Fascism is aggressively pounding on our door; all that remains is for it to break through. The antifascist struggle is no longer merely a matter of history, but increasingly one of the present day, said Nađa Bobičić, literary critic and socialist feminist from Belgrade, and Nataša Nelević, theatre critic, writer and feminist theorist from Podgorica. In the PROUDCAST of the Centre for Civic Education (CCE), they spoke with Željka Zvicer, Programme Associate, about the legacy of the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ), its erasure from collective memory, the extent to which women in contemporary politics are genuine heirs to that struggle, and how women should fight for their positions.
The AFŽ was founded on 6 December 1942 in Bosanski Petrovac, in the midst of the war, as an integral part of the antifascist struggle rather than as a separate women’s organisation. Its legacy demonstrates that women’s rights were not granted, but won through political struggle, organisation and the mass participation of women in social change.
Nataša Nelević recalled that in Montenegro, where the first social democratic ideas emerged in Boka, women’s path towards equality was also gradual. “When you follow their biographies, you see something both moving and inspiring – young women who initially joined the Party because of their brothers, boyfriends or husbands, in order to help them, sometimes simply by standing guard. Then, little by little, throughout the 1930s and above all through their participation in the struggle, they increasingly stood on their own feet and became who they were,” she explained, noting that even the Communist Party, despite its ideology of equality, never completely overcame certain reservations towards women.
Nađa Bobičić pointed out that the struggle for women’s equality also had a strong interwar history. “At the Fifth National Conference of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1940, Vida Tomšič, inspired by Clara Zetkin and the European communist movements of the time, drafted a programme with four key demands – equal status for children born within and outside marriage, the right to divorce, full legal equality, including the right to vote, and labour rights, meaning the possibility for women to work in all professions, as a large number of occupations were closed to them at the time,” she said.
She also recalled the scale of the movement, which was later significantly suppressed in collective memory through revisionism. “This was a mass mobilisation – around one hundred thousand women fighters and more than two million women involved across Yugoslavia, more than in France or Britain. When women from Yugoslavia went to work in France in the 1960s, they could not open a bank account there on their own, while women here already had that right,” she emphasised. “My grandmother was not a victim. These were women who took action and said no to fascism,” Bobičić added.
The AFŽ was dissolved in 1953, on the grounds that the issue of women’s equality had been institutionally resolved, but Bobičić and Nelević caution that this was a multilayered process. “I would not say that the Party was afraid that the AFŽ might slip out of its control. Rather, it was a compromise – it was deemed cheaper for some women to return to the private sphere than to build all the promised kindergartens, laundries and public kitchens,” Nelević said. She also recalled that many ideas aimed at socialising work traditionally performed by women were never implemented, while domestic violence remained outside the focus of institutions for a long time. Bobičić added that the dissolution of the AFŽ did not mark the end of women’s organising, as women continued their grassroots work and their struggle to change legislation.
The two guests argue that the legacy of the AFŽ is today almost entirely unknown to younger generations and that such oblivion is no coincidence. “Since the 1990s, a counter-revolution was being prepared – widespread plunder, war crimes, the destruction of common property, accompanied by a revisionist narrative in which the Ustaše, Chetniks and Nedić’s followers are glorified while the antifascist past is concealed,” Bobičić stated. In response to the suppression of this legacy, Nelević added, feminists in Ljubljana have launched an initiative to establish a museum dedicated to the shared heritage of Yugoslav antifascist women. She recalled that women’s political engagement was marginalised even within the antifascist movement itself. “In all these contexts, there is always a tendency to belittle and privatise women’s political engagement. This also happened under socialism whenever women tried to fight for something more difficult to achieve,” she said.
Speaking about continuity with contemporary feminist movements, Bobičić highlighted the student protests in Serbia as an example, where the participation of female students through organisation, care work and everyday work on the ground is reminiscent of the often routine and unglamorous work carried out by AFŽ activists. She also considers Clara Zetkin’s lesson particularly important: “If the left does not reach out to women, sooner or later the right will win them over, because it is very pragmatic in doing so.”
The guests also warned that a larger number of women in senior positions is not, in itself, proof of genuine equality. “I do not see that as evidence of equality. These are the individual successes of particular women, and the claim that they serve as an example to others is actually misleading, because a woman who has not had access to education cannot recognise herself in the success of a woman who has been privileged,” Nelević said. Bobičić stressed that this is a structural issue. “Either we want a society in which a small number of people hold power and wealth, in which case we can also be satisfied that, for example, Margaret Thatcher was a prime minister, or we want a society in which everyone has a dignified life, in which case women will naturally be represented in all positions,” she explained.
Reflecting on the involvement of new generations of women in politics, Nelević warned that their presence in political parties often remains at the level of political window dressing, without genuine access to centres of decision-making. “I see them, for example, whenever a political leader appears – there are always five or six young women around him. I assume they are already there, that they have entered politics, but it seems to me that this is actually a trend of young women entering politics largely at the symbolic level,” she said. Bobičić believes that feminists themselves need to engage more actively with young women about what political participation could mean for them. “The problem is that almost none of the women who enter political parties are feminists, and once they join, they pretend that they are. That is why I believe feminists in particular should talk to young women about what politics could be for them,” Bobičić concluded.
The full episode is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKWekQKBqdE
This PROUDCAST was jointly produced by the CCE and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES).
Maja Marinović, Programme Associate