Slovene Women Immigrants in Trst (Trieste): The Issue of Identity at the 1910 Census

The article analyzes the role of Slovene servants—mostly immigrants from the surrounding Slovenian basin and nearby Austrian lands—during the 1910 census in Trieste. The focus is on their autonomous behavior regarding the dependent position within households and the public pressure of (Slovene and Italian) national elites in the city. With the public discourse, archival material, and quantitative analysis of a sample of census polls, the research synthesizes the importance of data such as the language of communication and the servants’ places of origin. It then interpretively places them in the context of (national) identity.
Keywords: Slovene servants, immigrants, (national) identity, national elites, 1910 census, Trst/Trieste

In the multicultural Trieste, relations between the Slovene and Italian national elites became strained at the turn of the twentieth century. One of the neuralgic points was the question of the language of communication in the Austrian censuses, especially that of 1910, which thus underwent a revision. The agitation regarding the language of communication was largely focused on many (Slovene) servants, mostly immigrants from the surrounding Slovenian basin and nearby Austrian lands.
In this paper, the authors analyzed which language of communication the servants entered at the 1910 census and whether their behavior was autonomous regarding their dependent position within households and the pressure of the public or the national elites. In doing so, the authors relied on public discourse, archival material, and quantitative analysis of a sample of the census poles of the 1910 census in Trieste. They examined the initial entry in the census fields when counting the population and the first (municipal authorities and enumerators) and second official state audit. The authors found that the original entries of the servants’ language of communication were extremely heterogeneous, with the Italian language of communication predominating. At the first revision, the number of entries of the Italian language of communication increased even more. However, the second revision markedly increased the number of Slovene language entries compared to the increase in the Slovene language of communication entries in general.
Nevertheless, even after the last revision, many servants still chose Italian, even though they came from a Slovene-speaking environment. Such results would be difficult to attribute (only) to the pressures of Italian-oriented employers (or enumerators) and certainly reflect the fluidity of national or at least linguistic identity in a multicultural town. Italian is more often chosen as the language of communication by older servants who have been living in the town for a long time. At least to a certain extent, it is possible to talk about assimilation and not just about misleading young, naive Slovene servants, as, for example, the Slovenian newspapers used to write, although such cases are also attested. A careful study of the census poles draws a more complex picture of servants’ constructed (national) identity than the one portrayed by the nationalists of the time, as the article also suggests.