Discourses on a New Muslim Woman in Women’s Periodicals in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia (1918–1941)

Abstract

The paper elaborates why the portraiture of Muslim women had a privileged placThe goal of this paper is to explain why the portraiture of Muslim women had a privileged place in the interwar Yugoslav women’s and feminist press, as well as how the interpretations/discourses were differentiated according to the feminist ideology of the women’s movement which certain periodical belonged to. The author begins with a distinguishing the three streams of the interwar women’s movement: radical bourgeois/liberal, moderate bourgeois and left-feminist, whose agents and representatives were the periodicals Women’s Movement [Женски покрет, 1920–1938], The Woman and the World [Жена и свет, 1925–1941], and Woman Today [Жена данас, 1936–1940], respectively. A close reading of the articles in the given context(s) shows that differences notwithstanding, all three kinds of discourses dominated the picture/idea of uncovering and unveiling Muslim women as a precondition for their emancipation. Although its suitability for effective media agency sometimes led to simplifying the depiction (of life) of Muslim women as well as reproducing orientalist stereotypes, this image, i.e. the emancipatory idea itself, was often fitted into the more complex feminist agenda of the liberation of Muslim women (for the cause of themselves, for the integration into the new Yugoslav society/nation, for the massification of the antifascist and communist movements). That agenda in some cases included reaching for the Quran and attempts at its modern reading and interpretation, or presenting the newly created everyday life in the new Kingdom in which there was a need to protect Muslim women from the post-war crisis, or acknowledging the fact of their massive exit from private sphere due to the consequences of the Great Economic Crisis. Newer research on this topic, with its methodology and categorical apparatus, helps us to see the women’s movements in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in a more precise way, that is, to understand the discourses on the new Muslim woman as a result of complex mutual influence between prominent individuals, voluntary based women’s associations as ‘communities of practice’, and the wider groups that such associations represent. The conclusions that arise from the methodological framework set in this way say that in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia, Muslim women only had their own distinctive public voice as an exception and that feminists of non-Muslim origin, as well as Muslim men who were committed to the emancipation of Muslim women, spoke more often on their behalf. Due to the sensitivity of the issue of the emancipation of Yugoslav Muslim women, which stemmed from the tension between the secularity of feminist demands and the need to respect the religious feelings of Muslim women, discourses on the new Muslim woman were often implicitly transmitted through the journalistic portraiture the so-called new Turkish woman. This editorial strategy could be the starting point for a new study within the elaborated topic.