ZARAH explores the history of women’s labour activism and organizing to improve labour conditions and life circumstances of lower- and working-class women and their communities – moving these women from the margins of labour, gender, and European history to the center of historical study.
ZARAH’s research rationale is rooted in the interest of the interaction of gender, class, and other dimensions of difference (e.g. ethnicity and religion) as forces that shaped women’s activism. It addresses the gender bias in labour history, the class bias in gender history, and the regional bias in European history. ZARAH conceives of women’s labour activism as emerging from the confluence of local, nation-wide, border-crossing, and international initiatives, interactions and networking. It studies this activism in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the post-imperial nation states, and during the Cold War and the years thereafter. Employing a long-term and transregional perspective, ZARAH highlights how a history of numerous social upheavals, and changing borders and political systems shaped the agency of the women studied and examines their contribution to the struggle for socio-economic inclusion and the making of gender, labour, and social policies.
In terms of the forms of women’s labour organizing, ZARAH includes the study of informal collectives, solidarity networks, cooperatives, trade unions, political parties, and religious organizations. ZARAH studies women’s labour activism within both women’s networks and organizations and mixed-sex labour networks and organizations. In terms of the agendas of women’s labour activism, ZARAH takes into account activism addressing agrarian, industrial and office work, income-generating and unpaid work, problematizations of wage justice and ensuing claims, the politics of the double day, equal right to work, social and political rights, demands for better working conditions, and the issue of gender-inclusive trade union and labour education and organizing.
ZARAH is named after Zehra Kosova, a Turkish-Greek labour activist of the interwar period, and Sara Rokon Toth, a poor peasant woman and campaigner for peasant women’s and democratic rights in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy.
