Gender, Revolution, and War: The Mobilization of Women in the Yugoslav Partisan Resistance During World War II

Front Cover
Stanford University, 2009 - Collective memory - 740 pages
"The mass participation of women in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Second World War. According to official figures, by the end of the war more than two million women had been involved in the Partisan movement. Over 100,000 served as combatants in the Partisan army - a degree of female military involvement unprecedented and unrepeated in the region, and particularly unrivaled elsewhere. Why and how did the Partisans recruit women? What made these women - the vast majority of them peasants from underdeveloped regions with strong patriarchal traditions - decide to take up arms? More intriguing still: what made their transformation into warriors acceptable to the peasant-filled Partisan ranks? How were they integrated into the movement and how were their relations with men regulated? What images emerged to represent their experience and role? Last but not least, what was the legacy of women's mass military and political mobilization in the region? To try to answer these questions, this study explores the history and postwar memory of the phenomenon. It is, more broadly, concerned with the changes in gender norms and values caused by the war, revolution, and the establishment of the communist regime, which claimed to have solved the 'woman question' and instituted equality between the sexes"--Introduction.

From inside the book

Contents

Mobilizing Rhetoric
30
Developing the Antifascist Front of Women
95
Women in the Units
160
Copyright

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