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MAKING A PARTISAN:
Founding Narratives on the Participation of Women
in the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia
By
Iva Jeluši
Submitted to
Central European University
Department of Gender Studies
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
European Master in Women’s and Gender History
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Supervisor: Professor Constantin Iordachi
Budapest, Hungary
2015
�ABSTRACT
This thesis is a contribution to the growing body of scholarly work on the relationship
between state socialism and feminism in Yugoslavia. It focuses on the wartime development
of the image of female partisans (partizanke) and the postwar construction of memory about
them. Sources central to this project are the editions of the official monthly magazine of the
women’s organization Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia (Antifašisti ka fronta žena
Hrvatske, AFŽH). The time frame is the period from June 1943, when the magazine was first
published under the guidance of the AFŽH, until the dissolution of this organization in 1953.
This project departs from the premise that the communist leadership strongly influenced
the official narrative about World War II and, inter alia, included women as agents of the
People’s Liberation Struggle (Narodnooslobodila ka borba, NOB), which allowed them to
acknowledge women's temporary service to the war effort and to limit the scope of their
representation in the official narrative. Building on this notion, the thesis first explores the
circumstances in which the organization emerged, its wartime development and changes that
postwar period introduced. Then it analyzes the official journal Woman in Combat (Žena u
borbi) and elucidates how the goals of the organization and the pursuits of AFŽH officials
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during World War II influenced the wartime presentation of the narrative about the women
who contributed to the struggle as well as postwar remembrance of partizanke in the journal.
The major finding of the thesis is that the officials of this women’s organization did not act as
representatives of the experiences of all women who actively participated in the war. In their
publication they favored the women who, organized by the AFŽH, worked in the homefront
while the partizanke remained on the margins of their interpretation of the war narrative. In
consequence, this publishing policy influenced and modified the collective memory about the
women partisans.
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�ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Constantin Iordachi, for guidance and
encouragement during the thesis writing process. Also, I would like to thank my second
reader, Professor Kerstin Susanne Jobst, for her support.
I am especially thankful to my family for their emotional and financial support throughout the
last two years.
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Finally, to my friend Anne Snider, thanks for everything.
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�TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................1
Sources and Methods .....................................................................................................................3
Literature Review ...........................................................................................................................5
Theoretical Considerations .......................................................................................................... 11
CHAPTER 1 - HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ....................................................................................... 17
1.1 The Second World War in Yugoslavia .................................................................................... 17
1.2 End of the War and the Immediate Postwar Period................................................................ 23
1.3 Introduction of Self-management........................................................................................... 26
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 33
CHAPTER 2 - ORGANIZING WOMEN ................................................................................................ 34
2.1 Women’s Organizations in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-1941) ..................................... 35
2.2 The Antifascist Front of Women - Formation and Development ............................................ 41
2.3 Postwar Development of the Antifascist Front of Women (1945-1953) .................................. 52
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 57
CHAPTER 3 - IMAGES OF FEMALE FIGHTERS.................................................................................. 59
3.1 Official Narrative about the People’s Liberation Struggle ..................................................... 61
3.2 Wartime Publishing Policy of Žena u borbi............................................................................ 64
3.3 Postwar Development of War Imagery in Žena u borbi.......................................................... 73
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 85
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 88
APPENDIX 1...................................................................................................................................... 92
APPENDIX 2...................................................................................................................................... 93
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................ 94
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�LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AFŽ - Antifašisti ki front žena (Antifascist Front of Women)
AFŽH - Antifašisti ki front žena Hrvatske (Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia)
AFŽJ - Antifašisti ki front žena Jugoslavije (Antifascist Front of Women of Yugoslavia)
AVNOJ - Antifašisti ko vije e narodnog oslobo enja Jugoslavije (Antifascist Council of
the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia )
CK - Centralni komitet (Central Committee)
DFJ - Demokratska federativna Jugoslavija (Democratic Federal Yugoslavia)
FNRJ - Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija (Federal People’s Republic of
Yugoslavia)
GO - Glavni odbor (Main Committee)
HSS - Hrvatska selja ka stranka (Croatian Peasant Party)
KPH - Komunisti ka partija Hrvatske (Communist Party of Croatia)
KPJ - Komunisti ka partija Jugoslavije (Communist Party of Yugoslavia)
NDH - Nezavisna država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia)
NF - Narodni front (People’s Front)
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NKOJ - Nacionalni komitet oslobo enja Jugoslavije (National Committee of Liberation of
Yugoslavia)
NOB - Narodnooslobodila ka borba (People's Liberation Struggle)
NOO - Narodnooslobodila ki odbor (People’s Liberation Committee)
NOP - Narodnooslobodila ki pokret (People’s Liberation Movement)
NOV – Narodnooslobodila ka vojska (People’s Liberation Army)
NR - Narodna republika (People's Republic)
OK - Okružni komitet (District Committee)
OZNa - Odeljenje za zaštitu naroda (Department for Protection of People)
SBOTI J - Savez bankovnih, osiguravaju ih, trgova kih i industrijskih inovnika
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�Jugoslavije (Union of Banking, Insurance, Trade and Industry Clerks of Yugoslavia)
SKOJ - Savez komunisti ke omladine Jugoslavije (Communist Youth Union of Yugoslavia)
SKJ - Savez komunista Jugoslavije (League of Communists of Yugoslavia)
SSRN - Socijalisti ki savez radnog naroda (Socialist Alliance of Working People)
SUBNOR - Savez udruženja boraca narodnooslobodila kog rata Jugoslavije (Federal
Association of the Veterans of People's Liberation War of Yugoslavija)
SUZOR - Središnji ured za osiguranje radnika (Central Office for the Insurance of Workers)
SŽD - Savez ženskih društava (Union of Women Societies)
SŽDH – Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske (Union of Women Societies of Croatia)
UDBA - Uprava državne bezbednosti (Administration of State Security)
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ZAVNOH - Zemaljsko antifašisti ko vije e narodnog oslobo enja Hrvatske (State Antifascist
Council of People's Liberation of Croatia)
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�INTRODUCTION
According to official numbers, as many as two million Yugoslav women actively
supported partisan units in Yugoslavia during World War II in a broad range of functions, and
approximately one hundred thousand women joined the partisan resistance as fighters. A
quarter of them died during the war and another forty thousand were wounded. 1 Women
joined the partisans for a variety of reasons. Some followed their brothers or husbands to the
front, while others were motivated by a desire to defend the country and destroy the Yugoslav
monarchy. Some felt the partisan struggle was their last refuge from the atrocities inflicted by
the armed forces of the newly established Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna država
Hrvatska, NDH), while others sought liberation from the patriarchal social system. Resistance
to the occupying forces unfolded into a social revolution which sought to establish a postwar
political system similar to that of the U.S.S.R. This system promised to provide women with
the opportunity to leave social positions traditionally ascribed to females and actively
participate in the construction of the new state. Following the establishment of the Democratic
Federal Yugoslavia in Jajce in 1943, women were granted full personal legal and political
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rights and were, therefore, considered equal to men.
Furthermore, the state’s official narrative concerning the events of World War II and the
People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB) evolved to include the important role played by women
in the liberation of the country, and their participation was glorified as equivalent to that of
male partisans. Female partisans were portrayed as political and social vanguards amongst
women in Yugoslavia and gained a special place in the historical narrative of the country. In
1
Barbara Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945. (Denver: Arden Press,
1990), 46.
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�other words, communist party members defined the narrative of women’s participation in
World War II.
My main argument is that male and female state officials alike, albeit for different reasons,
engaged in and contributed to the construction of the collective memory of a female partisan.
The official narrative included women as agents in the struggle and allowed the communist
leadership to acknowledge women's temporary service to the war effort. I focus my attention
on female members of the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia (AFŽH) who in the
immediate postwar period respected the emerging image of the female partisan and
concentrated on projects that focused on helping to consolidate the power of the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia (Komunisti ka partija Jugoslavije, KPJ) and demonstrating that women
could contribute to the well-being of the country in peacetime as well as during the war. This
thesis will show that women of the AFŽH harbored a vested interest in the image of women
who actively participated in the AFŽH projects, while women partisans remained on the
margin of their interest. Therefore, through their journal AFŽH officials helped engrain into
the collective memory of its readership an alternative narrative about the role of women in the
war and postwar society.
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In my thesis I research the AFŽH, the most important women’s wartime group in Croatia
and the main postwar organization in existence from 1941 until 1953 when it was replaced by
the Savez ženskih društava (Union of Women Societies, SŽD). I explore the way in which the
AFŽ of Croatia positioned itself through its journal Woman in Combat (Žena u borbi) in
relation to the official historical narrative, which sought to commemorate women partisans as
“troopers, bombers, and fighters.”2 My goal is to reveal the ways in which, and to what extent,
this women’s organization adhered to guidelines of the official narrative concerning female
2
Vladimir Bakari , “Žena u borbi,” in Žene Hrvatske u Narodnooslobodila koj borbi, vol. 1, ed. Marija
Šoljan (Izdanje glavnog odbora Saveza ženskih društava: Zagreb, 1955), ix.
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�partisans. Furthermore, I will demonstrate the reasons why this organization participated in
and did not openly challenge the collective memory of women partisans and its influence in
solidifying the image of female partisans in the memory of Yugoslav people.
Sources and Methods
My project engages the methodological approach of Edward Gibbon’s concept that a
historian “is obliged to consult a variety of testimonies, each of which, taken separately, is
perhaps imperfect and partial.” 3 Therefore, in my research I examine a range of primary and
secondary sources that enable me to analyze World War II and the postwar period in
Yugoslavia from different perspectives.
The majority of my primary source material consists of articles from the journal Žena u
borbi, which was published both during and after World War II. It was the first, and by the
end of the war, only journal published by and for women in Croatia featuring articles that
specifically addressed women’s issues, from topics on personal and children’s hygiene to
articles on political issues concerning the “woman question.” Žena u borbi was published
during the World War II in partisan “free territory” carved out in NDH territories, and after
the war it was published by the Croatian branch of AFŽ primarily for women of the People's
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Republic of Croatia (Narodna Republika Hrvatska, NR Hrvatska). Therefore, in my research I
predominantly focus my attention on sources dealing with the territory of the Independent
State of Croatia during the war and on the territory of the People’s Republic of Croatia in the
postwar period.
I also utilize the official records of the Antifascist Front of Women, many of which are
available in the collection of wide array of documents published in two volumes entitled
3
Robert Levy, “Introduction,” in Ana Pauker, The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley:
University California Press, 2001), 12-13.
3
�Women of Croatia in People’s Liberation Struggle (Žene Hrvatske u Narodnooslobodila koj
borbi). These sources provide indispensable information on the roles and activities of female
partisans and, more importantly, on the contribution of the writers and editors of Žena u borbi
in shaping the collective memory surrounding female partisans. I also examine diaries and
memoirs written by women and men who participated in the NOB. 4 While some of these
diaries were published in the immediate postwar period, and still others published decades
later, they remain under-utilized but extremely important sources in understanding women’s
wartime experiences. These sources bring forth personal narratives that further elucidate
women’s experiences and recollections available in the primary sources.
Due to the advanced age of women participants in the People's Liberation Struggle and the
inability to arrange personal interviews, this project relies on available written sources. In
examining the literature I used quantitative textual analysis, more precisely the close reading
technique. Close reading is “thoughtful, critical analysis of a text that focuses on significant
details or patterns in order to develop a deep, precise understanding of the text’s form, craft,
meanings.”5 Hence, it is a mindful interpretation of text with special focus on the vocabulary
used by the author, namely individual words and phrases, then syntax, text structures and
features through which sentences and ideas unfold.6 Through such an analysis of the journal
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Žena u borbi I uncover which topics regarding women’s participation in the armed struggle
the journalists of the magazine selected to write about and promote, which aspects they
ignored, and finally, the aims of their narratives.
4
Marija-Vica Balen, Bili smo idealisti: uspomene jedne revolucionarke (Zagreb: Disput, 2009.); Saša
Božovi , Tebi, moja Dolores (Beograd: 4. Jul, 1981); Eva Grli , Sje anja (Zagreb: Durieux, 1997); Mitra
Mitrovi , Ratno putovanje (Beograd: Prosveta, 1953), Nada Sremec, Iz partizanskog dnevnika (Zagreb: Izdanje
Glavnog odbora AFŽ Hrvatske, 1945); Vladimir Nazor, S partizanima: dnevnik (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1958);
Ivan Šibl, Partizanski dnevnik (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1960).
5
Beth Burke, “A Close Look at Close Reading: Scaffolding Students with Complex Texts,” accessed
November 14th, 2014, http://nieonline.com/tbtimes/downloads/CCSS_reading.pdf, 2.
6
Ibid, 4.
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�Literature Review
Following the end of the Second World War and the establishment of Yugoslavia, the
People’s Liberation Struggle and the final victory over the Fascist and Nazi forces became the
foundational myth of the emerging regime. Therefore, contemporary Yugoslav historiography
is dominated by published primary and secondary sources portraying different aspects of the
partisan struggle, including significant documentary and historiographic literature featuring
exclusively the participation of women in the People’s Liberation Struggle. This literature was
influenced by the communist leadership who strongly encouraged Yugoslav historians to
focus on projects that promoted the idea of progress towards socialism and the achievement of
“brotherhood and unity.” That is, the historian’s task was to interpret and rewrite the history
of the Yugoslav peoples in accordance with the wishes of state leaders, including establishing
an ideologically acceptable version of the events of World War II.7
Women’s participation in the People’s Liberation Struggle has been researched by only a
handful of scholars. The first comprehensive analyses of the published primary documents
and at the same time the first historical examinations written in English on this topic were
published between 1980 and 1990. In 1980, Mary E. Reed wrote her doctoral dissertation and
published an article, both of which focused on women’s activities in World War II Croatia,
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with special emphasis on the relationship between the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia
and the Communist Party during the war.8 Soon after Barbara Jancar-Webster published two
7
Ivo Banac, “Historiography of the Countries of Western Europe: Yugoslavia,” The American
Historical Review 97, no. 4 (October 1992), 1086. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2165494?seq=1 (accessed
November 15, 2013). Writing of Yugoslavia’s twentieth-century history was closely supervised. Pero
Damjanovi , Jovan Marjanovi , Pero Mora a and Vlado Strugar were the most prominent historians writing
about the history of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunisti ka partija Jugoslavije, KPJ). The regime
also “had” suitable historians who wrote about earlier periods of the Yugoslav peoples, for example Vaso
ubrilovi , Dragoslav Jankovi , Ferdo ulinovi and Jaroslav Šidak. The historians whom the state and the
party approved of cooperated in state-inspired projects such as the two-volume History of the Peoples of
Yugoslavia (Historija naroda Jugoslavije) and Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia (Enciklopedija Jugoslavije).
8
Mary E. Reed, “Croatian Women in the Yugoslav Partisan Resistance, 1941-1945” (PhD diss.,
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�articles analyzing the roles of women soldiers in the Yugoslav NOB and conducted in-depth
research on the participation of women in the partisan struggle. 9 Both Mary E. Reed in her
dissertation and Barbara Jancar-Webster in her book emphasized that their work laid a
foundation for future researchers to build upon.
Jancar’s work has been influential to my project as it facilitated the process of precisely
distinguishing who my research would focus upon. In her article, “Women Soldiers in
Yugoslavia’s National Liberation Struggle,” she asserts that there is “a distinction between
women who joined ‘by instinct’ and the more ideologically oriented women who volunteered
in the first partisan units.”10 In her book she elaborates this claim further by dividing women
participants in the NOB into three groups: women fighters, women in the rear, and women
leaders.11 Among the three possibilities, women leaders are the group I am focusing on in my
research. I base my project on the analysis of the official journal of the AFŽH, specifically on
the activities of women members of the KPJ from the prewar period and the highest ranked
members of the AFŽH, in short, women leaders, who had a principal influence on the creation
of Žena u borbi. In addition, I found the information that Jancar acquired through interviews
with some of the most prominent women of the NOB, including Croatians Marija Šoljan,
Milka Kufrin, Anka Berus and Savka Milana Javorina, to be of great importance for my
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project. The information these former wartime AFŽ officials and women partisans shared
with Jancar helped my analysis of the journal Žena u borbi. Their statements improved my
understanding of the meaning of the war for women, and the changes it bestowed upon them
University of California, Berkeley, 1980); and idem, “The Anti-Fascist Front of Women and the Communist
Party in Croatia: Conflicts within the Resistance,” in Women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. Tova
Yedlin (New York: Praeger, 1980).
9
Barbara Jancar-Webster, “Yugoslavia: War of Resistance,” in Female Soldiers: Combatants or NonCombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nancy L. Goldman (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1982), 85-105; idem, “Women Soldiers in Yugoslavia`s National Liberation Struggle 1941-1945,” in
Women and the Military System, ed. Eva Isaksson (New York: St. Martin`s Press, 1988), 47-67; and idem,
Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 (Denver: Arden Press, 1990).
10
Jancar-Webster, “Women Soldiers in Yugoslavia,” 49.
11
See further in: Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 41-74.
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�because it became apparent to me that World War II to them was primarily an opportunity for
proletarian revolution and the subsequent achievement of the KPJ’s political goals. Their
dedication to the resolution of the “woman question” was secondary. Therefore, they never
attempted to undermine the Party’s authority or tarnish the image of women partisans in Žena
u borbi.
The first Yugoslav scholar to openly confront the official, ideologically infused version of
women’s history was feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky. Sklevicky devoted her career to
researching women's history in Yugoslavia with an emphasis on women in the NOB. For
example, Sklevicky conducted pioneering research of the archival sources on the Antifascist
Front of Women of Croatia during the Second World War and the postwar period. She
published several articles on the topic, and began writing a doctoral thesis, all with the goal to
examine in-depth the extent and importance of women’s agency which, Sklevicky argued, had
been ignored or erased from the official historical narrative. Although Sklevicky did not
complete her doctoral dissertation because she was killed in a car accident in January 1990,
her supervisor Dunja Rihtman Auguštin edited the dissertation and published it posthumously
in 1996.12 It remains the most thorough analysis of the AFŽ.
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Sklevicky distinguishes four phases in the AFŽ’s existence. The first phase began with
World War II from the foundation of the organization at the end of 1942 until the end of the
war in 1945. This period was followed by the educational phase of the AFŽ over the next two
years. The commanding/directive model was the third phase and lasted for two years during
the height of the crisis caused by severe disagreements between the Yugoslav leadership and
Stalin and the Soviet led Communist Information Bureau. The final phase was the dualistic
12
Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, ed. Dunja Rihtman Auguštin (Zagreb: Ženska infoteka, 1996).
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�period between 1950 and 1953. During this phase occurred the transition to the new women’s
organization, Union of Women Societies.13
Since women who participated in the work of Žena u borbi were also members of the
AFŽ, changes in the function of the organization influenced the process of editing the journal,
which stories were published, and the language and rhetoric used in the articles. In the third
chapter I will demonstrate how the political changes between 1948 and 1950 following the
Tito-Stalin split directly influenced the way in which the AFŽ operated and, consequently, the
way in which women wrote about the Second World War and women partisans. In addition,
although Sklevicky focused her research on the agency of women in the organization and in
relation to the Communist Party, the conclusions she made through the analysis of the
archival data were an important foundation that informed my analysis of the articles from the
journal Žena u borbi. Sklevicky points to the difference between two common types of
discourses she called “critically informative discourse,” and “representative.” The first one,
Sklevicky explains, “tends to present a particular situation in a most authentic way, it is selfcritical, tends to minimize ideological dimension and enable the regulation and the best
possible functioning of the daily practice.” On the other hand, the representative discourse “is
self-referential, relies on unquestionable/totalitarian speech from the authority position, and
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the mobilizing Eros with which it represents/legitimizes itself is focused on direct execution
of its ideas.”14 I use this methodological approach in my analysis of the articles published in
Žena u borbi. The fact that the articles were intended for a wider audience, according to
Sklevicky, entailed two things. First, the authors tried to use language suitable for the
intended audience, but secondly, their discourse was informed by a specific hierarchical
position they believed they had with regard to the audience, which also had an effect on the
language the writers employed.
13
14
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 63-138.
Ibid, 72.
8
�Female participants in the Second World War in Yugoslavia and their lives and work in
the postwar period have been increasingly researched in recent years, both in the countries of
former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. 15 For instance, Jelena Batini wrote both her master thesis
and her doctoral dissertation on different aspects of women’s participation in the NOB.16 The
author’s asserts in her dissertation that during World War II traditional gender norms were
influenced and changed through three different aspects, on the level of political rhetoric and
institutions, and through the daily practice. Batini examined the Communist Party wartime
rhetoric concluding it was double-sided. From one side, the Party drew on the profoundly
patriarchal heroic imagery of South Slavic folk traditions to legitimize the existence of female
soldiers within its ranks. On the other hand, to increase the number of women recruits,
Partisan leaders emphasized that the end of the war would bring about the end of women's
inequality within Yugoslav society. 17 AFŽ and Žena u borbi, similar to a number of other
journals issued in different regions of Croatia during the war, were a central component of the
communist propaganda machine. Through my research I demonstrate the degree to which
members of the AFŽ who were involved in the publication of the journal reproduced one or
another aspect of Party rhetoric, and, more importantly, following the end of the war, which
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aspects they continued to use and why.
15
See: Renata Jambreši Kirin, “The Politics of Memory in Croatian Socialist Culture: Some Remarks,”
Narodna umjetnost 41 (2004); idem, “Moderne vestalke u kulturi sje anja Drugog svjetskog rata,” in Dom i
svijet (Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008); Gordana Stojakovi , “Rodna perspektiva u novinama
Antifašisti kog fronta žena u periodu 1945-1953” (PhD Diss., University of Novi Sad, 2011); Ivana Panteli ,
Partizanke kao gra anke (Evoluta: Beograd, 2011); Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Revolutionary Networks: Women’s
Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957)” (PhD diss., Utrecht University,
2012); idem, “Women's Political and social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia,”
Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender
History 8 (2014). There is also a German-language monograph on women partisans. See: Barbara Wiesinger,
Partisaninnen: Widerstand in Jugoslawien 1941-1945 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008).
16
Jelena Batini , “Proud to Have Trod in Men’s Footsteps: Mobilizing Peasant Women into the
Yugoslav Partisan Army in World War II” (MA thesis, The Ohio State University, 2001); and idem, “Gender,
Revolution, and War: The Mobilization of Women in the Yugoslav Partisan Resistance during World War II”
(PhD diss., Stanford University, 2009).
17
Batini , “Gender, Revolution, and War,” 4.
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�Additionally, Batini dedicated the final section of her dissertation to the analysis of the
development of the collective memory of women partisans during the existence of
Yugoslavia. She interpreted several Yugoslav movies to depict a degradation of the image of
woman partisan “from the revolutionary icon par excellence in the early postwar years to
the oblivion of the present.”18 The journey, Batini suggests, unfolded through four phases
and the AFŽ during its existence, and its successors after 1953, always acted as the guardians
of the official image of women partisans. 19 Although she concurs with this position, Renata
Jambreši Kirin also points out that:
the mass media in the socialist politics of memory (…) played a far more complex,
‘shifting and transient’ role than merely as a means of indoctrination and
ideological censorship which, allegedly, erased the problematization of interethnic
conflicts from documentary as well as artistic representation of the war. (…)
Therefore the role of the media-newspapers, cartoons, film, television-as dominant
cultural forms with the help of which the past and the recent reality is reworked and
represented was not to impose an image of the past ‘as it should have occurred’ but to
offer a construction of history ‘as it could be imagined’ in codes of popular
culture.20
On the one hand, the AFŽ performed the function of official promoter and keeper of the
memory of the female partisan. On the other, as Jambreši Kirin points out, among the mass
media, AFŽH journalists also worked towards their own interpretation of the role of the
partisan woman. My goal is to demonstrate that journalists and editors of Žena u borbi were
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not just transmitting ideas and images imposed upon them by the higher echelons of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia, but that they displayed agency when they selected and
presented stories that they personally deemed desirable in a particular period and situation. In
other words, although one of the most important tasks of the journalists and editors of Žena u
borbi was the encouragement and coordination of wider support for certain ideas, including
the imagery of the memory about the Second World War and the role of women in it, I
18
Batini , “Gender, Revolution, and War,” 6.
Ibid, 297-305. Renata Jambreši Kirin expressed the same idea in the article “The Politics of Memory
in Croatian Socialist Culture: Some Remarks,” 129-130.
20
Jambreši Kirin, “The Politics of Memory,” 131.
19
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�believe the journal was still written from a position of individuals who informed the
transmitted ideas with their own, subjective memories and notions of what World War II
meant to them.
Theoretical Considerations
My thesis focuses on three main concepts: the personal narrative, collective memory, and
the totalitarian paradigm approach to researching state socialist systems. With regard to the
personal narrative, my research principally draws upon theories developed by Mary Jo
Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce and Barbara Laslett in their book Telling Stories, The Use of
Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. According to the authors, the agency
of a person can always be expressed in two ways, individual and social, and personal narrative
is always a witness to (re)construction of the self and to the social action taken.21 Moreover,
an individual who writes a personal narrative takes part in a certain historical situation and
influences its development, he or she is also conditioned by the historical circumstances.
Furthermore, personal narratives also have a dual nature and can be analyzed from two
different points of view. Namely, personal narratives determine the historical period, and they
are also contextualized by historical situations. 22 In the words of Paul Eakin, although selfnarration is the process of individualization, which is directed toward the definition of the
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self, it is also deeply rooted in the cultural and social practices of the surrounding community.
Therefore, although “[w]e tend to think of autobiography as a literature of the first person,
(…) the subject of autobiography to which the pronoun “I” refers is neither singular nor first,
and we do well to demystify its claims. We so easily forget that the first person of
autobiography is truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation.” 23
21
Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories, The Use of Personal
Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 45.
22
Ibid, 45.
23
Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
11
�With regard to their dual representation, personal experience as a primary involvement of
the individual in societal events commonly as a secondary axis of the development of
personal narratives, Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett warn that the researcher should be alert when
analyzing them because public narratives are usually overpowered by intimate ones. 24
However, in the case of the journal central to my research, since it was not intended to be
written and published explicitly as a personal narrative, the situation is more complicated.
Private opinions and personal attachments of the women writing for the journal were
suppressed, and I am analyzing Žena u borbi precisely in order to find indications of the
personal attitudes and pointers to individual stories behind the mandatory rhetoric and duty to
the state authority. As the third chapter will show, historical context played an important role
in the accessibility of personal narratives in the journal as well as in the types of narratives
that journalists and editors presented to the wider audience or the topics they determined
better to ignore.
A second important concept in my project is memory. Memory became an object of
academic research at the turn of twentieth century. Following the end of World War I memory
became interesting to social scientists, the most prominent among them being Maurice
Halbwachs. In his most renowned book, On Collective Memory, he argues that, similar to
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language, memory formation is founded on the social relationships of the individual and has
no meaning outside them. In my thesis I use a similar approach, the memory in a manner
described by Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka in the article “Collective Memory and Cultural
Identity.”25 The authors focus their discussion on the formation of cultural memory, which
they term the “concretion of identity.” 26 They assert that cultural memory relays three notions,
Press, 1999), 43.
24
Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett, Telling Stories, 43.
25
Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique
65 (1995): 125-133, accessed March 25, 2014, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488538.
26
Ibid, 128.
