The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19

The Women’s Movement in Wartime International Perspectives, 1914–19

Edited by

Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp

The Women’s Movement in Wartime

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The Women’s Movement in Wartime International Perspectives, 1914–19 Edited by

Alison S. Fell Lancaster University

and

Ingrid Sharp University of Leeds

Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp 2007. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230019669 hardback ISBN-10: 0230019668 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The women’s movement in wartime : international perspectives, 191419 / edited by Alison S. Fell, Ingrid Sharp. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9780230019669 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0230019668 (cloth) 1. World War, 19141918“Women. 2. Feminism“History“ 20th century. I. Fell, Alison S., 1971 II. Sharp, Ingrid. D639.W7W654 2007 940.3082“dc22 2006048012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

1 Introduction: The Women’s Movement and the First World War Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp

1

2 ‘Indian Sisters!    Send your husbands, brothers, sons’: India, Women and the First World War Santanu Das

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3 Martial Spirit and Mobilization Myths: Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany Claudia Siebrecht

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4 ‘French women do not wish to talk about peace’: Julie Siegfried and the Response of the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises to the First World War Alison S. Fell

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5 Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War Ingrid Sharp

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6 The Creation of an Icon in Defence of Hélène Brion: Pacifists and Feminists in the French Minority Media Joanna Shearer

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7 In a Different Voice: Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War Judit Acsády

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8 Feminism and Suffrage in Russia: Women, War and Revolution 1914–1917 Olga Shnyrova

124

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vi Contents

9 The Pankhursts and the Great War June Purvis 10 ‘The Woman Who Dared’: Major Mabel St Clair Stobart Angela K. Smith 11 Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., the First World War, and a Feminist Critique of Wartime Violence Kimberly Jensen 12 Elisabeth Rotten and the ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’, 1914–1919 Matthew Stibbe

141 158

175

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13 Transforming Utopia: The ‘League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform’ in the First World War Peter Davies

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14 The ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and Reconciliation after the Great War Erika Kuhlman

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15 Sacrificial Rituals and Wounded Hearts: The Uses of Christian Symbolism in French and German Women’s Responses to the First World War Catherine O’Brien Index

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List of Figures

1 Man: ‘Why are you turning down my proposal of marriage?’ Woman: ‘For the same reason that the recruiting board rejected you’ (Hirschfeld and Gaspar 1930: 67). 2 ‘Although parting is painful, yet she’s prouder of me for going’ (Hirschfeld and Gaspar 1930: Facing 172). 3 Front cover of A N˝ o: Feminista folyóirat (Woman: Feminist Journal), May 1915. 4 ‘Then and Now’, Ogonek (1917) 28: 1. 5 ‘Two Fighters for Women’s Equality. The Commander of the Women’s Battalion of Death M. Bochkareva and English Suffragist Mrs Pankhurst in Petrograd’, Ogonek 1917. 6 Mabel St Clair Stobart, while arrested as a spy in Belgium, 1914. Copyright Eric Stobart, provided by Joffe and Joanna Crichton. 7 Mabel St Clair Stobart with the convoy crossing a river during the Serbian retreat. Copyright Eric Stobart, provided by Joffe and Joanna Crichton. 8 Esther Lovejoy 1917, OHSU Historical Collections & Archives. 9 House of the Good Neighbor Monday Morning (Lovejoy 1919: Facing 16). 10 Liberty Loan Speech, OHSU Historical Collections & Archives. 11 War Babies (Lovejoy 1919: Facing 180). 12 O. Gulbransson 28 January 1919 ‘We aren’t allowed to join the conversation at Versailles’, Simplicissimus 23/44: 547. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/BONO, Oslo. 13 Eugène Delacroix, ‘Christ on the Cross’ © The National Gallery, London. 14 Our Lady Vulnerate (Reproduced by permission of the Rector, Real Colegio de Ingles, Valladolid, Spain. © Royal English College). vii

70 73 116 125

133

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169 180 181 183 188

228 250

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank Belinda Cooke for her editorial and translation work, the Universities of Lancaster and Leeds for financial assistance in the preparation of this volume, and the British Academy for their support for this project. They are also grateful to Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland at Palgrave for their advice and guidance.

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Notes on the Contributors

Judit Acsády is a sociologist working for the Sociology Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her fields of research include the history of Hungarian feminism and gender relations. Her PhD dissertation ‘Emancipation and Identity’ (2004) was about the recent representation of and attitudes to Hungarian women’s emancipation. She has published a number of articles based on her research findings. She is a guest lecturer at the ELTE and Corvinus University, Budapest. Santanu Das is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2005). He is presently working on India and First World War writing. Peter Davies is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh. He has written on the cultural politics of the German Communist Party and on mid-twentieth-century German literature. He is currently working on the reception of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s theory of ancient matriarchy in Germany. Alison S. Fell is Lecturer in French Studies at Lancaster University. She is the author of Liberty, Equality, Maternity (2003) and is currently writing a book on the image and experiences of French First World War nurses. Kimberly Jensen is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Western Oregon University. She has published articles and a book on American women and the First World War and is currently writing a biography of Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D. Erika Kuhlman is Assistant Professor of History at Idaho State University. She has written books and articles on American women’s resistance to the Great War, and is currently writing a book on US and German women’s involvement in post-war reconciliation. ix

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Notes on the Contributors

Catherine O’Brien is Lecturer in French and Film Studies at Kingston University. She has published on First World War literature and Mariology, and is currently writing a book on intersections between film and theology. June Purvis is Professor of Women’s and Gender History at the University of Portsmouth. She is the Founding and Managing Editor of the journal Women’s History Review, as well as the Editor for a book series on women’s and gender history, both with Routledge. She has published extensively on women’s education in the nineteenth century and on the suffragette movement in Edwardian Britain. Her most recent book is Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (2002). Ingrid Sharp is Senior Lecturer in German at Leeds University. Her research focuses on the history of the women’s movement in Germany and its international connections. She has published several articles on gender relations in Germany during the First World War and the Weimar Republic and is the co-editor, with Jane Jordan, of Diseases of the Body Politic: Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns (2003). Joanna Shearer is a PhD candidate at Oxford Brookes University, where she is completing a thesis on French women’s political journalism. She has previously published two book chapters on French women’s fiction and journalism in wartime. Olga Shyrnova is Director of Gender Studies and Associate Professor at the Ivanovo State University, Russia. She has received numerous travel and research grants from Russian and international bodies for her work on the history of the women’s movement and the campaign for female suffrage in the UK and Russia. Publications include For Freedom, for Honour! The Suffragette Mission to Revolutionary Russia (2005) and (with Igor Shkolnikov) ‘The Suffrage Movement in Great Britain and in Russia: Comparative Analyses’ (1998). Claudia Siebrecht is currently completing her PhD thesis in Trinity College, Dublin. Her research focuses on visual sources of the First World War and the title of her thesis is ‘Death, sacrifice and mourning in women’s art during the First World War in Germany, 1914–1919’.

Notes on the Contributors

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Angela K. Smith is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth. She has published books and articles on the First World War focusing on gender relations and the Suffrage Movement. She is currently working on a biography of Mabel St Clair Stobart. Matthew Stibbe is Senior Lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914– 1918 (2001) and Women in the Third Reich (2003); and co-editor with Kevin McDermott of Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe. Challenges to Communist Rule (2006). He is currently completing a study of civilian internment in Germany during the First World War with special reference to the camp at Ruhleben near Berlin.

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1 Introduction: The Women’s Movement and the First World War Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp

The First World War marked a crisis for the burgeoning women’s movements in Europe and in the United States and tested the strength of the international bonds that the movement had been working to establish since the late nineteenth century. The outbreak of the war forced those active in the women’s movement to make a choice between supporting their own country in a time of crisis and remaining true to the dominant vision of the ‘natural’ pacifism and international sisterhood of all women. In most of the combatant nations, the call to arms polarized women, often dividing those who had worked closely together, with some rallying unproblematically to their nation’s flag, others suspending their struggle for women’s advancement and turning their backs on their international contacts ‘for the duration of the war’, while yet others remained (or became) staunchly pacifist, developing and refining their ideological position as the war progressed. This volume explores the responses of the women’s movements to the war in all of the major belligerent nations (Germany, AustriaHungary, France, Britain and its Empire, Russia and the United States). Working from an interdisciplinary perspective, the contributors explore the impact of war on early feminist thought and activism, allowing for interesting comparisons between the responses of feminists in the various nations. Individual contributions demonstrate the difficulty of making valid blanket statements about women’s response to war, even within the small minority of women in each nation who were active in feminist and suffrage organizations. Women’s positions in relation to the conflict are revealed in the chapters to have been diverse and shifting, dependent not only upon the different socio-political contexts 1

2

Introduction

within the belligerent nations to which they belonged, and the historical roots of their organizations, but also upon the personalities of individual women and the variety of ideological beliefs that influenced their feminist ideals. Before discussing the individual responses examined in this volume in more detail, this introduction will begin by outlining the competing ideologies at stake in the international women’s movement in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.

The women’s movement 1848–1914 The roots of what we have termed the ‘women’s movement’ were not in a single organization, a mass movement or a coherent set of ideals. The organizations that formed in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America that we can label, from a contemporary perspective, as ‘feminist’ bear little resemblance in terms of their ideologies and practices to the ‘second wave’ feminist groups of the 1960s and 1970s. As Gisela Bock notes in her study of women in European history, The goal [of the classical women’s movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] was not to switch gender roles or make [these roles] the same but liberation from subordination by virtue of [women’s] sex.    The women’s movement was a social movement because it intervened in the ‘social question’ of pauperism, understood the ‘woman question’ also as a social question and, like other social movements of the time, adopted the form of a ‘movement’. (Bock 2002: 116) The organizations that emerged in order to attempt to bring about the ‘liberation from subordination’ for women often contained within them women (and men) with different political, religious or class allegiances, united by the common goals of the improvement of women’s social, economic and political condition. So although it was necessary to organize lobby groups at national and international levels in order to try to muster support and gain publicity for their demands, from its earliest days the women’s movement equally had to combat internal divisions and disagreements. While there were significant variations in the condition of women in different nations, it is possible to identify three core ‘feminist’ issues that women fought for during this period: the increased provision of and equal access to education for women; the improvement of working conditions and expansion of working opportunities for women; and the

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reform of the ‘civil codes’, giving women legal and civil rights equal to those of men, including the right to vote. The priority given to these issues was based upon the notion that women’s sphere, although necessarily separate from that of men, was too narrow and restricted, which prevented them from attaining economic, intellectual or moral autonomy. As an alternative to women’s status in the majority of nations as a ‘minor’, under the guardianship of the father or husband, many early feminist activists put forward the concept of the ‘complementarity’ of the sexes, meaning that although men and women had different roles, natures and duties, they shared a common humanity and deserved equality within their difference. The intellectual basis of the ideal of the ‘equal but different’ couple working together for the common good was often the individualism of middle-class liberalism (itself a fusion of the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the moral imperatives of Protestantism). One of the most influential applications of this thinking to the condition of women was by the British liberal theorist John Stuart Mill in his book The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill argued that the continued subservience of women risked impeding the progress of the human race by preventing women from fully developing and exercising their talents. He did not believe that men and women were equal per se. Rather he argued that women should be given equal opportunities in education and employment to those enjoyed by men; the laws of competition would in any case prevent them exceeding the limitations of their natures: If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. (quoted in Evans 1977: 21) Mill’s thinking was extremely influential; The Subjection of Women was translated into six languages, and was widely read in Europe and America. As Richard Evans notes, it offered a case for feminism that ‘linked it firmly to the political theory of liberal individualism and tied it to the assumptions about society and politics held by its audience’ (Evans 1977: 19). Women could thus exploit the belief in progress and individualism favoured by liberalism in order to underpin their claims for legal autonomy, for women’s enfranchisement, and for ‘public’ intervention into ‘private’ inequalities between men and women (Shanley 1989).

4

Introduction

Given the importance of liberalism for the nineteenth-century women’s movement, it is not surprising that many feminist associations began life as organizations of middle- and upper-class women involved in programmes of moral, social, political or charitable reform, before focusing their attention more specifically on what was known as ‘the woman question’. The increasing prominence of women’s suffrage as a goal towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, led many associations to become more radical in their objectives and tactics, and this in turn often led to a split in the feminist ranks. In some cases, these divisions were further emphasized by the opposing political and class allegiances of activists, particularly between socially conservative philanthropists from the professional or upper classes and politically committed socialist women whose agenda was more uncompromising. Generally, it is true to say that during this period these radical feminists were a minority in comparison to the more moderate majority. But it is important to reiterate that the directions taken by feminist and suffrage movements in different countries were evidently dependent upon the respective country’s political situation. In many countries, embracing a more moderate position that did not overtly counter the beliefs and social mores of the ruling classes was the only means by which women could ensure an audience for their demands. As Bock notes, ‘women only began demanding the franchise at a time when they saw some chance of success, and only at such times; namely, when democratization for men was on the political agenda’ (2002: 129). Accordingly, the northern European countries like Norway and Finland were the first to commit to political equality and the first to establish women’s right to vote (Finland in 1906; Norway in 1912). Progress towards the acceptance of female citizenship was much slower elsewhere, particularly in Catholic countries. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, feminist and suffragist movements had become increasingly influential all over Europe and in North America. Numerous new organizations were founded, and some of their leaders became well-known figures on the political landscape. This was certainly the case in Great Britain, where Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were the radical leaders of the suffragette organization, the ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’ (WSPU), founded in 1903. Pankhurst’s position was one shared by many in the international women’s suffrage movement: the belief that enfranchisement would be the most effective way to bring about real change in women’s lives. Where feminists differed, however, was over the tactics to be deployed in order to win the ‘Votes for

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Women’ battle. British suffragettes were engaged in attention-grabbing and sensationalist action including in some instances bombing, sabotage and arson, as well as impressive mass rallies and the heckling of politicians. When activists were arrested for their illegal activities, they went on hunger strike, and were force-fed. Worried about creating martyrs, the government passed the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ in 1913, which allowed prisoners to be released and rearrested once their health had improved. Also campaigning for women’s suffrage in Britain, but advocating less militant tactics and (initially at least) more wedded to the Liberal party, was the ‘National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ (NUWSS), led by Millicent Fawcett, who had been initially introduced to women’s rights campaigners by John Stuart Mill. The NUWSS believed that the activities of the WSPU risked alienating not only the MPs who they were trying to persuade to vote for women’s suffrage in parliament, but equally the general public, and favoured using constitutional methods to bring about a change in the law. However, the split between the two factions should not be exaggerated; Fawcett publicly supported the suffragettes, for example, when they were arrested and imprisoned (Liddington 2006: 72). In France, the largest women’s organization by far was the ‘Conseil National des Femmes Françaises’ (National Council of French Women), led by Protestant philanthropists and moderate feminists Sarah Monod and, from 1912, Julie Siegfried. In the 1880s, Hubertine Auclert had been the proponent of more radical action in order to obtain the vote for women, and advocated the withholding of taxes with the slogan, ‘I don’t vote; I don’t pay’ (quoted in Bard 1995: 37). But the majority of French feminists, keen to distance themselves from political radicalism in a nation still licking the wounds of the political unrest that had preceded the Third Republic, played a more cautious political game, their tactics reminiscent of those preferred by the British NUWSS. They combined their feminist activism with the struggle for other forms of social and moral reform, and often recruited women to their cause through bourgeois charitable organizations. Not all French women agreed with this approach. As in Britain, a more militant strand of feminist thinking became gradually more influential. These more radical women succeeded in placing women’s suffrage at the top of the agenda, by persuading influential feminists such as Marguerite Durand, editor of the feminist journal La Fronde, to support their cause. Momentum was certainly gathering in France in the first decade of the twentieth century: in April 1914, the feminists obtained over half a million signatures demanding the vote for women, and in July of the

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same year 6000 women marched on the streets of Paris. This momentum, however, was to be cut short by the outbreak of war, when the vast majority of French feminists put their campaign for women’s suffrage aside in order to concentrate their efforts on patriotic and charitable activities to aid the war effort. In Germany, the bourgeois women’s movement had split into two camps by 1900, calling themselves Moderates and Radicals. There were two rival umbrella organizations, the ‘Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine’ (BDF, ‘Federation of Women’s Associations’) founded in 1894, which aligned itself with the Moderates’ views, and the much smaller breakaway radical ‘Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine’ (VFF, ‘League of Progressive Women’s Organizations’), founded in 1898. Both groups had emerged from the first national German women’s organization, the ‘Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein’ (ADF, ‘General German Women’s Federation’), founded in 1865 under the particularly restrictive circumstances prevailing in nineteenth-century Germany. The Prussian Law of Association, which prevented women from even being present at political meetings, remained in place from 1851 to 1908, making campaigning for female suffrage well-nigh impossible during this period, so the aims of the ADF were restricted to improving women’s education and employment opportunities as a way of making a space in society for unmarried middle-class women that would allow them to work in adequately paid professions and live a life independent of men. Tactics remained conciliatory and progress slow until the late 1890s, when younger members of the movement, beneficiaries of the better education and greater employment possibilities won by their forerunners and of a more liberal post-Bismarck era, became radicalized by their campaign against the state regulation of prostitution (Gerhard 1990: 248–53). For those involved in these Abolitionist campaigns, far from being rational, even-handed and altruistic, male rule had resulted in a dangerously unbalanced society that badly needed the moral guidance of women. In a neat reversal of received wisdom, these women formed a view of men as the irrational sex, slaves to their baser instincts unless checked by the greater moral power of women. It was on this basis that the radicalized women campaigned for female suffrage and a greater role for women in the affairs of the state. Although these groups understood themselves as being in opposition to one another, there was in fact a good deal of overlap, with many women having membership of both BDF and VFF. The Radicals even dominated the BDF for a brief period between 1902 and 1908, under the leadership of Radical-sympathizer,

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Marie Stritt, who called several Radicals into the leadership committee. During this period, issues such as reproductive rights, the abortion laws and female suffrage dominated the agenda and international links were fostered, but when Marie Stritt was replaced in 1910 as leader by the moderate Gertrud Bäumer, who remained president until the end of the war in 1919, the BDF returned to more conservative, inward-looking policies and tactics (Evans 1976: 146–49). The path towards female emancipation in the decades preceding the First World War was not an easy one in the countries ruled by the Habsburg Monarchy. Although the constituent parts of the AustroHungarian Empire did have their own legislatures, they had little real power, which limited the progress of feminist and suffrage campaigns. Indeed, women lost a number of political rights in the late nineteenth century, when the Habsburg regime removed property franchises which had allowed certain women to vote, albeit cast by a male proxy. This led to protests by Austrian feminists in the 1890s, and by Czech feminists who allied their cause to that of the liberal nationalists, arguing that the Habsburg government had no right to dictate who should be enfranchised in Bohemia. When in 1912, the Habsburg government declared it would deny all women the right to vote, Czech feminists issued a ‘Women’s Appeal to the Bohemian Nation’, which was published in all newspapers (Evans 1977: 98). However, as in Austria, the lack of power enjoyed by the national legislatures meant that the women’s rights movements made little progress before 1914. In Hungary, the campaign for women’s suffrage faced particularly challenging obstacles, as the nationalist movement that should have been their ally against the Habsburg government did not favour universal suffrage, since this would enfranchise non-Magyars. Moderate feminism dominated and, as was the case in many other European nations, the women involved were concerned with social and moral reform and tended to come from the upper classes. The ‘National Council of Hungarian Women’, established in 1904, for example, was led by Countess Batthyány and then, from 1910, Countess Apponyi. There were, however, a small minority of radical feminists in Hungary before the First World War. The majority of these more militant feminists were Jewish, and were associated with the Jewish bourgeois liberal Democratic Party. Their agenda was similar to that of the German radicals. Indeed, the ‘Union for Women’s Rights’, founded in 1904 and led by Rozika Schwimmer, had close allegiances with members of the VFF in Germany. Schwimmer also played an important role in international feminism, being elected corresponding secretary of the ‘International Women’s Suffrage Alliance’ (IWSA)

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Introduction

in 1913, and, along with its American president Carrie Chapman Catt, going on a speaking tour of Eastern Europe. From 1905 onwards, the women’s movement in Russia was also divided along class and ideological lines. As in other European nations, the Russian suffrage movement had its roots in bourgeois charitable organizations such as the ‘Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society’ which had campaigned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for social reform. The women at the centre of this organization, such as Anna Filosofova, Anna Shabanova and Princess Oldenburgskaya, offered practical rather than ideological solutions to the social problems of the day. The Charity Division, for example, provided nurseries, shelters, dormitories and cheap restaurants for educated and professional women who were finding it hard to make ends meet; and other ‘causes’ the women devoted their attention to included temperance and prostitution. This form of moderate ‘social feminism’ in Russia became radicalized in line with the turbulent shifts in Russian society. As Richard Stites notes, ‘The Russian women’s movement synchronized slowly with the rhythm of the nation’s social history. In times of general apathy, the feminists languished in charity work and internal dialogues; in times of stress they were galvanized into political activity’ (1978: 198). Thus, the 1905 Revolution led to the formation of the ‘Women’s Progressive Party’, led by Maria Ivanovna Pokrovskaia, and the ‘All-Russian League for Women’s Equality’. The ‘Women’s Progressive Party’, which attracted middle- and upper-class women, campaigned for full civil and political rights for women, as well as equal rights in education, employment and inheritance of property. The programme of the more militant ‘League for Women’s Equality’ demanded legal and civil equality of the sexes, as well as improvements to the working conditions of all women. Suffrage was seen as the key that would unlock these wider demands. The 1905 Revolution had thus led the women’s movement towards a much more radical agenda, and to more organized and vigorous action. This experience in Russia resembled the evolution of the women’s movement in Finland, where the Finnish nationalist movement (1898–1906) had led to the increased solidarity of the woman’s movement and to sustained agitation, which achieved their aim of women’s enfranchisement in 1906. In Russia, however, despite the efforts of the feminist and suffrage organizations in 1905–1907, the suffrage movement ran out of steam after 1907, and women were not to attain the right to vote until a decade later. In America, as Christine Bolt notes, arguments for women’s equality had been ‘buttressed by references to the nation’s founding Revolution,

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whose leaders had begun by claiming the rights of Englishmen    but had ended by claiming universal human rights’ (Bolt 1995: 10). In practice, though, it was the religious revival (the ‘Second Great Awakening’) that followed the Revolution rather than the Revolution itself that provided the opportunity for the development of the American women’s rights movement. Organized feminist action began earlier in the United States than elsewhere, the first National Women’s Rights Convention taking place in Seneca Falls, New York State, in 1848. Some of those present were women who had shifted their focus from the anti-slavery movement to the ‘woman question’, as their disenfranchisement meant they had limited powers in relation to the former. Because of the connections between these two movements, feminists in the United States frequently made the analogy between racial and sexual slavery, arguing that women, like slaves, lacked legal status and the privileges of full citizenship. This radical discourse (echoing that of the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ made at Seneca Falls which had adopted the language of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ in order to argue for the equality of men and women) tended to shift in the later nineteenth century, however, towards a more conservative rhetoric, arguing for women’s rights and suffrage on the basis of women’s ‘feminine’ qualities as wives and mothers (Buechler 1990). This shift in emphasis reflected to a large extent the increasing domination of the women’s rights and women’s suffrage organizations in the late nineteenth century by middle-class women. The social make-up and concern with ‘social reform’ of such organizations meant that they had many points in common with their sister organizations in Europe during the same period. Within this general trend, there were also regional differences in approach – the Bostonian ‘American Woman Suffrage Association’ (AWSA), founded in 1869, for example, was more conservative than the New York-based ‘National Woman Suffrage Association’ (NWSA), founded in 1868. The movement was given a stronger national voice and greater recruiting power when in 1890 these two movements merged, despite their differences, to form the ‘National American Woman Suffrage Association’ (NAWSA), with the NWSA’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton as its first president – although she was soon replaced by more moderate leaders. Progress for the American suffragists, however, was slow. Although the feminist movement was well established and had an impressively large number of followers by the twentieth century, the women’s suffrage movement was complicated by other suffrage campaigns, particularly for black Americans and immigrants. Despite its early beginnings, then, it was not until the 1900s, when

10 Introduction

the women’s movement became part of Progressivism – a more widespread movement campaigning for social reform – that real progress was made. The year before the outbreak of the First World War, for example, saw the passing of the Illinois Municipal Voting Act, the founding by Ida B. Wells-Barnett of the ‘Alpha Suffrage Club’, the first black women’s suffrage organization, and a march of more than 5000 suffragists in Washington D.C. The cases discussed above show that when the development of the women’s movement is considered from a comparative perspective, it is possible to locate ebbs and flows in the progress made in women’s emancipation in different countries. These individual variations in early feminists’ experiences and successes were largely dependent upon the flux of social and political change in their respective nations. This is not to say, however, that international or transnational feminism did not exist before 1914. On the contrary, it was during this period that women began to attempt to operate on a global level, and, given the size and early origins of the US movement, it was perhaps inevitable that American women would lead the move towards the internationalization of the women’s rights movement. The ‘International Council of Women’ (ICW) was founded in 1888 in the United States on the fortieth anniversary of the ‘Declaration’ made at Seneca Falls, and is still in existence today, enjoying consultative status with the United Nations. Its first meeting included 49 delegates from nine countries, including England, France and India. Initially, keen to promote unity and international solidarity, it did not include controversial feminist issues such as women’s suffrage on its agenda. (In 1904, following the World Congress of the ICW in Berlin, the ‘International Women’s Suffrage Alliance’ was formed by women whose principal concern was women’s enfranchisement.) Rather it concentrated on topics such as women’s access to the professions, and improving conditions and protection for working women. Its objectives were, in fact, kept deliberately vague, in order to avoid religious or political conflict. Its principle aim was to be an umbrella organization; feminists in other countries were encouraged to create national ‘Councils of Women’ which would be affiliated to the ICW. This opportunity was taken up by many countries, particularly after 1893, when the British aristocrat and liberal campaigner Lady Aberdeen became the ICW’s first president (there were 23 national members in 1914). The First World War, however, brought the difficulties of uniting disparate women with different national allegiances to the fore, and the ICW suspended its activities for the duration of the conflict. Lady Aberdeen, for example, made it clear that when it came to

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a world war, national defence did – and should – take precedence over international feminist activism: All of us are glad that women all over the world have responded to the call of duty and sacrifice in such a wonderful manner    and that it is the best guide to us if women of each nation do what they believe to be their duty as citizens of the respective country. (quoted in Gerhardt 2004: 2) It was only the committed pacifists among the ICW membership who continued to attempt to bring international feminists together, organizing an ‘International Congress of Women’ in 1915 at the Hague to discuss peace proposals.

Responses to the First World War Given the climate of widespread patriotic nationalism in the belligerent nations, it is perhaps unsurprising that the majority of organized feminists supported the war, turning their backs on their rather vague pre-war commitment to internationalism and claiming with varying degrees of credibility the status of a ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ war fought to preserve their nation’s core values (Das, Fell, Shnyrova and Siebrecht). They aligned themselves to their nation’s cause, turning the organizational and lobbying skills honed in their years of feminist activism to various forms of war work. As had been the case with the moderate middle-class feminism of the pre-war years, their wartime activities included work with the poor and needy, as well as more patriotic campaigns such as knitting clothes for the soldiers in the trenches, raising money for widows, and encouraging women to stoically accept the potential sacrifice of their husbands, brothers and sons. Yet, although many early feminists abandoned any notion of pacifist internationalism in favour of overt patriotism, they rarely lost track of their feminist goals, and frequently attempted to use pro-war nationalist discourse for their own ends. While it would have been neither tactful nor strategically sensible for women to voice their hopes that the war would advance their cause, it is clear that the mainstream women’s organizations in Europe and the United States sought to earn political rights, notably the vote, through their patriotic wartime service (Fell, Purvis and Shnyrova). In fact, feminists often made use of the dominant expectations of women in wartime to further their own cause, whatever their political or ideological affiliation (Davies).

12 Introduction

We encounter, in fact, similar arguments used in support of quite contradictory responses to the war. Catherine O’Brien, for example, shows how women used religious discourse, specifically the central Christian idea of sacrifice, as a theoretical framework to express their ideas and feelings about the war whether these were patriotic or pacifist in nature. Although the majority of women’s organizations supported the war, a significant minority spoke out against it, both at a national and individual level. The first international Women’s Peace Congress, planned jointly by Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann from Germany, Jane Addams from the United States, Rozika Schwimmer from Hungary, Emmeline Pethwick Lawrence from the UK and Aletta Jacobs from Holland, was held at the Hague in Spring 1915 and drew together over 1300 women from Europe and North America (Gelblum 1998: 311–12). During the meeting, the delegates put forward far-reaching demands for peace and equal rights and founded the ‘International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace’, which became the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ (WILPF) at the second peace congress held in Zurich in 1919 (Kuhlman). The Hague congress built on international links already present through the IWSA and the initiators were all active in the cause of women’s suffrage, even though official support from the major suffrage organizations was lacking (Vellacott 1993: 29). It is notable that the resolutions passed at the congress made a strong link between women’s lack of political influence and the fact that it had come to war in the first place; without the influence of women in government, it was implied, the strongest moral impulse for peace was lacking. These international congresses show how for certain women in the combatant nations a commitment to the ideals of pacifism and internationalism endured throughout the war despite enormous hostility towards pacifists, who were typically isolated and persecuted within their own countries. Subjected to a level of censorship that effectively prevented them from arguing their case, pacifists were presented to the public as unpatriotic and ‘defeatist’ (Kuhlman, Sharp and Shearer) and the delegates to the Hague Congress were subjected to fierce criticism from within the ranks of the women’s movement. Nationalist feminists were keen to distance themselves from the pacifists’ activities and views and to position them as unrepresentative of the women’s movement, doubtless fearing that the pacifists’ behaviour, diverging as it did from the national consensus, could bring the women’s movement as a whole

Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp

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into disrepute and dash their own hopes of gaining more rights in recognition of their wartime contribution. In Britain, the rift between the pacifists and the nationalists was given additional poignancy by the public split between members of the prominent Pankhurst family, with veteran campaigner Emmeline standing alongside her elder daughter Christabel in vocal support of the war while younger siblings Sylvia and Adela opposed it (Purvis). Yet pacifism did not necessarily mean that women were anti-nationalist or anti-patriotic. In France, the public trial of Hélène Brion gave French pacifist feminists an opportunity to argue for the compatibility of pacifist and patriotic sentiments, even to argue that true patriotism was expressed in opposition to the war (Shearer). Interestingly, the response of the Hungarian women’s movement overwhelmingly took this very stance: the Hungarian women, under the leadership of the internationally active feminist Rozika Schwimmer, combined the patriotic service to the nation associated in other countries with a nationalist viewpoint with a commitment to pacifism, internationalism and women’s suffrage that endured throughout the war (Acsády). Although they had no more power to influence the peace than they had the course of the war, the pacifist women’s victory lay in managing to maintain international contacts where others were unable to do so both during and in the aftermath of the conflict. Their deliberate stressing of emotional ties of love and understanding between women of enemy nations maintained a sense of the shared humanity of the enemy even in the face of atrocity propaganda, keeping alive the possibility that the ‘good German’, for example, could exist at a time when this seemed almost a contradiction in terms. What this brief discussion of women’s positions during the conflict reveals is that there were variations and nuances even amongst women who defined themselves as pro- or anti-war. Many women adopted certain aspects of nationalism or pacifism while rejecting others, for pragmatic, personal or ideological reasons. Although some feminists had broad sympathy with the pacifist position, for example, they felt unable to withdraw their support from their own national troops, which necessarily sometimes included friends or family members. Thus, while many commentators during World War I were keen to pontificate on the role, duties and ideal characteristics of ‘woman’ during wartime, this volume demonstrates that there was no clear consensus about what constituted the proper ‘womanly’ response to the war, even among the small percentage of women under consideration here, who had already engaged at a theoretical and practical level with the role of

14 Introduction

women in society through their involvement in suffragist and feminist organizations. As Das notes in his discussion of the responses of Indian women to the conflict, a comparative perspective is important in that it helps us to understand ‘not only the astonishingly varied and complex kinds of feminine subjectivities’ in wartime, but also ‘how they are tied to specific cultural, economic and political contexts’. The multiplicity of positions taken by suffragists and feminists in response to the First World War is further illustrated by chapters assessing the contribution of remarkable individual women. The Swiss national Elisabeth Rotten (Stibbe), for example, espoused certain aspects of internationalist pacifism in order to carry out her charity work. She exploited her international links to provide essential support for enemy civilians trapped in Germany (often these were German women who had lost their citizenship on marriage to a foreigner now interned for the duration of the war) and for German civilians deported from enemy nations. The American doctor, Esther Pohl Lovejoy (Jensen), too, was an individual whose wartime experiences as a medic in France prompted her to exploit aspects of the discourses of internationalist pacifism in order to speak and write about the wartime suffering of women – she waged a campaign against poverty and militarism that was to continue long after the war had ended. UK-born Major Mabel St Clair Stobart (Smith) set up various ‘women’s units’ that served in the Balkans, Belgium and Serbia, giving her an insight into warfare normally reserved for men and allowing her to publicly expound her political ideas. While making use of the ‘equal rights’ rhetoric common to the British suffrage movement in order to challenge received beliefs about women’s physical and mental limitations, she interestingly also turned increasingly to essentialist understandings of women’s duty to oppose the excesses of ‘masculine’ militarism in her later writings and speeches. Mirroring the shifting expectations of women during the war, once the conflict was over, women were criticized for the same jingoistic response that had hitherto been praised, while the pacifist voices that had been largely silenced and dismissed came to the fore (Sharp). The aftermath of the war saw women working together in support of international reconciliation and prevention of future conflict ( Jensen and Kuhlman). When the women of the WILPF met in Zurich in May 1919, the desire for solidarity at the women’s conference was in stark contrast to the official Versailles gathering, where the German delegation was treated as beneath contempt. While the German men were forced to accept sole responsibility for the war, German women were treated with

Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp

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warmth and tenderness by the ‘victorious’ nations, one of the German delegates describing the event in lyrical terms as ‘a precious oasis, standing alone in a wide desert’ (Heymann and Augspurg 1992: 241). The terms of the Versailles peace treaty had been made known on 7 May 1919 and discussion of these dominated the conference. For many of the delegates, the harsh terms of the treaty were ‘a typical product of male logic’ (ibid.: 243), which they saw as fostering resentment and inequality which would inevitably lead to future conflict. Overwhelmingly, the women condemned its terms: however, they took heart in the proposal of a League of Nations even while seeking to improve it along the lines of their inclusive transnationalist vision. WILPF members decried the fact that not all nations desiring to be members would be invited to do so – for the women, this made the League ‘a league of conquerors against the conquered’ that reinforced one group of nations’ power over another (WILPF 1919: 7). The Women’s Charter, drawn up at the congress, outlined a society based upon sexual equality and justice, with female suffrage and gender equality regardless of marital status. The charter sought to bring about both national and female selfdetermination by supporting national self-determination for the Irish, for Germans living in occupied territories and for people living in territorial mandates, as well as requiring that in any plebiscite mandated by the Treaty of Versailles women should have the same right to vote as men. As Erika Kuhlman points out, ‘since women did not engage in the give-and-take of diplomatic bargaining at Versailles, they could only hope to influence any proposed treaty indirectly’. And the lack of access to real political power experienced by the international women’s groups in the immediate aftermath of the war was to a large extent to continue in the 1920s and 1930s. In some nations, the end of the First World War saw real changes in women’s condition. Russian, German, British and American women, for example, were awarded the vote either during or after the conflict (Russia in 1917; Germany in 1918; Britain and the US in 1919). Other women, however, would have to wait until another world war had passed before they saw their dream of women’s suffrage realized (France in 1944; India in 1950). Even in those countries where women were enfranchised, it is doubtful that the First World War was responsible in itself for improving the condition of women. On the contrary, it has been effectively argued that there was a backlash against the broadening of women’s ‘spheres’ that took place during the war, particularly in France where the suffrage movement lost much of the ground it gained in the years before the war (McMillan 1981). Margaret and

16 Introduction

Patrice Higonnet have noted that ‘the high costs of war characteristically entail a conservative reaction, whether political or social’ (1987: 41) and the post-war societies were indeed overwhelmingly characterized by a desire for stability and the need for regeneration which tended to position women once more in a domestic, maternal role. The need to reintegrate returning soldiers, potentially a highly disruptive element, into civil society also tended to encourage a return to traditional gender roles, with women workers dismissed in favour of returning soldiers and exhorted to set their sights on marriage and motherhood. Where women had gained the freedom to enter politics, too, their work was often directed at alleviating hardship and social problems at home rather than at influencing foreign policy – in other words, women were often sidelined into a political role that was in effect a continuation of their social and charitable work. Just as during the war, the post-war period was not a conducive environment for women’s organizations to pursue ‘potentially disruptive, gender-specific goals’ (ibid.: 39). The result was that both the pacifists’ goal of influencing national governments in such a way as to make future wars unlikely and the nationalists’ hopes that their valiant contributions to the war effort would result in an increased recognition of their rights were largely disappointed.

Bibliography Bard, C. (1995) Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940, Paris: Fayard. Bock, G. (2002) Women in European History, Oxford: Blackwell. Bolt, C. (1995) Feminist Ferment: ‘The Woman Question’ in the USA and England, 1870–1940, London: UCL Press. Buechler, S.M. (1990) Women’s Movements in the United States, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Evans, R.J. (1976) The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933, California: Sage. ——. (1977) The Feminists, London: Croom Helm. Gelblum, A. (1998) ‘Ideological Crossroads. Feminism, Pacifism, and Socialism’, in B. Melman (ed.) Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace 1870–1930, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 307–28. Gerhardt, U. (1990) Unerhört: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ——. (2004) ‘The “Long Waves” of Women’s Movements from an International Perspective’, conference paper delivered at the Nordic Conference in Iceland. Available online at http://www.nikk.uio.no/arrangementer/konferens/ island04/papers_pdf/gerhard.pdf Accessed 20 September 2006. Heymann, L.G. and Augspurg, A. (1992) Erlebtes Erschautes. Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für Freiheit, Recht und Frieden 1850–1940, in M. Twellmann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Ulrike Helmer Verlag.

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Higonnet, M.R and Higonnet, P.L-R (1987) ‘The Double Helix’, in M. Higonnet and J. Jenson (eds) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 31–47. Liddington, J. (2006) Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote, London: Virago. McMillan, J.F. (1981) Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society 1870–1940, New York: St Martin’s Press. Shanley, M.L. (1989) Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850– 1895, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stites, R. (1978) The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vellacott, J. (1993) ‘A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory: The Early Work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’, Women’s History Review 2: 23–56. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) (1919) Towards Peace and Freedom: The Women’s International Congress, Zürich, 12th–17th May 1919, London: WILPF.

2

‘Indian Sisters!    Send your husbands, brothers, sons’: India, Women and the First World War Santanu Das

For the young, impressionable Maria Bibikova from Russia, the war was charged with Oriental romance. At the beginning of the war, she set off, sketchbook in hand, to draw the Indian troops who had just landed at Marseille and she was captivated by the Indian prince: ‘But I only had eyes for this prince    The diamonds in his ears, the flash of his eyes, his brilliant smile lent a sort of radiance to his face’ (Bibikoff 1915: 115). Maria’s remarkable book Our Indians in Marseilles (1915), shimmering between documentation and romance, captures much of the enthusiasm of the British press for the Indian troops. During the war years, Indian soldiers were endlessly paraded, photographed and painted, at once fanning and feeding into colonial fantasies of power and loyalty, a habit carried into official histories such as Sir James Willcocks’ With the Indians in France (1920). The response in India was largely enthusiastic: apart from some revolutionary activities abroad, the educated middleclasses and the political bourgeoisie, including the Indian National Congress, supported the war. Thus, in the prestigious Indian Review War Book published in Madras in 1917, we have a poem by an elite Indian exhorting, ‘Indian sisters!    Send your husbands, brothers, sons’ (Madhaviah in Natesan 1915: 261). Yet the actual soldiers, like their English counterparts, came to very different conclusions. Consider the letter written by Sant Singh to his wife from the front, a letter that was suppressed by the censors: ‘Our life is a living death. For what great sin are we being punished? Kill us, Oh God, but free us from our pain’ (18 September 1915 in Omissi 1999: 102). Deprived of any information and having no stake in it, what did the women of India think about this war that suddenly took away from many of them their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons – more than one million Indians were drafted 18

Santanu Das 19

as soldiers and labourers and some 49,000 killed – to an unknown land across the black seas, to fight a sahib’s war in a sahib’s land? Over the last two decades, feminist scholarship has not only recovered women’s history and literature of the First World War but has fundamentally affected the way the war is conceptualised.1 In what has now come to be known as the second wave of war criticism, there have been two exciting trends: a diversification of interest and a focus on details, opening up whole new areas of enquiry such as the experience of civilians, deserters and labourers, and of prostitutes and children. ‘There were others’, as Jay Winter notes, ‘who suffered, to whose voices we must also attend’ (Winter 2000: 10–11). Yet, the modern memory of war has remained distressingly Eurocentric: while it is now almost a critical cliché to point out the omission of women from Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), it is less often pointed out that the soldiers are usually always white, if not European. Yet India provided one and a quarter million men who fought in France, Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Africa and China. Similarly, France called upon her African colonies, and some of the fiercest battles took place in German East Africa. While writing his African history of the war, Melville Page interviewed some elderly Malawi women who remembered how men were captured at night, tied up in chains of palm leaf rope and drafted on a steamer to work as labourers or soldiers. Interviewed on 4 April 1973, Abitisindo, a Malawi woman who worked as a courier, told Melville, ‘I went there [to the war] to eat, that is all’ (quoted in Higonnet 1999: 323). The aim of the present chapter is both recuperative and analytic. I wish to recover and extend the memory of war and women in an international and multiracial context, as well as to examine the interlocked tropes of gender, colonialism and warfare through a focus on Indian women and their writings during the First World War. In a society marked by class divisions and gender inequality, and particularly at a time when few women received formal education, the written records are mostly by women from relatively elitist backgrounds. My examples range from aristocratic to upper middle-class women, where the privileges of class partly overrode the handicaps of gender. Yet, these documents – ranging from the political to the literary – illuminate not only responses to the war but in the process provide rare insights into the feminine and colonial subjectivity of the time, as well as the tangled web of nationalism, women’s movements and the war. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section examines a range of responses from Indian women to the war, and the second

20 India, Women and the First World War

section focuses on the extraordinary figure of Sarojini Naidu. What kinds of ideological, emotional or political investment did these women have in the war and how do their responses compare with their European counterparts?

Not so gentle: Princesses and seamstresses At the outbreak of the war in 1914, when the ‘King-Emperor’ sent a message to the ‘Princes and People of My Indian Empire’ exhorting them to contribute to the imperial war effort, the response among the Indian royal princes and the national bourgeoisie was largely enthusiastic. Apart from a few revolutionary nationalist groups who saw the war as an opportunity to strike at the empire with the help of German and Turkish alliances, the majority of public political opinion was unanimously in support of the war. Thus, on 12 August 1914, Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the founding figures of the Indian National Congress, describing himself ‘more of a critic than a simple praiser of the British Rule in India’ noted, ‘the vast mass of humanity of India will have but one desire in his heart viz., to support    the British people in their glorious struggle for justice, liberty and honour’ (in Natesan 1915: preface). Other senior nationalist leaders concurred: fund-raising was organised and pamphlets were produced, pledging support, one typical title (1915) being Bhupendranath Basu’s ‘Why India is Heart and Soul with Great Britain’ (in Natesan 1915: 262–64). The First World War catches the Indian national consciousness at that fragile point between a continuing (though increasingly qualified) loyalty to the British Raj and the first concerted nationalist movements. The twin impulses are evident in the observations of Mahatma Gandhi: ‘I thought that England’s need should not be turned into our opportunity, and that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands while the war lasted’ (Gandhi 1982: 317). Support for the empire at this critical juncture could later be used to press for ‘responsible self-government’ or ‘Swaraj’. The war enthusiasm among the princes who were often heavily dependent on the British government was almost hysterical. Belonging to families immensely proud of their martial traditions and feeling somewhat impotent under British rule, a European war was for them a rare adventure. Different motives were combined: to curry fresh favour with the Raj, to take part in the march of world history and to flex their political, financial and military muscle. The princes started competing with each other with extravagant offers of men, money, horses and goods. The Nizam of Hyderabad, for example, contributed

Santanu Das 21

over a million rupees. Even more extraordinary was the response of the lady rulers or Maharanis. Consider the following speeches by two of the most powerful queens in India. The first is from a Hindu princess, Taradevi, in Calcutta on 25 December 1914 and the second from the Muslim Maharani of Bhopal delivered at the Delhi War Conference in April 1918: Gentlemen, though I am a lady of such an advanced age yet I am Kshatriya and when my Kshatriya blood rises up in my veins and when I think I am the widow to the eldest son of one who was a most tried friend of the British Government I jump on my feet at the aspiration of going to the field of war to fight Britain’s battle. It is not I alone, I should say, but there are thousands and thousands of Indian ladies who are more anxious than myself, but there is no such emergency, neither will there be one for the ladies to go to the front when they are brave men who would suffice for fighting the enemies. (quoted in Bhargava 1919: 205) Is it not a matter for regret then that Turkey should    join hands with the enemies of our British Government? All gentlemen like you have read, I suppose, in the papers, how the British Government is now, as ever, having Mohamedan interests at heart.    India will leave nothing undone to justify the confidence, the love, the sympathy with which the King-Emperor has always honoured us. The need of the Empire is undoubtedly India’s opportunity.    Now that the war has entered upon a more intense phase we assure you that it will never be said that in this supreme crisis India when weighed in the balance was found wanting. (ibid.: 278–80) Official war speeches thus become the platform for the triumphant assertion of loyalty to the British Empire. Made by two of the most powerful women rulers of the time, they defy the neat coupling of women with pacifism, or indeed, with anti-colonialism. Instead of a feminist politics of resistance, or indeed a ‘maternal’ protective attitude towards the subjects, we have in each case an imperious, authoritarian female figure, sending off her men to war, somewhat like the figure of Britannia in Owen’s war poem ‘The Kind Ghosts’, where she is neither ‘disturbed’ nor ‘grieved’ by the death of soldiers whose ‘blood lies in her crimson rooms’ (Owen 1990: 158). Within the colonial context, the above comments are both fascinating and disturbing, especially in the way local caste and religious politics

22 India, Women and the First World War

are being manipulated. Kshatriya is the martial caste. In the first extract we have the image of the Hindu warrior-queen invoking the caste and gender politics of a patriarchal, hierarchical society for recruitment in the world’s first modern war. The second quotation points to a specific religious issue. When Turkey entered the war, the sultan bore the title of Khalifa (‘steward’) or religious leader. As a result, the English became anxious about the possibility of jihad from the colonial Muslim troops. Here, the local leader is being used to pacify her Muslim subjects and ensure their continuing loyalty for the war against their religious brethren, inviting comparisons with the European Jews who could be found on both sides of No Man’s Land. In her speech, the ‘need’ of the empire becomes India’s ‘opportunity’ to prove afresh her loyalty to the empire. Beside the immediate gains, it also shows what Asish Nandy has called the ‘psychological damage’ caused by colonialism (Nandy 1983: 3–4). If colonial ideology is based on the assumed inferiority of the ruled, it shows the internalisation of the racist ideology by the native rulers themselves. Found ‘wanting’ before the ‘superior’ civilisation of the West, and still smarting under the blemish of the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), the First World War becomes an opportunity to set right the racial slur; local regional honour can paradoxically be salvaged through imperial war service. The contributions of the Princess of Bhopal to the war effort runs into four pages, including £6000 to the Prince of Wales’ Relief Fund; £6500 to the Imperial War Relief Fund; £13,300 to the National War Loan; six motor cars; clothes for Indian sepoys; and donations to the St John’s Ambulance Association (Bombay), the British Red Crescent Society and the Kitchener Memorial Fund. A number of women’s organisations were also funded: the Jhansi Girls’ Brigade; British women’s hospital, London; Women’s Branch of the Bombay Presidency War; the Relief Fund; and the Silver Wedding Fund. But how did the educated middle-class women of India respond who had neither such vast resources nor fantasies of martial prowess? An insight into this class of women and their activities can be found in one remarkable article published in The Indian Review War Book in August 1915, entitled ‘Women in War’ by an author who calls herself simply ‘A Hindu Woman’. The article begins on a note of affected astonishment: ‘Woman and War! How different are the ideas suggested by the above two words!’ (in Natesan 1915: 243). She, however, swiftly proceeds to dismantle the notion that there is an inherent contradiction in the phrase by providing a long list of the exploits of woman, with examples ranging from the Indian warrior-princesses such as the Rani

Santanu Das 23

of Jhansi to the war exploits of the Grand Duchess of Luxemburg and ‘the two telephone girls of Louvain – how proud we feel to read about them!’(ibid.: 245) before choosing to focus on the role of Indian women in the present war: And the women of India? They, too, are doing what they can, though their work consists for the present in the sewing of shirts and sending gifts of chocolate and money for the soldiers. The women of Bombay alone have collected about two and half lakhs in cash for the War Fund. Mr Bhupendranath Basu has told us that the women in Bengal have offered their jewelry for the cause of the Empire. (ibid.: 245) The above account by this anonymous ‘Hindu woman’ is echoed by Mrs Palmer, the wife of the Bishop of Bombay, who sent a description of the Indian women’s war work in the Bombay Presidency to the Daily Telegraph: Indian women of all classes have shared in this work and shown great capacity. Large numbers of Hindu and Mahomedan ladies – many strictly purdah women – not only gave generously of their money, but also themselves learnt to knit and to work sewing-machines, and made hundreds of shirts and pyjamas as good as any English shop could produce. In Bombay, we have four principal racial divisions, English, Hindu, Mahomedan and Parsi, and each community chose its own lady secretary, who organized the work among the women of her own race. (quoted in Bhargava 1919: 210) Often galvanised by the wives of the colonial administrators, Indian women started knitting socks, banians, shirts, caps, waistcoats and other items of clothing. They contributed to war charities such as the Imperial Indian Relief Fund, the Prince of Wales Fund, the Silver Wedding Fund and particularly the ‘Our Day’ Fund. A 300-bed hospital for Indian soldiers was set up and fully furnished by women in Bombay, and three ambulance trains were provided for use between Bombay and upcountry hospitals. Finally, Indian women were asked to equip a 500-bed hospital at Alexandria and, within a month, all the linen required for it was prepared and despatched: 3000 sheets, 3000 pillowcases, 2500 blankets, over a thousand pairs of pyjamas and other items of clothing. If the drafting of over a million soldiers to Mesopotamia and France is one of the biggest examples of mass transportation, the knitting-centres

24 India, Women and the First World War

in India, organised and managed by women for the benefit of English Tommies, give us new ways of thinking about globalisation, warfare, and female labour. These knitting centres, however, went beyond their utilitarian war function. To the Indian women, they provided the first threads in knitting together a fantasised international community of women-workers, at once united and devastated by the war. Started as part of the national war effort, they provided a glimpse into and identification with a global female community. ‘Women are always’, writes our ‘Hindu Woman’, ‘the greatest sufferers in a war. They have to send away their husbands and children and fathers and brothers to fight, waiting for the worst tidings from the seat of war’ (in Natesan 1915: 246). While Gilbert and Gubar’s thesis of a radical feminist politics during the war years based on a selective reading of war writings and posters has been powerfully debunked by Claire Tylee (1990), it is important to note that this stepping of women en masse into the man’s world, however fleeting or traumatic, did provide a pan-European narrative of female empowerment for this Hindu woman: ‘And thousands of women in England, France and Russia are doing valuable work in various directions such as organising relief kitchens, fostering orphans and the like. Many are stepping into the places of men as typists, clerks and waiters’ (in Natesan 1915: 245). However, it is only in the concluding section of the article entitled ‘A Suggestion’ that we find the first stirrings of a feminist consciousness: But the nature of woman is one that craves for a direct form of sympathy. So, if the women of India send, either out of the funds already collected or by a separate collection, a separate sum, ‘as a token of love to sorrowing English women from sympathising Indian sisters’, to the wives of poor British soldiers who have died in the present war, it will create a lasting bond between the two countries as nothing else has done hitherto.    The women of Britain will feel that the women of India have a heart large enough to feel for them and the result will be the strengthening of the ties between the two nations both politically and sentimentally. (ibid.: 246) What is extraordinary about the above account is at once the idealism and lucidity with which the empathy among women during wartime is evolved into a political vision; the relation between coloniser and colonised with all its ignominy is momentarily forgotten before this utopian notion of international sisterhood born out of sympathy and suffering. Though still pro-War and pro-empire, it is indeed a vision

Santanu Das 25

of the ‘gentler sex’ as warring communities of nationalist men are here supplanted by an international community of loving women. The masculine world of contracts and competition is rejected before this ‘bond’ of the heart, an international feminist politics of affect that will bind ‘the two countries as nothing else has done hitherto’. India, rather than Europe, is to take the initiative in this new venture, but can it overcome the insidious politics of colonialism? In the short story ‘Mutiny’ by Swarnakumari Devi – the first Indian woman editor and founder of ‘Sakhi Samiti’ (Ladies’ Club) – the first-person woman narrator feels a sense of profound estrangement from her European counterparts on the issue of war.2 Our ‘Hindu woman’, however, calls for a ‘prominent leader of society’ (ibid.) who, she wishes, would put her plan into action. Her plea found its answer in the figure of Sarojini Naidu.

Sarojini Naidu: ‘Poetess, peacemaker, politician, priestess’3 Ironically, it was the First World War that brought together two of the most prominent nationalist leaders of India: Mahatma Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu. Gandhi was sailing from South Africa to England when the war was declared. On 6 August 1914, he reached England. In his autobiography, he remembers the momentous encounter with Naidu amidst the excitement of the war: The Lyceum, a ladies’ club, undertook to make as many clothes for the soldiers as they could. Shrimati Sarojini Naidu was a member of this club, and threw herself whole-heartedly into the work. This was my first acquaintance with her. She placed before me a heap of clothes which had been cut to pattern, and asked me to get them all sewn up and return them to her. (Gandhi 1982: 318) Naidu came to take part in the war efforts of Gandhi, who in 1914 had formed an Indian ambulance corps, and, after her return to India, she worked for the Ladies’ War Relief Association (see Higonnet 1999: 65). While Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most celebrated political figures of the twentieth century, Sarojini Naidu is no longer much remembered outside India. Yet, in the early decades of the twentieth century Naidu was an internationally celebrated figure. An eminent poet in English, she was known as the ‘Nightingale of India’, and her admirers included Rabindranath Tagore, Arthur Symons and Edmund Gosse. An ardent champion of women’s causes, she was at the centre

26 India, Women and the First World War

of different women’s movements in India and in 1917 she led the All-India Women’s Deputation to Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, arguing for the political franchise for Indian women. One of the foremost leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, she ceaselessly campaigned for greater Hindu–Muslim unity, asking different groups to ‘become one in the service of the Motherland’ and became the president of the Indian National Congress in 1925 (‘Co-operation among communities’ in Naidu 1918: 228). Naidu thus remains one of those emblematic figures in whom poetry, politics and feminism (though of a traditional kind) come together. But how can we reconcile her anti-colonialism and feminism with her support for the colonial participation in the war? Ambivalence and contradictions were for Naidu a colonial as well as a family heritage. Born in 1879 into a distinguished Bengali family in Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu belonged to the educated bourgeois elite for whom the empire was, to use Asish Nandy’s phrase, an ‘intimate enemy’. On the one hand, there was immersion in and adoration for English literature and culture, and on the other, a growing resentment against the ignominy of colonial rule and a corresponding commitment to India’s nationalist struggle.4 Thus Sarojini’s father, the Edinburghtrained scientist and nationalist Dr Agorenath Chatterjee, would court arrest for spreading ‘Swadhesi’ (‘Home Rule’) but at the same time would punish his daughter for refusing to speak in English. Sarojini took her revenge by not only mastering the English language – at sixteen, she left for England to complete her education in London and Cambridge – but by becoming, as the Victorian critic Edmund Gosse noted, ‘the most accomplished living poet of India’ writing in English. Her first collection of poems The Golden Threshold was published in London in 1905. It was favourably reviewed in the Times, the Manchester Guardian, Athanaeum, Daily Chronicle and Spectator.5 A lushly sensuous lyricist who interwove Indian themes with a late Romantic style heavily influenced by Shelley and Tennyson, she burst onto the international literary scene as the ‘Nightingale of India’. Arthur Symons was captivated by ‘a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and under partly Western influences’ (quoted in Naidu 1918: Preface). And yet, just as the principles of Western liberalism were enthusiastically soaked up by the native elite only to later fuel their anti-colonialism, so would Naidu use this passion for and mastery over ‘a Western language’ to strike at the heart of the empire. As early as 1904, Naidu attended the annual

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session of the Indian National Congress at Bombay and recited the following lines: The nations that in fettered darkness weep, Crave thee to lead them where great mornings break, Mother, O Mother, wherefore dost thou sleep? Arise and answer for thy children’s sake! (from ‘Ode to India’, quoted in Sengupta 1966: 48) The trope of the mother to describe the nation is a recurrent one in the nationalist literature of the time, though ‘fettered darkness’ has also a Miltonic ring. According to the feminist Indian historian Tanika Sarkar, ‘For Bengalis, accustomed to the worship of a variety of female cults, emotional resonances connected with an enslaved mother figure tended to be particularly powerful’, as in the popular song: ‘Our Mother is now in the hands of the foreigner’ (Sarkar 2005: 251). There was also a contemporary social dimension to the affective power of the image. Sympathy for marginalised and downtrodden women in a patriarchal society is used to galvanise emotion for ‘Mother India’ just as the humiliation and misery of colonial subjugation are simultaneously used to understand the plight of women. In the history of early-twentieth-century India, the nationalist cause and women’s emancipation have been closely connected. Political leaders such as Annie Besant, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru encouraged women out of the purdah system to join the struggle for independence, and there were illustrious women social reformers such as Swarnakumari Devi and her daughter Saraladevi Chaudhurani (Basu 1990: 17). As early as 1886, Swarnakumari Devi, sister of the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, formed the ‘Sakhi Samiti’ (Ladies’ Club) to inspire women in the nation’s cause, and together with her husband, she edited the Bengali journal Bharati, becoming the first Indian woman editor. In 1889, she attended the fourth session of the Congress at Bombay along with other women such as Kadambini Ganguli, Pandita Ramabhai and Mrs Kashibai Kanitkar, all of whom would distinguish themselves as educationalists and social reformers.6 But Sarojini Naidu was one of the first Indian women to devote herself full time to politics, yoking together the struggle for political independence and the women’s movement, making the nationalist–feminist alliance the central credo of her incandescent political oratory.7 The lyric ‘I’ of her poems effortlessly spills into her political manifestos as time

28 India, Women and the First World War

and again she foregrounds her identity both as a woman and as a nationalist: ‘I say it is time for us all, women of India, to awake, whatever our race, or caste, or creed,    and [achieve] those lofty and patriotic ideals’ (in Naidu 1918: 73). ‘Let the womanhood of the country wake and work’ she continues, speaking at the Indian National Social Conference on 30 December 1915 about ‘Women in National Life’, ‘the one question that has never changed since the beginning of time itself, and life itself, the duty of womanhood, the influence of womanhood, the sanctity of womanhood, the simple womanhood as the divinity of God upon earth’ (ibid.: 96). At a meeting on indentured labour on 19 January 1917, she asks, ‘Is national righteousness possible when the chastity of your womanhood is assailed?’ (ibid.: 128). Admittedly, Naidu’s brand of feminism was traditional and conservative, circumscribed within the notions of a patriarchal, heterosexual society and glorying in the idea of a self-sacrificing, often abject, woman (usually the mother figure): sympathy and understanding rather than anger or dissidence was the route to liberation. Yet, if early-twentieth-century feminism includes a commitment to gender equality, to women’s education and political enfranchisement, and more generally to her ascent, then Sarojini Naidu would surely qualify as its most passionate advocate in India. Her politics, though by no means radical, was rooted in a solid understanding of the social and political reality of India. She ceaselessly toured the country, speaking at different women’s organisations, arguing for women’s education and political rights, the rights of widows and establishing a women’s home, tying these causes to a nationalist agenda: ‘I only understand the great abiding principles of patriotism which impelled each generation to give its own contribution of loving service to the great Motherland, in upholding the honour of the Motherland and in adding to the pleasure of the Motherland’ (ibid.: 100). It is remarkable in this context that Naidu would not only support India’s participation in the war, but would use her ‘feminist’ rhetoric to glorify it. Consider ‘The Gift of India’, written for the Report of the Hyderabad Ladies’ War Relief Association, December 1915, and later collected in The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and Destiny 1915–1916: Is there aught you need that my hands withhold, Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold? Lo! I have flung to the East and West, Priceless treasures torn of my breast,

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And yielded the sons of my stricken womb To the drum beats of duty, the sabres of doom. Gathered like pearls in their alien graves, Silent they sleep by the Persian waves. Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands. They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France. Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep Or compass the woe of the watch I keep? Or the pride that thrills thro’ my heart’s despair And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer? And the far sad glorious vision I see Of the torn red banners of Victory? When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease And life be refashioned on anvils of peace, And your love shall offer memorial thanks To the comrades who fought in your dauntless ranks, And you honour the deeds of the deathless ones, Remember the blood of thy martyred sons! (Naidu 1917: 5–6) What would have been a lush, somewhat sentimental, war lyric from an English poet in a distinct late Victorian-early Georgian vein becomes rich and strange when produced by a nationalist Indian woman. The tropes of gender, nation and colonialism are fiercely knotted in the above poem. Note the way the nationalist/feminist trope of the abject Indian ‘mother’ – from ‘Ode to India’ or from ‘Awake’ – with its lines, ‘Waken, O mother! Thy children implore thee, / Who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee!’ (Naidu 1918: 43)8 is here exploited to legitimise and glorify India’s ‘gift’ to the empire. A standard trope of anti-colonial resistance flows and fuses with imperial support for the war with breathtaking fluency. The poem remains a powerful example of how literature illuminates the fault lines of history, exposing its contradictions and ambivalences. Anglicisation and indigenousness, residual colonial loyalty and an incipient nationalist consciousness, patriarchal glory and female mourning are all fused and confused in the above poem. More than about the war or a tribute to India, Naidu’s poem is an ode to the complex and intimate processes of colonialism. The most articulate

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Indian woman nationalist is here found to be steeped by virtue of her class and education in the English poetic tradition. In the early nineteenth century, what British colonisation in India did most successfully was to produce a new class: an anglicised, indigenous elite immersed in English cultural and literary traditions. A classic example is the Indian poet Michael Madhusudhan Dutt who declared, ‘Yes – I love the language – the glorious language of the Anglo-Saxon in all its radiant beauty.’9 Though this adoration would significantly change in the latter half of the century with the stirrings of a nationalist consciousness, one could see the continuation of this anglicised colonial sensibility in Naidu. While the abstract imagery of ‘drumbeats of duty, sabres of doom’ or the ‘torn red banners of Victory’ is reminiscent of the Jessie Pope school of poetry that Owen so famously ridiculed, the aestheticisation of the dead soldiers in the second stanza with its sensuous vocabulary – ‘pale brows’, ‘broken hands’, ‘blossoms mown down by chance’ with their murmur of labials and sibilance – links the poem with the verse of Wilfred Owen, as it looks back to Tennyson, Swinburne and Yeats. In fact, the knotted relation between the tropes of gender, nation and war in the poem is richly resonant with Owen’s ‘The Kind Ghosts’ with its disturbing combination of misogyny and eroticisation of violence. Owen imagines Brittania as a femme fatale who lures her men to death: She sleeps on soft, last breaths; but no ghost looms Out of the stillness of her palace wall, Her wall of boys on boys and dooms on dooms. She dreams of golden gardens and sweet glooms, Not marvelling why her roses never fall, Nor what red mouths were torn to make their blooms. (Owen 1990: 158) Naidu’s poem, like Owen’s above, shows a common inherited Georgian vocabulary in its use of words like ‘doom’, ‘red’, ‘torn’ and ‘bloom’, but is also Owen’s poem turned upside down. The woman is no longer a seducer addressed in the third person by a male poet, but rather a bereaved woman imagined in the first person. The nation is no longer Britannia but ‘Mother India’ with whom the female poet and implicitly the Indian reader identifies. The affective power of the war-bereaved woman in this poem is here rooted in the native trope of Mother India ‘fettered’ by the colonial yoke. Thus, while pro-war and seemingly derivative, it is at the same time gently subversive. It testifies to

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the complexity of the colonial encounter, of how literary influences are negotiated, and Naidu manages to inscribe it with both a burgeoning national consciousness and her feminine identity. Indeed, the poem is significant for the imagination of the nation and the writing of Indian history. If one of the standard devices for the success of colonialism is the ideology that native history mattered only as an extension of the imperial drama rather than having any independent existence or value, Naidu brilliantly uses the war to align the native contribution with global history. Her poem is not an aria for the death of the high European bourgeois consciousness but rather for the just recognition of the Indian soldiers; they fight not only in ‘Flanders and France’ but also in Egypt and Persia, revealing a different and more international geographical imagination of the war than that found in the First World War verse of Owen, Sassoon or Brittain. Within the nationalist context, phrases such as ‘the pride that thrills through my heart’ or the closing line ‘Remember the blood of martyred sons’ gather particular intensities of meaning, especially when read alongside her political writings on India’s participation in the war. At the Madras Provincial Conference in 1918, she made the following appeal: It is, in my opinion, imperative that India should give the flower of her manhood without making any condition whatsoever, since Indians were not a nation of shop-keepers and their religion was a religion of self-sacrifice    Let young Indians who are ready to die for India and to wipe from her brow the brand of slavery rush to join the standing army or to be more correct, India’s citizen army composed of cultured young men, of young men of traditions and ideals, men who burnt with the shame of slavery in their hearts, will prove a true redeemer of Indian people. (Quoted in Bhargava 1919: 208–09) This political manifesto is in many ways a continuation of – or perhaps a prelude to – the poem: the maternal metaphor of the nation underwrites both, but the nationalist agenda is explicit here. The smarting phrase ‘nation of shop-keepers’ leaps out of the page and partly explains why this anti-colonial nationalist whose aim was to ‘hold together the divided edges of Mother India’s cloak of patriotism’ would support India’s imperial service. It also reveals one of the most insidious effects of colonialism: the internalisation by the dominant native class of the ideology of racial and cultural inferiority, as evident in a piece

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of doggerel verse by an anonymous Indian (presumably male) poet: ‘Who calls me now a coward base, / And brands my race a coward race?’ (quoted in Bhargava 1919: 218). Suffering from the humiliation of colonialism, fighting in France alongside the Europeans becomes, within the colonial psychology, a way of restoring the honour of the country, even if the result is death. Imperial war service thereby becomes a route to nationalist vindication. The last line of her poem reads, ‘Remember thy martyred sons’. Is Naidu asking India to remember her sons, or, is the empire called upon to remember India’s ‘gift’? The maternal metaphor binds together empire, colony and the female poet. There is also a certain political shrewdness that was shared within the Indian National Congress: support for the war at this stage could later be used to press for greater national autonomy. Indeed, early in 1916, when asked to defend the rights of the native Indians to carry arms, which the English had banned, Naidu rose to the occasion, citing the bravery of the Indian troops and the sacrifice of the Indian women as a proof of loyalty and using it as an emotional lever: It may seem a kind of paradox that I should be asked to raise my voice on behalf of the disinherited manhood of the country, but it is suitable that I who represent the other sex, that is, the mothers of the men whom we wish to make men and not emasculated machines, should raise a voice on behalf of the future mothers of India. Have we not, the women of India, sent our sons and brothers to shed their blood on the battlefields of Flanders, France, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, when the hour comes, for thanks, shall we not say to them for whom they fought    remember the blood of martyred sons, and remember the armies of India and restore to India her lost manhood. (‘The Arms Act’, Naidu 1918: 102–03) What is important to note is the way Naidu once more capitalises on her position as a woman and a mother, turning it into a position of moral and political strength. But at the same time, the identity of the ‘woman’ is dependent on ‘sons and brothers’ and her rhetoric operates very much within conventional gender norms, with its stress on ‘manhood’. What we find repeatedly in the poems and speeches of Naidu is an acute consciousness of and attention to gender difference – to her position as a woman – as well as a passionate attempt to advance the lot of Indian women, but seldom any versions of radical feminism or explicit challenge to Indian patriarchy.

