From Slovenia to Egypt: Aleksandrinke's Trans-Mediterranean Domestic Workers' Migration and National Imagination (Transkulturelle Perspektiven) 9783847104032, 9783847004035, 3847104039

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Transkulturelle Perspektiven

Band 13

Herausgegeben von Sylvia Hahn, Dirk Hoerder, Stan Nadel und Marlou Schrover

Mirjam Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik (ed.)

From Slovenia to Egypt Aleksandrinke’s Trans-Mediterranean Domestic Workers’ Migration and National Imagination

With 15 figures

V& R unipress

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-8471-0403-2 ISBN 978-3-8470-0403-5 (E-Book) Printed with the support of the Slovenian Research Agency and the Office for Slovenians Abroad. Translation: Barbara Skubic Language editing: Jana Ren¦e Wilcoxen Ó 2015, V& R unipress in Göttingen / www.vr-unipress.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Printed in Germany. Titelbild: Courtesy of Anica Stanicˇ Druck und Bindung: CPI buchbuecher.de GmbH, Birkach Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier.

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I. Aleksandrinke Mirjam Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik 1. Trans-Mediterranean Women Domestic Workers: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

Sylvia Hahn 2. Labour Migration and Female Breadwinners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

II. From Gorisˇka To Egypt Aleksej Kalc 3. Migration Movements in Gorisˇka in the Time of Aleksandrinke . . . .

49

Barbara Skubic 4. A Drop in the Sea of Foreign Workers in Egypt

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

73

Dasˇa Koprivec 5. Personal Narratives of Lives in Egypt and at Home . . . . . . . . . . .

93

III. Migration and National Imagination Dirk Hoerder 6. Re-Remembering Women Who Chose Caregiving Careers in a Global Perspective: Mothers of the Nation or Agents in Their Own Lives? . . . . 117 Katja Mihurko Ponizˇ 7. Representations and Mythologisations of Aleksandrinke in Slovenian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

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Contents

Marina Luksˇicˇ Hacin 8. Women Migrants and Gender Relations: Patriarchy in the Time of Aleksandrinke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Jernej Mlekuzˇ 9. The Newspaper Images of Aleksandrinke and the National Imagination . 173

IV. Comparative Perspective over Space and Time Sylvia Hahn 10. Migration and Career Patterns of Female Domestic Servants

. . . . . 195

Francesca Biancani 11. Globalisation, Migration, and Female Labour in Cosmopolitan Egypt

. 207

Majda Hrzˇenjak 12. Slovenian Domestic Workers in Global Care Economies . . . . . . . . 229 Bibliography Index

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

Acknowledgements

Most of all, I would like to thank Dirk Hoerder, who suggested five years ago to publish a book on the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo. He read the first draft of the manuscript and gave invaluable suggestions and comments and, as the coeditor of the series Transkulturelle Perspektiven, was always available for my never-ending questions and dilemmas. Without his kind support, immense knowledge, and patient editorial work, the year-long process of putting together this book would not have been successful. The head of the Slovenian Migration Institute at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Marina Luksˇicˇ Hacin, supported the project from the beginning and was always helpful as both a colleague and an expert on migration. Ksenija Vidmar Horvat from the University of Ljubljana included part of our aleksandrinke research in her project on Slovenian women migrants. Together we organised the inspiring symposium Dis-membered and dis-remembered: migrant women in national imagination in May 2013 in Ljubljana. Among other contributors to the book, Sylvia Hahn attended it to share with us her knowledge on women breadwinners and to help with the conceptualisation of the book. Very special thanks go to Barbara Skubic and Jana Ren¦e Wilcoxen who translated, copy-edited, and proofread the chapters. Without their dedicated precision, endless questioning of unclear sentences, insistence on clarity, and skill in polishing the texts by so many diverse authors with different academic backgrounds and styles of writing, this book would not have been possible. In translating, Stanley Nadel (chapters 2 and 10) and Mojca Vah Jevsˇnik (chapter 8) were also engaged. Marijanca Ajsˇa Vizˇintin and Mateja Gliha also helped with preparing the manuscript and Sˇpela Marinsˇek took care of all administrative matters. Thanks also go to the Slovenian Research Agency and the Office for Slovenians Abroad, who provided financial support for the book. When we visited the Museum for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Alexandrian Women in Prvacˇina with Dirk Hoerder, the members of the Society of Women from Prvacˇina greeted us dressed in the original dresses of aleksan-

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Acknowledgements

drinke, offered cookies and cakes baked according to the recipes that their grandmothers, mothers and aunts brought from Egypt, and shared with us some of their memories. A warm thank you to all of them and to Vesna Humar who organised the visit for us. For help in searching for the photographs, I would like to thank Marko Klavora and Inga Miklavcˇicˇ Brezigar in the Museum of Gorisˇka in Nova Gorica, Kaja Sˇirok and Katarina Jurjavcˇicˇ in the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, and Aleksej Kalc. Mateja Rihtersˇicˇ made the maps for an easier presentation of the complicated times and contested places. Very special thanks also to Anica Stanicˇ, a daughter of an aleksandrinka, who helped me in finding the right photography for the cover of the book in her personal and intimate archive of her mother’s and grandmother’s aleksandrinstvo.

I. Aleksandrinke

Mirjam Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik

1.

Trans-Mediterranean Women Domestic Workers: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Introduction Aleksandrinstvo is the general name of the phenomenon of mass emigration from the Western Slovenian region of Gorisˇka to Egypt, whose protagonists, aleksandrinke, were women. They were young women, widows, wives, and mothers who sought short or long-term employment in Egyptian cities. They mostly worked as chambermaids, cooks, and various other kinds of domestic helpers, frequently as nannies, sometimes as governesses, teachers, and wet nurses. Since the destination of their migration was the port city of Alexandria, at home they were referred to as aleksandrinke – Alexandrian women – and under this name they remain recorded in the collective memory. From the second half of the nineteenth century until 1954, when it eventually came to an end, aleksandrinstvo was an important component of the economy of the Gorisˇka region.1 The Slovenian ethnic territory, a part of the Habsburg Empire for centuries, was divided after World War I. The main and biggest part became a constitutional entity of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The small part in the North, Korosˇka, became part of Austria as a result of a referendum in 1919. The Western part, known as Primorska, which included Gorisˇka (heavily destroyed during the Isonzo front in World War I), became part of Italy as a result of the Rapallo Treaty. The population in Primorska suffered under the Fascist regime from 1921 to 1943. This involved economic, social and ideological measures that the Italian regime used to force the population to “become” Italian. When the measures stirred revolt, the answer 1 In the book, aleksandrinstvo will be used as the name of the phenomenon, aleksandrinke as the name of the women who migrated (aleksandrinka sing.) and the region of emigration, Gorisˇka (region) and sometimes Primorska (region) as a name for the broader Western part of the Slovenian ethnic territory, which includes Gorisˇka. A number of geographical names throughout the book are used in Slovenian, Italian, or German, in the three languages of this ethnically and linguistically diverse and politically contested territory where borders and names changed constantly during the twentieth century (see Map 1).

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was State brutality, forced migration, killings, imprisonments, and devastating tax policy. On the part of the population, the reaction was armed resistance and exodus. People left for Yugoslavia, Argentina, the United States, and women especially, for Egypt. After the Second World War, most of the Primorska region returned to Slovenia, which became part of the socialist federation, Yugoslavia. Slovenia became an independent state in the process of the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. (Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik 2014, 2)

Map 1: The changing borders of Slovenia and the cluster of villages in the Gorisˇka region

Aleksandrinstvo represented a vital economic resource for the households of farmers and workers, while its magnitude also gave it a systemic character. Emigration was a social strategy that had entered into the reasoning of women and of entire communities of this region and played an important role in meeting their socio-economic needs and in planning their individual and collective life paths. As such, it brought with it dramatic changes in the role of women and men, in the value placed on women’s work within the traditional economy and within the internal dynamics of their society of origin, both at the level of families and the wider community as well as in the relationships between generations. This emigration had a profound impact on women’s self-esteem and, at the same time, on the public image of migrants as non-conventional female characters whose reputation fluctuated between silent thankful adoration and loud moral condemnation. Regarding aleksandrinke and aleksandrinstvo, there are two contrasting interpretations, deeply embedded in the collective memory and national imagination and linked to two different perspectives: the (Catholic)

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discourse of suffering and sacrifice and the (feminist) discourse of freedom and emancipation. On the one side, the emphasis is on female sacrifice, placed in the moralist discourse of the sexually dangerous Orient and the devastating effects of freedom. Female suffering, mourning, and longing for home inside this interpretation even surpass the suffering of the abandoned children and husbands who stayed at home. In this image, two things are blurred: the saving of families, homes, farms, and properties and also the fact that the decisions about migration to Egypt were always tied to family survival strategies. The image emphasised is that of abandoned children as the essence of the phenomenon, and amongst aleksandrinke, the ones put in focus are wet nurses and mothers. On the other side, the emphasis is on the treatment of aleksandrinke stemming from interpretations that focus upon their courage, decisiveness, resourcefulness, and success. The suffering and longing are offset by the emancipation and freedom in the multicultural environment of a developed Mediterranean country ; and the abandoned children and husbands are offset by the calculations of the great and decisive financial contributions of migrant women that saved families and estates. In the intersection of both interpretations lies not only the question of the politics of gender but also that of the politics of remembrance. Both extremes raise the need for a more wholesome and complex treatment of this migration phenomenon.

From oblivion to recognition Thus, it is not surprising that the phenomenon was, for half a century, buried under a thick blanket of oblivion, denial, shame, and traumatic memories that we have only recently started to remove. The first public study dates from 1993, when Aleksandrinke, a popular book by journalist Dorica Makuc, was published (Makuc 1993).2 The book was presented as a part of an exhibition in the Gorisˇka Museum a year later, but they both received only local coverage. The exhibition, curated by Inga Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar and titled Wives – mothers, servants, wet nurses divided in the struggle for daily bread between the family and the overseas (1994) was the first attempt to present aleksandrinstvo in Gorisˇka.3 MiklavcˇicˇBrezigar’s exhibition was accompanied by an Italian exhibition about the institution of wet nursing in the region of Belluno in the nineteenth and the early 2 Dorica Makuc is also the author of a documentary that the Slovenian national television (RTVSLO) showed in 1974, but at that time it did not resonant significantly among the Slovenian public. The interviews with aleksandrinke that Makuc collected in the film and in the book are invaluable material. 3 Inga Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar is also the co-author of the first presentation of aleksandrinstvo in English (Barbicˇ and Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar 1999).

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twentieth century : rural women joined, as wet nurses, a system of agencies looking for young wives, setting them up for medical check-ups and thus providing healthy wet nurses for aristocratic and bourgeois families in the cities of northern Italy (Perco 1984). Very often, the only possibility of income for rural girls and women who were making the transition from the countryside into town was as nannies or servants; the wet nurses were particularly well paid. The wider historical context significantly illuminated the Alexandrian routes, as the women from Gorisˇka first went to Egypt with their Italian employers. It is not unimportant that both exhibitions gave the most attention to the wet nurses, though they were a minority amongst aleksandrinke. The fictionalised accounts of aleksandrinke by Slovenian writer Marjan Tomsˇicˇ (2002, 2006) followed this highlighting of wet nurses: while his immensely popular novels introduced aleksandrinstvo to the wider Slovenian audience for the first time – and won the author the highest national cultural award – his fictionalisation stuck obsessively to the Catholic normative regarding sexuality, presented the suffering and destruction of women, and, for the most part, judged and condemned aleksandrinke. With Marjan Tomsˇicˇ’s novels, an equation sign was drawn between aleksandrinke and wet nurses as well as between aleksandrinstvo and abandoned children; the collective memory was fixed. The phenomenon of the female migration in all its scope was – again – reduced to the prescribed social and religious perception of a (lactating) mother, and the understanding of the societies, fatally linked to the migration, set into the Orientalist interpretation. But this time, not for long. In 2005, there was a sudden and unusually intensive breakthrough in the treatment of aleksandrinke – both in methods and in interpretations. Works and projects appeared in different fields: art projects, documentary films, theatre performances, lectures, exhibitions, and research. Also in 2005, the interested public from the villages in Gorisˇka organised themselves into the Society for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of the Alexandrian Women ;4 a year later, a participatory museum of aleksandrinke opened in the village of Prvacˇina. From the local level, where the positive treatment of aleksandrinstvo appeared in the form of collecting material and immaterial heritage and organising exhibitions, round tables, lectures, performances, and events, the interest now spread to the national level. Dasˇa Koprivec, a curator in the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, who also prepared the exhibition in Ljubljana, started researching the phenomenon. The representatives of the state unveiled memorial plaques in Egypt in 2007 and 2010 and attended the openings of exhibitions and symposia. The exhibition Hidden

4 The Museum’s and Society’s website: http://www.aleksandrinke.si/eng/.

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Faces of Alexandria: Slovenian school sisters and aleksandrinke5, prepared in the Gorisˇka Museum in 2009 by Inga Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar, was opened by the president of the Republic of Slovenia with the Egyptian ambassador also in attendance. National and international audiences got acquainted with aleksandrinke via an extremely well-received documentary of the same name, which was a Slovenian, Egyptian, and Italian co-production (Pevec 2011). It was shown on Slovenian national public television, had a normal run in the Slovenian art house cinema network, and was screened in Egypt and at many festivals at home and abroad. It won a number of awards, including the Presˇeren Fund Award, the highest Slovenian award for culture for the director Metod Pevec in 2013. This breakthrough spurred further in-depth scientific study and research: conferences and symposia were organised, studies conducted, and academic articles published. Researchers in Trieste organised a bilingual conference and published a bilingual academic monograph Le rotte di Alexandria, Po aleksandrijskih poteh [Following the Alexandrian Routes/The Routes of Alexandria] (Perý, Vascotto 2011). In it, historian Marta Verginella picturesquely describes the consequences and interpretations of the transgression of not only geographic, but also social and national borders: The first to have written on female transgression of social and national borders were travellers who visited Egypt, priests who were worried about the moral life of female migrants and later also politicians and municipal administrators who were dealing with economic and administrative consequences of female migration to Alexandria and Cairo. For the nationally minded men who supported the image of a “loving and caring wife and mother”, the wet nurses from Primorska were a source of great shame, as they left their own children to feed those of strangers’. From the point of view of the defenders of national interests the women who were leaving to Egypt were “hindering the defence power of the nation”. Foreigners could have easily – in the absence of the family and village control – seduced and dishonoured them: abroad, even the most virtuous girls and wives could become women of dubious reputation. (Verginella 2011, 156)

Between sacrifice and emancipation Aleksandrinke so prisˇle domov [Aleksandrinke returned home], an extensive book of testimonies and memories of the descendants of aleksandrinke richly equipped with photographic material was published in 2012. The author Peter Zorn, himself a descendant of an aleksandrinka, wrote in the introduction that 5 The Congregation of the Sisters of the Order of St. Francis and of Christ the King has worked in Alexandria since 1908.

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the book is neither a history book nor a work of fiction – it is “a book, written with heart”: The word “aleksandrinka” was almost a swear word for decades in our villages. Women didn’t want to talk about their lives and experience abroad, because the society branded them as unchaste, as bad wives and mothers. Only in the last couple of years are we learning about and recognising their role. They were fighters for national rights, they started the process of emancipation of women and their equality, they were the heralds of Slovenehood abroad. They brought money, but also knowledge and culture to Primorska. To know aleksandrinke means to know an important part of history of the nineteenth and twentieth century. (Zorn 2012, 10)

Zorn caught the last moment to gather testimonies and memories of this great migration of women from Gorisˇka to North Africa. All aleksandrinke are dead by now, and their stories have survived in the memories of their descendants and relatives. In Zorn’s book, one testimony after another tells us about women from farms in debt that, after the devastation of World War I, came under the fascist government of Benito Mussolini, who used high interests on the loans as an effective instrument of the denationalisation policy and expropriation.

Bilje village, devastated during World War I Source: Museum of Gorisˇka, Nova Gorica

The only thing that protected farms from repossession was the migration of women who went to work in Egypt. Later what was pinned onto them was an image of loss, pain, and guilt for having left their families and their homeland. In

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reality, they left so that their families could survive and their homeland would not be completely erased. When they were leaving, they were afraid of the culture shock upon their arrival abroad. But migrant workers do not have time to be shocked. Aleksandrinke had to immediately adjust to the cultural habits of the environment, learn new languages, and start working. Through testimonies, Zorn’s book presents what aleksandrinke did in Egypt. They did interesting things and were successful. The photos show proud, smiling women who found themselves in big cities, women who learnt to speak Greek, Hungarian, English, Arabic, and French and sent home all the money they earned. They knew how to help each other and find their way among the Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and English. In fact, the cultural shock happened when they returned home. The environment rejected them as strangers and tried to burden them with guilt. If the women who returned refused to understand their experience as loss, sacrifice, and pain as is appropriate for a woman, the environment refused to acknowledge their migrant experience at all. It demanded that they understood their departure as a loss. This is why many re-embarked the steamer for Alexandria with relief and anticipation.

The theoretical and conceptual framework of aleksandrinstvo research Until recently, aleksandrinstvo was completely overlooked in the migration studies and Slovenian historiography. Even globally, waged domestic work has only recently been given more attention. This is all the more unusual, if we know that waged domestic workers form the largest single female category of migrant labour, not only in the twentieth and twenty-first century but in fact throughout the history of migration. This is accounted for by economic restructuring processes (mainly agrarian and in the textile industry), by an uneven distribution of wealth between regions and nations, and by changes in the international division of labor (Harzig 2006, 48).

The reason for the invisibility of the female migrants and their specific work, which is globally expanded and true for the past and for the present, was well defined by Sheila Rowbotham (2001, xvi): One reason for the lack of visibility has been the nature of female migrants’ occupation. In many cases they went into domestic service or served as wet nurses – activities which have never been regarded within the prevailing definitions of “work” or the “economy” and have thus defied statistical reckoning. This is a gendered obscurity in a double

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sense. The women leave no traces because they are female and because the framework of who is to be seen has been biased towards the male.

Sylvia Hahn explains in her chapter on labour migration and female breadwinners how some nineteenth-century statisticians and demographers as well as a few early twentieth-century sociologists noticed female migration, but generally downplayed its extent and significance, or ignored it entirely. Until late in the twentieth century migration history remained an essentially male history for long periods of time. Hahn presents many examples and some life stories of female (labour) migrants who supported their children and families with their earnings and became major breadwinners. It is important to understand that in past centuries female breadwinner migrants were not uncommon and they are not only a recent phenomenon as we are accustomed to expect. Within the female migration, aleksandrinstvo is a totally specific phenomenon because of the nature of aleksandrinke’s work and within it, the emphasised role of wet nursing. No other form of female migration cut so painfully into gender relationships, family relationships, children’s memories, and the collective memory and thus produced interpretations that were this emotionally charged, completely opposing, and controversial. Migration studies in Slovenia have only begun paying more attention to the phenomenon in recent years, because it was only recently that female migrants even became the subject of research (Sˇkrlj 2009, Koprivec 2006) and not only “subjects” but persons with their own stories, individuals with their own experiences. We can say that the attention given to female migrants has been sharpened within the biographicalnarrative methodological approach to migrations (Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik, Mlekuzˇ 2009). The initial orientation of this approach to the research of migrations in general, and aleksandrinstvo in particular, takes cues from the research approach of Abdelmalek Sayad. He claimed that the sociology of migration must be self-reflective: every research of migration phenomena is at the same time a social history of the migrants and a social history of the migration phenomenon discursive research. More than any other social phenomenon, migration research is subjected to politics, and for a good reason: it is a phenomenon that in all forms – demographic, economic, social, cultural, and political – is pinned to establishing and strengthening the existing social order and stability of the institutions (Sayad 2004). Of course aleksandrinstvo is also about retaining and reinforcing the existing social labour division between genders and the stability of prescribed gender roles. This may be, more so than in any other form of migration, obvious with women – but not in general. A special and exceptional circumstance of aleksandrinstvo is the nature of the work – care work in families, which even today is incomparable to any other work – and from it the origi-

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nating stigmatisations of women, the insinuations of their immorality, the pathology of abandoned children and homes, and the traumatic memories.

Migration system of aleksandrinstvo The research of aleksandrinstvo and the migration experience of aleskandrinke is thus a matter of migration politics as well as gender politics. We must understand it in the concrete historic and social circumstances which we could name migration systems. How can we place aleksandrinstvo within a migration system? The finding of Christiane Harzig (based on her long term historic research) will serve us as a starting point: As migrants of past and present show, migration works within transworld migration systems which are formed not only by global capitalism but by well-informed global players – the migrants themselves – performing multiple gendered functions, deciding about their moves in transnational communities, considering their assets on the global labour market and relying on networks formed by family, kin, friendship and neighbourhood/village. Within these transnational processes women are often decisive agents pursuing their own agenda at the local and global levels, negotiating gendered strategies and options. (Harzig 2001, 25)

To understand the strategies, patterns, and negotiations within (female) migrations, as Harzig explains, we must divide the research into three levels: micro, meso, and macro. The migration phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo must be understood through an analytical approach that places people in the focus of decision: individuals and their immediate family, extended family, and village environment. On this level, it is of key importance that we take into account the gender specific roles of people involved in the migration decisions. On the other hand, the decisions are a part of the cultural, social, political, and economic context, both in the narrowest sense of the home town environment as well as in the widest scope of the global world. We must consider all three levels of the system of migrations: micro, meso, and macro. On the macro level, aleksandrinstvo is to be understood as a migration phenomenon with its origin in the Habsburg Monarchy and later under the Italian fascist regime, which ruled cruelly over the Slovenian ethnic territories annexed to Italy after World War I. On the macro level, the political, social, and economic situation in the target country of migration – Egypt – is also important. As Sayad warns, we must always consider the wholesomeness of the migration process and consider the connections between societies and states and thus with all our strength resist the reductionist perspectives and one-sided analyses, where emigration and immigration, and also the place of emigration

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and the place of immigration, are dealt with separately. Thus Sayad (2004, 2) says: Any attempt to construct immigration as a true object of science must, finally, be a social history of the reciprocal relations between these societies, of the society of emigration and the society of immigration, of relations between emigrants and immigrants, and of relations between each of those two societies.

For this reason, there are chapters in the book that describe places of emigration and places of immigration as a common social and cultural history. Aleksej Kalc places aleksandrinstvo into a wider context of emigration from the Habsburg Monarchy and thus sets the first stable stone in the path of reinterpretation of this phenomenon. He shows that the various forms of migration by men and women into numerous directions were an inevitable part of life at the time. The retrospective delusion that only shows us the modern world as globalised is at this point effectively replaced by the presentation of the mobility of the population and the transnational and transcultural connections. The author emphasises that we have to observe this specific wave of female migration in a wider context of the extreme mobility of the population. His text shows that aleksandrinke were part of the domestic workers migrations to different directions. But the direction Egypt did matter a lot. It is not only about understanding the system of migrations within the connection made up by ship lines between Trieste and Alexandria and the fact that the sea journey was relatively short – that Egypt was, in fact, close. Neither is it only about the fact that for more than half a century there was an exchange of existentially necessary financial, emotional, and informational goods between the villages in Gorisˇka and the temporary addresses of women in Egypt. The issue here is that the migration direction in the case of Egypt is something completely different from that of the United States of America, Argentina, or England. Egypt is “the Orient” and the policy we have to take into account – policy of gender, policy of migration – was embedded in Orientalism (Said 1978). In a detailed description of Egypt, Barbara Skubic thus particularly emphasises the modernisation processes – social, political, and cultural – that formed the country long before the opening of the Suez Canal. She presents the places of immigration in a wider cultural and historical context and paves another stone on the road to the deconstruction of the stigma attached to the women who migrated and the families they left behind, which persevered long after the phenomenon was over, well into the 1990s. Her chapter is an insight into the social circumstances of the fast developing Egyptian society caught in the vice of the European colonial politics and at the same time a microcosm of life circumstances – not of the rich merchant employers, but of the multitude of (migrant) workers. The framework of the working class organising and activism

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Trst – Trieste 1907 Source: National and Study Library, Trieste

radically surpasses the Orientalist image of water-and-tamarind sellers, but also that of the elegantly dressed aleksandrinke – servants we could almost mistake for the ladies they served. It is a deconstruction of the stereotypical images of Egypt that have unfortunately been retained – in the popular images but also in academia – until today. On the meso level, the important issues when deciding to migrate are family economics, the search for work and independence, and the information about possibilities, all in the context of the region. In the case of the analysis of aleksandrinstvo, it is particularly important as well to understand the meso level when it comes to taking decisions, and within that, especially family. Dirk Hoerder (2002, 20) states: The concept of family economies, along with the inclusion of nonmeasurable emotional and spiritual factors in the negotiating process, avoids the reductionist approach to wage differentials and permits a comprehensive approach to decision-influencing factors. Family economies combine the income-generating capabilities of all family members with reproductive needs – such as care for dependants, whether children or elderly – and consumption patterns so as to achieve the best possible results according to traditional norms. Allocation of resources depends on the stage of the family lifecycle and individual life-courses as well as on gender and generational power hierarchies.

On the one side we thus have decisions based on expecting profits, acquiring independence, a better life for the family and the individual who will migrate; on

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the other side there are just as big concerns about losing support, emotional ties, and help. Hoerder calls the methodological approach that takes into account the economic, cultural, social, and emotional complexity and conditioning of migration decisions and their consequences in the place of origin as well as the place of migration – for those who leave and for those who stay – the “holistic material-emotional approach”. This is an extremely important approach for dealing with aleksandrinstvo, because we can use it to argue systematically the reductionist discourse, so rooted in the Slovenian territory, when studying this phenomenon. With the holistic material-emotional approach to the understanding of aleksandrinstvo we meticulously take into account all the individuals in this migration phenomenon as actors in the process of decision-making and their consequences: “Decisions about life-courses, levels of subsistence, and aspirations for betterment involve a conglomerate of traditional cultural norms and practices, of actual emotional and spiritual needs, and of economic rationales,” emphasises Hoerder (Ibid.). In this sense, our analysis may include the infinite series of emotions that decisions of migration triggered. In those who left and in those who stayed we can follow the life currents of the feelings of loss, abandonment, homesickness, missing, loneliness, alienation, anger, despair, resentment, incomprehension, but also happiness, independence, empowerment, courage, satisfaction, and fulfilment. The holistic material-emotional approach forces us not to miss anyone in the intertwining of the migration phenomenon actors. In the case of aleksandrinstvo, this is ever more so important, because the phenomenon is so diversified. When we try to understand its material-emotional aspects, we must make a distinction between women who worked as nannies and those who worked as wet nurses, and between both these categories and the women who did other types of work. We must differentiate women who had their children with them (or at least in the same city) and those who left them at home in Gorisˇka. We cannot treat single women and those who were married and mothers in the same way. When it comes to children, we know stirring stories of truly abandoned children whom nobody cared for, but also testimonies of childhoods a lot less dramatic. Some men accepted their wives’ absences without any problems, some had more difficulties. And then there are the children the aleksandrinke cared for and their testimonies of how their nannies marked their lives and identities. We could go on, but we can already understand that, when analysing this phenomenon, the already mentioned focus on individuals and their concrete life stories is the most helpful. It is the subjective perception of the migration process, into which everybody, those who leave and those who stay, that most precisely reveals the complexity of migration experiences. The complexity of the elements of the migration experience – family, politics, transnational and trans-local community, moral norms, prescribed

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gender roles, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality, and in the case of aleksandrinke even endangered nationality – indicates also to the extreme complexity of their identities and subjectivities. For this reason, the central part of the book is dedicated to life stories, memories, narratives, correspondences, and all other “valuable warehouses of individual memory” (Verginella 2004). Dasˇa Koprivec has collected numerous testimonies of descendants and relatives of aleksandrinke and the children they cared for, and completed them with other sources that shed light on the subjective perception of the migration process. In this way, she most convincingly deconstructs the mythologisation and demonisation of aleksandrinke and at the same time unfolds the transnational networks of connections that fatefully marked the lives of all those involved. In a wide scope of different stories, routes, and returns, there lies an exceptional wealth of destinies, decisions, and identity transformations. The controversy of the status of women, children, men that aleksandrinstvo produced is an endless source to understand the daily negotiations of an individual as an agent on the large scene of history. The presented narratives and memories link the entire world and the entire century and thus allow the sharpening of both the perspective of gender and the perspective of human subjectivity.

The “gender paradox” The relations, relationships, and statuses that aleksandrinstvo shook were many. In the forefront, there was the prescribed status of a woman in the society, which through the religious norms required that a woman be subjected to a man, that her activities be limited to the private, these norms enforced economic dependency, prohibited education beyond secondary level, and also prohibited political participation. On the level of family, the subordination of women was determined by the system of the law of inheritance, the absence of the right to be paid for the work done, and the obligation of woman’s care for children and family members. The departure of a woman from her home to go abroad to help with the survival of the family members, retaining or improving the material status of the family property made a radical cut into the prescribed female role in the society. Of course the cut was linked with the control over women, so it was particularly deep when it came to wives and mothers. With them, the need of the Catholic Church, the traditional community, and the conservative society for the total control over their behaviours, activities, reproductive abilities, and the prescribed moral behaviour, was the greatest. Paola Corti describes “a traditional specialty of women from mountain villages” in northern Italy, who left as wet nurses to France, and draws particular

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Rencˇe village in the 1920s Source: National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana

attention to the extreme surveillance they endured on the part of the Italian authorities: “Both consular officials and Italian prefects took pains to survey, and control, this type of work because it was believed to threaten family morality, and to lead to crime and imprisonment as peasant families disintegrated.” It’s interesting that, contrary to the belief of the authorities, many wet nurses called their husbands to join them, “thus using their relatively secure wages to stabilize a longer-term earning campaign involving other family members” (Corti 2002, 144). Regarding the surveillance of migrants in the target country, Sylvia Hahn’s study is enlightening: she found much evidence on the extremely precise and cruel control over domestic workers in the Habsburg Empire, carried out by both the local population and the police over the newcomers, particularly women. The intensity of the surveillance was linked to the social status, profession, and gender and the most controlled of all were single women: Detailed interrogation of women “picked up for questioning”, the arrests and interrogations, such as those of female “strangers”, were often carried out in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. The grounds were invariably suspicion of prostitution, illegal peddling, failure to officially register subtenants, or vagrancy and homelessness. (Hahn 2001, 122)

Every perspective marked by gender must include both genders. For this reason, it’s important to remember that in the structure of the women’s status in a

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society and family, we must also see the male side, although it is sometimes left out from the explanation. For a man – and even more so for a married man and a father – the prescribed gender code of behaviour (and emotions) demanded carrying out control over women, caring for the economic survival of the family and the estate, and not intervening into the female work of childcare and care of the elderly family members. For this very reason – and we cannot stress this enough – the departure of woman abroad cut radically and irreversibly into the prescribed social role of a man as well. Only in this context can we start to understand the most frequent and the most stubborn theme of aleksandrinstvo in the Slovenian collective memory, in Slovenian literature and cinema – the theme of the abandoned children. Why did the theme of abandoned children and consequently the cruel mothers who “abandoned” them overpower all other aspects of this specific migration phenomenon? Dasˇa Koprivec’s exhaustive research, which in this book explains the ways of caring for children within the extended family, through family and friendship networks, village and neighbourhood networks, and female solidarity structures prove that for the most part, children were taken care of. For this reason it is even more unclear why until recently the main image of aleksandrinke was linked to the image of abandoned children. We can find one of the answers on the other side of the world, in another millennium, in the analysis of the Filipino migration phenomenon by Rhacel Salazar ParreÇas (2001, 2005). The author draws attention to the specific situation of female migrants which is completely incomparable to the position of the male migrants and draws a precise image of the female captivity into the traditional cultural patterns, through which the un-altered control over them is attempted, regardless of the enormous changes of the globalised world. Female migrants, in this case the Filipina women, are the subject of passionate public ideological campaigns in their home environment, where they are stigmatised as bad mothers who have rejected their children for a couple of dollars. The Philippine media incessantly quote the research and findings about children of female migrants who suffer from various physical and psychological diseases caused by the absence of their mothers. ParreÇas used her research to verify these findings and found a number of very different cases, from children who for various reasons feel the absence of their mothers as an irreparable loss, to children who are perfectly content with such absence and respect their mothers’ efforts to give them a better life. As the actions that maintain transnational families do not always abide by their institutional and structural context, I found that a gender paradox of reifying and transgressing gender boundaries limits the potential for gender transformation in Filipino transnational households. More specifically, I observed that while the structural arrangements of transnational households sometimes force the unavoidable

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transgression of gender norms, for instance via the incomes earned by women, the performance that maintains these families also upholds “normative gender behavior”. I found that migrant mothers indeed provide care from thousands of miles away, whereas fathers continue to reject the responsibility of nurturing children. (ParreÇas 2005, 6 – 7)

It is interesting that such stigmatisation of female migrants occurs in a country that has a special state office for the acceleration of migration. And it is not in the slightest surprising that they are expected to feel remorse and repent for their independent economic entrepreneurship for which they decided in order to salvage the existential crisis of the family and enable education and a better life for their children, as the Philippines are not only a developing country, but also a Catholic one. If we use ParreÇas’s concept, we can see that in the villages where aleksandrinstvo was prevalent, and where there was almost no house without a transnational household and family life, a gender paradox occurred. It determined an intimate family life behind the closed doors where sometimes the father rejected the care for children and their emotional needs even more than he might have under different circumstances. Gender paradox especially defined the public village life, where “normative gender behavior” was defended fanatically. The comparison reveals the important role of the Catholic Church in preserving the gender paradox. On the one hand, it preached the necessity to retain the traditional gender roles and executed control over the morality of the women and the accepted sexual practices. It spoke about aleksandrinke with no restraint in the context of the morally questionable aspect of their lives and work abroad and spread insinuation about their sexual conduct. The emphasis on the suffering of the abandoned children because of their mothers who went abroad was a component of the ecclesial child-rearing and public discourse. On the other hand, the church happily collected money from its congregation without paying much attention where it came from and how it was earned.

“Moral destruction” The challenges for the wider environment were dramatic, and they emanated from the endangerment of gender relations as a structural base for the society and the community. Aleksandrinstvo endangered the traditional gender division of labour, the separation of the public and private spheres, and the ideology of segregated spaces. It endangered the social fabric by making women – particularly mothers – inaccessible for male surveillance and, at the same time, absent when it came to raising and caring for children. Due to the specifics of their work with wealthy families, they were untraditionally well paid, and often well re-

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spected and included in the family social life. Even more: albeit informally, they obtained certain knowledge when it came to knowledge of the larger world and its languages, habits, and traditions which in other circumstances would be inaccessible to them. In short, they achieved economic emancipation, although we’d be wise to speak about it conditionally, as they sent most all of their money back home to Gorisˇka and remained mere domestic workers in the multicultural environment of the rich merchant world. The emotional price was high and the consequences permanent. In the world in which they lived, they themselves preserved the patriarchal tradition and the prescribed gender norms. Of course, not all of them and not all the time, and even here we have to make a distinction between single and married women. For those women who strove even more than they would in different circumstances for the preservation of the endangered traditional gender relations, the Church was certainly important. The Slovenian Catholic Church set up institutions in Egypt that took care of the surveillance of women far away from home, but also offered them support, help, and guidance. The Slovenian Church played a double role in the history of the Slovenian mass emigration. On the one hand, it warned against emigration and shamed those who were leaving, and on the other, it directly organised, sponsored, and established migrant communities. In Egypt the Slovenian Women’s Christian Union, the sisters of the Order of St. Francis and of Christ the King (called school sisters) who managed the Franz-Joseph Asylum (latter called St. Francis Asylum) and the Catholic Association of St. Cyril and Metod were active (Barbicˇ, Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar 1999, 168). The purpose of these institutions was to “to organize cultural and religious activities, with an eye to the prevention of moral destruction” (Drnovsˇek 2009, 37). However, the institutions and discourses that supported the denigration of the aleksandrinke were far from limited to the Church only. Dirk Hoerder, in his chapter, shows that the discourse of disdain and moral condemnation of female work and migrations was deeply rooted in the nationalism of the nineteenth and the twentieth century and has not yet been overcome. The reduction of women to the role of “mothers of the nation” was intense in all political and ideological options and it was institutionalised on the legislative, cultural, and ideological levels. For this very reason, the concrete experiences, achievements, contributions, and importance of aleksandrinke and other female migrants had to be silenced, overlooked, forgotten, or wrapped into traumatic intimate memories. Hoerder thus sets aleksandrinke as an example of skewed historic memory and national historic narrative which is relevant across the globe, in the past and today. Moral destruction is directly linked to aleksandrinke particularly in Slovenian literature. The representation of femininity from the folk motive of the Beautiful Vida to the popular novels by Marjan Tomsˇicˇ is analysed in detail by

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The Gorisˇka region Source: National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana

Katja Mihurko Ponizˇ. Side by side with the Catholic motive of a breastfeeding mother, overwhelmingly present in Tomsˇicˇ’s description of aleksandrinke, Mihurko Ponizˇ sets a list of all those whom the writer condemns to moral and physical destruction. The result of her analysis is downright chilling. But for one exception – a woman who has all the attributes of the Virgin Mary and returns home to her husband unsullied – all of the aleksandrinke in the novels are damned. The moral and physical destruction that affects most of the described aleksandrinke goes as far as prostitution, procuring, self-immolation, and other types of suicide, madness, fatal diseases, slavery, humiliation, and people-trafficking, incest, and rape. That Tomsˇicˇ’s novels received the highest national award for literature and, according to the data from public libraries, soon became popular reading, tells us how they influenced the popular opinion about aleksandrinke. The downright astonishing fact that the literary representation of moral and physical destruction of women migrants is even today such popular reading is contextualised in Marina Luksˇicˇ Hacin’s text. Her analysis helps us understand the patriarchy of the Slovenian society and culture from the European and historical perspective. The methods of patriarchal constructions of the collective memory of aleksandrinke from the beginning of the phenomenon till now are connected to the religious, philosophical and theological definition of gender roles in the social and cultural organisation of the community and society and above all in the nation building process. In the process of forming nations, national identities, and nation states in the

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nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the press was an important mechanism everywhere in Europe. Two things must be mentioned: that constituting nations was a process that came late to Central Europe, but the nationalist discourses within it were brought to the boiling point; and that the territory of emigration was a border territory between the Slavic, Romance, and Germanic linguistic and cultural world, where the need to define the Other was even more pronounced and in the time of the Italian fascism even more existentially urgent. Within the formation of national cultural patterns, the Slovenian press was included in the re-constitution of the socially preferred gender roles. In this process, it – rarely, but with much zeal – turned on aleksandrinke. The newspaper discourse of the moral condemnation of female migration is dealt with in Jernej Mlekuzˇ’s chapter. It presents numerous quotes from the newspapers published at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. There we can find objections to female migration from the progressive liberal as well as the conservative Catholic camp. The reasons for these objections are embedded either in the religious faith and dogmas, or in the nationalism and fear of jeopardising the nation, or a combination of both. That said, there is nothing special about the studied period, the press played an important role in the processes of constitution of nations and nation states all over Europe. What is surprising, though, is the unbridled shaming and moral condemnation that only few spoke against. Thus, the chapters on memory and the national imagination bring us into the focus of the contemporary migration processes and the question of how contemporary aleksandrinke are treated, understood, silenced, and stigmatised on a global scale today.

The contemporariness of aleksandrinstvo Aleksandrinstvo is a concept with which we denote a specific form of a female migrant experience. It may be a thing of the past in Slovenian territory, but in the global world it is one of the main traits of our time. The phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo must be illuminated from the point of view of the present and the richly documented fact that today the work of women migrants everywhere in the world is for the most part care work for children, elderly, sick, and households as a whole. This is fully comparable with the world of aleksandrinke, who were mostly nannies, “dames de compagnie”, and housekeepers. The occurrence of the contemporary aleksandrinke raises a lot of attention of (female) researchers, and a great deal of surprise: A few decades ago, no one predicted that we would see a resurgence of paid domestic work and that this resurgence would appear in places at the apex of capitalist mod-

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ernity. Nor did anyone predict that this old pattern of employment would be dependent on a new dynamic: globalization and international migration. (…) In some of these sites, the parameters of employers have grown far beyond elites to include middle-class sectors, dual-career couples, the elderly living on a fixed income and even single mothers. In all of these places, paid domestic work relies on the global migration of women. (Ozyegin, Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008, 195)

In the closing chapter of Migration and Domestic Work (Lutz 2008), the authors discuss the key characteristics of paid domestic work: first, women who do domestic work in the globalised world today are migrants; second, migrants are not only poor often rural women as was usual in the past, but also well and highly educated professionals, who were employed in their country of origin, but for a significantly lower salary ; third, the countries where they work differ greatly in their migration politics; and finally, everywhere domestic work bears a mark of racial, ethnic, and gender ideologies, just as it did in the past.

Mothers and fathers An interesting difference could be observed in the phenomenon of transnational motherhood, which denotes “the emergence of a new global phenomenon: an immigrant woman who mothers her children from a physical distance – across transnational boundaries, creating new meanings and practices of motherhood” (Ozyegin, Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008, 200). In fact, we can, in a comparative perspective, see transnational motherhood as a historical phenomenon, not in the slightest bit new. Even the retrospectively used concepts of transnational family, transnational childhood, and transnational household can be easily observed between a handful of Gorisˇka villages and the cosmopolitan cities of Egypt. If we take into account the life stories of the children the aleksandrinke cared for we can see that the villages in Gorisˇka were not connected only to Egyptian cities. In the past and now, they have been connected to a number of places around the world where the people aleksandrinke cared for as children now live. Here, transnationality has an additional dimension, as the emotional ties and identifications did not only link different places and continents in the past, but they also link long periods of time and memories of people today. It is this emotional and memory aspect of migrations and the growth of the global emotional communities that deserve our deepest attention. Transnational motherhood, meaning the restructuring cultural practices and identities – of those who left as well as of those who stayed – is also a characteristic of aleksandrinstvo. It will demand a great deal of research effort if we are to present it in all of its dimensions and particularly in the gender perspective. Namely, it is important how little we understand the role of husbands and fathers

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in retaining the gender roles and their potential rebellions against the prescribed work division in transnational families. This holds true for the present as well as the past. One of the rare studies which through the narrative method shows the subjective, emotional dimensions of male migrations was done by Sayad on the example of Algerian men in France. His posthumous book The Suffering of the Immigrant, has presented long integral narratives of men who describe the male experience of migration in a painfully intimate perspective. One of them describes in detail what the “gender paradox” means for men migrants: What kind of life is it when, in order to feed your children, you are forced to leave them; when, in order to “fill” your house, you start by deserting it, when you are the first to abandon your country in order to work it? (…) Men who have the right to be at home for one month, that’s all, they are men for one month a year, that’s all, they are men for one month a year throughout their lives; the rest of the time, you don’t know what they are; men, but there is nothing manlike in their lives; the women aren’t like that, the women they have left at home are better men than they are; they outdo them, they manage without their husbands, they’re the real men. (Sayad 2004, 59)

In aleksandrinstvo, the widespread stereotype is that men in the villages drank the money women sent from Egypt. It is precisely this kind of stereotype that requires we take a closer look if this truly was the prevailing pattern of male behaviour and try to discover the ways of retaining as well as restructuring gender and cultural practices in the environments where women were absent. This is certainly one of the important tasks of the further research on aleksandrinke and female migration in general. In this point as well we can easily see the resemblance of the contemporary and past aleksandrinke. The question if in a hundred years anything changed at all in the gender roles and family obligations is a key question in researching the present day aleksandrinstvo. To the extremely important question, “Do fathers mother in the physical absence of women?” which ParreÇas so precisely laid out for the Philippines, the authors respond: The evidence thus far shows that a profound departure from the gendered division of labour, such as male mothering and domesticity, has not yet been observed. Fathers do not replace women as primary care givers, and in fact, the traditional gender ideology that defines the appropriate roles for women and men is being strengthened. Physical distance is not effective in breaking the strong connection between being the care giver and gender-role identity. (…) Patterns of allocating labour, privileges and responsibilities for childcare relies on pre-existing notions of the appropriate roles of women and men. So, in most cases, we see female kin, such as grandmothers, mothersin-laws, sisters and aunts, not fathers, becoming responsible for childcare and household chores. (Ozyegin, Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008, 202)

In addition, as the stories of aleksandrinke tell us, domestic workers have two (or more) homes, homelands, time reference frames, and often two (or more)

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families, households, and emotional and care duties. Helma Lutz defines the exceptionality of this work by the following characteristics: The intimate character of the social sphere where the work is performed; the social construction of this work as a female gendered area; the special relationship between employer and employee which is highly emotional, personalized and characterized by mutual dependency, and the logic of care work which is clearly different from that of other employment areas. (Lutz 2008, 1)

Of course there is a key difference between the aleksandrinstvo of yesteryear and the domestic work of today. Most women who employ migrants are not ladies of leisure from time lost, but working women. And what do a highly educated woman with children and family, a demanding and well-paid job, and a comfortable flat in a global city in the developed world and the nanny of her children, the housekeeper of her flat, and the carer of her family have in common? As the authors Global Woman (Ehrenreich, Hoschchild 2002), respond, both leave their own families and children for a relatively well-paid job. The former spends a part of her salary to pay her children’s nanny and housekeeper in a comfortable and luxurious home in a global metropolis to which she returns more or less every night. The latter spends her salary to pay her children’s nanny and household costs in a modest flat in a small village or a big city of the undeveloped world where she returns occasionally for big holidays for a short leave from work. They both live in Rome, New York, Hong Kong, or Toronto, often in the same flat. Both women are in the same position, paradoxically, namely that they have to, because of a relatively well-paid job, hire another woman to care for her family.

Workers and employers As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie R. Hochschild (2002) emphasise, in this world the robbing of the underdeveloped world is no longer represented by the exploitation of natural resources, but by the exploitation of social wealth in the shape of care, love, and compassion. This wealth is not directly plundered; it offers itself in the labour market of the developed world where daily an unstoppable multitude of female migrants arrives to offer their services to an ever growing number of families and aged and disabled persons. Without them, cities in Europe, North America, and the rich parts of Gulf and Asian states would be left without the most important elementary services as the new economy established them. What is the new economy? In the developed world, these are the global corporations with the constantly growing needs for highly educated and trained experts, among whom there are more and more women. The work is demanding, competitive, and requires long

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hours, often at weekends as well. Regardless of the fact that the demanding work is relatively well paid, it offers no alternative for women when it comes to their family and maternal obligations: the care for children, elderly, or disabled family members and other family chores and the maintenance tasks for the family and home have to be given over to services and to women, who are, as a rule, poor, but not necessarily uneducated female migrants. Women of the modern world decide to migrate from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India, and Thailand to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; from the Philippines to Italy, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus; from Morocco, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Albania to Italy, Greece, and Spain; and from the Central American countries and Mexico to the United States and Canada (Ehrenreich, Hoschchild 2002). To this we can add women migrants coming from the countries in Eastern Europe and the data stated in Women on the Move (Anthias, Lazaridis 2000) that shows today there are approximately seven million migrants, although their number is much higher, as the majority are undocumented. New migrations at the end of the twentieth century are a part of the globalisation and transnational processes that can only be understood when considering the conflicting processes of inclusion and exclusion, claims Floya Anthias. In her opinion, these opposing processes contain the discourses of tension and conflict: the idea of the universality of human rights and all people equal in front of the law is in obvious conflict with the prevalent denial of human and citizen rights to migrants and the racist attitude they often have to face; the next examples are the economic needs for the cheapest workforce, which is what makes migrants desirable; however, in total opposition to that are the political needs for ideological reinforcing of national firmness and ethnic homogeneity, where migrants are treated as a threat and a danger to the existence of the state; and on the level of the European Union the obvious gap between the declarative openness of the borders for the movement of people, commodities, and capital on the one hand, and on the other hand huge investments into the ideological defining of “others”, defined by their not being white or Christian, and closing borders to them. In this context, the novelty that after 1980, migration in Europe is a lot more female than male phenomenon must be taken into the account, as well as the fact that defining the “Other” is determined by gender (Anthias 2000, 24 – 25). Numerous analyses show that female migrant work today is – differently from the previous waves and work that offered migrants (aleksandrinke, for example) good pay and relative safety – poorly paid and with limited possibilities to obtain minimal social security and labour rights. Of course, this is the question of colonial societies in relation to the postcolonial relationships and not just the question of gender ; an intersectional discrimination where in addition to gender, the decisive role is the one of race or ethnicity. It is clear that aleksandrinke

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in Egypt were of the white race and spoke Italian, that they were Christians and that their references came, at least initially, from their Italian employers. Despite that, the comparison with the contemporary migration and care workers reminds us of important details.

Map 2: Trieste – Alexandria ship route

Francesca Biancani describes in her chapter this North to South migration, which is so incomprehensible today when the historical facts are forgotten and the prevalent discourse in Europe regards migration as a problem of the Others who want to come to our continent. The predominant “Mediterranean” character of migration to Egypt meant that the migrants were from Greece, Italy, France, Syria, and the Levant part of the Ottoman Empire, though there were also migrants from England, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire. They worked as instructors and advisors, engineers, technicians, and skilled labourers such as carpenters, stone-cutters, and printers. Restaurateurs, tobacconists, caf¦ owners, bakers, petty shopkeepers, grocers also found work and business in Egyptian booming cities. At the building of the Suez Canal, accountants, shopkeepers, clerks, doctors, carpenters, surveyors, topographers, barge captains, blacksmiths, masons, stonecutters, train conductors, cooks, and telegraph operators were needed. Many foreign women moved to Egypt without any male supervision, as sole breadwinners to work in the domestic service sector which expanded enormously. In the chapter on migration and career patterns of female domestic servants Sylvia Hahn adds very important data from the statistics of Austrians abroad in 1900. These statistics show that in 1900 Austrian women outnumbered Austrian men in the Egyptian cities of Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said, where nearly twothirds of the 4,505 Austrians in Egypt were women. In some cities in other countries the proportion of women migrants was also high and women made up

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half to two thirds of the Austrian citizens there: in Salonika it was 50 %, in Adrianople 54 %, in Jerusalem 50 %, in Beirut 59 %, in Damascus 53 %, in Tripoli 60 %, in Cairo 61 %, and in Alexandria 72 %. She also points out that if we look at the birthplaces of these women migrants we can see that every second woman migrant came from the so-called “coastlands” of the Habsburg Monarchy (Istria and part of Croatia) – so a quarter of all migrants from the monarchy came from there. If we again take the contemporary case of the Filipino migrants as a comparison, as Victoria Chell-Robinson (2000) describes them in the already mentioned book, women migrate to Italy from the Philippines legally and obtain work permits quickly for the socially relatively valued work of kitchen help, cleaners, nannies or carers of the elderly. In addition to that, the Filipinas are married and have children at home, which by the accepted social criteria, makes them respectable women who will one day either go back or have their families join them in Italy. Lastly, they are Catholic and thus symbolically white, and the different organisations within the Catholic Church help them greatly in overcoming the difficulties of migrant life and establishing social networks. In the symbolic order of national ideology, they are not only devout Catholics and caring mothers and wives, but also experienced, knowledgeable, and dedicated to their work. It is not unusual that they are very much in demand with employers, who prefer them over, for example, Somali women. The difference between them is not only in religious beliefs, although the fact that Somali women are Muslims is not unimportant, but also in their race. The objective difference is in that the Somali women were chased from their homes and did not, like the Filipinas, arrive based on their own decision (although this decision was often caused by economic necessity). Besides that, they do not do it to make a serious and wellpaid career out of it, like the Filipinas do, but they do it because they have to. The fact that work is a necessity for both of them, dictated not only by their own survival, but also for the life and welfare of their families is of course a given, but the importance of autonomy of the decision when deciding to leave for another country and the choice of work as a career path should not be underestimated. And this is one of the surprising and provocative findings of a number of studies: that within the heterogeneity of the female migration waves maybe the only common trait of the women is that we can no longer perceive them as passive victims of circumstances, but rather as active in making decisions regarding their own lives, and in great measure those of their families. The importance of migrations for women has long surpassed the negative connotations and although there are still circumstances where we cannot see the positive changes to the position of women, we can find numerous other situations when migrant women acquire power, influence, importance, autonomy over their

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body, work, and income, and, above all, the freedom they could not possibly imagine in their original environment. The price for this is undoubtedly high, and, in this sense as well, the comparison between aleksandrinke and contemporary care workers is highly relevant. In the concluding chapter of the book, Majda Hrzˇenjak focuses on the contemporary domestic workers from the same border region Gorisˇka-Primorska, who today work as domestic workers in nearby towns in Italy. In contrast to most of the Eastern European countries, Slovenia did not experience a care drain after the fall of socialism. Instead, two outstanding phenomena of Slovenian domestic workers abroad can be observed from the historical perspective: the first one is a daily mobility of working commuters from the villages and small towns in the Primorska region near the Italian border who have been taking up cleaning and care duties in private households in Italy stretching constantly from the nineteenth century till nowadays; and the second one is aleksandrinstvo. Apart from the historicisation of the global care chain phenomena, the focus of the chapter by Majda Hrzˇenjak is to confront and analyse the convergences and divergences in social conditions and motives which have shaped past and present patterns of emigration for taking up care work on the one hand, and, on the other, to analyse the specificities of the situation of Slovenian domestic workers in Italy in contemporary global care chains.

Aleksandrinke have come home In the end we are thus left with the question, what is the legacy of aleksandrinke? How much did the women who returned from Egypt trigger the change in the relationships at home, in the family, and in the broader community? As the testimonies tell us, they often had a chance to introduce the educational, hygiene, culinary, and clothing habits they got used to in the wealthy city environment. On the level of the wider society their experience and knowledge were covered with a stigma for a long time. Today, it is successfully overcome by the Society and the Museum for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Alexandrian Women in Prvacˇina. It is important in the context of the participatory museum practices and women’s museums. Since our view of history is shaped in relation to social changes and strategies of power, the cultural initiatives that aim to preserve the memory of aleksandrinke from the perspective of their descendants, the keepers of these stories, foster an affirmative image of aleksandrinstvo. On the level of the wider society and state, the positive importance of their work has been acknowledged in the national discourse on the preservation of the land, national identity, and development. What about on the personal level? Can we, despite all the religious, patriarchal, and culturally conservative

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interventions into their experience still talk about the experience of aleksandrinke as an emancipatory one? It is probably impossible to generalise, but we can state the finding of Christiane Harzig, a researcher of women’s migration, who concluded on the basis of long-term research of historical and contemporary domestic work: The women operate within a spectrum of options, which, even when encountering exploitative conditions, exhibit agency. Migration into domestic service usually is only a condition in pursuit of other life goals and personal trajectories. However, it is a means readily available towards reaching these goals and a method that the women are able to control. Thus I argue that, yes, migration into domestic service may have an emancipatory effect upon women. (Harzig 2006, 68)

For this reason, maybe the most touching part of aleksandrinstvo is the one that was potentially the happiest, the time when women come home. In the case of wives and mothers this meant reuniting with their families, partners, and children. But at the same time it is also the moment of reuniting with their traditional social and anticipated family roles, which had not changed a bit in the meantime. Beautiful clothes, ladies’ underwear, small objects, silk scarves, hats and parasols, shoes and gloves, evening gowns and fine stockings were packed off into trunks and stored in the most hidden corners of attics. Knowledge of languages, the rich world, cultural events, and urban habits made place for everyday life and work in the fields. Experience, memories, changed identities, emotions, and perceptions of the world were locked into the depths of the soul. Only whispers could be heard, every now and then, in the talks with other aleksandrinke, who could understand, share and accept them. The situation in which aleksandrinke found themselves upon return is presented beautifully in the book of testimonies Aleksandrinke Returned Home: When I returned home and said, down in the port on Trieste, to an old aleksandrinka who was on the ship with me: “There, nona, we’re home.” “Ah, child,” she responded, “only in heaven I’ll find my home.” I thought of her often and all those many women who were no longer at home, neither by the Vipava, nor by the Nile. But when today I see how people respect us and how they understand our decision and feel the weight of our hearts, I think to myself: “Aleksandrinke have arrived in heaven. Aleksandrinke have come home.” (Zorn 2012, 3)

The brief quote explains perfectly the double burden of the return home. First, the changed identities, the changed gender role, the different urban and higher class living, and the knowledge of the world and Egypt had to merge with the prescribed gender norms, the required social role, and the rural, farming way of life. Far more demanding was the adjustment of aleksandrinke to the level of interpretation of their experience. Here, they encountered a much greater obstacle, which was insurmountable for a very long time. Or as Katja Sˇkrlj, a great-

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Dobravlje village Source: National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana

granddaughter of an aleksandrinka and a cultural historian, wrote in her seminal text, “The Demythization of Aleksandrinke”: If only decades ago, aleksandrinke were a taboo topic in conversations, this no longer holds true today. Simultaneously with the dying of the last ones among them, the revitalisation of the memory of them occurs. This memory changes through the generations of their descendants from the complete rejection of the first generation through the interest in the exotic places and stories with the second, to popularisation with the third generation of descendants who no longer look onto them only as on victims of their town but try to give the suffering and passive image of an aleksandrinka an active and positive antipode, with which contemporaries can also identify. (Sˇkrlj 2009, 184)

Only half a century later, in different circumstances and the generation of their granddaughters and great-granddaughters, who have reached maturity and independent thinking, has the perception changed. It is only now that they have truly “come home” in the sense that the people understand the complexity of their decisions, the existential need for their departures, the exceptionality of their works and payments. Aleksandrinke have “come home” only today, when their experience is understood as an experience of cosmopolitanism, transculturality, resourcefulness, courage, and dignity. To be understood despite the never-ending stream of moralist discourse in literature and film and in the Orientalist shaming of the places of their working addresses, means to “arrive in heaven” – to rest in peace.

Sylvia Hahn

2.

