Century and Documents from the Countryside of Trieste

Abstract

Archive sources from the 19th century prove that family roles in a traditional rural environment were not identical with those spread out at the same time by the jornalism, meant for people in the countryside of Trieste. A severe hierarchic family model, Slovene moralists offered as an ideal to their readers, was very unusual for an environment, where both women and men determined the family strategy. It became acceptable only when the urbanization proces and disintegration of a traditional rural community pushed women into a private sphere and took away from them the economic role, they had had in the society of the old regime.