Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-282) and index.

Introduction -- 1. "To the people, she was a character from folk poetry" : the party's mobilizing rhetoric -- 2. The "organized women" : developing the AFW -- 3. The heroic and the mundane : women in the units -- 4. The personal as a site of party intervention : privacy and sexuality -- 5. After the war was over : legacy -- Concluding remarks.

"The book focuses on one of the most remarkable phenomena of World War II: the mass participation of women, including numerous female combatants, in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. Drawing on an array of sources--archival documents of the Communist Party and Partisan army, wartime press, veteran reminiscences, and Yugoslav literature and cinematography--this study explores the history and postwar memory of the phenomenon. More broadly, it is concerned with changes in gender norms caused by the war, revolution, and establishment of the communist regime that claimed to have abolished inequality between the sexes. The first book on the subject based on archival research, it investigates previously unexplored issues of gender, sexuality, and memory, providing a novel interpretation of the Partisan movement and women's mobilization. Contributes to current debates in multiple fields of scholarship: gender and war studies, women's/gender history, social history of war, comparative communism, East European studies, military history"--Provided by publisher.