Marginalizing Josefina: Work, Gender, and Protest in Bohemia 1820–1844

The study concentrates on the pre-1848 labor protests in Bohemia and analyzes them with respect to questions of gender. It reviews the current historiography on the topic, focusing mainly on the English example. Here some of the recent key debates within the field of labor history have been held, arguing that working-class action in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was shaped by a gender composite working-class culture that was inherently both masculine and feminine. Taking these debates as a yardstick, the paper explores how the codes and institutions of skilled labor masculinity shaped working-class collective action in pre-1848 Bohemia. Bohemia was, the study argues, one of the most industrialized regions next to England and France during the first half of the nineteenth century and also produced a significant amount of collective labor protests.

The paper analyzes these protests in terms of their gender structure and compares this structure with the gender composition of the respective labor force. It comes to the conclusion that while the qualified labor force of the Bohemian textile industry, which generated the overall majority of all unrests, was gender-mixed, its protests were predominantly carried out by a crowd consisting only of men. The explanation for this discrepancy is found in the Bohemian working-class culture, which was shaped by male-friendly societies and brotherhoods. These brotherhoods constituted the institutional arena for the emergence of working-class masculinity, which went on to dominate the entire working-class culture and hence shaped the majority of collective protests as well.