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.

Late in October 1923, troops of the German Reichswehr removed the government of Saxony and in the process touched off yet another political crisis in Berlin, one which nearly destroyed the Weimar Republic. This event in Saxony was not unprecedented, for the Reich had used force to remove state (Land) governments in 1919. But while the earlier interventions demonstrated a new republic's determination to enforce order, the intervention in 1923 reflected the weakness and confusion of a political system prematurely aged by five years of dissension and economic collapse. Gustav Stresemann's Great Coalition, in power at the time of the intervention, appeared to some knowledgeable observers, including Stresemann, the last chance to save the republic during the chaos produced by French intrusion into the Ruhr and the collapse of the currency. Talk of a dictatorship was in the air as men, groping for adequate words to measure catastrophe, went about gravely intoning “finis Germaniae.” Although this time both Germany and the republic escaped doom, the Saxon affair destroyed the Great Coalition and later ended Stresemann's career as chancellor. Since the men responsible understood something of the risks involved for the republic, it seems worthwhile to inquire into the way in which the dispute grew between Saxony and the Reich government and into the process by which the Reich reached its decision to intervene.

The returns of a tax called the common penny (gemeiner Pfennig) survive in considerable number, and when they are fully exploited they will help to make pre-Reformation Germany much more intimately known than ever before. Registers of this levy are likely to turn up in archives where they might not be expected. It is important, as a result, to know how to recognize and use these materials, most of which still remain to be identified. I will briefly review the common penny and its collection, and then I will demonstrate its potential as a resource for the study of social and demographic history.