Introduction

The question I would like to begin with in this article is why we should deal with Antifascist
Front of Women (AFW) today, in this context and almost 60 years after its suppression.
Firstly, I believe that AFW is an example, even rare one, of a womens organization that
started existing during Second World War and still continued to exist after the end of war, and
maybe more importantly, after the socialist revolution that took place in this region. Secondly,
its an organization that, on the one hand, participated in construction of Yugoslav socialist
society and on the other, was dealing with womens emancipation and liberation. So I believe
that today we need to consider the history of AFW by focusing on two important and mutually
related questions:
(1) Is socialist project per se enough for abolishing patriarchal relations and for achieving
womens liberation? And, if the answer is no,
(2) what can be learnt from AFW experience and be used in todays context in order to invent
some successful form of organizing for womens struggle?
I would like to begin with a very short overview of AFWs history in order to put things in
their context and to introduce those who dont know very much about this subject before I
start analyzing it so I could try to give an answer to mentioned questions.

1. (Very) brief history of AFW

Antifascist Front of Women, although not by that name, started working already in the first
year of Second World War. Many of its members were already activists before, and many of
them came from Youth section of an older womens Yugoslav organization called Alliance
of Womens movements and were members of Yugoslav Communist Party that was illegal at
the time. To understand difficulties and problems these women encountered in every step of
their way during pre-war period of their activism, we should look at some indicators that can
tell us more about the level of womens rights and positions in pre-war Yugoslavia. This was a
poor, mostly agrarian and underdeveloped country in the process of transition to capitalism.
Demand for industrialization, along with the formation of the new capitalist class and also the
working class shaped the conditions that women were living in. These processes couldnt go
without contradictions. On the one hand, strong church and conservative moral imposed on

women the roles of modest, dependent and subordinate wife, mother and houseworker, but on
the other, used them as less legally protected and less paid labor power.1 Even though, the
number of female workers was only 18-9% of whole employed population at the time. 2 Also,
women had no political rights. Of course, this situation didnt pass without some organized
resistance. We could say that there were two different, but mutually intertwined levels of it,
and I will name them the same way as Neda Boinovi did, as civil3 women movement on the
one hand and labor women movement4 gathered around Communist Party on the other.
Because of many different reasons (state and police repression, divergences that existed even
within Party on this question, etc.), already in the late 20s it became impossible for labor
women movement to operate functionally5. On the other hand, different civil womens
organizations, and Alliance as the biggest of them, were legal at the time and could perform
their actions without such problems. That was the main reason why most of the communist
feminists at the time decided to join these civil organizations and work within them. Now, I
will shift to the period before the war and try to explain briefly two important reasons for
forming another womens organization AFW, in the second year of the war.
(1) While during 30s it was possible and important for communist women to cooperate with
and within this older, often very liberal and bourgeois organizations, gathering around
struggle for womens right to vote6, the situation changed when it became obvious that the
war will start. While women from this older movement believed that there are some bigger
events going on the world scale, and that it is not the right time to pose womens question,
young activist that came from the communist party believed exactly the opposite: women are
1 Vida Tomi, str. 17
2 Ibid
3 I had a trouble to decide whether to translate this as civil or bourgeois,
because in serbian language, civil can mean both of them. I chose civil
because not all of the value this movement was fighting for could be described as
bourgeois, although many of them can.
4 Neda, str. 105
5 Ibid, p. 108
6 napisati o zboru, Neda, str.122

