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The End of the AFŽ – The End of Meaningful Women’s Activism?
Rethinking the History of Women’s Organizations in Croatia, 1953 – 1961
By
Jelena Tesija
Submitted to
Central European University
Department of Gender Studies
In partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts in Gender Studies.
Supervisor: Professor Francisca de Haan
Budapest, Hungary
2014
�Abstract
This thesis, as part of emerging scholarly work on rethinking the complex relations between
feminism and socialism, explores the Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske (Union of Women’s
Societies of Croatia, SŽDH), the women's organization that existed in Yugoslavia from 1953
to 1961. The SŽDH was the successor of the Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s
Front, AFŽ), and while there is ample literature about the activities of the AFŽ, the activities
of its successor organizations are hardly researched. This thesis examines the case of the
SŽDH in order to understand better what was happening in a forgotten period of Yugoslav
women’s history. I first discuss second-wave feminist historians’ perspectives on the AFŽ,
and in particular the fact that that most historians who have written about the AFŽ claim that
its dissolution in 1953, as an autonomous organization, was detrimental for meaningful work
on women’s problems in Yugoslavia. Second, I look at archival documents of the SŽDH. I
approach the material from a bottom-up perspective, which goes against the hegemonic
narrative on communist women’s organizations as being simply obedient “Party tools”. I
research the activities and goals of the SŽDH, the discussions and debates within the
organization as well as the problems that the SŽDH women were facing in their practical
work. I focus on the SŽDH women’s own perspective and the terms which they used
themselves when discussing and explaining their work. Using a bottom-up approach and
avoiding to apply the second-wave feminist “autonomy principle” for a state socialist
women’s organization, this analysis shows that the SŽDH was not simply a “Party tool”. This
research proves that the SŽDH women had their voices and opinions; that they had a wellthought-out strategy and ideas on how to enhance women’s position in the context they lived
in; and that they extensively discussed the SŽDH’s position in the new circumstances of selfmanagement in Yugoslavia.
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�Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my supervisor Francisca de Haan for guidance, extremely helpful
comments and ideas and encouragement during this thesis process. I would also like to thank
my second supervisor Elissa Helms for her support.
My parents were always there for me during my education. I want to thank to mom and dad
for their unconditional emotional and financial support.
I am grateful to Ivana for her assistance from home and to Jelena for technical and emotional
support. I also want to thank Aisuluu for being a friend.
Thanks to Cemre for everything.
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�Table of Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... i
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................. ii
List of abbreviations.............................................................................................................................. v
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1
Sources and Methods........................................................................................................................... 2
Theoretical framework ........................................................................................................................ 4
Women and socialism ..................................................................................................................... 4
Totalitarian model vs. bottom-up approach..................................................................................... 9
Second-wave feminism and the “autonomy principle” ................................................................. 11
How to apply this to Yugoslavia? ..................................................................................................... 16
1. A short history of Yugoslavia ......................................................................................................... 19
1.1. The KPJ, Tito and Yugoslavia in WW2 ..................................................................................... 19
1.2. The Yugoslav specific form of socialism ................................................................................... 22
1.3. Women's position in Yugoslavia ................................................................................................ 25
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 27
2. History and historiography of the AFŽ ......................................................................................... 28
2.1. The women’s movement in Yugoslavia before the AFŽ ........................................................... 29
2.2. The AFŽ (1942-1953) – organizational structure, goals and activities ...................................... 30
2.3. Historians' evaluation of the AFŽ's activities and the changes in its organizational structure ... 34
2.4. Historians’ interpretation of the dissolution of the AFŽ ............................................................ 36
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 41
3. The SŽDH (1953-1961): position, activities, goals and discussions ............................................. 43
3.1. The SŽDH’s structure and activities .......................................................................................... 44
3.2. How should women be organized?............................................................................................. 50
3.3. Polemics over the main goal of the organization ....................................................................... 57
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�3.4. Which problems were the SŽDH women facing in their practical work? .................................. 62
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 65
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 68
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 72
iv
�List of abbreviations
AFŽ - Antifašistički front žena / Antifascist Women’s Front
AFŽH - Antifašistički front žena Hrvatske / Antifascist Women’s Front of Croatia
AFŽJ - Antifašistički front žena Jugoslavije / Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia
AVNOJ - Antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije / Anti-Fascist Council of
the Peoples' Liberation of Yugoslavia
DFJ - Demokratska federativna Jugoslavija / Democratic Federal Yugoslavia
FNRJ - Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija / People’s Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia
GO - Glavni odbor / Main Committee
HR-HDA - Hrvatska-Hrvatski državni arhiv / Croatia-Croatian State Archives
KDAŽ - Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena / Conference for the Social activity of
Women
KDAŽH - Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena Hrvatske / Conference for the Social
Activity of Women of Croatia
KPJ - Komunistička partija Jugoslavije / Communist Party of Yugoslavia
NF - Narodni front / People’s Front
NO - Narodni odbori / People’s Committees
NOF - Narodnooslobodilački front / People’s Liberation Front
NRH - Narodna Republika Hrvatska / People’s Republic of Croatia
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�SKJ - Savez komunista Jugoslavije / League of Communists of Yugoslavia
SSRN - Socijalistički savez radnog naroda / Socialist Alliance of Working People
SSRNH - Socijalistički savez radnog naroda Hrvatske / Socialist Alliance of Working People
of Croatia
SSRNJ - Socijalistički savez radnog naroda Jugoslavije / Socialist Alliance of Working
People of Yugoslavia
SŽD - Savez ženskih društava / Union of Women’s Societies
SŽDH - Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske / Union of Women’s Societies of Croatia
SŽDJ - Savez ženskih društava Jugoslavije / Union of Women’s Societies of Yugoslavia
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�“How was it possible that a tradition of struggle, of commitment with the highest personal
costs, and which could have energized generations of women, had been simply wiped out of
my generation's historical consciousness?”1
Introduction
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Yugoslav feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky2 started to
search for the lost and forgotten history of Yugoslav women and their treatment in the
historiography. She found out from another study (Polić, 1986) that in 1986 in the Yugoslav
educational material women almost did not exist - there were more horses than women in
history schoolbooks from the fifth to eight grades of primary school (1989b: 70). Sklevicky
was the first author who wrote thoroughly about the Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist
Women’s Front, AFŽ), the women’s organization which was formed in the Second World
War in Yugoslavia and which fought actively for women’s liberation. Several historians
followed Sklevicky’s approach to write about the AFŽ’s goals, its activities and the changes
in its organizational structure.
I do not remember, during my education in Croatia in the 1990s and 2000s, that we
were learning about the AFŽ, nothing but the fact that the organization existed. However, at
1
Lydia Sklevicky, 1989b: 68
2
Lydia Sklevicky (1952-1990) was a feminist historian, theoretician, activist and author of the first feminist
academic articles in several disciplines (sociology, ethnology and history) in Yugoslavia. She graduated in
sociology and ethnology at University of Zagreb in 1976 and became an assistant at the Institute for the History
of the Workers’ Movement in Croatia. Sklevicky was dedicated to exploring women's history in Yugoslavia,
especially the history of the the Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ), the official women’s
organization that existed in Yugoslavia from 1942 to 1953. She published several articles on the AFŽ, but she
didn’t finish her doctoral dissertation on the same topic, because she died in car accident on January 21, 1990.
The thesis was published posthumously in 1996, edited by her supervisor Dunja Rihtman Auguštin and titled
Konji, žene, ratovi (Horses, Women, Wars), and is still the most thorough study on the AFŽ. Sklevicky was part
of the second-wave feminist movement in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, one of the founders of the feminist group
“Women and Society” in Zagreb in 1979 and an internationally active scholar, participating in many academic
conferences and other events (see Kašić, 2006: 517-520).
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�least the historiography on the AFŽ started to flourish then. Historians, following Sklevicky,
were discussing the AFŽ and tried to figure out what happened regarding the extremely
complex issue of the dissolution of the organization in 1953. But in their work, the AFŽ’s
successor organizations existed only as a note that there was something after the AFŽ. These
organizations have been almost completely neglected in the historiography of the women’s
movement in Yugoslavia. I was puzzled about this and one of the aims of my thesis is to try to
understand why this happened. But first and foremost I will search for information about one
of the AFŽ’s successors in Croatia, the Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske (Union of Women’s
Societies of Croatia, SŽDH), and try to integrate the forgotten voices of the SŽDH’s women
into the Yugoslav historiography.
The SŽDH was the women’s organization that existed in the People’s Republic of
Croatia (part of Yugoslavia) from 1953 to 1961. The SŽDH was the successor of the
Antifašistički front žena Hrvatske (Antifascist Women’s Front of Croatia, AFŽH), and, as I
already pointed out, while there is literature about the activities of the AFŽH, the activities of
its successor organizations are hardly researched. In this thesis I will first discuss historians’
perspectives on the AFŽ, and in particular the fact that that most historians who have written
about the AFŽ(H) claim that its dissolution in 1953 was detrimental for meaningful work on
women’s problems in Yugoslavia (Sklevicky 1996; Stojaković, 2012, etc.). Subsequently, I
will research the activities and goals of the SŽDH, the discussions and debates within the
organization as well as the problems that the SŽDH women were facing in their work.
Sources and Methods
Historians have done several primary researches on the AFŽ. Lydia Sklevicky made a
thorough analysis of the archival documents of the AFŽ on the level of People's Republic of
Croatia (1996), historian and feminist activist Neda Božinović researched the AFŽ in Serbia
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�(1996), and feminist historian Gordana Stojaković studied the AFŽ’s magazine in Vojvodina
(2012). However, the only primary research on the Savez ženskih društava (Union of
Women’s Societies, SŽD), that I found, has been done by Božinović. She has done research
based on the archival documents of the SŽD of Serbia and the research is presented in several
pages of her book about the women's movement in Serbia in the 19th and 20th century (1996:
171-184). Even though the history and historiography of the AFŽ is an integral part of my
thesis, my primary focus is on the activities of the SŽDH. Since I’m interested in the activities
of women’s organizations in Croatia after 1953, specifically the SŽDH (1953-1961), the main
data for my research are the archival documents of the Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost
žena Hrvatske (Conference for the Social Activity of Women of Croatia, KDAŽH), which
includes activities of the SŽDH. These materials are available in the Croatian State Archives
in Zagreb. I am mostly focused on the documents from the Founding Assembly of the
SŽDH’s, held on February 27-18, 1957, the First Plenary Session held on January 27-28,
1958, and the Second Plenary Session held on December 6-7, 1960.
I use textual analysis, more precisely the close reading technique, to analyze
discussions and debates which were going on during these meetings and to detect the
organization’s main goals and activities. Close reading is “the mindful, disciplined reading of
an object with a view to deeper understanding of its meanings” (Brummett, 2010: 3) and one
of the main goals of the close reading is “a better understanding of the rhetoric of what we
read” (Brummett, 2010: 4). I have tried to apply this when reading the archival documents,
especially to get a better and deeper understanding of the language and concepts the SŽDH
women used themselves when describing their goals and activities.
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�Theoretical framework
I’m framing my topic within three major theoretical fields. First, I’m dealing with the
general issue of women and socialism and different elements within it. I focus on the
unresolved ambiguous relationship between communism and feminism; part of which is that
socialist feminists opposed to what they call bourgeois feminism, which they found limited.
At the same time, I demonstrate that there was a strong support for women’s liberation as
something vital in socialist thought. Second, I discuss and challenge the general top-down
approach (or totalitarian paradigm) to communism, in which women’s organizations in state
socialist countries are seen as the state’s tool, which results in denying the agency of the
women in that era. Finally, I look to the other side of the complex issue of socialism and
feminism: the second-wave feminists and their disappointment with the socialist state and the
submission of gender to class. They advocated for women being separate and autonomous in
the gender struggle and, as historian Chiara Bonfiglioli recently argued, this notion was
projected on the past, which again resulted in an erasure of the agency of socialist women,
who were fighting against patriarchy at that time.
Women and socialism
There were different approaches to women's emancipation within state socialism and
different ideas about how to achieve it. First, I will discuss Marxism/communism and the
women’s question on the ideological level in terms of the theorizing by Marx, Engels, Bebel,
Lenin, Kollontai and Armand (Buckley, 1989: 18-27). Then, I will ask more concrete
questions about the main field of dispute in the communist thought and practice: whether a
separate women’s organization was necessary and justified or not, with a few examples from
different contexts to demonstrate how this problem was not specific only to the Yugoslav case
and how it remained unresolved.
4
�Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed that socialism was the only system in
which women’s liberation would be possible, which could be seen in their claim that “it is
self-evident, that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the
abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both
public and private” (1950: 36). Sovietologist and political scientist Alfred G. Meyer, in his
discussion of Marxism and the women’s movement before the First World War, claims that
Marx and Engels analyzed everything through the lens of the class struggle, meaning that
women’s oppression too “was to be understood in its functional relationship to the class
structure and the class struggle” (1977: 89). Political philosopher Sonia Kruks, anthropologist
Rayna Rapp and historian Marilyn B. Young, in their introduction to Promissory Notes:
Women in the transition to Socialism, argue that Marxism as a theory proposed to solve so
called Woman Question and all others social issues by introducing socialism (1989: 8).
Therefore, they claim that for the early socialist thinkers “women as category had nothing to
contribute to the theory of socialism” (1989: 8).
Working-class socialist August Bebel in 1879 published the book Die Frau und der
Sozialismus (Woman and socialism), in which he criticized the bourgeois feminist idea that
the liberation of women would be achieved through a battle for civil equality of men and
women. Bebel saw marriage as slavery for women and claimed that freedom for women was
impossible without abolishment the capitalist system (1988: 500-501). He emphasized that
only the Socialist Party advocated gender equality and said that the woman question
“coincides with that other question: In what manner should society be organized to abolish
oppression, exploitation, misery and need, and to bring about the physical and mental welfare
of individuals and of society as a whole?” (1988: 498). Even though he was aware of
woman’s special position, he still claimed that the solution for women’s question was the
same as solution for the social question (1988: 502). Bebel supposed that in the socialist state,
5
�in which there would be no private property, women would be free because “nurses, teachers,
women friends, the rising female generation, all these will stand by her when she is in need of
assistance” (1988: 504). Finally, Bebel said that “in the new society woman will be entirely
independent, both socially and economically” (1988: 502).
Lenin developed Marxist theory further and brought it on a more practical level,
according to Mary Buckley, a British historian who works on the Soviet Union (1989: 25).
Even though he advocated for drawing women into the socialist struggle and for raising their
political consciousness, before the 1917 Russian Revolution he rejected the idea of women’s
separate organization to achieve this goal (Buckley, 1989: 25). Nevertheless, after the
Revolution, Lenin was more ready to accept the idea of special work among women, even
though he was striving to separate this idea from so-called “bourgeois feminism”, as can be
seen from his conversation with the German socialist feminist Klara Zetkin on the women’s
question in 1920. While advocating for a strong international communist women’s movement,
Lenin again rejected the idea of having a separate women’s organization, but on the other
side, he claimed that “we must not close our eyes to the fact that the Party must have bodies,
working groups, commissions, committees, bureaus or whatever you like, whose particular
duty it is to arouse the masses of women’s workers, to bring them into contact with the Party,
and to keep them under its influence”, which “involves systematic work among them” (1950:
99). Additionally, he advocated for “special methods of agitation and forms of organization”,
while also insisting that “that is not feminism, that is practical, revolutionary expediency”
(1950: 99). Lenin offered some practical solutions for women’s problems in the Soviet Union,
in terms of two tasks: to get rid of bourgeois legislation and to socialize housework in order to
liberate women from the burden of household duties (Buckley, 1989: 26).
