Abstract (eng)
In the early 20th century in Vienna, women had only few opportunities to live independently without relying on their families, husbands, or employers. One of the rare exceptions was the single-kitchen-building Heimhof Frauenwohnheim (Heimhof Residential Home for Women), which offered cooperatively organized housing to single, employed middle-class women. The building officially opened in 1911 in Vienna’s 19th district providing private rooms as well as collective spaces for living and communal houshold facilities for its residents. Heimhof Frauenwohnheim was established in the context of the radical women’s movement in the early 20th century in Vienna, which loudly criticised women’s precarious working and housing conditions. The single-kitchen-building aimed to liberate women from unwaged domestic work and to enable them to engage in emancipatory social and spatial relations. In my thesis, I discuss the single-kitchen-building Heimhof Frauenwohnheim as part of the radical women’s movement. I investigate if and how the housing project allowed for emancipatory social structures and gender constructions. In order to explore these questions, I draw on historical sources such as official records, as well as auto/biographical documents of residents. Early on in my research, it became clear that the sources about Heimhof Frauenwohnheim are only fragmentary and essential documents, which could give an account of the residents’ everyday life, their working and housing conditions, or relationships, are rare. Thus, one of the core aims of my research was to investigate and work with these gaps in sources. By analysing existing documents I can show how the single-kitchen-building Heimhof Frauenwohnheim fostered emancipatory changes in the lives of middle-class women. However, the Heimhof Frauenwohnheim project did not manage to critically address the distribution of household labor – as the unpaid domestic work of middle-class women was simply taken over by paid working class women. Therefore, oppressive social structures were only transformed for middle-class women, while issues of class and class relations were barely questioned by the ideas of the Heimhof Frauenwohnheim.