Between Care Work and Factory Work: Raising Awareness of Alienation in West and East German Worker Photography of the 1970s

The concept of alienation is central to Western Marxism and its theorizing, but it was primarily conceived from the perspective of the male industrial worker and the division of labor.^[1] This viewpoint fails to consider the specific situation of women working both in the industrial sector and at home in their second shift. Alienation only appeared to exist in productive or wage labor, not in so-called domestic labor, as established in Western political economics with the beginnings of capitalism and industrialization, which gave rise to the “housewife,” the “middle-class citizen,” and “the wage worker” by distinguishing between their labor.^[2] According to Adam Smith, there are two types of labor, productive and unproductive: “There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour.”^[3] In his economic treatise first published in 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the moral philosopher valorized the labor of factory workers over that of servants – or that of his own mother, with whom he lived almost his entire adult life. But Smith failed to even consider the unpaid care work in the home. Following this, Karl Marx drew a similar distinction between unproductive and productive labor. Tellingly, Marx included writing books as productive work, but excluded domestic or care work: “Apart from such cases, productive labour is that which produces commodities, and unproductive labour is that which produces personal services.”^[4] To this day, the distinction between supposedly unproductive care work and productive factory work continues to determine the social character of labor, its status in society, and its gender division in Western capitalist industrial countries.^[5] Productivity, which according to Michel Foucault did not play a role in older orders of knowledge, has been denied to care work since the dawn of industrialization.^[6] This depreciation, which was based on political theories, was strictly followed, even though reproductive work produced “the laborer,” as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James argue, and even though, as Hannah Arendt wrote with a view to this contradictory devaluation of reproductive to unproductive labor, it created the preconditions for “potential productivity” in the first place.^[7] The naturalization of the gendered division of productive and reproductive labor resulted in the transfiguration of care work into a “labor of love” that, depending on the political context in the 1970s, might be solved in a socialist, that is social, way.^[8] But care work did not appear in the debates about alienation, which continues to function as a key concept of social critique.^[9]

However, in the course of the second wave of feminism and the women’s movement in the 1970s, the different divisions of labor and the resulting alienation of women workers in both of their work shifts became a focus of West and East German workers’ photography, which made factory work and women’s care work visible. Surprisingly, the photography from “the other side” (drüben, that is, in this case, East Germany) was not so different from that of the West.^[10] These socially critical or social documentary works were produced, exhibited – and ignored – outside of the official or state art establishment. In some cases, they have not been extensively studied in either art or photographic history, although they have been published in various media. Consequently, my aim is to explore from a materialist and feminist perspective, in the sense of a critique of representation, how these photographs staged women’s factory work and care work. Following Sigrid Schade’s and Silke Wenk’s work on visual culture, I understand the making visible of this work in photographs as the “productive power of the seemingly factual” in order to differentiate who actually made what visible for whom.^[11] I also adopt Allan Sekula’s view, characterized by the artist in the early 1980s as a “historical materialist alternative,” that, in photography, “meaning is always directed by layout, captions, text, and site and mode of presentation” to inquire into the “context” of the photographs, as well as into their ideological functions in capitalist or socialist industrial society.^[12] Tapping into this “context” of the photographs was also considered necessary in the workers’ culture of the Ruhr region in the 1970s, where some of the photographs analyzed here were taken. It promised to exploit the medium’s “communicative possibility”: “Photography demands to be complemented, intensified, and enhanced by other media, above all by the text,” a West German handbook on “Photography as a Weapon” stated at the time.^[13] Photography, and more precisely social photography, was programmatically conceived and tested as a “means of reflection” in the West German workers’ culture and the labor movement of the 1970s, “together with workers in Ruhr cities.”^[14] Likewise, social documentary photography in the German Democratic Republic since the 1970s has been credited with the ability to make visible the contradictions between the aspirations and everyday practices of real existing socialism.^[15] Depending on the context, the photographs of factory work and care work in East and West Germany were understood in different ways. As will be argued, they may have acted to reassure middle-class viewers or those working under real socialism, or activistically to make women workers aware of their alienation from both factory work and care work: as “consciousness raising” for (partly migrant) women workers. For, in the second wave of feminism, the medium of photography was also used to raise awareness in Europe, following the US-American techniques, for example by the socialist photography collective Hackney Flashers with its exclusively female membership, by the likewise all-female feminist group Rivolta Femminile, or in the Schule für Kreativen Feminismus (School for Creative Feminism) founded by Ulrike Rosenbach in Cologne in 1976.^[16] In both the women’s and workers’ movements, photography was developed into a feminist and socialist method of self-awareness. It was practiced by workers and for workers, independently of the academic Marxist and feminist theorizing of the 1970s.

