In 2006, Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur published an edited volume dedicated to Central and Eastern Europe's turbulent twentieth century. The volume delves into revolutions, conflicts, and wars as well as some of their trusty entourage, such as brutal repressions against civilians, forced movements of populations, scarcity of food, and diseases. According to the two editors, the assumed dichotomy between the male-dominated battlefront and the female-dominated home front was nowhere more often violated than in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe.¹ In other words, as explained by Margaret Randolph Higgonet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz in another influential edited volume, the realities generated by war, particularly the two world wars, “contradicted the myth that war compels men to go forth and fight in order to protect their women, who remain passive and secure at home with the children.”² While militaries appeal primarily to men, representing characteristics such as bravery, physical strength, and aggressiveness as desirable masculine traits, wars could not be waged and are never waged without the work of women.³

Despite growing historical inquiries into past military conflicts, contemporary warfare is often presented with a disconcerting disregard for the lessons of previous wars. This seems especially true of women's participation. One of the fundamental truths about warfare is that wars always change the gender dynamics of any given society. They both provide opportunities for creating more equal societies and reinforce traditional beliefs and values. For the duration of armed conflicts, women's roles, whether we are talking about the home front or the fighting front, become more diverse and gender roles more fluid. During the wars of the twentieth century, for example, women actively participated in wars in unprecedented numbers and undertook important steps forward toward emancipation and gender equality. At the same time, women always constituted the majority of displaced populations, and in every new war they seemed to be subjected to previously unparalleled insecurity, exploitation, and brutality. Yet, women's wartime involvements are, as a rule, valued and evaluated differently than men's in both state and international memory cultures and scholarship.⁴ While increasing numbers of scholars have been researching the breadth, variety, and significance of women's engagements in the context of militarism and war, especially in recent decades, the fact that women can and do participate in all aspects of war events still has the ability to surprise.⁵

This applies well to women's wartime undertakings in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle (1941–1945) during World War II.⁶ Women contributed to the Partisan military victory as well as the creation of socialist Yugoslavia, and these enabled important advances of the process of emancipation. Ideological assumptions of the leadership of this resistance movement challenged the pre-established hierarchies of class, nationality, and gender already during the war. Among several political and military factions operating in the Yugoslav territories during World War II, only the communist leadership of the People's Liberation Struggle launched an initiative to mobilize women for its cause. In response, large numbers of women supported the Yugoslav Partisan army. According to the official estimates, approximately one hundred thousand women joined the Partisan army and approximately two million women were recruited and coordinated by the women's organization known as the Antifascist Front of Women (Antifašistička fronta žena, AFŽ).⁷

In addition, as the leadership of the resistance movement included women's emancipation and gender equality in its political program, women's (and sometime men's) revolutionary imagination provided a basis for the further development of emancipatory practices. In the Partisan army, women were fighters and medical personnel, as well as couriers, typists, and members of services supplying food and equipment. Organized by the women's organization, they worked in agriculture, sabotaged roads, supplied the troops with food, clothes, shelter, and motherly care, and cared for the wounded and orphans on the home front. Importantly, high-ranking activists of the Antifascist Front of Women—the first women's organization on the territory of Yugoslavia that had the right to participate in all aspects of social life on an equal footing with men—invested considerable effort in (re)evaluating women's participation in the war, especially traditional women's roles socialized for the needs of warfare, in order to imagine the New Woman of (the envisioned) socialist Yugoslavia.

The first conference of the Yugoslav Antifascist Front of Women, the first occasion for women to coordinate their work on the level of the entire state, was held in December 1942. Mitra Mitrović, communist activist and political worker since the 1930s, elatedly spoke about women's equality in Yugoslav society, which to her “already look[ed] simple. Equality came as if incidentally, it is obtained, we already live in it.”⁸ In her 1953 memoir, she further explained her wartime enthusiasm, writing that “from of the horror and hell of this war, a new human figure emerged—a liberated woman.”⁹ Mitrović’s inspired comments encapsulate the sensation that, for women of Yugoslavia who supported the Partisan army and gathered under the leadership of the Antifascist Front of Women and, by extension, the Communist Party, the war brimmed with potential for social transformation. The same conference was also attended by Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the Partisan resistance. Aside from his presence, he expressed the ultimate endorsement of women's contributions to the war effort in a speech: “I am proud to stand at the forefront of an army that has a large number of women. I can say that in this struggle, by their heroism, by their endurance, women were and are in the first places and in the front ranks, and it is an honor for our peoples of Yugoslavia to have such daughters.”¹⁰ It was, as Jelena Batinić noticed, a “magnificent speech, a gem in his impressive oratory record,”¹¹ where political idealism—resting on the conviction that the war was at the same time a struggle for a more just society in which women would become equal to men—was intertwined with the optimism that each new military victory encouraged. In order to turn words into actions, high-ranking members of the Antifascist Front of Women, along with the boosting of women's participation in the war effort, insisted on literacy courses and political education, and pushed for the participation of women in all emerging institutions.¹² They continued their work in the post-war era as well.

