Women's Labour Activism in Authoritarian Regimes: Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland, 1938-1968

My present research is concerned with the history of welfare state, social identities and nationalism in 20th-century East Central Europe.

I ask how women workers mobilise to protect their interests in authoritarian regimes such as National Socialism and state socialism, and how these forgotten histories of working women’s participation might shape our understanding of women’s rights in post-communist Europe today. My project addresses those questions through the first social history of women’s labour activism in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria, 1938-1968. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, the project tells the unknown story of trade union women and ordinary female workers in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland from the period of Nazi occupation in World War II until the Prague Spring.

During the twentieth century, European women entered the industrial workforce in huge numbers, but we still know far too little about the way women workers mobilized to protect their interests, particularly in authoritarian regimes such as National Socialism and communism. Although women made up almost 40% of the workforce by 1942, however, there is almost no historical scholarship on women’s labour activism in eastern and western Europe from the 1930s to the 1960s. My project reveals the agency of women workers who struggled for equal pay, the right to work, and better living and working conditions under two different dictatorships and makes a bigger argument about the origins of social protection, feminism, and labour activism in non-democratic regimes. By showing how working women’s activism was sparked by struggles for social protection and social rights, my research promises to shed new light on the ambivalence of many working-class women towards feminism in post-communist countries since the 1990s, and sets a new research agenda for studying the gender, class, and ethnic dimensions of struggles for social rights and social protection in democratic and non-democratic regimes in twentieth-century Europe.