Working—Class women in the Weimar Republic faced a complex and disorienting political situation. The revolutionary government granted women the right to vote in November 1918, but then ousted many women from their wartime jobs with the assistance of the trade unions and factory councils. The growing radicalism of working women during the latter phases of the First World War, marked especially by heavy female participation in the general strike of January 1918 in the munitions industry, was checked by the expulsion of women from exactly those sectors of employment which were most conducive to radicalism, the large plants in the metal industry. In other sectors, however, there was a large expansion of union membership among women during there volutionary period from November 1918 until May 1919, and many women in light industry and rural areas simultaneously joined unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Urban women working in large plants who might have supported the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) or the Communist Party (KPD) were fired to make room for returning war veterans, and this led to an eclipse of female radicalism from 1919 until 1923. The inflation of 1923 again activated many women who were attracted to the Communist Party by its neighborhood price control committees, and women took an active part in pressuring food shops to keep prices down and joined in plundering shops or stealing from the fields of landlords and peasants when hunger left them no alternative. The economic chaos of 1923 pushed even women in light industry to the left, and textile workers in Berlin, Saxony, and Thuringia gave the Communists a majority in union elections.
Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20th Century