Santanu Das 33

Naidu’s conservative feminist politics – where advancement for the cause of women flows seamlessly into nationalism as well as imperial support for the war – sits gawkily, even unfavourably, with the progressive international feminism which opposed war, aligning it with patriarchy.10 The most celebrated spokeswoman for the latter position is the Virginia Woolf of Three Guineas: ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Woolf 2000: 234).11 It is a particularly acute and powerful insight from Woolf as, through a brilliant piece of ratiocination, she converts the social and political marginalisation of women into a position of (in)difference, aligning international feminism with pacifism. If the country had denied women the right to education or property, reducing her to a ‘slave’, she is, by the same logic, now impervious to any form of patriotism, regarding fighting as a male act ‘to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share’(ibid.: 234). This would be an extremely attractive and valuable model for future feminists (though its essentialist nature would come under scrutiny today) but it is equally important to consider Woolf’s immediate qualification: ‘when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s year by the cawing of rooks’. Barred from Oxbridge or the privileges of learning Greek, Woolf’s radical critique of patriarchy, empire and war was partly enabled by, even while reacting against, the security and confidence afforded by her upper middle-class English background with its roots solidly in Victorian traditions, and in fact in empire. Part of her private money came from an inheritance left behind by an aunt who had been killed after falling off a horse in India. Woolf’s vision of an international feminist community and its indifference to war is idealistic and speaks largely to an educated, enlightened, white middle-class audience, and is possible perhaps only at a certain level of national, social and economic progress. Moreover, belonging to the most powerful nation, Woolf can claim not to want a country, even though the abdication of Edward VIII brought forth a rush of emotion: ‘I thought what a Kingdom! England! And to put it down the sink   ’ (entry for December 1936, Woolf 1979 v.10: 41). Having actually lost a country to foreign subjugation, Naidu cannot make the same claim. Confronted with urgent issues of colonial oppression, widespread poverty, illiteracy and brutal forms of patriarchy such as child marriage, Naidu cannot evolve her critique of colonialism or gender inequality into the idealistic model of an anti-nationalist, antiwar international feminism: immediate needs and practical remedies

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prevailed. Naidu’s feminism has to be nuanced to the political and cultural specificities of India. In an atmosphere of racial subjugation and indignity where a united national front against the colonialists was the need of the day, international feminism took a back seat. Naidu could not perhaps afford to divide native society along gender lines or participate in the imagined global community of pacifist women. Within the practical as well as the ‘psychological limits’ imposed by colonialism, she worked relentlessly and succeeded spectacularly. India’s support in the war, though regressive from the hindsight of postcolonial politics, bore fruit: it directly led to the Secretary of State Montagu’s famous declaration in 1917 of the progressive realisation of responsible self-government in India. Moreover, Naidu’s passionate oratory inspired thousands of Indian women to come out of the purdah and join the struggle for independence. What the comparison between Woolf and Naidu highlights is the question of feminism and cultural difference, something we have been alerted to in recent years, and this has been an underlying theme of this chapter. Discourses of war and feminism not only intersect with each other, but are also embedded in a larger matrix of historical and cultural forces, whether they are of colonialism, class, religion or race. The present chapter is only a small attempt towards a more broad-based, multiracial recovery and understanding of women’s lives and stories during the First World War as well as trying to renegotiate the space between the war zone and the home front. To engage with the Indian woman’s story is essentially to reach out to the furthest corners of the home front where the war was being endlessly mediated, constructed, obfuscated and half-understood. It is true that they did not experience the national upheaval experienced by women in France, England and Germany but at the same time we have to take into account the mothers, wives or daughters of the thousands of men who died, as well as those imperious, imperial women whose politics went against the pacifist feminist alliance. Second, the woman’s story of the war in a comparative and international context helps us to understand not only the astonishingly varied and complex kinds of feminine subjectivities, but how they are tied to specific cultural, economic and political contexts. What I am arguing for is that gender has to be nuanced to other categories of knowledge and influence as well as to cultural and regional specificities. While I have compared Naidu’s account with Woolf’s, one might also effectively compare Naidu’s ‘Gift of India’ or Devi’s ‘Mutiny’ to a play such as Mine Eyes Have Seen12 (in Tylee et al. 1999: 31–35) by the Afro-American writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson and explore the relations

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between gender, war and different patterns of racial discrimination and anxiety. What we need is a whole community of scholars working in dusty archives and in different languages on particular histories and seemingly insignificant lives to piece together the broken accents of women at war.

Notes 1. Critics such as Margaret Higonnet, Jane Marcus, Claire Tylee and Trudi Tate have made gender concerns central to war criticism (see Higonnet 1987; Marcus 1989; Tylee 1990; Rait and Tate 1997). 2. Swarnakumari Devi’s intriguing story is extracted in Higonnet 1999: 384–89. 3. Cousins, Margaret, The Awakening of Asian Womanhood, 1922: 116. 4. The standard biographies are Sengupta 1966; Baig 1974 and Banerjee 1998. Some early works on her are K.K. Bhattacharya (April 1949) ‘Sarojini Naidu, the Greatest Woman of Our Time’, Modern Review, and R. Bhatnagar (n.d.), Sarojini Naidu: The Poet of a Nation, Allahabad. 5. Two more volumes followed in quick succession: The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). 6. ‘Saraladevi Chaudhurani, daughter of Swarnakumari, took an active part in nationalist movements, composed a song urging the people of different provinces to join the freedom struggle and trained a group of fifty girls to sing this song in chorus at the Congress session in 1901. The proceedings of the 1902 session of the Congress at Ahmedabad commenced with the singing of the National Anthem by Lady Vidyagauri Nilkanth’ (Basu 1990: 17). 7. Many of these speeches are collected in Naidu 1918. Quotations from this collection are referenced within the text. 8. This poem, dedicated to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was recited at the Indian National Congress, 1915, and collected in The Broken Wing (Naidu 1918: 43). 9. Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu (1854), quoted in R. Chaudhuri, ‘The Dutt Family Album and Toru Dutt’ in A. Krishna Mehrotra (ed.) (2003) A History of Indian Literature in English New York: Columbia University Press, 53–69: 53. See this article for insights into the anglicised, colonial mind. 10. Many of the contributors to this volume outline feminist responses along these lines: see, for example, Purvis, Shearer, Sharp and Smith. 11. See especially Barrett’s introduction (xli–xlix), which points out how Woolf’s position has since delighted ‘globally minded feminists’ and then proceeds to explore Woolf’s ‘intense ambivalence about feminism’ (xxxiv). 12. One-act playlet first performed in Wilmington, USA, 1918 (in Tylee et al. 1999, 31–35).

Bibliography ‘A Hindu Woman’, Women In War, in G.A. Natesan, pp. 243–46. Baig, T.A. (1974) Sarojini Naidu, Delhi: Publication Division, Government of India.

36 India, Women and the First World War Banerjee, H. (1998) Sarojini Naidu: The Traditional Feminist, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. Basu, A. (1990) ‘The Role of Women in the Indian Struggle for Freedom’, in B.R. Nanda (ed.) Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, London: Sangam, pp. 16–40. Bhargava, M.B.L. (1919) India’s Services in the War, Allahabad: Standard Press. Bibikoff, M. (1915) Our Indians at Marseilles, trans. L. Huxley, London: Smith, Elder & Co. Cousins, M. (1922) The Awakening of Asian Womanhood, Madras: Ganesh & Co. Fussell, P. (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gandhi, M.K. (1982) An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. M. Desai, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dunbar-Nelson, A. (1918) Mine Eyes Have Seen, in C. Tylee, E. Turner and A. Cardinal (eds) (1999) War Plays by Women: An International Anthology, London: Routledge, pp. 31–35. Higonnet, M. (ed.) (1999) Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I, New York: Plume. Higonnet, M. et al. (eds) (1987) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven: Yale University Press. Madhaviah, A. (1915) ‘England’s Cause is Ours’, in G.A. Natesan (ed.), p. 261. Marcus, J. (1989) ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’. Afterword to H. Zenna Smith [1930] Not So Quiet    Stepdaughters of War, New York: The Feminist Press, pp. 241–300. ——. (2004) Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race, New Brunswick: Rutgers. Naidu, S. (1917) The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and Destiny 1915–1916, London: William Heinemann. ——. (1918) Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu, Madras: G.A. Natesan. Nandy, A. (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Natesan, G.A. (ed.) (1915) The Indian Review War Book, Madras: G.A. Natesan. Naorji, D. (12 August 1914) ‘Message’, in G.A. Natesan: Preface (opposite contents page). Owen, W. (1990) [1920] The Poems of Wilfred Owen, in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press and Chatto and Windus. Rait, S. and Tate, T. (eds) (1997) Women’s Fiction and the Great War, Oxford: Clarendon. Singh, S. (18 September 1915) ‘Letter to his Wife’, in D. Omissi (ed.) (1999) Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914–1918, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 102. Sarkar, T. (2005) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, Delhi: Permanent Black. Sengupta, P. (1966) Sarojini Naidu: A Biography, London: Asia Publishing House. Tylee, C. (1990) The Great War and Women’s Consciousness, Basingstoke: Macmillan. ——. (1988) ‘ “Maleness run riot” – The Great War and Women’s Resistance to Militarism’, Women’s Studies International Forum 2: 199–210. Tylee, C. (ed.) with Turner, E. and Cardinal, A. (1999) War Plays by Women: An International Anthology, London: Routledge. Willcocks, Sir J. (1920) With the Indians in France, London: Constable.

Santanu Das 37 Winter, J. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. (2000) ‘Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History 35: 7–11. Woolf, V. (1979) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, in A. Olivier Bell (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——. (2000) [1938] A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, in M. Barrett (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin.

3 Martial Spirit and Mobilization Myths: Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany∗ Claudia Siebrecht

Yes, in these weeks in August, it was as if we women had entered a new world. Not only were we witnesses to the most powerful piece of history that mankind has ever experienced; we also discovered new depths within our own soul. All these great events: the experience of unity, the pulling together of the nation’s strength into one noble will, the heroic mood of our troops, the thousand and one small acts in which the great consciousness of our nation showed itself – to all of these our soul responded, and continues to respond every day – in sacred trembling, the depth and greatness of which we have never known before. No love, no matter how happy or sad it made us feel, no art, no matter how much it stirred us, no work and no happiness had ever made us feel this elevation. In us Germany speaks, feels and wills – our personal soul merges and rises within the soul of our nation.1 (Bäumer 1914: 6–7) This extract from a war pamphlet written by Gertrud Bäumer, leader of the ‘Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine’ (BDF), the umbrella organization of the German women’s movement, illustrates a reaction to the outbreak of war in August 1914 that was both emphatic and patriotic. The elevated language conveys an intense emotional response that was characteristic of the majority of women’s publications of the time. Leading members of the German women’s movement, among them, as ∗ I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Grace Lawless Lee Fund of Trinity College Dublin for supporting my research.

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well as Bäumer herself, Dr Agnes von Harnack, Dr Hanna Hellmann, Dr Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner and Helene Lange, invested much thought and effort into defining the relationship between women and war and explaining its historical dimension, generally concluding that women were indispensable to the war effort (Harnack 1915; Hellmann 1917; Lange 1914). War was perceived as an opportunity for re-inventing women’s identities, or shift the focus within them. Countless wartime publications, magazine articles, public lectures and pamphlets – written by women – demonstrate how these ideas were spread.2 Although these activities were continued throughout the war, an accumulation of publications discussing women’s ‘inner attitude’ to the war emerged during the first months of the conflict, which highlights the importance of this question for many women at the time. But how and why exactly did women mobilize for war? What were their ‘ideas of 1914’? In this chapter, I will argue that an influential section of the German women’s movement gave the war effort their full support.3 It will be seen, moreover, that their mobilization for war was based on a positive image of the conflict and the prospect of establishing an influential role for women as cultural missionaries in wartime and post-war society. Instead of being incorporated into the broader analysis of First World War history, gender issues and the role of women in Germany have traditionally been treated as a separate historiographical field. This narrow view has been generated by publications studying the role of bourgeois women in the confined space of their associational life and organizational structures.4 These works, while revealing much about the nature and scope of women’s wartime activities in the ‘Nationale Frauendienst’ (NFD, National Women’s Service) or the Red Cross, tell us little about the inner process of national mobilization of women for the war effort. The term ‘mobilization’ here is used in line with the concept of cultural mobilization as developed by John Horne in State, Society and Mobilization During the First World War (1997). This understanding widens the usage of the term to not only describe the process of military and economic mobilization, but to also refer to less tangible areas relevant to national mobilization, such as contemporary mentalities, ideas and ideologies. It also allows us to include the cultural forms which expressed and interpreted those ideas – through language, day-to-day conduct, writing and art – in the attempt to decipher contemporary understandings of war. The perception of a widespread enthusiasm for the war in Germany has been re-evaluated by Jeffrey Verhey, who concludes that it was more

40 Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany

determination than enthusiasm that characterized popular support for the war in Germany (2000). His study found considerable differences in popular support for the war, which varied according to social class and geographic location. Women’s responses to the outbreak of war, however, were not analysed within the context of his study. Equally, the substantial literature on men’s ‘ideas of 1914’ largely omits women’s views (Rürup 1984; Ungern-Sternberg and Ungern-Sternberg 1996)5 although numerous women’s journals and magazines provide rich and comparable sources. These reflect on the events of August 1914 from a different angle, revealing the specific meaning that the ‘spirit of 1914’ had for many organized bourgeois women in Germany.

The belief in a beneficial war Throughout the war, the overwhelming Augusterlebnis (i.e., the experience of August 1914) was remembered as a moment of intense power, when the prevailing purpose was to serve the Fatherland and enthusiasm for war was displayed by women irrespective of their political orientation. SPD member Lily Braun and National Liberal Gertrud Bäumer, for example, both warmly welcomed the outbreak of war. August 1914 was remembered as a period that ‘no one could forget’, the experience of which alone ‘would have been worth living for’ (Bäumer 1914: 7; Braun 1915: 9).6 In the following years, the crucial events of August 1914 were often recalled in order to revive women’s feelings of patriotic solidarity. There was simply no room for an alternative reading of those experiences and women were frequently assured that by fulfilling their national duty, they were taking the only acceptable course of action. ‘In August 1914 under looming danger, women experienced a new feverish love – that of the fatherland,’ recalled an author of the Calendar of the ‘Patriotic Women’s Association’ (Vaterländischer Frauenverein) in 1916, ‘To serve this country, to serve the greater whole of the nation, means honour and great satisfaction for every daughter of Germany’7 (Vaterländischer Frauenverein 1916: 10). The perceived unity of the nation, through the inclusion of women into the Volkskörper (‘body of the nation’),8 relieved them from an existence which they quickly denounced as having been dull and meaningless (Bäumer 1914: 5). The novelty of the prospect of fighting for an aim that was acknowledged by society as a whole, instead of engaging in the minority struggle that constituted the ‘women’s question’, secured the support of many formerly inactive women. As the following excerpt from Gertrud Bäumer’s article suggests, the war was also understood

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as a rite of passage for the women’s movement, putting to the test its ambitious goal of educating women to citizenship: The war rouses us and asks us [the women’s movement], as it asks every other great German cultural movement: what is your significance, now at this moment? Encircled by enemies, our fatherland summons the forces for its defence.    Now we are faced with the question: do the education and work of the women’s movement make women more prepared for this trial of strength that our nation has to accomplish at the moment? If the answer to this question is not an unequivocal ‘yes’, then our work so far stands condemned and is finished.9 (Bäumer 1915: 3) Anna Pappritz, member of the executive committee of the BDF and leading abolitionist, saw the successful mobilization of women as a direct result of the efforts of the BDF to educate its members to feel like responsible citizens of the state, with the duty to dedicate their skills and efforts not merely to the narrow circle of the family, but to the fatherland and the nation (Pappritz 1915: 33). During the war, therefore, it was women’s own exemplary behaviour that lent them citizen status. Women imagined themselves as belonging to the German nation, in full awareness that this implied both rights and duties.10 The war was held up as standing for the needs of the nation, to whose aid women had the right and the duty to come. Many women, moreover, believed that the war would have a beneficial effect not only on the ‘lethargic’ nation as a whole, but also specifically on women’s characters. The war was thought to bring out the true nature of the individual woman, and it was believed that the demands of the time would lead to a natural selection among women and exclude those ‘who had not been touched by the great time’ (Riese 1916: 87–88). War was thought to bring out the best in everyone: it was believed to be an educator, eliminating all weakness of character, and emphasizing personal strength (Harbou 1916; Meerheimb 1916: 190). Thus, war was viewed as a cleanser, a chastener that would improve the inner qualities of the nation (Hellmann 1917: 577–82; Herber 1916: 126–30; Pochhammer 1916: 182–83). The writer Helene Christaller asserts that to her ‘the war was the most gigantic means to bring about a catharsis and generate personal improvement’ (Christaller 1916: 167). Women stressed this aspect in particular, as they believed that the war would provide them with experiences that would be comparable to men’s military education and its presumed

42 Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany

positive influence on character (Lange Pentecost 1915; Pappritz 1915). The universal experience of war was highlighted: it was not something women could be excluded from. The experience of war, it was argued, would naturally engender equality between German men and women (Levy-Rathenau 1915; Riese 1916; Schwerin-Löwitz 1916). The war was commonly understood to have been caused by the jealousy and resentment of Germany’s neighbours, which justified the ‘defensive war’ strategy. Even from the viewpoint of the alleged victim, war was not perceived as something terrible and devastating. On the contrary, it was accepted as a necessity, as fate or as a trial sent by God (Ufer-Held 1915; Krane 1916: 154). If God wanted the world to go through war, it was reasoned, then it could only be with the purpose of bringing about a purer and stronger Germany, whose victory would then amount to proof of the superiority of German culture (Bieber 1915: 5–20).

Women as cultural missionaries The centrality of the concept of Kultur (‘culture’) for women’s reading of the war was illustrated by opinions which associated the elevated status of German culture with previous victorious wars: Culture as an ethical force in wartime is important for warfare. Misery could not be endured without lively intellectual and spiritual influences. Culture provides strength for war. The flourishing of German culture has always been associated with war: the Wars of Liberation and 1870/71, which provided the basis for a new intellectual development.11 (Lange 1915: 16–18) This key statement by Helene Lange emphasizes the imagined interdependence of war and culture. Not only was the war fought to defend German culture, but culture itself was vital for strengthening the moral force needed to continue fighting. The war was presented as being in the tradition of the Wars of Liberation (1813–1815), and the FrancoPrussian War (1870–1871), which were understood as flourishing times for German culture. Both of these periods of conflict had provided the basis for greater intellectual growth. Consequently, in the early years of the war similar expectations were held of the current struggle (ibid.; Bieber 1915: 14–16). Most importantly, the Kulturkrieg (‘cultural war’) was a war that could be fought by means other than force of arms, thereby providing an

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opportunity for women to engage actively in the war effort. In tune with their ‘ideas of 1914’, women outlined wartime tasks for themselves. The proclamation that women were destined to fulfil a special mission in this present war, namely ‘to serve the fatherland as keepers and guardians of its material and cultural goods’ (Hamann 1916: 29), was the core of their wartime ideology, and was presented as women’s crucial national responsibility (Bäumer 1914: 1–11; Lange 1914: 712–14; Pappritz 1915: 33; Stöcker 1916: 93). Women put themselves forward as the moral backbone of the nation and the embodiment of great German qualities such as loyalty, bravery, diligence and a sense of duty (Böhme 1916: 55). The women’s mission encompassed ‘sustaining the national character’ and creating ‘durable peace-time values’ (Levy-Rathenau 1915: 68). By outlining a role for women as preservers of German cultural values in wartime, these female activists had found a niche for themselves in the national war effort. More generally, many women understood culture to represent Germany’s standing in the world. The war was held to endanger German culture in general, and so was seen as a threat to the position of women in their role as guardians of German cultural ideals. This explains the cultural imperialist attitudes which were displayed, and the attempts to unite the forces of German culture. As Gertrud Bäumer wrote, women were engaged in what could be called the ‘German cultural mission’, the special influence Germans were destined to exert on the intellectual property of the world (Bäumer 1915: 2). The depiction of German women as Kulturträgerinnen (‘bearers of culture’) stressed their contribution to the interests of the state and the needs of the nation. Specifically outlined to strengthen the morale of the home front – and the fighting front – by ennobling the essential character of Germans, the encouraging role taken on by these women even appeased the antifeminists, who modified their outspoken criticism somewhat in response (Planert 1998: 178). The vigorous activities women engaged in on behalf of the war effort suggest that their attempt to establish a vital position for themselves in wartime society was motivated by true national interest and irrefutable patriotism. In September 1914, under the auspices of the BDF, an ‘Appeal to the Women of Neutral Countries’ was composed to defend the righteousness of the German cause in the war, justify German military advances, and counter accusations of atrocities being committed by German soldiers (Helene Lange Archiv (HLA) B Rep. 235, 187/1: 2741). The atrocities were described as ‘inventions of the foreign press’, which were to be corrected by selected

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propaganda material that was disseminated along with the ‘Appeal’. The signatories included Gertrud Bäumer, Hedwig Dohm and Marianne Weber, as representatives of the bourgeois women’s movement, yet support for the venture was far more widespread. Well-known writers such as Clara Viebig, Ida Boy-Ed, Ricarda Huch and Isolde Kurz, as well as artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Sabine Lepsius and Cornelia Pazcka-Wagner, all signed the document which was sent to over 4000 addresses abroad (‘Die Kriegsarbeit des BDF’ in BDF 1916: 7). This initiative indicates genuine loyalty to the national cause and is evidence of abundant support for the waging of war. Some of the more ambitious signatories of the ‘Appeal’ hoped that the document would lead to the establishment of a women’s propaganda bureau. Although the planned bureau never materialized, this engagement in wartime propaganda highlights the sincerity which women waged their own cultural war, and the efforts made to justify their wartime role as preservers of German culture. This role, which was founded upon what they saw as the virtues of the German people, was endangered by the depictions of ‘German brutes’ in French and British newspapers, which women therefore rejected.12 The notion of German soldiers committing atrocities challenged the professed superiority of German characteristics and of German culture, which in turn contested women’s roles as its representatives. The distribution of the ‘Appeal’ signified the denial of the accusations which would endanger the idealized picture of ‘true Germanness’. If women were to act as preservers of cultural ideas, and genuinely believe in this concept, it was necessary to present German culture as pure, clean and worthy. The link between the women’s ‘Appeal’ and the well-known ‘Appeal to the World of Culture’, a manifesto signed by 93 leading male intellectuals, writers and artists in October 1914 in defence of Germany’s war aims and denying the charge of German atrocities, is obvious (Ungern-Sternberg and Ungern-Sternberg 1996). Both documents show loyalty to the national cause, but there were differences in emphasis between the two appeals that appeared to arise from the difference in gender roles. The male cultural elites emphasized the rejuvenating and liberating effect of war.13 Male writers and painters especially welcomed the personal dimension of the experience of war, and saw it as an opportunity to live through all dimensions of people’s emotions and expand their understanding of human nature (Shapiro 1976: 132–72). The idea that the fighting itself, the direct physical engagement in war and battle, would bring about cultural salvation and personal fulfilment attracted many men, but was absent from women’s ideas of the war.

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They could neither share the practical side of defending German culture, nor could they physically protect the fatherland from its surrounding enemies (Paret 1983), hence their wartime roles prioritized more spiritual tasks in the cultural war that was being fought. Both men and women believed that enduring the war would finally make them worthy of the intellectual heritage left to them and enable them to match the great minds of the past (Der Kunstwart 1 September 1914). War was understood by both sexes as an opportunity for personal growth and for proving individual worthiness. This interpretation of the conflict shifted the war from the political level to the personal and private. The improved self, it was believed, would be able to serve the nation even better. Common ground was also found in visions of an influential post-war German culture that would guarantee the longterm continuity of German cultural ideals. The idea that these efforts would outlast their own mortal existence was a major motivation and justification to support the war. To secure their position as ‘cultural missionaries’, women went beyond the preservation of German culture by formulating cultural imperialist ideas.14 These envisaged German culture obtaining a worldwide influence. As Helene Lange wrote in 1915 ‘German culture is guided with an iron hand along a path which will transform it into a force to shape the world’ (1915: 11).15 The phrasing suggests that German culture was not simply led by human influence but had divine guidance. This indicates that culture in contemporary minds had attained a sacred character. Accordingly, those who engaged in the war were seen as mediators acting on behalf of stronger forces. This understanding of war ruled out the possibility of questioning the rights and wrongs of one’s own activities, let alone those of war. Women had created a potent framework to justify why the war had to be fought. The path of German culture was understood to be pre-determined, and the war guided its direction. German women, moreover, believed they could serve to homogenize national culture by ‘planting the seeds of true German values’ which had been envisaged before the war for the colonies and which was now planned for Oberost, the occupied territory on the Eastern Front.16 There, political and economic dominance were to be secured by cultural hegemony (Chickering 1988: 156–85; Wildenthal 1996: 371–95). Many of the wartime tasks were understood to be a preparation for the time after the war, when – after the expected German military success – vast amounts of ‘cultural work’ awaited German women (Engels-Reimers 1915: 531; Lange 1915: 18; Möbius 1916: 176–81). In effect, in the eyes of many German bourgeois women, the war was fought in the name of cultural ideals and

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their own position in relation to the war and their standing in society was directly and inextricably bound up with the fate of German culture. This can be seen as an attempt to create roles for women in which they would be identified, first and foremost, through ‘German culture’, an emancipatory vision that would relegate to secondary status any identities for women that were primarily defined through marriage or housework. The necessity and importance of the women’s mission was facilitated by a general interpretation within German society of the war as a cultural war (Beßlich 2000; Flasch 2000; Mommsen 1996). And, given the important status of culture in Wilhelmine Germany, in taking responsibility for the preservation of culture, women were claiming to be in charge of a vital element of national identity. The understanding of the German nation as a Kulturnation (‘cultural nation’) is a prerequisite to understanding the importance placed on culture by women. Culture was felt to have represented the German nation and its tradition long before the actual political manifestation of the German nation state in 1871 (Nipperdey 1998: 533–47; Wehler 1995: 952). It was not only in Germany, however, that culture played a vital role for the national mobilization. Cultural elites in Britain and France understood the German onslaught as an expression of her militaristic nature and expansionist culture, whereas Britain and France were defending the basics of human civilization (Hanna 1996; Hynes 1990; Mommsen 1997). Consequently, the very reasons to go to war for these three belligerent nations were – in contemporary minds – ultimately connected to each nation’s understanding of culture. The concept of women as bearers of German cultural values, moreover, was not an invention of women’s wartime propaganda in 1914. A cultural mission for women had previously been envisaged at the time of the Wars of Liberation and the Franco-Prussian War. During the time of the French occupation after 1806, women’s roles as preservers of a specific ‘German’ culture had been an essential part of national defence because the foreign – French – influence in language, customs and morals was understood to be responsible for the German malaise (Planert 2000: 29). Women’s task of preserving ‘German’ national customs and ‘German’ culture was considered to be a major national duty. Women were also responsible for passing on the understanding of culture and values to the next generation to guarantee the continuation of these ‘German’ characteristics. The importance of this task had been formulated by female and male authors alike.17 The qualifications women needed to teach the coming generation provided the grounds for arguing for an improvement in women’s education and participation in

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national events. From the point of view of German women, this had led to a re-evaluation of women’s roles as educators not only for children, but for the nation as a whole.18

Conclusion Bourgeois German women, and members of the women’s movement in particular, were among the most fervent and consistent supporters of the German war effort. The BDF denounced the conciliatory efforts of the women’s peace conference in the Hague in the Spring of 1915 and, two years later, a press statement was issued by the BDF committee against the proposal by the American president Wilson for a negotiated peace in 1917 (HLA 187/1: 2742a; Evans 1976: 220). This was warmly received by Hindenburg (HLA 187/1: 2742b). Moreover, as late as October 1918, public appeals were released by the BDF, providing moral support and upholding the idea of a victorious outcome of the war for Germany (HLA 187/1: 2742c). Despite the fact that it would have been difficult to maintain the idea of a ‘good’ war in the light of the devastating human costs and shocking reports from the front, and despite the fact that the vision of a cultural renewal in Germany with women at the centre remained but a vision, both were influential and powerful sets of beliefs. As preservers of German cultural values and defenders of moral standards, women fully intended to include themselves in concepts of national identity. Women saw themselves as part of the nation and consequently believed they had the right and duty to contribute to the war effort. The confidence and fervour of women’s publications and actions as part of, and in support of, the nation can be understood as an expression of their citizenship. These efforts illustrate that women were actively engaged in the discourse about the meaning and purpose of their social roles. The result was an alternative role model of great national relevance, in the service of no lesser ideal than that of the Fatherland. Although inspired by mobilization myths, women’s engagement in the war effort did have an effect in areas such as moral support, economic warfare, relief work, and care for the war wounded, and thus shaped the war and, arguably contributed to its long duration. Furthermore, active lecturing gave these women a position of authority in rural areas and in front of audiences from less privileged backgrounds (Altmann-Gottheiner 1915: 19–26). Women from different social classes all over Germany were provided with explanations about the nature and necessity of women’s sacrifice in wartime. Their affiliation with

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the BDF and co-operation with the military administration (GrevenAschoff 1981) equipped speakers with the necessary authority in their attempt to instil a sense of duty in women throughout the country and impose upon them lifestyles adapted to the constraints of wartime society. Patriotism and idealism were fundamental components of women’s ‘ideas of 1914’, seemingly placing the promises of national unity of August 1914 within women’s reach. The elevated national ideas and embellished visions for women’s identities, that were proclaimed in the speech and writing by many of their contemporaries, equipped women with a framework that rational thought and reason could not contest. Even the political emancipation of women lost significance in relation to the expectations raised by the sanctified national effort in which women participated at the outbreak of war in 1914. The enthusiasm for war and perceived unity which they experienced in August 1914 ensured that some of these women would be supportive of any movement that promised to repeat the experience. This explains, in part, the consent granted by certain sections of the female population in Germany to the advance of National Socialism during the years of the Weimar Republic.19 Although fuelled by the fiction of a worthwhile war and the prospect of a prestigious role within society for women, the extent of activism and idealism on behalf of the national war effort manifested by many women underlines the relevance of myths for their understanding and support of the conflict.

Notes 1. ‘Ja, wir Frauen sind in diesen Augustwochen wie in eine neue Welt eingetreten. Wir sind nicht nur Zeugen des gewaltigsten Stücks Geschichte gewesen, das die Menschheit noch erlebte, wir haben auch in unserer eigenen Seele Neuland gefunden. Alle diese großen Tatsachen: das Einswerden, dies rauschende Zusammenschließen unserer Volkskraft in einen ehernen Willen, die heroische Stimmung unserer Truppen, die tausend kleinen Züge, in denen die große Besinnung unseres Volkes sich zeigt: auf das alles antwortete unsere Seele – und antwortet sie noch jeden Tag – mit heiligen Schauern, die wir so groß, so bis in die Tiefe aufwühlend nicht kannten. Keine Liebe, so sehr sie uns beseligte oder schmerzte, keine Kunst, so sehr sie uns erhob und hinriß, keine Arbeit und kein Glück haben uns diese Erhebung kennen lehren. In uns sprach, fühlte, wollte Deutschland, unsere persönliche Seele ging auf in der Seele unseres Volkes.’ 2. For example see Bäumer 1914; Harbou 1916; Harnack 1915; Hellmann 1917; Lange 1915; Metzdorf-Teschner 1914. 3. For dissenting voices in the women’s movement, see Evans 1976. 4. See Gersdorff 1969; Greven-Aschoff 1981; Wurms 1998. 5. See also Brocke 1985; Flasch 2000; Lenman 1997; Mommsen 1994, 1996, 1997.

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6. Compare Braun 1915: 9; Bäumer 1914: 7. 7. ‘Im August 1914, als das Vaterland in Gefahr war, erfuhren die Frauen eine neue heiße Liebe: die des Vaterlandes. Diesem Lande, dem großen Ganzen seines Volkes zu dienen, bedeutet jeder Tochter Deutschlands Ehre und hohe Befriedigung.’ 8. Although usage of this and similar expressions is primarily associated with Nazi terminology, between 1914 and 1918 they dominated wartime language as applied by educated bourgeois women. 9. ‘Der Krieg reißt uns heraus, er stellt uns [der Frauenbewegung] wie allen anderen großen Bewegungen deutschen Kulturwillens die Frage: Was bedeutet ihr jetzt, in diesem Augenblick? Umringt von Feinden, überschlägt und sammelt unser Vaterland die Mächte seiner Verteidigung [    ] Jetzt fragt es sich: machen die Erziehung und die Arbeit der Frauenbewegung die Frauen fähiger zu der Kraftprobe, die unser Volk im Augenblick zu leisten hat? Wenn die Antwort auf diese Frage nicht unbedingt und selbstverständlich ‘ja’ lauten kann, so ist unsere bisherige Arbeit gerichtet und erledigt.’ 10. On the concept of imagined nationalism, see Anderson 1991. 11. ‘Kultur im Krieg ist wichtig als sittliche Kraft für die Kriegsführung. Not könnte ohne Kultur, ohne die lebendigen geistigen Kräfte nicht bestanden werden. Kultur gibt Kraft für den Krieg. Die Glanz- und Reifezeit deutscher Kultur geschah immer in Verbindung mit Krieg: die Freiheitskriege und 1870/71, welche die Grundlage einer neuen geistigen Entwicklung legten.’ 12. On German atrocities, see Horne and Kramer 2001. 13. Brocke 1985; Flasch 2000; Lenman 1997; Mommsen 1994, 1996, 1997. 14. On cultural imperialism see Mommsen 1975. 15. ‘Mit eiserner Hand wird unserer deutschen Kultur der Weg gewiesen. Der Weg heißt: Die deutsche Kultur zu einer Macht der Weltgestaltung machen.’ 16. On Oberost, see Frobenius 1917. I would like to thank Daniel Steinbach for the reference on women in the colonies, see Eckenbrecher 1913. 17. During the eighteenth century, the responsibility for the education of the offspring had been a male duty. The visible shift of the education of children to women’s duties during the Napoleonic Wars attached new national importance to the role of women. See Planert 2000; Allen 2000. 18. I would like to thank Matthew Stibbe for drawing my attention to the article by Kaufmann, which also portrays women as defenders in particular of religious and family values. See Kaufmann 1986. 19. On the importance of the ‘spirit of 1914’ for popular responses to National Socialism, see Fritzsche 1998.

Works cited Unattributed newspaper articles Der Kunstwart (1 September 1914) ‘Den Geistern der Ahnen’, 338–39.

Archives and manuscript collections Archiv der Deutschen Frauenbewegung, Kassel (ADF) Helene Lange Archiv, Landesarchiv Berlin (HLA)

50 Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany HLA B Rep. 235, 187/1: 2741–2743: Wartime Appeals and Resolutions of the BDF. HLA 187/1: 2741 BDF (September 1914) ‘Appeal to the Women of Neutral Countries’. HLA 187/1: 2742a Gertrud Bäumer and Alice Bensheimer (24 September 1917), Press statement ‘Women’s Rally against Wilson’. HLA 187/1: 2742b (27 September 1917), Telegram from Generalfeldmarschall von Hiindenurg to the BDF. HLA 187/1: 2742c BDF (4 October 1918), ‘Resolution for Continued Support of the War’.

Bibliography Allen, A.T. (2000) Feminismus und Mütterlichkeit in Deutschland 1800–1914, Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Altmann-Gottheiner, E. (1915) ‘Hausfrauenpflichten in der Kriegszeit’, in BDF 1915, pp. 19–26. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bäumer, G. (1914) ‘Der Krieg und die Frau’, in E. Jäckh (ed.) Der Deutsche Krieg: Politische Flugschriften, Vol. 15, Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. ——. (1915) ‘Die Frauen und der Krieg’, in BDF 1915, pp. 2–8. Beßlich, B. (2000) Wege in den ‘Kulturkrieg’: Zivilisationskritik in Deutschland, 1890– 1891, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bieber, M. (1915) Krieg und Kultur, Kassel: Scheel. Böhme, M. (1916) ‘Begeisterte Hingabe’, in K. Jünger, pp. 54–56. Braun, L. (1915) Die Frauen und der Krieg, Leipzig: Hirzel. Brocke, B. vom (1985) ‘Wissenschaft und Militarismus. Der Aufruf der 93 An die Kulturwelt und der Zusammenbruch der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in W.M. Calder (ed.) Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 649–719. ——. (1915) Kriegsjahrbuch des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine für 1915, Berlin and Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. ——. (1916) Heimatdienst im ersten Kriegsjahr, Berlin and Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. Chickering, R. (1988) ‘Casting their gaze more broadly: Women’s patriotic activism in Imperial Germany’, Past and Present 118: 156–85. Christaller, H. (1916) ‘Die große Hoffnung’, in Jünger, pp. 167–69. Engels-Reimers, C. (1915) ‘Wir Frauen und der Krieg’, Die Welt der Frau 34: 531– 39. Evans, R.J. (1976) The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, London: Sage Publications. Flasch, K. (2000) Die geistige Mobilmachung: Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der erste Weltkrieg; Ein Versuch, Berlin: Fest. Fritzsche, P. (1998) Germans into Nazis, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Frobenius, E. (1917) ‘Eine Frauenfahrt an die Ostfront’, Die Frau 9: 530–41. Gersdorff, U. von (1969) Frauen im Kriegsdienst 1914–1945, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Greven-Aschoff, B. (1981) Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1884– 1933, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.

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Hamann, E.M. (1916) ‘Durchhalten!’, in Jünger, pp. 29–30. Hanna, M. (1996) The Mobilisation of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Harbou, T. von (1916) Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg: Einblicke und Ausblicke, Leipzig: Hesse and Becker. Harnack, A. von (1915) Der Krieg und die Frauen, Berlin: Springer. Hellmann, H. (1917) ‘Die innere Stellungnahme der Frauen zum Krieg’, Die Frau 10: 577–82. Herber, P. (1916) ‘Herzensbildung’, in Jünger, pp. 126–130. Horne, J. (ed.) (1997) State, Society and Mobilisation in Europe During the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, J. and Kramer, A. (2001) German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hynes, S. (1990) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London: Bodley Head. Jünger, K. (ed.) (1916) Deutschlands Frauen und Deutschlands Krieg: Ein Rat–, Tat–, und Trostbuch, Gesammelte Blätter aus Frauenhand, Stuttgart: Lutz. Kaufmann, D. (1986) ‘Die Ehre des Vaterlandes und die Ehre der Frauen oder der Kampf an der äußeren und inneren Front. Der Deutsch-Evangelische Frauenbund im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik’, Evangelische Theologie 46: 277–92. Krane, A.F. von (1916) ‘Die Feuerprobe’, in Jünger, pp. 154–56. Lange, H. (1914) ‘Die große Zeit und die Frauen’, Die Frau 12: 709–14. ——. (1915) ‘Der Krieg und die deutsche Kultur’, in BDF 1915, pp. 14–19. ——. (Pentecost 1915) Die Dienstpflicht der Frau: Vortrag gehalten auf der Kriegstagung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Lehrerinnenvereins Pfingsten, Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner. Lenman, R. (1997) Artists and Society in Germany, 1850–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Levy-Rathenau, J. (1915) ‘Die Lehren des Krieges für die Frauenberufsbildung’, in BDF 1915, pp. 60–68. Meerheimb, M. von (1916) ‘Das große Auferstehen’, in Jünger, pp. 189–94. Metzdorf-Teschner, E. (1914) Die allgemeine Wehrpflicht der Frau während des Krieges, Leipzig: Verlag Neueste Frauen-Korrespondenz. Möbius, H. (1916) ‘Neue Grundlagen’, in Jünger, pp. 176–81. Mommsen, W.J. (1975) ‘Wandlungen der liberalen Idee im Zeitalter des Imperialismus’, in K. Holl and G. List (eds) Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, pp. 262–415. ——. (1994) Bürgerliche Kultur und künstlerische Avantgarde, 1870–1918: Kultur und Politik im Deutschen Kaiserreich, Frankfurt, M. and Berlin: Ullstein. ——. (ed.) (1996) Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg, Munich: Oldenbourg. ——. (1997) ‘German artists, writers and intellectuals and the meaning of war, 1914–1918’, in J. Horne 1997, pp. 21–38. Nipperdey, T. (1998) Deutsche Geschichte: 1800–1866; Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist, Munich: Beck. Pappritz, A. (1915) ‘Nationaler Frauendienst’, in BDF 1915, pp. 26–33. Paret, P. (1983) ‘The artist as Staatsbürger: Aspects of the fine arts and the Prussian state before and during the First World War’, German Studies Review 6: 421–37.

52 Bourgeois Women and the ‘Ideas of 1914’ in Germany Planert, U. (1998) Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich: Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. ——. (ed.) (2000) Nation, Politik und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegung und Nationalismus in der Moderne, Frankfurt, M.: Campus. Pochhammer, M. (1916) ‘Helft erziehen!’, in Jünger, pp. 182–83. Riese, C. (1916) ‘Dem Mann zur Seite’, in Jünger, pp. 87–88. Rürup, R. (1984) ‘Der Geist von 1914’, in B. Hüppauf (ed.) Ansichten vom Krieg. Vergleichende Studien zum Ersten Weltkrieg in Literatur und Gesellschaft, Königstein: Forum Academicum, pp. 1–30. Schwerin-Löwitz, G. (1916) ‘Mithelfen!’, in K. Jünger (ed.) Deutschlands Frauen und Deutschlands Krieg. Ein Rat–, Tat–, und Trostbuch. Gesammelte Blätter aus Frauenhand, Stuttgart: Lutz, pp. 148–50. Shapiro, T. (1976) Painters and Politics: The European Avant-garde and Society, 1900– 1925, New York: Elsevier. Stöcker, H. (1916) ‘Die innere Welt’, in Jünger, pp. 92–94. Ufer-Held, F. (1915) Stark in Gott: Ein Wort an Deutschlands Frauen in schwerer Zeit, Barmen: Müller. Ungern-Sternberg, J. von and Ungern-Sternberg, W. von (1996) Der Aufruf ‘ An die Kulturwelt!’: Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart: Steiner. Vaterländischer Frauenverein (1916) Notizkalender Vaterländischer Frauenverein, Berlin: Carl Henmanns Verlag. Verhey, J. (2000) Der ‘Geist von 1914’ und die Erfindung der Volksgemeinschaft, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Wehler, H.-U. (1995) Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Von der deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges, 1849–1914, Munich: Beck. Wildenthal, L. (1996) ‘She is the victor: Bourgeois women, nationalist identities, and the ideal of the independent women farmer in German Southwest Africa’, in G. Eley (ed.) Society, Culture and the State in Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 371–95. Wurms, R. (1998) ‘Krieg dem Kriege – Dienst am Vaterland. Frauenbewegung im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in F. Hervé (ed.) Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Cologne: Papy Rossa, pp. 84–114.

4 ‘French women do not wish to talk about peace’: Julie Siegfried and the Response of the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises to the First World War Alison S. Fell

In April 1915, the National Council of French Women (CNFF) published a manifesto explaining why they would not be sending French delegates to the International Congress of Women that had gathered at the Hague to discuss peace proposals to end the war. The manifesto, signed by Julie Siegfried and Avril de Sainte-Croix, president and general secretary of the CNFF, argues that a pacifist stance was not possible given France’s involvement in what they consider to be a purely defensive war against a ‘barbarous’ German aggressor: Those of you who know France, know that much was achieved in our country for the pacifist cause, and that the French nation would only have accepted a defensive war. We dreamt of peace and understanding, if not in the world, then at least in Europe. We did not want to believe those who pointed to the growing threat on the other side of the border. How were we forced to face up to reality? The reasons are well known, and this will be proven for posterity by certain diplomatic documents. As current events have proved to us that unilateral pacifism is futile, if not dangerous, we will only continue to promote pacifism when, in the future, peace will have provided us with an effective guarantee against one nation’s spirit of domination.1 (quoted in WILPF 1915: 313) The manifesto reveals how for mainstream French feminists loyalty to the fatherland was to take precedence over loyalty to the international 53

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women’s rights movement. In some ways this was surprising; as the manifesto suggests, the CNFF had previously, along with other national women’s organisations affiliated to the ‘National Council of Women’, promoted pacifist internationalism rather than belligerent nationalism. During the First World War, however, to be patriotic was necessarily to be nationalist. As Joanna Shearer notes in Chapter 6, ‘pacifism’ in France was inescapably connected to ‘defeatism’, and pacifists tended to be condemned as cowardly traitors. Accordingly, the majority of French feminists declared themselves to be ‘true’ patriots, supporting the hostilities, taking their nation’s cause as their own and condemning the enemy – even if they had enjoyed previously good relations with ‘enemy’ women’s groups.2 Siegfried published a letter that appeared in several newspapers shortly after the declaration of war, for example, declaring, ‘We count on the presidents of our departmental branches, on all of our delegates as well as individual members, so that at this time of anguish, but also of hope in a just cause, France will find in our association all the devotion that she has a right to expect from us’3 (Siegfried 25 August 1914). Siegfried supported the government further by going on a lecture tour in 1915, persuading women to devote themselves to the war effort. In this chapter, I shall examine in more detail the reasons that lay behind the CNFF’s support of the war, focusing in particular on the ways in which their patriotic nationalism during the war intersected with their feminist thinking. There were very few French feminists who did not rally to the flag during the war years. This is partly because many prominent campaigners for women’s rights and suffrage had close allegiances with Third Republic political parties, notably with moderate Republicans, who were generally middle-class and socially conservative, and Radicals, who were politically centrist and anti-clerical (McMillan 1981). Julie Siegfried’s husband Jules, for example, was a moderate Republican and member of the French parliament (1888–1897; 1902–1922) and senate (1897–1900). Yet it was not only the Republican leaders of the CNFF but also the socialist feminists who supported the war, declaring themselves in favour of the ‘Union sacrée’ (‘Sacred Union’, i.e., the wartime government that brought together politicians from opposing political parties) in 1914.4 The few feminists who remained committed pacifists during the war, such as Hélène Brion, Jeanne Mélin, Madeleine Pelletier and Louise Saumoneau, were censored, sidelined and in some cases attacked in the pages of the feminist press (Bard 1995: 18; Darrow 2000: 296). Undoubtedly, there were important variations in the aspects of pro-war, nationalist discourse taken up by individual

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women. While some expressed virulently Germanophobic sentiments, others emphasised instead their hopes for a swift end to the conflict. Despite the differences in tone, however, the widespread support of the war manifested by the French women’s movement stands in stark contrast to other nations where the response was notably more mixed, as the other chapters in this volume attest. It also clearly disappointed the organisers of the 1915 International Congress of Women at the Hague, who refused to read the manifesto during the conference, arguing that ‘its presentation [would have been] both technically out of order and offensive to neutrality and international good feeling’ (WILPF 1915: 311). What the manifesto shows is the extent to which French feminism, at least as it was expressed in the pages of La Française as well as the speeches, letters and articles produced by the leadership of the CNFF, overtly embraced nationalist discourse and rejected the pacifist internationalism that had characterised the pre-war women’s movement. The response of the mainstream French women’s movement to the outbreak of the First World War has been described as a U-turn not only in relation to its avowed pre-war pacifism, but also in relation to the increasing confidence and growing ambitions of French feminists during the Belle Époque. Christine Bard, in her history of the French women’s movement, argues that ‘the momentum for political activism that the feminist movement showed during the Belle Époque was suddenly broken by the outbreak of war’5 (Bard 1995: 47). Similarly, Felicia Gordon and Máire Cross note how the ‘unflinching opposition to war of    most feminist groups prior to the war was transmuted almost overnight into fierce patriotic optimism’ (1996: 12). At the time, feminists in France who remained committed to their pre-war pacifism were equally horrified by the enthusiastic espousal of the war effort as their new ‘cause’ by the majority of their former collaborators. Doctor and pacifist feminist Madeleine Pelletier acerbically commented that she had not spent eleven years fighting for feminist causes ‘in order to come to the point of knitting socks [for soldiers]’ (quoted in ibid.: 11). Equally outraged, pacifist activist Jeanne Mélin condemned the conversion of former pacifist sisters to nationalism, arguing that it was the ‘duty of feminist and pacifist women from all belligerent and neutral nations to make their protest heard when faced with such horrific carnage’6 (quoted in Bard 1995: 93). There are several factors that help to explain the ‘conversion’ of the vast majority of French feminists and suffragists to nationalism. First, it should be noted that the CNFF’s commitment to pacifism had only ever been one of a general agreement with vague pacifist principles. In 1908, for example, the ‘National Congress for Women’s Civil Rights

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and Suffrage’ had stated, ‘Feminism is in principle pacifist.    But one does not have the right to claim to love one’s country if one makes a gesture, says a word which could appear to weaken its defence’7 (quoted in Rabaut 1978: 225). Second, the pro-war attitude of the CNFF indicates the pervasive nature of patriotism in France at the outbreak of the war. In nationalist discourse, the needs of the individual were to take second place to the needs of the nation. This sentiment is clearly behind the patriotic declarations made by members of the women’s movement, such as the editors of the feminist journal La Fronde who on its reappearance in 1914 stated that the journal’s aim was no longer to fight for women’s political rights, but to ‘help them to carry out their civic duties’ (quoted in Rabaut 1978: 261). Third, it is possible to argue that feminists’ alignment with patriotic nationalism was more strategic, aimed at using their work during the war years as a lever with which to boost support for women’s suffrage. The war was a major opportunity for French women to prove their worth as citizens, and thus ‘earn’ the vote at the end of the hostilities from a government that would have been forced to listen to their arguments. And while this opportunity may have been more consciously exploited by some than others, it is clear that many statements made by French feminists during the war years are aimed at persuading public opinion of the justice of the call for votes for women in the light of women’s efforts for their nation. This strategic use of nationalist discourse is evident, for example, in an article by Avril de Sainte-Croix entitled ‘The Role of Women after the War’, which appeared in 1917. She writes, Women will be called on, in the future, to play a much larger role than in the past, if we want France to rise again quickly from the ruins that the war will leave in its wake. Women will have to replace the heroes who have died for their country. They will have to broaden their activities, broaden their perspective. And these new women will need a new status. How can we treat as minors individuals whom we ask to act as adults, as citizens? Women have proved, during the war, what they are capable of doing. Ill-prepared for the onerous task with which they were faced, they were able to carry it out.8 (Sainte-Croix 24 March 1917) It is my contention, however, that the response of the CNFF to the First World War was not as much of a U-turn as pacifist feminists such as Pelletier and Mélin suggested. Taking Julie Siegfried as an illustrative case-study, I will suggest that the alignment of the CNFF with nationalist

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ideals during the war is to a large extent consistent with the bourgeois, Protestant philanthropy that was the principle motivation of its leaders. The religious, social and political climate that had led to Julie Siegfried’s leadership of the French women’s movement in 1912 meant that during the First World War many French feminists saw no contradictions in combining the struggle for women’s rights with an enthusiastic support of the tenets of nationalism. Before discussing in more detail the uses of nationalism by members of the CNFF, it is important to outline first the importance of Protestantism as a key intellectual context for the French women’s movement during this period.

Protestant feminism in France Although Protestants formed only a tiny percentage of the population (between 1 and 2 per cent in 1900), there was a disproportionately large number of wealthy Protestant women involved in French suffrage organisations and women’s rights movements.9 The majority of the leadership of the CNFF in 1914, including Julie Siegfried and Avril de Sainte-Croix, came from the Parisian Protestant elite. In general terms, Protestantism, which preached doctrines of individualism, was a more fertile ground than Catholicism for a nascent suffrage and women’s rights movement. Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven Hause argue in this context that ‘Feminism grew more readily in Protestant countries, where individualism and the acceptance of individual rights grew naturally from a religious tradition that emphasized direct, individual access to the Bible, individual interpretation and investigation, and individual conscience as a guide to action’ (1994: 2). Further, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most French feminists were keen to disassociate the movement both from the revolutionary radicalism of earlier French feminists such as the Communard Louise Michel and from the confrontational and sensationalist tactics of the British suffragettes. Although feminist activists such as Pelletier and Saumoneau continued to espouse radical socialist values, the majority of women involved in the women’s movement were moderate and conservative, and came from the philanthropic bourgeoisie. The emphasis was placed on legal, economic, educational and moral reform rather than on improved political rights or equality with men. The roots of the CNFF lay not, then, in militant suffrage groups, but in women’s organisations that worked tirelessly for campaigns against the ‘blights’ of French society during the Third Republic, such as alcohol, tobacco, pornography, prostitution, juvenile delinquency and poor public health.10

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More specifically, the CNFF sprang from the ‘Conférence de Versailles’, an annual meeting of rich female philanthropists that was established in 1892 in order to publicise a wide range of women’s charitable activities. There were a few Catholic, Jewish and freethinking members, but the Conference was organised and led by the Protestant elite. Gradually, the ‘feminine’ charitable activities that were discussed came to include more overtly ‘feminist’ political activities such as suffrage, women’s working rights and the legal situation of women. The CNFF was eventually created in 1901 from a fusion of two umbrella organisations, one concerned with women’s rights, the ‘Congrès International de la Condition et des Droits des Femmes’ (International Congress of the Condition and Rights of Women), and the other concerned with women’s charitable activities, the ‘Congrès International des Oeuvres et Institutions Féminines’ (International Congress of Women’s Charitable Works and Institutions). The merger between these two groupings into the larger umbrella organisation of the CNFF effectively illustrates how the French women’s movement in 1914 consisted of a loose alliance of a cross-section of women’s organisations whose members represented a variety of ideological and political positions. The alliance was also powerful, claiming to have more than 100,000 members in 1918 (CNFF 1917–1918: 8). Given the religious beliefs, elevated social status and strong links between its Protestant leadership and moderate Republicanism, however, its gender politics were predictably conservative. The CNFF’s stated goals in its first General Assembly of 1903, for example, explicitly support a highly traditional view of gender relations: ‘We will never forget that the most beautiful privilege of women has always been and still is to love, to help and to console others’11 (quoted in Rabaut 1978: 217). Siegfried has recourse to similarly conservative conceptions of women’s roles and gender relations to support her arguments in a lecture given to the ‘International Congress of Women’s Suffrage’ in 1914: Is it not evident that women are only really capable of exerting their influence in the wider world when they have first exerted their influence in their own homes? Women know well that in order for their intellectual capacities to flourish they must remain women first and foremost, bringing to their roles of wife and mother all of their emotional and intellectual powers.12 (quoted in Sabatier 1924: 40) The CNFF was increasingly active in the feminist struggle for women’s rights and suffrage, yet their arguments tended to focus on the more

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traditional notion of ‘separate spheres’, arguing that women deserved more recognition and support in their core roles as wives and mothers, and that their ‘natural’ moral superiority could be of great benefit to a nation suffering from social scourges such as prostitution, alcoholism, a low birth rate and pornography. As Karen Offen notes, mainstream feminism in early-twentieth-century France did not present women as equal individuals who must be freed from socially imposed roles, but emphasised instead ‘the primacy of a companionate, non-hierarchical, male–female couple as the basic unit of society’ (Offen 1992: 76). Thus, Siegfried argues in a letter to CNFF members in 1918: Woman is truly becoming the companion of Man in the most beautiful sense of the word, a companion in work, in deed and in thought in order to serve a new world. The right to vote that she will soon obtain will give her the power to bring about real victories in the fields of public health and morality as well as in many other areas.13 (Siegfried 1918: 17) This brand of feminism, that Hause and Kenney call ‘social feminism’ (1984: 25) and Bard ‘reformist feminism’ (1995), was at the heart of the CNFF. In terms of its strategy and ethos it was at the opposite end of the feminist spectrum to the more radical politics of socialist feminists or organisations such as the British ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’, led by Emmeline Pankhurst. And it owed a great deal to the Protestant beliefs and reformist zeal of the women’s movement’s key personalities.

Julie Siegfried and World War I Julie Siegfried took over the leadership of the CNFF in 1912, at the age of 64, from Sarah Monod. Both were the daughters of pastors, and their beliefs and worldviews were infused with an austere and righteous Protestant faith. In 1869 Siegfried had married fellow Protestant Jules Siegfried, a wealthy industrialist from Alsace who became an influential moderate Republican member of parliament. The Siegfrieds’ religious beliefs were those of social Christianity, a brand of Protestantism that stemmed from the nineteenth-century Protestant Revival. Central to their faith was a belief in the importance of social action and in the duty to serve others. Julie Siegfried, for example, wore a piece of jewellery on which was engraved the word ‘Moi’ (Self) with a black line through it, to remind her of the importance of self-abnegation

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(Sabatier 1924: 45). Their beliefs led the couple to establish a number of charitable organisations involved in the area of women’s education and youth work, and supporting impoverished mothers and widows. Their work in these fields led them to believe that women’s suffrage was an important cause. If women were given the vote, they argued, women would be ‘naturally’ inclined to support politicians who were interested in improving social and moral conditions in France, thus furthering their philanthropic goals. Siegfried states, in fact, that there was a natural progression between charity work among the poor, dispossessed and ‘morally degenerate’ and the fight for women’s rights: ‘Philanthropy    led to social action, and social action to suffrage. The CNFF is a necessary training school that teaches those who were not initially feminists to become so’14 (quoted in Poujol 2003: 82). By 1914, Siegfried had become a seasoned campaigner for women’s rights, motivated by her Protestant beliefs in the importance of philanthropy and social action. She was also a committed moderate Republican, with a husband who had been involved in national politics since the early days of the Third Republic. Her response to the First World War was necessarily conditioned by her ideological, political and religious allegiances, as well as by her charitable and feminist activities. Siegfried’s support of the French ‘Sacred Union’, and the mutual cooperation for the good of the nation that (in principle) it embodied, was to a large extent a continuation of her ‘social Christianity’ and ‘social feminism’. More specifically, the upholding of the abstract ideals of justice and freedom, the principle of serving the nation and helping those who are suffering and vulnerable that were central to nationalist discourse during the war years chimed well with Siegfried’s Protestant dedication to selfless and morally improving social action. This espousal of the aspects of nationalism that echoed her pre-existing ideological beliefs was not unique to Siegfried but was representative of the road taken more generally by the leadership of the CNFF during the war. In what follows I will illustrate further how these different strands of Siegfried’s beliefs came together in her response to the war by discussing a lecture she gave in January 1915 entitled ‘The War and the Role of Women’. Siegfried uses the lecture as an opportunity to underline the importance of improving women’s lives and opportunities – as, in other words, a platform for her Protestant social feminism. She begins by drawing a comparison between the condition of women during the Franco-Prussian war and in 1914. Women were unable to be useful to their nation in 1870, she argues, because they were generally untrained

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and uneducated, and lacked the confidence to engage in political or religious debate. She equally attacks the futility of women’s ‘good works’ in the Franco-Prussian war, claiming that they did no more than scratch the surface of the misery it caused. In contrast, she argues that the charitable activities carried out by women during 1914 and 1915 were much more effective, reflecting her Protestant belief in the importance of organised social action. In contrasting women’s war work in both conflicts, she attempts to challenge traditional conceptions of women as being solely motivated by the heart, in order to replace it with one centred on the importance of the acquisition of ‘knowledge and method’ (Siegfried 1915: 5). She states that women need to be valued for their intelligence rather than for just their emotions, and uses teachers as an illustrative example of what women can achieve when trained (thereby lending her support to the anti-clericals’ battle to wrest national education away from the Catholic church). In line with the arguments used by the CNFF to make a case for women’s suffrage, she is constructing women as useful citizens, rather than as helpless and sentimental ornaments. The home and the family, however, are always posited as the basic unit from which society can learn and grow. Her case for improving women’s education, for example, emphasises the importance for society of having educated mothers: ‘When a woman wants to be a mother in the most noble sense of the term, she must be capable of understanding her sons and evolving with them; she must be able to take part in her children’s preoccupations’15 (Siegfried 1915: 6). In this way, Siegfried is loyal to the tenets of social feminism, supporting traditional conceptions of women as wives and mothers in order to persuade her audience of the importance of improving their rights and expanding their roles. In this context, the war is put forward as having brought advantages as well as tragedy for women. Deploying the rhetoric of ‘separate spheres’ ideology, Siegfried offers a vision of the war as an opportunity for women to realise their full potential as the equals of men: The time has come when the war, as painful and terrible as it is, has brought us unexpected consolations. The hand offered [by men] has been taken and one feels that now there is something that has been achieved and which will never be undone. Man and Woman are working together and    Woman is beginning to be for Man the companion who resembles him. War broke out, and Woman was at her post of suffering and combat. Yes, all women, they were ready as men were ready.16 (Siegfried 1915: 8)

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Siegfried then outlines the laudable response of women to the war, suggesting that it has been one of self-abnegation, service to others and selfless devotion to the nation’s cause – qualities which are at the heart of her Protestant beliefs. She argues that this new attitude in women will have knock-on effects on the rest of society – suggesting, for example, that it would lower the divorce rate (ibid.: 9). This prediction could not have been further from the truth; the divorce rate in fact rose in the 1920s when the troops returned, but the fact that she believed it indicates the extent to which her feminist ideals are based upon a Protestant feminist utopia of a nation of ‘companionate, non-hierarchical, male– female couple[s]’ (Offen 1992: 76) working in tandem for the good of others. This can also be seen in her association of the alleged breakdown of class barriers resulting from the ‘Sacred Union’ with women’s ‘natural’ instinct for selflessness and empathy (Siegfried: 9–10). What is equally evident in Siegfried’s lecture is her alignment with nationalist pro-war discourse: ‘France is engaged in an admirable war, a war against war, not against somebody, but for something that is of an eternal nature, that is to say justice and freedom’17 (ibid.: 11). However, she blends this nationalist rhetoric seamlessly into the Protestant feminist vision that I have outlined above. For example, the common trope in nationalism that the war is a ‘necessary evil’ in order to regenerate an ailing nation is mapped onto a plea for a collective struggle for a ‘better’ France (one, in other words, in which women are given greater civil rights, and which has defeated the social evils of the Third Republic): If, once the war is over, we have been able to decide to create a more upright, healthy and sober France, all of us being concerned with the morals and health of the nation, then we can say that we will not have suffered in vain and, thinking of those who have been killed on the battlefield, we will be able to see them as our redeemers.18 (ibid.: 12) Siegfried, then, was able to align her feminist ideals with mainstream nationalism during the war. Indeed, the lauding of self-sacrifice and criticism of egoism that were important elements of pro-war discourse fitted perfectly with her brand of Protestant philanthropy. As an invaded country, France was in a very different situation in 1914 than, for example, the UK or the US. Haunted by memories of similar happenings during the Franco-Prussian war, the country was forced to face up to the horror of the displacement of families, the destruction of towns and villages, and the occupation of parts of its territory (including

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the rape of women and mistreatment of civilians that this brought with it), as well as the losses of its soldiers in the trenches. This visceral link with the consequences of ‘total war’ helps to explain – although not to justify – why pacifist feminists were frequently demonised in First World War France. I would like to suggest, finally, that two aspects of Julie Siegfried’s personal circumstances contributed to her fervent patriotism and offer a further context for her rejection of pacifism. First, as I have already indicated, her husband’s family were from Alsace and she considered Alsace and Lorraine to be parts of France that had been illegally occupied by the Prussians after France’s defeat in the FrancoPrussian war in 1870–1871. Thus like many French citizens she saw the war as an opportunity to reclaim the nation’s ‘lost’ territories. Second, Siegfried had three sons at the front. The final section of her lecture, in which she advocates patience and stoicism for mothers with sons at the front, is clearly related to her own experiences: ‘We have to be patient at a time when our children, in the trenches, are living examples of this state of mind. The days pass slowly, very slowly, and we can only bear the length of the days by working for others’19 (ibid.: 12). It would have been extremely difficult for her to advocate pacifism, or to collaborate with ‘enemy’ women’s groups, when her sons were fighting for France (one of whom, Ernest Frank Siegfried, died in October 1918 as a result of an illness contracted in action).20 Siegfried’s feminist stance in 1914 thus stemmed from her personal and emotional response to the action, as well as being a consolidation of her ‘social feminism’ which, like that of many other women prominent in the pre-war women’s movement, was rooted in the values of Protestant social action and moderate Republicanism. Although she adheres to tenets of pro-war nationalism in her lectures and writings, she is always careful to emphasise those aspects that complement her own feminist and philanthropic concerns. In this sense, I would argue that Margaret Darrow’s claim that there was ‘little that separated’ the rhetoric of the CNFF and that of ‘right-wing nationalists’ (Darrow 2000: 296) needs to be nuanced. What Julie Siegfried’s case proves is that in order to be respected and, therefore, for one’s voice to be heard in First World War France, mainstream feminists were unable to stray too far from mainstream nationalism. But that does not necessarily mean that they accepted the ardent anti-feminism of right-wing nationalists such as Maurice Barrès, who argued that women’s only role in wartime was to be ‘worthy’ of the men who fought to protect them (Darrow 2000: 21). Rather, Siegfried, like many other ‘nationalist’ feminists, reinterpreted nationalist discourse according to her own beliefs, and did not lose sight of her feminist goals.

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Notes 1. ‘Vous toutes qui connaissez la France, savez les fruits portés dans notre pays par cette action pacifiste, et que seule une guerre défensive y pouvait être acceptée. Nous rêvions de la paix et de l’entente, sinon universelle, du moins européenne, nous ne voulions pas croire ceux qui nous montraient de l’autre côté de la frontière la menace grandissante. Comment avons-nous été rappelés à la réalité? Vous le savez et les documents diplomatiques le diront éternellement devant l’histoire. Puisque les événements actuels nous ont prouvé qu’un pacifisme unilatéral serait inutile, sinon dangereux, nous ne reprendrons notre propagande que lorsque la paix future nous aura donné des garanties efficaces contre l’esprit de domination d’un peuple.’ 2. Jane Misme stated in La Française in December 1914, for example, that ‘Tant que durera la guerre, les femmes de l’ennemi seront aussi l’ennemi’ (‘As long as the war lasts, the wives, sisters and mothers of the enemy will also be the enemy’). Quoted in Bard 1995: 18. 3. ‘Nous comptons sur les présidentes de nos branches départementales, sur toutes nos déléguées comme sur tous nos membres individuels, pour que, en ces heures d’angoisse, mais aussi d’espoir en notre juste cause, la patrie trouve en notre association tout le dévouement qu’elle est en droit d’attendre d’elle.’ 4. Socialist feminists did not remain as aligned with the wartime government as the bourgeois leaders of the CNFF, and supported the strikes by women workers in 1917 (Rabaut 1978: 268–72). 5. ‘L’élan contestataire que les féministes ont manifesté à la Belle Époque est soudain brisé par la guerre.’ 6. ‘   le devoir des femmes féministes et pacifistes de tous les pays belligérants et autres de faire entendre leur protestation en face d’un si horrible carnage’. 7. ‘Le féminisme est en principe pacifiste    mais on n’a point le droit de prétendre aimer son pays si on fait un geste, si on dit un mot qui puisse le faire paraître affaibli dans sa défense.’ 8. ‘Les femmes seront appelées, dans l’avenir, à jouer un rôle beaucoup plus grand que par le passé, si l’on veut que la France se relève rapidement des ruines que laissera la guerre derrière elle. Partout, elles devront remplacer les héros tombés au service de la Patrie. Elles devront élargir leur action, élargir leur champ visuel. A ces femmes nouvelles, il faudra un statut nouveau. Comment traiter en mineurs des individus auxquels on demande d’agir en majeurs, en citoyens? Les femmes ont prouvé, pendant la guerre, ce qu’elles sont capables de faire. Non préparées à la lourde tâche qui leur est échue, elles ont su y faire face.’ 9. There were also a number of Catholic women’s organisations, but the anticlericalism of the Third Republic made it difficult for Catholic women to align themselves with Republican feminism. See Hause and Waelti-Walters 1994: 4–5. 10. For further details on the formation of the CNFF see Bard 1995; Hause and Kenney 1984; Rabaut 1978. The CNFF papers (Le fonds du CNFF) can be consulted at the ‘Centre des archives du féminisme’ at the University of Angers. 11. ‘Nous n’oublierons jamais que le plus beau privilège de la femme a toujours été et reste encore celui d’aimer, de secourir et de consoler.’

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12. ‘N’est-il pas évident que les femmes ne seront vraiment capables de rayonner au dehors que lorsqu’elles auront d’abord rayonné à leur propre foyer? La femme sent bien que pour donner à son développement intellectuel un épanouissement normal il faut qu’elle reste femme avant tout, et qu’elle apporte à son rôle d’épouse et de mère toutes les forces de son coeur et de sa raison.’ 13. ‘La femme devient réellement la compagne de l’homme dans le plus beau sens du mot, compagne du travail, d’action et de pensée au service d’un monde nouveau. Le droit de vote qu’elle ne tardera pas à obtenir lui donnera un pouvoir qui amènera de véritables victoires dans l’ordre de l’hygiène moral et physique et dans bien d’autres domaines encore.’ 14. ‘La philanthropie    amènera à l’action sociale, et l’action sociale au suffrage. Le CNFF est une école normale où il faut passer pour apprendre à celles qui ne le sont pas, à devenir féministes.’ 15. ‘Lorsqu’une femme veut être mère dans la plus noble acception de ce mot, il faut qu’elle soit capable de comprendre ses fils et d’évoluer avec eux; il faut qu’elle puisse s’associer à ce qui préoccupe ses enfants.’ 16. ‘L’heure est venue où la guerre, si douloureuse, si terrible qu’elle soit, nous apporte des consolations inattendues. Cette main tendue, elle est prise, et, de côté et d’autre, on sent que maintenant, il y a quelque chose de fait et qui ne se défera jamais. L’homme et la femme sont deux pour travailler et    la femme commence à être pour l’homme l’aide semblable à lui. La guerre a éclaté et la femme a été à son poste de douleur et de combat. Oui, toutes, on peut le dire, elles étaient prêtes comme les hommes ont été prêts.’ 17. ‘La France fait une guerre admirable, une guerre contre la guerre, non contre quelqu’un, mais pour quelque chose qui est d’ordre éternel, c’est-à-dire la justice et la liberté.’ 18. ‘Si, lorsque la guerre sera finie, nous avons pu nous décider faire une France plus sérieuse, plus haute, plus saine, nous occupant tous, absolument tous, des questions d’hygiène et des questions morales, alors nous pourrons dire que nous n’avons pas souffert en vain et, pensant à ceux qui sont morts sur le champ de bataille, nous pourrons les regarder comme des rédempteurs.’ 19. ‘Il faut que nous soyons tous des êtres patients en ce moment où nos enfants, dans les tranchées, nous donnent l’exemple de cet état d’esprit. Tous les jours paraissent longs, bien longs, et on ne peut plus supporter la longeur des jours qu’en travaillant pour les autres.’ 20. See the entry on ‘Ernest Frank Siegfried’ at http://www.memoiredeshommes. sga.defense.gouv.fr/ Accessed 16 August 2006.

Bibliography Bard, C. (1995) Les filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940, Paris: Fayard. Conseil National des Femmes Françaises (CNFF) (1917–1918) Notice, Statuts et Rapports d’activité, Paris: CNFF. Darrow, M.H. (2000) French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front, Oxford: Berg. Gordon, F. and Cross, M. (1996) Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940, Vermont: Edward Elgar.

