Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (History of Warfare)

Aftermaths of War

History of Warfare Editors

Kelly DeVries Loyola College Maryland

John France University of Wales Swansea

Michael S. Neiberg University of Southern Mississippi

Frederick Schneid High Point University North Carolina

VOLUME 63

Aftermaths of War Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923

Edited by

Ingrid Sharp Matthew Stibbe

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

Cover illustration: ‘Hunger—For three years America has fought starvation in Belgium. Will you eat less wheat, meat, fats and sugar that we may still send food in ship loads?’ by Henry Raleigh, 1880-1945. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-10330 (color film copy transparency) // LC-USZC2-562 (color film copy slide), Call Number: POS—US .R35, no. 1 (C size) [P&P] (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719438) With kind permission of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyrights holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aftermaths of war : women’s movements and female activists, 1918-1923 / edited by Ingrid Sharp, Matthew Stibbe. â•…â•… p. cm. — (History of warfare, ISSN 1385-7827 ; v. 63) â•… Includes index. â•… ISBN 978-90-04-19172-3 (hardback : alk. paper) ╇ 1. Feminism—Europe—History—20th century. 2. Women political activists— Europe—History—20th century. 3. World War, 1914-1918—Social aspects—Europe. I. Sharp, Ingrid. II. Stibbe, Matthew. III. Title. â•… HQ1587.A34 2011 â•… 305.42094’09042—dc22

2010050340

ISSN 1385-7827 ISBN 978 90 04 19172 3 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

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Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix List of Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Introduction: Women’s Movements and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918-1923 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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part one

commemoration, remembering, remobilisation The aftermaths of defeat: the fallen, the catastrophe, and the public response of women to the end of the First World War in Bulgaria Nikolai Vukov. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .â•… 29 The women’s suffrage campaign in Italy in 1919 and Voce nuova (“New Voice”): Corporatism, nationalism and the struggle for political rights Emma Schiavon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .â•… 49 Raps across the knuckles: The extension of war culture by radical nationalist women journalists in post-1918 Germany Christiane Streubel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .â•… 69 The Rhineland Horror campaign and the aftermath of war Erika Kuhlman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .â•… 89

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contents part two

the renegotiation of gender roles From “Free Love” to Married Love: Gender politics, Marie Stopes, and middlebrow fiction by women in the early nineteen twenties Ann Rea. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 The disappearing surplus: the spinster in the post-war debate in Weimar Germany, 1918-1920 Ingrid Sharp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 After the vote was won. The fate of the women’s suffrage movement in Russia after the October Revolution: individuals, ideas and deeds Olga Shnyrova.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Women activists in Albania following independence and World War I Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 part three

women’s suffrage and political rights A bitter-sweet victory: Feminisms in France (1918-1923) Christine Bard.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Sisters and Comrades. Women’s movements and the “Austrian Revolution”: Gender in insurrection, the Räte movement, parties and parliament Gabriella Hauch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Who represents Hungarian women? The demise of the liberal bourgeois women’s rights movement and the rise of the rightwing women’s movement in the aftermath of World War I Judith Szapor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

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Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists: the Polish women’s movement after World War I Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Political and public aspects of the activity of the Lithuanian women’s movement, 1918-1923 Virginija Jurėnienė. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 part four

reconstructing communities/ visions of peace Diverse constructions: Feminist and conservative women’s movements and their contribution to the (re-)construction of gender relations in Hungary after the First World War Judit Acsády . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Elsa Brändström and the reintegration of returning prisoners of war and their families in post-war Germany and Austria Matthew Stibbe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 “We stand on the threshold of a new age”: Alice Masaryková, the Czechoslovak Red Cross, and the building of a new Europe Bruce R.╯Berglund. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 “Having Seen Enough”: Eleanor Franklin Egan and the journalism of Great War displacement David Hudson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Britain in the Balkans: the response of the Scottish Women’s Hospital Units Jill Liddington. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the LHRI at the University of Leeds and the Humanities Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University for their generous support of the conference at the University of Leeds in September 2008, upon which this volume is based, and the followup work editorial workshop, which took place at the Academy of Sciences in Budapest in April 2009. They are also grateful to those who attended the Budapest workshop: David Hudson, Olga Shnyrova and Nikolai Vukov, and in particular to Judit Acsády who organised and hosted this event. Finally, they appreciate the kind advice and encouragement of Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder at Brill. Ingrid Sharp would also like to thank her co-editor, Matthew Stibbe, for his professionalism and her family, Dorron, Søren, Frederike and Ferdinand for their help and support. Matthew Stibbe would also like to thank Sam, Nicholas and Hannah. And Ingrid, of course. Ingrid Sharp Matthew Stibbe May 2010

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list of abbreviations

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List of Abbreviations Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (General German Women’s Association, founded 1865) AÖFV Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein (General AusÂ� trian Women’s Association, founded 1893) BCP Balgarska Komunisticheska Partiya (Bulgarian Communist Party, founded 1919) BDF Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Associations, founded 1894) BeöK Bundesvereinigung der ehemaligen österreichischen KriegsÂ� gefangenen (Federal Association of former Austrian PrisonÂ� ers of War, founded 1924) Confédération Générale du Travail (General Federation of CGT Labour, France, founded 1895) CNDI Consiglio nazionale delle donne italiane (National Council of Italian Women, founded 1903) CSP Christlichsoziale Partei (Christian Social Party, founded in Austria, 1893) DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party, founded 1918) DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party, founded 1918) Feministák Egyesülete (Hungarian Association of Feminists, FE founded 1904) FFC Fight the Famine Council (founded in the UK, 1919) GDVP Großdeutsche Volkspartei (Greater German People’s Party, founded in Austria, 1920) ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross (founded in Geneva, 1863) International Council of Women (founded in the USA, ICW 1888) ICWPP International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (founded 1915) IWSA International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (founded 1904) KFO Katholische Frauenorganisation (Catholic Women’s Organisation, founded in Austria, 1906) ADF

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list of abbreviations

KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party, founded 1918) KPÖ Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (Austrian Communist Party, founded 1918) KSCS Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (official name for Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1929) LCWA Lietuvos katalikių moterų sąjunga (Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association, founded 1908) LWU Lietuvos moterų sąjunga (Lithuanian Women’s Union, founded 1905) MANSZ Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége (National AssoÂ� ciation of Hungarian Women, founded 1919) NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (founded in the USA, 1909) NEP New Economic Policy (Soviet Russia, 1921) NOK Narodowa Organizacja Kobiet (National Organisation of Women, founded Poland, 1918) NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party – the Nazi Party, founded in Munich, 1919) NUSEC National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (founded in the UK, 1918/19) NUWSS National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (founded in the UK, 1897) OLK Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (Voluntary Women’s Legion, founded in Poland, 1918/19) PCF Parti communiste français (French Communist Party, foundÂ�ed 1920) POWs Prisoners of War ReK Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener (Reich AssoÂ�Â�ciation of Former Prisoners of War, Germany, founded 1919) RLWE Russian League for Women’s Equality (founded 1907) RMAS Russian Mutual Aid Society (founded 1895) RUWE All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality (founded 1905) SCF Save the Children Fund (founded in the UK, 1919) SDAP Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (Social Democratic Labour Party, founded in Austria, 1889) SFIO Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (French SociaÂ�list Party, founded 1905)

list of abbreviations

xiii

SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party, founded 1875) STIs Sexually Transmitted Infections SWH The Scottish Women’s Hospitals (founded in the UK, 1914) UFN Unione Femminile Nazionale (Italian National Women’s Union, founded 1899) USPD Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (InÂ�dependent German Social Democratic Party, founded 1917) Voluntary Aid Detachment (founded in the UK, 1909) VAD Vereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener Deutschlands VeK (AssoÂ�ciation of former German Prisoners of War, founded 1925) Women’s Freedom League (founded in the UK, 1907) WFL WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (founded 1919) WPP Women’s Progressive Party (Russia) WSPU Women’s Social and Political Union (founded in the UK, 1903) ZLP Związek Legionistek Polskich (Association of Polish Women Legionaries, founded 1926)

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list of abbreviations

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List of Illustrations 1. Richard Ziegler, Junge Witwe (Das Zweite Ich), 1920

149

2. The grave of Anna Shabanova in St. Petersburg

173

3. The wife of the Hungarian governor, Miklós Horthy, with a group of women weavers at Buda Castle

313

4. General meeting of the Hungarian Association of Feminists, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their foundation in Budapest

320

5. Front cover of the Hungarian journal, Nők Lapja, 15 March 1916

321

6. Elsa Brändström, 1929

336

7. Alice Masaryková, 1921

356

8. Eleanor Franklin Egan, 29 June 1918

376

9. The eastern portion of Eleanor Franklin Egan’s European tour in 1919

377

10. Dr Katherine Macphail dances the kolo in wartime Serbia

396

11. Map of wartime Serbia, 1915-1918

398

12. Haverfield Orphanage at Bajina Basta, c.1919

410

13. Front cover of Daylight in a Dream, by E. M.╯Butler (1951) 416

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list of contributors

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List of Contributors Judit Acsády is a sociologist, employed by the Sociology Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She completed her studies at ELTE University, Budapest, in Sociology, English and Hungarian, attending postgraduate courses in Paris and Amsterdam. She was awarded her Ph.D on “Emancipation and Identity” in 2005. Her research includes the history of Hungarian feminism, the history of debates on the woman question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the construction of views on emancipation, and gender relations after the transition. She has published widely in these areas in Hungarian and in English, and has contributed to the work of several international research teams. She was a contributor to The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. Alison S.╯Fell and Ingrid Sharp (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She is also the mother of a twelve-year old boy, Áron. Christine Bard is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Angers. She is a specialist in the political, social and cultural history of women, feminism and anti-feminism, and her many publications in this area include Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914-1940 (Fayard, 1995); Les Garçonnes. Modes et fantasmes des Années folles (Flammarion, 1998); and Les Femmes dans la société française au 20e siècle (A.╯Colin, 2001). More recently she has published Ce que soulève la jupe (Autrement, 2010); and Une histoire politique du pantalon (Seuil, 2010). She is president of the association Archives du féminisme, coordinator of the virtual museum Musea, and editor-in-chief of the series Archives du féminisme at the Presses universitaires de Rennes. Bruce Berglund is Associate Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A specialist in East Central European history, he has published articles on the Czechoslovak exile community in Britain during World War II, turn-of-the-century religious art in the region, and the architecture of Prague Castle. He is co-editor, with Brian Porter-Szűcs, of the volume Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe (Central European University Press, 2010).

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list of contributors

Gabriella Hauch is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria and from September 2011 she will be Professor of Modern History/Women’s and Gender History at the University of Vienna. She has written widely on Europe and Austria since the eighteenth century and is a specialist in the political, social and cultural history of transformation of societies, gender relations and women’s organisations. Her publications in the area of the First World War period include Vom Frauenstandpunkt aus. Frauen im Parlament 1919-1933 (Döcker 1996); and more recently Frauen bewegen Politik. Österreich 1848-1938 (Studienverlag, 2009). She is co-editor of the ÖsterÂ�reichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (ÖZG). David Hudson is Associate Professor of English at Hamline UniÂ� versity in St. Paul, Minnesota where he teaches literature and jourÂ� nalism. He has written on soldier narrative and its relation to the canon of First World War literature. His recent work examines the intersections between journalism, propaganda, and literary and personal responses to the war, including an earlier article on the pioneering journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan: “Writing ‘Mesopot’: Eleanor Franklin Egan on the River to Baghdad, 1917” (Philological Papers, 2006). Virginija Jurėnienė is Associate Professor of History in the DeÂ�partÂ� ment of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Vilniaus University Kaunas, Lithuania. In 2004 she received her Doctorate in humaniÂ�ties (history) for the Ph.D thesis “The Lithuanian women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century”. Her research interests include the Lithuanian women’s movement, women’s political and social activities, and cultural representations of women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Erika Kuhlman is Associate Professor of History and director of Women Studies at Idaho State University. She is author of Petticoats and White Feathers (Greenwood, 1997) and Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender, and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her current book, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War, is under contract at New York University Press.

list of contributors

xix

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska is Assistant Professor at the American Studies Centre, University of Warsaw. She does research on women’s history, the social history of medicine, birth control and motherhood, and women’s movements in Poland and the United States. Her most recent publications include Zdrowe matki, chciane dzieci. Ruch konÂ� troli urodzeń w stanie Illinois, 1923-1941 (Well Mothers, Wanted Babies. The Birth Control Movement in the State of Illinois, 1923-1941) (NeriÂ�ton, 2010); and “From ‘Drop of Milk’ to ‘Schools for Mothers’ – Infant Care and Visions of Medical Motherhood in the Early 20th Century Polish Part of the Habsburg Empire,” in Medicine Within and Between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, ed. D. T.╯Sechel (Vienna, 2010). Jill Liddington is co-author of One Hand Tied Behind Us (Virago 1978, 2000) which quickly became a suffrage classic. Her history of Greenham won the 1990 Fawcett Book Prize. She is Honorary Research Fellow at Leeds University, and her most recent book, Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote (Virago, 2006) was shortlisted for the 2008 Portico Book Prize. In the summer of 2008, she retraced the steps of the American Unit – from Thessaloniki across to Ostravo, then up to Skopje and Vranje. Fatmira Musaj is Research Professor at the Institute of History in the Centre for the Study of Albanology, Tirana. Her field is the history of modern Albania, with the inter-war period as her speciality. Besides numerous articles, she has published the monographs Isa Boletini, 1864-1916 (Albanian Academy of Sciences, 1987) and Gruaja në Shqipëri 1912-1939 (Women in Albania 1912-1939) (Albanian AcaÂ� demy of Sciences, 2002). Her most recent book, Republika Shqiptare, 1925-1928, is in press. Beryl Nicholson is a sociologist and independent scholar. After doing research on North Norway and on population for many years, she has turned her attention to Albanian society in both the present and the period from the state’s foundation in 1912 to the Second World War. Her wide-ranging publications include a contribution to La violenza contro i civili durante la Grande guerra. Deportati, profughi, internati, ed. Bruna Bianchi (Unicopli, 2006), and many journal articles.

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list of contributors

Ann Rea is originally from Northern Ireland and works on twentiethcentury English Literature and Irish Literature, having obtained a Ph.D in English Literature from Rutgers University, New Jersey. A Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, PennÂ� sylvania, she is co-organiser of a forthcoming series of MiddleÂ�brow Monographs, is Co-President of the Space Between Society for the Study of Literature and Culture from 1914-1945, and is currently working on various projects that focus on Eilis Dillon’s fiction for adolescents, discussions of Marie Stopes’s ideas about marriage and sexuality in middlebrow fiction, and the spy fiction of John Le Carré, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. Emma Schiavon has a Ph.D in contemporary history, with a thesis on interventionist feminists in Italy during the First World War. She has focused in particular on the relationship between women, war and citizenship in different contexts and periods and has published articles and essays on this topic in Italia contemporanea, Passato e presente, Genesis, and DWF.╯She collaborates with the Cirsde (Research Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies of the University of Turin). Ingrid Sharp is Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds. She has published widely on gender relations at various stages in German history, and is co-editor with Jane Jordan of Diseases of the Body Politic: Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns (Routledge, 2003). In 2005 and 2008, she coorganised, with Alison Fell and Matthew Stibbe, two international conferences on the response of women’s organisations and female activists to the First World War and its aftermath. She is co-editor with Alison Fell of The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives 1914-19 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Olga Shnyrova is Associate Professor of History at the Ivanovo State University and the director of its research subdivision, Centre for Gender Studies. She teaches courses on Contemporary History, European Studies and Gender Studies and does research on women’s history and women’s movements in Russia and Great Britain. She was contributor to Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship – International PerÂ� spectives on Parliamentary Reforms, eds. Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi and Pirjo Markkola (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives,

list of contributors

xxi

1914-19, eds. Alison S.╯Fell and Ingrid Sharp (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and to the Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Fransiska de Haan and Krassimira Daskalova (Central European University Press, Budapest, 2006). She was also the editor of the Russian translation of Richard Stites’ book The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism 1860-1930 (ROSSPEN, 2004) and one of the translators into Russian of History of Women in the West (Aletheia, 2007-) Matthew Stibbe is Professor of Modern European History at Sheffield Hallam University. He was a contributor to The Women’s Movement in Wartime: InterÂ�national Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. Alison S.╯Fell and Ingrid Sharp (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and has written widely on Germany and Austria during the First World War period. His most recent publications in this field include British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914-18 (Manchester University Press, 2008); GerÂ�many, 1914-1933: Politics, Society and Culture (Pearson, 2010); and an edited book, Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration in Europe During the First World War (Routledge, 2009). He is also co-editor, with Kevin McDermott, of two volumes of essays on post-1945 Eastern Europe: Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (Berg, 2006); and Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression (Manchester University Press, 2010). Christiane Streubel is Reader in Modern History at the WestÂ� fälische-Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany. She specialises in the history of German right-wing women and in media discourses and visualisations of old age in postmodern times. Recent publications include Radikale Nationalistinnen: Agitation und Programmatik rechter Frauen in der Weimarer Republik (Campus Verlag, 2006), and Lenore Kühn (1878-1955): Neue Nationalistin und verspätete BildungsÂ� bürgerin (trafo, 2007). She is also co-editor, with Eva Schoeck-QuinÂ� teros, of ‘Ihrem Volk verantwortlich’. Frauen der politischen Rechten (1890â•‚1933): Organisationen – Agitationen – Ideologien (trafo, 2007), and with H.╯Hartung, D.╯Reinmuth and A.╯Uhlmann, of Graue Theorie: Die Kategorien Alter und Geschlecht im kulturellen Diskurs (Böhlau Verlag, 2007).

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list of contributors

Judith Szapor is Faculty Lecturer at the Department of History of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She has written on the HunÂ� garian women’s movements, including the Hungarian chapter in Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A EuroÂ�Â�pean Perspective, eds. B.╯Pietrow-Ennker and S.╯Paletschek (StanÂ� ford University Press, 2004). Recently, she published The Hungarian Pocahontas: The Life and Times of Laura Polanyi Stricker, 1882-1959 (East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2005) and, with Maura Hametz and Andrea Pető, edited the volume Tradition Unchained: Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe From the Late Nineteenth Century, forthcoming in 2010 at the University of Ottawa Press. Nikolai Vukov is Research Associate at the Institute of Folklore in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was a contributor to The Burden of Remembering: Recollections and Representations of the Twentieth Century, eds. E.╯Kõresaar, E.╯Lauk and K.╯Kuutma (Finnish Literary Society, 2009); and Neue Staaten – neue Bilder? Visuelle Kultur im Dienst staatlicher Selbstdarstellung in Zentral- und Osteuropa seit 1918, eds. A.╯Bartetzky, M.╯Dmitrieva and S.╯Troebst (Böhlau Verlag, 2005), among other volumes. He has written extensively on monuments, death and commemorations in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Currently he is a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, developing a project on reconceptualisations of the “recent past” following major upheavals in modern Bulgaria.

introduction

1

Introduction: Women’s Movements and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918-1923 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe* In November 1918, when an armistice ending the First World War was signed on the western front, Europe had experienced almost four and a half years of continuous fighting (six years if we factor in the two Balkan wars of 1912-13). The victory of the Allies and the defeat of the Central Powers had extremely important and lasting political consequences, notably the collapse of the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires and the redrawing of international frontiers in much of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Historic nations which had previously been swallowed up by more powerful neighbours, such as Poland and Lithuania, were revived, while entirely new states, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were created on the basis of supposed common ethnicity and linguistic heritage.1 Yet in many ways the war did not end neatly on 11 November 1918. For one thing, the deliberate exclusion of Germany, Austria and Hungary from subsequent peace talks, combined with Allied intervention in the Russian civil war of 1918 to 1920 meant that wartime conditions continued in central and eastern Europe for considerably longer than in the west. For another thing, the western Allies themselves soon fell out over the details of the Versailles peace settlement, culminating in the refusal of the United States Senate in March 1920 to ratify a treaty which the American President Woodrow Wilson had himself helped to negotiate. Italy too was left wholly unsatisfied, not least by what it considered to be the inadequate territorial rewards it was offered, especially in the Adriatic. Outside Europe, Britain and France were able to agree on an imperialist carve up of former Turkish-held territories in the Middle East, but even here problems remained – not least the failure to satisfy the demands of Arab nationalists for independence and of the world *╇ We would like to thank all our contributors for their critical feedback on earlier drafts of this introduction. 1 ╇ Hobsbawm (1994), p.╯33.

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ingrid sharp and matthew stibbe

Zionist movement for a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine. The end of the war offered no solutions to these pressing international questions.2 On top of this came the social and human costs of war, which continued to be felt long after the guns had fallen silent. Close to nine million soldiers and six million civilians were killed, and twenty million or so men were maimed or injured, some of them permanently.3 Quite apart from the war dead and war wounded, the November 1918 armistice did little to ensure the safe repatriation of hundreds of thousands of POWs, civilian internees, forced labourers and refugees who had been uprooted from their homes and families during the course of the fighting.4 The demobilisation of millions of troops was itself a mammoth task, causing fears of mass unemployment, a crime wave of unprecedented proportions, or even revolution on the Russian model. And finally, the war had brought hunger, disease and civilian casualties on a grand scale, particularly, but not only in territories which continued to be subject to Allied economic blockade until July 1919. The number of Germans who succumbed to malnutrition during and immediately after the war is estimated at between 478,500 and 763,000, while the Spanish ‘flu pandemic of 1918/19 caused up to 40 million deaths globally, including 200,000 in France, 112,000 in Britain, and 187,000 in Germany.5 In many ways, then, the urgency of immediate need eclipsed any possible social and political gains from the war, such as the extension of suffrage (including female suffrage in some countries); the introduction of more democratic structures; increased state concern for the welfare of populations; and the removal of authoritarian regimes. Or as Richard Bessel puts it, the years after 1918 were “years of upheaval and disorder, of unnatural disruption which had been set in motion by the great calamity of the First World War… Order had been left behind together with ‘peace’ in 1914”.6 The border between war and peace was much more porous in central and eastern Europe than it was in the west.7 In addition to the Russian civil war, other conflicts such as the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918-19, the Hungarian-Romanian war of 1919, the Polish-Soviet war ╇ MacMillan (2003). ╇Kramer (2007), p.╯251. 4 ╇See the various essays in Stibbe (2009). 5 ╇Kramer (2007), pp.╯153–4; Stibbe (2010), p.╯43; Dallas (2000), pp.╯198–9. 6 ╇Bessel (1993), p.╯283. 7 ╇ Winter (2010), p.╯256. 2 3

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of 1920-21 and the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, threatened the stability of the entire region. The new borders were contested in many places, such as between Slovakia and Hungary, Hungary and Romania, Slovenia and Austrian Styria, Polish Silesia and Czech Silesia, Poland and Lithuania.8 Ethnic minorities, “an object of suspicion at home and of desire from their co-nationals abroad”, were barely protected under the new treaties; worst affected were the several million Germans and Hungarians living in post-war Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania.9 In 1918/19 radical socialist revolution, followed by violent counterrevolution, came to the streets of Berlin, Munich and Budapest, while in Upper Silesia, a territory disputed between Germany and Poland, the League of Nations had to intervene and impose a partition in 1921 after a plebiscite failed to halt clashes between local armed groups.10 Further east, up to two million Russians were rendered homeless by the civil war, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of former German and Austrian POWs trapped by the fighting there.11 On top of this came a wave of violent anti-Semitic pogroms, particularly in parts of Polish Galicia including the former Habsburg city of Lwów (Lemberg). In the much truncated post-war state of Austria, meanwhile, successive governments prepared to expel tens of thousands of patriotic former Imperial Habsburg subjects, mainly refugees and migrants from the war-torn eastern provinces of the old empire, simply on the grounds that they were not ethnically German (or Christian) and therefore no longer had a right to residency. Many of the expellees were women.12 While the political and social history of the immediate post-war period is now fairly well documented, and while there has been increasingly differentiated interest in the role of particular groups of women during the war itself, for example munitions workers, Red Cross nurses and army auxiliaries,13 surprisingly little has been written to date about women’s movements and female activists during this time. This contrasts with the growing volume of literature on masculinities and aggression which continues to dominate discussions of the ╇ For an excellent overview see Gatrell (2010). ╇ MacMillan (2003), pp.╯486 and passim. 10 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯219–21; Gatrell (2010), p.╯564. 11 ╇ Hobsbawm (1994), p.╯51; Nachtigal (2009). 12 ╇ Hoffmann-Holter (1995). 13 ╇See for example Hagemann and Schüler-Springorum (2002); Gatrell (2003); Daniel (1997); Thom (1998); Ouditt (1994). 8 9

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gendered dimension of the war and post-war experience.14 The following set of essays seeks to fill this important gap by investigating responses of women’s movements to the aftermath of the First World War from a comparative, transnational and interdisciplinary perspective. In so doing, it includes accounts of women’s activism in a number of nations usually considered peripheral to the European war story. Many of the nations discussed in this volume are indeed seriously under-researched – there are for example few English-language publications on Albanian female activism. The chapter by Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson shows clearly how supposedly non-combatant nations were drawn into the conflict, challenging the boundaries between what does and does not constitute war. Likewise, very little has been published on the role of Italian women’s organisations and activists, and what there is focuses on women’s part in protesting against the war during the social and political unrest of 1917 rather than their role on the “inner front”.15 Chapters on women’s organisations in Lithuania, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland and on individual women working across national boundaries help to uncover the multiplicity of women’s post-war activism, and to place it within a broader historical and comparative context. As well as the geographical scope of the project, its interdisciplinary nature has allowed different methodologies and approaches to be brought to bear on these questions, with insights drawn from literary and cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology, gender and women’s studies, and feminist theory. Chronologically the main focus is on the years 1918 to 1923, with occasional reference to later events and trends. This fairly tight emphasis on the immediate post-war era is justified in view of the crucial importance of this period in shaping future developments: the years under consideration here constitute a distinctive period full of radical potential during which the renegotiation of gender relations took place under unstable and highly volatile 14 ╇See in particular the excellent collection of essays edited by Dudink, Hagemann and Tosh (2004). Also Bourke (1996 and 1999) and Meyer (2009). For recent works on war and gender which do give significant space to women’s movements and female activists see Higonnet et al. (1987); Coetzee and Shevin-Coetzee (1995); Melman (1998); Hagemann and Schüler-Springorum (2002); Braybon (2003); Gehmacher, Harvey and Kemlein (2004); Davy, Hagemann and Kätzel (2005); and Wingfield and Bucur (2006). One very useful volume which addresses itself to women in particular, albeit in the aftermath of the Second rather than First World War, is Duchen and Bandhauer-Schöffmann (2000). 15 ╇ An exception is Ortaggi (2003).

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conditions of unprecedented social, economic and political strain. “Women’s movements” and “female activists”, on the other hand, are defined more broadly. Thus “women’s movements” could refer here to organisations formally constituted at international, national or regional level, or to much looser forms of association. Some movements were clearly ideological (pacifist, nationalist, socialist, liberal or centred around suffrage campaigns) whereas others had a less clearcut political agenda. Likewise “female activists” could be individuals driven by prior social commitment or religious belief, or by personal wartime and post-war experiences, or by both. Women’s activism during this period took a variety of forms, from continued war service in the Balkans and central and eastern Europe (Liddington, Kuźma-Markowska) to renegotiations of national identity in Lithuania and Hungary (Jurėnienė, Szapor, Acsády) and ongoing campaigns for the vote in Italy and France (Schiavon and Bard). In post-suffrage states, women worked to establish their political priorities: in Austria and Poland there was female-specific cross-party cooperation on particular issues (Hauch, Kuźma-Markowska) while in Germany the women’s overriding aim was to preserve internal peace and protect the nation from the consequences of political polarisation (Sharp). Some women’s campaigns drew on and reinforced gendered discourses which positioned women as victims rather than historical agents (Kuhlman), while others were able to use gendered expectations such as women’s affinity to charity work to achieve aims possibly unattainable to similarly motivated men (Stibbe, Berglund). Eleanor Franklin Egan’s personal witness to post-war suffering in Europe contributed to international reconciliation by personalising and individualising the fate of the defeated nations for an American readership, revealing the suffering humanity behind the myth of the brutal and barbaric “enemy” (Hudson). While a major aim of the volume is to give an account of the role played by organised women and female activists in the aftermath of war, our collection of essays also addresses the question identified by Joan Scott in her essay for the seminal volume Behind the Lines (1987), asking not simply what impact the war had on these individuals and groups and how they themselves influenced events, but what our knowledge and understanding of these women’s aims and strategies tell us about the politics of war and the transition to peace.16 “Cultural 16

╇Scott (1987) p.╯30.

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demobilisation”, defined by John Horne as the dismantling of the mentalities and mindsets that support the war, was as necessary for a return to peacetime society as military demobilisation. In some nations, however, especially those whose war aims had not been realised, we instead find a tendency to “cultural remobilisation”, with the resentments and bitterness of the war kept alive rather than resolved.17 For some women’s groups in the post-war period, pressing for rights, especially the vote, entailed constant reference to and thus a revival of wartime activities and service that disrupted the return to peacetime values and often proved counter-productive (Schiavon). Nationalist women, too, especially in the defeated nations, had a vested interest in cultural remobilisation, fanning the flames of resentment and bitterness at the injustice of the settlement and using gender discourse to “rap the knuckles” of the faint-hearted men and shame them into renewed militancy (Streubel, Szapor, Acsády). Even where fighting had ceased, war mentalities continued into “peacetime”. Old hatreds and resentments did not evaporate and defeated nations’ suffering was viewed harshly and with suspicion by the victors (see Kuhlman, Hudson). Although we must be wary of exaggerating the sense of alienation, which is most likely to be represented in literary accounts of soldiers’ disillusionment, and of overstating the extent of separation between the experiences of soldiers and civilians,18 there is no doubt that most post-war societies suffered deep and disturbing divisions. Hatred and anger, at one time directed against external enemies, was now also all too often turned inward. Returning soldiers sometimes felt that a changed and disrupted postwar society did not live up to their dreams of peace and resented those who had not experienced frontline conditions, while women who had enjoyed independence and meaningful occupation during the war often found the return to the narrow confines of domesticity difficult and baulked at the priority given to men during the demobilisation process.19 ╇On both cultural demobilisation and remobilisation see Horne (2005). ╇See e.g. Liddle (1996); Watson (2004); and Ziemann (2003) and (2007). 19 ╇But see the comments by Elizabeth Domansky (1996) pp.╯458–9, who argues that, at least in the German context, the mass dismissal of women from their jobs to make way for returning veterans should be seen as beneficial to working-class women. For those with male providers, she writes, the reintegration of the better-paid men into the workforce made economic sense, especially when it was accompanied by the reunification of families separated by the war. 17 18

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Women’s role in the process of cultural de- or remobilisation was therefore important, although for many it appeared to consist solely in reintegrating the men into civil society so that “the natural order of things would be restored”.20 The soldier was a liminal figure in the immediate post-war period; seen on the one hand as having suffered on behalf of the nation and on the other as having overstepped peacetime boundaries by what he had witnessed and above all by what he might have done. As a potentially disruptive group, returning soldiers had to be reintegrated as quickly and as completely as possible and given a stake in building the peace. This entailed a process of decontamination and resocialisation: all traces of the violence necessary in combat could be neutralised by a women’s altruistic love, while fatherhood and employment would do the rest. This model relied on a view of women as having been untouched by the war and having kept peacetime values intact throughout. It also depended on their willingness to step back into domesticity and maternity, to bear children and look after the men. In most of the post-war societies, we find an emphasis on marriage as a stabilising social force, and a privileging of heterosexual relationships that had the effect of marginalising those who remained single (Sharp, Bard). This was not unproblematic: women who had organised entire hospitals in the Balkans now returned home and were unable to find employment or purpose (Liddington) and for many, as Ann Rea shows, escapist middlebrow fiction provided the only “safe” way of challenging the conventions of middle-class marriage and breaking free from the drudgery of postwar domesticity. Wives and girlfriends of soldiers wounded on the battlefield were also expected to play a key role in the reconstruction of masculinity, largely through the spirit of self-sacrifice and altruism demanded of them in their relations with the disabled, shell-shocked or disfigured men.21 Whatever their personal feelings, women were exhorted to avoid showing pity or spoiling the men, in case this infantilised war veterans or undermined their masculinity.22 Women also played a crucial role in reintegrating former POWs, for instance – as Judit Acsády shows in the Hungarian case – by organising reception parties for returning prisoners and by helping to “re-educate” them in the cause ╇Nicolson (2009), p.╯3. ╇Kienitz (2008), p.╯248. 22 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯245–7 and 259–70. 20 21

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of patriotism. Although the POWs’ situation was complicated by the more “passive” role they had been forced to play in captivity, and also by fears of their contamination by Bolshevik ideas,23 in Germany and Austria, the Swede Elsa Brändström urged women to recognise the manly and heroic in their suffering (Stibbe). For many women’s groups, their wartime service had been an important factor in supporting and legitimising their claims to greater equality in the life of the nation. Women had proved their patriotism and organisational skills: in some cases, as in Poland and Russia, they had even borne arms, and women of many nations had shown physical courage and endurance as nurses and ambulance drivers under frontline conditions. At home, munitions workers of many nations had worked to supply the army, often at the limits of their capacities, and had shared the fears and deprivations of the wartime economy. It was often women who organised and coordinated women’s labour, freeing men to serve at the front by their efforts. Many leading feminists were therefore puzzled, disappointed and ultimately angry that their service was largely discounted in a post-war discourse that concentrated on the needs of men. Or as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, those who had hoped that the war would lead to a better world were left Â�bitterly frustrated: “The past was beyond reach, the future postponed, the present bitter…”.24 In spite of these setbacks and disappointments, this volume takes the view that the contribution of the women’s movement and individual women activists to the shaping of post-war Europe during this period is highly significant and has been overlooked or unduly marginalised in previous historiography. Given the continuation of armed conflict in much of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, as outlined above, the collection’s strong emphasis on this region raises new questions about the role of the women’s movement and of individual activists in rebuilding nations and communities or alternatively, in facilitating the rise of new forms of ethno-nationalism and racial intolerance. At the same time, cultural demobilisation as a concept enables us to move beyond more mainstream questions about the reception, impact and representation of women’s war work to look at new and equally important issues concerning the post-war era. Can we identify any similarities and differences between the reactions of the women’s 23 24

╇See e.g. Leidinger and Moritz (2003). ╇ Hobsbawm (1994), p.╯52.

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movement in “victorious” nations such as France and the United Kingdom and in “defeated” nations such as Germany, Austria and Hungary? Were the women able to draw positively on their wartime record of service or resistance in order to negotiate a new role in postwar society? Did they feel – or were they expected to accept – responsibility for men’s wartime suffering? What role did the women’s movement play in international reconciliation and the rehabilitation of defeated nations? And how did they respond to some of the challenges of the post-war years, such as the redrawing of national boundaries and the mass displacement of populations? The commonalities and differences in the role of women’s groups and individual activists in cultural demobilisation and remobilisation under circumstances of defeat and victory, national trauma or continued conflict identified by the contributors to this volume serve to challenge any remaining assumptions about a uniform, definitively “womanly” response to war. In addition, we can identify four key themes which run through the essays: commemoration of the war; the renegotiation of gender roles in the war’s immediate aftermath; women’s suffrage and political rights; and women’s contribution to rebuilding shattered communities and creating new visions of peace in the years 1918 to 1923. We have also used these themes as a means of dividing the volume up into distinct sections, although in practice several of the essays could easily fit under more than one heading. Commemoration of war The meaning and significance of the First World War varies hugely between the combatant nations, and still more between combatant and non-combatant nations (Musaj/Nicholson). It is also subject to variation over time, with different social classes, ethnic groups and generations interpreting it in different ways. For Britain and France, this war currently holds an unparalleled place in the public imagination and plays a prominent role in popular culture. For some time, the British version of the war has largely been confined to the trenches of the western front, waged by stoical Tommies and heroic public school boys, most of whom die. Annual poppies and two-minute silences mourn the “lost generation”, the flower of British youth fallen in the mud of France and Belgium and the disillusionment, futility and infi-

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nite sorrow of war.25 The English term “war memorial” encompasses commemoration both of the war as a major event in national, communal and private life, and of the war dead themselves, whereas in France the “monuments to the dead” were just that: monuments to male citizen-soldiers who had sacrificed their lives for the fatherland.26 In spite of these differences, in both countries a kind of “civic religion” was created out of the act of commemorating the war, whereby traditional “Judeo-Christian forms were recast in national terms” – as seen, for instance, in the ceremonial burial of an unknown soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London, both events taking place on 11 November 1920.27 In this way the nation (or in the case of Canadians, Jamaicans, Australians and New ZeaÂ� landers, the “Motherland”) became sacred, the ultimate “good” that men had been fighting and dying for.28 Unknown warriors were also buried in Washington DC, Rome and Brussels (1921), Prague, Belgrade, Warsaw and Athens (1922) and Sofia, Bucharest and Vienna (1923).29 In Germany, however, the bitterness that dealing with symbols of the war aroused was such that there could be no agreement on the construction of a state memorial to honour the unknown war dead until the architect Heinrich Tessenow was finally tasked by the Prussian government with redesigning Berlin’s eighteenth-century Neue Wache (new guardhouse) for these purposes in 1929.30 Even after Tessenow’s project was completed in 1931, as Laurence van Ypersele notes, the new monument “failed to become a focus of national ritual”.31 Volkstrauertag, the day of mourning for fallen soldiers established in 1925, on the second Sunday after Lent, was also marked by separate commemorations organised by rival veterans associations, in spite of regular appeals for conciliation between the warring parties.32 Meanwhile, at local and communal level images of “manly honour”, “youthful nationalism” and “Christian sacrifice” tended to dominate, although Käthe Kollwitz’s famous sculpture of the “grieving parents” (Die Eltern), ╇Gregory (1994); Winter (1995); Hynes (1990). ╇ Forrest (2009), pp.╯216–7. 27 ╇ Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker (2000), pp.╯186–7. 28 ╇ Winter (1995), p.╯27; Smith (2004). 29 ╇ Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker (2000), p.╯196; van Ypersele (2010), p.╯579. 30 ╇Berger (2004), p.╯118; Mosse (1990), pp.╯97–8. 31 ╇ van Ypersele (2010), p.╯581. 32 ╇Ulrich and Ziemann (1997), pp.╯138–9 and passim. 25 26

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installed at the German war cemetery at Roggevelde in Flanders in 1932, carries a very different message.33 In Russia, the war now usually remembered is the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941-45 in which twenty million Soviet citizens lost their lives. In the period 1918-23, the achievements of the October Revolution eclipsed the previous conflict and no monuments were created to honour the fallen soldiers of 1914 to 1917. The First World War was depicted as an unjust “imperialist war” which had inevitably ended in the defeat of the old ruling class and the victory of communism: the only dead body that was commemorated in 1920s Moscow was that of Lenin, placed on permanent show in a special mausoleum in Red Square shortly after his death in January 1924.34 Elsewhere in Europe, commemoration of the war in the immediate aftermath of the November 1918 armistice was often small scale, local and organised by surviving (female) relatives.35 As Nikolai Vukov shows in his essay on Bulgaria, commemoration of a lost and unpopular war was often more difficult, especially in times of social instability and economic collapse, but the desire to remember family and friends who suffered and died in the fighting remained a strong human urge. In other countries, especially where national borders had been radically redrawn (Austria, Hungary, Romania) or where the state was new (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) or reborn from the ashes of a defeated empire (Poland, Lithuania), the construction of a collective memory of war through public acts of commemoration was clearly vital to the establishment of new national identities, although the precise form of commemoration was often still contested.36 Commemoration of women’s wartime service was not a priority and even in victorious countries an anti-feminist backlash was palpable, with women often forced to bear a burden of guilt for the war deaths.37 In France, for instance, the search for the “enemy within”, or for defeatist elements which had supposedly held the glorious French army back, often led women to be “cast… among the villains of choice”, a point illustrated by the intense post-war interest in the Mata Hari story, the true life tale of an exotic dancer who ╇Berger (2004), p.╯118; Winter (1995), pp.╯108–14. ╇Nachtigal (2009), pp.╯177–8; Gatrell (2003), p.╯199; Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker (2000), p.╯196. 35 ╇ Winter (1995), esp.╯pp.╯15–53; van Ypersele (2010), p.╯580. 36 ╇ van Ypersele (2010), p.╯581. 37 ╇See Sharp (2007), pp.╯67–87. 33 34

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was executed in Paris in October 1917 as an alleged German spy and double agent.38 As Olga Shnyrova shows, the Soviet state categorised all feminist activity before the Revolution as “bourgeois” and consequently completely suppressed the memory of these women’s contribution to the war effort. Meanwhile, the only woman whose war service was positively commemorated in official and popular representations of the war across the English- and French-speaking world was the British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans in October 1915 for helping stranded Allied servicemen to escape from occupied Belgium. According to Katie Pickles, the two hundred or so Allied soldiers Cavell helped to hide in occupied Belgium “paled in comparison with the number of men who enlisted to avenge her execution” after 1915.39 In this way, “chivalrous understandings of patriarchal warfare” were reinforced rather than challenged by the transnational commemoration of a female heroine who was herself only acceptable as a “life-giver”, “a symbol of civilization confronting barbarism” or a “martyr for humanity” – and certainly not as a partisan or as an independent, politically-engaged citizen-patriot fighting for her country or for the cause of freedom.40 In any case, whatever role they had played in the war, whatever the outcome, women were not accepted as central to the war story, which as we have seen focused on the sacrifice and heroism of the soldiers.41 What Mosse describes as the “myth of the war experience” was an exclusively male phenomenon, as were related constructs like that of the “lost generation” or the “cult of the fallen solider”.42 Or as another expert, Alan Forrest, puts it, the grieving and deeply traumatised nations of post-war Europe “saw no reason to commemorate the living when so many real heroes lay dead on the battlefield”.43

╇Darrow (2000), pp.╯269 and 284–94. ╇ Pickles (2007), p.╯203. 40 ╇ Ibid., p.╯202; Darrow (2000), p.╯278; Allen (2008), pp.╯9–10. Even Cavell’s oftquoted final words were used to emphasise her non-partisan and apolitical, “feminine” nature: “I know now that patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred and no bitterness toward anyone”. 41 ╇ Cf. Darrow (2000), esp.╯pp.╯1–15. 42 ╇ Mosse (1990). 43 ╇ Forrest (2009), p.╯217. 38 39

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The renegotiation of gender roles War has been aptly described as a “gendering activity”,44 in that, at the level of ideology at least, the roles of men and women are clearly defined and differentiated as soldier and mother respectively, where “men fight and women wait”.45 This division is undermined in a war seen by some historians as a “total war”, where success depended on the effective mobilisation of the civilian population, in which women were called on to enter the public sphere and take over roles previously reserved for men, even, as war progressed, within the military itself, and civilians and their property were drawn into the war zone and increasingly seen as legitimate military targets.46 While recruitment posters and press coverage stressed the compatibility of these new occupations and roles with traditional femininity and praised the women’s wartime contribution as nurses and in the munitions factories, there was a deep unease at the activities of women who appeared to be challenging gender norms, especially those who joined the military organisations. In most countries, including Poland (KuźmaMarkowska), women in uniform were viewed negatively, often being accused of sexual impropriety or of aping the men.47 However, the most extreme example of this is in Russia after the Revolution in 1917, when Maria Bochkareva, a woman already experienced in combat, formed some 2,000 women into a fighting unit called the Women’s Battalion of Death. The unit was sent to the front to shame the warweary men into continuing to fight, but in the hostile reaction to the unit twenty of the women were lynched by their own side.48 Competing ideas about the role and destiny of women arose within all post-war societies, but in most cases a return to maternalism, domesticity and clearly demarcated gender roles was seen as the key ╇ Higonnet (1987), p.╯4 ╇ Acton (2007) p.╯7 46 ╇Bock (2000), pp.╯240–1; Winter (2010), pp.╯254–6. 47 ╇ For similar trends in Britain and France see Grayzel (2003), pp.╯113–6. 48 ╇ Allen (2008), p.╯20. But it should be noted that the soldiers’ hostility in 1917 was not necessarily indicative of general social attitudes and that women as combatants did gain more acceptance subsequently. According to research by Olga Shnyrova, the battalions were extremely popular outside the army and several more were organised in Moscow, Perm, Odessa and Ekaterinograd, with up to 5,000 women fighting on both sides during the civil war. Afterwards, women were incorporated into the Red Army as non-combatants, some achieving high office as commissars in the army’s political departments. 44 45

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to national regeneration and social stability.49 These priorities were reflected in demobilisation policies that privileged returning soldiers and ignored the claims of women. Often women were dismissed from their jobs and simply expected to return home, get married and have children, regardless of whether there was a home or husband available to them. Although some activists fought the dismissals, there were no mass protests in favour of women’s rights in the workplace. Yet even where opportunities for women’s employment and public engagement were not carried over into peacetime, as they mostly were not, the women’s experience of a measure of autonomy and influence outside the domestic sphere fuelled the demands of the more progressive women’s organisations for greater equality. Suffrage and legal reform, including constitutional equality in some nations, encouraged women’s campaigns in others. However, where suffrage had been granted, emancipation was far from complete, with chronic under-representation of women and their exclusion from international politics in most post-suffrage parliaments. Women’s specific concerns were also often diluted by their minority status within male-dominated parties. What of other gains? Some women’s organisations proved adept at adjusting their rhetoric to the times and used war-related arguments to campaign for longstanding goals. For instance, an improvement in the status of illegitimate children and single mothers was evident in some countries, greater access to contraceptive advice and a trend towards smaller families in others, while a concern with maternal and infant health may have contributed to a dramatic drop in infant mortality rates even in the defeated and disadvantaged nations. For a small minority of educated middle-class women, access to higher education and the professions became easier in the post-war context, while many women entered new categories of work beyond the factory or domestic service as clerks and shop assistants. In some of the more progressive nations, for example in Britain and Scandinavia, marriage reforms were introduced that supported a greater equality between man and wife, while the influence of sexology stressed women’s right to happiness and sexual fulfillment in marriage (Rea).50 Most post-war societies experienced anxiety about the fall in the birth rate in the aftermath of war, not surprising in the light of the high 49 ╇Grayzel (2010); Winter (2010); Frevert (1997); Beddoe (1989). For similar patterns in the realm of peacemaking at international level see also Sluga (2005). 50 ╇ Allen (2008), pp.╯81–2.

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male casualties experienced by the combatant nations.51 This led to a perception that a women’s highest duty to her nation was reproduction and that the state had a right to intervene. Ann Taylor Allen writes that, in Europe, post-war “governments reconfigured even the most intimate areas of life, such as sexuality, reproduction and childbearing, as public concerns over which the state exercised control”.52 During the war, tighter regulation of women’s sexual behaviour had been seen as an issue important to soldier morale and habits of surveillance had been allowed to develop; especially where women were in receipt of state benefits, they were expected to conform to expectations of appropriate behaviour. Conservative, pronatalist and pro-family discourses were also very much on the political agenda, although, as Jay Winter correctly points out, “these ideological currents were not uncontested” by women themselves. Indeed, the decline in the birth rate is itself a strong indication of women’s increasing demand for “reproductive self-determination”, a demand which also occasionally expressed itself in political protests against restrictive government legislation.53 Although most democratic nations were content to promote a norm of female behaviour and encourage compliance by social disapproval alone, some states felt able to enforce their priorities more directly: in France, as Christine Bard outlines, a law of 1920 prohibited the distribution or promotion of contraceptives and completely outlawed abortion. Similar legislation can be found in other Catholic countries such as Ireland and Belgium while in liberal, protestant Scandinavia, eugenic concerns made it possible to prevent some individuals from marrying and reproducing at all.54 Abortion on demand was available only to women in Bolshevik Russia; elsewhere, it was either wholly illegal or accepted only under very strict medical conditions. Meanwhile, Italian women after 1922 suffered under the double burden of Fascist and Catholic restrictions on their reproductive rights and freedom of sexual expression,55 and in Romania, people of both sexes were exposed to increasing levels of (male) professional scrutiny as lawyers, doctors, biologists and anthropologists sought to ╇ Winter (2010), pp.╯259–60. ╇ Allen (2008), p.╯3. 53 ╇ Winter (2010), p.╯260. See also Usborne (1988) and Usborne (2007), pp.╯1 and ff. 54 ╇ Allen (2008), p.╯23. 55 ╇See De Grazia (1992), esp.╯pp.╯41–76; and Allen (2008), pp.╯51–4. 51 52

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align older discourses of gender with “modern” understandings of eugenics and “laws of heredity”.56 While state interventions in the private sphere and the backlash against women’s wartime gains were frustrating, some commentators have nonetheless noted a positive effect in terms of greater political recognition of women’s “patriotic” self-sacrifice as mothers, workers or consumers, and a wider social acceptance of unmarried mothers and their offspring.57 Whether this added up to genuine emancipation as opposed to the creation of a common war culture based on nationalism combined with distinct and unequal gender roles is a contested point, however. Indeed, a number of recent studies have emphasised the conservative, authoritarian or anti-emancipatory impact of the war on women, including in the work-place as well as in the sphere of family, reproduction and everyday life (and in cultural representations thereof).58 Women’s suffrage and political rights One of the major changes claimed for the impact of war on women was women’s access to citizenship and political influence, most measurable in the granting of female suffrage in a number of nations soon after the end of the war. While many have interpreted this development as a reward for women’s wartime patriotism and service, this is hard to support, especially as there appeared to be no real correlation between how that service was viewed, the positive or negative responses it aroused, and the enfranchisement of women.59 In the victorious nations, French women’s legitimate expectation that their patriotism and good citizenship during the war years would be rewarded with political rights was disappointed. Despite a bill enfranchising women being passed by the lower chamber in May 1919, the Senate first sat on and then, in November 1922, rejected the bill. In fact, French women had to wait until 1944 before being able to vote and stand for election (Bard). In the UK a suffrage restricted by age ╇See Bucur (2002), esp.╯p.╯220. ╇ This in particular is the thesis of Marwick (1974) and (1988). On single or unÂ�marÂ�ried mothers see also Usborne (1988), esp.╯pp.╯394–5 and Roberts (1994), esp.╯pp.╯166–70, and on women as consumers see Davis (2000). 58 ╇See e.g. Domansky (1996); Daniel (1997); Darrow (2000); Grayzel (2003); McMillan (2003); and Ziemann (2003). 59 ╇ This can be seen in the sphere of private communications as much as in public discourses – see e.g. Ziemann (2003) and Liddle (1996). 56 57

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was introduced that excluded most of the women who had actually served as nurses and munitions workers until 1928. In Belgium only bereaved mothers and war widows, as long as they did not remarry, were granted the vote in 1920, thus standing in as proxies for their deceased sons and husbands.60 Along with a number of other proposals on female suffrage, a similar model was also briefly considered by the Fascist regime in Italy for use in local elections, albeit with the cynical purpose of ridiculing those feminists and socialists who continued to campaign for votes for all, irrespective of war service or service to the nation.61 On the same war-related grounds some countries deliberately excluded prostitutes from the franchise (for instance in Austria in 1918 – see Hauch) or from pro-suffrage bills placed before national parliaments (as in the case of pre-Fascist Italy in 1919 – see Schiavon). In the meantime, defeated and unstable successor states to the Habsburg Empire and revolutionary governments in Russia and Germany did initially grant female suffrage in 1917 and 1918 and, of course, as the table shows, most of the Scandinavian states (three out of five) had already granted female suffrage before the outbreak of war, with a fourth following in 1915. Only Sweden had to catch up after the war. Table 1.62 The enfranchisement of women in selected European countries Countries enfranchising Countries enfranchising Countries enfranchising women after World War I women after World War II women before 1918 Finland (1906) Russia (1917) Bulgaria (1937/8, 1944, 1948) Iceland (1908, 1911) Austria (1918) France (1944) Norway (1913) Germany (1918) Albania (1945) Denmark (1915) Poland (1918) Italy (1945) Britain (1918, 1928) Portugal (1945) Hungary (1918-9) Yugoslavia (1945) Lithuania (1919) Romania (1946) Netherlands (1919) Switzerland (1971) Czechoslovakia (1919-20) Sweden (1919-21) Belgium (1920, 1948) Spain (1932) ╇Offen (2000), p.╯264; Sluga (2005), p.╯169. ╇ The much delayed law passed in 1925 was in effect nullified by Mussolini’s decision to end local elections for good in 1926. See De Grazia (1992), pp.╯36–8. 62 ╇ Although this table was originally adapted from one presented by Martin Pugh (1997) p.╯166, we have made some amendments and additions in line with information provided by our contributors. 60 61

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Martin Pugh makes a convincing case that the war helped to promote the cause of women’s rights “not so much by changing attitudes towards women or their role, but, more indirectly, by undermining the political system which obstructed women”.63 Thus in Russia, no amount of war work had allowed women to gain political influence until the Tsarist regime was overthrown in March 1917 and the Provisional Government enfranchised men and women aged twenty and over.64 In Germany, where women’s war work had brought them right into the heart of government – some 1,000 women worked for the Ministry of War under the direction of Marie-Elisabeth Lüders – the Kaiser notably failed to mention women’s claims in his “Easter message” to the German people promising post-war liberal reform in 1917.65 The emphasis on suffrage as a measure of women’s political influence is in any case not especially reliable, not least because legislation was not always put into practice either fully or immediately and in central and eastern Europe especially the extent and significance of the right to vote was affected by rapid political power shifts: in Hungary for example the suffrage laws passed by the Karolyi government in November 1918 were never put into effect and the laws of 1919, although implemented in the elections of 1920, were in 1922 subject to restrictions that reduced the number of voters of both sexes. Equally, apart from in authoritarian regimes where women could be rewarded by mid-level office and informal channels of influence for compliance with and promotion of the government’s ideal of femininity (Szapor, Acsády), the trend was for a very low level of female political activism in all democracies and for women to vote along party rather than gender lines. Few women achieved positions above entry level politics and those who did so rarely identified themselves as feminists. One partial exception was Gertrud Bäumer, leader of the mainstream, bourgeois Federation of German Women’s Associations (BDF) and an elected deputy in the Reichstag for the German Democratic Party (DDP), who held a high-level position within the Reich Ministry of the Interior from 1920 to 1933.66 Yet even at the entry level of politics women could have an impact, for example in Lithuania, where, as Virginjia Jurėnienė makes clear, a fledgling women’s movement outlined a progressive programme for ╇ Pugh (1997), pp.╯166–7. ╇See also Gatrell (2003), pp.╯210–1. 65 ╇Evans (1976), pp.╯208 and 223; Hering (1990) p.╯128. 66 ╇Stachura (1993), pp.╯12–3. 63 64

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gender equality in the new state that set the terms of the debate for decades to come. It was also possible for women to exercise influence on public life outside the political arena, and even without the franchise women’s organisations and activists did continue to campaign for women’s inclusion in the life of the state. This can be seen, for instance, in the case of Albania, where – as Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson show – members of the women’s movement fought to increase the rights of women within the family, education and society; and also in the case of Alice Masaryková in Czechoslovakia, who, as Bruce Berglund indicates, used her position as the president’s daughter and “de facto first lady” to demand a greater role for women in public health projects, Red Cross volunteer work and social welfare campaigns. In France, as Christine Bard argues, despite the lack of the vote and the bitterness this caused, organised women in political parties and feminist movements were still partially integrated into the life of the Republic through shared political values and patriotism. More generally, as the aims and priorities of the women’s organisations and activists themselves were not uniform even within a single nation, it is hard to measure whether the war brought them more gains than losses overall and, in any case, many developments were not unambiguously positive or negative. Enfranchisement of women and legislation that removed some of the barriers to equality did little to break down the religious and cultural assumptions about gender that were more often reinforced than challenged in the context of post-war uncertainty. Or as Gisela Bock puts it: “the main reason for the small number of female members of parliament was ... that they were still not accepted as representatives of the “people”, that is of the men as well. For them to gain such an acceptance would have required ... not just a narrowly defined political, but rather a cultural revolution”.67 Rebuilding communities/visions of peace The immediate years after the First World War represented the “apogee of nationalism” in Europe, to use a phrase coined by Eric HobsÂ� bawm.68 Nowhere was this more evident than in the lands which formerly constituted the Habsburg empire and which now – thanks to a mixture of Wilsonian idealism and Anglo-French Realpolitik – found 67 68

╇Bock (2000), pp.╯244–5. ╇ Hobsbawm (1992), pp.╯131–62. Cf. Sluga (2000).

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themselves reconstituted as new nation-states, many of them with sizeable ethnic minorities to contend with. The losers in this process – Germany, Austria and Hungary – also faced challenges from within by political movements and parties which placed extreme radical nationalism (as opposed to national self-determination) on their banners. Women were by no means immune from the appeal of this new form of politics – as the contributions by Christiane Streubel, Judith Szapor and Judit Acsády make clear. The result was a loss of momentum in terms of the achievement of women’s rights at national level after 1918. Yet while many national women’s movements were forced to confront conservatism and reaction at home, they also at the same time were obliged to redefine what they understood by women’s rights and citizenship in light of new challenges emerging from the need to rebuild and reconstruct communities in the aftermath of war. This was the case, for instance, in old nations facing defeat and sometimes a radical redrawing of their borders (Vukov, Hauch, Szapor, Acsády); with new or resurrected nations seeking to define themselves in the post-war era (Berglund, Liddington, Musaj/Nicholson, Jurėnienė, Kuźma-Markowska); and with women activists who worked at the international or transnational level, seeking to communicate war experiences to audiences back at home (Hudson) or to extend their wartime activism into the post-war era (Stibbe, Liddington). One common theme which appears across all the countries examined here is the extent to which women were expected to take responsibility for healing the wounds of war, whether this was through their work in reintegrating returning POWs and civilian internees, in drawing attention to the plight of starving mothers and children in blockaded central Europe, in nursing the sick and disabled, in working together with men in pacifist or anti-war organisations, in devising new social welfare policies or overcoming political divisions, or in mourning the dead in appropriate ways at local and communal level. On the one hand, this could reinforce existing gender divisions of labour, with men as soldiers and warriors, and women as carers and nurturers, as Christine Bard notes. Yet on the other hand, it could provide opportunities for women to break away from traditional restrictions and make a significant and meaningful contribution to cultural demobilisation in the war’s aftermath. Interestingly, a number of radical feminists in our period, including Amy Lillingstone in Britain, Andrée Jouve in France and Helene Stöcker in Germany,

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21

rejected the essentialist view that women were “naturally” more passive and anti-war than men. For them, female suffrage and women’s entry into national and international politics could not in themselves guarantee the maintenance of peace unless they were combined with broader cultural and educational changes affecting both sexes. First and foremost this meant action designed to demobilise and dismantle the hatreds that had built up between nations before and during the 1914/18 period. For some, it also meant a policy of active cooperation with male-dominated peace movements as opposed to maintaining the radical separatist stance advocated by some feminists which understood and fought war as an expression of male violence against women.69 However, while female anti-war campaigners often took on the difficult work of cultural demobilisation in national settings, both in cooperation with and separately from their male counterparts, there was little evidence of any shared, transnational vision of peace in the immediate post-war period. Thus some women’s movements, particularly in France and Belgium, but also further afield in Britain and America, demanded harsh punishment of Germany and Austria, including the women of those nations, as the precondition for any lasting peace. They condemned the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), founded in Zurich in 1919, for being too “pro-German” and some even went so far as supporting the exclusion of pacifist women from having any influence on the Paris Peace Conference on the grounds that they would be too soft or lenient towards the defeated enemy.70 At the opposite extreme, activists like Elsa Brändström and Helena Swanwick blamed the French for being too hard-line, and even said this publicly before international audiences in the early 1920s (Stibbe, Kuhlman). Here they came close to endorsing the position adopted by the mainstream German women’s leader Gertrud Bäumer, who insisted that German war crimes had been equally matched by French ones.71 Only the radical German peace campaigner Lilli Jannasch was brave enough to expose the German and international Rhineland campaigns for what they actually were – not a search for justice for German women, but a racist and

╇ Wilmers (2008), pp.╯132 and 239; Kuhlman (2007), p.╯237. ╇ Wilmers (2008), pp.╯181–96; Kuhlman (2007), pp.╯228–32. 71 ╇ Wilmers (2008), pp.╯200–1. 69 70

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colonialist diversion from the continued problem of militarism throughout the world, and in Germany in particular.72 Overall, then, our studies suggest that nationalism tended to trump female liberation within women’s movements in the immediate postwar years. However, this does not mean that women activists simply identified with the policies of male nationalists and statesmen. Rather, our findings also tally with those of Glenda Sluga, namely that women’s movements and female activists often appropriated languages of (ethnic and racial) “difference”, “patriotic sacrifice” and “self-deterÂ� mination”73 in order to assert their own claims for greater equality and recognition within the framework of the nation-state or at the level of peacemaking and international politics. Indeed, this applied as much, if not more, in eastern and central Europe as in the west. Here too, as our contributors have shown, women were able to operate “on the fringes of the peace process”, and much more centrally, in the rebuilding of local identities and communities, in the aftermath of the war.74 Bibliography Acton, C. (2007) Grief in Wartime. Private Pain, Public Discourse (Basingstoke: 2007). Allen, A.T. (2008) Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: 2008). Audoin-Rouzeau, S. and Becker, A. (2000) 1914-1918. Understanding the Great War, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson (London: 2000). Beddoe, D. (1989) Back to Home and Duty: Women in Inter-War Britain (London: 1989). Berger, S. (2004) Inventing the Nation: Germany (London: 2004). Bessel, R. (1993) Germany after the First World War (Oxford: 1993). Bock, G. (2000) Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: 2000). Bourke, J. (1996) Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: 1996). ———╯ (1999) An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in TwentiethCentury Warfare (London: 1999). Braybon, G. ed. (2003) Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18 (Oxford: 2003). Bucur, M. (2002) Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh: 2002). Coetzee, F. and Shevin-Coetzee, M. eds. (1995) Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War (Providence and Oxford: 1995). Dallas, G. (2000) 1918: War and Peace (London: 2000).

╇ Jannasch (1926), p.╯17. ╇Sluga (2005), pp.╯170–1. 74 ╇Sluga (2000), p.╯516. 72 73

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Daniel, U. (1997) The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, translated from the German by Margaret Ries (Oxford: 1997). Darrow, M. H. (2000) French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: 2000). Davis, B. J. (2000) Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill and London: 2000). Davy, J. A., Hagemann, K. and Kätzel, U. eds. (2005) Frieden – Gewalt – Geschlecht. Friedens- und Konfliktforschung als Geschlechterforschung (Essen: 2005). De Grazia, V. (1992) How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1992). Domansky, E. “Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany”, in Society, Culture and State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, MI: 1996) 427–63. Duchen, C. and Bandhauer-Schöffmann, I. eds. (2000) When the War was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940-1956 (Leicester: 2000). Dudink, S., Hagemann, K. and Tosh, J. eds. (2004) Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: 2004). Evans, R. J. (1976) The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London: 1976). Forrest, A. (2009) The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory (Cambridge: 2009). Gatrell, P. (2003) “The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 19141917”, in Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 191418, ed. G.╯Braybon (Oxford: 2003) 198–215. ———╯(2010) “War After War: Conflicts, 1919-23”, in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Oxford: 2010) 558–75. Gehmacher, J., Harvey, E. and Kemlein, S. (2004) Zwischen Kriegen: Nationen, Nationalismen und Geschlechterverhältnisse in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1918-1939 (Osnabruck: 2004). Grayzel, S. R. (2002) Women and the First World War (Harlow: 2002). ———╯(2003) “Liberating Women? Examining Gender, Morality and Sexuality in First World War Britain and France”, in Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18, ed. G.╯Braybon (Oxford: 2003) 113–34. ———╯ (2010) “Women and Men”, in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Oxford: 2010) 263–78. Gregory, A. (1994) The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919-1946 (Oxford: 1994). Hagemann, K. and Schüler-Springorum, S. eds. (2002) Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York: 2000). Hering, S. (1990) Die Kriegsgewinnlerinnen (Pfaffenweiler: 1990). Higonnet, M. R. et al. eds. (1987) Behind the Lines. Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: 1987). Hobsbawm, E. (1992) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: 1992). ———╯ (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: 1994). Hoffmann-Holter, B. (1995) ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914 bis 1923 (Vienna, 1995). Horne, J. (2005) “Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919-1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?”, in Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919-1939 ed. W.╯Hardtwig (Göttingen: 2005) 129–50. Hynes, S. (1990) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: 1990).

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Jannasch, L. (1926) German Militarism at Work: A Collection of Documents, translated from the German by John Pollock (London: 1926). Kienitz, S. (2008) Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914-1923 (Paderborn: 2008). Kramer, A. (2007) Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: 2007). Kuhlman E. (2007) “The ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and Reconciliation after the Great War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.╯S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 227–43. Leidinger, H. and Moritz, V. (2003) Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr: Die Bedeutung der Kriegsgefangenenproblematik für die Geschichte des Kommunismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1917-1920 (Vienna: 2003). Liddle, P. (1996) “British Loyalties: The Evidence of an Archive”, in Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, eds. H.╯Cecil and P.╯Liddle (London: 1996) 523–38. MacMillan, M. (2003) Paris 1919. Sixth Months that Changed the World (New York: 2003). Marwick, A. (1974) War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States (London: 1974). ———╯ (1988) “Introduction”, in Total War and Social Change, ed. A.╯Marwick (BasingÂ�stoke: 1988) x-xxi. McMillan, J. (2003) “The Great War and Gender Relations: the Case of French Women and the First World War Revisited”, in Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18, ed. G.╯Braybon (Oxford: 2003) 135–53. Melman, B. ed. (1998) Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 18701930 (London: 1998). Meyer, J. (2009) Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: 2009). Mosse, G. L. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: 1990). Nachtigal, R. (2009) “The Repatriation and Reception of Returning Prisoners of War, 1918-1922”, in Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration in Europe During the First World War, ed. M.╯Stibbe (London: 2009) 157–84. Nicolson, J. (2009) The Great Silence, 1918-1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War (London: 2009). Offen, K. (2000) European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, California: 2000). Ortaggi, S. (2003) “Italian Women during the Great War”, in Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18, ed. G.╯Braybon (Oxford: 2003) 216–38. Ouditt, S. (1994) Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: 1994). Pickles, K. (2007) Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (Basingstoke: 2007). Pugh, M. (1997) “The Rise of European Feminism”, in A Companion to Modern European History, 1871-1945, ed. M.╯Pugh (Oxford: 1997) 155–73. Roberts, M. L. (1994) Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago and London: 1994). Scott, J. W. (1987) “Rewriting History”, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. M. R.╯Higonnet et al (New Haven and London: 1987) 19–30.

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Sharp, I. (2007) “Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.╯S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 67–87. Sluga, G. (2000) “Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Re-Reading of the ‘Apogee of Nationalism’”, Nations and Nationalism, 6/4 (2000), 495–521. ———╯(2005) “National Sovereignty and Female Equality. Gender, Peacemaking, and the New World Orders of 1919 and 1945”, in Frieden – Gewalt – Geschlecht. FrieÂ� dens- und Konfliktforschung als Geschlechterforschung, eds. J.╯Davy, K.╯Hagemann and U.╯Kätzel (Essen: 2005) 166–83. Smith, R. (2004) Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (Manchester: 2004). Stachura, P. D. (1993) Political Leaders in Weimar Germany: A Biographical Study (London: 1993). Stibbe, M. ed. (2009) Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration during the First World War (London: 2009). ———╯(2010) Germany, 1914-1933: Politics, Society and Culture (Harlow: 2010). Thom, D. (1998) Nice Girls and Rude Girls. Women Workers in World War I (London: 1998). Ulrich, B. and Ziemann, B. eds. (1997) Krieg im Frieden: Die umkämpfte Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt/M: 1997). Usborne, C. (1988) “‘Pregnancy is the Woman’s Active Service’: Pronatalism in Germany during the First World War”, in The Upheaval of War. Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914-1918 eds. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: 1988) 389–416. ———╯(2007) Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (Oxford: 2007). van Ypersele, L. (2010) “Mourning and Memory, 1919-45”, in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Oxford: 2010) 576–90. Watson, J. (2004) Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: 2004). Wilmers, A. (2008) Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914-1920): Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: 2008). Wingfield, N. M. and Bucur, M. eds. (2006) Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis: 2006). Winter, J. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: 1995). ———╯ (2010) “Demography”, in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Oxford: 2010) 248–62. Ziemann, B. (2003) “Geschlechterbeziehungen in deutschen Feldpostbriefen des Ersten Weltkrieges”, in Briefkulturen und ihr Geschlecht: Zur Geschichte der privaten Korrespondenz vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute eds. Christine Hämmerle and Edith Saurer (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: 2003) 261–82. ———╯ (2007) War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914-1923, translated from the German by Alex Skinner (Oxford: 2007).

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The aftermaths of defeat

part one

commemoration, remembering, remobilisation

27

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nikolai vukov

The aftermaths of defeat

29

The aftermaths of defeat: the fallen, the catastrophe, and the public response of women to the end of the First World War in Bulgaria Nikolai Vukov The end of the First World War represented a second national catastrophe for Bulgaria, larger in scope than the one following the Balkan wars of 1912-13, and marked the beginning of the most difficult period in the development of the state since its liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878. Defeat in the war coincided with a soldierly uprising in 1918, in which troops marched from the front to the capital to protest against the government and the King. The uprising was crushed by force and thousands of soldiers died or were wounded by mobilised police units. By 29 September 1918, when an armistice was signed with the western Allies, Bulgaria faced demographic and economic collapse. In the context of defeat, international isolation and economic depression, the country had to solve a multitude of internal issues, putting a huge strain on the fragile democratic system. A successful military coup in June 1923 against the popular left-leaning government of peasant leader Alexander Stambolijski was followed by a failed communist uprising in September, leading to a violent clampdown on all forms of oppositional political activity. All of this conditioned the diverse roles played by Bulgarian women in the war’s aftermath – as observers and participants in demonstrations, as agents of post-war reconstruction, and as the grieving widows and mothers of dead soldiers.

One of the distinctive features of the First World War’s aftermath for the defeated nations in Europe was that instead of peace, relief and reconstruction, the war’s end brought continued misery, ongoing food shortages and repeated outbreaks of political violence, which only began to subside in the mid-1920s. After the armistice and especially after the Treaty of Neuilly in November 1919, Bulgaria found itself facing a familiar array of problems: economic breakdown, international isolation, domestic unrest, a communist uprising and government-backed violence against the left. The continued absence of men, due to deaths and injuries on the battlefield, and the Allied retention of POWs, made a return to pre-war norms impossible, and left Bulgarian women in the position of having to undertake many of the

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tasks of post-war reconstruction and cultural demobilisation on their own. Having increased their role in national life during the war, they now became actively involved in caring for front-line returnees, maintaining contacts with international organisations to overcome the country’s isolation, participating in various political campaigns, and, not least, fighting for their rights in a less than conducive atmosphere. Although in part representing a continuation of their pre-war struggles and experience, the activities carried out by organised Bulgarian women and their associations in the post-war years testified to a new kind of female activism – one which bore the signs of greater independence from male control and affirmed new aspects of women’s mission. This essay seeks to examine the role of female activists and organised women’s movements in Bulgarian public life after the war, focusing in particular on the immediate post-war years. It begins by providing some historical background on the development of the women’s movement in Bulgaria before 1915, and then goes on to explore its responses to the war and the national turmoil which followed in the wake of defeat. Focusing on the intensification of the activities of the women’s movement at this time, the paper will then shed light on three important aspects related to women’s participation in public life: the commemoration of the war dead, the care of the wounded returnees from the front, and the involvement of women in protest movements of various kinds. Without making claims to a comprehensive treatment, the article will also touch upon the contribution of organised women to the process of post-war stabilisation and cultural demobilisation – a topic which has remained largely overlooked in Bulgarian historiography of the inter-war period. Female activists and organised women in the pre-war period From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the role of women in Bulgarian society was closely related to the process of Europeanisation and the introduction of new patterns in clothing, lifestyles and social manners.1 Modernity was largely perceived in terms of overcoming tradition in everyday life, so that women were important subjects in the debates about the modernisation and nationalisation of Bulgarian 1

╇See Paskaleva (1983); and Cholakova (1995).

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culture in general. Women’s education, for example, received much official attention, although the arguments used in support of this often revolved around the advantages to be gained from women becoming better mothers, housewives, and educators of their children.2 In fact, partly due to such priorities, the only occupational field open for an educated Bulgarian woman until the late 1870s was the teaching profession. After the establishment of the Bulgarian state in 1878, the debate about women’s role in national life moved on to consider issues of citizenship.╯Although the first Bulgarian constitution of 1879 gave voting rights to “all citizens”, in practice it was understood that only men were envisioned in this category and women were therefore systematically excluded from political life.3 Access to the middle-class job market and in particular to more prestigious professions like medicine and law was also largely restricted to men – not least due the narrow openings for women’s professional education and training. Education was indeed an especially important issue for the organised women’s movement in Bulgaria before 1912. Mandatory primary education was introduced for all Bulgarian citizens by the constitution, and a great number of girls’ schools were opened in the country, but in general different policies were pursued for men and women. The prevailing attitude was that girls should attend school for a shorter period, and that the curriculum should focus mainly on cooking, sewing and clothes-making in order to prepare them for their future roles as housewives and mothers. Although towards the turn of the century girls and boys in secondary schools had the same number of classes and the school curriculum for both was similar, the overall emphasis on gender-specific educational activities for girls remained. In the meantime, the demand for more teacher training places for women became a key point in the debates surrounding the law of 1904. The issue of university education was even more controversial. Although in theory Bulgarian women gained access to higher education in 1901 (thirteen years after the first university courses were opened), their status was at first restricted to one of “auditors” and their numbers were tiny compared to men. Moreover, women’s right to attend university was of a “temporary” nature only; it was rescinded completely during the “university crisis” in 1907.

2 3

╇See Daskalova (2001). ╇See Daskalova (2001); and Gavrilova (2001).

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The small minority of women who did succeed in getting a good education also faced barriers in terms of securing a career. Although in 1905 the National Assembly approved a law that aimed to limit discrimination in relation to pay and conditions, the entry of Bulgarian women into traditionally male professions, such as law and medicine, was slow and difficult. The number of educated women increased after 1878, but, with the exception of teaching, the number entering professional jobs was minuscule. For instance, women were banned from practising law until the communist period after 1944. Meanwhile, rural women faced even greater obstacles to professional advancement than their urban counterparts, especially as the villages and agricultural regions were much slower to “modernise”. Here the more limited opportunities for self-realisation outside the family milieu were reinforced by a lack of equal rights to inheritance – a situation very similar to that in other European countries at this time. Compared to education, the question of political rights was of secondary importance to the organised Bulgarian women’s movement at the turn of the century, but even so there was some activity on this front too. With the foundation of the Sofia Educational Association in 1897 and then of the Bulgarian Women’s Union (Bulgarski zhenski sayuz) in 1901 – an umbrella organisation representing all of the women’s associations across the country – the campaign for political representation gained fresh momentum. Although female suffrage was not promoted as a central point in the Union’s programme (due to political considerations and the strong emphasis which many of the traditional associations placed on charity and education),4 it increasingly cropped up in discussions and became the cause of a number of splits and divisions between “moderates” and “radicals”. In addition, the socialist women’s association wanted to align the Union with the “class struggle” and made a strong bid to impose this policy at the 1903 Congress.5 When their efforts failed, they left the Union, to form in 1914 the Socialist Women’s Union, which argued that 4 ╇On the early programme and ideas of the Women’s Union see Daskalova (1998) and Daskalova (1999). 5 ╇ This move was part of the ideological struggle within the Social Democratic party in the early years of the twentieth century. Established in 1891, the Bulgarian Socialist Democratic Party joined in 1894 with the Bulgarian Social Democratic Union to form the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (BRSDP), which, after serious internal disputes, split in 1903 into two wings: “narrow” and “broad” socialists. In 1919 the “narrow socialists” embraced Leninism and renamed themselves the Bulgarian Communist Party (Balgarska Komunisticheska Partiya or BCP).

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working-class women would obtain political equality only by joining forces with men in the struggle for proletarian liberation against the exploiting capitalist class. After the departure of the socialists, the Women’s Union put itself forward as an organisation which stood “above party” and “above class”. Despite ongoing internal divisions – most of which were due to clashes of personality – the Union followed a policy of demanding complete civil and political equality for women. In 1906 it became a member of the International Council of Women (ICW) and the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). Around the same time a new body, the Union of Progressive Women (Sayuz na naprednichavite zheni), was founded. Soon renaming itself “Ravnopravie” (Equal Rights), it was particularly active in its demands for a change in the suffrage laws. In its view, educational and charity issues were marginal; the important thing was to build up a broader public campaign for women’s votes through the press, public assemblies, court petitions and so on. Meanwhile, the Women’s Union also embraced the goal of political equality, but it was much more moderate in its aims and followed a policy of gradualism. Although the issue of women’s voting rights enjoyed some support from representatives of the different political parties (Social Democrats, Democrats, and so on), it failed to gain wider backing or social acceptance, and instead remained the specialist concern of women’s organisations. With the approach of the Balkan wars (1912-13) and the First World War (1915-18) it was pushed aside by more pressing questions. The onset of war The second Balkan War of June to July 1913 led the country to its first national catastrophe, expressed in enormous economic, territorial, and military losses, waves of refugees from territories occupied by neighbouring states, huge social disruption and the failure of the national goal of unifying territories with a Bulgarian population into one state. The defeat and the humiliating Treaty of Bucharest (August 1913) placed Bulgaria in an especially difficult position in terms of its foreign relations, and largely determined its problematic decision to enter the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in October 1915. The different women’s organisations were actively involved in the attempts to find a way out of the country’s disastrous external situ-

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ation after 1913. For instance, women activists who were graduates of Russian schools travelled to Russia and used their personal connections to improve the relations between the two states. They also served as nurses and volunteer auxiliaries at military schools and hospitals. The two main periodicals of the women’s movement, “Women’s Voice” and “Ravnopravie” regularly commented on the role of BulgarÂ� ian women in post-war reconstruction, on their participation as nurses during the 1913 war, on the post-war economic difficulties and on the need to punish those responsible for the catastrophe. The issue of equal rights in education and the professions was also raised, but it was largely overshadowed by the tense political and social atmosphere in Bulgaria on the eve of the country’s entry into the First World War. A striking example of the new roles that women’s organisations (and especially those on the left) were undertaking at this time was the staging of a special “day of women” in March 1915, following the example set by the first women’s conference organised by the socialist Second International in Copenhagen in 1910. Celebrated initially as a day of women workers and international solidarity, the event became a means of mobilising women in their struggle for equal rights in all spheres of life. In Bulgaria, the day was marked for the first time in 1911 by a small group of socialists, and its first mass public celebration was in 1915. In this way, Bulgarian women were able to demonstrate their solidarity with pacifist and anti-war protesters in other European countries. Their claims to an equal role in the building of the nationstate also took on new meanings in the context of campaigns for the preservation of peace. This found expression both in widespread support for the policy of Bulgarian neutrality before October 1915, and in the anti-war protests staged by women during the period of belligerency after October 1915. The short period between the Balkan wars and the First World War was likewise marked by a sharp rise in the activities of women Social Democrats,6 who organised mass anti-war demonstrations which

6 ╇ Here and further on in the text the terms “Social Democrat” and “socialist” will be used interchangeably with reference to Bulgarian women’s activism. The first term refers to the party itself (Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party), while the second term relates to its ideological profile as “socialist” (claimed by both the “narrow” and “broad” wings), as well as to the name of the Socialist Women’s Union, founded in 1914.

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were also an affirmation of women’s social and political rights.7 Beginning in June 1914 in Sofia, when the first women’s Social DemoÂ� cratic conference was held, with more than 200 delegates taking part, the mobilisation of working-class women systematically increased as war drew closer. Taking particular impetus from the international conference of socialist women at Berne in March 1915,8 they organised meetings and protests against the war in an effort to mobilise the working classes for peace and political rights for women. On 7 June 1915, for example, the Social Democratic women’s group in Plovdiv staged a mass public event, where 800 people (half of them women) voted in favour of a resolution for peace and brotherhood between nations and against the political agitation for “a new war by the Bulgarian bourgeoisie”. As was asserted at the meeting, this was “an appeal against chauvinism and patriotism, for bread and freedom, for class struggle and socialism”. The resolution was sent to the Prime Minister and was published in Rabotnicheski vestnik, the organ of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party (narrow socialists). Women also participated in the 1 May events in 1915 on a large scale. The Social Democratic Party announced a “Demonstration for Peace”, which was attended by 30,000 workers, many of whom were women. Very often the anti-war message, as well as the demand for women’s rights, was combined with overt propaganda for socialist ideas, making the social protests and the struggle for female emancipation inseparable from the Social Democratic Party’s political agenda.9 And, in this respect, the role of women in political agitation, for instance through carrying messages, distributing bulletins and explaining the party policy, was crucial. The various political and anti-war activities carried out by socialist women were intended to demonstrate the clear difference between them and representatives of the other women’s associations. One of ╇See for example the series of lectures on this topic by Rayna Kandeva and other socialist women activists: “About the European War and Women” – Rabotnicheski vestnik 109, 20 August 1915. 8 ╇ The latter was embraced by women activists at the expense of the other international event, the International Congress of Women at The Hague in April-May 1915, which was perceived largely as an expression of bourgeois women’s activism and despite its broad address to women around the world did not enjoy the support of women socialists in Bulgaria. 9 ╇On the merging of the pacifist and women’s rights claims with the political ones, see for example the municipal elections in the capital on 3 May 1915 as reflected in Rabotnicheski vestnik 14, 26 April 1915; and Rabotnicheski vestnik 17, 30 April 1915. 7

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the most striking demonstrations of this was the series of actions that the Socialist Women’s Union held against the “Day of the Roses”. This holiday was set up for charity purposes by “bourgeois women” with the support of the official authorities and was scheduled for 29 June 1915. The idea was that on this day members of the associations which made up the Women’s Union would sell artificial roses with an appeal to citizens to support the battle against tuberculosis. Socialist women declared themselves against the holiday and on the day before it was due to take place, they organised public protest meetings and carried out wide reaching propaganda to prevent the event. The day was denounced as a “swindle” and as an “annual carnival” of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose was to conceal the link between tuberculosis and poverty among the working-class population.10 In the end, the activities carried out by socialist women prevented the holding of the holiday and it was postponed until a later date.11 At the opposite extreme to anti-war agitation, the First World War also saw some rare but nonetheless significant examples of women volunteering for active combat roles. One of them was Donka Ushlinova (1880-1937), a former participant in the armed movement for the liberation of Macedonia and Edirne Thrace, who fought together with her husband in the Balkan wars, and joined the infantry division in Macedonia during the First World War, where she was awarded the rank of an officer for her heroism. This case was not an isolated one, although in general, the participation of women at the war fronts was restricted to nurses and sanitary workers. Supported in their efforts by the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which provided supplies of hospital materials, instruments and medical facilities, these “soldiers of mercy” were a regular presence on the battlefield, caring for the wounded, assisting with the evacuation of casualties, and fighting epidemics. Regretfully, the role of the Bulgarian women’s medical service during First World War (and in the Balkan wars too) still remains a blank page in Bulgarian historiography. However, in contrast to previous conflicts, such as the RussoTurkish war of 1877-8 and the first Balkan war of 1912, women’s participation and input into the First World War was associated not so much with their Red Cross activities, but with the hunger demonstra╇Bradinska (1969), p.╯266. ╇See Rabotnicheski vestnik 63, 25 June 1915; and Rabotnicheski vestnik 59, 20 June 1915. 10 11

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tions and riots staged by the mothers, wives, and daughters of soldiers in protest against the unending shortages and deprivation. The first such riots occurred soon after Bulgaria’s entry into the war and were a reflection of the political and economic crisis in the country, finding expression in social turmoil, rising prices and black market speculation. The most violent protests occurred in villages, where the requisitioning of agricultural foodstuffs and the mobilisation of people and livestock led to widespread hunger. In their demands for peace and the end of food requisitioning, women frequently demonstrated with red flags and black handkerchiefs, and were often joined by old men and children. The first big urban riots took place on 9 March 1916, after a refusal of the municipality in Burgas to pay allowances for soldiers’ families. In the following year, mass demonstrations were carried out in Dupnitsa and the surrounding villages. In 1918, when the government announced a lowering of the bread ration, protests and riots spread to major towns across the country and led to the plundering of warehouses holding requisitioned foodstuffs. Although no particular organisation was behind them, in some towns the riots continued for several days and were put down by use of army units, leading to the arrest and murder of many female participants. In 1916 Gana Avdjieva from Burgas was tried and sentenced as an initiator of the riots, becoming the first female political prisoner in Bulgaria. The women’s riots had enormous impact on the soldiers’ morale on the front line, encouraging a breakdown of discipline and, ultimately, a refusal to fight any more. The sheer length of the war, the lack of adequate supplies for the front and the arrival of news about the poor conditions of families back at home, triggered waves of anti-military propaganda among the soldiers, which increased especially after the October Revolution in Russia and the Fourteen Points issued by the American President Woodrow Wilson in January 1918. The mass flight of troops from the front line after the unsuccessful battle of Dobro pole on 15 September 1918, and the retreating soldiers’ march on Sofia, where they protested against the government and the King, thus came as no surprise to the anti-war movement in view of the population’s mounting discontent. By the time the government agreed to an armistice on 29 September, some 101,000 soldiers had lost their lives, around 153,000 were wounded, and 27,000 were missing. A further 50,000 had fallen victim to epidemics, and 112,000 soldiers were about to become prisoners of war under the Salonika agreement. The Bulgarian army was forced to surrender substantial territories along

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all the boundaries of the pre-1915 state and the goal of national unification of all Bulgarians, which had been one of the major motives for participating in the war, now clearly had to be abandoned. The harsh realities were further sharpened with the signing of the Treaty of Neuilly on 27 November 1919, under which the country had to pay enormous reparations, limit its army to 20,000 men only, and accept the forcible resettlement of hundreds of thousands of its co-nationals from territories now incorporated into neighbouring countries. Isolated internationally, the defeated and truncated state of Bulgaria also faced economic depression, social dislocation and political crisis at home. Female activists and organised women in the war’s aftermath The difficult times that Bulgarian society encountered in the aftermath of the war shaped the roles that women took and in particular had an impact on the work of women’s organisations and individual women activists. In contrast to the pre-war period, the battle for educational, professional and voting rights was put on the backburner for several years and instead efforts towards overcoming the difficult social and economic situation took priority.12 Having become the main pillars of the family during the war years, women were expected to play a major role in post-war reconstruction and in rebuilding those parts of BulÂ� garÂ�ian industry, agriculture, and social welfare which had been destroyÂ�ed in the fighting.13 Although with the gradual return of men from the front, most of the women who had been mobilised as waged workers in factories and war-related industries returned to “normal” domestic activities, many now saw themselves not only as wives and mothers, but as equal participants in civil society. The first and most visible aspect of women’s activism in the immediate post-war years concerned their support for the war wounded and care of soldiers’ graves. In the medical profession, of course, women’s 12 ╇ The Bulgarian suffragist organisation “Ravnopravie,” for example, maintained its existence throughout the entire period of the wars, but it rose to prominence again only in early 1920s. 13 ╇ In fact, from the beginning of the twentieth century women were already an important part of the industrial workforce, and their number rose continuously in the first half of the century, from 22% in 1909 to 36% in 1944. See Todorova (2004), p.╯117.

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role as nurses remained strictly subordinate to that of men as Â�doctors. Here they had little autonomy. However, in the field of commeÂ� morative actions and the cultivation of the memory of the dead, they enjoyed more freedom to shape developments in accordance with traditional customs and practice. After the war the soldiers’ graves remained largely outside the new state boundaries (mainly in Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Romania). This led to a number of peculiarities, especially given the absence of public ceremonies celebrating the war’s end, and the impossibility of private visits to former battlefield sites. As the state was not permitted to take care of the war graves that were outside its territories, or to build official war memorials until the mid-1920s, most of the monuments were erected by local communities. Meanwhile, individual or “private” forms of commemoration were made more difficult by the lack of bodily remains. In fact, this kind of commemoration was typically left to women, who – in line with custom and tradition – used to bury clothes to mark the death of their sons, fathers, brothers and husbands. With the end of the war, public memorials dedicated to the dead of local and regional communities started to appear across the country – as both sites of remembrance for the fallen soldiers of consecutive wars, and as symbols of the sacrifice which local communities had been called upon to make in the name of the Bulgarian nation. Although often supported by local institutions, such as schools, churches and municipalities, most of these monuments were built with private donations collected by the communities themselves, and in this respect, the involvement of women was crucial. Against the background of enormous economic hardship, they would collect donations, make their own tear-ridden contributions, and maintain the sites identified for such public commemoration. Later, with the coming of state-sponsored memorial projects in larger towns such as Sofia, Plovdiv, and Stara Zagora in the mid-1920s, regional branches of women’s organisations participated in collecting donations for monuments to the war dead. Despite their principled position against the absurdity of the war and their tense relationship with male-dominated military institutions, such as the Ministry of War and the various officers’ associations, such branches were successful in making the commemoration of the dead a key component in the reestablishment of civic responsibility and social unity in the wake of the national disaster.

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In the first years after the war’s end, however, commemoration of the dead did not just mean building memorials, but also taking part in rituals of mourning and remembrance at the family and communal levels.14 In the realm of the family, the memory of the war dead was celebrated according to the traditional calendar, with special days marked out for particular commemorative rites. Aside from the burial rites, which (as noted), customarily included the burying of the dead person’s clothes in the absence of a body, there was also an established system of commemorative acts observed for every member of the community. Among them, the all souls’ days (four in number, accordÂ� ing to the traditional Bulgarian calendar) were used as occasions to honour the immortality of the soul and the undying memory that the living had about their loved ones, in accordance with Christian teaching.15 Graves without bodies in the local cemeteries served to reattach the dead to their communities of origin and to involve them in the cycle of commemorative acts that would enable the appeasement of their souls and the sustenance of their memory. The majority of these commemorative acts were carried out by female members of the community, and especially by the eldest women, who would pour water and wine on the grave, prepare a commemorative meal and serve it to the people attending the ceremony. Thus long before the remembrance of the war dead started to take on state-affirming functions, as it did from the mid-1920s, it had already developed a deeper, more intimate presence at local and communal level, albeit with a female rather than military garb. Indeed, given the lack of officially-sanctioned commemorations until the mid-1920s, private and communal grief was the main expression of mourning for the fallen. Despite some glorious and successful battles at the front, the defeat and the humiliating end to the fighting prevented the emergence of unifying national myths about the war. Instead, the war was associated with the bitter failure of national ideals, and with accusations and counter-accusations on all sides. For instance, the left attacked the government, King Ferdinand and the bourgeoisie in general for supporting Bulgaria’s participation in the war on the side of the Central Powers. On the other hand, socialists, democrats and pacifists were frequently accused by their right-wing opponents of undermining morale and acting as enemies and traitors. 14 15

╇ For a broader, pan-European view see Mosse (1990); and Winter (1995). ╇See Vakarelski (1990).

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Apart from illustrating the clear-cut confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the working class, this was also indicative of the great feelings of bitterness which dealing with the war and its aftermath aroused in post-war Bulgarian politics, and of the failure to engage in an open and honest debate about the merits and demerits of the country’s participation in that conflict – a situation paralleled in post-war Italy, as Emma Schiavon notes in her contribution to this volume. However, in contrast to Italy, the silence of the Bulgarian military on such questions in turn meant that women would become the main guardians of the memory of the fallen – at least in the period before 1923. The cultivation of the memory of the dead went hand in hand with the equally important task of caring for the war wounded and disabled – whether in hospitals or in the family milieu. Against the background of an army whose heroism was now called into question, and a national economy close to collapse, so much so that even basic care for the wounded could not be guaranteed by the state, the need for volunteer medical assistance was enormous. The majority of this volunteer work was undertaken by women, who came forward as individuals or via local branches of women’s organisations. Already during the war women had served in medical units for the wounded and appeals for volunteers had been followed by most of the leading women activists. The lack of specialist medical personnel (until the mid-1920s there were only 125 certified nurses in Bulgaria), and the death of large numbers of medical orderlies on the front lines, made women’s assistance in hospitals absolutely crucial in 1918 and 1919. Most of the volunteers came from the so-called “bourgeois” wing of the women’s movement, although some working-class women also heeded the call. After the brutal suppression of the soldiers’ uprising of 1918, women’s associations were among those that provided firm support to the veterans’ claims for state recognition and pensions, for their right to accessible medical care, and for financial compensation for their wartime service. Apart from the bitter disillusionment caused by the defeat of the soldiers’ uprising, the first post-war months were also marked by expressions of mass discontent, calls for revenge against those held responsible for the catastrophe, and attempts to overturn the heavy penalties imposed on the defeated state under the Treaty of Neuilly. With regard to the latter, women activists and organisations were especially energetic in issuing protests to international women’s groups demanding their support in the quest for a milder treatment.

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For instance, the Women’s Union prepared a series of written complaints against the unjust clauses of the peace settlement, which they forwarded to women’s unions and associations abroad. As in the years after the Balkan wars, declarations and appeals to the international community were made against the redrawing of national boundaries, the loss of territories with a majority Bulgarian population, the mass displacement of Bulgarian refugees, and the delayed repatriation of thousands of prisoners of war. After a somewhat difficult period in its existence during the war, the Bulgarian Women’s Union had a vital role in these post-war activities and in the appeals for peace and cultural demobilisation. Following a series of papers and speeches about disarmament, one of the main activists of the Union, Zheni Pateva, initiated the creation of the Bulgarian branch of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) in 1918. Pateva was a delegate at the International Congress of Women in The Hague in April-May 1915, where she made valuable contributions on disarmament and reconstructing the war-torn nations. In 1920 she was an official representative of the government of Alexander Stambolijski in Norway where she delivered a paper to the ICW, and two years later she was a Bulgarian government delegate at the International Women’s Congress. The Union was also represented at the fourth congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Washington DC in 1924 and at the fifth congress in Dublin in 1925. On each of these occasions the Bulgarian cause was presented for the attention of women activists from different countries. Although the appeals for a revision of the Treaty of Neuilly had little effect, Bulgaria gained some sympathy as a defeated nation which had been treated too harshly by the peacemakers in 1919, and this helped to overcome the international isolation which the country had faced in the early post-war years. The fulfillment of their social and patriotic duty did not prevent Bulgarian women from maintaining an increasingly critical stance towards the policies of the post-war state, especially in relation to issues of social and political justice. Opposition to state-sponsored acts of violence in the post-war era was expressed in newspaper articles and, less frequently, through participation in acts of rebellion. Socialist and bourgeois women’s organisations again disagreed over tactics and goals. The transformation of the pre-war Social Democratic Party into the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in 1919, and the latter’s adherence to the Comintern’s line on armed struggle and

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proletarian dictatorship meant that socialist women’s organisations would oppose almost any political programme other than the Leninist one. Based on agitation around issues such as low wages, economic deprivation, and exploitation in the workplace, this struggle resulted in recurrent strikes, labour protests, and public demonstrations in favour of the Bolshevik ideal. In fact, one of the most notable developments in the first post-war years was the subordination of the women’s socialist movement to the broader aims and objectives of the Communist party. On 19 December 1919, the Central Committee of the BCP issued a declaration, pointing out that women, who made up more than half of the population, were now participating in almost equal numbers to men in the production process. The declaration appealed to the party organisations to make every effort to attract working-class women and to recruit them to the class struggle.16 Meanwhile sales of the party’s newspaper for women, Rabotnicheski vestnik, increased from 6,000 in 1919 to 10,000 in 1920, and in 1922 there were 700 female members of the BCP out of a total of 38,500.17 A further 5,800 women were also taking part in educational groups designed to prepare them for entry into the party. In the years 1919 to 1923 a large number of women participated in all of the mass activities organised by the party, including the transport strike and the general political strike in December 1919 and January 1920 respectively; the action in support of the starving population of the Volga region; and various political demonstrations and election campaigns. The involvement of communist women in social and political protest peaked in September 1923, when, following instructions from the Comintern in Moscow, the BCP took the decision to organise an armed uprising against the leaders of the June military coup, with the ill-disguised aim of establishing communist rule. Despite the Communists’ intentions, the uprising was far from having a mass character, spreading to a limited number of regions only (mostly in central and north-western Bulgaria) and involving relatively small groups of the population. What turned it into a bigger and more ╇See Ravenstvo 8, 1 December 1919; and Rabotnicheski vestnik 259, 1 May 1923. ╇Trifonov (1988), p.╯9. The number of women in the Bulgarian Communist Party seems very low compared to the number of men, but it is worth bearing in mind that these figures include only the actual members of the party. In fact, many women engaged in party-led activities without becoming party members, thereby showing their sympathy with socialist ideals and their solidarity with their brothers or husbands. 16 17

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important event was the brutal clampdown by the state. Thousands of rebels were murdered and many of those who survived were given long prison sentences. After the suppression of the uprising, the BCP was banned and in 1924 the Law for the Protection of the State was passed by the National Assembly. The uprising occurred with mass participation of women, both as organisers and as foot-soldiers in the rebellion. They took part in gathering and hiding arms, transferring munitions, acting as couriers, and hosting meetings in their houses. In fact, on 15 September 1923, the decision in favour of an uprising had been taken at the house of Tina Kirkova, a female member of the Central Committee of the BCP.╯During the uprising women offered medical help for the wounded, ensured food supplies for the rebels, and were persecuted on an equal basis to their male comrades. Some of the organisers – including a prominent activist in the communist women’s movement, Tsola Dragoycheva – were sentenced to fifteen years in jail. They were also deprived of the right to practice as teachers. Although the uprising received direct support only from the communist women’s organisations, non-communist women were also horrified by the brutal nature of the government’s response. Protests were issued by bourgeois women’s organisations calling for an immediate end to state repression in the aftermath of the uprising. The leader of the Women’s Union, Ekaterina Karavelova, issued numerous appeals to this end. As an act of public defiance, she turned her home into a place for collecting charity for the victims of the clampdown, and urged local branches of women’s associations in the country to organise similar activities in reaction to the terror. Many members of the Union voiced their opposition to the new legislation on the death penalty, which was passed by the National Assembly in 1923. In 1925, at the time of the communist-backed terrorist attack on St. Nedelya church in Sofia, affiliates from the Women’s Union sent letters to the government calling for an end to the arrest and murder of left-wing political suspects, and in support of the more than one thousand people who had disappeared without a trace in the police departments. At the initiative of Zheni Pateva, a “Women’s Peace Society in Bulgaria” was created in Burgas, which spearheaded opposition against political repressions and police persecutions. The intense political crisis of the immediate post-war years left little space for women to continue their pre-war struggles for equal access to education and the professions, but activity on these lines did not

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cease altogether. Suffice it to say that women were barred from most professional and administrative positions, which were still overwhelmingly occupied by men. A state of relative, though paradoxical, “equality” was created by the 1920 Labour Service Law, which required men over twenty and women over sixteen to perform work on state construction projects for a period of twelve and six months respectively. Aiming to circumvent the armaments limitation clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly, the law placed young men and women in the service of the nation on an apparently similar footing, but this did not mean that they were now regarded as “equal citizens”. Meanwhile, in the early 1920s the Bulgarian women’s movement changed its slogan from demanding the “improvement” of women’s voting rights to demanding “equal rights” in the sphere of suffrage, marking an important step in the development of feminist consciousness.18 Even so, it was only in 1937 that voting rights were granted to Bulgarian women, and then only to those who were married, divorced or widowed.19 Full and equal suffrage was to become a fact only after 1944. In the field of education, the post-war years saw more visible success. In 1918 the Bulgarian academic system appointed the first female assistant professor, the chemist Teodora Raykova-Kăncheva, and in 1924 the Association of Bulgarian Women with Higher Education was established.20 Against the background of economic and political crisis after the war, the Ministry of Education passed a law in 1919 turning all secondary schools into mixed ones, with boys and girls studying together. Although debates about the “special” education of girls persisted, both in society in general and among women activists, progress towards overcoming gender disparities was more and more evident in the post-war years. This was also coupled with increasing levels of literacy among women, with 57% able to read and write by the early 1930s, compared to only 14% in the period before World War I.21 However, the question of how to enhance the education and professional aspirations of peasant women remained a major challenge in the 1920s. Both feminist and socialist women were aware of this chal-

╇See Todorova (2004), p.╯122. ╇ As Daskalova (2001), p.╯183, remarks, women were thus granted the vote only after they had entered into a relationship of dependency on a man. Single women were still not recognised as equal citizens. 20 ╇See Nazărska (2003). 21 ╇See Todorova (2004), p.╯116; and Dinkova (1980). 18 19

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lenge, and continued to advance different solutions over the next two decades. Conclusion Overall, the social and economic changes that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the First World War substantially changed the status of women in Bulgaria and together with the development of the feminist movement, also led to their increased participation in public life. Having survived the war on their own terms and with their own experiences, women were no longer content to be passive subjects and victims, but rather involved themselves directly in social and political campaigns. This testified to an important process that was under way throughout the post-war years – the gradual shift from charity, education and social welfare work to political action, involving either violent resistance against social injustice (on the left) or state-supporting activities (on the centre and right). Commemorating the war dead was an equally important part of this process, involving as it did the mobilisation of local communities in the absence of a clear lead from the central authorities. Metaphorically speaking, the rise of new ideologies of masculinity in the war years was followed by a no less important rise in the activities of organised women’s movements, which also found expression in spheres that were previously reserved exclusively for men. In these new trends, the “above class” and “above party” stance of the Women’s Union and its local branches was paralleled by the socialist women and their class-specific vision of social activism. Embracing rival visions of women’s involvement and role in society – one through education and social integration, the other through aggressive revolutionary activism – “bourgeois” feminists and socialists paradoxically followed similar paths when it came to responding to the challenges of the post-war years. Despite the many ruptures and divergences in their agendas, they both sought to shoulder the heavy social burden of military defeat and in so doing, to open up new outlets for women’s public activity in the war’s aftermath. This surprising similarity in terms of experience, which was superficially masked by exaggerated and overblown ideological differences in the immediate post-war years, would be repeated in the very different context of the Second

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World War and the period of establishment of communist rule between 1944 and 1947. Bibliography Bradinska, R. (1969) Văznikvane i oformyane na zhenskoto sotisaldemokratichesko dvizhenie v Bălgaria, 1885-1915 (Sofia: 1969). Cholakova, M. (1995) Bălgarskoto zhensko dvizhenie v Bălgaria prez Văzrazhdaneto (Sofia: 1995). Daskalova, K. (1998) “Bălgarskite zheni v sotsialni dvizheniya, zakoni i diskursi”, in Ot syankata na istoriyata. Zhenite v bălgarskoto obshtestvo i kultura, ed. K.╯Daskalova (Sofia: 1998) 11–41. ———╯ (1999) “Feminizăm i ravenstvo v bălgarskiya XX vek”, in Mayki i dăshteri. Pokoleniya i posoki v bălgarskiya feminizăm, ed. R.╯Muharska (Sofia: 1999) 80–105. ———╯(2001) “Zhenskata identichnost: Normi, Predstavi, obrazi v bălgarskata kultura ot XIX – nachaloto na ХХ vek”, in Balkanski identichnosti v bulgarskata kultura ot modernata epoha (ХIХ-ХХ vek), eds. N.╯Aretov and N.╯Chernokozhev (Sofia: 2001) 157–228. Daskalova, K., and Gavrilova R. eds. (2001) Granitsi na grazhdanstvoto: evropeyskite zheni mezhdu traditsiyata i modernostta (Sofia: 2001). Dinkova, M. (1980) Sotsialen protret na bălgarskata zhena (Sofia: 1980). Karima, A. (1910) Zhenskoto dvizhenie u nas. Negovoto minalo, nastoyashte i bădeshte (Sofia: 1910), reproduced in Ot syankata na istoriyata. Zhenite v bulgarskoto obshtestvo i kultura, ed. K.╯Daksalova (Sofia: 1998) 198–9. Mosse, G. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: 1990). Nazărska, Z. (2003) Universitetskoto obrazovanie i bălgarskite zheni, 1879-1944 (Sofia: 2003). Paskaleva, V. (1983) Bălgarkata prez Văzrazhdaneto (Sofia: 1983). Todorova, M. (2004) Istoricheska traditsiya i promeni v Bulgaria: zhenski i feministki problemi, in Zhenski identichnosti na Balkanite, eds. K.╯Daskalova and K.╯Slavova (Sofia: 2004) 112–25. Trifonov, D. (1988) Zhenite v Septemvrijskoto văstanie. Entsiklopedichen spravochnik (Sofia: 1988). Vakarelski, H. (1990) Bălgarski pogrebalni obichai. Sravnitelno izuchavane (Sofia: 1990). Winter, J. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: 1995).

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The women’s suffrage campaign in Italy in 1919 and Voce nuova (“New Voice”): Corporatism, nationalism and the struggle for political rights Emma Schiavon* Italy came into the war almost a year after the outbreak of hostilities, on 24 May 1915. Before then Italian society was deeply divided between neutralists who wanted to remain out of the war and interventionists who wished to enter it. The war itself failed to heal these rifts, even though Italy emerged in 1918 on the winning side. In the post-war period social conflict raged between the bourgeoisie, who had supported intervention, and the factory workers and peasantry, on whom it had been imposed. One side orchestrated the occupation of land and factories and launched revolutionary uprisings. The other side fomented nationalist unrest in reaction to what they deemed to be a “mutilated victory”. In this they were encouraged by the prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who in April 1919 walked out of the Versailles peace conference in protest at America’s rejection of Italy’s claims to Dalmatia and the Croatian town of Fiume (Rjeka). In September 1919 the town was illegally occupied by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and his troops remained there until Christmas 1920. Despite this difficult situation, after the war the Italian feminist movement led its most organised and determined campaign for the rights of women to date, arguing that women’s special role during the war entitled them to the vote. New trends developed within the movement during this period and some feminists started following ideologies of radical nationalism. In addition, the idea gained ground that a corporatist system would have provided better representation for women than a parliamentary model based on the individual.

