{"id":50892,"date":"2013-08-24T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=50892"},"modified":"2017-09-17T10:30:24","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T15:30:24","slug":"the-sworn-virgins-of-albania-social-rules-and-accommodations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/08\/24\/the-sworn-virgins-of-albania-social-rules-and-accommodations\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Sworn Virgins” of Albania: Social Rules and Accommodations"},"content":{"rendered":"

New interest in the virgjinesha inspires us to re-post our coverage from 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n

Rigid gender roles often inspire creative solutions. \u00a0Families in Afghanistan, for example, when they have all girls, often pick a daughter to pretend to be a boy until puberty<\/a>. \u00a0The child can then run errands, get a job, and chaperone “his” sisters in public (all things girls aren’t allowed to do). \u00a0The transition is sudden and doesn’t involve relocation, so the entire community knows that the child is a girl. \u00a0They just pretend nothing at all strange is going on. \u00a0In fact, it’s not strange. \u00a0It happens quite routinely.<\/p>\n

A similar\u00a0phenomenon\u00a0emerged in Albania in the 1400s. \u00a0Inter-group warfare had left a dearth of men in many communities. \u00a0Since rights and responsibilities were strongly sex-typed, some\u00a0families needed a \u201cman\u201d to accomplish certain things like buy land and\u00a0pass down wealth.<\/p>\n

In response, some girls became\u00a0\u201cvirgjinesha,\u201d or sworn virgins. A sworn virgin was a socially-recognized man for the rest of “his” life (so long as the oath was kept). \u00a0Many girls would take the oath after their father\u00a0died.<\/p>\n

There are only about forty sworn virgins left; as\u00a0women were granted more and more rights, fewer and fewer girls felt the\u00a0need to adopt a male identity for themselves or their families.<\/p>\n

Some of the remaining virgjinesha were\u00a0featured in a New York Times<\/em> slideshow<\/a>.\u00a0 Quotes from two individuals:<\/p>\n

After becoming a man, Qamile Stema [below] said she could leave the house and chop wood with other men. She also carried a gun. At wedding parties, she sat with men. When she talked to women, she recalled, they recoiled in shyness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Qamile Stema said she would die a virgin. Had she married, she joked, it would have been to a traditional Albanian woman. “I guess you could say I was partly a woman and partly a man, but of course I never did everything a man does,” she said. “I liked my life as a man. I have no regrets.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Photographer Jill Peters<\/a> has also captured images of sworn virgins.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New interest in the virgjinesha inspires us to re-post our coverage from 2012. Rigid gender roles often inspire creative solutions. \u00a0Families in Afghanistan, for example, when they have all girls, often pick a daughter to pretend to be a boy until puberty. \u00a0The child can then run errands, get a job, and chaperone “his” sisters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":56889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,15,135,55,2099,12538],"class_list":["post-50892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-culture","tag-demography","tag-gender","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-nation-albania"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/08\/Screenshot_128.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50892"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71395,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50892\/revisions\/71395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}