The earliest version of this article was a paper which I presented to the Fifth International Conference of Europeanists in Wachington, D.C. on 20 October 1985. I wish to thank Louise A. Tilly and Gay Gullickson for very useful comments. An expanded version was presented to an International Conference on the Meaning of Gender in German History, Rutgers University, 26–27 April 1986. I greatly benefited from participating in the conference, which helped me think anew about women's history in terms of its impact on standard interpretations of German history. I also thank the readers for Central European History whose queries and questions encouraged me to spell out in more detail many of my underlying assumptions.

1. The literature is vast and cannot be explored fully here but I found the following very useful: Hanagan, Michael and Stephenson, Charles, eds., Proletarians and Protest: The Roots of Class Formation in an Industrializing World (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Tilly, Louise A. and Tilly, Charles, eds., Class Conflict and Collective Action (Beverly Hills and London, 1981)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thane, Pat, Crossick, Geoffrey, and Floud, Roderick, eds., The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar. Also, Haupt, George, “Why the History of the Working-Class Movement?” Review 2 (Summer 1978): 5–24Google Scholar, and Dubofsky, Melvyn, “Give Us the Old Time Labor History: Philip S. Foner and the American Worker,” Labor History 26, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 118–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E. J., Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York, 1964)Google Scholar and also his Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984)Google Scholar. In addition, see Hanagan, Michael and Stephenson, Charles, eds., Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labor Process: Studies in Proletarian Class Formation (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar; and Stephenson, Charles and Asher, Robert, eds., Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History (Albany, 1986)Google Scholar. These collections demonstrate a variety of new approaches to labor history.

3. Kaplan, Temma, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918,” in Keohane, Nannerl O., Rosaldo, Michelle Z., and Gelpi, Barbara C., eds., Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology (Chicago, 1981), 55–76Google Scholar. For some of the most challenging applications of gender in labor history, see Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana and Chigaco, 1987)Google Scholar, and her edited collection, Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U. S. Women's Labor History (Boston, 1985)Google Scholar. Also, Janiewski, Dolores E., Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia, 1985)Google Scholar, and Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Tum-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).Google Scholar

4. For an excellent short synopsis of recent trends in German labor history, see Kocka, Jürgen, “Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800–1875,” in Katznelson and Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation, 279–351Google Scholar; the review article by Geary, Dick, “Artisans, Protest and Labor Organization in Germany 1815–1870,” European History Quarterly 16 (07 1986): 369–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and also the collection by Evans, Richard J., The German Working Class 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life (London, 1982)Google Scholar. For other examples of studies on the daily lives of workers, see Reck, Sigfried, “Bedingungen und Strukturen des Privatlebens deutscher Arbeiter-Wandlungen seit der Jahrhundertwende,” (diss., Marburg/Lahn, 1969)Google Scholar; Ruppert, Wolfgang, ed., Die Arbeiter: Lebensformen, Alltag und Kultur von der Frühindustrialisierung bis zum “Wirtschaftswunder” (Munich, 1986)Google Scholar; Haumann, Heiko, ed., Arbeiteralltag in Stadt und Land: Neue Weg der Geschichtsschreibung (Berlin, 1982)Google Scholar, and also the chapter by Luedtke, Alf, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, and Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany circa 1900,” in Hanagan and Stephenson, eds., Confrontation, 65–95Google Scholar. Luedtke is questioning the nature of politics in the context of daily living.