Photographs Raising Self-awareness

In 1971–1972, photographer Theodor Oberheitmann produced a series of photographs entitled Frauenarbeit (Women’s Work) or Frauen in der Fabrik (Women in the Factory), featuring female factory workers. It was his final project in his photography studies at the Faculty of Design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund. Afterward, several photographs were published as a series of eight postcards titled Leichtlohngruppe (Low-income Group; fig. 1). The term refers to the group of unskilled workers, typically women and migrants, who receive the lowest wages and has been used as a deliberate method of discrimination. Thus it became a keyword of the women’s and workers’ movements, but the photographs show first and foremost the consequences of this toil. Oberheitmann’s black-and-white photographs depict various women in close-up, each working alone at a machine, one behind the other in rows at their similar numbered workstations, or sitting side by side, bent forward, their faces motionless, weary from hard work, and as though clamped into the machines. The series visualizes the monotony and confinement of industrial mass production organized through the division of labor as seen in the photo of the assembly line. It shows a seemingly endless row of women at work whose repetitive hand movements as they grasp and assemble parts are routine enough that they need not even lift their eyes. Oberheitmann photographed the workers in front of or behind the equipment as if they were a part of it (fig. 2). This symbiosis of human and machine, however, is nothing like the enthusiastic technological utopias of the “New Man,” such as those of the photographer Umbo. In his 1926 photo collage Der rasende Reporter (The Roving Reporter), created as a poster for Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City), Umbo presented a progressive vision of the human body-cum-machine, leaving only the head in its natural state. Instead, Oberheitmann’s photo series demonstrates the division of mental and physical labor practiced at the machine in the factory and its consequences. In one photograph, for example, a woman worker appears to lend her arms, which protrude from the sides of the metal body, to the machine. Her head, meanwhile, has become superfluous, virtually replaced, as it is in the image, by the machine, behind which it disappears. On one postcard, Oberheitmann montaged the photographs of the two tasks of a woman worker, which she apparently repeats day in and day out. On another one, he combined twelve photographs of a woman worker assembling small metal parts in a device in several steps. The photographs show only her hands from above, so that they appear to belong to the viewers, as if they were working in the assembly process, whereas on two other postcards (fig. 1) only the heads of two women laborers are visible. Their haggard, slack facial muscles, directly juxtaposed with the machines they operate, framing their heads in the picture, suggest a state of exhaustion and indifference, which is immediately perceived to be the result of this monotonous labor. The photographs were all taken in the Ruhr region, including at Graetz AG, which had been manufacturing radios, televisions, and telephone systems in Bochum since the 1950s.^[17] The factory was of central importance to the city, providing about a thousand jobs in a sector that was independent of the mining industry, whose first collieries had already closed. Unlike the heavy industrial companies operating in the Ruhr region, which had long since become the site of the steel and oil crises, structural change, and the women’s rights movement, Graetz employed primarily women. However, Oberheitmann’s photo series should not be seen as a celebration of the West German working woman with equal rights. Nor would it have served as image-building advertising or even recruitment photography for the company, which may have hired industrial photographers, as so many companies do, to capture the workers and production processes in the best possible light for advertisements and company brochures.^[18] Instead, it reveals the isolation of women workers that came with the division and clocking of labor in what was once the engine of the West German “economic miracle.”