Along similar lines, two important socialist thinkers, Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa
Armand, were opposing the feminist movement, because they believed that women’s
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�liberation could be achieved only in a socialist system (Buckley, 1989: 33). Just to briefly
introduce them, Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was one of the most important women in
the Soviet Union. She was a writer, political activist, the director of the women’s organization
Zhenotdel from 1920 to 1922, and the first female ambassador in the world (she was a Soviet
diplomat in Norway from 1923 to 1925 and from 1927 to 1930) (Gafizova, 2006: 253-257).
Inessa Armand (1874-1920) was the first director of the Zhenotdel, a socialist feminist activist
in the Soviet Union and internationally, and a prominent member of the Communist Party
(Pushkareva, 2006: 33-36). Kollontai argued that bourgeois feminists’ demands “go no further
than demands for political equality” and that “they are fighting for their female prerogatives
without striving to achieve the abolition of all existing prerogatives and privileges…” (1984:
31). But these socialist women were also aware that, as Buckley claims, “liberation would not
automatically ‘happen’ or even ‘be guaranteed’ by a change in the economic substructure or
through legislation” (1989: 44). That is why in 1918 they advocated strongly for women-only
organizations and, according to Buckley, they managed to frame their demands in a
acceptable way, while claiming that “since revolution had successfully triumphed, these
organizations would serve the revolution, not bourgeois feminism, because they existed in a
socialist state pursuing socialist goals” (1989: 55). Buckley concludes that “although the core
of Bolshevik ideology resisted special groups for women, the practical need to confront the
low level of women’s involvement led to support for special women’s organizations, so long
as they were not separated from the Party” (1989: 57).
Changes in state socialist women’s organizations happened for several reasons:
ideological, practical, or because of different interests and power struggles. There is no one
answer, neither on a theoretical nor on the historical level, to why this happened. Not only on
the national, but also on the international level, there was discussion about how to organize
socialist women after the Bolshevik Revolution. As I said above, in his conversation with
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�Zetkin, Lenin was advocating for a strong Communist Women’s Movement, which was
formed within the Third International, at a conference in Moscow in June 1920 (Waters,
1989: 29). This Movement was a successor of women’s movement within the First and the
Second International, during which two women’s conferences took place: one in Stuttgart in
1907 and the second one in Copenhagen in 1910 (Waters, 1989: 30). Along similar lines, it
was clear from the Theses on the Communist Women’s Movement, presented during the
Moscow conference in 1920, that the delegates at the conference thought that the only
effective way for struggling for the Woman Question was within the communist society and
movement, and that at the same time “without the conscious and active participation of the
mass of women who sympathize with communism… a fundamental and far-reaching
transformation of the economic basis of society and all its institutions and all its cultural life is
impossible” (quoted in Waters, 1989: 31). In organizational terms, the Theses stated that
movement would be organized through Communist parties’ “women’s agitational
commissions” from local to national level with adequate women’s representation in parties’
committees (Waters, 1989: 37). What is interesting is that in one section of the Theses the
Second International was praised for making “a clear demarcation between the socialist and
bourgeois women’s movement” (quoted in Waters, 1989: 38). Waters argues that in the late
1920s there were attempts for isolation of women’s sections from national parties, but they
were unsuccessful and in the early 1930s these sections developed closer relationships with
the parties (1989: 44). One example, mentioned in Waters’ article, is especially important to
show how discussions on this topic were extremely lively and how even the most prominent
socialist women were sometimes going against general Communist Parties’ lines. Namely,
Waters explains how exactly Klara Zetkin was advocating for women’s organizations to be
separate from the Parties in the early 1920s in order to “spread the communist message
8
�beyond the small band of the faithful and bring together women from diverse social
backgrounds and with a range of political allegiances” (1989: 44).
In her book chapter about women’s organizations in the Soviet Union in the 1920s,
Mary Buckley presents and discusses the ideological justification for the women’s
organization’s existence; the organizational structure and different forms of these
organizations as well as the content, relevance and efficacy of their work. She also describes
the obstacles that women’s organizations were facing and the different forces that were
against separate work among women (1989: 60-107). Buckley says that after the 1917
Revolution in the Soviet Union, the Party needed women to be active, so separate women’s
organizations were temporarily allowed and ideologically justified as necessary to raise
political consciousness among women (see Lenin’s words above). In order to achieve this
goal and to organize and supervise work among women, the Zhenotdel, the Women’s
Department of the Central Committee Secretariat, was formed in 1919 (1989: 65). Buckley
emphasizes some structural obstacles in implementing changes on behalf of women during
the existence of the Zhenotdel (1919-1930), such as the Civil War in the country, high
unemployment and the lack of interest of Party leaders in changes in family life (1989: 61).
She also mentions the power struggle within the Party and the subordination of the Zhenotdel,
as well as strong opposition from conservative Bolshevik men, fear of separation of the
women’s question from the joint class struggle, and resistance among some women to accept
new roles or to obey policies that were seen as ordered ‘from above’ as problems that the
Zhenotdel’s activists were facing (1989: 62).
Totalitarian model vs. bottom-up approach
Another way in which I discuss the women's question in state socialism is through
challenging the totalitarian paradigm according to which emancipation was imposed on
9
�women for the sake of the Communist Party. The “totalitarian-model scholarship”, which
Sheila Fitzpatrick explained on the example of the Soviet Union, meant that historians viewed
the Soviet Union through the lens of a top-down approach, according to which the Soviet
Union was a monolith system in which “the destruction of autonomous association and the
atomization of bonds between people produced a powerless, passive society that was purely
an object of regime control and manipulation” (2007: 80). This approach was developed
mostly by political scientists, who were, according to Fitzpatrick often funded by different US
government’s agencies (2007: 80). In the 1970s and 1980s the model was challenged by socalled “revisionists”, who developed a bottom-up approach to the history of the Soviet Union.
Unlike the totalitarians, the revisionists were mostly social historians who supposed that
“society had to be more than a simple object of regime control” (Fitzpatrick, 2007: 81), and
who accordingly shed new light on Soviet Union history. According to Fitzpatrick, the
revisionist paradigm prevailed in the mid-1980s within the discipline of Soviet history, but
did not change the public picture of the Soviet Union in Western countries (2007: 79).
In terms of women’s emancipation, the totalitarian paradigm assumed that the
emancipation was a Party project imposed on women from above with different goals than
women’s interests, as for example Romanian feminist political theorist Mihaela Miroiu claims
(2007: 199). Following the totalitarian paradigm, Miroiu compares communism to fascism
and argues that women’s emancipation and political participation through a system of quota
aimed to make it certain for the Party to have docile supporters and “barely had to do with the
political presentation of women’s interests” (2007: 199). Above all, while acknowledging
possible positive consequences for mothers, she evaluates negatively the introduction of state
kindergartens and crèches by labelling them as a means of “control over the entire
population” (2007: 199).
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�There are, of course, historians who approach the history of state socialism and of
women in state socialist countries from a different perspective: the bottom-up approach. The
Polish-American social and cultural historian Malgorzata (Gosia) Fidelis, for example,
criticizes “the totalitarian paradigm” and claims that because of this approach “it is rare to
find works that give voice to women as active and diverse historical agents” (2014: 167).
Fidelis also emphasizes that the “conviction that ‘equality’ was given by the regime” actually
“distorts agency from below and contributes to misconceptions about how communism
worked in everyday life” (2014: 170). In her book on women and industrialization in Poland
after the Second World War, Fidelis concluded that during women’s protests in female
dominated industries, members of the Communist Party “often abandoned their official
agenda to spread the state ideology among women and pursued their own notions of social
justice” (2010: 97). Along similar lines, while claiming that historians can’t easily draw
conclusions about the non-existence of women’s activism in state socialist countries because
of the lack of research in this field, historian Francisca de Haan argues that some new
evidence suggests that “there was large-scale activism of socialist women on behalf of
women” (2014: 178). Similarly, Jill Massino, a historian who works on state socialist
Romania, says that some of the socialist women, members of the National Women’s Council,
the only legitimate women’s organization in Romania, were educated about feminism and
were really dedicated to the achievement of gender equality (2014: 179).
Second-wave feminism and the “autonomy principle”
The third theoretical field I will frame my research in is the feminist critique of
Marxism and state socialism. Particularly, I will position my analysis in relation with and in
contrast to the second-wave feminists’ use of the notion of the autonomy in evaluating
women’s activities in state socialist countries. As I already pointed out in explaining socialist
solutions for “woman question” in terms of separate or integrated women’s organizations,
11
�Marxism and feminism had/have a complex and difficult relationship. It was like this from the
beginning, when Marxist thinkers put themselves in opposition to so called bourgeois
feminism. But second-wave feminist critique towards state socialism and Marxism is equally
important for this thesis because in this period Yugoslav feminist historians (such as Lydia
Sklevicky) started to write about women’s organizations in Yugoslavia and to evaluate
socialist women’s activities, as well as their connections with the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia (KPJ). First, I will explain the relationship between Marxism and feminism from
the feminist side, then I will present an overview of the discussion among historians today on
feminism, state socialism and women’s organizations during state socialism, and finally I will
provide basic facts about the feminist movement in Yugoslavia in the 1970s.
According to Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp and Marilyn B. Young, many Western
socialist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s were criticizing Marxist theory for “its inability to
sufficiently analyze and incorporate the centrality of the gender division of labour” as well as
for “its lack of concerns with sexuality and reproduction” (1989: 8). For example, on a
theoretical level, while acknowledging the importance of Marxist analytical power, feminist
economist Heidi Hartmann framed the relationship between Marxism and feminism as an
“unhappy marriage” and said that Marxist analysis saw women only as part of the working
class and in that way “consistently subsume[d] women’s relation to men under workers’
relation to capital” (1981: 98). She said that Marxist categories were sex blind and couldn’t
answer the question why women are subordinated to men in family relations. Hartmann
claimed that Marxism never actually attacked patriarchy, which she defines as “a set of social
relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish
or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women“
(1981: 101). She further wrote that some of the key elements of patriarchy that women
experience were: heterosexual marriage, childrearing and housework and economic
12
�dependence on men (1981: 104). Hartman says that in patriarchy “men exercise their control
in receiving personal service work from women, in not having to do housework or rear
children, in having access to women’s bodies for sex, and in feeling powerful and being
powerful” (1981: 104).
In the 2007 Aspasia Forum “Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradiction in Terminis”,
historians mostly discuss women’s autonomy on the individual, personal level and its relation
to communism, but some of them also discuss the autonomy of women’s organizations and
the importance of autonomy in socialist thought in general (2007). Mihaela Miroiu takes
women’s autonomy as a regulative concept for feminism (2007: 197). Her conclusion on
communist’s success in solving the women’s question was that “communism has indeed
produced a relative economic independence of women from men, but this was not a road to
female autonomy” (2007: 200). Other historians in the same Forum were opposing to some
extent Miroiu’s insistence on the autonomy principle in evaluating women’s activities and the
state socialist approaches to women’s emancipation. Marilyn J. Boxer, while claiming that
socialism was “a contest against individualism” (2007: 242), argues that “once the concept of
personal autonomy, or any form of individualism, becomes a definitional criterion, then the
whole history of European socialism, and of a good many feminisms, stand in the dock”
(2007: 242).
Apart from personal autonomy, which Miroiu and Boxer discuss, there is still the huge
discussion among historian about a different kind of autonomy: the organizational autonomy
of women’s organizations in state socialist countries. Croatian historian Renata Jambrešić
Kirin applies the “autonomy principle” on the case of the Yugoslav women’s organization and
argues that with loss of organizational autonomy, women’s organizations also lost an
important dimension of women’s activism: at the same time to work for the sake of the
society, but also for themselves (2014: 180). Moreover, she argues that the AFŽ’s successors
13
�were just “fatefully following the Communist Party line” (2014: 180) on whose agenda the
political emancipation of women didn’t exist anymore (2014: 181).
Chiara Bonfiglioli, who has researched women’s activism in Yugoslavia and Italy
during the Cold War, criticizes the application of the “autonomy principle” to women’s
organizations in state-socialist countries (2014). She argues that second-wave feminism
contributed to the interpretation of women’s activism during the Cold War as being irrelevant
or even absent by applying the notion of “autonomy” as the measure for successful work on
women’s issues (2012: 22). In her study on women’s organizations in Yugoslavia and Italy
during the Cold War, she tries to prove that because of their local and international
significance, the “lack of political autonomy” of these organizations “cannot be equated to a
lack of political agency” (2012: 280). She claims that when “the principle of women’s
collective and individual autonomy from political institutions is taken as a prerequisite for
women’s political and social agency, our historical understanding is necessarily limited”
because the narrative of autonomy “erases the complexity, ambivalences, and nuances of
women’s activism after 1945” (2014: 4). Instead of being focused on the “autonomy
principle”, she suggests to take a look at forms of women’s agency that were present “within
the framework of existing political movements and institutions” (2014: 4). Along similar
lines, Fidelis criticizes the post-1989 approach to the socialist era and “the rejection of the
communist era as a black hole in the history of feminism” (2014:170). Russian historian
Natalia Novikova calls for contextualization in historiography. She emphasizes that is always
necessary to pay attention to “the contexts in which concepts and opinions have been
expressed, rather than simply interpreting them arrogantly in terms of what we might believe”
(2007: 203).
The “autonomy principle” was very important for the young Yugoslav feminist
scholars who worked in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s in Yugoslavia, in order to fight
14
�against patriarchy, women started to organize themselves outside of the Communist Party and
in opposition to the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ), the official
women’s organization that was successor of the SŽD, the organization that I am interested in.
These new ideas about women’s emancipation apart from the socialist organizations appeared
among young intellectuals born after WW2, who started to gather and held their first public
meeting in Belgrade on October 27–November 2, 1978. The conference was called “The
Woman’s question: a new approach”, and was also attended by feminists from other European
countries (Papić, 1994: 20). After the meeting, the group “Women and Society” was formed
in Zagreb in 1979 (one of the founders was historian Lydia Sklevicky, whose work on the
AFŽ I am dwelling on) and similar groups were also founded in Ljubljana and Belgrade
(Božinović, 1994: 18). The key problems feminists in Yugoslavia emphasized were: “gender
role stereotypes; social, economic and political inequality; the myth of female weakness; and
the relationship of false history to ideology” (Ramet, 1991: 205).
Žarana Papić, a Yugoslav feminist sociologist and anthropologist who was part of this
1970s movement, claims that feminist efforts were possible in Yugoslavia because of the
system which was more open (Yugoslavia was not aligned with either of the Power blocs
during the Cold War; the self-management economy allowed some kind of private
enterprises) and because of the ideology that wasn’t as strong as in other Eastern Europe
socialist countries (1994: 20). On the other hand, Papić explains that 1978 conference was
criticized by the socialist women’s organization for being a “sex-war conference” (1994: 21).
Along similar lines, Božinović wrote that the co-operation of the feminists groups in Zagreb,
Ljubljana and Belgrade and their solidarity with each other was “not kindly looked upon by
the governmental structures” (1994: 18).
