Het Boschstraatkwartier in Maastricht in de eerste decennia van de twintigste eeuw: een socialistisch (vrouwen)bolwerk

Maastricht was an early stronghold of socialism in the Netherlands from the late 1880s. In this article the local implantation of the Dutch Social Democratic Labour Party (sdap) is analysed by research into the electoral support for and membership of the party in each electoral district in 1920. Both were highly concentrated in a neighbourhood called 'Boschstraatkwartier', close to the glass- and earthenware factories of Regout ('De Sphinx'). It is argued that there was a close relationship between the experience of working at Regout in an earlier period and electoral support for the sdap in 1920. By linking individual data of party members with data from the personal files in the archives of the company, this is corroborated for the membership. Even more interesting, female members in this neighbourhood were highly overrepresented. I argue that this can be explained by the high proportion of female workers employed by Regout, and cite evidence of particular female militancy.