Women in the Socialist Fish-Canning Industry: Insights from the Yugoslav Adriatic Coast

Kosmos Iva () and Petrović Tanja ()
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Kosmos Iva: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Petrović Tanja: Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Comparative Southeast European Studies, 2025, vol. 73, issue 2, 181-208

Abstract: This article discusses the implications of including women in the labor force of the fish-canning factories on the Adriatic coast in socialist Yugoslavia. The discussion is based on ethnographic interviews with former workers from the Plavica (Cres), Kvarner (Lošinj), and Sirena (Lastovo) canneries. The authors offer insights into the socially relevant discursive registers in which this gendered labor is situated. As they reminisced, the interviewees spoke about modernization, mobility, and women’s emancipation as the dominant tropes of socialist industrialization, but also about perceptions based on strictly defined gender roles, insider-outsider dynamics, and local logics of social differentiation. The authors contextualize these workers’ narratives and experiences in discourses on industrial labor and fish canning on the global scale. They observe how workers’ memories and experiences in the Yugoslav socialist context contrast with the widespread perception of factory work as mundane and meaningless.

Keywords: industrial labor; socialist Yugoslavia; fish canneries; female workers; memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:soeuro:v:73:y:2025:i:2:p:181-208:n:1002

DOI: 10.1515/soeu-2024-0063

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