66 The Response of the CNFF to the First World War Hause, S.C. and Kenney, A.R. (1984) Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McMillan, J.F. (1981) ‘Clericals, Anticlericals and the Women’s Movement in France under the Third Republic’, The Historical Journal 24: 361–71. Offen, K. (1992) ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach’, in G. Bock and S. James (eds) Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, London: Routledge, pp. 69–88. Poujol, G. (2003) Un féminisme sous tutelle: Les protestantes françaises 1810–1960, Paris: Les éditions de Paris. Rabaut, J. (1978) Histoire des féminismes français, Paris: Stock. Sabatier, E. (1924) Madame Jules Siegfried 1848–1922, Paris: Privas. Sainte-Croix, A. de (24 March 1917) ‘Le Rôle de la femme après la guerre’, Renaissance. Siegfried, J. (25 August 1914) ‘Aux femmes’, L’Humanité. ——. (1915) La Guerre et le rôle de la femme, Paris: Cahors. ——. (1918) ‘Letter’, in CNFF (1917–1918), p. 17. Waelti-Walters, J. and Hause, S.C. (eds) (1994) Feminisms of the Belle Époque: A Historical and Literary Anthology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) (1915) Report of the International Congress of Women 1915, Amsterdam: WILPF.

5 Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War Ingrid Sharp

At the end of the nineteenth century, in Germany, as in most of Europe, women were frequently made responsible for male actions despite their lack of power and legal rights. At that time, German women were downtrodden even by the standards of the rest of Europe, with women trapped by legal, social and class restrictions, by established customs and the militarization of civil society, until they existed in a state of almost complete dependence on and subjection to men (Gerhardt 1978). Women were subject to male guardianship; the doors of most professions were closed to them, as were those of higher education. The Prussian Law of Association, which prevented women from even being present at political meetings, remained in place from 1851 to 1908, making campaigning for female suffrage well-nigh impossible during this period. Women may have lacked power, but, it was argued, they had influence, which was all the stronger for being indirect – clever women did not need the vote, as they already had the ear of powerful men. Women were supposed to have a civilising effect on men, to provide a moral influence and teach them the softer virtues of empathy, love, pity and forgiveness to compensate for innate male inadequacies in these areas and ensure that they were fully socialised. Writing in 1893, John Ruskin argued in this vein: There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery, in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. (Ruskin 1893) 67

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Similar accusations surfaced in Germany during and after the First World War, where women were blamed in various quarters for first failing to prevent the war and then to bring it to an end. In this chapter I will discuss the often unrealistic, even contradictory expectations placed on women during the war, notably their sense of indebtedness to and responsibility for the suffering of the soldiers, the perceived privilege of their position as supposedly separate and protected from the conflict and lastly the suggestion by some pacifist writers that women’s intervention could have prevented or curtailed the war. I will also examine the response of the women’s movement in Germany, both to the war itself and to the question of female guilt and responsibility. War has aptly been described as a gendering activity in that gender lines are clearly drawn at times of national conflict – men’s role is to protect the nation and women’s to preserve and embody its core values. In 1914, there was a clear hierarchy of men’s and women’s contributions to and roles in the war; after all, what could women do that rivalled the soldier’s willingness to face death, to lay down his young life for the sake of German culture and for future generations? Despite the changes to women’s circumstances during the war years, the war equally emphasised the differences between the sexes (Higonnet et al. 1987: 4; Higonnet and Higonnet 1987: 35) and privileged the experience and contribution of men over those of women. With the outbreak of war in August 1914, soldiers were elevated and glorified and women, placed in a subordinate, ancillary role, were expected to remain largely untouched by the war experience, to embody the virtues of domestic life and act as a reserve of goodness and humanity for the returning men. However, in the face of a modern war that targeted non-combatants both via the blockades and air raids, that enlisted a high proportion of the male population while relying on the remaining civilians to provide a growing supply of munitions and foodstuffs, this attempt to observe a sharp distinction between the war and civilian life was unrealistic and anachronistic. During the war years, German women were drawn into areas previously unthinkable for their sex, replacing the men down the mines, in agriculture and heavy industry. For a handful of women, their organised war work brought them very close to state power, as they worked to organise women’s labour and coordinate efforts to alleviate the hardships caused by the wartime economy (Hering 1990: 47–80). Elizabeth Domansky argues that the elevation of male sacrifice was mere rhetoric to disguise what was in fact the relative cheapness of men’s lives in modern warfare (1996: 441). In a war dominated by technological

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advances in weaponry, materiel was far more important than personnel and men were more expendable than munitions, or, indeed the workers who produced them (ibid.: 438). Despite women’s involvement in the war and consequent exposure to danger described above, the concept of a direct, unmediated sacrifice made by women was not part of the public consciousness, as women were seen as protected by the efforts of men. In reality, however, women could not be protected from the effects of this war – in 1918, civilian deaths nearly equalled those on the battlefield, while deaths of women were at 50 per cent above pre-war levels (Jackson 1996: 570–71). As Marie-Elizabeth Lüders points out, women working in the munitions factories and elsewhere sacrificed their health, youth, happiness and even lives in their support for the war effort (Lüders 1937: 208). It is quite clear, then, that women were not as remote from the war as the propaganda implied; indeed, the ideal woman represented in pro-war propaganda rarely took the form of a harassed workingclass munitions worker, tending instead to offer an image of idealised domesticity or unblemished youth and beauty. Both these images of womanhood were implicitly held up as prizes for the victorious army: for the painter Otto Dix, for example, all wars were ultimately ‘fought over the vulva’ (quoted in Eberle 1985: 41). This may make the connection between war and women uncomfortably intimate, but it nevertheless expresses what was for many a fundamental truth about women’s relationship to warfare: men risked their lives to protect women and could expect something in return. Calls to enlist in all combatant countries appealed to male chivalry and emphasised women’s dependence and vulnerability, but also their expectation that men have a duty to fight bravely on their behalf. Implicit in some images is the promise of sexual favours that will be withheld from those who are not ‘man enough’ to do their duty (see Figure 1). As well as wives and sweethearts, the suffering and courage of mothers forced to send their own sons into danger when all their instincts were to keep them safe was central to an understanding of women’s role in wartime. In 1916, the writer and soldier Karl Jünger published a collection of nearly fifty essays written by German women in response to the war.1 In his preface, Jünger speaks of love and sacrifice, of German mothers who are models of selfless loyalty and girls who embody ‘German morality and purity’ (‘deutsche Sitte und Reinheit’ Jünger 1916: 9). A woman was expected to send her menfolk off to war, to ‘lay her husband and son and father, her fiancé and brother as a sacrifice on the altar of the Fatherland’2 (ibid.). Jünger’s intention here may have

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Figure 1: Man: ‘Why are you turning down my proposal of marriage?’ Woman: ‘For the same reason that the recruiting board rejected you’ (Hirschfeld and Gaspar 1930: 67).

been to highlight women’s altruism in giving up their beloved sons and husbands for the sake of a higher good, but equally his comments reinforce the idea that women’s sacrifice is at one remove: in the end the price is paid by the men. Women, therefore, are seen as in a real sense responsible for male suffering and death, and they are therefore obliged to respond with humility and gratitude.

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This view is also clearly articulated in an anthology of war poems published in 1916 by K. Wendling, school inspector in the border region of Alsace. The volume is part of a series of text books dealing with the war and includes extensive teaching notes, showing how the poems may be used with pupils at all levels. The poem ‘Zu Hause’ (‘At Home’), by Andrea Frahm, is included in the extensive section entitled ‘Die Daheimgebliebenen’ (‘Those who remain at home’) and expresses a woman’s sense of shame and inadequacy in the face of male suffering and heroism: Nothing would be quite so hard If only the burning shame would fade For you they are facing the bullets’ rain You sit in your armchair and read of their pain. Wet grass is where they must lay their heads You lie in comfort in your warm bed. . And all your love and all your pain, Your most fervent wishes can’t attain For even one soldier in the heat of the fight A last hour a little more easy or light.3 (Wendling 1916: 197) Tellingly perhaps, another poem, ‘Für Uns’ (‘For us’ ibid.: 148–49), is written by a schoolboy, but from the viewpoint of a woman. Women are presented here as the reason for and cause of male suffering, and their role is reduced to ‘crying and praying for those who lie there, pale, bloody and trampled – for us!’ The final lines – ‘For there is no word for the sacrifice and no thanks (enough) for those who fell there. For us!’4 – imply both women’s ingratitude (there are no thanks for the fallen), while stating that no amount of gratitude could possibly be adequate for the depth of male sacrifice on women’s behalf.5 It is thus clear in both men’s and women’s wartime writings that there was a moral ambivalence attached to women’s relatively privileged role, in return for which they were expected to conform to an idealised standard of feminine behaviour and be ‘worthy’ of the sacrifice made by the men on their behalf. In her 1917 pamphlet, Frauentrost und Frauenpflicht zur Kriegszeit (‘Women’s Comfort and Women’s Duty in Wartime’), Anna Blanck expresses the sense of obligation felt by women: only the highest expression of altruistic patriotism would serve ‘if we want to pay off even a tiny fraction of the immeasurable debt

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of gratitude that we owe to our million-strong army’6 (1917: 7). In the same year, Agnes Zahn Harnack writes, ‘we must ensure that they do not spill their blood in vain; we must be as the best of the men out there see us in their best hours’7 (Zahn Harnack 1915: 22). It was easy to get it wrong – women responding to the exhortation only to write ‘Sunday letters’ (‘Sonntagsbriefe’) to the front and not complain of food shortages and overwork ended up sending strange, alien letters in which they appeared to be experiencing the war as one long party. Soldiers’ wives and mothers who attempted to strike the correct balance between the demands of patriotism and love found it extremely hard to demonstrate what were, in fact, mutually exclusive emotional responses. According to Angelika Tramitz, ‘the woman in wartime could choose between being not German enough or insufficiently womanly, depending on whether she placed too much or insufficient emphasis on her love for her own family’8 (Tramitz 1989: 87). There were key contradictions, too, in the expectation that women would serve as sexual rewards for the virile young men who went to war while at the same time remaining chaste: with women seen as open to sexual immorality in the absence of the controlling hand of husbands and fathers, anxiety about the moral health of the home front was expressed in the press and the pulpit. As the best of German men were assumed to be fighting at the front, women’s suspected sexual liaisons with the presumably morally and physically weaker elements who remained – or even worse, with enemy prisoners – was seen as a betrayal of the men fighting and of their patriotic duty to remain pure – at least until the soldiers’ return. German women’s apparent enthusiasm for the war and the apparent eagerness of the women’s movement to organise female labour to release working men for the front did not improve their public image either. Women were suspected in many quarters of benefiting from male absence and the feminists in particular could easily be criticised as attempting to steal a march on their absent competitors. The women we see in the contemporary newspaper images such as the one reproduced below (Figure 2) are smiling as they wave the men off to battle. As we have seen, patriotic women were expected to display both suppressed sorrow and quiet pride, and too much jingoism was viewed as both unseemly and tactless. As Jo Vellacott (1993) has pointed out, it was in the interests of national governments to present women as fully supporting the war, and legislation such as the Defence of the Realm act in the UK, and the imposition of military censorship throughout the war years ensured that dissenting voices and alternative perspectives very rarely filtered through

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Figure 2: ‘Although parting is painful, yet she’s prouder of me for going’ (Hirschfeld and Gaspar 1930: Facing 172).

to the public. The few pamphlets and publications expressing pacifist views that were produced in neutral countries such as Switzerland had a very limited circulation in Germany, and the military leaders maintained strict control of the German press, with the power to close down a journal if it produced unpatriotic arguments. It is therefore unsurprising that the image of women as war enthusiasts was the overwhelming impression created in Germany.

The response of the women’s movement The response of women, both to the war itself and to the question of women’s responsibility for it, was far from uniform even within the bourgeois women’s movement. By the outbreak of the war in 1914,

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the movement in Germany was divided into two opposing groups, the Radicals and the Moderates, who reacted very differently. The Moderates supported the war and set out to use it as a springboard for achieving their peacetime aims while the Radicals’ aim was to stop the war and work against it in any way possible. A majority within the bourgeois movement, the Moderates spent very little time analysing the causes of the war or worrying about their own responsibility. The leader of the mainstream ‘Federation of Women’s Associations’ (‘Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine’, hereafter BDF), Gertrud Bäumer, agreed with Heraclitus that war is the ‘father of all things’, and saw it as a test of women’s character and the skills and qualities developed by the women’s movement over decades (Bäumer 1915: 2). From the outset, key Moderates laid claim to a parallel war experience, in which women played a pivotal role. First, this was through their role as mothers and wives of the fighting men: ‘We mustn’t ever forget that it is not just military training that is being put to the test out there in the trenches and at sea, at the gun emplacements and in the air, but also German mothers’ upbringing and German wives’ care’9 (Bäumer 1915: 11). Secondly, this was through a coordinated war effort captured in the expression ‘seelische Mobilmachung’ (‘mobilisation of the soul’) in which men serve with arms and women with heart and soul – or more prosaically with wooden spoons and pickling jars (Bäumer 16 October 1914). This mobilisation took the form of organising women into a ‘National Women’s Service’ (‘Nationaler Frauendienst’) through which all their wartime activities were channelled. Women schooled in the women’s movement were able to apply their motherly care to the needs of the nation in the familiar fields of social welfare, employment and education. The BDF believed they were laying down foundations for peacetime acceptance of women’s competence and it is clear that they set great store by the closeness to government and decision-making at state level that they achieved during the war. They expected to have their service recognised by continued post-war involvement in the life of the state and were obviously wounded by their exclusion from the Kaiser’s Easter Message of April 1917, in which he promised to repay the loyalty and courage of working class men with political concessions that would express the new bond of trust and mutual respect between the social classes (Lange May 1917). To the chagrin of the BDF leaders, he made no mention at all of the contribution made by women, Marie Stritt commenting sadly, ‘we did believe that we were

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part of it, too’ (‘wir hatten gemeint, wir gehörten mit dazu’ Stritt 16 June 1917: 89). Despite the BDF’s increasing involvement in the war, Bäumer was convinced that theirs remained a specifically womanly contribution motivated by love and saw no contradiction between women’s nurturing role and the organisation’s success in fuelling the war machinery with workers and soldiers. For Bäumer, as for so many others, August 1914 was a shared emotional experience of great power and intensity which, she remained sure throughout the war, revealed the underlying connectedness of German society and would carry over into peacetime with enormous benefits for all: There is not one of us who doesn’t feel that this time, whatever it may bring, whatever it demands of us, is for our generation the pinnacle of our existence. We mourn for all those whom fate took away before these months could strike unawakened sparks in them, too; we mourn for all those who closed their eyes in death before they could see their nation’s great day.10 (Bäumer 1915: 6/7)

The pacifist response In contrast, bourgeois Radicals, centred around suffrage campaigners Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg, felt nothing of this elevated mood, remaining isolated amidst all the fellow-feeling: ‘The great crime, war, achieved in twenty-four hours a unity that had eluded the efforts of rational people for decades. This behaviour appeared repulsive to us, not glorious’11 (Heymann and Augspurg 1992: 137). A tiny minority within the women’s movement, these women saw themselves as the voice of reason amidst a howling storm of insanity. While they saw their duty very clearly as trying to stop the war, they were realistic enough to realise that few would be willing to hear a dissenting voice in the early moments of ‘war psychosis’ (Hering 1990: 84): ‘The German people felt like a mighty Colossus, united in its purpose of defying the whole world.    Anyone who had dared to openly oppose this unity would have been trampled, crushed, lynched’12 (Heymann and Augspurg 1992: 157). Moreover, even though they were keenly aware of their own isolation, the Radicals were convinced that absolute opposition to the war was the only true response for women and that this position served to absolve women from any responsibility for the war or its consequences. Unlike the majority of women, the Radicals refused to undertake war work of any kind, even palliative care, and concentrated

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on agitating for peace.13 This took the form of establishing and consolidating links with women from ‘enemy’ and neutral nations, culminating in the organisation of an international Women’s Peace Congress at the Hague in April 1915 (see Gelblum 1998). The congress, inspired by a sense of responsibility for preventing future wars, was planned jointly by women from England, Holland, Belgium and Germany and attended by women from these and eight other nations, including the United States, who were not yet in the war. Many delegates, notably 180 British women and Dr Frida Perlen, one of the co-organisers, were prevented from attending the conference and none of the ‘official’ women’s organisations in the combatant nations sent delegates. For Heymann and Augspurg, the cooperation of women from combatant and neutral nations was far from a sentimental illusion of sisterhood, it was a model for the peaceful and productive cooperation of nations. Through their campaigns against the state regulation of prostitution in the 1890s (Heymann 1903; Sharp 1998), the German Radicals had formed a view of men as the irrational sex, slaves to their baser instincts unless checked by the greater moral power of women and, for Heymann especially, the outbreak of war in 1914 was the ultimate demonstration of men’s enslavement to their atavistic urges and further evidence of their unfitness to govern: ‘The world war has proved that the male state, founded and built up on force, has failed all along the line; we have never seen clearer proof of its unfitness. The male principle is divisive and, if allowed to continue unchecked, will bring about the total destruction of humanity’14 (Heymann 1922 [1917] in Brinker Gabler 1980: 65). For the Radicals, then, feminism was identical with pacifism, and it was the same group of women who had campaigned for the vote in the radical ‘Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsbund’ (‘German Women’s Suffrage League’) who now campaigned for peace. They saw the two as inextricably linked: without the influence of women in government, the strongest moral impulse for peace was lacking. Heymann and Augspurg’s conviction that women in their natural state had an innate love of peace that made it impossible for them to support killing remained intact throughout the war despite all evidence to the contrary. In 1919 they wrote, ‘Women are, just because they are women, against all forms of brutal force that seek to pointlessly destroy what has grown, what has become. They want to build up, to protect, to create anew’15 (Heymann and Augspurg 1919: 1). Far from accepting any responsibility, Heymann’s analysis blamed men, not just for the war itself, but for the perpetuation of the unjust economic and political

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system that encouraged conflict, as well as for women’s failings, as years of male socialisation had produced a generation of trivial, empty-headed women who were incapable of moral maturity or of seeing the bigger picture. Although she did indeed criticise the women of the BDF for working to sustain the war, for example, she dismissed them and any other women who supported the war as male-identified and therefore irrelevant for her argument. A major weakness of Heymann’s position was the presence in all combatant nations of female supporters of the war who greatly outnumbered the pacifists. Consequently, during the post-war period many voices were raised against women for their complicity in the war, accusing women of war enthusiasm and indifference to male suffering. Many post-war pacifist authors imply that women had the power to prevent the war, to hold back the troops and bring the nations to reason. As they signally failed to do this, the women failed the men and were thus seen as directly responsible for their suffering and death.16

Literary representations: Claire Goll and Andreas Latzko During the war itself, this position was articulated most clearly by Claire Studer, better known as Claire Goll, who met the pacifist poet Iwan Goll while in exile in Switzerland in 1917, and by the Hungarian-born peace activist Andreas Latzko, both of whom managed to publish pacifist works that found their way into Germany during the war. Goll’s collection of anti-war stories Frauen Erwachen (Women’s Awakening) published in 1918, includes ‘Die Wachshand’ (‘The Wax Hand’), reprinted in Brinker-Gabler’s 1980 anthology of women’s antiwar writings. The plot is briefly this: a German officer returns to his young wife after losing a hand in battle and, as in so many of the stories in this collection, the war represents a barrier between the two that cannot seemingly be crossed. The wife has kept her instinctive response to the war hidden from her husband, adopting instead the patriotic mask expected of an officer’s wife. But now she feels she must speak, or forever remain a stranger to her husband. Cautiously, she confesses that she feels sympathy with enemy soldiers and suffers as much from German victories as from their defeats, because the pain of the individual touches her regardless of their nationality. For the officer, these are words of treason, and he views her empathetic response as unpatriotic weakness, as dangerous pacifistic sentiment that undermines his view of himself as hero and martyr in a just cause. In response, he tells her

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of the encounter with an unarmed ‘enemy’ soldier that robbed him of his hand and gained him the iron cross. She is horrified to learn that he has killed despite his perception of the enemy as a human being, and she sees his actions as nothing short of murder: ‘You saw the ring on his finger, his wife, waiting for him night after night, praying for his life, for his return and you were able to kill him.    you are a murderer!’ With these words she shattered the whole protective wall of phrases that he and millions of other men like him had built around his deeds in order not to hear the screams of his own heart.17 (Goll 1918: 20–21) Later, she asks herself whether her own failure to speak earlier makes her responsible for what he has become, whether it is women’s passivity and acquiescence that has turned men into both victims and perpetrators, hunters and prey: ‘Why hadn’t she shown him earlier that there were wives and mothers? Was he guilty of what he had done? Why had she let him go? Why hadn’t all the women thrown themselves in front of the trains?    They, the women, knew that there were mothers over there, too. Why hadn’t they united, they, the mothers of all men, to resist?    ‘The man was the brain, but women were the heart of the world. And yet we were silent.    We bear the greater guilt’18 (ibid.: 22–24). The pacifist Andreas Latzko came to much the same conclusion in both his address to the international women’s peace congress in Berne in March 1918 and the series of short stories Menschen im Krieg (Men in War). Latzko, who served in the Austro-Hungarian army before seeking refuge in Switzerland in 1916, published the instant best seller in 1917. In it, he sets out his pacifist stall, again lifting the lid on the empty war rhetoric and revealing the reality of war through the suffering of individuals. His targets are the military, the government and the ruling classes who have a vested interest in continuing the war, but also the women, who have remained silent and inactive in the face of male suffering and death. For Latzko, women’s failure to speak out against – and thereby stop – the war amounts to a betrayal of the husbands and sons they are supposed to love. The betrayal is made worse by the fact that the women appear to have been motivated by shallow considerations – for Latzko, a desire to be in vogue and play the

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fashionable role of the brave little wife/mother with the latest military accessory. The first story ‘Abmarsch’ (‘Off to War’) offers the clearest statement of his position via the unnamed protagonist, a captain who is recovering behind the lines from effects of trauma. He saw his best friend, Dill, grotesquely killed when a spurred boot, still with the leg inside, flew across the trench and hit him on the head. The spur embedded itself in his brain at the very moment when he was showing off a picture of his new bride. It took four men to remove it, and when it finally came away a portion of brain tissue was still attached to it ‘as if pulled up at the roots, like a jellyfish’ (‘wie ausgerissene Wurzeln, – wie ein grauer Polyp’ Latzko 1917: 26). The captain has not been able to speak since, and has been unresponsive, even hostile, to visits from his wife. The reason for this becomes clear when the ward sister, seeking the vicarious thrill of battle, asks the other patients what was the worst aspect of the war. Breaking his silence, the Captain begins to rave: ‘What was the most awful thing? The only awful thing is the going off. You go off to war – and they let you go. That’s the awful thing’19 (ibid.: 23). Later he raves, The man who doesn’t go is a coward, and they have no use for a coward. That’s the very thing. Don’t you understand? Heroes are the style now. The chic Mrs Dill wanted a hero to match her new hat. Ha-ha! That’s why poor Dill had to go and lose his brains. I, too – you, too – we must go die. You must let yourself be trampled on – your brains trampled on, while the women look on – chic – because it’s the style now.20 (ibid.: 28) Women have failed their men, and what makes their failure worse in the captain’s eyes is that, while seemingly so apathetic in the face of male suffering, they can be extremely active in their own interests: ‘Have you never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of prime ministers, and set fire to museums, and let themselves be chained to lamp-posts?    [F]or the sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you hear? But for the sake of their men? No. Not one sound. Not one single outcry!’21 (ibid.: 32) The captain will never forgive his wife nor any of the women, who have been revealed as cruel and shallow, their love a sham, their moral

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courage non-existent. For this they must be rooted out, pulled from the heads of men like the spur from his friend’s forehead: ‘Not one fought for us or defended us. Not one moved a little finger for us in the whole wide world! They drove us out! They gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent us to murder, they sent us to die – for their vanity’22 (ibid.: 33). This view is developed in Latzko’s Berne speech the following year, in which he warns his audience that the men are waiting for women to raise their voices against the war, and that their failure to act will be held against them once peace comes. What will the men feel for the women who did not speak out on their behalf, who failed to lift a finger for them during four long years of fighting? Echoing Otto Dix, Latzko maintains that men go to war only for the sake of women and that men will adapt their actions and characters to fit women’s changing expectations. If women want sensitive poets, he claims, then men will write poetry, if the style is for murderers, men will follow that trend, too. For Latzko, as for Ruskin, women through their sexual allure appear to hold the power to determine the actions of individual men and thus the foreign policy of nations: Do you think we should have gone if they had not sent us? Do you think so?    No General could have made us go if the women hadn’t allowed us to be stacked on the trains, if they had screamed out that they would never look at us again if we turned into murderers. Not a single man would have gone off if they had sworn never to give themselves to a man who has split open other men’s skulls and shot and bayoneted human beings. Not one man, I tell you, would have gone.23 (Latzko 1918: 30–31)

Conclusion In the preface to her account of women’s wartime work for international reconciliation, written in 1920, Heymann rejected the misogynist standpoint evident in both pro- and anti-war discourse entirely, reflecting, It’s a highly peculiar phenomenon, to be observed in nearly all countries during the war, that in the press, in literature, in political discussion, women were again and again found guilty of the fact that it came to war. Women of all people, who were always seen    as the inferior part of humanity, as lacking in judgement, in energy,

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as incapable of leadership or administration, – yes even as incapable of making decisions about their own affairs and who were therefore allocated a role utterly without influence in legal and social matters.24 (Heymann 1920: VVF I, 3) Not only did the dominant militarism, she felt, distort the reactions of many women, forcing them to go against their instincts and support the war, but it also ensured that any attempts made by women to work for peace were doomed to failure and obscurity. This claim is certainly borne out by the experience of those women who did persist in a public anti-war stance. Subject to censorship and restrictions at every turn, they found it hard to maintain international contacts. Heymann herself was expelled from Munich in 1917 and activists were prevented from leaving the country. To an extent, the middle-class Radicals were protected by their class and social status, and certainly received more lenient treatment than Socialist activists Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, who were both imprisoned (Luxemburg effectively for the whole of the war), but even so they had great difficulty in communicating with each other, let alone reaching the public. For private individuals, the price of expressing pacifist sentiments was often even higher. Some cases listed by Gutmann show disproportionate punishments meted out to women perceived of as dangerous to state security: imprisonment for long terms, expulsion from border states such as Alsace, separation from children, loss of livelihood, even a charge of treason against one woman who was doing exactly what Latzko advocated, trying to keep her own husband back from the front (Gutmann 1989: 192–94). After the war, Germany’s status as defeated nation and pariah of Europe added a further dimension to women’s responsibility for war. During the occupation of the Rhine by, among others, French Colonial troops, images of innocent German women’s sexual abuse at the hands of insatiably potent foreigners coexisted with contradictory images of their all-too-eager cooperation with the exotic conquerors. The racial element of the imagined sexual betrayal exacerbated these images of humiliation and defeat. In Berlin, women were accused of preferring solvent foreigners to home-grown heroes, thereby failing to fulfil the primary female function of replenishing the depleted nation and also of restoring the shattered self-esteem of the German male. The Revolution that brought the war to an end in Germany also brought with it political gains for women, most notably the vote, while the collapse of the economy coupled with demographic changes

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led to more women being employed, especially in white-collar jobs. Women were seen as having profited by the war without having suffered themselves, causing an exacerbation of the soldiers’ resentment against civilians. Meanwhile, the increased credence given to the Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back myth) brought with it an added sense of women’s share in the blame for the nation’s defeat and humiliation. As both the new government and the military were keen to lay the blame for Germany’s defeat anywhere other than with the heroic troops (‘undefeated on the field of battle’ according to the new Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert), it had to be laid elsewhere and women were given their share, along with Jews, big business, Communists, black marketeers and civilians in general. Women were blamed for crumbling under pressure, for frittering away scarce resources, for failing to maintain the morals and morale of the home front, for simultaneously undermining the soldiers’ will to fight and forcing them reluctantly into battle; in short, ultimately being unworthy of the sacrifices made by the fighting men on their behalf. After the war, German women were also blamed for the post-war rise in criminality, the spread of venereal disease and the breakdown in the moral and social order during the economic and political instability that characterised the 1920s (Bessel 1993). So we see that in Germany, the resentment against women stretched to encompass blame for both the war itself and the fact that it was lost, while women continued to be accused of the manifold moral failings and insensitivity to the needs of the men and the nation that would affect gender relations in Germany throughout the Weimar Republic.

Notes 1. Some of the contributors to this volume, such as Margarete Böhme, Leonore Nießen-Dieters, Isle Francke and Helene Christaller, were popular and well-known writers, some, like Helene Stöcker and Käthe Schirrmacher, were active in the women’s movement and many others had high positions in society by virtue of birth or marriage. Despite the inclusion of Stöcker, who writes cautiously of woman as the embodiment of love, both pacifist and socialist positions are absent from the collection. 2. ‘Sie legte ihren Mann und Sohn und Vater, ihren Bräutigam und Bruder als Opfer auf den Altar des Vaterlandes.’ 3. ‘Es wäre alles halb so schwer, Wenn nur die brennende Scham nicht wär: Sie gehen für dich in die Kugeln hinein Du liest es abends bei Lampenschein. Sie schlafen in nasses Gras gestreckt -

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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Dir steht dein gutes Bett gedeckt.  Und all deine Liebe und all dein Leid, Dein heissestes Wollen reicht nicht so weit, Daß es einem da draußen in würgender Schlacht Die letzte Stunde leichter macht.’ ‘Und wir? Wir können nur weinen und beten Für sie, die da liegen, bleich, blutig, zertreten Für uns! Denn es gibt kein Wort für das Opfer zu denken, Und es gibt keinen Dank für sie, die da sanken Für uns!’ Examples from other nations show that this feeling of shame was shared by women elsewhere, too, perhaps serving to partially explain some of the motivation behind the overwhelming rush by women to volunteer for nursing and other voluntary duties. In Cicely Hamilton’s poem ‘Non-combatant’, she writes of a ‘life and heart afire to give and give’ but finds instead that ‘in all the length of all this eager land, /No man has need of me’ (Reilly 1981: 46). The poem ends with the following lines, in which the relative worth of female and male sacrifice is seen very clearly: ‘Let me endure it then – I give my pride/ Where others give a life’ (ibid.: 46). ‘Wenn wir Frauen uns der Opfer würdig erweisen wollen, die für uns gebracht werden, wenn wir nur einen Teil der unendlichen Dankesschuld gegen unserer Millionenheere abtragen wollen    dann muß auch für uns wie für die Männer die Losung sein: Was ich bin und was ich habe, weih’ ich Dir, mein Vaterland.’ ‘wir müssen so sein, wie die Besten draußen uns in ihren besten Stunden sehen.’ ‘Wahlweise war die Frau im Krieg nicht deutsch oder nicht weiblich genug, wenn sie die Liebe zu den Ihren zu sehr in den Vordergrund stellte oder aber diese nicht genug betonte.’ ‘Es darf nie vergessen werden, daß da draußen in den Gräbern und auf der See, an den Batterien und in den Lüften nicht nur die militärische Ausbildung ihre Probe besteht, sondern auch das Erzeihungswerk deutscher Mütter und die Fürsorge deutscher Gattinnen.’ ‘Niemand von uns der nicht fühlte: diese Zeit, mag sie bringen und fordern, was sie will, ist für unsere Generation der feierliche Gipfel des Lebens. Wir trauern um alle, die das Schicksal hinwegnahm, ehe diese Monate auch aus ihnen ungeweckte Funken schlagen konnten, wie trauern um alle, die ihre Augen schliessen mußten, ehe sie den großen Tag ihres Volkes sah.’ ‘Das große Verbrechen: Krieg, brachte in 24 Stunden eine Einigung zustande, die dem Jahrzehntelangem Bemühen vernünftiger Menschen nicht gelungen war. Widerlich – nicht herrlich – schein uns dieses Gebaren.’ ‘Das Deutsche Volk fühlte sich wie ein mächtiger Koloß, einig in dem Sinne, der ganzen Welt zu widerstehen    Wer es gewagt hätte, gegen diese Einheit aufzustehen, der wäre überrannt, erdrückt, gelyncht worden.’

84 Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War 13. In this, their reaction was very different to that of the Hungarian feminists, who, despite their consistent pacifism, undertook charity work and organised women’s labour in a similar way to the women of the BDF in Germany. See Acsády Chapter 7. 14. ‘Der Weltkrieg hat bewiesen, daß der durch Gewalt aufgebaute und beherrschte Männerstaat auf der ganzen Linie versagt hat; der Beweis seiner Untauglichkeit wurde wohl noch nie anschaulicher erbracht. Das männliche Prinzip ist zersetzend und wird, wenn fortgeführt, die völlige Vernichtung der Menscheit herebeiführen.’ 15. ‘Frauen sind, nur weil sie Frauen sind, gegen jede brutale Gewalt, die nutzlos zerstören will, was gewachsen, was geworden ist, sie wollen aufbauen, schützen, neu schaffen, neu beleben.’ 16. For example, the gruesome images exhibited by the founder of the anti-war museum and tireless campaigner against war, Ernst Friedrich, had the aim of stripping away the comforting phrases that hid the reality of war in order to prevent any future wars. His book, Krieg dem Kriege! (‘War Against War’) exhorts women in four different languages if the men aren’t strong enough, do it for them’ (‘Frauen schafft Ihr’s wenn Eure Männer zu schwach sind’) (Friedrich 1999 [1924]: 14). 17. ‘ “Du sahst durch den Ring an seinem Finger die Frau, die jede Nacht auf ihn wartet, die an sein Leben, an ein Wiederkommen glaubt, und konntest töten!    Du bist ja ein Mörder!” Sie zerbrach mit diesem Satz den ganzen Schutzwall von Phrasen, den er, wie Millionen Männer mit ihm, um seine Taten gebaut hatte, um nicht sein eigenes schreiendes Herz zu hören.’ 18. ‘Warum hatte sie ihn nicht früher gezeigt, dass es Frauen und Mütter gibt? War er denn schuldig an seiner Tat? Warum hatte sie ihn gehen lassen? Warum hatten sich nicht alle Frauen vor die Züge geworfen?    Sie, die Frauen wussten doch, dass es da drüben Mütter gibt. Warum hatten sie sich nicht früher geeinigt, sie, die Mütter aller Menschen, zum Widerstand? “Der Mann war das Hirn, die Frauen das Herz der Welt. Und doch schwiegen wir.    Uns trifft der grössere Teil der Verantwortung.” ’ 19. ‘Gräßlich? Gräßlich ist nur der Abmarsch – rief er – man geht – und daß man gelassen wird, das ist gräßlich!’ 20. ‘Wer nicht geht, ist ein Feigling, und einen Feigling wollen sie nicht haben. Das ist’s ja! Verstehst Du nicht? Jetzt sind Helden modern. Die fesche Frau Dill hat einen Helden haben wollen zu ihrem neuen Hut, hehe. Darum hat der arme Dill sein Gehirn hinaustragen müssen. Ich auch - Du auch! Mußt sterben gehen, – mußt dich treten lassen, ins Gehirn treten! Und die Frauen schauen zu, - fesch - weil’s jetzt so Mode ist.’ 21. ‘Hast du nie was von Suffragetten gehört, die Minister geohrfeigt, Museen in Brand gesteckt, sich an Laternenpfähle haben anketten lassen für das Stimmrecht? Für das Stimmrecht, horst du? Und für ihre Männer nicht? Nicht einen Laut, nicht einen Schrei!’ 22. ‘Nicht eine hat gekämpft, nicht eine hat uns verteidigt. Nicht eine hat sich gerührt, in der ganzen Welt. Hinausgejagt haben sie uns! Den Mund verstopft haben sie uns! Die Sporn haben sie uns gegeben, wie dem armen Dill. Mordern haben sie uns geschickt, sterben haben sie uns geschickt, für ihre Eitelkeit.’

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23. ‘Oder glaubst du, wir wären gegangen, wenn sie uns nicht geschickt hätten? [  ] Kein General hätt’ was machen können, wenn die Frauen uns nicht hätten in die Züge pfropfen lassen, wenn sie geschrien hätten, daß sie uns nicht mehr anschaun, wenn wir zu Mordern werden. Nicht Einer wär hinaus, wenn sie geschworen hätten, daß keine von ihnen ins Bett steigt mit einem Mann, der Schädel gespalten, Menschen erschossen, Menschen erstochen hat. Nicht Einer, sag ich euch!’ 24. ‘Es ist eine höchst merkwürdige Erscheinung, die man während des Weltkrieges in fast allen Ländern beobachten konnte, daß in der Presse, in der Literatur, beim politischen Kannegießern wieder und wieder den Frauen die Schuld dafür vorgeworfen wurde, daß es zum Krieg gekommen sei. Ausgerechnet den Frauen, die man in der Familie, in Beruf und Gewerbe, in Staat und Gemeinde immer als den inferioren Teil der Menscheit betrachtete, als urteilslos, als energielos, als unfähig zu führen, zu verwalten, ja als unfähig für sich selbst und über ihre eigenen Angelegenheiten zu entscheiden und dementsprechend ihnen eine sozial und gesetzlich völlig einflußlose Rolle zuteilte.’

Bibliography Bäumer, G. (16 October 1914) ‘Zur seelischen Mobilmachung der Frau’, Die Frauenfrage, pp. 105–06. ——. (1915) ‘Die Frauen und der Krieg’, in BDF Kriegsjahrbuch des BDF, Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner. Bessel, R. (1993) Germany after the First World War, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blanck, A. (1917) Frauentrost und Frauenpflicht zur Kriegszeit, Mannheim: Schriftenvertrieb der Mannheimer Stadtmission. Brinker-Gabler, G. (ed.) (1980) Frauen gegen den Krieg, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Daniel, U. (1997) The War from Within: German Working Class Women in the First World War, Oxford: Berg. Domansky, E. (1996) ‘Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany’, in G. Eley (ed.) Society, Culture and the State in Germany 1870–1930, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 427–64. Eberle, M. (1985) World War I and the Weimar Artists, New Haven: Yale University Press. Friedrich, E. (1999) [1924] Krieg dem Kriege, Berlin: Anti-Kriegs-Museum. Gelblum, A. (1998) ‘Ideological Crossroads: Feminism, Pacifism, and Socialism’, in B. Melman (ed.) Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace 1870–1930, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 307–28. Gerhardt, U. (1978) Verhältnisse und Verhinderungen: Frauenarbeit, Familie und Rechte der Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Goll, C. (1918) ‘Die Wachshand’, Die Frauen Erwachen, Frauenfeld: Huber, 9–28. Also in Brinker-Gabler, pp. 58–64. Gutmann, B. (1989) Weibliche Heimarmee: Frauen in Deutschland 1914–1918, Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag. Hering, S. (1990) Die Kriegsgewinnlerinnen, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus. Hering, S. and Wenzel, C. (1986) Frauen riefen, aber man hörte sie nicht: Die Rolle der deutschen Frauen in der internationalen Frauenfriedensbewegung

86 Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War zwischen 1892 und 1933, Kassel: Schriftenreihe des Archivs der deutschen Frauenbewegung. Heymann, L.G. (1 October 1903) ‘Die Rechtliche Grundlage und die moralische Wirkung der Prostitution’, Die Frauenbewegung, pp. 162–64. ——. (1919) Völkerverständigung und Frauenstimmrecht, Leipzig: Naturwissenschaften. ——. (1920) Völkerversöhnende Frauenarbeit während des Krieges: Juli 1914–November 1918, Munich: Heller. ——. (1921) Völkerversöhnende Frauenarbeit II Teil November 1918–Dezember 1920, Stuttgart: Verlag ‘Friede Durch Recht’. ——. (1922) [1917] ‘Weiblicher Pazifismus’, in Brinker-Gabler, pp. 65–70. Heymann, L.G. and Augspurg, A. (February 1919) ‘Was will “Die Frau im Staat”?’, Die Frau im Staat, p. 1. ——. (1992) Erlebtes Erschautes. Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für Freiheit, Recht und Frieden 1850–1940, in M. Twellmann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Ulrike Helmer Verlag. Higonnet, M.R. and Higonnet, P. (1987) ‘The Double Helix’, in Higonnet et al. (ed.), pp. 31–47. Higonnet, M.R. et al. (eds) (1987) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hirschfeld, M. and Gaspar, A. (eds) (1930) Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges, Leipzig: Verlag fur Sexualwissenschaft Schneider. Jackson, A. (1996) ‘Germany, the Home Front (2): Blockade, Government and Revolution’, in P. Liddle and H. Cecil (eds) Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, London: Leo Cooper, pp. 563–75. Jünger, K. (1916) Deutschlands Frauen und Deutschlands Krieg. Ein Rat- Tat- und Trostbuch. Gesammelte Blätter aus Frauenhand, Stuttgart: Robert Lutz. Lange, H. (May 1917) ‘Der Oster-Erla des Kaisers und die Frauen’, Die Frau: 449–54. Latzko, A. (1917) Menschen im Krieg, Zurich: Rascher & Cie. All Translations by Project Gutenberg. Available online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ catalog/world/readfile?fk_files= 17814&pageno=2 Accessed 18 July 2006. ——. (1918) Frauen im Krieg. Geleitwort zur Internationalen Frauenkonferenz f˝ ur Völkerverständigung in Berne, Zürich: Max Rascher Verlag. Lüders, M-E. (1937) Das Unbekannte Heer: Frauen kämpfen für Deutschland 1914– 1918, Berlin: E.S Mittler & Sohn. Reilly, C. (ed.) (1981) Scars upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry of the First World War, London: Virago. Ruskin, J. (1893) Sesame and Lilies, Project Gutenberg. Available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/sesli10.txt Accessed 1 September 2005. Sharp, I. (1998) ‘Josephine Butler’s Campaign against the Double Moral Standard, and its repercussions in Germany’, in R. Byrn (ed.) Cousins at One Remove. Anglo-German Studies 2, Leeds: Northern Universities Press, pp. 159–82. Stritt, M. (16 June 1917) ‘Alles Beim Alten’, Die Frauenfrage, pp. 81–82. Tramitz, A. (1989) ‘Vom Umgang mit Helden. Kriegs(vor)schriften und Benimmregeln für deutsche Frauen im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in P. Knoch (ed.) Kriegsalltag: Die Rekonstrukton des Kriegsalltags als Aufgabe der historischen Forschung und der Freidenserziehung, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 84–113.

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Vellacott, J. (1993) ‘A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory: The early work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’, Women’s History Review 2: 23–56. Wendling, K. (1916) Das Kriegsgedicht in der Schule, Weißenburg: Straßburger Drückerei und Verlagsanstalt. Zahn Harnack, A. (1915) Der Krieg und die Frauen, Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag.

6 The Creation of an Icon in Defence of Hélène Brion: Pacifists and Feminists in the French Minority Media Joanna Shearer

The defeatist delights in peddling false news, unhealthy theories, unjustified or imagined impressions, attempting to sap the morale and resistance of both soldiers and civilians. The defeatist always acts in his own self-interest. Either unconsciously or, more commonly, consciously, he aids our enemies. He uses, in turn, the pen and the word. He acts in isolation or he obeys a group    Whatever he is, he is dangerous and it was necessary to pass a law in order to intimidate and punish him.1 (Procès Brion BMD 1918: 1) It is absolutely necessary to distract the masses from the external situation; one must entertain the public, feed it a story that will distract it from the war. All the scandals that suddenly materialize in the daily newspapers have no other goal. But that is still not enough. It is also necessary to let the blame for the war and its consequences fall on certain individuals, sacrificed in advance.2 (Vernet 1917: 31) The women’s press in Great War France consistently challenged traditional media views and became an effective space for minority opinions to be aired. Throughout this period, newspapers and pamphlets destined for women of various social classes became arenas of political agency, and within this ‘imagined sisterhood’ women could exchange ideas about their roles and duties. Arguably, at no time throughout the war was this discursive space more important for pacifist feminists (who, as Alison Fell notes in Chapter 4, constituted a minority amongst French feminists) than during the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for 88

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distributing so-called ‘defeatist’ propaganda. During the First World War, notions of pacifism, defeatism and feminism were conflated and demonized in French nationalist discourse. The trial of Hélène Brion was thus a defining moment in the battle between the pacifist movement and the government-regulated propagandistic national press. The trial itself has been briefly analysed by the other historians of women and the First World War3 but it has never been previously discussed in detail from the perspective of the women’s press, that is, the articulate, activist women collectively working to give other women agency in French society. The journalists Madeleine Vernet (a co-founder of an orphanage and editor of the newspaper La Mère Educatrice), Henriette Sauret (a poet and regular political contributor to the feminist newspaper La Voix des Femmes), Marguerite Durand (the founder of the first feminist newspaper La Fronde,) Nelly Roussel (a famous proponent of neo-Malthusianism and an articulate speaker and journalist on the cause’s behalf) and Séverine (a feminist militant journalist and co-founder of the League of Human Rights) all contributed to a variety of minority media publications and/or court testimonials and were resolute in their support of Brion. In this chapter, I shall demonstrate how, together and individually, these journalists textually and vocally used Brion’s trial as a means of promoting a calm, reasonable and politically motivated feminist vision. In so doing, they were attempting to re-define the function Brion fulfilled in French society of 1917 as an emblematic public figure and (ostensibly) to refute the way she had been exploited by the nationalist press as an ideological coat-hanger and embodiment of negative stereotypes. Through implicit and poetic counter-metaphors, this small group of women challenged broader social values regarding the portrayal of French women in First World War society. They attempted to present Brion not as a treacherous defeatist, but as a realistic and active role model for French women, a new Marianne figure who could instruct the nation’s females in the ways of principled, patriotic behaviour. In the first section of this chapter, I shall investigate the conflation of the pacifist, defeatist and feminist causes in the national press during the First World War and present a brief overview of the Brion trial. In the second section, I will examine the defence made by these persuasive and articulate representatives of the minority press as they vouched for Brion’s integrity, her ‘martyr-like’ qualities and her dedication to the pacifist cause in terms that are evocative of an idealized Marianne image. In the final section I shall discuss how, in their textual and vocal evocations of Brion, these women used the qualities they saw in Brion

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to cast her as the epitome of the ideal French woman, creating in effect a media-inspired counter icon. This was a strategy which, as I shall argue, brought benefits but also potential drawbacks to the cause of French feminist pacifism during the First World War.

Part one: The trial Brion’s trial became not just a debate about the new Prime Minister Clemenceau’s recent witch-hunting policies concerning defeatism, but a battle between the minority media and the national media. Many pacifist feminists complained about the false information that was routinely headlined in previously well-respected publications. Madeleine Vernet commented, for example: ‘The press has sold out, has prostituted itself; having been given a job to do, it has carried it out scrupulously. One must, after all, make a living’4 (1917: 9). Vernet, a close friend of Brion’s, explains in a long brochure produced in Brion’s defence how she and some friends visited the offices of the newspaper Le Matin to complain about their conflation of the terms ‘pacifist’ and ‘defeatist’ in their coverage of the Brion case. Vernet was shocked by the response to her enquiries. The editor reportedly argued, ‘But look, ladies, one must not play with words, to be pacifist is necessarily to be defeatist’. Vernet continues, ‘We protested greatly, but it was a lost cause. It was a recognized fact, for this journalist, that pacifist and defeatist were simply two identical terms’5 (1917: 24). Catherine Slater documents the early history of the neologism ‘défaitisme/défaitiste’ in her work Defeatists and their Enemies: Political Invective in France 1914– 1918. She notes that ‘the odium attached to the label défaitiste was such that people did not seem prepared to apply it to themselves in a bid to remove the stigma from it’. Though the Left occasionally proudly appropriated negative slogans used against them, this one had such echos of anti-patriotism that it was rejected even by those who were against any type of warfare (Slater 1981: 84). The common acceptance of the negative connotations of the word ‘defeatist’ (generally, one who desired peace at any price and who had no hope of victory, though as Slater notes, the accepted definition depended entirely on the exact week of the war that was being discussed) led the feminist press to define Brion with the less injurious term of ‘pacifist’ (one who believed countries should not participate in war) and to attempt to infuse this term, and Brion’s wartime role, with patriotic allegiance. Although several others had been arrested and tried for the crime of defeatism with little fanfare, in March 1918 Hélène Brion, a feminist schoolteacher from the working-class suburb of Pantin, outside of Paris,

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was famously tried for ‘aiding the enemy by disseminating what the government called defeatist propaganda’ and with sending this literature to a friend, Gaston Mouflard, who was fighting at the Front (Wishnia 1987: 103). None of the ‘defeatist’ material Brion distributed was her own personal work: the pamphlet was written by others and quoted various famous pacifist thinkers – Brion was merely the messenger. There were numerous more ‘dangerous’ activists who could have been more legitimately charged by the government and the media: so why was Brion chosen by Clemenceau as an appealing scapegoat? It has been previously argued that the main reason for this was her gender. Grayzel notes that women could only demonstrate their patriotism by support of the troops, as they could not fight. Thus, if they did not fulfil their proper feminine duty by providing moral support, inculcating and embodying virtue, then they were not adequately proving their patriotism and were therefore to be classified as defeatists (1999: 167). Brion’s gender, combined with her ‘radical’ extracurricular activities (she held various high-level positions in French trade-unionist and feminist groups), made her an ideal target. Brion herself explained her role as scapegoat in French political society best when she asked, Do you pursue me because I am only a woman, because I am a feminist, a schoolteacher, because I am a trade unionist, because I represent certain tendencies that you perhaps do not like, that you fear? Is this why you have attacked me? If so, my personality having been erased, have I become simply a symbol, an abstraction? It is evidently a great honour that you consider me to be a personification of the principles that I support, but I am paying a high price for this honour.6 (Procès Brion BMD 1918: 162) While the national press supported the government’s condemnation of Brion as defeatist, the feminist-pacifist media made it their task to present Brion not as an embodiment of negative stereotypes, but rather as an emblematic patriotic Frenchwoman (or, I will argue, as an embodiment of positive stereotypes) with a virtuous character and a strong voice who enunciated truly French ideals. It is important to add, however, that such a portrayal was a long way off from Brion’s self-presentation, in which she emphasizes the extent to which she had previously lived life as a wholly individual intellectual feminist and pacifist thinker. The ‘Brion scandal’ provided the national media with an opportunity to present absurdly clichéd characterizations of the

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defeatist Frenchwoman to their readership in order to portray both the pacifist and feminist causes in a negative light. It was on Sunday 18 November 1917 that the Hélène Brion story broke in the national press. All the main papers covered the story, but it was the national daily Le Matin that was the most scathing. Le Matin began by recounting the search made at Brion’s home at the school where she taught, noting that ‘We discovered numerous leaflets inviting soldiers to desert and a large amount of correspondence which allowed us to find the two accomplices who have now been charged. We also found detailed accounts and glowing commentaries of pacifist speeches at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, as well as various subscriptions for defeatist propaganda in France’7 (Le Matin 18 November 1917). The article goes on to describe how Brion and her ‘defeatist’ cohorts sent their ‘unsavoury, unwholesome literature’ to soldiers on the front lines. The most pressing concern for the national media was Brion’s role as a corrupter, or rather, as a persuasive brainwasher of innocent minds. The press also made much of Brion’s allegedly bizarre appearance. In Le Matin, ‘Abnormal, at the very least’ was the heading of one section of the article, with the writer making reference to her unusual masculine attire. In addition, her clairvoyant, Cassandra-like qualities were also evoked. Margaret Darrow notes that Brion was painted as ‘a fanatical visionary, at once the victim of a mystical temperament and villainous suggestions’ (2000: 299). Susan Grayzel also comments on the contradictory presentation of the schoolteacher in the nationalist press, contradictions that played on normalized notions of both femininity and masculinity: ‘Brion was described as both hysterical and masculine, irresponsible and dangerous, tempting and hard, in other words, qualities loaded with both masculine and feminine connotations. Brion thus was blamed for both being “naturally” female – a hysterical, irresponsible temptress – and “unnaturally” male – masculine, dangerous, unflinching’ (1999: 174). In order to counter the construction by newspapers such as Le Matin of Brion as an ‘unnatural’ and dangerous traitor, the women’s press were obliged to offer strong counter-metaphors for these negative caricatures. They thus highlighted the strong, patriotic and positive qualities that they claim Brion demonstrated and they proudly appropriated these attributes as female.

Part two: Testimonials Justice must triumph. We must enlighten the ignorant. There are clearly a number of people who only see what the press and the police

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want them to see. It is not that they are fundamentally wicked. It is just that it is so easy to accept ready-made explanations, without taking the pains to search for the truth oneself. Thinking is an effort, let us not forget it, and the masses prefer others to think for them.8 (Vernet 1917: 32)

Brion as Marianne In the character witnesses and written testimonials of the trial, as well as in various feminist newspaper articles, letters and brochures, Brion was consistently lauded for her upright standing in society as many acquaintances sought to refute the negative characterizations presented by the national media. It must be stressed here that the few female feminist journalists on whom I focus were atypical within French First World War society. Throughout the difficult war years, when many women involved in the women’s movement saw patriotic support of a nation at war as overriding their interest in women’s suffrage, these activists refused to be halted in their battle for gender equality. They continued, in their publications and speeches, to highlight the ways in which women retained intrinsic strength through discourses of Woman as ‘creator’ and as the ‘natural enemy of war’. In so doing, they encouraged their sisters to demonstrate similar influence on a society that, more often than not, parodied their progress with negative characterizations in the national media. In total, 57 friends and colleagues spoke in support of Brion at her trial, and others published articles, pamphlets and letters of support (though the censor, affectionately termed ‘Anastasie’ by the public, often cut salient lines of text from these publications). In Madeleine Vernet’s brochure, written entirely in Brion’s defence and entitled Hélène Brion: Une Belle Conscience et une sombre affaire, an old schoolfriend avowed, ‘I have known Hélène Brion for twenty-two years. I know her as an upright, honest, impassioned and courageous person’9 (1917: 13). This portrayal is typical of many that constructed Brion as a virtuous role model for French women to emulate. In Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Bonte’s 1992 work Marianne: Les Visages de la République, they examine numerous representations of the Marianne figure, symbol of the French Republic since its establishment in 1848, investigating her attributes in different political periods and how they were alternately praised or caricatured by the Right and the Left. The most conventional allegorical properties of the positive repertoire tended to remain the same, however, no matter which political party or movement claimed

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her as their own. The writers describe the ‘typical’ Marianne as ‘wise, calm and strong’ (1992: 78). Highly ‘feminine’ characteristics (such as beauty, sweetness and sex appeal) do not appear on the list. And it is these Marianne-like characteristics of wisdom, calm and strength, rather than more traditionally ‘feminine’ characteristics, that frequently appear in the testimonials supporting Brion. The political activist and historian Huguette Bouchardeau makes a similar point in her introduction to Brion’s feminist political pamphlet, La Voie féministe, when she comments that Brion possessed all the characteristics of a ‘humane person’, that is, courage, candour, determination with regard to work, intelligence, loyalty, integrity and toughness, but that these qualities did not rate highly on the list of feminine virtues (Bouchardeau 1978: 10). Brion’s defence team of journalists may not have intentionally set out to portray her as a patriotic Marianne figure, but they nevertheless had a set list of characteristics they wanted to play up in order to create an appropriately patriotic French feminist vision for the nation, and these qualities and the metaphors used to evoke them had much in common with those associated with the famous figurehead of the Republic. Brion’s unusual outward appearance continued to be a prominent leitmotif for the national press as they consistently mocked her dress sense in the early articles concerning her crimes. Madeleine Vernet countered these accusations indignantly, arguing that her famous attire was simply her cycling kit and that she wore it when she had tasks to accomplish for which she needed ease of movement. Vernet emphasized instead the many ‘womanly’ character traits that Brion possessed: ‘I can assure you, gentlemen of the press, that she is a woman, essentially a woman. Her qualities are all feminine qualities; and she has a woman’s heart – the heart of a strong and noble woman that beats in her chest’10 (1917: 18). Similarly, Agulhon and Bonte do not dwell on the aesthetics of the appearance of the symbol of the Republic but her character traits; they describe the traditional Marianne as neither pretty nor ugly, but rather as kind (1992: 77). Bouchardeau also notes that Brion’s thoughtful but quiet intelligence made it difficult for her to be slotted into the gender norms that were circulating in early-twentieth-century French society: ‘She had all the qualities that one expects from someone who should succeed, except the taste for competition. But it was men’s job to succeed; women could only make a name for themselves by kindness, seduction, beauty and patience’11 (1978: 8). Brion was neither beautiful and seductive as women were supposed to be, nor hugely ambitious and competitive as men were expected to be in order to succeed. It was Brion’s peaceful and unaggressive demeanor in the face of insult and

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injury that was singled out as proof of her patriotism by her defence team. In fact, her calm, distant exterior was often described as almost statue-like in its immobility. Sauret noted, for example, that she suffered everything with an astonishing serenity (Sauret, BMD undated letter: 7). She was, in short, a perfect symbol of the Republic holding strong in support of a confused, fractured nation.

Brion as Martyr Brion’s friends did not only draw on the Republican imagery of Marianne in their defence. They also turned to religious imagery in order to vouch for her status as a virtuous victim. More specifically, many testimonials drew on the imagery of pure and saintly spirits and sinless pasts. Vernet, for example, highlighted the purity of Brion’s soul: ‘Good and generous, she suffers from all the suffering to which she is witness, she shows her indignation and rebellion each time that her heart suffers when she sees the ugliness, cruelty and injustice that we all see everyday    It is a pure soul, like a pure diamond, that most effectively brings out the baseness that surrounds it’12 (1917: 10–11). Sauret even went so far as to call Brion ‘the eternal apostle’ and elevated Brion’s status to that of a martyr, writing in a tribute, ‘This beautiful living image, this uprightness made flesh, this peaceful gallantry made woman whose name is Hélène, Hélène Brion’13 (Sauret, BMD undated letter: 1). Catherine O’Brien also comments on the use of religious imagery in certain journalists’ portrayal of Brion, stating that they create a portrait of a ‘Christ-like figure persecuted by an uncomprehending crowd’ (1997: 34). Elevating Brion to the status of a martyr in this way was a cunning ploy in terms of her reputation in the press, but the writers occasionally overplayed their cards in terms of their creation of a French paragon of virtue. No flesh and blood woman could hope to live up to the image that these writers created for Brion and casting her as a faultless presence potentially hindered rather than helped the other flawed, individual women who also sought respect and/or political agency within First World War French society.

Brion as fighter for the pacifist cause In her brochure, Madeleine Vernet asks searching questions about feminists and their role within the pacifist cause, a divisive issue amongst feminists in First World War France. She attempts to construct a nonthreatening collective identity of feminist pacifist women, rather than

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singling Brion out as an exceptional case who held potentially dangerous or treacherous views: Hélène was pacifist, we do not wish to deny it; we share her pacifism. Our pacifism is born of love for our country and for humanity, sentiments that we do not consider to be incompatible with one another. We think that if the leaders so wished, peace could be discussed and a good solution could put an end to all the horrors that terrify us. We want a Society of Nations, a United States of Europe (that Victor Hugo ardently called for almost 50 years ago). We want an international entente of all the powers in order to prevent a similar calamity from happening again. This is our pacifism, and it was that of Hélène.14 (1917: 24–25) Although Brion became the figurehead for the pacifist cause, Vernet was keen to emphasize the fact that she was simply one individual example amongst a large group of dedicated followers. The pacifist feminists of First World War France did not claim universal martyrdom. Vernet presented them as intelligent women who thought deeply about the threats of war and detested killing of any kind. Brion’s trial became their shining moment to showcase an undervalued cause. Yet, as I demonstrate, their exaggerations in their descriptions of female righteousness, virtue and perfection did not help in their endeavours to offer a more realistic and sympathetic portrait of feminist pacifists than that found in government pro-war propaganda. Some of the feminists who testified at Brion’s trial were not afraid to bring out the tough side of their icon. Interestingly, it was Marguerite Durand, who once stated that feminism owed a lot to her blonde hair – referring to the appealing ‘feminine’ qualities that were necessary for feminist women to achieve their goals – who underlined the courage and strength that Brion displayed. These are not qualitites that would have previously been described as feminine but Durand refers to them in order to suggest Brion’s ardent patriotism: Hélène Brion did not put her flag in her pocket, she displayed it, in full awareness of her act, and in this she showed the courage that we all know she possessed; she testified with a force of character that you appreciate when forced to fight against your own side, no doubt in accordance with the adage ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’.15 (Procès Brion BMD 1918: 152)

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Even though in reality Brion appeared not to have a competitive or belligerent nature, she was sometimes described by witnesses as a patriotic, revolutionary fighter. Brion’s actual character and her imagined character were rarely consistent as the feminist press busily constructed a laudable icon. What mattered was not an accurate portrayal of a schoolteacher and trade unionist, but the construction of a woman who was the embodiment of ‘true’ patriotism. Brion’s alleged patriotism became an important point of contention, as each character witness sought to portray Brion as the ideal, and often highly idealized, Frenchwoman.

Part three: How to be feminine, feminist and French Susan Grayzel’s study of the Brion trial within her larger work Women’s Identities at War provides us with a neat encapsulation of the different societal norms and forces at work against Brion in the courtroom: At its core, [Brion’s] trial concerned itself with debates about political rights in wartime, with the responsibility of women to stand between society and children in order to both inculcate and embody virtue, and, fundamentally, with whether it was possible to be ‘feminine’, ‘feminist’ and ‘French’.    Brion was perceived as especially dangerous because as a feminist and a woman who dissented she overtly challenged certain norms, most significantly those concerning civil rights and national identity. (1999: 167) Brion herself deliberately connected her feminism and her pacifist activities when she spoke in her defence at her trial. She testified, This educational activity, I carried it out above all as a feminist, because I am first and foremost a feminist, all those who know me can attest to this. And it is through feminism that I am an enemy of the war.    I have never made a remark about the evils of the current situation without adding that, if women had a voice on the subject, things would happen differently.16 (Procès Brion BMD 1918: 152–53) Although Brion was an eloquent and logical speaker and communicated her feminist pacifism clearly, forcefully and with passion, her poetic defence team of seasoned feminists was far more concerned with recreating a preconceived notion of a patriotic Frenchwoman. Their accounts almost always present Brion as a brave, loyal and overwhelmingly good

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young woman who would appeal to a male judge, jury and readership. Brion’s trial certainly triggered a debate about feminism, but her defence also promoted Brion as an idealized French martyr. Her feminist supporters believed that only by demonstrating her unwavering virtue and patriotism could Brion escape her classification by the mainstream French press as a dangerous poisoner of innocent minds. Nelly Roussel, for example, a well-known neo-Malthusian and feminist activist, used all of her usual alliterative tricks to focus the audience on the inherent ‘Frenchness’ of Brion. Often, Roussel’s speech seemed to lose its focus on Brion herself, and she voiced what sounded like a rehearsed monologue defining the French patriotic feminist: I have come here to declare that I am proud of her: I am proud as a woman and as a feminist and I am proud – I insist on this point – I am proud of her as a Frenchwoman, because the glory of a nation does not only stem from the belligerent valour of its soldiers, but also from the generosity of spirit and of heart of its apostles. Hélène Brion is a credit to France: she is a pure and true Frenchwoman!17 (Procès Brion BMD 1918: 148–49) The author of the trial notes containing this quotation even states that Roussel’s goal seemed not to be to focus directly on Brion, but to distinguish between military and civil heroism. Roussel twice meandered off track when she got caught up in her own alliterative patriotic language. Roussel stated earlier in her testimony, for instance, that Brion’s previous publications were clear, spiritual, generous and in a word, truly French and I insist on this word that greatly pleases me, not only because of the ideas that it expresses, but also because of the moral qualities that it reveals, because there are important male writers, you know this Gentlemen, whose talent we all admire, but whose morality we sometimes question. But when reading Hélène Brion, reading her honestly and without taking sides, it is impossible to doubt her morality.18 (ibid.: 148) The argument that women were inherently more virtuous than men was a common one within the suffrage movement, as was the notion that pacifism could be patriotic. What Roussel does not do in this feminist commentary, however, is to paint a focused, realistic portrait of the defendant. Similarly, Séverine also said little about Brion herself, comparing her instead to another famous (if controversial)

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French patriot who is remembered with a statue at Montmartre, the Communard Louise Michel (Procès Brion BMD 1918: 149). In her written account of Brion, Sauret, known for her poetry, attempted to speak from the heart, but her description is also one of an abstract patriotic martyr: ‘Hélène of Pantin became Hélène of Paris and of the entire country’19 (Sauret, BMD undated letter: 3). Vernet also attested to Brion’s Frenchness, but she did so by way of a pointed accusation of the national press, stating that Brion was not to be confused with the bankers and the big businessmen who trade and sell everything, even the honour and morality of the country: Hélène was more French than you; because it is people like her who form the moral depth of a nation. Hélène loved her country, if I am permitted to say it, but she wanted a great and untainted France.    And the war was, in her eyes, a disgrace for France, the war with all its internal and external consequences.20 (1917: 26) Thus Vernet is determined to reclaim ‘Frenchness’ for feminist pacifists, and take it away from the ‘camp’ of nationalist male journalists. Vernet’s brochure was far more wide ranging and personal than many other accounts, mainly because it was not presented at the trial or published in a national newspaper and was thus largely free from censorship and imposed ideas. But Vernet also did her research, contacting old friends who recounted tales of Brion’s schoolgirl interests, her silly games and painful childhood memories. In total, Vernet humanized Brion with insight and affection in what is an occasionally humourous text. In a fond tribute to an old friend, Vernet speaks openly to her reading public, revealing that if they knew Brion like she did, they would be aware of her numerous interesting layers: ‘   when one has discovered, beneath the rough outer skin of strength and endurance of a person who has fought and struggled, treasures of tenderness and exquisite sensitivity, you cannot help but admire her’21 (1917: 20). Although Vernet’s testimonial is more personal and humanizing than many, I have shown how, in general, the feminists of the First World War minority press turned Brion into an untouchable icon of patriotic French womanhood, playing on both Republican and Catholic ideology with reference to a mythic Marianne figurehead and religious imagery that referred to her supposedly sinless previous existence. It must be noted, finally, that only a small section of the feminist community came out in support of Brion. Other feminist journalists remained in complete disagreement with the pacifist activism that she

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represented. Jane Misme, the editor of the newspaper La Française, was one such example. On 8 December 1917, just after Brion was arrested, Misme wrote, I dare say that I do not oppose the arrest of Mlle. Brion. I do not have at my disposal the intelligence that the legal team have collected in order to establish her regrettable guilt, but it is clear that she took part in so-called pacifist propaganda against which the newspaper La Française has never ceased to protest.22 (Misme 1917) In contrast, La Voix des Femmes, a feminist newspaper published from 1917 to 1922 which often included a column entitled ‘The Free Speech of Marianne’ (which, ironically, was often subject to the censor), was proud to call Brion a role model for other feminists. On 3 April 1918, the subheading of the section was ‘Touching Symbol’, and the writer who went by the penname of Marianne wrote that the intelligent, young, generous and brave Brion was a ‘femme de coeur’, a sincere propagandist with high ideals who had managed to make the judges treat her with ‘frank courtesy’. Thus a symbolic Marianne of the feminist press was heard on a national stage praising an iconic Marianne figure created by the same organ. Unfortunately the last few lines of the Brion section of the article were censored (one must imagine, by a male censor playing the part of ‘Anastasie’ that day), thus fuelling the argument that Marianne figures were best seen and not heard on the national stage. In conclusion, it is clear that the press of the time often fell, as it still does today, into the habit of presenting the world in stark black and white imagery of angels versus demons and good versus evil. Frequently, less subtle journalists tend to cut down complex political players into empty caricatures. Throughout the First World War, it appears that the women’s advocacy press was not offered many strong professional role models (either as women or as journalists) within the larger newspaper community. Their goal of creating a realistic vision of a strong and confident politicized female role model for France by presenting a composite portrait of a multitalented and virtuous individual was intended to promote a strong vision of women’s ‘agency’ instead of empty female ‘imagery’. Yet in attempting to accomplish this task, I have argued that these feminist writers often merely created a countericon, an image in response to an image; exactly what they had fought against in their previous texts and speeches. Sauret, writing for La Voix des Femmes in 1919, summed up her appreciation of Hélène Brion’s contribution to this vision of the potential benefits of feminist pacifism

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in a poetic tribute that captures the essence of the imagery/agency problematic: ‘   this groundbreaking rebel speaks of love and nothing but love. Thus, with her broad forehead, her clear eyes, extolling an air of proud energy, she appears as the very image of the Victorious Woman’23 (Sauret 1919, my emphasis). ‘Woman’ was often portrayed during the First World War as a mere propaganda concept that could comfort, inculcate virtue and provide moral support for men. In terms of her own vocal political agency, however, she was still severely limited. Brion’s trial did much for the reputation of feminism and it is the transcription of her own testimonial that makes the most fascinating reading as she eloquently presented her views on pacifism, feminism and women’s political duty to a respectful public. In contrast, her entourage’s insistence on her embodiment of the sinless spirit of all French feminists, pacifists and patriots tended to belittle her individuality and reduce her to an untouchable mythological martyr, rather than elevating her to the status of a humanized political player. Though the outcome of the trial (Brion was given a three-year suspended sentence) hinted at minor success in terms of transmitting a worthwhile political message from the mouth of a woman, the ‘image’ that the feminist-pacifist press advocated would have to mature into a more realistic representation if women were ever to achieve political parity in First World War French society.

