Albanian sworn virgins

Albanian sworn virgins are women who take a vow of chastity and wear male clothing in order to live as men in the patriarchal northern Albanian society. To a lesser extent, the practice exists, or has existed, in other parts of the western Balkans, including Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Dalmatian hinterland (Croatia) and Bosnia.

The tradition of sworn virgins are part of albanian code of conduct - the Kanun. 

Under the Kanun women are stripped of many human rights. They cannot smoke, wear a watch, or vote in their local elections. They cannot buy land, and there are many jobs they are not permitted to hold. There are even establishments that they cannot enter. The practice of sworn virginhood was first reported by missionaries, travelers, geographers and anthropologists who visited the mountains of northern Albania in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A woman becomes a sworn virgin by swearing an irrevocable oath, in front of 12 village or tribal elders, to practice celibacy. Then she is allowed to live as a man and may dress in male clothes, use a male name, carry a gun, smoke, drink alcohol, take on male work, act as the head of a household (for example, living with a sister or mother), play music and sing, and sit and talk socially with men. A woman can become a sworn virgin at any age, either to satisfy her parents or herself.  Breaking the vow was once punishable by death, but it is doubtful that this punishment is still carried out now. Many sworn virgins today still refuse to go back on their oath because their community would reject them for breaking the vows. However it is sometimes possible to take back the vows if the sworn virgin has finished her obligations to the family and the reasons or motivations which enabled her to take the vows are no longer current. 

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 dishonoring 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.  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 laboring, and always required to defer to men, particularly their husbands and fathers, and submit to being beaten.

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 daughter who became sworn virgin, she could live out her life in the home of her adulthood, in the company of her child. 

Prevalence The practice has died out in Dalmatia and Bosnia, but is still carried out in northern Albania and to a lesser extent in Macedonia. The Socialist People's Republic of Albania did not encourage women to become sworn virgins. Women started gaining legal rights, coming closer to equaling men in social status. By the time the communist government fell in Albania, women had as many legal rights as men, especially in the central and southern regions. It is only in the northern region that many families still live within the traditional patriarchal way. Currently there are between forty and several hundred sworn virgins left in Albania, and a few in neighboring countries. Most are over fifty years old. It used to be believed that the sworn virgins had all but died out after 50 years of communism in Albania, but recent research suggests that may not be the case, instead suggesting that the current increase in feuding following the collapse of the communist regime could encourage a resurgence of the practice.