This essay focuses on the Italian women’s movement after World War I with particular reference to the experience of the Milanese feminists, who were the leading group in Italy at that time. Above all it seeks to uncover the contradictory links between nationalism, interventionism

*╇ I would like to thank Grazia De Michele who helped me in many ways with this paper and in particular with translation into English.

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and feminism during the immediate post-war period by looking at the struggle for women’s rights conducted in the pages of the journal Voce Nuova (New Voice). It is not possible, however, to discuss this issue without first looking at the attitudes taken by the Italian feminist movement during the war itself. In 1915 – contrary to what one might have expected – Italian feminists displayed almost unanimous approval of the government’s decision to enter the war on the Allied side. All independent women’s organisations supported this position, with only a few individual exceptions.1 Part of the explanation for this can be found in the fact that Socialist and Catholic women, who opposed intervention, were no longer part of the independent feminist movement but instead operated within the women’s sections of their respective political parties, a trend which had begun around 1912. This in turn freed the feminist movement to pursue its own autonomous agenda beyond the influence of socialism and political Catholicism. Even so, the feminists’ support for intervention is still highly surprising, since most Italians viewed entry into the war as something imposed upon them by the government rather than as the voluntary fulfilment of a patriotic duty. This in turn formed part of the backdrop to the rise of Fascism in the war’s aftermath. Even in comparison with the French feminists’ total support for the war, the Italian movement’s attitude is rather peculiar, since in May 1915 Italian territory was not directly threatened with invasion, in contrast to the position facing France in August 1914. In fact, the Italian feminists’ involvement in the war effort was more a strategy to achieve recognition of female citizenship than a capitulation to the pressures of patriots or warmongers. This can be seen firstly in the fact that nearly all feminist groups began their campaign for intervention as soon as the war began in 1914, long before any government resolution on Italy’s involvement. Secondly, women’s associations themselves hardly managed to control the enthusiasm that spread within their ranks, especially among younger activists, who saw in the war – rightly or wrongly – an extraordinary chance for emancipation. On the other hand, thanks to the war, the women’s movement sought the rise of an embryonic welfare state, which had been 1 ╇ I have already discussed the interventionism of Italian feminist organisations in two articles: Schiavon (2001) and Schiavon (2004). See also my forthcoming book, Schiavon (2010).

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one of their long-term concerns: welfare organisations would offer appropriate roles for and recognition of new female professional figures. Besides, the nature of the First World War itself – as the first mass industrialised conflict – seemed to shatter previous boundaries between combatants and non-combatants, thus undermining one of the main arguments against women’s enfranchisement: indeed, by 1918 economic production on the home front was proving a crucial factor in Italy’s victory, at least in terms of military operations. Finally we should not underestimate the impact on Italian women of those widespread propaganda images from the countries already involved in the war effort (especially Great Britain) which portrayed strong, self-confident and smiling women at work in all kinds of jobs, often dressed in trousers or uniforms. Such representations broke down the narrow gender rules imposed upon women at the time, especially in Italy. Moreover it has to be remembered that these kinds of image arrived at the same time as news about the patriotic realignment of the Pankhursts and the WSPU.╯Finally it must be stressed that, despite their reassuring declarations, Italian feminists never really abandoned their campaign for the vote for the duration of the war, and even went so far as to organise two national suffrage congresses between 1916 and 1917.2 However, this strategy failed completely to win political rights. Instead, the European-wide post-war gender backlash affected Italian society in the most extreme manner, with the rise of Fascism paving the way for the long-term defeat of any feminist demands. The Italian feminist movement in the aftermath of war In spite of these longer-term trends, in the immediate aftermath of war the Italian women’s movement appeared to be quite strengthened. Many of its leaders had held key positions in war work and propaganda and could now call on managerial and political skills which they had never previously dreamt of. More generally, it seemed that the war experience had strengthened many women’s self-esteem and confi2 ╇On this topic the book edited by Fell and Sharp (2007) marks a quantum leap in the interpretation of feminist movements’ patriotic alignment during the First World War. Fell and Sharp indeed correctly underline how the feminists “rarely lost track of their feminists goals, and frequently attempted to use pro-war nationalist discourse for their own ends” (Introduction, p.╯11).

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dence in their own abilities, especially among workers. In particular, it was only then that a new class of women, which could be defined as lower middle-class, was formed in Italy; they were teachers, new welfare workers, and above all office workers, whose number both in public and private companies had rapidly increased throughout the war. These women were the only ones who could attain a proper, although limited, economic independence.3 Moreover, the political context had never been so favourable to suffrage issues. Good news from abroad flowed in as votes and civil rights were extended to women in an increasing number of countries. Meanwhile at home almost all political parties had suddenly started supporting suffrage, partly spurred by the new Catholic party – the Partito popolare (Popular Party) – which immediately declared itself in favour of women’s suffrage. In December 1918, shortly after the ceasefire, Italian feminist associations started presenting petitions and putting pressure on MPs. Both the Lega patriottica femminile (Women’s Patriotic League), an association that worked in Rome and was characterised by strong nationalist views, and the Milanese section of the Fascio nazionale femminile (National Women’s Union), which was a kind of federation of all Italian national feminist associations born after the defeat at Caporetto, immediately joined forces and took action. The former urged male parliamentary deputies to take initiatives on their behalf, and advised them not to leave all women’s question in the hand of the Socialists because this attitude would have displeased the mass of women workers. The latter summoned a meeting of its representatives on 12 December 1918 where they exhorted parliament to extend the right to vote to women immediately, and to stop the mass dismissal of those women who had taken on new jobs during the war.4 At this stage it was clear that the Milanese associations were leading the Italian movement toward a more forceful campaign. The Milan women’s movement had been the strongest in the country since national unification and was now led by some important figures, particularly notable for their competence, determination and international links. They included Margherita Ancona, secretary of the radical bourgeois Comitato lombardo pro suffragio (Lombard Suffrage Committee), member of the Italian branch of the International ╇ Curli (1998). ╇ “Per il suffragio femminile” (In favour of female suffrage), Attività femminile sociale, 6/12 (December 1918). 3 4

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Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), and Italian correspondent for the main international suffrage papers; Carla Lavelli Celesia, leader of the Lombard branch of the more moderate Consiglio nazionale delle donne italiane (National Council of Italian Women, CNDI), which was in turn a member of the International Council of Women (ICW); and Paolina Tarugi, a leading lawyer, journalist and suffrage campaigner. In January 1919 Attività femminile sociale (Women’s Social Activity) the national organ of CNDI, published an open letter written by Margherita Ancona to the journal and to its organisation. In it, she encouraged CNDI’s members to abandon gradualism in favour of a campaign for the immediate introduction of female suffrage on the grounds that the vote would allow them to secure all the important social and economic reforms they had advocated: “The vote, the vote, the vote. If we all act together to claim the right to vote, we will get it”.5 The Milanese associations therefore organised the fourth National Suffrage Congress, held in Milan in April 1919 and preceded by a national meeting held in March at the National Theatre in Rome. Many political parties and women’s associations that had been against the vote before the war attended the two meetings, which subsequently gathered the support of several politicians. The Milan Suffrage congress was thus a great success: nearly all the political parties sent representatives, who in turn declared themselves almost unanimously in favour of the vote (except for the Nationalist party).6 It is worth emphasising that the presence of MPs and ministers did not soften the activists’ tone. Remembering the long years that had elapsed in vain before the war, feminist associations required solemn assurances from MPs in exchange for their support in future elections; they even threatened to hamper their careers in the event of last-minute defec5 ╇ M.╯Ancona, “Per una pregiudiziale” (A question to be resolved before all others can be addressed), Attività femminile sociale, 7/1 (January 1919). 6 ╇ The issue of Italian feminist movement after the First World War has been neglected by historiography. On the national meeting in Rome, see “Per il voto alla donna” (On votes for women), Giovine Europa, 7/3 (March 1919); and on the Milan congress see M.╯Ancona “Per il voto alla donna. Quarto congresso suffragista nazionale (Milano 26–28 aprile 1919)” (On votes for women, national suffrage congress), Giovine Europa, 7/6 (June 1919); “Notiziario. Milano. Per il Congresso nazionale pro suffragio femminile” (Newsletter. Milan. For the National Women’s Suffrage Congress), La Fiaccola. Rassegna femminile di italianità, 2/3–4 (March–April 1919); and “Il congresso femminista” (The Feminist Convention), Il Corriere della sera, 28 April 1919.

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tions. At the end of the congress the Radical MP and future Minister Luigi Gasparotto committed himself to introducing a bill on women’s suffrage, a promise which he later kept. Completely unmoved by these protestations, the president of the Lombard Suffrage Committee, Margherita Ancona, addressed the MPs, exhorting them to “shut the floodgate of eloquence and save your intellectual strength for writing a simple little statute”.7 An ambitious editorial and political project: Voce nuova (“New Voice”) The weekly feminist paper Voce nuova saw the first light of day on 31 May 1919 and in spite of its short life (the final issue was published on 13 February 1920) it followed and commented on all the most significant parliamentary debates about women’s rights in the post-war period, including the abolition of the law requiring “marital authorisation” before a wife could engage in commercial dealings and property transactions on 17 July 1919; the approval of women’s suffrage in the Chamber of Deputies on 6 September 1919 followed by the dissolution of parliament before the same bill could be put before the Senate; and finally the general election held in November 1919. The project of a weekly political feminist newssheet arose from the suffrage congress which had reinforced the alliance between all the main local feminist associations in Milan – including not only the local branch of the CNDI and the Lombard Suffrage Committee but also the Unione Femminile Nazionale (National Women’s Union or UFN). One of the most important women’s groups at that time, the UFN had branches all over Italy but had started out and still had its main base in Milan. The organisation had operated until the war in quite an autonomous way because of its different ideological inspiration – which was socialist in a broad sense – and because of its methods inspired by the idea of direct action to improve woman’s social conditions. In this way, all of the main women’s organisations based in Milan supported the radical suffragist project of Voce nuova. As a matter of fact, every Italian feminist association claimed the right to vote at that time, but the Milanese feminists were the only ones who believed that ╇ M.╯Ancona, “Da un congresso all’altro” (From one congress to another), Voce nuova 1/2, 7 June 1919. 7

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the most effective strategy was to follow a hard-hitting campaign that aimed exclusively at suffrage. The important Roman branch of the CNDI, for instance, maintained its pre-war position, which called for the vote on principle, but felt it would be “naturally” granted to women once they had proved themselves, through social work, to be mature enough to exercise their new rights. This approach was common before the war to both the CNDI and, in large part, to the UFN, while the only associations which led real campaigns for suffrage were the “Suffrage committees” organised in the Federazione italiana pro suffragio (Italian Suffrage Federation), which was in turn affiliated to the IWSA.╯After the war, however, the UFN joined the “Suffrage committees” in the campaign for civil and political rights, while the position of the CNDI varied, depending on location, from the extremely moderate stance of the Romans, to the much more strident position of the Lombardy branch and its president, Carla Lavelli Celesia. Voce nuova was run by a cooperative in which all the major local organisations were represented and was characterised by an entrepreneurial spirit which was rather unusual for the independent feminist press, to the extent that the paper was able to pay for the salaries of two editors, Paolina Tarugi and Sofia Ravasi. The paper could also rely on the support of the Rome-based Associazione per la donna (Association for the Woman), which had committed itself to funding an office in the capital and to promoting the circulation of the periodical in central Italy. The project was ambitious, especially considering that the pre-war feminist movement in Italy was relatively weak.8 Voce nuova was an organ of public opinion in the widest sense of the term, since it covered domestic and foreign politics as well as strikes and labour unrest in the country. The choice of the weekly format was in fact largely dictated by the rapid pace of political events in Italy at this time, including working-class struggles and the birth of new political parties such as the above mentioned Popular Party and the Fascist Party (both established in 1919) soon followed by the Communist Party (founded in 1921).

8

╇ Pieroni Bortolotti (1972); Buttafuoco, (1984); Tesoro (1992); Migliucci (2006).

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The prevailing tone of the suffrage campaign undertaken by Voce nuova was defiant. Moderate or wavering male politicians were treated irreverently and sarcastically in its pages. The main parliamentary debates on women’s rights were reported in banner headlines or on the front page, transformed for the occasion into a sort of manifesto. The new activism and sense of purpose was no doubt legitimised by the role women had played during the war. Voce nuova’s position was in line with the interventionist choice made by all the Italian feminist organisations at the outbreak of war. Politicians, political parties and programmes were viewed through the lens of interventionism and neutralism, and judged accordingly. The two editors, Paolina Tarugi and Sofia Ravasi, also belonged to the younger generation of activists who had received their political training during the war. They had risen to prominence as journalists working in the field of wartime propaganda at the highest levels. Both had also been on the editorial board of the Bulletin périodique de la presse italienne, which was destined for the Bureau de la presse etrangère in Paris9 and had been contributors to several propaganda papers. In September 1917 Paolina Tarugi had become editor, along with another journalist, of the bi-weekly AssisÂ� tenza civile (Social Welfare), the main organ of the national committees for propaganda and civil assistance on the home front. To put it bluntly, this meant that the ideas of the feminists who wrote for Voce nuova in 1919-20 were rooted in an out-of-date interventionism, a position that would soon become anachronistic as a result of the political and social turbulence which characterised Italy and other European countries in the immediate post-war period. The failure to engage in a genuine and thorough cultural demobilisation was typical for all of Italian society at this time,10 especially among interventionists, but it resulted in a fatal political weakness for the feminist movement. As a consequence, even though at this point it had developed a vehement and well-organised struggle for women’s rights, the Italian feminist movement became politically isolated. 9 ╇ The collections of the Bureau are stored at the Bibliothéque de documentation internationale contemporaine in Paris. The presence of Paolina Tarugi and Sofia Ravasi on the editorial board is noted by Carrozza (1990), p.╯6. 10 ╇On the concept of ‘cultural demobilisation’ from a pan-European perspective, see Horne (1999) and (2002). For a general overview of the Italian situation see Corner and Procacci (1997).

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Voce nuova contributed to this process through its constant references to the war and to women’s role in it. In its view, performance of wartime service was not just an obligation in a banal contractual sense, but a life-changing experience for women, which had reinforced their political self-awareness and had demonstrated to the world their full personality. As one of the paper’s editorials put it on 31 May 1919: The intense way in which, in these last years, we have invested our physical and mental energies has saved us from any accusation of cowardice and is carrying us forwards in strength and composure towards the future, and removing us forever from the sad world of meek compromises, which has never brought us anything but discouragement and regret.11

Voce nuova consistently and clearly rejected the concept of women’s rights as a reward from men for war service. It also dismissed all notions of a gradual extension of rights. Instead it claimed nothing less than the full recognition of women as political subjects. In line with this principle, contributors to Voce nuova were particularly angered by the decision in some European countries, such as Belgium, to grant the vote to the mothers and widows of fallen soldiers. Margherita Ancona defined it aptly as “a vote by proxy awarded to the war dead”, in other words, as a substitution for the deceased male citizen rather than a recognition of women’s right to the vote.12 On 28 June 1919, following the introduction of the MartiniGasparotto bill in the Chamber of Deputies, Voce nuova provided detailed coverage of the stance on female suffrage taken by MPs past and present, providing a list of all those who had defected or changed their positions. A few days later, on 6 July, when the Chamber of Deputies approved the bill to grant women the vote, Voce nuova greeted this event with banner headlines. At the same time, however, it strongly condemned the Chamber’s decision – adopted against the background of jokes and double entendres – to exclude prostitutes from the right to vote. The suffragists of Voce nuova seemed fully 11 ╇ Voce nuova 1/1, 31 May 1919, without title, signed “Voce nuova”. The concept was restated in the following issue – see S. R., “Donna nuova per una famiglia nuova” (A new woman for a new family), Voce nuova 1/2, 7 June 1919. 12 ╇ M.╯Ancona, “Fra senatori e lords” (Between senators and lords), Voce nuova 1/9, 26 July 1919. On the proposal to grant the vote to war widows in France, strongly supported by the nationalist right, see Bard (1995) pp.╯83–4. On similar proposals for “family suffrage” as an alternative to equal political rights for women see Fiorino (1994).

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aware that the reference to prostitutes had an enormous symbolic significance, and that it concerned all women. The incident showed that there was still a long way to go in terms of securing women’s dignity and freedom: We... know that the struggle for woman’s freedom does not end here. On the contrary we have still achieved little or nothing, and the pitiful discussion on the unfortunate “love workers” (... repudiated by the same men’s egoism and brutality which fuels and creates them) is a sign of how much there is still to do in terms of raising women and the human family to the level of dignity and respect to which we aspire.13

The feminists of Voce nuova seemed, however, to miss a crucial point: the older notion that women might “contaminate” the nation through their involvement in politics had actually been reinforced by the war, and the debates on the exclusion of prostitutes, as well as the portrayal of suffrage as a “reward”, were highly revealing in this respect. The war had symbolically strengthened the idea that only men were entitled to citizenship as only they had been willing and able to sacrifice their lives as armed defenders of their country. The public discourse was more than ever dominated by heroic symbolism, while the prosaic reality of industrialised mass war on the home front, to which women had extensively contributed, was systematically downplayed and hidden by the gendered distinction now being made between (male) Â�soldiers and (female) non-soldiers. In the absence of cultural demobiÂ� lisation, and with even feminists apparently celebrating the continuation of the mindsets of war into the post-war period, the political idea of the nation became imbued with the concept of “armed civic virtue” based on the imagined hard and pure life at the front. This in turn strengthened the notion that women were not “naturally” bearers of rights and could only become so after a profound purification, a sacrifice comparable to that of the soldiers.14

13 ╇ “Il disegno di legge per l’elettorato femminile” (The bill in favour of women’s suffrage), Voce nuova 1/5, 28 June 1919. 14 ╇On the post-war gender backlash see Higonnet et al. (1987), p.╯7. On the concept of the Männerbund (male bonding established during war) see in particlar Mosse (1982); and on the concept of “armed civic virtue” see Elshtain (1987).

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Corporatism and nationalism in the pages of Voce nuova By the middle of September 1919 Voce nuova’s suffrage campaign was over. Already in the eleventh issue, attention was focused on the stance to be adopted by suffragists during the parliamentary elections. The debate was centred on the proposal, already presented by Carla Lavelli Celesia at the suffragist conference, to establish a common programme between all the feminist associations. This was to be submitted, dependÂ�ing on personal beliefs, to the competing political parties. Celesia’s idea was strongly rejected by Voce nuova because it was seen to be impossible to reconcile the different Italian political currents. Sofia Ravasi asserted that interventionism and neutralism were divided by a moral abyss, since “on the one hand, tenacity and enduring sacrifice were being called for, while on the other hand the so-called idealistic position of being against the war reduced all human virtue to impotence”.15 The frustrated expectations of victory and the understandable desire to play a leading role in such a crucial political situation led Voce nuova to set the issue of women’s suffrage aside for a while. Instead, between the first ten days of September and the 1 November it concentrated largely on “national” issues. The paper – as well as the majority of the Italian bourgeois press – enthusiastically greeted the occupation of the Istrian town of Fiume (today Rijeka) by the nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and a group of soldiers who had operated illegally and on their own initiative. Hitherto the city had been disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia with the western Allies caught in between as arbiters. In November 1919, the failure to reintroduce the Martini-GaspaÂ� rotto suffrage bill after the elections represented the umpteenth setback in the decades-long campaign for the enfranchisement of women, and led Voce nuova to attack the parliamentary system as a whole; in addition they began to suggest that a corporatist system might be the best solution. The exasperation, and maybe a slight naivety, induced the suffragists to think that the exclusion of women from representation would be more difficult in a political system based on social and occupational groupings rather than on the individual. The issue had been addressed for the first time in an editorial by Paolina Tarugi on the formation of the Nitti government in June 1919. The Radical ╇S. R.,“Rinsaldiamo all’avvenire il nostro passato interventista” (Let’s strengthen our future through our interventionist past), Voce nuova 1/18, 12 October 1919. 15

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Francesco Nitti was strongly opposed as Prime Minister by Voce nuova because of his alliance with the Socialists, even though he had also promised to address the issue of women’s suffrage: While we sincerely hope that those measures required for the safeguarding of the rights of minorities and for the reorganisation of the current electoral systems will be taken, this time we will surely not tolerate any omission of our rights... In spite of this, if parliamentary democracy has had its day, as we believe it has, if from the classical concept of the right to vote as a prerogative of the individual we necessarily move towards the concept [of corporatism] which identifies itself with an expression of class and professional interests, and if the low level of national political life is due... to the lack of political and moral consciousness, then we are not here to uphold systems that are redundant, to perpetuate political immoralities that we strongly condemn.16

This radical questioning of the parliamentary system was at odds with Voce Nuova’s campaign for women’s inclusion, and sure enough, the issue was soon set aside, at least by the editorial staff. However, it was taken up again by another notable contributor to the paper, the Romebased philosopher Teresa Labriola, who was not part of the editorial team. Before the war Teresa Labriola had led the Rome Suffrage committee, within which she already represented the more elitist wing, but during the conflict she came to a radically nationalist view that soon distanced her from the Federazione Italiana Pro Suffragio itself. By 1919, her initial interpretation of Hegel’s idealism, in which she portrayed women’s rights as part of the dialectical integration of the nation and the state, had become characterised by clearly racist elements. This was a form of politics hardly found in Italy and only comparable to the position taken by some “Nazi-feminist” groups in Germany.17 It is no accident that some of Labriola’s more significant articles were published by Voce nuova in the middle of September ╇ P. T., “La crisi e noi” (The crisis and us), Voce nuova 1/5, 28 June 1919. ╇On “Nazi-feminism” in Germany see Crips (1990). Racism, along with the dominant idea of the need for the Italian nation to expand at the expense of other peoples, was present in the Italian National Association before the war. However, hostility towards other nations was rarely expressed, since the need to improve, enrich and expand the Italian people was felt to be more important – see Gaeta (1981). Even though racism was not very common in political programmes, Italian society was of course far from being immune to those racist theories which were becoming widespread all over Europe, especially in medicine, psychiatry and sociology. See here the collection of essays by Burgio (2000). For an analysis of the links between racism and misogyny see especially Babini (2000), and the seminal essay by Rossi Doria (2000) in that volume. 16 17

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1919, while at the same time Margherita Ancona’s collaboration with the paper ended. Ancona had in fact always held a coherent position on the liberal wing of suffragism, and rejected all forms of nationalism and racism. Despite these differences, the corporate representation theory as formulated by Labriola seemed to meet the hopes and aspirations of the pro-war/ pro-interventionist wing of the Italian feminist movement: Action. The Parliament. I am enthusiastic about the former, but I have many and justified doubts about the second... Do you want the vote? Yes. Not for the old parliament but for the new one. For the new parliament of fighters, of producers and of mothers. Do you want the vote? Yes. Your exclusion from the vote today with the current atomistic system – or rather pseudo-system – means your likely exclusion from the future trade union vote, in the new parliament.18

The idea of special representation for women as “fighters, producers and mothers” within a corporatist political system struck a chord with those feminists who had placed special emphasis on the social and national importance of motherhood and motherly values. During the war this long cultivated strategy showed its first important results, for instance through the professionalisation of charity and social welfare based on mutual assistance. The director of Voce nuova, Paolina Tarugi, also contributed to this development with her support for the creation of social welfare services in Italy (in the 1930s).19 In this way, the Italian feminists, despite taking up nationalist themes, continued with their tradition of giving public visibility to the values of motherhood and femininity. There are some parallels here with the strategy adopted by mainstream female activists in Germany, as Matthew Stibbe notes in this volume. However, there are far fewer similarities with the extreme right-wing German women analysed by Christine Streubel, whose main goal seemed to be to reconstruct masculinity as a means to national recovery. Even so, Teresa Labriola’s contribution 18 ╇T.╯Labriola, “L’Azione. (Discorrendo di femminismo)” (The Action. (Talking about feminism)), Voce nuova 1/6, 5 July 1919. On the propagandistic success of fascist corporatism, seen by the contemporaries as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, and on the success it encountered abroad, see Santomassimo (2006). 19 ╇Nisi Bernocchi (1984). In Italy it was above all the UFN that pursued a maternalist strategy to obtain full citizenship – see Buttafuoco (1997). For the European dimension of the “maternalist” tendency see Bock and Thane (1991) and Offen, (2000). For a general view on Italy see D’Amelia (2005).

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did point more in the direction of such views, especially as her focus on motherhood was more materialistic and bodily, based on women’s specific contribution to the nation through biological reproduction. This was a stance which was perfectly consistent with her overtly racist statements, including an article in Voce nuova in September 1919 asserting that Italian women might think twice before welcoming the extension of the franchise, particularly as the right to vote had now become a “power instrument in the hands of yellows and blacks” and since a “serious threat comes from niggers aiming to dominate Aryan society”.20 Teresa Labriola was a guest contributor to Voce nuova and so she did not entirely reflect its views. Paolina Tarugi, on the other hand, repeatedly defined the interventionism of the paper as democratic and revolutionary, thus firmly distancing herself from the aggressive imperialism of the nationalists, to whom Labriola was very close. Even so, it is significant that pieces like the one quoted above should find their way into the pages of Voce nuova without the slightest censorship, especially when one remembers that Margherita Ancona and many members of the UFN were of Jewish origin. What actually distinguished the paper from the position taken by its well-known contributor Labriola was above all the awareness of the violently misogynist trend running through neo-nationalist political parties and organisations. After the political elections the hostile attitude of the pro-war parties towards women was denounced and directly contrasted with the openness of the “anti-national” parties on the “woman question”: ... In the [original] programme of the Fasci di combattimento [Fascist groups] women’s suffrage was mentioned in a very clear and explicit way, whereas today it is unclear which evolutionary process [the Fascist groups] are referring to, as the issue is no longer mentioned [by them]. The War Veterans’ Association speaks of elections with universal suffrage and [yet] we are led to understand that they consider the universitas to be formed only by men, leading them to believe that universal suffrage is already in force in Italy at this time. â•… The conservatives, as usual, are silent, and the nationalists, in the words of some of their candidates, even in some women’s meetings,

20 ╇T.╯Labriola, “Il voto alla donna e il femminismo puro” (Votes for women and pure feminism), Voce nuova 1/15, 11 September 1919. For a biographical portrait of Labriola see Taricone (1994).

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have recalled that women used to exist only for breeding farmyard animals!21

Paolina Tarugi in particular spoke in defence of women’s work, especially office work, in face of heavy attacks coming from neo-nationalist parties and veterans’ associations. It is worth noting that Tarugi, in her defence of female workers against the attacks of nationalist war veterans, did not base her argument on the number of single women who now needed to support themselves as a result of the war. Instead, this argument only began to be used during the Fascist period after 1922 in an attempt to resist the Mussolini regime’s policy of excluding women from the workforce. In this sense I would agree with Ingrid Sharp’s assertion in her essay in this volume that the “surplus women” debate was a sign of the weakness of the feminist movement. Tarugi, on the other hand, showed deeper insight when she linked the right to work with the rights of political citizenship: Let us remind veterans that, if for men it was a duty to defend their country by taking up arms for a just and higher cause, for women there was an equal duty to work for mobilised soldiers and to excel in activities for their country. Those who did not do this were called traitors, and these women were accused of being the cause of profligacy, indolence and underhand hostility to the war, and of everything which damaged and undermined the strength of the soldiers and the resistance of the country. So there is no good reason to call that greater female activity an “invasion”: it was for women simply a duty and a right at a time when the entire burden of the family fell on them. Other people also then took up the work of the absent soldiers for their own material survival, but we are in an election period and it is therefore a heroic feat to criticise women, who may neither vote nor be elected, and instead to support the shirkers, who are voters, and may even stand for election.22

21 ╇ P. T., “I partiti ed i gruppi politici si pronuncino sull'insoluta questione del suffragio” (Parties and political groups have to pronounce themselves about the suffrage question), Voce nuova 1/21, 11 November 1919. Emphasis in the original. 22 ╇ P. T., “La disoccupazione degli smobilitati ed il lavoro femminile” (The Unemployment of the veterans and women’s work), Voce nuova 1/20, 1 November 1919, emphasis in the original. Other articles on the same topic and with the same approach include “Rubrica del lavoro – Alle impiegate! L’Unione smobilitati e l’eliminazione delle donne dagli Uffici”, unsigned (Work section – For women office workers! The Veterans’ Union and the exclusion of women from the offices], Voce nuova 1/19, 22 October 1919; and “Rubrica del lavoro – La donna negli uffici” (Work section – Women in the officies) by ‘A Woman office bank worker’, Voce nuova 1/22, 15 November 1919.

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Despite these clashes with the patriotic associations of veterans, and despite their growing political isolation, the feminists around Nuova Voce clung on to their interventionist position as a matter of principle. This meant continuing to reject any collaboration or even any contact with the increasingly powerful women’s Catholic and Socialist organisations, owing to their neutralist stance during the war. How can this unwavering attachment to the national idea, by a group pursuing a feminist project which seemed so radical at the time, be explained, especially considering that they seemed to be aware of the isolation that such a choice entailed? In contrast to what happened at the same time in Hungary (see the chapters by Judith Szapor and Judit Acsády) and in Germany (Matthew Stibbe), where feminism and nationalism followed clearly different paths, most Italian feminists in the immediate period following the war appeared to experiment – albeit for a short time – with an unusual and rather surprising mix of radical feminist and radical nationalist themes. Nowadays radical nationalism seems to be the most “gendered” of all the modern ideologies. The correlation between nationalism and fanatical glorification of the “masculine” has had an extraordiÂ� narily emotional impact and it is probably the most enduring legacy of fascism. This link between nationalism and certain definitions of masculinity has also been characteristic of more recent extremist movements in Europe’s history. Hence it is no accident that the most profound, and maybe definitive, analyses of the relationship between gender and nationalism to appear over the last years have come from scholars working in central and eastern Europe, and in particular in the former Yugoslavia.23 But when Voce nuova was published this link had not yet been so firmly established and instead elements of an opposite tendency were operating. First of all there was the Risorgimento tradition to which all the protagonists of Voce nuova referred, with its moderate openness to women’s citizenship.╯Then there was of course the experience of war during which feminist interventionists were entrusted with tasks of extraordinary importance on the inner front. Moreover misogyny and gender reaction were not peculiar to nationalism. The moralising against women’s work as a cause of disintegration for working-class ╇See especially Iveković (1999) and (2003); and Iveković and Mostov (2002). On patriarchy in Italian Fascism see De Grazia (1992). 23

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families was persistently evoked by some socialists and trades unionists, for instance.24 Finally, it is worth remembering the experience of the government of Fiume led by Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1919-20, which had given active and passive votes to women and had seen the election of three women to its representative assembly. The short-lived occupation of Fiume was a contingent and extemporaneous event that nonetheless had huge resonance and engendered the warmest enthusiasm amongst Italian feminists.25 However, beyond the influence exerted by one or more significant episodes, at that moment the nationalist-corporative perspective seemed to be the only one able to give representation to those lower middle-class women whose mouthpiece Voce nuova aimed to be from the outset. Voce nuova’s target audience was made up of office workers, teachers, and new welfare professionals (for whom there were cheaper subscription fees). A small army of young and dynamic women, who had just got into the world of work, could not find representation in the socialist trade unions, which had chosen to represent factory workers only, or support from the old liberal ruling class, which was still linked to the upper bourgeoisie. By targeting this group of working women, and by reminding them of their achievements during the war, Voce nuova made a clear and far-sighted choice. However this choice was to collide with the diametrically opposed attitude of the new nationalist organisations, which were bent on riding the wave of veterans’ bitterness against women accused of stealing their jobs. Therefore, the regular references to the war, inspired by the search for political legitimacy, ended up working against the Italian suffragists. On the whole, the post-war attempt to reap the rewards of the interventionist choice of 1914 had already failed by the autumn of 1919. In November Voce nuova tried for the last time to relaunch the suffrage campaign: it requested, with the usual determination, that ╇See Casalini (1998) and (2001); and Willson (2003), p.╯14. ╇See, for example, A.╯Sestan, “Le elezioni a Fiume” (The elections at Fiume), Voce nuova 1/21, 11 November 1919; and “Le elette di Fiume” (Women MPs of Fiume), unsigned, Voce nuova 1/21, 11 November 1919. There are few studies of the women’s suffrage in Fiume; on the festive atmosphere of vital energy in the town during the occupation, and on the freedom of morals, which came close to an ante litteram sexual and homosexual revolution, albeit one that involved almost exclusively men, see Salaris (2002). 24 25

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the MPs should reintroduce the Martini-Gasparotto bill. But due to their political isolation, these pleas from the Voce nuova suffragists had no chance of being heard. Between December 1919 and February 1920 only four more issues of Voce nuova were published, and the two editors were not afraid to analyse, in their usual clear-headed way, the impasse and the loneliness to which their political project had brought them. In the following years, due to the country’s descent into political conflict and trade union struggles and due to the subsequent explosion of Fascist violence, women’s civil rights, already previously labelled by politicians as a “secondary issue”, were easily forgotten. Moreover, the advent of Fascism in October 1922 meant the transformation of the widespread anti-women prejudice into a consistent government policy and cultural discourse. In summary, the end of the suffrage campaign of 1919 marked the ultimate defeat of the Italian feminists’ “interventionist strategy”. Bibliography Babini, V. P. (2000) Un altro genere. La costruzione scientifica della ‘natura femminile’, in Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia, ed. A.╯Burgio (Bologna: 2000) 475–89. Bard, C. (1995) Les filles de Marianne. Histoire des féminismes 1914-1940 (Paris: 1995). Bock, G. and Thane P. eds. (1991) Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare State (London: 1991). Burgio, A. ed. (2000) Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia (Bologna: 2000). Buttafuoco, A. (1984) Cronache femminili. Temi e momenti della stampa emancipazionista in Italia dall’Unità al Fascismo (Arezzo: 1984). ———╯ (1997) Questioni di cittadinanza. Donne e diritti sociali nell’Italia liberale (Siena: 1997). Carrozza, G. (1990) Les “Cartons verts” de la BDIC: une photo d’époque (Paris: 1990). Casalini, M. (1998) “‘Sebben che siamo donne….’. Il movimento operaio e la questione delle lavoratrici”, Passato e presente, 45 (1998) 113–34. ———╯(2001) “I socialisti e le donne. Dalla ‘mobilitazione pacifista’ alla smobilitazione postbellica”, Italia contemporanea, 222 (March 2001) 5–41. Corner, P. and Procacci, G., “The Italian experience of ‘total’ mobilisation 1915-1920”, in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed. J.╯Horne (Cambridge: 1997) 223–40. Crips, L. (1990) “Une revue national-féministe: Die deutsche Kämpferin, 1933-1937”, in La tentation nazionaliste 1914-1941, ed. R.╯Thalmann (Paris: 1990) 67–182. Curli, B. (1998) Italiane al lavoro, 1914-1920 (Venezia: 1998). Elshtain, J. B. (1987) Women and War (New York: 1987). D’Amelia, M. (2005) La mamma (Bologna: 2005). De Grazia, V. (1992) How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1920-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1992).

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Fell, A. S. and Sharp, I. eds. (2007) The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-1919 (Basingstoke: 2007). Fiorino, V. (1994) “Il voto familiare tra suffragismo e crisi del parlamentarismo nella Francia di fine Ottocento e primo Novecento”, in Laboratorio di Storia. Studi in onore di Claudio Pavone, eds. P.╯Pezzino and G.╯Ranzato (Milan: 1994) 63–80. Gaeta, F. (1981) Il nazionalismo italiano (Rome and Bari: 1981). Higonnet, M. R. et al. eds. (1987) Behind the Lines. Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven; London: 1987). Horne, J. (1999) “Smobilitazioni culturali dopo la grande guerra 1919-1939”, Italia contemporanea, 215 (1999) 331–9. ———╯ (2002) “Demobilisations culturelle apres la Grande Guerre” in 14–18. Aujourd'hui. Today. Heute, 5 (2002) 45–53. Iveković, R. (1999) Autopsia dei Balcani. Saggio di psico-politica (Milan: 1999); German translation (2001): Autopsie des Balkans. Ein psycho-politische Essay (Graz: 2001). ———╯ (2002) with Mostov, J. eds. From Gender to Nation (Ravenna: 2002). ———╯(2003) Le sexe de la nation (Paris: 2003). Migliucci, D. (2006) Per il voto alle donne. Dieci anni di battaglie suffragiste in Italia (1903-1913) (Milan: 2006). Mosse, G. L. (1982) Nationalism and Sexuality. Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: 1982). Nisi Bernocchi, R. (1984) Le scuole di servizio sociale in Italia: aspetti e momenti della loro storia (Padova: 1984). Offen, K. (2000) European Feminisms 1700-1950. A Political History (Stanford: 2000). Pieroni Bortolotti, F. (1972) Socialismo e questione femminile in Italia 1892-1922 (Milan: 1972). Rossi Doria, A. (2000) Antisemitismo e antifemminismo nella cultura positivistica, in Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia, ed. A.╯Burgio (Bologna: 2000) 455–73. Salaris, C. (2002) Alla festa della rivoluzione. Artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume (Bologna: 2002). Santomassimo, G. (2006) La terza via fascista. Il mito del corporativismo (Roma: 2006). Schiavon, E. (2001) “L’interventismo femminista”, Passato e presente, 54 (2001) 59–72. ———╯(2004) “Interventismo femminile nella grande guerra. Assistenza e propaganda a Milano e in Italia”, Italia contemporanea 234 (2004) 89–104. ———╯ (2010) (forthcoming) Interventiste nella grande guerra (Milan: 2010). Taricone, F. (1994) Teresa Labriola. Biografia politica di un’intellettuale tra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan: 1994). Tesoro, M. (1992) “La partecipazione italiana all’International Women Suffrage Alliance”, in Salvatore Morelli (1824-1880). Emancipazionismo e democrazia nell’Ottocento europeo, ed. G.╯Conti Odorisio (Naples: 1992) 388–415. Willson, P. (2003) “Italy”, in Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45, ed. K.╯Passmore (Manchester: 2003) 11–32.

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Raps across the knuckles: The extension of war culture by radical nationalist women journalists in post-1918 Germany Christiane Streubel At the outset of the First World War, the liberal, social democratic and conservative wings of the German women’s movement at first worked together in the National Women’s Service (Nationaler Frauendienst) in order to support the male war effort. A deep conflict arose in 1917, when the socialist women’s movement and the predominantly liberal orientated Federation of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine or BDF) called for a democratisation of Germany including female suffrage. Conservative and nationalist women’s organisations vigorously rejected this demand in the final two years of the war, arguing together with their male counterparts that enfranchising the “uneducated masses” would ruin the Kaiserreich. As such, female suffrage came only with the revolution, being granted by proclamation of the Council of People’s Commissars on 12 November 1918. In the meantime, the extreme Right held the new Weimar Republic responsible for Germany’s defeat in the war, and did everything in its power to undermine the latter’s legitimacy in the eyes of the German people.

After the proclamation of female suffrage, the nationalist Right in Germany had to change its policy. In its eyes, more than 17 million female first-time voters1 had to be kept from electing democratic and left-wing parties. After decades of propagating the idea of the “apolitical woman”,2 the Right was forced to lure women to the polls in order to remain a strong force under the new political circumstances.3 New female political opinion leaders were needed to explain why women should vote for right-wing parties and join nationalist organisations.4 In this article I will explore the role of radical nationalist women journalists in rebuilding the nation after defeat and in contesting Germany’s 1 ╇ Cf. Die Wahlen zur verfassunggebenden Deutschen Nationalversammlung am 19. Januar 1919, bearbeitet im Statistischen Reichsamt, Berlin 1919, pp.╯24–5. 2 ╇ Planert (1998), esp. pp.╯224–40; Heinsohn (2000); Stibbe (2002). 3 ╇Scheck (2004), esp. pp.╯23–47; Woodfin (2004); Sneeringer (2007). 4 ╇ Wolfram Pyta has recently stressed the relevance of political opinion leaders in the political culture of Weimar Germany – see Pyta (2008), pp.╯88–9.

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redrawn national boundaries by analysing two important and widely read right-wing newspapers, the Deutsche Zeitung and Der Tag. My article focuses on two central questions: Firstly, how were gender relations renegotiated in the context of some of the unresolved conflicts of the post-war period? I will describe how female suffrage generated a new group of right-wing female opinion leaders who seized the chance to present women as part of the nationalist political milieu and as equal comrades in arms in the political conflicts of the day. Secondly, I ask if we can identify cultural remobilisation in the actions of female radical nationalists, in line with the use of that concept by John Horne.5 As we shall see, the female journalists analysed here joined their male counterparts in sustaining a culture of war. They portrayed the German population as victims of the Versailles order, helped to identify those whom the anti-republican Right considered to be the worst enemies of the German nation, and took part in proclaiming a special kind of heroism which would convert defeat into victory. I will show that these two phenomena – the renegotiation of gender relations and the practice of cultural remobilisation in Germany by radical nationalist forces –were closely interconnected; both were dependent on each other. The German Right and its radical-nationalist female wing The years from 1918 to 1923 were a period of radicalisation for the German Right, framed by events such as the foundation of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) with its radical völkisch wing in December 1918; by the Kapp Putsch of March 1920; and by Hitler’s attempted overthrow of the Bavarian government in November 1923. In the first years after the war, new radical nationalist organisations were set up to the right of the DNVP, not only the Nazi party or NSDAP, but others too, including the Steel Helmet, League of Frontline Soldiers (Stahlhelm, Bund der FrontÂ� soldaten), the Anti-Bolshevik League (Antibolschewistische Liga), the conservative-revolutionary June Club (Juni-Klub), the radical antiSemitic German Völkisch Defence and Defiance League (DeutschVölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund), and the looser groups of Freikorps, paramilitaries hostile to communism and the Weimar Republic. In the 5

╇See Horne (2005), pp.╯131–2.

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years from 1919 to 1923, the German Right was shaken by a permanent conflict between this radical wing and more moderate groups. Formed out of different right-wing parties of the Kaiserreich, the membership of the DNVP itself ranged from conservative aristocratic landowners, hoping for the return of the Hohenzollern monarchy, to völkisch anti-Semites, who called for the establishment of a dictatorship under a new charismatic leader. Furthermore, some members wanted to change the democratic system from within by participating in governments and forming alliances with other Reichstag groupings, while others noisily demanded radical opposition and refused all coopeÂ�ration with republican parties and institutions.6 In 1920, a female counterpart of the radical nationalist organisations came into being, the Ring of National Women (Ring Nationaler Frauen), which incorporated 200,000 members.7 The Ring of National Women was on the one hand part of the more general anti-Versailles agitation, and on the other hand an opportunity for right-wing women to join a “genuinely nationalist” women’s movement serving as an alternative to the established, more liberal-orientated BDF.╯With the granting of female suffrage in November 1918, the Ring was able to gain remarkable influence in radical nationalist circles. Not only was it considered to be the most effective opponent of the BDF in the postwar period, but also the Ring’s representatives became the new female opinion leaders in the periodicals of the German Right. In two leading newspapers, the Deutsche Zeitung, organ of the radical right-wing Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), and Der Tag, which appealed to a more intellectual readership,8 a new type of female journalist was recruited between 1919 and 1923. In Imperial Germany before the war, anti-feminists had dominated the radical nationalist milieu with their ideal of the “apolitical woman”. After the war, the male and female anti-feminists were gradually replaced by a new generation of editors and freelancers who advocated women’s political participation.9 Remarkably, some representatives of the Ring of National Women, through their journalism, became political commentators on the ╇ Hiller von Gaertringen (1996); Schildt (1998), pp.╯131–81. ╇ Another very successful new women’s foundation was the Queen Luise Alliance (Bund Königin Luise), founded in 1923. Cf. Schöck-Quinteros (2007). 8 ╇ Liebe (1956), pp.╯45 and 47. 9 ╇ For a detailed analysis of the Ring of National Women see Streubel (2006a), esp.╯pp.╯116–22, 137–53 and 199–256. 6 7

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nation’s general problems, discussing matters usually reserved for men. Käthe Schirmacher, Martha Voß-Zietz, Pia Sophie Rogge, and Lenore Kühn were encouraged to write leading articles for the front pages of the Deutsche Zeitung and Der Tag, dealing with topics like loyalty to the fatherland, the meaning of “German honour”, the preservation of Prussia, the demand for a return of Upper Silesia and Danzig to the German Reich, the new coalition governments after 1918/19, and the Treaty of Versailles. All of these authors were activists in the Ring of National Women. The female authors mentioned above did not emerge from total obscurity after World War I.10 Käthe Schirmacher, who held a Ph.D in Romance studies, had first risen to national prominence as an activist of the left-liberal female suffrage movement in the 1890s before she went over to the radical right völkisch movement of the German Empire at the turn of the century. She became a very active representative of the German Eastern Marches Association (Deutscher OstÂ�marÂ� kenverein), an organisation which favoured aggressive policies of Germanisation in those parts of Prussia where Poles formed a large part of the population. In 1919, Schirmacher was elected as a DNVP member of the Weimar National Assembly. Born in Danzig, she represented the electoral district of Danzig-West Prussia. Martha Voß-Zietz, who had supported Schirmacher in her campaign for female suffrage in the 1890s and was a co-founder of the German housewives movement in the Kaiserreich, underwent a similar political metamorphosis. In World War I, Voß-Zietz became a leading member of the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche VaterÂ� landspartei), founded in September 1917. The Fatherland Party was a strong pressure group for a “victorious peace” (the so-called Siegfrieden or “Hindenburg peace”). It condemned the Reichstag Peace Resolution which had called for a negotiated end to the war, and instead demanded a fight to the finish and large-scale annexations, especially in the East. It also agitated against a democratisation of the German Empire. After the war, Voß-Zietz joined the newly-founded German Völkisch Defence and Defiance League which declared the “fight against Jewry” to be its primary goal. Pia Sophie Rogge was an author and poet in Imperial Germany. After the revolution, she became a leading member of the DNVP in ╇ For biographical information on the female journalists mentioned in this chapter see Streubel (2006a), pp.╯92–9 and 122–33; and Streubel (2007). 10

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Schleswig-Holstein and ran for a seat in the Reichstag in 1920. In 1923, she joined the German Völkisch Freedom Party (Deutsch-Völkische Freiheitspartei), a new anti-Semitic political party founded in DecemÂ� ber 1922 when radical right-wing politicians broke away from the DNVP. Lenore Kühn, who held a Ph.D in philosophy, supported her husband in editing a Pan-German political journal during the war. In 1917, she was co-founder of the German Philosophical Society, which put itself forward as an anti-Jewish alternative to the older and betterknown Kant Society. After the war, she became Käthe Schirmacher’s campaign aide in Danzig. Upon returning to Berlin, Lenore Kühn was chosen as editor of the DNVP’s official newssheet for women. These women were not only invited to publish in male-dominated newspapers, but they were also important figures in the right-wing women’s press.11 Therefore, they can be identified as political opinion leaders who exerted influence on the cultural attitudes and perceptions of their epoch. Election campaigns and strict education for male weaklings The right-wing women discussed above were fundamental opponents of democracy and the Versailles order after 1919. In the eyes of the male leadership of the DNVP their activities as writers and journalists for the right-wing press were of great value. This was first and foremost because Schirmacher, Voß-Zietz, Rogge and Kühn, among others, were expected to mobilise newly-enfranchised female voters for the radical nationalist cause. Throughout the Weimar period, the number of articles by female authors appearing in mainstream national newspapers indeed increased noticeably when Reichstag elections were approaching.12 Secondly, the female journalists were welcomed as unforgiving and uncompromising critics of the BDF.╯Although female radical nationalists did not share the anti-feminism of many of the male leaders of the German Right, and believed that women should play a role in national politics, they nonetheless attacked the traditional German women’s movement as democratic and internationally orientated, thereby branding them as traitors to their country and as “anti-Germans”. The male leaders of the radical Right may have hoped 11 12

╇Streubel (2006a), pp.╯153–74 and 177–81. ╇ Ibid., pp.╯200–6, 209–10, 220, 227 and 239–40.

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that this criticism would be read as a condemnation of the women’s movement as a whole.13 But how can we explain the fact that the female journalists were also encouraged to write leading articles for right-wing newspapers that were directed beyond a narrow female readership to the public in general? For example, through leading articles on the front page of daily papers like the Deutsche Zeitung and Der Tag, they were able to define who ranked among the “real Germans” and who did not, why the German people should become “national”, and which political actions of men should be judged as honourable or cowardly. In addition, they established themselves as commentators on foreign affairs, and especially the disputed new borders of the Weimar Republic in East and West.14 This was in marked contrast to the idea of the “apolitical” woman, vigorously promoted by the political Right in Imperial Germany and continued by anti-feminists in the Weimar Republic.15 In May 1921, a male author, Franz Wugk, published an article in the German-national paper Der Tag under the title “Thoughts about a German Jeanne-d’Arc”. He claimed: [B]ecause there is no man to be found to evict the French, the English, the Poles [in the original source he used the pejorative term Polacken], the Belgians, the Danish, the Italians from Germany, we do have to hope for a female messiah after all…; a female Teuton [Germanin] of TaciÂ�Â�tus… And above all, she must have faith in the German future; faith that moves mountains and closes abysses. The faith that is almost too difficult to preserve in these days of hell. When will you come, German Jeanne d’Arc?16

This quote provides a clue as to how to interpret the post-war interest in female journalists who commented on questions of national inter╇ Ibid., pp.╯245–56. ╇See e.g. K.╯Schirmacher, “‘Deutsche’” (Germans), Deutsche Zeitung, 17 June 1921 (leading article); K.╯Schirmacher, “Warum müssen wir national sein?” (Why must we be national?), Deutsche Zeitung, 31 January 1920; M.╯Voß-Zietz, “Deutscher Ehrbegriff” (The German concept of honour), Deutsche Zeitung, 5 September 1922 (leading article); M.╯Voß-Zietz, “Was ist Feigheit?” (What is cowardice?), Deutsche Zeitung, 26 May 1920; K.╯Schirmacher, “Der annektierten Ostmark Verzweiflung” (The despair of the annexed Ostmark), Deutsche Zeitung, 7 September 1920 (leading article); K.╯Schirmacher, “Ostmark für Westmark” (Ostmark for Westmark), Der Tag, 17 April 1921 (women’s supplement); B.╯Prilipp, “Frauen des Rheinlandes” (Women of the Rhineland), Der Tag, 5 June 1921 (women’s supplement). 15 ╇ Planert (1998), pp.╯241–5; Hering (2003), pp.╯380–96. 16 ╇ F.╯Wugk, “Deutsche Jeanne-d’Arc-Gedanken” (Thoughts about a German Jeanne-d’Arc), Der Tag, 11 May 1921 (morning edition). Emphasis in the original. 13 14

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est, including foreign affairs. Against the background of the deepseated conflict within the DNVP between the moderate and the radical wing mentioned above, the so-called “national opposition”17 invented the idea of a “male crisis” in Germany. The loss of the war and the current weakness of the new German democracy in the concert of world powers seemed to demonstrate the lack of “true men” since the late Kaiserreich. In particular the new democratic leaders, the so-called “November criminals”, were wrongly blamed for causing the German army’s defeat through the revolution and were attacked as “unmanly” cowards who were unable to defend the nation against “impertinent behaviour” by foreign countries. At the same time, the moderate members of the DNVP could be pressurised into aligning themselves with the more radical, uncompromising line in order to avoid being labelled “unmanly” themselves.18 This strategy would be even more effective if selected women could be presented who demonstrated all these alleged “manly” qualities in contrast to the faint-hearted men. In other words, the brutal, intransigent language of the female journalists showed moderate representatives of the German Right in an unfavourable light. It made them appear weak and cowardly, incapable of acting in the interests of the nation. What they needed was a “rap across the knuckles”, hand-delivered by strict female educators. The female journalists were crucial to spur on tough manliness. Using titles like “So far and no further” or “We are calling you!”, writers like Pia Sophie Rogge and Martha VoßZietz pointed true men in the right direction, acting like Tacitus’s female Teutons.19 An analysis of the articles written by right-wing female journalists reveals a number of recurring arguments. One year after the German revolution, Pia Sophie Rogge reviewed the events in an article for the Deutsche Zeitung and identified a lack of manliness as the main cause of the revolution’s outbreak and the loss of the war. She argued:

17 ╇ Cf. as a contemporary comment on the term “national opposition”: W. [= R.╯Wulle], “Die nationale Opposition” (The National Opposition), Deutsche Zeitung (leading article), 3 October 1919. 18 ╇ Claß (1920), p.╯49–53; Boehm (1920), p.╯8. Cf. Rohkrämer (2007), p.╯147. 19 ╇ P. S.╯Rogge, “Bis hierher und nicht weiter” (So far and no further), Deutsche Zeitung, 23 October 1920; C.╯Hoch [= P. S.╯Rogge], “Wir rufen euch!” (We are calling you!), Deutsche Zeitung, 16 July 1919; M.╯Voß-Zietz, “Ein mahnendes Bismarckwort” (Words of warning from Bismarck), Deutsche Zeitung, 26 June 1920 (leading article).

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Rogge worried that those men who “were laid to rest on alien ground” were “our last heroes”.20 Even the German princes were not safe from female criticism because they did not stand up for the German Emperor after it became known that the Treaty of Versailles included a paragraph about putting Wilhelm II on trial in an international court of justice.21 Rogge, who was married to a naval officer, defended only officers of the former Imperial army against criticism, “shining material, bred to duty and honour”.22 This defence of the German army leaders was crucial because it strengthened the right-wing “stab-inthe-back legend” (Dolchstoßlegende) and shielded the officers from blame for the defeat.23 At the same time Voß-Zietz, Rogge and Schirmacher ignored an anti-feminist version of the stab-in-the-back legend which blamed women for the defeat. Wives and mothers were accused of writing defeatist letters to soldiers on the front line, begging them to lay down their arms.24 In response, the new female political commentators blamed the majority of the male population for being cowardly traitors, i.e. all men except officers, civil servants and “real leaders”. Pia Sophie Rogge wrote in 1919: “Yes, you cowards, who played soldiers in the Kaiser’s or King’s coat… you treacherously stabbed the army to death!”.25 These female journalists contributed to the hard-line anti-democratic policy of the national opposition. Lenore Kühn equated Germany after the revolution with “voluntary self-emasculation”.26 A search for true manliness in the new democratic government would ╇ P. S.╯Rogge, “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht. Gedanken zur Jahreswende des Revolutionsmonats” (Life is not the most important thing. Thoughts on the first anniversary of the revolutionary month), Deutsche Zeitung, 21 November 1919. 21 ╇ Hoch [= Rogge], “Wir rufen euch!” (as note 19 above). 22 ╇ P. S.╯Rogge, “In Helm und Schild geboren” (Born in a helmet and shield), Deutsche Zeitung, 3 May 1920. 23 ╇Barth (2003), p.╯149; Cramer (2006), p.╯297. 24 ╇ For contemporary judgements on women at war see Sharp (2001); Daniel (2002); Davis (1996); Davis (2000). 25 ╇ C.╯Hoch [= P. S.╯Rogge], “Das Volk der Treue” (The nation of loyalty), Deutsche Zeitung, 13 April 1919 (women’s supplement). 26 ╇ L.╯Ripke-Kühn, “Finis Livoniae”, Deutsche Zeitung, 28 May 1919 (supplement to “Das junge Deutschland”). 20

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be futile, claimed the like-minded Pia Sophie Rogge.27 The democratic government acted only for fear of the men on the street, writing a stream of whiny, useless notes to the former enemy powers.28 Martha Voß-Zietz advised each woman to open Tacitus’s “Germania” and to read how the ancient female Teutons had pushed the exhausted men back towards the enemy. Women had a God-given duty to fight cowardice, she explained to the readers of the Deutsche Zeitung.29 In addition, nationalist women like Voß-Zietz urged intransigence, radical action and ruthlessness. They even criticised male politicians on the Right who were considered to be too weak and faint-hearted for the present tasks. By claiming this, the female journalists supported the extreme völkisch wing of the DNVP against the moderate wing, accusing the moderates of being too soft and conciliatory towards the political Left. Their choice of words left no room for compromise. They demanded “sharp cuts”, “cold hearts”, and “readiness to die” for honour and for one’s beliefs.30 The struggle against the redrawn national boundaries The First World War did not end with the Treaty of Versailles. This becomes even more evident when we look at the contribution made by right-wing female journalists to debates over foreign affairs. Käthe Schirmacher and Lenore Kühn in particular were allowed to publish leading articles on these pressing issues. The Treaty of Versailles had defined new boundaries for the German Empire, but some of the borders were not fixed until the early 1920s. The female journalists were particularly involved in shaping public awareness of four contested territories. The dispute over Upper Silesia led to military conflict between Polish irregulars and the German Freikorps. After a referendum, the allied powers decreed the territory’s division in 1921. A second topic was the situation of the German port city of Danzig, before the war the capital of West Prussia, and after the war a part of the newly-founded Polish state. The dispute about Danzig – which ╇Rogge, “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht” (as note 20 above). ╇Rogge, “Bis hierher und nicht weiter” (as note 19 above). 29 ╇ Voß-Zietz, “Was ist Feigheit?” (as note 14 above). 30 ╇ Voß-Zietz, “Deutscher Ehrbegriff” (as note 14 above); K.╯Schirmacher, “Wir bauen auf!” (We are rebuilding!), Deutsche Zeitung, 30 October 1923 (leading article); K.╯Schirmacher,“Der Freistaat Danzig” (The Free City of Danzig), Deutsche Zeitung, 27 November 1920 (leading article). 27 28

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revolved around whether it should stay German or become a Polish city – was decided by re-designating it as a free city under League of Nations administration in 1920. The third topic was the fate of the socalled Baltic Germans, people of ethnic German origin living in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, who lost their predominant social position bit by bit after the Baltic states had gained their independence in 1918/19. The German landed class was dispossessed, especially in Latvia and Estonia. The last dispute was the international crisis over reparations which began in January 1923. When Germany fell behind in its payments, French and Belgian troops occupied the heavily industrialised Ruhr district. The German government encouraged the population of the Ruhr to engage in passive resistance and financed a general strike in the area. The Ruhr struggle exceeded the Republic’s capacities, exacerbated the hyperinflation crisis, and had to be aborted in September 1923. John Horne and others have identified these disputed border areas as sites of permanent cultural and political mobilisation, which kept alive the war’s language and its function as a role model.31 Women like Käthe Schirmacher and Lenore Kühn were part of this remobilisation as agitators in civil society. Schirmacher became famous in right-wing circles as one of the leaders of the so-called “National Defence” which mobilised the German citizens of Danzig against the city’s handover to Poland. Lenore Kühn was considered as an expert on the situation in Latvia because she was born and grew up in its capital Riga.32 Both were chosen to report about the situation of the German population in these regions which they described as “unbearable”.33 The female journalists’ line of reasoning, again, left no room for doubt about how to judge these conflicts. Every decision in this dispute was seen as a secret conspiracy of Germany’s enemies which included the victorious powers, the Polish population, Bolshevik Russia and – as domestic enemies – every Democrat, Social Democrat, and Communist as well as every Jew in Germany. Finally, any German 31 ╇ Horne (2005), p.╯150; Gusy (2008), pp.╯23–4. For the gendered dimension of the Ruhr crisis see Koller (2002). 32 ╇Streubel (2006a), p.╯122; Streubel (2007), pp.╯11–4 and 33. 33 ╇K.╯Schirmacher, “Fahrt nach Danzig” (Journey to Danzig), Der Tag, 18 June 1921 (morning edition, leading article); K.╯Schirmacher, “Nun ist es aber Zeit” (It’s about time), Deutsche Zeitung, 14 September 1923; Ripke-Kühn, “Finis Livoniae” (as note 26 above); L.╯Ripke-Kühn, “Bolschewismus in Riga” (Bolshevism in Riga), Deutsche Zeitung, 26 July 1919.

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who refused to fight against this imagined world of enemies was condemned as not belonging to the German people either.34 The female journalists prolonged the “ideas of 1914” into the post-war era. These ideas were developed during the war by leading German intellectuals who used the “miracle” of national unity in 1914 as their principle argument. An integral part of these “ideas” was the claim that German cultural superiority justified military aggression in Belgium and elsewhere, vividly condensed in the credo “The German spirit shall cure the world” (“Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen”). Europe had to be saved from a degenerate, materialistic individualism. The twentieth century could become the century of the Germans. The extreme Right added far-reaching expansionist war aims to the “spirit of 1914”.35 As an alternative political order to the constitutional monarchy they propagated the “absolutist state within the organic racial community of the Volk”, as Jeffrey Verhey observes.36 The female journalists shared these views. They saw the Germans as ideal educators of inferior peoples who could only be lifted to a higher cultural level by accepting German supremacy.37 This message was also directed to the German population in the contested border areas, where it found a warm reception.38 Moreover, these female agitators created in their articles an apocalyptic image of the post-war Weimar Republic as a slave state living at the mercy of hate-filled enemies who longed for Germany’s total destruction. During the Ruhr struggle, Käthe Schirmacher published a leading article under the title “The Clump” (Der Klumpen), a splatter film like description of the rotting corpse of a German citizen, cut up 34 ╇K.╯Schirmacher, “Für Preußen” (For Prussia), Deutsche Zeitung, 26 March 1919 (leading article); Schirmacher, “Warum müssen wir national sein?” (as note 14 above); Schirmacher, “‘Deutsche’” (as note 14 above). 35 ╇Rohkrämer (2007), pp.╯124, 127 and 136; Mommsen (2000), pp.╯178–81. For a detailed analysis see also Verhey (2000); and Bruendel (2003). 36 ╇ Verhey (2000), p.╯156. 37 ╇K.╯Schirmacher, “Balten und Deutsche” (Balts and Germans), Deutsche Zeitung, 4 May 1919 (leading article); Ripke-Kühn, “Finis Livoniae” (as note 26 above); K.╯Schirmacher, “Gegen die deutsch-polnischen Verhandlungen” (Against the German-Polish negotiations), Deutsche Zeitung, 7 August 1919; K.╯Schirmacher,“Gedenket der Not an unseren Grenzen!” (Remember the distress on our borders!), Der Tag, 20 April 1921 (leading article); K.╯Schirmacher, “Verbissene Würde” (Dogged dignity), Der Tag, 22 May 1923 (leading article). 38 ╇See the positive comment of a male journalist on Schirmacher’s work, in A.╯Zimmermann, “Die Deutschnationalen in Weimar” (The German nationals in Weimar), Deutsche Zeitung, 19 March 1919 (leading article).

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by the French enemy like garbage.39 The female authors constructed feelings that the end of the world was near, thereby legitimising the most brutal reactions in what was billed as a final struggle for existence. Martha Voß-Zietz declared: “Struggle means life and resurrection from this völkisch misery”.40 Käthe Schirmacher indirectly proposed the hostage-taking of the Polish part of the German population and their mistreatment to enforce the revision of the eastern border. In the conflict with Poland, she demanded the continuation of war: “Do we have weapons only to let them rust?”. The execution of pacifists in wartime was propagated as a good strategy, as was the use of unrestricted submarine warfare and the invention of poison gas.41 Revenge was the only possible response towards the former war enemies. Käthe Schirmacher let the readers of the Deutsche Zeitung participate in one of the racist nightmares she had dreamt during the Ruhr struggle: There were grimaces gushing, crawling, climbing from under my bed, half-black paunches, coffee-brown apes, pale yellow dwarfs – the RheinRuhr brood of the night: the future German citizen! I strangle them in mad rage as it becomes day and light.42

The present hateful conditions had to be destroyed to make way for an entirely new world order. The female authors showed a longing for total solutions. They rejected all opportunities for piecemeal revision and reconciliation, now and in the long run. The League of Nations was seen as a “hypocritical disguise for our deadly foe”.43 With their statements on foreign policy, the female radical nationalists perpetuated the war and contributed to cultural remobilisation. Andreas Wirsching has recently focused attention on the dangerous impact of a propaganda that appeals to emotionally disturbed societies trying to put the clock back to an imagined “golden past”, or seeking refuge in

39 ╇K.╯Schirmacher, “Der Klumpen” (The Clump), Der Tag, 26 July 1923 (front page). 40 ╇ Voß-Zietz, “Was ist Feigheit?” (as note 14 above). 41 ╇K.╯Schirmacher,“Endlich!” (At last!), Deutsche Zeitung, 26 August 1920 (leading article); K.╯Schirmacher, “Artikel 227–230” (Articles 227–230), Der Tag, 12 July 1919; K.╯Schirmacher, “Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten” (Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up), Deutsche Zeitung, 11 July 1923 (leading article). 42 ╇K.╯Schirmacher, “Volk in Schmach” (Nation in shame), Deutsche Zeitung, 10 October 1923 (features supplement). 43 ╇K.╯Schirmacher, “Der Freistaat Danzig” (as note 30 above).

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the escapist mentality of “all or nothing”.44 This was exactly the kind of propaganda being pursued here. Agitation against international reconciliation In addition to agitation against the new borders, the female journalists made a crucial contribution to hindering each attempt at cultural demobilisation by the German women’s movement and its most important representative, the BDF.╯In 1920, Marianne Weber, the chairwoman of the BDF, recommended the other board members to postpone the resumption of relations with the international women’s movement. The newly-founded Ring of National Women, she argued, would take advantage of this situation by accusing the Federation of betraying German interests. Worse still, this propaganda might even lead to the secession of the BDF’s right-wing members.45 The most radical criticism against the BDF in 1920 came from Pia Sophie Rogge reporting from a conference of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Geneva. It was published as a leading article in the Deutsche Zeitung. The performance of the German representatives was described as “doglike bootlicking”. With dramatising pathos, Rogge asked the fallen German soldiers for forgiveness, whose graves had been abased by these “rootless, homeless, mollusc-like wretches”.46 Another author alleged that BDF members were only interested in the buffets of international women’s conferences and not in Germany, where women were raped and men butchered. Female radical nationalists claimed after the Reichstag elections of June 1920 that the BDF’s leaders were no longer the true representatives of German women because the DNVP had won more votes than the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP), the party most clearly associated with the mainstream women’s movement.47 Under the title “National Spirit Abroad” an╇ Wirsching (2008), pp.╯385–6. ╇ Landesarchiv Berlin, B Rep 235 MF, Bl. 2347, letter from Weber to the Narrower Board (Engerer Vorstand), 15 March 1920. 46 ╇ P. S.╯Rogge,“Genf” (Geneva), Deutsche Zeitung, 24 August 1920 (leading article). 47 ╇ M.╯Diers, “Frauenbewegung und Stimmenzahl” (The women’s movement and the number of votes), Deutsche Zeitung, 26 July 1920 (women’s supplement); M.╯Diers, “Eine Auseinandersetzung mit einer ehrlichen Demokratie” (An altercation with a genuine democracy), Deutsche Zeitung, 2 August 1920. 44 45

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other female author wrote a leading article for the Deutsche Zeitung in 1923 demanding that Germany should send alternative female representatives to these international meetings, women who were not content simply to be servants of the Allies.48 The criticism continued throughout the period of the Weimar Republic. In 1927, the leaders of the BDF, under the pressure of the Ring of National Women, felt obliged to send some of their right-wing members to the editor of the newspaper Der Tag to ask him for a more favourable coverage of their organisation’s activities. Their mission failed.49 Implicit ideas of female leadership Referring again to the question of the renegotiation of gender roles, Rogge, Schirmacher, Kühn and Voß-Zietz tried to present themselves as part of the new and upcoming political elite. In other press organs addressed to a female readership, especially in the richly illustrated women’s magazine The German Woman (Die Deutsche Frau), they invented the myth of outstanding female “personalities” who were not only able to lead nationalist women’s organisations like the Ring of National Women, but the German people as a whole.50 Their most important justification for this idea was that women had suffered and achieved as much as male soldiers in the First World War. They did their duty on the home front, claimed the female radical nationalists.51 Members of the Ring of National Women tried to establish myths about their own charismatic leaders. For instance, Käthe Schirmacher was presented as a “German female fighter”.52 After the death of Schirmacher in 1930, female supporters symbolically selected her as 48 ╇B.╯Prilipp, “Der Friedensgedanke und die Frauen” (The idea of peace and women), Der Tag, 9 August 1921 (morning edition, leading article); I.╯Hamel, “Nationaler Geist ins Ausland!” (National spirit abroad!), Deutsche Zeitung, 5 July 1923 (leadÂ�ing article). 49 ╇ Landesarchiv Berlin, B Rep 235 MF, Bl. 2503, letter from Margarete von Keyserlingk, 11 November 1927; ibid., Bl. 2503, letter from Keyserlingk to Emma Ender, December 1927; ibid., Bl. 2494, letter from Ender to Käthe Herwarth, 6 August 1928. 50 ╇Streubel (2006a), pp.╯295–302. 51 ╇ L.╯Broecker, “Das Staatsbewußtsein der Frau (Teil 1)” (Women’s conception of the state (part 1)), Die Deutsche Frau, 18 (1925), 15 April 1925, p.╯146; P. S.╯Rogge, “Die Freiheitsbewegung der deutschen Frau” (The German women’s freedom movement), Die Deutsche Frau, 19 (1926), 15 February 1926, pp.╯62–3. 52 ╇S.╯Philipps, “Dr. Käthe Schirmacher”, Die Deutsche Frau, 18 (1925), 1 August 1925, p.╯282; E.╯Spohr,“Dr. Käthe Schirmacher”, Die Deutsche Frau, 21 (1928), 1 February 1928, pp.╯61–2.

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successor to the Prussian Queen Luise, who had led German resistance against French occupation during the Napoleonic wars.53 In the male-dominated press like the Deutsche Zeitung or Der Tag, the female radical nationalists did not characterise themselves explicitly as “female leaders” but their mode of language designated them as such. Their anti-democratic ideals led them to demand strict guidance of the people by a small elite. The journalists disparaged the idea of the sovereignty of the people by declaring that the protests, demonstrations, strikes and naval mutinies which sparked off the November revolution were actions of a “wretched horde” and “howling pack”.54 In the world view of these female authors, most of the German people were children misled by internal and external enemies of Germany.55 Due to the supposed eternal characteristics of this tribe, only a few Germans were politically gifted or born leaders.56 By explaining to the male and female readers of the Deutsche Zeitung and Der Tag which was the best path to follow, they presented themselves implicitly as part of the new elite. The solutions they offered were stark and bold: recovering from 1918 meant becoming nationalistic to preserve the German people, venturing one’s life to save German honour, believing with unflinching courage in Germany’s power, and convincing each individual German that foreign spirit had to be exorcised.57 Their manner of speaking and writing was extremely self-confident. Pia Sophie Rogge felt free to criticise respected occupational groups like civil servants, jurists, teachers and even state ministers as “weaklings”. She claimed that she was able “to bring truth to the light of the sun” on how to treat the “Jewish question”.58 Martha Voß-Zietz presented 53 ╇ I.╯Hamel, “Zwei Kämpferinnen für Deutschlands Freiheit” (Two women fighters for German freedom), Deutsche Zeitung, 15 March 1931 (women’s supplement). Cf. “Dr. Käthe Schirmacher †”, Deutsche Zeitung, 19 November 1930; I.╯Hamel, “Der Kämpferin für Deutschlands Ehre. Dr. Käthe Schirmacher zum Gedenken” (To a fighter for Germany’s honour. In memory of Dr. Käthe Schirmacher), Deutsche Â�Zeitung, 20 November 1930. 54 ╇ Hoch [= Rogge], “Wir rufen euch!” (as note 19 above); Rogge, “In Helm und Schild geboren” (as note 22 above). 55 ╇ Voß-Zietz, “Was ist Feigheit?” (as note 14 above). 56 ╇Schirmacher, “Warum müssen wir national sein?” (as note 14 above); M.╯VoßZietz, “In der Führung liegt das Heil” (Salvation lies in leadership), Der Tag, 12 February 1922 (women’s supplement). 57 ╇Schirmacher, “‘Deutsche’” (as note 14 above); Voß-Zietz, “Deutscher Ehrbegriff” (as note 14 above); P. S.╯Rogge,“Jahresabschied” (Before the year is out), Â�DeutÂ�sche Zeitung, 1 January 1921. 58 ╇Rogge, “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht” (as note 20 above); P. S.╯Rogge, “Judenhetze” (Jew-baiting), Deutsche Zeitung, 17 October 1919 (leading article).

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herself as an expert on the labouring classes and praised them for their “German concept of honour”.59 Lenore Kühn sharply criticised the Germans’ attitude towards their ethnic comrades in the Baltic countries. She made use of her historical knowledge to present the GermanBaltic people as the “most faithful Germans”. These former “Knights of the Order” would look with horror at the “cowardly” new Germany.60 Käthe Schirmacher declared that because the German people did not comprehend the relevance of articles 227 to 230 of the Treaty of Versailles, she would clear things up for the readers of Der Tag.61 In other articles, she emphasised that she had proven on several occasions that she knew a great deal more about the situation in Danzig and Upper Silesia than many right-wing comrades-in-arms.62 The female journalists claimed that they too were exponents of the true will of the German people. In demanding Germany’s return to alleged lost virtues like honour, loyalty, and pride, the female agitators appointed themselves as arbiters of the true meaning of these extremely emotional concepts, a role previously reserved for men. The conviction that women as well as men could help to define these virtues emerged during the First World War, when the totalisation of war created new concepts like “economic warfare” (Wirtschaftskrieg) and “home front” (Heimatfront).63 Female suffrage also increased the self-confidence of female agitators after 1918 and signalled their rising political influence in the new republican state.64 Looking at the arguments developed in the leading articles written by these female journalists it is striking that most of the authors did not present themselves as female authors who argued from a specifically womanly or maternalist perspective. Instead they used the typical languages of (male) leadership which Thomas Mergel has identified in ╇ M.╯Voß-Zietz, “Deutscher Ehrbegriff” (as note 14 above). ╇Ripke-Kühn, “Finis Livoniae” (as note 26 above). 61 ╇Schirmacher, “Artikel 227–230” (as note 41 above) Horne identifies the controversy over articles 227–230 as a crucial driving force behind the remobilisation of German war culture. See Horne (2005), pp.╯136–7. 62 ╇Schirmacher, “Wir bauen auf!” (as note 30 above); K.╯Schirmacher, “Tatsachen über Oberschlesien” (The truth about Upper Silesia), Deutsche Zeitung, 29 October 1920 (leading article); K.╯Schirmacher, “Der 10. Januar für Danzig” (The 10 January for Danzig), Der Tag, 10 January 1922 (morning edition, leading article). 63 ╇Davis (1996); Daniel (2002). 64 ╇ Hoch [= Rogge], “Das Volk der Treue” (as note 25 above); M.╯Voß-Zietz, “Deutscher Ehrbegriff” (as note 14 above). For gender-oriented conceptual historical studies on terms like Ehre and Treue see, for example, Frevert (2007); and Streubel (2008). 59 60

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his study on the culture of parliament and parliamentary speeches in the Weimar Republic.65 When they wrote for the general public in newspapers like the Deutsche Zeitung and Der Tag in the years between 1919 and 1923, Schirmacher, Voß-Zietz, Rogge and Kühn used a language that conjured up an overarching struggle for existence without mentioning particular “women’s questions”. Politics appeared as a matter of life and death that needed tough-minded, intransigent fighters, irrespective of gender. Misery, distress and the coming destruction of the German people were put before the readers’ eyes. This was flavoured with elements of the language of objectivity, as the journalists sought to demonstrate their comprehensive mastery of legal, historical and factual questions.66 In the years of crisis these authors did not have to argue from a specifically female or maternal viewpoint but were put forward as recognised experts on “national” questions, able to speak to and for the German people as a whole. Conclusion In the years of crisis in Germany, ideas of a radicalised, völkisch nationalism were used by formerly disenfranchised women to press forward their demands for full membership in the national community. In addition, they made an important contribution to the remobilisation of German society, not only by continuing a culture of war through speeches and articles, but also by hampering the moderate women’s movement in their attempts at cultural demobilisation. The female radical nationalists won some room for manoeuvre in the aftermath of war due to contemporary gender representations and internal conflicts on the German Right. Women who presented themselves as strict educators in nationalist values were considered useful in bringing shame upon men who acted in a less radical or uncompromising fashion. With the ending of the immediate post-war crisis in 1923, however, opportunities for female radical nationalists to write leading articles on national questions also began to wane. Only the fear of poor election results among female voters, and concern to destroy the influence of the BDF and the DDP, had led male newspaper editors to give a ╇ For the different languages of leadership see Mergel (2002), esp.╯pp.╯270–88. ╇ For the use of different political languages by female DNVP Reichstag deputies see Streubel (2006b), pp.╯138–42. 65 66

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more prominent voice to right-wing women journalists. Once it became clear that Protestant women were loyal supporters of the DNVP, whose votes could almost be taken for granted at election time, and once it became clear that it was not possible to abolish the republic by relentless opposition and a coup d’état, the strict female educators became obsolete.67 In the calmer waters of the Weimar Republic’s years of “relative stabilisation” between 1924 and 1929,68 the idea of heroic masculinity returned in full force and quickly became a rightwing monopoly.69 In this period too, gender representations are crucial to understanding the phenomena of cultural demobilisation and remobilisation, but the political context had clearly changed with the passing of the immediate post-war period, and right-wing women were now required to take a more back-seat role. Bibliography Barth, B. (2003) Dolchstoßlegende und politische Desintegration: Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914-1933 (Düsseldorf: 2003). Boehm, M. H. (1920) Ruf der Jungen (Leipzig: 1920). Bruendel, S. (2003) Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat: Die “Ideen von 1914” und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: 2003). Claß, H. (1920) “Des deutschen Volkes Wiedergeburt”, Deutschvölkisches Jahrbuch (1920) 49–53. Cramer, K. (2006) “A World of Enemies: New Perspectives on German Military Culture and the Origins of the First World War”, Central European History, 39 (2006) 270–98. Daniel, U. (2002) “Zweierlei Heimatfronten: Weibliche Kriegserfahrungen 1914 bis 1918 und 1939 bis 1945 im Kontrast”, in Erster Weltkrieg – Zweiter Weltkrieg: Ein Vergleich. Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland, eds. B.╯Thoß and H.╯Volkmann (Paderborn: 2002) 391–409. Davis, B. (1996) “Food Scarcity and the Empowerment of the Female Consumer in World War I Germany”, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. V. de Grazia (Berkeley: 1996) 287–310. ———╯ (2000) Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I (Chapel Hill and London: 2000). Frevert, U. (2007) “Honor and Gender in the Outbreak of WWI”, in An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914, eds. H.╯Afflerbach and D.╯Stevenson (New York: 2007) 233–55. Gusy, C. (2008) “Verfassungsumbruch bei Kriegsende”, in Demokratie in der Krise: Europa in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. C.╯Gusy (Baden-Baden: 2008) 15–51. Heinsohn, K. (2000) “Im Dienste der deutschen Volksgemeinschaft: Die ‘Frauenfrage’ und konservative Parteien vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg”, in Nation, Politik ╇Streubel (2006a), pp.╯221 and 243. ╇Kolb (2002), p.╯57. 69 ╇Schilling (2002), pp.╯289–90. Cf. Mosse (1990). 67 68

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und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne, ed. U.╯Planert (Frankfurt/M and New York: 2000) 215–33. Hering, R. (2003) Konstruierte Nation: Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg: 2003). Hiller von Gaertringen, F. (1996), “Die DNVP in der Weimarer Republik”, Historische Mitteilungen, 9 (1996) 168–88. Horne, J. (2005) “Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919-1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?”, in Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919-1939, ed. W.╯Hartwig (Göttingen: 2005) 129–50. Kolb, E. (2002) Die Weimarer Republik, 6th ed. (Munich: 2002). Koller, C. (2002) “Enemy Images: Race and Gender Stereotypes in the Discussion on Colonial Troops. A Franco-German Comparison, 1914-1923”, in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany, eds. K.╯Hagemann and S.╯Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: 2002) 139–57. Liebe, W. (1956) Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei (Bonn: 1956). Mergel, T. (2002) Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik: Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag (Düsseldorf: 2002). Mommsen, W. J. (2000) Bürgerliche Kultur und politische Ordnung: Künstler, SchriftÂ� steller und Intellektuelle in der Geschichte 1890-1918 (Frankfurt/M: 2000). Mosse, G. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: 1990). Planert, U. (1998) Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich: Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen: 1998). Pyta, W. (2008) “Antiliberale Ideenwelt in Europa bei Kriegsende”, in Demokratie in der Krise: Europa in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. C.╯Gusy (Baden-Baden: 2008) 86–104. Rohkrämer, T. (2007) A Single Communal Faith? The German Right From Conservatism to National Socialism (New York and Oxford: 2007). Scheck, R. (2004) Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany (Oxford, and New York: 2004). Schildt, A. (1998) Konservatismus in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (München: 1998). Schilling, R. (2002) “Kriegshelden”: Deutungsmuster heroischer Männlichkeit in Deutschland 1813-1945 (Paderborn: 2002). Schöck-Quinteros, E. (2007) “Der Bund Königin Luise: ‘Unser Kampfplatz ist die Familie…’”, in “Ihrem Volk verantwortlich”: Frauen der politischen Rechten (18901933), eds. E.╯Schöck-Quinteros and C.╯Streubel (Berlin: 2007) 231–68. Sharp, I. E. (2001) “‘Frauen und Fraß’: German Women in Wartime”, in The Great World War 1914-45, eds. P.╯Liddle, J.╯Bourne and I.╯Whitehead (London: 2001) Vol. 2 74–94. Stibbe, M. (2002) “Nationalism, Anti-Feminism and the German Right, 1914-1920. A Reappraisal”, German History, 20/2 (2002) 185–210. Sneeringer, J. (2007) “‘Frauen an die Front!’ The Language of ‘Kampf’ in DNVP’s Women’s Propaganda 1918-1933”, in “Ihrem Volk verantwortlich”: Frauen der politischen Rechten (1890-1933), eds. E.╯Schöck-Quinteros and C.╯Streubel (Berlin: 2007) 177–98. Streubel, C. (2006a) Radikale Nationalistinnen: Agitation und Programmatik rechter Frauen in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/M and New York: 2006). ———╯ (2006b) “‘Meine Herren und Damen!’ Rednerinnen der deutschnationalen Fraktion im Parlament der Weimarer Republik”, in Mitsprache, Rederecht, StimmÂ�

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gewalt: Genderkritische Strategien und Transformationen der Rhetorik, eds. D.╯Bischoff and M.╯Wagner-Egelhaaf (Heidelberg: 2006) 113–42. ———╯ (2007) Lenore Kühn (1878-1955): Neue Nationalistin und verspätete Bildungsbürgerin (Berlin: 2007). ———╯ (2008) “’Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue’. Entwürfe konservativer Frauen im Ersten Weltkrieg”, in Treue: Politische Loyalitäten und militärische Gefolgschaft in der Moderne, eds. N.╯Buschmann and K. B.╯Murr (Göttingen: 2008) 190–213. Verhey, J. (2000) The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: 2000). Wirsching, A. (2008) “Verfassung und Verfassungskultur der Zwischenkriegszeit”, in Demokratie in der Krise: Europa in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. C.╯Gusy (BadenBaden: 2008) 371–89. Woodfin, C. (2004) “Reluctant Democrats: The Protestant Women’s Auxiliary and the German National Assembly Elections of 1919”, Journal of the Historical Society, 4 (2004) 71–112.

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The Rhineland horror campaign and the aftermath of war Erika Kuhlman* On 11 November 1918 the armistice between the defeated Germany and the victorious Allied powers came into effect, although the peace treaty was not signed until June 1919. This treaty, which imposed sole responsibility for the war on Germany under article 231 (the War Guilt Clause) and consequently demanded high reparations, was bitterly resented in Germany as a slur on German honour. It was only signed when all possibility of armed resistance had been ruled out by military commanders, but still allowed the stab-in-the-back legend (Dolchstosslegende) to flourish, placing the blame for the defeat variously on the home front, a supposed Jewish conspiracy, and big business. The treaty included provisions for the establishment of a League of Nations with the aim of preventing future wars by arbitrating in international disputes. The Treaty of Versailles was not ratified by the US Senate in March 1920, and America also failed to join the League of Nations. The Rhineland was to be occupied and administered by France and Britain for 15 years and a disputed number of the occupying French troops were drawn from their African colonies. These troops were also used when in April 1920 the French marched into the “neutral” zone in response to German troops being deployed in the Ruhr area in contravention of the terms of the peace.

Beginning in April 1920, various German citizens’ organisations, encouraged by their government, launched a campaign against France’s stationing of colonial African soldiers in its zone of the German Rhineland. Far from limiting themselves to the nations directly involved in the situation, groups such as the Volksbund Rettet die Ehre (People’s Federation to Save German Honour) and the Rheinisch Frauenliga (Rhineland Women’s League) deliberately spread their propaganda overseas in an effort to create an international furor over France’s alleged transgressions. While on the face of it, the goal of the drive – known as the “Rhineland Horror” or “Black *╇ A version of this chapter first appeared in Erika Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and is reproduced here with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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Horror” campaign – appeared to be to rid the area of African soldiers, the crusaders clearly wanted bolder outcomes. Still reeling from the cease-fire and more recently a humiliating peace settlement, the propagandists desired nothing less than the international discredit of the French, a halt to France’s efforts to separate the Rhineland from the rest of Germany, an end to the entire occupation, and the restoration of German honour in the eyes of its own inhabitants and of other nations.1 To reach these goals, the propagandists sent tentacles across the Atlantic, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea to insure international support for their cause. In the case of the Americans, the campaigners hoped that race-baiting in the United States would draw their former enemy closer to the German side while driving a wedge between the Allied nations, a strategy that had succeeded in other issues involving the occupation.2 As crusaders played upon racialist ideologies prevalent in Europe and in the United States (I use the term racialist to convey the idea that perceived differences among humans are inborn and located in the immutable, physical body), they hinted that the presence of African troops in Germany could foment a race war that threatened the entire world’s white population, thus rendering the campaign not only international, but transnational in strategy. Although the campaign failed to gain the allegiance of the United States or to fully discredit the French or to reestablish German honour or end the occupation, it did (though not intentionally) reveal the hypocrisy inherent in Europe’s racialist justifications for overseas colonisation, the continuation of previously developed assumptions of racial hierarchies and white superiority well into the supposedly “modern” twentieth century, and it foreshadowed the role of racism in events to come by providing a podium for demagogues such as Adolf Hitler, among others.3 It also highlighted the extent to which the continuation of imperialism’s attendant ideologies impeded post-war reconciliation between nations, since, if not for imperialism, France would have had no colonial troops to send to the Rhineland and Germany no basis for complaint; furthermore, Germans could not 1 ╇Nelson (1970), Marks (1983) and Reinders (1968) have viewed the campaign in its diplomatic and political context; Lebzelter (1985), Campt, Grosse and LemkeMuniz de Fario (1998) view the campaign as an attempt to compensate for national anxieties produced by the defeat and occupation; Schüler (1996) explores the international women’s movement’s response to the campaign; and Koller (2001) places the campaign in its European perspective. 2 ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯1. 3 ╇Nelson (1975), pp.╯625–6.

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have persuaded others that the practice of using African troops was abusive if European and American leaders were not at least partially convinced of imperialism’s racialist underpinnings. Just as colonisation played a role in bringing the Great War about, so it can be blamed, in part, for keeping nations from reconciling to peace.4 The Rhineland Horror campaign encumbered post-war reconciliation in a more insidious, though less obvious, way as well. If the belligerent powers expected the official document that signaled the end of war, the Treaty of Versailles, to aid post-war reconciliation, then signatories to the treaty had to agree to the principle of mutual cooperation through the League of Nations that formed one of the bases of the peace (although Germany did not join the League until 1926, two other major powers involved in the campaign, France and Great Britain, were members). Instead of promoting collaboration and finding a pathway to a solution, the campaign relied on manufactured accusations and manipulated documents to create turmoil. Indeed, historian Sally Marks could find no evidence that the German government ever officially requested that the French withdraw their colonial troops until most of them had already left the Rhineland, indicating that Weimar’s real desire lay in provoking antagonism.5 The treaty’s promise of mutual cooperation to end international strife thus remained unfulfilled. In another way, however, the Treaty of Versailles and its provisions foreshadowed the continuation of strife rather than reconciliation between nations, to which the Rhineland Horror campaign’s shenaniÂ� gans also contributed. In the League of Nations covenant that formed part of the settlement, signatories agreed that only the states that elite nations deemed ready to self-govern – primarily those formerly part of the old Habsburg and Ottoman empires – would be guided by the new principle of self-determination.6 States, mainly located in central and west Africa, considered unprepared for independence would require an intrusive administrative mandate and not be allowed to form their own governments or militaries.7 Thus, the Treaty of Versailles left intact the notion that African people were uncivilised and incapable of governing themselves, paving the way for the bloody ╇ Joll (1984), p.╯148. ╇ Marks (1983), p.╯310. 6 ╇Sluga (2000), p.╯496. Ambrosius (2006), pp.╯159–60 discusses the mandates in relation to location as part of Woodrow Wilson’s racism. 7 ╇ Walters (1960), pp.╯56–8. 4 5

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African wars for independence. The belief that the African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland were barbarous and unable to control their physical instincts formed the centerpiece of the Rhineland Horror campaign’s strategy. While the crusade failed to garner broad support, it left intact the notion that “over-sexed” African males had a natural propensity toward raping white women, that females’ natural vulnerability left them easy prey for such attacks, and that therefore women needed white men’s protection from harm. Black men’s access to white women implied a level playing field between the races that constituted a threat to all societies built upon the notion of white supremacy. “The ‘Rhineland Horror’ is not only a disgrace for Germany,” warned the Grenzland Korrespondent. “It is much more. It represents the desecration of white culture in general. At the same time, it means the beginning of the end of the predominance of the white man”.8 Even Europeans such as Helena M.╯Swanwick and Americans such as General Henry T.╯Allen who balked at the campaign’s insistence that African men were unable to control their sexual impulses remained convinced that the white race had created and represented “civilisation,” whereas nonwhite people epitomised barbarism. A few women played combative roles in the battle to relieve Europe of Africans’ presence, while another handful – Europeans and African Americans – exposed the racialist notions underpinning the campaign to a wide audience. One German critic, Lilli Jannasch, considered the Rhineland Horror propaganda both racialist and sexist and her ideas will be discussed in detail below. With very few exceptions, however, women – as individuals and as international activists – united their rhetoric quite closely with the male policymakers and diplomats, thereby generating and responding to imperialist and racialist ideologies of the early twentieth century.9 Women such as Ray Beveridge and Margarete Gärtner (sometimes spelled Margarethe Gartner), and women’s transnational organisations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and sixty-six other European women’s organisations,10 acted in a manner generally consistent with the imperialist ideologies and racial hierarchies that formed the geopolitical view of the world in which they lived. In back╇ Quoted in Campt et al. (1998), p.╯211. ╇ I am indebted to Manako Ogawa for my interpretation of activist women and their relationship to race and international politics. See Ogawa (2007). 10 ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯5. 8 9

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ing the Rhineland Horror campaign, members undercut their ability to offer the world a truly alternative vision – including greater freedoms for all women throughout the world – of a post-war world order based upon human equality rather than prejudice and discrimination. Article 22 of the League of Nations covenant, too, reproduced the pre-war imperialist attitudes enshrined in the Berlin Act of 1885, based on the paternalistic conviction that colonialisation would have the effect of “instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilisation”.11 In the light of these stated aims, the Rhineland Horror campaign’s efforts to oust colonial troops from the presumed seat of civilisation, Europe itself, seemed hypocritical. The perpetrators of the crusade used the racialism inherent in imperialist ideology to foment an international outrage at the presence of armed African soldiers in the Rhineland. Historian Keith L.╯Nelson has noted that race became the most perfidious weapon the French and German diplomats used against each other in post-war relations, and the diplomatic conversations that took place before the occupation began gave campaigners reason to believe that the scheme might succeed.12 German policymakers had protested against the possible use of African troops, whether colonial French or African American, in the Rhineland during armistice negotiations and this position was supported by British and American negotiators at the Paris Conference.13 However, France had little choice but to deploy colonial troops as it lacked other soldiers to send.14 France began its participation in the Rhineland occupation with a total of 200,000 troops, reduced to 85,000 after the treaty.15 The German Foreign Ministry claimed that the numbers of colonials, often described as “coal black” although many were North Africans of mixed European and African descent,16 reached 30–40,000, or approximately half of the French force. However, Allied observers recorded only 14,000 to 25,000 African troops. Historian Anja Schüler has stated that this was the figure claimed by the French, which she deems more accurate.17 In addition, the presence of colonial soldiers resulted in some 600 to 800 “mixed race” children born of relations between ╇Berlin West Africa Conference (1886), n.p. ╇Nelson (1975), p.╯606. 13 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯608–9. 14 ╇ Marks (1983), p.╯297; Nelson (1975), p.╯613. 15 ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯3. 16 ╇ Marks (1983), pp.╯298–9. 17 ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯3. 11 12

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Africans and German women; they, too, also became fodder for the campaign. Crusader Ray Beveridge presented one of these offspring during her speech to a rally of protesters in Munich in February 1921, declaring the youth evidence of the “horrors” of the Rhineland occupation.18 In addition to presenting such live “evidence” of the threat to the white race, campaigners manufactured statistics and reproduced supposed police records and witnesses’ testimony to alleged atrocities, primarily against women, to signify the menace caused by colonial troops. Authors identified victims and witnesses using only initials in their reports. “We have not used the full names of our sisters who have endured the deepest of shame that a white woman can,” explained the Rheinische Frauenliga, “but to whomever wants to know the names we can provide the documentation”.19 Campaign output primarily took the form of pamphlets and books but also included numerous speeches heard in Germany, England, and the United States, as well as several novels and even a film.20 The content of each piece of propaganda remained consistent and was in many cases pornographic, evoking men’s sexual anxieties and fantasies. Occasionally the pamphlets hinted at immorality among German women but more often confirmed the sexual propriety of the victims, whose innocence symbolised the innocence of Germany and her claim to victim status.21 The Rhineland Horror campaign played upon existing discourses of occupation that used the trope of roving, hyper-sexualised soldiers raping vulnerable women to protest military occupations22 raising the stakes even higher because of whites’ fears of African men’s supposed overpowering lust.23 Two historians – Schüler and Christian Koller – have noted similarities between the propaganda used by the French against German soldiers who raped French women during the early months of the war and that used by the Rhineland Horror campaign, indicating a pattern of protest among occupied populations. That occupations – and indeed, wars in general – have included soldiers’ rape of women was not disputed. Rape has been a powerful weapon used to undermine social stability during and after wars, and it surely ╇ Campt et al. (1998), pp.╯208 and 213. ╇Rheinische Frauenliga (1920) “Vorwort zur ersten Ausgabe,”, pp.╯2:6. 20 ╇The most notorious being Guido Kreutzer’s Die Schwarze Schmach of 1921. 21 ╇Schüler (1996), pp.╯2 and 6. 22 ╇Enloe (2004), p.╯119; Enloe (1990), p.╯81. 23 ╇ Ibid., p.╯2; Koller (2002), p.╯143. 18 19

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occurred in all zones of the Rhineland occupation.24 The propaganda campaigns that have exaggerated such acts, however, served only to call the veracity of all accusations of rape into question. Instead of empowering female victims to prosecute criminal behaviour, the Rhineland Horror campaign served to further reduce women’s status in society by controlling women and their sexuality; firstly, by designating who women’s appropriate sexual partners should be, and secondly, by provoking their fears of sexuality. Although complaints against colonial soldiers increased during times of heightened tensions between France and Germany,25 the international campaign did not begin in earnest until 6 April 1920, when French troops marched across the boundary of the occupied Rhineland and into the neutral zone in retaliation for President Friedrich Ebert’s dispatch of German troops to the Ruhr to prevent a communist revolt. In Frankfurt, Moroccan forces led the French occupation of the city and, after provocation, fired fatal shots into a crowd, killing five people. The unit was withdrawn. But Germans continued to protest because the colonial troops had kept guard over two cultural bulwarks, the University of Frankfurt and the Goethe House, inflaming nationalists’ sense of humiliation over the occupation. Citizens launched protests in all provinces and in all political parties, except the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The National Assembly began an inquiry over the Frankfurt incident out of particular concern for German women and children.26 Lawmakers then passed a resolution backed by all political parties, again except the USPD, denouncing the use of colonial soldiers.27 Just prior to the Frankfurt tragedy, the French Commander Ferdinand Foch had aired his plan to install colonial troops in the British occupation headquarters in Cologne, to the chagrin of his British allies. The Germans perceived a looming breach among the Allies that they interpreted as an entrée for an international campaign.28 German crusaders easily won an ally in the British writer and critic of European imperialism Edmund Morel, whose inkwell overflowed with particularly pernicious propaganda. Morel was a founding member of the British Union of Democratic Control, an organisation that ╇Sideris (2002), p.╯147. ╇Nelson (1975), p.╯614. 26 ╇Koller (2001), pp.╯211 and 214. 27 ╇Koller (2002), p.╯146. 28 ╇Nelson (1975), pp.╯614–5. 24 25

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opposed secret diplomacy, the unequal application of laws to favour the rich and well born, the arms race, militarist alliances, and, ironically, racism.29 The propagandist authored an article about the Rhineland for the left-wing paper The Daily Herald on 10 April 1920, that was subsequently distributed in the form of a pamphlet entitled The Horror on the Rhine. The publication went through eight editions in Great Britain and was translated into German, French, Dutch, and Italian. Ultimately, Rhineland Horror pamphlets popped up in such far away places as Peru and Argentina.30 In Germany, Morel’s pamphlet found a home among all but extreme left wing political headquarters. The Nazi Party, for its part, created a link between the Rhineland Horror campaign and anti-Semitism by insisting that Jewish people wanted to bring nonwhite people to Europe in order to “bastardise” the race.31 More surprisingly, liberals and leftists made similar charges, although with less overt racism. Foreign Minister Adolf Köster of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), while reminding the National Assembly that hundreds and thousands of black troops had aided German soldiers in the defence of Germany’s colonies, called the stationing of French colonial troops in the Rhineland a crime. For Köster, the “black shame” constituted a national problem of morality that went beyond individual criminal behaviour.32 A headline in the party’s organ Vorwärts read simply “Away with the Blacks!”.33 The KPD (German Communist Party) leader Hans von Hentig commented that weapons should be taken from the African soldiers and given to German workers to support them in their struggle against the Weimar government. The communist press used the image of a colonial soldier to symbolise the “debasement” of the defeated Germany.34 Female politicians in the Weimar government also spoke out on the “horror”. Käthe Schirmacher of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), and SPD members Marie Ansorge and Klara Bohm-Schuch appealed to their partisans to pass resolutions against the use of colonials. Only Luise Zietz of the USPD did not follow the consensus in the Reichstag. Zietz claimed that the alleged atrocities were caused by ╇ Cook [1924] (1973), p.╯1. ╇Schüler (1996), pp.╯3–4; Nelson (1975), p.╯618. 31 ╇Koller (2002), p.╯143; Koller (2001), p.╯248. 32 ╇Koller (2002), p.╯147. 33 ╇Koller (2001), pp.╯213–6. 34 ╇ Ibid. p.╯234. 29 30

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militarism, not race. Like Lilli Jannasch (see below), she compared the crimes of colonial soldiers with those committed by German soldiers in Belgium, France, China, and the German colonies.35 Meanwhile, the German press sent out a cavalcade of news items about atrocities involving colonial troops onto the streets, while government agencies, such as the Reichsheimatdienst (National Service) and Rheinischer Volkspflege (Rhineland Social Welfare) organised public protests.36 German women’s organisations also joined the chorus. Margarete Gärtner, founder of the Rhenish Women’s League, set about mobilising women’s groups to promote the campaign by publishing information about alleged rapes and brothels in the French zone. The League distributed a pamphlet under the English title Colored Frenchmen on the Rhine: An Appeal of White Women to American Womanhood in 1920. Women also worked in mixed-gender organisations, including the Heidelberger Vereinigung (Heidelberg Association), whose membership included Marianne Weber (sociologist and leading figure in the BDF, the bourgeois German women’s movement). The Vereinigung also exported publications overseas.37 Other groups drew up petitions for international consumption. The Volksbund Rettet die Ehre and the BDF, among others, sent a plea for mercy on behalf of German women signed by sixty-six female organisations from the Netherlands, Sweden, and Austria to the League of Nations in October 1920. The document stated “that white people have worked for years to lift up the lowly races to educate them to conquer their low instincts”; but France has “legalised these abominable instincts and even makes the bearers of such instincts armed masters over her cultured neighbors. This is mockery and defiance to the missionary work of all peoples and all times”. The signatories stated that they were protesting on behalf of the Germans, but also the “entire white race” because missionaries had spent decades educating Africans to conquer their “low instincts” and uplift their culture. The Volksbund distributed this appeal in Germany and the United States, where a copy was sent to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)!38

╇Schüler (1996), p.╯10. ╇Nelson (1975), p.╯615, n. 42. Nelson counted 252 pages of clippings from German newspapers relating to atrocities. 37 ╇Singer (1920). 38 ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯5 quotes from the US edition of the petition. 35 36

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However, despite the appearance of unanimity created by the sheer volume of propaganda disseminated, Germans were not singleminded in the demand to oust African soldiers from the Rhine. Shortly after the Frankfurt incident, in the Rhineland itself, the ReichsÂ�komÂ� missar (Imperial Commissioner) argued that the claims were exaggerated, and that in reality crimes committed by African troops were no greater than those perpetrated by white French troops. At least one German newspaper editor, Georg Bernhard of the Vossische Zeitung, wrote to the Innenminister (Interior Minister), criticising him for not retracting inflated claims about atrocities committed by African soldiers.39 Meanwhile, Morel – who denied he was racist – employed all of the racial and sexual stereotypes commonly used all over Europe in his written and spoken harangues.40 Noting the “strong sex impulse” among colonial troops, he argued that Africans were unruly children that France should have kept in “Eden,” but instead the French military had “thrust upon the Rhineland [troops whose needs] in the absence of their own women-folk must be satisfied upon the bodies of white women”.41 On 27 April 1920, the anti-imperialist, Morel, warned a protest rally organised by the British section of the WILPF in London that “the militarised African, who has shot and bayoneted white men [during the war] in Europe, who has had sexual intercourse with white women in Europe”, now realises that “the white man is…rather a poor type, and that the key to his power is just that lethal instrument which he has obligingly taught the black man to use”.42 Propagandist Heinrich Distler parroted Morel’s sentiments: “The deployment of [colonial troops] among a downtrodden, defenseless people [is] a crime on the entire culture that awakens in these half-animals the sense that white power can no longer support itself”.43 The result would be a war of extermination between the two races, in part because rapes of white women by black men were often fatal, according to Morel.44 The campaign thus took on added urgency as a threat to white people all over the world.