and should be able to participate in those life-and-world-changing events. But, even more
important womens question, as they believed, their struggle for formal and real equality of
women is and must be part of global struggle for equality of whole human race.
(2) At the very beginning of the war, practice proved them right: their role in war was not only
possible, but soon became necessary. As active participants in national liberation struggle and
antifascist movement, women in war finally established their own centralized organization on
its first conference in December 1942, and named it Antifascist Front of Women. 7 In this
article, I will not focus on womens role in the war; I would just like to emphasize one
important point: due to many different reasons and causes, that I dont have space to elaborate
here, womens participation in the war and their crucial role in it made them equal within
national liberation struggle: they participated on an equal level in the struggle as men did,
they were elected as leaders of partisans boards, they had an equal right to vote, and so on.
The important thing to remember is that this equality wasnt only a formal one: it was a real
equality, enjoyed by women in struggle every day.
It is also worth mentioning that shortly before Second World War womens organization that
was gathered around Youth section was the biggest political movement in Yugoslavia.
When the war started, theyve made their objectives very clear: to participate in national
liberation struggle and, not less important, to work on womens liberation question.
I will now shift to the period after the war and try to mention some important roles that were
assigned to AFW. We need to take into account the situation that now socialist Yugoslavia was
in at the moment: the war was over, and it left the country devastated there was no food, no
clothes, almost 300.000 of children lost their parents, and so the country had to be rebuilt
from the ashes8. AFW took the role of social services. It was a well-organized, partly
centralized organization, very familiar among the people, who had the power to mobilize
female population in huge numbers.
Its objectives shifted only a little from those during the war time. First, women were needed
to participate in building the socialist society, and second, although the new state formally
accepted and legally introduced formal gender equality, it was at that time considered that
women should have their own organization, that wouldnt be separate from the state, but
7 Neda, 146
8 Neda, 153

would still have some autonomy in dealing with womens question. And back then,
womens question meant a lot of different things: emancipation, literacy, political education,
entrance into the public sphere, entrance into the sphere of waged-work, education in terms of
motherhood, and so on, and so forth. Women were also a huge labor force that had to be
used. Central committee of Communist Party of Yugoslavia wrote a letter in 1945 that gave
support to AFW and stated that it was an integral, but not subordinated part of the National
Front, the main political organization at the time 9. In that way, at least for some time, women
were able to stay the subjects of their own emancipation.
Things changed in 1950. At the third Congress of AFW in October, they changed their own
status: they remained a womens organization, but they became a section within the National
Front, which brought a new division of labor women should deal with specific womens
problems, and work of political and cultural emancipation should now be passed to the
organs of the National Front. The question of the necessity of existence of an autonomous
womens organization started to be posed again. Many different theories were formed within
the public opinion: because the macroeconomic policy changed, and there were many cuts,
facilities for childcare were closing and many people got fired from work, the questions like
should women be workers at all, shouldnt they stay at home and do what they are
naturally supposed to be doing, and the like, were posed again. Although leadership of the
party wasnt keen to support these views, at some moment it became obvious that they were
starting to spread among other politicians and also, the people. Many leaders of AFW were
also aware of these tendencies. At the sixth Congress of the League of Communist of
Yugoslavia, an organization that replaced the communist party, that took place in 1952,
AFWs leaders were posing this question and insisted that, I quote Bosa Cveti 10, laws that
protect women and guarantee them equality werent enough, neither they can be the only
condition for the realization of their real equality. We would be mistaken, Bosa said, if we
believed that the road to full equality of women isnt full of objective and subjective
obstacles, starting from the general backwardness, which is especially spread among
countryside women, and great burden they have to carry, because of the house and family, to
the wrong conceptions of womens position.11

9 Ibid, p. 165
10 dodati bio, Panteli, str. 139

And although communist leadership including Aleksandar Rankovi and Tito himself had
supported them again, in a year to come it slowly became obvious that something wasnt right
and that things had to change. Even the statistics told the same: there were far fewer women
in politics, literacy wasnt improving (although AFW did a great work on this question, there
were new and new generations of young women who never learned to read and write, and
with no public schools yet, it became impossible for AFW actives to do it by themselves
alone), children facilities were closing and with introducing new child allowances, many
women decided to give in to the pressures, give up their jobs and go back to the household.
I will take only one more year into consideration, a year 1953, and the fourth Congress of
Liberation Front, that took place in January, when that organization both changed its name to
Socialist League of Working people (SLWP), and also changed its methods of work. Among
other changes, it has been stated that although AFW has done really important work, now the
situation is changed and things had to change on that level as well. It was decided that SLWP
will form a special commission for working with women, and AFW accepted its new role that
was reduced only to emancipation of countryside women and advancement of backward
households, while whole political, public and cultural work with women would be left to
SLWPs new commissions.
Not long after that, in September the same year, AFW had its own Congress where it was
decided, after a long and exhausting debate, that it will deactivate itself. Explanation for that
decision was that existence of autonomous women organization somehow makes it looks
like women question is isolated from the society as a whole and that it leads to separations
within the working class.12 It is really important to note that many AFW activists and
delegates at the Congress felt angry about this decision and some of them protested. When it
was clear that theres no turning back, many boards were abolished and many activists just
became passive and excluded themselves from politics as such. But that wasnt the only
reaction: another one came from the women in lower classes and especially those in villages.
They were really annoyed and disappointed with this resolution and you could often hear
them speak about those great times when they had politics sessions, literacy lessons, and so.
Usual reactions were: Its over, its all over! Men have the party to debate politics, and they
11 Ibid, p. 168
12 Ibid, p.173

