Gender Equality in Serbia: “A Drop of Oil” in the Waters of Inequality?

Abstract

Since the 2012 elections, the political scene in Serbia has witnessed a recycling of the images we thought were irrevocably left in the millennium behind us. This now of events is the context which has for some time been the topic of many thought-provoking analyses.¹ One viable interpretation of these unseemly processes was offered by the contemporary “historian of the present” Dubravka Stojanovic, who claims that “[s]ocial groups for whom the issues of democratization and modernization were a question of survival have never had the power to prevail in Serbian society.”² Furthermore, these issues “remained a project of an educated civic minority who had never won this battle in Serbia.” So, they have “appeared more and more as a drop of oil in water: remaining in their narrow circle … isolated and clearly set apart from the prevailing underdevelopment of the society.”³ Stojanović belongs to the group, sometimes referred to as the “Women’s School of History,” who have, since the 1990s, produced many studies in order to offer a genealogy of how it is that Serbia has for two centuries (some periods notwithstanding) quite successfully resisted most chances for its full modernization.⁴ One of the parameters for “measuring modernization” in these studies has been, quite rightly, the position of women.