, had been among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. She was in charge of the feminine section of the pci and the editor of the journal La Compagna (The Comradess). In 1927 she went into exile and was named secretary of the party for three years. Arrested in 1930 by Fascist authorities, she was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment. She was detained for 5 years and later sent to the “confino” in the islands of Ponza and Ventotene. In 1939 she opposed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and was expelled from the party, to which she was readmitted in 1945. After the war she became a communist mp and was involved in the leadership of the udi. In 1951 she published a history of the women’s movement in Italy from 1861 until the Second World War (see Ravera 128 �Fascism, not only in Italy and Germany but also in Belgium, Romania, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Spain, and France. Fascism was able to spread because of the complicity of democratic countries with Mussolini, and was the result of capitalist and nationalist interests coalesced against the working classes. Because of this speech, adds Gobetti, “our position really improved”, and Italian women managed to obtain a place in the Executive Committee of the widf.45 Similar statements were uttered by the Italian delegation during their visit to the first afž postwar congress in the summer of 1945. The following statement is a typical representative text (Sklevicky 1996) that shows how udi women portrayed themselves to their afž comrades and expressed their wish to cooperate. Jole Lombardi declared on the 20th of June, the third day of the congress: We, representing the Italian women, want to tell you that the Italian people and the Italian women are sincerely antifascist: having lived through the painful experience of fascism for an entire generation and having been submitted to its most disastrous consequences, we felt the deep desire that a similar regime of reaction and imperialism would never be resurrected. (...) We guarantee to you therefore that we, Italian women, like you, Yugoslav women, will do all that is possible so that the Trieste problem, as well as all problems that might arise, will be solved justly and with fraternal spirit (…)46 Here we see the attempt of the speaker to emphasize the collaboration between Italian and Yugoslav antifascists, through a claim of common suffering under Fascism. We also see that the international issue of Trieste is evoked as a potentially problematic one that could threaten the solidarity between the Italian and the Yugoslav people.47 In a number of statements at the first afž and the first udi conferences, Italian delegates wish to underline that they are “sincere antifascists”, particularly when speaking to the representatives of countries that had been invaded by Fascist troops. During the first udi congress in October 1945, after the intervention of the Albanian 1951), which was revised and re-edited in 1978 (Ravera 1978). She was later named life senator, a position she held until her death in 1988. 45 Ada Gobetti, Consiglio Nazionale dell’udi, 13-14 gennaio 1946, in Archivio Centrale udi, Rome, fondo cronologico, b7 fascicolo 89. 46 “Noi che rappresentiamo le donne italiane vogliamo dirvi che il popolo italiano e le donne italiane sono sinceramente antifascisti: noi che abbiamo vissuto l’esperienza dolorosa del fascismo per un’intera generazione e ne abbiamo subito le conseguenze più disastrose sentiamo la profonda esigenza che un simile regime di reazione, di imperialismo non risorga mai più. (…) Vi garantiamo quindi che noi, donne italiane, come farete voi, donne jugoslave, faremo tutto il possibile, perché il problema di Trieste, come tutti i problemi che dovessero sorgere, venga risolto secondo giustizia e con spirito fraterno (…).” Jole Lombardi, 1 June 1945, I afž Congress. Roma, Archivio Centrale udi, fondo DnM, 45.3 A. 47 Another problematic issue was the one of Italian soldiers still detained in Yugoslavia in late 1945. They presented a petition to the udi delegation in Belgrade, asking them to lobby for their release. 129 �delegation, Marisa Rodano declared: “Italian women do not forget that Albania is a country that has suffered Fascist aggression. Fascism, not satisfied with having oppressed the Italian people and with having dragged them into an unjust and violent war, wanted to drag even the small Albanian people into war, though they, like the Italians didn’t want the war.”48 udi women attempt to speak not only for the antifascists, but also for “the Italian people”, and thus to legitimate themselves as national actors, while attributing to this “people” antifascist feelings (the Italian word “popolo” can stand both for “the nation”, Italy’s inhabitants as well as for the “common people”, the popular classes).49 This shows how women’s political participation in antifascist and internationalist organizations also had significant effects on the construction of national identities after 1945.50 At the same time, international encounters – but also the encounter with international politics at home – forced a number of women to reconsider the assumptions towards national and ethnic Others inherited from Fascism. Luciana Castellina recalls her encounter with politics during a nationalist student demonstration for the “italianità” of Trieste held in Rome in May 1945. Having grown up in a Triestine family, she joined the nationalist student demonstration, which later clashed with socialist and communist militants. After having escaped the violent clashes, she found herself in front of a group talking to the crowd about “the evildoings – I never knew about this – of Fascists towards the Slovenes, already in the 1920s (…) and then of the massacres during the occupation of Yugoslavia” (Castellina 2011: 127). Communist activists spoke of the need to “redeem” Italy through international solidarity with Yugoslavia. Luciana Castellina relates how she returned home from this encounter: “exhausted. And very upset. I remember that at home the Slovenes are called “schavi”, that is, slaves. And that’s how, more or less, they are treated, with contempt. I have never thought about these things” (Castellina 2011: 128). As I will show in the next sections, the idea that Italian antifascists have to “seek redemption” for Fascist crimes against the Slavic populations is far from uncommon in these years, and will play a great role in the battle for a Yugoslav Trieste. 48 “Le donne italiane non dimenticano che l’Albania è stato un paese aggredito dal fascismo il quale, non contento di opprimere e trascinare in una guerra ingiusta e violenta il popolo italiano, ha voluto trascinarvi anche il piccolo popolo albanese, che al pari del popolo italiano non voleva la guerra.” Roma, Archivio Centrale udi, fondo cronologico, B7 fascicolo 66. 49 This representation of the Italian “people” as antifascist became dominant during the postwar years, gradually silencing the violence of Fascist imperialism and the consensus it had among Italy’s inhabitants, while attributing the responsibility for the war to Germany and Nazism alone. About the myth of “Italiani brava gente” [Italians good people], and about the silencing of Fascist crimes in postwar Italy, see Sassoon (2003) and Poggiolini (2002). 50 About internationalism and internationalization as a process that strenghtens national identities, see Carlier (2010) and Zimmermann (2005). See also the conclusions of the present volume. 130 �2.3. The ambivalence of the Yugoslav model for Italian militants In this section I would like to explore other sources showing the importance of personal encounters between Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women in the postwar period, and notably the growing fascination of Italian antifascist militants with the neighboring socialist Yugoslav republic during the years 1945-1948. The various visits to Yugoslavia by Italian women affiliated to the udi are to be considered within the framework of the gradual marginalization of leftist parties in Italy under anti-communist pressure, which compelled the Italian Communist Party to rely on a number of external sources of legitimation, such as the myth of the Soviet Union (Urban 1986). The comparison with the successful Yugoslav model next door was therefore inevitable, but it also contained a number of elements towards which Italian militants were ambivalent, as I will show in this section. These sources prove that transnational exchanges between antifascist forces in the two countries remained particularly intense in the postwar period, and that East-West connections were being established from the beginning of the Cold War. For the first afž congress in 1945, the Italian delegation was composed of women with different political orientations, in compliance with the national unity government: a socialist, Jole Lombardi, a woman from the Action party, Gabriella Ricci, a woman from the Left Christian Party, Maria Luisa Sacconi, and a communist, Maria Michetti. There is archival evidence that Maria Luisa Sacconi and Maria Michetti personally met with afž leaders Vanda Novosel and Olga Kovačić during the congress. As mentioned earlier, another delegation from Trieste attended the conference in Belgrade, including Lina Morandotti from Monfalcone, Gigliola Destradi from Trieste, Carmen Perco from Lucinico, and other women whose full names are unknown. After this first encounter, udi members gave a number of enthusiastic radio interviews about the ongoing reconstruction efforts in Yugoslavia.51 They were particularly impressed with the government support to afž activities, a support that was “lacking” in Italy. The only critical note was towards the “devotion” to Tito, which “can seem unconceivable, or at least exaggerated, to a superficial observer.” But, they added, “even if democracy has a different appearance from how we conceive it in the West, there’s a new spirit in the air” characterized by the common desire to reconstruct the country.52 51 Interventions by Jole Lombardi and Gabriella Ricci, Trasmissione Radio, 7th of July 1945, in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-24-18; Interventions by Maria Luisa Sacconi and Maria Michetti, Trasmissione per “L’Italia Risorge”, 25thof July 1945, in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (19421953) 141-24-22. 52 Ibidem. 131 �A trace of this 1945 encounter – and of the sudden postwar political changes – can be found in a letter from Maria Michetti53 to Vanda Novosel54 in February 1947.55 The letter, written one and a half years after the visit to Belgrade, describes the gradual dismantling of the initial antifascist unity, and the political diversity of women’s antifascist positions. Michetti writes that of the four Italian women who visited the Congress, Maria Luisa Sacconi and Gabriella Ricci have abandoned politics and the “feminine movement”, while another, Jole Lombardi, has sided with the right-wing fraction of the socialists led by Saragat, and “is more and more anticommunist”. Michetti herself was still working within the pci. She had joined the commission for female labor, and female youth.56 Towards the end of the letter, Maria Michetti recalls the lasting impression that the trip to Yugoslavia had made on her: Dear Vanda, I could not help but write to you, so deep is the memory that I have of your country, of your people and of all of you, male and female Yugoslav comrades. Perhaps you cannot understand how many things I have learned from your experience, which is nevertheless so different from ours; but I am sure that this is what keeps me so connected to you, to your work and to your country.57 Beyond representative declarations, this letter makes evident that strong intersubjective relationships and friendships could emerge between women of different countries, as a result of the transnational connections established through bilateral meetings and in international settings.58 It is also a sign of antifascist women’s enthusiastic engagement in postwar politics, and of their faith in the possibility of social transformation. 53 Maria Michetti (1922-2007), communist militant since 1942, took part in the antifascist Resistance in Rome. She was one of the founders of the udi and the leader of the Feminine Commission of the pci in the Rome section after the war. From 1954 until 1987, she worked as a sociologist in La Sapienza university in Rome. She has been the editor of a number of volumes on the history of the women’s movement in Italy, among which an anthology of documents about the history of the udi, edited with Luciana Viviani and Marcherita Repetto (see Michetti, Viviani and Repetto 1998). 54 Vanda Novosel has been a member of the student communist youth (skoj) before the war, and an editor of the Zagreb women’s journal Ženski Svijet. During the war she joined the Liberation Movement, becoming a leader of the Croatian afž and a member of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav afž. 55 Letter dated 22 February 1947, in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-24-35. 56 Ibidem. 57 “Cara Vanda, non ho saputo fare a meno di scriverti tanto profondo è il ricordo che ho del vostro Paese, del vostro popolo e di tutti voi, compagni e compagne Jugoslave. Forse tu non puoi comprendere quante cose io abbia imparato dalla vostra esperienza, che pure è tanto diversa dalla nostra, ma io sono sicura che è questo, il fatto di aver imparato tanto da voi, che mi tiene così legata a voi, al vostro lavoro e al vostro Paese.” Ibidem. 58 About intersubjective relations and friendships within the framework of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, see De Haan (2010b). About the concept of intersubjectivity and its relevance for women’s history, see Passerini (1991, 1996). 132 �Two other examples show the great significance of the Yugoslav revolutionary model for Italian militants. Pina Palumbo and Luciana Viviani expressed very positive feelings after having attended the second afž congress in January 1948. The powerful revolutionary imagery that the Yugoslav Resistance could evoke among Italian militants is evident in the letter sent by Pina Palumbo, from the National Directive Committee of the udi, to the afž Central Committee in February 1948. Palumbo stated: We, Italian women, have a lot to learn from you [Yugoslav women], because despite the great sacrifices of our glorious partisan struggle, Fascism, internal capitalism and American imperialism still dominate our Country. So, with your example, we must work and strenuously fight in order for this to end forever. 59 While Italian antifascist women had fought in the Resistance like their Yugoslav comrades had, this effort hadn’t resulted like it had in Yugoslavia in a socialist revolution. As historians have noted, in the late 1940s many rank-and-file communist militants were disappointed with postwar Italian politics, and with the strategy of moderation chosen by the leadership of the pci. Like Palumbo and Viviani, many communist militants resented the fact “fascism, internal capitalism and American imperialism” still dominated Italy. Blaženka Mimica, the afž representative at the second 1947 udi Congress, noted a similar frustration among Italian communist militants in Milan. Among other observations about political life in Italy, Mimica spoke of her visit to the metallurgical factory of the Magneti Marelli. A woman working in the factory told the Yugoslav delegation that her son had died in the Partisans, and indicated his picture, which had been placed by the workers on the factory wall. The mother of the fallen partisan said: “He died to get the kind of life you have. We do not have it, but we will fight for it.” Before she left, Blaženka Mimica received a letter from the same woman. After having expressed her pleasure at the Yugoslav visit, the woman lamented the fact that in Italy many comrades were still falling for their ideals, while Fascists were rising again. She wondered, “how much more pain, how much suffering is needed to finally become free like you are in your lucky country. Please give our greetings to all the female comrades in Yugoslavia. We, Italian female workers, share their ideal: peace and freedom.”60 59 “Noi donne italiane abbiamo molto da imparare da Voi, perché malgrado i sacrifici della nostra gloriosa lotta partigiana, il fascismo, il capitalismo interno e l’imperialismo americano, dominano ancora nel nostro Paese, perciò noi dobbiamo col vostro esempio lavorare e lottare strenuamente perché tutto ciò finisca per sempre.” Pina Palumbo, comitato direttivo nazionale udi, fac-simile no. 9, page 96, in Le Front Antifasciste des Femmes de Yougoslavie au sein du Mouvement International des Femmes, 1951, iisg archive, Amsterdam. 60 “U toj fabrici sreli smo majku čiji je sin poginuo u partizanima. Pokazala nam je njegovu sliku koju su radnici istakli u fabrici i rekla: ‘On je pao za takav život kakav vi imate. Mi ga nemamo, ali – borićemo se.’ Od te žene dobila sam, poslije mog odlaska iz Italije pismo u kojem kaže: ‘Dan kad je delegacija Jugoslavije bila u našoj fabrici ostaće za mene trajan i nezaboravan. Mogu ti reći da mnogi naši drugovi padaju i danas pod zrnom fašista koji nastoje da se ponovo podignu, a im još moramo krvlju napatati naše ulice da im to ne dozvolimo. Koliko još boli, 133 �The Yugoslav context constituted an explicit point of reference for Italian militants, notably after 1947 and the ousting of the Italian Communist Party from the antifascist unity government. While in Italy conservativism and reactionism seemed to prevail, in Yugoslavia the construction of socialism was well on its way. During the 1948 afž congress, Luciana Viviani and Pina Palumbo argued in a speech that in Italy democracy was only “formal”, while Trieste, according to Laura Weiss, was “colonized” by Americans.61 As a result of this utopian image of Yugoslavia, many Italian workers and former partisans migrated across side of the border between 1946 and 1947 (Bonelli 1994; Giuseppini 2008). At the same time, while it was a point of reference for Italian militants, the superiority of the Yugoslav model also had ambivalences. Proud of their revolutionary successes, Yugoslav leaders admonished their Italian comrades for not having followed a revolutionary path, and for having accepted bourgeois democracy within the framework of the national unity government. They reproached the pci for not aligning themselves explicitly enough with the socialist camp and against the capitalist camp. When the pci was finally ousted from the national government in 1947, it seemed to prove that Togliatti’s line of “progressive democracy” had failed. During the first meeting of the Cominform in September 1947, therefore, “Edvard Kardelj criticized the pci for its wartime acceptance of party parity in the clns [National Liberation Committee], for not trying to seize power at the end of the war, for failing to secure key ministries in the Italian government, for excessive observance of parliamentary rules, and for eschewing the “two-camp” line” (Terzuolo 1985: 221). The great pride and the sense of superiority displayed by the Yugoslav delegations would generate a lot of resentment among militants active in Italy. Marisa Rodano recalled during our interview that during the first widf congress in Paris, Yugoslav women appeared “loaded with medals”. She associated Yugoslav women’s 1945 display of pride with Yugoslav communists subsequently condemning, in 1947, the Italian Communist Party, “for not having accomplished a revolution, while they [the Yugoslavs] had!”62 A similar superior attitude was remembered by Vinka Kitarović, who in her interview recalled how, upon her return to Yugoslavia, her resistance struggle in Italy was not taken seriously, since it did not seem possible to put the two resistance movements on the same level.63 In time, the Yugoslav revolutionary model would become problematic for Italian militants since it proved unfeasible in their own country. Italy, in fact, had been koliko je patnji potrebno da budemo zaista slobodni kao sto ste vi u vašoj sretnoj domovini. Pozdravi sve drugarice u Jugoslaviji s kojima nas, italijanske radnice, veze isti ideal: mir i sloboda.’” Published in Žena Danas, n. 51, nov-dec 1947. Državni Arhiv, Zagreb, hr-hda-kdaž -1234-147. 61 Interventions by Luciana Viviani, Pina Palumbo and Laura Weiss (wrongly transcribed as Luiza Weiss), ii afž Congress minutes, in Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, Fond Antifašistički Front Žena Jugoslavije (1942-1953) 141-2-683 ; 141-2-906 ; 141-2-908. 62 Interview with Marisa Rodano, 16th of December 2009. 63 Interview with Vinka Kitarović, 6th of April 2011. 134 �assigned to the Western sphere of influence during the Yalta conference.64 These tensions between the Italian and the Yugoslav communist parties over the correct political line to adopt led to conflict in the Italo-Yugoslav border area (Karlsen 2010), and particularly in the struggle for the contested city of Trieste (see next section). They will become even more explicit after the expulsion of Yugoslavia from Cominform in 1948, as I will show in Chapter 5. 3 . The Italo-Yugoslav border area as a microcosm of Cold War battles After having highlighted the international activities of the udi and the afž within the framework of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, I’d like to focus in this section on antifascist women’s organizations in the Italo-Yugoslav border area, notably the Union of Italian and Slovene women (udais – asižz) in Trieste. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the conflict over the definition of Italo-Yugoslav borders in the Second World War aftermath soon became a battle for the redefinition of Western and Soviet spheres of influence in Southern and South-Eastern Europe. Between 1945 and 1954, therefore, Trieste becomes a “microcosm” of Cold War ideological and national struggles (Valdevit 1986). I will not go here into detailed discussions of Cold War international and national political actors, which have been extensively covered by different scholars (Karlsen 2010; Novak 1970; Terzuolo 1986). What is important to note here is that the contested settlement of national borders has produced prevailing “national-patriotic historiographies” and divided memories on both the Italian and the Slovenian sides (Verginella 2006); moreover, these readings have been further complicated by the ideological anti-communist shift of 1989, and by the coupling of nationalist and anti-communist labels in revisionist discourses (the widespread usage of the label “Slavo-communist” in contemporary Italian rightwing publications being the most evident example).65 At the same time, the post-Cold War context and the increase in transnational scholarly exchanges opened up possibilities for cross-border critical dialogues among historians.66 Journals and scholarly publications have started to focus on the social 64 For a reconstruction of the relationship between the Italian Communist Party and Moscow, see Pons (2001). Pons refers to the fact that the Yugoslavs exerted pressure on the pci for a more radical position at the beginning of 1948, while the Soviet Union excluded the possibility of a Communist insurrection (2001: 20-21). 65 The stories of communist men and women in the Julian Region – and notably in Trieste – have largely been interpreted within this framework, underlying Moscow’s control over the Italian Communist Party at the expense of national interests, but also emphasized “Slavic betrayal” of Italian antifascists (Di Gianantonio 2006) as well as the crimes committed by Yugoslav partisans at Italy’s Oriental border. See footnote 30, chapter 1. Similar debates about partisan killings of collaborationist and nationalist forces in 1945 took place in post-Yugoslav successor states in the 1990s. See Verginella (2006). 66 A notable example of cross-border cooperation among historians is the work of a commission of Italian and Slovenian historians (Commissione mista storico-culturale italo-slovena), which worked from 1993 until 2000 to produce a joint historical report on the Italo-Slovenian 135 �and cultural production of “divided memories” in the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Julian Region, and on the effects of these divisions on the everyday lives of its inhabitants (Di Gianantonio 2006; Gombač 2007; Verginella 2006). Historians have recently started to deal with the importance of gender divisions in the border area, in connection with pressing ethnic, national and ideological divisions (Sluga 2001 and 1994). Some initial reconstructions of women’s lives and women’s forms of political participation in the border area have also been published (Troha 2007; Rossi et al. 2004; Di Gianantonio 2007). In this section I propose to contribute to these discussions from the perspective of a gender studies scholar, focusing on how competing ideological and political discourses were gendered, as well as on the way in which local internationalist women’s organizations played a significant – and highly political – role in Cold War disputes. At the same time, I aim to situate women’s organizations in the Italo-Yugoslav border area within the larger framework of the relation between antifascist and left-wing women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia, looking in particular at the connections and interactions between the Union of Italian and Slovene women (udais/asižz) of Trieste, the Union of Italian Women in Italy (udi), the Antifascist Women’s Front in Yugoslavia (afž), and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). Through this transnational framework, I hope to show that discourses of Fascism and antifascism in Trieste, and of communism and anticommunism, were part of larger divides that crossed Europe during and after the Second World War. While I do not wish to undermine the importance of post-Cold War studies of communist violence in the region (see notably Ballinger 2003), I am also wary of an exclusive focus on communist violence, which obscures the long-standing consequences of Fascism and of Nazi-fascist warfare in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. Without keeping in mind the local effects of Fascist violence and of the Second World War as a European total war, it is difficult to understand the importance of communist and socialist utopias for the antifascist generation living at the Italo-Yugoslav border, and notably the fascination with the Yugoslav model of “people’s democracy” for the Slovene and working class Italian inhabitants of Trieste (see Sluga 2001). In the next sections women’s organizing in the contested city of Trieste will be addressed in detail. 3.1. For a Yugoslav Trieste: the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (udais) The city of Trieste was liberated from Nazi-fascist forces by the Yugoslav partisan army , who managed to enter the city before the New Zealand Allied troops, on the border area, in order to create a shared memory of historical events related to the border area. The report (2000), however, was scarcely diffused in Italy and Slovenia. The Italian version of the report is available here: http://www.storicamente.org/01_fonti/archivio_2-2006.htm (last accessed 22.4.2012). 136 �1st of May 1945. This action corresponded to the wish of the communist Yugoslav government to secure the position of the city within the Yugoslav Federation, in the hope that the military annexation would also guarantee a political transfer of Trieste to Yugoslavia. Forty days later, nonetheless, the Yugoslav troops were forced to leave after a series of negotiations with the Allied troops. The border region was divided into the area surrounding Trieste, placed under Allied Military Government, and the area to the South of Trieste, including part of Istria, assigned to Yugoslav control (these later became zone A and B of the Free Territory of Trieste or tlt). See Novak (1970) and Karlsen (2010). Because of its Slovene population and because of its strategic position on the Adriatic Sea, the city of Trieste assumed a mythical status for the Slovene liberation forces.67 The inclusion of Trieste within the Yugoslav Federation was seen as a gesture of national liberation from the previous Italian Fascist oppressor, so that even politically moderate Slovenes joined the Liberation Front for patriotic reasons. At the same time, the majority of the local working class Italian population welcomed the idea of a socialist “popular government” under Yugoslavia.68 Since 1945, the local Italian and Slovene communist party sections were, in fact, joined and replaced by the pcrg or kpjk, the Communist Party of the Julian Region. In 1945 the Trieste communist party section declared itself in favour of the annexation of Trieste to Yugoslavia, even though some local members did not agree. During the war, the leadership of the Italian Communist Party had tried to to negotiate with the Yugoslav leaders in an attempt to counter the Yugoslav unilateral decision to annex Trieste. Nevertheless, the pci could not counter the hegemony of Yugoslav communists in the border area (Terzuolo 1985; Karlsen 2010). It is in this context, that the Union of Antifascist Italo-Slovene Women (udais/ asižz)69 was founded in the summer of 1945. This mixed organization was founded after the uais, the Antifascist Italo-Slovene Union, and after the Sindacati Unici, the Unified Trade Union, two “front” organizations linked to the Communist Party of the Julian Region, which included the Italian and Slovene workers and activists. These organizations were supposed to implement the politics of brotherhood and unity among different nationalities in the Julian Region, that is brotherhood and unity among Italian and Slovene inhabitants. The politics of brotherhood had already come into being during the antifascist Resistance, in which Italian and Slovene antifascist activists had fought together under Yugoslav command in the Julian Region. According to Glenda Sluga (2001: 71-72) “(…) brotherhood became the most distinctive feature of memories of the Liberation Front and its political meaningful67 About the importance of Trieste for the Slovene population and for Slovene communists, see Verginella (2007); Godeša (2007); Troha (2006). 68 See Sluga (2001); Troha (2006) and (2007). 69 Throughout the thesis I make use of the Italian acronym of the organization, which was the most commonly used in local publications. The Slovenian acronym, asižz or siažz (Antifašisticne Slovensko-Italijanske Ženske Zveze) was rarely used in Trieste. When referring to the organization Slovene militants used most often the earlier formula of “afž Trst” (Antifascist Women’s Front of Trieste). 137 �ness. During the war Italo-Slovene brotherhood entailed, and allowed, redefinition of what it meant to be Slovene (i.e., being able or choosing to speak the Slovene language in public), and Italian (i.e., being able to identify as Italian and antifascist). It also appealed to women (…).” The politics of Italo-Slovene brotherhood were indeed very important to redefine national and gendered identities, but I would argue that we need a more nuanced and critical assessment of their outcomes. These political practices were generally implemented in a top-down manner, and contained implicit hierarchical assumptions about national feelings and belongings, with Italian national sentiments being identified as negative and reactionary, and Slovene national sentiments being identified as progressive and righteous, thus portraying the solution of a Yugoslav Trieste as the only acceptable one. In August 1945, a first unified meeting took place between Slovene and Italian militants previously affiliated to the afž, the Antifascist Women’s Front of the Trieste region, and the dat, Antifascist Triestine Women.70 In the Trieste area, antifascist women’s organizing during the war and immediate postwar years followed the Yugoslav model of the Antifascist Women’s Front, and the Trieste activists had no contact with the Union of Italian Women until 1945.71 Although they supported the Yugoslav agenda until 1948, the leaders of the udais were affiliated to the Women’s International Democratic Federation as an independent organization, since they were formally part of an independent territory, the Free Territory of Trieste. The udais existed not only in Trieste but also in the rest of the Julian Region under Allied Administration, notably in the cities of Gorizia and Monfalcone. According to Nevenka Troha (2007), this organization had 3150 members in Gorizia in June 1946, and 19.700 members in the area between Trieste and Monfalcone in June 1946. In March 1948, it had 45.000 members in total. The organization’s main aim was to mobilize women in favor of Trieste becoming the Seventh Republic of the socialist Yugoslav Federation. This was notably the case during the visit of the Inter-Allied Commission in 1946, which had to decide upon the fate of the Italo-Yugoslav border settlement. At the same time, in order to gain consensus among women, the organization had to address their needs and interests, and to demonstrate that their everyday lives would be better under a socialist regime. The organization, therefore, combined “feminine work” (assistance to women and children, festivities, commemorations, economic mobilizations against high prices etc.) with political agitation and propaganda about local and global politics. The minutes of the meetings of the udais accordingly show not only how Cold War discourses in Trieste were gendered and ethnicized, but also how women themselves were conscious producers of political and ideological discourses in the imme70 Trieste, 23 Agosto 1945, Verbale della prima riunione del comitato cittadino unificato delle donne antifasciste triestine, in nsk Trieste, fond asižz-udais, box udi-zži. 71 This is also reflected in the location of the archival sources. Most of the udais documents, even those in Italian, are, in fact, located in the Slovenian National Archive in Ljubljana, or in the Slovene Library in Trieste, even though Italian and Italo-phone women were part of the organization. The material about the udais in Ljubljana and Trieste is classified quite loosely, but I will attempt to provide the most detailed archival information in this section. 138 �diate postwar period, contributing to the emerging Cold War divide. The battle for the transformation of Trieste into the Seventh Yugoslav Republic was placed within the general global struggle between capitalist imperialism and socialist progressive democracy. I will give here some examples of the discourses concerning international politics that were circulating within the udais meetings and congresses. During a udais Central Committee Meeting in Monfalcone in October 1945, for instance, [c]omrade Romea gives a political overview showing how Europe today is divided in two Democracies: 1) Popular Democracy, coming from the East, illuminating all the Balkans with a new light, with peace and work and reconstruction, giving land to the peasants and raising the wages of the workers (…); 2) Imperialist Democracy coming from the West, which has a number of consequences in our Region, of which we can see some examples: strikes, lay-offs, higher prices, a life that is not very satisfactory for the popular masses.72 Italy and Yugoslavia are positioned very differently in this struggle between progressive and reactionary forces worldwide. According to udais leaders, “the Italian reaction is the avant-garde of international reaction, while Yugoslavia is the advanced point of Progressive Democracy that has been established in the East.” The Julian Region is the “meeting point” of these forces, and is at the center of the “ruthless war” between the forces of “progress, which want the further advancement of Democracy, and the forces of Regress, who want to maintain their position.”73 As explained in another meeting by udais leader Marija Bernetić74: 72 “La compagna Romea da uno sguardo politico illustrando come al giorno d’oggi l’Europa si è divisa in due Democrazie. 1°) Democrazia Popolare, che viene da Oriente illuminando tutti i balcani con una nuova luce, pace e lavoro, e ricostruzione, dando le terre ai contadini e aumentando i salari degli operai, adeguando così la paga settimanale con il sistema di vita. 2° Democrazia Imperialistica che viene da Occidente, che porta pure delle conseguenze nella nostra Regione dal fatto che abbiamo pure degli esempi, scioperi sospensioni aumento di prezzi, una vita non molto soddisfacente per la massa popolare.” Comitato Centrale dais Monfalcone, 10.10.45, Ljubljana, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze. box 1, folder iia. 73 “L’affermazione della vera Democrazia nella nuova Jugoslavia ha smascherato e disarmato completamente la propaganda reazionaria, ed oggi possiamo dire che, come la reazione italiana è l’avanguardia della reazione internazionale così la Jugoslavia è la punta avanzata della Democrazia Progressista che si è affermata in Oriente. Nella Regione Giulia punto d’incontro di queste forze si assiste alla guerra accanità che essi si combattano (sic), quelle del progresso vogliono l’Ulteriore avanzata della Democrazia, quelle del Regresso vogliono mantenere le proprie posizioni.” udais Monfalcone, 17.12.45. Ljubljana, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze, box 1, folder 1, Glavni odbor afž Trst. 74 Marija Bernetić (1902-1993), was born in Trieste in a working class Slovenian family. Since her early youth she took part in anti-war demonstrations and in the strikes that followed World War I. In 1921 she adhered to the Communist Party of Italy and she became a party organizer among women and the youth. From 1927 she was repeatedly arrested by the Fascist authorities, until she went into exile in France in 1933. For years she maintained antifascist networks 139 �The reactionaries don’t want to give Trieste to Yugoslavia since they know that it would mean giving it to Russia. Trieste within the Yugoslav state would have an amazing future; it would become the harbor of the whole of central Europe. But through its harbor not only trade would come out, but also the progressive democratic idea that would expand everywhere, first of all in Italy itself, where, given the hard economic conditions, it would find a fertile terrain.75 To annex Trieste to Italy, a “defeated nation”, would, according to udais militants, be an injustice towards the Slovene population, since “this Slovene nation has fought for four years, as the only democratic base of the (Italian) empire.”76 It would mean “the continuation of the injustices suffered for over 25 years by the two peoples, Italian and Slovene, with disastrous consequences and with the loss of the rights which these two peoples in this land have already gained.”77 By “rights” they mean the institutions of “popular power” established by the Yugoslav partisans during the forty days of administration of the city. The establishment of the Free Territory of Trieste in 1946 is described by udais militants as an imperialist maneuver, and the Allied Military Government on the zone A of the territory as a dangerous imperialist colony in the Adriatic. A brochure published for the Women’s Day of 1947 states that the amg “treats our population in the same way that Anglo-American imperialism is accustomed to consider and treat the colonial population.”78 Triestine antifascists, therefore, cannot but wish for the between Italy and France, and in 1939 she was arrested and tortured, and imprisoned until September 1943, when she managed to return to Trieste. She joined the partisans first in Trieste and then in Slovenia. In 1945 she was among the leaders of the pcrg and a founder of udais. She took part in widf conferences in Prague, Budapest and Moscow between 1946 and 1949. 75 “La reazione vuole creare qui uno stato cuscinetto che sarebbe altrettanto, se non più pericoloso della nostra annessione all’Italia. La reazione non vuole dare Trieste alla Jugoslavia perché sa che significa darla alla Russia. Trieste incorporata nello stato jugoslavo avrebbe un avvenire grandioso, diverebbe il porto per tutta l’Europa centrale. Ma attraverso il suo porto non uscirebbe solo il traffico mercantile, ma pure l’idea democratica progressista che si espanderebbe ovunque, ma in primo luogo in Italia stessa, ove date le sue condizioni economiche difficili, troverebbe terreno fertile. Questo soprattutto teme la reazione e vuole impedire ad ogni costo.” Riunione dais 27.08.45. nsk Trieste, fond asizz-udais, box 2, folder “Poročila Sej”. 76 “L’Italia è un paese vinto! (…) Sarebbe una somma ingiustizia far pagare a questo popolo sloveno il peso delle avventure fasciste nel mentre come giustamente disse il nostro compagno Kardelj, questa nazione slovena, ha combattuto per quattro anni, come l’unica base democratica dell’impero (italiano).” Riunione udais 18.05.45.nsk Trieste, fond asižz-udais, box 2, folder “Poročila Sej”. 77 “L’ annessione di queste terre all’Italia significherebbe dunque la continuazione delle ingiustizie sopportate per oltre un quarto di secolo dai due popoli italiano e sloveno con consequenze disastrose per tutti e due e con la perdita di diritti, che questi due popoli su questa terra li hanno già conseguiti.” (sic) Commissione di Lavoro dais Trieste, 2.09.45. nsk Trieste, fond asižz-udais, box 2, folder “Poročila Sej”. 78 Il Governo Militare Alleato “tratta la nostra popolazione come l’imperialismo anglo-americano è abituato a considerare e trattare le popolazioni coloniali”, opuscolo “Alle donne del territorio libero di Trieste”, p.14. Trieste, Istituto Saranz, fondo Marija Bernetić, Busta 2 “Questione 140 �inclusion of Trieste within the socialist camp, rather than keeping the city in Italy, a reactionary country that has lost the war: “With Trieste as Seventh Autonomous State, we’ll adhere to Yugoslavia, not to become Slovenes, but to be truly Italian, finally free; and our victory will weaken the reactionary forces of the world, making it possible for the democratic forces, especially the Italian ones, to follow us on the road of justice and freedom.”79 Here the idea that Italian antifascist forces should learn from the Yugoslav experience , and that so far they haven’t managed to follow the right revolutionary path emerges again. In the udais documents, Italian women are described as more “backward”, and invited to take Slovene women as an example, since they are more “experienced” in the revolutionary struggle. While Yugoslav national demands are portrayed as a legitimate compensation for their suffering under fascism, and are equated with the advancement of socialism, Italian national feelings are by definition reactionary. In another 1946 document, we read: [T]he national feeling expressed today by the Slavic peoples cannot be classified as a chauvinistic feeling. Rather, it expresses the attachment of those peoples to the fruits of their revolution, to the new world that has emerged from the sacrifices and the effort of millions of people. Oppositely, the nationalism coming from the Italian side must be condemned. It is a damaging feeling, since it leads the people to defend a world that is long gone.80 The Italian Resistance is recognized, but only as subordinated, and as faulty in its lack of radicalism: “Fascism has been defeated in Italy through the people’s participation in the liberation struggle, but the fight had not been fought decisively enough to bring the people into power. This, instead, had happened here [in Trieste] and in Yugoslavia it is already a bright reality.”81 femminile”. For an analysis of the diaries of amg chiefs and of their views on the local political situation, see Sluga (2002). 79 Noi con Trieste 7° Stato Autonomo, aderiremo alla Jugoslavia, non per diventare sloveni, ma per essere italiani veri; finalmente liberi; e con la vittoria nostra indebolirà le forze reazionarie del mondo, dando così la possibilità a tutte quelle democratiche e specialmente quelle italiane di seguirci sulla via della giustizia e della libertà.” Riunione uais 5.11.45. Ljubljana, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze, box 1, folder iia. 80 “(…) il sentimento nazionale che oggi manifestano i popoli slavi non può esser classificato quale sentimento sciovinista. Esso esprime null’altro che l’attaccamento di questi popoli ai frutti della loro rivoluzione, a quel mondo nuovo che è sorto dai sacrifici e dalla volontà di milioni di persone. All’opposto il nazionalismo da parte italiana deve esser condannato quale sentimento dannoso perché porta il popolo a difendere un mondo ormai tramontato.” nsk Trieste, box afž – zsz – dat, third folder, “Programma che dovrà servire nelle riunioni per preparare le donne per il congresso regionale”, no date (probably 1946). 81 “Se il fascismo è stato abbattuto in Italia con il concorso del popolo nella lotta di liberazione, dall’altro canto questa lotta non è stata condotta tanto decisamente da portare il popolo al potere, ciò che invece qui da noi era già avvenuto e in Jugoslavia è ora luminosa realtà.” Ibidem. 141 �These examples demonstrate the importance of udais mobilizations within the contest for a Yugoslav, socialist Trieste. In the case of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, women’s organizations were directly engaged in the production of Cold War communist discourses and imageries, which opposed Eastern popular democracies to Western imperialist democracies. A women’s organization like the udais played an active role in the reproduction of everyday Cold War discourses at the local level. In the next section I will consider the way in which these discourses about the superiority of the socialist system were gendered, and how discourses about women’s emancipation were formulated in postwar Trieste. 3.2. “Let’s learn how to talk”: women’s class-based activism in a multi-  ethnic city Unlike it did for the udi and the afž, the issue of international politics dominated the agenda of the udais from 1945 onwards. At the same time, udais leaders also had the task of raising an interest in politics among the “base” of peasant and working-class women, and of reaching them by showing how they could benefit from political activism. Meanwhile, socialist discourses about women’s emancipation and women’s political rights circulated between Trieste, Rome and Belgrade, notably the discourse of social motherhood and women’s rights, portrayed as a special achievement of socialist “people’s democracies”, but at the same time as a universal democratic development that could interest Italy as well. Furthermore, in Trieste the idea of women’s emancipation is coupled with the idea of social justice and multi-ethnic tolerance and coexistence, giving rise to demands for gender, class and ethnic equality. The multi-ethnic character of the city is reflected in Trieste’s most important communist female leaders, two very different and remarkable women: Marija Bernetić (1902-1993), a Slovene militant of working class background, who had been involved in revolutionary activities in France and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, and Laura Weiss (1914-1987), an upper class Jewish doctor, who became involved in the communist party during the Resistance.82 They often participated in widf conferences as udais representatives, and played a very important role in Cold War intra-communist battles after 1948 (see next chapter). Already 82 Laura Weiss (1933-1989) was part of the Trieste Jewish bourgeoisie, and had been persecuted with her family since the Italian Fascist Race Laws of 1938. After the war she was involved in the Trieste communist party and in trade unionism, together with her father Ernesto, a natural scientist and teacher. Trained as a medical doctor, Laura Weiss strongly engaged in social work and in struggles for women’s emancipation and antiracism. In 1949 she was elected as communist party representative for the local council, and became a prominent figure in foreign politics, representing the Partito Comunista del Territorio Libero di Trieste (Communist Party of the Free Territory of Trieste, pctlt) at different international meetings. She was also part of udais, and in 1949 was elected in the widf Council. Close to party boss Vittorio Vidali, she became his partner and after his death she was the curator of his personal archive. See Andri et al, 2007. 142 �as a director of the udais journal “Donne”, Laura Weiss shows her engagement with women’s rights, but also against racism and anti-Semitism.83 Communist female leaders were assigned “work among women” by the party in order to win over women’s consensus (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 6); in the 1945 reports of udais meetings in the different localities of zone A, we read some reflections on the need for the organization to be less “political”, and to abandon the underground, clandestine attitude used during the Resistance, in order to open itself to the masses. The lack of skilled activists was a problem, as it was in the afž and the udi at the time. Another major difficulty was the fact that Slovene and Italian female militants had to work together; within the udais internal reports there are a number of remarks about the difficulty with which the Slovene and Italian militants abandoned “sectarianism” and implemented real “brotherhood”. Moreover, the udais needed to overcome the mistrust of the local population, suspicious as it was of authoritarian organizational forms experienced under Fascism. In a report from November 1945, we read that “[t] he female workers are wary of the organizations because they had bad experiences under Fascism, where they were forced to participate like puppets. The do not yet understand the difference between the Fascist regime and our organizations.”84 Already in October 1945, it became clear that “…it is no longer possible to interest and keep the women active only with the political issues, they want something more today: they want to learn.”85 The udais leaders realized that women’s everyday lives could not be improved only by focusing on international politics, but that they had to take into account women’s basic needs. In 1945 Trieste, wartime destruction, political uncertainty and the stationing of foreign troops had contributed to cause a number of urgent problems: high food and accommodation prices, the widespread migration of local inhabitants and women’s prostitution, notably among war widows (Nemec 2006). The crossing of racial and class boundaries through prostitution generated moral anxieties among the local population.86 Having interiorized the idea of women’s equality through their experiences in the antifascist Resistance, the most active militants gradually developed some forms of gender-solidarity with the working class and peasant women they tried to reach. 83 In order to reconstruct the activities of the udais, I have worked on the Weiss and Bernetić personal collections at the Istituto Livio Saranz in Trieste. As mentioned earlier, most of the minutes of udais meetings are held in the Ljubljana state archives and in the Slovenian library of Trieste. 84 “Le operaie si tengono discoste dalle organizzazioni perché hanno avuto brutte esperienze col fascismo, ove erano obbligate di parteciparvi come marionette. Non comprendono ancora la differenza fra il regime fascista e le nostre organizzazioni.” Commissione di Lavoro dais Trieste, 2.09.45.nsk Trieste, fond asižz-udais, box 2, folder “Poročila Sej”. 85 “Si constata che non è più possibile interessare e tenere attivizzate le donne con le sole questioni politiche. Esse oggi vogliono qualcosa di più, vogliono istruirsi.” Resoconto colloquio con le responsabili di Fiume, 2.10.45. nsk Trieste, folder udi-zži. 86 In a local dais report from the village of Selz (written by a male militant), women are reproached to prefer rich men and “all the races of soldiers” to the honest worker or the people’s hero who has no money or job. Ljubljana. as 1576. Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze. Box 1, folder iia. 143 �They were aware of the problems that needed to be addressed, such as “those of mothers and children, accommodation, prostitution, abortion, etc.” (Note that the issue of abortion is explicitly mentioned here, while this was not the case for the rest of Italy in 1945).87 As in the case of the udi and the afž, addressing “feminine” topics could allow the left to gain a broader consensus among women. For this, they decided to gather documents and brochures from the women’s organizations in Belgrade, Milan and Rome, in order to study them and thus be able to address the issues that most interest women.88 Even if expressed in a top-down manner, therefore, these discourses were progressive at the time, and were attempting to respond to the demands of the base. During a political meeting in the harbor city of Monfalcone in January 1946, a militant noted: “what can be observed among women and even among the working class inhabitants of the suburbs is that there is a great need to learn and become educated.”89 The lack of suitable cadres, however, made it difficult to meet this need. It was acknowledged that if a greater number of women who could “speak, write, and organize” much more could be accomplished . Of course, the issue of education cannot be disconnected from the issue of socialist agitation. In another undated udais report, we read that in order not to allow reactionary elements to rule the people, women have to be aware of everyday politics, read newspapers and brochures, follow conferences, so that “little by little you will all become activists, all conference-makers, in the streets and in the squares, wherever you will hear people talking against our democracy.”90 The Soviet and the Yugoslav model of women’s equality were evoked as something that could be applied within the local context too, if Trieste became the Seventh Yugoslav Republic. The emancipation of women was described as a crucial mean to preparing the advent of a future socialist society: “Tomorrow, when the people will have the power, we will need women who are good workers, good technicians, who 87 Resoconto colloquio con le responsabili di Fiume, 2.10.45. nsk Trieste, folder udi-zži. 88 Ibidem. 89 “Si osserva tra le donne e persino tra le popolane dei sobborghi della città un grande bi- sogno d’apprendere e d’istruirsi; esse leggono con grande interesse i giornali e con grande interesse partecipano pure alle riunioni. Esse stesse riconoscono che si potrebbe fare molto di più se si avessero maggiori quadri, se si avesse cioè un maggior numero di donne capaci di parlare, di scrivere, d’organizzare.” dais Monfalcone, 4.1.46, report 6.1.46, Ljubljana, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze. Box 2, folder 2 A. 90 “Di questo le donne dovranno essere ben sicure per non permettere che altri elementi reazionari vadano al potere e come prima ci amministrino, ecco la necessità di coltivarsi, d’essere al corrente dei fatti giornalieri, e questo attraverso la lettura dei giornali, degli opuscoli che voi troverete sempre nelle nostre biblioteche, attraverso le riunioni, le conferenze tenute dai nostri compagni i quali ampiamente vi illustrano l’attuale situazione in modo che voi saprete rispondere a tutte le voci emmesse dai rezionari e così un po’ alla volta diverrete tutte attiviste, tutte conferenziere e questo nelle strade, nelle piazze, dovunque sentirete parlare contro la nostra democrazia.” Document “Necessità della collaborazione della donna nella lotta politica”, no date, Ljubljana, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovansko-italijanske antifašistične ženske zveze. Box 2, folder 2 A. 144 �know how to work as journalists, who are good surgeons and engineers; this means that we should get them interested in these things already today.”91 As was the case for the udi and the afz in the immediate postwar period (see chapter 3), discourses about social motherhood and welfare had an important part in discussions about socialism. During a meeting in the harbor city of Monfalcone in January 1946, the benefits of the welfare provisions in the new Yugoslav Constitution were explained to the local women, highlighting how working mothers would continue to receive their salary three months before and three months after giving birth. “The comrade says that in the countries where there is a popular government, and a regime of healthy democracy, the woman does not have to worry any longer about becoming a mother, but she can wait, serene and calm, tasting the joy of her motherhood, because she knows that at the right moment she and her child will be taken care of.”92 As in udi and afž documents and speeches, the idea of social motherhood, that is, motherhood as a social phenomenon that is protected by the state (see chapter 3), coexisted with the idea that women should get an education and should be equal to men in the public sphere. The protection of women’s roles as wives and mothers in the private sphere was coupled with women’s equal political and social rights in the public sphere (right to vote, equal pay for equal work etc.), in formulations similar to those of the afž and udi on these issues. Women’s emancipation was thus defined as follows: “With emancipation we do not mean to make the woman the rival of the man, or his competitor, but rather to make her a free, conscious individual, active in the family life, in the social life as well as in the life of the state.” An emancipated woman was thus “a conscious mother, a companion of the man and not an eternal minor.” 93 We can perceive in this definition the long-standing anxiety of women’s socialist organizations to distance themselves from liberal feminism. At the same time, certain articles in udais’ magazine Donne [Women] – directed at the time by Laura Weiss – are extraordinarily progressive not only in terms of gender relations, but also in terms “Domani, quando il popolo sarà al potere, noi avremo bisogno di donne che siano brave operaie, brave tecniche, che sappiano fare del giornalismo, che siano chirurghe e ingegneri e a queste cose noi dobbiamo interessarle già ora” (sic). nsk Trieste, resoconto colloquio con le responsabili di Fiume, 2.10.45 92 “La compagna dice che nei paesi dove ci sono i poteri popolari, dove c’è un regime di sana democrazia la donna non ha più quella preoccupazione che provava nel momento in cui sarebbe divuta madre ma bensì può attendere serena e calma gustando tutta la gioia della sua maternità perché sa che al momento opportuno ci sarà chi penserà a lei e al suo bambino.” dais Monfalcone, meeting 4.1.46, report 6.1.46, Ljubljana, as 1576, Glavni Odbor Slovanskoitalijanske antifašistične ženske zveze. Box 2, folder 2 A. Note that this argument is very similar to the one advanced by Vida Tomšić during the first afž Congress, see Chapter 3. 93 “Con emancipazione noi non intendiamo far della donna una rivale dell’uomo, oppure una sua concorrente, bensì di renderla individuo libero, cosciente, attivo nella vita famigliare, nella vita sociale come in quella dello Stato. La donna deve divenire innanzitutto madre cosciente dei suoi compiti, compagna dell’uomo e non eterna minorenne (…).” sk Trieste, box afž – zsz – dat, third folder, “Programma che dovrà servire nelle riunioni per preparare le donne per il congresso regionale”, no date (probably 1946). 91 145 �of class and ethnic divisions. The magazine – modeled after the Slovenian women’s journal Nasa Žena – was published from May 1946 to the spring of 1948. It contained political articles on widf, udi and afž congresses, but did not make any explicit reference to Trieste as Seventh Yugoslav Republic. Most of the pages were dedicated to women’s everyday lives and to entertainment, with news reports and colorful illustrations about cinema and art, fashion tips, recipes, sewing models, and practical suggestions on how to raise children and decorate the house. It also contained extraordinarily progressive pages about women’s bodily hygiene, and some instructions on physical exercise. A 1947 editorial piece by Laura Weiss deserves to be quoted at length, since it highlights the way in which demands for women’s equality resonated with antiracist and socialist demands, finally creating an extraordinary manifesto against all forms of essentialism. The editorial is titled “Impariamo a parlare” (“Let’s learn how to talk”). I translate here an extensive part of Weiss’s editorial: Have you ever heard someone saying: “he’s a southerner, but a real gentleman”, “he’s a Slav but such a good person”, “he’s a worker, but seems very well educated”, “she’s a peasant but very refined”, “he’s a Jew but very generous”. Do you feel that this “but” is used in the right way? Does it not attribute something very despicable in the adjectives indicating the nationality, the social class, the religion of a person? I am persuaded that this “but”, dear friends, is terribly offensive. Without noticing, with the best intentions in the world, we lose in this way the confidence, the trust and the friendship of those surrounding us! As women perhaps we all felt more or less irritated by the usual phrase, “despite being a woman, she’s really good”, as if women were by definition inferior! Even worse when words that are used to indicate nationality, social class, sex, race, religion, are identified with their traditionally – and unjust – demeaning significance: Italian for fascist, Slavic for stubborn, Jewish for stingy, black and colored to mean inferior, peasant for ignorant, street sweeper for miserable, etc. All this expresses a very unjust prejudice. (…) Let’s see if we can demonstrate for once that a stereotype, partly positive, corresponds to the truth; people say that women are more sensitive than men; let’s demonstrate then that we know how to use this sensitivity here, when we have to fight not against thoughts, but against the evil words that divide us.94 This editorial is remarkable for a number of reasons. With a relatively accessible style, and without lecturing the readers, it tackles gender, racial and class prejudice all together, showing that these prejudices are already included in the labels that are used to indicate difference and otherness. While deconstructing women’s inferiority, the editorial targets the racism against Southerners, Slavs and Jews, as well as class prejudice towards workers and peasants. It also demarcates the definition of “Italian” from fascism, and criticizes race prejudices against black and colored people. Later in the 94 Laura Weiss, “Impariamo a parlare”, in Donne, August 1947. A collection of the udais journal Donne is available at Istituto Livio Saranz, Trieste. 146 �article, essentialist, racist words are described as “small atomic bombs” which destroy harmony and coexistence. As a talented politician, and as a dedicated doctor, Laura Weiss would play an important role in Trieste local politics, and in women’s organizing in the city (see Pacor 1991; see also Chapter 7). She would also take an active role in international politics and in the activities of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. While adhering to the communist party with conviction, she maintained her antiracist95 and anti-imperialist sensitivity, as well as her critical stance towards the bureaucratic decision-making of the communist leadership, notably during the de-Stalinization process (see Chapter 7). The stories of extraordinary antifascist women like Laura Weiss deserve to be rediscovered.96 In the early Cold War period, antifascist female leaders of women’s organizations were crucial in fostering the circulation of progressive ideas and images in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. Women’s access to education and to politics is enhanced through the publications of journals such as Donne. While instructing women about world culture and politics, and while responding to women’s everyday needs, essentialist ideas about women’s inferiority, as well as anti-Semitism, racism and class inequalities were denounced as backward and conservative. As Laura Weiss editorial and by number of articles in the journal Donne show, the udais contributed to diffusing the internationalist ideal of women’s emancipation across Cold War borders, together with demands for social justice and multi-ethnic coexistence. Conclusion This chapter dealt with the transnational activities of the udi, the afž, the udais and the Women’s International Democratic Federation in the period between the end of Second World War and the beginning of 1948. In it I have demonstrated that women were active participants in Cold War political struggles and divides. I have shown that women’s political engagements depended on a number of local, national and international factors, with important differences between the leadership and the rank-and-file members. The story of women’s transnational activism in the Cold War period, and of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, has been largely forgotten after 1989. In order to reconstruct a number of stories about women’s activism during the Cold War that had been largely silenced, I have translated and analyzed a variety of multilingual sources in this chapter, documenting multilateral and bilateral encounters across borders. These sources include transnational correspondence between Italian and Yu95 Thirty years after this editorial, in 1979, Weiss proposed an amendment the pci Statute, which declared that all citizens above 18 years old who accept the party program, “independently of race, religious faith, and philosophical convictions” could be members of the communist party. She proposed to eliminate the word “race”, a term “that is scientifically nonexistent or at least extremely equivocal when it comes to those belonging to the human species.” (Andri et al. 2007: 36). 