╇Koller (2001), pp.╯221and 224. ╇Bland (2005), p.╯41; Koller (2002), p.╯141. 41 ╇ Morel (1920), pp.╯9–10 (emphasis Morel’s). 42 ╇ Quoted in Bland (2005), p.╯40. 43 ╇Distler (1921), p.╯13. 44 ╇Bland (2005), p.╯40. 39 40

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After the rally, the British Section of the WILPF passed resolutions against the use of colonial troops in the Rhineland, later adopting a position against occupations in general, as potentially dangerous for females. Although the pacifists initially endorsed Morel’s activities, they subsequently backed away from the British crusader.45 The WILPF members did nothing publicly to discourage the racialist propaganda, however. The Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, living in London in the 1920s, wrote the only openly hostile letter about Rhineland Horror propaganda to appear in a British paper.46 In the American journalist Ray Beveridge the campaign found its feminine counterpart to Edmund Morel. Although her claim to US citizenship was far from clear – all that is known of Beveridge’s background is that she worked for a time at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.47 – Beveridge offered the crusade access to a US audience and to a female voice that could stir up images of a cuckolded German manhood. In any case flyers distributed at rallies in Hamburg read: “Americans, listen to your countrywoman Miss Beveridge”. The orator’s pretence at US citizenship allowed her to cultivate the hope that American women would act on German women’s behalf. She also baited the masculinity of the men in her audiences. “German men!… Your weapons have been taken from you, but there is always a rope and a tree! Take up the natural weapons used by our men of the South: lynch!”48 Rhetoric insinuating that masculine honour was at stake in the alleged atrocities soon caught on elsewhere. Belgian officers stationed in the Rhineland found tangible evidence on five mark notes overprinted in gold letters: “Awake, German man of honour; lend your aid against the anguish of the Rhineland Horror”.49 Beveridge’s suggestion in the crusade that the Germans resort to “lynching”, a term redolent of racially-motivated violence, was pointed deliberately at a US audience.50 While familiarity with the myth of the black rapist certainly helped the campaign’s progress in the United States, other factors, particularly the discovery of misinformation in the propaganda, stanched the enthusiasm. By June 1920 the State ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯11. ╇Bland (2005), pp.╯42–3. 47 ╇ Marks (1983), p.╯312, footnotes a State Department document that identified Beveridge as a former German Embassy employee now living in Germany. 48 ╇ Quoted in Schüler (1996), p.╯9, n. 32; also quoted in ibid., p.╯9. 49 ╇ Quoted in Marks (1983), p.╯315. 50 ╇ Zangrando (1980), p.╯3. 45 46

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Department had received so many letters in response to circulating propaganda that President Wilson instructed Secretary of State Robert Lansing to determine what “facts” the American ambassador in Paris, Bainbridge Colby, could secure about the matter. Lansing sent telegrams to the American commissioner in Berlin, Ellis Loring Dresel, and the commander of the American Forces in Germany, General Henry T.╯Allen, making particular inquiries about alleged mistreatments of German women by African forces.51 Colby cautioned the President that the agitators were simply spreading the campaign to provoke an active response in the US Congress.52 General Allen’s report further discredited the claims. The commander’s survey of alleged sexual assaults by colonial troops revealed that of the presumed 25,000 colonial soldiers in the Rhineland, sixtysix cases of alleged rape, attempted rape, sodomy, or attempted sodomy had been brought to the attention of the French authorities between January 1919 and June 1920. Twenty-eight convictions resulted, with twenty-three cases still pending (Allen’s study did not mention the number of crimes committed by Germans against colonial troops).53 French military officials meted out justice in cases of legitimate crimes efficiently and thoroughly. The General also singled out newspaper stories that inflated figures of the number of French colonial troops stationed in the Rhineland and in which reports of rapes were fabricated or unsubstantiated. He confirmed beyond doubt that the Rhineland Horror was a propaganda campaign to stir animosity toward France.54 In addition, he declared that racial segregation was not adhered to as strictly as it was in the American South, as a number of German-colonial marriages had taken place and were socially accepted.55 The Rhineland Horror campaign reached the peak of its hysteria in the US as the nation inaugurated a new president, Warren G.╯Harding, in 1921. German-American groups heightened their activity on behalf of the cause, including distributing editorials in George S.╯Viereck’s pro-German publication the American Monthly and among members of a German-American organisation called the Steuben Society. Ten thousand pamphlets were distributed across the country, financed ╇Telegram reprinted in Allen (1927), p.╯319. ╇Nelson (1975), p.╯617. 53 ╇Koller (2001), pp.╯254–5. 54 ╇ Allen (1927), p.╯321. 55 ╇ Ibid., p.╯16. See also Stovall (1999), p.╯170. 51 52

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with money contributed by wealthy German- and Irish-Americans. The National Council of Catholic Women appealed to the State Department by forwarding a protest note written by the League of Catholic Women in Bohemia that gave Americans a special responsibility to the matter because of its own history of race relations. To accompany the printed page, twelve thousand people rallied for an end to the use of colonial troops in the Rhineland at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 28 February 1921.56 Nevertheless, despite those concerted efforts, the US campaign generally backfired, as most Americans still identified too strongly with their wartime ally, and too fiercely against the enemy, to believe the propaganda. One opponent of the campaign, the American Legion Commander F. W.╯Galbraith, attracted double the number of participants to a counterdemonstration, also at Madison Square Garden to the 28 February event.57 However, it would be a grave error to assume that because the American Legion protested against the campaign it therefore rejected racial prejudice. The 25,000 patriots attending the 18 March rally were there to rejuvenate war enthusiasm, not chide Germans for the offensive accusations that they had hurled toward African soldiers. The patriots rebuked their former enemy, to be sure, but not for perpetuating false claims against colonial troops. Instead, the crowd “hissed” at those who dared to undercut the wartime Allies, and cheered at the recitation of “great Americans” from George Washington to Warren G.╯Harding (the list did not include African Americans). There was in fact little mention at all of the Horror on the Rhine. Indeed, if the “AllAmerican” event included any African Americans at all, that fact was kept quiet in the New York Times report.58 Historian Lucy Bland noted a similar pattern among conservative editors in England, where rightwing newspapers and journals barely touched the subject of the Rhineland Horror, instead restricting themselves to general anti-German rhetoric.59 American liberals, too, rejected the campaign. In a March 1921 article, the liberal Nation magazine cited General Allen’s interpretation of the German efforts as mere anti-French propaganda designed ╇Nelson (1975), p.╯620; Schüler (1996), p.╯17. ╇Nelson (1975), pp.╯620–1. 58 ╇ “25,000 Patriots at Garden Answer Rhine Horror Plea,” New York Times, 19 March 1921, pp.╯1–2. 59 ╇Bland (2005), p.╯41. 56 57

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to drive a wedge between the Allies. In any case, the Nation declared the real culprit in post-war relations to be the occupation itself. While the journal refused to be hoodwinked by the propaganda and confirmed that African soldiers were not the beasts presented, it nevertheless felt compelled to echo Allen’s note that whites were the better disciplined soldiers.60 The campaign courted other Americans (and exploited existing international links within the women’s movement) to gain support for its cause. German women, including the Rhenish Women’s League and the Catholic Women’s Association of Germany sent the reformer Jane Addams, whose standing had been severely diminished by redbaiting after the war, several pieces of campaign propaganda, asking her to act.61 Addams received a missive from WILPF member Agnes Flehinghaus begging her to help “protect the German women from the suffering which some of them have to undergo through the occupation of the Rhineland by colored French troops”. Secretary of the Nebraska League of Women Voters May Gund also wrote to Addams with a similar request.62 In addition, a German-American organisation calling itself the New York Committee Against the Horror on the Rhine invited her to speak on the topic, but she declined.63 Addams, co-founder of the NAACP and a critic of the film Birth of a Nation,64 nevertheless vacillated when confronted with issues involving race, sex, and sexual violence. Although opposed to lynching, which she called a “hideous act”,65 she did not examine the motivations for the rape charges, assuming these were true.66 Helena Swanwick, too, appeared apprehensive about the campaign’s racialist ideas, commenting that it was unfair to call men who had been kidnapped, forced to leave their homes and join a European military a

╇ “Black Troops on the Rhine,” Nation 112, 9 March 1921, p.╯365. ╇Sklar et. al (1998), pp.╯275–86 includes reproductions of a Fichte Bund plea to Addams, a letter from Terrell to Addams, and the 1921 WILPF congress in Vienna resolution on colonial troops. 62 ╇ Flehinghaus to Addams, 12 March 1920, WILPF US section, DG 043, microfilm #130.38, Series A,5 Literature and releases, Series C: Correspondences: General Correspondence, 1919-1924, Swarthmore College Peace Collection (hereafter SCPC), Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Gund to Addams, 24 June 1920, ibid. 63 ╇Schüler (1996), pp.╯12–3. 64 ╇ Franklin (1989), p.╯17. 65 ╇ Jane Addams, “Respect the Law,” Independent 53, 3 January 1901, pp.╯18–20. 66 ╇Knight (2005), p.╯388; Bederman (1995), p.╯197. 60 61

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“scourge” (in reference to Morel’s pamphlet entitled “The Black Scourge”), but she nevertheless supported the campaign.67 Addams’ failure to question racial stereotypes stood out most starkly in her letter to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes dated 5 March 1921, a missive she coauthored with fellow-US WILPF associate Mabel Kittredge.68 Despite the fact that WILPF had resolved to alter customs that led to discrimination against people on the basis of race at its 1919 Zurich conference, members’ response to the Rhineland Horror campaign indicated that they were not really prepared to undertake such alterations.69 Addams and Kittredge noted that German WILPF members had contacted them, stating that their government would gladly pay its reparations if not for one paralysing circumstance: “The soul of the nation is on fire with resentment at the fact that Germany, as a great land of culture, existing for almost 1500 years, has been placed under the military despotism of colored men of the lowest standard of culture for the duration of 15 years,” complained the pacifists, “and this only because the French government alone among the Entente governments has so willed it”. Furthermore, Addams and Kittredge continued, “German men will not disarm while the cry of German women goes unheeded”. In this the pacifists played upon men’s sense of honour and women’s presumed need for protection, just as Ray Beveridge had done. The reformers also remarked that black troops were committing immoral crimes against young boys. Finally, Addams and Kittredge insisted that “fine colored women” of the United States were also demanding the withdrawal of colonial troops.70 In March 1921, the African American pacifist Mary Church Terrell finally succeeded in convincing Addams that the German claims were exaggerated. In a letter to the WILPF leader, she expressed her sympathy for German women but argued that both German and US soldiers were guilty of the same charges of criminal behaviour that were being leveled at French colonials.71 In July 1921, at its conference in Vienna, the WILPF passed a resolution against the military use of ╇Bland (2005), p.╯43. ╇ Addams and Kittredge to Hughes, 5 March 1921, WILPF US section, DG 043, microfilm #130.41, Series C, Correspondence, Box 3 Folder 35, SCPC. 69 ╇Randall (1964), p.╯277; WILPF (1919), p.╯19. 70 ╇ Addams and Kittredge to Hughes, 5 March 1921, WILPF US section, DG 043, microfilm #130.41, Series C, Correspondence, Box 3 Folder 35, SCPC. 71 ╇Schüler (1996), pp.╯13–4. 67 68

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colonial populations, and the German delegation echoed that motion at the 1922 WILPF convention in the Netherlands.72 Moreover, the reformers decided to take a forceful stance against racialism instead. The “Resolution on Race Prejudice” declared that because race prejudice was based on ignorance and was unreasonable, unjust, and distrustful, it sparked suspicion, antagonism, and hatred towards the people of other nations. The organisation henceforth condemned racial discrimination as unworthy of civilised human beings.73 Other Americans, however, experienced no such epiphanies. In the US Congress in August 1922, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, Democrat of Nebraska and Senate minority leader, declared that the United States had a moral obligation to force France to withdraw its colonial troops.74 As tensions among the Allies and Germany grew over reparations payments, even General Allen wrote to Commander Pershing that same month that African troops had become a legitimate source of grievance for Germany. Allen became convinced that using colonial troops in Europe was a bad idea,75 not so much because he was convinced by the campaign, but more likely because the propaganda was so damaging. In any case, the French stopped deploying colonial troops during the 1923 Ruhr Crisis, probably because they felt that they were unnecessarily providing the Germans with anti-French propaganda fodder that found its target among their allies.76 The most trenchant critique of the Rhineland Horror campaign came from a German feminist, Lilli Jannasch, who during the war had acted as secretary of the most radical bourgeois pacifist organisation in Germany, the Bund Neues Vaterland. Although she had attended the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, she rejected the notion that militarism had to be fought as an exclusively male phenomenon, and instead aligned herself with male pacifists such as the exiled French writer and campaigner Romain Rolland. Her links with men and women in the anti-war wing of German Social Democracy also landed her a short spell in jail from March to July 1916.77 Her primary focus, both then and after 1918, was on Franco╇Koller (2001), p.╯220. ╇Blackwell (2004), p.╯97. 74 ╇US Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 67th Congress, 2nd sess., 31 August 1922, 12020. 75 ╇Nelson (1975), pp.╯622–3, n. 87. 76 ╇Schüler (1996), p.╯19. 77 ╇On Jannasch see Grappin (1952); and Quidde (1979), pp.╯101–2. 72 73

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German reconciliation, a factor reinforced by her dual-national heritage (her father was German and her mother French). Peace, she believed, would only come about once Germany recognised the truth about its war crimes in occupied France and Belgium, and finally turned its back on its militaristic past.78 Not surprisingly, Jannasch was an ardent opponent of the Rhineland campaign, offering her analysis in the 1921 pamphlet Schwarze Schmach und schwarz-weiss-rote Schande (Black Dishonour and BlackWhite-Red Disgrace), and in a German magazine article in November 1920. In the latter she compared the crusade’s antics to the German folktale the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” in which the piper (in this case, the Rhineland Horror campaigners) played irresistible music (of revenge, chivalric honour, and female protection) while making irresponsible claims (about the African soldiers). The German people, observed Jannasch, were being lured into a never-ending cycle of revenge by the campaign’s inflated claims of dishonour at the hands of the colonial troops. Jannasch explained that in using colonials, the French were perpetuating the spirit of revenge instigated by the aggressive, baiting methods begun by the Germans during the war. The pacifist declared that she had lived for a year in the post-war occupied Rhineland, in which several hundred colonial soldiers were stationed. The district administrator of the area assured her that no hostility toward women or children had occurred; the Africans were in fact quite popular with the local population, particularly when, for example, black troops had shared their provisions with hungry children. The writer noted that in many German cities, the talk of the town was that women found the colonials to be good company. Was it “white shame”, Jannasch asked her readers, for these German women to admit their feelings? Jannasch interpreted aggression on the part of some blacks as an individual problem, not as a mass phenomenon, and she suggested that authorities ought to handle such situations as isolated incidences. Citizens grumbling about injustices in the occupied zone were in any case hypocritical, since as a nation Germany itself had been unfair. The pacifist reminded readers that their military had occupied Lille, the coal-rich French city near the Belgium border, and deported ten thousand women and girls in 1916 for compulsory agricultural labour elsewhere. Furthermore, most readers were aware that German colonisers 78

╇See also Horne and Kramer (2001), p.╯364.

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had mistreated native populations. Was it not the same colonisers that were now hurling accusations of “black horror” at the French, Jannasch wondered? Furthermore, why did the BDF, the bourgeois women’s movement, not shed a tear when African women by the thousands were victimised by German colonisers? Answering her own query, Jannasch explained that “race fanatics” had argued that the inferiority of the black race excused such procedures and that the life and health of one German woman and one German child were worth one hundred African women’s lives. At this point, Jannasch extended her analysis from race to gender hierarchies in a patriarchal society. The writer questioned whether German men really valued German women’s lives, and then offered evidence to the contrary. One need only to think of prostitutes, forced into the business by hunger, whose lives had been cheapened (Jannasch did not believe that only the French were to blame for the proliferation of brothels, reminding readers of the bordellos built by the German military in Belgium). So, wondered the pacifist sarcastically, where was the concern for these German women? Assistance to impoverished women, she implied, may have saved them from the sex trade, but adequate welfare was nonexistent for nearly all German women, and working-class women (along with injured ex-soldiers) comprised the neediest group of people in the immediate post-war years. If patriarchy is maintained, in part, by valuing women’s maternal and domestic functions in lieu of full equality, Jannasch denied that they were granted even that small favour. Finally, the pacifist revealed the campaign for the foreign relations problem that it had become for the German state. “As long as Germans remain under the thumb of their military,” she warned, “other nations will not grant them understanding or trust”.79 From a diplomatic viewpoint, the Rhineland Horror campaign accomplished almost nothing. The French may have felt gratified by the revenge that they wreaked upon Germany with their deployment of African soldiers, and satisfied that they had achieved a small sense of security by keeping their neighbor subdued, but in return France lost the allegiance of some of its allies. The Germans, by trying to turn racial prejudices to their advantage, only managed to further alienate their former enemies, while leaving intact the hatreds that would in ╇ Lilli Jannasch, “Schwarze Schmach, Weisse Schmach?” (Black Shame, White Shame?), Die Frau im Staat 2/11 (November 1920), pp.╯1–4, translation mine. 79

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the next war destroy their own civilisation. Obscured in the entire occupation ordeal were the voices of the African soldiers themselves (although the experiences of German offspring of other African men living in Germany during the occupation years have since been recorded).80 These men, uprooted from their families and livelihoods, risked their lives and well-being to serve in a military in a place far from home. As Keith Nelson summed it up, “perhaps it was also to their [Africans’] advantage that, after the experience of war and occupation, they must have found it more difficult to idealise the white man”.81 The violence against females that did occur during the occupation, regardless of the perpetrators’ race or country of origin, reduced women’s chances of consolidating any gains they had won through their wartime participation in the economy and politics.82 Instead of empowering women to become agents of their own experiences, the campaign reduced women’s autonomy and individuality by outlining and publicising how rape victims should understand the offense done to them: as one of many unjust, disgraceful aspects of the Rhineland occupation foisted upon helpless female victims and upon German society as a whole by the victorious powers. While some soldier-rapists during the occupation may have indeed felt free to violate local women because they felt that their participation in the military victory entitled them to booty,83 the campaign did women no favours when it directed German men to seek revenge for those acts instead of empowering women to seek justice. In addition, as both sides of the controversy surrounding France’s use of colonial soldiers during the occupation – both supporters, including the Rhenish Women’s League, and detractors of the crusade, such as US General Henry T.╯Allen – battled each other over the number and nature of alleged outrages occurring in the Rhineland, neither side questioned how rape should be understood by its victims or by society: as a shameful misdeed that women themselves were somehow also guilty of perpetrating.84 By making women feel ashamed of their victimisation,

╇See Reiprich and Ngambi ul Kuo (1986), pp.╯56–76. ╇Nelson (1975), p.╯627. 82 ╇ Meintjes et al. (2002), p.╯11. 83 ╇Schüler (1996), p.1. 84 ╇ Morel (1920), p.╯13. 80 81

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campaigners compounded the sense that women were to blame for Germany’s humiliations, both during and after the war.85 Bibliography Allen, H.T. (1927) The Rhineland Occupation (Indianapolis: 1927). Ambrosius, L. E. (2006) “Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations”, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5/2 (April 2006)159–60. Bederman, G. (1995) Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: 1995). Berlin West Africa Conference, 1884-1885 (1886) General Act of the Conference of Berlin: signed February 26, 1885 (London: 1886). Blackwell, J. (2004) No Peace Without Freedom: Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1975 (Carbondale: 2004). Bland, L. (2005) “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War”, Gender and History 17/1 (April 2005) 29–61. Campt, T., Grosse, P. and Lemke-Muniz, Y. (1998) “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920-60”, in The Inmperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. S.╯Freidrichsmeyer, S.╯Lennox and S.╯Zantop (Ann Arbor: 1998) 205–29. Cook, B. W. (1973) [1924] “Foreword,” in Helena M.╯Swanwick, Builders of Peace: Being Ten Years’ History of the UDC (Garland: 1924; repr. 1973). Distler, H. (1921) Das deutsche leid am Rhein: ein buch der anklage gegen die Schandherrschaft des französischen militarismus (Minden, Westphalia: 1921). Enloe, C. (1990) Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: 1990). ———╯ (2004) The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: 2004). Franklin, J. H. (1989) Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988 (Baton Rouge: 1989). Grappin, P. (1952) Le “Bund Neues Vaterland”, 1914-1916: Ses rapports avec Romain Rolland (Lyon and Paris: 1952). Horne J. and Kramer, A. (2001) German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven and London: 2001). Joll, J. (1984) Origins of the First World War (London: 1984). Knight, L. W. (2005) Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: 2005). Koller, C. (2001)“Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppe in Europa Zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial-und Militärpolitik, 1914-1930 (Stuttgart: 2001). ———╯ (2002) “Enemy Images: Race and Gender Stereotypes in the Discussion on Colonial Troops – A Franco-German Comparison, 1914-1923”, in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. K.╯Hagemann and S.╯Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: 2002) 139–157. Lebzelter, G. (1985) “Die ‘Schwarze Schmach’: Vorurteile – Propaganda – Mythos,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 11 (1985) 37–68.

85

╇See Sharp (2007), pp.╯67–87.

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Marks, S. (1983) “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience”, European Studies Review, 13 (1983) 297–333. Nelson, K. L. (1970) “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post–World War I Diplomacy”, Journal of Modern History, 42 (December 1970) 606–27. ———╯ (1975) Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918-1923 (Berkeley: 1975). Meintjes, S., Pillay, A. and Turshen, M. (2002) “There is No Aftermath for Women”, in The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, eds. M.╯Turshen, S.╯Meintjes and A.╯Pillay (New York: 2002) 3–18. Morel, E.D (192 0) The Horror on the Rhine (London: 1920). Ogawa, M. (2007) “The ‘White Ribbon League of Nations’ Meets Japan: The TransPacific Activism of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1906-1930”, Diplomatic History, 31/1 (January 2007) 21–50. Quidde, L. (1979) Der deutsche Pazifismus während des Weltkrieges, 1914-1918: Aus dem Nachlaß Ludwig Quidde, ed. K.╯Holl and H.╯Donat (Boppard am Rhein: 1979). Randall, M. (1964) Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (Boston: 1964). Reinders, R. C. (1968) “Racialism on the Left: E. D.╯Morel and the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’”, International Review of History, 13 (1968) 1–28. Reiprich, D.and Ngambi ul Kuo, E. (1986) “Our Father was Cameroonian, Our Mother, East Prussian, We Are Mulattoes”, in Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, ed. M.╯Opitz, K.╯Oguntoye, and D.╯Schultz, trans. A. V.╯Adams (Amherst: 1986) 56–76. Schüler, A. (1996) “The ‘Horror on the Rhine’: Rape, Racism and the International Women’s Movement”, John F.╯Kennedy-Institut Für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung für Geschichte, Working Paper No. 86 (1996) 1–19. Sharp, I. (2007) “Blaming the Women: Women’s Responsibility for the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A. S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 67–87. Sideris, T. (2002) “Rape in War and Peace: Social Context, Gender, Power and Identity”, in The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation eds. S.╯Meintjes, A.╯Pillay, and M.╯Turshen (London: 2002) 142–58. Singer, M. (1920) Colored Frenchmen on the Rhine: An Appeal of White Women to American Womanhood (Chicago: New Press, 1920). Sklar, K. K., Schüler A., and Strasser, S. (1998) Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885-1933 (Ithaca, NY: 1998). Sluga, G. (2006) “Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Re-Reading of ‘the Apogee of Nationalism’”, Nations and Nationalism, 6/4 (2000) 496–522. Stovall, T. (1999) “Colonial Workers in France during the Great War”, in European Imperialism 1830-1930: Climax and Contradiction ed. A.╯Conklin and I. C.╯Fletcher (New York: 1999) 165–73. Walters, F. (1960) A History of the League of Nations (London: 1960). WILPF (1919) Towards Peace and Freedom: the Women’s International Congress, Zürich, May 12th to 17th, 1919, English ed. (London: 1919). Rheinische Frauenliga (1920) Farbige Franzosen am Rhein: Ein Notschrei deutscher Frauen (Berlin: H.R.╯Engelmann, 1920). Zangrando, R. (1980) The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: 1980).

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From “Free Love” to Married Love

part two

the renegotiation of gender roles

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From “Free Love” to Married Love: Gender politics, Marie Stopes, and middlebrow fiction by women in the early nineteen twenties Ann Rea The active suffragist movement in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Britain achieved its goal of votes for women in 1918, after Britain’s victory in the First World War, in part in recognition of the role that women played in the war effort. Feminist thinking in the pre-war decades is less widely known for its focus on women’s economic lives and their position within the family, including the culture’s attitudes towards sexuality. Pre-war feminists criticised marriage, in particular, as a form of economic and sexual slavery and exposed the high rate of prostitution and venereal disease whose sources lay in tolerance towards promiscuity in middle-class men. The result of their critique was a wholesale rejection of marriage by progressive women; however, marriage and the return of women to the domestic sphere formed a significant part of the culture of demobilisation after the war. This can be seen in particular through an examination of some of the middlebrow fiction written by and for women in the 1920s.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Britain’s ideology surrounding women’s sexuality and marriage underwent an immense change yet paradoxically caused a reassertion of the status quo. In the later decades of the nineteenth century debates surrounding the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) made apparent the brutality in many marriages, and activists in the women’s movement, including Cecily Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, Lucy Re Bartlett and Olive SchreiÂ� ner, subjected marriage to critical scrutiny which exposed it as a form of slavery and renounced it as physical and economic dependence.1 The economic and sexual disempowerment which marriage represented to these critics sparked the “silent strike” that Lucy Re Bartlett pointed to as huge numbers of women rejected marriage either in favour of celibacy, or experimentation with heterosexual activity outside marriage – sometimes known as “free love” – or lesbianism. 1

╇ Jackson (1994), p.╯20.

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Margaret Jackson shows that in 1911 “the rate of marriage reached an all-time low” and spinsterhood achieved a new respectability.2 Yet after the First World War attitudes changed so that by the mid1930s, fiction by middlebrow women writers shows women again choosing marriage instead of the alternatives the pre-war generation of women embraced, even if the fiction shows women scrutinising that choice. Here I will consider the role that Marie Stopes played in influencing vast numbers of women to turn away from the radical alternatives, towards what was known as “New Feminism,” ultimately a conservative backlash against feminism. In particular I will argue that she became part of a middle-class discourse which emphasised domestic roles for women, and I will explore the evidence of this discourse in middlebrow fiction by women.3 Although Stopes’s influence on the post-war culture was felt in the years immediately after the war, I will examine fiction published up to 1927 because of the time lapse between the changes in thinking in England and the manifestation of those changes in published fiction. Simply put, it took a few years before the current ideas about women, sexuality and marriage filtered into literature. In her 1918 marriage manual, Married Love, Stopes took only part of the feminist version of “free love” – that part which rejected the concept of male “conjugal rights” – and asserted the need for a woman’s control of “access to her own body”. She harnessed it to another radical concept: the sexologists’ recognition of female sexual drive. Combining this with sexology’s belief in the damaging effects of both sexual inhibition and lesbian sexual expression, and her own campaign for the promotion of birth control, Stopes managed to revise marriage into the form known as “companionate marriage” thereby making it attractive to women and simultaneously effectively mandating it. In doing so Stopes ended the rejection of marriage by large numbers of women, which, when combined with women’s economic progress, appeared as a threat to the social fabric. Stopes’s Married Love therefore combined elements of the women’s movement’s radicalism with the conservative post-war sentimental need to return to pre-war conditions, while at the same time appearing “modern”. Postwar patriotic sentiment was mobilised in Stopes’s invocations of ‘the race” and in her effusive references to the importance of marriage to 2 3

╇ Ibid. ╇See Briganti and Mezei (2006); and Bingham (2004).

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the social order, which aligned her with the eugenicist movement. While appearing to remove many of the feminists’ objections to marriage, Stopes’s revised marital state nevertheless reasserted heterosexual, patriarchal marriage, outlawing what Cecily Hamilton termed the “power of refusal” of celibacy, spinsterhood or lesbianism, and promulgating sexology’s normative influences in maligning lesbian sexuality, extramarital sex, and celibacy.4 Middlebrow fiction was the place where much of this ideology about marriage was considered, spread, and ultimately rejected in the early years after the war, because of the middlebrow writers’ capitulation to the endurance of conventional domestic life. While Stopes’s marriage imperative may not appear to be disruptive of bourgeois domesticity (after all she did urge “married love”), novels of the period from 1918 until 1927 nevertheless regard her call to a life of passion within marriage as incompatible with the realities of middle-class marriage. Middlebrow fiction, as some recent critics have argued, was what people, especially middle-class women, actually read. Less formally experimental than high modernist fiction generally, and more clearly part of the tradition of domestic fiction, it has been disparaged by critics beginning with Virginia Woolf and Q. D.╯Leavis and has only begun to receive serious critical attention in recent years.5 Yet to ignore this literature is to ignore a discourse which, as Nicola Humble says, is also very much the literature of the middle classes, paying a meticulous attention to their shifting desires and self-images, mapping their swings of fortune at this most volatile stage in their history. As a result, it not only reflected shifts in middle-class opinion and ideology, but also inspired them.6 Humble goes on to argue that: the “feminine middlebrow” in this period was a powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities, and… it is its paradoxical allegiances to both domesticity and a radical sophistication that makes this literary form ideologically flexible.7

╇ Jackson, (1994), p.╯20. ╇See Woolf (1943); Leavis (1932); Lassner (1998); Deen (2002); Grover (2009); and Humble (2000). 6 ╇ Humble (2000), p.╯3. 7 ╇ Ibid. 4 5

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I will argue that middlebrow fiction by women provided a site which allowed women to explore the ideology of sexuality and marriage that Marie Stopes promulgates. The novels show that Stopes’s manual, while reinstating marriage, also carried the potential of disrupting women’s thinking about marriage in creating a demand for the newer passionate, companionate form of marriage, even if women ultimately capitulated to domestic life as the conventional alternative. FurtherÂ� more I would argue that Stopes’s treatise on marriage and sexuality functioned as a “feminine middlebrow” version of patriarchal sexology. Effectively then Stopes became part of the “feminine middlebrow” discourse, perhaps because of that very “allegiance to both domesticity and… radical sophistication” that persists in middlebrow fiction, to which Humble refers.8 This dual “allegiance” would ensure women’s adherence to both matrimony and to domestic fiction in which complex reactions to the construction of a new and apparently “sophisticated” ideal of marriage might be aired, tested, disseminated, and revised. Stopes effectively created a complex tension between these disparate urges towards domesticity and sophistication, but played on women’s need for both. Stopes’s version of marriage appeared modern, not least because of its connection to what Humble describes as the “fashionable ideas” of Sigmund Freud: the “radical sophistication” which Humble points to as part of the feminine middlebrow’s appeal. But in the early years after the war middlebrow women writers regard Stopes’s ideas as too “modern” and too disruptive of the status quo even while they provided a source of excitingly radical potential for the fiction to explore. Marie Stopes’s marriage manual popularised the “scientific” findings of sexologists Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, who also appeared progressive and radical while reaffirming conventional patriarchal mores concerning sexuality and marriage, as Margaret Jackson argues.9 Using the groundbreaking new discipline of psychoanalysis with authoritative, if self-servingly tautological, claims about the male and female sex drives, the sexologists urged that women had sexual drives, a potentially radical and liberating idea; nevertheless they shackled that drive to a reassertion of patriarchal authority in claiming that women who were not heterosexually active were either “frustrated” and thereby suffering from psychological damage, or 8 9

╇ Ibid. ╇ Jackson (1994).

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risked sliding into “inversion”. In The Real Facts of Life: Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality, 1850-1940 Margaret Jackson asserts that: During this period it was extremely difficult for a member of the general public to gain direct access to the works of the sexologists, since both the libraries and booksellers restricted their availability to doctors, lawyers, scientific researchers, and scholars. In most cases, therefore, those who knew anything at all about sexology and the “facts of life” would have acquired their knowledge from marriage manuals.10

As an overwhelming bestseller, Married Love clearly functioned as a source of information about sex and sexology for the reading public. As Jackson shows, Married Love “was listed in 1935 as sixteenth out of the twenty-five most influential books of the previous fifty years”.11 Jackson tells us, “By 1955 it had gone through numerous reprints and twenty-eight editions, amounting to 1,032,250 copies, and had been translated into twelve languages”.12 The extent of this is apparent when we consider that in 1932 Q. D.╯Leavis in her iconic Fiction and the Reading Public placed Married Love in the category of fiction, denouncing it as the type of material that appealed to “popular,” as opposed to “educated” readers, when she commented in a note to the chapter “Disintegration of the Reading Public”: The enormous sales of the writings of Marie Stopes show conclusively that a considerable part of the community requires elementary advice (and takes it without flinching at the level and in the idiom of the C novelist – I am not thinking of the medical or moral problem) on the most elementary and essential matters of emotional conduct. I could find no more convincing proof of the incapacity of the twentieth century to manage its emotional life for itself.13

Indeed Modern Love was immensely popular, which explains some of Leavis’s scorn. Paul Ferris notes in Sex and the British: A TwentiethCentury History: “By the end of 1918 [having been published in March] there had been five editions, and seventeen thousand copies were in print”.14 Nicola Humble documents that it sold “half a million copies by the mid-1920s”.15 Although Margaret Jackson believes that research has still not fully shown the extent of Stopes’s influence she argues that ╇ Ibid., p.╯129. ╇ Ibid. 12 ╇ Ibid. 13 ╇ Leavis (1934), p.╯134. 14 ╇ Ferris (1993), p.╯81. 15 ╇ Humble (2000), p.╯227. 10 11

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it was immense, saying, “Although Stopes’s impact was at its strongest during the period 1918 to 1928, the popularity of these texts certainly continued well into the post-war period”.16 Stopes influenced male behaviour too, demolishing the idea of the “conjugal rights” of husbands, asserting that the “normal, spontaneous sex-tide in women of our race” can become “obscured, and entangled” and that the “stimuli” of the “modern civilized world” can increase this distancing of women from the “fundamental rhythm of their sexual desire” which she saw as cyclical.17 So although middlebrow writers saw Stopes as part of the “radical sophistication” of modernity, ironically Stopes herself disparaged modern life’s effects on an essential, “natural” women’s sexuality. By promoting heterosexual marriage, and stressing the purported unhealthy psychological effects of spinsterhood and women’s communities, Stopes effectively outlawed the rejection of marriage in either of its forms: lesbianism and spinsterhood, two of the radical means by which women in the previous generation rejected patriarchal marriage. That the text exerted this influence after the First World War, when losses at the front led women of a particular generation to outnumber men, and when marriage was impossible for large numbers of women adds a further irony: a condition which Ingrid Sharp observes in post-war Germany. Stopes improved marriage, but established it as the only option. Like Havelock Ellis, Stopes also believed in essential heterosexuality, claiming that there were “real” lesbians and “spurious imitations” as Margaret Jackson points out. Jackson explains that for Stopes, a very few women had strong inborn tendencies to lesbianism, but [she] maintained that most drifted into it out of laziness or curiosity and allowed themselves to be corrupted. This kind of lesbianism was dangerous because it was contagious [and threatened] the peace of her home and the love of her husband.18

Clearly this thinking, perhaps most dangerous when voiced by an apparently progressive woman, circumscribed women’s choices; if they chose to remain unmarried and reject the domestic ideal, as increasing numbers had done since the women’s movement, they aroused suspicion of being bitter and twisted, and even criminal, or of ╇ Jackson (1994), pp.╯129–30. ╇Stopes, (1918), pp.╯48 and 42. 18 ╇ Jackson (1994), p.╯138. 16 17

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indulging in perversion. If they sought heterosexual relationships outside marriage they appeared “soiled”, in Stopes’s words, and little better than the Victorian “fallen” women. Stopes’s refurbished and glamÂ�ourised companionate marriage was more modern and attractive, but feminine middlebrow fiction suggests that fiction was the site to entertain and be entertained by these radical ideas, while many middle-class women’s lives continued to be less “modern”. And while Stopes’s ideas appeared radical – she promoted birth control and in so doing brought real liberation to many women who lived in terror of repeated pregnancies, and she spoke in florid language of women’s emotional needs, attaching those needs to a romanticised ideal of sexual expression, one which might find its mode of expression in domestic middlebrow fiction – these ideas nevertheless lured women into marriage which ultimately entailed increased domestic responsibilities in the post-war period. While she evokes the “peace of the home” which is centered on the heterosexual marriage, Stopes does not elaborate on the role of the woman in maintaining domestic peace. The contradiction is that she never sees the woman as a housekeeper, even while her role in the family is central to domestic stability. Middlebrow fiction of the immediate post-war years elucidates this serious flaw in Stopes’s thinking, which perhaps lies in Stopes’s own blindness to the conditions of post-war life, in particular for less affluent women when the shortage of servants increased women’s domestic responsibility. Nicola Humble writes that: The gradual disappearance of servants consigned the middle-class woman to a life of domesticity, but the middlebrow novel re-imagined that life in order to offer her a shared cultural fantasy of a middle class freed to a degree from the restraints it had traditionally imposed upon itself.19

So middlebrow fiction of this period emphasises domestic life and remains, ultimately, domestic fiction, and yet the “shared cultural fantasy” is, in part, a denial of women’s domestic life, even at an historical moment when their domestic burden is increasing. So what is the “shared cultural fantasy?” Women chose marriage partly because of the cultural emphasis on domestic life as an alternative to war, but post-war culture also denigrated alternatives to marriage. The fantasy requires that women believe that they have chosen domestic life and marriage instead of the radical alternatives embraced by women of the 19

╇ Humble (2000), pp.╯147–8.

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generation before them, and that they are satisfied with that choice, although it is worth noting that three of the novels I examine in this piece end with women reluctantly accepting domestic life instead of passionate emotional fulfillment. And yet the new culture, with its need for marriage as a means of domesticating men returning from the front, its normalising impulse, and its need for women to relinquish jobs, chooses marriage for women while convincing them that they are behaving radically. The “fantasy” of modern marriage depends to some extent on the fantasy of passionate love, as an alternative to marriage, or within marriage. Historical circumstances “required” a reassertion of domestic roles for women, but those roles needed to appear palatable. Stopes’s “new and improved” version of modern marriage formed an intrinsic part of the demobilisation culture which persuaded women to return to domestic life and motherhood and reject their wartime places in the public sphere and the workplace. Stopes’s persuasiveness lay in the appearance of sophistication for what was ultimately a regressive step into the domestic sphere. Middlebrow fiction crucially allowed women as writers and readers to question the marital, domestic imperative, but simultaneously allowed an imaginative escape from it which ultimately serves as a palliative in the early years. For this piece I focus on the earliest emanations of Stopes’s influence in middlebrow literature. I discuss novels published after the First World War and up to 1927 to show the filtration of the new thinking on marriage as it began to emerge in fiction, a process that takes several years. The first of these, Winifred Holtby’s Anderby Wold (1923) shows an unrequited love affair in which urban passions (passionate love and also socialist ideas) come to rural Yorkshire, but must be relinquished for a hobbling respectability. Holtby’s later The Crowded Street (1924) is more radical in allowing its protagonist Muriel an alternative to heterosexual marriage, but with the chimera of the ideal companionate marriage lurking in the background. Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph (1924) is the epitome of experimentation with Bohemian escapes from “proper” English domestic conventions, revealing the tensions and absurdities of the role that middlebrow fiction played in giving women the means by which to scrutinise marriage and still to enforce the status quo, while imagining their lives to be sites of resistance. Crewe Train (1926), by Rose Macauley, shows passion within marriage squashed by the necessity for middle-class domestic and social conventionality, even while it allows readers the frisson of imagining an escape from domes-

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tic work. E. M.╯Delafield’s The Way Things Are (1927) portrays a provincial middle-class woman struggling to reconcile the many kinds of “advice” which, I argue, constitute a middlebrow discourse including Marie Stopes, aimed at middle-class women trying to pursue passionate love while ensuring the smooth running of her household without servants. In the fiction by women, women readers could see characters like themselves who flouted respectability either by refusing domestic life, like Crewe Train’s Denham, or by traveling to Austria to live among Bohemian artists like Florence in The Constant Nymph, or flirting with potentially scandalous passion and thereby risking domestic ruin; however, the novels’ reaffirmations of conventional marriage and domesticity undercut their radical message even while they exhibit deep ambivalence about conventional domestic life. Perhaps, in these early years of Stopes’s influence, the only real change was that middlebrow novelists and their readers were able to imagine marriage to be otherwise and to allow women to express dissatisfaction with marriage. The alternative entails a rejection of respectability and social ostracism which Stopes does not anticipate and which the women dare not risk. The novels rarely show characters choosing alternatives to marriage and domestic life; E. M.╯Delafield’s protagonist, Laura, leaves her Bohemian lover in London to return to her undemonstrative husband, her children and domestic responsibilities in the country. Crewe Train’s ingénue, Andorran-raised protagonist Denham finds undomesticated happiness in a Cornish cottage with a tunnel that leads to the sea, but she gives up, at the end, and pregnant, moves to a London dormitory town with her husband, to be absorbed into respectable middle-class society. Tessa, the young Bohemian woman in The Constant Nymph who has not received conventional English middleclass education in the rules of womanhood dies at the end, overwhelmed by the English Florence, who provides the narrative’s normative English perspective. Only Muriel Hammond, in The Crowded Street successfully escapes the hetero-normative imperative by moving to a London flat with Delia, as her domestic assistant, to enable Delia’s work in the feminist movement, but even this apparent solution to the domestic imperative resembles conventional marriage. Otherwise the fiction capitulates to a domestic compromise; passionate, companionate marriage is incompatible with middle-class life in the early 1920s. Indeed Stopes was not concerned to urge domestic life, much as she extolled motherhood and heterosexual marriage. Female

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characters in the fiction of the early 1920s tend to identify Stopes’s style of marriage with London, and with an exotic Bohemia foreign to their own less fashionable, less satisfying lives. Winifred Holtby’s Anderby Wold (1923) depicts the misery of marriage of the old style. Mary Robson, a woman of great energies and ambitions as a farmer, marries John, an older man, to ensure the continuation of the farm which her family has owned for generations. Her pact with tradition is unsettled by the arrival of David Rossitur, author of “[a] volume of essays” which Mary borrows from the lending library, and which turns out to be a “tirade against capitalism, patronage and the dependence of the proletariat on the self-interested solicitude of a bourgeois minority”, which describes Mary’s own acts of kindness to the villagers.20 Mary and David fall in love, and Mary discovers passion that her marriage with John has never aroused. Neither relationship prospers at the end of the novel; husband John suffers a stroke, perhaps caused by witnessing the passionate kiss between Mary and David. David is murdered by Mary’s most loyal employee who misunderstands David’s challenge to Mary’s patronage of the villagers. The provincial town envelops Mary into its conventionality, its meagre hope for opportunities for service, and in its defeat by respectability. Anderby Wold ends with Mary admitting that Market Burton was a dull place, but she supposed that there would be work of some kind to be done there. There would always be a girls’ club or a nursing association or something – something that couldn’t do anyone much harm.21

Holtby is adept at depicting the emptiness of the lives of women with no meaningful outlets for their energies and skills exemplified by Mary’s capitulation to middle-class, respectable society. The prospect of nursing associations and girls’ clubs resembles the life afforded Muriel Hammond and other women in Holtby’s The Crowded Street (1924). When the vicar in Holtby’s The Crowded Street asks Muriel Hammond “Have you noticed much change in Marshington since the war ended?”, Muriel replies “Change? Here? No, I don’t think so. People are still washing dishes to be dirtied at the next meal, and sitting at the same stools to add up other people’s accounts, and giving 20 21

╇ Holtby, (1923), pp.╯240 and 98. ╇ Ibid., p.╯309.

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tea parties to be envied by other people’s wives”.22 Domestic dreariness frames the novel, whose critique of the marriage economy shows marriage to be a woman’s whole aim. Muriel’s sister Connie pursues the logic of the marriage imperative to its furthest extreme, deliberately becoming pregnant as a means to marriage. In her defence Connie rails at her mother: You wouldn’t let us work or go away, or have any other interests, because you were afraid of our spoiling a chance of a good marriage. And if we didn’t get partners at dances we were beastly failures. And now that one of us has taken the only means she saw to fulfill your wishes and get married, and it hasn’t come off, you’re very angry, aren’t you, but you aren’t sorry, and if I’d been successful, you wouldn’t have been angry, would you, Mother?23

Connie almost becomes one of the “Fallen Girls” who Mrs. Hammond works to “rescue” as a philanthropic effort, chiefly to improve her social cachet. But neither Hammond girl understands this work for the Fallen Girls because “it was not nice that unmarried girls should know about these things”.24 And Muriel cannot work on the accounts of the Fallen Girls organisation because her mother wants her to maintain her innocence about those women; yet Mr. Hammond has been adulterous, and may even have contributed to the numbers of the “fallen” girls. In one scene we see Mrs. Hammond sitting at her dressing-table putting on her rings: Here was the diamond half-hoop, her engagement ring. Arthur had been generous but unoriginal. Here was the emerald that he had bought during their honeymoon. Here, the ruby set between two splendid pearls that he had bought her after that affair. She twisted it round on her finger reflectively. Her gentle face hardened… “Does he still keep her photograph in his watch case?” she wondered. That would be like Arthur, to repent extravagantly, and then to keep one little trace of his misdeed to sigh over… Mrs. Hammond was not a sentimentalist. She clapped the ruby ring down on top of the emerald and diamond, and smiled without too much bitterness.25

Mrs. Hammond pragmatically accepts her husband’s adultery, but in rural Yorkshire after the war no alternative to flawed marriage based on radically different views of male and female sexuality exists, and ╇ Holtby (1924), p.╯215. ╇ Ibid., p.╯152. 24 ╇ Ibid., p.╯219. 25 ╇ Ibid., p.╯63. 22 23

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when Muriel fails to find dance partners even at her first party as a little girl, she “learns” that “one must have a full programme. All else was failure”.26 The Crowded Street has a complex relationship to the prevailing discourse of marriage and sexuality in the 1920s, showing Holtby’s affiliation with the women’s movement and attitudes feminists held before the “modern” ideas espoused by Stopes. Muriel fails in the marriage imperative right from the start, but she lacks will for that kind of “success” which her mother urges unswervingly. Later Delia, a figure modeled on Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby’s great friend, induces Muriel to leave home for a different sort of domestic “allegiance” in London in which Muriel would keep the flat for Delia, cooking her nourishing meals while Delia works exhaustively for the Women’s Reform League. This life provides a purpose for Muriel, and an alternative to either marriage or spinsterhood, and Delia opens Muriel’s eyes to the circumstances of women’s lives. The Crowded Street stands out in its ability to imagine an alternative to the marriage economy and when Muriel receives a prestigious marriage offer she rejects it explaining that she has recently realised: not that the thing [marriage] that I had sought was not worth seeking, but that there were other things in life. To fail just in this one thing was not failure. A perfect marriage is a splendid thing, but that does not mean that the second best thing is an imperfect marriage.27

She continues, “If I married you, I’d simply be following the expedient promptings of my mother and my upbringing”.28 The Crowded Street, although radical, also yearns after the companionate marriage; Delia’s fiancé Martin Elliott dies at the front but entered Muriel’s imagination as the ideal husband and companion because he listened to her opinions, and the novel leaves the unresolved question of whether the domestic arrangement with Delia remains a “second best thing” to companionate marriage. The world of Bohemian composers in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph offers a vicarious thrill for domesticated English readers of middlebrow fiction who maintain “continent” households but need the assurance that they are sophisticated enough to read about a counter-culture. The English protagonist Florence marries the composer Lewis Dodd but he leaves her for the uncivilised “constant ╇ Ibid., p.╯16. ╇ Ibid., p.╯269. 28 ╇ Ibid., p.╯270. 26 27

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nymph”, Tessa. As Mary Gluck points out, counter-cultural movements like Bohemianism, “act out the latent ideological, economic, and cultural tensions that exist in the larger culture as a whole”.29 Indeed The Constant Nymph “act[s] out” the “ideological [and] cultural tensions” that beset the middlebrow women’s novel in its fascination with defiance of domesticated feminine virtue even while it ultimately reasserts domestic life and marriage. The Bohemian household in which Tessa grows up is revealed for its bestseller readership like this: Few people could recollect quite how many children Sanger [Tessa’s composer father] was supposed to have got, but there always seemed to be a good many and they were most shockingly brought up.╯They were, in their own orbit, known collectively as “Sanger’s Circus”, a nickname earned for them by their wandering existence, their vulgarity, their conspicuous brilliance, the noise they made, and the kind of naphtha-flame genius which illuminated everything they said or did. Their father had given them a good, sound musical training and nothing else. They had received no sort of regular education, but in the course of their travels, had picked up a good deal of mental furniture and could abuse each other most profanely in the argot of four languages.30

The children’s education has one focus; “Music was a sacred thing; perhaps the only sacred thing… it might not be cheapened by carelessness or economy of effort. The Sanger children were ignorant of obedience, application, self-command, or reverence save in this one cause”.31 Our first encounter with the Sangers occurs when Antonia, Tessa’s sixteen year-old sister, absconds to Vienna with Jacob Birnbaum and returns, without shame, to recount tales of his lavish generosity to her. Clearly she is no longer a virgin, and later they marry in a comical scene in which Florence’s Uncle Robert plays the role of the senior male relative restoring the young woman’s virtue by marrying her to her seducer. When Florence is given the charge of bringing her young destitute cousins back to England after their father’s death she is charmed and fascinated by “Sanger’s Circus”, but after her marriage to Lewis Dodd and their return to England with Sanger’s daughters she finds their unruly behaviour and impertinence to require civilisation. In England tensions appear in her marriage to Lewis when the

╇Gluck (2000), p.╯359. ╇Kennedy (1927), p.╯3. 31 ╇ Ibid., p.╯49. 29 30

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disparities in their social class and their views on art, domestic life, and Tessa begin to emerge. The Constant Nymph sets up a dichotomy that opposes domestic virtue and sexual virtue to ‘slattern[ly]” behaviour. In the novel’s economy these traits are genetic and arise from social class, but education can improve a girl, by at least leading her to improve her dress and reduce her drinking and swearing. Florence exemplifies the domesticated English version of Bohemianism fashionable in London in the 1920s; her house has whitewashed walls and drab colours with splashes of bright colour provided by a lustre wear bowl filled with oranges, for example, which she refers to as being “pleasantly Bohemian” and therefore as contrasts to her cousins’ unruly version of Bohemianism.32 The Constant Nymph urges Florence’s superiority, dependent partly on her superiority of education, over the other young women characters, but the novel gives way under its own contradictions, not least whether it is ultimately comical or tragic. While Kennedy appears to have wished readers to favour Florence, Tessa becomes more appealing because of the characteristics that mark her as different from the norms of English girlhood. Lewis Dodd leaves Florence for Tessa, the fifteen year-old, whose mis-education has produced a girl of whom we see Lewis thinking: “Innocence was the only name he could find for the wild imaginative solitude of her spirit”.33 He begins to worry that Tessa “would inevitably repeat” her older sister Antonia’s “history” because of the absence of male protection and of guidance in sexual virtue, and her exposure to Bohemian men.34 We read: “He knew what company they [the Sanger girls] kept; lust, a blind devourer, a brutish, uncomprehending Moloch, haunted their insecure youth, claiming them as predestined victims”. The masculine version of “free love” inherent in this Bohemian culture appears predatory to Lewis, even though he has been as guilty of it as any other Bohemian artist. He fears just as much that Tessa might become subsumed by the domestic imperative and when Tessa buys a lustre wear bowl of her own Lewis smashes it, convinced that the bowl will lead to Tessa wanting a house, but before her death Tessa exalts that she has “kept so free of possessions”.35 While our sympathies lie with Tessa, who is ultimately the more compelling character, Florence ╇ Ibid., p.╯189. ╇ Ibid., p.╯72. 34 ╇ Ibid., p.╯73. 35 ╇ Ibid., p.╯317. 32 33

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prevails, emblematic of the version of feminine behaviour that can endure in the world in which Margaret Kennedy writes, and in which her readers live. Tessa’s deviation from established domestic femininity entertains, but must be suppressed. Like the pleasure taken by Muriel, the protagonist of The Crowded Street, in furnishing the flat in unconventional, artistic ways and in cooking nourishing meals for Delia, Florence’s desires are compatible with the welter of discourse aimed at women of the middle class seeking to ease post-war women into their redefined domestic roles. E. M.╯Delafield’s The Way Things Are (1927) illustrates the post-war middle-class discourse of housekeeping and the plethora of advice books; we read that one “enlightened modern authority” or another haunts the protagonist, Laura Temple, at every moment.36 As a product of the post-war era, Laura is confused by what Nicola Humble describes as the: veritable barrage of domestic literature addressed to the middle-class woman in the years between the wars. The period saw an explosion of food writing, with scores of new books published, as well as the launch of at least sixty new women’s magazines in all of which recipes and the management of the home were perennial features.37

Laura and women like her receive instruction in their new role as housewives from middlebrow culture which encourages them to emulate aristocratic standards of elegance. Conscientiously Laura reads about household management and childrearing, in addition to Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes who pull her in a different direction. The plot of Delafield’s novel is Laura’s earnest efforts to reconcile all this modern, contradictory “advice” and it helps us to understand the tension between the domestic imperative and the passionate sexuality that urges them away from domesticity, both of which middlebrow culture urges. The result is that “Conflict, in the language of psycho-analysis, was the almost incessant companion of Laura’s psychological existence” and that Laura frequently has the sense ‘that she was making many mistakes in regard to the upbringing of her children, the solution of her domestic problems, and the selection of her clothes”.38 Typical of provincial middle-class women, Laura strives to maintain this pseudo╇Delafield (1927), p.╯51. ╇ Humble (2000), p.╯49. 38 ╇Delafield (1927), pp.╯23 and 137. 36 37

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aristocratic lifestyle on the reduced middle-class income common during the post-war period, inevitably feeling inadequate. Laura thinks “everything had been a lot less expensive and difficult, in the time before the war”.39 As Humble notes, “Economic recession and heavily increased taxation in the post-war years necessitated a great deal of belt tightening, and many households had to reduce the number of servants they employed or face the horror of doing without them altogether”.40 Women enact these changes, compensating for the absence of maids, cooks, governesses and gardeners. Typical of her class, Laura’s concerns are the children’s education and discipline, the preparation of food on a reduced budget, and the general management of a large house, including the few servants. We read: They lived at Applecourt, which had belonged to the Temples for three generations, and the house had nine bedrooms, two bathrooms and three sitting rooms, and two kitchens and a pantry, and a good deal of passageway, and a staircase with two landings, and no lighting whatever.41

Servants see no appeal in this kind of home, preferring the amenities of modern city life. In addition, due to post-war demographic changes, working-class women no longer seek domestic service since factory work afforded them “independence, camaraderie and higher wages,” and as Humble shows, “the increasingly democratic climate that followed the war [meant that] the working classes were no longer willing to accept service as their earthly lot”.42 Laura strives to reconcile the new and contradictory ideologies of sex and marriage with popular psychology, with the “little books” that offer advice to middle-class mothers on childrearing, the discourse on housekeeping and entertaining, in order to adjust to her new domestic role. The “little books” have left Laura with the “vague recollection of a sentence, read somewhere, to the effect that it is always the wife and mother who is primarily responsible for the atmosphere of the home”, a viewpoint with which Stopes would surely agree, even if she would ignore much of the daily grind involved in ensuring this “atmosphere”.43 Nevertheless the “housekeeping” which falls on women of Laura’s ╇ Ibid., p.╯13. ╇ Humble (2005), p.╯50. 41 ╇Delafield (1927), p.╯13. 42 ╇ Humble (2005), p.╯50. 43 ╇Delafield (1927), p.╯39. 39 40

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class is managerial rather than practical. In one scene in which the house-parlourmaid has given her resignation Laura walked around the room, mechanically straightening the shabby mauve cretonne covers on the armchairs, straightening the piles of music on the top of the cottage piano, and shaking up the little purple bolster on the window-seat – all the time rehearsing her interview with Nellie, [the house-parlourmaid] and thinking out excellent and dignified utterances for herself.44

While the work that Laura does here is hardly strenuous, Laura feels deeply inadequate for it, and she is also aware that women of lower social classes faced more arduous circumstances which they handle with more competency; nevertheless, the scene does point to what Humble refers to as “the balance of power having shifted to the servants”.45 Delafield tells us “it was Gladys [the house-parlourmaid] who, in their daily interviews, was entirely at her ease, and Laura who was nervous”.46 Emphasising that Laura’s experience is typical, The Way Things Are shows Laura’s arrival at the married state to be the result of the historical circumstances at the end of the war. We read that She had been rather anxious to be married, just when she first met Alfred. The war was over, and there had been a question of her returning home, which she did not want to do, and so many other people seemed to be getting married… She wanted the experience of marriage, and she was just beginning to be rather afraid of missing it altogether, because so many of the men belonging to her own generation had gone.47

This poignant, if euphemistic, reference to the loss of men’s lives in the war suggests that part of the return to marriage for many women was the anxiety that they would be unable to find husbands, and as Ingrid Sharp shows in examining post-war Germany, the culture of demobilisation pushes women towards marriage at a historical moment when losses at the front make marriage statistically less likely. Other single women in the novel show awareness of the population imbalance and we read that “young women and men were in a proportion of about twelve to one” in the district in which Laura lives.48 ParaÂ� ╇ Ibid., p.╯35. ╇ Humble (2005), p.╯51. 46 ╇Delafield (1927), p.╯31. 47 ╇ Ibid., p.╯16. 48 ╇Delafield (1927), p.╯44. 44 45

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doxically this is the population upon which the new ideology of passionate marriage is urged, and for whom spinsterhood is represented as being deviant and unhealthy. Laura struggles with a different predicament. In addition to the practical exigencies of her newly-defined domestic role she also strives to remain sophisticated in the modern, urban sense, and to observe “every enlightened modern authority”, including “a small volume of Dr. Marie Stopes, [hidden] beneath a pile of her more intimate underwear at the back of her chest of drawers”.49 She hopes “that one might live in the country all the year round and be a wife and a mother, and yet remain a woman of the world, and one in touch with the interests of modern literature”.50 The sophisticated new discourse about women’s sexuality and marriage makes Laura discontent with marriage of the old model, and makes her own life seem outÂ� moded. Stopes, then for Laura, pertains to sophisticated urban life, whose call threatens to entice women away from their respectable marriages, domestic lives and families. The feminine middlebrow novel serves the purpose of allowing critical examination of marriage, and scrutiny of the new discourse about marriage, effectively increasing the tension between ‘radical sophistication” and the domestic life. Laura decides to reject the possibility of passion at the end of the novel to return to “[t]he children, her marriage vows, the house, the ordering of meals, the servants, the making of the laundry list every Monday – in a word, the things of respectability – kept one respectable”.51 Laura dismisses the “fatally unpractical” ideal of passionate physical and emotional attachment as impossible for the middle-class woman, and by implication, for its readers, unless they are willing to risk social exclusion. The novel’s imagined audience is surely women who, like Laura, enjoy imagining the possibilities of the new companionate marriage and the emotional and sexual fulfillment that modern middlebrow discourse describes, but reconcile themselves to narrower horizons which leave the domestic sphere intact. So Laura ultimately only flirts with BoheÂ� mianism; domestic conventionality prevails. Rose Macauley’s Crewe Train offers another challenge to conventional domestic marriage in showing a primitive ingenue, Denham, brought up in Andorra returning to England after being orphaned, ╇ Ibid., pp.╯51 and 90. ╇ Ibid., p.╯44. 51 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯286–7. 49 50

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and submerged in the Gresham family who are “all right in Chelsea [but] not quite fit for Bloomsbury,” and therefore anxious about their social standing.52 In spite of their Bohemian radicalism, like Florence in The Constant Nymph, the Greshams cannot accommodate DenÂ� ham’s ‘natural,” “unsocialized behavior,” and her rejection of bourgeois domesticity. Denham’s husband Arnold, a writer, admires her primitive unconventionality, but makes her conform to “Metro-land” and renounce her ideal solitary life in their cottage by the sea, poking around in rock pools, messing about in boats, eating sandwiches and drinking tea on the front steps and leaving the dishes in the sink, described in a chapter ironically entitled “Householding”.53 Under the cottage she finds a cave which becomes the epitome of her domestic ideal: isolated from society and requiring no housework. Motherhood offers no attraction to her, but after one miscarriage she becomes pregnant again and eventually succumbs to acceptance of the social round of dinner parties and endless talking. When her aunt brings her some “Vim” and a little brush for scrubbing and warns Denham “I know what camping in a cottage without servants is. The danger is that one does house chores from morning to night”, we read that “Denham felt that danger to be remote”.54 The humour suggests that middlebrow readers might entertain, and be entertained by, Denham’s rejection of the middlebrow culture of housekeeping even while they live virtuous domestic lives. The novel’s parody of Bohemianism, in which Denham functions as a mirror showing the ultimately conventional nature of the London literary scene, portrays isolation as the only way in which Denham might avoid the housekeeping imperative, and maintain the passion she shares with her husband. Denham and Arnold begin by being “rapt in love” and “drowned in passion” and bearing “excessive love” toward one another.55 In lines that recall the excesses of Marie Stopes’s prose we read that “thrills of joy shivered through them as their lips and hands touched” and that ‘they were savouring one of the elementary human pleasures”.56 Denham is reluctant to marry, seeing that “there’d be a house to look after – meals, and servants, and people calling”.57 But when he kisses her Arnold’s “hard embrace… was like ╇ Macauley (1986), p.╯25. ╇ Ibid., p.╯151. 54 ╇ Ibid., p.╯153. 55 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯110 and 109. 56 ╇ Ibid., p.╯83. 57 ╇ Ibid., p.╯96. 52 53

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a trap closing over her”, and that trap is bourgeois domestic life.58 The Gresham family into which Denham marries, which Nicola Humble sees as a parody of the Beardsleys, have the “dangerous frisson of sexual radicalism”, but their Bohemian life is just another version of bourgeois respectability and ultimately suffocates a marriage founded on passionate attachment.59 Despite her efforts to reinvent a married life that will accommodate her need for freedom, Denham concedes defeat. We read that “[t]hey were dead, those old ardours and raptures, and an exuberant ghost did duty in their stead”,60 and we see Denham having her day “mapped out” for her, in a timetable of household management. The novel ends like this: “And,” continued her mother-in law kindly, “it needn’t only be the maids who have a time-table, either. I’m quite sure it’s a great help to one’s own life to have some kind of scheme mapped out for the day, to which one tries to keep.╯It’s wonderful what a help it is to see it written down. One should begin it right after breakfast – 9.30-9.45: see the servants; 9.45-10: do the flowers; 10-1 read the papers and write one’s letters; 11-1: serious reading; 1-1.30: lunch… You see, there needn’t really be any empty moments in one’s day, if it’s properly schemed out. Think of that! Not one empty, idle, useless minute”.61

The return to domestic roles for women in the post-war British cultural and political context relies on sentimental and economic foundations; Britain needed to get back to “normal”, men sought to return to the jobs they had relinquished, and women who formerly entered service no longer chose that work, so middle-class domestic life needed to be redefined. While Marie Stopes encouraged women to re-embrace marriage after their pre-war rejection of it, she did not reconcile passionate companionate marriage with the drudgery of housekeeping being newly inscribed as the lot of the middle-class wife; moreover, Stopes underestimated the restraint exercised by middle-class respectability in the early 1920s, and the realities of husbands and their resistance or inability to change. So the ideal of passionate love within marriage, which became a hetero-normative imperative, constituted a trap of bourgeois domesticity. Middlebrow fiction by women explores and exposes the tensions and contradictions in the ideology; but written within the ╇ Ibid. ╇ Ibid., p.╯160. 60 ╇ Ibid., p.╯251. 61 ╇ Ibid., p.╯256. 58 59

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ideology, the novels depict their fascination with defiance of established domestic femininity as entertainment in which this defiance ultimately must be suppressed. Reading the novels reassured women of their sophisticated radicalism, and functioned as a palliative which helped women to maintain their domestic lives but enforced the domestic life and conventional marriage which they appeared to repudiate. Bibliography Bingham, A. (2004) Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain, (Oxford: 2004). Briganti, C. and Mezei, K. (2006) Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E. H.╯Young (Aldershot: 2006). Deen, S. (2002) Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-45 (Aldershot: 2002). Delafield, E. M. (1927) The Way Things Are (London: 1927). Fell, A. and I.╯Sharp eds. (2007) The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-1919 (Basingstoke: 2007). Ferris, P. (1993) Sex and the British: A Twentieth-Century History (London: 1993). Garrett, W. ed. (2007) Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist (San Francisco: 2007). Gluck, M. (2000) “Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist”, Modernism/ Modernity, 7/3 (2000) 351–78. Grover, M. (2009) The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (Madison: 2009). Holtby, W. (1923) Anderby Wold (London: 1923). ———╯ (1924) The Crowded Street (London: 1924). ———╯ (1935) Women and a Changing Civilization (New York: 1935). Humble, N. (2000) The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (Oxford: 2000). ———╯ (2005) Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food (London: 2005). Jackson, M. (1994) The Real Facts of Life: Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality c. 1850-1940 (London: 1994). Kennedy, M. (1927) The Constant Nymph (New York: 1927). Lassner, P. (1998) British Women Novelists of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (Basingstoke: 1998). Leavis, Q. D. (1932) Fiction and the Reading Public (London: 1932). Light, A. (1991) Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: 1991). Macauley, R. (1986) Crewe Train (New York: 1986). Jerrold S. (1986) Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (New York: 1986). Stopes, Dr. M. (1918) Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (New York: 1918). Wilson, E. (2000) Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (New Brunswick: 2000). Woolf, V. (1943) “Middlebrow”, in The Death of the Moth: and Other Essays (London: 1943).

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The disappearing surplus: the spinster in the post-war debate in Weimar Germany, 1918-1920 Ingrid Sharp The German military defeat in November 1918 precipitated a revolution that spread from sailors in the north to the cities and provinces of a war-weary Germany. On 9 November the Kaiser was forced to abdicate and Germany became a Republic. The first years of the Weimar Republic were characterised by extremes: political polarisation, social unrest, hyperinflation, poverty and deprivation, exacerbated in June 1919 by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that left Germany burdened by war guilt and substantial reparations. Infighting on the left and open hostility from right-wing parties limited the state’s ability to recover from the war, much less implement a programme of social and political reforms. Yet German women gained political and civil rights in the course of the revolution, voting and standing for election for the first time in January 1919. Article 109 of the 1919 Weimar Constitution established the equality (“in principle”) of the sexes and at the same time, censorship was lifted, allowing much freer discussion of political and sexual matters in the press.

The concept of “surplus women” or Frauenüberschuss,1 the demographic problem identified by the census of 1851, was absolutely Â�central to the pre-war women’s movement in Germany. The ADF (AllÂ� geÂ�meiner deutscher Frauenverein or General German Women’s AssoÂ� ciation), founded in 1865, with little room for manoeuvre within a rigid, hierarchical society and hemmed in by laws and conventions, used the plight of middle-class single women to argue for access to proper education and suitable middle-class professions.2 At the time, marriage was the only respectable option for women of this class, and the figure of the spinster attracted pity and ridicule in equal measure, as the dependent poor relation or as the governess obliged to occupy an uncomfortable place in the household between family member and higher servant. In the nineteenth century, the movement aimed solely at increasing opportunities for those women not suited to, or not lucky 1 2

╇ I.e. the perception that there were more women than men of marriageable age. ╇See Dollard (2004).

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enough to attain the state of marriage and in no way set out to challenge the dominant ideology. In fact it is clear that the women’s movement made use of the theories of gender difference current at the time to press their case: they argued that women should be attended by female doctors and taught by female teachers for moral reasons. Better teacher training and access to the medical profession for some women would therefore not shake the primacy of marriage, maternity and domesticity in women’s lives, but enhance it. By the turn of the century, the renewed perception of a surplus of women ensured that the women’s arguments again centred on single women. For many within the bourgeois women’s movement, the concept of motherliness applied to all women: while the influence of biological mothers was limitÂ�ed to the family sphere, childless women could extend their motherly qualities to embrace the whole of society and the policies of the moderate women’s movement began to be understood as “spiritual” or “organised” motherhood.3 This line of argument again allowed the women’s movement to make radical demands for greater political and social influence without overtly challenging the dominant ideology of female maternity and domesticity, gender polarity and separate spheres.4 As Ann Taylor Allen argues, far from representing a restriction of women’s role, the dynamic maternalism of nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminists formed the basis of women’s claim to dignity, equality, and a widened sphere of action in both the private and public domains.5 It should be noted that this discourse did not reflect the attitude to single women prevalent in wider society, nor was it by any means the only one employed within an increasingly diverse women’s movement. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a minority of women within the movement who felt that women’s rights stemmed from their entitlement as human beings rather than their special nature as women, and who also felt keenly that women should avoid marriage as a rational political and personal choice, freeing up energies otherwise undermined by domestic drudgery and the debilitating health problems associated with sex and reproduction. Here the discourse of spinsterhood is very different and these women set out to

╇See Stoehr (1987). ╇See Allen (1997) and (2008). 5 ╇ Allen (1997), p.╯113. 3 4

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challenge the laws and mores of an unjust social order created by men in the interests of men.6 Singleness and childlessness have once again become hotly debated topics in the UK in recent years, with publications both popular and academic on the history and representation of single women published since 2000 as well as a huge amount of press coverage as we discover that more women are remaining unmarried in western societies – they now outnumber married women in the UK and around one fifth of women are remaining single and/or childless.7 In her introduction to her 2007 book, The Shadow of Marriage, Katherine Holden, who has written extensively about singleness in the UK context, notes that the negative characteristics attributed to the spinster are often contradictory, as her primary function is to define the limits of desirable female behaviour and character. She writes: The figures of old maids and spinsters are a location for personality traits widely believed to be unattractive and by implication unmarriageable in women. Their negative stereotypes define the limits of normative female behaviour.8

Bella DePaulo takes a similar view of the US context, using the acronym BLAME to describe society’s view of singles: Bitter, Loveless, Alone, Miserable and Envious.9 On the period after the First World War in the UK, research consensus since publication of Sheila Jeffreys’ The Spinster and Her Enemies in 1985 has broadly been that the inter-war popular press and sexology were hostile to single women and that single women were betrayed by the feminist movement, which abandoned a politics of spinsterhood and returned to maternalism in the aftermath of the war.10 This consensus has recently been challenged by Adrian ╇See Heymann (1922) and Heymann and Augspurg (1992) for an account of the radical position. 7 ╇See for example the extensive coverage of this topic in the Daily Mail over the last three years, including “Married couples are now in the minority as number of single and divorced people soars”, Steve Doughty Mail Online, 27 June 2008 http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1029725/Married-couples-minority-number-singledivorced-people-soars.html accessed November 2009. 8 ╇ Holden (2007), p.╯3. 9 ╇De Paulo (2006). 10 ╇See for example Melman (1988); Beddoe (1989); Kingsley Kent (1988) and Kingsley Kent (2002). For Jeffreys, it is the new science of sexology that pathologises single women and silences a discourse of spinsterhood during the inter-war period. However, Oram (1992) notes that feminists, especially feminist doctors, did in fact 6

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Bingham’s study of the Daily Mail during the inter-war period in Britain.11 My own research bears out his findings, that popular press coverage, then as now, sought out the new and striking and sought to encourage debate among the readership, many of whom, of course, were single women themselves. Virginia Nicolson’s study, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, also published in 2007, focuses on the post-war period in Britain and presents a more nuanced view of the lives and circumstances of unmarried women there, showing that many of them did much more with their lives than “make the best of a bad job”.12 This period is less well researched in the German context: US scholar Catherine Dollard has made an extensive study of single women in German history but her focus to date has very much been on the pre-war period – her 2006 study of single women in feminist discourse during the war years concentrates on pamphlets rather than the journals and uses no primary sources later than 1915.13 Her most recent publication stops at the end of the war while Bärbel Kuhn’s 2000 study stops short in 1914.14 Studies of single women in the context of the Weimar Republic usually focus on the urban phenomenon of the emerging New Woman, often drawing material from the mid to late twenties when her image had become more assimilated and, as my own research has shown, was domesticated enough to be used frequently in advertising, film, literature and the visual arts.15 The relationship between the realities of most women’s lives and media constructions of this urban phenomenon that conflated working girls, society flappers and Berlin prostitutes and often added a dash of misogynistic fantasy was in any case highly tenuous. In contrast, the years under consideration here constitute a distinctive period full of radical potential during which the renegotiation of gender relations took place under unstable and highly volatile conditions of unprecedented social, economic and political strain. defend single women against media attacks and discriminatory scientific discourse. For a discussion of feminist historians’ response to media representation of single women in the popular press see Bingham (2002), pp.╯21–3. 11 ╇See Bingham (2004) and (2002), p.╯17. 12 ╇Nicholson (2007), pp.╯233–72. 13 ╇Dollard (2006a). 14 ╇Dollard (2009); Kuhn (2000). 15 ╇Sharp (2003). See also the collections of essays in von Ankum (1997) and Meskimmon (1995) and books by Rowe (2003) and Petro (1989).

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Given the centrality of the category of single women in the arguments of the women’s movement prior to 1914, one might expect these arguments to be especially strong at a time when statistically very many more women were going to have to face life without men. Paradoxically, however, just at the point when there appeared to be a genuine female “surplus” with reduced marriage prospects for a generation of women, and just when it seemed, too, that single women were under attack from many sides, the “single woman” as a category and the Frauenüberschuss as a concept has all but vanished from the pages of women’s press in Germany. In Dollard’s words “The surplus single woman has disappeared from the rhetoric of the German women’s movement just when reason dictated that she ought to arrive”.16 In this chapter I will examine the ways in which the single woman was represented in public discourse and in the women’s press during the war and its immediate aftermath (1918-1920) in order to offer some explanation for the apparent weakness of feminist rhetoric in general during this period, and in particular for the singular absence of unmarried women from feminist discourse in the German women’s journals. I will compare the German case with the post-war coverage of the “surplus women” debate in British publications and consider whether any differences and commonalities can be explained by the very different circumstances of the two nations in 1918. Surplus women in the women’s press 1914-1918 It is perhaps not so surprising that the women did not want to emphasise the unpalatable fact of war casualties in their journals at this time and in any case, the concept of a female surplus largely became meaningless during the war, when many of the men were absent, and the contrast between single and married women was not as marked – in effect most women had to live as single women, and every woman free to work was needed, so the idea that there might be “too many” women was less persuasive. This is reflected, too, in wartime practices and policies that suggested a much more fluid understanding of the categories. For example, unmarried women pregnant by serving soldiers were more likely than previously to be afforded the status of married 16

╇Dollard (2006a), p.╯219.

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women and permitted to adopt the title Frau (Mrs), as opposed to Fräulein (Miss), and in being eligible for the benefits due to the wives and widows of soldiers.17 In fact, although the demographic facts are not always spelled out and the concept of a female “surplus” is not directly invoked, the single women of the organised women’s movement are quite often robustly defended in Die Frau and Die Frauenfrage18 during the war, particularly concerning the value of their wartime contribution, as in the debate about the German Hausfrau and in challenging the widely held idea that the war had acted as a much-needed corrective to gender relations. There is also another emerging discourse that uses warrelated arguments in support of long-standing aims, for example for greater equality within marriage supported by legal reform. Use of war-related arguments The fact that many men would return from the war disabled and incapable of supporting a family is invoked by Henriette Fürth in August 1915 as well as Marianne Weber in 1919. Why, they wondered, should men rendered incapable of work through service to the nation be denied the chance of home and family, and was it in the interests of society that “hundreds of thousands of fundamentally ... healthy men should be prevented from marriage and legitimate reproduction?”.19 As the state could hardly provide sufficient financial support for the men as well as their dependants, the wife should be willing to take on this burden in the spirit of loving self-sacrifice. While this would entail reforms that would benefit women, such as equality of pay and opportunity in education and employment, these were presented as secondary to the benefits to men and to society. The rare cases in which the surplus women discourse is referred to during the war are largely defensive, in response to attacks on the

╇Dollard (2008). ╇ Die Frau, edited by Helene Lange, appeared monthly and claimed to concern “das gesamte Frauenleben unserer Zeit” (the whole of contemporary women’s life). Die Frauenfrage, edited by Marie Stritt, was the journal of the BDF and appeared weekly. Both can be said to express the views of the mainstream bourgeois women’s movement during the period under consideration here. 19 ╇ H.╯Fürth, “Der Krieg als Lehrer und Wegweiser” (The War as Teacher and Guide), Die Frauenfrage, 1 August 1915, pp.╯66–7 (here p.╯66). 17 18

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gains made by the women.20 In Die Frau of October 1918, Helene Lange wonders what can be meant by the exhortation for women to “go back to being mothers!” and leave the field of employment and education free to men. She delicately spells out how the loss of male lives “will affect the marriage chances of girls in such a way that they cannot be outweighed by any possible improvement in circumstances... after the war”.21 Yet even here, Lange’s main argument centres on the economic and social benefits a better trained workforce will bring rather than on gains for women. The Hausfrau In the battle to control women’s patterns of consumption during the economic blockade of Germany by British ships, the German Hausfrau was the key to preserving scarce resources and reducing waste. This meant that she was subjected to scrutiny and in many cases found wanting. In the Hausfrau debate, the educated, childless spinster, for so long an object of pity and distaste, emerged in the pages of Die Frau and Die Frauenfrage between 1914 and 1918 as more valuable to the nation than the traditional housewife, whose horizons did not extend beyond her own threshold. Unhampered by allegiance to particular individuals and with their greater awareness of the needs of the national economy, the single women schooled in the women’s movement were able to apply their motherly care and formidable organisational skills to the needs of the nation in the Nationaler Frauendienst; organising, educating and deploying women to alleviate hardship and replace the men. As is cogently argued at several points in the feminist press, the Hausfrau’s limited sympathies, her “egotism of blood relations”22 hampered the war effort as she consistently prioritised the needs of her own family above those of the nation. For Regine Deutsch,

20 ╇ H.╯Lange, “Neue Frauenfeindschaft” (New Hostility Against Women), Die Frau (February 1917) pp.╯286–90. Born in 1848, Lange had been active in women’s organisations since 1872, was founder and co-editor of the influential journal, Die Frau, from 1893 and the life partner of Bäumer. 21 ╇ H.╯Lange, “Zeichen der Zeit” (Signs of the Times), Die Frau (October 1918), pp.╯17–8 (here p.╯17). 22 ╇R.╯Kempf, “Die Frau im Volkswirtschaft und Staatsleben der Gegenwart” (Woman in the national economy and national life today), Die Frauenfrage, 16 April 1915, pp.╯11–2 (here p.╯11).

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she had been “catastrophic”,23 while the women trained in the “despised women’s movement”24 were able to offer “an army of the enlightened”25 to advise on the proper use of resources. This became especially acute as supplies became scarcer and the search for food and fuel more urgent. In these circumstances the lack of skills of working-class housewives and the profligacy of the privileged classes took on national significance.26 Managing in times of plenty was easy: now was the time to show the housewives’ skill in cutting down consumption.27 For Lange, blame directed at the Hausfrau herself for single-mindedly ensuring that the needs of their own family were met was misplaced; it was the systematic limiting of women to the domestic sphere that had rendered them incapable of a broader vision.28 Despite their obvious satisfaction at being able to turn the tables on the housewives in this way, the women’s press also responded robustly to the unwarranted blanket criticism of women they noted elsewhere in the media: even if isolated instances of POW pampering and culpable cake consumption could be found, this was not representative of the female sex and they were confident enough to point to their own activities as an unambiguously positive reflection of the state of German womanhood. “What would have become of the war relief if it wasn’t for the women’s movement?” asks Anna Pappritz in 1915.29 Here, as elsewhere, the widespread suggestion that the war had acted as a much-needed “corrective” to the relationship between the sexes was roundly rejected. Far from “showing women their place”,30 they argued, the war had revealed how much women needed political, social and economic rights and would continue to need them in the post-war period, in which many men – “without wishing to detract from our heroes” – would be unable to provide for dependants due to absence, impairment or simple inability to settle.31 This position con23 ╇R.╯Deutsch, “Die Hausfrau” (The Housewife), Die Frauenfrage, 16 February 1915, pp.╯169–70 (here p.╯169). 24 ╇ Ibid., p.╯170. 25 ╇ H.╯Lange, “Die unschuldig-schuldigen Hausfrauen” (The innocent-guilty houseÂ�Â�wives), Die Frau (February 1915), pp.╯265–8 (here p.╯268). 26 ╇See Davis (2000); Bäumer (1930); and Daniel (1997), pp.╯189–197. 27 ╇Deutsch, “Die Hausfrau” (as note 23), p.╯170. 28 ╇ Lange, “Die unschuldig-schuldigen Hausfrauen” (as note 25), (here p. 267). 29 ╇ A.╯Pappritz, “Burgfrieden” (Truce), Die Frau (April 1915), pp.╯1–2 (here p.╯1). 30 ╇ Ibid., p.╯2; Lange, “Neue Frauenfeindschaft” (as note 20), pp.╯286–90. 31 ╇E.╯Schäfer,“Berichtigung” (Correction), Die Frauenfrage, 1 March 1916, pp.╯36–8 (here p.╯37).

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trasted sharply with the response of other women within the movement and the wider community, who saw the outbreak of war as emphasising and reinforcing gender differences. The Socialist feminist Lily Braun, for example, felt that the war had restored men’s instinctive manliness and had caused in women “the powerful re-emergence of that long-buried womanly feeling, which wants nothing but to help and to heal, of that primitive sense of their sex, which is expressed at its purest by one word: motherliness”.32 Surplus women in the post-war period Demographically, post-war German society was “profoundly skewed”, with disproportionate numbers of adolescents and a “surplus” of women of marriageable age – precisely those groups traditionally expected to be submissive and subordinate, but now without proper control.33 With some two million German men dead and a further 2.7 million disabled, Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner, editor of the BDF yearbook, estimated that the female surplus had risen from 800,000 in 1914 to 2.7 million in 1918.34 Moreover, unsupported women were especially vulnerable and disadvantaged during this period due to the economic and social instability and demobilisation policies that privileged the rights of men, a maternalist discourse that stressed the value of marriage and a suspicion that women’s war gains had come at the men’s expense.35 Alongside a simple yearning for “home” and “peace” in the returning soldiers, many observers have noted a sense of alienation and resentment against a civilian world that seemed indifferent to their suffering.36 This resentment was also directed against the women on whose behalf they had fought the war and who now were perceived of as having usurped men’s place in society and the labour market, gained in confidence and political rights.37 Writing in 1919, the UK war correspondent Philip Gibbs accuses the “girls” of “clinging to ╇Braun (1915), p.╯11. ╇See Bessel (1993), p.╯225; Daniel (1997), p.╯288; Peukert (1991), pp.╯86–101. 34 ╇ Cited in Hering (1990), p.╯145. 35 ╇See for example Kingsley Kent (1988) and (2009); Grayzel (2002). 36 ╇See most notably Fussell (1975) and Leed (1979), who use literary sources to support their points. There is also evidence of this resentment in contemporary writings in both England and Germany. See Sharp (2005). 37 ╇See Sharp (2005). 32 33

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their jobs”, of not “letting go of the pocket money which they spent on frocks”.38 Women in their turn were made aware of the gulf of experience between themselves and the men and, according to Susan Kingsley Kent, also feared unleashing a violent backlash against themselves if they tried to meet the men head to head in direct competition – Kingsley Kent suggests that British women retreated behind a protective barrier of a polarised gender identity in order not to further arouse male antagonism.39 This phenomenon can be observed in other countries too, for example in France, with what some have seen as a return to nineteenth century maternalism, even of anti-feminist rhetoric within the women’s movement itself.40 This position has been contested, with historians like Gail Braybon41 stressing the continuities in gender relations and arguing against the view of a radical breach with the past, and some of the competing ideas will be explored below. Interesting as the view of a backlash against women’s emancipation is in the UK context, it is even more so in the context of a defeated nation in the throes of violent revolution. Postwar Germany was characterised by extreme social, economic and political instability, political polarisation and violence, hyperinflation and acute shortages of food and raw materials that continued until the economic blockade was finally lifted in July 1919. Germany’s isolation from the international community was deepened by resentment at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, with the women of the BDF, some of whom had been elected to the National Assembly in January 1919, proving especially fierce in their resistance.42 The historian Richard Bessel notes the dominance of moral issues in public discourse: the rising crime rate, the spread of venereal disease, higher numbers of divorces and the drop in births were all seen as symptoms of a sick society in need of regeneration.43 While the moral panic centred on the perception that young people of both sexes were out of control, spending their high wages and ample free time on mindless hedonism, young women in particular were seen as a major factor in the moral decline of the nation – not only was the uncontained, sexualised woman seen as disruptive to the moral ╇Gibb [1920], p.╯420. ╇Kingsley Kent (1988); and Kingsley Kent (2009). 40 ╇See for example ibid.; and Grayzel (2002). 41 ╇Braybon (2003). 42 ╇See Scheck (1999). 43 ╇Bessel (1993), pp.╯220–53; Usborne (1992). 38 39

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order and to bourgeois marriage but in turning away from her biological duty to bear children she was a threat to German regeneration. Even in the post-war context in which an increased number of unmarried women was accepted as a given, singleness was seen as a source of social instability. Marriage was a key tool in the reintegration of men into civil society through ordered sexual relations, with the result that single women were categorised as “potentially married” or even as what Katherine Holden calls “imaginary widows” with the ghosts of a generation of soldiers, their potential husbands, hanging over them.44 As Holden points out, actual widows were expected to live in celibate mourning for their dead husbands – those who asserted their sexuality or used their state pensions in pursuit of pleasure or independence were condemned. Across Europe in general, as Ann Taylor Allen notes, political leaders advocated marriage “as a means of redomesticating the female war worker, of re-socialising the traumatised veteran and of replacing lost population”.45 In Germany, Marianne Weber’s vision of women’s “special cultural mission” also concentrates on their role in relation to men: it required loving wives and mothers to renew the peacetime values such as beauty, harmony and refinement lost to the men during combat.46 There is little sign here of Bäumer’s appropriation of military language and the emphasis is on the difference between men’s and women’s wartime experiences and women’s consequent duty to ennoble public and domestic life. Some of the attitudes identified above are reflected in the demobilisation process, which was above all viewed as a matter of speedily returning soldiers to paid employment and restoring their position as workers and providers.47 The demobilisation planning was largely nullified by the political revolution and the suddenness of military collapse that in a matter of weeks released millions of soldiers into an economically fragile society.48 However, the reintegration of soldiers into the labour market was accomplished very successfully, largely through summary dismissal of hundreds of thousands of women and foreign labourers from their jobs. The fact that women could be so ╇See Holden (2005) and Holden (2007). ╇ Allen (2008), pp.╯22–3. 46 ╇ M.╯Weber, “Die besonderen Kulturaufgaben der Frau” (Woman‘s Special Cultural Mission), Die Frau (February 1919), pp.╯137–43 (here pp.╯137–8). 47 ╇Bessel (1993), p.╯125. 48 ╇ Ibid., p.╯127. 44 45

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easily dismissed in favour of the returning men on the basis of a vague expectation that they could return home or to jobs that had proved suitable in the past, shows how little impression women’s competence in “male” jobs had made on the national psyche.49 Bessel’s argument that German women largely wanted to return to domesticity or at least chose it over the alternative “emancipation through work” is perhaps over-stated, but the emphasis on the temporary nature of employment throughout the war may have made many resigned to loss of their positions (some of which were far from attractive in any case) and thus less likely to protest.50 Although some provision was made in principle for women who had dependants to support or who relied solely on their own income, in practice this provision was often ignored, causing real hardship.╯In April 1919, for example, Die Frau describes the demobilisation process as “an all-out backlash against working women in general”.51 While the prior claims of ex-servicemen are fully accepted, the inequity of removing women from employment and universities in favour of non-combatants is noted with alarm, albeit discreetly and towards the back pages.52 The women’s press does, then, record strongly-worded protests against the “methods bordering on terrorism that are being used to exclude women from competition with men” and against the “arbitrary and indiscriminate” dismissals,53 but these are not highlighted and there is no real challenge to the underlying assumption of male entitlement. As late as December 1919, the planned response to the crisis seems feeble – a committee has been set up to “gather evidence” with a view to bringing it to the authorities’ attention.54 In contrast, the UK women’s journals do explicitly fight the corner of the “surplus” women and tackle the assumptions underlying the term itself head on. The sentiments already expressed in the Women’s Leader in November 191855 are echoed in the “Sauce for the Goose” ╇See Gersdorff (1969), p.╯277. ╇Bessel (1983), pp.╯223–4. 51 ╇ “Zur Frauenbewegung” (On the Women’s Movement), Die Frau (April 1919), pp.╯223–4 (here p.╯223). “Zur Frauenbewegung” was a rubrique that appeared in most issues of Die Frau towards the back pages of the journal and summarised the latest developments relevant to the women’s movement. 52 ╇ Ibid., p.╯224. 53 ╇ Cited in Hering (1990), p.╯145. 54 ╇ “Zur Frauenbewegung” (On the Women’s Movement), Die Frau (December 1919), pp.╯88–9 (here p.╯89). 55 ╇ “The End of the War”, Women’s Leader, 15 November 1918, pp.╯359–60. 49 50

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column in February 1920, which argues that while there may be more women than men as a result of the war, not one of them need be “superfluous” if allowed to do the work that is there for them to do “the prospect of a million unmarried women does not strike us as appalling. But frankly the prospect of a million idle women does”.56 Certainly the British women were more robust in their approach – there are even some references to the wrath of women if legitimate expectations are disappointed and warnings of a potentially destabilising “sex-war”. In a report highlighting the omission of women war workers from demobilisation plans in November 1918, the Woman’s Leader writes: “There is no sex war at present and we do not believe that there will be any, but we warn our rulers that any heedlessness or lack of courage at this grave moment may be a step in that direction”.57 A report from September 1919 entitled “Are the Women Wanted?” contrasts the exaggerated gratitude expressed to women workers during the war with the “extraordinary atmosphere of hostility... closing around them”,58 sentiments echoed in Ray Starchey’s article for Jus Suffragii in January 1920.59 Although the UK activists, like the Germans, acknowledged the prior claims of ex-servicemen, they launched a strong challenge to the practice of replacing women workers with apprentices and men who had not served, and the women’s disappointment and frustration at their treatment during the demobilisation process freely invokes and defends their wartime record. In the context of a victorious end to the war, British activists may well have been able to draw on their wartime service to support their arguments more readily than was possible in the defeated nation. What was revealed in both policies and practices surrounding demobilisation was the assumption of male entitlement within a discourse that was set to ensure that the wartime experience remained the exclusive domain of the fighting men. Women’s war-work, regardless of its actual nature or significance, was never acknowledged as central to the war story. As Domansky has argued, German women enjoyed real and extensive political and social power, with over 1,000

╇ “Sauce for the Goose”, Women’s Leader, 27 February1920, p.╯80. ╇ “What of the Women Now?”, Women’s Leader, 22 November 1918. 58 ╇ “Are Women Wanted?”, Woman’s Leader (September 1919), p.╯256. 59 ╇R.╯Strachey, “Demobilisation of Women in Great Britain”, Jus Sufragii (January 1920), p.╯52. 56 57

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women in administrative/government positions,60 but this was firmly bounded by the context of war and had little or no effect on how women’s primary role was conceived either during the war or afterwards.61 Gertrud Bäumer’s continued attempts to lay claim to a shared wartime experience were met with crushing resistance: war was soldiering and women’s role in it had been ancillary at best. Yet how could it be otherwise? Male sacrifice of life could not credibly be placed alongside the female contribution and for the women to attempt to do so would be to risk a return to social and civil marginalisation. Even in Britain, the “girls” who “did their bit” could not stand comparison with “the matchless heroism of her manhood and youth”.62 Also, the concern to reintegrate the soldiers – six million potentially brutalised, possibly armed men – into civilian life as quickly as possible had as much to do with restoring social order as with natural justice and German women, too, feared the violent potential of men. Theories of sexuality: woman as sexual criminal With the increased dissemination of scientific views on human sexuality, the single woman began to take on more pathological traits and became in the post-war period associated with deviant sexuality, crime and disease. Links between sexuality and criminality, already present in the nineteenth century, gained a new impetus in the post-war period.63 Notable, too, is the idea of latency, the notion that criminal potential lurks, waiting only for the right combination of circumstances to release it, which has the effect of pathologising whole social groups. For leading criminologist Erich Wulffen, it is women’s sexual nature that renders them liable to commit or incite men to crimes, and they are especially vulnerable when under the control of their sexual natures during adolescence, pregnancy, menstruation and the menopause as well as during sexual arousal.64 Where these conditions combine with opportunity, as in the chaos of post-war Germany, crime is almost inevitable. Only marriage, and especially motherhood, could ╇Domansky (1996), p.╯456. ╇ Ibid., p.╯441. 62 ╇ “A Glorious End” (Leader comment), Daily Mail, 9 November 1918, p.╯2. 63 ╇See Hales (1996). 64 ╇ Wulffen (1931). 60 61

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offer women an outlet for their sexual natures while keeping them safely in the domestic sphere.65 Richard Ziegler’s 1920 painting entitled Junge Witwe (Das zweite Ich) (Young Widow (The New Me)) (see below) illustrates the fear of the uncontained urban woman as well as emphasising the strong link between sexuality and death, and shows how the widow came to represent the dangerous attractions of a sexually awakened woman no longer restrained by marriage.

Figure 1. Junge Witwe (Das Zweite Ich) by Richard Ziegler, 1920 © DACS 2010

Competing theories of sexuality However, there were also radical elements present in the post-war attitudes to sexuality: many felt that the collapse of the old regime offered a new chance to replace the moribund moral code of Imperial Germany with a more humane and progressive view of sexuality. Weimar’s rev65

╇See Hales (1996); Grossmann (1983); and Sharp (2006).

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olutionary roots were reflected in a liberal constitution giving rights to women and gender as well as class equality. Importantly, too, censorship was lifted at the same time, allowing sexual as well as political freedom of expression and as a result Berlin had the most liberal climate for sexual research and representation in Europe. The Movement for Sexual Reform advocated the “rationalisation” of sexual relations involving the mutual expression of sexual needs as necessary for individual as well as national health.66 The contradiction between this view, shared by many in the medical profession and popularised in the UK by Marie Stopes, and the complete absence of sexual activity expected of unmarried women was never adequately addressed: the possibility of legitimate expression of sexual desire itself was ruled out for those who remained unmarried.67 Because of this unresolved contradiction, these new and progressive theories of sexuality in fact had the unwanted effect of further pathologising single women, as their repressed sexual drive was seen as leading them down deviant paths.68 The figure of the warped spinster expressing her sexual frustration in unhealthy, and sometimes criminal ways became a new trope – the spinster was no longer just an object of pity and ridicule, she represented a serious threat to the social order. Conclusion So, why did single women as a category not play a more prominent part in the post-war feminist discourse in Weimar Germany? Why did the women’s movement not use the real concerns over the female surplus to protect women from discrimination and attack and to consolidate and build on their political and social gains? One answer might simply be “self evidence”: the progressive new journal edited by radical feminists Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg, Die Frau im Staat (DFiS), embraces the new possibilities open to all women and feels no need to state the obvious, while Bäumer and other activists became heavily involved in the democratic process. The pages of Die Frau and Die Frauenfrage, too, are full of coverage of ╇See Grossman (1983). ╇See Stopes (1918). Stopes’ ideas and their reflection in middle brow literature are discussed in detail by Ann Rea in this volume. 68 ╇See Oram (1992). 66 67

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the expansion of professional possibilities for women in the law and the civil service, where they in fact campaign vigorously against the marriage bar in some professions. Reading Bäumer’s Heimatchronik (homeland diary) for this period we can see the many calls on the BDF’s attention (shock at the military defeat, uncertainty about the terms of the peace, to be sure, but also the excitement of female suffrage and preparation for elections and parliamentary democracy) and we can see, too, how defending the “surplus” might not have been the only priority.69 While the idea of reduced marriage prospects for women after the war has been almost universally accepted, statistics do not always support this: writing in 1985, the historian, Jay Winter, disputes the idea of diminished marriage chances for women in the UK, showing that celibacy rates actually declined in the post-war period as women were prepared to marry across previously rigid social divides.70 However, while the perceived scarcity of potential partners may have made some women less choosy, others used the discourse as a chance to embrace the single life while avoiding the stigma of “selfishness”. There is some evidence that individual women used the perception of a female surplus to justify their choice to pursue a career rather than marry, with better-educated middle-class women able to appropriate some aspects of singleness more associated with the bachelor than the spinster; independence, adventure and an unencumbered state to which women were not supposed to aspire.71 The pages of DFiS present a picture of a rich and fulfilling intellectual life for women that would be impossible to pursue if mired in domesticity. With articles on the arts, philosophy, poetry and literature as well as politics and international news, DFiS is very much a reflection of the lives and concerns of the editors: educated women of independent means with no need for male protection and no desire whatsoever for male company. Further explanation is offered by the context: in Germany, widespread disillusionment with the aims and conduct of the war, anger about the role of the home front, the trauma of defeat and the brief ascendancy of pacifist ideals in the immediate aftermath of the war ╇See Bäumer (1927). ╇ Winter (1985), pp.╯260–1. In a more recent essay,Winter reasserts this, noting that in post-war Britain “avoiding spinsterhood was the rule”, even at the cost of “marrying men in ‘lower’ social classes or from different social regions”. See Winter (2010), p.╯259. 71 ╇Nicholson (2007), pp.╯233–72. 69 70

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made this period an uncomfortable time to vaunt women’s role in supporting and sustaining the war.72 Many now saw the women’s movement as having been not only bellicose in tone, but by its very efficiency as having prolonged the war and led to more men being sent to the front.73 Squeezed on all sides, the women of the BDF found themselves increasingly forced onto the defensive against the pacifists who accused them of working against peace, the nationalists, including the nationalist women discussed by Christiane Streubel in this volume, who systematically cast doubt on their commitment to GerÂ� many, and the public discourse that positioned them as “KriegsÂ� gewinnlerinnen” (war winners).74 In the light of the pathologisation of celibacy, too, there was perhaps an unwillingness to associate women with deviant sexuality and thus threaten the acceptance they felt they had gained during the war years and were keen to preserve in the new Germany. In any case, stressing the cause of single women as war victims at this time would have placed them head to head with both returning and fallen soldiers in a hierarchy of suffering in which they could only lose. Margaret and Patrice Higonnet have noted that “the high costs of war characteristically entail a conservative reaction, whether political or social”75 and that the post-war period was not a conducive environment for women’s organisations to pursue “potentially disruptive, gender-specific goals”.76 The women certainly seemed hesitant about capitalising on their gains: several articles in Die Frau and Die Frauenfrage suggest that women must continuously strive “through tireless endeavour”77 to educate themselves and other women to deserve and properly exercise their new duties within the state rather than using them as a campaign platform. Several of the BDF activists were among the forty-nine female members of parliament who entered the National Assembly in 1919, including Gertrud Bäumer for the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP). 72 ╇ This climate is summarised by Hanna Hellmann, “Frauenstimmerecht, Krieg und Frieden” (Women’s Vote, War and Peace) Die Frau (August 1919), pp.╯325–8 (here p.╯325). 73 ╇See Sharp (2007). 74 ╇ Hering (1987), p.╯41. 75 ╇ Higonnet (1987), p.╯41. 76 ╇ Ibid., p.╯39. 77 ╇D. v. Velsen, “Die Frau und die Volksvertretung” (Woman and Representation), Jahrbuch des BDF (1920), p.╯28.

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They were keen to bring their dynamic maternalism and their civilising “cultural mission” to bear on political life, emphasising reconciliation and reconstruction in Germany, justice and rehabilitation internationally and above all working to overcome internal political and social divisions.78 This was especially acute following the signing of the peace treaty, which prompted an extension of the Burgfrieden (i.e. the suspension of internal differences for the duration of the war) in the face of the grave external and internal threats. For Lange, for example, “the consolidation of inner unity must be the overriding concern for any right-thinking person”.79 For Weber, even the nightmare of Germany’s post-war position in the international context – “all hopes betrayed, robbed of respect, mutilated, beaten and despised as criminals” – was outweighed by the inner divisions that were tearing Germany apart from within.80 Finally, we have to remember that the women were largely writing persuasive texts in which they used the arguments that they felt would be most effective in achieving their goals. In other words, they adapted their rhetoric to suit the climate of the time. The rhetoric of “surplus women” had been largely strategic in order to support gains in civil and professional rights for women at a time when it would have been ineffective to challenge the primacy or the nature of marriage. We have seen how during the war the women developed arguments based partly on the rights of disabled soldiers as well as the general needs of the national economy in order to achieve their long-standing goals in education and employment and in raising the political and social status of women. In the post-war climate they were all too aware that the vote was simply a useful tool to achieve genuine influence and equality: “after all, everything that we had to do before the vote remains to be done with the vote”.81 What the women’s writings during the years 1918-1920 reveal is a fundamental shift in emphasis: the women’s experience during the war had shown not just that properly-schooled women could make a genuine contribution to public life – they had always known that – but ╇See Scheck (1999). ╇ H.╯Lange, “Das Versagen” (Failure), Die Frau (July 1919), pp.╯293–4 (here p.╯294). 80 ╇ M.╯Weber, “Die Beteiligung der Frauen am geistigen und sittlichen Wiederaufbau unseres Landes”, Die Frau (October 1919), pp.╯1-7 (here p.╯2). 81 ╇ H.╯Lange, “Frauenstimmrecht und politischer Fraueneinfluss” (Female Suffrage and Political Influence), Die Frau (March 1920), pp.╯177–80 (here p.╯177). 78 79

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that women’s contribution was absolutely vital to the survival of the nation. As Bäumer put it in July 1918, a rise of 16.5% in women’s employment had been able to cover for a loss of almost half of the male labour force during the war,82 and the aftermath continued to show up male inability to transcend personal interests and ambition, continued hatreds, prejudices and political infighting that according to Lange “will be our ruin”.83 The “surplus women” argument had at heart been an appeal for fairness, to give a group of women who found themselves victims of a social order for which they were not responsible the chance of a meaningful livelihood, but now the stakes were far higher: during a crisis even deeper than the wartime struggle, women’s unique ability to overcome the destructive effects of inner division and “moral collapse” meant nothing short of life or death for their nation.84 During a period where women found themselves objects of mistrust and resentment because of political and social gains made apparently at the expense of the men, a women’s movement with an urgent sense of its mission no doubt found a conciliatory tone most effective. Dependent for their influence on broad acceptance of their aims, the women’s organisation had proved itself adept at using arguments and ideologies that found consensus in society or at least resonance in places of influence and it was now the language of patriotism, nationalism, service, gratitude for the soldiers’ sacrifice, alongside the cultural mission of women to imbue public life with motherly values that was a more serviceable line to take, and this is largely what we find in the pages of the women’s journals during the immediate post-war period. Bibliography Allen, A. T. (1985) “Mothers of the New Generation: Adele Schreiber, Helene Stocker, and the Evolution of a German Idea of Motherhood, 1900-1914”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10/3 (1985) 418–38. ———╯ (1997) “Feminism and Motherhood in Germany and in International PerÂ� spective 1800-1914”, in Gender and Germanness, eds. P. Herminghouse and M. Mueller (Providence RI and Oxford: 1997) 113-128. ———╯(2008) Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: 2008). 82 ╇G.╯Bäumer, “Die Friedensrüstung für die Frauenarbeit” (Peace time preparations for female employment), Die Frau (July 1918), pp.╯335–8 (here p.╯336). 83 ╇ H.╯Lange, “Politische Zerstörungsmethoden” (Political methods of Destruction), Die Frau (April 1920), pp.╯193–5 (here p.╯194). 84 ╇G.╯Bäumer, “Das kranke Volk” (The sick populace), Die Frau (March 1920), pp.╯161–4 (here p.╯164).

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Ankum, K. von, ed. (1997) Women in the Metropolis. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: 1997). Bäumer, G. (1915) “Die Frauen und der Krieg” (Women and the War), Kriegsjahrbuch des BDF (Leipzig and Berlin: 1915). ———╯(1927) Heimatchronik während des Weltkrieges Dritter Teil: 1 Oktober 1918-23 Juni 1919 (Berlin: 1927). Beddoe, D. (1989) Back to Home and Duty: Women in inter-war Britain (London: 1989). Bingham, A. (2002) “‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly’: Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise 1927-28”, Twentieth Century British History, 13/1 (2002) 17–37. ———╯(2004) Gender, modernity, and the popular press in inter-war Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Bessel, R. (1983) “‘Eine nicht allzu grosse Beunruhigung des Arbeitmarktes’. Frauenarbeit und Demobilmachung in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9/2 (1983) 211–29. ———╯(1993) Germany after the First World War (Oxford: 1993). Braun, L. (1915) Die Frauen und der Krieg (Leipzig: 1915). Braybon, G. (2003) “Winners or Losers? Women’s Role in the War Story”, in Evidence, History and the Great War. Historians and the impact of 1914-18, ed. G.╯Braybon (London: 2003) 86–112. Daniel, U. (1997) The War from Within: German Working Class Women in the First World War (Oxford: 1997). Davis, B. J. (2000) Home Fires Burning. Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill and London: 2000). De Paulo, B. (2006) Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (New York: 2006). Dollard, C. (2004) “‘Sharpening the Wooden Sword’ in Imperial Germany: Marital Status and Education in the Work of Helene Lange”, Women’s History Review, 13/3 (2004) 447–66. ———╯(2006a) “Marital Status and the Rhetoric of the Women’s Movement in World War I Germany”, Women in German Yearbook 22 (2006) 211–35. ———╯ (2006b) “The alte Jungfer as New Deviant: Representation, Sex, and Single Women in Imperial Germany”, German Studies Review 29/1 (2006) 107–26. ———╯ (2008) “Fräulein oder Frau? German Women and the Signification of Title, 1850-1917”, Women’s History Review 17/3 (2008) 377–93. ———╯(2009) The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 (New York and Oxford: 2009). Domansky, E. (1996) “Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany”, in Society, Culture and the State in Germany 1870-1930, ed. G.╯Eley (Ann Arbor, MI: 1996) 427–64. Fussell, P. (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: 1975). Gersdorff, U. von (1969) Frauen im Kriegsdienst 1914-1945 (Stuttgart: 1969). Grossmann, A. (1983) “The New Woman and the Rationalisation of Sexuality in Weimar Germany”, in Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. A.╯Snitow, C.╯Stansell and S.╯Thompson (London: 1983) 190–208. Gibbs, P. [1920] Now It Can Be Told (New York: no date). Grayzel S. R (2002) Women and the First World War (Harlow: 2002). Jeffreys, S. (1985) The Spinster and her Enemies: feminism and sexuality 1880-1930 (London: 1985).

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Hales, B. (1996) “Woman as Sexual Criminal: Weimar Constructions of the Criminal Femme Fatale”,€Women in German Yearbook 12 (1996) 100–21. Hering, S. (1990) Die Kriegsgewinnlerinnen (Pfaffenweiler: 1990). Heymann, L. G. [1922] (1980) “Weiblicher Pazifismus”, in Frauen gegen den Krieg, ed. G.╯Brinker Gabler (Frankfurt/M: 1980) 65–70. Heymann, L. G and Augspurg, A. (1992) Erlebtes Erschautes. Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für Freiheit, Recht und Frieden 1850-1940, ed. M.╯Twellmann (Frankfurt/M: 1992). Higonnet, M. R. and Higonnet, P. (1987) ‘The Double Helix’, in Behind the Lines. Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. M. R.╯Higonnet et al. (New Haven and London: 1987) 31–47. Holden, K. (2005) “Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the ‘Lost Generation’ in Britain after the Great War”, Journal of Family History 30 (2005) 388–409. ———╯ (2007) The Shadow of Marriage. Singleness in England 1914-60 (Manchester: 2007). Kingsley Kent, S. (1988) “The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism”, The Journal of British Studies 27/3 (1988) 32–53. ———╯ (2009) Aftershocks. Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 (Basingstoke: 2009). Kuhn, Bärbel (2000) Familenstand Ledig: Ehelose Frauen und Männer im Bürgertum (1850-1914) (Cologne: 2000). Leed, E. J. (1979) No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: 1979). Melman, B. (1988) Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (London: 1988). Meskimmon, M and West, S. eds. (1995) Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Brookfield, VT: 1995). Nicholson, V. (2007) Singled Out. How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War (London: 2007). Oram, A. (1992) “Repressed and Thwarted, or Bearer of the New World? The Spinster in Inter-war Feminist Discourses”, Women’s History Review 1/3 (1992) 413–33. Petro, P. (1989) Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: 1989). Rowe, D. (2003) Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Burlington, VT: 2003). Scheck, R. (1999) “Women against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic”, German Studies Review 22/1 (1999) 21–42. Sharp, I. (2003) “Riding the Tiger: Ambivalent Representations of the New Woman in the Periodicals of the Weimar Republic”, in New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930, eds. M.╯Beetham and A.╯Heilmann (New York and Oxford: 2003) 118–42.Â� ———╯(2006) “Dangerous Women: Woman as Sexual Criminal in Weimar Germany”, in Violence, Culture and Identity in Germany and Austria, ed. H.╯Chambers (New York and Oxford: 2006) 203–24. ———╯ (2007) “Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 67–87. Stoehr, I (1987) “‘Organisierte Mütterlichkeit’. Zur Politik der deutschen FrauenÂ� bewegung um 1900”, in Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte ed. K.╯Hausen, (Munich: 1987) 225–53.