12
�the memory, the culture, and the community. Memory is connected to a set of events from the
past that the particular social group deems momentous to its development. Therefore it is
perpetuated through a set of customs, texts and monuments, the “figures of memory,” through
which memory is closely intertwined to the objectified culture of that separate social group.27
An important characteristic of cultural memory, according to Assmann and Czaplicka, is
its role in the reconstruction of the past or, in other words, methods and means through which
it “always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation.” 28 Of course, there
are always individuals whose “expertise” is crucial to the accurate and proper dissemination
of knowledge, while the rest of the group participates through personal presence and
appropriation of knowledge. 29 In my analysis, I connected this idea to Jambreši Kirin’s
previously mentioned contention that the Yugoslav mass media constructed images about the
past as it “could be imagined.” Hence, while examining the journal Žena u borbi, I devote
special attention to the memory of women partisans and try to differentiate the degree to
which this particular memory of war owed to notions that individual women had about it and
shared in the journal, and how much it owed to the imposed master narrative, Yugoslav
cultural memory in the making, of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.
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Finally, a third concept that is important to my research is the top-down strategy of
studying socialist countries. Sheila Fitzpatrick explained the totalitarian paradigm using the
example of Soviet Union scholarship. She states that historians who interpreted the history of
the U.S.S.R. using this approach described the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the
predominant social power in the country which, often by using brutal measures, paralyzed and
27
Assmann and Czaplicka, “Collective Memory,” 128/129.
Ibid, 130; see also: Jan Assman, “Kultura sje anja,” in Kultura pam enja i historija, ed. Maja
and Sandra Prlenda (Zagreb: Golden marketing-Tehni ka knjiga, 2006), 64-65.
29
Assman, “Kultura sje anja,” 66-68.
28
Brklja
13
�destroyed any other autonomous social action. 30 In the 1970s and 1980s the so-called
“revisionists” challenged this approach to the research of Soviet Union. On the premise that
even in the U.S.S.R. “society had to be more than a simple object of regime control” 31
revisionist historians recast a new image of Soviet history recognizing the importance of
grassroots social movements.
In the introduction to the book State Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992 Jill A.
Irvine exemplified the development of scholarship on Yugoslavia with regard to the
totalitarian paradigm. The author asserts that, because of the Tito-Stalin split, this paradigm
was challenged much earlier in the Yugoslav case than in other socialist countries.32 Until the
1960s Western historians, Irvine claims, researched Yugoslavia as an example of “deviation
from the totalitarian model [with] occasional backsliding towards it.” 33 In the later period
emphasis was directed toward the modernization framework, which was described as a rivalry
between the different factions within the elite, and only in the 1980s did researchers begin to
attribute significance to social pressures from the bottom. Irvine then continues with the
depiction of the relations between state structures and society. From her description it is clear
that the development of scholarship approximately followed the development of the social
and political situation within the country. “The particular way in which regime elites
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approached the problem of generating support,” Irvine argues, “fundamentally shaped the
interaction between state actors and social forces.” 34 Thus, although Yugoslavia had
comparatively stronger legitimacy strategies than other Eastern European countries, its
strongest weapon of legitimacy, the Partisan myth, became over time the focal point of
dissention. During the Second World War communist leaders proclaimed that under their
30
Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007), 80.
Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” 81.
32
Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and Carol S. Lilly (ed.), State-society relations in Yugoslavia,
1945-1992 (New York: St. Martin`s Press, 1997), 3.
33
Ibid, 4.
34
Ibid, 6.
31
14
�direction the national question, unresolved throughout the existence of the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia, would be justly resolved in the postwar period. However, according to the
perceptions of many members of individual nations within the country, this question was
never truly resolved, and the legitimacy of the regime was thus undermined. An evolving
problem on this front, the author concludes, was paired with the weakening of the influence
and power of Party elites and the growing power of the masses.35
Notably, Irvine adds that despite its dominance and largely undisputed popularity in the
immediate postwar years, the regime was even then unable to eradicate autonomous factions,
both within the political elite or throughout the society.36 Still, it is important as Nannete Funk
warns, to “distinguish the who, when, and what – Who could be agents? When could they be
agents? And what kind of agents could they be?”37 In the case of women’s organizations,
Funk claims that they “both were and were not agents on behalf of women, and also prevented
women’s agency.”38 Funk touches upon the case of Yugoslavia and the AFŽ writing that,
although it was initially mostly independent from direct Party influence, this organization was
restructured after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, subjected to more severe control by the
Communist Party in 1950 and then disbanded in 1953. 39 Hence, although the totalitarian
paradigm cannot explain all of the nuances of the Yugoslav state socialist system in its early
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years, it does capture the overall balance of power, which rested heavily on the side of the
Party. Even though some differences of opinion and disagreements existed, members of the
political elite usually voiced complaints through official channels. Finally, as Sklevicky notes,
the most prominent women of the AFŽ were loyal Party members who, although dedicated to
35
Bokovoy, Irvine, and Lilly (ed.), State-society relations, 7-9.
Ibid, 10.
37
Nannete Funk, “A very tangled knot: Official state socialist women’s organizations, women’s agency
and feminism in Eastern European state socialism,” European Journal of Women Studies (June 2014): 1,
accessed August 24, 2014. URL: http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/27/1350506814539929.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid, 4.
36
15
�women’s liberation, saw its development in a similar or same way male Party members did,
and therefore did not try to jeopardize their or the Party’s existence. 40
My thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter I provide a summary of World
War II in Yugoslavia and the immediate postwar period until approximately 1953, the year
when the AFŽ of Yugoslavia was disbanded. While writing about the Second World War, I
focus particularly on the role and importance of the Communist Party in the outcome of the
war. In the postwar period, I emphasize the circumstances of the Tito-Stalin split and the
impact it had on Yugoslavia. Specifically, the Split directly impacted the political and
economic sphere by stimulating the development of self-management socialism, a form of
socialism characteristic to Yugoslavia. The Split also greatly influenced the social sphere
through purges of potential Stalin supporters and the Soviet style of communism within
Yugoslavia. In the second chapter I analyze the role of women partisans in the war effort,
with special emphasis on the Party’s mobilizing strategy and the importance of the notion of
“political education” and emancipation for the mobilization. I demonstrate how “political
education” was designed and executed throughout the war and after, and how it affected
women, particularly wartime partisans. I dedicate the majority of the chapter to the
development and the role of the AFŽ during the war and the postwar period, in order to
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exemplify (dis)continuities in its duties and roles in the period under analysis. The third
chapter is dedicated to the detailed analysis of the journal Žena u borbi. I will demonstrate the
ways in which the narratives in the journal evolved and discuss the possible reasons. First, I
will demonstrate what topics the editorial board prioritized and how those topics connect to
the political situation and, second, I will relate the described publishing policy to the role of
the narratives about memory of women partisans.
40
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 113.
16
�CHAPTER 1 - HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Below I provide a short overview of history of socialist Yugoslavia from her emergence in
the World War II until the early 1950s in order to illustrate political and social climate in
which Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia (AFŽH) was created and functioned until its
dissolution in 1953. I first present general facts about the wartime situation in Yugoslavia. I
dedicate a significant portion of the chapter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), and
its role in the war of resistance. I briefly analyze the Party’s relationship with the Soviet
Union during the war and in the immediate postwar period. In the second portion of the
chapter I explain self-management socialism, a form of socialism specific to Yugoslavia that
was introduced in 1950, and its scope and consequences.
1.1 The Second World War in Yugoslavia
To implement his plan “to tidy up the Balkans” 41 before launching an attack on the
U.S.S.R., Hitler pressured the regent Pavle Kara or evi to sign the Tripartite Pact on March
25, 1941. Just two days after the signing seventeen-year-old heir Petar was proclaimed the
new king of Yugoslavia in a military coup. Showing no desire to speak with the
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representatives of the new government, Hitler ordered an attack on Yugoslavia. Without
declaration of war, the attack began in the morning of April 6 with the bombing of Beograd.
The Yugoslav army was completely unprepared for the German offensive, all battles of the
so-called “April war” were over in eleven days and Yugoslavia was subsequently partitioned
and occupied.
41
Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 12.
17
�However, what started as an act of securing the region usurped both political and social
forces within Yugoslavia. As Barbara Jancar-Webster notes, the disintegration and occupation
of Yugoslavia and the creation of the new country in part of the territory, the Independent
State of Croatia (NDH), resulted in three separate wars in Yugoslavia. First and foremost,
there was a war to repel the German, Italian and Bulgarian invaders. Secondly, there was a
bitter conflict between different Yugoslav nations, primarily Croats, Serbs and Muslims.
Finally, this period was marked by the conflict between the old, royalist Yugoslavia and the
new, republican one.42
At the outset of World War II in Yugoslavia the KPJ, formed in 1919 and banned under
the Law on the Protection of the State in 1921, was a small political party counting no more
than twelve thousand members.43 Many of them perished in prisons of the newly established
NDH in the first weeks of its existence. 44 However, the Party “had an all-Yugoslav if as yet
imperfect underground, network, leadership, discipline, indoctrination, determination and
faith.”45 Already in the autumn of 1941 the KPJ achieved one of the first notable military
successes, the establishment of the Užice Republic in the western Serbia. In November 1941,
in the first enemy offensive, 46 German troops occupied the territory, and the majority of
partisan forces fled to re-group again at the river Fo a in southeast Bosnia. During that same
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period in the territory of the NDH, Slavko Goldstein states, the Ustasha policies contributed
significantly to the uprising of communist-led peasants. Rebellion in the NDH, he argues,
42
Jancar-Webster, “Yugoslavia: War of Resistance,” 89.
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 75; Slavko Goldstein, 1941.: godina koja se vra a, (Zagreb:
Novi liber, 2007), 425; Hrvoje Matkovi , Suvremena politi ka povijest Hrvatske (Zagreb: Ministarstvo
unutarnjih poslova Republike Hrvatske, 1995), 178.While Jancar-Webster states that the KPJ had twelve
thousand members, Slavko Goldstein claims there were approximately nine thousand, and Hrvoje Matkovi
eight thousand members.
44
For touching account of executions of communist by the Ustasha see: Balen, Bili smo idealisti, 191,
206, 216, and Goldstein, 1941., 206-209.
45
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 57.
46
Yugoslav historiography records seven major offensives between autumn of 1941 and spring of 1944.
Axis powers undertook these military maneuvers, some in collaboration with the Chetniks, in order to destroy
the core of the partisan army.
43
18
�emerged on the basis of mutual necessity. Namely, because of the persecution and killings of
Serb peasants, males and females, old and young alike, many in the territory of Kordun and
Banija escaped “to the woods.” They were completely disorganized and readily accepted the
leadership of Croatian communists whose lives in the NDH were also threatened and many of
whom also chose the partisan existence. 47
It is important to note that communist policies in this early period helped turn the people in
the territory of Užice Republic against them. In addition to the introduction of communist
symbols, their rhetoric dramatically emphasized the struggle against the class enemy, which
was implemented through the confiscation of private property and the execution of
individuals accused of treason.48 The policies of the KPJ became harsher in the winter of
1941-1942 because they now interpreted the partisan struggle exclusively in terms of a class
struggle and proletarian revolution. To secure its ideological aim the Party orchestrated both a
purge of its own ranks of “ideologically unreliable” elements and the mostly peasant
population of “class enemies” and “fifth columnists.” In this manner communists influenced
the radical narrowing of the Partisan support base among peasants, the backbone of the
uprising.49
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Furthermore, KPJ’s haste to begin the revolutionary changes in Yugoslavia infuriated
Stalin, whom Yugoslav communists considered their Soviet mentor. Therefore, in the spring
of 1942 communists accepted Stalin’s advice and considerably tempered their hard-line
revolutionary rhetoric. The revolution was temporarily forgotten and partisans began
presenting themselves as the best organization capable of repelling the occupiers. According
to Goldstein, communist insurgents in Croatia had already modified their rhetoric by the end
47
Goldstein, 1941., 257, 326-328.
Melissa K. Bokovoy, “Peasants and Communists: A Dubious Alliance,” in Peasants and
Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941-1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1998), 8-12; and Pawlovitch, Hitlers New Disorder, 95.
49
Bokovoy, “Peasants and Communists,” 14-17.
48
19
�of 1941, which was evident in the slogans they employed. During the summer partisans used
phrasing such as “Long live Soviet Union and the heroic Red Army,” and “Long live comrade
Stalin” most often. They soon realized that exiled peasants, who comprised the majority of the
partisan force, embraced slogans such as “Death to fascism-Freedom to the people,” and ones
dedicated to the “brotherhood and unity of Croats and Serbs in Croatia,” and to “our heroic
partisans.”50
Changes in rhetoric, which now pledged cooperation and mutual consideration between the
nationalities and strict discipline in behavior of communists toward peasants of all ethnic
groups, brought increased support for the partisans and made them the most successful
resistance movement in the country. They earned a reputation as freedom fighters, and by
1942 the People’s Liberation Movement (Narodnooslobodila ki pokret, NOP) had taken root
in Banija, Kordun, and parts of Lika with Biha in northwestern Bosnia as its center.51 Terror
against the civilian population by the NDH and the simultaneous anarchy in administering the
country contributed to the development of the NOP, and Italian capitulation in September of
1943 provided the impetus for the quick amassment of the People’s Liberation Movement.52
The partisans were not only fighting for freedom. They also had the future governmental
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organization of Yugoslavia in mind. As Jancar-Webster argued, they waged war on two fronts
simultaneously, politically as well as militarily. 53 Their rhetoric accentuated “brotherhood and
unity” of all Yugoslavs regardless of their nation and religion. The implementation of this
policy officially began on November 26th and 27th 1942 when the founding meeting of the
Antifascist Council of People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašisti ko vije e narodnog
50
Goldstein, 1941., 328. Croatian versions of the slogans written above, in the order of apearance, are:
“Da živi Sovjetski Savez i herojska Crvena armija! Da živi drug Staljin! Smrt fašizmu-sloboda narodu!,” te
“bratstvu i slozi Hrvata i Srba u Hrvatskoj” i “našim juna kim partizanima.”
51
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 129.
52
Ibid; and Goldstein, 1941., 356.
53
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 47.
20
�oslobo enja Jugoslavije, AVNOJ) was held in Biha . AVNOJ was proclaimed as “the
representative body of the liberation movement that harnessed all true patriots.” 54 The
establishment of AVNOJ was authorized by Stalin himself who agreed with Tito’s idea of the
necessity for an organization that would gather all antifascists willing to fight against the
occupiers.
Interestingly, Tito only informed Stalin about the agenda of second session of AVNOJ
held on November 29th 1943 in Jajce (Bosnia) after the meeting was complete and withheld
some of the conclusions the Council reached. The most important decisions were the
establishment of the National Committee of Liberation of Yugoslavia (Nacionalni komitet
oslobo enja Jugoslavije, NKOJ), the provisional government, and the inauguration of
Democratic Federative Yugoslavia (Demokratska federativna Jugoslavija, DFJ) “on the basis
of the right of every people to self-determination, including the right to secede, or to unite
with other nations, in compliance with the true will of all nations of Yugoslavia, confirmed in
the course of the three-year long common peoples’ liberation struggle which has forged the
inseparable brotherhood of nations of Yugoslavia [who wish to] remain united in
Yugoslavia.” 55 In addition, although the final decision on whether to re-establish the
monarchy or to create a republic was to be made in elections following the war, king Peter
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was forbidden to return to Yugoslavia at any time, and the prewar government was stripped of
its rights.56 At this point the Allies still supported the king and the government in exile as the
legal representatives of Yugoslavia, so Tito neglected to mention the decisions related to
them. However, the decisions made did not influence Stalin’s relationship with Winston
54
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 131.
As cited in: Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 211.
56
Ibid, 210-211.
55
21
�Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt or the course of Teheran Conference, which was in
session at the time, Stalin allowed the political changes Tito suggested.57
In addition to large liberated areas in Bosnia, the NOP held significant territories in
Croatia. Therefore, AVNOJ councilors who were from Croatia established an agreement with
the AVNOJ Executive Committee to institute the State Antifascist Council of People’s
Liberation of Croatia (Zemaljsko antifašisti ko vije e narodnog oslobo enja Hrvatske,
ZAVNOH).58 The first session of ZAVNOH was held in Oto ac and in Plitvi ka jezera (Lika,
Croatia) on June 13th and 14th 1943. This council assumed the function of the highest political
body of the NOP in Croatia, and poet Vladimir Nazor became its president. In the second
session held in mid-October 1943, Nazor proclaimed Istra, Zadar and the islands, which after
the signing of Rome treaty in 1941 had been under Italian occupation, returned to Croatia.
Finally, in its third session held in Topusko (Kordun, Croatia) in May 1944, ZAVNOH
declared the plan for Croatian accession to the DFJ on the basis of the right of selfdetermination.59
In addition to establishment of these institutions, one can discern the extent of preparations
for the future seizure of political power by communists in Yugoslavia throughout the war by
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the manner in which they functioned. For example, in ZAVNOH almost half of the members
of the Council were not members of the KPJ, including the Council president. However, these
men did not have the authority to make political decisions. Vice president Andrija Hebrang, a
member of the KPJ since its creation, secretary Pavle Gregori and Šime Balen were the most
57
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 211-212.
Hodimir Sirotkovi , “Konstituiranje ZAVNOH-a,” asopis za suvremenu povijest 5, no. 3 (1973),
41, 43. AVNOJ councilors from Croatia were: Pavle Gregori , member of KPJ since 1921, partisan fighter and a
doctor, Stanko anica Opa , commander of Kordun group of partisans, Šime Balen, political commissar of the
Fifth brigade of Kordun, Pavao Krce, parliament representative of Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska selja ka
stranka, HSS), Branko Zlatari , communist official from Zagreb, and Nikola Grulovi , member of the provincial
committee of KPJ for Vojvodina. In addition to six of them, oko Jovanovi , assistant commander of the
People’s Liberation Army (Narodnooslobodila ka vojska, NOV), and Vlatka Babi , a teacher from Crikvenica,
also worked on establishment of ZAVNOH.
59
Matkovi , Politi ka povijest, 187.
58
22
�influential decision makers. Similarly, although AVNOJ comprised all antifascists who
wanted to participate in people’s government, committees composed exclusively of members
of the KPJ oversaw the activities of the participants who were not declared communists.60
Finally, after the capitulation of Italy on September 8th 1943 and rapid strengthening of the
NOP, the Party leadership introduced conscription for all adult males residing in the liberated
areas. In the event that someone refused to perform their military duty, specialized partisan
units, so-called Anti-Fifth Column units, were dispatched to arrest them. 61 These units were
supervised by a newly emerging intelligence organization that once again started the process
of clearing their ranks of real, potential or imaginary collaborators as well as other categories
of “enemy of the people” and prepared lists to do the same when they reached larger urban
centers.62
1.2 End of the War and the Immediate Postwar Period
In October 1944 the Red Army entered Yugoslavia and helped partisans liberate Belgrade.
The Yugoslav army worked its way westward from Serbia, and Zagreb was liberated on May
8th 1945. The army soon left Zagreb and continued its liberation march toward Slovenia, and
the members of the newly founded People’s Government of Croatia (Narodna vlada
Hrvatske), which would for the next eight years be chaired by Vladimir Bakari , came from
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Split to stabilize their power in the capital of Croatia. The government based its legitimacy
upon the two-year existence of ZAVNOH which, in July, was renamed the People’s
Parliament of Croatia (Narodni sabor Hrvatske).63
60
Goldstein, 1941., 425-426.
Ibid, 360.
62
Ibid, 426. These intelligence centers gradually evolved into unified service for security and
information entitled Department for Protection of the People (Odjeljenje za zaštitu naroda, OZNa) that was
established in May 1944 as a department of NKOJ. In 1946 it was reorganized and renamed as the
Administration of State Security (Uprava državne bezbednosti, UDBA), and its tasks to monitor enemies
expanded as it kept an eye on “internal enemies,” emigrants and foreign intelligence services.
63
Igor Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma, Hrvatska u desetlje u poslije 1945. godine,” in Refleksije
vremena (1945.-1955.), ed. Jasmina Bavoljak (Zagreb: Galerija Klovi evi dvori, 2012), 11.
61
23
�Encouraged by Churchill’s policy of compromise, which sought to connect members of the
Yugoslav refugee government still residing in London with leaders of the NOP, Tito met Ivan
Šubaši , ban of prewar autonomous province (banovina) Croatia. They conducted
negotiations first time on the island of Vis in August of 1944, and then in Belgrade
immediately after the liberation. The two agreed that AVNOJ would remain the supreme
legislative body of the DFJ until the first elections, and the king would not return until the
people of Yugoslavia decide whether he was allowed to do so. Additionally, the temporary
government composed of members of the NKOJ and members of the refugee government
called for elections for the constituent assembly that would decide the final political structure
of Yugoslavia.64 However, as Pavlowitch notes, these concessions were only temporary and
were a deceptive ploy to appease the Allies until the Party could seize power completely. 65
Just prior to the first elections, held on November 11th 1945, the People’s Front (Narodni
front, NF) was formed. This political body was the successor to the People’s Liberation Front
(Narodnooslobodila ki front, NOF) and was composed of several communist-led
organizations, as well as some non-communist but antifascist groups. Due to the elaborate
machinations and obstructions of work of non-communist politicians and political parties, the
People’s Front headed by Tito was the only voting option and won 90% of the votes. In the
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first session the Constituent Assembly abolished the monarchy and declared a republic under
the name Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (Federativna Narodna Republika
Jugoslavija, FNRJ). Finally, in January 1946, the elected Constituent Assembly developed a
Yugoslav Constitution that was based on the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union.66
Socio-political organizations that comprised the People’s Front were principally dedicated
to ways to better control all social groups and social life in postwar Yugoslavia. As Éva Fodor
64
Matkovi , Politi ka povijest, 196-198.
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 253.
66
Matkovi , Politi ka povijest, 212.
65
24
�remarks, when becoming subjects of a socialist country, men, women and children were
assigned membership in one of the predefined social groups as, for instance, “workers,”
“peasants” or “women.” Members of certain groups, the political leadership assumed, had
similar needs and were trusted with similar tasks.67 Thus, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
established branches of the same organizations in every state and province of the federation
with the goal to involve as many people as possible, but without the obvious involvement of
the Party. The organization for high school and university students was the Communist Youth
Union of Yugoslavia (Savez komunisti ke omladine Jugoslavije, SKOJ), and its subsection,
the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia (Savez pionira Jugoslavije), was for elementary school
children. The most prominent organizations that adults could join were the Socialist Alliance
of Working People of Yugoslavia (Socijalisti ki savez radnog naroda Jugoslavije, SSRN) and
the Federal Association of Veterans of the National Liberation War of Yugoslavia (Savez
udruženja boraca narodnooslobodila kog rata Jugoslavije, SUBNOR). Both organizations
were open to male and female membership, but the organization that attracted the majority of
women was the Antifascist Front of Women (AFŽ).
During the occupation and war Yugoslavia experienced enormous losses, both human and
material, and by the end of the war “Yugoslavia’s production capacity had been all but
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destroyed by war damage, dislocation, chaos, rampant inflation and loss of trained
personnel.” 68 Still, enthusiasm for victory spilled over into enthusiasm directed toward
reconstruction of the country. Factories that were functional, worked at full capacity, and
people, largely young and those organized by SKOJ, enthusiastically participated in volunteer
activities advocated by the slogan “No rest while renewal is going on.” 69 Reconstruction
activities were primarily aimed at the elimination of war damage and were followed by
67
Éva Fodor, “Smiling Women and Fighting Men: The Gender of the Communist Subject in State
Socialist Hungary,” Gender and Society 16, no. 2 (April 2002): 243.
68
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, 272.
69
“Nema odmora dok traje obnova.“
25
�attempts to normalize the economy through the restoration and rebuilding of the
infrastructure, industrial and cultural facilities, and, finally, the creation of resources for the
transition to planned production. 70 The process of building an industrial economy unfolded
parallel to the reconstruction of the country. In order to modernize a society that was still
mainly agrarian, the communist leadership cooperated with the U.S.S.R. and structured its
plans on the basis of Soviet economic experience. The KPJ embarked on a project of
confiscation of property from the business owners who worked during the war and were thus
labeled war profiteers. Agrarian reform, particularly the colonization of estates once
belonging to the members of German national minority, was followed by rapid
industrialization, with an emphasis on heavy industry, the energy sector and mining, and
electrification that would transform the Yugoslav economy from agrarian to industrial. The
process of industrialization was planned and directed mainly by wartime revolutionaries who
distinguished themselves throughout the NOB and supervised by Soviet experts.71
1.3 Introduction of Self-management
In April 1945, Tito traveled to Moscow where he signed an agreement of friendship and
mutual assistance between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. In the following years Tito concluded
similar contracts with the other countries of the Eastern Block, such as Poland,
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Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and conducted negotiations with Georgi Dimitrov,
the secretary of the Third Comintern from 1934 until its dissolution in 1943 and the first
postwar Bulgarian communist leader, which were intended to lead to the establishment of a
Yugoslav-Bulgarian federation. In addition, Tito encouraged political rapprochement between
Yugoslavia and Albania with a possibility to include Albania in the Balkan federation.
70
71
Goldstein, 1941., 438; Hrvoje Matkovi , Povijest Jugoslavije (Zagreb: Naknada Pavi
Matkovi , Povijest Jugoslavije, 286, 294-295.
26
, 2003), 293.
�In 1947 the Communist Information Bureau, the so-called Cominform, was founded. In
essence, it was a Soviet-dominated organization through which Stalin aimed to obtain more
comprehensive political and economic influence over Eastern Block.72 The first member state
to be disciplined should have been Yugoslavia. During the war, a variety of disagreements
between the communist leadership of Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. had begun to emerge.
According to Sabrina P. Ramet, the most unsettling of KPJ’s characteristics was its tendency
to take independent action, and Stalin did not appreciate nor did he have the intention to
encourage Tito’s independence, especially his ventures in foreign politics. While Yugoslav
communists attempted to be Stalin’s most loyal allies on the Balkan peninsula, their actions
opened an opportunity for Yugoslavia to become unexpectedly strong and highly independent
of Stalin’s influence, which was far removed from the plan of complete subordination Stalin
intended for all European communist countries.73
Tito’s refusal to immediately establish the federation with Bulgaria, which would weaken
the KPJ, triggered Yugoslavia’s expulsion from Cominform in June 1948, and the withdrawal
of Soviet experts from the country resulting in a complete economic blockade by all Eastern
Block countries.74 The KPJ was characterized as a sectarian organization that was not willing
to acknowledge its anti-Party mistakes, namely, allowing “quiet in-growth of capitalism into
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socialism,” and its “hostile policy toward the Soviet Union, discrediting the Soviet Army, and
equalizing of the Soviet foreign policy with the foreign policy of the imperialist powers.”75 By
employing this kind of rhetoric, Stalin wanted to set in motion the overthrow of the current
leadership from within the KPJ.
72
Matkovi , Povijest Jugoslavije, 301.
Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005), 175-176.
74
Bruce McFarlane, Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics and Society (London-New York: Pinter
Publishers, 1988), 14-15.
75
As cited in: Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma,” 22; and Matkovi , Povijest Jugoslavije, 302.
73
27
�The leadership of the KPJ reacted in unexpected manner. First, they published all of the
materials related to the dispute with the Soviet leadership and Cominform. Subsequently,
between July 21st and 28th 1948 the Party held its Fifth Congress. Moreover, the sessions were
broadcasted live on the radio, and newspapers extensively covered activities at the Congress.
This deviation from the usual practice of secrecy in state affairs, Goldstein claims, produced a
widespread sense of common purpose in Yugoslav public for the first time since the end of
the World War II. The Party and the people felt that once again they had to resist foreign
domination.76
From June 1948 until the beginning of the 1950, the climax of Tito-Stalin split, the
economic situation in the country worsened at a dramatic pace. The economic blockade halted
exports, which decreased to one third. Imports of equipment from Eastern Block countries
were suspended, and, subsequently, many industrial reconstruction projects were stopped. For
military security, the locations of some industrial facilities were relocated. Finally,
agricultural production decreased, mostly because the rapid collectivization had not adjusted
to the capabilities or needs of peasants throughout Yugoslavia. Matkovi contends that,
despite the crisis the communist leadership held on to its positions by virtue of Western
economic assistance, which began to arrive early in 1950, and state apparatus, specifically the
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police. 77
KPJ leadership employed “Stalinist methods to suppress to Stalinism prone minority and
various other hesitations within their own ranks.”78 Dissenting individuals or those who could
perhaps develop in that direction were registered and prosecuted by the Administration of
State Security (UDBA) and often sent to one of the notorious penitentiaries. The vast majority
of political prisoners, at least fifteen thousand of men and women, were sent to prisons on the
76
Goldstein, 1941., 427-428.
