Ilegalke, rat i emancipacija: uloga žene u komunističkom pokretu otpora u Beogradu 1941–1944.

Abstract

This paper aims to present the group portrait of the Communist female resistance fighters during World War II in Belgrade. Following its pre-war political agenda, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia entered the war with a program of complete gender equality. But these ideological-theoretical concepts were not equally successfully implemented during the war. The case of female resistance fighters, and their position in the anatomy of resistance, is one of the more successful examples of women’s emancipation and achieved equality. The paper presents in detail all the leading positions that women held in the illegal resistance movement. The roles in which female resistant fighters could find themselves during the war in occupied Belgrade are defined and analyzed. This paper is based on primary sources from the Historical Archives of Belgrade and the Archives of Yugoslavia, interviews with former female partisans, relevant scholarly literature, and published memoires.

Keywords

• female partisans
• female communist resistance fighters
• women’s emancipation
• communist party of yugoslavia
• world war ii
• belgrade