Women Workers and Unionization in 19th-Century Berlin

Introduction

Germany is one of the world's leading industrial powerhouses, and its industrial growth and success is nonetheless remarkable, having moved from periods of severe oppression of workers to unionization and social democracy. This paper analyzes the autobiography of one of the women who faced gender-based oppression and manipulation at the workplace in Berlin in the 19th century.

In the generations before World War I, Germany emerged as Europe's industrial powerhouse, evident in rising exports, urbanization, expanding railroad networks, and increasing industrial output. Behind the shadows, however, are the millions of now-forgotten men and women who carried the bricks, printed the books, sewed the shirt cuffs and collars, hacked down coal, and laid railroad ties that made Germany the industrial power it was and remains today. The resource selected for this analysis is the autobiography of one of those now-forgotten women: Ottilie Baader. Baader was the oldest daughter of a sugar refinery worker in Berlin.¹ Having lost her mother at the age of seven, she was forced to work in the sewing industry in Berlin to support her siblings and her ailing father.² She worked as a seamstress in different companies in Berlin in the 1860s and 1870s, and in her memoir she details how female workers were manipulated by Berlin sweatshop owners — forced to work under strenuous conditions at degrading pay — and how they finally learned to say "no" to maltreatment. The memoir was composed in Berlin in 1921 and was targeted at working women across the world, to inspire them to stand up against gender-based oppression at the workplace.³

This historical document gives insight into the oppression of women in the sewing industry in Berlin in the 19th century and the development of their ability to stand up against their oppressors. It covers this in four major sections. The first focuses on the specific roles allocated to women by sweatshop owners and what those roles indicated about German culture, values, and the place of women. The second part focuses on the compensation paid to female workers and the conditions under which they worked. The third section addresses the introduction of unionization among working women in the sewing industry in Berlin and the factors that contributed to slow union activity among female workers in Germany. The final section discusses questions raised by the text that only future research could answer.

Background: Women in German Industrial Growth

The number of female employees across different sectors of the German economy grew tremendously in the second half of the 19th century. The textile industry particularly witnessed significant growth in the number of women workers following the invention of the sewing machine, which meant that more and more women in both rural and urban areas could be employed to work from home.⁴ Most of the work in the textile industry began to be done outside factory walls. The opening chapters of Baader's memoir recount her roles and duties as a seamstress in various sewing companies across Berlin. They document the countless hours she spent at a sewing machine performing the same monotonous, repetitive work. The author also demonstrates how challenging it was to organize working women at the time and to get them to stand up against gender-based oppression at the workplace.

Women and the Sewing Industry

Women began to be more involved in industrial activities in the late 18th century, when urbanization began across Europe. Their involvement in the textile industry remained, however, severely limited until the 1860s, when the sewing machine was invented.⁵ This is largely because women were considered homemakers — their place was in the home, nurturing children and receiving their husbands when they returned from work. It is possible, therefore, that German society, like most of its European counterparts, believed that employing women in factory work was a recipe for child neglect and broken homes. As such, the only women who could be employed in the textile industry were those who did not have young children to care for, or who were unmarried and without husbands to wait home for. Baader's family arrangement illustrates the German culture's emphasis on family values: her mother stayed at home with the children while her father went out to earn for the family. Even when Baader and her sister were old enough to work, they had to remain unmarried, because getting married and having children meant giving up industrial work to commit oneself to domestic duties. The author mentions that sitting long hours at the sewing machine made her feel like nothing more than a work machine, denied her the pleasures of her youth, and caused her to see little value in life.⁶

The invention of the sewing machine in the 1860s facilitated decentralization in the garments industry, as women with children gained the opportunity to participate in textile work from home.⁷ They nonetheless remained subordinate to their male counterparts and were assigned secondary roles — such as assembly and preparatory tasks — while men performed the main sewing work. Working at the Schwendy Wool Factory in Gitschinerstrasse, for instance, Baader and her sister were responsible for assembling gloves, footwear, feather decorations, and garments while their male counterparts carried out the principal embroidery work.⁸ Women were therefore largely viewed as casual, temporary employees who were inferior to men and who consequently deserved to be treated differently. This gender stereotyping was central to the relegation of women's roles in the industry to secondary status.

Conclusion

Germany is one of the world's leading industrial powerhouses; however, its industrial success did not develop overnight. Growth has been slow, moving from periods of massive oppression of workers to unionization and social democracy. Women, as Baader demonstrates in her autobiography, were particularly subject to gender-based oppression and manipulation at the workplace before they developed the collective power to stand up against their oppressors. This was in large part because German culture associated women with domesticity and perceived them as inferior to men — a perception that created the assumption that they ought to be treated and compensated differently from men in any work performed outside the home. For this reason, women were forced to work under strenuous conditions and at degrading pay until they were empowered by the growth of trade unions.

What remains a matter of debate, however, is whether autobiographies such as Baader's are representative of the situations of the millions of working-class women in Europe at the time, and whether the success of union activity among working-class women can be attributed to the involvement of the bourgeoisie and their political parties. These questions introduce uncertainties that reinforce the need for further research in this area of study. Nonetheless, Baader's autobiography provides crucial insights into the social structure, values, and culture of German society in the age of industrialization.

Bibliography

Kelly, Alfred. The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987.