There is a famous statement by Charles Fourier, the 19th-century utopian socialist, that “the degree of women’s emancipation ... is the natural measure of general emancipation”. Contradictions of the Yugoslav self-management experiment are particularly illustrative in the realm of women’s (self-)liberation. For this reason, we dedicate a special section of this exhibition to women: the transformation of their social standing, their role in the building of the Second Yugoslavia, and the resistance to modernisation and emancipatory practices.

It is undeniable that the social position of women underwent a significant transformation compared to the previous period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (also known as the First Yugoslavia). While under the Kingdom women were relegated to the background of history – legally equated, if married, with minors and the mentally ill – during the People’s Liberation War, as members of the Partisan movement, Yugoslav women won their political subjectivity. Many rights we take for granted today – such as women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, civil divorce, abortion, etc. – were formally guaranteed only during the Second Yugoslavia. The emancipatory content of the policies pursued by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia meant mass literacy campaigns for women, access to all levels of education, as well as a range of social services provided by the state.

And yet, despite undeniable progress, women’s emancipation remained until the very end of the Second Yugoslavia an unfulfilled ideological formula of the ruling party. Archival materials spanning several decades after the official introduction of the self-management system show that the same problems were regularly acknowledged but never resolved. At the core of all these problems lay the persistent contradiction between the private and public sphere, and the fact that competition in the internal labour market resulted in women being more frequently laid off and hired less often than men, under the pretext of their “unprofitability”. Inherited cultural norms regarding women’s role and position in society proved deeply resistant, particularly in economically underdeveloped republics and regions. From early postwar observations that only women were tending to war orphans, to late 1970s assessments that the socialisation of reproduction had not been achieved – and that women were still forced to balance or even choose between the private and public sphere (most often at the expense of the latter) – the lived reality of female “self-managers” was far from the slogans of socialism.

The issue of women’s oppression thus further illuminates the contradictory reality of the association of self-managers: on the one hand, unprecedented – and, unfortunately, even in the 21st century, still unmatched – levels of mass worker participation in decision-making about socio-economic matters; on the other, the consistent limitations faced by self-managers in actually controlling their own, let alone broader social conditions.