Elizabeth has participated in data gathering tours to Balkans. She has recorded the interviews with women in Macedonia and Serbia and placed those short movies on YouTube. The movies present socio-economic situation of women in Macedonia and Georgia viewed from their eyes.


Elizabeth:
There are many women in the region who do home based work like knitting, cooking, etc. They hardly sell their production. Most of them give away the things they have produced for free, as local people don’t really appreciate their products and don’t want to buy them unless they are really cheap. There are many women who have worked in garment factories. Some of them have lost their jobs because the factories have been closed and others because they had to work in Saturdays and Sundays and they couldn’t manage to do their housework. Many women knit, cook and prepare rooms in their homes for rural tourism simultaneously with other activities in order to earn some money. People think that their knitting and cooking skills are ‘natural’ for women, similarly as men’s inclinations to become electricians are ‘natural’ for men. Women we visited shared their experience from fairs they have attended and exposed their production. They said that it happens very often that when a woman likes something and she wants to buy it her boyfriend or husband says that she could make it herself and that there is no need for her to spend money on something so easy to make. They said also men think knitted things are useless. Actually, women produce goods that are really unique and are rarely sold in Europe, and are in fact very expensive on the European markets. In Macedonia these goods are produced by almost every woman and that is why they are taken for granted. Unfortunately the those ‘natural’ skills of women do not help them to improve their economic situation even if they work hard.