Matkovi , Povijest Jugoslavije, 306.
78
Goldstein, 1941., 428.
77
28
�island Goli otok or to neighbouring Sveti Grgur, which were from 1949 designated precisely
for them. 79 For instance, in her memoir Eva Grli notes that the Party organizations were the
initial theater for discussions about “Tito’s no” to Stalin. Reportedly, many were interested in
the issue and the polemics were initially quite animated. However, it was enough to express
mild criticism of the KPJ or to not report to the competent authorities, the UDBA, that
someone had criticized the ruling Party and to be expelled from the KPJ, lose one’s job or to
be imprisoned. 80 Eva’s husband, Danko Grli , among the first experienced all three because
someone reported to the UDBA that he asserted that, although he rejects the Resolution in
whole, he concurs that there could be more democracy in the Party. 81 Because she was his
wife, Eva Grli spent a short period in prison in Zagreb in the same period he was on Goli
otok. And because of comparing an employee of the UDBA to former Ustasha authorities, she
herself spent another two years on Goli otok.82 Another victim of the purges, Milka Žicina,
wrote the memoir Everything, Everything, Everything (Sve, sve, sve) about her imprisonment
in the women’s camp in Stolac. In the memoir she recorded the words “Dante knew
nothing.”83 This sentence, uttered by an anonymous victim who briefly shared the cell with
Žicina, sums up tragic experiences of victims of the purges triggered by the Tito-Stalin split.
Although the political showdown with the Cominform initiated a period of harsh political
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dictatorship, in the long term Yugoslav domestic and foreign policies gradually distanced
themselves from the Soviet model of socialism. 84 Already at the Fifth Congress Edvard
79
In 1949 the Party leadership ordered the establishment of the political camp Goli otok that was chosen
because it was inhabited and because it was virtually impossible to escape from it. The civilians who were
accused of collaboration with the Cominform were sent there by an administrative decision and military
personnel have been tried in staged processes. After the meeting of Tito and Nikita Khrushchev in 1955 the
majority of political prisoners were released, but the penitentiary on Goli otok operated until 1986.
80
Eva Grli , Sje anja (Zagreb: Durieux, 1997), 167-168.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid, 186-188.
83
As cited in: Ivana Panteli : “Dante ništa nije znao,” Dnevnik, September 30, 2011, accessed April 4,
2015, http://www.naslovi.net/2011-09-30/dnevnik/dante-nista-nije-znao/2846603.
84
Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma,” 23; and Carol S. Lilly, Power and Persuasion, Ideology and
Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia, 1944-1953 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001), 21.
29
�Kardelj, who was active in the KPJ since 1926 and became one of the leading figures of the
Party both during and after World War II, articulated a new outlook on communist ideology
in Yugoslavia: “the forms of expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat (…) are not and
cannot be the same in all countries and conditions.” 85 Declarative opposition to Stalin and
Cominform soon developed to theories about the practical possibilities of liberalization and “a
new path into socialism.” 86 The idea of the decentralization of the highly centralized and
bureaucratic country as a prerequisite to the anticipated withering away of the state was
formulated through a new interpretation of Marx and Lenin. Eventually, state leaders opted
for abandoning the system of total state control over the economy, and, thus, a new form of
socialism was adopted. With unavoidable slogans such as “Factories to the workers!” it
introduced self-management. In June 1950 the first federal law, entitled the Fundamental Law
on Management of the State Economic Enterprises and Higher Economic Associations
(Osnovni zakon o upravljanju državnim privrednim poduze ima i višim privrednim
udruženjima), was passed in favor of assigning the management of businesses to the workers
and soon worker’s councils were formed in enterprises and factories thorough the country. 87
According to Bruce McFarlane, changes in economic organization of the state that the
KPJ leadership introduced profoundly influenced the social sphere and politics. 88 For
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example, to demonstrate its commitment to reform the leadership renamed KPJ as the League
of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, SKJ) in 1953, and the People’s
Front became the Socialist Alliance of Working People (SSRN) the following year. At the
same time, the government passed a new Constitutional Law. It was a number of amendments
to the Constitution of 1946 and sought to introduce self-management into the Constitution.
Among other changes, the central government of the federation was relieved of controlling
85
As cited in: Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, 183.
Goldstein, 1941., 428-430.
87
Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma,” 23; and McFarlane, Yugoslavia, 32.
88
McFarlane, Yugoslavia, 45.
86
30
�the four ministries, Economy, Budget, Home Affairs, and Administration, which were from
that point forward managed on the republic level. 89 Furthermore, the government reduced
pressures in the field of culture and in everyday life. For example, during this period groups
of students visited Western countries for the first time, and the first passports required for
travel abroad were issued. Publications from Western Europe, such as Guardian and Corriere
della Sera, became available to the broad audience. Additionally, a group of young authors
launched the magazine Circles (Krugovi), and a group of intellectuals from the University of
Zagreb created the magazine Views (Pogledi).90
The culmination of the period of liberalization is captured in a speech given by Miroslav
Krleža, a Croatian author and encyclopedist, at the Congress of Yugoslav Writers Association
in 1952. Although a communist, he avoided involvement in active politics, refused to join the
partisans during the war and to become vice president of AVNOJ after its institution. He also
harbored distaste for social realism in art and refused to create his works according to the
canons of that artistic style. Hence, in his famous speech he called for the liberation of
literature from the constraints of ideology, and advocated for the exploration of innovative
literary practices that would integrate historical avant-garde and modern Western art and
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gradual lead to the fading of taboos with regard to discussed topics.91
However, the KPJ permitted the liberalization of public life only to a certain point. The
first period of liberalization ended abruptly at the beginning of 1954 precisely because certain
individuals, Milovan
of thought. 92
ilas is the most striking example, crossed the line of allowed freedom
ilas was one of Tito’s closest associates, a leading Party ideologue, and
89
McFarlane, Yugoslavia, 33.
Goldstein, 1941., 428.
91
“Govor na kongresu književnika u Ljubljani,” Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, accessed
December 12th, 2014. http://krlezijana.lzmk.hr/clanak.aspx?id=373.
92
See more in: Mario Kevo, “Odjek ilasovih teoretskih priloga Borbi u hrvatskom tisku,” Radovi
Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest 31 (1998), 159-162.
90
31
�secretary of the Central Committee (Centralni komitet, CK) of the KPJ (and SKJ after 1952).
Between October 1953 and January 1954 he published nineteen articles in The Fight (Borba),
the official Party newspaper and four in the journal The New Thought (Nova misao) with
which, notably, Miroslav Krleža also collaborated. In his first articles, for example in the
“Contents” (“Sadržine”),
ilas describes recent political developments in terms of the fight of
socialism and democracy against capitalism and bourgeoisie.93 However, his position evolved
and, for instance, in the “Little Election Themes” (“Male izborne teme”) and “The General
and the Particular” (“Opšte i posebno”) he advocated in favor of the complete democratization
of political life and considered the introduction of a multi-party political system. 94 He crossed
the line of “dosed freedom” and was severely punished by expulsion from the Party, discharge
from all political functions, conviction and imprisonment. 95 Reform of the state was abruptly
stopped, and the liberalization of culture and public sphere was interrupted. Further
developments in reforming the political sphere and economy did not occur until four years
later, after the Seventh congress of SKJ in 1958.96
Of the approximate nine to twelve thousand original members of the KPJ prior to the
outbreak of World War II, only three thousand survived the war. Still, by the war’s end, the
KPJ had more than one hundred and forty thousand members, the majority of them fighters
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and revolutionaries. By 1952 it had more than six hundred thousand members. However,
many of them were opportunists and careerists with a taste for power. Furthermore, thanks to
the sheer number of members and focus on personal advancement by many of them, it
became easier to implement “directives from above,” suppress grassroots movements that
93
Kevo, “Odjek ilasovih teoretskih priloga,“ 155.
Ibid, 155-156.
95
Goldstein, 1941., 429-431. Interestingly, ilas initially had to serve one and a half years in prison, but
served nine in period between 1955 and 1966. He was sentenced to seven years of prison for his work The New
Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, and for another five for Conversations with Stalin. On December
31, 1966 he was amnestied and freed.
96
Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma,” 25, 33.
94
32
�became overly libertarian, and maintain the desired level of freedom in public life for decades
to come.97
Conclusion
In this chapter I provided a short historical background for the period in which the
Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia emerged, developed and dissolved. Broader political,
economic and cultural context contributes to a better understanding of the changes in the
organization's duties and goals. First, development of the organized resistance to the Fascist
and Nazi forces into the People’s Liberation Movement under the communist leadership
proved to be a crucial cause for the establishment of the AFŽ. Furthermore, KPJ’s foreign
policy and close cooperation with the Soviet leadership influenced the relationship of the
Party and the AFŽ both during the war as well as in the immediate postwar period. Finally,
conflict with the Cominform, subsequent social purges and the introduction of selfmanagement which initiated the process of decentralization in Yugoslavia, led to the
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dissolution of the AFŽ and the formation of a new women’s organization.
97
Goldstein, 1941., 425, 429, 431.
33
�CHAPTER 2 - ORGANIZING WOMEN
The Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia (AFŽH) was founded in December 1941 by an
initiative of the Communist Party of Croatia (KPH). The Party saw an opportunity for the
further development of an already existent women’s activism and initiated the mobilization of
masses of peasant women for the benefit of the emerging People’s Liberation Army (NOV)
and, more broadly, in the interest of the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB). AFŽ leaders,
who were also Party members, adjusted their rhetoric to include the concerns and needs of
peasant women and successfully mobilized their traditional skills in the service of the
struggle. According to Barbara Jancar-Webster, in November 1943, after almost two years of
the existence of this organization, 243,000 women were recorded as members of the AFŽ of
Croatia. Furthermore, by the end of the war two million women throughout Yugoslavia
officially joined the organization. 98 Women’s participation in the AFŽ of Yugoslavia
depended on the wartime conditions in particular areas and was unevenly distributed. Thus, in
territories that were occupied throughout the war, such as Serbia, there were no branches of
the AFŽ. The first branch in Serbia was established after the liberation of Belgrade at the end
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of 1944. On the other hand, liberated territories within Croatia, such as Lika and Gorski kotar,
saw the emergence of a highly autonomous and well-organized women’s group in the
beginning of the war.
AFŽH united the efforts of women who were in the interwar period active both in the
leftist and “bourgeois” organizations. Therefore, I initiate this chapter by outlining the
activities of women’s organizations in the interwar period. Due to the fact that women’s
organizations, nationalist and leftist alike, originated predominantly in urban centers, I briefly
98
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 144.
34
�address the intensity and quality of communication between women belonging to these
organizations and women living in the rural areas of Croatia. Furthermore, I explore the
emergence and development of the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia throughout World
War II. In order to determine the tasks and goals of this organization, I will analyze the
speeches that Josip Broz Tito and Spasenija-Cana Babovi delivered at the First Yugoslav
Conference of the AFŽ in December 1942, which reflect the most important features of the
AFŽ and its activities during the war. In the final section of the chapter I examine several
speeches delivered at the First Congress of the AFŽ of Croatia in July 1945 by the most
prominent figures of the KPJ and the AFŽH, such as Josip Broz Tito, Maca Gržeti and Kata
Pejnovi , in order to exemplify changes in the tasks and roles of the AFŽ of Croatia in the
postwar period.
2.1 Women’s Organizations in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-1941)
The end of nineteenth century saw the emergence of the first Croatian women’s
associations that principally engaged in charitable, humanitarian and cultural work. While
many women who participated in these organizations were members of the upper middle
class, namely wives of wealthy merchants and noblemen, Sandra Prlenda reports that women
teachers, nurses and nuns also figured highly in women’s initiatives.99 The first organization
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of politically left oriented women was established in 1895 within the framework of the
Socialist Democratic Party of Yugoslavia (Jugoslavenska socijaldemokratska stranka). In
1919 this party split into several political factions, one being the Socialist Worker’s Party of
Yugoslavia (Socijalisti ka radni ka partija Jugoslavije), which was known as the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) from 1920 on. In 1919 KPJ organized the women’s section as a
99
Sandra Prlenda, “Žene i prvi organizirani oblici prakti nog socijalnog rada u Hrvatskoj,” Revija za
socijalnu politiku 12, no. 3 (2005): 321-322. See also: Dubravka Pei aldarovi , “Osnovne karakteristike
profesionalne djelatnosti žena u Hrvatskoj izme u dvaju svjetskih ratova (1918-1941),” asopis za suvremenu
povijest 3 (1997): 491-503.
35
�part of the Party. 100 At their first conference, female members of the KPJ accepted the Party’s
program according to which men and women should be legally guaranteed “full and
unrestricted equality (…) 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.”101
In 1921 king Aleksandar banned the KPJ fearing the further destabilization of parliamentary
politics and the possible spread of revolution or civil war inspired by the Bolsheviks in
Russia. Thus, the KPJ became an illegal organization, and its modest capabilities for
organized women’s activities were henceforth severely hindered.
Only after the Fourth Congress, held in Dresden in 1928, did the Party formally articulate
its policy on work with women and implemented the first organized actions. During the
Congress members reported that between the years 1921 and 1927 the number of women
workers had increased substantially even though male Party members had shown no
inclination for supervision or support of the development of women cadres, had disregarded
their duties to work with women and even gone so far as to refuse to aid female Party
members with their tasks. 102 Despite the lack of willingness on the part of male Party
members to support female members in their work or in training new women converts, female
members who were active in trade unions, front organizations and “bourgeois” groups during
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the 1930s persistently worked with women workers, helped to familiarize them with their
rights from a Marxist perspective, the importance of organized resistance to capitalist
oppression and communist ideology in general. Moreover, students, especially in gymnasiums
and universities in urban centers, exchanged Marxist literature amongst themselves and
participated in the illegal work of the KPJ, predominantly as couriers.
100
Sabrina P. Ramet, “In Tito’s Time,” in Gender Politics in the Western Balkans, Women and Society
in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1999), 92-93.
101
Neda Božinovi , Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku (Beograd: “Devedeset etvrta,” 1996), 102.
102
Reed, “Croatian Women in the Yugoslav Partisan Resistance,” 38.
36
�For example, Marija-Vica Balen, a prominent Croatian communist of the interwar period,
joined the communist cell in Gospi (Lika) in 1928. In her memoir she recounts that her
expulsion from the gymnasium in Gospi in the winter of 1929 was a consequence of her
illegal activity. She continued her education in Zagreb where, she wrote, “parallel with
studying (I) also developed a political activity. Indeed, even more extensive than before
because in Zagreb I gained new experiences and had a lot more Marxist literature at hand.
(…) I created groups of sympathizers among the gymnasium schoolgirls (…) and connected
with the group of the already organized communists.”103 Throughout her student years Balen
distributed illegal literature and Party related material, and when she joined the workforce she
became a member of the Union of Banking, Insurance, Trade and Industry Clerks of
Yugoslavia (Savez bankovnih, osiguravaju ih, trgova kih i industrijskih
inovnika
Jugoslavije, SBOTI J) that, after its Eighth Congress in 1931 in Split, transferred its
headquarters to Zagreb. Following her employment in the file office of the Central Office for
the Insurance of Workers (Središnji ured za osiguranje radnika, SUZOR), a state-led
institution where the work conditions were so miserable the employees referred to it as Sing-
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Sing, she conducted a campaign for joining the SBOTI J:
in order to, with the help of our class union, win at least some rights. It was not easy
because SUZNOR was a state institution, so it was “unthinkable,” as some have said,
that its employees join such a syndicate. Yet, with hard work and constant persuasion
of people that we have nothing to lose if we organize I managed to enroll a goodly
number of them in SBOTI J. This success was more important because it was the first
SBOTI J organization in a state institution. 104
103
Balen, Bili smo idealisti, 90. “(…) usporedo s u enjem razvijala i politi ku djelatnost. Dapa e,
opsežniju nego prvi put jer sam u Zagrebu stekla nova iskustva i imala pri ruci mnogo više marksisti ke
literature. (…) Me u gimnazijalkama stvorila sam simpatizerske grupe (…) a povezala sam se i sa grupom
organiziranih komunista.”
104
Ibid, 153. “(…) kako bismo uz pomo svoga klasnog sindikata izborili bar neka prava. To nije išlo
lako jer je SUZOR bio državna ustanoa, pa je bilo “nezamislivo” (kako su neki govorili) da se njegovi
namještenici u lane u takav sindikat. Ipak, upornim radom i neprestanim uvjeravanjem ljudi da ništa ne možemo
izgubiti pokušamo li se organizirati, u SBOTI J sam uspjela upisati lijep broj njih. Uspjeh je bio to zna ajniji što
je to bila prva organizacija SBOTI J-a u jednoj državnoj ustanovi.”
37
�The activities that Marija-Vica Balen described in her memoir testify to the accessibility of
Marxist ideology to students and young working-class people living in urban areas and to the
type of work a female member of the KPJ might engage in during the late 1920s and the
1930s in the capital of Croatia. 105 As a motivated individual she sometimes initiated activities
independently, that is, without the consent of the Central Committee (Centralni komitet, CK)
of the Party, and implemented them vigorously.
On January 6th 1929 king Aleksandar proclaimed the royal dictatorship, which included the
increase of political surveillance that continued long after his assassination in 1934, and
frequent stays in state prisons for male and female members of the KPJ as well as members of
all the political parties with ethnic or religious characteristic, such as Croatian Peasant Party
(HSS). This practice was so widespread that Sonia Wild Bi ani , wife of a prominent HSS
member Rudolf Bi ani who served three years in the prison in Srijemska Mitrovica, in her
memoir commented “that the prisons of Yugoslavia had served the same function as the
public schools in Britain in training the next generation of rulers.” 106 However, neither
Marija-Vica Balen nor Eva Grli describe the abatement of Party activity during this period.
On the contrary, their recollections testify to the dynamic atmosphere that culminated in the
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foundation of the Communist Party of Croatia (KPH) in April 1937 as a branch of KPJ.107
However, Balen’s memoirs point to two limitations a female Party member could
encounter prior to the end of World War II. First, her recollections indicate the strong
105
Grli , Sje anja, 40-45. Eva Grli recounted a similar narrative in her memoir. Although she never
joined the KPJ, as a student in the gymnasium in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) she was exposed to Marxist
ideology through her best friend and boyfriend. Like Marija-Vica Balen, she was expelled from school due to her
connections with the communists. Namely, the police found her correspondence with a young man who was
fighting in the Spanish Civil War at that time. In 1938 she moved to Zagreb with her family in order to start
anew. Instead, she found a job with the help of employees of the SBOTI J and reinforced her communist
activities.
106
Sonia Wild Bi ani , Two Lines of Life (Zagreb: Durieux: Croatian P.E.N. Centre, 1999), 8. Nada
Sremec, Iz partizankskog dnevnika, 36. While writing her wartime diary, Sremec noted the same thing about the
communist leaders who led the partisan movement naming Tito, Moša Pijade, Andrija Hebrang, Pavle Gregori ,
Šime Balen and uro Špoljari as former prisoners of the penitentiary in Srijemska Mitrovica.
107
Grli , Sje anja, 44-49; Balen, Bili smo idealisti, 99-102, 127-130.
38
�presence of sectarianism within the Party.108 Balen describes several occurrences her husband,
Šime Balen, told her about. Šime Balen became a member of the KPJ in 1935 while he was
serving a prison sentence in Srijemska Mitrovica accused by the State of being a Croatian
nationalist after the introduction of the royal dictatorship. Once a member, he easily gained
access to the upper echelons of the Croatian branch of the Party while Marija-Vica continued
to play an auxiliary role. She testifies that in the prewar years she was unaware of many of her
husband’s tasks and assignments in the Party, that she, her sisters and children frequently
spent time in front of their house or in the balcony keeping guard while male members held
meetings or that she sometimes accompanied her husband to meetings in public places solely
because he needed a cover. 109 In sum, notwithstanding her early joining the Party, her
unwavering convictions and entrepreneurial spirit, Balen’s case testifies that during the
prewar period the KPJ was not easily conceding to the advancement of women members
beyond auxiliary positions. Second, Balen does not mention instances of Party’s work with
women in the rural areas even once. Although she had numerous interactions with male and
female communists of different ranks, no one was involved in work with peasant women.
As late as November 1940 Vida Tomši , a Slovenian communist and People’s Hero of
Yugoslavia, spoke at Fifth State Conference of the KPJ in Zagreb about the work with women
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in her seminal presentation on the Marxist perspective of the role of women in contemporary
society. Tomši identifies work with women as “one of the most painful points of all our
work,”110 attributing such an unfavorable situation to the incessant neglect and ignorance of
Party cadres. Within the larger issue of work with women in general, Tomši spoke about the
work with peasant women in particular. She pointed out that the KPJ has not extended its
108
For more on sectarianism within the KPH see: Reed, “The Anti-Fascist Front of Women and the
Communist Party in Croatia: Conflicts Within the Resistance.”
109
Balen, Bili smo idealisti, 180, 187, 198, 270-271.
110
Vida Tomši , “O radu sa ženama” (“On Work with Women”), in Žene Hrvatske u
Narodnooslobodila koj borbi, vol. 1, ed. Marija Šoljan (Zagreb: Izdanje Glavnog odbora Saveza ženskih
društava Hrvatske, 1955), 2. “(…) jedna od najbolnijih to aka našeg rada.”
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�activities into rural areas, which led to the greater influence of bourgeois women’s
organizations of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS).111 Moreover, according to Mary Reed, in
addition to the rather limited influence of cultural and educational groups based in towns, the
HSS dominated rural areas of Croatia. On the one hand, the KPJ targeted urban, mainly
working-class, women. On the other hand, peasants were distrustful of and even hostile
towards outsiders, and the HSS actively worked to intensify these sentiments, particularly
towards members of the KPJ.112
In spite of their ideological differences, the HSS and KPJ shared similar attitude regarding
the role of women in society. Stjepan Radi , one of the founders of the HSS, wrote that “men
and women have in everything completely equal rights,” which in his “peasant republic,”
would be realized beginning with universal suffrage “without differentiation according to sex
from age eighteen.” 113According to historian Suzana Le ek, Stjepan’s wife Marija Radi was
devoted to work with peasant women. Working with the organization Peasant Concord
(Selja ka sloga), which was founded by the HSS, she aimed primarily at the “advancement of
a woman socially and culturally,” and then to “raising awareness of equality of women and
men.”114 In other words, in practice the HSS opted for a mitigated variant of Stjepan Radi ’s
original program. The improvement of the position of women was defined within the
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framework of the extremely conservative and backward territory, thus, mainly through the
organization of choirs, acting troupes, illiteracy, hygiene and cooking courses, but without
political education. These activities corresponded with the conception of women as guardians
111
Tomši , “O radu sa ženama,” 6.
Reed, “Croatian Women,” 29-30.
113
As cited in Suzana Le ek, “Selja ka sloga i uklju ivanje žena u selja ki pokret (1925-1929),” Radovi
Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest 32-33 (1999-2000): 295. “[M]uškarci i žene imadu u svemu posvema jednaka
prava,” “bez razlike spola od navršene osamnaeste godine.”
114
As cited in: Le ek, “Selja ka sloga,“ 296.
112
40
�of the national inheritance, which they then passed on to their children. Members of the HSS
and peasants shared this philosophy.115
Le ek and Reed agree that, regardless of the source or persistence of the reformist
attempts, advances in improving the living conditions and opportunities for peasant women
were mild. For instance, while illiteracy courses were well attended in all towns and villages
where there were branches of the Peasant Concord, most participants were men and in many
cases women refused to join, reportedly not to infringe upon their duties as mothers and
housewives.116 Le ek contends that a strongly traditional social system, with a surprisingly
high number of elements corresponding to the peasant culture of the interwar period, persisted
in the rural areas of Croatia until the 1960s. 117 Therefore, women’s organizations and
activities addressing specifically women’s interests as workers, mothers and wives in the
interwar period had almost exclusively influenced women living in urban areas.
2.2 The Antifascist Front of Women - Formation and Development
An organized struggle gradually developed in the territories of the Independent State of
Croatia (NDH), first in Kordun and Banija followed by Gorski kotar and Lika, throughout the
second half of the 1941. During this time the first partisan camps were organized.
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Communists who served in the Spanish Civil War distinguished themselves by organizing the
defense against Ustasha armed forces and formed the core of the partisan military command
in Croatia, while Ve eslav Holjevac, a Party member since 1939 who was awarded the title of
People’s Hero of Yugoslavia for his service, organized the smuggling of weapons.118
115
Le ek, “Selja ka sloga,“ 295-296.
Ibid, 296.
117
Suzana Le ek, “Selja ka obitelj u Hrvatskoj 1918-1960. Metoda usmene povijesti (oral history),”
Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest 29 (1996): 256.
118
Goldstein, 1941., 326.
116
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�Peasants who were living in these areas, especially women, contributed greatly to the
everyday functioning of the camps. Responding to the newly created circumstances in late
summer of 1941 the District Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia (Okružni komitet
Komunisti ke partije Hrvatske, OK KPH) for Lika issued a directive which ordered the
establishment of a network of local committees responsible for assisting partisan fighters and
refugees by collecting food, clothes, shoes and other material. This organization was named
the People’s Assistance (Narodna pomo ) and it initiated its first organized actions during
September and October of the same year. The committees of People’s Assistance were soon
established throughout the liberated territories as well as in some of the occupied territories, in
Zagreb and Split for example. Many members of these committees were women. In Zagreb
Marija Šoljan, who became a distinguished AFŽ member during World War II, held a
prominent position. In Split, almost all members in management positions were women, and
Anka Berus and Ružica Turkovi , also future influential AFŽ members, were leading
members of the committee in charge of the entire territory of Croatia.119
Furthermore, women in the People’s Assistance in the occupied territories worked with a
large number of non-affiliated individuals, again mostly women, by raising funds and other
goods in order to send them to the camps and prisons established and led by the NDH
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government. Women from the Split branch of People’s Assistance worked together with the
peasants, especially milkmaids, who lived in nearby areas. Specifically, milkmaids, who by
their own initiative began providing food for partisans in their area, came to Split with
buckets of milk for sale, and at the end of the day returned to their villages carrying weapons
or medical supplies for the partisans. 120 The Journal of the United Croatian People’s
Liberation Struggle, one of the many newsletters printed during the war, published an article
119
Marija Šoljan, ed., Žene Hrvatske u Narodnooslobodila koj borbi, vol. 1 (Zagreb: Izdanje Glavnog
odbora Saveza ženskih društava Hrvatske, 1955), f.n. 2 and 3, 48-49.
120
Šoljan, ed., Žene Hrvatske, vol. 1, f.n. 2, 49.
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�in December of 1941 about women in Lika who used the traditional female form of
socializing, prelo, to organize a constant supply of food and clothing for their men in the
partisan army. 121 Prominent communists from Lika, such as Kata Pejnovi and Jela Bi ani ,
attended these gatherings and used them to inform other women about current events, talk
about the political situation and discuss communism. 122 Finally, women began organizing
courses for female volunteers who wished to become army nurses, and began organizing
illiteracy courses shortly thereafter. 123
Among several political and military factions operating in the territory of Yugoslavia
during World War II only the communist leadership of the People’s Liberation Struggle
launched an all encompassing and successful initiative with the goal of mobilizing women for
their cause. 124 The aforementioned particulars provide insight into the voluntary, localized
activity of women before the AFŽH was created. Hence, women, particularly those living in
the numerous local communities in liberated territories, initiated a process of self-organization
to help men from the same villages who had joined the partisans in order to protect them.
