Gender-Conditioned Reconstruction of Society in Slavonia After World War I in the context of the workers’ press

Antropologija, 2020

The position of female workers from the middle of the 19th century, when they took a more active role in the world of work, was marked with double oppression, both gender-and class-conditioned. After World War I there was a strong conviction that legal framework would be changed and that it would enable women to have an equal social and political status. Although this did not happen, women still participated in the public domain. They were particularly active in the working sphere, which provided them with a more active social role, especially when it came to numerous strikes which were primarily a response to economic circumstances or demands for collective agreements and better working conditions. Within this context, the aim of the paper is to analyse the position of female workers in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, placing special emphasis on their social status and strikes as a means of gender and class emancipation. This analysis is conducted within the frameworks of microhistory and comparative history in order to create a thesis that women's labour movement, influenced by communist ideas, was an important component of the Yugo-slav labour movement in the interwar years, and that it had an impact on the formation and strengthening of the class and gender awareness in Yugoslav female workers.

2016

Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2022

Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, Vol. 9, 2015 , 2015

zarah-ceu.org, 2023

The magazine Makedonka, an official organ of the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF) of Macedonia, was issued in the period 1944-1952. Published by a state-building mass organization, it served as a medium that propagated the party views with the goal of the ‘top-down’ women’s emancipation in socialist Macedonia. In the period between 1944 and 1946, the magazine linked the political emancipation of women with the heroism of their choice to join the National Liberation Struggle (1941-1945). In this ‘heroic stage’ of WAF, antifascism was presented as the major ideological predisposition of politically aware women. In the issues of the magazine published after 1947, the ‘heroic stage’ was gradually abandoned, and the ‘shock worker’s stage’ of WAF moved to the forefront. Then, women’s political emancipation was linked to women’s mass participation in voluntary work actions, and the inclusion of women in different economic sectors was heavily stimulated. The chief political messages of the magazine during this stage, with respect to achieving equality, consisted of depictions of women as workers at workplaces that used to employ only men. In this blog post, I reflect on the magazine as a source for the political representation of women in the context of a planned economy. Three types of articles were most interesting for me in this endeavor: political speeches by WAF officials, reportages from the workers’ brigades, and stylized profiles of women workers.

2015

The article outlines the challenges for literatures created in ”small” languages. The only chance for such cultures to emerge from literary obscurity is to be translated into a ”big” language, a lingua franca of an international influence. This phenomenon is well illustrated by the spectacular Bibliography of Books by Female Authors in Yugoslavia, published by the Federation of Women with University Education in 1936 in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The book, a unique and remarkable feminist project of interwar Yugoslavia, was conceived to defy the Slavica non leguntur statement (the Slavic languages are not read [world-wide]). It features the intellectual achievement of women from South-Eastern Europe. This first discussion of Bibliography, which was composed in four languages: Serbian, Slovene, Croatian and French, presents its structure, aims and premises in a wider feminist context of interwar Yugoslavia

Comparative Southeast European Studies

The authors address working class women’s activism in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on archives produced at both factory and municipal levels by local društva žena or aktivi žena (women’s societies/sections) in the industrial town of Varaždin, Croatia. Their critical exploration of archival sources produced between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s has enabled the authors to challenge dominant interpretations of women’s activism during state socialism, particularly the idea that no relevant activism existed after the dissolution of the Antifascist Women’s Front (AFŽ) in 1953. To counter that view the authors highlight the continuities between the AFŽ and subsequent women’s organizations, the Union of Women’s Societies (SŽD) and the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ), in terms both of discursive narratives and of biographical trajectories. They argue that local archival collections provide new and differentiated insights into past gender and labour conflicts and into ...