have taverns to spend fun-time at, and we now have nothing. 13 This only shows how
important AFWs actions were in everyday life of many women who had a chance in those
few years to experience completely different kind of life: for most of them, it was the first
time they had a place to talk about politics, to socialize with one another and share
experiences, do have a vote and so right to decide about the way they would like to organize
their time, and so on.
With this, I would like to finish this historical part of article, since it has already taken me
more space than I planned, and to proceed to analysis. There will be four lines of the analysis
and four points I would like to make accordingly. All of them are attempts to answer the first
and partly the second question I posed at the beginning of the talk. They will be only
provisional and intended to induce further thinking and elaborating the theme.

2. (Very) brief analysis

(1) First point that I would like to make is related to the tension that we can come across when
we analyze the relation between AFW as women organization and different socialist
organizations. It is a well-known tension, or maybe even contradiction, between the class
question and the women question. To explain and illustrate it, I will use the already mentioned
child allowance measure introduced in the beginning of 50s as an example. Im using this
example because I believe it is a very simple way to show how this contradiction works in
praxis. So, when this measure was introduced, it was also socially sensitive: richer families
were supposed to get less money, and poorer ones more. It depended on familys other
incomes. From class perspective, this made a lot of sense. But, when we consider it from
womens perspective, it is not only that this measure by itself had an impact on women to
choose to give up their jobs and go back to the house work and children care work, but it did
it unequally: it was primarily women from lower parts of the working class who made such a
decision, which was devastating when you consider that exactly those women were the at the
same time also the most excluded from the public sphere, mostly illiterate, prevented from
politics etc. If you dont have a women organization that can point at aspects like this one and
that will argue for some different solutions, like perhaps a demand to build more public
kindergartens and schools, you will have bad consequences like this one.
13 Ibid, p. 174

Ever since the first labor and women movements came to life there existed different kinds of
tension between them. Whether it was a question more of a practical issues (should women
vote, should they have reproductive rights, should they have the same rights as workers as
men have, and so on) or more of theoretical ones (like the relations between class and gender,
which one of them have supremacy over the other), by looking at their mutual history we can
see many examples of the same logic appearing in almost every attempt for socialist and
feminist movements to work together. That tempestuous history couldnt be better named than
as a history full of marriages and divorces between Marxism and Feminism and a whole
bunch of advocates on each side trying to work in their clients best interest 14. I believe that
the example of AFW can be extremely helpful in understanding this issue and even giving
some guidelines for resolving it. There are few reasons for that. First, most of AFWs
membership and its founders were women who were both feminist and socialist activists from
the beginning. For them, question of transformation of society as a whole couldnt be thought
of if any of these aspects were missing. They were socialist women and feminist socialists,
but, what is more important, for them, to be a socialist, a true one, exactly meant to be a
feminist altogether, and vice versa. This self-understanding of AFW activists was very
important for shaping the course of actions AFW will take after the war, but, as we shall see, it
can also give as some indicators for explaining self-dissolution of AFW at the end. Second
reason for why AFW experience is helpful in trying to resolve conflicts between socialists and
feminists movements is the very specific situation in which AFW was actually formed: the
war situation. As I mentioned before, women were needed in this war and in this revolution if
communist were to win on both fronts. Not only they were the biggest organization, but they
also had a good territorial coverage and already established operating boards in whole
country. These and some other things resulted in their equal participation in war and
revolutions. The real equality I spoke about at the beginning of the article they enjoyed was
both the result of these objective conditions as well as their own everyday struggle for it. So,
when the war was over, things were already irreversibly changed. On the other hand, from
AFW experience, we can see that the relation of womens organization and socialist
organizations cannot be a relation between the particular and the general. As I hope it was
clear from my historical account, one of the main problematic tendencies was the one of
specialization, that is, the process in which AFW stopped being womens organization for
socialist struggle and was becoming womens organization for womens question.
14 I borrowed this phrase from the title of Cinzia Arruzzas book. For a very good
historical overview of this history, see her:

