2014_1_Holubec

Stanislav Holubec

Between Scarcity and Modernity: Working Class Families in Prague in the Interwar Period

 

This study investigates the life experiences of working class families in Prague in the interwar period with particular emphasis on processes of family formation and sustainment. With regards to the notion of “family formation,” I examined in particular the search for partners, patterns of cohabitation, and sociological aspects of partner’s choice. I analyzed the life course of workers´ families with a focus on child births, questions pertaining to health, and divorces and other non-traditional forms of family. Working class families are interpreted as having undergone and reacted to different aspects of modern social change. These include demographic transition (declining infant mortality, declining fertility), the adoption of modern values (individualization, rise of divorce rates, secularization, female emancipation, multiple identities), the effects of World War I (material scarcity, high mortality), local circumstances (housing shortages), and persistent traditional patterns and values in the mentality among the working class (gender inequality and family hierarchies).

Keywords: Prague, interwar period, working class families, life experiences, life course

 

In the following article I investigate the life experiences of working class families in Prague1 in the interwar period with particular emphasis on processes of family formation and transformation. In the first part I will outline briefly the socioeconomic development of Prague between 1870 and 1940, concentrating on the surroundings in which workers lived, the factors that, in my view, exerted a substantial influence on their family lives, and complex questions regarding identity. In the second part I will present the life experiences of working class families in Prague with emphasis on the processes involved in the formation of a family, including dating, cohabitation and marriage, in their sociological context. The family lives of workers, which includes child births, questions pertaining to health, mortality and the disintegration of families, will be analyzed in the last part. As there has been little research on these topics in the Czech context, I occasionally draw on comparisons with the situation in Germany.

The practice of writing about the everyday lives of workers and their families has a long history. It was strongly ideological under state socialism. The historiography concentrated on the political and social “struggles,” particularly in communities of heavy industry and mining workers, and simultaneously ignored the workers in other branches of the economy, such as agriculture. The official historiography tended to combine very pessimistic descriptions of the prevailing conditions based primarily on statistical data with idealized descriptions of workers as politically highly conscious and supportive of the Communist Party.2 The predominance of class and class struggle in peoples´ identities and life courses was taken for granted. In the studies on working class family histories, the statistical or folklorist perspective prevailed.3 Since 1990, Czech historiography has almost completely abandoned “workers” as a category of study, and only a small group of historians of the older generation has attempted to promote the social history of the lower classes, with emphasis on the nineteenth century.4 The interests of mainstream historiography shifted to the social history of the everyday lives of “elites” or members of the middle classes, sometimes presented as “typical citizens,” or to gender history and the history of ethnic relations. Attention was also paid to the history of the most marginalized social groups (prostitutes, Roma). The political history of the interwar period shifted from class struggle to the clash between democracy and totalitarianism. The history of industrial work remained as insignificant as it had been before 1989. The German scholar Peter Heumos was one of the few exceptions.5 Only in recent years have we begun to experience a return to the history of workers. The pioneering work by Martin Jemelka on everyday life in the miners´ colony in Ostrava until 1950,6 followed by the monograph on the interactions between the middle classes and workers in Moravia at the turn of the century by Lukáš Fasora,7 my monograph on everydayness and the social status of the Prague workers in the interwar period,8 and most recently the monograph on the everyday life of Czech workers during World War I by Rudolf Kučera.9 The problems faced by Czech workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also started to interest young non-Czech historians.10

Prague and Members of the Working Class During Industrialization

In the late nineteenth century, Prague, the historical capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, was the third largest city in the Habsburg monarchy and one of its most important industrial centers.11 At the time, it had experienced the greatest period of industrial and demographic growth in its history. The population growth in the period between 1870 and 1914 was 25 percent every ten years. Because of the influx of migrants from the Czech-speaking countryside, like other cities of Central and Eastern Europe, Prague started to lose its multicultural character.12 Symbolically, in 1868 the Czech administration enforced the replacement of German street names with bilingual versions and in 1894 exclusively with Czech names.13 Prague was still described as provincial in comparison with the imperial charm of Vienna or Budapest. It had neither the power nor financial resources to develop edifices comparable with those of Budapest. The Prague National theatre (1883), National Museum (1891), and Municipal House (1912) hardly rivalled the Hungarian parliament, the Budapest subway (the first in continental Europe), or St. Stephen´s basilica.

