Beyond the Soviet Model: Yugoslav Women’s Organizations and Nonalignment

Between 1945 and 1948, Yugoslavia appeared to be the dutiful pupil of the USSR in its revolutionary standpoints but also in its policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization. The Yugoslav Antifascist Women’s Front (AFŽ), in turn, was hailed as one of the most prominent founding branches of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) after the WIDF creation in Paris in 1945. The AFŽ largely followed the Soviet model in its campaign for higher labor productivity as well as in its fight against illiteracy, maternal mortality, and women’s political passivity in the countryside (Okić and Dugandžić 2016). The socialist “working mother” gender model, which combined women’s equality in the productive sphere with “social motherhood” (i.e., the socialization of reproductive tasks by the state) became part and parcel of AFŽ discourses and practices (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2014).

The expulsion of the AFŽ from the WIDF in 1949 meant that Yugoslav representatives suddenly became extremely isolated in the field of women’s internationalism. The WIDF, in fact, was the main transnational organization of reference for antifascist, anti-imperialist, and left-wing women’s organizations (Armstrong Reference Armstrong2016; De Haan Reference De Haan, Dublin and Sklar2012; Donert Reference Donert2013; Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b). It was also the first transnational organization to establish connections with delegates in the Global South and to voice a condemnation of colonialism since the 1940s (Armstrong Reference Armstrong2016). In response to their expulsion, Yugoslav representatives organized a series of mass meetings across Yugoslavia, protesting the WIDF decision, and sent a wide array of published material to women’s organizations affiliated to the WIDF (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli, de Haan, Allen, Purvis and Daskalova2013). Multilingual publications became a strong asset of Yugoslav women’s internationalism, mirroring official Yugoslav diplomacy in its attempt to overcome international isolation.

Once the break between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union appeared definitive after 1949, Yugoslav leaders started to look for new transnational allies, turning to the USA for economic and military aid and establishing some bilateral exchanges with Western European socialist parties and with former colonized nations in the developing world. The first contacts with India and Egypt, which later would play a very important role in the creation of the NAM, were established while Yugoslavia was occupying a seat as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in 1950–1951 (Rajak Reference Rajak2014; Rubinstein Reference Rubinstein1970). A first Yugoslav “mission of goodwill” was sent to India from December 1952 until January 1953, and Vida Tomšič took part in it as one of the delegates. Milovan Đilas visited the Asian Socialist Conference in January 1953 in Rangoon and stopped in New Delhi on his way back, while Tito led his first official visit to Asia, namely, to Burma and India, between the end of November 1954 and the beginning of January 1955. These visits anticipated the successive Bandung conference of Afro-Asian solidarity in 1955 (which did not include Yugoslavia) and the tripartite meeting between Tito, Nasser, and Nehru in July 1956. As Rajak (Reference Rajak2014) argues, the normalization of relations with the West and the end of Soviet threat after 1955 allowed Yugoslav leaders to venture more confidently into a rapprochement with the Third World.

In this context of growing nonaligned connections, the correspondence between the Belgrade and Zagreb bureaus of the Union of Women’s Societies (Savez Ženskih Društava; hereafter SŽD) recorded the visit of an Indian woman, referred to simply as Kamaladevi, in August 1953.Footnote ⁴ The guest was most certainly Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988), a long-standing anti-colonial activist and socialist feminist, the first Organizing Secretary of the All India Women’s Conference (founded in 1927), and the chief of the Indian Cooperative Union in the post-war era. Chattopadhyay was among the generation of women who became active in the nationalist struggle and who went to occupy positions of responsibility in the post-independence era. Another remarkable activist was Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister Virjaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990), ambassador to the USSR, the USA, and Mexico between 1947 and 1951, and the first woman President of the United Nations General Assembly in 1953 (Devenish Reference Devenish2014; see also Jayawardena Reference Jayawardena2016). Virjaya Lakshmi Pandit led the first fact-finding mission to Yugoslavia in the summer of 1954 (Rajak Reference Rajak2014). The magazine Žena u Borbi (Woman in the Struggle), published in Zagreb, highlighted how Pandit praised Yugoslavia for its adherence to UN principles and how she compared Yugoslavia’s role in Europe to India’s role in Asia.Footnote ⁵

