Class, gender, and working class politics: The case of the German textile industry, 1890-1933

This dissertation analyzes the role of gender in the transition from home to factory textile production, in the policies of reformers, state, and employers in the making of the world behind the mill gate, and in the emergence of textile unions and strikes as expressions of working-class politics. It is conceived as a history both of women and of gender, of a workplace and a political arena divided by gender, of male and female visions of work and politics. Its main themes are the role of gender in the formation and articulation of work identities and the relationship between work identities and political consciousness.;This study explores the relationship between gender and career patterns and suggests that women, like men, made long-term commitments to their mill jobs and formed work ethics and work identities, which forged a crucial link to the political arena of unions and strikes. An analysis of union publications and police and factory inspector reports shows that women's participation in unions and strikes increased parallel to their expanding role in the textile workforce and exceeded that of men during the early years of the Weimar Republic. The dissertation argues that the duality between family and workplace shaped women's experience of work and politics and women's political identities. It explores the distinct views of this duality in the Christian and Social Democratic textile unions. Finally, it discusses the implications of strike statistics, in particular the finding that female participation in strikes exceeded female union membership, for an analysis of gender and class in the formation of women's political consciousness.;The study encompasses the period from 1891 when the Social Democratic textile workers' union was founded and concludes in 1933 when the Nazi seizure of power annihilated the German unions and suffocated labor protest. The geographic focus is the textile belt in the German Northwest, in particular the former Rhine province and Westphalia. This region was divided along religious and political lines between the predominantly Catholic Lower Rhine and Aachen, home base of the Christian unions, and the largely Protestant Wupper Valley, where the Social Democratic unions predominated.