In her next point, Papić presents perfectly what could be seen as a general evaluation
of socialism by feminists in Yugoslavia, when she says that “in orthodox socialist ideology,
15
�not only that the women’s question is quite simply and automatically solved by the so-called
workers’ question, but also any different approach to this women’s question is very, very bad,
or very bourgeois or very sex-warish. One of the aims of this conference was the beginning of
the critique of the socialist patriarchy and the critique of the socialist concept of women’s
destiny” (1994: 21). As could be concluded from Papić’s claim, the Yugoslav feminists didn’t
“speak of overthrowing socialism” but about “the need to overthrow patriarchy and of the
failure of socialism to do so” (Ramet, 1991: 204). The young feminists acknowledged the
progressiveness of the Yugoslav legislation on equality, but they criticized the bad
implementation of the laws, the strong influence of patriarchy in private and public life, as
well as the “condemnation of feminism” by the state but also by women’s organizations and
the older, anti-fascist generation of women activists (Bonfiglioli, 2014: 3-4). One of the
feminists whom historian Sabrina P. Ramet interviewed in Belgrade said that the “official
women’s organization is really a joke. They are doing nothing useful but they are very, very
afraid of the feminist organizations because we are doing their job for nothing, and they are
afraid that soon people will see that their organization is unnecessary” (quoted in Ramet,
1991: 204). Lydia Sklevicky, who started to research women’s history, was an active
participant of this second-wave feminist movement in Yugoslavia.
How to apply this to Yugoslavia?
This thesis, which deals with the specific case of Yugoslavia, could be seen as part of
the emerging scholarship on rethinking the relations of socialism and feminism. Both the
history and historiography of the women’s movement in Yugoslavia are extremely interesting
research fields. First, in Yugoslavia was a strong presence of women’s organizing, as I will
demonstrate further in my thesis. Second, because of the different kind of socialism,
Yugoslavia was an exception among state socialist countries in Europe for having a developed
second-wave feminist movement, as I demonstrated above and will elaborate more in the
16
�chapter about the AFŽ. Actually, in this thesis I try to question the main historiographical
narrative about the AFŽ and its dissolution in 1953. The hegemonic narrative, which was
formed in the 1980s under the influence of second-wave feminism, presents the AFŽ’s
dissolution as a turning point in organized women’s movement in Yugoslavia. According to
this narrative, the dissolution of the AFŽ, a unique, autonomous and uniform women’s
organization, meant the end for meaningful work on women’s issues in Yugoslavia.
I’m questioning the hegemonic narrative on the AFŽ narrative, not in order to
completely reject it, but in order to understand where it comes from and how it works. In
other words, I discuss the influence of second-wave feminism on writing women’s history and
ask questions about the AFŽ’s successor organization without applying the second-wave
feminist lenses that lead to denying women’s agency. I approach the SŽDH from the bottomup perspective, trying to figure out how the SŽDH women saw themselves, how they
negotiated their position within the Yugoslav socialist system, and in which ways they
struggled with the patriarchal society they were living in. I try to demonstrate that the SŽDH
women weren’t simply docile Party followers and that they had their own ideas about how to
organize women within the new system they found themselves in. I locate the changes within
the official women’s organization in the context of self-management and decentralization of
Yugoslavia and strive to demonstrate the complexity of the issue of women’s organizing in
state socialist countries on the specific SŽDH case. I situate the discussions within the SŽDH
within the broader question whether to have separate women’s organizations (that would
separate women from the joint struggle for socialism) or not. I already showed that this was
and still is a huge debate within the socialist movement and I put the Yugoslav case and
discussions that were going on forming the SŽDH in this perspective.
In the first chapter of this thesis I will provide basic facts about Yugoslavia in order to
situate the women’s organization which I research. I will explain the role of Yugoslavia,
17
�particularly, role of communists and their leader Josip Broz Tito, in the Second World War.
Then I will explain the specific form of socialism in Yugoslavia, so called self-management
socialism, and finally, I will provide some statistics and facts about women’s position in
Yugoslavia until the 1960s. In the second chapter I will focus on the history and
historiography of the AFŽ. Firstly, I will briefly introduce the women’s movement in
Yugoslavia before WW2; secondly I will present the goals, activities and the organizational
structure of the AFŽ (1942-1953); thirdly, I will discuss historians’ evaluation of the AFŽ’s
activities and the changes that happened within the organization. Finally, I will discuss
historians’ interpretation of the dissolution of the AFŽ.
In the third chapter I will present my analysis of the archival documents of the SŽDH,
through which I discuss its goals and activities and the debates that were going on within the
organization. I will first provide basic information on the SŽDH’s structure and activities, and
then will analyze the discussions that were going on within the SŽDH around the complex
issue of women’s organizing in Yugoslavia. Thirdly, I will explore the SŽDH women’s
debates about the main goals of their organization. Finally, I will look at the problems the
SŽDH women were facing on the ground and explain how they were trying to solve those
issues.
18
�1. A short history of Yugoslavia
In this chapter I will provide a short history of Yugoslavia until 1961 in order to be
able to explain better and position properly the women’s organization SŽD that I research,
which existed from 1953 to 1961. First, I will present the most important facts about the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), the role of the communist leader Josip Broz Tito in
the Liberation War as well as his relationship with the Soviet Union and the international
communist movement. Then I will explain the specific form of socialism, so called selfmanagement socialism, that was introduced in 1950 in Yugoslavia to some extent as a
consequence of Tito’s relations with Stalin and the Soviet Union. This was followed by a
structural reorganization of Yugoslavia and Tito’s new position in international relations as
one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. Finally, I will briefly elaborate on
women’s position in early Yugoslavia in terms of the law, labour and women’s literacy rate.
1.1. The KPJ, Tito and Yugoslavia in WW2
After the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed in
1918 and this is where I start to describe the history of Yugoslavia. In April 1941, the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia (the name was changed in 1929) was attacked by Axis powers and
collapsed very quickly, with its territory being divided into several occupied areas (Prout,
1985: 1). One of the most powerful groups in resisting the occupiers in the National
Liberation War was the antifascist group Partisans, led by the Secretary-General of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), Josip Broz Tito (Prout, 1985: 1). The KPJ was formed
in 1919, but was banned under the 1921 Law on the Protection of the State, and it was still
banned when Yugoslavia collapsed in WW2 (Jović, 2009: 55). Tito was a communist who
was in close relationship with the Soviet Union and since the KPJ was part of the Comintern
(The Third International), Tito arranged a meeting of the Antifašističko vijeće narodnog
19
�oslobođenja Jugoslavije (Anti-Fascist Council of the Peoples' Liberation of Yugoslavia,
AVNOJ) on November 26-27, 1942 in Bihać, after consultation with Moscow (Swain, 2011:
49). Earlier that year, Soviet leader Stalin already gave Tito advice about how to organize a
governmental body which would not insult the Western allies. Stalin said that Tito “should
strive to organize a national committee of support for the Yugoslav people’s struggle for
liberation” and that “this committee should promote, in the country and abroad, the political
platform of the people’s liberation partisan army” (quoted in Swain, 2011: 49). The resolution
adopted during the meeting set up the AVNOJ as “representative body of the liberation
movement“ (Pavlowitch, 2008: 131) and a new system of committees, in which lower
committees had to follow higher committees’ decisions, was established (Swain, 2011: 50). In
December of the same year, the women’s organization AFŽ was formed.
The second meeting of the AVNOJ was held in Jajce in November 1943, where a
decision was made about the federal character of the Yugoslav state (Pavlowitch, 2008: 210).
During this session, the AVNOJ was proclaimed as the legislative body, and a new kind of
provisional government (National Committee of Liberation, with five communists out of nine
members) was formed with Tito as president of that government (Pavlowitch, 2008: 210).
This was an important moment in creating the new state, because Tito actually denied any
right to the exiled government, which could be seen as problematic for the Western allies who
supported the Yugoslav King Petar II and his exiled government. Stalin was afraid that the
AVNOJ’s decision would cause problems with his allies, but in the end that did not happen:
the Western Allies accepted Tito’s movement as the only resistance movement in Yugoslavia
(Pavlowitch, 2008: 211-212).
In October 1944, the Red Army entered Yugoslavia, after Tito signed an agreement
with the Soviet Union about temporary help in some parts of the country. On March 7, 1945,
in Belgrade, Tito set up the new government of Demokratska federativna Jugoslavija
20
�(Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, DFJ) and the AVNOJ turn itself into a provisional
parliament during its last session in August 1945 in Belgrade (Pavlowitch, 2008: 297-298).
The provisional Assembly called for elections, while giving the right to vote to every man and
woman older than eighteen. Just before these elections the Narodni front (People’s Front, NF)
was formed. The People’s Front was the successor of the Narodnooslobodilački front
(People’s Liberation Front, NOF) and consisted of several partisan groups, as well as of some
non-communist groups, but with the KPJ leading the Front. The People’s Front won 90% of
the votes in the November 11 elections, and several days later, the Constituent Assembly
abolished the monarchy and declared the Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija
(People’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, FNRJ). Soon after, in January 1946, a new
Constitution, based on the 1936 Soviet Union Constitution, was adopted (Pavlowitch, 2008:
268-269).
The People’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro - and two
autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo. In the period between 1948 and 1950, the
Yugoslav government was organized as a hierarchical chain of “state-Party joint” committees
on the federal, republic and local level, and on each level it was difficult to distinguish the
state from the Party (McFarlane, 1988: 45). At the same time, power was concentrated mostly
at the federal level (Prout, 1985: 1). Apart from committees, mass organizations such as the
youth organization, unions and the women’s organization (the AFŽ) were the main forces
within the People’s Front (Sklevicky, 1996: 109). Pre-war Yugoslavia was a “class society
based on agrarian relations” and economically dependent on Europe and this is what
communists wanted to change when they came to power (McFarlane, 1988: 11). In order to
transform the social structure, the KPJ decided to transform the economic system from
21
�agrarian to industrial, with a rapid industrialization based on the Soviet model from the 1930s
(McFarlane, 1988: 12).
1.2. The Yugoslav specific form of socialism
Yugoslavia’s specific form of socialism (self-management socialism) was introduced
in the 1950s, a decision highly influenced by Tito’s international relations. Historian Stevan
Pavlowitch argues that Tito “was a political leader and organizer” who “tied a popular
resistance movement to the cause of world communism led by the Soviet Union under Stalin”
(2008: 280). Yugoslavia, as I said above, used the Soviet model for its organizational
structure and it also introduced the Soviet model of socialism. But in 1948 the Tito-Stalin
break up happened, which was a turning point in the Yugoslav political and economic system.
There were several economic and political reasons for this split: Stalin wanted a greater
control over Yugoslavia and he opposed the idea of a Balkan Federation (a federation of
Balkan communist countries, which would make Yugoslavia and her allies much more
powerful). On the other hand, Tito was not satisfied with the introduction of joint-stock
companies that would favor the Soviet economy, not the Yugoslav, because he saw this as a
part of unfair economic relations between two countries (McFarlane, 1988: 13-14). The final
split happened when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform (the international alliance
of the Communist parties formed in 1947) in June 1948, followed by a complete economic
blockade imposed on Yugoslavia at the end of year (McFarlane, 1988: 15). Tito was in a very
difficult situation in which he and the Party had to come up with a new approach in
organizing the country in order to adjust to the new circumstances: having lost their great ally
and the economic support it provided, and being isolated in the international community. This
was when the idea of a new reading of Marx and the introduction of new form of socialism
was adopted (Jović, 2009: 60), as well as the necessity for decentralization of the highly
centralized country.
22
�Self-management was a system in which “the economy, local communities and public
administration” were organized in such a way as to prevent high bureaucratization and to
restrict state control and influence (Šmidovnik, 1991: 31). In this economic system, the state
was not the owner of the enterprises anymore and self-management of working councils was
introduced, or, in other words, in this system “productive property [was] managed by nonstate bodies, collectives or ‘groups of associated labour” (McFarlane, 1988: 148) in which
emphasis was put on a greater productivity of the enterprises. This change started in 1950
with the passing of the Law on Workers’ Control (McFarlane, 1988: 32), and despite
difficulties in implementing these changes, Yugoslavia experienced economic growth during
the 1950s.
As political scientist Bruce McFarlane writes, “forms of economic organization
conditioned forms of social organization and political institution” (1988: 45), which is why
administrative decentralization followed. Re-reading Marxist theory, the Yugoslav
communists decided to give greater autonomy to the republics of Yugoslavia (McFarlane
1988: 17) and also decided that each republic could decide on its own governmental structure,
according to its context and needs (McFarlane 1988: 45). The role of the central state was
weakened by the Law of Constitution from 1953, since only five state ministries continued to
exist on the federal level, while the ministries for Economy, Budget, Home Affairs and
Administration were put on the republic level (McFarlane 1988: 33). Several other steps were
taken in order to show the KPJ’s commitment to decentralization: in 1952 the Party changed
its name to the Savez komunista Jugoslavije (League of Communists of Yugoslavia, SKJ), and
in 1953 the People’s Front was reorganized into the Socijalistički savez radnog naroda
(Socialist Alliance of Working People, SSRN) (McFarlane 1988: 17). These changes
influenced all levels of the Yugoslav political, social and economic structure and it was during
23
�this process of change that the AFŽ was abolished (in 1953) and the SŽD, as a new,
decentralized women’s organization, was formed.
In addition to the republics being more politically and economically free, a system of
communes was introduced by law in 1955 (Šmidovnik, 1991: 25). Edvard Kardelj, the most
important communist ideologist in Yugoslavia, defined the commune as “an integrated social
and economic community of all the inhabitants and organizations (including enterprises) in its
territory” (quoted in Šmidovnik, 1991: 25), according to the example of the Paris commune of
1871 (Šmidovnik, 1991: 26). Actually, the commune was meant to be the basic unit of
society, with all other “forms of state” (federation, republics and regions) being grounded on
it (Šmidovnik, 1991: 25). The commune was supposed to work on the principle of selfmanagement, and communes on the local level, also called Narodni odbori (People’s
Committees, NO), were supposed to take over the role of local governments (McFarlane
1988: 49).
Even though Yugoslavia experienced huge economic growth during the first phase of
decentralization in the 1950s and the second Five Year Plan (1957-1961) was implemented
successfully, a second phase of decentralization and de-bureaucratization started in 1961
(Prout, 1985: 23-24). With the new 1963 Constitution (which had been debated since the end
of 1960), the republics gained more political and economic autonomy (McFarlane, 1988: 3435) and all of this, of course, influenced the Yugoslav mass organizations. The SŽD was
reconstructed in order to achieve greater decentralization and in 1961 changed its name to
Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena (Conference for the Social Activity of Women,
KDAŽ). It was during this period that Tito’s new foreign policy was introduced. Already in
1960 he established that the Yugoslav foreign policy would be focused on demilitarization,
world peace and anti-colonialism and in 1961, at the meeting in Belgrade, he became one of
the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement – a group of countries which were not in alliance
24
�or contra the two major blocs (the Eastern and the Western block) in the Cold War
(McFarlane, 1988: 180-181).
Finally, I would like to briefly explain the abbreviations I use. The Socialist Alliance
of Working People (SSRN), as every other organization in Yugoslavia, had its federal,
republic and local (district, county) level. I use SSRN when I refer in general to the Socialist
Alliance of Working people; SSRNJ, when I’m referring to the federal (Yugoslav) level and
SSRNH when I’m talking about the republic level of Croatia (Hrvatska). The same applies to
the organizations that I will be discussing: the Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s
Front, AFŽ) and the Savez ženskih društava (Union of Women’s Societies, SŽD).
1.3. Women's position in Yugoslavia
Historians agree that the Yugoslav authorities accepted the Soviet model of women’s
equality in the first three years after the Second World War (Jancar-Webster, 1990;
Bonfiglioli 2014). The Soviet model included “women’s equality in the public sphere” and
“‘social motherhood’ in the private sphere” (Bonfiglioli, 2014: 8). Summarizing Vida
Tomšič’s (later one of the AFŽ’s leaders) essay from 1940, historian Lydia Sklevicky says
that in the newly formed Yugoslavia, the women’s question was supposed to be solved similar
to the Soviet Union model: “political equality – protection of a woman’s reproductive
function – socialization of child rearing – education – labour” (1996: 51).
