This continued for five years. And the years passed without my even noticing that I was young, without life offering me anything. Around me, quite a few things had changed. First my sister and then my brother had married; my youngest sister had drowned on a boat ride. My father had not been able to work for a long time, so I shared my lot with many daughters who remain single and do not establish happy lives for themselves in good time: they have to hold everything together, acting not only as mother but also as father, i.e., as the breadwinner for family members who cannot earn their own livelihood. Thus, I supported my father for over twenty years and have always been able to find enough work to manage to maintain an apartment with a living room and a kitchen.
My brother’s wife died when their first child, a girl, was still very young. I took the child in, and she gave me a lot of joy during that year. She even learned to walk while staying with me. But when my brother remarried, I had to give her back. My brother, in turn, died a few years later, and I often took care of the two boys from the second marriage, because their mother had to earn money.
I can’t say that I was always happy. After all, I had expected to get something more out of life. There were times when I was so sick and tired of life, just sitting at the sewing machine year after year, always a pile of collars and cuffs there in front of me, one dozen after the other; life had no meaning at all, you were merely a work machine without any future prospects. And you saw and heard nothing of the beautiful things in life; you were simply excluded from all of that.
Source of original German text: Ottilie Baader, Ein steiniger Weg. Lebenserinnerungen einer Sozialistin (orig. 1921) [A Rocky Path: Life Reminiscences of a Female Socialist]. 3rd ed., introduced by Marie Juchacz. Berlin and Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1979, pp. 17-20.
Translation: Erwin Fink
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