Legacies of the Second World War in Croatian Cultural Memory: Women as Seen through the Media

Abstract

This article shows how the model of the ideal patriotic woman, established through propaganda activities between two competitive ideologies in Croatia during the Second World War, have been transformed and adapted to accommodate diverse genres of memory culture from 1945 until the present day. In order to indicate the inter-relation of media-ideological constructs and self-definition, the authors have compared cultural representation models of ‘acceptable’ and ‘obnoxious’ females in war time with ethnographical interviews conducted with women at the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Antifasisticki front žena (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front, AFŽ) Istrian Conference in 2004.