After 1918, as the capital of the new Czechoslovak Republic, Prague became the seat of the central authorities. The influx of migrants to the city continued, although it was slowing. Due to an administrative reform, in 1922 Prague expanded its territory eight fold and its population grew to 676,000 inhabitants, and in the late 1930s it reached 900,000. The historical center was unified with industrial suburbs, residential districts, and in some cases even with villages that had not yet been integrated into the infrastructures of the city. The creation of greater Prague weakened the power of the National Democratic Party (Československá národní demokracie), which was comprised of liberal nationalist forces that had dominated Prague in previous decades. After the administrative reform, the proportion of workers and members of the lower middle classes in the city increased significantly, and power shifted to the hands of centrist Socialists (Československá strana socialistická) and Social Democrats (Československá sociálně demokratická strana dělnická). Prague was not spared post-war political radicalization, and the Communist Party become an important representative of the professionally less qualified and poorest strata of Prague inhabitants. The creation of Greater Prague also further contributed to its ethnic homogenization. Jews and Germans, who lived primarily in the city center, now comprised less than 8 percent of the population, and as a political force they held onto influence only on the level of the central districts. Even increased migration to Prague from Slovakia, Polish Galicia and revolutionary Russia after 1918 did not modify the prevailing ethnically Czech character of the city.14

In spite of the rapid industrialization that had begun in the 1860s, as the country´s capital Prague maintained a strong proportion of middle and upper classes and was never perceived as an unambiguously industrial center, in comparison to Brno (Brünn in German) or the centers in northern Bohemia and Moravia. Its character as a regional capital and its proximity to northern and central Bohemian industrial centers and coal districts promoted industrialization, but the simultaneous growth of administration and the service sphere kept the social structure more balanced, so even after unification with the industrial suburbs, the number of workers and their families did not surpass 40 percent of the population according to statistics. The center of Prague never lost its high social status during the process of industrialization, and it remained home primarily to members of the middle classes,15 who also established the residential districts around it, such as Vinohrady, Bubeneč and Střešovice.16 Proletariats arriving to the city had to look for places to live comparatively far from the city center, close to the factories in the northeast or southwest of the city. As of the early twentieth century, the industry of Prague was oriented primarily around the production of machines, electric equipment and carriages. Textile production and glass production were less important. Industry in Prague was strongly diversified, with predominantly small places of production in comparison with the urban centers established during the period of rapid industrialization from 1870 to 1914. Only eleven plants in the city had more than 500 workers in early 1920s, and two of them were publically owned (the railway heating plant and a tram depot).17 The relative diversity of industry in Prague also meant a diversity of workers and less influence of trade unions.18

In combination with the general housing shortage, the migration of large segments of the agrarian population to Prague created serious social conflicts in the early 1920s. The presence of new workforces allowed owners to cut wages. The lack of appropriate housing led to crowding in apartments and the spread of slums. However, economic growth, which as of 1923 was increasingly rapid, helped to ameliorate the situation.19

The interwar urban slums, which were referred to as “poverty colonies” (nouzové kolonie), are an interesting phenomenon widely discussed in the literature. They came into existence shortly after 1918, as the plots of wasteland at the outskirts of Prague began to be rented to the migrants to the capital for the construction of provisory wooden cabins (old carriages were also used). Their inhabitants were sometimes people from the eastern parts of the republic or refugees from Galicia or revolutionary Russia.20 The colonies, with their picturesque appearance, soon attracted the attention of journalists and writers, and numerous reports on the conditions in them were written. Also the Prague municipal governments began to perceive the colonies as a problem primarily because of hygiene and crime. The illegally built cabins were sometimes destroyed in the presence of the police, creating conflicts between the inhabitants of the slums and the organs of public administration. The political left used the defense of slum dwellers as part of its own political agenda. Later, even the municipal administration of Prague attempted to start its own project of provisional housing for the families in need. Although the colonies are the subject of many documents in the archives and the secondary literature,21 their inhabitants in fact comprised only a small portion of the population of Prague, about 2 or 3 percent.

Even for workers’ families not living in the colonies, the housing situation was not easy. The average workers’ household in Prague was truly overcrowded. The families lived either in one-room apartments or (for the more fortunate) an apartment with a separate kitchen. Two-room apartments with separate kitchens were affordable only for the small numbers of workers who had the best jobs, such as typographers.22 The workers’ families sometimes even offered other people a place to stay, mainly grandparents.23 Occasionally other relatives lived together with the partner’s family, either new arrivals from the countryside or boyfriends or girlfriends who lived together with the family before they could establish their own households. Under these circumstances, not everyone had his or her own bed.24 Most children shared their beds with siblings, and older siblings sometimes slept on the floor.25 The only modern technologies Prague workers enjoyed at the time was the water pipe line to the houses (but only rarely to the apartments) and sometimes electrical lighting, which gradually became more common after the war (in 1931 about half of the workers´ households already had it).26 Other modern technologies already common in the middle class apartments, such as water lines, gas stoves, central heating, separate toilets and bathrooms, and refrigerators were rare in workers’ households until the 1950s.27

The high level of spatial stratification in Prague contributed to the fact that working class families lived primarily in the local neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.28 While workers made up only 10 percent of the inhabitants of the city center according to the censuses in 1921 and 1931, they often comprised more than 50 percent of the population in the peripheral parts of Prague. Although public transportation and bicycles were affordable to all social groups, the lower strata did not frequently go to the city center to indulge in amusements or cultural events, or even to shop, but preferred rather the local facilities. Much of social life also took place in the yards of the houses. The apartments had shared laundry rooms where the women met, and the modest size of the apartments pushed their inhabitants outside, where they spent time interacting with other neighbors (woman doing the laundry, men doing a little craftsman’s work, and children playing).

