Fringers: Women in Fishery in Trieste’s Maritime District, 1885–1923

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the characteristics of women’s labour participation in fisheries in the communities of the maritime periphery of the city port of Trieste. In the period in question, Trieste’s Maritime District was a strip of shoreline that extended from Grado (present-day Italy) to Savudrija (now Croatia). Apart from a few relevant cases, it had hardly been touched by the capitalist system of production. In this context, fisheries sometimes represented a significant source of wealth and employment for the populations of the local maritime communities. The women involved in fisheries were mainly factory labourers, fishmongers and owners of fishing boats. Their marginality (or marginalities) can be understood as ‘structural’ and a ‘social role’, and was articulated on different levels. Nevertheless, it seems necessary to go beyond the mere recognition of their liminality and, more generally, the traditional binarism characterizing gender studies in maritime contexts.