1

Theodor Oberheitmann, Leichtlohngruppe (Low-income Group), 1971–1972, photo postcards. Dortmund, Fritz-Hüser-Institute

2

Theodor Oberheitmann, Leichtlohngruppe (Low-income Group), 1971–1972, photo postcards. Dortmund, Fritz-Hüser-Institute

Around the same time, the photographer Evelyn Richter staged East German women workers harnessed to machines as a “counter-image to the heroic woman worker.”^[19] Her photograph An der Stanze. Dessau (At the Punch Press. Dessau, 1966; fig. 3), taken in Dessau, depicts the factory interior not as a joyous place of the construction of socialist society, but rather shot in black and white, quite dark and with almost no gray tones. The woman operating the machine is apparently doing heavy work. Despite her nicely tousled hair, she does not exhibit any affirmative pathos, even though in East Germany women workers were presented alongside men workers as “heroes of construction and labor,” because, as was enviously acknowledged in West Germany at the time, they were even employed in heavy industry and road construction.^[20] Nevertheless, the woman worker at the punch press looks downright tiny. She is neither enthroned on nor in front of the steel colossus, but rather bends down to press its buttons and trigger the mechanism. She is crammed between the materials in the foreground and the massive iron machine that fills the entire pictorial plane, staged in such a way that it seems to burst the format of the photograph on all sides. Richter identified the “psychology of work” as one of her special areas of interest in the 1970s.^[21] Photographing work and working women, she explored this subject independently of photojournalistic commissions from the 1950s to the 1980s, when she was initially a member of the Leipzig amateur and professional photographers’ group action fotografie (sic!) that pursued socially engaged photography beyond formal dogmas.^[22] Richter captured women workers in various ways, including alone, tired, concentrated, or absorbed. But most of the photographs she took “on her own behalf” could never raise anyone’s awareness since they had to be stored in boxes until 1989.^[23]

3

Evelyn Richter, An der Stanze. Dessau (At the Punch Press. Dessau), 1966, photograph. Leipzig, Evelyn Richter Archive of the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig

In the German Democratic Republic, photography was understood as a didactic medium, as explained by Berthold Beiler, one of the most important East German photography theorists, in 1959.^[24] Accordingly, women workers were to be presented in an “active and optimistic” way.^[25] A photobook, Die Frau in der DDR (Women in the GDR), for which Richter photographed women workers in the early 1960s for the publishing house Edition Leipzig, never went into print because her photos failed to glorify working heroines, the photographer assumed in retrospect.^[26] In 1973, however, Beiler published a book featuring Richter’s photographs, arguing that her works were to be understood as “indepth analyses” with the aim of tracing “the factual and psychological relationship of humans to work” and thus as “a genuine social concern.”^[27] Notably, the book did not include the woman at the punch press, but the woman An der Linotype. Druckerei des Verlags Neues Deutschland. Berlin (At the Linotype Machine. Print Shop of the Neues Deutschland Publishing House. Berlin) from 1959–1960 (fig. 4). The photograph, printed on a double-page spread in the large-format photobook, depicts a woman worker in the print shop of the publishing house of the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland, at the time the key organ of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). She is operating the Linotype machine, which takes up almost the entire pictorial space of the photograph, and typing out text that she probably did not write herself. Instead of her hands, however, wheels, screws, levers, springs, drive belts, and machine cladding fill the frame, in which the worker sitting behind the typewriter is perfectly integrated. Barely visible among the machine parts, she keeps her gaze fixed on the matrix lines that have been entered at the Linotype machine and then cast in lead, but which are not visible at all in the photograph, so that the fixed gaze is hardly explicable. “Responsibility – Typesetter at the Linotype Machine” reads the caption in the photobook, emphasizing the social task of newspaper typesetting and ignoring the strange contrast between the bare, loosely overlapping feet in sandals that abruptly protrude from the machine at the bottom of the image, as well as the imbalance between the socio-political responsibility suggested here and the staged excess of the sheer mass of a huge machine. Beiler’s photobook legitimized this contradiction by explaining Richter’s photographic concern “to [make] photos that contain problems” and, at times, reveal a certain “dialectic of concern and mission,” even in socialism.^[28] Due to a relaxed cultural policy in the 1970s, at least some of her work on labor could be interpreted argumentatively and transfigured and printed as a social “mission” in the service of socialism.^[29] However, the accompanying texts avoided the question of alienation from work in socialist production, leaving it up to the viewers, that is the working people in the “workers’ and peasants’ state,” to recognize their own working conditions.