Those who lived without much contact with their families were mainly the newcomers to Prague from the countryside. In some cases these people commuted on Sunday to visit their relatives, or their work in Prague was of a seasonal nature (construction workers), so they spent the winters at home. If their families lived at greater distances, they would visit them even less frequently. If the grandparents and other relatives lived in the countryside, contact was kept with them only sporadically. Short workers´ vacations, which lasted only about one week (in contrast with the longer vacations enjoyed by state employees or managers), and high transportation costs did not allow workers to take regular visits to relatives. People compensated for the lack of personal contact by writing letters, a practice that was already significant at the time.29 In contrast, families with grandparents living in Prague kept regular contact with them. The grandparents helped with the children and household, while the parents, who had paying jobs, supported them financially, as the elderly often had no pensions.

Due to the character of Prague industry and the character of modern society (which was slowly approaching the phase of mass consumption), the identities of Prague workers were more diverse than the pre-1989 historiography used to claim. It is likely that the inhabitants of Prague recorded in the statistics as “workers” (dělníci) often did not like to use this term to describe themselves. It had a negative connotation for them, and they preferred to call themselves “craftsmen” (řemeslník). They called themselves workers only if they had a job that required no training. The register books that were kept by every district of the city contain interesting information in this respect. Couples who were getting married were obliged to state their professions, along with other data. One could consider, for example, the register book from the district of Karlín from 1923–24. In this district, according to the statistical survey the percentage of workers was about 38 in 1921, roughly the Prague average.30 The wedding book contains 456 marriages, a total of 912 people, which can be considered representative. Surprisingly, in this sample only 13 percent of the people describe themselves as “workers” (dělník, dělnice), and there is no significant difference between males and females. Sometimes male respondents added an adjective, such as “factory,” “shoe,” “brick,” or “mill.” The other employees with manual jobs described themselves as “craftsmen“ or mentioned their trade, e.g. “locksmith,” “plumber,” or “joiner.” This group, which can be referred to as manual trained professions, comprised about 40 percent of the sample among males. Among females the proportion was much lower (only about 10 percent). In the register book no one described his or her job as “day laborer” (nádeník), the term used in the statistics for the untrained workers who worked without contracts at jobs that had the least prestige.

The reluctance of young workers to identify with this term is also visible in the personal ads, which as a practice was quite widespread at the time. We can cite here several ads that were published in the Prague women’s magazine Hvězda in 1930 showing the contrasting worlds of the middle and upper classes and the world of the workers. The first placed clear emphasis on the importance of property, while the second stressed personal characteristics: “A factory owner would like to marry an intelligent woman of gentle character possessing adequate capital. Replies with photographs are welcome and will be given back discretely.” “25-year-old farmer, in possession of 300,000 crowns, with the duty to care for his old parents, would like to marry a woman with a farm of at least 70 acres or a pub with its own farm. Widows are not excluded.” “40-year-old owner of factory, villa and car, intelligent and not unattractive would like to meet an intelligent lady, widow, possessing capital in the amount of 600,000, I offer a marriage and dowry, mortgage ensured.” Sometimes the personal ads were difficult to distinguish from the job ads: “I am looking for a female sales assistant for my shop, who will contribute by deposit 5,000 to 10,000 crowns. Latter marriage to me not excluded.”31

If one looks at ads taken out by people who had less assets, as is the case in the register books, the authors did not like to describe themselves as workers. In the case of males looking for females, they preferred to refer to themselves as “craftsmen” (řemeslník) or “employed.” Sometimes they did not mention their profession at all and stated only their age, along with descriptions of their character and physical appearance. Their ads were also shorter, because the cost of an ad depended on its length: “a blonde with a tall figure would like to meet a nice boy, preferably a craftsmen.” “28-year-old craftsman would like to meet a nice girl.” “25-year-old employed girl would like to meet a railway man, or someone with a similar profession who does not need money, but rather a good housewife.” Obviously the workers could neither offer nor expect money or assets and concentrated instead on character, sentiments or physical appearance.32