96 About notable female figures in the post-1945 Italo-Yugoslav border area, see also the case of Ondina Peteani, Di Gianantonio (2007). 147 �goslav women’s organizations, and between these organizations and the widf, as well as internal reports, and the minutes of the udi, the afž and the widf congresses. I have also described the different stances of Italian and Yugoslav delegations at widf congresses after 1945. While Italian delegates had to “redeem” the name of their nation, dissociating it from Fascism, Yugoslav delegates were glorified as the model to be followed, since they had established a socialist republic at the end of a successful Resistance struggle. In this chapter, moreover, I have introduced the case of postwar Trieste, a contested city situated at the crossroads of the forthcoming East-West divide, and in which the divided ideological and national legacies of the Second World War intersected with new Cold War conflicts. The case of the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (udais) illustrates the gendered character of socialist discourses. In their campaigns for turning Trieste into the Seventh Yugoslav Republic (Settima Federativa), local female militants directly mobilized a utopian imagery equating socialism with women’s emancipation and welfare rights. udais militants became active promoters of the Soviet and Yugoslav “dreamworld” in Trieste, claiming that women’s equal rights, including women’s “social motherhood”, constituted an integral part of socialist “people’s democracies”. In the focus on the case study of Trieste, I have pointed once again at the differences between leaders and rank-and-file militants in political organizing. I have highlighted the mutual influences between local, national and international settings, as well as the interrelations between the udi, the afž, the udais and the widf in this chapter. In so doing, I have demonstrated that women’s antifascist organizations provided an important connection between East and West in the early Cold War period. Progressive ideas about women’s emancipation circulated across the Italo-Yugoslav border and across Cold War borders, together with utopian images of revolution and social justice. Even though they were part of overall Cold War narratives about the superiority of the socialist bloc, the Resolutions approved by the widf in the years 1945-1947 were crucial in promoting women’s equal rights in the different countries affiliated to the Federation, as well as in supporting civil rights movements and processes of decolonization in other parts of the world. The 1945 Resolution on the economic, juridical and social situation of women and the 1947 Resolutions on women in colonized countries and on Black women in the United States attest to the fact that in the late 1940s antifascist women’s organizations developed a multi-level, sophisticated critique of gender, race and class power relations. The article “Let’s learn how to talk” written by udais leader Laura Weiss equally indicates a deep awareness of gender, race, and class prejudices, and a deep commitment to realizing a more just society. In this chapter I have shown that while women’s organizations such as the udi, the afž, and the udais were crucial in promoting women’s rights in the postwar period, they maintained the hierarchical, top-down structure that was characteristic of the “democratic centralism” of the communist left during the Cold War period. This hierarchical top-down structure was strengthened with the increase in ideological polarizations in the late 1940s. In the next chapters, I will consider the impact of growing Cold War tensions on women’s internationalist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia, notably the wide-ranging impact of the 1948 Cominform Resolution excluding Yugoslavia from the socialist bloc. 148 �Chapter 5 From comrades to traitors: the Cominform Resolution of 1948 Introduction On the island, our minds had to be “enlightened” at all costs (…) They kept lecturing us, reading us articles talking of the evil doings of Stalin, of concentration camps, of ethnic cleansing. Before [the Soviet-Yugoslav split], even thinking about that would have been forbidden, since it would have been taken as a sign of hostility and treason. In short, we, the militants, had been mere clay, excluded from all information, and used by the leadership as they pleased. (Eva Grlić 2005: 165) In 1997, Eva Grlić, a woman who was unknown as a public figure, and “who had spent most of her life in the shadow of her more famous husband, Croatian philosopher Danko Grlić” (Lukić 2004: 175), published her autobiography with the simple title Sjećanja (Remembrances). The book, an outstanding personal and familial narrative intertwined with twentieth century history, was translated in Italian in 2005. Eva Grlić (1920-2008) was born Eva Izrael in Budapest. Her mother was from a Hungarian Ashkenazi Jewish family while her father was a Sephardi Bosnian. After the fall of the Hungarian Republic, she moved with her parents, sympathizers of Bela Kun, to Split and later to Sarajevo, her father’s the native city. A left-wing sympathizer, Eva was expelled from her high school in 1937 for exchanging letters with her boyfriend, who had joined the International Brigades in Spain. In 1938 Eva and her family moved to Zagreb, where she got a job a secretary in a textile factory and became involved in trade unions and revolutionary movements. She married and gave birth to a daughter, Vesna. In 1941 with the onset of the war, the Ustasha forces immediately killed her husband and her father, whom they targeted as political opponents (Lukić 2004: 182). During the war, Eva lost her parents, her husband, her grandmother and many other relatives in the Holocaust. She managed to survive by joining the partisans, and after the war she found herself alone with her small daughter. While working as a journalist on the editing board of the journal Naprijed, she met Danko Grlić1, her second husband. But their postwar family life was cut short by another major political event: the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the socialist bloc, and the wave of arbitrary 1 Danko Grlić (1923-1984), journalist and philosopher, became one of the founders of the journal Praxis in 1965 . About the vicissitudes of the Praxis group, see Sher (1977). 149 �political repression which followed. Both Eva and her husband were sent to the infamous prison camp Goli Otok, (the ‘Naked Island’), Danko for a few months and Eva for two years, between the end of 1950 and the beginning of 1953 (Grlić 2005: 153-173). Eva Grlić’s story is one of the few accounts by a woman about post-1948 political repression and about Goli Otok (Jambrešić-Kirin 2009; Lukić 2004). In this chapter I will analyse the consequences of the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948-1949 on Italian, Yugoslav and Italo-Slovene women’s organizations at the national, international and local levels. Following the Cominform Resolution, which expelled the Yugoslav Communist Party from the socialist bloc, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf) excluded the representatives of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž). As a result, the Union of Italian Women (udi) suspended its bilateral relations with the afž, as did all the other national branches of the Federation. The Cominform Resolution, therefore, had major repercussions not only for women’s organization in the Balkans, but also for the relationship between Italian and Yugoslav antifascist activists, as well as for activists living in the ItaloYugoslav border area; because of the fierceness of ideological polarizations within the communist bloc, the fights have been equated by left-wing militants involved in it to a modern “war of religion” 2, the consequences of which are still felt today, not only by those who lived through these events, but also in terms of the divided memories of Southern and South-Eastern Europe. In the first section of this chapter I address the impact of the Soviet-Yugoslav split on the position of the Yugoslav delegation within the Women’s International Democratic Federation, from the Resolution of June 1948 until the definitive expulsion from the Federation in the autumn of 1949. I analyze the transformations in the public discourse of Soviet leaders, and subsequently in that of the widf, which turned the previously acclaimed Yugoslav comrades into fascist collaborators and imperialist spies. Together with the Yugoslav authorities, afž leaders at first strived to show that the decision was based on misinformation, and they continued to claim their identities as brave antifascist fighters and attempted to defend the prestige of the Yugoslav government. When the decision became irrevocable, however, they started to voice a more severe critique of widf undemocratic procedures, denouncing Soviet hegemony over less powerful countries. In the second section of this chapter I deal with the issue of political repression, and notably with the Cold War construction of internal enemies within the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties and women’s organizations. Yugoslav leaders engaged in a fierce political repression against internal “Cominformists” (i.e. those who allegedly sided with the Soviet Union and attempted to overthrow Tito’s regime). I look at the experiences of women detained in political prison camps, and notably in the infamous Goli Otok prison camp. I also deal with the experiences of Italian militants who had migrated to socialist Yugoslavia and were finally arrested as “Cominformists” and sent to Goli Otok. On the basis of archival sources, I discuss the issue of afž leaders’ complicity in the ongoing political repression, and ordinary militants’ fear and indif2 See for instance the interview of Julij Beltram, transcription contained in Archivio Bonelli, irsml Trieste. 150 �ference towards sudden geopolitical changes. I also deal with the discursive and moral shaming of so-called “Titoists” within the ranks of the Italian Communist Party, and with the role of the Union of Italian Women in producing Cold War divides. In the last part of the second section I return to the context of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, and look at the dramatic impact of the 1948 Resolution on the leftist forces in Trieste, and in particular on the udais (Unione Donne Antifasciste ItaloSlovene), the multi-ethnic women’s organization federating progressive Italian and Slovene women. As a consequence of the Resolution, the udais split up into the pro-Cominform udd (Unione Donne Democratiche) and the feminine section of pro-Yugoslav usi (Unione Socialisti Indipendenti). Moreover, in Trieste these intracommunist “wars of religion” were entangled with nationalist discourses related to the conflict over the definition of the Italo-Yugoslav border, and over the contested status of the city. This highlights once again the specificity of the border area – but also the entanglement of international, national and local geopolitical factors. As in the previous chapter, my aim is to show that women took a significant part in Cold War struggles, and were active producers of Cold War discourses between East and West, to the point of complicity in processes of ‘othering’ and ideological enemy-making. The leaders of the afž, the udi and the udais took sides that were not necessarily determined by their gendered position, but rather by their political affiliation, their leadership position, and/or by their national and ethnic identities. The fact that in the midst of Cold War struggles, udi and afž leaders chose to side with their respective communist parties – and thus against each other – doesn’t deprive its members of political agency but rather highlights the complexity of antifascist women’s political loyalties in the postwar period. It also shows the effects of Cold War polarizations on the internationalist, antifascist “sisterhood” expressed by the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and highlights the non-homogeneity and the shifting character of left-wing women’s political identities and subjectivities in Cold War Europe. 1. The Soviet-Yugoslav split and its consequences on women’s internationalism 1.1. The First and Second Cominform Resolutions (June 1948 – November 1949) The First Cominform3 Resolution of the 28th of June 1948 – expelling Yugoslavia from the socialist bloc for “nationalist deviation” – marked the beginning of the SovietYugoslav conflict, and had a number of consequences for the rest of the Soviet satellite 3 The Cominform (Communist Information Bureau, called Informbiro in Yugoslavia) was founded in 1947, after the announcement by the United States of the Marshall Plan. The network was composed of the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Seen as the replacement of previous Comintern (or Third International, the communist coordination organ founded in 1919 and dissolved during World War ii), the Cominform lasted until 1956. It was dissolved during the de-Stalinization process in 1956. 151 �states. It was not until the 29th of November 1949, however, with the publication of the Second Cominform Resolution (significantly entitled “The Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the Power of Assassins and Spies”) that the break between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was definitive. Between June 1948 and November 1949 the Yugoslavs were still hoping to disprove Cominform accusations and to be readmitted to the socialist camp. From the autumn of 1949 onwards, however, the Yugoslav elite started to turn towards the West to overcome the economic blockade and political isolation. This period of uncertainty between the First and Second Resolution had important effects on women’s international encounters, as I will show in the next sections. Let us briefly recall here some historical elements that shed light on the historical significance of the 1948 and 1949 Resolutions, before analyzing its effects on women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia. The Soviet-Yugoslav split, the first rift in the Soviet bloc after World War Two, has been the object of extensive studies on the part of Cold War scholars4; it has also been at the center of relevant memoirs by Yugoslav communist leaders, notably Milovan Đilas (1962) and Edvard Kardelj (1982). This split seemed particularly surprising since, as described earlier, in the immediate aftermath of World War ii Yugoslavia appeared as a dutiful follower of Soviet policies, which included agrarian reform and five-year industrialization plans. The Yugoslav Communist Party even had a leading role in the first Cominform meeting.5 A number of divergences with Moscow, however, had already started to emerge during the war, when the Yugoslav partisans waged a revolutionary class struggle alongside the war of liberation; they resisted Stalin’s appeals for moderation after the Yalta agreement (see Banac 1988). It must be remembered that the Yugoslav communists’ seize of power was the only one that derived its legitimacy from a successful Resistance movement, rather than from Red Army support6, a posiSee notably Banac (1988); Bass and Marbury (1959); Ulam (1952); Vucinich (1982). As mentioned in Chapter 1, at the first autumn 1947 Cominform session in Poland, the Yugoslavs pronounced their infamous critique of the French and Italian communist parties’ reformism. In his Reminiscences, Kardelj (1982: 101) writes that he and Đilas formulated their critiques of the Italian and French Communist Parties upon the suggestion of the Soviets, and that Stalin plotted this in order to better isolate Yugoslavia later. This retrospectively apologetic view is denied by Perović (2007), who argues that until early 1948 there was no evident sign of conflict. Both Kardelj (1982) and Đilas (1962) offer a teleological narrative of progressive misunderstandings between Soviet and Yugoslav leaders in their memoirs, and downplay the Yugoslav leaders’ radicalism and pro-Soviet stance in the period that preceded the Cominform Resolution. 6 Milovan Đilas’ memoirs recall that since the war, Yugoslavia had been critical of the war rapes committed by Red Army soldiers in the Northeastern corner of Yugoslavia. When Đilas met Stalin in person shortly before the rift, Stalin allegedly legitimated the rapes with the following argument: “Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade – over thousands of kilometers of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones! How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his amusing himself with a woman, after such horrors?” (Đilas 1962: 102) Stalin criticized Yugoslavia for imagining the Red Army to be ideal: “One has to understand the soldier. The Red Army is not ideal. The important thing is that it fights Germans – and it is fighting them well; the rest doesn’t matter” 4 5 152 �tion different from other communist elites in Eastern Europe (with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia, where the communist party received considerable popular support in the first free elections). In the postwar era, the presence of Soviet experts and diplomats in Yugoslavia caused frictions; in their industrialization plans and land reform projects, moreover, the Yugoslav government refused to blindly apply Sovietstyle collectivization and anti-kulak measures to a population that was largely constituted of peasants.7 International politics were also a matter of controversy between Stalin and Tito, notably in relation to the Anglo-American Allies. After 1945, Yugoslavia insisted on supporting the Greek communists in the Greek civil war, and on annexing the city of Trieste, while Stalin was more intent on pleasing the Allies and respecting the division of territories as agreed in Yalta. Another matter of disagreement was Yugoslav independent foreign policies in the Balkans, notably their attempt to incorporate Albania in the Yugoslav Federation. Yugoslavia also established economic and political agreements with Bulgaria, in view of a possible Balkan Federation – a project that was supported by Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov. Stalin, therefore, was wary of Tito’s relative autonomy from Moscow, and saw what he perceived as the excessively radical attitude of the Yugoslav communists as a potential threat to relations with the Western Allies. Recent studies of ussr archives (Perović 2007) have substantially confirmed the main motives behind the conflict: Yugoslavia’s excessive independence from Moscow on internal and external matters, and notably diverging views on the issue of Trieste and on the Greek Civil War, as well as Yugoslavia’s attempt to become a regional force in the Balkans, are all cited as reasons for the split. Other recent studies have highlighted the perspective of the United States on this rift. In August 1946, the Yugoslavs shot down a us Military plane, killing the four officers on board, and the United States defined the country as a “rat hole to be watched”(Mehta 2005). After the SovietYugoslav split, however, Yugoslavia gradually became a possible Western ally. United States officials attempted to profit from this first fissure in the communist camp, and to “keep Tito afloat” (Lees 1997). In time, the split with the Soviet Union came to determine Yugoslavia’s unique geopolitical position between the two Blocs, and its foreign politics of Non-Alignment. If most historical Cold War studies of the Soviet-Yugoslav split focus on political leaders’ decision-making, few investigate the impact of this major historical and political event on the everyday lives of thousands of communist militants and sympathizers living in Yugoslavia, Italy and in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. Even fewer studies consider the role of women and of women’s organizations within this conflict.8 (Đilas 1962: 102). 7 See Bokovoy (1998). 8 Sluga’s study (2001) of Cold War Trieste, although integrating a gendered perspective and looking at women’s organizations, does not address the effects of the Cominform resolution in the Free Territory of Trieste. Terzuolo, in his study (1985) of the relations between the Italian and Yugoslav Communist Parties, dedicates one chapter to the effect of the Cominform Campaign on the pci and on the Trieste region in general, but does not refer to women’s organiza- 153 �Although I will refer to existing studies for the overall historical framework, my aim here is to show how the Cominform Resolution affected international and national women’s organizations, and how, in turn, these organizations participated in the ongoing Cold War ideological struggles. Feminist scholars have focused on the way in which gendered bodies and allegoric female figures served as key discursive devices to re-signify ideological and ethnic boundaries during the Second World War and the Cold War aftermath (Duchen and Bandhauer-Schoffmann 2000: 3; Sluga 1994, 2001). On the other hand, as Helen Laville points out, the focus on gendered representations should also be accompanied by a reflection on women’s role as active participants in international relations (Laville 2002: 5). When dealing with the effects of the Cominform Resolution, I was confronted with omissions, silences and selective memories. The difficult issues of women’s victimization and of women’s complicity with discursive and material violence represent a “grey zone” that is difficult to uncover (Jambrešić-Kirin 2009). Increasing Cold War polarizations seriously reduced the margins of autonomy of women’s organizations, which became “embedded” in the ongoing ideological conflicts within the communist bloc. To a certain extent, some female communists contributed to a climate of fear and to the political repression of internal enemies. At the same time, many women, and particularly female antifascist militants, were the victims of repressive politics and of Cold War divides.9 The archival sources of the afž, the udi and the udais of this period are greatly shaped by Cold War discourses and propaganda. In order to look critically at the forms of exclusion and political repression enacted by women’s organizations, I make use of a number of other sources which provide a more balanced view on this period, and allow me to challenge Cold War constructions of internal and external enemies. I rely notably on autobiographical writings – such as those by historian Gerda Lerner, former partisan Eva Grlić and communist militant Alfredo Bonelli – as well as on other recent scholarly works that have started to untangle the silence that surrounds women’s experiences of Cold War intra-communist conflicts (Jambrešić-Kirin 2009). tions. Banac (1988) has traced in detail the emergence of different communist factions in Yugoslavia, and yet his study mostly focuses on political leaders and male militants. Scotti (1991) has retraced the destiny of Italian communists who sided with Stalin in 1948 and were deported to Goli Otok, but the experience of female inmates and of wives and relatives of prisoners is left in the shadow. 9 As noted by Jambrešić-Kirin (2009), the conditions experienced in the concentration camps for political prisoners such as Goli Otok created a “grey zone” in which forms of complicity and victimization were blurred, since fellow inmates had to reciprocally “re-educate” each other through punishment, so that no one could leave the camp without feeling both guilty and fearful. 154 �1.2. The isolation of Yugoslav delegates at the Women’s International Exhibition As mentioned in chapter 4, the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia had a prominent role in the 1945 widf founding Congress in Paris, and its achievements were repeatedly described in the widf Bulletin, Femmes du Monde Entier. In November 1947, only a few months before the Resolution, the widf Council decided that the next widf Congress would be held in Belgrade, a sign that the Yugoslav branch was still held in high esteem. The Yugoslav delegates participated in an Executive Council meeting held in Rome in May 1948. As shown in the previous chapter, the Yugoslav model of national liberation and revolutionary seizure of power – as the only neighbouring Soviet-style “people’s democracy” – was especially important to Italian leftists after 1945. The idea that Italian militants could learn from the Yugoslav model was still prominent in the spring of 1948, when the Union of Italian Women started to organize summer excursions to Yugoslavia for ninety women from the “base” (“factory workers, peasants, teachers, clerks”). The travelers were supposed to be carefully selected by their local udi section, and to engage in “useful and widespread propaganda work” once they returned to Italy.10 On their side, afž leaders were keen to present themselves as successful followers of Soviet-style emancipation.11 But these summer trips to Yugoslavia, planned for Italian women for July 1948, never took place. On July the 9th, the udi secretariat in Rome informed the Belgrade afž headquarters that the trip was cancelled since they had not obtained the necessary visas. The bilateral relationship between the udi and the afž would not be resumed until 1955. On the 28th of June 194812, after a tense exchange of correspondence between Yugoslav and Soviet leaders which had lasted all spring (see Bass and Marbury 1959), the Cominform announced that the “Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia has placed itself and the Yugoslav Party outside the family of the fraternal Communist Parties, outside the united Communist front and consequently outside 10 Each udi section was asked to elect the “representatives of a factory, or of an agricultural firm […] worthy of the highest trust from all the workers, for their morality and their merits.” Letter of June 1948 by Baldina di Vittorio, Rome, Archivio Centrale udi, fondo DnM 48.3, 6. 11 The Belgrade Secretariat recommended that each Republic take the foreign delegation to the “better collectives, where women are working and have greatly improved their qualifications within the factory.” They summoned each Republic to show “(…) the progress of our women up until today, as shock workers, innovators, rationalizers and so on.” “Zapisnik sa sastanka co afž sa rukovodiocima propagandne sekcije i kulturno prosvjetnih otseka Glavnih Odbora afž”, 10 June 1948. Zagreb, Državni Arhiv, afž-kdaž-hr-hda 1234-5-k.58 “Sjednice, Plenumi, Sastanci, 1946-1959”, 298. 12 The 28th of June, or Vidovdan (St.Vitus day) is a highly symbolic date in the history of Yugoslavia, being notably the date of the 1389 Kosovo Polje battle fought by Serbia against the Ottomans, as well as the day of the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand and of his wife Sofia in Sarajevo in 1914. The first Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was promulgated on the 28th of June 1921. 155 �the ranks of the Information Bureau.” There were multiple charges against the Yugoslav communist leadership in the Resolution. They were accused of dispensing “a deviationist domestic and foreign policy (…) [which] determined hostility toward the Soviet Union (…)”, and also, notably, of implementing a faulty agricultural policy (treating the peasantry as a single entity instead of looking at class differences).13 The Yugoslav Communist Party was also accused of not being democratic internally, of refusing to accept criticism, and of “arrogant behavior toward fraternal parties and claims to privilege“ (Bass and Marbury 1959: 40). At the end of the Resolution, the Information Bureau invited the “healthy elements” within the party to “compel their present leaders to recognize their mistakes openly and honestly and to rectify them; to break with nationalism, return to internationalism, and to consolidate in every way the united socialist front against imperialism.” This seemed to leave some space for correction of party policies. However, the Resolution concluded, “should the present leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party prove incapable of doing this, they ought to be replaced and a new internationalist leadership of the Party ought to be advanced. The Information Bureau does not doubt that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia will be able to fulfill this honorable task” (Bass and Marbury 1959: 46). The Cominform Resolution caused an immense shock wave within the socialist camp, creating confusion and disbelief among rank-and-file militants in Yugoslavia, but also in Italy and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. The Resolution had an immediately impact not only on the relationship between the Yugoslav Communist Party and the other communist parties belonging to the Information Bureau, but also on the relationship between the afž and the widf. On the 28th of June when the Resolution was published, the Women’s International Democratic Federation was holding an ambitious Women’s International Exhibition at Porte de Versailles in Paris, inaugurated on the 12 June. According to Yugoslav reports the exhibition had more than a hundred thousand visitors, mostly the “working masses” and intellectuals. An article in Donne reports: From 42 Nations, thousands of boxes of all dimensions have arrived on the shores of the Seine. They contain craftworks, artworks, photographs and documents of all that comes out of female hands, under all climates and all latitudes of the earth. Most of all, these are documents about the common struggle waged by the women 13 “On the question of the leading role of the working class, the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party, by affirming that the peasantry is the “most stable foundation of the Yugoslav state”, are departing from the Marxist-Leninist path and are taking the path of a populist, kulak party.” (Bass and Marbury 1959: 42) According to Bokovoy, this allegation of faulty agrarian policy had the purpose to “strike maliciously at the very heart of the Yugoslav revolutionary experience – the Communists’ relationship with the peasants.” Bokovoy continues: (...) “The kpj owed its rise to power to the alliance forged between the party and the peasantry, which still constituted a large part of the party’s membership in 1948. Throughout 1948, Stalin and the Cominform would challenge the unnatural liaison between peasant and Communist in order to force the kpj leaders to admit their mistakes and divide the party over this sin” (1998: 8586). 156 �of the whole world, for peace, brotherhood, protection of childhood, emancipation of women, cultural elevation, amelioration of social and economic conditions of all the peoples. We can truly say that this exhibition is the exhibition of universal friendship.14 The Soviet pavilion was “the most spectacular”, and the image of Stalin dominated the scene (Jeanneret 2002). The Yugoslav pavilion also stood out and was so successful that the Yugoslav staff had to point out to the visitors “how the Soviet stand was better, how there you could see thirty years of socialism, how it was more accurate, and so on.”15 The afž managed to obtain 165 square meters of exhibition space, and displayed artworks, folkloristic objects, publications, a statue of Marshal Tito, and a number of data on agricultural and industrial production in Yugoslavia since the end of the war. One of the central panels described women’s life in Yugoslavia and the rights achieved under socialism (social, economic and political equality, welfare services for children and mothers, equality in marriage). A special emphasis was placed on maternity leave regulations and on health provisions for mothers. Pictures portrayed women working the land, driving tractors, studying, teaching and doing sport, under slogans such as “The land belongs to those who cultivate it” and “Education and culture have become the property of the people.”16 Yugoslavia’s prestige among French communists and leftist sympathizers is apparent from the comments left in the guestbook of the Yugoslav exhibition before the 28th of June. Many French women wrote messages of solidarity with Yugoslavia, as well as messages of admiration for Tito and for the succesful realization of a socialist state. There were also messages of a more personal character, expressing strong solidarity and affection for Yugoslav women who had been fellow inmates in the Nazi concentration camps of Oranienburg and Ravensbruck.17 Yet, on the 28th of June, everything changed: the Cominform Resolution – published immediately by the French communist newspaper l’Humanité – accused the Yugoslav government of “nationalist deviation” and of favoring the “kulaks” in the countryside. In one of the (anonymous) reports written by the women in charge of the Yugoslav stand at the Paris exhibition, we get a sense of the sudden isolation that fell upon the Yugoslav representatives after the 28th of June. After the publication of the Resolution, she writes, they heard from the visitors “a million stupidities and insolences, which indicate the political level of their [the French] masses.” Visitors 14 udais magazine Donne, Trieste, July 1948 (Istituto Livio Saranz, Trieste). 15 “O međunarodnoj izložbi žena u Parizu”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-420. 16 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-134 ; 135. 17 One woman, J., wrote “During this visit I have thought of my little Ivanka, so brave, whose soul was so upright and so beautiful, despite her youth she was the one who helped me to endure the long fatigues and the blows in Ravensbruck.” Another woman, named Thèrese, wrote: “While visiting this stand I thought a lot of you, my dear little comrades Sylvia – Sladka – Marinka with whom I have suffered so much in the Nazi camp of Oranienburg. I have a lot of admiration for the beautiful work of the Yugoslav people, glory to them and to their beloved Marshal Tito. Long Live Yugoslavia.” The guestbooks of the Yugoslav pavillions at the Paris exhibition are located in Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141, folder n. 21. 157 �passing the stand accused Tito of being a “traitor”, a “bastard” and so on. 18 Many visitors, however, were sincerely curious and enquired after the true state of affairs. The Yugoslav staff tried to deny the accusations and defend the government, while also still showing admiration and respect for the Soviet Union. One French woman asked them if they really had betrayed the country to imperialists, but seemed to believe their explanations when they assured her that this was not the case; another woman who had travelled to Yugoslavia defended the work of the Yugoslav government to other French visitors. For the rest of the exhibition, the Yugoslav staff mostly had to face coldness, unpleasantness, and accusations of betrayal to the imperialist camp. They were questioned on various issues mentioned in the Resolution, notably the peasant question and the collectivization of land, but also the lack of democracy within the party, and their responses were rarely taken seriously (“some thought that the party had too many members, others that it had too few”).19 A French militant compared the Yugoslav communist party with the French one, which he saw as more revolutionary and yet eager to accept criticism coming from the Soviet Union.20 They were reproached: “Why did you not go to the [Cominform] meeting? How is it possible that eight [Communist] parties are mistaken, and that you are right?”21 After all these accusations and insults, the woman in charge of the stand admitted that she had “felt sick from embarrassment”, and “could not believe that the masses could be deceived with such lies, and why, and who’s benefiting from this?”22 The staff of the widf also behaved differently towards the Yugoslav delegation after the Resolution. During the preparation of the exhibition, the Yugoslav staff had already had some trouble to do with their exhibition with the widf organizers.23 What is more, the Yugoslav organizers were upset because the Italian pavilion nearby displayed a map of Italy, in which Istria was unequivocally shown as part of the Italian peninsula.24 It was only after the Resolution, however, that the Yugoslav staff had to “Razgovori na Izložbi”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-410. “Razgovori na Izložbi”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-414. “What do you want, you Yugoslav, you’re a young nation without revolutionary tradition, without any expert party leader, it’s clear that you have made mistakes and now is the moment to admit that you did not behave correctly. Look at us, a Party with such a revolutionary past, such revolutions, such an expert leadership, but when were criticized we accepted it, and this is evidence of your weakness.” “Razgovori na Izložbi”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-413. 21 “Razgovori na Izložbi”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-414. 22 Ibidem. 23 For instance, the Yugoslav staff was asked to erase any reference to the Communist Party, in order not to “scare” women. The photographs of Mitra Mitrović and Vida Tomšić were not exhibited, and the French left-wing newspapers did not mention their pavilion in their reports about the opening, even if it was allegedly “one of the most beautiful”. 24 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-98. The installation wasn’t changed despite their protest, and some engineers argued that no one would have noticed, since “the French people do not know geography.” There was also a stand from the Free Territory of Trieste (whose pictures are published in Donne, July 1948), which portrayed life in zone B, under Yugoslavia, 18 19 20 158 �face open expressions of hostility. According to Smilija Štimac, who was in charge of the delegation in Paris, the most unpleasant episode occurred on the last day during the closing ceremony. In their closing speech widf President Madame Cotton and another French woman praised the exhibition and the different delegations, but only briefly mentioned the Yugoslav presence. At a certain point, a French delegate seemed about to denounce a country that was distancing itself from the democratic countries, and Štimac writes that she was “prepared to stand up and leave the room. But everything went well. Only, I had sweat running down my back.”25 Then the delegates of different countries exchanged presents and flowers, and for a long time nobody gave anything to the Yugoslavs. Finally, they received an anonymous bouquet, and another one from a women’s organization in the suburbs of Paris, “so that it wouldn’t be shameful [if they got none].”26 Only the Chinese delegate, Lu Tsui, came to the Yugoslav pavilion to buy some objects on the last day, and complimented the stand and expressed the wish to keep in touch. Smilija Štimac observed: “I was surprised by all this kindness and attention after so much unpleasantness, and that’s why I write about it.”27 Even if the Yugoslav delegation had an apparently cordial meeting with the Soviet delegation, and attempted to show that their attitude towards the Soviet Union had not changed, the overall atmosphere remained tense until the end of the exhibition.28 As made evident by these reports, the Yugoslav delegates definitely did not experience this exhibition as “the exhibition of universal friendship”, but rather as the beginning of a process of international boycott and isolation that would last for many years to come. In the next section I discuss the impact of increasing Cold War polarizations on the widf during the Budapest Congress in the winter of 1948. I describe how the Yugoslavs were gradually turned from model comrades into unwanted guests, and how afž leaders responded to their growing international isolation. 1.3. “Sisterhood was no longer innocent”: the second widf Congress in Budapest The year 1948 marked an increase in global polarizations in the opposition between the Western and the Soviet blocs. The Soviets consolidated their position in Eastern Europe, notably with the communist coup in Czechoslovackia in February 1948 and as peaceful and rewarding, with women studying and building socialism. The pictures of zone A, including Trieste, showed crowds of angry women demonstrating against Anglo-American imperialism. 25 “O međunarodnoj ižlozbi žena u Parizu”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-21-423. 26 Ibidem. 27 Ibidem. 28 For instance, the Yugoslav representatives had trouble in finding workers who would disassemble their exhibition, and they had to hire a night guard for the surveillance of their valuable objects, “since in that situation I wasn’t sure of anything.” Some objects were damaged while packing and some others, deposited at the Trieste stand, were never retrieved. According to Smilija Štimac “that was not by chance.” Ivi, 141-21-425 ;426. 159 �with the Berlin blockade of April 1948, which accelerated Anglo-American politics of “containment” of the communist influence in Europe, as manifested in the Berlin airlift and the Marshall plan. The politics of containment also had a significant impact on the Italian elections of April 1948, in which the Christian-Democrats won a victory over the Popular Front alliance of Socialists and Communists after having received considerable material support from the United States. The polarizations accelerated what scholars have defined as the “cultural Cold War” (Scott-Smith and Krabbendam 2003; Mitter and Major 2004). Whereas the United States promoted their image as defenders of freedom against Eastern totalitarianism, the Soviet Union in turn relied on slogans of peace, economic justice and national self-determination against Western imperialism. In the meantime, the “red scare” was starting to take effect in the United States, with the blacklisting of federal officers, journalists and cultural producers suspected of communist sympathies. Any form of social critique or affiliation with left-wing organizations was equated with pro-Soviet, and thus anti-American espionage. On their side, the Soviets increased political repression in the satellite countries, establishing a tighter control over Eastern European communist parties through internal purges, arrests and executions.29 The Western communist parties of Italy and France – now excluded from anti-communist governments, and themselves facing state repression of workers’ movements – proceeded to assume a more radical position, supporting class-based organizing and adopting anti-imperialist slogans (for instance by campaigning against the Marshall Plan).30 The leaders of the widf, notably French women, took a manifestly pro-Soviet position in their Resolutions; as I will show in this section, however, it would be wrong to assume that these Resolutions were unanimously accepted by all the progressive women belonging to the international federation. Even if conflicts and disagreements were not expressed in the official documents, traces of them can be seen in the memoirs and travel diaries of the women who participated to widf Congresses in the late 1940s. The 1948 Budapest Congress is a case in point: not all the widf members accepted the unilateral condemnation of Anglo-American imperialism and the glorification of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Yugoslav delegation, isolated from the others because of the Cominform Resolution, started to voice a critique of the undemocratic methods implemented by the Federation, a critique that they would pursue throughout the 1950s. Women’s historian Gerda Lerner, who, because of her Jewish background, fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1939 and moved to the United States, where she joined the left-wing Congress of American Women (later disbanded by the House Un-American Activities Committee), tells of her attendance of the Budapest Congress in December 1948 in her autobiography. She revisited Vienna for the first time after her exile before continuing to Budapest. Although she thought that people looked equally “worn out” 29 “In an era of intense conflict between East and West, Soviet (and later sed) officials became convinced that capitalist spies were undermining socialism throughout East Central Europe—just as Senator Joseph McCarthy was sure that Soviet agents were ruining the fabric of American life in the United States.” (Epstein 2003: 130). 30 About the radicalization of the pci after 1947 see Urban (1986) and Pons (2001). 160 �in the two cities, Budapest made a better impression because of the rapid reconstruction of the city, while in Vienna, “three years after the war’s end, most of the bombed buildings had been fenced off from sight, but the rubble had not been removed (2002: 265).”31 Lerner writes of her amazement upon entering the Congress, which looked to her like a “United Nations of women”, all determined to prevent another war: “as various groups of European women during the Congress spoke about their lives and experiences, the suffering, devastation and personal cost of the war came alive. As we gathered for the opening session in the great hall, sisterhood seemed real and tangible among the women from fifty-six nations, all so visibly different and yet all working for world peace and nuclear disarmament. We might not have be able to communicate across barriers of language and custom, but we smiled as our eyes met, we hugged and found other ways of expressing good will” (2002: 265). The antifascist sisterhood inaugurated in 1945, however, had gradually been challenged by Cold War polarizations. The widf Resolution approved during the 1948 Congress established a clear moral hierarchy between women, one that now decisively portrayed Soviet and Eastern European women as more “advanced” in their anti-imperialist consciousness. While all women in the widf were invited to fight against imperialist wars in Greece, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and South Korea, it was specifically women from the usa, the uk, France and Holland who were summoned to ask their government to disarm, since “no people can be free while oppressing another.” Women in capitalist countries were asked to “demand the abolition of anti-labor laws [and] protest against the persecution of democratic organizations and their leaders” while the women from the countries of “new democracy” were asked to “continue their fight for the economic development of their countries and for the strengthening of their democracy.”32 Women from the colonial and semi-colonial countries were called upon to extend their fight against imperialism and for the independence of their countries, while Soviet women were charged with strengthening their homeland, “bulwark of peace and democracy.”33 Unlike women from socialist countries, therefore, Western women were encouraged to take a critical stance against the crimes of their government and to make themselves accountable.34 Gerda Lerner (2002: 267) recalls her feelings of Italian women made a similar comment after their visit to Belgrade in 1945. They compared the speedy reconstruction and cleaned streets of Yugoslavia with the rubble that was still widespread in Italian cities. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-24-22 ;141-24-23. 32 “Zapisnik Izvršnog Odbora afž”, 16-17 Dec 1948, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-8, pp. 13-15. 33 Ivi. About the superior image of Soviet women in widf publications, see also Ilič (2010). 34 The House Un-American Activities Committee, in its report about the caw, clearly resented these feelings of solidarity and accountability expressed by American women towards European women: “With apparent shame and mortification, Miss Flynn explained: “We were increasingly conscious of our warm clothes, well-filled suitcases and purses,” and the fact that her group came from a “richer, safer, happier” land. (…) Why these women did not feel called upon to extol the virtues of the land with such blessings and why they lost no opportunity to 31 161 �shame and guilt when meeting with Greek partisan women. The Greek women wore us military uniforms taken from the defeated Greek royalist troops, who were sponsored by the United States. Even if the Greek women did not hold the American women’s delegation responsible for Truman’s aid to the royalists, Lerner felt guilty as an American citizen. She felt in fact that “the moral high ground I had been accustomed to taking as victim of fascism was shattered. Now I belonged to those whom others regarded as their oppressors. Sisterhood was no longer innocent, but had become infinitely complex.” The new difficulties of the international antifascist sisterhood also became apparent when discussing the final resolution of the Congress. The resolution was openly pro-Soviet and harshly condemned the us government, so that the American caw delegates pointed out that it would be very difficult to use this resolution in their home country, where they would run the the risk of becoming an easy target of anticommunist discourses. Other Western European delegates, such as the Swedish, felt the same: “We suggested that an international Congress should put resolutions in a more neutral frame of reference and above all should stress positive work for peace, rather than blaming one country for all the political tensions in the world” (Lerner 2002: 268). However, widf President Nina Popova argued that the document was accepted by the Executive Committee of the widf and therefore could not be changed to suit the needs of a particular delegation. In the end the caw delegates did not file any formal protest, but resolved not to propagate the Congress’ main resolution in the United States.35 Another problematic aspect of the Congress was its treatment of the Yugoslav delegation. In preparation for the Budapest Congress, the afž central committee published a series of brochures expounding the merits of the Yugoslav antifascist Resistance and all the work done by the afž for Yugoslav women and for the popularizing of widf resolutions. As a reaction to the Cominform Resolution, they attempted to emphasize the great importance of the afž to the widf so far.36 However, in Budapest the treatment towards the Yugoslav delegation was clearly discriminatory, and they faced a number of incidents and provocations. They were not able, for instance, to obtain extra visas for their translators and their guests; they found an Albanian newspaper denouncing Tito on their desk; their flag was not visible like the flags of all the other different delegations. Mitra Mitrović was not allowed to respond when some criticisms towards Yugoslavia were voiced, and in a meeting in front of factory eulogize a land without them is something for a psychologist to fathom” (huac 1949). 35 We will see how the Federation’s ‘ideological line’ on Cold War issues, and both its connections and contradictions with women’s interests – would be debated and contested many times in the years to come, due to the different positions and geopolitical interests of the various delegations (see Chapter 7). 36 As mentioned earlier, for some time after the Resolution the Yugoslav leaders were still trying to prove that the Resolution was erroneous and based on misinformation, and that they were dutiful followers of the Soviet example. 162 �workers the Soviet delegation reminded everybody of the “mistakes” of the Yugoslav government, upon which the entire Yugoslav delegation left the room.37 Despite these insults and censures, international delegates were still quite open towards the Yugoslav representatives due the immense prestige of the Yugoslav Resistance, and freely asked them for reports on the state of affairs in their country, since they had had a positive image of it so far. A Slovenian woman that was part of the American delegation asked them for clarifications about the situation, saying “I have already heard about this from one side, now I want to hear it from another side.”38 Although isolated from the Federation, in December 1948 the Yugoslav women were still hoping that the situation could improve and that the Soviet Union might revise its position. Once in Belgrade, afž leaders wrote a letter of protest, listing the unpleasant incidents that had occurred in Budapest. They mainly held the Hungarian leaders responsible, but also reproached the widf leaders for not having “reacted in time” against the provocations, which, they claimed, weakened the “unity” of the Federation, and thus the democratic struggle against world imperialism.39 The fact that the discriminatory treatment during the Congress wasn’t made public through an open denunciation probably reflects the widf leadership’s uncertainty about how to handle the presence of the Yugoslav delegation, whose members were still part of the widf decision-maiking organs and had gained a considerable prestige. The exclusion came only some months later, in September 1949, and it wasn’t openly ratified by any Congress, but only enforced by the Secretariat of the Federation in a unilateral manner, through a letter sent to the afž headquarters. These examples demonstrate that women’s internationalist solidarity based on the common experience of antifascist struggle – a solidarity that had never been without problems – was complicated even more by impending Cold War divides. In the next section I will discuss the exclusion of Yugoslav delegates from the widf, an event that contradicts official widf representations of women as peacemakers who are naturally drawn to reciprocal solidarity across borders. Paradoxically, increasing Cold War tensions challenged the discourse of women’s unity across borders, a discourse which had been very important in the creation of the widf after 1945. 1.4. The break of udi-afž relations and the exclusion of the afž from the widf The international isolation of Yugoslavia continued to grow in 1949, but in the spring of that year it still seemed possible for the local authorities to resolve their conflict with the Soviet Union. The Yugoslavs adopted the internationalist discourse of anti-imperialism and frequently paid homage to the ussr. On the 1st of March 37 “Zapisnik Izvršnog Odbora  afž”, 16-17 Dec 1948, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-8, pp. 18-27 ; see also the letter of protest dated 17.1.49 by afž delegation in Budapest (in French) 141-17-637-640. 38 “Zapisnik Izvršnog Odbora  afž”, 16-17 Dec 1948, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-8, p.23. 39 Letter of protest by afž delegation in Budapest (in French) dated 17.1.49 141-17-637-640. 163 �1949, the afž sent a letter to the udi, calling upon Italian women to protest against the definitive acquittal of general Roatta, an Italian army officer who been in charge of concentration camps in the fascist-occupied province Ljubljana and in the Dalmatian Littoral during Second World War, and had committed many war crimes.40 Although Yugoslavia asked for his extradition, Roatta managed to evade persecution in 1945, benefited from the general amnesty of 1946 and later moved to Franco’s Spain with the help of the Vatican, where he resided until the end of his life.41 The letter to the udi denounced the continuity between the new Italian government and the old fascist regime, which allowed for the release of war criminals, and urged Italian “democratic women” to oppose this. In the letter, the afž still praised the Soviet Union as head of the struggle against imperialism. The imperialism at stake was not only AngloAmerican, however, but also, for instance, that of Italy and of the Vatican.42 On the 8th of March 1949, the udi – perhaps partly in reaction against the letter on general Roatta – sent the usual 8th of March greetings to the afž. In this message, however, the udi leaders appealed to Yugoslav women to “return to the common struggle for peace and against the intrigues of Anglo-American imperialism, in close union with the Soviet Union, the countries of new democracy and the peoples of the world.”43 Similar “greetings” and provocations were sent to the afž by the Union of French Women in the spring of 1949. On the 13th of April the afž secretariat rejected these “insinuations” of having moved to the imperialist camp. They accused the udi of deceiving Italian women about the real situation in Yugoslavia, instead of joining forces with the afž in the world struggle against imperialism.44 From these two letters we can see how the afž-udi bilateral relations were already ridden with tensions due to the legacies of Fascism and the Second World War. After the 1948 Resolution tensions could be openly expressed, since the udi and the afž now found 40 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-24-81 ;82 ;83. In the afž letter, Roatta was ac- cused of having directed the concentration camp of Arbe/Rab, with 35.000 detainees and 4.500 victims. He was also accused of commanding the special court of Šibenik, which had executed 400 people. They also mentioned the fact that entire villages in Dalmatia had been burned and their population massacred in the autumn of 1942. 41 Ironically, the amnesty that allowed many former Fascists to evade trial for their war crimes was signed by pci leader Togliatti, while he was still minister of Justice in the antifascist postwar government. This compromise was deeply resented within the ranks of the pci itself, notably by former partisans and antifascists who had suffered torture and whose perpertrators never stood trial. This was one of the elements which gave rise of the idea of the ‘betrayed Resistance’ among radical leftist groups, an idea that was revived in the 1970s by the far left. About Italy’s postwar continuity with the Fascist state, see Franzinelli (2006). 42 During the Rome widf Council in May 1948, the afž delegation had formulated a resolution against imperialism that condemned the Italian government and the Vatican in very harsh tones. The final widf resolution omitted these initial statements. 43 19 Marzo 49: “Chères Amies, à l’occasion du 8 Mars nous souhaitons aux femmes de Yougoslavie de reprendre le chemin de la lutte commune pour la paix et contre les menées de l’imperialisme anglo-américain, en union étroite avec l’Union Soviétique, les Pays de démocratie nouvelle et les peuples du monde entier.” Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-24-88. 44 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-24-90; 91. 164 �themselves on opposite sides of the intra-communist divide between the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia. The situation worsened in the summer45, and in the autumn of 1949 the SovietYugoslav split became irrecoverable. In a letter dated 28 September 1949, and signed by the Secretary General Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier46, the widf Secretariat communicated its decision to exclude Yugoslav delegates from the following plenary meetings in Moscow. The widf Secretariat explained that they had received protest letters from a number of women’s delegations, among which Chinese, Canadian, Greek and French, complaining about about “Tito’s betrayal” and “turning to the imperialist camp”. As a consequence, the Federation decided to interrogate the attitudes of the Yugoslav delegates, Mitra Mitrović, Olga Milosević, Vanda Novosel and Vida Tomšić, and concluded that they continued their support of the Yugoslav government’s “antidemocratic politics of terror”, which went against “the interests and the will” of the Yugoslav people, as shown by a “growing opposition movement” within Yugoslavia. According to the widf Secretariat, therefore, the Yugoslav delegates could no longer be considered the legitimate representatives of the women of Yugoslavia, and therefore had no right to participate in the Moscow Council. Since they supported the “war-monger” Tito, in fact, their presence at the Council would be “as inconceivable as the presence of representatives of feminine organizations supporting Franco, Tsaldaris or Tchang Kai Chek.”47 After this decision was made, all the national branches of the widf broke off their relations with the afž.48 The afž leadership immediately reacted against widf decision and against its attempts to internationally isolate Yugoslav women. They sent a wealth of counterinformation publications in different languages to all women’s organizations affiliated with the widf, with the aim of raising sympathy for Yugoslavia. As they explained, “we should not forget that in the leadership bodies of democratic women’s organiza45 In the summer of 1949, the afž protested to the widf against the recent refusal to accord visas to the Yugoslav youth delegation to the World Congress of Youth for Peace, held in Budapest in August 1949. 46 Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (born Vogel, 1912-1996) was born in a family engaged in art and journalism. She became one of the first female photoreporters, and in 1934 she became affiliated to the Jeunesse Communiste. In 1937 she married Pierre Vaillant-Couturier, a communist politician and journalist. As a reporter for l’Humanité and Vu, she covered the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Spanish Civil War. She worked in the Resistance under the Vichy regime, and was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1943. In August 1944, she was transferred to Ravensbruck until the Liberation. After the war, she was elected to Parliament and she became involved in the widf. She continued her engagement with the associations of former deportees and she testified at the Nurenberg trials. 47 “Décision du secretariat”, 28.9.1949, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-18-367 ;368. 48 The Union of Italian Women approved this decision during its Third National Congress held in October 1949 in Rome. In a letter dated 26.10.49 this decision was communicated to the afž. The afž delegates were accused of supporting the Yugoslav leadership and of having made themselves “complicit” with the crimes of Tito’s regime. In this way, they “had placed themselves out of the great world organization of democratic women with their own hands.” Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-24-94 ; 95 ; 96. 