The two most prominent women’s organizations in post-independence India were the All India Women’s Conference—connected to the Congress Party in power—and the Women’s Self Defence League (MARS)—linked to the Communist Party of India—which was especially strong in Bengal and whose representatives were active in the WIDF (Jayawardena 1986; Armstrong Reference Armstrong2016). As a result of their expulsion from the WIDF and of high-level contacts between the Indian and Yugoslav governments, Yugoslav women’s organizations were mostly connected to activists belonging to the All India Women’s Conference. Following Yugoslav authorities’ rapprochement with socialist parties in Western Europe and post-colonial countries in Asia, a 1954 report of the Yugoslav women’s organization duly noted that contacts had been made with the women’s sections of socialist parties in Belgium, Greece, and West Germany; they also reported some contacts in Sweden and Denmark on issues of domestic education and childcare. Connections with the female representatives of decolonization movements in India, Indonesia, and Burma were also mentioned.Footnote ⁶

The de-Stalinization of the mid-1950s and the fleeting reconciliation of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union also meant that Yugoslav female politicians partially rekindled their relationships with Soviet women and other women’s organizations of the socialist bloc. Between 1955 and 1956, delegations were exchanged with Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and China. In April 1956, Yugoslav women attended the WIDF Council in Beijing, while in November 1956, six prominent Yugoslav activists, including Vida Tomšič, travelled to the Soviet Union for two weeks. They reported that Soviet representatives were largely silent on the previous disputes and put on a display of everlasting friendship, nonetheless appearing skeptical when Yugoslav women presented the new course of Yugoslav self-management and its alleged revival of Leninist ideals.Footnote ⁷ Yugoslav representatives also felt that the visit and the discussions were kept at a superficial level. They expressed criticism toward the propagandist tone of the Soviet press, especially in relation to the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, which coincided with their time in Moscow.Footnote ⁸ The Hungarian intervention and the execution of the Hungarian reformist leader Imre Nagy led to a renewed deterioration of Soviet-Yugoslav relations from 1958 onward (Rajak Reference Rajak, Bott, Hanhimaki, Schaufelbuehl and Wyss2016), yet contacts with the WIDF continued, albeit with Yugoslav women acting as critical observers and looking for alternative pathways to the Global South.

Another congress, organized this time by the All-China Women’s Federation in August 1957, led Yugoslav representatives to embark upon a journey through Indonesia, India, and Egypt on their way back from China. The travel lasted from August 22 to October 19, 1957.Footnote ⁹ Indian, Egyptian, and Indonesian women’s organizations returned the courtesy and visited Yugoslavia in the following years. Also, as a result of Tito’s next grand tour of Asia and Africa between December 5, 1958 and February 5, 1959, which affirmed his primary role in nonaligned politics (Rajak Reference Rajak, Bott, Hanhimaki, Schaufelbuehl and Wyss2016), Yugoslav representatives’ connections with women’s organizations in recently decolonized countries intensified. While official exchanges with India, Pakistan, and Egypt continued, new connections with North Africa were made, with Tunisian women visiting Yugoslavia in November 1960. Yugoslav women had joined the Second Congress of the Tunisian Women’s Union in August 1960, together with Algerian, Libyan, Iraqi, Moroccan, and Turkish representatives. Alongside an American guest, Yugoslav women were the only foreigners that did not belong to the Middle East or North Africa. Contacts with women involved in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) also increased during the Algerian War, in line with Yugoslav support and military aids to Algerian revolutionaries (Rubinstein Reference Rubinstein1970, 86–88; see also Byrne Reference Byrne2014).

