The Voice of Peasant Women

Project Code:
O6-70230 (B)

Project Description:
The citizen science project “The Voice of Peasant Women” complements the fundamental research project “Invisible, yet Indispensable. Peasant Women in Socialism.”, which examines the paradoxical position of peasant women in socialist societies. Despite their crucial role in agriculture, family life, and local communities, peasant women were often marginalized in access to social and material rights and excluded from formal decision-making structures. Research shows that in exercising social rights—such as health insurance, pension and disability insurance, and maternity leave—both formally employed women in agriculture and those whose work on family farms remained formally unrecognized were disadvantaged and often recorded in official statistics as housewives. Their internal diversity, shaped by local environments, family strategies, and unequal access to rights, has also frequently been overlooked.

The aim of the project is to document and analyze the life stories of peasant women in Slovenia through the involvement of citizen researchers,thereby deepening understanding of their social and economic position during socialism and in the present. Members of rural women’s associationswill conduct semi-structured interviews in their local environments with women who were economically active during socialism. In addition tointerviews, they will document personal materials such as letters, photographs, documents, and objects related to the life experiences of theinterviewees.

A key advantage of the project lies in the fact that members of rural women’s associations already have established social networks andrelationships of trust within their communities. This enables access to life stories and personal materials that researchers in the fundamentalproject would otherwise find difficult to obtain. In this way, the project qualitatively enriches the fundamental research with new empirical sourcesand a participatory perspective.

The interviews will provide insight into the micro-level of lived experiences, enable comparative analysis between different local environments, andfacilitate the reconstruction of the historical position of peasant women and its reflection in the present. The project will contribute to a deeperunderstanding of their roles in family life, agriculture, and local communities, identify forms of cooperation and mutual support, and strengthenresearch capacities within local communities. Through the approach “peasant women for peasant women,” the project introduces an innovativeparticipatory dimension, fosters dialogue between academic research and rural communities, and generates new empirical sources and researchperspectives.