Researching women labour activists from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe can feel like piecing together a puzzle with many missing parts. Their stories are elusive, and it is sometimes hard to uncover even the most basic details like names or birth and death dates. Married women in our region traditionally changed their last names, which obscured their pre-marriage identities. This is especially problematic when trying to follow the trajectories of activists whose work lasted decades and was carried out under different names. Records from international gatherings, especially from the earlier period, also don’t always make it easy to recognise activists from Central and Eastern Europe. Misspellings of names in the documents, incomplete records, frequent use of Westernized versions of names (for example, “Sophie” instead of “Zofia”), as well as diverging transliterations of Cyrillic script, all make it harder to trace women’s activism across borders. These difficulties are rooted in historical gender and geo-spatial biases, the specificities of women’s activism, and the tumultuous events of the twentieth century.

Biased records and limited archives

Historical sources themselves often reflect the biases of their creators. Official records, like police files or trade union records, typically fail to highlight women’s activism. Especially early on, women were often excluded from trade union membership, but even when they were involved, their contributions were frequently downplayed or ignored in union documents. When trade union organizations did keep records, materials related to women’s activities could be subsequently discarded as unimportant, scattered, or not properly inventoried. Critical documents could also be relegated to overlooked and unlikely collections.

The violent history of the twentieth century also created gaps in historical records. Many left-wing activists, persecuted for their work, deliberately left few written traces or concealed their identities and actions. Others fell victim to murder or repression, and their correspondence and personal archives were lost or destroyed. Changes of political regimes also meant that the contribution of now-unwanted activists was downplayed or deliberately erased. The social democratic activists of the interwar period, whose activism and contributions were largely erased by the post-World War II state-socialist regimes, are just one example of this.

Additional difficulties arise from cultural and societal biases. Women’s labour activism often unfolded outside the workplace, in private or informal spaces such as homes, churches, or community gatherings that were not considered “official” venues of labour activism. These actions, like organizing childcare, strike kitchens, or leveraging consumer power, were critical but remained invisible in the formal records of trade unions. For example, strike kitchens are described in the journals and records of co-operatives but not in the records of the unions that organized the strikes.

The historical devaluation of women’s unpaid labour itself further compounds this issue. Tasks seen as extensions of caregiving, like organizing workplace safety or advocating for maternity leave, were often dismissed as routine work rather than legitimate labour activism.

Strategies for overcoming these challenges

Researchers have developed creative methods to uncover and reconstruct the hidden stories of women labour activists. Two key strategies involve reframing traditional sources and expanding the types of materials used.

Rethinking traditional sources

Traditional sources, like strike reports or labour inspection records, can reveal insights if read with a focus on marginalized voices. Researchers need to critically analyse these records, questioning who is represented and how. For instance, when activist men referred to “workers and their wives”, they often ignored that those “wives” were also workers, performing both unpaid domestic labour and wage work. Similarly, dismissive police reports describing women activists as “just housewives”, or migration records noting them down as unspecified “dependants” reveal underlying biases that must be unpacked. Many women engaged in activism intermittently due to family responsibilities or societal pressures, leading to fragmented records of their contributions.

Expanding the range of sources

Looking beyond conventional labour movement documents is crucial. Diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs often provide personal perspectives that official records lack. Autobiographical writings, for instance, can highlight how women activists balanced multiple identities – as trade union or political activists, members of the women’s movement, community leaders, or grassroots organizers – and chose more than just one cause or movement to apply their activist efforts.

Other approaches include examining local publications, photographs, and even unconventional sources like household debt records. For instance, in 1930s Poland, labour inspector Maria Przedborska published anonymized testimonies of women workers in a local newspaper to bring attention to workplace sexual violence – an issue largely ignored by official reports.

Smaller publications from enterprises with predominantly female employees, such as factory newspapers, can also offer valuable insights. Such sources can showcase the everyday organizing efforts of women that mainstream labour narratives often overlook. In some cases, a single photograph of women workers among striking men serves as the only evidence of their participation in the strike.

Shedding light on vulnerable workers

The voices of the most precarious women workers – those in casual or home-based industries or small workshops, or agrarian workers – are particularly rare. Yet, they sometimes emerge in surprising ways. Letters to prominent activists have preserved the struggles of these women in their own words. For example, in Hungary, rural labourer Mrs. István Bordás wrote extensively to Rosika Schwimmer, a well-known activist of the women’s movement, documenting the fight for peasant women’s labour rights.

These letters, along with other personal correspondence, highlight the solidarities and divisions among women across class lines. They show how alliances between working-class women and more privileged activists helped make marginalized voices heard.

Broadening the definition of labour activism

Focusing on women challenges traditional definitions of what constitutes labour activism. Women’s efforts often extended beyond formal workplaces and union activities: ensuring adequate childcare, organising in co-operatives, and creating informal networks were key strategies for achieving labour-related goals. By using a wider array of sources, including diaries, poetry, oral histories, activist publications, and photographs, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of these efforts. These materials reveal how profoundly women’s activism was intertwined with their daily lives and responsibilities.

Recovering women’s stories is an ongoing challenge, requiring persistence and creativity. Gender biases in records, fragmented activist roles, political disruptions and societal devaluation of women’s work all contribute to their historical invisibility. However, by critically analysing traditional sources, seeking out unconventional materials, and asking new research questions, historians can uncover the overlooked and forgotten instances of women’s labour activism.