Labour Migration and Female Breadwinners

When we take a look over the last 150 years of migration studies and research we are given the clear impression that, with only a few and rare exceptions, migration was basically a masculine affair. Although nineteenth-century statisticians and demographers and some early twentieth-century sociologists noticed female migration and paid some attention to it, scholars generally failed to recognise it or downplayed its extent and significance, or ignored it entirely. Until late in the twentieth century, analysts concentrated on male travellers and migration history remained an essentially male history for a long period of time. In Austria, for example, declarations about the origins of both female and male Austrian subjects were collected and presented in statistical form no later than the censuses of 1857 and 1869. Contemporary statisticians’ interpretations and presentations focused predominantly on male migration: Gustav Schimmer, one of Austria’s leading late nineteenth-century statisticians maintained in his “Elucidation of the Population Results” of the 1869 census “that the mobility of the native male population was strong while the female sex stayed more at home” (Schimmer 1872, V – XIV, 70). And “by sex the mobility of the native population is not equal, but the male is far more likely than the female to leave his homeland and seek his fortune elsewhere” (Schimmer 1872, V – XIV, 69). But a few sentences later he mentioned that “the mobility of both sexes of the native population not only grew considerably everywhere, but that of the female sex did so more strongly than that of the males” and that “the female sex predominated in 1869’s increase of native mobility over 1857” (Schimmer 1872, V – XIV, 69 – 70). He identified the primary source of this sudden predominance in the growth of female employing industries and the development of new modes of transportation “that make it easy for weak females to reach far off places that even the most robust of men couldn’t have reached by foot” (Schimmer 1872, V – XIV, 70). The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies made a similar argument a few decades later in his “Sociological Sketches”. Tönnies identified the “phenomenon” of female migration above all as internal migration and in particular with

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the great majority of female short-distance migrants from the countryside to the city, for whom the “ever renewed demand for female servants” was decisive. On the other hand he identified long-distance migration with the “older, higher skilled male labour force” (Tönnies 1926, 2). Tönnies justified the thesis of highly skilled male long-distance migrants with an occupational training and skills argument that ultimately rested on the old model of journeymen’s migrations with large cities playing the important role of quasi “universities for craftsmen”. This is especially significant as it is here that the association between more skilled occupational migration and exclusively male migrants was forged – migration for occupational specific employment and earnings or qualifications improvement and training was ascribed solely to the male population. This gender specific identification of “career” migration with male migrants meant that researchers excluded from their studies all indications of female careers, the “small” occupational ladders women climbed through education and/or labour migration. The prototype for this sort of investigation continued as it had begun: the trained journeyman craftsman, the highly qualified skilled worker, or in modern technical fields, the man with an advanced degree. We find a similarly one-sided male centred view regarding the European overseas migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Frank Thistlethwaite, for example, who developed an important critique of the weak points of European migration research and who argued for increased attention to the occupations of migrants, remained stuck in a male-centred perspective for his own analyses. So his discussion focuses exclusively on southern Italian workers in the US who preferred to work in the construction trades and heavy industry, or on Greeks and Italians who worked as shoe shiners or in ice cream saloons (Thistlethwaite 1972, 335). In Argentina he found Italians working as bricklayers, carpenters, stonecutters, gardeners, tile layers, and plasterers, and on the rivers of South America as captains, navigators, and sailors. By and large it was migrants as skilled workers, technicians, and crafts workers who held the centre of Thistlethwaite’s attention (Thistlethwaite 1972, 336 – 338). But, just like the previously discussed authors, Thistlethwaite restricted his enlarged and often reiterated stress on considering occupation exclusively to the male population and ignored women and their occupations. In opposition to the “old” migration research of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the 1950s Rudolf Heberle attempted to formulate a “typology of migration” (Heberle 1972, 70). There he brought the social aspect of migration to the fore (Heberle 1972, 70). Despite Heberle’s stress on the society of migrants, his society was nearly entirely male. Among the diverse types of nomadism he noted the seasonal rounds of shepherds; he attributed the overseas travels of the Angles, Saxons, and Vikings to “mostly young male followers of war leaders… [who] cut themselves off from their home societies” and created

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new social structures “based on the social orders of the ship and the war band” (Heberle 1972, 70). In contrast to the older studies Heberle only addressed women migrants explicitly once, and then as wives, “dependants” who were “frequently forced to go along by the decision of the head of the household” (Heberle 1972, 72). Just two decades later Wolfgang Köllmann published his social-historical migration theory (Köllmann 1976, 260). Köllmann made a distinction between socio-economic motivated mass migration and “individual economic motivated single migration” (Köllmann 1976, 266). Here, too, we find the male view of migration movements: single migration included craft trained journeymen, highly qualified skilled workers, or the educational travels of sons of the middle and upper classes. But he totally disregarded and ignored widespread female single migrations, including even the large-scale migration of female domestic servants. As with the other authors, for Köllmann there were no female migrants per se: women were only “spouses brought along” or “brides fetched for marriage” (Köllmann 1976, 268). Even the younger generation practitioners of “modern” social history in both Anglo-American and European circles of the 1970s and 1980s perpetuated this picture of migration with men as the centre and chief actors. Despite the theoretical and methodological progress of the English and American researchers, they took nearly the same position, that migrants were mainly “men in motion” (Thernstrom 1971, 17 – 47). Except for a few short pieces on women’s work, female migrants like the rest of the female population were analysed only as dependents of and in relationship to men, or as belonging to families and family networks (Bodnar 1985, 53ff). Women scholars noted later on that this familycentred approach inherently distracted researchers’ attention from woman specific areas of the economy like domestic service, dressmaking, prostitution, etc. (Gabaccia 1988, 245). The German-speaking world remained no less male-centred in its migration studies. Journeyman migration and male workers comings and goings from the centres of heavy industry and mines predominated in migration studies despite the increased attention given elsewhere to female servants and their origins following the establishment of women’s and feminist research in the 1980s (Walser 1986; Wierling 1987). The nineteenth-century traditional thesis predominated: long-distance migration equals skilled migrants equals male migrants. That meant that the majority of historical migration studies in the German-speaking world in the 1970s and 1980s continued to concentrate on heavy industry, long-distance migration and men. These studies ranging from the statistical demography of the nineteenth century up to recent times show that historical migration studies long sought only men in their investigations of mobile breadwinners. Most studies repro-

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duced the gender specific dichotomies and role specific stereotypes of the bourgeois-patriarchal family model set by European culture since the eighteenth century, and did so despite the increasing accumulation of statistical material in the nineteenth century that demonstrated that like men, women were both short- and long-distance migrants (Hahn 2008). And as historical sources show women were short- and long-distance migrants and very often also the main family breadwinners even before the nineteenth or twentieth century. But for a long time the scientific community has generally treated pre-nineteenth-century society as immobile. This too is linked to the long-lasting thesis holding that there was no labour market in pre-industrial societies. Women were not studied as migrants or breadwinners in part because they were not seen as participants in labour markets. Several factors led investigators to this view: first and above all was the exclusion of women from broad sectors of the economy, in the pre-industrial era particularly from the male-dominated crafts guilds backed by the authority of local and state agencies. The members of these commercial, crafts guild, or communal administrative groups were interrelated and bound by social networks and the utilisation of a collective social capital that enabled them to share specific information and qualifications and to exclude women or other members of the population like the poor or immigrants. This exclusion also meant that women could hardly penetrate the sectors where trade qualifications and better earnings were linked. Thus women had to rely on restricted and marginal sectors of the labour market and on activities in and around the household. Not only does this apply to the pre-industrial epoch, it also extends into the industrial era. Even the large-scale collection of data in censuses only compounded the problem as they mainly focused on the occupations of the male population. With only small alterations, the occupational categories of nineteenth-century statistics are still in use to this day with their close attention to male occupations intact. But when one reviews the statistics from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is clear that the largest predominantly female occupation, servants and household helpers, got only peripheral attention and was in no way subjected to any sort of thoroughgoing analysis. In contrast to other occupational categories that were always subjected to fine distinctions and categorised with similar economic classes and sectors, household service remained an undifferentiated category whose data provided almost no basis for further analysis. Because this sector was devalued as a “true” occupational domain, one subject to both great fluctuations of personnel and a specific association with housework, it was not carefully monitored and the number of unreported cases was relatively great. Other primarily female occupations like child-care or household-work were neglected along with the personal and household service sector. Among them were daily or weekly peddling on the

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streets or marketplaces; providing services for tenants, sewing or doing other work (together with the children) at home for cash; whole day or hourly work in other households doing washing, ironing, and cleaning or, last but not least, prostitution. Nearly all these officially neglected occupational domains constituted activities that required no official certification and therefore had no regular training programmes or rituals – as was the case for handicrafts. The official inquiries did not capture many of the occupations where a (female) generation passes on knowledge and skills informally to the next. The lack of a formal schooling with an explicit official completion and certification caused this informal training to be considered less skilled and thus less worthy of higher pay – even though, for example, the sewing skills of informally trained dressmakers often matched or exceeded those of formally trained tailors. Furthermore, these occupations viewed as marginal and peripheral to the labour market were not only poorly recorded, but were also not linked to migration processes as gender specific labour migrations. This closes the circle, as ideology influenced data collection and the resulting collections of data then reinforced the ideology. The reality was that women not only participated in the labour market in large numbers, they also often made up a majority of (short- and long-distance) migrants – sometimes preceding their male counterparts as well as outnumbering them. Furthermore these female labour migrants were very often the main breadwinners for their families and the “cultural transmitters” between the different societies of origin and arrival. For example, in the Habsburg Monarchy of 1890 among all long-distance migrants coming from abroad (including all foreigners), more female than male migrants came from Switzerland, Germany, France, and Great Britain. Twenty-three percent of these female foreigners were registered as employees, a significant proportion comparable to the total female employee rate of 30 %. A small but well-known group of these well-educated long-distance migrants were governesses, most of whom came from Switzerland, France, and Great Britain. As Michael Mitterauer has shown in his studies about adolescent domestic servants, there was a clear relation between increasing migration distance, age, and better job opportunities (Mitterauer 1992). Most of his findings refer to men working in crafts and trades or in the agricultural sector and not to female labour migrants or domestic servants. But was this really only a gender-specific male pattern? If we take a closer look at the micro level and consider individual lifecareers of female domestic servants we can find similar patterns of hierarchical occupational positions related to age and distance of migration. For example, in the Lower Austrian city of Wiener Neustadt in the 1880s, higher ranked servants were significantly less likely than lower ranked servants to have been born in Wiener Neustadt, and a higher percentage of them were long-distance migrants.

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We can also find these differences in the household of Paul Grüner, owner of a leather factory. Grüner was the married father of five children and had four female domestic servants working in his household. These domestic servants came from different regions of origin. The oldest and only long-distance migrant was the 32-year-old governess Therese Larisch, born in Troppau Silesia. Elisabeth Haller, his 23-year-old cook, came from nearby Oedenburg in Hungary. The 20-year-old chambermaid Elisabeth Bohar had also been born in Hungary. Johanna Manninger, the 23-year-old nanny, came from a village in Lower Austria. Except for the governess Therese, all of them were short-distance migrants, although two of them had crossed a “national” border. Although the three villages of origin were in different regions and directions from the town, all were less than fifty kilometres from Wiener Neustadt. We do not know as much about the lives of these women as we know about female servants who went from different parts of Europe to the US or from Gorizia to Egypt, if they could keep their earnings of if they sent money home to support their families. Female (labour) migrants who supported their children and families with their earnings and therefore became major breadwinners for their families were not uncommon in former centuries and are not only a recent phenomenon as we are accustomed to expect. If we look back in history, we can find examples of female breadwinners ranging from young domestic servants to widows of all ages, even women of the (upper) middle class, who had to support their families on their own. Women of the lower and upper middle classes worked mainly in the shadow of their husbands who were officially the main breadwinners of the family ; their work was not recognised (or officially seen) as “work” because it was unpaid work and seen as a “labour of love”. But the paths of migration and life of women like Therese Heyne (1764 – 1829) or Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817 – 1884) show us that the wives of intellectuals, politicians, revolutionaries, scientific researchers, etc., joined their husbands on their career steps through Europe or further on to the US or into (political) exile. From these women’s autobiographies we learn about their extensive migration paths through Europe, across the Atlantic to the US and/or remigration or re-remigration to the US or South America. The wives of political activists were especially likely to have had to support their children and even their husbands financially and became the (female) breadwinners of their families because their husbands did not earn enough (or sometimes anything) from their political activities. Mathilde Franziska Anneke, for example, was herself active as political speaker and writer and supported her family by establishing her own schools for girls in the US.

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Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s migration paths in Europe (1817 – 1884) 1817 born in Sprockhöven 1820 moved to Blankenstein with family 1834 moved to Hattingen 1836 first marriage – to Alfred von Tabouillot 1839 moved to Münster 1843 divorce 1847 second marriage – to Fritz Anneke 1849 fought in revolutionary battles against Prussian troops 1849 fled to Straßburg 1849 fled to Switzerland 1849 emigrated to the USA via Le Havre 1849 arrived in New York 1849 moved to Cedarburg, Wisconsin 1850 moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1852 moved to Newark, New Jersey 1856 founded the Green Street School in Newark 1858 moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1860 return to Europe, Switzerland 1865 return to New York and Milwaukee via Le Havre 1865 founded the Milwaukee Daughters’ Institute 1884 died in Milwaukee

These female life-stories show that sometimes these women were or became the main financial supporters of their families – they were female breadwinners. This phenomenon of female breadwinners has increased markedly in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For the ethnic and political refugees from Europe who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, it was also often the wives who secured the survival of their families in exile by working as servants – who cleaned, cooked, ironed, etc., in other households, as is clear by the many autobiographies of exiles from the Nazi regime that have appeared in recent years. This was also the case for migrants from Eastern Europe who left their homelands for political or ethnic reasons since the 1950s and it shows up in semi-documentary autobiographical novels like those of Vladimir Vertlieb, who wrote about female breadwinners in his family during their complicated migration from Riga to Germany and finally Austria – by way of Austria, Israel, and the US (Vertlieb 1995; 1999). Despite the good qualitative source materials this theme has hardly been tackled by researchers on migration history. In the meantime the worldwide migration of servants has become a major research field among sociologists who have focused especially on female breadwinners from Asia –from Thailand, the Philippines, etc. – who work as housemaids and domestic servants in European, Arabian, or American households (or as prostitutes) and whose income helps support their families at home (or is necessary for them to survive). The growing income disparity between the richer countries of the West and the rest of the

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world has led to an enormous increase in the globalisation of domestic service in recent decades (Anderson 2006; Lutz 2008). As a result, the strong presence of women workers in domestic service these days and their function as family breadwinners has become an ever more frequent topic of discussion and analysis. But the female breadwinners who were found at all social levels in the past have been rather overlooked so far and this would be a rich field for future research.

II. From Gorisˇka To Egypt

Aleksej Kalc

3.

Migration Movements in Gorisˇka in the Time of Aleksandrinke

Gorisˇka and its migration movements before World War I For the purpose of this chapter, Gorisˇka stands for the administrative and political region of the Habsburg Monarchy that, joint with Gradisca into the Gorisˇka-Gradisca County and together with the free port Trieste and Istria, made up the Austrian-Illyrian Littoral (German: Oesterreichisch-Illyrisches Küstenland).1 Between the two wars Gorisˇka was a part of the Kingdom of Italy. After World War II, Gorisˇka was divided between the Republic of Italy and Yugoslavia. In 1991 the independent Republic of Slovenia replaced the former federal republic of Slovenia, which had been a part of the former Yugoslavia. In its historic boundaries, Gorisˇka was an ethnically mixed region, and its eastern part (today in Slovenia) was – and continues to be – populated by Slovenians. Slovenians can also be found in the western part of the region (which is today in Italy), but there, the Italian and Friulian-speaking population is prevalent. For this reason, the lowlands of the Gorisˇka region in Austro-Hungarian times were deemed as Austrian or Eastern Friuli, which since 1866 was separated from the Italian Friuli by the state border between Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Italy. Roughly, the ethnic border separating Gorisˇka into the two mentioned parts follows the morphological border between the western, low part and the western mountainous terrain and the Karst plain separated by the Vipava River Valley. These two parts also differed historically in agrarian and landowning systems, since in the Italian and Friulian part latifundia were prevalent, while in the Slovenian territory small farms were the most common. These natural, social, and economic contexts were not only reflected in the different migration ty1 In this chapter, a number of geographical names are used in their Slovenian, Italian, or German version. These are the three languages of this ethnically and linguistically mixed territory, where state borders shifted and names changed throughout the twentieth century (see Map 1). For the region of emigration of aleksandrinke we mostly use the Slovenian name Gorisˇka (region); Trieste in Italian is Trst in Slovenian, Gorizia in Italian is Gorica in Slovenian and Görz in German.

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pologies that we can traditionally witness in Gorisˇka, but also seen especially with the beginning of the massive migration movements in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Map 1: The Gorisˇka region with the villages of aleksandrinke

In this particular period because of the economic development of this North African country and the ascent of the European and Middle Eastern entrepreneur bourgeoisie in Egyptian cities, the departure of women and girls to work in Egypt expanded. Yet it is not a migration pattern exclusive to Gorisˇka.

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We can find it in the neighbouring regions as well, for example, in Friuli, in parts of Carniola, and also in Istria. It became the most popular in the Slovenian part of Gorisˇka, particularly in the close hinterland of Gorica to the east. Due to its almost exclusively female character and the seemingly exotic geographic destination, it was undoubtedly a striking, but certainly not the only, form of migration amongst the Slovenian population of Gorisˇka. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gorisˇka region, like the neighbouring Carniola and Friuli, faced more and more massive migration movements. These were a constitutional part of the social and economic development and the shift of the traditional agrarian society towards mature capitalism, industrialisation, the expansion of cities, and thus, new markets, social strata, and modes of living. A look into the demographic development in the long nineteenth century helps us understand the scope and the character of these migration movements. They can be studied parallel to the rapid population growth – the population increased by 80 % from the time of the restoration to the beginning of World War I. Population growth was particularly strong until the 1850s. It then slowed down because the rise in demographic pressure was curbed by emigration, which offset a large percentage of the natural population increase: in the 1870s, emigration reduced the natural population increase by 65 %, in the 1880s and 1890s by about 50 %, and in the first decade of the twentieth century, despite consistent immigration linked to the industrialisation of certain areas, it still took almost 20 %. The mass emigration process began in Gorisˇka sooner than it did in the neighbouring Austrian provinces and was among the most pronounced in the context of the Austrian state, also because it was connected to the development of nearby Trieste. The population of this port, and later industrial, city in the northern Adriatic quintupled between the 1820s and World War I (from 45,000 to 230,000), most of which was a consequence of migration. Gorisˇka was one of the main pools of this influx and during this entire period Trieste was the principal destination of the Gorisˇka migration. As late as the last census in 1910, of the population who were born in Gorisˇka but resided elsewhere in the monarchy, 60 % lived in Trieste.2 Trieste was at the same time the main market for Gorisˇka’s agrarian economy. But such relationships were not one-sided and Trieste was not merely a consumer of Gorisˇka produce and the beneficiary of its demographic vitality. It also directly contributed to its development, with its entrepreneurship and capital that transformed certain parts of Gorisˇka into a Triestine industrial periphery. The inhabitants of Gorisˇka had been subject to the magnetic pull of Trieste 2 They numbered 22,192 and amounted to almost 10 % of the population of Trieste (Kalc 2013, 28, 34, 39). A more detailed study of migration into Trieste in the second half of the nineteenth century and until World War I can be found in Cattaruzza (1979; 1987).

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since the eighteenth century, when the rapid growth of the free port and the main Austrian sea access attracted different categories of professions and segments of the population. The demographic rise of the city3 was spurred precisely by the immigration from the multi-national hinterland, particularly the areas immediately surrounding it: more than a quarter of this influx of immigrants came from Gorisˇka, and throughout the eighteenth century, the largest group of immigrants in Trieste were those from Gorisˇka and Carniola (Breschi, Kalc, Navarra 2004, 358). The migration movements from Gorisˇka towards the principal Austrian port are thus shown as long-term processes and a constant component that contributed to the city’s demographic growth and the formation of its multiethnic and culturally diverse fabric. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Trieste thus attracted male migrants from Gorisˇka, but attracted even more female migrants, who represented the majority in the migration from Gorisˇka. Male migrants came from the countryside, but also from cities, particularly Gorica, and entered the broad spectrum of the Trieste labour market. Female migrants were mostly from the rural environment and were employed almost exclusively in domestic services. This was the prevalent field of employment for the female migrant workforce, and for the great majority of the migrants it represented the entrance on their way from the countryside to the city. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the level of migration from Gorisˇka reached its peak, the censuses show that the majority of the female migrants from Gorisˇka were amongst the house help in elite Triestine city quarters. Even after the abolition of the free port in the early 1890s when the structure of the Triestine economy changed following the development of industrial activities, the house help labour market attracted a large number of female migrants from Gorisˇka. Mass movements of the population from the countryside to the cities and new economic centres also took place within the regional borders of Gorisˇka between the 1850s and World War I. An important point of attraction was Gorica – not only the capital of the region, but also its administrative seat and the centre of the regional trade and services – which grew from 15,000 inhabitants to 31,000 (Pillon 1991, 126 – 127). Migrants from nearby surroundings, attracted by the city’s labour market, were the ones who contributed most to the growth, and many were able to progress socially to the level of the petty bourgeoisie through trade, craft, hospitality, or administrative jobs. When it became the centre for shipbuilding in the early twentieth century the little town of Monfalcone noticed the highest growth of the industrial centres. The migration here came from the wider Slovenian and also Friulian agrarian territory, and just like in the mi3 From 1735 to 1800 the population increased from 5,000 to 25,000 (Breschi, Kalc, Navarra 2004, 347; Kalc 2008, 52).

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Trst – Trieste Source: National and Study Library, Trieste

gration to Trieste, meant that the population was leaving behind the rural economies with their lack of prospects and moving over to the ranks of the proletariat. It is interesting that in the Friulian parts, the rural population that left the latifundia was replaced by the newcomers from the other side of the Austrian-Italian state border (Kalc 2013, 41). The picture of migration movements in the Gorisˇka territory was in any case a lot more diverse, as there were other movements in addition to the ones described. As of the mid-nineteenth century, new emigration destinations appeared – just as they did in other parts of the monarchy – but because Trieste was so attractive, the decisions for new destinations were weaker from the Gorisˇka territory than, for example, from other Slovenian lands, such as Carniola, Carinthia, and particularly Styria. In any case, the volume of these emigrations, as well as their orientation towards other Austrian destinations, changed over decades in accordance with the tendencies of the demographic growth, the economic development of individual areas, and many other factors. Thus in the first modern census in 1857, the emigrants from the Austrian Littoral were evidenced particularly in Lower Austria and in Croatia, Slavonia, and the Croatian Military Frontier, but most were in Veneto and Lombardy, which were at the time still Habsburg dominions. By the 1869 census, the emigration from the Austrian Littoral changed its destinations, so that the majority of emigrants from

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the region were found in Lower Austria and Upper Styria, as well as Dalmatia, while significantly fewer went to other Austrian lands. In 1880, the first year for which data is available according to parts of individual regions, statistics show that of the emigrants from Gorisˇka – in addition to those in Trieste – many were in Lower Austria and Upper Styria, with the most being in Istria. In the latter, they were mostly concentrated in Pula, which attracted its population with industrialisation and the development of the imperial navy and shipbuilding, and saw an exceptional demographic surge (Vojnovic´ 2004). In the 1890 census, of the inhabitants originally from Gorisˇka, the most were registered in Upper Styria, then Lower Austria (mostly Vienna) and other lands, while their presence in Istria was greatly reduced. In the last decade of the nineteenth century there was a marked increase in emigration from Gorisˇka, as the number of the inhabitants of the region who were present in other Austrian lands (other than Trieste, Carniola, and Lower Styria) doubled (from approximately 4,700 to 9,000). Emigrants from Gorisˇka were distributed through Lower Austria, Upper Styria, Upper Austria; more so than before in the Czech land, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia, Bukovina, Dalmatia, and Carinthia. Most of them were in Istria, where again, Pula led as the place of residence. By 1910 this picture was mostly retained, with a small decrease in the number and the change in distribution which were influenced by the normatives for changing residence, but also a lull of the migration process towards these destinations. Migration processes worth mentioning during all this period are those towards the Hungarian part of the monarchy. The most attractive part of these migrations was to Rijeka, the main port of the Hungarian half of the monarchy. The indicated migration movements were either permanent or temporary in nature. The data from censuses are only indirect and partial indicators of the infinitely more complex and dynamic migration phenomena which, to a large extent, escaped statistical observation. Even within Gorisˇka the picture was rather diversified. For example, the mountainous Tolminska district experienced a considerable number of seasonal male migrants who went as agricultural workers to Carinthia from April until either St Jacob’s Day (25 July) or All Saints’ Day (1 November). In the 1890s, this migration shifted towards Upper Styria. The equally mountainous region around Bovec was different: from spring to autumn, the population worked in local rural activities, while in winter months they peddled wool fabric, leather goods, and other goods (Valencˇicˇ 1990, 54 – 56), as did the travelling merchants from Carnia, the neighbouring Venetian Slovenia and Resia (Fornasin 1998; Kalc, Kodricˇ 1994). Peddling, or hauziranje as it was locally known (using a calque from German, hausieren) was quite common at least from the eighteenth century. As elsewhere in Europe it included different activities, from peddling poor, often refused, goods to selling quality goods in village markets and fairs, or door to door. At the top of the hierarchical

Migration Movements in Gorisˇka in the Time of Aleksandrinke

55

ladder of the Bovec peddlers were the so-called optikarji who sold glasses, binoculars, and thermometers, and had to have, in addition to some financial base and drive, certain professional competencies. From the mountainous parts of Gorisˇka, lumberjacks traditionally also left for seasonal work, looking for wages in Galicia, Bukovina, Slavonia, and Transylvania. Builders and other construction workers and labourers went to Austria, Germany, and Switzerland and were employed in the construction of tunnels, bridges, and railways, as well as in the maintenance of roads, riverbeds, and other public infrastructure. (Sedmak 1994, 84 – 87) In the second half of the nineteenth century the area around Rencˇe in the Lower Vipava Valley became a centre for builders and other construction professionals, and since the end of the century the workers were organised in their own co-operative. Around Tolmin and Bovec, there were many miners who worked in Austria and Germany. Since the 1890s, when a mine opened in nearby Rabelj (Ger. Raibl, It. Cave del Predil, today in Italy), the character of their mobility changed, as they could come home every weekend. (Srebernicˇ 1914, 5) These iterative migrations, very similar to those in the neighbouring Italian Friuli, could vary greatly in individual years. It depended on the economic situation, the needs of the population, and the changes in the labour market. The opening of new employment possibilities and the increase in opportunities to earn wages were sometimes linked to political events as well. Thus, for example, in 1878, a large group of agrarian labourers from the Tolminska district went to Bosnia, which was connected with the Austrian occupation, the colonisation policy, and the need for workforce there. (Kalc 1995, 36) In the following years the papers report other groups of workers from Gorisˇka going to Bosnia and other destinations for seasonal work. Unlike the migrations going towards Trieste, which exhibited more or less gender parity, the migration from Gorisˇka to other Austrian lands and other European countries was predominantly male. The census data show that Gorisˇka was particularly exceptional in this respect: among its emigrants to certain destinations there were only thirteen women for every hundred men, in places their number was around forty and in best cases around sixty, which is true, for example, for Vienna (Valencˇicˇ 1990, 60). The gender make up is of course closely linked to the migration typologies, professions, and labour market into which the migrants were entering and which offered more opportunities for women in cities in the most traditional and widespread area of women’s work, domestic service. Local women from the hills in Brda took up selling fruit, a typical female job, linked to seasonal migration. The area was, in addition to wine making, known for growing fruits which were then, thanks to the railway connection, sent daily all the way to Vienna. In the summer months, women from Brda sold fruit directly to customers in Austrian towns, such as Merano, Bolzano, Innsbruck,

56

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Salzburg, Semmering, Graz, and Klagenfurt (Gomirsˇek 2009, 350). Otherwise, the female component among the emigrants from Gorisˇka to other Austrian lands was mostly made up of migrants’ family members. In addition to internal migrations and those directed towards other European countries, the Austrian Littoral also witnessed emigration to the countries across the ocean, particularly to South and North America. The first departures towards these destinations were documented as early as the eighteenth century, when it was mostly individuals who left, among them some missionaries (Brecelj 1997). By the mid-nineteenth century, these migrations grew stronger, so the 1869 census finds 1,597 persons from the Austrian Littoral living in America (Schimmer 1870, 124 – 125). But we can speak of the so called American fever and massive transatlantic emigration from the late 1870s onwards, when this migration trend from western and northern Europe expanded to the east and south-east of the continent. In the county Gorisˇka-Gradisˇka emigration to South America appeared in 1878 with certain strength, similar to what had already been present for several years in the neighbouring Italy and Tyrol (Pagani 1968, 24, 42 – 43, 187; Oesterreich’s Auswanderung 1877). The process was more pronounced in the Friulian part of the county and was connected to the general agrarian crisis and, more specifically, to the crisis of the colonato system4. The migration process also included small landowners in addition to landless farmers and farmhands, and also non-farming professions. The crisis of the colonato system stemmed from the landowning circumstances and the economic logic of the big landowners. In the eye of the growing competition of foreign productions and the absence of investment into cultural, organisational, and technical innovations, the system became more and more oppressive for the tenant farmer, who remained caught in the subsistence and self-sufficient method of economy and slid under the poverty threshold during the years of bad harvest (Bianco 1991). A mass response to the invitations from South America was a reaction to this kind of situation and in many cases the prevention from social collapse and slipping into proletarianisation. For this reason, the phenomenon of migration acquired the meaning of revolt and the character of political protest against the class of big landowners. Such circumstances were partly present in the Vipava Valley, whose lower end likewise extended into the colonato system. But it was, in fact, near Gorica, thanks to the city farmers’ market, where a number of Slovenian and Friulian tenant farmers managed to become independent and thus gain their own land and social emancipation (Cecotti 2003, 18 – 19; Bianco 1991, 40 – 41). The South American migration included entire farming families who left for 4 Colonato – system of agriculture based on sharecropping or other type of agreement between the landowner and the tenant.

Migration Movements in Gorisˇka in the Time of Aleksandrinke

57

Argentina with the intention of obtaining their own farming land or improve their economic or social standing. They were attracted by the Argentinean policy of colonisation, which actively encouraged the immigration of European farmers. In the 1880s the migration waves to Argentina were followed by several similar waves to Brazil. These were likewise linked to structural and contingent problems (bad crops, plant diseases, destructive weather situations) that – with the deepening of the agrarian and general economic crisis – weakened the material and social situation of the rural population. On the other hand, it was influenced by the loan policy for transatlantic voyages, which in this phase also prompted the departure of the poorer rural classes, who could not otherwise afford the journey. In this transatlantic migration, the role of intermediaries, or emigration agents, was significant. On behalf of the shipping companies, and in some cases on behalf of the transatlantic governments or colonisation enterprises, they actively sought potential settlers, agitated amongst the exhausted and disgruntled farmers, and used false promises to convince the locals how favourable emigration to the American soil would be. In Austria, such agency and the very role of an emigration agent were illegal. The representatives of the shipping companies, which could only open branches in land capital cities and the travel agencies, were allowed only to advertise their offers for transatlantic travels and their staff could only give information to the interested in their offices. This order was of course nowhere near respected, because Austria – and particularly the areas from which the most numerous migrations towards the new world originated – was shot with an underground network of emigration agents who ensured their clients either legal or illegal migration towards transatlantic destinations. In the Austrian Littoral, this role was successfully played by the agents of the Italian shipping companies from the neighbouring Italy where such work was legal and who managed to spread the propaganda across the Italian-Austrian state border via post and other channels, sometimes via emigrants themselves in return for certain bonuses or discounts. It is worth adding that in the time when transatlantic emigration flourished, there was a transition corridor going through the Gorisˇka region for the emigrants from the inlands of the Austrian state towards Genoa and from there to the countries of South and North America. Thus in the 1890s, there was a control point and a resting place for emigrants at the Austro-Italian border crossing, which counted more than 24,000 crossings between 1896 and 1903 (Cecotti 2003, 25 – 39; Kalc 1995, 39). The migration process towards Argentina attracted the Slovenian part of the Gorisˇka, albeit with a significantly lesser force than the region of Austrian Friuli. Several families from different parts of Gorisˇka left with the first migration wave at the end of 1870s, and they were the first colony of Slovenian settlers in the Argentinean state of Chaco (Brecelj 1997, 216 – 217). There was less interest for

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migration to Brazil amongst the Slovenians than there was amongst the Friulians. From the Friulian territory of the Gorisˇka there was also migration to Brazil in the years before World War I, which lead through the port of Trieste, where the Austrian shipping company Austro-Americana set up a regular route for emigrants to South America in 1908 (Cecotti 2003). In these decades the transatlantic migrations were also oriented towards the northern part of the American continent, where since 1904 regular lines for emigrants from Trieste operated, in addition to the Austro-Americana by the Cunard Line, and as of 1912, the Canadian Railway Pacific Company. The migrations towards North America, as well, were much more meagre in the Austrian Littoral in comparison to the neighbouring Carniola and many other Austrian lands. Amongst the first ones to leave there were miners from the Bovec region in the 1880s and 1890s, whose principal goals were mines in Montana. Emigration to the USA was more pronounced in Gorisˇka in the last years before World War I.5 At that we must also explain that amongst the emigrants to North America, there were many returnees, particularly around the great crisis of 1907, and that a characteristic of this emigration – exclusively working class in character – was that the emigrants crossed the ocean for a limited number of years and went there several times, similar to the patterns with the outer continental and inland migrations in general. Many emigrants settled permanently in different cities and industrial centres in the USA. Permanent emigration was more common amongst the emigrants to South America, who until World War I mostly left to the regions of new settlement as farmers, craftsmen, and workers. Although many crossed the Atlantic with the intention of coming back, for them the cases of return were, due to the typology of the move, far fewer, and often happened either because the new world was hostile to immigrants or because they ran out of luck.6 What we have reported here so far suffices for at least a vague image on the diversity, directions, and characteristics of the migration from Gorisˇka, in the time when aleksandrinstvo developed there as well. For the last few years before WWI we do have more precise statistics available, with the help of which we can evaluate more concretely the weight of the migration phenomena and the 5 Of the 10,677 transatlantic migrants from the Austrian Littoral who used the Triestine routes from 1905, two-thirds left between 1910 and mid-1914; two-thirds of those were directed to North America (Kalc 2013, 138). 6 A group of migrants to Brazil who had left from Trieste in October 1888, returned within a couple of months, after they had rebelled against the inacceptable conditions of settlement. This event had a huge media and political response in the Littoral and the entire Austria, revealing the irregularities in scouting the emigrants in the part of the Triestine banking house Morpurgo which, in connection with the Brazilian authorities, and the steamboat company Austrian Lloyd organised transports to Brazil. The event also led to the cessation of a more vehement plan of the Morpurgo to transport around 5,000 potential emigrants from the Austrian Littoral and Carniola through the port of Trieste (Kalc 2001).

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59

characteristics of individual destinations. The statistics refer to the surroundings of Gorica, in other words, the judicial circuits Gorica, Kanal, and Ajdovsˇcˇina. The statistics were kept by the regional authority since March 1907 based on the passports and work papers issued for the purpose of leaving for work within the country or abroad (Srebernicˇ 1914). It is worth adding that in these years the migration process from Gorisˇka calmed down some, because of the progress already mentioned in the industrialisation of certain areas. Further stabilisation effects were caused by partial re-structuring and modernisation of the agrarian economy which turned towards market production for the regional urban centres and for Trieste. The Bohinj railway line which connected Gorisˇka to the north was of key importance in this process, as it significantly expanded the market for its farm produce. The area in question had 73,239 inhabitants at the 1910 census; most of them (95 %) spoke Slovenian as their first language. Geomorphologically, but also from the economic and demographic aspect, the region was divided into two parts. The lowland was, in professional structure and sources of income, more profiled, as there were, in addition to agriculture, different trades and factories. In Solkan, for example, there was a furniture factory and, in general, the carpenters and wood workshops were common in the north-eastern hinterland of Gorica. In the area south of Gorica, many were shoemakers, on the south-eastern Karst plain, builders and other construction professions; in the city’s immediate suburbs of Standrezˇ, Sovodnje, and Locˇnik the population, also because of the favourable land conditions, had a good source of income from growing vegetables for the city’s market. In the northern and eastern highlands there were far fewer craftsmen, their trades were not as profitable and organised for a wider market production as they were in the lowlands. The agrarian economy was – because of the unfavourable terrain and scarcity and meagreness of the arable land – more modest and geared towards sustenance, while in the lowlands and in the hills agriculture soon started specialising, particularly wine growing and fruit groves as well as cattle stables and milk farming, to meet the demands of the city. For this reason inhabitants of the highlands and other villages that were far from the city and other industrial centres, left from a young age and “went abroad like migrating birds every year, until their age stopped them” (Srebernicˇ 1914, 6). Amongst the women, employment in the lowlands was also closely linked with spatial mobility and emigration, as even there the local market opportunities for them were smaller than they were for men. Despite industrialisation, which in places offered employment for the female workforce as well, for example, the spinning factory, the female population of the Slovenian part of the region linked their desires for an independent source of income to domestic service in towns. In the seven years from 1907 to 1913 the statistics recorded 8,593 emigrants

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from the region of the local authority Gorica. Almost two-thirds (63.9 %) went towards destinations within the monarchy, while the rest (36.1 %) went abroad (Table 1)7. The large majority of the emigrants were men (77 %) and the annual contingents were mostly balanced, with the exception of 1907, when a larger than average number of departures was recorded. The difference between male and female emigration was not simply in numbers, but also in the directions. Men largely went towards the inlands of the Austro-Hungarian state (74.1 %), while women went mostly abroad (71.2 %). This image correlates with the previously mentioned statistical picture of the absent or foreign inhabitants seen in the censuses and which can be correlated with the different professional structures and labour markets. It is also linked with the mostly individual character of emigration. The end destinations of the internal migrations are not recorded in the statistics, so their more precise destinations are unknown. But we know from other sources that men were mostly seasonal workers, particularly builders, who left in spring and returned towards the end of the year, just before winter. The iterative pattern of these departures and the systemic role of emigration in the local economy are also confirmed by the age structure of the migrants, which spans from boys in their teens to men in their sixties. The male migration abroad was more evenly spread through the year. It was directed to various European countries in about one quarter of the cases, most often Germany (12.3 %) and Switzerland, but the majority went across the ocean, mostly to America (58.9 %) and Africa (14.9 %). The emigration abroad increased greatly in 1912 and 1913. This correlates to the general increase of emigration from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to North – and partly to South – America (Chmelar 1974, 49 – 50) and also from Gorisˇka to Africa (Table 2). Unlike the migrants to Austrian lands, those going abroad were mostly up to 40 years old. They left for several years, some then returned, and sometimes migrated again, while many settled abroad and called family members to follow them; this was particularly true in the case of North America.

Year 1907 1908

Internal migrations Migrations abroad Total Men Women Total Men Women Total M+W Annual % 1,101 138 1,239 266 229 495 1,734 20.2 922 75 997 49 156 205 1,202 14.0

1909 1910

624 600

60 75

684 675

163 259

148 215

311 474

995 1,149

11.6 13.4

1911

635

110

745

176

218

394

1,139

13.3

7 The source for all four tables in this chapter is Srebernicˇ 1914.

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(Continued) Internal migrations

Migrations abroad

Total

Year 1912

Men Women Total Men Women Total M+W Annual % 598 79 677 348 218 566 1,243 14.5

1913 Total

422 4,902

% Men/Women % Internal/Abroad

89.3

52 474 453 589 5,491 1,714 10.7

100 63.9

55.3

204 657 1,388 3,102 44.7

100 36.1

1,131 8,593

13.2 100

100

% M/M W/W 74.1 29.8 25.9 70.2 Table 1: Emigration from the District Administrative Authority Gorica 1907 – 1913 Men N Germany The rest of Europe America Africa Other

Women %

N

%

210

12.3

12

0.9

217 1,009

12.7 58.9

59 293

4.3 21.1

256 22

14.9 1.3

1,004 20

72.3 1.4

Total 1,714 100 1,388 100 Table 2: Destinations of the emigration from the District Administrative Authority Gorica 1907 – 1913

Even more clearly so than male migrations, female migrations going abroad (Table 2) were oriented overseas, as the continental migration accounted for a mere 5 % of the entire female moves abroad. Of that, 21.1 % of female migrants turned towards America, while the majority, that is, 72.3 %, of the overseas female migration went to Egypt. The statistics thus point towards the decidedly Egyptian specialisation of female emigration from the considered part of the Gorisˇka region and offer a more detailed picture on the scope of the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo in this territory (Table 3). Most aleksandrinke left from the municipalities of Prvacˇina and Rencˇe (22.9 %), then Bilje and Kojsko (18.1 %), Dornberk and Vrtojba (14.2 %), followed by the municipalities with a ˇ rnicˇe, Sˇempas, Vogrsko, Podgora, and Opatje selo. Altogether, smaller share: C 78 % of migrants travelling to Egypt came from the mentioned municipalities. The gravity of the phenomenon was particularly obvious in the municipalities Prvacˇina and Bilje, where the numbers of the departed in relation to the population according to the 1910 census amounted to 10.8 and 7.1 %, respectively. In female migrations as well, there is a noticeable age difference when it comes to destination. In the inland of the country it was more common for girls up to twenty-four years old, and for many (13 %) the migration experience started before they turned sixteen. Older girls and women left to go abroad, almost a third of them were over thirty (Srebernicˇ 1914, 12).

62 Municipality Vrtojba

Aleksej Kalc

70

7.0

Population 1910 2,637

Bilje Rencˇe

96 111

9.5 11.0

1,355 2,566

7.1 4.3

Vogrsko Prvacˇina

38 120

3.8 11.9

949 1,106

4.0 10.8

Dornberk Sovodnje ˇ rnicˇe C ˇSempas

72 22

7.2 2.2

2,152 1,400

3.3 1.6

47 47

4.7 4.7

1,738 1,015

2.7 4.6

Podgora Opatje selo

37 37

3.7 3.7

4,249 1,591

0.9 2.3

87 784

8.6 77.9

4,609 25,367

1.9 3.1

222 1,006

22.1 100

Kojsko Total Other municipalities Total

N

%

% 2.7

Table 3: Female emigration from the District Administrative Authority Gorica according to the municipalities of origin 1907 – 1913 Men Internal Abroad

Women Internal Abroad

Total

Highlands %

2015 82.1

231 9.4

108 4.4

99 4.0

2453 100

Gorica – surroundings % Gorisˇka hills

1007 42.9

531 22.6

186 7.9

626 26.6

2350 100

394 44.5 3416 60.0

163 18.4 925 16.3

186 21.0 480 8.4

143 16.1 868 15.3

886 100 5689 100

% Total %

Table 4: Emigration from the District Administrative Authority Gorica according to origin and destination 1907 – 1913

If we return to the general picture of the geographical origin of the emigration, it is worth re-emphasising that in the mountainous parts of the District Administrative Authority Gorica, the emigration phenomenon was more pronounced than in the lowland areas. In the former areas, the annual departure amounted – in the chosen period – on the average to twenty-one per thousand inhabitants and in the latter, to fifteen per thousand (Srebernicˇ 1914, 14). Table 4, which combines data from the municipalities with the most heavily pronounced emigration, distributed through the three geomorphologic regions (the highlands, the lowlands around Gorica, and the hilly Gorisˇka Brda), shows that the emi-

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63

gration from the highlands was mostly directed toward the inlands of the monarchy and that the large majority of migrants were men. Female emigration from this area was, in the years before World War I, not so pronounced. In the hilly part (Gorisˇka Brda) and in the lower Vipava Valley around Gorica the migration phenomenon was more evenly distributed regarding the internal and external goals and had more gender parity. Men were prevalent here, too, and were oriented towards the inland of the country, while a third went abroad. But there was a great deal of female emigration, too, and if emigration from the hilly regions (Brda) lead them in equal parts towards inland and abroad, then from the lower Vipava Valley they mostly went abroad. In both cases “abroad” meant, as explained, partly to America, primarily to Egypt.

Gorisˇka and its migration movements after World War I World War I interrupted all these migrations. With the entry of Italy into the war on the side of the Entente Powers, Gorisˇka was turned into a battlefield: the Sosˇka fronta, or Isonzo Front. The material consequences of the war, in addition to the levy in casualties, were disastrous for the country. The destruction not only affected the settlements and other infrastructure, it also left behind deep wounds in the landscape itself which needed immediate and thorough remedy. The agriculture was severely affected and recovered slowly with difficulty. At the end of the war, the region also passed under the new – Italian – authority : first as a military occupied territory, then with the Rapallo Treaty from 1920 and the definite demarcation between Italy and Yugoslavia as a part of the Julian March, a new province on the eastern edge of the Italian state. The consequences of the wartime destruction were thus corroborated by the difficult transition into a new state-administrative frame and economic system. Such circumstances, in which people strove to renovate the area and fulfil their basic needs, were fertile grounds for the immediate re-igniting of migration movements as soon as the conflict ended. Because of other changes in the geopolitical partitions in Central Europe, these movements partly followed the traditional routes, but more often turned towards new destinations. The migrations occurred within wider shifts and exchanges of the ethnically diverse population: the first phase after World War I was characterised by the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy and the annexation of the territory to Italy. With the advent of Italian fascism these transitions were further aided by the policy of Italianisation of the newly acquired eastern provinces with the systematic denationalising of the Slovenian and Croatian population which formed a majority in the territory. In addition to the abolition of all national rights and a prohibition of any form of expressing national identity, this policy

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Bilje village, devastated during World War I Source: Museum of Gorisˇka, Nova Gorica

also included the emigration of non-Italian inhabitants and their replacement with Italians. At the time in the Julian March, both the national question and ideological reasons gave even the migrations for economic reasons a strong political connotation. The most popular new destination was the newly formed state – and homeland – Yugoslavia. Between 50 and 70 thousand Slovenians and Croatians from the Julian March moved there by 1940. They were from all social strata, but proportionally speaking, most were from the higher and elite ones (Purini 2010, 156 – 157). The contribution of Gorisˇka to this migration was great, either immediately following the war which many of the inhabitants survived in exile and were left without property or economic means because of the devastation, or during the years that followed when the denationalising pressure increased. They settled mostly in Slovenia and with time elsewhere in Yugoslavia, from Serbia and Bosnia to Kosovo and Macedonia, in cities and in the countryside. In general, the local population in Yugoslavia considered the immigrants from the Julian March as a problematic element which meant competition in the labour market and a burden to the social welfare. With the aid of the Yugoslav authorities who supported them as refugees from fascism, and their own organisations, the emigrants in the south of the country established several farmers’ communities.

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Immediately after the end of WWI, many in Gorisˇka decided either to leave abroad for work or to migrate permanently to the United States, where some either had been before the war or had relatives or acquaintances there who were from the same village. In 1923 and 1924 the transatlantic migration turned again towards South America, primarily to Argentina. The emigration to Argentina and partly to Uruguay peaked from 1927 – 30 (Purini 2010, 149 – 162). Thus a relatively numerous Slovenian community was created in Argentina consisting mostly of the migrants from the Julian March. This massive emigration coincided with the peak of the fascist pressure on the minority (in 1927 all the Slovenian organisations were dissolved and any kind of organised activity on a national basis was banned, except fascist ones), the worsened economic circumstances, and the new demographic politics that strove to increase the Italian population. For the purpose of the latter, the regime severely curtailed emigration state-wide, but accelerated it in the Julian March as long as it was the Slovenian and Croatian population leaving (Kalc 1996, 26 – 27). One among the new destinations of the emigration geography after World War I was France, which needed – and with the help of bilateral agreements, attracted – a large number of foreign workers (Krmac 2008; Purini 2010, 166). The migrants from Gorisˇka and the entire Julian March moved particularly to the regions where there was significant post-war building reconstruction going on, or to mining centres. This migration also peaked in the beginning of the 1930s, when it dried out due to the inauspicious economic circumstances and the political atmosphere which had turned unfriendly towards foreigners; thus many emigrants decided to return home (Drnovsˇek 2012, 38). At the end of the 1930s, however, living in France were around 11,000 Slovenians who were Italian citizens from the Julian March, and many of them were from Gorisˇka (official Italian records show that 2,635 emigrated between 1927 and 1934). They represented almost one-half of all the Slovenians living in France, including those coming from Yugoslavia (Purini 2010, 165 – 166). The other important destination was Belgium, but miners in particular moved between the Belgian and French mining areas in search of employment. Migration within Italy and to Italian colonies in Africa was also frequent. Italian authorities actually encouraged such migration with monetary and other incentives in the Julian March, however, the majority of emigrants returned home before World War II (Purini 2010, 168). More meagre migrations led to other European countries, such as the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and to various South American countries and Australia. It is not possible to define the scope and dynamics of all these migrations in numbers, due to particularities of the Italian emigration statistics of the time, and because the Slovenian migrants from the Julian March were treated as Italian immigrants in their countries of destination. We must also add that a significant

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part of the migrations, particularly towards Yugoslavia, happened illegally. From the above it is certainly clear that after World War I, the migration geography radically changed in the Julian March and Gorisˇka, although it still retained certain continuity elements with the pre-war time. The most prominent among them in Gorisˇka was precisely the emigration to Egypt, which was revitalised after the interruption during the war and retained its predominantly female character. In this case, of course, it also changed its “citizenship” from AustroHungarian into Italian. With this, because of the significantly larger Italian presence in Egypt (including the naturalisation of the emigrants from the former Austrian Littoral) and the continuous emigration from Italy into Egypt (Petricioli 2007, 6 – 7) it becomes even less recognisable in the sources and statistics. The available data are indicative and tell that the migrations continued throughout the 1920s and in a lesser extent throughout the 1930s; that Egypt and, on a lesser scale, other countries in North Africa and the Middle East attracted also migrants from other parts of the Julian March; and that the core origin of migration remained in Gorisˇka (Purini 2010, 164), particularly in the places where it was traditionally most numerous. Female emigration and the link to the Egyptian labour market thus remained in these parts a firmly rooted practice which, as soon as circumstances allowed, was reactivated as a traditional and tested resource for individual and family economic needs or life plans. The change in political geography and the inclusion of Gorisˇka into a new state did not present an obstacle. Quite the contrary, as not only the Italian community, but also the presence of Italian economic and other organisations and interests were well branched out in Egypt. All the way till the advent of the autarchic policy in the second half of the 1920s, the Italian state supported emigration in general – and also to Egypt – and assisted it institutionally. There were even fewer impediments for the emigration from the newly acquired, ethnically-mixed eastern provinces. Women left, as they had left previously, to work in Egypt temporarily, for a number of years. It often happened that they returned there several times or stayed longer, even decades, and only returned home when they were elderly. Even before the war a sort of permanent migrant core formed in Egypt: some of them started families; some called their husbands and children, or even only some family members, to join them from Gorisˇka; some remained single and completely devoted to their work; and the community had more and more members who were born in Egypt. During World War II emigration was stopped again. The community, now much smaller, served as a source of income continued until 1956 when, after Nasser’s arrival in power, the politics to foreigners and in particular to their higher strata was toughened. The latter were ordered to leave the country and their departure meant the end of aleksandrinstvo. The women and girls from

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Gorisˇka returned home, but some remained in the service of their employers and followed them around the world. After World War II the circumstances in Gorisˇka also changed fundamentally, because the new demarcation assigned most of the region to Yugoslavia and the socialist order. This transition meant new shifts of the population in the border area, again fostered also by the political and ideological impetus. Although the Slovenian population engaged in the antifascist and anti-Nazi resistance during the war, and believed in the popular government, at the same time it was difficult to accept the ideologically conditioned circumstances and the system or the objective economic difficulties, which – among other things – stemmed from the fact that the new state border, which was at the same time the world border between the Western and Eastern blocs, cut through the traditional economic and social ties of the previously unified regional space. For this reason, there was no shortage of emigrations after the war, both legal processes and defections to the West, and further continuation to various European and other countries. At the same time, with the development of the regional economic infrastructure and the birth of Nova Gorica (New Gorica), a completely new city and a regional centre, as an achievement of the socialist social model vis-—-vis the capitalist Gorica (Gorizia), more auspicious work opportunities and living conditions were created. The impenetrable state border in the first years after the demarcation and the ban on any kind of emigration meant – alongside the at least partial redefinition of the female position and the principal emancipation of work after the war – that the traditional women’s work as maids or domestic help was devalued.

Aleksandrinke in the context of migration movements in Gorisˇka In the indicated context of the migration in Gorisˇka, aleksandrinstvo was – particularly due to its female nature and geographic specialisation – undoubtedly a phenomenon that stuck out. It is mentioned as special by the contemporary researchers of migration processes (Markitan 1913, 24). Today it is becoming ever more an emblematic example of female migration in the global scientific discussions on the history of labour, gender, and migrations (Barbicˇ, Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar 1999; Verrocchio, Tessitori 2009; Hahn 2008; 2012). Throughout its duration it was also exposed because of the social, cultural, and emotional implications and heated public debates on the harmful influences of the girls, wives, and mothers who were leaving to faraway Egypt on the traditional family and community life. This polemic and the emphatically emotional aspects of aleksandrinstvo as an experience of the entire social environment in

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which it grew contributed to its notoriety and to the blurring of the view over the remaining migrant scenarios. The background in which aleksandrinstvo occurred was, in general view, common with the rest of the migration movements from the Gorisˇka region. The form, as we can see, was not new, but simply a variant of the long established service work of rural women in urban environments. The growing urbanisation gave it more and more incentives and opportunities to align the needs and wishes in the countryside with the demands of the urban labour market. In the moment of the great progress in traffic connections and the general expansion of long distance migration movements, the female workforce found the Egyptian horizon wide open. This came about in the 1860s, when the economic development and the construction of the Suez Canal accelerated the growth of European interests and immigrant communities in Egypt, where wealthier urban population exhibited more demand for household staff. As early as 1871, fifty women from the parish of Bilje near Gorica alone worked in Alexandria, some as wet nurses (Kalc 2002, 18). One can conclude that the first few travelled to Egypt with their employers or were called by other employers interested or via personal acquaintances. The diminished demand for house help in Trieste, which went through a severe economic crisis, was responsible for girls turning to Egypt in the 1870s and partly in the 1880s (La popolazione 1878, LXVI). Later, the process expanded via information, mediation, and social networks that migrants kept between the Egyptian labour market and their regions of origin. An important support to this female migration to Egypt was offered by the traditional maritime connections of Trieste with the eastern Mediterranean. The regular weekly lines of mercantile and other exchange steamships of the Austrian Lloyd meant that not only in practice, but also in the perception of people around the northern Adriatic Egypt was less remote than we can imagine today. Not only was Trieste a big port, its hinterlands, too, coexisted with the Mediterranean world. The Egypt of the second half of the nineteenth century was considered some sort of a Mediterranean California that offered opportunities for business and work in different sectors of the economy. Within the community of Austrian citizens, which numbered 7,000 or 8,000 people in the decades before World War I, we can find numerous immigrants from Trieste and other places of the Austrian Littoral: entrepreneurs, people employed in commerce, trade, and also the public sector. There was an interest and hope regarding Cairo and Alexandria even at the bottom of the social scale, amongst the unemployed, the truly poor, the ¦migr¦s, and others who were fighting for survival and whose fate was unfavourable at home. Because they lacked funds and often did not have anything, the municipal administration provided them with support to pay for the travel costs and in the direst cases even for the clothes and the first costs on the Egyptian soil. In a way, Egypt thus became an alter-

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native exit for the welfare politics (Verbali, 1864 – 1907). Some successful migrants from Gorisˇka made names for themselves with esteemed careers and left a permanent mark on Egyptian cities, for example, the architect Anton Lasˇcˇak (Antonio Lasciac) with his buildings and urban planning (Godoli 2011). It is worth emphasising that the cabinet makers in Gorisˇka were also interested in expanding to Egypt: they exported fine furniture to the Egyptian market and in order to avoid intermediaries who took away a part of their earnings, the Slovenian cabinet makers joined into a cooperative and were even preparing to open their own agency in Alexandria (Pecˇnik 1900). Egypt was, in short, present in the wider economic aspects of the space from where aleksandrinstvo originated: it is enough to leaf through the regional newspapers in Gorisˇka to get a sense of the social relations that transpired between these two worlds and the visions that were born along with them. Some reflections on the economic position and mass emigration – which already in the 1890s had become more and more of a problem for the Slovenian territory – came as far as to see Egypt as an opportunity for a beneficial twist on these problems. If the homeland was incapable of sustaining all its citizens and such a level of emigration was inevitable – claimed Karol Pecˇnik, a Slovenian doctor in Alexandria and reporter on the local situation, in his article in the Socˇa, a newspaper for Gorisˇka – it should at least divert from the North American destinations and turn towards Egypt (see Jernej Mlekuzˇ’s chapter). Here, the immigrants could find employment in trades requiring more qualifications and achieve better social positions; while on the other side of the Atlantic they were a part of the most basic workforce in heavy industry and were drowning in the shapeless proletariat. It this way, the gender structure of Slovenian migration to Egypt would also be balanced and the necessary conditions to develop a social and economically articulate and harmonious Slovenian colony would be established. This would benefit not only the migrant community but also the Slovenian economic and national interests (Pecˇnik 1897). Such thoughts had no practical effects and the migration movement in Gorisˇka and elsewhere in Slovenia continued in the directions dictated by the ratio of supply and demand on the internal and transnational labour markets. Although men also went to work in Egypt, the Slovenian migration to this destination retained a distinctively female character throughout its duration, and also a narrowly specialised professional angle. Its main attraction was the worth of the women’s service work in Egypt. Despite the oscillations in the possibility for earnings linked to the economic conjunctures and welfare of the middle class, the domestics in Egypt earned significantly more than those in Trieste or Gorica. This was particularly true for wet nurses, who received special treatment. The difference was also aided by the higher cost of life in Egyptian cities, while at home the favourable exchange rate added value to the earnings.

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The establishment and retaining of the position on the Egyptian labour market were aided by the great reputation that girls and women from Gorisˇka had. The nicknames les SlovÀnes or les GoriciÀnnes immediately evoked some desirable characteristics. For example, the quality and attitude to work and human touch, which they expressed when working with children, and were therefore particularly popular as nannies. It was important that they all had completed primary schooling; many had a relatively good level of education, and were even comfortable communicating in Italian and sometimes German. The school, family practice, and other educational environments, which raised the girls to be good housewives and mothers, equipped them with the knowledge of how to do basic household chores and provided them with skills that were important to enter the labour market. With time, many exhibited a desire for further qualification, which brought some to the top of their chosen professions. However, most of them acquired – or upgraded – the work skills with the experience in the market, which in Egypt was selective and demanding. Many were forced to accept worse jobs because of insufficient work skills, or had to wait for employment long, or stay without it (Perý, Vascotto 2011, 316). For this reason, institutions that stood by their side and strove for their safety played an important role. The first to do so were the Franciscans, then the Asylum of Franz Josef which was established by notable members of the Austro-Hungarian colony in Egypt as a shelter with an employment agency to support these workers; a congregation of the Slovenian nuns, the School Sisters of the Order of St Francis and of Christ the King, who took over the asylum in 1908 and also opened a school for children; the Austrian Prince Rudolf Hospital, where the workers could receive treatment through the health security system of their municipalities of origin; and a free clinic led in Alexandria by the Slovenian Doctor Pecˇnik. To protect the girls from being led into prostitution and other forms of exploitation, the Triestine port police was joined by the International Association for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade8 and other organisations that helped female workers. Trieste – being a port – had a reputation as a city that would debauch people, and from the end of the nineteenth century, when the 8 Throughout history, this organisation appeared under many names and manifestations: the National Vigilance Association NVA, established in 1885, which later became the International Association for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade in 1899. In 1902, sixteen European delegates drafted an agreement – the International Treaty for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade – in hopes of establishing an international law on the issue. Later, in 1919 Association reformed as the International Bureau for the Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children (IBSTWC). In 1921, the League of Nations took up the issue of white slavery and renamed the crime to trafficking in women and children in order to make it non-discriminatory based on race or ethnicity. That same year the League of Nations produced the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children. By 1923, fourteen countries had ratified it (Segura 2010).

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question of human trafficking became more and more publicised, it was often associated with this phenomenon. The staff of the organisations for the protection of female workers thus carefully monitored the female migrants and potential procurers at the Trieste train station and in the port at the scheduled departures of steam liners. The Slovenian School Sisters, and from 1912 also the members of the mentioned organisations, used recognisable signs to welcome migrants upon their arrival in Alexandria and helped them if necessary. (Wingfield 2011; Lega 1912) Certain Slovenian political representatives got engaged in providing support to aleksandrinke and their valuable economic contribution. These representatives attempted to get Austrian authorities interested in providing more active support and assistance in Alexandria and Cairo and for the establishment of banking channels to send the income back home. They were also led by moralistic intentions, because they were particularly eager to establish an organisation for a stricter monitoring of the girls and their protection, not only from decadence, but also from the emancipatory influences (Gabrsˇcˇek 1910). Aleksandrinstvo was, like many other forms of labour migration, functionally built into the economic and social strategies of the Gorisˇka region. In principle it originated from the scarce life sources, the need to contribute to family budgets, the overcoming of economic crises. At the same time, it was supported by the life plans of families and individuals, for example, ensuring financial fundaments for marriage and procreation, acquiring means for modernising farms, improving living conditions, enabling social progress to younger generations, and other forms of investing in the future. Aleksandrinstvo entered the mentality as an economic source and a “normal” component of the social development. It aligned with the individual and collective goals of the protagonists and their families. Through the inclusion of traditional activities of the domestic service in a richer labour market it promoted the strategic role of female earnings and the position of the women in economy. Female emigration to Egypt, in short, had the characteristics of a system and it represented one of the pillars of the economy in the territory in which it was prevalent. Work in Egypt was not simply an economic opportunity, but also a life experience, “I could hardly wait to grow up and become an aleksandrinka,” remembers one of the thousands of girls who followed each other, generation after generation, on the route to the cosmopolitan Egyptian cities. For many, this was an important rite of passage in their life cycle and personal development. Many adopted new social and cultural connotations, world views and habits through this experience. In the protagonists and communities, in which it took root, aleksandrinstvo left marks that surpass the economic frames of the phenomenon, marks that, in the space of the memory, still live until today.

Barbara Skubic

4.

A Drop in the Sea of Foreign Workers in Egypt

Introduction Not every day can one use the opening sentence of an English novel to open a chapter on Egyptian history, but the context of the story of Slovenian women who were a part of the foreign workforce in the pre-1952 Egypt truly calls for it: “The past is a foreign country : they do things differently there.”1 The past is defined: it begins roughly in the mid-1860s and runs for almost a century, until the mid-1950s. The country is also known: Egypt, or more precisely, the cities of Alexandria and Cairo, rarely others. The past and foreign country notwithstanding, the main reason behind this chapter is to dispel the notion of things being done differently. That is, to dispel the notion that led to Slovenian female migration to Egypt being perceived as problematic, a perception which for a long time slanted the discourse on a certain part of Slovenian history so badly that it was nearly kept at bay. By the end of the chapter, the things done differently might turn out to have not been done so differently at all. This book deals with a specific phenomenon within migration: women who travelled abroad for work, on their own or in female groups – with friends or female relatives – often leaving families behind and almost inevitably earning far more than their male counterparts who stayed at home or migrated elsewhere. This chapter tries to present some information about the country to which they migrated. In the context of aleksandrinke, this is rather relevant, because throughout their century of migration misinformation about them abounded; and this misinformation often caused much grief and great distress to the migrants themselves and their families, those who lived in Egypt and most of all, those who were left behind. The problem was not (and other authors explain this in more detail) the migration itself, it was the combination of women migrating without men, in great numbers, and to Egypt that was considered particularly problematic. 1 This very famous sentence opens Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953).

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A large part of this misinformation was linked to Egypt: the lack of the facts about the country (allegedly dangerous, full of temptations, and in dire need of civilised foreign supervision), and the persistent perception from the population that remained at home that life in Egypt was significantly different from the life in cities closer to home. While that might have been a standard view of the country in the mid-nineteenth century when the first migrants crossed the Mediterranean, it is unacceptable that such a perception has endured into the early twenty-first century. The time lapse between the return of the last women from Egypt in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the beginning of continuous research in the 1990s – the near isolation in which their Egyptian experience was locked until a couple of decades ago, combined with the need to heal whatever wounds were still left open in the families (see Dasˇa Koprivec’s chapter) – resulted in another difficulty for the researchers studying aleksandrinke and their life in Egypt: there is very little information on how, if at all, they integrated into the society beyond their work and immediate Slovenian circle. The information that is available mostly explains the situation of children who were educated in a multicultural environment, or women who married other nationals, either Egyptians or mutamassirun, as they were known: foreigners residing in Egypt permanently. However, we do not really know how aleksandrinke functioned in this multicultural society when they were not working. Although some sources indicate differently, most of the discourse shows them to be astonishingly detached from the political, economic, and social situation in the country where they lived and worked. Reading some testimonies, but more often interpretations of testimonies, one might come away believing that as soon as they got off the boat in Alexandria, they forgot what caused them to leave in the first place (poverty, the political and/or social situation) and internalised the opinion that the privileged had of the local workforce. However, in the decades-long silence, we lost the opportunity to get the information directly from the source: women died, memories were forgotten, documents got lost. Some descendants have kept personal letters that their mothers or grandmothers sent in which they described the political situation in Egypt (mostly in the 1920s and 1930s), but the angle of political awareness of aleksandrinke, their partners and children has not yet been researched and we do not know if they joined the thousands of workers, both Egyptian and foreign, who were active in the political and social life in Egypt. Quite the contrary : in some testimonies – and again, more so in their interpretations – a shocking disconnect from the life of ordinary Egyptians is apparent, for example, when the events after World War II – particularly the Suez Crisis – are described as a complete surprise. Another difficulty in the study of aleksandrinke has been an almost complete absence of critical studies of the entire Middle Eastern region in the Slovenian

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academia: other than some isolated accounts, there is no critical study or discourse that would deal with the contemporary Middle East comprehensively. Whatever research exists has been made into specific topics: the Slovenian POWs in North Africa, the non-aligned movement, or similar. Although other chapters in this book clearly show that the links with Egypt and the interest in the country were much stronger than it was believed for many decades, none of this prompted a wider debate on the country itself that would help demystify the locale and turn it into just another migration destination – which, at least in retrospect, would be of great help to the families of aleksandrinke, if not to the migrants themselves. I use the expression great help: it might seem too emotional for an academic book on migration, but several chapters (especially the one on literature, which exposes the most Orientalist version of the phenomenon possible) show how the stigma attached to the women who migrated and the families they left behind was so strong that sometimes the feelings of shame and hurt persevered long after the phenomenon was over, well into the 1990s, and is only recently being deconstructed and explained in a way that is at the same time scientific and offers a certain kind of comfort and closure for the families that may still need it – the women themselves and their husbands are mostly deceased, and the youngest of their children are in their sixties. This chapter deals with the country and the guest workers in it: the period of aleksandrinke coincides with a very tumultuous century and a half in the Egyptian history, not only political, but also social and economic. For the purposes of this chapter, I have roughly divided it into five parts (a different division would also be possible): one, the early nineteenth century and Muhammad ‘Ali’s reign and reforms; two, the beginning of the construction of the Suez Canal (when the first Slovenian migrants started arriving amongst thousands of others who found work in the changing Egypt) until the ‘Urabi revolt in 1882; three, from 1882 until the end of World War I (when the migration routes between Gorisˇka and Egypt were well-established and Egypt itself was ruled by the British); four, the period between 1919 and 1945 (especially the 1920s, when the post-WWI poverty and later the Great Depression and arrival of the Italian fascist rule over Primorska prompted tens of thousands of Slovenians to leave the region, including a great number of women who went to Egypt, and also the decade in which the British protectorate ended and Egypt gained its independence, at least nominally); and five, the post-WWII period until the Suez Crisis in 1956. The chapter is disproportionately heavy on the events in the nineteenth century, which is the opposite with the numbers of Slovenian migrants to Egypt, whose numbers peaked in the 1920s. (Likewise, the Egyptian political and labour lives were a lot more dynamic after World War I.) However, the perception of aleksandrinke in the Slovenian public discourse continued to

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be drawn from the nineteenth-century geopolitics and philosophy, so it makes sense to give a better insight into what was happening in Egypt around that time. Because, if the past was a foreign country in which things were done differently, there is no reason why the present should retain the same stereotypes about where aleksandrinke went to and the society in which they lived.

