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Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
Patriarchy, tradition, national identity
More difficult for Kosovar-Albanian women than recognizing the advantages
of work, was understanding their past and present experiences within
a socio-cultural environment characterized (especially in rural areas) by
a rigid and persisting patriarchy, where womens’ rights to be educated, to
work, or to participate in decision-making both at home and in political
realms were largely unrecognised. This patriarchal structure of the
Albanian family and community had been adopted by Kosovo’s Serbs, as
evidence of their otherness, and of the difference between the two communities’
cultures, 14 even though a patriarchal model still holds amongst
the Serbs themselves. 15 The story told by Milica gives us just one example
of this:
I would like just to tell you that I only feel sorry for the Albanian women,
who are abused in this war. I feel sorry for these women because I had
the possibility to be with them in hospital, before the war. There was
already the conflict between Serbs and Albanians, you know, in the
woods. I saw an Albanian woman, she had [her] fourth baby… she was
young, I think she was 21, but she had [a] fourth daughter. And when the
husband heard that she had another daughter he didn’t want to take her
home, and she stayed there until her father came to take her. I felt very
sorry for her, because it was very stupid.
Milica’s account, though presented with concern and feminine solidarity,
is reminiscent of the denigration campaign led by Milosevic’s regime
against Albanians that began in the 1990s. Yugoslavian propaganda portrayed
Albanian women as victims, backward and uneducated “prisoners
of the patriarchy”, entirely under the control of fathers and husbands who
objectified them and reduced them to “baby factories” (Bracewell, 1996:
26-27). Amongst Kosovar-Albanian women, however, the family, with its
patriarchal structure, is highly valued as the basic unit of their community’s
culture. Though this view varied in conviction from subject to subject,
the habits and customs identified with the Kosovar-Albanian tradition
are also fundamental elements of the national identity. The links between
the patriarchy and the construction of the national identity, probably even
reinforced by the Yugoslavian propaganda and the radicalization of the
conflict, make it even more difficult for women to criticize the patriarchy
and to recognize their own needs and expectations either as individual
women or as a group. As has already been shown, nationalism forbids any
conflict that could compromise the stability of gender relations, since this
stability is one of the pillars that unites and holds together the nation itself
(Milic, 1996).
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