Notes 1. ‘Le défaitiste est celui qui se plaît à colporter des nouvelles fausses, des théories malsaines, des impressions injustifiées, imaginaires, tendant à affaiblir le moral et la force de résistance des civils et des militaires. Le défaitiste agit toujours dans un intérêt de parti. Il se fait l’auxiliaire, conscient le plus souvent, parfois inconscient, de nos ennemis. Il emploie tour à tour la plume ou la parole. Il se comporte en isolé ou bien il obéit à un groupe.    Quel qu’il soit, il est dangereux, et il a fallu voter une loi afin de l’intimider et le punir.’ 2. ‘Il est de toute nécessité de détourner l’esprit de la masse de la situation extérieure; il faut amuser le public, lui jeter en pâture une proie qui le détourne de l’horizon de la guerre. Tous les scandales qui surgissent comme à souhait dans les grands quotidiens n’ont pas d’autre but. Mais ce n’est pas suffisant encore. Il faut faire retomber tout le poids de la guerre et de ses conséquences sur quelques têtes, sacrifiées d’avance.’ 3. See for example Darrow 2000; Grayzel 1999; O’Brien 1997; Wishnia 1987. 4. ‘La Presse vendue, la Presse prostituée, avait reçu une mission, elle l’accomplissait SCRUPULEUSEMENT! – Il faut bien gagner son argent.’ 5. ‘“Mais voyons, Mesdames, il ne faut pas jouer avec les mots, être pacifiste c’est nécessairement être défaitiste.” Nous eûmes beau protester, ce fut peine perdue.

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

Il est avéré, pour ce journaliste, que pacifiste et défaitiste ne sont que les deux termes d’une même proposition.’ ‘Est-ce que vous me poursuivez parce que je ne suis qu’une femme, parce que je suis féministe, institutrice, parce que je suis syndicaliste et que je représente des tendances que vous n’aimez peut-être pas, que vous redoutez? Est-ce pour cela que vous vous en êtes pris à moi? Alors, ma personnalité s’efface, je deviens simplement un symbole, une abstraction? C’est un grand honneur que vous me faites évidemment en me considérant comme personnifiant les principes que je soutiens, mais cet honneur, je le paye un peu cher.’ ‘On y découvrit des tracts nombreux, invitant les soldats à la désertion, et une volumineuse correspondance qui permit de trouver les deux complices actuellement inculpés. On trouvait aussi des comptes rendus détaillés et des commentaires élogieux des conférences pacifistes de Zimmerwald et de Kienthal, ainsi que diverses listes de souscription pour la propagande de l’idée défaitiste en France.’ ‘Il faut que triomphe la cause de la justice. Il faut éclairer ceux qui ne savent pas. Il y a certainement nombre de gens qui ne voient que ce que la presse et la police veulent leur montrer. Ce n’est pas qu’ils soient foncièrement mauvais. Mais c’est qu’il est si facile d’accepter les explications toutes prêtes, sans se donner la peine de rechercher soi-même la vérité. Penser est un effort, ne l’oublions pas; et la masse aime bien qu’on pense pour elle.’ ‘Je connais Hélène Brion depuis vingt-deux ans. Je la connais comme une intègre, une ardente, une vaillante.’ ‘Soyez-en sûrs, messieurs les journalistes, c’est une femme, essentiellement une femme. Ses qualités sont toutes des qualités féminines; et c’est un coeur de femme – de femme forte et noble qui bat dans sa poitrine.’ ‘Elle a toutes les qualités que l’on attend de quelqu’un qui doit “réussir”, hormis le goût de la compétition. Mais c’est aux hommes qu’il appartient de réussir; les femmes ne peuvent s’imposer que par la gentillesse, la séduction, la beauté, la patience.’ ‘Bonne, généreuse, elle souffre de toute la souffrance dont elle est témoin    elle dit son indignation et sa révolte chaque fois que son coeur souffre devant les laideurs, les cruautés, les injustices dont nous sommes les spectateurs journaliers    L’âme pure, comme le pur diamant, fait mieux ressortir la vulgarité qui l’entoure.’ ‘Cette belle image vivante, droiture faite chair, tranquille bravoure faite femme, qui se nomme Hélène, Hélène Brion.’ ‘Hélène était pacifiste, nous ne songeons pas à le nier; nous le sommes avec elle. Notre pacifisme est fait de l’amour de notre pays et de l’amour de l’humanité que nous ne considérons pas incompatibles l’un avec l’autre. Nous pensons que si les dirigeants le voulaient, la paix pourrait être étudiée et qu’une bonne solution mettrait fin à toutes ces horreurs qui nous épouvantent. Nous voulons la Société des Nations, les États-Unis d’Europe (que Victor Hugo appelait de tous ses voeux il y a près de 50 ans), nous voulons une entente internationale de toutes les puissances pour empêcher qu’une pareille calamité se renouvelle. Voilà notre pacifisme; et c’était celui d’Hélène.’ ‘Hélène Brion n’a pas mis son drapeau dans sa poche, elle l’a deployé en se rendant compte certainement de son acte, elle a montré en cela un courage

Joanna Shearer

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

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23.

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que nous lui connaissons toutes; elle a temoigné d’une force de caractère que vous apprécierez en luttant contre son propre parti, sans doute en vertu de cet adage: “Qui aime bien, châtie bien.” ’ ‘Cette action éducative, je l’ai surtout exercée dans le sens féministe, car je suis surtout et avant tout féministe, tous ceux qui me connaissent peuvent l’attester. Et c’est par féminisme que je suis ennemie de la guerre.    jamais je n’ai fait une réflexion sur les maux de l’heure actuelle sans ajouter que, si les femmes avaient voix au chapitre pour les questions sociales, les choses se passeraient différemment.’ ‘   je viens ici déclarer que je suis fière d’elle: je suis fière comme femme et comme féministe et je suis fière – je tiens à insister sur ce point – je suis fière d’elle comme Française, car la gloire d’un peuple n’est pas faite seulement de la valeur guerrière de ses soldats, mais elle est faite aussi de la grandeur d’âme et de la générosité de coeur de ses apôtres, Hélène Brion fait honneur à la France: elle est une pure et une vraie Française!’ ‘   en un mot, bien français, et j’insiste sur ce mot qui me plaît infiniment, non seulement par les idées qu’il exprime, mais encore, mais surtout par les qualités d’âme qu’il révèle, car il y a de grands écrivains, vous le savez Messieurs, dont nous admirons le talent tout en conservant quelque inquiétude ou tout au moins quelque incertitude sur leur valeur morale. Mais en lisant Hélène Brion, en la lisant honnêtement et sans parti pris, il est impossible de douter d’elle.’ ‘Hélène de Pantin devenait Hélène de Paris et du pays entier’. Pantin is the suburb of Paris in which Brion lived. ‘Hélène était plus Française que vous; car ce sont les créatures comme elle qui font la richesse morale d’un peuple. Hélène aimait son pays, qu’il me soit permis de le dire; mais elle le voulait grand et sans tache.    Et la guerre était, à ses yeux, une opprobe pour la France; la guerre avec toutes ses conséquences intérieures et extérieures.’ ‘   lorsqu’on a découvert, sous la rude écorce des qualités de force et d’endurance qui en font une créature de lutte et de combat, des trésors de tendresse et d’exquise délicatesse; – on ne peut pas se défendre de l’admirer.’ ‘   j’ose dire que je ne proteste pas contre l’arrestation de Mlle. Brion. Je ne dispose point des renseignements que la justice a pu réunir pour établir le regret de sa culpabilité; mais il est évident qu’elle a pris part à la propagande dite pacifiste contre laquelle La Française n’a cessé de s’élever.’ ‘   cette révoltée, cette casseuse de barrières est infiniment amour et n’est qu’amour. Et parlant ainsi avec son front large, ses yeux clairs, toute vêtue de fière énergie, elle apparut comme l’image même de la Femme victorieuse’.

References Unattributed newspaper articles Le Matin (18 November 1917) ‘La Propagande Défaitiste: Une institutrice arrêtée à Pantin’. La Voix des Femmes (3 April 1918) ‘Libres Propos de Marianne: Symbole Touchant’.

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Archives and manuscript collections Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris (BMD) ‘Le Défaitisme et les Défaitistes’ (Procès Brion in text). Le Procès Hélène Brion et Mouflard Devant Le Premier Conseil de Guerre, Revue des Causes Célèbres: Politiques et Criminelles (1918), Compte rendu des débats judiciaires d’après la sténographie, avec croquis pris à l’audience. DOS Brion. Sauret, H. ‘Hélène Brion, Héroine de la Paix’, original copy of undated letter (1917?) addressed to Brion. DOS Brion.

Bibliography Agulhon, M. and Bonte, P. (1992) Marianne, Les visages de la République, Evreux: Gallimard. Bouchardeau, H. (1978) Hélène Brion: La voie féministe, Préface, notes et commentaires; Huguette Bouchardeau, Paris: Syros. Darrow, M. (2000) French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front, Oxford: Berg. Grayzel, S.R. (1999) Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, Chapel Hill: UNC Press. Misme, J. (8 December 1917) ‘Hélène Brion et la propagande défaitiste’, La Française. O’Brien, C. (1997) Women’s Fictional Responses to the First World War: A Comparative Study of Selected Texts by French and German Writers, Oxford: Peter Lang. Sauret, H. (9 January 1919) ‘La Victoire des Femmes’, La Voix des Femmes. Slater, C. (1981) Defeatists and Their Enemies: Political Invective in France 1914– 1918, New York: Oxford University Press. Vernet, M. (1917) Hélène Brion: Une Belle Conscience et une sombre affaire, Épone, Seine-et-Oise: La Société d’Edition et de Libraire de l’Avenir Social. Wishnia, J. (1987) ‘Feminism and Pacifism: The French Connection’, in R.R. Pierson (ed.) Women and Peace: Theoretical, Historical and Practical Perspectives, London: Croom Helm, pp. 103–14.

7 In a Different Voice: Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War∗ Judit Acsády

Let us make a stronger connection with our foreign sisters, the connection that has always existed among mothers of humankind. Let us gather strength from this solidarity in order to restore the peace that our civilization deserves and to find the way of non-violent resolution of conflicts between nations’1 (Woman April 1915: cover page).

Preface Hungary joined the First World War as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to defend the Empire’s interests. The war was presented in Hungary as being supported by the whole nation. Enthusiasm for the war and hostility against the enemy were understood to be inherent in patriotism and were expected to be demonstrated. Yet there were some who remained pacifist throughout the conflict. The politicians and social scientists who gathered around the first sociology journal, Twentieth Century (Huszadik Század ), and the movement of the socalled ‘middle-class radicals’ (polgári radikálisok) were critical of the war, although their pacifism was often merely theoretical (Mérey 1947: 45). The pacifist circles, who met informally in cafés or private apartments, were connected to free masonry in Budapest. The Radical Party’s programme also included the idea of anti-militarism (ibid.: 45). During the war, some of the strikes against poor food supply and high prices ∗ Special thanks to my aunt, Dr Rozália Rákóczy (who earlier worked for the Archive of the Military History Institute, Budapest) for her valuable advice about sources for my essay and for educational consultations about World War I.

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organized by the Party of Hungarian Social Democrats were likewise connected to this criticism of militarism (Nevel˝ o 1980: 118–20). Yet the social democrats, in their fear of the authorities (who accused them of anti-war propaganda), did not, apart from a manifesto in 1916, publish or act openly against the war.2 It seems that the strongest voice against the war in Hungary that could be heard was that of women (Galántai 2001: 206). A significant wing of the Hungarian women’s movement was represented by an organization called the ‘Feministák Egyesülete’ (‘Feminist Association’), which was established in 1904 in Budapest.3 The Association had contacts with the Hungarian radicals and shared their critical ideas. The pacifism of the Hungarian feminists led them to reject the over-militarized political discourse of the time and, unlike feminist organizations in other countries as well as other organizations at home, they refused to join the voices that justified the war.4 In this chapter, before discussing the representation of the First World War in the Hungarian press, a short overview of the origins of the Hungarian women’s movement will be given in order to establish the background of feminist activism. The pacifism of the Hungarian feminist movement will be presented on the basis of its manifestation in the monthly publication Woman (‘A N˝ o’), between 1914 and 1918. The international context and the significant personalities of the Hungarian feminist movement will also be discussed. In addition to exploring elements of the anti-war attitudes and the anti-militarist discourse of the feminist journal Woman, this chapter will also outline the practical work of the ‘Feminist Association’ – the ways in which they helped those in need on the home front.

The Hungarian women’s movement and its feminist forerunners Prior to 1914, feminism – as the critique of women’s subordinate position in society – had two roots in Hungary. One was the movement for women’s education. This started in the mid-nineteenth century, represented by upper-class women such as Éva Takács, Teréz Karacs, Klára L˝ owey and Blanka Teleki, founders of educational institutions and private schools for girls. Their main aim was to educate them in Hungarian rather than in the official school language, which was German (Kornis 1927: 523, 538, 561). The other root is the movement of employed women represented by ‘N˝ otisztvisel˝ ok Országos Szövetsége’ (‘National Federation of Women Clerical Workers’), established in 1896.

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The movement for women’s education was part of the national struggle for independence and the promotion of Hungarian culture and national identity. This was the so-called ‘Reform period’ which lasted from the mid-1820s until the war of liberation in 1848–1849, and which enjoyed the support of many Reform Party politicians, as the development in women’s education was believed to contribute to the improvement of Hungarian national culture and the promotion of the mother tongue. After 1849, with the fall of the national independence movement and the war of liberation against the Habsburgs, the question of women’s education came to the foreground once again thanks to the initiatives of an enthusiastic woman, Hermin Beniczky (also known as Pálné Veres), who was the founder of ‘Országos N˝ oképz˝ o Egyesület’ (‘National Association for Women’s Education’) in 1867. Two years later she established the first secondary grammar school for girls. In the wake of this, public debates started on the pages of contemporary journals about what young girls should be taught, whether they should learn the arts, sciences and languages or only household skills. These debates are well documented in the monthly periodical Nemzeti N˝ onevelés ( National Women’s Education), founded in 1879 and published until 1919. In Hungary, the processes of industrial and social modernization started in the 1870s, and by the turn of the century there had been significant changes in what had previously been a largely agrarian country. Large construction works had been carried out (for example, bridges in Budapest, the Houses of Parliament and railways), and new cultural and academic institutions had been founded, such as the National Library, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Kisfaludy Society. The decades before the war (the 1890s and 1900s) are referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of civic associations and progressive movements: at that time it was estimated that some 800 women’s organizations existed all over the country (Gergely HNA c.1945: 2).5 Most of these were religious or charity groups and traditional local women’s clubs. Very few of them put forward any political claims and cannot for this reason be seen as strictly feminist in nature. The charitable organizations such as the first women’s organization, ‘Pesti Jótékony N˝ oegylet’ (‘The Women’s Charity Organization’), founded in 1817 in Pest and lasting until 1892, did not challenge the prevailing patriarchal values and gender roles. These early women’s groups cannot be seen as necessarily fostering feminism, although they played an important role as charitable organizations and offered support and social services which had not previously been institutionalized and provided.

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The organization of white-collar women workers, the ‘National Federation of Women Clerical Workers’, was one of the earliest feminist initiatives. The Federation was founded in 1897 by Rózsa Schwimmer, who later became the leading figure of feminism and pacifism in Hungary.6 Along with the Social Democrats, the organization was probably one of the most important of the age in terms of defending employed women’s interests and helping them with information and moral support. The first feminist organization in Hungary, the ‘Feminist Association’, was founded in December 1904 in Budapest as a part of the ‘International Women’s Suffrage Alliance’ (IWSA) (Acsády 1999; Horváth 1989; Nagyné Szegvári 1981; Zimmermann 1996). Among the founders were members of the ‘National Federation of Women Clerical Workers’. The Association grew to have local groups in 28 towns all over the country. The organization believed that women’s franchise was the means to achieve their goals. The feminists aimed to achieve women’s equality in every sphere of life. They wished to guarantee women’s right to work and to ‘create nation-wide feminist clubs, running discussions and public lectures, publishing books concerning feminism and founding a journal’, according to the Association’s first booklet outlining its aims and activities (Anon 1905). According to the contemporary press, the membership consisted mostly of lower middle-class women from a range of professional backgrounds: white-collar workers, factory workers, teachers, journalists, writers and other intellectuals as well as urban upper middle-class housewives (Acsády 2004: 192). The significance of the movement can be illustrated by the fact that in 1913 the seventh conference of the IWSA was held in Budapest, yet the event is very rarely referred to in the Hungarian literature. Details of its rich programme and the list of participants (which included the best-known members of the international suffrage movement) are documented in the conference proceedings (Anon 1913).7 During the congress, feminists of all nations expressed the hope that once women had the franchise they would save society from wars. In articles dating from 1912, Schwimmer had already called attention to the coming threat of war (Kereszty 2005). When the war broke out two years later, Hungarian feminists maintained their pacifist stance and started pacifist initiatives. Among their numerous activities they campaigned for peace, helped war widows and ran an employment agency for women. The feminist wing of the Hungarian women’s movement represented a unique anti-war point of view. They thought militarism was the product of patriarchy and argued that women’s franchise (and, through this, their political participation) could both stop the present war and prevent

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future wars. They did not support women’s participation in the war, yet they saw women’s employment at home as a necessity and propagated women’s vocational training. This differentiated them from other, nonfeminist women’s organizations and individual initiatives that focused on charitable activities during the war. ‘Magyar Úriasszonyok Szövetsége’ (‘The Association of Hungarian Noble Women’), for example, distributed presents for wounded soldiers in hospitals (Farkas 1977: 247). Similarly, the ‘Auguszta Fund’ helped with several charitable initiatives and gave money to those in need; the Catholic ‘Caritas’ sent warm clothes to soldiers at the front; the protestant ‘Zsuzsanna Lórántffy Association’ ran a war-time hospital; and several others organized public charitable events without any of the women’s groups criticising the war itself (Szíj and Ravasz 2000: 49, 335, 432).

Propaganda and censorship It is September 1914. In most journals and daily newspapers, photographs show enthusiastic men approaching trains decorated with flowers taking them to the front. They are waving to their loved ones whom they will leave behind. They believe that they are going to fight for a just cause and that they will defeat the enemy. They are singing a contemporary popular song about the soldiers’ victorious return from the front ‘before the autumn leaves fall’. The representation of wartime mobilization in the most widespread illustrated weekly of the time, the political and cultural journal Új Id˝ ok (New Times), tried to avoid details that could arouse any doubts in the reader about the grandeur and the justice of the war. The centrally controlled press at the time served as a source of patriotic sentiments and during the four years of the war kept up the image of military events as part of a heroic struggle. In 1914, the Hungarian press was regulated by the Hungarian constitution, which in 1848 had guaranteed the freedom of the press. Yet, as I shall demonstrate below, its later amendments stated that it was in fact illegal to publish certain types of material without official approval. According to amendments made in 1878 (Article 456), it was a crime to publish any material relating to the army that was not already in the public domain; anyone who did so would be imprisoned. In the same way, according to Articles 144–47, 156 and 171, those publishing, presenting or disseminating material with non-patriotic or rebellious content would also be punished with imprisonment (Rákóczy 1978: 19). The mechanism of controlling the press – censorship, in other words – was put in place long before the outbreak of the war. Further, Article 63,

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added to the law in 1912, set out the exceptional steps to be taken in the event of war (ibid.: 19). According to this amendment, all printed press material should be submitted to the authorities before it could be distributed. The security forces had the power to ban the publication of a particular issue of a periodical if it was found to contain unsuitable material. On 27 July 1914 the Press Sub-committee of the Committee of Military Control was formed with a mandate to overview the content of the press. They surveyed all publications before printing: only the news legalized by them and centrally approved was able to get published. Thus the news from the frontline, such as war reports or letters from soldiers, was filtered along with the news of the domestic economy, such as reports of high prices or food supply problems. This strict control served the interest of the pro-war propaganda. The authorities wanted to avoid panic behind the lines and set out to reinforce repeatedly the glory of the war. They did not tolerate critical voices and declared them anti-patriotic. The pacifist feminist journal Woman could not escape from censorship either, although the women found ways of circumventing the authorities and continued publishing it – albeit in small numbers and distributed to members only – for the duration of the war. The ‘Feminist Association’ itself carried out the distribution of the journal, thus affording the authorities fewer opportunities to stop it. The journal was sent to members and subscribers, and individual activists distributed it in the street and at different events.

Hungarian feminist activism and international pacifism during the war Pacifists and intellectuals became divided on the question of what constituted a just (defensive) war. There was strong propaganda claiming that war was in the interest of progress, and on both sides of the conflict there were many who argued that the war was unavoidable (Székely 1998: 57). Very few politicians or intellectuals in any of the combatant nations dared to be openly against the war. In England, many pacifists did not condemn the declaration of the war, mainly on the grounds of patriotism (Giesswien 1914), and German peace activists also largely declared that they agreed with the war, which they saw as one of national defence. They took the view that it was not only a right to defend the country, but also a moral obligation. There was a tendency in all of the belligerent nations for organizations that had been pacifist to shift towards humanitarian activism (Székely 1998: 58). Notable exceptions in several nations were the responses of pacifist

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women’s groups that emerged from suffrage organizations, which in many cases unequivocally condemned the war (see Kuhlman, Sharp and Shearer in this volume). However, the work of the peace section of the ‘International Council of Women’ (ICW) at its Congress in Rome in May 1914 shows that even before the war there had been voices that warned of the coming danger. Reports of the Congress in the Hungarian press portrayed the Hungarian delegation as being one of the most active (Woman May 1914: 199). In Rome, the participants agreed upon the importance of calling on the mothers in all nations to avoid war toys and war stories for children. Also, they made the point that history books should be revised so that they teach respect for other nations and their culture and societies. Six months after the outbreak of the war there were two peace conferences, one right after the other, that were held at the Hague in April 1915. The first, with the participation of international peace organizations,8 was said to be less effective in formulating strong declarations than the second one, the ‘International Women’s Peace Congress’ held from 28 April to 1 May 1915. During this event the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ was formed and the participants set out their resolutions about peace to be based upon the following statements: 1. No forcible annexations of territories should take place without consulting the wishes of the male and female inhabitants. 2. All nations have the right to autonomy and a democratic parliament. Foreign affairs are to be controlled by democratic institutions. (Woman June 1915: 73–75; see also Kuhlman) One of the organizers of this conference was Aletta Jacobs, leader of the ‘Dutch Association of Woman’s Suffrage’ and the first woman doctor in the Netherlands. She had good contacts with Hungarian feminists, having visited Hungary as a lecturer in 1906. The Hungarian delegation to the Hague Congress was led by Vilma Glücklich, founder of the ‘Feminist Association’. Hungarian feminists were also present at the ‘Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace’ – Schwimmer and Jacobs both serving as Vice Presidents to Jane Addams. The ‘Hungarian Women’s Committee for Permanent Peace’ was formed by the ‘Feminist Association’ as the national branch of the international organization. Schwimmer and Glücklich were founder members, along with other Hungarian feminists such as Ödönné Groák, Flóra Perczelné Kozma and Sándorné Teleki. Like

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the international committee, they believed that international conflicts should be resolved by non-violent means and that women’s suffrage was a necessary condition for the preservation of peace. Schwimmer reflects the Committee’s viewpoint when she says, ‘Let our hearts speak. Men’s minds have ruled for too long – and this is where we have arrived. So I ask you now to let our hearts speak through our minds’9 (Schwimmer July 1915: 106). The Hungarian feminists had a wide network of international connections, and these were not limited to those on the same side. An extract from a letter from the French suffrage organization to the Hungarian feminists illustrates the efforts of women’s organizations to overcome the barriers between women in ‘enemy’ nations: ‘Let us all fulfil our duties for our nations, but let us not be hostile, and let us try not to treat others unfairly. The role of woman is to be a just judge’ (quoted in Woman February 1915: 26). Solidarity was also expressed by the editor of Jus Suffragii, the official journal of the London Office of the ‘Suffrage World Alliance’, who wrote, ‘I am glad to hear about your activism again.’ She added that she had pleasant memories of the 1913 conference of the IWSA in Budapest, and that although they were from opposing countries in the war she felt no hostility towards Hungarians (quoted in Woman February 1915: 26). The key figures in the Hungarian women’s movement – Vilma Glücklich, founder and president of the ‘Feminist Association’ in Budapest and a well-known peace activist up to her early death in 1920, and Rózsa Schwimmer – played a vital role in maintaining international relations in both the women’s and the peace movement, especially Schwimmer. Born in 1877 in Budapest, Schwimmer was a dominant force on the Hungarian feminist scene and, by 1914, had already been active in the name of social justice for several decades. As a child, she developed radical and progressive views from her family – her maternal uncle, who was the correspondent of the daily Pester Lloyd, provided her with books on feminism, pacifism and social issues (Zsuppán c.1995: 8). Before becoming engaged in the feminist movement, Schwimmer was active in helping female household servants to become politically organized (ibid.: 11) and was also involved in forming the socialist ‘Association of Hungarian Working Women’ in 1897. She had a wide correspondence with significant personalities within progressive movements in many nations, including Aletta Jacobs, Augusta Rosenberg, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt. Schwimmer was greatly influenced by the radical pacifism of Austrian campaigner Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace

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Prize. She must have gone to listen to her when Suttner gave a lecture in Budapest in 1906. In an article published in Woman in June 1914, she mentions von Suttner among women of the ‘highest achievements’ who are working for the ‘happiness of humanity’ (Schwimmer 1914: 30). Schwimmer’s own radical pacifist activism first took the form of agitation to prevent the war. In 1914, she became the Press Secretary of the IWSA in London and joined several peace campaigns. Lloyd George mentions her in this context in his memoirs. At a public meeting in 1914 he recalled a Hungarian woman (i.e. Schwimmer) at Downing Street who called his attention to the coming danger of the war (Zsuppán c.1995: 20). The IWSA at this time was calling on statesmen everywhere to arbitrate and conciliate in order to preserve peace (ibid.: 20). As the press secretary of the London Office of the IWSA, Schwimmer organized the first peace mission from Europe to President Wilson in 1914 and she also participated in the delegation of this mission in September 1914. The same year, the Office sent an Appeal to the Ambassadors in London from the countries involved in the conflict, calling on them to avoid bloodshed and resolve the conflicts between nations peacefully (Woman September 1914b: 305). While Schwimmer was in England she witnessed the splitting of the British women’s movement into patriotic and pacifist camps in response to the war (see Purvis). After the outbreak of the war she followed Carrie Chapman Catt to the United States, where she worked tirelessly for President Wilson’s arbitration in the war. On 10 January 1915, Schwimmer joined with other pacifists to found the ‘Women’s Peace Party’ in the United States and became its Foreign Secretary. The president of the organization was Jane Addams, and the honorary president, Carrie Chapman Catt. Later, Schwimmer lectured in Nebraska, and attended hearings at the Parliament about women’s suffrage. In 1916, she took part in Henry Ford’s Peace Ship programme, which aimed to bring American and European neutrals together (Zsuppán c.1995: 20). The British suffragette Ethel Snowden was Schwimmer’s companion. Later that year, Schwimmer returned to Hungary for a short visit to give lectures and to campaign further for the pacifist cause. Schwimmer was thus a key player in both national and international feminist peace activism.

The practical and political work of Hungarian feminists as presented in the journal Woman, 1914–1918 In Hungary, as in other combatant nations, the First World War had a significant impact on the history of women’s employment. Because

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of men’s mobilization, several occupations started to become available to women. Yet, as the appeals of the ‘Feminist Association’ suggest, this situation was a necessity and not a glorious victory of women’s emancipation. So, feminists working on the home front found it most useful to help women in need to find paid employment while at the same time continuing to lobby for the broadening of the scope of vocational training for women. To support employed women and war widows, the Association founded ‘Anya és Gyermekvédelmi Bizottság’ (‘The Mother and Childcare Committee’). The State Employment Office made them responsible for women’s employment in general (Woman August 1914: 301–02). Together with several other organizations and local authorities, they traced vacancies and supported women in their attempts to access different professions and skilled labour jobs that had previously often only been occupied by men. The feminists also ran day care centres for unemployed women and centres for schoolchildren whose mothers were at work, as well as organizing a sewing workshop. As they had direct contact with the clients who bought their products and they organized the distribution themselves, by cutting out the middleman they could keep wages higher while prices were lower than normal. They emphasized that there was no exploitation in their workshops (Woman October 1914: 330). The Association also organized work for women that could be done at their homes. The ‘Association of Women Clerical Workers’ took the opportunity to gather statistics about women who had been fired from their jobs illegally and monitored workers’ pay and conditions throughout the war.10 The feminists also lobbied the heads of a number of different vocational schools to try and persuade them to allow the entry of female students. In 1916 a conference was to be held in Budapest organized by the ‘Feminist Association’ with the planned participation of headmasters of several vocational schools. Although the authorities in fact banned the event, as the conference papers were printed the arguments are well documented and provide clear evidence of a shift in attitudes concerning women’s supposed suitability for certain occupations. Before the war, women had not been deemed suitable to train for professions and trades where they could work as photographers, shopkeepers, newsagents, conductors, hat-makers, confectioners or waitresses, but the headmasters of the vocational schools of the above professions at this conference were unanimous in their support for admitting women to train for these professions. Figures presented in the 1914 October issue of Woman show the efficiency of the employment office run by the feminists. There were

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between two thousand and five thousand women each month who found jobs through this office. Besides the skilled and the intellectual workers, the majority of these women worked as physical labourers in factories, in construction and agriculture and as paid domestic labour. By finding work for women who needed to support their families with their men at the front, the feminists said they were aiming to ‘heal the wounds of the victims of the economic war at home’ (Woman October 1914: 330).11 In addition to social work and peace campaigns the feminist group continued to stress the importance of women’s political rights. They claimed that they were politically neutral: standing between political parties for the sake of all humanity. However, they were explicit about certain political values, for example the necessity of democracy for women’s liberation. Women’s rights received a new context in the war. As outlined above, the Association felt that women’s suffrage could reduce militarism, make governments stop the war and avoid violent international conflicts in the future (Woman January 1916: 15).12 Even though some of the MPs agreed with the women’s point of view, the Hungarian parliament refused to pass the reform bill on the election law. Among feminist supporters, the progressive, leftist group the ‘Galilei kör’ (‘Galilei circle’) in Budapest deserves to be mentioned for its pacifist initiatives. This mixed group consisted of intellectuals and university students. In 1916, the Galilei circle worked for peace in cooperation with women’s groups, and by 1917 the group were putting forward a more radical peace propaganda. Their anti-militarist views were embodied in revolutionary ideas. In 1918, the police arrested several women members of this circle who were involved in the anti-militarist campaign and the group was banned (Nagyné Szegvári 1981: 78). Although subscribers’ donations made the publication of Woman possible, the Association had to strike the right balance between radicalism and being accepted by the Budapest authorities. In certain cases their initiatives were even supported financially or morally by the city council (Acsády 1999). Their activities, including the publication of their journal, might have been tolerated by the authorities because of the significance of the social work of the Association. As the political atmosphere became less tolerant from 1916 onwards, the journal was censored and the editors were more and more often forced to leave out certain articles. In the summer of 1916, for example, a feminist activist was arrested for taking part in a peace demonstration.13

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Pacifism in the journal Woman, 1914–1918 Woman (Figure 3) first appeared in 1914 as a renamed version of the periodical N˝ o és Társadalom (Woman in Society), the organ of the ‘Feminist Association’ and the ‘National Federation of Women Clerical Workers’, which had been established in 1907 and was edited by Schwimmer. It appeared fortnightly, but after the outbreak of the war it came out monthly. Margit Máday, Vilma Glücklich and Melanie Vámbéry were among the editors after 1920. The journal published a wide range of viewpoints regarding the war, although their own standpoint was clear. In short, their arguments were the following: 1. War was not a necessity (even though both theological and materialist arguments at the time were used to justify the war as the will of God or a law of nature). 2. Economic, territorial and other conflicts between nations should be resolved peacefully. 3. Democratic political systems were needed to control authoritarianism and militarism and prevent wars. Human life was a value. Society was to be defended from violence. 4. Feminists were pacifists by nature. They desired co-operation between nations and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

Figure 3: Front cover of A N˝ o: Feminista folyóirat (Woman: Feminist Journal), May 1915.

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The journal interpreted the war as a manifestation of male aggression. For the editors, militarism fed masculine identity and inflated men’s importance, while the battlefield was the nightmare of male superiority (Woman September 1914b: 305). Yet, the journal claimed, there were examples of countries, such as Norway, where men accepted women as partners in politics (Norwegian women had the franchise), thereby avoiding involvement in the war (Szegvári January 1916: 2–3). At the same time, as another article by Arnold Daniel suggested, if only men valued their own lives highly they would not volunteer to fight (Key May 1914: 203). Thus those men who did not agree with the patriarchal justification of war were on the same pacifist side as women, whom feminists wanted to see as united in this matter: the journal suggested that war was against all women’s interests. The feminist point of view formulated by the Association necessarily resulted in pacifism: they neither supported the idea of women’s participation in military action nor shared the view that women’s involvement in armed conflicts was a part of the emancipation process. At the time of the First World War, there was limited opportunity for women in the Hungarian army – they could join the army and go to the front as doctors, but not as soldiers and were certainly not allowed to participate in the fighting. This is broadly in line with other European nations – only post revolutionary Russia officially allowed women to take part in the fighting (see Shnyrova), although many women were actually involved in risky activities near the front lines. Feminists would not join the army: they felt that this was something that only women who were less informed (those whose consciousness has not been sufficiently raised) and too impulsive would contemplate. An article published in April 1915 by Flóra Kozma Perczelné,14 a Unitarian priest and member of the ‘Feminist Association’, called attention to the responsibility of intellectuals to support movements that campaigned for a just peace among nations, because war destroyed culture and human values (Perczelné 1915: 50–51). She believed that people were manipulated into being glad about the losses of the enemy. In her article she also stressed that Hungary had had no other choice than to join the war as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that it was not Hungary’s war, despite the propaganda claiming that it was. Citizens were expected to sacrifice their lives heroically and mourn the dead proudly, knowing that they died for the nation. Yet, she wrote, violent death was not a virtue. Perczelné is against the idea, put forward by some, that – as she put it – overpopulation should be compensated

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for by wars, believing instead that the number of children produced should be regulated (ibid.: 51). In another pacifist article published in Woman, Sándor Giesswien, an MP and head of the Peace League in Hungary refers to John Ruskin to support his contentions. He argues in ‘Pacifism and feminism’ (Giesswien 1914) that, though these terms might appear utopian, they should appear in real politics in connection to social reforms against social injustice (ibid.: 198). There may well have been just wars in the past, he argues, but these were no longer possible in modern times, thus societies must find other ways of resolving conflict. He argues further that war was economically bad because defence policies, militarization and the arms race are costly, and spending in these areas might lead to further social injustice. Thus he concludes that women have good reason to protest against it. The journal also regularly reported international pacifist events, including extracts from articles and essays by foreign authors. For example, the translation of Ellen Key’s article about world peace (‘Le Problème de la paix’ in ‘Les Documents du Progrès’) was published in 1914 in the first volume of Woman (Key May 1914: 203). The article defined women as being specifically responsible for bringing about peace, for example by means of educating their children. The same article also stresses the importance of women’s suffrage to enable women to take part in political decision-making. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s article, ‘Thoughts about the War’ (translated as ‘Elmélkedés a háborúról’), published in Woman in January 1915, she calls the war nonsense. For Gilman, it is being fought because some nations feel aggrieved or because they want to get richer by conquering other lands. She is against the idea that war is natural, just as she rejects the idea that prostitution is a necessary evil, and claims that war is not a necessity in civilized societies. The ‘Feminist Association’ saw its own role as that of the guardian angel, saving humans from pain and death. As the war caused the social, cultural and moral degradation of societies, no matter who wins the war, all humankind would inevitably lose if war were allowed to continue. The feminists used the journal to express motherly concern about the lives of young men and solidarity with those who suffered both on the battlefield and behind the front lines. The political discourse of Hungarian feminism contained both modernist and traditional elements, similar to that of the IWSA, whose petition to the Ambassadors is quoted in the special issue of the journal in September 1914: ‘We as mothers of humankind are conscious and can not remain passive spectators of the events. We call all governments to prevent

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the tragedy.    We women see all that we value most – home, family, friends – threatened.    We call on governments to stop the bloodshed’15 (Woman 1/17: 1). According to the same article, during the campaign initiated by the IWSA, women from 26 countries signed a petition to call for agreement between nations and sent it to their governments. The feminists expressed the view in their journal that one has a moral obligation to stand on the side of the weak, to support the defenceless, to help those in need. These ideas are manifested both in their political claims, for example in Schwimmer’s article expressing solidarity with Finland when it was about to be annexed by Russia (Schwimmer March 1914: 110), and in their social and benevolent activities. Anti-chauvinism was also among the ideas that were made explicit in Woman. The authors pointed out that it was in the interest of those in power, who were propagating the war, to suggest that chauvinism was a worldview shared by most of society. Even though people did not necessarily feel hatred towards other nations, it was argued, ‘the official press is keen on creating the atmosphere of hostility to legitimate the war’ (Woman January 1915: 5). The authors also pointed out that a better life for future generations was possible only if they were not threatened by what they termed ‘revanche chauvinism’, that is, hatred because of racial, ethnic and religious differences (ibid.). The Association’s suggestions for peace treaties towards the end of the war also contain an element of anti-chauvinism. Yet in the construction of their point of view they were keen on reconciling this idea with Hungary’s own interests in order to avoid the creation of further hostility between nations whose interests would easily be set against each other by the powers not acknowledging local affairs. In their petition in 1918, commenting on the Wilson peace plans, for example, they call on women to raise their voice to enforce the best possible solution for neighbouring nations to make peace (Woman October 1918: front page).

Conclusion Hungarian feminism between 1914 and 1919, then, represented a ‘different voice’ both at home and abroad. Within Hungary, women active in the ‘Feminist Association’ countered the jingoism of the mainstream press in the pages of their journal as outlined above, while working to alleviate the suffering of the most defenceless sectors of society: unsupported women and children. Hungarian feminists, notably Schwimmer and Glücklich, were also active on the international scene, working tirelessly to foster the links already present through the

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international suffrage organizations and to keep open lines of communication between women who were now on opposing sides in the war. In common with the handful of women, mostly from a suffrage background, who retained their pacifist ideals after the outbreak of the war, Hungarian feminists believed that women were by nature pacifist, and that with the greater political influence brought about by the vote, they would guide society towards more peaceful values and the greater social justice required to sustain them. International activities such as the conference at the Hague in 1915 and the petition signed by women from 26 nations in September 1914 are indicative of their determination to unite all women in a worldwide struggle to end the war, and, through the resolutions put forward at the Hague, to ensure that in future, war would never again be used as a means to resolve international conflict.

Notes 1. ‘    f˝ uzzük szorosabbra azt a kapcsolatot, amely az emberiség anyái között eddig is fennállott és merítsünk er˝ ot ebb˝ ol az összetartásból arra, hogy helyreállítsuk a civilizált emberiséghez méltó békés állapotot, hogy megtaláljuk a nemzetek közötti vitás kérdések vértelen megoldásának biztos útját.’ 2. In 1915 the social democrats in Hungary tried to establish contacts with international organizations for peace, yet the initiative remained weak. The Manifesto appeared in Szocializmus March 1916: 136–37 (Galántai 2001: 205–06). 3. The ‘Feminist Association’ was the first and only organization in Hungary (until 1990) that defined itself as feminist. The history of the movement is sketchy, as it was not widely researched before the Transition. What makes this Association exciting is its analytical and sophisticated feminist discourse and openness to a number of issues such as social politics, health, education and culture. 4. Several of the chapters in this volume outline how the organized women’s movement in countries such as France, England and Germany overwhelmingly supported the war. 5. The exact date of the manuscript is unknown, yet most probably it was written shortly after World War II. 6. In publications and references Rózsa Schwimmer’s name exists in two versions: Rózsa (in places Rózsika) Schwimmer and Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer. Bédy was the name of her husband, whom she divorced. In international literature she is more often referred to as Schwimmer, therefore in this article this version will be used. 7. The event is well documented in contemporary daily newspapers, in the feminist monthly N˝ o és a társadalom (Woman and Society), and can also be traced in the archive material of the Association (correspondence, minutes of meetings, etc.) in the Hungarian National Archive (MOL. P999. Feministák Egyesülete).

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8. The conference was organized by Dutch pacifists, and took place 7–10 April 1915. They accepted a so-called minimal programme containing the following points: annexing was not to be accepted; states had to guarantee the equality of rights for minorities; permanent peace committees were to be formed; and the war preparation and armaments were to be reduced. 9. ‘Beszéljen a szívünk. Túlságosan hosszú ideig uralkodott a férfiak esze – és íme hova jutottunk. Legalább most kérem önöket hadd beszéljen eszünkön keresztül a szívünk.’ 10. In each issue of Woman there was relevant information concerning these data in the Report of the Federation. 11. Unlike the German and French pacifist feminists (see Sharp and Shearer), the Hungarian women were not troubled by the notion that their efficiency in finding women to take the place of men was actually contributing to the smooth running of the war. I have not found any articles in Woman that raised or debated this point. 12. For discussion of women’s franchise in Woman, see Rónai 1916; Szegvári 1916. 13. The arrested woman’s name was not published. 14. Married women in Hungary may use their husband’s name attached to their maiden name, as the author Flóra Perczelné Kozma did (Flóra Kozma is her maiden name, Perczelné means ‘Mrs Perczel’). 15. ‘mint az emberi faj anyái nem maradhatunk az események tétlen néz˝ oi. Felhívjuk valamennyi ország kormányait, hogy el˝ ozzék meg azt a szörny˝ u szerencsétlenséget.    Mi asszonyok    mindazt, amit értékesnek tartunk és legtöbbre becsülünk, családot, baráti kört, otthont veszélyeztetve látjuk. Ne fuljon vérbe a civilizált világ nagyobbik fele.’

References Unattributed journal articles A N˝ o: Feminista folyóirat (Woman: Feminist Journal, henceforth Woman) (May 1914) ‘A római kongresszusról: A békeszakosztály munkája’ (‘The ICW Congress in Rome. The work of the peace section’), 1: 199. Woman (June 1914) ‘Békemozgalom Ausztráliában’ (‘Peace movement in Australia’), 1/10: 206–07. ——. (July 1914) ‘On Bertha von Suttner’, 1/11: 258–59. ——. (August 1914) ‘Rendkívüli kiadás’ (‘News about the War’), Special Issue 1/15: 297–98. ——. (September 1914a) ‘Az els˝ o békemisszió’ (‘The First Peace Mission’), Special Issue 1/17: 301–02. ——. (September 1914b) ‘Férfi-superioritás’ (‘Male superiority’) Special Issue 1/17: 305. ——. (October 1914) ‘A feministák Egyesületének munkaközvetít˝ o irodájában’ (‘The Work of the Employment office’), 1/18: 330. ——. (June 1915) ‘A n˝ ok hágai békekongresszusa’ (‘The Women’s Peace Conference at the Hague’, 2: 73–75. ——. (January 1916) ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’, 3/1: 15.

122 Pacifist Feminists in Hungary ——. (October 1918) ‘We are Appealing to you, Women of Hungary in the Time of Crisis’ (Válságos órában fordulunk hozzátok, Magyarország Asszonyai) V/10: Front page.

Archive and manuscript collections Hungarian National Archive, Budapest (HNA) Feministák Egyesülete. Vegyes egyesületi levelezés (Correspondence of the Feminist Association), P999. Gergely, J. (n.d.) ‘A feminizmus története’ (‘A History of Feminism’), P999/19/33.

Bibliography Anon. (1905) Tájékoztatás a Feministák Egyesületének czéljairól és munkatervéröl (Information About the Aims and Work Schedule of the Feminist Association), Budapest: Márkus Samu Nyomdája. ——. (1913) Seventh International Women’s Suffrage Congress Program, Budapest, 15–20 June 1913, Budapest: Grafikai Intézet. Acsády, J. (1999) ‘A magyarországi feminizmus a századel˝ on’ (‘Hungarian Feminism at the Turn of the Century’), in L. Püski, L. Timár and T. Valuch (eds) Politika, Gazdaság és Társadalom a XX. Századi Magyar Történelemben, I, Jelenkortörténeti Mühely II, Debrecen: KLTE. Történelemi Intézet, pp. 295–311. ——. (2004) ‘Woman of the Twentieth Century: The Feminist Vision and its Reception in the Hungarian Press 1904–1914’, in A. Heilmann and M. Beetham (eds) New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, London: Routledge, pp. 190–204. Arnold, D. (May 1914) ‘Az emberélet értéke és a n˝ o értéke’ (‘The Value of Human Life and Women’s Value’), Woman 1/10: 200–02. Dienes, V. (March 1915) ‘Béke-akció’ (‘Peace action’), Woman 2/3: 38–40. Farkas, M. (ed.) (1977) Az els˝ o világháború és a forradalmak képei (Pictures of WW1 and the Revolutions), Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó. Galántai, J. (2001) Magyarország az els˝ o világháborúban (Hungary in WW1), Budapest: Korona. Gilman, C. Perkins (1915) ‘Thoughts About the War’ (‘Elmélkedés a háborúról’), Woman 2/1: 8–11. Giesswien, S. (May 1914) ‘Pacifizmus és feminizmus’ (‘Pacifism and Feminism’), Woman 1/10: 198. Horváth, Á. (1989) ‘A n˝ ok els˝ o politikai mozgalma a XX. sz. elején’ (Women’s First Political Movement), Tanárképz˝ o F˝ oiskola: tudományos közleményei 19/1: 147–61. ——. (1995) ‘N˝ ok és a politika a század els˝ o éveiben’ (Women and Politics at the beginning of the Twentieth Century), in T. Valuch Tibor (ed.) Hatalom és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben, Budapest: Osiris – 1956-os Intézet, 370–88. Kereszty, O. (2005) ‘Bédy-Schwimmer Rózsa, a N˝ o és Társadalom szerkeszt˝ oje’ (‘Bédy-Schwimmer Rózsa, the editor of N˝ o és Társadalom’), in M. Palasik and B. Sipos (eds) Házastárs? Munkatárs? Vetélytárs? A n˝ oi szerepek változása a 20. Századi Magyarországon (Women’s Changing Roles in Hungary in the Twentieth Century), Budapest: Napvilág, pp. 86–195. Key, E. (May 1914) ‘A békér˝ ol’ (‘About the Peace’), Woman 1/10: 203.

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Kornis, G. (1927) A magyar m˝ uvel˝ odés eszményei 1777–1848 Vol. II. (Education in Hungary 1777–1848), Budapest: Kir. M. Egyetemi Nyomda. Mérey, G. (1947) Polgári radikalizmus Magyarországon 1900–1914 (Middle-class radicalism in Hungary 1900–1914), Budapest: Karpinszky Aladár Könyvnyomda. Nagyné Szegvári, K. (1981) Út a n˝ ok egyenjogúságához (The Road to Women’s Equal Rights), Budapest: MNOT Kossuth Kiadó. Nevel˝ o, I. (1980) A háború és a magyar munkásság 1914–1917 (The War and the Hungarian Workers 1914–1917), Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó. Papp, C. (2002) ‘ Die Kraft der weiblichen Seele’: Feminismus in Ungarn 1918–1914, Munster: LIT Verlag. Perczelné F.K. (April 1915) ‘A jöv˝ o legfontosabb feladata’ (‘The most Important Task of the Future’), Woman 2/4: 50–51. Rákóczy, R. (1978) ‘Katonai sajtó: Adalélékok a Tanácsköztársaság katonai sajtójához’ (‘The Military Press: Additions to the Military Press of the Hungarian Commune in 1919’), Unpublished dissertation, Budapest ELTE. Rónai, Z. (1916) ‘Pacifizmus és a n˝ ok felszabadítása’ (‘Pacifism and Women’s Liberation’), Woman 3/1: 2–3. Schwimmer, R. (January 1914) ‘A n˝ o t˝ okéje’ (‘Women’s Capital’), Woman 1/1: 30. ——. (March 1914) ‘A békemozgalom kötelességei’ (‘The Duties of the Peace Movement’), Woman 1/6: 110. ——. (July 1915) ‘Mit tehetnek a n˝ ok az emberiség jöv˝ oje érdekében?’ (‘What can Women do for Humankind?’) Lecture by Schwimmer in Budapest, 17 June 1915, Woman 2/7: 106–07. Szegvári, S. (January 1916) ‘Háború és választójog’ (‘War and Franchise’), Woman 3/1: 2–3. Székely, G. (1998) ‘Békemozgalom az I. Világháborúban’ (‘The Peace Movement in WW1’), in S. Gábor (ed.) Béke és háború: A nemzetközi békeszervezetek története (Peace and War: The History of the International Peace Movements), Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, pp. 57–63. Szíj, J. and Ravasz, I. (eds) (2000) Magyarország az els˝ o világháborúban (Hungary in WW1), Budapest: Petit Real. Teleki, S. (May 1916) ‘Mit akarnak?’ (‘What do They Want?’), Woman 3/5: 75. Zimmermann, S. (1996) ‘Hogyan lettek feministák?’ (‘How did they Become Feminists?’), Eszmélet 32: 57–92. ——. (1997) Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1915, Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó. Zsuppán, F.T. (1989) ‘The Reception of the Hungarian Feminist Movement 1904–14’, in R. Pysent (ed.) Decadence and Innovation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp. 61–65. ——. (c.1995) ‘Rózsika Bédy-Schwimmer in England and America 1904–1920’. Unpublished paper presented at ELTE University, Budapest.

8 Feminism and Suffrage in Russia: Women, War and Revolution 1914–1917 Olga Shnyrova

The outbreak of the First World War provoked a surge of patriotism in Russia, among both men and women, and the popular press were fulsome in their praise of those who broke the law for patriotic reasons. Shortly after the beginning of the war, for example, articles appeared that recounted the stories of women who joined military troops by concealing their sex. The truth was usually revealed only after they had been wounded or captured. Among them were women from all classes: peasants, factory workers, aristocrats and students. Many of them were honoured with awards and their deeds were admired by the general public, a fact reflected in a sketch entitled ‘Then and Now’ (Figure 4) that appeared in the popular illustrated journal Ogonek (The Light). The sketch shows two images of woman: before and during the war. The first one presented a traditional image of femininity – an elegant and well-dressed woman – the second, a new image of a female soldier wearing khaki and bearing arms. In spite of its humorous character, the sketch reveals a shift in public mentalities in relation to traditional gender roles. Public discourse on the whole, though, was not as radical in terms of gender norms as the sketch suggests. From the beginning of the war, women were expected to serve their nation in more traditional ways: by taking part in charitable activities, and by working as fundraisers, nurses, helpers and social workers. The need for women’s war service was widely propagated. In response to the demands of the war, the most popular choice of profession amongst women was nursing. For many people, the figure of the nurse symbolized more than just the medical profession, and more even than charitable and patriotic activity. The nurse in the First World War was associated with sacrifice and was seen 124

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Figure 4: ‘Then and Now’, Ogonek (1917) 28: 1.

by women as a means of finding a purpose in life and of achieving equality with fighting men. These feelings are expressed in a poem by Olga Lyatkovskaya entitled ‘Sestri’ (‘Sisters’) that was published in Ogonek: If death comes I shall die peacefully, just as I flourished with brotherly love, and maybe now I have earned the right to lie in the common soldier’s grave.1 (Lyatkovskaya 1915) In popular discourse, moreover, the nurse’s function was interpreted as a maternal one and was correlated with traditional representations of

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femininity: ‘Like a mother I’ll watch over the dying’2 (ibid.). Accordingly, from 1914 to 1915 the nurse became the most popular heroine of Ogonek. Photographs of women serving as nurses in hospitals on the front line, and who often performed acts of real heroism, appeared in nearly every issue.3 During the First World War the figure of the nurse became a real national heroine, the embodiment of the new ideal of wartime femininity, which was vividly described in a poem by A. Meisner: ‘You are Russian, I’m afraid to admit it    So what else can I say? You burn with compassion, you are the mother who loves and suffers’4 (Meisner 1915). Even women from the Tsar’s family played this role from time to time, visiting hospitals and refugee camps.5 Following such examples, women’s popular journals created a new image of the fashionable lady, who extended her activities from the parlour to the hospital ward. Acts of patriotism were thus very much in vogue. One of the most popular women’s journals, Zhenshchina (Woman), is a good illustration of this phenomenon. The front page of its August 1915 issue presents a sketch of Ida Rubinstein dressed in a nurse’s uniform. The inscription under the sketch reads as follows: ‘The famous ballet dancer and actress now living in London devotes herself to nursing of wounded soldiers. But even for this activity she has devised very attractive attire’6 (Zhenshchina 1915). Ogonek also informed its readers about the wartime activities of another prima donna. She was a well-known actress named Lidia Yavorskaya (the stage name of Princess Baryatinskaya) who successfully played the role of Nadezhda Durova, the heroine of the Patriotic War of 1812, in the play ‘For Russia’ in London’s Colosseum. This play was very popular among the public. The two performances she gave each day to audiences of five thousand enabled her to fulfil her patriotic duty. She sent the bulk of the donations she received to the front and at the same time helped to glorify Russian heroism among the Allies (Ogonek 1915). Wealthy women involved in various ways in charitable organizations were also enthusiastic in their support of the war effort. Keen to fulfil their patriotic duty, many Russian women’s organizations opened hospitals in which their members worked as doctors and nurses. In 1914 one of the first of such hospitals was opened by the conservative ‘Union of Russian Women’, an organization that consisted of upper-class women and was patronized by the Emperor’s wife Alexandra Fedorovna. During that time a lot of charitable ladies’ committees were created with the aim of helping the front in different ways: they collected medicines, knitted clothes, made bandages and sewed underwear for soldiers, as well as providing presents for them for the New Year and Easter

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holidays. It was also fashionable for these ladies to raise the morale of the soldiers by sending letters and small presents: such were the social and charitable obligations of upper- and middle-class women. Thus the First World War offered various opportunities for women to show patriotism, though mainly within the context of the traditional conception of woman as ‘wife and mother’. Nevertheless, at the same time it inevitably led to the widening of the public sphere for women and changed mainstream representations of femininity. Woman had now become a ‘woman-citizen’, fulfilling her civil commitments. It was mainly women of the upper and middle classes who were engaged in patriotic charity work. But war also made new demands on the labour market and led to real changes in the economic and social status of working women, since a shortage of manpower encouraged employers to take on women. As historian Bruce Lincoln notes: Child and female labour in Petrograd mills rose by nearly a third during the war’s first year and almost four times as many women and children worked in weapon factories by 1915 as before the war    In 1914 there had been sixty-three women for every hundred men in Russia’s factory labour force. By 1916 there were seventy eight. (Lincoln 1994: 226) There were, for example, 50,000 women workers in 1916 in Petrograd. In some industries, women formed between 50 and 80 per cent of the workforce. Women metalworkers and locksmiths, for instance, earned salaries that were equal to those earned by men (Jus Suffragii 1915). Because of the lack of qualified specialists during the war, women gained access to many professional roles that had hitherto been closed to them, such as factory inspectors, lawyers, engineers and state officers. The professional women most in demand were women doctors. In May 1917, the Provisional Government adopted a proposal to mobilize all women doctors less than 45 years of age. They were given the same status as male military doctors. This differed from other European belligerent states, where male doctors ‘topped the medical hierarchy’ with the exception of hospitals formed by women’s organizations (Thébaud 1999). All these changes triggered comparable shifts in public discourse. Traditionally, Russian women had been much praised by liberal and radical authors for the part they played in revolutionary movements. Now their patriotic activity gave rise to a new sort of admiration for their citizenship and self-sacrifice. During the First World War, many

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authors began to debate the issue of women’s equality, which was readily apparent given the large numbers of women who contributed to the war effort and who took part in war work. The well-known Russian publicist Nikolay Ardashev, for example, wrote in his article ‘The Great War and the Women of Russia’: Basic justice demands that we believe the following: if during wartime    a woman is permitted to participate in reconnaissance activities    if a woman is permitted to operate aeroplanes, then in peacetime the same woman has to be permitted to be an engineer, to operate a steam engine, car, tram or any other machine.7 (Ardashev 1915: 15) These factors created new opportunities for Russian feminists who strove to meet the new needs of the nation and, at the same time, prove that women could play an important role during a time of national crisis. It must be stressed that there were no pacifists active in the Russian women’s organizations. All Russian feminists expressed their support for the government in its war efforts and shifted their activities to acts of patriotism.8 This is why Russian women, like French women, were absent from the International Peace Congresses in the Hague and San Francisco. The Russian ‘League for Women’s Equality’ (RLWE) refused to take part in the Congress in the Hague, although later it received a delegation of congress participants in Petrograd, where the RLWE leader, Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein, proudly showed them the hospital for wounded soldiers and the kindergartens for the children of refugees and working mothers maintained by the organization.9 A similar stand was taken by the ‘Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society’ (RMAS). The Annual Report of the organization reported that: ‘Russian feminists declined the pacifists’ proposal to create the Women’s League of Universal Peace as untimely’ (RMAS 1916: 120). Like their counterparts in Great Britain, Russian feminist organizations claimed that ‘in this year of trouble [we have] put aside the struggle for equal rights of citizenship and have directed all [our] forces to helping the victims of war’ (Shishkina-Yavein 1915: 241). Demonstrating their patriotic feelings, the RLWE, RMAS and ‘Women’s Progressive Party’ (WPP) developed a wide range of activities to meet the needs of wartime Russia. In 1915, the RLWE reported, On August 14 of 1915 the State Duma discussed the formation of local committees in all the provinces where endless streams of refugees are

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passing through from the occupied regions    It was decided that such committees should be created and that women are to be allowed to sit on them. This appears to be the first occasion on which women have been granted the privilege of serving on local government bodies. (RLWE 1917) The RMAS and the RLWE organized shelters for refugees and homeless children, day nurseries and courses for nurses. Between 1915 and 1917, the RLWE courses trained 2000 nurses. The League recorded with satisfaction that courses had a good reputation because of the high level of teaching and that hospitals preferred to employ its graduates (RLWE 1917). Dr Maria Pokrovskaya, the leader of the WPP, also worked in a similar hospital. The RLWE maintained a hospital with 80 beds and provided cheap food for the needy during the war: ‘Because of the high food prices, the Russian League for Women’s Equality have organised two popular restaurants where more than 1,500 people can daily get a good healthy dinner at relatively low prices’ (Shishkina-Yavein 1917). In 1915, the RMAS joined the ‘All Russian Union of Cities’ and began to carry out patriotic acts, particularly in the fundraiser ‘Petrograd – for refugees’ collecting 10,600 roubles (about 1000 GB pounds) and 5000 items of clothing (Shabanova RGIA 1915: 9). That same year the RLWE, at the request of Petrograd’s mayor, took part in two fundraisers, collecting 9749 and 7335 roubles (RLWE 1917). Several women’s clubs and organizations in other Russian towns were similarly involved. Its reports were published in Zhensky Vestnik (Women’s Messenger). Thus, the first issue of Zhensky Vestnik in 1916 reported on the war work of the Women’s Club in Simferopol (in Southern Russia). Its members took part in the work of the city guardianship commission, giving charitable assistance to soldiers’ families, opening day nurseries for working mothers, and campaigning for the abolition of alcohol. It is worth noting that in Russia, as in many European nations, along with the war effort, alcoholism was an important concern for many feminist activists. Zhensky Vestnik, for instance, features reports of women’s temperance meetings organized in several Russian towns during the war. Women’s initiatives served as a stimulus for the abolition of the sale of alcohol in wartime. Newspapers also published articles about women workers who entered public houses and broke bottles, demanding the abolition of the sale of vodka to their husbands. Russian suffragists used this struggle for prohibition as an argument to support women’s political rights. If women were given the right to vote, it was argued, the campaign to combat alcoholism could be more successful.

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In general terms, then, it can be said that 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 organization in this sphere was the RLWE, led by Polyksena Shyshkina-Yavein, and the ‘Women’s Enfranchisement Section’ of 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 Home Affairs 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 organizations 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 activities 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 city Duma’10 (Shabanova 1916: 4). Most of the mayors agreed to the women’s request, and as a result the RLWE organized courses in local government administration to prepare women for their future role as electors and delegates. Ultimately, the decisive role in women’s suffrage in Russia was played by the February Revolution. After the declaration of a Russian Republic, all kinds of radical political reforms became a possibility, and the first of these was electoral reform. Seizing the moment, the main women’s organizations and trade unions sent petitions on 4 March 1917 to the State Duma, which demanded the inclusion of women in the new electoral law. They got the promise. Several days later, a deputation of women teachers visited the ‘Council of Worker’s and Soldier’s Deputies’ in Petrograd and presented a petition which declared, ‘We call on you to remember that the women in our country as well as the men took part in the great movement for freedom. This gives them the right to take part in decisions concerning their Motherland’s destiny’ (Jus Suffragii 1917). This lobbying was successful. The ‘First Russian Congress of Trades and Industries’ adopted the resolution in support of women’s political rights. The demands for suffrage made by Russian women in 1917 drew the support of women of other nationalities and faiths within the Russian Empire.11 Momentum was gathering, and the culmination of this campaign was the impressive demonstration of 40,000 women on 19 March, which led to the victory of the suffragists. It was described in a lengthy article by

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Olga Zakuta entitled ‘How the All-Russian League of Women’s Enfranchisement Strove to Obtain Electoral Rights for Russian Women’. Later, this article was published in English in Jus Suffragii (Zakuta 1917) and has been reproduced by R. Stites in The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia (Stites 1978), who notes, ‘Losing patience, the League organized one of the earliest mass demonstration in revolutionary Petrograd.    Some 40,000 women    proceeded from the City Duma to the Taurida Palace to confront the Provisional Government with their demands’ (292). There are photographs of this demonstration in the Russian Archive of Photo and Cinema Documents in Saint-Petersburg. They have been taken from the upper floor of the building on Nevsky Prospect opposite Gostiny Dvor and near the Taurida Palace, where the State Duma was located. A long column of women are stretched out along Nevsky Prospect carrying placards with slogans such as ‘The Place of Women is in the Constitutional Assembly’, ‘Votes for Women’, ‘Women – Unite’ and ‘Women-Citizens of free Russia demand the Vote’. A large crowd of male spectators stands on the pavement watching the demonstration. It closely resembles the large suffrage demonstrations that took place in London before the war. We cannot see the car with Vera Figner or the woman riding the white horse at the head of the column as described in Zakuta’s article, but nevertheless the images are very informative. These photographs provide evidence against the widely held belief that the feminist movement in Russia was exclusively that of bourgeois women and that in 1917 women workers followed the Bolsheviks. Most of the women in this procession are women workers, modestly dressed with scarves tied on their heads. Only a few of them can be specifically identified as ‘bourgeois’ women.12 The inclusion of working-class women in the procession as evidenced by these photographs shows the extent to which the question of women’s political rights was an issue that had succeeded in mobilizing women workers as well as middle-class women. As a result of this demonstration the Provisional Government gave the vote to all women of 21 and over. Thus, the war and the 1917 revolution, combined with the political and patriotic acts of feminists, enabled women to gain political equality in Russia earlier than in many other European countries. This leads one to consider the relationship between feminists, women workers and socialist women during the war. Feminists enlisted both bourgeois and working-class women and as a result bourgeois feminist women became concerned about the conditions working-class women had to live under. It is important to realize that feminist organizations had considered the defence of

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women workers as one of the main spheres of their public activity since the First Russian Revolution. In 1906, the WPP produced several articles on the issue of employment – campaigning on topics such as the 8-hour working day, equal pay for equal labour, social insurance, the abolition of fines and so on. During the First World War, the RLWE supported these demands. In 1917, the League put forward an initiative to unite all women’s organizations on a democratic platform that included the articles defending the interests of women workers. This annoyed Bolshevik women, especially Alexandra Kollontai who began to compete with feminists for influence among the women workers. For this purpose, a new journal Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) was issued, which published many articles that were critical of feminism and bourgeois women. In the majority of cases the articles were unfair distortions of the facts. When the League began to demand equal pay for equal labour, for example, an article in Rabotnitsa claims, ‘This principle is profitable only for bourgeois women    They will rake in huge salaries which is why their demand is selfish’ (Rabotnitsa 1917). One of Kollontai’s article in Rabotnitsa, entitled ‘Zhenskie batalyoni’ (Women’s battalions), was devoted to the so-called ‘Suffragette mission’ to Russia (Petrograd and Moscow) in Spring and Summer 1917. The leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Emmeline Pankhurst, accompanied by Jessie Kenny, visited Russia on a semi-official patriotic mission as the emissary of the British government. Her main purpose was to convince the Provisional Government to continue war with the Allies and encourage the Russian people – women and men – to continue fighting. In Petrograd, Pankhurst and Kenny visited a number of women’s organizations, where they were given a splendid reception by the ‘National Council of Women’, the ‘Patriotic Women’s Alliance’, the RMAS, and other women’s clubs, including a working women’s club. Particularly close contact was made with Anna Shabanova, president of the RMAS, and other leaders of this organization, who introduced the English suffragists to the organizer of the women’s battalions, Maria Bochkareva, and helped them to arrange meetings with other women’s organizations (Figure 5). Emmeline Pankhurst, true to the aim of her mission, strove to meet the largest possible number of women in order to disseminate her patriotic message. The official culmination of Pankhurst’s visit to Russia was a reception at the Astoria Hotel, organized in honour of the visit by the diplomatic missions of the Entente allies of Russia. This brought together not only diplomats representing Entente countries, but also the cream of Petrograd society, as well as representatives of the women’s battalion and women’s organizations.

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Figure 5: ‘Two Fighters for Women’s Equality. The Commander of the Women’s Battalion of Death M. Bochkareva and English Suffragist Mrs Pankhurst in Petrograd’, Ogonek 1917.

Richard Stites gives the following evaluation of this event: ‘Entente and Russian feminism achieved moral union in the Hotel Astoria’s restaurant during the dinner of Mrs. Pankhurst and Bochkareva in the presence of Anna Shabanova’ (Stites 1978: 306). During this reception, Emmeline gave a passionate speech, calling Russian women to unity and to action for the sake of the Motherland: ‘She called women to give up class struggle    spoke about England where women could unite and therefore became the strong influential force. She offered her experience and the

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help of her sisters-in-arms so that Russian women could unite, mobilize and lead Russia out of the crisis’ (Novoye Vremya 1917). The visit of Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenny was widely reported in the Russian press, but it is interesting to note that Kollontai appears to make a blunder when she wrote in her account: ‘Old Pankhurst rushed about the world agitating for the war. Now Pankhurst’s daughter Eleonora has come to Russia to bless the activity of the women’s battalions’ (Kollontai 1917: 8, my emphasis). It is difficult to believe that Kollontai, who was well educated and had lived in England, did not know who was who among the Pankhurst women. At the same time, for example, she expressed her admiration for the pacifist activities of Emmeline’s younger daughter Sylvia, who militated for the cause of pacifist socialism during the war. So the error must be due to the fact that Pankhurst’s visit coincided with the Bolsheviks’ demands for an immediate withdrawal from the war. They declared that all governments were primordially guilty and that is why proletarians should have fought first of all with the ruling classes in their own countries. Kollontai wrote in the booklet ‘Komu nuzhna voina?’ (‘Who needs the war?’), ‘If we want peace, we have to put those who started the war on trial. Let everyone struggle in his own country against our oppressors, let’s clear the country of the true enemies of people: tsars, kings, emperors’13 (Kollontai 1916: 19). From this perspective, it is not surprising that Bolshevik women should strongly criticize the patriotism and war commitment of feminists in Russia and abroad such as Emmeline Pankhurst. The antipatriotic and isolationist position of the Bolsheviks prevented the unification of the Russian women’s movement in the ranks of the national organization. The formal split in the women’s movement occurred during the Constituent Congress of the ‘All Russian Women’s Union’. The formation of the national organization of Russian women was the dream of Anna Filosofova, the founder and first leader of the RMAS and honorary vice-president of the ‘International Women’s Union’. The February Revolution at last made her dream come true. The Congress was held in Moscow in March 1917. The majority of delegates at the Union’s Constituent Congress supported the ideas of a common interparty women’s programme. But the Social Democrats were against the motion, and consequently withdrew from the Congress. As was the case at the first Russian Women’s Congress in 1908, the Social Democrats again provoked a split in the women’s movement. The revolution provided many new opportunities for women, but it also gave priority to class identity rather than gender identity, and thereby made

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women’s solidarity impossible on the basis of the realization of their communal interests. It should also be noted that in the Russian women’s movement, class identity was not always connected with social origin. A survey carried out by the RLWE in 1908, for example, showed that 80 per cent of its membership consisted of women from the so-called ‘educated professions’14 – teachers, clerks, doctors, nurses, etc. – who earned their own living and whose living standard was low, often very near to the living standard of women workers (Russian State History Archive, Fund 516, Schedule 1, File 3). On the other hand, the abovementioned Alexandra Kollontai was the daughter of a general and a well-to-do woman. There was a striking contrast between her elegant expensive dresses and her revolutionary speeches on behalf of workingclass women. This often caused the irritation among feminists, who called her ‘Kollontaisha’.15 Russian feminists appreciated and made use of the new opportunities that were opened up for women with the February Revolution. In June 1917, Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein was appointed to the Commission for the Elaboration of the Project of the Constitution. A member of the Cadet party, Countess Sophia Panina, was appointed the Minister of Social Welfare. In Autumn 1917, the Provisional Government took the decision to open all labour vacancies to female applicants. This was mostly due to the continuous efforts of the RLWE and the RMAS, who constantly applied to the State Duma and local authorities ‘not missing the chance to remind people about [women’s] demands and needs in the professional sphere’ (Shishkina-Yavein 1917). In response to the government measures that established women’s right to citizenship, feminists argued that if women were to earn the right to the vote from the new Republic they would have to prove themselves to be ultra republican and patriotic. In April 1917 in an editorial in Zhensky Vestnik Pokrovskaya comments, Woman became free and equal because of the ruin of the old state. That is why her first slogan is the Republic. But the thought that our dear Fatherland could fall under the German yoke, darkens the joy of liberation and makes us pay attention to external danger. That is why the second slogan of the free and equal woman-citizen has to be the Defence of our dear Russia.16 (Pokrovskaya 1917: 3) This is why feminists supported the creation of women’s battalions and the activities of women’s patriotic organizations such as the ‘Women’s Military Popular Union’. However, feminists shared the feelings of

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anxiety caused by the party’s internal wrangling that was worsening the political situation and by the disorder in the army that was threatening to have tragic consequences at the front. In Summer 1917, the ‘Women’s Military Popular Union’ published in Russkaya volya (Russian Will) an open letter to Russian workers in which its members wrote that they were ashamed that workers were ready to betray national interests for the sake of immediate material profit. This letter also appealed to all Russian women-citizens ‘to come to the rescue of the Motherland at a crucial time    to go to War themselves as volunteers, to protest against anarchy’.17 This letter was subsequently re-published in Zhensky Vestnik (1917). The first months of political equality granted to Russian women by law showed that obtaining the right to vote was not enough in order to gain admission to political power. This was particularly evident with the disappointing results of the first local government elections to the City Duma in Petrograd in which there were female candidates, on 20 August 1917. Only ten women among the 200 candidates were elected as deputies (two from the socialist and revolutionary parties, four from the Bolsheviks and four from the Cadets). These results forced the members of the Women’s Progressive Party to come to the following conclusion, recorded in Zhensky Vestnik: ‘The elections showed that parties only recognize women’s equality in theory, in reality they are not ready to promote women’18 (1917: 15). In conclusion, these elections showed that the same parties and political leaders who had supported women’s demands for the vote were not in reality eager to face political competition from women. The right to vote did not solve all of women’s problems and did not lead to the large-scale changes in women’s rights and lives as suffragists had hoped, because there would not be a large number of elected female representatives in the foreseeable future. If political parties were not ready to admit women to political power, workers were not willing to face the competition of women in the labour market because of their new right to apply for all labour vacancies on equal terms with men. As in other countries, male labourers were from the very beginning of the war worried about women replacing men in industry. In 1914, in the journal Zhenskoe Delo (Women’s Cause), in the article published by T. Khitrovo entitled ‘Voina i zhensky trud’ (‘War and women’s labour’) the author wrote, At the heart of the negative male attitude to female labour lies both a conscious and unconscious fear of competition    the women’s

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question does not generally sit easily with the party or any other theoretical frameworks. It is possible for some ideas to work out insofar as they stem from the dominant sex. In such cases the proletarian may offer a hand to the capitalist.19 (Khitrovo 1914)

The Provisional Government’s decision to give women equal opportunities in the labour market led to discontent among workers. Workers in a meeting at the Russo-Balt Aircraft Works, for example, adopted a resolution ‘about the reduction of women-workers and their replacement by male workers’ (Jus Suffragii 1918). The same resolutions were adopted at the other businesses and factories in Petrograd. In short, women’s equality in the sphere of employment led to conflict between male and female employees. Paradoxically, Russian women obtained equal political rights earlier than in many other European countries where woman’s suffrage movements had longer traditions and were much more solid. As a prominent member of the Cadet party, Ariadna Tyrkova, wrote, ‘It may seem strange that Russia was the first place for women to get political rights, where there was no significant women’s movement, that semiliterate Russian women took the lead over their more educated Western sisters’20 (Tyrkova 1917: 13). Russian feminists were clearly aware that they won their cause because of the war and Revolution, though they emphasized that the active participation of women in the revolutionary movement made them worthy to share the freedoms of the new Republic. But in the months after they achieved political equality women feminists discovered that this was not enough to achieve real equality in other spheres of life. That is why Russian feminists 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 in the laws concerning marriage, family and children, and continued to struggle for women’s rights in the labour market, arguing against gender prejudice, which hampered women in their efforts to have 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. However, in October 1917 a new Revolution broke out which halted democracy in Russia and proposed new measures concerning female emancipation that fitted in with new socialist ideals.