Members of prewar women’s organizations, particularly female representatives of the HSS,
but also female members of the KPJ, provided peasant women with guidelines and directed
their efforts. Men in leading positions of the KPH eventually realized the potential for large
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scale organized women’s work, and on December 6th, 1941 the Central Committee of
Communist Party of Croatia (Centralni komitet Komunisti ke partije Hrvatske, CK KPH)
issued a circular thereby establishing an umbrella organization with the goal of absorbing
121
Prelo is a type of gathering that took place in private homes. A housewife invited girls and women
from her village to help spin wool, knit, or prime feathers for bed linen. Sometimes, girls and women gathered
and knitted, embroidered or spun their own piece of work. Young men and husbands could also be present, but
not necessarily. Dinner was prepared for those present and singing and playing was usually a part of passing
time.
122
“O li kim prelima” (“About Prela in Lika”), in Žene Hrvatske, vol. 1, 28.
123
Šoljan, ed., Žene Hrvatske, vol. 1, f.n. 2, 39.
124
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 47-48; Batini , “Proud to Have Trod in Men’s
Footsteps,” 23-24.
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�women currently active in the NOB and attracting more women to its ranks. 125 Thus, the
Communist Party merely harnessed the sprouting pockets of active women’s assistance to
their own benefit.
In the case of the AFŽ, just like in the case of ZAVNOH and other political bodies of the
People’s Liberation Struggle, the KPH followed the policy of Andrija Hebrang, the wartime
leader of the Croatian communists who envisioned the NOB in Croatia as a coalition of leftoriented groups willing to fight against fascist forces. Hence, regardless of their prewar rivalry
with the HSS, the KPH incorporated women who had been members of the HSS and worked
for the Peasant Concord prior to the outbreak of war into the emerging mass organization.
However, similar to the way in which high ranking members of the Communist Party
governed ZAVNOH and AVNOJ, the Party appointed its own members who were already
active elsewhere, like Kata Pejnovi , Marija Šoljan and Anka Berus, into leading positions of
the AFŽH. According to the circular, the goal of the AFŽ was “to activate and connect a
broad strata of women and pull them into the People’s Liberation Struggle” and to handle its
activities with the objective to “by all means aid the fight of the people’s liberation partisan
detachments.”126 With regards to the definition of peasant women as passive and the most
backward segment of Yugoslav society, that was prominent in Party rhetoric since the
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interwar period, the AFŽ’s task was also political in nature. The organization sought to
“conduct antifascist propaganda, (…) popularize the Soviet Union and its leading role in the
fight for destruction of fascism, (…) and to lead the fight for the equality of women and
men.”127 Thus, KPH launched an initiative to establish a supportive women’s organization for
125
“Iz okružnice broj 4. CK KPH od 6. prosinca 1941. O organizaciji i zadacima Antifašisti kog fronta
žena” (“From the Circular No. 4 by CK KPH from December 6th, 1941. About the Organization and Tasks of the
Antifascist Front of Women”), in Žene Hrvatske vol. 1, 57.
126
Ibid, “Da aktivira i poveže široke slojeve žena i da ih povu e u Narodnooslobodila ku borbu. (…)
Da svim sredstvima pomaže borbu Narodnooslobodila kih partizanskih odreda.”
127
Ibid, “Da vodi antifašisti ku propagandu, (…) [D]a populariziraju SSSR i njegovu vodue u ulogu u
borbi za uništenje fašizma, (…) [D]a vodi borbu za ravnopravnost muškaraca i žena (…).”
44
�practical reasons, to provide the partisan army with necessary supplies, excluding weaponry,
and for ideological purposes, to educate women in order to enable them to become active
participants in the emerging communist state.
The Communist Party advocated equality between men and women. However, the Party’s
leadership hesitated to include women in combat units until the summer of 1942. In Žene
Hrvatske u Narodnooslobodila koj borbi editor Marija Šoljan includes women participating
in the NOB not as providers of auxiliary services but as fighters as early as 1941. For
instance, Šoljan lists a small number of women members of the Split branch of the KPH who
during the winter of 1941 had already operated within the communist task forces and
participated in sabotages and bombings in the city. 128 According to the lists of women
partisans available, four out of seven women continued to participate in the NOB as fighters
when the First Dalmatian Proletarian Brigade was formed in 1942. Two of them, Flora Jeli
and Mara Kuzmani -Hajdukovi , died in 1943, while Milka Šimi -Duvnjak and Jelica Bagat,
who was decorated with the medal Spomenica 1941, survived the war. 129 In addition,
Narandža Kon ar, political commissar of the First Women’s Partisan Unit, in her recollection
of the war in Lika mentions Slava Blaževi , Janja Hrženjak, Desa Maruni , Boja Tišma and
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Nevenka Grbi who served as fighters and nurses in the partisan army in 1941. 130
The women Šoljan and Kon ar pointed to represent an exception to the practice
established by the Party at the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia. Conduct of the Party
leadership reflected both the traditional biases characteristic of rural Croatia and the same
indecisive attitude that leading figures of the U.S.S.R. demonstrated towards the notion of
women fighters. Finally, the U.S.S.R. authorized the mobilization of women volunteers to
128
Šoljan, ed., Žene Hrvatske, vol 1, 25, 50.
Šoljan, ed., Žene Hrvatske, vol. 2, 102-176.
130
Narandža Kon ar-Rodi , “Prva ženska partizanska eta u Lici,” in Druga li ka proleterska brigada:
zbornik sje anja (Beograd: Vojnoizdava ki i novinski centar, 1988), 125.
129
45
�combatant positions, specifically in positions as snipers, riflemen, machine gunners, tank
crews and pilots, in March and April of 1942.131 Following the Soviet lead, in August the
KPH established the first all women partisan unit in the village of Trnavec in Lika. During the
autumn three other similar units were formed within the same territory. However, soon
thereafter the Croatian communist leadership decided to disintegrate these units and
incorporate small numbers of women into various male detachments. 132 This became the
standard practice until women were demobilized from combat positions in the final months of
the war. The principal reason for breaking up the all-female units was the excessive mortality
rates among female fighters. Of course, not all Soviet female soldiers were located in allfemale units, but women pilots served in such detachments. The reason why Soviet women
who volunteered for military service in combat positions could be placed in all-women units
was that they were young urban women educated in a system that promoted the equality
between men and women that, consequently, included practice at the shooting range. Military
training was an integral part of school curriculum in the Soviet Union from 1932 on, and was
carried out from the first grade. In the mid-1930s Komsomol, a youth organization controlled
by the Soviet Communist Party, introduced mandatory special defense training for all high
school students, which took place independently of the school curricula, in the national
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paramilitary bases. Therefore, female Soviet recruits experienced a type of education that
131
Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: a History of Violence on the Eastern Front (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 110-120, 156. Following the outbreak of conflict between Germany and the
U.S.S.R. a significant number of women volunteered for the army, and, although the state claimed equal
opportunities for men and women, that did not imply that women would be allowed to freely join the army. In
September 1941 when the state issued the Decree on the Universal and Obligatory Military Training of the
Citizens of the U.S.S.R., the decree demanded all male persons undergo military training, while women were not
mentioned. Furthermore, during public appearances state officials often addressed the public in non-gendered
terms. They did not advocate women`s participation in military training, but they also did not speak about the
exclusion of women. In the U.S.S.R. the period immediately before and after the beginning of the war was
accompanied with utter silence on the possibility to enlist women in combat positions in the army.
132
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 82.
46
�provided them with the basic skills for successful training for combat and also for successful
performance in the armed conflicts.133
On the other hand, Yugoslav women who volunteered to serve as fighters were
predominantly very young peasant girls with no education. In her recollection about the
establishment of the First Women’s Proletarian Unit, Narandža Kon ar recounts that out of
one hundred and twenty five girls who were accepted in the women’s unit less than ten girls
had attended school prior the war and many were completely illiterate. Therefore, in addition
to political courses that were required for all recruits, they also had to undergo elementary
literacy courses.134 Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, women living in rural areas of Croatia
were constrained by the conservative society and the traditional upbringing, which offered
little alternatives to marriage and motherhood and most often withheld even rudimentary
education of women. Moreover, due to the lack of military personnel and weapons, Croatian
partisan forces were not able to provide women recruits with a quality training, which
increased the risk of death in battle.
Despite the opening of Soviet military units to women, the KPJ leadership was not
convinced that soldiering was the correct direction for women’s liberation. Two prominent
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members of the Party gave speeches that testify to their vacillation in regard to the status of
women soldiers, partizanke, at the First Yugoslav Conference of the AFŽ. Following the
circular issued by the KPH the year before, the KPJ issued a directive in November 1942
establishing the Antifascist Front of Women of Yugoslavia (Antifašisti ka fronta žena
Jugoslavije, AFŽJ). The directive was worded similar to the earlier KPH circular in that it
133
134
Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 51-52.
Kon ar-Rodi , “Prva ženska partizanska eta,” 126.
47
�located the organization within the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP) and declared its
main goal as the provision of food, clothes and shoes for the army. 135
The First Yugoslav Conference of the AFŽ took place in Bosanski Petrovac in Eastern
Bosnia on the 6th of December 1942. One hundred and sixty six delegates from all over
Yugoslavia, liberated and occupied territories, attended the conference. Tito gave the opening
speech, the famous speech in which he declared that he was “proud to stand in front of the
army that has a huge number of women.” 136 During this speech he spoke about the female
members of the army who had contributed to the partisan struggle with a rifle in their hands,
shoulder to shoulder with their male comrades. At the same time, he spoke to members of the
AFŽ and the delegates of the conference about the nature of their fight stating “you met here
and you will define your work in a more organized manner and with more method in order for
our army to get the maximum which can be given. In you we see the main support in the
background.”137 With the simple exchange of the first and third person throughout his speech
Tito separated two factions of female members of his army. He referred to the women
combatants in the third person, indicating that they had no representatives among the
members of the AFŽ whom he addressed in the first person.
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Spasenija-Cana Babovi , one of the most prominent women in the KPJ and the member of
the initiative committee for the establishment of the AFŽ of Yugoslavia, held a presentation
on behalf of the CK KPJ at the same event. In her speech she made the distinction between
women combatants and female members of the AFŽ even less ambiguous. At the beginning
135
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 123-125.
Tito, Josip Broz, “Govor na Prvoj zemaljskoj konferenciji Antifašisti kog fronta žena Jugoslavije”
(“Speech at the First Conference of the Antifascist Front of Women of Yugoslavia”), in Ženama Jugoslavije
(Beograd: Centralni odbor AFŽ Jugoslavije, 1945), 6. “Ja se ponosim što stojim na elu armije u kojoj ima
ogroman broj žena.”
137
Ibid, 10. “Zato ste se vi ovdje i sastale, zato ete postaviti svoj rad još organizovanije i sa više
sistema, i usmjeriti ga na to da naša vojska dobije maksimum što se može dati. Mi u vama gledamo glavni
oslonac u pozadini.”
136
48
�of her presentation she stated, “when the Communist Party urged people to revolt against the
occupying forces, women responded to this invitation in large numbers. In the very beginning
of the formation of partisan detachments many women went to fight with a rifle in their
hand.”138 She continued by mentioning women who helped through traditional female tasks
such as cooking, making clothes and caring for the wounded. In the latter part of her
presentation she spoke about the future tasks of the AFŽ. She stated:
AFŽ has to achieve full and comprehensive support of the front. Women have to assist
fully in the organization of the background and to participate actively in the people’s
government. (…) Our husbands, brothers, sons are fighting against the bloody
occupier and their servants Ustasha and Chetniks, our army fought for its own weapon
shedding the blood of the best sons of its people, the army won from rifles to cannons
for itself. And we women in the background have to do everything to give our military
what it needs.139
Babovi expressed more strongly what Tito only alluded to in his speech. In their eyes the
Antifascist Front of Women was first and foremost an organization subordinated to the needs
of the portion of the army actively fighting the enemy. Although they admitted that some
women participated in the war as combatants, their speeches reveal that in their eyes men
were the fighters. And female partisans, although courageous and undoubtedly devoted to the
partisan cause, were not considered as pivotal to the People’s Liberation Struggle as the
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women helpers.
Moreover, the women leaders of the AFŽ, those who had been introduced to communism
through colleagues at leftist universities and through co-workers in worker movements during
138
“Iz organizacionog referata Cane Babovi ” (“From the Organizational Presentation of Cana
Babovi ”), in Žene Hrvatske, vol. 1, 177. “Kada je Komunisti ka partija pozvala narod na ustanak protiv
okupatora, u velikoj mjeri su se tom pozivu odazvale i žene. U samom po etku formiranja partizanskih odreda
mnoge žene polazile su u borbu sa puškom u ruci (...).“
139
Ibid, 178-179. “AFŽ treba da ostvari punu i svestranu pomo frontu. Žene treba da daju punu pomo
u organizaciji pozadine i da u estvuju aktivno u narodnoj vlasti. (…)Naši muževi, bra a, sinovi bore se na
položaju protiv krvavog okupatora i njihovih slugu ustaša i etnika, naša vojska je izvojevala sebi oružje liju i
krv najboljih sinova svoga naroda, ona je sebi izvojevala od puške do topa. A mi žene u pozadini moramo u initi
sve da našoj vojsci damo ono što njojzi nedostaje.“
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�the 1930s and who were the very core of the AFŽ, did not join combat units of the partisan
army nor did they have any desire to do so. On the contrary, Marija-Vica Balen, who worked
for the Lika branch of the AFŽ during the war, described courageous women fighters in her
memoir, but also stated that she refused to even carry a gun after weapons became readily
available for all organizers of partisan struggle. 140 Mitra Mitrovi , a member of the Central
Committee of AFŽJ and a member of AVNOJ, confessed in her memoir that, watching a
battalion comprised of SKOJ members where girls were in majority and one of them was a
battalion commissar, she thought “they should be disbanded as soon as possible.”141 However,
being a disciplined soldier and a believer in the equality of men and women, she did not
attempt to argue with the military leadership for the disbandment of the unit.142 Interestingly,
Lydia Sklevicky reports that AFŽ members often discouraged girls from joining the army as
partizanke. She quotes partizanka Draginja Metikoš who described several situations where
girls who were performing tasks for the AFŽ ran away in order to be able to join partisans as
fighters.143
Instead of carrying a rifle and participating in the armed combat, the leading cadres of the
AFŽ showed remarkable concern for what they called “the political education” of women
who joined the AFŽ. They considered a proper education as a prerequisite for the
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achievement of the anticipated equality between women and men, which was the second goal
of the AFŽ. According to Lydia Sklevicky, the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia exerted
a lot of effort to organize activities that would satisfy the various educational needs of
women. For illiterate women, AFŽ cadres organized literacy courses and courses in the
general culture, such as health, hygiene and historical courses. These were followed by
courses in political education, which focused on the nature and importance of the NOB, the
140
Balen, Bili smo idealisti, 249.
Mitrovi , Ratno putovanje, 117. “U dnu svesti mi je jasno da ih što pre treba rasformirati.“
142
Ibid.
143
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 39, 60.
141
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�significance of women’s contributions to the war effort and the role of the AFŽ. Finally, the
AFŽ of Croatia published several journals that had primarily an educational purpose.144 Thus,
contributing to these journals and propagation of reading was interpreted by KPJ and AFŽ
leadership as an important first step to the creation of an activist identity among women.145
The importance and role of education was, therefore, the reason why Spasenija-Cana
Babovi , in her speech in front of the assembly gathered for the First Yugoslav Conference of
the AFŽ, dismissed the role of female combatants and devoted closer attention to women
organized by the AFŽ. According to the Party program, women could achieve equality with
men only through the legal regulations of the communist state. And according to the
convictions and activities of the prewar communist women’s organizations, only ideologically
conscious and active working-class women could accomplish that goal and, consequently,
participate in political life on equal footing with men. Thus, although the contributions of
partizanke were noteworthy without question, their personal development through education
and the possibility to pass on that acquired knowledge to other women was impaired by their
choice to join NOV as combatants. In other words, neither men nor women in the partisan
army joined civilian organizations of the NOP. Such activity was considered a violation of the
unity of the army. 146 Therefore, the future Babovi envisioned for women partisans could not
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benefit from the education provided by the AFŽ. Upon closer analysis of her presentation it
appears that, although she emphasized the importance of assistance to the partisan army
repeatedly, it was solely because she thought that the women of the AFŽ were most
efficiently helping in their own victory through their work on the homefront. That is, that the
144
In addition to Žena u borbi throughout the war different branches of AFŽ in Croatia published
seventeen other journals aiming specifically female audience. Compare with: “Bibliografija lanaka objavljenih
u listovima Antifasisti ke fronte žena Hrvatske u razdoblju Narodnooslobodila kog rata i socijalisti ke
revolucije 1941-1945,” in Žena u borbi: glasilo Antifašisti ke fronte žena Hrvatske, ed. Marija Šoljan (Zagreb:
Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena Hrvatske, 1974), 61-156.
145
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 30-32.
146
Reed, “Croatian women,” 120.
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�victory of the KPJ would solve “the issue of participation [of women] in the building of our
people’s government.”147 Thus, perhaps partizanke thought that “equality was in the eta,”148
but afežejke149 were certain that it was in the Party organization.
2.3 Postwar Development of the Antifascist Front of Women (1945-1953)
Numerous historians agree that, since its establishment, the KPJ accepted Soviet
mentoring. Ivo Banac argues that “[a]s long as they were incapable of effecting revolutionary
change in their country, the [Yugoslav] communists were reduced to bondage to Moscow.”150
Notwithstanding the success in World War II and the seizure of power in Yugoslavia, during
the immediate postwar period communist authorities continued their efforts to adopt the
Soviet model of social and political organization as a template to reconstruct postwar
Yugoslavia.151 Therefore, they approached the issue of women’s equality in Yugoslavia by
thoroughly adhering to the Soviet script, which included “women’s equality in the public
sphere” and “’social motherhood’ in the private sphere.” 152 This was evident in the 1946
Yugoslav Constitution, which was closely modeled according to the Soviet Constitution of
1936. According to Article 24 of the new Yugoslav constitution, women were guaranteed
equality with men in all aspects of public life. The Article specifically addressed the role of
mothering women, and in particular, women workers, as a sphere where the state was obliged
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to intervene.153 Furthermore, the Constitution confirmed women’s active and passive right to
147
“Iz organizacionog referata Cane Babovi ,” 180. “(…) pitanje u eš a u izgradnji naše narodne
vlasti.”
148
As cited in: Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 99. eta is a small military unit.
A colloquial expression for the members of the AFŽ.
150
As cited in: Bokovoy, “Peasants and Communists,” 5.
151
Ramet, “In Tito’s Time,” 90; Matkovi , Povijest Jugoslavije, 286-287; for a general account of the
adoption of the Soviet model see: Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma,” 11-18; for the link between Stalin’s and
Tito’s personality cult see: Stanislav Sretenovi and Artan Puto, “Leader Cults in the Western Balkans (19451990): Josip Broz Tito and Enver Hoxa,” in The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorship: Stalin and the Eastern
Block, ed. Balázs Apor, Janc C. Behrends and Polly Johnes (Chippenham-Eastbourne: Palgrave, 2004), 208-212.
152
Chiara Bonfiglioli, Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of
Yugoslavia, Aspasia 8 (2014), 8.
153
As cited in: Sabrina P. Ramet, “In Tito`s Time,” 94. Article 24 of the Constitution of 1946: “Women
enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of state economic and social life. Women are entitled to a salary equal
to that of men for the same work, and enjoy special protection in the labor relationship. The state particularly
149
52
�vote obtained in February 1942, and authorized universal access to education, health and
childcare. 154 Hence, the end of World War II brought about numerous changes for women,
foremost in the domain of law, paid labor and education.
Despite the proclaimed gender equality, the end of the war saw a withdrawal of women
from armed conflict. During 1944 Party leadership introduced conscription for all adult males
in the liberated areas, and in October of the same year Red Army detachments provided
armed assistance in several battles including the liberation of Belgrade. As soon as the
necessity for partizanke ceased, they were demobilized, and the number of female personnel
within the army was reduced to a minimum. Women who remained in the army were
predominantly medics and nurses, while others found employment either in civil medical
institutions or the numerous associations organized to eliminate the consequences of war.155
Also, wartime nurses, who passed an elementary course in nursing within liberated territories,
underwent additional training following demobilization. 156 Towards the end of the war, in
addition to nursing courses, the economic department of the ZAVNOH began organizing
additional courses including typing, accounting, home economics and teacher training for
women who had already passed basic courses organized by the AFŽ. 157 Hence, the ZAVNOH
assumed the role of training women for specific types of work “for the sake of their own
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people and people’s government.”158
In the First Congress of the AFŽ of Croatia, held in Zagreb in July 1945, Tito addressed
the gathered women saying:
protects the welfare of mother and child by the establishment of maternity hospitals, children`s homes and day
nurseries, and by ensuring the right to paid leave before and after confinement.”
154
Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution, 163.
155
Božinovi , Žene Srbije, 141.
156
Ibid.
157
“O daktilografskim kursevima” (“About Typewriting Courses,”), “Doma inski te ajevi na
oslobo enom teritoriju” (“Housekeeping Courses in the Liberated Territory”), in Žene Hrvatske, vol. 2, 15, 33.
158
“Doma inski te ajevi na oslobo enom teritoriju,” in Žene Hrvatske, 33.
53
�this congress is not only a manifestation of solidarity of women of Yugoslavia, a
manifestation of brotherhood and unity, a review of your strength, overview of our
work, but a key meeting where you, the women of Yugoslavia, have to determine the
guidelines of your work, to determine what will be most important in your future
work, your assignments.159
Although he stated women should decide on their future activities by themselves, he clearly
expressing that future women’s activities had to be devoted “to the issue of consolidation of
our government.”160 Other speakers at this conference, including newly appointed Croatian
Prime Minister Vladimir Bakari , the president of the AFŽ of Yugoslavia Spasenija-Cana
Babovi , the president of the AFŽ of Croatia Maca Gržeti , and the vice-president of the same
organization Kata Pejnovi , reiterated similar sentiments. For example, Maca Gržeti began
her speech by celebrating the success of women in the People’s Liberation Struggle saying
“we, women of Croatia, as well as of the whole Yugoslavia, are proud and happy because in
this fight we won full equality, freedom and rights.”161 However, the promising and quite
optimistic introduction to the speech came with certain conditions specified only at the end of
her presentation. Gržeti concluded the speech by saying:
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we must never and by no means forget that only our people’s government is a
guarantee of true freedom, democracy and equality. Also we cannot forget that we will
more and more use and enjoy this freedom if we remove economic misery, ruin,
desolation, nakedness and barefootness as soon as possible-in a word, if we build the
homeland as soon as possible.162
159
Tito, “O novim zadacima žena” (“About Women’s New Tasks”), in Ženama Jugoslavije, 36. “Ovaj
kongres nije samo manifestacija solidarnosti žena Jugoslavije, manifestacija bratstva i jedinstva, smotra vaših
snaga, pregled našeg dosadašnjeg rada, nego je to važan sastanak na kome vi, žene jugoslavije, treba da odredite
smjernice svoga rada, da odredite ono što je najvažnjie u vašem budu em radu, vaše zadatke.”
160
Ibid, 37. “[P]itanju u vrš enja naše vlasti.”
161
Maca Gržeti , “Iz organizacionog referata Mace Gržeti ” (“From the Organizational Presentation of
Maca Gržeti ”), in Žene Hrvatske, vol. 2, 89. “[M]i žene Hrvatske, kao i cijele Jugoslavije, ponosne smo i sretne
i zato što smo u toj borbi izvojevale punu ravnopravnost, slobodu i prava.
162
Ibid, 92. “Ne smijemo zaboraviti nikada i nikako da nam je samo naša narodna vlast garancija
istinske slobode, demokracije i ravnopravnosti. Ali isto tako ne smijemo zaboraviti da emo sve više i više
koristiti i uživati tu slobodu ako što prije odstranimo ekonomsku bijedu, ruševine, pustoš, golotinju i bosotinjujednom rije ju, ako što prije izgradimo domovinu.“
54
�Kata Pejnovi explained in more detail the responsibilities of the AFŽ. She delegated them
to five areas: in consolidation of the values of brotherhood and unity and in consolidation of
people’s government, in construction and restoration of the country, in care for the young, the
elderly, and the war invalids, and, finally, in combating illiteracy and ignorance by organizing
illiteracy courses and courses of political education. 163 The organization’s broad area of
responsibilities transformed into a lengthy list of new assignments that AFŽ activists
immediately engaged in after the end of the Second World War. These included visiting, gift
giving and caring for veterans and war invalids, working in the orphanages and babysitting
the children of working mothers, participation in mass labor actions as well as agitation
among the youth to do the same, organizing reading groups and new illiteracy and political
courses, logging women on voter registration lists and the preparation of women for the first
elections, assistance in the newly formed state administration offices and even the donation of
blood.164
As Sklevicky points out, the AFŽ’s postwar tasks were dual in nature. Just as during the
war, the courses were the base through which the AFŽ attracted women to the organization
and educated them. The education provided, however, was not merely an exercise in social
equality with men or preparation for the labor market, but a way in which to expose large
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numbers of women to Marxist ideology, politically indoctrinate them and integrate them into
the Popular Front.165 During the war AFŽ members tried to gauge the level of ignorance and
the needs of peasant women and then to meet them through the organization’s activities. In
the postwar period, political education and indoctrination were secondary to the requirements
of education in general and the training of women capable of work. However, the emphasis
163
Lydia Sklevicky, “Prvi kongres AFŽ-a Hrvatske: putovi integracije u novo društvo,” in Oslobo enje
Hrvatske 1945 (Zagreb: Institut za historiju radni kog pokreta Hrvatske, 1986), 360-365.
164
Renata Jambreši Kirin, “Žene u formativnom socijalizmu,” in Refleksije vremena (1945.-1955.), ed.
Jasmina Bavoljak (Zagreb: Galerija Klovi evi dvori, 2012), 185.
165
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 118.
55
�changed. While the AFŽ was still in charge of various campaigns and courses that targeted
women, some of the course organization was transferred to the ZAVNOH, while the AFŽ was
primarily in charge of political education and ideological indoctrination.
In this situation, the Yugoslav Communist Party acted as its Soviet mentor and assigned
the AFŽ with tasks that mirrored the key activities performed between 1919 and 1930 by
Zhenotdel, the Soviet Women’s Department of the Central Committee Secretariat and its
committees for agitation and propaganda among women. According to Mary Buckley, the
meetings Zhenotdel organized throughout the U.S.S.R. were the main and often sole way of
educating women as well as a vehicle for “the party [to] pass ‘its will to the working
class.’”166 The meetings that Zhenotdel organized changed in emphasis over time. In the first
half of the 1920s education was focused on Marxist ideology, women’s rights and Party work.
After the promulgation of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928 the emphasis of Zhenotdel’s
activities were put on the participation of women in the realization of Plan requirements.167
Similarly, Sklevicky notes that after the proclamation of the first Yugoslav Five-Year Plan in
April 1947, which was designed to transform the country into an industrial force, the AFŽ
was assigned with the development and implementation of activities that sought to integrate
women into the labor force on a large scale. The AFŽ reformulated its goals according to
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Party directives and outlined its activities in accordance with the economical demands of the
industrialization process.168
Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in June of 1948 after a prolonged series of
disagreements between Tito and Stalin. The so-called Tito-Stalin split was followed by purges
of the Party ranks within Yugoslavia, as well as “a general and wide-ranging social purge
166
Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1989), 75-76.
167
Ibid, 77.
