In 2020, the city of Rijeka, which is located in the Kvarner gulf in present-day Croatia, was awarded the title of European Capital of Culture. Although the Covid surge heavily affected the cultural programmes, Rijeka’s multi-layered history has still proved able to stir up historical controversies. Some of the most sensitive issues were linked to the national and ideological conflicts that have characterized the twentieth century, and these conflicts have highlighted how polarized memories persist. In the meantime, there has been an increasing interest in the city’s social history, its everyday life, and industrial heritage. This has provided alternative lenses, forms and categories of belonging through which to look at the city’s past.

My article, published in Contemporary European History (‘Female Public Employees during a Post-Imperial Transition. Gender, Politics and Labour in Fiume after the First World War’) aims to bring together these two strands by looking at how the turbulent post-1918 political events affected two professional cohorts of women, who happened to be both state subjects and employees. Representing women from the middle and the working class respectively, teachers and tobacco workers strove to navigate the political transition, retain their jobs, and preserve their rights.

The mainstream narrative on post-1918 events in Fiume (which, together with Sušak, is part of today’s Rijeka) is highly gendered: not only is the city – depicted as pleading for protection from D’Annunzio’s legionnaires – feminized, but the contribution of women to pro-Italian irredentism is idealized. Notwithstanding the value of enfranchisement, the voices of few local women survived, and the tone of women’s engagement was set by female activists coming from Italy.

Moving the focus away from formal political participation, this article considers two highly feminized workplaces: schools and a tobacco factory. Here, political struggles reverberated through negotiations with the (male) political authorities; internal conflicts played out across the classrooms and the tobacco factory’s shop floor. Teachers and workers attempted to stay afloat in a time of widespread turmoil, while some even benefited from the new order.

The relatively small-scale environment of Fiume – a city of roughly 50,000-inhabitants and “the smaller of the postwar successor states”[1] – allows the historian to follow the trajectories and networks of ordinary people, those often in the background, without losing sight of the bigger picture. The complex transition that the city went through affected teachers and tobacco workers on two levels, since they were not just residents but also employees of the city-state, thus sharing its burdens and privileges. But what happened after 1918, when the state, once a regular employer, underwent a rapid and destabilizing series of changes?!

The available sources depict a non-linear picture of the Adriatic city; a remote contrast with simplistic interpretations of the past. From 1920, the prospect of Fiume’s annexation to Yugoslavia faded away, and the two main political factions disputing the city’s future settlement were those advocating annexation to Italy or the establishment of the Free State of Fiume. The actors who held power in the city displayed authoritarian attitudes, but they were often compelled to reach compromises with the locals, if only because of their weakness. Nationalisms and politics certainly played an important role, but everyday strategies did so too. In the aftermath of the war, women experienced both improvements and setbacks, and were highly sought-after or unattended to. Female employees were affected by the political events in ways sometimes similar to, but more often quite different from men. Among them, teachers and tobacco workers did their best to cope with the uncertainty of that time.

[1] Dominique Kirchner Reill, The Fiume Crisis. Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts – London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 22.

Female Public Employees during a Post-Imperial Transition. Gender, Politics and Labour in Fiume after the First World War by Francesca Rolandi