I am reading a book!

Entitled Autobiography of a Working-Class Woman, the autobiography of Adelheid Popp. She was a labor organizer in Inzerdorf in the 1890s, and her book is freaking interesting and has been all I've really done today.

But the thing I like the most that I have learned is that Barbara Ehrenreich (the author of Nickled and Dimed) had an interesting predecessor in Paul Goehre, who posed as a factory worker for three months in 1891 and wrote what looks to be kind of an insightful study.

Also that we keep arguing about the same things as a society, don't we?

I am on the lookout for any more information about Adelheid Popp. She was a for-real socialist (she apparently thought antisemitism was freaking stupid, among other things) and she died in 1939 in Vienna, so ... I am curious. Though she was also seventy years old in 1939.

I am also having curious thoughts about the nature of the conversion experience - I have an unlovely obsession with cult survivor blogs lately, and I'm starting to wonder if it's ever reasonable to trust a sudden sense of rightness and everything-making-sense-ness. Because I sure recognize some of my adolescent fervor in Adelheid Popp's accounting of suddenly realizing socialism is the answer (she was by all accounts nineteen at the time), but it's not like that means that she was wrong about the circumstances of women factory workers in 1895 Vienna.

I am aware that my public posts rarely veer quite so fast into serious business, but hey, the life of the mind and all that.