4

Evelyn Richter, An der Linotype. Druckerei des Verlags Neues Deutschland. Berlin (At the Linotype Machine, Print Shop of the Neues Deutschland Publishing House), 1959–1960, photograph. Leipzig, Evelyn Richter Archive of the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig

“In ads, we’re dolls; at work, low-paid thralls.”

In West Germany in the 1970s, Oberheitmann’s photographs of women workers were not included in representative photobooks, nor were large-format prints placed in photo collections. Instead, he presented and distributed them within the context of the workers’ and women’s movements. Thus, the photograph of the seemingly headless woman worker behind the potlike machine on the front page of the Dortmund Frauenzeitung (Women’s Magazine) serves to illustrate the headline “Zwischen Kochtopf und Maloche” (“Between the Cooking Pot and Drudgery”), as if she were doing her care work just as mindlessly and machine-like as her work in the factory (fig. 5). Oberheitmann, who had worked as a trained industrial and advertising photographer before studying photography, programmatically set himself apart from his former profession. He politicized his final project, which he did not have to hide in boxes, by publishing it in magazines of the women’s movement, circulating it on postcards, and positioning it in the feminist debates of the time by using the title Leichtlohngruppe.^[30] The term Leichtlohngruppe was a political catchphrase. It was commonly used in labor law in West Germany to describe the wage groups for supposedly light physical labor, which could therefore be paid less. These wage groups were introduced to circumvent the West German Basic Law, which provided for equal pay for equal work, and – tolerated by the trade unions – were used to pay women and migrant workers less.^[31] Although the German Federal Labor Court had ruled in 1955 that wages could only be set according to the work to be done, and not, for example, based on gender, it conceded in the text of the ruling “that there would be no legal objection if the employers staggered the wage groups according to light and heavy work and then classified the women as ‘light workers.’”^[32] “Equal pay for equal work” was therefore one of the central demands of the women’s movement in West Germany in the 1970s, along with the right to abortion. It was disseminated at demonstrations on banners and flyers and by chanting slogans, as in the photograph of a demonstration in Hamburg (fig. 6): “We should breed and nest for the capitalists” and “In ads, we’re dolls; at work, low-paid thralls,” which relates the sexist degradation and exploitation of women as “dolls,” “babes,” “honeys,” or “darlings” to their capitalist exploitation through lower wages.^[33] The title Leichtlohngruppe transformed the photographs on the postcards into media of women’s and workers’ struggles. As postcards, they were cheap to reproduce and could easily be passed on to draw the attention of colleagues to unfair pay. Oberheitmann printed his postcards as a member of the graphic workshop of the “Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt Dortmund” (Dortmund Chapter of the Working Group “Literature of the World of Labor”). The Werkkreis was a nationally and internationally organized association of writing workers and one of the key institutions of the active West German workers’ culture of the 1970s. It aimed to address socially relevant issues, such as working conditions, feminism, and environmental destruction, to change “social conditions in the interests of working people” and to dismantle “cultural and educational privileges.”^[34] The Dortmund working group produced various items, including calendars, prints, posters, and matchboxes featuring the association’s logo. The activists sold them at public events, such as trade union meetings, in order to “reach the public through committed art” like the Leichtlohngruppe series.^[35]

5

Zwischen Kochtopf und Maloche (Between the Cooking Pot and Drudgery), front page of the Frauenzeitung (Women’s Magazine) 1976, no. 9–10; issue edited by Frauenaktion Dortmund, with a photograph from Theodor Oberheitmann’s series Leichtlohngruppe. Cologne, FrauenMediaTurm

6

Heinrich Klaffs, Demonstration for the right to abortion, Hamburg 1971, with the slogans “In der Werbung sind wir Puppen, im Betrieb in Leichtlohngruppen” (In ads, we’re dolls; at work, low-paid thralls) and “Wir sollen brüten und nisten für die Kapitalisten” (We should breed and nest for the capitalists), photograph. Hamburg, Heinrich Klaffs

