Between Care Work and Factory Work: Raising Awareness of Alienation in West and East German Worker Photography of the 1970s

As a central concept of Western Marxist theory, alienation is conceived from the perspective of the male industrial worker, while the predominantly female care worker was given little consideration. The alienation of female workers was first thematized in the women’s movement of the 1970s and even became the focus of both West and East German photography that visualized women as factory and care workers. This essay examines the staging of female workers’ alienation in these images from the perspective of materialist feminism. Further, a critique of representation and analysis of the photographs in their various contexts demonstrate how the (women) workers themselves employed the photographs to raise social awareness of their condition.