5. There have been, of course, any number of books in German history on women in diverse occupations as well as women and the trade unions or in relation to the Socialist movement. For several examples, see Beier, Rosmarie, Frauenarbeit und Frauenalltag im Deutschen Kaiserrreich: Heimarbeiterinnen in der Berliner Bekleidungsindustrie 1880–1914 (Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Frauenbewegung und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung: Texte zur Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland und in der BRD von 1814 bis 1980, ed. Hervé, Florence (Frankfurt a.M., 1981)Google Scholar; Richebächer, Sabine, Uns fehlt nur eine Kleinigkeit: Deutsche proletarische Frauenbewegung 1890–1914 (Frankfurt a.M., 1982)Google Scholar; Losseff-Tillmanns, Gisela, Frauenemanzipation und Gewerkschaften (Wuppertal, 1978)Google Scholar; and my own study, Quataert, Jean H., Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar. But among German historians there has not been as much of an effort to explore theoretically and empirically how gender as an analytic unit encourages historians to rethink many of the basic, inherited categories used to study modern industrial work, like class or occupation. For examples of efforts to rethink these categories see Scott, Joan, “Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 31 (Spring 1987): 1–13Google Scholar, and the controversy it generated, 14–36, and her article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (12 1986): 1053–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, Cameron, Ardis, “Bread and Roses Revisited: Women's Culture and Working-Class Activism in the Lawrence Strike of 1912,” in Milkman, , Women, Work and Protest, 42–61Google Scholar; Dana Frank, “‘The Labor Woman Fights at the Point of Consumption’: Consumer Organizing and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1928,” paper presented at the Seventh Berkshire Conference on Women's History, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 21 June 1987; and Kaplan, Temma, “Women and Communal Strikes in the Crisis of 1917–1922,” in Bridenthal, R., Koonz, C., and Stuard, S., eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2d ed. (Boston, 1987), 429–49Google Scholar. German feminist historians, however, have made important theoretical breakthroughs in expanding notions of work to include so–called housework. See Kittler, Gertraude, Hausarbeit: Zur Geschichte einer “Natur-Ressource” (Munich, 1980)Google Scholar, and Bock, Gisela and Duden, Barbara, “Arbeit aus Liebe— Liebe als Arbeit: Zur Entstehung der Hausarbeit im Kapitalismus,” Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beiträge zur Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen, Juli 1976 (Berlin, 1977).Google Scholar

6. The laws of assembly varied throughout the states of Germany. They were most restrictive in Prussia; by contrast, the Saxon laws, like those in Hamburg, Baden, and Württemberg, set minimal barriers to female membership in political parties and attendance at political rallies. While in Prussia some determined women found ways to circumvent the laws, the political climate was such that women generally were reluctant to join parties even after 1908. See Schorske, Carl E., German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York, 1955), 102–3Google Scholar; Quataert, Reluctant Feminists, 24–25.

7. Cohen, Abner, Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), xi, 122.Google Scholar

8. The new uses of households by scholars interested in the themes of women, work, and status have been extremely rewarding. Among a variety of examples, see McGuire, Randall H., Smith, Joan, and Martin, William G., “Patterns of Household Structures and the World-Economy,” Review 10, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 75–97Google Scholar; Guyer, Jane I., “Household and Community in African Studies,” African Studies Review 24, nos. 2/3 (06/09 1981): 87–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, Richard, “Women's Work and Women's Property: Household and Social Relations in the Maraka Textile Industry of the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Study of Society and History 26, no. 2 (04 1984): 229–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deere, Carmen Diana and de Leal, Magdalene León, “Peasant Production, Proletarianization, and the Sexual Division of Labor in the Andes,” Signs 7, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 338–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I extracted the significant interrelationship between marriage, inheritance patterns, and patriarchy from an excellent review article focusing on households by Martha Howell, C., “Marriage, Property, and Patriarchy: Recent Contributions to a Literature,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 203–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In her own book on the urban economy of late medieval cities, Howell has advanced European historians' use of the household perspective; she shows how women's labor status was directly related to their place in the household economy; to the extent that capitalist advance undercut the family production unit, women lost access to resources and rewards. See Howell, Martha, Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an effort to differentiate households and families, see Rapp, Rayna, Ross, Ellen, and Bridenthal, Renate, “Examining Family History,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In their conception, households are the structures that deploy labor while family is the ideology encouraging such deployment.

9. Hartmann, Heidi I., “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” Signs 6, no. 3 (1981): 366–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the classic article by Oren, Laura, “The Welfare of Women in Laboring Families,” Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (1973): 107–25.Google Scholar

10. In earlier discussions of economic development in the West, the family as analytic unit was depicted as a dependent variable, a passive recipient of tumultuous economic changes around it. This view was implicit in the once-powerful interpretation of Talcott Parsons and his followers, who analyzed the family in terms of its functions within existing social structures; with ongoing industrialization, they depicted an increasing loss of function. Furthermore, their analysis assumed a necessary distance between the family household and other social institutions. See Greenfield, Sidney M., “Industrialization and the Family in Sociological Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 67, no. 3 (11 1961): 312–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A change in perspective came on numerous fronts, including the challenging research by historical sociologists who adopted a multidirectional line of influence between the household and other institutions in society. An excellent example of the new research which began to appear in the late 1970s is Demos, John and Boocock, Sarane Spence, eds., Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (Chicago, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Zaretsky, Eli, “The Place of the Family in the Origins of the Welfare State,” in Thorne, Barrie with Yalom, Marilyn, ed., Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York and London, 1982), 189.Google Scholar

