Ivana Pantelić

Institut za savremenu istoriju, Beograd

pantelic.ivana@gmail.com

Rade Ristanović

Institut za savremenu istoriju, Beograd

raderistanovic@hotmail.com

Female resistance fighters, war and emancipation: the role of woman in the communist Resistance movement in Belgrade 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

Summary: One specific World War II achievement was the binary gendering of war positions. Women gradually achieved positions that to them were previously unattainable, and this completely changed the position of women in the war. Contemporary historiographical research on the role of women in the Partisan movement, problematizes to a lesser extent women’s role within the underground Communist resistance movement in urban areas. According to our research, out of a sample of 880 Communist resistance fighters in Belgrade, 26% were women. The average Communist female underground fighter was 26 years old. Most of them came from the ranks of housewives, workers and clerks. The communist underground resistance organization in Belgrade was divided into seven territorial party areas. Women were less present at the higher echelons; however, they were able to attain some leading positions at the lower levels within the resistance movement. From the very beginning of the war, the Communist underground female fighters in Belgrade had the same position and assignments as men. They carried out all the tasks with equal success as their male comrades. The roles of the female resistant fighters were very diverse, from supporter, courier (messenger) to worker in an underground press all the way to being a saboteur.