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Stopes, M. [1918] (1995) Married Love (London: 1995). Usborne, C. (1992) The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany. Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (London: 1992). Winter, J.M. (1985) The Great War and the British People (Basingstoke: 1985). ———╯ (2010) “Demography”, in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Oxford: 2010) 248–62. Wulffen, E. [1924] (1931) Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin (Hamburg: 1931).

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After the vote was won. The fate of the women’s suffrage movement in Russia after the October Revolution: individuals, ideas and deeds Olga Shnyrova Serious social and economic problems generated by the First World War in Russia caused two revolutions in 1917: in February and in October. During this short period of time Russia moved from monarchy to parliamentary democracy and from parliamentary democracy to Soviet dictatorship.╯As Russia belonged to the Entente block, it was supposed to be in the ranks of the victorious nations, but the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 set it apart from the winners and the losers. The new Bolshevik regime was not recognised by most European countries until 1924 (except by Germany in 1922). The First World War was followed by the Russian civil war, accompanied by the intervention of Allied troops supporting the White armies. It was a long and hard period which ended in the famine of 1921-22, a period of hunger and collapse. It was also a time of sweeping economic and social reforms that turned Russian society “upside down”: the old ruling classes were expropriated and disenfranchised, and workers and peasants came to power. There was no time to mourn those who were killed on the battlefields before 1917: the war of 1914-17 and its victims belonged in the past. Revolutionary Russia opened a new page of its history, neglecting old traditions and values. â•… The two revolutions had a major influence on gender relations in Russia and gave an impetus to women’s emancipation. Just after the February Revolution women gained equal political rights and Russian feminists began the campaign for full gender equality in state and society. These processes could have triggered a new stage of development in Russian feminism, similar in direction to the development of feminism in western countries. But the October Revolution proposed new measures concerning female emancipation that fitted in with the new Socialist ideals. The feminist movement was rejected as hostile to the new regime. Feminist journals were closed and feminist organisations were dissolved. Thus began a period of extreme disappointment for most of the activists of the Russian women’s movement who had devoted their lives not only to the cause of women’s liberation but to the service of their country in times of war and peace.

As the women’s movement in Russia has its own specific history which is connected with the peculiarities of the political and economic devel-

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opment of the country, I would like to start with a short preamble describing its characteristic features in order to provide a contextual background. The birth of the women’s movement in Russia coincided with the liberal reforms that took place in the 1860s. These reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, development of local government, changes to legal codes and practices, and so on, transformed the structure of Russian society and gave great impetus to the development of a market economy and a public sphere. The spread of liberal ideas in Russian society in the nineteenth century led to the creation of the first women’s organisations in the 1860s and 1870s. The first women’s organisations made no political claims, because in Russia neither men nor women had political rights until the first democratic revolution of 1905. That is why these organisations were aimed exclusively at women’s access to education and professional careers. But even this moderate form of women’s activism virtually ceased altogether as a result of the wave of political repression imposed on Russian society after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. All forms of political agitation were prohibited and the only public organisations which were permitted were those linked to charitable activities. Men and women felt themselves to be equally disfranchised, and so a huge number of socially active women involved themselves not in feminist campaigns, but in the revolutionary movement against the Tsarist regime. The second peak of feminist activity coincided with the first Russian revolution of 1905 to 1907. This was a period of democratic political reforms and the development of civil rights. The passage of new electoral laws on 6 August, 17 October and 11 December 1905, which excluded women from the vote and therefore upset the previous “equality in illegality” between the genders, led to the emergence of a women’s suffrage movement in Russia. Supporters of women’s suffrage had a really good chance at this time to ensure that a women’s enfranchisement bill would pass through the first State Duma or parliament, since the majority of its members were on the radical wing of the political spectrum. During the revolution of 1905 to 1907 women’s organisations indeed forged close links with the leftist parties – the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Social Revolutionaries, the trydoviki (Labour Party) and the kadets (Constitutional Democrats, or Cadet Party) – all of which demanded universal suffrage and, consequently, women’s suffrage. Many prominent figures inside women’s organisations became members of these political parties. Thus the leader of the Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society (RMAS) Anna

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Shabanova, and two senior representatives of the Russian League for Women’s Equality (RLWE) Anna Kalmanovich and Ariadna Tyrkova were to be found in the rank and file of the Cadet party. Another RLWE activist, Olga Volkenstein, became a member of the Social Revolutionary Party. Prominent left-wing writer and public activist Ekaterina Kuskova was very influential in the Russian Social Democratic Party before defecting to join the Cadets. Several other women, like Ariadna Tyrkova, made successful political careers and took leading positions within the parties. Reaction set in soon after the revolutionary peak of 1907, which meant that the chance of the women’s enfranchisement bill being passed through the State Duma had been missed. Therefore, during the years from 1907 to 1917 suffragists confined themselves to the aim of achieving equality in the public sphere through reform of municipal law, education law, property rights, and so on. It so happened that one of the largest events of the first wave of Russian feminism, the AllRussian Women’s Congress, took place in 1908, during the time of political reaction. Differences in the evaluation of the political situation led to a schism between the liberal and socialist wings of the women’s movement. The First World War created new opportunities for Russian feminists who strove to meet the new needs of the nation and, at the same time, to prove that women could play an important role during a time of national crisis.1 It must be stressed that there were no pacifists active in the Russian women’s movement. All Russian feminists expressed their support for the war effort and shifted their activities to acts of patriotism. This is why Russian women, like French women, were absent from the International Peace Congresses in The Hague and San Francisco. The RLWE refused to take part in the Congress in The Hague. A similar stand was taken by the RMAS.╯The organisation’s annual report noted that “Russian feminists rejected the pacifists’ proposal to create a Women’s League of Universal Peace as untimely”.2 Like their counterparts in Great Britain, Russian feminist organisations claimed that “in this year of trouble [we have] put aside the struggle for equal rights [and] citizenship and have directed all [our]

1 ╇On the participation of Russian women’s suffrage organisations in patriotic activity during the First World War see Shnyrova (2007). 2 ╇ Women’s Mutual Aid Society (1916), p.╯120.

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forces to helping the victims of war”.3 In order to demonstrate their patriotic feelings, the RLWE, RMAS and the Women’s Progressive Party (WPP) developed a wide range of activities to meet the needs of wartime Russia, such as organising shelters for refugees and homeless children, setting up day nurseries and courses for nurses, and taking part in fundraising campaigns to help the men at the front. At the same time Russian suffragists tried to combine patriotic activity with the lobbying of the State Duma and of local authorities to promote women’s rights. The most active organisation in this sphere was the RLWE, led by Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein, and the “Women’s Enfranchisement Section” of the RMAS.╯The first step was the campaign for the municipal vote as the Duma was intending to revise the law on local government elections. In 1915 the RMAS sent two petitions to the Ministry of Interior demanding the admittance of women to local government. The Society, along with the RLWE, also sent a circular to all Duma deputies, urging them to vote in favour of women being granted the municipal vote, and another to the mayors of Russian towns asking them to unite with women’s organisations in lobbying the State Duma for municipal suffrage for women. The leader of the RMAS, Anna Shabanova, wrote: “Russian women pay the same taxes as men, have university diplomas and professions and their activity in local committees for refugees, hospitals and even in the army have proved that they can be useful workers in local affairs. That is why we ask that women be admitted to the city Duma”.4 A decisive role in women’s suffrage in Russia was played by the outbreak of revolution in February 1917. The war and the revolution, combined with the political and patriotic acts of feminists, enabled women to gain political equality in Russia at an earlier stage than in many other European countries. Russian feminists appreciated and made use of the new opportunities that were opened up for women with the February Revolution. In April the First National Congress of women’s organisations gathered in Moscow. This led to the formation of the National Women’s Union, which immediately applied to join the International Council of Women (ICW). Its programme included 3 ╇ P.╯Shishkina-Yavein, “Activities of the Russian League of Women’s Rights During the War”, Jus Suffragii, 9/5 (February 1915), p.╯241. 4 ╇ A.╯Shabanova, “Zayavlenie Soveta Zhenskogo Vzaimnoblagotvoritelnogo Obshschestva, otpravlennoye v stolichnie i gubernskie gorodskie dumi” (Declaration of the Women’s Russian Mutual Aid Society, forwarded to the city and provincial Dumas), Zhensky Vestnik (Women’s Messenger), 1 (1916), p.╯3.

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the demand that women be permitted to stand as candidates in the forthcoming elections for a new Constituent Assembly. In June 1917 Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein was appointed to the Committee for the Development of the Constitution (Komissia po razrabotke Konstitutsii). One of the leaders of the Cadet Party, the journalist Ariadna Tyrkova, was elected to the Petrograd City Duma in the summer of 1917, where she became the leader of the party grouping. Another member of the Cadet Party, well-known philanthropist Countess Sophia Panina, was appointed Minister of Social Welfare. A relatively large number of prominent women, including Anna Shabanova, Poliksena ShihkinaYavein, Ariadna Tyrkova, Sophia Panina, and Maria Chekhova, were nominated as candidates to the Constituent Assembly, which was to be elected in November 1917. In the autumn of 1917, the Provisional Government took the decision to open all forms of waged employment to female applicants. This was mostly due to the continuous efforts of the RLWE and the RMAS, who repeatedly urged the State Duma and local authorities “not to miss the chance to remind people about [women’s] demands and needs in the professional sphere”.5 But in the months after they achieved political equality Russian feminists discovered that this was not enough to achieve real equality in other spheres of life. That is why they continued their struggle, using their previous victory as the starting point for obtaining other civil rights. They made a number of demands such as changes in the Russian Civil Code, especially with regard to laws concerning marriage, family and children, and continued to struggle for women’s rights in the labour market, arguing against gender discrimination, which hampered women in their efforts to establish a professional career. All of these processes could have triggered a new stage of development in Russian feminism, similar in direction to the development of feminism in western countries. But the October Revolution took place in the same year, replacing parliamentary democracy with the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The Constituent Assembly (Uchreditelnoe Sobranie), which met on 18 January 1918 in Petrograd, was dissolved by the Bolsheviks shortly after its deputies refused to approve the decrees of the new Soviet government. At the same time Lenin declared the liberation of ╇ P.╯Shishkina-Yavein, “Activities of the Russian League of Women’s Rights during the War”, Jus Suffragii 11/4 (January 1917), p.╯56. 5

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the exploited classes and full emancipation of proletarian and peasant women. The Bolshevik Party took on the role of the main theorist and vanguard of this process. Its leaders established certain principles for ensuring women’s emancipation, such as guaranteeing the legal equality of women and men; recruiting female labour for the building of a Socialist society; promoting women’s participation in the state government; and liberating them from domestic labour. The Revolution needed women’s labour and women’s energy, and that is why a resolution passed by the ХIIIth congress of the Bolshevik Party stressed that “retention of women in industry is of great political importance”.6 The labour code stipulated equal pay, sixteen week vacations and additional allowances for mothers with babies. Laws also adjusted the principle of gender equality in the political, social and family spheres. Lenin wrote: “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins”.7 The party programme adopted in 1919 proclaimed that the “liberation of women from domestic labour” was one the most important tasks in the construction of socialism. It was to be achieved “by establishing communal services, public canteens, laundries [and] day nurseries”.8 Lenin considered that “electricity in every house will liberate thousands of domestic slaves from the necessity of spending three quarters of their lives in the kitchen”.9 During the first years after the Revolution radical and even utopian ideas and plans for transforming gender relations were put into practice. The Bolsheviks rejected all that was marked out as “bourgeois”, including “bourgeois” morality and “bourgeois” family values. Women were therefore granted equal rights in marriage, divorce procedures became short and simple, abortion on demand was legalised, and all children, whether legitimate or not, were awarded the same civil and property rights. These ideas were accepted and popularised by the Communists Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand. Two new women’s journals were established in 1923 – Rabotnitsa (The Woman

╇KPSS (1970), Vol. III, p.╯123. ╇Translation from http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/subject/women/ abstract/19_06_28.htm, accessed 12 January 2010. 8 ╇KPSS (1970), Vol. II, p.╯77 9 ╇ Lenin (1973), Vol. 23, pp.╯94–5. 6 7

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Worker)10 and Krestjianka (The Peasant Woman). These publications regularly reported on the enthusiastic response of peasant women and women workers towards Bolshevik policies and ideas. According to the perceptive observation of Irina Yukina “Soviet legislation was far ahead of its time and set benchmarks for western feminism”.11 In 1919-20 the international journal Jus Suffragii published articles with titles such as “Women as factory managers”, “Woman ambassador appointed” and “Women deputies”, alongside positive commentaries reprinted from the Soviet press.12 But can we consider this political course to be a true reflection and continuation of the ideas of the Russian feminists? Did the Bolsheviks remember their previous commitments in the sphere of women’s emancipation? As I mentioned above many Russian feminists were close to the Social Democratic Party before the Revolution. But in spite of this, feminism was considered to be a “bourgeois” movement and accordingly its ideas were rejected. Besides, the Bolsheviks’ radical approach to women’s emancipation also differed from the feminist one. “Bourgeois” feminism was built on a democratic base, while under the Bolshevik dictatorship equality and liberation were extended to workers and peasants, but not to the bourgeois classes. From the Bolsheviks’ point of view this category included not only property owners but also representatives of intellectual labour (intelligentsia), so most of the feminist women fell into the category of outcast, non-proletarian “elements of society”. Feminist journals were closed and feminist organisations were dissolved, being replaced by Rabotnitsa and Krestjianka as the official journals of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee department for women’s affairs. Even the titles of these journals reflect their target audience and the class character of gender policy in the Soviet state. No place was left for other views and opinions. Again, as in Tsarist Russia, part of the population appeared to be discriminated against, although this time it was the bourgeoisie as a class. Women and men were indeed targeted equally within this group.╯ That is why the reaction of Russian feminists to the October Revolution was far from positive because they could not continue their activity and did not accept the political course of the new govern10 ╇ In fact, this was the second attempt at publishing a journal with such a name. The first Rabotnitsa appeared between 1915 and 1917. 11 ╇ Yukina (2007), p.╯442 12 ╇See Jus Suffragii, 14/3 (December 1919); 14/5 (February 1920); and 14/6 (March 1920).

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ment. In such a situation they had to choose between two main strategies: escape and integration. We can find some brief information about the post-revolutionary fate of a few of them in various reference guides and encyclopedias13 and in Irina Yukina’s 2007 book Russian Feminism as a Challenge to the Present. More extensive data can only be found in their personal archives and memoirs.14 But there has recently been renewed interest in researching the biographies of these women, particularly in relation to their contribution to Russian feminism after 1917. The last chapter of Rochelle Ruthchild’s forthcoming book Equality and Revolution in the Russian Empire 1905-1917 is also devoted to the post-revolutionary fate of Russian suffragists.15 In fact, several Russian feminists, such as Ariadna Tyrkova, Sophia Panina and Ekaterina Kuskova, emerged as prominent figures in the anti-Bolshevik opposition in the period immediately after the October Revolution. They played an important role in the consolidation of anti-Bolshevik forces and joined the White movement, so emigration was the only option for them after the end of the civil war. All of them had risen swiftly in terms of their political careers after women gained political rights in Russia in March 1917, and were among the main organisers of anti-Bolshevik resistance. Ariadna Tyrkova supported General Kornilov and his attempts to establish a military dictatorship in the autumn of 1917 as she considered this to be the last chance to save the situation. After Lenin had seized power, she published several issues of the newspaper Borba (The Struggle), calling on readers to fight for freedom against the Bolshevik dictatorship.╯Her flat became a recruiting centre for the White Army. She left Russia for the first time in March 1918 and settled in London where she took an active part in the creation of the Committee for the Liberation of Russia and initiated an appeal from Russian émigrés to US president Woodrow Wilson in favour of western military intervention to save her country from Bolshevism. She returned to Russia again in 1919 as her husband, British journalist Harold Williams, was posted by British news13 ╇See de Haan and Daskalova (2006); Corigliano and Nihemias (2001); PolitiÂ� cheskie dejateli Rossii. Biographicheskii Slovar. (1993); Politicheskie Partii Rossi, Encyclopedia (1996); and Yukina (2007). 14 ╇ This article is based on materials from the personal papers of Maria Pokrovskaya (St. Petersburg Regional Historical Archive, Fund 2114), Maria Chekhova (Â�Moscow Central Historical Archive, Fund 2251), Anna Shabanova and Ekaterina TshepÂ�kina (Manuscript department of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, Fund 1000), and Alexandra Glagoleva (Russian State Literature and History Archive). 15 ╇See Ruthchild (2010).

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papers to the south of the country to report on the activity of the White movement. Here Tyrkova worked in the propaganda department of the White Army commanded by General Denikin. After the defeat of the Whites in March 1920 she had to flee back to London where she created the Russian Refugee Relief Society and led it for twenty years. Tyrkova also devoted herself to editorial and writing activity. Thus she edited the journal Russian Life; wrote books and novels including From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk. The First Year of Russian Revolution (1919); Hosts of Darkness (together with Williams) (1921); and a biography of Pushkin (1921).16 After Williams’ death, she moved to France and lived with her son’s family. She survived the German occupation from June 1940 to December 1944, during which she was interned as a British citizen. In 1951, again with her son’s family, she moved to the USA and lived at first in New York, then in Washington. Until her death in 1962 she remained a persistent critic of the Soviet regime: in spite of her age she took part in the creation of a Russian political committee in New York and became its Vice President. During the last years of her life this outstanding woman continued to work on her memoirs, and delivered lectures and speeches. Those who knew her at that time remembered that she stayed beautiful, clever, and strongwilled. The only thing about which she felt sorry was that she was unable to visit Vergezha, her family estate. The life of Countess Sophia Panina during the short post-revolutionary period between 1917 and 1920 was also colourful, eventful and deserving of screen adaptation.17 In spite of her aristocratic origin, this exceptional woman supported liberal and left movements for most of her life, financing trades unions, Social Democrats, Constitutional Democrats and women’s organisations. For her leftist activities in Tsarist Russia she was put under the supervision of the Secret Police, and its agents called her the “Red Countess”. Unlike her friend Tyrkova-Williams she tried to stay aloof from politics, but the February Revolution brought Panina onto the main political stage. In the summer of 1917, due to her family ties (her stepfather Ivan Petrynkevitch was among of the founders of the Cadet Party) and her popularity among left and liberal circles, she became a member of the ╇See Tyrkуva-Williams (1919), (1921) and (1998/1921). ╇ The author would like to thank Adele Lindenmeyr for her comments on Panina’s biography. 16 17

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Central Committee of the Cadet Party, Vice-Minister of Social Welfare and Minister of Education in the Provisional Government. On the day of the Bolshevik seizure of power (25 October 1917) she was sent by the Petrograd City Duma to the battle cruiser Aurora in order to prevent the shelling of the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was located. She was refused entry by the Bolshevik Provisional Revolutionary Committee as its members were afraid that she could persuade sailors not to shoot. After the October upheaval she, like Tyrkova, joined the growing anti-Bolshevik opposition, becoming a member of the Committee for the Rescue of the MotherÂ� land and Revolution (Komitet Spasenia Rodiny i Revolutsii) and the clandestine Provisional Government, consisting of the Vice-Ministers of the former cabinet, and leading a strike of public workers. She refused to hand over money gathered for the building of a women’s medical institute to the new Bolshevik regime, and instead put it in a bank account in Switzerland “until the coming of the legitimate govÂ� ernment”.18 At the end of November 1917 the Council of People’s Commissars (the Bolshevik Government) passed the decree on prosecution of the leading members of the Cadet Party as “enemies of the nation” and on 28 November Panina was arrested. But she was so popular among workers that the Revolutionary Tribunal, remembering her contribution to the revolutionary movement, confined itself to issuing a public reprimand and freed her from prison.19 In October 1918, dressed as peasant woman, she fled to the south of Russia with her family jewels, which she intended to donate to the White movement, but they were lost in the chaos of travel. On arrival, Panina, like Tyrkova before her, joined Denikin’s White Army. At his headquarters in the Crimea she worked together with the leader of the left-wing of the Cadet Party, Nikolay Astrov, who at that time was Denikin’s political advisor. Later he became her life partner. She was the only female member of an official delegation from the White government sent by Denikin in the summer of 1919 to Paris and London, to seek increased aid and support from the Allies. In early 1920, as Denikin’s army collapsed, Panina left Russia forever. After spending several months in refugee camps in Constantinople, 18 ╇S. V.╯Panina, “Voina i Revolutsia” (War and Revolution), Novyi zhurnal (New Journal), 49 (1957), p.╯192. 19 ╇On Panina’s appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal see Lindenmeyr (2001), pp.╯505–25.

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she went to Paris to meet with fellow Cadets (she remained a member of the party’s Central Committee), but Astrov, who shared her life in emigration from 1918 until his early death in 1934, fell ill, so they moved for several months to England, where Astrov received medical treatment. They briefly spent time in Paris in late spring 1921 at Cadet meetings, but were then sent by the émigré aid organisation Zemgor20 to Geneva, to represent the organisation before the High Commission for Refugees at the newly-created League of Nations. In Geneva Panina also studied to become a librarian, and supported Astrov (who was frequently ill), her elderly mother and stepfather. In 1923, they all moved to Prague when she was invited to head a refugee community centre there, Russkii ochag (Russian hearth). She lived in Prague, working for the Russian community, until December 1938, when she left for the USA.╯Though sixty-seven years old and without means, Panina began another life as one of the founders of the Tolstoy Foundation in 1939, created to aid refugees from Europe. She died in New York’s Roosevelt Hospital in 1956. Ekaterina Kuskova, one of the organisers of the All Russian Women’s Congress in 1908 and an active participant in the National Women’s Congress in 1917, also appeared in the ranks of the antiBolshevik opposition, in spite of her left-wing Socialist views. Indeed, her newspaper Vlast naroda (People’s Power) became a major centre for alternative politics in Moscow. But when the civil war began, she preferred to take a neutral position – the so-called “third power” – and was against dictatorship by either Bolsheviks or Whites. During the Great Famine in the Volga region in 1921 she, together with her husband, Sergei Prokopovitch, a former minister in the Provisional Government, became one of the organisers of a committee providing help to the starving. In spite of their extensive humanitarian work the couple were arrested for their “relations with the outside world” and sentenced to death, but were pardoned following the intervention of the US president Herbert Hoover and Fridtjof Nansen, High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations. They were deported from Russia and moved first to Berlin and then to Prague, where her flat became a “political salon” for Russian émigrés. As a talented writer and well-known publicist, Kuskova published many articles concerning the attitude of Russian émigrés towards Soviet ╇ Zemgor – the Russian Committee of Zemstvo and Cities for Help of Russian Citizens abroad, was an organisation dedicate to assisting Russian émigrés. 20

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Russia and her works often provoked sharp discussions. Unlike Tyrkova and Panina she was not an uncompromising opponent of the Bolshevik regime and the declaration of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 led her to believe in the possibility of moves towards greater democracy. Between 1924 and 1926 Kuskova protested against new plans for White intervention in the Soviet Union and expressed hope that changes in the country would make it possible for emigrants to return home. Unfortunately her hopes were dashed with the establishment of the totalitarian Stalinist regime in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Kuskova died in Geneva in 1958 without ever fulfilling her dream of a return to Russia. In spite of hard periods and acute homesickness, we can say that the strategy of emigration for Tyrkova, Panina and Kuskova was relatively successful: they managed to find a place in émigré circles, and were popular and active until the end of their long lives, though they never returned to feminist activity. Others were not so lucky. The emigration experience of Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein, the leader of the Russian League for Women’s Equality, ended tragically. In the summer of 1921 she with her family managed to move to Estonia where they had a summer house. Her husband, a professor of medicine, was invited to give lectures at Derpt university. But when they arrived they discovered that their house had been destroyed. Soon after this her husband died, leaving Shishkina-Yavein to raise a son and daughter alone and without any means of subsistence. She was an experienced doctor herself but the Estonian authorities refused to issue work permits to Russian medics. In 1921 Jus Suffragii published a letter from Chrystal Macmillan reporting that Shiskina-Yavein was in hospital recovering from typhus and calling on members of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) to raise funds for her sake.21 Paying tribute to the great services Shiskina-Yavein had rendered to the international women’s movement, Macmillan wrote: “Without the action taken by Shishkina-Yavein … we would probably not have half the number of enfranchised women in the world that we have today”.22 The life of Shishkina-Yavein in emigration after that is unknown even to her descendants, but it is likely that she did get some help from the IWSA as she later managed to return to Leningrad with her children. In Russia she resumed her medical career and worked as a doctor. She 21 22

╇ Jus Suffragii, 15/9 (June 1921), p.╯134. ╇ Ibid.

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survived the Second World War and the blockade and died in 1947. Her granddaughter still lives in St. Petersburg. But most of the suffragists did not make attempts to emigrate and stayed in Russia. We have to remember that many of them were not young by this time and to leave the country to which they had devoted their lives would have been very difficult. Besides they were not rich and had no means to fund a move. The first years after the October Revolution were very hard because of the civil war and accompanying economic problems. In face of food shortages the proletarian state chose to support workers, condemning other classes to hunger and starvation. The personal archive of Maria Pokrovskaja, the former leader of the Women’s Progressive Party, contains a letter she wrote to the editorial board of the newspaper Novyi Octjiabr (New October) on 29 May 1918, asking them to publish her article protesting against new ration cards.23 She called her article “Systematic killing of the nation’s brains”. She wrote that according to the new ration norms those who belonged to the class of intellectual workers could not get additional ration cards (which were intended only for industrial workers), which meant that they would have to starve. She reported instances of hunger, fainting-fits and deaths among the intelligentsia and wrote with indignation that a country without the force of intellectual creativity would be like the healthy idiot who can subsist physically but could not function as a reasonable human being. Because of the shortage of paper the letter was written on the back of a WPP leaflet demanding votes for women, but was signed “Doctor PokrovsÂ� kaja”. In other words, she had not chosen to associate herself in this action with the well-known feminist organisation, but, being a sociallyengaged person, she could not keep silent and protested from the medical point of view. She might have expected her protest to have some effect, as the greater part of her life had been dedicated to the improvement of the housing and labour conditions of the workers in St. Petersburg. She remained active in this field after the Revolution, working as a sanitary inspector until her death in 1922. Other suffragists who opted for the integration strategy were wellqualified professionals who were able to continue with their careers as the new regime needed their skills and expertise. Medicine, freelance 23 ╇ M.╯Pokrovskaya, “Sistematicheskoe umershvlenie mozga strany” (“Systematic killing of the country’s brains”), May 1918. Copy in State History Archive of St. Petersburg, Archive of M. I.╯Pokrovskaya, Fund 2114, list 1, file 16.

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writing and teaching were the three most common occupations among them. Doctors were in high demand and all suffragists with medical training continued to be professionally active in this sphere. The most prominent among them was Anna Shabanova, the leader of the RMAS.╯She was one of the first female doctors in Russia, the favourite apprentice of Professor Karl Rauhfus, the founder of pediatrics in Russia. After the Revolution she continued to work in the hospital named after her teacher, eventually clocking up more than fifty years of service. She taught junior medical workers (nurses), gave talks to young mothers about the proper nursing of babies, and took part in medical conferences. In spite of her great authority and experience she remained an ordinary doctor. After the Revolution she published only one article, a piece devoted to her teacher, with whom she had a long and fruitful friendship.╯ However, she did not forget her former ideals and campaigns. As far as we know she was the only activist who tried to support the vanishing feminist movement, at least by rescuing the last remnants of the Russian Mutual Aid Society. She maintained a correspondence with feminist organisations in other countries and was often invited to participate in international events, although she had no opportunity to travel abroad. Being better paid for her work than other feminists, she tried to help those who were less fortunate with financial gifts. Former members of the RMAS gathered at her flat every Saturday to remember the past and to discuss the current situation. Ekaterina Tshepkina called these discussions “crazy”, but as far as we know, she was no admirer of Shabanova. But even Tshepkina had this say about her after her death: “She was unpleasant, but strong”.24 Shabanova died in 1932 at the age of 84 from a stroke and was buried with honours. Her funeral gathered together, perhaps for the last time, the old guard of Russian feminists. It was perhaps for this reason that her colleagues from the hospital paid tribute not only to her medical achievements, but also to her feminist activity: “Anna Nikolaevna Shabanova fought for women’s rights at every opportunity and her name became widely known not only in Russia, but abroad”, as one funeral orator put it, while adding that “her talents could be developed to the maximum only after the Revolution, as only October gave women full rights and

╇ Letter of E.╯Thshepkina to M.╯Chekhova, 1932, in Moscow Central Historical Archive, Archive of Maria Chekhova, Fund 2251, list 1, file 670. 24

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fulfilled their most sincere dreams”.25 She was buried near her beloved teacher, Professor Rauhfus. It is interesting that several decades after her death a tombstone was erected on her grave – but not by the hospital where she had worked all her life.

Figure 2. The grave of Anna Shabanova in St. Petersburg, author’s own photoÂ�graph. Her actual date of birth was 1848.

Those former women’s suffrage activists who were connected with literary activity also continued their careers, publishing articles and essays on various themes, although not on women’s rights. Lubov GureÂ�vitch was a well-known literary and theatre critic, historian EkaÂ� terina Tshepkina worked in a research institute, and Aleksandra Glagoleva acted as a translator from German and English. But none of them achieved the level of popularity and recognition that they had enjoyed before the Revolution. Tshepkina was one of the first profes╇Speech given at the funeral of Anna Shabanova in 1932 by an unknown person, Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library, Fund 1000, list 2, file 1549. 25

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sional historians to write about women’s history and her works were very popular in pre-revolutionary Russia, but after the Revolution she managed to publish only one book, The Women’s Movement during the French Revolution (1921) with a foreword by Aleksandra Kollontai. In this foreword Kollontai asked the reader to be critical as the book was written from a “bourgeois feminist position” and the author “wrongly considers that the liberation of women can be an independent task disconnected from the economic base which is the fundamental cause of women’s enslavement”.26 Kollontai recognised that the book’s publication was possible only because of the lack of literature devoted to women’s emancipation. Tshepkina was traumatised by the accusation that her style of writing was petit-bourgeois, as she did not consider herself “bourgeois” at all. In a letter to Maria Chekhova she remembered: “Once in a hot dispute with Kuskova I told her: ‘you are a fine lady (barynia), but I am not.’ But for us, as well as for the peasants (muzhiks), it is difficult adapt to all the parties”.27 Nevertheless, Tshepkina kept trying to promote women’s history, writing reports for the literary research institute where she worked and leading the study group on the history of the woman question in the Communist Academy, an institute of higher education for the Communist Party leaders. She seized every opportunity to promote the cause of women’s history, and was often criticised for her idealistic approach. In spite of the difficult situation during the immediate post-revolutionary years she saved the papers of the Russian League of Women’s Equality and in 1930 passed them to the library of the Russian Academy of Science. Later this material was acquired by the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (now the State Archive of the Russian Federation) and a special collection devoted to the All-Russian Union of Women’s Equality (RUWE) was also created. Thus the Soviet state recognised the contribution of the RUWE to the revolutionary movement in the past, though it did not recognise the services of its leaders in the present. The fate of the founder and principal leader of the RUWE Maria Chekhova is a good example of this double standard. In 1917 Chekhova was the director of a high school for girls and as her daughter Ekaterina later remembered “led the school through the years of chaos and ╇Kollontai (1921), p.╯3. ╇ Letter of E.╯Thshepkina to M.╯Chekhova, 22 January 1930, in Moscow Central Historical Archive, Archive of Maria Chekhova, Fund 2251, list 1, file 670. 26 27

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hunger”.28 But in 1923 she was forced to leave this post with a small pension which was reduced by half in 1932 when her husband retired and began to receive a pension too, such was the curious interpretation of the concept of gender equality by those in charge of state social security policy. As Chekhova had supported the revolutionary movement all her life and was loyal to the regime, this display of Soviet ingratitude caused severe depression and after her retirement she was seriously ill for several months. But after that she found the strength to live, and being extremely energetic, devoting her life to writing memoirs and articles on the history of women’s medical education in Russia, which were translated into English and published in the USA.╯She died in 1937. After her death her loving husband and children made great efforts to collect and order her papers and after that passed them to the Moscow Central Historical Archive.29 Alexandra Glagoleva was also faithful to the memory of the women’s suffrage movement in Russia. She was not among its leaders and only once in her life did she manage to take part in a large international suffrage event – the IWSA congress held in Budapest in 1913. But this occasion made such a great impression upon her that she kept all of its materials (postcards, leaflets, tickets, photographs) and spent many years trying to pass these artifacts, which to her were very Â�precious, to an archive or museum for storage. She achieved success at last and now these materials are kept in the Central State Archive of Art and Literature in Moscow.30 Her persistence made an impression on the archivists and that is probably why in the reference guide to the archive’s personal collections, published in 1966, she is identified as a “Russian suffragist”, a distinction not afforded to anybody else in the guide, not even the leaders of the women’s suffrage organisations.31 Former RLWE activist and popular publicist Lubov Gurevitch continued her literary activity after the Revolution. She published several articles and books, but ideological restrictions led her to a state of crisis on several occasions, rendering her incapable of writing. 28 ╇E.╯Chekhova, “Semena griadushego (zhin moei mamu)” (Seeds of the Future (life of my mother)), Moscow Central Historical Archive, Archive of Maria Chekhova, Fund 2251, list 3, file 17. 29 ╇ The papers of Maria Chekhova make up her personal archive in Moscow Central Historical Archive, Fund 2251. 30 ╇ Central State Archive of Art and Literature, Fund 1238. 31 ╇See Lichnye arkhivnyr fondy v gisydarstvennyh khranilitshah SSSR (1962-1963).

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Growing older she often fell into depression and her last letters are filled with sadness and loneliness. So we can regard the fate of female suffragists who remained in Russia after the October Revolution as a hidden tragedy. They were not persecuted even in the years of the most severe political repressions. They were allowed to continue their professional activities. But they were not allowed to be active in public life and had to change or hide their views. For most of them this was a huge source of frustration. Being active as citizens they could not restrict their lives to their professions and families only, and voluntarily undertook a large volume of unpaid work, although this was rarely recognised. Their former careers and achievements were simply forgotten. The Soviet state needed a new type of women leader who would be politically engaged but at the same time willing and able to act as a “party soldier”. The older generation of feminists did not match this type of female activist and could not adapt themselves to reproduce it. So the state preferred to forget about them and simply airbrushed the history of the women’s suffrage movement from the political history of pre-revolutionary Russia. Bibliography Corigliano N. and Nihemias C. eds. (2001) Encyclopedia of Russia Women’s Movements (Westport, Connecticut; London: 2001). de Haan F. and Daskalova, K. eds. (2006), Biographical Dictionary of Women’s MoveÂ� ments and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: 2006). Kollontai A. K (1921) Kchitatelu/Tshepkina E.╯Zhenskoe dvizhenie nakanune FrantÂ� susckoi revolutsii (Petrograd: 1921) – Preface to Tshepkina E. (1921) Zhenskoe dvizhenie nakanune Frantsusckoi revolutsii (Petrograd: 1921). KPSS (1970) KPSS v resollutsiajah i reshenijah s’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK.╯Vols. II and III (Moscow: 1970). Lenin, Vladimir I. (1973) Polnoe sobranie sotchinenii (Collected Works), Vol. 39 (Moscow: 1973). Lichnye arkhivnyr fondy v gisydarstvennyh khranilitshah SSSR.╯Ukazatel, 3 Vols. Vol. 2 (Moscow: 1962-1963). Lindenmeyr A. (2001) “The First Soviet Political Trial: Countess Sofia Panina before the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal”, The Russian Review 60 (October 2001) 505–25. Politicheskie dejateli Rossii. Biographicheskii Slovar (Moscow: 1993). Politicheskie Partii Rossi, Encyclopedia (Moscow: 1996). Rutchild G. R. (2010) Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Pittsburgh: 2010). Shnyrova, O. (2007) “Feminism and Suffrage in Russia: Women, War and Revolution, 1914-1917”, in The Women’s Movement in War Time: International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A. S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 124–40.

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Tshepkina E. (1921) Zhenskoe dvizhenie nakanune Frantsusckoi revolutsii (Petrograd: 1921). Tyrkуva-Williams, A. (Mrs. Harold Williams) (1919) From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, the first year of the Russian revolution (London: 1919). ———╯ and Williams, H. (1921) Hosts of Darkness (London: 1921). Â�Â�Â�Â�Â�Â�Â�———╯ and Zhiznґ, A. (1998) [1921]) Pushkina (The life of Pushkin) (Moscow: 1998). Women’s Mutual Aid Society (1916) Otchet Rossiyskogo Zhenskogo VzaimnoÂ� blagotvoritelnogo Obshschestva za 1915 god (Petrograd: 1916). Yukina I. (2007) Russkii Feminism kak vyzov sovremennosty (St. Petersburg: 2007).

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Women activists in Albania following independence and World War I Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson* Albania is a new nation by most European standards, and one that had a difficult beginning. As a non-belligerent it took no part in the first World War, but was nonetheless occupied and sometimes fought over by others for most of the decade following its independence. As well as defending its territorial integrity militarily, after some of the Powers which had recognised its independence in 1913 reneged two years later, it was necessary for the state to renegotiate its very existence at the Paris Peace Conference, though it was not allowed representation. By the 1920s when invaders had at last been removed from its territory, the eagerness, creativity and energy that had been held in check for so long could finally be unleashed. Women began to organise again to improve their lives. Unlike their contemporaries elsewhere, the movement as a whole did not have women’s right to vote on its agenda, though some of its members argued for it in their writings (and it was discussed in parliament in 1924). As yet, the severe restrictions imposed on women by customary law and their position within the family were foremost among the concerns of most women.

In the early twentieth century Albania was a predominantly rural society, only about one in eight of the population of about a million and a half lived in towns. There was a more limited range of civil society in Albania than in western Europe; one institution, the family (with kin) was dominant.1 The position of women in the family and society was largely defined by unwritten societal and traditional lore (the various Kanun).2 From puberty onwards women (not only Muslims) were * The contribution to this chapter by Beryl Nicholson is based on research supported by Small Grants from the British Academy and a grant from the Elisabeth Barker Fund, which are gratefully acknowledged. 1 ╇ Mitterauer, (1996). 2 ╇ Musaj (2000), p.╯24; Musaj (2003). Less importance was usually accorded the norms of family rights of the three religious communities (Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic) with which it co-existed. Albania was not an unambiguously secular society, but, like the rest of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, nor was it an Islamic society in the sense that Turkey was.

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secluded.3 In towns they wore the veil, though not in the countryside, where they had to work in the fields. Under the Ottoman Empire education had been neglected, schools teaching the Albanian language were not allowed. Hence, women (and most men) were barely educated, few could read and write. The right of women to participate in political and social activities was circumscribed. Women and the Albanian Renaissance The major figures of the Albanian Renaissance, the rather late flowering of the Albanian National Movement in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, expressed in their writings a belief in the necessity of women’s improvement, particularly through the development of education and the abolition of oppressive customs. A leading figure, Sami Frashëri, argued that the education of women was of importance not only for women, but for the nation, for they were half of it. It was women who created the family, and the family formed society.4 The social emancipation of women was therefore included in the programme of the National Movement. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a small number of women who had been educated abroad, in both east and west, started the process of turning these sentiments into reality. The most prominent among them were the sisters Sevasti and Parashqevi Qiriazi from the south-eastern town of Korçë. After returning from Istanbul on completing their own studies, they started the first school for young women with instruction in Albanian in Korçë in 1891. Eighteen years later, on 29 January 1909, influenced by the ideas of the European women’s movement, and with the support of 100 women and girls, they established the first Albanian women’s organisation, Morning Star (Yll’i Mëngjesit).5 It sought to adapt the model of the European women’s movement to the conditions of Albanian women. Their aim was to bring together women and girls to promote their interests and well-being. They considered that education was one of the main factors that would further the advancement of women and of the nation, arguing that the education of women was the first duty of society. For almost three years the association ran courses and engaged in various ╇Durham (1990), p.╯559. ╇ Çetaku (2004), pp.╯95 and 97. 5 ╇ Drita, 28 November 1937, no. 307, pp.╯1 and 7. 3 4

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other activities, until, in the face of continuous pressure from the local Turkish administration, it was forced to suspend its activities at the end of 1911.6 Independence, the Balkan Wars and World War I Albania declared its independence on 28 November 1912, and a proviÂ� sional government was formed. In 1913 the new state was internationally recognised at the Conference of London, which also deterÂ�mined its boundaries and declared that the new state should adopt a position of neutrality. Independence was seen by the Qiriazi sisters as creating the opportunity for educated women to contribute to the cause of education, especially the education of women so they would be able to know and exercise their rights, and to form women’s organisations in other towns. They applied to the government to give their orgaÂ�nisation official status and resumed their activity. However, by then ParashÂ�qevi Qiriazi no longer thought the organisation by itself could materially improve the condition of women or enable them to make their contribution to society. To do that, she believed, they had to defeat the conservative mentality that considered that women were only fit for work in the home, and they needed to convince public opinion that their role in building the new state was just as important as men’s. However, before anything could be done, events beyond the control of the AlbaÂ� nian state intervened. Notwithstanding its independence and neutrality, Albania was invaded by its neighbours in 1912, and, from then onwards was continually occupied to some degree or other by foreign armies until the end of World War I and beyond. This created problems not just for the incipient women’s movement, but for the very functioning of the state. First there were hostile invasions by Serbs and Montenegrins in the north and Greek army in the south. In May 1914 the Greeks occupied Korçë, making it impossible for the Qiriazi sisters to continue their activities, so in July, under threats from Greek guerillas, they and many other refugees left the town. Across southern Albania some 200 villages were burnt down, in some there were massacres. Several thousand of the inhabitants became refugees, some fleeing towards Vlorë, where many died of hunger.7 Inspired by the Qiriazi sisters, women in 6 7

╇ Pepo (1962), p.╯130. ╇ Frashëri (1998) p.╯84.

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Vlorë had established their own association, a few months before, in May 1914 (Shpresa Kombëtare, the National Hope).8 They helped to provide food and accommodation for the refugees. In the second half of World War I, Albania was divided between areas occupied by the Italians, the Austro-Hungarians, and the French respectively. They regarded Albania, in the words of the Austrians, as “ein okkupiertes neutrales Freundesland” (an occupied neutral friendly country);9 essentially they were colonial regimes. All the occupiers set up civilian administrations, and boasted about the Albanian schools they established. In practice they built on what Albanians were already doing.10 The armies were under orders to respect the sensibilities of the population, especially those concerning women. It seems they did, but the local population was also very successful in keeping women secluded, to the annoyance of the soldiers.11 While Albanian men were not drafted into a national army, a considerable number joined the guerilla bands who hired themselves out to competing occupying armies and spent long periods in the mountains and defending the Front Line.12 The occupiers also formed Albanian battalions to fight alongside their own troops and recruited local men for work and to provide them with transport, depriving their families of labour power.13 In a rural context, that is in most of Albania, rather than opening up new opportunities for women, this added to their already heavy workload within the self-sufficient family economy. At most it may have reinforced the (slow) process of allowing women a little more independence that had already begun in southern areas due to a century or so of work-migration within the Ottoman Empire, known by the Turkish word, kurbet.14 In the postwar period women’s lives continued much as before. In the south it was a time of rebuilding destroyed villages. In the north there was famine in the 1920s, made worse by the loss of grazing lands when the national boundary was drawn and the destruction caused by the Serbian retreat through the mountains in 1915 and their invasion in ╇ Shpresa kombëtare, May 1921, no. 4, p.╯3. ╇ Haus- Hofs- und Staatsarchiv, Austrian National Archives (HHStA) PA I 1006 Thurn an Burián Nr. 14.120, Beilage, Teschen 8/9 1916. 10 ╇Schwanke (1971), pp.╯67 and 69–71; Bourcart (1921), p.╯163; Almagia (1918), p.12. 11 ╇Nicholson (2006), pp.╯135–6. 12 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯129 and 142–3; Veith (1922), pp.╯529–32. 13 ╇Nicholson, op cit., pp.╯139–144. 14 ╇Elezi (2002), p.╯71. 8 9

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1920.15 It was therefore in the towns, notably those with the most developed links to the outside world, where there were small intellectual milieux and some women, as well as men, who were educated, that women’s activism was first able to develop.╯ Women and the peace conference of 1919 Due to the situation in which Albania found itself after World War I, the nature of the Albanian women’s movement was rather particular and differed from movements elsewhere in Europe. The activities it engaged in were concerned above all with education and promoting literacy, and with contributing to the efforts to liberate the country from invading armies, re-establish its independence, and protect its territory from the annexation intentions of neighbouring states. In 1915, before she entered the war, Italy made approaches to the Powers that had approved Albania’s independence expressing disatisfaction at the borders they had agreed. After secret negotiations, three of the Powers, the United Kingdom, France and Russia, along with Italy agreed in the secret Treaty of London that after the war sections of Albanian territory should be given to three neighbouring states, leaving only the remainder as a much smaller independent Albania. ConseÂ�quently, the borders that had been agreed in 1913 had to be negotiated again at the Paris Peace Conference. Albania was not represented, and needed to seek the support of others, notably the United States. Women did what they could to support the Albanian cause. Acting on their concerns about territories in the south claimed by the Greeks, women in the town of Gjirokaster, in the south-west, held a meeting on 15 February 1919 and wrote a letter, which they sent to Mrs Wilson, the wife of President Wilson. They told her of the massacres carried out by Greek soldiers in southern Albania between 1912 and 1914, and requested that she, together with her husband, should use their influence to achieve a just resolution of the Albanian national question at the Paris Peace Conference. “Only in this way”, they argued, “will a continuation of the shameful succession of cruel acts perpetrated by

╇Somerset County Archives, DR/DRU4/23, CCIR correspondence 1927-28, un�at�tributed document. 15

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the Greeks in the course of our history be prevented”.16 They also sent a call to the women of America asking for their support for the defence of the territorial integrity of Albania against the threat from neighbouring states.17 The sisters Sevasti and Parashqevi Qiriazi, who by now were in the USA, were leading members of Partia Politike Shqiptare (the Albanian political party), one of the organisations formed by Albanians there to fight for Albanian independence from foreign rule. Sevasti Qiriazi was its President. Throughout the Peace Conference they sent telegrams and memoranda to influential figures in the upper echelons of the American government and the chancelleries of the major European Powers. Referring to the Fourteen Points of President Wilson’s declaration, which stressed the rights of small nations and in particular their right to self-determination, they asked that a solution to the specific question of Albania should be reached at the Peace Conference. They argued that no Power should claim to exercise authority over Albania and they were determined that none should be allowed to transgress its territorial integrity. Parashqevi Qiriazi was a member of the delegation the organisation sent to Paris.18 Italian troops still occupied the area around the port of Vlorë. So in 1920 the Albanian government set in motion a popular uprising in Vlorë with participants from all over southern Albania. Women from Vlorë took part. In mid-August the Albanian authorities regained control of the town. When, in the same month, Shkodër was attacked by Serbo-Montenegrin forces, women were caught up in the determination of the population to defend the town. It gave them the impetus to form an association Gruaja Shqiptare (The Albanian Woman).19 Their main aim was to assist the Albanian soldiers and to tend the injured at the front. In August 1920 their leader, Marie Çoba, made an appeal to the people of Shkodër to assist the association in what it sought to do. She also sent a telegram to the Council of Ministers (the government) asking for financial assistance and vehicles to take the women and their supplies to the front.20 They collected clothing and money, tended the soldiers and escorted the wounded to hospital in 16 ╇ Archiv Qendror i Shtetit (Albanian National Archives) (AQSh) Fondi 847, viti 1919, dos. 93, p.╯2. 17 ╇ AQSh, Fondi 847, viti 1919, dos. 47, p.╯1. 18 ╇ Pepo (1962), p.╯87. 19 ╇ AQSh, Fondi 847, viti 1920, dos 176, p.╯1. 20 ╇ AQSh, Fondi 847, viti 1920, dos. 177, p.╯1.

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Shkodër.21 The contribution of the women of both the town’s faith groups (Catholic and Muslim, which are of about equal size) to war work is made clearly apparent in contemporary documents. In July 1921, Marie Çoba, having obtained the requisite permission from the town council, published the first issue of the association’s journal, Gruaja Shqyptare.22 The aim of the journal was to encourage the women of Shkodër to participate in war relief work. A special column was devoted to the publication of lists of the names of townspeople and the donations they had made in money or kind. Marie Çoba and other activists in the association published various articles in which they addressed the problems that were of concern to women in Albania in general and in Shkodër in particular. They were especially concerned about women’s position in the family, that her rights and freedom should be respected. They considered that women should pay particular attention to the education and upbringing of their children, especially girls, the mothers of the future. Schools ought to be of special significance, they should be seen by women as an important source of learning and upbringing. Regular school attendance by girls would help to bring about the disappearance of customs such as the withdrawal of young girls into their homes at the age of puberty. In an article with the title “The mother’s duty” she argued that “Only when girls get to complete elementary school as the boys do will our country take its place alongside the civilised nations”.23 Another article, entitled ‘Feminizmi’ (feminism), argued that the freeing of women from old customs would help them to become more capable, to be more aware of their rights and freedoms, to increase their abilities and to contribute to the development of the country alongside men.24 The author saw this evolution of women as a gradual transformation that was supported by their intellectual development and the more positive features of the Albanian character. The journal Gruaja Shqyptare was important because it was the first of its kind in Albania and it opened the way for the publications of the associations in Korçë, Vlorë and later in Tiranë (which became the capital in 1920). To help and support the women of Shkodër in their defence of the country, in December 1920 women in Tiranë formed their own asso╇Repishti (undated). ╇ This title uses a dialect form of Shqiptare which would be familiar to its readers. 23 ╇ Gruaja shqyptare, Shkodër 1920, no. 1, p.╯2. 24 ╇ Gruaja shqyptare, Shkodër 1921, no. 7, pp.╯50–1. 21 22

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ciation Gruaja Shqiptare (The Albanian Woman).25 The main aims of the association were to collect aid for the national emergency at that time, and to help women to become better educated.26 Parashqevi Qiriazi, who had returned to Albania, played an important role in organising and developing the activities of this association. Together with other educated women, she established courses in Albanian for women who could not read and write, language courses in English and French and courses to teach needlework. They organised conferences and discussions with members of the association on particular aspects of women’s lives. They also established contacts with leading figures in society and women of the town who were well off and able to contribute materially and financially to the welfare of the soldiers in Shkodër. The interest shown by women and girls in participating in the activities of the association and their willingness to make contributions to keep its work going, seemed to grow. As Parashqevi Qiriazi noted in her memoirs, ‘It is apparent that a strong desire for progress and service to the nation, has overwhelmed the hearts of all our members’.27 Political developments in Albania in the early 1920s and women’s activism By the end of 1920 foreign armies had at last been removed from Albanian soil, the boundaries as established in 1913, had been reconfirmed, removing the danger of the break-up of the country, and Albania had been admitted to the League of Nations. The first pluralist elections, using an indirect voting system, had been held (men of 20 and over could vote) and the national parliament started work in April 1921. Conditions were at last such that political, economic and social development might take place. The more progressively minded of the small urban educated elite were taking an interest in the position of women. Educated women and girls were influenced by the demands put forward by the women’s movement in European countries, and by the reforms undertaken by Mustafa Qemal Ataturk in Turkey, which

╇ Gruaja shqyptare, Shkodër 1921, no. 5, p.╯34. ╇ AQSh, Fondi 447, viti 1921, dos. 42, p.╯1. 27 ╇ Ibid. 25 26

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improved the position of women in the family and society in general.28 They played an active part in this process. Some of those who had returned from serving in the administration of the Ottoman Empire, and who came to play important roles in the new state, had also been influenced by progressive thinking on the rights of women that was to be found in the centre of the old empire and elsewhere. They were critical of what they termed “bad customs”, such as polygamy and the veil.29 Migrants who had gone to those parts of the Ottoman Empire that were first to gain independence, then, after 1884, especially from Korçë, went back and forth to the United States, were exposed to new political ideas, and to other new ideas about women’s place in society. They were impressed that women worked outside the home and were economically independent of their husbands, some even thought that Albanian girls should be brought up to do the same.30 The fledgling press of the time was open to discussion of the broad questions relating to women. It covered matters such as level of education, a woman’s position of inequality in relation to her husband in the family, especially in marriage, her position in society, the right to work, and to vote. In addition, in parliament in the years 1921-1924, whole sittings were devoted to the rights and freedoms of women. At the insistence of liberal-democratic opinion a draft law granting women the right to vote, and also to divorce, and to inherit equally with men, was prepared for debate, but it was rejected by the conservative majority in parliament.31 A greater number of women than before became active in the field of education and the organisation of their associations. The town of Korçë was again an important centre of women’s activism in the 1920s. After the Qiriazi sisters left for the USA in 1914, the running of the women’s association was taken over by the teachers at the girls’ school. On 6 April 1919 they established the women’s association

╇Basbugu-Yaraman (2006). ╇Berkes, ([1964] 1998), pp.╯385–6; Selenica (1928), p.╯CXVII. A Muslim Congress in Tiranë in 1923 decided that monogamy ought to be legally enforced and wearing of the veil should no longer be obligatory for women, see Swire (1929), p.413. Though Muslim clerics pronounced on it, wearing the veil was a social, urban custom, observed irrespective of religion. Less than five percent of marriages, most of them in rural areas, were polygamous, Nicholson (2006b), pp.╯45–57. See also Basbugu-Yaraman, op.╯cit. 30 ╇ Pepo (1962), p.╯146; Demo (1960), pp.╯7, 8 and 10. 31 ╇ Musaj (1995). 28 29

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Përlindja (Renaissance).32 Two years later they drew up their formal statutes and obtained official recognition.33 The first paragraph of the statutes stated that the main aim of the association was to make instruction in the Albanian language available to women in the town of Korçë and its surrounding district. It should concern itself with the promotion of national consciousness among its members and their supporters, for the development of affection, respect, friendship and tolerance among women of diverse faiths. It should assist poor women to find employment and give their daughters the opportunity to attend school regularly.34 In 1922 the association published its journal, Mbleta (The Bee),35 eight issues of which appeared. Its articles reported the activities of the association and special sections were devoted to such matters as women’s education and family health and hygiene. Also in 1920 a women’s association, Shenja e përmirësimit (Signs of improvement) was established in the town of Gjirokastër on the initiative of a local teacher, Urani Rumbo. Its purpose was also to provide education in Albanian for women and girls.36 On 16 January 1921, under the leadership if its founder, Marigo Posjo, the association Shpresa Kombëtare was relaunched in Vlorë.37 The aim of the association was the advancement and enlightenment of women. At the same time they decided to publish a journal with the same name, Shpresa Kombëtare, the first number of which appeared in February 1921. Another association, one with a charitable purpose, was established in Korçë in June 1922, Çvillimi (Development). It sought to give material assistence to school pupils and poor people in the district of Korçë, to improve the circumstances of its members and work for the development of their minds and bodies.38 Of all the women’s associations that were established at this time, the one that stands out most, for its activities as well as its size, was the first mentioned, Përlindja, in Korçë. More than 300 members and others who supported its aims participated in its activities39. They extended the organisation into the rural areas around Korçë by setting up branches of the association, eleven in all, in the villages. This was a ╇ Pepo (1962), p.╯164. ╇ Ibid. 34 ╇ Ibid. 35 ╇ Mbleta, Korçë, 1922. 36 ╇ AQSh. Fondi 152, viti 1920, dos. 488, p.╯1. 37 ╇ Shpresa kombëtare, Vlorë 1921. 38 ╇ AQSh. Fondi 647, viti 1921, dos. 123. 39 ╇Godart (1922), p.╯109. 32 33

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significant achievement as it opened the way to emancipation to women in the villages, who endured difficult conditions, and where the old patriarchal concept of custom was strong. In her memoirs, the leader of the association, Evdhoksi Gërmenji, stressed that all through the work of building branches of the association in the villages women in the villages were waiting for this initiative. “Village women”, she wrote, “came together gladly and easily, because the village woman has remained in the obscurity of ignorance for centuries, she has been eager for enlightenment, and has a great desire to leave backwardness behind and to set off along the road of advancement”.40 The association further extended its aims to include assisting the setting up of associations in other towns and to establishing links between them. They were not satisfied with merely running courses teaching Albanian within the association, but made efforts to open girls’ schools both in the town and in the surrounding districts. To do this they formed links with various influential figures within the country and abroad. So, for example, having noticed that the representatives of the evangelical church of the USA in Korçë were taking an interest in the activities of the association, they applied to them for financial support to set up a university for women in Korçë.41 In addition, they established the first contacts with women’s associations among Albanians in the USA, Romania and Egypt,42 with whom they exchanged statutes, and sought to become acquainted with their activities and experiences. In 1921 Përlindja organised a reception for a visiting Swiss couple, Professor and Mrs Pittard. After informing to them about the aims and activities of the association, the association’s leader expressed the desire to establish links and collaboration with the Union of Geneva Women (Union des Femmes de Geneve). After her return to Geneva Mrs Pittard wrote back to the women in Korçë that the Union was interested to hear of the activities of their association and would be happy to maintain links with them. The chairperson of the Union also wrote to them expressing her belief in the importance of exchanging experiences.43 With the expansion of the activities and the growth of Përlindja, direction and development of the association’s activities became more difficult. Therefore a group of Korçë activists decided to break away ╇ Cited in Musaj (2002), p.╯118. ╇ Musaj (2002), p.╯120. 42 ╇ Pepo (1962), p.╯146. 43 ╇ Posta e Korçës, 20 September 1921, no. 47, p.╯1. 40 41

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and create another association, Bashkimi i Zonjave Shqiptare (The Union of Albanian Ladies (sic)). Its aims included teaching Albanian, raising the cultural level of its members and sympathisers and translating world literature into Albanian.44 Finally, on 24 March 1924, an association of women with the name Shqiptarka (the Albanian Woman), the most radical and political of all the women’s organisations, was established in Tiranë. Besides making a demand for education for the instruction of its members, it directed its efforts at freeing women from every vice and tradition that damaged morale, health and their advancement, raising the level of respect for the institutions and laws of the state among its members and supporters, and instilling respect for national sentiments and the different regions of the country.45 In addition it supported the ideas of the women in Korçë, and work for the extension women’s organisations to more towns, for the reinvigoration of existing associations and the creation of a central national organisation able to coordinate the activities of the women’s movement in the country as a whole.46 During this time, the political situation continued to be volatile. The activists of the association supported the liberal-democratic political faction. Its programme included the improvement of women’s position in the family and society, and its leading figures were prominent supporters of moves in parliament to give women the vote.47 When a deputy from this faction, Avni Rustemi, was murdered in April 1924 they took part in the protests that were organised in Tirana. Then, by successfully staging a revolution against the sitting government, the liberal-democratic factions, under the bishop Fan Noli, succeeded in taking over the government in June 1924. This government was, however, short-lived. In December 1924, Ahmed Zogolli staged another revolution. Shqiptarka’s leadership, with its members and supporters, organised a meeting in support of the threatened government, but it was too late. The supporters of Zogolli entered Tirana on 24 December 1924,48 and political power reverted to the conservative factions. Albania was declared a Republic, and on 31 January Zogolli (who ╇ AQSh, Fondi 617, viti 1922, dos. 45, p.╯1; Koha, July 1922, no. 87, p.1. ╇ Bashkimi, 4 November 1924, no. 25, p.╯2. 46 ╇ Ibid. 47 ╇ A handful of male politicians from this faction even demanded the introduction of women’s suffrage during discussions about the draft law for elections to the constituent assembly in August 1923, including Ali Kelcyra, Stavro Vinjau, Fan Noli, Hile Mosi and Luigj Gurakuqi. 48 ╇ AQSh, Fondi 195, dos 43, viti1925, f 1. 44 45

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shortened his name to Zog) was unanimously elected President. On 1 September 1928, he declared Albania a monarchy, and himself king. The years of early optimism were at an end. The takeover of women’s organisations by the state Once he had taken power, Zog took measures to establish order and centralise power. This included a decision to close down the women’s associations.49 They were to be replaced by a single, centralised organisation. This decision was opposed by activists, who sent the President a letter in which they made clear their view that the decision of the government was mistaken. They argued that the women’s associations were the only bodies that took responsibility for the cultural development of women and, as such, they ought to be left free to run their activities.50 The women’s displeasure was raised in the press and they received support from sympathetic politicians. The latter recognised the part played by the associations in women’s advancement and development, and considered the government’s decision to close them a backward step.51 Demands for political rights for women, on the other hand, were, they believed, inadmissible and premature, the result of foreign influences. Women were advised to stay away from politics, and instead to direct their efforts towards the development of education and culture, and improving health education for women.52 The task of setting up the new official women’s organisation was assigned to the Ministry of the Interior; local authorities were to organise branches in their own localities. Colonies of Albanians living abroad were encouraged to establish branches too.53 The leader was always to be the head of the Albanian Red Cross, who was appointed by royal decree.54 The organisation, which was called Gruaja shqiptare (the Albanian woman), was founded in October 1928, under the patronage of the Queen Mother, with Zog’s eldest sister, Princess Sanije, at its head. The aims of the organisation were to engage in work that promoted education, hygiene and charitable activities, to raise ╇ Fletorja zyrtare, 26 January 1925, no. 2, p.╯1. ╇ AQSh, Fondi 249, viti 1925, dos. I-617. 51 ╇ Demokratia, 31 December 1927, no. 135, p.╯4. 52 ╇ Ibid. 53 ╇ AQSh, Fondi 646, viti 1928, dos. 121, p.╯5. Musaj (2003). 54 ╇ Ibid. 49 50

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Albanian women to a higher cultural level, and to support and develop handicrafts.55 Well-educated women with previous experience of the women’s movement, including Parashqevi Qiriazi, succeeded in gaining election to leading positions. By the end of 1930 twenty branches had been established, notably in the towns where the women’s movement was already most active. As well as continuing the organisation of courses in literacy, the association was much concerned with the question of the employment of women. It also gave support to the reforms undertaken by the government in the educational, legislative and social fields in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular they campaigned on, and influenced, a law for educational reform and contributed to its implementation. Between 1929 and 1931 the association published the journal Shqiptarja (The Albanian [f]),56 with contributions from, among others, the Qiriazi sisters. What distinguished this journal from earlier women’s publications were the polemical articles that sought to refute conservative thinking that was opposed to the women’s movement and its demands. Yet while the women continued to be influenced by the women’s movement elsewhere in Europe, with their calls for rights and freedoms for women, especially in the political sphere, demands for the right to vote faded into the background. During these years it found less support than the other concerns of the women’s movement. The Civil Code More positively, legislative reforms in this period were important for the improvement of the position of women in the family and society. The elaboration and adoption of various legal codes, especially the Civil Code (Kodi civil), based on the Swiss model, in 1928,57 but also the Criminal Code the same year, and the extension of the judicial system to the whole territory of Albania, put an end to the investigation of civil cases according to customary law or religious courts. The Civil Code marked the change in women’s legal position in the family. She was granted the right to divorce58 and equality with her ╇ AQSh, Fondi 847, viti 1929, dos. 43, p.╯4. ╇ Shqiptarja, Tiranë 1929. 57 ╇ Musaj (2003b); Kodi Civil (1928). 58 ╇ Musaj (2003b), p.83; Kodi Civil (1928), para. 203–208. 55 56

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husband in the right to inheritance.59 Young women were given the right to have their approval sought to an engagement,60 the right of fathers, brothers and cousins to arrange betrothals of under-age girls was abolished, and the legal age for marriage was set at 16 years for women and 18 years for men. The principle of monogamy was established and it was made illegal for a man to marry more than one woman.61 For all the improvements in the position of women, the Civil Code had a number of shortcomings. For example, it did not include the right to vote for women, and it placed limitations on women’s right to employment. Nonetheless, it was a positive achievement for its time. Putting it into practice, however, met with difficulties and obstructions; the country’s weak economy, poor social conditions and customary law, which still held sway in Albanian society, were major obstacles to progress. The journal Shqiptarja, published by the association Gruaja shqiptare, devoted considerable space to discussing the laws that made up the Civil Code, which, in its view, was one of the most advanced of its kind, inspired by the most modern principles of the time. The concern that motivated the authors was that women should become acquainted with the legal provisions of the code and to seek to put them into practice. To achieve this, they argued that a struggle against old customs and mentalities in society as a whole was necessary, but those mentalities were also rooted in the very soul of women themselves. Women should be freed from customary law which had defined their unequal position in the family and society and insist on the implementation of the new laws. In March 1937 the law for abolition of the veil came into effect. Women were forbidden to cover their faces wholly or in part by any means and violations were punishable with fines or even deprivation of liberty.62 The leadership of the Muslim community stated that “in the twentieth century in the middle of Europe, when we see that we only have minor religious prohibitions, we should adapt to all the good practices of the civilised nations”.63 They were speaking for those of all faiths who had adhered to the use of the veil in the past. ╇ Kodi Civil (1928), para. 457. ╇ Ibid., para.114. 61 ╇ Ibid., para. 123. 62 ╇ AQSh, Fondi 58, viti 1937, dos. 69, pp.╯1–4. 63 ╇ Musaj (2003b), p.╯88. 59 60

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The women’s movement came into being later in Albania than in other parts of Europe. At the same time, it faced challenges that many others were spared, at least in western Europe. It had to run the gauntlet of political changes in both the international and national arenas which for a short time were favourable to women, but for the most part were not helpful. In the final years of Ottoman rule obstacles were put up by an out-dated regime, as in the rest of the Empire, but the difficulties of the first years of independence were much greater. The repeated incursions of neighbouring armies into Albania, before, during and after World War I, and the stubborn persistence of some foreign occupations meant that women divided their time and energy between assisting in various ways the struggle for Albania’s independence and the liberation of the country from foreign invaders, and their own interests. In the latter especially, some women showed considerable political astuteness, a quality that they needed, and made use of, to continue their work for the advancement of women during the vicissitudes of the post-war years. In a small country with small towns and few educated women, the number of activists could also only be small, and they faced challenges not known in the west. One of their major concerns, literacy, was shared by others, and especially the teachers of the time (women teachers were prominent among the activists), who showed great commitment in taking education to remote villages. They were also quite isolated. Women communicated with one another in different towns in spite of a far from complete road system, few vehicles, no railways and no telephones, just a telegraph and the post. The European women’s movement was a constant source of inspiration that they measured themselves against. Women who had been educated abroad, a small elite, had had an opportunity to learn what women were doing elsewhere; it is hardly a coincidence that most activism was in towns with outward links, especially Korçë. However, it is evident from the importance attached to a foreign visitor, or a letter, that they often had to clutch at such straws as were offered. Yet they doggedly persevered. What we see all the way through this account is how shrewd and pragmatic they were. If the way to one form of advancement, notably the right to vote, was all but blocked, they did not use up valuable energy pursuing it, they directed their

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efforts where they could find support among others and there was a better chance of positive achievements. In the first years of the 1920s hopes for legislation to improve the position of women, which were probably over-optimistic, were dashed, but the more modest measures of the Civil Code, the difficulties of implementing them notwithstanding, were firmly anchored and could be built on in future. On the other hand, with the removal of the right to form their own independent associations they lost an essential freedom, though one they encountered pragmatically, using, and extending, such opportunities as the state organisation allowed. Also, in 1933 a new law making private schools illegal forced the closure of the schools they had founded. The removal of these rights was a half step back, but nonetheless, some substantial steps forward had been made. Bibliography Almagia, R. (1918) “Il territorio d’occupazione italiana in Albania e l’opera dell’Italia”, Rivista coloniale, XIII (1918) 4–14. Basbugu-Yaraman, A (2006) La femme turque dans son parcours émancipatoire (de l'empire ottoman à la république). Cemoti, 21 (2006), http://cemoti.revues.org/ document556.html Berkes, N ([1964]1968) The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: [1964] 1998). Bourcart, J (1921) L’Albanie et les Albanais (Paris: 1921). Çetaku, D. (2004) “Sami Frashëri për emancipimin e gruas”, Perla, IX (2004) 91–7. http://www.iranalbania.ir/files/document/14592/010_Sami%20Frashëri%20 për%20emancipimin%20e%20gruas_Drita%20Cetaku.doc Demo, C. A. (1960) The Albanians in America, the first arrivals (Boston: 1960). Durham, M.E. (1990) Brenga e Ballkanit dhe vepra të tjera për Shqipërinë dhe shqiptarët (Tiranë 1990). Elezi, I. (2002) E drejta zakonore e Labërisë (Tiranë: 2002). Frashëri, M. (1998) Çështja e Epirit (Tiranë: 1998). Kodi Civil [Civil Code] (Vlorë: 1928). Mitterauer, M (1996) “Family Contexts: the Balkans in European Comparison”, History of the Family, 1 (1996) 387–406. Musaj, F. (1995) “Probleme të gruas në parlamentin shqiptar (1921-1924)”, Studime historike, (1995) 59–72. ———╯ (2002) Gruaja në Shqipëri 1912-1939 (Tiranë: 2002). ———╯ (2002b) “Lëvizja për organizimin e gruas shqiptare në diasporë (1912-1939)”, Studime Historike (2002) 29–40. ———╯ (2003) “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Frau zu Beginn des 20 Jahrhunderts”, Österreichische Osthefte, 45 (2003) 151–75. ———╯ (2003b) “Të drejtat e gruas në legjislacionin shqiptar (1925-1939)”, Studime historike, (2003) 79–90.

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Nicholson, B. (2006) “L'occupazione austro-ungarica di Mallakastër in Albania e le sue ripercussioni sulla popolazione civile”, in La violenza contro i civili durante la Grande guerra. Deportati, profughi, internati, ed. B.╯Bianchi (Milano: 2006) 127– 46. ———╯ (2006b) “Women who shared a husband: polygyny in Southern Albania in the early twentieth century” History of the Family 11(2006) 45–57. http://www. beryl-nicholson.co.uk/documents/nicholson_2006.pdf Pepo, P (1962) Kujtime të grave veterane (Tiranë: 1962). Repishti, Xh. (undated) Lufta për mbrojtjen e Shkodrës (1919-1920) (unpublished manuscript). Schwanke, R. (1971) “Das albanische Schulwesen und Österreich-Ungarn während des I. Weltkrieges” Dissertationes albanicae 13 (1971) 62–77. Selenica, T (1928) Shqipria më 1927, vol. 1 (Tiranë: 1928). Swire, J. (1929) Albania. The rise of a kingdom (London: 1929). Veith, G. (1922) “Der Feldzug in Albanien” in Der große Krieg 1914-1918, ed. M.╯Schwarte, 10 Vols. (Leipzig: 1922) Vol 5, 511–58.

A bitter-sweet victory

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A bitter-sweet victory: Feminisms in France (1918-1923) Christine Bard* Although France emerged as one of the chief victor powers in the war, it had to pay a terrible price. In particular it had the highest casualty rate of all the belligerent armies, with over 1.32 million soldiers (16.6% of all those who served) killed and a further one million or more returning home with injuries which left them permanently crippled. 600,000 war widows and 750,000 orphans were also rendered reliant on state support after the death of the main family breadwinner, while up to three million immigrants were needed to plug the serious labour shortages which emerged in the post-war economy.1 Once the true extent of the material devastation in the ten newly-liberated départements of the north and east became known, anti-German feeling rose even higher, feeding into popular demands for a “just” and harsh treatment of the former aggressor. The French women’s movement, and French women in general, were not immune to this process of cultural remobilisation in the aftermath of the war. However, as women did not win the vote here, they were not directly responsible for the landslide victory of the Bloc National in the parliamentary elections of November 1919. This alliance of centre and right-wing parties made it their top priority in foreign affairs to ensure the rigorous enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles, including the payment of reparations by Germany, a policy which culminated in the Ruhr occupation of 1923.

Feminists in France were to share in the mass jubilation of 11 NovemÂ� ber 1918. Despite part of the country having been invaded, and despite extraordinarily heavy losses in human terms, the French soldiers, known familiarly as les poilus, had shown their ability to “hold out”. French feminists were proud of this, and did not neglect to attribute a share of the responsibility for this victory to themselves.2 Feminist associations had taken part in the wartime domestic political truce, the union sacrée (sacred union); they had sustained the ideological mobil*╇Translated from the French by Terry J.╯Bradford. 1 ╇ Figures from McMillan (1992), p.╯79. 2 ╇Bard (1995). The present article is a synthesis of a part of this book, which was based on my thesis.

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isation of people, they had organised lots of projects which would prove useful behind the lines, and they had agreed to put their struggle for women’s rights on hold. As a result, their expectations were greater than they otherwise might have been. However, after the war, returning to a mode of protest would prove problematic: they were, henceforth, integrated into the state machine, and had confirmed their talents in the domain of managing private projects.3 From this time on, indeed, they were to demand a little more equality with men in the name of the “duties” rather than the “rights” of women. At the same time, given the extent to which the post-war years were to reinforce conservatism, not least in regard to the continuity of sacrificial demands from wartime to peace, it is difficult to equate any of this with the process of cultural demobilisation. The Conseil national des femmes françaises (National Council of French Women), founded in 1901, was the keystone of the feminist world. As a federation of associations, before the war it had represented the more moderate wing; after the war, it would represent the centre. On the right, in Catholic and bourgeois circles, which had until then been hostile to feminism, the Union nationale pour le vote des femmes (National Union for the Vote for Women) would be formed. Indeed, it was founded in 1920, just after the declaration of Pope Benedict XV supporting the political rights of women (15 July 1919). On the other hand the feminist left, which made up the radical wing of the movement, would from this time be separated from the proreform centre. The split began in 1915, with regard to participation in the pacifist International Congress of Women at The Hague. The few radical feminists intent on taking part were excluded. As the authorities had banned people from leaving the country, not a single French woman would attend the Congress which founded the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP). A small French section of the ICWPP was formed very quickly, nonetheless, thanks to Gabrielle Duchêne (1870-1954): it was to be called the Committee of Women of la Rue Fondary (which was their address in Paris). Under close police surveillance, its activities were limited. Even so, feminist school teachers active within their union, the CGT (the General Workers’ Confederation), became prime targets during the harsh government crackdown on so-called “defeatist” elements in ╇ For Thébaud (1992), the war brought about the “nationalisation of women”, to which women themselves contributed. 3

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1917 and 1918. This, however, was in no way comparable to what was happening in Germany, where pacifism developed on a much larger scale.4 The split in the French feminist movement would prove very difficult to overcome. It took the growing danger of fascism for some formerly warring sisters to be reunited, from 1934 onwards. The year 1917, marked by the end of the union sacrée, the resumption of social conflict, the Russian Revolution, and widespread exhaustion behind the lines and at the front, witnessed the awakening of revolutionary feminism. This feminism would enjoy a few good years, flirting with the young French Communist Party (PCF), founded in 1920. Against the centre-right parties, which had been victorious in the first postwar elections in November 1919, there stood a resolute leftist opposition which provided the most radical feminists with a space for action. Activists of some standing and stature, like Madeleine Pelletier (18741939) and Hélène Brion (1882-1962), were very quick off the mark to travel to Soviet Russia. Their influence in the communist movement was not negligible. When it came to the world of French feminism, there was thus an overlap of several different groups: they corresponded to different political paths, and varying degrees of feminism, ranging from the moderate to the radical, as much in terms of their means as their ends. This entrenched division augured badly for the feminists’ chances of success. In addition to the fundamental struggles for political, civil, and professional equality, moreover, there came a new dimension which would take up a lot of time and energy: pacifism. Post-war pacifisms At the start of the 1920s, the pacifist wave made itself manifest in the creation of women’s and feminist associations covering the whole spectrum of anti-war sensibilities. Feminists who had accepted the “lawful war” against Germany were now standing up for a “lawful peace”. In 1920, they founded the Union féminine pour la Société des Nations (Women’s Union for the League of Nations). Indeed, it was by means of this body that their desire for disarmament (morally, to begin with, and then materially) and an international police authority 4

╇ Cf. Wilmers (2008).

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which would carry out the decisions of the International Justice Court, could be achieved. French feminists had a particular interest in supporting the League of Nations which was typically ahead of French legislation when it came to law in the workplace, civil law, and the regulation of prostitution. However, the Women’s Union for the League of Nations was an association (funded by the French Foreign Office) which sought above all to mobilise people throughout society – including women – to support this new supranational institution, and to see it as a guarantor of the peace settlement. All of the leading figures of this association had been enthusiastic patriots during the war. Germaine Malaterre-Sellier (1889-1967), who had been injured and who was decorated for her acts of bravery, was the very symbol of this: she had a leading role in the “Peace” section of the National Council of French Women as well as the Women’s Union for the League of Nations (of which she was Vice-President). Women belonging to this circle were the ones who led the big associations such as the National Council of French Women and the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Union for Suffrage for Women), which was run by Cécile Brunschvicg (18771946). It was women such as these who represented France in international feminist associations.5 In 1919, they organised a Conference of Inter-Allied Women, which took place in Paris at the same time as the Peace Conference. One of its outcomes was the announcement of women’s admission to the League of Nations. In 1919, the idea of welcoming women from former enemy countries to their country was inconceivable, as far as French women were concerned. Yet in 1920 they were to encounter German women at the Congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Geneva, where the new League of Nations also had its headquarters. Three years later, the same association met in Rome, benefiting from the welcome extended by Mussolini. On this occasion, as the procession formed, French pride was doubly put to the test: as the French government had not deigned to send an official delegation, the French representatives were put at the back of the queue, together with “unofficial countries”. Only in 1926, when the Congress took place in Paris, would the French section reestablish dialogue with their German counterparts. In so doing, they had taken no risks whatsoever: Germany had by then been admitted to the League of Nations, and 5

╇Bard (1998a).

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France, since the victory of the centre-left Cartel des Gauches in the May 1924 elections, was pursuing a policy of rapprochement. Proreform feminists were in agreement with the policies of the new government. And yet if reconciliation came about, it was above all due to the concessions granted by the Germans: for example, the French members of the IWSA did not oppose the Allied occupation of the Rhineland, which continued until 1930. In 1919, the pacifists of the Committee of Women of la Rue Fondary had established a French section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). This was a new international association founded at the International Congress of Women in Zurich in May 1919. Two French delegates had attended that congress and returned having taken the oath to work towards the union of women “in order that war may never more dishonour humanity”. Jeanne Mélin (1877-1964), a pacifist from the beginning of the war, shook the hand of the leader of the German section, Lida Gustava Heymann (1868-1943), and paid tribute to the courage of the German pacifists “who have saved the honour of their fatherland”.6 The number of members in the French section was very disappointing: in 1926, there were only 500 of them. By contrast, in Britain there were 4,000; in Germany, 5,000; and in Denmark, 10,000. The small size of the French section was doubtless due to its overtly political outlook which was, nonetheless, comparable to that of the German section. In neighbouring countries, it was easier to rally women on the basis of moral appeals linked to religious culture and practices, but in France (and Germany) pacifism remained politically highly contentious. The French section of the WILPF was also attacked by critics of the Communist Party, to which it was quite close. It suffered on the one hand because it was not under the direct control of the PCF, and on the other, because exclusive pacifism seemed idealistic, if not naïve.7 Small in size, the French section nonetheless took part in the 1919 6 ╇ Letter from Jeanne Mélin to Cécile Brunschvicg, 22 May 1919, in Correspondance de Jeanne Mélin, fonds Bouglé, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. See also Wilmers (2008), pp.╯73–4. 7 ╇ In 1927, the French section of the WILPF would come under the control of the Communist Party when it agreed to join the Union fraternelle des femmes contre la guerre (Fraternal Union of Women Against War), which had been set up by the Party. Only in 1934, at the end of a long period as a communist fellow traveller, would Gabrielle Duchêne become leader of the French section of a new organistion, the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (World Committee of Women Against War and Fascism): this, at last, would constitute a mass organisation.

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Comité français de secours aux enfants d’Europe (French Committee to provide aid to children in Europe), and intervened in Russia in 1921. From January 1923, at the start of the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops, the French section would rise to the call of the German section. Andrée Jouve managed child sponsorship schemes as a way of supporting the substantial passive resistance movement which had formed in Germany. For the women of the WILPF, the priority was to bring about a rapprochement between France and Germany. At the invitation of Lida Gustava Heymann, they travelled to Germany on numerous occasions. Gabrielle Duchêne, for example, visited Stuttgart as early as 1920. The WILPF demanded complete disarmament and the revision of the Paris treaties in order to guarantee lasting peace. As time went on, its feminist leanings were less and less in evidence, although it did continue to be a women’s association led by feminists. A more uncompromising form of pacifism would be defended by the Ligue des femmes contre la guerre (League of Women Against War), which was set up in 1921 in Paris. Its founder was Madeleine Vernet (1878-1949), a radical campaigner with a background in pre1914 anarchist groups who was keenly supportive of mothers’ rights and absolute pacifism. Her entourage consisted of activists brought together under the auspices of La Voix des femmes (The Voice of Women), a revolutionary, feminist, and pacifist newspaper created in 1917. Amongst them was Hélène Brion, a school teacher, feminist, socialist and trade unionist (she had run the trade-union federation of school teachers during the war), who had risen to fame as a result of her trial for defeatism at the Paris War Council in March 1918. Having lost her job, she was available to serve the cause. The League had no more than a thousand or so members. Indeed, it found itself competing with Gabrielle Duchêne’s association: they shared the demand for complete disarmament, but the League, with its more libertarian sensibility, was also self-avowedly anti-militarist and intent on opposing the war-mongering education given to children. With the last war in mind, the League was opposed to any work of a social nature in the event of a new conflict: the reasoning was that even the humblest of jobs contributed to the prolongation of hostilities. Relying on activists who were already involved in other movements and had precious little time to spare, the League of Women against War only lasted as an organisation until 1923. Within it, two analyses of the relationship between feminism, gender, and pacifism can be

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discerned. The dominant position was that of Madeleine Vernet, expressed in the monthly newspaper that she founded in 1917: La Mère éducatrice (The Educator). This newspaper was dedicated to “the unknown mother of the unknown soldier”. This clever turn of phrase was an ironic comment on official commemorations of the war dead, and in particular on the Armistice Day celebrations on 11 November 1920, when an unknown soldier was solemnly entombed beneath the Arc de Triomphe.8 Vernet’s pacifism went on to develop a mystical character: she would emphasise the “salutary mission” of women, demand the “sanctification” of motherhood, and ask women to help men to explore the roads to forgiveness and kindness. Her feminism went hand in hand with a maternalistic vision of the world, in which the “feminine” principle of life stood in opposition to the “masculine” principle of death. Assuming pacifism to be an innate quality of the second sex, Vernet would state that “we need only to be women in order to think as one and feel with one heart on this question”.9 Hélène Brion could not subscribe to such a naturalistic and sentimental vision. Her political views were different: she had joined the Communist Party in 1920. She was not a mother, she lived with a woman, and she was not far removed from the theories of Madeleine Pelletier concerning the “virilisation” of women. She did not give priority to pacifism, but rather saw pacifism as the logical extension of her feminism. This was, moreover, the defence that she had chosen to use before the War Council, and this decision had done her cause no harm at all. Hélène Brion also had her own newspaper, created in 1919: La Lutte féministe (The Feminist Struggle). She made the point that in war, as in peace, political power remained in the hands of men. The ruling system, she argued, was necessarily “masculinist” and “bourgeois”. As far as she was concerned, the obvious way forward was that offered by feminist internationalism, given that women have no fatherland. Her position was that of the great supporter of suffrage, Hubertine Auclert (1848-1914): “If there is war between individuals and nations, it is because there is war between the sexes; only by 8 ╇ The ten or so feminists who demonstrated on 20 August 1970 at the Arc de Triomphe did so referring to “the unknown wife of the soldier”. The event is seen as the date on which the French wing of the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement was born. Although there is no evidence here of any cultural transmission between first and second wave feminism, or between Madeleine Vernet and Christine Delphy, the same idea had more or less reappeared. 9 ╇ Madeleine Vernet, “Appel aux femmes!” (Appeal to Women!), La Mère éducatrice, January 1921.

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becoming citizens will French women be sure of having a fatherland”.10 Written before the Great War, and reprinted in a collection of articles in 1923, this quotation had strange reverberations, as the war had given a striking demonstration of the dissociation between patriotism and citizenship.╯ This approach to female gender as defined by the deprivation of rights and power, and by the status of victim, had little effect: maternalistic pacifism, on the other hand, which was based on the belief in difference between the sexes, was more widely accepted. In particular it was taken up by mixed pacifist associations, in which men dominated, but which did not neglect to recruit women. From the beginning of the 1920s, the pacifist propaganda of women, therefore, was based on a naturalistic discourse, namely: “woman” is a pacifist by nature. The degree of naturalisation/essentialisation of the female was in direct proportion to the degree of ultra-pacifism: but on a general level, no historical event would call into question the mission assigned to the sex “which gives life” – not even the rise of new perils in the 1930s.11 “Long live the Republic all the same!” – the fight for the vote The specificity of women would also become increasingly prominent in arguments in favour of political equality. At the start of the century, the conquest of citizenship became the priority for French and international women’s associations alike. The civilian mobilisation witnessed during the Great War raised hopes for a quick victory among supporters of female suffrage. Shortly after the armistice, women in the majority of powers in the west had obtained voting rights. In France, hopes for victory seemed reasonable. The Chamber of Deputies was opened by its most senior member, Jules Siegfried, the husband of the president of the National Council of French Women. He requested the vote for women in the name of their admirable attitude during the war. A bill granting women the same political rights as men was accepted by the Chamber on 20 May 1919 by 334 votes to 97. The Senate, however, would delay in moving on to discuss the bill. On 21 November 1922, after three years of delaying tactics, the Senate rejected suffrage for women by 158 votes to 134. The president of the French Ligue des Droits de la Femme (League for the Rights of 10 11

╇ Auclert (1923), pp.╯371 and 385. ╇Kandel (2004).

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Women), the solicitor Maria Vérone (1874-1938), was unceremoniously removed from the gallery after shouting, “Long live the Republic all the same!”. Shortly afterwards, on 4 December, the Chamber came up with a new bill for voting rights limited to women aged thirty and above, as was the case in Britain. Other bills would follow, notably designed to link the vote for women to family suffrage: this served to spread great confusion in debates. A purely local vote for women (for the local elections of 1925) was also proposed. Moderate, pro-reform feminists lobbied parliament extensively, but were reluctant to use more radical forms of action (such as the methods used by Maria Vérone’s League from 1927-8 onwards). This would involve, for example, demonstrating in the streets, despite this being banned repeatedly by the French Interior Ministry. The coming-and-going between ministers and senators would continue to the end of the Third Republic in 1940.12 No government would take the risk of making a decision over this sensitive subject. It was thanks to an exceptional situation – the forthcoming liberation from Nazi occupation – that political equality was finally agreed, on 21 April 1944. A stormy debate saw continued opposition between those for and against the vote for women within the State Reform Commission which had met in Algiers in March 1944. At this time, the need for France to fall in line with western democracies weighed more heavily than the desire to correct an inequality. The “reward” granted to the women of the Resistance for their heroic service to the nation during the Second World War thus erased the memory of the pre-1940 struggles for suffrage: those struggles were now considered too painful a reminder of the Third Republic, which had died in the shame of military defeat in 1940, and was preferably forgotten. And yet for radical feminists at the start of the 1920s, it was unimaginable that the dead-lock could continue until 1944. If citizenship was an absolute priority for all feminists, the tactics and strategies of supporters of suffrage varied considerably and in revealing ways. It was not enough to state the natural right of women to citizenship.╯During the inter-war period, activists concentrated on the specificity of the political behaviour of women, and extolled the virtues of the sexes cooperating in order to better manage society. Likewise, in parliament, oratorical sparring was filled with both

12

╇ Cf. Hause and Kenney (1984); and Smith (1996).

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misogynistic and “philogynistic” clichés regarding the “nature of women”. Anti-feminism was very much in evidence.13 This was not the only explanation for what must be seen as the late arrival of suffrage to France: many centre-left radicals also set out to obstruct it. Their party, for example, was the last to accept female members, in 1924. The fear of clericalism – i.e. that women were more influenced by the Church than men – played its part in this, so that in effect the middle-class republican left was guilty of prioritising electoral calculation above the principle of political equality. As for the French Socialist Party (SFIO), it had written female suffrage into its programme as early as 1906, thanks to Madeleine Pelletier. However, in practice it was reluctant to promote this principle and indeed went on to welcome the decision of the Second International to ban socialist support for feminist militancy. Instead, a socialist women’s group was created and entrusted to Louise Saumoneau (1875-1950), a radical violently hostile to so-called “bourgeois” feminism.14 From then on, the SFIO would limit, control, and, indeed, stifle any feminist rebellion from within. The left would continue to view the struggles of women as a best a secondary issue. In order to explain the late arrival of the vote in France, it is necessary to consider the specificity of French political culture, as Pierre Rosanvallon and Joan W.╯Scott have done.15 However, the dominant intellectual references used by politicians had less and less to do with the abstract individualism which was part of France’s revolutionary heritage. The Catholic right had other references, claiming the family rather than the individual as the basic building block of society as well as the basic unit of political life. On the right as on the left, feminist battles were won in the name of the specificity of women. A reading of parliamentary debates shows that rival political ideologies and philosophies played a relatively minor role in decision-making. More important was the impact of political practices. The majority of deputies in parliament were committed to ensuring that politics remained a club for men: allowing in women could undermine the prestige of the role of politician, and it could endanger an exclusively male form of sociability. The prejudice of the politician, moreover, was the same as that of the ordinary man, convinced as they were that the “French ╇Bard (1999). ╇Sowerwine (1978). 15 ╇See Rosanvallon (1992); and Scott (1996). 13 14

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woman” had considerable influence. Should she be given the vote she would have even more power. Indeed, the impression that women were the ones “wearing the trousers” had been reinforced by the war. High on the list of objections raised against the idea of votes for women was the question of military duties. A citizen was defined as someone who defended the fatherland when it was under threat: in this light, military duties and civic duties went together. The idea of military service for women provoked laughter of a very Gallic kind, and embarrassed feminists. The more moderate feminists rejected the idea on the grounds that the sexes had complementary roles: men made war, and women made children. As a result, they viewed motherhood as a “social function” which had been wrongly neglected: given the still high number of women dying in child-birth, they viewed motherhood as a “blood tax”. The more radical feminists rejected the idea on the grounds that they prioritised anti-militarism. As neo-Malthusians, they advocated a “birth strike”, and refused to produce “cannon fodder”. The topic of the militarisation of women came up, in fact, on several occasions. During the Great War, France had refused to entrust women with fighting roles: women were restricted, rather, to roles as nurses and spies.16 It would take a certain set of conducive circumstances, namely those embodied by the Resistance in the 1940s, for this unwillingness to subside: the Free French Forces in the Second World War would finally accept the participation of women, and this exceptional situation would trigger the slow process of integrating women into the army. The political and demographic context of the 1920s provides a further explanation for the late arrival of the vote for women in France. The radical Republic prior to 1914 was but a distant memory. The winds of conservatism were blowing over the political class. The elections of November 1919 were won by the right. This conservatism was manifest in the dominant representations of the role of women, including an emphasis on the return to the household, the encouragement of large families, the banning of abortion, and the proscription of information about contraception. The obsession with demography was such that even feminists (with only a few exceptions) embraced the pro-birth consensus of the Republic. What was more difficult to 16 ╇ In 1927, the Paul-Boncour project, which provided, in case of war, for a general mobilisation, women included, would be abandoned: it provoked an outcry of protest amongst the ranks of feminists and pacifists, clashing as it did with dominant representations of women as soft, fragile, and peaceful.

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measure was the sense of illegitimacy that surrounded the emancipation of women after a war which had cost the lives of more than 1.32 million French soldiers, and traumatised so many former combatants. Reassuring values were sought, the boldness of the flapper was condemned, and the eternal aspect of womanhood was promoted.17 Indeed, the extreme right explained the chaos of the times in terms of the growing “feminisation” of democratic societies, and the “feminisation” of the political élite. The extreme right suggested that political life should undergo a process of “virilisation”, recommending a return to patriarchal authority with each sex in its place, following the example of what was already happening in Italy and Germany. Many writers and intellectuals, moreover, who had been affected by the experience of the Great War, could only conceive of political commitment in terms of a virile or heroic model of masculinity. This context was hardly conducive to their aims, and yet many French women felt themselves to be citizens. They were also able to exercise political influence in various ways.18 The Third Republic had a certain number of Muses.19 Talented women journalists, for example, were welcomed by the political press, following the model of Séverine.20 In 1920, Oxford graduate Louise Weiss (1893-1983), who had qualified to teach in higher education by the age of twenty-one, and who was a young reporter specialising in international relations, founded the review L’Europe Nouvelle (The New Europe). For the inter-war generation, this review appeared to provide the prototype of the “new woman” (femme nouvelle), which was the name given to the feminist association it created in 1934.21 It is true that the number of women in political parties remained low. A mere 1% of Communist Party members in the 1920s were women, for instance, and this was a party which included the equality of the sexes in its aims and which devoted particular care and attention to its propaganda directed towards women. Can such evidence be used, however, as a correct measure of the political activity of women? Political parties were organised by and for men, and the lives of men were regulated by elections from which women were excluded. 17 ╇ Cf. Bard (1998b). For similar observations on post-First World War Britain and Germany see Mosse (1985), pp.╯114–32. 18 ╇Reynolds (1996). 19 ╇Guichard (1991). 20 ╇ Le Garrec (1982). 21 ╇Bertin (1999).

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Moreover, late-night meetings, fly-posting, and regular confrontations with the police or rival groups, to quote only a few examples, only served to repel the majority of women. Ultimately, what must be seen as astonishing, in this context, is that women did commit to this sort of militancy and did take risks in the political field. Another type of activism was provided by trade unions. After the war, trade unions, more accessible than political parties, attracted female membership of approximately 20%. The freedom for a woman to join a union without the consent of her husband, a tiny hole in the Napoleonic Civil Code, was acquired in 1920. Women preferred commitment by association, especially in womÂ� en-only organisations which were devoted to all sorts of causes. Political commentators of the inter-war period, indeed, considered the feminist movement as a veritable party in its own right: it was seen as knowing how to manipulate all of the techniques of political activity and propaganda. Even in this non-institutional form, however, the integration of women was blocked by some diffuse forms of anti-feminism. Radical women were harshly caricatured as hysterical “blue stockings”, bitter and twisted spinsters, and as “she-men” of suspect habits. The mere act of demonstrating in the streets, at this time, was no easy thing for a woman, given the extent to which convention demanded that women take a low profile, that they be self-effacing and that they devote themselves entirely to their family. Representations of women active in the public sphere were so negative that French feminists adopted a cautious strategy in order to avoid shocking public opinion, and they constantly reiterated the idea that they were not suffragettes in the English style. “La Garçonne” or the moral peril In 1922, at the time of the Senate’s rejection of female suffrage, a controversy broke out regarding the novel by Victor Margueritte, La Garçonne (The Flapper). This novel depicted the emancipation of a young girl from the bourgeoisie, and described at length her sexual liberation. The fiancé of the heroine, Monique Lerbier, has been unfaithful to her, having hidden the existence of his mistress: she therefore decides to live her life as a boy. Financially independent, she chooses her sexual partners, male or female, gets drunk, and takes drugs, dancing until dawn in order to forget the sense of unease she

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would rather mask. In the end, she meets an older man who has embraced the socialist tenets of Léon Blum’s Du mariage (On Marriage, 1907), namely that it is better to have had romantic and sexual experiences before embarking on married life. Critics focused above all on the novel’s rather “come-and-get-me” style. Nationalists were shocked to see Monique being exported as “a portrait of the typical French girl of today”. The Vatican boycotted the book. And the Hachette chain of bookshops withdrew the novel from its train-station stores. These almost unanimous acts of disapproval did nothing, however, to prevent La Garçonne from becoming one of the best-selling books in French. The book’s male author, Victor Margueritte (1866-1942), was a committed writer on the left, a staunch pacifist and feminist. This was not necessarily at odds with his desire to make a lot of money from the scandal caused by the book: he earned enough money, indeed, to buy a villa on the Côte d’azur, providing a roof for his relationship with his new wife, who was a lot younger than him. Published after the war, the novel settled accounts with the war itself: Monique’s parents as well as her fiancé are depicted as a bourgeois family made rich by the arms industry. Hand in hand with the immorality of their fortune goes the immorality of their behaviour: the parents push their daughter into an arranged marriage, and the fiancé accepts a marriage even though he loves somebody else. In her metamorphosis as a flapper, Monique embodies the madness of the roaring twenties, and all of the sexual fantasies associated with that time. From being a naïve young girl during the war, she becomes expert at controlling her sexuality and even her fertility. She throws herself into a life of excessive and dangerous pleasures, which can be interpreted as a delayed effect of the great slaughter (expressing the subconscious guilt of those women who survived the war, perhaps). One of Monique’s friends, indeed, dies after taking opium. The post-war period saw Paris transformed into a very cosmopolitan capital, which raised fears in the author, as well as among many of his readers, about the mixing of races. In the end, Monique is saved from degradation by a pacifist who is all the more credible for being a former combatant. Victor Margueritte portrays him as a “man injured on the path of ladies”. This “injury” is reflected in the injury that he receives when protecting Monique from an attack by one of her spurned and jealous lovers. The moral of the story could be summarised as follows: nothing good comes from war between nations or

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from war between the sexes. However, the author’s good intentions and political ideals pale in the light of the daring nature of his novel, which many considered to be pornographic. For the majority of feminists, Monique was a debauched woman who should be seen as responsible for her actions. Feminists on the left, including the Communist Party, were no exception to this: they saw in Monique an opportunity to criticise the “decadent” lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. One exception was the feminist Madeleine Pelletier: she defended Victor Margueritte, who had become a veritable pariah, having been expelled from the Légion d’honneur by a decree without precedent in the history of this Order, which had been created by Napoleon in 1802. The literary “garçonne” was an explosive figure, alongside her sister, the fashion-conscious “flapper” of the 1920s. She shattered sexual taboos. And she rejected marriage and motherhood, which was a lot more serious in the post-war context. Was Monique the victim of a society which had completely lost its bearings because of the war? Her creator certainly thought so. The war, rather than gender inequalities, explained the flapper. Such a discourse conveniently allowed the link between the flapper and the women’s emancipation movement to be sidestepped. By contrast, women of the time preferred to highlight the role of conflict in women’s quest for independence, which at times was pushed to extremes. Another novel would tackle another of the most sensitive subjects during and immediately following the war, namely the adultery of soldiers’ wives. Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh, 1923), by Jean Cocteau’s protégé, the young Raymond Radiguet, triggered a new scandal, because it depicted – without a hint of guilt – the love affair between a very young man and a woman married to a soldier. In no other European country did the fear of a fall in the birth rate reach such intensity as in France. Indeed, the demographic decline had begun as early as the end of the eighteenth century. The consequences of war, therefore, were experienced in France as a matter of life and death, involving innumerable problems, including the question of resorting to immigration. What was envisaged, initially, was a reversal in the falling birth rate by both repressive means and incentives.22 The medal for mothers of large families was created on 26 May 1920. The Cognacq-Jay Prize, a private initiative, was also established in order to reward parents who had lots of children. The state founded 22

╇Bard (1997).

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the Conseil supérieur de la natalité (Upper Council for the birth rate), which included among its members a prominent feminist, Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger (1853-1924). Her presence implied the involvement of pro-reform feminism, since she presided over the most important association of women’s suffrage, the above-mentioned French Union for Suffrage for Women. From the Protestant and philanthropic upper bourgeoisie which had made its money in industry, Witt-Schlumberger had “set the example” by sending five sons to the front during the war (one of whom was killed). On 23 July 1920, the newly-elected “horizon blue” Chamber (named after the colour of the French soldiers’ uniform) approved a law which strengthened measures against abortion and banned publications and public speeches likely to have an adverse effect on the birth rate. The law was passed by a very large majority: 500 votes to 53. On 12 January 1923, a new law made abortion a crime to be judged in a magistrate’s court which, it was hoped, would prove harsher than Assize courts. The question of abortion split feminists completely, with moderate and pro-reform feminists on one side, and radical feminists on the other. The split, as we have seen, was also political in nature. The feminist journalist Séverine (1855-1929) was active in the Ligue des Droits de L’Homme (League for the Rights of Man), and protested, in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, against a government which had no business in meddling with what was happening “behind closed doors”.23 Nelly Roussel (1878-1922), a feminist and neo-Malthusian speaker, continued to defend her idea of “conscious motherhood”, be that within a marriage or a partnership.24 She put forward a highly informed critique of the first fruits of the pro-birth policy: she refuted the notion of “depopulation”, for the population had indeed remained at a stable level, thanks mostly to the contribution of immigration. Neo-Malthusian newspapers, more of a male than female platform, obviously protested against the stricter measures regarding abortion, that is, they did so when they were allowed to, as their work was much disrupted by censorship.╯As for the most prominent activists, for example Eugène Humbert (1870-1944) and his partner Jeanne Humbert (1890-1986), they received harsh prison sentences in 1921.25

╇Séverine, “La grève des ventres” (Birth strike), L’Humanité, 9 April 1922. ╇ Accampo (2006). 25 ╇Guerrand and Ronsin (1990). 23 24

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With the exception of anarchist circles, the “sexual revolution” had no reverberations in France, which stands in sharp contrast to the interest shown on this subject by feminist and intellectual circles in England and Germany.26 London and Berlin would indeed become the two main seats of the World League for Sexual Reform, founded in 1928. It would be a nonsense to explain this in terms of some French form of Puritanism, at a time when 1920s Paris proved itself, rather, to be a city of pleasure, where homosexuality was not penalised, where strip-tease had been openly advertised since the end of the preceding century, and where the night life had acquired a certain reputation.27 What this does give, rather, is a measure of the anxiety at the decline or fall in the birth rate, viewed as synonymous with decadence, which took hold of the country at this time. The diagnosis given by demographers, and what they prescribed for turning the birth rate around, was taken up by politicians. There was almost complete consensus on this issue. Mainstream feminists joined the pro-natalist campaign as if it were a new union sacrée, while those radical women fighting for women’s reproductive rights would often find themselves confronted by an anti-feminism which reproached them for being responsible for the drop in the number of births. Moderate and pro-reform feminists, therefore, were moved to isolate the radicals and prove them wrong, to invest their time and energy in the pro-birth policy, and to overstate the value of motherhood generally. The demographic situation also had an effect on women and work. Officially, women were not really encouraged to work, because it could turn them away from motherhood. The reality, however, was that women were needed in the world of waged employment because workers were in short supply. Women represented a little less than a third of the working population. And whilst female munitions workers – known as the “munitionettes” – were sacked from 11 November 1918, other female workers would keep their jobs in industries which had, up until then, been typically very male. More than this, reversals in the fortunes of shareholders would push young middle-class women into higher education and professions related to law, medicine, and social work because their parents could no longer afford to keep them before marriage. The war, therefore, also had the effect of speeding up the formation of a new corporate-style feminism based on a multitude 26 27

╇ Cf. Tamagne (2005). ╇Tamagne (2000).

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of specialist professional associations (including women lawyers, magistrates and doctors). Conclusion Post-war feminisms were confronted by new issues. Pacifism, relatively absent as a notion before 1914, was added to their programme, although it meant different things to different branches of the movement. Some women embraced pacifism from a sense of guilt. In 1918, for example, Andrée Jouve considered that women “have accepted or sought to assume a share of responsibility in this monstrous crime”, and that, as a consequence of this, they behaved either as “servants, dolls, or as copies of men”.28 Her position was close to that of the writer Romain Rolland: “You could have opposed or fought this war in the hearts of men”.29 By contrast, Gabrielle Duchêne, who came from the same circles as Jouve, thought that “women, because of the distance at which they have been kept from public affairs, are still not responsible for the past”.30 For all feminists, granting women the right to vote and stand in elections would allow the ideal of peace between nations to become a reality. The mobilisation of women for peace was sufficiently threatening, indeed, for male nationalist politicians to use it as a good reason for refusing the suffrage to women. In 1923 it was clearly not possible to predict that feminism would be thwarted for another two decades in France. However, the first signs of weakness among radical feminists, embroiled as they were in a stormy relationship with the Communist Party, were perceptible. The first expulsions from the party had already occurred, and others would follow shortly afterwards with the Stalinisation of the party. At the same time, the virulent anti-Communism of the post-war period

28

p.╯8.

╇ La Guerre et l’affranchissement des femmes, Geneva, éditions des tablettes, 1918,

29 ╇Speech delivered at the 1921 Congress of the WILPF.╯Copy in Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris (dossier LIPFL). See also Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1921). 30 ╇ International Charter of Woman, 1919, delivered to the Paris Peace Conference by the Office français des intérêts féminins (French Office for the Interests of Women). Copy in Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris (dossier Office français des intérêts féminins).

