Female Perspectives on Living, Learning and Working

Settlement Siemensstraße is a big council housing estate in peripheral Vienna, located in the district Floridsdorf that was built within the realm of the so called Schnellbauprogramm (Rapid Building Programme) following World War II. The settlement is surrounded by multiple industrial sites and therefore the two social spheres of Housing/Living and Working are closely intertwined until today, even if the industry has drifted since the 1970ies. Julia Edthofer examines womens perspectives on the relation of paid work and care work in the post-industrial context Siemensstraße. The biographical research project builds on a biographical contemporary witness-project in the settlement Siemensstraße, which showed clearly that male participants remembered a straight path from childhood to youth into working life and positively defined themselves as former blue-collar workers in well-earned retirement. Female interviewees, on the other hand, do not take up such a positive self-identification. Since years, biographical research points to this lack of narratives regarding womens working biographies. This self- perception is in stark contrast to the fact that nearly all female contemporary witnesses had completed an apprenticeship and at times even worked in two jobs parallel. The core question of the research project asks for the potential contribution of council housingunderstood as social urban infrastructureto womens chances to combine job and care work. In order to answer that question, the research area has been extended and now includes five different council estates: The settlements Siemensstraße, Justgasse, Ruthnergasse, Dr. Franz-Koch-Hof and Heinz-Nittel-Hof. These council estates reflect four different planning periods, ranging from the 1950ies until the 1980ies. The primary data corpus consists of biographical in-depth interviews with mothers and daughters at the age of 65+ years and 35+ years. Special focus is given to the question, if the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist working conditions, which reflects clearly in the vanishment of the local industry, can also be traced within the intergenerationally differing working biographies of the interviewees.