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Women in the Greek Resistance: National Crisis and Political Transformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Janet Hart
Janet Hart
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

In a 1982 review article, Theda Skocpol asks the question, “What makes peasants revolutionary?” She analyzes the conclusions of authors who endeavor to explain what leads peasants—a stereotypically powerless group—to engage in collective action that challenges the economic or political status quo. The above example suggests a useful paraphrase of the question: was Stathoula's case exceptional, and if not, what made a Greek working-class woman during the 1940s revolutionary?

Type
The Working Class in World War II
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 38 , Fall 1990 , pp. 46 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1990

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References

NOTES

1. Former prisoner, interview by Hart, Janet, Athens, , 04 30, 1985.Google Scholar Stathoula Levendis worked in a textile factory. She was executed on February 21, 1948. Papadouka, Olympia, Yinekes Filakes Averoff (The Averoff Women's Prison) (Athens, 1981), 79.Google Scholar Levendis's last words were “and Greeks do not live without freedom!” Her parting comments come from a line in Ehete Yeia Vrisoules (“Goodbye, Women of the Well”, or the “Souliote song”), referring to the women of Souli who danced off a cliff to avoid capture during the 1803 uprising against the Ali Pasha of Ioannina.

2. Skocpol, Theda, “What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?” Comparative Politics (04 1982), 351–75.Google Scholar

3. From Papadouka, Olympia, H Yineka Stin Antistasi: Tragoudia tis FilakisGoogle Scholar (Women in the Resistance: Prison Songs), first recorded in France under the title “Chants de Prison: Femmes dans la Resistance.”

4. Hart interview, Athens, 11 20, 1985.Google Scholar

5. Tilly, Charles defines a “national social movement”Google Scholar as one that “pits challengers against the people who run a national state.” He opposes this type to “a variety of phenomena — religious innovations, crusades, local rebellions, and others— to which the term social movement has often been loosely applied.” Tilly, , “Social Movements and National Politics,” in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, eds. Bright, Charles and Harding, Susan (Ann Arbor, 1984), 297–317.Google Scholar

6. For example, Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar and Passerini, Luisa, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (New York, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Mouzelis, Nicos, “On the Concept of Populism: Populist and Clientelist Modes of Incorporation in Semiperipheral Polities,” Politics and Society 14 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Luedtke, Alf, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany circa 1900,” in Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labor Process: Studies in Proletarian Class Formation, eds. Hanagan, Michael and Stephenson, Charles (Westport, Conn., 1986).Google Scholar

9. For example, Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), especially pp. 93–112.Google Scholar

10. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1983), 16.Google Scholar

11. Material for this study was collected in Greece in 1983–85 for the author's Ph.D. dissertation, “Empowerment and Political Opportunity: Greek Women in Resistance, 1941–1964,” Cornell University, 1989.Google Scholar I formally interviewed approximately forty-four female members (from a geographic crosssection of Greece) of the following resistance organizations: EAM, ELAS, EPON, EA, EDES, RAN, PEAN, and a British liaison group. Informally, I talked with twenty-seven others, thirteen of whom were male. I have also used written histories and personal accounts. Of the forty-four women, twenty-seven were from the youth organization, EPON. The others were mostly in EPON/ELAS units or the EA welfare organization. Several gave multiple organizational identities. Only four out of the sample were from non-EAM organizations. The interviewees were disproportionately from middle-class backgrounds and had thus been better able to escape and survive the repression of the postwar years.

12. The subject of the EAM as a discontinuous political movement is addressed by Stavrianos, Leften, “The Greek National Liberation Front (EAM): A Study in Resistance Organization,” Journal of Modern History 24 (03 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Legg, Keith, Politics in Modern Greece (Stanford, 1969)Google Scholar; Tsoucalas, Constantine, “The Ideological Impact of the Civil War,” in Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, ed. Iatrides, John O. (Hanover and London, 1981)Google Scholar; Hondros, John Louis, Occupation and Resistance: The Greek Agony, 1941–1944 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; and Minehan, Philip, “Dependency, Realignment and Reaction: Movement Toward Civil War in Greece During the 1940s,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 10 (Fall, 1983).Google Scholar

13. The EDES (National Greek Republican League), founded in September 1942, was a rightist organization led by Napoleon Zervas and supported by the British.

14. For example, see Stavrianos, , “EAM,” 44–46.Google Scholar

15. Hondros, John Louis, Occupation and Resistance: The Greek Agony, 1941–1944 (New York, 1983), 111–12.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., 119–20: “There were also six Orthodox bishops, many labor leaders, thirty professors from the University of Athens, and two members of the Academy of Athens in EAM/ELAS. … A noncommunist source inside of Greece in 1943 reported that EAM/ELAS was strongest among civil servants, white collar workers, merchants, shopkeepers and professionals in the urban areas and among wealthy peasants in the countryside.”

