Women Voices in Macedonia

We travel to Skopje to speak with four women, all of them active in Macedonian society, to discuss the #ISpeakUpNow campaign and what it means to be a woman in Macedonia today.

On January 16, a group of women from Macedonia started sharing on social media their personal testimonies of sexual harassment committed by perpetrators in positions of power, using the hashtags #ISpeakUpNow – #СегаКажувам in Macedonian and #TaniTregoj in Albanian. Back then, this was the variation of the #MeToo campaign that gained attention in the Balkans. Women in the Balkans of course have their voices, pain and anger, but are too often forced to keep their voices down.

Almost 10 months later, we travelled to Macedonia to speak with four women, Marija Matovska, Vlora Rechica, Irena Cvetkovic and Jana Kocevska, all of them, in different ways, vocal and active women in Macedonian society. We started our conversation by discussing what it means to be a woman in Macedonia. As we moved forward, we covered women in politics, the aftermath of the #ISpeakUpNow campaign and the importance of having the feminist festival organized annually in Skopje, Firstborn Girl. Speaking about the future, we asked them to outline the priorities for women in Macedonia.

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European Alternatives

European Alternatives is a non-profit, non-state organisation working with the conviction that a transnational renovation of our political imaginations, institutions and actions needs to take place to adequately understand and address the crises Europe is facing.