Gabriella Hauch's newest publication, Frauen, Leben, Linz, is a history of Austria that focuses on diverse women's organizations and women's involvement in the political life of Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Scattered in its pages are also select biographies and autobiographies of individual women ranging in background and class, from the long-term president of the Upper Austrian Catholic Women's Organization (KFO) Fanny von Starhemberg (1875–1943) to the drug-addicted and mostly forgotten artist Johanna Brosch née Springer (1894–1972). Numerous well-chosen photographs and archival images complement Hauch's 800-page volume, which includes over 90 pages of endnotes and a 170-page bibliography. The primary sources range from the archival to newspaper accounts to oral history, the latter carried out to a large extent by herself or her students at Linz University. In short, the amount of information assembled is insightful and encyclopedic.
Hauch, already an established expert on women's history during the Nazi period in Austria and working class women's movements in general, takes the reader chronologically through the social history of Linz from the early 1800s to the late twentieth century. The periods covered include 1848, World War I and the postwar revolutionary fervor, the First Republic, February 1934, Austro-Fascism, the Anschluss together with World War II, and the Second Republic. Tracing and analyzing these periods through the lens of women's history—especially women's organizations (such as the first women's organization, the Katholische Frauenverein in der Diözese Linz, which was established in 1849 and followed soon thereafter by the Israelitische Frauenverein für Armen- und Krankenunterstützung) and political parties—Hauch fills in a major historiographical gap that had left women's activities in Linz on the margins of history (17) and perpetuated the “separate spheres” ideology of women as apolitical persons.
The city, which lies on the Danube not far from the Czech Republic border and has approximately two hundred thousand inhabitants (52 percent of whom are women as of 2013), is still most infamously known as the Austrian city dearest to Adolf Hitler. Indeed, under the Nazis (1938–1945), Linz boomed as an industrial town, serviced largely by forced laborers and prisoners-of-war living in the nearby concentration camp Mauthausen (three of its subsidiary camps were located in the city itself). As Hauch writes, until World War II, Linz was a relatively small garrison town; a tobacco factory was the main employer of local women (59), and local prostitution was pervasive (61).
Much of the book is devoted to tracking the leadership and organized workings of Linz's three main political factions—Catholics, Social Democrats, and German nationalists—in light of the main organized women's associations: the Social Democratic women's organization, the middle-class liberal association, and the KFO. Indeed from the start, political Catholicism in Linz was a women's project (40). Although the women's organizations often competed for members, they remarkably put their differences aside during World War I (23, 118, 126ff.). We also discover that Linz women voted overwhelmingly for the Catholic-leaning parties: the Christian Social Party during the First Republic and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) since 1945 (see 215, 369ff., 579f.).
My minor complaints are the following: This is a broad historical study that integrates a full range of women's (mostly organized) activities over two centuries, whereas from the title, I expected more an urban history of everyday life or perhaps a history of specific women “making” Linz (cf. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago 1790-1990 [Bloomington, 2001]). Further, although Hauch makes comparisons to other women and women's organizations, especially in Vienna, those in Linz come across as mostly isolated; I missed more mention of international contacts and transnational influences. Finally, some subsections are presented at times as lists or miscellaneous facts, and certain generic assertions (often on gender and gender relations) tend to be repeated.
These small criticisms aside, Hauch has put together the most clear and comprehensive history of women's organizations and politics in Linz yet written, and she has contextualized them within mainstream Austrian history. The integration of key local case studies (her own, as well as those by Martina Gugglberger, Michael John, Brigitte Kepplinger, Helmut Lackner and Gerhard A. Stadler, Roman Sandgruber, and Regina Thumser, among others), which are duly acknowledged, is also a major feat. The inclusion of numerous colorful biographies makes for valuable and inspiring reading and illustrates clearly how women across political and ethnic spectrums have contributed to Linz's history and have been shaped by it.
