The Women's Movement in Yugoslavia: The Case of the Conference for the Social Activity of Women in Croatia, 1965-1974

Abstract

Ever since the European socialist labor movement took up the cause of female emancipation, Marxist parties have incorporated special women's commissions or caucuses. Those Marxist parties that have come into power since 1917 have continued this part of the traditional commitment to women's liberation. In the Soviet Union and East Europe there are official women's organizations of varying visibility. But western feminists tend to doubt that these actually represent women's movements. 1 After all, they exist only under the aegis of male-elite, oneparty regimes. These regimes allow only one view-the so-called Marxist view-of the woman question, that women's emancipation is possible only after the revolutionary working class achieves the abolition of private property, freeing women for work and economic independence. Since women's emancipation has already been achieved, by definition, what is the purpose of women's organizations in countries where the workers' vanguard party, the Communist Party, has come to power? Indeed, even in those countries of East Europe that had women's movements prior to revolution or sovietization, women's organizations seem to have represented women less than they served the governments' needs: to mobilize women into an expanded labor force; to support disarmament or selected international revolutionary movements; to celebrate and legitimize the state. At the same time, speaking directly for or about women is limited in the way all non-Party organizations are limited: nothing may be said or done that can be construed as helping the enemies of socialism, or as threatening Party control. Although the Party has led the working class to power, it still must defend this power against western imperialism, in all its guises, through unity behind the Party. The loyalty of nonParty organizations is maintained through simultaneous membership of a portion of their leaders in the Party itself and through police vigilance. Regardless of how useful Marxist theory may be for feminists elsewhere, under these conditions it serves in the socialist countries to obscure genuine discussion. Published statements by women's organizations are often litanies of citations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. One essential issue that they avoid is the relationship between men and women in familiestheir roles in the household-since this is bourgeois feminism, another guise of western imperialism. Added to the difficulties faced by women who want to work on behalf of women in these countries, official pronouncements notwithstanding, is women's overall condition of powerlessness. Women are mostly in badly paid, gender-determined jobs, are simultaneously personally responsible for domestic labor and child-raising, and in backward circumstances at that, and they have little time or energy to better themselves as individuals or as a group. Nevertheless, it is precisely this condition that increasingly characterizes women in industrial countries the world over. Women in the West have been driven to fight for themselves, and women in East Europe and the Soviet Union can be expected to do the same. Just because their societies are not pluralist does not necessarily mean that women cannot develop their own strategies. Above and beyond laws guaranteeing equal rights in these countries, in the past decade there have been many legal changes that far outstrip those in most capitalist countries.