The long nineteenth century and the first migrants At the beginning of what Eric Hobsbawm (himself born in Alexandria to immigrant parents in 1917) called “the long nineteenth century”, Egypt was a part of the Ottoman Empire, but being geographically peripheral, and with the empire embroiled in two wars (with Austria and Russia), it was more or less left to its own devices. The oppressive regime of the Mameluks did little to take advantage of this situation. Although the previous leader Ali Bey al-Kabir showed initiative to cooperate with the world beyond the Ottoman Empire, by the 1790s the warring factions of the Mameluk families almost completely destroyed any connections he had established. Egypt was drawn into the international arena as a strategic point during the wars between Britain and France: in 1798, Napoleon, wanting to block British trade routes to India, as well as secure agricultural land for France, embarked on an expedition to Egypt. The adventure was short-lived: Napoleon himself returned to France in July 1799, leaving behind the army, but also administrators, scientists, and engineers who – despite being seen as occupiers and thus unpopular – worked on infrastructure and reorganising legislation (mostly land and taxation). The joint Ottoman and British military campaign in 1801 put an end to the French presence in Egypt, and helped bring to power the man who would be responsible for the reorganisation of Egypt and its more or less independent status: Muhammad ‘Ali. The Albanian-born commander came out victorious from the disputes in Egypt and was recognised as the walı¯ – the Ottoman governor – by the Sublime Porte in 1805. Over the next couple of years, ‘Ali removed all opposition and established his power throughout Egypt. He started a series of reforms that immediately left the country changed: he reformed the armed forces, the administration, education, public services, agriculture, introduced heavy industry, introduced cotton as a crop (which proved to be one of Egypt’s great assets, but also a part of its downfall by the late nineteenth century), in short, started transforming Egypt from a province to a state. His intentions were not entirely altruistic:

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Muhammad Ali’s political objective was to secure independence from the Ottoman Empire and to establish in Egypt a hereditary dynasty for his family. Because he believed that independence could be won and preserved only by means of a powerful army and navy, the main purpose of all of his reforms was to strengthen the armed forces. (Cleveland 2009, 66)

And strengthen them he did: at its peak, the Egyptian army under Muhammad ‘Ali was 130,000 troupes, including conscripts. As Cleveland states: a large army of conscripts requires two things – revenue and reliable population records. Thus ‘Ali set out to reform the system of taxes and introduced the population records which later evolved into the national census. He developed military industry and introduced a new, profitable crop: the long-staple Jumel cotton, at the time most sought after in the European textile industry. Thousands of peasants “were put to work dredging canals and constructing barrages so that the annual Nile flood could be stored and used for a full summer growing season when the river was low. These public works projects were carried out through extensive use of the corv¦e, a levy of forced peasant labor.” (Cleveland 2009, 69) Such practices caused a lot of problems for the farmers and the workers alike, especially with the progressing industrialisation: when in the 1830s there was scarcity of agricultural workers and peasants could earn decent wages working the land, many were forced to work in factories for completely inadequate wages (Tucker 2002, 76). Muhammad ‘Ali may be generally hailed as a moderniser of Egypt and a founder of a modern Egyptian nation-state, but his reign was certainly not modern in any sort of current understanding of the world: Muhammad Ali’s success in Egypt [should not] be associated with any identification on his part with Egyptians. He was a dynast, not an Egyptian, and he is reputed to have despised his subjects. The language of his higher administration was Ottoman Turkish, not the local Arabic, and the initial composition of his new bureaucratic and military elite showed his preference for Turks and Circassians over native Egyptians. He also exhibited the traditional Ottoman reliance on minority groups for administrative expertise; his administration contained a high proportion of local Christians, and his most trusted personal adviser and minister of foreign affairs, Boghos Pasha, was an Armenian. (Cleveland 2009, 71)

Dynast or not, he reformed and developed more than industry and army during his reign: following the practice established by Selim III in Istanbul, ‘Ali organised student missions to Europe – mostly to secure the required numbers of engineers and military professionals, but also lawyers, doctors, linguists, and other experts to keep up with the requirements of running the state. The missions proved successful and continued long after ‘Ali’s death: they were vital, among other things, in reorganising schools and establishing a system of education independent of Al-Azhar. This included all levels of education: primary, secondary (general and vocational), and tertiary.

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Also following the Turkish model, ‘Ali founded the School of Languages (AlAlsun), which essentially functioned as a translation office: with the appointment of Rifa’a el Tahtawi, who supervised the translation of works from different fields into Arabic (and also wrote some himself), a translation enterprise that was possibly the biggest since the translation of Greek works in Baghdad, began. While this might seem relatively unimportant – given the small scale of people who had access to benefit from these reforms, it was the beginning of what is generally known as nahda, the renaissance, which later brought religious reforms of Jalal el-Din el Afghani and Mohamed Abduh (Hourani 1983, 103 – 160), but also spurred the nationalist movement which worked for the Egyptian independence in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century : most of the national leaders either came directly from this movement or were greatly influenced by it. ‘Ali’s reforms and endeavours also show that Cleveland’s and Fahmy’s descriptions of him as not being the nationalist leader he was made out to be are in many ways correct: he routinely gave preference to Turco-Circassian officers in the army (which was his main interest), and the first Egyptian publishing house Bulaq Press is curious proof of that: the vast majority of military manuals – practically all that were intended for military ranks higher than the platoon level – were in Turkish, rather than in Arabic.

Towards the Canal, and through it, to bankruptcy After Ali’s death, the reforms were still in effect and the connections to Europe intensified, but that turned out to be more of a problem than an advantage in the long run. Egypt became increasingly dependent on the European markets for its industry : essentially, that meant exporting raw materials, mostly cotton. Cotton crops required a reliable transport infrastructure, so the first train line between Cairo and Alexandria was built, while Alexandria itself became one of the Mediterranean hubs. However, the project that was the most important of the time was the idea of the Suez Canal: in 1854, the Egyptian ruler Sa’id Pasha granted concession to build a canal on the old Isthmus of Suez to the French Engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps. The deal was a success for world trade, but a financial disaster for Egypt: the conditions were so unfavourable for Egypt that the construction almost literally sank the entire economy of the country and forced it into political and economic dependence that continued for another century. In addition, because of the Capitulations Agreement2 with the Ottoman 2 Capitulations were a series of bilateral agreements that the Porte (and consequently Egypt)

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Empire, all sorts of – reputable and disreputable – European entrepreneurs tried their luck in Egypt, as did skilled workers, who often found the pay in Egypt was better and the cost of living lower than in Europe: Reputable firms and marginal operators, skilled technicians and common laborers, all attracted by the wealth to be made in transport construction, the cotton exchange, and concession hunting, poured into the country in the 1850s and 1860s. By 1872 an estimated 80,000 Europeans, over half of them Greeks and Italians, were resident in Egypt. Made exempt by the Capitulations from taxation and from the jurisdiction of the Egyptian government, they sought and received protection from their consuls whenever their scandalous social behavior or irregular financial dealings attracted the attention of the Egyptian authorities. The consuls themselves exercised extensive political and economic influence in Egyptian affairs, and their offices became centers of nearly autonomous power in Cairo and Alexandria. Some of the Europeans who came to Egypt obtained employment in the state service, mostly as skilled technicians such as train drivers, steamship pilots, and mechanics. Others received more lucrative positions—in 1855 Sa’id appointed an Englishman as minister of railways and communications, and in 1861 he named an Italian to the same post. (Cleveland 2009, 94 – 95)

This did not sit well with the newly formed Egyptian intelligentsia, which was trained and perfectly capable of carrying out the tasks foreigners were hired to do. The preferential treatment given to foreigners and the fact that they were almost never taken to task naturally caused tension between them and the local population. This tension, which had become apparent under Sa’id, only intensified under the rule of Isma‘il (1863 – 79) and never really went away. It grew increasingly bitter under the British occupation (from 1882 onward) and is occasionally still echoed in certain dire circumstances. In the 1860s, the first aleksandrinke were said to have arrived in Egypt, at first with the families of Austrian and Italian engineers who went to work on the Suez Canal, and later, independently to work for – mostly foreign – families who requested their services and thus joined legions of foreign workers who sought their luck in Egypt. Khedive Isma‘il, one of the most controversial figures in modern Egyptian signed with European countries. They were essentially trade agreements and were based on the concept of sovereignty relating to person rather than territory : in practice it meant that a person (usually a merchant) was tried according to the law of the country whose documents he or she carried rather that the law of the country in which the brush with the law occurred. Capitulations were initially not seen as problematic: as long as the signing parties were on equal footing they simplified trade – and their name, incidentally, has nothing to do with surrender, but simply refers to the chapters (capitula) of the contract – but once the geopolitical powers started shifting, such agreements proved to be biased against the local population and hence bitterly resented. In the case of Egypt, the Capitulation Agreements were only abolished in 1949, in accordance with the Convention regarding the Abolition of the Capitulations in Egypt signed at Montreux on 8 May 1937.

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history, a foolish spendthrift to some and a farsighted, if extravagant, reformer to others (Cleveland 2009, 95), set out to further modernise his country : he is frequently referred to as the ruler who modernised Cairo and gave the centre of the city the look it still has. He is also seen as the ruler who bankrupted the country. Less often is he discussed in connection to other, no less important, reforms, for example, the establishment of the Assembly of Delegates in 1866 and Mixed Courts in 1875. The existing practice under the Capitulations Agreement was that in any case of a dispute between an Egyptian and a foreigner the consul of the foreigner hear[d] the case and render[ed] a decision based on the law of the foreigner’s country. In these circumstances it was rare for foreigners to be convicted, no matter how grave the offenses they may have committed. To protect Egyptians from this abuse and to bring uniformity to a practice in which dozens of different consuls rendered judgments based on the legal codes of several different countries, the Mixed Courts were established in 1876. (Cleveland 2009, 96)

Mixed Courts, progressive at the time as they were a step towards curtailing the rights foreign citizens had under the Capitulations Agreement, remained in operation until 1949, and became a source of much dissatisfaction among Egyptians as the time passed, since the imbalance in power was such that they turned out to curtail not much at all. However, Isma‘il had no intention of giving up his absolute power, so his subjects were, legally speaking, not much better off because foreigners had some rights taken away and the country capital looked Western. Most of the Egyptian population was still living the old landowning relationships, corv¦e labour had not been abolished (in fact, most of the work on the canal was corv¦e labour, as was a lot of agriculture), and most farmers did not have enough land to be selfsufficient in terms of food production so they had to search for work in cities (Beinin, Lockmann 1998). Often, peasant families (men, women, and children) from the Nile Delta could find seasonal work in cotton gins, and those in Upper Egypt in sugar cane refineries. They benefited little from any kind of reforms, and were now subjected to local and foreign masters. Isma‘il’s spending extravaganzas were fuelled mostly by the cotton industry : the blockade of the Confederate ports during the American Civil War caused the prices of cotton to soar and Egypt became the principal supplier to the British textile mills. The revenue from cotton increased from less than a million pounds sterling in the 1850s to over 10 million in the late 1860s. This was not enough to keep up with Isma‘il’s spending, though, so by the 1870s, he was borrowing huge sums of money from European banks (at the disastrous interest rate of 10 %). Still not enough, he reformed the land laws to allow the landowners to pay land tax for six years in advance and then be exempt from it forever. To top it off, in 1875, he was forced to sell 44 % of the shares of the Suez Canal.

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In 1876, the Caisse de la Dette Public was established. Egypt was effectively bankrupt and within six years, it lost its independence to the British. In 1879, Isma‘il was replaced by his son Tawfiq, a largely unpopular ruler who immediately had to face the revolt in the armed forces led by Ahmad ‘Urabi. The ‘Urabi uprising started as a protest against the hierarchy in the army, where Turkish officers were given priority over Egyptians, but soon spilt over to express general dissatisfaction with the situation in the country and the growing influence of foreign forces. The rebellion was quelled in 1882 with the battle of Tel el Kebir in which the British navy defeated ‘Urabi and occupied the country which they then ruled until 1922 when Egypt gained nominal independence.

Foreign workers in Egypt Beginning with Muhammad ‘Ali’s reforms, the doors were open for foreigners to come and work in Egypt; not only for persons who arrived by invitation to set up or manage certain institutions for the state, but also for ordinary workers. While the massive influx of foreign workers is usually linked to the construction of the Suez Canal (and a great number of foreign workers did come around that time), the brief description of the reforms undertaken from the time of Muhammad ‘Ali on explains why so many workers (foreign or local) were welcome before and after the canal was opened. The cases of foreigners that ‘Ali and his successors employed to either help establish or run institutions are well documented; the life stories of people from all walks of life who moved to Egypt to find work, less so. While a number of studies have been done on different ethnic groups (mostly Greeks and Italians, as they were the most numerous), foreign workers as a general group with a specific dynamic, and their interactions with Egyptian workers were often just an afterthought, like some kind of collateral knowledge. However, the recent studies of foreign communities show a great diversity of nationality, ethnicity, and class (but not necessarily gender) in the nineteenth-century Egypt. Anthony Gorman also draws our attention to the complex situation of workers who were foreign, perceived as foreign, or not foreign at all: A less legalistic definition of foreign worker that uses ethnicity or “race” (to use the official term from the official census), namely those that were not “ethnically Egyptian”, also presents difficulties. Egypt was historically an ethnically pluralist society and the concept of Egyptian ethnicity belies the diversity within its population. (Gorman 2008, 239)

Gorman’s statement deserves further consideration: who was, in fact foreign? When the influx of workers began, Egypt was a part of a multinational empire,

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which means that the country’s two largest “foreign” ethnic groups – the Greeks and the Syrians – were often not really foreign at all. Many Greeks and most of the Syrian Muslims were Ottoman citizens, and as such, not “foreigners” in the legal sense of the word. On the other hand, some Greek families, for example, may have been legal aliens, but had lived in Egypt for decades, possibly centuries. A substantial proportion of British passport holders were in fact Maltese. In many Jewish families, either local Karaite, or Sephardic, or other, at least one male member would often have a European citizenship, usually French. Egyptians, that is to say, Egyptian-born Ottoman citizens who spoke Arabic as their first language, could be Muslims, Copts, Jews. Then, as Gorman points out, there were the Sudanese, and also Bedouins and Nubians. While it may have been easy to divide the population into “Egyptian” and “foreign” in terms of the law, when it came to actual people’s lives, it was rarely this straightforward. The one thing usually mentioned – and with a good reason – was that foreign workers were given preference over local ones: they got better jobs, earned higher salaries, worked in better conditions and received more benefits. In their seminal work Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882 – 1954 Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman use several case studies to show that foreigners were better paid even if they were doing the same job as their Egyptian counterparts. Not only that, the working conditions for foreigners tended to be much more favourable: foreigners were usually part of the minority of workers who received days off, medical care, vacation time, and severance pay, for example. Egyptians were usually not. Beinin and Lockman (1998) give the example of the state railway, which had three categories of employees, the highest of which consisted of the permanent, pensionable, disproportionately European employees who enjoyed extensive benefits and numbered 2,335 in 1907. The second category consisted of 4,905 non-pensionable but permanent employees paid monthly. The great bulk of this workforce was made up of nearly 15,000 “temporary” workers, many of whom had worked for the ESR for years, but nevertheless were paid on a daily basis, could be fired without cause or compensation, and had no right to paid days off or medical care. (Beinin, Lockman 1998, 40)

The state railway was not the only company that divided workers into categories, others did, too. (Suez Canal Company, Cairo Tramway Company, and various cigarette companies are mentioned.) While many of the Egyptian workers were skilled, they were still unable to secure a salaried position and continued to work for daily wages without any benefits, sometimes through their entire working life. And even if they did get a job that in theory brought the same benefits as it would if they were foreign, this was often not the case – they were denied the wages on the grounds that they were less skilled than the Europeans, or slower, or needed to be supervised (again by the European foremen, who in turn reported

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to their, usually also foreign bosses), or simply did not require as much money because they were used to the circumstances (presumably poverty) since birth (Beinin, Lockman 1998, 41 – 43). Difficult as these conditions were, workers in large enterprises were still better off than those workers in smaller companies – at least they would occasionally get a day off and their labour organisations were better. However, “even as late as 1937, 52 % of all industrial establishments employed no one other than the proprietor, and another 40 percent employed fewer than five people” (Goldberg 1986, 50). Agricultural workers fared even worse: most of them did not own any land, or not enough to support themselves, so they earned their living as farm hands. Poorly paid, they often had to supplement their income by working on sugar mills (usually foreign owned) or cotton gins (usually Egyptian owned). Although this could substantially improve their living conditions while they remained a part of their original community, it offered neither possibility to progress nor job security, not to mention the workers were not able develop new skills that they could then use to improve their situation. Also, the peak seasons in either industry often coincided with high agricultural season, which presented a problem for farmers. Sometimes, though, they were not really given a choice: corv¦e labour – or at least unpaid labour that they had to do for the supervisor, local official, or middleman – was common well into the 1930s (Goldman 1986, 50). While the working conditions for Egyptian workers seem to have been constantly bad, the ones for foreigners varied: skilled workers, supervisors, and people who filled clerical positions usually appeared to have little problems. For unskilled workers, and sometimes even skilled, the job situation was not so secure, though. Mostly, authors who study the working class in Egypt mention foreigners in two industries: Italians in construction and Greeks in tobacco. Construction is more interesting in the context of this book: Isma‘il’s infrastructural projects, including the massive undertaking of constructing the Suez Canal, did require large numbers of skilled workers – including Italian, Greek, Syrian and Dalmatian (Gorman 2010, 4) who joined Egyptian workers who were there mostly as corv¦e labourers, and also Austrian and French engineers – skilled or semiskilled workers arrived to Egypt in large numbers and thus created a foreign working class, which worked and organised alongside with the Egyptians. While we have no data on any Slovenians working on the actual construction of the canal, Kalc mentions that Slovenian carpenters were exporting wood and furniture to Egypt so much they were even considering establishing their own agency there (see Aleksej Kalc’s chapter). Italians are particularly interesting in this context: the stonemasons started arriving early in the nineteenth century. Whether the work was profitable was

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largely dependent on when the workers arrived and where they settled. As Bent Hansen explained in his study (Hansen 1989) on factoring prices and comparing wages, despite the fact that the wages for foreign workers – especially skilled ones – were higher than wages for the local workforce, this may not have always translated into a standard of living better than the worker would be able to have at home. He specifically compares the workers in the cigarette industry and construction, and draws a comparison between salaries a qualified mason could earn in Italy and in Egypt, decade by decade. The comparison is not always in favour of Egypt, so the constant influx of foreigners may have been a result of more complex processes than simply following the money. Referring back to the suggestions that Slovenian men should emigrate to Egypt and establish their own agencies this could have been the reason that the suggestion never materialised. For the Italian workers, though, especially those from the south, the proximity meant that for many of them work in Egypt was seasonal. Still, there were enough of those who settled there, and by the mid-century their community was big enough for them to get organised. Gorman (2010), who concentrates mostly on the anarchist movement in Egypt, says that Italian workers, as well as Greeks, were organised as early as 1860, and that although the movement was heavily Italian in character, the organisation did reach out to other groups of foreign workers: proceedings from the paper presented at the conference in Belgium in 1877 show that “the Alexandria section, with the support of the section in Cairo, and the Greek Federation, successfully sponsored a proposal, calling on the federal bureau to disseminate socialist propaganda in the East ’in Italian, Illyrian, Greek, Turkish and Arabic’” (Gorman 2010, 5). What is interesting here in the framework of studies of the Slovenian community in Egypt is the use of Illyrian: it could be used to refer to any of the Slavic languages normally spoken eastwards of Italy, but could also refer to Veneto and Friuli and languages spoken there, or even Albanian. Without access to actual materials, it is not possible to say, whether there were any Slovenian speaking workers in Egypt who could benefit from socialist propaganda. Even if there were no Slovenians, there were plenty others: labour historians agree that foreign workers were instrumental in labour organising and forming unions, as well as organising strikes and education. Just how much cooperation there was and how it played in actual life is where historians tend to differ. While it is generally accepted that foreign workers were only occasionally interested in cooperation with their Egyptian colleagues – for example, during large-scale strikes – they were often pitched against each other : Egyptian workers were sometimes used as strike breakers, and foreign employees were said to have abandoned strikes as soon as their requirements were met; as they were fewer –

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no matter how high their number, they usually did not exceed a quarter of workers – this was more easily done, and they were often accused of abandoning their union comrades and siding with their European employers. While all this is undoubtedly true in many cases, Gorman gives valuable insight into a different kind of cooperation when he studies Italian anarchist cells in Alexandria, which formed as early as the 1860s and in addition to organising workers (mostly masons), also organised popular universities, sent delegations to socialist and anarchist conferences, organised lectures by visiting movement leaders (Amilcare Cipriani, Errico Malatesta, etc.), and also sent a group of anarchists to help Ahmad ‘Urabi in his uprising and his fight against the British in 1882: “Characterised as anti-foreign, ‘Urabi did in fact receive support from some elements of foreign community, including Italian workers in Alexandria and a number of anarchists.” (Gorman 2010, 8) However, anarchists were never a unified group and were held together in an uneasy alliance with other leftist groups. It is difficult to ascertain, says Gorman, the presence of the Arabophone anarchists before 1900. However, this changed in the first decade on the twentieth century, and much more cooperation is shown between the Italian and local anarchists (or at least sympathisers). After all, when the anarchist movement founded a People’s and Workers’ University (UPL), the lecturers – just like the participants and indeed anarchists themselves, came from all nationalities and all walks of life (and genders): All UPL teachers were unpaid volunteers drawn in large part from the fields of education, law and medicine. Some drew directly on their professional expertise, such as Ernest Hobsbaum, the principal English master at the Isra¦lite Alliance Schools, and Shaykh Muhammad Hilmi, Arabic professor at the American Mission School in Alexandria. A lawyer, Michele Guarnotta, expounded on legal matters, Drs Latis and Flack lectured on anatomy and hygiene respectively, and a worker, G. Cervetta, spoke on electricity. Others, such as Dr Giuseppe Botti on Italian letters and Mario Colucci on MoliÀre, were amateur scholars or individuals savants who dealt with subjects in which they had a special expertise. The contribution of journalists and editors was also notable: Canivet of La R¦forme, ‘Abduh Badran of the Alexandrian weekly, al-Sabah, Tawfiq ‘Azuz of the Cairene bimonthly review al-Muftah, and Muhammad Kalza of alLiwa’, all taught at the UPL. (Gorman 2005, 309)

Anarchist movements may not have been hugely influential, but it does give us a glimpse into the life ordinary people lived: much has been said on the cosmopolitanism of pre-1952 Egypt, and there is a lot of nostalgia for the liberal atmosphere of the pre-revolution country. Without wading further into the topic, as it is vast, I would like to point out the article by Nancy Y. Reynolds “Entangled communities: interethnic relationships among urban salesclerks and domestic workers in Egypt, 1927 – 61”, which is one of the newly available

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studies on how different communities really interacted: not just the usually described circles – the elite foreigners, but also the working and lower-middle classes. It is unfortunate, that such a study must be focused on the murder case of an Egyptian Jewish merchant, Samuel Cicurel, but it does show how the society functioned for most people. The most poignant detail in the whole case must certainly be the sentences: [a]s a result of Egypt’s regime of Capitulations, the four men accused of the murder were prosecuted in different courts and received different punishments. The defendants were aware of the consequences of their different nationalities: the local subject, Jacoel, was reported to have urged Moramarco to confess to having handed Jacoel a blood-stained knife to dispose of after the murder ; in that way Jacoel’s charge of murder might be reduced to robbery and accomplice to murder. Jacoel is reported to have said to [Moramarco in the course of the interrogations], “Speak the truth: if you continue to deny I shall be condemned to death by the Egyptian Assize Court, but you, in any case, will be tried in Italy where there is no death penalty, and whether or not you confess to the killing you will be sentenced to the maximum penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment.” As mentioned above, Jacoel was the only one of the four accused ultimately put to death for the crime. (Reynolds 2012, 123)

When oscillating between describing Egypt as something foreign, strange, and dangerous, and revering it as some sort of multicultural ideal, it is good to remember that it was just a country which gave a lot of people work, but also treated a lot of people rather badly. In the discourse of aleksandrinke, such information should be shared more often.

Women in the workforce When it comes to studying the history of the working class, particularly women in paid employment, aleksandrinke are barely, if at all, mentioned by historians. As Mirjam Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik explains in the introduction to this book, this situation is not unique to them, but is rather the condition for women workers around the world, especially those working in domestic service, at least until very recently. To give an Egyptian example, who was a worker? More precisely, who did workers recognize as other workers? Four main characteristics defined a person as a “worker” socially and culturally, with a significant bifurcation within the category of “worker”. Egyptians treated as compartments within a single category what we regard as two distinct groups. Workers were male, urban, spoke the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, and got their hands dirty. (Goldberg 1986, 50)

But women were workers, too. This is what we know about the Slovenians: the construction of the Suez Canal coincided with the period when the first Slo-

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venian women arrived in Egypt, most likely with the families (Austrian or Italian) they worked for back home and followed when they moved to profit from the canal. It seems, though, that the sea route from Trieste, which was the nearest port, to Alexandria was soon established independently, and as early as 1871, the Catholic Church was raising alarm about the number of women who were leaving to work in Alexandria and demanded the local authorities to stop issuing passports to them. The priest from Bilje meticulously lists the names and social statuses of fifty women from the village of Bilje. The motion was denied and the Church was advised to educate (Makuc 1993, 27 – 28). Around the time of the ‘Urabi revolt, Slovenian migration to Egypt stalled somewhat, but was back at its usual numbers in the 1890s. However, other than alarmist newspaper articles (see Jernej Mlekuzˇ’s chapter) nothing much is written about them – either at the time when the migration was in progress, or later. Why can we not read about them? Did any Slovenian women ever take part in the activities organised by workers from other countries? Why is there no record of them ever getting involved in any – international or local – workers’ organisation, or even union? There are several possible explanations that sound plausible even almost a century and a half later. The first one is the most obvious: any Slovenian person travelling anywhere would be carrying Austrian (and later Austro-Hungarian) documents and be treated as Austrian. Also: while the numbers of Slovenian migrants seem enormous from this side of the Mediterranean,3 once they hit the shore in Alexandria, they were merely a drop in the sea of foreigners. It was easy for them to blend in, and it was equally easy for them to keep by themselves. Third, was the nature of their work: very early on, most of them were employed as live-in household help, and were thus less able to move around as freely as people in other lines of work were (for example, factory workers, trade workers, and similar). The line of their work probably also meant that there were not really any professional organisations for them to join. While workers’ organisations did welcome women to take part in educational programmes (as Gorman explains in relation to popular universities), the unions were almost exclusively male. A further complication – but this is speculation and needs to be verified – was that in the period when the numbers of Slovenian migrants in Egypt were the highest (1920s and 1930s), a lot of them probably would not have wanted to join Italian organisations, as many had to come to Egypt because of the pressures of Mussolini’s regime on Slovenians. 3 See the tables in Aleksej Kalc’s chapter, which show both the absolute numbers of female migrants and, more importantly, their percentage in particular villages. When we consider the breakdown by age, it is not surprising that the emigration seemed very threatening indeed.

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Another detail worth mentioning is the social background of Slovenian women: they came from an environment where union and political participation was not encouraged, and given the wrath they incurred from the Catholic Church at home it was also entirely possible that they avoided any kind of activity which might have spurred confrontation with clerics, so joining unions, which at the time in Egypt were anarchist (internationalist) dominated was out of the question, because it would have destroyed any reputation they had left after the moralists from Church (and elsewhere) were done with them. It is also true that most of them genuinely did not intend to stay. As the life stories in Dasˇa Koprivec’s chapter on memories reveal, most of them went for a couple of years at the most, and it was only by chance that they stayed for a decade or more. This isolation in certain cases worked against them, because by avoiding – or even not knowing what was available, and restricting themselves to Slovenian friends and the church only outside of work, they were – at least the more unlucky ones amongst them – more vulnerable than they would have been otherwise. But in this way, they were left to their own devices for quite a while. In addition to that, two other myths have been plaguing the entire perception of aleksandrinke in their home villages, and the battle against them sometimes feels like going uphill, although a lot of work has been done. The first myth was that Egyptian women did not work, or if they did, they only worked in dubious professions, so women who went over there – alone, without male protection! – naturally followed the same path. However, Egyptian women did work: as much as women everywhere around the globe, if they were rural women, they worked in agriculture – and participated in non-agricultural activities if there was a need for that. Also, the Egyptian countryside produced for the urban market, and this required women to occasionally take on additional duties. If they lived in urbanised areas, their participation in the work market varied: it may seem they were not active, but this could simply be the result of the organisation of work into guilds, and the lack of studies that concentrated specifically in women. In her study on women in Egypt in the nineteenth century, Judith E. Tucker explains that due to the nature of their work, which was centred around neighbourhood activities (fountains, markets, public baths) and the fact that women did not really participate in the established guilds of the time, there are not many traces left about their professional activities (Tucker 2002, 110). Tucker does paint an interesting picture of a public bath – a hammam, so popular in the Orientalist fantasies of many male writers, who were, for obvious reasons, left at the door : Business could also be conducted at the public bath, a social institution of great importance for women. Most contemporary accounts mention numerous baths which served all classes of women with the exception of the most wealthy, who could afford a

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bath at home. The several hours needed for a thorough scrubbing, soaking, depilation, and a period of repose afforded ample time for visiting and conversation in a totally female environment. Professional women bath attendants and female owners constituted a corps of female personnel who could function as a clearing house for information and contacts. Travellers’ accounts and elite chronicles of male authorship cannot provide, of course, any intricacies and purposes of bath visiting, but it figured prominently in the urban woman’s activities and gave her both the opportunity and setting for discussion of marriage arrangements, business transactions, family disputes, and the numerous other arrangements undergirding social and economic life. The bath serves an example of the sort of an informal institution of the woman’s world that existed parallel to, and in isolation from, the formal guild of masculine design. (Tucker 2002, 108 – 109)

Women also often worked in family trades, and as the century progressed, more and more of them chose a trade of their own: the rapid industrialisation of the country and the decline of traditional sources of income required changes in female participation in the labour market as well. Some more opportunities appeared for women and some traditional ones became obsolete because the organisation of the society changed. More and more women started working in service industry. Certain jobs required a woman to do them, and that went without saying: a bath attendant was one, alimah, an accomplished entertainer (not to be confused with an ordinary entertainer, whose reputation and earnings were significantly lower) who performed at weddings, christenings, and similar celebrations was another. Only an older woman who had access to different circles of the society, claims Tucker, could be trusted to broker a marriage, and continues: “Many such services were central to the organisation and cohesion of the community : women provided the social glue because of their ability to move in all circles.” (Tucker 2002, 91) When Tucker moves into the realm of the domestic service that is the topic of this book – ordinary women doing ordinary chores in ordinary houses – she briefly describes what it meant for an Egyptian woman to work as a domestic: the job itself seriously compromised the woman’s reputation, but for many, it was the only choice after the traditional crafts and trades declined. Many women simply had to go and earn a living, and as jobs were scarce, domestic service might have been their only option. Tucker describes cases where women worked at a tremendous personal cost: in many cases divorc¦es lost their children after their ex-husbands claimed in court that working made them unfit as mothers (Tucker 2002, 93). Still, the numbers of workers in domestic service swelled throughout the century, and continued to do so well into the twentieth century : Beinin and Lockman give data from the censuses from 1907 and 1917 and the Annuaires statistiques 1951/54 for the years from 1927 to 1947 which shows that the workers employed in personal services, which included domestic workers,

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increased tremendously : from 94,294 in 1907 to 204,041 in 1917; then 284,076 in 1927, a slight drop to 256,099 in 1937 and an immense increase in 1947, with 392,151 workers employed in personal services (Beinin, Lockman 1998, 38). The personal services category is not very precisely defined, and no distribution by gender and/or ethnicity is given, but the numbers do show astonishing growth. Tucker presents an interesting reason why there was a sudden demand for foreign domestic workers: following a particular scandal involving a married Egyptian woman working in a house of an English bachelor (no details are given if there really was something scandalous about the whole situation), Muhammad ‘Ali issued a decree that prohibited Muslim women working for foreign or local Christians. It is hard to say how this was monitored, and given the wording it probably did not extend to other Egyptian cities, however, the reason becomes a lot less compelling when we learn what the punishment for such women would be: they would be drowned in the Nile (Tucker 2002, 92). Whether this was the reason or not, foreign households did begin to hire more foreign workers. For other types of female employment, Nancy Gallagher gives us the example of graduates of the school of midwifery who, from the time of Muhammad ‘Ali onwards, worked as public servants and were credited with improving maternal health and the rates of infant mortality. Hakimas and their role in the society have recently come under much scrutiny : did they really represent progress for women and society, or were they merely government agents who helped the state control the population and destroy traditional female networks (Gallagher 2005).4 An interesting phenomenon could be observed in rural areas, where farmers were often hired to work in sugar mills and cotton gins as seasonal workers: slots for work went to families, and the shifts were long, so women often worked as a part of their family operation in such environments: There is little doubt that employment in gins and mills was widely regarded as an option for a peasant family rather than an individual. The cotton gins, for example, are reported to have employed significant numbers of women (for fourteen to eighteen hours a day), but the women represented a family labor commitment, for they were “replaced from time to time by another member of their family but the employer takes no steps to ensure that individuals are relieved at intervals.” It is less clear if the sugar mills employed women or whole families on a rotating basis, but it is nevertheless true that even in the year-round labor force of the large sugar refinery at Hawamadiyyah any 4 The role of hakimas is contested; some credit them with bringing modernity to Egypt and reducing infant and maternal mortality, other accuse them of being government spies who work for the army to keep an eye on prostitution and force out traditional dayas. The perception of the establishment of the school for hakimas and their work is an interesting testimony also on the academic discourse, downright to the decision which word to translate to describe them – a midwife or a woman doctor.

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position belonged to a family, whose members successively filled it. The freedom for such substitution points to extremely low level of skills involved and thus to the exceedingly poor bargaining position of the worker. Such workers were, however, the majority of the unskilled workforce in Egypt at the time. (Goldberg 1986, quoting Butler 1932, 20)

Egyptian women did work; there is no doubt about that. The second myth was that women, particularly white foreigners, were often – even routinely – sold as slaves into harems. Why this idea has been so persistently etched into the Slovenian interpretation of the story of aleksandrinke is probably due to the dominant role of the Catholic Church and literature (see Katja Mihurko Ponizˇ’s chapter). The truth is somewhat less dramatic than Slovenian literature would have us believe: while slavery was still legal in the late parts of the nineteenth century, both slavery and harems (which seemed to trouble the Slovenian mind the most), were on the way out. Although this may be less well-known, the steps for abolishing slavery were in fact taken before the British came to the country, by the Egyptians themselves, so the cause of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), noble as it originally was, which was used as one of the pretexts for occupation (much as, a couple of decades later, the liberation of women championed by lords Cromer and Cruzon, chief anti-suffrage champions at home, was used to present Egypt as a backwards country that needed foreign supervision, and completely overshadowed the genuine, home-grown voices supporting the emancipation)5 was more or less just that: a pretext. That is not to say that women travelling and/or living alone were not in some danger, or that societies that provided support for the newcomers or women who found themselves ill or between employment were not providing a much needed service but when it came to slavery, Egyptians were no more or less savage than other nations: after all, slavery persisted in Europe through the entire first half of the nineteenth century, although it was, much like it was in Egypt, in decline. So far, no research has shown that any Slovenian women at all were sold into slavery, despite the persistent rumours. While it is – again – difficult to establish the nationality of all white slaves (and odalisques, if you allow me this immanently Orientalist image) research has not yet found any solid indication to believe that morally loose aleksandrinke were only too happy to get themselves caught into the life of leisure and moral decay the Slovenian literature is so fond of describing (Sˇkrlj 2009). The harems that existed were mostly limited to the upper class, while the urban middle class, for whom Slovenian women mostly work, kept them extremely rarely.

5 See Diane Robinson-Dunn’s (2006) for a comprehensive picture.

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Conclusion In a sense, aleksandrinke in Egypt were terribly disadvantaged: they were female, rural, and foreign. They were also domestic workers, and barely noticeable in the sea of workers – Egyptian or foreign – in the Egypt of the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. In relation to other workers, they were in a subordinate position: because most of them worked in the service industry, there was no guild or union they could join to secure their rights as workers. This was hard for them if they had problems in the family they were working for, or when the family no longer needed their services. It was also fatal for those who returned to families in Slovenia they no longer felt a part of or those who did not return at all: they retired without any pension and health insurance and would need someone to provide care for them. Their work was often considered of less value. In the specific context of Egypt they were caught between a rock and a hard place, to use this tired adage: for the longest time they were not studied by the Slovenian historians, because they were servants and presumably not interesting enough, while from the point of view of the Egyptian labour historians, they were part of the foreign work force and as such lumped together with other foreign workers and not necessarily shown in a favourable light. In their country of origin, their morals and motives were too often doubted because they worked in a country that not many people had proper experience with, and they continued to be doubted because long after they returned home, no one could be bothered to study the country and the workers’ position in it for what they were: not past, not foreign, and not different at all, just people giving their best to make their lives better. Just like at home, actually.

Dasˇa Koprivec

5.

Personal Narratives of Lives in Egypt and at Home

Introduction “Some stayed there, some came home, some died there. Some forgot their children, forgot their husbands, forgot everything. If they came home, they came to take a look and went straight back”, Violetka Stubej said to me and then continued: “There were young women who went and ended up getting married over there. There were wives who left their children and husbands and they stayed and also died down there.” This quote is from one of the many testimonies about the lives of aleksandrinke and their children and families, at home and in Egypt that I have collected. The testimonies expose the construction of feelings and emotions, memories and meanings. “The construction is a process in which identity is negotiated between different traditions and different modernities in a specific context.” (Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik 2007, 134) In my research I have not yet been able to include all the different and complex family stories linked to aleksandrinke and all the different and complicated departures, arrivals and destinations. However, my research so far indicates that narrators who experienced Egypt, either Cairo or Alexandria themselves, speak very positively about the life there. The attitude of the narrators who stayed at home in Gorisˇka without their mothers, wives, or daughters is completely different. My research included members of four generations: aleksandrinke, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and also other relatives, such as aunts, nephews, mothers-in-law, sons-in-law. I have thus created a rich collection of testimonies recorded in the field, as sixty narrators have participated in almost two hundred in-depth interviews and discussions.1 The research has also 1 Dasˇa Koprivec: Aleksandrinke and Their Descendants. A research project of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum (2005 – 2011). Fieldwork in Slovenia was mostly carried out in the Gorisˇka region. In Egypt, the research was done in Cairo and Alexandria. The testimonies are kept at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in the form of tape recordings and field notes. All quotes from the testimonies and field notes in this chapter are from that collection, unless otherwise stated.

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included unpublished testimonies of the descendants as well as newspapers and electronic sources. Fieldwork was geared also towards evidencing the material legacy of aleksandrinke in their homes in Gorisˇka; through in-depth interviews we wished to establish how their legacy is today present and valued in the lives of their descendants and the people of the region.2

Aleksandrinke Leaving home For aleksandrinke who stayed in Egypt for ten, fifteen, even twenty years or more and had their own family in Gorisˇka to whom they kept sending the money, leaving home was an accepted modus vivendi which was in one way or another agreed to by all the adult family members. In this process, some women sacrificed more for the family’s survival – for example, wet nurses who left their babies at home, and certain less – young women who left on their own before marriage, widows, single women. The decision to leave was sparked by many circumstances including various economic reasons and numerous emotional impulses. Aleksandrinke were individuals, and every single one decided for different reasons, but what these women all had in common was that they accepted a way of life different from what they had before. This means that the family’s economic situation was sometimes the cause, but often also merely the trigger for the departure, a possibility to exit a situation that caused distress to an individual woman in her home environment. The economic situation was in such cases a welcome excuse to leave for Egypt where she could live more easily. The distinction between the trigger and the cause for the departure has maybe not been emphasised enough so far, or maybe the trigger and the cause were considered one and the same, because the distinction between them is very subtle and few women were willing to admit that what they felt upon their departure was (also) relief. Different women went for different reasons: single young women went for wages and experience, and sometimes made a new life for themselves in Egypt; engaged young women went for a couple of years to put together a trousseau, then returned to their village and never left it again; and then there were some who were travelling back and forth: they returned home from Egypt, got married, went back to Alexandria to earn more money, returned home, had a baby, went back to Egypt as wet nurses, and sometimes repeated the cycle several 2 A broader presentation of the research, with a particular focus on the influence that aleksandrinke had on the children they cared for, was published in Koprivec 2013.

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times. Daughters went to help their father’s family, newly-wedded wives went to help the families of their in-laws, young widows with small children went because they found no other solution. They left their children with their parents, their in-laws, or in foster care with other families in the village. Many of them decided to leave for Egypt and their children were often adults when they returned home. Beside the different reasons and triggers we also encounter an incredibly extensive and intertwined network of family relationships among aleksandrinke in the 1920s and 1930s. A daughter of an aleksandrinka, Violetka Stubelj from Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, born in 1928, recounts: “My mother also went and my aunt. My father’s four sisters were also in Egypt. My grandmother also went. She went, came home, had another baby, and left again for Egypt, this time to nurse. Yes, so that she secured some land they could buy.”3 ˇ erne from Bilje, born in 1912, left for Egypt at the age of eighteen for Marija C economic reasons and stayed there more than thirty-five years. When she was telling me her story I often thought how significantly the economic aspect marked the relationships within her family as well: after her departure, Marija only saw her father one more time, after ten years, in 1936. When she came back next time, her mother and her father were already deceased (her mother died in 1939 and her father in 1947) – this was the situation in many cases, a brief departure for some years meant the beginning of the final goodbye. Marija remained abroad, in Egypt and later in the USA, for a full fifty-two years and only returned in 1982 to her birth house in Bilje. Lidija Susicˇ from Bukovica remembers her own departure: “I was so happy to go. And my mother told me all about it; she was over there for five years. And I was happy to see all those places that my mother had. And then my aunt took me to where my mother used to work, she took me to that lady.”4 Lidija Susicˇ, born in 1916, was happy to go to Egypt, because she was interested in everything new; her mother’s narration was an important emotional impulse for departure, although its underlying reasons were economic – her parents failed to repay a loan from a saving society and lost a part of their land as a result and had to send daughter Lidija to Egypt to help pay it back. I believe that it was also the stories from their mothers, aunts, and other relatives who went through a positive experience in Egypt that influenced the young women’s decision to depart. So Lidija left at the age of eighteen and spent almost two decades of her life in Cairo and Alexandria.

3 Violetka Stubelj, interview by author, tape recording, 3 November 2005, Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, Slovenia. 4 Lidija Susicˇ, interview by author, tape recording, 25 November 2005, Bukovica, Slovenia.

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Dragotin Volk, born in 1922 in Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, remembers the family circumstances that took his mother to Egypt: Mother helped here, at home, but Papa was not for work. My grandparents, that’s what they were all about – work, work, work. Then, slowly, he abandoned all of it. They lost everything, all that was left was a patch of land and some forest. Then Mama decided, when she saw there was no solution, no solution. Yes, I was three when she left me. Then she called me down there.5

Dragotin Volk joined his mother in Egypt when he was ten. He remembers his first encounter with his mother after seven years of separation: Yes, the first day, when we went to Egypt, we arrived at night. It was around ten at night and in December, there were women in front of me and they said, who’s your mother there? That one, I said. And they told me, no, it’s not that one; that was her sister. I still remember.6

Violetka Stubelj remembers that the economic aspect was not the only reason for her mother’s departure to Egypt, as they had a big farm at home and lacked nothing: “Papa said, why did she go, if she hadn’t, they could have had another child for so much land, no? In the end, it was just me and my brother. Such is fate.”7 To this day, she wishes that at least her mother would not have gone for such a long time. She left for the first time when Violetka was two years old and stayed for four years (from 1930 to 1934), returned, gave birth to Violetka’s brother and soon left again, for twelve long years (from 1935 to 1947). Violetka only saw her again when she was almost twenty, she spent her childhood in the care of her grandparents. Bozˇenka Jelercˇicˇ from Prvacˇina, both of whose grandmothers were aleksandrinke, pointed out the subtle nuances of relationships within families that could cause the departure of young wives to Egypt, even if the economic situation was not so dire: You have to look at what it was like in some families. The bride got married, came to the house, but the mother-in-law was there and wanted to eat her alive. It often started from there. The young one had nowhere to retreat. The mother-in-law had children young enough to be her grandchildren, sometimes there were twenty years between the eldest and the youngest. And would not let go of anything. And so the bride left for Egypt.8

5 Dragotin Volk, interview by author, tape recording, 28 June 2005, Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, Slovenia. 6 Ibid. 7 Violetka Stubelj, interview by author, tape recording, 3 November 2005, Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, Slovenia. 8 Bozˇenka Jelercˇicˇ, interview by author, tape recording, 13 November 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia.

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Life in Egypt The rich knowledge the women acquired during their life in Egypt was one thing that impressed me in my talks with aleksandrinke and their descendants. They spoke several languages; I myself met some who could communicate in French, English, some Arabic and Greek, and of course Italian.9 As they were nannies to children in another environment with a different culture and different religion, they gained knowledge on education and psychology. They were governesses, or companions to the wives of rich businessmen. To take on those roles, they had to hone certain communication skills. They internalised standards of hygiene that were higher than at home. They learned to be flexible, since they had to adapt to a different climate, different foods, different clothes, a different rhythm of work, and different tasks from those they carried out at home.

A house in Cairo, where an aleksandrinka worked in the 1930s Source: Slovene Ethnographic Museum

For aleksandrinke I met, the issue was all about individual inclusion in the families they worked for : even though in the rare moments of free time they did 9 They learnt Italian in primary school if they were children in the period when Gorisˇka was a part of Italy. The narrators who were born in Egypt, or left there in early childhood, speak and read Arabic.

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socialise amongst themselves and today we treat them as a group, they were not, in fact, one. Every single one of them had to adjust to the family members of the employer’s family, their interpersonal relationships, the family climate, rules, and the hidden language characteristics. In my research I never met an aleksandrinka who was a wet nurse, but rather met ones who were nannies, chambermaids, and companions, known as dames de compagnie. The latter was an expression they used themselves and it meant a woman who accompanied the wife of their employer through all the tasks of a more personal nature: she took care of her clothes, helped her with personal hygiene, accompanied her for walks, and kept her company during the day, and also evenings. So Lidija Susicˇ mostly remembers the long evenings, often extended into the night during which she played cards with the lady. The work was indeed not difficult, but it was often psychologically demanding. Not least, it is for this exceptional emotional and care dimension, on the level of subjective experience and everyday negotiations of loyalty and love, that domestic work is incomparable with any other work. Generally, we can see that aleksandrinke in Egypt, both in Cairo and in Alexandria, were socially stratified. Some served very rich families, mostly Jewish, as governesses, nannies, or sometimes chambermaids. Their work was strictly prescribed and a part of the hierarchy of other house chores and servants. ˇ erne who spent twenty-two years working for an Alexandrian Jewish Marija C family, remembers: There were three people, the son, the wife, and the husband. Eleven persons were working for the family. There was the cook, there was an assistant to the cook, there were two who served tables, two taking care of the flat, I didn’t sweep my room by myself. But, there was a lot of work every day. Then there was the gardener, and the one who washed cars, they had a chauffeur, and a night guard, and a washerwoman. I was a chambermaid.10

For the next family, Marija worked as a nanny. It was a Jewish family with French citizenship. The master was a surgeon and in 1958 they had to leave Egypt together. After a couple of years in Beirut, they left to the USA, to Boston. Marija remembers their life together : “These children had me for a mother, I’d say. I had a lot of patience with them. Not that she wasn’t a good mother, but it was like, they grew attached to me, right. We grew attached to each other.”11 Aleksandrinke who worked for wealthy families like to remember the comfort they had there. Like Alberta Gregoricˇ from Prvacˇina, born in 1928. First, her nona, her mother, and two sisters of her mother were in Alexandria, later her father, and when she was six years old they sent for her as well. She spent twelve ˇ erne, interview by author, tape recording, 28 October 2005, Bilje, Slovenia. 10 Marija C 11 Ibid.

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years there, from 1934 to 1946. At sixteen she became a nanny in a family with two children. Her story : “The lady was ill, and the doctor prescribed her cream with a bit of cocoa on top to eat, and she always gave me some. Everything was open to me, always. I got up in the morning, and there was coffee with milk and a big piece of bread. I’d be a lady today if I’d stayed there.”12 Violetka Stubelj remembers her Aunt Rafaela and her decision to live in Egypt: “Yes, you know, she got a second chance there. She took it. She did the right thing. For forty years, she said, she never lifted a finger, she never even rinsed a spoon, she had a cook, she had a servant. She had a nice life.”13 Rafaela Kouhi (n¦e Volk) was born in Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino in 1908, left for Egypt in 1929 and there married Neom Kouhi, a rich factory owner. Today, they are both buried in the graveyard in Gradisˇcˇe. For the family, Aunt Rafaela was a symbol of wealth and a possibility to achieve a beautiful and wealthy life by leaving for Egypt. She helped the family at home in different ways, with clothes and money. I was surprised by the positive attitude narrators had towards Egypt. Based on the academic literature I read before doing fieldwork in Gorisˇka, I was more prepared to hear negative and sad memories, but it was not the case. “Egypt was a very beautiful country, let me say this first, and Alexandria was a very beautiful city,”14 said Alberta Gregoricˇ and surprised me tremendously. After that, I heard many beautiful memories as well as many sad and heart-breaking ones. During my research in Gorisˇka, I found testimonies that almost bordered legends when the descendants’ were narrating the urgency of breastfeeding for infant survival in the time when no formulas were around, and their grandmothers’ departure to Egypt. A granddaughter of a woman who left as a wet nurse in the mid-1920s told me that “Nona went down with the milk of her daughter. The family who hired her was an elderly French couple, both in their sixties, who discovered a foundling on their doorstep, and called nona, because the wife couldn’t breastfeed, of course.”15 We can find some testimonies about wet nurses in expert literature for the time after World War I as well, but they are, in fact, relatively few, considering how deeply ingrained the image of an aleksandrinka as a wet nurse is. Dorica Makuc talks about wet nurses a lot, but among numerous life stories she lists in her book, she only has one wet nurse’s story, that of Marija Mozeticˇ from Miren. Marija Mozeticˇ went to Egypt as a wet nurse in 1926 and left her six-month-old son at home, whom her sister “raised on the dummy” (Makuc 1993, 119). She decided to go to Egypt because they were in huge debt renovating the home and 12 Alberta Gregoricˇ, interview by author, field notes, 19 May 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia. 13 Violetka Stubelj, interview by author, tape recording, 3 November 2005, Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, Slovenia. 14 Alberta Gregoricˇ, interview by author, field notes, 19 May 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia. 15 Dasˇa Koprivec, field notes, TZ 15.

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Nannies in a park in Alexandria in the 1930s Source: Slovene Ethnographic Museum

to prevent her husband from leaving to Argentina, which was the migration alternative at the time for families who were poor or in debt. In my research, I got two testimonies about wet nurses for the period before World War I, one left in 1903, the other in 1906. Both returned. Indirectly, other wet nurses were mentioned in the conversations, usually mothers-in-law or great-grandmothers (the so-called bisnone) to the narrators. The testimonies about wet nurses who left for Egypt in the 1920s and the 1930s are more precise. The daughter of a wet nurse from Prvacˇina told us that her mother went to Egypt in 1922, when the narrator was seven months old. Mother and Father had both been widowed and this was the second marriage for both. In 1922 they already had five children altogether, and the house was poor. After her departure her mother never returned home other than for occasional visits and she died in Cairo in 1959. The narrator also said: “We got nothing from our mothers, nothing at all, they left us and they went.”16 A granddaughter of a wet nurse who also left from Prvacˇina summarises the family history : Nona left in 1925, after her husband’s death. Nona married to her husband’s farm, where she wasn’t well received. She gave birth to two children. After the birth of the

16 Dasˇa Koprivec, field notes, AO7 – 01.

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second child, her husband, who worked for the railways, fell ill and died of pneumonia. With the death of her husband, her status in the family fell down to zero.17

What to do? She decided to go to Egypt, as a wet nurse. Her daughter was nine months old. A daughter of a wet nurse from Bukovica told us that her mother left in 1930, after her first child, the narrator’s brother, was born: “Mother left in 1930 and returned in December 1939. She went to breastfeed a two-month-old girl. Her goal was to buy property. She earned it in three years, but then you want more.”18

Life at home Aleksandrinke had to readjust to their home environment when they returned from Egypt. At home, their Egyptian-acquired knowledge (for example, languages), had no value and could not be used constructively. They treated their own children with detachment. Their relationships to their husbands can be most explicitly observed through the words of Vidojka Vecciet, the granddaughter of an aleksandrinka, from Prvacˇina: “Some of them wouldn’t even come home while their husbands were alive.”19 The material standard upon returning home was very poor compared to the one in Egypt. We can assume that significantly fewer would have returned, had the return not been essential due to the change of the political system in Egypt in the 1950s. Together with the wealthier stratum of the European and Jewish families, aleksandrinke also left. Bozˇenka Jelercˇicˇ remembers: And then, when they came home, they were shocked! None of them expected this. Even if you’re with your children every day, there are problems, and not small ones. Imagine that you come home and get a formed boy or girl; it also depended what words the husband used. You know, they were used to manners and a proper upbringing over there.20

She also mentions the tense relationship between her mother and her grandmother, as both her father and her mother were children of aleksandrinke: “Besides, my mother couldn’t even look at any photos from Egypt, because her mother had also been in Egypt and sent her home when she was three months old.”21 Violetka Stubelj remembers living with her mother after the latter’s twenty-year absence: “We didn’t get along, because we weren’t used to her. We 17 18 19 20 21

Dasˇa Koprivec, field notes, TZ 15. Dasˇa Koprivec, field notes, AO7 – 04. Vidojka Vecciet, interview by author, field notes, 19 May 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia. Bozˇenka Jelercˇicˇ, interview by author, field notes, 3 November 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia. Ibid.

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were used to Nona. And Mama also, she was used to over there and those children. I used to have photos, too, of those children that she used to look after. But I don’t know where they are, it’s been many years, no?”22 For this reason, life in Egypt remained a concealed theme for a long time after aleksandrinke returned as remembers the granddaughter of an aleksandrinka from Prvacˇina, Milojka Bitezˇnik: “Women didn’t want to talk about it. They skipped a generation, they skipped my mother, they skipped me.”23 The son of an aleksandrinka, Peter Zorn, remembers: “They didn’t want to talk about that outwardly. They talked amongst themselves, but alone, when the husband was not around.”24 I believe that one of the strong identities of aleksandrinke was their perennial otherness: they were different in Egypt when they had to adapt to the new family, the fashion, the food, the climate, and learn the languages, and they were again different at home, where they had to re-adjust. This otherness is clearly shown if we consider language. In the book Aleksandrinke, its author Dorica Makuc introduces the story of Andr¦e Sidhan, who as a child was looked after by Marija Mozeticˇ from Miren. Andr¦e remembers that during their trips to the park, when her nanny met her friends “she felt angry, because the Slovenians were speaking amongst themselves and the child understood not one bit” (Makuc 1993, 121). I encountered identical narratives during my visits to Gorisˇka. The interlocutors remembered that aleksandrinke liked to chat among themselves, for example, on Sundays after mass, but as soon as an adult from outside of their “Egyptian circle” approached, they shut up, or when a child approached them, switched to French, English, or even Arabic. Peter Zorn remembers: “They wouldn’t let you near, they didn’t let anyone near!”25 As much as they could, they adjusted to the home environment so they would not provoke even more opposition: “At home they were always wearing black, as they were used to,” said Bozˇenka Jelercˇicˇ when we were looking at the photos of her exquisitely dressed grandmother on the photos from Egypt. Now it has been fifty and more years from the return of the last aleksandrinke and their personal testimonies are becoming rarer and more precious. The change in time has left its mark in their legacy as well. Although the departure of wives and young women was conditioned with the economy, the economic effect is today the least visible aspect of their migration. This was caused by great social and political changes in Yugoslavia after World War II, together with the nationalisation of agrarian land, when many of the estates that aleksandrinke had 22 Violetka Stubelj, interview by author, tape recording, 3 November 2005, Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, Slovenia. 23 Milojka Bitezˇnik, interview by author, field notes, 18 January 2008, Prvacˇina, Slovenia. 24 Peter Zorn, interview by author, field notes, 3 November 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia. 25 Ibid.

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paid for with their work in Egypt were nationalised. On the other hand, farming land was devalued and underutilised due to the rapid industrialisation in the region in the 1960s. Young people found employment outside villages; the land aleksandrinke had earned is today often unkempt and uncultivated as there is no one to work on it: “You can see, it used to be a farm, now it’s all overgrown,”26 lamented Violetka Stubelj. The economic standard in Gorisˇka after World War II also rapidly grew and much of what aleksandrinke saved or brought home did not have the same value in the new circumstances, as remembers the daughter of an aleksandrinka, Alojzija Gregoricˇ from Zalosˇcˇe: “My mother went to Egypt as a girl and worked there. She stayed for four years, she prepared her entire trousseau there. She had so much lace, crocheted lace. And nothing remained, everything got lost over the years.”27 Despite their seeming importance at the time, few everyday objects were preserved; instead, more keepsakes with symbolic value remained, a memory of grandmothers: like different jewellery boxes, brooches, jewellery, and souvenirs from Egypt. What they brought home was otherness, which has left a particular imprint on the third and fourth generation. Milojka Bitezˇnik remembered: I’m the granddaughter and I know more than my mother did. Because they were not interested, my mother wasn’t interested. We, grandchildren, were interested, but only as fantastic, improbable stories, not real, can you believe it? And only today I see that they were real! All those stories Nona told us, the animals, and the zoo. When we were sitting like that in the evening, shelling beans or something and Nona would tell us her memories from Egypt. And the children listened like it was something unbelievable.28

The children of aleksandrinke Migrations of the children of aleksandrinke This section examines the migrations from the 1930s to the 1960s, a period which was, in regard to migration currents from Europe towards the Middle East, extremely varied and dynamic. Migrations of the children of aleksandrinke went in three general directions: from Gorisˇka to Egypt, from Egypt to Gorisˇka, and from the 1940s onward also from Egypt to other parts of the world. The migrations of the children of aleksandrinke were not only a result of the family context, but also related to the wider economic and political circumstances in the 26 Violetka Stubelj, interview by author, tape recording, 3 November 2005, Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, Slovenia. 27 Alojzija Gregoricˇ, interview by author, field notes, 25 April 2005, Zalosˇcˇe, Slovenia. 28 Milojka Bitezˇnik, interview by author, field notes, 3 November 2005, Prvacˇina, Slovenia.

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stated era. We can say that – more so than the adults – the children were somehow the object of migration currents, since their moves depended on their parents’ decision, sometimes a decision of both, sometimes only the mother’s, depending on the relationships in the child’s primary family. A child had no say in her or his migration, but had to accept it and reconcile with it. During our talks, many narrators confessed how difficult it was to accept the move from their native village in Gorisˇka to Egypt, when their mothers came for them. Many hid or tried to run away from moving. “I didn’t want to go. But, what could I have done? I hid over there under the bridge. But my sister knew. She grabbed me and she took me. Yes, I was there and then they caught me and took me to Egypt,”29 says Franc Lukezˇicˇ, the son of an aleksandrinka, who left for Egypt as a six-yearold boy in 1935 together with his eight-year-old sister when their mother came back to take them. Children who were born in Gorisˇka and migrated to Egypt in the 1930s were born between 1922 and 1929. Most often it was the mother who first left and was later joined by the husband if he managed to secure suitable employment. Children who had stayed home during the first part of their parents’ work could now migrate from Gorisˇka to Egypt to join them, and the desire for the family to reunite after the parents had settled in the new environment was fulfilled. Alberta Gregoricˇ from Prvacˇina, a daughter of an aleksandrinka who was born in 1928 and lived in Alexandria from 1934 to 1946, explained: I went to Egypt because my mother was there. My mother left when I was two. Then Papa went, one year before me. I was six when Mama came to get me. Mama and Papa, at first they both worked in the same house, with one family. When I came to Egypt first I stayed with my aunt, for two years. Then Mama and Papa rented a flat, Papa started working in a flour mill and then slowly, I went to school, I went to the French school.30

However, nuclear families with both Slovenian parents were a minority in Egypt: mostly they were single parent families, headed by widowed mothers, or those who had lost track of their husbands after the latter had migrated to Argentina, or those whose husbands found work and income in Italy, or Switzerland, or in other European countries and thus had to take care of their children alone and sought a solution by earning their income in Egypt. Young women aged between fifteen and seventeen moved from Gorisˇka to Egypt for economic reasons. The academic literature has testimonies on this kind of migration from the time before World War I and also immediately after it (Sˇkrlj 2009, 168). Mothers brought their daughters to Egypt when the girls had finished primary school in Gorisˇka and could work. They found employment 29 Franc Lukezˇicˇ, interview by author, tape recordings, 20 May 2008, Rencˇe, Slovenia. 30 Alberta Gregoricˇ, interview by author, tape recording, 12 October 2007, Prvacˇina, Slovenia.