168
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 124-127.
56
�which was aimed with equal or even greater ferocity at all ranks of society.” 169 Svetlana
Slapšak observes that during this period no members of mass organizations, including the
AFŽ, were considered immune to the threat of the imminent “ideological deviation” by the
KPJ leadership.170 Hence, the Party leadership strove towards complete control of the entire
Yugoslav community and practiced extensive monitoring of all spheres of society and mass
organizations until the early 1950s. During this time the AFŽ of Croatia, the organization that
during the war had already gained a bad reputation due to its tendencies towards autonomy
and independence from the supervision of the Party, was under strict scrutiny. The Party acted
to remove it from the public role and in 1953 the AFŽ ended its existence with voluntary
dissolution. 171
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have discussed the development of women’s organizations with the
emphasis on the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia during and after the Second World
War. I reviewed the activities of women in the “bourgeois” and leftist organizations during
the interwar period and then turned my focus to the AFŽH, which was, according to Lydia
Sklevicky, the successor of both prewar traditions. 172 With regard to AFŽH, I analyzed its
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creation, its goals and its evolving relationship with women partisans.
The AFŽH was a women’s organization established in December of 1941 under the
supervision of the KPH, and integrated in the AFŽ of Yugoslavia one year later. AFŽ and all
of its republican branches were disbanded in 1953 and replaced with the Union of Women’s
Societies, which was integrated in the Socialist Alliance of Working People (SSRN). During
169
Crampton, Eastern Europe, 267.
Svetlana Slapšak, “Between the Vampire Husband and the Mortal Lover: A Narrative for Feminism
in Yugoslavia,” in, Research on Russia and Eastern Europe: Women in Pot-Communism, ed. Barbara Wejnert,
Metta Spencer and Slobodan Drakuli (Connecticut: JAI Press, 1996), 217.
171
Ibid, 217.
172
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 79.
170
57
�its existence, the Antifascist Front of Women changed its organizational structure, and to
some extent its tasks and goals. Through the analysis of the documents it is clear that the most
important goal of the organization was the education of women in order to facilitate their
inclusion into the public sphere of the socialist society. Of course, the AFŽ was founded
primarily to provide organized help to the partisan army during the war, and was tasked with a
multitude of assignments for reconstruction following the war. However, during the war
AFŽH members repeatedly stressed the importance of education and, therefore, launched
innumerable courses and initiated several journals to educate as many women as possible. The
trend continued into the postwar period as well and lasted for the duration of the existence of
the organization.
Female fighters were first and foremost members of the People’s Liberation Army. They
owed their dedication to the army, and could participate in the activities organized by the AFŽ
only if they had no other duties assigned by army leadership. This meant that as a rule
partizanke, who were predominantly young peasant girls, could not benefit from educational
programs AFŽ offered to women and were often excluded from AFŽ meetings and
conferences. AFŽ continued to promote the importance of the education for women in the
socialist Yugoslavia during the postwar period and, in connection, sought to introduce women
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to the paid work force, especially in the industrial sector. Women partisans, thus, remained on
the margins of interest for AFŽ officials.
58
�CHAPTER 3 - IMAGES OF FEMALE FIGHTERS
Žena u borbi was the first wartime journal in Croatia that targeted a female audience. The
editorial office initially consisted of Kata Pejnovi , Jela Bi ani , Dr. Slava O ko and Marija
Šoljan, members of both the Communist Party of Croatia (KPH) and the Antifascist Front of
Women of Croatia (AFŽH), specifically, the District committee (Okružni odbor) of the AFŽH
for Lika. 173 The journal was published for the first time in March 1942 in the liberated
territory of Lika. In June 1943 Žena u borbi became the official publication of the AFŽH, and
the District committee for Lika renamed the publication Woman of Lika in Combat (Li ka
žena u borbi). In addition to the changes of the responsible authority, the editorial board was
also altered. From mid-1943 until the end of the war Žena u borbi had five editors in chief. In
chronological order they were Olga Kova
Krea
-Krea
, Bosiljka-Beba Kraja
, Valika Pap-
, Nada Sremec and Veda Zagorac. During the interwar period all five women were
active in the “progressive movement” led by the KPJ and interested in the “woman question”
and during the war they were active members of the KPJ and the AFŽ.174 From the end of
World War II until 1953 the editors in chief were Marija Šoljan and Emilija Šeparovi , with
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the exception of 1947 when Nada Sremec was once again the editor in chief. Both Šoljan and
Šeparovi were active in the AFŽH during the war and contributed articles to the journal,
Šoljan from the very beginning and Šeparovi from 1943, but neither was prominent like the
wartime editors in chief. All the editors regularly contributed articles to the journal, primarily
dealing with the topics related to the political situation in the country and the activities of the
AFŽH.
173
174
Šoljan, ed., Žene Hrvatske, vol. 1, 205.
Šoljan, ed., Žena u borbi, 40-41.
59
�While in Croatia there was not a single journal which would meet the same informative
and educational role Žena u borbi aspired to fulfill, the same redaction that edited Žena u
borbi in February 1946 started to publish Our Fashion (Naša moda). In January 1958 the
Union of Women’s Societies of Croatia (Savez ženskih društava Hrvatske, SŽDH), the
successor to the AFŽH, renamed Žena u borbi as Woman (Žena), added the subheading
Magazine for Family and Household (List za porodicu i doma instvo) and changed the
concept of the journal.
It is commonly accepted in the contemporary literature that in the postwar Yugoslavia
female partisan became the symbol of legitimacy of the communist regime and the prominent
icon in the emerging collective memory. 175 In this chapter I analyze the content of Žena u
borbi published from June 1943, when the AFŽH took the journal under its supervision, until
September 1953, when the AFŽ of Yugoslavia decided to abolish the organization and its
republic branches. I discuss the topics that dominated in the journal in order to expose the
AFŽH’s attitude toward the Yugoslav female partisan and the emerging collective memory.
Wartime editions focused on armed struggles with the emphasis on the successes of the
partisan army, women in the homefront, women partisans and the importance of education,
and the postwar editions stressed the reconstruction of the country and the role of female
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shock-workers in it as well as the People’s Liberation Struggle which became an unavoidable
and frequently featured topic. Alongside featured topics, I will briefly address the topics
editorial board avoided, wartime collaboration, enemy propaganda and the political prisons on
Goli otok and Sveti Grgur. Furthermore, I demonstrate the ways in which the narratives in the
journal evolved, with special emphasis, in the postwar period, on the narratives about the
memory of women participating in the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB) in general and
175
See more in: Batini , “Gender, Revolution, and War,” 281-343; Vesna Drapac, “Women, Resistance
and the Politics of Daily Life in Hitler’s Europe: The Case of Yugoslavia in a Comparative Perspective,”
Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European women’s and Gender
History 3 (2009): 55-78; Jancar-Webster, “Yugoslavia: War of Resistance,” 85-105.
60
�women partisans in particular. In the last section I focus on the extent to which the narratives
about the women partisans were limited, and provide reasons for the imposed restrictions.
3.1 Official Narrative about the People’s Liberation Struggle
The People’s Liberation Struggle in the territory of Yugoslavia evolved in the postwar
period into the so-called Partisan myth that became the foundational legitimizing strategy of
the communist leadership which constitutes an important step for every new regime in order
to legitimize their control and create foundation to foster trust and support for the new
government. The selfless struggle of all the peoples of Yugoslavia, the enormous loss of life
and the innumerable personal sacrifices made in support of the resistance of the cruel enemy,
Germans and Italians, and their collaborators was central to the postwar narrative and
collective memory of the wartime efforts of Yugoslav citizens. Holm Sundhaussen notes: “A
central element of the legitimization of the state and the regime was the revival of the
sacrifices endured for victory.” Moreover, “the dead were the proof of the right to live.” 176 In
other words, not only the participation in war effort but the willingness to sacrifice one’s life
or even lives of their children proved the moral worth of the partisan struggle.177
While writing about the commemorative practices that developed in connection to the
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Partisan myth, Jelena Batini describes partizanka as one of the most prominent icons of
World War II whose role in war was celebrated through commemoration services and
holidays established by state leaders and remembered through memorial sites. Furthermore,
the most outstanding among partizanke were honored by naming, for instance, streets and
176
Holm Sundhaussen, “Jugoslavija i njezine države nasljednice. Konstrukcija, destrukcija i nova
konstrukcija ‘sje anja’ i mitova,” in Kultura pam enja i historija, ed. Maja Brklja i Sanja Prlenda (Zagreb:
Golden marketing-Tehni ka knjiga, 2006), 247.
177
Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, “Epilogue: Half-Hidden From History,” in Soviet
Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 245. Interestingly, in
1947 Stalin decided to abolish the celebration of the Victory Day, public holiday that glorified the victory over
Germans. Roger D. Markwich and Euridice Charon explain that the Soviet Union experienced urgent need for
heroes of labor in order to reconstruct the devastated country. Therefore, neither male nor female heroes of war
were present in the Soviet collective memory until Khruschev's “thaw” when many veterans started publishing
their memories and reinstitution of the Victory Day as a public holiday under Brezhnev.
61
�schools after them. Less known and anonymous women partisans were immortalized in
partisan songs and literature.178 Moreover, a nameless girl in the photo entitled A Girl From
Kozara (Kozar anka) gave her face to the Yugoslav woman partisan (see appendix 1). The
photograph was taken in 1943, after the Fourth Enemy Offensive, and the author, GeorgijeŽorž Skrigin, added the caption: “As a young woman she was captured during the First
Enemy Offensive. She succeeded in escaping-even from Germany-and reached Kozara (NW
Bosnia) where she became a fighter of the Kozara forces.” 179 In the postwar period this
photograph was reproduced in war monographs, school readers and magazines as well as in
posters for labor actions and commemoration parades. As Natascha Vitorelli notices, girl’s
smiling face that seems to exude self-confidence and belief in the upcoming victory coupled
with the fact that she was a volunteer in the People’s Liberation Army “makes the People’s
Liberation Struggle the cause of the whole nation.” 180 Consequently, partizanka makes the
indisputable source of legitimacy for the communist authorities.
The Federal Association of Veterans of the National Liberation War of Yugoslavia was
tasked with the preservation of the memory of partisans in general. The Antifascist Front of
Women and its successors were the official guardians of the memory of female partisans, and
they had the duty to revise narratives related to partizanke and interpret them in compliance
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with Party ideology. Under the guardianship of these women’s organizations the official
178
Batini , “Gender, Revolution, and War,” 298.
As cited in: Natascha Vittorelli, “With or Without Gun. Staging Female Partisans in Socialist
Yugoslavia” in Partisans in Yugoslavia: Literature, Film and Visual Culture, ed. Miranda Jakiša and Nikica
Gili (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 127. Vittorelli adds that the author of the photograph did not know the
girl (Milja Marin) before the event. Thus, in his description of the photograph he acknowledged the courage of
women partisans as he imagined them. Furthermore, the girl on the photo was in reality a nurse who posed with
a borrowed rifle. Kozar anka, the embodiment of the female partisan, proved to be only a product of Skrigin’s
imagination.
180
Ibid, 126-127.
179
62
�image of women partisans became “a figure of memory” whose picture in the state narrative
remained essentially unchanged throughout the communist period.181
However, next sections will show how the AFŽH officials used different aspects of the
memory of partizanke to coordinate their contributions with the prevailing traditional
worldviews. According to Renata Jambreši Kirin, “Yugoslav ideologues did not practice a
radical break with the cultural forms of the pre-revolutionary society based on the idea of
gender difference and compatibility.” 182 Thus, traditional values that implied the existence of
a “woman’s place” in society continued to exist uninterrupted long after high-ranking Party
officials and distinguished AFŽ members proclaimed the institution of gender equality. 183
These circumstances strongly influenced the image of partizanka, which is clearly visible in
the publishing policies of the editorial board of Žena u borbi, the choice of published topics
and their presentation to the readership. Thus, the image of partizanka was in the official
women’s press affected by the traditional worldviews that affirmed the patriarchal order and
tended toward the representation of patriotic motherhood.
Furthermore, the general political situation in Yugoslavia, especially the Cominform
Resolution and ensuing Tito-Stalin split, have figured significantly in the publishing policy of
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the editorial board of Žena u borbi. Namely, the denouncements against the leadership of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Fred Warner Neal reports, caused psychosomatic illnesses
among the most prominent members of the Party and psychological difficulties with coping
with the charges among the rank and file. 184 Insecurity of the leadership in the loyalty of the
Party membership reinforced the activities of the secret police and initiated the purges that
181
Batini , “Gender, Revolution, and War,” 297.
Jambreši Kirin, Dom i svijet, 20.
183
Mitrovi , Ratno putovanje, 150. For instance, already in The First Yugoslav Conference of the AFŽ
in November 1942, Mitra Mitrovi said: “Indeed, I almost forgot the equality of women. This is because it
already looks simple. Equality came as along the way, it is obtained, we already live in it (…)”
184
Fred Warner Neal, Titoism in Action, The Reforms After 1948 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1958), 4-5.
182
63
�worsened the situation even more. Thus, individuals who had the possibility, like the
journalists and editors of Žena u borbi, used the journal to publicly disclose their trust in the
KPJ and its policies. Consequently, current events were strongly embedded in the narratives
about the past and influenced the portrayal of the war and, hence, women who served in the
army.
3.2 Wartime Publishing Policy of Žena u borbi
Following Lenin’s instructions on the most favorable methods of agitation and propaganda
for the process of the mobilization of revolutionary consciousness of the masses, throughout
World War II and thereafter, the KPJ considered the printed press as the most important
means of conveying information. Through the printed media, the Party leadership believed
they could inform a broad public audience about their struggle, aims and achievements. As
Renata Jambreši Kirin and Reana Senjkovi notice, the printed press was “the most popular,
the most common and the most appropriate way for training the masses.” 185 Furthermore,
although the leadership of the KPJ did not hesitate to apply coercive methods to achieve the
objectives of creating a communist state, they were firmly convinced that “communism could
only be built with the voluntary cooperation and participation of the vast majority of the
population.”186 In order to maximize support for the emerging system of government, Carol S.
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Lilly observes, “persuasion was a vital component of the Party’s activities.” 187 Finally,
because women were attributed with gender specific backwardness related to their social
status in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, female members of the Party and the AFŽ launched
several journals for women in different parts of Croatia. Intertwined with the tasks of
informing women about the NOB and propagating their participation in it, the women’s press
185
Renata Jambreši Kirin and Reana Senjkovi , “Puno puta bi Vas bili izbacili kroz vrata, biste bila
išla kroz prozor nutra: preispisivanje povijesti žena u Drugom svjetskom ratu,” Narodna umjetnost 42, vol. 2
(2005): 111.
186
Lilly, Power and Persuasion, 2.
187
Ibid.
64
�had the additional duty of educating its audience by strongly emphasizing the role of women
in the process of building the new socialist state.
During the war, different district committees of the AFŽ published local women’s journals
when they were under the control of the KPJ and ceased such activity when the partisans were
driven away by the Germans, Italians or Ustashas. On the other hand, when AFŽH started to
publish Žena u borbi, the journal was issued on a regular basis, almost every month, and was
distributed throughout the occupied and liberated territories of Croatia. Following the end of
World War II in Yugoslavia, most wartime women’s journals ended publication and Žena u
borbi became the official women’s magazine of the AFŽH and the long-term, stable and
consistent source of information for readers.
For the duration of the war, the editorial board of the Žena u borbi strongly focused on
armed struggles and the political developments in Yugoslavia and abroad. The front cover and
the leading article of the first issue set the tone for wartime editions of the journal. The front
cover featured a woman in a tattered dress with her hair flying in the wind. In her left hand the
woman was holding a toddler, and in her right hand, a rifle (see appendix 2). Vladimir
Bakari , who, at that time, was a political commissar of the main staff of the People’s
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Liberation Army for Croatia, wrote the leading article. He began by paying tribute to the
courageous struggle of the people of Yugoslavia against the fascist enemy, and then moved on
to the women’s merits. 188 Yugoslav woman, he wrote, “devotedly decided to sacrifice for the
people’s liberation-if necessary-herself and her children, her dear and beloved ones.” 189
Bakari continued to clarify the nature of women’s sacrifices describing the tasks they carried
out in the homefront and on the front and concluded by stating, “in the construction of our
better and happier future” the role of women “will have to be taken into account as she will be
188
Vladimir Bakari , “Borba,” Žena u borbi 1 (June 1943), 1.
Ibid, “požrtvovno odlu ila da za narodno oslobo enje žrtvuje-ako treba-i sebe i djecu svoju, svoje
mile i drage.”
189
65
�the participant in that improvement of standard to the same extent she is now participant in
our joint struggle.” 190 Women's wartime efforts were the focus of the first edition, with
women partisans appearing both on the cover design as well as in the article written by
Bakari . The rifle in the woman’s hand in the cover illustration salutes women’s
advancements into traditionally male territory, i.e. the military. On the other hand, her attire, a
dress instead of pants and boots, and a baby in her left hand demonstrate traditional concepts
of women's role as both feminine and maternal. Similarly, Bakari interpreted women’s
support of the partisan army as women’s investment into their future improvement. He,
therefore, emphasized the importance and the diversity of women’s tasks in the supportive
roles on the homefront. Surprisingly, he praised only the memory of partizanke, although he
wrote the article in the middle of the war.
In the remaining articles of the first issue and in articles in future editions, the editorial
board elaborated the types of contributions they considered more useful in the future
construction of the socialist state with emphasis on topics that sought to educate women to
become productive citizens of a socialist country. Thus, they dedicated a significant number
of pages of every issue to the diverse examples of women’s successes working in the
homefront, for instance, caring for orphans who lost their parents in wartime atrocities or to
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their work as nurses. They also emphasized the accomplishment of literacy courses. In
connection to the success of women in education, journal editors published numerous articles
that focused on political content as an extension of “political education” courses AFŽ
organized throughout liberated territories. Some articles simply explained the role and the
importance of certain political bodies, particularly with regard to women’s interests, some
articles reproduced speeches by the communist leaders, while other articles described political
events. For example, in the first edition of the journal Anka Berus authored an article that
190
Bakari , “Borba,” 1. “U izgradnji naše bolje i sretnije budu nosti trebat e se to uzeti u obzir i ona e
biti sudionikom tog boljitka u istoj mjeri kako je sada sudionikom naše zajedni ke borbe.”
66
�explained the role and the tasks of the AFŽ within the framework of the People’s Liberation
Struggle, but also the importance of the organization for women’s emancipation.191 Following
the First Conference of the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia, the editorial board
published Marija Krea
’s report about the event, the Resolution adopted at the conference
and the excerpts of Vladimir Bakari ’s speech held at the conference.192
Editors were mindful of the prewar success of the HSS and its organization Peasant
Concord in work with peasant communities throughout Croatia, and in several editions
devoted space for articles about former HSS leader Stjepan Radi , whom they seemingly held
in high esteem, and also about the switch of many HSS members to the People’s Front (NF)
and the KPJ over the course of war, which was intended to demonstrate the similarity of this
political options and generate increased peasant support for the Communist Party. 193 They
also published several articles about the final prewar HSS leader, Vladko Ma ek, whose
political decisions they severely criticized. They resented the fact that, despite refusing the
German invitation to head the puppet government, he urged the people of Croatia to
obedience toward the Ustasha authorities. Furthermore, Bosiljka-Beba Kraja
reports that he
spoke against the women’s right to vote and argued in favor of restricting women to the
private sphere.194 Finally, they often wrote about the achievements of the U.S.S.R. and the
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Red Army that was assisting the partisan army in their struggle against the fascist forces and
Soviet women whom editors presented as a model Yugoslav women should aspire to emulate.
While journal editors fervently advocated the social and political equality of men and
women, traditional conservative values shaped the underlying attitudes present in many
191
Anka Berus, “Za u vrš enje organizacije,” Žena u borbi 1 (June 1943), 6-7.
Marija Krea , “Prva konferencija Antifašisti ke fronte žena Hrvatske,” Žena u borbi 2 (July 1943),
1-4; -, Rezolucija Prve konferencija Antifašisti ke fronte žena hrvatske,” Žena u borbi 2 (July 1943), 18-20;
Vladimir Bakari , “Naša vojska nije kao druge-Ona je i vojska žena,” Žena u borbi 2 (July 1943), 5-6.
193
For instance, see: Nada Sremec, “Drugaricama u okupiranoj Hrvatskoj,” Žena u borbi 5-6 (OctoberNovember 1943), 5-6.
194
Bosiljka-Beba Kraja , “Od obmane do izdaje,” Žena u borbi 7 (March 1944), 5-6.
192
67
�articles. Therefore, only a small number of articles spoke specifically about the actions of
women partisans. One such article published in April 1944 by an anonymous author, titled
“Three Bloody Years,” described the development of the People’s Liberation Army (NOV)
and the simultaneous emergence of the People’s Liberation Struggle. Towards the end of the
article the author states:
In these three years of brutal war, our women heroically, shoulder to shoulder with the
comrades, carried the burden of the war on their backs. These three years have
spawned a new type of woman-a woman fighter. We are proud of the Serbian and
Montenegrin women who, immediately after the arrival of the occupier, rebelled
together with their comrades. We are proud of the unprecedented heroism of the
women of Lika, Kordun, Banija, Dalmatia, Slavonia and other parts of our country.
We greet women of Slovenia who, with their comrades, fight heroically against the
cruel invader.195
Unfortunately, the author did not include names of women partisans, their deeds or
contributions, which are scarce in wartime editions.
Captain Desa Miljenovi wrote one of the few articles about women in military units, “The
Women Heroes.” Miljenovi provided several examples of women who joined the NOB in
1941 and then moved into the partisan ranks as soon as the KPJ granted permission for
women to mobilize. Interestingly, she felt compelled to clarify why women felt such a need to
participate in fighting during the war. She wrote that women fight so “that [their] children
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have a happy youth, that they do not live in fear of the knife, that [their] family has a bright,
cheerful future.”196 The author concluded the article by stressing once more her belief that
what had been traditionally considered a woman’s natural inclination, that is, the wellbeing of
195
-, “Tri krvave godine,” Žena u borbi 8 (April 1944), 3. “U ove tri godine surovog rata naše žene su
herojski, rame uz rame sa drugovima, nosile breme rata na svojim le ima. Te tri godine izbacile su novi tip žene
– ženu borca. Ponosni smo na srpske i crnogorske žene koje su se odmah po dolasku okupatora zajedno sa
svojim drugovima digle na ustanak. Ponosni smo besprimjernim junaštvom žena Like, Korduna, Banije,
Dalmacije, Slavonije i ostalih dijelova naše zemlje. Pozdravljamo žene Slovenije koje se herojski bore sa svojim
drugovima portiv okrutnog zavojeva a.“
196
Desa Miljenovi , “Žene junakinje,” Žena u borbi 17-18 (June-July 1945), 10. Da joj djeca imaju
lijepu mladost, da ne strepe od noža, da sva njezina porodica ima svjetlu, vedru budu nost.
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�her offspring and her family in general, was also the motivation for women to join the partisan
army as fighters.
The notion that women had a natural affinity for tasks related to the care for others was
highlighted in other articles as well. Dr. Grujica Živkovi , a major in the NOV, wrote an
article, “Fight for the Public Health-Important Women’s Task,” where this traditional
worldview was most obvious. Živkovi claims that “women can and must contribute in a
particularly large proportion to the resolution of the health issues.” 197 Živkovi explicates her
claim by adding that men who are capable have joined the NOV and perform duties that
correspond to their strength and competence. Moreover, because of their physical
characteristics, Živkovi argues, men cannot be as devoted medical personnel as women.
Women, because they are not as strong as men, but are more sensible than men, are perfect
for the various tasks medical personnel perform, especially nurses. 198 Finally, Živkovi
touches on the issue of equality between men and women in the army claiming that women
who join the partisans as nurses are, despite the supposedly physically less demanding tasks,
equal in status to their soldier comrades. 199
Ivan Šibl, a partisan and a political commissar of several brigades in Slavonia during the
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war, expressed in his memoir the concern and confusion that women who served in the NOV
as partizanke raised. Namely, Šibl worried that partizanke could become rough like men and
that their participation in armed conflict could “deprive [them] of the wonderful properties
that make a woman a woman and that we want to feel from the women we love.”200 Similarly,
in 1945 the newsletter Woman soldier published by the Main Committee of the AFŽH
197
Grujica Živkovi , “Borba za narodno zdravlje-važan zadatak žena,“ Žena u borbi 8 (April 1944), 16.
Naro ito velik udio u rješavanju zdravstvenih pitanja mogu i treba da doprinesu žene.
198
Ibid.
199
Ibid,“ 17.
200
Ivan Šibl, Partizanski dnevnik (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1960), 271. “(…) lišiti divnih svojstava koja ženu
ine ženom i koja želimo osjetiti kod žena koje volimo.“
69
�contained a letter written by the political commissar of the Nineteenth partisan division in
which the author praises the stamina and bravery of women soldiers. He continues his report
by writing that women soldiers are not just fighting in battles, but also voluntarily wash and
mend clothes and oversee the hygiene of soldiers in the division. Thereby partizanke are also
mothers and sisters to the soldiers and “in their tender concerns preserved all the traits of
women.”201
Due to the prevalence of traditional definitions of women’s role within society, the journal
featured articles more often that highlighted the actions of partisan mothers and widows rather
than texts about the partizanke, who brought traditional concepts about femininity into
question. Women who the AFŽ organized did not raise such doubts because they often
contributed to the war effort in a supportive capacity by performing traditional women's tasks
such as cooking for the army, mending soldiers' clothes, caring for the war orphans and
teaching in the partisan schools, while their children served in the army. Thus, these women
became the most prominent figures in stories about wartime sacrifices offered by Yugoslav
women for the better future of the country.
In contrast to articles focusing on women partisans, texts that emphasized the importance
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of education for all Yugoslav women and its significance to both the war effort and the future
of the country, were published more regularly with each edition featuring at least one article,
but often several such articles on the topic. In September 1944 Žena u borbi featured the
article “Education is the Foundation of Any Progress” by Professor Anica Rakar. In the article
Prof. Rakar asserts that during the NOB it became usual to have women participating in the
struggle as members of the People’s Liberation Councils (NOOs) and fighters in the NOV.
201
“Dopis politi kog komesara XIX. divizije Glavnom odboru AFŽ Hrvatske o ženi vojniku” (“A
Letter by the Political Commissar of the Nineteenth Partisan Division to the Main Committee of the AFŽH about
the Female Soldier”), in Žene Hrvatske vol. 2, 136. “(…) i u svojoj nježnoj zabrinutosti o uvala je sve osebine
žene.”
70
�Rakar then expresses the conviction that this trend will continue until the aftermath of the war
because “not only men but also women work for the progress and raising of people, and with
their harmonious work we will achieve the progress of the entire people.” 202 In order to
achieve the goal, the proper education of women is of paramount importance and “we cannot
even think not to create all the opportunities for women to really gain the necessary
education.” 203
In the article “New Tasks,” Anka Berus expressed similar thoughts, but taking them one
step further. Not only should women be allowed to participate in the construction of the new
socialist community, they are obliged to do so because the KPJ trusted them with the right of
social and political equality. 204 Furthermore, Berus asserts, antifascist women who actively
participated in the NOB should use their “resourcefulness and vigor, unbreakable energy and
thrilling enthusiasm (…) to fulfill all the tasks placed in front of our people’s community, as
well as the obligations to maintain the main achievements of the struggle because it is a
prerequisite for building a happier future.”205 In this process, the education women obtained
was the most valuable asset for their future success. Of course, Berus observes, a happier
future could only be reached through the fulfillment of various tasks on the construction of the
war-ravaged country and through the preservation of the memory of wartime atrocities in
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order to appreciate the present possibilities that are attainable only within the framework of
202
Anica Rakar, “Prosvjeta je temelj svakog napretka,” Žena u borbi 10 (September 1944), 12. “(…) da
za napredak i podizanje naroda ne radi samo muškarac nego i žena i da emo njihovim skladnim radom posti i
napredak cijelog naroda.“
203
Ibid. “I ne smijemo ni pomisliti da ženi ne stvorimo sve mogu nosti da zaista stekne potrebno
obrazovanje.“
204
Anka Berus, “Novi zadaci,” Žena u borbi 16-17 (June-July 1945), 7.
