Peasant Women and Women's Rights in Yugoslavia, 1930s–1950s: Seeking Peasant Women’s Voices

• In Event: Political Thought, Memory, and Biographies from Women’s Intellectual History in East Central Europe

Abstract

While historians of Yugoslavia have examined the uneasy alliance between peasants and communists (Bokovoy, 1998), the relationship between Partisans and the peasantry (Batinić, 2015), and the Antifascist Women's Front’s approach to collectivization (Simić, 2018), women’s rights discourses concerning peasant women remain largely unexplored from the perspective of the history of political thought. Even less attention has been given to the voices of peasant women themselves, hence erased from our historical memory.
Building on existing scholarship, this paper draws on a range of published and archival sources to examine peasant women’s voices in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. It asks: How can we research peasant women’s voices? What sources are available? What methodological approaches are most effective? How can the history of political thought contribute to this inquiry, and vice-versa? The paper argues that when we explore the history of political thought from the perspective of peasant women, traditional concepts such as the state or nation recede into the background, while other concepts—such as abortion, guilt, and family—emerge as central.

Author

• Isidora Grubacki, Inst of Contemporary History (Slovenia)