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Outsider Bodies, Everyday Lives: Single Mothers and Their Children in Red Vienna
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2023
Abstract
Healthy bodies were central to the welfare projects of Red Vienna, 1919–34. This article traces the discourse of care surrounding single mothers and their children within the interwar Viennese welfare system, paying particular attention to the ways their bodies were described, monitored, and maximized for social utility. It establishes a shift in the perception of “worth” for these citizens, and then contrasts this stated value with the remembered experiences of children growing up without legal fathers in Red Vienna.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota
References
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24 Die Neue Frau (Vienna, 1924).
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36 An excellent guide to services can be found in Jugend in Not: Ein Jahrbuch der Fürsorge des Allgemeinen Verbandes f. freiwillige Jugendfürsorge in Wien (Vienna, 1924).
37 Several scholars have explored French interwar pronatalism. See especially Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, 1994); Downs, Laura Lee, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-class Movements and the Colonies de Vacance in France, 1880–1960 (Durham, 2002)Google Scholar; Childers, Kristin Stromberg, Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914–1945 (Cornell, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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39 Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, MAbt 119. A32 5218/28, Bund für Mütter- und Kindesrecht, “Statuten.” Emphasis in the original.
40 These terms are central in Julius Tandler, Ehe und Bevölkerungspolitik. The text is little concerned with marriage, and instead focuses on repopulating Austria, which should seek to “not inhibit the instinct to breed, but rather to enlarge upon it, to make it responsible, and even to rationalize it.” Tandler, Ehe und Bevölkerungspolitik, 4.
41 I am grateful to Katya Motyl for highlighting this insight, found in Hayes-Conroy, Jessica and Hayes-Conroy, Allison, “Visceral Geographies: Mattering, Relating, and Defying,” Geography Compass 4 (2010); 1273–83, 1277CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Motyl uses this concept to problematize the relationships between the environment and the body. See Motyl, Katya, “Re-Embodying History's ‘Lady’: History, Materiality, and Public Space in Early-Twentieth-Century Vienna,” Gender & History 33, no. 1 (March 2021): 169–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 174.
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75 Gulick, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler, 510.
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80 Kalisch, “Als lediges Kind geboren … ” 184.
81 Kalisch, “Als lediges Kind geboren … ” 185.
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84 Maria-Luis D., Geboren 1916, 181. Maria-Luis entered the pool in street clothes and remembered that by the time she had walked home, she was dry enough that her mother did not notice.
85 Maria-Luis D., Geboren 1916, 181.
86 Maria-Luis D., Geboren 1916, 182.
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88 Koller, “Kindheit,” 3.
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91 Galhuber, “Meine Lebenserinnerungen,” 1.
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94 Luise Zipperle, “Als lediges Kind,” 208.
95 Ernestine Wollner, in Verein “Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen,” hg.,“Als lediges Kind geboren … ” Autobiographische Erzählungen 1865–1945 (Vienna, 2008): 247–84, 252.
96 Ernestine Wollner, “Als lediges Kind,” 254.
97 Charlotte Keltner, in Eva Hiss, hg., Ziehkinder (Vienna, 1994): 194–97, 194.
98 Charlotte Keltner, Ziehkinder, 194.
99 Charlotte Keltner, Ziehkinder, 195.
100 Charlotte Keltner, Ziehkinder, 195.
101 Charlotte Keltner, Ziehkinder, 195.
102 Kaschuba, Wolfgang, “Popular Culture and Workers’ Culture as Symbolic Orders,” in The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Lüdke, Alf, trans. Templer, William (Princeton, 1995), 169–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 170.
103 Statistiches Taschenbuch Wien, 1933, as cited in Gulick, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler, 514. The rates in 1918 were certainly inflated by the starvation blockade of Vienna, so the celebrated improvement may be less impressive.
104 Wilhelm Hecke, Die Unehelichen in Oesterreich,” in Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, ed. Ludwig Elster (Jena, 1930), 573–92, 591.
105 Kautsky, Der Kampf gegen den Geburtenrückgang, 8.
106 For a sensitive, complex reading of the KÜST and city initiatives for children's well-being, see Wolfgruber, Gudrun, “Messbares Glück? Sozialdemokratische Konzeptionen zu Fürsorge und Familie im Wien der 1920er Jahre,” L' homme: Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 10, no. 2 (1999): 277–94Google Scholar. The old KÜST is today a center for children named the “Julius-Tandler-Heim.”
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