Participation and Volunteering in Liberal and Socialist Democracies: Female Volunteer Firefighters in the Central European Borderlands during the Cold War

This article compares the different trajectories of women’s participation in volunteer fire brigades in Austria and Slovenia, focusing particularly on the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. During this period, women made up nearly 20 per cent of Slovenian fire brigades, whereas on the other side of the border, Austrian women were barred from joining the fire brigades until the mid-1990s. This article asks why there was such a difference in the participation of Slovenian versus Austrian women in volunteer fire brigades. The main argument revolves around questions of democratisation, relations between the state and civil society organisations and their role in the implementation of gender policies. The article claims that in the context of socialist democracy as it was practiced in self-managing Yugoslavia, the mobilisation of women into volunteer fire brigades took place from the bottom up, while the interweaving of state and non-state actors enabled the realisation of progressive gender policies and broadened the borders of citizenship. In liberal democratic Austria, by contrast, neither political parties nor the feminist movement nor the Firefighting Organisation itself managed to change the undemocratic policies of women’s exclusion from the volunteer fire brigades. This change only came about after negotiations with an international organisation, the European Union, which Austria wanted to join.