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A birthday celebration for a daughter of an aleksandrinka on the terrace of their home in Alexandria Source: Slovene Ethnographic Museum

with the family where their mother or another relative worked before. Such migration was a consequence of the family economic distress and the need for every family member to contribute to the family budget as soon as possible. Therefore already as adolescents, girls left for Egypt. They worked as nannies and maids, they went to Egypt to work and thus added to the part of the income that mother contributed with her work in Egypt. The majority of these girls stayed there and got married, usually to a non-Slovenian. In the families of aleksandrinke that had several children with an age difference between the oldest and the youngest of twenty or more years, at the same time some children lived in Gorisˇka and some in Egypt. The eldest daughters, who were twenty, eighteen, or sixteen lived and worked with their mother in Egypt, while the youngest baby stayed with relatives back home.31 Within the same family there were different migration processes and they changed continuously. The moves from Gorisˇka to Egypt and back can be traced through generations, as the narrators remember the migrations of their mothers who left for Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century, many of them as sixteenyear-old young women who started working straight away. Then their children and grandchildren also started to migrate, in some cases in the 1960s, it was their

31 Viljem Sulicˇ, interview by author, tape recording, 27 July 2007, Logatec, Slovenia.

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great-grandchildren who were at the end of this migration chain and moved from Egypt to Australia, Argentina, Canada, or elsewhere.

Testimonies of the children of aleksandrinke about the life in Egypt In this section I present the testimonies of those children who moved to Egypt from Gorisˇka, and those who were born in Egypt. Here I would like to go beyond the stereotype that is attributed to aleksandrinke, namely, that they, without fail, left their children at home when they went to Egypt, that the children were left alone, in the care of their grandmothers or other close female relatives or neighbours. How this image of a departing aleksandrinka is anchored in the Slovenian consciousness can be seen in the debates about their migration process and it is even reinforced in many expert/academic and popular publications in different media. Very little is known about the family life of Slovenian spouses or spouses from different nationalities and the important role of men in family lives of aleksandrinke. Based on my research I have found that the children of aleksandrinke have been extremely important witnesses on the life in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. They complement the existing knowledge that most often focused its interest on merely aleksandrinke themselves. Their children represent the new generation and often their view is the view of those who were born in Egypt. The period I am talking about is the time from the 1930s to the 1960s in Egypt. I will present the memories of those who today live in Gorisˇka and those who live in other countries. I have established many connections in Italy, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland. Contact has either taken place electronically or through interviews that I conducted when the narrators were visiting Slovenia. The content of this part includes multiple talks with over twenty children of aleksandrinke, those who were born in Gorisˇka and later joined their mothers in Egypt and also those who were born in Egypt. The children who were born in Gorisˇka and later joined their mothers in Egypt were, as explained before, born between 1922 and 1929. Their mothers are from the generation of aleksandrinke born around the turn of the century, from 1900 to 1910. They went to Egypt in the mid-1920s when the crisis after the World War I in Gorisˇka was the greatest (Wohinz, Pirjevec 2000, 42 – 45). They left because of a great social and economic distress that was even more compounded and painful if they were the wives of men who had gone to Argentina and had never been heard from again (Sjeklocˇa 2004, 95 – 108); or they were widows. Mothers and children in families where the mother was the first to leave and was later joined by her husband and later still by the child(ren) were better off. Life together depended on the nature of the mother’s and father’s work. If the

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mother was a nanny or a chambermaid with a family, she lived in and had no home of her own (Hrzˇenjak 2007, 40 – 45). This made family life really difficult. In such cases the spouses, albeit in the same city had to live separately, each with their own employer; the husband was a chauffeur, gardener or handyman with one family, the wife worked with another family as a nanny or a maid. In such cases, they could only bring their children over when they were old enough to go to school. Schools in Cairo and Alexandria took boarders, which was very convenient for migrant families from different migrant communities (Warnock Fernea 2002). Slovenian children went to Italian, German, or French primary schools. Don Bosco Catholic School with a boarding house was very suitable for boys and parents often chose it. Thus a certain kind of family life was established in Cairo and Alexandria of a husband, wife, and child – although they lived separately, they were connected, because they lived in the same city and could visit each other often. Parents also called children to join them in case the extended family lived in Alexandria. When the grandmother and two or three aunts or cousins lived in Alexandria, the child from Gorisˇka could join this community although his mother worked as a nanny and lived in. In such cases, the child lived with aunts who were, for example, seamstresses; or the grandmother lived with one of her daughters and looked after the children of all of them. The extended family was especially important for those children who were in Egypt without a father who may have died; or maybe had decided not to migrate and to stay at home. There were many such cases. The wife went to Egypt to work and the spouses became estranged during the years, or they had growing disagreements between them, so the wife decided to return home to get the child (ren) and take them to Egypt. I found several cases when children had never seen the father again or had no other contact with him, because the parents severed all contact. In such cases we can talk about de facto divorces of spouses, although they were not formalised since the Church fervently opposed the separation of marriage. In such cases the father role was taken by another adult male from the extended family, maybe an uncle, an aunt’s husband, or an older cousin. Franc Lukezˇicˇ, a son of an aleksandrinka, who last saw his father at the age of six remembers: “Of course I was sorry that I had no more contact with my father. He was my father, after all. But, you know, when something is taken from you, something else is given back. My uncle was there, my aunt’s husband. He was really good to me, like a real father.”32 In this context, I find the phrase “he was like a father to me” interesting, because especially in researching aleksandrinke we find a lot of substitute roles, when, for example, the narrators refer to their childhood nannies with the phrase “she was like a mother to me” and those who 32 Franc Lukezˇicˇ, interview by author, tape recordings, 20 May 2008, Rencˇe, Slovenia.

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were left behind as children in the care of their grandmothers define the latter as being “like a mother to me”, or even their fathers with the memory of “he was a mother and a father in one to me”. In Egypt children of aleksandrinke finished primary and vocational education; they trained to be mechanics, toolmakers, young women became seamstresses, typists, and so on. They also learnt several languages. In every primary school they learnt at least three languages, depending on which school they attended: French schools taught in French, and had English and Arabic as subjects, Italian school did the same in Italian, German schools taught the subjects in German, etc. I have to emphasise that all the children introduced here who were born in Gorisˇka between 1922 and 1929 never went to Slovenian school. In the time of their life in Gorisˇka this territory was annexed to Italy, which completely eliminated education in Slovenian language (Wohinz, Pirjevec 2000, 53 – 55). For those children who moved to Egypt from Gorisˇka and joined further migration currents when leaving Egypt in the 1950s and moved to, for example, Australia or Canada, linguistic identity appears as a very illustrative indicator of their complex identity. The son of an aleksandrinka, Franc Lukezˇicˇ who followed his mother to Alexandria at the age of six explained that when he came to the Italian School Don Bosco in Alexandria he could not speak a word of Italian, because he had not yet started school back home and could only communicate in Slovenian. He gradually learned Italian in the Italian school in Alexandria. It should be emphasised that Slovenians from Gorisˇka at the time were Italian citizens, so they often chose an Italian school. Regardless of where Slovenians came to Egypt from, as a community they were not strong enough to form their own Slovenian school. Communication in Slovenian was thus limited to the private sphere and to a lesser extent to a few hours weekly at the asylum of the school sisters in Alexandria or Cairo, and maybe in church. We must stress, though, that the churches frequented by Slovenians were Catholic, not Slovenian, so speakers of different languages congregated there. In the 1950s Franc Lukezˇicˇ moved from Egypt to Australia, where at first he could speak no English. In five decades in Australia he internalised the English, and when he returned to his native village for the first time after his departure, he could no longer communicate with relatives in neither Slovenian nor Italian. Only after a longer stay in Slovenia he started recalling Slovenian and Italian words so that communication with relatives is no longer so difficult.33 33 Let me here explain that this is an extraordinary story of a son of an aleksandrinka who joined his mother in Egypt at the age of six, spent twenty years of his life in Egypt and moved to Australia in 1955, where he lived until 2008, when, after seventy-two years of living abroad, he decided to spend the rest of his life in the village of his birth. He sold all his property in

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Children in Cairo and Alexandria integrated into the society that was, in the studied period – from the 1930s to the 1950s – multicultural, multiethnic, and multi-religious. Social differences were more important, said Claudia Roden (2008), who as a child had a Slovenian nanny from Batuje named Maria Koron. She remembered that affluent Jews in Cairo and Alexandria did not associate with poor Jews and that her father never allowed her to go to the part of Cairo where the poor were living. The well-to-do Jews, such as Claudia’s family, the Doueks, associated with English, French, and Jewish families of similar standing.34 Thus neither the children of aleksandrinke nor the children cared for by aleksandrinke mention ever meeting or playing together, although they lived in the same city.35 Despite that, children did come into contact, at least in passing, with family members and other staff at the place where their mothers worked and were thus exposed to different cultures. Their parents mostly worked for Jewish families who came to Egypt from different parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. They worked for the families of Spanish, Portuguese, and Austrian Jews; Egyptian Jews and Jews from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, and so on. A part also found employment with Greek, Armenian, and Lebanese families. Servants of other nationalities worked for these families as well. Cooks were mostly Arabs, while wet nurses were also Egyptian, Italian, and Greek women. On the other hand, a nanny brought her own character to the family, her habits and values, so her influence over the children she cared for was more long term than it may have seemed at first it could possibly be. They became new family members, for ten, fifteen, even more than twenty years. Slovenian nannies brought their religious faith (Catholicism) into the non-Catholic families, introduced new food – dishes from Primorska – for example, gnocchi, polenta, pasta, and potica, the taste and smell of which the children they cared for, now adults, remember to this day. Some aleksandrinke taught them Italian and also a couple of Slovenian words. They were there as these children were growing up, so their importance was not only in fulfilling the household chores. The growing children also adopted their values, as Ellis Douek, Claudia Roden’s brother, remembers their nanny Maria Koron:

Australia and made a new home for himself in Gorisˇka, and also obtained Slovenian citizenship in 2009. 34 Claudia Roden, interview by author, tape recordings, 3 March 2008, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 35 There were occasional contacts during the brief visits of aleksandrinke to their homes in Gorisˇka, when they were accompanying their employers on holidays in Europe. The children of aleksandrinke and the children cared for by aleksandrinke did establish contact, but women, in relation to both, typically paid more attention to the latter, because although they were at home, they were still at work. This left their children with deep emotional trauma.

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I suspect that Maria may be responsible for the surge of optimism, almost satisfaction, which I still experience when struck by adversity – she brought me up to expect a plus in return for each minus, even though for me it has had to be limited to this life, as I do not have the benefit to the necessary dimension to extend my own accounts into the next. (Douek 2004, 101)

Slovenian nannies met French, English, and Greek nannies in parks. Their own children absorbed this variety of cultures, ethnicities, and religions. Although the encounters were short, they were repeated through a longer period of time so the children of aleksandrinke adopted certain nutrition habits, rules of comportment and other behaviours they saw at their parents’ employers. Their identity was even more formed during the educational process, especially if their primary and secondary education included a boarding house where pupils of different ethnicities came together. In the class of Dragotin Volk, the son of an aleksandrinka, who trained as a mechanic in an Italian school, there were, in 1939, boys of Italian, Greek Maltese, Syrian, Egyptian, Turkish, Jewish, and Armenian origin. He was the only Slovenian amongst them. Although most of the pupils were Christians, they also had Jewish and Muslim schoolmates.36

Forming their own family and professional identity Children who came to Egypt from Gorisˇka spent their childhood, their youth, and a part of their adulthood in Cairo or Alexandria. For this reason, they say that Egypt was their fundamental education for everything, their starting point in life. Not only did they acquire education and profession in Egypt, many met their life partner there and got married. Their partners came from different nationalities, as Slovenians were a part of the ethnically and culturally diverse society there. Most of them were married in the mid-1940s or early 1950s, when they were in their twenties. Thus children of aleksandrinke created many nationally mixed families in Cairo and Alexandria. The children of aleksandrinke who were born in Cairo or Alexandria between 1937 and 1948 are a decade or younger than those who came to Egypt from Gorisˇka. After 1938, due to the unrest in the Mediterranean prior to the looming World War II, people from Gorisˇka no longer went to Egypt, thus the last children arrived there in the mid-1930s. For the children of aleksandrinke born in Egypt, there are some particularities. They were more often born in nationally mixed marriages, they feel a stronger emotional bond to Egypt and nostalgia for the country of their birth, after leaving Egypt they had more problems adjusting 36 Dragotin Volk, born in 1922 in Gradisˇcˇe nad Prvacˇino, joined his mother in Cairo in 1932. Since 1962 he has been living in Turin with his family after having spent thirty years in Egypt.

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to the climate, food, and other things, especially those who left for Europe or Canada where the climate is much colder than in the Mediterranean Egypt. Aleksandrinke who started their own families in Egypt in the 1940s came there at the end of 1920s or beginning of the 1930s, when they were between seventeen and twenty years old. They came alone, or they joined their mothers and aunts who came to Egypt before them. They found employment as nannies, chambermaids, cooks, dressmakers. By the beginning of the 1940s they had managed to save some money and find themselves a partner, mostly a partner who was not Slovenian. Their children are most often products of marriages with Italians, Swiss, Hungarians, Maltese, Lebanese, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and also Egyptians. Their husbands were often Egyptian-born, often from nationally mixed unions themselves. Thus in 1938 an aleksandrinka who came from Prvacˇina married her Egyptian-born husband who identified as Italian: his father was an Italian, his mother a Slovenian from Prvacˇina.37 Another one’s husband was also Egyptian-born, but declared himself Greek; his father was Greek, and his mother from Dalmatia (Zˇigon 2003, 101).

The family of an aleksandrinka from Prvacˇina in a park in Alexandria in the 1940s Source: Slovene Ethnographic Museum

The families used more languages at the same time, depending on the origin of the parents and the school the children attended. The children had contact with Slovenian through their mothers and her relatives while they were living to37 Amalia Romanelli, interview by author, tape recordings, 22 July 2006, Prvacˇina, Slovenia.

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gether, then this contact could be severed for years. Children born in this generation in Egypt also spoke better Arabic, because after the 1952 revolution it became a compulsory subject in all schools, public and private alike. The narrators I spoke to were very proud of their knowledge of Arabic. Some still keep their primary school textbooks and can still read them. Hedi Metelko, who graduated from high school in Alexandria in 1960 described an interesting experience of visiting her old school as a tourist in 2008: “When I visited the old German school in Alexandria I went to for twelve years, the girls, mostly Egyptian Muslims, applauded because I could still write my name in Arabic on the board and talk to them in their language.” (Metelko 2008, 2) Girls often attended the German Deutsche Schule der Borromäerinnen, ran by German school sisters. Primary schools for Christian children in Egypt were run by different church congregations, for example, Franciscans, Salesians, school sisters. Schools were separated by gender. Different nationalities that had greater political and economic power had their own schools. As explained earlier, Slovenians did not have their own school. They sent their children to the nearest appropriate one, and in cases of mixed marriages, often chose the one that fit the father’s nationality. So children went to not only Greek or Italian, but also German or French schools. Those children who were born in Egypt in two-parent or extended families were usually not boarders, because their mothers no longer worked after marriage. Their fathers did different jobs and were responsible for the family budget and mothers mostly stayed at home. Some, particularly the Jews and the Lebanese, as well as the Greeks and the Italians, worked in profitable crafts, some were also employed in the cotton and transport industries. They were bank clerks, architects, and builders, owners of small workshops or transportation companies, foremen and technicians in the cotton and textile industry. They lived in flats they owned or rented; some were also tenants in factory housing or compounds that were already built in Alexandria and Cairo in the first half of the twentieth century. Children took school busses to school because the transport from different parts of town was well organised. Life was relatively prosperous right up to the beginning of the 1940s because, as Viljem Sulicˇ, the son of an aleksandrinka, said: “Nobody was hungry in Egypt.”38 In the 1940s the circumstances stared to worsen rapidly because of World War II, this was corroborated with internal turmoil, the revolts of the Egyptian people against English and French economic and political predominance. A period of unrest and instability began. It was hard for the families from Gorisˇka, as they had Italian citizenship: they were thus labelled “dangerous” because Italy was an enemy of France and of Britain, who 38 Viljem Sulicˇ, interview by author, tape recordings, 27 July 2007, Logatec, Slovenia.

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Alexandria Source: Slovene Ethnographic Museum

had geopolitical interest in Egypt. After 1940 all Slovenian men with Italian citizenship became undesired aliens. Most of them were put in internment camps. A lot of children thus survived almost four years, from 1940 to September 1943, without fathers. Their mothers sought help and solidarity within the extended family, and some re-entered the workforce in this period.

Conclusion When we are discussing the concepts of memory and legacy in evaluation of aleksandrinke we should point out the insufficient research of the archival sources that could tell us more about the history of Slovenian emigration to Egypt. The archival sources are poorly researched, or not at all. The research is made more difficult because Slovenians are not in fact registered as Slovenians, but rather as Austrians, Italians, Yugoslavs (Haag 2004, 10 – 17). This was also shown in the research that the Slovene Ethnographic Museum and the Society for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of the Alexandrian Women carried out in March 2010, when we registered all the graves of the Slovenians at the Latin Cemetery in Cairo, and all the entries in the local civil register of deaths, where not even one name of aleksandrinke – that we knew from the testimonies of their descendants – was registered as Slovenian; instead they were recorded as Austrian, Italian, and Yugoslav citizens. If it was true for previous decades that aleksandrinke were a theme that people rather did not mention in the discussions in Gorisˇka, today this no longer holds true. Particularly the generations of granddaughters and great-granddaughters talk proudly about their grandmothers and great-grandmothers. They empha-

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sise that their ancestors brought home “a challenge of cosmopolitanism”. They brought the openness of the world, the tales of the south of France or Switzerland, where they spent summers with the children they cared for because it got too hot in Alexandria. They brought European fashions, knowledge of foreign languages, novelties in nutrition and different dishes when they started preparing molokhiya, hummus, tabbouleh, foul. In the villages of Prvacˇina, Bilje, Bukovica, Zalosˇcˇe, Rencˇe, and many other villages in Gorisˇka, the memory of aleksandrinke is preserved through material cultural heritage that can be seen even as we enter many a house: tea pots, china, tablecloths. On the kitchen counter in Bilje we can also see the pictures of the children whom an aleksandrinka cared for sixty years ago and their descendants: right till her death the children she cared for visited her and her relatives and regularly sent her birthday greetings and pictures of their own children and grandchildren.

III. Migration and National Imagination

Dirk Hoerder

6.

Re-Remembering Women Who Chose Caregiving Careers in a Global Perspective: Mothers of the Nation or Agents in Their Own Lives?

Introduction It has become a topos in migration studies that migrating women are not counted in statistics, are not included in historical accounts and analysis, are not part of public memory. This does not only falsify history, it also does violence to the women’s emotions. In this chapter I will briefly place the experience of aleksandrinke – who also went to Cairo, Port Said, and other cities – in a regional context of silencing of memory. Next I will move to the data on migrating women and the concept of women’s work as unskilled. In the concluding sections I will place the experience of aleksandrinke in a global context and suggest translocal and transcultural frames of analysis. Like the women from the Gorisˇka region migrating for employment in households to Egypt, South Tyrolean women migrated to households in Italy after World War I and women from Styria to neighbouring Switzerland after World War II. As different as were their individual personalities and the families for whom they worked as similar were economic frames and societal reprobation. All left constraining circumstances: agricultural Gorisˇka with little or no wage-work for women and no stateside economic development policy ; South Tyrol annexed to Italy after the lost war begun by the military-minded Habsburg elites; Styria on the margins of the small Habsburg Empire’s Austrian remnant after another war declenched by the aggressive “Greater German” Nazi elite. All of the women had to cope in the “small” spheres of their lives with the destruction and marginalisation that “greater” men and institutions had “achieved”. The women could cope because they had capabilities and wanted to regain agency over the course of their lives. The paths they chose, domestic and caregiving labour, helped their families, was important for the local societies of departure, provided input to the employer households – but were not condoned by gender ideology and discourse. A blanket of silence or worse was imposed on their experiences. Many could never talk about their lives and achievements until decades later scholars began to analyse the data and interview surviving mi-

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grants. Public non-memory can be brutal. Those who imposed silence were the local Honoratioren – men who did not honour women’s work (Lüfter, Verdorfer, Wallnöfer 2006; Prettenthaler-Ziegerhofer, Schmidlechner, Sonnleitner 2010; Sonnleitner 2011). Thus the research on aleksandrinke deals with broad issues. These women’s experiences are symptomatic for gender roles and skewed historical memories in the larger region and across the globe.

Societies, states, nation-states, and cultural self-affirmation Historians and political scientists have, for long, established a theory of state and a state-centred historical memory. Most of this was (and is) pure fiction. States were and still are considered permanent while individuals are said to be ephemeral. However, women or men born in the early 1900s outlived the Habsburg Empire, various small successor states, Nazi annexation or occupation with Quisling regimes, two world wars, and the Great Depression. These men and women had to continue their lives while states and economies collapsed – were collapsed by the political and economic elites – with millions of deaths and vast destruction of living conditions resulting. The German term for elites, staatstragende Schichten, is merely a smokescreen – they are the suckers. Let us look at the theory and discourse. Since the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution states are theorised to treat each and every citizen as equal before the law. Nations, theorised at the same time with additions in the nineteenth century, postulate the opposite: they place the nation above minorities whether long resident or recently migrated. The label nation-state thus reflects a contradiction in terms and, as more recent analyses by scholars who now include women show, exclude, and hierarchise. As regards women: according to law and discourse their cultural nationality and political citizenship was derived from men, fathers or husbands, to the 1950s; thus the men could claim possession, “our women”; voting rights were denied to women into the twentieth century ; their right to property ownership and their access to societal resources was severely limited. Women, who decided to migrate to a polity different from that run by their men, achieved control over their own wages and, to some degree, over their own lives. The contradictions of nation-state ideology went further. While not providing women with a space of their own and rights equal to men the male stateside ideologues constructed women as “mothers of the nation” who would inculcate children with “national” values. Given the gender and ethno-cultural segregation, national values meant male views of values, anti-minority views or hate, gender discrimination, aggressiveness against neighbouring peoples and (similarly skewed) polities. While historians have labelled the decades from the 1880s

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to the 1920s the apogee of the nation-state, much of Europe was ruled by empires – Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern – or was the realm of states of many cultures like Great Britain or Switzerland. Of these the Habsburg Empire – even if ruled by an increasingly German-chauvinist elite – at least was honest in calling itself “a state of many peoples”. The many peoples, excepting the hegemonic German-language one – on the other hand had to struggle to continue living their cultures with distinct dynamisms. They, too, pursued concepts of maintaining culture but they had to do this from a defensive stance rather than the aggressive-expansionist-exploitative one of the institutionally domineering and discursively hegemonic ethno-cultural group. Slovenians had faced in the past the Habsburg re-catholicisation with its stifling of scholarly inquiry and was facing in the nineteenth century the economic neglect of the periphery by the Vienna metropole. Geographical factors, proximity to the port of Trieste and sea-lanes, did, however, open options, thus permitting the development of transmediterranean and transatlantic networks. Temporary departure or permanent emigration could deplete the Slovenians’ cultural and material resources or add to them materially by remittances and mentally by enlarging options, by an awareness that other frames than the Habsburg one existed in which to pursue life courses. In this context women raised children or emigrated to improve their lives. If seven million men and women left the (ephemeral) German states-Second Reich-Weimar Republic-Third Reich-occupied or liberated zones-Federal Republic from the 1830s to the 1950s, each and every one of them knew that the construct of Germanness did not feed them or provide options for a meaningful life. Many wanted agency to work for a better life for themselves and their children. Migration is a critique of the shortcomings of both nation and state of departure. Among those who stayed, middle-class families often hired domestic labour and nannies – jobs labelled female in vague but deeply rooted discourses and formalised economists’ categorisations. Those hired come from a town’s lower classes speaking a different sociolect, from neighbouring rural regions’ peasant families speaking a different dialect, or from cross-cultural-border families of different language. Their life-praxes and values were different – but hierarchically merged in one household. In Vienna many of the Kindermädchen and Haushaltshilfen came from the marginal Burgenland or from further afar, cooks came from Bohemia or from one of the Balkan societies. National values? National food habits? In Trieste, many household workers – Haustöchter was the Swiss name for immigrant young Styrian women – came from Gorisˇka. In this peculiar frame of nation-state structures and discourses the absence of women from statistics and historical memory is a purposefully built-in aspect. The state-nation ideology is male-conceptualised, the institutions male-run, the data collected by men. All combined to label women as “dependents” of men

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and, in migration and most other statistics, did not count them separately and as individuals. While the conceptualisation-ideologisation of the male state is a nineteenth-century phenomenon, supported by twentieth-century male scholars, new approaches are slow to come. As late as the 1990s, decades after the admission of women into academic life and the development of women’s studies and gendered research (Morokvasic 1984; Harzig 2001), a United Nations Expert Group had to criticise that women were still often labelled “associational migrants, that is, moving as passive companions of other family members” (Bilsborrow, Zlotnik 1992; Boyd, Grieco 2003). Creating the borders that exclude is a project, is work – done by men. It is interest-driven. In the present, when women’s migrations are receiving ever more attention – the shortcomings of which we will discuss below – whole state apparatuses reconceptualise themselves from administrative or ruling institutions protecting or in charge of the state’s population to export organisation of labour and in particular of labouring women. The Philippine and Bangladesh states, for example, set quotas for women (and men) to depart in a given year once the state budget has been determined. Those sent out have to balance the deficits of external trade and state debt obligations by their remittances. As regards this economic level, the aleksandrinke balanced family budgets by their remittances. Through the input of wage income earned afar the families’ ever more marginal agricultural smallholdings – hit by global decreases of grain prices – could continue to function and those staying behind could keep their life-ways as well as their ancestral landholdings. To this aspect of family economies a cultural-national perspective added itself. When, after World War I, Gorisˇka (like South Tyrol) became Italian, the new – distant – state, especially when turned fascist, demanded payment of debts secured by land, that is, by the family inheritance, on penalty of confiscation of the possessions. The remittances of aleksandrinke permitted their Slovenian families from losing the land to the Italian state – their wages assumed a role in cultural survival and the Slovenian nation’s coherence. This achievement of women having taken charge of their lives was, however, not valued by men of the cultural elite, priests and writers in particular. Scholarship, some women scholars included, also has not emphasised the migrant women’s agency but has imposed a victimisation approach: women as (passive) exploited victims of economic conditions, patriarchal structures, constructed discourses. The denigration of the aleksandrinke in national literature – men’s writings of wide circulation sometimes deemed worthy of national prizes – represented and represents a slander approach to women’s work and life-projects.1 Such slander resembles the medieval pillory and involves a stig1 See the chapters by Katja Mihurko Ponizˇ and Marina Luksˇicˇ Hacin in this volume.

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matisation process intended to prevent others from following the model of independent lives presented by migrating women. Like the aleksandrinke, the South Tyrolean and Styrian women could express their suffering from such exclusionary discourses only late in their lives in their responses to the scholarly interviewers’ questions. Not only was these women’s departure met by the priests’, intellectuals’, writers’, and others’ reprobation approach but so was their return. Such climate of reprobation was meant to silence and did silence. Experiences that did not fit the ideology of the nation, regional gendered culture, and male interests had to be barred from public expression (Lüfter, Verdorfer, Wallnöfer 2006; Prettenthaler-Ziegerhofer, Schmidlechner, Sonnleitner 2010; Sonnleitner 2011; 2012). The migration of men, in such biased perspectives, was legitimate, as Ute Sonnleitner noted in the title of a presentation: “‘Weibliches’ Heimweh – ‘Männliches’ Fernweh?” These were societies that, in the words of a young Canadian author raised in an enclosed Mennonite community, had “no bars or, for women, visible exits” (Toews 2004, 53).

Women’s migrations: the data Many women did find exit options and the data on migrating and emigrating women are not as poor as has been assumed. For the Habsburg Empire Sylvia Hahn, referring to the work of the late nineteenth-century statistician and Staatswissenschaftler von Randow, has pointed out that regional and local data include everybody – women, men, children – and, under the institution of Heimatrecht, provide data on migration (Hahn 2008; Randow 1884). On a European scale, Marlou Schrover from Leiden University has reanalysed the data in the massive statistical compilation of Willcox and Ferenczi (Schrover 2013; Willcox, Ferenczi 1929; 1931). She presents the data in graphs for each country and concludes that migration in Europe, with some variations, involved about equal shares of men and women. Finally, on the global level, the authors of a collective project led by Katharine M. Donato and Donna Gabaccia have reassessed the available data. The authors have summarised the changes in gender ratios among international migrants, 1820 – 1930 (Donato, Gabaccia 2012).2 For migrations beginning in 1960, Hillmann and Wastl-Walter have compiled the international data and emphasised the near-equal gender ratio (Hillmann, Wastl-Walter 2011). Schrover (2013) comments on the recent catchword suggesting a feminisation of migration. Not only does the term not fit the empirical data about historical 2 With contributions by Elizabeth Zanoni, J. Trent Alexander and Annemarie Steidl, and Johanna Leinonen.

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migrations. In the gendered discourses, in which women’s agency is considered a threat by male masters of the discourse (master narrative, never mistress narrative), the term also suggests a problem and, like any problem, requires action by men-staffed bureaucracies.3 What is, in fact, new is that women leave first and that, compared to past migrations, a larger share leaves children behind. This increases their role as main breadwinners of their families. Those taking caregiving jobs – rather than domestic cleaning and general help – provide emotional labour to employer families, comforting their children while they have to leave their own in the care of others. Usually female relatives care for leftbehind children since husbands-fathers frequently do not assume the tasks of childcare or provide emotional support. They are non-practising family members in the words of a Canadian sociologist.4 In terms of cultural transmission of national values, children of one culture receive their socialisation from migrant women of another culture. They may impart general human values, perhaps human rights values – unless they are made inferior within the employer family and become servants of rather than caregivers for children. The caregiver migrants depart because of economic necessities imposed on them by the, often severe, constraints of their society-economy-state of origin. They deliberately choose caregiving tasks that require emotional in addition to physical labour. Caretaking may provide emotional rewards in addition to wages. The self-willed aspect of their choice is, however, often constrained by a receiving states’ frame of entry regulations: if a state grants entry visas to women – or women of a colour of skin other than white – only for caregiving and domestic labour, women are forced to enter this segment of the labour market. In a way, they might be compared to investors. Their goal is to invest their capabilities and achieve the best possible return – they are investors in their own life projects. In addition, if they have family, they often supported those remaining behind through remittances. Those scholars who postulate or emphasise victimisation and exploitation of migrating women need to reflect not only on the conditions of work and migrant women’s agency but also analyse women’s position in the society-family from which they departed. Departure in itself may involve a self-liberation from extremely constraining gender roles or individually abusive family relationships.

3 At many critical junctures in a society’s development, women/feminisation is being blamed by men: the feminisation of consumption, of schools’ teaching staff, of women’s entry into the labour market. 4 Interview, 9 Nov. 2000, of the author with Jean Burnet, York University, Glendon College. The late Jean Burnet was a sociologist and former research director for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

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Resident and migrant women’s work: skilled or unskilled? The migration of women from their homes, which provide few or no options and, in some cases, insufficient food, to the home-workspaces of employer families has been interpreted as a continuity of work in their sphere. An analysis of their trajectory indicates otherwise. When urban lower- or lower middle-class girls and women migrate into a middle-class household they have to cross a class border; rural women have to cross the border between peasant and urban lifestyles. Even within one specific ethno-cultural space this required and requires far more adjustment than the migration of men over larger distances from farm to infrastructural earthwork – building of railroads, canals, roads. At both ends of their journey they worked the ground and, given patterns of migration, did so in the company of co-ethnics. A Sardinian man’s experience is instructive: during his work stints in Naples, in Panama on the construction of the Panama Canal, and in Pennsylvania, he neither left his earth-working occupation nor his reference group of fellow Sardinians. In contrast, the life experiences of female domestic workers everywhere on the globe indicate constant close contact with employer families. In particular in live-in situations they had and have no room of their own – a space which male factory workers could create by distancing themselves from foremen, building labour union halls, or immersing themselves in pub or sports cultures (Lagumina 1981, 25 – 32). Analyses of women’s domestic and caregiving labour also suffer from the conceptual trap of the customary skilled-unskilled juxtaposition. This categorisation of societal discourses, economists’ theories, and employers’ wage-scales reflects nothing but gender ideology. Historically, work was skilled if certified – a useful construct in Europe’s urban world. Guilds, usually male, guaranteed highquality craftsmanship by certificates issued upon successful completion of an apprenticeship. During industrialisation the process was adapted to industry and by labour unions. In contrast, capabilities learned during childhood socialisation by observing, imitating, and practising (on-the-job training), whether women’s family labour, agricultural families’ labour, or families’ home production of marketable goods, were not certified and were, in a non sequitur, labelled unskilled. From the social convention of a certificate-skill connection an interest-driven regime of remuneration was and is deduced. It might be noted cynically that, at times when marriage was the norm, women who migrated as brides to patri-local new family homes received a marriage certificate that entitled them to life-long unpaid service labour. Most societies have labelled domestic and caregiving work, food production, home or factory-based production of clothing as unskilled, the production of durable goods and machinery as skilled. Thus, hewing stones for a building became skilled work, raising a child unskilled work. While in reproductive – as in productive – work some tasks may

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be learned quickly, women – the aleksandrinke among them – cooked and sewed as well as coddled, trained, and educated children. Most of these tasks, when certified, change categorisation to skilled and entitle the worker to adequate remuneration. Even at the height of steel-based industrialisation – on which historians have placed so much emphasis – the majority of wage-earners worked in food processing and textiles. To counter the denigration of migrant women’s paid household labour Christiane Harzig (2001) has argued, taking Canada as an example, that their strategies may be analysed under the concept of “Otherness as cultural resource”. Domestic workers’ “foreignness or otherness is one of the most substantial and tangible aspects of socio-cultural capital”. In a dialectical relationship, being different permits both entry into a distant society’s labour market segment – the goal to be achieved – and exploitation, a consequence to be avoided, if in any way possible. During the comparatively free admission regime of the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, industrial workers sought entry into receiving societies’ un- and semiskilled labour market segments as a pathway to improved family economies and life-course options. Under the repressive entry regimes of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, female service workers seek household and caretaking jobs as a stepping stone for improved lives. They “are hired precisely because they carry a different cultural baggage”. Demand for domestic and caregiving labour in a society cannot be satisfied without entry of Others.5 After admission, however, her Otherness also permits a “domestic worker to situate herself outside” the receiving culture with its specific hierarchical power relationships, which inevitably places her at the bottom. She may take recourse to the knowledge about her own social position at home and to her being essential [through remittances] to the family’s survival. She may also have a strong sense about her own culture’s superior food habits and child rearing practices. (Harzig 2001, 66)

Women need such resilience because: “The race-class-gender systems of ‘importing’ cultures provide for ready access to stereotypes in order to structure and organise historical ‘knowledge’ and present ‘experience.’ Cultural markers are attached to the women.”6 (Harzig 2001, 66) Ascriptions and hierarchisations are explicit. In late twentieth-century Italy, Filipina women are considered 5 Industrial employers sometimes bore the cost of recruitment and travel to obtain a reliable labour force; domestic workers often receive help from sympathetic employing women in negotiating bureaucracies and in language acquisition. 6 The preceding paragraphs on “otherness” follow closely, sometimes near-verbatim, Harzig (2001), “Domestics of the World (Unite?)”, but – even in case of quotations – are adapted to allow for comparison with nineteenth-century migrations.

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suitable domestic workers since they are Catholic and speak Spanish or English (in addition to Tagalog), while Somali women, who are black and from Italy’s former colony, are assigned inferior jobs (Chell 1997; Venturini 2004). Over time and across societies, women’s migration between the household into which they were born or married and a household in a different social space turned their domestic and caretaking work from unpaid into paid work. If conditions were miserable, the women could serve notice and leave for another job. In their families of birth they could serve notice that they would emigrate.

Comparisons: domestic and caregiving work in a global perspective To place the experience of the aleksandrinke in a globally comparative perspective, I will briefly discuss Chinese amah-chieh from the 1930s to the 1970s, Swedish maids in Chicago from the 1880s to the 1930s, and Finnish maids on both sides of the Canadian-U.S. border from the early 1900s to the 1930s. These women had reputations as positive as those of Slovenian women in Egypt. All pursued their own life-course strategies – single, married, in family contexts, as class-conscious workers. Chinese migration to Southeast Asia and, later, to British Malaysia was of long tradition. While most Chinese migrated as single men often with borrowed funds for the trip, the gradual establishment of Chinese mercantile communities implied (sequential) family migration and households with a demand for maids. Simple and dirty labour was the task of mui tsai – “little younger sister” as a euphemism similar to Haustochter. This institution involved a kind of servitude: Indebted parents sent a female child to a family of higher socioeconomic standing to which they were indebted. The child, as a kind of hostage, served as collateral. As worker she repaid the debt, favour, or immaterial obligation. This often involved abuse and exploitation. In contrast, amah-chieh were mature women who – contrary to most male labour migrants – paid their own fare from Canton to Malaysia, contacted chi mui (sworn sisters) in a lodging house (kongsi pang usually run by a woman) to inquire about prospective employers and their reputation. They would then negotiate working conditions and pay. Described – or mythologised – as domestic servants par excellence, the amah-chieh managed most upper class Chinese-Malaysian households from the late 1930s to the 1970s. They were nannies to infants and young children, authority to adolescents, nursemaids to the elderly. Given culturally-mandated respect for age, they became part of the employer family as elder sisters, chieh. At age 65 they usually retired. With independence in 1957, recruitment ended as did the system when the last amah-chieh reached retirement age. They were by Indonesian maids, poorly paid, often exploited, and frequently slandered as sex-hungry. The

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similarities to aleksandrinke are obvious as is the societal slandering of others (Gin Ooi 2013, 405 – 26). Another group of feminae migrantes moved from Europe to domestic work in North America. A study of women in Chicago, in the 1880s to 1920s, focused on Swedish maids, valued as highly as the aleksandrinke7 and, given the favourable local labour market, they established a well-travelled route from one particular region, Dalsland: Single young women arrived just in time for a position, informed through one of the millions of transatlantic letters to communities of origin and mobilised by a prepaid ticket from a female friend. Control over disbursing their wages permitted women to establish gender-specific migration routes and to decide whom to bring in. Some stayed in service for a decade or longer – comparatively Irish, Polish, and German women chose different labour market segments or, as maids, stayed for shorter periods and then married. A few Swedish maids used their wages to establish a farm for themselves in Dalsland – a feat they could never have achieved without migration. In Chicago, the customary half-day off allowed them to socialise and exchange information about employers and positions. Swedish men in Chicago coveted marriage to a maid – who had English-language skills and could prepare both Swedish and “American,” that is, Chicago-regional food. However, many of the women were disinclined to marry. Middle-class employers’ homes permitted a standard of living that immigrant husbands could not necessarily provide. Some SwedishAmerican male publicists begrudged such self-determination. They cautioned against marrying a domestic, who allegedly had not learned – or after arrival had unlearned – to be frugal. Still, these women contextualised their success story : First, they had protested working conditions in Sweden by emigrating. Rather than building a labour movement in Sweden and striking – temporary withdrawal of labour power – for better working conditions, they withdrew their labour and skills permanently by migrating. Second, they provided a critique of domestic service and counselled second-generation women against entering service. This notwithstanding their own major rise in status: In terms of their community’s cultural codes, they advanced from pigor, girls in service, to hemmadotter, a term used in Sweden for girls whose parents provided for them at home but referring in Chicago to women who provided for themselves (Harzig 1997; Matovic 2005).8 A third group, Finnish immigrant women, lived and worked on both sides of the permeable Canada-U.S. border. In the 1920s three-quarters of all Finnish 7 In this case the slander approach, a clich¦ of Sweedie as silly maid, was a money-making invention of Chicago’s early American moviemakers. Did Anglo-American national identity need an inferior Other? 8 Based on Christiane Harzig (1997); research on Swedes by Margareta Matovic (2005).

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women listed “domestic service” as intended occupation upon debarkation. Arriving with as much pride in their skills as the Swedes, they were far more assertive given the strong class consciousness and communist movement in Finland. The Finnish-North American community established employment agencies that warned of employers with a poor reputation and hostels where women could stay in-between jobs – the same support that amah-chieh had. Demand permitted maids to quit when they felt that working conditions were not acceptable. The radical newspaper Toveritar [The Women Comrade], published in Astoria, Oregon, 1911 – 1930, printed a short poem:9 I am not beautiful,/ Yet, I am the most wanted woman. I am not rich,/ Yet, I am worth my weight in gold. I might be dull, stupid,/ Dirty and mean, Yet, all doors are open for me./ I am a welcome guest All of the elite compete for me. I am a maid.10

In the 1910s North American Finnish socialists debated the domestics’ class position. While some dogmatically considered them a mere “appendix to the parasite class,” the majority analytically noted that, in distinction to factory workers, domestics face their boss/employer on a daily basis and worked for middle-class or even prosperous working-class families rather than capitalists. They accepted that the women were self-taught and highly skilled (N.B.) and thus adopted the following guidelines: 1. Because the maid meets her employer as a human being she must have the selfconfidence and the sense of self-worth to demand decent human treatment. 2. Maids must become professionals by improving their skills to the utmost of their ability. The key to successful bargaining is the ability to perform well. 3. They must organise maids’ clubs, cooperative homes, employment exchanges and raise the class-consciousness of the maids before they can put forth strong demands.11

Women domestic workers were thus placed in the tradition of class-conscious skilled male industrial workers. “The Finnish” women, like “the Swedes”, and “the Chinese” did not come from across their countries of origin but from specific communities in specific regional contexts with access to information about destination and migration traditions. They did not go “to America” or “to Canada” but to specific locations where kin or friends lived, sent job information, and helped with acculturation. 9 Poem by Arvo Lindewall, in Toveritar, 10 February 1925 (reprinted in Lindström-Best 1986; 1988; Lindström-Best, Seager 1985). 10 Seven decades later, a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong wore a T-shirt imprinted “Young talented Filipina” and proudly consented to have her photo taken by C. Harzig. 11 In Toveritar, 9 May 1916 (Lindström-Best 1986, 47).

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Conceptualisations: translocal – transregional – transcultural Migrations emerge from the decisions of individuals in the context of family economies and transregional networks, local traditions and patterns of mobility and gender roles, regional labour markets, and knowledge of potential destinations. The sum of the myriads of decisions – those of the women discussed here included – in combination with the larger frames of macro-regional economic development results in the emergence (and decline) of migration systems as self-regulating processes. Information flows about demand for labour, domestic or industrial, could be initiated top-down though active recruitment by potential employers or emerge bottom-up through contacts with friends, traders, migrants. They could also be self-evident part of migration traditions. In classic labour migrations, from the 1840s to the 1910s, the information from acquaintances regulated the quantity of arrivals by evaluating chances for quick insertion. A migration system, empirically observable in geographic space, thus is a cluster of moves between a region of origin and a receiving region that continues over a period of time. On the macro-level, such systems connect two or more distinct societies each characterised by degree of industrialisation and urbanisation, by political structures and current policies, by specific educational, value, and belief systems, by ethno-cultural composition and demographic factors, and by traditions of internal and external migrations. Potential migrants, rightly or wrongly, perceive comparatively fewer constraints and increased options at the destination (Hoerder 2012; 2013). Men and women depart from regions characterised by labour markets which limit their options and ability to feed themselves and which provide socialisation and training in specific types of work. In the context of information and migration networks, they select a region and its labour markets to earn a living better than at the unsatisfactory or unsustainable “home”. Their decisions are influenced by gendered patterns of inheritance and dowry, by patterns of landownership and access to jobs in nearby towns or cities. Many factor in postmigration possibilities to help families of birth by remittances. All weigh loss, ruptured emotional proximity and relationships (sometimes called “homesickness”). Their assessment includes their bodies and physical (and potential sexual) exploitation, their emotions including options to establish new relationships, and their spirituality, that is, the possibility to practise their religion. Such cost-benefit analyses are gendered since many men experience loss of relationships less intensely than women. Migration thus begins at the local space of socialisation and targets a specific local community, where friends and kin live, as destination. It is translocal and, within the frame of regional options, transregional. This was the case for transatlantic migrants in the nineteenth century and is the case for globally

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mobile Filipinas in the present. Such translocality characterised moves across the Indian Ocean, into the Chinese diaspora, or within Europe. Routes, like the Gorisˇka-Trieste-Alexandria one, were well known – and thus Alexandria was (mentally) closer to Trieste than Rome or Vienna. In the present, when macroregions are connected by faster communication and transport, migration may be local-global, glocal, or imperial-local. The local-regional approach fits migrants’ experiences and relies on the inclusionary local data which enumerate all residents, regardless of gender, age, and generation. The recently much touted transnational approach not only limits itself to aggregate data but also compounds nation, state, and society. It has to be differentiated into trans-state and trans-national aspects. Since the late nineteenth century, in some cases earlier but mainly from World War One, states frame migration by restrictive entry and exclusionary citizenship regimes. Political borders between nations more often cut through cultural regions than delimit distinctive cultures. The postulate of one single national identity demands cultural conformity, assimilation instead of selective and stepwise acculturation. In the Mediterranean World the continuities were self-evident, self-constructed mono-cultural bordered nation-states were destructive of such links. The three levels of local, regional, and state-wide agency are combined in a concept of transcultural adjustment. Developed in Brazil, Cuba, and Canada as early as the 1930s and 1940s, this approach permits empirical determination of multi-layered processes of cultural interaction. Transculturation denotes a selftaught competence to live in two or more cultures and to create border-crossing transcultural spaces. Strategic transcultural competence involves conceptualisation of life projects in more than one society and choice between cultural options. Transculturation involves developing contact zones and negotiating different lifeways into a dynamic and plural new whole. Such dynamism involves structured processes rather than acts of autonomous individuals and processual structures rather than immutable institutions. A Transcultural Societal Studies-approach integrates the study of society and its patterns and institutions (social sciences), all types of representations of it (discursive sciences), and the actual practices (lifeway or habitus sciences) in the context of legal, religious, and ethical norms (normative sciences), the somatic-psychic-emotional-spiritual-intellectual characteristics of individual men and women (life sciences) and the physical-geographic context (environmental sciences). They analyse becoming, the historical dimension, in relation to being, the present, and aspirations, the projects for the future. This adds an intergenerational perspective to the gendered approach. What seems complex to researchers trained in one particular bordered discipline was the daily experience of migrant women and men. They had to integrate difference and diversity to not merely function but to lead sat-

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isfactory lives. Homo oeconomicus is concerned about food and shelter, homo and femina migrans about whole lives (Hoerder 2010 ; Roberts 2006).

Katja Mihurko Ponizˇ

7.

Representations and Mythologisations of Aleksandrinke in Slovenian Literature

In this chapter I will present how Slovenian writers – male and female – formed the character of the aleksandrinka. The first text with an aleksandrinka as a character – the short story Sˇumi Nil [The Murmur of the Nile] (1901) was written by Marica Gregoricˇ Stepancˇicˇ. The latest literary work on aleksandrinke, Odhajale so [They were leaving] (2011), was also written by a woman, Darinka Kozinc. Both female authors share a common trait that in that they do not show aleksandrinke as promiscuous human beings. In contrast, Slovenian male authors, such as Anton Asˇkerc, France Bevk, and Marjan Tomsˇicˇ, for the most part do not motivate the departures of their characters to Egypt by economic distress, but by a desire for a more interesting, luxurious life. The aleksandrinka in Asˇkerc’s poem Egipcˇanka [The Egyptian Woman] (1906) is shown as girl without monetary problems who was lured abroad by the desire for adventure. The departure of Francka, a married woman who is the central character of Bevk’s novella Zˇerjavi [Cranes] (1932) is similarly motivated. In the new millennium, when Slovenia was already an independent country, aleksandrinke were re-discovered as a literary theme by the writer Tomsˇicˇ, who used them in two of his works: the novel Grenko morje [Bitter Sea] (2002, reprint 2004) and a collection of short stories Juzˇni veter [Southern Wind] (2006).1 As I will later show, his work as well overwhelmingly consists of life stories of abused, sexually exploited, or promiscuous aleksandrinke. This poses the question why the image of a female migrant in the Slovenian literature is almost always the one of a victim of sexual violence or a sexual being who cannot control her sexuality. Therefore my research of the listed literary works uses the culturological definition of representation as its starting point: this definition emphasises that language functions as a system of representation – a medium, among others, 1 In 2005, Neda R. Bric directed the performance Trieste – Alessandria: EMBARKED (The story of aleksandrinke). It was based on the play written by the acclaimed Slovenian playwright Dragica Potocˇnjak specifically for the performance, but I will not analyse the text in my paper, because it was not published and its reception was linked to the staging, which further developed the text.

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which we use in a culture to represent thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Expressing representations through language is one of the fundamental processes with which we create and expand meanings (Hall 1997, 1 – 11). However, we must be aware that a representation is not merely a copy of reality, but is formed by the author’s specific view of the world, a consequence of her or his integration/ entrapment in different social systems.2 Literary studies examine how a certain phenomenon or a group are represented in a literary work on the level of contents and reveal formal and stylistic procedures that show the degree of the author’s artistic power and originality.3 Representations of aleksandrinke belong to the research field linked to the representation of femininity. In the Western tradition, a woman was often understood as a riddle; female characters in literary and fine arts often simply seem to be in the foreground, while the authors are not really interested in them and their gender identity. Instead, they project their own distress and crises into the characters, and therefore we can, when studying certain texts, speak about the transgression of the gender (cf. Flaubert’s creation of Emma Bovary). Because the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo is placed in a foreign environment, so different from the Slovenian (even if we only consider religious differences), the life of Slovenian women in Egypt can be very attractive for literary works, but the texts with this topic are surprisingly few and very similar to each other in terms of representing life abroad and the images of the Other, and therefore do not bring different views of the studied phenomenon. Their common characteristic is the negative attitude towards the life in Egypt, a life which is shown as the source of moral collapse if the heroine – the aleksandrinka – does not stand up for herself in time (which rarely happens).

The images of foreigners and the foreign in the Slovenian literature As a small nation that has lived in an independent state only since 1991, the Slovenian nation has developed a specific attitude towards literature. The population in the Slovenian ethnic territory was mixed, and the ethnic differences 2 When researching the representation of the aleksandrinke we must recognise that femininity and masculinity are not unified and single-meaning categories, as they are based on a group that is not homogenous and represents a cross-point of different identities. In connection to this, we need to draw attention to the finding of Val Plumwood (1993) that the fundamental representation or narrative technique is dualism, with which the position of the otherness in a hierarchic structure is precisely determined; it is thus about subordination and inferiority. 3 In the early studies, researchers (Kate Millett, Susan Koppelman Cornillon, Elaine Showalter, Shoshana Felman, and others) concentrated primarily on the representation of femininity in the works of male authors, while contemporary researchers also study the texts of female authors (Bielby, Richards 2010).

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were, as late as the nineteenth century, largely aligned with social ones – political and economic power was in foreign hands. Ascending the social ladder was linked to education: being educated could mean linguistic-cultural assimilation, so the novels of the second half of the nineteenth century introduced the character of a young patriotic Slovenian intellectual who succeeds by the means of education and whose sensible marriage brings him wealth and a higher social status (Kmecl 1975, 85).4 The narrative prose thus made describing the contemporary life its programme and the national aspect became a constant, also fuelled by the relationship between our, Slovenian, and foreign, mostly AustroGerman (Dolinar 2005, 95 – 96). Slovenian literature was understood as a necessary condition for retaining and developing the national identity, however, this nationality principle effectively blocked the art itself: literature lost its artistic quality and largely became ideology (Pirjevec 1972, 35). In the nineteenth and also in the beginning of the twentieth century, foreign influences (especially from the literatures of nations that governed over Slovenians) were therefore problematic; even the translations of great German literary names were very rare, not because the Slovenian bourgeoisie was bilingual, but because the authors belonged to the culture seen as the product of a nation that suppressed Slovenehood (Hladnik 1992, 109 – 119). Although Slovenian literature started shaking off this nation-affirming function in the beginning of the twentieth century, the strengthening of the national consciousness regained prominence during the rise of fascism in the part of the Slovenian territory that was annexed to Italy after World War I, (see map 1) and this was reflected in literature. The images of foreigners, especially Italians, were thus marked with this negative attitude (Torosˇ 2011a, 363 – 368; 2011b, 101 – 104). Because aleksandrinke were leaving to Egypt from this very space, the absence of texts with them as a topic can be partly explained by the political and cultural-historic situation in an era that was impartial to representation of foreigners and faraway places, and instead bound to national themes. Surprisingly, even Tomsˇicˇ’s texts about aleksandrinke, written in the time of globalisation, do not veer much from the xenophobic representation of Muslims (and other foreigners) in earlier works with similar themes and settings. Although the artistic value of the discussed works is contested, they’re still worth research attention. Not only do they reveal the attitude Slovenian writers have towards aleksandrinke and the world in which these women found new life possibilities, they also tell the story of the traumatic European encounter with the East, the Other. More than that, even: we recognise in them the fear of losing control, etched into the cultural and collective memory, especially the control over “our own women”. This fear is encoded into Slovenian literature through 4 For a short overview of the history of Slovenian literature, see also Cooper (1998 – 1999).

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the story of the Beautiful Vida who leaves her husband and child to find happiness abroad. Through its numerous literary presentations, this motif with folk origins became a Slovenian myth (Pogacˇnik 1998). Jozˇe Pogacˇnik, the author of a monograph dedicated to its development in Slovenian literature, found that, by 1988, the motif could be recognised in forty-three works.

The Beautiful Vida – the first mythical migrant in Slovenian literature The character of the Beautiful Vida first appeared in Slovenian folk songs, but variations of the motif can also be found in other folk songs created in the space from Southern Italy to the Balkans (Grafenauer 1943, 19). Three types of songs about Beautiful Vida were preserved in the Slovenian territory, and we can divide them according to the ending: in two variants it is elegiac or tragic, in one, happy, as the protagonist returns home. The core of the motif is the kidnapping of a young mother tricked by a foreigner into boarding his boat and taken to a faraway place (most often the Spanish court): Vida in most cases boards the boat to get a substance that will save her ill child, be it incense (the Kropa variant), a root (variants from Ihan, Lisˇcˇace, and Osojan) or coltsfoot (the Bila variant). Regardless of her circumstances, Vida as a mother felt the foremost responsibility for her child. In that moment, the sailor takes off and Vida recognises the deceit. Only in the Ribnica variant which Presˇeren later based his poem on, did Vida go to the boat consciously believing she was beginning a better life. The difference between the two motifs, between the desire to save the child and the decision to leave him, is the fundamental difference in the conflicts that were created when Vida stepped on the boat. (Klobucˇar 2007, 88)

The first records of these poems go back to the nineteenth century. However, Grafenauer dates the origin of the ballad about the abduction of a young wifemother into the period from the eleventh to the thirteenth century (and determines when each variant was developed) and finds that in all the variants, the development of types was concluded before the end of the fourteenth century (Grafenauer 1943, 367 – 371). When studying the first literary text about the Beautiful Vida, the ballad Pesem od Lepe Vide [The Poem of Lovely Vida] (1832) by the Slovenian national romantic poet France Presˇeren (1800 – 1849), Pogacˇnik declared that the author created a turn in the motivation for Vida’s departure – from the mythological or historic motivation to the psychological one. Vida is shown as a romantic rebel, who ends up crushed and remorseful because of her decision. In this early artistic presentation of the Beautiful Vida, Pogacˇnik discovers the motif of

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longing that changes only the course of the psychological process after Vida’s departure because at the Spanish court she continues to long as well – but there she longs for her homeland. In Presˇeren’s poem we discover two issues that later authors will show with different emphases and intensity. The first is Vida’s desertion of a husband she did love, and the second is her longing for a more beautiful, better life. In this sense, Pogacˇnik reveals that Presˇeren transferred the limits of the ballad “from the framework of a particular event to a symbolic sense of unrequited longing that in life continues to return as the problem of a human heart, forever unsatisfied and unfulfilled” (Pogacˇnik 1988, 25). With the image of the dark foreigner who lures Vida onto a boat, this early version already exhibits the negative attitude towards the foreign.5 After Presˇeren, Beautiful Vida was used more than sixty times as a literary motif. The majority of the texts are by male authors and display a negative bias towards the motif and the characters. Female authors (Marjeta Novak, Alenka Goljevsˇcˇek, Brina Svit) rarely used the motif, and then mostly with an ironic or critical distance (Pogacˇnik 1988). The male authors see female migration as something that causes psychological and moral destruction of women and can only result in their well-deserved punishment and regret. Vida is always sentenced to pain and suffering from which she cannot escape to a liberating death. As Denis Ponizˇ emphasises, Vida’s “crime” is primarily the act of searching for absolute freedom, it is a desire to reach beyond the given (1980, 1). The texts with the Beautiful Vida motif can also be read as a testimony of the eternal struggle between sexes. The motif of longing is not the only one present: there’s also the motif of love, and this is how Bevk and Tomsˇicˇ used the mythological base in their literary works. Vida’s departure, be the motivation social (poverty) or psychological (adulterous love) is shown as the protagonist’s defeat in fighting temptation. This links the myth of the Beautiful Vida to the Bible, where Vida is Eve who succumbed to temptation and was punished for it. The femininity in the myth of the Beautiful Vida is always a construct determined by its setting within the social relationships. After all, female longing, especially when placed in the context of motherhood, has different consequences than male longing does. For the durability and appeal of the myth it was surely essential that the protagonist was female, but the question is if the authors truly wished to delve into her interior or, as Mojca Sˇauperl finds: “The Beautiful Vida is so alluring and intoxicating because she’s the core of a myth tried and tested 5 The articulation of the motif is completely different in the poetic drama Lepa Vida [The Beautiful Vida] (1911) by Ivan Cankar, where the principal motif is the one of longing. Vida is neither a mother nor a wife, but she is a subject and an object, and also a symbol of longing: “Vida from Cankar’s play is a young woman who wants to leave the dark, stifling world to a new and bright life […] The world of expectations is a world of longing; it does not truly exist in reality, but only inside herself.” (Ponizˇ 2006, 97)

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since antiquity. Time and again, and adapted to time, it strengthens the community. As such it is – anything but voluntarily – in service of those who have power and governance.” (Sˇauperl 2009, 229) These facts might additionally explain why the myth of the Beautiful Vida was the one in which, as D. Ponizˇ writes, “certain traits, actions, fateful turns, characteristic of the Slovenian nation and its ‘collective soul’ were supposedly hidden” (Ponizˇ 2006, 10). Pogacˇnik similarly writes “that the motif of the Beautiful Vida had in its continuity a peculiar function of renewal for Slovenehood” and from that develops the thought that all the creators dedicated themselves to the “study of the primordially feminine, or maybe we could call it Faustian, restlessness” (Pogacˇnik 1988, 312 – 313). The motif of the Beautiful Vida thus encapsulates the universal human longing for freedom, the desire to leave a constraining environment, the relationship between the homeland and the foreign land, yet at the same time by locating this longing into a female character it introduces gender as an important factor in the myth.

Aleksandrinke as Beautiful Vidas Slovenian history has no great figures with whom authors can identify and thus form their identity in the political and personal sense. The defeat of female longing, a woman’s powerlessness to liberate herself in the patriarchal society because of her reproductive role, gives the insecure manliness the victorious feeling that it lives in a world in which the desertion of a husband and a child is sanctioned severely – there’s even no need to bother with institutionalised sentencing because everything sorts itself out according to natural order. Vida’s motherhood, a constant in the myth about her, is further proof of clinging to the traditional images of femininity. Thus the reflection on the imaginary of the Beautiful Vida reveals another image – the image of a sad and breastfeeding mother which in the Slovenian myth is transformed into an image of a sad mother breastfeeding another woman’s child. This notion, inherent in the myth and already articulated in The Poem of Lovely Vida by France Presˇeren, was taken up as a starting point by France Bevk and Marjan Tomsˇicˇ, who moulded it into the character of an aleksandrinka. In the first two texts created about the aleksandrinke in the beginning of the twentieth century by Gregoricˇ Stepancˇicˇ and Asˇkerc, this motif is not yet present. When observing the literary presentations of aleksandrinke we can conclude that their phenomenon, aleksandrinstvo, is a construct, a screen into which all the collective fantasies of a woman as the Other, a sexual and irrational being, are projected. In this construct, there is no place for the multi-layered and diverse experience of the actual migrants – it is reduced to a single, collective image, a

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phantasm about a woman – an aleksandrinka – as an irrational human being who needs to be (urgently) controlled so that the balance of traditional values is maintained. Literature with aleksandrinke as protagonists consolidated a narrative filled with prejudice not based on factual historic data. It is probable there were some among the women who went to Egypt who became prostitutes or were sexually abused, but the frequency of such events, described in 1910 by Father Benigen Snoj (Makuc 1993, 63 – 64), is not historically proven. It does seem quite probable that the envy towards aleksandrinke, who overcame the narrowness and backwardness of the rural environment, and the fear of their economic power, encouraged the image of an aleksandrinka tarnished with promiscuity,6 which was of course an attractive literary theme that had a rich tradition in the Slovenian and world literature.7 But it was this stigmatisation of the migrants as sinful Beautiful Vidas that caused many difficult moments in the lives of women (Sˇkrlj 2009, 178 – 179, 183), who knew nothing of promiscuity and for the most part were left with no time after hard work to be promiscuous.