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would dampen the broader impact of this kind of feminism which was quickly marginalised from mainstream politics.31 As for the right to vote, a historic opportunity to win this in the wake of military victory had thus passed. Comparisons around the world showed, indeed, that reform was often facilitated by exceptional events in the lives of states. France, however, resumed its old habits, within a Republic that was already outdated. Democrats in particular remained fearful of destabilising the system, given the effective fragility of the parliamentary regime. In what was a difficult context, in the face of great adversity, feminists were therefore thwarted. Assessing the share of responsibility that they should bear in this failure is a delicate undertaking. Apart from divisions which are directly attributable to the war, the French women’s movement was also marked by diverse loyalties and political commitments. Maria Vérone’s cry of “Long live the Republic all the same!” is revealing: no secession was possible, and there was no place for real autonomy for feminism. Despite their inferior status, women were already integrated, and shared with men a love of the Republic, the Fatherland, Peace, or even Revolution, in the name of which they were prepared, at times, to sacrifice their own rights. The difference, therefore, between the political attitudes of women and those of men was not so marked: therein, indeed, lies the paradox of the long-lasting exclusion of women from politics in France. If integration presupposes the sharing of values and attitudes, it already existed in fact. From this point of view, the war, by mobilising people on patriotic grounds, did contribute to the creation of a culture common to both sexes, a lot more, indeed, than it “emancipated” women.32 Roles would evolve out of necessity, but post-war periods are typically characterised by a return to the traditional order.33 Feminists themselves often wanted a return to “normality”, even as they hoped to win some new rights. Retrospectively, the thwarting of these hopes would give the victory of 1918 a bitter-sweet taste.

╇Bard and Robert (1998). ╇ Perrot (1984). 33 ╇ This has also recently been demonstrated in the British case by Nicolson (2009). 31 32

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Accampo, E. (2006) Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit. Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore: 2006). Auclert, H. (1923) Les Femmes au gouvernail (Paris: 1923). Bard, C. (1995) Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914-1940 (Paris: 1995). ———╯ (1997) “Marianne and Mother Rabbits: Feminism and Natality under the Third Republic”, in Population and Social Policy in France, eds. M.╯Cross and S.╯Perry (London: 1997) 34–48. ———╯ (1998a) “La France dans les internationales féministes de la Belle Époque à la Seconde Guerre mondiale”, in Féminismes et identités nationales: Les processus d’intégration des femmes au politique, eds. F.╯Thébaud and Y.╯Cohen (Villeurbanne: 1998) 141–52. ———╯ (1998b) Les Garçonnes. Modes et fantasmes des Années folles (Paris: 1998). Bard, C. ed. (1999) Un siècle d’antiféminisme (Paris: 1999). Bard, C. and Robert, J.-L. (1998) “The French Communist Party and Women, 19201939: From ‘feminism’ to familialism”, in Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe between the two World Wars, eds. H.╯Gruber and P.╯Graves (New York and Oxford: 1998) 321–47. Bertin, C. (1999) Louise Weiss (Paris: 1999). Guerrand, R.-H. and Ronsin, F. (1990) Le Sexe apprivoisé€: Jeanne Humbert et la lutte pour le contrôle des naissances (Paris: 1990). Guichard, M.-T. (1991) Les Egéries de la République (Paris: 1991). Hause, S. and Kenney, A. (1984) Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton: 1984). Kandel, L. (ed.) (2004) Féminismes et nazisme (Paris: 2004). Le Garrec, E.╯Séverine, une rebelle 1855-1929 (Paris: 1982). McMillan, J. (1992) Twentieth-Century France: Politics and Society, 1898-1991 (London: 1992). Mosse, G. L. (1985) Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: 1985). Nicolson, J. (2009) The Great Silence, 1918-1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War (London: 2009). Perrot, M. (1984) “Sur le front des sexes: un combat douteux”, Vingtième siècle, 3 (1984) 69–76. Reynolds, S. (1996) France between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: 1996). Rosanvallon, V. P. (1992) Le Sacre du citoyen. Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris€: 1992). Scott, J. W. (1996) Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA and London: 1996). Smith, P. (1996) Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France, 1918-1940 (Oxford: 1996). Sowerwine, C. (1978) Les Femmes et le socialisme: un siècle d’histoire (Paris: 1978). Tamagne, F. (2000) Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe. Berlin, Londres, Paris. 1919-1939 (Paris: 2000). Tamagne, F. (2005) “La Ligue Mondiale pour la Réforme Sexuelle: la Science au service de l’émancipation sexuelle?”, Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, 22 (2005) 101–21. Thébaud, F. ed. (1992) Histoire des femmes en Occident. Vol. 5: Le XXe siècle (Paris: 1992).

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Wilmers, A. (2008) Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914-1920): Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche AuseinanderÂ� setzungen (Essen: 2008). Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1921) Report of the Third InterÂ�national Congress of Women (Vienna: 1921).

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Sisters and Comrades. Women’s movements and the “Austrian Revolution”: Gender in insurrection, the Räte movement, parties and parliament Gabriella Hauch* In reaction to the murder of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. The Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany, later Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) faced the Entente Powers (France, Great Britain, Russia, and Serbia, later Japan, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Greece and the United States). In Austria, neither the bourgeois-liberal feminists nor the Social Democratic women’s movement took part in the patriotic enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war. Beginning in 1917, the strike movement called not only for bread, peace and female suffrage, but also for a new, democratic form of government. In October 1918 Social Democratic and bourgeois-liberal women’s organisations presented the Provisional National Assembly with a petition for the political equality of women, which was also supported by numerous Catholic women’s associations and the huge Reichsorganisation der Hausfrauen Österreichs (National Organisation of Austrian Housewives). Finally, the revolutionary situation that accompanied Austria’s surrender and the foundation of the First Republic in early November 1918 made all related discussion redundant: the new constitution of 12 November 1918 introduced universal, direct suffrage for citizens of both genders.

“Man,” commented philosopher Margarete Susman at the end of the central European monarchies in 1918, “no longer” had “any world” to offer. “His order and his laws” had “collapsed”.1 Susman, a disciple of Georg Simmel and fellow student contemporary of Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, was convinced that the disastrous effects of the First World War had thoroughly discredited the “old” political order, which granted political participation only to men. This concern became the background for the socio-political rupture that shook the old order in * Special thanks to Kristina Pia Hofer for her translation of this article and to Bettina Fürlinger for help with the layout. 1 ╇Susman (1992), pp.╯143–69; Hauch (2008).

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central Europe and ended its privileges – privileges based on class, nationality and gender. Many Europeans were now asking which new “world” they were to build. Inspired by the October Revolution in Russia, Hungary and parts of Germany discussed a possible new order in terms of polarised opposites: either a revolutionary system based on the Räte – the councils of soldiers’ and workers’ deputies – or a “bourgeois” parliamentary republic. In Austria, however, the Räte movement and the parliaÂ� mentary republic must be regarded as interwoven and connected. The Räte movement developed at the same time as the political system was transformed into a parliamentary republic, reaching its height when the Constituent National Assembly convened for the first time in February 1919. Since women were first granted full citizenship rights during the Austrian Revolution, large parts of the Austrian public perceived the founding of the republic and the emancipation of women as connected. However, the opportunity for socio-political participation in the early years of the First Republic depended very much on gender. Gender-specific categorisations, still influenced by the structural characteristics of the First World War,2 found expression not only in law, but also at the cultural and individual-psychological levels, and designated specifically male and female spheres for (political) action. Women were expected to think and act in a certain way simply because they were women. During World War I, civil liberties like freedom of speech and assembly were suspended. In spite of this, from 1917 Social Democratic women’s organisations and the middle-class Allgemeiner ÖsterreiÂ�chiÂ� scher Frauenverein (General Austrian Women’s Association or AÖFV) organised meetings and rallies to promote peace. They also drafted petitions for the political equality of women. Christian Social and German Nationalist women did not take part in these activities. To survive the war, however, the state called upon the resources of all its women’s organisations. Urban women in particular, irrespective of their political and religious denomination, were given responsibilities for which the dominant discourse had previously declared them unfit. Thus in “War Consumer Committees” (Kriegs-KonsumentenÂ�ausÂ� 2 ╇Studies based on women’s history and gender history have discussed these structures, generating some controversies in the process. See Pfoser (1981), pp.╯205–22; Higonnet and Higonnet (1987), pp.╯31–47; and Thébaud (1987), pp.╯33–91.

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schüssen) and “Price Inspection Units” (Preisprüfstellen) they managed the rationing and distribution of food and other daily necessities, and in “Women’s Aid Actions” (Frauenhilfsaktionen) they organised the mass distribution of meals, set up nurseries and took care of orphans. These public and often publicly acclaimed activities also involved women from organisations that usually labelled women as “unpolitical” beings – namely the Christian Social and German National women’s groups. The Christian Social Party (CSP), however, baulked at conservative women’s attempt to organise themselves within an explicitly political framework and instead called on them to remain inside the “non-political” Catholic Women’s Association (Katholische Frauenorganisation or KFO). In 1921 Nationalist women who supported the Großdeutsche Volkspartei (Greater German People’s Party or GDVP) founded the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community), a general association of German women. Social Democratic women, on the other hand, had a longer history of political engagement. They had at their disposal a mature organisational structure and pool of experience and – at least on paper – the acknowledgement of equal rights for women in the statutes of the Social Democratic Labour Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei or SDAP), founded in 1891. Margarete Susman’s critique of First World War politics seems to imply that only “new” ideas and agents can change the political field for the better. Taking this as a starting point, this paper will inquire into the role of gender in the politicial negotiation of this new “world”, focusing in particular on women’s role in wartime strikes and industrial unrest, in the revolutionary Rätebewegung of 1918-20, and in post-war parliaments and political parties. Strikes and insurrection During the mass strike wave of May 1917 the Austrian Ministry of War instructed state-owned industries to employ large groups of women only where production would otherwise collapse. The Ministry of War justified its decision by stating that women were of an “innate disposition to agitate”, and therefore threatened to cause a disproportionate number of strikes.3 Of course, the idea of female unruliness ╇ Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, Ministry of War 1917, 10. Abt., Zl. 213134/1917. Cited in Augeneder (1987), p.╯195. 3

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and irrationality, as defined by the state, was rooted in the fin-de-siècle discursive construction of women as pathological. On the other hand, the fear of “rebellious hags” brings to mind a long tradition in which women played important roles in unofficial political protests, including strikes and uprisings. Social history teaches us to understand rebellious female behaviour by looking at historically specific Lebenswelten – the social, cultural, political and economic environment in which insurgent women lived and worked. The same applies to the rebellious women of the First World War. Having stayed behind as providers for their families, they were the first to be affected by the food shortages and the inadequacies of the rationing system. Women met the ongoing price rises and cuts in the food ration with looting and protests.4 Thus in Upper Austria the earliest signs of unrest came on 12 October 1915 when about 1,000 “housewives” demonstrated against the shortage of flour and bread in Linz. Likewise the armaments industries in Steyr were confronted with a first “bread strike” on 16 September 1916. As insurgents, women functioned as catalysts of the Austrian Revolution (and revolutions elsewhere in Europe), and were discursively constructed as “undisciplined” by virtue of their gender. Contemporary records describe women protesters as being “without fear of authority” and of “surprising determination”, apparently motivated by the desire that they and their families survive by getting enough to eat.5 In addition, it was hard to deter female protesters using legal sanctions. Under the wartime Military Service Law (Kriegsdienstleistungsgesetz) conscription could be used to punish or intimidate male strikers – women, however, could not be drafted. Radically “undisciplined” female behaviour irritated not only the state authorities, but also the Social Democratic labour unions and the SDAP – the very movements which had fought for women’s rights and the democratisation of society for decades. Though the unions had earlier criticised the political passivity of women, they now found the “new” female activism to be inconvenient and even alarming. In the last two years of the war, the unions and the SDAP aimed to prevent national production and provision from collapsing. Their “stabilisation” policy – which involved a commitment to continuing the war ╇Unfried (1988), pp.╯192–5. ╇See the pamphlet Um Friede, Freiheit und Recht! Der Jännerausstand des innerÂ� österreichischen Proletariats (Vienna, 1918). 4 5

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– ran counter to many of the concerns of striking workers. To meet their goals, the unions and the SDAP strove to exclude potentially troublesome agitators. Militant women workers were taken to be a risk: since they were integrated into the unions to a lesser degree than male workers, they were held to be less susceptible to the soothing rhetoric of party and union officials. The wave of strikes that hit the industrial centres around Vienna in May 1917 bears witness to the instability of socio-economic conditions during the last years of the war. The strikes began without the Social Democratic unions’ knowledge or sanction, and challenged the SDAP’s dominant position among Austrian industrial workers. In negotiations for the cessation of the strike at the Favoriten workers’ club in south Vienna, female strikers verbally abused the official representatives of the Metal Workers’ Union, Franz Domes and August Siegl.6 The Social Democratic Party leadership and the union commission were concerned with the obvious rupture between workers and their official representatives in the Social Democratic workers’ movement. On 1 June 1917 they called an all-day conference to analyse the schism over “wild strikes and demonstrations”, and discuss countermeasures. The highly emotional nature of the issue permeated the discussion.7 Franz Domes, chairman of the Metal Workers’ Union, complained that, unless checked, “adolescents, women and students” would “campaign for revolution”. He threatened that if the party leadership did not “choose to fight bleak radicalism aggressively”, metal workers would “take action themselves”. Johann Pölzer invoked a similar rhetoric of difference between the party and union line, criticising the “exceedingly noxious agency ... of [female] comrade [Berta] Pölz,” who had taken “monstrous action against the party”, and who had been “recommended” by “the female comrades”, that is to say by Therese Schlesinger, a female member of the SDAP executive. The subsequent argument over whether Schlesinger did or did not personally know Pölz ended in “tumult and clamour”. The women in attendance left in protest. The party minutes quoted above reflect a distinct feature of the social revolution during the First World War, namely the SDAP lead╇ Augeneder (1987), p.╯197. ╇ Minutes of the party executive of the SDAP, 1897-1918, edited by Gabriella Hauch, unpublished project report (Linz, 1990). Original document at Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung Wien, Altes Parteiarchiv. 6 7

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ers’ fear for the unity of their party, their influence over workers, and the functioning of the state. The Social Democratic elite projected their fear of political chaos onto female activist and party comrade Berta Pölz, a young leftist radical organised in the Social Democratic Verband Jugendlicher Arbeiter (Association of Young Workers).8 Conflict with the unions aside, the party thus created and individualised in the person of Pölz a new, heavily gendered field of demarcation. In the 1917 meeting, dominant union members inscribed discourses of the emotional and capricious woman in their “executive [female] comrades” Mathilde Eisler, Gabriele Proft and Therese Schlesinger. Though the male unionists’ distrust was partly based on differing political views, they expressed their concern mainly in personal accusations. In contrast to the “general” party, Social Democratic women’s organisations had opposed the war from the beginning, criticising the policy of obedience to the wartime domestic political truce, and – as early as 1915 – calling on the party leadership to organise demonstrations for peace.9 Facing mass poverty, the retreat of the army, the disconcerting news of the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia, and a permanent split of the German Social Democratic Party in March-April 1917 into pro- and anti-war factions, Austrian trade unionists seemed to perceive the independent opinions of their female “comrades” as a portent of undisciplined, uncontrollable revolutionary chaos. In the end, the Austrian Social Democrats were able to uphold party unity and retain their control over the workers. Fifteen years later the party prided itself on having won over “the fevered masses in these stormy days ... through a tireless spiritual struggle for democracy”.10 The socio-political dynamics, however, did not change. In January 1918, a new wave of strikes and protests broke out across Cisleithania, beginning in Wiener Neustadt with protests against cuts in the flour ration, and ending in a mass strike wave supported by 550,000 workers. Inspired by the Bolshevik example in Russia, Austrian workers began to organise in Arbeiterräten, workers’ councils. The councils sought contact with striking workers in order to radicalise them and turn them against the pro-war policies of the SDAP leadership.╯The party answered with its distinct “policy with the ╇ Hautmann (1987), p.╯140. ╇ Hauch (1988), p.╯117. 10 ╇ “Was haben wir von der Republik?” (What does the republic mean for us?), Zeitbilder 3, Wien, n.d. [1932], p.╯9. 8 9

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Räte” which would significantly influence the development of the councils’ movement in Austria. The Räte movement With the exception of the Munich Soviet Republic of 1919, the Räte movement outside Russia has not been researched in the context of gender history. With their roots in the organisational structure of the Paris Commune of 1871,11 Räte organisations formed in many EuroÂ� pean countries at the end of the First World War. They were most evident, however, in Russia, Bavaria, Hungary and Austria, where the movement had a particularly important effect on developments in the political field. All of these cases show that principles of male bonding could easily cross ideological and political boundaries. In marked contrast to the socialist theory of emancipation of women with its underlying notion of gender equality, the Räte conceived themselves as a community of brothers, thus continuing the structural inscription of binary gender relations in the modern institution. The councils were based on two great “educators to discipline” (Max Weber): the industrial factory and the military. The “new”, grassroots movement was thus realised on sites dominated almost exclusively by men. This transformation was most obvious within the Soldatenräte, the soldiers’ councils. Since the introduction of compulsory military service in Austria in 1867, the army, for men, seemed to eradicate conventional social divisons based on class and religion. Suddenly, men from all backgrounds found themselves working towards a common goal, the defence of the country. Their sense of unity was based on the exclusion of a weaker “other”: children, foreigners, the infirm, the elderly and women. In time of war, the functioning of the military depended on strict hierarchical structures and unconditional obedience. The shared experience of fighting and suffering in the brutal battles of the First World War led men to bond with an intensity unheard of in civilian contexts. The figure of the strong warrior standing his ground for God, emperor and country was, of course, an unstable one. Austrian soldiers lost the war. The humiliation of defeat was physically inscribed onto the destroyed minds and bodies of injured and shell-shocked soldiers. In 1918 combat fatigue, hunger and 11

╇See Sternsdorf-Hauck (1989); and Eichner (1998), pp.╯525–55.

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increasing conflicts over national belonging led to mass desertion from the Habsburg military.12 At home, where women had taken on jobs in traditionally male-identified occupation like the metal industries, male identity also appeared vulnerable. The militancy of soldiers’ councils, Red Guards and other veterans’ associations promised to repair at least part of the damage to collective male identity. Factories, as the second great “educator to discipline”, did in fact rely on semi-skilled female labourers, and employed them in large numbers. The speakers and union delegates who represented the work force, however, were usually skilled workers and therefore male. It is thus noteworthy that in January 1918, two women were among the fourteen delegates elected to the newly-formed Vienna Workers’ Council.13 Made up of “representatives of the shop floor”, not party or union officials, the Council negotiated conditions for the resumption of work. We do not know whether this relatively high percentage of women in the 1918 Council delegation was due to the importance of striking “women’s workshops” (factories lacking a male workforce due to the war), or to the strong role women played as “catalysts” at the beginning of the strike wave. The workers’ councils quickly realised that if they wanted to represent the Austrian labour force in all its diversity, they had to include delegates from non-industrial organisations. The regional branches of the SDAP, the unions, the cooperatives and the party’s youth and women’s organisations were invited to send delegates to the councils. Any member of a socialist party or a union who was eighteen years of age or older was eligible to stand. Suffrage was granted to every member of the Austrian workforce regardless of gender, including adolescents.14 Voters were organised into groups. Voting Group II for the 1919 Vienna Workers’ Council election, for instance, comprised small businesses, “independent intellectual and manual workers” and “proletarian housewives”. This appreciation of unpaid female labour in Socialist Vienna probably corresponds with the SDAP-initiated strateÂ�gy of the “familiarisation” of the proletariat.

╇See Hanisch (1999), pp.╯313–38; and Hämmerle (1998), pp.╯431–58. ╇ Um Friede, Freiheit und Recht! (as note 5 above), p.╯24. 14 ╇ Heinz, “Die Arbeiterräte in Deutschösterreich” (The workers’councils in German Austria), Der Sozialist, 24 April 1920, p.╯279. 12 13

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The Austrian Räte movement, however, did not discuss gender equality.15 Of the 155 delegates who attended the second Reichskonferenz der deutschösterreichischen Arbeiterräte, the councils’ conference that marked the end of the social-revolutionary phase of the Austrian Revolution between March and July 1919, only two were women: Käthe Pick, better known under her married name Leichter, of the Innere Stadt district workers’ council, and Elfriede Friedländer of the Leopoldstadt district workers’ council.16 The situation was similarly bleak in the provinces, though the Linz workers’ council, aware of the problem of female under-representation in the councils, tried to coopt women delegates. The council’s constitutive meeting on 14 October 1919 was attended by sixteen women among more than 300 delegates. The only female speaker was Marie Beutelmayr, chair of the Upper Austrian Social Democratic women’s organisation.17 While the Soviets in Bolshevik Russia installed women’s sections, it seemed that the Austrian Räte could neither accommodate the (political) skills of women nor represent their interests. Relative to the number of women in the population, and in contrast to the elections for the national and municipal councils, female participation in workers’ council elections was “weak”.18 The case of Therese Schlesinger exemplifies the similarly uncertain identification of the workers’ councils with gender politics. Schlesinger, a leading figure on the left wing of the SDAP, had significantly influenced the organisation of the Räte system in Austria, and always acted as a strong advocate of genderspecific claims. She did not, however, comment on the lack of gender equality within the workers’ councils themselves. In early 1919, Räte governments came to power in Bavaria and Hungary. The leadership of the SDAP, alarmed by these developments, framed its discussion of the Austrian situation in terms of the binary opposites: Rätediktatur oder Demokratie (dictatorship of the ╇ Here, the Austrian Räte differed significantly from the Bavarian movement – see Sternsdorf-Hauck (1989), pp.╯20–7. 16 ╇ Hautmann (1987), p.╯368. Attending as guest delegates were Emmy Freundlich of the Konsumgenossenschaften (consumers’ cooperatives), Dr. Helene Bauer of the socialist Vereinigung geistiger Arbeiter (Association of Intellectual Workers), and AdelÂ�heid Popp and Therese Schlesinger for the Social Democratic FrauenreichsÂ� komitee (Reich Women’s Committee). 17 ╇ “Der Umsturz und die Frauen” (The revolution and women) (1928), pp.╯66–72. 18 ╇ F.╯Adler, “Die Ergebnisse der Wiener Arbeiterratswahlen” (The results of the Viennese workers’ council elections), Der Kampf. Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift 13, 2/3 (February-March 1920), pp.╯97–101 (here p.╯99). 15

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councils or democracy).19 This polarisation further handicapped discussion of gender relations in the Austrian political context, especially within the councils. The Räte stood for the nationalisation of industries and the abolition of the privileges of property – in short, they stood for goals that implied class struggle and revolution. Inter-war Austrian discourse, however, had yet to connect the idea of revolution with concrete steps towards gender equality. Traditionally, demands for the political equality of women were associated with parliamentary democracy.20 As a young movement lacking both awareness and experience, the Räte system was unable to relate to this tradition. A few women, however, addressed the Räte system in terms which went beyond the Rätediktatur oder Demokratie debate. In April 1919, Marianne Pollak, a Social Democrat, analysed the role of Räte in education, advocating the formation of “parents’ councils” which would enable the transformation of schools, kindergardens, juvenile welfare and juvenile courts along equal lines.21 The Russian feminist and shortlived People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, Alexandra Kollontai, whose ideas are discussed by Olga Shnyrova in this volume, also had some influence in Austria. This can be seen in particular in the work of Elfriede Friedländer-Eisler, born in 1895, who was the only female inter-war politician to discuss social revolution in terms of the transformation of gender relations. A sociology student during the First World War, Eisler had joined the anti-authoritarian Wiener JugendÂ� beÂ�wegung. She also attended and lectured at the “Women’s Study Group” (Gruppe zum Studium der Frauenfrage), organised as part of the Academic Women’s Association (Akademischer FrauenÂ�verein).22 Unlike Käthe Pick, who was also involved in the Akademischer Frauenverein and would later join the SDAP, Friedländer-Eisler was a founding member of the Austrian Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs or KPÖ) in November 1918.23 Like Pick, Friedländer served as one of the few female delegates elected to a workers’ council. Twice every month, Friedländer-Eisler published her ideas in the jour╇Bauer (1919). ╇Bader-Zaar (1997), pp.╯547–62. 21 ╇ M.╯Pollak, “Die Bedeutung der Elternräte” (The significance of the parents’ councils), Der Kampf. Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift 12,8 (August 1919), p.╯26. 22 ╇ “Einladung zu den nächsten 6 Vorträgen” (Invitation to the next six lectures), in Jüdisches Institut für Jugendforschung. Landessammelstelle Österreich, YIVO (Jüdisches Wissenschaftliches Institut) New York. See also Fallend (1992), pp.╯48–69. 23 ╇ Friedländer-Eisler held party membership number 1. 19 20

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nal Revolutionäre Proletarierin (Revolutionary Proletarian Women), the weekend supplement to the Communist Party’s central organ Rote Fahne (Red Flag). Her journalistic activities, however, reflected her own initiative more than the official KPÖ line. After FriedländerEisler’s relocation to Germany in August 1919, issues such as sexuality and gender equality disappeared from the Communist daily press.24 Party politics In April 1919, Therese Schlesinger defined the purpose of the Austrian Räte movement in the Social Democratic journal Der Kampf (The Struggle). The goal, she argued, was to focus the will of “all those exploited toward the same ends” and to “transform this will into power”. The struggle itself was now focused on the Constituent National Assembly. On 8 April 1919, fifty year-old Social Democrat Adelheid Popp became the first woman in Austrian history to address parliament. For many, Popp’s appearance before the Constituent National Assembly, a public space that had until recently been completely dominated by men, represented a decisive turning point. The topic of her speech added to this impression. Popp argued for the introduction of a bill to “abolish the gentry, all its privileges, and all associated titles and decorations”.25 From the beginning, Popp was interrupted by the jeers of the male delegates. This behaviour contrasted sharply with the relatively enlightened discourse to be found at the time of the establishment of the republic in October-November 1918, when all the parties in the Provisional National Assembly – including the Christian Social and Greater German groupings – had supported female suffrage. Ignaz Seipel, future federal chancellor and chairman of the CSP, acknowledged the subtle change in the Christian Social view of women voters in his inaugural lecture at the theological faculty of the University of Vienna in 1917, in which he suggested that Muttersinn und Muttersorge (mother’s sense and mother’s care) could have a positive effect on parliament. As “mothers”, women had, in his view, a greater sense of social responsibility, stronger attachment to moral values, more finely attuned social skills, and greater commitment to ╇Eisler (1995), pp.╯103–8. ╇Stenographische Protokolle der Konstituitiven Nationalversammlung, Vol. 8 (Vienna, 1919), pp.╯189–91; Hauch (1998), pp.╯27–51. 24 25

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social harmony than their male colleagues. Seipel was not the only one to invoke this popular discourse of gender difference. In fact, many politically active women incorporated rhetorics of difference into their own discourse of gender equality. To contrast their own “motherly” brand of politics with the cruelty and inhumanity of the First World War, female politicians in the early First Republic actively sought out peace-keeping functions. Using ideas of female “difference”, women politicians of all parties looked for consensus with their male colleagues, and did not seek to transform the political sphere as radically as Margarete Susman suggested. Elise Richter, for instance, candidate for the liberal Bürgerliche Arbeiterpartei (Bourgeois Workers’ Party) and the first Austrian woman to complete her second doctoral thesis, the Habilitation, campaigned in 1920 on the “female character” of her politics. Adelheid Popp similarly insisted that the new republic should not function “in a male fashion”, but rather bring “women’s nature” into action.26 Invoking a harmonising female “nature”, Popp now argued against the Räte, revolution, and class struggle – positions she had favoured in her first address to parliament. A parallel discourse appears in the rhetoric of Ignaz Seipel. On the one hand, women embodied the opportunity to bring benevolent “Mutterart” to parliament. On the other hand, Seipel – much like the leading trade unionists arguing against the “unruliness” of female strikers – voiced concern that the political participation of women would elevate “unschooled persons” to important positions. He feared that the sudden opportunity to enter the political arena would throw women politicians into a “mindless frenzy”, making them prone to emotionally motivated decision-making.27 The discourse of the supposedly greater emotional sensibility of women, which had opened the public sphere to women politicians, was now invoked to prevent or limit their participation. Despite this development, § 30 of the Vereinsgesetz (Law of Association), which had forbidden the political organisation of women either among themselves or together with men, was repealed in October 1918.28

26 ╇E.╯Richter, “Die Ziele der Frauen in der Nationalversammlung” (The goals of women in the National Assembly), Neue Freie Presse, 17 October 1920; Popp (1919), p.╯12. 27 ╇ Reichspost, 13 December 1917, p.╯1. 28 ╇ In the following, I will only address parties who delegated women to the National Assembly. For women in the Communist Party, see Hauch (1995), pp.╯75–7.

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In accordance with the principle of gender equality, the Social Democrats founded a “common” organisation for women and men. They did, however, maintain a separate women’s organisation, to accommodate, as formulated at the Fourth National Women’s Conference in 1911, the “intellectual and emotional position of women”. After the war, female Social Democrat activists hoped for greater acceptance of their claims.29 Soon this hope faded. At the 1919 party congress Gabriele Poft, Secretary for Women’s Affairs, complained that less and less time at party meetings was being dedicated to gender issues. The debate over the relationship of “female comrades” and their “women’s politics” to the “general party” and its “general” politics reflects the male-dominated discourse of the time, and hints at an ostensibly gender-neutral sphere that was in fact male by implication. While modernity brought equality to male citizens through universal male suffrage and compulsory military service, modern discourse constructed women as the “other” or “second” sex. This difference influenced the structure of the political sphere as well as the self-conception of political agents. As one of the most distinct features of the First Republic’s gender discourse, the Social Democratic women’s press openly debated the discrepancy between their claims to political equality as “female comrades”, and political reality, in which they often came second to men. The party benefitted from its female members’ enthusiasm: between 1918 and 1921, membership increased from 40,000 to 210,000. By 1929, 149,000 Viennese women were organised into Social Democratic groups. The majority of Austrian women, however, supported conservative parties during the First Republic. In the 1920 National Council elections,30 the CSP was able to gather the most female votes (1,315 female votes for every 1,000 male votes). The SDAP won 1,000 male for 888 female votes. With 1,000 male to 945 female votes, the Greater German Party could claim the most balanced gender ratio. The widest gender gap was seen in support for the Communist Party, I will not be able to address independent women’s organisations and the female Bundesrätinnen. 29 ╇ “Protokoll der vierten sozialdemokratischen Frauenreichskonferenz, Innsbruck 28.-29.10.1911”, in Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der deutschen SDAPÖ, Innsbruck 29.10.-2.11.1911 (Vienna, 1911), p.╯341. On the women’s organisation of the SDAP see also Hauch (1995a), p.╯278; Hacker (1981), pp.╯225-45; and Bandhauer-Schöffmann (1989), pp.╯369–410. 30 ╇ Male and female voters used separate, colour-coded ballots.

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which gained 1,000 male votes for every 571 votes from women. The election results of 1927 again made it apparent that the majority of women did not vote for the left-wing parties – though this gap decreased over time. This time 52% of all female and 44% of all male votes went to an Einheitsliste (unity list) with candidates from the CSP and GDVP, while the SDAP gained 40% of all female and 46% of all male votes. For a long time, the SDAP held women accountable for poor election results. In 1930, when female votes for the SDAP exceeded those for the CSP for the first time, by the absolute number of 959, an SDAP statistician argued that the party was being rejected by female voters and would have gained three more seats if there had been no female suffage in 1923.31 Adelheid Popp countered that the “entire party” was responsible for election results, especially when “women have the impression of coming second in the party”. Meanwhile, female Christian Social politicians successfully reÂ�cruited supporters, especially in the provinces: “Shall Austria be ruled by a Christian Weltanschauung, or by anarchy? It is our struggle. We have to decide”.32 The party expressed gratitude,33 but did not otherwise acknowledge their efforts. The 1920 party conference overruled a proposal for the foundation of a “Political Association of Austrian Christian Women” (Politischer Verband der Christlichen Frauen Österreichs). The party’s decision was a great defeat for the sponsors Hildegard Burjan and Fanny Starhemberg, who had wanted to establish women as “a limb of the Christian Social Party”.34 Instead, Christian Social women politicians had to organise within the broad, hardly political KFO, a move that severely restricted their range of action within the CSP.╯For Fanny Starhemberg, however, the unequal gender politics of the CSP came as no surprise. Earlier in the same year, the party had refused to nominate her as a candidate for the National Council: a woman, the party reasoned, was not fit for an ╇ Verhandlungen 1931, p.╯16. ╇ Hildegard Burjan, “Versammlung des Deutsch-christlichen Wählervereins Penzing” (Meeting of the German-Christian voters’ association in Penzing), Reichspost, 22 January 1919, p.╯3. For Catholic Christian Social women see Hauch (1995a), pp.╯281–3. 33 ╇ I.╯Seipel, “Die politischen Aufgaben der Frauen nach den Wahlen” (The political tasks of women after the elections), Österreichische Frauenwelt (1919), p.╯17. 34 ╇ Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Archiv der Republik (henceforth ÖStA-AdR), CS-Parlamentsclub, Karton 63, M.╯Parteitage, 1920; Reichspost, 2 March 1920. 31 32

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important office. Starhemberg, an aristocrat and politically active since the turn of the century, was highly displeased.35 Catholic women, however, had already prepared the ground for their debut in party politics. In November and December 1918, the Viennese and Lower Austrian branches of the KFO founded the Frauenrecht (women’s rights) political club to “prepare for political work, and to be trained”.36 Together with the periodicals Frau und Volk (Women and Nation) and Frauenarbeit und Frauenrecht (Women’s Work and Women’s Rights), the club built a strong basis for political organisation along gender lines. During the 1920s, Catholic women attempted to unite “the entire Christian Social women’s movement”, establishing district offices and a network of ombudswomen “with close ties to the head office”. The KFO began to organise into groups, among them so-called Civic Sections, which offered courses in speech-making and political campaigning. The Catholic women’s political outlook was militantly anti-Semitic and anti-Socialist. They also strove to counter the “petty-minded questions of prestige” and “power struggles” (Alma Motzko-Seitz) which characterised male politics by proclaiming the importance of the female-motherly principle. In the German Nationalist camp, too, women defined their political positions through gender difference. They organised women’s committees in the newly-founded Greater German People’s Party (GDVP), and, after 1921, in the Volksgemeinschaft German women’s club and in the Reichsverband deutscher Frauenvereine (National League of German Women’s Associations). In June 1921 female representatives of the diverse regional German Nationalist clubs convened at a first Reichsfrauentag of the GDVP.37 Closely following Social Democratic organisational structures, GDVP women attempted to establish themselves as a modern mass movement, but failed. They created an ideal image of the German woman as housewife who had her own political interests but did not wish to compete with men in general, and male politicians in particular. This focus on gender-specific roles often complicated inner-party discussions on tactics. While male and female German Nationalists argued in favour of recruiting women for politicial “agitation” against their main rivals, the SDAP and CSP, they at ╇Deutsch (1969), pp.╯176 and 142 (Letter to her son). ╇ Reichspost, 8 December 1918, p.╯6. 37 ╇ ÖStA-AdR, GDVP-Archiv, Kartons 59 and 60. For Greater German Nationalist women see Hauch (1995a), pp.╯283–6; and Gehmacher (1998). 35 36

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the same time expressed a longing for “the good old ... days”, when women belonged “in the home”.38 At regional party congresses, too, female delegates criticised prejudice against women activists in the party, and the obstruction of their work. Their complaints conflicted with the image German Nationalists liked to present of men and women belonging together in a conflict-free, racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist Volksgemeinschaft. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism and hostility towards the SDAP brought German Nationalist women politicians ideologically closer to Christian Social women. Their Greater German anti-clericalism and cultural politics, however, widened the gap between GDVP and CSP women’s politics. Elections and Parliament How did all this affect the parties’ attitudes towards female voters and female candidates at election time? On 30 October 1918, a number of women’s organisations presented a joint petition to the Provisional National Assembly calling for equal political rights for women. Among them were the Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine (Federation of AusÂ�trian Women’s Organisations), the Viennese Committee for Women’s Suffrage, the Reichsorganisation of Austrian Housewives, the Verein der Lehrerinnen und Erzieherinnen (Female Educators’ Club), the Vereinigung der arbeitenden Frauen (Association of Women Workers), and all Socialist Democratic women’s organisations. Four days later, a broad alliance of women politicians called a general meeting, where the participants formulated their claim for active and passive suffrage for women.39 On 12 November 1918, general, equal, direct and free suffrage for citizens of both sexes was adopted in § 9 of the constitution. On 18 December 1918 the Provisional National Assembly passed the regulations for the election of a Constituent National Assembly, §§ 11 and 12 of which granted active suffrage to citizens over twenty and passive suffrage to citizens over twenty-nine, regardless of gender. Prostitutes, however, remained excluded from the vote until the October 1920 constitution and the enacting law of 11 July 1923. The introduction of female suffrage was due largely to the political strength of the Social Democrats in 1918/19, the party which since 38 39

╇ ÖStA-AdR, GDVP-Archiv, Kartons 23 and 20. ╇Bader-Zaar (2006), p.╯1027.

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1892 had supported the female right to vote in their programme. For the SDAP, however, the republic itself was more important than the principle of political equality. “Women did not gain the vote as a prize after a long struggle”, Adelheid Popp concluded in 1919, “but as the fulfillment of the just principles of the republic”.40 Popp construed the republic as a higher abstract principle, almost a superordinate being with a special relationship to women; women had to “teach” the republic “to perceive and acknowledge them as worthy citizens ... to learn how to make use of their newly-obtained rights”; the republic, in return, was “entitled to the gratitude and loyality of women”. In fact, the SDAP took credit not only for having established political equality for women, but also for the other gender-specific innovations of the young republic: the right of women to serve on juries, to study law and the sciences, and to be judges and superintendents of schools. In the following months, the parties recognised that, as they made up 52.16% of the electorate, women were potentially a stronger voting bloc than men. The experience of the first elections in the new republic on 16 February 1919 undermined previous assumptions that women were politically uninterested. In fact, 82.1% of all female voters exercised their right to vote. The rate of male participation was 86.97%. Elections to the Viennese Workers’ Council in 1920 saw a dramatic decline in the participation of female voters: 78.4% of all men, but only 21.6% of all women turned out to cast their ballots. In the elections for the National Assembly in the same year, the gender gap seemed to close again (83.77% male and 77.68% female participation). During the First Republic, female participation in parliamentary elections increased steadily, so that 83.35% of eligible female voters and 86.97% of eligible male voters turn out in 1923. The figures for 1927 were 88% and 91% respectively, and for 1930 89% and 91% respectively.41 Women thus voted in large numbers, and were also occasionally elected to seats in parliament. In total, nineteen women (out of a grand total of 408 delegates) held seats between 1919 and 1933. Twelve of them were members of the SDAP, and already enjoyed considerable experience in public speaking and debating within the ranks of their own party, even before they were elected to parliament. Among them ╇ Popp (1919), p.╯12. ╇Stiefbold et al. (1966), pp.╯70, 74, 95 and 105; K.╯Heinz, “Die Wiener Arbeiterratswahlen” (The Viennese workers’ council elections), in Der Kampf. Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift 14, 2/3 (February-March 1921), pp.╯76–81. 40 41

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were two of Austria’s first female professional politicians: Adelheid Popp, who, as a young woman of twenty-four with only four years of formal education, began her career as an editor for the Social Democratic periodical Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (women workers’ newspaper) in 1893; and Anna Boschek, who, at the age of twenty, was employed by the Union to handle the organisation of women. Boschek’s retrospective remarks make visible the structural challenges that these women confronted in their unusual careers: “You can perhaps imagine how I felt when I had to struggle through the accursed terminology of archaic legislation, and when I, a factory hand with four years of elementary school, had to share a table with seasoned practitioners of the law”.42 During the first twelve years of the First Republic, Anna Boschek was a member of the Board of Social Administration, and took part in negotiating social legislation. Boschek was one of only five female delegates to represent the SDAP in the National Assembly over the entire duration of the First Republic. The small group of SDAP women parliamentarians benefitted from the “principle of seniority” and “permanence of mandates” which would later be established in the Second Republic. Committed to the idea of a republican, democratic government, the SDAP assigned a few permanent seats to female delegates and the party groups they represented. Within their fields of interest and expertise, these veteran politicians became powerful experts on how to gain influence in and on the National Assembly. In contrast to the SDAP, the CSP and GDVP – parties ideologically committed to the principle of gender difference – did not promote long-term careers for their female delegates at the national level. Hildegard Burjan’s work for the CSP illustrates this. In the 1919 electoral campaign, Burjan convinced her party of the importance of Catholic women as a voting group: “The Socialists keep together and will come to power, if we, as women, will not stand up to them”.43 Her dedication won her a seat in the National Assembly. Burjan, a native of Germany, had been politically active since 1910. A proponent of female-specific social and educational politics, she often sought dialogue with female candidates of the SDAP – hence the SDAP's disappointment when Burjan did not run for office in the 1920 National 42 ╇ Interview with Anna Boschek by Julie Schneider-Hanusch in Die Frau, 15 May 1954. 43 ╇ Hildegard Burjan Archiv, Vienna, minutes Köck. Cited in Kronthaler (1995), p.╯159.

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Assembly elections. Officially, Burjan stood down for reasons of health. There were rumours, however, that future Minister of Defence Carl Vaugoin had declared in internal party discussions that he would not be dispossessed of “his” electoral district (the 12th, 13th and 15th districts of south-west Vienna) by a “Prussian Jewish swine”.44 Burjan, who was of Jewish background and had converted to Christianity after falling seriously ill, was thus directly affected by the CSP’s anti-Semitic politics and ideology. With the exception of Olga Rudel-Zeynek, who served in the National Assembly for seven years, there was a rapid turnover of female CSP and GDVP parliamentary representatives. German NationaÂ�list Lotte Furregg, for instance, moved up to the National Assembly to replace deceased delegates between September and November 1920, and April and November 1923. No Christian Social or Greater German Nationalist woman delegate served in the National Assembly between 1927 and 1930. Female party members perceived the situation as scandalous. In the run-up to the 1930 elections for the National Assembly, the Catholic women’s organisations and the Greater German Reichsfrauenausschuss demonstrated their now fully developed political campaigning skills. Though not explicitly a political club, the KFO, with its 188,000 members, was aware of its importance to the party, and demanded a guaranteed place for a woman on the party list in exchange for their support in the 1930 campaign. Though the CSP recorded a net loss of votes, Emma Kapral, a teacher from Vienna, won a seat in the National Assembly.45 Greater German Nationalist women mobilised support in the women’s movement outside the political parties. The bourgeois Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine and the affiliated Österreichische Frauenpartei (Austrian Women’s Party, founded in 1929), for instance, did not enter the election, since the GDVP promised to give a seat to Marie Schneider, who had strong ties to the bourgeois liberal women’s movement. During the first two parliamentary sessions of the First Republic (1919-1923), important gender-specific bills were introduced and supported by women, most importantly the Hausgehilfengesetz (law concerning domestic service) and the bill enabling women’s entry into 44 ╇ Cited in Bosmans (1971), p.╯77. Also see Burjan’s secretary Irmgard BurjanDomanig, cited in Kronthaler (1995), p.╯218. 45 ╇ Frauen-Briefe 60 (1930), p.╯1.

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higher education. The first female delegates in the National Assembly all addressed “women’s questions” and were acknowledged within their parties as experts on gender issues. Male politicians did not dispute the strong symbolic presence of women in the field of gender politics: adhearing to patriarchal values, they hardly regarded women’s issues as a prestigious area of party politics. Anna Boschek, for instance, led the negotiations on the Hausgehilfengesetz for the SDAP, Hildegard Burjan for the CSP.╯The stated intention of all parties to guarantee regular wages, board and subsistence for domestic workers, a majority of them women, made their cooperation possible.46 Female party members similarly dominated the debate over higher education for women. Though Christian Social Olga Rudel-Zeyneck and Greater German Nationalist Emmy Stradal were only interim substitute members of the Committee of Education, their parties nominated them to give the first addresses in debates on the education budget and school reform for girls. For several legislative sessions, female delegates formed coalitions on the questions of access to and public funding of grammar schools for girls, and the equal employment of female teachers at public schools. Such coalitions were grounded in shared social experience: Rudel-Zeynek, Stradal and Therese Schlesinger, proponents of female higher education, had been kept out of grammar school and university, regardless of wealth, because of their gender. From time to time women of all political persuasions could thus recognise a collective female interest, and formulate common goals “from a woman’s point of view”. Cross-party female sponsorship of legislation ended after the 1930 elections for the National Assembly. The main reason is to be found in the polarisation of the political camps. Christian Social Emma Kapral and Greater German Marie Schneider, both teachers and active supporters of the women’s movement, did not object either to the cutting of funds for grammar schools for girls, or to the dismissal of female teaching staff. Their silence stands in stark contrast to the women’s politics of only a few years before. When, in the wake of the economic crisis, the CSP Minister of Finance refused to revoke the closing of a grammar school for girls, Christian Social Olga RudelZeynek protested in public: “The minister saves on issues he thinks of

46

╇ Hauch (1995), pp.╯142–8.

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less importance to public opinion. I think our party colleague has let us down”.47 Conclusion The end of woman-specific, cross-party intervention coincided with the end of the short-lived Austrian First Republic, where, as one gender-specific aspect of the Austrian Revolution, women were granted formal political equality. The “new world”, however, did not bring a profound transformation of gender relations. Nor was this a broad political goal of the revolution. The Räte movement in particular failed to confront issues of female emancipation or even flagging female participation in councils’ elections. As citizens, women not only “compete[d] with man for his world,” as Margarethe Susman put it, but, first and foremost, competed “within” a male world. Female participation in institutionalised politics met with defensiveness and irritation. However, the power of gender as a constructive category – deeply ingrained in the structure of bourgeois modernity – continued to limit female access to important political spaces. For strategic reasons, female activists in the First Republic identified themselves as representatives of women’s interests and as women’s politicians. Women parliamentarians lived the “feminist paradox”48 that dominated the modern emancipatory women’s movement from the beÂ�ginning: they criticised the construction of presumed female charÂ� acteristics, and struggled to transform hierarchical gender relations based on such a construction – yet at the same time “being a woman” and having a collective female experience constituted the basis for their committed politics “from a woman’s point of view” and “in the name of all women”. At a maximum of only twelve in the National Assembly between 1920 and 1923, the number of women in parliament in the First Republic might seem low. However, we would have to reconsider this assumption when we remember that it took the Second Austrian Republic until 1978 to reach the figure of twelve female delegates in its National Assembly.

47 ╇ “Der Abbau der Frauenbildung” (The dismantlement of women’s education), Arbeiter-Zeitung, 21 March 1924. Cited in Hauch (1998a), p.╯268. 48 ╇Scott (1996).

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Augeneder, S. (1987) Arbeiterinnen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Materialien zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Vienna: 1987). Bader-Zaar, B. (1997) “Bürgerrechte und Geschlecht. Zur Frage der politischen Gleichberechtigung von Frauen in Österreich, 1848-1918”, in Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. U.╯Gerhard (Munich: 1997) 547–62. ———╯(2006) “Frauenbewegungen und Frauenwahlrecht”, in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918. Politische Öffentlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft, Vol. VIII, Part 1, eds. H.╯Rumpler and P.╯Urbanitsch (Vienna: 2006) 1005–27. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, I. (1989) “Parteidisziplin”, Zeitgeschichte 11/12 (1989) 369– 410. Bosmans, L. (1971) “Hildegard Burjan – Leben und Werk”, (M.A. thesis, University of Vienna: 1971). Bauer, O. (1919) Rätediktatur oder Demokratie (Vienna: 1919). Deutsch, H. (1969) “Franziska Fürstin Starhemberg”, (Ph.D thesis, University of Vienna: 1969). Eichner, C.J. (1998) “‘To Assure the Reign of Work and Justice’. The ‘Union des Femmes’ and the Paris Commune of 1871”, ÖZG 9/4 (1998) 525–55. Eisler, E. (1995) “Sexualethik des Kommunismus. Eine prinzipielle Studie” (1920), in KampÂ�fname Ruth Fischer. Wandlungen einer deutschen Kommunistin, eds. S.╯Hering and K.╯Schilde (Frankfurt/M.: 1995) 103–8. Fallend, K. (1992) “Von der Jugendbewegung zur Psychoanalyse”, in Siegfried Bernfeld oder die Grenzen der Psychoanalyse. Materialien zu Leben und Werk, eds. K.╯Fallend and J.╯Reichmayr (Frankfurt/M.: 1992) 48–69. Gehmacher, J. (1998) “Völkische Frauenbewegung”. Deutschnationale und nationalsozialistische Geschlechterpolitik in Österreich (Vienna: 1998). Hacker, H. (1981) “Staatsbürgerinnen”, in Aufbruch und Untergang: Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, ed. F. Kadrnoska (Vienna: 1981) 225–45. Hanisch, E. (1999) “Die Männlichkeit des Kriegers. Das österreichische MiliÂ� tärstrafrecht im Ersten Weltkrieg”, in Geschichte und Recht. Festschrift für Gerald Stourzh zum 70. Geburtstag, eds. T.╯Angerer et al. (Vienna: 1999) 313–38. Hämmerle, C. (1998) “↜‘… wirf ihnen alles hin und schau, dass du fort kommst’. Die Feldpost eines Paares in der Geschlechter(un)ordnung des Ersten Weltkrieges”, Historische Anthropologie 6/3 (1998) 431–58. Hauch, G. (1988) “Der diskrete Charme des Nebenwiderspruchs. Zur sozialdemokratischen Frauenbewegung vor 1918”, in Sozialdemokratie und Habsburgerstaat. SoziaÂ�listische Bibliothek, Abt. 1: Die Geschichte der österreichischen SozialÂ� demokratie Vol. 1, ed. W.╯Maderthaner (Vienna: 1988) 101–18. ———╯ (1998) “Adelheid Popp (1869-1939), Bruch-Linien einer sozialdemokratischen Frauen-Karriere”, in Das alles war ich. Politikerinnen, Künstlerinnen, ExzenÂ�triÂ� kerinnen der Wiener Moderne, ed. F.╯Severit (Vienna: 1998) 27–51. ———╯ (1998a) “‘Oszillierende Allianzen’– Politikerinnen und die höhere MädchenÂ� bildung in der Ersten Republik”, in Zeitgeschichte im Wandel. 3. Österreichische Zeitgeschichtetage 1997, eds. G.╯Diendorfer, G.╯Jagschitz and O.╯Rathkolb (InnsÂ� bruck and Vienna: 1998) 263–70. ———╯ (1995) Vom Frauenstandpunkt aus. Frauen im Parlament 1919-1933. Studien zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte 7 (Vienna: 1995).

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———╯ (1995a) “Frauenbewegungen – Frauen in der Politik”, in Handbuch des politischen Systems Österreich. Erste Republik 1918-1933, eds. E.╯Tálos et al. (Vienna: 1995) 277–91. ———╯ (2008) “‘Welche Welt? Welche Politik? Zum Geschlecht von Revolte, RäteÂ� bewegung, Parteien und Parlament”, in “…der Rest ist Österreich”. Das Werden der Republik 1918-1922 Vol. 1, eds. H.╯Konrad and W.╯Maderthaner (Vienna: 2008) 317–38. Hautmann, H. (1987) Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918-1924 (Vienna and Zurich: 1987). Higonnet, M. and Higonnet, P. (1987) “The Double Helix”, in Behind the Lines. Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. M.╯Higonnet (London: 1987) 31–47. Kronthaler, M. (1995) Die Frauenfrage als treibende Kraft. Hildegard Burjans innovative Rolle im Sozialkatholizismus und Politischen Katholizismus vom Ende der Monarchie bis zur “Selbstausschaltung” des Parlamentes (Graz: 1995). Pfoser, A. (1981) “Verstörte Männer und emanzipierte Frauen. Zur Sitten- und LiteÂ� raÂ�turgeschichte der Ersten Republik”, in Aufbruch und Untergang. ÖsterÂ�reichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, ed. F.╯Kadrnowska (Vienna: 1981) 205–22. Popp, A. (1919) “Was die Frauen der Republik verdanken”, in 12. November. 1. Freiheit und Aufstieg, (Vienna: 1919). Scott, J. W. (1996) Only Paradoxes to Offer: French feminists and the right of man, (Cambridge and London: 1996). Sternsdorf-Hauck, C. (1989) Brotmarken und Rote Fahnen. Frauen in der Bayrischen Revolution und Räterepublik 1918/19 (Frankfurt/M: 1989). Stiefbold, R. et al ed. (1966) Wahlen und Parteien in Österreich. Österreichisches Wahlhandbuch, Vol. 3 Part C (Vienna: 1966). Susman, M. (1926) “Das Frauenproblem in der gegenwärtigen Welt”, in Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden. Essays und Briefe, ed. M.╯Susman (Frankfurt/M: 1992) 143–69. Thébaud, F. (1987) “Der Erste Weltkrieg. Triumph der Geschlechtertrennung”, in Geschichte der Frauen, eds. G.╯Duby and M.╯Perrot Vol. 5 (Frankfurt/M and New York: 1987) 33–91. Unfried, B. (1988) “Krawall in Wien. Hungerdemonstrationen im Ersten Weltkrieg”, in Die ersten 100 Jahre. Österreichische Sozialdemokratie 1888-1988, ed. H.╯Maimann (Vienna: 1988) 192–5.

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Who represents Hungarian women?

245

Who represents Hungarian women? The demise of the liberal bourgeois women’s rights movement and the rise of the right-wing women’s movement in the aftermath of World War I Judith Szapor Since its founding in December 1904 the Association of Feminists (FeÂ�miÂ�nisták Egyesülete or FE), the leading liberal Hungarian women’s rights organisation, developed along the lines of the bourgeois women’s movements of western Europe. The Association and its leaders, most notably Rózsa Schwimmer (also known as Rosika Schwimmer or Rosa Bédy-Schwimmer) and Vilma Glücklich, forged close ties with the international women’s movement by joining the ICW and the IWSA and hosting the latter’s 1913 congress in Budapest. The battle for suffrage soon took priority over previous campaigns for women’s legal, economic, and educational rights and culminated in several attempts to bring a reform bill to parliament, the last in the spring of 1914. These ultimately unsuccessful attempts helped raise the profile of the cause of women’s emancipation but alienated the Feminists’ natural allies: in a scenario reminiscent of earlier developments in Germany and Austria, the insistence of the Social Democrats and Bourgeois Radicals on universal suffrage (excluding women if need be) clashed with the Feminists’ willingness to compromise.1 The mutual breach of trust proved to be beyond repair and particularly damaging to the Feminists in the coming, crucial war years and during the political turmoil and right-wing turn in the war’s aftermath.

Building on its previous contacts and connections, the FE participated in the radical anti-war initiatives of the pacifist wing of the international women’s movement during the years 1914 to 1918.2 At the same time, it did not ignore the home front; the story of the Association’s prompt and efficient organisation of women for the war economy is yet to be told. In the last two years of the war, the Feminists reignited their campaign for electoral reform, using the arguments of their wartime service and sacrifices, familiar from the rhetoric of their western 1 2

╇Szapor (2004), pp.╯198–200; Evans (1987), pp.╯37–65. ╇ Wiltsher (1985); Acsády (2007).

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sisters. The hope for an imminent victory in their decade-long fight for the suffrage was reinforced by several developments. A coalition of left-wing and liberal parties that included dissident Independent Party members led by Count Mihály Károlyi, the Bourgeois Radicals, the Social Democrats, and Vázsonyi’s Democratic Party was formed in June 1917 to push for universal suffrage. In the same month a new coalition government was given a mandate by the king to introduce electoral reform; Vázsonyi, a long-time supporter of women’s suffrage, was named Minister of Justice and later Minister responsible for electoral reform.3 The reform bill submitted to parliament in December 1917 indeed included women with high-school education and raised the number of eligible voters from approximately 1.8 million to 3.6 million.4 During the following months however, as a result of continuous political crisis and rising popular anti-war unrest, electoral reform lost its urgency. The bill finally apÂ�proved in September 1918 was a watered-down version of the original proposal; it now excluded women and over 400,000 males and was soon to be cast aside by revolutionary events. The similarities with the European mainstream pattern continued in the immediate aftermath of the war. As the left-liberal coalition government led by Count Károlyi came to power and announced the new, independent Republic of Hungary, its first decree on 23 November declared universal suffrage, including women. The law fell short of complete equality as it set the minimum voting age for women at twenty-four and for men at twenty-one; yet it represented a marked improvement over the previous bill and a victory for the Feminists who also became members of the governing National Council. And this is where the parallels in women’s rights with western European developments ended. Instead of post-war reconstruction and a return to constitutional government in a new, democratic framework, a series of traumatic political changes and crises followed. In the next fifteen months, Hungary proceeded from democratic government to a Bolshevik-style revolution to counter-revolution, ending up under the authoritarian regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy. During the same period, the country was continuously embroiled in armed conflict with neighbouring states such as Romania and Czechoslovakia, 3 4

╇Kovács (2003). ╇Benda (1983), p.╯835.

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as well as being torn apart by virtual civil war between the forces of the left and the right. Finally, to make matters even worse, it was forced to sign the disastrous Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. The impact of these developments on women’s rights and the Hungarian women’s movement was nothing short of paradoxical. The elections scheduled for March 1919 were swept away by the Republic of Councils, which seized power in the same month but was in turn overthrown by counter-revolution and Romanian invasion in August 1919. Thus women first exercised their right to vote in January 1920, under drastically different conditions. The legislation of the Károlyi government had been repealed and a new electoral law, introduced at the request of the great powers, enfranchised all men and women over the age of twenty-four, with a literacy requirement for women only. Despite the impressive scope of electoral reform, the conditions of the elections fell far below the liberal democratic standards of the day: in protest against the still raging White Terror the Social Democrats boycotted the elections. Under the circumstances, the results were not surprising: a majority was won by the far right Christian National Unity Party with the agrarian, centre-right Smallholders Party coming a close second. First-time women voters were instrumental in bringing the parties of the right to power, apparently showing little gratitude towards those liberal parties that had championed their political and educational rights before and during the war. In the long run, the end result for the Feminists was even more devastating. They had every right to claim credit for the suffrage as the achievement of their decade-and-a-half long struggle; yet, instead of growing in stature, by early 1919 we find them in disarray. Despite a tremendous increase in size during the last months of the war, by the autumn of 1919 their organisation was fighting for its very survival. At the same time, a competing, emphatically anti-liberal women’s organisation, the National Association of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége or MANSZ), founded in January 1919, had replaced them as champions of middle-class women, and even denied the Feminists’ right to represent Hungarian women. What was it that led, in a matter of months, to the demise of a previously respected and successful liberal feminist movement and the rise of a right-wing, anti-liberal women’s movement? What made Hungarian middle-class women switch their allegiance, seemingly overnight, from the liberal programme of women’s emancipation to

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the conservative, anti-emancipatory and anti-Semitic agenda of MANSZ? In what follows, I will trace the contrasting trajectories of the demise of Hungarian liberal feminism and the rise of a right-wing women’s movement in the immediate post-war period. In the absence of a comprehensive secondary literature on the subject, I will attempt to outline what I consider to be the defining trends and turning points in this complex set of developments. I also offer a brief review of the few existing studies, including a revision of my own, previously published hypothesis;5 they underline the pressing need for more research, to resolve outstanding questions ranging from women’s electoral behaviour to the labeling of women’s movements and the characterisation of their respective agendas. The research presented here is based on the archival documents of the two competing women’s organisations. Yet it cannot stand on its own and needs to be located in the broader political context and the experience of women’s unprecedented political activism in the revolutionary period and its aftermath. Political history, limited to the study of women’s organisations, legislation of women’s political rights, and electoral patterns cannot do justice to this experience and this paper can do no more than call attention to this missing dimension of a broadly defined political history. While it is primarily concerned with uncovering new evidence to help explain a series of paradoxical developments in the post-war history of Hungarian women’s movements, this essay has also been informed by the recent preoccupation of gender and women’s historians with right-wing movements.6 This points to the need to place the Hungarian women’s movement in a broader European context. When approached from a comparative perspective, the Hungarian case in the post-war period should not necessarily be seen in terms of a clean break with the western model. At its most obvious, it could be interpreted as yet another manifestation of the anti-liberal and anti-feminist backlash affecting all European societies in the 1920s, democracies and authoritarian regimes alike.7 Potentially even more useful is to look at women’s role in the right-wing movements of the inter-war period, brought to the fore in the historiography of the last decade.8 Could the Hungarian case with its right-wing woman activists be ╇Szapor (2006); Pető and Szapor (2004). ╇See de Grazia (1992) and the Koonz-Bock debate. 7 ╇ Thébaud (1994). 8 ╇ Passmore (2003). 5 6

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regarded as a harbinger of things to come? The line dividing democracies from authoritarian regimes was neither straight nor permanent; countries which counted themselves among the democracies in the 1920s (Germany and Austria, or even Poland) came to be ruled by authoritarian governments by the 1930s. Hungary’s political development in the inter-war period, with its swings from authoritarian to quasi-democratic to overtly fascist government, reminds us of the difficulties of establishing clear-cut classifications in the region. Finally, if a comparative European approach promises fresh perspectives, so does a long view of Hungarian political and social history. It reveals the relevance of the post-1918 battle between the two models of women’s emancipation to Hungarian society at large. The persistence of conservative gender and family values in public discourse, along with the emergence of a right-wing women’s movement and its attack on liberalism, mirrored, to a large extent, the increasing polarisation of Hungarian political and social life. This division, between the forces championing a progressive agenda, ranging from the liberals to the Communists on the one hand, and the coalition of rightwing and conservative forces appropriating national interests on the other, would prove to be remarkably persistent for the rest of the interwar period. And far from being a spent force, it has reemerged after the collapse of state Socialism, with a resurgence of conservative gender and family values and a marked decrease in women’s political participation since 1989. What happened to the Association of Feminists in the immediate aftermath of war in terms of membership and influence? Surprisingly little is known about the Association of Feminists in the period between October 1918 and January 1920, apart from the fact that they joined the National Council, led by the governing coalition of Károlyi’s Independent Party, Jászi’s Bourgeois Radicals and the Social Democrats. Another fact, invariably mentioned, is the appointment of Rózsa Schwimmer as ambassador to Switzerland, a move, then and now, generally considered characteristic of Károlyi’s political naïveté. Schwimmer, who was expected to mobilise her considerable wartime western connections to alleviate Hungary’s diplomatic isolation, was doomed not to succeed: she failed to receive accreditation

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from the diplomatic corps and was ostracised by her own embassy staff before her recall in January 1919.9 In an earlier article I suggested that once the vote was granted in November 1918, the Feminists were unable to renew their agenda. Consequently, their membership dwindled and, in the absence of a new political programme, women activists opted for the emerging radical left or nationalistic, right-wing parties. This picture, based on the evidence and documents of a competing women’s organisation of ex-feminists who chose to ally with the Bourgeois Radical Party, needs to be corrected.10 New evidence in the archival collection of the Association of Feminists provides definitive answers on membership numbers and indicates that the organisation was in fact tested by the opposite problem and stretched to the breaking point by an abundance of new members. Membership estimates for the Association of Feminists are few and far between, with one study venturing a figure of 4,000 for the year 1917.11 The archival files of the Association of Feminists contain several “smoking guns”: one lists the membership figures, along with those of local branches and the names of affiliated organisations across the country. It is to date the best source to gauge the membership of the Association of Feminists before the end of the war, given at close to 3,700. It also confirms the expected: that the organisation was concentrated in the capital, with 2,947 members there. The five largest branches in the countryside represented another 750 members. A further 6,000 came from the ranks of the Association of Female Clerks; founded in 1897, the organisation represented white-collar women and served as the forerunner of the FE.╯Rózsa Schwimmer and Vilma Glücklich both emerged from its rank and file. For many years, the two associations also shared offices and the official bulletin The Woman and Society. Members of two committees, the “committee for peace and suffrage” and the “committee for the protection of mothers and children” created under the umbrella of the FE, accounted for a further 5,600 and 300, respectively. Note the combination of pacifism, increasingly

9 ╇ The details of Schwimmer’s failed mission can be traced in the correspondence of Károlyi in Litván (1978) nos. 287, 291, 298–9, 307–8, 340–2, 345, 348, 350–1, 355–6, 373, 380, and 383. 10 ╇Szapor (2006); Szapor (2005), pp.╯61–5. 11 ╇ Zimmermann (1997), pp.╯202–3.

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popular in the final years of the war, with suffrage, a shrewd political move. The archives of the Association of Feminists also contain a handwritten log of new members, indicating the somewhat lower number of 3,061 at the close of 1917.12 Membership had shown tremendous growth in 1917 (an increase of 1,100 members compared to 1916), continuing uninterrupted throughout 1918, reaching 5,312 by midJuly 1918 and 6,200 by the beginning of 1919. These are strikingly high numbers, compared to the previous peak of 1,492 members in 1913, considered the most successful year for the Association in the pre-war period. Contrary to expectations for an organisation often dismissed by contemporaries as limited to the Jewish middle class of Budapest, the logbook indicates that new members overwhelmingly came from the provinces, modifying the previous 1:4 ratio between the countryside and the capital.13 Further research should explore the possible sources of this marked growth as well as the curious fact that it did not seem to end, only slightly slow down, until well into the counter-revolutionary period in 1921.14 In the meantime, some clues can be detected in the minutes of the weekly executive meetings of the FE during the autumn of 1918. They reflect the immediate changes brought by the democratic Republic, nothing short of exhilarating from the Feminists’ perspective: Károlyi and his wife were old friends of Schwimmer (they had met during the war in London), and both were advocates of female suffrage. The Feminists were invited to nominate two members to serve on the National Council, the de facto governing body, and were asked to name a further twenty-five to thirty of their members for the so-called Council of 500.15 By 19 November the subcommittees of the National Council were formed and the Feminists reported that “our nominated experts were accepted with some difficulty”. In the end, the education committee accepted three feminist delegates, while the rest of the committees accepted one each.16

╇Registry of members, year 1917, HNA P999, box 13. ╇ The increase in new members from the countryside began at the end of 1917. 14 ╇One possible explanation could be that the registry did not indicate cancellations of membership. 15 ╇ Minutes of the 19 November 1918 executive meeting, Hungarian National Archive, P999, box 1, mixed association files. 16 ╇ Minutes of the 19 November 1918 meeting, p.╯1. 12 13

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In terms of membership, the minutes of the executive meetings confirm that new members joined at the rate of seventy-five to eighty a week, a trend continuing into December 1918. Who were these new members? And why would they join now when the Feminists’ main demand, the suffrage, had been fulfilled by the first decree of the new Republic? Some of them were men: the meeting of 19 November 1918 considered the application of a judge of the higher court and his son, a case curious enough to be noted in the minutes. Another clue might be found in the list of civic organisations eagerly announcing their support for the National Council in the early days. For instance, almost all conservative, church-based organisations threw in their lot with the winners, perhaps driven by genuine enthusiasm but more likely by political expediency. Thus the Association of Catholic Women Clerks informed the FE on 4 November 1918 that it had joined the National Council two days earlier. Members of the Association, continued the letter, “deeply understand the severity of the times and want to partake in the building of the new Hungary”.17 Yet another document drives home the point that the majority of new members did indeed come from outside Budapest. The leadership of the Szeged branch appealed in November to the FE leadership for advice in handling the sudden upsurge in membership.18 A couple of months later Szeged became the headquarters of the newly-organised extreme right, including the counter-revolutionary government-inwaiting and the Hungarian free corps, the instigators of the White Terror in the autumn of 1919; and letters from the remaining Feminists in Szeged expressed very different concerns.19 By January 1919 the Károlyi government, paralysed by shortages, a hostile Entente and military aggression by Hungary’s neighbours, lost much of its initial popularity. At the same time, as we have seen, the National Association of Hungarian Women was emerging as a female auxiliary of the organised counter-revolutionary, Christian, rightwing forces. The Károlyi-led coalition was gradually dissolved as the Social Democrats were drawn into a partnership with the emerging 17 ╇ Letter of leaders of the Association of Catholic Women Clerks to the Association of Feminists, 4 November 1918. P999, box 2 (domestic correspondence). The “new Hungary” was a term used exclusively by the progressive movements, now in government, to describe their coalition of socialists, radicals and the artistic avantgarde. 18 ╇Szeged leadership to Budapest office of FE, November 1918, P999, box 2. 19 ╇Szeged leadership to Budapest office, January 1920, in ibid.

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Communists and finally deposed when a Socialist-Communist coalition allowed Béla Kun to seize power in March 1919. These developments did not leave the Feminist organisation unaffected: some of its younger leaders joined the Communists and a few the emerging right-wing women’s organisation. Yet another group of high-profile Feminist leaders broke away to organise a female auxiliary of the Bourgeois Radical Party and enlisted candidates for the upcoming elections under its banner. In spite of this, the Feminists insisted that their Association should remain an organisation beyond and above parties.20 In a previous article I presented the motives of these “dissidents” in a sympathetic light. Their criticism of the Associations of Feminists was based on the belief that in a climate of extreme political polarisation and in light of the imminent fall of the Károlyi government it was not only foolish but suicidal to stick to the mantra of politics “above party”. And yet, despite the futility of these debates, one cannot escape the sense of this being a singularly exhilarating time for politically active women, full citizens in a democracy for the first time. There is also something to be said for the Feminists’ stubborn refusal to engage in party politics and take sides. It was a stance rooted in their loyalty to Károlyi and the spirit of his coalition, and as such, nothing short of admirable: he was after all the first in a long line of male politicians who not only promised but delivered the suffrage for women.21 How many Hungarian women’s rights movements were there? The problem of continuity In recent comparative histories of European women, the Hungarian case is rightly treated under the label of post-war authoritarian regimes.22 But when the laudable effort to make European women’s history more inclusive is combined with a lack of detailed local studies, it can easily result in generalisations that reveal very little about – or in fact do more to distort – the dynamics and shifts in the Hungarian

20 ╇ Minutes of executive meeting, 27 February 1919, P999, box 1 (mixed association files), pp.╯1–3. 21 ╇ Ibid. Members of the executive discussed the possibility of running on a party platform and postponed the decision, pending Károlyi’s approval. 22 ╇ Passmore (2003); Allen (2008).

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women’s movement.23 What is needed is a clear distinction between the declining, liberal, and the emerging, right-wing women’s movements. Despite some similarities in their leaders’ background and despite their shared claims to represent middle-class, educated Hungarian women, the two movements were poles apart in their outlook and mandate. These differences, although in less pronounced form, reached back to the beginning of the Hungarian women’s rights movement in the early twentieth century when the relationship of the liberal and conservative women’s activists was already strained.24 To treat MANSZ as an heir to the traditional women’s associations of the late nineteenth century would be a misrepresentation: the latter, usually organised by denomination, strictly limited their activities to charity and education, and supported the political and social status quo. They did join the Feminists under the umbrella of the Alliance of Hungarian Women’s Associations and at times reluctantly participated in some of the initiatives of the FE.╯The Feminists, in turn, were not above using the substantial numbers involved in the traditional women’s organisations as an argument in their campaigns for the vote. In contrast, the founders of MANSZ set out with a clear political agenda: to serve as the women’s auxiliary of the reorganised counterrevolutionary right during the dying weeks of the Károlyi revolution.25 Moreover, they were determined to shake up the temporarily disoriented Right, “to rap them across the knuckles” as Christiane Streubel’s study of German right-wing nationalist women in this volume puts it, and to urge them to set aside pre-war political and confessional differences in the interests of the fight against Bolshevism. True, some among the founders of MANSZ had been present on the periphery of the broad pre-war coalition of women’s movements, representing a conservative and Christian Socialist agenda while others moved from a moderate to a radical nationalist stance as a result of the revolutions. 23 ╇ Allen (2008), pp.╯50–1, portrays the Hungarian situation as representative of a pattern developed by women’s movements in the region to replace universalist feminist principles with right-wing ideologies in exchange for educational and political gains. There is no mention of the fact that MANSZ, the National Association of Hungarian Women, was not the only women’s movement in Hungary at this time. 24 ╇Kovács (2003), p.╯82, describes the pre-war Hungarian feminist movement as “a conglomerate of women activists with diverse roots in liberal, Christian socialist, social democratic and even conservative circles”. 25 ╇Report of the general secretary of MANSZ, Károly Kiss, in 1929. Quoted in Kádár (2003), p.╯12, n. 27.

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Most of its leaders however, including the writer Cecile Tormay, rose to prominence as leading ideologues of the counter-revolution relying on long-existing right-wing and anti-Semitic convictions. Tormay was instrumental in supplying much of the right-wing regime’s new-fangled, virulent anti-Semitic language, tied to a rhetoric of conservative family and social values, rich in Christian and, once again, racial references.26 The role of MANSZ in the political struggles over the limitations of women’s higher education and voting rights in the early 1920s, not discussed in this paper but addressed by Judit Acsády in her contribution to this volume, should not obscure the fact that its leaders assumed the role of a women’s movement only gradually and half-heartedly. Their claim to represent “Hungarian”, that is to say, non-Jewish, middle-class women through the expansion of MANSZ into a mass organisation in the countryside (MANSZ claimed to reach a membership of 1 million by 192127) was fulfilled by the early 1920s; yet it is not clear if they ever fully emancipated themselves from the auxiliary role allotted to them by the extreme right – in whose rise they had also been instrumental. Was there a split between the liberal and conservative women’s movements? The “original sin argument” In her previously cited essay, Mária M.╯Kovács highlights the ambiguities of woman’s emancipation in Hungary’s post-war, illiberal era of growing ethnic and religious fragmentation.28 Her argument helps to explain the mutually beneficial cooperation between the right-wing regime and the women’s activists. She was also among the first to reveal the latter’s significance in developing the regime’s anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideology. Recent studies have contributed a more detailed analysis of the work and role of Tormay.29 While adding a refreshing, new perspective to the history of Hungarian women’s movements, Kovács tends to understate the fun26 ╇Tormay (1923), her “diary” of the revolutionary year documents the emergence of this lethal combination and its translation from rhetoric into ideology and policy. 27 ╇Kádár (2003), p.╯11, note 27; the number, given by Tormay’s sympathetic biographer, should be taken with a large grain of salt. 28 ╇Kovács (2003). 29 ╇Bánki (2008); Kádár (2003). It should be noted that Tormay’s novels and autobiographies enjoy a revival in today’s Hungary.

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damentally different roots, agendas and personnel of the two competing women’s organisations and instead assumes a continuity between the pre-war conservative women’s associations and the post-war right-wing women’s movement. She also puts the demise of the liberal strand of feminism down to its “original sin”, i.e. the failure of bourgeois feminists to support the Socialists’ demand for universal suffrage in 1906 and their willingness to compromise their universalist principles during the debates on the 1917 reform bill. The first part of the argument, the failure of the liberal feminists to support the Socialists in their fight for universal (manhood) suffrage, is an accusation often voiced before on more comprehensive grounds.30 Presented here without the context and on sparse evidence, it does little to convince. More persuasive is the second part of the argument that detects a final split between the liberal and conservative women activists in 1917. Even if the chronology of events presented is open to questions, it highlights the fact that the roots of post-war right-wing extremism and antiSemitism were established in the preceding era. Did first-time women voters, as a rule, support clericalism and conservatism? How did Hungarian women vote in 1920? There is very little evidence to support the claim, voiced by contemporaries, liberal feminists and Socialists alike, that in 1920, the first election in which they exercised the right to vote, Hungarian women supported the parties of the right.31 Voter behaviour was not recorded until after 1945 and the argument seems to rest not on statistical evidence but on a left-wing prejudice, also present in countries like France, as Christine Bard shows in this volume, that women were unduly influenced by the churches. In the Hungarian case, this assumption happens to be supported by ample anecdotal evidence and by the dominant role of the churches, above all the Catholic Church, in Hungarian political life. Church leaders, with rare exceptions, posi-

╇ Zimmermann (1999). ╇Kovács (2003), p.╯86 and notes 8–9 quotes the first and only woman MP of the Social Democratic Party, Anna Kéthly from 1928 as well as the liberal feminist newspaper from 1922 to that effect. The argument itself has had a long history in Socialist politics, especially in countries with a Catholic tradition. Evans’s account (1987), chapter 3, is a valuable guide here as well. 30 31

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tioned themselves on the side of political and social conservatism and were instrumental in influencing voters, especially in the countryside. An equally important fact to consider is that the elections of January 1920 took place in a climate of repression and counter-revolutionary terror. Much of the pre-war left and anyone with a role in the two revolutions was excluded from political life. As a result, the Social Democratic Party, the only remaining party of the left with mass support, boycotted the elections. Their position and the climate of fear is explained, to the limited degree it was possible at the time, on a flyer, titled “The elections and the Social Democratic Party” found in the files of the Feminists. “Because of the mandatory nature of the elections, we cannot ask you to completely abstain”.32 The only way to make your non-vote count, continues the flyer, is to cross out the entire ballot, before placing it in the envelope. While this advice may have been heeded by organised workers, it is unlikely to have convinced the middle class, and nor was it meant to target them. Another flyer in the FE’s files, probably written and distributed by the Social Democrats, seems to have been aimed more directly at the middle class. It avoids using party names, characterising its author instead as the voice of “the overwhelming majority” and the parties of the right as “representatives of extremism and intolerance” who “do not reflect the will of the majority”.33 As for ways of forcing a truly democratic election, the flyer suggests the same method, namely to cross out all the candidates, and assures its readers that “This counts as a legitimate vote and nobody can be harmed for it”. Finally, a sample of the electoral propaganda of the right-wing Christian National Unity Party, the eventual winners of the election, also found in the files of the Feminists, is indicative of the tenor overtaking political life. It is likewise a telling example of the juxtaposition of the respective liberal and Christian-conservative agendas concerning women. Sisters! Christian Hungarian women! Before you step in front of the ballot box, take stock of your conscience! Every Jewish-leaning representative who makes it to Parliament means a step to the left, towards Communism. The Communist makes the woman the pariah of society, because his laws do not defend the wife! They do not recognise the sanctity of marriage! The man can leave his wife whenever he wants to. 32 33

╇ P999, box 14. ╇ P999, box 14, my translation.

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Judith Szapor Mothers! When you go to vote, think of the innocent angel faces of your little girls because you hold their fates in your hands! The vote is secret! No one will ever learn if you listened to your conscience, to the whisper of your heart! Sisters! Our fate this time, and perhaps for the last time, is in our hands.34

What was the alternative? Were there any other parties the Feminists and middle-class moderates, men and women could vote for? Very few of the Feminists’ partners in the pre-war democratic opposition, many of whom they had fought tooth and nail with over the degrees and conditions of women’s suffrage, survived into the new era. In their absence, the Feminists opted for the least of evils; they supported the remaining liberal parties, including the Democratic Bourgeois Party of Vilmos Vázsonyi, the same politician with whom they had broken over his 1917 electoral reform bill.35 Two years later when the Social Democrats reentered the political arena, the Feminists supported the lone woman elected on the Social Democratic ticket, Anna Kéthly. Back in 1920, however, in the absence of any real alternative, the right won and formed a government, claiming to have received an overwhelming mandate from the population, including first-time women voters. Who has the right to represent Hungarian women? The competing women’s movements in the international context In the final section of the paper, I will look at an episode that figured the two competing women’s movements and their rival claims to represent Hungarian women in the outside world. The episode took place at the eighth congress of the IWSA, which was originally intended to be held in Madrid in the spring of 1920. The choice of location raised immediate concerns, namely the logistics and cost of transport and visas at a time when civic organisations in most European countries were bankrupted by the war and the post-war inflation. The FE was a founding member of the IWSA and as such automatically qualified to

34 ╇Electoral flyer of Dr. Pál Lipták, candidate of the Christian Party, P999, box 14, my translation. 35 ╇ A letter acknowledges this support and promises to represent women’s rights. Letter of the Democratic Bourgeois Party to Association of Feminists, 27 December 1919, P999, box 2.

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represent Hungarian women there. The Feminists replied to the call for the Madrid convention in January 1920: We are sorry to state that there is little hope for the Hungarian Auxiliary to be represented at the 8th Congress of the I.S.A. [sic]. The obstacles are twofold: it is doubtful whether we could get visas for the countries we have to pass to reach Spain and secondly and chiefly we see no possibility to raise the expenses for this distant journey as considering the devaluation of our values [sic] this will amount to an enormous sum. … We regret intensely that the congress is not held in a country which we could reach without having to combat insurmountable difficulties as we believe it to be of extreme importance after the long interval of these tragic years which have past since the last convention…36

The financial difficulties were far from exaggerated: the finances of the Association were in a shambles. Not only was it unable to afford the expenses of a trip abroad, it could barely maintain daily operations, pay its rent or cover its telephone service. The minutes of the 15 October 1919 executive meeting provide insight into these circumstances: “We sent telegrams to the international organisations to ask for assistance as our movement is heading for a crisis. We are unable to collect the membership fees from the countryside or able to hold lectures; as a result we have no income”.37 This was a far cry from the pre-war era when the Hungarian branch and its leaders were the equals of their western European and American counterparts, a change alluded to in the subtle reference to the “last conference” and happier times. The IWSA leaders must have had fond memories of the last pre-war conference in Budapest in 1913 and its lavish receptions. The January 1920 letter also contained a reply to the request of the IWSA organising committee, and supplied a list of supporters of women’s suffrage whom the Hungarian branch recommended to be invited as honorary guests. They were establishment figures, close to the current government: Countess Albert Apponyi, wife of the head of the Hungarian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and President of the Federation of Hungarian Women’s Associations, the Catholic Prelate Dr. Sándor Giesswein, and Auguszta Rosenberg, the conservative former president of the Federation. And while their inclusion could be interpreted as a gesture towards the conservative forces now in power, they were also bone fide supporters 36 37

╇ FE to secretariat of IWSA on 6 January, 1920, P999, box 13, original in English. ╇ Minutes of 15 October 1919 executive meeting, P999 box 12.

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of the suffrage and long-time associates of the Feminists since the beginning of the century. Between January and May 1920 several developments took place: the congress had to be moved from Madrid to Geneva and, by some oversight, representatives of MANSZ received an invitation. A letter from the vice-president of the IWSA, Chrystal Macmillan, dated 24 February 1920, indicates the continuing importance the IWSA leaders assigned to the Hungarians’ participation: “You will no doubt be glad to know that the Congress has been withdrawn from Madrid, and that it is to be held in Geneva, probably in the week beginning June 6th. We do hope that this will make it possible for Hungarian women to be present”.38 She went on: “We are not quite clear as to what is at present the political situation in Hungary with respect to a Parliament. We have been proposing that one of the Propaganda Meetings at Geneva should be addressed by women members of Parliament of different countries. Have you any women members of Parliament now? If so, is there any you could recommend as a good suffrage speaker?”. This was a sad reminder of the isolation of Hungary and the difficulties experienced by liberals in maintaining ties with the west. In fact the elections took place five weeks earlier and the new parliament had a single woman representative, the conservative Christian Socialist Margit Schlachta. In the end, two representatives of the Association of Feminists, Eugenie Miskolczy and Rózsa Schwimmer, managed to attend. What happened there we can reconstruct from the letter of Chrystal Macmillan to Vilma Glücklich. Macmillan relays a communication from Emily Balch, who would go on to become president of the WILPF and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The following then is Balch’s recollection of her meeting with Rózsa Schwimmer in the aftermath of the Geneva congress. Rosika [i.e. Rózsa] Schwimmer, whom I saw recently is greatly grieved over a certain matter and as I am a great believer in frankness I would like to put it to you as she explained it to me, as nearly as I can remember it. I do not doubt there is some sort of an explanation. I understand that it is a rule of the Alliance that Fraternal Delegates will be received from any country only when recommended by the affiliated association in that country. Rosika says that without consulting the Hungarian Suffrage Society you invited Hungarian women who were not only reactionary but always opposed to the Suffrage, almost up to the time I think 38

╇ Chrystal Macmillan to FE, 24 February 1920, P999, box 9.

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she said, when it was finally granted. She reports that they have gone back to Hungary and made things very difficult for the Feministák Egyesülete (sic!) that they claim to be the authentic representatives and that generally they are making life very hard for our old friends in Hungary.39

In explanation, Macmillan adds: I am extremely sorry if there has been misapprehension on your part as to the invitations sent officially by the Alliance to Hungary or on the part of the delegates from the National Association of Hungarian Women as to the status accorded to them in the Geneva Congress. The Alliance did not issue any invitations to Societies in Hungary to send Fraternal Delegates because the letter from the Feministák Egyesülete (the Hungarian Auxiliary) dated January 6th 1920 in response to a request from the Alliance for the names of suitable societies did not propose any.

Who were the Hungarian women who showed up without an invitation? Research in the archives of the IWSA would likely turn up their names. In the meantime we can find evidence of their activities on their return to Hungary in a letter written by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Defence League for Hungary’s Territorial Integrity to the FE.╯The League was one of the nationalistic, extreme right-wing organisations that emerged in the post-war period and found continuing legitimisation in the Treaty of Trianon. Its women’s auxiliary was led by the same set of women who developed the programme of conservative, Christian regeneration represented by MANSZ.╯The tone of the letter is characteristic of the times and a sharp departure from the pre-war civility prevailing even among political adversaries: Rosa Bédy-Schwimmer and Eugenie Miskolczy… do not have the right to represent Christian Hungary, not even when it comes to women’s suffrage. Neither has the Association of Feminists this right until they cleanse themselves of the destructive elements. Until they do that, we have every right to ask: how dare they represent, in any matter whatsoever, Hungarian women.40

The writers left no doubt what they meant: “We say it out loud: we find it intolerable that an association that consists mainly not of Hungarians but of immigrant aliens, who to all accounts have propagated destruc╇ Chrystal Macmillan to Vilma Glücklich, 25 November 1920, P999, box 9. ╇ Women’s Auxiliary of the Defensive League for Hungary’s Territorial Integrity, 30 July 1920 to FE, P999 box 2. Italics in the original, my translation. 39 40

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tive activities, would dare to represent Hungarian women abroad”. Note the appropriation of “Hungarian,” code for “non-Jewish” and the repeated use of “destructive”, by then both part and parcel of a Hungarian version of the “stab-in-the-back” legend, used to great effect in the anti-Semitic rhetoric and physical terror directed against Jews and leftists in these months. The unfailingly polite response and explanation provided by the Feminists made little dent in this and similar attacks.41 And yet, it was not for lack of trying: among others, the Feminists had sent a telegram to the IWLPF and the IWSA, appealing to their sisters to bring pressure on their governments to change the terms of the disastrous peace settlement. Not only would it destroy Hungary but, they remarked with rare foresight, it “would inevitably lead to conflagration in the whole of Europe”.42 Such evidence of the Feminists’ use of their international connections to defend Hungarian interests, readily cited, fell on deaf ears; the right-wing regarded the international organisations in question as extended arms of Jewish and leftist interests and there is no evidence of any further attempt on their part to gain access to them. The question then is: why did MANSZ find it important to be represented at the 1920 IWSA congress, an international gathering of suffragists whose political agenda, women’s emancipation and pacifism, they clearly did not share? The answer is the ongoing Paris Peace Conference where negotiations over the final form of the Trianon Treaty were taking shape in May and early June, coinciding with the IWSA conference. The right-wing women of MANSZ and the Women’s Auxiliary of the Defence League for Hungary’s Territorial Integrity most likely used their appearance at the conference as a lastditch attempt to call attention to the injustices about to be committed against Hungary. The refusal of the IWSA to accredit them when appearing at the conference uninvited only confirmed their suspicion of the existence of a Jewish-pacifist international conspiracy. 41 ╇ Mrs. Oszkár Szirmay and Melanie Vámbéry to Women’s Auxiliary of the Defence League for Hungary’s Territorial Integrity, no date, P999, box 4. The Feminists also complained about the vicious attacks in the right-wing press directed at Schwimmer that eventually forced her to flee. See FE to Mrs. Albert Apponyi, President of the Federation of Hungarian Women’s Associations on 7 February 1920, P999, box 4. 42 ╇ The Hungarian Section of the Alliance to the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom and to the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, 1 March 1920, P999 box 13.

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On 4 June 1920 the Hungarian delegation signed the Treaty of Trianon which deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its former territory and almost 60% of its population, including 30% of the ethnic Hungarians living in central Europe. By then, the right-wing government and its ideological adherents, men and women, had found the culprit in the composite image of Socialists, democrats, Jews, free masons and feminists. The above exchange provides insight into the pivotal role of right-wing women activists in the formation of the post-war period’s nationalistic, anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideology. It demonstrates the means by which they managed, in one fell scoop, to discredit the liberal feminist organisation FE as anti-Hungarian and the liberal programme of women’s emancipation as outside of the Hungarian mainstream. This in turn enabled them to claim to be the only legitimate representatives of Hungarian women. At the same time, the episode highlights the fatally weakened position and extremely limited room for manoeuvre of the liberal women’s emancipation movement in the post-1919 political landscape. Their international connections, their early and principled stand against the war, and their universalist, liberal principles were now all turned against them and deemed unpatriotic, treacherous and alien to the values of true Hungarian women. Bibliography Acsády, J. (2007) “In a Different Voice: Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A. S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 105–23. Allen, A. T. (2008) Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: 2008). Bánki, É. (2008) Unpublished literary biography of Cecile Tormay. Benda, K. (1983) ed., Magyarország történeti kronológiája (Budapest: 1983). Evans, R. J. (1987) Sisters and Comrades: Feminism, Socialism and Pacifism in Europe 1870-1945 (London: 1987). De Grazia, V. (1992) How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945 (Berkerley and Los Angeles: 1992). Kádár, J. (2003) “Az antiszemitizmus jutalma. Tormay Cecile és a Horthy-korszak”, Kritika, 32/3 (March 2003) 12. Kovács, M. “Hungary”, in Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45, ed. Kevin Passmore (Manchester: 2003) 79–90. Litván, Gy. ed. (1978) Károlyi Mihály levelezése, vol. 1., 1905-1920 (Budapest: 1978). Passmore, K. ed. (2003) Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (ManÂ� chester: 2003). Pető, A. and Szapor, J. (2004) “Women and the Alternative Public Sphere: Toward a New Definition of Women’s Activism and the Separate Spheres in East-Central Europe”, NORA, Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 4 (2004) 172–82.

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Szapor, J. (2004) “Sisters or Foes: The Shifting Frontlines of the Hungarian Women’s Movement, 1896-1918”, in Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective, eds. B.╯Pietrow-Ennker and S.╯Paletschek (StanÂ� ford, CA: 2004) 189–205. ———╯ (2005) The Hungarian Pocahontas: The Life and Times of Laura Polanyi Stricker, 1882-1959, East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia UniÂ� versity Press (New York: 2005). ———╯ (2006) “Feministák és ‘radikális asszonyok’ – Női politikusok az 1918-as demoÂ� kratikus forradalomban”, in Nők a modernizálódó magyar társadalomban, eds. B.╯Nagy and G.╯Gyáni (Debrecen: 2006) 248–77. Thébaud, F. (1994) “The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division”, in A History of Women in the West vol V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. F.╯Thébaud (Cambridge, MA: 1994) 21–75. Tormay, Cecile (1923) An Outlaw’s Diary, vols. I-II (London: 1923). Wiltsher, Anne (1985) Most Dangerous Women (London: 1985). Zimmermann, S. (1997) “Frauenbestrebungen und Frauenbewegungen in Ungarn. Zur Organisationsgeschichte der Jahre 1848-1918,” in Szerep és alkotás, eds. B.╯Nagy and M.╯Sárdi (Debrecen: 1997). ———╯ (1999) Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 (Vienna and Budapest: 1999).

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Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists: the Polish women’s movement after World War I Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 aroused hopes among Polish patriots that they might be able to exploit the situation to restore their national independence, lost during the three partitions of the late eighteenth century. Some put their faith in a victory of the Central Powers over Tsarist Russia, but were disappointed by the very limited autonomy granted to the newly-proclaimed Kingdom of Poland on 5 November 1916. Others sought alignment with the western Allies, especially after President Wilson included Polish independence as one of his Fourteen Points in January 1918. Yet the new Republic of Poland which emerged from the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires in November 1918 was far from being a stable creation. Rather, it had to establish its borders through a series of concurrent wars in 1918-21, including anti-German uprisings in Poznań (Posen) and Upper Silesia, armed conflict with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn (Těšín/ Teschen), and a brutal struggle with the West Ukrainian Republic over eastern Galicia and its capital Lwów (L’viv/Lvov), ending in a ceasefire in July 1919. However, the conflict which came closest to destroying the new Republic, and which claimed the most lives, was the Polish-Soviet war of 1920-21. Only after the “Miracle of the Vistula” in August 1920, when Red Army troops were pushed back from the gates of Warsaw, was Poland saved, allowing it to annex Wilno (Vilnius) from Lithuania in October 1920 and to wrest substantial territorial concessions from the Bolsheviks under the Treaty of Riga in March 1921. Even then, the new eastern borders were not formally recognised by the western Allied powers until March 1923.1

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Polish women living in all three partitions not only lacked political rights but were also denied freedom of association. The first universities on Polish territory were opened to women only at the end of the nineteenth century. The relative weakness of the Polish women’s movement, which demanded ╇Davies (2005), pp.╯291–8; Lukowski and Zawadzki (2006), pp.╯217–31; Zamoyski (2008). 1

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voting rights for women only in 1905, has been usually explained by reference to the unique difficulties faced by a nation living under the rule of three separate powers. It is no accident that the activities of the Polish women’s movement were concentrated in the Austrian and Russian partitions. In Habsburg Galicia male citizens were granted the freedom to associate and since 1907 they could participate in elections to the Austrian parliament. Only a few groups of Galician women had voting rights to parliamentary bodies at various levels. A tiny handful of female owners of large landed estates could take part in elections to the Reichsrat in Vienna. Educated and employed female residents of the biggest cities (Cracow and Lwów) who paid the highest taxes, for example public school teachers or civil servants, had the right to vote in municipal elections. Galicia’s political autonomy and its relatively greater freedoms were both factors that contributed to an increased gender and national consciousness among female activists in this part of Poland. Campaigning for voting rights for women, the activists organised public meetings and sent petitions. In 1908 a painter and feminist, Maria Dulębianka, supported by other female activists, stood for election in the Lwów municipal elections. The political and legal changes in Congress Poland after the 1905 Revolution provided a stimulus for female activists living under Russian rule. Being granted the freedom to associate, Polish feminists Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit and Józefa Bojanowska set up the Związek Równouprawnienia Kobiet Polskich (Union of Equal Rights for Polish Women) in 1907. The Union demanded full equality for women in the spheres of politics, civil law, education and employment. The organisation petitioned Polish delegates to the Russian Parliament (Duma), urging them to initiate a debate on granting women political rights, but to no avail.2 From the outset, the “woman question” in Poland was intertwined with the issue of political and territorial independence. For the majority of male political activists, women’s demands for suffrage took priority over the recovery of Polish nationhood. Liberals and socialists, between whom female activists oscillated, urged women to prioritise the national interest over their own. Interestingly, the involvement of Polish women in the struggle for independence (for instance, their participation in the 1830/1 and 1863 uprisings against the Tsar, which 2

╇Sierakowska (1994), pp.╯245–7.

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 267 were punished with deportations to Siberia) was used by feminists as an argument for granting them the same political and legal privileges as men cherished. Maintaining that women had the same right to decide about their homeland as men, feminists emphasised the need for women’s participation in building the future Polish state.3 Underlining their patriotism and competence, Polish female activists demanded their inclusion in the Polish civic community. The arguments referring to women’s patriotism intensified during the First World War. The conflict among the partitioning countries was considered by all, male and female activists alike, as a real opportunity for gaining independence.4 Tens of thousands of politically aware and active women, among them some pre-war feminist activists, took part in the Polish war effort, which until 1917 was directed mainly against Tsarist Russia. The best known and most significant role that Polish women played during the First World War was their support for the Polish army corps organised by the Austrian high command. Women’s activities were concentrated mainly in two organisations: the Liga Kobiet Pogotowia Wojennego (Women’s League for War Alert) and the Liga Kobiet Galicji i Śląska (League of Women from Galicia and Silesia). The first, usually referred to as League A, was established in 1912 in Russian Poland, and had around twenty thousand members.5 The second, customarily called League B, was set up in 1915 and had twelve thousand members.6 Members of both leagues were recruited mainly from the leftist progressive intelligentsia.7 Their war work concentrated on “the care of and provision of material and moral support for Polish soldiers”.8 Polish women also served in the Polskie Drużyny Strzeleckie (Polish Firing Squads), whose female division was estab╇ Ibid., p.╯250. ╇Nowosielska (1929), p.╯18; Jaworska (1930), p.╯9. 5 ╇ Piłsudska (1960), p.╯200. 6 ╇ “Witajcie!” (Welcome!) Na Posterunku 6, 4 February 1917, pp.╯1–2 (here p.╯1). The weekly newspaper claimed that the women in League B were organised into one hundred and twenty groups and came from diverse political, social and religious backgrounds and opinions. In reality, women from the intelligentsia and the leftist middle class predominated. 7 ╇Dufrat (2001). 8 ╇ The term “care” is repeatedly emphasised in the published aims of the League. They were to “take care” of: 1. soldiers, 2. sick and wounded, 3. former soldiers, 4. families, widows, orphans, 5. people. See “Działalność Ligi Kobiet Galicji i Śląska” (1927), p.╯170. 3 4

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lished as early as in 1911;9 and in the Polska Organizacja Wojskowa (Polish Military Organisation).10 The activities of women’s auxiliary groups included intelligence (secret service), distribution of supplies and nursing. They worked as couriers (dispatch riders), and in kitchens, laundries, offices and military hospitals.11 Women’s groups such as League A and League B were organised and supervised by leading activists in the Polish women’s movement, including the socialist Zofia Moraczewska, the economist Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska and the writer and pedagogue Iza Moszczeńska. When Poland regained its independence in November 1918, female activists drew on their patriotism and war work in order to legitimise their demand for full political rights and inclusion in the public sphere. The specific sense of entitlement that Polish women now had was underscored by one of the activists who announced: “[i]f, after the end of the war, one would dare to tell a woman that ‘Negro did his work, Negro may leave’ – she will not listen!” (emphasis in the original).12 The right to vote and to participate in political affairs was perceived as a reward that was due to women because of their involvement in the First World War and in patriotic activities in the nineteenth century.13 An example of such an argument may be found in the memoirs of Aleksandra Piłsudska, who, more than forty years after the end of the First World War, wrote: It was acknowledged that women, who had shown so great a national awareness and spirit of sacrifice while participating in the Legions as couriers and members of the Polish Military Organisation and while working in auxiliary organisations, had the right to be members of Parliament.14

Piłsudska, who served in various military roles during the war, was later famous as the wife of Józef Piłsudski, the post-war Chief of State, whom she married in 1921. The latter’s November 1918 decree on the elections to the first Polish parliament granted equal voting rights to

╇Nałęcz (1994), p.╯75. ╇ Ibid., p.╯78. 11 ╇ Jaxa-Kwiatkowska (1927), pp.╯207–8; Danysz-Fleszarowa (1918), pp.╯42–3. 12 ╇ Jahołkowska-Koszutska (1918), p.╯31. 13 ╇ “Prawa wyborcze kobiet w okresie wojny światowej” (Women’s suffrage during the world war), Na Posterunku 10, 4 March 1917, pp.╯5–6; Jahołkowska-Koszutska (1918), p.╯27. 14 ╇ Piłsudska (1960), p.╯213. 9

10

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 269 men and women, a provision that was later confirmed in the 1921 Constitution. Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (Voluntary Legion of Women) The armistice on the western front in November 1918 did not bring an end to military conflict in Poland. The fact that the eastern part of Polish territory was populated by Belarussian and Ukrainian minorities and that the borderland with Russia was ravaged by fighting spurred by the revolution meant that the restoration of peace was delayed for at least another two years. The character of the PolishUkrainian war and the war with Bolshevik Russia waged in the years 1918-1920, and the soldiers’ weariness after four years of combat, made voluntary units even more important. One of the voluntary miliÂ�tary associations established after World War I to defend the Polish territory was the Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (Voluntary Legion of Women, henceforth OLK). The OLK was the first Polish women’s military organisation. It was established in Lwów, in eastern Galicia, a former Habsburg city with a Polish majority and a large Ukrainian minority, which became one of the major battlegrounds of the Polish-Ukrainian war in 1918/19. Lwów was also important as a key centre for Polish women’s activism; indeed, one of the first Polish feminist organizations, Związek Równouprawniena Kobiet we Lwowie (Union of Equal Rights for Women in Lwów), was set up there before the war.15 The tradition of active involvement in politics and social affairs might be seen as one of the reasons for Polish women’s contribution to the defence of Lwów during the conflict with the Ukrainians in 1918/19. For instance, one of the most famous Polish feminist activists, Maria Dulębianka, supervised the Komitet Obywatelski Polek (Civic Committee of Polish Women)16 which oversaw the provision of relief for Lwów’s defenders.17 However, even more striking were the activities of the OLK.╯The Legion grew out of female militia units set up by Aleksandra Zagórska to defend the city from the Ukrainians in December 1918; Zagórska then went on to command the Legion her╇ Petrażycka-Tomicka (1931); Habrat (2008). ╇ Jaworska (1930), p.╯11. 17 ╇ Z.╯Daszyńska-Golińska, “O Maryi Dulębiance w czasie wojny” (On Maria Dulębianka during the war), Na Posterunku, 4 (May 1919), pp.╯5–7 (here p.╯5). 15 16

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self.18 As Anna Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś, the author of a book devoted to the activities of the OLK argues, the reasons for the establishment of the Legion were the scarcity of regular army soldiers, the disorder in the city (i.e. theft), and the worsening political situation on the eastern border with Russia, which demanded the addition of voluntary units to the military effort.19 The female militia was divided into three groups; two of them were composed of couriers, sentries and liaison officers whereas the third one constituted a regular combat group.╯Although the role of the combat group was limited to defending the city perimeter only, it still constituted the first female military unit.20 The development of the combat unit encouraged the Galician army leaders to transform the female militia into the OLK, granting it the same privileges as other military units. This meant, for instance, that Legion members were to be provided with uniforms, firearms and soldiers’ pay, to be housed in barracks, and to pledge an oath of loyalty to Poland.21 In reality, the economic conditions of the war forced OLK members to wait for uniforms for quite some time.22 It was in December 1918 that the women from the OLK first participated in combat. Some of them were recruited to assault squads; other fought in disguise.23 Not only did they defend Lwów but they also fought in the eastern part of Małopolska (Little Poland).24 In February 1919 the number of Legion members grew to 350 as women from other parts of Poland came to join it. Generally they served as sentries guarding the army units, the transport network and Lwów’s borders.25 The end of the defence of Lwów in June 1919 put the future of the Legion into doubt. The activities of the OLK gave rise to scepticism, or even hostility, among some senior army commanders. Inspector General Józef Haller questioned the need for the very existence of the Legion, claiming that its continuation was “irrational” given the scarcity of money for the regular army units. Referring to the gender stereotypes firmly rooted in Polish culture, Haller emphasised: ╇ Ceysinger (1921), p.╯11. ╇ Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś (2006), p.╯57. 20 ╇ Ibid., p.╯62. 21 ╇ Ibid., p.╯63. 22 ╇ Ceysinger (1921), p.╯13. 23 ╇S.╯Tatarówna, “Kobieta w walce o Lwów” (A woman in the fight for Lwów), Na Posterunku 35, 15 December 1918, pp.╯2–3. 24 ╇Nałęcz (1994), p.╯77. 25 ╇ Ceysinger (1921), p.╯13. 18 19

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 271 In the Polish army, as in any other army, a woman may in the future serve in auxiliary units which are suited to women’s nature, such as nursing, secretarial work (typing) or household duties. She must be unconditionally excluded from the regular units of the Polish army as well as from bearing arms.26

However, Haller’s order to exclude women from the army and to prohibit the existence of female units in the future was questioned by the local army command. Personal experiences and the comradeship between male and female soldiers contributed to a much more positive evaluation of the OLK by army leaders in Galicia. Having witnessed at first hand the activities of the OLK, soldiers and officers in Galicia were less prone to be guided by gender stereotypes. As well as the opposition of some army leaders, the Legion had to face hostility from certain parts of Polish society. Service in the army and especially engagement in armed combat were clearly transgressions of gender norms and accusations of immoral sexual conduct provided opponents of the OLK with the easiest and most handy weapon against the women. As Alicja Kusiak-Brownstein argues, by adopting the role of “fighting Patriot”, women from the OLK were breaking a number of taboos, which in turn provoked a backlash from society at large.27 Hence, they were subject to “the most vicious insults”,28 including accusations that they engaged in prostitution and established brothels.29 Interestingly enough, even members of women’s organisations were prone to raise the immorality issue: clearly women in uniforms represented a step too far for these women as well.30 At the same time, however, the OLK met with the sympathy of some feminist activists such as the above-mentioned Maria Dulębianka, the writer Maria Rodziewiczówna and the physician and social activist Justyna BudÂ� zińska-Tylicka.31 An early historian of the OLK, Wanda Kiedrzyńska, in her 1931 account of the Legion’s activities, saw a link between people’s reaction to women in the army and their earlier response to the first female students:

╇ Ibid., p.╯26. ╇Kusiak-Brownstein (2006), p.╯417. 28 ╇Bruchalska (1930), p.╯17. 29 ╇ Cieślikowa (1998), p.╯67. 30 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯39–40. 31 ╇ Ibid., p.╯40. 26 27

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Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska It is enough to remind ourselves how hard was the struggle waged by the first female university students. And indeed the Legion was something much more shocking because of the uniforms and the rifles and – what a horror – the officer ranks.32

One can only agree with another remark made by Kiedrzyńska that all forms of change and innovation provoke the antagonism of the conservative majority. Moreover, the intrusion of women into the male environment of the army clearly provoked a reaction from those who wished to define the Polish military as a “brotherhood in arms”. However, there was one factor which prevented the complete dissolution of the Legion, in spite of the hostility of some army commanders, namely the political situation on Poland’s borders. The threat of war with Bolshevik Russia forced the command of the Polish army to acknowledge the role of voluntary units, the OLK included. As a result, in May 1919 a new branch of the Legion (usually referred to as OLK 2) was organised in Vilnius by Hanna Orleńska and sisters Klara and Ludwika Zatorskie.33 At first OLK 2 was intended as an auxiliary unit whose role was to nurse the sick and the wounded, and to work as typists, couriers or seamstresses. Its members were forbidden to bear arms. As with the Lwów OLK, women were uniformed but they were not allowed to wear army insignia or to supervise male soldiers. However, the scarcity of fighters and the approach of the Red Army led by Michail Tuchaczewski forced the Polish army command to modify the status of the Legion. As a result, OLK members were again allowed to undertake guard duty and to advance to the ranks of officers.34 New branches of the OLK were also established in Cracow and Posen.35 In May 1920, during the defence of Vilnius, a town disputed between Poland, Lithuania and Russia, the women’s military unit was transformed into a regular battalion which participated in combat operations.36 Another female battalion was created from the Legion’s volunteers in August 1920 during the Polish-Soviet war but OLK members did not take on combat roles in the most significant event of that campaign, the battle of the Vistula in August 1920.37

╇Kiedrzyńska (1931), p.╯39. ╇ Ibid., p.╯26. 34 ╇ Ceysinger (1921), pp.╯31–41. 35 ╇ Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś (2006), pp.╯98–9. 36 ╇Kiedrzyńska., p.╯28. 37 ╇ Ibid., p.╯32; Ceysinger (1921), p.╯42. 32 33

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 273 In the years 1919-21 around four thousand women enlisted in the OLK.╯Their social background varied from intelligentsia to illiterate members of the working class and peasantry. Young single women predominated.38 It can be argued that service in the Legion played a pivotal role in emancipation as well as patriotic education for a considerable number of women from the lower strata of Polish society. Significantly, women’s military units were formed mainly in the eastern borderlands of the country, an area characterised by ethnic conflict and religious diversity. For Legion members, service in the OLK and participation in the defence of Poland was thus a declaration of Polishness. After the war, the members of the OLK constituted one of the groups that insisted on compulsory military service for all Polish women in order to make them capable of bearing arms in defence of their homeland.39 Former members of the Legion as well as other women activists underscored the positive influence that military training would exert on women’s character. According to Helena Ceysinger, women would acquire a greater sense of public responsibility, dutifulness, conscientiousness and punctuality. Ceysinger advocated military training by referring to women’s motherly responsibilities, claiming that “it is necessary that through a woman – the educator of future generations and the organiser of family hearth – the strength and seriousness in embracing the demands of life is inserted into the nation”.40 Similarly, for Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka, physician, social activist and feminist, military service was an important element in shaping women’s character and behaviour, and the OLK itself represented the best possible school of civic engagement. In an article published just after the Legion’s dissolution, Budzińska-Tylicka wrote: And think – how a woman changes under the influence of this disciplined and responsible military organisation – from being cowardly she becomes courageous; from frail, strong. From disobedient, noisy and defiant, she becomes so disciplined that she forgets about herself; [she is transformed] from a pampered doll into a person who renounces luxuries. Isn’t this a new era of female revival? Doesn’t it herald the revival not only of the woman herself but of future generations who she will be mothering? And she will be not only a strong, wide-chested and broad-shouldered mother but also brave, self-reliant and always and ╇ Cieślikowa (1998), p.╯74; Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś (2006), p.╯133. ╇ Wiśniewska (2007). 40 ╇ Ceysinger (1921), p.╯62. 38 39

274

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska everywhere aware of her deeds. Imagine how powerful and brave the Polish nation would become if such service was common and compulsory.41

For Budzińska-Tylicka, service in a military unit such as the Legion would transform the Polish woman from an oversexed female endowed with such stereotypical feminine qualities as cowardice, noisiness, defiance, selfishness and frailty into a person with traits hitherto signified as masculine: bravery, strength, discipline. Military service would not only make a woman mannish in a psychological sense, but also in a physical one as wide chest and broad shoulders have always been the quintessential bodily characteristics of the male warrior. Due to her maternal duties and responsibilities, this new female ideal was the hope for the transformation of the whole nation. By creating a new militarised version of the powerful icon of the Polish Mother, Budzińska-Tylicka represented an array of voices calling for universal compulsory women’s military education, thereby preparing them for the defence of the country’s borders in case of war. The military defeat of Soviet Russia in 1920 again changed the attitude of Polish society and of the army leaders towards the OLK and its involvement in the war effort. As had been the case in the middle of 1919, after the successful defence of Lwów and fighting in Małopolska, a severe backlash could be observed. MarcinkiewiczGołaś claims that until the end of the war with Russia the women’s military service was accepted by society at large and OLK members were praised for their solidarity with the whole nation in the face of military danger.42 But after the war, the OLK started to be harshly attacked not only by the army command but also by ordinary soldiers.43 It was generally assumed that in time of peace traditional gender roles should be restored and women should be relegated to the private sphere and focus on their “natural” functions as wives and mothers. On the other hand, many OLK members, exhausted after years of military and auxiliary service undertaken in harsh conditions, simply wanted to return home. In fact, it was the leaders the Legion and persons such as Zagórska and Ceysinger who protested against the OLK’s dissolution in 1922. Their point of view, regret tinged with 41 ╇ J.╯Budzińska-Tylicka, “Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet” (Voluntary Legion of Women), Głos Kobiet 14, 25 October 1920, p.╯3. 42 ╇ Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś (2006), p.╯238. 43 ╇ Zagórska (1938), p.╯5.

