Women in illegal and unregulated work from the mid-19th century to today

The MOONLIGHTING project builds on the findings of the ERC EIRENE project (2017-2023) which dealt with aspects of women's work in the NE Adriatic region in the 20th century (more about EIRENE: https://project-eirene.eu/). The core of the proposed project is a historiographical concern with women's illegal and unregulated work from the mid-19th century to the present. The region of the North-Eastern Adriatic, where the Germanic, Romanic and Slavic worlds converge, is a rewarding observatory for the study of women's cross-border economic activities. Historically, it has also been the site of many illicit forms of gainful labour, which emerged from the volatility of political borders and state sovereignties, and the powerful politico-economic cleavage between the western capitalist and eastern socialist worlds during the Cold War. The thematic structure of the proposed project addresses the issue along three thematic axes, where a large proportion of women's activities are mapped: domestic work and retail (1), prostitution and trafficking (2), and the black market and smuggling (3). The diversity and dispersion of relevant sources, both written and oral, will require an in-depth, comparative and transnational historical analysis of all aspects of women's invisible labour through a longer temporal perspective, with the aim of contributing to a broader epistemological reflection on the treatment and normalization of unregulated and illegal labour today.

Keywords: labour history, women's work, illegal and unregulated work, domestic and retail work, prostitution, trafficking, black market, smuggling