11. As stated by Hanagan and Stephenson, Proletarians and Protest, 4. For the classical interpretations of the peasant-to-worker phenomenon see Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (New York, 1965), 9Google Scholar; Ashton, T. S., The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948; reprint, New York, 1965), 3.Google Scholar

12. Mendels, Franklin, “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (03 1972): 241–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Medick, Hans, “The Proto-industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 1, no. 3 (1972): 291–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mager, Wolfgang, “Haushalt und Familie in protoindustrieller Gesellschaft: Spenge (Ravensberg) während der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhundert,” in Bulst, Neithard, Goy, Joseph, and Hoock, Jochen, eds., Familie Zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Studien zur Geschichte der Familie in Deutschland und Frankreich vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1981), 141–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hudson, Pat, “Proto-industrialisation: The Case of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries,” History Workshop 12 (1981): 34–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schöne, Bernd, “Zur Lebensweise von Textil-produzenten im Erzgebirge und im Vogtland in der Zeit von 1750 bis 1850,” Jahrbuch für Volkskunde und Kulturgeschichte 12 (1984): 107–34Google Scholar. Also, see my article analyzing this literature in detail, Quataert, Jean H., “A New View of Industrialization: ‘Protoindustry’ or the Role of Small–Scale, Labor–Intensive Manufacture in the Capitalist Environment,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 33 (Spring 1988): 3–22.Google Scholar

13. One demographer sums up the new interpretation uncritically as follows: “Instead of ‘industrialization and urbanization,’ these scholars place proletarianization at the heart of their analysis. They see this as an uneven, diverse, and protracted process, culminating finally in the formation of a mass urban factory proletariat, but beginning at least two centuries before in the precipitation of a mass of rural landless labourers.” See Seccombe, Wally, “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review, no. 137 (1983): 25Google Scholar. For examples of this school of thought see the edited collection of Levine, David, Proletarianization and Family History (Orlando, 1984)Google Scholar and particularly the chapter in the collection by Tilly, Charles, “Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat,” 1–85Google Scholar. Here Tilly offers an exceedingly broad and therefore analytically imprecise definition of proletarian, which obscures the significant diversity that historically is observable among industrial laboring groups. See also Tilly, Charles, “Flows of Capital and Forms of Industry in Europe, 1500–1900,” Theory and Society 12, no. 2 (03 1983): 123–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Additional uses of the new chronology are found in Hanagan and Stephenson, Proletarians and Protest, 5. For recognition of various stages in what is nonetheless the same evolution to proletarian status, see Hanagan, Michael, “Agriculture and Industry in the Nineteenth–Century Stéphanois: Household Employment Patterns and the Rise of a Permanent Proletariat,” in Hanagan, and Stephenson, , Proletarians and Protest, 77–106.Google Scholar

14. Quataert, Jean H., “Combining Agrarian and Industrial Livelihood: Rural Households in the Saxon Oberlausitz in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 145–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These findings are compatible with those of historical sociologists and economists who also are reevaluating the concept of proletarianization as a singular, linear, and inevitable corollary of industrial capitalism. As Aminzade states it, based on his work in French labor history, proletarianization “was not the only means by which labour became subordinated to capital during the course of nineteenth-century European industrial development. Throughout the process of…industrialization, many master artisans in household and handicraft production retained ownership of their small workshops while journeymen retained ownership of the small tools they needed to ply their trades.” See Aminzade, Ronald, “Reinterpreting Capitalist Industrialization: A Study of Nineteenth-Century France,” Social History 9, no. 3 (10 1984): 331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. See my article, “An Approach to Modern Labor: Worker Peasantries in Historic Saxony and the Friuli Region over Three Centuries,” with Holmes, Douglas R., Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 2 (04 1986): 191–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar, and also Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in 19th Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation,” 305, 313. Kocka explores diverse patterns of identity formation characteristic of domestic industrial workers and journeymen. Also see the companion piece in the same collection: Nolan, Mary, “Economic Crises, State Policy, and Working-Class Formation in Germany, 1870–1900,” in Katznelson and Zolberg, Working-Class Formation, 373ff.Google Scholar, particularly the discussion of “class consciousness, craft particularism, and precapitalist identities.” I am not willing to describe peasant-worker awareness as “precapitalist.”

