Albanian Sworn Virgins - Motivations

Motivations

There are many reasons why a woman would have wanted to take this vow, and observers have recorded a variety of motivations. One woman said she became a sworn virgin in order to not be separated from her father, and another in order to live and work with her sister. Several were recorded as saying they always felt more male than female. Some hoped to avoid a specific unwanted marriage, and others hoped to avoid marriage in general.

Becoming a sworn virgin was the only way for women whose families had committed them as children to an arranged marriage to refuse to fulfil it, without dishonouring the groom's family and risking a blood feud. It was the only way a woman could inherit her family's wealth, which was particularly important in a society in which blood feuds resulted in the deaths of many male Albanians, leaving many families without male heirs. (However, anthropologist Mildred Dickemann suggests this motive may be "over-pat", pointing out that a non-child-bearing woman would have no heirs to inherit after her, and also that in some families not one but several daughters became sworn virgins, and in others the later birth of a brother did not end the sworn virgin's masculine role.) It is also likely that many women chose to become sworn virgins simply because it afforded them much more freedom than would otherwise have been available in a patrilineal culture in which women were secluded, sex-segregated, required to be virgins before marriage and faithful afterwards, betrothed as children and married by sale without their consent, continually bearing and raising children, constantly physically labouring, and always required to defer to men, particularly their husbands and fathers, and submit to being beaten.

Sworn virgins could also participate in blood feuds. If a sworn virgin was killed in a blood feud her death counted as a full life for the purposes of calculating blood money, rather than the half a life ordinarily accorded for a female death.

Dickemann suggests their mothers may have played an important role in persuading women to become sworn virgins. A widow without sons has traditionally had few options in Albania: she could return to her birth family, stay on as a servant in the family of her deceased husband, or remarry. With a son or surrogate son, she could live out her life in the home of her adulthood, in the company of her child. Murray quotes testimony recorded by René Gremaux: ""Because if you get married I'll be left alone, but if you stay with me, I'll have a son." On hearing those words Djurdja threw down her embroidery" and became a man.