Chained with aprons

In anticipation of the Eighth of March, a group of female activists and scientific workers offended the patriarchal Serbian public by desecrating the monuments of famous great men, so to speak. Those shameless hooligans hung aprons, imagine, on the monuments of Nikola Tesla, Jovan Cvijić, Josif Pančić, Dositej Obradović, Patriarch Pavlo and Borislav Pekić. The messages "Science is female", "Abortion is a woman's right" and "I support the women's strike" were written on the aprons.

Drekka rose as if, far away, they had plastered the Terasian Tunnel with stickers. Nađa Duhaček and Biljana Stojković spoke about the action they carried out in the TV N1 report. Who are those two women, the uninformed reader will ask. Well, here is some information that is not difficult to find with a simple search on the Internet.

Master's student Nađa Duhaček worked in the Office for European Integration of the Government of Serbia (2008) and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (2006-2007). The activist is the Woman in Black. She is a member of the British Gender and Education Association (GEA). Her areas of research are gender and education, feminist educational policies, elementary school ethnography, and the pedagogical role of popular culture. She collaborated with Unicef ​​on the promotion of science among girls.

Professor Biljana Stojković completed her graduate studies at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Belgrade in 1996. She attended master's studies in the field of genetics and evolution from 1996 to 1999, and obtained the title of doctor of sciences in the same field in 2007. The following year, she became an assistant professor at the Department of Genetics and Evolution. Since 2013, she has held the title of associate professor at the same department. In addition to a large number of publications in leading international scientific journals, prof. Stojković is the author of chapters and books in the field of evolutionary biology. Together with prof. With Nikola Tucić, she wrote the books "Darwiniana: a guide to evolutionary biology" (2009) and "From molecule to organism: molecular and phenotypic evolution" (2012). She is a member of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

What do the biographies of these two women tell us? Well, that the critics are not even up to their knees and that their life achievements give them every right to speak out clearly, loudly and, if you really want, rudely - on behalf of every woman. I only know both of these women through their public appearances. Actually, I'm lying, once I found myself in the same company as Biljana Stojković. I, as a woman, a woman in Serbia, a woman on the labor market, a woman perhaps a future mother, want Biljana Stojković to represent me in public. I want the public to see schoolgirls, writers, directors, photographers, women who drive trams, women who work on forklifts... Because they exist, but they are not seen. Because we don't have a monument to any scientist, any writer, any politician. Because in this country there are girls who have yet to decide what to do in life, and the only heroine that this society recognizes is Milunka Savić, whom I have nothing against, but I don't want that, if one day I decide to give birth to a child, that child will be a daughter , she gets the message from this society that she is only valuable if she is a warrior or a worker. I don't want her apron. Or at least not just an apron, because contrary to popular belief, we feminists do not shy away from cooking. On the contrary, we believe that every independent and independent human being should be able to feed himself. The problem is when they reduce us to just that.

What is that apron and why an apron? The apron is a symbol of unpaid women's work, cooking for the whole family, scrubbing other people's clothes, doing everything for others and nothing for yourself. The apron is shackled. If it wasn't, many people wouldn't be upset that someone hung an apron on the monument to Patriarch Pavlo. Because what? The deceased "living saint" does not deserve an apron? The fact that someone is bothered by the patriarch's apron is the most accurate diagnosis of the degree of patriarchy in which we live. You recognized each other well. But, where is the monument to a nun?