Is a Woman still "A Stranger at Supper" in Montenegro?
Is a Woman still "A Stranger at Supper" in Montenegro?

Summary/Abstract: "Men are fighters. Who would protect us? Everything else has to be taken care of for them. That's what women are for." So says Milena, one of ten women one hundred years old or more who in Zorka Milich's study, A Stranger's Supper, offer a rare look inside the traditional tribal culture of Montenegro. Encouraged by the late Dr. Albert Bates Lord (The Singer of Tales, 1960), who had spent three years in Montenegro, Zorka Milich listened to these articulate centenarians explain what life was like for the women behind Montenegro's warriors. Born as a disappointment to her parents because she was not a boy, the female in traditional Montenegro--roughly characterised as pre-World War II--was raised to serve and give birth to the male she could not be. During these five centuries the people living in this craggy Balkan region were at war defending their country against the Turks, Germans, or Austrians and fighting among themselves in defence of tribal and family honour. Clearly the defining moment in each of these women's lives was their wedding. It marked not only the passage from adolescence to adulthood but to a whole life that from that point forward would be directed by the needs of her husband and his family. All women were subject to arranged marriages, and most had never seen their husbands before. Tradition dictated that a woman leave her family's home for his. She would become not her family's but her husband family's happiness. She would become "a stranger at supper". She took care of people who were at first little more than strangers.[...]

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