Following the Soviet model of women’s equality and the Soviet Constitution from
1936, the Yugoslav authorities included articles on gender equality in the Yugoslav 1946
Constitution. Many changes happened in women’s lives in Yugoslavia after the Second World
War in many fields, including the law, education and paid labour. Before the Second World
War, women didn’t have the active or passive right to vote. They obtained the right to vote in
Yugoslavia in 1945, while the war was still going on, with later confirmation of the right to
25
�vote in the 1946 Yugoslav Constitution (Jancar-Webster, 1990: 163). The 1946 Constitution
guaranteed equality in Article 24, with the statement that “women 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” (quoted in Bonfiglioli, 2014: 8).
Additionally, the 1946 Constitution guaranteed universal access to education, health
and child care (Jancar-Webster, 1990: 163). In 1931, the illiteracy rate for women in
Yugoslavia was huge: 54,4% of women was illiterate (Tomšič, 1980: 18, quoted in Ramet,
1999: 95-96); in 1961 this percentage had been decreased to 28,8% (Đurić and Dragičević,
1975: 10, quoted in Ramet, 1999: 96).
In general, there were two reasons for the inclusion of women into the paid labour
force in all state-socialist countries: gender equality was a part of socialism as an ideology but
also the systems needed women for the huge projects of industrialization (de Haan, 2012: 89).
According to Vida Tomšič, who was a war heroine, partisan and one of the leaders of the
AFŽ, about 27% of the industrial labour force in 1939 in Yugoslavia were women, and
between 1945 and 1948 this percentage increased to 47% (quoted in Jancar-Webster, 1990:
164). In 1950 the percentage of women workers in the overall Yugoslav labour force was
23.2%, and in 1960 the percentage increased to 27% (de Haan, 2012: 89). Just to briefly
compare with Western countries, de Haan explains how the level of participation reached in
East Europe in 1960s and 1970s was reached in the West only twenty to thirty years later
(2012: 95)
26
�Even though abortion was prohibited in 1951, very soon, in 1952, a new law legalized
abortion if it was carried out for medical reasons (Božinović, 1996: 158). But the practice was
different and there were many obstacles in implementing the 1952 law in some parts of the
country. In 1963, this was changed, when the practice was standardized and the abortion
procedure was liberalized, and in 1977 abortion was permitted without any restriction until
the tenth week of pregnancy (Božinović, 1996: 158).
Conclusion
In this chapter I strived to contextualize the organization that I research and to provide
a short historical background for it. This is important for a better understanding of the changes
within the women’s organizations in Yugoslavia in the 1940s and 1950s, since both the AFŽ
and later the SŽD and the KDAŽ experienced changes in their organizational structure,
activities and goals, according to changes that were happening in the overall Yugoslav
economic, political and social structure. I found it relevant to mention the role of communists
in the National Liberation War and Tito’s foreign policies and contacts with the Soviet Union,
because both influenced the Yugoslav state, and accordingly the women’s organization. I
explained the meaning of self-management and decentralization for the Yugoslav system,
because this is where and when the abolition of the AFŽ and the formation of the SŽD,
organization whose documents I analyze, were situated. In the end I briefly explained
women’s position in the Yugoslav society and changes in women’s lives after the Second
World War; changes to which women themselves and women’s organization contributed to a
great extent, which will be elaborated in the next chapter on the AFŽ, as well as in the
analytical chapter on the meaning of the SŽDH, its activities, goals and discussions that were
going on within the organization.
27
�2. History and historiography of the AFŽ
In this chapter I will explore and discuss how historians have written about the
women’s organization Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ) that existed
in Yugoslavia from 1942 to 1953. Namely, I will be focused on books and articles about the
AFŽ and will present historians’ evaluations of the AFŽ’s activities and their ideas about the
meaning of the dissolution of the AFŽ for women’s activism in Yugoslavia. The main
historiographical question of this chapter, discussed through the most relevant literature about
the AFŽ is: How have historians written about the AFŽ and how have they explained the role
of the AFŽ and the meaning of its dissolution in 1953 for women’s organization in
Yugoslavia?
Trying to answer this question, I will first provide basic historical facts about the
women’s movement in Yugoslavia before the establishment of the AFŽ. Secondly, I will
explain how, when and in which circumstances the AFŽ was founded, what kind of activities
it carried out, what changes in organizational structure and regarding its position within the
People’s Liberation Front the organization was going through, and how and in which specific
context it was dissolved. Thirdly, I will demonstrate historians’ evaluation of the AFŽ’s
activities and the changes in its organizational structure. Finally, I will discuss key arguments
and claims about the meaning of the AFŽ and its dissolution in 1953 for meaningful work on
women’s problems in Yugoslavia given by several historians who have written about the
AFŽ. Following historian Chiara Bonfiglioli, I will locate these historiographical
interpretations of the AFŽ in the time in which they emerged and discuss how these narratives
were part of the contemporary scholarly and political (feminist or otherwise) framework.
28
�2.1. The women’s movement in Yugoslavia before the AFŽ
According to feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky (1952-1990), the Antifašistički front
žena was a successor of two different, often competing, traditions in the women’s movement
in Yugoslavia between the First and Second World War: the bourgeois women’s movement
and the socialist women’s movement (1996: 79-107). The women’s movement in Southern
Slavic countries emerged at the end of the 19th century, when women’s autonomous
organizations carried out activities related to traditional women’s role (such as care work), but
in the beginning of the 20th century these bourgeois organizations redirected their activities
towards the political sphere, demanding women’s right to vote and equality before the law
(Sklevicky, 1996: 79). These women were active participants in the First World War (mostly
as nurses on battlefields), and after WW1 continued with their activities within bourgeois
women’s organizations. Even though these bourgeois women’s organizations’ activities were
separated from the activities of women in the labour movement in the interwar period,
Sklevicky emphasizes that the shared fear of fascism provided common ground for the two
movements and that in the 1930s they were cooperating to some extent (1996: 80).
In 1919, the women’s section within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) was
established; i.e. the same year when the KPJ was established (Ramet, 1999: 93). At their first
conference, the socialist women accepted the KPJ’s program, which stated that the KPJ
“demands full and unrestricted equality for all men and all women, regardless of religion,
nationality or occupation, as well as the universal, equal and secret right to vote for all
citizens of eighteen years and above” (Božinović, 1996: 102). But Sklevicky claims that only
during the 1930s women in the KPJ started to be more organized and that the above
mentioned cooperation with the bourgeois movement was useful for the “creation of a new
self-consciousness of the female Party members about women’s ‘double oppression’ – being
29
�subordinated to capital, but also being in a subordinated position [to men] within the labour
movement” (1996: 86).
The bourgeois feminist movement dissolved itself at the end of 1940 because of the
war, but Sklevicky argues that the AFŽ, which appeared two years later, was a successor of
this tradition, as well as a successor of the women’s movement within the labour movement
(1996: 81), which continued to exist and work on mobilizing women for the revolutionary
movement (Božinović, 1996: 127).
2.2. The AFŽ (1942-1953) – organizational structure, goals and activities
The Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ) was created in
December 1942 and dissolved in 1953, with several organizational and program changes
during its existence. Women were active participants in the anti-fascist People’s Liberation
Front during the Second World War in Yugoslavia, and historian Neda Božinović claims that
from the very beginning they were supposed to help the army but also to work on women’s
political and cultural education (1996: 135). The KPJ issued a directive in November 1942 to
create AFŽ groups in every city or village, with explicit emphasis on the idea that the AFŽ
was to be part of the People’s Liberation Front (Bonfiglioli, 2014: 5). The delegates from
already formed women’s groups met at the conference in Bosanski Petrovac on December 7,
1942 to decide on the program and the structure of the women’s organization - and that is
where and how the AFŽ was formed (Božinović, 1996: 142-143).
In this short overview of the AFŽ’s history, I will mostly dwell on Sklevicky’s work
on the AFŽ, which was supposed to be part of her doctoral dissertation and was published
posthumously in 1996, because hers is still the most thorough analysis of the AFŽ. Sklevicky
distinguishes four phases in the organization’s life in terms of organizational structure, main
goals and the activities that were carried out by the organization: (1) The AFŽ in the war
30
�period
(1942-1945);
(2)
Educational
model
of
the
AFŽ
(1945-1947);
(3)
Commanding/Directive model (1948-1949) and (4) Dualistic model of the transitional phase
(1950-1953). Sklevicky describes and discusses these phases in detail (1996: 63-138).
During the war, the AFŽ had two main tasks: to help the army by performing
voluntary labour (help in food supplies, gathering clothes, etc.) and generally to organize life
in the liberated areas, and secondly to work on women’s political and cultural emancipation
(Sklevicky, 1996: 25). Sklevicky claims that during the Educational phase (1945-1947), right
after the war, the AFŽ was supposed to perform reconstruction work and to organize
functional everyday life, which included providing assistance to working mothers, taking care
of the wounded and the orphans, etc. (1996: 117). At the same time, the AFŽ had the most
important role in raising the consciousness and social status of women (through improving
their literacy rate and organizing different educational courses), as well as in the political
socialist education and efforts to gain women’s support (women in Yugoslavia obtained the
right to vote in 1945) for the new Communist authorities (Sklevicky, 1996: 118). Sklevicky
argues that in this period, the AFŽ was an organization with a pyramidal structure (with a
wide rank-and-file membership, county, district and regional committees, and at the top the
main committee and the central committee) and a certain level of organizational autonomy
(1996: 119). Sklevicky further states that in this period the KPJ’s aim was not to subordinate
the AFŽ to the People’s Front, but to demand help from the AFŽ for the Front (1996: 117).
She also emphasizes that this model of the AFŽ was the most efficient for mobilizing women
through an “instrumentalization of traditional women’s roles” (1996: 122). In other words,
women in the AFŽ were participating mostly in social and care work.
The next AFŽ’s phase was that of the Commanding/Directive model (1948-1949),
during which the KPJ had positioned itself as a leader of all mass organizations that
participated in the People’s Front. Thus, the KPJ was giving commands and directions,
31
�according to which the mass organizations were shaping their activities (Sklevicky, 1996:
131-132). Accordingly, there were changes in the AFŽ’s relation with the KPJ and the
People’s Front. Sklevicky claims that the AFŽ leaders changed the definition of the
organization. The AFŽ accepted the program of the KPJ and defined itself as the one KPJ’s
organizational form for work among women (1996: 132). The AFŽ created its goals in
accordance with the demands of the first Five-Year Plan and redirected its activities. The
main AFŽ’s task in this period was to bring women into the labour force and, in order to do
that, to take care of working mothers and their children (Sklevicky, 1996: 125-127). This
corresponds to what happened in the Soviet Union after the introduction of the First Five Year
Plan (1928-1932), according to Mary Buckley. She claims that women’s liberation, until then
understood to be achieved through education, joining the labour force etc., at this point started
to be seen through “participation in plan fulfilment” (1989: 77).
The final, Dualistic model of the transitional phase (1950-1953), Sklevicky explains as
a phase during which the AFŽ went through a lot of (self) criticism for being too formal,
bureaucratized and professionalized. This criticism, according to Sklevicky, was a
consequence of the ideas of “democratization, decentralization and debureaucratization”,
incorporated in the political discourse after the introduction of self-management socialism in
1950 in Yugoslavia (1996: 135). Sklevicky says that the AFŽ had a specific role in this period
to organize its work according to the KPJ’s priorities, for example, to put special emphasis on
the work among peasant women and on socializing and rearing pre-school children (1996:
137). According to Božinović, however, after the Third Congress of the AFŽ in 1950, the
organization especially focused on the problems of illiteracy and educating peasant women
about household and child rearing (hygiene, healthy nutrition, etc.) (1996: 154). According to
Sklevicky’s analysis of the AFŽ, there were changes in the organizational structure in this
period, which became more complex. Namely, after the Third Congress of the AFŽ in 1950
32
�two new assistive organizational forms were introduced within the AFŽ: sekretarijati
(secretariats) and aktivi (‘actives’). Secretariats were special bodies that managed and
coordinated the work of the AFŽ, while ‘actives’ were basic units that “intended to be forms
of direct democracy from the ground” in order to “trigger the ‘self-initiative’ of the masses”
(1996: 128).
Sklevicky didn’t finish her work on this phase of the AFŽ’s structure and activities,
but Božinović explains how during the Fourth Congress of the People’s Front in January
1953, a decision was made about forming special commissions for work among women
within the Socijalistički savez radnog naroda (the People’s Front changed its name into
Socijalistički savez radnog naroda or Socialist Alliance of the Working People, SSRN, during
that congress) (1996: 165-167). The organizational structure of the AFŽ was also discussed at
the People’s Front’s Fourth Congress and the conclusion was that the AFŽ could continue to
exist simultaneously with the planned women’s commissions, but had to go through changes
that would result in the AFŽ becoming “not a uniform and single organization, but more an
alliance of several autonomous women’s organizations” (Božinović, 1996: 167).
Nevertheless, at the Fourth Congress of the AFŽ later that year, the organization was
dissolved and a new organization, the Savez ženskih društava (Union of Women’s Societies,
SŽD) was formed. The Resolution on forming the SŽD emphasized that the existence of a
single and uniform organization would “separate women from joint efforts in solving social
problems, support the wrong idea about women’s position in the society being some kind of
separate women’s issue and not an issue of the entire society, an issue of all socialist fighters”
(quoted in Božinović, 1996: 169). It is still unknown why the AFŽ women decided to dissolve
the organization, despite the January 1953 decision to keep the AFŽ.
33
�2.3. Historians' evaluation of the AFŽ's activities and the changes in its
organizational structure
Lydia Sklevicky, whose work on the AFŽ is the most detailed (1996), Neda
Božinović, who explains thoroughly the AFŽ’s work (1996), and other historians who have
written about the meaning of the AFŽ for women’s emancipation and have provided their
evaluation of its activities, all give a general positive evaluation of the AFŽ’s early years.
Neda Božinović (1917-2001), who was an active member of the AFŽ and a feminist activist
in Serbia, claims that Yugoslav women were actively fighting for all rights that they received
in the socialist Yugoslav state and that the AFŽ was the organization through which they
articulated their needs and demands (1994: 15). Božinović further writes that the AFŽ,
besides its role in helping the army during the Second World War, since it was created was
fighting against women’s oppression, and after the war started to fight against patriarchal
customs in Yugoslavia (1994: 15). American political scientist Barbara Jancar-Webster, who
has written about women and revolution in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, argues
that even though the AFŽ “was not a spontaneous organization of women” (1990: 157), it was
an excellent example of what could happen when women who were organized under the
Communist Party’s sponsorship “inject their own needs and goals into operation” (1999: 78).
Even though Jancar-Webster (without substantive evidence) claims that the AFŽ was
never meant to be an organization in which women would represent women, but an
organization with an hierarchical top-down structure and the KPJ’s “tool to educate and
mobilize women for its side of the conflict” (1999: 82), historians argue that the organization
made a difference in women’s lives. Sklevicky, Božinović, Ramet, and Stojaković agree on
the positive influence of the AFŽ on women’s position in the political and social spheres. For
example, Sklevicky, who raised questions about the reasons for the invisibility and lack of
34
�historians’ research on the AFŽ, and while herself providing the first serious historical work
on the AFŽ, claims that the AFŽ was the only organization in the post-war period that was a
successor of women’s hundred years long efforts to become part of the public sphere and to
achieve equality in all aspects of social life (1996: 62). Similarly, in her evaluation of the
AFŽ’s impact on women’s everyday life, Božinović writes that the AFŽ gave women
opportunities to be active on the local level and to change their communities (1994: 15). She
also emphasizes that AFŽ’s activists were in direct contact with many women and that
because of this “they uncovered the specific problems that the women from various social
backgrounds were facing, brought them to public attention, and sought for ways to solve
them” (1996: 262).