Although unattractive in everyday life, the term worker as a collective political identity still had its appeal. Social democratic forces used it in the name of their party and in the names of the affiliated organizations (Workers’ Academy, Workers’ Sport Association),33 while the Communists preferred the more radical term “proletariat.” Those who were reluctant to label themselves “workers” obviously had no difficulties voting for “workers’ parties,” which regularly got one-third of Prague’s votes in the interwar elections. The parties were conscious of this contradiction and strove to educate their members to become more “class conscious.” The party publications appealed to young members not to be ashamed of the word “worker” when they had to state their profession.34

Young Workers Dating and Marrying

Young people from working class families usually had jobs before they were married. For working class boys and girls it was natural to take a job after leaving school or completing an apprenticeship, while for members of the middle class about half of the girls did not have any job before marriage. They either pursued studies or helped at home. The girls from working class families of Prague did not have much chance of getting a job as a house servant, since middle and upper class families tended to prefer girls from the countryside (who were in abundant supply) over girls with a working class background (who were perceived as unclean, frivolous or otherwise having bad habits).35 Workers’ wives did not stay at home after their weddings either, but rather had jobs until they bore children. In contrast, in many cases middle class girls who worked as clerks did not wait until they were pregnant to quit their jobs, but rather quit immediately after having gotten married “to take care of their husbands.”

As it was unusual to send children to a nursery, women had to stay at home with them until they reached school age. This time span was as long as seven to ten years, if one takes into consideration the average number of children and the differences in their ages. As the children began to attend school, only a minority of working class women sought out regular paid work in the factories, as the factories offered jobs primarily to childless women. Instead, mothers in working class households took part-time jobs, mainly as helpers and cleaners in middle class households or as wash-women (a task that was time-consuming; one had to set aside one day a week to clean the clothes for a single family).

Concerning the places where one could find a future partner, the dancing room was a well-known option, but there were other places as well, such as outdoor swimming pools, the workplace, sport organizations (for instance the numerous but middle class and nationalist leaning Sokol [Falcon], which resembled the German Turnvereine, or the less numerous Dělnické tělocvičné jednoty [Workers’ Sport Association], which was close to the Social Democratic Party). Sometimes shared quarters also offered people a chance to get acquainted. An activity that was specific to Czech culture and that allowed young people a chance to meet one another was weekend camping, referred to in Czech as “tramping” (“tramping” usually took place from Saturday afternoon to Sunday, as Saturday morning was still a workday). Tramping is considered the first Czech youth subculture,36 taking form in Prague in the early 1920s, imitating in its dress code and leisure-time activities the life of the American mountain man known from Westerns and adventure novels by Karl May and Jack London. In comparison to the scout movement, it was anti-authoritarian, not divided by gender, and its social base was more working class than middle class. While scouts were mainly for pre-adolescent and early-adolescent kids, “tramping” was popular among late teenagers and young adults. At the time, the only similar subculture seems to have been found in Germany, the so called “wilder Wandervogel” (Wild wandering birds), which was an anti-authoritarian split from the German Wanderfogel movement.37 Czech tramping profited from the hilly landscape covered by forests in the south of Prague, which was easy to reach by local trains. Tramps would stay overnight in tents or improvised wooden cabins, wearing cowboy-like clothing and playing guitars by camp fires and singing their “tramp songs.” Naturally this all created an ideal atmosphere for young people to fall in love. The authorities were alerted by the shocked moralists of older generations (who complained that tramping was a site of “free love,”), and in 1931 the regional government issued a regulation prohibiting unmarried people from spending the night together in a tent or a cabin, bathing together without proper dress, or singing “obscene songs”.38 This was soon followed by police raids against tramps. In response, the movement organized protests, including demonstrations and a press campaign, and the regulation was repealed four years later.

As the working class youth started to date, it was not uncommon for them to have sex.39 Again, the world outside offered more suitable sites for trysts than the overcrowded apartments. The prevalence of premarital sex among members of the working class contrasted sharply with the prevailing expectations of the middle classes, according to which a bride had to be a virgin,40 which was still common at the beginning of the interwar period. Middle class boys had their first sexual experiences as visitors to the brothels, although this habit among middle class students and soldiers, though strong before the war, started to decline after 1918, not least due to the spread of venereal diseases caused by the war.41 It seems that in the 1920s middle class girls also become more liberal in terms of sexuality. In the 1930s all urban youths may well have had similar experiences of premarital sex.