Oberheitmann made explicit reference to the feminist labor struggles surrounding the West German Leichtlohngruppe. In 1975, during the United Nations’ International Year of Women, he published four photographs in the magazine Arbeiterfotografie (Workers’ Photography); they were featured on the cover and inside pages (fig. 7a–b). Founded in 1973, the thin, small-format magazine was neither a glossy nor an art magazine, but rather the “information and discussion forum” of the West German association of the same name.^[36] Financed and ideologically supported by the German Communist Party (DKP), this group revived the tradition of workers’ amateur photography from the Weimar Republic. Its aim was to rehabilitate the medium after its exploitation during National Socialism and to make it a medium of class struggle once again. Readers and viewers of this magazine did not perceive Oberheitmann’s photographs as objective records or autonomous works of art, but rather as political instruments, similar to Oberheitmann himself. At Graetz AG in Bochum, as was common throughout the FRG, women and migrant workers were primarily employed in the Leichtlohngruppe. To counter this, Oberheitmann explained in his text that he had wanted to show with the series “that it is unjustified to classify this women’s work as light labor. It is therefore also unjustified to pay them less. The Leichtlohngruppe, which unfortunately still exists today, should be abolished as a matter of urgency.”^[37] He discredited the unnamed company, which naturalized the work in its advertising brochures as delicate, piecemeal, and light women’s work, and called on the trade unions to finally show solidarity with the women workers. One year later, in 1976, the photographs were even exhibited under the title Leichtlohngruppe at the Department of Photography and Film of the Arts Center of the Ruhr University in Bochum. In a makeshift barracks on campus, the photos showed the “working world as it presents itself in the Ruhr region, i.e., up close and personal.”^[38] The academic researchers identified them as “socially committed photography” because of the visible distinction between their intellectual labor at the university and physical labor in the factory and the resulting social consequences, as one exhibition review put it before the barracks burned down along with the photographs.^[39]

7a–b

Theodor Oberheitmann, Frauen in der Fabrik (Women in the Factory), front page and double-page spread in: Arbeiterfotografie 1975, no. 5, no. 5, 10–11

The same photographs, however, two years earlier suggested that the “woman on the assembly line” was perfectly content (fig. 8a – b). Several pictures from the series were printed as full-page images in ZeitMagazin in 1974. Although the accompanying article notes that it was about migrant workers, piecework, and the endless repetition of the same manual operations, and that the women worked like “robots,” it reassures the educated West German middle-class readers by arguing at the very beginning, directly under the heading “Bloss nicht denken” (Whatever you do, don’t think), that the “married Greek woman” Simela Kostidou finds her work “great.”^[40] The texts describe the consequences of the hard, monotonous work – the boredom and the risk of injury – but always tempered by the hope of being able to return to Greece or the former Yugoslavia or by the advantage of at least being able to earn money or to work in shifts, because then there is always someone at home to take care of the children. And finally, the article concludes with an accusation. It shows the photograph of the women on the assembly line, whose heads and hands seem to act separately from each other due to the division of labor, and comments pejoratively that the “Yugoslavian Nada Handabaxa (above: second from the left) […] has not given any further thought to the total alienation of her personality from production and production behavior. It is enough for her not to make any mistakes on the assembly line, to be considered a good colleague, and to earn money.”^[41] The article diminishes awareness as it emphasizes differences between migrant workers in the factory and the educated middle-class readers instead of highlighting similarities or responsibilities. The Leichtlohngruppe is characterized as hard work, but the possibility to work at all is praised despite the working conditions. The newspaper argues that the women should be content with their jobs, while also blaming them for not reflecting critically on their own alienation from work. Thus it frees its readers from the need to critically question the conditions under which their consumer goods are produced, allowing them to feel a sense of relief.