While analyzing the meaning of the changes in the AFŽ’s organizational structure and
while criticizing the gradual loss of the AFŽ’s autonomy, Sklevicky acknowledges that the
AFŽ (and through the AFŽ - women themselves) played a role in achieving positive changes
in women’s lives until 1949, such as increased literacy rate, entrance in the labour force,
better health care, and socialized childrearing through the opening of kindergartens and
crèches (1996: 134). Along similar lines, Sabrina Ramet, a US scholar who has focused on
East and South-East European affairs, emphasizes that the AFŽ played a very important role
for women in many spheres, such as health care and in opening facilities such as restaurants,
collective laundries and many others (1999: 93).
Gordana Stojaković, a feminist historian who has been doing research about the AFŽ
in Vojvodina for many years, argues that the AFŽ women were working on the reconstruction
of the country in the key years after the Second World War and that the AFŽ was the
organization through which the idea of a new life for women in socialist society was
introduced (quoted in Marčetić, 2013). In her work on the journals of the AFŽ, Stojaković
analyses what kind of messages were sent through the journals Glas žena (The voice of
35
�women) and Zora (The Dawn), how these messages were received and how much influence
they had on women’s everyday life (2012: 14). She claims that through the AFŽ, women had
an opportunity to express themselves and to discuss different issues, and that through the
AFŽ’s journals opinions about and ideas for solutions to women’s problems were available to
a large number of women in Yugoslavia (2012: 38).
However, historians have evaluated negatively the changes in the AFŽ’s
organizational structure after 1948. Sklevicky interprets negatively the changes that happened
during the Directive model (1948/1949), specifically, the KPJ positioning itself as a leader of
all mass organizations and issuing directives towards them, according to which the AFŽ
defined itself as the organizational form of the KPJ's work among women and fulfilled its
directives (1996: 132). Sklevicky evaluates these changes as loosening the vertical
hierarchical structure of the AFŽ and lowering the level of the organizational autonomy
(1989a: 101). She also criticizes the changes that happened in 1950, when the AFŽ introduced
a new organizational form, called ‘actives’. Sklevicky explains this change as detrimental for
the AFŽ, because the organization lost its own vertical lines, ‘actives’ were “mutually
unrelated” and “integrated into the PF [People’s Front] on respective hierarchical level”
(1989a: 103).
2.4. Historians’ interpretation of the dissolution of the AFŽ
After the above mentioned changes in the AFŽ’s organizational structure, goals and
activities (Sklevicky, 1996; Božinović, 1996), the AFŽ was finally dissolved in 1953 and
replaced by the Savez ženskih društava (SŽD), which was integrated in the SSRN. Sklevicky,
who started to research the AFŽ in the context of the late 1970s, when the first feminist
groups appeared in Zagreb, presented the changes in the AFŽ’s organizational structure as
gradual loss of the organization’s autonomy, which transformed the AFŽ into an organization
36
�that “was obediently fulfilling the Party’s directives” (1996: 132). Sklevicky has a very clear
position on the changes in the AFŽ’s organizational structure and relations with the KPJ and
People’s Front. She claims that the AFŽ could have provided the institutional space for the
struggle against women’s discrimination and for the fight against patriarchal society, if only it
had insisted on being an “independent mass political organization” (1996: 36).
Other historians have followed Sklevicky’s approach. Barbara Jancar-Webster, for
example, in her book about women and revolution in Yugoslavia (1990), relies mostly upon
Sklevicky’s earlier work on the AFŽ.3 Jancar-Webster’s narrative about the AFŽ is also a
narrative of gradual loss of autonomy until the final subjugation of the AFŽ to the KPJ (1990:
163-167). Even the name of the chapter in which she explains the end of the AFŽ (“The
Reassertion of Patriarchy and the End of the AFŽ”) suggests clearly her interpretation of the
AFŽ’s dissolution. Jancar-Webster emphasizes that the AFŽ lost its autonomy in 1950, when
the organization became just “a transmission belt” of the KPJ (1990: 166). She evaluates the
disappearance of women’s separate organizations in 1953 as detrimental, because it “deprived
women of an independent organizational base from which to develop a women’s position and
to make claims as women upon government and society” (1990: 174).
Along similar lines, Božinović argues that the final shift of women’s issues to the
SSRN and the abolishment of the AFŽ in 1953 was “the beginning of the end of organized
women’s work in which they defined their own problems and found their own solutions”
3
Lydia Sklevicky died in 1990, and her unfinished doctoral disertation on the AFŽ was published posthumuosly
in 1996. But she wrote several articles on women's movement in Yugoslavia, especially on the AFŽ, that were
published in 1980s and were avaliable for other historians.
Sklevicky, Lydia. 1989a. “Emancipated Integration or Integrated Emancipation: The Case of Post-revolutionary
Yugoslavia” in Arina Angerman et al., ed. Current Issues in Women’s History. pp. 93-108. London and New York:
Routledge.
Sklevicky, Lydia. 1989b. “More Horses than Women: On the Difficulties of Founding Women’s History in
Yugoslavia”, Gender & History 1(1): 68–73.
37
�(1994: 16). While framing the dissolution of the AFŽ as a result of patriarchal backlash and
claiming that patriarchal society welcomed the abolishment of the AFŽ (1996: 170),
Božinović emphasizes that the main problem with this dissolution and the redistribution of
responsibilities was that the SSRN was now responsible for conducting activities for women’s
conscience raising. She argues that the Socialist Alliance didn’t pay much attention to these
duties “since the most rigid, patriarchal concepts regarding the woman held on obstinately
among the members and leadership, and they had no motive whatsoever to renounce their
privileged position in the family and in the society” (1996: 263).
Gordana Stojaković explains how women’s political engagement and the importance
of the AFŽ started to decrease after the introduction of self-management and decentralization
in 1950 in Yugoslavia, when the previously established social standards (kindergartens,
crèches) became an expensive project for the state (Stojaković, 2012: 18). Stojaković also
claims that the idea of a strong fight against patriarchy, which was very present during the war
and during the post-war reconstruction of the country, started to disappear in the 1950s
Yugoslav state (2012: 18). Very similar to Sklevicky, she concludes that with the dissolution
of the AFŽ, women “lost the space for collecting experiences and discussing problems and
successes on their way towards women’s emancipation” (2012: 38).
What I found equally interesting in Božinović’s work on the AFŽ, however, is her
remark about contradictions in one essay that was read during the Fourth (last) Congress of
the AFŽ in 1953. Božinović points out that the decision was made that work among peasant
women would be focused on enlightenment, without any political characteristics, but Bosa
Cvetić’s essay (who was one of the AFŽ leaders and later one of the SŽD leaders) concluded
that “women have to be educated to be fighters for achieving full equality for themselves, the
equality that is already recognized by our revolutionary laws” (quoted in Božinović, 1996:
169). Unfortunately, Božinović only briefly mentions this point and doesn’t develop it clearly,
38
�but what I found extremely important here - in order to evaluate the dissolution of the AFŽ, as
well as the work of its successor organizations - is to ask questions about the boundaries
between and meanings of “enlightenment” and “political work” in this context. In other
words, we could ask what the idea (and the decision) that the women’s organizations should
cease with political work among women actually meant, when we can read in the same essay
about the necessity for women to be educated enough to be able to fight for their rights. I
think that finding this kind of contradictions could complicate the narrative about the AFŽ’s
dissolution as the end of successful work on women’s position in Yugoslavia, because it
raises the question about the extent to which the AFŽ’s successors continued and followed the
AFŽ’s work and can offer directions for understanding this history in possibly more nuanced
ways.
Indeed, recently there is a new approach in historicizing women’s activism in the Cold
War era. Young historian Chiara Bonfiglioli, born in 1983, in her doctoral dissertation
explores women’s activism in Yugoslavia and Italy during the Cold War and challenges the
idea that during this period women’s activism didn’t exist (2012: 22). As I explained in the
Introduction of this thesis, Bonfiglioli criticizes second-wave feminist historians for applying
the “autonomy principle” while evaluating activities of women’s organizations during the
Cold War (2014: 4).
Through this lens, Bonfiglioli is criticizing second-wave feminist historians in
Yugoslavia and strives to contextualize their work into the political situation of the time in
which they emerged. Particularly, she explains Lydia Sklevicky’s work on the AFŽ and says
that Sklevicky started to write about the AFŽ in the context of late 1970s, when the first
feminist groups appeared in Yugoslavia (2014: 3). As I mentioned in Introduction, Sklevicky
was researching women’s history that was erased from the Yugoslav schoolbooks. She
claimed that this erasure of women from the official history corresponded to the general
39
�opinion on women’s position in Yugoslavia, which stated that women’s liberation came as a
consequence of the revolution, not as a consequence of women’s struggle for their
emancipation (Bonfiglioli, 2014: 3). Bonfiglioli argues that Sklevicky wanted to confront this
version of history, but, in the end, by insisting on explaining the dissolution of the AFŽ as a
sign of patriarchal backlash, fell in the trap of a new tradition - one that claims the nonexistence of women’s activism during the Cold War (2014: 4).
Bonfiglioli’s approach demands a questioning of the main narrative about the AFŽ and
the idea that its dissolution meant the end of meaningful activities of women’s organization in
Yugoslavia. Instead of being focused on the “autonomy principle”, as I already pointed out in
the Introduction of this thesis, she suggests to search for different forms of women’s agency
that existed within the political, economic and social context of the time (2014: 4). Bonfiglioli
criticizes the narrative in which the AFŽ was dissolved as a result of patriarchal backlash, the
AFŽ leaders’ loyalty to the KPJ and fear of feminism, and advocates for a better
understanding of the social and political circumstances that led to the dissolution of the
organization (2012: 210-211).
Based on her analysis of documents from the Fourth Congress of the AFŽ, Bonfiglioli
claims that its leaders dismissed the organization in order to adjust work on women’s issues to
the new self-management model of socialism (2012: 216). Bonfiglioli emphasizes that the
AFŽ’s leaders were aware of the difference between the official KPJ’s discourse on women’s
equality and the real conditions on the ground, where local Party leaders didn’t support
women’s liberation, and that exactly because of this the AFŽ’s leaders considered the AFŽ’s
dissolution as the best option in that moment (2012: 213). They explained that a separate
women’s organization was not useful anymore and that work on women’s issues should be
done by political authorities in a more systematic way (Bonfiglioli, 2012: 214). In short,
Bonfiglioli claims that “the fear of being labeled feminist and that a separate women’s
40
�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” (2012: 216).
Nevertheless, Bonfiglioli is clear in her evaluation of the meaning of the dissolution of
the AFŽ for women's everyday life, which corresponds to some extent to earlier analyses of
the AFŽ’s dissolution. Namely, Bonfiglioli argues that the dissolution of the separate
women's organization didn't mean much in the more developed parts of Yugoslavia (Slovenia,
Croatia), where women were already integrated in political life, but the separate organization
meant a lot for women in the less developed parts of the country (BiH for example) and its
dissolution left them without state support in the fight against patriarchal local structures
(2012: 217). In addition, Bonfiglioli advocates for thorough research on the AFŽ's successor
organizations (the Union of Women’s Societies and the Conference for the Social Activity of
Women), which are hardly researched (2012; 2014), and insists on her criticism of the
second-wave feminist historians for their a-historical application of the “autonomy principle”
in the evaluation of women's organizations during the Cold War.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have analyzed books and articles about the Antifašistički front žena
(Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ), published since the 1980s. I first provided basic historical
facts about the women’s movement in Yugoslavia before the AFŽ and then provided
information on the AFŽ’s goals, activities and the changes in its organizational structure.
Thirdly, I presented historians’ evaluations of the AFŽ’s activities and changes in the level of
autonomy of the organization and finally, I discussed their ideas about the meaning of the
dissolution of the AFŽ in 1953 for meaningful work on women’s problems in Yugoslavia.
41
�The AFŽ was a women’s organization formed in 1942 and dismissed and replaced in
1953 with the Savež ženskih društava (Union of Women’s Societies, SŽD), which was
integrated in the SSRN. As I presented above, most historians who have written about the
AFŽ claim that its dissolution in 1953 was the end of meaningful work among women in
Yugoslavia. Acknowledging the importance of the AFŽ for women’s emancipation, historians
generally evaluate the AFŽ’s early years positively and claim that the organization enhanced
women's position in the Yugoslav society.
But the assumption of most historians has been that the dissolution of the AFŽ and the
end of women’s autonomous organization had a detrimental effect on the work for women’s
rights and enhancing their position in the society. While researching women’s activism in the
Cold War era, historian Chiara Bonfiglioli challenges the dominant idea that during this
period women’s activism was irrelevant or didn’t exist. She claims that second-wave feminist
historians contributed to this interpretation of women’s activism during the Cold War by
applying the “autonomy principle” as a measure for meaningful work on women’s issues
(2014). Bonfiglioli discusses what the notion of autonomy means, and whether it is applicable
when we talk about women’s organizations in Yugoslavia (2014). By accepting Bonfiglioli’s
approach to historicize and contextualize women’s agency, I think that historians could open a
space for researching the activities of the AFŽ’s successor organizations - that are still hardly
researched (several pages in Božinović, 1996) - and evaluate those activities in more nuanced
and complex ways. This is why I decided to follow her approach and to research the SŽD, but
without using the term or searching for “women’s activism” as such. I will be focused on the
SŽDH women’s own perspective and I will discuss their activities in the terms which they
used themselves when explaining their work.
42
�3. The SŽDH (1953-1961): position, activities, goals and
discussions
In chapter 2, I presented the AFŽ in general and I discussed historians’ perspectives on
the AFŽ and its dissolution in the 1953. In this chapter I move towards the Savez ženskih
društava (Union of Women’s Societies, SŽD) (1953-1961), the AFŽ’s successor organization
that is hardly researched. I approach this organization on the level of the Narodna Republika
Hrvatska (People’s Republic of Croatia, NRH) so I analyze documents of the Savez ženskih
društava Hrvatske (Union of Women’s Societies of Croatia, SŽDH). My research is based on
the material from the Founding Assembly of the SŽDH’s, held on February 27-18, 1957, the
First Plenary Session held on January 27-28, 1958, and the Second Plenary Session held on
December 6-7, 1960, through which I discuss several topics.
Since there is barely any information on the SŽD in the Yugoslav historiography, I
will first provide basic facts about the SŽD in general and the SŽDH in particular: how it was
organized, which activities it carried out and when it was dissolved. Secondly, there are
different questions and approaches to women's emancipation within state socialism and
different ideas about how to achieve it, as well as how to evaluate socialist women’s
activities, discussed in the introduction of this thesis. In this chapter I will discuss the main
field of dispute in the communist thought and practice – whether separate women’s
organizations were necessary and justified or not – on the example of the discussions and
debates, that were going on within the women’s organization the SŽDH. Thirdly, I will
analyze the debates about the characteristics of the SŽDH’s activities and about the main goal
of the SŽDH’s work, from the perspective of the SŽDH’s leaders and rank-and-file members.