Cohabitation was also quite common among young workers, while it was taboo for the Prague middle classes. This pattern of cohabitation existed at the time primarily among the poorer segments of the working class in Prague, while the “workers’ aristocracy,” like the middle class, rejected cohabitation as unacceptable. From our sample of the 456 couples who married in 1923–1924 in the Žižkov district (who could be identified as workers, at least as far as their professions were concerned), about 15 percent lived at the same address on the day of the wedding.42 Among the 101 couples at least one member of which characterized himself or herself explicitly as a “worker” the proportion of cohabition was about one-third. Cohabitation sometimes preceded dating in cases in which young people met each other as inhabitants of the same apartment. Cohabitation among workers was sometimes criticized by the middle class journals and authorities. One of the complaints of the Prague municipality regarding the urban slums was that many of the inhabitants lived together without having gotten married.43 The young workers active in the Communist Party were similarly scandalized by allegations made in the right-wing press that they lived in a “concubinate.”44 It is worth stressing that unmarried cohabitation often was not a consequence of love but rather of necessity. According to the most common model, due to the lack of apartments one of the partners moved into the home where his or her partner lived with the parents.45

Conservative middle class authors tended to offer shocking descriptions of the sex lives of young members of the working class in the late nineteenth century, characterizing workers as promiscuous, rash, and prone to incest. This discourse was still used in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly with regards to the sexuality of “socially difficult” families, but not anymore with regards to workers, who were perceived in the mainstream discourse almost as “normal citizens.” On the other hand, leftist authors tended to present the sex lives of young workers as “clean” and “honest,” in contrast with the “cynical” sexuality of the sons of the bourgeoisie.46 The two main political forces representing the workers—the Communists and Social Democrats—had different views on the sex lives of young people. The Communists, who were influenced by the radicalism of the Russian revolution, seemed to be more liberal, while the Social Democrats remained quite conservative. For example, in 1922 the Social Democratic brochure recommended that people begin to have sexual relations only after having gotten married and secured employment.47 The question of contraception was not mentioned at all.

Contraceptives that were commonly used by members of the middle classes already in the early 1920s came into use more slowly among the working class. They seem to have entered widespread use first among youngsters. An article entitled “How to avoid unwanted conception,” printed in the women’s communist magazine Rozsévačka (female sower), popularized contraceptives among workers in 1930 as something entirely new. Condoms were recommended as the safest method of contraception. Contraceptives were propagated in Prague with the argument according to which they were already in widespread use in the Soviet Union and they would allow women to be more active in the revolutionary struggle.48 Interestingly, the article was not approved by the police censorship, and only its title and the last sentence were published. The editorial board, however, did not give up, and they let it be read as a speech in parliament by a Communist MP, which meant it could be published again uncensored.49

If contraception failed, abortion was fairly widespread. Although it was prohibited by the law inherited from Austria (approved in the Czech lands in 1852),50 abortion was quite common in the interwar period in Prague, and practitioners ranged from luxurious clinics where it was performed officially as a treatment of the appendix or an inflammation of the peritoneum to backstreet abortionists. The Social Democrats and Communists protested against the law primarily by noting its “class” character. According to them, it brought harm primarily to poor women, because they could not afford good treatment and they were forced to ask for help from amateur backstreet abortionists.51 Also biological arguments were used. For instance the claim was made that too many births would weaken a woman. The Communists argued that women should not produce “slaves for the bourgeoisie” or “soldiers for imperialist wars,” and they referred, in support of their argument, to the legality of abortion in the Soviet Union, at least they did until 1933, when abortion was prohibited there.52 Interestingly, the individual right of a woman to choose (which today is perhaps the most important argument in favor of the legality of abortion) was not cited as an argument.53 The left-leaning MPs even repeatedly initiated the abolishment of abortion laws, but they were unsuccessful in their efforts. The state authorities, however, were quite tolerant in putting the law into practice. They did not actively search for cases of abortions, and they pursued charges only if they had been informed by a doctor, which was usually only the case if an amateur abortionist had endangered a woman´s health and she found herself compelled to ask for professional medical treatment. According to the health statistics, of the estimated 100,000 thousand annual abortions, only about 600 were prosecuted in Czechoslovakia.54 The common penalties ranged from a couple of weeks to six months in prison, though mothers of children generally were given milder sentences.

Many young male and female workers became parents as unmarried couples.55 The extramarital births (referred to as “illegitimate” in the public discourse at the time) were more frequent in Prague than in the rest of the country (about 13 percent of births between 1921 and 1931 in Czechoslovakia were “illegitimate,”56 whereas the figure in Prague was 22 percent). Extramarital birth rates were higher in the capitals all over Europe, because many unmarried pregnant girls from rural areas left for the city to give birth in order to avoid social stigmatization in their communities. The illegitimacy rate was somewhat higher in Prague among the working class than it was among the middle classes. It can be estimated at one-fifth of the total number of births.57 However, most children were “legitimized” by later weddings, which were very informal in these cases. Only very rarely did children grow up living together with both the unmarried parents.

