“We were learning a feminist language. At the beginning, I was always rethinking my sentences, asking myself the question: ‘what would this mean in the vocabulary of feminism?’ It was not just words we were translating, it was thoughts”. This is how Vera Litričin , an ophthalmologist, summarised her experience of her first encounter with the feminist group taking its first steps in Belgrade . 1 Language, concepts and ideology were the key elements to a new feminism emerging in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s. The late 1960s were boiling with women wanting to speak up, to influence politics and to take charge of their lives. By no means should this suggest that there was nothing between the 1960s and the first moments of feminism in the nineteenth century, but the protest spirit of the 1960s and the feminist disappointment with these movements of the 1960s mobilised feminist thought and feminist activism. 2 In Yugoslavia, it was a couple of decades into socialism when a handful of intellectual women out in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb began to rethink and challenge the socialist project of women’s emancipation.
In the mid-1970s, the universities in Zagreb and Ljubljana and the students’ cultural centres in Belgrade and Ljubljana offered space for the groups which were called Žena i društvo [Woman and Society] . The group had a “very traditional name, but still, we were feminists from the beginning”—said Biljana Kašić , a sociologist member of the group from Zagreb, who studied earlier in Belgrade and later taught at the University of Rijeka. This name itself tells us a lot about the place of this group within the Yugoslav political and intellectual scene. The phenomenon which is referred to here mostly as the new Yugoslav feminism—sometimes called by the members neofeminizam, that is “new feminism”, a name, however, not acknowledged by all the members of the group—took a critical, counter-discursive, dissenting stance within the Yugoslav system. The new Yugoslav feminism targeted the proclaimed, yet to them, unfulfilled equality of women in Yugoslavia. They argued from a feminist base, inspired and infused by critical Marxism , post-structuralist French feminism, new theories in psychology, anthropology and sociology, but also referring to the Yugoslav partisan tradition as an emancipatory ideology for women. The arguments took shape first in academic work, the arts and literature, relatively quickly reaching the popular mass media and turning into activism.
This research places itself within the scholarship which treats feminism, similar to the artistic counterculture in Western capitalisms from the 1960s on, as dissent . While acknowledging that dissidence in the oppressive regimes of the Soviet Bloc had different stakes and different limitations, one cannot think of East European socialisms in terms of the pure binaries of state vs. individual, collaboration and resistance. Reading through the history of these movements and the theoretical implications arising from that, I base my analysis on the questioning of the binary and focus on the tensions and balance within the new Yugoslav feminist discourse. Therefore, my claim is that through rereading concepts and meanings, integrating ideologies and theories from “Western” feminisms and through transfer creating their own version, new Yugoslav feminism was cooperating with the state and criticising it at the same time.
With the longest feminist history in Eastern Europe between the Second World War (hereinafter WWII) and the fall of state socialism , Yugoslavia offers a case study where the socialist state was challenged based on one of its biggest promises, the equality of women. It was exactly this promise that placed new Yugoslav feminism at the crossroads of discourses. In contrast to Western capitalist societies, where feminism directly clashed with the state about women’s emancipation and therefore clearly appeared as dissent, in Eastern Europe the state guaranteed many of the rights which the North American and West European feminist groups were fighting for. 3 In the meantime, new Yugoslav feminism was a counter-discourse vis-à-vis the newly emerging oppositional discourses in Yugoslavia too. The oppositional groups either refused to discuss women’s rights in search of an agenda of liberal democracy which disregards difference or, with a bio/ethno-nationalistic agenda, propagated the reversal of the supposedly “unnatural” and forced emancipation of women.