165 �tions there are certainly a lot of women who disagree with the actions of their representatives in the Federation, but [information about] the facts and our materials are not yet available to them.”49 afž leaders defended themselves by denouncing the lies and undemocratic methods of the widf. In a letter (in French) accompanying a Memorandum sent to all widf Council members in October 1949, the afž Central Committee argued that excluding the Yugoslav representatives meant in effect the exclusion of all Yugoslav women, who were working every day for “peace and the progress of humanity”. They asked that a widf investigative commission to be dispatched to Yugoslavia, in order to investigate the attitude of Yugoslav women towards their afž representatives, and to re-establish the truth about this “most active” and “most progressive” of widf branches. They complained that the widf Secretariat’s decision had transformed the Federation into a “branch of the Information Bureau, working under the diktat of some Parties and adopting unjust and undemocratic decisions against millions of women, and even against an entire country.”50 Following the Yugoslav leadership’s statements, the afž leaders started to put forward the argument of national sovereignty and self-determination, portraying Yugoslavia as a small underdeveloped nation fighting once again for independence, against the unequal, exploitative treatment that smaller socialist countries received from the developed, mighty Soviet Union. They specifically referred to their United Nations action agitating “for relations of parity between big and small peoples”, and for the liberation of each people from “foreign hegemony”, as a condition for world peace.51 The afž leaders relied on their moral authority as antifascist fighters, and representatives of a people that had bravely resisted the invasion of foreign armies. The Yugoslav people, they argued, was prepared to stand again behind its leadership in order to resist another attempt to undermine its independence. The history of the antifascist Resistance, therefore, was mobilized to disprove Cominform accusations of “fascism”. They demanded that the widf explain “how it is possible for Yugoslav women, who had fought with so much self-sacrifice against fascism, to have suddenly become fascists, condoning the ‘fascist’ policy of their government.”52 Mitra Mitrović, in a long and rather personal letter addressed to Madame Cotton, tried to defend once again the position of the afž delegates. Already on the first page she pointed to the hypocrisy and the absurdities of the widf statements, which 49 “(…) a ne treba zaboraviti da je u rukovodstva demokratskih ženska organizacija ima svakako mnogo žena koje se ne slažu sa postupcima njihovih predstavnica u Federaciji, samo im činjenice i naši materiali nisu još dostupni.” “afž i Međunarodni Demokratski Pokret Žena. Referat drugarice Mitra Mitrović”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-7-414. 50 “Memorandum du Comité Central du faf de Yougoslavie”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-18-375. 51 Ibidem. 52 “[k]ako je moguce da jugoslovenske žene, koje su se toliko požrtvovanja borile protiz fašizma, odjedanput postanu i same fašisti, i jedinstveno odobravaju “fašisticku” politiku svog rukovodstva.” afž i Međunarodni Demokratski Pokret Žena. Referat drugarice Mitra Mitrović”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-7-411. 166 �claimed a great sympathy towards the Yugoslav peoples, while accusing its leaders of being “traitors, Trotskyites, spies, who participated in the revolution on behalf of the Gestapo!”53 Mitrović claimed that despite the enormous pressure exerted by the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, the Yugoslav people were standing by their leaders, since the leadership was for the first time working in the interests of the people. Mitrović argued that the popularity of the communists among the people was precisely due to the fact that they were building schools, factories and health clinics, so that the people “are assured that this leadership will really take the country out of its secular backwardness.”54 According to Mitrović, despite this progress in the advancement of socialism and despite the Yugoslav people’s attachment to the Soviet Union, the ussr was, in fact, inventing all sort of allegations and financing dubious “political émigrés” to overthrow the government: “the Soviet government – and other governments too – would make use even of the devil to overthrow the leaders of our country, whose independence is annoying them, in whatever way they could.”55 Mitrović respectfully demanded that Madame Cotton, as president of the widf, stops the Federation’s complicity with the Cominform campaign against Yugoslavia, asking her to allow the Yugoslav representatives to attend the Moscow Council. I include here an extract from Mitra Mitrović’s letter, since it has a very personal, direct tone, and hints at the difficulties faced by the afž leaders after the Cominform Resolution. It also clearly shows the afž leaders’ identification with the Yugoslav government, and their refusal to comply with ussr dictates. afž leaders’ righteous indignation is abundantly evident in this letter. Mitra Mitrović, 36 years at the time, who had been a “communist for 19 years (…), and member of the Party for 15 years”, wrote: It embarrasses me to talk about us [afž representatives] without this seeming like a justification or a lack of modesty. But, since these offenses are directed against us personally as well as against the women of Yugoslavia, there is something to I have say: look at my life, at the lives of comrade Vida, Olga and Vanda, and you will see that since our earliest youth we have consecrated our lives to the struggle for freedom and democracy, to the struggle for socialism. Since 1941, we have participated in the people’s liberation struggle, and we were also in the concentration camps. (…) Our Party made us into fighters, and not into some traitors who, under a simple order from Moscow, would cover it [the Party] with mud, and would be recognized, then, as traitors and spies. This makes no sense at all! We are the same 53 Letter of Mitra Mitrović to Madame Cotton, 5.10.49, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-18-450 till 141-18-462. 54 141-18-453. Mitrović’s letter contains interesting statements concerning Yugoslavia’s geopo- litical and historical position in Europe. She writes: “Our country is one of the most backward in Europe. As I have said, we have lived for too long under foreign slavery, and it is notably the domination of such a backward country, feudal Turkey, which weighted on us and pulled us backward.” 141-18-452. In the next chapter I will assess some afž modernization campaigns, and its fight against “backwardness” in the rural areas. 55 Ibidem, 141-18-456. 167 �as before, the same as we were in 1945 in Paris, the same as we were during the armed struggle of our people.56 In Mitrović’s letter, the reference to the 1945 widf Congress in Paris was a response to an earlier letter from the Bureau of Union des Femmes Francaises (uff) to the widf, in which the uff Bureau stated their refusal to attend the plenary session if the Yugoslav delegates were present. The uff letter lamented that the present leaders of afž were “not speaking in the name of those peasant women and workers, those wonderful women and national heroes, whom [they] met at the first widf Congress in Paris.” The afž, however, could easily demonstrate that its 1948 delegates were the same ones who had attended the Paris conference, showing the shallowness and the hypocrisy of uff arguments. The Cominform and widf campaigns aimed at showing that the current Yugoslav representatives had lost the mandate of the “people”, while Yugoslav – and afž – leaders maintained their claim that the Yugoslav peoples supported the government. Mitra Mitrović’s letter clearly stated that “millions of Yugoslav women” were standing behind the afž leaders, and would have voted for them once more in case they had an election. In Mitrović’s view, millions of afž supporters could not “have become fascists, traitors, Trotskyites, spies.” Yugoslav women had experienced capitalism, fascist occupation and revolution, and could see for themselves that these accusations were false. As a result, according to Mitrović, they were protesting against the widf decision all over Yugoslavia. By excluding the afž representatives, therefore, the widf was excluding “3.800.000” Yugoslav women who were part of the Federation.57 The progressive isolation and exclusion of the Yugoslav delegations from internationalist meetings paved the way for the Second Cominform Resolution in the autumn of 1949. On the 29th of November 1949 a second Cominform Resolution was published, calling the Yugoslav leaders a “clique” of “assassins” and “fascist spies”, who had “definitely passed from bourgeois nationalism to fascism.”58 The Resolution explicitly indicates: “the fight against the Tito clique, the clique of the assassins and 56 “Il est gênant pour moi de parler de nous, – sans que cela ressemble à quelque justification ou à un manque de modestie. Mais, puisqu’il s’agit ici de telles injures dirigées contre nous personellement et contre les femmes de Yougoslavie, j’aurais cependant quelque chose à dire: regardez ma vie, et celle des camarades Vida, Olga et Vanda, et vous verrez que dès notre prime [première] jeunesse nous la consacrâmes à la lutte pour la liberté et la démocratie, à la lutte pour le socialisme. Depuis 1941, nous avons participé à la lutte de libération populaire, et nous avons aussi connu les camps (…) Notre Parti a fait de nous des combattants et non des traîtres qui, sur un simple ordre de Moscou, le couvriraient de boue, et se reconnaitraient eux-memes traîtres et espions. Ce sont là des choses insensées! Nous sommes ce que nous fumes naguère, ce que nous fûmes en 1945 à Paris, ce que nous fûmes dans la lutte armée de nos peuples.” Ibidem, 141-18-457. 57 Ibidem, 141-18-458. 58 While in the rest of the Soviet bloc politicians such as Hungarian Lazlo Rajk and Albanian Koci Xoxe were arrested and executed as “Titoist spies”, a secret Cominform meeting was held in Budapest in November 1949, resulting in the explicit order to overthrow Tito (while the previous Resolution had still given him the possibility to repent). 168 �hired spies, is an international duty for all Communists and workers’ parties.”59 In late 1949 Yugoslavia was thus facing extreme political isolation and an economic blockade from the Soviet bloc. It also faced military provocations at its borders with Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, while rumors about a possible Red Army invasion of Yugoslavia started to circulate internationally. The call to overthrow the current Yugoslav leadership circulated all over the Soviet bloc, and the language used by the Cominform became more and more violent. One astonishing example of how previous internationalist discourses could be reversed is a report from the widf Moscow Council in November 1949 in which the Spanish Pasionaria Dolores Ibarruri argued that the Yugoslav representatives had been excluded “because under their antifascists mask they were hiding their true face of deceitful, vile spies and creatures of fascist leaders. Even in the era of the Yugoslav people’s liberation war against the Nazi invaders, these ‘representatives’, Mitra Mitrović and Vida Tomšić, were agents of the Gestapo and of the Italian police.”60 This was the general tone of statements about Yugoslavia during the widf 1949 Moscow Council, according to the travel diaries of udais leaders Marija Bernetić and Laura Weiss. 61 Yet, even in this case, there were disagreements among the different international delegates, which are not reported in the official statements and publications of the widf.62 Cominform declarations never targeted the Yugoslav people as a whole, but instead appealed to the “masses” (occasionally to “women”) and incited them to overthrow their illegitimate representatives. Opposing them, Yugoslav communist leaders and the afž constantly claimed to be the legitimate representatives of the Yugoslav “peoples” and of Yugoslavia’s “feminine masses”. I discuss the relation between female communist leaders and “feminine masses” in the following sections of this chapter and 59 See http://www.osaarchivum.org/files/holdings/300/8/3/text/78-4-102.shtml 60 Conseil de la Federation Democratique Internationale des Femmes, Moscou 17-22 novem- bre 1949, supplement de la revue La Femme Sovietique, n.6, 1949, p.12. 61 According to Bernetić’s handwritten notes, Greek participants denounced Tito’s betrayal, and so did Nina Popova, while Ibarruri denounced the “Titoist women M.M. and V.T. ; Rosetta Longo also made statements about Yugoslav delegates’ support for the warmongering government.” (Trieste, Istituto Livio Saranz, fondo Bernetić, Busta 1, fascicolo 6, diari e appunti 19491981, Terzo quaderno del 1949). According to Weiss, a chief argument was Tito’s “backstabbing” of Greece. After having supported the Greek communists in the Greek civil war for three years, in 1949 Yugoslavia closed its borders to Greek communist fighters, who took the side of the Cominform (for a reconstruction of Yugoslavia’s role in the Greek Civil War, see Ristovic 2006). 62 According to Weiss’ diary, there was a very “animated discussion” within the commission about the economic situation. Weiss’s proposal to include a condemnation of Tito – because of the economic situation in Yugoslavia and of the division of the working masses – found a “notable resistance” among some of the delegates. The delegates from South America and Algeria accepted only the first part of the proposal; another delegate (undecipherable name) excessively praised Tito, which led to “outbursts”. I am interpreting here Weiss’ handwritten notes. (Trieste, Istituto Livio Saranz, fondo Weiss, f. 32 c6 cv636 p.160, quaderno di viaggio urss del 49 e viaggio a Varsavia nel 47). 169 �in the next chapters. While in these sections I have considered the public documents produced by the afž and the widf leaderships at the international levels, in the next sections I look at the way in which the Soviet-Yugoslav split affected the “masses” of rank-and-file female militants were in Yugoslavia, Italy, and the Italo-Yugoslav border area, and particularly at the waves of political repression and intra-communist enmity that continued from 1949 until the mid 1950s. 2 . Intra-communist wars in Yugoslavia, Italy and the Italo-Yugoslav border area 2.1. The making of Yugoslav “Cominformists” While people were silent about it [Goli Otok], it was a hard rock on which the [Yugoslav] state relied. When people began to speak about it, even the state began to crumble. (Božidar Jezernik 1994: 686. Quoted in Jambrešić-Kirin, 2009) Within Yugoslavia, alleged “Ibeovci”63 or “Cominformists”, that is, those siding with the ussr after 1948, were widely repressed, but this repression was erased from the official discourse until the 1980s, when the crisis of the socialist regime prompted the emergence of private memories that had been silenced until then.64 Yugoslavia was in a dire economic and political situation in 1948. According to the testimony of pci militant Alfredo Bonelli (1910-1999), who emigrated from Milan to Rijeka (Fiume in Italian) in the spring of 1948 to join his Croatian wife, standards of living were very low, with shortages of meat, fruit, and of all kinds of other basic products (soap, razors, needles etc.) The conditions gradually worsened after the Resolution, so that in the winter of 1948-49 no fruit could be found, while in the next winter there was no wine available. The shortage and rationing of food and basic products was even more intolerable since a whole “new class” of bureaucrats and privileged functionaries had emerged, which was not subjected to food rationing and were provided for in special shops. Bonelli thus tells of a “spontaneous dissatisfaction” among the people, with the way in which the revolutionary elite had become bureaucratized and removed from the everyday needs of the population. 65 Singular “ib-eovac”, from ib, Informbiro, the Yugoslav abbreviation of Communist Information Bureau (or Cominform). 64 The first movie dealing openly with this issue is Emir Kusturica’s When father was away on business (1985) based on the real story of the father of his screenwriter, poet and writer Abdulah Sidran. 65 See Bonelli (1994). In a letter to his mother, Bonelli estimated that the living conditions in Yugoslavia were in between the ones of Northern and Southern Italy. Still, unemployment “did not exist” and skilled workers were in great demand. Many unemployed men from Italy, mostly peasants from the neighboring regions, still came to look for work. See Rome, Istituto 63 170 �According to Bonelli, the common people in Yugoslavia saw the Cominform Resolution as an “internal issue between communists, with no relevance for everyday life” (Bonelli 1994: 31). Eva Grlić, however, relates how among rank and file party militants and leftist intellectuals, many people who had become critical of the current lack of democracy interpreted the Resolution as partially justified. This happened notably with old communists and former fighters who were dissatisfied with the leadership’s decisions. Eva Grlić (2005: 139) says that she was angry with Tito and the leadership, for portraying the Soviet system as ideal. Now, instead, the propaganda had been reversed: “ (…) in the ussr everything was wrong, all was lie and crime, but we learned this only because the cpsu, with Stalin at its head, had decided to kick us out of Cominform. It was impossible at this point to establish where truth was: evidently there were lies on both sides.”66 Paradoxically, when the split became irrevocable, Yugoslav leaders, intent upon their own survival at any cost, ended up adopting the same Stalinist methods in their attempts to counter Cominform attacks on their government. The political repression waged by the Yugoslav government against Cominformists started in the autumn of 1948, and increased rapidly during 1949. This wave of political repression, mainly carried out by the udba, the secret information services, affected many thousands of people indiscriminately, not only active “Cominformists”, but also many who had no clear opinion on the Tito-Stalin split. An overheard joke about Tito was enough to condemn one to a tour of infamous prisons such as Sremska Mitrovica, before being banished to the infamous secret prison island Goli Otok, a barren rocky stretch of land in the Adriatic Sea, or to Sveti Grgur, another island nearby which hosted the women’s prison. The prison conditions on the islands were extremely harsh, with forced labor, insufficient food, and compulsory “re-education” sessions among the inmates, which included reciprocal beatings and denunciations, so that no one could leave the island without feeling guilty or responsible towards the other inmates (Banac 1988; Bonelli 1994; Scotti 1997; Jambrešić-Kirin 2009, 2008). Banac (1988) has calculated that a total of 55,600 people were put on trial as “Cominformists”, with around 17,000 men and 860 women arrested and incarcerated as political prisoners, but the sources are sparse and incomplete. Many records of Cominformist trials were destroyed after Yugoslavia’s reconciliation with the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. As with the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the political represGramsci, Fondo Mosca, Busta 135 Jugoslavia e Venezia Giulia. As mentioned earlier, few thousands of Italian workers and families from the bordering cities had moved to Yugoslavia in the years 1946-1947, when the pci journal L’Unità painted the situation of Yugoslavia in rosy colors, and the local communist sections actively encouraged their militants to go “on the other side” to help with the construction of socialism, and also as a way to counter the “exodus” of Italian exiles from Istria and Dalmatia. See Giuseppini (2008) and later in this chapter. 66 Italian communist militants had a similar reaction of disillusionment in 1956, when Stalin’s crimes were revealed during Kruschev’s “Secret Speech” at the twentieth Congress of the pcus. Compare the words of Eva Grlić with the statements by Laura Weiss quoted at the opening of Chapter 7. In both cases, the sudden change in the official “Truth” provoked disbelief and distrust towards the communist leadership. 171 �sion mainly affected the middle and lower cadres of the Yugoslav state, notably former partisan fighters and long-standing antifascist militants who had become part of the state administration as local officers, journalists and doctors. Many of them endured the Goli Otok concentration camp after having survived the hardships of partisan war and in some cases Nazi concentration camps. Some found the Goli Otok camp even harder to bear, as the repression was at the hand of the socialist state, and there were no guards, but only fellow prisoners incited against each other and encouraged to earn their “redemption” by mistreating their fellow inmates.67 Even after their release, former detainees continued to live in a state of fear and mistrust and were forced to periodically report on their surroundings at the police station.68 For many years, their citizenship rights were suspended, their property confiscated, they were refused employment and ostracized by their surroundings. All of this deepened past traumas and fears. As Renata Jambrešić-Kirin notes (2009), the first literary renditions of male inmates’ experiences at Goli Otok were already published in the mid-Fifties. The publication of non-fiction studies and survivors’ testimonies became possible only in the 1980s, when the crisis of the Yugoslav regime started. Yet, as she points out, women’s memoirs and testimonies about their detention on Goli Otok (such as those by Eva Grlić, Jenny Lebl, and Rosa Dragović-Gaspar) were made public only forty years after their release from custody, in the 1990s and 2000s. This phenomenon, she argues, “says a lot about the lack of women’s statements on internal dissent, the marginalization of women as subjects of political history, but also about the success of police intimidation and the depths of repressed trauma, which they didn’t want to pass on to their children and nephews” (Jambrešić-Kirin 2009). The silence lasted for years even between close friends: former partisan and afž leader Neda Božinović relates that one of her school friends, another former partisan, only told her twenty-five years later that she had been on Goli Otok. On her hand, though, Neda seemed to have already guessed what had happened: “We saw each other all the time, but avoided talking about Goli Otok. She avoided it and I avoided it…I did not ask (Stojaković, Jankov and Savić 2002: 31).69 Kuzmanović (1995: 60) made similar observations about the proliferation of male testimonies about Goli Otok, and about the silences of the prisoners’ wives. She recounts the case of Olga Hebrang, wife of Croatian communist leader Andrija Hebrang, one of the most notorious victims of the post-1948 repression: “The fate of Olga’s secSee the quotations from former inmates in Jambrešić-Kirin (2009). According to the writer Abdulah Sidran, whose father was detained on Goli Otok, the survivors were forced to cooperate with the secret service once they had been released, or they would have lose their jobs, houses, or be sent back to the island. In this way the secret service was able to establish a network of thousands of collaborators (Sidran and Del Giudice 2009: 414-415). 69 This woman was later ‘rehabilitated’ thanks to Neda, who openly visited her with her husband, a member of the Party Central Committee, in 1953/1954. This was interpreted by the community as a symbolic ‘rehabilitation and allowed her friend to get a job afterwards. Still, she did not reveal to Neda what she had experienced on Goli Otok until the 1990s (Stojaković, Jankov and Savić 2002: 31). 67 68 172 �ond husband became the subject of hot national debate in the late 1980s, and Olga became the center of media attention. If she had been born male, perhaps she would have written a book about her experiences. But being what she is, Olga gave a single interview, the central figure of which was her husband. That she had been a victim in her own right was of no interest.” Other women, whose husbands had been imprisoned, and who had suffered state harassment for decades, declined to be interviewed by Kuzmanović, since they did not see their sacrifices as worth remembering. Sometimes the catastrophic Yugoslav wars of the 1990s convinced these women to speak out and so counter erasure and forgetting, as related by Eva Grlić (2005: 7): “After having already survived into my eighties, instead of the expected and deserved peace, I witnessed a terrible war falling upon Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. When faced with an avalanche of new mass war tragedies, I started to subtract from forgetting, through these memoirs, that which we had lived through during and after the Second World War.” Still, Eva told her own story only decades after retiring from public and intellectual life, a life dedicated to her family, and notably to her husband, the influential philosopher Danko Grlić, whose career and intellectual engagements found an invaluable support in Eva’s talents. In a remarkable essay contained in the anthology Dom i Svijet about the feminist interpretation of women’s writings on Goli Otok, Jambrešić-Kirin (2008) notes the scarcity of studies about the specific gendered experience of intra-communist political repression, and notably how in the prison camps new “egalitarian” conceptions of women’s roles were combined with long-standing misogynistic anxieties about the women “of the enemy”. The recently gained right to divorce, for instance, was used as a tool for state repression. Husbands were urged to divorce female detainees, and detainees’ parents pressured to break off any relations, if they wanted to avoid reprisals. The wives of political prisoners, too, were encouraged to break with their husbands, now “enemies of the state”; they were themselves sent to Goli Otok or permanently harassed, losing their apartments, their jobs, and facing public hostility. Many women detained on Goli Otok found themselves there merely because of family relationships, or by chance, and had no idea of what the Cominform was. Others were professors, journalists, party officers, or women who had had contact with foreign countries through their work or their husbands, and who had gained these positions thanks to the Resistance legacy and to postwar emancipation politics (see Grlić 2005: 155-156). The identities of female detainees are a testimony of political fears about ambitious women (“quality cadres”), but also of the ideological fear towards “conservative” women, who do not show unconditional loyalty to the state because of their familial, religious or ethnic attachments (Jambrešić-Kirin 2008: 85). According to Jambrešić-Kirin, therefore, the gendered experiences of Goli Otok show that the post-revolutionary emancipation politics implemented in the Yugoslav state had an instrumental component, and could not dispel long-standing patriarchal structures (2008: 84, 92). Jambrešić-Kirin points to the fact that the “ceremonies of degradation” set up for female prisoners specifically targeted them as biological female beings, affecting their 173 �reproductive capacities70 and their gendered individualities (2008: 82). This included head shaving, group undressing and disinfections, being made to wear clothing and footwear of inappropriate size, obscene signs carried on the body, cleaning of toilets and the public “confession” of misdeeds (2008: 99). In a distorted socialist experiment, the tortures within the camp were entirely “self-managed”, in order to destroy any solidarity among the inmates and in order to create reciprocal hatred and guilt. Interrogations, confessions and the organization of labor were entirely managed by the detainees themselves, while the prison administration lived outside the camp. Within this system, “nobody could leave as if nothing had happened, without feelings of guilt.” Instead, all detainees “were forced to hate each other, accuse each other, beat each other, while the administration, housed in simple, decent buildings, in a different area of the coast, was far removed from these horrors” (Grlić 2005: 167-168). The feelings of guilt and fear accompanied the former inmates for the rest of their life. In this way the prisoners – the women prisoners in particular – “guarded for the longest time the best kept secret of Yugoslav ‘juridical independence’, the secret of Goli Otok” (Jambrešić-Kirin 2008: 81). 2.2. Enemy making: The afž and the udi amidst Cold War struggles As mentioned in the previous section, there are still few published memoirs of women’s experiences of post-1948 political repression and victimization, and they are rarely analyzed in political history. Similarly, few studies have dealt with the role of women’s organizations within Cold War intra-communist conflicts in Yugoslavia (Sklevicky 1989b; 1996; Jeraj 2005; Pantelić 2011).71 In this section I adopt a transnational perspec70 Not only did the prisoners stop menstruating because of exhaustion and hunger (Grlić, 2005: 58), but some were convinced that this was an effect of poison in the prison food (Jambrešić-Kirin 2008: 90). According to the testimony of Slava K., a woman who had been detained on Goli Otok, none of the women detained there were able to have children afterwards, probably because of being poisoned: “Ja mrtva gladna, valjda su nam brom davali, tko zna što su nam davali u hrani. Samo cu ti reći : nijedna žena koja je bila na Golom Otoku nema djece. Znači, tu je nešto.” (I was starving, probably they gave us bromine, who knows what they put in the food. I will tell you only one thing: not one woman who has been to Goli Otok managed to have children. That means, there must have been something there.) Quoted in Dijanić et al. (2004: 145). 71 In her study of Slovenian women in socialist times, historian and archivist Mateja Jeraj dedicates some pages to the effects of the Cominform Resolution on the Slovenian chapter of the Antifascist Women’s Front (see Jeraj 2005: 211-219). She also tells the story of a woman detained on Goli Otok, Vilma Štendler-Zupan (born 1927), whom she interviewed in 2002. In her book on female partisans in Serbia, Ivana Pantelić dedicates a chapter to the lives of some partisan women who had been detained as political prisoners, on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, but also in other prisons all over the country (Ramski Rit, Zabela, Stolac, Lonjske Polje etc.); she also deals with the case of Marija Zelić, former udba officer and the main interrogator in Ramski Rit and Sveti Grgur, a woman who is remembered by all detainees for her fanatism and fierceness, but who spoke of her tasks as interrogator with burocratic detachment, underlining 174 �tive on these events, expanding my analysis to include the effect of the Cominform Resolution on women’s organizations in Italy and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. A detailed study of this issue is beyond the scope of this dissertation, since it would require a thorough exploration of state and party archives, whereas I choose to limit the present research to the collections of the afž, the udi and the udais, with the exception of some Italian Communist Party material housed at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. From the collections of the afž, the udi and the udais, it is already clear, however, that women’s organizations, in alliance with their respective communist parties, were active agents of these struggles and actively contributed to the production of Cold War discourses, which included the creation of internal and external enemies. This process, in turn, also greatly affected women militants. In this section I will give some examples of the way in which Cold War fears and mentalities permeated the life of women’s organizations in Yugoslavia and Italy, while in the next section I will deal with the specific context of the Italo-Yugoslav border area. As shown in the first part of this chapter, afž leaders attempted to counter their international isolation resulting from the 1949 expulsion from the widf. During the war the afž had mobilized women against Nazi-fascist enemies and collaborators, while in the postwar period women were encouraged to mobilize against class enemies, speculators and former collaborators, in order to strengthen the government (see Jeraj 2005). After 1948, as Sklevicky notes in her pioneering essay, “for the first time the stress was overtly on the ideological indoctrination of women” (1989b: 101) and the afž was in charge of transmitting anti-Soviet party directives. The Yugoslav authorities called for mass mobilization against Information Bureau spies and conspirators, but also against those identified as “kulak”72, notably peasants who resisted the collectivization of land imposed by the Yugoslav state in the years 19491951. The collectivization was seen in fact by state authorities as a way to survive the economic blockade raised by the Soviet bloc.73 It is not surprising, therefore, that a 1949 Resolution by the afž Central Committee instructed militants on the necesher engagement in the ‘re-education’ of the prisoners (see Pantelić 2011: 105). 72 See Jeraj (2005: 207-211). Bokovoy (1998: 90) explains: “While the Soviets had tried to define, quantify, and clarify the different peasant groups during the 1920s, the kpj, by late 1947, finally settled on a broad philosophical definition of the kulak. For the kpj, “kulak” became interchangeable with “speculator”, “enemy of the people”, and “usurper” as a term for rich, exploitative elements. “Kulak” came to mean all that was obstreperous, recalcitrant, opportunistic, and obstructionist – anyone who prevented the Communists from accomplishing their goals in the countryside, regardless of what their material or social position might be. Kardelj said it best when he stated in November 1947, “The kulak is a political concept – a man who does not fulfill his obligation to the state.” About the afž and the construction of internal enemies before 1948, see Jeraj (2005: 189-211). 73 Bokovoy (1998: 135) quotes Ivo Banac on this point: “The anti-Cominformist purge was a unique opportunity for the kpj leadership to cleanse the land of all potential troublemakers.” However, she adds, “in the countryside, it was not always clear who the troublemakers were. Trouble could be interpreted as simple recalcitrance or outright resistance to the otkup and the peasant work cooperatives. Both tendencies existed, and both were punished.” 175 �sity to “actively unmask those among women who are kulak, war-kulak and Inform Bureau spokespersons.”74 From another report presented during the Third afž Plenum in June 1949, we get a sense of the violent climate prevailing in 1949, and we see that women at times actively took part in the production of violence. The delegate from Pula, Istria, declares that more must be done in the struggle against the Inform Bureau, and that “today every member of the Party, every member of the Liberation Front and every female member of the afž has to immediately clarify his/her Inform Bureau activities.” She reports the discovery of a secretary of the afž, who had pretended to separate from her husband “only to maintain her position”, while she in fact continued her relationship with him, and hid him at home: “As soon as it was found out she was thrown out and boycotted and sent to work, to wash laundry in a factory.” In Pula, she reports, the fight against supporters of Inform Bureau had intensified: “When two [male] supporters of ib spoke in the street against our Party, our women told them that they love the Party and hit the two ib supporters on the spot.”75 On the other hand, the majority of the afž sources express concern about afž members’ lack of interest in the Cominform issue (see also Jeraj 2005: 212). Another undated document, most probably from 1949, laments the indifference towards the struggle against the Cominform among afž members, who see this issue as a “party issue” and not as an issue pertaining to the Antifascist Women’s Front. “Many of our organizations [sections] estimate that the struggle against the Informbiro can limit itself to a general declaration, since in the midst of these organizations there are no Informbiro supporters.” In the women’s press, the document continues, there are hardly any references to the issue, so that one could have the impression that “nothing has happened in the relation between the Soviet Union and our country.” As pointed out by Jeraj (2005: 212), this “lack of interest” might also be interpreted as a sign of fear, and as a wise strategy to stay out of trouble, due to the sensitivity of the issue, and the great risk of getting arrested for no reason. As a woman relates in an interview, after 1948 people were advised to “keep silent, since even the walls have ears. So it was better if you kept silent” (quoted in Dijanić et al. 2004: 169). At the same time, many local afž cadres probably could not decide on the proper stance to assume in this process, due to the continuous shifts in the relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, rumors, fears and anxieties about a possible Zagreb, Državni Arhiv, afž-kdaž-hr-hda 1234-5-k.58 “Sjednice, Plenumi, Sastanci, 19461959”: 801. “Resolucija o Narodnim Zadacima Trečeg Plenuma co afž Jugoslavije Održanog 4 i 5 Juna 1949 u Beogradu.” See also Sklevicky, 1996: 130-138 for a discussion of afž role in the villages. See also Chapter 6. 75 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž collection, 141-6-15, 1025 : “Imamo primera organizacija afž da se otkrila tajnicu afž da se rastala od muža koji se izjasnio za Rezoluciju Informbiroa samo da se održi na položaju i koja je i dalje održavala sa njim veze i skrivala ga u kući. Čim se doznalo za to ona je izbacena i bojkotovana i poslata da radi, da pere veš u jednoj tvornici. Imamo u Puli slućaj zaoštrene borbe protiv informbirovaca. Kada su dva informbirovca govorila na ulici protiv naše Partije, nase žene su pokazale da vole Partiju i na licu mesta pretukle ova dva informbirovca.” 74 176 �foreign invasion were spreading among women in 1949: some people waited for the British, while other expected the Russians to arrive. “People say that in such isolation we cannot resist for too long” (quoted in Jeraj 2005: 214). The afž federal leaders, therefore, feared that the mass of women could be an easy “prey” of the Inform-bureau slogans, notably the slogans casting doubt on the competence of the state, such as for instance the ideas that “the English, the Americans, or the Russians and the Hungarians will come”, or that “socialism is being built too quickly, that we export too much” etc. These slogans could easily combine with “reactionary” statements from church members, and circulate among women.76 afž members in all the provincial sections were therefore entreated to counter the “passifying” of the feminine masses, and to mobilize them on this issue, by explaining the danger that Informbiro actions represented against “the construction of socialism in our country.” The struggle against the Inform-Bureau had to become “an integral part of the consciousness of our citizens.”77 The afž leaders had the task of “chang[ing] the opinion of some provincial councils that women in their sections are not interested to the Inform-Bureau Resolution; they have to actively build the consciousness of our working women.” The document concluded by saying that “our power [the power of the country] resides not only in the righteousness of our positions towards the Informbiro, but also in the fact that many millions could support the struggle – if only everyone was aware of the impending threat.”78 Across the border, the Italian pci was also affected by increasing Cold War tensions, and by its gradual isolation after the 1948 April elections. On the 14th of July 1948, a young man of anti-communist persuasion shot pci leader Palmiro Togliatti at the exit of Parliament. While he was in hospital in critical condition, mass strikes and armed insurrections of the workers erupted all over the country and were harshly repressed by the police. The climate seemed to prefigure the start of a civil war, with 30 dead and 800 injured; Togliatti was finally saved and called for moderation, managing to calm the situation. Yet in this tense climate pci militants adopted a siege mentality, with neighborhood sections assuming “the same comprehensive role as the church in the everyday life of its members” (Urban 1986: 220) and with a strong reliance on the myth of the Soviet Union as a source of popular legitimacy. In this context, the pci unavoidably joined – albeit in a “not always consequent” way – the Cominform campaign against “Titoism” (see Terzuolo 1985; Karlsen 2010). The pci national press campaign against “Titoists” increased after the Second Cominform Resolution of November 1949, with a number of reports on the conditions of politiBelgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-6-537. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-6-538. Ibidem. “Svaki graditelj socijalizma danas kod nas mora da je sasvim na čisto sa pravo sadržinom i namerom informbirovskih kleveta, jer to danas mora biti sastavni deo svesti naših graditelja. Naša rukovodstva zbog toga moraju razbiti mišljenja nekih sreskih odbora koji javljaju da se žene u njihovom srezu ne interesuju za Rezoluciju Informbiroa, one moraju aktivno graditi svest naših radnih žena. Moć našeg stava nije samo u pravilnosti njegovoj, već i u činjenici da ima masovnu mnogomiljonsku podršku trudbenika naše zemlje, a ta podrška toliko je veća, ukoliko smo našim radom omogućili da svako zna za klevete.” 76 77 78 177 �cal repression and “terror” within Yugoslavia and in Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste. L’Unità even reported on the fate of Italian political prisoners in Goli Otok as early as 1952 (Karlsen 2010: 214). The struggle against “Titoists” took an internal character in Italy too: in 1951 the pci expelled two prominent former partisans and pci leaders from Emilia-Romagna, Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi, and accused them of being “Titoist traitors”, because they expressed independent opinions about the relationship between the Soviet Union and workers’ movements in other countries (Terzuolo 1985: 139-143). Valdo Magnani, notably, who had fought in the Resistance in Yugoslavia, condemned in January 1951, during the local pci Congress in Reggio Emilia, the fact that many Italian militants placed their hopes in a revolution brought by the Red Army. He petitioned for a democratic renewal that would draw on national, rather than international forces, and declared any invasion by a foreign army unacceptable, no matter which side it might come from. He was immediately expelled from the party as a “traitor” and isolated from political life. The testimony of Valdo Magnani’s second wife, journalist and writer Franca Schiavetti Magnani, whose antifascist parents and relatives refused to have any relationship with her husband for the next five years, affirms the painful fierceness of intra-communist divisions and makes the difficult status of leftist “heretical” thought in early Cold War times apparent (Magnani 1990). The fear of “Titoist” heresy, be it internal or external, spread also to the Union of Italian Women, which between 1948 and 1953 was more than ever ’embedded‘ in Cold War struggles (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of the issue of autonomy of women’s organizations). Even though the udi had severed all ties with the afž after its expulsion from the widf, udi magazine Noi Donne regularly published articles on “Tito’s terror” in Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste, and relayed Cominform propaganda in its publications. Moreover, the udi sent some messages of “greetings” to the Yugoslav women, for instance on the 8th of March 1950, when the udi section of the city of Udine wished “the Yugoslav women who suffer under a fascist regime a forthcoming liberation, that would save them from being a tool of warmongering American imperialism.”79 But as in the case of the base of the afž militants, issues of international politics seemed far removed from the everyday preoccupations of udi intermediate cadres and rank-and-file members. This is made clear by the transcription of a 1950 meeting of the Women’s Commission of the Italian Communist Party, which gathered communist female cadres, including some leaders of the udi.80 Discussing how to better mobilize women in the midst of anti-communism and class-based repression, it was noted that not much had been done to popularize the Soviet campaign for “peace”. Elda Marsiglio from Padua (where party members comprised only 1 per cent of the female population) stated: “some women do not understand that the threat of war is real, others are passive, others fear that the war will come from the Soviet side.”81 Lina Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-24-118. Rome, Istituto Gramsci, mf 233, fascicolo 17 – sezione femminile 1949-1950, Verbale della riunione della Commissione Femminile del26-27 gennaio 1950. 81 Ibidem. 79 80 178 �Fibbi, former partisan, communist and trade union leader lamented that very few provincial councils of the udi had expressed interested in the widf Moscow Congress. She also pointed to the fact that the exclusion of the Yugoslav leaders and the Resolution of the Moscow Council had scarcely been debated.82 widf representative and udi leader Maria Maddalena Rossi also complained that the “comrades had not studied the Moscow Resolutions”, and pointed to the risks of counter-propaganda coming from Yugoslavia: “What are the practical consequences, for instance, of the exclusion of the Yugoslav leaders ? Are we worrying about sending back the material that is continually sent to our organizations from Yugoslavia?”83 The need to reject the counter-propaganda from Yugoslavia was connected to the fear of possible internal dissidence. Another communist leader worried about the students of the scuola quadri, located in Milan. These schools trained a number of women from different social backgrounds to become local cadres and party leaders. Within the school, it was noted, “the need for vigilance is serious and must be examined: cases of Titoist deviation among women have not been signaled so far, but nonetheless we need to develop a more careful vigilance and a tighter control.”84 These debates among leaders show how Cold War fears and anxieties were propagated by women’s organizations, and how these organizations contributed to the creation of internal and external enemies. This allowed them to build group identity and internal cohesion, but also resulted in processes of political repression and exclusion. Internal polarizations within Italy caused by the Soviet-Yugoslav split seem to be confined to the leaders and the intermediate cadres of the party, while they only partially affected the militant base. In the Italo-Yugoslav border area, however, where ideological polarizations combined with ethnic and national tensions, the Cominform Resolution had very divisive consequences for the local leftist forces and for women’s organizations. 2.3. The effects of the Cominform Resolution in the Italo-Yugoslav border area As made clear in the previous chapter, in the postwar era the Yugoslav model had been hegemonic among the leftist forces of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, notably in the contested city of Trieste under Allied administration, as well as in the harbor of Monfalcone, from which thousands of skilled workers of the shipyards migrated to Ibidem. “Quali conseguenze pratiche, per esempio, ha nelle nostre organizzazioni femminili, il fatto che le dirigenti iugoslave siano state espulse dalla fdif? Ci si preoccupa di respingere il materiale che dalla Jugoslavia viene continuamente inviato alle nostre organizzazioni?” Ibidem. 84 “La questione della vigilanza è seria e deve essere esaminata: non sono stati sinora segnalati casi di deviazione di carattere titista tra le donne, occorre però, comunque, sviluppare una più attenta vigilanza e un maggiore controllo.” Ibidem. 82 83 179 �Yugoslavia in 1947.85 In Trieste, from 1945 onwards, the leftist forces were constantly mobilized to campaign for Trieste as Settima Federativa, or Seventh Republic of the Yugoslav Federation, as a way to include the city in the socialist bloc guided by the Soviet Union. While for many Slovenes this implied a national choice, for many Italian workers, living in a land that has been “Italian” only since 1919, and heavily repressed during Fascism, this choice was determined by class and ideology.86 Some Italian workers wished to be part of Yugoslavia because of their internationalist beliefs (which in Federal Yugoslavia would not contravene the Marxist doctrine of national self-determination). Yet, over the years, the possibility of an annexation to Yugoslavia had practically vanished; while the campaign on this issue had failed, not much had been done on other impending issues, such as labor rights, housing prices and other pressing matters. Some of the Italian leaders of the local communist party, the pctlt (previously pcrg), had grown exasperated with Slovene communist leaders’ attempts to dictate the agenda within the pctlt according to Yugoslav and Slovene concerns, since this alienated the sympathies of the Italian workers, while deepening the rift between “Slavo-communism” and the anti-communism of the Italian middle classes.87 The Resolution of June 1948, therefore, was received in a context already ridden with nationalist tensions, and added further divisions within the party and among the local leftist militants of different ethnic backgrounds, not only in Trieste but also in the rest of the Free Territory of Trieste. The leadership of the pctlt met on the 3rd and 4th of July, and after a heated debate the party leadership split between a majority of followers of the Cominform Resolution, led by Vittorio Vidali, and a minority of followers of the Yugoslav Communist Party, led by Branko Babić (Terzuolo 1985: 145). The majority of Italian militants from Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav border area accepted the 1948 Resolution88, and agreed with its allegations of “nationalism” on the part of the Yugoslav Communist Party, since they were already critical of the behavior of Yugoslav leaders towards the Italian minority. However, some of them recognized the allegations in the Second Resolution of 1949 – especially those which portrayed the Yugoslav government as a “gang of assassins and spies” – as exaggerated and unrealistic89, notably when they contradicted direct experiences of joint Resistance fight85 These workers were encouraged by the local pci to move to Yugoslavia to “build socialism”, and from the beginning of 1947 around 2000 of them took the direction of Fiume/Rijeka, the harbor city on the other side of the (yet uncertain) border (see Berrini 2004). 86 Their image of the motherland, in fact, was “filtered through the uniforms of carabinieri, police and Fascists, a motherland that always considered us as Italians of second or third rank” (Berrini 2004: 45). 87 About the strategies of the pctlt, see notably the 1947 report by Mario Pacor. Rome, Archivio Gramsci, mf 134, f. “Trieste e Pola”. See also Terzuolo (1985: 145-151), as well as Karlsen (2010). 88 In the administrative elections held in zone A in June 1949,  “the Cominformists won 21.4 percent of the vote in Trieste, as opposed to 2.35 percent for the Titoists. The difference in Muggia was even more striking – 56.86 as opposed to 4.39 percent. Even in the more heavily Slovene comuni of zone A, the Cominfomists always received a higher percentage” (Terzuolo 1985, 146). 89 See for instance the interview of Licia Chersovani, intervistatore Franco Giraldi, pp. 8-9, dattiloscritto Fondo Bonelli, irsml Trieste. 180 �ing.90 While the Cominform side also gathered some Slovene support, the majority of Slovene militants of the Antifascist Italo-Slovene Union sided with Tito. A number of Slovene villages near Trieste sided with Vidali, while others sided with Babić. In this way “nationality remained a major dividing line within the Trieste working-class movement” (Terzuolo 1985: 148), and the ideological divides overlapped with previous national and ethnic divides. The Italian communist militants who had immigrated to Yugoslavia, too, remained faithful to the Italian Communist Party and to the Soviet Union. The allegations against the Yugoslav leadership appeared to be a faithful portrayal of the dire material situation they experienced, while they continued to believe that living conditions in the Soviet bloc were idyllic, as reported by the Italian communist press (Bonelli 1994). Through 1949, the Cominformist campaign became fierce on both sides of the border. The leaders of the Trieste party, traditionally hard-liners and now freed from Yugoslav hegemony, acted as a Soviet outpost in the fight against Titoism. Popular communist leader Vittorio Vidali – a long-standing revolutionary with a personal connection to Moscow – became Cominform’s most prominent man in Trieste (Karlsen 2010; Bonelli 1994; Terzuolo 1985). In Zone B of the tlt and in Yugoslavia proper the political repression affected many Italian workers who had sided with the pci. The majority of them managed to return to Italy, while some others, including a few who had been encouraged by the pci and by the pctlt to agitate against the Yugoslav government, were put on trial, and sentenced, and suffered many years in Goli Otok and in other prisons (Bonelli 1994; Scotti 1997). Women were not spared from this intra-communist “war of religion”. As Silva Bon notes (2004: 49), in Trieste the Cominform split forced many women to “take sides” within the party and in their personal lives, often leading to the painful ending of important relationships and friendships: “these are years in which for many women even the ‘private is public’. Ideology conditions all their life experiences.” A number of Italian women who had migrated to Yugoslavia with their families were affected directly or indirectly by the political repression too.91 The trauma of political repression, moreover, persisted through the years: many Istrian men who had been detained on Goli Otok were very violent towards their wives once they returned home.92 A former partisan who had fought with the Yugoslavs stated: “It was a trauma for us all. Many among us never accepted this. How could I, for instance, accept such a thing after having collaborated with them for more than two years, seeing them dying in struggle in the way they died?” – (“Fu una cosa traumatica per tutti. Molti e molti tra di noi non abbiamo mai accettato una cosa come questa. Ma come potevo io, per esempio, accettare una cosa come questa se per più di due anni avevo collaborato con loro, li avevo visti in lotta morire come sono morti?”). Intervista con Mario Lizzero per il programma rai Trieste nel ’48, dattiloscritto Fondo Bonelli, irsml Trieste. 91 Eva Grlić remembers Licia Pipan, for instance, an Italian woman on Goli Otok (Grlić 2005; see also Scotti 1997). 92 As reported by professor Gloria Nemec, oral historian and scholar of gender relations, who has researched the lives of Italian exiles from Istria in the postwar period (personal conversation, Trieste, November 2010). 90 181 �The violent ideological divides also affected women’s organizing in Trieste, notably the udais, the Union of Antifascist Italo-Slovene Women. On the 21st of July 1948, after a turbulent assembly attended by 500 women, in which a female comrade was even “mistreated and beaten”, the majority of the association took a stance in favor of the Cominform Resolution.93 On the 5th of August, the general council of udais representatives from the Free Territory of Trieste expelled those women, mostly Slovenes, who still supported Tito.94 From then until 1950, ‘Cominfomist’ women continued to use the name “udais”; in 1951, they adopted the name of Unione Donne Democratiche (udd), and in 1954, when Trieste was assigned to Italy, they merged with the Union of Italian Women (udi). For their part, the ‘Titoist’ women also tried to keep the name “udais”, but later renamed themselves as the women’s section of the Union of Independent Socialists (Unione Socialista Indipendente, usi), a national party founded by former pci dissidents Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi, which in Trieste united the pro-Yugoslav left.95 Judging from the documents produced by the two sides in this period, the local conflict between “Titoist” and “Cominformist” leaders was heated. The two organizations were competing for the favor of the local “masses” of housewives and working women, through the organization of political campaigns, cultural and recreational activities, kindergartens and the like. Reading between the lines of official reports, it seems that women from the “base” were more occupied with their daily survival and less with ideological discussions. The top-down attempt to mobilize the “passive” masses was a constant concern of the leaders. In March 1950, the pro-Titoist udais organized a Congress, and reported that the pro-Cominform udais attempted to disrupt it, but were unable to mobilize their “mass”. Mass is written in inverted commas in the original document, to distinguish between real and false mass support: “We should not forget that we are the true representatives of udais, and as such we should penetrate among the passive mass, explaining to them how to struggle for the rights of the working class people.”96 A similar language is used in a document of the udd, which reports that “Titoist women” attempted to “pacify” the activists, while they build consensus among women by “visiting each house, and knowing from the Ljubljana, Archiv Republike Slovenije, as 1576, k.3, 2C’, “Relazione politico-organizzativa delle compagne responsabili dell’udais” (December 1948). 94 Ibidem. 95 Due to the quick changes of political denominations and to the fragmentation of sources, I formulate this interpretation on the basis of cross-checked documents collected in Ljubljana and Trieste. While the documents of the pro-Cominform udais – later udd – are conserved mainly in Trieste, the documents of the pro-Tito udais – later usi – are held principally in Ljubljana. The documents of the two organizations are more or less evenly distributed according to their political orientation. 96 “Non dobbiamo dimenticare che noi siamo le vere e proprie rappresentanti del Udais e come tali dobbiamo penetrare fra la massa passiva, spiegando a questa come bisogna lottare per i diritti del popolo lavoratore…” Ljubljana, Archiv Republike Slovenije, as 1576, k.3, 2E, report 7.3.50 (cr iii Rione, Trieste). 93 182 �information gained from activists at the base the problems, the difficulties, the weaknesses of each family, to whom they attempt to get closer by promising help.”97 udais leaders and intermediate members engaged in a number of grassroots activities at the local level, which were heavily conditioned by the post-Resolution climate. Its leaders were also involved in transnational activism: in 1948-49 Laura Weiss, Marija Bernetić and other udais leaders attended the widf Congresses in Budapest and Moscow. They did not mention the local strife, but actively engaged in the Cominformist campaign by supporting the exclusion of the Yugoslav representatives from the widf. The figure of “professional revolutionary” Marija Bernetić is, in this sense, particularly interesting. Together with Vittorio Vidali, she had a very prominent role in anti-Tito activities, not only through the udais and the widf, but also through the organizing of secret Cominformist activities within Yugoslavia proper (Bonelli 1994). In the mid-1950s, after the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, she allegedly contributed to the destruction of files on the Italian Cominformists, which had become by then a source of embarrassment for the Italian Communist Party (Scotti 1997; Bonelli 1994; see Chapter 7). These examples seem to indicate that a separation between “women’s” and “communist” agendas is misleading, as is the vision of “communist women” as naive and manipulated. Instead, we need more studies on women’s different political loyalties, and on the different roles they played within Cold War intra-communist conflicts, notably when they occupied a leadership position. Conclusion In this chapter – based on a combination of sources from different archives located in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Trieste, and Rome – I have dealt with the historical and geopolitical consequences of the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948-1949, focusing on its impact on Yugoslav, Italian and Italo-Slovene women’s organizations. I have analyzed the production of Cold War discourses and its effects on women’s organizing, but also the ways in which women’s organizations were themselves producers and propagators of Cold War discourses and worldviews. Political processes of exclusion, othering and enemy-making were an intrinsic part of the early Cold War period. Women were both engaged in these political processes, and dramatically affected by them. While the widf excluded and discriminated against the representatives of the afž , in compliance with the Cominform Resolution excluding Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc, udi leaders participated in the Cominform campaign, by approving the decision of widf. The Yugoslav afž, however, was later involved in the creation and repression of internal dissidents, the so-called ibeovci, or “Cominformists”. The udais in Trieste was also split along ideological and ethnic lines. “Una non indifferente attività individuale svolgono le titiste portandosi di casa in casa, e conoscendo attraverso le informazioni delle loro attiviste della base, i problemi, le difficoltà, le debolezze di ogni famiglia, cercano di attirarle promettendo loro aiuti.” Narodna in Studijska Knjizica, Trieste, fond asizz-udais, report udd 6.1.51, Trieste, “Dalla Relazione dell’Unione Donne Democratiche. Attività titista.” 97 183 �In this chapter, I have once more paid attention to the different positions of the women affiliated to these organizations, looking at the leaders and at the intermediate cadres, but also at the subjectivities and voices of the “masses” – as they were constructed by leaders and intermediate cadres in their documents. As militants of Marxist organizations, udi, afž and udais leaders were keen to work for the consensus of the “masses”, which would serve as a source of power and legitimation. On the other hand, in times of social fear and paranoia about external and internal enemies, the most “organized” women often perceived the “masses” as passive, indifferent, or potentially reactionary, and attempted to establish tighter control. In the lack of interest or “drifting” of the feminine masses one can read a number of feelings and strategies, such as fear of war, everyday survival, as well as resistance to top-down political directives and state control. A major difference between the udi and the afž, from now on, is the fact that the afž became fully integrated in the state apparatus of the Yugoslav socialist regime after 1948. According to Lydia Sklevicky, “the total integration of the emancipatory process into the ‘ideological apparatus of the state’ meant that emancipation became something ‘practiced’ on women, as inarticulate objects of the social-political process, instead of making them its legitimate subject” (1989b: 105). Yet, even when perceived as objects rather than subjects of social change, the “feminine masses” could express their agency, for instance by refusing to get drawn into the intra-communist “war of religion” caused by the Soviet-Yugoslav split, and in the enmity it produced. Women also participated in the making of internal enemies, with discursive and material consequences. In these early Cold War years many antifascist women were put on trial as enemies of the state: a case in point is Slovene antifascist Angela Vode, whose trial was approved of by the leadership of the afž.98 In the Soviet satellite states the show trials of the late 1940s and early 1950s caused many victims, among whom a former widf representative, Czech female politician Milada Horakova, who was executed in 1950.99 This chapter further demonstrates that Yugoslav and Italian women’s antifascist organizations played an important role in Cold War political struggles and divides, and that the subjectivities of afž, udi and udais members depended on a number of 98 Angela Vode (1892 – 1985) was a Slovenian pedagogue, feminist writer and antifascist activist. She joined the illegal communist party before the war, from which she was later expelled for having criticized the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939. She later joined the Liberation Front and spent many months in the Nazi camp Ravensbruck. She survived and continued her life as a teacher in Slovenia. In 1947, she was arrested and tortured by the Yugoslav secret police, and put on trial with other politicians during the so-called 1948 ‘Dachau trials’ – the detainees were in fact survivors of Dachau, and accused of cooperation with the Nazis (Banac 1988: 20). She was jailed for six years and lived the rest of her life without political rights. Her secret memoir was published in Slovenia in 2004. Lydia Sklevicky notes that the leadership of the afž in 1948 congratulated the security services for the successful persecution of “Hitlerite war perpertrators and imperialist agents…“, including Angela Vode (1996 : 133-134). 