UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Saturday 18 February 12:00 – 1:30: Panel J2: Inclusion and Exclusion During World War II

Barbara Wiesinger (University of Salzburg): ‘The "right to fight"?: women partisans in the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, 1941-1945’

My paper, which is based on research for my Ph. D. thesis, addresses women's inclusion in and exclusion from the Yugoslav partisan movement.

Officially, the National Liberation Army (NLA) boasted 100.000 women partisans. Propaganda claimed that the partisans' revolutionary war had brought about female emancipation and facilitated the emergence of a >new woman<, who participated on equal terms with men in the war and the building of socialism.

My analysis of the movement's documents and veterans' life stories showed very different results:

* Women were accepted into the NLA purely out of military necessity. They became fighters only after long struggles within the resistance movement.

* Women soldiers were habitually discriminated against and denied access to leading positions.

* When women won acknowledgement as resistance activists, they were re-defined as male. Emphasizing supposedly >female< qualities, on the other hand, ensured the continuity of traditional gender roles.

* The emergence of a practically autonomous women's organization, the AFŽ, was cut short by the CPY.

* Even though women gained formal legal equality after the war, they were not recognized as political subjects in their own right.

In my paper I will focus on inclusion/exclusion of women in/from the NLA: recruitment policy, women's roles in the army (medical service vs. combat) and their status in reality and propaganda. I argue that women's participation in the partisan war was not an act of emancipation, even though on the surface it challenged gender stereotypes. It was rather an act of self-defence in a cruel war imposed on the Yugoslav peoples by the Third Reich and its allies. Also, women's formal emancipation after the communists’ rise to power was not a self-determined political practice and did not lead to a fundamental change in conceptions of gender roles in Yugoslav society.