I’m interested in how those women evaluated themselves and their work and which terms
they used in describing their activities. Finally, I will present problems the SŽDH women
43
�were facing in their work. I will ask to what extent these problems and the SŽDH’s
approaches to them can clarify what kind of activism was possible, suitable and preferred at
the time, and how we can evaluate the engagement of the SŽDH women in dealing with the
patriarchal society. The bigger issue I aim to answer with this analysis is whether secondwave feminist historians’ perception of the AFŽ’s dissolution in 1953 as the end of
meaningful work on women’s issues is justified or not.
3.1. The SŽDH’s structure and activities
The Savez ženskih društava (Union of Women’s Societies, SŽD) was the women’s
organization that existed in Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1961. It was the successor of the
Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ). Briefly, at the Fourth Congress of
the AFŽ in 1953, the organization was dissolved and the new organization, SŽD, was formed.
As I already explained in chapter 2 of this thesis, at the Founding Congress of the SŽD (the
last Congress of the AFŽ) it was emphasized that women’s organizing should be done
differently in order to prevent an understanding of women’s issues being only women’s
concerns and in order to act upon the idea that women’s position in society was the
responsibility of the entire society.4 That is why the SŽD was supposed to exist and work
simultaneously with the newly formed Komisije za rad među ženama (Commissions for work
among women) within the Socijalistički savez radnog naroda (Socialist Alliance of the
Working People, SSRN). However, according to the decisions of the Fourth Congress of the
SSRNJ in 1953 and of the Fourth Congress of the AFŽJ later that year, the SŽD would be
responsible for women’s enlightenment and the SSRN’s women’s commissions for the
political work among women.5 Like the AFŽ, the SŽD had its federal (SŽDJ), republic, and
several local levels, but unlike the AFŽ (which was one unique organization), the SŽD was an
4
5
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-1, 1.1., GO SŽDH, February 19, 1957, p.1-7
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-1, 1.1., GO SŽDH, February 19, 1957, p.1
44
�alliance of a number of organizations, that were searching for solutions for different concrete
problems related to women’s position within the Yugoslav communist society, such as
prosvjećivanje (enlightenment), opening child rearing facilities, improving the household etc.6
In this thesis I focus on the Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske (SŽDH), the SŽD organization
on the level of the People’s Republic of Croatia.
Since there were no strict rules in terms of organization and activities of the SŽD on
the republic and lower levels, each organization could choose its own preferences in work
“according to the problems and issues of each city and village”.7 In Croatia, the Founding
Assembly of the SŽDH was held on February 27-18, 1957, more than three years after the
SŽDJ was formed at the federal level. One of the reasons for this delay was precisely this lack
of directions and rules for organizing, which I will discuss in the second part of this chapter.
The Founding Assembly was attended by delegates from the lower committees, who were
supposed to choose new members of the Glavni odbor (Main Committee, GO) of the SŽDH,
but representatives from other organizations and committees within the SSRN were also
invited to attend the meeting.8 At the Founding Assembly, the main assignment was to decide
on the role and tasks of the Main Committee of the SŽDH. The decision was made that the
main tasks of the GO SŽDH should be: to assist working families and to solve the problems
of household work in order to help women workers (Krajačić, 1957: 25-27). The GO SŽDH
was seen as the body whose role would be, first of all, to initiate and launch different kind of
social actions, according to specific contexts in which local SŽD’s committees were operating
(Berus, 1957: 63).
Even though there were discussions on how to organize work among peasant women
(Krajačić, 1957: 33; Jančić, 1957: 51-53), village and peasant women’s problems were not in
6
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-1, 1.1., GO SŽDH, February 19, 1957, p.1
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-1, 1.1., GO SŽDH, February 19, 1957, p.1
8
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, October 2, 1956
7
45
�the focus of the Founding Assembly of the SŽDH, which was clear from the very title of the
published book of essays that had been read during the Founding Assembly: Pomoć radnoj
porodici i radnoj ženi – naš osnovni zadatak (Assistance to the working family and to the
working woman – our main task). Soka Krajačić, a member of the Presidency of the Main
Committee of the SSRNH and also a president of the GO of the SŽDH, in her evaluation of
the SŽD’s past work, claimed that one of the major problems was that most of the women’s
societies were formed in the cities, whereas the villages were neglected (1957: 23).
The SŽDH was helping working women and working families in several ways:
through organizing crèches and kindergartens; through advocating and taking steps towards
socializing household work in order to ease the burden of working mothers, but also through
providing courses for better dealing with the household work, which was contested within the
organization, as I will discuss in the third part of this chapter (Krajačić, 1957). In her essay,
Soka Krajačić presented mostly similar tasks and achievements of the SŽD on the local
levels: taking care of nutrition, schools’ restaurants and restaurants within the commune or
enterprise and organizing household courses (1957: 21-22).
At the Plenary Session one year later, on 27-28 January, 1958, similar topics as at the
Founding Assembly in 1957, were discussed, with slightly more emphasis on the duties of the
commune (discussed in Chapter 1) in solving working women’s problems, in accordance with
the general idea of including the entire society in solving women’s problems (discussed in
Chapter 2 and further in the second section of this chapter). More attention was paid to
villages and women’s role in collective farming.9 Jela Jančić, one of the leaders of the
Women’s section within the cooperatives, in her essay “Referat o problemima žena-seljanki i
Sekciji žena-zadrugarki” (“Essay on the problems of women peasants’ and the women’s
section within cooperatives”), explained how the Women’s section within the so called
9
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958
46
�zadruge (cooperatives) was the best suitable organizational form of the SŽD for work among
and for peasant women. Jančić emphasized how the main task of the Women’s section was to
draw women into cooperatives through advocating for the opening of services that could
make it easier for them to enter the cooperatives.10 Basically, the Sections were conducting
very similar activities as the other SŽD’s organizations, but in accordance with the new rules
of adapting to the needs of women in specific contexts, they found this form being most
suitable for the work among peasant women.
Apart from the essay on peasant women, the majority of the essays were discussing
how to help working women and working families through including the entire commune in
solving a number of issues. One of the members of the GO of the SŽDH, Milka Planinc (later
the prime minister of Yugoslavia, 1982-1986), explained how this idea came from the Fifth
Plenary Session of the SSRNJ held in 1957, where it was discussed how to enhance women’s
position by including the entire society in solving a number of social and economic issues.11
Approaches and ideas given during the SŽDH’s Plenary Session in 1958 were actually similar
to those proposed at the Founding Assembly of the SŽDH a year earlier: together with other
social factors (local people’s committees of the SSRN, enterprises) to take care of children
and child rearing facilities, as well as to maintain already existing services and open new
services for socializing household work.12
What was specific for the SŽDH was its unusually good relationship with the
women’s section within the Unions. Historian Neda Božinović points out in her book on the
women’s movement in Yugoslavia that the SŽD in general didn’t pay much attention to
women workers, since this was supposed to be an Union’s duty. But, unlike the SŽD in other
Yugoslav republics, the SŽDH was giving strong support to women’s sections within the
10
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 2.day, morning, p. 17-24
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, morning, p. 1
12
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, morning, p. 14-44
11
47
�Unions, and these sections were very successful in solving women’s workers problems within
the self-management enterprises (1996: 175). As I already explained, it was clear from the
discussions and essays, both in Founding Assembly in 1957 and Plenary Session in 1958, that
easing the burden of women workers was the main activity of the SŽDH, but apart from that,
the SŽDH cooperated successfully with the women’s section within the Main Committee of
Unions. The member of that section, Ružica Turković, praised the SŽDH during the Plenary
Session in 1958 for the good cooperation and the support in advocating for more services,
better qualification courses for female workers, etc.13
As discussed in chapter 1, Yugoslavia experienced economic growth during the 1950s,
which resulted in fulfilling the Five-Year Plan (1957-1961) one year before its official end.
The next plan was supposed to start already in 1961, and that is why the next (and according
to documents last) SŽDH’s Plenary Sessions on December 6-7, 1960 was mostly focused on
it. The SŽDH women discussed how to integrate solutions for a number of problems women
were dealing into the next Five-Year Plan (1961-1965). Again, a book with essays from the
Plenary Session was published with, entitled Što petogodišnji plan donosi porodici i kakve
perspektive otvara ženama (What the Five-Year Plan brings to the family and which
perspectives it opens for women). Irena Bijelić, member of the GO of the SŽDH and president
of the Council for Social Security of the NRH, in her essay (with the title the same as the
book’s title) emphasized two main issues to deal with: how to help the family and how to
make it possible for women to enter manufacturing and social activities in high numbers
(1960: 11). The problems Bijelić emphasized did not differ much from the problems
discussed at the SŽDH’s Founding Assembly in 1957 and in First Plenary Session in 1958. At
all three SŽDH’s meetings that I analyze, the problems to deal with and the solution provided
were similar, but this time the Plenary Session was all about emphasizing all these issues in
13
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.30-33
48
�order to make them an official part of the Five-Year Plan. Bijelić articulated “constantly
present issue of women’s position in society” and said that the main problems which should
be addressed in the Five-Year Plan were: women’s segregation in female dominated
industries, the low qualification of the female labour force, the inadequate school system
which put female students in a disadvantaged position, and the bad attitude of cooperatives
towards women producers (1960: 22).
At the same Plenary Session in 1960, it was clear that new changes in the women’s
organizations would be introduced. I will say more about the discussions on this topic in the
next part of this chapter, but here it is important to state that changes in the work among
women were debated at the Fifth Congress of the SSRNJ in April 1960. Soka Krajačić
informed her drugarice (female comrades) at the Plenary Session of the SŽDH in December
1960 about those possible changes.14 She said that the name of the SSRN’s Women’s
commission for work among women had been changed into Commission for the social
activity of women and that, according to the new rules, neither the SSRN’s commissions; nor
the SŽD’s committees should be vertically connected.15 In other words, hierarchical vertical
structure, in which lower committees communicate and receive directions from the higher
committees, shouldn’t exist. Krajačić said that all the changes were made in order to achieve a
higher decentralization and to put emphasis on solving the problems of families and women at
the level of the commune, according to each local context.16
Krajačić also mentioned that, during the Fifth Congress of the SSRNJ, it was proposed
to dissolve the SŽD, but the decision was left to the next Congress of the SŽDJ.17 Among the
SŽDH’s documents I couldn’t find information on that following Congress of the SŽD of
14
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.183a-198
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.190-193
16
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.185
17
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.194
15
49
�Yugoslavia, but, according to historian Božinović, it never happened (1996: 184). Instead, the
Assembly of SŽDJ was held in April 1961, where the decision was taken to abolish the SŽD
and to form the Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena (Conference for the Social Activity
of Women, KDAŽ), which continued to exist, with several changes in its name, until 1990
(Božinović, 1996: 184).
3.2. How should women be organized?
The Yugoslav socialist state (federal level) was searching for an answer to the
complex question of how best to deal with enhancing women’s position in society. Should
that be done through separate women’s organizations or not? This question was also
ubiquitous on the republic and district level and occupied lots of space in the archival
documents from the Founding Assembly of the SŽDH, held on February 27-18, 1957. Even
though the SŽDJ was officially formed in 1953, it took three years for the Founding
Assembly of the organization on the republic (Croatian) level to happen. Some of the issues
discussed during the Founding Assembly, which I will present in this part, were: Why is
important to have women’s organizations? Is it necessary and if so, why? If we decide to have
them, which type of structure should we introduce? Should it be an uniform and autonomous
organization or an alliance of different organizations/associations which will be dealing with
specific women’s issues in each district, while leaving the political work among women to the
SSRN?. These discussions continued at the Plenary Sessions in 1958 and 1960.
At the Founding Assembly in 1957, the leaders of the SŽDH discussed these issues
several times. In her essay “Naš rad je društvena aktivnost – u izgradnji socijalističkog
društva i pomoći radnoj ženi” (“Our work is social activity – in the construction of the
socialist community and in assistance to the female worker”), Soka Krajačić, president of the
Main Committee of the SŽDH, explained that this was the first assembly of the women’s
50
�organization in Croatia (republic level) after the last Fourth Congress of the AFŽH in 1949.
She presented what the AFŽH did until the dissolution of the AFŽ on the federal level in
1953. While emphasizing its main activities: the enlightenment of women, literacy courses,
assistance to female workers, but also political work among women, Krajačić said (similar to
the conclusion of the AFŽJ last Congress in 1953) that:
“[…] a series of these problems, which the women’s organization was solving, were
treated as specifically women’s and not as societal issues. Thus, searching for the
solution of these problems didn’t have the full support from the overall society. Within
this process, the AFŽ - which was active as a part of the People’s Front at the time and
worked on women’s political education and elevation and many other practical issues
related particularly to women’s position – was actually separating itself from the
framework of the general social fight for women’s rights. The AFŽ secluded itself in
this struggle” (1957: 18).
Additionally, Krajačić emphasized that the AFŽ had to be dissolved. Despite its excellent
success in the work among women, the organization became too “narrow” and was unable to
deal with all activities that were necessary for solving women’s many problems (1957: 19).
Women from the lower SŽDH’s committees expressed the same opinion. A document
from the Founding Assembly of one District Committee of the SŽDH in Hrvatsko zagorje (a
region in the north of Croatia), for example clearly said that “women’s social activity has
surpassed the narrow frames of specific women's organizations and today women are
participating, in almost all social activities and there is no topic that our women would not be
interested in”.18 Additionally, the document explained that the SŽD, as a new type of
organization, was “not as sturdy as the AFŽ, but adjusted to the needs of women of some
18
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, October 1, 1956
51
�particular region. The SŽD consists of many associations which are dealing with particular
questions”.19
Soka Krajačić, president of the Main Committee of the SŽDH, also explained the
somewhat extraordinary fact that the Founding Assembly of the SŽDH was held three years
after the Founding Assembly of the SŽD on the federal level. She explained how the GO of
the SŽDH didn’t want to insist on forming associations just to have them, but instead wanted
women to gather around certain activities and then form associations according to the specific
issues they were struggling with (1957: 20). Members of the GO of the SŽDH were thinking
that, if the GO insisted on forming societies, women could be directed to form separate
women’s organizations, which would reduce their participation in political organizations,
where they worked to solve many problems related to women’s position (1957: 20).
The statements presented above could be seen as support for historian Chiara
Bonfiglioli’s claims about the dissolution of the AFŽ, which go against usual the
interpretation of the dissolution of the AFŽ, discussed in chapter 2. While analyzing
documents from the Fourth Congress of the AFŽ, Bonfiglioli claims that it is evident that its
leaders dismissed the organization in order to adjust work on women’s issues to the new selfmanagement model of socialism (2012: 216).
But although all SŽDH leaders argued against a uniform and separate women’s
organization like the AFŽ was, at one point they were justifying their own existence as an
alliance of women’s associations within the SSRN, hence still in a way a separate women’s
organization. Anka Berus, member of the GO of the SŽDH and member of the Executive
Council of the NRH’s Parliament, started her essay “Treba se boriti za radnu kvalifikaciju
žena“ (“We have to fight for women’s professional qualifications”), with the question whether
19
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, October 1, 1956
52
�Croatia needed specific women’s associations, since women had all rights and participated in
political life. She explained that according to data, women’s associations justified their
existence since in every place where they were formed around specific problems that women
had, women were participating in high numbers (1957: 48). She concluded that through
women’s societies, many problems could be solved much faster and easier than through other
organizations (1957: 48).
