Gender and Secularisation in Early Yugoslav Socialism: The Struggle for Minds, Hearts and Souls
Gender and Secularisation in Early Yugoslav Socialism: The Struggle for Minds, Hearts and Souls

Summary/Abstract: This article places gender analysis at the core of the Yugoslav Communist Party’s secularisation project. By examining how a particular understanding of gender informed secularisation, I argue that gender was crucial for the Party, its activists, and also for the religious authorities. They all understood women as particularly prone to religious influences, creating patronising policies to suit their needs. The Party considered women to be a threat to the socialist modernisation project; the Party activists singled out religious women often to demonstrate their own modernity; while different religious organisations targeted women to ensure the continuation of religious practices. Targeting women speaks a volume about views on men’s religiosity and agency. Secularisation project entrenched imagined class and gender hierarchies, in which peasant women were marked as the most backward group in the country. Nevertheless, despite the Party’s efforts, the secularisation of countryside was not successful, particularly regarding women’s church attendance amongst the Catholic population, or regarding people’s use of priests’ services during life-cycle events such as births, weddings and funerals. Following the initial aggressive campaigns in the first decade after the war, the Party opted for a more gradual approach hoping that secularisation would be achieved with migration, urbanisation and industrialisation.

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