205
Ibid, “(…) snalažljivost i neumornost, nesalomljivu energiju oduševljavaju i elan (...) za ispunjenje
svih zadataka koji se postavljaju pred našu narodnu zajednicu, kao i obaveze uvanja osnovnih tekovina borbe
jer je to preduslov za izgradnju sretnije budu nosti.“
71
�the Democratic Federative Yugoslavia, that is, under the leadership of the KPJ and
mentorship of the AFŽ.206
Besides favoring some topics, the editorial board hesitated and even avoided to address
some issues like collaboration and enemy propaganda. The circular that Central Committee of
Communist Party of Croatia (CK KPH) issued with the aim of establishing AFŽH clearly
states that this organization was required to “lead the antifascist propaganda, prevent women
and female youth to become fascists, to destroy existing fascist organizations and prevent the
formation of the new ones.” 207 This circular indicates women had the possibility to join the
Female Lineage of Ustasha Movement (Ženska loza ustaškog pokreta), the only official
women’s organization in the Independent State of Croatia. Ante Paveli , leader of the
Ustasha, established it in November 1941 encouraging Croatian women to join the
organization in order to become “mother[s] (…) of a great national family.” 208 However, in
Žena u borbi there is not a single article dealing with the Female Lineage of Ustasha
Movement or its membership.209
Furthermore, editorial board approached the topic of the enemy propaganda with extra
caution. 210 The articles addressing this issue are very scarce and written by individuals who
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represented a moral authority. For instance, in the article “Knighthood, Sisterhood and the
Idealism of People’s Fighting Woman,” Msgr. Dr. Svetozar Rittig, priest in the parish of Saint
206
Berus, “Novi zadaci,” 7.
“Iz okružnice broj 4. CK KPH od 6. prosinca 1941. O organizaciji i zadacima Antifašisti kog fronta
žena,” in Žene Hrvatske vol. 1, 57. “Da vodi antifašisti ku propagandu, da spre ava fašiziranje žena i ženske
omladine, da uništava postoje e fašisti ke organizacije i spre ava stvaranje novih.”
208
Jambreši Kirin and Senjkovi , “Puno puta bi vas bili izbacili kroz vrata,” 114.
209
Similarly, in the postwar period, there are no articles featuring possible women supporters of the
Cominform or about the penitentiary for the female political offenders on the island of Sveti Grgur.
210
About the nature of Italian propaganda against woman partisans see: Gloria Nemec, “Un altro essere,
che non è un animale, vive nei boschi. Percezione del partigianato e memoria collettiva in una comunità
contadina dell’ Istria interna,” in Donne guerra politica: esperienze e memorie della Resistenza, ed. Dianella
Gagliani et al. (Bologna: Clueb, 2000), 337-350. About the Ustasha anti-propaganda see: Rory Yeomans,
Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the
Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945, The Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (October 2005):
725-726.
207
72
�Marko in Zagreb from 1917 until 1941 and a supporter of the People’s Liberation Movement
(NOP) from its inception, wrote that “the image of a woman in combat in great liberation
movement of the Yugoslav peoples came out distorted and often smirking.” 211 Msgr. Dr.
Rittig did not elaborate further on “the vile suspicions of the opponents,” but reassured the
readership in the modesty, chastity and patriotism of partizanke comparing their activities
with the examples of biblical story about Judith and Holofernes and Jeanne d’Arc, French
martyr and saint.212
3.3 Postwar Development of War Imagery in Žena u borbi
The immediate postwar period was marked by the processes of the consolidation of power
of the KPJ and the simultaneous implementation of the control over all citizens of Yugoslavia.
The KPJ resorted to all means of agitation and propaganda in order to successfully complete
their seizure of power, such as “museums of the revolution,” monuments and memorials in
public spaces, commemoration services, movies, comics, journals, memoirs, and, of course,
the Party press. 213 Holm Sundhaussen argues the KPJ leadership attempted to exploit the
political turmoil, traumatic experiences of the people as well as the death toll of World War II
in order to construct a founding myth and a homogeneous tradition common to all citizens of
the state. Although the Party acknowledged ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural
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differences, during the first two decades of Yugoslavia’s existence it strongly emphasized
unity based primarily on the shared experiences of the People’s Liberation Struggle.214 The
construction of a common political and cultural identity resulted in the creation of the shared
211
Msgr. Dr. Svetozar Rittig, “Viteštvo, posestrimstvo i idealizam narodne borbene žene,” Žena u borbi
12-13 (December 1944-January 1945), 4. “(…) je slika borbene žene u velikom oslobodila kom pokretu
jugoslavenskih naroda izišla iskrivljena i esto iscerena.”
212
Ibid.
213
Renata Jambreši Kirin, Dom i svijet: O ženskoj kulturi pam enja (Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije,
2008), 8.
214
Sundhaussen, “Jugoslavija i njezine države nasljednice,“ 248, 250.
73
�collective memory which provides trust and orientation. 215 In the reality of postwar
Yugoslavia, the social obligation to the group that shared a common memory entailed the
obligation of forgetting or, at least, modifying personal memory to the official version. The
Party leadership criminalized the expression of competing memories that were not otherwise
suppressed216 and over the course of 1945 introduced the Law on Press (Zakon o štampi),
which legalized censorship in the country.217
The end of the war influenced the organization and operation of the AFŽ of Yugoslavia as
well as Croatia. Both Lydia Sklevicky and Renata Jambreši -Kirin agree that the end of
World War II brought an even stronger concentration by the AFŽH on social work, which
was carried out in the interest of the renovation and reconstruction of socialist Yugoslavia.218
The journal Žena u borbi reflects changes happening within the state and in the AFŽH. Thus,
the NOB remained a recurring topic in journal articles and “women’s sacrifices in the defense
of their own homes, successes in organizing the background and their engagement in the front
were not forgotten, but absorbed into the grand narrative of heroic victory of the united people
under the leadership of its vanguard-the Communist Party and Josip Broz Tito.”219
In the immediate postwar period Žena u borbi exuded enthusiasm for the wartime victory
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and transformed it through articles into constant invitations for further voluntary work in the
reconstruction of the country. However, authors relied upon the same as the language used
during the war. In July 1947 Žena u borbi featured the article “We are not Giving up the
Fight” signed by the Main Board (Glavni odbor, GO) of the AFŽH. The article discussed the
option for changing the name of the journal because, since the conclusion of the war, some of
readers no longer considered “woman in combat” an appropriate name for the journal.
215
Assman, “Kultura sje anja,” 64-65.
Sundhaussen, “Jugoslavija i njezine države nasljednice,” 246.
217
Duda, “Uhodavanje socijalizma,” 16.
218
Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi, 122; Jambreši Kirin, “Žene u formativnom socijalizmu,” 185.
219
Jambreši Kirin, Dom i svijet, 30.
216
74
�However, the members of the main board and several branches argued in favor of the name
because “[i]t is not yet time to give up the fight because the fight is not completed.” 220
Although the war is over, the author resumes, the realization of the Five-Year Plan requires
continuation of the fight because “without the struggle we will not achieve the Five-Year
Plan, and without that there is no happy future for us or our children.”221 In the initial postwar
years “the fight” and “fighter” remained repeated key words in articles devoted to politics and
especially economics published in Žena u borbi. In the postwar period, the term fight and
related concepts were used to channel enthusiasm over the victory in the war and the hope for
a bright future into economically beneficial activities. Carol S. Lily argues that in Yugoslavia
the armed struggle did not end in May 1945, but was only transferred from partisan units into
workers’ brigades.222
Under the described circumstances, the woman fighter was no longer deemed as a woman
of the new time. In the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, the new
woman was the female shock-worker. Workers were the foundation of the new socialist
society in Yugoslavia and the tradition of competition in the workplace and the image of the
shock-worker that originated in the U.S.S.R. were considered by the communist leadership a
prerequisite for the socialist transformation of Yugoslavia and defined as a legal obligation of
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every worker. 223 Thus, instead of the partizanke, the front covers of the journal featured
women such as Josipa Planinc, a resident of Zagreb who won a golden badge for voluntary
work on the construction project of the new highway “of brotherhood and unity,” 224 and
220
GO AFŽ, “Mi se borbe ne odri emo,” Žena u borbi 41 (July 1947), 16-17.
Ibid, 17.
222
Lilly, Power and Persuasion, 75, 87.
223
Tomislav Ani , “Junakinje i junaci rada,” in Refleksije vremena (1945.-1955.), ed. Jasmina Bavoljak
(Zagreb: Galerija Klovi evi dvori, 2012), 41.
224
Žena u borbi 42 (August 1947), front cover.
221
75
�Danica Kosijer, the tractor driver and one of the champions “in the fight for high labor
productivity.”225
Virtually every issue of the journal brought new information about the successes of women
in the workplace, particularly in factories, but also in peasant cooperatives and, to a lesser
extent, in areas such as education and health care. Following the end of the war, the editorial
board devoted a significant portion of space in every issue to articles detailing the
reconstruction of the country, and praising women’s participation in these projects as well as
the cooperation and assistance women provided in those projects and to people affected by
war. Žena u borbi also featured numerous articles devoted to women who participated in the
construction of socialism in Yugoslavia and hailed their achievements. Journalists of Žena u
borbi drew inspiration from the Soviet example, which they also proposed as guidance for the
Yugoslav readership. Given that the first Yugoslav Five-Year Plan was adopted in the spring
of 1947, female workers came to the focus of the journalistic attention during that year in the
Soviet Union as well as in Yugoslavia. For instance, in August 1947 Žena u borbi featured the
article “Great Strength” which described a peasant woman, Hana Denisovna, who, despite her
old age, became the Soviet Hero of Socialist Labor. 226 In November of the same year the
journal featured a similar article about the agricultural successes of Paša Angelina, the first
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tractor operator in Donetsk and a convinced supporter of the kolkhoz system, 227 and another
article about the accomplishments of female Soviet factory workers whose experience was
presented as precious help to Yugoslav women factory employees who were just beginning
work on the first Five-Year Plan. 228
225
Žena u borbi 12 (December 1949), front cover. “U borbi za visoku produktivnost rada.”
Evgenij Ratner, “Velika snaga,” Žena u borbi 42 (August 1947), 6-7.
227
Ada Stahova, “Traktoristkinja iz Donjeckog sela,” Žena u borbi 45 (November 1947), 19-20.
228
Nada Sremec, “Sovjetske žene su nam pokazale put,” Žena u borbi 45 (November 1947), 11-12.
226
76
�Following the Tito-Stalin Split, Soviet women, their successes in the collective farms or
factories notwithstanding, no longer appeared on the pages of Žena u borbi. For the next four
years, until the introduction of self-management socialism and the consequent diminishment
of the role of the shock-worker in the Yugoslav economy, the work and accomplishments of
the Yugoslav women factory shock-workers and of peasant women in agricultural
cooperatives were the most publicized topics. In comparison between the March issues of
Žena u borbi from the first postwar issue in 1946 until March 1953 there is a marked
transformation in ideological rhetoric. In honor of International Women's Day, first
established in 1911 by Klara Zetkin, a renowned German Marxist and women's rights activist,
the editors of Žena u borbi published numerous articles dedicated to the accomplishments of
prominent Yugoslav women in celebration of the date. The development of the economic and
political situation in Croatia and Yugoslavia is evident in these articles.
In March of 1947, one month before the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan, the article
“Women-Representatives of the People,” which featured particularly successful women,
presented to the readers information about women who performed various duties within the
People’s government of Croatia. This article was followed up by an interview with Anka
Berus, who was Minister of Finance at the time. The following year, instead of politicians, the
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focus of interest was on the accomplishments of women scientists. The anonymous author of
the article “Work Efforts of Women in Science” stressed that the victory of the partisan army
had allowed women to participate in the efforts of the “working intelligence” to elevate
Yugoslavia to a higher economic and cultural level.229
As the Five-Year Plan gathered pace, so did the number of successful industrial workers
and peasants in agricultural cooperatives represented on the pages of Žena u borbi. At the
229
-, “Radni napori žena na polju nauke,“ Žena u borbi 3 (March 1948), 8.
77
�height of the conflict among the Yugoslav leadership and the Cominform, between 1949 and
1951, the trend of highlighting well-educated and, thus, outstanding women who worked in
fields that had been previously inaccessible to them was altered. In this period the March
issues were saturated with articles about women who excelled in various redevelopment
projects. For example, in March 1949, when it became clear that international relations
between Yugoslavia and Eastern Block countries were irreparably damaged and that the
country was in a precarious economic situation, the feature article of Žena u borbi, “We are
Building Socialism,” discussed the achievements of women in the implementation of the first
Five-Year Plan. Similar articles were published over the next two years.
Through these articles two things became clear. First, this period marked the initial stage
of Party rule. Party leadership carried out a series of social purges deemed necessary to
eliminate potential political threats and established “correctional facilities” for political
offenders on Goli otok. Thus, journal articles reflected concepts of proper political and social
behavior and provided concrete examples that time and again substantiated the ideologically
correct attitude women workers should adopt. For example, in a March 1950 article, “Women
of Croatia greet March 8 with the Series of Major Successes in Building Socialism,” Soka
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Kraja
wrote:
March eight, international fighting women’s day, we celebrate again this year in the
sign of heavy exertions and immense victories of the working people in the execution
of the Five-Year Plan. (…) all slanders, political and economic pressures of the CC of
the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the countries and parties of
Cominform have shattered on the steel unity of the working masses of our country
gathered around the Communist Party, and the CK KPJ headed by the comrade Tito.
In this situation our women have demonstrated their high level of political
consciousness and again on this occasion proved that the new socialist Yugoslavia is a
homeland they love above all else and that in the struggle for the construction of
socialism and in the struggle for the equal relations between the socialist countries
they will persevere until the end.230
230
Soka Kraja
, “Žene Hrvatske do ekuju 8. mart nizom krupnih uspjeha u socijalisti koj izgradnji,“
78
�The second point that journalists and editors of the journal considered important was, in
accordance with the promotion of the notion that women were as equally capable as men to
work, articles attempted to demonstrate that women were willing and able to meet the
economic needs of underdeveloped and devastated country. Therefore women’s
accomplishments, especially in industrial professions, were often emphasized. Women, such
as Sonja Erbežnik, a textile worker who was decorated several times as a shock-worker, were
represented multiple times over a short period in Žena u borbi articles as counterparts to
heroic male shock-workers such as Alija Sirotanovi , a miner who beat the world record in
the coal mining by topping Aleksei Stakhanov’s Soviet record. 231
In the eyes of the Yugoslav communist leadership the People’s Liberation Struggle was
always a desirable topic to write about and articles about successful women often contained
short stories related to their prewar and wartime life. For example, in the article “We are
Building Socialism” the anonymous author recounted five biographies of women who
experienced misery and poverty in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and then became involved in
the NOB. Since the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia they diligently worked on the
reconstruction of the country and the development of a socialist society. Through the five
biographies the author presented some of the common representations present in the official
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narrative of the Second World War on the territory of Yugoslavia. According to the author,
Matilda Papo, although Ustashas shot her husband and her son died serving in the partisan
army, she did not grieve over her losses but “in the partisans became a mother not to one, but
Žena u borbi 3 (March 1950), 4. “Osmi mart, me unarodni borbeni dan žena, proslavljamo i ove godine u znaku
teških napora i ogromnih pobjeda trudbenika naše zemlje u izvršenju Petogodišnjeg plana. (...) sve klevete,
politi ki i ekonomski pritisak CK SKP(b) i zemalja i partija informbiroa razbili su se o eli no jedinstvo radnih
masa naše zemlje okupljenih oko Komunisti ke partije i CK KPJ na elu sa drugom Titom. Naše žene u takvoj
situaciji pokazale su svoju visoku politi ku svijest i dokazale i ovom prilikom da je nova socijalisti ka
Jugoslavija takva domovina koju vole iznad svega i da e one u borbi za izgradnju socijalizma i u borbi za
ravnopravne odnose me u socijalisti kim zemljama istrajati do kraja.“
231
For example: Nataša Popovicki, “Sonja Erbežnik,” Žena u borbi 11 (November 1949), 12-13.
79
�to hundreds of children.”232 Anka Mati had been in France when the war began. There she
became the secretary of the communist emigration organization in order to help the partisans.
Following the end of the war she returned to Zagreb where, as a professor of psychology, she
taught her students “to become good experts and conscious builders of socialism like
herself.” 233 Furthermore, Marija Ivanec, although a mother of two young children and
pregnant with the third, decided to leave the territory under the control of the Ustasha in order
to give birth to her baby in a partisan hospital. Although her newborn soon died of frostbite,
she did not surrender. Instead, she joined the local AFŽ branch where she was the most active
member responsible for the initiation of reading groups and various educational courses.
Milica Karas, a machine gunner during the war, became a factory worker and, according to
the author, remained fighter in peacetime in the construction of socialism. Finally, the author
described the life of Cvita Gliši who during the war was active in many roles as “courier,
nurse, sister and mother of the fighters.”234 The author stressed the diversity of life stories of
women who participated in the NOB. Besides underpinning political and economic articles
with stories about the NOB, Žena u borbi featured full-lenth articles, short literary works and
poems about the Second World War in Yugoslavia and women’s participation in it. Despite
the ostensible variety of genres and the diversity of the personal narratives, the experiences of
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mothers constitute the dominant trope of women’s wartime narratives. The other is the
experiences of partizanke.235
For the first time after three years the leading article in the edition of March 1952 did not
feature women workers. Instead, the date was used as a pretext to recall the wartime
celebration of the International Women’s Day and expose the hardships women endured on
232
-, “Gradimo socijalizam,” Žena u borbi 3 (March 1949), 17. “je u partizanima postala majka ne
jednom ve stotinama djece.“
233
Ibid, “da postanu kao i ona dobri stru njaci i svijesni graditelji socijalizma.“
234
Ibid, 16. “kurir, bolni arka, sestra i majka boraca.”
235
Jambreši Kirin, Dom i svijet, 58.
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�the island of Bra (Dalmatia) in 1944 because they had written slogans on the walls of the
town on the occasion of March 8. 236 While the event of writing slogans describes the six
women as willing to destabilize the German authority in any way accessible to them and to
help their comrades, the article is set up in the way that the women’s activity seems to merely
provide the background to detailed narrative about their distress in captivity. The article about
Nada Dimi was similar in tone and reported how this eighteen-year-old SKOJ member
withstood several months of torture in Karlovac and Zagreb prisons without disclosing even
her name, 237 and in the article “The Memories About the Atrocities Committed by Italian
Fascists are Still Living” the author described the different ways in which women partisans
were tortured in Italian prisons. Unfortunately, the author did not include the names of all the
women mentioned or what they did in the NOB or how they survived the ordeal. 238
In the early 1950s the editorial board of Žena u borbi did not feature more articles about
women’s participation in the Second World War than in previous years, these kind of articles
were still habitually published to mark the establishment of the AFŽH or important dates such
as the Day of the Uprising of the People of Croatia and the Day of the Army, but the emphasis
of the articles changed. The ways in which women contributed to the war effort ceased to be
of the primary interest and instead, articles began to stress the level of suffering women
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experienced as a result of their involvement, both emotionally, due to the loss of family
members, or physically, while in enemy captivity. The editors seemingly resort to the
exploitation of women's personal wartime traumas in an effort to counter fading interest in
shock-workers and in an effort to muster support and vigilance against the external and
internal threat of political enemies of the state. For instance, they were attempting in part to
stir the emotions of the people who lived through the Italian occupation in order to attract
236
-, “8. mart,” Žena u borbi 3 (March 1952), 1.
-, “Nada Dimi ,” Žena u borbi 3 (March 1951), 12-13.
238
-, “Još su živa sje anja na zlodjela talijanskih fašista,” Žena u borbi 5 (May 1952), 2-3.
237
81
�their interest and support in resolving the issue of the Free Territory of Trieste (Slobodni
teritorij Trsta, STT)239 which gained importance during this period. Thus, the destinies of
women who were involved in the NOP and served in NOV were used to manipulate public
support for political needs.
In the postwar period only rarely did articles about women in war clearly reflect the past
experiences of the authors themselves. The clearest examples are the article “Our Work-Our
Response,” published in August 1948, and the article “July 27th-The Day of The Uprising of
the People in Croatia” published in June 1949. The former article appeared shortly after the
Yugoslav leadership publicly disclosed information about the disagreements between Stalin
and Tito and allegations surfaced against Yugoslavia and only days after the KPJ’s Fifth
Congress. “Our Work-Our Response” appeared in the journal immediately following a
presentation given by Tito on the first day of the Fifth Congress on the history and the
importance of the KPJ.
Although the author of “Our Work-Our Response” ostensibly wrote on behalf of all the
women of Zagreb who participated in and contributed to the struggle against the enemy, she
started the article by denominating exclusively the “progressive women” of Zagreb, a small
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group of the prewar members of the Party who had already before the war followed the
ideologically correct path led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Subsequently, she
continued, these women provided the foundation for the establishment of AFŽH in Zagreb at
the end of 1941 and “via their organization most actively cooperated in the NOP.” 240 Thus,
239
Under the auspices of the United Nations all the victorious powers of World War II met in February
1947 and signed the peace agreement with Italy. This treaty sanctioned the establishment of the STT as a
temporary solution to the territorial dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav government
administered the southern part of the STT, the so-called “Zone B,” and the northern part which included the city
of Trieste, known as “Zone A,” was under the military rule of the United States and Great Britain. After a series
of negotiations the London Treaty confirmed full integration of the “Zone B” into Yugoslavia and most of “Zone
A” into Italy.
240
GO AFŽH, “Naš rad-naš odgovor,” Žena u borbi 8 (August 1948), 12. “(…) preko svoje
organizacije najaktivnije sara ivale u NOP-u.”
82
�from her narrative she left out the women who were supporting the endeavors of the AFŽ
branch in Zagreb, but did not have contact with the “progressive women” before the war, or
who acted on their own. For example, Diana Budisavljevi kept a detailed journal and card
index that testify to her endeavor to save more than fifteen thousand children from the
Ustasha camps. Since she was a native Austrian who managed so much with the help of a
small number of nonaffiliated individuals, immediately after the war secret police
appropriated all the files related to her wartime activities and her success remained unknown
until the publication of her journal. 241
Finally, the author concluded the article “Our Work-Our Response” by expressing the love
that the women of Zagreb felt for the KPJ and for comrade Tito.242 This article was an instant
response to the Resolution of the Cominform and expressed the personal testimony of the
author who was, undoubtedly, a member of the Zagreb branch of the AFŽH, a participant or
organizer of numerous listed activities and an idealist who believed, like many others, in the
better future of Yugoslavia. At the same time, this article was not only an expression of belief
but of fear, too. Instead of writing, for example, about the first AFŽH district in Lika and the
work that women members conducted in the midst enemy occupation and terror, or about an
extraordinary individual like Diana Budisavljevi , the author choose to write specifically
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about the AFŽH in Zagreb. Thus, it is most likely she was a part of it during as well as after
the war. That way she attempted to prove that her activism, as well as activities of women
working with her, was always in compliance with the interests of the Party.
Similarly, Mitra Mitrovi wrote in her memoir, the biography of a comrade can be written
in four points starting with the time of acceptance to the Party, followed by a description of
the person’s activities in the Party and Party organizations and their demeanor in jail, if he or
241
See more in: Diana Budisavljevi , Dnevnik Diane Budisavljevi : 1941-1945. (Zagreb: Hrvatski
državni arhiv; Jasenovac: Javna ustanova Spomen-podru je, 2003).
242
GO AFŽH, “Naš rad-naš odgovor,” 13.
83
�she had been imprisoned. The final point refers to person’s life during the Second World War,
that is, whether the NOB makes a part of his or hers biography or not.243 After 1948, attitudes
toward the Resolution of the Cominform marked another point vital to the life of a Yugoslav
communist, and it was of utmost importance for the author of the article to keep their personal
resume unstained and, hence, their future secured.
The second very interesting article is “July 27th-The Day of The Uprising of the People in
Croatia” published in June of 1949. Unlike the previous article, which was written in the
name of the Main Council of the AFŽH of Zagreb by an anonymous author, this article was
authored by Milka Kufrin. She was a member of the Socialist Youth Union of Yugoslvia
(SKOJ) from 1938, and a member of KPJ from June 1941. In October 1941 she left Zagreb to
join the partisans in Kordun where she worked as a member of the SKOJ and participated in
armed combat. She was one of the first women to receive permission to go “to the woods”
and the very first who served as a commissar of the eta. She became famous for her audacity
throughout the partisan army as well as in the enemy ranks and was thus declared a national
hero in 1953.244
Kufrin began her article by criticizing the leadership of the U.S.S.R. and the cosignatories
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of the infamous Resolution who, she claims, “cannot erase the sufferings and the sacrifices
women made for the liberation of our country from the memories of our peoples or from the
memories of our women.”245 To illustrate women’s sufferings and sacrifice, Kufrin provided
several examples of women whom she considered the most deserving of recognition for their
contributions during the war, partizanke and nurses who served in the combat units.
243
244
Mitrovi , Ratno putovanje, 223-224.
-, Heroine Hrvatske odlikovane ordenom Narodnog heroja (Zagreb: www.deseti-korpus.com, 2011),
26.
245
Milka Kufrin, “27. jula-Dan narodnog ustanka u Hrvatskoj,” Žena u borbi 6 (June 1949), 11. “(…)ne
mogu izbrisati iz sjecanja nasih naroda, iz sjecanja nasih zena stradanja i zrtve koje su dali za oslobodjenje svoje
zemlje.”
84
�Comparing areas where she worked throughout the war with places where the women she
mentioned served, it is most likely that she personally knew the women she mentioned in the
article. Similar to the anonymous author of the former article, Kufrin writes about aspects of
the war she was most familiar with. However, in contrast to the first author’s focus on herself
and the relatively isolated group with which she associated, Kufrin highlights the actions of
other women who she felt deserved recognition and commendation rather than drawing
attention to her own actions. Furthermore, she wrote her article at the height of the conflict
between Tito and Stalin and related it to that context which restricts the breadth of collective
memory about women who served in the NOV. Nevertheless, she acknowledged them and
emphasized the significance of their actions even though the trend of articles in the journal
marginalized women’s wartime experiences in favor of detailing the success of workers and
peasants who were now considered more significant because they actively contributed to the
construction of socialism in the particular moment when many felt vulnerable and when
longstanding loyalty and past successes did not always count.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I strove to demonstrate the range of topics the editorial board of Žena u
borbi selected, at the same time differentiating between the publishing policy that originated
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under wartime circumstances from that shaped in the postwar period. Furthermore, I sought to
contextualize choices made by the journalists and editorial board by connecting them to the
wider political and social currents in Yugoslavia. In the last section of the chapter I introduced
the personal dimension of the wartime narratives presented through two contrasting articles
published in the journal.
After presenting the essentials of the official image of the women partisans, in the second
section I analyzed several wartime articles that give the impression of restraint of the AFŽH
85
�officials towards the partizanke. The number and choice of articles published about women
partisans suggests that the members of the AFŽH were trying to understand why they were
fighting in the NOV in the first place. The solution capitan Desa Miljenovi proposed in the
article “The Women Heroes” points to a prevalent fear of women who chose killing instead of
caring and an attempt to define them through the traditional concept of protective
motherhood.