99 See Watkins (2010) and Feinberg (2009). Feinberg argues that in the socialist bloc the unilateral propaganda and the mobilisation of societal fear through the show trials convinced a number of citizens to partipate in state repression, for fear of themselves being repressed. 184 �local, national and international factors, with important differences between the leadership and the rank-and-file members. In the previous chapter I showed that women’s antifascist organizations created important connections between East and West during the Cold War, and that through these organizations discourses about women’s emancipation, as well as discourses on class justice and anti-colonial discourses circulated across borders. This chapter, on the other hand, focuses more on the limits, the ambiguities and the complexity of Cold War international ‘sisterhood’. When it came to international relations in the early Cold War period, both Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations followed the lines of their respective communist parties, while the widf aligned itself with the Soviet stance on the expulsion of Yugoslavia. At the same time, the wide-ranging impact of the Cominform Resolution, and its domino effect on international, national and local levels, proves the richness of connections and the interdependency of internationalist women’s organizing that existed in 1948, at least between Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. This interdependency justifies a transnational approach: the stories contained in this chapter could simply not be written by taking only one national viewpoint. A transnational perspective allowed me to show the multiplicity of viewpoints, and, at the same time, the similarities between the afž, the udi and the udais in terms of organizational structure and production of Cold War discourses. While the udi, the afž and the udais were crucial in promoting women’s rights and women’s activism at the national and local levels, they maintained a hierarchical, top-down structure that was typical of the “democratic centralism” of the communist left in Europe during the Cold War period. From 1948 onwards, the differences between the udi and the afž increased. While the udi remained an oppositional left-wing organization within a capitalist country, the afž became integrated into the state apparatus within a socialist country led by an authoritarian government (notably in the years 1948-1953). This major difference in political context determined the dissolution of the afž in 1953. The udi, instead, became a vital, relatively autonomous organization from the mid-1950s – and so did the udd, which merged with the udi in 1954, when Trieste was definitively assigned to the Italian state. This chapter addressed the effects of the Cominform Resolution of 1948 on women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. In the next chapter I shall address another theme that has widely been debated by feminist historians in Italy and Yugoslavia: the margins of autonomy of women’s organizations vis-à-vis their respective communist parties, and the intersection between class-based and gender-based activism in the early Cold War period. 185 �Chapter 6 Into the field: the afž, the udi and the practice of emancipation Introduction In 1947 a Party directive arrived, about convincing the most influential people in the city of the necessity for women to take off their veils (…) My father was present in the first of those meetings, and immediately made a decision: his daughter was going to take off the veil. Of course, he did not ask my opinion. My father’s decision seemed to me the most horrible punishment. I was shocked, stunned, with no force to oppose him when he told me that he had given his word to the local Party committee. I cried all night. I was seventeen. I wanted to get married and I did not want to be different from other girls of my age. (Didara Dukađini in Malešević 2004: 39) In 1947 Didara Dukađini, a seventeen-year-old Albanian girl raised in a wealthy family in the town of Prizren, was told by her father that she had to abandon her feređže, the full Islamic veil that covered her head and face when she ventured outside the house. The local communist authorities had invited the most important families in town to set the example, in order to establish the new socialist values in the traditional and underdeveloped region of Kosovo. Didara was shocked by her father’s decision. She thought she could not survive the shame of going out “naked” in the streets. Upon deciding that she had to take off the veil, her father also decided that she would enroll in a teachers’ training course. Three months later, Didara obtained employment as a teacher, since for the literacy campaign, literate workers who could teach in the different villages of Kosovo were in great demand. Two years later, at age nineteen, Didara fell in love and was asked in marriage by a Serbian communist militant, Toša: “Communist from head to toe, he did not care at all about the difference in our national backgrounds” (Malešević 2004: 47). In order to marry the man she loved, and in order to avoid an arranged marriage with an Albanian man, Didara had to escape from her father’s house, breaking off the relationship with her parents for several years to come. She later became a member of the afž: as a “living example” of women’s emancipation, she was sent to different villages to recruit other Albanian women for the activities of the Popular Front. While the case of Didara is exceptional, it is also an illustration of the extraordinary social and political transformations taking place in Yugoslavia’s former Ottoman regions in 186 �the immediate postwar period, and of the implications they had for women with a Muslim background. This chapter deals with the national and local activities of the afž and of the udi in the period from 1948 to 1953. In the previous chapter I have highlighted the way in which women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia coped with increasing Cold War tensions on a national and international level. In this chapter I look at the way in which udi and afž leaders attempted to formulate and offer solutions to the different everyday needs of the majority of women living in their respective countries, targeting in particular poverty, illiteracy and underdevelopment in the countryside. I also look at the organizational debates about the possible forms that their “work among women” could take, and notably at the discussions about the need to maintain or abandon separate women’s organizations. The early Cold War period has been read by feminist historians as a general moment of “return to order”, that is, a moment in which traditional gender roles were re-established after the disruption created by women’s participation in the Resistance. According to feminist interpretations of women’s history in Italy and the former Yugoslavia, the (partial) autonomy gained by women’s organizations during the Resistance was gradually lost because of a general postwar conservative backlash, but also because of the primacy of Cold War geopolitical divides and ideological battles (Sklevicky 1996; Božinović 1996; Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998; Rodano 2010; Casalini 2005). The concept of autonomy used by feminist historians stands here for gender-based women’s organizing, as opposed to class– and broader geopolitical interests. In this chapter I challenge these interpretations, showing that the concept of women’s autonomy is far from being universal, and does not have the same significance in all times and locations. As I have argued in Chapter 1, an epistemology based on the idea of autonomy emerged in Italy and Yugoslavia with second wave feminism, and is located within specific historical, political and economic processes. When the concept of autonomy is used as a static theoretical category, and when women’s collective and individual autonomy from political institutions is taken as the prerequisite for effective activism, we risk limiting and oversimplifying our historical understanding. This is the case when the ideal of women’s autonomy is applied to the antifascist women’s organizations of the Cold War period. The afž and the udi, as already discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, did not come into existence as “autonomous”, but rather as part of the Liberation Front led by communist party elites in Yugoslavia and Italy. From the beginning, they were engaged in the fight against Nazi-fascism, war, poverty, and class inequalities, as well as working for women’s political, economic and social rights. This does not mean, as I have already noted, that these organizations should be seen exclusively as “transmission belts” of their respective parties. Rather, their leaders had to negotiate between their loyalty to party and state politics and their engagement in women’s issues. In this chapter I propose a multi-layered analysis of women’s political agency in the Cold War period, looking at the activities of the udi and the afž between 1948 and 1953. 187 �First I analyze how the udi and the afž strived to enforce a program of emancipation and modernization, targeting in particular rural, underdeveloped or war-torn contexts where women lived in extremely destitute and patriarchal conditions. I address some of the nation-wide and regional campaigns implemented by the afž, such as the campaign against infant mortality, the action in the less developed districts of Yugoslavia against the full Islamic veil , and the campaign to ameliorate living and hygienic standards in the region of Kosovo. I also look at how the udi demanded better wages and welfare provisions for female workers, engaged in the battle for the rights of landless peasants in the South of Italy, and attempted to support women who had been victims of war rapes in Central Italy. With these campaigns afž and udi leaders were trying to extend the new Constitutional and welfare rights “into the field”, to masses of women who had no awareness of their recently acquired right to take part in political decisions. Feminist historians have criticized the tendency of antifascist women’s organizations to focus on equality in the public sphere, while neglecting issues of sexuality and of the gendered division of labor. udi and afž field reports show, however, how painstakingly difficult it was to of dismantle long-standing women’s inferior position on the material and cultural level and to promote women’s right of access to the public sphere as equal citizens, students and workers. udi and afž activists perceived themselves as an avant-garde due to their participation to the antifascist Resistance, their education and their self-realization as political subjects. They attempted to extend their egalitarian experiences and political consciousness to other women, through meetings, campaigns and grassroots mobilizations. At the same time, afž and udi militants also recognized that the “feminine masses” often had different needs and interests that had to be taken into account, and they provided support on the level of everyday needs, knowing that the social transformation of family relations and of women’s status would be a “long and tiring work”. The documents I have collected here show that udi and afž militants were not blind to violence against women in the private sphere, or to the sexual division of labor that existed at all levels, even among “comrades”. udi and afž activists had to face the hostility of male party members, particularly at the local level. During these campaigns udi and afž militants realized that, while suffering from class oppression or poverty together with men, women were doubly exploited on the basis of their sex in the sphere of productive and reproductive labor. They saw that long-standing patriarchal traditions and violence against women represented a major structural phenomenon, which also had to do with culture and which could not be solved through legislative measures or economic development only. At the same time, on the basis of their Marxist beliefs they were convinced that any form of progressive social change – including women’s emancipation – could only be achieved collectively, via the long and strenuous work of mass-based politicization, education, and economic redistribution involving both men and women. Despite their similarities in their structure and in their avant-gardist and classbased approach towards women, after 1947-1948 the two organizations differed completely in their relationship to communist party politics and state power. While the 188 �udi – together with the pci – was placed at the opposition of Italian mainstream politics, and had to strive for survival in the midst of harsh anti-communist campaigns and state repression of workers’ struggles, in Yugoslavia the afž – and notably its leaders – were completely integrated in the communist state apparatus, particularly after the internal repression that followed the Cominform crisis. On the other hand, after the break with the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav elites promoted a new political system based on geographical decentralization and self-management through workers’ collectives. A vertical, hierarchical organization such as the afž no longer corresponded to the main party line, and this led to the decision for the organization to dissolve itself and to decentralize the “work among women” within the respective local, regional and republican councils. The “self-dissolution” of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia in 1953 has been seen as a sign of socialist “state patriarchy” and male control over women’s autonomous organizing (Sklevicky 1996; Stojaković, Jankov and Savić 2002). In this chapter I contend that we need a more complex and nuanced interpretation of this event, one that acknowledges the different levels of decision-making, the different strategic options that existed in 1953 Yugoslavia, as well as the position of female leaders and of rank-and-file members within and outside party politics. 1. The afž in the early Cold War era 1.1. afž campaigns in 1948–1953: women’s equality as a modernization project As shown in Chapter 5, the 1948-1949 Cominform crisis forced the afž to engage more intensively in agit-prop activities in support of the Yugoslav government, and as a result of political repression and uncertainty, many rank-and-file militants abandoned the organization in the late 1940s.1 The afž work for the amelioration of women’s living standards, however, did not cease in the early Cold War period, but rather continued in new ways and with new goals, notably women’s entry into the labor market as a way to meet the requirements of the Five Year Plan (Lilly 2001: 66). In this section I shall describe afž campaigns of “emancipation from above” in the early Cold War period, showing their pedagogic approach, but also the engagement for women’s rights manifested by afž activists, and the impact of these campaigns on women’s everyday lives in the rural and underdeveloped areas of the country. Despite the fact that women’s juridical, economic and social rights had been inscribed in the new Yugoslav Constitution, afž militants were immediately confronted with the gap that existed between these rights and women’s everyday lives. The reports written by afž local sections in the late 1940s and early 1950s testify to 1 This is indicated by a number of reports on the politička pasivizacija (becoming politically passive) of women. According to historian Lydia Sklevicky in the years 1948-1950 “the total integration of the emancipatory process into the ‘ideological apparatus of the state’ meant that emancipation became something ‘practiced’ on women, as inarticulate objects of the socialpolitical process, instead of making them its legitimate subject” (1989b: 105). 189 �the extent and the degree of patriarchal domination, physical exploitation and lack of education in which the majority of women lived, notably in the countryside, and to the scarcity of resources of which the organization disposed in its fight against these phenomena. afž activists describe the majority of women as over-exploited in their domestic, agricultural and industrial work. Women’s labor is undervalued and treated as less worthy, but is in fact the core factor of household production. A report from Croatia prepared for the 1953 afž Congress denounces the fact that in the countryside a number of heavy agricultural tasks are considered “women’s work” (ženska posla). Women carry on their backs all kinds of heavy material, like wood, water and wheat. In certain villages, in poor weather the cattle are given more consideration than the women, who are forced to carry water and wood in the rain. The author states that “from all this it is evident that women as an economic factor produce a lot and with their work contribute to a much higher extent to the household income than men, because women produce throughout the year and have no rest. Women’s rights in the household are very limited and in some cases are less than those of ancient servants.” 2 Women’s living standards are low not only in the countryside, but also in urban areas. A 1953 report on women working in factories in Zagreb stressed that women’s labor was considered less productive in the working collectives, and that women were the first to be fired. Because of their precarious conditions, female workers did not make use of their health and maternity rights for fear of losing their jobs. The report also listed other problematic issues, such as unwanted pregnancies and pregnancies out of wedlock.3 The 1953 afž reports about the different republics present a number of similarities with regard to describing women’s inferior position in society. The socialist revolution could not dispel traditional customs, popular religious practice, or traditional ideas about women’s roles in private and public life. A number of religious and pagan rituals persisted, notably ritual and magic practices against the ‘evil eye’ striking pregnant women, infertile women, and newborns. afž activists painstakingly compile lists of these rituals and practices for each village, denouncing them and treating them as a sign of backwardness, religiosity and ignorance. They constantly denounce the “wrong”, “backward”, “primitive” opinion on women’s position in society, an opinion held by men but also by women themselves, who resist social change and have interiorized their inferior position as normal. Another report about village life in the republic of Macedonia, states that women are not aware of having obtained new rights with the revolution. What they know, says the author, is that “a woman has only to work and to listen [obey].”4 Across ethnic 2 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-4-154. “Iz svega ovoga vidi se, da žena kao ekonomski faktor mnogo privređuje i sa svojim radom doprinosi mnogo veće prihode u domačinstvu nego sam muškarac, jer žena privređuje kroz čitavu godinu i nema odmora. Međutim, prava žene u domacinstvu su vrlo ograničena, a u pojedinim slučajevima manja nego sto je imao nekadasnji sluga.” 3 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-4-166. 4 “One znaju samo to da žena treba da radi i da sluša.” Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-4-206. 190 �groups, men’s violence against women is seen as normal, and many women are sold for marriage or bought as a labor force for the patriarchal household. According to the author, it is necessary for men and women to realize that “a woman is a human being, like the man, and as such she deserves dignity like any other human being.”5 Between 1948 and the early 1950s, the main task of the afž was the “enlightenment” (prosvecivanje) of peasant women. Five years after the end of the war, in a response to a 1950 un questionnaire, the organization described its main activities as follows: In collaboration with the other organizations and leading a widespread political activity, the awf [afž] is mainly embracing the most backward and passive masses of women. This organization is devoting a general attention to the educational work among women especially in view of developing their political conscience, raising their cultural level, etc. The awf [afž] organizes and helps a whole system of aid to the working woman and mother and performs this in the closest cooperation with the People’s Committees and public health bodies, with trade unions, the Red Cross, by means of maternity-homes, medical consultations, ambulances, creches, playgrounds, harvest-time nurseries, kindergartens, also by improving housekeeping methods in order to facilitate living conditions for women, by opening restaurants, school-canteens, laundry-houses, reading-rooms, etc., and by lending individual help to mothers and children. So women should be enabled to take a greater part in the activities of economic and political life.6 In the late 1940s the organization targeted in particular “the most backward and passive masses of women”, and saw itself as the institutional body in charge of the modernization of women’s lives, notably in the countryside and in the rural areas, which constituted the majority of households in the Yugoslav Federation. In fact, in a number of speeches, afž leader Vida Tomšić reasserted the idea proposed by Fourier, and popularized by Marx, according to which the condition of women in a society gives the measure of the development and civilization of that same society. The persistence of patriarchal and “backward” households in the rural areas, and particularly in the southern regions of Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Metohija, was seen as an obstacle to the modernization of the country and to its socialist achievements. In the next section I will address the way in which the afž targeted “backwardness” in the regions of Kosovo and Metohijia, and the way in which Muslim women living in Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo came to be seen as the most oppressed subjects, in need of being saved and enlightened by their emancipated Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian sisters living in the more advanced republics. Despite their top5 “Ovi primeri govore koliko je nužno da muškarac, pa i sama žena na selu shvate da je žena čovek kao i muškarac i da kao takva i ona zaslužuje poštovanje kao i svaki drugi čovek” Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-4-206. 6 “Replies to questionnaire concerning organisations of women and youth in the countryside”, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-20-137;138. 191 �down, pedagogic character, these campaigns ameliorated women’s everyday lives on an unprecedented scale, and offered to some rural women the possibility of study, employment, access to the public space and a negotiated position within the family, thanks to the support of state authorities. 1.2. From darkness to enlightenment: the campaign against feređže Already in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the interwar period, Serbian, Croatian and Slovene elites tended to look at the regions which had for a longer time been dominated by the Ottoman Empire – the republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and the regions of Kosovo and Metohija – as the most backward and underdeveloped areas, notably because of the diffusion of Islam. The existence of a consistent Slavicspeaking population who had converted to Islam was seen as an unwanted legacy of the Turkish occupation. Orientalist conceptions about Islam were interiorized by communist elites, who also looked upon these populations for reasons of political loyalty. Since the Slavic-speaking Muslim population of Bosnia and the Albanian-speaking population of Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro participated only marginally in the antifascist Resistance, moreover, the mark of civic backwardness was coupled with a mark of political backwardness. This was notably the case for the Albanian minority in Kosovo: the project of an Albanian-Yugoslav Federation was halted by the Cominform resolution of 1948, and Kosovo Albanians were perceived as a potential “fifth column” of Stalinist Albania. These elements have to be taken into account when considering the campaigns carried out by communist authorities and afž sections between 1947 and 1951. The campaign against the full veil or feređže, which covered the whole body and face, ran from 1946 until the early 1950s, when the different republics approved a number of laws forbidding the full veil. This wasn’t a new idea: Serbian and Croatian feminist women’s organizations had already written about the need to “liberate” their Muslim sisters from the slavery of the veil in the first half of the twentieth century (Giomi 2011). After the war, this project was first backed to a certain extent by state authorities, and by local sections of the Popular Front. The afž activists of Muslim background were engaged in the campaign too, but it is hard to assess the role they played, since they were more commonly portrayed as “sisters in need” than as active subjects in the official afž publications. The afž campaign against the feređže was marked by a far-reaching faith in humanism and historical progress, and by a strong ideal of socialist modernization, of which women’s emancipation was seen as an intrinsic component. A report published in the journal Žena Danas in March 1951, recounts the journey of 400 Muslim men and women from Macedonia to Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and the seaside. The article is significantly titled “The first excursion of unveiled faces.” For many participants, this is their first departure from their native village, and among them are many women who have abandoned their veil. Marija Marinčić writes in particular about a young Turkish woman, Azbija, who has taken off the veil and has learned her first few words 192 �in Macedonian: “The veil, I took off the veil.” Maria continues, describing Azbija: “She [Azbija] looked at me. In that moment I felt that all that was old in her had died, that she felt as free as I did. In her gaze there was warmth and a great joy: – I used to live like a beast (životinja), now I know that I am a human being (čovek).”7 Metaphors of light and darkness, progress and backwardness, modernity and tradition, humanity and inhumanity were perpetually used in agit-prop publications designed to convince women of the benefits of taking off the veil. In an illustration shown at a public exhibition in Zagreb in 1949, veiled women were literally portrayed as coming out of the darkness, and entering the light, as they abandoned the feređže. The entry into public space was symbolized by images of women working and studying, their faces uncovered. The traditional scarf covering the hair, worn by Christian and Muslim peasant women alike, was seen instead as completely acceptable, since it did not prevent women from taking part in educational and work activities. A cover of Žena Danas in 1951 portrayed a woman whose head and mouth was covered with a black veil, captioned: “No veil on the face, no darkness in the spirit.”8 The last page of the journal, by contrast, carried an article on the latest clothes fashions, showing a range of urban, Westernized dresses. This made clear the ideal of modern Westernized femininity shared by the editors of the afž press. Since the break with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had become more open to Western trends. Thus the new form of humanist socialism also included a shift in femininity paradigms. Vida Tomšić in fact stated in 1948 that real socialism will mean happiness, not the form of socialism that is promoted today by the Soviet Union, a grey bureaucratic socialism, which means the uniformity of the entire life, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, and not the people’s government (...) In the Russian newspaper we see how women there are badly dressed, as some sort of socialist necessity. This negates all that we are looking for – beauty, joy and diversity. We should teach women how to dress well, how to tidy up their apartment and how to do that quickly.9 According to Zagreb feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky, the increasingly depoliticized stance of the feminine press is apparent from 1950 onwards. Political articles and serious themes were replaced with articles on “family, housekeeping, fashion, popular medicine, entertainment, cultural life, etc.”, so that “the image of the ascetic combat7 “Feređžo, pusto feređžo”: “Pogledala me je. U tom trenutku osetila sam da je u njoj sve staro umrlo, da se i ona oseća slobodna kao i ja. U njenom pogledu bilo je topline i mnogo sreće: – Živela sam kao životinja, sada znam da sam čovek.” (p.9) “Otkrivenih Lica Na Prvom Izletu”, Žena Danas n. 82, 1951. 8 “Bez zara na licu, bez mraka u duši”, Žena Danas n. 81, 1951. 9 “Znači, socijalizam koji ce značiti sreću, a ne koji će biti onakav kakvim ga danas proglasuju za uzor socijalizma u sssr, sivi birokratski socijalizam, koji zapravo znači ukalupjivanje čitavog života, koji znači svevlast birokracije, a ne vlast naroda (...) Mi vidimo po ruškim novinama kako su tamo sve žene ružno odjevene, i to kao neka potreba socijalizma, sve sto negira ono sto mi tražimo – ljepotu, veselje i raznolikost. Treba učiti žene da se znaju lijepo odijevati i pospremiti svoj stan i da to znaju brzo uraditi” (quoted in Sklevicky 1996: 134). 193 �ant-cum-worker-cum-political activist was gradually and silently being abandoned” (1989b: 104). To read these changes solely as a form of patriarchal backlash, however, would be misleading. As illustrated in the above quotation, the figure of the “modern socialist city woman” promoted by the afž press in the late 1940s and early 1950s embodied a dream of modern and emancipated femininity, opposed to the traditional model of servile femininity associated with peasant life. The afž press also reflected the subjective position of afž militants themselves, and the way in which they saw other women as sisters in need. The idea of an enlightening mission against backwardness undertaken by progressive female experts also characterized the 1951 campaign for house sanitation in the Kosmet region. This was part of an overall effort to decrease the very high rates of infant mortality all over Yugoslavia. A team of afž activists accompanied by a number of midwives and nurses toured the different villages of the region for six months. Here’s a description of the campaign in a French brochure about the conditions of women in Yugoslavia: At the end of April 1951, the first team of women members of the Antifascist Front and the first team of the Red Cross made up of women from the most progressive centers of Yugoslavia (Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Novi Sad) took the route of Kosovo to offer help to women, mothers and children and to teach them personal hygiene, childcare (food and care for infants and children), and household management. In addition to the members of the Antifascist Front of Women and of the Red Cross, these teams were comprised of medical personnel (doctors, midwives, dental hygienist and nurses) and members of mass organizations and experts in agronomy.10 The afž activists and nurses taught rural women basic hygiene, how to cook, how to feed children in a healthy way, how to arrange the house in the most hygienic manner, describing the exact gestures and actions so that they could learn by imitation. Educational films and exhibitions were also employed. In a discussion of this campaign at the central levels of the afž, the situation in Kosmet is described as far away not only in space, but also as far removed from the progress of the other republics in time. The campaign, according to Vida Tomšić, would start to change something in accordance to the “pace of civilization”. Tomšić argued that it was “necessary to liberate women in Kosmet from those old habits, and show them the path to a better life, so that they can get rid of those millennial habits. I would like the other advanced republics from which help is required to think of this as a unique political mobilization.”11 Yet the situation on the ground was very complex and difficult. These campaigns 10 Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-20-112. 11 “Potrebno je osloboditi ženu sa Kosmeta tih starih navika i pokazati joj put boljeg života, kako bi ona raskinula te hiljaduvekovne stare navike. Ja bih želela da napredne republike od kojih se traži pomoć za ovo to shvate kao jednu političku mobilizaciju (…).” Sednica Izvršnog Odbora afž – 2.2.1951. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-8-93. 194 �of “emancipation from above” were met with great resistance and suspicion. The afž reports from the field testify to the difficulty and the complexity of the grassroots campaigns with regard to differences in ethnic and gender relations. Men and religious authorities strongly opposed women’s abandonment of the full veil. Oppositional voices spread the rumour that women’s unveiling would mean that they would be forcefully enrolled in the army and in the brigades for voluntary work. After having taken off the veil during the demonstrations held on the 8th of March or 1st of May, many women started to wear it once again. When the law forcefully forbade the feređže, many women decided to stay indoors. Soon it became evident that symbolic actions and legislative measures were far from efficient, and that the campaign against the feređže had to be accompanied by material actions which promoted women’s literacy and economic emancipation through employment; the negotiation with men, and particularly with the Islamic authorities, was also seen as essential in order to convince women of the possibility to abandon the veil without being stigmatized by their community. The fact that it was often Serbian or Croatian women conducting the campaign among Muslim women was identified as a big weakness of the campaign, since it risked exacerbating ethnic tensions. In a 1947 report on the situation in Bosnia, a few passages in particular deserve to be quoted, since they summarize the many issues at stake in the campaign against feređže: The action to remove the veil was met with a stormy revolt on the side of the reactionaries, which includes Muslims, Serbs and Croats. At this stage it has engendered a return to the old position of incitement to ethnic and religious hatred. The Serbian and Croatian reactionaries used the campaign to launch the slogan: “here you are, that’s the gift you received for having been good militants” [ironic, i.e. that’s the punishment you get]. In a number of cases the Muslim reactionaries stated explicitly that they would not allow women to unveil just because they do not want them to be equal to Serbian and Croatian women. This passage shows how postwar ethnic tensions were an obstacle to a campaign like this which would encourage women of different ethnicities to work together. The author continues: Many Muslim women working in our organization were met with a strong resistance, which is usually an expression of religious fanaticism, cultural backwardness, and often the husbands’ stubbornness. The lack of understanding on the side of husband and relatives was the main obstacle to the action. There were cases in which the female comrade told us: “If you think that I should uncover myself, you should immediately get me a place to stay or an apartment, since my husband will throw me out of the house.”12 12 “Akcija za skidanje zara naišla je na buru revolta od strane reakcije i to udružene muslimanske, srpske i hrvatske. Na tom pitanju ona je podgrijavala svoj stari stav po pitanju raspirivanja nacionalne i vjerske mržnje. Srpska i hrvatska reakcija iskoristili su akciju skidanja zara da se narugaju Muslimanima i izbacili su parolu: “Eto, to vam je za uzdarje sto ste dobri fron- 195 �The opposition of male relatives and the “incorrect view of women as [not full] human beings” convinced the afž activists that women’s emancipation could not be achieved without changing men’s positions and attitudes on this issue. The story of Didara cited at the beginning of this chapter shows how important it was to involve the male community when dealing with changes in women’s position. The afž workers realized that women’s inferiority and male opposition to social change were certainly more extreme in the less developed republics, but existed in different forms among local authorities and institutions all over the Federation. As I will show in the next sections, this was an important strategic realization that led afž cadres to question the efficiency of a separate women’s organization. 1.3. Feminist historiography and the dissolution of the afž in 1953 In the previous sections I have addressed the difficulties faced by the Antifascist Women’s Front when dealing with struggles for women’s equality in the field. In this section I discuss the issue of strategic choices adopted by the organization, when its leadership chose to abandon the form of a separate women’s organization in 1953. In the years after the Cominform crisis, in line with its top-down, pedagogic character, the afž mainly targeted, as I have described above, women’s living conditions in the villages, particularly in the less developed regions and republics. While having some degree of political autonomy during the Second World War (Sklevicky 1996; 1989b), the afž was conceived by the communist elites not as an autonomous women’s organization fighting for women’s rights, but rather, as as “an instrument of progressive forces under the direction of the Communist party in the struggle for the national, democratic and social rights of the Yugoslav peoples.”13 In the immediate postwar period, in particular, the existence of a separate woman’s organization was seen as a temporary means to “drawn the widest feminine masses, especially the most backward ones, into the building of socialism, helping them to achieve civic conscious- tovci.” Bilo je dosta slućajeva da su muslimanski reakcioneri izjavljivali da neće da otkriju žene samo zato da ne budu jednake sa Srpkinjama i Hrvaticama. Veliki otpor pokazale su i mnoge Muslimanke koje su aktivno radile u našoj organizaciji, tu uglavnom dolazi do izrazaja vjerski fanatizam, kulturna zaostalost, a često i muževljeva samovolja. To nerazumjevanje od strane muževa i rodbine bilo je nekada glavna prepeka akciji. Bilo je takvih slućajeva gdje drugarica kaze: ‘Ako vi smatrate da ja treba da se otkrijem, odmah mi tražite mjesto ili stan jer ce me muž istjerati iz kuće.’” 24.12.1947, Zemaljski odbor afž za Bosnu i Hercegovinu – Centralnom Odbor afž-a; Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-2-7. 13 “afž za razliku od mnogih ženskih organizacija u svetu, nije od svog početka bio organizacija za borbu za ženska prava, vec je nastao kao instrument progresivnih snaga pod rukovodstvom Komunisticke partije u borbi za nacionalna, demokratska i socijalna prava naroda Jugoslavije.” Vida Tomšić, “Mesto i uloga ženskih organizacija u danasnjoj etapi razvitka socijalistickih društvenih odnosa”, iv afž Congress, 1953, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-5-302. 196 �ness, which can only be reached by educating women, by raising their cultural level, thus with a wide-reaching cultural-educational work.”14 The problem of separate women’s organization vs. ‘universal’ party work has been a long-standing one in the history of socialist and communist parties (Thonnessen 1976). On the one hand, the idea that women should be fighting separately for women’s rights contrasted with the Marxist assumptions held by generations of socialist feminists, which held that only a transformation of society as a whole could bring about women’s emancipation. On the other hand, since party leaders saw the “feminine masses” as oppressed and politically backward, separate women’s organizations were considered a necessary step to achieve a first degree of politicization, allowing women to participate in “universal” party work. The afž of Yugoslavia resembled in this respect to the Soviet Ženotdel, the Woman’s Section of the Soviet Central Committee, an organization founded in 1919. Separate women’s sections were created at each level of the party, and these sections in each village or town were designed to familiarize women with politics, integrating them into political and social life.15 As Elizabeth Wood (1997) shows, however, the women’s sections – and particularly their most politicized female leaders – found themselves in a contradictory position: these sections were seen as a temporary devices to draw women into the party, and were not supposed to raise oppositional voices against the government, for fear of resembling feminist organizations. But in their work on the ground, female activists were confronted with gender conflicts and the fact that local party committees boycotted their “work among women”. It commonly happened that male party leaders refused to send their wives to the meetings, and to provide support to the women’s sections, something that the afž would also experience. The Soviet Ženotdel was dismantled in 1929: its female leaders started to criticize the Soviet government for not providing the necessary services and for discriminating against female workers, and were accused of “feminist deviation”.16 Lydia Sklevicky describes a similar process for the afž in the postwar years. After the Cominform crisis, according to Sklevicky, the organization was gradually placed under the control of the party and dismantled for fear of “feminist deviation”. Until 1950, there were around 1000 paid functionaries working for the afž, plus some administrative staff, which guaranteed a permanent female leadership in charge of the organization.17 In 1950 the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party 14 “afž ima zadatak da najšire ženske mase, specijalno one najzaostalije, uvlači u izgradnju socijalizma, da im pomaže da postanu njegovi svesni graditelji, a to se ne može postići bez prosvečenosti žene, i podižanja njenog kulturnog nivoa, dakle bez širokog kulturno-prosvetnog rada.” “O radu i zadačima naše organizacije u pitanju suzbijanja nepismenosti i skidanju feređže.”19-20.9.1948. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-6-319. 15 Separate meetings were seen as the only way to reach the baba, the backward countryside women that had to be transformed into a new comrade. As Elizabeth Wood reports, Ženotdel leader Aleksandra Kollontai stated that only by talking to rural women about their sick cow, one could eventually come to talk of world revolution (Wood 1997, 84). 16 For a collection of essays on women’s history in the Stalin era, see Ilič, 2001. 17 Seven women worked in the Central Committee in Belgrade, five to seven in the main 197 �questioned the afž’s efficiency, and imposed a re-organization, in which its professional staff was dismissed.18 In this way, the heretofore vertical structure of the afž was abolished, and the organization gradually “dissolved into a number of small and mutually unrelated units, called ‘actives’, and integrated into the pf [Popular Front] on respective hierarchical levels” (Sklevicky 1989b: 103; see also Sklevicky 1996; Mikula 2005). In 1953 the organization merged with the broader Socialist Alliance – which replaced the Popular Front – and was renamed Union of Women’s Societies (Savez Ženskih Društava). The lack of autonomous organizational structure, according to Sklevicky (1989b: 106), “incapacitated any collective action by women themselves” and transformed the afž into an “amorphous organization” reinforcing traditional women’s roles. Despite the fact that afž reports show “an acute awareness of pressing problems” – such as the tendency to lay off pregnant women and single mothers, the harassment of children born out of wedlock, the desperate conditions of orphanages, and the dissatisfaction of women in the labor force – these concerns could not be voiced in an autonomous way in an authoritarian society. “Progressive women”, in particular, especially afž leaders, “were constantly showing signs of divided loyalties by supporting organizational schemes dictated by ‘broader’ and ‘more relevant’ political needs, at the evident expense of the awf[afž] and of women in general.” In her book about former partisan women in the postwar period, Begrade historian Ivana Pantelić also notes that the “dependent character of the waf[afž] in politics led to its transformation or rather its abolition. Female partisans did nothing to stop the waf from being abolished” (Pantelić 2011: 203). According to these historical interpretations, the leaders of the organization finally dissolved the Antifascist Women’s Front because of their loyalty to the party, choosing thus the party line over other women and over afž rank and file militants, who objected to the dissolution of the organization at its Fourth Congress in 1953. While the fear of feminism certainly played a role in the dissolution of the afž, this interpretation – mediated by the principle of autonomy elaborated by second wave feminist theory – runs the risk of reducing this event to an a-historical manifestation of patriarchal backlash, or of male party control over women’s organizing, without explaining what the historical and political reasons were that compelled the leaders of the afž to dissolve the vertical organization from within. I suggest here that we need a more complex interpretation of the decision to dismantle the afž, one that takes into account the overall political and economic transformations of the Yugoslav system in the early 1950s, and the ambivalent role played by female communist leaders. More specific research into party archives would be required in order to document this process in detail, but for the purpose of this research I will offer an interpretation based on the the internal debates between afž delegates that preceded the dissolution of the organization. Committee of each Republic, three or four in the regional committees (oblast), and one or two in the district committees. 18 The professional apparatus was reduced to a minimum: one secretary at the Central Committee, one or two women at the Republics’ Committees, and no paid positions at the local level, except in Kosovo. 198 �1.4. The women’s question as a social question: the iv and last afž Congress In the immediate period after the Cominform crisis, the Yugoslav communist elites were looking for new sources of political and economic legitimacy, defining their position as opposed “not only to the liberal West, but also to the statist Socialism of the Soviet Union” (Jović 2009: 4). This legitimacy was partly found in Marxist theory, specifically in the ideal of workers’ self-management, decentralization and the progressive “withering away of the state” in the transition from socialism to communism. The system of workers’ councils (radnički saveti) – elaborated by Slovene communist intellectual Edvard Kardelj (1910-1979) – was conceived as a third way between the Western democracies and Soviet statist bureaucracy. The new policies of self-management and the decentralisation of economic production to the different republics was elaborated in an attempt to regulate employment, labour productivity and the distribution of consumer goods. This was also a way to steer the Yugoslav economic system towards a market economy, as a consequence of Western aid (Unkovski-Korica 2011). The system of self-management was supposed to promote workers’ direct participation at all levels of society, while avoiding Sovietstyle state intervention.19 The League of Communists – the new name for the communist party since 1952 – has then, according to Kardelj, “no pretensions of ruling in the place of the working masses, but wishes to inspire and educate the masses so that they will know how to lead their own government, their own factories, and their own social organs and organizations” (Kardelj, quoted in Lilly 2001: 211). Between 1950 and 1951, as a result of the new Law on self-management, many Federal governmental organs, committees and administrative boards were abolished, and their powers transferred to the republican and municipal districts. This process of decentralization was seen as a necessary measure to avoid the creation of a bureaucracy that would resemble the Soviet system (see Broz 1963: 123- 128). The result, however, was a strenghtening of bureaucratic procedures, one that would prove fatal to the Federation as a whole in the long run (Jović 2009). In this phase of decentralization, the professional apparatus of the afž was also abolished, as mentioned in the previous section. In 1953, the afž as a hierarchical Federal organization was dissolved, and transformed into the Union of Women’s Societies (Savez Ženskih Društava). This transition which has not been explored or interpreted by historians, and has simply been read as the end of the afž and of women’s organizations in Yugoslavia. 20 “New ‘delegate assemblies’ were created, and thousands of people really became members of groups such as delegations, workers’ councils, and self-managing interest communities (…). A complex electoral system was introduced that abandoned equal representation of citizens, replacing it with functional representation of social groups. The Party still kept the leading role, but without being named a party (since 1952: the League of Communists), and was supposed to run society by persuasion of the workers and citizens (assembled in the Socialist Alliance of the Working People), not directly. The system of self-management was to replace the state, which was decentralized on its way to withering away” (Jović 2009: 77). 20 Historical interpretations generally treat the period between 1945 and 1953, but do not explore the transition from the previous organization to the ones following, namely the Union of 19 199 �The dissolution of the afž and the transition to the Union of Women’s Societies was partly caused, however, by the structural limitations of the afž in the 1950s, as militants pointed out in their reports. In the early 1950s, afž activists noted that a process of patriarchal backlash was taking place not just in the most backward areas, but all over the Federation: the numbers of women elected to the republican and district committees rapidly decreased, as did the number of women employed in the industry. In the agricultural and industrial sector male worker’s collectives openly voiced the idea that women’s labor was less efficient and less valuable. The idea that a woman’s proper place is at home remained widespread among women and men, including respectable male comrades. Many male comrades said that there was no need for women to do anything else than staying at home, cooking and taking care of the children. According to many male comrades, in fact, “the revolutionary time in which she could be a revolutionary worker had passed.”21 The afž delegates in the main republican committees as well as in the executive and central commitees22 regularly denounced the gap between the official discourse on women’s equality promoted by the party at a Federal level and the indifference or overt hostility towards social changes manifested by local party authorities. During a session of the afž Executive Committee in Ljubljana in September 1952, the afž delegates discussed the fact that the party took no interest in the issue of women’s emancipation, which was constantly delegated to the afž. Bosnian afž leader Dušanka Kovačević pointed out that even among female comrades who had taken part in the Resistance, the idea that it was enough for women to stay at home with children persisted. Similarly, the transformation of the family in a socialist sense was a neglected issue: “We talked very little about what is really moral. It’s a terrible thing that a worker who is a member of the party – who is a shockworker, a patriot, in the high ranks, reading this or that – at the same time beats his wife, neglects his children, likes to drink, and nobody holds him accountable for this.”23 Kovačević observed that the issue of family relations could not be treated only as a woman’s issue, but it was a structural problem concerning society as a whole. Therefore it could not be solved by the afž alone, republican and local authorities had to address it too. Women’s Societies (created in 1953), and the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (created in 1961). For an account of the activities of the Croatian kdaž branch, see Dobos (1983). 21 “Kako moze žena da se bavi nekim drugim? Njezino je mesto kod kuće, da gleda decu, da dobro kuva itc. Prošlo je ovo revolucionarno vreme kada je ona mogla da bude revolucionarni radnik.” Izvrsnog odbora afž Jugoslavije, 9.5.1953, Skopje – Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-8-254. 22 I am talking here not about delegates at the municipal level or in the voter assemblies, but rather about delegates to pre-congress discussions in the bodies higher up in the hierarchy. Thanks to Vladimir Unkovski-Korica for suggesting that I clarify this issue. 23 “Veoma smo malo govorili o tome sto je zapravo moral i strašno je to, da radnik koji je član Partije, udarnik je, patriota je, na visini je i čita to ili ono, a pored toga tuče ženu, zanemaruje djecu, voli da popije, a niko ga zbog toga ne poziva na odgovornost.” Sednica Izvrsnog Odbora co afž Jugoslavije, 23-24 settembre 1952, Ljubljana, p. 13. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-8. 200 �In a May 1953 Executive Committee discussion, various delegates complained that party members did not engage on the issue of equality between men and women, but instead used the existence of the afž as an alibi to shirk responsibility. Neda Božinović stressed the issue of women’s double burden within “progressive” families: “Is it not possible that at home, husband and wife as members of the family jointly perform certain tasks, and that the husband helps the wife? But our comrades are astounded when we say these things.” According to Božinović, these were general problems that could only be solved within the framework of the Socialist Alliance and not by female activists alone. Božinović stressed the importance of enlightening not only women, but also men, through the structures of the party: “I think that it is a matter of fighting not only on concrete issues, for the enlightenment of women etc., but also for the enlightenment of men, that is to say, to look at what women’s equality means from women’s perspective, and without merely accepting palliative measures.”24 During the meetings which preceeded the fourth afž Congress in 1953, many afž delegates stressed the importance of fighting the unequal relationships within families and of improving women’s inferior role in a socialist society. At the same time, many afž delegates agreed that a “specific organization” (posebna organizacija) of women was no longer a useful instrument. As they had experienced “in the field” the task of emancipating the masses was in fact a “gigantic” one, which needed to be addressed in a systemic manner by the political authorities. These considerations finally led to the dissolution of the afž and to the formation of the Union of Women’s Society during the fourth afž Congress in September 1953. Communist leader Milovan Đilas opened the congress with a speech that dealt with the ‘women’s question’. He argued that while these issues may seem to concern only women, they were in fact social issues and concerned the whole community. He noted that equality had already been established by law, but that real equality had not yet been reached and that the struggle to achieve it continued at home, in the family, in the opinions, and in the intimate life. Đilas argued that women should not separate themselves from men in social life, but rather strive to integrate society in order to reach equality. According to Đilas, in fact, socialist democracy was not possible with- 24 “Dalje, u Socijalistickom savezu naveliko se distkutuje o ravnopravnosti žena. Diskutujute malo sa drugovima, sa našim dobrim drugovima na rukovodnim mestima. Mi stalno pričamo o dvostrukoj opterećenosti žene. Da li je potrebno i u ovakvim uslovima žena bude dvostrukno opterećena? Zar je ne moguće da kod kuće muž i žena kao članovi te porodice zajednićki obavljaju izvesne poslove, da muž pomaže ženu? Međutim naši drugovi se zgranjavaju od tih stvari. I mislim ima tu niz problema i niz pitanja koji pred našim ženama ostaju za rešavanje i koju ostaju za rešavanje pred Socijalistickom savezu i da nema nikada da bude dovoljno da li to možda još malo i da za sve nas ima dovoljno rada na rešavanju svih tih problema. S toga smatram kada se radi o borbi ne samo za konkretne stvari prosvečivanja žene itd. vec i za prosvečivanje muškaraca, ako hocete, u pogledu žene da bi jedanput konkretno postavili sta je to ravnopravnost žene i da ne polažimo od toga da idemo palijativno.” Izvršnog odbora afž Jugoslavije, 9.5.1953, Skopje. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž collection, 141-8-246. 201 �out women’s participation: “There is no socialist democracy, there is no socialism if women do not take part in the economic, political and cultural life.”25 Vida Tomšić’s speech, after Đilas, recalled the history of the afž and of the construction of socialism in Yugoslavia. Tomšić again referred to the “old Marxist truth” according to which one can gauge the state of the working class and of socialism in a country from the position of women in its society.26 She then compared circumstances in Yugoslavia with the situation in the ussr, stating that at the level of women’s emancipation it was not possible to follow the example of the Soviet Union, and forcefully modify society from above. It was necessary instead to consider the existing problems and to look at the way in which old and new ways of living coexist. Tomšić stressed the importance of economic and social rights (“jednaka plata za jednaki rad”), and of the education of girls. She stressed the conflict between women’s roles as wives and mothers and women’s roles as active citizens, arguing that this conflict was most acute in the first years of the socialist revolution, when women were needed for the reconstruction of the country and the welfare services were not yet developed. Later in her speech, Tomšić denounced some “incorrect” interpretations of selfmanagement and decentralization, and the return of some supposedly “democratic” theories according to which women’s proper place was the family. The process of decentralization, according to Tomšić, had been interpreted in certain places as a “return to capitalism”, and women were again treated “as awaiting marriage, or as a spouse who is dependent on the salary of her husband.” Tomšić criticized this view, and the fact that a number of workers’ collectives had dismissed female workers on the basis of their “less valuable” labor. Tomšić tried to establish a new ideal of women’s emancipation corresponding to the new ideological line of the party – one that refused both Soviet-style state intervention and capitalist patriarchal ideology.27 After having criticized the feminine press for reviving feminine stereotypes in the domain of fashion and appearance, Tomšić stated: “No one thinks that within socialism everyone should wear the same clothes and forget about variety and beauty. But that’s very different from the obvious effort aimed at turning a woman into a doll who thinks that outward appearance is the most significant aspect for her social position, and that only appearance, and not her work, provides her with a place in society.”28 Tomšić stressed instead the importance of work and economic independ25 “Nema socijalisticke demokratije, nema socijalizma ako žena ne sudeluje u ekonomskom, političkom i kulturnom životu.” Stenografske Beleške, iv Kongres afž, 27, 28, 29. 9. 1953, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-5. It is interesting to note that only one year later Đilas would become Yugoslavia’s main dissident because of his articles against the “new class” of state bureaucrats published in the newspaper Borba. 26 “Na ovom se opet potvrduje stara marksisticka istina, da je položaj žene u jednom društvu u prvom redu ovisan od opšteg položaja u kojem se nalazi radni narod, da je položaj žene i njezine emancipacije jedno od pitanja proleterske revolucije, socijalizma.” Stenografske Beleske, iv Kongres afž, 27, 28, 29. 9. 1953, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-5.289. 27 Ibidem. 28 “Niko ne misli pri tome, da bi u socijalizmu morali svi nositi jednaka odela i zaboraviti na raznolikost i lepotu, ali to je potpuno različita stvar od očitih nastojanja da se žena opet pretvori 202 �ence for women’s self-consciousness. The aforementioned quotation by Tomšić clearly summarizes the ambivalent position of afž leaders towards shifts in socialist ideology after the Cominform crisis, and it gives a sense of the contradictory ideals of femininity that were circulating in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. The afž leaders struggled to abandon Soviet-style centralism and modernize women’s lives in a socialist country, without falling back into the consumerist ideal of femininity promoted by the West. In a series of very progressive arguments on women’s role in the socialist society, Tomšić concluded that the afž was no longer useful in the new political phase. During her speech at the fourth Congress, Tomšić declared that the afž had played an enormous role in the socialist construction in Yugoslavia, and that unlike women’s organizations (read: feminist organizations) in other countries, it had been fully integrated within the revolutionary process. In this new phase, however, women’s separate organizing would “lead to the mistaken opinion that in order to achieve women’s rights, women would have to fight against the rest of society, and this is particularly dangerous. A similar way of organizing would demobilize women in the self-managing institutions.”29 From the documents that precede and follow the fourth Congress, it is evident that the self-dissolution of the afž was seen by Tomšić and by other delegates as a logical step in integrating and mobilizing women within the new system of selfmanagement. The fear of being labeled feminist and that a separate women’s organization could foster critique of the socialist authorities certainly played a role, but so did the afž leaders’ faith in the possibility to “mainstream” the issue of equality within the institutions of socialist self-management, and the fear that a separate women’s organization would isolate female activists from universal party politics. The decision to create the Union of Women’s Society was aligned to the new direction of socialist self-management, a line that wished to “inspire and educate the masses so that they will know how to lead their own government.” The work on specific women’s issues (education, hygiene, motherhood, labor) was decentralized to the republics, the communes and the workplaces. This strategical decision had mixed results “in the field”, and different consequences in the different republics and communes. Even though the decision was supposed to encourage women’s direct participation, decision-making and activism from below, an avant-garde in fact continued to impose it from above. While in the more developed republics and communes an organization specifically for women was no longer necessary, since women were active in all kinds of local “societies” and committees with different purposes, in the less developed regions the lack of a specific women’s organization enforcing “emancipation from above” deu lutku koja misli da je za njen društveni položaj od najvećeg značanja njen spoljašni izgled, i da samo time, a ne svojim radom, sebi obezbeđuje mesto u društvu.” Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-5.297. 29 “Ako bi sada u ovim uslovima za politički rad među ženama imali posebne ženske organizacije to bi vodilo odvajanju žena iz našeg političkog života, dovodilo bi do pogrešnog shvatanja da se za ostvarivanje prava žena one moraju same boriti protiv ostalog društva, sto je naročito opasno. Takav rad bi demobilisao žene u organima društvene samouprave.” Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, afž fund, 141-5.303. 203 �prived women of state support against local forms of patriarchal control. The process of decentralization and self-management, thus, paradoxically disempowered women in the less developed republics. A statement by afž leader Neda Božinović is testimony to the negative effect of afž dissolution. Božinović tells of afž work in the villages: “I remember the meetings in which women came to complain about their husbands beating them, without shame. (…) Then, of course, we agreed that a couple of women would go to reprimand the husband. Husbands were not allowed to do many things because of fear of the afž.” She then recalls how peasant women in the villages protested when the organization was abolished and placed under the direction of the Socialist Alliance. “- “Why did you abolish the afž?” they asked – “Well, I said, there is now the Union of Women’s Societies.” “Come on, they said, our afž ... it’s a monstrous sin that you have committed. Where are we going to gather now? Our husbands go to the pub, drink, play cards, play dice, and we sit at home and take care of children. Since there’s no afž, we no longer gather.”30 One can gather a hint of the “feminist threat” represented by the afž from Elissa Helms’ dissertation on present-day women’s activism in Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to Helms, while the afž was dismantled in 1953, “the name has remained, however, in colloquial speech as a pejorative label for any independent women’s political initiative or often even merely gatherings of women, unaccompanied by males, in public places” (Helms 2003: 55). The name of the afž in Bosnia-Herzegovina is still associated with a utopian subversion of “natural” women’s roles: “the mere appearance of a large group of women in a hotel restaurant normally dominated by men was enough for some men gathered there (…) to condescendingly intone, “Ugh, here’s the afž” (Uf, evo afža) for everyone to hear” (Helms 2003: 59). From this account, written fifty years after the dissolution of the afž, one can measure the persistence of patriarchal structures and beliefs, and the radical effects of abolishing a separate organization fighting women’s oppression. As I have tried to demonstrate in this section, the demise of the afž cannot be interpreted simply as a sign of patriarchal backlash, but needs to be situated in the new ideological framework developed by socialist authorities in the early 1950s.31 In this section I have highlighted women’s different positions and political subjectivities within the afž, and in particular afž delegates’ conflicting loyalties between the party and the “feminine masses”. The party’s “continuing ambivalence about and ultimately its refusal to accept the unpredictable consequences of genuine activism from below” (Lilly 2011: 153) was also affecting afž delegates’ view of rural women. 30 Testimony by Neda Božinović (1917- 2001). Stojaković, Jankov and Savić (2002: 47 – 48). 31 The transition from the afž to the Union of Women’s Society itself deserves to be studied more extensively. Here I have concentrated mainly on the perspective of leaders and highranking delegates. Research into the rank-and-file members and into the significance of the afž “from below” would allow for a better assessment of this transition, particularly in the rural areas. The great difference between the “more advanced” and “less advanced” republics further complicates matters, and further comparative research would be needed to establish the impact of the afž and of its demise in the different republics. See for instance Stojaković (2010) on the afž in Vojvodina. 204 �afž delegates often had to settle for moderate mid-term results when working with peasant women in remote villages, and had to compromise their emancipatory ideals. The reality of women’s patriarchal oppression contradicted afž delegates’ faith in social change, and their subjective experience as rational, modern subjects. Often there were also considerable differences in opinion of what constituted a desirable standard of women’s equality, as already evidenced by Vida Tomšić’s statement on the need to preserve beauty while encouraging women’s independent position in the public sphere. While in general afž delegates had an urban background, and saw the propagation of modern urban lifestyles as progress in terms of living standards, other delegates noticed that the “urbanization” of the peasants did not necessarily bring an increased emancipation among women.32 Despite these limits, until 1953 debates between delegates continued to be lively, engaged and informed. Because of their work “in the field”, female activists had a very thorough understanding of the problems faced by women. This political edge was lost with the demise of the organization in 1953, and with its integration into the Socialist Alliance, an event that in my view had more to do with the bureaucratization of the Yugoslav political system of selfmanagement, than with male patriarchal control over women. 2 . The udi in the early Cold War era 2.1. udi campaigns in 1948-53: class conflicts and solidarity networks As discussed in the previous two chapters, the Union of Italian Women was also affected by increasing geopolitical tensions in the early Cold War period. After the victory of the Christian-Democrats at the elections of April 1948, and as a result of growing polarizations between the Eastern and Western blocs, a strong wave of anticommunist reaction was directed at the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the associations affiliated with these parties, such as the udi. In July 1949, the Vatican explicitly condemned the communist ideology, excommunicating those Catholics who adhered to the pci.33 After first having advocated measures of economic austerity which were a precondition for receiving us aid, the Christian-Democratic government sided with the industrial elites and landowners in the ongoing class conOne delegate declared for instance: “We constantly hear about the need to reduce the distance between village and town. But this distance isn’t reduced when a peasant woman cuts her hair, curls its, has a manicure and dresses like a city woman. The principle we have established is (..) to raise the cultural level of our villages and our villagers, to teach everything we can so that (s)he becomes a cultivated human being.” Zagreb, Državni Arhiv, afž-kdaž-hr-hda 1234-5k.56. iv Kongres afž Jugoslavije 1953 – minutes of the meetings “Sa sastanka diskusione grupe za prosvetna pitanja”, p.8 (Meeting with the discussion group about educational issue). About gender relations and urbanization in Yugoslavia, see Denich (1976). 33 This happened to Catholic and communist intellectual Franco Rodano (1920-1983), husband of udi activist and founder Marisa Rodano, and one of the main proponents of pci openness to Catholic believers. 32 205 �flict: under the direction of Mario Scelba, the ministry of the Interior reorganized the police force, encouraging them to intervene in workers’ and peasants’ struggles (Ginsborg 2003: 110). In this atmosphere of conservative reaction, the udi’s primary task was to “seize every occasion to mobilize women” for the cause of the Popular Front through a number of grassroots campaigns and particularly through so-called ‘differential associations’ (associazioni differenziali), that is, associations uniting women on specific issues and causes (peasant women, war widows, female heads of households, housewives, women working from home, etc.). These associations were all part of the Feminine Alliance established in support of the Popular Front during the 1948 elections. The udi, as the association of the “best, most conscious and politically aware women”, was supposed to function as the directive avant-garde of the Alliance, reaching out to the feminine masses that would join the Alliance through grassroots campaigns. Even if the goals of the organization during these years were largely based on the line of the Popular Front, this did not necessarily mean an erasure of gender-based concerns, or a lack of space for women’s agency. As recalled by some of its protagonists these were years “of exceptional women’s mobilization, presence and fighting spirit” (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 22). In years of great conservatism, the udi became an “amplifier” of social struggles and defended in particular the most exploited categories of female workers in the agricultural and industrial sector: rice-weeders, olive pickers, seasonal labourers, sharecroppers, and women who worked from home (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 35). A constituent assembly of the “agricultural proletariat” took place in Bologna in December 1947; through the associations of women from the countryside and the trade unions, the left-wing forces supported a number of workers’ demands for better living and working conditions. The living conditions of peasant women were particularly harsh in the postwar period. The prices of food were very high in relation to the salaries of agricultural labourers (braccianti), and unemployment in the agriculture sector was widespread. A study of female labourers in the countryside near Bologna after the war notes that peasant women had no right to medical assistance, and would perform, even when pregnant, heavy tasks for up to 16 hours a day. The rice-weeders (mondine), in particular, worked in the mud for up to 15 hours a day for 7 months a year , with few pauses and constantly surveilled by guards. Since no welfare was available, pregnant women carried on working until late in their pregnancy, resulting in 25 per cent of pregnancies ending in stillbirth (Acerra 1978: 158). In several waves of strikes in the late 1940s, agricultural day laborers and rice weeders demanded better salaries, better food, medical assistance, and a decent place to stay. In the great struggle of thousands of day labourers in Val Padana, held in May 1949, the demonstration and the picket lines were violently repressed. The former partisan, war widow and rice-weeder Maria Margotti was killed by a carabiniere, and 30 other people were injured. At the end of the battle the rice-weeders negotiated a new contract, which limited the lenght of the working day and obliged the landowners to provide decent facilities where the workers could rest. The landowners, however, did not easily comply with the new contract, 206 �and hence the struggles continued (Ravera 1978: 194-195). The udi supported agricultural struggles all over Italy, and developed a thorough understanding of women’s lives in the different regions of Italy. In the following years, the organization opposed the “coefficiente Serpieri” approved under Fascism, a calculation method which valued women’s work in the countryside at only 40 per cent of work done by men. The position of women working in the industrial sector became critical after 1948. The wave of austerity and lay-offs brought greater female unemployment, and made it difficult to resist overexploitation and low salaries, particularly in the textile industries. In 1950, the president of Confidustria declared that “in Italy there is an excess of remuneration for women”, while in all sectors women were paid less than men and received fewer welfare benefits. The working conditions were unsafe and unhealthy, with factories being excessively hot, lacking hygiene, and so on. Between the summer of 1949 and April 1950, textile workers’ agitations took place in 4.088 firms in Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto, Tuscany, Liguria and Campania (Ravera 1978: 190-192). The tobacco sector, too, was on strike. The 100.000 tabacchine, the women producing tobacco and cigarettes in humid, dark factories that devastated their health agitated for better conditions. Their renewal of their national contract was obtained in 1950 after a very long strike, brutally repressed by the police (Ravera 1978: 196). The pci and the udi defended different categories of female workers throughout Italy, organized conferences and solidarity networks, and effectively promoted, through strikes and mobilizations, women’s demands for “equal pay for equal work”. The udi also started to claim welfare provisions and retirement pensions not just for female workers, but also for housewives. A progressive measure proposed by the udi and the Popular Front was the law for the “Physical and economic protection of working mothers” (Per la tutela fisica ed economica delle madri lavoratrici), a law that would regulate female workers’ maternity rights. Teresa Noce proposed and carried out the approval of this law with great determination. In the postwar period, after the Resistance and her deportation to Ravensbruck, she became a delegate to the Constituent Assembly and the secretary of the Union of Female Textile Workers (fiot). In her autobiography she recounts how the law proposal was developed in a myriad of grassroot meetings, assemblies, and consultations with female workers all over Italy, popularizing these demands among women of different political and social backgrounds. After strenuous popular and parliamentary battles, the law for the “Physical and economic protection of working mothers” was approved in August 1950, with a generous provision of 80 per cent of salary for five months of maternity leave, three before and two after the pregnancy; the law forbade the dismissal of pregnant women until the child’s first year; in the presence of more than fifty women workers, the firm had to support the creation of kindergardens. The Christian-Democratic party managed to modify this provision in a conservative sense, adding that the workers had to be “married” (coniugate) to obtain the crèches. Nonetheless, maternity rights were extended in this way from textile workers to other categories of industrial and agricultural workers (see Noce 1974: 405-413). 207 �It is interesting to note that Teresa Noce, while deeply engaged in the fight for women’s rights as workers, opposed separate women’s organizations, and had refused to take part in the udi.34 Noce (1974: 414) recalled that she had frequent disagreements with the younger generation of women who were part of the udi: “I had the impression that they were too feminist, and that they did not deal enough with the problems of working women, who were, then, the majority of Italian women, if we consider that even most of the housewives had worked outside of the house before marrying. But the comrades, probably, found me too sectarian and not feminine enough.” The udi, however, fully embraced the campaign for paid maternity leave and promoted it throughout the country. The figure of Teresa Noce – representative of the old antifascist generation – shows the great diversity of positions that existed within the leftist camp on the issue of “work among women”; it also proves that political transformation in women’s lives could be achieved through class-based political engagement, since many Italian women were oppressed by a gendered and classist division of labor. In the last part of this chapter I will return to the discussion of class-based party work vs. “work among women” within the udi. In the next section I will give some more examples of pci and udi postwar activities, looking at the campaigns for land occupation taking place in Southern Italy in 1949-1950, and at the support offered by the udi to the victims of war rapes in Cassino. 2.2. Peasant movements in Southern Italy: a “woman with no name” In the immediate postwar period the South of Italy was in a condition of dire misery, as a consequence of Fascism and of the economic crisis brought on by Second World War.35 From 1944, however, the transition to the republic and the encounter between the Italian Communist Party and the Southern peasants created great hopes, embodied by the dream of land redistribution. These hopes were raised notably through the projects of land reforms promoted by the pci minister of Agriculture, Fausto Gullo, and through the actions of cgil leader Giuseppe di Vittorio for the regulation of 34 Teresa Noce (1974: 415-416) opposed the fact that udi women called themselves “friends” (amiche) instead of “comrades” (compagne), since according to her the noun “compagna” had nothing to do with the “party line”, but was rather a feminine noun, used to signify comradeship in the fight for emancipation and in antifascist battles. She also found most women in politics, in the udi and in the trade unions too accomodating with male comrades. On this topic, she wrote an article entitled “Learning to say no”, in which she argued that in order to achieve their emancipation as women and as workers, women had to learn to say no: to their teachers and parents, to their bosses, to their husbands, and to their comrades when they knew they were right. 35 A realistic portrait of the living conditions in the South under Fascism is drawn in Carlo Levi’s masterpiece Christ stopped at Eboli, in which the communist intellectual and doctor recounts his years of forced confinement in two remote villages in the region of Basilicata. In his novel, Levi describes the indifference towards politics and the abyssal distance separating the Southern peasantry from the Italian state. 208 �agricultural labour. As Ginsborg summarizes: in the South of Italy “too much of the best land was in too few hands and too many people had no land at all” (2003: 122). The underdevelopment and the miserable living standards of the Southern region were appalling, and the peasants were encouraged to mobilize collectively in order to ameliorate their living conditions.36 In the autumn of 1949-1950, a new wave of peasant protests started in Southern Italy, demanding land reform and redistribution as well as better working conditions for agricultural laborers. The previous attempts at reform undertaken in the years 1946-1947 under the government of antifascist unity had been put halted when the left was excluded from the government. The Christian-Democrats were, in fact, keen to reassure the Southern landowner elites. But the peasant mobilization started once again with an unprecedented participation in 1949. On the 24th of October, 24.000 peasants marched between Cosenza and Catanzaro: Entire villages set out in procession, women with their children, some of the men on horseback and the red banners of the Communists often carried next to the portrait of the patron saint of the village. From the slopes of adjoining hills different columns of peasants would wave their banners at each other, as a greating and as encouragement. When they arrived at the estates of the great landowners, the peasants meticoulously pegged out and divided the land, and the work of preparation for sowing could then begin (Ginsborg 2003: 124). Women had a very important role in the peasant protests: they put themselves in the front lines with the children, attempted to negotiate with the land-owners, and pretended to be faint or ill in order to distract the police. The repression was nonetheless very harsh: a few days later, three peasants, two young men and a young woman, were killed by a police gunshot in the town of Melissa on the 29th of October. Soon the movement spread from Calabria to all the regions of the South, with the slogan “the land to those who till it” (Ginsborg 2003: 124-125). udi and pci leader Luciana Viviani tells in her autobiography of a peasant struggle that took place near Naples in the winter of 1949, when landless peasants set out to occupy land used for the pasturing of buffalo cows, whose milk was used to produce the well-known mozzarella. While the cows could profit from large expanses of land, the surrounding peasants starved, and felt less worthy than the cattle. When the movement for land occupation started, the peasants near Naples decided to occupy the land that had up to then been reserved to the cattle. Luciana Viviani was sent as a representative of the communist federation of Naples, to assist the peasants in their negotiations with the landowners. She mediated in one of these meetings, which hosted the landowners, the prefecture, the police, the trade unions and a delegation of peasants themselves. 36 To give only one example, after the war “90 per cent of communes in Calabria had either no school buildings or schools housed in unhygienic conditions; 85 per cent of the communes were without drains and 81 per cent without adequate aqueducts; there was one hospital bed per 1500 inhabitants, and nearly 49 per cent of the adult population were illiterate” (Ginsborg 2003: 122). 209 �The meeting continued for hours. While the landowners defended their right to exploit the land for agriculture, the trade union officers demanded some measures that would ameliorate the miserable lives of the peasants. The discussion became more and more violent, showing the “visceral hatred of the rich against the poor and the profound contempt of local squires for those ignorants in rags who expected to have something more than their parents and grandparents.” At a certain point, after hours of vain discussion, a peasant woman of an unknown age but worn out by labor, her hair hidden by a headscarf, came up to the table where the representatives were sitting. She took something out of her shawl, and threw on the table a package wrapped in newspaper. The package contained a piece of polenta (maize flour cooked in water), white and solidified. “This is all we have eaten since this morning”, the woman said. And then she returned to her place. According to Luciana Viviani, the intervention of the “woman with no name” was more efficient than all the trade unionists and leftwing politicians had done so far: after a moment of tense silence an agreement was reached, leading to the concession of parts of the land to the peasants’ cooperatives (Viviani 1994: 65-66). The “woman with no name” in Viviani’s account symbolizes the encounter with rural women and men who for the first time felt that they could take part in politics, in order to achieve a better life. As Ginsborg recalls, the communist party elites played a very important role in promoting solidarity among the peasants, and in dismantling the traditional fatalism and individualism that had characterized their lives. The utopian character of the landless movements was very strong, due to a combination of communist ideals and pagan mysticism. Invoking the myth of the Soviet Union was a way to promote political solidarity among the peasants.37 The Communist Party also used the Soviet myth in its attempts to moderate workers’ demands in order to comply with the law and avoid insurrectional demonstrations that might engender further repression against the workers’ movement. In January 1950 the police killed six workers and injured several hundreds during a demonstration held in the city of Modena against the purge of “undesirable” leftist workers from the Fonderie Riunite metallurgical factory. Between January 1948 and June 1950, 62 workers were killed, 3.126 injured and 92.169 arrested all over Italy. The majority of them identified themselves as communists. In this period, the udi initiated a campaign against the police being allowed to carry weapons during street demonstrations. The udi could also make use of their solidarity networks between Northern and Southern Italy to support the struggle: in 1950, in the town of San Severo in the Southern region of Puglia, a strike of day labourers asking for “bread and work” turned 37 “An extraordinary and exalted fede pubblica (…) was created. The organization and collective action of the peasantry would lead them into a new golden age. ‘Why’ asked the party of its militants, ‘ are the workers in the Soviet Union masters of the factory and the peasants owners of the land they till? Why have the scourges of unemployment, prostitution and hunger disappeared? Why do women have the same wages as men for the same work? Why does the Russian people enjoy the greatest amount of liberty and the most democratic Constitution in the world?’ The answer lay in their discipline, their organization, their willingness to fight” (Ginsborg 2003: 126, reporting a leaftlet of the Sicilian pci section). 210 �into a riot against the police. As a consequence, 180 people were arrested for “armed insurrection against the State”, and detained for two years before being tried and released. In the meantime, 70 children from San Severo were trasferred among workers’ families in the North, thanks to the udi’s longstanding network of assistance inaugurated in 1946. The same networks were activated after two major floods in the Polesine and Reggio Calabria regions in winter 1951, and hundreds of homeless children were transferred to Milan, Rome and other cities during the reconstruction work. The field of assistance to children in need, however, had become highly politicized, and udi solidarity actions were opposed in many ways by the government and by the police, and were the object of fierce anti-communist accusations in the press. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, in fact, the Christian-Democratic government gradually withdrew the funding assigned to leftist associations, thus ensuring a Catholic monopoly on education, assistance and social work (Rodano 2010: 71-73). In this section I have explored a variety of grassroots activities promoted by the udi among peasants in Southern Italy. In the next section I will deal with another campaign launched by the udi in the early Cold War period, that is the support to women victims of war rape in Central Italy. 2.3. The udi support of of war rape victims in Cassino province During the advancement of the Allied troops in Central Italy in the summer of 1944, thousands of women and men living in the province of Cassino were victims of war rapes by French Moroccan troops of the French Expeditionary Corps, known as Goumiers. In the first village encountered by the troops, the village of Esperia, 700 women were raped out of a total of 2500 inhabitants, and several relatives were killed for having opposed the violence. This theme was portrayed several years later in the novel La Ciociara by Alberto Moravia and in the well-known movie of the same title. Several years later, 60.000 women – commonly defined as Marocchinate (literally: Moroccoed) – were still suffering from venereal diseases, and had not received any compensation or adequate assistance from the state. A public meeting organized by the udi took place in Pontecorvo in October 1951, with 500 women delegates from Central Italy. In 1952 udi President and communist mp Maria Maddalena Rossi38 raised the issue in Parliament, asking for invalidity pensions and specialized health care for the women in the villages affected by the war rapes. Former udi members have argued in recent years that in the 1950s udi campaign there was no reference to the sexist nature 38 Maria Maddalena Rossi (1906-1995) was born in a middle class family in Northern Italy, and graduated in chemistry. In 1937 she became member of the clandestine pci in Milan. Later, she went into exile in Switzerland where she continued to organize antifascist activities. In December 1944 she returned to Milan where she joined the clandestine editorial board of the newspaper L’Unità. In 1946 she was elected as communist delegate to the Constituent Assembly. She was President of the udi from 1947 to 1956 and vice-president of the widf from 1957 until 1967. 211 �of these events (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 53), or that even udi members saw war rapes mainly as a crime against honor (Rodano 2010: 76). Maria Maddalena Rossi’s speech, however, repeatedly made use of a language that highlighted the specificity of the experience lived by women victims of rape. She also expressed a profound solidarity with the women she claimed to represent in Parliament. After having described some individual cases of violence, she referred to how old and young women coped with the rapes: Many of these old women are ill: they are slowly dying because of the ugly disease transmitted by the Moroccoan soldiers. Upon entering their miserable huts one can see these poor old women on their beds of rags, with children around them, with the relatives who aren’t able to cure them. And these old women talk, telling what happened to them. Not so for the young women; the young women, in general, are unwilling to speak, and one can well understand why. If for the old women the insult has almost the character of a martyrdom, for the young ones it signifies something worse than death: it signifies to have a long span of life in front of oneself, a life not yet lived, but dark and cold, in which there is no glimmer, no hope, no light; they have lost the possibility of having a family, of having children; they are even prevented from working, and the poverty in their case is even more tragic, since economic well-being could at least help them to get out of this terrible isolation in which their disgrace has thrown them.39 In Rossi’s speech one can get a measure of the shame and stigma affecting these women, and of the way in which war rapes were interpreted at the time in the Italian Parliament. While sharing the general idea that for these women rape was something worse than death because of its moral implications, Maria Maddalena Rossi attempted to break the isolation surrounding this phenomenon and asked for special provisions that could partially improve their lives: “That’s why today we say to the Government: apply the existing laws, that until now haven’t been applied as they should have been; but also: study some special provisions for this horrible mutilation caused by war, study something different for this different evil, different from the other grave ones left to heal by the war.” Rossi asked therefore for a special compensation for these women, on the basis of their unique experience as victims of war rapes. It is possible to sense here an intuition of these women’s need to obtain some specific care, but the idea of psychological help was not mentioned. The demand for health care was related instead to the spread of venereal diseases. The communist mp also denounced in Parliament the public hypocrisy towards the fate of these women, and the double standards implied in the concept of “morality”. She emphasized that the scandal wasn’t women’s denunciation of war rapes, but rather the hidden social injustice they experienced as female victims living in the periphery of the country: “I know that some pretend to be scandalized since we have taken the defense of these women in Parliament and in the country. I believe, instead, 39 Maria Maddalena Rossi, parliamentary intervention, 7 April 1952. The text of the inter- vention is available on the website of the Italian Senate. www.senato.it 212 �that we should be scandalized because among us some people would like to cover up with a veil of silence this disgrace, this awful crime committed against innocent women, young girls, profiting from the fact that they live far from the big cities, in far away villages.”40 The Christian-Democratic government, however, was reluctant to approve any special provision for these cases, also since they suspected that the numbers of rape victims had been inflated in order to obtain pensions and compensations in villages that were in a state of extreme misery. According to the spokesperson of the government, mp Tessitori, only 20.000 compensation requests had been deposited after 1944 and there were no more women with veneral diseases in the area. The spokesperson of the government was thus keen to dismiss the specifity of war rapes, and the need for a specific compensation. He compared the fate of these women to the fate of those who have lost a son or husband in war, stating that in any case no monetary compensation can possibly heal their pain. Maria Maddalena Rossi reacted to these statements with indignation. She pointed to the insensitivity of the male mp towards the issue (“We really can see that you are not a woman!”), and underlined that these crimes could not be compared to other war losses: No, it is not the same thing. We know the mothers who have lost their sons, the wives who have lost their husbands: we love them, honor them, demonstrate our full solidarity, so that they sometimes can find comfort in the fact that their mourning is shared, that the memory of their beloved is sacred to millions of citizens. But not for these women! For them there’s no possible comfort. They have to hide, as if they are infected even on a moral level! Some would like to forbid these women from talking of their disgrace, from gathering, from making claims, in the name of public morality! 41 Rossi accused the government representative of cynicism and insensitivity since he “did not find this violence more horrific and more repellant than any other violence that war can bring”; she promised that the pci would propose another law establishing “a special treatment, different from the others, for these victims, who are victims different from others.”42 The campaign for women victims of rape contains all the elements characterizing the udi in these years: a strong engagement in the field of social assistance, their support of grassroots movements, and their efforts as representatives in the parliamentary arena to achieve laws and welfare provisions that could respond to some of the pressing social demands that existed in Italy at the time. In the same era, in 1948, the socialist mp Lina Merlin proposed the abolition of the “closed houses” (case chiuse), the state-managed brothels that employed thousands of women. This system allowed all sorts of police and medical abuses of prostitutes, who were described as propagators of veneral disease. Prostitutes were registered on a special list and were deprived 40 Ibidem. 41 Ibidem. 42 Ibidem. 213 �of civil rights. Senator Lina Merlin opposed the system as “unacceptable from the point of view of legality and equality between the sexes”, but also as “unacceptable from the point of view of civilization, human dignity and the prestige of the female sex”, since it reified men’s rights to exploit women under state control, and condoned a form of sexual slavery based on the supposed need to protect public morality (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 385-391). The “closed houses” were finally abolished ten years later, in 1958.43 These two campaigns show that while adopting a class-based analysis, udi leaders were sensitive to issues of violence against women, and that they were aware that women victims of violence required specialized assistance. In the next sections I will look at the way in which udi leaders discussed their engagement between “work among women” and “party work” in the early Cold War period. 2.4. Feminist historiography and the debate on the autonomy of the udi In the previous chapter I have described some of the activities conducted by the udi at the national level in the early Cold War period, focusing on grassroots campaigns and activities promoting women’s rights, particularly for workers and peasants. As shown in the previous section, class-based activism did not mean that specific women’s interests were abandoned. By working to improve welfare provisions, to eliminate extreme poverty and stamp out labor exploitation, the udi attempted to respond to women’s needs. The “differential associations” (associazioni differenziali) allowed the udi to take root at the local level, among rice-weeders, olive pickers, seasonal labourers, sharecroppers, home-workers, and housewives. Many women from working class or peasant backgrounds became aware of their rights and of politics for the first time, by participating in petitions for world peace. For many women the local udi section provided a solidarity network, a place to socialize, and a regular occasion to step out of the home. More ethnographies of local grassroots activism are needed on this subject, to assess the significance of the organization at the local level and for its rank-and-file members.44 Within feminist historiography, however, the activism of the udi in the early Cold War years has been read within the framework of a loss of autonomy, due to udi subordination to the strategy of the communist and socialist parties. At the end of 1947, in fact, the organization entered the “Popular Democratic Front for Freedom, 43 As shown in the interviews collected by Pasolini in his 1965 documentary about sexuality in Italy, Comizi d’Amore, this law did not prevent many Italian men from being nostalgic for the old system, since the case chiuse represented a masculine rite of passage, and preserved the widespread sexist double standard. 44 For an ethnography of the udi in Emilia-Romagna based on oral history interviews conducted mainly with rank-and-file members, see Liotti et al. 2002. According to Rosangela Pesenti, who writes in this same volume, the udi has been largely under-researched also because of the working class and peasant character of the vast majority of its members, which, as a result, produced fewer “intellectuals” than the feminist generation (Pesenti 2002: 79-85). 214 �Labor and Peace”, the coalition created by the pci and the psi – together with other minor parties – forming a “Feminine Alliance for the Front” and inviting its members to support the Popular Front in 1948 elections. According to historical interpretations, including those written by former udi leaders (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998; Rodano 2010), the support for the Popular Front marked the lowest point of autonomy in the history of the udi. The constant overlapping of the activities of the Popular Front, the Alliance with its “differential associations” and the udi created confusion, and a loss of specificity in terms of gender-oriented goals. In these early Cold War years, in fact, even the words “woman” and “emancipation” disappeared from the agenda of the udi (see Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998, 314-315; see Rodano 2010, 61-80).45 According to these interpretations, the udi of these years had somehow lost its original goal of struggling autonomously for the emancipation of all women. Because of its open position in support of the Communist and Socialist parties in the midst of a conservative backlash, the udi wasn’t an association of “left-wing women for women” any more, but had become an association of “women for the left” (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 27). Words like “women’s emancipation” and “autonomy” came back onto the agenda only after the mid-1950s, as I will show in the next chapter. While offering a glimpse of the political climate of the early Cold War years, these reconstructions of the history of the udi tend to build a retrospective, teleological narrative of loss and return of autonomy (Hemmings 2011). This narrative describes “the originary” udi as an autonomous and spontaneous organization in 1944-1945. According to the narrative, this autonomy is subsequently lost in the early Cold War years between 1948 and 1953; from 1953 onwards the value of women’s emancipation is gradually rediscovered, until the encounter with feminism in the 1970s. As in the case of the dissolution of the afž in Yugoslavia, these historical interpretations – mediated by second wave feminist theory – risks oversimplifying the complex, multi-layered political decisions and strategies in which the udi was entangled. These historical narratives have also been adopted by former udi members to react to the new feminist paradigm that dominated Italian women’s history from the late 1970s, and as a reaction towards post-1989 anti-communism. Both paradigms – the feminist and the anti-communist – had the tendency to discredit the udi for its lack of autonomy, describing it as a “chain of transmission” of Italian Communist Party politics (itself dominated by guidelines from Moscow). udi leaders and intellectuals have thus attempted to preserve a positive image of the organization by emphasizing instances of gender-based consciousness and political autonomy from party politics that were present in the organization since its beginnings, and which became more prominent from the mid-1950s onwards. The problem with this interpretation is that the term autonomy had a radically different meaning when used in the late 1940s and 1950s within the context of the 45 The Second udi Congress – held in Milan, 19-23 October 1947 – was significantly titled “For a happy family, for peace, and for work”, while the slogan of the Third Congress in 1949 was “For the future of our children, for freedom and progress, no to war” (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 21). 215 �udi. The discussion of the autonomy of the udi in the late 1940s and 1950s, in fact, was not a discussion that opposed female militants to male party leaders, but rather a discussion between two opposed political currents existing within the Italian Communist Party, a current marked by Togliatti’s moderate strategy, and a current striving for a more revolutionary, class-based strategy. At the height of Cold War tensions, the survival of the communist movement in Italy was threatened – as shown by the attempted assassination of Togliatti in 1948 – and the udi became embedded in these pressing debates on political strategy, at the national and international level. Two different political lines about women’s organizations – although never clearly defined – existed within the party: one was the Togliatti line of “progressive democracy”, which included the alliance between the communist and the socialist party. The creation of a unitary, women-only organization like the udi has to be situated within this project. According to Togliatti, the question of women’s emancipation, like the “Southern question”, had to do with the democratization of Italian society, and was transversal to class struggle. Togliatti regularly defended the need for a nation-wide, unitary, autonomous women’s organization, against those members of the party (women included) who saw the organization as a pure “transmission belt” (see Rodano 2010: 53-55). The other more radical current of the party, guided by hardliner Pietro Secchia, was, in fact, eager to use the udi as a vehicle for propaganda and electoral politics, and to dismiss it as useless when these goals were not met. This line prevailed in the early Cold War years, when the communists and socialists were no longer part of the antifascist unitary government, and when a number of militants regarded Togliatti’s national unity strategy as failed (see Rodano 2010: 60-61). As in Yugoslavia, the internal discussions about the need for a women-only organization were highly dependent on matters of political strategy. They also shifted according to the different loyalties of the female leaders: many communist leaders worked simultaneously as party functionaries, within the Feminine Commissions of the Party, and within the udi. Some communist militants, like Teresa Noce, rejected separate women’s organizations, while others felt “at home” in the udi (see for instance Ombra 2009). Mutual connections also existed at the base. In the “red” regions, such as Emilia-Romagna, the local grassroots and cultural activity of the pci, the udi, and the trade unions frequently overlapped with each other, constituting a specific workingclass subculture (Kertzer 1996; see also Liotti et al. 2002). In any case, the activities of the udi were never separate from the activities of the Popular Front or of the Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This does not mean, as I have indicated also for the afž, that its members did not exert forms of individual political agency, nor that the organization simply executed party directives, nor that conflicts between male and female activists were absent (about the communist party’s double standards towards male and female comrades, see for instance Ombra 2009; Bellassai 2000). The archives testifying of the relations between the udi, the pci and the Feminine Commissions of the pci have not been studied in depth, but seem worthwhile considering when dealing with issues of autonomy and control. A “Note on the functioning of Women’s Commissions” produced in 1950 is explicit about the directive role of pci Women’s Commissions with respect to the udi. In 1945, each section of the 216 �party included two women constituting the local feminine commission, one dealing with party work and “women’s cells”, the other dealing with “mass work among women,” that is, “the section (circolo) of the udi”. This, however, brought “confusion” and “overlap” between the women’s pci cells and the udi sections, with the result that “the comrades could not understand the difference between the udi and the Party and thus the necessity and the importance of establishing a strong mass organization.”46 While praising the results of the Women’s Commissions (increasing pci membership, strengthening communist women’s activism in the udi, forming militant cadres), the document stressed the limits of these Commissions. As in the case of the afž, the document denounced the fact that the Party “doesn’t’ yet consider work among women among its fundamental tasks”, and thus “many women’s initiatives – even when they are well implemented – are seen as done for their own sake, without a larger political perspective for the widening and strengthening of the women’s movement and for the influence that this can exert on the development of the democratic movement in general.” Since the Party largely ignored “women’s issues”, the members of the Women’s Commissions felt “isolated”. The risk of creating a “Party within the Party” with little influence was apparent. As in the case of the afž, communist women were in charge of “work among women” with a certain degree of freedom and decision-making, but this freedom was due to the fact that the Party preferred to delegate these “secondary issues”, rather than engaging with them on a systemic level. A report on the Women’s Commissions in the city of Bologna, accompanying the previous “Note on the functioning of Women’s Commissions”47, denounced the high amount of work required from the communist women, who under extreme pressure juggled the coordination of all the different activities of the pci and udi sections. They were also in charge of the women’s cells in each section, and in addition, dealt with trade unions, work cooperatives and so on. In this way, the female militants, became indeed good plodders, and also excellent executors of the directives, but […] did their work in a mechanical way, without reflecting on what they were doing, due to the many problems they had to face. But the most negative aspect manifested in the lack of a concrete study of women’s problems, in a superficial knowledge of women’s life and work conditions in our province, in the scarce reflection on how to apply the political line of the Party in a concrete way, that adheres to reality.48 46 “Note sul funzionamento delle Commissioni Femminili”, dalla introduzione alla riunione di Commissione Femminile Centrale del 29.9. 1950. Istituto Gramsci Rome, mf. busta 233, fascicolo 17, sezione femminile 1949-1950. 47 “La funzione delle Commissioni Femminili”, di Vittorina dal Monte Responsabile della Commissione Femminile della Federazione di Bologna. Istituto Gramsci Rome, mf. busta 233, fascicolo 17, sezione femminile 1949-1950. 48 “E’ fuori dubbio che questo nostro cattivo metodo di lavoro si faceva sentire in tutta la nostra attività in direzione delle masse femminili e soprattutto nei risultati. Prima di tutto esso si risentiva nella formazione dei nostri quadri femminili che diventavano sì delle buone sgobbone (…) ma che svolgevano il loro lavoro in modo meccanico, senza riflettere su quanto facevano, dovuto ai numerosi problemi che esse dovevano affrontare. Ma l’aspetto più negativo si mani- 217 �The fragmentation of decision-making was overwhelming to the militants, and was at odds with another important necessity, the need to “adhere to reality” and to respond to women’s different needs. The party propaganda had become too “generic,” lacking a true understanding of the problems of the “different social strata in our province” and offering the same “speech” to bourgeois city women and countryside day labourers. In order to overcome this situation, similar to the problems the afž faced in the early 1950s, the Women’s Commissions from Bologna proposed to “mainstream” women’s issues within every party organ – thus engaging the whole Party on the women’s issues in each of its sections and work commissions. Many comrades from the Women’s Commissions were sent to work directly within the party, the udi, the trade unions, and the cooperatives. In this way, these women could become “political cadres and not just women [cadres], with a less unilateral preparation that also helps them in the work of directing women.” This passage hints at the inferior valuation of “work among women”, seen as “feminine” and less political. Female leaders refused to be limited to a task that seemed extremely hard to achieve due to the disinterest of male comrades. But the goal of “making the entire Party responsible for women’s work” was met with “difficulty and incomprehension”, notably from the base. The widespread sexism of Italian society was reflected also within the party. Many men opposed women’s presence in the public sphere and in party politics – as well as women’s right to work, notably when it came to their own wives. As in afž reports, in fact, pci and udi reports and publications testify to the hegemony of the breadwinner in the family, and to the widespread character of violence against women, even in the families of men who were party members. A former militant, Giovanni Cesareo, relates that at that time, in a pci section in the center of Rome, people said “oh! The comrade is very good, he attends the party school, he knows things, he’s very open, and then he goes home and beats his wife. That was the idea. There was a world divided in two, politically at the Section all were like this, but at home…there was really a neat division” (quoted in Casalini 2010: 155). The idea that “beating up one’s wife isn’t a private matter”, but amounts to a “feudal conception of the family”, as pci leader Ruggero Grieco insisted, was received with difficulty by many party members, who saw these habits as “natural” (Bellassai 2000: 213-218). From these reports one can assess the coexistence of instances of modernization of gender relations – inaugurated with women’s participation in the Resistance and continued in their engagement in postwar politics alongside their male comrades – and the persistence of a long-standing traditionalism that was also reflected within the party. As Bellassai (2000: 147) notes, “the communist representation of the family, on the one hand, recalls, even with pride, (…) some images taken from the austere and healthy proletarian morality (in which, really, the popular accents cannot be neatly distinguished from the patriarchal ones); on the other hand, it cannot be simply festava nella mancanza di uno studio concreto dei problemi femminili, in una conoscenza superficiale delle condizioni di vita e di lavoro nella nostra provincia, nella poca meditazione del come applicare la linea politica del Partito in un modo concreto e aderente alla realtà.” Ibidem. 218 �defined as conservative.” In her work on communist families Maria Casalini (2010) similarly shows the ambivalent coexistence of progressive and traditional gender relations within communist households. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, women’s desire for individual self-expression and autonomy were gradually emerging, challenging traditional Italian views of family and society, in which women could only be wives, mothers, or daughters. This is well illustrated in the 1952 novel Quaderno Proibito (the Forbidden Diary), by feminist writer Alba De Cespedes, in which a forty-year-old woman is able to express the gap between her family role and her individual desires and personality only when she starts to keep a secret diary, which she doesn’t know where to hide since she has literally no space for herself in the house. As noted by Piccone-Stella (1981: 28), in the 1950s women’s self-expression was highly tamed, and the range of permitted behaviours was very restricted. A strong individual personality was enough to cross the line, and to be admonished by male relatives and public authorities. For many communist women, the choice of dealing with party politics had been based on a “personal revolution”, achieved by transgressing widespread social norms. The individual choice to take part in politics formed part of a process of self-realization, and made these women conscious of their “difference” from other women, who stayed away from politics and the public sphere (Bellassai 2000: 266-7). At the same time – and this is worth noting when discussing an issue like women’s individual and collective autonomy in relation to the party – the communist doctrine of collective sacrifice was ill equipped to give voice to women’s individual aspirations. Party ethics rejected individualism as a “bourgeois” vice and promoted the notion of collective sacrifice for male and female militants alike.49 Self-sacrifice, heroism, and abnegation to the collective were key values in twentieth century communist culture. 50 For women, this ethic included the necessity to “give the example” in the realm of morals, therefore adopting the gendered double standard permeating Italian society. In their identity as both communists and women, therefore, female militants were submitted to a double bind, being required to embody an irreproachable example not only as militants, but as women, too. In their daily lives they needed to “reconcile these two universes, so distant in the collective imagination: the militant and the woman, the first confined to the public sphere, the other to the private sphere” (Gabrielli, quoted in Bellassai 2000: 265). The figure of the emancipated woman, thus, also had to encompass the traditional female figure, according to the model of the 49 As recounted with irony by Luciana Viviani in her 1994 autobiographical stories, the need to strenghten the spirit of sacrifice led to some absurd situations in the pci school for young male and female cadres in 1950, modelled after similar schools in the ussr. The pci school encouraged a collective ritual of self-critique, particularly from those who came from “bourgeois” families. Another task was to carry heavy stones in the garden, for no reason other than to learn about the heaviness of manual labor. The young students subsequently invented a series of songs in which they made fun of the rules of the school, and of their teachers (Viviani 1994: 79-89). 50 As shown by historian Jolande Withuis (1990), a comparable ethic of heroism and sacrifice was present among Dutch communist women during the Cold War period. 219 �“harmonious balance”51 (Piccone Stella 1981: 23). Often communist militants felt torn between these two dimensions, since they were forced to “neglect” the home and the family in order to attend meetings and travel around the country. Nonetheless, they tried to keep everything together, as former partisan commander Laura Polizzi did, who only found the time to do household chores at night (Liotti et al. 2002). Historians underline on the one hand the break with previous symbolic norms exemplified by the small number of “emancipated” women, who “established, with their behavior, that it was possible to be different” (Signorelli, quoted in Bellassai 2000: 267). At the same time, they stress that these exceptional life paths were the result of a specific historical moment determined by the Second World War and the Resistance, which could not be repeated. The “heroism” and “seriousness” displayed by communist women during the Resistance were offered as models for daily life in the postwar period, generating a great desire for escapism and distraction among younger generations, who found themselves in a completely different situation from the Resistance heroines (Piccone-Stella 1981). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, udi magazine Noi Donne had to adapt itself to the changes in society and to the desires of the new generation, more interested in photostory magazines such as Grand Hotel than in international politics. The political articles became rarer, and the magazine was increasingly filled with beauty tips, recipes, sewing models and stories about Hollywood movie stars. As in the case of the afž press, these changes in the udi press – and its focus on “lighter” subjects – did not automatically amount to a patriarchal backlash, but also served to express a desire for a better, “civilized” life, a wish to “emancipate oneself from peasant culture” (Bellassai, 2000: 259). When the Italian political climate started to relax, in the mid-1950s, the udi found the necessary space to reopen the discussion about the priorities of the organization and on its relationship with the communist and socialist parties. Its magazine Noi Donne started its famous fieldwork inquiries into women’s lives, denouncing poverty, domestic violence, sexist attitudes in the workplace, and launching a campaign for family planning. In the next chapter I will discuss the period of de-Stalinization, which marked an increasing focus on gender-based concerns at the national and international levels. Conclusion In this chapter I have analysed the activities of the Yugoslav afž and the Italian udi between 1948 and 1953. Due to the immense amount of material, for the sake of comparison I have selected some of the most relevant campaigns conducted by the afž and the udi, showing how these organizations attempted to respond to women’s everyday needs in a situation of postwar poverty, illiteracy and underdevelopment, no51 “L’ emancipazione non conduceva all’antagonismo, anzi: le donne emancipate hanno più cose da dare ai loro uomini, sono migliori educatrici dei figli, collaboratrici intelligenti e solide” (Piccone Stella 1981: 25). 220 �tably in the countryside and in the less developed areas of Yugoslavia and Italy. In the case of the afž, I have focused on the campaign against the full Islamic veil, as well as on the campaign for health education and sanitation in Kosovo. In the case of the udi, my analysis addresses the campaigns for the rights of agricultural workers and factory workers, as well as the organization’s of the peasants’ land movement in Southern Italy. The udi’s support for the women who had been victims of war rapes in the region of Cassino is also described in detail. In all of these cases, I have highlighted the “long and tiring work” and the many difficulties faced by afž and udi activists, who represented an educated, politicized avant-garde trying to grapple with women’s inferior position in all aspects of cultural, economic and social life. While the documents analyzed here have been produced by high-ranking and mid-ranking militants, some “voices from below” made their way into the reports, showing the constant social interaction between the leadership and the “feminine masses”. These interactions sometimes included the making of a full-veiled, Kosovo girl into a respected teacher and afž militant, or brought for the first time an anonymous peasant woman into a political meeting in the South of Italy. Since afž and udi militants were striving to “adhere to reality”, and studied women’s lives in depth in order to develop social interventions, the documents produced by these organizations are invaluable sources about gender relationships and women’s lives in the postwar and Cold War period. As demonstrated in this chapter on the basis of a wide array of archive material, udi and afž activists were not blind to violence against women or to the sexual division of labour that existed at all levels of society. Women’s inferior position was taken, in accordance with Marxist theory, as a sign of general backwardness – patriarchal behaviors in fact are often described with words such as “feudalism” or “superstition” – which could only be overcome through economic progress, political organizing and education, of both men and women. udi and afž militants had been trained to think of social change – including change in family relationships – in collective terms, as a result of general economic and political change. During their work in the field, however, the antifascist militants were confronted with everyday sexism and discrimination, and realized that changes in family customs and interpersonal relations proceeded at a slower pace than other changes. While being in charge of “work among women” on behalf of the party, they often had to face sexism and double standards by their male comrades at the local level. Loyal to their party engagement, but having developed a solidarity with “the feminine masses”, antifascist leaders attempted to overcome the marginalization of women’s problems within their respective parties. They proposed “mainstreaming” women’s issues at all levels of the party, persuaded that women’s inferior status could be overcome if the “women’s question” was embraced by the party as a social, universal question, which involved men and women alike. This wasn’t an easy task. Both the Yugoslav and the Italian communist parties, in fact, were eager to comply with existing traditional moral standards in order to gain popular legitimacy. While Marxist theory had challenged for the first time the idea that family relationships were immutable, its 1940s Stalinist version was ill equipped to develop a critique of men’s 221 �“natural” primacy within the family. “Natural” sexual and family roles were mostly seen as a given in the Italian and Yugoslav peasant societies of the late 1940s and early 1950s, permeated as they were with religious traditions, sexism and pro-natalism. I argue in this chapter that while operating in extremely difficult conditions, the afž and the udi became important agents of progress, modernization and social change with regard to gender relations and women’s lives in Italy and Yugoslavia in the early Cold War period. In this chapter I take a critically stance towards prevailing feminist historiography, which has largely interpreted the Cold War period as one of conservatism and moderation, and which has read women’s activism in this period as moderate or conservative, due to the lack of autonomy of women’s organizations from communist and socialist parties. As shown in these pages, the lack of autonomy of women’s organizations did not prevent their members from exerting political agency at a collective and individual level, and from improving women’s life conditions on a great scale. I have contended that the problem of separate women’s organization vs. universal party work cannot be limited to an issue of women’s autonomy vs. state (or party) control, as it is often interpreted retrospectively, judging these organizations against the backdrop of second wave feminist paradigms. These organizations, instead, have to be understood in their relation to party politics and to state power. As demonstrated in this chapter, Cold War women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia cannot be seen as simple “chains of transmission”, or as monolithic entities. Political divisions and differences existed between communist parties and women’s organizations, between male and female militants, but also within parties and within women’s organizations. Women took different sides and expressed their various political subjectivities, often advocating women’s rights from within and through party structures, and just as often advocating these same rights through the work of the afž and the udi. For afž and udi leaders in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a struggle for women’s rights and women’s emancipation was simply inconceivable outside the framework of existing political parties and state institutions. This faith in state-based modernization and in political institutions is, in my view, what differentiated the antifascist generation from the feminist movements that emerged in Yugoslavia and Italy after 1968. By the 1970s, in fact, the faith in postwar states and in their modernizing effects had been put into question from different sides.52 While in this chapter I explored the activities of the udi and the afž at the local level, in the next chapter I will move once again towards an exploration of Italo-Yugoslav transnational connections. I shall examine women’s transnational activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia, looking at the impact of the de-Stalinization process of The faith in state-driven modernization was challenged, for instance, by environmentalist movements, after a series of environmental disasters caused by state modernization, such as the disaster of Vajont in Italy. The institution of labour and its supposed emancipatory effects were also put into question by various student, artistic and political movements across Europe. A case in point is the philosophy of Italian operaismo, or workerism, which pointed at the exploitative character and at the conflictual elements present in labour relations. In Yugoslavia, as mentioned in Chapter 1, a critique of the authoritarian state was formulated mainly by the 1968 student movement and in the philosophical arena, as well as in the visual arts, and in cinema. 