Margarethe Faas-Hardegger

Several women workers’ unions appeared in Switzerland in the late 1860s and in the following decades of the century, mostly in the textile industry, but they did not last. In 1890, five of them joined to create a Women Workers’ Federation (Fédération suisse des ouvrières/Schweizerischer Arbeiterinnenverband), on the intiative of radical socialists like Luise Steck, Clara Zetkin and Angelica Balabanoff. The mainstream (predominantly male) unions looked at it with disfavor, as a competing organization. Although the Swiss Trade Union Federation had decided that all its member unions had to accept women into membership, very few women had actually joined. 

In 1904 the Women’s Federation decided to affiliate to the national Trade Union Federation under an agreement according to which the Women’s Federation would concentrate on organizing home-based workers and domestic workers, laundry workers, etc. It would conduct trade union, social and political educational activities, and encourage industrial women workers to join the existing unions in their branches. At the time, about 3,000 women workers were union members, mostly in the textile, tobacco and paper industries. 

About the same time, the Swiss Trade Union Federation decided to appoint a Women Workers’ Secretary, in fact an organizer. Of two candidates, Margarethe Faas-Hardegger (later, after her divorce, Margarethe Hardegger) was chosen. Her father was a post office employee and her mother a midwife. When she became the Federation’s first women’s secretary at 23, she had already organized two unions of women workers in the textile industry. In a circular introducing herself to the local union organizations, she described her task as follows:

“The secretary will have to dedicate herself most particularly to the organization of the female proletariat which, such as it is today, represents a big obstacle to the unfettered development of the labor movement. We shall therefore have to recruit the female worker to her appropriate union and make her join her male colleagues to advance together with them, with the same interests and the same objective: “the emancipation from the capitalist yoke”. And since in Switzerland we do not yet have female inspectors of labor, the secretary will have to do that work as well, caring for the personal life of the woman working in the factory or at home, drawing out from her the complaints which a woman has such difficulty confiding in a man…” (22)

In 1906, Margarethe Hardegger started publishing Die Vorkämpferin (The (Woman) Vanguard Fighter), a monthly German-language journal of the Women Workers’ Federation, with a circulation of 2,000 copies after one year. One year later, and after about one hundred organizing meetings in Western Switzerland, she started a French-language journal, L’Exploitée (The Exploited (Woman)), with an initial press run of 10,000. In 1908, both papers had a regular circulation of about 2,400. 

In her journals, Hardegger not only denounced the abuse to which women were subjected at work, but also in society and in their families. She advocated contraception, disseminated information about contraception methods and also campaigned against the criminalization of abortion. She denounced “legal prostitution” (i.e. marriage) and the repression of prostitution without addressing its social causes. She campaigned for women suffrage. She also denounced the arrests and expulsions of “foreign agitators” (in particular the Italian anarchist leader Bertoni).

Very soon Hardegger’s relations with the Federal Executive turned sour. The two other (male) secretaries and the Executive were increasingly irritated by her freewheeling style (she would take direct action when she believed it necessary and would not bother about protocol and office routine) and by her radicalism. She was twice dismissed (in 1906 and in 1908) and both times reinstated after leading trade unionists intervened on her behalf. 

In Spring 1907, the women workers at the Vautier cigar factory in Yverdon invited Hardegger to a meeting to explain trade unionism; they were considering affiliation to the Food Workers’ Federation. The owner immediately dismissed the seven leaders and almost all women walked out on strike demanding their reinstatement. The men working at Vautier were then offered a half an hour reduction of daily working time and a raise of 50 cents per day and kept on working, which Hardegger denounced as treason. (At that time, the women were working an 11-hour day for a daily wage of 1.50 francs). The municipal authorities called on the army to protect the strikebreakers. The local employers blacklisted the striking women and got the municipality to close the crèche to the children of the striking women, to prevent them from seeking employment outside the city.

When the Trade Union Federation and its Food Workers’ Federation would not support this strike, ostensibly because the workers were not yet members, in reality because the struggle had taken more radical forms than they cared to endorse, Hardegger declared a boycott of Vautier cigars and turned to the Fédération des Unions Ouvrières de Suisse romande (the regional federation of unions in Western Switzerland), led by revolutionary syndicalists. The Fédération fully supported the women at Vautier and the cigar-making co-operative that they had established. The Vautier boycott ended in 1909 when the owner agreed to reinstate all dismissed workers at better conditions and to recognize the union (the Food Workers’ Union of the national Federation). 

The same year, Hardegger resigned from the secretariat of the Trade Union Federation, exhausted by her struggles, not least inside the organization. In 1908, the Federation had decided to reorganize on the basis of industrial unions, which the women workers were invited to join. The Women Workers’ Federation was no longer recognized, although an independent women’s secretariat was maintained. The position of women’s secretary was advertised at a salary of 2,700 francs per year; the salary of the two male colleagues was respectively 3,300 and 3000 francs. Hardegger was invited to re-apply for her own job – she did not bother. In recognition of her services, the Federal Executive offered her one half of a monthly salary: the princely sum of 112.50 francs.

In the April 1909 issue of Die Vorkämpferin, she took leave as an editor:

“Over the last four years, my views have developed in such a direction as to make it clear that my place is apparently no longer among you as secretary and editor. This has been a slow and irreversible development, while I was keeping the company of the poorest, the most miserable, the lowest social layers to which we women workers belong – with those who are desperate, and for whom there is no hope, no salvation, no life except in an entirely new society. My only wish today is to contribute, together with the comrades who share my opinions, to building this new society; to show you how it is possible to live and work without the salary system, without exploitation – in freedom. This is why I am told that I am no longer suitable.” 

At that time, there were 9,000 organized women workers, three times more than in 1904, representing over ten percent of the membership of the Trade Union Federation: half of them in textile, about a quarter in watch making, another quarter mostly in food production and tobacco. 

In her letter of resignation to the Federal Executive she wrote: “My experience in the Yverdon conflict and on other occasions have given rise within me of an immense disgust with the centralist bureaucracy and its heavy quasi-statist apparatus. It is this disgust which has led me finally … to resign from my position of trade union secretary.”

Her last trade union function was her participation in the Congress for the Protection of Home Workers in August 1909. At that time, about half of the industrial labor force in Switzerland were home-based workers, three quarters of these women and children, in certain occupations only women. The Women Workers’ Federation had made the organization of home-based workers a priority. 

The congress, which was attended by four hundred delegates from different countries, discussed protective legislation for home workers; it was accompanied by an exhibition illustrating the great variety of products made by home workers under miserable conditions. 

Trans PS. source: www.margarethe-hardegger.ch/bio_mh.html
[dead link https://web.archive.org/web/20060719182606/http://www.margarethe-hardegger.ch/bio_mh.html  ]

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.