8a–b

Frau am Band: Photos von Theodor Oberheitmann (Woman on the Assembly Line), in: ZeitMagazin, 30 August 1974, no. 36, 14, 19

Or perhaps not? In West Germany, sociological studies with very different motivations investigated the “unsatisfactory” situation of working women as well as of non-working wives and homemakers.^[42] These reports analyzed the physical and psychological effects of factory work, assembly line work, piecework, and housework on women workers.^[43] At the same time, nonfiction books on the subject, produced in the socialist GDR, as well as coffee table books specifically published for export to capitalist German-speaking countries, suggested that under socialism women worked without any sense of alienation or “emotional conflicts.”^[44] On the contrary, they appeared to use socialist labor for their own “personal development.”^[45] The book Die Frau im Sozialismus (The Woman in Socialist Society) by Marlis Allendorf, who later became editorin-chief of the East German women’s magazine Für Dich (For You), was published by the export publishing house Edition Leipzig and addressed readers in both East and West Germany. The photobook argues, through texts and images, that women in the GDR and all other socialist so-called brother states were equally involved in all areas of society and politics, not just in the Leichtlohngruppe or in the home.^[46] Moreover, the heroines of labor apparently took immense pleasure in “work free of exploitation, the work of free producers for themselves,” that is demonstrated in the images.^[47] It does not appear to be work at all. In this representative format, Allendorf published one of Evelyn Richter’s older photographs that seemed to correspond to the ideological demands placed on the medium in East Germany (fig. 9). The full-page photograph in the large-format book depicts a woman worker with a bright smile. She is positioned almost at the center of the image and of the vanishing lines of the cornices and the ceiling lights, making her the focal point of the entire production. In Richter’s estate, the photograph is titled Ostrava, after the Czechoslovakian center of heavy industry and heavy mechanical engineering at the time.^[48] In the photobook, the caption reads Die Arbeit macht Spaß (Work is fun) – to dispel any doubts readers in the West or the East might have had.^[49] Similar photographs of happy women workers were used to celebrate women’s employment in West Germany. Yet, in the Federal Republic of Germany, this was not praised as an achievement of socialism as in the neighboring country, but rather as a merit of the West German women’s movement and feminism: “Spaß an der Werkbank” (Fun at the workbench) is the caption of a photograph of a laughing woman apprentice in the West German feminist magazine Emma, founded by a women’s collective in 1977, in a report on the training of women in the Leichtlohngruppe to become skilled workers.^[50] Both photographs blank out aspects such as alienation, drudgery, social or gender hierarchies, divisions of labor, and wage differentials in the factory. However, even socialist researchers acknowledged that due to the “not yet completely overcome legacy of capitalism […], there was also in the GDR job content with one-sided physical or psychological demands […], [and] with low creative demands.”^[51] As noted in the West German licensed edition of the East German emancipation study, women workers and migrant, so-called “contract workers” primarily took on these “jobs with low skill requirements.”^[52] Allendorf’s book does not include photographs such as Richter’s An der Stanze that portray women workers effortlessly operating machines or doing simple, monotonous work on the assembly line, which was also considered a “women’s occupation” in East Germany and was correspondingly lower paid and less socially respected.^[53] The book does not shed light on the GDR’s Leichtlohngruppe.

9

Evelyn Richter, Ostrava, before 1974, photograph. Leipzig, Evelyn Richter Archive of the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig

Alienation in Care Work

Instead, Allendorf’s publication argues that women under socialism had overcome the dichotomy “between the cooking pot and drudgery” anchored in capitalism.^[54] The preface states that they were “no longer in irreconcilable conflict with their social environment and […] have regained their mental balance through the social esteem they enjoy.”^[55] Allendorf supports this thesis with photographs of cheerful men and women care workers smiling and turning towards each other, sharing care work as an intimate moment and dividing it up differently than was customary in West Germany. In Marijonas Baranauskas’s photograph Die Väter… (The Fathers…), taken in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, the men perform the care work (fig. 10). Four men, each with an infant in a stroller, sit side by side on a park bench, while two women walk by in front of them, one of whom turns to them with a smile. Although the photograph may appear to demonstrate an equal division of care work, the diagonal perspective reveals otherwise. The four men, only one of whom is rocking the stroller with his hand, all have their eyes glued to a newspaper. While they are reading the news instead of caring for their children, the gaze of the readers falls instead on the baby carriages and the babies, so that the viewers take on the role of supervision. Without specifying whether this is an everyday or an exceptional situation, and without highlighting the contradiction captured in the photograph, the comment says that the “second shift” was increasingly divided equally between men and women and outsourced to a “public industry.”^[56] Organized in this way, it could actually “transform itself from a burden into a joy.”^[57] Despite reports in the early 1970s from the Western European press that Russian women were exhausted by the double burden of gainful employment and care work, and that women in the GDR still spent 47.5 hours a week on housework, the book demonstrated to readers in both East and West Germany how women could lead fulfilling lives at work, in caregiving, and during leisure time.^[58]

