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Hilda Weiss AI simulator
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Hilda Weiss AI simulator
(@Hilda Weiss_simulator)
Hilda Weiss
Hilda Weiss (29 August 1900 – 29 May 1981; alternatively Hilde Weiss, Hilde Rigaudias-Weiss, Hilda Weiss Parker, Hilde Weiß) was a sociologist, trade unionist and socialist. She lived in Germany until 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, when she escaped to France. In 1939, she emigrated to the United States and lived there until her death in 1981.
Weiss was one of the first doctoral students at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, joining in 1924. She wrote her thesis on a comparison of the Zeiss optical factory, based on her personal experiences working there, and the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Her main interest was in the differential impact of the ideologies of Ernst Karl Abbe, the founder of Zeiss, and Henry Ford.
She describes the challenges of working at Zeiss in her autobiography, where she was the only woman in her department. Initially the men there harassed her:
They told obscene jokes and laughed so maliciously when I could not understand them. But after a little while they found out that I was a member of the union. Then they no longer treated me as a little girl, but talked about labor conditions and union meetings.
In 1930, Erich Fromm was given responsibility for directing a large empirical survey of workers' conditions in Germany. The survey was "largely carried out" by Weiss and involved distributing questionnaires to 3,300 participants. It is likely that Weiss was influenced by a questionnaire developed by Karl Marx in 1880 which she uncovered whilst working in an archive. Friedman notes that:
Hilde Weiss turned out to be the most valued associate in the undertaking; she was charged with the distribution of the questionnaire and taking the measures necessary to guarantee a high return rate from the respondents. Weiss had studied earlier German survey research ventures, especially Max Weber’s pioneering protocols to solicit data about the social psychology and feelings of German workers. She familiarized Fromm with Weberian survey research approaches.
Smith argues that:
Hilde Weiss is one of the truly neglected figures in the history of the Frankfurt School. But that neglect is inversely proportional to her importance. Weiss was in many ways the principal architect of the workers’ survey, which built on work she had already completed in industrial sociology and laid the foundation for research she would later conduct on Marx and the history of working-class surveys and families. Politically, Weiss was among the most active and astute members of the Institute, and she was better educated in Marxian theory, sociology, and labor studies than Fromm, Horkheimer, or Adorno. She was intimately familiar with trade unions and she had direct, disillusioning experiences of both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.
Hilda Weiss
Hilda Weiss (29 August 1900 – 29 May 1981; alternatively Hilde Weiss, Hilde Rigaudias-Weiss, Hilda Weiss Parker, Hilde Weiß) was a sociologist, trade unionist and socialist. She lived in Germany until 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, when she escaped to France. In 1939, she emigrated to the United States and lived there until her death in 1981.
Weiss was one of the first doctoral students at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, joining in 1924. She wrote her thesis on a comparison of the Zeiss optical factory, based on her personal experiences working there, and the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Her main interest was in the differential impact of the ideologies of Ernst Karl Abbe, the founder of Zeiss, and Henry Ford.
She describes the challenges of working at Zeiss in her autobiography, where she was the only woman in her department. Initially the men there harassed her:
They told obscene jokes and laughed so maliciously when I could not understand them. But after a little while they found out that I was a member of the union. Then they no longer treated me as a little girl, but talked about labor conditions and union meetings.
In 1930, Erich Fromm was given responsibility for directing a large empirical survey of workers' conditions in Germany. The survey was "largely carried out" by Weiss and involved distributing questionnaires to 3,300 participants. It is likely that Weiss was influenced by a questionnaire developed by Karl Marx in 1880 which she uncovered whilst working in an archive. Friedman notes that:
Hilde Weiss turned out to be the most valued associate in the undertaking; she was charged with the distribution of the questionnaire and taking the measures necessary to guarantee a high return rate from the respondents. Weiss had studied earlier German survey research ventures, especially Max Weber’s pioneering protocols to solicit data about the social psychology and feelings of German workers. She familiarized Fromm with Weberian survey research approaches.
Smith argues that:
Hilde Weiss is one of the truly neglected figures in the history of the Frankfurt School. But that neglect is inversely proportional to her importance. Weiss was in many ways the principal architect of the workers’ survey, which built on work she had already completed in industrial sociology and laid the foundation for research she would later conduct on Marx and the history of working-class surveys and families. Politically, Weiss was among the most active and astute members of the Institute, and she was better educated in Marxian theory, sociology, and labor studies than Fromm, Horkheimer, or Adorno. She was intimately familiar with trade unions and she had direct, disillusioning experiences of both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.