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Notes 1.

Eckb cvthnm ghbltn, evhe cgjrjqyj z, Btlm b z wdtkf k,jdm ,hfncrj, B ntgthm, yfdthyjt, ljcnjqyf z, Ktxm d vjubke j,oe, cjklfncre

2. ‘Z, rfr vfnm, crkjycm yfl evbhfobv.’ 3. One of the most impressive articles was entitled ‘Podvig sestri miloserdiya’ (‘The heroic deed of the nurse’), Ogonek 1915 40: 5. This short article was about the nurse Mirra Ivanova. When all officers in her regiment were killed she collected soldiers and led them to attack the enemy. She was wounded during the attack but nevertheless managed to seize German positions and died from loss of blood just after the battle. For her heroism she was awarded by special Tsar’s decree the officer’s Order of St George. It was the first time a woman had received such an award. 4. ‘Ns heccrfz    A[, z ,jcm ghbpyfnmcz    Xnj yjdjuj crfpfnm? ns dcz – rjcnth exfcnmz, cnhflfkbwf b k,zofz vfnm.’ 5. For example, the cover page of one of the Ogonek numbers in Autumn 1914 (43) contains the photo of the daughters and wife of Nikolai II dressed as nurses and taking care of wounded soldiers in the hospital which was opened in the Tsar’s palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Similar photos often appeared in popular illustrated journals such as Ogonek and Novoe Vremya (New Times). 6. ‘3yfvtybnfz nfywjdobwf b frnhbcf, ghj;bdfofz ctqxfc d Kjyljyt, gjcdznbkf ct,z e[jle pf hfytysvb. Yj lf;t lkz ’njuj ltkf jyf bpj,htkf ct,t ytj,sryjdtyyj ’aatrnysq nefktn.’ 7. ‘Cfvfz ’ktvtynfhyfz cghfdtlkbdjcnm pfcnfdkztn levfnm, xnj tckb d djtyyjt dhtvz    ;tyobyt hfphtiftncz exfcndjdfnm d hfpdtlrf[    tckb ;tyobyt cfvjcnjzntkmyj hfphtiftncz eghfdktybt djtyysv f’hjgkfyjv - nj d vbhyjt dhtvz ’njq ;t ;tyobyt yt ljk;yj ,snm ytljcnegyj ghjbpdjlcndj    by;tythys[ bpscrfybq    eghfdktybt gfhjdjpjv, fdnjvj,bktv, nhfvdftv bkb rfrjq-kb,j lheujq vfibyjq.’ 8. The absence of pacifism among Russian women’s organizations was noted with satisfaction in S. Graham’s article ‘Russian Women and War’ (Suffragette 16 April 1915: 5). 9. ‘heccrbt ;tyobys gkfnzn nt ;t yfkjub, rfr b ve;xbys, j,kflfn eybdthcbntncrbv j,hfpjdfybtv, cfvjcnjzntkmyj dtlen njhujdj-ghjvsiktyyst ltkf b cdjtq ltzntkmyjcnm d ujhjlcrb[ gjgtxbntkmcndf[, kfpfhtnf[ b lf;t d fhvbb ljrfpfkb xnj jyb vjuen ,snm gjktpysvb hf,jnybwfvb b d ujhjlcrjv [jpzqcndt. Gj’njve vs ghjcbv ljgecnbnm ;tyoby r ujhjlcrjve cfvjeghfdktyb.’ 10. See the introduction to this volume for a description of the principal Russian feminist organizations. 11. There was, for example, a meeting of Muslim women on 18 March 1917 that took place in Moscow. Its participants expressed solidarity with Russian women and adopted the resolution, along with a demand for the political equality of men and women. 12. This fact has even led to the misidentification of some of the photographs. Some pictures have been identified, for example, as a demonstration by

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14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

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soldiers’ wives rather than by women’s rights organizations. (In the archives, these latter photographs are located in the same box and only a comparison of slogans helped to distinguish them). ‘Xnj,s lj,bnmcz vbhf, ye;yj ghbpdfnm r jndtne dbyjdybrjd djqys. gjqltv djqyj/, rf;lsq d cdjtq cnhfyt, yf yfib[ euytnfntktq, jxbcnbv cnhfye jn bcnbyys[ dhfujd yfhjlf – jn wfhtq, rjhjktq, bvgthfnjhjd.’ In Russian – ‘byntkkbutynyst ghjatccbb’ – this term that was used in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. In meaning it is similar to the term ‘white-collar professions’. The suffix ‘sha’ in Russian gives the word a derogatory meaning. ‘:tyobyf cltkfkfcm cdj,jlyf b hfdyjghfdyf ,kfujlfhz ub,tkb cnfhjuj ujcelfhcndf, gj’njve tt gthdsq kjpeyu – htcge,kbrf    yj vsckm j njv, xnj yfit ljhjujt Jntxtcndj vj;tn gjgfcnm gjl ytvtwrjt buj, jvhfxftn hfljcnm jcdj,j;ltybz b egjhyj j,hfoftn yfit dybvfybt yf dytiy// jgfcyjcnm. dnjhsv kjpeyujv cdj,jlyjq b hfdyjghfdyjq uhf;lfyrb ljk;yf ,snm pfobnf yfitq ljhjujq Hjccbb.’ ‘ghblnb yf gjvjom Hjlbyt d rhbnbxtcre; vbyene tt ceotcndjdfybz    blnb yf djqye lj,hjdjkmwfvb    ghjntcnjdfnm ghjnbd ,tcghfdbz b fyfh[bb.’ ‘ds,jhs gjrfpfkb, xnj gfhnbb njkmrj ntjhtnbxtcrb ghbpyf/n hfdyjghfdbt ;tyoby, yf ghfrnbrt ;t jyb yt ujnjds dsldbufnm ;tyoby.’ ‘d jcyjdt ve;crjuj jnhbwfntkmyjuj jnyjitybz r ;tycrjve nhele kt;bn pfxfcne/ cjpyfntkmyfz bkb ytjcjpyfyyfz ,jzpym rjyrehtywbb    Jnyjitybt r ;tycrjve djghjce yt cjukfcetncz j,sxyj yb c gfhnbqysvb, yb c rfrbvb bysvb hfvrfvb    bpdtcnysq rheu bltq dshf,fnsdftncz d cbke ghbyflkt;yjcnb r ujcgjlcnde/otve gjke; d ’njq j,kfcnb ghjktnfhbq vj;tn gjlfnm byjq hfp here ,eh;ef.’ ‘vj;tn rfpfnmcz elbdbntkmysv, xnj ;tyobys ght;lt dctuj gjkexbkb hfdyjghfdbt d Hjccbb, ult ;tycrjuj ldb;tybz gjxnb yt ,skj, xnj vfkjuhfvjnyst heccrbt ;tyobys jgthtlbkb cdjb[ ,jktt j,hfpjdfyys[ pfgflys[ ctcnth.’

References Unattributed newspaper articles Jus Suffragii (1915) ‘Women and War’ (‘Extracts from Women’s Messenger), 4: 224. ——. (1917) ‘Organizations which Support Women’s Suffrage’, 11: 134. ——. (1918) ‘All Government Appointments Open to Women’, 12: 61. Zhenshchina (Woman) (1915) Front cover illustration of Ida Rubinstein, 8: 1. Novoye Vremya (New Times) (8 J uly 1917) ‘Ona poluchila prava’ (‘She has Gained Rights’), 25. Ogonek (The Light) (1915) ‘Russian seasons in London’, 4: 6. Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) (1917) ‘O respublicanskom Soyuze Zhensky Organizatsii pri Lige Ravnopraviya Zhenshschin’ (‘The Republican Union of Women’s Organizations Affiliated to the League of Women’s Equality’), 5: 10. Zhensky Vestnik (Women’s Messenger) (1917) ‘Zhenshschini zagovorili’ (‘Women speaking’), 5–6: 3.

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Archives and special collections Russian State History Archive (RGIA) Shabanova, A. (1915) Retch, proiznesennaya v den dvadtsatiletiya Zhenshschogo Vzaimnoblagotvoritelnogo Obshschestva 25 Octyabriya 1915 (Speech devoted to the 20th Anniversary of the Women’s Russian Mutual Aid Society, 25 October 1915). Fund 1075, Schedule 2, File 46. Russian Archive of Photo and Cinema Documents, Saint-Petersburg.

Bibliography Ardashev, N. (1915) Velikaya Voina i Zhenshchini Russkie (The Great War and Russian Women), Moscow: FJ Prigozchin. Khitrovo, T. (1914) ‘Voina i zhensky trud’ (‘War and women’s labour’), ZhenskoeDelo (Women’s Course) 20: 9–10. Kollontai, A. (1916) ‘Komu nuzhna voina?’ (‘Who needs the war?’), Edition of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democrat Party, p. 19. ——. (1917) ‘Zhenskie Batalioni’ (‘Women’s Battalions’), Rabotnitsa 6: 7–8. Lincoln, B. (1994) Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyatkovskaya, O. (1915) ‘Sestri’ (‘Sisters’), Ogonek 1: 6. Meisner, A. (1915) ‘Sem zhenshschin’ (‘Seven women’), Zhenshchina (Woman) 8: 30. Pokrovskaya, M. (1917) ‘Lozung Svobodnoy i Ravnpravnoi Grazdanki’ (‘The Slogan of Free and Equal Woman Citizen’), Zhensky Vestnik 46: 3. Russian League for Women’s Equality (1917) Otchet Rossiyskoi Ligi Ravnopraviya Zhenshchin za 1914 i 1915 god (Annual Report of the Russian League for Women’s Equality, 1914–1915), Petrograd: Severnaya Pechatnya. Shabanova, A. (1916) ‘Zayavlenie Soveta Zhenskogo Vzaimnoblagotvoritelnogo Obshschestva, otpravlennoye v stolichnie i gubernskie gorodskie dumi’ (‘Declaration of the Women’s Russian Mutual Aid Society, forwarded to the capital’s and province’s dumas’), Zhensky Vestnik (Women’s Messenger) 1: 3 Shishkina-Yavein, P. (1915) ‘Activities of the Russian League of Women’s Rights During the War’, Jus Suffragii 9: 241. ——. (1917) ‘Activities of the Russian League of Women’s Rights during the War’, Jus Suffragii 11: 56. Stites, R. (1978) The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860–1930, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thébaud, F. (1999) ‘The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division’, in F. Thébaud (ed.) A History of Women in the West, Vol. V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, pp. 31–74. Tyrkova, A. (1917) Osvobozhdenie zhenshschiny (Liberation of Woman), Moscow: F.J. Stoikovoy, p. 13. Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society (RMAS) (1916), Otchet Rossiyskogo Zhenskogo Vzaimnoblagotvoritelnogo Obshschestva za 1915 god (Annual Report of the Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society 1915), Petrograd: S.K. Pentkovsky. Zakuta, O. (1917) ‘How the All-Russian League of Women’s Enfranchisement Strove to Obtain Electoral Rights for Russian Women’, Jus Suffragii 12: 25–28.

9 The Pankhursts and the Great War June Purvis

Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU or Union) on 10 October 1903 as a women-only organisation that would campaign for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain. Over the next eleven years, until the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, she was to become the most notorious of the suffrage leaders, renowned not only for her charisma, powerful oration, courage and determination but also for the fact that she was willing to endure 13 imprisonments in order to wring from an obdurate Liberal government women’s right to full citizenship.1 During the early years of the WSPU campaign, the suffragettes had engaged in mild militancy, such as the assertive questioning of leading Liberal MPs expected to form the next government, and marches and deputations to parliament. Gradually, however, these forms of protest had been extended to include the destruction of property, especially from 1912 when mass windowbreaking of shops in London’s East End took place, empty buildings and pillar boxes were set on fire and paintings in art galleries attacked.2 The aim of these more aggressive forms of militancy was to damage property, never to kill people. ‘Human life for us is sacred’, insisted Emmeline Pankhurst (Purvis 2002: 216). From 1909 until the outbreak of the First World War some suffragettes were imprisoned for their political activity, many of them being forcibly fed when they went on hunger strike as a protest against the government’s stubborn refusal to grant women full citizenship rights (Purvis 1995). The authorities never dared to force-feed Emmeline Pankhurst, however; the inspirational leader of the WSPU had become an icon of women’s suffering in a just cause. During these pre-war years Emmeline worked closely with her eldest daughter Christabel, the Chief Organiser of the WSPU and key strategist of militant activity. Emmeline’s middle and youngest daughters, Sylvia and Adela, respectively, were also WSPU members. There had been considerable rivalry between the sisters when they were growing up, especially between the plain Sylvia and the pretty, 141

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clever, graceful Christabel, their mother’s acknowledged favourite, and this rivalry continued into womanhood. As children, the girls had not been segregated from the radical socialist politics and women’s rights campaigns that their parents were involved in, but ‘bobbed like corks’ on its tide, more often participating in the political gatherings held in their home than in playing games (West 1933: 483). Consequently they grew up to become strong-minded young women who were not content to accept the status quo but agitated for a more egalitarian society. During the suffrage campaign of the pre-war years, Emmeline and Christabel adopted a women-centred, radical feminist worldview that was often at odds with the socialist politics of Sylvia and Adela. In particular, Sylvia was very upset when, in 1907, her mother and Christabel broke the formal link, at central level, between the WSPU and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Eventually, the disillusioned Sylvia sought to fuse her socialism and feminism by forming a group amongst the working classes in the East End of London, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). Although the ELFS was formally linked to the WSPU, it followed its own independent line in that it included men in its ranks and would not attack the Labour Party or Labour parliamentary candidates sympathetic to women’s suffrage. These differences in policy and tactics led Emmeline and Christabel to expel Sylvia from the WSPU in January 1914, an act that was never forgiven by the banished daughter and sister. Sylvia took her revenge in The Suffragette Movement, first published in 1931, a text that has become the dominant narrative of the movement.3 Later in that month of January 1914, the unsettled, unhappy Adela was also sent away by her mother, but to faraway Australia. Emmeline believed that her youngest daughter might join forces with Sylvia to form a rival faction to the WSPU and so, sorrowfully, planned to give her a new start in life in a country where some women already had the vote (Purvis 2002: 246–49). Before the First World War began, then, there were both personal and political tensions amongst the Pankhurst women that would intensify during the war years. These were disagreements that reflected more generally divisions within the women’s movement as feminists responded to the unprecedented events of the conflict. Predictably, the elder Pankhursts went in one direction, the younger in another. Thus Emmeline and Christabel supported the war effort and became patriotic feminists, encouraging women to enter war work and to fight for equal pay. Sylvia and Adela, on the other hand, became pacifists and opposed the war, especially Britain’s role within it. This chapter will explore in

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greater detail the differing approaches to the Great War taken by the Pankhurst women. On 1 August 1914, a frail Emmeline Pankhurst was recuperating in St Malo from her last hunger strike when she heard the mayor of that town read out Germany’s declaration of war against France. Like Christabel – an ardent Francophile who had fled to France in 1912 when she feared arrest – Emmeline’s dislike of all things German and enthusiasm for all things French came to the fore. When Germany invaded the small, peaceful country of Belgium and Britain declared war on the aggressor, she fully endorsed the British government’s action, despite the fact that votes for women had not been won. Believing that the war was a just war, she sent a circular to all WSPU members on 12 August 1914 announcing a temporary suspension of militant activity until the conflict was over and proclaiming her patriotic support for her country. Christabel, in full agreement with her mother, later elaborated on their reasoning: As Suffragettes we could not be pacifists at any price    We offered our service to the country and called upon all our members to do likewise. The cause of Votes for Women would be safe, provided our country and its constitution were preserved, for on the restoration of peace we should, if necessary, resume the pre-war campaign. To win votes for women a national victory was needed for, as Mother said, ‘What would be the good of a vote without a country to vote in!’ (1959: 288) Thus the war between Britain and Germany became for Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst a ‘continuation’ of the ‘fight for freedom’ that the suffragettes had undertaken within their own country (Gullace 2002: 122). The militant and crusading rhetoric of the WSPU was now adapted to a new enemy as the elder Pankhursts realigned themselves alongside the men of the nation who, at a time when military conscription was voluntary not compulsory, could ‘redeem’ themselves by offering to go to the war front (Tickner 1987: 321). As Barbara Caine has observed, and as the chapters in this volume confirm, the crisis posed by the First World War brought into prominence for the women’s movement questions about the relationship of feminism to nationalism and militarism on the one hand, and to internationalism and pacifism on the other (Caine 1997: 133). Nowhere were these divisions more evident than amongst the Pankhurst women. Emmeline and Christabel began skilfully to present themselves as British patriotic feminists as they wove into their speeches themes about the

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nation, patriotism, imperialism, democracy, internationalism, men’s and women’s contribution to the war, and, in particular, the part that women’s loyal war service could make to women’s enfranchisement (Purvis 2002: 269). This was evident early in the conflict when Christabel, on her return to London, addressed an enthusiastic crowd at the Opera House on 8 September 1914. Her speech, later published as a WSPU one-penny pamphlet, The War, contains many of the ideas that Christabel and her mother were to advocate. The suffragettes, she began, believed that it was their duty to rouse citizens to fight for the freedom and independence of their country and the Empire since a victory for Germany would lead to the extinction of democratic government. Women already had the vote in some democracies, such as in Australia and New Zealand, and in Great Britain the only remaining obstacle to their enfranchisement was the resistance of a handful of politicians. One of the powerful anti-suffrage arguments against granting women the vote had been that they did not fight for their country in times of war, that they took no part in national defence. Christabel directly challenges this view, arguing that women’s support on the home front was vital and would be a way to win their enfranchisement: [I]t must be clearly understood that if women do not actually take part in the fighting, that argues no inferiority    no diminution of their claim to political equality. It simply means that men and women in co-operation decided the task which, in the interests of the whole, it is most necessary that they shall do    It is the women who prevent the collapse of the nation while the men are fighting the enemy. (1914: 12) And in a last prophetic statement, Christabel notes that once the war is over and England is victorious, women who have taken a full part in the war effort ‘will insist upon being brought into equal partnership as enfranchised citizens of their country’ (ibid.: 16). What one can see in this important speech is the interweaving of a key theme that the elder Pankhursts reiterated throughout the war – that women’s war service was crucial to the war effort and would earn them the right to the parliamentary vote. As Gullace observes, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were able to take control of the discourse, drama and spectacle of war to serve their own feminist ends and further the campaign for female citizenship. In so doing they demolished the anti-suffrage argument and helped to bring about a cultural shift in the definition of citizenship so that it centred on the idea of loyal service,

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patriotic sentiment and British blood rather than manhood, majority or property (Gullace 2002: 118–19). Emmeline, sitting in a box at the London Opera House that September night of 1914, listened with great pride to what her eldest daughter was saying. But the pacifist Sylvia, also in the audience but sitting apart from her mother, was horrified. When Victor Duval, of the ‘Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement’, interrupted Christabel with a cry of ‘Votes for Women’, Sylvia states in her memoirs how her sister ‘checked him impatiently: “We cannot discuss that now.” ’ Sylvia recounts how she listened with sadness, resolving to campaign more urgently for peace. As a pacifist socialist she believed that the war had been created by greedy capitalists who would exploit the working classes for their own political ends. After the meeting, she went backstage to speak to her sister, describing how she felt: ‘An impenetrable barrier lay between us’, she recollected, and went on to ask: ‘Is Mother here?’ Soon Emmeline appeared, surrounded by a group of women. ‘We exchanged a brief greeting, distant as through a veil’, Sylvia noted. When she went outside the hall, a small crowd of East End women began cheering her in opposition to the cries for Christabel and their mother. ‘I was irritated beyond measure    and hurried home without waiting for my henchwomen’ (1932: 66). The rift between the elder Pankhursts and Sylvia, now very public, was to deepen during the coming months as Emmeline and Christabel, after their return from Paris, announced they would be coming back to England to partake in rallies for recruiting men into the army. When Sylvia read the news in the press she wept. Old memories surfaced of her father’s peace crusade in the 1870s in which the young Emmeline Goulden had met her future spouse. For nineteen years, Emmeline had supported her beloved husband in his life-long advocacy of peace and internationalism, and after his death she had stood with her children against the Boer War. Sylvia wrote to her mother on impulse, only to receive condemnation. ‘I am ashamed to know where you and Adela stand’ (ibid.: 66–67). Adela, like Sylvia, an ardent pacifist, was now a leading anti-war speaker in Australia at a time when few women were active in public life in that country. A courageous speaker against conscription, her antiwar polemic, Put Up the Sword, was published by Melbourne’s Peace Army in 1915. In this text, Adela argues against the jingoism of the British, imperialism and colonisation, and refuses to cast Germany as the enemy. ‘We have not proved ourselves any better than the Germans or any wiser’, she claims (1915: 227). Much publicity had been given

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in Britain to atrocities committed by the Germans following official investigations that stated unequivocally that, amongst other crimes of war, babies had been brutally slaughtered and civilian women raped and mutilated (Kingsley Kent 1993: 23–25). Such violence provided further fuel for Emmeline’s and Christabel’s feminist justification for the war, as well as enhancing their moral authority to speak out for conscription. ‘It is only by accident    that British women on British soil are not now enduring the horrors endured by the women of France, Belgium, and the women of Serbia’, Emmeline announced at one recruiting rally in 1915. Men have said time and time again that not only do they fight to defend their country, but that they ‘protect women from all the dangers and difficulties of life’. The least that men can now do, she insisted, is ‘to redeem’ their word to women by saving them from an ‘outrage too horrible even to think of’ (The Suffragette 23 April 1915: 24). However, the youngest Pankhurst daughter, in faraway Australia, was scornful of stories about German atrocities. Indeed, Adela was willing to forgive German soldiers for any crimes of war against civilians but would make no such concessions for Allied troops (Coleman 1996: 67). Emmeline was not the only one horrified at Adela’s views. The fiercely pro-British, Labour Prime Minister of Australia, Billy Hughes, urged his supporters to throw themselves ‘like Bengal tigers’ upon Adela and her supporters (Pankhurst 1932: 405). Sylvia Pankhurst, however, defended her sister’s stand, claiming that Australians visiting Britain told her that the youngest Pankhurst daughter was ‘the most popular woman in Australia’, socialists affectionately referring to her as ‘our Adela’ (ibid.; Coleman 1996: 66). It is important to remember that the pacifist stance adopted by Adela and Sylvia was a minority view during the Great War and that a number of socialists who had previously supported the elder Pankhursts and the WSPU – such as H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford – also supported the war effort (Foot 2005: 229).4 It is also critical to acknowledge that in wartime Britain, it was Emmeline Pankhurst who was in the limelight, not Sylvia. Repeatedly, Emmeline Pankhurst had extensive and positive newspaper coverage for her patriotic speeches arguing for the necessity of women to enter war work, including jobs traditionally held by men. Challenging dominant definitions of femininity which saw women’s work as voluntary, nurturing work, Emmeline suggested in 1914 that the WSPU did not agree that it was women’s duty ‘to form relief committees, or open workrooms’ (Western Daily Mercury 17 November 1914). As she later emphasised, ‘I’m not nursing soldiers. There are so many others to do that    it is no more to be expected that our

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organisers should now necessarily take to knitting and nursing than that Mr Asquith [the Prime Minister] should set his Ministers to making Army boots or uniforms’ (Daily Sketch 27 January 1915). The demand for women’s right to war work, however, did not endear Emmeline Pankhurst to industrialists and trade unionists who opposed the entry of unskilled women into jobs traditionally held by men. In particular, since women usually earned less than half the wages of men, trade unionists feared that women employees would undermine their own wage, which was predicated on the notion of the male breadwinner. Despite this opposition, Emmeline campaigned vigorously against the trade union closed shop. She encouraged men to sign up for the war front, urging workers in industrial areas not to be tricked by socialists and Bolsheviks into strike action. Her efforts and those of others had some success when, in March 1915, the Board of Trade issued a circular calling upon women able and willing to work to enter their names in a register. Such ideas were very different from those held by Sylvia Pankhurst. In the autumn of 1914 she began organising relief work for the working classes through her East London Federation. This included motherand-child welfare centres, cost-price restaurants, toy- and shoe-making factories run on co-operative lines, and a day nursery (Romero 1987: 98–101). Yet, despite her differences with her mother, Sylvia still craved her approval. Accompanied by Norah Smyth, she decided to spend Christmas 1914 in Paris with her mother and Catherine Pine since Christabel was away on a lecture tour of the United States. According to Sylvia, her mother seemed ‘a very Maenad of the War with her flashing eyes’. And, unsurprisingly, Sylvia attributed Emmeline’s constant talk of the war to Christabel, ‘now her unchallenged mentor’. The pacifist Sylvia was glad to get away. ‘We were distant from each other as though a thousand leagues had intervened’ (1932: 124). That Christmas, Sylvia was one of 100 British women pacifists who signed an open letter, published in Jus Suffragii on 1 January 1915, to the women of Germany and Austria. ‘Do not let us forget that our very anguish unites us    We must all urge that peace be made.’ But the bitter differences that divided Sylvia from her mother would never be overcome, even on Emmeline’s deathbed. Emmeline was astounded when, in June 1915 her old enemy, Lloyd George, now the Minister for Munitions, asked her to help organise a procession of women to demonstrate their readiness to engage in war work, especially munitions work, but she agreed. The great Women’s Right to Serve procession, held on Saturday, 17 July 1915, rehab-

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ilitated Emmeline Pankhurst as the embodiment of British patriotic womanhood. Women marched in the rain, singing patriotic songs and carrying flags in the colours of the Union Jack and banners with slogans such as ‘Shells made by a wife may save her husband’s life.’ In the pageant of the Allies, one of the most striking figures was the Madonnalike bare footed woman draped in dark purple, carrying a torn flag who typified Belgium, mourning for her children. ‘There has never been a procession like it’, enthused The Observer, the following day. ‘They were women of all classes – ladies of title, working women, and in the majority women and girls of the middle classes’ (The Suffragette 23 July 1915: 231). After the procession, a large crowd assembled in front of a platform at the Ministry of Munitions on which Lloyd George and Emmeline Pankhurst appeared. Emmeline reiterated her point that she wished to see equal pay for time-work for women, as a way to prevent the sweating of women in munitions factories; untrained and unskilled women could not be expected to turn out as much as the skilled men they replaced and were in danger of working longer hours in trying to do so. An amicable Lloyd George regretted that the government could not grant equal pay for time-work but gallantly emphasised that Mrs Pankhurst was ‘perfectly right’ in insisting that the ‘rates of wages should be fixed and that there should be a fixed minimum, which would guarantee that we should not utilise the services of women in order to get cheap labour’ (ibid.). Although during the following weeks Lloyd George could not offer work to all those women who registered their interest, the Women’s Right to Work procession was a critical turning point in giving the Minister for Munitions justification for putting pressure on the trade unions to ease their rules about entry of unskilled labour. The patriotic wish of thousands to women to serve their country was sharply contrasted that July with the action of trade unionists in Wales. On 15 July 1915, Welsh miners went on strike, in defiance of the recommendation of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. Such action aroused widespread concern since it threatened Britain’s command of the sea and its national survival (Wilson 1986: 223–24). Emmeline and Christabel lost no time in condemning the strikers and arguing for women to take their place (Mackenzie 1975: 294). From now on the elder Pankhursts gave short shrift to those on strike, slackers, conscientious objectors and pacifists whose unwillingness to contribute to the war effort was contrasted with the loyal war service of women. As Gullace has observed, the Pankhursts’ use of a kind of ‘comparative patriotism’ provided a context in which male as well as female citizenship was being re-examined. The WSPU established a tough-minded,

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pro-war feminism that brandished militant women as better citizens than cowardly, unenlisted men (2002: 129–31). However, not all of the members of the WSPU saw things this way. In the autumn of 1915, discontented suffragettes sent a resolution to Emmeline and Christabel protesting against the WSPU’s abandonment of the cause of women’s suffrage and asking for an audited statement of the accounts. No reply was received. By March the following year, two short-lived breakaway groups had been formed to devote themselves solely to the suffrage issue – The Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Independent WSPU (Crawford 1999: 664, 299). Despite these developments, Emmeline Pankhurst as the leader of the WSPU was regarded by the press and public generally as an elder stateswoman as she articulated the important role that women could play on the home front. But praise from her daughter Sylvia was still lacking and even more so after Sylvia’s lover, Keir Hardie, the founder member of the ILP, died in September 1915. Hardie, like Sylvia, had been bitterly opposed to the war, and was disappointed when the Labour Party joined the coalition government. In failing health, after a stroke, he had returned home to his wife, Lily, in Scotland. When Sylvia discovered that Christabel had reprinted in the July 1915 issue of The Suffragette a Punch cartoon showing the Kaiser giving her one-time lover a bag of gold, she was deeply offended. She wrote to her mother, protesting about the way their old family friend, who was dying, was being lampooned. According to Sylvia, Emmeline did not reply (1932: 228; Benn 1992: 344–51). Such treatment from her relatives undoubtedly coloured Sylvia’s representation of Christabel and their mother’s war activity in her influential The Suffragette Movement. She makes no mention of the push by her relatives for women’s war service to be recognised as a worthy basis for female enfranchisement, nor of the advocacy of equal pay. ‘The W.S.P.U    had now entirely departed from the Suffrage movement’, pens Sylvia. ‘Giving its energies wholly to the prosecution of the War, it rushed to a furious extreme, its Chauvinism unexampled amongst all the other women’s societies’ (1931: 593). Emmeline and Christabel continued their campaign, arguing for male conscription at the war front and for female industrial work at home. In October 1915 The Suffragette was renamed Britannia and edited by Christabel, from Paris. With the slogan ‘For King, for Country, for Freedom’, the patriotic Britannia adapted the past fighting rhetoric of the WSPU to the service of the nation. And as the war progressed there was more condemnation of socialism and the emerging communism, especially since it was linked to trade unionism, pacifism and the ILP.

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‘I consider the Pacifists a disease’, Christabel wrote in 1917. ‘They are a disease which comes of over-prosperity, and of false security’ (Britannia 3 August 1917: 72). A couple of months later, she spreads her condemnation wider, attacking the idea of a League of Nations, the Socialist Internationale, the Vatican, Sinn Fein, International Finance and the Quakers for an allegedly pro-German stance. ‘Women proudly recall what Queen Elizabeth did to get rid of the Germans and strengthen the nation. Hers is an example the women of to-day must follow’ (Britannia 12 October 1917: 146). To our modern ears, her views sound extreme, jingoistic and xenophobic, but as Angela Smith points out, many of these ideas were voiced in the contemporary mainstream press at the time (2005: 28). Adela and Sylvia Pankhurst, by contrast, were following a very different path since both were becoming increasingly concerned with class rather than women’s issues. Adela in Australia had left the Women’s Peace Army by January 1917 and joined the Victoria Socialist Party. A fervent speaker during the bitter anti-conscription campaigns, she served a term of imprisonment from late 1917 to early 1918. Ever keen to work hard for any cause she believed in, the ‘Maid of Peace’, as Adela was called, was a prolific writer like her sisters and made weekly contributions to the feminist and socialist press, as well as publishing in 1917 another anti-war, pacifist tract, this time a play titled Betrayed (Damousi 1993: 423; Coleman 1996: 55). Sylvia, in England, was also moving further and further to the left. Working with other like-minded women and men in opposing conscription, Sylvia too became a leading anti-war activist. The war newspaper she edited, The Woman’s Dreadnought, reflected not only her pacifist views but also dealt with the harsh realities of life for working-class women during war-time. Pacifism had to be dealt with ‘subtly’, however. This was because Sylvia lived in the East End of London where there were many women supportive of their men folk at the war front (Smith 2005: 39). Sylvia’s socialist feminist perspective shone through the kinds of topics she selected to write about during the First World War. Thus she was strongly opposed to what she saw as the exploitation of women as a cheap reserve of labour by employers and the state. In 1914, for example, she published an article criticising the Queen Mary’s Workrooms which aimed to give work and training to unemployed young women for the sum of ten shillings a week for making, amongst other things, shirts for soldiers (The Woman’s Dreadnought 26 September 1914: 110). Sylvia had strong sympathies too with the male-dominated trade unions, believing that the claim for higher wages for the male head of

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household would benefit the working class, male and female alike. Thus she was very bitter about Emmeline’s and Christabel’s campaign to make women ‘blacklegs’ by bringing them into the munitions factories when male workers were on strike; indeed, she encouraged male workers to go on strike, for better pay, as a way to improve working-class standards of living (Gullace 2002: 128, 136). And in contrast to Christabel’s articles in The Suffragette and later Britannia, Sylvia’s weekly editorials attacked the war, militarism, conscription and imperialism. Two months after the war began she asked: Can we believe that we are fitted to dominate all other peoples, we, with those serious social and economic failings towards our own people   ? Can we believe that any group of nations should dominate the rest? Can we believe that the domination by brute force can possibly be for the ultimate good, either of the nations who dominate or of those who are dominated by the rest? (The Woman’s Dreadnought 3 October 1914) Sylvia approached the war from a feminist socialist, internationalist and pacifist standpoint, speaking as the voice of the common people, fighting for the rights of working-class women and men. Although she strongly supported adult suffrage, as she became more revolutionary in her politics, both her organisation and her newspaper became less concerned with gender issues, a change that is reflected in the following changes of name: in 1917, the East London Federation of Suffragettes became the Workers’ Suffrage Federation while The Woman’s Dreadnought became The Workers’ Dreadnought. One year later, her Federation changed its name again, to the Workers’ Socialist Federation. As the pressure for women’s suffrage gained pace, Emmeline Pankhurst, much to the annoyance of the constitutional suffrage societies, joined their representatives on 29 March 1917 at a meeting held at 10 Downing Street. That Emmeline and Christabel had been fiercely critical of the Liberal leadership, especially the hated Asquith, and that the offices of their newspaper had been frequently raided had not hindered the slow march towards women’s enfranchisement. Now that Asquith had been replaced by Lloyd George as Prime Minister, the WSPU leadership felt it could do business. Lloyd George explained that that very morning a draft bill had been prepared that would grant the parliamentary vote to certain categories of women. Although the bill would not enfranchise women on the same terms as men – the issue on which Emmeline and Christabel had campaigned so consistently – both were

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prepared to support the measure, with its limitations, unlike Sylvia who would only accept adult suffrage on equal terms (Holton 1996: 226). Sylvia disagreed deeply with her relatives too over Emmeline’s role as a war emissary to Russia in 1917, with Lloyd George’s backing. Emmeline had rejoiced in the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917, believing this would lead to a parliamentary democracy, but was extremely concerned about the growing demand from the Russian people and the Bolsheviks for withdrawal from the war and for peace. A ‘premature peace’ on German terms, she insisted, ‘would rob the Russian people of the freedom for which they have had their revolution, and would involve them in a far worse slavery than the old’. Further, it would weaken the Eastern Front, lead also to Britain’s withdrawal from the war and the collapse of the Allied war strategy (Britannia 13 June 1917: 12). Sylvia, on the other hand, supported the Bolsheviks, believing that both Russia and Britain should withdraw from the war that exploited the poorest sections of society and only served capitalist interests. Later that year Emmeline Pankhurst, accompanied by Jessie Kenney, arrived in Russia in order to attempt to persuade Alexander Kerensky, the Head of the Provisional Government, to keep Russian troops at the front. But the political situation was far from stable and the vulnerable Kerensky, fearing that the pro-war stance of a Western bourgeois woman would alienate many of his supporters, refused the leader of the WSPU the necessary permission to address public meetings. Instead, Emmeline spoke at gatherings held in private houses, at meetings of women’s societies, and visited women’s battalions, such as that led by Maria Botchkareva, a strong, unlettered widow whose husband had been killed in battle (see Shnyrova). Her main argument, that Russian women of all social classes should join together, free from affiliation to any political party or creed, held little sway in a society where the ending of class privilege was seen as the key priority and radical Marxism was flowering. Emmeline had little sympathy with Marxism. ‘I have always been astonished at the materialistic aspect of Marxian Socialism’, she told one reporter. ‘I cannot think of Socialism without a spiritual background’ (Britannia 13 July 1917: 44). She was particularly contemptuous of the Bolsheviks who were terrorising workers and encouraging them to go on strike, and was advised to leave Russia before they gained control. Arriving back home, she heard the expected news, that the Bolsheviks had been swept into power. Emmeline called for armed intervention by the Allies to restore order and to save Russia from the oppression and tyranny that was emerging (Britannia 21 December 1917: 227). She was not alone in expressing such views. Worldwide

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there was strong condemnation of Bolshevism. For Sylvia and Adela, however, Bolshevism revitalised their revolutionary zeal. They particularly welcomed what Emmeline denounced, namely the control of workers’ councils over the army or industry, whether in Russia or abroad (Romero 1987: 126–28; Coleman 1996: 87). In such turbulent times, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst now re-launched the WSPU in late 1917 as the ‘Women’s Party’, primarily to prepare women for their impending citizenship during wartime and after. With the slogan ‘Victory, National Security and Progress’, the Women’s Party conflated the winning of the war with the women’s cause, thereby challenging the old anti-suffrage notion that women were not involved in the defence of the realm. The post-war social reform programme demanded a number of progressive feminist measures such as the advocacy of equal pay, equal marriage laws (including equal conditions of divorce), equality of parental rights, the raising of the age of consent, equal opportunity of employment, a system of maternity and infant care, co-operative housekeeping to relieve the drudgery of housework for women, and equality of rights and responsibilities in regard to the social and political service of the nation. In terms of women’s wartime duties, however, the aims of the Women’s Party were patriotic and imperialist, encompassing both a national and international worldview, but always subservient to the national interest. In particular, the solution to industrial unrest was not sought in the hated Bolshevism with its emphasis upon workers’ control but in industrial reform which would bring increased production of wealth, shorter working hours, the raising of living standards for women workers (and all workers) and the abolition of the proletariat. ‘The present mania    for the socalled “Democratic Control” of industry is the greatest possible danger to the nation, and especially to the workers’, insisted Christabel. ‘Shop Stewardism, Committee Control    will destroy the possibility of realising the great aim of securing for the mass of the people the comforts, refinements, and luxuries as yet enjoyed only by the few!’ (1918: 108; Purvis 2002: 302–03). With its emphasis upon class co-operation rather than class conflict, the Women’s Party promised a more prosperous and harmonious Britain. Such anti-Marxist views widened the gulf between Emmeline and Christabel on the one hand, and Adela and Sylvia on the other. This is not surprising. The worldwide reaction against Bolshevism and the developing communism drove many feminists to the right (Dubois 1998: 272–73). According to Sylvia, ‘advanced women’ of the left regarded the Women’s Party as an attack upon the entire socialist

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movement, a ‘phalanx of the Tories’ (1935: 163). However, as Gullace points out, the elder Pankhursts were not so much a feminist anomaly as the feminists ‘most in tune’ with the cultural climate of wartime Britain. Although they alienated many of their former colleagues in the women’s movement, they acquired ‘an odd assortment of new allies’, including the Liberal MP Lloyd George, the right-wing press and female munition workers. Such scenes only make sense, continues Gullace, if we realise that when they were retreating from militancy at the outbreak of the war, Emmeline and Christabel were not abandoning suffrage agitation, but engaging in a shrewd change of tactics that helped to bring about the momentous legislation of 1918 that granted eight million women the vote (2002: 140–41). Thus the 1918 Representation of the People Act, while not enfranchising all women on the same terms as men, nevertheless gave the parliamentary vote to all women over thirty who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property of a yearly value of not less than £ 5, or university graduates. When an armistice was called on 11 November 1918, the guns of the First World War stopped. The carnage had been horrendous, especially among the young men in the trenches, and everyone welcomed the peace. The divisions amongst the Pankhurst women were more difficult to resolve. By the end of the war, Christabel had converted to Second Adventism and eventually settled in the United States, where she became a successful preacher and writer about the Second Coming of Christ. To Sylvia, an atheist, such a religious turn was incomprehensible, although, after many years of estrangement, the two sisters did begin a correspondence in old age, in the 1950s. Unlike Christabel, Sylvia moved further to the left, becoming a founding member of the British Communist Party from which she was expelled in 1921 for expressing her own independent views. A strong believer in sexual freedom, she lived in the 1920s with her lover, an Italian socialist, giving birth out of wedlock in 1927 to her only child, a son. It was said that when the aged and failing Emmeline heard the news, while she was campaigning for election as a Conservative Member of Parliament, it hastened her death in June 1928. The bitter divisions between the once charismatic leader of the WSPU and her rebellious middle daughter were never healed. Before her death, however, Emmeline was reconciled with Adela, who had come to reject trade unionism, socialism and the Labour Party and would convert, many years later, to Roman Catholicism. The twists and turns of the strong-minded Pankhurst women have fascinated historians for many years, perhaps because it is within this family that we find the

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strands of thinking that have divided feminists ever since in regard to war, pacifism, nationalism, imperialism and internationalism.

Notes 1. In this chapter I draw upon my biography of Emmeline Pankhurst (Purvis 2002), especially pp. 268–312. For other accounts relevant to this theme, see Mitchell 1966, 1976, 1977; Pugh 2001; Kingsley Kent 1993; de Vries 1994; Bartley 2002; Gullace 2002; Smith 2003, 2005. 2. See Harrison 1982; Purvis 2000. 3. E.S. Pankhurst (1931). For comment on this text, see especially Dodd 1993: Purvis 1996; Purvis and Wright 2005. 4. Pugh (1992: 10) notes that the pacifist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom claimed only 2458 members in 1916 and 3687 by 1918.

References Unattributed newspaper articles Britannia (13 June 1917) ‘Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Jessie Kenney Visit Russia’. ——. (13 July 1917) ‘Mrs. Pankhurst in Russia’. ——. (21 December 1917) ‘Women’s Party Campaign. Mrs. Pankhurst at Merthyr’. The Suffragette (23 July 1915) ‘Women Needed for Victory’.

Bibliography Bartley, B. (2002) Emmeline Pankhurst, London: Routledge. Benn, C. (1992) Keir Hardie, London: Hutchinson. Caine, B. (1997) English Feminism 1780–1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleman, V. (1996) Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette 1885–1961, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Crawford, E. (1999) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928, London: UCL Press. Damousi, J. (1993) ‘The Enthusiasms of Adela Pankhurst Walsh’, Australian Historical Studies 25: 422–36. de Vries, J. (1994) ‘Gendering Patriotism: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and World War One’, in S. Oldfield (ed.) This Working-Day World: Women’s Lives and Culture(s) in Britain 1914–1945, London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 75–89. Dodd, K. (ed.) (1993) ‘Introduction’, A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dubois, E.C. (1998) Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, New York: New York University Press. Foot, P. (2005) The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Determined, London: Viking. Gullace, N.F. (2002) ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

156 The Pankhursts and the Great War Harrison, B. (1982) ‘The Act of Militancy: Violence and the Suffragettes, 1904– 1914’, in his Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 75–89. Holton, S.S. (1996) Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement, London: Routledge. Kingsley Kent, S. (1993) Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. MacKenzie, M. (1975) Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary, London: Allen Lane. Mitchell, D. (1966) Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War, London: Jonathan Cape. ——. (1976) The Fighting Pankhursts, London: Jonathan Cape. ——. (1977) Queen Christabel: A Biography of Christabel Pankhurst, London: MacDonald and Jane’s. Pankhurst, A. (1915; Third edition 1917) Put Up the Sword, Melbourne: Cecilia John, Guild Hall. Pankhurst, C. (1914) The War: A Speech Delivered at the London Opera House on September 8th, 1914, London: WSPU. ——. (3 August 1917) ‘No Compromise Peace’, Britannia. ——. (12 October 1917) ‘The “international” Danger’, Britannia. ——. (30 August 1918) ‘Industrial Salvation’, Britannia. ——. (1959) Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, London: Hutchinson. Pankhurst, E. (23 April 1915) ‘What Is Our Duty?’ The Suffragette. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia (26 September 1914) ‘Ten Shillings a Week’, The Woman’s Dreadnought. ——. (3 October 1914) ‘The War Cure’, The Woman’s Dreadnought. ——. (1931) The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals, London: Longman. ——. (1932) The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England During the World War, London: Hutchinson & Co. ——. (1935) The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst, London: T. Werner Laurie. Pugh, M. (1977) ‘Politicians and the Women’s Vote, 1914–1918’, History 59: 358–74. ——. (1992) Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1914–1959, Basingstoke: Macmillan. ——. (2001) The Pankhursts, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. Purvis, J. (1995) ‘The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review 4: 103–33. ——. (1996) ‘A “Pair of    Infernal Queens”? A Reassessment of the Dominant Representations of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, First Wave Feminists in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review 5: 259–80. ——. (2000) ‘ “Deeds, not Words”: Daily Life in the Women’s Social and Political Union in Edwardian Britain’, in J. Purvis and S.S. Holton (eds) Votes for Women, London: Routledge, pp. 135–59. ——. (2002) Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography, London: Routledge. Purvis, J. and Wright, M. (2005) ‘Writing Suffragette History: The Contending Autobiographical Narratives of the Pankhursts’, in J. Purvis (ed.) Special Issue of Women’s History Review 14: 405–34. Romero, P. (1987) E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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Smith, A. (2003) ‘The Pankhursts and the War: Suffrage Magazines and First World War propaganda’, in A. Heilmann (ed.) Special Issue of Women’s History Review 12: 103–18. ——. (2005) Suffrage Discourse in Britain During the First World War, Aldershot: Ashgate. Tickner, L. (1987) The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14, London: Chatto & Windus. West, R. (1933) ‘Mrs. Pankhurst’, in W.R. Inge (ed.) The Post Victorians, London: Ivor Nicholson. Wilson, T. (1986) The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War 1914–1918, Cambridge: Polity Press.

10 ‘The Woman Who Dared’: Major Mabel St Clair Stobart Angela K. Smith

At this moment the ‘Votes For Women’ agitation was sadly upsetting equilibriums. I had been outside the range of suffrage politics and had never even heard it discussed,    but I could not help being a feminist, for I knew from personal experience that women could do things of which tradition had supposed they were incapable. I viewed the situation from an angle of my own. My feeling was that if women desired to have a share in the government of the country, and this seemed a legitimate ambition, they ought to be capable of taking a share in the defence of their country. (Stobart 1935: 83) The moment was 1907. The self-confessed feminist was Mabel St Clair Stobart, a woman who, as she states, had good reason to understand that women had the ability to achieve much more than convention gave them credit for. She had lately returned from a four-year-long adventure in the Transvaal, during which she and her husband St Clair (a masculinist by her own admission) had set up a frontier farm, Mabel herself taking charge of a ‘Kaffir’ store that sold a range of products to the local people as well as to white settlers and missionaries. This move to Africa had been precipitated by a financial disaster that had put an end to the comfortable married life filled with golf, tennis, fishing and other leisure pursuits that the Stobarts had enjoyed for almost 20 years. In 1907 Stobart found herself back in London and widowed. St Clair had died suddenly on the return voyage and Mabel knew nothing of it until his ship docked, as she had travelled on ahead. This shock must have left her wondering what to do next with her life. Looking for a new role, the Suffrage Movement – ‘sadly upsetting social equilibriums’– caught her eye. Despite the alleged ‘masculinist’ outlook 158

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of St Clair, it is easy to imagine that the cause might well have caught Mabel’s eye even without the African adventure. The Stobarts’ marriage, although on some levels very conventional, always seems to have offered her a significant degree of equality. There was little call for conventional lady-like behaviour as the pair trekked across Europe on outward-bound fishing trips. And her account of the South African years in her autobiography, Miracles and Adventures, never suggests that her husband restricted her independent activities. The campaign for the vote thus seems to have been the obvious way forward for a woman of Mabel’s talents and interests, but the soap box was not for her any more than the more militant policies developing in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). But although Mabel could not have reconciled herself to what were seen by some as acts of terrorism, the WSPU slogan, ‘deeds not words’ may have been an appropriate motto. When she states, ‘I viewed the situation from an angle of my own’, she is referring to her belief that acting in defence of one’s country earned the right to citizenship, and from this position, she saw immediately how best to work for the cause. Of course, Stobart’s position was by no means a new one. Indeed, it inverts the old anti-suffrage argument that women should not vote precisely because they could not serve their country in time of war. But her actions as a result of this position were new, and she founded the pioneering organisation the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps (WSWCC) in 1908, with the primary intention of demonstrating that women could play a useful role in warfare. Again, women were not entirely new to warfare. The role of woman as nurse had been accepted and acknowledged since the Crimea, with Florence Nightingale, a bastion of respectability, leading the support for the continuing emancipation of women in this field. But prior to 1908, there was no movement suggesting that women could do anything other than nurse. Stobart knew better. What makes the WSWCC so radical is the idea that an entire hospital unit could be staffed by women, not just nurses but doctors too, with women taking all the other supporting roles. There had been women doctors for several decades. By 1908 it was not difficult to find willing recruits for the Corps. Stobart’s unit was also mobile; it could go wherever it was needed and as close to the battlefront as necessary. The idea was to take women closer to the danger zone than ever before and show the world how well they could perform there – as well as the men or better. Stobart wrote,

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The Women’s Convoy Corps have shown that women can be of use not only in hospitals of war administered by men, they have shown that women can – without depriving men of their privilege of remaining in the fighting line – improvise and administer, on their own, a hospital of war in all its various departments.1 Stobart is very careful with her language and phrasing. Her intention is to prove what women can do, without ever undermining men. Antagonism is not helpful; co-operation is the key. The WSWCC worked first with both the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and the British Red Cross (BRC). The women trained for three years in many aspects of military and medical life. By the time they were called to action in 1912 they were a fully formed field hospital unit, able to deal with almost anything that the war in the Balkans could throw at them. But Stobart never lost sight of the fact that her work, although first and foremost humanitarian, also fulfilled a political purpose; her unit should not only be doing, but also be seen to be doing. ‘Our watchword was Loyalty, not only to country, but to womanhood’, she later wrote (1935: 85). As the daughter of a baronet, Sir Samuel Boulton, she was extremely well connected, of the right social class, and known to the right people. She knew exactly how to make sure that her work was seen, and to that end she began to use the media to good effect during the Balkan campaign. Getting to the Balkans was not easy. Stobart had approached the BRC as soon as she became aware of the need for hospital reinforcements, but had met with a response that would soon become all too familiar to British medical women: ‘There was no work fitted for women in the Balkans’ (1935: 87) but, like her successors in the First World War,2 she refused to give up, going ahead to Bulgaria to make immediate arrangements for her Unit despite the lack of official support. The BRC even attempted to hinder her further by putting out advertisements in the media warning women against the dangers of such ‘unauthorised’ expeditions. But the Unit followed nonetheless, with the support of the Bulgarian government and royal family, and saw seven weeks of active service in a military hospital. Upon their return, Stobart made sure that as many people as possible heard about the successful operation. Her first tool of communication was the press. The women’s adventures were reported across the country in both the local and national newspapers. Many of the headlines drew on conventional representations of women, the Florence Nightingale

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tradition – ‘Women’s Mission of Mercy’ or ‘Care of the wounded: A Deficiency Remedied by Women’. The Times ran an article entitled ‘In the Footsteps of Florence Nightingale’, which drew welcome parallels with Nightingale’s less angelic qualities, In the same fine spirit of independence which led Florence Nightingale to order the store-rooms of Skutari-in-Asia to be broken open in defiance of staff officers and red-tape Mrs Stobart went to Bulgaria, and, having seen the Queen and the medical authorities, secured an invitation for the Women’s Convoy Hospital to come and work in Kirk Kilisse. (20 November 1913) Such representation was exactly in line with Stobart’s political intentions. Another example, an article in the Standard, 24 December 1912, entitled ‘Women in War Time: The Part They Can Play in the Field’, takes a much more practical line giving vivid details of the actual work undertaken by women with an undertone of liberation: ‘In the women of this country we have an asset of the highest value; and the authorities should recognise the necessity of organising the material that is ready to hand’ (24 December 1912). This, the article argues, is woman’s sphere, yet it is subtly different from that of the previous century. Into the First World War Stobart continues to argue that her work falls within the woman’s sphere – it is the boundaries of the sphere itself that shift and change. During 1913, Stobart used her experiences in the Balkans to enhance the cause of feminism. She did this in a number of ways. First, she toured the country giving a series of ‘Lantern Talks’, recreating the front line with her own images and words. Secondly, she developed links with the military that might be useful later. For example, an advertising poster from March 1913 puts the Women’s Convoy Corps on the bill for the 35th annual ‘Assault-At-Arms’ for the 14th Battalion London Regiment. The Corps gave a ‘Practical Ambulance Display’, appearing alongside the Aldershot Army Gymnastics Staff and the ‘Girls of the Guards’ Home’.3 Thirdly, she worked much more closely with the Suffrage Movement: her Balkan experiences were promoted by its campaigners, and she often found herself on the platform beside them. Finally, Stobart used that most powerful of weapons, the written word, to get her message across. Her book War and Women, recounting the Unit’s part in the Balkan War, was seen by many as a suffrage publication and was regularly discussed alongside the latest suffrage book, The Future of the Women’s Movement,

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by Helena Swanwick. Stobart was providing the reader with a practical demonstration of woman’s potential that stepped beyond the usual rhetoric of suffrage. As one reviewer put it, Mrs Stobart is also a believer in the emancipation of women, but with her freedom means not the right to do as one pleases but the liberty to do as one ought. In addition to her views as to the necessity of a widening of the general sphere of woman’s work, she has specialised in one corner of it, and, leaving argument and figures to others, she proves her points by doing them. Her book is a record of a piece of practical service rendered by women in war time which is used as an argument for the regular employment of adequately trained women as an integral part of the Territorial Force.4 ‘She proves her points by doing them.’ This is a very accurate description of Mabel St Clair Stobart. Always desiring to find a way to make a difference, in March 1913 she stood for election to the London County Council. Again using her Balkan experience, this time to promote her political office, Stobart could claim a history of action that could have recommended her to the electorate. She and her running partner, fellow ‘Moderate’ Leland W. Wilberforce Buxton, had a liberal manifesto that placed a significant emphasis on the importance of having a woman representative in a constituency, two-thirds of which was made up of women and children. Their policies included school reform such as the establishment of school clinics, adequate classroom space and vocational classes. They also campaigned for better housing for the working classes and a minimum wage, as well as arguing strongly for the unification of government in London. Campaign meetings for the election often included a ‘Lantern Talk’ by Mrs Stobart, no doubt to encourage attendance. Unfortunately they were not elected. But this, of course, did leave Stobart free for other business at a most crucial moment. In War and Women, Stobart demonstrated publicly how women could provide a valuable service in wartime and indicated that she was ready to do her duty again should the need arise. But in fact, War and Women does more than this. In her ‘Proem’ she writes, ‘I condemn war – and therefore militarists will be offended. And I vindicate women, and anti-feminists will perhaps be shocked’ (1913: xv). These two parallel ideas also form the basis of her response to the First World War. They were to be developed intellectually as a result of further practical experience, and they caused her to grace the suffrage platform again, particularly through

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the Women Writers Suffrage League, in those last few months before the new conflict drew her back to active service: Mrs Flora Annie Steele took the chair at a meeting of the Women Writers Suffrage League, held at the Suffrage Club, Yorkstreet, yesterday, when Mrs St Clair Stobart described some of her experiences in the Balkan war. Mrs Steele said she [Mrs Stobart] would impress on all the members of the league that they had great opportunities of forwarding the women’s cause    (13 May 1913) Stobart was one of the ‘Famous Living Authors’ invited to speak at a reception organised by the ‘Women Writers Suffrage League’ in February 1914, reading alongside established names of the Suffrage Movement such as Cicely Hamilton, Flora Annie Steele and Elizabeth Robins, as well as important contemporary writers such as John Galsworthy. Mabel, it seems, had officially joined the Women’s Movement. The seven weeks of active service in the Balkans was to be a dress rehearsal. The real show began in August 1914 and Mabel St Clair Stobart was ready. Unlike contemporaries such as Dr Elsie Inglis, founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Stobart already knew the futility of attempting to go through official channels. She had resigned as commandant of the WSWCC in 1913, allowing it to merge with the BRC; later she also resigned from the BRC. Some saw her alliance with the Women’s Suffrage Movement as too radical, and she needed to start again. It did not take long. In August 1914, many newspapers carried calls such as this one: Women’s Service May I make known through your columns that the Women’s National Service League, of which I am the director, has been organised with the object of providing a body of women who are fully qualified to give useful service to the nation at home and abroad. It includes professional women – doctors and trained nurses – and all workers essential for the independent working of a hospital. We are offering ourselves for service abroad or at home, either with the sick and wounded or for social service work, as circumstances may require. Particulars may be obtained from the Secretary, WNSL.    (5 September 1914)

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Often the appeals were directed specifically at the suffrage community as is shown by articles such as ‘Women Doctors for the Front’, printed in Votes For Women in August 1914. Here they refer to ‘a most urgent and cordial appeal for English women doctors’ from the Belgian Red Cross to which ‘Mrs St Clair Stobart, with characteristic energy, at once responded   ’ (Votes For Women 21 August 1914). They go on to say: Mrs Stobart, who by the way is a very keen Suffragist, like most of the women now giving their services to the State, has already had actual experience of hospital work at the seat of war, as will be remembered by those of our readers who enjoyed her account in Votes for Women of what her Women’s Convoy Corps did in the Balkan War. (ibid.) This is an interesting extract for a number of reasons. It shows how the press drew upon Stobart’s unusual status as a war veteran to promote her further activities. It also clearly suggests a very strong link between her and the Suffrage Movement, perhaps stronger than she might, herself, have confessed to. At the same time it valorises Suffragettes, placing them above other women for their war work, or ‘services to the State’, implying a patriotic duty that contrasts with the recent public impression of Suffragettes as women intent on upsetting the running of the very same ‘State’. It also emphasises the fund-raising role of the Suffrage press and movement in facilitating women-centred expeditions such as Stobart’s, thus reinforcing Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s call as leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, for women to take the opportunities the war provided to prove themselves worthy of suffrage.5 Having answered the appeal and raised her women’s hospital, Stobart set off for Belgium. She had collected enough money to put together a Unit to travel there within weeks of the outbreak of the war. The intention was to set up a hospital at the heart of hostilities, in Brussels. Stobart again travelled ahead of the Unit to establish a suitable site for the hospital, but this time the tide turned against her. Brussels indeed became the heart of hostilities when on 20 August 1914 the German Army marched in. She left almost immediately. She and her companions – her second husband Judge John Greenhalgh, and the Reverend B.G. Bouchier – were soon arrested (Figure 6) and it quickly became clear that their situation was grave. Trapped within the chain of German command, as prisoners of an enthusiastic German major, they were condemned as spies, and imprisoned in squalid conditions awaiting execution:

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Figure 6: Mabel St Clair Stobart, while arrested as a spy in Belgium, 1914. Copyright Eric Stobart, provided by Joffe and Joanna Crichton.

It was an interesting experience, and I took careful note of the emotions which filled my mind. I was glad to find that fear was not among them.    I did not want to die, for that would mean that I should never again see those – including my two sons – which were dearer to me than life.    A few shots, a little quicklime – I had seen the wagon passing through Brussels – and, like the smoke and powder that would kill us, we should vanish.    Besides, I had unfinished work. (Stobart 1935: 157)

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However, luck was on their side and Judge Greenhalgh found that he had an acquaintance in common with the Judge presiding over their case – an escape route was found. And importantly Stobart was able to return to London with another dramatic story to tell to anyone who would listen. Again, her adventures were represented widely in the press in many diverse ways. The Indicator, 3 September 1914, talks of ‘Hampstead Lady’s Thrilling Adventures at the Front’ whereas The Daily Graphic more prosaically and inaccurately describes: ‘Arrested in Germany: Terrible experiences of London Vicar and Red Cross nurse.’ An extraordinary range of publications reported the incident: The Times, The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, The Western Morning News, The Scotsman, The Cork Examiner, The Schoolmistress, The Tatler, The Manchester Guardian, The Advertiser, The Church Evangelist and The Lady’s Pictorial. The coverage must have begun to make Stobart a household name, although interestingly The Times coverage makes no mention of her at all, despite her position of authority: ‘Captured by Germans: London Vicar’s Adventures in Belgium’ (5 September 1914). This is unusual though and in most cases, the ‘British Lady’s Adventures’ captured the headlines (Daily Record 2 September 1914; Daily Mail 2 September 1914). By November 1915 Stobart was back in business again. The Women’s National Service League raised the money to set up a hospital in France to treat the French and Belgian wounded. A location was found, the Chateau Tourlaville, near Cherbourg, and an all-women party set forth (with the Judge as the honorary man). This time, however, they had the unofficial approval of the BRC, which was, it seemed, coming round to the idea of women. In France the hospital had the opportunity for sustained success, and Stobart made sure to keep the suffrage press up to date with the women’s activities there to ensure they were never out of public view. In December 1914, she sent an update for publication in The Common Cause, writing, with her accustomed poetic zeal, of the wounded, ‘Then comes the turn of the ‘gravement blessés’ – those who cannot walk. A large hole opens in the ship’s side and she disgorges shattered remnants of humanity, who placed on stretchers, are carried to our waiting ambulances    and obtain that attention and loving care which only devoted women can give’ (The Common Cause 21 August 1914). And as always, her emphasis remains on what women can do, here implying that they do some things better than men. She never concedes that they are not at least equal to men, and uses the hospital to show how she is demonstrating this equality at every opportunity. She goes on to describe a visit, for instance, from the director of the

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French Croix Rouge, who expressed ‘a desire to gain the novel experience of seeing a woman surgeon operate’. Stobart is, of course, able to oblige, and reports the satisfaction of all concerned as he declares, ‘A man could not have done it better.’ She closes the article with a strong political entreaty: It is gratifying to see not only that the work done by this Women’s Unit is advancing the cause of women amongst all the many officials, naval and military, medical and otherwise, who come to inspect and visit our work, but we also know that the demonstration which was given for the first time during the Balkan War by the Women’s Convoy Corps, is, during this present war, being followed by further demonstrations which prove beyond possibility of dispute that women surgeons are capable of doing effective work in hospitals of war, also that soldiers do not resent being under the care of women surgeons, and that women are capable of administering hospitals of war in all various departments without masculine assistance. What Florence Nightingale proved for women nurses has now been proved for women surgeons. Surely, henceforth, it will be impossible for British officialdom to deny to women privileges of national service which have already been gratefully acclaimed respectively by Bulgarian, Serbian, Belgian and French authorities? (ibid.) The message is all about ‘Deeds not words’. These women are showing that they are equal to men and, according to Stobart, the men cannot argue with the evidence presented. The emphases are hers. She is not shy to call in the name of Florence Nightingale with all that that implies in order to illustrate the significant and pioneering nature of the project. And the soldiers themselves, she claims, are happy with the arrangement. What possible reason could there be for the British establishment not to follow the example of their allies in employing women for this essential war work? Unfortunately, despite Stobart’s wellargued case, the British remained reluctant. They did, in the end, fully support another independent, women-run, suffrage-sponsored hospital unit, the Women’s Hospital Corps of Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray,6 but they were the only women working with the ‘Royal Army Medical Corps’ to achieve any degree of equality during the First World War. By mid-February 1915 Stobart began to get itchy feet. She knew that the Cherbourg Hospital was in good hands and she spotted a new challenge in Serbia. Stobart capitalised on the Belgian and French

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experiences to raise money for her next project during the first months of 1915. She set sail on 1 April 1915 as administrator of the Third Serbian Relief Fund. Upon arrival in Serbia she set about founding hospitals and dispensaries across the country that dealt with the battle-wounded and the medical needs of the ethnic population, combating outbreaks of typhus, diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox and tuberculosis. By September 1915, however, the Serbian military position was precarious. There was the danger of invasion on several borders from German, Austrian and Bulgarian forces. It is testament to Stobart’s reputation that at this point, as the moment of danger loomed, the Serbian military asked her to take command of a ‘flying field hospital’, to accompany their troops to the front line, bestowing upon her the rank of major in order to do so. No such appointment had ever been offered to a woman before. The ‘Stobart Flying Column’ was attached to the Serbian Army Medical Corps and was headed straight for trouble. She was soon to be given the epithet ‘The Lady of the Black Horse’ as a result. Later, George Rankin painted her thus, leading her troops, seated high on a black horse – not towards battle this time, but away from it, as she led her Unit with troops attached, in the great Serbian Retreat away from those invading armies across the mountains of Serbia, Albania and Montenegro. Even her decision to ride the black horse seems to have been strategic: No one had said I was to ride, but it was obvious that I couldn’t control the column of men and the slow-moving wagons if I was sitting comfortably inside a swiftly-moving motor car. I therefore made up my mind to ride at the head of the convoy always, and to take the lead in very deed, for better or worse, and to share with the men the practical difficulties of the road. So I took one horse, the black one, for myself.    (Stobart 1935: 238) Stobart’s eye for public image does not seem to have failed her during the war. Although a slight and slender figure, she is also an imposing one perched high on horseback at the front of her troops, every inch the major. And her continued use of the image on her return to England demonstrates again her awareness of the importance of self-projection. She became known as ‘The Lady of the Black Horse’, echoing ‘The Lady of the Lamp’, in newspaper reports, advertising posters and books. She thus forwarded the women’s cause further by way of this dramatic

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illustration of how a woman can do anything that a man can do and more. And she is shown doing it everywhere. The Serbian Retreat, although often sidelined by history, was a great and tragic event. Surrounded by death from exhaustion, disease and starvation, hindered by appalling weather conditions, struggling along treacherous mountain paths, always with the threat of enemy guns close behind, Major Stobart doubtless deserved the medals bestowed upon her by the Serbian military at the end of the journey (Figure 7). The horrors encountered here paralleled those found in the war hospitals of earlier months. The British press of late 1915 and early 1916 frequently featured stories of the retreat and they often included the mythology surrounding ‘The Lady of the Black Horse’: ‘3 Days Without Water; Serbians Had to Eat and Sleep on Snow; Story of Lady Who was Made a Major’ (Bristol Evening Times 30 December 1915); ‘Stirring Story of Mrs Stobart; Commanded Hospital in Serbian Retreat; A Fleeing Nation’ (Evening News 5 November 1915), and finally the author of ‘The Lady on the Black Horse by One Who Knows Her’ writes,

Figure 7: Mabel St Clair Stobart with the convoy crossing a river during the Serbian retreat. Copyright Eric Stobart, provided by Joffe and Joanna Crichton.

