Redefining the Public-Private Boundary: Nationalism and

In a socialist nation, men and women are equal, but women are different. The task of this article is to discuss the ways in which nationalism was practiced by the political elite in the former socialist Yugoslavia since the 1970s, and the ways in which this process coincided with the stages of women's activism in Yugoslavia during the same period. The decentralization of authority within the Communist party and between regions of Yugoslavia had a profound impact on the trajectories of social life, including women’s initiatives. I would like to start with an apparent paradox. It seems, ironically, that ethno-nationalist ideology and Western feminist studies, namely, some aspects of the post-modernist approach, often regarded as 'enemies', share a similar focus on the politics of collective identity and the blurring of the boundaries between the public and private spheres of life. Both ideologies, it seems, assume a direct relationship between the two spheres, a relationship in which private sphere exhibits an unmediated influence on the sphere of public-political life. Collective identities of women, ethnic identities in particular, are assumed to be unmediated by civic structures. In addition, and especially in the context of the post-socialist change of the role of women in the public sphere, they both exhibit a tendency to speak on behalf of women, as a group of victims, without allowing any 'local knowledge ' to become part of legitimate political or academic discourse. This neglect of women's self-evaluation of their roles results, as many of us witnessed in the past several years in some serious misunderstandings between Western and 'local ' East Central-European feminist researchers and activists on the issue of "what the post-socialist women want " from the democratization processes, and how they should react to the roles assigned to them by ethno-nationalist ideology. I will return to the problems of Western feminist analyses in the closing sections of the article