ABSTRACT
This article contributes to the study of the labor conditions among female employees of the tobacco industry in the north-eastern Adriatic region through the use of theoretical concepts of the new so-called working class studies and an investigation of archival sources. The novel approach for this analysis results from both a longitudinal and a transnational perspective: three tobacco factories—located in Klagenfurt, Ljubljana, and Rovinj, respectively—and their historiographic significance throughout the twentieth century are examined. Particular emphasis is placed on periods of postwar transition and their sociopolitical as well as socio-economic implications for gender constellations within and beyond the tobacco factories. Besides exploring the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion in the private and public spheres, the chapter further contextualizes the contrasting aspects of intersectionality. Further, commonly known notions of the “triple burden” are redefined in their complexity and expanded to a multiple-burden model that also includes pertinent factors such as gender-related discrimination and violence, for instance. This laboratory environment of the tobacco factories in the profiled sites of Klagenfurt, Ljubljana, and Rovinj hence highlights characteristics that can be applied to processes and hierarchies of industry and consumption on a global and contemporary scale.