The second point that I want to address is that from the beginning it was clear for everybody,
not just AF, but also the leadership of the party, that the problem that caused difficulties laid
elsewhere, and not in AFs form of organization. The problem was patriarchy, and patriarchy
is not only a womens question, but in truth, it is related to the form of the whole society.
The resistance to womens liberation wasnt coming only from women, and I hope this wont
sound too essentialist, but it was coming mostly from men, and not just from the so-called
common men, but also from the members and some leaders of the party (good example is
Milovan ilas). AF was a women organization, whose members were only women, and
whose target group was women only. Except for the different proclamations and declarations
that were coming from some members of the party leadership, especially Tito, on the
organizational level there was no concrete work with men on this question. Although the law
was propagating a formal equality between the sexes, practice showed that it was far from full
equality, even far from equality that some women gained during the war time and due to some
objective circumstances. It is precisely patriarchy that reduces the question of gender equality
to the question concerning exclusively women. So, maybe we can conclude that it is not
enough to have women-only organization, even though it is necessary for a time, but that men
must also be a part of this project and process. If you dont organize concrete field work and
make men not only passive observers that simply listen to the directives even though they
dont understand them and mostly dont agree with them, but to make them actively
participate with women in this struggle, that, in the end, is not only a struggle for womens
emancipation, but for the community as a whole.
And, thirdly, also closely connected to the first two points, is a question of a nuclear family.
Even though women gained many family law rights that they never had before, like an
absolute right to divorce, the right for extramarital children to be recognized, and, in the 70s,
abortion rights, nuclear family as a model was never questioned. Quite to the contrary, it was
often represented as a good model that should only be strengthened more. And in the example
of child allowances we can also observe another peculiar thing: at the moment when womens
economic freedom should have been raised because of supplementary funds they acquired,
what in fact happened is that it diminished. In fact, they returned to providing unwaged
reproductive labor within the nuclear family. In trying to make sense of this process, we have
stumbled upon a crucial question: why was it that, amongst many different possible processes
that could be initiated at this point, it was precisely the return of women to the sole function of
reproductive laborers that imposed itself?

My thesis would be that the persistence of the nuclear family and the unwaged female
domestic labor even within the nominally socialist society in Yugoslavia was a consequence
of the historical fact that wage labor in its modern form only ever asserted itself as the
dominant form of labor after the socialist revolution. Before the 2 nd WW Yugoslavia was a
backward and agrarian country and it became a modern industrialized country only with
socialism. That included the development of modern forms of wage labor, with all the
contradiction that process involves, including the domestication of the activities, necessary for
the reproduction of labor power. This process was of course not the same as in capitalist
modernization, but showed some disturbing similarities.
From the experience of AF and the gender question in general in Yugoslavia we can learn
that developing socialism means a lot more than nationalizing the economy and creating full
employment for workers, which still remain wage workers. The wage form always has its
consequences and one of them is that it sometimes puts the gender and class emancipation at
odds with one another. These contradictions were not solved in historical socialism and
remain urgent tasks for any attempts in the future.
Also, to conclude, the question of separate womens political organizations remains open.
Many orthodox Marxists and socialists would insist that separate womens organizations only
serve to disarticulate the common class interest of the united proletariat, marching ahead into
a glorious socialist future. But what if the womens question is not merely a slight disturbance
in such glorious march, but a necessary aspect of full theoretical and political understanding
of the methods and goals of class emancipation itself? Separate womens organizations are in
that case necessary in order for womens question to not be automatically subsumed under
supposedly more urgent and important political goals but never separate in a sense that
would understand womens question as a completely independent and unrelated to all other
issues of full political and social emancipation. Difference-in-unity of the womens question is
a political puzzle that was historically suspended by the dissolution of AF and still remains
to be solved.