Once upon a time in northern Albania, there was a custom of women becoming men. They dressed like men, moved about in society as men, and were content to relinquish traditional female experiences like pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childrearing, and simple, normal human experiences like sex and the companionship of marriage, with its soaring joys, petty resentments, and sometimes-tragic disappointments.
The alternative was to watch their large extended families wither without male leadership in a society that recognized women as worth only 6 oxen to a man’s 12. Sworn Virgins were worth 12. In exchange for their sexuality, they gained freedom from the severe restrictions women faced.
By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.
Both Muslims and Christians adhered to this 500-year old oral code of conduct. The last of the Sworn Virgins (about 40 of them) are in their 80s.
I know, I know, one doesn’t have to experience pregnancy or childbirth or breastfeed or raise children or have sex to be a woman, but CAN YOU IMAGINE?
I don’t know which would be worse — being a woman and thus unable to do anything but keep hearth and home (as sublime as that is), or to become a man in everything but biology and have every opportunity but those which are most instinctual. Except you would still be denied the human experience of sex and marriage, which, last time I checked, most men are interested in.
I’m not one to think that any of us are totally free from cultural absurdities or insane religious, ethnic, or traditional practices, but I just cannot even fathom having to make a choice like that. Give me the modern Mommy Wars any day!
Nowadays women in Albania have more freedom, more choices. They can “go out half naked to the disco” if they want. One Albania man said that “Women and men are now almost the same,” and that it’s “no longer a stigma not to have a man of the house.”
I think it’s a bit ironic that women no longer have to become men to get the freedoms that men enjoy, because “Women and men are now almost the same.” Only now those women can bear children, which, you know, is just one more way those uppity women want to be like the men.
This weekend’s Things That Must Go Giveaway is for a $50 gift certificate to a cool online store.
Visit Fussypants for more reasons to be glad we’re not living in Albania 100 years ago.
Tags: albania, feminism, kanun, motherhood, sexuality, sworn-virgins
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Wow! I can’t believe I got a comment from you! “Shannon! The blogging Goddess!” I feel very honored! I had to laugh when you signed your comment
“Shannon (Tara’s friend)” Of course I know who you are! and I love reading your blog. I always think: Someday I will be as good a blogger as Shannon and Tara.
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What an interesting piece of history. I had never heard of this strange custom. It certainly makes me think about our freedoms here and all I take for granted.
Great post.
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Given those were the only options, I would have totally taken them up on the sworn virgin option, if I were making that decision in my early 20s.
I would totally do it. I joke a lot about being a nun if only I were Catholic, but the life truly has a lot of appeal for me.
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Great post! I have never heard of that before.
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Wow. That is REALLY interesting. I very much enjoy being a woman with all the blessings that come with it.
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Wasn’t it fascinating to see what kind of men these women-turned-patriarchs ended up being? You would think that the circumstances surrounding their decision to cross gender lines would lead them to be more understanding and sympathetic toward women. After all, it was their impotence as women that forced them to become men. And yet that is not at all what they became.
Instead, one “lorded over her large family in her modest house in Tirana, where her nieces served her brandy while she barked out orders. . . . Even today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not dare marry without their ‘uncle’s’ permission. ” One rejected traditionally female work: “I can’t clean, I can’t iron, I can’t cook. That is a woman’s work,” and she “lamented [that] women do not know their place.” The most fascinating is that one of the women, who had taken the vow of virginity after her father was killed, had the man who killed her father killed in vengeance, essentially depriving another family of a male patriarch.
These women turned out to be the very same type of men that were responsible for their formerly-repressed state! I suppose that’s what it took to survive, but still . . .
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Carolina — EXACTLY!
I think they must have employed some sort of cognitive dissociation or something to cope with the gender role change. For them to be as (probably even more) devaluing of the role and worth of women as the men is incredible!
The last two comments are so typically American. While blood vengeance and the oppression of women are bad, you are viewing this with an extreme lack of understanding of the society.
Imagine a rural society of subsistence farmers who live much the way people in rural America did 100-200 years ago, for whom the government’s rule of law has little relevance. Someone has to be the executor of the family’s life and somebody has to bark out the orders.
As for blood feud, you seem to lack understanding also about the concept of honor in these societies as well. I’m not talking about honor killings of a young bride who flashes too much skin, but the betrayal of this family’s security by a murderer. In such an archaic society, there is little choice but to then take the blood back.