Despite these increased connections, Yugoslav representatives did not cease from making use of WIDF networks in order to get in touch with left-wing women’s movements in the Global South. In 1958, an Asian-African Conference of Women was held in Colombo under the initiative of social reform women’s organizations in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Sri Lanka. Further preparations were made for the Women’s Conference of Afro-Asian solidarity held in Cairo in February 1961, which affiliated this time left-wing women’s organizations associated with the NAM and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (see Armstrong Reference Armstrong2016; Bier Reference Bier and Lee2010). The conference preparations were described in a 1960 SŽD report but only as a translation of reports contained in the WIDF periodical Femmes du Monde Entier. Footnote ¹⁰ The same happened for the Congress of Women of West Africa held in July 1959 in Bamako. With Ghanaian women’s organizations, however, there were direct exchanges due to the Yugoslav embassy in Accra. A delegation of Ghanaian female members of parliament visited Yugoslavia in September 1960. In the coming year, the SŽD made contact with Kenyan women through the Kenyan bureau in Cairo.Footnote ¹¹ The following diplomatic report of the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ), which replaced the SŽD in 1961, explicitly indicated that Yugoslav women had an interest in cooperating with the WIDF in view of the fact that many women’s organizations from Africa, Asia, and Latin America were joining the WIDF and bringing a fresh critical perspective. Yugoslav women explicitly mentioned the possibility of reaching other women’s organizations in the developing world through WIDF networks.Footnote ¹² In their bilateral connections, Yugoslav representatives adhered to the principles of peaceful coexistence, self-determination, and “national roads to socialism.” This also applied to the politics of women’s emancipation, which had to be adapted to each country’s specific political, economic, and social context rather than follow a predetermined (Soviet) model.

In their effort to reform the WIDF and its bloc orientation, Yugoslav women found the support of the Union of Italian Women (UDI), which affiliated women belonging to communist and socialist parties and had an interested in transforming the WIDF in a less pro-Soviet direction from the mid-1950s onward (see Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli, de Haan, Allen, Purvis and Daskalova2013). The Yugoslavs established the best networks in Western Europe with the UDI followed by cooperation with the communist Union of French Women (hereafter UFF) and socialist women in Belgium and Sweden.Footnote ¹³ Exchanges of delegations with state socialist women’s organizations in Eastern Europe were also frequent, but only Polish and Hungarian women’s organizations were deemed significant by Yugoslav observers. Organizations in other countries, especially in East Germany, were deemed as excessively “pro-bloc.” Instances of longstanding competition and mistrust with Soviet women persisted in Yugoslav reports and extended to East-South diplomatic relations. During the conference of the All India Women’s Congress in April 1960, for instance, which happened simultaneously to a Soviet official visit, two unspecified Indian women (dve indijke) reported to Yugoslav delegates Marija Šoljan-Bakarić and Jelica Marić that they had been criticized by Soviet politician and forthcoming Minister of Culture Yekatarina Furtseva (1910–1974) on account that they had not yet paid a visit to the USSR despite repeated invitations, while they had already visited Yugoslavia.Footnote ¹⁴

Despite the overbearing presence of Soviet women in transnational meetings, Yugoslav women were very proactive in their internationalism between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. Between of April 19–21, 1961, five months before the well-known Belgrade summit that marked the official founding of the Non-Aligned Movement and the proclamation of its principles of “peaceful and active coexistence” (Rubinstein Reference Rubinstein1970, 56), the KDAŽ organized a major conference in Zagreb, which saw the participation of delegates from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the Global South.Footnote ¹⁵ Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and East German women took part in the conference as socialist bloc representatives, while Swedish, Italian, and French women joined from Western Europe. The conference focused on anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, reflecting the growing radicalism of the nonaligned movement (Byrne Reference Byrne2014). Since the event happened shortly after the murder of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, his wife Pauline Lumumba was invited as a guest of honor, as well as Algerian activists, who thanked Yugoslav women for their material support during the liberation struggle. Women from the socialist bloc also hailed the example of Cuba, who had just survived the failed Bay of Pigs invasion a few days earlier. The delegates from the Ugandan liberation movement, in turn, praised their Algerian and Cuban sisters, while anti-colonial activists from South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) argued that “the task that is placed before humankind is threefold: the question of erasing all the traces of colonialism in the whole world; the question of removing military bases from Asia and Africa and stopping nuclear testing, for instance French tests in Sahara; and thirdly, that Asian and African countries will be no longer a source of profit for Western imperialists and foreigners who comfortably sit in London, New York, and Washington.”Footnote ¹⁶ Other developing countries represented at the conference were Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Indonesia, Tunisia, and the short-lived United Arab Republic, which federated Egypt and Syria.

