Adelheip Popp

Adelheid Popp, a leader in the Viennese women’s movement, was motivated by socialist ideals, serving the movement as a journalist and politician. From the age of eight, she worked for many years in a factory and understood firsthand the abusive conditions under which women labored. In 1889, she joined the Viennese Association for the Education of Working Women. As a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party, she became editor-in-chief of the newly founded Arbeiterinnenzeitung (Working Women’s Newspaper) in 1892. The next year, she organized the first strike of women garment workers in Vienna’s history. In 1909, she published Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin (The Autobiography of a Working Woman), in which she attempts to show how gender and class structured and constrained her life choices. This was followed by her study on domestic servants, Haussklavinnen (Domestic Slaves, 1912). She was elected to the Vienna Council in 1919 and the Parliament in the same year. At the local and national levels, she pressed for—but without much success—a package of benefits for women such as maternity leave.