18. Eley, Geoff, “The British Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course of German History before 1914,” in Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York, 1984), 48.Google Scholar

19. Tipton, Frank B., Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany during the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, Conn., 1976)Google Scholar; Hoffmann, Walther G., Das Wachstum der deutschen Wirtschaft seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (West Berlin, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baar, Lothar, Die Berliner Industrie in der industriellen Revolution (1966; reprint, Berlin, 1974)Google Scholar; Crew, David, Town on the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Fischer, Wolfram, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung: Aufsätze—Studien—Vorträge (Göttingen, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forberger, Rudolf, Die Manufaktur in Sachsen vom Ende des 16. bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1958)Google Scholar; Hofmann, Ernst, “Volkskundliche Betrachtungen zur proletarischen Familie in Chemnitz um 1900,” Jahresinhaltsverzeichnis der Wissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 20 (1971): 65–81Google Scholar; Pollard, Sidney, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760–1980 (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar

20. Nolan, “Economic Crisis,” is also concerned with this question, recognizing that Social Democracy “both united workers and deepened divisions among them,” 379.

21. For an introduction into the early economic development of the Oberlausitz province see, among others, Gröllich, Edmund, Die Baumwollweberei der sächsischen Oberlausitz und ihre Entwickelung zum Grossbetrieb (Leipzig, 1911)Google Scholar; Gebauer, Heinrich, Die Volkswirtschaft im Königreiche Sachsen: Historisch, Geographisch und Statistisch Dargestellt, vols. 2 and 3 (Dresden, 1893)Google Scholar; Köhler, Johann August Ernst, Bilder aus der Oberlausitz als ein Beitrag zur Vaterlandskunde (Budissin [Bautzen], 1855)Google Scholar; Kunze, Arno, Die nordböhmisch-sächsische Leinwand und der Nürenberger Grosshandel: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Friedland-Reichenberger Gebiets (Reichenberg, 1926).Google Scholar

22. Kunze, Arno, “Vom Bauerndorf zum Weberdorf: Zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Struktur der Waldhufendörfer der südlichen Oberlausitz im 16., 17., und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Reuther, Martin, ed., Oberlausitzer Forschungen: Beiträge zur Landesgeschichte (Leipzig, 1961), 185Google Scholar. For the social impact of household manufacturing on gender work roles and inheritance see Medick, “The Proto-industrial Family Economy,” 310–14, and Quataert, Jean H., “Teamwork in Saxon Homeweaving Families in the Nineteenth Century: A Preliminary Investigation into the Issue of Gender Work Roles,” in Joeres, Ruth-Ellen and Maynes, Mary Jo, German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History (Bloomington, Indiana, 1986): 3–23.Google Scholar

23. The statistics for the village of Hainewalde also come from Kunze, “Vom Bauerndorf,” 185–86. In an earlier article, I erroneously derived the figure for the Scheffel at 1.76 acres; it is 0.68 acre.

24. Schmidt, Friedrich, Untersuchungen über Bevölkerung, Arbeitslohn und Pauperismus in ihrem gegenseitigen Zusammenhange (Leipzig, 1836), 296–300.Google Scholar

25. For provincial population statistics see Die Sudöstliche Oberlausitz mit Zittau und dem Zittauer Gebirge (Berlin, 1970), 232Google Scholar, and Zeitschrift des K. Sächsischen Statistischen Bureaus [hereafter ZKSStB] (Dresden, 1905), 23–24; and also (Dresden, 1912), 13Google Scholar. According to Kocka, the annual average population growth rate was 0.84 for the period 1800–50 and 0.94 for the remaining years until 1900; for Gross-Schönau in the seventy-six years between 1834 and 1910 it was 0.98 and for Seifhennersdorf, 0.76. See Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation,” 292.

26. ZKSStB (Dresden, 1909), 10–11Google Scholar, and also von Schlieben, Richard, “Beiträge zur Statistik des landwirtschaftlichen Grundeigenthums im Bezirke der Amtshauptmannschaft Zittau,” ZKSStB (Dresden, 1894), 129–39.Google Scholar

27. For the business histories of many firms in the Oberlausitz see the collection, Die Deutsche Industrie: Festgabe zum 25 Jährigen Regierungs-Jubiläum seiner Magistät des Kaisers und Königs Wilhelm II, dargebracht von Industriellen Deutschlands (Berlin, 1913).Google Scholar

28. Consult, particularly, notices in the Zittauer Morgen-Zeitung, the paper of the Progressive Party. These festivities were part of the paternalism of the area's businessmen, a deliberate and rational effort to maintain the facade of personal concern for the welfare of workers.