The magazine Žena (which replaced Žena u Borbi) published detailed reports about women’s movements in newly decolonized countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with data about legislative reform, women’s participation in liberation movements, and new women’s organizations engaged in the promotion of women’s political and social rights. The parallels established between Yugoslav women’s participation to the liberation struggle in World War Two and Asian and African women’s fight for liberation from colonialism were especially prominent. Also emphasized was the understanding that new mass-based women’s organizations in post-colonial countries were emerging out of a wider liberation struggle and as part of newly founded state institutions, as the AFŽ did after 1945. In the eyes of socialist women’s leaders, such a stance was opposed to interwar liberal feminist organizations in the Global South and Yugoslavia, which had allegedly focused on women’s issues in isolation from wider social issues. New industries, agricultural cooperatives, and welfare infrastructures, such as hospitals and schools, were all seen as crucial means to achieve political and economic self-reliance after colonialism, as Yugoslavia did in its effort to overcome foreign domination. Women’s organizations were understood to be crucial actors in this modernization effort.Footnote ¹⁷

After the high-profile international conference of 1961, and after the intensification of cross-border connections in previous years, Yugoslav initiatives in the field of women’s internationalism appear to be less consistent and strategic, even if bilateral travels continued and new connections were established, notably with African movements, such as through Vida Tomšič’s visit to Guinea, Mali, and Senegal in 1967, during which she reported in detail about local efforts to build welfare institutions after the end of colonialism (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016c). Yugoslav women’s internationalism was influenced by the crisis of coordinated nonaligned initiatives throughout the 1960s, especially toward the end of the decade (Byrne Reference Byrne2014; Dinkel Reference Dinkel, Bott, Hanhimaki, Schaufelbuehl and Wyss2016). Divergences in the movement became apparent: India, a powerful interlocutor, got closer to Moscow vis-à-vis China (Mastny Reference Mastny2010) and grew less supportive of the new predominant agitational kind of nonalignment promoted by Yugoslavia, Egypt, and Algeria. Moreover, Nehru died in 1964 (Byrne Reference Byrne2014). During the 1963 Moscow WIDF gathering, Cold War divides, such as the Sino-Soviet conflict, came to the fore. Chinese representatives, supported by Albania, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia, promoted a radical anti-imperialist line that objected to the denomination of the event as the “World Congress of Women” (a denomination which implied a less ideological position and an increased openness to cooperate with non-socialist women’s organizations). Even if Yugoslav representatives were not supporting the Chinese line, they nonetheless aimed to maintain their independence from Soviet positions.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1967, during a visit to Moscow on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, Indian and Bulgarian women invited Yugoslav women to reenter the Federation, but Vida Tomšič repeated once again the usual formula that Yugoslav representatives would only cooperate with the WIDF on matters of common interest on a case by case basis.Footnote ¹⁹

While the second half of the mid-1960s marked a low in the development of the Non-Aligned Movement, the revival of coordinated developing countries’ activism on economic issues in the 1970s, especially within the UN, meant that Yugoslav women had a new platform for internationalist connections. The UN Decade for Women (1975–1985) led to a wide array of meetings within the NAM on the role of women in development. Vida Tomšič emerged as the uncontested leader of Yugoslav diplomacy in the realm of women’s rights. While her cross-border activism went beyond nonalignment and the UN, for the purpose of this article I focus on Tomšič’s connections and discussions with Indian activists on the role of women in development.

Yugoslavia, India, and the Role of Women in Development

In the 1970s, nonaligned countries engaged in sustained South-South cooperation with the aim to challenge the existing global economic order. Also due to its trade interests in the Global South, Yugoslavia took a very active role in these processes, liaising with other NAM and G77 countries as well as supporting the 1974 Declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) within the UN General Assembly (Dinkel Reference Dinkel, Bott, Hanhimaki, Schaufelbuehl and Wyss2016; Spaskovska Reference Spaskovska2018). Additionally, an entirely new field of institutional cooperation opened up when the UN General Assembly adopted its 3010 Resolution in 1972, declaring 1975 International Women’s Year.Footnote ²⁰ The UN Decade for Women (1975–1985) coincided with renewed nonaligned activism on economic matters, fostering a wide array of exchanges over issues of women and development as well as encouraging Yugoslav women’s organizations to liaise with activists from the Global South.

