In the same way as men, even for women the possibility to survive during a period away from their own homes was linked to work. Whoever was lucky enough to find work was able to face more easily the thousand difficulties of daily life given that the subsidy that ought to have guaranteed the economic livelihood of refugees was very often not even distributed.
According to the most recent research on this subject, the women who found work were aged between 15 and 40 years. In most cases they were employed in factories which at that time turned their operations into the production of arms and ammunition for the army or else in workshops for the manufacture of civilian clothes and army uniforms. Very often, however, the manual skills of women had to adapt themselves to tasks that were typically associated with men, to heavy and dangerous duties: from the rice fields in the Po valley to the metal and steel industry where, among a thousand obstacles, they could at least aspire to have a wage that would be higher than the average wage.
Certainly many people took advantage of the weak state in which most women refugees found themselves since they had to look for work and to accept work at any condition. Cases are known to have occurred of blackmail and low wages while many were abused, both financially and sexually. In these cases the ones who were mostly hit were younger girls: jobs such as maids with rich landowners in the south of Italy were offered to the more attractive girls and this, obviously, gave rise to the worst rumours in areas that were historically very conservative. Women refugees were therefore considered as prostitutes, lazy women, who were not interested in the welfare of their own children. Some of them, in order to be able to survive, were effectively forced into prostitution. Several men in the big cities in the centre and in the south of Italy took advantage of the weakness of these people and organized a real trade in the trafficking of women refugees.
