The lived experience of women in Kosovo after the Second World War: revisiting historical feminisms from below

Abstract

This article proposes a feminist historiography of Kosovo grounded in nonlinear temporality, embodied memory, and the structural analysis of social reproduction. Rather than presenting women’s history as an uninterrupted line of progress under socialism, the study situates women’s lived time within the overlapping rhythms of labor, ideology, and survival. Drawing on Victoria Browne’s concept of nonlinear feminist time, alongside the materialist and affective approaches of Elizabeth Grosz, Silvia Federici, and Verónica Gago, the article challenges state narratives that depict women’s incorporation as a completed story of emancipation. These theoretical starting points allow for a reading of women’s experiences not as sequential achievements but as temporal layers in which repetition, deferral, and fragmented visibility coexist. Through close examination of periodicals and ideological campaigns from the Second World War to the early socialist period, the article identifies four thematic fields in which the contradictions of emancipation become evident: unveiling, socialist motherhood, wartime participation, and labor defined within ideological boundaries. Each of these fields shows how Albanian women in Kosovo were at times hyper-visible as signs of ideological transformation and at other times structurally excluded from decision-making. For example, unveiling was presented as liberation but was often enforced "as a form of bodily control. Motherhood was elevated symbolically as the foundation of the socialist future, while remaining rooted in unpaid labor that sustained everyday life. Women’s participation in resistance and war was glorified to reinforce state narratives, even though their concrete agency was suppressed or fragmented. Entry into the labor market was interpreted as evidence of equality but was conditioned by biological and maternal discourses that restricted professional mobility. These cases reveal a lived temporality entangled in recurring structures, never fully surpassed. The temporalities of care, reproduction, and survival intersect with expectations of modernization and socialist acceleration, producing a double temporality in which patriarchal continuity and ideological demands mutually reinforce one another. The article contributes to critiques of socialist and post-socialist historiographies that instrumentalize women’s experiences for ideological ends, and supports the case for a feminist method that resists epistemic flattening and traces the partial, interrupted, and fragile forms of memory through which histories from below can be reconstructed. In doing so, it opens space for recovering historical feminisms that were never fully encompassed by the categories imposed on them.