engleski

A move to modernity: Women in Croatia after the postsocialist transition

The paper is an attempt to summarize the changes in values, attitudes and practices of women in Croatia that have taken place in the period of postsocialist transition. Based on the discussion of empirical evidence extending from the mid-1980s to the present day, the paper calls into question the “retraditionalization thesis”, prominent in the social science accounts of the social and cultural trends in Central and East European countries at the beginning of the transition period. In the case of Croatia, the discussion of primary data from 1999, 2005 and 2015 surveys suggests that – in spite of various retraditionalization pressures – the process of modernization of Croatian women continued uninterruptedly in the postsocialist period. However, the analysis also suggests that the modernization process in question has evolved in a non-linear fashion, as it has resulted in seemingly contradictory replies of the surveyed women, in which traditional and even pre-modern values, attitudes and practices frequently coexist with modern and reflexive ones. Such results are interpreted as an outcome of a partial acquisition of values that a linear modernization process would be expected to entail and related both to the specificities of Yugoslav “third way” socialism and of the “second modernity” context toward which the Croatian society has moved in the period of postsocialist transition. The theoretical framework of the interpretation is informed by the tenets of newer modernization theories (Beck, Giddens, Touraine, Inglehart-Welzel), and discussed survey results relate to the fields of family, work, religion and politics.

Women; Croatia; postsocialism; new theories of modernity

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