Members of the working class in Prague married at a relatively young age and at a relatively high rate in comparison with members of the middle classes or the Czech Germans and Jews. They also married earlier than the rural population. A typical age at marriage of a working class girl was around 23. Members of the middle class in Prague married on average four years later. The age gap between the workers´ brides and grooms was about two years, lower than among the middle classes, where it was about seven years. This was the result of the middle class custom according to which a man first had to obtain a position and accumulate wealth before entering a marriage. A working class girl who was not married at age 25 was considered an old maid, while the public was much more tolerant of men who remained unmarried. The number of women who never married was much higher than the number of men, in part because of the tremendous casualties suffered by men in World War I. In the cohort born between 1890 and 1900, one in ten males died in the war and one in ten was permanently disabled.58 About one-fifth of the females born between 1880 and 1900 therefore remained unmarried and childless, the highest proportion since the introduction of statistical records until today.

People tend to marry people of similar social, demographic and economic backgrounds (this is known as endogamy). On the other hand, marriage is also considered a channel of upward social mobility, which leads to a certain exogamy. There are numerous discussions regarding the factors that lead to shifts in patterns of exogamy and endogamy, how to categorize different societies, and the thesis according to which there was a shift from endogamy to exogamy during the transition from pre-modern to modern society.59 Although comparisons are always difficult, the inhabitants of Prague in the period under discussion seem to have been more exogamous than the rural population. Of course, a working class girl could not hope to find her millionaire (a common plotline in penny novels and movies at the time), but there was a chance of marrying a bit higher on the social ladder. Men who worked in public service were regarded as a “good catch” for working class girls. They included policemen, subordinate officers, tram conductors, railway men, or qualified workers in the private sector (typographers or electrical workers). A working class man could hope to marry his foreman’s daughter or possibly a widow with some wealth but few other endearments.

Although class barriers were strong in Prague at that time, some marriages were sealed between two people of differing social status. The prevailing marriage pattern of socially unequal partners followed the pattern typical in other modern societies, meaning that a marriage between a bride of lower status and a groom of higher status was more acceptable than vice versa. A young woman with a working class background had somewhat higher chances of marrying someone from the middle classes than a young male worker. In 1925, 9.1 percent of the marriages were partnerships between a female worker and a male clerk, while only 1.8 percent of the marriages involved a male worker and female clerk.60 The barriers between the social classes, however, seem to have been more permeable than the barriers between the Czechs and Germans or Jews, as ethnic identity was considered more important than class identity, and members of different social classes were more likely to meet one another than people belonging to different national backgrounds were, due to a rather clear geographic line dividing ethnic Czechs and Germans.61 Interethnic marriage was almost nonexistent among workers in Prague, as Germans or Jews were not numerous in the city. Although the Prague workers and their families belonged to different Christian denominations (about half of them were baptized as Catholics, a third were atheists,62 and one-sixth was protestant), it was not considered a problem to marry a member of a different church, as the working class in the capital city was already highly secularized.

The political orientation of grooms was sometimes a big problem for the families of brides. There was a significant rift between the Communists and the rest of the community.63 Some girls were explicitly warned not to marry a Communist, and in some cases this led to a break with other family members.64 There was some rational basis for this attitude, since a Communist Party activist sometimes had to face the loss of work, and in military production there was an explicit prohibition against giving members of the Communist Party a job. In contrast, if one had a membership card for the Socialist Party (bearing since 1926 the name National Socialist Party), which dominated Prague, this could prove helpful in the search for a job in publically owned enterprises.

Working class girls were also warned not to marry an alcoholic or a man who liked to play the cards, a habit considered (along with alcohol consumption) the worst social evil.65 For example, one female who wrote a letter to the journal Hvězda on her personal troubles, expressed her appreciation of her husband, since he neither drank nor played cards.66 Consorting with prostitutes, which was particularly common among students and soldiers, was not a big issue among workers.67 All in all, in contrast with the middle classes, working class parents did not have much influence on their children’s choice of partners. The last obstacle to marriage was age. One was only allowed to marry without parental permission at the age of 21. Couples between the ages of 17 and 21 were only allowed to marry if they had the permission of their fathers or legal guardians.68

Family in the Life Course

The period under discussion was marked by the end of a demographic transition in the Czech lands. In 1880, the average woman gave birth to 4.7 children. This figure declined in 1900 to 4.1, in 1920 to 2.8 and in 1938 to 1.9. The working class people of Prague were average in this respect. The birth rate was lower than in the countryside, but higher than among the middle classes. The prevailing model among workers was a family with two or three children.69 The one-child model was not preferred due to child mortality, which was still high.70 The social surveys on the working class people of Prague revealed more nuanced views. According to a survey conducted by Marie Nečasová in the late 1920s, the average clerks’ family had two children, the average workers’ family71 had 2.8, and the average day laborers’ family had 3.8.72 Other authors have consistently confirmed that a lower social position means more children. This was also the case according to a criminological survey on prostitutes with many brothers and sisters,73 as well as a pedagogical survey on schools, according to which “neglected [pupils] who were in danger of being ruined” usually came from the largest families.74 We do not have any data on the basis of which we could compare birth rates among atheist, protestant and Catholic workers, but denominational belonging does not seem to have played a significant role, as social workers did not pay any attention to it. Although the statistics indicate a decline in fertility, even in the 1930s working class women in Prague complained that they gave birth to more children than they actually would like to have had.75

