I have already listed the wages paid for some types of women’s work. Well, if only the women were actually always paid! Even poor seamstresses have to accept credit and are often paid late – and sometimes not at all. Many of the truly rich have no conception of work, no idea that a poor young girl who neither begs nor looks like a beggar can still desperately need a few thalers. Quite often, the elegant ladies also have no inkling of how long it takes to sew a piece, and instead of using their own speed as a gauge, which they could very easily do, they say: Well, of course it takes us a long time to finish such a piece because we only work on it every now and then, but for those who do needlework all day long, the work just flies – it’s incredible how much they can finish in a day. For it is not customary for rich people to apply the same standards to the poor that they use for themselves; instead, they practically regard the poor as different beings, as a different species. Thus, they are not familiar with the worries and needs of the bashful poor – a few thalers or guilders amounts to so little for rich folks, and therefore they often actually forget about such a pittance. But in that very forgetting lies all the egoism, all that is contrary to nature, all the un-Christian behavior that accompanies false piety, all the inhumanity that exists alongside the humanitarian efforts of today’s society!
Source: Louise Otto, Das Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb. Blicke auf das Frauenleben der Gegenwart [Women’s Right to Earn a Living: Views on the Life of Women in the Future]. Hamburg, 1866, pp. 19-20, 23-24.
Original German text reprinted in Hartwig Brandt and Ewald Grothe, eds., Quellen zur Alltagsgeschichte der Deutschen 1815-1870 [Source Materials on Everyday Life in Germany 1815-1870]. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005, pp. 106-08.
Translation: Erwin Fink
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