Victory over temptation or the first literary presentation of an aleksandrinka The earliest thematisation of aleksandrinstvo is the previously mentioned short story by Marica Gregoricˇ Stepancˇicˇ (1874 – 1954)8 The Murmur of the Nile which she published under the pen-name Ksenja in the most prestigious Slovenian literary journal of the time, Ljubljanski zvon.9 In the story, the author, who visited North Africa herself (Verginella 2007, 139), aligned to the image of Egypt as a place in which sexual promiscuity and prostitution are inherently present. Gregoricˇ Stepancˇicˇ begins the story with the description of Cairo as a proud city with dusty streets; she calls it the southern Babylon with screaming Arabs and 6 Katja Sˇkrlj writes that “although there are certain indications of human trafficking in Egypt, it is very probable that the chicanery was the consequence of fear of female emancipation and an attempt to discredit women who had economic power in their hands and with that the possibility of making decisions in the family” (Sˇkrlj 2009, 149). 7 Slovenian authors and the representatives of other literatures have most often presented women in the role of sexual beings who cannot control the surplus of their sexual energy and are therefore almost always punished (Mihurko Ponizˇ 2008). 8 Marica Gregoricˇ Stepancˇicˇ was a teacher. She taught in several villages around Trieste/Trst. During that time, she travelled almost all over Europe. She started writing in 1896, at first short articles and reports on the national struggle, later also poems. Between 1921 and 1923 she edited the magazine Jadranka. 9 Considering the reviewed works in the Slovenian periodicals since the first newspapers and magazine, or the beginning of the Slovenian narrative prose from the 1850s onwards. There is a possibility that there are some earlier unpublished manuscripts, but we have not yet found them.

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Indians who peddle exotic fruit and oriental objects. The protagonist of her story is Lina, a young girl who has left her homeland not because of poverty, but, as the author says, because of stubbornness. Lina’s dreams have not come true, her earnings are meagre and she cannot even sustain herself. Her only belongings are two bracelets that she intends to pawn to buy food. At that moment, an elegant stranger approaches her in the street and invites her to join him in his carriage so they might talk. The author vividly describes their ride and strings together the moments of the Egyptian life that Lina observes along the way : the turbid Nile; the splendid Gezira gardens; tall, slender palms; dirty, half-naked Arabs; and screaming children (Gregoricˇ Stepancˇicˇ 1901, 350). Her companion lures her into the house with a trick: she should then become a mistress of a married rich man. Realising the situation she has found herself in, Lina recoils in horror. Gregorcˇicˇ Stepancˇicˇ presents her character as a woman who immediately realises what the men intend to do with her, and rebels despite her initial resignation and wish to die as the simplest exit from the situation. She feels the energy inside and this energy gives her strength to leave: “no sooner than the dawn broke, she was up. She went quietly, straight to the train station. On the way she asked when the train to Port Sad leaves.” (Ibid., 352) Although the author shows Egypt as a place in which a woman can also choose the path of a kept woman or even a prostitute, the Egyptian characters she creates are not shown as aggressive, as her protagonist can freely choose her fate and is able to return home with the help of compatriots.

The moral destruction of an aleksandrinka as a pedagogical example: The Egyptian Woman by Anton Asˇkerc The poem The Egyptian Woman was also written following a visit to Egypt. Its author, Slovenian poet and playwright Anton Asˇkerc (1856 – 1912),10 was there in March 1906 (Asˇkerc 1989, 42). Written in three parts, the poem consists of two letters that the young girl Malka writes to her mother from Egypt in 1890s, and the final part, in which a fellow villager narrates the story. Malka writes the first letter immediately after arriving in Egypt; in it, she describes her enthusiasm about visiting the country she knows from the Bible and which she thinks is beautiful. She describes to her mother her voyage by steamboat, the fellow 10 Anton Asˇkerc was a priest but left the vocation and worked as an archivist. As a poet he first established himself as a lyricist who talked about love, patriotism, and religious doubt. His first collection of poetry, Balade in romance [Ballads and romances] was published in 1890 and the epic style was already prevalent. He travelled a lot and wrote about his experiences in the collection of poems Akropolis in piramide [Acropolis and Pyramids] (1909) (Asˇkerc 1989).

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passengers, her homesickness, and two stalkers – a Gypsy and a Jew. Then she writes about the family where she works as a governess, how she takes the children to the park, how she’s followed there by foreigners, tanned Arabs and Africans with wild eyes, and how she finds them annoying. Especially the dark dandy “Mehemet-Ali”, who is trying to persuade her to become his wife. Asˇkerc writes in her name: I laughed at him! My God, a black man/my husband, black as ink! … And my children/ might also be black then … /Phooey! And I laughed at him out loud/but he guessed why I was laughing … /Since then he just won’t let me be/he stalks and pesters me …/And brings me flowers, yet I don’t care for him/ a Negro. He disgusts me, you know, when/he looks at me like a cannibal/and shows his white teeth … /Fear not! A black man’s wife/ I’ll never be! Besides, I keep still/deep in my heart your warnings/to keep myself from male seducers! (Asˇkerc 1906, 537)

Her next letter is from three years later. She informs her mother that she has moved from Alexandria to Cairo, where she has a beautiful flat. She describes Cairo as a beautiful, colourful city and she’s thrilled with the country in which she lives: “Orient, Orient! I love it so!/This mixture of people, brown, black, white!/Oh, and the slender palms so pretty/green in summer and in winter!” (Ibid., 538) She also explains to her mother how the change in her life came about. She describes an old woman who enticed her to a different life path in which she enjoys and is happy. The third part of the poem is not in letter form; the poet, who’s a part of the village community, reports about Malka’s visit to her home village where she has returned after ten years. The “Egyptian woman” has come back as a lady, but the poet finds her beauty gone, her eyes without sparkle, her cheeks withered. She has returned to the homeland physically ill and psychologically broken. Her heart is dead, her youth buried under the Sahara sand. The poet puts the following words onto her tongue: I lived, I also lived … /And now I’m dead, dead … and it was /fine, so fine … It’s passed, sailed away/vanished like a beautiful short dream … /And what am I left with, I’m asking you/from that merry life? These silken rags, gold pendants/some pearls and some shiny diamonds/a couple of hundred of pounds sterling and a body/withered, waned, dried out, dead. (Ibid., 543)

Malka cries for her innocence and youth that she sold for Egyptian gold. These are her last words, because she dies mere moments after saying them. With The Egyptian Woman, Asˇkerc followed the presentation of those female characters in the Slovenian literature that indeed do get the chance to enjoy life for a fleeting moment (also as sexual beings), but pay a high price for it – with moral de-

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struction or even death.11 While in the first letter he introduces Malka as a carrier of the traditional views of foreigners, especially those of colour, and as a hostile human being formed, as she was, in the conservative catholic environment of a Vipava Valley village at the end of the nineteenth century. In the second letter, he opens the new possibilities of accepting the foreign and the different. It seems quite probable that through her words, Asˇkerc expressed his own fascination with the Orient, because he sang enchanted about his voyage to Egypt in the collection Acropolis and Pyramids (1908). But as if he got scared of the mirthful, cosmopolitan view of another culture, he concludes his poem as a morality tale. Maybe the Catholic tradition re-awoke in him, as he was a priest (although he had abandoned this vocation at the turn of the century) and the rhetoric about female innocence as the highest value overruled the openness towards the Other and silenced different voices.

Jusˇ Kozak’s novella Tuja zˇena [The Foreign Woman] (1929): an aleksandrinka as a wet nurse In his psychological study of a young woman who cannot resist her own sensuality, Jusˇ Kozak shows the departure to Alexandria as a last resort for Agata who has unexpectedly found herself with child. Kozak’s novella is divided into several chapters, and Agata’s experience as an aleksandrinka is presented in the chapter Svet [World]. The writer describes the protagonist’s voyage and her first impressions in Alexandria where a mother with a child attracts her attention, so she follows them, because she cannot yet find her own way in the foreign world. The stranger helps Agata find the way to her sister’s house. There, Agata gives birth to a baby to whom she grows terribly attached but soon has to give up, because she has no means for survival. She finds employment as a wet nurse in a wealthy household, leaving her own child in the care of her sister. The author describes with great emotion Agata’s separation from her infant, and her pain when she finds out that her sister has neglected the child – the fruit of a sin – and has thus caused the baby’s death. Agata is broken and breastfeeding the child she takes care of causes her unimaginable pain, but she slowly grows attached to this baby. In this part of the novella, we can hear the echo of the folk ballad about the Beautiful Vida, who breastfeeds a stranger’s baby in tears: “At times, her throat knotted up, she hugged the foreign baby at her breasts and started kissing it like crazy. When she came around, her arms caved in; she spent hours by the win11 In the Slovenian literature, the character of a woman who cheats on her husband appears in the era of the realist literature, when the Slovenian prose develops and it becomes a constant in the representation of femininity (Mihurko Ponizˇ 2008).

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dow, staring at the azure sky.” (Kozak 1992, 79) Agata grows so attached to the baby that she begins to hate its mother and hide the child from her, so she gets fired. When she finally realises that this child, too, is lost to her, she boards a ship, and the author sends her off from Alexandria with the thought of the poor stranger who helped her in the first hours in the city : “One more time I would like to see that woman, who must by now be leading her child by the hand through the streets past dogs and filth. To her I could trust the bitterness of my soul.” (Kozak 1992, 80) Kozak’s novella introduces the character of an aleksandrinka as a Beautiful Vida, who breastfeeds a foreign child in a wealthy environment, while her own dies in neglect. Kozak follows the heritage of the Beautiful Vida by focusing on the protagonist’s motherhood, her pain at the death of her child, in a word, a Marian image of a Mater Dolorosa. Although France Bevk must have almost certainly known Kozak’s work, because it was published in the then most important literary journal Ljubljanski zvon, maternal suffering is not in the centre of his novella.

Bevk’s novella Cranes: the introduction of the Beautiful Vida motif into the presentation of aleksandrinke France Bevk (1890 – 1970)12 opened his novella Zˇerjavi [Cranes]13 with a quote from a folk song about Beautiful Vida: “If their home’s not happy, then the cranes/Flee beyond the sea” and also used some stanzas from The Poem of Lovely Vida by France Presˇeren. With this, Bevk places his work in the tradition of presenting this motif, in which the woman is put in the role of a mother who abandons her child (and husband).14 The author thus touches the most painful stories of aleksandrinke – those of women who left their newborns at home and 12 France Bevk is the author of a large opus, in which prose predominates. He was also a translator and established himself as an author for children and young adults. As a prosaist he wrote a number of historic novels and novellas, and a number of his works take place in the Primorska region. In the time of fascism he was its sharp critic, and he described the pertaining political situation that was extremely hostile to Slovenians. He was intrigued by gender relations, so his works are often love stories with a female protagonist. 13 The novella Cranes was primarily written for the literary journal Ljubljanski zvon. For the book edition, the author added chapters that take place in Egypt. When editing the manuscript for the Izbrano delo [Selected Works] series (the book in which Cranes was published in 1961) the author again eliminated these chapters (Koblar 1961, 482). 14 Jozˇe Pogacˇnik reports about three versions of the novella. At first, the author wrote it for Ljubljanski zvon, but it was not published. He changed it significantly for the book edition in 1932, put the woman in the centre, and for the Selected Works re-worked it, but made it close to the first variant and thus centred the story on the husband (Pogacˇnik 1988, 177).

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went to Egypt to breastfeed.15 Bevk’s protagonist Francka takes this step not because of a difficult social situation, but rather because she’s lured by the wealth and luxury of the Egyptian world. In the foreground, then, is not the social motivation, but the psychological – Francka is an unfulfilled materialist, therefore the family’s tragic end is her fault. Bevk characterises her as a joyous and frivolous girl, brought up by her mother to be a vain creature, craving material goods. He characterises her mother as greedy and writes in a naturalistic manner : “What must a girl born of the body of such mother be like?” (Bevk 1932, 21) Bevk also emphasises her inclination towards promiscuity, as, after her first romantic disappointment, she now sees her love as a commodity. She marries Florjan on the insistence of her mother, who sees in him an auspicious match for her daughter. Francka is unhappy in marriage, because she does not love her husband. Her aunt Filomena, who has returned from Egypt, takes advantage of this. She talks Francka into leaving her newborn to her husband and going to Egypt as a wet nurse. This soon happens, but the foreign country does not fulfil Francka’s expectations until she finds happiness in love. While for her lover Jean this is all a brief affair, her world is shattered when he leaves her. From a sinner she turns into a penitent who wants to return home. But when she gets the news from her homeland that her son has died she realises there is no way back so she succumbs to engineer Rubinstein, becomes his mistress and goes to Sudan with him. At the end of the novella, Francka is psychologically broken, her son is dead and her husband has chosen a voluntary death. When the story was published in 1932 a review appeared in the Ljubljanski zvon in which the critic Andrej Budal evaluated not only the literary value of the text, but also touched upon aleksandrinstvo: “Aleksandrinstvo from the Vipava Valley is included and presented as a wound, worse and more septic than the erstwhile emigration to America, although not so extensive.” (Bevk 1961, 483) The author of the commentary to the Cranes, France Koblar, did point out that the presentation of Egypt is not the best, because Bevk did not know life there and only used his imagination. The most precise analysis of Cranes was done by literary historian Jozˇe Po15 It is interesting that the author of the introduction to the second edition of Cranes in the Selected Works, France Koblar, narrowed the entire phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo to wet nurses: “Just like men went over the world throughout the year as construction workers, so young wives left their homes to be wet nurses in the rich houses across the sea. This job was tied to more delicate and morally questionable coincidences; the job itself was often unnatural with regard to the duties that a mother had to her own child. Leaving for Alexandria usually had economic reasons. Many a woman helped her family in dire straits with the money earned abroad, frequently she was the one who saved the home, but often the reason for the departure was the desire for an easier life and adventure.” (Bevk 1961, 479)

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gacˇnik, who pointed out that aleksandrinstvo is not at the forefront: the starting point of the story is rather the “incomprehensibleness of the female nature that chains the man to itself with a mysterious power, tortures him and leads him into the expected life situation that has disastrous consequences” (Pogacˇnik 1988, 179). Pogacˇnik adds that Bevk was led in his writing by the idea that a woman is the cause for all calamity “which is a reflection of a certain imbalance and a special kind of demon on the part of the author” (Ibid., 185). We can fortify his statement with the number of negative images of aleksandrinke in the novella. Bevk is only interested in those who had love affairs in Egypt or prostituted themselves to Arabs. The very first mention of an aleksandrinka by the narrator expresses a negative bias, when describing how Filomena appeared in Florjan’s dreams: “She jeers with an impertinent laugh. Old aleksandrinke laugh like that. How deeply Florjan hated her!” (Bevk 1932, 5) Everything linked to aleksandrinke and associated with Francka is connected to sex: Filomena was a mistress of a rich bey, in the village there is a black child of an aleksandrinka who got pregnant by an Arab, as a girl Francka met an aleksandrinka who gave her a golden cross with the words that she will be beautiful so she should not go to Alexandria. With Filomena she visits an aleksandrinka who was married to an Egyptian rich man just before he died, so she has a wonderful villa. The narrator also tells about Francka’s visit to a town where she has a friend who once worked for a former aleksandrinka – her wealth, too, was a reward for having been a second wife to a wealthy Muslim. Bevk describes aleksandrinke as Francka sees them before her departure, as women marked by the encounter with the foreign world in one way or another : Francka was thinking … she knew many who crossed the sea. Sometimes they’d come home for a short time and leave again. They were luxurious, they rode in carriages. They had fun, danced, and laughed … No, not all of them were like that. Some wore a weary smile on their lips, a certain sadness in their words and eyes. (Bevk 1932, 29)

Nor does the writer describe favourably the aleksandrinke Francka meets in Egypt. Juliette – erstwhile Julka – is described as a half-literate cocotte (Bevk 1932, 66), who has obtained her wealth as a mistress of rich men. As Jozˇe Pogacˇnik finds, Egypt is shown as a place where people encounter “the rottenness and moral destruction of the world and long for a lost and unattainable home” (Pogacˇnik 1988, 181). Denis Ponizˇ (1980) also points to Bevk’s attitude to foreignness in his study of the Cranes, the thematisation of the problem of leaving home, the homestead, because of the voice of foreign lands, enticing with their wealth. However, the voice of foreign lands and people are shown as deceptive voices for Bevk; they seduce a person into destruction and misery. Denis Ponizˇ points out Bevk’s alluding to the actions of the Italians in the occupied Primorska, the threat that this caused to the national organism. “Francka’s story

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is a part of this endangerment, it is a reminder what happens if the voice of the foreign wins, if a person succumbs to its allure and lets himself or herself be seduced.” (Ponizˇ 1980, 1) In Bevk’s story we thus follow the confrontation between the hearth as something positive and the foreign as negative. At the forefront are not individual stories, but rather the author’s intention to tell, through the story of an aleksandrinka, the necessity for the community life of the nation, which the community understands as the only successful model of revolt against foreignness. Francka not only broke away from her husband and child, not only broke the deepest ethical imperative, but also broke away from the national body. The foreignness endangered not only her, but the entire national community, and the “punishment” that befalls on her is also the punishment for this “transgression”. (Ibid., 1)

Given the negative images of the majority of aleksandrinke in the novella, the ending, with which the author tries to somewhat soften his critical attitude towards them, is surprising. On the way to Sudan Francka thinks: Do others go through the same? Two thousand Slovenian women and girls … Maybe most of them haven’t shared her dreams. They pass their days quietly at work, go to church on Sunday, visit the nuns … Then there are others, whose hearts are not as sensitive as hers, who don’t look for love … And then others still … yes, in that moment she remembered the day when they pulled a naked girl from the canal. An icon from Sveta gora was hanging around her neck … She’s one of them, too … (Bevk 1932, 103)

Aleksandrinke caught into sacrifice and promiscuity in the prose of Marjan Tomsˇicˇ : Bitter Sea and Southern Wind Seven decades passed before aleksandrinke became interesting for literary representation again. The theme became attractive after journalist Dorica Makuc (1993) made a documentary and published a book about them. As writer Marjan Tomsˇicˇ (b. 1939) wrote in the introduction to the novel Bitter Sea, he collected material from aleksandrinke and their families for fourteen years and was inspired by the narratives recorded by Makuc.16 As a result of this introduction, many readers – and unfortunately also a part of the literary critics – understood the book to be an historical testimony and received the work with 16 However, he re-worked the stories significantly into fiction. Makuc (1993), for example, only mentions Louis the water carrier with one sentence, namely that his mother left him at the beginning of the century on the threshold of St. Francis Asylum in Alexandria, while Tomsˇicˇ makes this into a story about a woman who was abused (the book contains a very graphic description of one having to orally pleasure her employer who then rapes her and she finally commits suicide).

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enthusiasm and even selected it as the text high school students studied for the national competition in Slovenian language in 2004. The novel, in its simple realist form, popularised the then still rather taboo topic, and merged it with the reader-friendly topic of a sacrificing woman divided between motherhood and the love for another man. But foremost, it piled more or less enticing images of sexuality and (sexual) violence. The novel’s big success prompted the author to continue with a collection of short stories Southern Wind (2006). Surprisingly, no review or literary study (although all bar one were written by female reviewers) – neither about the novel nor the stories – has problematised the author’s representation of aleksandrinke as stereotypical.17 Despite the seeming glorification, the images of these female migrants in Tomsˇicˇ are still bound to the traditional images of imaginary femininity, divided between a sacrificing mother dedicated to the community and a destructive sexual being who, because of her inability to control her sexual urges, brings suffering or even ruin to her nearest kin, and often to herself as well. Tomsˇicˇ’s representations of aleksandrinstvo focus primarily on the relationship between genders. Most reviewers said that his female characters were sensitively shown, and even claimed that Tomsˇicˇ built aleksandrinke a monument,18 because he entered the soul of a woman divided between sin and duty. Almost without fail, the reviewers accepted this view as non-problematic. Nobody called for a critical reflection of the view of a woman as a human being permanently trying to catch her balance before sliding into devastation. Thus far, it has never been problematised that in Tomsˇicˇ’s stories all aleksandrinke (except the central character Merica, the exhausted old women, and the nuns, the sisters of the Order of St. Francis and of Christ the King) are shown either as irrational sexual beings who cannot resist temptation or as victims of sexual violence. Very often, Tomsˇicˇ makes them victims of male lust (the designated perpetrators are either Muslims or Eastern/Southern Europeans – Poles, Greeks, Romanians). 17 As an exception to that Irma Planjsˇek Sagadin (2003, 17) warned: “There are many mentions of sadness and pain and ‘that intolerable longing’. Undoubtedly true, but there is also the other side of the story, perceptible in the book, but less emphasised, which means a great personal gain of knowledge, manners, economic independence and self-confidence; all this was in many cases available to the children of aleksandrinke as well.” 18 Here are some examples from the reviews in which Tomsˇicˇ was praised for his presentation of female characters: “The author proved with his rich literary horizon that he is, in the first place, a great master in knowing and describing a female psyche and the role of the women in hard historic times. Here we’re not talking about ideologically imbued stories, but simply true life events Tomsˇicˇ describes with extreme respect and humaneness.” (Cergol 2003, 8) “Tomsˇicˇ remains the master of delving into a female psyche, her thoughts, doubts, dividedness between home and foreign places, duty and pleasure, the tested and the unknown.” (Tucovicˇ 2006, 13) “I want to say : he sensitively presented a ‘female soul’ in special situations […] only characters from good classical works can compare to the portraits of Merica, Vanda, Ana … and maybe some others in this book.” (Horvat 2003, 86)

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The central character, Merica, is one of the few migrants in the novel Bitter Sea who manages to continue life rather successfully, but even her character is defined as a victim. Tomsˇicˇ thus reinforces the image of an aleksandrinka as a victim or as a woman who succumbs to promiscuity or uncontrollable emotions despite being fully aware that all this leads her to moral destruction. There are three narrative streams to the Bitter Sea, but most of the narrator’s attention is dedicated to Merica’s story. The plot follows the narrative of a (trivial) romance novel: a woman undecided between two men must retain her purity despite temptation, and a force majeure takes care of the complete removal of the unsuitable man, while the heroine is rewarded for her virtue in the end. Two other important characters are Ana and Vanda, but Merica is set apart, because the author allocates so much space to her narrative. The story also includes numerous more or less short tales – cautionary tales of a kind – about aleksandrinke. Because the narrator’s attention is directed to the story as a model, literary characters that appear in them do not come to life as complex persons of flesh and blood. The reviewer Alenka Jovanovski remarked that each of these three literary characters represents only one part of the triad which we would otherwise expect to be realised in every human. So the nave Vanda is determined by her sensuality, Ana’s mind controls all her emotions and senses, while Merica experiences everything through emotions and is thus guided by her heart or her soul (2003, 206). Thus even the central characters are in fact reduced into a single mode of response to the world and are not really presented as complete human beings. We must not overlook that the narrator is most partial to Merica’s story, because it is she who embodies the ideal femininity. Merica is a suffering mother who cannot reconcile with the (temporary) separation of her child, a passive person who only at the end expresses her own will when she visits the dying Pierre, the brother of her Alexandrian chatelaine who fell in love with her, and the (for the community) strange aleksandrinka Pepca Lebanova. The central figure thus does what is expected of her, of course, as long as it is in accordance with the moral directives of the Catholic Church (rejects Pierre, although she loves him, because she is a married woman). She is an untouchable, pure, and beautiful woman, and even the priest tells her she is “too beautiful for the Egyptians” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 6). For Pierre, Merica is a riddle: he sees in her the realisation of the collective phantasm about the eternal femininity as a mystery, unattainable and incomprehensible to men. Hard as the readers might try, they will not find a single negative trait in the representation of Merica: we can thus conclude that she is a completely idealised character, and careful reading leads us to the realisation that she is extremely close to the image of the Virgin Mary, which I will discuss in the continuation. Some minor characters are mentioned in passing to illustrate a statement or finding (for example, about the hard work of the nannies) and are not given any

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special attention. There are many characters who do not appear in the main story, but the heroines of the novel relate their destinies, or their stories come to life in other women’s memories or consciousness. These stories often serve as models. All of them centre around a sexual female who, because of her beauty, attracts attention of a morally corrupt man, most often a Muslim.19 The sheer number of these episodes confirms that women are sexual beings who act irrationally, or that only those who completely suppress their instincts can succeed. Almost twenty aleksandrinke are marked exclusively by their relationship to men. In the novel, and even more in the collection of short stories Southern Wind, which offers nothing new neither thematically nor formally, the stories of women who were sexually or psychologically abused are prevalent. Tomsˇicˇ introduces a strip-tease dancer who douses herself with paraffin and sets herself on fire, and a promiscuous foreign woman who tempts and tortures a Slovenian priest, to mention but a couple of cases. A look on a woman through the eyes of the Other are revealed also by Merica’s unusual dreams in Bitter Sea in which she is holding a black puppy in her arms and a crude male voice claims the puppy is his baby and Merica should breastfeed it or else he will kill her son. Even stranger are the dreams of Olgica Novakova in Southern Wind: she dreams that she is breastfeeding an old man. A motif of a woman giving her milk to an old man is a Catholic one, namely, the Lactation of St Bernard.20 The ambivalent attitude towards female corporeality in the novel is likewise expressed in the images of Ana and Vanda. Both are marked by sexuality. The first description of Ana is given at the very beginning by Merica: “There’s a rumour about the village that Ana, when she was in Egypt for the first time, was whoring around with Arabs. I do not believe that. She is a joyful person, and, like that, more courageous, but to go with another, and an Arab at that, no, not possible.” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 6) Ana herself emphasises her sensuality both in her attitude to other men and in the memories about sex with her husband. In these parts of the novel she is allowed to speak up about her sexuality, more problematic is the linking of the narrator’s own view of Ana with the priest’s: this can have us presume that Ana’s decision to marry Chevalier is not a consequence of a rational decision but rather sexual frustration: “Maybe it was those embers of hers (that priest Ivan Dobravec had warned her about) that stopped her from staying cold when, after a year of her stay in Alexandria, Georges Chevalier, one of the permanent hotel guests, started to court her.” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 172) However, since the parts in which Ana is the first-person 19 The only exceptions are the Egyptian man in the story of Katja Pesek and the husband and father in law of Marija Skobec, who do not have negative attributes. 20 The Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernard of Clairvaux and pressed milk out of her breast and sprinkled it onto Bernard’s lips. One of Mary’s miracles is also curing a monk with her breastmilk (Warner 1990, 197 – 199; Rubin 2010, 350).

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narrator bring no insight or thoughts on the topic that are her own, it seems that the third-person narrator and priest Dobravec know more about her than she does herself – this also puts her intellect under question or at least limits its ability to judging and arranging simple facts, while deeper reflection remains beyond her reach. Vanda is even simpler in the way she perceives the world around herself. She went to Alexandria at the age of sixteen, in other words, as an unformed personality. She also left home armed with warnings about the raffish Arab world: “Uncle Pepe did say Vanda shouldn’t go to Egypt. She’s too pretty, he said, and too young. She could be stolen and end up in some brothel. Or a harem.” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 6) The scene on the ship where she accepts a golden coin does indicate her enchantment with the material goods that later develops into the worship of sensual pleasures. Vanda internalises these images: she dreams that she got lost and cannot find the right path. The narrator creates Vanda as a character who craves a comfortable life and soon reconciles with the situation in which she finds herself when she’s tricked into going to a brothel. There, she could have ended up like one of the heroines from the cautionary tales, but she is lucky to meet a cultivated Arab who is willing to take her as his third wife. In creating Vanda’s character the narrator failed to use the potential of the story about a woman who decides to live out her sexuality : her sexual experiences are shown through the optic of a man who describes titillating scenes and not through the optic of a participant in the action. The narrator’s description of girls bathing in the harem reveals the European view of this institution, which is phantasmal, because the space functioned in a way completely different from the one shown in European literature and art (Baron 2005; El–Azhary Sonbol 2006; Grosrichard 1985; Said 1996). Tomsˇicˇ’s description21 is surprisingly reminiscent of the painting The Turkish Bath (1821) by the French painter Jean-August-Dominique Ingres.22 The narrator introduces Vanda in the continuation as a being who lives only for sexual pleasure and absolutely lacks her own will or intellect, her actions are supposedly led by her soul, which – for Tomsˇicˇ – is not in opposition to the body. The author shows Vanda’s first night of love through the words of Mahmud 21 “What scared her, but at the same time pleasantly excited her, were the girls whisking to her. Now these girls were naked and were laughingly, with child-like glee, chasing each other, splashing and wading in the clear and obviously very warm water, because steam was coming out of it. Two ran to her and, as if it were a part of an entertaining game, started pulling her towards the shallow water. Another girl joined them and Vanda later couldn’t remember how they managed to take all her clothes off and how at once they were in a pool where they chatteringly and laughingly poured water over her, caressed her, and cheekily kissed her shoulders and her entire body.” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 151) 22 Moroccan sociologist Fatema Mernissi says this painting represents a Western view of a harem, because women never walked around it naked, but wearing mostly trousers and tunics (2001, 104 – 105).

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Saleh Pasha: “He thought he’d have a lot more problems with Vanda before taming her. ‘A cute little thing. Obedient, willing, sensible enough,’ he thought. The memories of the previous night were extremely pleasant.” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 215) At the end of the novel we find out that Vanda has adjusted to the world in which she lived. Her life was made easier by a happy coincidence – she gave Saleh a son. What all three female characters in Bitter Sea share is servility, (noble) humbleness, the ability to subjugate to the men to whom they have bound themselves, and (a lucky coincidence?) that they gave them male progeny. None of them is a rebel, one who would confront the traditional image of a woman as a sexual being led and determined by nature to fulfil her wishes and dreams. All three central characters in this way fulfil their reproductive function they have been subjected to as spouses. The title itself represents aleksandrinstvo as a primarily bitter experience – a consequence of the fact that women are sexual beings, importantly connected to nature (as nursing mothers and/or sexual beings). And although the novel, through Ana’s and Vanda’s story, offers a different understanding of certain migrants’ destinies, the focus remains on the image of a sacrificing and often sexually abused aleksandrinka shedding bitter tears over the separation from the homeland and family. The only exception are the stories of three persons the narrator gives the most attention to and allows a different understanding of the metaphor about the bitter sea: if a woman finds a man who falls in love with her or finds her a suitable partner and she responds to his expectations (becomes his business partner, mistress, or an ideal), her experience (at least in the period of shown by the writer – in other words, when Merica, Ana and Vanda fulfil this image) is positive. All other women, whose paths were not crossed by the right men, experience their emigration as a series of unpleasant events. Tomsˇicˇ does not use the possibility of narrative strategies pertaining to a modernist novel, but retains traditional narrative structures into which he includes his own, sometimes ideologically very marked, point of view, which a less demanding reader does not recognise as a non-literary category, but rather accepts as a confirmation of eternal truths (a good mother is the one who breastfeeds her own infant, some women are born prostitutes, etc.). In Bitter Sea, there is no different, multi-layered type of narration that would problematise the consolidated, traditional images of aleksandrinke as sexually promiscuous beings and victims. The stereotyping is not a subject of irony or another method of alienation. On the level of narrative procedures Tomsˇicˇ – by exposing Merica’s ideal story and stringing a number of cautionary tales about abused migrants – represents aleksandrinstvo as the split between following the maxims of the Catholic Church and living the life of sensuality. Merica’s story confirms which path is the right one (although she is the only one of her sex), because she does

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not hurt anyone (except possibly herself and Pierre, but he is soon saved from suffering because he dies). All other stories are an example how a woman’s life turns out when it strays from the rules dictated by Catholicism. A woman as a rational being who follows her own point of view is only partly realised in the character of Ana. Yet, as the narrator reports, her decision was likewise not influenced by reason, but rather the embers which priest Dobravec mentioned. Conservative, at times even racist, statements have not been confronted with a critical response that would disclose their Orientalism. When Sister Marcelina talks about Arabs as sparrows and Sister Doloroza adds that they are like children, “but very naughty children” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 30), their words are not problematised in any way. Since the nuns are shown in the novel as exemplary human beings, a reader might consider these words as a statement that reflects the actual situation. The writer could have intertwined and confronted different views of both aleksandrinke and the world in which they lived and could have thus revealed the stereotypes with which these images were loaded. But Tomsˇicˇ even reinforces these stereotypes by emphasising the salvation role that the church or the nuns as its representative had, by stringing statements about religion that alone can protect a woman from sliding into the abyss of immorality (as the Catholic Church defined this) and by showing women incapable of any reflexion of their own position, because the erotic dependence on a man blurs their view and capability of rational judgement. Marjan Tomsˇicˇ has, on different levels of his novel, represented aleksandrinstvo as a division between sacrifice and pleasure. In Slovenian literature, he is the first author who has dealt with this phenomenon in two extensive works. Although in his novel Bitter Sea aleksandrinke – as opposed to the long years of silence from the actual migrants – finally speak, they’re constantly trapped in relation to men and children. The majority of them are shown as either victims of corrupt Muslim or Eastern European men or as sexual beings who follow only their instincts. By emphasising their sad life stories, Tomsˇicˇ glorifies the role of the Catholic Church as the only institution that took care of the preservation of the moral integrity of the aleksandrinke. Tomsˇicˇ’s representations of the aleksandrinstvo are not consistent with the findings of historic, ethnographic and sociological research, but express his purely personal view of this phenomenon, which, after all, is a perfectly legitimate procedure in literature. The difficulty here is that the author – by emphasising the detailed study of the sources, and possibly not even realising how caught up he himself was into the (often collective) fantasies and phantasms of femininity – willingly or unwillingly created an opinion that his book is a copy of reality. By doing so, he certainly won less demanding readers who are only attracted by true stories, but reopened a family wound that has never really healed for many a descendant of aleksandrinke, a wound that was created precisely because of the stigmatisation of aleksandrinke

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as women who were allegedly not able to control their sexuality or used it for profit.

The most recent literary rendition of aleksandrinke: a different view The interest for aleksandrinke in the new millennium encouraged the creation of collection of four short stories by Darinka Kozinc They Were Leaving (published in the book Tisˇina se je uglasila [The Silence Tuned Itself] (2011) and a book for children by the same author titled Pravili so jim Aleksandrinke [They Called Them Aleksandrinke] (2008). Darinka Kozinc conceives her texts as a view of the past from the present. In them, the protagonists relive the destinies of aleksandrinke through a person from an older generation. Although the writer selects only a few life stories, she strings in them the characteristics of the departure of women to Egypt. Love is not in the forefront, nor is (promiscuous) sexuality, which is the central theme for Tomsˇicˇ’s aleksandrinke. With the short story Jaz, aleksandrinka [I, Aleksandrinka], the author draws attention to the fact that aleksandrinstvo is still alive, but the departure abroad is not only triggered by the existential distress, but also a desire for new experiences. Darinka Kozinc also introduced the image of the aleksandrinka to children with her book They Called Them Aleksandrinke (2008), which Anna Törrönnen illustrated by making a collage of old photos and her own illustrations, thus reinforcing the feeling of an authentic narrative. It is a first person narrative with a frame story – told by Manca, a little girl and a granddaughter of an aleksandrinka. The narrative frame also tells the reader who aleksandrinke were. Then the story continues with another first person narrator, Manca’s Nona, who recounts her pain when her mother left for Egypt, how the life went on in her absence, the joy upon her return, and the great sadness when her mother left again for Alexandria. Nona Benedikta concludes her story with her own experience of aleksandrinstvo and says that she only understood her mother when she left for Egypt herself – like her mother, she, too, wanted to give her children a life without poverty. The writer thus touches upon the most traumatic part of the phenomenon: the stories about abandoned children, but tells them without blaming aleksandrinke. It is quite clearly stated that Benedikta’s mother had to go to Egypt because of the economic crisis in the 1930s, but the children were taken care of at home, because their father was heedful. Benedikta’s story confronts the young reader with both sides of the story : the sadness of the children, and also the pain of the mothers who went into the world. The fate of the children who suffered because they lost their beloved nannies is also mentioned, because Benedikta also mentions her mother’s prot¦g¦. The baffll, the wooden trunk with

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objects from Egypt, is also Manca’s link to the foreign world, which is presented as something attractively mysterious without negative connotations. The book has an additional short text by Dorica Makuc at the end, which briefly explains who aleksandrinke were, but it does not mention which jobs they performed. So the reader gets an incorrect impression that they were only nannies or wet nurses. This impression can be further consolidated by the commentary by Dusˇica Kunaver on the back cover : “Aleksandrinke were young mothers who had to leave their homes because of poverty in our villages in Primorska and go to Alexandria as wet nurses and nannies for children in wealthy families. They spent years longing for their own child and their own family.” The careless editorial decision to publish this text which reduces aleksandrinstvo to breastfeeding and childcare certainly harms the book, which tries to emphasise the perspective of the migrant and the child, because it reinforces the one-dimensional view of aleksandrinke. Likewise, Kunaver’s back cover commentary, instead of broadening the perspective, narrows aleksandrinstvo to the myth of the Beautiful Vida: “Manca’s story about her grandmother is told with a child’s sincerity, simple and touching, but in the soft words of a child the hard truth is hidden, dictated by the hard life of the Slovenian beautiful Vidas.” The return of the Beautiful Vida myth to the phenomenon of the aleksandrinstvo confronts us with the question of why this connection is so attractive that it resurges time and again in the literary, journalistic, and academic discourses.

The depiction of the Beautiful Vida myth in texts on aleksandrinke Certain stories of aleksandrinke in certain traits have coincided with the fate of the mythical character of the Beautiful Vida. If we transfer this recognition to the studied texts, we find in all of them that the desire for a better life is thematised, and this is a motive inherent to the myth of the Beautiful Vida. However, we would be hard pressed to call the protagonist of the short story The Murmur of the Nile a Beautiful Vida, because the author tells us nothing about her longing, she simply mentions that the protagonist wanted a more interesting life and that her departure was not motivated by poverty. The ending of the story is also not consistent with the Beautiful Vida motif, because Lina does not end in a tragic way. Some of the Beautiful Vida can be discovered in Asˇkerc’s Malka, but she comes home in the end as well, not because she longs for the homeland, but because she is physically and psychologically crushed and wants to die at home. To research the beautiful Vida motive, the works Cranes and Bitter Sea are thus more suitable. We can identify both Francka and Merica as beautiful Vidas:

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they are both mothers who left a husband and a child at home – the most important constant in the myth, in which we can also discern biblical characters: Eve as a character who succumbs to temptation and with it makes her husband unhappy, and Mary as a suffering mother. Bevk’s Francka is primarily the sinful Eve, who pays a high price for her curiosity about what life can offer to her. Tomsˇicˇ’s Merica is closer to Mary than she is to Eve, although she is also, like her biblical predecessor, exposed to temptation. However, she overcomes it with the help of the traits attributed to the mother of God.23 Merica is the embodiment of the Marian femininity. We first meet her as a sad mother – mater dolorosa – who has lost her child and cries for it, but, unlike Mary, she is also burdened with the consciousness that she has committed a sin by deserting her child. Merica appears throughout the novel in this role, but soon, a new image comes to the forefront: the image of the breastfeeding Mary – Maria lactans (Warner 1990, 192 – 205). In the novel, there are a number of occasions where Merica is shown as a wet nurse. Merica’s milk is, like Mary’s, shown as a source of happiness and welfare, the woman is metonymically thus reduced to a breast.24 However, other Marian images occur in the novel, expressed through Merica’s prayers.25 In her most difficult moments, Christ appears to the protagonist in the 23 Mary appears in different forms in Christianity, she is a figure, defined, as Marina Warner pointed out, by softness, tenderness, acceptance, mercy, tolerance and resignation (1990, XXIV). To many, the Virgin Mary is a symbol of an ideal woman. She has been given as an example to women since the third century and her image has been consolidated in Christian countries without any difficulties through the centuries up till now, although it is a construct, an idealised representation of femininity that has almost nothing in common with actual women, because she is determined by the very fact that she is, as M. Warner emphasises in the title of her excellent book, “alone of all her sex”. 24 “Sweet Lord how this little caterpillar gnawed into the breast! He must have felt that this was his last time. He wouldn’t and wouldn’t stop drinking. He was all shivering, like a twig in the strong wind. Then suddenly he stopped drinking, let go of the breast and stared into me.” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 11) The narrator is not merely observing a nursing woman, but also issues statements about breastfeeding that are not without ideological subtone, as he writes about the relationship between Merica’s employer to her son: “Every now and then she played with her son a little, stroke his hair, asked him a question, but she didn’t know how to create a deeper relationship with him. Probably because she couldn’t give him milk, which is the tightest bond between a mother and her child.” (245) “Oh, how he suckled! He ate into the breast and his tiny hands were shaking. The breasts were swollen, full of milk.” (23) “The child fell instantly silent. He turned his little face towards Merica’s breasts, inhaled her scent and fell silent.” (39) “A breast, brimming with milk, offers itself to him. The child suckles greedily.” (49) “He placed his tiny hand onto the breast, spread out his fingers and only moved them a little every now and then. As if he wanted to make sure that the breast was still there by touching it, that everything was alright.” (84) She sat on a bench under a walnut tree and offered him her breast. Electricity, mild and gentle, went through her body. And the child drank, drank, drank and the sky was clear, clean, and the wind was even gentler than before.” (284) 25 “And she prayed. Her pale lips were moving barely perceptibly : ‘Mary, mother of God, please, stay with me, don’t leave me for even a moment. Protect me, defend me, lead all my

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form of her husband Ivan; Christ who is God’s son, but also the celestial groom. When Merica goes to visit the dying Pierre, she puts on a cross pendant, a light dress with flowers and a coat made of azure silk. Merica’s closeness to Mary is emphasised with the vision of Mary the Queen of Heaven as well. The end of the story elevates Merica into the place of a queen who rules over her surroundings and thus embodies another Marian image – Maria Regina. In the myth of the Beautiful Vida, Tomsˇicˇ is inspired by a traditional view of femininity as torn between sin and sacrifice; the writer returns to the Marian ideal without problematising it. In the literary tradition of the myth of beautiful Vida, his novel thus does not represent an innovative approach or an artistic surplus, because it reiterates the already solidified mythical constants. We have indirectly touched upon Bevk’s take on the beautiful Vida myth in the section describing Cranes, so let us here simply add that for him, aleksandrinstvo is merely a frame in which to place a story about a sexual woman who cannot find happiness in her marriage, so she longs for a different life. Francka sees the fulfilment of her desires in her departure to Egypt. Pogacˇnik correctly states that the ideological starting point for her departure is Bevk’s view of “the incomprehensibility of female nature that with a mysterious force chains a man to herself, tortures him and brings him to an expected life situation that has disastrous consequences” (Pogacˇnik 1988, 179). For Bevk, the social dimension of aleksandrinstvo remains a marginal topic; in the forefront is the research of a woman as an eternal enigma, a woman as an erotic demon. The foreign and mysterious Egypt is merely an attractive backdrop for placing his research. Bevk is also disturbed by the rebelliousness in the character of the beautiful Vida, her readiness to cut off the ties to the moral limits of the world in which she grew up, to find personal happiness, so his Francka is a woman who takes the challenge and succumbs to temptation. For a brief pleasure in the happiness of love she is, like her predecessors, punished; even more, by leaving she sets in motion a series of events that do not only make her unhappy, but also her husband and her child. Bevk and Tomsˇicˇ brought the aleksandrinka character close to the myth of the beautiful Vida with their texts. While Bevk remained bound to the traditional representation of beautiful Vida as a destructor of the happiness of the hearth, Tomsˇicˇ decided with the character of Merica for the variant in which Vida returns home and by this emphasised the Marian basis of the myth. By this, he also followed the desire to retain the moral pureness of the character of beautiful thoughts, all my deeds. I’m asking you the same, my beloved intercessor, St Joseph. I’m terribly scared, look, I’m fragile like a reed in the wind. If you don’t stand by me, you and Mary, I’ll break, I’ll burn in flames. St Joseph, protect me, keep an eye over us all, Amen, amen!’” (Tomsˇicˇ 2002, 28)

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Vida inherent to this variant. Although Bevk and Tomsˇicˇ showed different endings to women’s fates they are both interested in an aleksandrinka as a sexual being, divided between pleasure and duty. Their innovation in regard to the beautiful Vida character in the myth is nothing more than linking it to the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo.

Conclusion Let us conclude with the thought that the image of an aleksandrinka was, particularly because the phenomenon itself hid the subversive charge of the rebellion against any kind of control, so seductive for the power struggle between the author and an imaginary aleksandrinka. The latter is, in the works of all the male authors (Asˇkerc, Bevk, and Tomsˇicˇ) finally tamed and/or crushed in one way or another. By asserting his domination on the imaginary level, the author puts himself in the role of the creator punishing evil. It is therefore not surprising that Slovenian authors also showed or emphasised the image of the promiscuous aleksandrinka and thus anchored it in the collective memory even more. While Asˇkerc showed the moral ruination of an aleksandrinka on one character only, Bevk and Tomsˇicˇ clustered their tragic fates and the fates of their families and created the image of aleksandrinstvo in which sexual promiscuity was prevalent and caused the disintegration of the traditional family and a threat to the national organism. Although in literature, authenticity and experience are not a measure of the artistic worth of texts, I will leave the final words to aleksandrinka ˇ erne: Marija C Even when I was a little girl, they considered the aleksandrinke to be chic (beautiful and elegant). I also got many chic things when I was working over there. Some girls went very gladly, for this particular reason. They could hardly wait to become aleksandrinke. (…) But we went for the most part to earn more, here in Gorica I’d get 50 lira, and in Egypt 300, that’s why we went, for the money […] And it also wasn’t all as bad as that one writes in his book [Marjan Tomsˇicˇ : Grenko morje]. And there weren’t any of those harems, as he says in the book. Not in my time anymore. I also don’t know of any woman getting lost, there were rumours, but I know of only one woman who married someone else. A Muslim, but he lived like Europeans. She had a chance, life was different there. (Sˇkrlj 2009, 183)

Marina Luksˇicˇ Hacin

8.

Women Migrants and Gender Relations: Patriarchy in the Time of Aleksandrinke

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to present social relations through the prism of gender dichotomy in the period of migration of aleksandrinke. This specific migration took place in times of patriarchal mentality observed in the Slovenian ethnic territory and throughout Europe. Patriarchy can be considered as one of the constitutive axes of the phenomenon of aleksandrinke, aleksandrinstvo, which is evident from debates on relations between the nation state and female migration. The chapter provides an analysis of patriarchy in the European context and subsequently focuses on regional conditions that encouraged female migration to Egypt. In both contexts, patriarchy is explored on different social levels: in the field of science/philosophy and literature, on the levels of politics, media, and public opinion, and in the activities of the Church and everyday life. The chapter concludes with a thematisation of aleksandrinke through the prism of patriarchy and the creation of memory. Namely, while the existing narratives and interpretations of aleksandrinstvo differ, (non)patriarchy seems to be the main point of distinction. We can talk about women as such when we shift to a very abstract level of consideration of social relations. The similarity and uniformity of women (men) and the stereotype of such similarities are established as a construct of a thought process, derived at a certain level of abstraction under precisely defined criteria which consider gender dimorphism to be a biological fact, while in reality, this dimorphism translates into a culturally/socially constructed gender dichotomy. The cultural/social male and female genders and the relations between them are thus established as homogeneous groups. Women are indeed similar to one another, but they are also, even mostly, very different. The differing realities of cultures/societies classified in a (post-)modern or Eurocentric environment require us to categorise the population of women into various subgroups all the way down to the individual if we want to understand their lives. The understanding of cultural/social relations I set out in my approach stems from the life

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of the individual woman. She combines various roles and statuses and in her interactions with her environment she belongs to various social groups which she has either chosen or been assigned to by her environment. Women differ in their family status, social class, education, occupations, religious affiliations, ethnicity, and citizenship; some have moved to other countries and become migrants, others have not. What do migrant women have to say about their lives? Why did they choose to migrate? What networks emerged, and how were they treated in the country of destination? A series of questions leads us not just to the fate of particular women, but also to the life paths of migrant women over the last two hundred years, the age of mass migration. The debate on migration through the prism of (patriarchal) gender dichotomy is very broad, as it covers both synchronous and diachronous perspectives. The case of Slovenian women is very complex, as they migrated all over the world. To understand their lives we have to recognise the European context in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the emphasis on events in Central Europe, mass emigration from Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the deeply pervasive gender dichotomy in the Slovenian environment, which in two hundred years has loosened and shifted to a concealed, systemic level, where the term patriarchy has discursively replaced the term androcentricity. “Man is idea, woman is matter” (Hegel 1986, 259) or “man is the head, woman the heart” (Bleiweis, in Vodopivec 1994, 35) are oft-repeated words in Europe in various social contexts and levels – in everyday life, in politics, ideologies, theories, and so on – which we find throughout history up to the present day. The phrase conveys a central message which forms one of the fundamental axes of the patriarchal or androcentric perception of reality. This sustains itself in social conditions through various (un)conscious mechanisms. Patriarchal relations between the genders are evident and maintained in the case of migration, although it can also depatriarchalise them. People move from one society/culture to another society/culture. Cultural practices are different, as are contexts and power relations. Yet often social powerlessness and subordination remain relative constants accompanying the female gender which through history are only slowly changing. In the Slovenian case we find typical female (labour) migration, which had a significant economic effect: women were social actors and destroyed traditional relations. Nevertheless, a strong patriarchal perception of the passive role of women in public life has remained anchored in the collective historical memory right up to the present day. It is only now that we are seeing redefinitions and reconstructions of the patriarchal historical memory, which recognise the historical facts of active and employed women who are (were) constituent social actors. Today, women’s life stories are shifting strongly away from concealment to openness, from a

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masculinised rhetoric to an authentic feminised one, and as such they are also becoming more visible in historiography, which is finally providing space for them in the construction of the collective memory – in Slovenia as well as in the whole of Europe.

Europe We live in a European space, where the understanding of genders, gender differences, and their social/cultural constructions are bound up in the mentality1 heritage, which is androcentric. Tradition is the result of social conditions which, in European history, have been imbued with patriarchal relations in terms of both perception and daily life. This is supported by numerous studies that consider gender relations from a historical perspective in terms of various social sciences and humanities and testify to the deep-seated nature of patriarchal relations in Europe. Examples include Women in European History (Bock 2004), The Gender of History : Men, Women and Historical Practice (Smith 1998), Political Systems and Definitions of Gender Roles (Isaacs 2001), Social History of the Family (Sieder 1998), and Women, Gender and Labour Migration (Sharpe 2001). In the past, justifying and excusing the existing patriarchal structure of reality were a constant feature in every existing social/cultural sphere, including philosophical thought. It is both interesting and instructive to read how the great philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who in Europe to this day still has an important role in thinking about social/cultural relations, understood gender relations. He developed his view of gender relations and his justification for the existing (patriarchal) gender dichotomy in his Phenomenology of Spirit, when he talks about human2 and divine law,3 man as idea and woman as matter (Hegel 1986, 257). 1 Mentality as a category is related to the term tradition. In certain respects, the terms match and are intertwined, but they are also different. While tradition is more enthused by the past, mentality is a construction of the present conditioned by the past. Both terms designate processes (and not states) that are constituent parts of the practices comprising the process of culture. It could be said that culture is a process of intertwining dynamic processes and more stable, long-lasting, slowly changing processes. The last-mentioned in relation with certain other processes form the longer-term axes of culture. 2 Human law is the spirit of universality, it is a given, present morality on which rest government (authority), a social reality which points to an active individual. Human law embodies male operating principles, and it is only men who from social frameworks are included in social life extending beyond the boundaries of the family, and who achieve self-awareness. Here both the individual consciousness (not a single, arbitrary individual consciousness, but rather the universal individual consciousness) and the individuum in general operate.

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In Central Europe at the turn of the century, of which until 1918 Slovenia was a part politically, Hegel’s starting point was taken to extremes by Otto Weininger in his work Sex and Character.4 In the spirit of philosophical dualism, Weininger creates an ideal-type gender duality. Woman is emotional, man conceptual. Woman lives unconsciously, man consciously. Woman is an object, man a subject. Female nature is passive, male nature active. Woman is matter, man structure. Woman is matter, man an idea. Durable, valuable, perfect is the idea, conscious, subject, activity, structure, male. Worthless, sinful, transient is the emotional, unconscious, object, passive, matter, female (Weininger 1936, 281). For both authors, reason is the domain of the male. The only sexuality that is permitted and desirable is linked to reason, while it is necessary to break the link between sexuality and emotions and emotionality, which is the domain of the female. Sexuality linked to emotion is sinful. In the European tradition, which in the past centuries was also imbued with national ideology, this discourse has also been linked to concern for the state, the homeland, the fatherland, which in the first instance is reflected in the concern for the birth rate.5 This becomes women’s duty, a sacred duty, which is reflected in the glorification of motherhood. Concern for the state was brought intensively to the fore in the age of the nation state. The aforementioned dyad of reason-emotion led to a changed understanding of the human body and to a reconstruction of the gender dichotomy. Patriarchal relations between the genders and a patriarchal interpretation of sexuality itself slowly became the key emphases of nationalist ideology. This was analysed in greater detail by Nira Yuval-Davis in Gender and 3 Divine law operates on the individual, and encompasses the substance in its vicinity. It establishes itself in the family, where we find female operating principles. Family morality is merely superficial. Family cannot be based on emotion, but on a universal principle. The fundamental concern of the family is concern for the dead – also the point at which the family connects to the universal. 4 Weininger died young (1903), but after his death his work achieved great success, which says much about the mentality of the period. 5 There are contact points, crossovers, between human and divine law. They each bear within them a schism, which is fundamental as it enables the existence of the law (both laws carry within them an external contradiction under Hegel’s principle, where the smallest part contains a contradiction of the whole). In the husband-wife relation there is a direct awareness of one consciousness in another, and mutual recognition. However according to Hegel this cognition is natural and not moral, it is merely an image of the soul, and not the actual soul. The actual reality of this relation is not in the relation itself (it does not return to itself), but in the child, through which generations change. This relation is based on natural and emotional ties. The most moral relationship within the family is the brother-sister relationship. It is the only one with peace and balance – a balance of blood. Both genders are mutually independent individualities. It is thus as a sister that a woman has the most sense for moral essence. To the sister, the brother is an equal being, her relationship to him is pure, untainted by natural relationship (Hegel 1986, 257).

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Nation (2004) and Marija Juric´ Pahor in Narod, identiteta, spol [Nation, Identity, Gender] (2000), who found that the decisive ideological dimension of this time is the negative valuation of gender (sex) and sexuality. Gender and sexuality became areas in which nation states began to implement repressive control over people. At a given moment concern for the birth rate leapt6 from the level of the individual life to the level of concern for the state. A discourse emerged on the duty of the citizen. The duties of citizens to the state were emphasised, rather than the state’s obligation to care for its citizens. This concern is of course unevenly distributed between genders, which means that women are more responsible and obliged to have and raise children – proper citizens – which also emphasises a demand for quality in addition to the birth rate. The nationalist discourse, imbued as it is with consideration of the quality of the state and the nation, is viewed by the authors as a eugenic discourse (Yuval-Davis 2009, 43 – 63; Juric´ Pahor 2000, 43 – 68). Thoughts of the quantity and quality of the nation and on the role of women in the field of duty to the nation state inevitably lead to specific attitudes towards migration as a drain of people, and particularly to the stigmatisation of female migration. Socio-political attitudes toward female migration in European history were influenced by the patriarchal relations that in the nation state further tightened control over women. Mirjana Morokvasˇic´ states that in patriarchal societies where women are in a subordinate and dependent position, the gender structure of emigration is distinctly male (1984, 979). Gabriella Arena adds that this is typical of environments where women are distinctly subordinate and do not have free choice. In such environments, it is unacceptable for women to travel abroad alone, to work or to take on a role assigned to men (1983, 180). However, in these situations male migration feeds back to the existing patriarchal relations and the gender dichotomy. The family dynamic changes. Social roles and status are redefined. Maura Palazzi shows that women who stayed at home also had to adopt a male role and run the household. Although this was not always necessary, as sometimes the family male role was taken on by the husband’s or wife’s original family. Women were often forced to seek employment. As more men emigrated, demand for labour appeared, and it was easier for women to find work (1992, 371 – 373). However, there was female migration even in these patriarchal societies, although the number of women opting to do so was extremely low. Morokvasˇic´ shows that in such environments, emigration was socially inappropriate for women. In societies with gender segregation or where women’s spatial mobility is restricted, only certain categories of marginalised women are involved in migration flows: divorced, unmarried, widowed (1984, 6 The leap happens both in the sense of concern for the birth rate and in the sense of constituting an individual obligation to care for the state and its identity (Juric´ Pahor 2000, 22).

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979), and women were presented as an unimportant factor in migration, as companions to male migrants. A woman should only passively accompany her husband, as dictated by her natural role (Ibid., 976). Migration is one important factor that changed and continues to change social relations in emigration and immigration societies. This is particularly true if we view migration phenomena through the prism of gender dichotomy as such or through the specific patriarchal gender dichotomy. Under the influence of migration and the associated cultural contacts, existing gender stereotypes and relations were radically redefined on the group and individual levels (in individual cases, but with a long-term influence on the community level as well). The positions of women involved in migration due to migration by their husbands, and of migrant women, are highly complex and differentiated. Even when women do not migrate but stay at home while their husbands leave, social consequences soon emerge. They are even more obvious if we consider female migration. But nothing is said in public on this aspect of the social dynamic. Women were not involved in public discourses on socially important relations, if we exclude discussion of the duties of women to the nation, the state, and the family. They were silent, and that silence is an important factor in the construction of the collective memory, which enabled the reproduction of the patriarchal mentality in Europe.7 Women in the twentieth century truly began slowly to enter history as important rulers, noblewomen, artists, writers, nuns and townswomen, but less important women, such as the petit bourgeoisie, farmers and workers, had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s before entering the historical record. (Verginella 2004, 8)

Concealment of women is a phenomenon throughout European history, especially evident in cases of migration. Morokvasˇic´ states that, despite the growing numbers in migration practice, women long remained invisible in theory and reflections (1984, 976). Some time ago, the Dutch demographer Hofstee found that the problem of female migration was one of the most neglected problems in demography and economics. Female migration represents a phenomenon that 7 “As the first fighters for women’s rights understood, the decisive conflict with the explicit and even more dangerously the concealed misogyny of western thought cannot avoid historiographical ground. The need became evident for a thorough settlement with the discipline that legitimised the patrilinear and patriarchal structure of authority, thereby helping perpetuate the institutional mechanisms excluding women. Delegitimising them required not just political activism, which over time adopted as its goal the extension of men’s rights to women. It also required a specific shock to the position of women, which could only follow from a daring exposure of historical restrictions, subordination and repression of the second sex, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, which became a founding text of feminism.” (Verginella 2004, 7)

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we know exists but the dimensions, frameworks, and characteristics of which we do not know (Zanini 1964, 9). Women were presented as an unimportant factor in migration, as a variable of male migration. A woman should only passively accompany her husband, as dictated by her natural role. In the past, female migration was not a subject of serious debate and research. Women only very rarely generated research interest, and only if they greatly outnumbered male migrants (Morokvasˇic´ 1984, 976). Giovanna Brunetta adds that the greater focus on women was a consequence of (liberal) migration policies in western European countries, where the demand for cheap labour also promoted greater female immigration (1983, 154).

Slovenian ethnic territory In the history of gender relations in the Slovenian ethnic territory, we find similar patriarchal relations to those prevalent in Europe. There was a strict division of labour by gender in all classes: nobility, farmer’s wives, town residents, workers. There were differences among members of different social classes – noble women were raised to be exemplary, loving spouses, elegant and refined hostesses; farmer’s wives8 were raised to do women’s farm work, and had limited freedom in terms of marriage and place of residence; women in crafts and merchant families were raised to do women’s work9 (Mihelicˇ 2004, 24). Similar subordination and valuation of the female workforce also applied to female industrial workers.10 “Under the collective agreement, women were paid 8 “In the agricultural economy, women generally did not hold their own property. If they married into a farm, they did not usually become joint owners of the property, but they did retain possession of their dowry, if so stated in the marriage contract. On farms where their husband joined them, they usually became joint owners of the property, although their husbands controlled the whole property. Women only controlled household income, which usually included income from garden vegetables, dairy, poultry and breeding other small animals.” (Kresal 2004, 173) 9 “In business, women had a subordinate role. They were almost exclusively involved in dependent work. They were only economically active in trades, retail and free occupations as widows or heirs. In the nineteenth and twentieth-century industry, women were involved as workers: they accounted for 25 – 40 % of all employees.” (Ibid., 171) 10 We must mention that, as a result of the fight for women’s rights, at the end of the nineteenth century women in Slovenia were given significant protection against exploitation: “In the first codification of labour protection in the 1880s, female workers were protected against excessive exploitation, employing women in night and unhealthy work was banned, motherhood was partly protected, maternity leave was introduced, companies had to provide childcare if they employed significant numbers of mothers of small children. They had to provide suitable apartments in female residences for young single female workers, ‘to protect their morals’. The 1922 Workers’ Protection Act further extended this protection.” (Ibid., 171)

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less than men; even the minimum wage as defined by the state was lower for women. Women had fewer qualifications than men; female workers usually worked on piecework, which was harder and less favourable.” (Kresal 2004, 171) Women, members of various classes, were very diverse, and in politicaleconomic terms they were on different sides and sometimes in conflicting social relations. On the other hand, they were similar in at least two senses: the role and status allocated to them by their environment because of their gender. First, within their own particular social class, they were subordinate to men in that class. The hegemonic social perception of fairness affirmed female subordination. Secondly, they were all exposed to the same view of the nature of women and women’s social/national duties: concern for birth, descendants, raising children, household and the elderly. These concerns were assigned to all women, regardless of their social class and historical period. Maca Jogan (2004) states that, thanks to its great power and influence in Slovenia, the Roman Catholic Church was a key factor in defining the image of the proper woman. Its official positions imbued contemporary science, politics, and other social subsystems. The image of woman was derived from several assumptions. The first assumption was that the world is defective and can be improved, but only in line with the divine plan, which requires a social hierarchy. The subordination of women is particularly important for the social hierarchy. The second assumption was that man is sinful and must therefore be raised accordingly. The final assumption was that the only worthy women are those who are married with children. By her nature and in the divine plan, she is dependent on, and must be subordinate to, her husband. The only environments in which women can live naturally are marriage and family which – like motherhood – are praised and glorified. Typically, the idealised family image is as a place of harmony, enjoyment, and a source of altruism. The prevalent one-sided views of home and family eliminated behaviour based on the personal experiences of most women, and helped correctly direct emotional control. Rather than resistance and demand for change, much of the effort of those forming mass consciousness was directed towards developing humility and submissiveness in the name of the fear of God. The Catholic Church was particularly active in this regard through various organised forms of operation. One such was the Marian Society, which became particularly influential in the first two decades of the twentieth century. (Jogan 2004, 302)

Jogan continues that, given the belief that it is the family that teaches humility and submissiveness, much attention began to be paid to the revitalisation of the proper image of women as the main bearers or moral characteristics.11 Because 11 “Since the 1890s, the Marian Society, in the Trieste region as elsewhere in Slovenia, has had a clearly defined purpose, to celebrate the image of Mary, that is woman as caring spouse and

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of this key role, daring women were very unnatural and harmful. The main sources for the (re)interpretation of the social order and the consolidation of the ideology of gender hierarchy were the historically tested theological explanation and the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, as well as the increasingly powerful social sciences, that is, sociology, which in Slovenia was closely tied to the Roman-Catholic interpretation of reality (Ibid.). The position was similar for philosophy. In keeping with the spirit of the age, positions similar to those of Hegel and Weininger were advocated in Slovenia by, for instance, Bleiweis, who showed that the husband is the head, the wife is the heart. He is characterised by reason, she by emotion. The husband strives in the outside world, while she supports the house. It was an important message that the wife’s domain is nature and the husband’s domain, the spirit. Men sacrifice themselves for an idea, while women give themselves over to the well-being of the family and loved ones. Humour is further evidence of women’s inferiority. Humour is their weak point, as it requires creative thinking and research; women do not have these characteristics and are therefore incapable of producing fruitful literary and cultural-historical studies (in Vodopivec 1994, 35 – 36). Similar influential arguments at that time were also provided by Anton Mahnicˇ, who justified women’s subordination using two decisive pieces of evidence. He said that the creator himself wanted to subordinate wives to their husbands, as shown by the way in which he created them. Secondly, this subordination is punishment for the sin brought into this world by a woman. Mahnicˇ further insisted on the old form that God rewarded man with reason and woman with heart. Among the six characteristics that define male and female spirituality, for men, Mahnicˇ places reason in the first place and passion in the last; for women, it is precisely the opposite (in Vodopivec 1994, 41). Mahnicˇ claimed that because of his intelligence, man is called upon to take a higher place in society, and to rule. The job of women, in contrast, is through tenderness and gentleness to calm, soften and smooth men when they are too serious and too strict. This is essential for the successful development of society. Society cannot develop successfully if this natural order is transformed into gender equality. Woe betide society should women take on a leading role. It’s the equivalent of a blind man acting as a guide, or leaving judgement to the imprudent. Wives should operate privately, within the family circle, and should not go out in public. Women in public – be quiet! The press around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century asserted that women must be modest, parent, who protects the home and looks after children, and not as an emancipated person who sells bread or otherwise earns money, and who is approached by village farmers for loans when they find themselves in financial difficulties.” (Kalc 2002, 165 – 166) The Marian Society and Marian Cult are also described in Jernej Mlekuzˇ’s chapter.