52 222 �1955-1956 on the Union of Italian Women and the Union of Women’s Societies (sdž) of Yugoslavia. I will interrogate once again the meaning of the concept of autonomy within the framework of the transnational dialogues established between the udi and the sdž in 1956-1957. This concept, in fact, gained in importance within the udi from the mid-1950s, and was the object of a transnational discussion between Italian and Yugoslav leaders in 1956-1957, within the framework of a critique of the methods of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). 223 �Chapter 7 After 1956: national ways to women’s emancipation I am not satisfied with a way of acting that seems to say: “Now that Stalin is dead […] everything will be all right." (Laura Weiss, 1956) In 1956, after two decades in which the “personality cult” of Stalin had widely been promoted in the international communist movement, Khrushchev’s denounced the crimes committed under Stalinism in his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. During the Congress, Khrushchev also stated that the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the socialist bloc had been a Stalinist plot. The first signs of Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation had been expressed the year before, in June 1955, when Khrushchev paid a visit to Tito in Belgrade. As a consequence of reconciliation between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the bilateral relations between the Italian Communist Party and the League of communists of Yugoslavia were re-established, and the former “Titoist” traitors that had been expelled in 1948 were readmitted once more into the socialist camp. As a result of these events, from the mid-1950s the cooperation between antifascist women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia was reestablished, after almost eight years of conflict. In the Italo-Yugoslav border area, however, where the fight between pro-Cominform and pro-Tito partisans had divided the local leftist forces – including women’s organizations – the new “Truth” of Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation was ill-accepted. These shifts in the official ‘Truth’ promoted by the Soviet Union and by the Italian Communist Party were strongly resented by Triestine udais leader Laura Weiss. Laura Weiss could not come to terms with the de-Stalinization process, nor with the new Soviet line about Yugoslavia. In 1956 she wrote to Vittorio Vidali that perhaps it was time for her to leave the communist party, since “[i]t is for me inconceivable that in the ussr there was a situation of such terror that leaders can be exempted from responsibility of having accepted leadership methods that contrasted with our principles for 20 years [from 1936 till 1956], and that no one raised their voice (…). I am not satisfied with a way of acting that seems to say: now that Stalin is dead (…) everything will be all right." Weiss said that the idea of a ‘politically useful’ truth – which included the recent rehabilitation of Tito, after years of violent rivalries between proCominform and pro-Tito militants in Trieste – had become ‘unbearable’ for her, and that therefore she might leave the communist party.1 1 224 In the end Weiss remained in the party, but was somehow marginalised over the years, �The year 1956 was a watershed for many communist party members in Italy. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” caused bewilderment and confusion among rank-andfile militants, since “the pci base had been led to believe by their own leaders that the Soviet camp was a land of milk and honey for the working class (Urban 1986: 238). The fact that pci leader Togliatti denied to have known anything about Stalin’s crimes, moreover, was shocking to many high ranking party members (Rossanda 2005). Many militants, particularly intellectuals, left the party at the end of 1956, when the pci failed to condemn the Soviet intervention in the Hungarian uprising. During the Soviet intervention, Giuseppe di Vittorio, the popular leader of the left-wing trade union, the cgil, had expressed his solidarity with the Hungarian workers, and had claimed that the Soviet intervention violated the principle of autonomy of socialist states. Di Vittorio was forced to rectify his position, while other intellectuals such as Italo Calvino, Delio Cantinori, Franco Fortini and others chose to leave the party, which lost around 400.000 members between 1955 and 1957 (Ginsborg 2003: 207). The “epistemological rupture” of “the unforgettable” year 1956 caused considerable soul-searching and disquiet2, but it also had lasting political consequences for the Italian left. Among Italian militants, the dogmatic belief in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been put into question. New possibilities for debate opened up within the Italian Communist Party, as evidenced by a recent memoir of workerist philosopher Mario Tronti.3 The stormy debates that raged in the communist and socialist parties provoked a shift also within the udi. The organization in fact started developing a new policy of organizational autonomy with respect to political parties at the national level, and a critical line towards the Women’s International Democratic Federation at the international level. In their critique of the widf, which mainly consisted of challenging Soviet hegemony within the organization, Italian women found common ground with Yugoslav antifascist female leaders, who had been expelled from the widf in 1949. After the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation in 1956, the widf invited Yugoslav representatives to join the Federation once more. As shown in this chapter, however, the representatives of Yugoslavia maintained a critical position towards the widf. Both Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations, therefore, found themselves in a critical posidue to her critical position towards the national pci leadership based in Rome. See Andri et al. 2007: 117, 147. The original letter is deposited at the Laura Weiss collection, f44, d961, Istituto Livio Saranz, Trieste. 2 Rossana Rossanda – similarly to Weiss – recalls the disillusionment towards the Soviet Union and its leadership, as well as the disappointment towards the pci approval of the Soviet intervention in Hungary. The atmosphere within the party was so stressful that Rossanda’s hair turned white at that time, at the age of 32 (see Rossanda 2005: 175-176). 3 Tronti (2012: 2) recalls: “One key date emerges as a strategic locus for us all: 1956. Several things made that year ‘unforgettable’, but I would stress the transition – in effect, an epistemological rupture – from a party truth to a class truth. The time span from the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress to the Hungarian events constituted a sequence of leaps in the awareness of a young generation of intellectuals. I sensed, before I consciously thought it, that the twentieth century ended there. We awoke from the dogmatic slumber of historicity.” 225 �tion towards the widf from the mid-1950s onwards. The cooperation between Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations reflected the renewed convergence between the Italian Communist Party and the Yugoslav League of Communists on the topic of “national ways to socialism”. Let me briefly recapitulate the geopolitical context of the mid-1950s, and let me clarify the importance of the doctrine of “national ways to socialism” in Yugoslavia and Italy, before discussing the connections between Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations. After the death of Stalin and with the beginning of the de-Stalinization process, socialist movements and communist parties in Western and Eastern Europe started to question Soviet hegemony, and to explore possible “national ways to socialism”, that is, ways to achieve the socialist economic system in a way adapted to the specific historical conditions and needs of their respective nations. A “national way” to development and sovereignty was also advocated by the leaders of newly independent Asian and African states, who met for the first time at the Bandung conference, in 1955.4 Yugoslavia had a crucial role in these geopolitical exchanges, since it embodied the possibility of achieving a socialist system without the patronage of the Soviet Union, and in opposition to Western imperialism. Jozip Broz Tito, together with the Indian leader Nerhu and the Egyptian president, Nasser, became the founders of the NonAligned Movement, a movement which demanded that the 1945 Charter of United Nations be respected, and which stressed the need for peaceful coexistence of smaller and bigger nations on the basis of national self-determination and equality.5 In this changed context, the Italian and the Yugoslav communist leadership could find once more a common ground on the basis of the doctrine of “national ways to socialism”. After the first sign of Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, contact between the Italian and the Yugoslav communist parties was re-established. In May 1956 pci Secretary Palmiro Togliatti and communist mp and member of party leadership Luigi Longo visited Yugoslavia and met with Tito in Brioni. Togliatti and Longo apologized for past errors and praised the Yugoslav way to socialism, and expressed the wish for a similarly autonomous strategy in the Italian context (Urban 1986: 234; Terzuolo 1985: 181-190). In response to the process of de-Stalinization, Togliatti in fact designed a new strategy for the pci at the international level. He contested the idea of the ussr as the “guiding state” and proposed a greater degree of autonomy for communist parties 4 African-American writer Richard Wright wrote a wonderful report on the Bandung conference, showing the intersection between the Iron Curtain and what he names “The Colour Curtain”: “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!” (Wright 1956: 10). 5 As Chackrabarty (2010: 47) notes in a recent article on the Bandung conference, “It may be timely to remind ourselves of a recent moment in human history when the idea of nation was something people aspired to and the idea of empire wielded absolutely no moral force." 226 �across the world. These notions were summarized in the formula of “polycentrism”.6 The discussions with Tito and the Yugoslav formulation of Non-Alignment surely had some impact on Togliatti’s notion of “polycentrism”. While arguing for a more democratic system of international relations, however, both Tito and Togliatti, for strategic reasons, were extremely ambivalent with regard to to the democratization within the Yugoslav state and the Italian Communist Party.7 The idea of national ways to socialism, moreover, came to a halt at the end of 1956, with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution (whose leader, Imre Nagy, had been inspired by the Yugoslav experience) and with the Anglo-French armed intervention that followed the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez channel. While condemning the Western intervention as imperialist, both Tito and Togliatti accepted the Soviet intervention in Hungary.8 All these historical events and transformations had an impact on the activities of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations in the years 1956-1957. At the same time, udi and sdž leaders took an active role in these new geopolitical settings, notably when it came to their position within the widf. This chapter, therefore, describes how Cold War geopolitical changes shaped women’s organizations, and highlights the significant role played by Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations – and particularly by its leaders – in Cold War politics in the years 1955-1957. In the first part of the chapter, I reconstruct the changes in women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia at the national and international level. I analyze the new formulations of organizational autonomy and women’s emancipation developed by the udi, and their attempt to shift the focus of the widf from peace campaigns to women’s rights. I also address the position of the Union of Women’s Societies of Yugoslavia (sdž) within the widf, making use of a number of reports in which Yugoslav 6 These ideas included “the suggestion that Communist parties were just one among several forces in the global march towards socialism, a notion inherent in the pci’s later support for socialist pluralism. They also included the affirmation of autonomy as the basic organizational norm of the world Communist movement, a norm that could however lead to voluntary ententes among like-minded Communist parties” (Urban 1986: 225). 7 In 1953 and 1954 former revolutionary leader and vice-president Milovan Ðilas started to argue for the need to establish a full democratization in Yugoslav society, putting an end to the political monopoly of the League of Communists. He was accused of revisionism, stripped of his functions and persecuted by the secret police (Ðokić 2006). In Italy, while Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the twentieth Congress was made public by the liberal press, the Italian Communist Party was reticent to spread the news, for fear of alienating the consensus of its militants, for whom Stalin had become a mythical figure. In his first interview about de-Stalinization in the magazine Nuovi Argomenti (May-June 1956), Togliatti openly acknowledged the degeneration of the bureaucratic system in the Soviet Union. He stressed, however, the successes of the “socialist construction” in the history of the ussr, and claimed that he had no doubt about the legality of the 1930s purges and trials. See Togliatti (1962: 85- 117), Ginsborg (2003: 204-5) and Rossanda (2005). 8 About the ambivalent position of the Yugoslav leaders during the Hungarian Revolution, see Granville (1998) and Stykalin (2005). About the reaction of the pci leadership see Ginsborg (2003: 204-7) and Urban (1986). 227 �female leaders position themselves as “critical observers” of the Federation. The connection between Yugoslav and Third World organizations is particularly significant in determining the Yugoslav stance towards the widf. In line with the Yugoslav foreign politics of Non-Alignment inaugurated in 1955, the sdž strengthened its links with women’s organizations in Asia, Africa and the Arab world, and was particularly attentive to the critiques of the widf that came from the Third World. In the second part, I focus especially on the transnational exchanges between the udi and the sdž. I look at the bilateral exchanges between the leaders of the Italian and Yugoslav organizations, paying special attention to the discussions held in the summer and autumn of 1957. The debates which took place during the Helsinki Plenum of the widf in summer 1957 and during the bilateral meeting between the udi and the sdž representatives, held in Ljubljana in September 1957, serve as examples. I analyze the discussions between udi and sdž leaders about the developments in the widf, as well as their exchange of views on how to better address “women’s questions” such as housing, labour rights, contraception and abortion. In the third part of the chapter, after having stressed the transnational cooperation established between Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations in 1956-1957, I come back to the specific situation of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, and to the effect of the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation on the communist party and on women’s organizations in the city of Trieste. In this chapter I will show that despite the official reconciliation between the Italian Communist Party and the Yugoslav League of Communists, the ideological and national divisions created by the Cominform Resolution of 1948 had a long-standing impact on Trieste left-wing organizations well beyond 1956. 1. The impact of 1956 on Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations 1.1. A new climate within the udi: redefining emancipation and autonomy In this section and the next I look at the changes in women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia in the years 1956-1957, and particularly at their changing international position within the framework of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. In this section I analyze the changes within the udi at the national level, changes that influenced their transnational relationship with the sdž and with the widf. As already mentioned in the previous chapters, from the early Cold War period the position of the udi and the afž towards state power differs greatly.9 At the same time, from the mid-1950s udi and sdž leaders expressed a similar refusal of the instrumental role often played by the two organizations in Cold War geopolitics (see Chapter 5), and increasingly focused on women’s “real problems” at the national level.10 While the udi is part of oppositional left-wing forces, in alliance with the communist and socialist parties, the afž gradually transforms into a “state feminist” organization, and is finally dissolved in 1953, when the Union of Women’s Societies (sdz) replaces it, with the purpose of “mainstreaming” women’s issues within the structures of the socialist state. 10 The political and social issues that two organizations have to deal with are similar: women’s 9 228 �After the 1953 elections, the political climate within Italy became less hostile to left-wing parties and mass organizations. When the urgency of broader political battles became less pressing, the leaders of the udi were able to set out on a theoretical and political elaboration that had “women’s emancipation” as its main focus. The “new course” for the udi started already in preparation for the 1953 Congress. In a preparatory document, communist leader Nilde Iotti directed a polemic against those critics who saw “women’s emancipation” as “a sort of feminism, suitable only to certain groups of women who have reached an independent position. We mean by emancipation the possibility for Italian women to redeem themselves from the conditions of debasement in which they live, from the worker and the day labourer, to the peasant, the intellectual, the housewife” (quoted in Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 342; emphasis added). In line with Togliatti’s strategy of “progressive democracy”, his partner, Nilde Iotti identified women’s emancipation as a legitimate progressive goal for the democratization of Italian society, thus challenging the idea that women’s emancipation could only be reached in the future socialist society (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 89). In 1955, the Second National Conference of Communist Women was organized. Ten years had elapsed since the first conference on the same theme, in itself proof of the secondary role of this issue within the party (Rodano 2010: 92). During the conference, many communist women did not mention the phrase “women’s emancipation” (emancipazione femminile) as a specific goal, but commended women’s class-based activism for broader social reforms. Against this trend, pci reformist leader Giorgio Amendola argued that communist militants had to recognize “the autonomous place” of women’s struggle for emancipation “within the framework of the struggle for renewal and for socialism." While assuming that there was a link between women’s emancipation and “general democratic struggles”, Amendola argued that it was necessary to recognize “the particular character of women’s struggle, its autonomous place and thus its specific organizational forms” (Rodano 2010: 94). As udi leader Marisa Rodano reminded the conference, women’s emancipation was mainly seen in those years as subordinate to class struggle, and the idea of emancipazione femminile sounded to many comrades like a “bad word” (2010: 89-90; see also Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 68). Many communist militants still considered the udi a mere electoral instrument. At the same time, some militants within the udi and the pci promoted a different line, arguing for a redefinition of women’s emancipation as an autonomous, socialist goal. In this, they were partially supported by reformist male leaders such as Amendola, and by Togliatti himself.11 equal access to citizenship, education, labour, and welfare rights. Issues of planned parenthood, sexual education of the youth, contraception and abortion also start to be debated in both countries. See later in the chapter. 11 According to Rodano, during the 1955 conference Togliatti tried to mediate between different positions, arguing that in Italy the struggle for women’s emancipation was “essentially a struggle for rights, that is for the juridical equality with men, as well as for a [change in] custom, meaning the effective realisation of this equality; on the other hand it is a struggle against misery, for the elevation of the standards of living of the working masses in the city and in the 229 �The fact that the communist party in its Eight Congress in 1957 would start to use the term questione femminile (women’s question) – a term that was highly criticized by second wave feminists – was at the time celebrated as a great achievement. The term questione femminile, in fact, was established in analogy to Gramsci’s concept of questione meridionale (Southern question). The usage of this term was a way to acknowledge that the issue of women’s emancipation was “a national problem, transversal to social classes”, having its own independent dynamic not subordinated to class politics (Rodano 2010: 106). As discussed in the previous chapter, the significance of the word autonomy within the udi was radically different from second wave feminist definitions. The formulation of concepts such as autonomy and emancipation was connected to the ongoing internal debate within the Italian Communist Party about the definition of the “women’s question”. The debate was on whether it was a “national” question with its own historical specificities or an issue subordinated to class struggle and economic development. The definition of autonomy was inseparable from the idea of the unity of the organization, which allowed for the presence of both communist and socialist women within the udi. The autonomy proposed at the time, therefore, was organizational, rather than political.12 In 1956 Marisa Rodano had been nominated as the new udi President, replacing Maria Maddalena Rossi before the fifth Congress of the udi, held in April 1956. This change symbolized the new line of the udi, since Maria Maddalena Rossi was closer to pci hard-liners, while Marisa Rodano followed a more reformist strategy. A thorough self-critique of the udi stance is apparent in the first preparatory document for the Directive Committee drafted by the newly elected President in June 1956 (see document 39 in Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 395-400). In this document, one of the main weaknesses of the udi was found in the fact that many of its leaders were not convinced that the struggle for women’s emancipation was the ultimate goal, but instead saw this goal as an instrument to propagate left-wing political stances (1998: countryside.” Thus, he argued that the struggle for women’s emancipation was “an essential part of the general struggle for the democratic renewal of society” (Rodano 2010: 95). 12 During a session of the pci Central Committee held in on 12-14 February 1962 and dedicated to the women’s movement within the party (“Sviluppare l’elaborazione politica e l’iniziativa delle donne comuniste”), Nilde Iotti proposed “a women’s autonomous movement within the party”, and added: “When we speak of autonomy we speak of operative and organizational autonomy, in the sense of autonomy of initiative, and not of political autonomy. The line of the Party is valid for everyone; within this line the feminine movement develops its autonomous initiatives, and has thus more liberty.” The model of organizational autonomy, taken from the ChristianDemocratic party, is motivated with the need to adapt to women’s needs, which are dictated by their “limited freedom” due to family life. As we can see, the meaning of the word autonomy as used within the udi and among communist women in the 1950s and 1960s radically differs from the formulations used in the 1970s by new social movements. 230 �396).13 The hierarchical, pedagogic stance of the organization, and the instrumental attitude of many leaders towards the “feminine masses” were also criticized.14 The 1956 document also argued for the need for the udi to become more autonomous from the communist and socialist party. In this, it voiced the growing dissatisfaction of udi leaders, who in the early Cold War years had been constantly mobilized for political campaigns of assistance and propaganda decided by policy-makers outside of the organization.15 The document argued that regarding women’s rights it was necessary to shift “from propaganda to struggle”, and that the only way to do this was to establish the udi’s “autonomy from the subordination to any political force”, supporting women’s interests as an ultimate goal and not as an instrumental means to a different end. This new autonomous line meant that the udi would not “take side, in principle, for or against any political force nor administrative formation nor government, provided that they do not reject the ideals of the Resistance and of antifascism. The udi is not programmatically on the opposition, but has to determine its stance of support or critique in each case, on the basis of concrete facts, demand by demand.”16 This declaration of autonomy from the socialist and communist parties represented, in Rodano’s view, “a cultural revolution”. This decision, however, remained contested within the left. For the first time, before the general 1958 elections, the organization did not give any clear instruction on how to vote, and was harshly criticized for this within the pci and the psi. At the same time, this independent position allowed udi leaders to maintain the unity of communist, socialist and independent militants within the organization (Rodano 2010: 110-111; Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 89-94). In 1956, in fact, the traditional alliance between the Communist (pci) and the Socialist Party (psi) was coming to an end, but communist and socialist women were still working together in the udi. 13 The document criticized the fact that the organization had focused only on class-based demands, leaving aside other important issues such as prostitution, contraception, or the reform of the family code. 14 The document argued that udi leaders did not sufficiently act as “women’s representatives”, and that “often many udi leaders behave towards women as if they only are in possess of the truth (depositarie di sicure verità), while women themselves are seen as a mass of people who has to be “approached”, “touched”, “mobilised” and so on” (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998, 397). Local militants, moreover, were not to be anymore “executors” of a political line decided from above, but instead had to become real women’s leaders (1998: 400). Despite its importance, however, this document was circulating among national and provincial leaders. As Rodano herself admits, the pedagogic, modernist approach of the organization towards the “feminine masses”, was only partially challenged in practice (Rodano 2010: 110-111). 15 For some ironic remarks about the never-ending task of collecting signatures for international peace campaigns, see Rodano (2008b: 142); about the dissatisfaction of udi leaders based in Rome, see Rodano (2010: 87). 16 Emphasis added. L’Udi “non si schiera, in linea di principio, a favore o contro alcuna forza politica né a favore o contro alcuna formazione amministrativa o di governo purchè esse non rinneghino gli ideali della resistenza e dell’antifascismo. L’Udi non è programmaticamente all’opposizione, ma deve determinare la sua posizione di appoggio o di polemica caso per caso, per fatti concreti, richiesta per richiesta” (1998: 398). 231 �The new stance of the udi became even more significant after the Twentieth Congress of the pcus and the Soviet intervention in Hungary, when the socialist party (psi) decided to distance itself from the communist party (pci) and from its support for Moscow, and started to seek an alliance with the Christian-Democrats. The presence of socialist women within the udi, then, was possible only if udi leaders managed to reach a compromise and to assume a critical position towards Moscow. The geopolitical changes of 1956, moreover, accelerated the internal political changes within the organisation (Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 94), leading to a new position within the Women’s International Democratic Federation (see later in this chapter). The udi’s “new course”, therefore, was the result of multiple political factors and strategic decisions. On the one hand, it reflected the new equilibrium reached within the pci after the beginning of de-Stalinization and the changes of 1956, characterized by Togliatti’s “national way to socialism”, and by the marginalization of pro-Moscow hardliners. It was also a result of the shifting relations between the pci and the psi. The new line of autonomy and unity allowed communist, socialist and independent women to work together on women’s rights irrespective of their party affiliation. At the same time, udi leaders had their own agency in determining the changes within the organization. Tired of being mobilized on behalf of their respective parties, they strived to carve out their own political space, defining women’s emancipation as the ultimate, legitimate goal of women’s organizations, not only nationally, but also internationally. Later in this chapter I describe how the udi strived to transform the goals of the widf, in the process getting closer to the position of the Yugoslav woman’s organization, the sdž. 1.2. Critical observers: Yugoslav sdž leaders and the widf In the previous chapter I analyzed how the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž) was dissolved in 1953, and replaced with the Union of Women’s Societies (sdž), in line with the new doctrine of self-management and of the “withering away of the state” (Johnson 1972: 143-156). The sdž was intended to federate different “women’s societies” dealing with specific societal problems, fostering women’s direct participation within the broader framework of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People, the organization that represented mass participation in socialist Yugoslavia. After the death of Stalin and with the consolidation of the Yugoslav geopolitical position in the mid-1950s, the Yugoslav coercive state machinery created in the postwar period was gradually reformed. This led to an increase in individual liberties and to a limitation of the arbitrary power of the secret police. The Yugoslav Communist Party changed its name into the League of Communists (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije, skj) in 1952, and stressed the “educational role” of the skj among the masses, in contrast to the Stalinist control of the previous years. Workers’ councils were established and some of the privileges of the communist elite were reduced. Đilas’ 1954 proposals to abandon the Leninist conception of the party, and the one-party system, however, were fiercely rejected (Johnson 1972: 144; 216-217; see previous sections). 232 �Since the ideological-political role of the League of Communists after 1953 was ambivalent and not clearly defined (Johnson 1972: 217), the same happened for the Union of Women’s Societies (sdž). The main idea behind the dissolution of the afž, namely that women had to be encouraged to take part in the socialist institutions in order to strengthen their rights, proved more difficult to implement than expected. In many sdž reports from 1954-1955, there is a constant complaint of the feminine masses having become ‘passive’ after the dissolution of the afž, and of a general ’regression‘ on the women’s question.17 While in the most advanced republics and in the cities some women tended to join specific “societies” for the resolution of concrete issues (childcare and maternity, school canteens, welfare provisions), in the less developed republics and in the villages the situation remained very difficult. The situation was also challenging for female workers in the factories, where overexploitation was rampant and childcare nonexistent. The documents written by sdž leaders from the mid-1950s onwards remarked on the constant lack of interest in women’s problems within the trade unions and within the Socialist Alliance. Against the idea of separate women’s organizations, sdž leaders tried to promote women’s participation within overall political institutions, and to “mainstream” women’s concerns within the broader social institutions of the Socialist Alliance, notably at the local level.18 At the international level, since 1949 the leaders of sdž had attempted to overcome the isolation caused by its expulsion from the widf. In the early 1950s, sdž leaders were mainly in contact with Scandinavian women’s organizations on specific issues such as domestic education and childcare, and had established links with the women’s sections of socialist parties in Western Europe. Moreover, in line with the Yugoslav politics of Non-Alignment, sdž leaders were starting to establish contact with the female representatives of decolonization movements, particularly in Asia.19 With the beginning of de-Stalinization, and the reconciliation between Yugoslavia 17 See for instance the report (“zapisnik”) from 6.3.1954, included in the 354 fond (sdžj), box 1 (Zapisnici i stenografske sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretariata sdžj i sa savetovanja sdžj 1954-1961), Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije. 18 See also the report (“zapisnik”) from 6.10.1954, Upravnog Odbora sdžj, included in the 354 fond (sdžj), box 1 (Zapisnici I stenografske sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretariata sdžj I sa savetovanja sdžj 1954-1961), Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije; Similarly to Togliatti, Yugoslav leaders such as Tito and Kardelj define women’s emancipation as subordinate to the achievement of socialism, and see “backwardness” and “economic underdevelopment” as the main obstacles to women’s full equality. See the quotation from the 1957 ssrnj Brioni Plenum included in “Postavka iv Kongress sdž”, 1959, 354 fond (sdžj), box 7-8 (“O Aktivnosti Žena u Drustvu I Porodici”), Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije. 19 See for instance the report of 2.09.1955 on international relations, Uglavni Odbor sdž, fond 354: 1: Zapisnici i stenografske sa sastanaka upravnog odbora i sekretariata szdj i sa savetovanja szdj 1954-1961, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije. In this report sdž leaders refer to their contacts with the feminine sections of socialist parties in Belgium, Greece and West Germany; they also refer to some contacts in Sweden and Denmark, and to some connections with India, Indonesia and Burma, and advance the possibility of using their contacts in Asia to discuss the issue of decolonization within the Socialist International. 233 �and the Soviet Union in 1955, the Yugoslav female leaders were able to re-establish connections with the widf, and with its affiliated organizations in Eastern and Western Europe. The first contact between Yugoslav and Italian militants is re-established through a greeting card sent by the udi to the sdž for the New Year of 1956, followed soon afterwards by an invitation to attend the next Congress of the udi. In April 1956 two Yugoslav delegates (Marija Koš and Vlatka Babić) attended the Fifth Congress of the Union of Italian Women.20 In the same month, sdž Yugoslav delegates were invited to attend the widf Congress in Beijing. In Beijing the Yugoslav representatives were invited to join the widf once more: In a warm and enthusiastic atmosphere, Mme. Eugenie Cotton’s proposal, to annul the decision taken in 1949 to expel the Yugoslav members from the Council, which they recognised as unjust, was unanimously approved. Several delegates intervened in commission meetings as well as in the plenary session, expressing their deep desire that the bonds of friendship be strengthened and fruitful co-operation again built up between the Yugoslav Women and the Federation. The Italian delegation present in Beijing supported this proposal, noting that the udi already had “friendly relations” with the Yugoslav women and aimed at further collaboration in the future. The Yugoslav representatives, however, declined the offer to re-enter the widf. Nonetheless, they agreed to participate in further congresses as observers, and to cooperate on specific issues of common interest. In line with Tito’s politics of Non-Alignment, Yugoslav women were keen to support the position of autonomous “national ways to socialism” within international organizations such as the widf. In their response to the widf, they stated in fact: The Federation of Yugoslav Women’s Organisations considers that the problem of women’s equality is still directly tied up with the struggle for social progress and that it can be solved in different ways according to the specific conditions of each country. For this reason progressive women’s organizations in every country should seek the best ways and means of settling those questions and deciding on methods of action and international co-operation (…) On the basis of such principles the Federation of 20 A detailed report by Marija Koš about the fifth udi Congress is contained in ars, Ljubljana, kdažs – zzds, 1, 1956-1957, box n.7, folder 146. The Yugoslavs noted that during the congress there was a certain distance between the udi leadership and the foreign guests, except from the Soviet representatives and Madame Eugénie Cotton. Most of the Italian delegates were sympathetic to the Yugoslav guests but did not dare to go into political discussions, a part from Dina Rinaldi, who says that “a big mistake” has been committed towards Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs also observed that there was a certain “distance” between the udi leadership and the intermediate delegates. Many of the leaders, in fact, left at the end of the Congress with their cars and did not mingle with the delegates from the base. The Yugoslav guests, thus, noted that in the leadership “there are quite some arm-chair communists” (“Čini se da u rukovodstvo ima dosta ‘salonskih komunistkinja’. Daleko bolji utisak ostavile su delegatkinje nego rukovodstvo udi-a”). 234 �Yugoslav Women’s Organisations co-operates with many national and international organizations dealing with problems of children, women and family.21 In 1956 Yugoslav leaders refused to rejoin the widf, since they regarded it as aligned with the Soviet bloc (blokovska organizacija). Nonetheless, they established regular bilateral relations with the women’s organizations that were part of the widf, and notably with the udi, in an attempt to foster more democratic methods within the Federation. They also established direct links with the women’s organizations of Asia and Africa, which were gaining in importance within the widf and which were increasingly criticizing the Federation for its moderation on decolonization struggles. The Yugoslav female leaders, therefore, through women’s internationalism, played a very active role in the politics of national ways to socialism and Non-Alignment, carving a space out for debate between the Western and the Soviet bloc, in dialogue with Third World decolonization movements. In the next sections, I will analyze how sdž and udi leaders established bilateral and multilateral transnational relations, looking in particular at their critical discussion about the role and methods of the widf. The next sections are based mainly on reports by Yugoslav leaders, which are particularly helpful in detailing the different point of view within the widf. Deeply aware of the ambivalences of Soviet hegemony, the Yugoslav militants in fact took part in widf Plenums and Congresses as critical observers, and determinedly pursued a coherent strategy in their bilateral and multilateral relations. The discussions presented in the next sections are a further contribution to the forgotten history of the widf. As already shown in Chapter 5, different positions existed within the widf, although they were rarely expressed in the final proceedings of its different congresses. Contrary to the prevailing Cold War historiography, which describes the organization as a mere instrument in the hand of the Soviets, the following section demonstrates that power relations and decision-making within the widf were matters of international discussion and contention. 2 . Women’s internationalism and its discontents 2.1. The widf and the geopolitical crises of 1956 in Suez and Hungary In the summer and autumn of 1956, while reinstating the ideal of “national ways to socialism” within the widf, the Yugoslav militants were re-establishing their connections with women’s organizations from the Eastern bloc (Soviet, Romanian, Polish and Czechoslovak) through a number of bilateral visits. In November 1956, Vida Tomšić was in Moscow for a visit to the Council of the Soviet women. At the time, the Hungarian revolution was violently suppressed through Soviet intervention. Once home, Tomšić reported that the effects of the Cominform Resolution could still be felt in her encounter with Soviet women. The discussions with the Soviet representatives, 21 Translated into English in the widf journal Women of the whole world, n. 12, Dec 1956, from “Nouvelles Yougoslaves”, Paris, 5 November 1956. 235 �Nina Popova and Lidia Petrova, remained quite vague, without any political debate. The Yugoslav visitors also noted that while the foreign delegations were shown the marvels of the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the justness of the Soviet intervention in Hungary was omnipresent, “to the point of disinformation”.22 The 1956 geopolitical crises of Suez and Hungary in fact had caused unremitting tensions and heated debates within the women’s organisations affiliated to the widf. According to Marisa Rodano (2010: 112-113), the mediation of Italian functionaries working within the widf, Angiola Minella23 and Carmen Zanti24, had been crucial in reaching a compromise among the different national branches, and in tempering pro-Soviet positions. The widf statement, in fact, was quite moderate in comparison to Soviet official propaganda on the Hungarian events. The December 1956 widf statement “on peace” started by saying that “Serious events have taken place during recent weeks causing much suffering and loss of life, and which have seriously worsened the international situation. Throughout the world women are expressing their grave concern and are voicing their protests." It continued: “Aggression against Egypt, creating a dangerous centre of war in the Mediterranean, [and] the tragic events in Hungary which threaten to make another area of war in the heart of Europe, are attempts to revive the atmosphere of the cold war and to thrust mankind once again into a world conflict.”25 While it did not explicitly condemn the Soviet intervention in Hungary, using a vague formulation – “tragic events” as opposed to the “aggression against Egypt” – the statement did not condone it either. It expressed instead worry at the revival of the “cold war” atmosphere. It continued further by recalling the spirit of the Bandung meeting and the summit of the Big Four in Geneva, both held in 1955: “Women have struggled with great determination and confidence for the principles of negotiation and peaceful co-existence to triumph over policies of force. With great hope they welcomed the Bandung decisions and the ‘Geneva spirit’ – the successes of the peoples’ 22 The report of the Yugoslav visit to the ussr can be found in Zagreb, Hrvastki Državni Arhiv, afž-kdaž – hr hda 1234-5-box 71 (Međunarodne veze 1945-1959). 23 Angiola Minella Molinari (1920-1988) was born in a bourgeois family in Turin. In 1932 her father, director of an insurance company, was killed in a Fascist attack. Angiola graduated in philosophy and literature, and during the war was involved in the Resistance first as nurse and then as fighting partisan. In 1945 she joined the pci, and was part of the Constituent Assembly. She was elected in the Savona municipal council in 1946 and in the Italian parliament in 1948. She worked from 1953 to 1958 at the secretariat of the widf in East Berlin. In the 1960s and 1970s she pursued her political activities as mp and senator in Italy. 24 Carmen Zanti (1923-1979) spent most of her youth in France, where her father Angelo had gone into exile for his antifascist activities. She joined the French communist party in Nice, and in 1940 she returned to Italy. From 1943 she was engaged in the antifascist Resistance. Since the early 1950s she was part of the udi leadership, and from 1953 to 1957 she was secretary of the widf in East Berlin. After the udi break with the widf in 1963 Zanti returned to Italian politics as mp and as senator, and was particularly involved in welfare plans for childhood in the province of Reggio-Emilia. For a biography of Zanti, see Nava and Ruggerini (1987). 25 Women of the whole world n. 12, December 1956. Statement of the widf on peace (Berlin, 30th of November 1956), p.5. 236 �struggle for peace.” The statement thus condemned “(…) the policy of military blocs which have resulted in the presence of foreign troops and the setting up of military bases in many countries” and supported the proposal made by the Swiss government for a meeting of the heads of state of the United States, the ussr, Great Britain, France and India with the aim of relaxing geopolitical tensions.26 This 1956 statement represented a compromise between the different political positions within the widf, in the attempt to ease the tensions that rose in the Federation, notably when the Federation was used as an instrument of pro-Soviet politics. The accent on women’s unity and autonomy, against war and for “peaceful coexistence” – seems indeed to recall the Yugoslav principles of national sovereignty and Non-Alignment, while anticipating the position of udi representatives within the widf in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the next section I will look in detail at the discussions between the Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations about the role of the widf. While the Yugoslav sdž representatives remained critical observers of the widf, the Union of Italian Women tried to introduce its new line on the primacy of women’s emancipation into the Federation. 2.2. Contesting Soviet hegemony: the widf Helsinki Plenum After the Congress of Bejing in April 1956, the first widf event that was attended by both Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations was the Plenum held in Helsinki in June 1957. The Yugoslav representatives at the Helsinki Plenum, moreover, were still feeling the effects of the isolation they had experienced because of the Cominform Resolution (see Chapter 5). In her report, Yugoslav sdž militant, Saša ĐuranovićJanda observed that both Eugenie Cotton and Nina Popova expressed their relief with respect to the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, saying that the Cominform period “has been terrible." The Italian and French communists, however, maintained a distant attitude towards the Yugoslavs, which they did not seem to consider as “part of their rank." Only Carmen Zanti, the newly elected widf Secretary, seemed to be interested in the activities of the Yugoslav women and asked for some material.27 Besides reporting on the Yugoslav position, Đuranovic-Janda describes other tensions that were present within the widf in 1957. She noted that Soviet hegemony was contested, and that Asian and African delegations played an increasingly prominent role in the meeting. The discourses voiced within Federation were, in fact, heterogeneous, and changed according to shifting geopolitical balances. During the plenary discussions, but especially “in the corridors”, one could feel, 26 Ibidem. 27 “Izvestaj o toku Sastanka Saveta mdfž, Helsinki 22-27 Juni 1957” by Saša Đuranović Janda, fond 354 (sdžj), k. 9, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Belgrade, pp.1-6. An extended discussion of all the decisions and issues mentioned at the Helsinki Plenum and in this report is beyond the scope of this section. I will focus here on the main questions that were considered relevant by the Yugoslav observers, namely those who had to do with Soviet hegemony and decolonization movements. 237 �according to the Yugoslav observer, that there were different opinions about the decision-making methods of the widf. Some delegations opposed the “old methods” of administration, that is, the automatic election of the widf leadership without broader discussion, and the leadership’s veto power over the documents it ratified. The discussions in the working commissions on the various documents, moreover, was “extraordinarily lively”, with heated discussions and moments of tension, in what ĐuranovićJanda calls “the battle for the new spirit” against the old spirit. The discussions about the different passages of the Statute lasted for hours, and some widf leaders tried to enforce their position (here the Yugoslav observer explicitly mentions Maria Maddalena Rossi as “the Italian who follows the Soviet line”).28 The Arab countries were particularly insistent on the formulations dealing with the struggle against colonialism. The Arab women in fact bemoaned the reticence of the widf to take a position on the Algerian war and in the Middle East, since this went against the positions of the French delegation, while it had in the past strongly protested against in the wars of Korea and Vietnam.29 A transnational controversy, furthermore, stemmed from the screening of a documentary commissioned by the Federation. La Rose du Vent, by Joris Ivens and other directors (1957), was intended to offer typical scenes of women’s lives in five different countries (Brazil, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, and China). Yet the propagandistic intent of the film was immediately apparent: while in the Soviet Union and in China the future of society, including that of young women, appeared promising and favorable, in Italy, France and Brasil the female protagonists were oppressed by poverty, labor exploitation, evictions from their homes and police harassment.30 The Brazilian Izvestaj o toku Sastanka Saveta mdfž, p. 2. “Međutim, rad u komisijama bio je neobično živ. Dolazilo je do napetih situacija, podižanja tona, očiglednih neslaganja, borbe za novi duh odnosno zadržavanje starog.” 29 Izvestaj o toku Sastanka Saveta mdfž, p. 3: “Arabljanke su upozoravale da se mdfž jako angažovala u vezi sa Korejom i Vijetnamom, a da se sad ne istupa precizno i masovno u vezi sa Alžirom i situacijom na bliskom istoku.” 30 For a detailed description of the different episodes composing the film (in German), see http://www.defa.de/cms/DesktopDefault.aspx?Tabid=412&Filmid=Q6uj9A00409F&qpn=0. I watched the film, in order to understand the critiques formulated in the Yugoslav reports. The film provides a very interesting example of the values and imaginaries constructed by the Women’s International Democratic Federation. The rhetoric effects of the film are achieved through the juxtaposition of settings and plots. In the episodes taking place in the Soviet Union and in China, the landscape is beautiful, the characters do not seem to have any material problem, and the local communities are exerting their decisional powers. The only struggle of the female characters is to fight for their rights in the public sphere, something that men are reluctant to accept. In both episodes, the emancipated female heroine finally gives a public speech in front of the community. The episodes end with crowd scenes, showing happy Soviet workers and happy Chinese peasants in charge of their destiny. In the Brazilian episode, instead, the landscape is desolate and dusty, and a woman gives birth in the fields, while the peasant protagonists are trying to reach the city of San Paolo to find work. In the French episode, set in a gloomy periphery of Paris, a left-wing schoolteacher defends her poor pupils and their family from evictions, and is harassed by public authorities. The Italian episode, directed by Gillo 28 238 �episode especially was criticized by the Brazilian delegation. They argued that the film could not be used in their country since it was not realistic: “maybe something like this happens in the deep Amazonian forests."31 Đuranović-Janda reported that many delegations criticized the film for not portraying about women’s lives in the different countries realistically, particularly in the Soviet Union: “in the corridors, and publicly, people say that the film is bad and for some countries completely useless – it is not typical – but stereotypical, exaggerated, artificial – nothing works anywhere, but in the ussr everything is wonderful, there are no problems, except misunderstandings in love."32 The pro-Soviet bias of the meeting was also evident in the organization of the delegates’ free time in Helsinki. Some international delegates complained that no cultural visit of the city was organized, since allegedly “in capitalism there is nothing to be seen."33 The name, statute and priorities of the Federation were also discussed during the Plenum.34 Many delegations – and notably the Italian one – expressed their reserve about the constant mobilization for peace and disarmament, and asked instead to work on longstanding discrimination against women in daily life and particularly in the labor market. The statement of udi President Rosetta Longo – translated and quoted with great interest by the Yugoslavs – started by recalling the new line established by the Fifth udi Congress: “The struggle for women’s emancipation is the raison d’être of our organization." What is needed, Longo argued, was an “effectively autonomous and unitary” organization.35 Autonomy meant the possibility to realize various initiatives to defend women’s interests, independently from other organizations or political forces. Unitary meant that the organization could affiliate groups Pontecorvo, was also set in a working class periphery, where female workers occupy a textile factory to protest against a wave of lay-offs. Interestingly, the Italian delegation imported the film “illegally” in their suitcases, after a meeting in Switzerland with widf secretary Carmen Zanti, before obtaining the necessary authorizations from the Italian state. The Italian episode was screened once again in 2002 during a demonstration for labor rights (Rodano 2010: 117; Rodano 2008b: 200-201). 31 Izvestaj o toku Sastanka Saveta mdfž, p. 4. 32 “Ovo međutim nije tačno – bio jeprikazan u Helsinku – kuloarski a i javno smatra da se lošim i sa neke zemlje sasvim neupotreblijv – nije tipisno – sabloniziran, crno-belo, inskostruisan – nigde ništa ne valja, a u sssr sve je prekrasno – nema problema – sem nesporazum u ljubavi." Saša Đuranović-Janda, “Izvestaj br.2 o publikacijama i drugim sredstvima informacija mdfž." Fond 354 (sdžj), k. 9, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Belgrade. 33 Izvestaj o toku Sastanka Saveta mdfž, p. 5. 34 One proposal was to eliminate the adjective “democratic” (which was too connotated in a communist sense), and to change the adjective “international” into “world” (Women’s world federation). Some delegations, however, argued that a name change was not sufficient to change the connotation of the organization and its functioning. See next section. 35 I am quoting here from another report by Saša Đuranović-Janda, with extensive translations of Rosetta Longo’s speech. See fond 354 (sdžj), k. 9, Međunarodne Veze sdž, Italije, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Belgrade. The whole Serbo-Croatian translation of the statement by Rosetta Longo at the Helsinki Council can be found in the Slovene National Study Library (nsk) in Trieste, 1st box afž-zdz-dat, folder “Jugoslovanske Zenske Organizacije." 239 �and individuals who had the same goal on women’s emancipation, without having the same political background or opinion, in order to represent the largest number of women in the country.36 As for the role and tasks of the widf, Rosetta Longo recalled the udi statement on the events in Suez and Hungary, which expressed solidarity with the victims of all wars and stressed the need for peaceful negotiation. She argued that the situation in the world was changing, with the decolonization of the Third World, new processes of industrialization in the West, and the processes of democratization and decentralization in the socialist countries. After the crisis of 1956, the world was going, according to Longo, towards a phase of “peaceful coexistence”. The widf, therefore, had to change in accordance with the new political situation, developing its own independent stance and its own specific “physiognomy”. While arguing that the struggle for peace had to continue in the interest of women, Rosetta Longo noted that there were specific commissions, such as the International Committee of Mothers, working on peace and atomic disarmament. The specific character of the organization, according to Longo, could be reached only if the widf had women’s emancipation as its main goal: The basic content of such an independent political line must contain, in our opinion, the goal to raise the living conditions of women in the political, economic and social field. In each country the problem of women’s emancipation exists. Of course problems are not the same everywhere. In some countries the problem is to gain the right to political participation, in others the advancement of women at work and in the family, while other countries are still developing an awareness about the need for women to unite, in order to eliminate certain customs and backwardness, get an education, create social institutions, etc. In each country, the question of women’s progress and of their full equality, not only on paper but in reality, remains.37 In keeping with the idea of “national ways to socialism”, Longo was in favour of strenghtening the executive role of the different national branches within the widf. As related by Marisa Rodano, a meeting was held in Rome on the 9th of July, soon after the Helsinki Plenum; widf secretary general Carmen Zanti, widf officer Angiola Minella, the delegate of the women’s commission of pci Nella Marcellino, and the communist members of the udi secretariat, that is Marisa Rodano, Nilde 36 Rosetta Longo, “Intervencija”, 1st box afž-zdz-dat, folder “Jugoslovanske Zenske Organizacije”, nsk Trieste. 37 I am translating here the Serbo-Croatian translation of the speech. “Osnovni sadržaj jedne takve političke i nezavisne linije mora da sadrži, po našem mišljenju, podižanje uslova života žena na političkom, ekonomskom i socijalnom polju. U svakoj zemlji postoji problem emancipacije žena. Naravno on se ne postavlja svugde na isti način. U nekim zemljama problem se postavlja da se dobije pravo glasa u učešče u političkom životu, u drugima za poboljšanje položaj žene na radu i u familiji, u drugima još se razvija medju ženama svest o potrebi ujedinjenja, da odstrane izvesnu zaostalost u obicajima i odgoju, da stvore socijalne ustanove, itd. U svakoj zemlji se postavlja pitanje progresa žena i njihove pune jednakosti ne samo na papiru nego u stvarnosti.” Rosetta Longo, “Intervencija”, p. 5. 240 �Iotti and Vittorina dal Monte, were present to discuss the position of the udi towards the widf. During the meeting Carmen Zanti expressed a “severe judgment” on the Helsinki Plenum, and on the fact that the Soviet delegation saw the widf as an instrument of their foreign politics. The udi proposal at the Plenum to reverse the priorities of the widf, putting women’s emancipation before the struggle for peace, was not understood, and “the udi in Helsinki seemed very isolated” (Rodano 2010: 112). In order to change this situation, the udi leaders decided to hold a number of bilateral meetings with other organizations affiliated to the widf, or not (such as the Yugoslav sdž), in order to develop some alliances to change the role and the functioning of the Federation (see Rodano 2010: 113). The reports about the Helsinki Plenum make evident that Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations played an important role in the redefinition of Cold War international politics, and in the redefinition of the goals and perspectives of the widf. These reports also demonstrate that a number of political ideas – such as the concept of “national ways to socialism”, and a critique of Soviet hegemony – circulated across blocs, through widf international meetings and through women’s organizations such as the udi and the sdž. From the mid-1950s, non-aligned Yugoslavia offered a geopolitical location in which different political ideas and currents, and particularly the position of the decolonization movements of Asia and Africa, could be expressed. In the next section I will discuss the bilateral meeting between Italian and Yugoslav women leaders held in Ljubljana in the autumn of 1957, the first significant meeting after the Cominform era. 2.3. The 1957 Ljubljana meeting between Italian and Yugoslav leaders At the Helsinki Plenum, the udi had assumed a critical position towards the proSoviet stance of the widf, drawing closer to the position of the Yugoslav leaders. The Yugoslav observers at the Helsinki Plenum were very interested in Rosetta Longo’s intervention and in the Italian position towards the widf. In July 1957, soon after the Helsinki meeting, sdž president Bosa Cvetić sent a letter to the udi headquarters to invite a delegation of three or four members to visit Yugoslavia.38 udi President Marisa Rodano replied positively on the 24th of July, stating: “we already thought that an exchange of viewpoints about our respective experiences would be very useful for our future work.”39 In another letter, sent on the same day by udi secretary general Rosetta Longo40, the 13th to the 15th of September were proposed for the bilateral Italo-Yugoslav meeting, together with a list of possible participants. They were udi president Marisa Rodano, secretary general Rosetta Longo, national secretary Giuliana Nenni, widf 38 Letter,11.7.1957, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 354 (sdžj), box 9 – 186. 