Partisan care: women’s wartime experiences in the Yugoslav Partisan Medical Corps

The onset of World War II saw an unprecedented number of Yugoslav women join the Partisan forces in the National Liberation Struggle (NOB). In order to build support amongst conservative rural populations, Partisan forces relied on the appropriation of traditional gendered structures, leading to the creation of a complex medical infrastructure heavily reliant on the participation of women. Whereas contemporary scholarship has primarily focused on the histories of women combatants or of women’s political organization, little attention has been paid to the largest demographic of Partisan women: the doctors, nurses, pharmacists and auxiliary staff tasked with caring for the sick and wounded. The MSCA project YUCARE traces the biographies of five notable women medical workers, using their wartime trajectories as a starting point for discussing the diversity of experiences encompassed within the sanitet. The project addresses two central questions: focusing on the overlooked experiences of women in the Yugoslav Partisan Medical Corps, it explores the divergences between accepted narratives and individual experiences to integrate temporal, geographic and demographic differences into a broader gendered history of World War II. Secondly, it explores how traditional gendered structures were maintained, challenged and negotiated within the Partisan army, and how these contributed to the state-building practices of the fledgling socialist state. This empirical objective is compounded by the combination of a microhistorical methodology with digital history tools, building on actor memoirs and a unique collection of archival materials to evaluate and communicate results in a web-based map format. By acquiring new skills in database management and virtual mapping, YUCARE will enable me to reach my desired specialization in digital historical communication while grounding myself professionally in my region of study.