Jil Lewis. Connecting Women: Käthe Leichter´s Network 1914 to 1938
Montag, 03. Juni 2013 - 18:15 Uhr
IFK
Since 1989 and the publication of the first volume of Edward Timms’ biography of Karl Kraus, the image of fin-de-siècle Viennese cultural life as a set of interlocking circles of intellectual creativity has been very influential. Many of these circles were formal, but many were informal. The networks did not cease to exist in 1918, although some of the new arrivals were very different from the coffee house cliques. The groups surrounding Käthe Leichter, born Marianne Katharina Pick in 1895, are one example. Leichter studied with Max Weber in Heidelberg in 1917 and then worked with Otto Bauer, Joseph Schumpeter, and Wilhelm Ellenbogen on the Austrian Socialization Commission. In 1925 she was appointed as leader of the Women’s Section of the Vienna Chamber of Labor. It was in this position that she established a network of women drawn from academia, politics, and trade unions—a network that cut across different class backgrounds—to investigate the lives of working women both at work and at home. Their findings, published in four separate volumes between 1927 and 1931, constitute the first detailed studies of working women in Europe. But who were the investigators? How were they brought together? And how did they relate to each other and to debates in Red Vienna and within the Austrian Social Democratic Party, in which almost all of them were active? It is equally important to ask to what extent the Viennese Leichter network reflected the work of activists in the Labor and Socialist International at large, and in particular its Women’s Conference, in which Leichter was also active. Jill Lewis’ lecture addresses these topics.
Lecture
JILL LEWIS
Connecting Women. Käthe Leichter’s Networks, 1914 to 1938
3 June 2013, 6.15 p.m. at the IFK (in english, free entry)
Jill Lewis is a Reader in History in the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University and Stadt Wien/IFK_Fellow. Her area of research specialization is twentieth-century Austrian history, in particular the political and social history of the First and Second Republics and the influence of socialism and fascism on Austrian political culture.
Selected Publications: The Birth of the Österreichischer Gewerkschaftsbund, in: Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 34, No. 4, July/August 2007, pp. 199–212; Workers and Politics in Occupied Austria, Manchester 2007; with Matthew Paul Berg and Oliver Rathkolb (ed.), The Struggle for a Democratic Austria: Bruno Kreisky on Peace and Justice, Oxford, New York 2000; Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918–1938: the Failure of Labour in the First Republic, London 1991; Conservatives and Fascists in Austria 1918–34, in: Matthew Blinkhorn (ed.), Fascists and Conservatives: the Radical Right and the establishment in twentieth-century Europe, London 1990, pp. 98–117.