New Light On Women’s Post-War History

Towards the end of 2022, The Center for Research of Nationalism and Culture (CINIK) and a team of researchers, under the editorship of Ivana Hadjievska and Jana Kocevska published a thematic study of the first periodical designed and dedicated to women in North Macedonia – Makedonka – Organ of the Anti-fascist Front of Women. The primary perspective of the study is the history and currents of the emancipation of women within the socialist project after the Second World War, but also the historical experiences from the processes of emancipation in cultural memory in the Macedonian society. The study is published both on Macedonian and English and it's available for free download HERE.

This project is a continuation of previous project Invisible Archives, which focused on the (in)visibility of women in the press that was printed or circulated on the territory of, then, Vardar Macedonia in the interwar period (1918-1941). This research and published study is focused on reviewing and targeting narratives that testify to the social and institutional processes of women’s emancipation. The magazine Makedonka (1944-1952), as the focal source of the research, is characterized with historic, linguistic, literary and semantic specifics very relevant to the translation work. The first issue of the source was printed one year before the standardization of Macedonian as an official language in 1945; the content of the magazine was created by women from various rural and urban places on the macedonian territory after the Second World War.

The aim of the research is to offer authorial perspectives on the historiographical, gender, symbolic, cultural and linguistic aspects of the researched periodical. The team consists of Ivana Hadјievska (political history of the magazine), Jana Kocevska (social aspects); Darko Leitner-Stojanov (educational and didactic aspects); and Manja Velichkovska (linguistic and semantic aspects). Part of the project is an artistic articulation and communication of the research, in the form of an exhibition by the artist Hristina Ivanoska, in collaboration with Tiiiit! Inc. Skopje.

Makedonka was unsealed by the activists of the partisan resistance in Bitola. The initiative to publish this magazine was launched in October 1944 by the activists from AFW and Veselinka Malinska, as the first editor-in-chief. The first issue was printed on 24 pages and had a circulation of around 1000 copies and was published monthly. From 1944 to 1946, the magazine linked the political emancipation of women with their heroic participation in the partisan movement. In this “heroic phase” anti-fascism is presented as a prerequisite for transformation into a politically aware woman. In the period immediately after the war, the magazine, as “the main media space for women's issues in society”, remained closely connected with other public needs for which it was started. Political and ideological changes had a great impact on the goals and vision of the magazine and went beyond the influence of the leadership of AFW - an organization that itself experienced a political transformation in the 1950s. Therefore, the name of the magazine changed accordingly: until 1952, it was called Makedonka; then it became Prosvetena žena (Enlightened Woman); since 1990 it has been published under the title Žena (Woman), and from 1997 to 2005 as Nova žena (New Woman) and during that period it was edited by the respected poet and writer Liljana Dirjan; and finally, since 2005, it has been released for a short time under the name Zgodna (Handsome). The transformations of the Macedonian woman are an excellent example and reflection of social views on female emancipation in the second half of the 20th century: from revolutionary post-war ideas about a new socialist society, to reactionism in the post-Yugoslav society characterized by turbo-nationalism and repatriarchalization.

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Elena Koprtla is from Skopje, Macedonia and currently living in Zagreb, Croatia. She has a PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. She has worked in the cultural editorial board of several media channels in Macedonia, as a book editor and coordinator for an art festival.