[2] At the age of 13, Baader moved with her family to Berlin and was employed at a factory working for 12 hours a day as a manual worker, later a seamstress.

[3] In 1885, Ottilie Baader was one of the founders of the "Association of Berlin Mantle Sewers", the first trade union organization for women in Germany; for this activity, she received her first sentence in prison, which she fortunately avoided after Friedrich III issued a general amnesty on his accession to the throne in 1888.

[4] In 1891, Baader was a member of the board of the workers' education school, opened on the initiative of Wilhelm Liebknecht.

[2] According to the Prussian Laws of Association women were not allowed to be members of political organizations until 1908, but the Social Democratic Party circumvented it through a structure of contact persons or agents (Vertrauenspersonen) and agitation committees (Agitationskommissionen).

[2] In 1921, Baader published her autobiography Ein Steiniger Weg in which she told how she had become a socialist and what her accomplishments in the movement were.

Her book became one of the dozens of German working-class life narratives that appeared during the growth of socialism from the early 1890s through the 1920s.