Along similar lines, in the material from the Founding Assembly of one District
Committee of the SŽDH in Hrvatsko zagorje, leaders of the District explained that there
always was the question of whether it was necessary or not to have women’s associations,
since women had already attained all rights, but the practice actually showed that women’s
societies could be very helpful in finding solutions for women’s specific problems in
particular counties.20 Additionally, the document said that the women’s organization was
necessary because the situation on the ground was difficult for women and in practice they
were not equal to men. Many problems prevented women from participating in social and
political life and the biggest problem was the overload of domestic labour.21
Similarly, a separate document from the Plenary Session in 1958, also stated that there
were lots of discussions about how to approach women’s organization. It said that “there were
opinions that all [women’s] problems are problems of the entire society”, which was why
some people asked, “why then to have a women’s organization, since it can’t solve those
problems”.22 The question was “why not to solve all problems related to women’s role and
position within the socialist society through the SSRN”. However, the answer provided in the
next paragraph was that in the districts, where discussions were not going on and the SŽD had
20
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, October 1, 1956
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, October 1, 1956
22
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, p.1
21
53
�begun to work, “the initial work justified the organization’s existence through the SŽD’s good
results and its cooperation with the local people’s committees and other social institutions”.23
Soka Krajačić justified the existence of the SŽDH towards the end of her essay by
claiming that in practice, there were often no other organizations that would deal with
problems of women’s position in society. Still, she said that there were no reasons why this
should stay only in the framework of women’s organizations, since these were the problems
of the entire society (1957: 23). The whole necessity for the justification of the SŽDH’s
existence was actually related to the idea that there were no specific women’s issues, only
issues of the entire society and that the entire society had to help women workers and working
families to solve the everyday problems, such as better nutrition, childcare or socializing
domestic labour (Krajačić, 1957: 23). The SŽDH leaders kept inviting other organizations to
join in finding solutions for social (not only women’s) problems that the SŽD was dealing
with (Krajačić, 1957: 23), but these organizations often didn’t perform their tasks, but often in
vain.
Bosa Cvetić, president of the Central committee of the SŽD of Yugoslavia (SŽDJ), in
her essay “Društva žena nisu se odvojila od općedruštvenih zadataka” (“Women’s societies
are not detached from general social activities”) explained debates that were going on in the
period between the last Congress of the AFŽ in 1953 and the Founding Assembly of the
SŽDH in 1957 and said that all the time the question was, “is our work useful or not” and
“whether is it enough for women just to join to the SSRN, engage there to the full extent and
try to find solutions for women’s problems from those positions” (1957: 56). She argued that
a scenario in which a separate women’s organization would result in smaller participation of
women within the SSRN and isolate them didn’t happen. Instead, “women didn’t leave other
political and social organizations, they still work there” and the biggest success of the SŽD
23
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, p.1
54
�was that it managed to draw new women activists into the political and social sphere (1957:
56). She was actually arguing for a double strategy: for simultaneously organizing both in the
regular SSRN’s institutions and in separate women’s organizations.
Anka Berus was explaining a similar thing, when she criticized the SŽD’s activists
who were complaining about comrades’ behavior towards them (see below). According to
Berus, sentences such as “comrades didn’t give us, comrades promised us” were unacceptable
since at least half of women present on that Plenary Session (1958) “worked in some of the
people’s committees” and there were “no one who, apart from being active in the SŽD, was
not also active in some other form of social management”.24 That was why women were
supposed to work on all issues within these institutions, and within communes. In other words
they had to, according to Berus, work on enhancing women’s position in the society, not to
beg comrades for anything.25
At the Plenary Session in 1960 other SŽD’s leaders and rank-and file members
expressed almost same opinions. Irena Bijelić, member of the GO of the SŽDH, concluded
that women, apart being active in the SŽD and discussing problems within the women’s
organization, “should discuss these issues in all positions, which our society created for
debates and adoptions of collective proposals and conclusions, therefore at union’s meetings,
working councils, institutions of League of Communists…” (1960: 27). Activist from lower
committees also recognized this need. Jelica Radojčević from Koprivnica (a small city in the
north of Croatia) said that it would be excellent if, as a result of conclusions of that Plenary
Session, all institutions would help in solving different kind of problems. It would be
especially good, Radojčević said, if it would be possible to mobilize “women who work in the
municipal people’s committees, the councils of the municipal people’s committees, and in
24
25
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.39
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.30-33
55
�management positions in other socio-political organizations” in solving all those issues (1960:
94). While emphasizing that the conclusions of the Plenary Sessions should be used as
directions for solving problems within the communes, Milka Planinc explained that the Main
Committee of the SŽDH invited “other [female] comrades to put these issues [the problems of
working families and female workers and the problem of people’s living standard] on the
agenda of all political organizations, first of all on the agenda of the SSRN” (1960: 127).
As is obvious from the quotes above, the SŽDH women at the Plenary Session in 1960
continued to advocate for a double strategy in women’s organizing. But as already mentioned
in the first part of this chapter, just before this SŽDH’s 1960 Plenary Session, the Fifth
Congress of the SSRNJ was held, during which women’s organizing was discussed further in
accordance with a greater decentralization of the country and putting emphasis on solving
every problem on the level of the commune.26 Soka Krajačić emphasized that during 1960
discussions over the role of the SŽD, which started in 1953, continued 27 and that the SSRNJ
suggested the dissolution of the SŽD.28 This final decision was left to the next Congress of the
SŽD, and Krajačić was clear in explaining the SŽDH’s leaders’ position. They obviously
wanted to continue with the double strategy of organizing women, both in separate
organizations and within the SSRN, because they saw the need for a separate women’s
organization. According to Krajačić, the SŽDH leaders were clear in their position that “in
our Republic there is no need for orders to dissolve districts’ committees of the SŽD, because
this has to be decided in each and every committee in every district, according to practical
needs”.29
26
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.185
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.184
28
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.194
29
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.5., GO SŽDH, December 6-7, 1960, p.194
27
56
�3.3. Polemics over the main goal of the organization
Here, I will first analyse discussions that took place during the Founding Assembly of
the SŽDH’s and First Plenary Session held on January 1958 about the importance of the
“political work” among women, in order to see how the SŽDH’s leaders and members saw
their own work and what was important for them to emphasize about that work. Thus, I will
try to give answers to several questions: Which terms were the SŽDH women using in
describing their goals and activities? What can we conclude from the fact that the SŽDH
women were discussing very thoroughly their own position and that they were searching for a
new solution of women’s organizing in the new system of self-management socialism and
decentralization of Yugoslavia? What does the insistence on labelling the SŽDH’s work as
“political” - even though, in the division of labour between the SSRN’s commissions and the
SŽDH, “political work” was supposed to be the SSRN commissions’ activity - by the SŽDH
leaders, tell us about how they saw themselves, and how did they evaluate the organization’s
activities and goals?
The president of the Main Committee of SŽDH, Soka Krajačić, reminded her
drugarice of the conclusion of the last AFŽ Congress that the political work among women
should be performed in the framework of the SSRN. She claimed that the idea behind this
decision was to prevent an isolation of women in separate organization and to move the
“political work” among women to the SSRN “where overall political activity is going on”,
while at the same time to encourage the forming of different women’s associations in order to
solve specific women’s problems of each district (1957: 19).
Krajačić several times emphasized that the main goal of the SŽDH’s activities was to
enable women’s participation in the political and social life of Croatia. For example, while
evaluating the activities of the Main Committee of the SŽDH, she insisted that it “was
approaching all issues with the idea of providing assistance to the women workers, which
57
�aimed to enable women’s higher participation in the political and social spheres” (1957: 30).
What is visible from Soka Krajačić’s remarks is the struggle of the SŽDH’s leadership to
position itself in the new system and to figure out what was the SŽDH’s status within it. Even
though officially the SŽDH was not supposed to conduct “political work” among women for
the above mentioned reasons, I think it was really important for Soka Krajačić to explain that
the SŽDH’s activities still could be labeled as political activities. This is the most evident
when she criticized the SŽDH’s work on providing household courses for women and at the
same time defended the organization (1957: 32-33). As I explained above, apart from
providing facilities and services for the working family, the SŽDH was also teaching women
how to better deal with all domestic labour through household courses for women. Krajačić
said that this could be seen as one of the reasons for the backlash in understanding women’s
position in society – as a mother and housewife (1957: 32-33). She said that because of the
household courses, “it seems that our only goal is to teach women how to cook, to tidy
apartments and to take care of children”, but she insisted that the SŽDH was conducting this
activity also “in order to make it possible for women to participate more in the political and
social life” (1957: 33). At the end of her essay, Krajačić again explained that everything they
did was “in order to help women in overcoming obstacles for their greater participation in the
political and social life” (1957: 34).
Mika Špiljak, a (male) member of the Presidency of the Main Committee of SSRNH,
who was participating in the discussion during the Founding Assembly, explicitly claimed in
his essay “Aktivnost društva žena je društveno-politička aktivnost” (“The activities of the
women’s societies are socio-political activities”) that the SŽDH was conducting “political
activities” (1957: 63). I found his essay extremely important because of his remarks on the
meaning of the socio-political work in the new moment for the Yugoslav state. Even though
the Resolution on forming the SŽD in 1953 stated that political work among women should
58
�be removed to SSRN’s special committees for work among women, Špiljak asked in his
introduction “Where do these ideas about the SŽD not conducting political activities come
from?” (1957: 63). He argued that in the new circumstances the SŽD’s activities were for sure
socio-political activities and he blamed some political actors for not to being able to see sociopolitical character of the SŽD’s work, saying that they failed to see how political work meant
something else than it meant during the war (1957: 63). Špiljak tried to explain that the
political work during WW2, such as the “fight against chetniks, ustashas or the fight for
independence” was not relevant or important anymore and that “there [were] completely
different problems in our society at the moment” (1957: 63).
Maybe the best comparison between what was seen as important during WW2 and
what was seen as urgent in the 1950s and 1960s in Yugoslavia was made several years later,
at the Plenary Session of the SŽDH in 1960. SŽDH member Nada Sremec strived to explain
what the main task of all women should be. In her words, all of them should “learn, learn,
learn” because “just as during the war one had to fight”, today’s task is to study in every field:
from ideological education, to general, professional and political education” (1960: 104).
Bosa Cvetić, president of the Central committee of the SŽD of Yugoslavia (SŽDJ),
claimed that “it seems from the outside that we narrowed the scope of our work” (1957: 55),
and “that we are preoccupied with irrelevant problems” (1957: 56) compared to the political
work of the AFŽ, but actually the SŽD’s work was “widespread and diverse” (1957: 55).
Similar to Mika Špiljak’s remarks about the different nature of the political work, Cvetić
argued that “in these conditions, if an organization doesn’t have political program, it doesn’t
have to mean that it is apolitical”, because in the overall work of the SŽD “there was no
activity that wouldn’t be in line with the general struggle for building our socialist society”
(1957: 59). In other words, everything that the SŽDH was doing was in order to build
socialism.
59
�The notes for a book of essays from the SŽDH Founding Assembly’s clearly stated
that the overall conclusion on the role of the SŽDH was that its goal was women’s
participation in political life. It was stated in the document that “the first Assembly of the
SŽDH produced rich material and gave orientation for further work with women in solving a
series of questions and problems in order to help them in their efforts to enter all sectors of the
social life and in their struggle for full political and social affirmation”.30
During the Plenary Session of the SŽDH on January 27-28, 1958, several leaders
referred to this issue as well. Anka Berus, while advocating for the cooperation of the SŽDH
with other social factors and while claiming that all women’s specific problems could and had
to be solved within the commune, she emphasized that this approach would “contribute to
enormous women’s political enlightenment and their participation in social activities”.31
When she spoke about kindergartens, Irena Bijelić emphasized that one of the purposes of
opening kindergartens was to “enable parents to enter political and social life”.32 While
analyzing the overall work of the SŽD, Marija Šoljan, member of the GO of the SŽDH, said
that they “couldn’t be satisfied, but also they couldn’t be unsatisfied” because there were
improvements in women’s political participation and women had been elected to the district
and local committees of the SSRN in higher numbers in 1953 than in the elections in 1950.33
It is clear that she thought that the SŽD’s work helped women to enter the political life and
that the SŽD should continue to take care of women’s political participation. At the same
Plenary Session, it was several times emphasized that the session was held intentionally just
before the elections for the People’s Assembly and the Parliament of the NRH. Šoljan
concluded that it was necessary to organize meetings with women on the ground to enhance
30
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, February, 1957
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.43
32
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, morning, p.14
33
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 2.day, p.33
31
60
�their participation in elections, because “experience from last elections showed that very good
results were achieved in places where separate meetings with women were held”.34
Šoljan also stressed another issue, which can be illustrative for the position of the
SŽDH leaders on the women’s question in Yugoslavia. Apart from the next elections, the
second most important topic at the Plenary Session in 1958 was the preparation for the next
International Women’s Day on March 8. When women from lower SŽDH’s committees gave
reports on the preparations in their committees, Šoljan warned them about the content of the
celebration. She said that “in recent years March 8 started to have characteristics of Mother’s
Day”, which she highly disapproved of.35 Šoljan emphasized that the GO of the SŽDH
already “gave guidelines that March 8 should be celebrated differently, that it should be a
socio-political manifestation for all women, not only for mothers”, because “women achieved
so many results in our socialist community” and March 8 should be celebrated accordingly. 36
In contrast to the Founding Assembly and the First Plenary Session, at the Second
Plenary Session 1960, which focused on the new Five-Year Plan and on manufacture,
“political work” was barely mentioned. Irena Bijelić explained that she did not mention
women’s political participation in her essay “not because they [the SŽDH] consider it an
irrelevant question, but because this question is directly related to the first one [women’s
participation in manufacture]” (1960: 23). She argued that “women’s greater participation in
skilled jobs and the presence in manufacture” would lead to “women’s greater participation in
authority and management bodies” (1960: 23).
34
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 2.day, p.35
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 2.day, p.35
36
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 2.day, p.35
35
61
�3.4. Which problems were the SŽDH women facing in their practical work?
Here, I will present problems the SŽDH women were facing in their work. What were
the biggest problems women were dealing with? What can we conclude from these problems
and the SŽDH’s reaction towards them about the society they lived in and about what kind of
activism was possible and suitable at the time? How can we evaluate the SŽDH engagement
in dealing with the patriarchal society?
The consequence of these debates and of a looser structure of the organization,
compared to the AFŽ’s, was a temporary paralysis in the women’s activities in some districts.
An indicative example is one from the above mentioned Hrvatsko zagorje, where during the
forming of the District committee of the SŽDH women emphasized that “there are no strict
directives or rules for our work, because every district or region has its own specific issues”.
They evaluated these changes as being helpful because “strict directives could maybe prevent
work on the ground”. On the other hand, they referred to the period of three years after the
dissolution of the AFŽ and before forming this committee of the SŽDH in their district and
said that “we have to be careful not to transform this liberty in organizing and acting into a
complete neglecting of the work among women, which happened in the region before”.37
The problem of the “political work” among women was not solely a problem on the
level of the SŽDH’s leadership discussions. Problems related to this “political work” were the
biggest problems that the SŽDH’s members were facing on the ground. It is evident from
several essays form the SŽDH Founding Assembly in 1957 that the ‘comrades’ from the
SSRNH’s Commissions for work among women weren’t doing their job, that is, they often
neglected their tasks on raising women’s political consciousness and providing political
education for women.
