ABSTRACT
Women are often portrayed as peaceful and passive victims in situations of political mass violence such as that which afflicted the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As the crisis began to unfold in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, women faced increasingly dangerous and demanding life circumstances. Women of former Yugoslavia shared a common socio-political background of living in the same one-party communist and socialist state for at least forty-five years, even though cultural specifics between different parts of the country, and between urban and rural surroundings, varied. The presence of women in politics was a legacy of World War II where Partisan and Communist women joined the struggle in the hope and promise of gaining equality. The need to account for and understand women's experiences of every day life during such crises is largely ignored and seemingly passed off as that which is only important to women and not the larger society.