A Brief Overview of the Events, Forums and Members of the New Yugoslav Feminism
The story begins in the early 1970s: at this point, what we find in the open are journal publications, and what we find backstage are a handful of young women and a few university professors following the Western feminist movement, beginning to compare the situation in their own country and looking for ways in which their insights could be communicated resulting in change and not punishment. As we can see from the interviews and from their biographies, these women came from a relatively homogeneous social background and, with a few exceptions, were from the same generation. It was a generation born after the war , from mothers who had a first-hand war experience and very often were themselves active participants of the partisan movement. Unlike their mothers, these women were puzzled by the contradiction between the promise of the regime and their own experience of their “emancipation”, the lives of their mothers who were supposedly equal to their fathers and the women around them, who on the level of discourse were equal to men. 4 Academia seemed to be a relatively safe space for the first tentative publications about “what is happening to American women”. 5 Also, because of the influence of some professors and the openness of some women officials in the state women’s organisation , the Konferencija za društvenu aktivnost žena [Conference for the Social Participation of Women], that is the KDAŽ , some of the young women and men could participate in the conferences and editorial work of the journal Žena [Woman].
The array of journals accepting feminist pieces expanded relatively quickly. From 1975 on, it included Pitanja [Questions], Naše teme [Our topics], Argumenti [Arguments], Ideje [Ideas], Socijalizam u svetu [Socialism in the world], Dometi [Scopes], Republika [Republic], Književnost [Literature], and in the 1980s, Problemi [Problems] in Slovenia. The student journals, Mladina [Youth] in Ljubljana and Student and Vidici [Views] in Belgrade , also provided important forums for new feminist discussions, which is not by accident: the youth organisations enjoyed relative freedom from state control in their activities. 6
With time, the feminist articles reached a wider audience through newspapers and weeklies, such as NIN [Nedjeljne informativne novine—Weekly informative news], Danas [Today], Start , as well as women’s magazines, such as Bazar published in Belgrade, Svijet [World] in Zagreb and Jana in Ljubljana . Naša žena [Our woman], another print medium in Ljubljana, was a magazine between the more serious Žena and the popular women’s magazines. The journalist, writer and sociologist Slavenka Drakulić , the sociologist Vesna Pusić , the journalist (sociologist and psychologist by training) Vesna Kesić and Sofija Trivunac , a psychologist from Belgrade, were frequent authors of these popularised articles about serious feminist issues. Helping the spread and exchange of feminist ideas, the media space was open for contributors from all of Yugoslavia and the main papers were also accessible throughout the territory of the whole country.
The institutional framework was provided partly by the youth organisations also publishing Student and Vidici, and partly by the universities in Zagreb and Ljubljana : the groups called Žena i društvo were part of the sociology departments of these universities. In Belgrade , the most important stronghold of new feminism was the SKC , the Students’ Cultural Centre, where the director of the Gallery of the SKC, later the director of the whole institution, was Dunja Blažević . A group of young and talented curators, such as Biljana Tomić and Bojana Pejić, met here with university students and later scholars and professionals such as the sociologist Žarana Papić , the psychologist Sofija Trivunac, the construction engineer Sonja Drljević and the journalist Lina Vušković . Under the auspices of the SKC, Papić, Blažević, the writer and film-maker Jasmina Tešanović and Nada Ler-Sofronić , the only member of the new Yugoslav feminist circles from Sarajevo , arranged the first international feminist conference in Yugoslavia in 1978. Many women joined the feminist circles after they had attended the conference. The programme organiser of the SKC, Dragica Vukadinović , helped with the conference and made many other feminist events at the SKC possible. This famous and canonical conference, however, was preceded by many publications (since 1972), a lot of brainstorming, as well as events including public forums, open discussions, exhibitions and literary readings, and even feminist presentations at KDAŽ organised conferences, starting in 1976 in Portorož . 7
At the beginning, Belgrade and Zagreb were the most active venues, but the only participant from Sarajevo, Ler-Sofronić, became one of the most prolific and creative authors of scholarly work. The Ljubljana scene joined the other two Žena i društvo groups later, in the early 1980s. Perhaps because of the later awakening of the group, it was more complex in the sense that it found a niche both at the university and at the ŠKUC , the students’ centre in Ljubljana .
The intense interpersonal exchange throughout the member states and the connections with the international feminist scene were possible partly due to the fact that many women studied and worked in different cities. For example, Rada Iveković, Biljana Kašić and Dunja Blažević studied both in Zagreb and Belgrade . Silva Mežnarić taught at both the University of Zagreb and the University of Ljubljana. The women in the group were friends, who visited and hosted each other in the other cities. Nada Popović-Perišić’s d...