37
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.2.1., GO SŽDH, October 1, 1956
62
�Maybe the most direct critique towards the SSRN came from Soka Krajačić when she
asked “why there are not more women in leadership positions within the SSRN” (1957: 32),
although women were very active in all social organizations. She argued that one of the
reasons must be that “the SSRN doesn’t take care of political work among women; neither
does it keep track of women’s participation in the social life” (1957: 32). Moreover, she
briefly repeated that the decision of the Fourth Plenary Session of the SSRNJ (and also of the
Fourth Congress of the AFŽJ) was that the political work with women had to be conducted
within the SSRN, but then she stated that “SSRN’s organizations don’t know much about
women’s activities” or about the “problems that women are dealing with” and how this really
“makes it difficult to work on enlightenment and an intensive raising of women’s political
consciousness” (1957: 32). Krajačić concluded that there was a backlash in understanding
women’s position in the Yugoslav society and that the lack or the non-existence of political
work among women was one of the reasons for that backlash (1957: 32).
Other leaders also criticized the SSRN for not fulfilling its duties and suggested to the
SŽD to perform those duties. Anka Berus, for example, said that the SŽDH should put
pressure on the SSRN and maybe conduct activities that should be performed by the SSRN.
She emphasized that women’s societies “should ask the SSRN to solve some special issues if
the SSRN doesn’t take it in its own hands” because “in politics, everybody can knock on
everybody’s door and has right to ask questions and raise issues that one thinks have to be
solved” (1957: 50).
The SŽDH not only had a problem with the political work among women not being
conducted by those responsible for it. In addition, organizations that were supposed to work
with them on solving the problems of female workers and working families didn’t do their
jobs either. For example, while explaining that the role of the SŽDH Main Committee was to
help working families by opening kindergartens together with other responsible organizations,
63
�Soka Krajačić was worried about the condition of the kindergartens and their future because
the SŽDH “found omissions and irresponsibility even among those social factors that are
legally obliged to take care of kindergartens” (1957: 26).
Krajačić’s and Berus’s critique could be seen in light of feminist historian and activist
Neda Božinović’s critique of the transfer of political work among women to the SSRN,
almost 40 years after. She interpreted the dissolution of the AFŽ as the result of a patriarchal
backlash (1996: 170), which I discussed in the chapter on the AFŽ. But, as I also already
mentioned, Božinović points out that the redistribution of responsibilities between the SSRN
and the SŽD caused serious problems on the ground, since the SSRN simply didn’t take its
duties seriously (1996: 263). From archival documents that I analyzed above, the same
conclusion can be drawn.
Maybe the most illustrative examples of what kind of problems women from the SŽD
were facing and how they struggled with them are those of SŽDH’s member Nevia Zakinja
from Pula (a town in Istria), given during the Plenary Session in January 1958. She thought
that the biggest achievement of the SŽD in her district was that problems which bothered
women were now finally discussed during the meetings of the District committees of the
SSRN. But she was also complaining about the comrades’ reaction towards the SŽD
members’ demands: they often said there was no money for solving a certain issue in order to
help women from the community.38 That is why women from the SŽD were very “resolute”
and tried to fight for what they wanted. She gave the example of crèches in Istria and said that
the comrades wanted to close some crèches because of a lack of money, but women from the
SŽD visited the comrades and explained them that the SŽD wouldn’t let this happen.39
38
39
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.1-2
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.5
64
�Nevia Zakinja explained that she was saying this “to show how often and easily
comrades and authorities made decisions on closing facilities for childcare”. The SŽD’s
activists managed to prevent the authorities form doing that, but the communication between
the SŽD and the people’s committees was in general poor. Zakinja said that the SŽD women
called presidents of working councils or managers of enterprises for a meeting to include
them in solving women’s workers problems, but they didn’t have success in this undertaking.
Most of the time, she said, women had to go and try to convince comrades from Union’s
councils or the local SSRN’s committees of taking them seriously. In the end of her speech
Zakinja concluded that “the biggest problem is that we have to go there and struggle to
persuade them that we are talking about real problems”.40
Similar problems were pointed out by other women at the SŽDH’s Plenary Session in
1958. Jelka Marković from the SŽD in Virovitica (a city in the north of Croatia) explained
how women were struggling while organizing the SŽD in their district. Women gave their
best to organize women’s societies according to the specific problems in their community, but
“the comrades tricked them [the SŽD women]” by saying that women can “rely on the SSRN,
which will bear the costs [of organizing]”.41 In but in the end the SSRN was not helpful at all
and everything that women got from their comrades was only “one corner of the table, where
already three comrades were working”.42
Conclusion
In this chapter I provided basic facts about the SŽDH, presented discussions which
were going on within the SŽDH in the 1950s around the complex issue of women’s
organizing in Yugoslavia, explained what was the main dispute over the SŽDH’s goals,
40
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.6
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.21
42
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.21
41
65
�provided an example of the SŽDH’s approach to women’s position in society and summarized
problems the SŽDH women were facing in their work.
I analyzed archival material from the Founding Assembly of the SŽDH’s, held on
February 27-18, 1957, the First Plenary Session held on January 27-28, 1958, and the Second
Plenary Session held on December 6-7, 1960. I approached these documents from a bottomup perspective, striving to show the SŽDH women’s agency. I tried to demonstrate how these
women saw themselves, what was important for them and which language they used to
describe their activities and position in the Yugoslav communist society. The SŽDH leaders
discussed the position of their organization within the new circumstances of self-management
socialism and decentralization in Yugoslavia in the 1950s. It was important for them to
explain why the AFŽ had to be dissolved and to emphasize how, in the new context, the entire
society had to work on solving the problems of women’s position in the community.
Although, the SŽDH’s leaders and rank-and-file members agreed with the dissolution of the
AFŽ, they justified the existence of a somewhat separate women’s organization, because they
regarded this as the only way to solve specific women’s issues in particular districts, cities or
villages. Apart from justifying the existence of the SŽDH, some leaders strongly advocated
for a form of double organizing: to fight for women’s liberation both in a separate
organization and within the SSRN. It seems that the SŽDH women really believed this was
the right approach to women’s liberation.
The SŽDH’s leaders were trying to position themselves and to figure it out what was
their role in the new circumstances in Yugoslavia. They often emphasized that, although this
was supposed to be the SSRN’s task, the SŽDH’s work could be labelled as “political work”.
It was extremely important for the SŽDH women to prove that they were not just explaining
women how to do housework, but that all the SŽDH’s activities were performed in order to
enhance women’s position in the political and social sphere. It was obvious from the problems
66
�that the SŽDH women were facing on the ground that they didn’t receive much help from
other institutions, as they were supposed to. Often, the biggest obstacle in their work was
exactly the disparaging behaviour from comrades from the SSRN. Therefore, I would agree
with the historian Chiara Bonfiglioli’s opinion that the AFŽ’s leaders (which later became the
SŽD’s leaders) decided to dissolve the AFŽ in order to try to find a solution for achieving
women’s equality within the self-management institutions, where all political activities were
going on (2012: 216). But, what is obvious from the documents that I analyzed, this idea was
not implemented well enough, primarily because of the lack of cooperation from the SSRN.
Nevertheless, I believe that the SŽDH’s work shouldn’t be judged as not meaningful, as
several historians who evaluated the end of the AFŽ as the end of meaningful work on
enhancing women’s position in Yugoslavia did, just because in the SŽDH women had
problems with the implementation of the new structure. As I demonstrated in the last part of
the chapter, those women on the ground were fighting for what they considered as important,
and the leaders (such as Soka Krajačić) were openly and publicly criticizing the SSRN for not
fulfilling its duties.
As mentioned in the Introduction of this thesis, the mainstream paradigm in the
scholarly literature about the official women’s organizations in state socialist countries still
disparages them as “Party tools”. By contrast, my analysis of archival documents of the
SŽDH showed that the SŽDH women had their own voices and opinions; that they strived to
enhance women’s position in society in a way they found the most suitable for the context
they lived in; and that they discussed at large the SŽDH’s position in the circumstances of
self-management and tried to find solutions for the problems they were facing on the ground.
Therefore, I argue that the SŽDH can’t be labelled as “Party tool” and that the SŽDH
women’s work should not be erased from the historiography on the Yugoslav women’s
movement.
67
�Conclusion
“Comrades, we are proceeding with our meeting. [...] It has been exactly 15 years
since the first Antifascist Women's Front conference was held in Bosanski Petrovac on
December 6-7, 1942. [...] This year we are celebrating the 15th anniversary of that great and
important date”.43 These were the words of SŽDH Main Committee Marija Šoljan at the
SŽDH Plenary Session in 1958. The SŽDH women celebrated the establishment of the
women’s antifascist organization, and it is evident that they were proud of everything the
Antifascist Women's Front (AFŽ) had done for women in Yugoslavia. After analyzing
archival documents, I believe the SŽDH women considered the SŽDH as a successor of the
AFŽ, which continued the AFŽ’s efforts, but in a different way. The SŽDH women saw
themselves as part of continuum, but while historians have written about the AFŽ, their
contributions were erased from women’s history in Yugoslavia. This continuum is not visible
in scholarly works on Yugoslav women’s history. Historical overviews usually start with the
AFŽ and continue with the feminist movement in the 1970s, suggesting that after the
dissolution of the AFŽ in 1953 there was nothing noteworthy for women’s history until the
1970s. The AFŽ’s successor organizations remained almost completely unresearched.
In a broader sense, this thesis could be seen as part of emerging scholarly work on
rethinking the complex relations between feminism and socialism. I examined the case of one
of the AFŽ’s successor organizations in order to understand better what was happening in a
forgotten period of Yugoslav women’s history. I looked at the Savez ženskih društava
Hrvatske (Union of Women’s Societies of Croatia, SŽDH), the organization that existed from
1953 to 1961 in the People’s Republic of Croatia. First, I wanted to explore what the SŽDH
women did, in order to be able to rethink second-wave feminist historians’ perception of the
43
HR-HDA-KDAŽH 1234-2, 2.4.4., GO SŽDH, January 27-28, 1958, 1.day, afternoon, p.23
68
�AFŽ’s dissolution in 1953 as the end of meaningful work on women’s issues. Second, I
wanted to find out whether historians’ negative evaluation of the SŽDH as “Party tool” which is the general scholarly narrative about official women’s organization in state socialist
countries - was justified in this case.
I first provided basic facts about Yugoslavia in Chapter 1 in order to locate the
organization that I research in the specific context of self-management socialism and
decentralization of Yugoslavia in the 1950s. In Chapter 2 I dealt with the complex history and
historiography of the AFŽ. I explained the AFŽ’s goals, activities and the changes in its
organizational structures, as well as historians’ evaluation of all of this. Above all, I focused
on the historians’ interpretation of the AFŽ’s dissolution, according to which, the dissolution
of the autonomous and unique organization was detrimental for meaningful work on women’s
position in society. Following the historian Chiara Bonfiglioli, I decided not to apply the
second-wave feminist “autonomy principle” when evaluating the activities of the SŽDH, in
order to be able to examine what the SŽDH women did and interpret their work in a new way.
In Chapter 3 I looked at archival documents of the SŽDH without second-wave
feminist lenses and I approached the material from a bottom-up perspective, which goes
against hegemonic narrative on communist women’s organizations being simply obedient
“Party tools”. I presented the SŽDH’s goals, activities and discussions that were going on
within the organization. Above all, I wanted to find out how the SŽDH women perceived
themselves, how they negotiated their position within the Yugoslav society, which words they
used in describing the SŽDH’s activities and goals, and how they fought against the
patriarchal structures they encountered. I showed that the SŽDH leaders discussed their
position and sought for the best way of organizing women in the new circumstances of selfmanagement in Yugoslavia. I demonstrated that it was important for the SŽDH women to
emphasize that they were fighting for enhancing women’s position in the social and public
69
�sphere and to keep their position as a somewhat separate organization, but at the same time to
include the entire society in solving specific women’s issues, what I referred to as their double
strategy. In the end, I showed that SŽDH’s leaders and rank-and-file members were not afraid
to criticize the Socijalistički savez radnog naroda (Socialist Alliance of the Working People,
SSRN) openly and in public. I believe that I managed to prove that the SŽDH was not simply
a “Party tool” and that the SŽDH women had a well-thought-out strategy and ideas on how to
enhance women’s position in community.
While analyzing documents and doing my research I encountered two problems. First,
I dealt with the extremely difficult, challenging and sometimes ambiguous language of the
SŽDH women, often loaded with meanings specific for the context in which it emerged,
which made it difficult to analyze and then translate into clear English. Second, because of the
lack of scholarly work on this topic, and because of the lack of documents in the archive, I
couldn’t answer all the questions I would have like to address, for example, why and how the
SŽDH was abolished.
I believe my research can serve as a starting point for further study on the extremely
complex and almost completely unexplored field of women’s organizations in Yugoslavia
after the AFŽ. This thesis deals with the SŽDH, the organization on the republic level, but it
would be excellent if further researchers could use this research while studying the SŽD on
the federal level. Moreover, this research can be a helpful starting point for researching the
SŽD’s successor organization, the Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena (Conference for
the Social Activity of Women, KDAŽ), which has been equally erased from Yugoslav
women’s history. I think this is important in order not to deprive future generations of
knowledge on the extraordinary rich and empowering women’s movement in Yugoslavia. Or
in historian Lydia Sklevicky’s words:
70
�“Whether the need for approaching this kind of history which is able to integrate many
dimensions and voices, among them women's perspective, will be met in the near future is
hard to predict. But, it would be worth a try, since it is notorious fact that women in Yugoslav
society make up the slightly bigger half of population, and since they have always
significantly outnumbered the horses”.44
44
Sklevicky, 1989b: 73
71
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�
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Istraživački radovi
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The End of the AFŽ – The End of Meaningful Women’s Activism? Rethinking the History of Women’s Organizations in Croatia, 1953 – 1961 - Jelena Tešija
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Central European University
Department of Gender Studies
In partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts in Gender Studies.
Supervisor: Professor Francisca de Haan
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This thesis, as part of emerging scholarly work on rethinking the complex relations between feminism and socialism, explores the Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske (Union of Women’s Societies of Croatia, SŽDH), the women's organization that existed in Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1961. The SŽDH was the successor of the Antifašistički front žena (Antifascist Women’s Front, AFŽ), and while there is ample literature about the activities of the AFŽ, the activities of its successor organizations are hardly researched. This thesis examines the case of the SŽDH in order to understand better what was happening in a forgotten period of Yugoslav women’s history. I first discuss second-wave feminist historians’ perspectives on the AFŽ, and in particular the fact that that most historians who have written about the AFŽ claim that its dissolution in 1953, as an autonomous organization, was detrimental for meaningful work on women’s problems in Yugoslavia. Second, I look at archival documents of the SŽDH. I approach the material from a bottom-up perspective, which goes against the hegemonic narrative on communist women’s organizations as being simply obedient “Party tools”. I research the activities and goals of the SŽDH, the discussions and debates within the organization as well as the problems that the SŽDH women were facing in their practical work. I focus on the SŽDH women’s own perspective and the terms which they used themselves when discussing and explaining their work. Using a bottom-up approach and avoiding to apply the second-wave feminist “autonomy principle” for a state socialist women’s organization, this analysis shows that the SŽDH was not simply a “Party tool”. This research proves that the SŽDH women had their voices and opinions; that they had a well-thought-out strategy and ideas on how to enhance women’s position in the context they lived in; and that they extensively discussed the SŽDH’s position in the new circumstances of self-management in Yugoslavia.
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Jelena Tešija
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www.academia.edu
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2014.
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Jelena Tešija
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PDF
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English
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14-IR
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83 pages
Antifascist Front of Women
Croatia
Jelena Tešija
Union of Women’s Societies of Croatia
women's emancipation
Women's Oorganisations
Women’s Activism
Yugoslavia