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without make up, and should be honest and humble. Their clothing must also be cheap and modest. Women must be distinguished by their natural characteristics, which are evident in their movements and physical appearance. Humility must also be evident from their movements and appearance. A woman should express herself in public only through her male representative, and she grows and rises or falls and fails with him. Even the very idea, let alone the practice, of a girl being too daring is immoral, and is evidence of a lack of faith (Jogan 2004, 303 – 306). In the Slovenian context too, the hegemonic interpretation is that reason is a male domain.12 Sexuality is the domain of women. However, the only sexuality that is permitted and desirable is linked to reason, while the link must be broken between sexuality and emotion and emotionality, the domain of women. As already mentioned, this discourse is also linked to concern for homeland, fatherland, state, nation, reflected in the first instance as concern for the birth rate. This becomes a woman’s duty, even a sacred duty, which is reflected in the glorification of motherhood. Marija Juric´ Pahor says that the ideology of virtuous and somehow desexualised motherhood is one of the most vital questions of national policy among Slovenians. Even within national politics, motherhood is sacred and the most elevated task of women. Praise be to the woman who make sacrifices to fulfil their task. Her reward will be the immeasurable love of children and the gratitude of the nation. In Slovenian conditions we also encounter a eugenic construct even more intensive than in Western European countries, since the nation-building processes followed the so-called Central European model,13 where the nation is not a legal and institutional concept but a cultural 12 Even at the end of the nineteenth century, women in Slovenia still faced harsh restrictions in education: “Women in this context were fundamentally restricted: under an 1878 law, they were only allowed to attend university lectures in exceptional circumstances. Their applications were handled individually on a case by case basis. (..) But even if they were allowed to attend lectures, they were still not allowed to matriculate at university. (..) It was only in 1896 that medical doctorates obtained in other countries were recognised, and it was only in March 1897 that women were finally allowed to enrol in the Faculty of Arts. […] Under the monarchy, even after that year female Slovenian university students were uncommon.” (Gantar Godina 2002, 187) 13 The authors mainly talk about two models of nation-state formation in Europe: Western European, and Central European. The first (western) model appeared within the frameworks of absolutist states. They particularly emphasise the centrality of national territory, shared laws and institutions, legal equality of all citizens and the important of a common citizenship culture. But it is primarily based on the concept of nation. The nation is a legal and institutional concept, in which the borders of the state and the nation coincide. The term nation substantively describes this coincidence. The second model emerged with the support of intellectual and cultural elites. It stresses the importance of ethnic origin, cultural ties and common language. Here too, the focus is on the concept of nation, but nation is a cultural and social concept, while the state, as a wider political community, can combine multiple nations (Rizman 1995, 197).

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and social concept, with great emphasis on ethnic origin and inherited cultural ties – this is also reflected in the ius sanguinis principle of inheriting citizenship that gradually became established. The view of nation, national belonging, and identity as an inherited category also had a strong influence on attitudes towards emigration, which was often referred to as “draining the lifeblood” or as a cause of the extinction of the Slovenian nation. This fear-mongering was a powerful element of the political discourse of the Church, science, and individual political parties. In relation to women, we can again add the discourse on duties in relation to the nation and culture in the sense already mentioned of concern for a higher birth rate. The described spirit of the age, which imbued everyday life, was very strong in the past in the Slovenian ethnic territory. In the age of mass emigration from Central Europe – including from Slovenia – it also heavily influenced attitudes towards migration as well as migration dynamics. The church had a clearly defined negative attitude towards emigration, particularly the emigration of women. It believed that migration leads to the death of the national body, an outpouring of blood, and is a cancer on the Slovenian nation. Furthermore, female migration represents a risk of moral and physical collapse. In relation to the emigration of women, we encounter an interesting phenomenon relating primarily to Catholic women, to religious women and families. (..) The separation caused by the emigration of Slovenes clearly also entailed the breaking of families as a consequence of the separation of men and women, who were abandoned to the (sinful) temptations of the world. And the consequences involved not just broken families, but also badly raised children, a risk to their faith. On the other hand, they emphasised that, if they maintain their faith and family life, women in new environments are the preservers of Slovenian identity, that is the Slovenian language. (Drnovsˇek 2002, 175)

Kalc states that men had considerably greater freedom of movement than women. At the turn of the century, this was reflected in the fact that, when the whole family travelled, the husband obtained a passport, and his wife and children were recorded in his passport. When whole families travelled, married women could not have their own passports. Female migration was more involved in institutional frameworks. In this context we mention the family as a social institution, whether that be her family, in which the woman is a partner and a mother or daughter, or the family of the immigration environment, in which the woman migrant is involved as a worker (Kalc 2002, 154). Nevertheless, in history we can find numerous examples of typical female daily and seasonal migration, as well as more sustained female emigration. Apart from the very well-known case of the aleksandrinke, we could also mention the straw hat makers, slamnikarice, from the Domzˇale area, who emigrated to the US, and the emigration of housewives and maids to Argentina. Drnovsˇek states that in the nineteenth

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century, among Slovenian women we find pedlars from Venezia Giulia and spinners and farm workers from the eastern part of the Slovenian ethnic territory, who moved to Croatia and other parts of what was then Hungary. Women moved as cooks and servants to large European towns and tourist destinations, such as Trieste, Gorizia, Milan, Paris, Zagreb, Belgrade, Vienna, etc. (1997, 28). Women moved to Italy for work, women from Prekmurje travelled as seasonal workers to the fields of Germany and France, missionaries from Prekmurje moved to France, etc. Women were wet nurses, maids, washerwomen, housewives, chestnut sellers, smugglers, bread makers, fruit and vegetable sellers, dairymaids, ˇsavrinke (egg resellers, sing. ˇsavrinka), pedlars, spinners, farmers, cooks, servants, etc. Through her activities, the ˇsavrinka became a symbol of the brave, persistent and active Istrian wife. She typically had a special social status both within the family and in wider society. As resellers, every week they walked across the Istrian peninsula. They were separated from their families for days at a time. They recognised the difference between the interior poverty of Istria and the splendour of Trieste. (Ledinek Lozej, Rogelja 1996, 654)

Female migration had an impact on their environments of origin. It had an important economic impact. It actively destroyed the traditional patriarchal perception of the passive role of women in public life, which permeated their areas of origin. Single women often sent money home, but even when they did not, the news of their active lives changed stereotypical views of women. Married migrants left their husbands at home with their families, and their departure in itself radically changed the stereotypical family parental relations and roles. Right up to the present day, women temporarily or permanently migrated to various countries as part of mixed-gender waves (as individuals, partners, or mothers with families), or as part of typical female destinations. The reasons for migration were ordinary, and are well-known in migration studies. In terms of the study of gender dichotomy, a new aspect emerges which must be mentioned. In the patriarchal Slovenian environment imbued with numerous gender stereotypes of subordinate women and superior men as heads of the family, migration appeared to women as an opportunity to escape from the constricting domestic bonds to more women-friendly environments. Graziella Favaro and Mara Tognetti Bordogna found a similar phenomenon when researching Italian migration. The researchers talk of migration as escape from male violence, from the authority of relatives, from their subordinate patriarchal relations to environments with greater female autonomy, and as emancipation (Favaro, Tognetti Bordogna 1991, 138). Examples of Slovenian migration are testified by numerous stories of women, including the stories of some of the aleksandrinke, who viewed their lives in Egypt entirely differently than their original environments,

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and many of them had their own attitudes towards Islam, its beliefs and the Egyptian social/cultural environment. Similarly, the path to the US or Argentina gave women the opportunity to enjoy less discriminatory relations in their new environment. Women who moved to the US or Argentina reported that conditions were more women-friendly than in most European countries. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, women had more social space and greater social and political rights. In her book, Marie Prisland described one of her first impressions of America as this one: “The honor and the freedom which American women were enjoying was a marvel to me. This is not duplicated in any other country on the globe. A few married men, however, were of a different opinion. Used to European behavior, they thought that America was over-protecting the little woman. One complained: ‘In Europe a man could mishandle his wife and nobody bothered him, but here, if a man beats his wife a little and the neighbors hear her cry, they quickly call the police! The man is taken to jail for something he believed it was his right to do. Isn’t the wife his property? And is he not free to do with it what he thinks is right?’ (Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik 2007, 129)

Aleksandrinke Women in Slovenia were an important active part of public life in the broadest sense of the word, but this was not discussed, and the results of their work were minimised and ascribed to their husbands or men, and were thus masculinised; otherwise, they were not talked about, and were thus silenced. Slovenian reality thus functioned in two stages – on the level of practice with full and important participation by women, and on the level of construction of the image of existing reality, where women as actors were silenced, they were only spoken of in the “educational” sense, how women ought to be, and in the punitive sense for women who resisted this, lived their own lives and were not always diligent. In the case of migration, the situation was similar. In practice, the aleksandrinke were not the only instance of female migration in Slovenia at that time. We saw that women’s engagement in migration was an important economic, social, and cultural factor in Slovenia, whether it involved daily, seasonal, temporary, or permanent migration. On the level of construction of a view of reality and later memory of it (history), their stories were mostly silenced. The exceptions were polemics on the dangers of migration for the extinction of the nation and culture which, within the Central-European understanding of nationality, were even harsher and linked to glorification of motherhood. In migration flows, this was (and continues to be) reflected on the one hand in relation to emigration in barriers to emigration, in the understanding that emigrants, and even their descendants, are full-blooded Slovenians, that Slovenian lifeblood is draining;

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and on the other hand in negative attitudes towards immigrants and their descendants who, despite naturalisation, were long viewed not as proper Slovenians – today as citizens of Slovenia who are not proper Slovenians. One of the key agents establishing the conditions described is (was) the Roman Catholic Church, who long actively intervened in public events, forming public opinion, and social control. The question that arises in this context is: How were the aleksandrinke special, what made them stand out, such that the dynamic of creating memory of them took such a particular path? In practice, their stories were not especially different from the stories of those who emigrated to the US, Argentina, or Italy, or indeed from those women who stayed at home but who wet-nursed other people’s children – at that time in Slovenia, wet-nursing was almost a special domestic trade. Aleksandrinke were special in at least two things: they experienced the phenomenon of chain migration of women, and to a large extent they returned. The very existence of chain migration is highly disturbing in the context of the nationalist covenant and the duties of women to their nation, culture, and faith. Nevertheless, chain migration would not in itself have been so contentious had it not also entailed chain returnees. Personally, I think that returning was the factor that makes aleksandrinstvo stand out as a special phenomenon. Why? Returning reinforces the migration effect on the reconstruction of existing (patriarchal) social relations. Changed, spoiled, strengthened, more educated women, who lived for some time in more democratic environments, they did not just write about it in letters: they also came back changed, and brought changes to their original environment – thereby increasing the danger that other women, even their daughters, would become infected. When visiting or on their return, many aleksandrinke showed that they had become what conventional wisdom of the day said women could not become. Jogan states that at the time of the aleksandrinke even the desire to escape hunger was seen as greed; the desire for even minimal control of their own lives as female licentiousness; the desire for different criteria as the desire for immorality ; the desire to decide on childbirth as the desire for abortions (murder); the desire to gain at least the same rights as men in terms of the family as the desire to become men; and so on. On this basis J. Cimperle also warned women of the negative consequences of educated (learned) women in this order: the learned woman (sooner or later becomes) – the unfaithful women (who is also malicious, and so becomes) – shameless (and incapable of physical work, and so becomes) – a woman engaged in “horizontal handicrafts” (= prostitute, whore). This creates the most morally negative and terrifying image of woman who appears (can appear) as a binding framework of persuasion on the moral and “proper” image of woman. (Jogan 2004, 303)

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And the aleksandrinke were all of this, achieved all of this – so their changes had to be linked with immorality, sacrilege, and human weakness. To this we can add the warnings, adopted from Jogan, saying that woman becomes the devil as soon as she is infected with doubt or even becomes an unbeliever. The aleksandrinke were also exposed to Islam in Egypt. They also received extra education abroad: In the Slovenian press, the desire of women to access knowledge was proclaimed as a desire for destruction of (the greatest good) the family, and hence something truly “disgusting”, and as nascent immorality. True morality would be achieved if women followed a positive example – the Virgin Mary. (Jogan 2004, 304)

The aleksandrinke broke the commandment on the social gender division of roles and status, demanded by both society and faith. They violated the belief in subordination, the belief in glorified motherhood, the prohibition of education. And then they returned home, and became even more troublesome as examples of the new behaviours they brought back to their places of origin, including different styles of clothing. The returning aleksandrinke had changed, and they were among the harbingers of changes in patriarchal relations between the genders in the Slovenian countryside. And this sin follows them to this today, when the memory of them contains two opposing currents of memory construction. The first current comprises stories, mostly men’s stories, captured in the nation, culture, cultural creation and assessment, dominated by the principle of the tension between saint and whore. The whore as a different woman, one very similar to contemporary woman, who is not unconditionally available as a service – not as a wife, not as a mother. The saint as a mother who is modest, selfsacrificing, loving to the grave, is glorified and placed on a pedestal. Interpretation of the past thus in a way becomes the author’s way of dealing with the present, and a presentation of the author’s view of how woman should be in the present. The second current comprises approaches that create a public space allowing the aleksandrinke to break their silence and speak for themselves. They speak of everything, of beauty and misery, joy and sadness, gains and losses, rights and injustices. Of all the parts of the mosaic of life, in which when you lose something you always gain something, and vice versa.

Jernej Mlekuzˇ

9.

The Newspaper Images of Aleksandrinke and the National Imagination

Introduction In this chapter I try to answer the following questions: what model of womanhood did the Slovenian press create by writing about aleksandrinke and aleksandrinstvo; how did it articulate the theme; and what material did it use while doing it. This text can be described as a history of representations of a phenomenon which the press typically ignored. But when it did pay attention, the debate was never bland and sleepy, but rather loud and passionate. From the period before World War I until 1940 the press importantly (co-)created and disseminated gender roles in Slovenia. “At the time, one of the most important mass media, the press was used as a suitable tool for solidifying and protecting (patriarchal or androarchal) tradition.” (Jogan 2001, 7) We shall thus analyse what images of aleksandrinke and aleksandrinstvo were in fact spread by this mass media. The mass media images of aleksandrinke and aleksandrinstvo were not simply a wrong, fake notion, rather, they influenced in many different ways aleksandrinstvo itself and the actual lives of aleksandrinke. To go with Foucault: they systematically formed the objects of which they spoke.1 Indeed, the lives of aleksandrinke were directly and greatly influenced by the traditional institutions – family, local community, church. However, the impact of newspapers in constituting and representing the phenomenon was important in the wider (reading) public, whose numbers were considerable.2 In turn, this reading 1 Discourses are composed of signs, “but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things”. Discourses have to be understood as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 2002, 52). 2 The Austrian law of primary education, which introduced compulsory education in 1869, successfully raised literacy among the Slovenian population despite its inconsistent and insufficient implementation. In the territory of the present day Slovenia, 39 % of illiterate inhabitants were older than ten years old in 1880, 25 % in 1890 and only 15 % in 1900 (Drnovsˇek 1991, 52).

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public, through its presence in the families, local communities and church parishes, influenced the image and the treatment of aleksandrinke. The articles that I have collected appeared in clusters, that is, groups of interlinked articles activated by a problem over a relatively limited time period. Thus, from 1884 – when the first known article about aleksandrinstvo appears – till 1910, we can find the following three groups of articles: 1. The moralistic-accusatory article “Rak na telesu primorskega ljudstva” [The Cancer on the Body of the People of Primorska] (Socˇa 1890)3, provoked a heated debate between this conservative newspaper published in Gorica and the liberal Slovenian newspapers Nova Socˇa [New Socˇa] from Gorisˇka and Edinost from Trieste, which took a calmer, less accusatory stand. 2. The series of articles “Izviren dopis iz Aleksandrije” [An Original Post from Alexandria] by Doctor Karol Pecˇnik (Socˇa 1897), who lived there for a period of time. In the articles he presented his open-minded, independent views on aleksandrinstvo. It caused an irritated response in the conservative newspaper Primorski list from Gorica. 3. A long article published in four parts in the liberal Ljubljana paper Slovenski narod (1910) as a patriotic appeal to Slovenian brothers that triggered a response in a form of a series of articles by Andrej Gabersˇcˇek about his mission to Egypt that were published in the liberal newspaper Socˇa. After World War I there were considerably fewer articles. With the advent of Italian fascism to power (1922) most of the Slovenian press in the Kingdom of Italy was discontinued, especially after 1929. In this chapter I shall focus on the time before World War I. Within that period, I will present these three groups of articles as they most clearly reflect specific and fabricated attitudes towards aleksandrinke and aleksandrinstvo. Firstly, I will present the Catholic-inspired attitude, illustrated by the first abovementioned group, which judges and scolds the phenomenon, mostly because it is ruinous to family and faith. Secondly, I will present a personal testimony, found in the second group, of a different view of aleksandrinstvo that did not (completely) yield to the prevalent negative and accusatory attitude to the phenomenon. Finally, I will present the attitude of the liberal press towards aleksandrinstvo, as seen in the third cluster. It could be just as moralistic and accusatory as the conservative one, the only difference between them being that the liberal incitement put national pride and purity in the forefront. Within the liberal discourse, I will present the thoughts of the patriot Andrej Gabersˇcˇek. 3 Throughout this chapter, when newspaper articles are referenced, I cite the name of the author if it was printed in the newspaper. In the cases of anonymously written newspaper articles, I reference the name of the newspaper and its issue number and/or date.

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Through his writings, I will show that the attitude towards aleksandrinstvo should not be understood merely within a framework for the local liberalconservative divide and disputes, but instead shaped by some wider social and cultural circumstances and discourses of the time, which were greatly influenced by ideals of patriotism and freedom as well as concerns by bourgeois reformers over public health and trafficking in women and children.

“The Cancer on the Body of the People of Primorska” Such was the title of an anonymous article that was published in 1890 in two issues of Socˇa (13, 14) in Gorica and triggered a wider newspaper debate. Let’s see what this cancer was: Unless a remedy is soon found, this negligence will revenge itself over the religion, morals and national consciousness of our people from Primorska. I’m talking about the well known aleksandrinstvo of our girls and barely a year married young women. Can we be indifferent in the face of this lethal evil? No. Because aleksandrinstvo is devastating to wives, husbands, children, municipality, state, church, and also estate. (Socˇa 1890/13)

And what is aleksandrinstvo – if we follow the author, who later in the polemic reveals himself as a chaplain with the name Ignacij Kralj – besides being a “lethal evil”? As we can see, it is described and defined mostly through its harmful nature: [A]leksandrinstvo is harmful to women and their morals. Parents complain about the looseness of their children even when they’re at home in a Christian country ; their father keeps an eye on them, their mother, neighbours, the priest looks after them and warns them … But what about when a young girl, inexperienced, travels far across the sea to a commercial, unbridled maritime town where everything glitters and entices into traps with its example! Besides, she doesn’t need to be ashamed, “because nobody knows me here” … And a young wife, despite being married … isn’t this a great danger! And a sad experience teaches us that many fall and return pregnant … yes, even disappear, so even husbands don’t know about them!!! True. I know such cases! (Socˇa 1890/13)

Until nearly the end of the century – the early 1890s – the Slovenian discourse was ruled by texts, as Katja Mihurko Ponizˇ shows, in which the authors (most often from Catholic provenance) felt “chosen to scold, with a hefty dose of misogyny and intolerance, those women who did not follow the eternal commandments, and to warn the public about the increasing evil embodied in the female contemporaries who lack self-will and humility” (Mihurko Ponizˇ 2009, 8). This last group included aleksandrinke, those supposedly cancerous, or

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cancer spreading, creatures. In a number of moralistic texts, which dealt with family life and roles of spouses in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is possible to notice fierce opposition to any sort of female independence (Verginella 2006, 28). This first article can be filed into this type of moralistic texts. The author, bound to conservative, catholic values, with the engaged moralist vocabulary which can be found in other contemporary catholic papers, is not an exotic example of his species, nor is he a desperate lone voice crying for help, when he continues: Aleksandrinstvo harms women in relation to their faith as well: the population of Alexandria is for the most part Mohammedan, Jewish, renegade [Orthodox] and a number of other faiths. There must be a lack in Christian instruction. This can’t fortify our aleksandrinke’s faith, nor can we claim that those returning would fulfil their religious duties and divine commandments with more zeal than before. The girls, when they return, go to all the dances, stay up late and look for a husband from amongst the many admirers of their “napoleons”,4 and then they, after giving birth, return to Alexandria a year later. Because the home food and farm work no longer appeal to them, they have eaten – especially those who have breastfed – selected foods, and have walked on shiny floors and ridden in wealthy carriages side by side with rich, and possibly attractive, gentlemen. It is quite natural that they no longer wholly appreciate their husbands in muddy shoes, or barefoot, smelling of manure for a week … (Socˇa 1890/13)

But this is not the end of the “harm” and “devastation” that aleksandrinstvo spreads. Aleksandrinstvo does not only “harm women and their morals” and, especially, women in relation to their faith, but it is also ruinous to their husbands and children: While she is in Alexandria – what about her husband and her child, or children, at home? “Husbands of aleksandrinke” regularly cast the wee girls and boys into a corner and go day after day to the post office to wait for napoleons. Husbands of aleksandrinke have their own club: on Sundays and, if the need be, on workdays they get together for fun and in the patriotic fervour dance with the youth “until dawn”, while their children are fearfully waiting for papa at home, hungry, without a mother, or wandering around the village. Husbands of aleksandrinke regularly give in to drinking and instead of using the money sent to pay off the debt on the house or buy a plot of land, they drink it. A husband of an aleksandrinka also visits town often. He likes company. Besides that, there’s a certain type of house in Gorizia that keeps multiplying. So they must have visitors. It’s also well known that many of the husbands of aleksandrinke were sentenced for violence … naturally. Aleksandrinstvo opens the door to adultery. A wife, who wants to go to Alexandria to earn money breastfeeding, leaves an infant barely a 4 French gold coins minted with the portrait of Napoleon were not only used during his reign of Egypt in the early nineteenth century but the term napoleon was also later used to refer to coins in general, even those imprinted with other rulers’ images.

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month old and departs. It often happens that she’s not even reached Alexandria when the innocent babe is in the casket. (Socˇa 1890/13)

Men are likewise shown as morally weak in this conservative discourse: lazy, prone to drinking, incapable of taking care of the family and children. Such a depiction of men can be understood as a rhetoric figure within the moral condemnation of aleksandrinstvo – since it represents a threat to a wider social order, because it endangers not only aleksandrinke, but also corrupts men and destroys children. But weakness and moral contamination of men can also be interpreted in the wider frame of the Christian doctrine, or the church usurpation of the civil authority. The exclusive church authority over the institute of marriage after the Council of Trident, according to Luisa Accati, brought limits to father’s authority and consequently all other secular authorities. A priest as an unmarried and pure man thus gained authority that was incomparably higher than the authority of married men: he could put himself in the role of a supervisor of a father’s control over his daughter, and limit a groom’s influence over his bride. The priest’s takeover of the mediation between the bride, the father and the groom, claims Accati, radically changed the balance of social relations in catholic countries. We can therefore understand the depiction of men as morally weak as helping to establish the authority in secular matters – particularly in the family sphere (Accati 2006). Catholic conservatives’ condemnation of aleksandrinstvo must therefore not be understood (only) as a reactionary response to the threat for the family order and the existing gender relations, but also as the establishing and demonstrating church authority in the realm of secular life. If we continue with the article, this is not the end of the “ruin”, the “evil” spread by aleksandrinstvo: A tiger doesn’t abandon her cub to feed a stranger’s, but a human mother – she does. Greed, a greed-blinded mind that uproots emotions. But if the child survives, it goes wild, in body and soul, because it has no one to take care of it; ignorant, crude and evil become such children. […] Also, aleksandrinstvo impedes procreation, and even among the children born, girls go to Alexandria when they grow up, so a farmer can’t even get a wife. But those who stay at home: because there are so few of them, they demand to be paid well, and they also demand – good food in the morning, noon and night. No wonder a farm owner then slips into debt! I know a house, from which 4 or 5 were aleksandrinke. One would expect that they really had something: they even wasted what they used to have! Sin will find no blessing. Before they had a cow, oxen and a pig, but now they have nothing. (Socˇa 1890/13)

The primary role of women, as the author of the article tells us, is thus a reproductive one. The Catholic press of that era glorified the role of the mother and stressed that neglecting maternal duties was a cardinal sin. To benefit her family,

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husband and children, a good mother had to give up her interests and ambitions; any activity outside of the home thus meant neglecting maternal and family duties (Mihurko Ponizˇ 2009, 165). Motherhood in the nineteenth century meant the biggest possible contribution women could make to the national community and it was a subject of glorification. The maternal cult in the Slovenian society was so strong that even progressive women writers did not question it. “Motherhood primarily realised in the relinquishing one’s own wishes and striving towards the ideals of the Marian cult5 presents one of the bases of the constructed femininity in the nineteenth century and even today marks the receptions of the femininity.” (Mihurko Ponizˇ 2009, 56 – 57) In the continuation of the article, published in the consecutive number of the paper, the author immediately questions: “Who should suppress this aleksandrinstvo, which destroys families and as experience shows doesn’t do good not even a thousandth of the moral harm it does?” According to the author, this should be done by the state, the municipality, and the Catholic Church. Let us present in detail only the latter aleksandrinstvo suppressor, to which the author pays most attention anyways: Who can suppress this: only the Church. And how? Girls must be shown the beauty of purity – and the abomination of fornication, gradually they must be warned about the dangers for purity and religion in the faraway unbridled maritime city … and show them that our ultimate motive is to redeem their souls, but aleksandrinstvo makes the happiness of the soul teeter to great dangers, that earthly goods, particularly sinfully acquired, don’t pay. It must be explained to married women: the holiness and the purpose of the holy matrimony : great dangers to it, for the husband, children, even for the property if she separates and goes to Alexandria. (Socˇa 1890/14)

The endeavours of the church authorities to stop or at least limit female migration to Egypt were of course not limited simply to newspaper preaching and moralising. For example, vicar Janez Fiegl from Bilje turned to the Gorica 5 Marian veneration was supported by the Pope in the time when the secularisation process became faster and the male population more deliberately eschewed the church control, when the laicisation of the urban environment broke through to the countryside and the legacy of enlightenment seeped from the circle of intellectuals to the ordinary middle class. The crown of Mariology – the doctrine that has been, despite a great resistance from the clerics, supported by the Immaculatists since the fourth century – was the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, declared in 1854. By finally conceding to the Marian privilege, the pope emphasised the merits stemming from purity and celibacy and set the divine mother as an example to the congregation. He decided for this new dogma, which gave an example of purity to unmarried women and prescribed strict chastity to the married ones, in a time when women started entering professional life and when even the newspapers of Catholic countries published voices of women’s rights supporters (Verginella 2006, 13; more on the Marian Cult, see Accati 2006).

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Archdiocese Ordinariate in 1871 to prevent the departure of fifty women from the home parish to Egypt. He appealed to his superiors to intervene with secular authorities, because the departure of women from the parish their own “physical and moral life” was in danger, as well as the “moral life” of all the other parishers (Makuc 1991, 23 – 24). Church interference into the family and the expansion of the model of a subservient wife and sacrificing mother reached the rural environment towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the church replaced its influence in the public sphere with the authority in family life. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Slovenian church authors launched – in the publications that had a wide reach in the Slovenian territory – an image of the family that on the one hand was coherent with the doctrine of the post-Tridentine church, and on the other took some fundamental characteristics of the bourgeois family model (Verginella 2006; Studen 1994). The endeavours of the religious and civil authorities for the women to abandon gainful activities and dedicate themselves exclusively to family business (keeping house and raising children) were visible everywhere in the Slovenian countryside.6 In the second half of the nineteenth century the writers of Christian moral teachings strove for a strict division between sexes and keeping the women at home. Crossing the threshold meant a great danger for the moral integrity of the family, while female independence was seen as the beginning of female domination and the world turned upside down (Verginella 2006, 12). Emigration of women posed a great danger that this moral integrity of the family would loosen, crack, and break.7 The article “The Cancer on the Body of the People of Primorska” was not without response. Immediately after the first part of the article appeared in Socˇa (1890/13), the liberal Edinost from Trieste published an anonymous article in the section Home News (1890/27), which shows that aleksandrinstvo also became a subject of disputes along the liberal-conservative division line, which in the

6 Slovenian church writers supported the strict division of work with the argument that it is the fundamental condition for family happiness. Such a division was alien to the traditional rural families and better suited to the needs and model of the urban and industrial society. In the bourgeois and wealthy families the wife for the most part let the husband take care of the material welfare and dedicated herself to raising children and managing household. Church authors thus demanded of the rural population to adjust to the urban form of the family, which, as explained, divided gender and economic roles far more strictly (Verginella 2006, 28; for a more detailed presentation of the bourgeois family and ideology that was the base of the new forms of work, see Studen 1994; Sieder 1987). 7 On the attitude (of the Catholic Church) towards female emigration in the time of mass emigration, see Drnovsˇek (2004, 387 – 389).

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decades leading to World War I governed not only the political field, but also the wider cultural and social sphere:8 In its last issue, the old “Socˇa” published an article speaking against “aleksandrinstvo” of our girls. We are against this “aleksandrinstvo” as well, quite firmly, and we believe it’s high time the competent circles harnessed this unfortunate mania of some of our girls: to Alexandria, to Alexandria! But even in this case the beloved “old one” can’t avoid its old habit as soon as it comes to serious matters – it jumps the fence. But that on many of our families, there is a cancer for the ruin of Austria, this is – forgive us – a bit too spiced up. Likewise we cannot approve of the subsequent writing in the said paper, because it might sooner do harm than good in terms of morals. Such writing might entice the imagination of a young, inexperienced, maybe slightly inclined to carelessness, and on the top of that curious, girl. […] we admit that we need to talk about this sad topic, but this should be done in an appropriate place and in an appropriate manner, not publicly. This is what we believe. God forbid we should write something like that: imagine the din! [all emphases in original, J. M.] (Socˇa 1890/23)

The second, possibly more critical response appeared in Nova Socˇa – a liberal Gorica paper (1889 – 1993).9 Unfortunately, we can only learn about Mr. Vodo8 With the formation of middle-class parties (catholic conservative and liberal) and with the establishment of social democracy (still politically weak), the Slovenian political life in the 1890s finally got the modern (tri-polar) structure. The bourgeois party blocks – the catholic conservative and the liberal were in the first place ideological-political groups, who indeed searched for voters in different social groups of the Slovenian population, but they did not represent more homogenous social groups. Once the unity was over and the split in Carniola in the first half of the 1890s, they were not ready for even minimal consensus about the common national interests, while the picture of the society and the world their leaders were painting was distinctly black-and-white. In the years before World War I, the bourgeois party politics were thus transformed into a ruthless catholic conservative vs. liberal struggle for power, which controlled not only the party programme principles and political goals, but also the wider cultural and social climate (Vodopivec 2006, 124, 113 and elsewhere). In Gorisˇka, the situation was somewhat different. In 1899, there was a split between the acolytes of the catholic party and the liberals, where the following year the Progressive national party for Gorisˇka (Narodno napredna stranka za Gorisˇko) was formed. Because of the internal rifts within the Catholic bloc between the adherents to the so-called liberal Catholicism, who rebelled against the catholic conservatives and the more belligerent Christian socialists, the catholic side only got its own political organisation (for Gorisˇka) in 1907. However, the process of “separating the spirits” did not encompass the entire Slovenian territory. In Trieste, the Slovenian bourgeoisie was active in the liberal association Edinost (Unity), in Istria it worked in the joint Slovenia-Croatian association, and in Carinthia in a unified conservative Catholic party (Vodopivec 2006, 114 and elsewhere). 9 Nova Socˇa was created after Socˇa was taken over by the cleric-conservative group in 1899 (see Marusˇicˇ 1988, 228). Although the liberal and the catholic press often had opposing views before (and after) WWI of a number of political, social, cultural and other issues, it is – according to Bernard Nezˇmah (2012, 9) problematic to view the papers with a schematic overviews of individual papers, editors and journalists. The press, as Nezˇmah shows, was not monolithic and filed into strict dichotomies, and through the history at least some of them underwent major changes (e. g. Socˇa) and different people wrote for them.

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pivec’s writing in Nova Socˇa indirectly (the issue of the paper is not available in Slovenia). The author of “The Cancer on the Body of the People of Primorska” writes in Socˇa to defend his article following the response of Mr. Vodopivec in Nova Socˇa: Aleksandrinstvo is not only anti-Christian, it is, I’d almost say, anti … animal. A cow suffers if a calf is forcibly taken from her … but a mother, a human mother leaves hers willingly. […] This is what you defend, Mr. Vodopivec!? […] The mother leaves at home her own infant and goes to breastfeed … a foreign one. A Christian mother leaves her own Christian child and goes to breastfeed – a renegade! A Turk! A Jew! Vodopivec, what ideas do you have about the state of motherhood that you defend aleksandrinstvo? What kind of love for innocent babies! … Slovenian, who, like chicks without a mother they roam about the village, dirty, rude, wild, pale, neglected, in rags … (Socˇa 1890/21)

This is not at all about the love for any old “innocent babies” but specifically for innocent Slovenian ones. Here for the first time in the polemic with a liberal paper an important word appears. It was thus only in the discussion with the liberals that the author felt obliged to show his national sentiments, and only on the political battlefield does the pair mother-church become the trinity of mother-church-homeland. At that time, another author stepped up in Socˇa as the anonymous author of “The Cancer on the Body of People of Primorska” (Socˇa 1890/23). He continued with the Catholicism-infused writing which cannot approve of aleksandrinstvo: The clerics try to prevent, or at least partially harness aleksandrinstvo, to evoke repulsion about it, but now “Nova Socˇa” and its correspondent arrive and want to destroy these years-long efforts. This upsets us. To the correspondent in “Nova Socˇa”, we’d advise he open his eyes and look around a little in his village and its surroundings; and to “Nova Socˇa”, we’d advise not to accept articles like this […], if it does indeed care for the welfare of our nation. (Socˇa 1890/23)

A similar, moralistic-accusatory discourse was seen in the first-known article about aleksandrinstvo from 1884 in Socˇa. The same discourse can also be found in the two-part article “Ne v Aleksandrijo!!” [No to Alexandria!!] (1897) published in the Catholic Primorski list seven years after the 1890 debates in Socˇa, as well as in the article “Slovenians in Alexandria” (1910) from Slovenec. But already by 1897 different voices could be heard. I will pay attention to one of these voices in the next segment.

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“An Original Post from Alexandria” The title above was used for a series of articles that appeared in three consecutive issues of Socˇa in 1897 (nos. 15, 24, 26)10 written by Karol Pecˇnik, a doctor specialised in treating tuberculosis in the desert who was working in Egypt. If in the previous section I dealt mostly with the genre of a moral sermon, the “Original Post from Alexandria” can be defined as reportage. Pecˇnik starts the article by describing the “Slavic colony in Egypt” (Russians, Czechs, Bulgarians, Poles, Croats and Serbs), and then soon focuses on Slovenians, particularly Slovenian women. After describing the numbers of “Slovenian folks”, their spatial distribution, cause of emigration, he starts dealing with the “black book of our Slovenian settlement”. He gives an engaged and detailed account of “the main difficulty of our maids in Egypt” – “the Jewish traders” – “the white slave traders”:11 a couple of Italians from Gorizia and Trieste, almost all of them Jewish, who have for years been exploiting thousands of our maids in Egypt. They have job agencies, and place women, newly arrived, also to jobs I’d better not say anything about. Ayoung girl, who doesn’t know a cheater, goes to her ruin unknowingly and has to pay for this ruin dearly to the Jewish leech. All these leeches speak some sort of Italian-Slovenian vernacular, which is even more dangerous for the newcomers, who like to follow a “friend who speaks like their father” who calls to them in Slovenian and invites them to come with him. This type of trade has corrupted a number of Slovenian girls. (Pecˇnik 1897/ 15)

In four detailed points, Pecˇnik suggests how it “will be possible for us to exterminate the mentioned traders, the worthless scumbags of the Jewish tribe”. Despite the strong language that we would today reproach as racist, anti-Semitic and Orientalist (and supremely so), Pecˇnik’s attitude towards aleksandrinstvo is more positive and less accusatory : To be impartial, I will need to wrap up with the bright side. The girls who are able to escape the danger lurking from traders are honest and diligent, – and I have to say to the honour of our settlement, that more than half are like that. The young women who work in Trieste and Gorizia are a lot more corrupt than those here in Alexandria, despite the trading intrigues. The danger for a good girl to go bad is a lot smaller here in Alexandria than it is in Trieste or Gorizia. […] I also have to gladly note that they speak Slovenian everywhere and are not shamed of their language, they’re even proud they are Slovenians. The thing is, the Italian colony in Egypt engages mostly with the shady, forsaken trades and is here extremely despised. Among the Arabs the word “Italian” almost means “thief”. Of course, every girl would be ashamed to be considered Italian, 10 No. 15 gives it the subtitle “Extract from a letter from Alexandria”. 11 For more about the so called white slave trade and prostitution in Egypt in that period, see Biancani 2014.

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while the Slavs, strongly supported by the French, are well respected. It often happens that an Italianised Slovenian from Trieste or Gorizia comes to Alexandria, but here is immediately transformed from a fanatic Italian into a Slovenian. Your overzealous people in Gorizia would therefore benefit from a trip across the sea to see the “Italian glory” here. Many of our girls are here, who are learning French, Arabic and English quite well, yet remain Slovenians. (Pecˇnik 1897/15)

Pecˇnik thus stands up for Slovenian “girls” in Alexandria and, as we shall see in the continuation, he makes sure with his “unimportant opinion”, that his article is not without resonance: “Primorski list” has recently brought us an article called “No to Alexandria!!” I, being well familiar with the situation in Egypt, can’t fully agree with that article. Comparatively, a lot more girls go astray in Trieste and Gorizia than in Alexandria, and at the same time they “Friulianise” themselves, thus bringing shame to their Slavic name. God allow us to eradicate the Jewish traders, and then I’ll advise directly : Don’t send Slovenian girls to work in Trieste and Gorizia anymore, send them to Egypt, where they will earn more, sin less and remain – Slovenians! Last year, many Slovenian women travelled during the time of cholera.12 There are many posts for Slovenian servants. (Pecˇnik 1897/15)

The Catholic Primorski list (1897, nos. 14, 15) that Pecˇnik mentions continues with the moralistic-scolding discourse seen in the previous section. In the twopart article “No to Alexandria!!” we can read as early as in the second sentence: “This emigration, regarding the family and morality, is so harmful that it has to be condemned.” As the anonymous author continues: “A real marriage cannot be imagined without a husband and a wife who are of one spirit and one heart.” (Primorski list 1897/14) This is the language, which after the section “The Cancer on the Body of the People of Primorska” is still ringing in our ears and which can be found also in other Catholic-slanted papers of the time (see Vodopivec 1994; Mihurko Ponizˇ 2009 et al.). But this is not the language used by Pecˇnik, though he does not totally negate it. The article “No to Alexandria!!” in the next issue of the Primorski list (1897/ 15) touches Pecˇnik’s “unimportant opinion” and even reproaches him about his “lies and slandering”. However, it does close on a slightly less belligerent note: “Let’s show the wounds everywhere and the dangers of this miserable emigration, but you, gentlemen in Alexandria, support us, so almost all of us hus12 It was the cholera epidemics that prompted international health cooperation. For this purpose, between 1853 and 1901 several international conferences were organised, where attempts were made to standardise/unify prevention measures. However, according to George Sticker these conferences were primarily about diplomatic agreements on trade alliances between states, and the European guardianship over the Orient. Maintaining health councils in Turkey, Egypt, and Tangier was thus supposed to be more a fruit of foreign politics interests rather than serious protection from contagious diseases (Keber 2007, 13).

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bands will have our wives at home, the children their mothers, and the parents their daughters.” Pecˇnik begins his next article in Socˇa by saying that he has crossed swords with the Primorski list, but remains unmoved in his opinions: My last article was not meant to insult patriotic hearts at home. Quite the contrary, my genuine wish is that Slovenians in Alexandria and brothers across the Mediterranean Sea work with each other in total unity and in terms of us emigrants, respecting the wishes coming from the homeland. There are no aspirations here that would oppose the Slovenians at home; our request is only to receive help from home, as much as possible, for our organisations in Egypt, so that the very scattered members of our colony here can be spared from a religious, national, family and moral death! I will admit that emigration of our folk to cities is harmful to the peasants in religious, national, social, family and moral aspects. “Primorski list” emphasises that emigration to Alexandria harms Slovenians from Gorisˇka in all aspects mentioned. This is true, but let’s not be so one-sided. In my last article, I was simply stressing that Trieste has many more dangers for our peasant girls than Alexandria. I am very familiar with the circumstances of the Slovenian maids in Trieste – and also here in Alexandria. I stand by my claim that Slovenian women in Alexandria are better off in Alexandria than in Trieste when it comes to religious, national, social and moral issues. There is no point in going against truth and facts. (Pecˇnik 1897/24)

If Primorski list primarily underlines the fear of moral and religious damnation of aleksandrinke, Pecˇnik in the first place fears of national “corruption” or, more precisely, he cares about the nation. His “peasant-loving” appeal in the article proves to be so patriotic that the appeal “Not to the cities!” also proves that Pecˇnik is no stranger to the moralistic and scolding discourse: Let it not happen in Slovenia what is now a sad truth in some artisan regions of England and France today – a broken and rusty plough! — We Alexandrians eagerly join the patriotic appeal: “Not to the cities! — thus also: No to Alexandria!!” But how to begin? I’m talking about the previous years specifically. The more warnings there were in the papers about emigration to Alexandria, the more people came. […] It is not the job of us on this side of the sea to research the causes of this sad phenomenon, it is not in our power to contribute significantly to this, this is the work for the patriots at home. (Pecˇnik 1897/24)

From that perspective, as Barbara Henkes (2001, 233 – 34) showed as well in the analysis of images of German domestic servants in the Netherlands, the city no longer signifies civilisation and culture, but it stands for immorality, while the county is the synonym for authenticity and innocence. Pecˇnik’s “An Original Post from Alexandria”, as well as probably the rest of the writing about aleksandrinke, must thus be understood within the accelerated mobility and urbanisation in the second half of the nineteenth century, which not only brought great expectations and hopes to the population, but also activated the fear of the

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unknown. Unlike the stable and safe rural environment, the city represented a danger that in particular young women, consistently called “girls”, could not cope with. Pecˇnik’s correspondence with Socˇa is not over with the “Original Post from Alexandria”. In the following year, he published a series of articles called “Slovenians and the International Trade” in which he invites Slovenian tradesmen, amongst others, to Egypt (particularly carpenters) and presents professional possibilities in great details, even a sort of a business plan of an, as he calls it, a “carpentry export co-op” (Pecˇnik 1898/3). Pecˇnik’s attitude to emigration was obviously not a priori negative. For him, moral accusations and glorifications of motherhood were not issues with which he’d torture readers. His main preoccupation is most likely a patriotically-minded woman who, in a foreign urban environment, is in great danger to escape from the national sieve. Pecˇnik was in the first place a patriot, an aware and working member of the society which was thinking in a (more and more) nationalistic way. I will dedicate the next section to another unique patriot likewise from the national border and thus particularly sensitive to the national question.

“Our Present and Our Future in Egypt” Much more is known about the author of the series of articles with the above title published in the then liberal Socˇa in 1910 than about the author of the “Original Post from Alexandria”. Andrej Gabrsˇcˇek was a patriot, journalist, publisher, one of the leading Slovenian politicians of the Austrian Littoral (a member of the Sloga political association, the president of the executive committee of the liberal National Advancement Party) who travelled to Egypt in 1907.13 Gabrsˇcˇek’s articles from 1910 were written as a direct response to a long, anonymous article published in four numbers (nos. 104, 105, 107, 108) of the liberal Ljubljana Slovenski narod, the most popular and widely read newspaper. The latter article begins as an appeal to “Slovenian brothers, Slovenian patriots” and calls to a unified political action during the time of split spirits – the ruthless conservative vs. liberal struggle for power, unwillingness to reach even minimal consensus about the common national interests, distinctly black-and-white, ideologically opposite evaluation of events and problems and also increasingly more complex and deeper ideological demarcation in the realm of culture and society. The duty of all Slovenian patriots, without fail, must be to think about this and agree on how female emigration to Egypt could be prevented in the future. This is a prerogative 13 Notes on Gabrsˇcˇek’s mission to Egypt were published in 1907 in Edinost (no. 50 and 60) and Socˇa (no. 27).

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for the national honour of all Slovenians. Immediately and with utmost seriousness we’re informing our Slovenian brothers that the first condition to achieve agreeable results in the campaign against female emigration is to remove all the party lines and political passions: it is of no importance what political convictions a person holds, nor should it be objectionable that the places from which this emigration originates are influenced by a certain political group. (Slovenski narod 1910/104)

The article continues with a detailed history of the migration of Slovenian women to Egypt, with the “bloody Arab revolution against Christians” in 1882, which brought about “indescribable grief and shameful consequences of the Slovenian female migrations to Egypt”. Because the women were left unemployed and with no income to live on, their landlords “threw them out” and “every day there was a new house that opened to speed the destruction of these girls”. These girls, as we can read in the article, “stumbled into temptation and later turned to prostitution?!” (Slovenski narod 1910/107) It was, as the continuation of the article in the next issue of the Slovenski narod warns us, only the beginning of this “horrendous infection” that afflicted all the women: The syphilis hospital and the maternity ward of the European hospital care for several such women who do not pay their own costs, rather the consulate does it for them, and then charges the families or competent municipalities, some of which have been completely destroyed over these costs. We’ve come to the point where the older Slovenian women who are happily and honourably married here and settled, are ashamed to admit they are of Slovenian origin. The scattering of Slovenians who only settled here a couple of years ago never tell foreigners they’re Slovenians, but simply say they’re Austrians. Wanting to be tactful to the readers and Slovenian brothers, we will not describe in detail the horrors of the crimes, murders, child-murders and atrocities that play out in the Slovenian settlement. Only the realist pen of Êmile Zola could do such description justice. But we have to emphasise that we consider female emigration to be a national disaster for Slovenians in Trieste and Gorizia regions. (Slovenski narod 1910/108)

Although the article ascribes a “good part of this female corruption to the lack of culture and upbringing and selfish exploitation of landlords,” it also stresses “that the origin of all the evil is in the homeland and that a doctor is needed there, not here: here, the body is eaten by cancer, but for this illness there is no other cure but death, that is the cessation of emigration” (Slovenski narod 1910/108). In the continuation of the article, the scolding, accusing, and moralising merge with an unusual liberal debate about freedom: We’ve started this question so that true patriots can learn about it, but the persistent Slovenian nation, this beloved brother of ours, will without a doubt soon find a cure for this evil … the true, real social freedom is not in that every individual and every group feel in themselves a personified need to not only fight any kind of tyranny and breaks chains that limit the freedom of mind and consciousness, but to rebel relentlessly to any

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sort of atrocity, particularly the greed of egoism which despises honour and human dignity. But we consider oppressed and egoist all those who force their wives and daughters abroad simply so they can provide them with means for a lavish and carefree life, disregarding the shame which this brings to the face of the entire innocent nation. Every individual has the right to defend his honour, and nations have it, too. The Slovenian nation also has the right to stand up to such atrocities with all possible means. (Slovenski narod 1910/108)

If within the conservative discourse we were dealing with the images of men as passive, those who stumble into all kinds of temptations without their better halves, the liberal discourse assigns them a rather different role. Here, men are those “who carelessly force their wives and daughters to go across the sea, limit the freedom and damage the honour of the Slovenian nation”. Here, men are presented not only as active, but as guilty of “damage the honour of the Slovenian nation”. Therefore it is not surprising that this liberal appeal to the “healthy, honest Slovenian people”, to the “free, honest and patriotic person”, to prevent this “horrible evil, which damages so badly the good name and reputation of our Slovenian brothers” (Slovenski narod 1910/104) turns primarily to men. This is how it concludes: The duty of every free, honest and patriotic man, and this describes the entire Slovenian nation, is thus to break with full determination all the prejudice and all unnecessary tyranny of the corrupt elements in particular places, because these prejudices, this violence is harmful not only from the individual point of view, but also from the social and the national. All the Slovenians, to the last man, must gather and unite in the merciless fight against such unnecessary and damaging freedom of individuals […] We’ve thus published a series of articles on the emigration of Slovenian women to Egypt, so that we can show the Slovenian public the dangerous cancerous wound on our national body, which not many people have known about until now. Patriots of Primorska, your national paper should now do its patriotic and social duty! (Slovenski narod 1910/104)

Thus the cancerous wound was discovered – and the call for its healing issued – not only by the conservatives, but, with equal ardour and zeal, also by the liberals, supposed advocates of “freedom”, who, when it came to aleksandrinke, called “for a merciless fight against such unnecessary and damaging freedom of individuals”. But why? “Because such freedom is antisocial, because it is against the nation, because it poisons good habits, because it tarnishes the nation’s name and corrupts the tribe, because in such freedom of the individual is the germ and the seed of decadence.” Unlike the author in Socˇa, the anonymous author in the Slovenski narod discovers the cancerous wound on a different body : the former “on the body of the Primorska people” which he likely sees, or wants to see, mostly as a religious people, and the latter on “our national body”. The moralising permeates both

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articles; in the case of the former is entrenched in religion and in the case of the latter in patriotism. But with both, moralising grows into a complete moral panic with ardent appeals, moral demands, harsh scolding. In the society of the second half of the nineteenth century, which was thinking more and more along the national terms,14 the (dis)honourable behaviour of women (which was significantly linked to retaining the purity of the blood line) gained additional weight. As Marta Verginella (2006, 16) writes, the nationally envisioned society demanded of women not only that they will, by sexual abstinence, keep themselves and their families pure, but also preserve the purity and honour of the national community they belonged to. The dishonourable behaviour of mothers, sisters, wives and daughters began, in the ever more nationalistic society, to endanger the essence of the nation and reduce the ability to stand up to the national influence. Women who overstepped the national borders and entered a foreign environment […] meant a threat of national heresy.15

Andrej Gabrsˇcˇek, whose response I will present now, could probably also be called a patriot, a member of a community which thought in more nationalist terms and saw itself in the concept of national honour and purity. But nevertheless, his writing of and attitude towards aleksandrinke cannot be well explained if we only describe him as a patriot who scatters liberal nationalismarousing appeals from the Slovenski narod. To understand his attitude to aleksandrinstvo we must look into his activities, into his plans that he describes in the series of the articles. However, it is probably good to mention that in addition to the nationalist flurry, a constituent part of the Slovenian entrance into the modern era was also an increased interest in the women’s question. In the time since the publication of “The Cancer on the Body of the People of Primorska” and “An Original Post from Alexandria” important changes have occurred. In 1897, the first Slovenian women’s journal Slovenka [Slovenian woman] was published, and in addition to the traditional views on female – maternal, housekeeping and national – tasks, it already championed more contemporary points of view. In 1901, the Slovene General Women’s Association was established, becoming the central Slovenian women’s organisation before World War I. It is also worth mentioning that 14 The central theme of the Slovenian politics prior to World War I was more or less exclusively the national question. The aggravated situation in the monarchy in the 1890s demanded of all three parties to modernise and redefine their national demands. Despite that, the national programme of the two largest parties, the catholic conservative and the liberal, continued to be modest. Both spoke of linguistic emancipation and national autonomy, occasionally mentioned Zedinjena Slovenija and supported the establishment of new Slovenian cultural and educational institutions. The positions of the democrats were hardly more radical. (Vodopivec 2006, 121). 15 For a wider conceptual and historic framework see Yuval-Davis (1997).

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Gabrsˇcˇek, using the pen-name Rosˇcˇin – published a series of articles titled “The Female Question” in the Slovanski svet [Slavic world] in 1894, in which he stood for female education, a different upbringing for girls, and the elimination of double standards in the bourgeois marriage (see Mihurko Ponizˇ 2009, 174 and elsewhere), which certainly sheds a different light on his engagement. In the introduction to the series of the articles, Gabrsˇcˇek briefly presents the objectives of his writing. His call reveals an “urgent need” for the professional politicians and other actors to turn their attention to Egypt and to the Slovenian communities there – and at the same time it is to my satisfaction that as early as three years ago I was thoroughly dealing with this difficult task, how to prevent evil and create in Egypt a community that will make us proud and will help our exports to the Orient. (Gabrsˇcˇek 1910/63)

In 1906 he started seriously dealing with the question of how to prevent this evil. Gabrsˇcˇek created a plan which included establishing a support association with a wide scope of activities, a good administrator and a doctor in Alexandria; providing the tight ties of the association with the consulate and constant communication with the homeland. He prepared his plans “in detail, written and even printed in several languages,” he even “recruited the first and determining actors in Trieste and Vienna, but also Paris, London, Alexandria and Cairo.” As he argues, this care for women is intrinsically tied to the control over them. We thus again encounter control, which often – if not always – accompanies all the debates and activities connected to aleksandrinke.16 But what is of utmost importance … is the control our association would have through our bodies and sympathisers. Our women would know and feel that they are under control abroad and that their parents, relatives, home town … learn about every improper step. So far, each woman has felt free, completely on her own amongst foreigners as soon as she got on the steamer in Trieste. From now on, it would all be 16 Aleksandrinke were the subject of many initiatives, activities and organisations geared towards surveillance, protection and help. Sloga Association worked in Alexandria from 1895 and changed its name to Slovenian Palm on the Nile in 1901. Benigen Snoj, a Franciscan who worked in Egypt between 1901 and 1911 founded Krsˇcˇanska zveza Slovenk (Christian Association of Slovenian Women). From 1908 onwards, the sisters of the Order of St. Francis and of Christ the King from Maribor were active in Alexandria and Cairo; their work was dedicated also to the primary education of the children of Slovenian migrants. We must also mention the Austrian hospital “Prince Rudolf” where migrants could be treated at the expense of their home municipalities and the free clinic led in Alexandria by the Slovenian physician Dr. Karol Pecˇnik. The protection from procurement for prostitution that was threatening women travelling to Egypt was, in addition to the Triestine port police, provided by the activists of the International Association for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade, later reformed and renamed the International Bureau for the Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children in 1919, and other organisations that helped female migrants (Makuc 1991, 45; Verginella 2011, 157).

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different. She’d leave the homeland with precise instructions and she’d feel as if she were in her home circle all the time, where a watchful, kind, careful and, yes, strict eye of these organs would be guarding over them and know how to intervene successfully in their fate. (Gabrsˇcˇek 1910/63)

In his article, Gabrsˇcˇek describes how he has presented his activities to the representative of the Viennese Oestereishische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels (Austrian League against Trafficking in Girls). The representative, who has severely criticised the inactivity of the Austrian government in this field, was full of praise for Gabrsˇcˇek’s plan and recommended including the League, which Gabersˇcˇek then describes at length.17 After the detailed description, the plan about the cooperation of the League and support association, he presents informational steps, talks and agreements with all possible circles in Alexandria, Cairo, and even Luxor, to where he travelled in February 1907. Next comes the description of his activities after he returned from Egypt in March 1907 where he continues the plans that matured in Egypt, but have not come through because “the state didn’t have 10,000 Kroner for a start up”. He concludes his lengthy description: Our misery, our shame, our sadness in Egypt – is great, and the help is difficult. […] The task I’ve begun to tackle is enormous and thus requires joint forces, many sacrifices, and work if we wish to realise it. Hence I appeal to all the patriots, be they of this or the other political conviction, to carefully read my articles, consider them and think how the careful and widely set plans could be realised. (Gabrsˇcˇek 1910/63)

I am including Gabrsˇcˇek’s mission to Egypt, which probably sticks out from this interest for the press image of aleksandrinke, because it shows that the attitude towards female migration was, at least in certain circles, significantly conditioned by historically specific concerns. Such concern of the bourgeois re17 Most likely the International Bureau for the Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children – an umbrella organisation of abolitionist associations which in Egypt established three branches, run by the British National Vigilance Association in Alexandria, Port Said, and Cairo (Biancani 2014). As is mentioned in Kalc’s chapter, this organisation appeared under many names and manifestations: the National Vigilance Association NVA, established in 1885, which later became the International Association for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade in 1899. In Paris in 1904, sixteen European delegates of the League of Nations signed the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic – in hopes of establishing an international law on the issue. In 1910 the International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic was signed. Later, in 1919 the Association reformed as the International Bureau for the Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children (IBSTWC). In 1921, the League of Nations took issue with the name white slave traffic and renamed the crime to trafficking in women and children in order to make it non-discriminatory based on race or ethnicity. That same year the League of Nations produced the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children. By 1923, fourteen countries had ratified it. (Segura 2010)

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formers from the end of the nineteenth century onwards was the white slave trade. As Francesca Biancani (2014) writes: Purity and abolitionist activists orchestrated a powerful propaganda campaign, publishing numerous pamphlets and publications that portrayed commerce in the lewdest and flashiest tones. Wretched women and tricked silly girls, presumably living examples of “weak” female and working-class morality and decency, were turned into symbols of dangerous political and social disorder.

The question as to what extent Andrej Gabrsˇcˇek was under the influence of this obsessive concern for the so-called white slave trade remains open. But as his detailed and favourable description of the League shows, this concern of the European bourgeois reformers, which Judith Walkowitz (2001, 247) in the case of Britain calls a veritable “cultural paranoia” was probably not alien to Mr. Gabrsˇcˇek. As it seems, in the case of this “question of utmost importance” his bourgeois care is mixed with his patriotism, but this in turn triggered only “flaming” words; in other words, despite a serious engagement with the project, Gabrsˇcˇek only managed to show “where the origin of this great evil lies and how this great evil could be annihilated” (Gabrsˇcˇek 1910/60).

Conclusion Though not very numerous, these expressive sketches that I have exposed reveal that the controversy on aleksandrinke and aleksandrinstvo was a public issue that created heated debates and caused various writers to problematise it differently. The debate was not a monolithic one, but it also did not reach beyond the two basic tenets: religion and nationalism – both strongly imbued with moralising. The debate on aleksandrinke was a debate amongst men. If I have said that aleksandrinke posed a public concern that simply means they posed a problem to men. I can thus agree with Lisbet van Zoonen that gender is always subject to a struggle for definitions. But this struggle does not mean, as van Zoonen emphasises, that it includes equal opponents, because different actors and groups in society have different powers of (self-)definition (1994, 39). In this respect, the debate on aleksandrinke is not special in history. The attitude towards aleksandrinstvo is not only the mostly male attitude toward female migration, but also the attitude toward the migration of women to a foreign environment which meant a threat to the nation, a threat that the women would escape from the national screen. And last, but certainly not least, this foreign environment is not merely that of Trieste or Gorizia, but a world of “other religions”, “foreign religions”, “renegades”, “Moslems”, “Moham-

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medans”, “Jews”, “dim Arabs” – however, it is not per se more dangerous than Trieste or Gorizia. Let us conclude that when they became a public concern the aleksandrinke gained place in the shaping of Slovenian national consciousness and imagination. Or, to put it differently : when Slovenian women went to the land of “dim Arabs”, all sorts of cleverness came out of the woodwork at home.

