Ottilie Baader Extended Biography
Ottilie BaaderExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.“From childhood on my life has been all work, and everything that I’m going to relate here is based on this life of work and can only be understood on this basis. There is nothing unusual about my life. Thousands of working girls of my time lived and worked just as I did”.1With these words, German seamstress Ottilie Baader summed up her life as a life of labor. Baader was born in 1847, just as Germany was becoming heavily industrialized. Her family were working class inhabitants of Frankfurt. Her father worked in a sugar factory. Her mother made filter cloths, mainly from home, for the same factory. Their house was on the outskirts of the city, and they didn’t go to school regularly at first. However, times were hard and factory jobs didn’t pay much. So her father took a job at a huge train factory in Berlin, leaving them behind. Her mother sickened in his absence, and died. It was only with the help of fellow workers that her father could afford a funeral. At ten years old, Ottilie finally began to attend school. She learned to read and write, but most of her education was in “good manners” and running a house. At thirteen, however, she had to leave school to help make money. She went into sewing. “There was no need for any big family council to choose the right trade for me, because there wasn’t much choice for girls in those days.” Ottilie worked in a small shop, plus taking on extra work making cuffs in the evening. Eventually, she and her sister got jobs at the Schwendy Wool factory, working on dangerous spinning machines. Then a number of other factories. During the Franco-Prussian War, the factory cut wages. The women refused to work unless wages went back up. Their first action was successful, but soon afterward the factory owners developed new strategies to stop this kind of action. Eventually, Ottilie and others turned to labor organizations to support their actions. Ottilie became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.1 Translated from Ottilie Baader, Ein Steiniger Weg: Lebenserinnerungen, (Stuttgart: Jw.H. Dietz Verlag, 1921), 1-17, by Alfred Kelly in The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 64-96.