Lekë Dukagjini (1410-1481) was a commander-in-chief of the Albanian resistance against the Ottoman invaders. His name is often linked to the so-called Kanun, which is the code of customary laws transmitted orally for centuries in Albania. Under his initiative, in fact, such laws, whose origins are not clear, were written down and became the regulatory corpus of the basis of social life. The laws of the Kanun are then used for more than five hundred years as a fundamental theorem of social and administrative behaviour for the clans of Northern Albania.
It’s interesting to analyse generic role distributions that these laws predisposed: the position of the woman was of absolute and decisive subordination to the man, both within the family and outside it. This is not news if we consider the role that was attributed to women in the European Middle Ages: still today we are suffering from deep disparities, which trickle culture inherited from the past.
From the Kanun, women were not given considerable rights, if not just negative freedoms and simply functional to the maintenance of the marriage and the family and domestic life. The woman, the married one, was considered to be the “lady of the house” and she was untouchable, as she couldn’t be neither abused nor killed, therefore she suffered a double-revenge, from both the husband’s family and the parents of the victim. The Third book of the Kanun, in particular, it’s the one that was mostly took care of the rights and the freedom assigned to the women. To give a few examples, let’s look at articles 12 (.31), 13 (.33) e 33 of the section titled “Marriage”:
Art. 12: The rights of the girl
31. The girl, even if the parents are not alive, is not free to provide for her own marriage; this right belongs to her brothers or her relatives.
The girl has no right to: a. choose her husband, and therefore must accept that which she has been assigned to; b. neither interfere in the choice of the mediator, nor in what concerns the engagement; c. be somewhat interested in her own wedding attire.
Art. 13: The duties of the husband and the wife
33. The duties of the wife to her husband
The wife has the duty: a) to retain loyalty to her husband; b) to serve him selflessly; c) to behave submissively; d) to correspond to the marriage duties; e) to raise their children honourably; f) to upkeep clothes and footwear; g) to not interfere in the engagement of their sons and daughters.
Art. 33
58. The rights of the husband over the wife
The husband has the right: a. to advise and correct his wife; b. to beat her and tie her, when she doesn’t obey to his words and orders.
Since the role of the man is central, it becomes a problem when a family found itself with no male personality ready to take the leadership. Therefore, with the death of the patriarchs and in the absence of male heirs, an unmarried woman could essentially access, through swearing celibacy, the status of a man. She would then become the head of the family, she had the right to own a weapon, to gain ownership and to move freely.
The social need to maintain unaltered the customs therefore created the so-called “sworn virgins”. In her book Women who become men, the anthropologist Antonia Young has analysed this phenomenon as almost extinct: all the sworn virgins are now elderly, relics of an ancient exceptional phenomenon. Many of them chose virginity as an alternative to a life of submission, not to be forced to wash the feet of their husbands, not to eat their leftovers, not to be beaten. Others claim to have becomes because the Kanun forced them to: in order for the inheritance not to be lost, it was normal for one of the women of the family, usually the youngest one (therefore spotless), to be placed on the sacrificial altar of forced masculinity, but liberating. The conversion of women into men had, in fact, primarily a socio-economic function. It has to be rejected, however, the hypothesis that sees the sworn virgins as repressed lesbians or liberated lesbians, to flee from a bitter future, they would become men: according to Young, in fact, in a society extremely sexist as that defined by the Kanun, female homosexuality was not even contemplated, as opposed to the male one that was considered taboo and was not to be pronounced. In addition, the sexuality of these women was entirely suppressed, if not directed towards asexuality, and was not in any way part of the new status acquired: the sworn virgins, although considered men, could not marry women.
Necessity pushed these women to live with their double identity. To suppress all memories of one’s femininity, the most obvious aesthetic traits were eliminated: the movement became marked as those of a man, the breasts were bound to the point where they would disappear, the smile would vanish as a result of the alcohol and the tobacco consumed in abundance.
There was no way of repentance for these people, there was no going back: once they became sworn virgins, they had to be that for the rest of their lives. No misunderstanding thought could go through their heads, shame was not to impact them: the shame against the Kanun had to be washed with blood.
Sources:
Beshiri D., Puka E., (2013), “I diritti delle donne albanesi nel Kanun di Lekë Dukagjini”, in Educazione Democratica, 6/2013, Edizioni del Rosone, Foggia.
Resta P. (1997), Il Kanun di Lekë Dukagjini: Le basi morali e giuridiche della società Albanese, Besa, Lecce.
Whitaken I. (1968), “Tribal structure and national politics in Albania, 1910-1950”, in History and Social Anthropology, edited by I. M. Lewis ASA Monograph n. 7, Tavistock Publications, London.
Young A., (2000), Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins, Bloomsbury Academic, London.