Another aspect of the demographic transition was the decline in infant mortality, which fell from 15 to 9 percent in the Czech lands in the period between 1920 and 1940.76 However, this figure indicates that even towards the end of the interwar period the death of an infant was not uncommon. Although the statistics do not offer any breakdown of infant mortality rates according to social class, the data from different districts of the city clearly show social stratification. Prosek, the district of Prague with the highest proportion of workers and the highest concentration of slums, also had the highest infant mortality rate, 23 percent in 1935, while the suburbs with the highest percentage of “independents and landlords” had rates of only about 10 percent.77 Higher infant mortality was also recorded among children born out of wedlock, whose chances of reaching adulthood were two times lower than those of children of married parents.

Even the children of working class parents who survived infancy often were in poor health according to doctors, primarily as a result of malnutrition. About half of the children at the schools in the working class districts were characterized as unhealthy. The most frequent findings were rickets, anemia, “backward body development,” “weakness,” “nerve instability” and “hypertrophied chest glands.”78

Fathers were often absent from working class families. Female mortality rates were lower, and many men had died in the war. The death of a woman in childbirth, which had been frighteningly common only a few decades earlier, became less frequent, occurring in no more than 5 out of 1,000 of births. The most common cause of death in working class families was tuberculosis, which reached its peak during the war, but steadily declined afterward. In 1914, 26 of 100 deaths in the Czech lands were caused by tuberculosis. By 1937 this proportion had declined to 9 of 100.79 Tuberculosis was truly a “malady of the proletariat,” affecting primarily young adults. According to the statistical bureau of Prague, it was the cause of one in four deaths among male workers, but only one in ten deaths among people employed in liberal professions.80 Even successful medical treatment meant a long period of time and a considerable financial burden for the family.

Two other reasons for the absence of fathers were single motherhood and divorce.81 The Austrian legislature only allowed divorces in the sense of separation (Scheidung/rozvod), but without the right to remarry. Divorce (Trennung/rozluka), meaning that the parties to the process would have the right to remarry, was rarely allowed. The Czechoslovak Republic liberalized the laws regarding divorce after 1918, making divorce (rozluka) much easier and taking the procedure out of the hands of church. Consequently, the divorce rates began to rise: In 1921 they rocketed to 4.7 percent, possibly in part because the option had only recently become available and many people who had already separated from their spouses chose to finalize their separations with divorce. Although the rise in the divorce rate slowed down soon, as of the latter half of the 1920s it began to grow again, reaching 7.9 divorces annually for every 100 marriages in 1935–1937.82 Among the working class people of Prague, divorce was by no means unheard of. However, the statistical evidence shows that divorce was less widespread among working class families than it was among the middle classes, who might have had better proficiency in the use of the law. Members of the middle classes were also better able to afford divorce, since the breakup of a household represented a less threatening economic burden for them than it did for working class families. According to the statistics, divorce was twice as frequent among the middle classes in Prague than among the workers.83

Concerning the reasons for divorce recorded by the court of justice, domestic violence was more common among workers, while adultery was more common among the members of the middle classes.84 This could mean either that adultery was actually more common among the middle classes, who had more opportunity (more leisure time, better apartment conditions), and that domestic violence was more common in the working class families, or that adultery was not as frequently perceived as grounds for divorce among workers.

The outcome of a divorce was the separation of the household and a ruling regarding alimony, which could be a big financial burden to a male worker.85 However, Nečasová noticed in her survey that in the majority of cases divorced working class fathers did not pay anything. According to her, although the court of justice declared it the duty of the father to pay alimony, in many cases the fathers did not meet this obligation and their ex-wives had no legal means of compelling them to do so.86 The impact of the great depression on divorce rates was ambivalent. On the one hand, the rise in unemployment and increasing financial uncertainties frequently led to conflicts within families, while on the other among members of the working class divorce rates declined, presumably because the financial burdens were too great.

Combining divorce and the death of a parent, one can estimate that about one-third of the school-age children of working class parents in Prague came from “incomplete” families. According to research by Stejskal, in three-fourths of the cases the father was absent because he had died. The other one-fourth were cases of unwed mothers or divorced parents.87 The relatively frequent “incompleteness” of the family is confirmed by Apetauer. According to him, about 20 percent of Prague apprentices had lost their fathers, and 10 percent had lost their mothers. In the 1930s, as World War I become a more distant memory, the ratio of deceased fathers and mothers equalized somewhat.