29. Amtliche Mitteilungen aus den Jahres-Berichten der Gewerbeaufsichtsbeamten 2 (Berlin, 1899): 1112–13.Google Scholar

30. German Democratic Republic, Staatsarchiv Dresden—Aussenstelle Bautzen, Amtshauptmannschaft Zittau [hereafter B, AZ], Nr. 8214: Invaliditäts- und Alters-Versicherung der Hausgewerbetreibenden der Textilindustrie in Gross-Schönau, Gemeinde-Amt report concerning the case of the handwarper Theresia Sussig and her daughter, Emilie Tannert, 4 July 1904 (not paginated).

31. Melzer, Carl, Chronik von Neugersdorf (Neugersdorf, 1903), 177Google Scholar; ZKSStB (Dresden, 1905), 22Google Scholar. The Zittau report is found in B, AZ, Nr. 9073: Einwirkung der beschränkenden Bestimmungen für die Baumwoll-Industrie, 1915–1916, Bl. 162: Übersicht über die von Zittauer Textilfirmen zu Gunsten der Textilarbeiter-Fürsorge an die Stadtkasse Zittau abgeführten Arbeitgeberbeiträge, 7 Mar. 1916.

32. The two cases are drawn from, B, AZ, Nr. 8241: Invaliditäts- und Alters-Versicherung der Hausgewerbetreibenden der Textilindustrie in Wittgendorf, Bl. 11,6 Nov. 1894 (interview with Johanne Hermann); B, AZ, Nr. 8238: Invaliditäts-und Alters-Versicherung…in Spitzkunnersdorf, 1 Nov. 1899, Bl. 183–84 (interview with Pauline Neumann).

33. Volks-Zeitung: Organ für die Werktätige Bevölkerung der Oberlausitz (SPD paper), 29 July 1909 and 17 Apr. 1914.

34. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities, 195–205, and Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation,” 331.

35. Allen, W. S., The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930–1935 (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar. In this classic study of the community context of fascist success, Allen makes much of the social hostility between working-class and middle-class townspeople. Each had its own separate recreational and social associations. Other historians have documented similar patterns, as discussed in Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities, 225–26. The Oberlausitz did not replicate fully these experiences, as Socialists were aware. The Socialist press in the area continuously bemoaned workers' participation in these societies. See, particularly, Volks-Zeitung, 20 Mar. and 3 Apr. 1914.

36. This case offers an empirical test for Heidi Hartmann's statement that the family “can … provide a basis for struggle by its members against larger institutions such as corporations or the state.” See Hartmann, “The Family,” 369. It also affirms Beatrix Campbell's telling insight that “most people can only influence the local and the familial, so if people are parochial it's probably because they're relatively powerless, elsewhere.” Campbell, , Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties (London, 1984), 47.Google Scholar

37. Nolan, “Economic Crisis,” 361.

38. I have described the course of the conflict in some detail, in Quataert, Jean H., “Workers' Reactions to Social Insurance: The Case of Homeweavers in the Saxon Oberlausitz in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 20, no. 1 (03 1984): 17–35Google Scholar, but I offer new evidence and interpretation here.

39. The law itself assumed that women were first and foremost housewives. Several questions were directed to wives, asking if their husbands worked in homeweaving so that they were merely assistants (so dass die Ehefrau nur Gehilfin ist). The legislators had argued that the traditional (herkömmliche) position of the female sex in economic life or the housewife role in the family made woman's labor distinct from superficially similar employment of the man. Thus, household members realized that government officials would accept the label “family assistant” for women much more easily than for men. See Quataert, “Workers' Reactions,” 28–29. For women's important and diverse roles in the era of rural manufacture see, particularly, Quataert, “Teamwork,” 3–23.

40. For example, Louise Tilly develops a typology of women's collective action by correlating the organization of production, household division of labor, and protest. She finds women absent from handloom weaver strikes in France and concludes that “Workers in the small, separate, household production units were slow to mobilize and strike. When they did, the women's role was minimal.” See Tilly, Louise A., “Paths of Proletarianization: Organization of Production, Sexual Division of Labor, and Women's Collective Action,” Signs 7, no. 2 (1981): 406CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The case of the Oberlausitz shows that the relations to collective protest among home-industry women workers were not as simple as Tilly hypothesizes.

