Die Organisation der Heimarbeiterinnen

Summary

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1902 pamphlet asks how political capacity can be created among the least organizable workers: women who sew and take putting-out work at home. It begins from the 1896 Vienna enquiry on women’s labour, whose 700 printed pages stirred press and public but produced no programme. Sympathy was not enough. The enquiry, he writes, had roused feeling but gone no further:

"Der unmittelbarste Zweck, ein Gefühl gesellschaftlicher Solidarität wachzurufen, war erreicht; wider Erwarten strebten jedoch die Veranstalter der Enquête weitere Ziele nicht mehr an; man ging auseinander, wartete die Drucklegung der Protokolle ab und vereinigte sich dann niemals wieder, um die praktischen Ergebnisse aus der Veranstaltung auszulösen."

English translation: "The most immediate purpose, to awaken a feeling of social solidarity, had been achieved; contrary to expectation, however, the organizers of the enquiry no longer pursued any further goals; they went their separate ways, awaited the printing of the protocols, and then never again united to draw out the practical results of the undertaking."

but Schwiedland argues that the exposed abuses demanded law, administrative action, and social aid. His thesis is causal: the distress of working women is bound to their lack of organization. Serious labour circles, he writes, should have drawn one conclusion from the enquiry:

"In den eigentlichen socialpolitischen und in Arbeiterkreisen wäre aus der Enquête zweifellos das Ergebniss abgeleitet worden, dass die geoffenbarte schlechte Lage der arbeitenden Frauen und Mädchen mit ihrem Mangel an Organisation in einem ursächlichen Zusammenhange steht."

English translation: "In genuinely social-political circles and in labour circles, the conclusion would doubtless have been drawn from the enquiry that the revealed bad situation of the working women and girls stands in a causal connection with their lack of organization."

The pamphlet first distinguishes organization from mere relief. Viennese bourgeois women’s associations performed useful charitable work, yet did not build collective representation. Social Democracy, by contrast, had the right field but not the right strategy. It treated home work chiefly as competition with workshop labour, and for years its leadership could issue a stark party watchword:

"Ihre Führer fanden daher auch nicht unbedingt die Worte, welche Heimarbeiter packen konnten, und die oberste Parteileitung konnte in Österreich jahrelang die Parole ausgeben, die Heimarbeit sei gesetzlich — abzuschaffen."

English translation: "Its leaders therefore did not unfailingly find the words that could grip home workers, and the supreme party leadership could in Austria for years issue the watchword that home labour was to be legally — abolished."

For Schwiedland this was politically sterile: women dependent on home work could not be mobilized by a demand that abolished their livelihood. Nor would compulsory workshops or centralization necessarily attract isolated seamstresses. His point is not to defend home work as such, but to insist that reform must begin from the actual dependency, dispersion, and fear of the women inside it.

The analytic centre of the essay explains why women, and especially home-working women, are hard to organize. Schwiedland names education toward marriage, inherited habits of leaving public affairs to men, mistrust, lack of confidence, impatience with distant goals, domestic labour, childcare, family necessity, and the low qualification of much female work. These are structural conditions, not simply failings of character. The woman responsible for a household loses the power to bargain:

"Da frägt sie nur um den Auftrag, nicht mehr um dessen Preis."

English translation: "There she asks only about the commission, no longer about its price."

Thus the same forces that make women’s wages low—crowding into work, family burden, reliance on a husband’s wage, replaceability—also weaken association. Yet Schwiedland avoids fatalism. Once organization takes root, women can develop their own leaders, solidarity, and energy. The hardest case is the trade that is almost wholly female and conducted as dispersed home work; there neither male unions nor workshop community supply a ready base.

From this impasse comes the pamphlet’s central conceptual move: self-help sometimes requires prior social manufacture. Schwiedland considers two supports, law and “gesellschaftliche Hilfe.” In discussing Gertrud Dyhrenfurth, Wilbrandt, Feig, and Brentano, he treats compulsory or state-assisted representation as education rather than bureaucracy:

"Gertrud Dyhrenfurth, die Verfasserin einer geschätzten Monographie über die berliner Konfectionsnährinnen, hat mit Recht bemerkt, die Frage der Organisation sei eine Frage der Erziehung, und soweit das weibliche Geschlecht in Betracht komme, sei diese erst herbeizuführen."

English translation: "Gertrud Dyhrenfurth, the author of an esteemed monograph on the Berlin garment seamstresses, has rightly remarked that the question of organization is a question of education, and, so far as the female sex is concerned, that this education has first to be brought about."

Such organization would help enforce protective laws, advise legislators, and make inspection meaningful. Legal protection for home work, he argues, needs organized workers as its organs of knowledge and pressure.

The more practical model is private initiative that creates, then yields to, worker control. Schwiedland describes Melbourne’s Anti-Sweating League and especially the Berlin Gewerkverein of female home workers in clothing and linen, founded by a church-social women’s group. Its method is concrete: collect addresses, visit workers, hear their conditions, invite them to meetings, and let practical remedies arise from the women themselves. It offers legal aid, sickness supplements, job information, mediation with employers, savings and purchasing schemes, cheaper sewing machines, and sociable gatherings. The key point is the transition from aid to self-direction:

"Nunmehr führt der neue Gewerkverein selbst seine Sache."

English translation: "Now the new trade union conducts its own affairs."

Schwiedland recommends a similar neutral union for Vienna. Women’s associations may initiate it, but civic supporters should remain a minority and withdraw from leadership once the union exists. The goal is institutional capacity: legal protection, mutual aid, cheaper tools and supplies, consumer cooperation, sewing rooms for the unemployed, and eventually sales cooperatives. At that point relief becomes economic reconstruction. Once a sales cooperative lets workers bypass the putter-out, the change is structural:

"Ohneweiters muss aber klar werden, dass mit der Ausschaltung des Verlegers die Ueberführung der Hausindustrie in eine andere Betriebsform vollzogen und die Grundlage für eine bessere Existenz der Betheiligten gewonnen ist."

English translation: "But it must become clear without more ado that, with the elimination of the putter-out, the conversion of the domestic industry into another form of enterprise is accomplished, and the foundation for a better existence of those involved is won."

The pamphlet’s relevance lies in this hybrid programme: labour organization, feminist social work, cooperative economics, and state policy are made complementary. Schwiedland rejects both sentimental charity and abstract abolitionism. He argues instead for institutions capable of turning isolated women into collective economic subjects, extending protection even to childbirth, sickness, tools, fuel, credit, law, and markets.