During the UN World Conferences on Women in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985), East-West and North-South divides came to the fore. Not only did the Soviet “peace” agenda gain prominence during the first two conferences, as Ghodsee (Reference Ghodsee2010) noted, but also the Global South agenda, which emphasized the connection between women’s rights and the need for new global economic relations (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b). Western delegations very much resented the “politicization” and perceived “anti-Western” character of these demands. Meanwhile, women affiliated with the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 organized within and outside UN World Conferences on Women through parallel meetings dedicated to women in development. Already during the 1976 NAM summit in Colombo, a seminar including women from nonaligned countries encouraged the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement to give proper consideration to the “specific problems of women,” supporting the “initiative already taken by Yugoslavia to have this subject included in the agenda for the Summit Conference.”Footnote ²¹ The first Conference of nonaligned and other developing countries on the Role of Women in Development was held in Baghdad in 1979.Footnote ²² A follow-up took place during the “Meeting of High-level Experts of Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries Concerned with the Role of Women in Development,” held in Havana in May 1981.Footnote ²³ Another Ministerial Meeting was held in New Delhi in April 1985, in preparation for the Nairobi World Conference on Women to be held in September of that year.

Yugoslavia had an active role in promoting the nonaligned agenda at the UN, especially due to the role of the International Center for the Promotion of Enterprises in Developing Countries (hereafter ICPE), an intergovernmental organization founded in 1974 in Ljubljana following a United Nations initiative, which cooperated with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and other UN institutions (see also the article by Calori and Spaskovska in this issue). The ICPE was especially active in women’s issues from 1983 onward, when it was asked to prepare a study on the role of women in developing countries to present at the 1985 Nairobi conference.Footnote ²⁴ A wide array of expert-based encounters and high profile meetings were held in Yugoslavia during the UN Decade for Women. The 1977 Bled conference on the role of women in development, for instance, was opened by the first-ever female Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Helvi Sipilä (1915–2009), and included an intervention by ILO (International Labor Organization) representative Krishna Ahooja Patel (1929–2018).Footnote ²⁵

Throughout the UN Decade for Women, Yugoslav representatives openly sided with nonaligned and developing countries by arguing that the achievement of women’s emancipation was dependent upon the transformation of relations of production across the world. Yugoslav leaders’ long-standing Marxist theorization of the “women’s question”—which saw issues of production and reproduction as intrinsically related—were thus translated on a global scale within the NAM. Vida Tomšič had a leading role in promoting such stances, which coincided with her profound belief that women’s emancipation did not concern women only but society as a whole. As such, women’s emancipation needed to be tackled through the in-depth transformation of social and economic relations (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b; Reference Bonfiglioli2016c). Due to her earlier waryness of “bourgeois” interwar feminism, on the one hand, Tomšič mainly associated second-wave feminism with Western countries’ attempts to depoliticize women’s issues and to reduce them to a field of humanitarian intervention in order to pursue neo-colonialism in the developing world. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, many Western feminist activists, as well as Western governments, read socialist and developing countries’ demands for a new economic order as an unwarranted attempt to politicize UN conferences on the status of women (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b).

Given her wariness toward feminism, it would seem paradoxical that Vida Tomšič established relevant connections with women who are considered today the foremothers of the Indian second-wave feminist movement, such as Vina Mazumdar (1927–2013) and Devaki Jain (1933–), or even that someone like Jain would retrospectively define Tomšič as a Yugoslav feminist (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b; Ghodsee Reference Ghodsee2014). At the same time, figures like Mazumdar and Jain started to express their engagement primarily as academic experts within state-sponsored initiatives before being recognized as feminist foremothers. Even more importantly, as often highlighted by Mazumdar herself, the establishment of the first state-sponsored program in women’s studies within the framework of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) coincided with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s proclamation of a state of emergency. Such profound ambivalence in the relation between the Indian state and Indian women’s movements has been analyzed in multiple publications (John Reference John2017; 1996; Mazumdar Reference Mazumdar1994; Sreekumar Reference Sreekumar2017).

In the post-Yugoslav region, similarly, the ambivalence of “state feminism” and figures like Tomšič has often come to the fore, in line with debates over the extent of women’s agency within state socialist women’s organizations (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016c; De Haan Reference De Haan2016). As noted previously (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b; Reference Bonfiglioli2016c), someone like Vida Tomšič held deep beliefs about the modern state and welfare institutions as fundamental factors of social change, equality, and political participation, especially due to the Yugoslav experience of self-managed workplaces and municipalities. She often fostered the nonaligned idea of “collective self-reliance” (Spaskovska Reference Spaskovska2018), emphasizing the importance of active popular participation, including women’s participation, to modernization and development. The significance of women’s political engagement within state structures in places like Yugoslavia and India during the 1970s and 1980s cannot be overstated, especially at a time when “national machineries” for the promotion of women’s rights were conceived as the main tool of modernization and social change across the Eastern and Western blocs as well as within the United Nations.Footnote ²⁶ Due to the multiple institutional mechanisms put in place during the International Women’s Decade, “national machineries” became an important instrument of knowledge production in developing countries. Social scientists, in fact, started to engage in gender-sensitive research on women and development in order to report back to UN institutions and expert meetings, and this process often fostered new women’s groups and movements, as in the case of India. Yugoslav scholars and activists closely followed research on women in developing countries, especially due to the contacts established by the ICPE in Ljubljana.