41. B, AZ, Nr. 8233: Invaliditäts … Versicherung, Reichenau, Bl. 101–102, 4 July 1896.

42. B, AZ, Nr. 8235: Invaliditäts … Versicherung, Seifhennersdorf, Bl. 71, Fragebogen, 13 Sept. 1899.

43. B, AZ, Nr. 8082: Die Krankenversicherungspflicht der Hausgewerbetreibende 1902–1905, Bl. 34–35, report from Ollersdorf.

44. For Auguste Lowe's remarks, B, AZ, Nr. 8235: Invaliditäts … Versicherung, Seifhennersdorf, Bl. 54, 15 Sept. 1899; also ibid., Nr. 8210, Bertsdorf, Bl. 49, 13 Oct. 1900, and Nr. 8217, Jonsdorf, Fragebogen, 1906.

45. B, AZ, Nr. 8082: Die Krankenversicherungspflicht der Hausgewerbetreibende, 1902–1905, Bl. 70–76: Bericht, 21 Apr. 1902.

46. B, AZ, Nr. 8241: Invaliditäts … Versicherung, Wittgendorf, 1895–1908, Bl. 1.

47. Ibid., Bl. 17–18.

48. Sally Alexander makes a similar point about political discourse becoming increasingly homogenized. “That communities imposed their own moral laws as well as conception of the value of women's and men's different social skills and responsibilities is certain. And women themselves often spoke a different reality. But we capture only fragments of those customs.” Alexander, “Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History,” History Workshop, no. 17 (Spring 1984): 146.

49. The 11th district of the German Textile Workers' Union (seat Neugersdorf) had unionized 8,478 workers by 1914, of which 49 percent (or 4,148 workers) were female. Volks-Zeitung, 18 Mar. 1914.

50. Community involvement in strikes is seen clearly in newspaper accounts of different conflicts. For example, the Zittauer Morgen-Zeitung, 19 June 1901, reported rising complaints of depleted municipal revenues during the Cunewalde strike discussed below and several weeks later the paper noted widespread concern with decline in municipal economic health.

51. I relied on the following newspaper accounts to reconstruct the course of the strike: Zittauer Morgen-Zeitung, Zittau, Mar.-Aug., 1901: Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung: Organ zur Wahrung der Interessen der Arbeiterklasse, Dresden, 1901Google Scholar; Kähler, W., “Rückblick auf den Aufstand in Cunewalde,” Gleichheit, 14 08 1901.Google Scholar

52. Kähler, “Rückblick,” 14 Aug. 1901.

53. For a report on new unionized workers, see Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, 14 May 1901.

54. B, AZ, Nr. 5477: Arbeitseinstellungen, Bl. 14–16, May 1917.

55. I am indebted to the work of Blackbourn and Eley for these points, Peculiarities, 20.

56. For various, detailed reports on the cooperative movement see Zittauer Morgen-Zeitung, 31 Aug. 1895; 7 and 28 Feb. 1904; Volks-Zeitung, 20 Sept. 1909; 5 and 20 Oct. 1910;3 Apr. 1914.

57. These activities sponsored by Naturheilverein members were the historical antecedents of the mass working-class sex-reform leagues that were active in the Weimar period. See Grossmann, Atina, “‘Satisfaction is Domestic Happiness’: Mass Working-Class Sex Reform Organization in the Weimar Republic,” in Dobkowski, Michael N. and Wallimann, Isidor, eds., Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic Collapse of the Weimar Republic (Westport, Conn., 1983), 265–93.Google Scholar

58. B, AZ, Nr. 4024: Geburtenrückgang 1914, Bl. 10, 16–17, 71, 82–85.

59. Quataert, Jean H., Reluctant Feminists, 96–99Google Scholar; Bergmann, Anneliese, “Frauen, Männer, Sexualität und Geburtenkontrolle: Zur ‘Gebärstreikdebatte’ der SPD 1913,” in Hausen, Karin, ed., Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte (Munich, 1983), 81–108.Google Scholar

60. Zittauer Morgen-Zeitung, 9 May 1895.

61. Volks-Zeitung, 23 Aug. 1909.