Preliminary Programme

*** The paper is addressed to the Labour network but could be also part of the Gender network ***

On the basis of my forthcoming monograph Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector (2019), and of new research conducted within the framework of the collective research project Microsocialism: Microstructures of Yugoslav Socialism: Croatia 1970-1990 (University of Pula, 2018-2022), I will discuss the specificities of the archives of state socialist women’s organizations and their usefulness for micro-histories of labour and gender, with a focus on the 1970s and 1980s Republic of Croatia, then part of the Yugoslav Federation. Only recently the multi-layered character of state socialist women’s organizations is starting to be uncovered in its complexity. As I will argue, the archives produced at the federal, republican and municipal levels by the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ), founded in 1961, represent a veritable gold mine to understand the ambivalences and variations of the socialist ‘working mother’ gender contract, which aimed to combine women’s entry into the productive sphere with the socialisation of women’s reproductive tasks as mothers and caretakers. Due to the numerous pitfalls of this model, its results are generally summarized through the formulation of the ‘double burden’, which often reinforces static and homogenizing interpretations of gender and labour history during socialism, and of socialism itself. Contrary to widely held assumptions, however, women's double burden was not silenced, but rather frequently discussed and acknowledged by socialist authorities, women’s organizations and female workers themselves. In the decentralized Yugoslav system, the local women’s societies federated by the KDAŽ were a stable presence within factories and municipal councils, and took part in numerous expert meetings and discussions over women’s productive and reproductive labour, tackling various issues affecting female workers and society more generally, such as the vexing question of local resource allocation for childcare facilities. Local case studies, and local hierarchies of class and gender, make clear that the ‘double burden’ formulation is in need of historicization and contextualization, and that KDAŽ archives can be productive sources for revisiting labour and gender history in socialist times. (Show less)

For many hundreds of years, the production of cheese was done by women. They milked the cows and processed the milk on farms in most areas of the world, and the entire process was in the hands of women.
This pattern shifted when the production of milk and cheese became industrialized. When the production units in the middle of the 1800s increased in size, men entered the business. In the first years, they helped with heavy and mechanical jobs. After a few decades, however, they took over the most central jobs as well. By the 1930s, men dominated in the central jobs required for milk and cheese production, while women were pushed aside to work at lower-paid positions like packaging and similar secondary tasks.
The paper will document the development of gender distribution in the production of cheese and examine the shift in relation to cultural dimensions, technological developments, and changes in the job function itself.
Of specific interest are the changes in central education when the trade moved from a business based entirely on craftsmanship and peer training to a trade where training for the craft was heavily influenced by research and higher education. (Show less)

In recent years, research on women’s work during industrialisation in England or Spain have suggested that including female data in analyses could force us to reconsider both the chronology and nature of industrialisation. This paper further adds to this body of research by presenting the first full reconstructions of both female and male occupational structure covering the period of industrialisation currently available for France.
Indeed, numerous aspects of French industrialisation remain hotly debated to this day. Despite going through a brief period of intense revisionism in the 1960s and 1970s, the debate opposing British exceptionalism to a supposed French backwardness is yet to be settled; while that on the existence of a ‘French path’ to industrialisation involving specialisation in high-value added goods has seen it being referred to in turn as a sign of agricultural retardation, a rational response by entrepreneurs to economic circumstances, ultimately a dead-end, or even a pure chimera.
By producing an analysis of both female and male labour force participation rates and sectoral distributions over time covering the period of industrialisation, the paper enables an exploration of patterns of women’s work and their determinants and, through this, suggests that optimistic accounts of French economic development in the period – whether those that suggest that France was not significantly lagging behind Britain once figures are brought back to per capita levels, or those that see in the ‘French path’ a socially preferable alternative to the British, are overstated. The data nonetheless equally refute the hypothesis that the French ‘lag’ was the result of agricultural retardation.
Overall, the paper thereby aims to show that data on female employment is crucial to our understanding of French industrialisation and its mechanisms – and that, in the French case, such data can be successfully retrieved. (Show less)