The topic of this dissertation is the analysis of the role and position of female industrial workers in Rovinj since the establishment of the two largest industrial plants for processing tobacco (1872) and fish (1877) until 1970. By defining this time frame, it is possible to follow the most important changes affecting the social status of female workers: social and political changes (Austro Hungarian Empire, Kingdom of Italy and Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), technological changes (from workshops to contemporary mechanisation characterized by the use of assembly lines). The paper begins with the author’s positioning through the prism of feminist anthropology. By questioning objectivity and insider knowledge, the author defines her most suitable work methodology, reflected in the combined employment of a historical method and ethnographic background, along with situated knowledge and intersectionality as a methodological, theoretical and analytical framework. From the very beginning, the industrial anthropological thought and feminist theories focusing on the revised standpoint theory and intersectionality are compared with insights gained through fieldwork in order to maintain a clear link between a methodological and theoretical framework and empirical research. The author especially focuses on the constructivist nature of information about female workers and/or women in general. Therefore, the content and topic of the research as well as the methodology and theory are all part of one and the same message. In the fourth part, the author analyses historical sources: the register of female workers employed by TDR (Rovinj Tobacco Factory), birth and death records as well as marriage registers for the period between 1816 and 1907 (1913 for death records). The author shows the invisibility of female work through public records, thus placing them in the general historiographic thesis about the invisibility of women through history. The social status of women in Rovinj dramatically changed due to industrialization developments by the end of the 19th century. In order to understand these changes (specific for this micro-location), the author also analyses earlier research into the position of women in Istria, focusing especially on the institution of the “Istrian marriage” – the latter is seen as a likely means to achieve better social status for women even before industrialization. By employing intersectionality when analysing the status of female workers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century through written sources, informants’ memories and female workers’ experiences representing the empirical part of the qualitative ethnographic research, this paper discusses the mechanisms at work in the creation and intersection of different identities: gender-, national- and class-related (the latter being the most prominent) within a workers’ group. The research focuses especially on expressing the heterogeneity of workers’ experiences, especially when it comes to interpreting (social) memory versus lived experience. The paper ends with the analysis of the concepts of cultural memory based on the contemporary perception of the role and status of female industrial workers in the period included in this research.