IV. Comparative Perspective over Space and Time

Sylvia Hahn

10. Migration and Career Patterns of Female Domestic Servants

Introduction For centuries the field of personal and domestic services made up one of the most important branches of employment for a large part of the population in cities and in the countryside. It was one of the main areas of employment where women especially could find work apart from their family household. In early modern England around 60 % of 15 to 24 year olds worked as servants. In agriculture they made up from a third to a half of the labour force (Kussmaul 1981, 3), while in the sixteenth century servants made up around 10 % of the total population in some southern European cities (Beloch 1937, 84 ff.). In Central European cities during the seventeenth century, servants amounted to between 5 and 10 % of the population, but in big cities like London in 1696, servants accounted for 11 to 13 % of the entire population. By 1775 there were about 80,000 servants employed in London and around 20,000 of them were women and girls (Earle 1998, 132). Even in the early nineteenth century, servants made up around 10 % of the populations of cities like Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bochum, and Bremen. And in 1869 and 1880, as Table 1 shows, 7 % of all employees in the Habsburg Monarchy were domestic servants. In Vienna in 1880, 12 % of the employed population of the city, that is, every eighth person, worked as a domestic servant. During the nineteenth century this field of employment became nearly a completely female domain. The most important reasons for this strong orientation of female employment opportunities toward personal and domestic servant positions can be seen in connection with the role-specific assignment of women to family and household-related activities. Although a wide variety of new jobs were created over the course of the industrialisation process in the nineteenth century, women had only a limited range of job opportunities available to them. In many cases they had no alternative but to seek employment in areas considered “women’s work” like personal and domestic service. For example, in the 1860s in Vienna, 87 % of all domestic servants were female, and

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by the turn of the century this figure had increased to 97 % (Stekl 1975 vol. 30, 301 – 313). We can find similar results in other European cities. In Hamburg the figures for female servants increased from 73 % in 1764 to 98 % in 1900 or in Berlin from 74 % in 1830 to 98 % in 1895 (Engelsing 1973, 225 – 261). The variety of job possibilities was broad and ranged from domestic live-in servants in households of farmers, craftsmen or the (petite) bourgeoisie, to non-resident domestics like laundresses or charwomen who lived in their own household but worked for other households. All in all, in past centuries, working as a childmaid or in the general field of personal or domestic services was very common for women, and even for children. Total Population Servant Servants in Servants in Population Employed Population Total Population Employed Population (N) (N) (N) (%) (%) 1869 20,394,980 11,173,082 817,895 4.0 7.3 1880 22,144,247 1890 23,895,413

10,736,867 13,569,287

775,882 456,277

3.5 1.9

7.2 3.4

1900 26,150,708 1910 28,571,934

14,108,596 16,020,405

478,756 470,072

1.8 1.6

3.4 2.9

Table 1: Servants in the Habsburg Monarchy 1869 – 1910 Source: Österr. Statistik (Berufsstatistik) 1880 ff.; Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 81.

Migration distances and career patterns A significant characteristic of this employment was that labour-migration played a major role within personal and domestic services. Already in the eighteenth century the labour migration of domestic servants was discussed publicly. In a book published in 1717, the author discussed the reasons young domestic servants migrated and concluded that the main driving force for children and young women to leave their parents home and “to go into service” (in Dienst gehen) was their parents’ poverty (and NOT Leichtfertigkeit). Regarding the distances of these labour migrations, the authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth and even those of the twentieth century were convinced that this was mainly a labour migration from the villages to the next small or mid-sized city – a so called short-distance migration. But if we take a closer look we learn that domestic servants often had very different migratory ways which could vary over the life-course and/or sometimes depend on age, type of specific employment and position within the field of domestic service. Sometimes changing migration distances went hand in hand with small career ladders for domestic servants.

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One very good example for that is the life story of Regina Lampert who wrote an autobiography about her working and personal life (Lampert 1996). Regina Lampert was born in 1854 in a small village in Vorarlberg, the westernmost province of Austria on the Swiss border. Regina was only five years old when she went into service for the first time. She was one out of hundreds of Vorarlberg children who had, ever since the seventeenth century, had to leave their parents every year in the spring to go to the Ravensburg district in Germany to work as a farm-maid or farm-boy (cow-boy) till the autumn (Uhlig 1998). When she was twelve years old she went into service for the entire year at a farm in a nearby village. During the following years she switched her job nearly every year. Starting from a farm household in the neighbouring village, not only did the regional distances from her home village grow greater, but the working places and the social milieu she was working in also changed a lot: from village farming households to petit bourgeoisie households in town. There she started as a socalled Mädchen für alles (“maid of all work”), but as she gained more knowledge about the work in the different households she slowly climbed up the small career leader open to domestic servants. When she was in her late twenties (27) she married and set up her own household, giving birth to five children: Anna (1882), Emma (1886), Berta (1888), Elsa (1889), and one son who died. In 1893 her family moved to Zürich where Regina ran the household and worked in her husband’s business (he founded a small construction company). In 1899, when she was 45 years old, Regina’s husband died and she never married again. She lived as a widow for 43 years while having to take care of and provide for her family on her own. During the first years after the death of her husband she took different jobs till she had saved enough money to set up a small guest house in Zürich in 1906 and which she ran until the beginning of the 1920s. Regina Lampert’s life-history as a domestic servant is very interesting in many ways: having begun her working life as a five-year-old goose and cow maid, she climbed up the small domestic servant “career” ladder at the different farmhouses year after year, first going into the kitchen as a helping hand for the farm women and after developing her kitchen skills she moved up at last to a small town bourgeois household. All these socially different work places, ranging from small and big farms and petit bourgeois households up to higher middle class employers, were accompanied with different ways and routes of labour migration, including places close by and others across the borders in Southern Germany or Switzerland – which from a contemporary point of view are pretty short distances but were still long distance journeys of two or three days in the nineteenth century. This aspect of Regina’s small career within the field of personal and domestic services is very interesting and worth mentioning because scholarly research generally regards labour migration and career mainly as an exclusively male phenomenon. Till today historical studies about

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female labour migration accompanied by small or great professional careers are still very rare.

Path to the city Another topic that runs through literary essays and scientific research of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is that young women mainly went from the countryside to big cities like Vienna or Berlin to find a job as a domestic servant in a bourgeois household. Autobiographies or memoirs like that of Josefine Joksch, who was born in Bohemia and took the road to Vienna in the 1880s to find a job as a domestic servant supported this image. Josefine later became a leading figure in the labour movement who wrote and published articles about her working life. She noted in her memoirs about her journey to the capital city that “Vienna had long been the object of my yearnings.” She continued: while “sitting shivering in the corner of the railway car and peering out into the muted twilight of the winter morning” she “thought about how dreary and boring such winter days had been in her hometown, and how great it was to be able to escape this eternal monotony” (Joksch n.d., 86 – 87). Further on in her memoirs we get to know that she had trouble finding a proper place as a domestic servant and after having switched jobs a few times she ran out of money and she returned home again with the help of a friend she had met. Although dreams and wishes for a life in the (big) city are a common feature that we can find in many female and male autobiographies as well as literary essays of the nineteenth century and many of them stress the “myth” of the Imperial Capital and Residence City of Vienna, the statistics for employees in the field of personal and domestic services between 1890 and 1910 show that only about one-fifth (21.5 %) of all such employees in the Habsburg Monarchy worked in Vienna and only 3 % in Prague. The majority of domestic servants worked in smaller cities and towns in the countryside: 27 % in Lower Austria, 20 % in Bohemia and about 10 % in Moravia. That means that the majority of domestic servants in the late nineteenth century were more likely to move and migrate within the “province,” from a small village to a town or vice versa. Although the literature is full of stories about migrating and moving to Vienna, and indeed a lot of people from all over the monarchy did so, the life/experience of the majority – some three-quarters of all domestic servants – was an experience far away from the excitement of the capital cities. Maria Erhard was one of them. Born in 1843 in a small village in the southeastern part of Lower Austria, Maria arrived in Wiener Neustadt during the 1860s. Wiener Neustadt was a booming industrial town with a big locomotive plant and other industrial factories for chemical, paper, and textile production. It

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was a major production and administrative centre for the south-eastern part of Lower Austria. We know from the manuscript census that in 1869 Maria worked as a domestic servant in the household of a spice dealer, together with another female and one male servant. All the domestic servants lived in their employer’s household. Maria must have married the male domestic servant Leopold Fachathala shortly after the 1869 census. In 1880 Leopold Fachathala was working as a “day labourer in the locomotive factory” and Maria Erhard was taking care of the household and the three children, who had been born in 1873, 1876, and 1880. Two circumstances may well have eased the way for the couple to establish their own household: the savings accumulated during their years “in service” and the salaried industrial work available to the man. In many respects Maria Erhard, like Josefine, was a typical nineteenth-century female migrant: single, young, approximately 15 to 35 years old, taking the road alone to a nearby city to work, and integrated into an employer’s household, as a domestic servant. Like Maria, about 40 % of the female servants in Wiener Neustadt – and this was by far the largest group – came from villages in Lower Austria, mostly from nearby rural areas or districts in the immediate vicinity of Wiener Neustadt. The second largest group was the 25 % who were women who had been born in the city. Hungarian women comprised the third group; in 1869, 14 % and in 1880, 20 % came from Hungary – but the majority of them came from regions near the Austrian border which meant mostly only 20 to 50 kilometres away from Wiener Neustadt. Compared to other towns in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, Wiener Neustadt displayed the highest proportion of Hungarian immigrants. In Vienna, for example, only 5 % of all domestic servants were Hungarians. As one of the biggest cities in the immediate vicinity of these Hungarian districts, Wiener Neustadt seems to have been a focal point for these labour migrants – both female and male (Hahn 1994, 218). This example shows that national borders were more or less irrelevant for the labour market. The villages and cities across the Hungarian border were still part of the regional labour market of Wiener Neustadt and its surroundings. There was a permanent coming and going, for example, between the small town of Mattersdorf [now Mattersburg] and Wiener Neustadt – as exemplified by the Jews who moved to Wiener Neustadt after the ban on Jews was lifted in the 1860s, but who still had very close ties to their relatives and networks in Mattersdorf (Tortik 2003). As for domestic servants, it is worth mentioning that most of the first generation of immigrants “brought” their domestic servants with them from their region of origin (see more below). This tradition changed over time and by 1880 the number of domestic servants coming from the city itself or the surrounding area (who were therefore Catholic) increased. Careful consideration of migrants who crossed district, state, or national borders provides an argument against automatically allocating them to long

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distance migration: labour market regions in border areas show very clearly that migration across county, state, or national borders was not necessarily associated with long distances. For example, we see from the 1794 census that there were servants in Salzburg who had come from Bavarian villages near the borders of Salzburg and they were (like in Lower Austria) still short-distance migrants even though they had crossed an international border. National border crossers have been consistently counted as long distance migrants – even when they had actually only travelled a few kilometres. Statistics from 1890 show that some 5.5 % of the 400,000 servants in the Habsburg Monarchy came from other countries; but a third of these international migrants lived in border districts – and immigrants accounted for higher proportions among servants in the border regions as opposed to the “inner” territories. Three-quarters of all cross border servants remained in the borderland regions of Bohemia and Galicia while only a quarter sought work deeper in the interior of the monarchy. But among the cross border servants in Lower Austria and Vienna only 10 % stayed near the borders – most of them headed for the larger cities and towns.

In the wake of the employer In general, historical research and migration history did not pay much attention to the relationship between employers and employees in the field of domestic services. But it turns out that servants did not always just move by themselves, sometimes they accompanied their employers. Servants belonged to the retinues of noble families, merchants, traders, military personnel, wealthy artists, writers, students, and middle-class families. And they often travelled long distances with their employers. A common language was often a crucial factor in employers deciding to bring servants with them when they travelled. Municipal (interrogation) protocols, account books, travel stories, contracts, etc., from the Middle Ages record servants travelling in this way clear across the European continent (Hahn 2012a). It is clear from account books of German students at Italian universities in the fifteenth century that the majority of them brought their own servants from their regions of origin and a large number of Germanspeaking servants were always present in university towns like Padua and Bologna (Matschinegg 1990, 117). The contracts and travel papers of seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch merchants in Russia also indicate that many merchants’ families took servants with them (mostly female). In his study of the Russian recruitment of foreign technical workers from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Erik Amburger found border records and other sources in Dutch, Swedish, and Russian archives that describe this kind of servant migration. In 1703, for example, a Dutch family that migrated to Russia

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filed a four-year contract with two Dutch maids. The servants committed to moving to Russia with them in exchange for 50 Gulden in the first year, 75 in the next two, and 100 in the fourth year (Amburger 1968, 71). The border records analysed by Amburger are also an excellent source of information about such servant migrations. There we find a lieutenant-colonel Rohr from Königsberg who travelled to Moscow with two servants on 8 January 1698; and on 2 February, Georg Mingelius, “a student from Saxony,” also crossed the border with a servant en route to Moscow. Then, we find an entry from 7 July that “Captain John Dorn, along with his wife, and 4 daughters, as well as a Moor and 3 servants” were underway “from England to Moscow”. Two days later, Johan Gordan and his wife also crossed the border with an “English Captain, 4 Scottish servants” (Ibid., 158). The list of examples could be extended and the printed sources in the appendix to Amburger’s study offer interesting insights into an area of servant migration that previous research had hardly considered. These border records are also a good source for the analysis of the labour migration of skilled workers (miners, textile workers, etc.) whom Russia recruited. Neither was it unusual for servants to be brought along when an employer got married and relocated, especially female employers. It was common well into the nineteenth century for upper and middle class women’s marriage migrations to include taking along servants from their places of origin to their new homes and families. We can only guess what it meant for a young woman who followed her employer from Kaschau to Wiener Neustadt as Karoline Schirger did. Karoline lived in the household of a military officer who mentioned in the census entries that he had been stationed in Kaschau in Bohemia before he came to Wiener Neustadt. We also see from the census records that not only had his wife been born in Kauschau, but so had their governess Karoline. Coincidences like this can be found in many other households and families with live-in domestic servants. It seems that (bourgeois) women liked to bring “their” servants with them, as if they wanted to bring some piece from their former home/town with them to the new and strange environment to which they were moving. The ability to share a common language and some common memories of their home region were major factors in the decision to bring along servants from home. As Karoline’s example shows, in addition to the huge portion of short distance female migrants there was also a significant percentage of female servants who can be considered long-distance migrants. For example in the Habsburg Monarchy in 1890, among all long-distance migrants coming from abroad (including all foreigners), more females than males came from Switzerland, Germany, France, and Great Britain. And 23 % of these female foreigners were registered as employees, which can be regarded as a significant proportion comparable to the overall female employee rate of 30 %. A small but well-known group of welleducated long-distance migrants were the governesses (Hardach-Pinke 1993,

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206 – 240), most of them coming from Switzerland, France, and Great Britain. But not only did women go to the Habsburg Monarchy from abroad as domestic servants and long-distance migrants, some women from the monarchy also went abroad to work as domestic servants far away from their parents’ homes – some even crossed the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Ocean.

Across the seas – international (long-distance) migration Servant migration was in no way restricted to regions near Europe. It is wellknown that more than half of the Irish migration to the USA consisted of women and girls, and that most of them worked as domestic servants. From the German North Sea and Baltic regions young women went to St. Petersburg as domestic servants. Letters that have been handed down from German origin domestic servants in the US indicate that the women often sent small and regular amounts to their families and relatives in Europe (Helbich, 1988). It was not unusual for this support to either finance the migration of family members left behind or to provide an essential contribution to the family budget (Hahn 2012b). A glance at the statistics of Austrians abroad in 1900 for example shows that Austrian women outnumbered Austrian men in Constantinople and in the Egyptian cities of Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said (Österreichische Statistik, 1900, 2, 30). Nearly two-thirds of the 4,505 Austrians in Egypt in 1900 were women. Table 3 indicates that in 1900 the proportion of women among Austrians in European Turkey was 43.6 %, in Asian Turkey 47.2 %, in Egypt 63.3 % and in Africa 36.1 %. In some of these cities and in Africa the proportion of women migrants was even higher and women made up one-half to two-thirds of the Austrian citizens there. In Salonika it was 50 %, in Adrianople 54 %, in Jerusalem 50 %, in Beirut 59 %, in Damascus 53 %, in Tripoli 60 %, in Cairo 61 %, and in Alexandria 72 % (Hahn 2008, 230ff). When we take the analysis further and look at the birthplaces of these migrants one sees that every second woman migrant came from the so-called “coastlands” of the Habsburg Monarchy (Istria and part of Croatia) – so a quarter of all migrants from the monarchy came from there. The majority of these women came from small villages in an unproductive agricultural hinterland of Trieste, mainly from Gorizia-Gradisca and Carniola – that is from parts of present-day Slovenia. In this region the development of agriculture after the peasant emancipation of 1848 splintered the formerly homogenous peasant population, leaving a portion without enough land for subsistence and forced into labour migration. Village and local authority statistics show a noticeable surplus of men over women as a result of the predominance of women among the emigrants from many villages (Moritsch 1969). Young rural Slovenians from

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Carniola and Gorizia were either employed as migrant workers or they worked as day labourers, servants, harbour workers, or factory workers in Trieste (Cattaruzza 1997). The short-distance migration to the harbour city of Trieste, which was a major transit point for both goods and labour, often led to long-distance migration across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Egypt, or other African territories. The construction of the Suez Canal in the 1870s, for example, attracted technical staff and construction workers. Women also went along with their employers to work as servants in the households of the technical staff. Some of them were probably brought to Egypt to work in the brothels that serviced the workers on the gigantic construction sites. The recruitment of women took place mostly in Trieste where they boarded ships for the trip to Egypt to work as wet nurses, nannies, chambermaids, “maids for all work,” cooks, governesses, or lady’s companions. This servant migration of the so-called aleksandrinke began in the 1860s and 1870s, and as the articles in this book and other publications show (Barbicˇ, Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar 1999) it continued long into the twentieth century. And it seems that these women were the main financial supporters of their families – female breadwinners. The increase in full-time employment of women since the middle of the twentieth century has led to a renewed strong demand for domestic helpers, caregivers, nannies. Workers in personal and household services are now being recruited worldwide: in US-American middle and upper class households women workers from Mexico, the Caribbean, eastern Europe, and China clean, iron, cook, and care for small children and the elderly ; while it is mostly women from southern and eastern Europe who do that work in the households of their western European counterparts. In conclusion, I suggest that we should first start to question the long tradition within migration history of generalising migration patterns in a very crude gender specific way – thinking that men are long-distance and women are shortdistance migrants. Secondly, we should question the male breadwinner system (model or ideology) that tends to obscure the specific part of the (dual) labour market where female labour migrants work and very often became or are today either “the” or at least a main breadwinner for their families. And thirdly, for these female breadwinners and labour migrants, neither crossing national borders nor migrating long distances were and/or are uncommon. Some of them even could and can make small careers out of personal and domestic services. Generally, these professional careers involve further migrations and steps taken across their life cycles.

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With Employm.

Employment

Without Employm.

With Employm.

Total

(N) 93

(N) 140

(N) 233

(%) 1.4

Industry Trade & Traffic

1,582 1,693

1,616 1,644

3,198 3,337

24.6 26.4

Public Services, Military Personal and Domestic Service

2,041 1,015

1,316 75

3,357 1,090

31.8 15.8

Agriculture

TOTAL 6,424 4,791 11,215 Table 2: Employment of Austrian Citizens in Turkey, Egypt, Africa, Asia 1900 ource: Österr. Statistik 1900, 2. Heft, Staatsfremde. XXX.

100.0

Women (N) 1,841

TOTAL (N) 4,222

Men (%) 43.0

Women (%) 30.8

Men (%) 56.4

Women

Turkey (Europe)

Men (N) 2,381

Konstantinopel Salonichi

1,923 191

1,385 190

3,308 381

34.8 3.5

23.2 3.2

58.1 50.1

41.9 49.9

Adrianopel Skutari

62 54

74 40

136 94

1.1 1.0

1.2 0.7

45.6 57.4

54.4 42.6

Üsküb Durazzo

35 21

34 21

69 42

0.6 0.4

0.6 0.4

50.7 50.0

49.3 50.0

1,314 466

1,174 459

2,488 925

23.8 8.4

19.7 7.7

52.8 50.4

47.2 49.6

296 301

301 178

597 479

5.4 5.4

5.0 3.0

49.6 62.8

50.4 37.2

Beirut Aleppo

43 47

63 38

106 85

0.8 0.8

1.1 0.6

40.6 55.3

59.4 44.7

Jaffa Damaskus

39 32

34 30

73 62

0.7 0.6

0.6 0.5

53.4 51.6

46.6 48.4

25 1,654

28 2,851

53 4,505

0.5 29.9

0.5 47.8

47.2 36.7

52.8 63.3

Alexandria Kairo

605 466

1,564 741

2,169 1,207

10.9 8.4

26.2 12.4

27.9 38.6

72.1 61.4

Port Said Suez

317 119

318 97

665 216

5.7 2.2

5.3 1.6

47.7 55.1

47.8 44.9

Mansura Ismailia

53 67

56 40

109 107

1.0 1.2

0.9 0.7

48.6 62.6

51.4 37.4

182 19

103 7

285 26

3.3 0.3

1.7 0.1

63.9 73.1

36.1 26.9

12

18

30

0.2

0.3

40.0

60.0

Place of Living

Turkey (Asia) Smyrna Jerusalem Saffed

Kaiffa Egypt

Africa & Asia Tunis (Land) Tripolis

(%) 43.6

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(Continued) Place of Living Marokko Teheran Japan China Bangkok TOTAL

Men (N) 31 14

Women (N) 28 4

TOTAL (N) 59 18

Men (%) 0.6 0.3

Women (%) 0.5 0.1

Men (%) 52.5 77.8

Women

36 55

21 25

57 80

0.7 1.0

0.4 0.4

63.2 68.8

36.8 31.3

15 5,531

0 5,969

15 11,500

0.3 100.0

0.0 100.0

100.0 48.1

0.0 51.9

Table 3: Austrian Citizens in Turkey, Egypt, Africa, and Asia 1900 Source: Österr. Statistik 1900, 2.Heft, Staatsfremde. XXX.

(%) 47.5 22.2

Francesca Biancani

11. Globalisation, Migration, and Female Labour in Cosmopolitan Egypt

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to frame aleksandrinstvo within the larger migration trends connected to the processes that economic historians and migration studies scholars indicate as the “first wave of modern globalisation” between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I. This period was characterised by the extension of capitalist relations of production, the incorporation of non-metropolitan territories in the global market in a subordinated position, free trade, the introduction of the gold standard, and low tariffs (Hatton, Williamson 2008). This era saw millions of people migrating from resource-scarce Europe to other parts of the world. While the United States and South America took the lion’s share of these massive movements of people, more recent scholarship (Clancy-Smith 2011; Clancy-Smith 2002; Khuri-Makdisi 2013) focuses also on Mediterranean migrations. Instead of looking primarily at either European subalterns crossing the Atlantic or bourgeois imperial journeys (McKeown 2004) such innovative studies on global migrations have highlighted the role that the Mediterranean played in the processes of massive human circulation at the end of the nineteenth century. Thousands of “subsistence migrants” or “white marginals” driven by a number of reasons – political unrest, demographic imbalance, environmental crisis – left the northern shores of the Mediterranean for the southern ones, in search of better opportunities in boom-and-bust capitalist countries such as Egypt. This chapter aims at reconstructing the ways in which the Mediterranean, in particular Egypt, fitted within this global trend of massive human movement. I will analyse the economic fundamentals that turned Egypt into an immigration country, in particular after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and even more after the establishment of British Occupation in 1882, when the economy of the country became completely harnessed to imperial economic and financial interests. Egypt came to be known as a sort of “Eldorado”, where incredible riches could materialise, attracting thousands of people to its big bustling cities, es-

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pecially Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said. Veritable multicultural and cosmopolitan spots, Cairo and Alexandria knew an unprecedented expansion: home to a number of foreign communities since earlier decades, their ethnic composition deeply changed with the establishment of a comprador economy which attracted an unparalleled number of European foreign subjects from all walks of life. Cosmopolitanism, an evident feature of the social fabric of Egypt’s main cities, was mainly a result of the social stratification imposed by capitalism and colonialism: despite the mixing of peoples and cultures, class and race structured a neat division between the colonial and the indigenous city. Gender intersected with sweeping economic change in important ways. Internal migration within Egypt was usually a family business, as whole peasant families tended to transfer from the countryside to the city and rural women were rarely unattached. On the contrary, many foreign women moved to Egypt without any male supervision, as sole breadwinners. I will analyse migrant women’s economic roles within the local labour market and the peculiar positioning of the aleksandrinke within this context.

Egypt and the “first wave of modern globalisation” The nineteenth century, especially its second decade, featured a growing interconnectedness in the world economy that can be termed as a globalisation wave in contemporary terms. Far from being a recent phenomenon, globalisation has a long history. In the nineteenth century, the extension of capitalist relations of production, direct colonial incorporation, or indirect economic penetration of Western powers into large parts of non-European territories took a distinctive form.1

1 The phenomenon has been analysed differently, according to liberal or Marxian theoretical leanings. Modernisation theory proponents have understood the incorporation of areas not yet extensively characterised by capitalist economies as a trajectory, as advancement from traditional modes of production to full-fledged modernisation (Rostow 1960). Dependency theory and world-systems supporters have introduced notions of centrality and periphery as fundamental to macro-economic patterns of change. According to Paul Baran (1957) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1979), the creation of a unified capitalist system proceeds from a developed core to peripheral areas which are linked to the centre by dependency relations whereby industrialised metropolitan countries import raw materials and cheap labour from the colonies and export manufactured goods. According to this dependency circle, poor countries are not underdeveloped because they are not integrated or fully integrated within the global economy, but rather because their subordination is purportedly maintained by rich countries through coercive and other extractive means. Notwithstanding the fact that both modernisation and dependency theories were equally ethnocentric and teleological in their failure to question the very same idea of limitless development or desired replicability of the

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If we take a look at the Ottoman Empire and one of its main provinces, Egypt, we see that the fundamental changes in their trade patterns with Europe in the beginning of the nineteenth century set the stage for a dependency circle. After the marginalisation of French trade by the British, the Ottoman Empire became the most important commercial partner of the British Empire. Precise quantitative data are difficult to retrieve, but, on the basis of contemporary sources, historian Roger Owen calculated that the total value of British imports and exports to the Middle East increased from an annual average of £200,000 – 300,000 during the Napoleonic Wars to £5,500,000 in 1850 (Owen 2002, 87). During the first half of the 1800s most of the British trade took place in Anatolia. Istanbul not only constituted the main Mediterranean port but also a fundamental trans-shipment location for goods bound to the Black Sea coast or central Anatolia via caravan routes, while Izmir “[b]esides being an entrepút for the Asian trade was also a major source of raw materials” (Ibid., 86). The second most important source of raw materials for the British within the Middle East was Egypt. As part of his wide programme of defensive modernisation and state self-strengthening reforms (Fahmy 1997), Muhammad ‘Ali, walı¯ of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, tried to maximise the output of the country’s main economic sector, agriculture, by introducing new patterns of land tenure and export crops: long-staple cotton, the Jumel, cultivated in large plantations owned by a few families belonging to the Turco-Circassian elites2, substituted subsistence crops like wheat, barley, and beans. At the same time, to limit the dependency from the import of Western products, Muhammad ‘Ali also invested in a programme of local industrialisation, especially in the sectors of textiles and weapons. These economic fields were protected by monopoly policies, actively preventing foreign merchants to buy goods from any producer other than the state, at very high prices. This was a clear challenge to the Capitulation system that, since the seventeenth century, had constituted the cornerstone of European commercial penetration into the East and the Levant in particular (Wansbrough 1986). To quell the consequences of the imposition of the monopoly system to Syria, which Muhammad ‘Ali’s son, Ibrahim (1798 – 1848) had conquered in 1832, the British exchanged their military cooperation for more favourable trade policies with the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Balta Liman (1838) had longlasting consequences for the economy of the Middle East: by abolishing all the monopolies in the Ottoman domains and allowing the import of foreign goods at an advantageous rate of 3 % it actually ensured the commercial penetration of capitalist model, the latter certainly contributed to refining the knowledge of the political economies of extra-European areas (Beinin 2001, 81). 2 Turco-Circassians and Albanians who had supported Muhammad ‘Ali’s military campaign and therefore held prominent positions in the military and the administration.

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European powers in the Middle East and the incorporation of Middle Eastern economies within the capitalist global system in a subordinate position. The defeat of the Egyptian troops by a joint British-Ottoman expedition on the Lebanese soil forced Egypt to comply with Western economic desiderata. Although recent analysis has reassessed the dynamics of capitalist penetration in previously largely non-capitalist economies pointing out their unevenness (Chalcraft 2005; Khuri-Makdisi 2013, 139), the Egyptian economy found itself in a “dependency circle”. This situation worsened during the second half of the nineteenth century, when Egypt transformed into an almost exclusively agrarian country, largely deindustrialised by the inflow of cheaper European products. In Egypt, under Khedive Isma‘il (1863 – 1879), the process of globalisation of the economy went on apace. The Egyptian Khedive chose, as his predecessors ‘Abbas (1849 – 54) and Sa‘id (1854 – 62) did before him, to foster the agricultural output for the international market to the effect that, by the 1870s, the Egyptian Delta was a virtual enormous cotton plantation. Cotton production was also fostered by the very high prices reached on the stock market as a result of the American Civil War and the blockade of Confederate ports: from 1861 to 1865 the price of cotton quadrupled and cotton fields extended all over Lower Egypt. Such demands required the undertaking of a massive infrastructural programme that European bankers were eager to finance. The expansion of cultivated land depended on the capacity of digging and maintaining a wide network of canals. In addition, a good railway system was vital in order to reach Alexandria, the country’s main port that by 1870 had established itself as the fourth most important in the Mediterranean in terms of shipping tonnage after Istanbul, Marseilles, and Genoa (Reimer 1988, 531; Kolluog˘lu, Toksöz 2009; Tarazi Fawaz, Bayly, Ilbert 2002; Abulafia 2011). Railways, tracks, and canal networks were extended or improved at very high costs. Despite the general increase in cotton revenues, the heavy obligations incurred to repay the debts contracted with foreign credit institutions could not be met. The most impressive case of Egyptian financial mismanagement is represented by the construction of the Suez Canal (Karabell 2003). According to economic historian Roger Owen, the initial agreement between Khedive Sa‘id and the French engineer Ferdinand De Lesseps had fatal consequences for the Egyptian budget: [N]ot only did the government stand to lose a valuable source of income from the transit in mails and passengers crossing Egypt from Alexandria to Suez, not only did it agree to provide a corv¦e of 20,000 labourers a year, not only did it abandon its rights to the land along both the main canal and a second one to be built from the Nile to the new city of Isma‘iliyyah to provide fresh water for the workers, but it also let itself in for a huge financial obligation involving the agreed purchase of 64,000 of the initial issue of

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400,000 (500 franc) shares. If this was not enough, when subscriptions first opened to the public in 1858 and only just over half were taken – making it impossible to constitute the company under French law – De Lesseps persuaded Said to purchase almost the rest. (Owen 2002, 125)

The Suez Canal, lavishly inaugurated in 1869 and saluted as the material realisation of the integration between Egypt and Europe, a promise of modernisation and progress, ironically led in many ways to the dependency of the Egyptian economy on European interests. As a vital strategic communication and trade route between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, in time it made for one of the main reasons for the extension of British direct rule over the country and it came to symbolise the very same exploitation of local resources to the advantage of foreign powers. In 1875, when a series of debts contracted by Isma‘il could not be repaid, he decided to forfeit 44 % of the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal Company for the downright payment of £4 million. Such provision did not solve the situation. In 1876, the Egyptian government announced its insolvency, an act which was tantamount to a declaration of bankruptcy. A Public Debt Commission staffed by the representatives of the four major creditor countries, Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, came to supervise the Egyptian economy completely, with the aim of diverting all the country’s revenues to the servicing of the debt. An attempt by Khedive Isma‘il to re-establish his authority over the budget management quickly met with the Great Powers’ resistance: Isma‘il was deposed and substituted with a more pliant ruler, his son Tawfiq (1879 – 1892). Meanwhile, a proto-nationalist movement lead by an army officer of Egyptian rural background, Colonel Ahmad ‘Urabi, formed with the aim of establishing Egypt’s sovereignty over its economic resources and finances, thus repealing both unwanted European intervention and the power of the Turco-Circassian elites and their prot¦g¦s. With the help of an unstable and shifting coalition of notables, ‘Urabi took the office of Prime Minister in 1881. Wary of the fact that a nationalist government would not meet its obligations on the debt, an AngloFrench naval force reached Alexandria’s western harbour. This move, in a context of high tension, precipitated the events: on 11 June 1882, a brawl between an Egyptian cab driver and a Maltese customer over a fare unleashed a series of riots in which hundreds of people were killed, including at least fifty Europeans. After ‘Urabi deployed technically advanced Krupp cannons to strengthen Alexandria’s defence, the British issued an ultimatum to the Egyptians, who duly refused it. While the French decided not to take part into military actions, British Admiral Seymour ordered to start a massive bombardment, which lasted ten hours and a half. Bombing their way into Alexandria, the British physically took possession of Egypt. The occupation of Egypt in response to the ‘Urabi Revolution actually developed into a full-fledged colonial enterprise which formally

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lasted until 1922, but practically ended in 1956 with the evacuation of the last R.A.F. base on Egyptian soil.

North-South Mediterranean crossings: the case of Italian migrants to Egypt After the 1882 British Occupation and in particular during the speculative boom of 1897 – 1907, Egypt came to be considered as a safe haven for entrepreneurs of any kind. The combined effects of increase in agriculture outputs and the confidence in the realisation of high profits from any investment in rural land or urban properties generated an investment upsurge which involved all types of companies, from mortgage and banking to transport. Economic dynamism attracted not only a foreign comprador bourgeoisie which vied with affluent locals to profit from investments and speculations, but also Europeans from a wide range of social, economic, and ethnic groups. Before the cotton boom of the 1860s, most Europeans were professionals who transferred to Egypt as part of technical missions. Later migrants were mainly sub-proletarian, proletarian, and middle-lower class, coming especially from economically depressed areas of southern Europe. Various proxies used by economic historians (to make up for the lack of per capita income estimates) show how a significant economic backwardness in Southern Europe in comparison with Northern Europe was already evident at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Reis 2000). This stagnation went unabated during the century : agrarian countries such as Italy and Greece saw no industrial take off until the second half of the nineteenth century. Southern Europeans then fled their countries in growing numbers and many crossed the Mediterranean in search of better opportunities on the southern shores. Greeks and Italians made the bulk of south-bound migration from the northern coast of the European continent. Mostly after the 1861 Unification, Italy, for example, saw a conspicuous migratory wave to Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.3 Between 1876 and 1925, almost 200,000 Italian citizens obtained permits to migrate to North Africa.4 Despite the fragmentary nature and scarce reliability of data at hand,5 the numbers we find in contemporary reports or censuses showing the number of Italian migrants to Tunisia, the major receiving country, as well as to Algeria 3 The Libyan case is obviously peculiar as Libya became an Italian colony in 1911 to the effect that Italians migrated there as settlers. Also, Morocco saw a markedly lesser influx of Italian migrants, therefore it is not considered here. 4 Commissariato generale emigrazione – CGE (1926a). 5 For an explanation of the reasons why data about the presence of Italians and French nationals respectively are highly fictional and linked with colonial policies see Melfa (2008, 16 – 17).

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and Egypt, clearly point out how trans-Mediterranean mobilities were constantly on the rise, at least until the late 1920s, when migration partly declined due to the global crisis of 1929. Migration to the countries of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, moreover, decidedly ceased after the 1950s, when the nationalist policies of Nasser in Egypt or the threat posed by the Algerian liberation war against the French caused most of the foreign residents to leave those lands for good.6 During the first half of the nineteenth century, most migrants from the Italian peninsula were professionals, petty bourgeois active in trade and commerce,7 and political dissidents in three major waves (1821, 1830 – 31, and 1848). After 1850 the increasing imbalance between demographic growth and available resources in rural areas caused a vast migration especially from the South, mostly Sicily, and Sardinia. As the majority of migrants were peasants, they settled where the agricultural sector was more developed, that is, Tunisia. Here, many Italians worked as diggers, terrace-builders, and cereal and wine growers. The local manpower in fact did not have the required experience to work in vineyards established by European merchants. In time, some farm labourers were also able to buy plots of lands, due to the relative availability of cheap uncultivated terrains (Natili 2010). In Algeria, the bulk of Italian migrants were employed as casual workers in mining and the building of infrastructure, many also worked as fishermen. To what pertains Egypt, as also Barbara Skubic points out in the present volume, the Italian presence was particularly big in construction, petty commerce, and services. The history of the Italian community in Egypt can be traced to the beginning of the nineteenth century when Muhammad ‘Ali started his massive modernising project: Italian instructors and advisors were hired to assist developing the postal and infrastructural systems and in the bureaucracy. Later on, under Isma‘il Pasha, Italian engineers, technicians and workers gave a vital contribution to building the Suez Canal, the Aswan Dam, and other major infrastructural and architectonic works in Alexandria and Cairo. Not only 6 See Cortese (2012, 26). Data about Tunisia can be found in Cresti (2008, year 1871), CGE (1926b, years 1881 – 1926), Granturco, Zaccai (2005, years 1924 – 1966). According to them, the apex of the Italian presence in Tunisia was reached in 1936, when the Italian community counted 94,289. Data or estimates about Algeria are retrievable from 1833 to 1926 only : Italian residents were almost 45,000 in 1886 and decreased to 28,535 in 1926. See Cortese (2012, 27) using data from Cresti (2008), CGE (1926b) and De Leone (1957). Data about the presence of Italian citizens, both estimates and censuses data, are available from 1820 to 1937, when the Capitulations were abolished and capitulary subjects ceased to be protected by extraterritorial legislation. At that time the Italian community of Egypt had reached its apogee (57,710 inhabitants). See Iacovella (1992) and Petricioli (2007). 7 See for example the Jewish merchants from Livorno who established an important community in Tunis, whose origins can be traced to the seventeenth century.

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skilled labourers such as carpenters, stone-cutters, and printers, but also restaurateurs, tobacconists, caf¦ owners, bakers, petty shopkeepers, and grocers opened their businesses in Egypt’s booming cities (Reimer 1988, 541). As Reimer remarks (1988, 543): [A]lthough there were still large numbers of Egyptians active in the same areas, they were virtually shut out of certain occupations and were in direct competition with immigrants in other areas. Below these middling groups were a multitude of indigenous labourers in a kaleidoscope of jobs, mainly transport, services and construction. There was also a mass of peddlers and hawkers crowding the streets […]. To this poor class must be added the rootless, indigent Europeans who were thrown back upon the charity of their fellow expatriates.

Mass migration and urban change The mosaic of foreign communities in Egypt was not limited to Southern European subsistence migrants. With all the limits of the data provided by the Egyptian census of 1882, 1897, 1907, and 1917 as discussed by Lanver (2011, 16), the local British community (including subjects of the British Crown of Mediterranean origins like the Maltese, and Britons actually coming from the British Isles) grew dramatically from 1882 to 1897. After that date, the number of British subjects resident in Egypt increased steadily but less exponentially.8 The increase in the number of British subjects in Egypt after 1907 was mainly due to the influx of Maltese, thus adding to the predominant “Mediterranean” character of migration to Egypt (Lanver 2011, 19).9 The initial upsurge had to do with the establishment of a British Occupation Army and the necessity of filling administrative posts quickly, while British contractors were likely to succeed in bids for major infrastructural works. After 1917, however, the British started to Egyptianise the bureaucracy and repatriated a number of civil servants. Interestingly, this dynamic departed tremendously from the growth patterns of other communities, the Greek and the Italian particularly, which grew by 65 % and 43 % respectively during the same time span (Lanver 2011, 22). Such growth is probably linked to differences in migratory projects: while Greeks and Italians perceived Egypt as a place to settle permanently in search of better opportunities, the British, mostly employed in businesses or colonial administration, stayed over limited periods of time and eventually went back to their country. This also explains why, even at the time when the British com8 British subjects living in Egypt were 6,118 in 1882; 19,563 in 1897; 20,653 in 1907; and 24,535 in 1917 (Lanver 2011, 17). 9 The Maltese became subjects of the Crown when Malta voluntarily joined the British Empire in 1800 in order to escape France’s expansionism in the Mediterranean.

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munity was at its quantitative apex, Britons constituted only 11 % of the foreign population in the country, or 0.13 % of the total population (Lanver 2011, 16). Located especially in the main urban centres such as Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said, the British held posts in the judiciary and the administration, as all Egyptian ministries (finance, public works, education, etc.) were staffed by British personnel alongside locals. Government officials were joined by businessmen, professionals, missionaries, soldiers (the presence of British soldiers garrisoned in Egypt, not included in the regular censuses, boomed during World War I), and labourers. Far from being composed solely by upper middle class colonial administrators, in fact, the British community in Egypt was far more stratified in terms of social class and income levels than often maintained. Working class Britons were protected by the Capitulations, thus they were favoured when competing with local labourers on the job market. Unskilled casual workers, on the other hand, were hardly better off and often lived on the fringes of legality because of the de facto immunity granted them by the very lenient administration of consular justice. The French also began moving to Egypt at the time of Muhammad ‘Ali, when they were hired as a part of technical missions or staff of newly state-funded technical schools or academies. Later on, they increased with the continuous integration of the Egyptian economy within the global capitalist system. When the Suez Canal works started, migrant workers, European in general, but French in particular, as France companies were the first shareholder in the project, swarmed to the country. As Karabell states (2003, 211 – 212): [W]orking for the Suez Canal became one of the most desirable jobs in Europe. […] One of the best ways to advance in society, then as now, was to become involved in important projects run by important people, and the Suez Canal by the mid-1860s was the largest, most expensive, and most scrutinized engineering project in the world. A mason or a machinist in his twenties, a hydraulic engineer or a metallurgist in his early thirties might aspire to oversee the construction of a bridge or railroad or tunnel, but the only way to get there was to work steadily, make contact with other prominent engineers, and establish a reputation. The canal provided exactly that, and not just for engineers. It offered an opportunity for accountants, shopkeepers, clerks, doctors, carpenters, surveyors, topographers, barge captains, blacksmiths, masons, stonecutters, train conductors, cooks, and telegraph operators, as well as for hundreds of minor functionaries who went to work for the company.

The foreign population in Egypt also included a great number of Ottoman subjects of non-Egyptian origins, so-called shawwam from the Levant, who reached Egypt especially after the sectarian clashes of 1860 in Mount Lebanon and Greater Syria. Their status within the Egyptian society was always liminal: surely they shared close cultural ties with native Egyptians, but they were mostly economically attached to the European communities to which they were asso-

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ciated because of the fact of being educated, professionally trained, and multilingual, as many of them had studied in missionary schools in the Levant. Some of them, in fact, had traditionally profited from their position as intermediaries between European and local merchants and had been able to amass considerable fortunes, while others were in services (as dragomans, bank employees, money changers) and professions (as lawyers, medical doctors, journalists). Former non-Christian Ottoman subjects from the Levant tended to Egyptianise themselves by assuming an Egyptian citizenship after the country’s independence in 1922. This proved to be a tragic decision in time, because in the 1940s and 1950s they discovered that they were not considered as full Egyptians, but as disguised foreigners, khawagas in local parlance, so: [T]heir attempted integration was undone: first by the rise of nationalist demands for jobs, economic positions, improved standards of living in Egyptian society […], secondly by the Arab-Israeli conflict; and thirdly by the Arab socialist laws and the nationalization of economic assets enacted by President Nasser in the early 1960s. (Mabro 2006, 252)

Others, mostly Christian Levantines of various denominations, Armenians, and Jews chose to attach themselves to some capitulary power, whose nationality they would acquire, or often buy (especially the French one). According to Lanver (2011, 24), thirty-five thousand Ottoman subjects switched to consular protections by World War I. Most Jews, particularly in Alexandria, maintained to originate from the ancient Jewish community of Livorno and thus assumed the Italian citizenship. Others, such as the Rolos and the Hararis opted for the British nationality, the Mosseris for the Austro-Hungarian one. The British promoted rural infrastructure development projects thus furthering the growth of Egypt’s agricultural sector. The expansion of an export-oriented plantation economy caused relations of production and patterns of land ownership in rural areas to change. Thus, peasants saw the pace of the processes of dispossession they had been subjected to since the beginning of the nineteenth century rapidly accelerate. As social historian Judith Tucker pointed out in an effort to underline the importance of structural forces without writing off people’s resistance or agency, the history of the nineteenth-century Egyptian countryside was a complex one, where both internal and external factors combined and wrought momentous transformations upon the autonomy of Egyptian rural families. State-power interference in the lives of the rural population actually started under Muhammad ‘Ali’s ambitious centralisation programme: “[T]he peasant family unit gradually lost control over the organization of its production and consumption as the central government interfered directly in peasant life through a system of

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agricultural monopolies, corv¦e labor, military impressment, and the confiscation of peasant land.” (Tucker 1985, 25) When state monopolies faltered in the 1830s under the joint pressure of economic crisis and foreign expectations, the walı¯ restructured the way of controlling rural relations of production by granting large estates to various members of the royal family. The total extension of athar, that is, lands privately owned and exploited by their owner-peasants with all the rights connected with it, notably decreased. Pressure on the semi-autonomous peasant family further intensified with the increasing commercialisation of crops: after 1860, large and small landowners intensively invested in cotton for export. Tucker (1985, 34), basing her statements on a number of archival sources, showed how peasants, exposed to the ups and downs of the global market, increasingly experienced dispossession due to the debts they were not able to repay : “the fall in the market price of cotton in the 1870s erased the margin of profit of small holders altogether, […] and foreclosure often ensued.” While the vast majority of rural Egyptians kept on working their families’ plots, they increasingly suffered the effects of swinging prices, debt, tax collectors, and corv¦e labour. The British tried to boost the agricultural sector, a fundamental move in order to extinguish the country’s foreign debt, and effectively ameliorated agricultural infrastructures. While they tried to confront the problem of peasants’ insolvency by reforming the taxation, corv¦e, and military conscription systems, pressure on small holders did not diminish and the number of landless peasants grew. For many, the choice was between staying on the land as waged labourers and leaving the countryside in search of new employment opportunities in cities. The following data relating to the three major Egyptian cities from 1882 to 1907 can give us an understanding of the extent to which the urban centres boomed: Cairo had 374,838 inhabitants in 1882; 570,062 in 1897; and 654,476 in 1907; growing by 52 % between 1882 and 1897 and 14.8 % between 1897 and 1907. Alexandria, the second city in the country, grew from 231,396 residents in 1882 to 319,766 in 1897, and 332,247 in 1907, that is, by 38.2 % between 1882 and 1897 and by about 4 % between 1897 and 1907. Finally, Port Said, due to its strategic position on the Suez Canal, saw its population increase from 16,560 inhabitants in 1882 to 42,095 in 1897, that, is, by a dramatic 157.5 % (Egyptian censuses 1882, 1897, 1907). From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, though, the percentage of people living in large towns was about 14 – 15 % of the total population, demonstrating that a full-fledged rural-urban exodus had not yet started, Egyptian peasants (fellahin) fled the countryside en masse after World War I. Rural migrants who migrated to booming Egyptian cities between 1882 and 1914, especially to Cairo and Alexandria, merged with 200,000 foreigners there, half of them coming from Europe (Owen 2002, 217).

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Cosmopolitanism in Egypt: Cairo and Alexandria The main Egyptian centres were radically changed by the coexistence of a majority of native population and large foreign communities. Elizabeth Cooper (1914) thus described Cairo’s wealthy quarters, which seemed to combine European high society life with the exoticism of the Orient, here specifically the exterior of the famous Shepherd’s Hotel, a veritable institution of cosmopolitan Cairo: [O]ne does not pass at once to the Cairo of the Egyptians, but one lingers on the hotel terraces and studies the cosmopolitan life that is surging around him in this meeting place of East and West. […] During the season, that is from November until March, there is always a well-dressed crowd sitting around the little tables on the big verandahs of the hotels. One sees the French woman with her exaggerated styles, the American, looking as if she had just come from her Fifth Avenue milliner, the heavy but practical German frau with her heavier husband and uninteresting daughters, and finally the English woman with her blas¦ air and feather boa. (Cooper 1914, 33)

Similarly, this is how Frederic Courtland Penfield, a former United States Diplomatic Agent and General Consul to Egypt, described the uniqueness of Alexandria: Alexandria is a city with a past, truly ; but […] I regard its present-day aspect, as the one great mart of the southern coast of the Mediterranean and entrepút, to be more important still. […] The motley scene meeting the eye on getting ashore vividly indicates the transition that is in progress from the half-barbarism of the East to the civilization of the West. […] The sapphire sky, the balmy atmosphere, and palm-trees overtopping the houses, tell you that you are in Egypt; but the buildings, their shops and their wares, suggest a city of Italy, or southern France – perhaps Naples, possibly Marseilles (Penfield 1903, 78 – 9).

In this section I will talk about the defining characteristics of emergent cosmopolitanism in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how it was embodied in the urban space by looking at two significant case studies, Cairo and Alexandria, the latter of which has come to symbolise the notion of cosmopolitanism par excellence. Cosmopolitanism, it has been argued (Vertovec, Cohen 2002), is tightly linked with colonial relations of power between foreigner elites or Capitulary prot¦g¦s and local subjects. Khawagas, as foreigners were called, played a dominant role both culturally and economically, to the point that their very presence and their being different from native Egyptians were considered tantamount to the unique identities of the main Egyptian cities, Cairo and Alexandria. As the author of the most extensive urban history of Alexandria to date, Alexandrine Robert Ilbert wrote, Alexandria was particularly connoted by a “[m]ixture of values which, on

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the one hand, glorified the individuals and emphasized personal success, usually commercial, and, on the other, imposed rigid, social constraints, on the same individuals’ relationship with others” (Ilbert 1996, 82). Ilbert, as many others writing on Alexandria, was certainly haunted by the so-called spirit of the place, to the point that cosmopolitanism was not thought of as a concept applied to the sociologic reality of the city : quite the contrary, cities that had some of Alexandria’s features could be rightly defined as cosmopolitan. This idea gained currency also thanks to the literary achievements of a number of authors such as Lawrence Durrell, E. M. Forster, and the Greek Alexandrine Constantine Cavafy, who established a veritable literary canon for Alexandria (Forster 1922; Cavafy 1992; Durrell 1962). The term “cosmopolitanism” has been subjected to much theoretical scrutiny lately (Hanley 2008; Halim 2013; Barak 2009; Fahmy 2006b). Unlike nostalgic memories of pre-revolutionary Alexandria and their longing for a Westernised tolerant liberal society forever lost to Nasser’s radical nativist policies, recent studies of cosmopolitanism have “de-europeanised” the city, that is, have begun introducing the hitherto repressed voices of the city’s Arab residents or subaltern groups into the historiography of Alexandria (Barak 2009, 188). With an innovative and interesting take on the matter, Barak asserts that Alexandria has been basically de-materialised by the ways in which it has been narrated. He thus argues for an urban historiography of the city whereby the concrete processes of urban construction, such as street paving, gas lighting, garbage collection services, public transports, and water works, are also analysed as human constructs, the result of intense negotiation between native Egyptian Alexandrines and the Egyptian government on one side and the foreign community on the other, eventually leading to the establishment of Alexandria’s autonomous Municipal Council in 1890 (Barak 2009, 187 – 205). Khaled Fahmy (2006a) expresses a pressing concern for the paradoxical quality of the very same idea of cosmopolitanism which constituted the peculiar trait of Egyptian cities like Alexandria, but also Cairo and Port Said. According to die-hard dichotomous understandings, cosmopolitanism, he argues, was paradoxical in many ways: it implied the peaceful coexistence of diverse communities in a unique multicultural microcosm but it was premised on exclusionary practices. Cosmopolitan cities were thought to be spatially distinguished by a dual urban structure where a crowded, disordered, unsanitary traditional Arab city was juxtaposed with a modern, paved, well-lit, and hygienic Westernised city ; similarly, from the sociological point of view, the various ethnic groups were separate from each other and did not come into close contact. Apart from the sheer fact that even in the most cosmopolitan Egyptian town, Alexandria, foreigners never constituted more than 15 % of a population that was surely overwhelmingly native. Factual evidence demonstrates that every-

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day interactions of various kinds took place between locals and foreigners in the “traditional” and the “modern” areas of the cities. I subscribe to this revisionist trend in arguing the need for a thorough analysis of the actual range of harmonious or contentious practices of ordinary cross-cultural communication between different ethnic and religious communities. For working-class Greeks or Italians whose status was closer to ordinary Egyptians than to their respective elites, class certainly played a huge role in regulating such interactions as well as daily experiences and concerns, with the exception of access to Capitulary rights.

Cairo in numbers As urban historians have shown, (Abu-Lughod 1971; Raymond 2000) a number of trends already marking the city’s development during Isma‘il’s times (1863 – 1879), like the expansion of built-up areas, urban planning, increasing Western economic and cultural penetration, were reinforced on an unprecedented scale after the British Occupation of 1882 and added significantly to the city’s cosmopolitan environment. More than the concentration of wealth and occupational possibilities generated by foreign investment, rural demographic pressure drove peasants away from the land and accounted for Cairo’s rampant population growth during World War I and in its aftermath. Whereas in 1917 about 35 % of Cairo’s population had been born outside the city (that is, they were migrants either from other areas of Egypt or from abroad), by 1927 this figure had risen to over 42 % (Abu-Lughod 1971). Increasing dispossession and overpopulation driving thousands of villagers to the city combined with the increase in life expectancy rate, due to the positive impact of sanitation on people’s living conditions. Cairo’s population increased from about 374,000 in 1882 to 1,312,000 in 1937, that is, by 250 % through a time span of 45 years (Raymond 2000, 319). Surely much of the demographic influx was constituted by rural migrants in search of employment opportunities and better living standards (Clerget 1934, 242; Abu-Lughod 1971, 174). They usually settled in the poorest neighbourhoods of the Islamic City such as Gamaliyyah, Bab-alSha‘riyyah, Darb al-Ahmar and in the northern commercial district of Bulaq where they could rely on the existence of social networks of urbanised covillagers offering some material and psychological support. Toledano described the ways in which rural migrants adapted to the Cairene urban environment in the mid-nineteenth century with reference to a collection of 36 case files from the Dar al Watha’iq al Qawmiyyah, (DAWAQ), the Egyptian National Archives in Cairo (Toledano 1991, 196). Although social practices change over time, migrant adjustment to city life shows a remarkable degree of stability. For example, Janet

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Abu-Lughod’s study (1964) based on the localisation and distribution of village benevolent societies, showed how protective patterns of physical proximity, cooperation, and mutual assistance among urbanised former co-villagers helped easing the difficulties of rural-urban transition. At the same time, a significant proportion of newcomers were non-Egyptians. Due to favourable investment conditions under the Capitulation Laws, foreign presence in the city increased constantly : aggregate data given by Raymond show that the number of foreign residents from the main four colonies (the Greek, the Italian, the British, and the French) in Cairo rose from 18,289 in 1882 to 59,460 in 1927, with a total number of foreign residents (that is, including noncapitulary nationals) in 1927 being 76,173 (Raymond 2000, 320). While the British (11,221 individuals in 1927, tenfold their number before 1882) and the French (9,549 in 1927) constituted the foreign elites and were mainly middle class and professionals, the largest communities, that is the Greek (20,115 individuals in 1927) and the Italian one (18,575 in 1927), were much more stratified. Besides these four main European communities, many other national groups were represented in Cairo: the 1927 census of Egypt enlists twenty-three nationalities (Census of Egypt 1927, 216) not to mention the shawwam community originating from the Levant, the so-called bilad al-sham (contemporary Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories). Moreover, 23,103 Jews lived in Cairo in 1927 (Clerget 1934, 222), the majority being local subjects belonging to the Egyptian diaspora community established in ancient times and fully integrated within the local society yet preserving its cultural identity. Steady population growth resulted in the dramatic expansion of Cairo’s builtup area from 1,000 hectares in 1882 to 16,331 hectares in 1937 (Raymond 2000, 322), accompanied by blatant speculation in the real estate sector. The urban landscape changed with the introduction of municipal utilities such as gas lighting and water piping in the rising middle-class areas of Isma‘iliyyah, Faggalah, and Tawfiqiyyah, in the Gezirah, Garden City, and Qasr al-Dubbarah along the Nile. Circulation within the city was made easier thanks to the paving of large tracts of the street system; to the effect that by 1917 public cab-driving constituted the single most diffused occupation in Cairo. After 1896, public cabs faced increasing competition from the development of large-scale transport infrastructure in the form of electric tramlines (Chalcraft 2005, 134 – 135). From 1882 to 1927 Cairo’s space became increasingly sanitised with the introduction of clinics and hospitals and, more importantly, the construction of a drainagesewage system. Under the close supervision of ‘Ali Mubarak, Minister of Schools and Public Works, in the second half of the nineteenth century, “a new structure was laid out between the northern and western edges of the existing city and its gateway from Alexandria and Europe, the railway station, with plots made available to anyone who would construct a building with a European faÅade”

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(Mitchell 1991, 65). This required the “removal of certain human agglomerations from the interior” of the city, to quote Abbate Bey, a contemporary expert of public health (Mitchell 1991, 65). Boulevard Muhammad ‘Ali was cut through the old city from the khedivial palace of ‘Abdin. It ran diagonally for two kilometres and, as Janet Abu-Lughod wrote, “its path stood almost four hundred large houses, three hundred smaller ones, and a great number of mosques, mills, bakeries and bath houses” (1971, 113). These were all destroyed, or cut in half so that, when the work was finished, the area looked as if it had been shelled, with houses in all stages of dilapidation, though still inhabited, exposing their views of domestic interiors with a somewhat grotesque effect. The demolition of unsanitary, narrow streets and old houses to make space for new ambitious European-style architectonic projects destined to rich apartment blocks for the emerging middle class and the affluent expats meant the relocation of low-class Egyptians to the margins of the modern city, its core being located in the area between Garden City, Qasr al-Dubbarah, Tawfiqiyyah, Azbakiyyah, and ‘Abdin. The Islamic City, that is, the four districts of Gamaliyyah, Darb al-Ahmar, Muski, and Bab-al-Sha‘riyyah, quickly overpopulated, while services and infrastructures crumbled. In the period between 1882 and 1927, the population of Gamaliyyah increased by 44,788 individuals, while number of residents of Darb al-Ahmar increased by 52,544 persons during the same amount of time. In 1927 the newer popular commercial area of Bulaq accommodated 79,681 persons more than in 1882 (Clerget 1934, 242 – 244). The booming areas were the northern districts though, Shubrah and Wa’ili, where, according to Raymond, “the share in Cairo’s total population had been growing with impressive regularity : 12.9 % in 1897, 21.5 % in 1917, 34 % in 1937” (Raymond 2000, 337). A huge demographic problem was already evident in Cairo by the beginning of the 1930s. Population increase in these areas must certainly take into account the natural urban growth rate, the decline of the high rate of mortality, and the increase in the birth rate, but it was also connected with the arrival of new settlers from the countryside, especially to the Islamic City which offered the cheapest and, due to the incipient demographic pressure, most run-down accommodations available in town.

Cosmopolitan Alexandria Alexandria, even more than Cairo, came to embody the very same idea of cosmopolitanism, the “paradigm case of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism” (Zubaida 1999, 26), in short a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages. The city knew an extraordinary expansion and during the nineteenth century metamorphosed from a sleepy fishing settlement of about 5,000 inhabitants (Fahmy 2006b, 228)

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into a vibrant and bustling city of 320,000 at the end of the century. As one of the main experts on Alexandrian urban history, Michael Reimer, remarked, “[Alexandria’s e]xpansion was certainly linked to the process of Egypt’s assimilation to the European world economy, as was the case of ports in other lands” (Reimer 1988, 531). Under Muhammad ‘Ali, Alexandria’s growth was premised on at least two main infrastructural projects: the excavation of the Mahmudiyyah Canal and the building of the liman, that is, the dockyard and the arsenal. The Mahmudiyyah Canal was completed in three years, from 1817 to 1820. Manpower was provided by the coerced labour of hundreds of thousands of peasants, men and women, coming from the Delta provinces, whose casualties were as high as 100,000 (Fahmy 2006b, 284). Eventually, the canal, fed by the Western branch of the Nile, was seventy-two kilometres long. It permanently supplied fresh water to Alexandria and integrated it better with the cotton plantations of the hinterland. Its role in the economic boom of the city was crucial. The port was significantly expanded to develop the city into a naval station. Almost 4,000 workers were employed in the building of the dockyard (Owen 2002, 71). Manpower was provided also by the inmates of the Liman prison. The port was further developed from the 1860s in order to meet the higher demand of Egyptian cotton due to the blockade of American southern ports during the Civil War, hence the growing tonnage of cotton to be shipped overseas (Cole 1999, 198). Alexandria’s population skyrocketed: 104,128 people lived in the city in 1848; 231,396 in 1882; 319,766 in 1897; 332,246 in 1907; 444,617 in 1917; 573,063 in 1927; and 685,736 in 1937 (Mabro 2006, 248). Data collected from 1878 onwards give us a glimpse of the rising number of non-Egyptians living in Alexandria. Despite the fact that natives always constituted the majority of the Alexandrian population, urban development and economic dynamism prompted a massive inflow of Europeans, who took up residence in the city. Not surprisingly, they became Alexandria’s most influential citizens. In 1878, Europeans in Alexandria were 42,884: 20,830 Greeks, 8,993 Italians, 2,191 British (including Maltese and Cypriots), 8,417 French (including Levantines, Algerians, and Tunisians after 1881), and 2,453 subjects of other nationalities. In 1897, while the Greek community had slightly diminished in number (15,182), the Italians had reached 11,743. After the establishment of the protectorate in 1882, a greater number of British subjects migrated to Alexandria (8,301), but also the number of French nationals and people coming from other Europeans country augmented (5,221 and 5,672 respectively). In 1907, at the closing of the investment boom, the European population of Alexandria totalled around 62,000 people: 26,259 Greeks, 16,669 Italians, 8,935 Britons, 4,639 French, and 5,456 individuals of other nationalities (Lanver 2011, 22). Alexandria’s population approached half a million while Cairo was double that, yet it was the smaller city which was home to

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nearly half of all foreigners living in Egypt. Here it should be noted that “foreignness” and “localness” constitute quite slippery categories in the case of Alexandria, a port city which was made by the successive settlements of communities coming from different areas of the Mediterranean. As the category of “Egyptian” became a legal status only from the beginning of the 1920s, we are on the safe side in saying that the term “foreigner” could apply to all those people who were either non-Muslim or not subject to the native jurisdictional system, that is, protected by the Capitulations, or non-Ottomans. This does not mean that they did not perceive themselves as Alexandrine and their culture was a hybrid one, mixing “foreign” and “arabized” tracts (Hanley 2007; Minkin 2012, 85). The Greeks constituted the major foreign community at any time in Alexandria, and they were particularly active in commerce: grocery trade, food processing, manufacturing of soft drinks, spirits and cigarettes, and the ginning and export of cotton (Haag 2004, 18). The Italians, on the other side, were big in crafts, especially construction works. The pronounced increase of foreign residents up to 1927 was due to the human movement brought about by the end of the World War I, while the marked decrease registered in 1927 could have been caused by the extension of Egyptian citizenship to former Ottoman subjects, so called mutamassirun (Ilbert 1996, vol. 2, 761). How did this very diverse population settle in the city? The limits of Alexandria’s growth, unlike Cairo, were geographically determined by its coastal position. While the land neck of Ra’as al-Tin had been inhabited from 1835, the city naturally expanded to the south and the east of the old city, where the fancy area of al-Manshiyyah originated. As Reimer suggested (1988, 536), this quickly became the fanciest part of town and the rallying point of European elites. The foreign consulates were placed here, together with luxurious international hotels, posh department stores, elegant caf¦s and restaurants. The central site of this area was Muhammad ‘Ali Square, or “the Square”, [w]hich was at the very heart of the city’s affairs, with the Bourse containing the cotton and stock exchanges at its eastern end, the Anglican Church of St. Mark nearby […], the Mixed Courts on its south side, a bronze equestrian state of Muhammad ‘Ali in the middle […] and smart caf¦s, restaurants and shops all around. (Haag 2004, 23)

Much of the social interaction took place along the Corniche, the large boulevard looking onto the sea that had been modelled after Nice’s La Promenade des Anglais. In time this area connected with the eastern suburb of al-Raml, a tiny village on the coast about ten kilometres away from the city centre. Under Khedive Isma‘il a light railway was built in al-Raml, later to be transformed into an electric tram line in 1904. Al-Raml distinguished itself for being a wealthy quarter, with beautiful villas in Italianate style, green areas, expensive shops and a Khedivial palace. The establishment of affluent residents in Alexandria im-

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pacted the real estate sector, driving up land and housing prices. The resulting settlement pattern was one where low-income sectors of the population inhabited the areas on the peninsula and in the western part of the city. They extended mostly behind the main cotton market, Mina’al-Basal, where the warehouses (called shunah in Egyptian dialect) were located and all the bargaining of export merchants and international buyers was done. Foreign communities played a crucial role in the city’s sanitisation and modernisation. The deplorable conditions of the streets, described as dusty in summer and muddy in winter by a number of coeval observers, prompted the affluent merchant foreign community to engage actively in the realisation of paving, sewage, and streetlighting works (Barak 2009, 190). In many ways, the history of Alexandria’s street paving works contributes to the history of the city’s self-government and regulation of interethnic policies, as the need for public works was premised on the cooperation of Alexandria’s diverse communities and eventually led to the establishment of Alexandria’s autonomous municipality. Massive modernising infrastructural plans were aimed at facilitating commerce, but of course they had an impact also on the settlement patterns in the city. Working classes and proletarians could not afford to live in the affluent European parts of the city, regardless of their ethnic background: locals, Greeks, and Italians of limited economic means thus came to inhabit the older areas behind the Western harbour : “maps of the period show only a relatively small expansion of the areas characterized by jag streets (the telltale sign of Egyptian housing.) This in turn suggests serious problems of overcrowding and the hasty construction of temporary shelters to accommodate the rapidly growing population.” (Reimer 1988, 538) With a slight advance over Cairo, a dual city had thus emerged.