The death of a father created a situation of extreme difficulty for a working class family. One strategy to minimize the disastrous consequences was to move in with grandparents or take in sub-tenants, who sometimes became new partners, as one sees on the basis of the information collected by the authorities about the widows of the 46 men who died during the collapse of construction works of the new shopping mall in the city center in 1928 (street Na Poříčí), the biggest catastrophe of this sort in the interwar period in Prague. Many widows found new partners astonishingly quickly.88 In the case of the death of his wife, a husband usually preferred to turn the children over to the care of relatives or sometimes institutions than to try to combine child care with paid work.

While first marriages were based on personal preferences and sympathies among workers, a marriage after the death of partner or after a divorce was generally a way out of a difficult situation, and the expectations placed on a potential partner were much lower. In particular, children from the previous marriage were instructed by their mothers to behave respectfully in the presence of their stepfathers. Records from the 1920s indicate that mothers even pressured their children to kiss their stepfather’s hand, a practice that was no longer common at the time, or to greet him with the words “praise the lord Jesus Christ” (pochválen buď pán Ježíš Kristus).89 This greeting was already out of fashion before the First World War, and after 1918 it was abolished from the schools and other public spaces, but still was perceived by some people as more polite than the civil “Good day” (dobrý den).

Conclusion

The family-lives of the Prague workers can be interpreted in light of the different transformations at the time. These include a demographic transition (declining infant mortality rates, declining fertility, rise of divorce rates), the adoption of modern values (individualization, secularization, female emancipation, emotionalization), combined with the effects of World War I (material scarcity, high mortality), local circumstances (housing shortages), and persistent traditional patterns and values (gender inequality and family hierarchies). The crucial aspect of the everyday lives of workers’ families seems to have been material scarcity, which was particularly significant at times of economic depressions (in other words roughly half of the period under discussion), resulting often in the malnutrition of children. The welfare system still existed only in rudimentary forms, so changes in the nuclear family, such as the death of a spouse or serious illness, could have disastrous effects on the family. Although the emotional bonds were important aspects of a marriage, in order to minimize the consequences of such catastrophes emotions sometimes had to be put aside, and remarrying was not always a sentimental so much as a rational choice.90

Living standards did not improve much during the period under discussion, and real average wages grew above the pre-1914 levels only for a short period of time, in the second half of the 1920s. World War I and the subsequent economic depression had disastrous effects on every segment of society, but particularly on the urban workers. The spread of “incomplete” families and the “marriage squeeze” for females were two of its consequences. On the other hand, the foundation of the Republic brought an improvement in the living conditions of workers due to the passage of new socially conscious legislation, including the reduction of work hours and the introduction of vacations, pensions and unemployment benefits, not to mention the emancipation of women during the war.

1918 also marked a shift in the values of the generation of young workers, who seemed to bear more affinities with their middle class counterparts than their parents had. In leisure-time activities, the formation of subcultures, dating practices, pre-marital sex, and the free choice of partners, the young workers even seem to have adopted these practices more rapidly than the middle class youth. The youths were also reluctant to accept the exclusive identity as “workers,” as the register books and personal ads illustrate. Also marriages between members of different social classes probably became more common than they had been in the past. The levels of social inequality and perceptions regarding these differences nonetheless remained strong at the time, separating the social strata in terms of consumption, space or demographic behavior. In this respect Prague did not differ from other cities of Central Europe. Due to our limited knowledge of the social history of Polish and Hungarian working class families, comparisons can only be drawn with well-researched life histories of German and Austrian working class families. In this context, Prague was not unusual, differing primarily only in housing welfare policy, which was more developed in the case of Germany or Austria.

 

Archival Sources

Národní Archív České Republiky (NA ČR) [National Archive of the Czech Republic]. Ústřední výbor Komunistické strany Československa 1921–1938 [Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 1921–1938].

Národní Archív České Republiky (NA ČR) [National Archive of the Czech Republic]. Československá sociálně demokratická strana dělnická [Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Praty].

Národní Archív České Republiky (NA ČR) [National Archive of the Czech Republic]. Společnost pro potírání chorob pohlavních [The Society for the Fight on the Venereal Diseases].

Archív Hlavního Města Prahy (AHMP) [Archive of Capital of Prague]. Kancelář primátora [The Office of Mayor].

Archív Hlavního Města Prahy (AHMP) [Archive of Capital of Prague]. Rada hlavního města Prahy [Council of the Capital].

Archív Hlavního Města Prahy (AHMP) [Archive of Capital of Prague]. Sbírka matrik [Collection of Register Books].

Archív Národního Technického Muzea (ANTM) [Archive of National Museum of Science] Sbírka vzpomínek a rukopisů [The Collection of Memoires and Manuscripts].

Všeodborový Archív (VA) [All Unions’Archive]. Odborové sdružení Československé [The Union’s Association of Czechoslovakia].

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