In the third section, I presented the development of the editorial publishing policy
throughout the postwar period until 1953. While World War II and the NOB were recurring
topics present in many articles that were not primarily devoted to the war, the editorial board
preferred articles about current activities and achievements of women. Thus, they first
focused on women who participated in voluntary labor actions, and then, after the
implementation of the first Five-Year Plan in 1947 and even more after the Tito-Stalin split in
summer of 1948, they strongly emphasized the accomplishments of women in the agricultural
cooperatives and of industrial workers, especially the shock-workers.
Throughout the postwar period the editors implemented a practice of publishing articles
exclusively on the People’s Liberation Struggle only when commemorating important
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anniversaries. In the early 1950s, when publishing the articles about women in NOV, the
editorial board developed a new trend that tended to disregard women’s contributions to the
struggle and their achievements in order to emphasize their, especially physical suffering. The
article “The Memories About the Atrocities Committed by Italian Fascists are Still Living” is
an exemplification of such practice.
In sum, AFŽH officials who edited Žena u borbi stressed through their publishing policy
the importance of women who exercised political equality performing the duties and
contributing to the activities organized by the AFŽH. Therefore, the overall image of
86
�women’s contributions and accomplishments is skewed in the journal in favor of women who
worked during the war on the homefront under the guidance of the AFŽH. Furthermore, in the
circumstances where every article seems to have been connected to the wider political
situation in the country and carrying a particular message, only rarely did published articles
present personal recollections of the partizanke. Milka Kufrin had the authority to have such
an article published, and hers was one of the few articles that appeared in the postwar period
that plainly spoke about her comrades in arms without exploiting their successes or sufferings
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for political or personal gain.
87
�CONCLUSION
In the final section of this project, I am revisiting the very beginning. One hundred
thousand women who supported the partisan struggle as fighters make an unparalleled
example to any other war in the history of Yugoslavia. What happened to all those women
partisans after the war? Similarly to both U.S.S.R. and the Western Allies, the vast majority of
women were expelled from the army. While AFŽH arranged their further employment, a few
that remained served in clerical positions and medical corps. 246 Moreover, Jelena Batini
reports that in the early 1950s women were excluded from all professions where they were
obliged to carry weaponry, i.e. from the People’s Militia (Narodna milicija). 247 Although
professional opportunities for women significantly expanded with the establishment of the
socialist Yugoslavia, the gender division of labor continued to influence the government’s
employment policies. As Batini notices, wartime women partisans no longer served in the
army, but “moved to the realm of cultural representation and memory. In the first postwar
decades, [they were] a ubiquitous symbol of the new state-a revolutionary icon par
excellence.”248
This project focuses on the officials of the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia (AFŽH)
and the manner in which they managed the legacy of the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB).
More precisely, it discusses the solutions they utilized when adapting the memory
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of partizanke to their more conservative worldview and political interests. While the state
ideologues and historians who were favored by the Party leadership shaped the official
narrative about the NOB, different organizations had the task of guarding the memory of the
war. Thus, one of the AFŽ’s numerous duties was the preservation of the memory of women’s
participation in the war including the memory surrounding the activities of female partisans.
In order to reveal the ways in which, and to what extent, the Antifascist Front of Women
of Croatia followed the guidelines of the official master narrative concerning female partisans,
246
Batini , “Gender, Revolution and War,“ 294.
Ibid, 293.
248
Ibid, 294.
247
88
�this thesis focuses on the organization’s official journal Woman in Combat (Žena u
borbi). Analysis of the journal shows that the AFŽH’s officials who edited Žena u
borbi reformed the collective memory of women partisans as it was perceived by the
leadership of Yugoslavia and formulated in a vast body of state-sponsored literature that dealt
with the partisan struggle. The editorial board and authors who contributed to the journal did
not simply duplicate the official narrative. They re-interpreted it in a way meaningful to them
by focusing on the aspects they experienced and considered important, predominantly through
the narratives about the contribution of women organized by the AFŽ and their sacrifices as
mothers and wives of partisans who died during the war, thereby emphasizing their
understanding of the war and promoting concepts relevant to them.
The first chapter of the thesis provides a short analysis of World War II in Yugoslavia with
emphasis on the performance of the Communist Party as a decisive factor in the outcome of
the war of resistance in the country. While discussing the postwar period, the chapter focuses
on the Tito-Stalin split, which proved to be a turning point in the history of Yugoslavia. This
conflict prompted the Party leadership to revamp their interpretation of communist doctrine
and from firm adherents to the Soviet-type socialism evolve into architects of “the new way
into socialism” 249 through the institution of self-management. This historical context in which
AFŽH emerged and developed conditioned the goals and policies of the organization. For the
communist leadership AFŽH was primarily envisaged as an organization in charge of
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coordination of women’s activities on the homefront. However, during the war, as well as in
the immediate postwar period, AFŽH officials strongly emphasized their role as educators of
the masses of uneducated women.
The second chapter, predominantly based on the published primary sources available in the
collection Women of Croatia in the People’s Liberation Struggle (Žene Hrvatske u
Narodnooslobodila koj borbi), demonstrates the ways in which AFŽH officials prioritized the
education of women as a means of creating favorable preconditions for their future in socialist
Yugoslavia. In other words, education coupled with interventions in law was supposed to
249
Goldstein, 1941., 430.
89
�bring about the desired equality of women and men. However, during the war, as a rule
women partisans could not participate in the activities of the AFŽH due to restrictions
imposed by military service. Hence, they were prevented from obtaining the necessary
education that AFŽH officials considered essential for their future accomplishments.
The editions of Žena u borbi indicate that members of the Antifascist Front of Women
were under the influence of the traditional Yugoslav worldview that defined women primarily
through motherhood and femininity and assumed that there is an a priori “women’s
place”. Afežejke were fully prepared to educate women who were, in turn, expected to use
their newly acquired knowledge to redefine the “women’s place” through entry into the
workforce, i.e. in the way their teachers conceived the process of emancipation. At the same
time, AFŽH officials were not prepared to admit that service in the army was one possible
avenue to a successful emancipatory process. Therefore, when they published articles about,
for example, women industrial workers, the authors reported new opportunities that had
opened up for women and women’s great achievements. On the other hand, when they
published the articles about female partisans, they seemed to justify women’s presence in the
military service as if they did not belong there.
Furthermore, due to political currents in the country, the great need for reconstruction and
the conflict with Cominform, AFŽH officials considered it opportune to emphasize current
rather than past successes of women. Moreover, since women partisans experienced a side of
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war that AFŽH officials had not known firsthand, the officials wrote about successes that
were familiar to them as organizers of the homefront. Consequently, personal memories about
the women partisans could competently retell only a person like Milka Kufrin. She was
herself a partisan, but, similar to during the war, she was courageous enough to point out the
achievements that her female comrades-in-arms accomplished during their military service,
instead of writing of her own actions.
While conducting my research, I encountered some limitations. First, Žena u borbi was an
official journal of a state organization and, therefore, all the narratives presented in the journal
had the same goal. The editorial board made sure all the articles, fragments from literature,
90
�poems and reader’s letters they published contributed and testified to the successes of the
communist leadership and the socialist system in Yugoslavia. This publishing policy limited
the findings of this thesis on the dominant narrative about the NOB as AFŽH officials
interpreted it, while leaving out the silenced voices. Second, although I intended to diversify
by introducing published personal narratives, I did not discover any published diaries or
memoirs written by female partisans. Therefore, I was unable to address all the issues I
originally intended to, principally, how the recollections of female partisans differ from the
narrative presented in Žena u borbi.
Finally, AFŽH regularly communicated with the Antifascist Front of Women of
Yugoslavia (AFŽJ), as well as the Party. Renata Jambreši Kirin points out that both the Party
and the AFŽJ sometimes criticized the publishing policy of the editorial board in Zagreb, but
does not elaborate further.250 Since AFŽH was an organization that operated on the republic
level, this thesis fills a void in the historiography that discusses the collective memory of
women’s wartime activity in the People’s Republic of Croatia and provides ground for future
research that would widen the scope to the federative level and explore the publishing politics
on the level of Yugoslavia as well as the relationship of the AFŽH and the center of the
organization in Belgrade. Another interesting direction of research can delve into the
development of the collective memory related to the People’s Liberation Struggle in the
official press after the dissolution of the AFŽ and the emergence of poorly researched and
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largely neglected successor organization Union of Women Societies (SŽD).
250
Jambreši Kirin, “Žene u formativnom socijalizmu,” 196.
91
�APPENDIX 1.
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Geogrije-Žorž Skirgin’s Kozar anka (Milja Marin)
92
�APPENDIX 2.
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Front Cover of the First Issue of Žena u borbi
93
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Periodical Žena u borbi:
Bakari , Vladimir. “Borba.” (“The Fight.”) Žena u borbi 1 (June 1943).
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Žena u borbi 1 (June 1943).
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(July 1947).
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Kraja
, Bosiljka-Beba. “Od obmane do izdaje.” (“From Deception to Treason.”) Žena u
borbi 7 (March 1944).
Kraja
, Soka. “Žene Hrvatske do ekuju 8. mart nizom krupnih uspjeha u socijalisti koj
izgradnji.” (“Women of Croatia greet March 8 with the Series of Major Successes in
Building Socialism.”) Žena u borbi 3 (March 1950).
Krea
, Marija. “Prva konferencija Antifašisti ke fronte žena Hrvatske.” (“First Conference
of the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia.”) Žena u borbi 2 (July 1943).
Kufrin, Milka. “27. jula-Dan narodnog ustanka u Hrvatskoj.” (“July 27th-The Day of The
Uprising of the People in Croatia.”) Žena u borbi 6 (June 1949).
Miljenovi , Desa. “Žene junakinje.” (“Women Heroes.”) Žena u borbi 17-18 (June-July
1945).
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�Popovicki, Nataša. “Sonja Erbežnik.” Žena u borbi 11 (November 1949).
Rakar, Anica. “Prosvjeta je temelj svakog napretka.” (“Education is the Foundation of Any
Progress.”) Žena u borbi 10 (September 1944).
Ratner, Evgenij. “Velika snaga.” (“Great Strength.”) Žena u borbi 42 (August 1947).
Ritig, Svetozar, Msgr. Dr. “Viteštvo, posestrimstvo i idealizam narodne borbene žene.”
(“Knighthood, Sisterhood and the Idealism of People’s Fighting Woman.”) Žena u
borbi 12-13 (December 1944-January 1945).
Sremec, Nada. “Drugaricama u okupiranoj Hrvatskoj.” (“To Women Comrades in the
Occupied Croatia.”) Žena u borbi 5-6 (October-November 1943).
Sremec, Nada. “Sovjetske žene su nam pokazale put.” (“Soviet Women Showed us The
Way.”) Žena u borbi 45 (November 1947).
Stahova, Ada. “Traktoristkinja iz Donjeckog sela,” (“Tractor Driver from Donetsk.”) Žena u
borbi 45 (November 1947).
Živkovi , Grujica. “Borba za narodno zdravlje-važan zadatak žena.” (“Fight for the Public
Health-Important Women’s Task.”) Žena u borbi 8 (April 1944).
_____. Rezolucija Prve konferencija Antifašisti ke fronte žena hrvatske.” (“Resolution of the
First Conference of the Antifascist Front of Women of Croatia.”) Žena u borbi 2 (July
1943).
_____. “Tri krvave godine.” (“Three Bloody Years.”) Žena u borbi 8 (April 1944).
_____. “Radni napori žena na polju nauke.” (“Work Efforts of Women in Science.”) Žena u
borbi 3 (March 1948).
_____. “Gradimo socijalizam.” (“We are Building Socialism.”) Žena u borbi 3 (March 1949).
_____. “8. Mart.” (“March 8th.”) Žena u borbi 3 (March 1952).
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_____. “Nada Dimi ,” Žena u borbi 3 (March 1951).
_____. “Još su živa sje anja na zlodjela talijanskih fašista.” (“The Memories About the
Atrocities Committed by Italian Fascists are Still Living.”) Žena u borbi 5 (May
1952).
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�
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Making a Partisan: Founding Narratives on the Participation of Women in the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia - Iva Jelušić
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106 pages
Iva Jelušić
Partisan women
People’s Liberation Struggle
Yugoslavia
-
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4/7/2016
Partizanke - Dangerous Women Project
EXPLORE
NEWS
EVENTS
ABOUT
SUBMISSIONS
Partizanke
Their dangerous legacy in the post-Yugoslav space
1st April 2016
Chiara Bon glioli is currently Newfelpro post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for
Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism (CKPIS), Juraj Dobrila University of
Pula, Croatia. From 2012 to 2014, she has been a research fellow at the University
of Edinburgh, within the framework of the CITSEE project (The Europeanisation of
Citizenship in the Successor States of the former Yugoslavia). Her doctoral
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dissertation dealt with women’s political and social activism in Cold War Italy and
Yugoslavia (1945-1957). She has published extensively on gender history in the
post-Yugoslav space, and is currently researching women’s labour in the garment
industry during socialism and after post-socialist transition.
The contribution of partizanke, or female partisan ghters, to the Yugoslav
liberation war was unprecedented in occupied Europe: of cial statistics of
the socialist period report 100,000 women ghting as partisans, and two
million participating in various ways to the support of the National Liberation
Movement. Approximately 25,000 women died in battle, 40,000 were
wounded, and 2,000 of them acquired the of cer’s rank, while 92 women
were designated as national heroes.
Women of all nationalities and ages performed a variety of tasks, particularly
as ghters and nurses in the army, but also as couriers, cooks and typists.
Women also played a very important role away from the front, working in
agriculture, bringing supplies to the troops and taking care of the wounded
and the orphans, especially within the framework of the Antifascist Women’s
Front (AFŽ). [1]
The Antifascist Women’s Front was founded in an attempt to mobilise large
masses of women in the struggle against the occupation. Since the majority of
the population lived at the time in rural areas, the National Liberation
Movement strived to gain consensus among peasant women, which were the
majority at the time in Yugoslavia. The support of the female population in
the villages became crucial for partisans’ victory. [2]
The rst generation of AFŽ leaders – who were also former partisans and
communist party members – included many outstanding women from all over
Yugoslavia, generally highly educated and from families with a tradition of
leftist engagement. They took part in illegal revolutionary activities in the
interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, after the banning of the communist party in
1921. They often joined legal women’s and youth organizations, spreading
socialist and antifascist ideas.
Women in the communist leadership embodied a radically different
femininity than the majority of peasant women living in Yugoslavia at the
time, as made evident by this photograph of Judita Alargić, Mitra Mitrović
and Vera Zogović, resting between battles in summer 1944 on the Adriatic
island of Vis, where the headquarters of the Yugoslav Army had been located
after the capitulation of Italy.
During World War II, partisan women were dangerous rst of all for their
enemies, namely Nazi and Fascist troops and local collaborationist forces,
whom they fought with incredible courage and sacri ce, incurring in torture,
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deportation to concentration
camps, losses of loved ones and
death. They were portrayed as ugly,
dirty and promiscuous by enemy
propaganda, which saw women’s
participation to the liberation
struggle as something that went
against the natural gender order.
Partisan women were indeed
dangerous for existing patriarchal
gender norms. Their participation
in the struggle carved new
subjectivities for women, whose
Judita Alargic, Mitra Mitrovic and
Vera Zogovic on the Island of Vis.
(Wikipedia – Muzej Istorije
Jugoslavije, inv. br. 12011)
political, social and economic rights
were recognized for the rst time in the Yugoslav constitution of 1946.
Through the local and national activities of the Antifascist Women’s Front,
moreover, antifascist leaders reached out to the most underdeveloped
territories of the Federation, promoting women’s alphabetization and
education, healthcare for mothers and children, as well as women’s equal
engagement in the processes of postwar reconstruction and industrialisation.
Their activities on the ground met the frequent opposition of men and local
authorities, including party members, as well as women’s reticence to
abandon their traditional customs. [3]
At times, prominent female partisans became dangerous for the socialist
system they had contributed to create, especially in the aftermath of the
Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948, when alleged pro-Stalin supporters, including
women, were subjected to political repression, prison camps and political
ousting. [4] Of the women portrayed in the picture, only Judita Alargić
continued to have a relevant political career in socialist institutions, while
translator Vera Zogović suffered the consequences of political repression
together with her husband, poet Radovan Zogović. Mitra Mitrović was also
ousted from politics because of her closeness to Yugoslavia’s most famous
dissident, her ex husband Milovan Đilas.
Cold War times were complex and dangerous, as exempli ed by Želimir
Žilnik’s recent documentary, One Woman One Century (2010). Dragica
Vitolović Srzentić (1912-2015), former partisan, rst Yugoslav BBC speaker
and diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign affairs, was the one who brought
Tito’s letter of insubordination to Stalin in 1948, only to be incarcerated for
Stalinism together with her husband three years later. As the movie shows,
however, she never regretted her leftist choice nor denied socialism’s
progressive tenets.
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And here is a dangerous element of the partizanke’s legacy: the complexity of
their engagement and of their life trajectories, or, in other words, their
irreductible agency during World War II and in its aftermath. While many
scholars are keen to study women’s participation in the antifascist resistance,
very few are ready to recognise women’s agency in socialist Europe, or the
importance of women’s state socialist organisations such as the Antifascist
Women’s Front. These organisations and their leaders, in fact, are often seen
as too dependent from party politics or the socialist state.
The very idea of women’s agency during socialism seems indeed dangerous for
some feminist scholars, since it challenges their engrained representation of
state socialism as inherently totalitarian and patriarchal, as well as the liberal
equation between feminism and women’s autonomy from the state. [5] As
other feminist scholars have shown, however, it is time to question preexisting historical interpretations in unced by long-standing Cold War
paradigms, which risk reducing women to the mere victims of state socialism,
without understanding their actual political contribution in such complex and
dangerous times. [6]
To silence the legacy of women’s participation to the antifascist Resistance,
and their engagements in socialist times, would mean to undermine the
struggles against patriarchy that were waged through state socialist women’s
organisations, as well as the progressive legacy of such struggles in the
contemporary post-Yugoslav space. As Lydia Sklevicky wrote in her
pioneering study of the Antifascist Women’s Front, “Listening today to the
voices of women from the past, one sees not only the mistaken choices which
should not to be repeated, but also the unspent reserves of utopian energy.”
And then she added, quoting Walter Benjamin’s Fifth thesis on the concept of
history, ‘For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to
disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it’.
[7]
In the contemporary post-Yugoslav space, young activist women recognize
themselves in antifascist women’s struggles for women’s rights and
emancipation, particularly now that many of the social and economic rights
gained during socialist times have been deteriorating due to the Yugoslav
wars and the post-socialist privatization process, which led to widespread
deindustrialisation and unemployment. [8]
In 2010, for instance, architect and curator Ana Džokić revisited the story of
her grandparents, Rajka and Vukašin Borojević, two former partisans and
social entrepreneurs who founded a juice factory in Banja Luka, as well as
cooperative of women weavers in the village of Donji Dubac. The project was
signi cantly titled Taking Common Matters into Your Own Hands, as an homage
to the socialist legacy of collective solidarity and workers’ self-management.
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[9]
The gure of Rajka Borojević is exemplary of the idealist spirit carried by
partisan women well into the Cold War. A teacher and partisan from
Herzegovina, she took shelter with her two children in rural Serbia during the
war, and felt indebted to the local peasant population. She moved to the
village in the early 1950s, and started her rst workshops with peasant
women in 1954, teaching basic hygiene, nutrition, housekeeping and sex
education, and overcoming many dif culties, including the mistrust of male
villagers. [10] Later she founded the Dragačevo weavers’ cooperative, which
employed 420 women in the early 1960s. Women’s position in the village
gradually improved, and in 1967, the newly founded House of Culture even
hosted the nals of the ‘best husband’ competition. The building itself had
been funded with self-organised ‘best husband’ parties in the surrounding
villages. [11]
Young activists, archivists and scholars are putting renewed efforts in
preserving the dangerous legacy of partisan women across the former
Yugoslavia. The legacy of workers’ self-management, inter-ethnic solidarity
and women’s struggles for emancipation has been taken up as a form of
counter-memory by local activists in different post-Yugoslav states, against
new hegemonic national narratives centered on ethnic homogeneity and
based on the rehabilitation of anti-communist collaborationist forces. Such
counter-memories are also serving as a repertoire against the post-socialist
retraditionalisation of gender relations and workers’ gradual loss of social
rights. [12]
The reaf rmation of antifascist values happens through archiving, exhibitions
and activist initiatives. Two recent examples of such efforts are the
digitalisation of the existing archive of the Antifascist Women’s Front located
in Sarajevo by a collective of women artists, [13] and an exhibition on the AFŽ
recently organized in Banja Luka, which featured former partisan Branka
Bjelajac as a guest. [14]
Another example is the Zagreb Antifascist Network (Mreža antifašistkinja
Zagreb, MAZ) founded in 2007, which organises antifascist parties,
commemorations and solidarity marches. [15] The subversive legacy of
workers’ solidarity, women’s struggles and antifascism is also revived by a
number of antifascist, feminist and queer choirs across the region, such as
Kombinat in Slovenia, Horkestar in Serbia, Le Zbor and Zbor Praksa in
Croatia. [16]
Such choirs have been performing different local partisan songs, together
with other international protest songs (The Internationale, Bella Ciao, Bread
and Roses), as a way of protest against current neo-liberal and neohttp://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/
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conservative politics, for instance in support of workers of bankrupted
factories, or as part of pride marches for LGBT rights.
The ‘unspent reserves of utopian energy’ contained in the antifascist heritage
are thus re-appropriated and re-signi ed, in multiple dangerous ways, by the
nieces and nephews of partizanke, seventy years after the end of World War
II.
[1] Barbara Jancar-Webster. Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945
(Denver: Arden Press, 1990)
[2] Jelena Batinić. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II
Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
[3] Chiara Bon glioli, ‘Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold
War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia’, Aspasia, The International Yearbook of
Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 8
(2014): 1-25.
[4] Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, ‘Yugoslav Women Intellectuals: From a Party Cell
to a Prison Cell’, History of Communism in Europe 5 (2014): 36-53.
[5] Nanette Funk, ‘A very tangled knot: Of cial state socialist women’s
organizations, women’s agency and feminism in Eastern European state
socialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 21, no. 4 (2014): 344-360.
[6] On this discussion, see the two Forums published on the journal Aspasia,
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European
Women’s and Gender History: Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in
Terminis? 1 (2007); Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited, 10
(forthcoming 2016).
[7] Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, Žene, Ratovi (Zagreb: Ženska Infoteka, 1996), 69.
[8] Igor Štiks and Srečko Horvat (eds.), Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism:
Radical Politics After Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2014).
[9] See the documentation of the STEALTH research archive (last accessed
18.3.2016).
[10] Rajka Borojević, Iz Dubca u svet (Beograd: Etnografski muzej, 2006), rst
edition 1964. See also Natalja Herbst, ‘Women in Socialist Yugoslavia in the
1950s. The Example of Rajka Borojević and the Dragačevo Women’s
Cooperative’, in Roswita Kersten-Pejanić, Simone Rajilić, and Christian Voß,
(eds.), Doing Gender-Doing the Balkans (München, Berlin, Washington D.C.:
http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/04/01/partizanke-dangerous-legacy/
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Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012)
[11] STEALTH documentation.
[12] Chiara Bon glioli, ‘Gender, labour and precarity in the South East
European periphery: the case of textile workers in Štip’, Contemporary
Southeastern Europe, 1 no. 2 (2014): 7-23.
[13] http://www.afzarhiv.org/
[14] “Uspostavljanje izgubljenje veze: AFŽ u Bosanskoj krajini“, Narodna i
Univerzitetska Biblioteka Republike Srpske, Banja Luka, Bosnia Herzegovina.
[15] www.maz.hr
[16] Ana Hofman, Glasba, politika, afekt. Novo življenje partizanskih pesmi v
Sloveniji (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2015)
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Partisan women
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Cahiers balkaniques
41 (2013)
Evliyâ Çelebi et l'Europe
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Ivana Pantelić
Yugoslav female partisans in World
War II
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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Ivana Pantelić, « Yugoslav female partisans in World War II », Cahiers balkaniques [En ligne], 41 | 2013, mis en ligne
le 19 mai 2013, consulté le 17 novembre 2014. URL : http://ceb.revues.org/3971 ; DOI : 10.4000/ceb.3971
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�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
Ivana Pantelić
Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
Pagination de l’édition papier : p. 239-250
1
This paper deals with female partisans' role and integration with in wartime society in
Yugoslavia. Women public engagement, during the war, was very important for process
of emancipation in post war Yugoslavia. This was first time that women joined military
forces, especially combat unites. We shall present what were their motives to join partisan
movement and which were their positions in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and in
People's Liberation Army (PLA). We shall also discuss about official documents that were
published during the war and are immediate related to the emancipation factors. A distinctive
part of this paper will include description and analysis of establishment and first activities
of Women's Antifascists Front of Yugoslavia (WAFY). We shall also try to compare female
partisans' engagement with the Greek and Soviet women activities in guerilla warfare during
the WWII. Our research was based on unpublished and published documents of the resistance
movement, wartime press as well as on the memoirs of female partisan's.
Women in the Partisan's units
2
3
4
In addition to huge losses and destruction, the world wars have brought substantial social
change. During the First World War in Britain and in France, due to their contribution to the
home front, women acquired a significant role by replacing men in industry and in various
other jobs, a role that gained prominence during the Second World War, both on the home
front and in the military operations. In the early years of the war, classic fronts had yet not
been established and, as the opposition had not been quelled in the region of the German Reich
and its satellites and occupied countries, women were given an important place in the guerrilla
units and resistance movements.
In addition to the Soviet partisan units that from 1941 sprang up over the large territories
under the German occupation and the great French resistance, the two largest guerrilla forces
in Europe operated in the Balkans: the communist movement in Yugoslavia and The Greek
People's Liberation Army (ELAS). The Yugoslav Partisans (People's Liberation Army of
Yugoslavia or Narodnooslobodilačka vojska Jugoslavije – NOVJ) and the ELAS were not
only fighting for liberation from the occupier, but they also began the Communist Revolution.
In addition to establishing the socialist system following the model of the Soviet Republic,
these movements wanted to encourage a radical change in social relations. One goal was to
legalize gender equality and to accelerate the emancipation of women. Partisan warfare was
the first opportunity to set an important stage in this process. Just as the National Liberation
Committees (Narodnooslobodilački odbori) throughout the liberated territories established the
new government, during the war female partisans (partizanke) gained their role in the new
society, the role that would, in the ideal new society after the war, be secured for the entire
female gender. The term partizanke has been most often used in reference to female fighters
and nurses. The typical representation of the female partisans, in the post-war Yugoslav society
is a young, armed, girl who fights and heals the wounds.1 Female partisans have become a
kind of political and social vanguard among women.
The Partisan uprising began three months after the April War (invasion of Yugoslavia,
6-17 April 1941) and the subsequent disintegration of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Having
had a hostile attitude toward the occupying forces, the Communist Party called for a popular
uprising on 4 July 1941, two weeks after German assault on the Soviet Union (June 22). By the
end of 1941, People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia had accepted a new concept of warfare:
the establishment of highly mobile proletarian brigades (proleterska brigada) and, later, the
proletarian divisions (proleterska divizija) in which women constituted a significant part of the
medical corps. After the April War of 1941 and the occupation and division of Yugoslavia, the
new communist guerrillas (the Partisans) organized themselves throughout the territory of the
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
2
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
5
6
former state. Unlike other antifascist and collaborationist movements, the partisan movement
advocated the complete emancipation of women in post-war socialist Yugoslavia. Since the
guerrillas, from the beginning, presented themselves as the embryo of a new state, women
straightaway had an opportunity to play a prominent role in shaping of the revolutionary
authorities and a secure place in the partisan revolutionary army.