Vida Tomšič’s first contacts with India date from December 1952 to January 1953, when she visited the country as a member of the Yugoslav Goodwill Mission. She took extensive notes and documentation, using it to organize various lectures on India across Yugoslavia as well as to write a children’s story on Indian history.Footnote ²⁷ The most intense contacts with Indian activists, however, happened in the course of the UN Decade for Women, engendering a rich correspondence as well as published material. Tomšič’s visited India for a second time in March 1974, after having visited Sri Lanka and its Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike within the framework of the Non-Aligned Movement and in preparation of the NAM summit to be held in Colombo in 1976.Footnote ²⁸ Once in New Delhi, Tomšič met with Indira Gandhi, along with functionaries of the Yugoslav embassy. In her report of the joint visit, she noted that both Bandaranaike and Gandhi were facing strong internal opposition and did not delve into issues related to the UN Decade for Women.Footnote ²⁹

Cooperation on women’s issues, however, was emphasized two years later, when, in November 1976, the Slovenian lawyer received the Spirit of India award from the Indian ambassador in Yugoslavia on behalf of Indira Gandhi for her contribution to women’s rights in connection to International Women’s Year. The Spirit of India award consisted of a scroll signed by Indira Gandhi with the following inscription: “In this International Women’s Year, the women of India recall your services to India and present this to you as a token of their gratitude.”Footnote ³⁰ The Indian ambassador’s speech also mentioned that Tomšič had successfully led the Yugoslav delegation during the Mexico City Conference (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b). Despite the fact that Tomšič was held in high esteem in India, she only returned to the country a decade later for a Ministerial Meeting of “Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries on the Role of Women in Development” (April 8–11, 1985) and then again as a guest of the Indian Center for Social Science Research (ICSSR) (November 2–10, 1985), delivering the “J.P. Naik Memorial Lecture at the Center for Women’s Development Studies” (CWDS).Footnote ³¹ During this last visit, besides a reception by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother Indira Gandhi after her assassination in 1984, Tomšič held several meetings with feminist academics and women’s organizations.Footnote ³² A roundtable was also organized by the ICSSR, in cooperation with the Research Group on Women’s Studies based at the Department of Political Sciences, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of defeating fascism in Europe as well as women’s contribution to World War Two and post-war reconstruction. Tomšič was the guest of honor, and she was defined as a “veteran with first-hand experience, being a participant in the national struggle of Yugoslavia.”Footnote ³³ On the same day, Tomšič gave a lecture entitled “Women in the Struggle against Fascism” at the invitation of Janwadi Mahila Samiti, the Delhi branch of the National Association of Indian Women, affiliated with the Indian Communist Party.Footnote ³⁴

Women’s studies in India had grown significantly since the start of the UN Decade for Women in the mid-1970s. Its founding document, the monumental report Towards Equality (1974), authored by the newly founded Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) and led by Vina Mazumdar, was supposed to provide a country-level report for International Women’s Year. The report—which ended up not being presented in Mexico City due to its critical perspective—had pointed at the exclusion of Indian women from development gains and citizenship rights. According to the authors, “masses of women in this country have remained unaffected by the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and the laws enacted since Independence.”Footnote ³⁵ The report was followed by the founding of the Indian Council of Social Science Research Programme of Women’s Studies (1976) and the Center for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS) in New Delhi in 1980, both directed by Mazumdar. The Indian Association for Women’s Studies was founded in 1982 (John Reference John1996, Reference John2017; Mazumdar Reference Mazumdar1994; Rai Reference Rai2007).