39 Letter, 24.7.1957, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 354 (sdžj), box 9. Rodano added that this meeting would be part of a new framework of international activities. She also mentioned that udi members “of different opinions” would take part in the meeting. 40 Letter, 24.7.1957, Rome, Archivio Centrale udi, fondo DnM 57.3-22, fascicolo 9. 241 �secretary Carmen Zanti and widf vice-secretary Maria Maddalena Rossi. The high functions occupied by those who were part of the delegation makes evident that this encounter was supposed to seal a new epoch of bilateral relations, after the dark Cominform years. The sdž secretary Marija Kos replied that she was impressed with the “quality of the composition of the delegation”, and agreed to host the Italian delegation on the chosen dates. Since the Italian militants expressed the wish to meet “not far from the border”, the sdž secretary suggested that they meet in Ljubljana, with a short visit to Zagreb, then hosting an exhibition on “Family and Domestic science” (Porodica i Domacinstvo).41 Although interested in the attitude the of Italian udi representatives, the Yugoslav leaders were also critical of the possible outcomes of an argument about the autonomy of women’s organizations. In August Vida Tomšić sent a letter to some other sdž members, inclosing the translation of Rosetta Longo’s intervention at the Helsinki meeting.42 While Tomšić found “many new things” in the intervention by Rosetta Longo, she also saw some dangers of “disorientation”. Tomšić commented that the “strong emphasis on the struggle for the autonomy of the women’s movement is – for us Marxists – an abstraction. The women’s movement has to be a fundamental part of the struggle for a true democracy and the liberation of human beings, of the struggle for socialism." The “Italian communists”, Tomšić argued, “know that, too”. But in their attempt to criticize Soviet hegemony, they insist excessively on the formulation of the struggle for women’s rights, reaching “the other extreme”, that is, feminism.43 Since she conceived of the women’s question as a social question (see Chapter 6), Vida Tomšić claimed that there was no need to revert to these formulations to criticize Soviet hegemony. The Italian delegation, moreover, had proposed to strengthen the executive power of the national sections within the widf. Tomšić found this proposal more conservative than the one by the Indian delegation, which proposed to abandon the system of national delegations, transforming the widf into a world women’s organization with its own autonomous stance. Despite these disagreements, Vida Tomšić also expressed interest in the activities of the udi at the national level, and sent to other sdž members some more material on women’s work in the cooperative sector in Italy, together with some documents on the “women’s question” produced during the Eight congress of the Italian Communist Party.44 The Yugoslav militants, 41 Letter, 31.8.1957. Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, 354-9-189. 42 Letter, Ljubljana, 2.8.1957, Belgrade, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 354 (sdžj), box 9. 43 “Jasno je da to italijanske komunistkinje znaju, pa mi i zbog toga njihova formulacija o borbi za ženska prava opet izgleda preterana u drugu krajnost, zbog toga da bi na taj način formulisani zapravo borbu protiv sovjetskog dirigiranja.” Ibidem. Vida Tomšić read the Italian autonomist position only as an undirect way to criticize the Soviet position, missing out the internal debate that had taken place within the udi and the Italian Communist Party. The idea of an autonomous women’s movement was inconceivable for Tomšić, and associated with interwar bourgeois feminism. See Sklevicky (1996). 44 Ibidem. During that congress, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, the pci used for the first time the expression questione femminile, and stated in its declarations that the issue of women’s emancipation was “an integral part” of the struggle for democracy and socialism. See 242 �therefore, were encouraged to make use of this material in preparation for the visit of the Italian guests. On the 13th of September 1957, udi president Marisa Rodano, secretary general Rosetta Longo, widf vice-President Maria Maddalena Rossi and socialist widf leader Giuliana Nenni traveled to Ljubljana. widf secretary general Carmen Zanti was supposed to be present but in the end did not attend. Note the presence of udi main leaders and of a representative of the widf, and of both socialist and communist women.45 The Yugoslav delegation was equally composed of the highest representatives, belonging to the Directive Committee of the Union of Women’s Societies (sdž). Many of them were also former partisans and were important functionaries of the League of Communists at the Federal or Republican level. They were: Vida Tomšić, Mara Načeva, Milka Kufrin, Blaženka Mimica, Aleksandra Janda, Marija Šoljan-Bakarić, Angelca Očepek, Olga Vrabić, Ada Krivić, Meta Košir, Majda Gaspari, Jelica Marič.46 The discussions between the Italian and the Yugoslav delegation are reported in detail by Vida Tomšić to a meeting of the Directive Committee of the sdž concerning the international relations of the organization, held on the 27th of September 1957.47 Vida Tomšić describes at length the exchanges with the Italian delegation in Ljubljana. The Yugoslav and Italian representatives briefly talked about the widf. The Yugoslav delegates openly expressed their long-standing criticisms of the widf, formulated ever since their expulsion from the organization in 1949. They acknowledged that the organization had enlarged its scope since the Beijing Congress, by including Asian and African women’s organizations, and by dealing with “women’s problems” more concretely. On the other hand, the widf continued to be comprised mainly Rodano 2010, 106-107. According to Rodano, while these declarations constituted a “watershed”, in practice many male pci leaders opposed udi’s autonomous organizing at the local level, and the fact that women “tried to do politics by themselves”. Few months after the congress Togliatti himself sent a letter to the different pci federations, about the need to apply the party line and to stop having a “double standard” towards female cadres. 45 According to Terzuolo, pci’s good relationships with the lcy during these years are also the result of a commitment to cooperation with the Italian Socialist Party (Terzuolo 1985: 199). 46 Correspondence afž-udi of July – August 1957. Rome, Archivio Centrale udi, fondo DnM, 53.3-22, f. 9, 1957. 47 Sastanak Upravni Odbor sdž, 27.9.1957, fond 354 (sdžj), k. 1 (Zapisnici I stenografske sa sastanka upravnog odbora I sekretariata sdžj I sa savetovanja szdj 1954-1961), Arhiv Jugoslavije, Belgrade. While opening the meeting, Marija Koš summarized the recent developments in sdž international relations, referring to the udi as the only Western European organization belonging to the widf with whom the sdž had a bilateral relation. Vida Tomšić stressed the need to become more active in the relations with India, Indonesia, and the Arab countries, since the widf was also getting more active on that front. She then summarized the recent contacts she had with Soviet women. She recalled the holiday she had in the Soviet Union, and her discussions with Lidia Petrova and Nina Popova about possible common initiatives. They discussed of having a seminar on women’s lives under socialism. Vida Tomšić openly told to the Soviet representatives that she agreed with the idea, but only if the seminar would take into account concrete problems, without portraying women’s condition in the Soviet Union as ideal (as in the film produced by the widf, La rose des vents, see previous section). 243 �of organizations with explicit ties to communist parties and was thus implicitly affiliated to the socialist bloc. For these reasons, the Yugoslavs did not trust the widf enough to join it again. They complained that the expulsion of the afž had not been explained in detail, and that they had no guarantee that something similar would not happen again in the future. Vida Tomšić also urged the udi representatives to “fight a bit more” for change within the Federation, since it was already clear in the Helsinki meeting that one of their delegates had expressed a very critical position.48 On the topic of the decision-making process within the widf, Tomšić opposed widf Resolutions that would be binding for each affiliated member. A resolution on “equal pay for equal work”, for instance, argued Tomšić, could be useful in Italy but not in India, since different women’s organizations in different countries have different priorities. In this way she was advocating the principles of “national ways to socialism”, and of national sovereignty, as they were being developed in Yugoslavia and in the NonAligned Movement. The Italian guests thanked the Yugoslav women and agreed that there was a need to work together in order to change the Federation from within. At the same time, they declined to discuss the widf in greater detail. Only widf vice-president Maria Maddalena Rossi indirectly called upon the Yugoslav leaders to re-enter the widf, referring to the need for national women’s organizations to combat “provincialism” by joining an international women’s organization. She also added that the widf was enlarging its scope and working methods, and that within the Federation there was enough space to accommodate various national positions.49 The issue of the widf was, however, soon abandoned; Tomšić had the impression that the Italian representatives did not want to act as the ambassadors of the Federation. In fact, the Yugoslav leader felt that the Italian guests were themselves unsure of their stance towards the Federation, since the organization was undergoing a phase of internal transformation, which had also created a crisis in the relationship between the udi and the widf. 50 In private, even Maria Maddalena Rossi, who seemed like a pro-Soviet hardliner, admitted that the Federation needed to be transformed, and added: “It is very difficult to work for the Federation."51 She mentioned the resistance of the French women and of the Brazilian president Bianca Fialco; the Russian women, in her view, were much more open and knew what had to be done. Rossi also mentioned that during the meeting of the Executive Committee in Rome the udi proposed a name change, removing the word “Federation” and changing the name to “Women’s World Alliance” (Svetski Savez Žena).52 Many women opposed this move and accused Rossi of wanting 48 Ibidem. 49 Ibidem. 50 Ibidem. 51 “Madalena Rosi, koja je potpresednica Federacije i koja stalno ističe da Federacija mora postojati kakva da je, priznala mi je i rekla u cetiri oka ‘sve ovo mi osečamo i moram da kazem da je strašno teško raditi u Federaciji’.” Ibidem. 52 “One su u Rimu imale sastanak Izvršnog komiteta i predložile da se izmeni ime organizacije tako da bude Svetski Savez Žena a da se izostavi rec ‘Federacija’. [Rossi] kaze: ‘bilo je suza, mene su napadale žene kao da sam ubila Federaciju, vole Federaciju i sada sam u Helsinkiju 244 �to “kill the Federation”.53 During their exchange, Rossi and Tomšić speculated about what would happen if the Federation would be dissolved. Tomšić argued that if an organization does not work anymore it should be rather be dissolved, but that in the case of the Federation it was worth trying to change it from within, also in light of the recent changes in the Soviet Union.54 During the bilateral meeting in Ljubljana, Vida Tomšić had the general impression that Italian women were not trying to persuade the Yugoslav women to change their attitude, but were rather trying to find some alliances to strengthen their own position within the Federation.55 This impression is confirmed by Marisa Rodano’s memoir, in which she recalls that the udi tried to establish international alliances outside and within the widf, in order to foster the new line on “women’s emancipation” (see Rodano, 2010: 113). The Yugoslav position about the Federation – cooperating on issues of mutual interest on the basis of the different national contexts – partially coincided with the Italian goal of turning women’s rights into the main mission of the widf. As aptly summarize by Tomšić, in fact, Italian representatives aimed to change the priorities of the Federation from “peace-women-children” to “women-children-peace”.56 The opinions expressed by the udi in Ljubljana, together with Vida Tomšić’s critical assessment of them, demonstrate the udi and sdž leaders’ political agency regarding internal and international matters, particularly apparent in the udi leaders’ active role in reframing women’s autonomous organizing at the international level. These reports also show how in the mid-1950s udi and sdž representatives, on the basis of their national experience, established transnational forms of cooperation, in order to transform the functioning and role of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. The relationship between the udi and the widf became even more complex in the following years. In 1963, in fact, in an unprecedented gesture of protest, the udi delegation collectively left the main assembly during the widf Moscow Congress57, and subsequently decided to change its status in the Federation from adhering member (membro aderente) to associated member (membro associato), thus adopting a stance similar to that of the Yugoslav delegation. osečala da smo ostali kod starog." Ibidem. 53 Ibidem. 54 Ibidem. 55 “Naš je utisak bio da su Italijanke više tražile naše argumente za svoje stanove, nego sto su one mislile da ce nas ubediti u to da promenimo svoj stav." Ibidem. 56 Ibidem. 57 This event has been generally framed within udi historiography as Italian women «saying no to Moscow» (see Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1998: 167). In fact, the reasons behind this gesture appear to be quite complex, and have also to do with the expression of Third World women’s radical anti-imperialist positions within the widf. See the volume curated by udi (1963) on the conference. See also Pojmann (2009). 245 �2.4. Women’s questions: autonomy, contraception and abortion During the bilateral meeting in Ljubljana, besides discussing international matters, Italian and Yugoslav leaders also compared notes on their respective work at the national level. udi and sdž members developed an ongoing reflection and a deep engagement on how to improve women’s lives in Italy and Yugoslavia, as is evident in the accounts of the Ljubljana meeting. The exchange of views appears to be open and constructive, less ideological than in the late 1940s, and encompasses a range of issues to do with women’s life and labour. During this transnational dialogue, the Yugoslav representatives acknowledged that women’s equality in Yugoslavia had not yet been achieved in practice, despite the advanced legislation. The Italian representatives, for their part, presented their current campaigns, such as the one about “equal pay for equal work” and the campaign for a state pension for housewives, and freely talked about women’s lives in the villages, particularly in the South of Italy.58 On the second day of their visit, Marisa Rodano and Maria Maddalena Rossi were taken by the Yugoslav colleagues to visit an institute for progressive household planning (Zavod za napredek gospodinjistva) in Bežigrad, and met with an architect in charge of household planning. They discussed the different innovations in household planning, domestic appliances and school canteens. The Italian guests were particularly interested in the collective laundries developed in Yugoslavia, and planned to order some to be installed in the city of Bologna. The general assumption is that issues such as contraception and abortion only started to be discussed with the advent of second wave feminism. Cold War women’s organizations have been represented as mainly focused on women’s equality in the public sphere and as scarcely preoccupied with issues of family, sexuality and the private sphere. As the reports about the Ljubljana meeting show, however, in the mid1950s women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia were starting to debate these issues locally and internationally. In the summer of 1956 the udi magazine Noi Donne had published an editorial (signed by Giuliana dal Pozzo) entitled “As many as we want, when we want them?” (Quanti ne vogliamo, quando li vogliamo?), initiating a debate about contraception and responsible motherhood. During the meeting in Ljubljana, the udi leaders discussed the discrimination against women within the family in Italy, and spoke of the difficulty of legalizing contraception and divorce because of the opposition of the Catholic Church. During their stay, moreover, Giuliana Nenni and Rosetta Longo were taken to visit a centre for family planning. The Italian guests seemed very interested in the fact that many citizens attended the center, and discussed contraception methods, particularly the diaphragms produced in Yugoslavia, with the Yugoslav doctors. In Yugoslavia abortion (for medical reasons and in cases of extreme social distress) had been legalized in 1952. To access abortion women had to submit to the 58 The theme of women’s lives in the countryside remained a topic of common interest. In the 1960s, Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations frequently sent delegations to their respective seminars on this topic. 246 �decision of a commission of medical experts. After having reported about the meeting with the Italian guests, Vida Tomšić went on to outline the situation of contraception and abortion in Yugoslavia. While speaking with the Italian guests about these issues, in fact, it became clear to her that “this is a women’s question, and if our organization does not deal with it, no one else will.” Tomšić argued with her fellow comrades that the sdž had to address the issue more systematically, by advancing the diffusion of contraception. The diffusion of contraception in fact, according to Tomšić, was lower than it could be, also due to women’s reticence about their private life.59 While discussing abortion and contraception in the Yugoslav context, Tomšić also showed her awareness of international developments on the theme of abortion and contraception, comparing the policies in the Soviet Union, China, India and the United States. She suggested borrowing some of the methods of the American Planned Parenthood organization, which she had visited during a stay in New York. The Yugoslav leader opposed the Malthusianism of the Planned Parenthood organization on the basis of her Marxist beliefs. Nevertheless, she argued that the American methods could be borrowed to enhance the diffusion of contraception in order to diminish abortions and “liberate women from fear”. The communist leader, was acutely aware that sexuality and reproduction were terrains on which women’s organizations had to engage urgently.60 Organizational matters were also a matter of discussion during the 1957 Ljubljana meeting. The udi and sdž leaders debated about the functioning and roles of women’s organizations, and about their degree of autonomy from political parties and international politics. The discussion addressed a question which was to become a longstanding topic of debate within transnational feminism, namely to what extent women’s organizations had to get involved in broader geopolitical issues. During the events in Hungary, explained the udi leaders, their organization took a stance different from that of the communist and socialist parties, condemning the use of force and demanding a peaceful resolution of the crisis. This autonomous position managed to keep socialist and communist women together and to maintain the unity of the organization. To this, Vida Tomšić replied that she found this position “weak” (bleda, lit. “pale”). The Yugoslav leader asked if the udi, in order to gather larger numbers of women, would avoid taking explicit political positions, or would advocate pacifism on various international problems from now on. The Italian leaders, however, replied that on certain issues such as “imperialism, colonialism and war-mongering” they would always take a stance, since the udi represented a part of progressive public opinion in Italy.61 59 “Žene imaju razne teškoće, a posto je to iz intimnog života većina njih smatra da treba da pati i ne iznosi." Ibidem. About the usage of abortion as a contraceptive method among Yugoslav women who had migrated to France, see Morokvasić (1981). 60 The abortion law was revised and further liberalized in 1960. Almost two decade later, in 1974, Vida Tomšić redrafted the family provisions of the new Yugoslav Constitutions, including a provision that stated that men and women had the right to freely decide about childbirth in the family. 61 “No, one su rekle, i mislim da je to vrlo važno i potrebno u Italiji, s vremena na vreme 247 �The relation between the udi and the other political forces in Italy was also discussed, with udi leaders explaining that in order to establish a successful women’s mass organization in the Italian context, it was necessary for the organization to be autonomous, not linked to the communist or socialist party. They also explained that the work “on the ground” was hard, since many psi and pci members, including women, did not understand the new line of the udi.62 And then, according to Vida Tomšić, udi women stated that within the party “they were accused and are still accused of having become feminists. They, however, explained that since women’s conditions in Italy were intimately connected to the capitalist structure of the country and to the changes in that structure, every step taken by women – whether economic, social, or in terms of marriage rights – would be a step forward in the resolution of political problems.” For these reasons, udi women were “not retreating from the struggle against the political system, but fighting on the side of the progressive forces, not as feminists against the men, but rather against the system, against prejudices, capitalist exploitation and so on.”63 This passage demonstrates that the udi had to walk a tightrope when arguing for (partial) autonomy from political parties. When udi leaders stepped out from their subordinate role to their respective parties, and argued that the struggle for women’s emancipation was already a form of struggle for social change, they were accused of “having become feminists”. This accusation – as in the case of the afž (see Chapter 6) – indicates that the udi had reached a certain organizational autonomy in the mid-1950s, and that their members used their political agency to strenghten women’s rights, even if they rejected any possible feminist affiliation. The autonomy of the organization was certainly limited and hierarchical in comparison to 1970s second wave feminist elaborations. In the context of 1950s Italy, however, it represented the most advanced reflection on the “women’s question”, one that took into account women’s oppression on a national and international scale, in its intersections with poverty, injustice and exploitation. o krupnim pitanjima – imperijalizma, kolonijalizma, protiv huskaca na rat etc. – da se i one izjasnjavaju, jer ipak pretstavljaju jedan deo progresivnog javnog mišljenja." Ibidem. 62 Ibidem. 63 Emphasis added. “Njima su tu prebacivali i još uvek prebacuju da su postale feministkinje, ali one objasnjavaju njima položaj žena u Italiji kakav je, da je životno vezan na kapitalističku strukturu zemlje i na promene te strukture, da svaki korak – ženskih, ekonomskih, drustvenih ili bračnih prava, koji ce ostvariti, podrazumevaće i pretstavljati i korak napred u rešavanju političkih problema. Zbog toga se ne izključuju iz borbe protiv političkog sistema, jer se bore na strani progresivnih snaga, ali se ne bore feministički protivi muškaraca, nego se bore protiv sistema, predrasuda, kapitalističkog iskorisčavanja, itd.” Ibidem. 248 �3 . The difficult reconciliation in the Italo-Yugoslav border area Despite the reconciliation and cooperation between Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations in the mid-1950s, women’s transnational and inter-ethnic cooperation was still not always easy. The situation in the border area, in particular, remained tense. In the mid-1950s, the contested status of the border city of Trieste was finally settled, contributing to an easing of geopolitical tensions.64 After several rounds of negotiations between the United States, the Soviet Union, Italy and Yugoslavia, the London Memorandum of October 1954 assigned the city of Trieste and Zone A to Italy, while Zone B remained under Yugoslav jurisdiction. 65 When Trieste was assigned to Italy, the dismantling of the Allied Military Government (amg) caused great economic precariousness in the city, which was already coping with a housing shortage due to the arrival of refugees from the areas assigned to Yugoslavia. This economic situation, and the constant political tensions in the area, impelled thousands of its residents, particularly those who had worked for the Allies, to emigrate to Australia from 1954 onwards (Sluga 2001: 155). Also within the communist milieu of Trieste, the feeling of uncertainty and precariousness was widespread after the definitive passage of the city to Italy. As in the previous years (see Chapters 4 and 5), because of the contested status of the city the situation experienced by communist militants in Trieste was markedly different from that experienced by other pci militants in the rest of the Italian peninsula. When looking at the reactions of Triestine militants towards geopolitical changes in the mid-1950s, notably the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation and the de-Stalinization process launched by Khrushchev during the Twentieth Congress, one notices the specificity of political experiences in Trieste, and the immediate relevance of global geopolitical shifts for the political life of the city, which had become a microcosm of Cold War tensions. As mentioned earlier, the Cominform Resolution had split left-wing organisations in the Italo-Yugoslav border area. In 1955, after years of violent rivalries with the Titoists (titini), many Triestine communists – including the leaders of the Unione Donne Democratiche, udd (Union of Democratic Women) – were not ready to accept the reconciliation between Yugoslavia and the rest of the socialist bloc. Many Tries64 The situation at the Italo-Yugoslav border had reached a critical point in summer/autumn 1953, with the so-called “crisis of Trieste”, characterized by a diplomatic crisis between the Italian and the Yugoslav government over the repartition of the zone A and B of the Free Territory of Trieste. In October 1953, the Allies announced the assignment of zone A to Italian jurisdiction. Italian and Yugoslav troops were amassed at the border of zone A and B, with concrete risks of an international conflict. 65 This border settlement, however, was formally ratified and became definitive only in 1975, with the Treaty of Osimo (see Novak 1970). The border between zone A and B, established in 1947, reinforced in 1954 and finally ratified in 1975, was never completely sealed, differently than other East-West borders during the Cold War: “with varying levels of restriction, throughout the 60-year history of the border, locals crossed it legally or illegally from the very first to the very last day of its existence” (Škrlj, 2012: 63). 249 �tine communists had welcomed the Cominform Resolution. The Soviet denunciation of Yugoslav leaders as ‘nationalists’, in fact, conformed to the everyday experience of Yugoslav hegemony over the leftist forces in the border area. Especially for many Italian militants living in Trieste, the Resolution brought an end to Yugoslav hegemony and a return to the strategic line promoted by pci leader Palmiro Togliatti.66 In 1955 Khrushchev disowned the 1948 excommunication of Yugoslavia as a Stalinist machination (plotted by the chief of the Soviet secret police, Beria), and redeemed Tito and his collaborators. In an unprecedented gesture of insubordination against the pci party line, the chief of Triestine communists Vittorio Vidali made public in a local newspaper his disagreement with Khrushchev’s declarations, since “we supported that Resolution […] with our documents, our sufferings, our experiences, without the intervention of Beria or imperialist agents.67 This divergence in opinion, in fact, according to Vidali, corresponded, “at least on the basis of our experiences, to the objective truth." The fight against Yugoslavia, he argued, “was meditated, conscious, and not an act of blind discipline."68 The case of Vidali’s resistance to the official Soviet and pci line indicates the importance of subjective, situated experiences with regard to communist engagement. The Triestine communist leadership, placed in the first line of Cold War ideological and national conflicts, could not easily accept the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, since it contrasted with their own subjective experiences and beliefs. The importance of experience and affect concerning Triestine militants’ subjectivities is quite apparent, particularly when looking at internal meetings between the national leadership of the Italian Communist Party and the Triestine leadership. After Vidali’s statement, in fact, all Trieste party leaders were asked to travel to Rome for a pci Leadership meeting, in which they were harshly reprimanded for this gesture, and forced to publicly apologise.69 The transcriptions of these meetings70 could serve as a case study for contemporary identity politics and affect theory. The speeches by Triestine militants are, in fact, full of emotions and passion, highlighting the dramatic individual and collective divisions that marked Trieste in the early Cold War period, and how Cold War political identities could become totalizing for communist militants. In front of the pci leadership in Rome, Triestine militants described the Cominform Resolution as their “Gospel”, and declared that they could not accept that the Cominform Resolution had been false, “since [their] personal experience corresponded to the Resolution." One militant says: “We have full confidence in the land of 66 See Terzuolo (1985: 146-147). About the different strategies of the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties after 1945, and about their clash in Trieste, see Karlsen (2010). 67 Vittorio Vidali, ‘Le dichiarazioni del compagno Kruscev ed i comunisti triestini’, Il Lavoratore, 30.5.1955; see also Longo’s reply on L’Unità, 1.6.1955. 68 Ibidem. 69 pci Secretariat meetings of 7th and 8th of June 1955. Fondo Mosca, Verbali Segreteria 194448, mf194, Istituto Gramsci, Rome. 70 Verbali della segreteria del pci del 7 e 8 giugno 55, mf 194, Istituto Gramsci, Rome. 250 �socialism, but one should also take our suffering into account, we have dignity, too."71 Another militant recognizes that “sentiment” is taking over in this affair. When invited by pci leaders to apologize, the Triestine party members do not see why they should, since they only voiced their own personal truth, against the new Truth promoted by the Soviet leadership. Triestine leader Marija Bernetić replies: “We have been influenced by the base, by the Slovenes and the Italians, at home and in the street. I said this so that you would not think that we cannot think with our own head.”72 As recalled in the beginning of the chapter, these sudden shifts in “Truth” were upsetting for many militants in Trieste, and also for female leaders such as Marija Bernetić and Laura Weiss. After already having considered leaving the pci in 1956, Laura Weiss decided to resign in 1960 from her position as director of the Union of Democratic Women (Unione Donne Democratiche – udd), since she was opposed to the entry of a group of former ‘Titoist’ Slovene women (part of the women’s section of the Independent Socialist Union (Unione Socialista Indipendente – usi) into the organisation.73 In 1960, moreover, Jole Deferri, representative of the udd in Trieste, wrote to the leaders of the udi in Rome about the difficult reconciliation between udd and usi women, and reminded them that usi women, “being a group of women for the majority, if not totally, Slovenes, some of their representatives have conducted in these years a campaign of denigration against the udi, since, [in their view] being the association of the Italian women, it could not defend the interests of Slovenian women in our territory”. 74 Deferri feared that the entry of usi women into the udd would compromise the “need to enlarge our ranks among Italian women.”75 These episodes indicate that despite the official reconciliation between Yugoslav and Italian women’s organizations in the mid-1950s, national and ideological tensions persisted in the border area of Trieste. The divided memories created by the Cominform Resolution outlasted the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation. This reconciliation was also a blow for those Italian militants who had been persecuted within Yugoslavia for siding with the Cominform in 1948-49. Some of them were still imprisoned in 1955, and only an intervention of pci leader Longo during a visit to Tito led to their release. When they came out of jail, heavily traumatized, they had to face the great indifference of the Italian Communist Party, for which they were the uncanny reminders of an historical episode that had to be erased (Bonelli 1994).76 Their personal dossiers and files Ibidem. Ibidem. Letters reproduced in Andri et al. 2003. The usage of indirect speech makes the quotation unclear, but I interpret it in this way: Deferri expresses her disagreement with usi’s allegation according to which udi, “being the association of the Italian women, could not defend the interests of Slovenian women in our territory." 75 Jole Deferri (Unione Donne Democratiche/Zveza Demokraticnih Žena) to Comitato di Presidenza udi, 6.5.1960. Rome, Archivio Centrale udi, fondo DnM, 60-3-27, f.9. 76 In 1978 former Cominformist Alfredo Bonelli tried to interview a woman, L.P., who had been Cominformist in Rijeka. The woman was scared and denied any affiliation to the organization. Bonelli thus concluded that the attitude of this woman “was in itself a document: 71 72 73 74 251 �were destroyed after the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation – allegedly by Marija Bernetić – making any historical reconstruction very difficult. The episodes mentioned in this section show the multiple contradictions faced by communist militants in 1956, and the degree of “selective remembering” involved in the De-Stalinization process. In 1956 Italy and Trieste, the subjective truth of individual militants often collided with the new ‘politically useful’ Truth promoted by the Soviet and pci leaderships. Conclusion In this chapter I dealt with the Cold War geopolitical context of the mid-1950s and examined its complex effects on women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the cpsu, the Soviet reconciliation with Yugoslavia and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution had a longstanding impact not only on world politics, but also on the political subjectivities of communist militants across East and West, in Italy, Yugoslavia and in the city of Trieste. Soviet hegemony was no longer taken for granted in the international workers’ movement, and neither was the hierarchical relationship between the leadership of the party and its militants. In the case of Trieste, communist militants themselves contested the Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, and rejected the idea of a “politically useful” Truth, as Laura Weiss aptly described it. As shown in the last section of the chapter, specific national and ideological divisions persisted in the Italo-Yugoslav border area and in the city of Trieste. Transnational and inter-ethnic cooperation was difficult to re-establish after the divisions created by the Cominform Resolution in 1948. While accounting for the specific situation of Trieste in the last part of the chapter, in the first and second part of the chapter I described how the geopolitical changes of 1956 opened up new possibilities for internal debate and for transnational cooperation for the leaders of Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations. The leaders of the Union of Italian Women benefited from the beginnings of de-Stalinization. In the need to preserve the unity of the organization despite the end of the alliance between the pci and psi, the udi gradually developed a position of organizational autonomy towards Italian left-wing parties. The udi shifted the emphasis once again onto women’s emancipation, understood as a “national” question not subordinate to class politics, but representing a progressive goal in itself. This renewed focus on women’s emancipation and organizational autonomy had important repercussions internationally, since udi leaders attempted to transform the role and functioning of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, of which they had been founding members since 1945. The critique of the widf developed by Italian leaders led to bilateral and transnational discussions on the goals and functions of a women’s world organization. As this it confirmed the atmosphere of fear, repression, retaliations and blackmailing that was created around the Cominform and around us, cominformists of the party apparatus back then.” Archivio Bonelli, irsml, Trieste. 252 �chapter has made evident, with the advent of decolonization movements, reflections about the “women’s question” circulated not only across the Italo-Yugoslav border and across East and West; they also traveled within the Third World itself. Women’s transnational connections between the First, Second and Third World have also been analyzed in a number of recent scholarly works.77 Third World women’s organizations affiliated to the decolonization movements were particularly critical of the methods of the widf. As recalled by Marisa Rodano (2010: 116), widf secretary general Carmen Zanti was aware of the crisis of the Federation. Zanti mentioned that many Asian and African organizations were thinking of leaving the widf to create their own AfroAsian women’s organization. In February 1958, in fact, an Afro-Asian Conference on Women was held in Colombo, Indonesia, affiliating twenty-nine women’s organizations from the countries that had taken part in the Bandung conference. As Bier (2010: 150) argues in her article about Egyptian women’s organizations after Bandung, patterns of global feminism (…) shifted in accordance with the dramatic political changes that occurred during the early cold war and postcolonial periods. But these shifts were not mere reflections of geopolitical transitions then current. Rather, the role of “Third World” women and their organizations must be understood as active and therefore vital in the shaping of these new and evolving global orders. In this chapter, I demonstrated the connections between “Third World” women and Yugoslav women, underlining the active role played by Yugoslav female leaders within the Non-Aligned Movement. In the mid-1950s the Union of Women’s Societies of Yugoslavia had already established a number of links with other women’s organizations in Asia (particularly Egypt, India and Indonesia). In 1956 Yugoslav female leaders re-entered the widf as critical observers, engaging in a dialogue not only between West and East, but also between the Second and the Third World. The Yugoslavs’ critique of Soviet hegemony within the widf was informed by Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the socialist bloc in 1948, but it was also connected to the international ideal of “national ways to socialism”. This idea could be translated, in the case of Yugoslav women’s organizations, as “national ways to women’s emancipation”, as made evident by the statements by Vida Tomšić contained in this chapter. In 1956 and 1957, therefore, Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations found common ground in their critique of the Women’s International Democratic Federation and in their focus on the “concrete problems” of women’s emancipation. As I have described in this chapter, during the 1957 Ljubljana meeting udi and sdž leaders had important exchanges about international matters such as the widf, Western imperialism and the Hungarian crisis. They also discussed the most urgent “women’s issues” in Italy and Yugoslavia, namely women’s entry into the labor market, welfare 77 See Bier (2010), for an account of women’s South-South connections after Bandung. See Castledine (2008), about connections between South African and African American women’s movements in the postwar period. On the connections between anti-apartheid South African activist Lillian Ngoyi and the widf, see Caine (2010). 253 �provisions for working mothers and housewives, women’s lives in the countryside and in underdeveloped regions, marriage, divorce, contraception and abortion. While showing how Cold War geopolitical changes shaped women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area, the chapter showed how women’s organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia – and particularly their leaders – in turn played a significant role in Cold War history and politics in the years 1955-1957. Former partisans and communist leaders such as Carmen Zanti and Vida Tomšić contributed to shape internal and international politics with their engagement and their political experience. Against a flattening, homogeneous view of communist women as deprived of agency, this chapter supports the three main theses of the dissertation. First, antifascist women were active participants in Cold War political struggles. Secondly, women’s antifascist organizations allowed the circulation of emancipatory reflections about the “women’s question” across Cold War borders. Finally, women’s organizations such as the Union of Italian Women and the Union of Women’s Societies of Yugoslavia, while being characterized by an pedagogic, top-down approach, were nonetheless crucial in promoting women’s political, economic and social rights in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia. When the geopolitical situation started to be more open after 1956, the leaders of the udi managed to carve out a limited space of organizational autonomy and to strengthen their focus on women’s emancipation, refusing to subordinate the struggle for women’s rights to class struggle and to the task of realizing a socialist society. In Yugoslavia, sdž leaders saw the resolution of the “women’s question” as intrinsically linked with socialist economic progress. At the same time, they were deeply aware of women’s everyday problems, and thus attempted to “mainstream” women’s issues within decentralized local institutions. While udi and sdž leaders rejected feminism on the basis of their Marxist beliefs, they could easily be accused of having become feminists. This proves, in my view, that udi and sdž leaders’ engagement towards women’s emancipation was sincere, unfaltering, and exceptional for their times. 254 �Concluding remarks and suggestions for future research The feminists – or other critical intellectuals as nomadic subjects – are those who have a peripheral consciousness and have forgotten to forget injustice and symbolic poverty: their memory is activated against the stream; they enact a rebellion of subjugated knowledges. (Rosi Braidotti 2011a: 60) In formulating a conclusion to this research, let me return to where I began. Having grown up in “red Bologna”, amidst family memories of antifascism, I was struck by the silence surrounding antifascist women’s political and social activism after 1945, and I wanted to activate memory against this forgetting. While women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia had been studied in detail by feminist historians, antifascist women’s activism in the Cold War period has remained underresearched, both at the local and at the transnational level. By constructing an historical narrative about women’s thriving political and social activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia, I have aimed to contribute to the overcoming of this scholarly gap. I have argued that antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia. I have shown that their leaders designed a progressive agenda for women’s organizations, fighting against long-standing gendered discrimination and violence, and fostering women’s political, social and economic rights. What is more, I have demonstrated that during the early Cold War period Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations provided women with imaginary and physical connections across borders, not only between East and West but also between the West, the Second World and the Third World. I have sustained these theses through extensive empirical research and data gathering, analyzing a wide array of archival documents, autobiographical sources and oral history interviews in Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and French. These sources were treated as complementary, and brought together into a single historical narrative, through a process of translation. This process of translation implied a dialogue not only across different languages, but also across different political and epistemic viewpoints (Iveković 2010). By bringing together a multiplicity of national and ideological viewpoints, this thesis attempts to go beyond the divided memories of Fascism and Second World War in the region of Southern and South-Eastern Europe (Müller 2002). The comparison between Italy and Yugoslavia, moreover, challenged the historical legacy of Cold War mental mappings, which still frame our contemporary scholarly perspectives when it comes to the study of women’s activism in the Western, post-socialist, and non-Western world (Chary and Verdery 2009; Hemmings 2011). By bringing together 255 �primary sources in different languages, I contribute to the growing field of comparative European women’s history. As suggested by historian Karen Offen (2010: 156), a comparison between primary sources in different languages is crucial to trans-European comparative research. This is a way to do justice to the “multicultural, multinational society that we know as Europe, especially (but not only) in the post-World War ii, post-colonial, and post-Communist era." By adopting a multi-lingual, transnational perspective on Cold War politics, this dissertation constitutes a form of “entangled history” (Werner and Zimmermann 2006) of women’s antifascist and internationalist activism in Italy and Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1957. It establishes a dialogue across scholarly disciplines and fields that have been rarely put into communication, namely women’s and feminist history, Cold War political history, post-socialist and post-colonial studies. It also contributes to each one of these fields in an innovative way. This concluding chapter details the theoretical and methodological contributions made to these different fields, as well as possible directions for future research. First, I stress the contribution made to the field of women’s and feminist history, particularly to the growing literature about women’s transnational activism during the Cold War. Also, I reflect on the implications of the dissertation for contemporary Italian, post-Yugoslav and European feminist genealogies. Secondly, I specify the contribution made to the field of Cold War studies, and suggest directions for future research. By showing the significance of women’s activism in the production of Cold War discourses and practices, and the way in which Cold War discourses were gendered, I proved the importance of studying Cold War political, social and cultural history from a gender and women’s history perspective. Finally, I point out the implications of this work for what Chari and Verdery define as “post-Cold War” scholarly research. I reflect upon the relevance of my study for contemporary post-Cold War feminist narratives, and suggest possible directions for future studies in the field of women’s history and feminist historiography. 1. Women’s transnational activism in Cold War Europe This research is based upon an investigation and historical comparison of the transnational relations established between two organizations founded in Italy and Yugoslavia during the antifascist Resistance, namely the Union of Italian Women (udi) and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž). As we have seen in Chapter 2, these organizations came into being to support the ongoing liberation struggle, as a result of the strategy of the antifascist popular fronts designed by the international communist movement to fight against Fascism and Nazism. A small number of politicized antifascist women constituted the core of the leadership of these organizations. As a specific case study, I have included the Union of Antifascist Italo-Slovene Women of Trieste (udais). The study of this organisation is useful in exploring the influence of Italian and Yugoslav geopolitical developments in the Italo-Yugoslav border area, which became in the late 1940s a microcosm of global Cold War divides. The activities of Italian, 256 �Yugoslav and Trieste women’s organizations have been considered not only on a local level, but also in relation to the different phases of Cold War women’s internationalism, and particularly in relation to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf, in French fdif, Féderation Démocratique Internationale des Femmes). The udi, the afž and the udais after 1945 were in fact affiliated to this antifascist, pro-Soviet and anti-colonial women’s world organization. The last decade has seen a worldwide growth in the study of Cold War women’s activism. Contrary to the prevailing image of the post-1945 period as a moment of return to order after the break in gender relations provoked by World War ii, recent studies are demonstrating the existence of significant women’s activism in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the United States and Canada in the 1940s and 1950s and during the Cold War era (Cobble 2004; De Haan 2010a; Ghodsee 2010; Horowitz 1998; Laville 2002; Lerner 2002; Michaels 2010; Penn and Massino 2009; Popa 2009; Storrs 2003; Thorn 2010; Weigand 2001). The Italian and Yugoslav cases, however, have been neglected so far, and I am adding a new perspective based on these cases, by situating the history of women’s activism in a broader historical and geopolitical context. Against the anti-communist representation of internationalist women’s organizations as “chains of transmissions” of Soviet propaganda, I have explored the specificities and the complexities of women’s antifascist activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia. I have demonstrated that women’s political engagement was not only a result of Cold War ideological divides, but that it also grew out of the long-standing struggle between Fascism and antifascism in the interwar period and during World War ii. Moreover, women’s national identities in Italy and Yugoslavia did not disappear during their transnational encounters. Rather, as noted by scholars working on international and transnational women’s movements (Carlier 2010; Rupp and Taylor 1999; Zimmermann 2005), antifascist women’s national identities were reformulated and strengthened in international and transnational settings. In Chapter 3, for instance, I have shown how Italian and Yugoslav women reformulated their national and multi-national78 position in international settings, particularly within the framework of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). In Chapter 7, I have exposed the ways in which the leaders of Yugoslav and Italian women’s organizations formulated a critique of Soviet hegemony within the widf in the mid-1950s. This critique was informed by their political experiences at the local level within their own federal and national contexts. 78 As shown throughout the dissertation, Yugoslavia was a multi-national Federation, and Yugoslav identity was conceptualized by the postwar elite as a socialist, multi-national identification which included the expression of different nationalities, affiliated by the socialist idea of “brotherhood and unity” within the Yugoslav Federation. In the case of Cold War Trieste, national demands were nonetheless expressed in foreign politics on the basis of a common South-Slavic identity and on the basis of the national rights of the Slovene national constituency (see Terzuolo 1985). About intersections of communist and nationalist ideologies, see Lenvai (1969). The idea of multi-national coexistence within a single state started to crumble during the economic crisis and the re-emergence of ethno-nationalist politics in the late 1980s, until the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. About the contested and shifting character of Yugoslavism, see Ðokić (2003); Sekulić, Massey and Hodson (1994). 257 �These examples are coherent with the observations of Werner and Zimmerman (2006) on the dynamic entanglement of transnational, national, and local scales within transnational history.79 I have described multiple forms of women’s transnational activism during the Cold War period, showing that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations provided women with imaginary and physical connections across borders, not only between the Italo-Yugoslav border and between West and East, but also between the West, the Second World and the Third World. Contrary to the representation of women’s transnational activism as a post-1989 phenomenon, I have demonstrated that multiple revolutionary networks and border crossings were established despite the existence of the “Iron Curtain”. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Adriatic region and the Italo-Yugoslav border area became an ambivalent Cold War “buffer zone”. In Italy, the mass support gained by the communist party provoked the intervention of the United States in support of moderate, capitalist forces. After having been the “dutiful daughter” of the Soviet Union, and a supporter of revolutionary movements in South-Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia was expelled from the socialist bloc, and gravitated towards the Western sphere of influence. In the mid-1950s, Yugoslav authorities used their “in-between” position to co-found the Non-Aligned Movement (nam), affiliating countries from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As I have shown, Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia, and were forced to adjust their local and transnational strategies according to the aforementioned geopolitical changes: the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the socialist bloc, the de-Stalinization of 1956, which led to Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, and the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. Through the Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia, I have argued, many women actively took part in the political and ideological struggles of the Cold War. Women’s political engagements during the Cold War were different, shifting and complex. Within the framework of the udi and of the afž , female militants took different stances, on the basis of their family and class background, their political orientation and their ethnic or national identity. Throughout this thesis, also for comparative reasons, I have mainly focused on the women who constituted the leadership of these two organizations. These women often had a great deal of political and organizational experience gained through antifascist and party activities in the interwar period, and had distinguished themselves during the antifascist Resistance. As communist (or socialist, in the case of Italy) party militants, the afž and udi leaders were appointed to lead the antifascist women’s organizations on the basis of the egalitarian discourse of women’s emancipation promoted by their respective parties. As I have exemplified in Chapters 3 and 6, on the one hand the political subjectivity of antifascist female leaders passed through an identification with universal party 79 “Within a histoire croisée perspective, the transnational cannot simply be considered as a supplementary level to be added to the local, regional, and national levels according to a logic of a change in focus. On the contrary, it is apprehended as a level that exists in interaction with the others, producing its own logic and feedback effects upon other space-structuring logics” (Werner and Zimmermann 2006: 43). 258 �work, so that many of them were not keen to engage in “feminine work”, or “work among women”, a task that appeared as secondary and less valued. On the other hand, on the basis of socialist egalitarianism, many female militants genuinely engaged in the task of ameliorating women’s life conditions across their countries, promoting women’s juridical, social and economic rights. As shown in Chapter 6, afž and udi campaigns in the early Cold War period mainly targeted the illiteracy, poverty, inferiority and over-exploitation of women in the most rural, patriarchal regions of Yugoslavia and Italy. In this enormous task, afž and udi militants had to face the opposition of local male comrades, who were attached to their patriarchal privileges. Their loyalty towards women-based activism thus conflicted with their party loyalty. This comparative analysis clearly highlights that, for this region of Europe, changes in women’s forms of political participation cannot be disconnected from broader processes of political and social change. The Italian and Yugoslav liberation movements drew into politics masses of citizens who had been previously excluded from decisionmaking processes, namely the working class and the peasantry. The post-’45 climate also brought an unprecedented attention towards forms of labor and exploitation, included women’s productive and reproductive labor, and towards their life conditions as workers, citizens and mothers. Within this framework of working class and peasant struggles, of antifascist Resistance and reconstruction, women entered politics in Italy and Yugoslavia. When accessing the public sphere, they demanded to end women’s traditional inferiority – as juridical beings and as human beings. The framing of the “women’s question” within Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations cannot be separated from this context of postwar national reconstruction. The influence of the Soviet model of gender equality on the Italian and Yugoslav communist parties and women’s organizations is also particularly significant. Because of the lack of autonomy of antifascist women’s organizations from their respective communist parties, as argued in Chapter 1, feminist historiography in Italy and Yugoslavia tended to read the history of these organizations as a missed opportunity when it comes to the subversion of traditional gender roles (Sklevicky 1989b; 1996; Casalini 2005; Kemp and Bono 1993). The feminist reading of the Cold War period as a moment of conservatism and moderation is a European phenomenon (Duchen and Bandhauer-Schoffmann 2000). The representation of the Cold War era as one in which women’s activism was lacking is even stronger in the case of Eastern European socialist countries (Penn and Massino 2009). Throughout my study I have contended that Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations’ lack of political autonomy cannot be equated to a lack of political agency. Instead, women’s organizations played an important role locally and internationally after 1945. At the local level, women’s organizations and their leaders strived to ameliorate women’s life conditions, at the juridical, social and econonomic level. Internationally, meanwhile, they took side in ongoing Cold War ideological and political struggles. As shown in Chapters 4 and 7 taking sides could mean fostering cooperation across the Italo-Yugoslav border and within the widf. It could also mean, however, as made evident in Chapter 5, a form of complicity with processes of Cold War othering, enemy-making and intra-communist political repression. The topic of the Soviet-Yugoslav 259 �split of 1948, and of its impact on women’s organizations, was the most difficult to untangle. On the one hand, the secondary literature on this theme is particularly scarce (see Jambrešić-Kirin 2009); on the other hand, the research showed the ambivalences of women’s political agency, which did not consist only of peace making, but also of enemy making and top-down control. In different parts of the dissertation I have highlighted the ambivalence and complexity of women’s political agency in the Cold War period, notably when it came to the female leaders of the udi and the afž. I have explored their position towards non-politicized women and rank-and-file members, a position that was modeled according to the Leninist, pedagogical framework of the communist left. When looking at the ambivalences of antifascist women’s organization in the Cold War period, I relied on the critique of socialist authoritarianism and Marxist ideology developed within feminist movements and feminist historiography in Italy and Yugoslavia from the 1970s onwards. As a post-Cold War feminist, I strived to enter into dialogue with the achievements of feminist historiography, while at the same time opening up the archive of women’s Cold War utopian activism, which has receded from view in our current post-Cold War neo-liberal and dystopian era. In this sense, I positioned myself at the crossroad of different spatialities, temporalities, epistemologies and ideologies. Rosi Braidotti (2011a: 109) has emphasized the connection between feminist ethics and the ability to position oneself across shifting temporalities: “A feminist critical position assumes the dislocation of the linearity of time and hence the necessity to inhabit different, and even potentially contradictory, time zones simultaneously: a sort of trip through chronotopia." As Braidotti argues, “[o]n the theoretical level, feminists have developed crucial critiques of ideologies, revisions of the symbolic, and a vast array of countermodels and paradigms to configure the shifts of subjectivity actually in progress in our globalized world.” Time traveling and space traveling across Cold War and post-Cold War borders implied a journey through different forms of gendered subjectivities, epistemic paradigms and worldviews. While investigating the subjectivities of the Cold War antifascist generation, I was aware of the post-1968 feminist critique of communist dogmatism and state authoritarianism. At the same time, raised in the post-Cold War ideology of the “end of ideologies”, I had to re-invent a vocabulary to narrate Cold War women’s struggles against Fascism, imperialism, class divisions, exploitation, poverty and social inequalities, and in order to inscribe the stories of the antifascist generation within Italian, post-Yugoslav and European feminist genealogies. By positioning myself in different spatio-temporal locations, and by listening to the voices of women from the past, as Sklevicky (1996: 69) suggests, I hoped to strike a balance between the “unspent reserves of utopian energy” which were part of antifascist women’s activism in the Cold War era, and the “mistaken choices” leading to the crushing of those same utopian energies during and after the Cold War. In the next section I will address the contribution made by this research to the field of Cold War studies. 