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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Chiara Bonfiglioli
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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
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Routledge
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2013.
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Routledge, Chiara Bonfiglioli
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English
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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