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Yugoslavia The Role of Women
Traditionally, women played subservient roles in Yugoslavia's
patriarchal families, especially in the country's backward
mountainous regions. In the interwar period, specific legislation
protected women's subservient status within the family. Rapid
industrialization and urbanization in the communist era broke
down traditional family patterns in varying degrees among the
land-less inhabitants of rural and mountainous areas. This trend
was most pronounced in the more developed northern and western
urban areas. The number of women employed outside the home rose
from 396,463 in 1948 to 2.4 million in 1985. As women began
working away from home, they developed a more independent
identity.
Since World War II, women in Yugoslavia have won complete
civil and political rights and gained access to education,
employment, social welfare programs, health care, and political
office. Although women became better educated and increasingly
employed, however, they did not generally win full equality in
the job market or advancement to high social and political
positions. In the 1980s, the percentage of women in low-level
political and management positions was quite representative, but
their representation declined toward the top of the
administrative pyramid.
Women accounted for 38 percent of Yugoslavia's
nonagricultural labor force in 1987, up from 26 percent thirty
years earlier. The participation of women in the Yugoslav work
force varied dramatically according to region. In Slovenia, women
made up 43.9 percent of the work force; in Kosovo, 20 percent. In
1989 Yugoslav women worked primarily in three fields: cultural
and social welfare (56.3 percent of the persons employed in the
field), public services and public administration (42 percent),
and trade and catering (41.8 percent). Almost all Yugoslavia's
elementary school teachers were women.
Although women's groups had formed in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and
Belgrade, and a number of female political columnists advocated
the feminist cause, as of 1990 the women's movement had yet to
achieve significant power in Yugoslavia. Feminist commentators
observed that Yugoslavia's rapid industrialization had not
eradicated traditional patriarchalism, but had instead created a
new form of patriarchal society in which women were treated as
sex objects exploited in the workplace and at home. Those
allegations were backed by the wide availability of hard-core
pornography everywhere in the country, and the fact that most
working women were still expected to do traditional household
chores.
Data as of December 1990
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