Women’s empowerment in Kosovo

10 June 2020

By Nadia Nan

Today was the second day of our virtual field trip and this also meant the start of working on our projects. These group projects are creative assignments and aimed to raise awareness in some way. This can be in the form of for example a documentary, a podcast, or an Instagram page. We will work on this project during our virtual field trip so that we can ask questions related to our projects during the meetings and plan follow-up meetings. Our projects will be presented in the last week of this course and I will work together with Hanna.

Yesterday we met Igo Rogova, who is working for Kosovo Women’s Network, a network that is dedicated to support, protect, and promote women’s rights. Igo is fighting for a society built on gender equality because women are not being recognized in Kosovo nowadays and gender equality is not a goal every Kosovar strives to achieve. Violence against women is widespread and affects many women living in Kosovo. In addition, the word ‘feminist’ does not have the positive connotation of female empowerment. Nevertheless, Igo told us yesterday that in the 1990s, being a feminist was generally accepted, as there was more gender equality under communist rule. The Kosovo War put an end to this gender equality and Kosovo turned into the patriarchal society it still is today.

This was a very impressive meeting. Igo was funny and powerful and inspired us to focus on women’s empowerment for our project. We started to think about ways we could explore the relationship between women and feminism in Kosovo online. Today, when we were searching the internet, we found an interesting article describing ‘Balkan sworn virgins’ or Burrnesha, living in Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Albanian people in these regions follow the Kanun, a set of old and traditional Albanian laws, customs, and ethics. These rules restrict women’s rights and Albanian women living in these areas are mainly taking care of the family. The sworn virgins are wearing men’s clothes, have short hair, and live their life like a man. Some women decided to live like this to express their autonomy, other Burrnesha became the head of the family out of necessity, because there were no male family members left. Becoming a sworn virgin was a possibility to support the family in a patriarchal society in which men were seen as superior. Burrnesha could enjoy greater freedom compared to women, for example, they could have a job and visit the mosque because no one knew they were sworn virgins.

Hanna and I are planning on exploring the evolution of women’s empowerment in Kosovo, through collecting exceptional stories. Burrnesha will be one of these examples. We are hoping that we can find a way to reach these communities and meet with one of the sworn virgins. In addition, we will try to find more inspiring stories and plan an online follow-up meeting with organizations in Kosovo, for example Kosovo Women’s Network and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights. We are planning on connecting the stories to analyse what female empowerment looks like in Kosovo today and how this has evolved over the years. I am super excited to start working on this project!