Women and Yugoslav Partisans

By: Jelena Batinić

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Synopsis: 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.