10

Marijonas Baranauskas, Die Väter… (The Fathers…), 1966, photograph. Vilnius, MO muziejus

In contrast, the magazine Arbeiterfotografie in West Germany aimed to highlight the weight of paid labor and care work in the capitalist production process. In 1975, it commissioned a member of its affiliated association of photographing workers to take pictures of his wife (fig. 11a – c). Significantly, the article, titled “Ein Arbeiter fotografiert seine Frau” (A Worker Photographs His Wife), is headed with a portrait of Oskar taken by his wife Monika, using the camera he purchased with her savings for a freezer.^[59] The other photographs in the article, however, depict her: working as an employee in a supermarket, talking to customers and colleagues, taking their daughter to school, having her at work and taking her home, spending time with friends, and attending a trade union meeting. The following double-page spread features five photographs that showcase her daily care work at home, while the caption speaks of “the double burden of daily housework.” The images are arranged in a row to make “the labor of love visible exactly as that: as labor, namely as a labor that requires and simultaneously produces a disciplined body.”^[60] The photographs have a narrow frame that obscures the context, portraying Monika maintaining rather than producing things. They show her performing various household tasks such as ironing, making the bed, sewing, doing the dishes, and helping with homework. The serial arrangement of the images suggests the repetitive character of these activities, which appear to be equally timed and could go on forever. The accompanying text, written by the worker/husband, initially focuses on his difficulty in capturing all of his wife’s actions rather than acknowledging her double burden. However, then the text credits the photographs with making the latter visible, even though Oskar and Monika share everything: he does all the heavy work, and she does “only the housework.”^[61] “Monika [now] sees herself more consciously through the photos and the discussion we had about them. […] She is more interested in the trade union, more interested in the women’s movement.”^[62] “The household is monotonous, and she didn’t really notice that before, only now through the pictures!”^[63]

11a – c

Oskar Krause, “Ein Arbeiter fotografiert seine Frau” (A Worker Photographs His Wife), double-page spreads in: Arbeiterfotografie 1975, no. 5, 3–7

The sequence of photographs depicting repetitious housework, published in the same issue of the magazine Arbeiterfotografie as Oberheitmann’s Leichtlohngruppe, reveals a concern that was already being discussed in the women’s movement. It makes visible the threat of alienation in care work. Although the specific term may not have been used, it was recognized that care work, like factory work, carried the risk of alienation, even if it was not performed within a division of labor. Helge Pross, a sociologist and gender researcher, regularly wrote for West German newspapers and magazines such as Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and Brigitte. She was criticized by radical feminists for her moderate positions on equality. But in the early 1970s she conducted a survey on the “reality of the housewife.”^[64] Her research discovered that one-third of house-wives found their unskilled care work “very monotonous.”^[65] Similarly, feminists identified various alienating characteristics of housework in the 1970s. “Everything a housewife does, she does alone. You have to do all the work in the house yourself. […] The work is the same, day in and day out. […] The daytime radio serials help to pass the time, but nothing changes the isolation and boredom,” wrote the feminist activist Selma James in 1973, describing the lonely monotony of care work at home.^[66] In her 1970 essay Women’s Work is Never Done, feminist activist Peggy Morton argued that housework never produces a finished product with which the care worker could identify.^[67] In addition, according to Christine Delphy, a sociologist who published her critique under a pseudonym, care workers could not dispose of their own (wo)manpower.^[68] In 1971, the psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell also made similar arguments: “Naturally, the child does not literally escape [like a product], but the mother’s alienation can be much worse than that of the worker whose product is appropriated by the boss.”^[69] The article in the magazine Arbeiterfotografie does not address the question of alienation on a theoretical level. Nevertheless, in the juxtaposed photographs it becomes clear that the individual and daily repetitive steps of care work are not so different from the division of labor of the Leichtlohngruppe, which can be seen a few pages later.^[70] Moreover, Oskar’s self-centered leading role in raising his wife’s consciousness was fortunately severely criticized by the Essen chapter of the Worker Photography Association in the following issue.^[71]

