Sworn virgins

 The "sworn virgins" of the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe are women who, as children, as adolscents, or in adulthood, adopt male dress, take male names, socialise with men, and take on masculine jobs in agriculture and blood feuds. Traditionally, the farmers and herders of the mountain regions were organised into patrilineal households and tribes, which feuded constantly (I love the detail that, because the head of an enemy would be taken, the men wore topknots "for ease of carrying".) The details of the sworn virgin's life varied from place to place; different sworn virgins had different motivations. Some were "surrogate sons", whose presence in the household kept property in the family, let a widow stay in her marital home or let sisters avoid arranged marriage; some were themselves widows. Some may have helped make up for a shortage of men caused by constant feuding. Sometimes the sworn virgin seems to have chosen the role as a child, sometimes it seems to have been imposed by parents. They claimed not to menstruate. Some had female partners.

 

As Mildred Dickemann points out, women were valued in these societies as the primary laborers, inside and outside the home; as producers of children, especially male heirs; and for the bridewealth the brought when sold as wives. They were segregated, beaten, and regarded with contempt (often also expressed by sworn virgins). Escaping this life must have been an attractive prospect. Dickemann writes, "They seem to have enjoyed respect and even high esteem for doing what women were believed incapable of doing." (They also had an advantage in feuding; they could kill a man, but no man would kill a woman, even a sworn virgin.)

 

René Grémaux states that there are numerous records of sworn virgins from the mid-Sixteenth Century to the early Nineteenth Century; there were still some alive in the late Twentieth Century who she was able to interview.

 

Grémaux remarks on the special status of the virgin in many cultures: "Virginity is inherently an extremely ambiguous and ambivalent human condition, for it is considered to be neither a masculine nor a feminine quality, but rather a peculiar combination of both." An adult virgin doesn't fit into the scheme of men vs women, or girls vs women. "Virgins challenge common concepts of femininity," she writes, "of which motherhood and dependence on men are basic traits, and moreover they threaten the clear-cut demarcation of both genders." Classifying them as men partly resolves these ambiguities. Similarly, post-menopausal women in these cultures may behave like and be treated like men.

 

Grémaux describes the women of these cultures as "social outsiders" - it's interesting to think that, broadly accepted as what Dickemann calls "a subcategory of men", the "third gender" sworn virgins had become social insiders, the opposite of the fate of trans people in Western society. That makes this another of the numerous societies in which an established role for gender variant people offers some inclusion and protection.

 

The sworn virgin and the Ancient Mesopotamian "third gender" cult functionaries such as the gala have little in common, but I couldn't help connecting them when Grémaux remarked that, "Singing and making music for an audience that included males, activities traditionally considered improper for local women, was a kind of speciality of many Albanian sworn virgins."

(Would that I had time to more than glance at Suzana Milevska's thesis Gender Difference in the Balkans. Into the infinite queue it goes.)

 

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Dickemann, Mildred. "The Balkan Sworn Virgin: A Traditional European Transperson". in Bullough, Bonnie, Vern Bullough, and James Elias (eds). Gender blending. Amherst NY, Prometheus Books, 1997.

 

Grémaux, René. "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans". in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history. New York, Zone Books; Cambridge MA, Distributed by MIT Press, 1993.