It’s ancient, in today’s world it’s inappropriate, and you pray that people living this lifestyle would move on, but the attempt at analyzing it from a Western psychological standpoint is useless.
Now, how exactly did you have the time to find that out? Interesting.
I can’t even imagine having that choice.
Nick, I agree that these Albanian women operated (and still operate) in a completely different cultural landscape–one which I will never fully understand, and one which is fading away (the point of the article). And I certainly do not fault these women for their choices–I would have been the first to volunteer for the patriarchal position and would have embraced all that the role offered.
While my comment above is certainly made with a “Western psychological standpoint,” the relevant cultural issues are not lost on me. I am from Venezuela, a country in which traditional patriarchy have historically been the norm. My grandfather was stabbed in a public square to vindicate the honor of a political figure. My grandma, who wore black and abstained from all social functions after my grandfather’s death, rarely spoke unless she was spoken to by this dominating, but well-loved patriarch. She never drove a car because women did not do that. My husband complains that I often revert to a classic subservient Latina woman when I return to Venezuela, and I have to admit that he’s right, despite how I hate it. So I wouldn’t consider my comment “so typically American.”
However, my comment had nothing to do with what the Albanian culture prescribes, but rather with what the system of young women becoming patriarchs says about a broader human culture.
My own cultural experience aside, there are parallels even in today’s Western society. The working-mom v. stay-at-home-mom wars are a perfect example. So many women take jobs outside of their homes in rejection of the male-dominated society that for so many years deprived women of any real choice in what they did with their lives. Sadly, many of us then begin to devalue the work that has traditionally been called women’s work and try to separate ourselves from that work. We try to become “men,” the very “men” who hoped to deny women a choice in what they did. This is not egalitarianism. Neither is it equality. It is simply increased social mobility within a rigid social (and gendered) hierarchy. That is precisely what was going on in Albania. The women described in this article were not attaining equality with men. Rather, they enjoyed (?) a windfall of social mobility that was otherwise unattainable, which allowed them (forced them?) to “rise above” traditional female roles.
I hope that better explains (and gives context to) my comment above.
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Lest I get blasted for the phrase “classic subservient Latina,” let me clarify that I am referring to the subservient female role of my grandmother’s time.
Carolinas last blog post..Alex’s Top 5
I enjoy (most of the time) what I do for my family, and I can’t imagine not having them to do things for. Every time I fold my childrens’ clothes, or wash my oldest daughter’s teddy bear, I am thankful for them. Every time I plan a menu full of meals for my husband, I am thankful for him. Maybe it’s alright for some, but if I am made to be a woman, then why would I want to live life as a man?
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And I get annoyed sometimes if I have to choose between washing the dishes or doing the laundry first. I’m obviously a lucky girl.
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Nick — While of course my worldview is influenced by the fact that I am American, I do consider myself a woman also, and it was from the instinctual, emotional standpoint of a woman that I considered how the women in Albania might have felt when faced with such a choice.
I also wonder how women in China feel when they give birth to a female or when (if) they ever desire to have a second child.
I spent two years living in Cairo, where the idea of family honor is very important, and where the roles of men and women are still highly prescribed and circumscribed. I felt great kinship with the Muslim women I met, an emotional understanding (not analysis) that was underscored by our common experience as women, and esp. as mothers.
Carolina’s example of the working mother in America is great. I would take it a step further and say that I see parallels to the Albanian female patriarch’s dismissal of “women’s work” and women’s value in the (hopefully very few) working women who are angry or disappointed in their female peers who choose to be homemakers and stay-at-home mothers in America.
True choice and freedom is in each person being able to exercise self-determination.
And for women to demean or not value other women for being women (whatever that means, even if that means an acceptance or even an embracing of the “traditional” female role) is inexcusable and shameful to those women who have chosen the “traditional” male role, no matter what culture they are from.
If we women do not honor the traditional and biological female roles, if we do not value motherhood, pregnancy, childrearing, breastfeeding, etc and show that we think it’s possible, even desirable, to be both a woman and a human being with all the same rights and opportunities as a man, why should we expect men to?
It’s hard to believe that this is so current that there are women still alive who can tell the story. Amazing!