Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914

Kathleen Canning explores the changing meanings of women's work in Germany during the transformation from agrarian to industrial state from the mid-nineteenth century through 1914. Canning places gender at the heart of the transitions from workshop to factory, community to society, and estate to class in the textile-producing regions of the Rhineland and Westphalia. Canning distinguishes structural transformations from the changing meanings contemporaries ascribed to women's work, exploring not only the rhetoric and imagery of the new social question of female factory labor, but also the ways in which women workers perceived their own experience, analyzing career patterns, work identities, and work cultures, and debunking the notion that women constituted a peripheral and transient labor force. She also argues that female textile workers became a crucial object of the social policy debates that engaged Catholic, Socialist, feminist, and liberal academic social reformers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and helped to shape the protective labor policies of the emergent German welfare state. Frontmatter Preface (page ix) Introduction: German Labor History and the Meanings of Women's Work (page 1) 1 Gender and Sexual Politics in the Transition from Home to Factory Industry (page 16) 2 "The Man Transformed into a Maiden"? Feminization in the Textile Industries of the Rhineland and Westphalia (page 38) 3 Sexual Difference and the Social Question in the Transition to the "Industrial State," 1844-1889 (page 85) 4 State, Social Body, and Public Sphere: Regulating Female Factory Labor during the 1890s (page 126) 5 Social Policy, Body Politics: Factory Labor, Maternity, and Volkskörper, 1900-1914 (page 170) 6 Work Experiences, Work Identities: Dissolving the Dichotomy between Home and Work (page 218) 7 Behind the Mill Gate: Gender and the Culture of Work (page 283) Conclusion (page 324) Index (page 333)