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My first sensation on hearing that Mrs St Clair Stobart was out in Serbia and in a fair way to be caught in the Bulgarian tide of invasion was one of anxiety, but it was soon replaced by one of confidence. It is no figure of speech to say that I have never met a braver woman or one of stronger personality in spite of her very feminine charm. She is just the type that wins through, not only by sheer ability, but by virtue of the confidence which she inspires in others. (5 November 1915) Articles such as this reinforced this impression of Mabel Stobart in the public mind, even before her safe return from Serbia. The mythology presents her as heroic, inspiring, efficient – more so than a man could be – but above all, feminine none the less. She is the perfect representative of the feminist cause in every way. The article continues, I can see her as the correspondent has pictured her riding her black horse in the long procession of retreating Serbian troops and peasants, and I will wager she is as much use as a dozen ordinary generals or a score of transport officers. She is so calm herself that she calms others, and her quiet, authoritative and withal musical voice has just the note to hearten a people in their dark hour. (ibid.) Mightier than the military, powerfully pictured, she is presented here as nothing less than the saviour of a people. Framed by those very people, exuding a serenity that gives her a kind of moral and spiritual superiority to mere men, the mythology of ‘The Lady of the Black Horse’ is crafted. This publicity was extremely helpful for Stobart’s post-Serbian activities. Throughout 1916, she travelled around the country delivering lectures on the Unit’s experience in Serbia, all publicised by the press with striking images, usually of Stobart herself. The proceeds were always donated to patriotic funds. In 1917, she was sponsored by the Ministry of Information, through the offices of John Buchan, to go to the United States and Canada. This coincided with America’s entry into the war. She travelled across the continent promoting the causes of the war, Serbia and women with equal zeal. Her role here was officially as a government propagandist, but by now a new political note had crept into Stobart’s lectures, one which significantly developed her feminist position. The New York Evening Sun introduced Stobart to the people of New York with the dramatic headline: ‘Militarism Is Maleness Run Riot: And it can Only be Destroyed With Woman’s Aid, Declares Pioneer Field Hospital Worker’ (1 September 1917). The article goes on to cite Stobart’s own

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passionate words from her The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere – perhaps her most famous book: I believe that humankind is at the parting of the ways. One way leads to devolution on spiritual lines; the other to devolution along lines of materialism, and the signpost for devolution is militarism. For militarism is a movement of retrogression which will bring civilisation to a standstill – in a cul de sac. And I believe that militarism can only be destroyed with the help of woman. In countries where woman has the least sway militarism is most dominant. Militarism is maleness run riot. (ibid.) Here, Stobart’s feminism in September 1917 really does occupy a new position, reminiscent of other suffrage arguments, but still presented in her own unique way.7 By the time she reached the United States her lecture tour was actually promoting The Flaming Sword, and the arguments of this book form the substance of her presentations. Much of the book acts as a detailed account of all the Serbian adventures, but the alternative feminist message is much more deeply political than her previous work. Her gender politics are essentialist and extreme, but it is a brand of feminism nonetheless and it is continually linked to women’s abilities and achievements. If women were enfranchised they would be able to prevent war – now a qualification that is just as important as defending one’s country. Woman, whether as a citizen or as a worker for national defence, is for Stobart associated primarily with Life: If the entrance of women into the political arena, is an evolutionary movement – forwards and not backwards – woman must not encumber herself with the legacies of male traditions likely to compromise her freedom of evolvement along the line of life. If the Woman’s Movement has, as I believe, value in the scheme of creation, it must tend to the furtherance of life, and not of death. (1917: 3) This approach has its foundation in the notion of woman as Mother.8 For Stobart, this nurturing role, diametrically opposed as it is to war and death, needs to be acknowledged and embraced for the good of all humankind. For Stobart, herself a mother, maternity was not there for the enforced containment of women, but the experience of motherhood should mean that women have a special role to play within government that was essential for the political and cultural

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advancement of society. For much of The Flaming Sword Stobart is also grappling with her own religious faith, so her use of the ideas of evolution seems appropriate, implying that the only natural way forward is for woman to take a more active role – the kind of role that Stobart herself has already taken: The idea of votes for women, or justice for women, is not here my concern; the idea, which, as a result of my small experiences, engulfs all others, is the necessity of votes for life, justice for humankind. This can only be achieved with the suppression of war, and wars will never be suppressed by men alone. (ibid.: 315) The horrors that Stobart had witnessed in Serbia convinced her that there was more to the women’s struggle than the franchise; although the latter is clearly an important steppingstone, it is not the ultimate goal. By talking instead of ‘votes for life’ she draws together a range of different ideological concepts: women, justice, participation, equality and not least, pacifism. The Flaming Sword, written on her immediate return from the Serbian retreat, enabled Stobart to crystallise her views. It was widely reviewed, using her image as ‘The Lady of the Black Horse’ to encourage sales. When promoting the book, she had at last found the voice to speak on behalf of not only the women’s movement – that had, by this time, served her well – but on a range of other radical political ideas, all with the blessing of the Ministry of Information. A formidable achievement indeed. ‘No wonder it is    that my hairs are grey. But I have come out of it with the same conviction that I had in the beginning, that there is no path of achievement impossible to women’ (Stobart 1917). It would have been interesting to see how Stobart might have engaged with the Suffrage Movement had she been in Britain at the birth of the WSPU in 1903. Though it seems likely that she never identified herself as a suffragist in the way that so many other women did,9 it is impossible to view her activities during the First World War, and those immediately preceding it, without acknowledging her parallel intentions. It would, no doubt, have taken a brave man to tell Mrs Stobart that she did not deserve the vote, and that would not have stopped her attempting to get it, just as the men who attempted to stop her from taking her hospital Unit where it was needed found their words falling on deaf ears. One headline captures Mabel St Clair Stobart perfectly: ‘Mrs St Clair Stobart might fitly be known as “The Woman Who Dared.” She dared the Huns in Belgium, braved the typhus plague in Serbia, and suffered

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the unspeakable horrors of the Serbian retreat.’10 She also dared to make her voice heard, in as many places as possible, fighting for the cause of women, all women and for women’s equality, for which the Suffrage Movement must have been truly grateful.

Notes 1. Stobart quoted in ‘Women Can’t Fight’, Votes [For Women?], date not recorded. This extract, like many others I refer to in this chapter, is from a series of newspaper cuttings in Stobart’s own scrapbook, so some details are missing. 2. For example, Dr Elsie Inglis, who met considerable opposition from the establishment when forming the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. For further information, see Leneman 1994. 3. Advertising poster for event dated 7 March 1913, which took place at Headquarters, Buckingham Gate, London. Also in scrapbook. 4. Name of publication indecipherable, 5 December 1913. 5. Not all suffragists followed this advice. Some believed that women should naturally oppose war and there was a strong suffrage support for pacifism. Others took Fawcett’s notion a stage further. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst of the WSPU worked with the government to get women to work in industries such as munitions and worked themselves as war propagandists. For further discussion of the diversification of the suffrage movement upon the outbreak of war, see Chapter 7 in Smith 2005. 6. For a more detailed discussion of this unit, see Chapter 5 in Smith 2005. 7. See Christabel Pankhurst and peace campaigners such as Catherine Marshall. 8. For a longer discussion of this political approach, see Chapter 2 in Smith 2000, 47–69. 9. Suggested in testimony of her granddaughter, Joanna Crichton, interviewed May 2005. 10. Sunday Herald, quoted in a publicity pamphlet.

References Unattributed newspaper articles Bristol Evening Times (30 December 1915) ‘3 Days Without Water; Serbians Had to Eat and Sleep on Snow; Story of Lady Who was Made a Major’. Daily Record (2 September 1914) ‘British Lady’s Adventure’. Daily Mail (2 September 1914) ‘British Lady’s Adventure’. Evening News (30 December 1915) ‘Stirring Story of Mrs Stobart; Commanded Hospital in Serbian Retreat; A Fleeing Nation’. Evening News (5 November 1915) ‘The Lady on the Black Horse by One Who Knows Her’. The Globe (13 August 1914) Untitled article by M. A. Stobart.

174 ‘The Woman Who Dared’: Major Mabel St Clair Stobart New York Evening Sun (1 September 1917) ‘Militarism Is Maleness Run Riot: And it can Only be Destroyed With Woman’s Aid, Declares Pioneer Field Hospital Worker’. The Standard (24 December 1912) ‘Women in War Time: The Part They Can Play in the Field’. The Times (20 November 1913) ‘In the Footsteps of Florence Nightingale’. The Times (5 September 1914) ‘Captured by Germans: London Vicar’s Adventures in Belgium’. Votes for Women (21 August 1914) ‘Women Doctors for the Front’. Women’s Platform (13 May 1913) ‘Women’s Part in War: Mrs F. A. Steele on Gilding the Suffrage Pill’. [Name of publication indecipherable] (5 December 1913) ‘Review’.

Bibliography Krippner, M. (1980) The Quality of Mercy: Women at War Serbia 1915–18, London & Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Leneman, L. (1994) In the Service of Life: The Story of Dr Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Edinburgh: Mercat. Smith, A. K. (2000) The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——. (2005) Suffrage Discourse in Britain During the First World War, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Stobart, M. St Clair (1913) War and Women, London: G. Bell & Sons. ——. (23 December 1914) ‘British Women Surgeons in France’, The Common Cause. ——. (1917) The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere, London, New York, Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton. ——. (1935) Miracles and Adventures, London: Rider & Co.

11 Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., the First World War, and a Feminist Critique of Wartime Violence∗ Kimberly Jensen

For American physician Esther Pohl Lovejoy, the First World War was a vital bridge leading from local and national feminist activism to feminist activism and organization on an international scale. The conflict was also a turning point in her understanding of the impact of war and militarism on women; from it she created a new vision of the possibilities for social change on a transnational level. A suffragist and public health activist from Oregon, Lovejoy went to France for five months in 1917– 1918 as a representative of American women’s organizations to study the public health needs of women and children in devastated areas. In France she found that wartime violence against women took the form of rape, dislocation, poverty, and disease, and she developed a strong critique of militarism and war. Her observations also underscored her belief that women were capable citizens who were equal with men and that women could cross national, class, and professional divides to unite for progressive action. When she returned to the United States, Lovejoy developed her views in the course of several speaking tours, written reports and published articles. She then provided a full account of these experiences and a critique of war’s violent effects on women in The House of the Good Neighbor.1 Lovejoy subsequently transformed ∗ The author wishes to thank Sara Piasecki and Karen Peterson at the Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives, Portland, Oregon, and Joanne Grossman and her staff at the Drexel University College of Medicine, Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine and Homeopathy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, archivists extraordinaire and guardians of the treasures. Thanks also to Alison Fell and Ingrid Sharp and to participants in ‘The Gentler Sex’ conference for their helpful comments and suggestions and to Linda Kerber, Erika Kuhlman, Karen Jensen, Todd Jarvis, and Jeanne Deane.

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her critique into a post-war programme for action by organizing and directing visionary new international organizations for medical women and medical relief. For many US women, including Esther Lovejoy, the First World War was a watershed in the struggle to define and claim the full rights of female citizenship. Prior to 1917, women in 12 US states and territories had achieved the right to vote, all but one of which were in the West and Pacific Northwest regions, including Oregon. Western suffragists linked their message to late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Populist and Progressive reform agendas, and to the process of statehood and state building in the region (Mead 2004). Many suffrage supporters believed that wartime service would be the final demonstration of women’s civic credentials, building on the momentum of the suffrage campaign and ensuring the passage of the federal suffrage amendment that would bring the vote to all American women (Kerber 1998; Jensen 2007). Supporters of the moderate ‘National American Woman Suffrage Association’ (NAWSA) followed the lead of their President, Carrie Chapman Catt, by working for the war effort while continuing their suffrage activism. Members of the ‘National Woman’s Party’ supported Alice Paul’s determination to focus on suffrage activism alone (Cott 1987). Both groups claimed victory in August 1920, when the United States ratified the federal amendment granting the vote to all women. The vibrant culture of women’s organizations and reform groups fostered by the Progressive Era’s (1890–1920) vision of women’s active participation in civic life was a strong foundation for American women’s activism during the war.2 Before the war, diverse women members of organizations such as the ‘National Association of Colored Women’, the ‘National Women’s Trade Union League’, the ‘Consumer’s League’, the ‘General Federation of Women’s Clubs’, the ‘National Council of Jewish Women’, and a variety of local groups and clubs worked to bring about social change and to transform woman’s place in American society. Women nurses and physicians were active in a thriving public health movement that sought to regulate food and drugs, and provide for sanitation and healthy schools and communities. And some women were claiming the rights of ‘economic citizenship’ by increasing access to wage work and the professions. By 1910, the US census showed that women comprised 20 percent of the paid work force (Kessler-Harris 2001). When the United States entered the World War in April 1917, Anna Howard Shaw, past president of NAWSA, headed the Women’s Committee of the ‘Council of National Defense’, an umbrella

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organization that coordinated the work of women’s organizations for the war effort and sought to develop and direct women’s wartime employment (Clarke 1918; Blair 1920). However, gender, race, and class boundaries continued to be powerful barriers to the full development of female citizenship. While the war brought opportunities for many groups of women to extend their progressive activism, it was also a time of severe repression of civil liberties, anti-immigrant sentiment, and continuing violence against Americans of colour. Those who criticized the government were vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment under a series of wartime laws. Professional and political women who opposed the war, such as Emma Goldman, Anna Louise Strong, Kate Richards O’Hare, and Oregon’s Dr Marie Equi, were particular targets because of their ‘disorderly’ and ‘unmotherly’ behaviour and were therefore considered unworthy of full citizenship (Kennedy 1999). After the war, women in the United States and other combatant nations faced a backlash in a post-war climate of maternalism. There was a return to the traditional gendered roles of males as ‘protectors’ and women as ‘protected’ that contained women’s wartime gains (Carter 1997; Roberts 1997; Grayzel 1999). Women used a variety of strategies to combat this backward move. Esther Clayson was born in 1869 in a logging camp in Seabeck, Washington Territory, to immigrant British parents. As a child she and her brothers served tables and cleaned the family’s Bayview Hotel in Seabeck, while attending the local grammar school. She combined study at the University of Oregon Medical School from 1890 to 1894 with work as a department store clerk to help support herself, her single mother and siblings, examining bones surreptitiously under the lingerie counter. She graduated from the Medical School of the University of Oregon on 2 April 1894, and three weeks later married her colleague Emil Pohl. The two physicians set up a medical practice together in Portland, and in the years that followed Esther joined Emil sporadically while he followed a dream of Gold Rush riches in Alaska. Meanwhile Esther continued her medical education at the Chicago Clinical School in 1897 and postgraduate clinical studies in Vienna in 1904 and 1910. Esther and Emil had a child, Frederick Clayson Pohl, who lived from 1902 to 1908, and three years after Frederick’s death Emil died in Alaska in 1911. Esther then married Portland businessman George A. Lovejoy in 1912, and they divorced in 1920 after her return from wartime service (Lovejoy ca. 1957; Lovejoy 1974). Lovejoy became an activist in her position as Portland City Health Officer from 1907 to 1909 and in the Oregon woman suffrage campaigns.

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She worked to make the health bureau an activist body. She spearheaded milk and water inspections as well as checking school children for contagious diseases. She also established fair contracts for garbage disposal, and enforced processes such as a city ordinance requiring physicians to report contagious diseases immediately. Working with city and business leaders, she successfully prevented the bubonic plague from spreading to Portland from San Francisco and Seattle in 1907–1908. She believed that health was a political issue and that the city had a responsibility and accountability for the health of its citizens. She worked with Portland’s strong network of women’s organizations to achieve these goals. In the Oregon campaigns for woman suffrage, Lovejoy worked with the ‘Equal Suffrage League’, the ‘Portland Woman’s Club’, and the ‘College Equal Suffrage League’. She also served as a key ally of Anna Howard Shaw, the president of NAWSA, as well as other national suffrage leaders. Shaw kept Lovejoy apprised of national events and the two established a local/ national networking process that supported Oregon’s two major bids for woman suffrage, in 1906 and in the successful campaign of 1912. When the United States entered the war in 1917, many of the nation’s 6000 women physicians, like Lovejoy, were active suffragists involved in civic and legislative campaigns to promote progressive public health. Most regretted the transnational conflict, yet saw an opportunity to strengthen their rights and responsibilities as women citizens and professional women on an equal footing with male colleagues. Over the course of the war, the ‘Medical Women’s National Association’ (MWNA), organized in 1915, led a strong though ultimately unsuccessful fight for officer status for women in the Army Medical Corps through the registration of women doctors, petition drives, and test case applications (Jensen 2007). This was part of a long struggle for equal access to medical education, internships, and professional opportunities for medical women (More 1999; Morantz-Sanchez 2000). Many women physicians also reacted to the news of rape and violence against women in the war zone and spearheaded efforts to support the women involved (Jensen 2007). They believed that their medical skills made them especially qualified to take action on behalf of the victims.3 Esther Lovejoy attended the second annual meeting of the MWNA in New York in June 1917. Delegates discussed how to help women who were ‘pregnant by force’ in the invaded and occupied territories of Belgium and Northern France and considered the creation of medical ‘Maternity Units to Devastated Parts of Allies’ Countries’ (AWH 1917; Morton 1937: 273). Esther Lovejoy volunteered to go to France to represent the women physicians of the United States to survey

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‘conditions affecting women before, during, and after childbirth’ and then to ‘determine what women physicians might advantageously do in the way of relief work in that war-stricken country’ (Lovejoy 1918: 109; Lovejoy 1939: 33–34). On June 19, Lovejoy and her colleague, Dr Eliza M. Mosher, represented the medical women’s organization at a meeting of some 59 women’s organizations called by the ‘Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense’ (WCCND), headed by Anna Howard Shaw, Lovejoy’s close colleague from the Oregon suffrage campaigns. Shaw and the members of the committee supported Lovejoy’s visit to France and ‘gave her letters of introduction to the American officials’ there (Clarke 1918: 38; Lovejoy 1939: 34). By the time she sailed for France in August, Lovejoy had added the support and sponsorship of the American Red Cross and the American Fund for French Wounded to that of the MWNA and the WCCND (Lovejoy 1939: 34–35; Lovejoy 1957: 304). With this substantial, multi-layered organizational backing, Lovejoy spent the next five months gathering information for her survey and recommendations (Figure 8). In September 1917, Lovejoy began her investigation by living and working at the Résidence Sociale, a settlement house administered by Marie-Jeanne Bassot and her staff in the working-class factory district of Levallois just northwest of Paris. For some 15 years before the war, the Résidence had served the local community and its role intensified with the transformation of Levallois in wartime. Pre-war automobile and perfume factories retooled to manufacture munitions and airplanes and employed women workers, many of whom were single or whose partners and husbands were at the war front. The Résidence provided day care and after-school care for children, as well as an employment office. Contracts were agreed with the French war department enabling local women to sew pyjamas and shirts for soldiers while caring for their small children. Résidence staff also established networks with other agencies such as the Red Cross to provide Levallois women and their families with subsidized milk and food. Visiting nurses had established an anti-tuberculosis campaign and the staff provided other public health care through dispensary work in the community with a focus on prenatal, childbirth, and early childhood care and nutrition (Lovejoy 1919) (Figure 9). Lovejoy’s investigation of conditions for women took her outside the circle of the Résidence Sociale. She observed maternity clinics and canteens for single mothers, including the Paris Maternity Clinic on the Boulevard Port Royal. She visited munitions factories in and around Paris that employed many women workers including André Citroën’s

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Figure 8: Esther Lovejoy 1917, OHSU Historical Collections & Archives.

‘showcase’ plant on the Quai de Javel in Paris (Lovejoy 1919: 142). In these factories she found women producing 75-millimetre shells and other weapons, and noticed that many who were exposed to the chemicals used in the production process became ‘bright yellow’ with toxic jaundice (Lovejoy 1919: 151). Lovejoy observed that the ‘industrial face of the nation had changed’. With France ‘literally bristling with munition plants    modern woman had found her place in modern warfare’ (Lovejoy 1919: 143). She also stayed at the refugee centre established at the French resort city of Evian-les-Bains across Lake Geneva from

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Figure 9: House of the Good Neighbor Monday Morning (Lovejoy 1919: Facing 16).

Lausanne on the Swiss border. Here French rapatriés (former residents now repatriated) returned from exile and captivity in the occupied North; most of them were women and children and many were in need of medical and surgical care. In January 1918, the Red Cross asked Lovejoy to return to the states as a special representative and speaker to participate in a fundraising drive that spring before returning to France. Again, her diverse organizational backing was apparent, as she was officially a ‘special representative of the Women’s Committee, National Council of Defense and of the Women’s National organizations as well as the Women’s Medical Committees of America’. Her role was to raise awareness of the work of the Red Cross in France and directors believed she would raise more money for the cause than it would cost to send her (Folks to Lovejoy 1918; Folks to Lucas 1918). The Oregon Journal reported that ‘it is supposed that her mission is to assist in the education of the women of this country regarding the needs in France and to lay systematic plans for more effective and systematic work in behalf of the women and children of the devastated districts in whom she is especially interested’ (20 January 1918: 6). In fact, her speaking tours were so successful that she extended her stay in the United States and Lovejoy did not return to service in France until after the war. Lovejoy’s message about women and the war reached many Americans in large cities and small communities around the United States during

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her series of speaking tours from February to December 1918. Upon her arrival in New York in early February 1918, she reported to the ‘Medical Women’s National Association’ and then spent time in Washington, D.C., briefing the ‘Women’s Committee of the Council of the National Defense’ and other women’s organizations. On 8 May, she spoke to the assembled representatives of the ‘General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ at their biennial convention in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and then went to the Midwest for the Red Cross with stops in Chicago and various Michigan towns. For the rest of May to early June 1918, she toured Florida and Georgia for the Red Cross Southern Division fund drive. Lovejoy also made a report to her medical colleagues at the third annual meeting of the ‘Medical Women’s National Association’ in Chicago from 10 to 11 June, when she also accepted the position of first vice president of the organization. She returned to Oregon on 20 June and embarked on a regional speaking tour of the Pacific coast for the Red Cross Pacific Division and the YMCA in army logging camps and shipbuilding facilities across the region. From 8 to14 September she was the featured speaker in the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive (Figure 10) on a tour of southern and central Oregon, and then went to New Orleans for a proposed tour of the South for the Red Cross. The influenza pandemic affected the scope of this last Red Cross campaign, which was stalled for most of October, during which month Lovejoy participated in emergency public health work in New Orleans and then resumed her Red Cross lectures to audiences in Louisiana and Arkansas at the end of November and through December 1918 (Oregonian 7 September 1918: 6). As she honed her arguments in her speeches, Lovejoy also put her experiences and ideas down into writing, enabling her to reach an even wider audience. The WCCND mimeographed her extensive written report of the situation in France and sent it to the over 50 national organizations under the council’s umbrella as Council of National Defense Circular 113, and the MWNA published the report in full in the Woman’s Medical Journal in May 1918 (Lovejoy May 1918, ‘Official Report’). And that same month, the popular women’s magazine the Ladies’ Home Journal published Lovejoy’s account of the women and children rapatriés at Evian (Lovejoy May 1918, ‘Most Interesting Spot’). While recuperating from her own bout with influenza and a case of sciatica in Washington, D.C. in early 1919, she spent her time writing (Lovejoy to Bassot April 1919: 2). The Macmillan Company was interested in a sample chapter she had submitted, and she used this time to develop and complete her account of her time in France, which was then published

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Figure 10: Liberty Loan Speech, OHSU Historical Collections & Archives.

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by Macmillan as The House of the Good Neighbor in 1919. Reviewers praised the book and the editors of the Medical Women’s Journal serialized many of its chapters for readers during 1920. Through her extensive speaking tours, her published reports and articles, and in The House of the Good Neighbor, Lovejoy developed her ideas about the meaning of the war for women and formed four major conclusions. The first was that wartime showcases the capabilities of women and demonstrates their fitness for citizenship and equality with men. Her second point emphasized the possibility that wartime experience would lead women to transcend class, as well as cultural, and professional differences in order to unite for progressive action. Third, she demonstrated that the impact of both wartime and war’s violence is different for women, a fact that deserved specific attention. And fourth, Lovejoy mounted a critique of the destructive role of militarism in the modern state. In her speeches and writing, Lovejoy emphasized women’s contributions to the war and underscored their equality with men: ‘Compared with the usual apprenticeship period of a beginner in the different industries, these women developed remarkable efficiency in an unbelievably short time,’ she wrote of munitions workers. They made 90 percent of the 75-millimeter shells for the French contribution to the Allied war effort (Daily Gazette-Times 16 September 1918: 1). In The House of the Good Neighbor, she used parallel examples of women’s and men’s service during wartime to emphasize their equality. ‘If a man fell at his gun, his place was filled and the fight went on. If a woman failed at her lathe, her place was filled and the work went on. Men might die and France might be lost, but not for the want of munitions if her women could help it.’ French soldiers fell asleep while marching and ‘among the munition makers exhausted women often fell asleep at their work.’ The ‘staccato tat-a-tat of the automatic hammer’ that women used was ‘like the sound of a machine gun at a distance’ (Lovejoy 1919: 145, 147). For Lovejoy, the ‘manner in which women en masse have stepped under and lifted the burden of labor from the shoulders of men has amazed the world’ (Lovejoy May 1918, ‘Official Report’: 112). Lovejoy’s second major conclusion emphasized that wartime conditions called upon women to transcend the barriers of class, nationality, and professional status that divided them. This would enable them to unite for progressive action. Cooperative work for the war effort, Lovejoy insisted, had created a ‘new aristocracy of service’. Women factory workers and ‘women who have been deprived by generations of wealth in America’ were finding common ground (Lovejoy 8 May

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1918: 3). The elite women who founded the Résidence Sociale, she said, ‘realized that the exclusive circles from which they had escaped had succeeded in excluding the best part of life    They wanted to be strong enough to help themselves and to help others    they had had enough tea and macaroons to last forever.’ And more importantly, she observed, the ‘fight against established customs which these women had made for their own freedom of action, the right of self-determination and selfdevelopment’ meant that they were also willing to grant to the workingclass women at the Résidence Sociale the ‘independence of thought and action they had demanded for themselves’ (Lovejoy 1919: 6–7). The ‘progressive opinions expressed’ by ‘young working mothers astonished’ Madame de Witt Schlumberger, the president of the French suffrage society, who had ‘delivered a mild, antebellum talk on the subject of woman suffrage, carefully restraining and modifying any opinions she considered too radical for her audience’. Schlumberger told Lovejoy that she realized she was ‘not keeping abreast of all the phases of the woman movement’ (ibid.: 17). Lovejoy’s primary goal in France and her charge from the women’s organizations that sent her was to observe conditions among women and children and to recommend how women physicians and others might provide the most effective assistance. In her official report to women’s groups, Lovejoy was careful to recommend cooperation and respectful working relationships with French women midwives, nurses, and physicians and concludes by stating, ‘The need for American women physicians in the maternity field in France is not urgent.’ There were some 1300 sage-femmes (midwives) in Paris, Lovejoy noted, and they delivered ‘practically all’ of the routine births in Paris and about ‘95 percent    in other parts of France’. The sage-femme was ‘popular with the French people    and in most cases her services would be preferred to those of foreign women physicians who are unable to speak French’. Indeed, Lovejoy observed, the ‘favor with which French women physicians have been received, and which is also accorded to American women physicians, is probably because the French people regard these professional women as a higher order of their beloved sage-femmes’ (Lovejoy May 1918, ‘Official Report’: 109–10). Yet American women and other woman physicians could provide valuable assistance to French medical workers in public health in the devastated areas by helping to raise funds and to create a structure for necessary support. ‘While the child-bearing women of France are not in need of maternity service’ because of the preferred services of French midwives and physicians, however, they ‘are in need of almost everything else’

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she reported (ibid.: 110). American women physicians could provide essential public health services and connect refugees and civilians with vital medical relief. They would not supplant French physicians and midwives but would work in cooperation with them to assist women in need. Lovejoy’s third major conclusion was that women suffered the violent impact of war differently from men. This often entailed a loss of control over their bodies and lives, including the rapes that were a common occurrence in occupied areas. In her speeches and in her published accounts, she wrote of her experiences at the refugee centre at Evian where she felt that she confronted the ultimate horror of war’s violence. At the time of invasion the Germans had ‘sorted out’ the residents of Northern French villages: ‘Those without military value were robbed of their earthly possessions, evicted en masse from their native towns and villages, herded together, and finally deported’, and ‘those with military value were detained by their conquerors’ (Lovejoy 1919: 172). Those who could fight, those who could labour, and those who could breed, Lovejoy wrote, had military value to the Germans and were kept in the occupation zone. Families had been separated by the German policy of keeping ‘strong boys over fourteen’ for labour value and ‘strong girls over sixteen’ and ‘strong young women’ with ‘less than one child’ for labour and ‘breeding’ value (ibid.: 173). As a result, the Germans did not allow young women to be repatriated from occupied areas ‘to prevent most of the children born to young French or Belgian women by German fathers’ from leaving German territory (Lovejoy May 1918, ‘Official Report’: 110). The Germans ‘separated the women they could use for breeding and other purposes in Northern France and Belgium, just as tho they were so many cattle’, according to a newspaper account of one of Lovejoy’s speeches (Daily Gazette-Times 16 September 1918: 1). Lovejoy emphasized that women suffered the consequences of war not only by rape from the ‘brutal soldier who breaks down the door with the butt of his rifle’ but also from the soldier who ‘comes in kindness with a loaf of bread for her and her children and who actually affords her protection against all save himself’ (Lovejoy 1919: 180). Wartime exposed the lie in the traditional construction of men as protectors and women as the protected. She pointed out, ‘The women who had been most carefully protected by their husbands and fathers were the most helpless’, and added, ‘Under such circumstances’ the ‘cumulative power of fear and want is harder to resist’ than rape (ibid.: 179). Women suffered the consequences of invasion, violence, rape, desperate impov-

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erishment, and disease, and some, she said, could turn only to the enemy for so-called ‘protection’. ‘Warfare is much worse for women than for men. Men have the right of death and they die fighting gloriously for their ideals. But women must live and be confiscated with the goods and the chattels’ (ibid.: 180). These observations and experiences led Lovejoy to a general critique of modern warfare and militarism. One of her strongest assertions came in her speech to the ‘General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ when she asked her audience to consider the impact of ‘military rule’ on soldiers, regardless of nationality: Suppose in this country (we all respect our troops, they are the highest type of men), suppose next to our military camps there was a village and the order went out to make this place as horrible as possible, the military order was no door shall be locked in this village, would that village be a safe place for women and girls?    It merely makes that town the property of the soldiers   ’ (Lovejoy 8 May 1918: 5) The German private soldier, she asserted, was the ‘pathetic victim’ of ‘military values’ (Rogue River Courier 10 September 1918: 1). Militarism was a process and a power that trapped participants on both sides of the conflict, and the price of modern war was too great. Lovejoy argued that the ‘vital participation of women in this war means that war must cease between nations, or men must fall lower than beasts. There is no beast that will attack the female of its own species, and the successful conduct of future wars means the wholesale killing of the women of the enemy as well as the men’ (Lovejoy 1919: 148). Lovejoy’s House of the Good Neighbor, in one reviewer’s dramatic analysis, ‘wrenches from us all our last barbaric taste of war in any form, under any cloak’ (Oregon Journal 3 January 1920: 6). Her extended discussion of the impact of war on working women, refugee women, war widows, and women who experienced rape and desperation established that ‘War babies are the living evidence of a force far greater than violence or deliberate villainy. They are the issue of war, and the changed conditions and relationships resulting from war’ (Lovejoy 1919: 180) (Figure 11). Nations, she believed, created a false ‘camouflage of holiness’ for the ‘unholy sacrifices’ of wartime. Lovejoy concluded her book with a dramatic and emotional appeal for an end to war. In the last pages of the House of the Good Neighbor, she described her unexpected return due to illness to the Résidence Sociale at Christmas 1917. Everyone was away except for Madame Fleuret, the cook, who shared rabbit stew with

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Figure 11: War Babies (Lovejoy 1919: Facing 180).

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her guest and told of her own losses while living in occupied France for three years. Her husband and two sons had been killed and her daughter ‘taken into captivity’ and Madame Fleuret expressed the hope that her daughter was dead rather than alive and suffering. Lovejoy considered the German helmet with a bullet hole that an American soldier had given her. She imagined the ghost of the young German soldier who ‘looked so young, so like an innocent boy protesting against a cruel fate that had marked him for this sacrifice’ (ibid.: 215). For Lovejoy, war was personified in these dual images. ‘War crouched before me in the bent figure and broken heart of that one woman robbed of everything’ and in another guise, ‘not the martial figure of Mars as it is usually depicted, but a fair young boy cut off in his youth when life was very sweet’. War represented ‘Death to manhood, and worse than death to womanhood’ (ibid.: 217–18). During the war, American medical women established all-female medical units in France to provide vital health care to civilians. They also worked cooperatively with other women physicians in the war zone. When the war ended, Lovejoy expanded these organizational foundations and strengthened them with her commitment to challenge militarism and the violent effects of war on women. She did this by taking a leading role in the development of two international medical organizations. She agreed to take the chair of the ‘American Women’s Hospitals’ (AWH), the medical relief service for civilians and refugees established by the MWNA of the United States during the war. In the post-war period of revolution, nationalist conflicts, and refugee crises, Lovejoy expanded the scope and purpose of the organization and continued pioneering international relief efforts until her retirement in 1967. And as one of the organizers and first president of the ‘Medical Women’s International Association’ (MWIA), Lovejoy believed that medical women could take the lead in formulating policies that would counter militarism, disease and poverty. Through the AWH and the MWIA, medical women, cooperating across national boundaries, could organize medical relief and support local health care providers in devastated regions. Such medical relief and global organization and cooperation among medical women had the potential to change the world by empowering women and communities, bridging national boundaries, and challenging state policies that caused disease and suffering. Lovejoy’s understanding of the dangers of militarism and the impact of wartime violence against women born of her wartime experiences motivated her to call for an alternative vision for the post-war world.

190 Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the First World War

This vision, what she termed ‘international health’, could enable the 10,000 medical women worldwide to shape international policy and peace. For Lovejoy, international health consisted of combating ‘pestilence, which passes from country to country, and all the causes of pestilence, chief among which stands war’, and ‘the prevention of disease which is due in large measure to destitution resulting from social and economic injustice and war between nations’. It also included the political enfranchisement of women across the globe so that they could participate in formulating health policies. Members of the AWH and MWIA could support this with successful fundraising and health programmes, providing the ‘corporate structure’ for the activism Lovejoy envisioned and by providing expert policy advice to international organizations such as the League of Nations (Lovejoy 1923: 17). Both organizations developed strong accomplishments along these lines under Lovejoy’s direction, and they continue to be demonstrated in their work today. Lovejoy’s critique of wartime violence and her transnational feminism embodied in the AWH and the MWIA are important to our understanding of the dimensions, theory, and activism of progressive internationalism and the international women’s movement surrounding the First World War (Rupp 1997, 1998; Enloe 2004; Dawley 2003). Lovejoy was among many observers and activists who called attention to women’s wartime accomplishments (Blatch 1918; Clarke 1918). She went beyond these observations by taking a strong and public critical stance against the effects of wartime violence on women and the impact of militarism by developing her theory of the progressive possibilities of ‘international health’ and taking a generative role in the international medical relief movement and in the Medical Women’s International Association. During the First World War, Esther Pohl Lovejoy developed what Cynthia Enloe describes as a ‘feminist curiosity’ (2004: 3–7). She did this by taking women and their needs seriously and by questioning the social structures such as war, militarism, class, and nation that limited women’s economic, social, and civic freedoms. She also transformed the ideas that resulted from such feminist curiosity from theory to action by developing the AWH and the MWIA as structural platforms from which women could build a movement of ‘international health’ that would benefit all citizens. Lovejoy’s ‘feminist curiosity’ and the activism it inspired comprise an important chapter in the history of the international women’s movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Notes 1. Published by Macmillan in a first edition in 1919, and a second edition with a foreword by Herbert Hoover in 1920. 2. In the United States, the ‘Progressive Era’ (1890–1920) was characterized by reforms that addressed the problems of an expanding, industrializing nation, particularly through government oversight and community action. Reformers emphasized action through community-based institutions such as settlement houses, free kindergartens, and consumer organizations and through local and national organizations that embraced a wide range of issues from conserving natural resources to improving labour conditions. At the state and national levels, reform was characterized by legislation to limit child labour and hours for working women in urban areas, pure food and drug laws, and the regulation of business monopolies and railroads. Proponents of woman suffrage at the state, regional, and national level in this period were part of this broader progressive era context. 3. Scholars today continue a debate begun during the war concerning the validity and scope of the accounts of atrocities in Belgium and Northern France. Much of subsequent analysis downplayed the information about wartime rape, but several scholars have recently reexamined the accounts (for examples, see Horne and Kramer 2001; Harris 1993). From the vantage point of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the experiences of women in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Sudan, and many other areas it is important to consider rape as a tool of conquest. The women physicians in this study viewed rape and violence against women as real, and Lovejoy’s subsequent observations supported it. For an extended discussion, see Jensen 2007.

References Unattributed newspaper articles Daily Gazette-Times [Corvallis, Oregon] (16 September 1918) ‘Liberty Loan Meetings Held in Benton County’: 1. Oregonian [Portland, Oregon] (7 September 1918) ‘Dr. Lovejoy to Speak’: 6 Oregon Journal [Portland, Oregon] (3 January 1920) ‘Dr. E. Lovejoy’s Book Is Praised’: 6. ——. (20 January 1918) ‘Dr. Esther Lovejoy Will Return to This Country in February’: 6. Rogue River Courier [Grants Pass, Oregon] (10 September 1918) ‘Dr. Lovejoy’s Speech Thrills’: 1.

Archives and manuscript collections American Women’s Hospital Records, 1917–1982, Accession 144. Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine and Homeopathy, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Acc. 144, Box 3, Folder 20, 4. American Women’s Hospitals (AWH) (19 July 1917) ‘Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee and General Association of the American Women’s Hospitals, 19 July 1917’.

192 Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the First World War Acc. 144, Box 3, Folder 20. Lovejoy, E. P. (8 May 1918) ‘Red Cross Abroad’. Typescript of Speech. Esther Pohl Lovejoy Collection, Accession 2001–011. Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives, Portland, Oregon. 2001–011, Box 1, Folder 2B. Folks, H. (3 January 1918) ‘Dr. Lovejoy’s Visit to America’. Letter to Dr W. P. Lucas. 2001–011, Box 1, Folder 2B. Folks, H. (4 January 1918) Letter to Dr Esther Lovejoy. 2001–011, Box 3, Folder 17. Lovejoy, E. P. (26 April 1919) Letter to Jean Marie Bassot. 2001–011. Box 3, Folder 19. Lovejoy, E. P. (c.1957) ‘Biographical Manuscript’.

Bibliography Blair, E. N. (1920) The Woman’s Committee, United States Council of National Defense: An Interpretive Report, Washington: Government Printing Office. Blatch, H. S. (1918) Mobilizing Woman-Power, New York: The Woman’s Press. Carter, E. (1997) How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clarke, I. C. (1918) American Women and the World War, New York: D. Appleton and Company. Cott, N. F. (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Dawley, A. (2003) Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Enloe, C. (2000) Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. (2004) The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press. Grayzel, S. (1999) Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Harris, R. (1993) ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: Rape, Race, and Nationalism in France During the First World War’, Past and Present 141: 70–206. Horne, J. and Kramer, A. (2001) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, New Haven: Yale University Press. Jensen, K. (1998) ‘Physicians and Citizens: U.S. Medical Women and Military Service in the First World War’, in R. Cooter et al. (eds) War, Medicine, and Modernity, 1860–1945, London: Sutton Publishers, 106–24. ——. (2007) Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kennedy, K. (1999) Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kent, S. Kingsley (1993) Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kerber, L. (1998) No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, New York: Hill and Wang.

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Kessler-Harris, A. (2001) In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, New York: Oxford University Press. Lovejoy, E. P. (May 1918) ‘The Most Interesting Spot in the World’, Ladies’ Home Journal 35/5: 75–76. ——. (May 1918) ‘Official Report of Dr. Esther Clayson Lovejoy, Council of National Defense Circular 113’, Woman’s Medical Journal 28/5: 109–13. ——. (1919) The House of the Good Neighbor, New York: Macmillan Company. ——. (1923) ‘The Possibilities of the Medical Women’s International Association’, Medical Woman’s Journal 30/1: 14–18. ——. (1933) Certain Samaritans, New York: Macmillan. ——. (1957) Women Doctors of the World, New York: Macmillan. ——. (1939) Women Physicians and Surgeons; National and International Organizations. Book One: The American Medical Women’s Association, The Medical Women’s International Association. Book Two: Twenty Years with The American Women’s Hospitals, Livingston, New York: The Livingston Press. ——. (March 1974) ‘My Medical School, 1890–1894.’ Introduction by Bertha Hallam. Oregon Historical Quarterly 75/1: 7–35. Mead, R. (2004) How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, New York: New York University Press. Morantz-Sanchez, R. (2000) Sympathy & Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. More, E. (1999) Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morton, R. S. (1937) A Woman Surgeon: The Life and Work of Rosalie Slaughter Morton, New York: Frederick Stokes. Roberts, M. L. (1997) Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rupp, L. J. (1997) Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——. (1998) ‘Solidarity and Wartime Violence Against Women’, in L. A. Lorentzen and J. Turpin (eds) The Women and War Reader, New York: New York University Press, 303–07.

12 Elisabeth Rotten and the ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’, 1914–1919∗ Matthew Stibbe

On 27 April 1918 the London Daily Herald, a newspaper with close ties to the Labour Party, published the following article in defence of the Quaker-led ‘Friends Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress’ (FEC): In our own country the efforts of the ‘Friends Emergency Committee’ on behalf of enemy aliens in Great Britain has received much abuse in the columns of a section of the press. ‘Are there any Germans’ it is asked ‘who would do the same for our folks over there?’ The answer is that there is an exactly similar organisation which has been working in Berlin since the earliest days of the war. The two committees are each mainly concerned with the very hard cases of the wives and families of ‘alien enemies’, but each has a section that also gives advice and help to the interned civilians; and to a smaller extent to the military prisoners also. When one committee works out some new plan of assistance, it usually finds that the other is already active on the same lines. In December 1915 the Berlin Committee published a general appeal for assistance in its work, quoting the amount of support already received by the British Committee. This appeal was signed by nineteen societies and ninety-eight prominent men and women. Later, when more support was needed, Prince Lichnowsky ∗ I would like to thank Claudia Siebrecht for her helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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held a meeting at his house    and a collection of 800 marks was taken. (Daily Herald 27 April 1918)

The author of this article was indeed correct; little had been written up to this point about the work of the Berlin Committee and its links to the FEC in Britain. Known in German as the ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’ (‘Information and Assistance Bureau for Germans Abroad and for Foreigners in Germany’), it was founded in October 1914 by a 32-year-old Swiss national, Dr Elisabeth Rotten, with the assistance of Pastor Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a leading figure in the German ecumenical movement and head of the youth missionary project ‘Soziale Arbeitsgemeinschaft Berlin-Ost’ (see Grotefeld 1995). As its name suggests, it aimed to provide practical and financial assistance to impoverished German civilians arriving home after being expelled from enemy countries, and to enemy civilians trapped in Germany, including those who were interned in POW camps. As such it followed the Quaker principle that ‘love of one’s enemies remains the distinguishing mark of those who are loyal to our Lord’ (‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’ SFL, pamphlet, 7 November 1914). Rotten’s work with internees and their families brought her face to face with the grim realities of poverty, hunger and despair in wartime Berlin. In this sense, her experiences might be compared with those of the Swede Elsa Brändström, the so-called ‘Angel of Siberia’, who saved thousands of lives among German and Austrian prisoners in Russia while working for the Swedish Red Cross (Rachamimov 2002: 5–6; 164–69). Like Brändström, Rotten was a citizen of a neutral country, and saw it as her duty, as a committed internationalist, to come to the aid of the innocent victims of human conflict and disasters. However, Rotten’s work is also interesting from other points of view. First, she was much more politically engaged than Brändström. For instance, she co-founded the pacifist ‘Bund Neues Vaterland’ (‘New Fatherland League’, BNV) in November 1914 and represented that organization at the international women’s peace congress at The Hague in April–May 1915 (see BNV IISG 1915). Although representatives from both the pro- and anti-war wings of the German women’s movement served on her committee, her closest associates were anti-war radicals like Minna Cauer, Helene Stöcker, Eduard Bernstein and Albert Einstein (see Cauer IISG 1911– 1922; Wickert 1991: 97–98; and Goenner 2005: 79–80). This necessarily gave her work a subversive edge that was not apparent in the more mainstream patriotic wartime charities described by Claudia Siebrecht.

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Secondly, Rotten’s organization was concerned not only with the welfare of male POWs, but also with women and children who had been interned and/or separated from their families as a result of the war. Indeed, as time went by, most of the work done by the ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’ was directed at the wives and children of internees, including German women who had lost their citizenship upon marriage to a non-German, and French and Belgian families deported from Germanoccupied territory. Through this, Rotten gained a much greater awareness of the impact of war on women and children, which became a key factor in her allegiance to the pacifist wing of the women’s movement. In the 1920s she worked on various educational projects aimed at international reconciliation, including the ‘Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund’ (‘German League of Nations Society’, founded in 1918), and also managed funds donated from British and American Quaker charities for the relief of hungry and destitute children in Germany. Forced by the Nazis to move to Switzerland in the 1930s, she continued to be a leading campaigner for world peace and human rights until her death in London in 1964.1 This chapter will look closely at the activities of the Berlin Committee between 1914 and 1919, focusing on three key areas: aims, sources of funding and motivations. The final two paragraphs will then consider the long-term impact of Rotten’s work and ideas for the women’s movement.

Aims Between 1914 and 1919 Rotten worked tirelessly on behalf of civilian war victims, never once taking a holiday in five years. Born in 1882 in Berlin to wealthy Swiss parents, she became one of the first women to sit for the Abitur exam at the Kaiserin Augusta gymnasium in 1906. She followed this up with periods of study at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, Montpellier and Marburg, completing her doctorate at Marburg in 1913. Her links to the German women’s movement were forged in her youth. This was because the director of the Kaiserin Augusta gymnasium was Helene Lange, one of the original founders of the ‘Bund deutscher Frauenvereine’ (‘Federation of German Women’s Organisations’, BDF) and a close associate of its president, Gertrud Bäumer. The biggest influence on her life, however, was the neo-Kantian philosophy taught at Marburg, with its strong emphasis on social responsibility and social inclusion, values rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.2 It was these ideals that most attracted Rotten to the cause of women’s rights and women’s education, although, like her friend and colleague Helene

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Stöcker, who is the subject of Peter Davies’ chapter, she was always something of an outsider in the bourgeois feminist movement. In July 1914, Rotten had just returned to Germany from a year working as a Lektorin at Newnham College, Cambridge, and, encouraged by Lange’s example, was considering a career in teaching. As she explained in a letter to an old university friend in 1918, When the war broke out I was staying with my parents in Berlin for the holidays and I immediately offered assistance to English students I knew who were travelling in Germany and were experiencing difficulties    word soon got round to other foreigners, and this is how I became involved in organizing [relief] work with a handful of likeminded supporters.3 (Rotten to Anita Lenz, EZA 11 February 1918) Initially her efforts were directed towards providing practical advice and assistance to stranded ‘enemy aliens’ (British, French and Russian subjects) who were now unable to return home, as well as transmitting letters to and from their families via a contact in neutral Switzerland. At this stage most of her clients were fairly affluent students and language teachers who were clearly in some distress but not vulnerable financially: in fact, many were able to hold on to jobs in spite of the outbreak of war (Rotten to Stephen Hobhouse, SFL 26 April 1915). However, this began to change in the autumn of 1914 for a number of reasons. First, following a series of mutual agreements between the belligerent governments, women and children of enemy nationality, and men over 55, were allowed to leave Germany, reducing Rotten’s initial client list substantially. Secondly, though, in the wake of anti-German outrages in London and other British cities, the German government ordered the arrest of all British males aged 17 to 55 still on German soil, and their internment at a converted racecourse at Ruhleben near Berlin (Stibbe 2005). Of the four thousand to five thousand men held in this camp from 6 November 1914 onwards, a significant number had German-born wives and children who immediately faced grave financial hardship and an uncertain future as ‘enemy aliens’ within their own country. Children of British internees, for instance, were expelled from German schools, and their wives were denied access to the usual state benefits and separation allowances, forcing them to rely on friends or private charities to make ends meet (‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’ to the Reich Office of Interior, BA Berlin, 16 December 1914). Finally, at around the same time news began to reach Berlin about the desperate condition both of German women trapped in African colonies and

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of enemy women deported to Germany from the occupied parts of Northern France and Belgium, none of whom were covered by existing exchange arrangements. Unconfirmed reports also made reference to cases of rape and mutilation allegedly committed by German troops in occupied Belgium. Even if only a fraction of these stories turned out to be true, they represented a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented magnitude (see Cauer IISG 13 December 1914; Horne and Kramer 2001). Looking back over four decades later, Rotten recalled how, after October 1914, [t]he sudden increase in our work load was almost breathtaking: supplying books and other learning materials to internment camps    supporting the families of interned men    passing news between divided families in the occupied and unoccupied parts of France and Belgium, if possible through legal channels, but if not, through illegal ones    We pursued each individual case as if it were unique; in fact, every case was representative and indicative of millions of others    4 (Rotten 1962: 79–80) The biggest achievement of the Berlin Committee, in Rotten’s view, was the rescue of several hundred French children who had been holidaying in Northern France in the summer of 1914 and were separated from their families after the German invasion. For over two years she persisted with her campaign to bring them home, enlisting the support of various influential individuals, including the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, in order to overcome the objections of the military authorities (Wolff 1984: Vol. 1, 432, 443–44, 466). Eventually, in late 1916 and early 1917 some 22 transports were arranged from occupied French territory through Germany to neutral Switzerland, the children being accompanied by female members of Rotten’s committee or related organizations. In Switzerland they were handed over to representatives of the Swiss Red Cross and then reunited with their families in unoccupied France. Equally difficult but rewarding was the work involved in searching for news of missing persons on behalf of anxious relatives, an activity which the Berlin Committee undertook in cooperation with the FEC in London, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva and specialist information bureaux based in Stockholm, Lausanne, Basel and Berne. Exchanges were also organized of captured medical personnel, a task performed with the assistance of Lilli Jannasch

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of the BNV and the Geneva-based French anti-war campaigner Romain Rolland (see Rotten 1915: 40–44; Goenner, 2005: 79). On a more mundane level, volunteers from Rotten’s committee assessed the financial needs of distressed foreigners living in Berlin and other German cities and distributed money, food and fuel to them. The amounts involved varied from case to case. In April 1916, for instance, a report noted that the committee had supported up to 2500 families at one time or another and was spending an average of 3000 marks per month on relief. Most of this was going to German-born women who had married foreigners, but in some cases it was going to single women of foreign nationality. Around 49 per cent of the recipients were British, either by birth or by marriage, 24 per cent Russian, 9 per cent French, 7 per cent Italian, 3 per cent Serb and 2 per cent Belgian. A handful of Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Rumanian and Greek women were also on the committee’s books (Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle ACICR, pamphlet, April 1916). As prisoner exchanges and release schemes were put into effect, the proportion of British, Russian and French women decreased slightly, while the proportion of Rumanian, Belgian and American women increased (Rotten to Miss Fox, SFL, 5 July 1916). Apart from material relief, the Berlin Committee offered practical support in the form of legal advice and help with housing and employment problems. For instance, attempts were frequently made to find jobs for destitute aliens, occasionally with some success, but more often without. Several English women were given translation work and Russian women were sometimes found positions as domestic servants (Hobhouse SFL 1915). Pastor Siegmund-Schultze also regularly visited the Ruhleben camp in the first year of the war, offering spiritual encouragement and news from friends and family at home (Siegmund-Schultze EZA 1914/15). By and large, however, the Berlin Committee left the material support of internees to other charitable organizations, particularly the American YMCA, and instead concentrated on helping those enemy aliens living in relative freedom in Germany, who often faced far greater hardships than those inside the prison camps.5 The Berlin Committee itself operated, appropriately enough, in rented rooms in the Friedenstrasse (Peace Street). Apart from two part-time salaried typists, the seven office staff and twenty visitors worked as unpaid volunteers (Hobhouse SFL 1915). Constant police surveillance and negative publicity in the right-wing, anti-foreigner press led to a tense atmosphere, especially after the BNV was effectively shut down on 7 February 1916 and its director Lilli Jannasch taken in for questioning shortly thereafter (Quidde 1979: 101–02). Heinrich Becker, who got to

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know Rotten in the 1920s, later recalled her telling him ‘that there were times when she always kept a small suitcase in her office packed with essentials in case she was arrested’6 (Becker 1972: 182). In spite of this, she and Pastor Siegmund-Schultze developed a good working relationship with officials from the German Foreign Office and the Prussian Ministry of War. This proved vital to the success of their endeavours, and perhaps explains why the expected police raid on the Berlin Committee never came. It was only through such contacts, for instance, that Rotten was able to secure permission from the Berlin Kommandantur for the German wives and mothers of Ruhleben internees to visit the camp for two hours each month from April 1916 (Higgins NA 1919: 4–5). Equally vital, though, were the international ties Rotten developed, particularly with the FEC, the ICRC and the Dutch pacifist organization ‘Vrede door Recht’ (‘Peace through Justice’). As much as anything, these links were used as a means of pooling information and organizing propaganda in favour of reciprocal humanitarian assistance to trapped civilians. When a delegation from the ICRC visited Berlin on a factfinding mission in March 1917, for instance, Rotten was their first port of call (ICRC, ACICR 1917). Rotten also travelled extensively herself, using her Swiss passport. In April–May 1915, she attended the international women’s peace congress at The Hague, and in September 1915, she went to Brussels, where she managed to persuade General von Bissing, the German military governor, to approve the evacuation of French children under 13 years of age from occupied Belgian territory (‘Auskunfts-und Hilfstelle’, minutes of committee meeting, EZA 21 October 1915). In July 1915 she even visited London, where she met up with Stephen Hobhouse of the FEC to discuss ways of further promoting public knowledge of the work of both their committees and correcting misrepresentations in the press (Hobhouse SFL 1915). Thenceforth letters from Rotten and clippings from newspaper articles were regularly read out at FEC committee meetings and Rotten in turn ensured that the FEC’s activities were given maximum publicity in Germany. To Rotten’s regret, however, it was not possible to make contact with like-minded organizations in France and Russia (‘Auskunfts- und Hilsfstelle’, minutes of committee meeting, EZA 1 November 1917). Finally, while the Berlin Committee focused a lot of attention on the Ruhleben camp in particular, it also monitored and campaigned actively against the internment of women and children, as practised by the German military in camps at Holzminden, Rastatt, Havelberg and elsewhere. In January 1916 there were some signs of success. France and Germany agreed to repatriate women prisoners and children under

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16 held in German camps in exchange for German women held in France or in French and Belgian colonies in Africa. However, after this the Germans continued to seize women from the occupied parts of France and Belgium as hostages or ‘criminal suspects’, deporting them to Germany and holding them in separate compounds of male POW camps or in local prisons (see also Becker 1998). In June 1917, for instance, it was noted, Around 200 Belgian and French women are currently being held in the convict prison at Siegburg. They are political prisoners who are being held on suspicion of spying, in most cases because they gave shelter to enemy soldiers on the run. Various attempts have already been made to secure better conditions for them, so far without success. Recently it was suggested that they might be interned in Switzerland. The Red Cross in Geneva addressed a petition to this effect to the Swiss Federal Council [Bundesrat], and received a positive response; we will need to send a similar request to the authorities here.7 (‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’, minutes of committee meeting, EZA 7 June 1917) Later in 1917, however, the Berlin Committee was informed by the ICRC that the women had been forcibly returned by the German military to prisons in occupied France and Belgium, so that little more could be done to help them (‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’, minutes of committee meeting, EZA 1 November 1917). This was indeed a common experience in the last two years of the war, as other ICRC reports, and the records kept by Rotten’s own organization, confirm (see ICRC 1921: 129–76; EZA Bestand 51 C III g 1–3).

Sources of funding A welfare operation on the scale managed by Rotten required large amounts of cash. Indeed, by the middle of 1919 she estimated that up to 200,000 marks had been spent by her committee (Rotten to Max Warburg, EZA 1 July 1919). At first she relied on one-off donations raised through private contacts and notices posted in sympathetic newspapers, but the money raised in this way soon ran out. The Berlin Committee’s financial difficulties were compounded when the military decided in early 1916 to ban it from making further charitable appeals. The official reason given was that other charities had already collected sufficient funds to look after German prisoners of war (although Rotten of course

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received none of this money for her organization). However, given the Berlin Committee’s connections with the BNV and other pacifist organizations, and its support for enemy aliens (angering certain nationalist groups) the underlying motive is likely to have been political. Indeed, such was the hostility towards Rotten at the beginning of 1916 that it was even rumoured that she was about to be deported from Germany to Switzerland under military escort (Cauer, IISG, 18 February 1916). A meeting held at the house of Prince Lichnowsky in BerlinGrunewald on 20 June 1916 provided a brief respite from these pressures. This brought the Berlin Committee important contacts with wealthy donors and some much-needed publicity in the German and overseas press. The impetus for this event came not from Rotten herself, but from Bernhard Dernburg, the banker and former German colonial secretary, who – although not a member of the BNV – had nonetheless set himself up as a strong advocate of a compromise peace with the West (Schiefel 1974: 149–61). Amazingly, given the background of the ever-tightening British economic blockade and worsening relations with the USA, over 120 dignitaries attended the meeting, and between them pledged to provide the committee with a monthly income of 800 marks. The biggest donors were the bankers Arthur von Gwinner, Paul von Schwabach and Hugo Simon, as well as the former ambassadors Prince Lichnowsky and Prince Hatzfeldt (EZA, Bestand 51 C III a 5). Between May 1916 and August 1917, large sums of money were also received from the military historian Hans Delbrück, the newspaper proprietors Hermann Ullstein and Rudolf Mosse, and from a variety of pro- and anti-war women’s charities (EZA, Bestand 51 C III a 6/1). Even so, rising food prices and rents on a new office at Monbijouplatz, combined with an increased caseload, meant that by the autumn of 1916 the committee was once again struggling financially. A regular income of 800 marks a month was not enough to meet an anticipated outlay of 4000 marks a month over the winter, and Rotten urged her co-members to redouble their efforts to find new sources of money (see ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’, minutes of committee meeting, EZA 20 October 1916; and Wolff 1984: Vol. 1, 432). After 1916 Rotten indeed continued to spend a lot of her own time corresponding with potential donors, especially from the business and commercial world. Among those who reacted positively to her appeals were the electrical companies Siemens-Schuckert (through its director Dr Spiecker) and AEG (through its chairman Felix Deutsch), as well as numerous lesser-known concerns (see the correspondence and lists of donors in EZA, Bestand 51 C III a 6/1). However, her most important

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donor was the Hamburg banker Max Warburg, who provided a oneoff gift of 10,000 marks in August 1917 and thereafter made regular payments of 500 marks a month until the committee was wound up at the end of 1919 (Warburg to Rotten, EZA 23 August 1917 and 31 October 1917).8 Rotten also became increasingly adept at tailoring letters to suit different audiences. For instance, when dealing with patriotic charities and women’s welfare groups she argued that the main beneficiaries of the Berlin Committee’s work were German-born women who, in spite of marrying foreigners, had decided to remain in Germany and to raise their children as Germans: If our Committee were to cease operating, then many women and children of German origin and exclusively German culture would be forced to leave their homeland for what would hardly be a better life in a foreign country, namely the (to them) alien land where their interned or deceased husbands or fathers came from.9 (Rotten to Dr Liepmann, EZA 30 September 1916) Interestingly, this played on an issue already raised by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and some bourgeois feminist critics of the 1870 and 1913 citizenship laws, who feared that the automatic loss of citizenship by a woman who married a non-German was damaging to the national interest and/or to the goal of sexual equality (Nathans 2004: 181–84). On the other hand, when approaching business leaders, especially those involved in the import and export trades, Rotten’s tactic was to stress the importance of repairing and building on commercial links with enemy nations after the war. Thus, in a letter to a Herr Mathie in September 1917, she wrote, Again and again I get the impression that we could and should be doing more to attract the support of banking and business circles, since it is they who will have to reestablish international contacts after the war, and it will undoubtedly help their cause if they are able to furnish evidence of their philanthropy rather than narrow minded nationalism during [the war].10 (Rotten to Herr Mathie, EZA 25 September 1917) Finally, in private correspondence and in various newspaper articles, Rotten made explicit reference to the work of the FEC in Britain and the funds it had raised to help stranded and interned Germans. Supporting enemy aliens in Germany, she argued over and over again, was not an

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act of betrayal, but a patriotic duty born out of concern for the welfare of German subjects and of humanity in general.11 Only in 1919, when the war was over and Germany was facing a fifth winter under economic blockade, did the real truth behind this claim become apparent. Convoys carrying emergency food supplies and sterilizing equipment for mothers with young babies had been organized by the FEC and the American Quakers, but the Allied military authorities would only allow this through on the express undertaking that the goods were intended for distribution through Rotten’s committee alone, and would not fall into anybody else’s hands (Rotten to Max Warburg, EZA 25 February 1919 and 1 July 1919). Exactly how many undernourished children were fed in Germany in the years 1919–1920 by this means is impossible to say, but estimates run between over half a million (Goenner 2005: 80) and one million (Howard, 1941: 13).

Motivations and implications The fact that an impressive list of companies and banks were willing to donate money to fund Rotten’s committee in the final two years of the war and the first year of peace is worthy of an essay in its own right. At the very least it suggests that there were elements in the German business community who were repositioning themselves for the period after the war in anticipation of a less than complete German victory. This, of course, put them at odds with the propaganda of the Pan-German League, the Fatherland Party and other right-wing organizations, not to mention with the policies of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff.12 The increased involvement of women’s patriotic charities in the work of the Berlin Committee is also striking, although this inevitably led to tensions and resentments. Minna Cauer, for example, noted in her diary in January 1917 that she found it impossible to accept that pro-war organizations affiliated to the BDF, which had once refused to support foreigners in distress, were now openly boasting of their devotion to the Christian duty of care for one’s enemies: ‘Since when, I wanted to ask, but I remained silent and shrugged my shoulders, war was the fashion for you then, [but] now the restoration of peace is on the horizon’ (Cauer IISG 17 January 1917).13 But what of Rotten’s own motivations? After all, in order to run the Berlin Committee she had sacrificed not only a lot of time and money and a potential career in teaching which she resumed, albeit in a different guise, in the 1920s, but also, in 1917, a direct offer from

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Bernhard Dernburg to work as an expert advisor to his own committee, which was looking into the setting up of a permanent international court of arbitration after the war (see Rotten to Max Warburg, EZA 6 August 1917). As she later confessed, before 1914 she had no interest in politics or international relations. Nor was she a Quaker: in fact she did not join the Quakers until 1930, although her links with the FEC in London were obviously important to her before then (Rotten 1962: 81). What really moved her, over and above her background in the women’s movement, was a deep love of German idealist philosophy and literature, particularly the works of Goethe and Kant, two men who, she believed, had brought the spirit of humanity into the world as a counterweight to militarism and to the ‘mechanization of the public spirit’ (Rotten 1920: 13). Indeed, it was no accident that her 1912 Marburg dissertation, completed under the guidance of the philosopher Paul Natorp, had been on the theme ‘Goethes Urphänomen und die platonische Idee’, or that she later helped to produce the first two volumes of the new Goethe handbook, which appeared under the overall editorship of Julius Zeitler during the years 1916 to 1918 (Haubfleisch 1996: 2). By contrast, she had little time for what she referred to as ‘theoretical pacifism’ (Rotten 1962: 80). Although a member of the BNV, her views were considerably more pragmatic than those of its leaders, especially Kurt von Tepper-Laski and Count Arco. In order to stop the war, she believed, it was important to cooperate with as many persons and interests as possible, and to this end she even agreed to be interviewed in 1915 by the German undersecretary of state Arthur Zimmermann about her knowledge of the peace movement in Britain (LehmannRussbüldt 1927: 168–81). Furthermore, while she was personally drawn towards the anti-war wing of the SPD, which split in 1917 to form the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), her vision of socialism was very different from that of radicals like Clara Zetkin or Lenin, and owed far more to Kant than to Marx. Thus she explicitly rejected the Bolshevik model of class struggle and appealed instead for a ‘revolution of the spirit’ [eine geistige Weltrevolution] which would bring an end to conflict between different classes and interests (BNV 1919: 19). In spite of her Swiss nationality and left-wing views she was above all a German patriot, to the point of never criticizing the German war effort directly. Her opposition to all forms of militarism, for instance, did not stop her from praising the ordinary German soldiers as ‘fighters who have stood firm with exemplary courage and endurance for more than four years’ and as the ‘moral victors’ in the war (ibid.: 18).14 Germany, she also

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argued, should be accepted at the peace negotiations as an equal, not as a vanquished nation (ibid.: 17). In terms of the women’s movement, Rotten occupied a curious halfway position between bourgeois respectability and militant feminism. On the one hand her organization stood very much in the longer tradition of women’s patriotic wartime activism in Germany which, as Jean Quataert argues, relied heavily on ‘the language of humanitarianism and the religious precept of love thy neighbo[u]r’, as well as on gendered images of women as carers and conciliators (Quataert 2000: 459). In line with bureaucratic forms of record keeping, she was also anxious to keep regular accounts of her income and expenditure, which she dutifully presented to the Reich Office of Interior and the Foreign Office for inspection (see Rotten to the State Secretary of Interior, BA Berlin 14 June 1918). On the other hand, her close links with foreign pacifist groups, and the support she offered to enemy aliens as opposed to German nationals, were perceived as a challenge to the organic unity of home front and fighting front as constructed by the male-dominated military establishment. On several occasions Rotten came close to arrest, but managed somehow to carry on. At the same time members of her organization continued to have regular dealings with representatives of the German military and even won their grudging admiration. This represented a small but significant victory for women’s emancipation in the face of increased state intervention in the private sphere of charity and the growing professionalization/masculinization of welfare organizations (see Hong 1996). In December 1919 the Berlin Committee was finally wound down and its remaining assets absorbed into the ‘Deutsche Wohlfahrtsstelle’ (‘German Welfare Agency’), which founded its own ‘Beratungsstelle für Ausländer’ (‘Advice Bureau for Foreigners’) to assist non-Germans in need (Rotten to Max Warburg, EZA 20 September 1919). Meanwhile, Rotten herself continued to work on various Quaker and League of Nations-funded projects in Berlin in the 1920s, as well as establishing a name for herself in the education reform movement. Although she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 she remained active in international campaigns for peace, social justice and disarmament throughout the inter-war period and beyond. Her contribution to the women’s movement, while more hidden from view, was also considerable. In particular, by highlighting the suffering of women and children living under foreign occupation or blockade she was able to advance the feminist critique of war outlined at The Hague in 1915 while at the same time remaining true to her own core belief in the Kantian ‘categorical

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imperative’ to treat all persons – including enemy aliens – as ends rather than means. In this sense the work of the Berlin Committee was both an admonition against war and a tribute to what could be achieved through voluntary cooperation between different parties and interests.

