Rote Patriarchen

Soon available as e-book

Were the socialists who advocated equal rights for all men more pro-women than other men? Or did they, too, remain patriarchs at heart? The author notes that although women's emancipation was affirmed in theory, it always remained secondary in practice.

For a long time, the majority of the comrades were against equal rights for women. The bourgeois family image with the man as breadwinner and the woman as housemother was also considered desirable by the socialists. Women were hardly represented in the workers' movement and could rarely rise to leadership circles. Many men were highly uncomfortable with women - including their own - interfering in the male domain of politics. The fact that anything at all was done to improve the miserable existence of women workers between the cooking pot, the factory and ever new births was not thanks to the labour movement, but to the socialist women's movement.

Their history from the first mergers to the end of their autonomous organisation is traced in this book.

Rote Patriarchen, Arbeiterbewegung und Frauenemanzipation in der Schweiz um 1900, Chronos Verlag, Zürich 1987. (PhD thesis, out of print). Only in German.