CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Tomicic, Antonija |
|---|---|
| Title | Women Workers in Zagreb in the First World War |
| Summary | In this thesis, I focus on the possible impact that the First World War had on working women of Zagreb, including questions such as were women allowed to enter into “men's work” after the lack of male workforce and did women workers have the same rights as their male colleagues. I strive to answer if the war offered women to experience changes in their working opportunities and possibilities. In order to find answers to my questions, I used a broader perspective of main European trends related to women's work during the First World War. The thesis is based on a rich variety of published and unpublished primary material, and I also make use of the extremely scarce scholarship touching upon my topic. My analysis of these materials has found that working women of Zagreb did experience changes in their working opportunities and possibilities by late 1915 and early 1916. In that period, the significant lack of male workforce allowed women to be employed in vocations that, before the war, were considered intended explicitly for men. As women started to replace men, including their fathers, husbands, and sons in the workplaces, they were slowly entering a previously unknown sphere of work. During the First World War, women of Zagreb worked in factories, public and private offices, schools and hospitals. They protested for better working conditions and higher work payments with their male colleagues regardless of the fact that they were constantly underpaid for doing the same as did men workers. In the post-war years, similar to other European countries, Croatian women workers and those of Zagreb were “asked” by the stated to return to their households. My reading of the scholarly literature on the history of women's work and working women in other European countries during World War I, allows me to put my findings into a larger context. As British women, women of Zagreb were offered new work opportunities, and as German women, some working women of Zagreb did agricultural work in order to provide for their households. Unlike French women who mostly worked in war industry, women workers of Zagreb did not move into this sphere of employment since Croatia did not have such industry. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan Carin |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/tomicic_antonija.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University