Globalisation, gender, and labour As we have seen, migrants, both locals and internationals, made the bulk of Cairo’s and Alexandria’s populations. The increasing imbalance between the agricultural output and the rate of demographic growth resulted in a powerful wave of rural-urban migration not only from the Egyptian countryside, which saw the apex of its crisis around 1914, but also from agrarian Southern European countries. Egyptian cities like Alexandria and Cairo constituted interesting employment markets because of the influx of capitals deriving from the cotton boom in the 1860s first and the speculation boom from 1897 to 1907. Thus, the availability of occupational opportunities, offered by affluent employers, either colonial elites, expat middle classes and wealthy locals, attracted subsistence migrants, men and women, in growing numbers. Globalisation then greatly

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impacted the productive roles of both sexes outside the pre-capitalist family unit of production: life in the city exposed men and women more directly to the fluctuations of the market and especially to harsh competition for waged labour. The process of disruption of the family as a unit of production in times of fast capitalist growth is not unique to Egypt, naturally. Domestic service, and personal services in general, as an extension of the chores performed within the family unit of production, was the most available form of access to the market labour, especially before marriage, in Europe during the nineteenth century : [I]n England in 1911, 35 % [of women working outside the home, F.B.] were servants, including laundresses. […] In Milan, according to the censuses of 1881, 1901, and 1911, a similar concentration in domestic service existed. […] Similarly, in France […] garment making and domestic service were the chief areas of female employment. […] Economic and social change associated with urban employment opportunities in a few traditional sectors in which women worked at jobs similar to household tasks. (Scott, Tilly 1975, 39)

At the same time, while embodying “traditional” female employment, domestic service meant relocation from the countryside to the city : “[O]nce the trip to the city and the period of adjustment to urban life had been accomplished under the auspices of service, a young girl [or a woman, F.B.] could seek better and more remunerative work.” (Ibid., 62) In Egypt, both men and women were exposed to the vagaries of rapid urbanisation, but women were hit harder. Mostly unskilled and untrained as they were, women were extremely vulnerable in the job market and occupational options for them were scarce. If Cairo’s data from the 1907 Census can be taken as indicative of female socio-economic vulnerability in Egyptian urban contexts, we see that women were mostly unemployed, while the largest female occupational group was constituted by unpaid labourers (Census of Egypt 1907).10 In the absence of a significant industrial sector in Cairo, the only expansion for female employment was thus in the service sector, a poorly paid field of activity. Women seemed to be in a very vulnerable position: either their prospects for earning were poor or they were not earning at all. As Judith Tucker observed, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, [R]apid urbanization […] increased the demand for household maids and all matter of women who performed special services, such as seamstresses, hairdressers, tattooers […] As the female role in production in the urban economy contracted, service activity multiplied: […] working women were concentrated in this world of casual services and informal networks. (Tucker 1985, 101) 10 Jobless women were 103,856 compared to 32,843 men. Domestic workers in their own households, that is unpaid, numbered 126,919.

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Aleksandrinstvo took place against such a global background of both transnational and rural-urban migrations. The migrations of aleksandrinke from Trieste to Alexandria and Cairo often constituted the last move of an occupational history starting with the transferral from their agricultural villages to the main maritime and commercial port-city of Trieste. From here, Les GoriciÀnnes or Les SlovÀnes, as they were called in Egypt, moved to Alexandria and Cairo where their services as nannies, governesses, wet-nurses, and companions were highly appreciated and requested by expat and local elites. Right before World War I they were 7,000: 4,500 in Alexandria, 1,500 in Cairo, and 1,000 in other Egyptian cities (Makuc 1993, 221). Historian Aleksej Kalc stated that 39.5 % of the women living in the area around Gorica (the villages of Vrtoba, Bilje, Rencˇe, and Prvacˇina) migrated to Egypt between 1907 and 1913 (2011, 197). At the beginning of the interwar period, their influx steadily grew, due to the worsening of economic conditions after the conflict in the Vipava Valley, increasing fiscal pressure and the harsh anti-Slovenian policies of the Italian fascist government after the promulgation of the “Fascistissime laws”. Aleksandrinke’s working conditions compared very favourably to those of local and other foreign working class female workers. The comparative advantage of the aleksandrinke was that of catering for a specific high segment of the domestic service labour market: hiring a GoriciÀnne was tantamount to a status-symbol among the upper classes. Aleksandrinke were considered particularly suitable to an elite and upper class milieu: coming from a trilingual area (Italian, Slovenian, and Friulian), they learned new languages (mostly French and Arabic) easily. Moreover, they were considered to be extremely “clean, disciplined, well-mannered, and sweet, unlike British nannies who were so severe!”11 This affected their wages, which were incomparably high not only for Egyptian standards but also if compared to the earnings in Trieste and the surrounding areas. Their salaries started to decline only after World War I because of the fall in the price of cotton. At that time, the aleksandrinke suffered stiff competition by Arab and Greek women, who were paid lower wages.

11 Max Kark¦gi Pasha’s personal conversation with the Author, 20 November 2009. Kark¦gi’s family settled in Cairo after his grandfather, a Syrian Greek-Catholic, left upon Ibrahim Pasha’s conquest of Damascus in 1832. In 1963, because of Nasser’s nationalisation policies, the Kark¦gis left Cairo to France. Raised by a nanny from Trieste, Max Kark¦gi has been a key informant of mine since my doctoral project on the social history of prostitution in Cairo during the colonial period, as he made me available his incomparable private collection of vintage photographs of Cairo and other Egyptian cities from the pre-revolutionary era.

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Conclusion This chapter purported to show how globalisation was the major force behind cosmopolitanism, a main feature of Egyptian society since the second half of the nineteenth century. The increased integration of the Ottoman Empire and, after 1805, the autonomous province of Egypt within the West-dominated global capitalist economy induced local rulers to undertake impressive infrastructural works. Unable to repay the debts contracted with European credit institution despite the wealth made ready available after the Cotton Boom of the 1860s, Egypt went bankrupt in 1875. Egyptian financial disarray resulted in its direct occupation by the British, concerned with the defence of a vital imperial life-line as the Suez Canal. Colonial economy and its boom-and-bust capitalism attracted an unprecedented migration wave from Europe, especially from economically depressed southern countries, to Egypt. Expats from all walks of life settled in the port-city of Alexandria and in Egypt’s capital Cairo, which became truly cosmopolitan cities. Cosmopolitanism functioned in a paradoxical way in many instances: although premised on a concept of integration and coexistence, it marked, both sociologically and physically, a clear cut separation between economically and culturally dominant Europeans and subaltern Egyptians. Yet, the working of the capitalist system brought about increasing socio-economic differentiations. We have seen that foreign communities in both Cairo and Alexandria were far from homogenous. Together with a less culturally determined concept of abstract and bourgeois notion of “cosmopolitanism”, new approaches in Middle Eastern social history and post-colonial studies points to the deconstruction of the entrenched binary opposition “native/European” at the core of the imperial enterprise. Native and foreign, that is “white”, subalterns shared similar material conditions which defied clear-cut racial and class distinctions thus challenging those essentialist categories which made the bulk of the colonial mentality. Economic and social history can thus integrate cultural history to complicate and de-mystify our understanding of Egyptian cosmopolitanism in times of sustained economic growth. As part of this momentous process of change, aleksandrinstvo has been analysed as an important aspect of the intersection between the redefinition of women’s economic roles during the first wave of modern globalisation, with the aim of elucidating both to what extent female productive roles outside the family as a unit of production, although generally vulnerable, could generate also new opportunities of social promotion, especially in colonial society such as the Egyptian one from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

Majda Hrzˇenjak

12. Slovenian Domestic Workers in Global Care Economies

Introduction1 The post-industrial societies of the “global North” are facing care deficit as a consequence of a combination of demographic, social, and political developments such as: the ageing of the population; changes in the structure and dynamics of post-modern families; increasing participation of women and older people in the labour market; reductions of the welfare state; and the deregulation of social services (Daly, Rake 2003). Numerous research data show that the key strategy by which private households in countries “at the centre of capitalism” compensate for the care deficit is the outsourcing to (global) migrant care workers from the countries at the “periphery of capitalism”. The growth of female migrants employed in care work in private households has rapidly increased since the second half of the 1990s and accelerated after 2000. What is more, the composition of migrant domestic workers has changed: if in the 1990s, the majority of foreign domestic workers in Western, Southern, and Northern Europe came from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, after 2004 Eastern European2 women represent almost half the domestic workers in EU according to some estimates (Sarti 2005). The deep structural changes during the (post)transition period in Eastern Europe such as the polarisation of the well-off and the poor, high unemployment, the intensification of working conditions, and changes in the welfare system have influenced the growing supply of informal paid care work provided by Eastern European women migrants. The EU enlargement also makes it easier for Eastern Europeans to migrate to the West, which opens up a burning question about the internal splitting of 1 An earlier version of this chapter has been published in Hoerder, van Nederveen Meerkerk, Neunsinger (2014). 2 Though Slovenia can be identified as a Central and Eastern European country, here we use the term “Eastern European” to refer to internal split within the Europe between East and West and to the feminisation of migration from East to West Europe as a consequence of the fall of the communist and socialist regimes in Europe.

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Europe, with the East supplying the West with domestic workers, cleaners, and carers. Slovenia, though one of the Eastern European, (post)socialist, and exYugoslavian countries, was an exception in these developments and did not experience an increase in female working emigration during the transition period despite economic scarcity and the growing unemployment in the 1990s. Nevertheless, two outstanding phenomena of Slovenian domestic workers working abroad with long-term duration can be observed from the historical perspective: the first one is a daily mobility of working commuters from the villages and small towns in Slovenia bordering Italy for the purpose of taking over cleaning and caring work in families in Italy within the frame of global informal care markets which keeps constant over decades, stretching from the nineteenth century till nowadays; while the second one is an almost centurylong tradition that lasted from the opening the Suez Canal in 1869 to the end of World War II, according to which women from the very same micro region have been emigrating as domestics, nannies, and wet nurses to Egypt.3 Their working migration represents a clear example of what is nowadays conceptualised as a global care chain. The global care chain concept, which reflects these developments in terms of global structural inequalities, has been established as the dominant concept for the critical analysis of the contemporary globalisation of care markets. It unveils the features of the “transnational political economy of care” (Williams, Gavanas 2008), which designates the exploitation of specifically feminised care work performed by female migrants. The “archetypal” global care chain, as coined by Hochschild (2000), involves mothers who emigrate from poor to rich countries to take care of children in middle and higher class families, leaving their own children behind in the care of the relatives, be it grandparents, older siblings, or extended family. This global transfer of care work is mainly related to “motherly” labour, and international migration is driven by women with dependent children in wealthy countries. They have entered the paid labour market and solve their work/family conflict by outsourcing domestic work to paid (migrant) care workers. At the end of the chain the value of the care work decreases, and often it becomes unpaid work for female members of the migrant care worker’s family in a source country. As Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002) emphasised, the globalisation of care work has brought together active, ambitious, and independent women from around the globe, that is, career-oriented, upper middle-class women from rich countries and women from poor “third-world countries” and post-socialist 3 For detailed data about migration of Slovenian population from this region to other destinations in Europe and globally, which was, however, not limited to the phenomena of women’s emigration for care work, see Aleksej Kalc’s chapter.

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states, who strive to improve their own and their families’ socio-economic situation. However, these women do not struggle for common goals, as Western feminism had anticipated. The set of privileges and “equal opportunities” enjoyed by one group, yet which are inaccessible to the other, stands like a wall between them. The relation between them is a maternalistic relation of mistress and servant, or, in the best case, of employer and employee. The conflict between care and paid work which is intrinsic to the capitalist system has been individualised and internalised into the class and racial conflict between women belonging to different social locations. These patterns of global transfer of care work are not accidental. They are often influenced by questions of proximity, by similarities of language, culture, religion, and other cultural factors (this is the case, for instance, of Slovenian and Croatian care workers taking care of children and elderly in Italian families, or Ukrainians working in middle class Polish families and Polish women working in Germany, etc.). Often these connections exist because of the legacy of colonialism (for instance, within Francophone Africa, France is a common destination). The end result of these developments is what Tronto (2011) calls a system of privatised neo-colonialist care. The global care chain concept reveals the dependence of reproduction of European societies on global structures of inequality according to ethnicity/race, class, and gender that are even intensified by migration and employment policies and concomitant status of insecure citizenship and working status for migrants. In this analysis, the position in the global capitalist hierarchy of countries as core or periphery, as well as class, ethnicity, and gender all combine to produce this exploitation of the specifically gendered labour of care work. The concept of a global care chain establishes a markedly synchronous analysis of migrant care work. By integrating topical but heterogeneous elements, such as the feminisation of migration, globalisation, structural inequalities, gender inequalities, changes at the labour market, demographic trends, new developments in social policies, border regimes, etc., an interpretative framework is established that analyses migrant care work exclusively from the perspective of the present. Focus on the present in this analytical framework is so dominant that migrant care work appears as an almost new phenomenon that arose only in the past few decades. However, as Yeates (2005, 12) states, if the concern is not just to map the spread and structure of global care chains but also to understand the transformation of these chains over time and the confluence of factors that bear on that transformation, the currently strong emphasis on the contemporary context requires historicisation.

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The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the historicisation of the contemporary interpretation of global care chains through an outline of a tradition over a century old, whereby Slovenian female residents of the coastal border region between Slovenia and Italy have worked regionally, primarily in Italy, and globally, in Egypt, in private households as migrant domestic workers continuously since the nineteenth century on. I am interested in what emerges if we take a look at the contemporary phenomenon of migrant care workers from a diachronic perspective, if we follow the continuous presence of this phenomenon at a specific location back in time. What new dimensions, meanings, and contexts emerge from considering migrant care work from a diachronic perspective, and in confrontation of the diachronic and synchronic perspectives? The focus of the chapter is to confront and analyse the convergences and divergences in social conditions and motives which shape(d) past and present patterns of emigration for taking up care work. On the one hand, I will point to the specificities in the situation of Slovenian migrant care workers in Italy in contemporary global care chains because of this long-term tradition and characteristics of the border region, while on the other hand, I want to take a look at the historic global care chains, that is, aleksandrinstvo, through contemporary lenses. Apart from contrasting the past and present situations of Slovenian domestic workers abroad, this chapter aims also to highlight alternatives to aleksandrinstvo which existed within the care economy in the local border region between Italy and Slovenia in the last century and persist even today.

Aleksandrinstvo – a historical example of a contemporary global care chain From the perspective of contemporary reflections of globalisation of care, aleksandrinstvo represents a typical example of global care chain established among women and their families from two different continents (Europe and Africa) already about 150 years ago. This testifies that global care chains are not entirely new phenomenon but existed already in the past, though in different contexts. If contemporary global care chains are driven by care deficit in wealthy countries and deepening of global inequalities, in the past, the circumstances were different: the directions of migrations were opposite to today’s; the source country and the destination country were in different socio-economic situations compared to today’s situation; instead of care deficit, the push factor was the lifestyle of the wealthy European and Egyptian strata living in Egypt. Slovenian women and men from Gorisˇka region started to migrate to Egypt shortly after the construction of the Suez Canal was finalised (1869) and opened

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up a way for European migration to Egypt, which was in the middle of economic prosperity at the time. Egypt attracted cotton merchants, architects, craftsmen, doctors, officials, and others. In the first emigration wave, that is, in the 1870s, when the Slovenian territory was a part of the Habsburg Empire, numerous Slovenian women were employed as domestic workers in Italian and Austrian families. It was Italian families from Trieste and Milan and Austrian families from Vienna that brought the first Slovenian women to Egypt, as these women stayed employed with these families when they moved to Cairo and Alexandria. The migration of Slovenian women to Egypt continued after World War I when the western part of the Slovenian territory came under Italy after the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. Most of the Slovenian women who left to Egypt originated from the rural surroundings of Trieste and Gorica. According to now known data it was mostly women who emigrated, but also some men and children (Koprivec 2013, 57). Young women, married women, and mothers as well as widows migrated to Egypt for different reasons. In spite of this diversity, in the Slovenian collective awareness, aleksandrinke represent the symbol of mother who left their small children, sometimes newborns, in the care of relatives and fathers to take on the well-paid work of wet nurses abroad and thus provide for the livelihood of their families. The symbol of aleksandrinke thus reflects the contemporary ambivalence of transnational mothers, on the one hand elevated into victims who sacrificed their motherhood for improvement of the economic situation of their families; on the other hand, judged as women who deserted their children for a better life in a richer world. The story of Marija Koren, presented by Barbicˇ and Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar (1999, 169), testifies to this ambivalent position of aleksandrinke within a multi-generational global care chain. Marija knew about Egypt as a child, since after Marija’s father’s death before World War I, Marija’s mother left to work in Alexandria, leaving her three children in the care of her sister, Marija’s aunt. Marija went to Egypt for the first time in 1935, leaving her four-year-old daughter with her own sister-in-law. Two years later, in 1937, she returned home, bought a vineyard and enlarged the family property with the money she had earned in Egypt. In 1939 she gave birth to a son and six months later left once again for Egypt, because her husband was pressing her to earn more money. Her six-month-old son was left in the care of her sister, who taught him to take a bottle, while her mother-in-law took care of Marija’s husband and daughter. Marija returned for good in 1972, after a total of 37 years working as a maid or nanny in Egypt. Contemporary studies of global care chains as well as transnational families and transnational motherhood (Lutz 2011; ParreÇas 2005) demonstrate dynamic processes of re-definition of family patterns by migrant’s agency, when

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confronted with separation from their families. ParreÇas (2005) points to the costs of separation borne by children and families of migrant domestic workers that are evident in the long-term absence of the physical contact between the mother and the children, in overcoming innumerable bureaucratic obstacles in attempt of arranging for children to visit mother, and in years long waiting for the possibility for the family’s reunion. These studies show that the effects of separation are emotionally demanding, especially because the migrant women are often entangled in transnational mothering and emotional care at the same time as performing demanding care work for their employers. Lutz (2011, 114) shows how, beside these practical problems and emotional burdens borne by migrant domestic workers, the dominant concept of family, which corresponds to the lifestyle of the upper class, also stigmatises migrant families and transnational mothers as abandoning their children, because they deviate from the normative concept of family. However, migrant and domestic workers of the past and the present invented – and those of the present continue to invent – diverse individualised strategies of continuous and successful care for the extended family from the distance. In times of their absence, aleksandrinke who were mothers, similar to modern transnational mothers in contemporary global care chains, took care of their children by paying female relatives and neighbours to take care of their children, sometimes also for surrogate breast-feeding; fathers, the same as in contemporary transnational families (ParreÇas 2005) did not play a significant role in child care. The money that the aleksandrinke sent back home to the family for their livelihood and improvement of quality of life represented the same as modern remittances do, motherly love and care. An important difference between the transnational motherhood of the past and the present is represented by technology. Modern transnational mothers can be in regular contact with their children through contemporary digital communication networks, regular contact is also enabled by fast and affordable air transport, while aleksandrinke did not have these possibilities and therefore the conditions of transnational motherhood were significantly more oppressive a century ago (see Mirjam Milharcˇicˇ Hladnik’s chapter). Contemporary global domestic workers, especially undocumented migrants and live-in workers, are often confronted with isolation and individualisation, they are mostly not organised and have nowhere to turn for assistance when in need. Sometimes they turn to familial migrant networks or they find refuge in organisations of the Catholic Church, which, especially in Italy, takes care of their recruitment into the households. It is only in the recent decades that selforganised groups for mutual help have been established; for instance, Respect in the Netherlands, and the organisations Waling-Waling and Kalayaan in the UK, are intended to provide support to immigrant domestic workers when they find

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themselves in a “no-way-out” situation and to encourage professional and political campaigns and lobbying for changes in labour legislation and immigration policies in order to provide regulation in the segment of domestic work, and immigrant work in particular. Compared to contemporary global domestic workers, aleksandrinke had a wide support network in Egypt, especially on the side of Catholic Church, which by offering socialising and support also made space for implementing social control. The St. Francis Asylum was managed by Slovenian nuns, the sisters of the Order of St. Francis and of Christ the King. They organised receptions on their arrival in Egypt, delivered women to families, provided the space for meetings and cultural life, organised church services in Slovenian and also undertook the responsibility of supervising the morals of younger and older women. The asylum provided accommodation and food at affordable prices, and a free medical examination and medication if women fell ill. The asylum also assisted them in finding work and kept a blacklist of families who maltreated servants (Testen 2004, 110). A significant difference between aleksandrinstvo and the contemporary global care chains is also the location of discrimination of migrant domestic workers. As Anderson (2000) reports, contemporary migrant domestic workers in European capitals frequently cope with psychological problems as a consequence of their immigrant status, the constant fear of the police, uncertain employment, hard work, social isolation, and a humiliating attitude on the part of the employers. A domestic worker who becomes sick loses her job and is left without income and without a roof over her head. The employer does not feel any responsibility towards her. Physical and sexual abuse is not rare, either. In comparison to contemporary studies which reveal discrimination, exploitation, and abuse of domestic workers by their employers, aleksandrinke were mostly respected and appreciated in the families they worked for, also their stay in Egypt was legal and safe. The demand for “Les GoriciÀnnes”, as Slovenian maids in Egypt were called, was very high. For instance in January 1900, 210 families sought Slovenian maids through the St. Francis Asylum, while there were only 19 available (Makuc 1993). Moral judgement was passed on them mainly in their home country, from their families, from the local community, as well as from both the church and the secular authorities, who were concerned about the “moral” threat faced by Slovenian women abroad and therefore lobbied intensively for women to give up their profitable activities, return home, and devote themselves to housekeeping and the upbringing of children. The institutions’ fears and concerns about the moral behaviour of female emigrants was manifested in constant warnings by priests and lay writers about the temptations posed by foreign lands and the single lifestyle and culminated in the condemnation of the supposed immorality involved. By passing moral judge-

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ment on the migrant domestic workers of that time, the secular and church authorities strived to domesticate migrants to give up profitable activities and stay home to devote themselves to the traditionally rooted roles of housewife and mother. According to their opinion, the aleksandrinke, as migrants living outside their families and undertaking economic activity, violated the natural order of things that determined a strict division of labour and gender hierarchy between men and women (Verginella 2006).

Life-cycle model: a parallel alternative to aleksandrinstvo Simultaneously with the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo, and also before and after that, women from the broader Primorska region (the Western part of the Slovenian territory, which includes Gorisˇka) worked as migrant domestic workers in private households in Italy in the nearby border towns. Until World War I, when a part of Italy and the Western Slovenian territory belonged to the Habsburg Empire, and the urban centre of Trieste with its harbour influenced the Slovenian rural hinterland as a strong magnet for migration, Slovenian women represented more than half the migrants in Trieste compared to men (Kalc 2002). The majority of them were young rural women, many of them even children, aged between twelve and twenty-two (Mlekuzˇ 2004, 151), who came to the city seeking work and earnings. As Verginella (2006, 144) points out, their departure was often the consequence of the deep economic crisis at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century that hit the poorest strata of the rural population hardest. The migrants came from impoverished families with too many members to survive on modest plots burdened with enormous taxes and debt. The patrilineal inheritance pattern also dictated that the major part of the farm and property belonged to the firstborn son; therefore, most of the children, especially daughters, had no choice but to leave home (Mlekuzˇ 2004) and to find employment as workers, mostly servants, cooks, and household maids in families. According to Barbicˇ and Miklavcˇicˇ-Brezigar (1999, 169), it was almost a rule for rural young women to find employment as maids in order to earn their own money for their dowry, and partly also to support their families. Young women generally started work at about the age of fifteen, worked as servants for a few years, and then between the ages of twenty to twenty-five, returned to their home villages with the money they had earned, got married, and settled down. Besides assistance to the family, the main purpose of their migration was to earn their own dowry, something which would prevent their falling among the poorest on the marriage market. As stated by Kalc (2002, 18), the movement of the young women to Trieste was an alternative to the social marginalisation that they would have encountered in their home village and which was often con-

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nected to involuntary single status. This rural-urban economic migration represented a typical life-cycle model of employment (Sarti 2005), in which servant work was part of the transition from the family of origin towards the formation of one’s own family, was considered as a learning process, an opportunity to establish contacts, as well as to move up the social ladder and to save money. The stories about aleksandrinke, as well as the stories of life-cycle migrant young women therefore deconstruct patriarchal myths, often repeated by scholars, of the woman as primarily the stay-at-home mother who takes care of the home and the children. This represented the dominant model of women’s social position at that time. But the decisions of the aleksandrinke and those departing to Italy reveals an alternative image of an rural woman, who at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century migrated locally and globally to emancipate herself or to take on the active role of the family breadwinner, although their employment was limited to traditional women’s, feminised fields of work, such as child care, nursing, housekeeping, cleaning, cooking, etc. But domestic work was only one of the profitable activities in which women engaged. Women who migrated to work daily or took temporary jobs abroad played a special role in the economy, working also in other jobs: chestnut sellers, bread sellers, fruit and vegetable market traders, milkmaids, egg sellers, hawkers, yarn spinners, cooks, maids, wet nurses, chambermaids, washerwomen, housekeepers, etc. (Luksˇicˇ Hacin 2009, 76). These were traditional informal gainful activities that enabled women to contribute to the survival of the family or to their own economic independence. All of these activities demanded mobility in various forms: daily crossing from a rural to an urban environment, travel from town to town to sell farm produce for a few days, live-in services in a neighbouring or faraway town, or transnational migration to Egypt, the United States, and Argentina.

Double ethnicisation experienced by Slovenian domestic workers in Italy With the Italian military occupation of 1918, followed by the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920, the Western part of Slovenia came under Italy as part of the Julian March. Thus, Slovenians in the Primorska region and Croatians of Istria were separated from their nations and subjected to foreign authority. Working as a servant with the Italian urban upper class remained the main employment for many Slovenian rural young women. They worked in Trieste and Gorizia as well as in Milan, Rome, and Naples. Although Slovenian women from the Primorska region were citizens of Italy and consequently were legally working and living in Italy, their situation took a significant turn for the worse. With the annexation,

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and even more so by the subsequent rise of Fascism in Italy, Slovenians became second-class citizens and, as Slavs, an inferior race. All of this was reflected in the working conditions of Slovenian servants. Zora Tavcˇar left to work with an Italian family when she was fifteen. As she said, the pay was poor, she received no respect, and she had to sleep in the boiler room. Employers renamed her Alba because they felt it was inappropriate for “such a beautiful girl to have a Slavic name” (Kalc 2002, 62). During this period of legitimised discrimination and denationalisation of Slovenians in Italy, many Slovenians migrated to Yugoslavia, while the Italian authorities actively encouraged this emigration. In this period, Slovenian servants, chambermaids, nannies, and laundresses who retained employment in Italian households were subjected to ethnic and racial discrimination by their employers, a type of discrimination that is also a defining structural characteristic of contemporary care work of migrant women today. However, as Verginella (2006, 15) points out, ethnicisation also came from the other side, from their own nation, but with different aims. The processes of ethnic discrimination in Italy strengthened and deepened the sense of ethnic affiliation among Slovenians, and the stronger this sense of ethnic affiliation, the more indispensable female members of the national community became in their role as child-bearers, mothers, and educators of future Slovenians. National awareness-raising activities among educated middle-class women became publicly important and were perceived as the key contribution to strengthening the Slovenian national concept. However, as noted by Verginella (Ibid.), if the process of national affirmation was beneficial for middle-class women, it was far less positive for the rural women who worked in Italian households. These were considered “deserters of the national body” and their crossing to the foreign, Italian environment was considered as weakening and tarnishing the good name of the nation. The figure of the nationally-conscious housewife and mother who was bringing up nationally aware individuals and taking care of the family’s wellbeing was not consistent with the image of the woman who broke the rules and served a foreign nation. Nationally minded men who fostered the figure of “loving and caring wife and mother” considered these women as a source of shame, especially laundresses and servants that were in contact with foreign national environment, with its most intimate and therefore most dangerous side, its “dirty laundry” (Verginella 2006, 143).

The impact of Yugoslav socialism on female emigration After World War II, the borders shifted again. Part of the Primorska region now belonged to Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic country that consisted of Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, and Bosnians. The new

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border was not only geographical but also became an ideological division between two utterly alien and contradictory economic, social, and political systems. These people, who traditionally eased their economic underdevelopment by dependence on Italian urban centres, such as Trieste and Gorizia, were strongly affected by the negative impacts of the Italian-Yugoslav border, given that during the first years after the war to 1954, the border was controlled and ideologically aggravating. After 1954, agreements establishing special functional exceptions for the movement of goods, services, and people in the border region allowed inhabitants to cross the border under more favourable conditions than other citizens of Yugoslavia. The first wave of industrialisation in Yugoslavia after the war represented an opportunity for employment to rural populations, but especially for men. Women mostly stayed at home, worked on the farms (which was rarely recognised as formal employment) and took care of children. However, in spite of the officially closed border between Yugoslavia and Italy, as established by the Peace Treaty in 1947,4 women still worked in Italian households and sold home-grown vegetables on the other side of the border in the form of daily labour migrations, and hence contributed to the family budget. Although some of them decided to relocate to the family where they worked and thus became live-in domestic workers because of the difficulties involved in crossing the closed border, most of them preferred daily migration, that is, a live-out form of work, and occasional work for several families. The varying degrees of border control compelled these daily commuters from Yugoslavia to Italy to develop various strategies for circumventing the rules in order to be able to cross whenever they wished and take whatever products they wanted to sell in Italy. In the period between 1945 and 1954, because of uncertainty about whether the Slovenian coastal territory would fall to Yugoslavia or Italy, and in fear that the Trieste hinterland that was vitally dependent on the urban centre would be cut off from Trieste, a substantial number of Slovenian families moved to Trieste. It was precisely these emigrants who represented an important new social network which Slovenian women could lean on in their daily commute (Orehovec 1997, 120). In Italian cities, women developed their own social network that was vital for keeping regular customers and widening the circle of city buyers for their services and farm produce. Symbolically, the image of the women from the Primorska region who outwitted border control on a daily basis to informally earn money in Italian households acquired connotations of mobility, in4 Because both Italy and Yugoslavia demanded the territory in question, a Free Territory of Trieste was established in 1947. In 1954 according to the London Treaty, the Free Territory of Trieste ceased to exist, and Trieste and the surrounding area were divided between Yugoslavia and Italy.

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ventiveness, interference, artfulness, and resale. They were embedded in numerous structural and symbolic contradictions: between Yugoslavia and Italy, rural and urban, capitalism and socialism, traditional female roles and women’s autonomy, good wages and undervalued work, migrant and native, etc. Among these contradictions they managed to steer quite successfully and even to turn them to their own advantage. But later in the 1960s and 1970s, enhanced industrialisation and better educational and working opportunities in socialist Yugoslavia for all contributed greatly to the emancipation of rural women; the number of women from the Primorska region who worked as domestic workers in Italian families temporarily decreased but not at all vanished, while women’s emigration in Egypt completely stopped. Besides the overall better economic situation the reason for that can be sought also in Yugoslav socialism which improved situation of women in many respects. In the 1960s and 1970s the breadwinner family model turned into the “adult worker model” (Lister et al. 2007) in which both adult partners were employed full-time outside home. This became a norm in Yugoslavia and economic gender equality was constructed as a trade-mark of socialist gender equality. With the assistance of newly established public support services, such as kindergartens and nurseries, mass full-time employment for women was enabled and along with that also at least minimal economic independence. Women gained access to all public services and an equal position in the education system, which enabled them to attain adequate qualification and, at least formally, equal entry into the labour market. They were granted the right to equal payment for equal work and mothers were entitled to special protection at the work place. As disclosed by Burcar (2009), in accordance with socialist policy encouraging overall employment for all and giving special emphasis to women’s emancipation, women for the first time gained the right to full-time and longterm employment which brought along important individual rights to social, health, and pension insurance. Women’s entrance into the labour market would not have been possible, however, without the concurrent establishment of an extensive network of publicly available social services. For this purpose, kindergartens, nurseries, extended child care, children’s colonies and homes, initially milk and, later on, school kitchens, worker’s cafeterias and canteens, and even organised care facilities for the elderly and the ill were established to relieve women of household chores and full-time care for children, the elderly, the ill, and other family members in need of help. Along with that, women also gained the right to maternity leave before and after giving birth, which was paid equally as regular salary with all regular supplements. The prohibition of the dismissal of pregnant women and nursing women entered into force; in addition, legislation ensured social security and economic independence for mothers with a

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special clause which enabled women after the maternity leave to return to the same full-time work position they had left because of the maternity leave. Thus, women as full-time employees and mothers became entitled to diverse individually-based social transfers, assistance, and allowances, instead of being dependent on the employment of the men. Full-time and long-term employment brought along women’s economic independence and consequently had an essential impact on the change of their role and improvement of their position not only in the family but also in the wider society. Although socialism did not bring women equality in politics and in family, where they remained primary care givers despite the extensive socialisation of care work that was institutionalised by the socialist state, it did, however, enable their full-time employment and their economic independence from their partners. Nevertheless, some women who worked full-time as industrial workers in Yugoslavia continued with their work as household help in Trieste a few times a week. Some even left their industrial employment preferring to work informally as housekeepers in Italian households, while they were paying social and pension contributions in Slovenia. In factories, working conditions were hard, working hours inflexible and salaries poor. On the other side of the border, in Italy, the informal economy offered them much better opportunities: flexible and part-time work and, despite the stigmatism attached to this underrated work, significantly better salaries.

The situation of Slovenian domestic workers in Italy today The secession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia and the establishment of a (nation) state in 1991 was followed by the restructuring of the Slovenian socio-economic system and the economic recession of the 1990s. This led to the closing down of many factories and companies, and temporarily increased the economic importance of informal paid domestic work in Italian border towns as a means of family survival. At the same time research shows that since 1991 labour market conditions have changed drastically. In particular, long term unemployment in particular for elder, low educated women has increased, while the full-time permanent employment of youth has become rather an exception. Intensity, precarity, and flexibility of work are on the increase. In Slovenia the working hours are relatively long in comparison to Northwestern Europe. The volume of overtime work, weekend-work, and shift-work has rapidly increased in Slovenia. In 2002 the relation between empirically executed hours and contractually mandatory hours of work was 45.8 to 40.5. Cranet international research showed that overtime work is being carried out in 96 % of organisations; shift-work is not used in only 14.8 % of organisations; and weekend-work is not executed in

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only 17.4 % of organisations (Ignjatovic´ 2002). In this situation women from the Primorska region turned back to the traditional pattern of performing domestic work in private households on the other side of the border in Italy. The entrance of Slovenia into the European Union in 2004 and into the Schengen Area in 2007 practically abolished all limitations on the daily border crossing for these women. However, demographic analysis of the interviewed women5 from the Primorska region who work in Italian households today shows that middle aged (40 to 65) and older women, and pensioners prevail (the oldest narrator was 76 years old). Young women (20 to 35 years old which is a dominant cohort in contemporary global care chains or 12 to 22 years old which was the age of women in the life-cycle model) are far less often inclined to take such jobs. Most of the narrators were married and had children. With the exception of one who had a higher education and took a job of cleaning Italian homes after her retirement, all narrators had lower levels of education, having finished primary school or two-year vocational school. Almost all narrators have in the past been formally employed in Slovenia, but exchanged their employment for work in Italian households. Their motives are diverse. Economic ones are still important, but they are not as pressing as they were in the past. An important aspect is qualification: women with lower levels of education have a hard time finding employment in Slovenia, and if they succeed they find only poorly paid, full-time physical work. In Italian households they receive a substantially better salary for shorter and more flexible work hours. Women reflect also insecurity on the labour market and changes in economy structure that were established with the transition from the socialist to capitalist system. One of them said: “Well, that is private capital as well, you know … who knows what’s better … these are the ones that just dismiss you … there are no more state-owned enterprises where you were safe.” (Susˇnik 2006) For retired women with a small pension due to their previous work as housekeepers, factory workers, or as informal domestic workers in Italy, domestic work in Italy is a

5 The present situation of Slovenian domestic workers in Italy was analysed on the basis of sixteen individual interviews. Five interviews were conducted in 2006 within the SIPA project (Equal Programme), while eleven interviews were conducted in 2009 within the diploma work research of Ivana Bratozˇ : “Donne di servicio: Placˇano druzˇinsko delo” [Paid Family Work]. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The narrators were found by using the snowball method. In addition to basic demographic data about the narrators, the interviews contained questions on previous work experience and their motives for doing this work, their positive and negative experiences, the general work day, relations with members of the household, their opinions about why the households hired them, their outlooks on doing this work for a living, potential links with other workers from the same field, social security, and their plans for the future.

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necessary addition to their pensions. For many families this work augments the family budget, thus enabling an improvement in their economic standard. Flexibility and length of working hours which enables better reconciliation of work and family life represent important motives. A 39-year-old mother of two school-aged children has been working in Italy for ten years. To the question why she decided to take on this work in Italy after she had been working in a store in Slovenia for several years, she answered: “Because of growing pressure at the work place, continuous prolongation of the workday, and first and foremost because of my family. The decision had to be made, either family or business.” (Bratozˇ 2009) Another narrator who has been working for fourteen years in the catering industry gave the following response to the same question: “You know how it is, small children, working each weekend, in catering, the money is not good. And I said to myself, I am going to work ‘over there’ [in Italy, M. H.], at least I will be off on Saturdays and Sundays” (Ibid.) Nowadays women from the Primorska region work in Italian households exclusively in live-out arrangements in one or more households, on average five to six hours per day and thus have enough time for their children and farm and household work at home. Most of the workers prefer cleaning and tidying over care for children or the elderly, as the former permit more favourable time flexibility. Employers allow them to take a leave; sometimes they even pay for their sick leave. As stated by one of the narrators, “If I need a vacation, there is no problem. If I get sick, two families still pay me, although I actually do not work. And the other two do not. But they do give me a 13th-month pay and some additional money for my summer holidays.” (Ibid.) Like aleksandrinke did, transnational domestic workers come into private homes in wealthy countries to do domestic work and must fully give up spending time with their children; for daily commuters, the same type of job allows daily commuters to spend at least some time with their children and to balance their work and family duties. Many of them depart for work collectively by bus and have developed a sense of affiliation to a special women’s community. The shared ride to work connects them into a collective where they can exchange experiences and information on “good” and “bad” employers; they can also help each other in finding new employers. This socialising provides an informal social security (as well as social control) network. This social network has a key role and is sufficient in finding employers; therefore, Slovenian domestic workers never use agencies to find work. Today’s women from the Primorska region still carry on the tradition of cross-border trading with home-grown products, vegetables, baked goods, fruit, etc.; to the mutual satisfaction of both sides. They supply the households where they work with these products and are thus even more appreciated in these households. The working relation between an individual domestic worker and a

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household is usually a long-term one, it can last for several decades, and the workers feel accepted as “part of the family”. At the same time Slovenian domestic workers in Italy reflect hierarchical relations, relations of “othering” and inequality that exist below seemingly kind surface and are exposed in fine, subtle, everyday gestures. One of which would be testing the worker’s honesty by the employer. One narrator said: “That is a thing that really hurts. I was being set up. They put fifty euros there by the shoes, just thrown down. But you know, I knew it didn’t just accidentally fall.” (Susˇnik 2006) Another gesture would be the social distance described by a narrator taking care of small children in one of the families with Slovenian background in Italy : “I have told them that they should sometimes come to us, you know, we have feasts, like plum feast and such, because it’s nice for kids. But they don’t want to. They strictly refuse.” (Ibid.) There were numerous small gestures described by the narrators, depicting how in private households, on an individual level of interpersonal relations and in relations between employer and migrant care worker, structural relations of power are being dribbled between economically stronger and economically weaker, between urban and rural, between “old” and “new” European Union members, and also between “regular” formal work and informal care “nonwork”. In spite of that, Slovenian domestic workers display great autonomy in their relationships with their Italian employers. If they are treated disrespectfully, they simply change employers. Thanks to the experience accumulated through work passed down from generation to generation, they have established their own social networks, which allow them to have control over the informal “labour market” in Italian border towns. Although in the last decade more and more women from the Philippines (who being Catholic and often English-speaking are highly appreciated in Italy) have been offering their services on the informal care market, alongside migrants from Eastern European countries and the Balkans, today the women from the Primorska region of Slovenia have a kind of monopoly over paid domestic work in Trieste. And this is so despite the fact that their price is up to twice as high as the pay of “new” migrants. The ethnicisation and hierarchisation of domestic workers in this case establishes Slovenian domestic workers as privileged, and the reasons for this may be found in long tradition, in the characteristics of the border region where many families in Italian border towns have Slovenian ancestors, and also in the greater ease with which the language barrier can be overcome. In spite of the Italian Fini-Bossi law by which the Italian government aimed to curb the illegal employment of migrants in 2002, the situation of Slovenian domestic workers did not change significantly. Their persistence in the informal economy suits employers as well as employees, since this hidden activity in a neighbouring country allows them to profit from the remains of the Slovenian

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welfare state, and at the same time gives them the opportunity to gain income and independence. As stated by a narrator: They wanted to employ me right at the beginning. But I did not want to, because I was already employed with my husband and I preferred that. So actually I worked undeclared. They give me 100 euros once a month so I can pay for my social insurance here in Slovenia. I prefer to pay for this here than in Italy. I receive child benefits, a scholarship for my child, and this works better for me. (Bratozˇ 2009)

This century-long tradition and the special border region, puts Slovenian migrant workers in Italy in a position significantly different from that of migrant care workers in Southern and Western European countries, which have been analysed in many studies. They remain commuters, so continue to take care of their families on a daily basis. As emerged from the interviews, most of them receive unemployment or other social support in Slovenia, which makes them less dependent on their earnings gained by informal paid domestic work. They do not face problems related to citizenship status, working visas and housing, as many migrant care workers in the European Union do. All these circumstances empower Slovenian migrant domestic workers and make them less vulnerable on the global informal care market in Italy.

Conclusion In this chapter the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo was observed from several different perspectives. From the comparative perspective of contemporary and past global care some visible divergences and convergences emerged. In comparison to modern migrant care workers, aleksandrinke had fewer possibilities of being in contact with their families back home and were more limited in their possibilities to care for their own children. The separation from their families was much more radical as it is in the case of contemporary migrant workers, which is mainly a consequence of transport, banking, and communication technology development. Due to the duration of separation from their families, which was even more radical from the perspective of the period in which the social role of a woman was mainly defined by the role of a mother and a housekeeper tied to home and family, they were significantly more stigmatised by their local community than contemporary domestic workers are. However, on the other hand, they were highly appreciated in wealthy Egyptian and European families living in Egypt where they worked, contrary to contemporary migrant women who are often abused, exploited, and racialised at their place of work. Aleksandrinke in this Slovenian-Egyptian care chain had a good support

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system in numerous national, mainly church, organisations which took care of their safety, mutual interconnection and also social control. In spite of self-help organisations that have been increasingly arising in the last decade when the contemporary problem of migrant care workers has been gaining political recognition and advocacy also by the International Labour Organization (ILO), contemporary migrant care workers are still often isolated, individualised, and left to their own resourcefulness and luck. From a comparative perspective of aleksandrinke and Slovenian migrant care workers in neighbouring Italy, two phenomena of Slovenian emigrating domestic workers which took place partly in parallel, we see that while aleksandrinke represent what is nowadays conceptualised as a typical global care chain, a transcontinental working emigration for care work which often lasted for almost a life-time, Slovenian domestic workers in Italy represent a typical life-cycle model, short-term working emigration. From the second half of the nineteenth century on, Slovenian rural young women have been emigrating to Italian urban centres to work as servants, housekeeping help, and nannies, to earn money for a decent dowry, and to help support the large families that stayed behind on their small, indebted family farms. This period intervening between puberty and marriage, which young people filled in by doing apprenticeship and service, was made possible by a marriage pattern in which the age at first marriage was relatively high. After World War II, Slovenians entered a changed economic and political situation; the “new” border separated Slovenia within Yugoslavia from Italy, communism from capitalism, and East from West. In this period the phenomenon of aleksandrinstvo stopped completely while female working emigration to Italy was temporarily reduced and transformed into a daily commuting of middle-aged and elderly women. This can be explained by industrialisation processes which paved the way for a slowly prospering economic situation in post-war Yugoslavia and for sufficient employments for women too. Gender equality, though limited to labour market equality and economic emancipation of women, was a trademark in Yugoslavian socialism and contributed to the improved situation of women compared to the situation in other European countries. This might have temporarily kept women from the Primorska region, who traditionally acquired a habit to emigrate for work, at home and find job as factory worker. But not for a long time. In the years after the establishment of the new border, they developed strategies to cross it on a daily basis up until 1954, when the border became increasingly permeable. As an alternative to the socialist, factory worker – emancipated, equal to men, and employed full time who after work also tends a small farm and the kids, some of them nevertheless opted for the work of a domestic worker in Italy, informal, live-out, flexible, well-paid, always accessible, and traditionally acquired.

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Although, according to socialist ideology and gender equality norms, this work was especially stigmatised, features such as good pay and the simultaneous drawing of social allowances and benefits, flexible and part-time arrangements, personal freedom in time management, and “familiarity” with this work do outweigh its social undervaluation. The economic aspect of unemployment and indigence once more became important for a short time in the 1990s, when the Slovenian economy went through a crisis because of the changing political and economic system and separation from Yugoslavia. In contemporary times, Slovenia has come close to Italian economic standards and quality of life; therefore, economic reasons such as poverty and reduced opportunities for education and employment are no longer the reasons pushing Slovenian women to work in households in Italy. However, a symbiotic relation between Italian urban and Slovenian suburban women continues and is passed on inter-generationally, from mothers to daughters, as a deeply rooted traditional pattern that is comfortable, familiar, and always accessible. From the perspective of a contemporary analysis of the globalisation of care, these two phenomena of Slovenian domestic workers abroad open perspectives on how the past is embedded into the present, tradition in modernity, in different guises and in various political and socio-economic contexts. Topical analysis (Bettio et al. 2006) shows that, because of population ageing, increased employment of women, the absence of public care capacity and the consequent individualisation and privatisation of care work in Italy, the care model “male breadwinner – female carer” is transforming into the “migrant-in-the-family” model. However, the extended tradition of women from the Primorska region working in Italian households as servants, laundresses, cooks, nannies, attendants, cleaners, companions, etc., shows that the “migrant-in-the-family” is more likely a cultural pattern that persists as a self-evident and normalised custom from the past, lingering in the present where it has gained new dimensions, new contexts, and new interpretations. Today, this long-standing symbiotic relationship places Slovenian domestic workers in a privileged position in comparison to other transnational migrant domestic workers in Italy. The established system of daily labour migration from Slovenian border villages to Italian border cities appears as a win-win situation for both sides. However, this satisfaction on the individual micro-level is nevertheless one aspect of macro-structural inequalities within the European Union between the centre and its periphery.

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Index

abandoned children 13 seq., 19, 22, 25 seq., 93, 142, 151, 167, 233 Aleksandrinke returned home 15, 37 Alexandria 14 seq., 129, 151 seq., 218 seq., 224 – condemnation of female migrants going to 174, 176 – 178, 180 – 185 – cosmopolitanism 218 seq., 222, 228 – female migration to 11, 15, 17, 20, 34 seq., 68 – 71, 74, 87, 93 – 95, 98 seq., 104 seq., 107 seq., 139 – 144, 146 – 148, 176 – 178, 180 – 185, 202, 204, 208, 227, 233 – foreign populations in 176, 202, 211, 215 – 219, 222 – 225, 228 – in Slovenian literature 139 – 144, 146 – 148 – migrant family life in 107 – 114 – schools in 107 – 114, 189 – settlement patterns 14 seq., 225 – shipping routes to 11, 20, 34, 87, 129 – social assistance in 69 – 71, 108, 189 seq. – urban development and infrastructure 78 seq., 112, 210, 213, 218 – 219, 221, 223, 225 Arab revolution 186, see also ‘Urabi, colonel Ahmed Austria 11, 39, 45, 54 seq., 57 seq., 76, 180, 197 Austria-Hungary 49, 211 Austrian – migration movements 51 – 58, 60, 79, 83, 87, 109, 113, 186, 199

– statistics for origins of population at home 39 – statistics for population abroad 34 seq., 55 seq., 68, 202, 204 seq. – (Illyrian) Littoral 49, 53, 56 – 58, 66, 68, 185 – Lloyd 58, 68 Austro- 49, 57 seq., 60, 66, 70, 87, 133, 216 – Hungarian Monarchy 54, 60 breadwinner 7, 18, 34, 41 seq., 122, 203, 208, 237, 240, 247 British – citizens in Egypt 82, 91, 214 – 217, 221, 223, 227 – occupation of Egypt 75, 79, 81, 85, 207, 211 seq., 214, 217, 220, 228 – trade routes through Egypt 76, 79 seq., 209 – 212, 214, 220 Cairo – cosmopolitanism 139, 218 seq. – female migration to 15, 34 seq., 68, 93, 95, 97 seq., 100, 113, 117, 202, 227, 233 – foreign populations in 34 seq., 215, 217, 220 – 226, 228 – in Slovenian literature 137, 139 – migrant family life in 107 – 110, 112 – schools in 107 seq., 110, 112, 189 – social assistance in 71, 189 seq. – urban development and infrastructure 78 – 80, 112, 208, 213, 215, 218 seq., 221, 223, 225

268 Capitulations 78 – 80, 86, 183, 213, 215, 224 care – deficit 120, 229, 232 caregivers 122, 203 Catholic Church 23, 26 seq., 35, 87 seq., 91, 146, 149 seq., 157, 164 seq., 170, 178 seq., 234 seq., 252 Catholicism 109, 150, 180 seq. child care 25, 31, 42, 122, 152, 163, 264 children – of aleksandrinke 8, 13 – 15, 18 seq., 22 seq., 25 seq., 37 seq., 66, 73 – 75, 93 – 95, 97 – 99, 100 – 113, 139, 141 – 145, 149, 151, 170, 176 – 178, 184, 189, 233 – the aleksandrinke cared for 22 seq., 30, 70, 94, 97 – 99, 109, 114, 139, 141, 153, 170, 227 contemporary aleksandrinke 29 dishonourable behaviour 188 domestic – helpers 11, 203 – servant 99, 196, 199 – 203, 231, 237 – service 17, 34, 37, 41, 46, 52, 55, 59, 71, 86, 89, 126 seq., 195 – 198, 200, 203 seq., 226 seq. – work 17, 29 seq., 32, 37, 98, 126, 230, 235, 237, 241 – 245 – worker 11, 17, 20, 24, 27, 31, 36, 85, 89 seq., 92, 123 – 125, 127, 226, 229 seq., 232 – 237, 239 – 247 Egypt 14, 15 – cosmopolitanism 30, 208, 218 seq., 228 – history of 74 – 81, 85 seq., 101, 176, 183, 207 – 211, 213, 215 – 217, 222 seq., 226, 228 – foreign workers in 81 – 86, 88, 92, 182, 185, 202 – 204, 212 – 217, 220 seq., 223 seq., 227, 233 – migrant family life in 17, 73 seq., 93 seq., 97 – 99, 102 – 108, 110 seq., 131 seq., 168, 171, 235 – migration to 8, 11 – 17, 19 seq., 31, 34,

Index

36 seq., 44, 50, 61, 63, 66 – 71, 73 – 75, 79, 81 seq., 84, 87, 92, 94 – 96, 99 – 101, 103 – 111, 113, 117, 125, 131, 133, 137 seq., 142, 148, 151, 154 seq., 157, 178 seq., 182 seq., 185 seq., 189, 203, 207 seq., 212 – 214, 227 seq., 230, 232 seq., 237, 240, 245 – Slovenian institutions in 27, 70, 184, 189 seq., 235 – stereotypes about 21, 74 seq., 86, 91, 132, 137 seq., 142 seq., 147, 154, 182 seq., 189 seq. Egyptian – independence 21 seq., 75, 77 seq., 81, 125, 145, 176, 179, 216, 237, 240 seq., 245 – women 88 – 91, 138 seq. – workers 81 – 84 fascism 29, 63 seq., 133, 141, 174, 238 female – domestic servant 34, 41, 43 – 45, 125, 184 – foreigner 43, 201 – migration 14 seq., 18 – 20, 29, 31, 35, 39, 61, 67 seq., 73, 135, 157, 161 – 163, 167 – 169, 190 seq. femininity 27, 132, 135 seq., 140, 145 seq., 150, 153 seq., 178 feminisation of migration 121, 229, 231 gender – dichotomy 157 – 162, 168 – differences 44, 109, 132, 159, 163, 214 – paradox 23, 25 seq., 31 – segregation 118, 161 global care chain 36, 230 – 235, 242, 246 globalisation of care work 32, 230 seq., 241, 247 Gorisˇka 8, 11, 13 – 16, 20, 22, 27, 30, 36, 49 – 71, 75, 93 seq., 97, 99, 102 – 110, 112 – 114, 117, 119 seq., 129, 174, 180, 184, 232, 236 – map of 12, 50

269

Index

Habsburg monarchy 19 seq., 35, 43, 49, 63, 195 seq., 198 – 202 human trafficking 71, 137 International Bureau for the Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children 70, 189 seq. Isonzo Front 11, 63 Italian worker 40, 84 seq. Jew 17, 82, 109, 111 seq., 139, 181, 192, 199, 216, 221 khawagas 216, 218 Khedive Isma‘il 79 – 81, 83, 210 seq., 213, 220, 224 labour – force 11, 22, 25, 40, 57, 76 seq., 81, 90, 92, 124, 146, 154, 187, 190, 195 seq., 211, 216, 228, 240 – market 51, 54, 56, 59, 69 seq., 78, 88, 207, 210, 215, 217, 225 seq., 230, 236 seq., 244 seq. – migration 18, 39 seq., 43, 71, 128, 158 seq., 196 – 198, 201 seq., 239, 247 Les GoriciÀnnes 70, 227, 235 Les SlovÀnes 70, 227 – liberal discourse 29, 85, 163, 174 seq., 179 – 181, 185 – 188, 208, 219 live-in 87, 123, 201, 234, 237, 239 – household help 87, 241 – servants 196 live-out 232, 243, 246 maid 67, 105, 107, 125 – 127, 167 seq., 182, 184, 196 seq., 201, 203, 226, 233, 235 – 237 maternal cult 165, 178 Mediterranean 13, 34, 68, 74, 78, 87, 109 – 111, 129, 184, 202 seq., 207, 209 – 214, 218, 224 migrant – female 15, 17 seq., 25 – 27, 29, 32 seq., 41, 52, 61, 71, 87, 131, 145, 189, 199, 201, 229 seq.

– long-distance 40, 42 – 44, 201 seq. – male 25, 40 seq., 43, 52, 54, 162 seq. – short-distance 40, 44, 200 migration – chain 106, 143, 154, 170, 186, 230 seq., 245 – distance 30 seq., 43, 68, 135, 197, 200 seq., 234, 244 – gender specific 19, 40, 42 seq., 69, 203 – internal 12, 39, 61 – 63, 69, 112, 128, 180, 208, 216, 229 – mass 27, 41, 51 seq., 56, 69, 102, 158, 164, 167, 173, 179, 214, 217, 240 – movements 41, 49 – 54, 63, 67 seq., 85, 166, 207 – processes 17, 19 seq., 29, 33, 43, 52, 54, 67, 84, 105, 128 seq., 132, 159, 166, 207, 216, 219, 233, 238, 246 moral – accusation 185 – condemnation 12, 27, 29, 177, 235 – destruction 14, 26 – 28, 63, 117 seq., 135, 138, 140, 143, 146, 171, 186 moralist discourse 13, 38 Muhammad ‘Ali 75 – 77, 81, 90, 209, 213, 215 seq., 222 seq. Muslim 35, 82, 90, 110, 112, 133, 143, 145, 147,150,155, 224 mythologisation 23, 131 nanny 32, 44, 98 seq., 102, 107, 109, 227, 233 narrative 18, 23, 27, 31, 102, 122, 132 seq., 137, 144, 146, 149, 151, 157 national – identity 23, 31, 36, 63, 93, 108, 110, 126, 129, 132 seq., 136, 161, 167, 221 – ideology 26, 31, 35, 43, 117 – 119, 121, 123, 133, 160, 165 seq., 179, 203, 247 – imagination 7, 12, 29 – nationalist discourse 29, 161 Nova Gorica 8, 64, 67 Orient 13, 20, 139 seq., 183, 189, 218 orientalist 14, 21, 38, 75, 88, 91, 182 otherness 102 seq., 124, 132

270 Ottoman – citizens 35, 65, 68 seq., 80, 82, 108, 113, 161, 166, 170, 202, 204 seq., 212 seq., 223, 237 – 239 – Empire 34, 76 seq., 109, 209, 228 patriarchy 28, 157 seq. political – activity 65, 88, 160, 178, 226, 236, 244 – participation 23, 88 seq., 169, 229 prostitution 24, 28, 41, 43, 70, 90, 137, 182, 186, 189, 227 purity 146, 174, 178, 188, 191 refugees 45, 64 – political 54 representation 27 seq., 129, 131 – 133, 140, 144 – 146, 150, 153 seq., 173 reprobation approach 121 rhetoric 140, 159, 177 sacrificing mother 145, 179 Sa’id Pasha 78, 79 sexuality 14, 23, 131, 145, 147 seq., 151, 160 seq., 166 Sisters of the Order of St. Francis and of Christ the King 15, 27, 70 seq., 108, 112, 145, 189, 235 slander approach 120, 126 Slovenia 12, 15, 18, 36, 49, 64, 69, 92 seq., 95 seq., 98 seq., 101 – 109, 111 seq., 131, 159 seq., 163 – 167, 169 seq., 173, 180 seq., 184, 202, 229 seq., 232, 237, 241 – 247 – map of 12 Slovenian – literature 25, 27, 91, 131 – 135, 137, 139 seq., 150, 155 – language 108, 145, 167 – migrants 65, 75, 87, 187, 189, 232, 245 seq. – migration 7, 51, 69, 87, 168, 230 – community abroad 65, 84 – territory 22, 29, 49, 69, 133 seq., 179 seq., 233, 236

Index

Slovenians 7, 49, 58, 64 seq., 75, 83 seq., 86 seq., 102, 108, 110, 112 seq., 119, 133, 141, 166, 169 seq.,181 – 187, 202, 237 seq., 246 Society for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of the Alexandrian Women 14, 36, 113 – Museum 11, 14, 36 St. Francis Asylum 27, 70, 108, 144, 235 stigmatisation 19, 26, 121, 137, 150, 161 Suez – Canal 20, 34, 68, 75, 77 – 83, 86 seq., 123, 144, 203, 207, 210 seq., 213, 215, 217, 223, 228, 230, 232 – Crisis 74 seq. Tawfiq 81, 85, 211 transmediterranean 119 transnational – families 24 – 26, 31 seq., 233 – 234 – motherhood 30, 233 seq. traumatic memory 13, 19, 27 Trieste 15, 20, 37, 49, 51 – 55, 58 seq., 68 – 71, 87, 119, 129, 131, 137, 164, 168, 174, 179 seq., 182 – 184, 186, 189, 191 seq., 202 seq., 227, 233, 236 seq., 239, 241, 244 unions 84, 87 seq., 111, 123 ‘Urabi, colonel Ahmad 75, 81, 85, 87, 211 USA 45, 58, 95, 98, 202 Venetian Slovenia 54 victimisation approach 120 Vienna 54 seq., 119, 129, 168, 189, 195, 198 – 200, 233 walı¯ 76, 209, 217 wet nurse 11, 13 – 15, 17, 22 – 24, 68 seq., 94, 98 – 101, 109, 140, 142, 152 seq., 168, 203, 230, 233, 237 Yugoslavia 11 seq., 49, 63 – 67, 102, 230, 238 – 241, 246 seq.