Women and Yugoslav Partisans
A History of World War II Resistance

This book focuses on the mass participation of women in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance during World War II.

Jelena Batini? (Author)

9781107091078, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 May 2015

298 pages, 10 b/w illus. 1 map 2 tables
23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.56 kg

'[Batini?] is sympathetic to her subject matter but also dispassionate and objective; she highlights the many contradictions and ambiguities that were involved in the Partisans' revolutionary mobilization of women in a highly patriarchal society. The combination of rigorous methodology and extensive research based on archival and other primary sources, as well as an impressive mastery of the literature, comes together splendidly: this book is essential reading for anyone interested in either gender or World War II in Yugoslavia.' Marko Attila Hoare, Slavic Review

This book focuses on one of the most remarkable phenomena of World War II: the mass participation of women, including numerous female combatants, in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. Drawing on an array of sources - archival documents of the Communist Party and Partisan army, wartime press, Partisan folklore, participant reminiscences, and Yugoslav literature and cinematography - this study explores the history and postwar memory of the phenomenon. More broadly, it is concerned with changes in gender norms caused by the war, revolution, and establishment of the communist regime that claimed to have abolished inequality between the sexes. The first archive-based study on the subject, Women and Yugoslav Partisans uncovers a complex gender system in which revolutionary egalitarianism and peasant tradition interwove in unexpected ways.

Introduction
1. 'To the people, she was a character from folk poetry': the party's mobilizing rhetoric
2. The 'organized women': developing the AFW
3. The heroic and the mundane: women in the units
4. The personal as a site of party intervention: privacy and sexuality
5. After the war was over: legacy
Concluding remarks.

Subject Areas: Military history [HBW], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]