MSCA : YUCARE

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

Acronym: YUCARE

The onset of World War II saw an unprecedented number of Yugoslav women join the Partisan forces in the National Liberation Struggle (NOB): some of the many 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 Partisan sanitet. Using a combination of microhistorical methodology and digital history tools, the project builds on actor memoirs and a unique collection of archival materials to evaluate and communicate results in a web-based map format.

• How can divergences between accepted narratives and individual women’s experiences in the Yugoslav Partisan Medical Corps be better understood, taking into account temporal, geographic, and demographic differences and a broader gendered history of World War II?
• How were traditional gendered structures maintained, challenged, and negotiated within the Partisan army, and how did these contribute to the state-building practices of the fledgling socialist state?
• How can established methodologies be combined with emerging digital tools to advance historical communication?

Introducing a new methodological approach towards the study of women’s everyday life during World War II, YUCARE consolidates archival and published source material to encourage both academic and mainstream interest in previously marginalized wartime experiences. Through exploring the diversity of ways in which women engaged in care work as part of the Partisan Medical Corps, this project sheds new light on the gendered dimensions of everyday life at war of a population that has up until now been largely overlooked. As such, it combines microhistorical methodologies with digital mapping tools to provide an alternative foundation to the study of gendered agency in the regional social history of WWII.