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 275 resentment at the unfair treatment of the Legion, was expressed in the post-war publications that were to commemorate the OLK’s service and achievements. Commemoration The building of the legend of the OLK began even before the dissolution of the organisation when Helena Ceysinger – one of the Legion’s leaders and the person responsible for propaganda and recruitment – was asked to write a book describing its activities. Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet. Szkic historyczny (Voluntary Legion of Women. A Historical Sketch) was published in 1921 in Lwów. The place of publication and the speediness of the attempt to commemorate the OLK’s existence show that the leaders of the organisation paid a lot of attention to promoting awareness of their involvement in the defence of the city. In the book, Ceysinger emphasised the bravery of OLK members: “[U]sually they went in the first rows of the attacking unit, [and] with fearless courage, they led their fellow soldiers into the line of fire”.44 In her view, the presence of women among Lwów’s defenders and especially their daring and courage had a positive impact on the men, making them more competitive and bold.45 Interestingly enough, Ceysinger did not mention any cases of negative reactions of soldiers and other male volunteers towards OLK members. Even hinting at such things would indeed have destroyed the myth of women’s leading role in the defence of Lwów. With the Piłsudski Coup in May 1926 and the return of his former soldiers and comrades to power, the commemoration of women’s involvement in the war intensified. Two books, Wierna służba (Faithful Service) and Służba ojczyźnie (Service to the Homeland), which included the recollections of women who participated in the campaign for independence in the years 1910-1918, were published in 1927 and 1928 respectively. The two volumes were part of the effort to revitalise the cult of Piłsudski. In the preface to Wierna służba, its Â�editors – among whom was Piłsudski’s wife Aleksanrda – proudly deÂ�clared: “[l]et this small page in the story of the great battle for the life of the Nation serve as a testimony to the concrete deeds under44 45

╇ Ceysinger (1921), p.╯14. ╇ Ibid., p.╯7.

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taken with a joyful faith in the cause and the Leader”.46 At the same time, it was emphasised that the women active in auxiliary units were gathered around Piłsudski, and not his rival Władysław Sikorski. That is why, for instance, the role of Iza Moszczeńska – Sikorski’s follower – was virtually ignored. Similarly, the volumes only hinted at the split in women’s organisations (League A and League B). The publication’s time span was limited to the years 1910-1918; thus, the recollections of the women fighting in the war with Soviet Russia were not included. At the same time, however, five articles were devoted to the defence of Lwów against the Ukrainians. Political changes in the mid-1920s and Piłsudski’s return to power encouraged Aleksandra Zagórska – the commandant of the OLK and Piłsudski’s admirer – to involve herself more actively in the commemoration of the Legion’s war effort. It is worth underlining that Zagórska was an opponent of women’s military training in its existing form as she believed that ex-OLK members were not being given a sufficient role in promoting it.47 Hence, in order to commemorate the OLK and to emphasise its importance to the war effort, Zagórska decided to establish a combatant organisation named Związek Legionistek Polskich (Association of Polish Women Legionaries or ZLP) whose aim was to propagate the history of the OLK as well as to help former members of the group.╯The ZLP’s activities included lecturing, publishing and holding exhibitions about the Legion and its exploits during the war.48 The intensified commemorative efforts also resulted in the publication of a second book devoted to OLK activities, based on the recollections of Zagórska and of Wanda Gertz, the commandant of the OLK in Vilnius, as well as on material from the ZLP’s archives. Just like Ceysinger’s 1921 book, Zarys Historii Wojennej O.L.K. (Outline of the History of the OLK) underscored the significance of the Legion’s involvement in the war against the Ukrainians and against Soviet Russia. Its author, Wanda Kiedrzyńska, was one of Piłsudski’s most ardent supporters; soon afterwards she became the director of the Piłsudski Institute’s archive. As part of her attempt to build up the OLK’s role in the war, Kiedrzyńska greatly overestimated the number of its members, magnifying it three times.49 ╇ Wierna służba (1927), p.╯vii. ╇ Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś (2006), pp.╯250–2. 48 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯254–69. 49 ╇Kiedrzyńska (1931), p.╯41. 46 47

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 277 Having said this, Kiedrzyńska’s 1931 publication Zarys Historii Wojennej O.L.K. presented a more balanced picture of the Legion’s activities. For instance, this time she did not boast about the OLK’s leading role in the war. What is more, she admitted that women’s engagement in armed combat was an exception caused by the ferment of battle.50 Considering the fact that Kiedrzyńska wrote the book at the request of Zagórska and other combatants we can regard it as an expression of a more nuanced stance in keeping with the passage of time and the development of more sober views. An increase in the number of memoirs and newspaper articles could be observed after 1926 not only in the case of the OLK but also of other groups and organisations that took part in the war effort. Women who had been nurses and physicians in military hospitals or who had fought in disguise published their recollections.51 Articles on women’s involvement in the war appeared in popular women’s magazines such as Kobieta Współczesna,52 in the daily press,53 or in Praca Obywatelska. The latter was the official periodical of the Związek Pracy Obywatelskiej Kobiet (Union of Women’s Civil Work), the organisation that coordinated female supporters of Piłsudski and his camp.54 Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, in an atmosphere heavy with the inevitability of future military conflict, a daily newspaper, Kurier Poranny, published a series of articles by Zagórska celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the OLK.55 Women’s recollections were also included in the official state publications commemorating the war effort.56 For instance, an article on women’s involvement in the battle for independence appeared in a

╇ Ibid. ╇ Zawiszanka (1928); Nowosielska (1929); Bruchalska (1930); Germanowa (1936); Świtalska-Fularska (1937). 52 ╇ H.╯Ceysinger, “Śmierć żołnierska” (Soldier death), Kobieta Współczesna 45, 4 November 1928, pp.╯2–3. 53 ╇ Z.╯Zalewska, (1929) “Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet” (Voluntary Legion of Women), Kurier Warszawski 67, 9 March 1929, p.╯7. 54 ╇ Z.╯Zawiszanka, “Moje wspomnienia sierpniowe z 1920 r.” (My memoirs from August 1920), Praca Obywatelska 12, 20 August 1930, pp.╯7–11; Z.╯Plewińska, “Moja służba w Legionach” (My service in the Legions), Praca Obywatelska 2–4 (February– April 1934); M.╯Matuszewska, “Jak dostałyśmy się na linię bojową” [How we got to the combat line], Praca Obywatelska 19–20 (October-November 1934) pp.╯3–4. 55 ╇ A.╯Zagórska, “Ze wspomnień komendantki OLK” (From the memoirs of the OLK commandant), Kurier Poranny 308–21, 7 November–20 November 1938. 56 ╇Gieysztor (1935). 50 51

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publication celebrating the tenth anniversary of the restoration of Polish nationhood in 1928.57 Summing up, commemoration of women’s contribution to the war effort was centred on the activities of female soldiers and women from auxiliary units and military groups like the OLK or the Polska Organizacja Wojskowa (Polish Military Organisation). On the one hand, publishing ventures (such as the volumes Wierna Służba and Służba Ojczyźnie) or the establishment of Związek Legionistek Polskich were made possible by the initiatives of female combatants. On the other hand, it is telling that the commemoration of women’s military effort started only after the May Coup in 1926. In fact it was only the female supporters of Piłsudski and his camp who were included in the official state commemorations of the Great War. This clearly shows that the commemoration of Polish women’s contribution to the war effort was dependent on the political situation and the people holding power. Politics The granting of women’s suffrage in November 1918 sparked a vivid debate on women’s place in politics. A number of articles entitled: “what should women bring into politics” appeared, the majority of them referring to firmly-established notions of female superior morality and the new ethics that they would guarantee. For instance, Stafenia Tatarówna from League B maintained at the beginning of 1919: “We have to be guardians of the public good, to take up the fight against corruption and protection, to control public deeds”.58 According to many female voices, women were to bring new values into politics because of their innocence, which was held to stem from their lack of exposure to the corrupting influence of public life.59 Zofia Moraczewska, a socialist and wife of a future Prime Minster, claimed that women would contribute with “a civic element: an ethical one”.60 Similar voices can be found among more conservative Polish women organ╇ Pełczyńska (1928). ╇S.╯Tatarówna, “Co wnieść musimy do polityki” (What should we bring into politics), Na Posterunku 1, 26 January 1919, pp.╯1–2 (here p . 2). 59 ╇ Ibid. 60 ╇G.╯Majewska, “Zjazd kobiet polskich w kwestii wyborów do Sejmu” (Convention of women on the question of parliamentary elections), Bluszcz 52, 28 December 1918, pp.╯1–2 (here p.╯1). 57 58

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 279 ised around the Catholic Church or the National Democrats, the largest and most influential rightist party.61 Female activists also tended to concur that the presence of women in the political sphere and specifically in the new parliament was the only guarantee of the transformation of politics and the consideration of women’s interests and needs. In December 1918 a group of activists gathered at the Congress of Polish Women to discuss the issue of the following year’s parliamentary elections. In its recommendations, the participants in the Congress urged all women to be “an active element” by taking part in voting.62 Similarly, a socialist bi-weekly Głos Kobiet underlined: “It is up to us who will be chosen as a MP… it is up to us to chose women as MPs and make sure that they will guard our interests and influence Parliament’s agenda to consider our needs, demands and ideals…”.63 What were those demands and ideals? The battle against corruption, favouritism and immorality, and the promotion of the interests of mothers and children were the issues considered the most relevant to all women, regardless of their political opinions and party membership.64 The emphasis on women’s special roles and common needs did not translate into the creation of a common list of candidates or cooperation in the elections to the first Parliament. The Komitet Wyborczy Kobiet Postępowych (Election Committee of Progressive Women), created in January 1919, withdrew from the idea of a separate list of female candidates.65 The Committee’s agenda included child care, the protection of motherhood, the fight against prostitution and alcoholism, and other issues embraced by women’s organisations at large. As early as the beginning of 1919, the previous emphasis on the commonality of women’s needs and ideals was replaced with statements about the irreconcilable social and political differences between women. “It does not matter how many women are elected but who and with what kind of values” – it was argued.66 Generally, female 61 ╇K.╯Neronowiczowa, “Nowe prawa, nowe obowiązki” (New rights, new responsibilities), Bluszcz 52, 28 December 1918, p.╯3. 62 ╇ Majewska, “Zjazd kobiet polskich” (as note 60 above), p.╯1. 63 ╇ W.╯Weychert-Szymanowska, “Co kobiety mają do zrobienia w Polsce” (What women have to do in Poland), Głos Kobiet 6, 22 May 1920, pp.╯1–2 (here p.╯1). 64 ╇Tatarówna, “Co wnieść musimy do polityki” (as note 58 above), p.╯1. 65 ╇ “Kobieta w Sejmie” (A woman in Parliament), Na Posterunku 1, 26 January 1919, p.╯8. 66 ╇ “Kobiety w Sejmie” (Women in Parliament), Kobieta w Sejmie. Pismo Komitetu Wyborczego Kobiet Postępowych 3, 25 January 1919, p.╯1.

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activists from various circles chose to run from party lists. The only separate women’s list, headed by Iza Moszczeńska and including such candidates as Helena Ceysinger from League B and the OLK, received a mere 51 votes.67 The performance of women who appeared on the mainstream party lists was also disappointing. Only five women (out of 296 MPs) were elected to the first Parliament: two from the Peasant Party (Jadwiga Dziubińksa and Irena Kossowska), one from the National Democrats (Gabriela Balicka), one socialist (Zofia Moraczewska) and one member of the National Committee of Peasants and the Working Class (Maria Moczydłowska). Three more women were successful in byelections in 1920 in Wielkopolska (Great Poland).68 A number of prewar feminist activists such as Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska, Teodora Męczkowska or Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka, who were placed lower down on the party lists, failed to get elected. Women from leftist circles connected with the female auxiliary units felt greatly disappointed with the outcome of the elections and especially with, as they described it, “the passivity of women”.69 Socialists accused women of making the first Parliament “reactionary,” underlining a generally-held belief that women’s votes had contributed to the victory of rightist parties.70 The separatist list that would represent women’s interests and that had been criticised before the elections, was now perceived as a potentially positive step forward. However, future attempts to create female-only lists in parliamentary elections also failed. The independent, non-partisan group of women who ran for the 1922 parliamentary elections in Lwów gained 357 votes, seven times as many as in 1919, but still too few to be elected.71 The handful of women in the first parliaments tended to cooperate on a number of issues considered of utmost significance for women, such as alcoholism, housework, married women’s civic rights, and protection of children and mothers.72 However, among some groups of women, especially the socialist ones, the belief prevailed that “…there are too few women representatives, they do not

╇ Hass (1992), p.╯80. ╇Kondracka (2003), p.╯161. 69 ╇ “Kobieta w Sejmie” (as note 65 above), p.╯8. 70 ╇B.╯Roszanka, “Rachunek sumienia” (Examination of conscience), Głos Kobiet 4, 20 February 1921, p.╯8. 71 ╇ Hass (1992), p.╯ 91; Habrat (2001), p.╯161. 72 ╇Kondracka (2003), p.╯167. 67 68

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 281 look after our interests enough and women’s issues are too rarely discussed”.73 Civic associations In the post-war years, the activism of women in civic organisations was hampered by archaic legislation requiring a husband’s consent before his wife could join any organisation. This point became symbolic for many women across Europe in their attempts to remove discriminatory laws, as Christine Bard shows for France in her essay in this volume. In Poland, it was also used by a socialist activist, Władysława Weychert-Szymanowska, in her redefinition of the woman question after the war: The woman question does not end with freeing married women from dragging their husbands into a lawyer’s office to confirm their signature. The woman question is the fostering of a new morality, a new social order without prostitution, which harms both illegitimate children and the women who we judge harshly while failing to criticise the social conditions that are the source of their crimes or guilt.74

Weychert-Szymanowska’s broad agenda for women’s organisations was in accordance with one of the few Polish women’s post-war associations that can be labelled “feminist”. The Klub Polityczny Kobiet Postępowych (Progressive Women’s Political Club), established in 1919 by three of the most active campaigners in the Polish women’s movement, Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka, Teodora Męczkowska and Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska, aimed at training women to exercise their political rights. Its agenda included equal opportunities for men and women, civic education, equal pay for equal work, protection of working women, child and maternal welfare, and “introducing ethics into political and social life”.75 The Club raised some of the points emphasised by Weychert-Szymanowska, calling for a fight against prostitution, which it presented as a male transgression of the moral order, supporting birth control, and demanding equal rights for illegitimate

73 ╇ Weychert-Szymanowska, “Co kobiety mają do zrobienia w Polsce” (as note 63 above), p.╯1. 74 ╇ Weychert-Szymanowska, “O cywilne prawa kobiet” (For civic rights of women), Głos Kobiet 4 (1921), p.╯3. 75 ╇Bujak-Boguska (1930), p.╯29.

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children.76 Despite its quite radical agenda and cooperation with the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), the Club did not use the term “feminism”. Indeed, no women’s organisation in interwar Poland was prepared to use such a term. Another progressive women’s organisation that was created soon after the war was the Polish chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Established in 1921 by Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka, the organisation fulfilled the promise of Polish female wartime activists who had vowed that after the war they would become pacifists.77 Adopting a broad definition of the women’s movement as incorporating “women’s organisations working for the improvement of women’s situation”,78 one also needs to take a closer look at associations for conservative and right-wing women. In the immediate post-war period, the National Democrats were much more successful in mobilising female voters than the leftist parties. The victory of the former in the first parliamentary elections was commonly attributed to women’s support. The influence of the Catholic Church on women should also be considered here. By and large, the successful mobilisation of women by the Right was possible due to the activities of one particular female organisation set up in 1918. Narodowa Organizacja Kobiet (National Organisation of Women, henceforth NOK) admitted only Christian Polish women who supported their motto “God and Homeland” and agreed with their aim of infusing Christian values into Polish foreign and domestic politics. In spite of this, NOK’s objective was also the complete equality of women in all spheres of life, civil law included. It even shared the same views on social welfare issues as progressive organisations like the Klub Polityczny Kobiet Postępowych or female MPs.79 However, while aiming at “raising the national and political awareness of Polish women”,80 NOK propagated a restricted vision of the civic community that excluded women of non-Polish ethnicity and non-Catholic religion. Thus, their emancipatory vision was off-set by chauvinism and religious prejudice, including, most notably, antiSemitism. The vision of family propagated by NOK, and in particular its emphasis on the sanctity and inviolability of marriage and the ╇ Ibid., p.╯151. ╇Kuźma-Markowska (2007). 78 ╇Kałwa (2003), p.╯154. 79 ╇ Przemówienie przewodniczącej Narodowej Organizacji Kobiet p.╯Ireny Puzynianki na walnym Zjeździe N.O.K. dnia 25 listopada 1928 (1928), p.╯11. 80 ╇ Statut Stowarzyszenia: Narodowa Organizacja Kobiet (1921) , p.╯2. 76 77

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 283 national and religious upbringing of children,81 also differed from the views of Polish women who saw themselves as “progressive”. Conclusion In the first years after the war, three main spheres of Polish women’s public activism can be identified: military, political and associational. The role women played in military activities in the years 1918-20 and specifically their involvement in combat did not in fact greatly influence gender roles, the place of women in the Polish society, or their greater visibility in the public sphere. Women who participated in the defence of the country did not utilise their war services to gain greater power. It was widely acknowledged that women were granted political rights due to their participation in the battle for independence but a few years after the war, their military role and particularly their participation in armed combat were perceived as an abnormal and exceptional response at a time of danger. The attempts of pre-war female activists to enter post-war politics failed to a considerable extent. Not only did the separatist list gain a pitifully small number of votes but also very few female politicians were elected to the first Parliamnent from the lists of the main parties. By and large, the presence of women in parliament, the judiciary and legislative bodies was pitifully small. Female politicians within parliament devoted their time and energy mainly to the aforementioned “women’s issues”. These concerns remained women’s core interest in the first years of independence. Pre-war female activists such as Męczkowska, Daszyńska-Golińska or Moszczeńska, after losing out in the parliamentary elections, established the most progressive women’s group in inter-war Poland. However, support for the feminist Klub Polityczny Kobiet Postępowych was always smaller than for the biggest and most influential rightist female association – Narodowa Organizacja Kobiet, established under the auspices of the National Democrats. The revival of progressive women’s attempts to organise took place only after 1926 when it was supported and utilised by Sanacja (Piłsudski’s supporters) whose members argued for a new social and political order.

81

╇ Ibid.

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Bruchalska, M. (1930) Z obrony bohaterskiego Lwowa i Małopolski Wschodniej (Lwów: 1930). Bujak-Boguska, S. (1930) Na straży praw kobiety. Pamiętnik Klubu Politycznego Kobiet Postępowych, 1919-1930 (Warsaw: 1930). Ceysinger, H. (1921) Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet. Szkic historyczny (Lwów: 1921). Cieślikowa, A. J. (1998) Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet, 1918-1922 (Warsaw: 1998). Danysz-Fleszarowa, R. (1918) “O organizacjach wojskowych kobiecych,” in Pamiętnik Zjazdu Kobiet Polskich w r. 1917, ed. J.╯Budzińska-Tylicka (Warsaw: 1918) 42–3. Davies, N. (2005) God’s Playground. A History of Poland (Irvington, New York: 2005). Dufrat, J. (2001) Kobiety w kręgu lewicy niepodległościowej. Od Ligi Kobiet Pogotowia Wojennego do Ochotniczej Legii Kobiet (1908-1918/1919) (Toruń: 2001). “Działalność Ligi Kobiet Galicji i Śląska” (1927) in Wierna służba. Wspomnienia uczestniczek walk o niepodległość 1910-1915, ed. A.╯Piłsudska (Warsaw: 1927) 169–71. Germanowa, Z. (1936) Od Rarańczy do Marmaros-Sziget. Wspomnienia sanitariuszki Legionów (Warsaw: 1936). Gieysztor, M. (1935) “Oddział żeński POW,” in Polska Organizacja Wojskowa. Szkice i wspomnienia, eds. J.╯Sztachiewicz and W.╯Lipiński (Warsaw: 1935) 197–9. Habrat, A. (2001) Jadwiga Petrażycka-Tomicka. Życie i działalność (Rzeszów: 2001). Habrat, A. (2008) “Związek Równouprawnienia Kobiet we Lwowie”, in Działaczki społeczne, feministki, obywatelki… Samoorganizowanie się kobiet na ziemiach polskich do 1918 roku (na tle porównawczym), eds. A.╯Janiak-Jasińska, K.╯Sierakowska and A.╯Szwarc (Warsaw: 2008) 97–112. Hass, L. (1992) “Aktywność wyborcza kobiet w pierwszym dziesięcioleciu II RP”, in Kobieta i świat polityki. W niepodległej Polsce, eds. A.╯Żarnowska and A.╯Szwarc (Warsaw: 1992) 70–99. Jahołkowska-Koszutska, L. (1918) “Wpływ wojny na sprawę kobiecą”, in Pamiętnik Zjazdu Kobiet Polskich w r. 1917, ed. J.╯Budzińska-Tylicka (Warsaw: 1918) 17–31. Jaworska, M. (1930) Marja Dulębianka (Lwów: 1930). Jaxa-Kwiatkowska, M. (1927) “Oddział żeński P.O.W.”, in Wierna służba. Wspomnienia uczestniczek walk o niepodległość 1910-1915, ed. A.╯Piłsudska (Warsaw: 1927) 206–8. Kałwa, D. (2001) Kobieta aktywna w Polsce międzywojennej. Dylematy środowisk kobiecych (Cracow: 2001). Kałwa, D. (2003), “Poland,” in Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945, ed. K.╯Passmore (Manchester: 2003) 148–67. Kiedrzyńska, W. (1931) Zarys historii wojennej O.L.K. (Ochotnicza Legja Kobiet) (Warsaw: 1931). Kondracka, M. (2003) “Parlamentarzystki w Sejmie Ustawodawczym – między porozumieniem a niezgodą”, in Społeczeństwo w dobie przemian. Wiek XIX i XX.╯Księga jubileuszowa Profesor Anny Żarnowskiej, eds. M.╯Nietyksza, A.╯Szwarc, K.╯Sierakowska and A.╯Janiak-Jasińska (Warsaw: 2003) 161–8. Kusiak-Brownstein, A. (2006) “Płeć kulturowa, ‘doświadczenie’ i wojna – kilka metodologicznych uwag o wykorzystaniu relacji wspomnieniowych”, in Kobieta i rewolucja obyczajowa. Społeczno-kulturowe aspekty seksualności. Wiek XIX i XX, eds. A.╯Żarnowska and A.╯Szwarc (Warsaw: 2006) 409–20. Kuźma-Markowska, S. (2007) “‘Pacyfistkami będziemy po wojnie’. Postawy ideowe polskich niepodległościowych środowisk kobiecych w latach 1912-1920”, in Lata

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists 285 Wielkiej Wojny. Dojrzewanie do niepodległości 1914-1918, eds. D.╯Grinberg, J.╯Snopko and G.╯Zackiewicz (Białystok: 2007) 164–79. Lukowski J. and Zawadzki H. (2006) A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge: 2006). Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś, A. (2006) Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (1918-1922) (Warsaw: 2006). Nałęcz, T. (1994) “Kobiety w walce o niepodległość w czasie I wojny światowej”, in Kobieta i świat polityki. Polska na tle porównawczym w XIX-tym i na początku XX-tego wieku, eds. A.╯Żarnowska and A.╯Szwarc (Warsaw: 1994) 73–82. Nowosielska, Z. (1929) W huraganie wojny: pamiętnik kobiety-żołnierza (Warsaw: 1929). Pełczyńska, W. (1928) “Kobieta w walce o niepodległość”, in Dziesięciolecie Polski Odrodzonej 1918-1928. Księga pamiątkowa, ed. M.╯Dąbrowski (Crakow: 1928) 870–2. Petrażycka-Tomicka, J. (1931) Związek Równouprawnienia Kobiet we Lwowie. Przyczynek do historii równouprawnienia kobiet w Polsce (Cracow: 1931). Piłsudska, A. (1960) Wspomnienia (London: 1960). Przemówienie przewodniczącej Narodowej Organizacji Kobiet p.╯Ireny Puzynianki na walnym Zjeździe N.O.K. dnia 25 listopada 1928 (1928) (Warsaw: 1928). Sierakowska, K. (1994) “Aspiracje polityczne Związku Równouprawnienia Kobiet Polskich”, in Kobieta i świat polityki. Polska na tle porównawczym w XIX i w początkach XX wieku, ed. A.╯Żarnowska and A.╯Szwarc (Warsaw: 1994) 245–53. Statut Stowarzyszenia: Narodowa Organizacja Kobiet (1921) (Warsaw: 1921). Świtalska-Fularska, J. (1937) Wspomnienia lekarki legionowej (Lwów: 1937). Wierna służba. Wspomnienia uczestniczek walk o niepodległość 1910-1915, ed. A.╯Piłsudska (Warsaw: 1927). Wiśniewska, M. (2007) Przygotowanie obronne kobiet w latach 1921-1939 (Toruń: 2007). Zamoyski, A. (2008) Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Poland (New York: 2008). Zawiszanka, Z. (1928) Poprzez fronty. Pamiętnik wywiadowczyni I pułku piechoty Legionów z 1914 r. Na podstawie notatek spisanych w II-III 1915 r. (Warsaw: 1928).

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Political and public aspects of the activity of the Lithuanian women’s movement, 1918-1923 Virginija Jurėnienė The Lithuanian state existed from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, when it fell under Russian rule. From the second half of the nineteenth century, as nationalist movements spread across central and eastern Europe, demands were also raised for the (re)establishment of an independent state in Lithuania. This was also the beginning of the Lithuanian women’s movement which prioritised the attainment of national freedom over the drive for equal political rights for both sexes. Women were active campaigners for Lithuanian schools, the Catholic Church and Lithuanian script, which was prohibited by Tsarist Russia after the revolt in 1863-4. At the end of the nineteenth century they founded the first charity organisation, soon followed by the first women’s organisations, Lietuvos moterų sąjunga (the Lithuanian Women’s Union or LWU) and Lietuvos katalikių moterų sąjunga (the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association or LCWA). Lithuanian women’s contribution was lively and effective both during World War I and in the years that followed. During the war their efforts were concentrated in Russia and western Europe because in 1915 Lithuania was occupied by Germany, which prohibited any social and political activity. US president Woodrow Wilson’s peace programme strengthened the country’s determination to reestablish independence, which was declared in February 1918. Between November 1918 and October 1920, Lithuania fought for independence against the invading armies of both Poland and Russia. In the same year the first provisional constitution was adopted, guaranteeing the equality of all citizens, irrespective of their gender. The period from 1918 to 1923 saw the blossoming of women’s rights both in the political arena and in the sphere of paid employment.

At the beginning of World War I many Lithuanian inhabitants moved to Russia in the hope of escaping the horrors of war. People were used to Russian rule since Lithuania had been under the reign of the Tsar for over a century. Lithuanian organisations and representatives of the different parties continued their activity there more effectively than in Lithuania itself which in 1915 was occupied by Germany and placed under German military rule.

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In 1916 Lithuanian nationalists gathered at a conference in StockÂ� holm to promote the idea of restoring the independence of the Lithuanian state. The conference was illegal, organised by Lithuanians living in Stockholm and western Europe. The event was not an exception at that time: Poles, Latvians and Estonians organised similar conferences in the hope that World War I would soon be over and their national states could be reestablished. In 1917, Lithuanian organisations in Russia and western Europe were actively pursuing this aim. The German occupation authorities in Lithuania were anxious about the Lithuanian political activity in Russia and the changing situation in the war. After the first Russian Revolution in March 1917, Lithuanian political and social activists were permitted to call the Lithuanian Assembly in St. Petersburg. The Assembly was attended by representatives of the political parties and delegates appointed by those women’s organisations which supported the restoration of an independent Lithuania. At that time, both the Russian and German governments’ policies in the occupied territories were changing: both made efforts to secure their positions through making concessions to nationalist aspirations among the non-Russian peoples. In September 1917 the Germans permitted the holding of a special conference in Vilnius which led to the election of a twenty-member Council of Lithuania. The latter worked closely with the Germans, without bowing to all the latter’s demands. On 16 February 1918 it declared the existence of an independent Lithuania. Although the Council of Lithuania did not have any women among its twenty members, female activists were also galvanised by these events. The first Lithuanian women’s organisations, Lietuvos moterų sąjunga (the Lithuanian Women’s Union) and Lietuvos katalikių moterų sąjunga (the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association), had been founded at the beginning of the twentieth century. The aims of both organisations were similar. They wanted the reestablishment of an independent Lithuanian state and the granting of political rights for women. The priority given to national aims makes the Lithuanian women’s movement stand out among other movements in central and eastern Europe, particularly as Lithuanian women also held leading positions in the established political parties. Members of the LWU had liberal and social democratic views and were public figures, teachers, writers and newspaper editors. The LCWA directed its activities mainly towards Catholic and rural women.

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Both organisations actively cooperated with women’s organisations in other states, particularly Russia. Many educated women in Lithuania were graduates of Russia institutes of higher education and were familiar with the processes there. Lithuanian women supported reforms to Russian family law and also cooperated with Latvian, Estonian, Belorussian and Jewish women’s organisations in sending petitions to the Russian Duma (Parliament) demanding political rights for women and restrictions on the sale of alcohol. However, relations between Lithuanian and Polish women were tense because Poles disapproved of the Lithuanian national movement and the restoration of an independent state of Lithuania. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the social and political activities of the Lithuanian women’s organisations in the aftermath of the First World War and to explore how their position was affected by the war itself. It also examines women’s struggle for independence from the established political parties after 1919. Since both of these issues are under-researched in Lithuania and abroad, the chapter relies mainly on archival and newspaper sources, buttressed by the small number of secondary sources now available. First and foremost the chapter is based on an analysis of the transcripts of debates in the Constituent Assembly between 1920 and 1922, and in the two subsequent Seimas (Parliaments) between 1922 and 1926, with particular emphasis on the contributions made by women parliamentarians. Unpublished archival material from the holdings of the Central Archive of the State of Lithuania, the Manuscript Department of Vilnius University Library and the Manuscript Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences is also used to shed new light on women’s position in Lithuanian society. Newspapers are the final primary source used in this chapter. The Lithuanian press became legal from 1904. A women’s magazine, Lietuvaitė (Lithuanian Girl), was issued by the LCWA from 1908 to 1914. Besides reporting on hygiene, children’s education, household activities, and so on, it published articles on the campaign for women’s political rights and on the activities of women’s organisations across Europe. A more radical democratic magazine, Žibutė (Violet), appeared between 1911 and 1913, but its views offended patriarchal Catholic society and it was eventually shut down. The dailies Lietuva (Lithuania) and Lietuvos aidas (Lithuanian Echo) also carried articles about women’s activism. After the restoration of the state in 1918, women’s magazines proper such as Moteris (Woman), Vaidilutė

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(Virgin1) and Šeimininkė (Housewife) published advice on housework and daily chores, life stories of famous women and so on. Besides this, the party-affiliated press also contained articles on women’s social, cultural and political activities. In addition, the press of that time reflects the governments’ position towards the women’s movement and describes the activity of the women’s organisations when addressing the issue of the dismissal of women employees. Women often contributed to daily newspapers and magazines, particularly the writer Gabrielė Petkevičaitė and the teacher Teresė Kubilinskaitė. The paper also draws on the few available secondary studies, such as Ona Voverienė’s analysis of the first Lithuanian women’s congress in 1907; recent books by Dalia Marcinkevičienė, Leonas Kaziukonis and Juozas Uzdila on the activities of Gabrielė Petkevičaitė, the leader of the secular wing of the women’s movement; and Indrė Karčiauskaitė’s discussion of women’s associations in Kaunas in the 1920s and 1930s.2 There is also my own previous work on the Lithuanian women’s movement during the first two decades of the twentieth century;3 and a number of publications produced for non-academic audiences, such as Dalia Marcinkevičienė’s edition of A.╯Ambraziejūtė-Steponaitienė’s collection Famous Lithuanian Women.4 The collection was originally finished in 1938, but not published at that time. One can find further information about women and their activity in archival sources, memoirs and press articles; yet, in these sources, the emphasis is usually on cultural rather than political figures. Women’s activity during World War I At the beginning of the First World War, most Lithuanians believed that the conflict would help to reestablish Lithuania as an independÂ�ent nation. Attitudes changed in 1915, when the occupying German government prohibited the activities of all organisations, exploited the residents of the country by taking food and livestock away, and humiliated women by cutting off their hair, stating that it was needed for the war. ╇ This is a pagan name denoting a virgin girl whose duty is to serve pagan gods. ╇See Voverienė (2000), pp.╯30–4; Marcinkevičienė (2001), pp.╯65–70; Kaziukonis (2001), pp.╯12–30; Uzdila (2001), pp.╯43–51; and Karčiauskaitė (2005), pp.╯30–53. 3 ╇See Jurėniene (2003), pp.╯96–109. 4 ╇ Marcinkevičienė (1997), p.╯270 1 2

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During the war there was no organised women’s activity in Lithuania and women were involved in politics only on an individual basis. They nonetheless had a continued presence not only in the household but also in the public sphere. They worked in factories, nursed the injured in the war, and participated in the clandestine activity of political parties and social organisations which remained active despite the ban. Women activists did not stand out and their names rarely appear in historical sources or literary accounts of the period. There are one or two exceptions, however, including S.╯Smetonienė who helped her fellow citizens to return to the home country by providing the necessary documents; J.╯Višinskienė, who worked with refugees in Lithuania in 1914-15; and F.╯Grincevičiūtė, who opened a canteen for Lithuanians in Vilnius in 1915. From the viewpoint of organisations, one notable example was that of Šventos Zitos draugija (the St. Zita Servants’ Association) which worked illegally from 1915. Its members took care of wounded Lithuanian soldiers and prisoners of war. Later this association renewed its official activity in Kaunas, the provisional capital city. World War I aided the process of women’s emancipation in Lithuania to some extent. Although female activists did not raise the question of political rights during the war, they fully participated in the struggle for independence by acting for absent men. They also led the meetings of the rural committees, sowed the fields and educated children. However, they did not capitalise on their contributions during the war to gain political influence. After a number of Lithuanians moved to Russia, the women’s movement was revived there. Between 1914 and 1918 the St. Zita Servants’ Association was officially reestablished in St. Petersburg, under the leadership of Reverend Senkus. Its main activities were charity, self-education and self-support. It was also active in Voronez in south-western Russia. On 6 March 1917 the Lietuvių moterų laisvės sąjunga (Lithuanian Women’s Freedom Union) was established in Moscow. The goal of the organisation was to fight for equal rights for women and to increase national awareness within Lithuanian communities living in Russia. To this end it arranged lectures and meetings for women. An organisation that was especially prominent in Lithuania before the war was the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association (LCWA), established in 1908. Prior to World War I its main activity took place in Vilnius, and thereafter in Kaunas. It protested against the exclusion

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of women from political life and demanded that its representatives be invited to participate in any future national parliament and government. Its demands for political rights were based on the resolutions of the 1905 Great Vilnius Seimas (Parliament) and the wartime St. Petersburg Seimas which declared the right of both genders to elect representatives and to stand as candidates. Realisation of these resolutions was postponed until the reestablishment of the state, yet, as we have seen, there were no women among the twenty-member Council of Lithuania elected at Vilnius in September 1917. On 17 February 1918, the day after independence was declared, female activists organised a meeting and signed a petition demanding that women be included in the Council of Lithuania by way of cooption.5 The women’s delegation went to Vilnius and handed the petition with 20,000 signatures to the chair of the Council presidium, Antanas Smetona, who promised to look into the matter.6 However, he did not keep his word because he did not approve of women’s participation in politics. Rather, in his view, women should restrict themselves to caring for their families and homes and participating in charity organisations. We know that the women’s demands were not discussed in the Council between February and December 1918, because at the end of December the presidium’s vice-chair, S.╯Šilingas, pointed out that women were still demanding places for their representatives.7 Women who did not get places on the Council of Lithuania founded the Lithuanian Women’s Committee whose aim was to prepare for the election of the Constituent Assembly. From November 1918, after the State of Lithuania was restored, the Council of Lithuania became the new legislature. It worked as a legislative body until 15 May 1920, when it was replaced by the Constituent Assembly. During the whole period of its existence, women were not able to participate in the Council, and nor were they able to hold any positions in the new government; indeed, some members of the 5 ╇ Lietuvių konferencija Vilniuje 1917. Organizacinio komiteto lietuvių konferenÂ� cijai sušaukti, Protokolas (Lithuanians’ Conference in Vilnius in 1917. Protocol of the Steering Committee for Summoning Lithuanian Conference), Vilnius University ManÂ�uscript Department, B. 1–405, p.╯13. 6 ╇ “1907-1927 m. moterų teisės ir pareigos” (Women's Rights and Duties in 19071927), Lietuvos žinios (The Lithuanian News), 23 September 1927. 7 ╇ Lietuvių konferencija Vilniuje 1917. Organizacinio komiteto lietuvių konferencijai sušaukti, Protokolas, Vilniaus University Manuscript Department, B. 1–405, p.╯8.

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Council thought that women politicians would damage the image of the state. Despite the fact that they were not represented on the Council of Lithuania, women contributed substantially to the rebuilding of the impoverished country and its economy after the war. Lithuanian women were educated, therefore they were able to work as secretaries, translators, teachers, editors, doctors and lawyers in various state institutions. Until 1923 they actively worked in these spheres without fear of male competition. These facts show clearly that Lithuanian women contributed to the reestablishment not only of the state but also of its institutions after 1918. The resurrection of the Lithuanian women’s movement in 1918 The activity of the women’s organisations before and after the war differed in the sense that they were able to act legally after November 1918. Besides, women’s political awareness was raised greatly during the war; indeed, after 1918 women not only took an active part in organised campaigns but also adopted outspoken positions when addressing concerns of direct relevance to them. Even so, patriarchal relations were still very prevalent in society. After the war, when men returned from the front, women made way for them in the public sphere. This meant that decision-making at every level was dominated by men. Secondly, Lithuania was an agrarian country where more than 80% of the population lived in the countryside. Rural women were not very active politically and were expected to restrict their activity to within the borders of their parishes. Women in industrial towns were much more active. They participated not only in women’s organisations but also in trade unions. Their activity thus made a stronger impact on the Council of Lithuania than did the largely rural and Catholic LCWA.╯Members of the secular women’s organisations were not only educated individuals, public figures or wives of leading politicians, but also ordinary women who strove for self-realisation and/or who wanted to help to solve the various economic and social problems facing women. Nevertheless the Council of Lithuania ignored all of the women’s activities and their initiatives. The situation might have been better if only the different draft constitutions drawn up by the Council of Lithuania had been fully imple-

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mented and adhered to. A number of provisional constitutions were adopted between 1918 and 1922. It was already established in Article 22 of the first provisional constitution (the Framework Laws of the Provisional Constitution of the State of Lithuania, approved on 2 November 1918)8 that all citizens, irrespective of their gender, should be equal before the law. It was established in the preamble to this constitution that the precise form of the state should be decided by the future Constituent Assembly, which was to be elected by a general, equal, direct and secret ballot. In this way, the first provisional constitution very clearly adopted the principle of political equality between the sexes. Analogous provisions were also included in the second provisional constitution of 1919 (the Framework Laws of the Provisional Constitution of the State of Lithuania).9 In both cases, women activists played a direct role in ensuring that their demands were met. In 1918, the Lithuanian Women’s Freedom Union moved from Moscow to Vilnius. Its main goals were to fight for full political rights for women and to promote cultural work among Lithuanian women. A statement addressed to the Council of Lithuania was prepared which called for the abolition of all remaining restrictions on women’s rights in the in the field of education. Also high on the list of demands were equal pay for equal work for both women and men and opportunities for women to join professional associations. The Freedom Union argued that women should be able to participate at every stage of elections and in the government. It placed particular emphasis on women’s education because it believed that only an educated mother could raise intelligent children who would love their native land. Although the Freedom Union expanded its activities in the nation it did not directly criticise the Council of Lithuania in the hope that the issue of women’s political rights would soon be resolved. Besides, the Union supported the Council as a legislative institution. At the end of the year 1918, the activities of the Catholic wing of the women’s movement, the LWCA, were weak. The leaders of this organisation worked in the urban centres, and in the provinces activists were either too few in number or lacked the courage to resist the patriarchal views of society and Catholic priests. Why did the Catholic Women’s Association lose impetus in this way, especially when compared to the level of activity it had displayed while in exile in Russia? 8 9

╇See Andriulis et al. (1996), pp.╯2–3. ╇ Ibid., pp.╯4–6.

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It appears that now that they had returned home and now that the main goal of Lithuanian independence had been achieved, a more conservative, traditional view of women was gaining ground. As mentioned earlier, the strong influence of the Catholic Church was also reasserting itself and once more emphasising women’s domestic and reproductive roles. On top of this, the new Lithuanian state faced invasions from Poland and Russia, and ongoing social and economic problems, which militated against a strong emphasis on women’s rights in the years 1918-19. Women’s public activities, 1919-1923 In 1919 the liberal, Social Democratic and Catholic wings of the women’s movement existed side by side. From 1919, the liberal wing started to give more attention to philanthropic activities. At the beginning of the year 1919 Lietuvos moterų globos komitetas (the Lithuanian Women’s Care Committee) was established in Kaunas. Its goal was to take care of children, the elderly and all those who had suffered in the battle for Lithuanian independence. Material and moral support was to be offered to all those in need, irrespective of religion and ethnicity. However, the LCWA was much more active in welfare on behalf of the Catholic wing of the women’s movement. It was the biggest women’s organisation in Lithuania. In the early 1920s the Lithuanian women’s movement expanded not only its political but also its cultural and philanthropic activity. In 1922 the Lithuanian Women’s Union (LWU) began its activity again. It represented the Social Democratic and liberal wings of the women’s movement. The LWU was weaker in organisational, financial and social terms, with only twenty branches in 1922.10 This could be compared with the 111 branches boasted by the Catholic LCWA.11 Admittedly the LCWA had a built-in advantage because it was partially financed from the state budget. The Catholic women’s organisation cooperated with the Lithuanian Christian Democrat party because it was the dominant force in the government at that time. On 3 December 1922, at a meeting of the LCWA, a union of all Catholic women’s organisations was established, calling itself the Highest Secretariat of Lithuanian Catholic Women. Its goal was not 10 11

╇ Jurėnienė (2006), p.╯56. ╇See Belickienė-Gaigalaitė (1933), p.╯134.

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only to unite all cultural, economic, public and professional Catholic organisations, but also to coordinate the activity of Catholic women. The Highest Secretariat was particularly concerned about media profile and supported the publication of the magazines Moteris (Woman) and Naujoji Vaidilutė (New Virgin). In 1920 the LCWA started organising annual conferences. At the 1922 conference the main theme was family, while in 1923 issues of health, press and women’s work were discussed. Meanwhile, more specialist women’s organisations concentrated on particular areas of female activity, including culture, education, charity and support for soldiers. The following associations were active in the sphere of education: Lietuvos darbo jaunimo (Lithuanian Working Youth); Lietuvos baigusių aukštąjį mokslą moterų sąjungos (the Union of Lithuanian Women with Higher Education); Žiburėlis (a Little Light); and Lietuvos vaiko draugija (Lithuanian Children’s Association). Moterų kultūros draugija (Lithuanian Women’s Culture Association), the Associations of Lietuvos abolicionisčių (Lithuanian Abolitionists) and Moterų sporto mėgėjų draugijos (Women Sports Fans) worked in the field of culture. Kariams ir invalidams globoti komitetas (Committee for the Care of Soldiers and the Disabled), Karininkų šeimų moterų draugija (Association of Women from Military Families) and Šaulių moterų kuopa (Subdivision of Women Rifles) provided help for soldiers. Lietuvos moterų sąjungos tautiniam laivynui remti sąjunga (the Union to Support the National Fleet of the Lithuanian Women’s Union) and Lietuvos jūrininkų sąjunga (the Union of Lithuanian Sailors) were both involved in charitable work. There were also organisations representing women from different ethnic minority groups, for example Russians, Jews, Germans and Poles. They cooperated among themselves, and their most active Â�periods were during the war of independence (1918-20) and in the 1930s. They were prominent in the social and cultural spheres, but were less directly involved in politics during the period of democratic government in Lithuania (1920-26). Their activity contributed to the modernisation of society and to the transformation of traditional gender roles. Yet this brief period of modernisation and relative liberalisation lasted only until the military coup d’état of December 1926 brought the highly conservative Lietuvių tautininkų sajunga (LithuaÂ� nian National Union) to power. It was too short a time to initiate major and lasting social and cultural changes. The coup replaced the democratically-elected government with an authoritarian regime led

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by Antanas Smetona, whose views on gender equality had been made clear by his earlier refusal to countenance women’s inclusion in the Council of Lithuania in 1918 (see above). Realisation of women’s political rights The summer of 1919 witnessed a change in the position of the Council of Lithuania with regard to female suffrage.12 On 1 July 1919 it addressed Lithuania’s citizens, pointing out that the nation was built on such basic principles as freedom, democracy and equality. The address also stated that “all Lithuanian citizens have equal duties towards the state and all must have equal rights irrespective of nationality, religion and language”. This address was influenced by the new opportunities granted to women in other countries.13 The purpose of this statement was to encourage patriotism in the population, particularly in the face of Russian and Polish invasions. All Lithuanian citizens protected the state either at the front or behind the lines. Unlike in Poland, where, as Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska’s chapter in this volume outlines, some women fought alongside the men, Lithuanian women took on traditional wartime roles, sewing clothes, knitting socks and gloves, and cooking food to be sent to the soldiers. They also organised charity parties and concerts at the front and in this way supported the young defenders of the state. Members of the LCWA were especially active, strengthening their influence by creating local branches throughout the country in 1919. On 1-3 SepÂ� tember 1919 the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Congress was also organised. One of its resolutions was to support the work of the Council of Lithuania. On 11 September 1919 the Prime Minister, Mykolas Sleževičius, and the President, Antanas Smetona, appointed a commission to prepare the law on the election of a Constituent Assembly. The commission was chaired by the Minister of Interior, Petras Leonas. None of the commission’s members objected to the idea that elections in

12 ╇ The Council of Lithuania was also sometimes known as the Lithuanian State Council, and continued to function as the main legislative body for Lithuania until the Constituent Assembly was elected in 1920. 13 ╇ Women were elected to parliaments in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Finland, Czecho� slovakia and Austria.

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Lithuania had to be conducted by a general, direct, equal and secret ballot.14 Women received the vote on 20 November 1919 after the Council of Lithuania passed the law governing the Constituent Assembly elections. The first article of this law declared that the representatives of the Lithuanian Constituent Assembly were to be elected by a general, secret, equal vote according to a system of proportional representation. The second article declared that Lithuanian citizens of all religions and nationalities, men and women, over twenty-one years old were allowed to participate in the elections. In this commitment to equal votes for women, the restored Lithuanian state followed the example of other newly-created states in central Europe and was ahead of older nation-states with more established parliamentary traditions where the principle of universal suffrage was undermined by the introduction of property or other qualifications, or where, as in the example of Britain, only women over the age of thirty were eligible to vote. It should also be noted that several states, such as France, Italy and Switzerland, failed to grant female suffrage until much later in the twentieth century (see the Introduction to this volume for further details). The Lithuanian Provisional Constitution (4 April 1919) and the laws of the Constituent Assembly (20 November) were of the utmost importance to the Lithuanian women’s movement. This was the end of the first stage in the women’s movement whose main goal, namely to obtain political rights for women, had been achieved. After the announcement of the elections to the Constituent AsÂ�sembly the rival political parties drew up lists of candidates. Most of the lists included women. However, they were often placed lower down on their respective party lists, for instance from number six to ten and sometimes from eleven to twenty. The exception was Gabrielė Petkevičaitė who was the first candidate on her party list. The women candidates to the Constituent Assembly were educated and usually single. Most of them were already active and well-known leaders in the women’s movement. Another feature of the women candidates was their youth.

14 ╇ “1919 09 11 Komisija Steigiamojo Seimo projektui paruošti” (The Commission of 11 September 1919 for the Preparation of the Bill of the Constituent Seimas), Central Archive of the State of Lithuania, F. 923, pp.╯1–3.

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On 14-15 April 1920 the Constituent Assembly was elected by direct vote. The number of serving members at any one time was 112, but 150 members in total worked in the Assembly during the two year period from 1920 to 1922. Of these 150, only eight were women, who made up 5.3% of all members. Six were from the Christian Democrat bloc: M.╯Galdikienė, E.╯Gvildienė, M.╯Lukošytė, V.╯Mackevičaitė, O.╯MurašÂ�kaitė and S.╯Stakauskaitė. However, no woman from the Social Democrats’ list was elected to the Constituent Assembly. The elected women were social activists, secondary and primary school teachers, or headmistresses. Educated women applied their knowledge in different professional fields, for example Felicija Bortkevičienė was the editor-in-chief of the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuva (Lithuania). Marija Galdikienė was the principal of the girls’ grammar school in Kaunas. One woman from the Socialist Populist Democrats and Peasants’ party was elected: this was Gabrielė Petkevičaitė (1861-1943), the most outstanding figure in the Lithuanian women’s movement.15 She was the first feminist in Lithuania and already at the end of the nineteenth century founded a charity organisation Žiburėlis (a Little Light) that supported Lithuanian students. In 1908 she wrote a book, Women’s Rights, and from 1911 she was the editor of the women’s magazine Žibutė (Violet) that raised the question of granting civil and political rights to women. In 1920 she briefly chaired the Constituent Assembly and contributed to the preparation of the democratic constitution of 1922, which guaranteed equality between the genders. In addition, in 1907 she chaired the first congress of Lithuanian women which passed a resolution demanding civil and political rights for women. She was an active leader of the women’s movement as well as a writer. Since 1990 the Gabrielė PetkeÂ� vičaitė award for the most active women in public and political life has been granted in Lithuania. Petkevičaitė represented both the parties because the two shared the same programme and only their target groups were different: the Democrats worked in towns and the Peasant Party was active in the countryside. On 15 May 1920, with a celebratory session at the Music Hall in the temporary capital Kaunas, the Constituent Assembly started its work. Its temporary presidium was dominated by women. Petkevičaitė, its chair, was at sixty years of age, the oldest member of the Assembly, ╇ (1924) Trumpos Steigiamojo Seimo narių biografijos (Short Biographies of the Members of the Constituent Seimas), p.╯10. 15

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and the secretary was the youngest representative, a twenty-four-yearold teacher O.╯Muraškaitė-Račiukaitienė. Such a structure remained until the permanent presidium was constituted. That was a great sensation in Europe. In the opening speech Petkevičaitė greeted the new Assembly members: I am happy to do this as an old fighter for my nation’s freedom, as a woman who has gained the desired equal rights, as a member of society who did not cease to fight against all enslavement of nations, social status, capital … As representatives doing great work, let’s do it, not forgetting even for a moment that we are here only as the voice of our fellow Lithuanians.16

During this period, women parliamentarians worked in the committees of Education and Bookshops, Work, Social Security and Health. The group of six women from the Christian Democrat bloc, led by M.╯Galdikienė,17 was called a women’s fraction in the Constituent Assembly although it did not formally separate itself from the Christian Democrat bloc. The Christian Democrat women were active participants in the work of commissions charged with preparing amendments to laws. Their main concern was to ensure that the process of writing the constitution of Lithuania and adapting the laws inherited from Tsarist Russia to the new conditions would not leave them with restricted rights. While striving for the equality of both genders the women developed a maximum programme which was to be realised in the new state. The programme stated that: 1) A family should be based on equality between both genders. This principle would allow the family to develop on the basis of humanity, and not on the subjugation of one partner to the other.18 2) The principle of equality was also to be asserted in the world of employment. In particular it was noted that “the same payment should be made for the same work, regardless of gender”.19 3) At the same time women’s housework and the education of the children was deemed to be of equal value to the work of men outside the home.20 This programme has remained relevant up to the time of writing. ╇ Čepėnas (1992), Vol. 2, p.╯367. ╇ Ivinskis (1970), pp.╯3–25. 18 ╇ (1922) Steigiamojo Seimo darbai 1920-1922 (Works of the Constituent Seimas, 1920-1922), 2 March 1922, Session 177, p.╯13. 19 ╇ Ibid. 20 ╇ Ibid. 16 17

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The women parliamentarians also drew up a series of bills which were presented to the Assembly. Among them were laws abolishing the state regulation of prostitution, laws restricting the sale and distribution of alcohol, revisions to civil law where this was necessary to ensure equality between men and women, and amendments to the law of Ligonių kasų įstatymas (a form of National Insurance). In the second reading of article 84 of the draft constitution, which concerned military service, one Assembly member proposed the followÂ�ing formulation: “All Lithuanian citizens must take part in defending [Lithuanian] territory”.21 Representatives of the Christian DemoÂ�Â�crat bloc discussed whether women should be involved in the country’s military defence plans. The chair of the constitution project, A.╯Tumėnas, generalised the discussion and responded to the proposals as follows: Women are so very different from men … that we cannot impose this obligation on them. … I cannot understand women’s rush to defend our territory. … If they push for this, it means that they either do not have work of their own or do not know where their responsibilities lie. … Every woman should try to do their own job properly, and not try to take over duties which have always belonged to men.22

His words represented the fundamental attitude of men in the AsÂ�sembly to woman’s role in society. They further reflected a broader hosÂ�tility towards women in the military which is also discussed by Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska in her contribution to this volume. In 1922, the Constitution of the State of Lithuania was adopted, completing the process of independence.23 Article 10 established that all citizens of Lithuania, men and women, were equal before the law. Article 24 specified that Lithuanian citizens, men and women, enjoyed full rights. All persons aged twenty-one and over were granted the right to elect representatives to the Seimas, while those aged twentyfour and over also had the right to stand for election. F.╯Bortkevičienė participated in the preparation of the National Insurance bill, made necessary because women had started working in various fields and needed the same legal guarantees as men. Female Assembly members also suggested amendments to the civil code so that the inequality between men and women would be ╇ Ibid. ╇ Ibid., 11 July 1922, Session 221, p.╯52. 23 ╇ Maksimaitis, (2005), p.╯169. 21 22

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removed, particularly in relation to family law and laws regarding women’s property rights. The proposed amendments to the civil code were supported by all the parties, and therefore passed onto the statute book, although some inequalities between men and women remained. For example, even though the law stated that a woman had the right to chose not to live with her husband, this was not the case in practice, as the old Tsarist Law on Marriage of 1836 remained in force, under which the husband was considered the head of the family: a woman had to live with her husband in the place of his choosing. Under the law of 1922, the principle of male domination in the family remained, because it specified that “the wife must obey her husband, head of the family, love and respect him, be absolutely obedient to him, do her best to please him and be affectionate as a housewife”.24 There were proposals for the legalisation of civil marriage, too, and women also prepared and submitted other draft laws. The Law on Amending and Supplementing the Civil Laws of 1922 established the principle that a husband’s and wife’s property could remain separate even after marriage, thus allowing either party to engage in financial or business transactions independently of the other. Couples could also enter into a prenuptial agreement as long as this was witnessed by a civil law notary (in these arrangements, one could also agree to the common management of property). The principle was also established that the wife had to contribute to the maintenance of the family and even to cover the entire cost if her husband had no property and could not work. Women also called for an end to the practice whereby the marital status of a woman was revealed in the ending of her surname,25 a change only implemented in the twenty-first century. However, upon the adoption of the Law on Amending and Supplementing the Civil Laws of 1922, the inequality of women, especially in family law, remained. Lithuania at that time was characterised by “legal particularism”, meaning that different codes of law applied in different regions of the country, a situation that had arisen due to historical circumstances. In one part of Lithuania, the Napoleonic Code of 1804 was in effect, in another part the legal practices of Tsarist Russia were dominant. In the Klaipėda region, the civil laws of ╇ (1924), Civiliniai įstatymai (Civil Laws) Vol. 10, 1, p.╯26 ╇ In Lithuanian practice, it is possible to tell whether a woman is married or not by the ending of her surname, while the same is not true of men. The proposal would have removed the distinction between married and unmarried women and may be compared to the use of ‘Ms’ in some Anglophone societies. 24 25

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Germany were in effect between 1924 and 1929. The provisional constitutions provided for the continuity of these pre-existing laws when they were not in conflict with the more recent legislation. Civil and family law was especially influenced by the highly patriarchal laws of Tsarist Russia which had been in effect before the restoration of independence in 1918 and continued to apply in some areas up until 1940. The organisations that belonged to the Lithuanian women’s movement raised and discussed problems of unequal pay for the same work; the problem of women’s citizenship; legal discrimination against illegitimate children; women’s right to education; and so on. For example, until 1940 only Church marriages were considered legal26 and the law did not provide for equal rights for illegitimate children.27 Women participated in the preparation of other bills and their readings, as well as ensuring their passage into law. In the Constituent Assembly the women’s group lacked legal expertise, while in the first (1922-3) and second Seimas (1923-6) a lawyer, the Social Democrat L.╯Purėnienė, was active. In the first and second Seimas, the number of women was much smaller. They comprised just 5% of the elected deputies. After the Constituent Assembly, a tradition of electing the same women to the Seimas was established. The reasons for the phenomenon were as follows: 1) the elected women were active and well-known public figures; 2) their election was determined by their social status as well; 3) the parties themselves developed a particular stance on women’s participation in politics. Quite often parties would place women as numbers eleven to twenty on their election lists. In November 1922 the first Seimas was elected and only four women got mandates. These were M.╯Galdikienė and E.╯Gvildienė of the Christian Democrat fraction, G.╯Petkevičaitė of the Socialist Populist Democrat party and L.╯Vienožinskaitė-Purėnienė of the Social Democrat party. Paradoxically, although they were able to stand in local and municipal elections from 1918 onwards, two years before they could vote 26 ╇ Though the civil registration of the marriage was also legal, there were no institutional arrangements, so in most of Lithuania only the church had a right to confirm the legal status of marriage. Only in the Klaipeda region was it possible to register marriage in administrative institutions 27 ╇Up until the beginning of 1962 (in the period of the Soviet occupation) the rights of illegitimate children were not acknowledged. Such children were ignored and humiliated: they had their mother’s maiden name in their birth certificates and later in their passports. Only as late as 1962 were the rights of the illegitimate child acknowledged in the Family Code.

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and participate in elections to the Constituent Assembly, Lithuanian women were much slower to become involved in local and municipal government. This was partly because the franchise was more restricted here, and partly because, especially in rural areas, society still had a negative view of women’s involvement in politics. In the municipal elections of 1921, seventy-eight women were elected, constituting just 1% of the total number. At national level, women’s activity was nonetheless high-profile and professional, and very much focused on calling attention to and finding solutions for the important problems that were raised by the women’s movement. In 1928 the Lietuvos moterų taryba (Lithuanian Women’s Council) was founded, bringing together women from all the political parties and establishing itself as the main representative body for Lithuanian women in international organisations. Conclusion Because of its occupation by Germany during the First World War, the Lithuanian women’s movement presents something of a special case. As all organisations were prohibited in Lithuania, some women continued their activity in Russia and participated in the Lithuanian Assembly in St. Petersburg, where a resolution declaring the equality of the genders was passed. Within Lithuania itself, however, the case for women’s rights could not be made and women’s organisations were unable to engage in war work until the war of independence of 1918-1920, during which they took on the rather traditional role of supporting the fighting men. Also unusual was the priority given by the Lithuanian organisations to broad national political aims, primarily the restoration of Lithuanian independence after years of Russian control. With the renewal of their activities after the war, women’s organisations addressed the issues of female education, participation in municipal government, employment and other social issues. Women’s organisations representing different minority ethnic groups were active in the country. Due to the complicated political situation during the war of independence and defects in existing laws, women could not participate in parliament at national level until 1920, although they had been elected to local government councils since 1918.

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After the achievement of the vote and other political rights in 1919, the third phase of the Lithuanian women’s movement began. It reached its apogee when women dominated the presidium of the Constituent Assembly of 1920 under the leadership of Petkevičaitė and women could in theory at least be nominated for the Presidency. This period was marked by a high level of activity by women’s organisations. They became involved in the work of the Assembly, participated in the cultural sphere and took part in women’s congresses. They energetically spoke up on various issues connected with domestic policy and foreign affairs. From 1920 until 1926 the Catholic, Social Democratic and liberal wings of the women’s movement all had representatives in the Constituent Assembly and in the following two Seimas, and actively worked to address the problems outlined above. Despite the relatively progressive nature of the political rights granted to Lithuanian women after 1918, the influence of the Catholic Church on the largest of the women’s organisations, the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association, and on society in the rural areas where the majority of the population lived, ensured that traditional attitudes towards women remained. Legal reform lagged behind political changes and the gains of the liberal era were swiftly reversed by the return to authoritarian government after the coup d’état of 1926. Bibliography (1924) Trumpos Steigiamojo Seimo narių biografijos (Klaipėda: 1924). (1922) Steigiamojo Seimo darbai 1920-1922 (Kaunas: 1922). (1924) Civiliniai įstatymai. Įstatymų rinkinys (Kaunas: 1924). Andriulis, V., Mockevičius, R. and Valeckaitė, V. eds. (1996) Lietuvos valstybės teisės aktai: (1918.II.16-1940.VI.15) (Vilnius: 1996). Belickienė-Gaigalaitė, O., ed. (1933) Tiesos ir meilės tarnyboje: Lietuvių katalikių moterų draugija 1908-1933 (Kaunas: 1933). Čepėnas, P.(1992) Naujųjų laikų Lietuvos istorija (Vaga: 1992). Ivinskis, Z. (1970) “Lietuvos Steigiamasis Seimas. Jo kilmė ir reikšmė”, Į Laisvę, 50 (1970) 3–25. Jurėnienė, V. (2003) “Steigiamojo Seimo narės ir jų veikla įteisinant lyčių lygiateisiškumą 1922 m. Konstitucijoje”, in Mūsų konstitucionalizmo raida, eds. A.╯Bartkutė and A.╯Vaišnys (Valstybės žinios: 2003), 262. ———╯ (2006) Lietuvių moterų judėjimas XIX amžiaus pabaigoje–XX amžiaus pirmoje pusėje (Vilnius: 2006). Karčiauskaitė, I. (2005) “Kitiems ir sau: moterų draugijų veikla Kaune”, in Kauno istorijos metraštis, ed. R.╯Varsackytė (Kaunas: 2005) 140–52. Kaziukonis, L. (2001) “Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė ir Lietuvos Steigiamasis Seimas”, in Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė: laikmetis, žmonės, aplinka, ed. G.╯Astrauskienė (PaneÂ� vėžys: 2001) 82.

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Maksimaitis, M. (2005) History of the Constitutions of the State of Lithuania (Vilnius: 2005). (1960), (2003): 65–70 Marcinkevičienė, D. (2001) Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė ir moterų klausimas, in Feminizmas, Visuomenė, Kultūra, ed. D.╯Marcinkevičienė (Vilnius: 2001) 233–5. ———╯ ed. (1997) Įžymios Lietuvos moterys XIX a. antroji pusė – XX a. pirmoji pusė (Vilnius: 1997) 270. Uzdila, J. (2001) “Gabrielės Petkevičaitės-Bitės pagarbus požiūris į šeimą ir moterį”, in Feminizmas, Visuomenė, Kultūra, ed. D.╯Marcinkevičienė (Vilnius: 2001) 242. Voverienė, O. (2000) “Moterys politikoje ir moterų politika” in Lietuvos moterys amžių sandūroje, ed. O.╯Voverienė (Vilnius: 2000) 75.

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Diverse constructions: Feminist and conservative women’s movements and their contribution to the (re-)construction of gender relations in Hungary after the First World War Judit Acsády* The immediate years after the war were a turbulent time in Hungarian history. The Habsburg Monarchy had ceased to exist. Hungary, as a defeated nation with economic shortages, civil unrest and unending social despair, faced an uncertain future. The democratic reforms of the Karolyi government, which came to power in November 1918, were followed by a period of Bolshevik rule (the Hungarian Soviet Republic) under the leadership of Béla Kun, which instigated a wave of bloody repression against those seen as class enemies. In November 1919, Admiral Miklós Horthy seized power as the head of the newly-formed Hungarian National Army and remained as Governor during the decades leading up to the Second World War. In June 1920 Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, which led to the loss of two thirds of the former territories of the country and more than three million ethnic Hungarians, who became citizens of neighbouring states. The activities of social movements and associations became highly politicised in this period. The National Federation of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége or MANSZ) became a tool of the government, being used to spread revanchist propaganda and to create a remobilising discourse among groups of Hungarian women. A key aspect of this was an attack on the activities and the values of the progressive women’s movements. Against the hostile backdrop of the three-month-long Bolshevik reign of terror in 1919 and the right-wing, authoritarian Horthy regime which followed, the Association of Feminists (Feministák Egyesülete or FE), formed in Budapest in 1904, attempted to maintain its earlier endeavours for a democratic society based on gender equality. In line with the Association’s former pacifist struggles they encouraged cultural demobilisation and reconciliation between conflicting social groups and nations.

*╇ I would like to express my thanks to my aunt, Dr. Rozália Rákóczy, historian of war, who greatly helped my work with personal support and suggestions for useful readings.

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In Hungary after 1918, fundamental changes in government, politics and demographic structure shook a society already torn by the cruelties of war.1 The attention of the organised women’s movement understandably turned from gendered aspects of social life towards questions of survival and adaptation to new political rules. Yet debates about suffrage rights, about women’s participation in public life, employment, education and social care were still ongoing in the early 1920s. These issues were raised and discussed before World War I by progressive women’s groups like the Association of Feminists (FE) who tried to carry on with their political and social work especially because various changes to the electoral system following the revolution of November 1918 did not bring universal voting rights. After 1920 the right to vote was limited by newly-defined qualifications (gender, age, marital status, education, wealth). In spite of the presence of the first woman in parliament, Margit Schlachta (Christian Democrat), the women’s movement had to face a reversal of some of the gains made in the immediate post-war period. Further restrictions were introduced. The exclusionary law, 1920: XXV, also called the Numerus Clausus, characterises the policies of these years. The law aimed to regulate enrolment in universities by limiting the number and proportion of students allowed from certain social groups, defined on the basis of their gender, ethnicity or religion. The justification for this regulation was that after the peace treaties a large number of intellectuals decided to leave the “lost territories” and move to Hungary, creating pressures in cultural and scientific life to control the number of students. Those who were considered “not patriotic” because of their ethnicity, place of origin, culture, religious background or political views had their places restricted. The intention was to ensure that the ratio of social and ethnic groups at universities reflected the make-up of society at large. The regulations also aimed to restrict the number of women among university students, in order to “defend the interests of Hungarian men”.2 As in many other countries, employment patterns changed in Hungary during and after the war. The proportion of women who were economically active slowly started to increase in the early 1920s. In 1920 this rate was 37.6%.3 Most of those who worked for a living 1 ╇ Péter Kozák (Social Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Science) contributed greatly to my work in the discussion of the historical background 2 ╇Szegvári (1988) provides a good description of the Numerus Clausus. 3 ╇Nagy (1994), pp.╯159–60. These tendencies are also discussed by Bódy (2008), p.╯94.

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were single women or widows but in the next decade the proportion of married women in employment also grew. Society gradually accepted women in new occupations (especially as postal workers, clerks, shopkeepers and teachers) and acknowledged that women’s employment was just as important as their motherly role. Yet there was still much discussion, most of it of an ideological nature, regarding the employment of upper middle-class women and women in intellectual life. The question of whether married women should work or not was also hotly contested.4 War widows were given special license by the state to open tobacco shops and were therefore able to make a decent living. This often became a way for middle-class women to earn money without being criticised for taking on men’s roles.5 The issue of changing gender relations was handled very differently by the two organisations selected for comparison in this paper, namely the Association of Feminists (FE) and the Hungarian Women’s National Federation (MANSZ).6 These two organisations have been chosen because they represented two very different points of view. MANSZ reflected the mainstream political voice of the governing class: a conservative, revanchist line. The Association of Feminists represented democratic values and an internationalist, pacifist, socially critical, anti-patriarchal and anti-authoritarian approach to politics, as Judith Szapor also shows in this volume. Over time this approach became increasingly marginalised and persecuted by the authorities. After 1919 gender issues appeared in the context of the defeated nation’s desperate efforts to regain what was lost during the war. Thus, contrary to what happened in the case of victorious nations, the First World War could not be followed by military and cultural demobilisation in Hungary. As in other defeated or disappointed countries – such as Italy, discussed by Emma Schiavon in this volume – a “cultural remobilisation” started for a renewal of the war. The main cause was the resentment felt at the territorial losses imposed under the Treaty of Trianon, combined with the trauma of defeat itself.

╇Bódy (2008), pp.╯94–6. ╇See Radics (1995). For this information I am grateful to the director of the Sociology Institute, Tamás Pál. In the author’s family a relative (daughter of the townclerk in Szigetvár) also ran a tobacco shop as a war widow in the 1920s. She raised her four children out of the income she earned running the shop. 6 ╇ In the following the latter will be referred to as MANSZ or, alternatively, as the Federation. 4 5

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This chapter examines the contributions made by the two women’s organisations to cultural de- or remobilisation. It draws both on archival material7 and on published output in the form of periodicals, which were the main means by which the organisations communicated their views and gave voice to their rival political beliefs and value systems. Besides mapping the differences in political discourses, common threads will also be drawn out in respect to the aims and arguments of the women’s organisations in public life in Hungary after the First World War. In this respect, particular reference will be made to gender-related social issues such as suffrage, employment, education, private life, violence, health, childbirth, state welfare and the fate of returning soldiers and prisoners of war (POWs).8 The role of women’s organisations after the First World War As in much of central and eastern Europe, the war was not followed by a period of peaceful restoration of social and political life in Hungary. On the contrary the Horthy regime promoted the establishment of large social organisations that could help in mobilising the people to construct a strong nationalist, chauvinist discourse as a background to irredentist (i.e. revisionist) policies. Huge public events served to strengthen the symbolic importance attached to Hungarian ethnicity. From the point of view of women’s participation in political life a significant event was Horthy’s ceremonial march into Budapest on horseback on 16 November 1919 following the final defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.9 The carefully choreographed elements of the ceremony, from the white colour of the horse to the emblems on flags, were all designed to represent different aspects of Hungarian history. Fifty-four women dressed in black (representing fifty-four detached county districts belonging to Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon) gave bouquets of flowers wrapped in black to the Governor, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to commemorate the lost territories. The key role of greeting the Governor in the name of Hungarian women was given to the writer Cécile Tormay, the President of MANSZ,10 who 7 ╇See the archive materials, including pamphlets and photographs, listed at the end of the chapter. 8 ╇Some of the statements in this chapter are related to earlier archival research by the author. See Acsády (1997, 1998, 2007 and 2009). 9 ╇ For a detailed interpretation of this event see Vörös (2002). 10 ╇See the MANSZ publication marking its fifteenth anniversary, “15 év. Képek a

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was holding the tri-coloured national flag and addressed Horthy. In her speech she urged him in the name of Hungarian women to restore the pre-1918 boundaries.11 The organisation MANSZ was founded in 1918 in Budapest and enjoyed the personal support of the wife of the Governor. She participated in many activities of the organisation and used these events to promote her public role as a leading advocate for her husband’s political values (see, for example, the photograph below). Being the largest women’s organisation after the war MANSZ played a significant part in the “cultural remobilisation” of the country by promoting government propaganda in different ways. The efforts of MANSZ were based on “love of God” and “love of homeland”, and were directed against leftism of any kind. They maintained good connections with Christian and nationalist movements abroad, but shunned internationalist feminist groups after 1920.

Figure 3. Mrs Horthy, the wife of the Governor, Miklós Horthy with a group of women in the Buda Castle. (Photo by János Müllner. Photographs of the 1920s, Photograph Collection of the Hungarian National Museum, no. 2742/1949fn) With kind permission of the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Fotótár MANSZ 15 esztendejéről” (Fifteen years. Pictures of MANSZ’s fifteen years), henceforth referred to as 15 év (1935). 11 ╇ Á.╯Gézáné, “Magyar Assonyok ünnepe” (Hungarian Women’s Celebration), Almanach az 1920-ik évre. (1920). Magyar Assonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége. Budapest, Szent István Társulat, pp.╯101–8.

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MANSZ issued several brochures in the immediate post-war years. In a French language publication it addressed “women of all nations” and called for their support in fighting for “justice for Hungary” against the decisions of the Paris Peace Conference.12 The Federation used various forms of propaganda to promote its militant programme for reclaiming the lost Hungarian territories and supporting the “national cause”, including the publication of calendars, journals and political leaflets.13 Up to 100,000 postcards were also produced with a map of the detached territories and slogans in four different languages.14 As was made clear in all of its publications, MANSZ was an organisation of women dedicated to the service of their nation. Their basic values were connected to loyalty to Hungarian national traditions and the Christian religion. Yet often in their periodical the expression of religious and national attachment was accompanied by intolerant attitudes towards non-Hungarians and non-Christians. The Federation was organised on a nationwide basis. It had local groups in all towns or villages where at least thirty women got together who wanted to join the Federation. They organised workshops to defend home industry, for example women weavers. In their annual general meetings they formulated a common platform with women’s organisation representing the same values and political aims, including Országos, Katholikus Nőszövetség (the National Federation of Catholic Women), Magyar Protestáns Nők Országos Szövetsége (the National Federation of Protestant Women), and Szociális MissziótárÂ� sulat (the Social Mission Association).15 MANSZ divided its work into five committees, dealing with “political, cultural, charity (for the reception of prisoners of war), organisational and foreign affairs”. These committees also made attempts to promote their aims among students. With handmade products that were produced by the members of the Federation they took part in exhibitions in Stockholm and Helsinki. The Federation had personal contacts in the Netherlands whom they visited regularly.

12 ╇ The booklet Proclamation de l’Association Nationale can be found in its original format in the National Széchenyi Library, Budapest, Reg. No. 25794. 13 ╇ 15 év (1934), p.╯6. 14 ╇ Ibid., p.╯12. 15 ╇ Éves közgyűlés: beszámolók (MANSZ annual general meeting: reports) (1920)

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After the war the organisation played a key role in commemorating the dead and initiated the erection of statues and memorials. MANSZ involved itself in charitable activities, in supporting women students (though on a selective base) and in helping POWs to return home. For instance, it took part in the welcoming home of returning prisoners at the Keleti Railway station in Budapest and organised a reception for them with food and drinks on 18 November 1921.16 According to a report about another event, Captain Pedlow, the representative of the American Red Cross, donated seventy-nine parcels to supply the needs of returning prisoners,17 while the food and drink for a similar reception was donated by the villages of the south-east of Budapest.18 Upon their arrival those soldiers who returned from captivity in Russia and Siberia were isolated in special camps (quarantines) before they were allowed to go home. The camps provided health checks and medical treatment, but they also served the purpose of “ideological purification”, that is to say that soldiers were questioned to establish whether they had embraced communist or internationalist ideas during their wartime captivity. They were also given lectures about patriotism in the camps by officials.19 As is described in their journal, later called A Magyar Asszony (Hungarian Matron, established in 1921), MANSZ took part in charitable activities such as delivering medicine and shoes to refugees in 1919, and gathering and distributing donations in cooperation with the Red Cross. At another reception in Csót, books and publications were donated.20 The work of MANSZ activists among the POWs kept in the special camps included advice in conflict resolution, emotional support and prayer. The Federation also enthusiastically contributed to the ideological retraining of the soldiers by distributing leaflets containing patriotic messages.21 ╇ “A hadifoglyok fogadása” (Receiving prisoners of war), Magyar Asszony, I/5 (December 1921), p.╯42. 17 ╇ “A jótékonysági bizottság jelentése” (Report of the Charity Commitee), Magyar Asszony, I/1 (July 1921), p.╯22. 18 ╇ “A hadifoglyok megvendégelése” (Reception for the returning prisoners of war), Magyar Asszony, II/5 (May 1922), p.╯28. 19 ╇See Rákóczy (1987), pp.╯23–4, quoting J.╯Breit, A magyar 1918-19 évi forradalmi mozgalmak és a vörös háború története (The history of the Hungarian revolutions in 1918-19 and the red war) (Budapest: 1925). 20 ╇On the reception of prisoners of war see Magyar Asszony, II/7-8 (July–August 1922) and II/9 (September 1922). 21 ╇See “A nő a patronázsmunkában” (The woman as patron), Magyar Asszony, II/4 (April 1922), p.╯15. 16

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MANSZ had supporters in very high political circles. In the summer of 1923 as an expression of their support for women’s higher education, MANSZ founded the Carlota Dormitory (Leányotthon) in Hold Street in central Budapest, named after the wife of Klebersberg Kunó, Minister of Culture, who was president of the Cultural Committee of MANSZ.╯The construction of the dormitory was financed by the Ministry of Culture. In the first year it provided accommodation for twenty-two students and later it became a dormitory for sixty-five students.22 Despite being involved in public activities, MANSZ never ceased to express its explicit rejection of women’s emancipation. In articles published in its journal and in various petitions MANSZ encouraged women’s traditional roles as housewives and mothers. It approved women’s subordinate position in social and private life and agreed to the restriction of women’s employment. However it supported the idea of women’s education as long as the education was based on Christian values, and promoted the foundation and operation of colleges and boarding schools built for such purposes. The issues raised by their journal, A Magyar Asszony, such as the problem of returning POWs, suffrage, employment, social care, motherhood, and so on, were all formulated in the context of an anti-emancipation discourse combined with nationalist and irredentist political views. Association of Feminists The main target of the anti-feminist attack was the Association of Feminists. This well-known organisation was formed in Budapest in 190423 by Vilma Glücklich and Rózsa Schwimmer – both of whom had international connections – and played a key role in the suffrage movement in Hungary. The Association both continued the traditions of previous emancipation movements in Hungary, beginning with the struggles for women’s education and participation in public life in the 22 ╇ 15 év (1934), p.╯30. In 1925, a conference about women’s education in Budapest was organised by MANSZ. 23 ╇ The history of feminism and the Association of Feminists was a neglected subject until the late 1980s when it started to get more attention. Among others the following authors began publishing studies of the Association and its leading figure, Rózsa Schwimmer: Irén Elekes, Ágnes Horváth, Claudia Papp, Susan Zimmermann, Orsolya Kereszty, Andrea Pető and Judith Szapor. For earlier publications by the author of this chapter on Hungarian feminism see Acsády (1997) (2007) and (2009).

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mid-nineteenth century, and established the values of international feminism. The Association was part of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and was present at international meetings. In 1913 it hosted the seventh congress of the IWSA in Budapest. It published a high quality monthly periodical, Nő és társadalom (Woman and Society) starting in the year 1907. The title of the publication changed to A Nő (The Woman) in 1914. These periodicals served as a means of consciousness-raising in gender issues, spreading information and promoting progressive ideas. During the First World War A Nő expressed a definite pacifist, anti-war point of view.24 The Association cooperated with many progressive social organisations including the circle of Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century – a sociology journal), the Társadalomtudományi Társaság (Association of Social Scientists), the “polgári radikálisok” (middle-class radicals), and the leftist Galilei Circle. It also established good working relations with the City Council of Budapest, led by an open-minded major, István Bárczy between 1906 and 1918. The City Council supported several initiatives of the Feminists both morally and financially.25 The Association of Feminists had at least forty local groups all over the country and mobilised women from the most diverse social, professional and educational backgrounds. It was a politically independent organisation, not supporting any of the political parties, yet it cooperated with progressive MPs to discuss and promote reforms on suffrage rights. From the point of view of women’s participation in politics however, a landmark event was the appointment of Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer as a member of Mihály Károlyi’s opposition National Council in October 1918. After Károlyi came to power in November 1918, she became the first woman in Europe to be given a senior diplomatic post when she was sent to Berne as the new Hungarian Ambassador to Switzerland.26 Due to the unfavourable reactions in diplomatic circles she withdrew from this position at the end of December 1918, less than a month after her appointment.27 After the collapse of Károlyi’s government in February 1919, the ╇On the pacifism of the Hungarian Feminists see Acsády (2007). ╇ For a detailed description of the activities and values represented by the FE based on archival material see Acsády (1998). 26 ╇Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer was called upon to represent the National Council in Switzerland by Károlyi in November 1918. See the correspondance of Mihály Károlyi in Hajdu (1990), p.╯266. Also Judith Szapor’s contribution to this volume. 27 ╇See letter to Mihály Károlyi, Berne, 25 December 1918, in Hajdu (1990), p.╯348. 24 25

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Association of Feminists had to face a traumatic period during which their activities were severely restricted – both during Béla Kun’s reign and under the Horthy regime which followed. In the early 1920s, the authorities harassed members of all progressive movements, feminists among them. The Association was accused by conservatives (including MANSZ) of being anti-patriotic. Due to their earlier involvement in pacifism during the First World War they were easily targeted as scapegoats for the military defeat. Yet in spite of ongoing persecution, the Feminists continued to campaign for and defend the values of women’s emancipation. Thus in the pages of A Nő, the Association made attempts to defend the interests of women in employment (working alongside the Kenyérkereső Nők Országos Szövetsége or National Federation of Wage-Earning Women), and protested against the restriction of political rights. It also strove to maintain its existing international networks and alliances, including links with pacifist bodies. At the same time, the activism of the Association can be interpreted as an effort to boost modernist visions of gender relations and promote the image and the cultural context of the emancipated woman in a radically anti-democratic social atmosphere that fostered conservative values and mores. The efforts of the Association included: – continuing the debate about suffrage rights and fighting against the restrictions imposed; – promoting women’s education and employment to reach equal social status with men; – stressing the importance of a democratic society in preventing a new war; – formulating an anti-militarist platform which rejected violence and anti-democratic political measures. The Association agreed that the peace settlement was harsh and unjust towards Hungary, but nonetheless argued that all women’s efforts should be directed towards preventing a revanchist war.28 Although the programme of the Association of Feminists contained some socialist elements, it did not support the Hungarian Soviet 28 ╇S-né. Szegvári “Fegyveszünetet, Magyarország népköztársaság, a nők politikai állásfoglalása!” (Armistice, Hungarian Republic, women’s political statement), A Nő, V/11 (November 1918), p.╯139.

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Republic in 1919, mainly because the Kun regime was anti-democratic and violated the principles of private property and respect for human life. As Rózsa Schwimmer pointed out in later articles,29 the Feminists were against the executions and the terror perpetuated by the leftist Lenin brigades. The feminist interpretation of democracy rejected the idea of Bolshevism as it appeared to deny the basic processes of democracy. In Schwimmer’s eyes communist rule represented terror, the dictatorship of one class ruling over the others, not a classless society. For holding and expressing such an openly oppositional point of view her voice was silenced. During the Soviet Republic meetings of the Association of Feminists were banned and it was not allowed to publish. The communists attempted to dismiss them. Like the BolsheÂ� vik regime in Soviet Russia, discussed by Olga Shnyrova in this volume, Béla Kun claimed that feminism was a “distortion of bourgeois ideology”. Feminists were also pilloried for their “sentimental pacifism” and their “bourgeois” idealism. Some recent academic publications still use these labels, thus continuing a negative form of imagery used by anti-feminists on the extreme left in 1919 and later by the ruling right-wing conservatives. In this atmosphere, many of the leaders of the Association of Feminists left the country, as the police harassed them and made a large part of their activities impossible. Yet in their publications, Nő és társadalom (Woman and Society), Nők Lapja (Women’s Journal), and A Nő (The Woman) their attempt to formulate an opposition to the emerging cultural remobilisation and revanchism can be traced. The Feminists’ counter-arguments against militarism and nationalism were at the same time arguments in favour of a democratic society based on gender equality. Differences and similarities in the interpretation of social and gender issues in the journals of women’s organisations The Feminists’ approach towards women’s employment after the war was based on their earlier endeavours. Already back in 1916 on the

29 ╇R.╯Schwimmer, “Egy év” (One year), A Nő, VI/3 (November 1919), p.╯1 (cover page); and idem., “A feminizmus sérelmei a proletárdiktatúra alatt” (The injuries of feminism under the proletarian dictatorship), A Nő, VI/4 (December 1919), p.╯2.

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Figure 4. General meeting of the Association of Feminists in Budapest, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their foundation. (Photographs of the 1920s, Photograph Collection of the Hungarian National Museum, No. 389/1953fh) At the table: Károlyné Kozma, Eugenia von Polittsek (Wien), Gr. Sándorné Teleki, Mrs. Cecily Corbett , László Fenyvesi, Eugenia Miskolczy Mellerné (standing), Melanie Vámbery, Gr.Albertné Appnyi, Laczkóné (Prague) With kind permission of the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Fotótár

cover page of the first issue of Nők Lapja, next to the art nouveau flower motifs, women can be seen in a decorative graphic illustration carrying out different types of work in a manner reminiscent of similar illustrations in calendars of earlier centuries depicting yearly tasks in agriculture. Women on this cover page are performing both traditionally female tasks such as sewing, cleaning, cooking, and unusual ones, including physical labour in industry or selling newspapers. The editorial article described how women had replaced men during the war in many spheres. In the spring time it was up to women in rural areas to go out and cultivate the land in order to provide food for their families and for the nation. The journal, edited by one of the members of the Association of Feminists, Adél Spády, argued in favour of launching a campaign for broadening the scope of women’s employment even after the war when soldiers would return home. It suggested that women’s right to employment outside the home should be protected

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and that both men and women should be given proper work opportunities.30

Figure 5. Cover page of the journal A Nő. With illustrations of women’s occupations during the war. With kind permission of the OSZK, National Széchenyi Library

Perhaps not surprisingly, the journal of MANSZ, Magyar Asszony, had a different stance on women’s work. As a monthly periodical founded by Ilona Berta, the official journal of the Federation appeared for the first time in 1921.31 The articles about employment suggested that a woman’s role was primarily to be a housewife and mother. In the given historical situation, women also had a duty to cultivate national consciousness, first and foremost by educating their children in a patriotic manner.32 According to a report published in the journal, Aurélné Koncz declared in a speech marking the formation of the MANSZ group in Debrecen: “It is women’s responsibility to create the Hungarian future, to cultivate the land and their sons’ minds”. In the same speech she fiercely attacked the supposed “hedonism” of BudaÂ� pest: “silk, cabarets, cosmopolitans”.33 The article “Work and the Soul” by Alice Dirner claimed that women should work in the home and not elsewhere “because the

30

p.╯1.

╇ V.╯Zseni, “A földek üzenete” (Message of lands), Nők Lapja, I/1 (March 1916),

31 ╇ In the first years Magyar Asszony came out in a small leaflet format for the members of the organisation. From the 1930s it became a periodical similar to other women’s journals. It was the continuation of another journal published during the war, A keresztény nő (Christian Woman). 32 ╇ Magyar Asszony, I/9 (September 1922). 33 ╇ “Széchenyi szellemében” (In the spirit of Széchenyi), Magyar Asszony, II/1 (January 1922), p.╯16.

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home requires their heart and soul”.34 After the war MANSZ did not support the extension of women’s employment. In certain areas where women took men’s jobs, for example in post offices, the Federation promoted the idea of retraining so that such women clerks might become, for example, hat makers. They even organised hat makers’ training among other handicraft courses, and promoted homemade products.35 MANSZ also formulated the view that if women ever entered into politics they should be responsible for women’s issues, such as social care, housing and healthcare. The journal of Christian feminism, Magyar Nő (Hungarian Woman)36 also stressed the importance of women’s presence in social care and called for the professional training of social workers. The Social Mission Association, as the publisher of this journal, supported women’s paid work in a broader sphere than MANSZ.╯For example, they approved of women clerks. Besides paid work Magyar Nő urged women to do voluntary work, for example among returning prisoners of war who had been placed in quarantine, by helping them to find jobs, contacting their families, providing emotional support and organising entertainment for them.37 The two movements together – MANSZ and the Social Mission Association – did not challenge the pre-war, traditional division of labour between men and women. Though they promoted women’s education and their participation in public life they supported women only insofar as their public roles reinforced those functions traditionally perceived as “motherly”, even if these functions now extended from the framework of the small family unit towards the wider community. The image of the “caring woman” in the context of wider society had also been present in the publications of the Feminist Association ever since its foundation. Yet the Association took a step further in challenging traditional gender roles. A guarantee of the rights and opportunities for women’s education and employment in society was 34 ╇ A.╯Dirner, “Munka és lélek” (Work and soul), Magyar Asszony, II/1 (January 1922), p.╯13. 35 ╇See Magyar Asszony, II/4 (April 1922), p.╯15, and on women hat makers, Magyar Asszony, I/4 (April 1921), p.╯3. 36 ╇ Magyar Nő (Hungarian woman), the journal of Catholic women, published between 1918 and 1924. 37 ╇ In contrast to MANSZ activists, the Christian women’s movement did not call for political work among the returning soldiers in their journal.

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one of the basic aims of the Hungarian feminists. However A Nő,38 the periodical of their Association after the war, mainly discussed political and theoretical questions (for example suffrage and voting rights), and developments in the international women’s movement. When it came to social issues it always emphasised the importance of paid work. In her article about the “Decline of Women” Valéria Dienes even described those women who did not earn money as “parasites”.39 Eugénia Mellerné Miskolczy in the same issue stressed the importance of equal pay for equal work, and equal access to unemployment benefits for both men and women.40 However, A Nő raised its voice against children’s work,41 and was persistent in its campaigns against child poverty.42 To propagate women’s access to work and vocational training during the war the Association published a special booklet43 containing the speeches of a banned congress about women’s employment and vocational training. The booklet was reviewed in several daily papers, for example Pesti Hírlap (Pest News), Az Est (The Evening), Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest News), Világ (The World), and enjoyed positive evaluations. The booklet described how during the war the public had got used to women’s services: in restaurants and cafés. After the war according to the Feminists these jobs were to be kept. The defence of women’s employment rights and the need to guarantee proper working conditions was most profoundly expressed in the journal Háztartási munkásnő (Women in Domestic Service), which went through only a few issues in 1919.44 This journal explicitly 38 ╇ After the war the journal A Nő still appeared regularly for some years, except between February and November 1919 when several issues were banned by the Kun regime. The journal, like all the other publications, was censored by the authorities. The empty spaces in the columns marked the missing text that was cut out by the censor. 39 ╇ V.╯Dienes, “A nő alkonya” (the decline of women), A Nő, V/12 (December 1918), pp.╯156–7. 40 ╇ M. E.╯Mellerné, “Egyenlő munka, egyenlőtlen munkabér, egyenlőtlen munkanélküli segély” (Equal work, unequal payment and unequal access to unemployment benefit), A Nő V/12 (December 1918), pp.╯157–8. 41 ╇Ten year old children were reported as doing hard physical labour on the same basis as adult men and women. See A Nő, V/5 (May 1918), p.╯78. 42 ╇ A Nő, IV/1 (January 1917), p.╯31. 43 ╇ Az 1916-ban betiltott (1917). 44 ╇ This was the official publication of the National Organisation of Household Employees (earlier called domestic servants) during the Kun dictatorship in 1919. Copies of the four issues that came out can be found in the National Széchenyi Library, Budapest.

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approved the changes in the traditional division of labour and accepted men’s participation in jobs that had previously been women’s sphere, for example in laundrettes.45 After the war, returning soldiers often could not find any other job than hard physical labour in private households (where women also worked as carpenters, wall painters, and even as blacksmiths and shoemakers). So, in the pages of Háztartási munkásnő social democrat women welcomed washermen, although they also called for solidarity between the sexes to avoid rivalry in this section of the labour market. Despite the differences in the interpretation of women’s work outlined above, there was a general consensus on two issues between the different political women’s journals. One was the importance of campaigning against the planned restrictions on voting rights. The other was the awareness of the immensely damaging effects of the war on private lives, and especially the need to support and defend women facing severe marital difficulties and/or domestic violence after the return of their solider husbands from the front Suffrage Having earlier been an issue of specifically feminist concern, women’s suffrage became a symbolic field of rivalry among the diverse women’s movements after the war. All of them emphasised the need for women in public life, in politics and in parliament but for very different reasons. Feminists argued for universal suffrage on the basis of women’s inalienable right to vote and to stand for election without qualifications. Women’s political rights were needed to achieve a just society without privileges and without gender discrimination.46 On the other hand, MANSZ did not support the idea of universal voting rights, and instead argued for the necessity of qualifications, although it was against further restrictions planned by the government in 1922. Cécile Tormay, the president of MANSZ stated at a press conference following a public meeting on suffrage rights organised by the Federation on the 31 January 1922 in Budapest: “we are not feminists, we contested

45 46

╇ “Mosóférfi” (Washerman), Háztartási munkásnő, February 1919, p.╯14. ╇ A Nő, issues on 8 March and 23 September 1919.

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the bill not to defend women’s interests against men’s but to defend the interests of our homeland”.47 The idea of women taking part in politics for the sake of the nation in fact dates back to the end of the eighteenth century, when the very first political petition on behalf of Hungarian women was drawn up in 1790.48 This idea was present in political discourses throughout the twentieth century. The final issue of the Christian journal Magyar Nő, before it was forced to suspend publication for the duration of Bolshevik rule between March and September 1919, even contained the first part of the original text of the 1790 petition. The next part of the petition was included in the following issue, which appeared six months later after the fall of the Kun regime. The impact of war on private life In the political journals of women’s associations after 1918 the issue of the effect of the lost war on private life was often discussed. Given the death of so many men during the course of the conflict, the primary concern was to ensure adequate state financial support for orphans and war widows. Yet in the case of those families where the husband survived and came home after the war, other problems emerged. “The return of many of the soldiers did not bring blessing but trouble and suffering to the family and for the nation”49 stated Magyar Nő in 1918, referring to venereal diseases and also to “infectious ideas” (meaning here leftist, internationalist ideas). The feminists who wrote for the Association’s periodical A Nő were equally concerned about the effects of war on private life, albeit for slightly different reasons. Countess Teleki Sándorné, for instance, was horrified by evidence of widespread domestic violence and even “wife executions” after the war. She reported that in many cases juries did not find the returning soldiers guilty of beating and shooting their wives if they suspected that the woman had been unfaithful while they

47 ╇ “Asszonyok munkája a fővárosban” (Women’s work in the capital), Magyar Asszony, II/1 (January 1922), pp.╯25–34. 48 ╇ “A magyar anyáknak alázatos kérések” (Request of Hungarian mothers) (PozÂ� sony, 1790). Copy in National Széchenyi Library, Budapest. 49 ╇ “Hazajöttek százhatvanezren” (One Hundred and sixty thousand men returned), Magyar Nő, I/2 (March 1918), cover page. The article explains why soldiers are in quarantine after their return.

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were away at the front.50 Domestic violence was also mentioned in another article by the “Red Countess”, Mihály Károlyi’s wife, Katinka Andrássy. She wrote about the changing nature of gender roles within marriage after the war.51 Husband and wife had been separated for long periods, and when the soldier/husband arrived home he realised that his spouse had become economically independent and used to managing the household alone. He felt as if he was now “surplus” to requirements as the wife and children had managed without him. Yet if he tried to take back control of everything in the household it would lead to conflict.52 The source of friction lay in the fact that the man was unable to provide for his family during those years, while his wife gained in self-confidence and self-awareness because she was able to maintain the family alone. Yet politically she still had no rights, argued Andrássy, so that both husband and wife were victims of a system that promoted militarism. Another delicate problem which was treated sympathetically only by the progressive political women’s journals was the increased number of children born from extra-marital relationships during the war. These illegitimate children were excluded from the legal rights enjoyed by children born within marriage. Both the journals A Nő53 and Nők Lapja54 devoted articles to this issue and proposed legal changes to guarantee basic rights for all children. Though the late twentieth-century feminist slogan “the private is political” was not yet known and used at the time, these women’s movements were attempting to turn the attention of the public towards private life and show how political and legal structures impinged on and were reflected in the problems of individuals and families. Values The initiatives that were reported in the political women’s journals can be interpreted as efforts to achieve justice in society. Obviously justice ╇ A Nő, V/4 (April 1918), p.╯52. ╇Gr. (Countess) M.╯Károlyi (K.╯Andrássy), “A háború hatása a gyermeknevelésre” (The effect of war on children), A Nő, V/5 (May 1918), p.╯74. 52 ╇ The article was censored, therefore there are missing sentences and paragraphs in the print. 53 ╇ A Nő, VI/2 (February 1919), p.╯15; and A Nő, VI/4 (December 1919), p.╯8. 54 ╇ “A házasságon kívül született gyerekek ügye” Nők Lapja, IV/1 30 January 1919, p.╯2. 50 51

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was defined differently by the diverse movements. For the Feminists, social justice meant equality in terms of legal rights between men and women, equality in terms of opportunities to study and work and a move away from gender stereotyping. Politically their initiatives were embodied in a pacifist, internationalist discourse. It is important to note that the Association of Feminists also interpreted the Paris Peace Treaties as “unjust”. However they warned against revanchism and militarist propaganda .They argued that a new war was not the answer but that a mutually acknowledged reconciliation process could help to promote peaceful coexistence between the rival nations.55 The movement lead by MANSZ defined justice on a different political basis. Primarily they wanted justice for Hungary, the defeated country that had lost two thirds of its pre-war territories. For this reason they supported and promoted the revanchist politics of the government. They subordinated all issues they discussed to the “nationÂ�al interest”. For example in terms of suffrage MANSZ accepted the concept of reduced rights if it was “in the interest of the nation”. They referred to Catholicism as the basis of all their endeavours. Or to put it another way, women in MANSZ saw themselves as fighters for “justice” although they did not seek to challenge and change existing gender relations. On the contrary, they defined feminism and emancipated women, alongside social democracy and communism, as one of their greatest enemies.56 In their efforts to maintain traditional gender roles they argued that even in matters of appearance traditions must be followed. Thus men should wear moustaches, otherwise they would lose “their national Hungarian and male character”.57 Women should wear traditional clothing with Hungarian patterns, according to the fashion supplement of the journal Magyar Asszony. An attempt to link the two very different trends was made in the writings of Kozma Flóra Perczelné, a Unitarian woman priest. She was a well known theorist of social care, a supporter of women’s suffrage rights and pacifism. She was close to both feminist and conservative circles, and published her articles both in feminist journals and in the 55 ╇ Arguments against the supposed territorial injustices of the peace settlement were already being expressed in the journal of the Association of Feminists towards the end of the war. See for instance the editorial on the cover page of A Nő, V/10 (October 1918), and Rózsa Schwimmer’s article, “Aminek jonnie kellett” (What had to come), in the same issue, pp.╯122–4. 56 ╇ A Magyar Asszony, I/4 (November 1921), pp.╯3–4. 57 ╇ “A bajusztalanság divatja” (The fashion of not growing moustaches) Magyar Asszony, II/7-8 (July-August 1922), p.╯48.

