Reports written by Labour Inspectors responsible for the implementation of protective labour legislation in Greek industry during the period 1913–34 are analysed both as discourses that construct new industrial relations and as sources that provide evidence of workers’ resistance. To account for their difficulty in implementing labour laws, Inspectors defined themselves as agents of ‘progress’ struggling against the ‘backwardness’ of the working masses, especially as expressed in gender attitudes. Yet the reports also provide evidence of divergent cultural meanings and unravel the multiple ways in which men and women workers negotiated their identities.

In the 1950s, as the Cold War was setting in, dividing the world, a new spectre was rising, reuniting it against a common threat: the 'youth who have strayed' and their 'criminal' proclivity. Governments, legal professionals, the press and the public in a host of countries throughout the world agonized over the new danger. The problem of 'juvenile delinquency' seriously preoccupied the World Health Organization and the Council of Europe, which organized meetings and conferences, and funded and published research studies by experts. 1 During the second half of the decade, in Austria, Britain, Germany and Italy, as well as in Australia and Japan and even in the Soviet Union, governments instituted measures aimed at protecting young people from 'immoral influences' and restoring those who had strayed from the rules of 'proper behaviour', either capitalist or socialist. Their goal was to stamp out the violence attributed to groups of youths, largely male: the British 'Teddy boys', the Italian teppisti, the German Halbstarken, the French blousons noirs, the American 'rockers', as well as the Soviet stiliagi, the Japanese tokyo yakou or the South African tsotsis, in addition to the Greek tediboides. These young people, often identified with a particular manner of dressing, automobile worship and loud rhythmic music, group amusement and boisterous and violent behaviour, were considered one of the most negative outcomes of postwar economic development and advancing capitalism.This phenomenon, which German analysts called 'prosperity criminality', 2 is related to -among other things -the introduction of two important sociological terms. First, research on this phenomenon soon after it appeared led to the international adoption of the term 'juvenile delinquency' (délinquance juvénile). This term characterizes actions of young people which, while against the law in one way or another, or at least on the legal fringes, were considered

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The collection below was published in Greek by Gnosi ("Knowledge") Publications in Athens. It inaugurates a series on women's history by this press in a country whose universities as yet offer no women's history courses and where no women's studies programs exist. This translation of part of the Editors' Note and Preface by Angelos Kokkinos offers a bitter indictment by the editors of academic Greek historiography's utter disinterest in the history of Greek women or of Greek feminism. The Co-Editors of the Journal of Women's History encourage its international readers to submit similar excerpts or descriptions in translation of important feminist historical works not yet available in English. Feminism in Inter-War Greece represents a heroic effort at retreival of women's past, indeed a rather recent past, that was already fading from sight when a group of young activist Greek university women began to reclaim it. The women whose words they have retrieved from time's ravages (Maria Svollou, Roza Imvrioti, Alkis Thrilos, Sofia Antoniadou, to name but a few) are not known to us-but like many women whose names we know better, they should be considered previous witnesses. They young women who edited this collection, Efi Avdela and Angelica Psarra, have committed a heroic act in preserving these texts and their authors from oblivion, a strange oblivion resulting when political needs as defined by male leadership of Greek progressive politics overpowered and drowned out the women's claims. We are reminded by these texts and their editors how difficult it can be to sustain feminist momentum in difficult political circumstances, and we thank them for the courage and conviction that made this material once again available.