17. Migdal, Joel, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution (Princeton, 1974), 232.Google Scholar Also Skocpol, , “What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?” 361–67.Google Scholar

18. Tsoucalas, Constantine, The Greek Tragedy (London, 1969), 70.Google Scholar

19. For the legal ramifications of the White Terror, see Alivizatos, Nicos C., “The ‘Emergency Regime’ and Civil Liberties, 1946–1949,” in Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, ed. Iatrides, John O. (Hanover and London, 1981), 220–28.Google Scholar

20. For example, see Eudes, Dominique, The Kapetanios: Partisans and Civil War in Greece, 1943–1949 (London, 1972), 326–39.Google Scholar

21. See Kaufman, Robert R., “The Patron–Client Concept and Macro-Politics: Prospects and Problems”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (06 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Mouzelis, Nicos, “Class and Clientelistic Politics: The Case of Greece,” Sociological Review 26 (08 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Ta Tragoudia Tis Antistasis Kai Tou Emfiliou (Songs of the Resistance and Civil War) (Athens, 1975).Google Scholar

23. Mouzelis, , “Populism,” 340.Google Scholar

24. “‘Timi’ expresses the idea of worth, whether this is an economic value in a market, or social worth evaluated in a complex of competing groups and individuals.” Campbell, J. K., Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964), 268.Google Scholar

25. Pollis, Adamantia, “Greek Women: The Struggle for Individuality” (unpublished manuscript, 1980), 10.Google Scholar

26. My source material was mainly drawn from an age cohort consisting of individuals who were adolescents, teenagers, and young adults during the war. Thus, many of the oral histories evince changes in youthful aspirations and identities. In this part of the study, I have based my analysis on what the individual might have projected before the war in light of family background and expectations, and then compared those answers to how the person felt the resistance had reshaped her perception of women's rights and capabilities. The subjects did not appear to have been conditioned to respond in the sort of stylized leitmotifs that usually result from intervention by the news media, by political party rhetoric, or by previous academic studies.

27. Hart interview, Athens, 11 22, 1985.Google Scholar

28. Ibid.

29. Hart interview, Marathon, 12 8, 1985.Google Scholar

30. Hart interview, Athens, 05 8, 1985.Google Scholar

31. Hart interview, Athens, 10 21, 1985.Google Scholar

32. To institutionalize a system of civil administration and “popular democracy” (laokratia), the EAM set up a paralegal infrastructure in rural Greece designed to adjudicate local cases ranging from sheep-stealing to property disputes to honor-killings. A number of women were appointed to serve as judges, including a woman in the Peloponnese famous for her decision to transcend family connections and “convict” her brother-in-law for his role in a controversy with a neighbor.

33. Woodhouse, C. M., The Apple of Discord (London, 1985), 146.Google Scholar Woodhouse, commander of the Allied Military Mission in Greece during the war and generally critical of the EAM/ELAS, acknowledged that “communications in the mountains, by wireless, courier, and telephone have never been so good before or since; even motor roads were mended and used by EAM/ELAS.… Schools, local government, law-courts, factories, parliamentary assemblies began for the first time. Communal life was organized [for] the Greek peasant.”

34. Minehan, , “Dependency,” 28.Google Scholar

35. Sarafis, Marion, ed., ELAS: Greek Resistance Army (memoirs of Maj. Gen. Stephanos Sarafis) (1946; reprint, London, 1980)Google Scholar, footnote added by Marion Sarafis.

36. Sarafis, Marion, letter to the author, 12 16, 1985.Google Scholar

37. Vasilis Rotas was a poet, writer, theatre producer and translator (of Shakespearean plays into Greek, for example), and was one of Greece's most prominent intellectuals both before and after the war.

38. The Theatre of the Mountains, a documentary film shown 11 13, 1985Google Scholar at the Center for Scientific Research, Athens.

39. Fortouni, Eleni, Greek Women in Resistance (New Haven, 1984), 29.Google Scholar

40. Alivizatos, Nicos C., “Emergency Regime,” in Greece, ed. Iatrides, 220–28.Google Scholar

41. A dilosi was a statement whereby signers renounced participation in the resistance, declared themselves traitors for joining the EAM organization, and promised thereafter to be “good Greeks.” Those who refused to sign ran the risk of execution (until 1950) or of imprisonment (until 1963 or after).

42. The youngest political prisoner in the Averoff Women's Section was Nina Ekonomou, called “Ninaki” or “Little Nina” by the other prisoners. She was twelve and one-half years old when she arrived at the Averoff after being court-martialed in March 1948, along with a fourteen-year-old classmate, Nina's, Theofano Z. prison classmates, Georgia Poliyennous and the sixteen-year-old Maria Repa, were executed on 03 9, 1949.Google Scholar

43. Tsoucalas, , Tragedy, 114–15.Google Scholar

44. One woman tells of being forced to write an essay calling her parents “traitors” for having been active members of the EAM.

45. The dowry (prika) system was only recently outlawed as part of the Family Law (1982). A girl without a dowry was seriously handicapped in the marriage market.

46. Tragoudia (Songs).

47. Tsoucalas, Constantine, “The Ideological Impact of the Civil War”, in Greece, ed. Iatrides, 326–27.Google Scholar

48. The literature is vast. See, for example, Chafetz, Janet Saltzman and Dworkin, Anthony, Female Revolt: Women's Movements in World and Historical Perspective (Totowa, N.J., 1986).Google Scholar