At the same time, women were the targets of, as Wingfield and Bucur describe it, “often grotesque sexual violence”¹³ because they may have helped the Partisans, because they were related to them, because they were in their ranks.¹⁴ While World War II in the Yugoslav territories inspired an abundance of research, secondary literature on wartime gender-based violence is very scarce.¹⁵ Inevitably, accurate counts of acts of sexualized violence or numbers of victims are not available and would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct. Primary sources suggest that, as is the case in every and all wars, in order to be attacked by a soldier, it was enough to be a woman. What is more, similarly to Joanna Bourke's reflection that during the Great War the male body “was intended to be mutilated,”¹⁶ the bodies of women who dared to become soldiers or activists engaging in political work were targets of particularly brutal violence. Torture of communists had been normalized throughout the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia already in the early 1920s, and communist women were not exempt.¹⁷ During World War II, physical abuse escalated. Torture of people who were considered communists and who participated in activities related to the People's Liberation Struggle was unrestricted and unregulated, with slightly different “trends” discernible in different locations, probably depending on the inspiration and creativity of the individuals in charge.¹⁸ Concurrently, sexualized violence against women participants and supporters of the Partisan resistance movement became widespread. One participant of the People's Liberation Struggle wrote in his memoir: “Because, what awaited a captured Partisan man is terrible. The only thing more terrifying is what awaited a captured Partisan woman.”¹⁹ Alongside being subjected to physical violence similar to that endured by men, women were often repeatedly raped, their vulvas and vaginas were mutilated, their breasts cut off, and some accounts also include public humiliation of captured women that probably served the bonus purpose of sending a warning to the spectators.²⁰

Not surprisingly, memoir literature as a rule skirts this facet of women's experience of war.²¹ Somewhat more often, however, it returns to women's relationship with weapons, which seemingly arose from their greater vulnerability. Although both men and women had been advised to kill themselves before the enemy captured them, mentions of the importance of the last piece of ammunition appears more often in women's writings. For instance, the author Jara Ribnikar's fondness towards her weapons presents an interesting facet of women's participation in the People's Liberation Struggle and their unique perspectives within this context. She wrote that, although she belonged to the non-combatant part of the Partisan army, on the move she liked to march next to the machine gunners. That way, in case of unexpected skirmishes, she thought she would be in the safest place possible.²² Ribnikar also carried a gun and a bomb, and in her memoir, she described her special relationship with the bomb:

I was very fond of my bomb, touching it every now and then, checking to see if it was firmly attached to the belt. It gave courage and confidence. No one will catch me alive. That was the most important thing.²³

The twentieth century, as I noted at the beginning, was a century of numerous violent political upheavals and conflicts. At the same time, it bears mentioning, it was a century of strong development of the feminist struggle. Throughout the century, feminists—including women active in the Antifascist Front of Women during World War II and later²⁴—were breaking frontiers by venturing into spaces previously reserved for men as well as by examining overlooked topics and questioning what had previously been taken for granted or even silenced. Feminist activism has transformed women's lives, and feminist theorizing has effectively reimagined our pasts and presents.²⁵ Contemporary feminists in the region continue to work against forgetting the achievements of their predecessors, which in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia includes contending with an organized process of negating and falsifying the socialist past. Importantly, feminist interventions have even influenced international policies designed with the desire to provide the conditions for a better future. The adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security was certainly the most visible in this respect.²⁶

Yet, leaders still fight wars like they are playing chess. Wars still mercilessly grind civilians. Women still fight many of the same battles. Many are still surprised when they find out that in war men are not the only heroic defenders and women are often active participants. True, militaries continue to be predominantly male institutions. Because of that, in wars, women combatants account for a much smaller number of soldiers compared to men. At the same time, women and girls continue to comprise the majority of displaced populations and are subjected to persistent human rights violations, especially gender-based violence and sexual exploitation. Notably, women are present more than ever in governing and military institutions as well as in humanitarian spaces and civil society. Such groups, on the other hand, are oftentimes underfunded and excluded from formal decision-making processes. Reminding me of the Yugoslav Antifascist Front of Women both during World War II and in the postwar years, some eighty years later women still wrestle with the largely unchanged mainstream gender perspective on warfare. I wonder, therefore, who has not been paying attention. Or, to echo Cynthia Enloe's thinking, who has been benefiting from looking the other way.²⁷