Autobiographical sources, fragments of memoirs and correspondences, and individual oral narratives, collected in the 1980s, enable a research of female Slovenian refugees from Gorizia and Soča region, who found themselves on both sides of the front, in Austrian and Italian context, during the First World War. Individual narratives, although succinct, highlight the centrality of women, mothers or older sisters, from their ability to use and complement state subsidies to becoming interlocutors for the authorities, depending on the place of the transfer. The war loosened social control over women, yet not all benefited from these new spaces of autonomy. The Slovenian intellectuals from Trieste and Gorizia, who during the war became public champions of the suffering of the displaced and refugees, especially of the plight of mothers-refugees, became refugees themselves after the war when the former Litoral region became part of Italy and fascism ascended.