260 �2. Gendering Cold War politics In addition to women’s and feminist history, with this research I aim to contribute to the field of Cold War studies, and particularly to the contemporary debates relative to the social and cultural aspects of the postwar and Cold War period (Bessel and Schumann 2003; Caute 2003; Major and Mitter 2004). The cultural and social history of Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area during the Cold War has been mainly read from the perspective of political elites and military leaders. Increasingly however, studies are investigating the effect of Cold War discourses and divisions on the everyday lives of local inhabitants and citizens, including women. By showing that Cold War ideological and political discourses were gendered, and that the mobilization of discourses about women’s emancipation played an important role in the construction of the political legitimacy of socialist regimes, this research has shown the importance of reading Cold War politics from a gendered perspective. Moreover, I have stressed how women’s organizations, and particularly antifascist female leaders, were active producers of Cold War discourses and practices in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Italo-Yugoslav border area. Within the field of Cold War studies there is a growing interest in transnational connections established by non-state actors, such as associations, movements and private individuals. In his survey of recent literature about transnational civil society in the Cold War era, Iriye (2004: 213) defines transnational history as “the study of movements and forces that cut across national boundaries”, a definition which could well apply to Cold War women’s internationalism. In order to stress the importance of physical, but also of imaginary transnational connections across borders, I have made use of the concept of “dreamworlds” coined by Buck-Morrs (2000). I have indicated that Italian and Yugoslav women’s antifascist organizations provided their members with physical, but also with imaginary transnational connections. Competing Cold War “dreamworlds” faced each other at the Italo-Yugoslav border, which was simultaneously the border between democracy and totalitarianism, or, inversely, the divide between imperialism and people’s democracy (see also Mihelj 2009). Within the framework of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, transnational encounters between women of different nationalities were organized, connecting women’s movements in the West, the Second World and the Third World. Through the mediation of Cold War women’s organizations, Italian and Yugoslav militants felt connected to international women’s movements, from the struggles of antifascist women in fascist Spain to the anti-colonial wars of Indonesia and Algeria. What has emerged, furthermore, is the connection between individual subjectivities and collective myths, or, in other words, the role played by affectivity in shaping Cold War political engagements. Kertzer’s (1996) political ethnography of a pci section in 1980s Bologna made evident the importance of symbols, rituals and myths in the creation of communist identities. Kertzer argued that narratives and myths of evil and salvation were fundamental to the construction of militant subjectivities: “[f]or the Italian Communists these sacred tales – tales of the October Revolution, the heroic Resistance, the battle of the working class against capitalism and imperialism – un- 261 �derlay not only their identity but also their sense that they were the chosen people. It was they who were at the vanguard of history” (1996: 8). The antifascist Resistance was a veritable foundation myth for the Yugoslav and the Italian communist parties, and further studies are needed in order to assess the mobilization of this myth in the Cold War period (for the case of Eastern Germany, see Epstein 2003). It would be worthwhile to investigate further how “broken myths” and sudden changes in “Truth” – such as the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948, or the de-Stalinization of 1956 – affected militants and common citizens in Italy, Yugoslavia and the ItaloYugoslav border area. As shown in Chapter 5 and 7, Italian and Yugoslav left-wing forces – including antifascist women’s organizations – have been greatly affected by these geopolitical transformations. In these chapters I contribute to the specific Cold War history of the Italo-Yugoslav border area, and of the city of Trieste in particular, investigating the impact of the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948 and of the subsequent reconciliation of 1956 on left wing forces. I retrace the history of the Union of Antifascist Italo-Slovene Women (udais), founded in 1945, which after 1948 was split into two opposing women’s organizations, a pro-Soviet (udd) and a pro-Tito one (usi). The reactions of Trieste militants towards the process of de-Stalinization, and the difficult reconciliation between pro-Cominform and pro-Tito militants – including women – confirms that political engagements during the Cold War were not simply a matter of rational choice (Kertzer 1996). For communist militants, the political engagement assumed a totalizing aspect, which was interwoven with one’s sense of selfhood and integrity. More specific studies are necessary to investigate the long-standing divided memories provoked by the Soviet-Yugoslav split, not only in Yugoslavia, but also in Italy, the Italo-Yugoslav border area, and in other countries of South-Eastern Europe.80 When it comes to Cold War history “from below”, documentary films based on oral history interviews can be a powerful resource, and can suggest possible directions for future inquiries into the contradictions of Cold War history in the region of Southern and South-Eastern Europe. In his latest documentary, acclaimed Serbian film director Želimir Žilnik focuses precisely on the life story of a woman to retell the complex and shifting political history of South-Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The film, titled “One Woman – One Century” (Jedna Žena – Jedan Vek), tells the life story of 99 years old Dragica Vitolović Srzentić, born in 1912 in Sovinjak, Istria, a village that was under the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1919 and part of the Kingdom of Italy until 1943.81 At 17 years old Dragica moved to Belgrade, then the capital of the 80 During a conversation with Metka Gombač, archivist and historian at the Slovenian State archives in Ljubljana, she told me the story of her father-in-law, originary from a Slovene village near Trieste. After having fought side by side as partisans, he and his best friend did not speak for fifty years as a result of the Cominform Resolution. In that village, to this day, old people bitterly remember who was pro-Vidali (pro-Moscow) and who was pro-Babić (pro-Tito) in 1948. In Italy itself, the communist narrative about Tito’s “betrayal” of the socialist camp has merged with post-Cold War nationalist narratives about the violence of Yugoslav partisans’ retaliations after 1945. See Di Gianantonio (2007). 81 After 1943 the village was part of the Nazi occupied area of the Adriatisches Kunstenland during the war; from 1945 it became part of socialist Yugoslavia, and in 1991 of the new 262 �Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where she got involved in left-wing revolutionary movements. As a partisan during World War ii, she was sent in a private jet to London to report on the victory of the Yugoslav Resistance on the bbc in 1945. A secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of socialist Yugoslavia in 1948, Dragica was personally in charge of delivering the correspondence between Tito and Stalin. Disagreeing with the SovietYugoslav break, however, she was arrested and harshly persecuted for more than three years as “Cominformist”, while her husband, also part of the communist leadership, was deported to the prison camp of Goli Otok. Despite these events, in 2011 Dragica still declared herself a “leftist” (levičarka). She recalled the utopian ideals of her antifascist generation, she denounced the authoritarianism of the socialist regime and finally she expressed a deep sadness for the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Stories like the one of Dragica Vitolović Srzentić, therefore, seem to contain and express both the utopias of the antifascist generation and the terrible violence of twentieth century Europe. Indeed, I have demonstrated that oral history interviews and autobiographies can constitute a powerful source for a cultural and social study of the Cold War.82 They can become an important complementary source for Cold War studies when archive documents are silent, or when the end of the Cold War provides researchers with the possibility to tell stories – and particularly women’s stories – that could not be narrated before. 3. Post-Cold War feminist narratives While certain stories could only be told after the end of the Cold War, other stories have been forgotten or deliberately rewritten after 1989, as a result of the epistemic rupture provoked by the end of the Cold War. Marisa Rodano, former member of the Italian Communist Party and president of the udi, wrote in her recent autobiography that “the person who believed in the revolution is placed today in a diasporic situation; it is not the land, nor the monuments which are missing, it is the broken historical continuity, and with that the continuity and the development and the tiresome critical evolution of ideas, all that could make clear and understandable for the others, and thus, in a mirror, also for one self, the reasons of one’s own acts, of what one has been.” (Rodano 2008a: 105. Emphasis added). Another more tragic epistemological rupture to take into account when working on the successor states of the former Yugoslavia independent Croatia. As Braidotti (2011a: 31) notes, “Such is the fate of borderlands in the old continent of Europe: points of transition across the multiple geographical, ethnic and linguistic dividing lines: they never sit still, but rather shift with incredible violence.” 82 Another documentary dealing with the effects of sudden geopolitical events on people’s lives is Divorce Albanian style (Peeva, 2007). It tells the stories of Albanian male citizens who married Polish, Russian or Czech women after World War ii, when internationalist brotherhood was promoted through cultural and professional exchanges. When in 1961 Albania broke off its relations with the Soviet Union and the rest of the socialist bloc, these men were forced to divorce their foreign wives, who were in turn charged with espionage and expelled from the country, or, alternatively, spent years in prison. 263 �is the rupture provoked by “the last wars”. Feminist anthropologist, anti-war activist and pioneer of gender studies in the region, Žarana Papić (1950-2002) describes the conflicts of the 1990s as a “destabilization of the previous perception and intelligibility of the balance between past, present and future." Papić states: “It is a new, mutated totality of the past, present, and future, dramatically imposed on all people who lived (now expelled or dead) or are still living in the region — it is not the past we thought we knew, nor the present we thought we had been living, nor the future we thought we could foresee and expect. The catastrophic drama of Yugoslavia’s “eventfulness” shows how the “transition” of one socio-political system may turn into a disaster for both humans and civilization”(1999: 157. Emphasis added). When working on this study, this description of the epistemological break caused by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s helped me to imagine how uncertain and disrupted the European landscape in 1945 must have looked. At the time, however, fascism had been defeated, and the antifascist narratives of the postwar era in Italy and Yugoslavia privilege this sense of victory and the enthusiasm for the reconstruction. In order to get on with life Europe deliberately forgot about destruction, death and the millions of war victims, particularly the Jewish victims of the Holocaust (see Bessel and Schumann, 2003). During the period going from 1945 to 1989, both Italy and Yugoslavia witnessed extraordinary changes in economic, political, social and cultural life. Both countries underwent an unprecedented period of modernization, urbanization and economic development. Education and welfare provisions were extended to the majority of Italian and Yugoslav citizens. From 1991 onwards, the political landscape of South-Eastern Europe was once again turned upside down by violent ethnic, gendered and class warfare (Papić 1994, 2002; Iveković and Mostov 2002). This violent, dramatic “transition” – together with its hundreds of thousands of civilians killed or displaced – provoked a regression in terms of economic and social life, and a re-traditionalisation of gender relations. The wars also produced new ethnic divisions (Žarkov 2007). Significantly, the concepts of fascism and antifascism did not cease to be used in the post-Yugoslav successor states, but were invested with new meanings. In the fight against nationalism and historical revisionism, the memories of the antifascist Resistance and of the socialist past became resources to be activated against oblivion. In relation to the former Yugoslav context, scholars have noted that nostalgia can take the form of individual paralysis or collective escapism towards war responsibility and complicity (Volčić 2007); on the other hand, it can also draw on the memories of past social justice and multicultural coexistence to criticize present injustices, ethnic discriminations and amnesia, expressing a fundamental “wish for better times” (Velikonja 2008: 132–133).83 In the Italian context of the 1990s and 2000s, similarly, the memory of antifascism was reactivated against the right-wing political hegemony, and against raising social inequalities, state racism and widespread violence against women. The stories of the women’s antifascist Resistance started to be re-appropriated and re-signified as resources for feminist activism, 83 About the phenomenon of nostalgia in Eastern Europe and in the former Yugoslavia, see Todorova (2010); Luthar and Pušnik (2010). 264 �against neo-liberal, nationalist and xenophobic “master narratives” which are dominating the contemporary post-Cold War, European context.84 Post-Cold War alternative narratives of the past, in my view, are an example of what Claire Hemmings defines as “recitation”. According to Hemmings (2011: 181) recitation is not the telling of a new story, bur rather “a renarration of the same story from a different perspective. It operates as a breaking open of the presumed relation between the past and the present, rather than as an instantiation of a new, fixed relation between the two.” Recitation thus becomes “an intervention, a mode of engagement that values the past by understanding it affectively and politically rather than in terms of finality." Women’s activism in the Cold War era can thus become, through recitation, a resource for post-Cold War feminist narratives, “inviting back” (Hemmings 2011) the antifascist generation in our transnational feminist genealogies. A renewed interested in Cold War women’s activism in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, and the possibility to combine antifascist and feminist genealogies in post-Cold War feminist narratives, is made evident by a recent feminist manifesto, ironically called: “Neo-afž: Revolution without Premeditation” (Žabić 2011). The author, together with another activist friend, started to write poetry and graffiti under the name of “Neo-afž” in 2001, re-appropriating the name of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia.85 Another sign of recitation tactics is a statement made by a feminist collective in Rome for the anniversary of the Liberation, on the 25th of April 2012. The statement is titled: “We are (female) partisans, because we have decided which side we are on."86 I see these two documents – the Neo-afž manifesto and the statement by feminists 84 “In the xenophobic social climate of contemporary Europe, these traditional values once again produce hierarchies of identities, cultures, and even civilizational belongings. In other words, the deterministic reassertion of differences introduces structural patterns of mutual exclusion at the national, regional, provincial, or even more local level. These master narratives are not “new” in any historical or theoretical sense, but they have gained a renewal of interest and a new momentum in the present context, under the combined impact of the new technologies and the triumphant, post-cold war neoliberal belief in the capitalist market economy as the allegedly highest form of human evolution” (Braidotti 2011b: 171). 85 “Considering that the organization had been gone for 50 years, the acronym was still used remarkably widely, and I remember how people in Vukovar would often joke about contemporary women’s organizations, calling us the afž, not without a touch of nostalgia. In Croatia and Serbia in 2001 (…) Yugo-nostalgia grew ever stronger, for an obvious reason: it grew out of frustration with the then current state of affairs, the joblessness, the corruption and the hundreds of thousands of families torn apart and displaced as a result of the wars of the 1990s (…) When one is unable to imagine a better future, one reimagines the past as near utopia” (Žabić 2011: 151). 86 “We are partisans, because we have decided on which side we are (Siamo partigiane, perchè abbiamo scelto da che parte stare). The 25th of April is the anniversary of the Liberation from Nazi-fascism. (…) The politicians will parade and bring flowers, while at the same time they will continue to attack and plunder in the name of profit (…) Being a partisan means to choose which side you are on. So, no self-absolutory parades, no complicity with those responsible for the life we are living, but autonomous and independent initiatives” (Coordinamenta femminista e lesbica di collettivi e singole-Rome, Public statement for the 25th of April 2012). 265 �in Rome – as emblematic of the tendency of post-Cold War feminist narratives to reappropriate the antifascist legacy. At the same time, these contemporary narratives also incorporate the achievements of the feminist second wave. They revive the memory of the antifascist generation while making clear that they would not renounce to the political autonomy gained by 1970s feminism. Žabić (2011), particularly, establishes a post-Cold War feminist genealogy, which includes both the antifascist and the feminist generation. Žabić positions herself as “part of the third, post-socialist generation of feminists” and says that the Neo-afž “intentionally built alliances with both of the previous generations, wary of falling into the same old traps” (Žabić 2011: 152). They thus want to avoid “starting from scratch” and perpetuating amnesia. In my thesis, similarly, I have constructed a post-Cold War narrative about women’s Cold War activism, striving to invite these stories back into the feminist genealogies from which they have been previously excluded, or marginalized. Bridging divides between languages, national borders, temporalities and generations, I have collected some Cold War stories of women’s transnational, revolutionary networks, starting from a post-Cold War, feminist perspective. In Italy and in the post-Yugoslav successor states, further investigations are needed on the actual encounters between different generations of female activists, and on the overlaps and contradictions between women’s antifascist, communist and feminist cultures after 1968. As for trans-European and transnational feminist genealogies, I hope that this study will provoke further debates on women’s transnational networks and traveling theories during the Cold War era, not only across Europe, but also between Europe and the rest of the world. Our contemporary transnational consciousness can allow us to read Cold War women’s history in a different way, challenging the limits dictated by methodological nationalism and Cold War frameworks. By reviving the transnational history of women’s activism in the Cold War era, and by challenging imaginary dichotomies between Europe and the Balkans, or the West and the Rest, post-Cold War feminist narratives of the past can become a resource against contemporary injustice and forgetting. As Braidotti (2011b: 33) writes,“ [w]hat matters ultimately about the job of remembering is the capacity to engender the kind of conditions and relations that can empower creative alternatives.” This project is the result of a long-standing subjective investment, rooted in intersecting paths of personal remembering. A loyalty to my grandmother’s generation, the fact of growing up in a former “red city” after the end of the Cold War, and personal connections with friends from the former Yugoslavia have been crucial elements in shaping my political location. At the same time, the encounter with feminist methodologies and with gender theory have allowed me to connect the personal, the political and the academic, and to transform personal memories into a productive path of scholarly research. Feminist methodologies enabled me to investigate alternative, forgotten knowledges that were not inscribed in post-Cold War master narratives, and to establish an inter-subjective encounter with the women of the antifascist generation. This book pays homage to their different voices, hopes and ideals. It also represents a tribute to antifascist women’s deep belief in the power of education and learning, a belief that was transmitted across generations. 266 �List of abbreviations amg – Allied Military Government – Trieste anpi – Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani/National Association of Italian Partisans avnoj – Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije/ Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia afž – Antifašistički Front Žena/Antifascist Women’s Front * caw – Congress of American Women clnai – Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia/National Liberation Committee for Upper Italy cnl – dat – gdd – Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale/National Liberation Committee Donne Antifasciste Triestine/ Antifascist women of Trieste Gruppi di difesa della donna e per l’assistenza ai combattenti della libertà/ Women’s Groups for Defense and for the Assistance of the Freedom Fighters huac – House Un-American Activities Committee kdaž – Konferencija za Društvenu Aktivnost Žena/Conference for the Social Activities of Women kpj – Komunistička Partija Jugoslavije/Yugoslav Communist Party nov i poj – Narodnooslobodilačka Vojska i partizanski odredi/ Popular liberation army and partisan detachments of Yugoslavia sdž – skj – skoj – Savez Ženskih Društava – Union of Women’s Society Savez Komunista Jugoslavije/ League of Communists of Yugoslavia Savez Komunisticke Omladine Jugoslavije – League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia uais – Unione Antifascista Italo-Slava/Italo-Slav Antifascist Union ✳ Throughout the book I am using the Serbo-Croat abbreviation, afž. Some authors refer to this organization with the English abbreviation, awf. After 1953 the afž was replaced by the Union of Women’s Society (sdž). In 1961 the organization was renamed into the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (kdaž), and this name was maintained until the end of the socialist regime. 267 �udais/asižz – Unione Donne Antifasciste Italo-Slovene/Antifašistične Slovensko-Italijanske Ženske zveze/ Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women udd – Unione Donne Democratiche/Union of Democratic Women udi – Unione Donne Italiane/ Union of Italian Women usi – Unione Socialisti Indipendenti/ Union of Indipendent Socialists pci – Partito comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party pcrg/kpjk – Partito Comunista della Region Giulia/Komunistička Partija Julijska Kraijna/ Communist Party of the Julian Region pctlt – Partito Comunista del Territorio Libero di Trieste/Free Territory of Trieste Communist Party pda – Partito d’Azione/ Action Party psi – Partito socialista Italiano/ Italian Socialist Party tlt/ftt – Territorio Libero di Trieste / Free Territory of Trieste widf/fdif – Women’s International Democratic Federation/Fédération Démocratique Internationale Des Femmes 268 �Bibliography Acerra, Giovanna. 1978. 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While women’s political participation in the Second World War had been studied in detail, women’s political and social activism in Cold War Europe has remained under-researched. In my dissertation, I show the liveliness of women’s political and social activism in Italy and Yugoslavia in the early Cold War period (1945-1957), demonstrating that women’s antifascist organizations played an important role in everyday Cold War politics, at the local and at the international level. The thesis studies in particular the local and international activities of the Union of Italian Women (udi) and of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž), two women’s organizations founded during the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, which continued to play an active political role after 1945. It also takes into account the activities of the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (udais) in the contested border city of Trieste. The dissertation is based on extensive fieldwork research in Italian and former Yugoslav archives. Oral history interviews and autobiographies represent a crucial complement to the archival research. Archival documents, and excerpts from oral history interviews and autobiographies in Italian, Serbo-Croatian and French are translated and organized into a single historical narrative, which demonstrates the entangled history of women’s antifascist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia after 1945. By writing this entangled history, I show that transnational connections were established by women across the Italo-Yugoslav border, and across Cold War borders. I explore the bilateral and multilateral relations of the udi, afž and udais, and their shifting position towards the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). This dissertation is founded upon three main theses. The first thesis is that antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia. Throughout the dissertation, I reconstruct the different forms of women’s activism and explore the complexities and limits of left-wing women’s political agency and subjectivity. I focus in particular on the female leaders of antifascist women’s organizations, and on their position towards the base of rank-and-file militants, and towards the “feminine masses”. My second thesis is that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations were crucial in promoting women’s emancipation in the Cold War period. Antifascist women’s organizations promoted women’s literacy on a large scale, as well as access to work and political participation. On the basis of a Marxist faith in modernization and historical progress, antifascist female leaders fought against women’s juridical, economic and social inferiority. Thirdly, I posit that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations provided women with imaginary and physical connections across Cold War borders, not only between Italy 289 �and Yugoslavia but also between the West, the Second World and the Third World. As I demonstrate, women’s antifascist internationalism allowed progressive ideas about women’s emancipation to circulate across borders. The first chapter of my dissertation contains the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the research. I discuss in detail the different scholarly debates to which I wish to contribute, namely current debates about women’s activism during the Cold War period, as well as debates on European feminist genealogies across East and West. I provide an outline of contemporary scholarly debates about women’s history in Italy and post-Yugoslav successor states, and discuss the possible reasons for which antifascist women’s activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia has been written out of history. In the final part of Chapter 1 I describe the research methodology; I cite the reasons for the choice of an historical narration, and I discuss the types of document analyzed throughout the dissertation. In the remainder of the dissertation I organize the empirical material collected from archival research, oral history interviews and autobiographies in an historical narrative. Chapter 2, Women’s antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, provides an introduction to the complex history of the antifascist Resistance across the Italo-Yugoslav border. The chapter describes how transnational encounters between antifascist women had already started during World War Two, in Fascist jails or in concentration camps, such as the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbruck. I compare the historiography about women’s participation in the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, relying on the secondary literature which describes the foundation of the Italian and Yugoslav women’s antifascist organizations, the Union of Italian Women (udi) and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (afž). Chapter 3, The aftermath of the war: the udi, the afž and the task of reconstruction, examines the post-war activities of the udi and afž at the local level. The chapter shows how antifascist women’s activism continued in the post-war period, notably in the field of reconstruction and social work, as well as in the drafting of women’s political, economic and social rights in the new Yugoslav and Italian Constitutions of 1946. This chapter mainly contributes to the second thesis of this dissertation, demonstrating that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations were crucial in promoting women’s emancipation in the post-war and Cold War period. In contrast to the preceding emphasis on udi and afž local activities in favor of women’s emancipation, Chapter 4, Women’s internationalism after 1945, focuses on the active role played by antifascist women’s organizations in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia, and on the connections established by udi and afž members across borders. Based on extensive archival research, the chapter recounts how Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations established bilateral and multilateral relations within the framework of the newly founded Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf). The case of the antifascist women’s organization of Trieste (udais) is also introduced in this chapter, illustrating how ideas about women’s emancipation circulated at the international, national and local level. Chapter 5, From comrades to traitors: the Cominform Resolution of 1948, provides an analysis of the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948-1949, focusing on its impact on Yugo- 290 �slav, Italian and Italo-Slovene women’s organizations in Trieste. In particular, I discuss the exclusion of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia from the Women’s International Democratic Federation in 1949. The chapter affirms the notion that women’s organizations were active producers of Cold War narratives, and indicates how these narratives contributed to political repression and to the creation of internal and external enemies. The transnational perspective allows me to highlight the role of the widf, the afž, the udi and udais in the production of Cold War narratives, and the part played by the leaders of these organizations in promoting the interests of their respective communist parties at the international level. Chapter 6, Into the field: the afž, the udi and the practice of emancipation, covers a number of activist campaigns conducted by afž and udi in the less developed, rural areas of Italy and Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1953. The campaign against the full veil (feređže) in Yugoslavia and the campaign in favor of Italian women victims of rape by Allied soldiers in wwii are pertinent examples. While the previous chapter examined how women’s organizations aligned themselves with their respective communist parties in international politics, this chapter highlights the conflicts that arose between women’s organizations and communist party cadres at the local level. Issues that have been widely debated by feminist historians, such as the degree of political autonomy of the udi and the afž in the early Cold War period, as well as the dissolution of the afž in 1953, are discussed in detail. In Chapter 7, After 1956: national ways to women’s emancipation, I analyze the changes in the Cold War geopolitics of 1956, and its effects on women’s organizations in Italy, Yugoslavia and Trieste. In this chapter I discuss Italian and Yugoslav female leaders’ critique of Soviet hegemony. I examine how Italian antifascist leaders worked to transform the methods and goals of the Women’s International Democratic Federation by strengthening the focus on women’s rights. I look, moreover, at Yugoslav female leaders’ engagement in the politics of Non-Alignment, in connection with Third World women’s organizations and decolonization movements. The main three theses of the dissertation are reestablished in this chapter: Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics, favoring the transnational circulation of progressive ideas about women’s rights across Cold War borders. In my concluding chapter, I first stress the contribution made to the field of women’s and feminist history, particularly to the growing literature about women’s transnational activism during the Cold War. Also, I reflect on the implications of the dissertation for contemporary Italian, post-Yugoslav and European feminist genealogies. Secondly, I specify the contribution made to the field of Cold War studies. I underline the importance of studying Cold War history from a gender and women’s history perspective, and offer suggestions for future research. Finally, I point out the implications of this work for post-Cold War scholarly research. I reflect upon the relevance of my study for contemporary post-Cold War feminist narratives, and suggest possible directions for future studies in the field of women’s history and feminist historiography. 291 �Samenvatting De Koude Oorlog is over het algemeen voorgesteld als een conservatief tijdperk als het gaat om het activisme van vrouwen. Terwijl hun politieke participatie in de Tweede Wereldoorlog tot in detail is onderzocht, is het politieke en maatschappelijke activisme van vrouwen in het Europa van de Koude Oorlog onvoldoende bestudeerd. In mijn proefschrift bespreek ik het levendige politieke en maatschappelijke activisme van vrouwen in Italië en Joegoslavië in de vroege periode van de Koude Oorlog (1945-1957). Antifascististische vrouwenorganisaties speelden een belangrijke rol in de dagelijkse koudeoorlogspolitiek, zowel op lokaal als international niveau. In mijn proefschrift bestudeer ik in het bijzonder de lokale en internationale activiteiten van de Unie van Italiaanse Vrouwen (udi) en het Joegoslavische Antifascistische Vrouwenfront (afž). Deze twee vrouwenorganisaties, die werden opgericht ten tijde van de antifascistische verzetsbeweging in Italië en Joegoslavië, speelden ook een actieve politieke rol in de naoorlogse periode. Er wordt in het proefschrift ook aandacht geschonken aan de activiteiten van de Unie van Italiaans-Sloveense Antifascistische Vrouwen (udais) in de betwiste grensstad Triëst. Het proefschrift is gebaseerd op uitgebreid veldwerk in archieven in Italië en voormalig Joegoslavië, aangevuld met cruciale oral history interviews en autobiografieën. Archiefdocumenten en fragmenten uit oral history interviews en Franse, Italiaanse en Servo-Kroatische autobiografieën zijn vertaald en geordend in één enkel historisch verhaal. In dit verhaal komt de complexe, naoorlogse geschiedenis van antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties in Italië en Joegoslavië tot leven. Het schrijven van deze complexe geschiedenis stelde me in staat om aan te tonen hoe vrouwen transnationale verbanden aangingen over de Italiaans-Joegoslavische grens en koudeoorlogsgrenzen heen. Ik verken de bilaterale, multilaterale betrekkingen tussen de udi, afž en udais, en hun verschuivende positie ten opzichte van de Internationale Democratische Vrouwenfederatie (widf). De drie voornaamste stellingen in dit proefschrift zijn: ten eerste, antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties speelden een actieve rol in de dagelijkse Italiaanse en Joegoslavische koudeoorlogspolitiek. Ik reconstrueer in het proefschrift steeds welke vormen het activisme van vrouwen aannam, waarbij ik ook de complexiteit en de beperkingen van progressief-politieke agency en de subjectiviteit van vrouwen exploreer. Ik richt me daarbij vooral op de vrouwelijke leiders van antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties en hun positie ten aanzien van hun militante achterban en de “vrouwelijke massa”. Mijn tweede stelling is dat Italiaanse en Joegoslavische antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties van cruciaal belang waren voor de bevordering van vrouwenemancipatie tijdens de Koude Oorlog. Antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties stimuleerden op grote schaal de geletterdheid van vrouwen, evenals hun toegang tot werk 292 �en politieke participatie. Vanuit een marxistisch geloof in modernisering en historische vooruitgang bestreden vrouwelijke antifascistische leiders de minderwaardige positie van vrouwen op juridisch, economisch en maatschappelijk gebied. Ten derde, Italiaanse en Joegoslavische antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties stelden vrouwen in staat om imaginaire en fysieke verbindingen te onderhouden die de koudeoorlogsgrenzen overschreden, waarbij ik niet alleen doel op de Italiaans-Joegoslavische grens, maar ook op de grenzen tussen het Westen, de tweede wereld en de derde wereld. De antifascistische internationalisering van vrouwen veroorzaakte een uitwisseling van progressieve ideeën over vrouwenemancipatie die over grenzen heen reikte. Het eerste hoofdstuk van het proefschrift bevat mijn theoretische en methodologische onderzoekskader. Ik leg gedetailleerd uit aan welke wetenschappelijke debatten ik een bijdrage wil leveren, namelijk hedendaagse discussies over het activisme van vrouwen tijdens de Koude Oorlog en debatten over Europese feministische genealogieën in het Oosten en het Westen. Ik geef een overzicht van hedendaagse wetenschappelijke debatten over de de geschiedenis van vrouwen in Italië en in de post-Joegoslavische opvolgerstaten. En ik bespreek waarom en op welke manier het antifascistische verzet van vrouwen in Italië en Joegoslavië ten tijde van de Koude Oorlog buiten de geschiedschrijving is gehouden. In het laatste deel van hoofdstuk 1 beschrijf ik mijn onderzoeksmethodologie; ik leg uit waarom ik voor een historische vertelling heb gekozen en bespreek de verschillende soorten documenten die ik in dit proefschrift analyseer. In de rest van het proefschrift voeg ik het empirische materiaal dat ik ontleen aan archiefonderzoek, oral history interviews en autobiografieën samen tot één historisch verhaal. Hoofdstuk 2, Het antifascistische verzet van vrouwen in Italië en Joegoslavië, biedt een inleiding op de complexe geschiedenis van het anti-fascistische verzet over de Italiaans-Joegoslavische grens heen. In de Tweede Wereldoorlog waren er al transnationale ontmoetingen tussen antifascistische vrouwen geweest, bijvoorbeeld in fascistische gevangenissen of concentratiekampen, zoals het vrouwenkamp Ravensbrück. Ik vergelijk de geschiedschrijving over de deelname van vrouwen aan het antifascistische verzet in Italië en Joegoslavië, met een beroep op de secondaire literatuur over de oprichting van Italiaanse en Joegoslavische antifascistische vrouwenorganizaties, als de Unie van Italiaanse Vrouwen (udi) en het Joegoslavische Antifascistische Vrouwenfront (afž). In hoofdstuk 3, De nasleep van de oorlog: de udi, de afž en de wederopbouw, onderzoek ik de naoorlogse, lokale activiteiten van de udi en de afž. Het hoofdstuk laat zien hoe vrouwen na de oorlog hun antifascistische activisme voortzetten, met name op het gebied van de wederopbouw, het maatschappelijke werk en de wetgeving (met name hun bemoeienis met de opname van politieke, economische en sociale vrouwenrechten in de nieuwe Joegoslavische en Italiaanse grondwetten van 1946). Dit hoofstuk draagt voornamelijk bij aan de tweede stelling van dit proefschrift, omdat het aantoont dat Italiaanse en Joegoslavische antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties cruciaal waren bij het bevorderen van vrouwenemancipatie in de naoorlogse periode en tijdens de Koude Oorlog. 293 �Waar hoofdstuk 3 de nadruk legt op de lokale activiteiten van de udi en afž ter bevordering van de vrouwenemancipatie, richt hoofdstuk 4, De internationalisering van vrouwen na 1945, zich op de actieve rol van Italiaanse en Joegoslavische antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties in de koudeoorlogspolitiek, en de internationale connecties van udi en afž leden. Dit hoofdstuk is gebaseerd op diepgaand archiefonderzoek en beschrijft hoe Italiaanse en Joegoslavische vrouwenorganisaties bilaterale en multilaterale relaties onderhielden in het kader van de nieuw opgerichte Internationale Democratische Vrouwenfederatie (widf). Het hoofdstuk introduceert ook de antifascistische vrouwenorganisatie van Triëst (udais) als voorbeeld van de manier waarop ideeën over vrouwenemancipatie circuleerden op internationale, nationale en lokale niveaus. In hoofdstuk 5, Van kameraden tot verraders: de Cominform Resolutie uit 1948, wordt de breuk tussen de Sovjet-Unie en Joegoslavie uit 1948-1949 geanalyseerd. De analyse richt zich op de impact van deze breuk op de Joegoslavische, Italiaanse en Italiaans-Sloveense vrouwenorganisaties in Triëst. Ik besteed vooral aandacht aan de manier waarop het Joegoslavische Antifascistische Vrouwenfront buiten de Internationale Democratische Vrouwenfederatie werd gehouden. Dit hoofdstuk bevestigt de idee dat vrouwenorganisaties actief koudeoorlogverhalen produceerden en legt uit hoe deze verhalen bijdroegen aan politieke repressie en de schepping van interne en externe vijanden. Mijn transnationale perspectief belicht de rol van de widf, afž, udi en udais in de productie van koudeoorlogverhalen, en de manier waarop de leiders van deze vrouwenorganisaties de belangen van hun respectievelijke communistische partijen internationaal behartigden. Hoofdstuk 6, In het veld: afž, udi en de praktijk van de emancipatie, heeft betrekking op een aantal activistische campagnes van de afž and udi in de onder ontwikkelde, landelijke gebieden van Italië en Joegoslavië in de periode 1948-1953. Relevante voorbeelden daarvan zijn de campagnes tegen de hoofddoek (feređže) in Joegoslavië en de campagne ten bate van de Italiaanse slachtoffers van verkrachtingen door geallieerde soldaten. Waar het vorige hoofdstuk onderzocht hoe vrouwenorganisaties zich in de internationale politiek verbonden met hun communistische partijen, bespreek ik in dit hoofdstuk de conflicten tussen vrouwenorganisaties en het lokale, communistische partijkader. Feministische historici hebben bepaalde kwesties, zoals de mate van politieke autonomie van de udi en afž aan het begin van de Koude Oorlog en de ontbinding van de afž in 1953, uitgebreid besproken. Ik kom in dit hoofdstuk gedetailleerd terug op deze kwesties. In hoofstuk 7, Na 1956: nationale wegen naar de emancipatie van vrouwen, analyseer ik de geo-politieke veranderingen in de Koude Oorlog uit 1956, en hun effect op vrouwenorganisaties in Italië, Joegoslavië en Triëst. De kritiek van Italiaanse en Joegoslavische vrouwelijke leiders op de Sovjet hegemonie staat centraal in dit hoofdstuk. Ik onderzoek hoe Italiaanse, antifascistische leiders de methoden en doelen van de Internationale Democratische Vrouwenfederatie versterkten door zich op vrouwenrechten te concentreren. Bovendien bespreek ik de betrokkenheid van deze leiders bij de politiek van de Non-Alignment, in relatie tot vrouwenorganisaties in de Derde Wereld en dekolonisatie-bewegingen. De drie stellingen in het hart van dit proef- 294 �schrift worden bevestigd in dit hoofdstuk: Italiaanse en Joegoslavische antifascistische vrouwenorganisaties speelden een actieve rol in de dagelijkse koudeoorlogs politiek. Zij bevorderden de transnationale circulatie van progressieve ideeën over vrouwenrechten over de grenzen van de Koude Oorlog heen. In mijn afsluitende hoofdstuk benadruk ik de bijdrage van dit proefschrift aan vrouwengeschiedenis en feministische geschiedenis, in het bijzonder de groeiende literatuur over het transnationale activisme van vrouwen tijdens de Koude Oorlog. Ik denk in dit laatste hoofdstuk ook na over de implicaties van dit proefschrift voor hedendaagse Italiaanse, post-Joegoslavische en Europese feministische genealogieën. Ten tweede specificeer ik mijn bijdrage aan Koude Oorlog-Studies. Ik onderstreep het belang van het gender en vrouwengeschiedenis perspectief voor de studie van Koude Oorlog-geschiedenis en doe voorstellen voor toekomstig onderzoek. Als laatste wijs ik op de implicaties van dit proefschrift voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar de periode na de Koude Oorlog. Ik reflecteer op de relevantie van mijn proefschrift voor hedendaagse feministische verhalen over de periode na de Koude Oorlog en doe suggesties voor toekomstige studies in vrouwengeschiedenis en feministische historiografie. 295 �Biography Chiara Bonfiglioli was born on January 24, 1983 in Bologna, Italy. In 2005 she obtained a bachelor in Cultures and Human Rights (cum laude) at the Faculty of Political Sciencies, University of Bologna. In 2008 she completed a Research Master in Gender and Ethnicity (cum laude) at the University of Utrecht, with a thesis based on oral history interviews, addressing transnational encounters between Yugoslav and Western European feminist women in the late 1970s. The title of her ma thesis was Belgrade, 1978. Remembering the conference «Drugarica Žena. Žensko Pitanje – Novi Pristup?»/ «Comrade Woman.The Women’s Question: A New Approach?» thirty years after. Between 2008 and 2012, she carried out her PhD at the Research Institute for History and Culture (ogc), Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University, with a project titled Revolutionary Networks. Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957). Chiara has taught on feminist history, gender and globalization, post-colonial and post-socialist studies. She has published several essays in Italian, English and French on women’s and feminist history and politics in the European context, particularly on second wave feminist movements in Italy and Yugoslavia, on intersections of racism and sexism in Italy and on the headscarf debate in France. 296 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Istraživački radovi Ostalo Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Revolutionary networks - Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957) - Chiara Bonfiglioli Description An account of the resource Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University, 2012. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived https://www.academia.edu/3025831/Revolutionary_networks._Women_s_political_and_social_activism_in_Cold_War_Italy_and_Yugoslavia_1945-1957_ Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost Crvena, Utrecht University Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 10-IR Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 296 pages Chiara Bonfiglioli Cold war Italy political and social activism women Yugoslavia http://afzarhiv.org/files/original/21d987d9318f1e11a52a8330d42b45de.pdf 0b911d044a796110c922581ef2775d6d PDF Text Text 4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project      EXPLORE NEWS EVENTS ABOUT SUBMISSIONS Partizanke Their dangerous legacy in the post-Yugoslav space 1st April 2016 Chiara Bon glioli is currently Newfelpro post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism (CKPIS), Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia. From 2012 to 2014, she has been a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, within the framework of the CITSEE project (The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the former Yugoslavia). Her doctoral http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 1/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project dissertation dealt with women’s political and social activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957). She has published extensively on gender history in the post-Yugoslav space, and is currently researching women’s labour in the garment industry during socialism and after post-socialist transition. The contribution of partizanke, or female partisan ghters, to the Yugoslav liberation war was unprecedented in occupied Europe: of cial statistics of the socialist period report 100,000 women ghting as partisans, and two million participating in various ways to the support of the National Liberation Movement. Approximately 25,000 women died in battle, 40,000 were wounded, and 2,000 of them acquired the of cer’s rank, while 92 women were designated as national heroes. Women of all nationalities and ages performed a variety of tasks, particularly as ghters and nurses in the army, but also as couriers, cooks and typists. Women also played a very important role away from the front, working in agriculture, bringing supplies to the troops and taking care of the wounded and the orphans, especially within the framework of the Antifascist Women’s Front (AFŽ). [1] The Antifascist Women’s Front was founded in an attempt to mobilise large masses of women in the struggle against the occupation. Since the majority of the population lived at the time in rural areas, the National Liberation Movement strived to gain consensus among peasant women, which were the majority at the time in Yugoslavia. The support of the female population in the villages became crucial for partisans’ victory. [2] The rst generation of AFŽ leaders – who were also former partisans and communist party members – included many outstanding women from all over Yugoslavia, generally highly educated and from families with a tradition of leftist engagement. They took part in illegal revolutionary activities in the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, after the banning of the communist party in 1921. They often joined legal women’s and youth organizations, spreading socialist and antifascist ideas. Women in the communist leadership embodied a radically different femininity than the majority of peasant women living in Yugoslavia at the time, as made evident by this photograph of Judita Alargić, Mitra Mitrović and Vera Zogović, resting between battles in summer 1944 on the Adriatic island of Vis, where the headquarters of the Yugoslav Army had been located after the capitulation of Italy. During World War II, partisan women were dangerous rst of all for their enemies, namely Nazi and Fascist troops and local collaborationist forces, whom they fought with incredible courage and sacri ce, incurring in torture, http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 2/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project deportation to concentration camps, losses of loved ones and death. They were portrayed as ugly, dirty and promiscuous by enemy propaganda, which saw women’s participation to the liberation struggle as something that went against the natural gender order. Partisan women were indeed dangerous for existing patriarchal gender norms. Their participation in the struggle carved new subjectivities for women, whose Judita Alargic, Mitra Mitrovic and Vera Zogovic on the Island of Vis. (Wikipedia – Muzej Istorije Jugoslavije, inv. br. 12011) political, social and economic rights were recognized for the rst time in the Yugoslav constitution of 1946. Through the local and national activities of the Antifascist Women’s Front, moreover, antifascist leaders reached out to the most underdeveloped territories of the Federation, promoting women’s alphabetization and education, healthcare for mothers and children, as well as women’s equal engagement in the processes of postwar reconstruction and industrialisation. Their activities on the ground met the frequent opposition of men and local authorities, including party members, as well as women’s reticence to abandon their traditional customs. [3] At times, prominent female partisans became dangerous for the socialist system they had contributed to create, especially in the aftermath of the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948, when alleged pro-Stalin supporters, including women, were subjected to political repression, prison camps and political ousting. [4] Of the women portrayed in the picture, only Judita Alargić continued to have a relevant political career in socialist institutions, while translator Vera Zogović suffered the consequences of political repression together with her husband, poet Radovan Zogović. Mitra Mitrović was also ousted from politics because of her closeness to Yugoslavia’s most famous dissident, her ex husband Milovan Đilas. Cold War times were complex and dangerous, as exempli ed by Želimir Žilnik’s recent documentary, One Woman One Century (2010). Dragica Vitolović Srzentić (1912-2015), former partisan, rst Yugoslav BBC speaker and diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign affairs, was the one who brought Tito’s letter of insubordination to Stalin in 1948, only to be incarcerated for Stalinism together with her husband three years later. As the movie shows, however, she never regretted her leftist choice nor denied socialism’s progressive tenets. http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 3/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project And here is a dangerous element of the partizanke’s legacy: the complexity of their engagement and of their life trajectories, or, in other words, their irreductible agency during World War II and in its aftermath. While many scholars are keen to study women’s participation in the antifascist resistance, very few are ready to recognise women’s agency in socialist Europe, or the importance of women’s state socialist organisations such as the Antifascist Women’s Front. These organisations and their leaders, in fact, are often seen as too dependent from party politics or the socialist state. The very idea of women’s agency during socialism seems indeed dangerous for some feminist scholars, since it challenges their engrained representation of state socialism as inherently totalitarian and patriarchal, as well as the liberal equation between feminism and women’s autonomy from the state. [5] As other feminist scholars have shown, however, it is time to question preexisting historical interpretations in unced by long-standing Cold War paradigms, which risk reducing women to the mere victims of state socialism, without understanding their actual political contribution in such complex and dangerous times. [6] To silence the legacy of women’s participation to the antifascist Resistance, and their engagements in socialist times, would mean to undermine the struggles against patriarchy that were waged through state socialist women’s organisations, as well as the progressive legacy of such struggles in the contemporary post-Yugoslav space. As Lydia Sklevicky wrote in her pioneering study of the Antifascist Women’s Front, “Listening today to the voices of women from the past, one sees not only the mistaken choices which should not to be repeated, but also the unspent reserves of utopian energy.” And then she added, quoting Walter Benjamin’s Fifth thesis on the concept of history, ‘For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it’. [7] In the contemporary post-Yugoslav space, young activist women recognize themselves in antifascist women’s struggles for women’s rights and emancipation, particularly now that many of the social and economic rights gained during socialist times have been deteriorating due to the Yugoslav wars and the post-socialist privatization process, which led to widespread deindustrialisation and unemployment. [8] In 2010, for instance, architect and curator Ana Džokić revisited the story of her grandparents, Rajka and Vukašin Borojević, two former partisans and social entrepreneurs who founded a juice factory in Banja Luka, as well as cooperative of women weavers in the village of Donji Dubac. The project was signi cantly titled Taking Common Matters into Your Own Hands, as an homage to the socialist legacy of collective solidarity and workers’ self-management. http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 4/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project [9] The gure of Rajka Borojević is exemplary of the idealist spirit carried by partisan women well into the Cold War. A teacher and partisan from Herzegovina, she took shelter with her two children in rural Serbia during the war, and felt indebted to the local peasant population. She moved to the village in the early 1950s, and started her rst workshops with peasant women in 1954, teaching basic hygiene, nutrition, housekeeping and sex education, and overcoming many dif culties, including the mistrust of male villagers. [10] Later she founded the Dragačevo weavers’ cooperative, which employed 420 women in the early 1960s. Women’s position in the village gradually improved, and in 1967, the newly founded House of Culture even hosted the nals of the ‘best husband’ competition. The building itself had been funded with self-organised ‘best husband’ parties in the surrounding villages. [11] Young activists, archivists and scholars are putting renewed efforts in preserving the dangerous legacy of partisan women across the former Yugoslavia. The legacy of workers’ self-management, inter-ethnic solidarity and women’s struggles for emancipation has been taken up as a form of counter-memory by local activists in different post-Yugoslav states, against new hegemonic national narratives centered on ethnic homogeneity and based on the rehabilitation of anti-communist collaborationist forces. Such counter-memories are also serving as a repertoire against the post-socialist retraditionalisation of gender relations and workers’ gradual loss of social rights. [12] The reaf rmation of antifascist values happens through archiving, exhibitions and activist initiatives. Two recent examples of such efforts are the digitalisation of the existing archive of the Antifascist Women’s Front located in Sarajevo by a collective of women artists, [13] and an exhibition on the AFŽ recently organized in Banja Luka, which featured former partisan Branka Bjelajac as a guest. [14] Another example is the Zagreb Antifascist Network (Mreža antifašistkinja Zagreb, MAZ) founded in 2007, which organises antifascist parties, commemorations and solidarity marches. [15] The subversive legacy of workers’ solidarity, women’s struggles and antifascism is also revived by a number of antifascist, feminist and queer choirs across the region, such as Kombinat in Slovenia, Horkestar in Serbia, Le Zbor and Zbor Praksa in Croatia. [16] Such choirs have been performing different local partisan songs, together with other international protest songs (The Internationale, Bella Ciao, Bread and Roses), as a way of protest against current neo-liberal and neohttp://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 5/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project conservative politics, for instance in support of workers of bankrupted factories, or as part of pride marches for LGBT rights. The ‘unspent reserves of utopian energy’ contained in the antifascist heritage are thus re-appropriated and re-signi ed, in multiple dangerous ways, by the nieces and nephews of partizanke, seventy years after the end of World War II.     [1] Barbara Jancar-Webster. Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 (Denver: Arden Press, 1990) [2] Jelena Batinić. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) [3] Chiara Bon glioli, ‘Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia’, Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 8 (2014): 1-25. [4] Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, ‘Yugoslav Women Intellectuals: From a Party Cell to a Prison Cell’, History of Communism in Europe 5 (2014): 36-53. [5] Nanette Funk, ‘A very tangled knot: Of cial state socialist women’s organizations, women’s agency and feminism in Eastern European state socialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21, no. 4 (2014): 344-360. [6] On this discussion, see the two Forums published on the journal Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History: Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in Terminis? 1 (2007); Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited, 10 (forthcoming 2016). [7] Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi (Zagreb: Ženska Infoteka, 1996), 69. [8] Igor Štiks and Srečko Horvat (eds.), Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics After Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2014). [9] See the documentation of the STEALTH research archive (last accessed 18.3.2016). [10] Rajka Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet (Beograd: Etnografski muzej, 2006), rst edition 1964. See also Natalja Herbst, ‘Women in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The Example of Rajka Borojević and the Dragačevo Women’s Cooperative’, in Roswita Kersten-Pejanić, Simone Rajilić, and Christian Voß, (eds.), Doing Gender-Doing the Balkans (München, Berlin, Washington D.C.: http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 6/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012) [11] STEALTH documentation. [12] Chiara Bon glioli, ‘Gender, labour and precarity in the South East European periphery: the case of textile workers in Štip’, Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 1 no. 2 (2014): 7-23. [13] http://www.afzarhiv.org/ [14] “Uspostavljanje izgubljenje veze: AFŽ u Bosanskoj krajini“, Narodna i Univerzitetska Biblioteka Republike Srpske, Banja Luka, Bosnia Herzegovina. [15] www.maz.hr [16] Ana Hofman, Glasba, politika, afekt. Novo življenje partizanskih pesmi v Sloveniji (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2015)   Share this    4  1K+  You may also like Remembering Chrystal Macmillan Dangerous women on the stage Tradition, sexuality and power In "History & Biography" In "Arts & Creativity" In "Human Rights" Posted in Careers & Livelihoods, History & Biography, Identity & Community, Law & Politics, Peace & Con ict / Tagged 20th century, Cold War, Europe, History, marriage, politics, research-led, socialism, War, WWII, Yugoslavia  Margaret Oliphant and the Upending convention  Romantic Novel http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 7/8 �4/7/2016 Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project × Comments for this thread are now closed. 0 Comments  Recommend 1  Dangerous Women Project ⤤ Share Login Sort by Best This discussion has been closed. ✉ Subscribe d Add Disqus to your site Add Disqus Add Privacy Never want to miss a Dangerous Women post? Enter your email address to receive noti cations of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe Terms & conditions | Privacy & cookies | Website accessibility http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/ 8/8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Istraživački radovi Ostalo Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Partizanke - Their dangerous legacy in the post-Yugoslav space - Chiara Bonfiglioli Subject The topic of the resource Partizanke, Drugi svjetski rat, Jugoslavija, AFŽ, NOB Description An account of the resource The Dangerous Women Project is an initiative of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived http://dangerouswomenproject.org/ Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Udruženje za kulturu i umjetnost Crvena The Dangerous Women Project Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01.06.2016. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Chiara Bonfiglioli Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 7-IR Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 8 str. Chiara Bonfiglioli Partisan women World War II Yugoslavia