As recalled by Mazumdar (Rai Reference Rai2007, 106; Mazumdar Reference Mazumdar1994), Indian social scientists engaged in fieldwork across the country for the very first time in the mid-1970s, adopting a gender perspective and making clear that enormous social and economic inequalities existed among Indian women, a majority of which lived in poverty. The modernization agenda adopted by Indian authorities was under question, as social scientists showed that development gains were unevenly distributed according to class, caste, and gender. Vida Tomšič clearly tried to follow these developments, as shown by her 1978 request to the Indian ambassador in Yugoslavia to be sent Devaki Jain’s Reference Jain1975 book From Dissociation to Rehabilitation: Report on an Experiment to Promote Self-Employment in an Urban Area, dedicated to self-employed women in the informal economy, a theme that was of particular interest for Tomšič due to her vision of women as active agents of social development.Footnote ³⁶ Jain met Tomšič during her 1985 visit and warmly remembered her contribution to women’s nonaligned activism in her later publication Women, Development and the UN (Jain 2007) as well as in public interventions on the UN Decade for Women (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2016b).

Warm relations were also established with Vina Mazumdar, whose correspondence with Tomšič span from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s and whose coordinating role was crucial in organizing Tomšič’s visit in November 1985.Footnote ³⁷ In 1983, Mazumdar visited Yugoslavia after she was entrusted with coordinating the preparation of the ICPE study on the role of women in developing countries that was to be presented at the UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement.Footnote ³⁸ Yugoslav and Indian scholars mainly contributed to the study by collecting materials from relevant institutions in other countries. Mazumdar came back to Ljubljana in January 1985, discussing the developments of the study with Vida Tomšič and other ICPE staff. The Yugoslav report emphasized once again that “the accent and political orientation of the study is on the relation between development and the role and status of women, which is directly related to the struggle for a NIEO, that is, for new economic international relations. We do not believe that this standpoint is showing a politicization of the women’s question, contrary to what the West argues, simultaneously promoting a partial and sectoral approach to women’s issues (women as a marginalised and depressed group).”Footnote ³⁹ The final study—which included a comprehensive overview of women’s roles in the world economy and in relevant fields requiring national and international intervention (such as agriculture, industry, education, and culture, the mass media, science and technology, health and population)—was approved during the Ministerial Meeting held in New Delhi in April 1985 and circulated to the Nairobi conference.Footnote ⁴⁰

A few months after their meeting in Ljubljana, Vina Mazumdar arranged all the details for Vida Tomšič’s November visit to New Delhi, where she delivered the “J.P. Naik Memorial Lecture” at the Center for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS). In her lecture, Tomšič reinstated her vision of women as a crucial factor in development, which is now widely accepted as a tenant of gender mainstreaming. Tomšič (Reference Tomšič1985) stated:

The Slovenian politician praised the ways in which women’s issues had been tackled in UN and nonaligned settings, as opposed to “extremist feminist movements,” reinstating the idea that the status of women was deeply related to global relations of production, and represented an “indicator of development of every country and on the global scale” (Tomšič Reference Tomšič1985).

Once she returned to Ljubljana, Tomšič thanked Mazumdar and expressed her satisfaction with the visit, which had included a wide array of meetings with Indian scholars and activists. She told the Indian scholar, “My stay was so rich in discussions and meetings that I haven’t managed yet to go through all my notes.”Footnote ⁴¹ A year later, she reminisced: “One year has passed since my visit in India, but it seems to me much shorter, while being very busy all this time, I feel like having been with you just few days ago. I feel sorry for not having more time for more frequent contacts with all friends I met in India, and with you especially.”Footnote ⁴² The two remained in contact and exchanged greetings for the rest of the 1980s, updating each other on their political and personal struggles. In 1986, Mazumdar told Tomšič about Indian activists’ successful struggle to get women’s issues incorporated in the National Education Policy. They had lost, however, a battle concerning new legislative measures that denied Muslim women the right to maintenance after divorce. In an affectionate tone, Mazumdar wrote: “I have also not been very well recently, and have been wondering how I could imbibe some more of your continued strength and energy.”Footnote ⁴³ Their correspondence encompassed various issues, especially publication projects, including the edited version of Tomšič’s lecture.

In her foreword to the published lecture (Tomšič Reference Tomšič1985), available on the site of the CWDS, Mazumdar did not spare her admiration when introducing the work of her Yugoslav colleague: