The project “A Land of Joiners” compares social history of women’s participation in a male-dominated Voluntary Firefighting Departments in the East Central European border region between Austria-Hungary-Yugoslavia/Slovenia after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the emergence of nation states until the end of the Cold War divide. Drawing on a wide range of regional, local, and associational archival sources, and integrating the voices of women, this project traces motives and purposes of on the one hand the new states and regimes and on the other hand of the volunteer firefighting departments, to implement policies to achieve broader participation and equality of women.
Historical studies both in and about East Central Europe are traditionally very much focused on the emergence of, and the political conflicts in and around, the nation state. For many decades, ‘high politics’ occupied the forefront of historiographical narratives, whose most relevant actors were predictably coherently members of the political elite, parties, and governmental bodies. Such an approach does not leave much room for agents that were not part of the state, that is actors of so-called civil society. The project looks at East Central European history by focusing on non-state actors, particularly on developing democratic and inclusive policies in the voluntary associations.
The project in particular focuses on voluntary firefighting departments, an association which service and the specific ways through which they were organised, were indispensable in authoritarian, democratic, and dictatorial regimes alike. In East Central Europe, first volunteer firefighting departments were established in the second half of the nineteenth century as purely male domain. Nowadays, on the level of European Union, there are significant differences in the number of volunteer firefighting departments and the voluntary firefighters among the member states. On average, less than 1% of the EU population is involved in volunteer firefighting. Not just in Europe, but world-wide, East Central Europe represents the frontrunner in the number of volunteer firefighting departments. In the border, the concentration of volunteer firefighting departments is the largest or one of the largest in each of the three countries; in Prekmurje region in Slovenia, for example, with the number rising up to 12% of the population being involved in volunteer firefighting.
Rather than focusing on national case studies, this project situates a comparative and international analysis of women’s engagement and participation in voluntary associations. It investigates the relationship between local voluntary firefighting departments and gender equality and democratization project in a diverse national, political, and social realities of East Central Europe between 1918 and 1989. It shows, that in the Habsburg monarchy, firefighting association laws did not allow women to join. Nevertheless, the first examples of women’s groups within firefighting brigades have been observed in the years leading up to 1914. In Interwar Yugoslavia, the firefighting law allowed women to join the voluntary firefighting departments, mainly as Samaritans. Building on women’s emancipatory endeavors starting in the 1950s, the 1970s were a peak decade for women’s inclusion in the Slovenian Firefighting Organization. This integration did not focus on finding ‘suitable’ tasks for women within the firefighting department, but on the principle that women and men should participate equally in operational tasks and jobs related to welfare and school activities. In Austria, the 1990s were the decisive decade for women’s inclusion in firefighting departments. In 2022, in Austria, almost 9% of all firefighters were female, an increase of approximately 147% since 2008 and in 2023 in Slovenia almost one-third of all firefighters were women.
