Mitra Mitrović (1912–2001) was a communist activist, writer, and politician whose activist trajectory combined antifascist resistance with a long commitment to women’s political, social, and economic rights. Born into a poor family in the Serbian town of Užička Požega, she experienced hardship early on when her father, a railway clerk, was killed during World War I. Raised by her mother alongside four siblings, she grew up acutely aware of the precariousness of everyday survival, an experience that likely fed her later insistence on the social and political value of women’s work.

She radicalized as a student in Belgrade during the 1930s, a period when authoritarianism and censorship under the royal dictatorship shaped daily life. While studying Yugoslav literature, she immersed herself in Marxist writings and the student movement, officially joining the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1933. For Mitrović, theory and practice were inseparable: along with her studies and intellectual development, she participated in strikes and public demonstrations.

In 1935 she co-founded the Youth Section of the Women’s Movement in Belgrade and served as its first president. The organization advanced what was called “new feminism”, which sought to attract working-class and peasant women and find a place for their concerns within the antifascist, feminist, and communist movements. At the same time, Mitrović joined the editorial board of Woman Today (Žena danas), a magazine that became a vital platform for discussing health, reproductive labour, and women’s right to work, among other things. Even under censorship, the journal continued to voice the conviction that women’s unpaid and underpaid labour was not a private burden but a social and political question.

Her activism did not remain confined to writing. In March 1941 she was among the speakers at the mass demonstrations against the pact between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. Soon after, she was arrested and became the first registered prisoner of the Banjica concentration camp. She escaped and joined the Partisan movement, where she helped establish the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ). As a member of its central committee, she worked to mobilize women not only for the resistance but also for long-term political participation, securing suffrage and equality in the emerging socialist state.

After the war, Mitrović held leading positions in government, including minister of education in the People’s Republic of Serbia. She pushed for reforms that placed education at the heart of reconstruction, connecting literacy and schooling to wider questions of citizenship and social justice. She continued to edit Woman Today, which became the official journal of the AFŽ, ensuring that women’s labour rights remained part of the national conversation.

Mitra Mitrović in 1950 (Source: WikiCommons)

Her later writings deepened these commitments. The Woman’s Position in the Contemporary World (Položaj žene u savremenom svetu) (1960) took a comparative perspective on women’s labour internationally. She argued that across different political economic systems, women faced similar obstacles: difficulties in obtaining education, undervaluation of their work, and above all the challenge of reconciling motherhood with wage work. She described this as the “universal problem of the whole contemporary world”, a formulation that captured her conviction that no society could achieve equality without addressing the double burden carried by women. Her proposed solution was active and comprehensive state intervention that included paid maternity leave, security of employment for pregnant women and young mothers, accessible healthcare, and workplace protections. These measures, she believed, were necessary to create the conditions in which equality could be more than a formal promise.

Mitrović’s career was not without setbacks. In the 1950s, she was largely removed from positions of power. Yet she continued to write, research, and publish, leaving behind a body of work that bridged communist and feminist thought. Mitra Mitrović’s works reveal a vision of emancipation rooted in everyday realities of paid and unpaid labour.

Read more: Mitra Mitrović. The Woman’s Position in the Contemporary World. “About the Author” and “Context” by Isidora Grubački in Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights (eds. Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz), 294-306.

See also: Veljko Stanić. “Parče velikog života: Mitra Mitrović o tridesetim godinama 20. veka”. In Časopis Žena danas (1936–1940): Prosvećivanje za revoluciju (ed. Stanislava Barać), 55–97. Belgrade, 2022.