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periodical of MANSZ.58 Perczelné made an attempt to reconcile the two trends and also probably to bridge the distance between progressive and conservative women’s organisations. In her article about Rózsa Schwimmer’s lecture in the Lloyd Hall in Budapest during the war she stated that both feminism and Christianity were aiming for a just society. In a similar way to the Association of Feminists she claimed that women’s suffrage was not a goal in itself, but rather a means to achieve a peaceful, just society. Yet the question could be raised whether women’s rights and the question of peace were identical issues. Could the values of Christianity and feminism be merged? According to Perczelné59 all this was indeed possible. According to the journals published by the politically different women’s movements after the war, it was not. Conclusion After the First World War, Hungarian society was shaken both by the terrors of the war and by the consequences of the military defeat embodied in the Paris Peace Treaties. In this political context the progressive women’s movement led by the Association of Feminists tried to carry on their struggle for equality between men and women, primarily by agitating for suffrage rights. In their programme suffrage was not an end in itself, but a means to establish a just society. Feminists supported the rights of women in employment and encouraged women’s vocational training and higher education. Their concern was to reconcile people and to maintain peace. Their journal represented a modernist approach touching upon structural and private issues in women’s lives and arguing that these were interrelated. Their work during the war had been underpinned by pacifist ideas and afterwards was characterised by a desire to restore and maintain peace between nations in the new post-1918 international context. In this way the activities of the Association of Feminists can be seen as an attempt to contribute to the cultural demobilisation of Hungary, to stop the cycle of resentment and revenge, and to work against the possibility of future wars. ╇ Perczelné, “Schwimmer Rózsa”, Nők Lapja II/5 (May 1917). ╇See further writings by Perczelné, including “Vallás és szabadság” (Religion and freedom), A Nő, VI/1 (January 1919), p.╯1; and “Nőket a parlamentbe!” (Women into Parliament!), A Nő, VI/9 (October 1919), cover page. 58 59

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Their efforts were strongly opposed by the largest women’s association of the inter-war period, MANSZ, which saw international feminism as one of its basic enemies. The Federation was formed with the political aim of fighting to regain the lost territories of the country, thus keeping the idea of the war and the injustices suffered by Hungary alive in public consciousness. Like the writings and activities of the nationalist German organisations described by Christiane Streubel in this volume, MANSZ propaganda was directed towards cultural remobilisation, in other words towards increasing the nation’s readiness for another war. It supported the Governor Horthy’s policies and received approval and encouragement for its endeavours from the government. Being a partner in revanchism, MANSZ propagated an image of women as primarily dedicated to the interest of the nation. In this view women could best serve their nation by confining themselves to traditional roles in the household or in producing handicrafts in small-scale home industry. There were individual efforts to reconcile the women’s organisations, with little result. As the conservative movement led by MANSZ enjoyed enormous support from government circles their voice became relatively stronger. By contrast, in the face of ongoing harassment by the authorities, the voice of the Association of Feminists was gradually drowned out until it was eventually silenced altogether. Bibliography Acsády, J. (1999) “A magyarországi feminizmus a századelőn”, in Politika, gazdaság és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben. I., ed. Püski L.╯Jelenkortörténeti Műhely II. KLTE Történelmi Intézet (Debrecen: 2002) 295–311. ———╯ (2007) “In a Different Voice. Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A. S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 105–23. ———╯ (2009) “The Debate on Parliamentary Reforms in Women’s Suffrage in Hungary 1908-1918”, in Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship – International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms, eds. I.╯Sulkunen, S.╯Nevala-Nurmi and P.╯Markkola (NewÂ�castle upon Tyne: 2009) 242–58. Ambrus, A. (1997) “Magyar nők a dualizmus korában”, PhD Dissertation JPTEBTK.╯Pécs. Manuscript. (e-version: iqdepo.hu Dimenzió 21). Bódy, Zs. (2008) “A női munka felszabadítása vagy korlátozása”, in Határtalan nők. Kizártak és befogadottak a női társadalomban, eds. B.╯Boglárka and E.╯Zs.Tóth. Nyitott Műhely (Budapest: 2008) 93–113. Burucs, K. (2002) “Nők az egyesületekben” , História, 19 (2002). Feitl, I. ed. (2008) “Bárczy István”, in A főváros élén. Budapest főpolgármasteri és polgármesterei 1873-1950 (Budapest: 2008) 163–79. Hajdu, T. (1990) Károlyi Mihály levelezése 2 Vols. (Budapest: 1990).

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Juhász, B. and Szikra, D. (2008) “A lány villamosa. Határátlépő nők a két világháború közötti szociális munkában Földy Ilona és Göntér Zsuzsanna életrajzán keresztül”, in Határtalan nők. Kizártak és befogadottak a női társadalomban, eds. B.╯Boglárka and E.╯Zs.Tóth (Budapest: 2008) 113–29. Nagy, B. (1994) “A nők kereső tevékenysége Budapesten a 20. század első felében”, in Férfiuralom. Írások nőkről, férfiakról, feminizmusról (Budapest: 1994) 155–75. Szegvári, N. K. (1988) “Az antifeminizmus történelmi gyökerei. A nők egyetemi felvételének ügye az első világháború előtt”, in Numerus clausus intézkedések az ellenforrdalmi Magyarországon (Budapest: 1988) 53–85. Papházi, T. (1996) “Egyesületi és alapítványi pénzgazdálkodás. A reformkortól a második világháború végéig”, Mozgó Világ, 9 (1996) 59–67. Papp, C. (2002) “Die Kraft der weiblichen Seele”. Feminismus in Ungarn 1918-1941 (Munster: 2002). Pető, A. (1997) “Minden tekintetben derék nők”, in Szerep és alkotás. Női szerepek a társadalomban és az alkotóművészetekben, eds. B.╯Nagy and M. S.╯Sárdy (Debrecen: 1997) 269–78. ———╯ (2003) Napkisasszonyok és holdkisasszonyok. A mai magyar konzervatív női politizálás alaktana (Budapest: 2003). Pető, A. and Szapor, J. (2003) “A női esélyegyenlőségre vonatkozó női felfogás hatása a magyar választójogi gondolkodásra 1848-1990”, in “Az ‘állam érdekében adományozott jog’ feminista megközelítésben”. Készült az MTA Filozófiai Intézet “Recepció és kreativitás. A nyitott magyar kultúra” programjának keretében (BudaÂ� pest: 2002–3). Radics, K. ed. (1995) Móricz Zsigmond és Magos Olga levelezése. Püski (Budapest: 1995). Rákóczy, R. (1978) Katonai sajtó. A magyar Történelmi Társulat Sajtótörténeti pályázat. Kézirat. Manuscript. Sauvageot, A. (1987) Souvenirs de ma vie hongroise. Magyarországi életutam (BudaÂ� pest: 1988). Tormay C. (1923) Bujdosó köny, 2 Vols. (Budapest: 1923). Vörös, B. (2002) “Térfoglalás Budapesten – térfoglalás a történelemben? A Nemzeti Hadsereg budapesti bevonulási ünnepsége 1919. november 16-án”, in ÜnnepHétköznap- Emlékezet, ed. C.╯Pásztor (Salgótarján: 2002) 181–6. Archival sources 1920-as évek fotói [Photographs of the 1920s], Photograph Collection of the Hungarian National Museum (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Fotótár), 174. és 249- es doboz. (1917) Az 1916-ban betiltott…[Speeches of the banned congress in 1916] Kiadja Feministák Egyesülete. Budapest. 1917. (1918) Asszonyok! Leányok! – Feministák Egyesületének röplapjai [Women! Girls! Leaflets of the Association of Feminists] (Budapest: 1918), Museum of Military History (Hadtörténeti Múzeum) 3469. l.n. 1193. (1918) A NŐK politikai állásfoglalása. Feministák Egyesületének röplapja [Women’s political statement. Leaflet of the Association of Feminists] (Budapest: 1918), Museum of Military History (Hadtörténeti Múzeum). (1920) Almanach az 1920-ik évre [Almanach for the year 1920] Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége –. Budapest, Szent István Társulat. (1920) Proclamation de l’Association Nationale des Femmes Hongrois a Tout les Femmes du Monde (Budapest: 1920), National Széchenyi Library. (1922) Politikai Káté. [Political catechism] MANSZ, National Széchenyi Library

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(1922) Arguments against the Territorial Aspirations... (Budapest: 1922), Stephaneum könyvnyomda. National Council of Women of Hungary, National Széchenyi Library. (1925) MANSZ 1925 évi Nőnevelési Kongresszusa. [MANSZ Congress on Women’s Education in 1925] MANSZ Kiadványa. 1925 (?), National Széchenyi Library (1934) 15 év. Képek a MANSZ 15 esztendejéről. [Fifteen years. Pictures of MANSZ’s fifteen years] Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége. (Budapest: 1934) Révai, National Széchenyi Library Dobrovits, S. (1936) Budapest egyesületei. Statisztikai Közlemények. [Associations of Budapest. Statistical reviews] (Budapest: 1936), National Széchenyi Library (1933) Szervezett tömegmozgalmak Magyarországon. [Organized mass movements in Hungary] Kiadja a Magyar Királyi Rendőrség [Issued by the Hungarian Royal Police] (Budapest: 1933), National Széchenyi Library. Tormay C. (1923) Bujdosó könyv. I-II. (Budapest: 1923). Journals A Nő [The Woman], 1919-23 A keresztény nő [The Christian Woman] Magyar Asszony [The Hungarian Matron], 1921-23 Est 1920/III. [The Evening] Pesti Napló [The Pest Diary]

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Elsa Brändström and the reintegration of returning prisoners of war and their families in post-war Germany and Austria Matthew Stibbe* When the First World War formally came to an end on 11 November 1918, some seven million soldiers from all sides were still in enemy captivity, many of them trapped by the outbreak of fresh conflicts on the eastern borders of Europe.1 Most Allied prisoners of war were released fairly quickly, but hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian POWs in France and Russia had to wait until 1920 or even longer before they were allowed to go home. Furthermore, when they were finally repatriated, they returned to defeated, demoralised countries which struggled to reintegrate them or to understand their plight. One woman activist who sought to highlight the suffering of former POWs and their families was the Swedish Red Cross nurse Elsa Brändström. Her fund-raising and publicity campaigns also touched upon the supposed injustices committed against German and Austrian women under the Versailles settlement, and on the quest for international peace and reconciliation in the post-war world. It is up to us women to heel [sic!] what the war has broken, to mother the suffering and help them to get back their belief in humanity. We must give the victims of the war back their desire to live and to become again useful human beings.2

So argued Elsa Brändström in a speech to groups of women activists in the United States in 1923, during a six-month speaking tour to raise funds for a new home for German and Austrian POW orphans at Schloß Neusorge in Saxony. The timing of this trip is of course significant: 1923 was the year of hyperinflation in Germany, when the col* I would like to thank Heather Jones, Reinhard Nachtigal, Beryl Nicholson and Alon Rachamimov for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. 1╇ Nachtigal (2009), p.╯157. 2 ╇Elsa Brändström, handwritten notes in English on a speech to a group of American women, no date [1923], in Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BA-MA) Freiburg, MSg 200/1060, Bl. 9-21 (here Bl. 19). Emphasis in the original.

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lapse of the currency created extremely harsh economic conditions, especially for women and children. It was also the year in which international women’s campaigns against the injustices of the Versailles peace settlement reached their climax in the context of the FrancoBelgian occupation of the Ruhr.3 By this stage Elsa Brändström herself was already famous throughout the world as the “Angel of Siberia”, the Swedish Red Cross worker who had organised the distribution of food, clothing and medical supplies to up to 700,000 German and Austrian POWs interned in European Russia, Turkestan and Siberia between 1914 and 1920. Indeed, it is largely in her wartime role, and her subsequent angelic image – often compared with that of Florence Nightingale – that Brändström has been written about in history books too, from Hans Weiland to Alon Rachamimov.4 Far less, though, is known about her contribution to the reintegration of returning POWs and their families in post-war German and Austrian society, and to the concomitant reconstruction of gender roles. This paper therefore seeks to fill a significant gap in the historical record. The first part will examine Brändström’s activities during the Russian civil war from 1918 to 1920, and in particular her efforts to secure the repatriation of former German and Austrian prisoners trapped by the fighting in the Caucasus, Siberia and Russian Central Asia. Subsequent sections will then look at her work with returnees and their families in Germany after 1922, and at her role in the movement for international reconciliation and peace, especially at the time of the 1923 Ruhr crisis. Finally, the paper will end with some broader comments on the significance of Elsa Brändström’s work for the question of women’s activism in the aftermath of the First World War more generally. The Russian Civil War Elsa Brändström was born in St. Petersburg on 26 March 1888. Her father, Lieutenant General Edvard Brändström, to whom she was 3 ╇On the Ruhr crisis and its relevance to the international women’s movement in particular see Kuhlman (2007), p.╯239. 4 ╇See Weiland (1931) and Rachamimov (2002). There are also numerous biographies of Brändström; the best ones are Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962); Padberg (1968); Björkman-Goldschmidt (1969); and Kohlhagen (1991).

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closely attached, was the Swedish military attaché, and later the SweÂ� dish ambassador, to the Russian empire. After a period of education in Sweden, when she also completed her teacher training, she returned to St. Petersburg in 1908. Her mother died here in 1913, but her father, a staunch pro-German, continued in his diplomatic role. As soon as the First World War broke out in August 1914, she volunteered to work as a military nurse in a hospital for wounded Russian soldiers, relying on funds raised by members of the Swedish expatriate community in St. Petersburg. In 1915, when the Swedish Red Cross took over responsibility for the welfare of German and Austrian POWs in Russian captivity, she decided to become involved by agreeing to act as one of its representatives and by personally undertaking missions on its behalf.5 Over the next five and a half years she carried out a series of risky expeditions through Siberia, from Omsk to Vladivostok, visiting numerous camps, hospitals and forced labour stations, including those where deadly infectious diseases were rife. In February 1916 she contracted typhus while at Irkutsk and was eventually forced to return to St. Petersburg, but she was soon planning a second trip into the sub-Arctic wilderness. Doubtless exploiting her father’s diplomatic connections, and her own status as a neutral, she also went on two fund-raising tours of Germany and Austria-Hungary, where she was received by, among others, the Empress Auguste Victoria and the Empress Zita. Despite “perpetual strife” with the Russian authorities,6 she and her fellow Swedish Red Cross delegates were nonetheless able to organise the rolling stock and customs certificates necessary to dispatch forty-one trains (or 1,016 van-loads) full of gifts for needy prisoners in European Russia, Siberia and Turkestan between October 1915 and March 1918.7 The relief parcels thus sent from Germany and Austria-Hungary via Sweden and Finland undoubtedly saved thousands of lives, but the mere appearance of Red Cross delegates in the camps was also said to have been a great boost to morale. Soon Brändström herself acquired the appellation “Angel of Siberia”, a title which was still being used at the time of her death in 1948.8 5 ╇Biographical details taken from the works cited in note 4 above and from the unsigned obituary “‘Angel of Siberia’ Dies in Cambridge”, New York Times, 5 March 1948. On the Swedish Red Cross and its role in wartime relief see also Davis (1993). 6 ╇Brändström (1929), p.╯178. 7 ╇ Ibid., p.╯173. 8 ╇See, for instance, the obituary “‘Angel of Siberia’ Dies in Cambridge” (as note 5 above). Also Davis (1993), p.╯37.

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Figure 6. Elsa Brändström, 1929 (Pos. 1 BARCH, Signature: Bild 183-R06836, Article ID: 31494706) With kind permission of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz

When the armistice was signed on the western front in November 1918, Brändström was on the third and most dangerous of her three journeys in Siberia. This involved crossing several undemarcated borders between Red and White-held territory. At one point in July 1918 she even faced death by firing squad after being arrested at as a suspected German spy by Czech legionaries, only to be acquitted a day later by a specially convened military court and allowed to proceed to Omsk.9 Indeed, just how risky her venture was can be seen by the fact that a month later, two other Red Cross workers, a Swede and a Norwegian, were robbed and hanged by Cossack troops at Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East.10 Brändström’s aim, of course, was to highlight the plight of roughly 600,000 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners still trapped by the ongoing civil war, and to increase the international pressure for their release and repatriation. At this point, the White Russians and their Czech allies refused to recognise the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and continued to regard Germans and Austrians as “the enemy”, while the Bolsheviks often sought to conscript ex-POWs in their territories into the Red Army.11 In subsequent speeches and written accounts Brändström ╇ This incident is discussed very briefly in Brändström (1929), p.╯253. ╇ Moorehead (1998), p.╯272. 11 ╇See Nachtigal (2009), pp.╯158–68. 9

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also recalled the daily encounter with death and disease, but took care not to blame ordinary Russians themselves. Indeed, amidst all the suffering, she also witnessed moving acts of human kindness, such as the German Plennys (the Russian word for POWs) who saved an orphaned Russian child after his father, a White Russian officer, had shot the rest of the family and then himself.12 Brändström’s journey ended by and large with success, especially after the conclusion of an agreement between Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union on 19 April 1920 for the reciprocal exchange of all their prisoners, and the simultaneous appointment of the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen as special League of Nations commissioner responsible for POW repatriation.13 Her last act, while returning home in July 1920, was to issue an appeal through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on behalf of the remaining 200,000 prisoners in Russia.14 In fact, though, it was to take until 1921/22 before the last groups of German and Austrian POWs were released from Ukraine, southern Russia and Siberia.15 Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia After returning to Sweden in 1920, Brändström fell into a depression, partly caused by inactivity and partly by the illness and subsequent death of her father in November 1921. During this time, she decided to write a book about her wartime experiences, and to use the proceeds to set up a foundation for ex-POWs in Germany and Austria.16 The book appeared in Swedish at the end of 1921, and in German and English language editions in 1922 and 1929 respectively.17 It was an immediate bestseller. However, Brändström was careful to put the prisoners, rather than herself, at the centre of her narrative. As she later explained to her friend and former collaborator, the ex-POW Pastor Eduard Juhl:

╇Brändström, handwritten notes (as note 2 above), Bl. 13. ╇Brändström (1929), p.╯280; Moorehead (1998), p.╯274. 14 ╇Brändström (1920). 15 ╇Nachtigal (2009), p.╯166. 16 ╇Brändström to Luise von Baden, n.d. [November/December 1921], in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 200/1054, Bl. 23-4. 17 ╇See Brändström (1921), (1922) and (1929). 12 13

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Matthew Stibbe When I came back from Siberia, I tried to sum up the story of captivity in my book “Unter Kriegsgefangenen in Russland und Sibirien” and in the process collected a large number of official and private documents. The War Ministry and the Foreign Office in Berlin, the German Red Cross, the equivalent authorities in Austria and Hungary, as well as many former POWs in Germany, German Bohemia and Austria, also helped me to put together what is probably the most comprehensive work on Russian captivity and on wartime conditions in Russia which exists in Germany today.18

At the same time, as the “only neutral who witnessed the fate of prisoners of war in Russia from beginning to end”, she was determined to use her account in order to “rouse public opinion to the necessity of new [international] legislation” for protecting the rights of POWs during wartime.19 Later the material she collected was put at the disposal of the historian Dr. Margarete Klante, a former employee of the POW directorate inside the Prussian Ministry of War, who translated Brändström’s Swedish book into German in 1922 and wrote her own study of the Czech legion, published in 1931.20 It was then handed over to the Reichsarchiv to create an Elsa-Brändström-Gedächtnisarchiv, most of which, unfortunately, did not survive the Second World War. The remaining fragments are now held at the Bundesarchiv-MilitärÂ� archiv in Freiburg im Breisgau.21 Historians are nonetheless divided over the historical worth of Brändström’s own book, whose English title was Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia. Alon Rachamimov praises its “solidity”22 whereas Verena Moritz warns against its limited adherence to conventional standards of Wissenschaftlichkeit and its tendency towards carelessÂ�ness with sources. In particular she cites Brändström’s correÂ� spondence in 1921 with the former Austro-Hungarian Superintendant for POW affairs Heinrich von Raabl-Werner, in which she made clear her intention to allow “the facts to speak for themselves”, and “to introduce some humour and Russian culture”. In a further letter to

╇Brändström to Eduard Juhl, 10 January 1934, in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 200/37. ╇Brändström (1929), p.╯5. 20 ╇Klante (1931). 21 ╇ For further information on the Elsa-Brändström-Gedächtnisarchiv see the BunÂ� desÂ�Â�archiv website at http://www.bundesarchiv.de/bestaende_findmittel/bestaendeue bersicht/index_frameset.html 22 ╇Rachamimov (2002), p.╯6. 18 19

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Raabl-Werner she admitted that she had collected so much material that she could not be sure of the sources for some of her claims “as everything has got mixed up together”.23 However, in my view, Moritz’s argument misses the point. Brändström’s intention was never to produce a work of scholarship, but rather, as she told Eduard Juhl, to create a “monument to the collective efforts of the POWs in Russia [and] Siberia”.24 In this sense her objectives were similar to those of the larger, two volume Germanlanguage compendium In Feindeshand, which appeared in Vienna in 1931. The latter publication, edited by the Austrian researchers Hans Weiland and Leopold Kern, also described itself as standing “on the border between memoir literature and historical writing”, while aiming to become a standard reference work or Quellenwerk for those wishing to conduct further research into what had become a neglected area of the wartime experience.25 In terms of method and approach (although not in terms of literary quality) Brändström’s book might also be compared to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s more famous Gulag Archipelago, published in the west in the early 1970s. Thus Solzhenitsyn also based his account of Soviet captivity on “reports, memoirs and letters” given to him by “227 witnesses”, but not on verifiable or traceable evidence alone. As he wrote in the preface: I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents. And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them? Those who do not wish to recall have already had time enough – and will have more – to destroy all the documents, down to the very last one.26

And yet today few people would dispute the essential truth of what he wrote about the Soviet Gulag system. In the same way, Brändström’s book contains essential truths about the experience of First World War captivity, truths which would have vanished were we to rely solely on the official documents destroyed deliberately or unintentionally during the Russian civil war and/or the Soviet era.

╇ Moritz (2005), p.╯23, n. 23. ╇Brändström to Juhl, 10 January 1934 (as note 18 above). 25 ╇ Weiland and Kern (1931), Vol. 1, pp.╯31 and 33. 26 ╇Solzhenitsyn (1974), p.╯x. Emphasis in the original. 23 24

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Finally, a reading of the correspondence between Brändström and Raabl-Werner in 1921, which can be found in the Austrian war archive in Vienna, reveals that she was far from naïve about the importance of factual accuracy, in particular in relation to statistics concerning deaths, rates of illness, financial contributions and so on, all of which were bound to be disputed by one side or the other, and particularly by the Russians.27 In her last letter to Raabl-Werner in December 1921 she wrote that she hoped her book would: ... provide an accurate and reliable account of captivity as I observed it during my 5 ½ year period of activity among the POWs. The figures I received from you for Austria and from Herr von Mielecki and Fräulein Klante for Germany have of course in many ways added to the value of the book, and have filled in many gaps where my personal knowledge was lacking.28

The reintegration of POWs As well as telling their story to a wider international public, Brändström also intended her book to be of more practical use to returning POWs and their families. Homecoming was very much a pressing social and political issue in the immediate post-war years, as Judit Acsády also shows in her contribution to this volume, not least due to anxieties that those who had been in captivity in Russia might return “infected” with revolutionary ideas. The example of Béla Kun, the leader of the violent and short-lived Hungarian Soviet in 1919, indeed served as a reminder of the “dangers” of Bolshevism.29 France’s decision to retain German POWs until the spring of 1920 also led to widespread resentment.30 Meanwhile, as they came to terms with military defeat and political revolution, Germany and Austria struggled to reintegrate millions of ex-soldiers, war widows and war orphans into impoverished and demoralised societies. In Austria this process was made easier by the fact that relatively few Austrian prisoners had fallen into western hands (although hundreds of thousands remained in Russian captivity in the years 1918-22). Yet in Germany, as Heather Jones has argued: 27 ╇See, for example, the letters from Brändström to Raabl-Werner on 14 May, 4 August and 8 October 1921, in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, Nachlaß Heinrich von Raabl-Werner, B/141: 4. 28 ╇Brändström to Raabl-Werner, 10 December 1921, in ibid. 29 ╇See Leidinger and Moritz (2003) and Nachtigal (2009), pp.╯160–1. 30 ╇Nachtigal (2009), pp.╯173–4.

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Perhaps the only thing which [everybody] agreed on in 1919-1920 was that the Allies’ refusal to let German prisoners home to their families over a year after the war had ended was morally wrong.31

In 1922 Brändström settled in Germany and, using the profits from sales of the book, she opened two respite homes for sick and disabled former POWs from Germany, Austria and Bohemia, one at MarienÂ� born in Saxony and the other at Schreibermühle bei Lychen in BranÂ� denÂ�burg. Later, after her trip to the USA in 1923, she added an orphanage for the children of deceased POWs at Schloß Neusorge in Saxony, intending in this way to keep a promise she had once made to a dying prisoner in Siberia to take care of his son.32 Between then and her marriage to the German law professor Robert Ulich in 1931, which was followed by the birth of a daughter, Brita, in 1932, she devoted most of her time to the management of these homes, as well as raising funds to keep them going. Her guiding principle here was that former POWs should be encouraged back towards independence and selfdignity, and that children should be encouraged “to discover the pleasures of harmonious forms of living”.33 In addition to managing her homes, Brändström also worked very closely with two organisations for ex-POWs, the Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener (Reich Association of Former Prisoners of War or ReK) in Germany, and the Bundesvereinigung der ehemaligen österreichischen Kriegsgefangenen (Federal Association of former Austrian Prisoners of War or BeöK) in Austria. For instance, she was often invited to attend branch meetings and other events as a star speaker.34 The ReK also helped to identify those children who were to be offered a place at Schloß Neusorge.35 In terms of their politics, both organisations adopted an “above parties” position and declared themselves in favour of a vague Volksgemeinschaft ideology which put the good of the community over class or individual self-interest. They were certainly not socialists or radicals, and they vehemently opposed the Versailles peace settlement, but, as Heather Jones has shown in the ╇ Jones (2005), p.╯412. ╇ Photographs of and brochures for these homes can be found in BA-MA FreiÂ� burg, MSg 200/454. 33 ╇Elsa Brändström, “Einige Gedanken über Kindererziehung” (Some thoughts on children’s education), Sonderbeilage des Heimkehrers, March 1925. Copy in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 200/944. 34 ╇Rachamimov (2002), p.╯222. 35 ╇ Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), p.╯259. 31 32

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case of the ReK, they also avoided the extreme forms of nationalism and racism which characterised some of the other veterans associations in post-1918 central Europe, especially in Germany and Austria. Instead, they adopted their own distinctive brand of conservative nationalism which combined a loose commitment to reconciliation between former enemies with more concrete demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles in Germany’s favour.36 In the earlier post-war years in particular, these organisations also had to deal with a range of financial and emotional problems faced by returning POWs, many of whom were unemployed and/or found it difficult to readjust to “normal” family life after so many years away from home. A speech Brändström gave to the Berlin section of the ReK in April 1922 is very revealing here, especially for what she says about the reconstruction of gender roles and the difficulties experienced in many marriages after the war. It is therefore worth quoting at length: Returning prisoners of war cannot be reminded often enough of the enormous debt of gratitude and respect they owe to their wives for what they achieved and what they suffered during the war. But the POWs themselves also have a right to demand that their families will show consideration and understanding for their unique experiences. And where is the positive in these experiences? They have given the prisoners a broader vision and an understanding of the human condition which goes well beyond their own smaller world… They have also taught the prisoners to respect the views of others… Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that the Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener includes members from all parties and all social classes. The feeling of belonging which was felt by every comrade out there in enemy captivity, simply because he was a German, must be preserved by you, former prisoners, in this new Germany torn apart by party strife. You know more than others how unity can overcome adversity, and this is the lesson which you, through your own example, can bring home to your people.37

A number of key points emerge from this speech. Firstly, there is Brändström’s endorsement of the vague Volksgemeinschaft ideology referred to above; the idea that Germany would have to put party squabbles – and gender squabbles – behind it if it were ever to recover from the traumas of war (and post-war hyperinflation). Indeed, the ╇ Jones (2005), pp.╯416–7. On the ReK see also Pöppinghege (2005). ╇Brändström, typewritten notes for a speech to the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft GroßBerlin der ReK”, 4 April 1922, in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 200/1060, Bl. 70-4. 36 37

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motto for her charitable foundation, which hung from every building which it owned, also had a distinctly nationalistic tone to it: Du sollst an Deutschlands Zukunft You must believe in Germany’s â•… glauben, â•… future, an deines Volkes Auferstehn. in the resurrection of your people. Laß diesen Glauben dir nicht rauben, Let nobody rob you of this faith, whatever else may happen. trotz allem, allem, was geschehn. Und handeln sollst du so, als hinge And always act as if on you and your deeds alone von dir und deinem Tun allein das Schicksal ab der deutschen Dinge, the German cause depends, and you bear responsibility. und die Verantwortung wär dein.38

Secondly, there is the reference to the notion that suffering somehow ennobles, which is also very interesting in connection with the cultural construction of the POW experience during and immediately after the First World War. Brändström’s assertion that bad things happen for a greater purpose, which still had some resonance in Europe in the first two decades after the Second World War, was to become increasingly less accepted as the “short” twentieth century entered its final throes, for instance. Thus, at the end of the 1980s writers like Primo Levi could assert that survivors of the Holocaust such as himself were not “true witnesses” but simply an “anomalous minority… who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom”.39 More recently, the same position has been adopted by the novelist Linda Grant: “the only truth that matters [is]… that survivors survive beÂ�cause of their strength or cunning or luck, not their goodness, and certainly not their innocence”.40 In the 1920s, though, in spite of the great suffering and injustices caused by the First World War and its aftermath, it was still possible to believe wholeheartedly in the power of individuals – or of ideas, or of God – to do good in the world. This went hand in hand with what Rainer Pöppinghege refers to as the “self-mystification” [Selbstmystifizierung] of the POW experience, or rather the assertion put forward by the ReK and other bodies that even those forced to spend the war behind barbed wire had played their

╇ Cited in Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), p.╯214. ╇ Levi (1988), pp.╯63–4. Also cited in Hobsbawm (1994), p.╯1. 40 ╇Grant (2008), p.╯12. A similar theme runs through the Second World War concentration camp film Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), written and directed by the Austrian film maker Stefan Ruzowitzky in 2007. 38 39

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part in the war effort and had remained “unbroken in character” [charakterlich ungebrochen].41 Thirdly, there are clearly some important gendered messages in this speech. In the immediate post-war years, when France as well as Russia retained thousands of German POWs in defiance of international law, German women had been closely involved in the campaign to get their men home, writing to the ICRC, to the heads of neutral states, and even to the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.42 In December 1919 they scored an important victory when the Weimar government agreed to distribute an extra, one-off allowance of 200 Marks to prisoners’ families to help them through the winter months.43 But after the last POWs had returned in 1920-22, a reaction set in. Women were now blamed for the supposed destruction of traditional moral standards and collapse in family values brought about by the war, and for the increased spread of STIs.44 During the hyperinflation of 1922-23 they were also depicted as symbols of the rampant consumerism and sexual excess which was allegedly undermining the fabric of the nation.45 The spectre of large numbers of young single women failing to find husbands further heightened the sense of a serious threat to the gender order, as did rising divorce and illegitimacy rates and falling fertility rates.46 More particularly, it has been suggested that the war experience did not prepare single women like Brändström herself for the anti-climax of post-war demobilisation, redundancy and loss of position in society. Military nurses in particular were vulnerable as targets for ridicule or hostility, often being presented in cartoons or popular newspapers as “frivolous society women who went to the front in search of male companionship”, rather than as war heroes.47 On top of this they faced the “further insult of being labelled “the surplus two million” who must defer to the needs of the surviving members of the opposite sex”, including, one might assume, returning prisoners of war.48 ╇ Pöppinghege (2005), pp.╯394–5. ╇ Jones (2005), pp.╯363–4. 43 ╇ Ibid., p.╯365. 44 ╇Bessel (1993), pp.╯233–53. 45 ╇ Widdig (2001), esp.╯pp.╯196–220. 46 ╇See Sharp (2007) and Sharp’s contribution to this volume. Also Bessel (1993), pp.╯230–3. 47 ╇ Allen (2008), p.╯10. See also Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska’s contribution to this volume. 48 ╇Summers (1988), p.╯289. 41 42

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Brändström speech, calling for greater respect for women and their war contribution, was clearly an attempt to counter all of this. Yet her appeals fell on deaf ears. While Vorwärts, the Social Democrat newspaper, reported her speech in full, praising in particular its focus on the “spirit of unity” [Gemeinsamkeitsgeist] which must enter into the hearts of all Germans, the mainstream bourgeois newspaper the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger dwelt more on Brändström’s “feminine” refusal to engage in politics and her conformity to traditional, pre1914 gender roles: “Was sie sagt, ist so ungekünstelt, so weiblich, so – deutsch” (“what she says is so unaffected, so feminine – so German”).49 Indeed, it is not without irony, as Bianca Schönberger has said, that in post-war Germany “the only [acceptable] female heroine of the First World War was a Swede”.50 The same applied in Austria, where, as fellow Swedish Red Cross nurse and Vienna resident Elsa BjörkmanGoldschmidt later recalled, Brändström’s name was always invoked at meetings of former Plennys in 1920s, not least by Hans Weiland, the president of the BeöK, who never tired of telling how she had saved his life.51 By contrast, the aristocratic German, Russian and AustroHungarian women who were also directly involved in Red Cross missions to POWs on the eastern front were usually missing in public commemorations of the captive experience after 1918, so that names like Elsa von Hanneken, Countess Nora Kinsky, Countess Anna Revertera, Countess Alexandrine von Uexküll and Baronness Käthe von Mihalotzy have been largely lost to history. None of these Red Cross workers, as Alon Rachamimov puts it, “could truly conform to the ideal-typical representation of a nineteenth-century nurse, and none managed to win the confidence of more than a section of the POW population”.52 Nor, as aristocrats, did they fit easily into the new national and gender narratives being forged in republican Germany and Austria, or in Bolshevik Russia, in the early 1920s.

49 ╇See Vorwärts, 5 April 1922; and Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 5 April 1922. Copies of both in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 201/112. 50 ╇Schönberger (2002), p.╯102. 51 ╇Björkman-Goldschmidt (2007), p.╯323. 52 ╇Rachamimov (2006), p.╯24.

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Paradoxically, then, the Swede Elsa Brändström was a more suitable symbol of patriotic war work than any German Red Cross worker was, and this at a time when, according to Heather Jones, “the international humanitarian aid sphere was… under pressure” as “voluntary aid efforts for prisoners of war became nationalised efforts” linked to government drives towards mobilisation for war. True, Brändström’s own wartime activities were transnational, in the sense that they involved cross-border communications and cultural contacts. But they did so in a way which was hardly “neutral”; rather her efforts on behalf of POWs in Russia were supportive of Germany and its national war effort, not the cause of internationalist, pacifist feminism.53 How did this nationalisation of wartime humanitarian relief fit into the gendered politics of aid work in the post-war period of economic, military and cultural demobilisation? Conventional feminist readings of women’s involvement in Red Cross nursing and army auxiliary work during the First World War (and other conflicts) have seen it as having placed women in subordinate positions within male-dominated hierarchies, thereby diverting them from suffragist and other political campaigns and leading them to identify with the militarist objectives of the warring states. Thus for Bianca Schönberger “the transgressing of gender boundaries” which wartime nursing entailed “was embedded in pseudo-family relations, corresponding to the social order”. By such means, the gender inequalities of the pre-war era were reproduced in a new guise.54 Above all, nurses were expected to behave towards their male compatriots as “surrogate mothers” rather than as military comrades or (again playing on class differences) as “female generals”.55 As Alon Rachamimov argues in his study, the cult of Elsa Brändström, the “Angel of Siberia”, which first appeared in the camps and was further promoted in numerous memoirs, poems and works of art by former POWs after the war, also encouraged such gender stereotyping. In his view, it was “no coincidence that, after the war, ex-POWs preferred to honor and remember those women who best fitted the traditional mold of a compassionate and caring nurse”.56 ╇ Jones (2009), p.╯709. ╇Schönberger (2002), p.╯102. 55 ╇ Allen (2008), pp.╯9–10. 56 ╇Rachamimov (2006), p.╯42. 53 54

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Brändström’s efforts on behalf of former POWs nonetheless led her at times to step out of the conventional role prescribed for nurses. For instance, it led her to embrace certain aspects of the feminist worldview, based on the belief that war was destructive to women and families, as well as to men. Like members of the German section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), she believed that cultural demobilisation in the post-war world was dependent on “women of goodwill” being granted a greater role in international relations.57 Although she steered clear of party politics, she was a convinced democrat, and like her future husband Robert Ulich, a determined anti-fascist. In 1923 she was put forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, making her the second woman to be so recommended.58 She was also involved in the ecumenical movement on both sides of the Atlantic and a speech she made in Stockholm in 1925 calling for international peace was published in the German pacifist journal Die Eiche.59 Indeed, there are some parallels with the case of Elisabeth Rotten, the Swiss wartime activist, feminist and peace campaigner who established a relief organisation for enemy aliens and their families in Berlin in 1914.60 For instance, both women were citizens of neutral states who made their homes in Germany. Both were involved in relief for those caught up with the problem of captivity. And both highlighted incidents in which German and Austrian women could be identified as victims of war, when the rest of the world wanted to see them only as aggressors. The difference was that Elsa Brändström was not regarded as a radical pacifist in Germany, and was not affiliated to any international anti-war or feminist organisation. Nor, in contrast to Rotten, did she have any encounters with the German police and military authorities, at least until 1933. In the Weimar era she was regarded as “unthreatening” because she was politically neutral, and ╇ Cf. Kuhlman (2007), pp.╯237–40. ╇ “Nobel Peace Prize is Asked for Woman”, New York Times, 1 February 1923. In 1905 Bertha von Suttner became the first woman to receive the prize. Brändström was not in the end awarded the honour in 1923, in spite of the official recommendation. Fridtjof Nansen was the sole winner in 1922. See the list of prize winners at http:// www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/. 59 ╇ “Liebestätigkeit als völkerversöhnende Macht” (Charity as a force for international reconciliation), Vortrag von Schwester Elsa Brändström auf der Ökumenischen Konferenz in Stockholm, 26 August 1925. Published in Die Eiche, 4/4 (1925); also reproduced in Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), pp.╯354–7. 60 ╇Stibbe (2007). 57 58

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because her post-war as well as wartime roles focused on “archetypal ‘maternal’ activities such as clothing, feeding and healing”.61 This made her a “safe” choice for the award of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Tübingen and Königsberg, for instance, or for the granting of an honorary seat on the University of Halle senate.62 Her hatred of war and desire for international reconciliation also went hand in hand with strong pro-German feelings, especially in 1923 when many of her speeches – in both Germany and the USA – were strongly critical of France. In particular she wanted to create a sense of “transnational outrage” to mirror that of the outrage caused by the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914 and the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell in 1915.63 Or, as a radio address broadcast in Germany in 1929 on Brändström’s life and career put it: She was the first to speak out [in America] about the suffering of German children whose fathers perished [in Russian captivity]. This took some courage! Since how often did [she] receive a frosty reception when she pleaded Germany’s case, how often was she confronted with stories of the atrocities which Germans had allegedly committed in Belgium when they cut off the hands of children. How difficult it must have been for her in the face of such lies. And yet she waged and continues to wage her campaign untiringly, not for her own nation, but for another nation, the German nation, a nation related to her own by ties of blood.64

Such views may also help to explain her popular appeal across the political spectrum. Indeed, in Germany her many admirers extended from committed republicans and cosmopolitans on the left like Count Harry Kessler to reactionary and rabidly nationalist former generals on the right like Field Marshal August von Mackensen.65 But it also points to the one area where her ideas clearly failed: in the sphere of German politics itself. Instead, her claim for moral recognition on behalf of POWs contributed to what Rainer Pöppinghege refers to as the “fracturing of war memory” [Fraktionierung der Kriegserinnerung] after 1918, with competing discourses increasingly used to mobilise new emotions and hatreds in the divided post-war political landscape.66 ╇Rachamimov (2006), p.╯27. ╇ Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), p.╯273. 63 ╇On Cavell see Pickles (2007). 64 ╇ “Elsa Brändströms Liebeswerk” (Elsa Brändström’s charity work), transcript of radio broadcast, March 1929, in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 201/112. 65 ╇See Kessler (1971), pp.╯282–3; and Mackensen (1931). 66 ╇ Pöppinghege (2005), p.╯392. 61 62

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To make matters worse, former POWs could not even agree among themselves on how they should project the captive experience in Â�public, with a smaller left-leaning group, the Vereinigung ehemaliger KriegsÂ�geÂ�fangener Deutschlands (Association of former German PrisonÂ� ers of War or VeK), establishing itself in 1925 in opposition to the more nationalist ReK.╯The two groups nonetheless continued to cooperate on some issues.67 More generally, the focus on POW suffering – which had no parallel in victor nations like Britain, France and Italy – simply added to the ongoing and ultimately divisive debates about the meaning of the war conducted by veterans’ associations of all hues, without helping to consolidate democratic values or institutions. Or, as Richard Bessel puts it, “Weimar Germany remained stuck in [a] post-war rut – [it was] a society whose points of reference had been fixed by the War”.68 Elsa Brändström both contributed to and became a victim of this process. During the 1920s she was a tireless campaigner for the reintegration of former POWs and their dependants, but in spite of achieving national and international fame she found little to build on in terms of genuine transnational understanding and even less in terms of equality between men and women within POW and veterans’ organisations. Increasingly critical of the authoritarian and racist direction of German politics in the early 1930s, she rejected an approach from leading Nazis to lend her support to the party’s “Winter Relief” campaigns and also curtly declined an invitation from Hitler to visit him at his residence in Obersalzberg.69 Instead, she emigrated with her husband and daughter to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1934, where she set up a series of relief organisations for refugees from Europe.70 As late as January 1939, in a fund-raising speech for refugees in New York, she blamed the west, and in particular France, for having undermined Weimar Germany through the imposition of a harsh peace settlement in 1919: One cannot help feeling that, had the Western powers been treating [sic!] the Weimar Republic as an equal member in the family of West-

╇ Ibid., pp.╯398 and passim; Jones (2005), pp. 415–16. ╇Bessel (1993), p.╯284. 69 ╇ Padberg (1968), pp.╯150–1; Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), p.╯292; BjörkmanGoldschmidt (2007), p.╯407. 70 ╇ Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), pp.╯299–329. 67 68

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Perhaps for this reason, and also because of her work for war orphans after 1945 through the Save the Children Fund, her reputation enjoyed something of a revival in (West) Germany in the immediate post-Second World War years, when many new streets and schools were named after her. This was also a time when millions of German families were again awaiting the repatriation of their loved ones from western and Soviet captivity. After making one brief lecture tour of Sweden in 1945, however, she found that she was too ill to make any further trips to Europe. She died at her home in Cambridge in March 1948, aged 59, and, following a special ceremony that was held in her honour in Berlin, she was finally buried in Stockholm.72 Conclusion What, light, then, does Elsa Brändström’s story shed on the women’s movement in the aftermath of the First World War more generally? In a recent book, the Canadian scholar Jonathan Vance notes that the two defining characteristics of the Canadian warrior during World War I were “his youth and his attachment to a mother figure”.73 In the case of German and Austrian POWs in Russia, it is tempting to cast Elsa Brändström in this role as “mother figure”; in popular remembrance she stood side-by-side with the grieving soldiers’ mothers who had sacrificed their son’s lives for the higher cause of the fatherland, except her surrogate sons were not the warriors who had died a hero’s death on the battlefield, but defeated men who wasted away in enemy captivity or eventually came home, broken and disillusioned. Yet to do this would be to reduce Brändström unfairly to a straightforward “feminine” maternal role – and her role was in fact more complex than this. Thus she refused to bow down before male-dominated hierarchies, and where necessary, created her own independent organisations for helping POWs. She retained her patriotic and pro-German credentials while undertaking expeditions to the rival nations engaged in war. 71 ╇Brändström, typewritten speech on refugees, 18 January 1939, in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 200/1060, Bl. 65-9 (here Bl. 65). 72 ╇ Juhl, Klante and Epstein (1962), pp.╯335–7. 73 ╇ Vance (1997), p.╯147.

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And she used the transnational skills and experiences she had acquired in Russia and Siberia to find a new and rewarding public role in postwar Germany, and later in the United States. So, was she just an exception that proves a general rule, or does Elsa’s case suggest new ways of looking at the position of women’s activism after the First World War? Like a number of other women involved in war work with refugees or ex-POWs, Brändström did not find much time to write about her own experiences.74 Her main publication, Among Prisoners of War, says little about her personal motivations, and we are left with just a few speeches and other scraps of evidence. As one of her biographers, Magdalena Padberg, puts it: “Die Verfasserin tritt ganz zurück, ihre Spur verliert sich ‘unter Kriegsgefangenen’” (“her person recedes into the background, disappearing ‘among the prisoners of war’”).75 Yet one important clue lies in her ability to present her work in much broader terms than the traditional female concern with charity; it was a specific practical contribution by a woman to the process of cultural demobilisation across borders, parties and genders. Or, as she explained in a letter to two colleagues turning down the offer of a job at the League of Nations in Geneva in the late 1920s: On the surface my work up till now might seem to be purely charitable in nature, but fundamentally it is the psychological, pedagogical and socio-cultural elements that most attract me. For this reason I am quite certain that the post in Geneva is not suitable for me, as I would not be able to give to such theoretical work the attention that it needs without making awkward compromises.76

In this sense, the continued and ongoing importance of the POW question after 1918, and its links to cultural demobilisation, really did offer, for women like Elsa Brändström, a chance to heal the very gendered, male and female, German, French, Austrian and Russian, wounds created by the war. The impulse which drove her, and others, sprang both from a general humanitarianism and from a concern to “provide the kind of aid that would help people to become independent and productive members of society” in a non-judgmental envi74 ╇ Cf. Rozenblit (1995), p.╯211, who emphasises the similar lack of written testimonies by Jewish women activists in wartime Austria. 75 ╇ Padberg (1968), p.╯79. 76 ╇Brändström to Reinhold Schairer and Dr. Erich Kraske, 31 July 1929, in BA-MA Freiburg, MSg 200/1054, Bl. 28-9.

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ronment.77 The story was always theirs, the victims of war and persecution, and not hers, the campaigner and activist. This was a principle which she also sought to apply in the very different setting of her work with refugees and war orphans during and immediately after the Second World War. Bibliography Allen, A. T. (2008) Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: 2008). Bessel, R. (1993) Germany after the First World War (Oxford: 1993). Björkman-Goldschmidt, E. (1969) Elsa Brändström. En Biografi (Stockholm: 1969). ———╯ (2007) Es geschah in Wien: Erinnerungen von Elsa Björkman-Goldschmidt, ed. R.╯Schreiber (Vienna: 2007). Brändström, E. (1920) “La détresse des prisonniers de guerre en Sibérie”, Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge 2/20 (15 August 1920) 937–41. ———╯ (1921) Bland Krigsfångar i Ryssland och Sibirien, 1914-1920 (Stockholm: 1921). ———╯ (1922) Unter Kriegsgefangenen in Russland und Sibirien, 1914-1918, translated from the Swedish by M.╯Klante (Berlin: 1922). ———╯ (1929) Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia, translated from the German by C.╯Mabel Rickmers (London: 1929). Davis, G. H. (1993) “National Red Cross Societies and Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914-1918”, Journal of Contemporary History, 28/1 (1993) 31–52. Grant, L. (2008) The Clothes on their Backs (London: 2008). Hobsbawm, E. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (LonÂ� don: 1994). Jones, H. (2005) “The Enemy Disarmed. Prisoners of War and the Violence of Wartime: Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920”, (Ph.D thesis, Trinity College, Dublin: 2005). ———╯(2009) “International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action During the First World War”, European Review of History – Revue europeene d’histoire, 16/5 (2009) 697–713. Juhl, E., Klante, M. and Epstein, H. (1962) Elsa Brändström: Weg und Werk einer grossen Frau in Schweden, Sibirien, Deutschland und Amerika (Stuttgart: 1962). Kessler, Count H. (1971) The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918-1937, translated from the German by C.╯Kessler (London: 1971). Kohlhagen, N. (1991) Elsa Brändström: Die Frau, die man Engel nannte (Stuttgart: 1991). Klante, M. (1931) Von der Wolga zum Amur: Die tschechoslowakische Legion und der russische Bürgerkrieg (Berlin: 1931). Kuhlman E. (2007) “The ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and Reconciliation after the Great War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime: InterÂ� national Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 227–43. Leidinger, H. and Moritz, V. (2003) Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr: Die BedeuÂ� tung der Kriegsgefangenenproblematik für die Geschichte des Kommunismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1917-1920 (Vienna: 2003). 77

╇Rozenblit (1995), p.╯210.

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Levi, P. (1988) The Drowned and the Saved, translated from the Italian by R.╯Rosenthal (London, 1988). Mackensen, A. von (1931) “Die tapfere Schwedin”, in In Feindeshand: Die GefanÂ�genÂ� schaft im Weltkriege in Einzeldarstellungen, eds. H.╯Weiland and L.╯Kern, 2 Vols. (Vienna: 1931) Vol. 2 240. Moorehead, C. (1998) Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: 1998). Moritz, V. (2005) Zwischen Nutzen und Bedrohung: Die russischen Kriegsgefangenen in Österreich 1914-1921 (Bonn: 2005). Nachtigal, R. (2009) “The Repatriation and Reception of Returning Prisoners of War, 1918-1922”, in Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration in Europe During the First World War, ed. M.╯Stibbe (London: 2009) 157–84. Padberg, M. (1968) Das Leben der Elsa Brändström (Hamburg: 1968). Pickles, K. (2007) Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (Basingstoke: 2007). Pöppinghege, R. (2005) “‘Kriegsteilnehmer zweiter Klasse?’. Die Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener 1919-1933”, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 64 (2005) 391–423. Rachamimov, A. (2002) POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford: 2002). ———╯ (2006) “‘Female Generals’ and ‘Siberian Angels’: Aristocratic Nurses and the Austro-Hungarian POW Relief”, in Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, eds. N. M.╯Wingfield and M.╯Bucur (Bloomington and IndianaÂ� polis: 2006) 23–46. Rozenblit, M. L. (1995) “For Fatherland and Jewish People: Jewish Women in Austria During the First World War”, in Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, eds. F.╯Coetzee and M.╯Shevin-Coetzee (Oxford: 1995) 199–220. Schönberger, B. (2002) “Motherly Heroines and Adventurous Girls: Red Cross Nurses and Women Army Auxiliaries in the First World War”, in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, eds. K.╯Hagemann and S.╯Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: 2002) 87–113. Sharp, I. (2007) “Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 67–87. Solzhenitsyn, A. (1974) The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary InvesÂ�tigation, translated from the Russian by T.P.╯Whitney (London: 1974). Stibbe, M. (2007) “Elisabeth Rotten and the ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’, 1914-1919”, in The Women’s MoveÂ� ment in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 194–210. Summers, A. (1988) Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 18541914 (London: 1988). Vance, J. (1997) Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (VanÂ� couver: 1997). Weiland, H. (1931) “Elsa Brändström: Caritas inter arma”, in In Feindeshand: Die Gefangenschaft im Weltkriege in Einzeldarstellungen, eds. H.╯Weiland and L.╯Kern, 2 Vols. (Vienna: 1931) Vol. 2 238–40. Widdig, B. (2001) Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (London: 2001).

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“We stand on the threshold of a new age”: Alice Masaryková, the Czechoslovak Red Cross, and the building of a new Europe Bruce R.╯Berglund

Of the new states established at the end of the First World War, the Czechoslovak Republic was one of the most heralded and most reviled. To its supporters in western Europe and North America, Czechoslovakia’s promise as a liberal democracy had been shown in the wise and stately manner of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the professor and former member of the Imperial Austrian parliament who had lobbied the Allied governments for the empire’s breakup and took office in 1918 as the republic’s first president. To opponents of the peace settlement, Czechoslovakia was the example of how the victors distorted the principle of self-determination to punish their adversaries, creating an artificial state that put sizeable numbers of Germans and Hungarians under the discriminatory rule of the Czechs. To the Czechs themselves, Masaryk was the “President-Liberator” and the multinational state, encompassing the industrial cities of Bohemia and the rural villages of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, was territory that their modern, democratic nation would govern capably. As the first director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross, Alice Masaryková, the president’s daughter, pursued this task of building a healthy, prosperous republic and offering the model of a new democratic society to the rest of Europe.

“How beautiful is a land of justice! . . . After the war, there will be life! Full of vitality! The new age will bring something new”.1 Alice Garrigue Masaryková wrote this pledge to her mother in February 1916 from a prison cell in Vienna. Masaryková spent eight months in Austrian prisons on charges of conspiring in the treasonous activities of her father, Tomáš Masaryk, who had gone abroad at the start of the war to seek Allied support for the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire. Certainly, when she wrote these lines, Masaryková could not have imagined that, within three years, her father would return to Prague as ╇ Alice Garrigue Masaryová (henceforth AGM) to Charlotte Garrigue Masaryková (henceforth CGM), 1 February 1916, letter no. 58, in Hájková and Soukup (2001). 1

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the first president of independent Czechoslovakia and that she would have the opportunity to build this land of justice, this new age, as the founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross. Still, Masaryková in 1916 envisioned the conclusion of the war as an unprecedented moment for the Czechs – and for all of Europe. In expectation of this new age, she devoted her days in prison to reading texts on public health and social welfare, pursuing problems that she had studied – and worked to remedy – for more than a decade as a teacher, social worker, and activist in the Bohemian Lands and the United States.

Figure 7. Alice Masaryková, 1921. Courtesy of the Architectural Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Alice Masaryková has long been left in the historical shadow of her father, who served seventeen years as Czechoslovakia’s first president, and her brother Jan, the diplomat whose mysterious death was a shocking early event of the Cold War.2 Even today, there is little attention in studies of the inter-war Czechoslovak Republic to her work as director of the Red Cross. Instead, she is discussed (albeit in passing) as confidante of her father and de facto first lady, roles that she took on with the illness and death of her mother in 1923, or for her part in

2 ╇Only in 2007 was Masaryková made subject of a full, scholarly biography, with the subtitle A Life in the Shadow of a Famous Father – see Lovčí (2007). Two recent studies of women’s movements in the Czechoslovak Republic, Feinberg (2006) and Burešová (2001), make no reference to her.

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the renovation of Prague Castle during the 1920s.3 The neglect of Masaryková’s work in addressing the new state’s public health and welfare conditions is a symptom of the general oversight of social issues, as opposed to matters of national and party politics and high culture, in histories of the Czech Lands and east central Europe. Although scholars in recent years have addressed topics of public health, welfare, and education, discussion of these social issues remains largely filtered through the lens of nationalist politics or constructions of nationhood. But such subjects do deserve attention apart from questions of nation-building or political contests; health and demographic conditions reveal key differences among the regions of Europe, and social scientists and geographers have pointed to indices of health and disease, life expectancy, and education as markers of eastern and western Europe. Historians, however, have generally not addressed the sources of these divergences, the factors in their persistence, and the efforts of individuals and institutions to close them. In looking at the work of one of these individuals, Alice Masaryková, we see how east central Europe’s encounter with modernity generated hybrid ideas. Masaryková advocated health education programs in rural villages and industrial cities, American models of nursing and social welfare, and expansive, volunteer-driven campaigns for health testing and treatment. At the same time, she was a traditionalist who drew upon Christian notions of selfless service, idealised the harmonious life of the village, and saw the effort to improve public health as a moral struggle. A synthesis of these ideas, she believed, was possible in the new Europe. Indeed, this was Europe’s hope. But, in suggesting a de-emphasis of the political in addressing social conditions in post-war Czechoslovakia, I do not propose to move such matters entirely out of the picture. Masaryková did take serious interest in politics. She briefly served in the Czechoslovak parliament after the state’s founding, and she was a fixture in her father’s closest circle of advisers. “Alice, you are my conscience”, Tomáš Masaryk once said to his daughter.4 Masaryková, in turn, believed wholly in her father’s philosophy of a humanitarian democracy and his vision for the new

3 ╇ For examples of this attention to Masaryková in political histories of Czechoslovakia, see Klimek (2000) and Soubigou, (2004), and for Masaryková’s role in the renovation of Prague Castle see Berglund (2007). 4 ╇ Anna Gašparíková-Horáková, diary entry of 3 October 1931, in Academic Electronic Press (1995).

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state, and she saw the Red Cross as having a vital role in the building of the republic. In the history of inter-war Czechoslovakia, Masaryková’s work with the Red Cross represents an organised attempt to put this political vision into practice. In his lifetime, Masaryk’s ideas gained praise at home and abroad, and his writings and statements have been subject to generally adulatory exegesis. Historians of the inter-war republic, however, have judged that these ideas, while noble, were undercut by Czechoslovakia’s contentious partisan and nationalist politics, by the increasingly tense environment of 1930s Europe, and by overreaching on the part of Masaryk’s own supporters in the Czech political elite.5 Yet, while the principles of Masarykian humanism did not hold sway on the floor of the parliament or in the popular press or in demonstrations of Czech and German nationalists, they did have practical application in the programs of the Czechoslovak Red Cross. Alice Masaryková understood the Red Cross as an instrument for putting her father’s political program into effect, not only by bringing improvements in public health and social welfare but also by encouraging a new spirit of civic engagement. Although Masaryková saw these efforts to transform society as original, indeed as an epochal transformation in European politics, she did resemble other figures of 1920s Europe – men and women, religious and secular, Right and Left – who saw the post-war environment as the opportunity to build the ideal society. The First World War represented for her not the negation of European civilisation, nor the confirmation of its bankruptcy. Instead, MasaryÂ� ková believed, the war offered an opening for grand, far-reaching solutions that would bring the remaking not simply of governments and politics but of the nature of communities and the fundamental ways that people viewed the world. * Like the other new states of east central Europe, Czechoslovakia faced a public health catastrophe in the wake of the First World War. German-populated regions of Bohemia and Moravia had suffered the highest military death rates on the Austrian side, and after the war, some six percent of the republic’s population were invalids or the wid-

5 ╇ The classic account of the inter-war state is Mamatey and Luža (1973). For recent critical studies of Masarykian democracy and the First Republic see Feinberg (2006); Orzoff, (2009); Cornwall and Evans (2007); and Wingfield (2007).

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ows or orphans of dead soldiers.6 The civilian population of the Czech Lands and Slovakia had suffered through the deprivations brought by the Allied blockade of Austria-Hungary; moreover, agricultural production had dropped some 50–60 percent from pre-war levels, and livestock numbers had been depleted by army foraging. By the winter of 1918-1919 the infant state was in desperate need of foodstuffs. The American Relief Administration estimated that the Czechoslovak population needed 250–275,000 tons of imported flour to meet basic rationing before the 1919 harvest, along with supplies of potatoes, sugar, and milk.7 In addition to these aftereffects of the war, the new Czechoslovak government had to contend with pre-war health problems that had been exacerbated during the years of fighting. From the turn of the century to 1914, the Bohemian Lands had shown improvement in a number of areas of public health, such as rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality, but those advances stalled during the war years.8 Potentially disastrous were new threats gathering in the east: cholera and trachoma spread in the newly-acquired regions of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia in the months after the war, while a typhus epidemic loomed in Poland and Ukraine. And, like the rest of Europe, the entire country had to contend with the influenza epidemic in late 1918 and 1919.9 The health situation was not as dire as in neighbouring states, such as Austria and Poland. Nevertheless, with the Â�collapse of the Imperial Austrian administration, the Czechoslovak govÂ�Â�ernÂ�ment had to establish new health and welfare institutions in urgent circumstances. President Tomáš Masaryk was well aware of the importance of health care and welfare services for the stability of the new state. In his early speeches, Masaryk spoke of the material as well as political conditions of the republic, and he remarked that the physical health of the citizenry was essential to the strength of the state. As he declared in ╇Rothenberg (1976), p.╯218; and Stepanek (1921), p.╯349. On overall conditions in the Czech Lands during the last years of the war see Šedivý (2001), pp.╯318–26 and 340–4. 7 ╇Surface and Bland (1931), pp.╯165–9. 8 ╇ League of Nations Health Organization (1927), pp.╯62–3; and Pelc (1924), pp.╯52–3. 9 ╇ In Prague alone, in the autumn months of 1918, 1064 people died from the Spanish flu, and in the province of Moravia 7831 people died from the disease in 1918. Although severe, these numbers did not approach the mortality rates in western Europe, where in France (166,000 deaths), Britain (229,000), and Germany (225,000) the flu was particularly devastating. See Šedivý (2001), pp.╯341–2. 6

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his 1919 New Year’s address: “Health – a healthy spirit and a healthy body – are in the end the aim of all politics and administration”.10 To address the crisis conditions in Czechoslovakia, Masaryk announced in February 1919 the formation of a Czechoslovak chapter of the Red Cross and, on the recommendation of Prague civic officials and representatives of health organisations, named his daughter Alice its first director.11 Forty years old at the time, Alice Masaryková had a well-established record in promoting public health and welfare issues in Prague. She had a longstanding interest in conditions of urban and rural poverty and social welfare. In 1898, hoping to work in the public health field, she had entered the Czech-language university in Prague to study medicine (the only woman in her class) but was forced to leave the program due to failing eyesight. She turned to history, becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate in the subject at Charles University, and then went on to post-graduate courses at the University of Leipzig. Her studies of history, economics, and sociology in Germany were intended preparation for a career in social welfare, and she followed the time in Leipzig with a one-year stay in Chicago, where she worked with Jane Addams at Hull House and Mary McDowell at the University of Chicago Settlement.12 Masaryková’s attention to contemporary social problems was, at once, invigorating and despairing. As a young woman, she declared an uncontainable need to act, to give of herself and contribute, tangibly, to the improvement of society. While in Leipzig, she wrote to her father: “I want to do my duty, duty & a strong will are the motors of my life, which I don’t mean to throw away”.13 But the more she learned about conditions in industrial districts, particularly those faced by women and children, the more she grieved the human casualties of modern urban society. While working in Chicago, she returned from visits with immigrant workers to lie on the floor of her room, weep10 ╇ “Novoroční projev prezidenta Masaryka k deputaci Národního shromáždění,” 1 January 1919, in Fejlek and Vašek (2003), p.╯60. See also “Poselství prezidenta republiky”, 22 December 1918, in the same volume, p.╯32. 11 ╇ Mitchell (1980), p.╯104; and Lovčí (2007), pp.╯245–7. 12 ╇On Addams’ influence on Masaryková as well as on Alice Salomon of Germany, see Hegar (2008). On Masaryková’s work in the U.S. see Lovčí (2007), Chapter 4; and Skilling (2001). 13 ╇ AGM to Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (henceforth TGM), 12 September 1903, written in English, Archiv Masarykův ústav, Akademie věd České republiky (henceforth AMÚ AV ČR) T.G.╯Masaryk Collection, Korespondence III, box 54, folder 2.

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ing.14 Even as a student, her research of social problems plunged her into anguish. Masaryková wrote to her mother of exhaustion, of debilitating headaches and bouts of paralyzing depression. Her studies left her wounded, and she felt inadequate to the task of remedying the problems she researched. She wrote from Leipzig in 1904: I have to think about things no girl is fond of thinking. I often howl – howl like a little child – till I am tired & get to bed. But who looks at things as they are – cannot be quite happy. If I was an artist!! Something grand! I would write a poem or I should compose a sonata & those wretched feelings would fade away. But to give them away in commonplace actions, to feel the burden of the whole society on your week[sic] shoulders.15

The letter is representative of Masaryková’s personal correspondence as well as many of her public statements. In her language and imagery, Masaryková aspired to the poetic, often linking the observation of a detail in nature to a reflection on contemporary social problems and to the affirmation of her own obligation to act. She longed to be a poet or an artist, and she yearned for the solace of natural beauty and the ideal of classical harmony. Yet, she also held to the Christian ideal of selfless service, as a response to the inequalities of society and her own sense of inadequacy. In the letters from prison during the war, she expressed to her mother a longing for release, not only to re-enter the world, to experience again its splendor, but also to return to her work. “The world is beautiful,” she wrote. “God help me to get back soon to the world that I so love, and back to work. It is my food!”16 In her cell, she lingered over memories: the breeze on a mountain lake, springtime flowers decorating an altar, a crafted piece of ancient marble, a young girl suffering from tuberculosis in a dirty room near the Chicago stockyards. She juxtaposed these episodes of her life, scenes of beauty and misery, with what she saw as an irresistible call to service. Masaryková understood her life as one of devotion and offering. As she wrote to her mother, “My life, as it is given to me, shall become an active prayer”.17 Yet, at the same time that Masaryková was moved by the sensitivity and idealism of an artist, she also recognised the necessity of system╇ Mitchell (1980), p.╯52. ╇ AGM to CGM, letter written in English, 26 January 1904, AMÚ AV ČR, T.G.╯Masaryk Collection, Korespondence III, box 60, folder 34. 16 ╇ AGM to CGM, 11 April 1916, letter no. 124, in Hájková and Soukup (2001). 17 ╇ AGM to CGM, 24 March 1916, letter no. 109, in ibid. 14 15

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atic study and the building of networks and organisations. In 1912, while working as a gymnasium teacher in Prague, she founded a pioneering initiative with partners in universities and welfare organisations. Combining the expertise of social scientists, the practical experience of workers’ and women’s advocates, and the energy of university students, this network completed research surveys of industrial districts and implemented programs to assist the working poor.18 Following her release from prison in 1916, Masaryková resumed her work with this group and organised training seminars for social workers. These seminars became the foundation of the first school of social welfare in Prague, which Masaryková helped launch in autumn 1918.19 Shortly afterward, immediately following the war’s end and before her appointment to head the Red Cross, Masaryková initiated a large-scale study of Prague’s social welfare needs. Through her contacts in Chicago, she invited a team of American social workers to come to Prague in order to conduct a survey of the city, similar to what social welfare groups in the U.S. had been doing for decades.20 The group, eventually growing to five Americans and twelve Czechs, spent the year 1919 cataloging existing welfare agencies in Prague and researching health problems, sanitation conditions, and facilities for children.21 The team of American women, all recent college graduates, also worked in the summer of 1919 to train twenty-six Czechs in social welfare practices, with the aim that they would become the first of a corps of social workers for the new state. After her appointment to head the Red Cross, Masaryková turned in other ways to the United States – and other Allied nations – for assistance. She spent six weeks in France, Britain, and Switzerland in spring 1919, meeting with representatives of various groups in an effort to gain support for the relief of Czechoslovakia’s immediate needs and the building of the Red Cross. In the months after the war’s end, Paris, London, and Geneva were stages for the emergence of what we call today the “international aid community”, the constellation of 18 ╇ Papers of the Sociological Survey, including the “Přihlaška”, which narrates the group’s activities, are collected in AMÚ AV ČR, A.G.╯Masaryková Collection, box 7, folder 39. For an overview of the pre-war years, including her work with the Sociological Section, see Skilling (2001), pp.╯75–89; and Lovčí (2007), Chapters 5 and 8. 19 ╇Due to suspicions surrounding her father’s activities and her stay in prison, Masaryková had to arrange the opening of the school behind the scenes. See Mitchell (1980), pp.╯94–9; and Lovčí, (2007), pp.╯194–6. 20 ╇ Hegar (2008), p.╯727. 21 ╇ Crawford (1921).

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government agencies, international and national organisations, and private foundations that launched relief campaigns in regions devastated by the war. As this international network came into formation, male administrators, academics, and politicians took the lead in defining policies and establishing structures. For instance, nearly all of the delegates at the 1919 Cannes Conference, an important gathering in the formation of the League of Red Cross Societies, were male physicians, philanthropists, and health officials, while women participants met in a separate “Nursing Section”.22 Nevertheless, women did play vital roles in the building of this aid network, whether as policy makers (such as Dame Rachel Crowdy, the first head of the League of Nations Social Section), as benefactors (like Lady Muriel Paget, whose foundation gave money to staff and supply clinics in Russia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia), or as the founders of organisations (such as Eglantyne Jebb and Ellen Palmstierna, who launched the British and Swedish Save the Children foundations). And, of course, women nurses, physicians, and other volunteers were essential to the work of these organisations on the ground across post-war Europe. Although Masaryková was wary of “chattering ladies” in high society, she did recognise the value of female backers and met in Paris with representatives of women’s organisations and in London with women donors.23 The connections proved beneficial: French women’s groups donated rubber gloves and other medical supplies, while the circle of donors surrounding Lady Paget, who had supported Tomáš Masaryk during his wartime stay in England, provided supplies, facilities, and personnel for an epidemiological station, a children’s hospital, and other clinics in Slovakia, as well as more than 300 metric tons of milk.24 Masaryková also met with administrators of the French, British, Canadian, and American Red Cross societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Relief Administration. The supplies and support she gained were essential to the founding of the Red Cross in Czechoslovakia: medical equipment and medicines, volunteer nurses and doctors to teach training courses, and clothes and blankets.25 Masaryková also gained needed financial aid, appealing in particular to Czech and Slovak émigrés in North America. Of the 80 million crowns that the Czechoslovak Red Cross spent in 1919-1921 ╇ Hutchison (1996), pp.╯299–301. ╇ Lovčí (2007), p.╯251. 24 ╇ Švejnoha (2006), pp.╯52–3. 25 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯50–3; Pelc (1924), pp.╯38–9; and Mitchell (1980), pp.╯106–7. 22 23

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(roughly $2.4 million at the time), most funds came from foreign donors.26 In her meetings in Paris and London, Masaryková also appealed for food supplies to alleviate the crisis conditions in Czechoslovakia. Foreign assistance proved indispensible in meeting the population’s needs in the first year after the war. The country received more than 98,000 tons of relief supplies from France, Italy, and Britain during 1919. Of particular importance to Czechoslovakia’s recovery were supplies provided by the American Relief Administration. Over the spring and summer, the ARA delivered some 245,000 tons of flour and grain, 4400 tons of powdered milk, and 20,000 tons of pork and fats to Czechoslovakia: the fourth-largest amount of supplies delivered to a European state (after those received in Germany, Austria, and France).27 Masaryková was a key figure not only in securing this aid, meeting directly with Herbert Hoover during her visit to Paris, but also in coordinating its delivery. Complementing her duties with the Red Cross, she directed a second organisation, simply called “Care for Children” (Pečé o děti), that handled the distribution of supplies in cooperation with ARA officials. By December 1919, Care for Children was feeding more than 465,000 thousand children across CzechoÂ� slovakia, and by the end of 1921 it had provided more than 15,000 tons of clothing and blankets, cocoa, powdered milk, and cooked meals. Of this amount, nearly 6500 tons had been provided by the ARA, with the rest coming from the European Children’s Fund and the Czechoslovak government.28 Masaryková’s reliance on American sources of support was characteristic of the development of the international aid community in the immediate post-war years. Her trust in American methods of care and expertise (even that of recent college graduates) was also a product of her own work in Chicago’s settlement houses. But Masaryková and her family had deeper connections to the United States. Her mother was an American, whom Tomáš Masaryk had met while studying in Germany. Throughout his life, Masaryk acknowledged the influence of his wife, Charlotte Garrigue, on his views of politics, religion, civic ╇ Pelc (1924), p.╯38. ╇ “Agreement between the Czechoslovak National Republic and the American Relief Administration”, 24 February 1919, and “Report to the President of the Supreme Council on Relief Operations”, 3 September 1919, in Bane and Lutz (1943), pp.╯293–6 and 714. See also Surface and Bland (1931), pp.╯32–7. 28 ╇Surface and Bland (1931), pp.╯169–71. 26 27

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engagement, and women’s rights. Alice Masaryková likewise spoke of the great inspiration of her mother. With her three younger siblings, she grew up speaking English, and like her father in his views on politics, she came to regard American practices in the field of social welfare as a model. Their respect for the American example overlapped in an appreciation for civic activism. Tomáš Masaryk admired the core virtue of the American republic – the emphasis on the individual autonomy of the citizen combined with an expectation of participation in civic life – and he adopted these ideas into his own political philosophy. He consistently described the democratic citizen as creative and assured, religious yet sceptical toward authority and dogmas, individualistic yet motivated by a spirit of volunteerism and charity. At the founding of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk expressed hope that the people of the new republic would fulfill his ideal of a vigorously active citizenry committed to humanitarian, moral principles. Czechoslovakia in turn, he believed, would offer a model to the rest of Europe – and to the world. Alice Masaryková had unshakeable trust in her father, as a thinker and politician, and she was devoted fully to his vision for the Czechoslovak Republic. For her, the Red Cross was to be a vital instrument in fulfilling this vision. Prior to her imprisonment, Masaryková had served as a volunteer with the wartime Austrian Red Cross, and she was determined to turn the Czechoslovakia society in a new direction. Rather than an association largely of aristocratic women, the Czechoslovak Red Cross would be a broad-based volunteer organisation (although Masaryková did welcome the participation of women who had been involved in the Austrian association). And, instead of restricting its activities to preparation for war, Masaryková envisioned the Red Cross as a means of promoting improved health and welfare among the civilian population.29 Masaryková stated the organisation’s charge in her first public statement as director, a flyer issued in March 1919 calling for donations of money and goods for the Red Cross: “Czechoslovak people! It is necessary to restore the nation to prosperity, to health, to home – as quickly as possible. It is necessary to restore to health and strengthen men, women, and children, to return them to their families and to work, to repair their damaged households. For

29

╇ Lovčí (2007), pp.╯246–7.

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this we need nutritious food, medicines, clothes, blankets, furnishings. For this task the Czechoslovak Red Cross was created”.30 In its first years of existence, the Czechoslovak Red Cross did gain wide volunteer support. By the end of 1919, 34,000 people were serving in the organisation; a year later, that number jumped to 200,000, with another 115,000 young people enrolled in a junior section of the Red Cross. By 1924 more than 500 local chapters had been formed. The society was also broad in the scope of its activities. In its first three years of operation, the Red Cross administered more than 14,000 smallpox vaccinations to people in the Těšín region on the CzechPolish border, provided for some 2500 children suffering from tuberculosis to recover at sanitoria in Switzerland, and opened thirty-one child welfare centers in Slovakia and Ruthenia.31 The organisation also reached more than 200,000 people in its various educational programs, from training courses for social workers and nursing assistants to community lectures on health care and hygiene.32 The Red Cross also steered the efforts of volunteers to problems outside the country, establishing the new state’s reputation as a contributor to the international aid community. The organisation provided supplies and services to refugees who had fled Russia and Ukraine and were billeted in camps in Czechoslovakia, and in 1922 the Red Cross joined with various groups in Czechoslovakia to offer aid to people suffering from famine conditions within the Soviet state. In one campaign organised by the Red Cross, children in more than 2000 schools across the country collected food and money (more than 115,000 Czechoslovak crowns) and made clothing for Russian children.33 Further fundraising and collection campaigns followed in the mid- and late-twenties to provide relief to earthquake victims in Japan, Greece, and Bulgaria. Certainly, the establishment of local chapters, the opening of clinics and training programs, and the offering of public lectures and health screenings were aimed at remedying the public health crisis in postwar Czechoslovakia. But the larger aim of the organisation, according 30 ╇ Leaflet of the Czechoslovak Red Cross, dated March 1919 and signed by “Dr. Alice Masaryková, předsedkyně [director]”, in AMÚ AV ČR, A.G.╯Masaryková CollecÂ�tion, folder 37. 31 ╇ Pelc (1924), pp.╯38–9 and 57–8. 32 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯38–9. 33 ╇ Lovčí (2007), pp.╯293–7. Masaryková’s advocacy for the Russian and Ukrainian populations, including appeals for support at international conferences, earned her criticism from the conservative press in Czechoslovakia.

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to Masaryková, was to involve ordinary citizens in this work of reviving and sustaining the health of the nation. In speeches to Red Cross volunteers, to representatives of government ministries and other organisations engaged in health work, and to delegates at international conferences, Masaryková spoke of the Czechoslovak society and the entire Red Cross movement as promoting a civic altruism needed to overcome the dislocation of the times. Her attention, however, like that of her father, was focused not so much on the immediate aftermath of the war but on the larger challenges of building a new democratic society, addressing the cultural problems of modernisation, and, most importantly, instilling the virtues of responsible, moral citizenship in the people of Czechoslovakia. Masaryková wrote of her hope that every citizen would one day become a member of the Red Cross.34 For her, this wish was more than a grand fantasy for the organisation she led; it was a practical strategy for the success of the new state. The involvement of all citizens in volunteer service would not only improve the health and welfare of the country, it would also fulfill the ideals of the republic, as set down by her father In explaining these tasks of the Red Cross in speeches and writings, Masaryová often repeated themes from an early manuscript titled “The Good Neighbour” (Dobrý soused).35 In the text, she offered as the model of neighbourly relations and mutual support the people of the small, rural estate. The vision was romantic: the “wise manciple” kept order, while the villagers, “under feudal and church authority”, valued the worth of neighbourliness.36 Yet sons and daughters of these villages had been drawn away to the cities, and the rural example of the “good neighbour” had not survived the migration. Masaryková wrote of material conditions in the cities, of poverty, poor living conditions, and disease, but of greater concern to her were the social and moral effects of life in industrial districts. Life in the city, in worker’s quarters, was not “harmonious”, as it was in the village. Instead, relations among neighbours were shallow and fleeting; since people 34 ╇ “Dobrý soused”, undated manuscript (1922?) addressed to members of local Red Cross chapters, Literární archiv, Pamatník národního pisemnictví, Prague (henceÂ�forth LA PNP), A.G.╯Masaryková Collection, box 1. 35 ╇Several of Masaryková’s speeches and articles, in typescript and manuscript form, are collected in LA PNP, A.G.╯Masaryková Collection, boxes 1 and 2. MasaryÂ� ková’s secretary, Iva Šmakalová, collected many of these writings into a published booklet – see Masaryková (1935). 36 ╇ “Dobrý soused” (as note 34), p.╯1.

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moved constantly for work, there was no opportunity to build longlasting ties. This social dislocation was, according to Masaryková, especially trying for women. Women were isolated in cities; there was no encouragement of neighbours in the daily tasks of managing a household. Masaryková wrote hypothetically of a woman living in the city, a new arrival from the countryside, who at first cleans her flat with care, puts flowers in the window, and attentively selects food at the market. But with illness and unemployment and the social distance of the city, she loses energy for the work of the household. Without the stability of a well-managed home and the support of neighbours, Masarykova argued, women too often spiraled into alcoholism and addiction, into neglect of their children, and even into prostitution. Masaryková used the term “slavery” to describe this condition, but she did not associate it only with industrial labour or urban poverty. The enslaved were those whose moral integrity had been worn down by their surroundings. Masaryková used the evolutionary image of humans and beasts, with the suggestion of both social conditioning and individual moral failing. “Modern society is on the threshold between the human and the animal”, she wrote. “Many people have lost the healthy instincts of the animal, yet they still have not evolved to a higher humanity. Instead, they revert to the breed of domestic animals, with obtuse, blunted instincts”.37 There was, however, hope for progress. Indeed, the advances of the twentieth century opened new opportunities for – and the necessity of – closer human relations. “Newspapers, radio, and improved transportation bring distant lands and peoples closer together”, Masaryková wrote. “Manufacturing and commerce not only cross the boundaries of communities and regions but also of states”.38 These wide-reaching economic ties stimulated an even greater reliance on others, thus requiring a modern idea of what it means to be a neighbour. MasaryÂ� ková saw this as the opening to spur a new sense of communal mission, the broadening of the neighbourly ties of the pre-modern village to the industrial city and to the democratic state. In this task of building new communities, Masaryková held, the efforts of the individual were “not sufficient”, but “our shared labour will flourish”.39 One means – the primary means, to Masaryková – of encouraging and 37 ╇ “Mezinárodnost a červený kříž”, undated address to the Red Cross in Lány, LA PNP, Masaryková Collection, box 2, document number 550. 38 ╇ “Dobrý soused” (as note 34), p.╯2. 39 ╇ Ibid.

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channeling this shared work was volunteer service in the Red Cross. “A good neighbour, in the current sense of the word, is a member of the Red Cross”, she wrote.40 The principal task of the organisation was to provide support to people afflicted by illness and poverty, but its members would also address the fundamental cause of social ills: the isolated and rootless nature of modern life. Red Cross volunteers would contribute their talents to their communities, the republic, and all of humanity. In doing so, they benefited not only their neighbours but also themselves. To Masaryková, a life devoted to “mammon” or selfishness – or, even worse, a life without clear purpose – weakened society. But volunteers to the Red Cross would both “give and receive”.41 Volunteer members contributed in selflessness and humility, with a “dear smile and good will”, aware of their abilities and their responsibilities. This was “the essence of democracy”, she insisted: the root of the democratic, responsible ethic that her father envisioned.42 Like her father, Alice Masaryková saw the establishment of democratic Czechoslovakia as part of, indeed as the vanguard, of a new era in human history – and the Czechoslovak Red Cross was essential in building this new humanitarian, democratic society. Volunteer members would be active partners with the branches of government. “Voluntary civic service is the torchbearer and builder of legislation”, she wrote. Parliamentary bodies, influenced by public opinion and current social research, would create new laws, while state authorities, in cooperation with volunteers, would put these laws into effect. Motivated by good will and an awareness of the eternal, these volunteers would bring a religious element into the process of legislation and administration. The result would be, Masaryková expected, the erasing of differences between church and state, between, on the one side, the analyses of researchers and practical actions of bureaucrats and, on the other, the altruism of the believer.43 “We stand at the threshold of a new age”, she told one gathering of Red Cross volunteers, “an ensouled culture for our nation and humanity. In this culture, art and science will not be in conflict with religion. And whereever this conflict is absent,

╇ Masaryková (1935), p.╯17. ╇ Ibid., p.╯68; and “Dobrý soused” (as note 34), pp.╯6–7. 42 ╇ “Dobrý soused” (as note 34), p.╯6. 43 ╇ Ibid., p.╯3. 40 41

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everyday life will always have zeal”.44 The rhetoric echoed President Masaryk’s talk of a “world revolution” and a “new Adam”. “We are participants in a great rebirth of humanity”, she declared.45 Masaryková pointed to the Red Cross insignia as the symbol of this new age. The cross was significant not for its Christian meaning. Rather, its vertical axis symbolised the connection of the heavens and earth, of principles and action, an awareness of the eternal, the universal, and a commitment to the immediate. At the same time, the horizontal axis symbolised the union of east and west, the traditional and the modern, the harmony of the rural village and the advances of a new age – like Czechoslovakia on the map of the new Europe.46 Masaryková‘s utopian visions were not unusual in Europe of the 1920s, when ideas for far-reaching solutions to post-war social and political problems were proposed by activists, philanthropists, and politicians across the ideological terrain, by some who came to power or launched new organisations and others who have been lost to history. Like many of these post-war idealists, Masaryková melded a longing for pre-modern patterns of life with an appreciation of modern advances. In her own life, Masaryková embodied the feminist principles that her father and mother had advocated in the nineteenth century; she had completed advanced university studies, held a seat in parliament, and represented her country at international conferences. Yet, she was also a traditionalist, as we see in her concerns about the lax housekeeping of urban women, her appreciation for the neighbourliness of the rural village, and her attention to the moral decline of the urban poor. She insisted upon the necessity of research and education in advancing social welfare, but she also emphasised the altruistic enthusiasm and religious sensibilities of volunteers. “To be involved in the Red Cross means to have a spiritual strength and a spiritual foundation in uncertain, hectic conditions”, she wrote. “I am convinced that only the person who lives with a conscious religiosity can be worker in the Red Cross in the true sense of the word”.47 Masaryková also resembled other visionaries of the post-war years in her mixing of universal aspirations and nationalist prejudices. As with most of the republic’s political leaders, her view of Czechoslovakia 44 ╇ Masaryková, “Kříž”, undated address, LA PNP, Masaryková Collection, box 1, doc. no. 470–2. 45 ╇ Masaryková (1935); and “Dobrý soused” (as note 34), p.╯7. 46 ╇ “Kříž” (as note 44). 47 ╇ Masaryková (1935), p.╯73.

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presumed the paramount role of the Czechs. Masaryková did take pride in her work with the state’s minority nationalities, the Germans, Hungarians, and Poles, and she earned the criticism of Czech nationalists for her inclusion of former members of the Austrian Red Cross Society in the new organisation.48 However, German and Hungarian citizens of the republic viewed the Red Cross, which used Czech and Slovak as its languages of operation, as an agency of Czech nationalism and formed their own charity organisations. Masaryková’s statements about the organisation, despite their appeals to universal ideals (and even, on the occasion of one international conference, with quotations from Goethe delivered in German), were unable to counter this view. In one manuscript, she wrote that a Czechoslovak citizen of any nationality, who had concern for “his health, his family, his nation and his state”, would find a place in the Red Cross. Yet, in adopting her father’s interpretation of Czechoslovakia’s founding, she described the organisation as following in the wake of the “liberation of our nation and the restoration of its state sovereignty”. She insisted, like President Masaryk, that the traditions of the “Czechoslovak nation” led it, “out of bold and unselfish love”, to embrace “truth and humaneness, to armed resistance against lies and coercion, with neighbourly trust and helpfulness toward other nations who strive for the interests of justice”.49 This rhetoric, in particular the use of the device “our nation” and the insistence on its struggle for independence and justice, indicated the lines of distinction that Czechs drew between themselves, and “their state”, and the other nationalities of Czechoslovakia. Masaryková was not given to such statements in public; however, her personal writings indicated a chauvinistic belief in the Czechs’ – or, more broadly, the Slavs’ – redemptive role in post-war Europe.50 This belief 48 ╇ Masaryková spoke of work with Germans, Hungarians, and Poles in a letter to friend Josefina Schwaigrová, 13 April 1933, AMÚ AV ČR, A.G.╯Masaryková Collection, box 5, folder 26. On opposition to Masaryková's choice of associates, see Lovčí (2007), pp.╯252–5. 49 ╇ Masaryková, “Československý Červený kříž–mír–válka”, undated, LA PNP, Masaryková Collection, box 2, no. 547 50 ╇ The published volume, Československý Červený kříž, is entirely free of references to the singular “nation” or any other statements that indicate Czech and Slavic allegiances. Masaryková‘s Czech and pan-Slavic nationalism is most evident in her letters to Jože Plečnik, the Slovene architect responsible for the renovations of Prague Castle. The letters are collected in Plečnik's Archive at the Architectural Museum of LjublÂ� jana.

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led to the Red Cross’ admirable efforts to help other national groups, such as its support for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the Czechoslovak Red Cross was unable to conciliate the nationalist divisions in the inter-war state. The Czechoslovak Red Cross did succeed, however, in contributing to advances in public health and welfare. The magnitude and persistence of the country’s health problems, particularly in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, were evident in the relatively static indices through the 1920s. But by the early thirties, marked improvements were shown in rates of infant mortality and tuberculosis infection; the overall death rate for the country also declined (with a corresponding rise in the average life expectancy).51 As for the larger, political aims of the Red Cross, the organisation did not produce the revolution that Masaryková had expected. Although she often took prominent roles at international health and welfare conferences, Masaryková’s political influence in Czechoslovakia was limited. Certainly, her gender was one factor in this; Czechoslovakia was one of the first states in the new post-war Europe to grant women the right to vote, yet they had little political power in the state.52 Masaryková’s personality also irritated many in the Czech political elite, who saw her as a meddler with no serious political ideas. Derided as a naïve idealist and moral puritan, Masaryková was dismissed in political circles.53 Moreover, even Tomáš Masaryk‘s close supporters faulted Alice for her adulatory devotion to her father, particularly as they came to concern themselves more and more with the real threats of 1930s Europe rather than the ideals of a new democratic society. In asking why Alice Masaryková became lost in the historical shadow of her father, we have to acknowledge that, to a large extent, she put herself there. At the same time, though, Masaryková’s historical obscurity has been a result of the work she pursued. The statesmen and political observers of the time devoted relatively little attention to issues of public health, social welfare, and international aid – as have historians. General histories of twentieth-century Europe as well as studies of Czechoslovakia and east central Europe typically 51 ╇ For a summary of the public health situation through 1926, see League of Nations Health Organization (1927), pp.╯ 62–3. On the progress made by the early 1930s, see Klimek (2000), vol. XIV, pp.╯89–90. 52 ╇ The political situation of women and women’s groups is addressed in Feinberg (2006) and Feinberg (2007). 53 ╇Klimek, (2000), vol. XIII, p.╯239, and vol. XIV, p.╯25.

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make passing mention – if at all – to the enormous post-war relief campaign or to general matters of health and demography in the interwar period. These issues merit greater attention. The programs of the Czechoslovak Red Cross, the aid shipments of the ARA and other organisations, and the work of volunteers in the new states of east central Europe had real significance to the lived experiences of people in the months and years after the war. We might even accept the selfcongratulatory accounts of the aid organisations, recognising that their efforts did save lives and stabilise communities. Furthermore, the projects of Masaryková and others offer another lesson about the history of east central Europe after the First World War. We see in her grand vision and her practical measures – as well as in the generosity of Muriel Paget, Elsa Brändström’s work as nurse and advocate for returning POWs, the efforts of the Scottish Women’s Hospital Units in the Balkans and elsewhere, and the service of numerous American, Canadian, and British volunteers in orphanages and aid stations across the region – examples of people moved to devote their energies and treasure to the idea that the war’s end would bring a brighter future for Europe (see also Matthew Stibbe’s and Jill Liddington’s contributions to this volume). The history of the region in the inter-war decades cannot be limited to parliamentary disputes and authoritarian interventions, nationalist conflicts and radicalised thugs, economic instability and unresolved backwardness. There were as well episodes of international cooperation, progress against chronic social problems, and real efforts to nourish communities. The fact that these goals, chased by Alice Masaryková and other idealists of the post-war years, and the movements they founded continue to inspire people today should spark the attention of those who write the history of the twentieth century. Bibliography Bane, S. L. and Lutz, R. H. eds. (1943) Organization of American Relief in Europe, 1918-1919 (Stanford, CA: 1943). Burešová, J. (2001) Proměny společenského postavení českých žen v první polovině 20. století (Olomouc: 2001). Berglund, B.R. (2007) “Demokratický Hrad jako posvátný prostor (Náboženství a ideály v obnově Pražského hradu)”, translated into Czech by Martin C.╯Putna, Souvislosti: Revue pro literaturu a kulturu (September 2007) 208–21. Cornwall, M. and Evans, R. J. W. eds. (2007), Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, 1918-1948 (Oxford: 2007).

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Crawford, R. (1921) “Pathfinding in Prague”, The Survey 46, no. 11 (11 June 1921) 328–32. Feinberg, M. (2006) Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1950 (Pittsburgh: 2006). ———╯ (2007) “The New ‘Woman Question’: Gender, Nation, and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak Republic”, in Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, 1918-1948, eds. M.╯Cornwall and R. J. W.╯Evans (Oxford: 2007) 45–61. Fejlek, V. and Vašek, R. eds. (2003) Cesta demokracie I: Projevy, články, rozhovory, 1918-1920. Vol. 33: Spisy T.G.╯Masaryka (Prague: 2003). Gašparíková-Horáková, Anna (1995) U Masarykovcov: Spomienky osobnej archivárky T.G.╯Masaryka (Bratislava: 1995). Hájková, D. and Soukup, J. eds. (2001) Drahá mama/Dear Alice: Korespondence Alice a Charlotty Masarykových 1915-1916 (Prague: 2001). Hegar, R. L. (2008) “Transatlantic Transfers in Social Work: Contributions of Three Pioneers”, The British Journal of Social Work 38 (June 2008) 716–33. Hutchison, J. F. (1996) Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder, Col: 1996). Klimek, A. (2000) Velké dějiny zemí Koruny české, vols. XIII-XIV (Prague: 2000). League of Nations Health Organization (1927) The Official Vital Statistics of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. League of Nations Statistical Handbooks Series, no. 8 (Geneva: 1927). Lovčí, R. (2007) Alice Garrigue Masaryková: Život ve stínu slavného otce (Prague: 2007). Mamatey, V. S. and Luža, R. (1973) A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918-1948 (Princeton, N.J.: 1973). Masaryková, A. G. (1935) Československý Červený kříž (Prague: 1935). Mitchell, R. C. (1980) Alice Garrigue Masaryk, 1879-1966: Her Life As Recorded In Her Own Words and By Her Friends (Pittsburgh: 1980). Orzoff, A. (2009) Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 19141948 (New York: 2009). Pelc, H. J. (1924) Organization of the Public Health Services in Czechoslovakia (Geneva: League of Nations Health Organization, 1924). Rothenberg, G. E. (1976) The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette: 1976). Šedivý, I. (2001) Češi, české země, a velká válka, 1914-1918 (Prague: 2001). Skilling, H.G. (2001) “Alice Garrigue Masaryk,” in Mother and Daughter: Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk and Alice Garrigue Masaryk (Prague: 2001) 80–1. Soubigou, A. (2004) Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, translated from the French by Helena Beguivinová (Prague: 2004). Stepanek, B. (1921) “Social and Economic Problems: How Czecho-Slovakia is Trying to Meet Them”, The Survey 46/11 (11 June 1921) 349. Surface, F. M. and Bland, R. L. (1931) American Food in the World War and ReconÂ� struction Period (Stanford, CA: 1931). Švejnoha, J. (2006) “Alice Masaryková a mezinárodní hnutí Červeného kříže”, in Červený kříž Alica G.╯Masaryková a Slovensko, ed. Zora Mintalová (Martin, Slovakia: 2006) 52–3. Wingfield, N. M. (2007) Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: 2007).

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“Having Seen Enough”: Eleanor Franklin Egan and the journalism of Great War displacement David Hudson The United States emerged from World War I not merely as a great military and political power, but also as the creditor of the exhausted victors, Britain and France. Through Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, it also provided food assistance and public health support for countries across central and eastern Europe. Inspired by President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, many looked for a radical realignment of the European political and security system, the dismantling of multi-national empires, and the creation or restoration of nation states based on the right of self-determination of peoples. Wilson’s ambitious programme ultimately foundered on the political realities of post-war Europe, particularly British and French insistence on punishing Germany and disputes over new territorial borders in many parts of the continent. It was also undermined by resistance at home. American public opinion, instinctively unilateralist if not isolationist (America was always an “associated power” rather than an ally), balked at the prospect of a prolonged and expensive commitment to European security. Saturday Evening Post correspondent Eleanor Franklin Egan reflected American ambivalence in the articles she wrote during an extended tour of eastern Europe and the Caucasus following the armistice. Proud of America’s new international prowess and its achievements in humanitarian relief, she was deeply sceptical of the Paris peace process and the ability or intention of the Great Powers to bring stability and peace to the distressed populations of the eastern war zones.

The Great War presented American journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan with an unmatched tableau, and by the time of the armistice she had cemented her reputation as one of the foremost international journalists of her day. Her long essays from Serbia, Turkey, Belgium, and Japan were regular features of the Saturday Evening Post war coverage. She had survived near-drowning in the Mediterranean in 1915 after a U-boat attacked the merchant ship she was travelling on. And her breathless accounts of the British occupation of Mesopotamia provided an exclusive glimpse at a war zone in which civilians, and parti� cularly western women, were all but banned. Following the publi�cation

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Figure 8. Eleanor Franklin Egan, 29 June 1918. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, ARC 1222

of her book, War in the Cradle of the World, in 1918, Egan’s by-line disappeared from the Saturday Evening Post for 10 months. But she had been hard at work most of that time. Rather than depriving her of a subject, the end of the war opened up new vistas that had been offlimits during the hostilities. During 1919 alone she journeyed from Paris to Italy and Yugoslavia, to Austria, through Hungary to Romania and Russia, then on to Turkey, and finally to the killing fields of Armenia, publishing a series of 11 articles of eight to 13,000 words each. Egan was no stranger to these countries; she had visited them all and written about them before and during the war. But what she witnessed now shocked and depressed her. Rather than relief and reconstruction, the armistice had brought filth, disease, and starvation to millions in eastern Europe and central Asia. In many areas it had not even brought an end to war. Her accounts, still spiced with humour, still offering assurances of American exceptionalism and ingenuity, are strangely contradictory. She says she seeks to tell the “truth”; she must tell it, but she recoils from seeing too much. The unflagging spirit that had spurred her to pull every string and overcome every official obstacle in order to get to Baghdad two years earlier has been replaced by reluctance and dread: “I did not desire to go to Armenia”, she writes. “I was quite willing to take anybody’s word for it that condi-

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Figure 9. The eastern portion of Eleanor Franklin Egan’s European tour in 1919.

tions there were just as bad as bad could be … I had no desire to see any of the things that were described as being so frightful. I now wonder at the utter inadequacy of every description I ever read or heard”.1 A sense of the inadequacy of language, especially her own, haunts these articles. Egan corrects herself, comments on her writing, and occasionally simply surrenders to the impossibility of accurate representation. She also attempts ways of distancing herself, and her readers, from the horror of what she sees with rhetorical frames. Scenes of squalor, corruption, and inhumanity are set up as contrasts to AmeriÂ� can efficiency, fairness, and generosity. Sometimes they are warnings about what may come to America if she is not vigilant in her opposition to the Bolshevist disease, carried into the American homeland by unfettered immigration. She also flirts with imperial fantasies. Britain, France, and Italy are busy pressing their political and economic Â�advantÂ�ages while the U.S. is depicted as a disinterested, wealthy, but putupon giant doing most of the heavy lifting in relief and rebuilding. Perhaps, she suggests, America should take a more active part in 1

╇Egan (1919g), p.╯14.