The phenomena of partizanke as in Yugoslavia was not unique. However, it should be noted
that despite the different social conditions, to a lesser or greater extent specific for most of
Europe, as well as the specifics of Yugoslav society and its contradictions during the interwar
years, the phenomena of women's mass military engagement presented a major and unexpected
shift. When it comes to social analysis of the partisan revolutionary army, we should bear in
mind that, before the war, barely a quarter of the Yugoslav population lived in cities. Although
a woman had a subordinate role in this rural world, several factors significantly affected
her entry into the revolutionary partisan army. The weapon development and the nature of
warfare made women, as much as (un)educated men, a significant potential. Finally, the rapid
development of cities, as well as the arrival of many female teachers into villages after 1918,
ensured that such ideas were not as inconceivable as they were before.
As for the ideology, program and staffing, the Partizans and Yugoslav People's Liberation
Army relied on the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije – KPJ).
The Party publicly advocated legal and practical equality of the sexes. However, until the end
of the war, women's participation in the Communist Party was merely symbolic. However,
by May 1941 women members of the Communist Party, the Young Communist League of
Yugoslavia (Savez komunističke omladine Jugoslavije – SKOJ) and female activists of pre-war
Women's movement joined the partisan movement.2 According to data presented by Stanko
Mladenović, participation of women in the first partisan units varied from 2% to 20%. So the
First Proletarian Brigade (Prva proleterska brigada) at the time of its formation had 67 women,
in the Second Proletarian Brigade (Druga proleterska brigada) there were 46 women, most
of whom were medical workers, while in the Fourth Proletarian Brigade (Četvrta proleterska
brigada), among 1,082 fighters 200 were women.3 According to official statistics, by the
end of war, about 100,000 women entered into the ranks of the People's Liberation Army of
Yugoslavia. Barbara Wiesinger says that this figure is exaggerated and that women accounted
for 5-10% of the partisan units. It is estimated that during the war 25,000 of them were killed
or died and 40,000 were wounded. Neda Bozinović, judging by incomplete data, estimated
that only in Serbia more than 1,500 women were executed.4 Most of them served as medical
staff, although they were also present in all combat units. Women doctors and nurses with
a history of leftist activism had every reason to disappear from the occupied towns into the
forest. Consequently, 173 women doctors and an estimated 10,000 trained nurses volunteered
for service in the National Liberation Army.5 Some authors, such as Neda Bozinović, argue
that the leadership of the Communist Party at first hesitated whether to allow the entry of
women into the combat units. During the mass uprising of the 1941 in Serbia, the partisan units
included few women. In early 1942, however, the partisan leadership decided to make combat
roles officially available to women. A letter by Tito, written in February 1942, explained this to
his associates: “Since ever more women demand to join the [partisan] units, we have decided
to accept them ... not only as nurses, but also as fighters. It would be a real disgrace for us to
make it impossible for women to fight with a weapon in hand for national liberation.”6 The
exceptions were pre-war communists who took active part in organizing the first insurgent
units. During the war women were not able to progress to the higher command or political
positions in the military. Also, there were no women in the top ranks of the Communist
Party leadership (Politburo). During the war, about 2,000 women have been promoted to
officer ranks in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army. The Order of National Hero was
awarded to 1,241 men and 93 women.7 Among national heroes there were 7.03% woman of
total awarded, and they accounted for around 13% of combatants in the war. By comparison,
in Greece, equally patriarchal society, where the war for liberation turned into a civil war,
female partizans accounted for 30% of the wartime composition of the Democratic Army of
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
3
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
7
8
Greece and 70% of medical and auxiliary staff.8 In the Soviet Union where women enjoyed
equality officially since 1917, number of women serving in the Red Army during the war
reached 800,000. Although one in four was awarded, only 89 of them received the Hero of the
Soviet Union medal (during Second World War, the Hero of the Soviet Union was awarded
to 11,635 people).9 The Second World War in Britain saw women actively participating in
the military. In June 1945 Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service accounted for 6.13% of the
military, Women's Royal Naval Service 8.42% of the entire Navy, while Women's Auxiliary
Air Force accounted for 13.87%.10
At the beginning, the question of women's equality was not emphasized as one of the goals
of the National Liberation War (Narodnoslobodilačka borba). Although in the defining
documents for the establishment of new authorities (National Liberation Committees) it was
not particularly stressed that women will get active and passive voting rights and there was
no formal plan for their entry into the partisan units, women still enjoyed these rights.11 From
the beginning of the war, women's committees were organized at different levels (village,
local, county), with the task to assist the partisan units and the new government, to organize
ambulance training and to participate in the political education of women. It can be said that
the first documents in which the partisan government anticipated full equality for women were
published in the eastern Bosnian town Foča in February 1942. Two documents entitled Duties
and Organization of National Liberation Committees and Explanations and Instructions to the
National Liberation Committees in the Liberated Areas established the right of women to vote
and to be elected to the organs of revolutionary authority.12
Women were indeed in symbolic numbers chosen to the highest institutions of the Partisan
state. Thus, at the First Congress of the Antifascist Council of the People's Liberation of
Yugoslavia (Antifašističko Veće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije – AVNOJ), in the northern
Bosnian town Bihać on 26 November 1942, the only woman delegate was Kata Pejnović.13
Only 11 women attended the Second Congress, held on 21–29 November 1943.14 In the Second
Congress of the AVNOJ, women accounted for just over 4% of the lawmakers.15 On that
occasion the new Yugoslav government named the National Committee of Liberation of
Yugoslavia (Nacionalni komitet oslobođenja Jugoslavije – NKOJ) was elected. The National
Committee of Liberation of Yugoslavia had 17 members, but no women among them. The
presidency of the AVNOJ had a total of 63 members, among which were only two women
(3%).16
The Women's Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia
9
A body that gave an opportunity to women to self-organize politically and through this
to activate as many women as possible was the Women's Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia
(Antifašistički front žena Jugoslavije – AFŽJ). AFŽJ held its first conference in Bosanski
Petrovac (northwestern Bosnia) on 5–7 December 1942. Previously, female partizans had
activities in their units and in the regions they fought. The First National Conference of the
AFŽJ was the first opportunity for women to coordinate their activities at the Yugoslav level.
Delegates at the Conference were leaders of the Communist Party, an activist of pre-war
Women's movement, young women that became active during the war, and members of the
partisan units. The Conference brought together 166 female delegates,17 the session lasted for
three days. The AFŽ’s most important objective was to provide support system for the Peoples
Liberation Army by mobilizing women’s labour. The other objectives of this Conference
were to connect women from different territories of occupied Yugoslavia, the emancipation of
women through eliminating literacy among women, political education and equal participation
in the Partisan war activities. Women collected food, clothing, they also sewed uniforms,
knitted sweaters and socks, provided medical supplies. Many key services for the army were
provided by the AFŽ. In addition, the AFŽ made significant contribution to the medical corps
as they mobilized and trained women to serve as Partisan nurses.18 The social and humanitarian
work was organizations prominent activities. The AFŽ run orphanages and children’s homes
in the liberated zones and provided aid and care to the families and widows of Partisan solders.
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
4
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
10
The organization helped accommodated the exiled Partisan families and numerous refugees
that followed the units on the move.19 In order to achieve all of these objectives AFŽ soon took
on many responsibilities that, in the condition of regular warfare, would be associated with the
home-front and coordinated by the state.20 Despite all humanitarian activities AFŽ did not pass a
milestone in the program objectives for the emancipation of women in the partisan movement,
or in the unfolding socialist state. However, on that occasion the first mass Yugoslav women's
political organization was created which will play a huge role in post-war history of women's
emancipation.
Josip Broz Tito attended the Conference, he stressed the importance of the presence of women
in combat and underlined their crucial place in the background:
Female comrades! It is clear that a huge share of the burden in this struggle falls on women – both
on the home front and so often in the combat. Your sons, fathers and brothers are, of course, the
soldiers on the battlefield, and you are also an important background factor. Everything that our
army is capable of doing today is also a credit to our heroic women of Yugoslavia. The fight that
we conduct requires tremendous sacrifices and the brunt of those sacrifices falls on our mothers
and daughters who are losing their loved ones."21 But finished speech in less patriarchal, traditional
sense: "I can say that in this struggle, by their heroism and their endurance, women have been at
the forefront. The peoples of Yugoslavia should feel honoured to have such daughters. I am proud
to be the leader of an army that includes an enormous number of women.22
11
12
13
Spasenija Cana Babović, member of the CPY’s Central Committee, who after the war became
the president of the Central Committee of the AFŽJ, devoted her speech to the issues of the
organization. Based on this speech, it is clear that one of the most important goals of the First
National Conference of the AFŽJ was to boost women's participation in the war efforts.23
AFŽ mostly gathered older, married females over the age of 30. This was part of the Party
policy. As the most numerous and devoted female partisans were very young girls in their
early twenties and they already were involved in Party’s activities, CPY’s leaders supported
the idea that AFŽ should target older women, uninvolved in the movement. As Jelena Batinić
in her PhD theses noticed: “The archetypal AFŽ member was the very presiding over the
organization’s Central Council, Kata Pejnović, a serb from Lika, who had lost her three sons
and husband to the Ustasha terror at the beginning of the war.” But the AFŽ leadership, during
and after the WWII, on the state and federal levels, was not typical profile. All of them,
with the exception of Kata Pejnović, were educated, pre-war Party members or communist
youth activists. Most prominent among them were Mitra Mitrović, a pre-war CPY activist
and graduate of University of Belgrade, very active in the Youth Section of the Women’s
Movement in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Vida Tomšič, lawyer from the University of Ljubljana
and prewar CPY member, Spasenija Cana – Babović, the CPY’s Central Committee member
and professionally politically trained in Serbia and Moscow, Vanda Novosel, activist and
editor of the pre-war women’s journal Ženski svijet in Croatia.
About activities of the AFŽ during the war, but also about the patriarchal family relations, and
attempts to break them up writes female partisan Nevenka Petrić. Although she considered
that the AFŽ had no influence on her emancipation, she says:
To be able to organize women you need to know that they have no say. If her husband says that
she must go, she will come to a meeting. If he says that he doesn't agree, then she can't come.
To found the AFŽ in a village, there must be a National Liberation Committee, which I come
and set up. They heard about me from peasants in other villages and they say: that little one will
come, so when the 'little one' comes, they set up a National Liberation Committee. In addition to
its political activities, the Committee collects food for hospitals and military units. Politics has
always been the main thing! It was emphasized that the sessions were dedicated to women, but
that men may come if they wish and they came in smaller numbers. Women generally came if they
were widows or those who wore pants in their house. Some would come with their husbands, but
with their prior consent. At the meetings the participants would say that women have never had
any rights in society, although they contribute to the household as much as the male members. The
aim was political, the French Revolution would be mentioned, its ideas, the Marxist movement,
and there was talk about Marx. Women understand that they now have no rights, and from now
on, they will like to have them. The goal was to raise awareness among them, so that woman can
accept herself as a person capable of making decisions in the household. Women give birth to
children, run the household, and finally they are labourers in the field and work with the livestock.
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
5
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
Women have participated in these meetings by talking about their lives. Many wanted me to be
their daughter-in-law because they liked me. For these reasons, many told me in what military
units their sons were."24
14
15
16
17
During the war the Antifascist Council of Women began to build organizations all around the
country. By the end of 1943, throughout Serbia, district, county and municipal committees
were created.
It should be noted that at the beginning of the 1944 a women's Ravna Gora organization was
formed under the name the Yugoslav Women's Ravna Gora Organization (Jugoslvemnska
organizacija Ravnogorki – JUORA). The task of this organization was to build a network of
clubs and associations, with the help of the operational units of the Yugoslav Army in the
Fatherland (Jugoslovenska vojska u otadžbini – JVO or Četnički pokret). In addition to setting
up medical units, JUORA members had the task to raise national awareness among adults
and children, and one of the most important was the “sister” help to the soldiers as well as
their “brave conduct in the face of the enemy”.25 We can conclude that unlike the AFŽ, which
undoubtedly had similar tasks when it come to activities in the war but also devoted its efforts
to raising women's literacy and providing cultural and political training programs, the work
of the JOURA was confined exclusively to helping fighters (men) and to their role of good
mothers and citizens. Modelled on the character of national heroine from the 14th century
(Kosovka devojka) their role was even symbolically based on the principle of "women as an
unequal helper".
Barbara Wiesinger concludes that women in the framework of the People's Liberation Army
of Yugoslavia constituted a social object, they were deprived of personal initiative, and their
roles defined by the military and political leaders – men.26 In contrast, the Party historiography
and some later authors considered that partizanke were led into the war by their high selfawareness and their desire for the emancipation.27 Our interviewee Vera Đukic-Plavsić, who
was herself a combatant, has written about women's participation in the partisan movement
in following way: “Their heroism was startling, their quest for freedom could not be broken
neither by fear nor by death, hunger or bullets. Taking part in military operations with the
strength of their youth, female comrades of Forth Serbian Brigade, despising the fear, gave up
the love and motherhood in the constant face of death.”28
Anthropologist Svetlana Slapšak, has also considered a phenomena of female partisan:
The success of the Yugoslav partisan movement was comprehensive: it provided the female
workforce in the background, the female warrior force to the front, the women's labour force in
rebuilding the country after the war and the women's political forces that supported the winning
ideology... A woman in uniform, a woman capable of using a weapon, a woman who kills: an
essential element of the engraved image of the female Partisan is fear. It does not help that women
rarely reached the commanding positions, and that the military career to them was mostly closed.
To her comrades, perhaps no less than to her opponents, she represented a threat of a perfectly
protected and therefore independent offensive sexuality. A woman bearing arms makes her own
choices...
29
Why? The motives of female partisans
18
The motive of departure of female partisan to war speaks eloquently about their self-awareness
and aspirations. Most of our interviewees today emphatically assert that they went to the
Partisans motivated by the idea of the national defence from occupiers and the destruction of
the “repressive regime”. It can be said that our female interlocutors belonged to the minority
of female partisans, who were either associated with the partisan movement, or were members
of the Communist Party or the Communist Youth League before the war. However, although
they considered themselves already emancipated, they joined the Party and/or were enlisted
in the partisan units, joining their brothers or friends. According to their testimonies, their
expectations were mainly associated with the war effort for the liberation and revolutionary
change in the society. To a greater extent this was the case of enlightened and previously active
female partisan. However, female partisans recruited from villages whose going to war was
often the result of their circumstances, did not have any developed awareness of their position,
or clear expectations of the future.
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
6
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
19
Female partisans's goals and their expectations from today's perspective are also incoherent.
Danica Dana Milosavljević, later awarded the Order of National Hero, said that since
childhood she wanted to be an equal, imagining that she was a soldier and a man, but reading
the works of August Bebel before the war, prompted her to join the Partisans:
My parents for a long time did not have children and wanted a son. I wanted to be a son, I wanted
to be a soldier. A hundred times I have run under the rainbow to become a male, she says. She
joined the Partisans at the beginning of the war. At first she was a nurse in the platoon (četa) of
the Third Užički Partisan Detachments, later she entered the medical corps of the First Proletarian
Brigade, and by the end of the war she became a member of the Second Proletarian Brigade as
a fighter and bomber: I asked to be a fighter but they did not let me. They said: How could you
be a fighter? I went to the Supreme Headquarters to complain to Tito (Josip Broz Tito). There
I met with another member of the Supreme Headquarters, Sreten Žujović... and he approved it.
Since then I hugged my rifle and I gave it to no one. I distributed my medical supplies and told
my friends who did not have respect for me: So here, bandage yourselves. I was very keen to be
a fighter to prove myself and I did everything male fighters did, I didn't spare myself. And when
I persisted over the first few months, they did not complain.
30
20
21
However, most of the others, regardless of their later careers and education, cite different
reasons. Those who were members of the Communist Party before the war or were considered
its followers regarded their participation in the partisan movement a logical continuation in
their work.
The partisan movement in Yugoslavia was the largest revolutionary army in Eastern
Europe, which, among other things, advocated for women's equality. The issue of women's
emancipation set in existence since the beginnings of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as an
important and, certainly, very difficult question. The fact that women, despite the aspirations
of the Party to win them over, and in spite of customized organizational structure, were poorly
represented in the membership of the Party and its leadership, limited the participation of
women during the war. However, the massive uprising in western Serbia, Bosnia and parts of
Croatia, as well as the changes in the conduct of war and a numerical strength of the generation
born after the 1918, whose members did much of the fighting for the People's Liberation
Army, contributed to women's more prominent role in the Communist Party. Unlike the Red
Army and its partisan units, in which women previously had a distinctive role, the Yugoslav
partizanke started a new page in the social history of Yugoslavia and the insurrectionary war.
Although they were not equally represented in political parties and the partisan institutions of
the state, partizanke were more proportionally represented in People's Liberation Army than
in the most other similar armies, and won additional highest awards than female members of
the Red Army. Based on our research, we concluded that the aspiration for the emancipation
and the equality was not prevalent among female partisans, but they were primarily concerned
with their patriotic and revolutionary motives.
Notes
1 J. Batinić, Gender, Revolution and the War: The Mobilization of Women in the Yugoslav Partisan
Resistance during World War II, PhD thesis defended in 2009, Stanford Univ. 162.
2 N. Božinović, Zensko pitanje u Srbiji u 19. i 20. veku /Womens question in Serbia in 19. at 20. century/,
(Beograd: Feministicka 94, 1996), 135.
3 S. Mladenović, Spasenija Cana Babović, (Beograd: Rad , 1980) 211.
4 N. Božinović, 144; According to documents provided by the Yugoslav Commission for War Crimes,
throughout Yugoslavia 282,406 women died in concentration camps. In Serbia that number is 18.708;
Žene žrtve fašističkog terora, AFŽJ 141-10-50, Archive of Yugoslavia (A.J.)
5 B. Wiesinger, »... denn die Freiheit kommt nicht von alleine«. Frauen im jugoslawischen
»Volksbefreiungskrieg« 1941–1945, PhD thesis defended in 2005, Salzburg; Vera Gavrilović, Ženelekari u ratovima 1876-1945 na tlu Jugoslavije (Beograd: Naučno društvo za istoriju zdravstvene kulture
Jugoslavije, 1976), 53, 56-61.
6 J.B.Tito, Drugu Bevcu i Loli /To Comrades Bevc and Lola/ 23. February 1942, in Žena u Revoluciji /
Woman in Revolution/ (Srajevo: Svjetlost, 1978), 62-63.
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
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�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
7 Women national heroes accounted for 7,03% of the total number of awards given, while they accounted
for around 13% soldiers in the war, Lj. Petrović, Narodni heroji u jugoslovenskom društvu 1942–1980.
godine, Prilog istraživanju položaja boračkih elita u posleratnoj Jugoslaviji, Vojno-istorijski glasnik,
no. 1, (Beograd: Vojno-istorijski institut, 2001), 131.
8 C. Pateras, Notes on the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), http://inter.kke.gr/News/2006new/2006-09civil1 (03 11 2010).
9 H. Skaida, Heroines of the Soviet Union 1941–45, (London: Osprey Publishing, 2003); P.
D. McDaniel Jr, P. J. Schmitt, The Comprehensive Guide to Soviet Orders and Medals, 1997.
10 L. Noakes, Women in the British Army, War and the gentle sex, 1907-1948, (New York: Routledge
2006), 131.
11 Period rada 1941–1945, AFŽJ 141-10-50, A. J.
12 Ibid.
13 Žene članovi AVNOJ, Žena danas /Woman today/, no. 35, October 1945, 10. However, in the AFŽJ
document about war activities of this organization it is quoted that the female delegates were Spasenija
Cana Babović i Kata Pejnović. Period rada 1941–1945, AFŽJ 141-10-50, A. J.
14 S. Nešović (ed.), Drugo zasedanje Antifašističkog veća narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije 1943–
1953, Beograd [1953?], 190–193.
15 S. Nešović, 190–193; Neda Božinović calculated that women accounted for 3,7% of delegates of
Second National Conference AVNOJ; N. Božinović, 150.
16 S. Nešović, 189.
17 AFŽJ 141-14-74, A. J.
18 J. Batinić, 126.
19 Ibid.
20 B. Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia, (Denver: Arden Press 1990), 139.
21 Josip Broz Tito, Govor na prvoj zemaljskoj konferenciji AFŽ-a, Žena u revoluciji, (Sarajevo: Svjetlost
1978), 81–82.
22 Ibid.
23 Za učvršćenje organizacije – prema usmenom referatu Cane Babović, AFŽJ 141-14-75, A. J.
24 Interview with Nevenka Petrić-Lalić, 30 July 2007.
25 B. B. Dimitrijević, Žene ravnogorskog sela 1943-1944, in L. Perović (ed.) Srbija u modernizacijskim
procesima XIX i XX veka: položaj žene kao merilo modernizacije, 2 ( Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju
Srbiije, 1998), 359.
26 B. Wiesinger, 219.
27 “Regardless of their function, level of education, social background, they (partizanke) liberated
themselves from prejudices of their subordinate social position in battle, in the communal life and
constant work on their experiences”, N. Božinović, 143.
28 V. Đukić-Plavšić, Sećanja na Drugi svetski rat /Remembering Second Wrld War/, in possession of
Ivana Pantelić.
29 Svetlana Slapšak, Ženske ikone XX veka /20th Century Women’s Icons/, Beograd 2001, 208.
30 Interview with Dana Milosavljević, conducted 19 September 2007.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Ivana Pantelić, « Yugoslav female partisans in World War II », Cahiers balkaniques [En
ligne], 41 | 2013, mis en ligne le 19 mai 2013, consulté le 17 novembre 2014. URL : http://
ceb.revues.org/3971 ; DOI : 10.4000/ceb.3971
Référence papier
Ivana Pantelić, « Yugoslav female partisans in World War II », Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | -1,
239-250.
Droits d’auteur
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
8
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
©Inalco
Résumés
Women public engagement, during the war, was very important for process of emancipation
in post war Yugoslavia. This was first time that women joined military forces, especially
combat unites. In addition to the Soviet partisan units that from 1941 sprang up over the
large territories under the German occupation and the great French resistance, the two largest
guerrilla forces in Europe operated in the Balkans: the communist movement in Yugoslavia
and The Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS). The Yugoslav Partisans and the ELAS
were not only fighting for liberation from the occupier, but they also began the Communist
Revolution. In addition to establishing the socialist system following the model of the Soviet
Republic, one goal was to legalize gender equality and to accelerate the emancipation of
women. During the war female partisans (partizanke) gained their role in the new society, the
role that would, in the ideal new society after the war, be secured for the entire female gender.
By the end of 1941, People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia had accepted a new concept of
warfare: the establishment of highly mobile proletarian brigades in which women constituted
a significant part of the medical corps. In early 1942, however, the partisan leadership decided
to make combat roles officially available to women. During the war women were not able
to progress to the higher command or political positions in the military. Also, there were no
women in the top ranks of the Communist Party leadership (Politburo). Women were indeed
in symbolic numbers chosen to the highest institutions of the Partisan state. A body that gave
an opportunity to women to self-organize politically and through this to activate as many
women as possible was the Women's Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia (Antifašistički front
žena Jugoslavije – AFŽJ). AFŽJ held its first conference in Bosanski Petrovac (northwestern
Bosnia) on 5–7 December 1942.
The fact that women, despite the aspirations of the Party to win them over, and in spite of
customized organizational structure, were poorly represented in the membership of the Party
and its leadership, limited the participation of women during the war. Although they were not
equally represented in political parties and the partisan institutions of the state, partizanke were
more proportionally represented in People's Liberation Army than in the most other similar
armies, and won more of the highest awards than female members of the Red Army.
Les femmes partisanes yougoslaves pendant la Seconde Guerre
mondiale
L'engagement public des femmes pendant la Guerre a été très important pour le processus
de leur émancipation dans la Yougoslavie de l'après-guerre. Pour la première fois des
femmes rejoignirent les forces armées, spécialement des unités de combat. En plus des
unités soviétiques de partisans qui, à partir de 1941, surgirent sur de larges territoires sous
occupation allemande et de l'importante résistance française, les deux plus grandes forces
de guérillas qui ont opéré en Europe furent le mouvement communiste en Yougoslavie et
l'Armée de Libération populaire grecque (ELAS). Les Partisans yougoslaves et l'ELAS ne
luttaient pas seulement contre l'occupant, ils commençaient aussi une révolution communiste.
En plus d'établir un système socialiste selon le modèle soviétique, l'un de leurs buts était de
proclamer l'égalité des sexes et d'accélérer l'émancipation des femmes. Les femmes partisanes
(Partizanke) obtinrent un rôle dans la société, rôle qui serait dans la société idéale nouvelle de
l'après-guerre, assuré à toutes les femmes. À la fin de 1941, l'Armée populaire de Libération
Yougoslave avait adopté une nouvelle tactique : la création de brigades prolétariennes très
mobiles dans lesquelles les femmes constituaient une part importante du personnel médical.
Au début de 1942 cependant, les dirigeants des partisans acceptèrent de donner des postes
de combat aux femmes. Pendant la guerre, les femmes n'ont pu atteindre des postes élevés
dans l'armée ni en politique. Il n'y eut pas non plus de femmes dans les postes les plus élevés
de la hiérarchie du Parti communiste (Politburo). Les femmes étaient choisies pour figurer
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
9
�Yugoslav female partisans in World War II
symboliquement dans les hautes institutions de l'État partisan. Mais le Front antifasciste des
Femmes de Yougoslavie qui tint sa première Conférence à Bosanski Petrovac (NW de la
Bosnie) les 5–7 décembre 1942 leur a donné la possibilité de s'auto-organiser politiquement
et d'éveiller ainsi le plus grand nombre de femmes.
Le fait que des femmes, malgré le désir du Parti de les attirer à lui, et en dépit de structures
d'organisation personnalisées, ont été pauvrement représentées parmi les membres du Parti
et sa direction limita la participation féminine pendant la Guerre. Mais bien qu’inégalement
représentées dans les partis politiques et les institutions partisanes de l'État, les partizanke ont
été proportionnellement plus représentées dans l'Armée de Libération populaire que dans la
plupart des armées similaires et ont gagné plus de médailles et récompenses élevées que les
femmes de l'Armée rouge.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : femmes-partisans, femmes au front, femmes dans le Parti Communiste,
émancipation des femmes
Keywords : women-partisan, women on the front, women in the Communist Party,
women emancipation, Second World War, women history
Клучни зборови : Жени отпорни, Жените на предната, Жените во
Комунистичката партија, Зајакнување на женитем, Југославија, Втората
светска војна, Историја, Историјата на жените
Anahtar Kelimeler : Kadın-partizan, Savaşında Kadın, Komünist Parti kadınları,
Kadınların güçlendirilmesi, Yugoslavya, Ilk Dünya Savaşı, Tarih, Kadın Tarihi
Λέξεις-κλειδιά : Ανταρτίνες, Γυναίκες στο μέτωπο, Γυναίκες στο Κομμουνιστικό
κόμμα, Χειραφέτηση των γυναικών, Γιουγκοσλαβία, Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος
Πόλεμος, Ιστορία, Ιστορία των γυναικών
Territoires : Yougoslavie
Périodes & Événements : guerre mondiale (1939-1945)
Domaines : Histoire, Histoire des femmes
Glossaire : AFŽJ, NOVJ, KPJ, NKOJ, SKOJ, ELAS
Notes de l’auteur
This text is written within the project Serbian society in the Yugoslav state in the 20th century:
between democracy and dictatorship (No. 177016) of the Ministry of Education and Science
of the Republic of Serbia.
Cahiers balkaniques, 41 | 2013
10
�
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Yugoslav female partisans in World War II - Ivana Pantelić
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Partizanke, Jugoslavija, Drugi svjetski rat
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Cahiers balkaniques
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Ivana Pantelić
Partisan women
World War II
Yugoslavia