Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Women at work
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
The memory of “daily heroism” required of these women during the war
seemed to find continuity in their descriptions of the present. Many of the
female interviewees remarked that after the war prices kept rising higher
and higher, making it increasingly difficult for them to face the steep climb
in the cost of living on their restricted (or poor) family budgets. The
emphasis they placed on their role as family providers also seemed to
influence their definitions of their own needs, which, in the reality of postconflict
Kosovo, were most often considered of a monetary nature.
During the interviews, it was often emphasized that mothers and wives
now, more than ever, urgently need a job, in order to better provide for
their families. This is especially true given that many families had lost
fathers and sons, and because, given the wartime economic collapse, widespread
unemployment was driving out the custom (especially steadfast in
the countryside), that women should not be allowed to work outside of
their homes. Working in a woman’s craft workshop set up in Mitrovica by
an Italian NGO, one woman therefore remarked, in agreement with her coworkers:
Now women are more active, they are seeking to be employed more than
they were before the war. Before the war we could not get out of the
house because the Serbian army was everywhere, but we were in better
economic conditions. Now we need to find a job because it’s hard to live.
Our economic conditions were better before the war than now, although
there were more Serb[ian] employees than Albanians.
The urgency of their search for work could primarily be attributed to new
difficulties in providing for their families, as the women of the workshop
maintained. The money they made there was desperately needed. Further
in the interview, however, they also admitted that if they could return to
their former living conditions (a comfortable house, a working husband),
they would still prefer to keep their extra-domestic jobs. As one woman
said, “the best would be to have our houses as we had before and to continue
working. Now we don’t want to give up working”.
The advantages of work for these women are therefore more than just
financial. Their ability to work allowed them to forge relationships beyond
their families, and thus to develop a new and broader social network that
they felt was needed in order to cope with the hardships they encountered
in post-conflict Kosovo.
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