The rapid industrialisation of Brno, the population growth in its suburbs in the second half of the 19th century, and the associated change in lifestyle brought about an increase in female factory work. According to the middle-class ideals of the time, which paradoxically also governed the working class, this was not socially acceptable – even women from the lower classes were expected by their partners to focus primarily on raising their children. In the working-class environment, however, it was impossible to do without women's earnings – the ideals of a family where the man earns and the woman takes care of the children were pragmatically set aside – entire industries, typically textiles and food processing, could not function without women's labor. As a rule, women performed unskilled, less well-paid, and therefore less prestigious professions, without entitlement to things that are taken for granted today – health insurance, decent maternity leave, occupational safety, etc.
The Juliánov workers' house is now one of the few reminders of the great workers' movement in Brno. These multifunctional houses, usually built in areas where workers lived, provided space for discussion, organisation, education and, among other things, joint exercise. Workers' houses were naturally also places where working women gathered and organised themselves.
Compared to the rest of Austria-Hungary, employed women in Brno formed independent associations very early on, as early as the 1870s, or joined professional and trade union workers' associations, which aimed to provide material support for their members, for example in the event of illness or dismissal from work. At first, they joined existing associations with a male membership base, and later they founded women's associations. Among the first to accept women as members was, for example, the Workers' Educational Association, from which the Women Workers' Educational Association split off in 1872, only to cease to exist three years later. In the 1870s, female membership was also brought together by the Professional Association of Manufactory Workers, and in the following decade, the Handicraft Association and the First General Workers' Health and Disability Fund continued this activity. Between 1888 and 1895, the Union of Women Workers in the Wool Industry, a trade union association for female textile workers in Brno, was active in Brno. Its officials also sponsored the publication of Ženský list (Women's Journal), the first Czech socialist periodical for female workers in the Czech lands, whose editorial office later moved from Brno to Prague. Between 1889 and 1893, the Association for the Further Education of Women was established in parallel, bringing together German socialist women from Brno and the surrounding area. Both associations ceased to exist for personnel, financial, and other reasons, including the generally weak position of women within the labor movement.
The construction of the Workers' House in Juliánov at the end of the 1890s thus found the women's labour movement in a phase of transitional decline, caused by an ideological dispute over whether women should organise themselves in separate workers' associations and "have their own voice," or become members of gender-mixed workers' associations, learning from their male colleagues but at the same time merely supporting them. In December 1897, the first conference of working women in Moravia and Silesia was convened in the newly built Workers' House, which resulted in a proposal to revive separate women's structures within the Social Democratic Party. These were represented in Brno by the newly established Union of Women and Girls, which, despite its inconspicuous name, politically organised women's workers' associations in the Brno region and, before 1914, also represented the executive of the women's socialist organisation for the whole of Moravia and Silesia, to which the individual regional women's secretariats were subordinate. The Workers' House was the natural base for this headquarters.
Hana Krutílková, Moravské zemské muzeum