Notes 1. There is as yet no full-length biographical study of Elisabeth Rotten. For biographical details, I have relied on Haubfleisch 1996; Becker 1972: 180– 217; and Rotten 1962. 2. On the ‘Marburg school’ and neo-Kantian thought more generally, see Lübbe 1974: 83–123. 3. ‘Bei Kriegsausbruch befand ich mich in den Ferien zu Hause in Berlin; und da ich mich selbstverständlich sofort um englische Studentinnen bekümmerte, von denen ich wusste, dass sie sich in Deutschland aufhielten und fürchteten, dass sie in Schwierigkeiten geraten würden, sprach sich dies unter anderen Ausländern herum, und ich bin so auf ganz natürliche Art in meine Arbeit hineingewachsen, die ich dann mit einigen Gesinnungsfreunden    zu organisieren suchte’. 4. ‘Die Aufgaben überschlugen sich fast atemraubend: Beschaffung von Studien- und Freizeitmaterial für Internierungslager    Fürsorge für die Familien der Internierten    Nachrichtenvermittlung, wenn irgend erreichbar, legal, wenn nicht, illegal, um getrennten Familien zwischen besetzten und unbesetzten französischen und belgischen Gebieten die tägliche Angst um das Leben der Ihren zu nehmen [usw.]    Jedem individuellen Fall gingen wir nach, als ob es nur diesen einen Fall gäbe; ein jeder war uns dabei Verkörperung und Mahnzeichen für Millionen uns noch unbekannter Fälle   ’. 5. Even so, in 1917 and 1918 Rotten went to considerable efforts to collect books and scientific apparatus for the internees at Ruhleben, which she acquired as gifts or loans from German companies, academics and libraries. For further details, see Higgins 1919: 1–2. 6. ‘Später hat sie mir einmal erzählt, daß es Zeiten gab, da sie in ihrem Büro stets ein Köfferchen gehabt habe, worin für den Fall ihrer Verhaftung die nötigsten Dinge ihres persönlichen Bedarfs gewesen seien’. 7. ‘Eine Zahl von ca. 200 belgischen und französischen Frauen ist im Zuchthause Siegburg gefangen. Es handelt sich dabei um politische Gefangene, die dort unter Spionageverdacht festgehalten werden, zum grössten Teil, weil sie belgische Soldaten auf der Flucht beherbergt haben. Es sind schon verschiedene Versuche gemacht worden, die Lage dieser Frauen zu erleichtern; bisher ohne Erfolg. Zuletzt wurde vorgeschlagen, sie in der Schweiz zu internieren. Das Genfer Rote Kreuz hat ein dahingehendes Gesuch beim Bundesrat eingereicht, das auch genehmigt ist, es muss nun hier noch ein Gesuch eingereicht werden’. 8. During the war Warburg was also the principal benefactor of the German branch of the König Eduard VII. Stiftung (also known as the Cassell Fund)

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

which provided material support to the German wives of British internees. For evidence see BA Berlin, R 1501/112365, Bl. 60–63. ‘Ein Versagen unserer Stelle hätte zur Folge, dass vor allem viele Frauen und Kinder deutscher Herkunft und ausschliesslich deutscher Sprache ihre Heimat verlassen müssen um in dem ihnen fremden Lande ihrer hier internierten oder verstorbenen Ehemänner oder Väter ein schwerlich viel besseres Fortkommen zu suchen’. ‘Im besonderen habe ich immer mehr den Eindruck, dass man die Bankund Geschäftskreise noch viel mehr für unsere Sache interessieren sollte und könnte, da doch diese nach dem Kriege die internationalen Beziehungen wieder werden anknüpfen müssen und es ihnen dann ganz lieb sein könnte, sich auch während desselben in philanthropischen Dingen grosszügig und nicht engherzig national gezeigt zu haben’. See, for instance, Rotten 1915: 40–44; articles by Rotten in the Berliner Tageblatt, 26 April 1916, 28 August 1916, 15 February 1917 and 19 December 1917; and Rotten to the State Secretary of Interior 14 June 1918. In spite of the huge volume of literature on German war aims, there is still little detailed research on the pro-English outlook of certain export-oriented bankers and industrialists. The one partial exception (Jaeger 1967: 214–56) pays considerable attention to people like Gwinner, Schwabach and others, but says nothing about their links to Rotten’s committee. The same applies to Niall Ferguson’s recent essay on Max Warburg – see Ferguson 2003. ‘Ja, seit wann, meine Damen, wollte ich fragen, schwieg aber und zuckte die Achsel, Krieg war für euch Mode, jetzt wird es nun bald der Friede sein’. ‘Die deutschen Soldaten sind heimgekehrt, nicht, wie es viele von uns erwartet und erhofft haben, als Sieger aus der Schlacht, wohl aber als Kämpfer, die mit beispielloser Widerstandskraft vier Jahre standgehalten haben und, viel mehr als das, als moralische Sieger’.

References Archives and manuscript collections Archive du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge, Geneva (ACICR). ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’ (April 1916). Pamphlet in German. C G1 419/XI. ICRC (March and April 1917). ‘Missions d’Etude: Mlle Cramer et M. Boissier à Berlin, Copenhague et Stockholm’. C G1 419/XI. Bundesarchiv, Abteilung Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA Berlin). ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’ (16 December 1914). Unpublished letter to the Reich Office of Interior. R 1501/112364, Bl. 218. Rotten, E. (14 June 1918). Unpublished letter to the State Secretary of the Interior. R 1501/112371, Bl. 209–11. Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin (EZA). ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’ (1915–1918). Minutes of committee meetings. Bestand 51 C III a 4/1–2. Rotten, E. (11 February 1918). Unpublished letter to Anita Lenz. Bestand 51 C III a 6/4.

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Rotten, E. (6 August 1917; 25 February 1919; 1 July 1919; 20 September 1919). Unpublished letters to Max Warburg. Bestand 51 C III a 6/5 and a 7/4. Rotten, E. (30 September 1916). Unpublished letter to Dr Liepmann. Bestand 51 C III a 6/4. Rotten, E. (25 September 1917). Unpublished letter to Herr Mathie. Bestand 51 C III a 6/4. Siegmund-Schultze, F. (1914/15). Papers relating to his regular visits to the Ruhleben internment camp near Berlin. Bestand 51 C II b 1/1–2. Warburg, M. (23 August 1917; 31 October 1917). Unpublished letters to Elisabeth Rotten. Bestand 51 C III a 6/5. Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG), Amsterdam. Bund Neues Vaterland, BNV (24 April 1915). Agenda and minutes of meeting of executive committee, Eduard Bernstein papers, M3. Cauer, M. (1911–1922). Manuscript diaries. Minna Cauer papers. National Archives, Kew, London (NA). Higgins, E. (10 March 1919). ‘Connection of Dr Rotten with Ruhleben’, unpublished report. FO 383/524. Society of Friends Library, London (SFL), records of the ‘Friends Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress’ (FEWVRC). ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland’ (7 November 1914). Pamphlet in German and English. FEWVRC/EME/06. Hobhouse, S. (24 July 1915). Unpublished notes on a meeting with Dr Rotten. FEWVRC/EME/06. Rotten, E. (5 July 1916). Unpublished letter to Miss Fox. FEWVRC/EME/06. Rotten, E. (26 April 1915). Unpublished letter to Stephen Hobhouse. FEWVRC/EME/06.

Bibliography Becker, A. (1998) Oubliés de la grande guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre. Populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre, Paris: Éditions Noêsis. Becker, H. (1972) Zwischen Wahn und Wahrheit. Autobiographie, East Berlin: Verlag der Nation. BNV (1919) Durch zum Rechtsfrieden. Ein Appell an das Weltgewissen von Professor W. Schücking, Dr Helene Stöcker und Dr Elisabeth Rotten, Berlin: Flugschrift des Bund Neues Vaterland, No. 2. Ferguson, N. (2003) ‘Max Warburg and German Politics. The Limits of Financial Power in Wilhelmine Germany’, in G. Eley and J. Retallack (eds) Wilhelminism and Its Legacies. German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1933. Essays for Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 185–201. Goenner, H. (2005) Einstein in Berlin, 1914–1933, Munich: Beck. Grotefeld, S. (1995) Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze. Ein deutscher Ökumeniker und christlicher Pazifist, Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser. Haubfleisch, D. (1996) ‘Elisabeth Rotten (1882–1964) – eine (fast) vergessene Reformpädagogin’, http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sonst/1996/0010.html Accessed 17 July 2006.

210 Elisabeth Rotten and the ‘Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle’ Hong, Young-Sun (1996) ‘World War I and the German Welfare State. Gender, Religion and the Paradoxes of Modernity’, in G. Eley (ed.) Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 345–69. Horne, J. and Kramer, A. (2001) German Atrocities 1914. A History of Denial, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Howard, E. F. (1941) Across Barriers, London: Society of Friends. ICRC (1921) Rapport général du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge sur son activité de 1912 à 1920, Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross. Jaeger, H. (1967) Unternehmer in der deutschen Politik (1890–1918), Bonn: Röhrscheid. Lehmann-Russbüldt, O. (1927) Der Kampf der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte, vormals Bund Neues Vaterland, für den Weltfrieden, 1914–1927, Berlin: Hensel & Co. Lübbe, H. (1974) Politische Philosophie in Deutschland. Studien zu ihrer Geschichte, Munich: dtv edn. Nathans, E. (2004) The Politics of Citizenship in Germany. Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism, Oxford: Berg. Quataert, J. H. (2000) ‘Women’s Wartime Services under the Cross. Patriotic Communities in Germany, 1912–1918’, in R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds) Great War, Total War. Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 453–83. Quidde, L. (1979) Der deutsche Pazifismus während des Weltkrieges, 1914–1918. Aus dem Nachlaß Ludwig Quidde, K. Holl with H. Donat (ed.), Boppard am Rhein: Boldt. Rachamimov, A. (2002) POWs and the Great War. Captivity on the Eastern Front, Oxford: Berg. Rotten, E. (1915) ‘Frieden im Kriege’, in Die Staatsbürgerin. Monatsschrift des Deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht, 4/3: 40–44. ——. (1920) Aufgaben künftiger Völkerbund-Erziehung, Berlin: Rowohlt ——. (1962) ‘Idee und Liebe’, in R. Weckerling (ed.) Durchkreuzter Haß. Vom Abenteuer des Friedens. Berichte und Selbstdarstellungen. Heinrich Grüber zum 70. Geburtstag, 2nd ed, West Berlin: Vogt, pp. 78–84. Schiefel, W. (1974) Bernhard Dernburg, 1865–1937. Kolonialpolitiker und Bankier im wilhelminischen Deutschland, Zurich: Atlantis. Stibbe, M. (2005) ‘A Question of Retaliation? The Internment of British Civilians in Germany in November 1914’, Immigrants & Minorities 23/1: 1–29. Wickert, C. (1991) Helene Stöcker, 1869–1943. Frauenrechtlerin, Sexualreformin und Pazifistin. Eine Biographie, Bonn: Dietz. Wolff, T. (1984) Tagebücher, 1914–1919. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der Weimarer Republik in Tagebüchern, Leitartikeln und Briefen des Chefredakteurs am ‘Berliner Tageblatt’ und Mitbegründer der ‘Deutschen Demokratischen Partei’, B. Sösemann (ed.), 2 Vols, Boppard am Rhein: Boldt.

13 Transforming Utopia: The ‘League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform’ in the First World War∗ Peter Davies

In February 1915, the ‘German League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform’ (‘Deutscher Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform’) was due to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its founding, yet the outbreak of war had drastically changed the context in which the League had to work. The 1915 Business Report of the Berlin branch of the League reflects this change: We had hoped to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the League in public, first and foremost by organising an international congress designed to demonstrate how the ideas that we are fighting for have spread to the rest of the civilized world. Until the outbreak of war, we could not have imagined that a world war would put a stop to our work    We have had to get used to coping even with this extraordinary situation, and we have adapted our work to suit the new circumstances.1 (Geschäftsbericht 1915: 1) However, despite the antimilitarist stance of many of the League’s members, the outbreak of war is seen as offering new opportunities as well as new problems: It is clear that the war has not exclusively hindered and disrupted our work – we were clear about this from the very start. Eight months of wartime experience have confirmed this. Ten years’ work for the ∗ I would like to thank the Humboldt-Stiftung for supporting my research for this chapter.

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protection of mothers has not been in vain. The idea of strengthening social support for motherhood has been gaining ground day by day, year by year.2 (ibid.: 25) This can be read as the preservation of optimism despite the outbreak of war, and yet there is a telling ambiguity in it, which suggests that in fact the war has become part of the rhetorical armoury of a campaigning organisation concerned to find ways of pushing through progressive social legislation. The ‘German League for the Protection of Mothers’ had been founded some ten years earlier in February 1905, and the Austrian League two years later.3 The most prominent personality in the German League was Helene Stöcker, a campaigner for sex reform and feminist causes, whose campaign for a new sexual ethics caused outrage in the conservative press, as well as consternation amongst the women’s organisations of Imperial Germany. The New Ethics was seen as a programme for ethical, social and sexual renewal, designed to eliminate the repressive social and moral codes that were preventing individuals from pursuing a natural sexual life and holding back the human race in its evolution towards ever higher forms. The theory aimed to combine the most upto-date scientific knowledge – in this case the Darwinist socio-biology of Haeckel and Bölsche and the eugenics of Galton – with a Romantic notion of human freedom, love and perfectibility and a feminist critique of social institutions and attitudes. The League’s practical activities, which were organised independently by a variety of regional groups, concentrated on providing support and advice for unmarried mothers and other women who fell foul of the repressive social codes of the Wilhelmine era, while the centre in Berlin ran political campaigns to reform marriage laws, to introduce universal maternity insurance, and to end discrimination against unmarried mothers and their children. Both the German and Austrian Leagues had had to struggle with a certain outsider status amongst the women’s organisations of their respective nations, for various reasons: the more conservative majorities in the ‘League of German Women’s Organisations’ (‘Bund deutscher Frauenvereine’ BDF) and the ‘League of Austrian Women’s Organisations’ (‘Bund österreichischer Frauenvereine’) objected to their stress on the free expression of sexuality and their critique of traditional marriage forms, while more radical campaigners for equal political rights were troubled by what they saw as the reduction of femininity to ‘natural’ sexuality and motherhood. What is striking about the kinds

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of theory produced by thinkers close to the League is their focus on the materiality of the body and its status as the basis of a liberated culture: there is little talk of the more abstract qualities of ‘motherliness’ that formed the theoretical justification for women’s political participation amongst the majority of women’s organisations in this period. However, instead of questioning and rejecting the discourse of motherliness, as did more radical German and Austrian thinkers such as Minna Cauer, Hedwig Dohm or Rosa Mayreder, the League’s theorists celebrated both physical motherhood and the liberation of the sexual body from oppressive moral codes, while campaigning for economic, social and political rights. The body that emerges in the work of the theorists of the New Ethics is a utopian response to turn-of-the-century discourses of degeneration, as well as to theories of women’s physiological inferiority. Theorists like Helene Stöcker drew on a variety of scientific, ethical and cultural discourses: Stöcker’s own work is a radical integration of the monist interpretation of Darwinian evolution, Romantic theories of love and human perfectibility, a Nietzschean critique of Christian morality combined with a feminist critique of structures of power and oppression, and calls for women’s individual political and sexual emancipation combined with a neo-Malthusian, eugenic concern with the biological betterment of the race. Monism, based on Ernst Haeckel’s socio-biological interpretation of Darwin, suggested that the theory of evolution provided a way of overcoming the mind–body dualism that was seen to have dogged Western culture. Here, the development of human culture is read in analogy with the physical evolution of physiological and intellectual characteristics from simple to complex organisms. ‘Lower’ cultures are seen as simple and undifferentiated systems, which gradually advance into higher, more sophisticated states: the physical differences between men and women become more pronounced as this process continues. In liberal versions of this theory, evolution is seen as producing pronounced differences between men and women which are then gradually blurred by the increasing differentiation that higher cultures bring with them. The feminist employment of this theory in the work of Mutterschutz theorists introduced a gendered critique of social power structures by suggesting that women’s subordination and exclusion from education and public participation had held back their development along the lines available to men, and that hypocritical moral standards had denied them the free expression of sexuality. This second point brings us to another key aspect of Mutterschutz theory, namely the focus on the materiality of the body and its eugenic improvement.

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The main impetus of race hygiene theory in Imperial Germany was explicitly anti-feminist, subordinating individuals’ freedom of choice to an ideal of state intervention in and control of reproductive decisions in the name of reversing falling birth rates. The imperialist worldview was that the white races were becoming weak and decadent, and were failing to keep up with their competitors. Mutterschutz theorists such as Helene Stöcker transform this thinking with what they see as a stress on quality rather than quantity. The institutions of patriarchal control that had developed in the West since the fall of ancient matriarchal civilisations had led to the degeneration of individuals’ biological substance, since they had usurped women’s natural, active role in the selection of partners and in taking responsibility for reproductive decisions that affect the nation as a whole. In this view, sexual liberation and the emancipation of women are not only a good in their own right, but will inevitably lead to an improvement in the quality of the biological substance of the race, since under natural conditions, women operate with a conscious sense of responsibility for the welfare of their children and the correct choice of father: this is the basis of eugenic principles of Zuchtwahl (biological selection) and Höherzüchtung der Rasse (raising the biological quality of the race). Although this theory is framed in terms of emancipatory politics, the language of naturalness and evolutionary inevitability contains a potentially coercive moment, implying (and occasionally stating) that ‘inferior’ types, including the genetically weak, but also criminals, alcoholics and the irresponsible, should be ‘discouraged’ from breeding. One of the central planks of Mutterschutz theory, financial and moral support for unmarried mothers and the rejection of the moral code that condemns them, is designed not only to rescue women from hardship, but also to prevent potential damage to the race. In the pre-war years, the difficulties and contradictions in this kind of theory could be ignored by overlaying them with a language of historical optimism, and resolved in the parallel images of a utopian natural body and the utopian society which was to be built upon it. The German League survived a number of serious crises during the pre-war period, resulting from fundamental differences amongst its members as to the nature of the desired social transformations, as well as over Stöcker’s style of intellectual leadership. In 1910, several of the local organisations rebelled against the status of the Berlin branch as the centre of the League’s propaganda activities, and, in the wake of a series of attacks on her leadership, Stöcker was obliged to step down as Chair in favour of Max Rosenthal, although she continued to edit the journal

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and remained the League’s most prominent campaigner and theorist (von Bockel 1991: 33). The historical optimism upon which the monist theory of inevitable evolutionary progress is based is challenged, rather than destroyed, by the outbreak of war. The standard view is that the optimistic worldview of pre-war progressives simply collapsed when faced with the reality of war, which shattered their illusions. However, this does not do justice to the complexity of the League’s response to the war. Stöcker’s muchquoted diary entry of 5 August 1914 is certainly not typical of the League’s wartime attitude: To me, this all seems like immature children arguing, this foolish tearing apart of other nations, these brutal instincts set free. The painstaking, centuries-long work of moral refinement – all in vain! And so many allow themselves to be swept along, people of whom one would have least expected it.4 (quoted in Wickert 1991: 95) The key phrase here is ‘painstaking, centuries-long work of moral refinement’: if we read this in terms of monist evolutionary theory, then Stöcker’s view of the war as the collapse of a fragile civilisation and a return to barbarism represents a severe challenge to the correlation of biological evolution with cultural and intellectual development. However, the investment of Mutterschutz theory in this correlation is too strong – after all, it is the foundation of a whole series of emancipatory political projects based on a particular understanding of ‘nature’. Stöcker’s personal response to the crisis sets her at a distance from the majority of the League’s members, as we shall see, but it is important not to exaggerate this conflict, since there is a large amount of common ground in the way the movement’s theorists coped with the new situation. The literature on Stöcker has often gone out of its way to stress her distance from other League members, since her committed, courageous pacifism has made it very easy for her biographers to identify with her and to avoid confronting the – for us – uncomfortable fact that much early-twentieth-century progressive politics not only took a particular form of eugenic thinking for granted, but also saw it as a scientific basis for political critiques and utopian projects. On the other hand, the forms of progressivist monism that the League’s theorists shared should not be confused with the proscriptive, racist and antifeminist politics of the ‘German Society for Racial Hygiene’ (‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene’) or the Aryan race mysticism of proto-Nazi thinkers like the Austrian theorist

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Christian Lanz von Liebenfels. Despite this, a certain backlash has crept in against Stöcker and the League, with scholars such as Anette Herlitzius (1995) stressing the racial and coercive implications of Mutterschutz theory. Accounts of the history of the League have tended to fall into two camps, depending on the historian’s view of the intellectual and social roots of National Socialism. Richard Evans’s view set the tone for much of the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting that the League’s programmes had become increasingly influenced by eugenic and racist ideas, which betrayed its original emancipatory purpose, and which paved the way for Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programmes (Evans 1976: 138–39; Weingart 1987). More recently, scholars such as Ann Taylor Allen have argued that one needs to differentiate between a socially conservative, authoritarian eugenics and a more radical vision that argued for individual liberation as the driver of evolutionary advance. Allen suggests that the League employed the language of eugenics as a powerful feminist counter discourse to the language of patriarchal authoritarianism (Allen 1991: 162). Others scholars have treated the language of eugenics in the League’s work as of little relevance, since it would have been surprising if scientifically minded reformers had not conceived their ideas in this way in this period (cf. Schlüpmann 1984; Wickert 1991: 68). This is a useful reminder that there was no direct route from turn-of-the-century eugenic language to National Socialism, but instead what Atina Grossman calls a ‘convoluted and highly contested route’; it also avoids the ‘accusatory history’ of scholars like Christine Wittrock, who are concerned to denounce the bourgeois women’s movement as a precursor of National Socialism (Grossman 1995: vi–vii). Nevertheless, it seems unsatisfactory to describe one of the key discourses that went into the formulation of the League’s political stance as something of an optional extra, and the most recent work, for example by Edward Ross Dickinson and Anette Herlitzius, has begun to investigate the centrality of a ‘liberal’ eugenic discourse of the embodied subject for the League’s theoretical stance. There is still a significant difference of emphasis between these authors, depending on whether they set the League’s activities in the context of contemporary eugenic and race thinking as does Herlitzius (1995), or whether, like Dickinson (2001), they trace its history through liberal and feminist critiques of the authoritarianism of pre-war Germany. Dickinson has shown that there was no increasing emphasis on eugenic language between 1905 and 1914 – this language was a constituent feature of Mutterschutz theory from the beginning – but that it was possible to

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construct a progressive, liberal politics from it, and that it was the ‘conceptual vocabulary with which they thought and spoke about social and political issues’ (Dickinson 2001: 206). Nevertheless, this language contained within it a coercive potential that was only partially disguised by the utopianism of many of the League’s theorists in the pre-war period. The outbreak of war did not represent a fundamental break in the theoretical positions of the Mutterschutz theorists. After the initial shock, they began to try to interpret what was happening in terms of welltrodden theoretical paths in order to preserve the sense of utopian optimism that had helped to paper over some of the contradictions and conflicts within the League. One of the editorials in the League’s journal Die neue Generation in October 1914 – they were generally written by Stöcker – called for all branches of the League to join Gertrud Bäumer’s ‘Women’s National Service’ (‘Nationaler Frauendienst’): ‘Only through the self-sacrificing work of all will it be possible to preserve the new generation and the future of our people despite the terrible perils of war’5 (DNG October 1914: 524). Stöcker herself very quickly moved away from this position; Regine Braker, for example, has documented a ‘notable shift in Stöcker’s wartime writing’ from support for women’s home-front aid to rejection of ‘any service or work that supported the war effort’ (Braker 2001: 77). In this, Stöcker is alone amongst the League’s members. However, since most of them are involved in efforts to combat extremes of nationalism, whatever their stance on the war itself, there is still significant common ground in their worldviews. The desire to secure the future of the nation expressed in the October 1914 appeal needs to be read in the context of the monist theory that formed the basis of the League’s pre-war work: what is meant here is the future biological health of the nation, as well as the potential threat to the League’s emancipatory project. The theoretical link between these two ideas is reflected in the fact that the League’s criticism of the dangers of violent nationalism stems from the theory that war is not, as nationalistic race hygienists insisted it was, a healthy expression of Darwinian principles, but is in fact contraselective in eugenic terms, since it is the most valuable, healthy men who are removed from the reproductive cycle. Both the nationalistic ‘race hygienists’ and the progressive theorists of the League share an understanding of eugenic theory as a tool in the scientific critique of bourgeois values, structures and hierarchies, but they draw diametrically opposing conclusions. Max Rosenthal,

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the League’s Secretary (Schriftführer), summarises its position in this way: It cannot be denied that in the current social circumstances and under the conditions of modern warfare, war has lost any value as a ‘selective factor’ that it may have had in earlier ages, and is tending to have the effect of lowering the birth rate and reducing the quality of newborns, as far as their fitness for life is concerned. It is above all the physically weak men who survive and are responsible for the renewal of the nation, since they are now marrying in greater numbers. (Geschäftsbericht 1915: 15)6 Statements such as this show how difficult it was for the League’s theorists to preserve the integrity of their ideas under wartime conditions that exposed their contradictoriness: the essential problem lies in the attempt to support emancipatory programmes using a set of theories that, when put under pressure, imply coercion. The idea that it is only through collective, socialised support for motherhood that emancipation along natural lines could be achieved meant that the League had to enter into what one might call an alliance of convenience with forces within the wartime state that they would otherwise have opposed. Anette Herlitzius puts it like this: Whereas the idea of maternity insurance, as a form of protection for women in industrial working conditions and as social support for motherhood and pregnancy, had begun as part of a campaign for women’s right to self-determination, it was now being steadily transformed into an instrument of power politics, race hygiene and population control, that had little to do with the original feminist political demands.7 (1995: 201–02) The most successful period in the League’s political activities since its founding were the years 1914–1915, when several petitions to the Reichstag and Bundesrat (i.e., lower and upper houses of parliament) were accepted, including important concessions on the right of the children of unmarried parents to financial support if the father had been enlisted, or to financial support in the case of the father’s death. The petitions were supported with patriotic arguments, though they were mild and always tempered with criticism of nationalism and hatred. The clear difference between the tone of the League’s argumentation

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and the bellicosity of official propaganda should not disguise the fact that the League was able to employ references to the war as part of a successful propaganda strategy: their political successes in the war years owed far more to the wartime attitude of the government than to the persuasiveness of their pre-war activities. Furthermore, the loss of so many young men – the biological future of the nation – made it all the more urgent to introduce measures that would ensure that this loss did not do permanent damage. The petition to the Reichstag for the inclusion of children of unmarried parents in the state social security system summarises: The male children will be called to the duty of the defense of the fatherland exactly as the children of married parents are. As future mothers, the female children of unmarried parents are of equal significance. This factor must be taken into account in the present serious situation, since we will have to come to terms with sacrifices of men in the prime of their life. It is particularly important to preserve the generation currently being born as far as possible in its entirety.8 (Geschäftsbericht 1915: 32) So the war is considered not only a disaster for the nation but also the only means of getting progressive measures passed – and by seeking common ground with groups for whom the emancipation of women was considered a factor in racial degeneration. In fact, ideological responses to the war that thought in terms of population policy in response to perceived threats of national extinction opened the way for political interest in the League’s ideas, which the League’s activists responded to. Governments had previously been less than enthusiastic about many of the political proposals of radical race hygienists. However, the war radicalised ways of thinking about populations in terms of quantity and quality, and state intervention in reproduction became less a matter of upholding standards of moral propriety and more a matter of national and racial destiny. This shift in policy emphasis provided a limited opening for the League’s activities, but at the cost of sacrificing the emphasis on the autonomy of women’s decision-making about reproduction. That the opening was very limited indeed is clear from the constant police observation of the League’s activities, but what is most striking about the reactions of many of the League’s theorists to this situation is the transformation of the utopian impetus of their pre-war thinking. This will be illustrated by contrasting the responses of Stöcker

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herself with the work of the Austrian Mutterschutz theorist Grete Meisel-Hess.

Helene Stöcker Stöcker continued to campaign during the war, her position shifting ever further in the direction of outright pacifism, and she intensified her collaboration with a number of German pacifist organisations. However, censorship restrictions and the need to preserve the unity of an organisation – most of whose members either supported the war effort or who wanted to avoid what they thought of as party political statements being made in their name – meant that Stöcker was unable to employ the League’s journal as a platform for her own views. The trajectory of Stöcker’s thought moves away from the idea of Mutterschutz towards a more universalist Menschenschutz (protection of human life). Most commentators have greeted this as a step forward in her thinking, but many of the League’s local organisations were not so sure, showing a profound suspicion of what they saw both as a shift in emphasis away from the League’s practical, day-to-day work, and as a party political engagement that they were not willing to support (Wickert 1991: 105; von Bockel 1991: 55–56; Hamelmann 1992: 121). As soon as the war had ended and free discussion became possible again Stöcker’s open engagement in support of the aims of the German revolution met with hostility from a number of local organisations, and there followed a year of conflict and negotiation. In October 1919, the League’s General Assembly reached a compromise, according to which Stöcker would continue to edit the League’s journal, but would no longer claim to speak in its name, and would no longer provide unsigned leading articles for the journal. The General Assembly would no longer be a platform for political debate, but would instead concentrate on the business reports of the various local organisations. These reports would no longer be published in the journal, which would then be able to use the space for political discussion. Stöcker did eventually emerge as the victor from this conflict, however, since she was able to persuade a majority at the October 1922 Assembly to accept a new set of statutes that wrote pacifism into the League’s constitution, finally giving an official expression to the unity of Menschenschutz and Mutterschutz that she had been working for (cf. Stöcker 1922: 30). The unanimous, and entirely justified, admiration for Stöcker expressed by her biographers, as well as a tendency to identify with her pacifist positions, can lead scholars caricaturing those within the League

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who objected to her political campaigns as conservatives or nationalists, or at best, as individuals who lacked her political insight. There is a grain of truth in this, but at the same time, it is necessary to understand the concerns of Mutterschutz activists working under difficult wartime and post-war conditions, who were worried that the vital practical work they were doing was being overshadowed, possibly even undermined, by Stöcker’s political campaigning. After all, the League’s activists at a local level consisted of a broad coalition of individuals who set aside potential political differences for the sake of a vital social enterprise, and who were also worried that support for revolutionary transformations might increase the difficulties they already faced from police, churches and conservative local political groups, not to mention the difficulties they had being accepted by mainstream women’s organisations. Stöcker’s programmatic change from Mutterschutz to Menschenschutz implies a move away from maternalist positions in her analysis of social phenomena, shifting the emphasis to a more universalist critique of capitalist economic structures as the cause of war. For example, she begins to question the maternalist view of women as natural peacemakers, in disappointment at the failure of the mainstream women’s organisations to oppose the war (Stöcker 1915; Stöcker 1917: 380). This goes hand in hand with a retreat from the body-centred utopianism of her pre-war work. At the same time, however, the emphasis on Menschenschutz also entails a retreat from the gendered critique of social institutions, as well as the utopian political impetus, that Mutterschutz theory had made possible.

Grete Meisel-Hess: The essence of sexuality The Austrian Mutterschutz theorist, Grete Meisel-Hess, took a very different theoretical trajectory: radicalised by the war, she pushed further the League’s gendered anti-bourgeois Mutterschutz-eugenic view of society until she arrived at a theory of collective state action, taking the League’s pre-war emphasis on the physical body and working it into a set of analogies with an idealised wartime state. Her 1916 text, Das Wesen der Geschlechtlichkeit (The Essence of Sexuality),9 proposes a set of remedies for what she sees as the crisis-ridden sexual life of the German nation (she elides the distinction between German-speakers in Germany and Austria). The war is interpreted in a fairly standard manner as the ‘primitive feelings of the nations’ (‘die Urgefühle der Völker’: x) breaking through the ‘sickly hair-splitting of a degenerate age’ (‘krankhafte Spitzfindigkeiten einer Verfallsepoche’: x) and the text

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is an assessment of what this means for Mutterschutz feminism and eugenic thinking. This rhetoric of renewal at a primitive, physical level ensures that the war is seen as fitting into Meisel-Hess’s theory of the oppression of the body under bourgeois capitalism. This in turn influences the solutions that she proposes in this text, which treat the nation as an organic whole, a kind of collective body that needs to be liberated from oppressive morality in the same way as the individual body. The nature of this liberation, however, is determined by what is held to be a scientific understanding of the body’s nature. One of the features of Meisel-Hess’s developing thought is a combination of the eugenic development of the race with a greater stress on the innate moral goodness of the liberated body and its desires. The League is defended on moral grounds against detractors who assume it stands for a promiscuous sexuality: although all individuals have a ‘right to a normal sexual life’ (‘Anspruch auf ein normales Geschlechtsleben’: xxiv), what this means in practice, once bourgeois double standards have been abolished, is a natural monogamy: ‘For those of pure race, monogamy is a demand of the blood’ (‘Monogamie ist für Menschen von reiner Rasse eine Forderung des Blutes’: xxix). The coercive potential of this discourse of naturalness becomes clear in statements like this: if a progressive, monist conception of the higher development of humanity is to be preserved, then a form of eugenic thinking becomes necessary in order to support it. Such statements are occasionally complemented with Germanophile ones that reflect wartime conditions and the need to defend the Germans against their portrayal as barbarians: the ancient Germanic tribes are held to have adopted monogamous marriage through an inborn sense of moral propriety while their laws still permitted polygamy, thus giving themselves the moral and racial strength to defeat ‘degenerate Rome’ (‘das entartete Rom’: 84). Meisel-Hess distances her views from the conservative cult of motherhood, which ‘usually goes hand-in-hand with the downgrading of all other female achievements, aside from giving birth, and which makes no attempt to solve the many economic problems that prevent motherhood’ (37).10 Her project is emancipatory, but this text brings out more clearly some of the difficulties inherent in Mutterschutz theory: since she connects conservative sexual morality with bourgeois individualism, capitalism and women’s economic dependence, it follows that socialised forms of support for maternity are better able to support mothers, ensure the political and social emancipation of women and to provide a more natural form of social organisation. For MeiselHess, allowing the experience of maternity to be dependent on the

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financial security of the individual family can lead to poverty, stress, the passing on of damaged genetic inheritance to the child or to abortion of otherwise eugenically healthy foetuses (38). Thus, socialised support of maternity, in the form of ‘planned social and ethical organisations’ (‘planmäßige soziale und ethische Organisationen’: 14), protects the natural evolutionary processes that bourgeois society has damaged. Meisel-Hess is concerned to restore the prestige of fatherhood: not individual, bourgeois fatherhood, which has failed in its duties, but the ‘fatherliness of society’ (‘Väterlichkeit der Gesellschaft’: 13). The matriarchal theory of Johann Jakob Bachofen serves as a source for her key statement, providing imagery and a historical system that illustrate Meisel-Hess’s wartime conversion to the idea of a paternal state: Bachofen sees ‘wild swamp vegetation’ as the fundamental symbol of unmarried motherhood. And he opposes it to the apollonian purity of paternity, which is symbolised in sun worship.    Unmarried motherhood is in fact in many ways identical to the cult of nature and swamp vegetation. But only because the ordering, leading principle of fatherhood is completely absent and the mother is abandoned to the wilderness. Moving from the wildly overgrown, unprotected fertility to the apollonian principle, to Father Right, which secures a father for the child, is certainly progress. However we must not forget what is now being welcomed by so many prophetic minds, namely the existence of a greater Sun,    a fatherhood higher than the simple act of fertilisation: the great paternal protection of society for the human lives generated within it. History has shown that one cannot free oneself from the nourishing maternal principle, but it has also shown the unreliability of individual fatherhood.11 (13) The change of tone here is striking: where Mutterschutz theory had previously stressed that the maternal body could form the moral foundation of a natural social order, Meisel-Hess now suggests that the maternal principle, having been failed by individual fathers, requires a collective father in order to raise it above the level of materialism. The gendered abstracts – male–female/order–disorder – imply an opposition between a feminised Volk and a masculine, ordering, protecting state. The utopian body of monist feminism has been tamed and subsumed into the greater collective of the wartime state.

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Conclusion The war presented Mutterschutz theorists with particular challenges, which exposed some of the contradictions in the theoretical basis of their project, and which led thinkers like Stöcker and Meisel-Hess to take strikingly different paths from the same starting point. Despite this, it would be wrong to see the outbreak of hostilities as causing a radical overhaul of the League’s theoretical stance: theorists’ investment in a particular combination of languages of scientific objectivity and of moral progress was so great that the outbreak of war simply shifted the terms of their argumentation, or even provided new material to support it. Attempts to preserve the utopian impetus of the League’s pre-war theory ultimately exposed both the difficult circumstances under which the League had to wor, and some of the blind spots of pre-war scientific optimism.

Notes 1. ‘Wir hatten gehofft, das zehnjährige Bestehen unserer Bundesarbeit durch eine öffentliche Feier, vor allem durch die Veranstaltung eines Internationalen Kongresses begehen zu können, der in weiten Kreisen zeigen sollte, wie die Ideen, für die wir kämpfen, sich nach und nach auf die andern Kulturländer verbreitet haben. Daß ein Weltkrieg uns so bald einmal an jeglicher Arbeit in diesem Sinne hindern könnte, haben wir bis zum Ausbruch des Krieges wohl alle nicht für möglich gehalten [  ] Wir haben längst lernen müssen, uns auch diesen außerordentlichen Zuständen anzupassen und haben unsere Arbeit auf diese besonderen Verhältnisse eingerichtet.’ 2. ‘Wir sehen aus dem allen, daß der Krieg inbezug auf die Arbeit, die wir zu leisten bemüht sind, nicht in jedem Sinne hemmend und zerstörend wirkt – darüber waren wir uns von Anbeginn an klar. Die acht Monate der Kriegserfahrung haben das bestätigt. Unsere zehn Jahre Mutterschutzarbeit sind nicht umsonst gewesen. Der Gedanke einer stärkeren gesellschaftlichen Förderung der Mutterschaft hat von Tag zu Tag, von Jahr zu Jahr an Boden gewonnen.’ 3. I shall be using the German term Mutterschutz (literally, protection of mothers/motherhood) in this text, since it describes a set of political and philosophical precepts that go beyond practical campaigning for maternity insurance and legal reform. 4. ‘Wie ein Streit unreifer Kinder erscheint mir dies alles, dies törichte Zerreissen der anderen Nationen, diese Entfesselung aller brutalen Instinkte. Die mühsame jahrhundertealte Arbeit sittlicher Verfeinerung - ein großes Umsonst! Und so viele lassen sich mitreissen, von denen man es nie erwartet hätte.’

Peter Davies 225 5. ‘Nur durch die aufopfernde Betätigung aller kann es gelingen, trotz der furchtbaren Gefährdungen des Krieges die neue Generation und damit die Zukunft unseres Volkes zu erhalten.’ 6. ‘Überhaupt ist nicht zu verkennen, daß der Krieg den Wert als ‘Auslesefaktor’, den er in früheren Zeiten vielleicht gehabt haben mag, unter den neueren sozialen Verhältnissen und bei der jetzigen Art der Kriegsführung, eingebüßt hat und vornehmlich solche Tendenzen zeitigt, die auf eine Verringerung der Geburten und Verschlechterung ihrer Qualität (hinsichtlich der Lebenstauglichkeit) sich richten. Es sind überwiegend die körperlich schwächeren Männer, die erhalten bleiben und denen nun, indem sie in größerer Zahl zur Ehe gelangen, die weitere Volkserneuerung obliegt.’ 7. ‘War die Mutterschaftsversicherung als Form des Frauenschutzes in industriellen Arbeitsverhältnissen, als soziale Absicherung von Mutterschaft und Schwangerschaft unter dem Primat weiblichen Selbstbestimmungsrechts angetreten, so wurde sie nun sukzessive zum Instrument einer machtpolitischen, rassenhygienischen Bevölkerungslenkung umstrukturiert, das mit den frauenidentifizierten politischen Forderungen nicht mehr viel gemein hatte.’ 8. ‘Sofern [die Kinder] männlichen Geschlechtes sind, werden sie ebenso wie die ehelichen zur Erfüllung der Vaterlandsverteidigungspflicht herangezogen. Die unehelichen Kinder weiblichen Geschlechts wiederum sind doch als künftige Mütter nicht von geringerer Bedeutung. Dieser Gesichtspunkt sollte im gegenwärtigen ernsten Augenblick besonders deshalb nicht unbeachtet bleiben, weil wir mit uns bevorstehenden Opfern am blühenden Leben rechnen müssen. Wir haben ein besonderes Interesse daran, die jetzt geborene Generation möglichst vollzählig zu erhalten.’ 9. All quotations in this section are from this work. 10. ‘gewöhnlich mit einer Herabsetzung jeder andern Leistung, als der Gebärleistung der Frau, Hand in Hand geht, ohne daß man im übrigen die wirtschaftlichen Probleme, die die Mutterschaft vielfach verhindern, zu lösen sucht.’ 11. The term ‘Father Right’ (Vaterrecht), as opposed to ‘patriarchy’ (Patriarchat), reflects the diversity of the anthropological discussion of gender relations in the period in question: Vaterrecht implies a connection between inheritance down the paternal line and institutionalised male dominance in the family. ‘In der “wilden Sumpfvegetation” sieht Bachofen das Urbild des ehelosen Muttertums. Und er stellt ihm die apollinische Reinheit des Vatertums entgegen, und sieht im Sonnenkult sein Symbol [  ] Eheloses Muttertum ist heute tatsächlich mit Tellurismus und Sumpfvegetation häufig identisch. Aber nur deshalb, weil das ordnende, leitende Prinzip des Vatertums in jeder Gestalt dabei fehlt und die Mutter der Wildnis überliefert bleibt. Von dieser wildwuchernden unbeschützten Fruchtbarkeit zum apollinisch-uranischen Prinzip, zum Vaterrecht, das dem Kinde den Vater garantiert, ist gewiß ein großer Fortschritt. Woran wir aber denken müssen, was heute von so vielen Geistern ahnend gegrüßt wird, das ist die Existenz einer größeren Sonne [  ] an ein höheres Vatertum, als das der Zeugung; an den großen väterlichen Schutz der Gesellschaft, für die in ihr erzeugten Menschenleben. Die Unlösbarkeit vom nährenden, mütterlichen Prinzip hat die Geschichte aller Zeiten bewiesen. Die Unverläßlichkeit des persönlichen, väterlichen Elementes aber ebenfalls’ Emphasis in original.

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Bibliography Publications of the Bund für Mutterschutz and associates Die Neue Generation (The New Generation), (1908–1932), Berlin: Deutscher Bund für Mutterschutz. Hereafter DNG (originally published as Mutterschutz, 1905–1907). Geschäftsbericht der Ortsgruppe Berlin für das Jahr 1914–1915, Berlin: Deutscher Bund für Mutterschutz. Meisel-Hess, G. (1916) Das Wesen der Geschlechtlichkeit, Jena: Diederichs. Stöcker, H. (1915) Geschlechtspsychologie und Krieg, Berlin: Oesterheld. ——. (October 1917) ‘Mütterlichkeit und Krieg’, DNG 9/10: 373–83. ——. (August 1922) ‘Geleitwort zur Revidierung unserer Richtlinien’, DNG 14/7– 8: 301.

Other works Bockel, R. von (1991) Philosophin einer ‘neuen Ethik’: Helene Stöcker, 1869–1943, Hamburg: Edition Hamburg Bormann und von Bockel. Braker, R. (2001) ‘Helene Stöcker’s pacifism in the Weimar Republic: Between ideal and reality’, Journal of Women’s History 13/3: 70–97. Dickinson, E.R. (2001), ‘Reflections on feminism and monism in the Kaiserreich, 1900–1913’, Central European History 34/2: 191–230. Evans, R. (1976) The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933, London: Sage. Grossman, A. (1995) Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamelmann, G. (1992) Helene Stöcker, der Bund für Mutterschutz und Die neue Generation, Frankfurt a.M: haag and herchen. Herlitzius, A. (1995) Frauenbefreiung und Rassenideologie: Rassenhygiene und Eugenik im politischen Programm der ‘Radikalen Frauenbewegung’, 1900–1933 Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universtäts-Verlag. Schlüpmann, H. (1984) ‘Die Radikalisierung der Philosophie: Die NietzscheRezeption und die sexualpolitische Publizistik Helene Stöckers’, Feministische Studien 3/1: 10–38. Taylor Allen, A. (1991) Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Weingart, P. (1987) ‘The rationalization of sexual behavior: The institutionalization of eugenic thought in Germany’, Journal of the History of Biology 20/2: 159–93. Wickert, C. (1991) Helene Stöcker, 1869–1943: Frauenrechtlerin, Sexualreformerin und Pazifistin, Bonn: Dietz.

14 The ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and Reconciliation after the Great War Erika Kuhlman

As men representing France, Britain, Italy, the United States, and other countries each played their hand to win their nation’s advantage at the Paris peace table in the spring of 1919, newspaper and magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic depicted peacefulness nearly universally as a feminine figure in numerous cartoons and drawings. One German cartoon, for example, shows a crestfallen peace angel waving an olive branch as she sits next to an equally morose German peasant (Figure 12). ‘We aren’t allowed to join the conversation’ at Versailles, she laments. Neither pacifists nor the defeated enemy would be invited to help fashion the post-war world. In the United States, readers opened their newspapers to see a winged washerwoman labelled ‘peace conference’ bent over her washtub scrubbing out the challenges to a permanent peace across her washboard (Current History 1919). The League of Nations, an organization designed to help avert international conflicts in the post-war world, frequently wears a skirt in both German and American cartoons (The Independent Weekly 30 November 1918; Current History April–September 1921). The idea that peacefulness was a feminine quality thus appears to have been a commonly-held notion in the early twentieth century. Yet in the First World War men and women clashed with each other as to which gender could make war and which should act as the true arbiter of peace (Rupp 1997: 586). As Fell, Purvis, Siebrecht and Smith show in this volume, women on both sides of the conflict took on a belligerent stance and eagerly supported the war in a variety of ways. While women crossed gender boundaries during the conflict, men did so after the war, by negotiating the peace. The verbally combative bargaining that occurred at the Versailles peace table was interpreted as hardnosed, 227

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Figure 12: O. Gulbransson 28 January 1919 ‘We aren’t allowed to join the conversation at Versailles’, Simplicissimus 23/44: 547. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/BONO, Oslo.

unsentimental, and therefore as manly (Vellacott 1993: 26). This chapter will trace women activists’ attempts at shaping international politics and peacemaking through rhetoric and action, in an era when those touting proper gender roles for men and women – which they perceived as well defined and ‘natural’ – sought to restrict women’s activities to the private or domestic sphere. Women did not participate in the 1919 Paris negotiations, but it was not for lack of trying. A week after the Armistice, the New York Times

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reported that American suffragist and eventual war supporter Carrie Chapman Catt had asked President Wilson to invite female delegates to join him in the peacemaking process (New York Times 17 November 1918). In contrast, suffrage opponent Alice Hay Wadsworth decried the idea that women should participate in the work of reconciling belligerent nations. As pacifists, Wadsworth insisted, Catt and her colleagues Jane Addams and Anna Howard Shaw would doubtlessly try to ‘obtain a mitigation of the terms proposed to be imposed upon the Central Powers’. The Senator’s wife did not protest in principle to women’s presence at Versailles – she would accept female Red Cross volunteers, for example; it was only pacifist women she objected to (ibid.). The Times also reported that another anti-suffrage group petitioned Wilson against the appointment of any type of woman to accompany the president (New York Times 23 November 1918). Those opposed to female peacemakers at the conference prevailed, and, despite the proliferation of dovish female figures in popular culture, President Wilson embarked on his transatlantic adventure without lady reconcilers present. Since women did not engage in the give-and-take of diplomatic bargaining at Versailles, they could only hope to influence any proposed treaty indirectly. Writing the history of women and reconciliation in the early twentieth century must, therefore, seek the unofficial ways in which women facilitated fence-mending with the former enemy. Members of the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ (WILPF), one of the most active female international political organizations of the Great War era, influenced post-war reconciliation in a number of ways: they communicated privately with male policymakers in Paris and elsewhere before and during the fashioning of the peace treaty; they created the Women’s Charter and other documents in which they provided a set of alternatives to the goals touted in the Treaty of Versailles; and finally they aided peacemaking by reaching out to the ‘enemy’ in areas of continued conflict. But just as the presumed line separating feminine pacifists from masculine warriors was blurred, women’s attitudes toward precisely what their role in the reconciliation process should be also remained unclear, even among activist women. The paths that female reconcilers pursued depended on their perception of the political context in which they made their bid for power, on their understanding of women’s and men’s relationship to national and international politics, and on how male politicians interpreted women’s roles. Since men nearly exclusively wielded power both nationally and internationally among the nations

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gathered at Versailles, women depended upon men to incorporate their ideas into the proceedings. At the end of the Great War, the concept of nationalism played a key role in how political power was distributed in the post-war world, and it explains in part why women were left out of post-war diplomacy. As historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the post-World War I era marked the beginning of ‘the apogee of nationalism’ when the Wilsonian principle of creating linguistically and ethnically homogenous, autonomous nations was offered as a replacement for the old system of colonial holdings (1991: 130–33). Women’s understanding of their relationship to nationalism influenced the ways in which they attempted to make peace. Pacifist reformers, particularly members of WILPF, related the notion of self-determination to women’s inability to define themselves as citizens of a nation on a level equal to men, regardless of linguistic and ethnic homogeneity. Suffragists perceived women as ‘stateless’ people who, in many countries, could not yet vote and who could not retain their own nationality or, in some cases, assume their spouse’s nationality when they married foreigners. Since many national governments did not always grant women full voting rights and did not allow women to determine their own nationality, women activists increasingly looked upon international political organizations, such as WILPF and the League of Nations, as the vehicle through which they could exercise their political views (Miller 1994: 219–20; Sluga 2000: 501). By researching women’s unofficial, international efforts at peacemaking, and by noting how reconciliation and nationalism were themselves gendered, a clearer picture of how peacemakers of both sexes helped shape the post-war world begins to emerge. In her book review article ‘Where are the Women?: The Gender Dimension in the Study of International Relations’, Rosemary Foot noted ‘   [it is] the extent to which governments depend on certain kinds of relations between men and women, and it is the exposure of this interconnectedness, of this nexus between the private and the public, that will help to take the study of international phenomena beyond a study of the male policy elite’ (1990: 621). Male policymakers, both nationally and internationally, desired a return to gender normalcy as they spurned women’s presence at the peace table, rejected their bid for self-determination, and shunted women wage-workers back to their former status as protected, vulnerable domestics (Greenwald 1980: 128–36; Rouette 1993: 92–93). Even pondering the possibility of female self-determination in the age of nationalism, according to historian Glenda Sluga, raised fears of

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maternal neglect and infertility; both were an anathema to a robust nation. Motherhood, on the other hand, was supported by nationalist discourses since having children re-populated a society depleted from warfare and since mothers could be encouraged to rear the next generation of nationalists, or cannon fodder, from the point of view of some feminist pacifists (Sluga 2000: 502; Hopkins 2 June 1917). Despite their limited ability to obtain full citizenship rights from national governments, however, women indicated their sense of female responsibility to the nation by expressing concerns over falling post-war birth rates. In its 1919 program, the Federation of German Women’s Associations encouraged women to fulfil their duty to the nation by marrying and having as many children as possible (Evans 1976: 236; Usborne 1988: 408). WILPF’s Feminist Committee directed the organization’s national sections to study population problems since women were responsible for birth rates (Sluga 2000: 515). WILPF also supported national self-determination for the Irish, for Germans living in occupied territories, and for people living in territorial mandates. However, the pacifists registered a unanimous rejection of the overzealous nationalism that they blamed for the harsh peace treaty, a foiled reconciliation, and a perpetual state of war in parts of Europe. As post-war politicians reaffirmed time-honoured links binding women and mothers to domesticity and the nation, they also upheld the postwar tradition of rewarding the winners and damning the losers. They extended the occupation of the Rhineland, and demanded war reparations, and assigned Germany’s former colonies as mandates under the Treaty of Versailles. Male policymakers thus largely adhered to custom in their expectations of proper gender roles and in international affairs. By barring women – the presumed chiefs of the private sphere – from international politics, they reinforced men’s primacy in the public sphere while concomitantly reifying the myth of separate spheres. As the answer to the question in Foot’s article – ‘Where are the Women?’ – they were excluded from international politics because affirming the privileges of the victors over the vanquished depended on keeping them isolated from worldwide policymaking. Since females were thought to be ‘naturally’ pacifistic, ladies demanding access to international politics threatened to ‘obtain a mitigation of the terms proposed to be imposed upon the Central Powers’ (New York Times 17 November 1918) as Wadsworth had put it, and thereby weaken the power and privilege of the conquering nations. Ironically, men (and women) denied female negotiators a role in the peace talks precisely because it was assumed that they would advocate peace. Indeed, newspapers such as the Washington

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Post aroused such fears when they reported that women peace activists were vulnerable to German requests for a lenient peace. Women reconcilers themselves fed nationalists’ fears that women’s involvement in politics would weaken national potency. Not all women activists were willing to overturn traditional gender roles or relationships, and some eagerly vaunted women’s exclusive dominion over childrearing. WILPF members glued themselves to the private sphere when they glorified their positions as housekeepers and argued that women were inherently more pacifistic than men and therefore better suited to orchestrate a peaceful, post-war world than were their male counterparts. When women made essentialist arguments for the natural peacemaking abilities of the ‘mothers of the people’, nationalists saw this as confirming traditional views of women as the gentler sex, an anathema to the principle of nationalism just as it was reaching its hegemonic peak. On the other hand, when pacifists criticized officials’ methods of peacemaking, rather than the war-liking nature of their gender, they were more effective.1

The founding of the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ Before the gavel fell at the closing of the International Congress of Women’s conference at the Hague in 1915, those in attendance pledged to hold a second worldwide conference of women pacifists. This was to take place at the conclusion of the Great War to coincide precisely with the official peace negotiations. Two hundred women from 17 different nations voted to change their organization’s name to the ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and established their philosophy and their methodology for conducting business. The Great War had reinforced their conviction that peace, which they thought required justice and equality, could not be obtained unless women participated equally in international affairs, and for many members, peace required social justice for the working class as well (Gelblum 1992: 221). In Zurich, in May 1919, members established a permanent international section of the WILPF in addition to the national sections. Each national section sent two consultative members to the International Executive Committee, which was otherwise made up of individual members not representing particular countries. At all of their convocations, the women rejected any hint of nationalism from their delegates because they were convinced that the overt nationalism expressed at Versailles could never create a world reconciled to peace.

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According to historian Jo Vellacott, WILPF members considered themselves as women transnationals, rather than as representatives of their respective nations. At the Zurich meeting, members established a pattern that they pursued at subsequent colloquia: the delegate hailing from the nation that did the perceived wrong urged that justice be done (1993: 33). As Vellacott has suggested, women’s disfranchisement – the very circumstance keeping them isolated from politics – may in fact be interpreted as their advantage: their limited experience in national life enabled them to rise above the pettiness of nationalism that prevented men from establishing a peaceful world and allowed them to envision a new world order (ibid.: 32). While male elites barred women and the defeated enemy from helping to reconcile belligerents at Versailles, WILPF’s transnationalism fostered post-war reconciliation unofficially. Shortly after the Armistice, Irene Cooper Willis, secretary of the British section of WILPF’s precursor organization, sent a telegram to German, Austrian, and Hungarian members, their enemy counterparts, greeting them warmly and assuring them that they would work for an end to the blockade and a fair treaty (Willis to Miss [Rosa] Manus AUA 16 December 1918). Such displays of transnationalism were not confined to women, although WILPF did not note that fact. As rumors of a ceasefire circulated in October 1918, for example, US and German soldiers fighting in France defied orders by deliberately shooting over the heads of their opponents in an effort to save them. They later welcomed their enemies into their camps (Keene 2001: 113–17). In both its method and its philosophy, WILPF cultivated a transnational sense of women’s relationship to each other as fellow peace activists rather than as citizens of nations, an attitude that fostered their ability to work toward a peaceful world in which women would share political power with men. Nationalist sentiment did rear its head at the Zurich meeting, however (Wilmers 2005: 123–43). On the final morning of the conference, German delegate Lida Gustava Heymann clasped hands with the newlyarrived French delegate Jeanne Mélin. ‘A German woman gives her hand to a French woman’, exulted Heymann, ‘and says in the name of the German delegation that we hope we women can build a bridge from Germany to France and from France to Germany, and that in the future we may be able to make good the wrongdoing of men.’ Yet even in the face of such exuberance, Mary Chamberlain noted dryly that ‘none [of the delegates] presumed to say France and Germany were united’. Indeed, as Chamberlain described the Zurich conference, many members thought that the German women should have apologized for

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their country’s belligerence toward France. Chamberlain attributed the German women’s neglect to their ‘senses [having been so] dulled by their own present suffering [that] they could not visualize the enormity of the suffering of others’ (Chamberlain 14 June 1919: 427–28). In any case, because WILPF held its meeting in neutral Zurich where German and Austrian women could attend, members saw the results of Allied foreign policy. They actually observed bodies made thin by hunger, whereas policy makers at Versailles kept themselves distant from the impact of the continued blockade. Furthermore, despite the brief animosity created by the presence of the apparently unrepentant German women, overall the organization stood by its determination to reduce nationalist-inspired strife by encouraging belligerent nations to reconcile. Indeed, other WILPF actions and resolutions reflected the organization’s distrust of fanatical nationalism. The group’s most notorious activity during the May meeting was its vociferous rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. The pacifists were the first international group to receive and discuss the treaty when it emerged from Paris. Overwhelmingly, the women condemned its terms. However, the women took heart in the treaty’s League of Nations idea, since the proposed international body represented the only hope of implementing their transnationalist vision. Yet the League’s Covenant left much to be desired. Firstly, WILPF members decried the fact that not all nations desiring to be members would be invited to do so. The women interpreted the League as ‘a league of conquerors against the conquered’ that reinforced one group of nations’ power over another and simply reinstituted the old order that the war had purportedly destroyed. Members then drew up the Women’s Charter, which a special WILPF delegation brought to the negotiators in Paris, asking the officials to insert their document into the Treaty of Versailles (WILPF 1919: 7, 19). The Women’s Charter outlined a society based upon sexual equality and justice. The document reinforced both national and female selfdetermination by requiring that in any plebiscite mandated by the Treaty of Versailles women have the same right to vote as men. WILPF demanded that suffrage and equality for women (access to education and professions, equal wages for equal work) be granted nationally and internationally. Furthermore, upon marriage all women should have ‘full personal and civil rights, including the right to use and dispose of her own earnings and property, and should not be under the tutelage of her husband’. Finally, WILPF insisted that a married woman should have the same right to retain or change her nationality as a man.

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While Paris peacemakers confirmed traditional relationships between men and women and between victorious and conquered nations, WILPF (theoretically) envisioned equality between sexes and nations, rather than dominion of one country over another in the post-war world. WILPF could count a few successes toward that goal. The League of Nations appointed a commission on behalf of Greek, Armenian, and other women and children still captive in harems, and it selected a British woman, Dame Rachel Crowdy, as head of the Social Questions and Opium Trafficking sections (WILPF AUA 1919–1921). Furthermore, WILPF’s advocacy of equality between sexes and nations was spreading among British thinkers (Sluga 2000: 505). Despite these successes, however, WILPF limited its ability to influence reconciliation when members argued that women were inherently more peaceful than men, since men could dismiss their arguments as representing the private sector and therefore as inappropriate for political bodies.

The US Section of WILPF US WILPF member Harriet Connor Brown promoted women’s ‘natural’ pacifism when she testified during Congressional hearings on disarmament and military appropriations in the US House and Senate. In January 1921, the ‘Women’s Peace Society’, a US organization formed in 1919 to effect complete and universal disarmament, requested a hearing before the US House Committee on Military Affairs to encourage lawmakers to call for an international conference with the goal of achieving universal disarmament. WILPF hoped that such a conference might rectify the injustices done by the Treaty of Versailles, which required only one belligerent in the war to disarm (WILPF 1919: 18). Harriet Connor Brown’s testimony emphasized both the transnationalism and the gender difference aspects of WILPF’s pacifism. She conversed with Chairman Julius Kahn about the growing military threat posed by Japan. Brown quoted Kahn when he had warned his Congressional colleagues that within 75 to 100 years Japan would unite the ‘yellow races’ against the western world, and had asked rhetorically what white people were going to do about it. ‘I’ll tell you what we white women of [WILPF] are going to do about it’, declared Brown. ‘   We are going to educate Japanese and Chinese women to cooperate with us for the peace and freedom of all nations.’ Kahn responded that he thought the idea a very good one. Unconvinced that he understood her point, Brown continued that because women now had the vote ‘[w]e can elect men to our Congresses and parliaments who will disarm, who are going

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to reflect our views. We are going to spend the next two years in an effort to enlighten the women of the world, so that when Congress convenes two years from now it will be a Congress of people pledged to disarmament’ (House of Representatives 1921: 41). Arguing from the premise that women generally opposed war, Brown reasoned that once suffrage was achieved worldwide, women would vote uniformly and elect men advocating disarmament, implying that political views depended upon gender. Following her logic, Brown’s Congressional opponents could at least expect a draw, since women comprised only half the population. Brown favored emphasizing women’s presumed voting habits over any real political power they could potentially wield as lawmakers. Brown dramatized the distinction she saw between men and women more stridently in her testimony before the June 1923 Senate subcommittee hearing on the War Department Appropriation Bill. The WILPF member objected to Congress’s reliance on military experts to help them determine the amount of money needed to sustain the nation’s military. ‘I wonder if you would think it would be stretching a point if I said that we women are experts?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Now you have your choice between the military expert, who is an expert in the culture of destruction, and we women, who are experts in the culture of life.’ As she had in her 1921 testimony, Brown threatened Congress with women’s new and – she assumed – uniformly pacifistic vote: ‘But the [military] experts have not very many votes to give you, and we have approximately half of the electorate’ (United States Senate 1923: 663). Overall, the Congressmen hearing the pacifists’ reasons for reducing the American military and seeking disarmament around the world dismissed their arguments either by pointing out that Congress had already reduced the size of the wartime military, or by noting that since other nations viewed military power as a measure of national power, the US could not be convinced to give up the clout that it had gained through military victory. The women’s strategy of contending that policymakers should include women in determining its international policy conflicted with the Congressmen’s desire to retain America’s power, since the speakers confirmed that women unanimously favoured peace and reduced military power. Furthermore, Brown and her WPS colleague conceded that, even with suffrage, women only influenced and did not make public policy. Indeed, during the 1921 hearing Congressmen had mocked the notion that female voters carried a ‘big stick’ (House of Representatives 1921: 4–5).

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The German section of WILPF As US WILPF members were touting the political muscle they expected suffrage to confer on women, German members’ rhetoric exerted feminine power as their nation formed its new government after the war. The German section of WILPF concurred with Brown’s contention that women’s life-giving nature led them naturally to pacifism; as Lida Gustava Heymann wrote, ‘No, the masses of women will never support war. He who believes that [they do], has no concept of women’s nature   ’ (Heymann 1919: 14). Pacifist feminist Germans, coming from the radical wing of the pre-war women’s movement, had adopted a commitment to human rights and had demanded equal political rights and opportunities for all Germans. But when war broke out in 1914, radical German women saw male domination as the enemy rather than other nations (unlike the bourgeois women’s movement that supported the war (Gelblum 1992: 216)). The German WILPF section’s rhetoric remained largely essentialist, despite the changing political context of the post-war period. Before women were granted suffrage, member Auguste Kirchhoff had noted that women, although politically powerless, did hold ‘a piece of the future’ as mothers (Kirchhoff 1989: 105–06). After the November Armistice, the German WILPF, the only women’s peace organization to survive the war, witnessed the defeated nation’s struggle to establish a new government. For most WILPFers, male-dominated post-war German society lacked a feminine sense of morality. One local branch of the German WILPF utilized the tactic of emphasizing women’s moral superiority over men when it called for a new feminist politics. ‘We [Germans] have been known as ruffians long enough’, declared German WILPF’s Württemberg branch. ‘After the collapse of purely masculine politics it is high time that women should take part in the guidance of affairs in order to realize the new political maxim Right before Might.’ The German pacifists hinted that women’s participation in politics would ensure that moral righteousness would prevail (WILPF AUA 1919–1921). The German section jumped at the chance to participate politically after suffrage. ‘We women    demand of the new state that its leadership not only allow women unimpeded activity, allow them full participation in all official domains, in lawmaking and administration, but that it also view all positions of the state as inadequate if they have not been determined substantially by the spirit of the mothers of the people’ (WILPF AUCBL 1918–1920: 11–12). But the new government that Germans elected in January 1919 was headed by a centralized

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government staffed by older, established politicians and values, with only a handful of women elected to the Reichstag (Gelblum 1992: 219). The German WILPF warned that the new government ‘   should also take into consideration the perspective, the way of thinking, of women, which is by nature different from that of men, and which must complement and broaden the latter if anything is to be created that is truly vital’ (ibid.: 11). The German section of WILPF, having experienced the war and its aftermath more traumatically than American members, reflected an even more blatant sense of sexual difference that it applied to Germany’s post-war political situation than did its US counterpart. However, the German women did not attribute that difference exclusively to biology; for example, they sought to educate Germans in a manner that would foster the peaceful disposition of men (Gelblum 1992: 225; Davy 2005: 165). The German women’s politics of goodwill included supporting the eight-hour day, free trade, equal employment opportunities for men and women, equal laws relating to marriage for men and women, guarantee of basic human rights, and the abolishment of capital punishment (Anon AUCBL 1924). In the realm of foreign policy, the German section condemned Britain for its policies toward Ireland, declaring that the Irish should have the right to national self-determination (German section IFFF to David Lloyd George AUCBL 3 January 1921). Nevertheless, German members still adhered to Auguste Kirchhoff’s adage that women control the future through their children. To that end, the German section published a children’s magazine for ten- to fifteen-year-olds. The magazine included news about German youth who spent summers abroad, information about other nations, in addition to offering its readers a pen-pal program. The 1922 edition featured an article called ‘The Children of the World War’, in which readers were reminded of the hardships that their nation had endured during the war, and were encouraged to look upon the world not with hatred but with understanding. The German section also urged educators to rid their classrooms of books that celebrated war and replace them with histories of other countries, and they encouraged mothers not to purchase war toys or clothes for their children (WILPF AUCBL 1921–1922). One of the German section’s major projects was to foster peace with the French. For the German pacifists, French/German reconciliation symbolized a larger post-war project of healing and rebuilding after the carnage of war (Henke 2000: 110). Yet here, too, the focus remained on children. ‘The peace of Europe depends upon German/French reconciliation,’ declared Gertrud Baer, ‘and that depends on the youth’

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(Baer AUCBL 1924). To further demonstrate its desire for fence-mending, the German section and others participating in the Youth Movement created the ‘Sacrifice of Reconciliation’, in which they proposed to build a ‘House of Reconciliation’ that would serve as a meeting place and library in a northern French village. However, when the German government failed its reparations obligations, France took over German mines and railroads in the Ruhr district and attempted to establish a Rhineland Republic. French WILPFers reciprocated their colleagues’ earlier peacemaking efforts by creating the Fraternal Aid for the Children of the Ruhr as a ‘political protest and a gesture of reconciliation and humanity’ (WILPF 1924: 31). By the time WILPF held its 1924 meeting in Washington D.C., the French section had collected more than 12,000 francs. Andrée Jouve when reporting to fellow French WILPF delegates in Washington said, ‘I have wanted to show you German and French action that is quite independent of, and not in agreement with that of official France and official Germany’ (Jouve to German comrades AUCBL 25 October 1923: 30–33). For WILPF, the Ruhr occupation and German and French responses underscored the chasm between official government foreign policies, in which fighting men invaded and the goal of national self-determination lay abandoned, and women’s work of reconciliation through transnationalism. The German WILPF’s rhetoric during the Weimar Republic continued the gender polarity common in pre-war German feminist ideology, and underscored the ways in which practical-minded woman activists argued that women’s natural propensity for nurturing and care-giving should exert a wider influence on the public sphere (Abrams and Harvey 1997: 21). The German WILPF’s assertion that the nation’s future depended on what members saw as inherently feminine qualities coincided with a nation devastated by a war that, given the continued blockade, reparations, and occupation, seemed never ending. However, WILPF’s insistence that only women could influence childrearing simply played in to Germany’s official post-war policy of returning German women to the private sphere (Rouette 1993: 40–41). On the surface, the influence WILPF had sought on post-war reconciliation had little effect. Paris negotiators did not incorporate its ideals of gender and national equity into the Treaty of Versailles. What the pacifists did accomplish was to form lasting relationships between ‘women of goodwill’ that helped bridge the gaps left by official policies such as the continuation of the economic blockade and the Ruhr invasion. Members such as Jane Addams, Hannah Clothier Hull, and Gertrude Baer made the ‘personal political’ by urging policymakers to consider

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the conditions of children in post-war Germany as a weathervane of Germany’s future social well-being. This was a method that coming generations of feminists would continue to use in the future (Addams and Hamilton 1919: 4–17; Hull, H. Clothier to Hon. Frank B. Kellogg AUCBL 7 July 1924). WILPF’s international congresses provided likeminded female activists from around the world with a forum where ideas about a political system based on gender and national equality were created and perpetuated. Ultimately, however, WILPF’s Janus-faced rhetoric perpetuated its relative isolation from international politics. The pacifists’ transnationalism called for a new era of equality between men and women and between powerful and powerless nations, and they viewed those two goals as complementary. WILPF consistently supported self-determination for nations and women and rebuffed the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations that empowered the victorious nations at the expense of the vanquished. But members generally adhered to what they perceived as women’s primary social and national responsibility as ‘the mothers of the people’. By making issues such as falling national birth rates and the care of children exclusively women’s concerns, their ability to make the personal political faltered. They positioned the power women held as mothers in competition with men’s power in the political realm. Thus, when Harriet Connor Brown argued before the Senate that women/mothers were the ‘experts in the culture of life’, she placed women in competition with men’s presumed expertise in making war for the Senators’ attention. While such rhetoric undoubtedly felt empowering to women, it could not match the real political power that men granted themselves as leaders of the public sphere. Rather, it simply reinforced the notion of separate spheres that kept women marginalized from politics. Too often the women reinforced a mythical boundary between men’s and women’s domains, thus enabling negotiators at Paris to keep pacifism and women out of the official peace process. As Jo Vellacott has noted, women’s disenfranchisement allowed them to rise above nationalist sentiments and offer a vision for a new post-war world (1993: 32). But too often they seemed unwilling to actually live in the gender-neutral world that they envisioned.

Notes 1. Jane Addams offers the best example of this type of analysis in her critique of the League of Nations (Addams 1972: 199–201).

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References Unattributed newspaper articles New York Times (19 November 1918), ‘Women at Peace Table’: 2. ——. (17 November 1918), ‘Decries Women Delegates’: 2. ——. (23 November 1918), ‘Wants Men to Make Peace’: 13. The Independent Weekly (30 November 1918): 96. Current History (1919) ‘Every Day is Washday’, 9: 558. Current History (April–September 1921): 14. Washington Post (17 May 1919) ‘Hun Voices Sway Women’s Congress’: 6.