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developing spheres of influence, particularly in the former Ottoman Empire. All of this represents a rather complex and sometimes contradictory picture. Egan was no activist in the usual sense of the word. And she was suspicious of organisations, including governmental, philanthropic, and women’s organisations. Her works and her politics were largely in line with that promulgated by the Saturday Evening Post, which by 1919 was retreating rapidly into nativism and isolationism.2 But her personalised eyewitness accounts, her vivid descriptions and dramatisations, and finally the noticeable if unintended traces of the psychological toll that her work exacted, potentially undermined the overt message of her work. This middle-class, middle-aged American woman, trying to buy a hat in Vienna, spraying insect powder around her bed in Bucharest, and weeping uncontrollably at the sight of starving women and children in Kars, was an identifiable and relatable point of contact for readers in comfortable drawing rooms. Inasmuch as she was ‘just like them,’ often using a collective ‘we’ to describe Americans, she modelled responses to horror and deprivation that subtly indicted the complacency of her readers. The fact that she was a woman, enduring hardships and exploring territory traditionally the domain of only the most adventurous of men, made this indictment even more pressing. Although in later life she was well-connected to business and political leaders in New York and Washington, Eleanor Franklin Egan came from relatively humble Midwestern origins. She was born Eleanor Pedigo in 1879 in Terre Haute, Indiana, the daughter of a Scottish mother and an Italian father.3 By the early 1900s she was known as Eleanor Franklin – that most American of names – and was posted overseas by Leslie’s Magazine as a foreign correspondent in Japan. It was there, in 1905, that she married Martin Egan, correspondent for the Associated Press. They worked together at the Manila Times, with Martin acting as editor from 1908 until 1913.4 During that time they became close to Philippine Governor-General and future U.S.╯President William Howard Taft. In 1914, Martin joined J.P. Morgan and Company, where for two decades he worked as Â�confiÂ�dante, personal assistant, and publicity man for several senior Â�partners. ╇ Cohn (1989), p.╯100. ╇ Martin Egan Papers, The Pierpont Morgan Library Archives. 4 ╇ “106 Years in a Nation’s Rich History”, The Manila Times, 27 August 2008; Rothman (1994) p.╯2. 2 3

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Martin was Eleanor’s entrée into the world of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America. As John Rothman writes, Martin “knew everybody, it seems, and his graciousness in dealing with people, whether he was their host or their guest, granting favors or seeking or acknowledging them, was legendary and endeared him to all”.5 Besides Taft, his friends and correspondents included Herbert Hoover and John J.╯Pershing as well as “bank and industry executives and publishers throughout the world”.6 These connections, along with her extensive writing and overseas experience, might have helped persuade legendary Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer to hire her as a regular correspondent to the Post in 1915. Her first story, “The Difficult Truth About Serbia”, appeared in the 25 September 1915 issue. She went on to write 65 more articles for the Post over the next 10 years, making her one of the most identifiable names on the masthead. Her seeming willingness to go anywhere, her familiarity with the political and physical terrain, and her uncanny ability to be on the spot when extraordinary news broke, made her an indispensible member of a team that included Sam Blythe, Irvin Cobb, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Elizabeth Frazer. The Saturday Evening Post, which traced its origins rather spuriously to Benjamin Franklin, was without rival in American magazine publishing. In 1908, when its weekly circulation reached one million, and its readership was estimated to be four to five million, the Post was said to have reached one out of every nine literate Americans.7 By 1919 circulation had reached two million and was rising steadily.8 The magazine, under Lorimer’s autocratic control, sought no less than the formation of the American character. As Jan Cohn puts it, “George Horace Lorimer set out to create America in and through the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. Week after week he crafted the issues of his magazine as an image, an idea, a construct of America for his readers to share, a model against which they could shape their lives”.9 When war came in 1914, the Post advocated a principled neutrality, counselling Americans to hold themselves apart from the spectre of European conflict. But it swung around to full support of American involvement once the United States broke off relations with Germany on 3 February ╇Rothman (1994), p.╯3. ╇ Ibid. 7 ╇ Cohn (1989), p.╯5. 8 ╇ Ibid., p.╯165. 9 ╇ Ibid., p.╯5. 5 6

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1917.10 Following the armistice, Lorimer and his magazine became increasingly suspicious of foreign involvements and influences, particularly communism. “At the root of what Lorimer saw as the dangers to the United States”, Cohn writes, “lay radical ideas imported from abroad. The work ethic was undermined by Bolshevik propaganda. Labor was corrupted by red infiltrators. America itself was polluted by immigrants”.11 Egan was more of an internationalist than Lorimer, and her sympathies from the outset of the war were consistently pro-British, if not always pro-interventionist. After the armistice, though, her writing lent itself willingly to Lorimer’s post-war project. As she toured central and eastern Europe, her articles frequently made disparaging reference to what she usually referred to as “Bolshevism”. In Vienna she quoted a doctor excusing the condition of a hospital wall, saying the “workmen are getting Bolshevistic”.12 In Romania she pontificated on the hard lessons learned in trying to use food relief to combat political radicalism. We know better now. We know a well-fed Bolshevist is as good a Bolshevist as a hungry one – even better. He has the strength and the physical pep to vociferate. He does not supplicate; he toils not, neither does he spin – he merely takes. We know now that the seat of Bolshevism is not in the stomach but among the feathers in the brainpan.13

Her tone darkened in a later article. Here she used examples of degraded conditions to warn of the fate that might be in store for her own country: Can you imagine such a state of affairs? It is not too utterly unthinkable. Other peoples have come to it. We have many of their representatives with us. And what with Plumb plans,14 foreign domination of labor and industry, unchecked socialist agitation and a leadership which leads steadily away from purely American conceptions, we may be on our way.15

╇ Ibid., p.╯101. ╇ Ibid., p.╯135. 12 ╇Egan (1919a), p.╯12. 13 ╇Egan (1919d), p.╯99. 14 ╇ The Plumb plan was a proposal put forth in 1919 to nationalise the railroads of the United States. It was authored by labor attorney Glenn E.╯Plumb and supported by the Plumb Plan League and some organised workers groups. Taft denounced it as “radically socialistic” (see “Taft Hits Plumb Plan”, New York Times, 11 August 1919). 15 ╇Egan (1919e), p.╯9. 10 11

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Egan’s regular jeremiads against Bolshevism accompany a sense of an overstrained America that has been compelled to come in and pick up the war’s broken pieces. Foreigners are often portrayed in generalised terms, as people who have been brought to ruinous states through their own perfidy or weakness. The Austrians, certainly, and the Hungarians, possibly, deserve to suffer given what they unleashed on the world. Would they be overly concerned now, she asks, if things were the other way around and the Parisians were suffering as they are?16 The Romanians, and especially the Armenians, are in a somewhat different category. They were either ostensible allies or victims of the Central Powers. But they too have national failings that help explain their present condition. Try as she might, though, when confronted with the spectacle of actual suffering, such as she encounters in post-war Vienna, Egan sets aside abstract notions of blame and retribution. In her second postwar article, “Starvation in Vienna” (26 April 1919), she describes children standing in the cold without shoes: “Here for the first time I saw barefoot children with their little purple toes clinging to the snow and ice. I had seen the same thing at Trieste and Fiume, but it is not a thing toward which familiarity breeds indifference”.17 She goes on to describe various kinds of inadequate footwear, noting that she herself “was freezing in my heavy leather boots, my coat and sweater and furs”. Then she exclaims, “You know you can’t hate such enemies as they, however much you may think with regard to grown-ups: ‘Well, you are getting what’s coming to you, and it serves you right!’”.18 This admission of a lingering grudge actually makes Egan’s reactions seem more honest, and it could help to overcome barricades of emotional resistance in her readers who had been steeped for years in war propaganda. Egan ultimately becomes a kind of advocate for the people she encounters, and she presents their cases often against the backdrop of outsiders’ sometimes wilful ignorance of real conditions. Of those who downplay the situation in Vienna she says, It is only people from the outside – Americans, Englishmen and Â�others – who come into Vienna, undertake nothing in the way of investigation, get a few fairly satisfactory meals, and go back to Paris with the report ╇Egan, (1919b), p.╯8. ╇Egan (1919a), p.╯58. 18 ╇ Ibid. 16 17

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Statements like this become a running motif in her work, problematising her otherwise rigid espousal of assumed American values and interests. But the most striking note, one she hits often and poignantly, is that of regret and psychic wounding from having seen too much. In the first Vienna article it emerges when she sees undernourished and ill-clad children at a school and then an orphanage. In an early case of the media covering the media, a newspaper has reported that “the American lady was deeply touched by the sight of a nine-year-old boy who looked no more than five”. She responds, “And I was, but I was as deeply touched by many ten-year-old boys who looked about eight as to physical development and old as Time as to the solemn gaze they turned upon me. Arrested development . . . seen en masse . . . is such a horror as I hope never to see again”.20 After visiting the orphanage she gives us some idea of the cost of these images: “I think I shall be haunted all the days of my life by some of the faces I saw late one afternoon at an orphan asylum for boys”.21 In a second article, she recalls witnessing a trainload of Italian prisoners just before the armistice. Many are in the last stages of tuberculosis; most are clothed only in rags. Once again she refers to the cost of witnessing: “Here and there, in the various war zones of the earth I have seen a good many terrible things, but I think I have never seen anything quite so dreadful as that trainload of sick men”.22 Such blatant emotional appeals, of course, risk backfiring – they lack concreteness, and they might be dismissed as a particularly feminine response to unpleasantness. But Egan’s work partially avoids this by placing these passages in the context of extensive documentary detail and hard-headed analysis. She frequently demonstrates an insider’s grasp of the intricacies of post-war economics and politics, mixing a kind of macro-level discussion with intimate and often personal detail and reaction. Sometimes these alternating discourses are found adjacent to one another, creating telling juxtapositions. One example in “Armistice Days” comes at the end of an extended discussion of the difficulty of weighing the needs and aspirations of the var╇ Ibid, p.╯56. ╇ Ibid. Emphasis added. 21 ╇ Ibid. Emphasis added. 22 ╇Egan, (1919b), p.╯165. Emphasis added. 19 20

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ious belligerents, particularly since former enemies might have more pressing claims in some instances than allies and ‘victims’: “If certain of these enemies stood their ground instead of hurling themselves into the arms of their conquerors”, it would have been a simple problem of economics to decide who would pay. The next paragraph, though, abruptly changes the subject: “For two weeks there had been nothing but rain or a thick murk of frosty fog”.23 This is followed by a gloomy description of the city and its inhabitants, which in turn becomes a reflection of her own mood: “I had been depressed and sometimes horrified. Underfed myself and always cold, I decided that a visit to Vienna, whatever it may have been in the days before the Viennese resolved to make war, was a thing now carefully to avoid”.24 Approaching the large and abstract through the small and concrete is a hallmark of journalism, then and now. And the Saturday Evening Post cultivated an opinionated first-person style among its correspondents. Egan is a skilled practitioner of this style, and her work is not markedly different in this regard from her male colleagues. Through the act of witnessing from a privileged position, Egan is able to cross what Margaret Higonnet has called “the gendered line between those who would have the authority to record the war and those who would not”.25 Her authority is based on the act of seeing, however reluctantly, and also on her undisputed experience and familiarity with the larger picture. Egan herself neither disguises nor trumpets the fact that she is a woman. Nevertheless gender has implicit, and occasionally explicit, influences on the text. In Vienna, it emerges through the domesticity of her research methods – she goes shopping: “I went first to the fine shops, as though I myself were looking for things to buy”, she tells us.26 Eventually she actually buys a hat, “a small black sailor effect with a bow and quill”.27 She makes it very clear that her interests in this case are geared to women: “During the course of a fatiguing day I think I priced everything from shoe laces to hairpins, inclusive; and I came to the conclusion that a woman in Vienna could not be well dressed without paying a ‘price of shame’ – shame of some kind; shame of profiteering, of cynical recklessness or of the abandonment

╇ Ibid., p.╯8. ╇ Ibid. 25 ╇ Higonnet (1999), p.╯xxvii. 26 ╇Egan, (1919b), p.╯161. 27 ╇ Ibid., p.╯162. 23 24

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of all the virtues”.28 This oddly incongruous remonstrance introduces a moral tone that singles out women, particularly women of means. Are women, especially, responsible for bearing the guilt of a defeated people? Do they represent the frivolity and excess of a pre-war Vienna that is sadly out of tune with the austerity of the moment? Egan seems to be participating in the often-implied feeling that women bear a special responsibility for the war.29 As she moves deeper into war zones where the ability to “be well dressed” becomes largely irrelevant, Egan invokes gender in other ways. Making the 140-mile, 30-hour trip from Bucharest to Constantza (Constanţa), she finds herself on a decrepit train, “no lighting arrangements, no linen, no carpets, no curtains and no water; nothing but some loathsomely dirty mattresses and a few old red blankets”.30 She has, however, booked a compartment “for which she has “paid more than the whole car was worth”. The conductor, who has apparently taken money to allow another passenger into the compartment, is at first reluctant to open the door for Egan. An American officer of her acquaintance takes command of the situation: “You open it now or I’ll break it open”, he tells the conductor. Faced with this threat, and clearly frightened, the conductor opens the door to reveal a man hastily dressing. Egan dissolves in laughter, but the officer is angry and chastises the conductor severely although somewhat ineffectively: He called him some unpleasant names of sorts and told him that even if he had known that the owner was a lady the lady could have expected no better protection from him; that he was exactly like all the other railway employees in Rumania and he had proved conclusively that American men were justified in not permitting American women to travel alone in his country.31

Egan does not comment on the scene, beyond citing it as an example of petty corruption. It also seems to function as a bit of comic relief in a narrative that is growing steadily grimmer. Whether she finds the colonel chivalrous or ridiculous is hard to say; there seems to be a little of both in her depiction. And it is also uncertain how she regards herself in this scenario. Is she exempt from the category of American ╇ Ibid. ╇ Ingrid Sharp has examined this tendency, specifically, but not exclusively, in defeated Germany, of laying the blame for the war at the feet of women. See Sharp (2007). 30 ╇Egan (1910e), p.╯54. 31 ╇ Ibid. 28 29

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women who ought not to be permitted “to travel alone”? Apparently not. However welcome the colonel’s intervention, Egan generally assumes her ability to do anything and go anywhere. Another incident that illustrates both Egan’s independence and the distance she creates between herself and other women takes place some time later on the same train. “A little Rumanian widow” in the company of her dead husband’s brother turns up.╯After hearing her greeted as “ma petite!” Egan mockingly refers to her as “Petite” thereafter. Under the sub-title, “Washing Petite’s Patty-Paws”, she rather contemptuously describes Petite’s self-indulgent behaviour and the effect it has on her male companions: “With three men to pose for, Petite forgot her fatigue, curled herself up in a corner of my compartment and began to do the kitten-in-out-of-the-rain act with powder and rouge and shamelessly frank pencils. And the men loved it! They et it up!”.32 Egan’s patience is tested again when the “beau-frère” uses a bottle of her mineral water to wash Petite’s “patty-paws”. Egan responds: “I am certainly glad I haven’t patty-paws; I have hands. But is it not extraordinary the way men succumb to the patty-paw fascination?”.33 Again some comic relief, and a reinforcement of the sense that the only two women in the group share nothing, not even body parts. There is also a critique, somewhat hackneyed to be sure, of predictable male susceptibility. But a larger point seems to be the recurring idea that Egan is somehow outside the prescribed roles of military officer, relief worker, and refugee. She alone is immune to the blandishments of Petite. She alone can see things clearly without preconceptions or prejudice. In her study of Edith Wharton’s Fighting France, Jean Gallagher finds a similar possibility of escape or exclusion from the rigid confines of what she calls the “specular economy”, a closed and highly restricted visual system.34 Wharton visiting the French front-line trenches, like Egan in war-ravaged Romania, must establish her authority on the act of witnessing. But as a woman she is marked as an outsider to the restricted zone, as one who by definition cannot ╇ Ibid., p.╯57. ╇ Ibid. 34 ╇Gallagher (1998), p.╯12. Drawing on the work of Martin Jay and Luce Irigaray, Gallagher presents specularity as a closed visual system, definitions of which “invariably employ the metaphor of a mirror to describe a totalized visual field: ‘a mirror reflecting only itself with no remainder’ (Jay) or ‘the eye seeing itself in infinite reflection (Jay)’”. 32 33

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really see as the soldiers do. Ironically, though, this exclusion offers “a female civilian observer . . . a very different visual field than the one in which the soldiers participated”.35 The soldiers are themselves trapped in a reified visual system in which they stare across no-man’s-land at their own mirror images staring back. As Gallagher puts it, On the one hand, the enlistment of women’s vision through writing and reading about war involves them within a wartime specular economy that tightly regulates their positions as subjects and objects of militaristic sight. On the other hand, such an enlistment allows for a potential disruption of that economy, not only allowing for the possibility of a woman’s escape from specular military visuality but recasting that visuality as something that traps or contains male soldiers.36

Egan, working within her role as journalist, is already in some ways detached from other players in the scenes she witnesses. Her identity as a female journalist removes her yet another step.╯When she evokes her gender specifically, as in the shopping episode and the anecdotes of the protective American officer or Petite, she is acknowledging and even emphasising her femaleness but also distinguishing herself from other women, women who pay the “price of shame”, require male protection, or rely on sexual attraction. This ambivalence carried over into Egan’s attitude toward the suffrage struggle. In 1920 she published an article that departed from international reporting to consider the impact of women voting for the first time in a U.S. general election. “Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party” documents the efforts of the major parties to woo the millions of newly-enfranchised voters. She uses the opportunity to make a kind of confession: “I happen to be one of the vast majority of women who had nothing to do with the long struggle which is to result in the Nineteenth Amendment. If I had any feeling at all with regard to suffrage for women it was a feeling of opposition”.37 She goes on to admit that her “vision was restricted by old-fashioned conservatism and prejudice”, and that her silence, along with others, impeded the efforts of those who were fighting for women’s votes: I am not proud of my record of indifference, but on the contrary am inclined to be somewhat regretful when I consider that the women engaged in organized opposition to this most momentous movement in ╇ Ibid., p.╯27. ╇ Ibid., p.╯12. 37 ╇Egan (1920b), p.╯12. 35 36

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the history of social progress have been able always to use me and my numerous kind as convincing examples to point their contention that women did not want to vote and were being railroaded into politics by a fanatic and clamoring minority. I feel like apologizing to the women of the combat battalions who have done all the fighting and who now bear all the scars.38

Egan’s “somewhat regretful” and “feel like apologizing” are perhaps less than a breast-beating mea culpa, but they express an ability to adapt her thinking as well as revealing an habitual distrust of social movements of any kind. She puts this explicitly in the case of her reports from Armenia: “. . . I wanted to make my observations entirely unhampered by considerations that had to do with organized philanthropy”.39 Her reasons in this case, she argues, are an attempt to preserve her objectivity, which she describes with characteristic irony: “From what I had heard I thought it not improbable that I should be impelled to join the anvil chorus and hammer sparks out of the philanthropists. . . . In any case I was unofficial . . .”.40 Being unofficial is a key part of the image that Egan projects. It serves her as a journalist and, along with her gender, it allows her to separate herself, when necessary, from received opinion. But it is also a mask that conceals as much as it reveals. As intrepid and resourceful as she is, there is no way that Egan could have been able to travel as she did were it not for the active cooperation of the authorities. She does acknowledge this help, for example the French destroyer that carries her from Constantza to Constantinople and the extensive accommodations she received from the British: “I was the first unofficial person who had arrived in the Caucasus since before the war and if the Britishers had cared to do so they easily could have made it impossible for me to move in any direction”.41 On the contrary, she goes on to say, they gave her every assistance, even attaching a car to the army commander General Corey’s train to take her to Kars. Egan is forthcoming enough about the means of this assistance, but says little about why it would have been of such great interest to the British, French, and Americans to make sure that she was able to go wherever she wanted. Clearly it helps that she has so many old friends ╇ Ibid. ╇Egan (1919g), pp.╯71–3. 40 ╇ Ibid., p.╯73. 41 ╇ Ibid. 38 39

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and contacts. For instance, the General Beach who helps her get into Armenia is the same Colonel Beach whom she met in Baghdad in 1917.42 Beyond personal connections, though, it is likely that the Allied Powers and the United States found it advantageous to have a welldisposed writer for a large-circulation conservative American publication documenting their work. This had served the British well two years earlier in her accounts of the Mesopotamian occupation. She was a known quantity who could be relied on to present the Allies in the best light possible. Whether or not she produced the kind of account that served Allied purposes is a more difficult question. She flatters her hosts, the British officers in their “snappy” uniforms and the “gallant French captain” who conveys her across the Black Sea.43 But her conclusions are less complimentary. For instance, near the end of her account of Turkey, “Down to Constantinople”, she writes, The British and their Allies were tangled up in unpleasant political intrigues and engagements which made it difficult for them to deal with one another or with us frankly and in dignified harmony. It was not nice. Nobody seemed really to approve of what was being done to Turkey, yet each in his way was compelled to fight for his own advantage.44

But far more damaging is the picture she draws of the great powers’ ineffectualness in preventing or even alleviating the suffering of displaced civilian populations. As she continues her eastern journey it becomes a descent into a physical and emotional hell. The themes we have noted before – revulsion, anger, and finally a reluctance to see – are re-intensified. Romania is filthy; she describes her hotel as having “sanitary arrangements that one would not dare to approach without a gas mask and a hose …”.45 But the offense is personal. She can be philosophical about it: “It cleans out the system”, adding, “I am not trying to be deliberately disgusting. I am trying deliberately to tell such unvarnished truth as may convey an idea of common, ordinary and serenely accepted conditions” (53). But Armenia is a different story. Here she encounters “grinning, gibbering starvation en masse”.46

╇ Ibid. ╇Egan (1919f), p.╯166. 44 ╇ Ibid., p.╯170. 45 ╇Egan (1919e), p.╯53. 46 ╇Egan (1919c), p.╯29. 42 43

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The story of what Egan saw in Armenia is concentrated in the penultimate article in the series, “This to be Said for the Turk”, which appeared the week before Christmas in 1919. Despite the suggestiveness of its title, it is neither a defence nor a condemnation of the Turks, rather it is an indictment of a world in which institutions and ultimately civilization itself have failed. Egan begins with a “cheap witticism” making the rounds in Paris that the only problem with the Turks was “that in attempting to annihilate the Armenian race the Turk had embarked upon a commendable enterprise and fallen down on the job”.47 Once again she condemns the comfortable outsider for cruel ignorance. Egan, who has acquired knowledge almost against her will, has paid for it. Even before she tells us what she saw, she says that she could not eat, and in the end gave away food to starving children before she found out that solid food could kill them. “I came to a point, too” she says, “when to look upon the things that had to be looked upon set my heart to quaking in a horror difficult to describe”.48 As we have seen before, Egan repeatedly tells us of her reluctance to have made the trip: “I had no desire to go to Armenia”, she writes. “I had no desire to see any of the things that were described as being so frightful. I now wonder at the utter inadequacy of every description I ever read or heard”.49 Egan receives a prophetic commission in Paris from Howard Heinz, Hoover’s Near East representative. Like her, he found it difficult to believe the stories he was hearing, dismissing them as propaganda. But after visiting the region, he has changed his mind: “Merciful God!” she quotes him as saying, “It’s all true! Nobody has ever told the truth! Nobody could!”.50 He tells her that she too, must make the trip: “‘You will be sorry all your life that you did go,’ he said. ‘What you will see will make scars on you that you will never get rid of. But nevertheless you must go. It is a duty’”.51 Egan’s journey into Armenia begins, as mentioned earlier, on a rail carriage, “Russian in its dimensions and Bolsheviki in its condition”, attached to the British General Corey’s train.52 General Corey is guardÂ�ed by a detachment of Ghurkas. Accompanying Egan are two young ╇Egan (1919g), p.╯14. ╇ Ibid. 49 ╇ Ibid. 50 ╇ Ibid., p.╯15. 51 ╇ Ibid. 52 ╇ Ibid., p.╯73. 47 48

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men, “Mr. Norman Whitehouse and Mr. Kachidoorian, an American of Armenian ancestry”.53 She goes to some length in praising these men, who become “my boys”. Once again the protective presence of men is appreciated, notably the “peculiarly American attitude of Mr. Kachidoorian”. As she generously observes, “he is a hyphenated American, but he is about as one hundred per cent as any foreign-born American ever gets to be”.54 Passing from Alexandropol (modern-day Gyumri) to Kars, she enters a nightmare landscape, “a land of hideous human suffering and degradation”.55 This is where she discovers starving human beings grazing for grass. It is an image that must have struck her deeply, because it recurs several times in her narrative, and is alluded to in previous and subsequent articles. It was another case where only seeing is believing: I did not believe that there were people anywhere down on their knees eating grass. I thought it very likely that starving persons might go out and gather grasses and greens of various sorts to be prepared for food, but that men, women and children should gather like cattle in herds to graze, this I did not believe – not until I saw it.56

Later she has another experience that seems to haunt her. Near the beginning of the article she tells us, “At Kars I saw one man die with bread in his teeth. And if you will consent to look with me upon a too awful thing I will add that he showed evidence of having eaten too much grass”.57 Note her enlistment of the reader: “if you will consent to look with me”. Now she tells us the whole story. She is putting together some lunch for herself and her fellow travellers while the starving multitude crowds round the train. And then it was that the man died. He was so movingly awful in his too evident anguish that I leaned away out of the car window, thrust the ravening others aside and placed a piece of bread in his hands. Standing where he was, he wolfed it. I was not watching him, but when I heard a terrible whining cry I looked again. He staggered away a few paces and crumpled up in the mud. The others regarded him dazedly for a

╇ Ibid. ╇ Ibid., p.╯74. 55 ╇ Ibid. 56 ╇ Ibid. 57 ╇ Ibid., p.╯14. 53 54

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few moments, then went their searching ways murmuring, “O-na-ne! O-na-ne!”58

The power of this incident lies not only in its situational irony (the starving man dies with food in his mouth), but also in the way it implicates Egan in the man’s death. She, in fact, kills him, again ironically, by feeding him. We who have consented to look are also implicated, unable to help and unable to look away. Egan, acting as our surrogate, responds with tears, and is encouraged not to see by her male protectors: “I think I worried my two boys because every once in a while I simply had to cry. I couldn’t help it. They tried to keep me from seeing some of the too awful things. Like protecting brothers they would get on either side of me and say, ‘Don’t look!’”.59 Just as she relies on the restraining protection of her earnest male companions, she desperately wants to believe that those in charge will salvage the larger catastrophe. She has encountered energetic relief workers and investigators in almost every city. And her faith in American capability and good will is still largely unbroken. But for the moment the situation has defeated her. She begins, she writes, “to feel a great resentment and to ask unanswerable questions”.60 Why had the refugees been allowed into an area with no food? Where were the workers? What had become of the “millions of dollars” that Americans had donated for relief? She talks of seeing places worse than Kars and understanding that this was only a small piece of the gigantic humanitarian crisis facing the region. She says she has learned that two American relief workers were on their way to Kars and “would take the thing in hand”. “But”, she asks, “only two? It seemed to me that there should have been – well, more than two”.61 So “This to be Said for the Turk” ends on an uncertain note. She seems to speak both figuratively and literally when she writes, “And that is as far as I can get now”.62 She promises to continue the story, with views of Mount Ararat and the Grand Katholikos of the Gregorian Church. In fact the final article in the series, “Under Noah’s Rainbow”, published 17 February, 1920, does deliver effusive descriptions of these famous sites, along with an extended retelling of an Armenian ╇ Ibid., p.╯77. ╇ Ibid., p.╯74. 60 ╇ Ibid., p.╯77. 61 ╇ Ibid. 62 ╇ Ibid. 58 59

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legend of St. Gregory. She even adds some new details about conditions in Alexandropol and Erivan (Yerevan). Overall, however, it lacks the sense of personal despair that reached a peak in the previous article. She mentions that she has been “crying over babies”, and that she “felt like crying some more” when she sees oxcarts loaded with American milk, and is told that it is the first milk seen in Erivan since before the war.63 But the narrative of Americans coming to the rescue has reasserted itself, as she describes doctors, administrators, and especially American orphanages where food relief efforts have been focused. These orphanages, she is told by her Armenian guide, “were establishing the basis of the future Armenian state …. They would be the leaders of the next Armenian generation and by degrees the Armenians would adopt purely American standards and principles; a consummation devoutly to be wished”.64 Just who is wishing such an outcome is unclear, but Egan suggests that this is an Armenian idea, and she is a little uncomfortable with it. She comments, The American who has things of this kind said to him under such circumstances is not unlikely to feel slightly embarrassed and to hope in a vague sort of way that American standards and principles are all that they should be. Or he may think he is being coerced by flattery and feel a sense of resentment. It depends on the American.65

She goes on to say that her feelings can never be hurt by anyone’s praise of her country. Nevertheless, she writes, I do have periods of wishing we could vacate the position that goes with moral leadership.╯I get tired of being afraid that our performance may not always measure up to our standards and principles and to the expectations of our eager friends, who are sure to call us worse names for our shortcomings under the circumstances than they would have if we had kept them in ignorance of how wonderful we are.66

Egan’s oddly prescient misgivings look forward to a twentieth century that she will not live to experience. Within five years she will be dead, killed by complications from a massive giardia infestation, believed to have been contracted from exposure to contaminated water and food

╇Egan (1920a), p.╯148. ╇ Ibid. 65 ╇ Ibid. 66 ╇ Ibid. 63 64

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during her many overseas assignments.67 In the meantime she travelled to Russia and India, and brought the misery of the Chinese drought and famine of 1922 into her readers’ living rooms. In 1921, U.S.╯President Warren G.╯Harding named her as one of four women delegates to the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament.68 This was a significant honour, although “Mrs. Eleanor Franklin Egan”, as one feminist commentator rather testily pointed out, “did not in any sense represent organized women of this country”.69 Deciding just what Egan did represent involves us in a set of contradictions. She was an unapologetic booster of American ideology and interests, yet she had grave doubts about the feasibility or wisdom of spreading American power in the world. She was a public and independent professional woman with political clout, yet she was a reluctant and recalcitrant supporter of women’s suffrage. She endured hardship and took great risks to witness events at first hand, yet she openly declared her reluctance and even her aversion to seeing. Finally, Egan, while adopting the mantle of authority and experience, often undercut her own position, rewriting and revising on the page to qualify or even withdraw a previous judgment. With some qualifications, and there are contradictions here too, one might say that Egan was reflecting the arrival of a Modernist sensibility. The war had incarnated the crisis in meaning and authority that had heretofore existed in the literature and art of the avant-garde. Fragmented perspective, juxtaposed modes of discourse, and inner dialogues are not simply rhetorical devices in Egan, but essential components of meaning construction. The viewer’s privileged proximity to the subject, her ability to see, and her attitude toward seeing all grant her authority, especially when compared to discredited, distant, and implicitly male institutional voices (the “peacemakers” at VerÂ� sailles or the visiting officials who never leave their hotels). Like a soldier returned from the trenches, she bears the heavy burden of witness, and the right to tell a singular truth that she and her readers still believe exists. “It is the truth I am telling you”, she declares, explicitly and implicitly, throughout these articles.70

67 ╇ Martin Egan to George Horace Latimer, 27 June 1924, in Martin Egan Papers, The Pierpont Morgan Library Archives. 68 ╇ “Committee Named to Advise Parley”, New York Times, 2 November 1921. 69 ╇Edson (1922). 70 ╇Egan (1919g), p.╯71.

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Unlike the returning soldier, though, she also bears the burden of her gender. She is the “American lady”, travelling improbably to places to which, according to the officer she met on the train, “American men were justified in not permitting American women to travel alone”.71 But like Edith Wharton and other women observers, her exclusion from the closed male visual system, and in her case, her self-imposed separation from other women, affords her a liberating independence. She can risk the vulnerability of emotional despair. She can renounce the desire to see without appearing precious or weak. Through these acquired and imposed conditions, and despite all the inconsistencies of her message, Egan could potentially transmit hard-won and reluctantly gathered images of suffering to an unguarded reader. Bibliography Cohn, J. (1989) Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh: 1989). Edson, K. (1922) “Women on the Advisory Committee: Conference on the Limitation of Armament”, Who’s Who Among the Women of California (San Francisco: 1922) http://www.calarchives4u.com/women/whotxt/27–53.htm. Egan, E. F. (1918) War in the Cradle of the World (New York: 1918). ———╯ (1919a) “Starvation in Vienna”, Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1919. ———╯ (1919b) “Armistice Days in Vienna”, Saturday Evening Post, 24 May 1919. ———╯ (1919c) “Our Sphere of Influence”, Saturday Evening Post, 20 September 1919. ———╯ (1919d) “Helping Rumania”, Saturday Evening Post, 27 September 1919. ———╯ (1919e) “Demnition Bowwows: Their Tracks in Rumania”, Saturday Evening Post, 11 October 1919. ———╯ (1919f) “Down to Constantinople”, Saturday Evening Post, 8 November 1919. ———╯ (1919g) “This to be Said for the Turk”, Saturday Evening Post, 20 December 1919. ———╯ (1920a) “Under Noah’s Rainbow”, Saturday Evening Post, 7 February 1920. ———╯ (1920b) “Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party”, Saturday Evening Post, 22 May 1920. Egan, M. (1923-29), Martin Egan Papers, Box 17, Folder 4, “Egan, Eleanor: Illness, Death, and Its Aftermath 1923-1929”, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Gallagher, J. (1998) The World Wars Through the Female Gaze (Carbondale, IL: 1998). Higonnet, M. (1999) Introduction to Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I, ed. M.╯Higonnet (New York: 1999) xix–xxxiii. Rothman, J. (1994) Introduction to Martin Egan Papers, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, ed. Christine Nelson, 1994, 2004. Sharp, I. (2007) “Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War”, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives, 1914-19, eds. A.S.╯Fell and I.╯Sharp (Basingstoke: 2007) 67–87.

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╇Egan (1919e), p.╯54.

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Britain in the Balkans: the response of the Scottish Women’s Hospital Units Jill Liddington* The Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH) sprang from the suffrage movement on the outbreak of War. After Serbia was invaded by AustriaHungary, SWH units served in the Balkans. It proved to be an unlikely alliance of British feminists and Serb soldiers. In the aftermath of war, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS) was formed – despite continuing political problems both external and internal. The Serbs remained cruelly scarred by war; so how should the SWH respond to such urgent medical and humanitarian needs? What should be the SWH strategy for post-war relief? Later, Yugoslavia remained the “impossible country”, but the doctors and nurses, orderlies and drivers who had served with the SWH – soon just “the Happy Few” – still remembered Serbia.

The Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), brainchild and visionary creation of Edinburgh surgeon Dr Elsie Inglis, sprang from the constitutional suffragist movement. In contrast to the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Inglis was always a particularly implacable opponent of suffragette militancy. Within the Scottish suffragist movement, she was recognised as Scotland’s leading suffragist, being Secretary of the Scottish Federation within the constitutional National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Just days after the outbreak of war in 1914, Inglis learnt of Dr Louisa Anderson’s forming a field hospital, and wrote offering her own considerable surgeon’s skills – only to be informed regretfully that the team was already full. She then offered her services to the Royal Army Medical Corps officer at Edinburgh Castle. He would surely be familiar with her formidable reputation as a pioneer surgeon in the city? Yet Inglis was dismissed with the memorable official rebuff: “My good lady, go home and sit still”.1 * I would like to acknowledge the generous expert advice of Dr. Wendy Bracewell, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University; Dr. Dejan Djokic, Goldsmiths College, University of London; John Holme, great-nephew of Vera Holme; and Aftermaths editor Matthew Stibbe.

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Inglis did not do sitting still – and did not take “no” for an answer. A child of British imperialism – and already commandant of an Edinburgh Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) – she recognised only patriotism, duty and service, never meek acquiescence to a War Office snub. Returning home dejected, she answered her niece’s eager questions and when at last asked “What are you going to do now?” she replied “I know what we’ll do, May. We will have a unit of our own. We’ll offer help to the Serbs, and to the French”.2 So the SWH was formed – drawing both constitutional suffragists and some suffragettes, plus, significantly, those many women outside the organised suffrage movements. Organised with redoubtable Edinburgh efficiency, the SWH sent mobile units out to the fronts – to Royaumont in northern France, and then to the Balkans (mainly Serbia) and to southern Russia – eventually establishing hospitals. The irony was that, as a result of the War Office rebuff, British women – surgeons and doctors, nurses and orderlies – were sent out to far more dangerous war zones. For the British women and Serbian soldiers, it was to be a warm relationship, surviving long after the immediate aftermath of war.

Figure 10. Dr Katherine Macphail dances the kolo, the Serbian national dance, with a Serbian colonel and his men. From: Monica Krippner, The Quality of Mercy: Women at War, Serbia 1915-18. With kind permission of David & Charles Lawrence (1971), p.╯98. ╇ Ibid. Other accounts differ slightly; the sentence “We will have a unit of our own” comes from Balfour (c.1919), p.╯145. 1 2

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SWH enters the Balkans The contrast between Britain and Serbia, at either end of Europe, could not be more dramatic. The one, an imperial nation, was proudly central to European diplomacy; the other still viewed suspiciously as the perilous periphery, quaintly primitive. This “imperialism of the imagination” had insidious consequences – notably in summer 1914.3 Austria declared war; yet “plucky little Serbia” forced Austria into retreat, though left behind a worse enemy. By winter 1914-5 typhus stalked the land. Inglis was as good as her word and a SWH unit sailed out – arriving in Kragujevac (60 miles south of Belgrade) in early 1915, establishing a make-shift hospital. With typhus still rampant, Inglis was implored to come out in person – and by May 1915 she too had arrived in Kragujevac; here she set to work with customary zeal. With her went Honorable Evelina Haverfield, joined by her life-partner Vera Holme; both had earlier been militant suffragettes (Holme had been the Pankhursts’ chauffeur) though, with the development of the arson campaign, both had left the WSPU. However, by autumn 1915, with Serbia again invaded by AustriaHungary, by Germany and now by Bulgaria, Belgrade had fallen. So most SWH staff had no option but to join the Serb soldiers’ dismal retreat westwards, over Albania’s forbidding mountains to the Adriatic and safety. Inglis, Haverfield and Holme decided it was their duty to remain: they were taken captive and eventually sent north under Austrian armed guard – and so back to Britain. Inglis’s fortitude was becoming legendary. She was soon organising Kosovo Day flag-days for her beleaguered Serbs. Responding to the deepening war crisis, as fighting raged on the Somme, Inglis formed a new SWH “London Unit”. It sailed in September 1916 to Archangel, destined for eastern Romania (which had just joined the Allies, been attacked and was now in retreat). The situation in marshy Dobrudja, where the Danube meandered into the Black Sea near the Russian border, was as appalling as Serbia: refugees and malaria. Inglis set to work, putting in marathon surgery hours. But she fell seriously ill and collapsed in her tent – though still refusing to spare herself. All this took place as the volatile politics in Russia erupted. Eventually, the Unit decided to depart for home (accompanied by loyal Serb soldiers) via Archangel. It was ╇See Goldsworthy (1998) – although this phrase is used slightly differently by GoldsÂ�worthy. 3

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Figure 11. Map of wartime Serbia. From: Monica Krippner, The Quality of Mercy: Women at War Serbia 1915-18. With kind permission of David & Charles.

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a terrible journey: the ship, hit by arctic blizzards, finally landed at Newcastle. Inglis was clearly dying. To those who had been with her in Russia, she sent the same message: “My dear Unit – Goodbye”. She died that night, and was buried with memorable military ceremony on 29 November 1917 in her own home city, Edinburgh. 4 * The SWH units did more than just survive the great loss of their esteemed founder: highly efficient committees took over running SWH’s complex financial structures. Moreover, ambitious fund-raising in the neutral United States proved effective: Andrew Carnegie alone donated £1,000. The SWH committee agreed that, yes, a new unit could be named the American Unit – if £10,000 was raised, and this goal was reached.5 The American Unit’s mid-1916 start was inauspiciously timed, as the full cruel horrors of the Somme unfolded. And in the Balkans, the earlier retreat meant Salonica in the south remained the Allies’ main base. The Unit set sail in August 1916 for Salonica. Equipment was unloaded and a lengthy convoy of ambulances, lorries and motorcars set off west across the relentlessly arid Vardar plain. Eventually the Greek roads, sometimes little more than donkey tracks, began to climb, cars snaking up hairpin bends into fertile hills of figs, pomegranates and vines.6 Here, at arcadian lakeside Ostravo, the American Unit remained holed up for two frustratingly long wartime years. Aims and methodology This article assesses the significance of the contribution of one selected SWH relief initiative during aftermath of war, that of the American Unit. It has been selected because of its close relationship with Serbia, its central role in medical aid, and its effectiveness in the aftermath. The article therefore tracks the SWH post-war responses in the Balkans ╇ Leneman (1994), pp.╯136–40; SWH found the Bolshevik Revolution rather an inconvenience. 5 ╇ Ibid., p.╯58; Canada was also included in the speaking tour. 6 ╇ ‘The American Unit’, typescript, pp.╯1–5, SWH Collection, Mitchell Library. Note: Balkan place-names have been variously translated into English, which can feel confusing. I have therefore largely retained the spelling provided in Krippner’s map (p.╯398), offering alternative spellings when appropriate. Also, inhabitants or Serbia are variously called ‘Serbs’ and ‘Serbians’; here I have mainly used the word ‘Serb’. 4

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to new chilling complexities, by focussing on four key post-war moments: November 1918; early 1919 and a new Yugoslav state; 1920 and the new humanitarian internationalism; and finally 1923, both SWH’s eventual homecomings and Yugoslavia’s tricky election. To illuminate these themes and to map linkages, five personal SWH case studies (mainly within the American Unit), have been selected. The aim is to reflect the broad social class composition of the SWH in Serbia, rather than a traditional focus on elite doctors and those most likely to leave behind rich documentation like diaries and autobiographies. The case studies therefore include both a well-established surgeon; two upper-middle-class drivers; one lowlier nursing orderly; plus a hard-working administrator. * The role of a surgeon of course remained pivotal, gathering around her a coterie of support staff that her surgery required: junior doctors, nurses, orderlies. The key surgeon selected here is Dr Isabel Emslie. Like Inglis she was also Edinburgh-trained;7 she had joined the SWH in 1915, serving first in France, and then appointed as Chief Medical Officer of the SWH American Unit. Second, that inseparable pair of drivers, Hon Evelina Haverfield and Vera Holme. Such vital skills – Holme’s driving prowess, Haverfield’s horsewomanship – made them invaluable recruits, adding a new flamboyance to SWH in Balkans. Third, orderly Lilian Lenton, daughter of a carpenter-joiner, had been a dancer and later a suffragette. Lenton’s appointment reveals changes in SWH recruitment policy since Inglis’s fastidious days; any casual reader of pre-war newspapers would recognise Lenton’s name as that of a prolific suffragette arsonist, burning empty buildings. Now, after almost four years of fighting, the SWH’s earlier anti-suffragette recruitment policy had apparently relaxed, and Lenton was enrolled just like any other recruit. Finally, Mary Green from Inverness was now a SWH administrator, a key role in such a complex international operation. Green had arrived in Serbia in 1915 as housekeeper – and later, proving an asset, was promoted to American Unit administrator.

╇ Pre-war Emslie had worked at Stirling District Asylum, specialising in paralysis of the insane. 7

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November 1918 So, to broaden the focus, by considering the wider picture of the SWH in the Balkans at our first key post-war moment: 11 November 1918. At the other end of Europe, Germany had at last been defeated. Armistice Day marked the end of war on the western front: in Britain, women were finally enfranchised, though limited only to those over thirty. All this was in contrast to the Balkans. Here, the conventional periodisation of “war” and “peace” was far less clear-cut and felt very different. In early September in Macedonia, Allied troops (especially Serb) had determinedly forced Bulgarian troops into rapid retreat north. Bulgaria requested an armistice, this was soon agreed, and America now entered the War too. So, two months before the western-front armistice with Germany, the Balkans were, at long last, transformed. Serb soldiers now marched northwards home – fast. The SWH Transport Column attached to the American Unit, but infinitely more fleet of foot (a procession of just twelve heavily-loaded cars), swept courageously north too – past bridges destroyed and rivers to be forded. Yet the speed of advance far exceeded their wildest dreams. “We thought that we should probably winter at Prilip [Prilep]; we hoped for Uskub [Skopje]; we dreamt of Nish [Nis]; but nobody’s wildest flight of imagination took them as far as Belgrade!”8 In this fast-moving advance, the American Unit, with all its delicate yet cumbersome specialist medical equipment, remained at Ostravo, miles behind the Serb soldiers. Eventually, Chief Medical Officer Dr Emslie and administrator Mary Green were able to reconnoitre northwards to Vranje just inside southern Serbia. Then at last the cumbersome American Unit packed up, each nurse carrying in a haversack enough food for five days, and embarked on the arduous trek over 300 kilometres north. They toiled up steep passes, crowded with Serbian soldiers and sullen Bulgarian prisoners. The roads were pitted by shellholes, their lorries fording low rivers, always passing roadside sights of war: horse and donkey carcasses pecked by blue jays. Soon the route grew crowded with desperate Serbian refugees streaming northwards back to their villages, weary old soldiers, adrift from their units, wan-

╇Kathleen Dillon, “The History of the First Transport Column of SWH”, quoted in Leneman (1994), p.╯172. 8

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dering along: “We are trudging homewards”. But many found only villages looted, families missing, often dead. As expected, the American Unit arriving in Vranje found appalling conditions: the floor of Emslie’s operating room was “swimming in blood, [with] pails crammed with arms and legs and black with flies”.9 Her staff faced a hospital full of military casualties, and beyond, exhausted civilians – as Mary Green’s letter home evokes: I don’t suppose the censor would like me to tell you too much about the awful condition of things here. The people say the Germans took all the food and useful material of every kind out of the country before they left, so that the deprivation has been terrible… We want all the warm clothing we can get – shirts, pyjamas, socks… Everything is needed badly; men, women and children are nearly naked.10

In Vranje, roughly eleven operations were performed a week, mainly amputations and bomb wounds, many more than at Ostravo.11 HowÂ� ever, there were now additionally also equally desperate civilian casualties. Orderlies like Lilian Lenton tried to cope with it all (though little is recorded of what she felt). Emslie in her autobiography later noted: A constant procession of Serbians arrived… Day and night they burst into my office, dragging me from my bed as they implored me to come to their sick relatives… On 11 November we heard that it was Armistice Day, but nobody was glad and few realized what it meant.12

However Emslie more than coped. Green wrote home, full of praise of how Emslie had: done splendidly, she looks such a young C.O., but she is most capable, and has made wonderful strides to bring order out of colossal chaos… We had to tackle a Herculean task to battle with indescribable filth and vermin, evil smells, no rations, no lights, a hospital full of ill and dying men, and everyone tired out.13

Elsewhere in Europe, Germany might at last have been defeated; but in Vranje fatalities remained so high that the town’s Commander ordered the hearse to be parked permanently at the back door to remove the ╇ Hutton (1960), p.╯166. ╇ McLaren (1919), p.╯313, quoting from Green’s letter, 4 November 1918. 11 ╇ McLaren (1919), pp.╯398–406 provides chilling surgical figures and dates for Ostrravo and Vranje. 12 ╇ Hutton (1960), pp.╯169–71. 13 ╇Green to Laurie, December 1918, Mitchell Collection, quoted in Leneman (1994), p.╯190. 9

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dead to the local groblja (graveyard). With no doctor for fifty miles, Emslie remained acutely aware that the SWH work in Serbia initiated by Inglis in 1915 was only just beginning.14 Back in Britain meanwhile, the NUWSS paper, Common Cause, regularly reported on SWH units out in the Balkans. Drivers Haverfield and Holme continued speaking and fund-raising for the Serbian cause. The range of donors remained impressive: Leith Domestic Servants’ Association, Railwaymen, large donations from New Zealand and Canada – without which, Emslie could not operate.15 Haverfield started a “Comforts Fund for Serbian Soldiers and Prisoners”, appealing for flannel shirts, sweaters and gloves, along with cigarettes, tobacco and tea – and soon despatching thousands of shirts and socks.16 Yet significantly, the Fund’s language was sentimental, its appeal still amateur, its patrons remained the aristocracy and royalty of a preBolshevik era. A change of style in such relief efforts, opening SWH up to something less imperialistic, more rational and international, would come only later. Early 1919 On 1 December 1918, a new state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS), as Yugoslavia was officially called 1918-29, was constituted. Yet its borders remained unclear, most notably in the northwest with Italy assertive; but also with other large (albeit defeated) neighbours – Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, as well as Romania and Albania. KSCS immediately faced internal tensions too. Should its structure be centralised or federal? Was Serbia, politically dominant, merely absorbing the South Slav parts of old Austro-Hungary? Serb politicians had one view, those in Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia another. Insurgency gripped much of Kosovo and Macedonia where the KSCS army and various vigilantes tried to impose an unwelcome centralised regime, broadly seen as domination by Belgrade.17 MeanÂ� ╇ Hutton (1960), p.╯172. ╇ Common Cause, 17 May 1918 and 11 October–13 December 1918. 16 ╇ Vera Holme papers, 7VJH/3/2/02, Sergeant-Major Flora Sandes, “The Serbian Soldier. What he Endures and Deserves”, leaflet, 1918. Haverfield was the Fund’s Hon. Sec.; its committee included Nina Boyle (WFL), Edith Craig (actress) and Vera Holme. See also ibid., 7VJH/3/2/04, “Account of the work of Evelina Haverfield in Serbia”, c.1920. 17 ╇Glenny (1999), pp.╯365–7. 14 15

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while, most Allied politicians assembling in Paris in January to open the Peace Conference cared less about the harassed KSCS delegation than about fear of upsetting its larger neighbour, Italy. Political stability in the Balkans was no longer an urgent priority. Against this dangerously volatile political backdrop, what should be SWH’s post-war relief strategy in the Balkans? Was it an organisation established specifically to meet only wartime crises, or should it respond to urgent medical and humanitarian need in the aftermath? The SWH operation elsewhere was beginning to disband. In France, Royaumont officially closed in December 1918. Now that in Britain women over 30 not only could vote but even stand for parliament, there was a yearning to turn away from the war, and try to envision a new and better international world order. However, among the stress of post-war adjustment, there remained no coherent overall SWH planning or strategy. 18 Yet up in Vranje Emslie – now with a well-equipped hospital, surgical wards and operating theatre – still faced insatiable demands for urgent medical treatment. Serb soldiers, civilians and convoys of starved Bulgarians from prison camps arrived at the out-patients’ department, sometimes just expiring in the crowded hospital waitingroom: “such tottering ghosts of humanity brought home once again the dire results of war”, Emslie recalled.19 Patients continued to pour in during early 1919, the cold weather bringing with it the dreaded pegavi typhus epidemic: patients, often delirious, had to have their ragged clothes removed and incinerated, were shaved of every scrap of hair and then disinfected by efficient nurses in boots and rubber gloves. (However, despite these elaborate precautions, one Unit typhus nurse, Sister Agnes Earl, never recovered from a scratch incurred on the wards, and died on 10 March. At her burial, the keening of thousands of ceremonially-dressed peasants contrasted with the stoicism of the calm, dry-eyed SWH sisters).20 When Emslie learnt that the SWH Committee was considering closing down the Unit by spring 1919, she strongly advised against terminating the Vranja hospital:

18 ╇ Leneman, (1994), pp.╯185–91; in March 1919 the Transport Column was withdrawn home from Serbia. 19 ╇ Hutton (1960), p.╯174. 20 ╇ Ibid., pp.╯173–6.

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The work increases daily instead of showing any signs of decreasing. I am now unable even to get the number of patients below 350, however hard I try… Our outpatient department is increasing daily… We still are the only doctors in Vranja, or for…a radius of fifty miles.21

In March, the SWH Committee eventually agreed that the Unit should continue its work. Green wrote back relieved: “the need is very great at present. At this moment there is not one single empty bed… and most of our patients are very ill”.22 Especially pressing was the plight of orphaned children. Yet the strategic question remained: should the SWH be sucked into a long-term commitment in the Balkans, and if so – how should relief be targetted? Emslie felt the veteran SWH organisers in Britain had scant inkling of the post-war chaotic tragedy in the Balkans. The Serbs desperately wanted the Vranje hospital to continue, whereas – as a jaundiced Emslie phrased it – back home the SWH “want the Hospital for their darling ‘Elsie’ to be in the Capital where all will see it”. Two Committee members journeyed out to Belgrade to see for themselves – and were dismayed by what they encountered: nursing a despised profession for Serb girls and a lack of suitable buildings for a training centre. Emslie wrote scathingly about them: “Poor old girls they are such genteel old Edinburgh West Enders that I am very sorry for them – such fearful bores without a single original idea in their heads”. She added, “They are old things…and I felt… they were children as they were so inexperienced about everything”.23 Women such as Emslie might sound impatient, but they had moved on immeasurably since 1914, learning new survival and medical skills, vital in this aftermath. The “Old West Enders” now seemed completely out of touch, unable to cope with the new world order that was finally arising from the post-war ashes. This was the nub: organisationally, the SWH responded to war better than it did to peace. Emslie was aghast when she learnt Vranje’s hospital was to close. It nevertheless began to be disbanded and staff sent home. Lilian Lenton’s period of engagement ended in June 1919, and she arrived back to Brixton in London, ill with malaria.24 By the autumn, the Unit had disbanded, Emslie perhaps the most reluctant to depart: ╇Emslie to Russell, 12 January 1919, quoted in Leneman (1994), p.╯190. ╇Green to Laurie, 25 March 1919, quoted in ibid., p.╯191. 23 ╇Emslie to her mother, 14 November 1919, quoted in ibid., p.╯199. 24 ╇ “List of members who served with the American Unit…”, and Lenton to Laurie, 22 July 1919, Mitchell Collection. 21 22

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Jill Liddington I believe that my sojourn in Vranja was the most worth-while period of my war experience and possibly of my life… I departed from Vranja most regretfully… I was leaving my youth behind.25

1920 It was decided in March 1920 that the complex SWH operation in KSCS should be finally wound up: all its supplies and equipment were donated to the Serbs, and the last of the SWH staff departed. By 1920 the world had become an infinitely more complex place than during the certainties of wartime. Europe was riven by new political differences – particularly because of the success of Russia’s October 1917 Revolution. In spring 1919 the Third International was formed in Moscow, based on Leninist principles of a Bolshevik Revolution – to urge workers and socialists across Europe to join, against a background of industrial discontent. But it was the diplomatic and military repercussions of the Russian Revolution that particularly affected the Balkans. In Britain, at the 1918 General Election, Lloyd George and his conservative “Coalition” government had won a decisive victory, taunting the Labour Party that it “is being run by the extreme pacifist, Bolshevik group”. In 1919, the Government attempted to crush the Revolution by assisting White Russian forces. Conflict continued on a massive scale in the civil war in Russia. There was naturally a very wide range of responses among relief organisations to this rapidly-changing political situation. These stretched from, on the right, diehard supporters of White Russian troops in the Crimean, whose relief efforts focused on dispossessed aristocrats and Russian émigrés – through, on the left, to those who were prepared to recognise the reality of the Bolshevik Revolution and to organise relief in cooperation with the USSR.╯Among the latter, scientist and polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen stood out. He became one of Norway’s delegates to the emerging League of Nations, managing to repatriate thousands of prisoners of war, and was appointed the League’s first High Commissioner for Refugees, even creating the Nansen passport, recognised travel documents for stateless refugees. How female activists in Britain responded to this new whirligig scenario may be approached through two contrasting portraits, both dominant figures on this new international stage. The first is Lady 25

╇ Hutton (1960), pp.╯177 and 181–2.

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Muriel Paget, daughter of two earldoms and wife of a baronet, who was moved by stories of the suffering of distressed governesses and so on as southern Russia fell to the Bolsheviks; and in December 1919 she founded a Women and Children of Russia Relief Fund for a hospital in the Crimea. In contrast, a newer generation of internationalist humaniÂ�tarians formed a new Fight the Famine Council (FFC), demanding the raising of the food blockade. One of its founders, Eglantyne Jebb, believed the situation was so desperate that within a few months she created a new organisation: Save the Children Fund (SCF), soon with a base at Geneva. So when in 1921 the harvest in the Volga lands in Russia suffered appalling drought, Nansen assigned SCF the isolated Saratov district (about 500 miles up the River Volga, half-way between Moscow and the Urals); SCF sent out its own workers into Bolshevik Russia to run soup and milk kitchens there. However, back in Britain both the FFC and the SCF were attacked as dangerously left-wing. 26 * So, in this challenging European politics, what were the responses of those women who had served out in the Balkans with the SWH units during the War? For most, there was no choice but to return home – and try and earn a living. Mary Green, working closely with Emslie up at Vranje, felt that “this Hospital is one of the best pieces of work the SWH has done yet”; but she began to see that their work was coming to an end, the Serbs now being “quite able and willing to look after their own sick”.27 So in December 1919, after nearly five years with SWH, even loyal Green returned home. She corresponded with the SWH treasurer in Glasgow, Mrs Laurie, grateful to the SWH Committee for the generosity of her final salary cheque, adding “nearly every post beings me most grateful letters from some of our old Serbs”.28 But for what did her SWH achievements fit her in harsh post-war Britain? The title of Virginia Nicholson’s recent inter-war survey puts the survival options starkly: Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived WithÂ� out Men after the First World War (2007).29 Laurie helped Green find 26 ╇ Wilson (1967), pp.╯180–3; in starting SCF, Jebb worked with her sister Dorothy Buxton. 27 ╇ Quoted in Leneman (1994), pp.╯195 and 197. 28 ╇Green to Laurie, 3 January 1920, quoted in ibid., p.╯202. 29 ╇ Yet Nicholson’s book, opening as mournful lament, ends in spirited celebration.

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employment as a sales representative travelling across northern Scotland. This was her home-ground, but scarcely ripe with commercial possibilities. By spring 1921, Green confessed shamefacedly to Laurie that she felt “a perfect failure… Not a single solitary order of any kind”. Here was the post-war rub: Green had encountered “a certain amount of prejudice against women doing this job, and if they can manage it at all men try to get out of giving you interviews”. Laurie tried to remain supportive, but by the end of the year Green had failed to obtain yet another job.30 A few SWH women decided to remain out in the Balkans on relief work. Here, Serbia, having been wartime allies of Britain and having been brutally invaded by Austria and Bulgaria, ironically found that the major relief organisations were now turned further eastwards than the Balkans. The SWH had folded up its tents. The new SCF recognised Serbia as an obvious recipient of aid, but saw conditions as direr elsewhere. So it was decided that £10,000 grant money be returned to London – to be reallocated to starving children in Vienna, Hungary and elsewhere.31 However, even if the relief momentum had shifted north and east, the momentous experiences of SWH staff in the wartime Balkans would neither be forgotten nor wished away. Lives had been changed forever, and experience and skills could still be put to good use – urgently. So, from c1920, SWH good practice was disseminated in two ways. The first model was embedding good practice through individual initiative within Serbia itself on a more permanent basis. The second was dispersal: to take the lessons of the Balkans further east, most particularly to Russia – initially to the Crimea and then even further out. From in and around the SWH American Unit, two examples of each model shine out. Embedding and dispersal Outstanding are two different examples of embedding good practice, both the initiatives of charismatically energetic and committed women. First, driving all before her, Hon Evelina Haverfield had long ╇Green and Laurie correspondence, quoted in Leneman (1994), p.╯213. ╇Eglantyne Jebb papers, Serbia file, papers held at SCF. I have used the word “Serbia” here, even though the area was now KSCS, as many of the British aid agencies still used that term. 30 31

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gathered about her a small lesbian circle – flamboyant Vera Holme and others whose intimate friendships had been forged particularly as intrepid SWH drivers at Dobrudja. From her “Comforts Fund”, Haverfield returned to Serbia in December 1918 to distribute supplies to those starving and those dressed in little but rags. In the American Unit at Vranje, Margaret Greenlees from Glasgow was one of the orderlies (though middle-class compared to Lilian Lenton). In January 1919, she was one of first to return home but took with her an abiding concern for the great needs of the Serbs she left behind. With Haverfield she soon (January 1920) journeyed back in Serbia – setting up a HaverÂ� field orphanage, almost an individual initiative. Haverfield, exploring various options (and assisted by her fluent if not grammatical SerboCroat), decided to help those Serbian children left orphaned by the War. She soon started a Dom (Home, with its own matron, also exSWH) at Bajina Basta, south-east of Belgrade, near the River Drina’s border with Bosnia. However, the strain of hard work told on HaverÂ� field’s health: in the winter snows she caught pneumonia. In her delirium she constantly repeated “What can we do for the Serbian people?” When Haverfield died on 21 March 1920 aged 52, her last words were “What will become of the children?” Gathered around the bedside, her friends – Holme, Greenlees and others – pledged to carry on her work; that is, Holme wrote, “to bring up the sixty children who we have had in our care as good Serbian citizens”.32 Emslie was among those attending the funeral and wrote: “My word she did love the Serbs and worked so hard for them to the very end”.33 After Haverfield’s death, her intimate ex-SWH friends did indeed work hard to continue the orphanage. As administrator of the Evelina Haverfield Fund for Serbian Orphans, Vera Holme was busy fundraising in UK.╯They kept in touch with the new Yugoslavia (though their traditionalist loyalties seemingly remained with monarchists).34 As a second example of embedding, one of the original SWH doctors, Dr Katherine Macphail, was among those who had not sprung from suffrage, and indeed she said, we “were much relieved to find that almost none of us was what might be called ‘strong’ [suffragists],

32 ╇ Vera Holme papers, 7VJH/3/2/04, “Account of the work of Evelina Haverfield in Serbia”, c. 1920. 33 ╇Emslie to her mother, 31 March 1920, quoted in Leneman (1994), p.╯203. 34 ╇ Vera Holme papers, 7VJH/3/2/05-09 and 7VJH/3/3/14-41.

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Figure 12. Vera Holme papers, 7VJH/5/3/50, Haverfield Orphanage at Bajina Basta c. 1919. Seated left to right, probably: Margaret Gordon Smith, Margaret Kerr, Alexandra Onslow, Evelina Haverfield, Vera Holme, Serbian woman, Margaret Greenlees.

and that Serbia was the common bond, not suffrage”.35 She had been junior doctor in Kragujevac in 1915 (see p.€396), but grew exasperated that her skills were not used, and instead went to work for a military hospital in Belgrade and then for Serbian Relief Fund. By early 1920, Macphail was back in Serbia, setting up her own small but permanent Anglo-Serbian Children’s Hospital in Belgrade, running right up to 1941. It probably remains the most significant permanent monument embedding SWH’s original good practice.36 * The other dissemination model, dispersal, took SWH experience to where it was now most desperately needed. After Vranje, Dr Isabel Emslie had taken charge of a central hospital in Belgrade; here Serb surgeons gathered from their villages, the war forgotten, in the excitement of the newly-merged “Yugoslavia” territories, however variegated. Emslie had long loved music and ballet, and she now enjoyed the capital’s music – including Madame Butterfly seen in a makeshift 35 ╇Talk given by Macphail September 1916, quoted in Leneman (1994), p.╯6; possibly exaggerated. 36 ╇ Leneman (1994), pp.╯21 and 211.

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theatre. But after March 1920 when the decision was made to wind up the SWH’s work in the region, it was finally time for even Emslie herself to move on. She went to cosmopolitan Vienna to study; but when she heard that doctors were urgently needed by Lady Paget’s Mission for Children in Crimea, she decided to join them. Emslie left Belgrade on the Orient Express heading for Constantinople.37 In Sebastopol in the southern Crimea, Emslie now worked in a congested hospital, again crowded with out-patients. But she also found time to pick up gossip about “the Bolshevik reign of terror” from Russian émigrés, supporters of the White Russian army. And Emslie, entering this effortlessly pre-Revolution world, was happy to watch Imperial Ballet and Cossack dancing. So she grew angry that in Britain, Lloyd George’s Government would not help the White Russian refugees – despite evacuation from the Crimea – for fear of offending the Bolsheviks. Eventually, on Christmas Eve 1920 Emslie returned home and married Major Hutton in Edinburgh in 1921.38 She took all her impressive hospital and surgical experience back home, but there had to face a new and equally difficult set of challenges. * The other example of the dispersal focuses on carpenter’s daughter Lilian Lenton, WSPU suffragette and SWH American Unit orderly. After Lenton left the SWH’s administrative system, and arrived home ill with malaria in July 1919, her movements become more tricky to track. Yet it is clear that she met Nina Boyle, an upper-middle-class suffragette who had been active in the Women’s Freedom League (WFL, a group that had broken away from the Pankhursts’ WSPU over internal democracy). Boyle had also been out in the Balkans with a hospital unit during the War, and this experience stayed with her. By 1920, she had become Hon Secretary of Haverfield’s Fund for Serbian Children, and a member of the SCF council.39 Through such post-suffrage and post-SWH relief networks, Lenton linked up with Boyle and they were sent by SCF to study famine conditions out in the starved Volga lands, probably to the main SCF centre at Saratov. In carrying relief to areas stricken by crop failure, both endured considerable ╇ Hutton (1960), pp.╯182–5. ╇ Ibid., pp.╯186–205. 39 ╇ The Eglantyne Jebb papers, Serbia file (EJ.230), papers held at SCF but, at time of writing, inaccessible. 37 38

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hardships. Of this intrepid SCF venture, her memorialist just wrote with tantalising brevity that Boyle: was one of a party that travelled to Russia, on behalf of [SCF], in the black year 1921; carrying relief to the stricken area where untold thousÂ� ands were starving. In those early days of the Soviet Union, travel in Russia meant cold, hunger and risk… It was not only on relief work and a member of its Council that Nina Boyle served the cause of ‘Save the Children’;…she was one of its most effective speakers.40

Back in Britain, fund-raising for Russian famine victims meant walking a political tightrope – between Lady Paget and the Daily Express, alert to any signs of pro-Bolshevik propaganda; and a sympathetic Daily Mirror and, say, Nansen, who had accepted a loan from the Soviet Government. SCF and Jebb nevertheless tried to maintain an even-handed balance: “a child is a child is a child”.41 Children’s hospitals were desperately needed. SCF speakers began appealing for funds. Lilian Lenton, well used to the peripatetic life as a suffragette, now stumped all over Britain speaking “on behalf of starving Russian children”. Yet, with unemployment problems in Britain, the public appetite for Russian fund-raising necessarily waned. Even Lady Paget’s networks had to admit that “the interest in Russia seems dead”.42 1923 Our final moment, 1923, offers a return to the contrasts between the two nations: Serbia and Britain. These could not be starker. In KSCS, the Constitution had been promulgated in June 1921; but while the arrangement pleased many Serbs, it left many other groups – Croats and Slovenes, Macedonians, Muslims and Albanians – bitterly disenchanted. One Croat party even boycotted parliament in protest, with accusations of Serb centralisation. KSCS’s troubled elections in March 1923, including police intimidation and vote-rigging, left it – YugoÂ� slavia – “the impossible country”, its turmoil continued amidst political instability, including assassinations. Moreover, with women’s 43 In Britain, su by contrast, though women under 30 still remained without the parlia╇ Cicely Hamilton, “Nina Boyle”, pamphlet, c. 1943. ╇ Daily Mirror, 4 August 1921-20 December 1921. 42 ╇ Calling All Women, February 1965; Blunt (1962), p.╯216 43 ╇Glenny (1999), pp.╯402–3. 40 41

Britain in the Balkans

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mentary vote, the campaign for full enfranchisement had not disappeared. The suffragist NUWSS became the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), led by Eleanor Rathbone MP; and the suffragette WFL continued its equal rights campaigns and its paper, The Vote. So where were the case-study SWH staff by 1923? A small minority, like Macphail in Belgade, did not go home; but most of course had returned to Britain. Apart from the unlucky few (such as Agnes Earl), all had emerged alive at the end of the slaughter – unlike so many men of their generation.44 Yet their return was often to an “unwelcoming home”. In Scotland, Mary Green continued to experience seemingly insuperable problems competing with male applicants for jobs. Even an experienced surgeon could still faced insurmountable barriers. Dr Isabel Emslie, now married into the military elite and adopting the name Emslie Hutton (later Lady Hutton), encountered an unrelenting ‘marriage bar’ in Britain. Women doctors, teachers and civil servants had to relinquish their posts on marriage. The public health posts, for which Emslie Hutton was more than amply qualified, eluded her. The couple had no children, and the life in army married quarters felt suffocating. She confided in her autobiography her private feelings (shared only with her supportive husband) that she now felt “unproductive” and “in peril of becoming embittered and downcast”. In the end, she made use of her considerable experience by medical research and writing; and in 1923 she accepted a psychiatric post in an out-patients’ department – but it was both unofficial and honorary.45 Those who did not need to earn a living had an easier home-coming. An independent income combined with strong suffrage bonds and fierce SWH loyalties sustained post-war spirits. After Haverfield’s death and Vera Holme’s work for the orphanage, she and Margaret Greenlees returned home to Scotland. They shared a home in the Highlands, the flamboyant Holme-Greenlees coterie – not unlike that of mannish, elite Radcliffe Hall – and enjoyed theatricals, like Vera’s drama productions with Edith Craig of the Actresses’ Franchise League?46 But the “Ladies of Lochearnhead” always kept a part of their hearts in the Balkans. ╇ Leneman (1994), pp.╯208 ff. ╇ Hutton (1960), pp.╯207–18. 46 ╇ Margaret Kerr was also involved – see Vera Holmes Papers, 7VJH/4/2/08–13. 44 45

414

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Back home for good, Lilian Lenton was one who needed to eke out a living and make a new life for herself. Many of her old WSPU friends had dispersed, one having gone up to the north-east to organise a WFL holiday campaign. Increasingly, Lilian found herself drawn less to the rump of the Pankhursts’ WSPU and more towards the WFL.╯This suited her political energies and offered a meagre salary: for nine years, Lilian worked as a WFL travelling organiser. Her post took her regularly up to Middlesbrough, where she found a “home-from-home” with a WFL doyenne; and even further north up to Clydeside.47 After a week’s hard work in Glasgow, would she be invited up by the Ladies of Lochearnhead to theatricals – and to re-live their Balkan glory days? * The camaraderie of those who served in the war remains legendary, and the SWH was certainly no exception. Bonds forged in Serbia remained almost unbreakable. The Balkans and especially Serbia had imprinted themselves deeply in SWH’s emotional memory: 1914-19 friendships were powerfully sustained by a nostalgic yearning for the traditional Balkans. Those who could afford to revisited: in 1925 Emslie Hutton travelled to Albania with Vera Holme. However, the politics of new Yugoslavia post-1945 grew increasingly different – especially as a communist federal republic under Tito. In 1956 Emslie revisited the SWH hospital near Belgrade given to Yugoslavia’s medical women – though only to find “no one in the hospital knew its history”. Yet, as late as 1971, one Inglis biography was still dedicated “To the Happy Few who remember the days of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals”.48 Conclusion The contrasts between Britain and Serbia remained stark. Both were battered€combatant nations, both€were victorious. Yet one, in island safety, had done its fighting across the Channel, the other had been devastated by invading armies. One did eventually enfranchise all women in 1928; the other not till 1945. Few in Britain understood the crucial distinctiveness of, say, Macedonia or Kosovo. Yet ironically, from Britain’s “imperialism of the imagination”, an unlikely alliance 47 48

╇See for instance “Coast to Coast Campaign”, The Vote, 18 July 1924. ╇ Hutton (1960), p.╯339; Lawrence (1971).

Britain in the Balkans

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of Serbian soldiers and SWH feminist activists flowered. It not only established desperately-needed wartime hospitals, when and where needed – right up by the front line, at the time of battle. But it also embedded and dispersed SWH good practice longer-term in the aftermaths of War – both in Balkans and further east, notably in Russia. * So, the period 1918-23 saw radical shifts in the political and feminist frame. SWH sprang from Elsie Inglis’s imperialist, patriotic creed – unquestioning of Britain’s diplomatic entanglements and women’s duty of wartime service. Since Inglis’s death in 1917, such traditional political certainties had for many been shaken by the ravages of war and by the Bolshevik Revolution. By 1923, remembering the War, with two minutes’ silence observed at local war memorials, had become more complex. Although Britain had experienced no loss of great imperial territories, yet a new internationalism and idealism was epitomised by the spirit of the League of Nations and the work of SCF.╯Such initiatives were not specifically feminist nor direct descendants of trans-European relief initiatives, but were a distinct SWH trajectory. So naturally Haverfield and Holme, Emslie and Lenton, rather than just remaining at home after Serbia, had set out east again when they learnt of orphaned children and famine victims. Thus was SWH good practice disseminated by embedding and dispersal. If this was at the public, organisational level, the SWH experience in the Balkans also had repercussions in a personal, intimate sphere. Life was never the same again. Perhaps the best writing to evoke the significance of their SWH experiences in the Balkans in the aftermath is a novel, Daylight in a Dream by E. M.╯Butler, published beautifully by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in 1951 (see p.€416), but probably written much earlier. Butler had been a SWH orderly out in Dobrudja 1916-7. After the war, her fictional heroine Miss Rawlinson returns home – and gets a job as an elementary teacher training college lecturer. Now aged thirty-five, after the adrenalin of the wartime SWH, she finds this numbingly uninspiring: “The contrast between the past and present was too poignant to be easily borne”. Then Rawlinson has a vivid dream, re-living the vibrant past as a small group of her SWH Unit headed out of Russia through the snow: The members [of this group], while remaining triumphantly themselves, were becoming part of the others too. This hurt abominably and yet it was a heavenly pain. They were on the verge of a discovery; for a spirit

416

Jill Liddington was abroad in those battered [train] compartments fusing the many into one. Most of them were suffering a fundamental change, and those who were carried the marks of it upon them to the end of their days.49

Figure 13. Front cover of Daylight in a Dream, by E. M.╯Butler (1951), published by the Hogarth Press

Rawlinson recognises that with her SWH unit in Russia and in Macedonia, “never either before or since had she felt so complete and so alive”. She found that the past, though dream-like, profoundly enriched the inter-war present, bringing with it news of post-war SWH reunions and annual dinners.50 Daylight in A Dream explores and celebrates post-SWH singleness and modernity after their unforgettable Balkan experience. Bibliography Andric, I. (1945) The Bridge over the Drina (Belgrade: 1945, London 1959 and 1994). Balfour, Lady F. (c. 1919) Dr Elsie Inglis (London: c. 1919, reprinted New York: 2007).

49 50

╇Butler (1951), p.╯25. ╇ Ibid., p.╯76.

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Blunt, W. (1962) Lady Muriel: Lady Muriel Paget and her Philanthropic Work in Central and Eastern Europe (London: 1962). Butler, E. M. (1951) Daylight in a Dream (London: 1951). Corbett, E. (1964) Red Cross in Serbia 1915-1919: a personal diary of experiences (Banbury, 1964). Glenny, M. (1999) The Balkans: Nationalism,War and the Great Powers (London: 1999). Goldsworthy, V. (1998) Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination (New Haven: 1998). Hutton [Emslie], I. (1960) Memories of a Doctor in War and Peace (London: 1960). Krippner, M. (1980) The Quality of Mercy: Women at War Serbia 1915-18 (Newton Abbot: 1980). Lawrence, M. (1971) Shadow of Swords: A biography of Elsie Inglis (London: 1971). Leneman, L. (1994) In the Service of Life: the story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (Edinburgh: 1994). McLaren, E.S. (1919) A History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (London: 1919). McLaren, E.S. (1919) Elsie Inglis: the Woman with the Torch (SPCK: 1919). Nicholson, V. (2007) Singled Out: how two million women survived without men after the First World War (London: 2007). Ross, I. (1988) Little Grey Patridge, (Abderdeen: 1988). Wilson, F. M. (1967) Rebel Daughter of a Country House: the life of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children Fund (London: 1967). Archival collections Scottish Women’s Hospitals Collection, Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Vera (Jack) Holme (7VJH) papers, Women’s Library, London, catalogue 2007.

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index

419

Index A Nő (The Woman), Hungary 316-19, 321, 323-8, 331 Academic Women’s Association (Akademischer Frauenverein), Austria 230 Addams, Jane 102, 103, 108, 360 ADF – see General German Women’s League All Russian Women’s Congress (1908) 161, 169 Allen, Ann Taylor, 15, 136, 145 Alliance of Hungarian Women’s Associations 254 Allies/Allied Powers 1, 2, 29, 50, 59, 77, 82, 89, 90, 93, 95, 101, 102, 104, 159, 168, 203, 265, 333, 341, 355, 359, 362, 388, 397, 399, 401, 404 American Legion 101 American Red Cross 315, 363 American Relief Administration 359, 363, 364, 375 Ancona, Margherita 52-4, 57, 61, 62 Anderby Wold (1923) 120, 122 Anderson, Dr Louisa 395 Andrássy, Katinka 326 Anglo-Serbian Children’s Hospital, Belgrade 410 Antibolschewistische Liga (Anti-Bolshevik League), Germany 70 anti-feminism 73, 208, 211, 215 anti-war protests, Bulgaria 34 AÖFV – see General Austrian Women’s Association Arbeiterräte (Workers’ Councils), Austria, Germany 226, 228, 229, 230, 237 Armand, Inessa 164 Armistice Day November 1918 1, 2, 11, 29, 37, 89, 93, 205, 206, 269, 336, 375, 376, 380, 382, 401, 402 Assistenza civile (Social Welfare), Italy 56 Association of Catholic Women Clerks, Hungary 252 Association of Former German PriÂ�soners of War (Vereinigung ehemaliger KriegsÂ�gefangener Deutschlands) 349

Association of Polish Women Legionaries (Związek Legionistek Polskich) 276, 278 Association of Women Workers (VereiniÂ� gung der arbeitenden Frauen), Austria 236 Associazione per la donna (Association for the Woman), Italy 55 Astrov, Nikolay 168 Attività femminile sociale (Women’s Social Activity), Italy 53 Auclert, Hubertine 205 Augspurg, Anita 150 Avdjieva, Gana 37 Balch, Emily 260 Balkan wars (1912-13) 1, 29, 33, 34, 36, 42, 181 Bäumer, Gertrud 18, 21, 145, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154 BCP – see Bulgarian Communist Party BDF – see Federation of German Women’s Associations Bédy-Schwimmer, Rosa (a.k.a. Rózsa Schwimmer) 245, 261, 317 BeöK – see Federation of Former Austrian Prisoners of War 341, 345 Bessel, Richard 2, 144, 146, 349 Beutelmayr, Marie 229 Beveridge, Ray 92, 94, 99, 103 birth control: abortion, contraceptives 14, 15, 114, 119, 164, 209, 214, 281 see also reproductive rights birth rate, post-war decline in 14, 15, 21315 birth strike, France 209 Bloch, Ernst 221 Bochkareva, Maria 13 Bock, Gisela 19 Bohemianism, Bohemians 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131, 132 Bojanowska, Józefa 266 Bolshevism 166, 254, 319, 340, 380, 381 Borba (The Struggle), Russia 166 Bortkevičienė, Felicija 299, 301

420

index

Boschek, Anna 238, 240 Brändström, Edvard 334 Brändström, Elsa 8, 21, 333-53, 373 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) 167, 336 Brion, Hélène 201, 204, 205 Brittain,Vera 124 Brunschvicg, Cécile 202 Bucharest, Treaty of (1918) 1913 33 Budzińska-Tylicka, Justyna 271, 273, 274, 280-2 Bulgarian Communist Party (Balgarska Komunisticheska Partiya) 42-4 Bulgarski zhenski sayuz (Bulgarian Women’s Union) 32 Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine (FeÂ�dÂ�eration of Austrian Women’s OrÂ�Â� ganizations) 236, 239 Bürgerliche Arbeiterpartei (Bourgeois Workers‘ Party, Austria) 232 Burjan, Hildegard 234, 238-40 Butler, E. M. Daylight in a Dream (1951) 415-16 Caporetto, battle of (1917) 52 Cartel des Gauches, France 203 Catholic Women’s Association (KatholiÂ� sche Frauenorganisation), Austria 223, 234, 235, 239 Cavell, Edith 12, 348 celibacy 113, 115, 151, 152 Central Powers 1, 33, 40, 221, 265, 381 Ceysinger, Helena 273-6, 280 CGT – see General Federation of Labour Chekhova, Maria 163, 174, 175 Civil Code in Albania, (Kodi civil) 192, 193, 195 in Lithuania 301, 302 in Russia 163 in France 211 Clemenceau, Georges 344 CNDI – see National Council of Italian Women Çoba, Marie 184, 185 Comitato lombardo pro suffragio (Lombard Suffrage Committee), Italy 52, 54 Comité français de secours aux enfants d’Europe (French Committee to provide aid to children in Europe) 204 Committee for the Liberation of Russia 166 Committee of Women of la Rue Fondary 200, 203

Common Cause, The 403 Conference of Inter-Allied Women, Paris (1919) 202 Congress of Polish Women 279 Conseil national des femmes françaises (National Council of French Women) 200 Conseil supérieur de la natalité (Upper Council for the birth rate), France 214 Celesia, Carla Lavelli 53, 55, 59 Constant Nymph, The (1924) 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 131 Council of Lithuania/Lithuanian State Council 288, 292, 293, 294, 297, 298 Crewe Train (1926) 120, 121, 130 Crowded Street, The (1924) 120, 121, 122, 124, 127 cultural demobilisation 6, 8, 9, 20, 21, 30, 42, 56, 58, 81, 85, 86, 200, 309, 311, 328, 346, 347, 351 cultural remobilisation 6, 70, 80, 199, 311, 313, 319, 329 Czech legion 336, 338 Daily Mail 138 Danzig 72, 73, 77, 78, 84 Daszyńska-Golińska, Zofia 268, 280, 281, 283 Day of the Roses, Bulgaria 36 DDP – see German Democratic Party Delafield, E. M. 121, 127, 129 demobilisation 2, 6, 14, 120, 129, 143, 145, 146, 147, 344, 346 Der Kampf (The Struggle), Austria 231 Der Tag 70, 71, 72, 74, 82, 83, 84, 85 Deutsche Zeitung 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85 Die Deutsche Frau (The German WoÂ�man), Germany 82 Die Frau (The Woman) Germany 140, 141, 146, 150, 152 Die Frau im Staat (Women and the State), Germany 150, 151 Die Frauenfrage (The Woman Question) 140, 141, 150, 152 Distler, Heinrich 98 DNVP – see German National People’s Party Dobro Pole, battle of (1918) 37 Dolchstosslegende – see stab-in-the-back legend Dollard, Catherine 138, 139

index Domes, Franz 225 Dragoycheva, Tsola 44 Duchêne, Gabrielle 200, 204, 216 Dulębianka, Maria 266, 269, 271 Duma (Russian Parliament) 160, 161, 162, 163, 266, 289 education of women 14, 19, 21, 31, 32, 34, 38, 44, 45, 46, 135, 140, 153, 160, 175, 180 181, 183, 185, 187, 188, 190, 191, 215, 238, 240, 245, 247, 254, 255, 266, 294, 296, 303, 304, 310, 316, 318, 322, 328 Egan, Eleanor Franklin 5, 375-94 Egan, Martin 378 Eisler, Mathilde 226 Ellis, Havelock 116, 118, 127 Emslie, Dr Isabel 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 407, 409, 410, 411, 413, 414, 415 eugenics 15, 16, 115 famine in Albania 182 in Armenia 376 in China 393 in Russia (Volga region, 1921-2) 159, 169, 366, 411, 412, 415 Fascio nazionale femminile (National Women’s Union), Italy 52 Fascist Party, Italy 55 FE – see Hungarian Association of Feminists Federal Association of former Austrian Prisoners of War (Bundesvereinigung der ehemaligen österreichischen KriegsÂ�gefangenen) 341 345 Federation of German Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine) 18, 69, 71, 73, 81, 82, 85, 97, 106, 143, 144, 151 Federation of Hungarian Women’s Associations 259 Federazione italiana pro suffragio (Italian Suffrage Federation) 55, 60 Female Educators’ Club (Verein der Lehrerinnen und Erzieherinnen), Austria 236 feminine middlebrow 115, 116, 119, 130 Ferris, Paul 117 FFC – see Fight the Famine Council Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) 117 Fight the Famine Council, UK 407

421

Fighting France 385 food relief 380, 392 Fourteen Points (1918) 37, 265, 375 Frau und Volk (Women and Nation), Austria 235 Frauenarbeit und Frauenrecht (Women’s Work and Women’s Rights), Austria 235 Frauenhilfsaktionen (Women’s Aid AcÂ�Â� tions, Austria), Austria 233 Frauenrecht (Women’s Right) 235 Frauenüberschuss 135, 139 see also surplus women free love 113, 114, 126 Freikorps 70, 77 French Communist Party (Parti communiste français) 201, 203, 205, 210, 213, 216 French Socialist Party (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) 208 French Union for Suffrage for Women (Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes) 202 Freud, Sigmund 116 Friedländer, Elfriede, née Eisler (a.k.a. Ruth Fischer) 229-31 Furregg, Lotte 239 Gasparotto, Luigi, Italy 54, 57 see also Martini-Gasparotto bill GDVP – see Greater German People’s Party General Austrian Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein) 222 General Federation of Labour (Confédération Générale du Travail) 200 General German Women’s League (Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein) 135 German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) 96, 233 German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei) 18, 81, 85, 152 German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81, 86, 96 German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) 96 Gërmenji, Evdhoksi 189 Gibbs, Phillip 143 Giesswein, Dr Sándor 259 Glücklich, Vilma 245, 250, 260, 316

422

index

Grant, Linda 343 Greater German People’s Party (Großdeutsche Volkspartei) 223, 234-6, 238, 239 Great Patriotic War, Soviet Union (194145) 11 Greek-Turkish war (1919-22) 3 Green, Mary 400-2, 407, 413 Greenlees, Margaret 409, 410, 413 Gruaja Shqiptare (The Albanian Woman) 184, 186, 191, 193 Gurevitch, Lubov 175 Haller, Józef 270, 271 Hari, Mata 11 Hausfrau 141, 142, 221 Hausgehilfengesetz (law concerning domestic service) Austria 239, 240 Haverfield, Evelina 379, 400, 403, 408, 409, 410, 411, 415 Heinz, Howard 389 Heymann, Lida Gustava 150, 203, 204 higher education, women and 14, 31, 45, 210, 215, 240, 255, 289, 296, 316, 328 Higonnet, Margaret 152, 383 Hobsbawm, Eric 8 Holden, Katherine 137, 145 Holme, Vera 397, 400, 403, 409, 410, 413, 415 Holtby, Winifred 113, 120, 122, 124 home front 51, 56, 58, 82, 84, 89, 151, 245 Hoover, Herbert 169, 364, 374, 379, 389 Horne, John 6, 70, 78 Horthy, Miklós 246, 309, 312-14, 318, 329 Humbert, Jeanne 214 Humbert, Eugène 214 Humble, Nicola 115-17, 119, 127-29, 132 Hungarian Association of Feminists (Feministák Egyesülete) 245, 247, 24954, 257-63, 269, 301, 309-11, 316-20, 322, 323, 327-9 Hungarian-Romanian War (1919) 2 Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), Hungary 317 ICRC – see International Committee of the Red Cross ICW – see International Council of Women ICWPP – see International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace

illegitimacy 281, 303, 326 imperialism 42, 62, 90, 91, 95, 396, 397, 414 Independent German Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland) 95, 96 influenza epidemic 2, 359 Inglis, Dr Elsie 395, 396, 397, 399, 400, 403, 414, 415 International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva 36, 337, 344 International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace 42, 200 International conference of socialist women at Berne (1915) 35 International Congress of Women at The Hague (1915) 42, 104, 200 International Congress of Women at Zurich (1919) 21, 103, 203 International Council of Women 33, 42, 53, 162, 245 international reconciliation 5, 9, 81, 334, 348 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance 33, 53, 54, 81, 170, 175, 202, 203, 245, 258, 259, 269, 261, 262, 282, 317 Congress in Budapest (1913) 175, 245, 259, 317 Congress in Geneva (1920) 81, 202, 260, 261 interventionism, Italy 49, 56, 59, 62 IWSA – see International Women’s Suffrage Alliance J. P. Morgan and Company 378 Jackson, Margaret 114, 116, 117, 118 Jannasch, Lilli 21, 92, 97, 104, 105, 106 Jebb, Eglantyne 363, 407, 412 Jones, Heather 340, 341, 346 Jouve, Andrée 20, 204, 216 Jus Suffragii 147, 165, 170 Kapral, Emma 239, 240 Karavelova, Ekaterina 44 Kariams ir invalidams globoti komitetas (ComÂ�mittee for the Care of Soldiers and the Disabled), Lithuania 296 Karininkų šeimų moterų draugija (Association of Women from Military Families), Lithuania 296 Károlyi, Count Mihály 18, 246, 247, 249, 251, 252, 253, 254, 309, 317, 326

index Kennedy, Margaret 120, 124, 126, 127 Kern, Leopold 339 Kessler, Harry 348 Kéthly, Anna 258 KFO – see Catholic Women’s Association Kiedrzyńska, Wanda 271, 272, 276, 277 Kirkova, Tina 44 Klante, Margarete 338, 340 Klub Polityczny Kobiet Postępowych (Progressive Women’s Political Club), Poland 281, 282, 283 Kobieta Współczesna, Poland 277 Kollontai, Alexandra 164, 174, 230 Kollwitz, Käthe 31 Komitet Obywatelski Polek (Civic Committee of Polish Women) 269 Komitet Spasenia Rodiny i Revolutsii (Committee for the Rescue of the Motherland), Russia 168 Komitet Wyborczy Kobiet Postępowych (Election Committee of Progressive Women), Poland 279 Kornilov, General Lavr Georgiyevich 166 Kovács, Mária M. 255 KPD – see German Communist Party Krestjianka (The Peasant Woman), Russia 165 Kriegsdienstleistungsgesetz, Austria 224 Kriegs-Konsumentenausschüsse (War Consumer Committees), Austria 222 KSCS╇Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (official name for Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1929) 395, 403, 404, 406, 412 Kubilinskaitė, Teresė 290 Kuczalska-Reinschmit, Paulina 266 Kühn, Lenore 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 82, 84, 85 Kun, Béla 247, 253, 309, 318, 319 Kurier Poranny, Poland 277 Kusiak-Brownstein, Alicja 271 Kuskova, Ekaterina 161, 166, 169, 170, 174 L’Europe Nouvelle (The New Europe), France 210 L’Humanité, France 214 La Garçonne (The Flapper) 211, 212 La Lutte féministe (The Feminist StrugÂ� gle), France 205 La Mère éducatrice (The Educator), France 205

423

La Voix des femmes (The Voice of WoÂ�men), France 204 Labour Service Law, Bulgaria 45 Labriola, Teresa 60, 61, 62 Lange, Helene 141, 142, 153, 154 Lavelli, Celesia Carla 53, 55, 59 LCWA – see Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh, 1923) 213 League of Nations 3, 78, 80, 89, 91, 93, 97, 169, 186, 201, 202, 337, 351, 359, 363, 406, 415 League of Red Cross Societies 363 Leavis, Q. D. 115, 117 Lega patriottica femminile (Women’s Patriotic League), Italy 52 Leichter, Käthe née Pick 229 Lenin, Vladimir Illych 11, 163, 164, 166 Lenton, Lilian 400, 402, 405, 409, 411, 412, 414, 415 lesbianism 113, 115, 118 Leslie’s Magazine 378 Levi, Primo 343 Lietuva (Lithuania) 289, 299 Lietuvaitė (A Lithuanian Girl) 289 Lietuvių moterų laisvės sąjunga (Lithuanian Women’s Freedom Union) 291 Lietuvos vaiko draugija (Lithuanian Children’s Association) 296 Liga Kobiet Galicji i Śląska (League of Women from Galicia and Silesia), League B 267, 268, 276, 278, 280 Liga Kobiet Pogotowia Wojennego (WoÂ�men’s League for War Alert), Poland, League A 267, 268, 276 Ligue des Droits de L’Homme (League for the Rights of Man), France 214 Ligue des Droits de la Femme (League for the Rights of Women), France 206 Ligue des femmes contre la guerre (League of Women Against War), France 204 Lillingstone, Amy 20 Literacy 45, 183, 192, 195, 247 Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Association (Lietuvos katalikių moterų sąÂ�junga) 287, 288, 289, 291, 293, 295, 296, 297 Lithuanian Catholic Women’s Congress 297 Lithuanian Women’s Union (Lietuvos moterų sąjunga) 287, 288, 295, 296 Lorimer, George Horace 379, 380

424

index

lost generation, myth of 9, 12 Lukács, Georg 221 Lwów (L’viv/Lvov/Lemberg) 3, 265 LWU – see Lithuanian Women’s Union Macauley, Rose 120, 130 Mackensen, August von 348 Macmillan, Chrystal 170, 260, 261 Macphail, Dr Katherine 396, 409, 410, 413 Magyar Asszony (Hungarian Matron) 315, 316, 321, 327 Malaterre-Sellier, Germaine 202 Manila Times 378 MANSZ – see National Association of Hungarian Women Marcinkevičienė, Dalia 290 Marcinkiewicz-Gołaś, Anna 270 Margueritte, Victor 211-13 marriage 7, 14, 100, 113-125, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143 145, 148, 149, 153, 163, 164, 187, 193, 212, 213, 214, 215, 257, 282, 302, 303, 326, 342 companionate 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 124, 130, 132 marriage bar 151, 413 Married Love (1918) 114, 115, 117 Martini-Gasparotto bill, Italy 57, 59, 66 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 355, 357, 358, 359, 360, 364, 365, 370, 371, 372 Masaryková, Alice Garrigue 19, 355-374 masculinity 3, 46, 64, 99 reconstruction of 7, 61 glorification of 86, 210 maternalism, return to 13, 136, 137, 144, 153 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) 113 Mbleta (The Bee), Albania 188 McDowell, Mary 360 Męczkowska, Teodora 280, 281, 283 Mélin, Jeanne 203 middlebrow fiction 119, 130 Milanese feminists 49, 54 military service, compulsory 224, 227, 233, 301 for women 209, 273, 272 Miskolczy, Eugenie 260, 261, 320, 323 modernity 30, 118, 233, 241, 357, 416 Moraczewska, Zofia 268, 278, 280

Morel, Edmund 95, 96, 98, 99, 103 Moritz, Verena 338, 339 Mosse, George L. 12 Moszczeńska, Iza 268, 276, 280, 283 Moteris (Woman), Lithuania 289, 296 Moterų kultūros draugija (Lithuanian Women’s Culture Association) 296 motherhood 61, 62, 120, 121, 131, 136, 148, 205, 209, 213, 214, 215, 279 Motzko-Seitz, Alma 235 Mussolini, Benito 63, 202 NAACP – see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nansen, Fridtjof 169, 337, 406, 407, 412 Napoleonic Code, Lithuania 302 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, USA 97, 102 National Association of German WoÂ�men’s Clubs (Reichsverband deutscher Frauenvereine), Austria 235 National Association of Hungarian WÂ�oÂ� men (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége) 247, 248, 254, 255, 260, 261, 262, 309, 311-16, 318, 321, 322, 324, 327-9 National Council Austria 233, 234 Hungary 246, 249, 251, 252, 317 National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes françaises) 200, 202, 206 National Council of Italian Women (ConÂ�siglio nazionale delle donne italiane) 53, 55 National League of German Women’s Associations (Reichsverband deutscher Frauenvereine), Austria 235 National Organisation of Austrian HouseÂ�Â�wives (Reichsorganisation der Hausfrauen Österreichs) 221 National Organisation of Women (Narodowa Organizacja Kobiet), Poland 282, 283 National Union for the Vote for Women (Union nationale pour le vote des femÂ� mes), France 200 National Women’s Union (Unione FemÂ� minile Nazionale), Italy 54, 55, 62 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), Germany 70

index National Suffrage Congress, Milan (1919) 51, 53 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, UK 413 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, UK 395, 403, 413 Nationaler Frauendienst (National WoÂ�Â� men’s Service), Germany 69, 141 nationalism 8, 10, 16, 19, 20, 22, 49, 59, 61, 64, 85, 154, 319, 342, 371 NEP – see New Economic Policy Neuilly, Treaty of (1919) 29, 38, 41, 42, 45 Neutrality/ neutralism 89, 94, 344, 347, 379, 399 in Albania 181, 182 in Bulgaria 34 in Italy 49, 56, 64 New Woman 138, 210 Nightingale, Florence 334 Nitti, Francesco 59, 60 Nobel Peace Prize 260, 347 Nők Lapja (Women’s Journal), Hungary 319, 320, 326 NOK – see National Organisation of Women Novyi Octjiabr (New October), Russia 171 NSDAP – see National Socialist German Workers’ Party nurseries 162, 164, 223 nurses/nursing 3, 8, 13, 17, 20, 34, 36, 39, 41, 122, 172, 209, 268, 271, 272, 277, 291, 333, 335, 344-7, 356, 363, 366, 395, 396, 400, 401, 404, 405 NUSEC – see National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship NUWSS – see National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies October Revolution, Russia 11, 37, 159, 163, 165, 166, 171, 174, 176, 222 OLK – see Voluntary Women’s Legion Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele 49 Orleńska, Hanna 272 orphans/ orphanages 199, 223, 325, 333, 337, 340, 349, 350, 352, 359, 372, 382, 392, 405, 409, 410, 413, 415 Österreichische Frauenpartei (Austrian Women’s Party) 239 pacifism/ pacifists 5, 20, 21, 34, 40, 80, 99, 103-6, 151, 152, 161, 200, 201, 203-6,

425

212, 216, 245, 250, 262, 282, 309, 311, 317, 318, 327, 328, 346, 347, 406 Paget, Lady Muriel 363, 373, 407, 411-12 Palmstierna, Ellen 363 Panina, Countess Sophia 163, 166-70 Paris Commune 227 Paris Peace Conference (1919) 21, 179, 183, 259, 262, 314 Partia Politike Shqiptare (Albanian political party formed in the US) 184 Partito popolare (Popular Party), Italy 52 Pateva, Zheni 42, 44 PCF – see French Communist Party Pelletier, Madeleine 201, 205, 208, 213 Perczelné Kozma, Flóra 327, 328 Petkevičaitė, Gabrielė 290, 298-300, 303, 305 Pickles, Katie 12 Piłsudska, Aleksandra 268 Piłsudski, Józef 268, 275-8, 283 Plumb Plan, USA 380 Pokrovskaja, Maria 171 Polish-Soviet War (1920-1) 2, 265, 272 Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-19) 2, 265, 269 Political Association of Austrian Christian Women (Politischer Verband der Christlichen Frauen ÖsterÂ�reichs) 234 Pollak, Marianne 230 Polish Firing Squads (Polskie Drużyny Strzeleckie) 267 Polish Military Organisation (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa) 268, 278 Pölzer, Johann 225 Pope Benedict XV 200 Popp, Adelheid 231, 232, 234, 237, 238 Pöppinghege, Rainer 343, 348 Posjo, Marigo 188 POWs – see Prisoners of War Poznań (Posen), anti-German uprisings in 265, 272 Praca Obywatelska –Związek Pracy Obywatelskiej Kobiet (Union of Women’s Civil Work) 277 Prisoners of War 2, 3, 7, 8, 20, 29, 37, 42, 142, 291, 312, 314-16, 322, 333-53, 373, 406 Proft, Gabriele 226 Prokopovitch, Sergei 169 prostitutes/prostitution 17, 57, 58, 106, 113, 138, 202, 236, 271, 279, 281, 301, 368

426

index

Provisional Government in Albania 181 in Russia 18, 163, 168, 169 psychoanalysis 116 Pugh, Martin 18 Qiriazi, Sevasti and Parashqevi 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 192 Raabl-Werner, Heinrich von 338-40 Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), Russia 164, 165 Rachamimov, Alon 334, 338, 345, 346 Ravasi, Sofia 55, 56, 59 Red Army 265, 272, 336 Red Cross Society 191, 315, 335, 338, 355, 356, 358, 360, 362-7, 369, 371, 372, 373 see also International Committee of the Red Cross Red Guards (Austria) 228 refugees 2, 3, 33, 351, 352, 406 Albania 181, 182 Armenia 391 Bulgaria 42 Russia and Ukraine 162, 168, 169, 266, 397, 411 Lithuania 291 Hungary 349 Serbia 401 Reich Association of Former Prisoners of War (Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener) 341-3, 349 ReK – see Reich Association of Former Prisoners of War reproductive rights 14, 15, 164, 209, 214, 215, 295 Revolutionäre Proletarierin (Revolutionary Proletarian Women), Austria 231 Rhineland, allied occupation of (1920-30) 93-5, 107 Rhineland Horror campaign 91-6, 100, 103-6 Rhineland Women’s League (Rheinische Frauenliga), Germany 89 Richter, Elise 232 Riga, Treaty of (1921) 265 Ring of National Women (Ring Nationaler Frauen), Germany 71 RLWE – see Russian League for Women’s Equality RMAS – see Russian Mutual Aid Society

Rodziewiczówna, Maria 271 Rogge, Pia Sophie 72, 73, 75-7, 81-3, 85 Rolland, Romain 104, 216 Rosanvallon, Pierre 208 Rosenberg, Auguszta 259 Rote Fahne (Red Flag), Austria 231 Rotten, Elisabeth 347 Roussel, Nelly 214 Royaumont 396, 404 Rudel-Zeynek, Olga 239, 240 Ruhr, Franco-Belgian occupation of (1923) 78-80, 89, 95, 103, 104, 199, 204, 334 Russian civil war (1918-20) 1, 2, 3, 159, 166, 169, 171, 174, 334, 336, 339, 406 Russian émigrés 166, 169, 406, 411 Russian League for Women’s Equality 161-3, 170, 175 Russian Mutual Aid Society 160-3, 172 Russian Refugee Relief Society 167 Russkii ochag (Russian hearth), refugee community centre 169 Rustemi, Avni 190 Saturday Evening Post, USA 375, 376, 378, 379, 383 Šaulių moterų kuopa (Subdivision of Women Rifles), Lithuania 296 Saumoneau, Louise 208 Save the Children Fund, UK 407, 408, 411, 412, 415 SCF – see Save the Children Fund Schirmacher, Käthe 72, 73, 76-80, 82, 84, 85, 96 Schlachta, Margit 260, 310 Schlesinger, Therese 225, 226, 229, 231, 240 Schneider, Marie 239, 240 Schönberger, Bianca 345, 346 Schwimmer, Rózsa – see Bédy-Schwimmer, Rosa Scottish Women’s Hospitals 371, 395, 396, 399, 400, 401, 403-11, 413-16 Scott, Joan W. 5, 208 SDAP – see Social Democratic Labor Party Šeimininkė (Housewife), Lithuania 290 Seipel, Ignaz 231, 232 September 1923 uprising, Bulgaria 43, 44 Serbian Relief Fund 410 Séverine 210, 214 sexology 14, 114-17, 137

index sex reform 150, 215 Sexually Transmitted Infections 113, 144, 325, 344 SFIO – see French Socialist Party Shabanova, Anna 161-3, 172, 173 Shihkina-Yavein, Poliksena 163 Shpresa Kombëtare (The National Hope), Albania 182, 188 Shqiptarja (The Albanian [f]) 192, 193 Sikorski, Władysław 276 Simmel, Georg 221 Sluga, Glenda 22 Social Democratic Labour Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei), Austria 223-6, 228-30, 233, 234, 236-38, 240 Soldatenräte (Soldiers’ Councils) Germany, Austria 227 Soldiers’ uprising, Bulgaria (1918) 29, 41, 43, 44 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 339 SPD – see German Social Democratic Party spinsterhood 114, 115, 118, 124, 130, 136, 137 stab-in-the-back legend 76, 89, 262 Starhemberg, Fanny 234, 235 STIs – see Sexually Transmitted Infections Stöcker, Helene 20 Stopes, Marie 113-22, 124, 127, 128, 1302, 150 Stradal, Emmy 240 suffrage, female 9, 16, 17, 20, 32, 33, 45, 51-60, 62, 65, 66, 69-72, 84, 151, 160, 162, 173, 175, 176, 205-208, 211, 214, 216, 231, 245, 246, 247, 251-3, 258-61, 266, 278, 297, 310, 312, 316-18, 323, 324, 327, 328, 386, 393, 395, 396, 409, 412, 413 suffragettes (UK) 211, 396, 397, 400 surplus women 63, 135, 139, 140, 143, 146, 153, 154 see also Frauenüberschuss Susman, Margarete 221, 223, 232, 241 Šventos Zitos draugija (St. Zita Servants’ Association) 291 Swanwick, Helena 21, 92, 102 SWH – see Scottish Women’s Hospitals Taft, William Howard 378, 379 Tarugi, Paolina 53, 55, 56, 59, 61-3

427

Terrell, Mary Church 103 The Way Things Are (1927) 121, 127, 129 The Woman and Society, Hungary 250 Tormay, Cécile 255, 312, 324 Trianon, Treaty of (1920) 247, 261-3, 309, 311, 312 Tsarist Russia 165, 167, 265, 267, 287, 300, 302, 303 Tuchaczewski, Michail 272 typhus 170, 335, 359, 397, 404 Tyrkova, Ariadna 161, 163, 166-8, 170 UFN – see National Women’s Union Union of Democratic Control, UK 95 Union of Equal Rights for Women in Lvov (Związek Równouprawniena Kobiet we Lwowie) 269 Union of Equal Rights for Polish Women (Związek Równouprawnienia Kobiet Polskich) 266 Union of Geneva Women (Union des Femmes de Geneve) 189 Union of Progressive Women (Sayuz na naprednichavite zheni), Bulgaria 33 union sacrée (sacred union), France 199, 201, 215 Ushlinova, Donka 36 USPD – see Independent German Social Democratic Party Uzdila, Juozas 290 VAD – see Voluntary Aid Detachment Vaidilutė (Virgin), Lithuania 289 Vance, Jonathan 350 Vaugoin, Carl 239 Vázsonyi, Vilmos 246, 258 VeK – see Association of former German Prisoners of War Vernet, Madeleine 204, 205 Vérone, Maria 207, 217 Versailles, Treaty of (1919) 1, 49, 70-3, 76, 77, 84, 89, 91, 135, 144, 199, 333, 334, 342, 393 violence, post-war 7, 21, 29, 42, 66, 99, 102, 107, 144, 312, domestic 324-6 Vistula, battle of the (1920) 265, 272 Vlast naroda (People’s Power), Russia 169 Voce nuova (New Voice), Italy 49, 50, 54-62, 64-6

428

index

Voluntary Aid Detachment, UK 396 Voluntary Women’s Legion (Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet), Poland 269, 271-8, 280 Voß-Zietz, Martha 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85 War in the Cradle of the World (1918) 376 war widows 17, 29, 45, 57, 140, 145, 149, 199, 311, 325, 340, 385 Weber, Marianne 81, 97, 140, 145, 153 Weber, Max 227 Weiland, Hans 334, 339, 345 Weiss, Louise 210 Weychert-Szymanowska, Władysława 281 WFL – see Women’s Freedom League White Army 166-8 White Terror 247, 252 Williams, Harold 166, 167 WILPF – see Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Wilson, Woodrow 37, 166, 184, 265, 287, 375 Winter, Jay 15, 151 Witt-Schlumberger, Marguerite de 214 Women’s Battalion of Death, Russia 13 Women’s Freedom League, UK 411, 413, 414

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 21, 42, 92, 98, 99, 102-4, 203, 204, 260, 282, 347 Women’s Leader, UK 146 Women’s Progressive Party, Russia 162, 171 Women’s Social and Political Union, UK 395, 397, 411, 414 Women’s Union for the League of NaÂ�Â� tions (Union féminine pour la Société des Nations), France 201 Woolf, Virginia 115 WPP – see Women’s Progressive Party WSPU – see Women’s Social and Political Union Wulffen, Erich 148 Zagórska, Aleksandra 269, 274, 276, 277 Zatorskie, Klara and Ludwika 272 Zemgor (Russian émigré aid organisation) 169 Žiburėlis (a Little Light), Lithuania 296, 299 Žibutė (Violet), Lithuania 289, 299 Ziegler, Richard 149 ZLP – see Association of Polish Women Legionaries Zogolli, Ahmed (King Zog of Albania) 190, 191

History of Warfare History of Warfare presents the latest research on all aspects of military history. Publications in the series will examine technology, strategy, logistics, and economic and social developments related to warfare in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East from ancient times until the early nineÂ�teenth century. The series will accept monographs, collections of essays, conference proceedings, and translation of military texts. ╇ 1. Hoeven, M. van der (ed.). Exercise of Arms. Warfare in the Netherlands, 1568Â�-1648. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10727 4 ╇ 2. Raudzens, G. (ed.). Technology, Disease and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11745 8 ╇ 3. Lenihan P. (ed.). Conquest and Resistance. War in Seventeenth-Century IreÂ�land. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11743 1 ╇ 4. Nicholson, H. Love, War and the Grail. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12014 9 ╇ 5. Birkenmeier, J.W. The Development of the Komnenian Army: 1081-1180. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11710 5 ╇ 6. Murdoch, S. (ed.). Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12086 6 ╇ 7. Tuyll van Serooskerken, H.P. van. The Netherlands and World War I. EspionaÂ�ge, Diplomacy and Survival. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12243 5 ╇ 8. DeVries, K. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and TechÂ�nology. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12227 3 ╇ 9. Cuneo, P. (ed.). Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles. Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe. 2002. ISBN 90 04 11588 9 10. Kunzle, D. From Criminal to Courtier. The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550Â�1672. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12369 5 11. Trim, D.J.B. (ed.). The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Profes sionalism. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12095 5 12. Willliams, A. The Knight and the Blast Furnace. A History of the MetalÂ�lurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages & the Early Modern Period. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12498 5 13. Kagay, D.J. & L.J.A. Villalon (eds.). Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon. Medieval Warfare in Societies Around the Mediterranean. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12553 1 14. Lohr, E. & M. Poe (eds.). The Military and Society in Russia: 1450-1917. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12273 7 15. Murdoch, S. & A. Mackillop (eds.). Fighting for Identity. Scottish Military Experience c. 1550-1900. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12823 9 16. Hacker, B.C. World Military History Bibliography. Premodern and NonÂ�western Military Institutions and Warfare. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12997 9 17. Mackillop, A. & S. Murdoch (eds.). Military Governors and Imperial FronÂ�tiers c. 16001800. A Study of Scotland and Empires. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12970 7 18. Satterfield, G. Princes, Posts and Partisans. The Army of Louis XIV and ParÂ�tisan Warfare in the Netherlands (1673-1678). 2003. ISBN 90 04 13176 0 20. Macleod, J. & P. Purseigle (eds.). Uncovered Fields. Perspectives in First World War Studies. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13264 3 21. Worthington, D. Scots in the Habsburg Service, 1618-1648. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13575 8 22. Griffin, M. Regulating Religion and Morality in the King’s Armies, 1639-1646. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13170 1 23. Sicking, L. Neptune and the Netherlands. State, Economy, and War at Sea in the Renaissance. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13850 1

24. Glozier, M. Scottish Soldiers in France in the Reign of the Sun King. Nursery for Men of Honour. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13865 X 25. Villalon, L.J.A. & D.J. Kagay (eds.). The Hundred Years War. A Wider Focus. 2005. ISBN 90 04 13969 9 26. DeVries, K. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2004. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14040 9 27. Hacker, B.C. World Military History Annotated Bibliography. Premodern and Nonwestern Military Institutions (Works Published before 1967). 2005. ISBN 90 04 14071 9 28. Walton, S.A. (ed.). Instrumental in War. Science, Research, and InstruÂ�ments. Between Knowledge and the World. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14281 9 29. Steinberg, J.W., B.W. Menning, D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D. Wolff & S. Yokote (eds.). The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. World War Zero, Volume I. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14284 3 30. Purseigle, P. (ed.). Warfare and Belligerence. Perspectives in First World War Studies. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14352 1 31. Waldman, J. Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The EvoÂ�lution of European Staff Weapons between 1200 and 1650. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14409 9 32. Speelman, P.J. (ed.). War, Society and Enlightenment. The Works of General Lloyd. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14410 2 33. Wright, D.C. From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh-Century China. Sung’s Foreign Relations with Kitan Liao. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14456 0 34. Trim, D.J.B. & M.C. Fissel (eds.). Amphibious Warfare 1000-1700. ComÂ�merce, State Formation and European Expansion. 2006. ISBN 90 04 13244 9 35. Kennedy, H. (ed.). Muslim Military Architecture in Greater Syria. From the Coming of Islam to the Ottoman Period. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14713 6 36. Haldon, J.F. (ed.). General Issues in the Study of Medieval Logistics. Sources, Problems and Methodologies. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14769 1 37. Christie, N. & M. Yazigi (eds.). Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities. Warfare in the Middle Ages. 2006. ISBN 90 04 15024 2 38. Shaw, C. (ed.). Italy and the European Powers. The Impact of War, 1500– 1530. 2006. ISBN-13 978 90 04 15163 5, ISBN-10 90 04 15163 X 39. Biggs, D. Three Armies in Britain. The Irish Campaign of Richard II and the Usurpation of Henry IV, 1397-99. 2006. ISBN-13 978 90 04 15215 1, ISBN-10 90 04 15215 6 40. Wolff, D., Marks, S.G., Menning, B.W., Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D., Steinberg, J.W. & S. Yokote (eds.). The Russo-Japanese War in Global PerspecÂ�tive. World War Zero, Volume II. 2007. ISBN-13 978 90 04 15416 2, ISBN-10 90 04 15416 7 41. Ostwald, J. Vauban under Siege. Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession. 2007. ISBN-13 978 90 04 15489 6, ISBN-10 90 04 15489 2 42. MCCullough, R.L. Coercion, Conversion and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV’s France. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15661 6 43. Røksund, A. The Jeune École. The Strategy of the Weak. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15723 1 44. Hosler, J.D. Henry II. A Medieval Soldier at War, 1147-1189. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15724 8 45. Hoyos, D. Truceless War. Carthage’s Fight for Survival, 241 to 237 BC. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16076 7 46. DeVries, K. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2003-2006. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16445 1 47. France, J. (ed.). Mercenaries and Paid Men. The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16447 5 48. Meyer, J. (ed.). British Popular Culture and the First World War. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16658 5 49. Jones, H., J. O’Brien & C. Schmidt-Supprian (eds.). Untold War. New PerÂ�spectives in First World War Studies. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16659 2

50. Burgtorf, J. The Central Convent of Hospitallers and Templars. History, OrgaÂ�nization, and Personnel (1099/1120-1310). 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16660 8 51. Villalon, A.L.J. & D.J. Kagay (eds.). The Hundred Years War (Part II). Di 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16821 3 52. González de León, F. The Road to Rocroi. Class, Culture and Command in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1567-1659. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17082 7 53. Lawrence, D.R. The Complete Soldier. Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17079 7 54. Beckett, I.F.W. (ed.). 1917: Beyond the Western Front. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17139 8 55. Whetham, D. Just Wars and Moral Victories. Surprise, Deception and the NorÂ�mative Framework of European War in the Later Middle Ages. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17153 4 56. Miller, S.M. Soldiers and Settlers in Africa, 1850–1918. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17751 2 57. Amersfoort, H. & P. Kamphuis (eds.). May 1940. The Battle for the Netherlands. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18438 1 58. Murdoch, S. The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare, 1513-1713. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18568 5 59. Fagan, G.G. & M. Trundle (eds.). New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18598 2 60. Klingelhofer, E. (ed.). First Forts. Essays on the Archaeology of Proto-Colonial Fortifications. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18754 2 61. Shean, J.F. Soldiering for God. Christianity and the Roman Army. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18731 3 62. Keene, J.D. & M.S. Neiberg (eds.). Finding Common Ground. New Directions in First World War Studies. 2011. ISBN 978 90 04 19182 2 63. Sharp, I. & M. Stibbe (eds.). Aftermaths of War. Women’s Movements and Female AcÂ� tivists, 1918-1923. 2011. ISBN 978 90 04 19172 3 ISSN 1385–7827