Bernard, Sara, juhendajaSpahić, Ehlimana, juhendajaHusar, LaraTartu Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste valdkondTartu Ülikool. Johan Skytte poliitikauuringute instituut2025-10-302025-10-302025https://hdl.handle.net/10062/117207This thesis investigates how gender shaped the experiences and memories of labour migration among Yugoslav women in the Federal Republic of Germany between the late 1960s and 1990. While dominant narratives in West Germany have long depicted female “guest workers” as passive dependents within male-dominated migration flows, this study challenges such assumptions by centring women’s own voices. Building on eight in-depth oral history interviews and employing a gendered and intersectional analytical framework, the thesis explores how participants narrate their own migration stories, workplace experiences, family roles, and social positioning between home and host societies. The findings demonstrate that Yugoslav women migrated for diverse reasons and exercised agency within the constraints of structural inequalities shaped by gender, class, and migrant status. As their life stories show, migration is remembered not as a single, fixed event but as a layered and ongoing process that influenced their identity formation, belonging, and socio-economic positioning well into retirement. Despite the influence and impact of gender in all areas of women's experiences as the analysis shows, there is nevertheless a prevailing invisibility regarding gender (discrimination), at times even on the part of the women themselves. By uncovering female counter-narratives to dominant memory regimes, this thesis contributes to feminist oral history, memory studies, and migration history. It demonstrates the importance of bottom-up perspectives for understanding how migrant women’s experiences and memories complicate and enrich existing narratives about labour migration to West Germany.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Estoniahttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ee/magistritöödThesis