Archives and manuscript collections Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries (AUCBL). WILPF Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Anon. (1924) ‘Zehn Gebote’ (‘Ten commandments’). Accession 32–38. German section IFFF to David Lloyd George (3 January 1921) ‘Resolution’. Accession 32–37. Baer, G. (1924) Merkblatt, Translated by author. Accession 32–38. Hull, H. Clothier to Hon. Frank B. Kellogg (7 July 1924), DG043, WILPF Part III US Section, Series A,5 Literature, Box 1, Reel 130.33. Jouve, A. to German comrades (25 October 1923), Translated by Dr Pamela Park. Accession 32–38. WILPF (1921–1922) ‘Friede auf Erden!’, Kinder Zeitung (Children’s Magazine). Accession 32–38, 32–37. WILPF (1918–1920) Völkerversöhnende Frauenarbeit, Translated by Dr Joan Birch. Accession 32–36. Archives, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. (AUA) Willis, I.C. Honorable International Secretary to Miss [Rosa] Manus (16 December 1918) Series I, International Executive Committee, 1915–1978, Part F. Circular and Form Letters, 1915–1972, Microfilm 7090, Reel #26. WILPF (1919–1921) WILPF Reports, Zurich 1919–Vienna 1921, Series I. WILPF International Executive Committee, 1915–1978, Part B. Executive Committee Records, 1915–1976, Microfilm 7090, Reel #9. WILPF Papers, Series I, International Executive Committee, 1915–1978, Part A. Correspondence, Microfilm 7090, Reel #1.

Bibliography Abrams, L. and Harvey, E. (1997) ‘Introduction: Gender and Gender Relations in German History’, in L. Abrams and E. Harvey (eds) Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1–37. Addams, J. (1972) Peace and Bread in Time of War and Patriotism and Pacifists, New York: Garland.

242 The WILPF and Reconciliation Addams, J. and Hamilton, A. (1919) ‘Report to the American Friends Service Committee on the Situation in Germany’, American Friends Service Committee Bulletin, 25, Available from the American Friends Service Committee, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia, PA 19102. Chamberlain, M. (14 June 1919) ‘The Women at Zurich’, Survey 426–28. Darling, J.N. (1918), ‘Enter – the League of Nations’, The Independent 96: 276. Davy, J.A. (2005) ‘ “Manly” and “Feminine” Antimilitarism: Perceptions of Gender in the Antimilitarist Wing of the Weimar Peace Movement’, in K. Hagemann and U. Kätzel (eds) Frieden – Gewalt - Geschlecht: Friedens- und Konflictforschung als Geschlechterforschung, Essen: Klartext Verlag, pp. 144–65. Evans, R.J. (1976) The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, London: Sage. Foot, R. (1990) ‘Where are the Women? The Gender Dimension in the Study of International Relations’, Diplomatic History 14: 615–22. Gelblum, A. (1992) ‘Feminism and Pacifism: The Case of Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann’, in S. Volker and F. Stern (eds) Tel Aviv Jahrbuch für Dutsche Geschichte, Neuere Frauengeschichte, Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, pp. 209–11. Gulbransson, O. (1919) ‘Wir beide dürfen nicht mitreden’ (‘We’re not allowed to comment’), Simplicissimus 23/44: 547. Translated by author. Greenwald, M.W. (1980) Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hahmann, W. (1921), ‘The Peace Governess in Geneva’, Current History 14: 493. This cartoon originally appeared in a Berlin publication called Kladderadatsch. Henke, C. (2000) Anita Augspurg, Hamburg: Reinbek bei Hamburg. Heymann, L.G. (1919) Frauenstimmrecht und Voelkerverstaendigung, Leipzig: Verlag Naturwissenschaften GMBH. Translated by author. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1991) Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, M.A. (2 June 1917) ‘Women’s Ways in War’, Four Lights, unpaginated. House of Representatives, Sixty-sixth Congress (1921) ‘World Disarmament’, Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs, third session, 11 January 1921, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Keene, J.D. (2001) Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Kirchhoff, A. (1989) ‘Unserer Kinder Land’, in C.C. Hannelore and V. Steinecke (eds) Ein Weib Wie Wir?!: Auguste Kirchhoff: Ein Leben für den Frieden und für die Rechte der Frauen, Bremen: Verlag in der Sonnonstrasse. Translated by author. Miller, C. (1994) ‘ “Geneva – the Key to Equality”: Inter-war feminists and the League of Nations’, Women History Review 3: 219–45. Rouette, S. (1993) Sozialpolitik als Geschlechterpolitik: die Regulierung der Frauenarbeit nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Frankfurt/Main & New York: Campus. Translated by author. Rupp, L.J. (1997) ‘Sexuality And Politics In the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of the International Women’s Movement’, Feminist Studies 23: 577–605. Sluga, G. (2000) ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Re-Reading of “The Apogee of Nationalism” ’, Nations and Nationalism 6: 495–521. United States Senate, Sixty-Seventh Congress, second session (1923) ‘War Appropriations Bill, 1923’, Hearings before the subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, H.R. 10871, Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office. Usborne, C. (1988) ‘ “Pregnancy is the Woman’s Active Service”: Pronatalism in Germany during the First World War’ in R. Wall and J. Winter (eds) The

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Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 389–416. Vellacott, J. (1993) ‘A Place for Pacifism and Trans-nationalism in Feminist Theory: The Early Work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’, Women’s History Review 2: 23–56. Wilmers, A. (2005) ‘Zwischen Den Fronten: Friedensdiskurse in der Internationalen Frauenfriedensbewegung, 1914–1919’ in J.A. Davy, K. Hagemann and U. Kätzel (eds) Frieden-Gewalt-Geschlecht: Friedens- und Konflictforschung als Geschlechterforschung, Essen: Klartext Verlag, pp. 123–43. Translated by author. WILPF (1919) Towards Peace and Freedom: the Women’s International Congress, Zürich, May 12th to 17th, 1919, London: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. WILPF (1924) Report of the Fourth Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Washington, D.C.: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

15 Sacrificial Rituals and Wounded Hearts: The Uses of Christian Symbolism in French and German Women’s Responses to the First World War Catherine O’Brien

In our contemporary culture, the word ‘sacrifice’ is frequently employed indiscriminately and inappropriately.1 It is in times of war that the dual definition of the noun regains its full force: first, the ritual killing of a person or animal with the intention of pleasing a deity; and secondly, the surrender of something of value as a means of gaining something more desirable or of preventing a greater evil.2 Analysing this sacrificial theme from both patriotic and pacifist perspectives, this chapter explores the First World War works of French and German writers such as Thea von Harbou, Madeleine Pelletier, Nelly Roussel and Claire Studer. In the pages of both fictional and non-fictional publications, these women questioned whether their female contemporaries were handing over their husbands and sons to be sacrificed, making them active participants in a bloody ritual; or whether women were victims themselves, whose particular ordeal was to survive despite their sacrificial wounds. After a discussion of wider notions of wartime sacrifice, the focus will turn to intersections between theology and popular culture. During the First World War the Christ-like imagery of the front-line soldier, laying down his life for the greater good of the nation, created explicit links between religion and patriotism. Taking the analogy further, this chapter will explore how interpretations of the New Testament Crucifixion scene – and particularly the role of the Virgin Mary within it – provide a framework for understanding women’s expression of patriotic and peace-living sentiments. More specifically, the analysis 244

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draws on two cultural images of the Virgin Mary: the mother of Jesus at the foot of the Cross, a figure made popular by artists across the centuries as a representative of both stalwart valour and maternal grief; and Our Lady Vulnerata, a mutilated statute of the Virgin and Child, which is a poignant symbol of Simeon’s prediction to Mary in the New Testament (‘and you yourself a sword will pierce’ (Luke 2: 35)) that helps us comprehend the sacrifice made by the bereaved women of 1914–1918.

Performing the rite In his study of the theme of sacrifice, French philosopher René Girard argues that war is a ‘form of sacrificial violence’ (Girard 1977: 251) and that the ‘scapegoat’ principle – by which a community maintains an inner sense of cohesion when it directs its hostility towards an outsider – reaches it apotheosis in wars between nations, where the scale of the aggression is magnified. Inspired by Girard’s research, Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle develop the scapegoat theme by claiming that society’s ‘greatest taboo’ is that the real sacrificial victims in time of war are the soldiers of one’s own nation – supposedly the ‘insiders’: ‘At the behest of the group, the lifeblood of community members must be shed. Group solidarity, or sentiment, flows from the value of this sacrifice’ (1999: 4). They maintain that a society draws strength from the death of its own soldiers, for it is this event that creates a sacrificial identity, with the flag as the totemic symbol that underpins the patriotism. Within this equation, the use of force is not regarded as running counter to religious conviction, for a Christian’s devotion to the faith is measured by the extent to which he (or she) is prepared to sacrifice his (or her) own life for the sake of others. The nation celebrates the actions of its soldiers who take on a Christ-like mission in sacrificing their lives, with the national flag replacing the Christian cross (Marvin and Ingle 1996). Pursuing this argument in relation to the First World War in an article entitled ‘The Soldier as sacrificial victim’ (2005), Richard Koenigsberg asserts that a country hides the sacrificial meaning of the war by delegating the soldiers’ execution to ‘the enemy’. Koenigsberg argues that each country is disguising the fact that a ritual is being carried out on behalf of the community and for the good of the nation, with one important caveat: a war cannot unify the community if its members see the dead bodies of its soldiers. Therefore, while the sight of the body bags brought back to the United States during the Vietnam War divided

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rather than united the American people, the First World War was more successful in its sacrificial rite because so many of the corpses were not returned to the bereaved families, as the graves on the Western Front poignantly testify. In order for the ritual to take place and for men to agree to die in battle, soldiers (and, therefore, their wives and mothers) must be persuaded of the virtue of sacrifice and have their idealism awoken by words such as ‘honour’, ‘glory’ and ‘heroism’. It is here that French and German women writers working during 1914–1918 played a specific role. Unable to fight themselves, pro-war women accepted the opportunities offered by the written word to raise the nation’s spirits. In her overview of French women’s contribution to the war effort, La femme au temps de la guerre de 14 (Women in the First World War), Françoise Thébaud claims that the task of patriotic women writers was to use their poetry and prose to awaken love for the French nation and, consequently, a sense of devotion and sacrifice amongst the French people (1986: 246).3 Hans-Otto Binder, in his survey of German women’s First World War writing, Zum Opfern bereit (Ready for the Sacrifice), similarly stresses how they saw themselves as supporting the soldiers’ sacrifice by encouraging fortitude and making sense of the conflict (Binder 1997: 125). From a contrasting pacifist angle, French feminist Nelly Roussel draws attention to the role of the scapegoat in Paroles de combat et d’espoir (Words of Combat and Hope), which was published in 1919. Her hatred is directed towards those who are responsible for the war, not towards the Germans, who have been constructed as the enemy: ‘Now, a whole nation can never possibly be the enemy.    Hatred between nations is not – no matter what they say – a natural, instinctive sentiment; it is the monstrous creation of those who have, or believe that they have, an interest in armed conflict’4 (Roussel 1919: 60–61). She is joined in her condemnation of the scapegoat ritual by her contemporary Madeleine Pelletier, who shared Roussel’s feminist and pacifist principles. Writing in an article entitled ‘Avons-nous des devoirs?’ (‘Do we have a duty?’), Pelletier reiterates the fact that words such as ‘homeland, honour, flag, duty’ are needed to persuade men to go into battle and sacrifice themselves (Pelletier, no date: 5). From this perspective, women writers, by employing emotive language in their wartime writing, were contributing to the atmosphere of sacrificial fervour. Pelletier, who envisaged the destruction of Christian values with the outbreak of war, also compares the soldiers marching into battle ‘to a herd of sheep being led to the abattoir’5 (ibid.: 5). Her writings pre-empt the views put forward by

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Marvin, Ingle and Koenigsberg as she intimates that the troops are being led to the slaughter by their own people and that the French soldiers are the scapegoats of their own community. Further, in La Guerre est-elle naturelle? (Is War Natural?) Pelletier dismisses the idea that the desire to fight is an intrinsic element of human nature, arguing that, if that were the case, there would be no need for conscription. Soldiers are driven on by a hatred that is stirred up by the press in their own country (1931: 6) while women have played a part through their published support of the war. While pacifist writers such as Pelletier and Roussel are critical of the promotion of a bellicose spirit, some wartime women writers actively encouraged men to risk their lives in the belief that they were undertaking a sacred duty. This is the case with a poem by Ilse Franke, entitled ‘Sei ein Mann!’ (‘Be a Man!’), in a collection published in 1914. The poetess writes, ‘Sacrifice yourself for the highest ideal: / God will win the battle for you’6 (1914: 21). Similarly, Thea von Harbou, whose feet are also firmly in the patriotic camp, encourages her readers by stating that ‘a capacity for enthusiasm and a willingness to make sacrifices are perhaps the most Germanic of all German virtues’7 (1916: 12). When the Fatherland calls in time of war, women themselves are also required to make sacrifices – they are sacrificing the men they love for the good of the nation – and von Harbou admires the heroic way that these sacrifices are carried out ‘as a matter of course’8 (ibid.: 14). Der Krieg und die Frauen (War and Women), published during 1915, contains Margarete Henschke’s patriotic advice to German women writers, informing them that their words are able to inspire ‘strength, enthusiasm and a spirit of self-sacrifice’9 (1915: 26). Gertrud Bäumer, the leader of the Bund deutscher Frauen, writes that the man who is fortunate enough to fight and to make a sacrifice for the highest ideal, feels his existence ‘ennobled and uplifted as it has never been before’10 (1916: 31). Henschke, however, goes a step further by declaring that it is women who are performing the sacrifice: ‘the great demand that the war makes of women is that they sacrifice their loved ones to the Fatherland, and do so bravely, calmly, submissively and obediently’11 (1915: 4). Across the border in France, a pamphlet entitled ‘Un Devoir urgent pour les femmes’ (‘An Urgent Duty for Women’), published by the French section of ‘Women for Permanent Peace’, was also stressing the importance of the sacrificial theme and the way in which the nations who agreed to make such a sacrifice believed ‘in the justice and the sanctity of their Cause’12 (1915: 3). The patriotic fervour becomes interwoven with

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religious imagery on both sides of the front line, as the soldiers’ wartime sacrifice takes on New Testament connotations.

The mother of Jesus at the Cross The reference to the ‘sanctity’ of the Cause, highlighted in the message from the Women for Permanent Peace, recalls the theme of Christian redemptive suffering at the Crucifixion. However, it is the interpretation of the role of Mary, who witnesses the execution of her son, that is most relevant to an understanding of women’s sacrifice during the First World War. The Marian dimension is evoked in various religious meditations. In her study of the Virgin Mary entitled Alone of all Her Sex, Marina Warner points out that Saint François de Sales preached on the courage of Mary, proclaiming that she ‘was not faint-hearted, but stood stalwartly at the Cross, exhibiting no signs of feminine hysteria and weakness’ (1990: 218) because she understood her son’s mission. The Counter Reformation theologian Francisco Suarez also wrote that Mary was not simply ‘engaged in witnessing the cruel spectacle; rather, she rejoiced utterly that her only begotten was being offered for the salvation of the human race’ (quoted in ibid.: 220). In the twentieth century, the Liberation theologian Victor Codina claimed, ‘She is not a “possessive mother,” trying to retain Jesus in her protective bosom. Rather, she lets Him be free and collaborates with Him in His task of liberation, culminating in His death on the Cross’ (quoted in de Margerie 1987: 53). All three male Catholic theologians present Mary as a mother who believes that her son is dying for a higher cause and, therefore, she is a willing participant in this sacrificial rite. Indeed, in more controversial readings of the scene at Calvary (in arguments used by proponents of a fifth Marian dogma of the Coredemption),13 Mary is given a ‘deliberate and active role’ as she ‘wills the offering of Jesus as a victim and hence makes the offering in union with him in the definitive act of the renunciation of her own will’ (Calkins 1996: 133). Warner has asserted that the Catholic Church would not countenance the idea that the Virgin Mary’s actions should be considered priestly because it would give ‘powerful ammunition to the lobby for a female priesthood’ but argues controversially that Mary’s presence at Calvary ‘belongs in the tradition of the all-devouring and savage goddess of myth who, like Inanna, sacrifices a substitute to the powers of darkness to save herself and then weeps for him’ (1990: 221). While First World War German novelists do not embrace the goddess imagery found in

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Warner’s study of mythology, they adopt the sacrificial theme in their fictional meditations, placing women in a priestly role in the nation’s cause. At the conclusion of her novel Die unsere Hoffnung sind (Those in whom we Trust), Helene Christaller, who was the wife of a pastor, envisages the bereaved women of Germany carrying a silver ‘Opferschale’ – the bowl which was traditionally used to catch the blood of animals sacrificed in a pagan ritual. Christaller describes the women as ‘the priestesses’ who make the offering for those who have been spared (1916: 216).14 A similar image is used by Ida Boy-Ed in her patriotic novel Die Opferschale (The Sacrificial Bowl) as the title indicates: Katharina, the heroine, has a vision of a woman carrying a sacrificial bowl filled with the warm tears of those who have suffered in the war (1916: 143).15 Both novelists find inspiration in the vision of women as priestesses engaged in a sacrificial rite. Yet, as René Girard states, ‘Even the wildest aberrations of religious thought still manage to bear witness to the fact that evil and the violent measures taken to combat evil are essentially the same’ (1977: 37). Christian women writers were striving to justify the killing of the enemy for the sake of peace, yet were aware of the consequences of the bloodshed for the wives and mothers of the enemy soldiers. In ‘Die Wachshand’ (‘The Hand of Wax’), one of the short stories in Die Frauen erwachen (Women awake), pacifist Claire Studer highlights this issue when the central female protagonist, Inès, describes her husband as ‘a common murderer’ when he gives an account of his shooting of a French soldier (1918: 21). Pacifist writers of 1914–1918 drew attention to the dichotomy between the pursuit of duty and the perpetration of violence, together with the repercussions for the bereaved women. In attempting to convey the reaction of women when faced with this moral dilemma, the image of the Mater Dolorosa, which is also intrinsic to the Christian iconography of the Crucifixion, is the theme most often evoked in reflections on the death of soldiers. Eugène Delacroix famously painted a bare-breasted woman in a Phrygian bonnet encouraging the people of France into battle in Liberty leading the People (1830), his ‘Marianne’ being a bellicose figure who is the antithesis of the Marian image. The difference between the Republican symbolism of the warlike Marianne and the traditional Christian imagery of Mary is underlined in Delacroix’s interpretation of the Calvary scene entitled Christ on the Cross (1853), where there is no stalwart female figure. Mary, dressed in her traditional blue, is fainting in the arms of St John, while Mary of Magdala kneels at the foot of the cross (Figure 13).

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Figure 13: Eugène Delacroix, ‘Christ on the Cross’ © The National Gallery, London.

The Crucifixion scene thus offers inspiration to writers who are reflecting on the conflict between a mother’s acceptance of her son’s wartime service and her individual suffering. In ‘Der Weisse Kreuzzug’ (‘The White Crusade’), for example, Studer writes, ‘Bereaved widows knelt before invisible crosses on which their sons were hanging’16 (1918: 90). Her words evoke Pope John Paul II’s reflections on Mary in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater (Mother of the Redeemer) in which he writes

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that Mary must ‘live her obedience of faith in suffering, at the side of the suffering Saviour, and that her motherhood will be mysterious and sorrowful’ (1987: 16). Indeed, in the Order of Christian Funerals ‘the Church asks that the grief of parents over a dead child may be assuaged by the maternal presence of Mary who stood by her dying Son on Calvary’ (Dictionary of Mary 1997: 92) – not because she was stoically unmoved but because she comprehends their pain. The image of the valiant, redoubtable woman who experiences her son’s death without flinching is questioned by a number of wartime novelists, chiefly through the voice of minor characters or in asides. In Margarete Böhme’s Kriegsbriefe der Familie Wimmel (The Wartime Letters of the Wimmel Family) one of the protagonists, Sophie, writes to her husband in the army that she has heard and read about the magnanimity of German women who make the greatest personal sacrifice for the Fatherland ‘without batting an eyelid’ and, while full of admiration, knows that she could not do the same (1915: 40).17 Helene von Mühlau makes a similar point in her novel Der Kriegsfreiwillige (The War Volunteer), also published in 1915, when the main female protagonist Maria, whose only child goes into the army, finds no comfort in the stories that she reads in the papers about ‘heroic wives and heroic mothers, who will not let themselves be bowed – who value the Fatherland so highly that they forget their own interests and consider themselves fortunate because they can make painful sacrifices. Where do they get the strength?’18 (1915: 276). While the committed patriots are prepared to offer up the tears of the widows and bereaved mothers as a brave sacrifice on the altar of the Fatherland, the anti-war writers see the effects on women on the home front in more destructive terms. As Mary falls as if physically wounded in Delacroix’s painting, so women in pacifist writing are presented as physically suffering. In Briefe einer Deutsch-Französin (Letters from a FrancoGerman Woman), the peace campaigner Annette Kolb writes of the war as a poison, which reaches the afflicted women ‘who far away in the safety of the towns learn of their men’s death throes’19 (1917: 13). Notably, Kolb, who was the daughter of a German father and French mother, sees it as her duty to confront the gulf between France and Germany and to try to awaken understanding between the two nations. However, in the climate of 1914–1918 she finds herself to be an ‘outcast’, who is ‘separated from such a world, like a fool’20 (ibid.: 14). Indeed, she herself became a scapegoat when she was accused of being a pacifist and left Germany for Switzerland, where she went on to translate her writings into French.

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In a publication entitled Frauenleben im Weltkrieg (Women’s Lives during the World War), Aurel von Jüchen writes of the sound of sobbing that can be heard on the home front – it is a sign that the war has wounded the hearts of women and that their tears are ‘a sacrifice on the altar of the Fatherland’21 (1915: 6). However, in this case the tears are a symbol of suffering rather than of patriotism. In von Jüchen’s words, ‘The loving mother and devoted wife endure a spiritual pain that is often greater than the soldier’s suffering’22 (1915: 7).

A third way? In God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, theologian Tina Beattie argues that Girard has promulgated the sacrificial value system of patriarchal religion, but she points out that Girard’s biblical studies brought him to the conclusion that the New Testament was unique in undoing ‘the scapegoat mechanism’ by revealing the innocence of Jesus, the victim. By advocating forgiveness rather than retribution, Jesus ‘offers a new possibility of communal life based not on mimetic violence and sacrifice, but on mimetic forgiveness and peace modelled on his own example’ (2002: 134). Expanding on this argument, Beattie examines the work of the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray and her suggestion that the symbolism of Christianity might lead to the transformation of culture through the recognition of sexual difference. As Beattie explains, Irigaray counters Girard’s work and explores the fertility cults of the pre-Socratic era when women ‘were the custodians of a religious order in which there was peace between the sexes and between culture and nature’ (ibid.: 34). Irigaray herself writes, ‘In a patriarchal regime, religion is expressed through rites of sacrifice or atonement. In women’s history, religion is entangled with cultivation of the earth, of the body, of life, of peace’; and she makes a case for a culture governed by women’s values in which ‘religious rituals would be based not on sacrifice and bloodshed but on fecundity and a celebration of the body and nature’ (ibid). These are views promulgated in the pacifist writing of 1914–1918 by both French and German writers who are striving to promote women’s role as peacemakers. Madeleine Vernet, writing in defence of her friend, the pacifist Hélène Brion, claims that a woman should be ‘the implacable enemy of war’ because she is ‘the creator of life,    the star of the future’23 (1917: 4). The vocabulary here is quite Mariological in tone – the type of imagery that is attributed to the Virgin Mary in Catholic devotion,

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as exemplified in the following example: ‘Mary who unveils in her person the whole mystery of womanhood, the mystery of openness, of being source and protector of life’ (Bingemer 1991: 105). While there is an evident danger of essentialism, it is an essentialism that seeks to use ‘feminine’ qualities to counteract patriarchal belligerency. Likewise, in Germany, Lida Gustava Heymann was claiming, ‘Women, as the source of all life, value the effort that it takes to create life in a quite different way to men,    and that is why women, simply because they are women, are the greatest advocates of pacifism’24 (quoted in Hervé 1983: 100). In Studer’s ‘Die Wachshand’ (‘The Hand of Wax’), in which a soldier has ‘sacrificed’ his hand on the ‘altar of the Fatherland’, his pacifist wife Inès responds, ‘Oh, we are but the pretext for your sacrifice! Why do you insist on shielding us with your bodies instead of your spirit? Why do human beings protect themselves by murdering other human beings? As if true heroism resided in brute force and numerical superiority and not in the ability to love’25 (1918: 17). The anti-war Studer highlights the conflict between the soldier’s sense of duty and the woman’s desire to see an end to the brutality. In similar vein, the Weihnachtsgruss an die Mitglieder des Frauenweltbundes (Christmas Greetings to the International Council of Women), published in 1916, includes a German translation of a letter from a French woman whose sons are fighting on the western front: ‘I did not hesitate to give them to my country. But I feel that my heartfelt anxiety and my grief have caused an irresistible yearning for everlasting peace to stir inside me – a peace that will dry the tears of all mothers, no matter what their nationality’26 (1916: 3). René Girard claims, ‘Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour. Moreover, it must be kept in mind that the efficacy of the rites depends on their being performed in the spirit of pietàs, which marks all aspects of religious life’ (1977: 20). Most famously sculpted by Michelangelo, the pietà, which depicts the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus in her arms, allows us to see the sacrificial act as ‘both sinful and saintly’ (ibid.) – violent death by crucifixion leads to salvation for Christian believers. The pietà is an image of suffering and mercy and has become a powerful symbol for twentieth-century wars – an image adapted, for example, by Alonzo Earl Foringer for his First World War Red Cross poster entitled ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’; and in John Filo’s celebrated photograph from the Vietnam era, in which Mary Vecchio (ironically called Mary) kneels by the body of student

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Jeff Miller killed in a demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.27 However, the mass graves in France and the ossuary at Douaumont, which contains the bones of 130,000 unidentified soldiers, reveal how few mothers in the First World War had the opportunity to mourn over the bodies of their children. Perhaps a more appropriate Christian symbol for the suffering of mothers during the First World War is the statue of Our Lady Vulnerata (the wounded one), which is to be found in the English College in Valladolid, Spain. In its once perfect form, the statue of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child on her knee was in a church in the town of Cadiz. In 1596 English sailors attacked the town, took hold of this statue of the Virgin and child and mutilated it. The statue was stabbed with a sword and part of the mouth and nose, and the arms of the Virgin, were cut off. All that was left of the Christ child was a foot attached to the Virgin’s knee (Figure 14). In an article published in The Tablet, Brendan Geary referred to the Vulnerata statue when he wrote of the suffering of the mothers of those killed in the bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Marie Fatayi-Williams, the mother of one of the victims, said, ‘Death and destruction of young people in their prime as well as old and helpless can never be the foundations for building society’ (quoted in Geary 2005: 13). Her words offer a critique of the very ritual of sacrifice identified in wartime. Marvin and Ingle claim that, once the bloodletting is over, the group can begin again: ‘Our bad feelings toward one another are purged. Time begins anew, space is re-consecrated. The group basks for a while in the unanimity of its effort, until internal hostilities accumulate once more, and the entire cycle must be repeated’ (1996). Nevertheless, the statue of the Vulnerata serves as a reminder that the sacrificial cycle is never fully completed. The Vulnerata is the image of a woman who has survived the attack but whose child has been torn away from her, leaving her visibly wounded. While the Marian dimension of the Crucifixion inspires reflections on the dilemma between acceptance of duty and maternal grief, the Vulnerata – the woman whose son has been taken from her and who bears the scars – stands as a tangible testament to acts of military brutality and maternal suffering. In Studer’s story ‘Die Wachshand’ (‘The Hand of Wax’), Inès laments, ‘Men are supposed to be the spirit, women the heart of the world. Yet we remain silent when the children born of us are being sacrificed and become heroes as they learn to perfect the art of killing. And still we women say nothing’ (trans.

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Figure 14: Our Lady Vulnerate (Reproduced by permission of the Rector, Real Colegio de Ingles, Valladolid, Spain. © Royal English College).

in Cardinal et al. 1999: 249). However, in reality, Studer joined many French and German women who succeeded in breaking that silence. Just as the statue of the Vulnerata makes visible the mother’s anguish at the loss of her child, so women’s wartime writing enables us to understand the repercussions of the sacrificial ritual on those who survived the First World War.

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Notes 1. For example, in the week of 15 August 2005, journalists working for The Guardian newspaper employed the word ‘sacrifice’ in articles that covered the removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ international/story/0„1551191,00.html); the concern over women’s rights in Iraq (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0„1550617,00.html); the efforts made by Russian women who rise early in the morning to perfect their hair and makeup in the cause of fashion (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ g2/story/0„1552051,00.html); and the actions of cricket player Jason Gillespie in the third Ashes test between England and Australia (http://sport. guardian.co.uk/ashes2005/story/0„1549998,00.html). 2. As responses to the twenty-first century conflict in Iraq have underlined, the concept of sacrifice continues to be manipulated consciously and emotively by both the pro-war and pacifist camps. Cindy Sheehan, an American woman whose son Casey was killed while serving with the US army in Iraq in April 2004, claimed that the war was ‘not worth [her] son’s sacrifice’ (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1459409/posts) and conducted a vigil outside President George Bush’s Texas home during August 2005: ‘Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we’re asking is that [the president] sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq’ (http://www.truthout.org/cindy.shtml). Making reference to the soldiers who had died in Iraq, the American President responded, ‘We’ll honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists’ (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/22/politics/main789411. shtml). 3. ‘Faire aimer la France à l’étranger, faire aimer la patrie aux Français et susciter dévouement et sacrifice. Comme les hommes, des femmes de lettres mettent leur prose ou leurs vers au service de la bonne cause’. 4. ‘Or, cet ennemi-là n’est jamais, ne peut pas être, un peuple tout entier.    La haine entre les peuples n’est point – quoi qu’on en ait dit – un sentiment naturel, instinctif; elle est une création monstrueuse de ceux qui ont, ou croient avoir, intérêt aux conflits armés’. 5. ‘Alors, on fait donner les grands mots: la patrie, l’honneur, le drapeau, le devoir.    à un troupeau de moutons que l’on mène à l’abattoir’. 6. ‘Opfre dich für höchstes Gut:/Gott gewinnt für dich die Schlacht’. 7. ‘Vielleicht sind überhaupt Begeisterungsfähigkeit und Opferwilligkeit die deutschesten der deutschen Tugenden’. 8. ‘   und in der Erfüllung dieser Opferpflicht liegt wahrlich etwas Heroisches durch die Selbtverständlichkeit, mit der sie gefordert und dargebracht wird’. 9. ‘   Kraft, Begeisterung und Opfermut’. 10. ‘   fühlt sein Dasein auf eine nie erlebte Art geadelt und erhoben’. 11. ‘   tapfer, gefaßt, ergeben, gehorsam der höchsten Pflicht’. 12. ‘Des nations qui, depuis un an, consentent chaque jour un pareil sacrifice croient toutes en la justice et en la sainteté de leur cause’. 13. A fifth Marian dogma would proclaim the Virgin Mary as Coredemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate. The title of Coredemptrix (which partly relates to the Virgin Mary’s role at Calvary) is controversial and open to

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15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

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misinterpretation, for Christ alone is the Redeemer. For a discussion of these issues, see Miravalle 1996. ‘Die Trauernden aber tragen die silberne Opferschale in den Händen und sind die Priesterinnen, vor denen die Freude sich beugt, und denen das Glück in heißem Dank den Saum ihres Kleides küßt, denn sie litten für uns, und ihre Häupter sind schwer vom Segen der Verschonten’. ‘Sie sah eine Frauengestalt, von dunklen Flören war sie umflossen und kaum erkennbar vor den düsterroten Schatten des Hintergrundes. Ihre ganze Erscheinung verschwamm fast mit ihm in eins. Nur ihre Hände waren deutlich - weiße, vorausgestreckte schmale Hände - sie trugen eine Schale, aus ihr stieg eine Rauchsäule in steiler Linie empor, der Dampf heißer Tränen, die die Schale füllten’. ‘Trauernde Witwen knieten vor unsichtbaren Kreuzen, an denen ihre Söhne hingen’. ‘Man liest und hört in diesen Tagen viel von der antiken Seelengröße deutscher Frauen, die ohne Wimpernzucken dem Vaterland die schwersten persönlichen Opfer darbringen’. ‘In den Zeitungen liest man oft von den Heldenfrauen und Heldenmüttern, die sich nicht beugen lassen - denen das Vaterland so hoch steht, daß sie das eigene Ich darüber vergessen; ja, die sich glücklich preisen, daß sie schmerzhafte Opfer bringen dürfen! Wo mögen sie die Kraft herhaben?’. ‘   die weit weg in den geschützten Städten die Agonie ihrer Männer vernehmen’. ‘   von einer solchen Welt bin ich geschieden; wie ein Idiot’. ‘   ein Opfer am Altar des Vaterlandes’. ‘Seelisch erduldet die liebende Mutter, das treue Weib meist stärkere Leiden, als der Krieger.’ ‘Car celle qui, dans l’ordre naturel des choses, doit être l’ennemi irréductible de la guerre, n’est-ce pas la femme? La femme créatrice de vie   , étoile de l’avenir’. ‘Das Weib, Urquell allen Lebens, bewertet die Mühen, Leben zu schaffen, ganz anders als der Mann,    und so werden die Frauen, nur weil sie Frauen sind, zum stärksten Förderer des Pazifismus’. ‘O, dass wir euch Vorwand für solche Opfer sind! Warum uns mit euren Körpern schützen und nicht mit dem Geist? Warum müssen sich Menschen vor Menschen schützen durch Mord? Als ob wahres Heldentum in brutaler ˝ Stärke und numerischer Uberlegenheit, und nicht einzig in der Liebe bestünde!’ The story has been translated by Agnès Cardinal (Cardinal et al. 1999: 244–50). ‘Ich habe sie ohne Zaudern für das Vaterland gegeben. Aber ich fühle, dass aus meinen Seelenängsten, aus meinem Schmerze, der unwiderstehliche Drang nach dem ewigen Frieden in mir erwacht ist, der die Tränen aller Mütter, welcher Nation sie auch angehören mögen, trocknen soll’. The copyright for Alonzo Earl Foringer’s Red Cross poster of 1918 belongs to the trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London; and John Filo’s photograph is reproduced at http://edition.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/ 2000/5/4/filo/.

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References Anon. (1916) Weihnachtsgruss an die Mitglieder des Frauenweltbundes, Genf: Zentralbureau. Anon. (1997) Dictionary of Mary, NJ: Catholic Book Publishing Co. Bäumer, G. (1916) Weit hinter den Schützengräben, Jena: Eugen Diederichs. Beattie, T. (2002) God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, London: Continuum. Binder, H.-O. (1997) ‘Zum Opfern bereit: Kriegsliteratur von Frauen’ in Hirshfeld, G. et al. (eds), Kriegserfahrungen: Studien zur Sozial- und Mentalit¨atsgeschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs, Essen: Klartext Verlag, pp. 107–28. Also available online at www.erster-weltkrieg.clio-online.de/_ Rainbow/ documents/ Kriegserfahrungen/ binder.pdf. Bingemer, M.C.L. (1991) ‘Woman: Time and Eternity: The Eternal Woman and the Feminine Face of God’, in A. Carr and E. Schüssler Fiorenza (eds), The Special Nature of Women?, London: SCM, pp. 98–107. Böhme, M. (1915) Kriegsbriefe der Familie Wimmel, Dresden: Carl Reißner. Boy-Ed, I. (1916) Die Opferschale, Berlin: August Scherl. Calkins, A. (1996) ‘Pope John Paul II’s Teaching on Marian Co-Redemption’, in M.I. Miravalle (ed.), Mary: Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, Advocate. Theological Foundations II, Papal, Pneumatological, Ecumenical, Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Company, pp. 113–47. Cardinal, A. et al. (eds) (1999) Women’s Writing on the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christaller, H. (1916) Die unsere Hoffnung sind, Stuttgart: Thienemanns Verlag. ‘Comité International des Femmes pour la Paix permanente’ (1915), Un Devoir urgent pour les femmes, Paris: 32 rue Fondary. Franke, I. (1914) Deutsche Treue, Kriegslieder einer deutschen Frau, Leipzig: Hesse & Becker. Geary, B. (30 July 2005) ‘A Madonna for our time’, The Tablet, London: The Tablet Publishing Company Limited. Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred, trans. by P. Gregory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harbou, T. von (1916) Der Krieg und die Frauen, Stuttgart and Berlin: J.G. Cottasche Buchhandlung. Henschke, M. (1915) Der Krieg und die Frauen, Berlin: Protestantische Schriftenverlag. Hervé, F. (1983) Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Cologne: PahlRugenstein Verlag. John Paul II (1987) Redemptoris Mater, http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0224/ __P4.HTM Jüchen, A. von (1915) Frauenleben im Weltkriege, Leipzig: Xenien-Verlag. Koenigsberg, R. (2005) ‘The Solider as Sacrificial Victim: Awakening from the Nightmare of History’. Available online at http://www.wagingpeace.org/ articles/0000/0000_koenigsberg_soldier-as-sacrificial victim.htm. Kolb, A. (1917) Briefe einer Deutsch-Französin, Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag. Margerie, B. de (1987) ‘Mary in Latin American Liberation Theologies’, Marian Studies 37: 47–62. Marvin, C. and Ingle, D.W. (1996) ‘Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64: 4. Also available online at http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/fcm/jaar.htm.

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Marvin, C. and Ingle, D.W. (1999) Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mühlau, H. von (1915) Der Kriegsfreiwillige, Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co. Pelletier, M. (no date) Avons-nous des devoirs, Caen: le Journal ‘Le Semeur’. Pelletier, M. (1931) ‘La Guerre est-elle naturelle?’, La Brochure mensuelle No.107, Paris: Editions du Groupe de Propagande par la Brochure. Roussel, N. (1919) Paroles de combat et d’espoir, Epône (S et O): Editions de l’Avenir Social. Studer, C. (1918) Die Frauen erwachen, Frauenfeld: Huber & Co. Thébaud, F. (1986) La Femme au temps de la guerre de 14, Paris: Editions Stock. Vernet, M. (1917) Hélène Brion, Une Belle Conscience et une Sombre Affaire, Epône (S et O): L’Avenir Social. Warner, M. (1990) Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, London: Picador.

Index Agulhon, Maurice Marianne: Les Visages de la République, 93–4 American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), 9 American Women’s Hospitals (AWH), 189, 190 American YMCA, 199 anti-colonial resistance, 28, 29 anti-suffrage groups, US, 229 anti-war radicalism, 195 Appeal to the women of neutral countries (Germany), 43–4 Appeal to the World of Culture, manifesto, 44 armistice, 1918, 154 Army Medical Corps, women’s officer status, 178 arrest of Mrs Stobart, 164 Asquith, H., 151 atheism of Sylvia Pankhurst, 154 Augspurg, Anita, pacifist, 75–7 Australia, 144, 146 Australia, Adela Pankhurst in, 145, 146 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 105 suffrage campaigns in, 7 authoritarianism of pre-war Germany, 216 Balkan Wars, 160–4, 167 bank and company donors, Germany, 204 Barrès, Maurice, on role of women in war, 63 Bartley, B., 155 Bäumer, Gertrud, 7, 38, 40–1, 44, 74, 75 on German cultural mission, 43 on men’s sacrifice, 247

see also Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF) Federation of German Women’s Organizations Belgium, 143, 146 Belgium, Stobart hospital unit, 164 Belle Époque, France, feminism in, 55 Beniczky, Hermin, Hungary, 107 Benn, C., 149 Berlin Committee, 194, 195, 201, 202 closure of, 206, 207 support for aliens, 199, 200 work of, 203, 204 Betrayed, 150 Bharati (Bengali journal), 27 Bhopal, Princess of, contribution to war effort, 22 Bibikova, Maria Our Indians in Marseilles, 18 Binder, Hans-Otto, on German women in war, 246 biological health of the nation, 217 birth rates, 231, 240 blame for war men or women, 76, 78 women, 68, 69, 70, 71, 82 Blatchford, R., 146 Boer War, 145 Bohemia, franchise in, 7 Bolsheviks, 147, 152 Bolshevism, 131, 134, 152–4, 205 Bonte, Pierre, 93 Marianne: Les Visages de la République, 93–4 Botchkareva, Maria, 132, 133, 152 Bouchardeau, Huguette, on La Voie féministe, 94 Bouchier, Rev. B. G., 164, 166 bourgeoisie in France, feminism and, 54, 57 bourgeois women in Russia, 131 Boy-Ed, Ida, on sacrificial rites, 249 260

Index 261 Brändström, Elsa, Swedish Red Cross, 195 Brion case, testimonials, 92–3 Brion, Hélène, 13, 54, 88–104 feminist support for, 93 as Marianne, 93–5 as martyr, 95, 98 as pacifist, 95–6 trial of, 90–2 Britain, 143 Britain at war, 1, 2 Britannia, 149, 150, 151, 152 British colonisation in India, 30 British Communist Party, 154 British Empire, Indian loyalty to, 20–1 British Raj, and Indian princes, 20 British Red Cross (BRC), 160, 163, 166 British suffragettes and violence, 5 Brown, Harriet Connor, (WILPF), 235, 236 Buchan, John, 170 Bulgaria, military hospital, 160 Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF) Federation of German Women’s Organizations, 6, 38, 47, 48, 74, 75, 212–21, 231 on free expression of sexuality, 212, 213 Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV) (New Fatherland League), 198, 199 Caine, B., 143 capitalism, bourgeois, 222 ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, 1913, 5 Catholic countries, votes for women, 4 Catt, Carrie Chapman, American suffragist, 8, 113, 176 on peace negotiations, 229 Cauer, Minna, on Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, 204 charitable activities, 4, 6, 60 of women, France, 58 charity in Russia, middle-class women, 126–7

Chaudhurani, Saraladevi and national movements, 35 child labour, Russia, 127 children and youth, Germany, 238, 239, 240 Christaller, Helene on experience of war on German women, 41–2 on pagan sacrifice, 249 Christianity idea of sacrifice, 12 morality, 213 social, 59 symbolism, and war, 240–59 values, destruction of, 246 Christ-like mission of soldiers, 245 citizenship and loyal service, 144 civil rights for women, 3 class barriers, breaking of, 184–5 boundaries, US, 177 feminism and, 7, 8 gender identity in Russia and, 134–5 class struggle, 132, 133, 205 Clemenceau, Georges French Premier, 1906–1909, 1917–1920, 90, 91 Codina, Victor, on Virgin Mary, 248 Coleman, A., 146, 150, 153 colonial rule and nationalism in India, 26–32 Common Cause, The, 166 ‘complementarity’ of the sexes, 39 Conseil National des Femmes Françaises (National Council of French Women), 5, 53–66 commitment to pacifism, 55 and ‘Conférence de Versailles’, 58 and Julie Siegfried, 59 Crawford, E., 149 Croix Rouge (French Red Cross), 167 Crucifixion scene iconography of, 249 mother and son’s sacrifice, 250, 251 Virgin Mary in, 244, 245 cultural imperialism, Germany, 42, 43, 45, 49

262 Index Damousi, J., 150 Darrow, Margaret on CNFF and right-wing nationalists, 63 on Hélène Brion, 92 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), 213, 217 death and society building, 254 in war, and of civilians, 69 defeatism, in French press, 89, 90–2 Defence of the Realm Act, UK, 72 Delacroix, Eugène, painter (1798–1863) Christ on the Cross, 249, 250 Liberty leading the People, 249 deportations of women to Germany, 197–8 Dernburg, Bernhard, German banker, 202, 205 de Vries, J., 155 disarmament, universal, 235, 236 disease prevention, 190 divorce rate in France, 62 Dix, Otto, painter, 69, 80 Dodd, K., 155 donations from wealthy people, 202 Dubois, E., 153 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Mine Eyes Have Seen, 34 Durand, Marguerite, 5 on Hélène Brion, 96 La Fronde newspaper, 89 Dutt, Madhusudhan Michael ‘The Dutt Family Album and Toru Dutt’, 30, 35 Duval, V., 145 East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), 142, 147, 151 welfare work, 147, 150 education access for women, 2 reform, and Elisabeth Rotten, 206 for women, Hungary, 106–9 electoral reform in Russia, 130 employment for women, 113–15, 147 post-war Germany, 82 Russia, 132

enemy aliens in Germany, 199 stranded, 197, 198 support for, 203–4, 206, 207 enfranchisement, 10, 154 of women, 15, 144, 190, see also Suffrage Movement, and Mrs Stobart England, cultural elites, 46 English literary tradition in India, 30 Enlightenment values, 196 equality of women and men through war, 42 equality for women, 3, 148, 173 in post-war Germany, 238 in Russia, 128 eugenic principles, 214, 215, 216, 217 Eurocentrism of First World War, 19 ‘euthanasia’ programmes of Nazis, 216 family as basic unit, 61 Fatherland, 47, 69 loyalty to, 53 sacrifice for, 251 fatherhood, prestige of, 223 fathers, rights of, 223, 225 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 5, 164, 173 February Revolution, Russia, 1917, 130, 131, 134–5 female citizenship, 176 female empowerment in war work, 23 female labour in Russia, 136–7 female religious rituals and fecundity, 252 female suffrage, Women’s Charter, 15 feminism, 5 and cultural differences, 18–34 France, view of, 59 in Hungary, 106–9, 119–20 in India, 34 international ties through, 24 militant and non-militant, 4, 5, 6 moderate and militant, 5, 7, 8 nationalism and, 33, 63 and pacifism, 33 in Russia, 124–40 war and patriarchy, 33, see also women’s movements, 1848–1914

Index 263 feminist activism, Hungarian, during war, 110–13 Feminist Association, Hungary, 106, 108 moral degradation of societies, 118 on war and humankind, 118–19 feminist critique of war, 206 feminist view of social institutions, 212 fertility cults, 252 Finland nationalist movement, 8 votes for women, 4 First World War, 1–17 feminist activism and, 10–11 Germany and, 39 responses of feminists, 11–17 flying field hospital, Serbia, 168 Foot, P., 146 foreign nationals in Germany, 199 foreign occupation, 206 France, 146 cultural elites, 46 Esther Pohl Lovejoy in, 180 Red Cross in, 181, 182 wartime violence, 175 women’s movements in, 5–6, 53–66 women’s support for war, 54, 55 franchise and women’s struggle, 172 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 42, 46, 60, 61–3 Franke, Ilse, on sacrifice of men, 247 French feminism, nationalist, 55 Friends Emergency Committee (Quakers), 194, 195, 200, 203 fund raising, France, 185 funding of welfare operations, 201–4 ‘Galilei circle’, Hungary, pacifist group, 115 Galsworthy, John, 163 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma), 20, 25, 27 Garrett Anderson, Louisa, 167 gender and cultural context, 35 and international relations, 230 in peace and war, 35, 227–8 gender equality, Women’s Charter, 15

gender politics of Mabel Stobart, 171 gender roles in national cause, Germany, 44–5 traditional, 16 German invasion of France, 186 German League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, 211–26 German Society for Racial Hygiene, 215 German soldiers, atrocities of, 43, 44, 146 German women, 14, 42–6 attitude to war, 40 citizenship, 203 and ideas of, 1914, 38–52 movements, 6, 38, 195 German Women’s Suffrage League, 76 Germany, 143, 144, 145 culture, 14, 42–6 as fatherland, 40, 41, 42 help for foreign nationals in wartime, 194, 195 Moderates and Radicals in, 6 Girard, René, philosopher, 245 on evil of war, 249 on innocence of Jesus, 252 on sacrificial rites, 253 ‘glory’ and ‘heroism’ of war, 246 Glücklich, Vilma, Hungary, 111, 112 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, (1749–1832) humanity of, 205 Goll, Claire, pacifist writer Frauen Erwachen, 77–8 see also Studer, Claire goodwill politics of German women, 238 Grayzel, Susan, on Brion trial, 97–101 Greenhalgh, Judge John, 164, 166 grief of wives in war, 253 guilt for war, 78 Gullace, N., 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 154, 155 Habsburg Empire, 7 Hamilton, Cicely, 163 Harbou, Thea von, 244 on sacrifice in war, 247

264 Index Hardie, Keir, Independent Labour Party, 149 Harnack, Agnes, Zahn, on men’s sacrifice, 72 Harrison, B., 155 health, international, 190 health policy formulation, 190 Henschke, Margarete, sacrifice in war, 247 Heymann, Lida Gustava, pacifist, 75–7 expelled from Munich, 81 Hindu–Muslim unity, Naidu on, 26 Holton, S., 152 home-front support and voting rights, 144 Horne, John State, Society and Mobilization During the First World War, 39 hospitals equipment, India, 23 in Russia, 126, 129 in Serbia, 168 hospital unit, mobile, 159 Hughes, B., 146 human life, protection of (Menschenschutz), 220, 221 humanitarian assistance to trapped civilians, 200, 206 humanity versus militarism, 205 Hungarian culture and identity, 107 Hungarian feminists and Woman journal, 113–15 Hungarian language, 106, 107 Hungary, 1, 2, 105–23 women’s movements, 13, 106 women’s suffrage campaign, 7 hunger strikes, 5 Emmeline Pankhurst, 141, 143 Hyndman, H. M., 146 ‘Ideas of 1914’ Germany, 38–52 Imperial Germany, 212, 213, 214 independence for Hungary, 107 spirit of, 161 Independent Labour Party (ILP), 142, 149 Independent WSPU, 149

India and First World War, 18–37 and imperial war service, 22 independence, 34 Indian National Congress, 18, 20, 26, 27, 32 Indian Review War Book, 18, 22 industrial work for women, 149 Information and Assistance Bureau for Germans Abroad and for Foreigners in Germany, 194–209 Ingle, David, on sacrifice in war, 245, 247, 254 Inglis, Elsie, 163, 173n intellectual heritage in German culture, 43, 44, 45 International Committee of the Red Cross, 198, 200 International Congress of Women’s Suffrage, (ICWS), 1914, 58 International Council of Women (ICW), 10, 111 international political organizations, 230 international relations with women, 113 international relief efforts, 189 international sisterhood in war, 24 International Women’s Peace Congress, (IWPC), The Hague, 12, 53, 55, 76, 128, 195, 200, 232 and Russian women, 128 international women’s rights movement, loyalty to, 54 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), 10–11, 12, 108 International Women’s Union (IWU), 134 internment of ‘enemy aliens’, 197, 198 Irigaray, Luce, on religion as cultivation and life, 252 Jannasch, Lilli, 198, 199 Japan, military threat, 235 Jewish women in Hungary, 7 Jouve, Andrée, France, 239 Jüchen, Aurel von, on women’s grief in war, 252

Index 265 Jünger, Karl, on women and war, 69 Jus Suffragii, 147 Kahn, Julius, on Japan’s military threat, 235 Kaiserin Augusta gymnasium, 196 Kant, Immanuel, philosopher (1724–1804), 205 Kenney, J., 152 Kenny, Jessie, visit to Russia, 132–4 Kerensky, Alexander, Russian government, 152 Key, Ellen, on women and peace, 118 Kingsley Kent, 146 knitting centres for Indian women, 22, 23, 24 Koenigsberg, Richard, on soldier’s sacrifice, 245, 247 Kolb, Annette, peace campaigner, on war as poison, 251 Kollontai, Alexandra, 132, 134, 135 Kulturkrieg (‘cultural war’), 42–6 labour market in Russia, 126, 137 Labour Party, Britain, 142 Ladies War Relief Association, 25 ‘Lady of the Black Horse, The’ (Mrs Stobart), 168, 169, 170 La Fronde, feminist journal, France, 5, 56 Lange, Helene (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine), 196 on German culture, 42, 45 Latzko, Andreas ‘Abmarsch’ (‘Off to War’), 79, 80, 81 Menschen im Krieg (Men in War), 77–8 La Voix des Femmes, feminist newspaper, on Brion, 100–1 League of Austrian Women’s Organisations, 212–13 League of Nations, 15, 234, 235 seen as female, 227 League of Nations, 150 Le Matin (French newspaper), on defeatism, 90, 92 liberal manifesto of Stobart, 162 Lloyd George, David, 147–8, 151

Prime Minister, 1916–1922, 147–8, 151, 152 London bombings, 2005, 254 Lovejoy, Esther Pohl doctor and suffragist, 14, 175–93 The House of the Good Neighbor, 175, 184, 187 Luxemburg, Rosa, activist, 81 Mackenzie, M., 148 Maharani of Bhopal, on the war, 21 male and female workers Britain, 147 Russia, 136–7 male conscription, 149 male domination in Germany, 27 male policymakers, 230 male sacrifice in war, 68, 71 man and woman as companions in war, 61, 62 ‘Marianne’ figure in France, 93, 94, 95, 99, 100 and the Virgin Mary, 249 marriage and women’s rights, 234 Marshall, Catherine, 173n martial caste in India, Kshatriya, 21, 22 martial spirit, 38–52 Marvin, Carolyn, 247, 254 on sacrifice in war, 245 Marxism, 152, 205 Mater Dolorosa, and death of soldiers, 249 maternal grief, 245 maternal suffering, 254 maternity (work) France, 185 maternity insurance, 218 maternity units, medical, 178–9, 180 medical relief, women in, 176 medical units in France, 189 Medical Women’s International Association (MWIA), 189, 190 Medical Women’s National Association (MWNA), 178, 182, 189 Meisel-Hess, Grete, 221–4 Melbourne’s Peace Army, 145 Mélin, Jeanne, pacifist activist, 54, 55

266 Index Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement, 145 Michelangelo, painter (1475–1564) ‘Pietà’, image of suffering, 253 midwives (sage-femmes), in France, 185 militant feminism in Britain, 141 militarism, 14, 171 destructive role of, 184 dominant, 81 impact on women, 175 as maleness run riot, 170 opposition to, 205 patriarchy and, Hungary, 108–9 military brutality, 254 military camps, Germany, 200 military conscription, voluntary, 143 military establishment, Rotten’s challenge to, 206 military in US, and pacifist women, 236 military power of nations, 236 military threat from Japan, 235 Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873) The Subjection of Women, 3, 5 Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, 148 Ministry of Information, 170, 172 minority opinions, French press, 88–104 Misme, Jane, editor, La Française, on Brion, 100 missing persons work, 198 Mitchell, D., 155 mobilization in society, 39 Moderates, Germany, 74 monism, 213, 215, 217, 222 Monod, Sarah, leader of CNFF, 5, 59 monogamy, 222 moral codes, oppressive, 213 moral standards, hypocritical, 213 moral superiority of women, 237 moral support of troops, 91 of women in war, 47 mother figure, 27, 28, 32 ‘Mother India’, 27, 28, 30 motherliness, abstract qualities, 213 mothers education for, 61

and financial security, 222, 223 power of, 237 protection of, 211–26, 231 and wives, role of, 74 munitions factories, France, 179 munitions work for women, 147, 184 Murray, Flora, 167 Muslim troops, 22 Muslim women in Russia, 138 Mutterschutz (care and protection of mothers), 213–17, 220–4 Naidu, Sarojini, poet, 25–35 ‘The Arms Act’, 32 The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and Destiny, 28 The Golden Threshold (poems), 26 ‘Ode to India’, 27 Nandy, Asish, on colonialism, 22 Naoroji, Dadabhai, Indian National Congress, 20 National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 176 National Association for Women’s Education, Hungary, 107 National Congress for Women’s Civil Rights and Suffrage, France, 55–6 National Council of French Women (CNFF), 53–66 National Council of Hungarian Women, 7 national defence, 144 National Federation of Women Clerical Workers, Hungary, 106–8 national identity France, 97 Germany, 46 nationalism, 11, 13 dangers of, 217 in France, 60, 62 and political power, 230 and transnationalism, 232, 233 and women’s rights in France, 57 nationalist–feminist alliance, 27 nationalist movements in India, 20 nationalist sentiment at Zurich conference, 233–4 nationality of women, and voting rights, 230

Index 267 National Socialism, 48, 216 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), 5, 164 National Women’s Party, 176 National Women’s Rights Convention, New York State, 9 National Women’s Service (NFD) (National Frauendienst), 39, 74 National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), 9 nations as enemies, 246 Nehru, Jawaharlal Prime Minster of India (1889–1964), 27 New Ethics, 212, 213 New Zealand, 144 Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910), 159–61, 167 Norwegian women and franchise, 4, 117 nurse training in Russia, 124–5, 129 The Observer, 148 October Revolution, Russia, 137 Ogonek (The Light), journal, 124, 125, 126 Our Lady Vulnerata, Virgin and Child, mutilated statue, 245, 254, 255 Owen, Wilfred, ‘The Kind Ghosts’ (war poem), 21, 30 pacifism, 1, 11, 53, 172, 227 and defeatism, 54, 90, 91 of Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst, 134, 142–3, 150 and feminism, 56, 63 France, 88–104 Germany, 73, 75–7 Hungary, 105, 106, 108 international, 14, 110–13 nationalism and, 53, 54, 55, 231, 232 patriotism and women’s movements, 12–13, 14, 244 religion and, 244 Russia, 128 of Stocker, 220–1

of women and wives in war, 130, 235, 237, 253 Woman journal and, 116–19 Pacifism, 142, 143, 145, 149–50 pacifist reformers, 230 pacifist stance in Britain, 146 Pankhurst, Adela, 13, 141–55 anti-war speaker, 145 pacifism in Australia, 150 Pankhurst, Christabel, 4, 13, 141–55 on patriotism, 144, 145 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 4, 13, 59, 141, 149, 173n on pacifism, 150 patriotic womanhood, 148 recruiting rallies for army, 145 visit to Russia, 132–4, 152 war work, 147 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 13, 141–55 anti-war activist, 150 and British Communist Party, 154 and Emmeline, differences, 147, 149, 152, 154 pacifist socialist, 145 The Suffragette Movement, 141, 142 support for Bolsheviks, 152 Pappritz, Anna, on citizen status for women, 41, 42 Paris, 147 Paris peace negotiations, 1919, 227, 228 patriarchy, 33 belligerency of, 253 patriotic activity and women’s rights, Russia, 130 patriotic charities, Germany, 204 Patriotic feminists, 142, 143 Patriotic Women’s Association Germany, 40 patriotism, 12, 13, 148 in Germany, 40, 41, 43, 48 of Hélène Brion, 97 of Julie Siegfried, 63 and nationalism in France, 54, 55, 56 of Pankhursts, E. and C., 142–4 and religion, 244 in Russia, 124, 126-8, 134

268 Index peace and equality for women, 232 as female, 227 with France and Germany, 238 and war, 12 women’s responsibility for, 118 peace conference, women’s, 47 peace negotiations, 205, 229, 232 Pelletier, Madeleine, feminist, pacifist activist, 54–7, 244 on persuasion of men to sacrifice, 246 on pressure to hate, 247 Perczelné, Flóra Kozma, on peace, 117 philanthropy in French society, 57–8, 60 physicians, French women, 185 Pine, C., 147 Pohl, Esther Clayson, short biography, 177–8 Pokrovskaia, Maria Ivanovna on patriotism, 135 women’s groups, 8, 135 political franchise for Indian women, 26 political power and maternal power, 240 for women, Russia, 136 political prisoners, 201 political radicalism, 5 political rights and the vote, 11 of women, 115 Pope John Paul II on Virgin Mary, 250–1 population problems, 218, 231 press censorship, Hungary, 109–10 prisoner exchanges, 199 prisoners of war, male, 196 Progressive reform, in US, 10, 176, 191 prostitution, 6, 8 ‘protection’ from invading Germans, France, 186–7 Protestantism beliefs, 59 feminism in France, 57–9 philanthropy, France, Julie Siegfried, 62

social and feminist action, 60, 61, 63 Protestant Revival, 59 Prussian Law of Association, 6, 67 public health in US, 178 public health in wartime, 175, 176 public speaking on war, Germany, 47–8 Pugh, M., 155 Purvis, J., 141, 142, 144, 153, 155 Put Up the Sword, 145 Quakers, 150, 195, 205 Queen Elizabeth, 150 Queen Mary’s Workrooms, 150 Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), 132 race boundaries, US, 177 race hygiene, 214–18 racial subjugation, 34 Radicals, Germany, 74, 75 Rankin, George, painter of Mabel Stobart, 168 rape as conquest in wartime, 178, 186, 191 reconciliation process France and Germany, 239 post-war, 227–43 Red Cross lectures in US, 181–4 Reform Party, Hungary, 107 religion and patriotism, 244 religious allegiances, 2 religious imagery, 248 repatriation of women and children, 200–1 Representation of the People Act 1918, Britain, 154 Republicans in France, 54, 59, 60 Résidence Sociale, Levallois, France, 179, 185, 187 revolution and feminism in Russia, 137 ritual killing, 244 Robins, Elizabeth, 163 Rolland, Romain, 199 Romantic poetry, Naidu, 26 Romero, P., 147, 153 Rosenthal, Max, 214 on war and newborns, 217–18

Index 269 Rotten, Elisabeth, Swiss national, 14, 194–209 Roussel, Nelly, journalist, 89, 244 on Hélène Brion, 98 on scapegoats in war, 246 Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), 160, 167 Rubinstein, Ida, ballet dancer, 126 Ruhleben camp, Germany, 200 ruling classes, beliefs, 4 Ruskin, John, 118 on women’s guilt, 67 Russia, 152 Russia at war, 1, 2 feminism and suffrage, 124–40 women’s movement, 8 Russian Civil Code, 137 Russian League for Women’s Equality (RLWE), 8, 128–30 Russian Mutual Aid Society (RMAS), 8, 128, 129, 130 Russian Revolution, 1917, 130, 131 sacrifice, 244, 247 sacrificial rituals, and war, 240–59 sacrificial victims, soldiers, 245 Sainte-Croix, Avril de, 53 on women’s role in war, 56, 57 St François de Sales, on Virgin Mary, 248 Sakhi Samiti (Ladies Club), 25, 27 Sarkar, Tanika, feminist historian, 27 Saumoneau, Louise, feminist activist, 54, 56, 57 Sauret, Henriette, journalist, 89 on Hélène Brion, 99, 100–1 scapegoats in war, 246, 247 school reform, 162 Schwimmer, Rozika, Hungarian feminist, 7, 13, 108 and pacifism, 112, 113 Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), 163, 173n Second Adventism, 154 self-determination for nations, 240 for women, 240

Serbia, 146, 167–72 Serbian Army Medical Corps, 168 Serbian Retreat, 169, 170 Séverine, journalist, 89 on Hélène Brion, 99 sexual abuse of women, post-war Germany, 81 sexual ethics, new, 212, 213 sexual freedom, Sylvia Pankhurst, 154 sexual immorality in wartime, 72 sexual liberation for biological quality of race, 214 sexuality essence of, 221–4 and motherhood, ‘natural’, 212 sexual morality, oppressive, 222 Shabanova, Anna and Emmeline Pankhurst, 132–4 shame of women, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 Shaw, Ann Howard, suffragist, 179 Siegfried, Julie, 53–66 and World War I, 59–5 Siegmund-Schultze, Pastor Friedrich, 195, 199, 200 silence of women in war, 254–5 Sinn Fein, 150 Slater, Catherine Defeatists and their Enemies: Political Invective in France, 1914–1918, 90 Smith, A., 150, 155 Smyth, N., 147 social action, organised, France, 60, 61 social feminism in Russia, 8 socialism, 149 and feminism, 59, 142 Socialist Internationale, 150 social reform, 7, 153 social responsibility, 196 spying accusations, 201 state intervention in birth rates, 214 Steele, Flora annie, 163 Stobart Flying Column, 168 Stobart, Mabel Annie, 158–74 Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere, the, 171–2 London County Council, running for, 162

270 Index Stobart, Mabel Annie – continued Miracles and Adventures, 159 War and Women, 161–2 Stöcker, Helen, 212, 217, 220–1 theories, 213, 214, 216 on war, 215 strike-breakers, women as, 151 strikes, 151 Stritt, Marie (Bund Deutscher Frauvereine), 7 Studer, Claire, 244 ‘The Hand of Wax’ (‘Die Wachshand’), 77–8, 249, 253 heroes are killers, 254 ‘The White Crusade’, 250 see also Goll, Claire, pacifist writer Suarez, Francisco, on Virgin Mary, 248 Suffrage Movement, and Mrs Stobart, 1, 3, 4, 164, 172 campaigners, Germany, 75, 82 equality for women and, 234 for women, 130, 151 T he Suffragette, 148–9, 151 T he Suffragette Movement, 142, 149 suffragettes, 4, 79 in Britain, 5, 57, 141 war work of, 164 Suffragettes of the WSPU, 149 suffragists, 164, 175, 176 victory in Russia, 130, 131 on women as ‘stateless’, 230 Swanwick, Helena (The Future of the Women’s Movement), 161–2 Tagore, Rabindranath Indian poet and philosopher (1861–1941), 25, 27 Taradevi, Hindu Princess, on the war, 21 Thébaud, Françoise, on women in war effort, 246 Tickner, L., 143 T imes, The, 161, 166 trade unionists, and female employment, 147, 148, 150–1 Trade unions, 147, 150 Tramitz, Angelika, on women in wartime, 72 transnationalism, 240

Transvaal, 158 Treaty of Versailles, 227, 229, 230 Tyrkova, Ariadna, on Russian women workers, 137 unmarried motherhood, 223 support for, 212, 214, 218 unmarried parents children of, 218, 219 Vatican, 150 Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (VFF), (League of Progressive Women’s Organizations), 6 Verhey, Jeffrey, on German attitudes to war, 39–40 Vernet, Madeleine, 90 on Hélène Brion, 92–6, 99, 252 La Mère Educatrice, 89 Versailles peace treaty, 14, 15 Victoria Socialist Party, 150 violence, effect of war on women, 175–93 Virgin Mary at the Cross, her sacrifice, 248 imagery, 252–3 role of, 244, 245 von Suttner, Bertha, pacifist, 112–13 V otes For Women, 164, 173n see also The Suffragette Wadsworth, Alice Hay, on pacifism, 229 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, on Protestantism, 57 war death to manhood/womanhood in, 189 eugenic selection and, 217 as male aggression, 117 overpopulation and, 117–18 roles of men and of women, 68–9 suffering and, 78 suppression of (Stobart), 172 women’s identities and, 39 ‘War and the Role of Women, The’ Siegfried on Protestant social feminism, 60–1

Index 271 war babies, 187, 188 war charities, 22, 23 war effort imperial, 20 Russia, 124–5, 126–7 support for, 146 women and, 39, 69 war propaganda, Hungary, 109–10 war victims, civilian, 196 War work, 147 Warburg, Max, banker and donor, 203 warfare and militarism, 187 Warner, Marina, on Virgin Mary, 248, 249 Wars of Liberation (1813–1815), 42, 46 wartime employment for women, US, 176, 177 wartime German novelists, on women’s sacrifices in war, 251 wartime ideology of German women, 43 wartime propaganda, 43–4 wartime service for women, 176 wartime violence on women, 175–93, 189, 190 Weimar Republic, 48 and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 239 Wells, H. G., 146 Welsh miners strike, 148 Wendling, K., on male sacrifice, 71 West, R., 142, 146 Wilhelmine era, Germany, repression, 212, 213, 214 Wilson, T., 148 Woman, Hungarian feminist journal, 106, 110–19 T he Woman’s Dreadnought, 150, 151 ‘Woman Who Dared, The’ (Stobart), 172–3 Women Writers Suffrage League (WWSL), 163 Woman (Zhenshchina), Russia, 126 women, 39, 69, 176, 206, 228 against war, in Hungary, 106 blamed for men going to war, 79, 80, 81

and children, 196, 200, 232, 239, 240, 253 and domesticity, 230, 231 in Germany, 46, 47, 67, 74, 82 international politics, exclusion, 231 Japanese and Chinese, 235 as ‘minors’, 3 and nurturing role in society, 171–2 and pacifism, 232 in priestly role, 248, 249 and slaves in US, 9 subordination of, 213 as useful citizens, France, 61 the war effort, 39, 54, 146, 159, 161 in war in Russia, 124–5, 127, 131, 136 ‘Women in National Life’ conference, 27 women of India and war effort, 23, 25 women physicians and surgeons, 167, 185 Women’s Charter, 15 on sexual equality, 234 ‘Women’s Comfort and Women’s Duty in Wartime’ (Anna Blanck), 71 Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, 179, 182 Women’s Convoy Corps, ambulance display, 161 Women’s Dreadnought, The, anti-war newspaper, 150, 151 women’s grief in war, 251 women’s guilt for wars, 78, 80 Women’s Hospital Corps (WHC), 167 women’s influence on men, 67 Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace, 111 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 12, 14, 15, 155, 227–43 founding of, 232 German section, 237–40 members as transnationals, 233 rejection of Treaty of Versailles, 234, 235 US section, 235

272 Index Women’s Military Popular Union, 135–6 women’s movements, 1848–1914, 2–11 comparison in different countries, 10 Germany, 38, 39, 40–1, 68, 74 in India, Naidu, 26 international, 190 loss of ground, 15–16 Women’s National Service League (WNSL), 163, 166 Women’s National Service (Nationaler Frauendienst), 217 women’s organizations Hungary, 107 United States, 176 Women’s Party, 153 Women’s Peace Society, US, 235 women’s press in France, 88–104 Women’s Progressive Party, Russia, 128, 136 women’s responsibility for war, 67–87 women’s rights in India, 28 women’s rights movements and Protestantism, 57 Women’s Right to Serve procession, 147–8 women’s role as traditional, France, 58 in wartime Germany, 39, 43 women’s sacrifices in war, 251

Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps (WSWCC), 159–61, 163, 167 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) (Pankhurst), 4, 141, 142, 143, 159, 172, 173n on militant feminism, 148–9 re-launched as Women’s Party, 153 women’s suffering in war, 23 women’s suffrage, 108, 151 in Britain, 5, 141, 142 and disarmament, 236 in France, 5, 6, 60, 185 and militarism, 115 and patriotism, France, 56, 58 in Russia, 124–40 women’s war service, and suffrage, 149 women’s wish for heroes, vanity, 79–80 Woolf, Virginia, on country and feminism, 33, 34 T he Workers’ Dreadnought, 151 Workers’ Socialist Federation, 151 Workers’ Suffrage Federation, 151 working women in East End, 150 in Russia, 127 Yavorskaya, Lidia, actress, 126 Zakuta, Olga, on women’s suffrage, 131 Zetkin, Clara, activist, 81