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I have a confession to make. It was impossible for me in 1992 to read the work presently under review fairly, within its own time frame of 1941-1945. Regardless of how I struggled to focus, I kept thinking about the refugees from the former Yugoslavia with whom I worked in Southern Hungary, in the camp at Nagyatad, earlier this year. I kept thinking about the good friends and colleagues and about the tragedy of their country in which I traveled much and dearly love. And, in spite of my effort to concentrate, I kept thinking of the colleague who, instead of reading her paper about the women's movement in Yugoslavia at a conference we were attending, in tears talked about the grotesque futility of description and analysis while blood is flowing amid madness.
Barbara Jancar-Webster, professor of political science at the State University of New York at Brockport, dedicates her book to the women partisans of Yugoslavia whose participation in the National Liberation Movement between 1941 and 1945 "is one of the most significant events in modern history" that has been overlooked by Western scholars (p.1).
More so than in any other country, Yugoslav women played a crucial role "in the achievement of victory over an occupying enemy and the realization of a Communist state" (ibid). While communist partisan forces recognized the importance of women's role in the period between 1941 and 1945 by giving women highest official commendations, and while "for many women who fought in the war it was the decisive factor in the liberation of Yugoslavian women, opening the door permanently to women's equal participation with men in the building of a new Yugoslavia," from the late 1970s these official assumptions have been questioned by a contemporary generation of Yugoslav women who maintain that, "war or no war, women are no more liberated in Yugoslavia than they are in the Western "capitalist" countries. In order for liberation to take place in any society, there must be sweeping changes in the existing patriarchal order" (p. 2). For her theoretical framework Jancar-Webster combines Kathryn Sklar's and Gerda Lerner's separately developed approaches that mainly look at the "placement of women's history within human specific and gender-specific experiences" (p. 2).
The focal point of the study is "that the war years do not represent a revolution in the Yugoslav woman's experience but rather a foreshortening of the process of consciousness development" (p. 4). While the author relies on a number of different sources, most of her material for the present study are from published Yugoslav sources, or, as she tells us, from "impressive collections of documents, compiled by every republic, pertaining to women's role in the war" (p. 4). She also remarks that, because of "administrative formalities" --so very familiar to most of who did research in pre-1989 Eastern Europe and the Balkans--wartime archives were not available to her. In addition to secondary sources, and after a ten-part questionnaire in preparation for the follow-up encounter --with the help of the Women's Conference of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Veteran's Association-- she interviewed 19 leading women partisans, four Croatian, four Serbian, five Macedonian, and six Slovenian. Because of the bad weather she was not able to interview the surviving women partisans of Montenegro.
Following the introductions by the editors of the series and the author, the study is divided into six chapters. The first chapter gives us an overview of women's place in the economy, rural and urban culture, and formal organizations in Yugoslavia before the Second World War. Jancar-Webster writes about the very fragile national unity in the interwar period and how the nationalist question appeared to be present in the women's organizations and ideologies that were saturated with "righting the nationalist wrongs" (Ch. 1, ff). Most of the partisans came from traditional rural rather than industrial modernizing urban culture of Yugoslavia (p. 29). Particularly important is the background information Jancar-Webster gives us on the military tradition of the Serbian, Montenegran, and Macedonian women in history. For instance the kult majke, or cult of motherhood "...permitted women a large degree of autonomy in the home and allowed them to go to dress in men's clothes and go to war" among the Montenegrans (p. 29); also, Serbian women's history of fighting the marauding Turkish troops for centuries; and the secret women's societies in Ohrid, Struga, and elsewhere of Macedonian women, along with their strong military tradition (p. 30).
In the second chapter the author tells us about the heterogeneous group of the women partisans. There were, according to official records, two million women participants in the Yugoslav partisan cause, a figure that is 12 percent of the pre-war population (pp. 46-47). Seventy percent were under the age of 20 (p. 48); they came from all over the country, representing all nationalities, and numerous occupations, and the majority were from peasant backgrounds (p. 49). In Chapters Three, Four, and Five the role of women in the Partisan Army, the Yugoslav Communist Party, and the National Liberation Movement, respectively, are discussed. Finally, Jancar-Webster looks in Chapter Six "The Impact of the Revolution." She finds that, although women achieved some major economic and legal gains during the war, for a number of reasons "virtually no further improvement in Yugoslav women's status occurred after the war" (p. 185).
According to other students of Yugoslav peasant life too, the most radical departure from the traditional position of village women was brought about by the Second World War. Trouton (1952) for example, noted that the absence of men during the war increased women's responsibilities as well as their independence; yet this alone would not have produced lasting change. It happened before, without changing women's status. Trouton attributes the change to the Partisan Movement which emphasized equal right as a working reality out of necessity and not as an abstract doctrine. Mitrovic-Dzilas (1944) shares this notion: "before any laws were written, women were already taking part in making laws... no one any longer drove women out of doors while men were consulting." Halpern, however, does not find this to be the case shortly after World War Two in Yugoslavia. While he contends that in the domestic sphere women have been participating more in the discussion of household budget and plans for the future, men are still regarded as superior. He offers a rather telling example of women's status in the public domain. In a 1953 election a woman candidate lost by an overwhelming majority because "most people both in the village and in the town thought that women have no place in politics" (Halpern, 1967:275). First-Dilic (1974) contends that in rural Yugoslavia both in the private and socialist farms the role of women was that of substitution. This is precisely what Louisa Rayner (1957) found immediately after the Second World War, when some of the men returned from the front they took their "rightful places" in the village society. Presumably, here traditional forces and relationships were at work. Then, during the socialist regime, like under any totalitarian regime, women were not merely more repressed than men, but all citizens became subordinated vis-à-vis the state. And, as among others, de Riencourt (1974:372) argues, an equality of sorts was established but not because women's status was elevated but because men's status was suppressed.
There are some problems with Jancar-Webster's study; minor flaws, like typos such as "Serbanization" (p.14); there is one imprecise date like 1868 instead of 1867 for the Ausgleich that created the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (p. 14). However, the leading questions (particularly numbers 2, 6, 8, 10 ) of the 10 part-questionnaire that was completed by the women partisans before the interview took place constitute a more serious problem. Even though a former partisan fighter Sasa Javorina told Jancar-Webster (p. 49) that she joined the partisan movement "by instinct," I have great difficulties with such interpretive passages by the political scientist as "Why did these peasants take up arms? The basic answer is simple: because of instinct. The war was being fought in their villages and fields. Like their ancestors, they had no choice but to take up arms and defend their homes" (p. 45). In spite of these problems, Jancar-Webster's work is a significant addition to studies of women in war and the Balkans, and could be used as an upper-level undergraduate text for women's studies, gender, history and society of the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
The most valuable aspect of the work is the women partisans' voices and stories. They made me remember the voices and stories and faces of the refugee women in Hungary during the summer of 1992. Together, they compelled me to recall Bulatovic's Hero on a Donkey, particularly when he equates war with pornography. Indeed, like pornography, war (and revolution also) engage women's participation, both manipulate, exploit and denigrate, but ultimately do not elevate women's public status in their society.
References
Bulatovic, Miodrag
1965 Hero on a Donkey. New York:Johnson
Halpern, Joel
1964 A Serbian Village. New York:Harper-Colophon
Mitrovis-Dzilas, Mitra
1944 About the women's antifascist front, In: Zena Danas, 9:44
de Riencourt, Amaury
1974 Sex and Power in History. New York:McKay
Rayner, Louisa
1957 Women in a village. London:Heinemann
Trouton, Ruth
1975 Peasant Renaissance in Yugoslavia 1900-1950. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press.
Posted:12/24/96
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