Women Workers Facing Alienation in Both Shifts

Oberheitmann’s photo series Leichtlohngruppe does not feature any care work. However, a few women workers at Graetz AG, where some of the photographs in this series were taken, used them to highlight the fact that care work is often invisible, as in Oberheitmann’s photographs, as it is usually performed alongside work in the second shift. A few years later, Doris, Gitte, and Petra, women workers who had joined together in 1981 to protest the rationalization measures, the acceleration of the production line, and lower wages, compiled their own interview transcripts into a book titled Montags biste sowieso geschafft (You’re Already Exhausted on Mondays Anyway; fig. 12). The book includes several photographs of the Leichtlohngruppe, one of which is printed on the cover. It shows women workers seated at numbered workstations in a seemingly endless line. The book’s subtitle, Frauen am Fließband erzählen (Women on the Assembly Line Talk), suggests that they will now speak up. The book combines photographs of their factory work with descriptions of their care work, revealing the double burden of factory work and care work from their point of view. It highlights their alienation from care work and marriage:

12

Verena Born (ed.), Montags biste sowieso geschafft: Frauen am Fließband erzählen (You’re Already Exhausted on Monday Anyway), Hamburg 1982, front cover with a photograph from Theodor Oberheitmann’s series Leichtlohngruppe, 1971–1972

Yes, so then you sit down in the bus. And then, of course, you’re exhausted. Then you fall asleep. Or you’re about to fall asleep. Then you get up again. Because you have to get off the bus. And then you’re home. And the work at home starts. Then you warm up something to eat. Or, if you don’t always feel like precooking something in the evening, you drink a cup of coffee. You make the beds. Then you do a bit of work here, and then you go shopping. Before that, pick up the little one from daycare, because she’s cranky. Maybe do some laundry. And then you’ll soon go to bed, completely exhausted. You got nothing out of the day. Absolutely nothing. […] And then you get up early again on Monday. And you go to work. You’re already exhausted on Monday anyway. And then on Tuesday. Oh, it’s always the same.^[72]

Doris, Gitte, and Petra discuss the double burden of factory work and care work, and how some women workers feel obligated to also fulfill marital duties: “Yes, your husband is always in the mood, and as soon as you drop your bag after coming home from work, you have to do your duty.”^[73]

The women workers had made the Graetz factory one of the “kampfstarken Betriebe” (combative companies), as it was respectfully called in the union jargon at the time.^[74] They established their own in-house company newspaper, entitled Schmierblatt (a play on words meaning both “tabloid” and “greasy paper”). Additionally, they held meetings outside the factory to discuss issues and formed personal relationships with their colleagues. Furthermore, they appropriated Oberheitmann’s Leichtlohngruppe series for their own gender and labor struggles. Showing the photographs, their book explains the production methods used in the factory, as well as the various employment relationships, tax classes, and collective wage agreements, such as “Leichtlohngruppe.” It is intended for women workers and readers who may not (yet) have had any firsthand experience of factory work.

Although not called by that name, they used the photographs for their own awareness-raising. This approach did not owe its existence to an academic consciousness-raising group of the kind that had been attended since the early 1970s, especially by women “of the well-educated middle class.”^[75] Rather, it grew out of labor law disputes and proceeded independently of feminist and Marxist theorizing, addressing the power of women workers through photographs depicting them and through their own oral histories. Only these women workers encountered alienation as the same problem of both of their shifts. Doris, Gitte, and Petra utilized photography as a feminist and workerist method for self-awareness, distinct from academic social critique that focuses on alienation.

Translated by Gérard A. Goodrow. Translations of publications cited are also his unless indicated otherwise.