The challenging aspects of women’s simultaneous exclusions and inclusions in times of transitions, of their inclusions that paradoxically derive from or relate to exclusions and the contrary, are generally not researched. The EIRENE project filled in the gap by introducing a daring and novel analytical concept, defined as the “exclusion/inclusion dynamics” and argued its applicability to various aspects of women’s lives.
Women’s empowerment in times of conflict or post-conflict situations can be ascribed to housemaids, costermongers and other workers, who were crossing severely controlled national borders on a daily basis in order to work in the places they used to work before the border redefinition. Their role of semi-legal border transgression, by means of which they actually built a (microeconomic) bridge between the places, where official international relations were deficient, can be conceived within a novel ‘cross-boundary mediators’ concept.
The basic methodology of the EIRENE project is a comparison, which is being carried out on three levels; on temporal, spatial, and gender level. Women’s positions are set within a gender framework, which pays close attention to gender roles and ideologies and is regularly compared with men’s positions. Although the analytical category ‘gender’ is a central element of the project, gender is to be observed in relation to other social factors, such as race, class, generations, educational and religious background etc. by employing the concept of intersectionality.
Regular meetings and multiple informal conversations among team members demonstrated the importance of teamwork in which the concept of multiple burden was elaborated, suitable predominantly for understanding women’s participation in the field of labor history. It seems to be particularly useful when embracing longitudinal perspective and the intersectional approach, which takes into insight social status, place of origin and family status This concept will first be presented in the EIRENE volume on Work (CEUP, 2024).
The transnational analysis of teaching practices in the post-war period has shown the utmost importance of taking gender into account. Namely, in the observed spatial and temporal framework, young and unmarried women teachers were important actors of the national and ideological homogenization after both World Wars in the area, which was/is particularly multiethnic.
